Free Sin City by Harold Robbins Page B

manager who knocked out Sinatra’s two front caps. After Howard Hughes bought the Sands, Frank, who had been the top bill at the place, got pissed because he wasn’t getting the respect he thought he deserved and Hughes wouldn’t return his phone calls. Frank wasn’t the kind of guy who controlled his temper.
    Angry when the Sands casino boss cut off his credit line, he went across the street and signed to perform at Caesar’s Palace, then he came back and had a confrontation with the casino manager to rub it in. Frank called the guy a few names and got popped in the mouth. Hey, maybe the tourists loved Sinatra, but the little people on the Strip had had it with him. Pretty soon the posters went up that said that the guy who popped Sinatra ought to be mayor.

11
    I used to hang around the parking lot in back of the Desert Inn in between checking on my crew, sometimes sacking out in the Olds to get some shut-eye. I woke up in the dark one night, it was just before Thanksgiving, not that the holiday meant anything to me—Betty worked holidays because people were more generous with their tipping. I had gotten out of the car to take a piss near a Dumpster when a security guard opened a service entrance door. Headlights and engines went on and three vehicles, an ambulance and two limos, lined up at the door. Other men came out and then a man came out on a stretcher. The guy on the stretcher was naked except for a hotel towel thrown across his midsection. He was skinny, no, more than that, he was wasted, emaciated, a dried mummy almost, skin stretched taunt from bone to bone. His skin was so pale, he glowed in the dark. He had long unkempt hair and a scraggly beard. I couldn’t help but stare at his sunken cheekbones and eyes that were dark sockets, his fingernails and toenails so grotesquely long and curled.
    No one noticed me standing by the Dumpster except the dude himself. When the attendants paused before lifting the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, the guy’s eye caught me and he turned to stare. For a moment I was jolted by recognition, not that I knew the guy, but a feeling that I should know him.
    Then he was gone, hustled into the ambulance, a flock of other guys jumping into limos, and the motorcade took off like it was carrying the president or somebody.
    I hailed the security guard as he was closing the service door. “Who’s the roadkill?”
    â€œYou just saw Howard Hughes, kid, the richest man in the world. He’s leaving Vegas. He’s been here for four years, almost to the day, and damn near owns the whole state.”

    â€œWhere’s he going?”
    â€œWith that guy, who knows. Probably to hell.”
    Â 
    Suke taught me more about sex in a month than the regulars at the Pink Lady had learned over a lifetime. People related in different ways and Suke was a sexual animal.
    â€œLo-key, all men too impatient,” she told me, as I eagerly jumped on her naked bones. She pushed me to the side. She was small built, but every ounce was muscle. “You have to talk to woman with hands and lips before you pump like dog fucking leg.”
    She had me start at the top of her head, coming down the side of her cheeks, my lips caressing the soft skin of her neck and under her ear, down the lush valley between her breasts, running my tongue over her nipples, slipping down to tease her bellybutton with my tongue, working my way down the insides of her thighs and to the soles of her feet before my head disappeared in the pink between her legs. She taught me to lick her vulva and go back to her lips so she could taste her own femininity, going back slowly to the pink and the sweet little button there.
    â€œWork it slow,” she told me, moaning with pleasure as I wet-kissed her neck while my penis spoke to her womanhood.
    After a month, I considered myself quite a stud.
    â€œYou very good,” Suke said. “Your cock not as big as Naomi’s