Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother --- dark hair, dark eyes, dark heart. "The heart of another is a dark place" ... something like that. Who the hell said it? Turgenev? Ed Murrow? Howdy fucking Doody? One of those wooden cocksuckers, anyways.
    More ice cubes and a bathtub. Old needle tracks. My big, beautiful and empty hacienda --- the fucker destroys me.
    My girls regularly ambushing me in my dreams, a year on. Sometimes in my dreams --- no, strike that, call 'em "nightmares" --- I pick up my Colt, put that Peacemaker in my mouth and press it to my palate. In his cups, in Key West, Hemingway used to pantomime for me "The Blessed Shot," as he had dubbed it. Papa confided to me tips for doing it right. "Get that thing in your mouth, up against the roof, pointed toward the fontanel," he'd lecture drunkenly. "Press it to your temple or under your chin and you'll just end up disfigured, or a vegetable, or both." That was Papa --- always the teacher.
    But in dreams --- and in life --- I can't ever pull the trigger on myself. Too much contrition for that flavor of presumed peace, I reckon.
    I awakened with a start, wrenched from my dark dreams by thunder. It was raining again --- desert storm. The windows were cracked on Bud's side and I could smell the sage and the rain. My mouth was dry and my eyes wouldn't focus. My hands were shaking and I felt nauseous.
    Bud raised his eyebrows. "You okay, Lass'?"
    I nodded and sat up and stretched and felt more bones crack. I was too old to be sleeping in cars. Bud, probably prompted by all the knuckle-digging in my eyes and my blinking, passed me a thermos filled with iced tea. He rifled through a bag on the seat between us, then handed me a Stuckey's Pecan Log and a ham salad sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. "This'll help," he said. It did, though it took some time.
    We were rolling west along Rt. 10, skirting the Mexican border. I had slept right through Columbus and adjacent Pancho Villa State Park --- the places where all of this bad juju got rolling so many bloody decades ago. My knuckles were starting to hurt from those shots I had taken at the Texas Republican. I checked my Timex. We should have been on the other side of the Arizona border by now, but we were just fringing the Pyramid Mountains.
    "You stop for a quickie while I was sacked out, Bud?"
    Fiske glanced at me and turned down his mouth. "Called in a marker," he said. "Old friend of mine is a Yale grad. I wanted some more gen on this Skull and Bones Society."
    I grunted and gulped down a half-a-thermos of tea and it didn't touch my thirst. "Just a kind of über fraternity, isn't it?"
    Bud lit up a Pall Mall --- must have bought his own pack when he stopped for my grub. He shook his head. "Naw, it goes way deeper than that, Hector."
    Marty Robbins was crooning on the radio: "A White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation)." I know Marty. I like him. But I prefer his cowboy ballads. I turned down the volume.
    I said, "Startle me, Bud."
    "This politician ," --- Bud said "politician" like he was saying "clapped-up cunt" --- "this politician , Prescott Bush? He supposedly personally robbed Geronimo's grave and stole the Apache's head for the Skull and Bones Society's secret archive."
    "Had heard that. And he supposedly paid Holmdahl $25,000 to steal Pancho Villa's head," I said. "We knew that, too. Or we thought we did. It's all hearsay."
    "Actually, my guy told me a guy named Frank Brophy said that he and four others put up $5,000 to have Emil Holmdahl steal the head," Bud said. "But Brophy said it was a Skull and Bones scheme, all the way."
    I shook out one of my cigarettes and fished for my Zippo. I fired her up. "That's a big range," I said, "twenty-five-grand down to five-grand? Big gap there, my friend."
    Bud Fiske smiled. "Huh-uh. Think about it, Hector. Prescott supposedly offered $25,000 for the head theft. Brophy, who belonged to the Skulls and Bones too, well, he said that he and four friends put up five-grand. Well, what if it was five-grand each ? Then