A Day, A Week, Eighteen Years Earlier

You Can Call Me Hiram

Big Ed Gillespie first met Hiram Spaneker in a casino parking lot in Reno. Big Ed was twenty-two at the time, three weeks past being cut by the Oakland Raiders, dead broke and dead drunk. A decent senior year as linebacker for Southern Oregon University and a four-six forty got him invited, undrafted, to Raiders camp. His beer-drenched work ethic and inability to cope with pro blocking schemes got him sent packing again. He took his training camp pay—two weeks’ worth plus a modest signing bonus—to Vegas, where he distracted himself with craps and blow jobs purchased from plasticine women he met off full-color postcards. He burned through five grand in a baker’s week. When he checked out of the Barbary Coast eight days after his arrival, he couldn’t buy gas for the drive back to Medford. He sat in his car in the parking lot, windows open under the hot sun, and thought about a guy he knew who went to Australia to play Aussie Rules football. Whatever that was.

A couple crossing the parking lot caught his eye. They were holding each other up, weaving as ineffectively through the parked cars as he had through the silver-and-black tackling dummies. Just another afternoon in Vegas. His first thought was they must be in the same shape he was in, broke, drunk, and short of options. Why else leave the casino in the middle of a hot afternoon? But as they neared his car he heard them laughing. Mid-fifties, overweight suburban types. Khaki and Keds, red cheeks and white arms. Big Ed got out of his car and approached.

“Do you folks know where the Lucky Duck Lounge is?” A name he made up on the spot.

The two turned as a unit and stopped, unsteady even with four feet between them. Sunlight gleamed off the woman’s hair, the color of L’Oreal brass.

“Lucky who?”

“Not you.” Big Ed waded in, one hand for each of them, the dregs of his last Jack-and-Coke doing his all thinking. He crushed the man’s larynx with a single strike, put his knee into the woman’s gut as he pulled her toward him. She gasped and started to call out, but too late. He cracked her head against the pavement while her husband clutched his throat, gagging.

They’d been happy for good reason. He pulled fifty-eight hundred bucks out of the man’s pocket, a roll of crisp hundred dollar bills, fresh from the cage. He left them in the parking lot and drove straight through to Reno. No idea if the woman was alive or dead, though he guessed the man would survive. Maybe never speak again. Either case, no point in hanging around in Vegas waiting for cops to start asking questions.

In Reno, he checked in to the Peppermill, but this time he stuck to bar sluts and nickel craps. When the dice went cold, he backed away, hit the buffet or returned to his room for a nap. He gambled enough to get his room comped, won enough to maybe nurse the old couple’s fifty-eight hundred bucks for weeks.

Then he met Charm Butcher.

She was practically his neighbor. Born and raised in Klamath Falls, fifty miles down the highway from Big Ed’s home in Medford. Tall and blond with pillow boobs and a mouth to rival his ill-tempered conditioning coach back at S.O.U. She’d just graduated, though her alma mater was the type that advertised on late night television, and she’d come to Reno with a flock of girlfriends for a bachelorette weekend. When Charm saw Big Ed in the bar at the Peppermill, tan and fit and stretching his black Raiders t-shirt out of shape with shoulders like a pair of loin roasts, she decided he should be the one to deflower her virginal, soon-to-be-wed gal pal. And, what the hell, he could give her and the others a ride as well. He spent two hours slamming tequila shooters with the crowd of grain-fed Klamath beauties, then allowed himself to be led to a suite and straddled first by one, then another in succession. Big Ed awoke the next morning, naked and alone. When he finally collected his scattered clothing, he learned not only had the girls from Klamath Falls given him the ride of his life, rivaling even the team parties back in school, they’d left with the remains of his fifty-eight hundred dollars—more than three grand. All he had to his name was his car, a couple of changes of dirty clothes, and eighty bucks in Peppermill chips.

At first, Big Ed thought he could parlay the eighty bucks into some real cash. He’d been playing pretty well. But when he got down to the craps table, the bleat of the slot machines and the stench of the dealer’s cologne seemed to settle behind his eyeballs and lay siege to his concentration. His chips didn’t last through his first watered-down drink. It was noon, and he was more sober than he’d been in two weeks. He headed for the Fish Bar, the very spot where he’d met Charm and the girls the night before. He didn’t figure there was anything to gain admitting that he couldn’t pay for incidental charges to his room, so an hour and a half and six Blue Hawaiians later, he scrawled his name on the tab and then stumbled out into bright daylight.

In the parking lot, he caught sight of an older man climbing out of a Suburban. A good omen. Big, expensive truck, fellow coming rather than going. The way he saw it, the universe was in a giving mood again. Dude like that would have some money in his pocket. Big Ed tacked toward him, not planning anything specific, just some variation on Vegas. As he got closer, he opened his mouth. “Hey, fella—”

The old guy stopped. He wore jeans and battered cowboy boots, a tan shirt and a baseball cap. Early thirties, maybe. Ed moved toward him. The hot, still air thrummed against his eardrums. In his mind, he was thinking he needed to say something, ask for directions. Wasn’t that how it worked? But he was too drunk, and still whipped from his night with the girls. He raised his hands, a lurching B-movie Frankenstein. The old guy stepped inside his reach and threw a fist hard as a hammer into Big Ed’s gut. His breath rushed out of him and he plopped backward onto his ass. For a moment he looked up at the old guy, then dropped his chin and puked into his lap.

The fellow backed away from the acrid spatter. “What the hell you think you’re up to, boy?”

“I’m sorry. I got, I mean ...” His stomach was rolling over in the aftermath of his expulsion. Hard to talk.

“You broke?”

Big Ed nodded, ran the back of one hand across his chin.

“Okay. Not too smart, are you?”

“I graduate college.”

“You do, huh. Let me guess: football scholarship.”

Big Ed nodded. The motion threatened to bring up more vomit, and he leaned to one side.

“Tell you what, kid. Let’s get you inside, get you cleaned up. Then maybe we can figure out what to do with you.”

“You gonna call the cop?”

“Which one?”

“Huh?”

The old guy laughed, then hooked a hand under one of Big Ed’s arms. “You gotta help me out, big boy. I’m not used to hauling the whole goddamn hog all by myself.” The last thing Big Ed remembered was walking across the parking lot toward the hotel.

He awoke in bed, in his own room. The fellow he’d failed to rob sat in a chair near the window, looking out at the brown rise of the Sierra Nevada to the west. When Big Ed stirred, the man turned and looked at him.

“Morning there, big guy.”

“Morning?” Big Ed ran his hand over his face. The inside of his mouth tasted like a sock left at the bottom of the laundry bin.

“You slept all the way through. You were seriously fucked up.” The man grinned. “How do you feel?”

Like someone was cracking two stones together between his ears. “Been better, I guess.”

“I’ll bet.”

Ed threw his legs over the edge of the bed and his stomach lurched. He was wearing a pair of unfamiliar boxer shorts. He wondered what happened to his own underwear. “What’s going on here?”

“Son, it’s like this. I figure you owe me, so I’ve got a proposition for you.”

“A proposition.”

“You’re gonna come do for me.”

“I don’t care what you think was gonna happen in that parking lot. I ain’t sucking your dick.”

The old man kept grinning. “Ain’t like that. I’m offering you a job, big boy. Come back with me, I’ll get you all set up. You know Givern Valley?”

“Never heard of it.”

“You and everyone else. No matter. Southeast Klamath County, tucked away, which has its advantages. And when you get stir crazy, K-Falls is just an hour down the road. What do you say? I can use a big fellow like you.”

“You don’t know nothing about me.”

“Sure I do. I done some checking while you were sawing logs and belching swamp gas. Linebacker in college, washed out of the pros before they had a chance to learn your name. You’re strong, you’re quick, but you’re stupid. Strong and quick I can use, and stupid I figure I can train out of you.”

Big Ed couldn’t decide whether to get angry or curl up and go back to sleep. He didn’t like being called stupid, but it wasn’t something he hadn’t heard before. He needed to piss, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to attempt upright travel. He wasn’t ready to answer this crazy old fuck from Butthumper, Oregon either. Then the old fellow said something that got his attention.

“I understand you spent some time with a group of young ladies. Good time had by all, if expensive.”

“How the hell you know all this shit?”

“I make friends easy. You can be one of my friends too. I’ll help you out, help you find the missies what walked off with all your cash.”

“And in exchange I work for you.”

“We take care of each other, that’s the way I see it.”

“And if I say no?”

The fellow turned over his hands. “Your choice. You’ll have to figure out how to pay the balance on your room, though I don’t figure you’ll get the chance to attempt another robbery since I already talked to hotel security about you. You walk out of here with me, you won’t have any trouble. You walk out alone ...”

“Jesus.”

“Close enough for your purposes, but you can call me Hiram.”

“What am I supposed to be doing for you?”

“Whatever I tell you to do.” The old man stared at him across the room, lips curled into a grin but his eyes dark and hard. “Son, you and me, we gonna have one helluva party.”