It was early evening and the other tables were mostly occupied. Occasionally a burst of laughter or a snatch of conversation would rise over the level of the general racket, but mostly it was just noise with a country-western beat. The band may not have been good, but they fulfilled one of the primary requirements for any lounge act by being loud, almost loud enough to drown out the unrelenting cacophony from the slot machines on the other side of the railing.
“My head hurts,” he muttered.
“Best place for a private meeting,” Kuznetsov told him. “Noise drives listeners crazy and even digital signal processors have trouble picking out one conversation.”
“How do you know that?”
The Russian just smiled. “Heads up everyone. Here comes our contact.”
Jerry turned in his seat and saw a man pushing his way through the crowd. Save for bushy white eyebrows and an enormous white mustache there wasn’t a hair on his head. He looked like a walrus, if you can imagine a sunburned walrus wearing aviator sunglasses and an orange flight suit decorated with a wildly improbable collection of patches. Jerry saw insignia from everything from the 23rd Fighter Squadron to something called Miz Lai’s Cottontail Ranch and Sporting Club. He looked over at Gilligan.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” Gilligan muttered.
The man nodded to the Russians and pulled a chair over to the table where the others sat. “Charlie Conroy,’“ he boomed, extending a paw that was sunburned as pink as the rest of him. “My friends call me Cowboy.”
As Jerry shook the preferred hand he saw the wrist was decorated with a watch the size of a can of snuff, with dials and buttons and hands galore.
Almost as soon as Charlie sat down a waitress wearing not much, and that black and slinky, slithered up to take his order.
“Honey,” he boomed, “bring me over one of those Tanqueray and tonics. Make it a double.” The waitress reflexively avoided a pat on the rump and swivel-hipped off through the tables.
He turned to the Russians. “Vaseline you old commie, how’s it hanging?”
“Okay, sky pirate. Burned any babies lately?”
“Naw, I got out of that end of tie business. How about you, Ivan? Still doing them dirty deeds?”
“I get by,” Kuznetsov said with a slight smile. Jerry got the impression he wasn’t nearly as charmed by Conroy’s antics as his partner. Gilligan was obviously un-charmed, but he was keeping his mouth shut.
“Hell of a crowd, ain’t it?” Cowboy boomed to Jerry and Bal-Simba. “Between the tourists and the computer geeks, whole damn town is packed. I ain’t seen anything like it since the fall of Saigon.”
The waitress returned with Charlie’s drink and Jerry paid for it. Charlie emptied the gin and tonic in one gulp and held up the glass. Fill’er again will you, darlin’?” Obviously he had never heard of the “twenty-four hours from bottle to throttle” rule either.
“Now,” he said, setting the glass on the tiny table, “I understand you boys want to make a little excursion.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said, glancing around the table. “Four of us and, ah, some cargo. About five hundred pounds of it. We need to make one trip to a place about a hundred and fifty miles from here.”
“No problem,” Charlie said. “But there are some conditions.” He leaned forward and put his meaty forearms on the tiny table. Gilligan grabbed his drink just as it was shoved off the edge.
Their guest was oblivious. “Now understand, I don’t smuggle dope. Leastways not for strangers. And I won’t stand for murder on my airplane. Beyond that—” he shrugged. “I don’t see nothing and I don’t hear nothing.”
That, Jerry reflected, was probably going to be the most important characteristic of all.
“Where are we gonna make pickup and will it be a day or night flight?”
“You can pick us up at the airport,” Jerry said. “Day is probably better than night. It’s the destination that’s a little tricky.”
“Where you going?”
“Uh, Groom Lake, Area Fifty-One.”
“Just outside inner fence toward the end of runway,” Kuznetsov added, leaning over from his table.