“You gonna need money to do that,” Beauchamps said. “Cole and I can go talk to Larry right now, tonight, and see if Harrelson and his old lady have gotten home.”
“Gonna be dangerous, Harrelson is. The guy will be tough, he’s gonna have guns, probably a heavy-duty security system,” Deese said. He decided he’d call Santos again that night, maybecome down to eight hundred thousand. That’d have to be his minimum.
—
DEESE WAS SITTINGon a couch in a T-shirt and a pair of Jockey boxer shorts, wrapping a new bandage around his calf. Ten months earlier, he’d been hurt by a man named Howell Paine, but inefficiently, he admitted: there’d been a fight, and Paine had bitten a chunk of meat out of his calf. That had led to his arrest and the chain of events that had led to his secret graveyard and the cannibalized bodies.
Though the wound was almost a year old, Deese had self-treated it and it had never properly healed. Instead of a skin-covered scar, he had a gnarled reddish-and-bluish lump of flesh that had become infected two or three different times.
He’d continued to self-treat the wound. A few days after they moved into the house, he’d gone out to the hot tub, where he’d scraped the wound open again on a drain cover. A pocket of pus had drained down his leg, and Beauchamps had told him he needed to go to the emergency room. Deese had resisted, but the wound had smelled bad enough that he’d eventually given in.
The wound had been opened and cleaned by an on-call surgeon at the medical center and he’d put Deese on antibiotics and told him to change the bandage daily until the new surgical wound had healed.
“We can handle Harrelson,” Beauchamps told him.
“That’s what we do,” Cole added. “But first things first. We gotta get rid of all our phones. Now. Tonight.”
—
THEY GOT RIDof the phones.
Deese wanted to break them up with a hammer, but Cole argued against it. Instead, he and Beauchamps took them to a tough neighborhood beneath the Stratosphere Tower and left them on a concrete-block wall, from where he’d expect them to disappear in a minute or so.
“Better to have them walk around than to suddenly go quiet. That could pull the feds off our asses, at least for a few days,” he told the others.
They agreed. “But then what?” Cox asked.
“Then we go talk to Larry about Harrelson,” Beauchamps said.
“And we get a whole bunch of new phones,” Cole added
—
LARRY O’CONNERwas a short man with dull-brown hair, a skimpy brown mustache, and a serious potbelly. He dressed in double knits from head to toe because they didn’t need ironing. He and Beauchamps had met years before at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New Orleans. They’d both been sent to AA after convictions on minor burglary charges as part of court deals to avoid serving time. They’d both realized that neither of them was likely to stop drinking or go straight.
O’Conner had migrated to Las Vegas, where he made a living betting on sports and horse racing but had barely been getting by. Beauchamps had used him to connect with Las Vegas fences and had given him a small cut of the money that came out of thosedeals. That had led to O’Conner spotting Jim Harrelson, a golf hustler and poker player.
—
HARRELSON WASgood at gambling, much better than O’Conner. So good, he wasn’t really gambling. He had a golf partner who everybody called Dopey, who carried a 9 golf handicap and could play six strokes better than that when he had to. Dopey, like O’Conner, was a drinker, and one night in a bar had bragged to O’Conner that Harrelson kept five million in cash on hand for his high-stakes poker games with LA whales and for his golf.
“The buy-in for some of those poker games can be a quarter million just to sit at the table,” Dopey said.
And he and Harrelson had once taken more than a million dollars off two Phoenix financial guys who thought they were scratch golfers, Dopey told O’Conner, but they’d failed to prove it over a dozen rounds. All the bets were in cash, and Harrelson had fronted the money for their side of the bets.
“He took a banker’s box of hundred-dollar bills out of the trunk of his car like it was chump change,” Dopey said. “You know how much he keeps around? Five million.All the time.Said he wouldn’t want to be caught short.”
O’Conner filed the information away for possible later use.
Later had arrived.
—
THE MORNING AFTERthey’d ditched the phones, and with new burners in hand, Beauchamps and Cole found O’Conner in a motel downtown. He’d been drinking for several days but wasn’t toodrunk to drive, he said. The night before, he’d gone to Tina’s Wayside and had seen Harrelson’s custom-yellow Porsche Cayenne in the parking lot.
“They’re back. When he’s here, he usually goes over to Tina’s at night to hang out and figure out who’s in town, where the big game is. His wife doesn’t go with him, it’s business,” O’Conner said. “He usually heads back home by ten o’clock or so, especially in the summer. If you’re gonna play golf in the summer in Vegas, you’ve got to be out there by six or you’ll die.”
Harrelson lived in an upscale neighborhood south of the airport, O’Conner said. That was also different than the situation in LA. In Beverly Hills, the houses were gated but not the streets. In Vegas, the streets were gated but not the houses—and, in Harrelson’s case, the gates had guards instead of electronic remotes. But there was a simple way around it if Harrelson went home after dark.
