The Heart Goes Last

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“Whoa!” he says. “Wait a minute, lady! If that’s what you want, you need to be back at your hotel, and then I can call, we have a service, you’ll love …” The thought of Lucinda Quant in bed with an Elvis bot makes him shudder. Even in her present diminished form, she’d be odds on to win that one.

“Don’t panic, I don’t want your body,” she growls with a derisive laugh. “I want your belt buckle. Right now!”

“Wait,” he says. She can’t be the one! She’s not at all what he was expecting – not a suave double agent in black, not a tough Surveillance guy working for Jocelyn, not – worst case! – a Positron-sent assassin. How can he know this unlikely biddy is the right handover link? “Just a minute,” he says. “Who sent you?”

“Don’t be silly. You know who,” she says, tossing her black wig and orange Nymp horns with a hint of the coyness that must have made her a lethal flirt forty years ago. “This is gonna be my fucking comeback, so don’t screw around.”

Wait, wait, he tells himself. You can’t just roll over. “There’s a password,” he says as sternly as he can.

“Tiptoe Through the fucking Tulips,” she says. “Now do I have to pull your pants off or what?”

Stan unsnaps his belt. Lucinda takes it over to the makeup counter, puts on her reading glasses, and holds the buckle under the light. She’s got a tiny implement, like a little screwdriver. She inserts it into the top of the buckle, gives a twist, and the thing snaps open. Inside there’s a miniature black flashdrive.

She tucks the drive into a small envelope, licks it shut, whips off her hair complete with the horns, and duct-tapes the drive to the top of her fuzzy scalp, which isn’t totally bald, but close. Then she pulls the wig back on and adjusts her horns. “Thanks,” she says. “I’m off. I sure hope this has a major scandal in it. I don’t mind risking what’s left of my neck, so long as it’s worth it. Watch the news!”

She’s gone in a swirl of hibiscus floral print and Blue Suede perfume. What’s next? Stan wonders. Wait until the four guys in sunglasses arrive and start ripping out my molars? I don’t have it! he’ll scream. It’s that wizened-up cancer survivor with horns! She’s duct-taped it to her head! Why can’t life hand him something plausible for a change?

The door opens again: four bald guys file in, except they don’t have sunglasses, and they’re green. They fill the dressing room. “Stan,” says the first one, advancing in back-pat stance. “Welcome to Vegas, bro!”

“Conor!” says Stan. “What the fuck!” They do the pat; something wet comes off on Stan’s cheek.

“Right,” says Conor, smiling greenly. “You remember Rikki and Jerold. It was Jerold let you in backstage.”

Handshakes, grins, whacks on the shoulder. The fourth guy says, “Stan. Well done.” Could it be Budge? Bald and green? Yes, it could.

“You guys freaked me out,” says Stan. “Turning up at the Elvis place, with my picture and all.” His honeymoon photo on the beach, the one he’d sent to Conor. That’s where they’d got it.

“Sorry about that,” says Con. “Thought we could cut some corners, make contact earlier, save time. But we missed you.”

“It came out okay in the wash,” says Budge.

“How’d you get out of Possibilibots?” Stan asks him.

“In a box, like you,” says Budge. “Hard to find an Elvis outfit my size, but we cut it up the back the way the undertakers do; plus the box was cramped, but apart from that it worked without a hitch. Our lady friend closed my lid at the Possibilibots end.”

“Let’s get you out of that dickwit Elvis suit. You look like a twat” says Conor. “Who’s got the razor?”

Stan, wearing a badly fitting Green Man suit, his head newly shaved, his face a seaweed green, is drinking a coconut water in Conor’s dressing room. Conor says the coconut water is a quick energy lift, though Stan really doesn’t need any more energy right now: he’s buzzing like a bad fuse.

On the small, blurry dressing room screen, the second Green Man show of the night is in progress. They run them through in teams, says Conor, because the act takes so much out of you. Not out of the boys, because they’re not really in it, they’re just in disguise. They can come and go backstage because everyone in Team One thinks they’re in the other team and vice versa. But Conor himself has always craved the spotlight, so he’s had himself inserted as a gong player.

“Yeah, I know, it’s moronic,” says Conor. “But you have to admit it’s the best cover while we’re waiting to pull the job.”

“What job?” says Stan.

“Oh. She didn’t tell you? She was extra-fucking definite about you. She said you totally had to be in with us; otherwise, it would be a fail. She said you were the lynchpin.”

“Who says? You mean …” He stops himself from saying Jocelyn’s name. He glances around, then up at the ceiling: is it safe in here?

“I mean her! The Big Wazooka! She said the two of you were fucking joined at the hip.”

The Big Wazooka isn’t how Stan would have thought of Jocelyn, but it kind of fits. Bazooka. “So, I’m the lynchpin,” he says. “Mind if I ask why?”

“Fucked if I know,” says Conor cheerfully. “Been doing odd jobs for her since before Christ. She’s known you were my big brother ever since she saw you at the trailer joint, before you signed into that body-parts wholesaler corral. I warned you about. But I never ask her why she wants what she wants, that’s her business. Deal is I just do the job, no loose ends; then I collect, end of story, have a nice life. But I guess we find out tomorrow, about why you’re so fucking central. That’s when it’s going down.”

Stan tries to look wise. Is it possible to look wise with your face painted green? He doubts it. “What do I do?” he says. He hopes they aren’t going to rob a bank or kill anyone. “On this job? When it’s going down?”

“Figure we’ll put you on the gong,” says Conor. “Not hard to pick up, you just have to know the cues, then hit the gong with the hammer and look like a dumbass. That shouldn’t be too hard for you.”

“So I’m onstage?” says Stan. That’s not safe, everyone will be looking at him. But then, so what? He no longer has the thing in the belt buckle; he no longer has even the belt, since Rikki took away his whole Elvis outfit and tossed it into a dumpster.

“Not here,” says Conor. “Place called Ruby Slippers. It’s a retirement home clinic type of thing, lot of rich old farts warehoused or getting themselves cut and sewed. We’re the entertainment.”

“That’s all?” says Stan. “All I have to do is hit the gong?” Though he’s been to that Ruby Slippers branch as Elvis a lot, romancing old ladies, nobody will recognize him; not in his current disguise as a giant pea.

“Don’t be a fucking dummy,” says Conor. “That’s the cover! The real job is a snatch.”

“That place has fucking tight security,” says Stan.

“Hey! This is your brother you’re talking to!” says Conor. He rubs two fingers together. “Those guys get paid off! We just go there, start the green act, knock down the security for the look of it, do the snatch …”

Crap, thinks Stan. They’re kidnapping someone. That could get them shot, not to mention himself. “So, I hit the gong …”

“You got it.” says Conor. “And then, whisk-o!”

“Whisk-o?”

“The big snatcheroonie,” says Conor. “It’s genius.”

In Flight

Ed’s up front, in Business. It would look strange for Charmaine to be there too – after all, she’s only the assistant, officially. That’s Ed’s reasoning, says Jocelyn: he doesn’t want to call undue attention. Thank goodness for that, thinks Charmaine, because she would find it very, very hard to be nice to him or even civil, now that she knows what he intends to do to her. If she were beside him in Business, most likely he’d be squeezing her arm all the way to Las Vegas, plus dosing her with gin and tonic and trying to get his fingers onto her knee or look down her front, though no hope of that because she’s wearing the button-to-the-chin blouse Aurora picked out for her.

And all the time he’d be asking her if she’s feeling any less grief because of Stan. Not that he really cares about Stan, or about anything she likes or loves or doesn’t like or love, because he has no interest in who she is really. She’s mostly just a body to him, and now he wants to turn her into only a body. She might as well not have any head at all.

After feeling so sad for weeks, she’s now really angry underneath. If she had to sit with Ed she’d be sure to snap at him, and then he might figure out that she’s learned about his big plan. And then he might panic and do something weird, right on the plane. He might throw her to the floor and start ripping off her buttons, the way Max used to, but with Max she wanted him to do that, whereas with Ed it would be a very different thing, it would be awkward and quite frankly creepy. Keep your freaking hands off my darn buttons! That’s what she would say.

Well, he couldn’t really do that – the floor thing with the buttons – because the flight attendants would stop him. But what if they turned a blind eye, what if they’re all his employees, what if everyone on the plane is on his side?

Calm down, Charmaine, she tells herself. That’s just foolish. Those kinds of things don’t happen in real life. It’s okay, it’s going to be fine, because Jocelyn is sitting beside her and Aurora is in the row behind them, and there’s another Surveillance person on the plane too, Jocelyn has assured her – a man, back near the exit door. And that man plus Jocelyn and Aurora, they’ll be more than a match for Ed. She doesn’t know what they’ll do, but it might involve a judo kick or something. And they have the advantage of knowing about Ed’s plan, while he doesn’t know a thing about theirs.