Dragonfish

1

IT WAS THREE IN THE MORNING and dark in my apartment. I stood half naked behind the front door, peering through the peephole at my vacant porch. My voice had come out small and childish and like someone else’s voice calling from the bottom of a well.

“Who’s there?” I said again, louder, more forceful this time. The porch light flickered but I could see only the lonely rail of my balcony, the vague silhouette of trees beyond it.

I grabbed my officer jacket off the kitchen counter and slipped it on. I steadied the gun behind me, then slowly opened the door and let in the cool December air. The hair on my chest and legs bristled. I stepped onto the porch. No one on the stairwell. No one by the mailboxes. A sweeping breeze from the bay made my legs buckle. I peered over my second-floor balcony. In the darkened courtyard, strung over the elm trees, a constellation of white Christmas lights swayed.

I returned inside and locked the door. I crawled back into bed, back under the warm covers as though wrapping myself in the darkness of the room.

The two knocks that had awakened me resounded in my head, this time thunderous and impatient and so full of the echo of night that I asked myself again if I had heard anything at all. Could a knocking in your dreams wake you?

Some minutes passed before I placed my gun back on the nightstand.

“NO ONE out there to hurt you but yourself,” my father, a devout atheist, used to tell me. I never took this literally so much as personally, because my father knew better than anyone how selfish and shortsighted I can be. But whether he was warning me about myself or just naively reassuring me about the world, I have chosen, in my twenty years as police, to believe in his words as one might in aliens or the hereafter. They’ve become, it turns out, a mantra for self-preservation. Cops get as scared as anyone, but you develop a certain fearlessness on the job that you wear like an extra uniform, and people will know it’s there like your shadow slipping its hand over their shoulder, and intimidated or not they’ll think twice about hurting you. It’s an armor of faith, a wish etched in stone. Go ask a soldier who’s been to war. Or a priest. Or a magician. Without it, without that role to play, everything is a cold dark room in the night.

MY PHONE RANG at six the next morning, an hour after my alarm woke me. I was already in uniform, coffee cup in hand and minutes away from walking out the door. As soon as I answered, the phone went dead — just like the previous morning.

I went to the window and peeked through the mini blinds at the parking lot below. No one was up and about at that early hour, and the morning was still a stubborn shade of night. I made a fist of my left hand, unfurled it. My fingers had healed along with the pink scar on my wrist, but a warmth of unforgotten pain bloomed again. I stood there gazing at the lot until I finished my coffee.

Two days before this, I had come home from my patrol and found the welcome mat slightly crooked. Easily explainable, I figured, since any number of people — mailman, deliveryman, one of those door-to-door religious types — could have come knocking during the day. But once inside I noticed an unfamiliar smell, like burnt sugar, like someone had been cooking in the apartment, which I never do. In my bedroom, the pillows on the bed were in the right place but looked oddly askew, and one of my desk drawers had been left an inch open. It’s always been the little things I notice. Show me a man with three eyes, and I’ll point out his dirty fingernails.

The same smell greeted me the next evening as soon as I opened the front door. It followed me through the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, fading at times so that I found myself sniffing the air to reclaim it, as I did as a boy when I roamed the house for hours in search of a lost toy or some trivial thought that had slipped my mind. Then the smell vanished altogether. Half an hour passed before I finally went to the bathroom and saw that the faucet was running a thin stream of water. I shut it off, more than certain that I had checked it before leaving that morning, something I always did at least twice.

I closed all the window blinds and spent the next two hours combing through all my drawers and shelves, opening cabinets and closets, searching the entire apartment for something missing or out of place, altered in some way. I knew it was ridiculous. Why would they go sifting through my medicine cabinet or my socks? Why move my books around? I suppose checking everything made everything mine again, if only temporarily.

That night I went to bed with my gun on the nightstand, something I hadn’t done in nearly five months, since those first few weeks back from the desert.

I’d been trained on the force to trust my gut, or at least respect it enough to never dismiss it; but it crossed my mind that I was imagining all this, that in the previous five months I’d been glancing over my shoulder at shadows and flickering lights. You fixate on things long enough and you might as well be paranoid, like staring at yourself in the mirror until you start peering at what’s reflected behind you.

When the phantom door knocks awoke me that same night, I lay in bed afterward and waited. I was that boy again, hearing the front door slam shut in the middle of the night and measuring the loudness and swiftness and emotion of that sound and whether it was my mother or father who’d left this time, and then waiting for the sound again until sleep washed away the world.

The lesson of my childhood was that if you anticipate misfortune, you make it hurt less. It’s a fool’s truth, but what truth isn’t?

When I got home the following evening, I stayed in my car and stared for some time at the dark windows of my apartment. I was still in uniform but driving my old blue Chrysler. A drowsy fog crawled in from the Oakland bay, a cataract on the sunset, the day, which now felt worn. “Empty Garden” played on the radio, a slow sad song I hadn’t heard since my twenties. I remembered the old music video, Elton John playing a piano in a vacant concrete courtyard amid autumn leaves and twilight shadows. I sat back and scanned the complex of buildings surrounding me and thought of Suzy and the flowers that decorated every corner of our old house, and at the pit of me was not sadness or anger but the hollowness of forgetting how to need someone.

Three kids on bicycles glided past my car through fresh puddles left by the sprinklers. Some twenty yards away, an elderly man strolled the courtyard with his Chihuahua like a scared baby in his arms. In the building that faced me, three college guys were leaning over their balcony, smoking and leering at a pretty redhead who passed below them with a baby stroller. Then I saw a skinny Asian kid — a teenager — walk in front of my car, turn, and approach the window. He smiled and gestured for me to roll it down. His hands looked empty. He was wearing a Dodgers cap and an oversize blue Dodgers jacket zipped all the way to his throat. His smile was like a pose for a camera, and when he bent down to face me, he was all teeth.

I cracked open my window.

“Hello, Officer,” he said. “Nice evening, huh?” He slipped me a folded note through the crack, and before I could say anything, he jogged away around the corner of the building.

I recognized the yellow paper, the Oakland PD logo, ripped from the notepad on my kitchen table. The words were neatly printed in red ink: We’ve come from Las Vegas. Leave your gun in the car and come into your apartment. We just want to talk. Follow these instructions and no one will be harmed.

That last line lingered on my lips as I refolded the note and slipped it into my breast pocket, glaring again at the windows of my apartment. Why would they warn me? Why give me a chance to walk away? I considered calling in for help, but had to remind myself that if I hadn’t told a soul about what happened five months ago, there was no explaining it now, at least not to anyone who could help. I could have driven away too, but I’d done that before and it had only led me here, to this moment. Or so I suspected.

And that was really the thing: whatever it was, I just needed to know. Nothing more exhausting than the imagination.

I pulled my gun out of its holster and made a show of holding it over the steering wheel before placing it into my glove compartment.

Walking away from the car felt like leaving a warm bed. I had lived in the complex for over two years, ever since the divorce, and liked it well enough, but only then, as I was trudging up the path toward my apartment, did I see how its tranquil beauty seemed like a postcard of someone else’s life: the ivory stucco buildings leaning into shadow, hugged by tall trees and trimmed bushes and small perfect squares of lawn drowned now, even in winter, by the evening sprinklers. I began my climb up the stairwell. I noticed for the first time how craggy the stone steps were, how awfully they’d scrape at your skin if you were to go falling down the stairs.

Not sure what to do at my own front door, I knocked. There was no answer, so I slowly turned the knob. The door was unlocked. It opened into darkness. As soon as I stepped inside, the lamp in the living room clicked on.

There were two young Asian men standing side by side in front of the TV set. The taller one spoke up in perfect English: “Close the door, please.”

I remained in the doorway and gripped the doorknob, one foot still lingering on the porch. I remembered the last line of their note and took another step inside, nudging the door shut with my heel.

It’s always difficult to tell with Asians, but the two of them could have been no older than twenty-five. The short one sported a goatee and slick hair and stood ashing his cigarette into my potted cactus, his wiry frame wrapped in a shiny black leather jacket. The other one, buzz-cut and sturdy in jeans and a bomber jacket, was a foot taller and moved that way, having just, without a word or glance, handed his binoculars to his partner, who dutifully set them atop the TV. I saw no sign of a gun on either yet, which bothered me more than if they’d already had one pointed at my head. They were not nervous, though they expected me to be. The goateed one, like their messenger outside, acted happy to see me; he had nodded when our eyes met, right after the lamp flickered him into existence. But it was the taller, stoic one who again spoke.

“You are Officer Robert Ruen.”

“Who’re you? Why are you in my home?”

“I’m sure you can guess. You came up, didn’t you?”

“Did I have a choice?”

He said something to the goateed kid that I did not understand, but I knew for certain then that they were Vietnamese.

Casually, the kid put out his cigarette in the cactus pot and approached me with a sly grin and his palms out like he wanted a hug. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Officer, I’m gonna search you right now. Wanna make sure we all on even ground.”

I hesitated at first, not sure yet whether I should cooperate or play dumb and tell him to search himself. His pleasantness both irked and intimidated me. I put my hands on the front door and let him pat me down. He was half my size, but his hands were solid, with weight and intention behind them. Satisfied, he gestured for me to make myself comfortable on my own couch, which I did after quickly sniffing him and smelling nothing but cigarettes.

They’d been waiting for some time. A couple of my travel magazines lay open on the coffee table beside two open cans of Coke from my fridge, and the TV remote sat atop the TV instead of its usual resting place on the arm of the sofa. I was surprised they hadn’t kicked off their shoes and made coffee.

The kid watched me as I, by force of habit, slipped off my loafers and set them neatly to the side. He chuckled lazily and turned to his partner. “I think we dirtied up his carpet.”

His partner looked at his watch, then at my shoes. Again he spoke in Vietnamese. The kid threw him an exaggerated frown, but he repeated himself and was already silently unlacing a boot. A moment later they had both tossed their shoes onto the tile floor by the front door.

“Our Christmas present to you,” the kid said to me in his white socks.

“How did you get in here?”

“Through the front door. Simmer down, Mr. Officer. We just waiting for a phone call.” He shut up for the moment, waiting like his partner.

On the wall behind them hung the samurai sword I had bought ages ago at a flea market for forty bucks. I had unsheathed it once or twice to admire it, and now wondered how sharp it actually was.

“Hey,” the kid said, struck by something. “I got something else for you.”

Though I was going nowhere, he gestured for me to remain seated. He arched his brow mischievously at me, as if at some eager child at a birthday party, and reached into his jacket pocket. I held my breath as he pulled out another cigarette, which he put to his lips. From the other pocket, he revealed a silver flask. Holding out an index finger like a perch for a bird, he carefully poured the contents of the flask over the length of it. He raised it to his face and flicked his lighter. The finger ignited in a calm blue flame, which he promptly used to light his cigarette. He held up the finger like a candle, blew a lazy plume of smoke over it, and watched it burn itself out as he flashed his jack-o’-lantern grin. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to scare me, entertain me, or make fun of me.

His partner looked on with glassy, tired eyes. We exchanged an awkward glance before he looked away as if embarrassed by this brief talent show.

His cell phone chimed and he brought it carefully to his ear, nodding at the kid to take a post by the door. He spoke Vietnamese into the phone as he gave me another once-over. He moved into the hallway between my bathroom and bedroom, murmuring into the shadows. After a minute, he came back and handed me the phone.

The line was silent.

“Yes,” I said.

“You. Robert Ruen.” It was a declaration, not a question — an older man’s voice, loud and somehow childish, the accent unmistakably Vietnamese. “Say something to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You. Your voice, man — I don’t forget thing like this.”

It might have been his broken English or how quickly he spoke, but he sounded something like a puppet. He was smoking, sucking in his breath fast and exhaling his impatience into the phone.

“You’ve made a mistake,” I said.

“You got bad memory? You know who I am.”

“I have no idea—”

“Las Vegas, man. I know you come here. You think I’m dummy I not figure out?” He snorted and spat, as if to underline his point. “In Vietnam, we say beautiful die, but ugly never go away. For policeman, you do some bad fucking thing. You know how long I wait to talk to you? I been dream about this. I see your face in my fucking dream.”

My houseguests were stirring. The tall one slowly unzipped his jacket, and the kid drifted behind me. I could still see curls of his cigarette smoke.

I spoke calmly into the phone, “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“You fucking know.”

“I don’t know anything about anything. Just what the hell are you talking about?”

He sounded like he was thinking. Then he replied, as if repeating himself, “Suzy.”

The name drained me all at once of any effort to deny its importance. It was like he had slapped me to shut me up.

I think back on it now, and this was the moment I felt the full weight of the things I’d already lost — the last moment before everything that would later happen became inevitable.

I heard movement behind me. On cue, the goateed kid appeared at my shoulder. I did not see the gun until it was pointed, a dark hard glimmering thing, squarely at my temple.

The voice spoke again over the line. “I ask you one time. Where is she?”

2

FIVE MONTHS BEFORE ALL THIS, I drove into Vegas on a sweltering July evening just before sunset. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light and glowing alien and purplish in the sky. I was convinced it was a UFO and kept gazing at it before nearly hitting the truck ahead of me. That jolted me out of my exhaustion.

Half an hour later, the guy at the gas station told me about the beam of light from atop that giant pyramid casino, which you can spot from anywhere in the city, even from space if no clouds are in the way.

“Sorry, man,” he said like he was consoling me.

I must have looked disappointed.

The drive from Oakland had taken me all day, so I checked into the Motel 6 near Chinatown and fell asleep with my shoes on and my five-shot still strapped to my ankle. I slept stupid for ten hours straight and woke up at six in the morning, my mouth and nostrils so dry it felt like someone had shoveled dirt over me in the night. The sun had barely risen, but it was already a hundred degrees outside. Not even a wisp of a cloud.

After a long cold shower, I walked to the front office. The clerk from last night — an old Chinese guy who spoke English about as well as I spoke Chinese — was slurping his breakfast and watching TV behind the counter. He looked up when I knocked on the counter, but did not set down his chopsticks until he saw me brandish cash. I’d already paid him for last night’s stay, and now I handed him a hundred for two more nights. He said nothing and hardly looked at me before handing me a receipt and diving back into his noodles. When I asked him where I could get some eggs, he mumbled a few incomprehensible words, his mouth stuffed, glistening. I felt like slapping the noodles out of his mouth but I turned and walked out before he could annoy me any further. Ever since Suzy left me, I’d learned to curb my temper. Let it sleep a little, save it for another, more necessary day.

In the strip mall across the street, I had some coffee at a doughnut shop and spent an hour thumbing mindlessly through a couple of Asian newspapers, waiting for the pho restaurant next door to open. I hoped they made it like Suzy used to — the beef thinly sliced and not too gristly, the noodles soft, the broth clear and flavorful. Turned out theirs was even better, which finally cheered me up, though it reminded me of something her best friend — a Vietnamese woman named Happy, of all things — once told me years ago when she was over at the house for Sunday pho. Suzy had been mad at me that morning for nodding off at church, as I often did since my weekend patrols didn’t end until midnight, and though she knew I’d only converted for her and had never taken churchgoing seriously, she chewed me out all the way home, and with more spite than usual. So when she stepped outside to smoke after lunch, I asked Happy, “What’s bugging her lately?” Happy was her one good friend, her sole witness at our courthouse wedding and her emergency contact on all her forms, and they talked on the phone every day in a mix of English and Vietnamese that I never did understand — but she shrugged at my question. I chuckled. “Just me, huh? I bet she tells you every bad thing about me.” But again she shrugged and said, very innocently, “She don’t talk about you much, Bob.” I’d long figured this much was true, but it burned to hear it acknowledged so casually. Suzy and I had been married for two years at the time. We somehow lasted six more years before she finally took off.

I sat in a front booth and finished off an extra large bowl of beef pho, four spring rolls, and two tall glasses of Vietnamese coffee, staring all the while at people passing by in the parking lot, including a bald Asian man who climbed into a red BMW. It could have been him, except Suzy’s new husband looked more bullish on his driver’s license and sported a thin mustache that accentuated the stubborn in his eyes. DPS listed a red BMW under his name — Sonny Van Nguyen — as well as a silver Porsche, a brand-new 2000 model. The master files at Vegas Metro confirmed he was fifty, five years older than me, and that he owned a posh sushi restaurant in town and an equally fancy rap sheet: one DUI, five speeding tickets, and three different arrests, one for unpaid speeding tickets, two on assault charges. He apparently struck a business associate in the head with a rotary phone during an argument and a year later threw a chair at someone in a casino for calling him a name. The last incident got him two years’ probation, which was four months from expiring. It was Happy who told me he was a gambler, fully equipped with a gambler’s penchant for risking everything but his pride. You should be afraid of him, Happy had said, but I knew it was already too late for that.

In my two decades on the Oakland force, I had punched a hooker for biting my hand, choked out a belligerent Bible salesman, and wrestled thugs twice my size and half my age. I once had a five-year-old boy nearly bleed to death as I nightsticked his mother, who had chopped off his hand with a cleaver, tweaked out of her mind; I’d fired my gun three times and shot two people, one in the thigh, the other in the palm, both of whom had shot at me and quite frankly deserved more; I’d been known to kick a tooth or two loose, bruise a face here and there, maybe even silently wish more harm than was necessary. But never, not once, had I truly wanted to kill anyone.

I WALKED DOWN Spring Mountain Road and quickly regretted not taking my car. Vegas, beyond the Strip, is not a place for pedestrians, especially in the summer. I’d pictured a Chinatown similar to Oakland’s or San Francisco’s, but the Vegas Chinatown was nothing more than a bloated strip mall — three or four blocks of it painted red and yellow and then pagodified, a theme park like the rest of the city. Nearly every establishment was a restaurant, and the one I was looking for was called Fuji West. I found it easily enough in one of those strip malls — nestled, with its dark temple-like entrance, between an oriental art gallery and a two-story pet store. It was not set to open for another hour.

Nothing surprising about Vietnamese selling Japanese food. Happy’s uncle owned a cowboy clothing store in Oakland. What did startle me was the giant white-aproned Mexican — all seven feet of him — sweeping the patio, though you might as well have called it swinging a broom. He gazed down at me blankly when I asked for Sonny. He didn’t look dumb, just bored.

“The owner,” I repeated. “Is he here?”

“His name’s no Sonny.”

“Well, can I speak to him, whatever his name is?”

The Mexican, for some reason, handed me his broom and disappeared behind the two giant mahogany doors. A minute later a young Vietnamese man — late twenties, brightly groomed, dressed in a splendidly tailored tan suit and a precise pink tie — appeared in his place. He smiled at me, shook my hand tenderly. He relieved me of the broom and leaned it against one of the wooden pillars that flanked the patio.

“How may I help you, sir?” He held his hands behind his back and spoke with a slight accent, his tone as formal as if he’d ironed it.

“I’d like to see Sonny.”

“I’m sorry, no one by that name works here. Perhaps you are mistaken? There are many sushi restaurants around here. If you like, I can direct you.”

“I was told he owns this restaurant.”

“Then you are mistaken. I am the owner.” He spoke like it was a friendly misunderstanding, but his eyes had strayed twice from mine: once to the parking lot, once to my waist.

“I’m not mistaken,” I replied and looked at him hard to see if he would flinch.

He did not. I was a head taller than him, my arms twice the size of his, but all I felt in his presence was my age. Even his hesitation seemed assured. He slowly smoothed out an eyebrow with one finger. “I am not sure what I can do for you, sir.”

“How about this. I’ll come back this evening for some sushi. And if Sonny’s not too busy, he can join me for some tea. I just want to have a little chat. Please tell him that for me.”

I turned to go but felt a movement toward me. The young man was no longer smiling. There was no meanness yet in his face, but his words had become chiseled. “You are Officer Robert Ruen, aren’t you?” he declared. When I didn’t answer, he leaned in closer: “You should not be here. If you do not understand why I am saying this, then please recognize my seriousness. Go back home and try to be happy.”

That last thing he said unexpectedly moved me. It was like he had patted my shoulder. I noticed how handsome he was — how, if he wanted to, he could’ve modeled magazine ads for cologne or expensive sunglasses. For a moment I might have doubted that he was dangerous at all. He nodded at me, a succinct little bow, then grabbed the broom and walked back through the heavy mahogany doors of the restaurant.

I felt tired again. Pho always made me sleepy. I walked back to the hotel and in my room stripped down to my boxers and cranked up the AC before falling back into bed.

People my age get certain feelings now and then, even if intuition was never our strong suit in youth, and my inkling about this Sonny guy was that he was the type of restaurant owner who, if he came by at all, would only do so at night, when the money was counted. My second inkling was that his dapper guard dog stayed on duty from open to close, and that he was willing to do anything to protect his boss. I had a long evening ahead of me. Before shutting my eyes, I decided to put my badge away, deep in the recesses of my suitcase.

WHEN SUZY LEFT ME, it was easy at first. No children. No possessions to split up. No one really to care. I was an only child, my parents both years in their graves, and her entire family was either also dead or still in Vietnam. After eight years together, I’d gotten to know maybe two or three of her friends, and the only things my police buddies knew about her was her name and her temper.

She gave me the news after Sunday dinner. I was sitting at the dining table, and she approached me from the kitchen, her mouth still swollen, and said, “I’m leaving tomorrow and I’m taking my clothes. You can have everything else.” She carried away my half-empty plate and I heard it shatter in the sink.

The first time I met her, I knew she was fearless. I was responding to a robbery at the flower shop where she worked. She’d been in America almost a decade, but her English was still pretty bad. When I arrived, she stood at the door with a baseball bat in one hand and bloody pruning shears in the other. Before I could step out of the patrol car, she flew into a tirade about what had happened, as though I’d been the one who robbed her. I understood about a quarter of what she said — something about a gun and ruined roses — but I knew I liked her. That petite sprightly body. Her lips, her cheekbones: full and bold. Firecracker eyes that glared at people with the urgency of a lit fuse. We found the perp two miles away, limping and bleeding from a stab wound to his thigh. The pruning shears had done it. Suzy and I married four months later.

I was thirty-five then, an age when I once thought I should already have two or three kids, though I suspected she, at thirty-three, had given little thought to her own biology, let alone the passage of time. When I proposed, she agreed on the spot, but only if I was okay with not having children. She was not good with kids, she said, and having them would hurt too much, two reasons she repeated when I brought it up again a year later and a third time the year after that. I always figured she’d eventually change her mind.

Her real name was Hong, which meant “pink” or “rose” in Vietnamese. But it sounded a bit piggish the way Americans pronounced it, so I suggested the name of my first girlfriend in high school, and this she did give me, though her Vietnamese acquaintances still called her Hong.

When we married, neither of us seemed to have any worldly possessions beyond our clothes and the car we drove. It was like we had both, up until the time we met, lived our adulthoods at some cheap motel, so that we knew nothing about domesticated life beyond paying bills and doing laundry. We combined all our savings and bought an old townhouse near Chinatown that I repainted and she furnished — a luxury she’d apparently never had and one she indulged in with care and sincerity, down to the crucifixes that adorned every room and the two brass hooks on the wall of the entryway, the one for my coat a little higher than hers.

In our first year, we bonded over this novelty of owning a home, of living with another human being and building a brand-new life together with chairs and tables and dishes and bath towels. We were happy, I realize now, not because of what we actually had in common, but because we were fashioning this new life out of things that had never existed for either of us.

I’d stop by the flower shop every afternoon during my patrol to visit her. We had two days of the week together, and we spent it fixing up the townhouse, exploring local consignment shops, trying out every cheap restaurant in Chinatown, then going to the movies (Westerns and old black-and-white detective films were her favorite) or walking the waterfront, where the smell of the ocean reminded her of Vietnam. For a long time I didn’t mind losing myself in her world: the Vietnamese church, the food, the sappy ballads on the tape player, her handful of “friends” who with the exception of Happy hardly spoke a lick of English, even the morbid altar in the corner of the living room with the grue some crucifix and the candles and pictures of dead people she never talked about. That was all fine, even wonderful, because being with her was like discovering a new, unexpected person in myself.

But after two years, I realized she had no interest in discovering me: my job, my friends, my love for baseball or cars or a nice steak and potato dinner. She hardly ever asked me about my family or my upbringing. She must have assumed, because of her silence about herself, that I was equally indifferent to my own past. She didn’t know that until her I had not thought of Vietnam since 1973, when I was eighteen and the draft ended and saved me from the war, and that all of a sudden, decades later, this distant country — this vague alien idea from my youth — meant everything again, until she gradually embodied the place itself, the central mystery in my life. The least she could do was share her stories, like how happy her childhood had been and how the war upended everything, or what cruel assholes the Communists were, or how her uncle or father or neighbor had died in battle or survived a reeducation camp, or something. But she’d only say her life back home was “lonely” and “uninteresting,” her voice muted with hesitation, like she was teaching me her language and I’d never get it anyway.

Gradually, an easy distance settled between us. I found I loved her most when she was sick and had no choice but to let me take care of her. Feed her. Give her medicine. Keep her housebound, which she rarely was for more than a day. And since I’d apparently reached the limit of what she was willing to give me, I grew fond of any situation where she’d talk about herself, even if it was her waking in the night from a bad dream and then, in the grip of her fright, waking me too so I could lie there in the darkness and listen to her recount it.

She had bad dreams constantly. Recurring ones where I had cheated on her and hurt her in some profound way and she’s beating me with her fists as violently as she can and yet all I’m doing is laughing and laughing as she throttles me in the face. Sometimes it’s another man in this dream, though she’d never say who that might be — perhaps a lover from her past whose sins she was now mistaking for mine. Then there were the dreams where she’s murdered someone. Not just one person but a lot of people. She doesn’t murder them in the dream, she’s only conscious of having done it and must now figure out how to cover it up. In one version, she has buried them under piles of clothes in the closet. In another, she has shoved them into the washer, the dryer, that large cabinet in our laundry room where she kept all the strange pickled foods I could never force myself to like. And the entire time, all she can think about it is that she has killed people and that her life is now over.

I remember her describing one dream where she’s walking for hours through an empty furniture store and someone is following her as she makes her way across beautiful model bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms. Even as she climbs the stairwells from one floor of the store to the other, the person keeps following her, their footsteps loud and steady. I asked if she ever saw what the person looked like, and she said she couldn’t make herself stop or turn around in the dream, and that all she wanted was for the person to catch up to her, take her by the shoulder, and show their face.

To church every Sunday, she brought along a red leather-bound journal, worn and darkened with age, and held it in her lap throughout Mass like a private Bible, except she never opened it. She said it was a keepsake from the refugee camp and that it made her feel more right with God at church, whatever that meant. At home, it lay on the altar beneath the crucifix. I opened it once. The first few pages, brittle and yellowed, were written in someone else’s handwriting, the rest in Suzy’s tiny Vietnamese cursive, which was already hard to read. I tried translating the first page with a bilingual dictionary but could get no further than the opening sentence. Something about rain in the morning and someone’s mother yelling at them. Suzy once forgot the book at church and didn’t realize it until bedtime. She wanted to go right then and there to retrieve it, insisting, “Someone is always there!” But I refused to let her go. At dawn the next morning, after a long, sleepless night, she drove to church and came home with the journal clutched to her chest like a talisman, her eyes red from crying. She did not speak to me the rest of the day.

She could go an entire week without speaking. A way at first to punish me for whatever I had done to anger her, though gradually, almost every time, her silence outlasted her anger and became a retreat from me and into herself, an absence actually, as though she had gotten lost in whatever world she had escaped into. Her temper — that flailing beast inside her that she herself hated — would retreat as well, and the only thing left between us until she spoke again was what we had said and done to each other when we fought: about money we didn’t have and the children we weren’t having, about what to eat for dinner, about my poor driving and my poor taste in clothes and a million other things I can’t remember anymore. I always played my part, stubborn and mouthy as I am, my own temper always burning brightest before hers exploded. She’d go from yelling at me to lunging at me, those eyes erupting out of her face as she slapped and punched my chest or seized my neck with both hands. Both of us knew she was not strong enough to hurt me, and on a certain level I think she went out of her way to avoid it, never throwing or breaking anything in the house, never once using anything but her hands and her words. Even as I held her wrists and let her scream at me, let her kick me in the stomach or the legs, it sometimes felt as though she were asking me — with her hateful, pleading eyes — to hold her back and tie her to the mast until the storm passed. Because inevitably she’d crumple to the floor and cry herself into a numb silence and eventually into bed, where she would begin withdrawing from me and the world.

Sometimes we didn’t need an argument. She’d be talkative and affectionate in the morning, and then I’d come home in the evening and she’d seem afflicted with some flu-like melancholy that only silence and aloneness could treat. So I learned to let her be. I turned on the TV in the kitchen during dinner. I turned up the music in the car as she sat staring out the window. I spent more and more time with friends at the bar or at our weekly poker game. I slept in our spare bedroom, which was otherwise never used.

Once or twice a year, I’d startle awake in the middle of the night and find myself alone in bed, the house empty, her car still parked in the driveway. An hour later the front door would open and she’d be barefoot in her nightgown and a jacket, having taken one of her nocturnal walks through the neighborhood, God knows what for or where to. She’d crawl back into bed without explaining anything, despite my stares and my questions, and in the morning I’d notice the dirty bottoms of her feet, the stench of cigarettes on her clothes, the whiff of alcohol on her breath. One evening I came home from work and every single light in the house was on, and she was out back beneath the apple tree, curled up and asleep on the grass, empty beer bottles lying beside her with crushed cigarettes inside.

Then, after a few days, sometimes as long as two weeks, with out any hint whatsoever of reconciliation, she’d crawl into my arms while I lay on the couch watching TV, roll over in bed and bury her face in my chest, join me in the shower and lather me with soap from my head to my feet. I never knew how to feel in these moments, whether to love her back or commence my own week of silence. Not until she started talking again, recounting some funny incident at the flower shop two weeks before, or describing some movie she’d seen on TV at three in the morning, would I then feel her voice burrow into me, unravel all the knots, and bring us back to wherever we were before the silence began. Then we’d make love and she would whimper, a childlike thing a lot of Asian women do, except hers sounded more like a wounded animal’s, and that would remind me once again of all the other ways I felt myself a stranger in her presence, an intruder, right back to where we were.

And yet we still kept at it, year after year of living out our separate lives in the same home, of needing each other and not knowing why, of her looking at me as though I was some longtime lodger at the house, until I came to believe that she was both naive and practical about love, that she’d only ever loved me because I was a cop, because that was supposed to mean I’d never hurt her.

The night I hit her was a rainy night. I had come home from the scene of a shooting in Ghost Town in West Oakland, where a guy had tried robbing someone’s seventy-year-old grandmother and, when she fought back, shot her in the head. I was too spent to care about tracking mud across Suzy’s spotless kitchen floor, or to listen to her yell at me when she saw the mess. Couldn’t she understand that blood on a sidewalk is a world worse than mud on a tile floor? Shouldn’t she, coming from where she came, appreciate something like that? I told her to just fuck off. She glared at me, and then started with something she’d been doing the last few years whenever we argued: she spoke in Vietnamese. Not loudly or irrationally like she was venting her anger at me — but calmly and deliberately, as if I actually understood her, like she was daring me to understand her, flaunting all the nasty things she could be saying to me and knowing full well that it could have been gibberish for all I knew and that I could do nothing of the sort to her. I usually ignored her or walked away. But this time, after a minute of staring her down as she delivered whatever the hell she was saying, I slapped her across the face.

She yelped and clutched her cheek, her eyes aghast. But then her hand fell away and she was flinging indecipherable words at me again, more and more vicious the closer she got to my face, her voice rising each time I told her to shut up. So I slapped her a second time, harder, sent her bumping into the dining chair behind her.

I felt queasy even as something inside me untangled itself. There’d been pushing in the past, me seizing her by the arms, the cheeks. But I had never gone this far. The tips of my fingers stung.

Everything happened fast, but I still remember her turning back to me with her flushed cheeks and her wet outraged eyes, her chin raised defiantly, and how it reminded me of men I’d arrested who’d just hit their wives or girlfriends and that preternatural calm on their faces when I confronted them, the posturing ease of a liar, a control freak, a bully wearing his guilt like armor. It made me see myself in Suzy’s pathetic show of boldness. She’d never been as tough as I thought, and now I was the bad guy.

She spit out three words. She knew I understood. Fuck your mother. She said it again, then again and again, a bitter recitation. I barked at her to shut her mouth, shoving my face at hers, and that’s when she swung at me as if to slap me with her fist, two swift blows on my ear that felt like an explosion in my head. I put up an arm to shield myself and she flailed at it, still cursing me, until finally I backhanded her as hard as I could, felt the thud of my knuckles against her teeth.

She stumbled back a few steps, covering her mouth with one hand and steadying herself on the dining table with the other until she finally went down on a knee, her head bowed like she was about to vomit. Briefly, she peered up at me. Red milky eyes, childish all of a sudden, disbelieving. I watched her rise to her feet, still cradling her mouth, and shamble to the sink and spit into it several times. I watched her linger there, stooped over like she was staring down a well. I didn’t move — I couldn’t — until I heard her sniffling and saw her raise herself gingerly and reach for a towel and turn on the faucet.

As I walked upstairs, I listened to the water running in the kitchen and the murmuring TV in the living room and the rain pummeling the gutters outside, and everything had the sound of finality to it.

In the divorce, she was true to her word and I was left with a home full of eggshell paintings and crucifixes and rattan furniture. It was a testament to the weird isolating vacuum of our marriage that she was able to immediately and completely disappear from my life. Her flower shop had closed down a year before and she had been working odd jobs around town: cutting hair, selling furniture, I rarely kept up. I had known so little about her comings and goings or the people she knew that once she was gone I had no way of even finding out where she was living. Even Happy had quietly disappeared.

Months later, after the divorce was finalized, with a little help from within the department I found out she had moved to Las Vegas. I sold the townhouse and everything in it and tried my best to forget I had ever married anyone. I went on a strict diet of hamburgers and steaks.

But two years later, a few months before my trip to Vegas, I bumped into Happy at the supermarket. Instead of ignoring me or telling me off, she treated me like an old friend, which didn’t surprise me too much. She had always lived up to her name in that way, and actually looked a lot like Suzy without her glasses: a taller, more carefree version. She said she, too, had moved to Vegas for work and was in town for the summer to visit family. I asked her out to dinner that night. Afterward she came home with me. We shared two bottles of wine and I let her lead me to the bedroom, and it wasn’t until we finished that I realized — or admitted to myself — my true reason for doing all this. With her blissfully drunk and more talkative than ever, I asked about Suzy. She told me everything: how Suzy had become a card dealer in Vegas and met up with this cocky Vietnamese poker player who owned a fancy restaurant and a big house and apparently had some shady dealings in town, and how she quit her job and married him after knowing him a month, and how everything had been good for about a year.

“Until he start losing,” Happy declared casually, sitting back against the headboard. She fell silent and I had to tell her several times to get on with it. She looked at me impatiently as though I should already know, as though anyone could’ve told the rest of the story.

“He hit her,” she said. “She hit him too, but he too strong and he drink so much. Last month, he throw her down the stair, break her arm. I see her two week before, her arm in a sling, her cheek purple. But he too rich for her to leave. And always he say he need her, he need her.”

“Did she call the cops? Why didn’t she go to the cops?”

I stood from the bed, my head throbbing from the wine and all that I was imagining. I knocked the lamp off the nightstand.

Happy flinched. She had put her glasses back on, as if to see me better. After a moment, she said, “Why you still love her?” There was no envy or bitterness in her voice. She was simply curious.

“Who said I did?”

She checked me with her eyes as though I didn’t understand my own emotions.

I tried to soften my voice, but it still came out in a growl: “Is it just the money? What — is he handsome?”

“Not really. But you not either.” She patted my arm and laughed.

“You know what? I’m gonna go to Vegas and I’m gonna find this fucker. And then I’m gonna hit him a little before I break his arm.”

This time she laughed hard, covering her mouth and regarding me with drunken pity. “You a silly, stupid man,” she said.

I RETURNED TO FUJI WEST at 8:00, as the sun was setting. I drove this time. The parking lot was half full, mostly fancy cars, and I immediately spotted the silver Porsche in the back row. Sure enough, it had the right tag. I rechecked the five-shot in my ankle holster. My hands felt bruised from the hot, dry air.

Inside, the restaurant was cool and dark and very Zen. Piano music drifted along the ceiling beams overhead. Booth tables with high-backed wooden seats, lighted by small suspended lanterns, lined the walls like confessionals. Candlelit tables filled in the space between the booths and the circular sushi bar, an island at the center of the restaurant manned by three hatted sushi chefs in white who resembled sailors. Flanking the bar were two enormous aquariums filled with exotic-looking fish staring out calmly at the twenty or so patrons in the restaurant, most of whom easily outdressed me.

I asked for a table near the bar and ordered a Japanese beer and told the hostess I was waiting for a friend. I’d barely wet my lips before Sonny’s young Doberman appeared and sat himself across from me, as casually as if I’d invited him.

He was now dressed in a charcoal suit, set off by another beautiful pink tie, looking very ready to be someone’s best man. He waved at a waitress, who swiftly brought him a bottle of Perrier and a glass with a straw. Pouring the Perrier into the glass, he said to me, “So you did not like my advice.” His voice was gentle but humorless. He sipped his Perrier with the straw like a child. In the aquarium directly behind him, a long brown eel swam slowly through his head.

“My business with Sonny is important.”

“I’m sure it is. Except my father has no business with you.”

I drank my beer and tried to hide my surprise. I searched his face for some resemblance of the hard man I’d already envisioned in my head. “So you know who I am.”

“Miss Hong’s friend Happy is also a friend of mine. She visited me recently and mentioned that she had been seeing you. That is, until last month. You stopped taking her calls. She got worried. She told me what you had been planning to do. She did not know how serious you were, but she wanted to tell me for your sake. She likes you, Mr. Robert, and I suppose she has some womanly notion of saving you. She did not tell Miss Hong, of course, or my father. So only I know that you are here. And that is a good thing.”

“Because your father’s a dangerous man?”

He eyed me sternly, drawing together his dark handsome eyebrows. “Because my father does not have my patience.”

The hostess came by and whispered something into his ear, and Sonny Jr. looked to the front of the restaurant, where a large party had arrived, people in suits and dresses. He stood and gestured for a waiter, then gave him and the hostess rapid orders in Vietnamese. He glanced at me distractedly and went on with his instructions. He watched them walk away and continued watching as they saw to the party.

His father might have been a poker-playing gangster, or maybe a gangster-playing poker player, but for the moment Junior seemed nothing more than what he appeared: the young manager of a restaurant.

He turned back to me, adjusting his tie, his face once again as calm as the fish. “You were a narcotics investigator once. Ten years ago, I believe.”

I took another swill of my beer. “Nice detective work.”

“You did it for only two years and then returned to being a patrol officer. Why?”

“It didn’t suit me. Why do you want to know?”

“Because the answer matters. You do not strike me as someone who gives up easily.”

“I didn’t give up on anything,” I said, a little too loudly. His facts were accurate but told a meaningless story. He had no idea how good I was at prying into other people’s lives, how tedious and occasionally thrilling the job was, or how enjoying it emptied me because I didn’t care to know so much about people I cared nothing for. “It just wasn’t my cup of tea.”

He tried to puzzle me out, like he was readying a few more questions. But then he grabbed the linen napkin on the table and stood. He dabbed at his forehead with the napkin, pocketed it, and said, “I have something to show you. It will behoove you to come with me.”

“I’m guessing this something is not your father.”

Instead of answering me, he nodded toward the front of the restaurant. “You are free to go if you want. But I think you will regret it.”

I still hadn’t moved.

“You’re the police officer here,” he said. “It should be me who is nervous.”

I felt vaguely embarrassed and downed the rest of my beer before getting up. As I gestured for him to lead the way, I noticed again how much taller I was. On our way to the kitchen, we passed two private tatami rooms, each being busily prepared by the staff for the swarm of guests out front. Foolishly or not, the presence of so many people eased my mind.

The kitchen was staffed by Mexicans and Asians, all in white uniforms. No one paid us any attention as we walked to the back, toward a door marked OFFICE. Junior unlocked it, and once we stepped inside he relocked it. He approached an enormous, door-size oil painting of a geisha walking up a dark flight of stairs. There was a clock on the wall beside it, which he set to midnight, then he turned the minute hand three revolutions clockwise and two revolutions counterclockwise. The painting slowly swung open from the wall like a door, revealing a passageway and a dark descending staircase. He walked down and with a glance over his shoulder said, “It will close again in ten seconds.”

Visions of my own doom flittered through my head, but at that point I’d already talked myself into following. If he wanted to lure me into danger, he wouldn’t be this obvious about it, even if he figured me for a complete idiot. The kid seemed too smart to underestimate a cop. He really wanted to show me something, and I wasn’t ready yet to walk away.

We reached a long dim hallway and passed six closed doors, each with a keypad over the knob. At the end we stopped at a door that was set much farther away from the others. He punched a series of numbers on the keypad and something clicked. He pushed the door open completely before walking inside.

I heard soft oriental music. The room glowed bluish and shimmered.

It was no more than eight hundred square feet but felt cavernous, with a lofty ceiling and walls of glass surrounding us, behind them water and fish. I had entered a gigantic aquarium. The three walls before me each showed the flush faces of four separate tanks, framed in quadrants like giant television monitors, their blue-lit waters filled with stingrays and sharks and what looked like piranha and other menacing fish, swimming around beds of coral and white gravel. High above me were two ceiling fans, their slow synchronous spinning like the gears of a machine. I noticed then the small video camera perched in the corner, peering down at us.

On a large oriental rug in the center of the room stood a black leather couch, two dolphin chairs, and a glass coffee table. Sonny Jr. walked to the table and took a cigarette from the pack lying there, lit it casually, and approached the tank of stingrays.

I sensed something behind me. Haunting the hallway outside, in his oversize bib of an apron, was the seven-foot Mexican, his dull Frankenstein face looming beyond the top of the doorframe, nearly severed by it. Junior spoke Vietnamese to him and he stepped inside, bowing to do so, and propelled me farther into the room until I was standing by the black couch. He untied his apron and let it wilt onto the floor, then closed the door behind him.

I don’t know why it had taken this long for my nerves to kick in, but as soon as the door clicked shut, I clenched my jaw. It struck me that the Mexican spoke three languages, including Vietnamese apparently, and something about this — the fact that he belonged completely to this absurd situation — was both comical and deeply troubling.

I said to Junior, “Your father has expensive pets.”

“He is not here, Mr. Robert,” he replied and ashed into an ashtray he held in his other hand — yet another overly formal mannerism. He gestured at the entire room. “But I have brought you to meet his fish. You may already know that they are not. . particularly legal. This one here”—he pointed at a whiskered creature over two feet long, with a golden, undulating body, glimmering in the light—“is an Asian arowana. A dragonfish. Very endangered in the wild. They’re supposed to bring good luck, keep evil away, bring the family together. Asians always love believing in that. Our clients will pay over ten thousand for a gold one like this.”

He glanced at me for a response. I gave him nothing. His arrogance with all this was confusing, but more than anything it was beginning to annoy me.

He watched the fish intently. “You’ve heard of caliche?” he said with his back to me. “It’s a dense bed of calcium carbonate in the desert soil. Harder than concrete. They must often use special drills to remove it. Because of caliche, my father spent a fortune building all this. Being underground, you see, that’s very important to him. He comes down here two or three times a week, sometimes for an entire day, to smoke and listen to music, to be alone with his fish, remove himself entirely from the world. For all his flaws, he is a man who values peace.”

“Maybe he just values a nice hiding place.”

“A person can hide anywhere, Mr. Robert. Even right out in the open. You do, don’t you? How long could you stand it down here, all alone, with nowhere to hide, with no one but you and yourself?”

I took a step toward him and heard the Mexican shuffle his feet behind me. I spoke to Junior’s back. “I’ve met your fish. Why else have you brought me here?”

He turned around, expelling smoke through his nostrils. “I have brought you here to tell you a story.” He licked his lips and brushed ash from his breast. “You see, my father appreciates these fish because they are beautiful and bring him a lot of money. But they also remind him of home — they bring home to him. It is the irony, you see, that is valuable: a tiny tropical ocean here in the middle of the desert; all these fish swimming beneath sand. The casinos in this city sell you a similar kind of irony, but what we have here is genuine and real, because it also keeps us who we are.”

“Who you are? You and your pops run a Japanese restaurant.”

“Be quiet, Mr. Robert, and listen.”

He put out his cigarette and walked over to take a seat in one of the dolphin chairs. He grabbed a remote off the table and pressed a button and the music faded into the soft purr of the aquarium pumps. Unbuttoning his jacket, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he offered me the face of a boy but sounded like an old man.

“Twenty years ago,” he said, “my parents and I escaped Vietnam by boat. Ninety people in a little fishing boat made for maybe twenty. We were headed for Malaysia. On our sixth night at sea we hit a terrible storm and my mother fell overboard. No one saw it. It was too dark and stormy, and the waters were too violent for anyone to save her anyway. I was seven at the time. I will not bore you with a tragedy. I will only say that her death hardened my father, made him more fearless than he already was.

“In any case, after nine days, our boat finally made it to the refugee camp in Malaysia, on a deserted island off the coast. The first day my father and I were there, a few ruffians in the camp made themselves known to us. My father was once in a gang back in Vietnam and had also fought in the war, so he was not afraid. He ignored them. A week later, one of them stole my rice ration. He slapped me several times, pushed me to the ground, ripped the sack out of my hand. For one last scare, he grabbed my wrist and ran a knife across it, barely cutting the skin. I ran to my father, bawling, and before he said a single word, he too slapped me. Shut me up in an instant.”

Junior peered at his hands for a moment, like he was studying his nails. His sudden sincerity felt real, except I couldn’t locate its purpose.

He went on: “He took me by the arm and dragged me to the part of the camp where the ruffians hung out, near the edge of the forest. There was hardly anyone around except three young men kneeling and playing dice outside their hut. One of them was the man who had attacked me. My father made me point him out, then had me stand under a palm tree. He ordered me to watch. On a tree stump nearby, someone had butchered an animal and left the bloody cleaver and my father grabbed it and marched up behind the man and kicked him hard in the back of the head. The man fell forward, dazed, and his two friends pounced at my father, but he was already brandishing the cleaver. They backed off. My father grabbed the man by the back of his shirt and dragged him to the tree stump. In one swift motion he placed the man’s hand on the stump and threw down the cleaver and hacked off three fingers. The man screamed. Suddenly there were voices around us, faces appearing in doorways, from behind the trees. I heard a woman shriek. The man was kneeling on the ground, stunned and whimpering, clasping his bloody hand to his chest. His fingers — the three middle ones — still lay on the tree stump. His two friends could only stare at them. My father flung the cleaver away and bent down and muttered something in his ear. Then he wiped his own hand on his pants and held mine as we walked back to our shack. We stayed in that camp for three more months before we came to the States. No one ever bothered us again.”

Sonny Jr. stood from the chair and walked over again to the stingrays. He took out the linen napkin and wiped the glass where his finger had pointed at the arowana. “I still occasionally have dreams about that afternoon,” he said, as if to the fishes. Then he turned to me thoughtfully. “But I’m not telling you this story so that you’ll pity me. I simply want you to understand what kind of man my father is. I want you, in your own way, to respect it. He will hurt you, Mr. Robert. If he doesn’t do it this time, he will find you some other time and hurt you then. No matter what.

“So please, think of this conversation — this situation between us — as an exchange of trust. I have brought you down here, an officer of the law, to see my father’s illegal business. This rather foolish gesture should convince you of my good intentions. Please trust that I am trying to help you. I’m offering you the door now and trusting you to forget your plans in this city, to go home and not say a word of what you have seen. A man of your sentiments should appreciate the sincerity of this offer.”

I watched him neatly fold the napkin and place it back in his pocket. His fastidiousness seemed overdone, just like his words. He’d both shown me his hand and told me how to play mine, but it all still smelled like a bluff. The kid knew he was smart, and in my experience if you let people think they’re smarter, they’ll try a little less to outsmart you. Easier said than done though.

I walked over to the couch and sat down. I hadn’t smoked since Suzy left me — another part of my detox plan, since smoking together was one of the few things we never stopped doing. But now I took a cigarette from the pack and lit up.

I squinted up at him. “Why do you want so badly to help me?” I said. “Is it really me you’re protecting? Or is it your father? Because somehow I feel he’s no longer the hard man you say he is. Maybe never was. And I’m guessing maybe you made up that dramatic little story just to scare me. But even if it’s true, I’ve dealt with scarier people. Now why you’ve chosen to show me all this fish stuff is still a mystery to me — though I’d wager you just like getting off on your own smarts and impressing people. You’ve either read too many books or listened to people who’ve read too many books. Either way, it’s not my fault that I can’t understand half the things you say. But what I do understand is this. .” I leaned forward on the couch. “Your father is a thug. Not only that, he’s a coward. He threw a woman down the stairs and broke her arm. Who knows what else he did or could’ve done or might do in the future, but men like him only have the guts to do that to a woman. You’re a smart boy. You know I’m right. He’s your father and you want to protect him. That’s fine. It’s admirable. But my business with him has nothing to do with you.”

I stood from the couch and walked around the table, stopping a few yards from him. “I’d tell you to fuck off, but that would be rude. I will say that I have police buddies who know exactly where I am and who your father is, and if I don’t say hi to them next week, they’ll know where to come find me.” I took a long drag from the cigarette, flicked it on the ground. “I want to speak with your father. That’s it. All the rest of this doesn’t mean a whole lot of shit to me.”

Junior glared at my cigarette on the floor, still curling smoke, then at me. I couldn’t tell if he believed me or saw through my empty threat. From behind him, the stingrays swam languidly around his thin, stiff figure like a flock of vultures.

His eyes looked past me and he nodded and before I could turn I felt the Mexican’s meaty arms clasp around me, crushing my chest so I could hardly breathe. My feet left the floor, my body seeming to spin like the ceiling fans above me, and I felt a fumbling at my ankle holster and soon saw Sonny Jr. with my five-shot, which he deposited in his jacket pocket. He said something in Vietnamese, and the Mexican shoved me to the floor, forcing me flat onto my stomach. With his knee digging into my lower back, he twisted one of my arms behind my shoulder and held the other to the floor before my flattened face. I could do nothing but grunt beneath him, a doll in his hands, the tile floor numbing my cheek.

I looked up and Sonny Jr. had taken off his jacket. From his pant pocket, he now pulled out a switchblade, which he opened. The Mexican wrenched my extended forearm so that my wrist was exposed. Junior kneeled and planted his shoe on my palm. He steadied the blade across my wrist.

“Wait!” I gasped. I struggled but could hardly budge under the Mexican and his boulder of a knee.

Junior slowly dragged the blade. I could feel its icy sharpness slice the surface of my skin. It was like a crawling itch, not yet painful, but my jaw clenched so tightly that it ached. He lifted his shoe. A line of blood appeared across my wrist, swelled.

I suddenly saw Junior’s open palm beside my face. He pulled back his sleeve and revealed the thin pale scar, like a bracelet, around his wrist.

“You and I,” he murmured, “now share something.”

He wiped the blade twice on my sleeve, closed it, and returned it to his pocket. He stood and I could no longer see his face, but his voice came out bitter and hard, like he was shaking his head at me:

“I know exactly who you are, Mr. Robert. The minute you arrived at our door, I knew. You are a man who has nothing to lose. But that does not make you brave, it makes you stupid. Happy told me you were a foolish man. What were you going to do — kill my father? Break his arm? Yell at him? Everything I have told you is true, and I meant every sentiment. Yet you are too sentimental to listen. You want to come here and be a hero and save your former wife from a bad man. You want to know how he has hurt her, and why. But in the end, the only thing you really want is to know why she would leave you for slapping her and then stay with a man who threw her down a staircase.”

The cut on my wrist was deeper than I had thought. I could feel the sting sharpening, the skin breaking as I bent my wrist and blood dribbled down my arm.

Junior’s shoes reappeared before my eyes, a foot from my nose. He was now speaking directly over my head like he was ready to spit on it.

“Do you know why fish swim in schools? To protect themselves. To move more easily. To find food and a mate. Now who do they choose to swim with? Their own kind, those they resemble most. Why do you think nearly every casino dealer in this city is Asian, and nearly every Asian dealer is Vietnamese? Because we enjoy cards and colorful chips? No. Because we flock to each other. We flock to where there are many of us — so that we will belong and survive. It is a very simple reality, Mr. Robert. A primal reality.”

He bent down, speaking closer to my ear. “What made you think she ever belonged to you? Or that you ever belonged with her? You call her Suzy, but her name is Hong. It has always been and always will be Hong. America, Mr. Robert, is not the melting pot you Americans like to say it is. It’s oil and water. Things get stirred, sure, but they eventually separate and settle, and the like things always go back to each other. They’ve made new friends, perhaps even fucked them. But in their heart they will always return to where they belong. Love has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

He sighed loudly and stood back up. “That’s enough. I’m tired of speeches.”

He lifted his shoe above my head and stomped on my hand with the heel.

I screamed out. The Mexican dismounted me. After a long writhing moment I forced myself to sit up. I held my injured hand like a dead bird. I couldn’t tell if anything was broken, but my knuckles and fingers felt hot with pain, enough to distract me from my aching shoulder and my wrist, now smeared wet with blood.

Junior pulled out the linen napkin again and tossed it at my feet, then handed the Mexican my gun. He wandered back to the piranha tanks, snug in his jacket again and with his hands in his pockets. As if ordering a child, he said to me, “If I ever see you again, I will do much worse. You will now go with Menendez here. He will take you back outside. Remember, you have seen nothing here. If necessary, I will hurt my new mother at your expense. I like her, but not that much.”

He nodded, and the Mexican led me out of the room by the arm, gently this time. Junior’s voice crooned behind me: “Go home, Mr. Robert. And try to be happy.”

As I held my left hand wrapped in the napkin, the Mexican ushered me to another door, which revealed another staircase, which ascended into an office identical to the last one, except we stepped this time out of a painting of cranes flying over a rice paddy. The office opened into the pet store next door to the restaurant. We walked down the dark aisles, passing the droning aquariums and the birdcages and then the dog pens, where weary shadows stirred inside, their dry whimpers following us to the front entrance. Deep in the store, something squawked irritably.

I was released outside into a rainy, windy night. It was like stepping into another part of the country, far from the desert, near the ocean. I must have looked at Menendez with shock because he said, in a gruff but pleasant voice: “Monsoon season.”

He handed me my five-shot, closed the door, and I saw his giant shadowy figure fade back into the darkness of the store.

I DROVE DOWN I-15 toward California in soaked clothes. My left hand lay throbbing in my lap, the three broken fingers wrapped tightly in the linen napkin and my wrist bleeding through the cuff of gauze and tape I’d used from my first aid kit. I could still move my thumb and index finger, but they too felt swollen and numb.

It was ten o’clock, half an hour after I left Fuji West. The rain had finally stopped, but on my way out of town I saw two car accidents, one of which appeared deadly: a truck on its side, the other car with no front door, no windshield, a body beneath glistening tarp. I had worked so many of these scenes in my time, and yet that evening they spooked me. In the desert night, rain falls like an ice storm.

I remembered another rainy night many years ago, when I came home from work all drenched and tired and Suzy made me strip down to my underwear and sat me at the dining table with a bowl of hot chicken porridge. As I ate, she stood behind me and hummed one of her sad Vietnamese ballads and dried my hair with a towel. I remember, between spoonfuls, trying to hum along with her.

I had often felt bitter in the moments I loved her most. What Junior said was only partly right. I did come to Vegas to save Suzy. Maybe whisk her away if she’d let me. I’d also had some hazy notion of punishing Sonny, though the farther away I drove from his son’s threats, the more I understood that I had actually come to punish Suzy — to give her a reason to regret leaving me. She had stayed all those years only because I was not yet replaceable. She then found a man who would come to hurt her more than I ever could, but at least he felt right to her, in a way I never did. “How can I be happy with children,” she once said, “if I’ve never been happy with anything else?”

Sonny Jr.’s parting words flashed through my mind. What did he know about other people’s happiness?

I took the very next exit and turned back toward Vegas, driving in the direction of their house. I had memorized the address, even looked it up on a map before the trip. It took me over an hour. By the time I turned into their neighborhood, the rain was coming down hard again and I could feel my tires slicing through the water on the streets.

Their house was two stories of stucco with a manicured rock garden and two giant palm trees out front. It looked big and warm. All the windows were dark. A red BMW sat in the circu lar driveway behind the white Toyota Camry I bought Suzy years ago. God knows why she was still driving it, with what he could buy her now.

I parked by the neighbor’s curb and approached the side of the house, beneath the palm trees that swayed and thrashed in the wind. The rain fell in sweeping sheets, and I was drenched again within seconds.

On their patio, I saw the same kind of potted cacti that stood on our porch just two years before, except these porcelain pots were much nicer. And also there, like I was staring at the front door of our old house, was a silver cross hanging beneath the peephole.

The cool rain soothed my injured hand. I tightened the wet napkin, then donned the hood of my jacket.

I rang the doorbell and waited, shivering. I didn’t know who I wanted to answer, but when the porch light flicked on and the door finally opened, I understood what I wanted to do.

He looked exactly as he did on his driver’s license, except shorter than I expected, shorter than both Suzy and his son. He was wearing a tight white T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, his arms tan and muscular, his mustache underlining the furrows of curiosity and annoyance on his face.

“Yeah?” he muttered sleepily and ran a hand over the hard, bald contours of his scalp.

I raised my gun. He snapped his head back and froze. He was looking at me, not the gun. There was a stubborn quality in his expression, like he’d had a gun in his face before, like he was trying to decide if he should be afraid or not.

“Open the door and raise your hands above your head,” I said. “Then back up slowly until I tell you to stop.”

He obeyed and withdrew into the foyer, then farther into the living room as I followed him inside, leaving some distance between us. I left the front door open, and the porch light spilled into the darkness.

I turned on a small lamp by the wall and another one next to the couch, which flushed the room with a warm light that did not quite reach the high ceilings or the darkness of the open rooms behind Sonny, but it was enough to get my bearings.

Their house was furnished with all the fancy stuff required of a wealthy, middle-aged couple: the big-screen TV, the lavish stereo system, the large aquarium by the foot of the staircase. It was hard not to notice the tall wooden crucifix above the fireplace and the vases on every table, filled with snapdragons and spider mums, oriental lilies, bluebells and gladioli. I had learned all their names over the years.

Rain was drumming the roof above us. I must have been a sight to him: pale and hooded, one hand swathed in bandages and the other wielding a gun, a stranger dripping water onto his wife’s pristine white carpet. She used to yell at me just for wearing shoes in the house.

I caught a whiff of shrimp paste in the air, that nostalgic smell I would forever link to the Vietnamese.

“What you want?” He spoke in a quiet but strained voice. “You want money, my wallet right there.”

He nodded at the table beside me, where his wallet lay by the telephone and some car keys. Behind the phone stood a photo of him and Suzy on a beach, in front of waters bluer than I’d ever swum.

“I got no other money in the house.”

His was a voice that liked being loud, that liked dancing around its listener. I could tell it took him some effort not to fling his words at me.

With the free thumb of my injured hand, I managed to pull the receiver off the phone and leave it face up on the table. “Anyone else in the house?”

“Nobody here.”

“Nobody? Your wife — where’s she?”

I could see him about to shake his head, like he was ready to deny having a wife, before he realized that he had all but pointed out the photo.

“She not here. She sleep at her mother house tonight. Just me.”

“I see two cars in the driveway.”

“What do that matter? I tell you it just me here tonight.”

“So if I make you take me upstairs, I won’t find anyone there?”

He looked stumped, like I had tricked him. He glanced, as if for answers, at the giant crucifix above the fireplace before returning his outrage on me. “I tell you nobody here,” he growled. “Take my wallet. My car. Take what you want and go.”

I kept my gun trained on him and walked over to the fireplace. Sure enough, on the mantelpiece, by a rosary and some candles, lay Suzy’s red journal. I wondered if Sonny understood or even cared about its contents. The crucifix peered down at us, a contortion of dark anguish on the wall. I tucked the journal into my back pocket.

Sonny’s eyes narrowed and he lowered his hands a bit. In the dim light, his shaved head made him look like some ghoulish monk. From the open door, I could hear rain slapping concrete, a violent sound.

“Tell you what,” I said, “I’m gonna let you go. Walk out the front door. Call for help if you want.”

He threw me a baffled scowl.

“Go on. If no one’s here, then you have nothing to worry about.”

Now his hands fell. “What this shit, man? Who are you?”

I took a step toward him, and he slowly raised his hands again without adjusting his glare on me.

“Last chance,” I said.

“I’m not go anywhere, man.”

There was a calm now in the flimsy way he held up his hands, like I was an annoying child with a toy gun. He was ready to fight to the death. He didn’t know, though, that he’d already won. He’d passed the test. Except how many more times would he save her like tonight? And what did that prove anyway?

I glanced up the stairs, at the dark hallway of doors at the top, wondering which room was their bedroom, which room might she be sleeping in, which door might she be standing behind right now, cupping her ear to the wood, holding her breath. A heaviness fell over me, like I no longer recognized that shrimp paste smell in the air or any of the outlandish flowers in this strange house — but I shook off the feeling.

I’d only glanced away for a second or two, but Sonny had already reached into the adjacent room and reappeared with a kitchen knife in his hand. He moved willfully, almost casually, and was coming at me like he either knew I wouldn’t shoot him or didn’t care if I did. I stumbled back a few steps, aiming at his chest, but I bumped hard into something and lost my balance, tumbling backward onto the coffee table, which met my back with a crashing thud.

He lunged on top of me, a rock of a man, and I managed somehow to grab his wrist in the crook of my bad hand, holding off the knife as best I could, but his other hand had seized my right wrist, his fingers digging into the bone so hard I thought it would snap and I lost my grip on the gun and it fell to the floor. He was dumb strong but I was still bigger, and growling through my teeth I heaved him off me and he pulled me with him onto the carpet. In our struggle I was able to get enough space between us to knee him in the groin, which knocked the breath out of him and freed my good hand. A glass ashtray from the table lay overturned on the carpet and I grabbed it and struck him across the temple. He grunted and still clawed at my arm, so I struck him a second time and was about to bring down the ashtray again. But he’d gone limp.

My lips were trembling, my mouth dry as I swallowed that animal urge to crush his head. I snatched the knife from his hand and tossed it across the room.

I got up, backed away. I found my gun on the floor and trained it again on him. For a second, I thought he might be dead. In my fingers, I could still feel the thud of the ashtray on his skull. But he moved a little now, holding the side of his face with one hand.

Part of me was ready to shoot him while the rest of me rummaged through the consequences of walking away. I glanced at the dark staircase and nearly expected Suzy to be standing there, gazing down at me with horror. I hooded myself.

Sonny had raised himself on an elbow. He watched me slink toward the front door, ignoring the blood crawling down the side of his face, his eyes brimming with some unspoken promise. Behind him, in the aquarium, a pair of football-size fish were writhing around in the black water as though awakened by our violence.

I ran out into the rain, stumbling across the gushing lawn and through the surging water in the street to my car. My engine whined to life. As I sped past the house, I glimpsed Sonny standing on their front porch with his fists clenched at his side. I could have sworn a slimmer figure lurked behind him in the dark doorway.

I careened down the slick Vegas streets like an ambulance and passed cars one by one, my windshield wipers yelping back and forth. Only after I’d driven a few miles did I slow down. I turned on the radio. I reentered the highway. My body felt cool, and the rain was soothing on the roof of the car.

My bandaged hand, a claw now, began throbbing again. I looked at it several times like it was some talisman, amazed that I’d been able to use it. Then I remembered Suzy’s red journal in my back pocket and managed to pull it out. Cradled there in my lap, it too seemed miraculous and inexplicably precious. Stolen treasure with no value.

The Strip receded in the distance, a towering shining island in the night. I turned off the radio and let the rain drum in my ears. The night was a tunnel. I drove a steady clip down the highway and thought of nothing and everything all at once.

3

THE KID HELD THE GUN inches from my head, its proximity like a brace on my neck so that I could only stare straight ahead and lock eyes with his partner. They seemed disarmingly calm, my two intruders — and thoughtful, like they had heard what Sonny had said and were now, like their boss, waiting for my response.

When I was six, I watched my father grab my brown terrier by the collar and slam it headfirst against our porch wall. It had pissed on his shoe — this, after a month of him warning me of its messes around the house. It instantly went limp and he held it up and looked at it and walked to our curbside trash can. Hours later we heard scratching at our front door, and there it was, limping sleepily around the welcome mat. I remember the shiver that coursed through me when I saw its small head bobbing in the doorway, the same shiver I felt now as Sonny uttered Suzy’s name. I realized that in the last five months, as I tried my best to close every door that led to Las Vegas, I’d been waiting all along to hear bad news about her.

I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “What do you mean, where is she?”

“I ask you. Four days now she been gone. She just disappear?”

He said “disappear”the way an adult would say it to a wide-eyed child. Poof! In a puff of smoke!

“Wait,” I said. “You think I know where she went, or you think I took her? I haven’t heard from her since she left Oakland two years ago. Since she left me.”

“But you come here to Vegas, right?”

“Look, I heard you hurt her and I had to do something. It was stupid and you can come at me with what you think I deserve. But whatever this is with Suzy, I don’t know anything about it. I told you — I haven’t said a word to her in over two years.”

“How I know you not lie to me, huh?”

“I got no reason to. I know you think I do, but she left me, man. A long time ago.”

I heard ice cubes clinking in a glass, like him finishing off the last of a drink, like he was beginning to believe me.

“Sonny, can you please tell your boy here to point his gun at something else?” I could hear the kid breathing through his nose.

“Don’t call me fucking Sonny. Give the phone to him.”

“He said to give you the phone.”

The kid snatched it out of my hand, said “Yes” in Vietnamese a couple of times, then backed away from me. I had to blink several times, breathe out, like the gun had been a hood over my face.

He handed the phone to his partner, who listened intently without saying a word. A minute later he hung up.

“We’re leaving. You’re coming with us to Las Vegas.”

“What for?”

He slipped on a pair of black leather gloves, then turned away all of a sudden, seized by hacking coughs. He recovered himself, wiping his mouth with renewed calm. “Your clothes. Change them.”

The kid was kneeling on the floor, tying his shoelaces with his gun on the carpet beside him. He peered around my apartment, then up at me. “This a sad place, man. Not even a Christmas tree?”

IT WAS DARK by the time we got on the 580 going south, toward Vegas. As I sat in the backseat of a morbidly tinted Lexus with the kid beside me and his partner driving in front, I felt more a guest than a captive. No guns pointed at me, my hands free, the car doors unlocked. It was like I had asked them for a ride. Their remaining gesture at seriousness was their silence, though the kid was soon singing under his breath, tapping his fingers to some beat in his head.

It dawned on me that I’d been spared for the last five months — that Sonny had known all along who I was and where I lived and for some reason had decided to do nothing, because whatever this was now, whatever he was planning for me, it didn’t smell of him settling a score. What actually troubled me was that he was dangling Suzy over my head, certain that I’d be desperate to find out what happened to her, that if my escorts had stopped the car and let me out, I would have climbed right back in.

Around midnight, we stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through by the highway. For the first time since we left, the quiet one spoke, regarding me in the rearview mirror. “You eat meat?”

I watched him order for us, the way he passed the kid his food without asking him what he wanted.

“You’re all brothers, aren’t you?” I asked the kid.

He stopped smacking his food and checked for a reaction from his partner up front.

“You old enough to drink?” I continued.

“Hey, man, I’ll be twenty-three in December.”

“And he’s the oldest, right? What, twenty-five?”

He looked away, chuckling like he didn’t care, and stuffed his mouth with some fries. In the rearview mirror, his brother was ignoring us, driving and chewing his food evenly.

“Behind us,” I said, gesturing at the third brother trailing us in my Chrysler, the one who had handed me the note in the parking lot. “He’s younger than you both. Looks like he got his driver’s license last week.”

The kid made a face. “Come on, man, we don’t look that much alike.”

“You don’t need to. I can still tell.”

He tried to suss out my meaning, his grin a defensive one now. He couldn’t see what I saw: the older brother’s authority, unquestioned, almost paternal. It was a right of kinship wielded by Asian siblings, whether they looked alike or not — a right I would have envied had I a brother or sister.

Hours later, as we traveled deep into the night, I was watching him sleep when he opened his eyes, like he’d only been meditating, and stared at the back of his brother’s head.

I noticed something in his hand. Before we left my apartment in Oakland, they had me call the station and leave a message for my sergeant, explaining only that I would be out of town indefinitely for a family emergency. Then they made me pack a small duffel bag and change into civilian clothing. Before we left, they took one of my credit cards and also my badge, which I could now see in the kid’s palm. He was caressing it slowly with his thumb.

He peered at me. “How many people’ve you killed, Mr. Officer?”

“I’ve lost count.”

“Come on, you ain’t young. How you be a cop in Oakland for so long and not kill nobody?”

“We don’t kill people. We defend ourselves when necessary and sometimes people die. It’s part of the job. It’s not exactly intentional.”

“Man, it’s intentional if you killing them before they kill you.”

“All right. If that’s how you want to see it.”

“So come on, how many you shot. How many you killed?”

“I’ve never killed anyone. You look disappointed.”

“No one, huh? But I bet you wanted some of them bitches to die, right?”

There was a vulgar sincerity in the way he kept nodding at me as though, despite the difference between us in age and profession, we shared some secret affinity because of the hardware we carried.

“Sure, I wanted a few assholes to not make it. Do I have to give you a number? Tell me yours.”

He looked up as if sifting through his memory. “Shit, I—”

His brother snapped at him in Vietnamese, three or four clipped words and a glare in the rearview mirror, his sudden scowl as startling as his tone. The kid fell silent and sheepishly turned to the window.

The brother glanced at me before returning his eyes to the road, as if returning to a reverie, as if the night saddened him.

IT WAS DAYLIGHT when I awoke, with the kid driving now and the brother seated next to me, facing the window. His coughing had awoken me, but the car was coasting in funereal silence. I sat up and saw that we’d arrived in Vegas, crawling along I-15 in early-morning traffic. Still following us, nearly riding our rear bumper, was the youngest brother in my Chrysler.

I yawned, and this time it was the kid glancing back in the rearview mirror.

I said, “Your baby brother been driving all night long?”

“Don’t worry, he’s a fucking vampire. He doesn’t sleep till the sun’s out. We drop you off, and his ass is going to bed.”

“And where are you dropping me off?”

“You think I know?”

Next to me, the eldest brother lit a cigarette and massaged his cropped hair as he gazed out the window, cut off in his own quiet like he was the only person in the car. I could tell that he rarely concerned himself with any of his brother’s white noise. He rolled down his window halfway and ushered in the buzz of traffic and a frigid morning breeze. It had slipped my mind that winter comes to the desert. I put on the rumpled jacket I had used as a pillow. The car was so darkly tinted that the white light from his open window looked alien to my bleary eyes, the color of emptiness.

I asked him for a cigarette and he obliged, lighting it for me without a word, without meeting my eye. The quiet ones do this. They exert control by giving nothing out, and it’s this blankness that makes them unpredictable, as dangerous as the loud ones are obvious. But this kid’s silence also made him somehow genuine. The one person so far who wasn’t trying.

I opened my window and zipped up my jacket, blew smoke into the harsh light. The one time I’d smoked since Suzy left was that last time here with Sonny Jr. But it soothed me now, as it used to in the morning, back when I’d smoke a pack and a half a day, starting with the one I’d put to my lips the moment I got out of bed: before I brushed my teeth or even looked at myself in the mirror, standing by the bedroom window and slowly waking myself in the sunlight, amid the drifting curling smoke, those five minutes like a silent prayer to prepare myself for whatever the day might bring. Suzy sometimes joined me by the window. We’d share the cigarette.

I realized now why I had quit. It wasn’t to get healthy. And it was only partially to rid myself of the nostalgia for my old habits with her. I was at work the day she left the house; she took all her clothes and only the possessions she had acquired before we met, which amounted to some Vietnamese music cassettes, a few books, and a collection of small framed watercolor paintings of Vietnam landscapes. And of course the red journal. Everything else remained: our furniture, the jewelry I’d bought her, all our photographs together, framed and unframed. I came home that evening to a fully furnished house that felt as empty as her half of the bedroom closet. To my surprise, her crucifixes still hung on the walls and her porcelain figurines — the various Jesuses and Virgin Marys and Saints this and that — still peopled the shelves, as if in knowing my resistance to religion she had purposefully left God’s presence to save me. Or mock me. I found myself sinking into the sofa and not quite believing that she’d actually gone through with it, abandoned me. I remember smoking a cigarette on the front porch that night, watching the fog amble in from the bay, and deciding that after a carton a week for three decades — since I was fourteen, for God’s sake—that cigarette would be my last one. I was quitting not because I wanted or needed to, and definitely not because I thought it would be easy. I was quitting to punish myself.

We were approaching the southern end of the Strip. As the brother lit up another cigarette, I flicked mine out the window and gazed at the mountain range of hotels that bordered the highway. At night, I remembered, amid giant digital screens flashing promises and exaltations, these same hotels towered over the city like monuments, some with mirrored walls that — as you traveled past them — trembled in the wash of glitter and dancing light, as though the city were too alive, too troubled with hope, ever to fall asleep.

But now, in the desert dawn, there was a lifelessness to the way the valley’s light fell across the Strip and to how the shadows pooled beneath the hotels like melted paint. Framed by the Martian mountains in the distance, the Strip looked like an artist’s rendering of some alien civilization, with buildings erected from every culture and time in history, every possible mood, and with no consistency save their garishness and size. In the daylight, everything looked faraway, out of reach. If people came here to lose themselves, did they ever come to find anything?

As traffic picked up, I closed my window and let its tint darken Vegas once more. I wondered then if peace was a thing that one achieved or that one could only be given.

Last time I took this road, I felt like I’d just escaped a burning house that I’d ignited in the night, that had singed my backside and sent me fleeing my own shadow. I didn’t understand it then, but I admitted it to myself now: I had wanted all along to kill Sonny. There was no logic or morality behind it. Just an overwhelming desire to do something to him, at least hurt him badly, and maybe then things would feel right again. Except they never did, because they never do, not for people like me. I was back on the highway, steering blind, hoping for a clear path beyond the horizon.

This had become my life since Suzy left: a constant fumbling toward peace that lies only and always in the distance.

4

WE TOOK THE HIGHWAY south of the Strip until the city turned into a succession of clay tile roofs and stuccoed strip malls lined with palm trees. It was typical suburbia, distinguished by a pervading newness as bright as the sunlight. You could almost smell the sawdust and drying paint.

We approached a large park. Softball fields and basketball courts. Picnic tables. More trees and shade than I’d seen anywhere in the city so far. By the entrance, crowning the treetops, a giant digital screen flashed the words SUNSET PARK! HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

After some distance inside the park, we appeared to reach its end at a gravel lot that yawned into a vast desert of brush and dirt mounds. We parked. The brothers got me out. We were still deep in the suburbs, but this felt like the edge of the city, the point where it surrendered itself entirely to sand and dust and silent sunlight and people vanish by simply walking into the distance. A few lonely cars peppered the lot. My Chrysler was not among them. For the first time since leaving Oakland, I regretted ever getting out of that car.

But I only had to turn around to see life again: the tops of pine trees ahead and then, as we mounted a short grassy hill, the enormous pond that glistened beyond them.

It was like stumbling upon a man-made oasis, burnished gold in sunlight. The pond was around fifteen acres, its grassy banks dropping over a short brick wall that encircled the waters like the coping of a swimming pool. A few people sat at picnic tables bundled in their coats beneath shady pines, watching the ducks, the pigeons flapping about like seagulls, the toy boats buzz-sawing across the glimmering water.

As my two escorts scanned the area, I spotted the small island at the center of the pond, a mirage within a mirage, adorned with a giant Easter Island head that loomed out of a grove of palm trees.

The older brother pointed at someone in the distance. As they flanked me, we walked toward a chestnut tree with a large branch overhanging the water. Beneath the tree, wrapped in a dark coat, sat a hooded figure in one of two lawn chairs. He held a fishing rod in his lap, its line in the water. I wondered if Sonny was a man who ate the fish he caught or threw them back.

As we came closer, the figure turned his head, and I realized it wasn’t Sonny at all. Even under the hood, Junior’s angular, elegant face was easily recognizable. His expression did not change when he saw me. He just sucked at his cigarette and returned his attention to the pond. His father was nowhere in sight, and I couldn’t decide if that relieved or disappointed me.

With my two escorts hanging back, I approached the empty lawn chair beside him, stepping into the shadow of the chestnut tree.

“Please have a seat,” Junior said without turning to me. He was wearing a long black duffel coat and leather gloves, holding the fishing rod indifferently in one hand and smoking with the other. As stoic as a mannequin.

He called out something in Vietnamese to the brothers. The older one approached him and said, “Are you sure?” Junior gave him a look. Without another word, the two brothers made their way down the sidewalk that skirted the pond.

Junior peered at me now with raised eyebrows. I could see my own awkwardness in his calm, dignified demeanor. It reminded me of my first and only time going to confession, at Suzy’s request, and not knowing what was too sinful to divulge to the priest and what was not sinful enough.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said.

“Is it?”

“It is. So long as you cooperate this time.”

“I don’t know anything about Suzy.”

“I know.”

“Does your father know it?”

“We both know it now. We had to be sure first.”

“About what? That I wasn’t hiding her? That I hadn’t stolen her back?”

“Given your last visit, we thought anything was possible.”

A moment passed before I realized I was silent out of shame. My recklessness months ago had cost me the right to be above suspicion in anyone’s eyes, least of all theirs.

“So why am I here now? Is it penance you want?”

Junior unhooded himself. His pale skin was flawless, his hair slicked back, not a strand out of place. Such symmetry seemed to sharpen his admonishing air.

He said, “I am here today in my father’s place because I insisted on it. Because I know he is a man who remembers everything and forgives nothing. You should be glad to see me, Mr. Robert. And you should be grateful — to my father and to me — that up until now you have been shown some mercy. Do you understand?”

He noticed my left hand, which I’d been absently clenching and unclenching.

“Of course I do,” I said, more meekly than I wanted to. If I had been spared, I doubted that kindness was behind it. Still, Junior’s tone confused me. It struck me that his most inscrutable habit was his insistence on his own sincerity. Like last time, I found it difficult to trust, but even more difficult to dismiss.

I searched along the banks, the picnic tables, the random vague figures who might resemble his father, watching us from a distance. About fifty yards away, the brothers sat smoking on a bench with their sunglasses and their obviousness trained on us.

“Listen,” I said to Junior. “I respect everything you’re saying. Believe me, this situation between me and your father, between me and you — none of that’s lost on me. But you guys’ve had a gun to my head for a day now. Someone needs to either shoot me or explain what the hell’s going on.”

Junior reached down and stubbed out his cigarette in the dirt. He took off his gloves, dropped them in his lap like he was ready at last to speak truthfully.

“Miss Hong disappeared four days ago. The last time my father saw her was Saturday night when she was sleeping in bed. Sunday morning, she was gone. As you must know, she never misses Sunday Mass for anything. She took her car and her purse and left everything else. Her clothes, jewelry, books, everything. She and my father have had their problems, and she’s had her reasons for leaving in the past. But nothing explains her leaving like this.”

He looked at me like I had contradicted him. “Understand something, Mr. Robert — my father has made mistakes, some much worse than others. But he loves Miss Hong more than anyone in the world. He wants her back. And he wants you to help him.”

I must have looked sufficiently perplexed because he raised a quelling hand and added, “We have reason to believe she’s still in town, and I’ll explain that shortly — but that is why you’re here.”

“What makes you think I can help him?”

“Don’t be stupid. You know your value to us. You know my father wants nothing to do with the police. The real police anyway. What he has is you, and you are in debt to him.”

I felt like telling him his idea of a cop was as real as Dick Tracy, but he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a photograph, which he handed to me. I tried not to blink. It was a surveillance image of me standing in Sonny’s living room with a gun over his prostrate body. The camera must have been hidden on the crucifix and lurking above our heads the entire time. It wasn’t a very clear image, but I was unhooded, my face recognizable, teeth bared like a dog’s.

Junior took out another cigarette. “We have the entire video. I’m sure you understand all the implications here. Unlawful restraint. Burglary. Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Losing your badge would be the least of your worries.”

He held the unlit cigarette with his thumb and forefinger like the handle of a teacup, his hands as slender and delicate as a woman’s. I felt a sweet, savage urge to shove him into the pond.

I gave him back the photo, but he raised his hand. “That’s yours to keep.”

“You could have hired a private investigator,” I said. “This is Vegas. Plenty of them here, and you have plenty of money. I’m not a detective anymore. I write traffic tickets, man.”

“Mr. Robert. . do you really think we brought you here for your professional talents?”

“What if she refuses? Suzy’s more stubborn than I am. She wouldn’t come back to me, and now you want me to convince her to come back to your father. Maybe it’s better that she stay away from him.” I waited a breath for a reaction. “Why would I let her go back to something she had reasons to leave?”

He leaned back in his chair as if he had anticipated the question. He was still holding the unlit cigarette like a forgotten pen. “She’s been unwell for a year now, especially these past few months. We think this has something to do with her disappearing. It’s impossible to know unless we find her. My father — he’s afraid she might hurt herself.”

I winced and he saw it. He already knew that I was only too familiar with what he was saying.

“Has she?” I asked. “Since she’s been with your father?”

“He does not always tell me those things. What I do know is that she had an episode two months ago. My father called me in the middle of the night. He’s not one to ask for help, but that night he didn’t hide his concern. She had gone out walking again. The front door was left wide open and it was raining outside, and her car was still in the garage. He’d been driving around the neighborhood for an hour. I came over at once and we searched for her together on foot. We shined our flashlights in everybody’s backyard, calling out her name in the rain. My father was not angry like I had expected. When he’s worried, his voice is calm, and he kept calling her with that calm voice.

“Around three in the morning, we found her at the elementary school a few blocks away, sitting on a swing in the playground. She was drenched and barefoot, shivering in her nightgown. It’s possible she was drunk. I never got close enough to be sure. As soon as she saw us, she got up and started walking away and ignored our calls. We ran after her. She struggled when my father caught up to her and screamed out a few times before suddenly falling silent. They didn’t say a single word to each other. He wrapped her in a raincoat and we walked her home in silence. She was sick in bed for almost a week and said hardly anything to anyone.

“After she got better, she started going to the movies every Thursday evening. She told my father that she just wanted to be alone in a dark theater for a few hours, then maybe have dinner somewhere by herself — that the routine helped her. It turns out she’s been visiting this hotel downtown called the Coronado. There’s no telling how long she’s been making these visits. She checks herself into a room on the twelfth floor, always room 1215. It’s reserved every week in her name. She arrives around seven and doesn’t leave or even open the door until midnight, when she comes out and makes her way home. My man is positive that the room is empty before her arrival and that she is alone the entire time. For all we know, she naps for those five hours. My father wanted to confront her immediately, but I convinced him to wait, let a few weeks pass, see if something happens that we can’t ignore. Until then, what is the difference really between a movie theater and a hotel room? Maybe this was something like church for her. Something she can do every week to feel whole or normal or whatever again.”

Junior had been rolling the cigarette between his fingers and now peered at it as though he didn’t know what to do with it. “I was wrong,” he said. “It was three weeks ago that we found out about the hotel. Now she’s gone. It’s partly my fault, I suppose.”

He fell silent for a moment as if reflecting on the accuracy of this confession. I could have believed now that he was sincerely, humbly, asking for my help.

“The truth is, Mr. Robert, she will not run away from you if it comes to that — or do anything foolish. You may find that hard to believe, given your history with her, but you’re the only person who can do this.”

The confidence with which he spoke of my marriage should have annoyed me, except that it was comforting to hear someone acknowledge what I’d only known as a private regret.

“You also want to find her as much as my father does. He needs someone who will care how this all turns out. Think of him what you will, but he wants no harm to come to her. He wants her back because he wants to take care of her, something you, frankly, never did very well. It might displease you to hear this — but my father knows that Miss Hong still loves him. She has always loved him. Long before she ever met you. Perhaps one day that will all be explained to you.”

He crossed his legs, satisfied that he’d said enough to convince me. He finally lit the cigarette, sighing smugly, and switched the fishing rod to his other hand.

“We checked, and she has again reserved her normal room at the Coronado. Something about that room is important to her, so we’re hoping she comes tonight, or sometime today. We booked the room next door under your name and with your credit card. Room 1213. Check-in is at noon, so you should be going shortly. You will wait for her there — until tomorrow, if necessary. If she does come, talk to her. Persuade her to come home. Tell her whatever you need to tell her.

“If you will, consider this a favor. Bring Miss Hong back to my father, and you can go on your way. He’ll forget everything, and we never have to see each other again. I’m offering you another deal. Hopefully this time you will accept for her sake, if not your own.”

He offered me a cigarette, his eyes disarmingly warm, con spiratorial. I shook my head, which seemed to disappoint him. He waved the brothers back.

I was still processing everything he had said. In particular, about me not taking care of Suzy, about her knowing Sonny before me, her still loving him. Every time he called her “Miss Hong,” I felt like clocking him. It didn’t matter if he was lying.

A feeling passed close to me then, distressing in a way I could not yet understand, like some shadow of a painful memory flitting past me while I wasn’t looking.

Junior’s fishing line jerked and his body awoke. He stood and took hold of the rod expertly with both hands, tugged at the line a couple of times with his cigarette clamped between his lips. He started reeling it in as the brothers approached. The kid rushed over to the bank as Junior’s fish burst out of the water, floundering violently, a foot-long trout. As Junior held up the rod, concentration petrifying his face, the kid grabbed the line and then the fish itself. It took him a few seconds, but he took hold of the convulsing trout with both hands, looked over at me, and kissed its belly with an exaggerated smack.

Junior ignored the kid’s antics. He gestured for him to unhook the fish and throw it back. “My father comes here about once a week. It’s the only place you can fish in the city, outside of Lake Mead, which isn’t a real lake either. They stock this pond with about thirty thousand trout a year. Catfish, too, and bass.”

Junior eyed the shimmering waters. He said, seemingly to himself, “I have never eaten a single fish I’ve caught here.”

The kid finally managed to unhook the fish, and it jumped out of his hands and flopped on the ground before tumbling back into the pond. He stared at the rippling water and wiped his hands on his jeans with an infantile smirk.

Junior sat back down and placed the rod on the ground. Beside his chair was a small blue cooler. He reached into it and pulled out a small but bulging manila envelope. He handed it to me and flicked his cigarette into the pond, which drew some glares from fishermen nearby.

I was struck by how openly he was doing all of this, as if no one would find this scene curious, the two brothers in their FBI shades and him in his stylish fishing gear, pulling envelopes out of a cooler like beers. Why, I wondered, were we not having this conversation at his restaurant or some dusty office with the curtains drawn?

“Inside the envelope,” he said, “you will find a cell phone and five hundred dollars in cash for the room and any expenses you might have. Stay alert. Check Miss Hong’s room as often as you can. Stand guard outside if you have to. And keep the phone on you at all times in case I call. The boys here will escort you to the hotel. You will find your car parked on the fourth level of the garage, in lot 4B. I will give you back your keys after this is all over. Just know that it’s there, and that despite everything, we do want you to drive home on your own.”

“And if she doesn’t come?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, start with the hotel room.”

The brothers approached me, my cue to embark on the job I’d been given.

When I stood, Junior gestured at me with yet another unlit cigarette between his fingers. “My father would not want me telling you this, but you should know that it was Miss Hong who pleaded for you. In fact, she promised him that if he left you alone, she would never leave him. She swore her life on it. For you. That is the only reason my father’s men didn’t come to your doorstep months ago.”

He lit the cigarette, turned from me, and expelled a profound cloud of smoke into the morning air.

He had spent our first meeting convincing me that I had no business being with Suzy. This time I was the only person who could save her.

That feeling rose in me again, though now I understood what it was, why it distressed me so. The job I’d been given was to be my punishment.

5

THE ENTRANCE TO THE CORONADO HOTEL was canopied by a blanket of lights so brilliant, even at noon, that I imagined it singeing my hair. Two valet attendants, bow ties choking their necks, stood glumly below the raised lance of a giant bronze conquistador who welcomed guests. Like the other casinos downtown, the Coronado revealed its age during the day, with its big-bulbed signs flashing sixties glamour, its flat crusty walls a world away from the mirrored splendor on the Strip.

When the brothers dropped me off, the kid handed me my duffel bag of clothes through the car window along with my credit card and my badge, which he pulled out of his own pocket. “Don’t lose yourself, Mr. Officer,” he said. “We’ll find you.” He winked at me as the tinted window swallowed up his face. Slowly, their hearse of a Lexus rolled down the street.

I walked at once to the parking garage where my Chrysler, as promised, stood pristinely in lot 4B. I checked the undercarriage and could find nothing suspicious. To my surprise, the door was unlocked. Inside, my Glock lay where I’d left it in the glove compartment, and my backup five-shot was still nestled comfortably in its holster beneath the driver’s seat. Except for the seat having been adjusted for its recent driver, everything else seemed normal. I pocketed the Glock after checking the clip.

At the registration desk, I waited in line behind an overweight family besieged by luggage and cigarette smoke, the two parents puffing away as their three snickering sons took turns punching each other in the arm. Twenty minutes later I reached the desk, which stood before a mural of the two resident shows, some white-haired comedian I vaguely knew and a magic act involving a python and exotic birds. The girl gave me my room, reserved under my full name, and the credit card the brothers had returned to me matched their records. When I asked whether a Hong Thi Pham or a Suzy Ruen had checked in, she claimed she couldn’t divulge that information, so I asked for directions to their gift shop. It took me another fifteen minutes to find the shop, the clerk’s directions as helpful as a compass in a maze. For about thirty bucks, I bought an obscenely expensive pack of cigarettes, a razor and shaving cream, and some ibuprofen.

“Don’t be taking that with alcohol, baby,” the small black lady behind the counter said with an admonishing smile. “Bad for the tummy.”

I must have looked as worn-out as I felt.

My room was on the twelfth floor and looked clean and inoffensive: a queen bed, a private desk and loveseat, framed prints of Old World maps and Spanish galleons, maroon velvet drapes that covered an entire wall like a theater curtain. There were other stabs at luxury, like the gilt mirror above the bed and the glass doorknobs, but flop down on the stiff mattress and sniff the vague odor of bleach and cigarettes and you knew how many stars the hotel was.

A door connected my room to Suzy’s. It seemed fantastical to me, a portal into another world. I tried the knob. It was locked. I knocked several times and heard nothing but the heater blowing in my room.

Next thing I did was place the Glock in the drawer of the nightstand, right on top of the Bible. I went to the notepad on the desk. Suzy, I wrote, I’m next door in room 1213. I’m here to help you. Please let me. Robert.

I stepped out into the hallway and slid the paper under her door. For a moment, I wondered if it was possible she had forgotten my handwriting.

In the bathroom, the harsh fluorescent lights emitted heat. I shaved, showered, and changed into a pair of jeans and a white button-down shirt that I’d only ever worn to church with Suzy.

I brewed myself a pot of coffee and popped three ibuprofen before sitting down with a cigarette and everything Junior had given me.

The cash in the manila envelope was all new hundred-dollar bills, which I pocketed. The cell phone looked brand-new too, a disposable. I checked the outgoing and incoming calls and saw that the phone had not yet been used.

I looked again at the surveillance image Junior had given me. Seeing it this time, with only myself as judge, reminded me of how enraged and terrified I was that night. How entwined those two emotions could be.

I thought of Junior’s story about Suzy and the episodes she used to have with me. Sonny and I, it seemed, shared an affliction. We were in love with Suzy and afraid of her at the same time, and though I’d like to think he and I went to different places once our marriages went bad, I couldn’t help wondering where I would have gone had Suzy stayed with me a little longer. I’d arrested plenty of people over the years who had violated restraining orders, who’d hunted down ex-lovers and begged for love with threats, their fists, a gun. At that point there’s no difference between a plea and a threat, between loving someone and hurting them. At that point, love doesn’t matter.

My parents came to mind, all those years of them openly resenting each other for reasons never explained to me. My father died when I was sixteen, two years after he abandoned my mother for an identical woman: same age and height, same dark curly hair, same everything except she wasn’t my mother. When he was dying in the hospital and the cancer in his lungs had muted his once sonorous voice, I asked him why he left her, and he said that love just dies sometimes, and when it does, you can’t save it anymore than you can revive a corpse. The words rasped in his throat, but I could still hear his confidence, his certainty. He had never lost it, not for a second. I suppose I had always admired him for this trait. Everything else about him was cold and cruel.

I thought again of all the reasons Suzy had to leave me and wondered how many Sonny had given her.

One thing I was sure of: when and if I found her, delivering her was out of the question. They couldn’t possibly expect me to discover the real reasons why she left, as I surely would, and then just hand her over like a lost puppy. I suspected Junior already anticipated I’d feel this way, which unsettled me all the more. Why would he give me the chance to disobey him yet again?

Other half-formed questions flitted through my head. I dropped my cigarette in the coffee just to hear the satisfying hiss.

On the room telephone, I dialed Tommy, my old partner during my time in narcotics. He was a lieutenant now and had been working homicide for the last decade. Before I met Suzy, we used to go out drinking and I’d spend all night watching him start fights and chase ass. Nowadays he played the devoted husband and father, something he once drunkenly swore he’d never do, not even if life put a gun to his head.

“Yeah?” his dull voice muttered over the line. His idea of answering the phone was to communicate his displeasure at being called.

“Tommy. It’s me.”

“Where’ve you been hiding? You were MIA at Laura’s birthday a few weeks ago.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I still have her present, actually. I’ll give it to you next time I see you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I got a favor to ask. That call you put in for me to Vegas Metro six months back? On a Sonny Van Nguyen? I need a narrative on one of his assault charges. Incident at a casino. He threw a chair at some guy.”

“This again?”

“It’s N-G-U—”

“I know how to spell Nguyen, Bob. We live in California, for fuck’s sake.”

“Two more things. Can you run a tag for me?” I read him the plate for Suzy’s Toyota. “I’m also curious about priors on 2121 E. Warm Springs Road, 89119. Anything in the last six months.”

“Jesus, you running a federal investigation?”

“Just some questions that need answering. You still have that Vegas contact, right?”

“You know, man, if you want to play detective, just apply to be one again.”

“Look, I know you’re busy, but if you can do this asap for me, I’ll owe you forever. I’ll call you back in an hour.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get out of the house, man. Go visit an old friend. Call him for something other than a favor.”

He hung up. Peevish and sensitive as always. I hadn’t told anyone yet about Suzy moving to Vegas and remarrying. But Tommy knew something was up. He knew five months ago and either didn’t want to pry or didn’t care enough to. Probably the latter. The world is full of people who care but never quite care enough.

It was half past noon. How many hours would I have to wait? How many was I willing to wait? I tried to imagine Suzy’s face once she saw me. I’m here to help you, I’d say and put up my hands like someone surrendering, like I’d always done at some point in our arguments. I have money saved, I’d say. We can jump in a taxi and get out of town, away from this desert, back to California and back to the ocean, and then we can go wherever you want to go and forget everything that happened here and you won’t have to say a single thing to me except yes I’ll go with you. Was this what she had wanted to hear all those years ago? Could she already be there next door, sitting in an identical room, on an identical bed, staring — as I was — at the door that separated our adjoined rooms?

I fell back on the bed, letting my head sink into the pillows.

Some faraway sound startled me awake an hour later. I jumped out of bed and went to the adjoining door and tried knocking a few more times. I put my ear to the door, as though waiting for an echo.

A glass of water cleared my head a bit, and I called Tommy back.

“Yeah, I got your info,” he said, his voice less irritable now. “No priors on the address you gave me. And no activity on the tag. Sorry if that disappoints you. That casino incident, however, is a little less boring.”

“Go ahead.”

I heard him sip some hot coffee while a baby started crying in the background. I’d caught him on his day off. He was probably still in his pajamas and sitting in his kitchen with the morning newspaper. I could see Laura sitting across from him, trying to nurse the baby.

“Looks like your guy Nguyen was playing poker downtown two years ago and got into an argument with another player at the table. White twentysomething male who tossed a hundred-dollar chip at his chest and called him a Chinaman. Very creative. Anyway, Nguyen went at the kid and tried to strangle him. Kid had fifty pounds on him but apparently didn’t fare very well. Casino security rushed in to break things up and managed to pry Nguyen off him, but he got loose and picked up a chair and flung it at the kid’s head. Knocked him out cold. Kid was fine but suffered a mild concussion, cut to the head, bruises to the neck. Your guy was held by security until Vegas Metro came and arrested him.”

“The casino blacklist him? Which one was it?”

“Let’s see. .” I could hear him flipping through his notes. “The Coronado. I’ve been there actually. Years ago. One of those old downtown joints on Fremont Street. Ain’t no models waitressing there. And yeah, he got himself a criminal trespass. Immediate arrest if seen on the premises. That goes the same, by the way, for his son.”

“His son?”

“Yeah. A Jonathan Van Nguyen. Twenty-eight years old. Runs his daddy’s restaurants. He showed up during the melee and tangled with security. One of the reasons his father got free and was able to throw the chair. The casino didn’t press any charges on the son, but they did ban the both of them. Anyway, Nguyen Senior pled out and got two years’ probation, which actually expires in three months. I doubt he wants to make trouble any time soon. If he’s been throwing chairs at people lately, he’s probably doing it in private.”

Tommy let my silence go for a few seconds before saying, “Exciting enough for you?”

“That’s what I needed.”

“Sure that’s all you need?”

“Of course.”

“Should I be asking you anything?”

“Sounds like you already are. I’m just curious about the guy.”

“Uh-huh.” I could hear him nodding doubtfully at me. “We should have a drink at McGee’s next week. I’m off Wednesday night. You free?”

“I’ll call you. Thanks again, man. Really.”

“Bob. . ” he said soberly. “Call me, right?”

“Of course.” I hung up.

I took a swig of cold coffee but spat it back into the cup, retching a little as I smelled the cigarette still floating there. I rinsed the cup and my mouth in the sink, then poured myself a new cup. I downed it in three gulps.

I put on my jacket and stuffed its pockets with the cell phone, the surveillance photo, and my badge, which now felt unfamiliar and useless.

In the hallway, I knocked on 1215 and waited five seconds before moving on.

The hotel was lined with mirrors: along the hallway, in the elevators, across the walls of the casino floor, which appeared much bigger and deeper than it really was. I saw myself everywhere I walked. I saw every person multiplied, refracted like a kaleidoscope of faces and bodies, a constant illusion of life so that this place never felt empty, even when it was.

I wandered through the throng of afternoon gamblers, hunched over table games amid a cigarette haze, the air alive with their chatter and the melodic jangling of slot machines. Nearly every dealer I passed was Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese — just as Junior had said. I wondered how many of them had actually come from somewhere far away, and how many were right at home.

The poker room stood in a lonely corner of the casino — an open space sectioned off by a wooden rail. A few onlookers were leaning on the rail and watching the action. Only half of the eight tables were occupied at the moment, populated by college-age dudes in baseball caps and sunglasses, their white-haired elders in plaid and khakis, and the solitary middle-aged woman with her purse in her lap. The place was like some sad foodless cafeteria, fluorescent lights shining down on worn green felt and flimsy chairs, on pale faces staring hungrily at one another behind their towers of poker chips. Sonny must have spent hours on end at these tables, drinking coffee and cheap booze, stepping outside the rail every half hour for a smoke break. Hardly the high roller I had imagined.

I took a seat at the bar nearby and ordered myself a beer and lit a cigarette. For the first time since pulling up to my apartment the previous night, I felt at ease. Neither Sonny nor his son could touch me here. At least not yet. What gave me pause was that Suzy had apparently chosen this place with the same thing in mind. She must have had a very good reason for not wanting to be found, for holing up every week in the one place in town that could protect her.

The bartender served me my beer. “Got the good juice tonight, brother?” He had slicked grayish hair and a sincere Latin accent. He wore his maroon vest and bow tie as proudly as a soldier.

“Don’t gamble.”

“Smart man then.”

“Not smart. Just unlucky.”

“Everybody think they unlucky. Even lucky people say they unlucky.”

“We all complain, don’t we?”

“Not me, brother. Vegas been good to me.”

I nodded for him and his stubbornly winning smile. “Anything exciting ever happen over there?”

“The poker room? What you mean, exciting?”

“I don’t know — people getting into fights. Getting thrown out.”

He looked over at the room and shrugged, rummaging through his Rolodex of memories with his hands on the bar. “Nah, I don’t remember nothing like that. People lose and yell at each other, yeah. Sometime they come over here and yell at me too.”

“No one ever gets caught cheating or anything?”

“Nah. Other gamblers, sure, but not poker players. I been working at casinos in Cali and Reno too. Poker players are honest, brother. They wanna win your money, not steal it. They too smart and proud for that, know what I mean?”

“I guess I’ve watched too many Westerns.”

He chuckled. “I from Columbia. People bring guns to go gamble. Here in Vegas — people cheat you, but they cheat you honestly.” He let that sink in, then patted the bar genially as he walked off to see to another customer. He was a service provider indeed. How often did desperation trudge up to his bar and beg for a drink and a dose of his ready optimism?

A tapping noise made me turn my head. Nearby, an obese guy in an oversize T-shirt sat between two slot machines, a plastic bucket of coins in his lap and a hand on each machine, tapping them like tribal drums. Every now and then, he stopped to wipe his face with a towel. I wondered if he knew it was daylight outside.

Around me, the air felt artificial. Time was artificial here too. No windows or clocks. No sense of progression outside of what you gain and what you lose. That thought made me anxious, like hours had passed without me knowing it.

I finished my drink and left a tip for the bartender and pulled out another cigarette for the long walk to the elevator.

Back in my room, I turned on the TV and stretched out on the bed with my shoes on. It was a little past two. I realized I hadn’t eaten since the highway stop at McDonald’s the night before. I muted the TV, perused the room-service menu, and reached for the phone. A woman’s voice greeted me. But I hung up on her.

A door had opened in the next room.

I grabbed an empty glass off the nightstand and rushed to put it against the adjoining door. Nothing but silence for a long time. Then a door clicked shut. Was someone arriving or leaving? I stepped out into the empty hallway. I went to put my ear against 1215.

My first knock was gentle. The knock a maid would make. After some moments, I knocked again, louder this time but still polite. I could feel her standing behind the other side of the door.

“Suzy?” I said, leaning in. “It’s me. It’s Robert. Please open the door.”

I took a step back so that I could stand in full view of the peep hole. I would have stood there for hours if I had to. But then the knob turned.

The door opened halfway, revealing the face of a young woman who stood partly behind it, staring out at me, cautious but unafraid. She was Vietnamese, in her early twenties, and wore faded jeans, cowboy boots, and a tight brown leather jacket zipped all the way up like she’d just come in from the cold. No jewelry and no makeup, though she needed neither.

Her boyishly cropped hair muted the resemblance at first, but it was impossible not to recognize the cheekbones and the dark glaring eyes, the shade of familiar stubbornness there. She even had the same long, proud neck, that way of holding up her chin like she was ready to stand her ground against anything. I felt a childish urge to blink and see if she’d disappear, wave my hand in front of her so that something might change.

But my eyes did not lie. Suzy stood there before me, twenty years younger, both something found and something I had lost.

“Who’re you?” she said. “And who is Suzy?”