Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life Read Free Page B

bureau?”
    “Y-yes.”
    “I’m in big trouble and I don’t understand it. Can you come out to Vegas?”
    “I’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon.”
    When I hung up, Ron Tremont stepped back from the forefront of consciousness. That’s how it felt. My awareness was like a pulpit or a podium that varied personalities approached in order to use their knowledge and abilities. I was always there but not necessarily in control.
    There came a knock.
    “Yes?” I said, standing to the side of the door, squatting low.
    “Mr. Strong? It’s Alberto. Tony send me up to tell you somethin’.”
    I opened the door on the red-skinned, fleshy-featured young man.
    “These bad dudes come up to Tony and said where was you at? Somebody called before then asking for Jack Strong, but they hung up. Tony figured it was the bad men that called, but he didn’t know.”
    “Who was calling?”
    “The bad dudes,” Alberto said, upset that I wasn’t getting his meaning. “Tony sent ’em to a empty suite on the eighth floor, but you got to get outta here before they find out you’re not there. Tony already split ’cause he don’t want ’em comin’ after him. He called me on his cell phone an’ told me to warn you.”
    “Is there a back way, Alberto?”
    “I’ll show you.”
    Before sneaking out the service entrance of the hotel, I told Alberto that if a woman named Anna Wolf called for me to have her call and ask for Carl Rothman at the Beamer Motel after six the next day. I repeated the message twice and gave him a hundred-dollar bill.
    “My cousins Esther and Shoni work the switchboard,” he said with a smile. I noticed that an upper tooth was edged in silver. “They’ll do it.”
    Two twenty-three in the morning found me at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on the dowdy end of the Strip. I was sitting hunched over a table in a booth at the back eating a chili size and searching my mind.
    Richards. Lance Richards. He’d been dead for a while. It was 2008 when Mr. Petron’s bookkeeper figured out that Lance had been skimming off the money Petron had been skimming from the big boss Ira Toneman. Lana Santini, the daytime bartender, and Richards had worked together to get a nightly bundle of twenty-dollar bills from the vig chest into their joint safe-deposit box. They’d been doing it for almost two years and had more than six hundred thousand stowed away.
    But then it came out that Lance was the one who’d been stealing. He went to Lana’s, and she gave him a shot of whiskey. That was the last memory Richards could muster. She had probably killed him. He always carried the second key to the box in his wallet when they went to the bank in Phoenix. She probably thought he always had it there. It was only after he was dead that she must have realized her mistake.
    He took the money, but Lana was the one who smuggled it out of the casino. Maybe Petron never suspected that Lance had a partner.
    Lance hungered for his lucre. He lingered near the forefront of my mind.
    Call Lana, he said silently.
    I ignored the plea, wasn’t concerned with the money.
    Who was I? What was I?
    “Mr. Strong?”
    Wearing a tailored gray suit, he was my height and well built, the color of a denizen of southern Italy, tan tending toward olive. His eyes were a brilliant green, and his hair was black and shiny.
    I gripped the pistol in my jacket pocket and took a quick look around the room. There was nobody there except a tired waitress leaning against the counter.
    “Who are you?” I, and hundreds of others, wanted to know.
    “May I sit?”
    It took me a few moments to say, “Okay.”
    He slid onto the long seat opposite me.
    “Tom Grog,” he said. “I represent an organization called the Convocation.”
    His green eyes stared into my multi ones.
    “What does that mean to us?” I recognized the plural and accepted it.
    “Why are those men after you?” he replied.
    “I think I stole some money from them a few years ago. I guess they want it