Two of Manny’s bodyguards kicked the door to my shitty, off-the-strip motel room door right off its hinges. I was waiting for them by the peeling door jamb with a taser. I jammed fifty-thousand volts of electricity into Paolo’s neck and two hundred pounds of meathead dropped to the floor with all the grace of a bag of cement.
Jaqi, the other bodyguard, turned to me, exasperated. I dropped the taser when she punched me in the jaw so hard my vision flickered in time to the neon vacancy sign looming over the motel’s parking lot.
“I don’t like to hit women anymore,” she said, reaching out a hand. She had a shotgun cradled in her other arm like it was her kid. “So quit messing around.”
I groaned as I wobbled up to my feet. Jaqi, an aging medium-weight boxer, famous in her time for her vicious combinations, looked bored as she pulled a chair over for me.
“Sit.”
I obeyed like a trained dog. Ass in chair.
“You know why we came,” Jaqi said, pulling another squeaking desk chair over. She sat down across from me, the corners around her gray eyes wrinkled with crow’s feet from the Nevada sun and etched with a weariness that made me want to apologize to her for making her day more complicated than it had to be.
“I can’t pay it back,” I told her, the truth leaping from my lips instead of the lies and pleas I’d spent the last two nights developing.
“Two hundred grand.” Jaqi lay the shotgun across her lap. It made a point. “Manny can’t overlook that kind of debt.”
“I had a system that always worked when I ran tests,” I said. I idly wondered if I could grab the gun from her.
Then I patted the numb side of my face. No way to run away from this.
Hell, Vegas was where I had run to.
Jaqi ignored what I’d just said. Too silly to dignify. Everyone had a system that worked, until it didn’t.
“Manny has a way you can pay him back,” Jaqi said.
“I won’t—”
“You’re not all that, college girl,” Jaqi interrupted me, anticipating my next words. “Not for two hundred thousand. No one can work off that much that way. No, Manny has another use for you.”
I could feel my heart hammer at my chest. I licked my nervous, dry lips. “What does he want?”
Jaqi leaned over as Paolo started to stir and groan. She petted him on the head. “A small piece of your soul,” she said to me.
***
She’d told me not to take the money. She could have said “I told you.” But that wasn’t Jaqi’s way, was it?
“Come,” she told me after Paolo’d thrown up into the gravel by the parked Tesla. “Time to pay up.”
I should have run farther, faster, the moment after I’d watched the cards come up bad as the slot machines chattered in the background. When that sinking, twisting feeling had risen and swallowed me. That moment, that instant when I’d realized I’d fucked up so bad I’d lost everything, and then some.
We drove away from the lights. I’d walked to the motel in a daze after that, past women in too-tight dresses and men laughing as they leaned out of limousines. Now we swept away from it all and toward the suburbs. The tall edifices, fueled by the failings of so many other transplants like me, fell away behind us in the mirrors.
Now it was all red-tiled roofs and clean white walls. Business centers. The edges of the city that lived off that beating center of flash and hope.
***
Manny lay in a bed in a small, boxy ranch house near the edge of a medical park. The machines crowded around him like boxy vultures, their light splashing across his pallid face.
“What’s wrong with him?” I’d just seen Manny a few weeks ago, loaded down with jewelry and sitting on an Aeron chair for his throne.
“His heart.” Jaqi pulled the edge of a blanket back over one of Manny’s feet. She pointed over to a corner, where a thin man lurked in the shadow. “Mr. Skin.”
“Mr. Skin?”
The man’s paper-thin skin soaked up the light as he stepped forward and grinned. “Has it been explained to her yet?”
I had visions of being left in a bathtub of ice and a bloody cavity in my chest as Mr. Skin stuck his hand out. A skeletal hand.
I refused to shake it. “What’s happening?”
“Manny needs his heart fixed,” Jaqi said. “And you owe him two hundred thousand dollars.”
“You can’t take my heart.” Jaqi could knock me out easily enough, but I wouldn’t die without a fight.
Mr. Skin wheezed. Laughing, I realized. “We don’t want your heart, dearie. But we do need a piece of you to fix Manny’s.”
I looked at Jaqi. She looked bored. The same bored she’d looked when I’d arrived before Manny, just off my run on the tables. I needed a stake. Look at what I’d done with just the money I’d scraped together to leave the small college town I’d been trapped in.
My parents had refused to co-sign a loan. They couldn’t afford it. Couldn’t risk it if I failed. I’d seen the countdown toward having to leave start. I saw the future. A move back into my childhood room, a job waitressing, and eventually a rundown house and car that always needed repairs and a kid who couldn’t wait to leave you and the small town you’d trapped them in. And, over here, I could see a glimpse of the future I’d have with something different. Something big.
What else would you do with a math degree?
“Fuck you all,” I said, looking around the room. “This is some weird shit.”
***
Mr. Skin followed me outside as I sat on the side of the pool. He squinted up at the stars, then carefully unpacked a vape pen. He slotted a cartridge in and held it up. “Do you mind?”
I shook my head.
He clicked a button, and a cloud of peppermint wafted over our heads as he exhaled.
“I’ve been doing this a very long time,” Mr. Skin said under the Las Vegas desert sky. “Nowhere better than here to be in my line of work.”
He gestured toward the distant haze of neon lighting up the undersides of several nearby clouds.
“Are you a doctor?”
“No.” He smiled. In the dark it looked feral and made me shudder. “You know better.”
For some reason, I did.
“Jaqi said you wanted my soul.” I couldn’t look him in the face. It sounded ridiculous. Yet, the shadows, Skin’s eerie face, and the whole night, it felt like it could be real.
Maybe there was something more than peppermint in that vape cartridge.
“Not all of it.”
I laughed. Laughed at the absurdity of owing someone hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been lost in under thirty seconds. Laughed that I’d been dragged out here by some mobster’s bodyguard. Laughed that Mr. Skin looked so serious.
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked. “Rumplestiltskin?”
He blew peppermint smoke politely away from me.
“Yes,” he said.
“Doesn’t it stop working if I know your name?” I asked.
Mr. Skin nodded. “I changed my name, legally.”
He pulled a wallet out from his tailored slacks. He opened it, and the driver’s license inside peeked out of a clear plastic slit.
“You’re covering the name with your thumb.”
“My apologies.” He moved his thumb. The license read JACK PARONSKAFT.
He pulled it out and tossed it into the pool where it fluttered to rest with dead leaves. Behind it was another license. TOM T. SKIN.
“I have lots of names now, all legally, with documentation. I’ve changed it so many times no one will ever track it down. Technically, I’m an LLC corporation, not even a name. And those shell corporations are nestled in shell corporations so deep it’s just turtles all the way down.” He held out a titanium card. A business card. It had no name on it, just an address. “I made the mistake of someone finding out my name once. I won’t do it again.”
I looked at his dark eyes as I put the card in my back pocket. “You really think you’re Rumplestiltskin?”
He shrugged. “Try me.”
Something in his voice, an eagerness, chilled me. But there was a way out, wasn’t there?
The same way out from the story.
“Can you give me money?” Like the gold she’d woven from straw to give a king? “Enough to get out of this situation?”
Mr. Skin’s eyes glittered. “I can pay your debts. I can even stake you a little more to go back. I heard about your system. I think it’s a good one.”
“Ask about the price,” Jaqi hissed, startling me. I turned around to see her watching us from the door, arms folded.
“Go back inside,” Mr. Skin told her.
“What price to become the champion,” Jaqi said. “What price to get your stake. What price to fix a dying heart.”
“I am, always, fair,” Mr. Skin said. “Always. I give dreams, I give life.”
“You trap the desperate. The kids who get off the bus at the big city. The hungry. The mother with a sick child.”
“What price will Manny pay?” I asked.
Jaqi walked over to stand between us. “The price for Manny’s heart that you will pay will be less than the one Manny will have to pay. Skin just needs a small bandaid from you. But if you make a promise with him, that’s binding.”
“Let the girl make her own way in the world,” Mr. Skin snapped.
“Come.” Jaqi pulled me up to my feet. “It’s time to do what you need to do.”
***
I stood over Manny, and Mr. Skin lit a candle that he waved over the bed.
“Will it hurt?” I asked.
“No.”
“What does it mean? To lose a piece of my soul. Am I going to die young?”
“You’ll just feel a little less,” Jaqi said as Mr. Skin leaned over Manny and tapped a pair of fingers to his chest. “A little less pain, a little less pleasure. A little less excitement, a little less disappointment. A little less of everything. It’s just a nip, enough to save a heart, to hold it together, to let it beat.”
I looked at Jaqi’s weary face and realized it wasn’t weariness in the corners of her eyes: it was just… less. And I understood.
She nodded.
“With your permission,” Mr. Skin said, approaching me. He had a pair of scissors in his hand.
I didn’t believe any of this. Did I?
If so, what harm would there be in letting them take some hair, chant something, and then move on. Shit, it was a deal to get out a two hundred-thousand-dollar debt, right?
“Go ahead.”
Mr. Skin cut a small piece of hair. The smoke as he burned it on the candle lazed around the room, and everyone held their breaths.
“It has been done!” he announced.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it.”
I felt… slightly relieved. But not as much as I expected.
***
Jaqi drove me back toward the city, and I watched the floodlit palms go by. “You believe Manny’s really going to be okay? That this isn’t some snake oil bullshit?”
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen it.” Jaqi slowed down for a red light. “Paolo had cancer three years ago. I gave him the card. Like the one in your pocket.”
I bit my lip.
“I have a system,” I told her.
“I know.”
“I can’t go back to that town. I can’t… fade away. I want to *be* something.”
“I saw my name in lights,” Jaqi said. “I know. Kids from where I grew up, they could only dream of the life I lived.”
And that’s all she said until we stopped at the motel parking lot. She handed me a small stack of cash. A few hundred.
“It’s enough for a plane ticket home,” she said. “Or a good night at the tables. If your system’s really that good, it’s a small stake.”
For a moment I sat there, looking at the worlds ahead of me.
Then I gave her the card from my back pocket.
“Give that to someone who really needs it,” I said to her.
The ex-boxer smiled wanly as she took the titanium card. “I’d be happy to.”
And then she drove off before I could change my mind.