Francis Marion “Buster” Malloy occupied the post of security guard at the Galaxy. Second-generation Irish, he was a neckless, pork-bellied block of a man of fifty-four with thinning red hair, a pink boozer’s face, and a penchant for violence. The black patch over his left eye—courtesy of a Vietcong sniper—lent his countenance a not-undeserved air of toughness. The injury had provided Buster with an honorable discharge, a Purple Heart, and an abiding hatred of Asians. Any distinction between Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, and other Orientals was lost on the burly ex-Marine, who detested them all equally.
His position at the giant hotel-casino—amusement park complex was relatively undemanding, and Malloy tolerated it, despite the stupid cybercop uniform he was obliged to wear. Back in South Boston he’d held a lot worse jobs than this one. Mostly in quasi—law enforcement—mall cop, security guard, armored-car attendant—because despite the lousy pay, he enjoyed the heady feeling of power that a uniform bestowed, along with the chance to indulge his proclivity for beating up the occasional drunk or transient whenever the opportunity arose. But that was then, back in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Southie. These days, whenever he was obliged to use force, as in breaking up fights or evicting undesirables from the premises, Buster usually disciplined himself to accomplish the task with restraint. Management at the Galaxy, despite CEO Emmett Druperman’s legendary toughness, frowned upon excessive violence.
Money fascinated Malloy—and he handled plenty of it at the Galaxy. More accurately, he handled plenty of containers that held money. His duties included collecting filled casino drop boxes—the locked metal containers secured under each of the tables into which dealers dropped gamblers’ cash and markers through slots in the tabletops—and replacing them with
empty ones at the end of each shift. The boxes were loaded onto rolling cages—wheeled metal carts that Buster, another guard, and an executive delivered to the counting room. Casinos never permitted anybody to be alone with their money, even when it was locked inside metal boxes.
Slot machines were emptied differently. Their contents were dumped into open buckets, right there on the casino floor, in plain view of anybody who happened to be walking by. This operation was performed only once a day, during the small hours of the morning—a timetable that Malloy reasoned quite correctly was adopted because the Galaxy desired as few witnesses as possible to the staggering tonnage of coins excavated daily from its one-armed gold mines.
The other requirements of Buster’s job included patrolling the grounds, checking the hotel corridors, and occasionally escorting a cash-laden high roller to his suite after a winning session. Malloy resented this last duty and seethed inwardly at the unfairness of a system that often saw gamblers wagering as much on one roll of the dice or flip of the cards as he himself earned in a year.
Usually these winners would tip him quite generously—twenty-five, fifty dollars, sometimes even more—depending on the degree of their alcohol-induced bonhomie. The big Irishman would swallow his pride and accept the handouts, stoically suppressing the urge to beat the shit out of his charges and abscond with the rest of their money.
Despite a lack of formal education, Buster Malloy possessed a shrewd, street-smart intelligence and made it his business to learn as much as he could about the inner workings of the megaresort that employed him. He memorized the security codes that provided access to all but the sanctum sanctorum of Executive Row. He familiarized himself with the labyrinth of corridors and stairways and loading docks, the mailroom, and other service areas. He knew most of the employees by sight, if not always by name. Because, he figured, you never knew when that kind of information might come in handy.
The longer Malloy lived in Las Vegas, the more he liked it. Its weather was kinder to his Irish bones than Southie’s, its people were more laid-back, and you could get anything you wanted, from booze to pussy to cheap food, twenty-four hours a day.
For beyond the buck-ninety-five buffets, the blackjack tables, and the
blazing neon there was another Las Vegas that the average tourist rarely saw and generally couldn’t care less about.
Over a million ordinary people with wives and husbands and kids and desires and dreams made their homes in and around this other Las Vegas. Beyond the Strip and the downtown casino core there existed a city much like any other in the Sun Belt, with schools, office buildings, parks, museums, a zoo, shopping malls, and thousands of homes. And just as in all the other cities and towns of America, the caliber of these homes reflected the circumstances of their occupants.
Atop the real-estate pyramid sat the mansions of the entertainers who had settled permanently in America’s glitziest show town. At the corner of Pecos and Sunset, Wayne Newton, possibly the best known of all the resident Vegas stars, raised Arabian horses and other exotic animals on fifty-two very expensive walled acres, behind an ornate wrought-iron gate ostentatiously flanked by a pair of prancing bronze stallions. On Vegas Drive, Siegfried and Roy, Masters of the Impossible, shared an equally magnificent home. A veritable phalanx of white lions guarded their gates, a white wall circumscribed their property, and a forest of white palm trees could be glimpsed within the compound. A brass SR monogram on the gates left no doubt as to the identity of the occupants of this particular Las Vegas estate.
The next level of residential splendor comprised the comfortable upscale ranch houses and condos of the city’s businesspeople, professionals, and casino executives.
Somewhat lower down the Las Vegas real-estate pyramid were the modest bungalows, town houses, and apartments of the casino dealers, cocktail waitresses, taxi drivers, valet parking attendants, construction workers, and all the other honest, hardworking folk who constituted the backbone of Las Vegas’s population.
The base of the pyramid consisted of the run-down shanties and mobile-home parks of the shoestring retirees, the poor, and the unemployed who eked out a marginal existence under the desert sun. In the meanest of these parks on Miller Avenue just outside the Las Vegas city limits, Buster Malloy had purchased a secondhand mobile home. It was more of a converted travel trailer, really; the previous owner had added an aluminum screened porch and, ostensibly to impart an air of permanence, had enclosed the underside of the trailer with plywood panels, now badly delaminating. In the dirt around Malloy’s trailer sat a rusted satellite dish
surrounded by clumps of sagebrush and unkempt patches of Indian ricegrass. The fact that the park was strewn with junked cars, festooned with clotheslines, and littered with garbage irritated Malloy, but it was cheap living and all he could afford.
Buster bitterly resented the casual abandon with which gamblers at the Galaxy, especially the Asian ones, pissed away small fortunes. He’d personally witnessed those goddamn slopes blow the price of a fucking mansion on one flip of the cards at baccarat—while he was obliged to wear a Mickey Mouse outfit and kiss serious ass just to keep a crummy tin roof over his head.
Filled with envy, prone to violence, Buster Malloy was not an easy man to like. He had acquired a few drinking buddies, mostly local ex-leathernecks at the First Marine Division Association who tolerated him more for their mutual military background than for his good fellowship. There was something ominous about the one-eyed man; even these battle-toughened Vietnam vets recognized the latent danger and afforded him plenty of space. He was rarely invited to their homes.
The person closest to Buster was Helga Johanssen, a hooker in the twilight of her career who shared the big Irishman’s mobile home on a semiregular basis.
Prostitution was one of the facts of Vegas life. Unofficial policy regarding prostitutes at the Galaxy inclined toward tolerance. As long as the women conducted their affairs in a reasonably discreet manner, nobody bothered them. The hookers furnished a necessary service for some of the guests, and it would have been foolish to force those guests to seek that service elsewhere. While the managers of the Galaxy knew full well that many of these women were “represented” by certain hotel employees, they reasoned that the extra income the employees derived from such activities was income that the hotel would not have to provide.
Helga was a big, buxom Swedish blonde of somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five—Malloy had never bothered to ascertain her precise age—whose Las Vegas “business” career had begun two decades earlier in the wide-open pre-AIDS era.
She’d been a waitress at a second-class steak joint in Long Beach, struggling to bring home $150 a week, when a coworker had invited her to drive to Vegas for the weekend. Helga, who hadn’t ventured east of Los
Angeles’s city limits since emigrating from Europe with her parents, had never dreamed there was such a place! She was enchanted by the bright lights, swept up by the excitement—and totally mesmerized by the money. She had never seen so much of it in her life. To the teenage waitress, it seemed to flow as freely as the waters out of the marble fountains at the Roman Palladium. Finally, this was the American dream. Helga vowed then and there that she was going to get her share of it.
Helga Johanssen became a weekend warrior, one of the legion of young women—housewives and waitresses and secretaries, mostly from L.A.—who had discovered that they could make more money turning tricks in Vegas in a single weekend than they could working forty hours a week for an entire month back home. After a few profitable weekends of commuting to Las Vegas, Helga decided to take the plunge and move to Glitzville permanently.
In the beginning, she hustled business anywhere and any way she could. She’d hang around bars or cruise the streets in her old car, soliciting “dates” from solitary male strollers. As she became more familiar with the Vegas scene, she realized there were easier ways to ply your trade—as long as you knew the right people. And the right people were the bell captains, the bartenders, and the pit bosses of the big hotels. Naturally, you had to look after them—either in cash or in trade—but that was simply a business expense.
Over the next twenty years, Helga Johanssen established a comfortable, expensive lifestyle for herself. But with time, her freelance business diminished and she signed on with an escort service—actually a thinly disguised pimping operation—that for the past few years had provided most of her clients. She had somehow managed to avoid drugs, the downfall of many of her colleagues. But lately she’d begun to face the fact that she really had nothing to show for her two decades of self-employment, apart from a luxury sports car, a closet full of beautiful clothes, and some good jewelry.
As Helga approached forty, the customers grew scarcer. Aside from a generalized slowdown of activity in her field due to the onset of AIDS, Helga no longer fit the current preferred-prostitute profile. She was tall, where petite was the style; she was pushing middle age, where the Lolita types were fashionable.
When Buster Malloy met Helga Johanssen, she was a no-longer-young hooker, still reasonably attractive but desperately aware that her remaining
years in the business were limited. She’d been fired from the escort service. Her hotel contacts were beginning to look elsewhere for talent. Most of the money she’d earned in two decades of hooking had somehow slipped through her fingers. Twenty years older, she thought ruefully, twenty years wiser, but right back where I started. Well, there was nothing for it but to cruise the bars again.
Helga Johanssen had always prospered at Halley’s Comet, a piano lounge at the Galaxy, rarely leaving unaccompanied. She smiled at Charlie, the portly greeter, as she ascended the steps to the bar, surreptitiously slipping him a folded twenty in passing.
“Thanks, Helga,” said the tuxedo-clad doorkeeper as he smoothly pocketed the bill. “Haven’t seen you for ages. Where’ve you been?”
“Oh, around. Those bastards at the service let me go. I’m on my own again.”
“That’s a bummer, Helga,” Charlie replied sympathetically. “But you still look super. As a matter of fact—”
A great crash inside the bar followed by angry shouts distracted Charlie from his chat with Helga. Seconds later a harried-looking bartender ran out and whispered urgently in the greeter’s ear.
“Better stay out here for a few minutes, Helga,” Charlie said. “Problems …” He reached for a phone, then hesitated as he spotted the familiar cybercop uniform of a Galaxy security guard striding past the bottom of the stairs. He recognized the burly Irishman immediately. “Malloy!” he called out. “Can you give us a hand here?”
Buster Malloy instinctively felt for his billy club as he ran to answer Charlie’s summons. “What’s the problem?”
“The usual. Some drunk is trying to redecorate the joint.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Malloy plunged into the darkness of Halley’s Comet and emerged moments later triumphantly supporting a sheepish-looking man by the back collar of his jacket as if he were displaying the prize catch in a fishing derby. The hulking one-eyed security guard dragged his trophy down the stairs, propped him against a pillar, and spoke intensely for a moment to the offender. The man blanched, nodded vigorously, and staggered off as fast as his rubbery legs could carry him.
Helga Johanssen watched in fascination. She was intrigued by the big
security guard with the eye patch—mesmerized like a rabbit by a rattlesnake. There was definitely something evil about the man, something cruel. Yet for no logical reason at all, she felt a strange need to meet him, to talk to him, to find out what made him tick.
She casually strolled over to Buster. “What did you say to that man?” she asked, quietly so that Charlie wouldn’t hear. But Charlie was already back on the phone, the incident with the drunk forgotten. Helga was alone with Buster—as alone as any two people could be outside a popular piano bar in a crowded casino.
Malloy sized her up. Big blond woman, good-looking—but no spring chicken. Nice figure, sexy black dress, expensive-looking jewelry. A hooker, for sure. The Irishman had no moral objection to prostitutes. In his opinion, everybody was entitled to make a living; he himself had engaged their services on numerous occasions. Buster answered with a twisted smile: “I told ‘im if ’e ever come back, I’d take ’im in the back room an’ cut off ’is balls with me Swiss Army knife.”
“And he believed you?” she whispered wonderingly.
Malloy grinned crookedly. “Maybe I wasn’t kiddin’.”
“My God, you weren’t, were you?”
The one-eyed man said nothing.
“My name’s Helga,” she offered, then added the mandatory Vegas corollary: “I’m from L.A. And Sweden before that.”
“Buster. Buster Malloy. From South Boston.” There was an awkward pause, during which Malloy merely stared down in amusement at the big Swedish hooker. If this bimbo was looking for witty conversation, she was barking up the wrong tree. The silence lengthened.
“Well, Buster, nice to have met you,” she said finally, nervously turning to ascend the steps to the bar and explore its commercial possibilities. “Maybe we’ll see each other another—”
“Wait a minute.” Malloy sensed that this woman liked him; he hated to pass up a potential freebie. “Do you wanna … would you like to maybe get together later?”
Helga ignored the small warning bell that was ringing in her subconscious. “Yes,” she replied simply.
That first night, Malloy resisted his natural impulses by forcing himself to be as gentle as possible. But she sensed his repression and said, “Don’t be afraid to get tough with me, Buster—just no bruises, please,” and Malloy
was glad to oblige. From then on, he’d knock her around a little before they got it on. Both enjoyed the rougher aspects of sex.
Sometimes the fun went too far. He’d had to take her to the Sunrise ER on more than a couple of occasions after getting a little too enthusiastic with his fists. Yet she stayed with him, for reasons even she didn’t understand, or want to.
As the years passed, Malloy recognized that for him, with an aging hooker for company and a beat-up trailer to live in and twelve bucks an hour at the Galaxy, this was probably as good as it was ever going to get. He’d never make the kind of money those fucking slopes threw around the tables like confetti. There’d be no fine house with in-ground pool, no fancy car, no lavish vacations. The more the specter of personal failure clouded the big Irishman’s soul, the more he felt like hurting somebody.
Near the end of a particularly brutal shift at the Galaxy—the crowds were fierce and security guard Buster Malloy had been nursing the mother of all hangovers—he overheard a commotion in the baccarat pit.
Square foot for square foot, baccarat was by far the casino’s biggest moneymaker. The game attracted the highest of the high rollers, mostly Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese businessmen, many of them with seven-figure credit lines. The Galaxy spared no effort to create a cachet of sophisticated opulence for these premium baccarat players. The pit area was set down three steps and segregated from the rest of the casino by an oak railing; it was elegantly draped in red velvet and carpeted with inch-thick broadloom.
A carefully selected buffet of Oriental delicacies was laid out for the convenience of the players so that they might remain at the table for hours, leaving only to obey the occasional call of nature. The idea of providing restroom facilities in the baccarat pit, something of a deluxe Johnny-on-the-spot, had been suggested by some Galaxy executives but ultimately abandoned as perhaps a little too predatory even for Vegas.
The caller and the dealers were attired in formal eveningwear, while beautiful young ladies in gorgeous gowns, actually shills in the employ of the casino, pretended to play the game. The Asian gamblers appreciated this American arm candy, habituated as they were to the ubiquitous hostesses of Tokyo or Hong Kong or Taipei.
The noise grew louder as Malloy approached the pit.
“I no pay you shit commission! You bastard take enough money from me al’eady!” a middle-aged, somewhat inebriated Hong Kong Chinese player was shouting angrily at Al Mitchell, the caller.
In the game of baccarat, gamblers could wager either on “bank” or “player.” Winning bets on either side were paid off at even money, except that winning bank bets carried a 5 percent house commission, usually collected by the dealers only after the eight-deck shoe had been completely dealt out. It was possible, therefore, that a player who had lost money during a particular shoe, despite winning some bank bets, would be obliged to pay the house an amount additional to what he had already lost. This was evidently the case here, Malloy saw.
“Sir, you know the rules,” the caller protested. “We have to collect the comm—”
“I say fuck you rules. You not make me pay one more dollah. I go now.”
Malloy stumped into the area. “Need any help here, Al?” he asked the caller.
“I think we’re okay, Buster. I’m sure Mr. Ling will reconsider his position—”
But the player refused to be mollified. “Mistah Ling not reconsidah. Mistah Ling go now. Tell you shithead security guard back off,” he added, his voice rising in that supercilious mixture of anger and disdain with which the Chinese address their social inferiors.
Malloy laid a big hand lightly on the player’s shoulder. “Sir,” he began, attempting to disguise the contempt he felt for the little yellow scumbag. All Orientals were scum to his way of thinking, whether you found them in the jungles of Vietnam or the casinos of Las Vegas. “Please keep your voice—”
Without warning, Ling responded by picking up his drink from the table and hurling the contents in Buster’s face. “No touch!” he hissed.
Buster Malloy fought to control his temper—and lost. Stung more by the insult than the alcohol, his normally pink face darkened several shades to the hue of a beefsteak tomato. Throbbing purple veins on his neck threatened to pop his uniform collar. Buster’s hands shook with fury and tightened into ham-size fists. Bitter memories of ’Nam came flooding back, filling his heart with rage. He grasped the little man’s shirtfront with one hand and drew back a huge fist … .
Alarmed, Mitchell stepped between the two men referee-style, somehow managing to separate the big Irish security guard and the diminutive Asian gambler. “Cool it, Buster,” he snapped. “Mr. Ling is one of our best cust—”
“I don’t give a shite,” Malloy shouted, attempting to reach past the caller and get his hands on the now-fearful player. “‘E ain’t got no right doin’ what ’e did.”
“Malloy! You take this any further and I guarantee you’ll be out of a job in five minutes,” Mitchell panted as he struggled to protect his customer from the larger man. “Is that what you want?”
Enraged, Malloy ignored the caller’s warning and continued to press forward. “I’ll kill the yellow motherfucker,” he roared.
Mitchell looked around in desperation. “Give me a hand here, guys,” he called out to his associates in the baccarat room.
Defiantly, Buster shouted, “Let me at that little zipperhead!” Only with the belated assistance of the two male baccarat dealers was Mitchell able to keep Malloy from assaulting a thoroughly shaken Ling. Stymied, the big man ceased his struggling.
The caller straightened his tie, brushed off his jacket, and scowled at the furious security guard. “I’m going to have to report this, Malloy.”
“It just ain’t fuckin’ fair, Al,” Buster growled in frustration, wiping the liquid from his face with a soiled handkerchief. “If this was Vietnam, I’d know what to do,” he added grimly. “But this is America an’ a man’s gotta eat shit just to make a crummy livin’. An’ I guess that ain’t never gonna change.”
“You know what, Malloy? I think you’ve got a real problem. I don’t want to see you in here again. Ever. And I’ll make goddamn sure Steve Forrester hears about this.”
Buster Malloy stomped out of the baccarat room, muttering about his lousy luck.
The big Irishman never suspected that within six months he would finally get his one and only shot at the brass ring.