Las Vegas Noir

The Tik by John O’Brien

Scotch 80s

Part of me wished that I had asked the cab to wait. I hadn’t. I stared up at the big double doors, weathered from the desert sun, yes, but still so imposing that you half expected to see a muscled bodyguard when they opened. The doorbell didn’t work. It never had. I felt the familiar quiver begin in the back of my neck as twice I dropped the ornate knocker, an upside-down black iron cross. I peered over my back to see if the cab was still in sight. The long drive was empty.

Despite the impending nightfall, I noticed the German shepherd asleep on the grass, his white face a beacon in the otherwise black lawn. I knew this dog and wondered if he would remember me. I walked over to nudge him awake.

When I had last left this house over ten years ago, I was certain that I was through with this all-consuming part of my life, but as I bent over to pet the dog, it was clear this place was far from finished with me; rather, like the dog, it was merely lying in wait for some new awakening. The shepherd lifted his head and growled, but whether the snarl was for me or something else, I did not know. I followed his gaze and was startled to find that I was being watched by a tall slim figure, standing where only moments before the closed doors had been.

“Timmers, you’re back,” she said, not at all surprised to see me.

I cringed at her easy, reflexive use of my nickname; at her prosaic manner of observation, as if I’d just returned from a short walk — when in fact I had been gone for a decade. This meeting was nothing less than heart-stopping for me.

“Melinda, I... I didn’t hear the door open. You startled me...” So much so, in fact, that I couldn’t remember anything that I had planned to say. “You sound as if you’ve been expecting me.” She ignored this.

“Come in,” she said.

As I followed her through the foyer and into the heart of the house, I began to feel a sort of resignation; a feeling that, now that I had set things in motion, I could sit back and relax, free from the burden of decision making. It was not an unpleasant outlook.

“Christ,” I said as we walked into the living room, its windowed ceiling a full twenty feet above me. “I’d forgotten how damn big this place is.”

“I doubt that,” she responded. “Still drink bourbon?”

“Finally a question. Apparently there is at least one thing that you’re not sure of.” I was starting to feel cocky. How else could I feel? I’d come this far into the house, into my past. The less I thought about it, the better it felt. I was comfortable here. Melinda understood me in a way that no one else could.

“Not really, Timmers.” She reached into an antique Spanish sideboard and extracted a dusty bottle of Wild Turkey.

“My brand, even. I’m impressed.” I narrowed my eyes and grinned at her. Her presence was making me giddy. I was excited — this was so easy. She knew why I was here. It was like being in a cathouse — no pretense. You ask for sex and they give it to you. But a cathouse would seem like a church compared to this place.

“Your bottle, actually,” she said.

“Fuck it,” I said. “We can drink all we want later.”

Without missing a beat she set down the bottle, picked up my hand, and turned silently toward the staircase. I willingly followed her determined walk and flowing silk robe. This was the beginning of the end of ten years’ anxiety. It seemed as if I’d barely been away. Right now nothing seemed less relevant than my time away from her.

But I did have that time, and I had to remember that. I had to remember the futile years of trying to ignore this hidden life, with Melinda and this extravagant house standing at the center. I had to remember why I was here.

Why was I here?

What if I did like it? Liking it — living it — had been the whole point. I was back now and it was time to unlearn compassion and let Melinda take me again.

We climbed the staircase to her bedroom; ten years since it had been our bedroom and yet it looked exactly the same to me. Perhaps it would always be our bedroom. Melinda dropped my hand and turned to face me. She stepped back and looked into my eyes as she untied her robe and let it fall to the floor. I was amazed at her perfection. Though life had left its many marks on my body, she was just as I remembered — flawless, still possessing all the curves and textures of a nineteen-year-old showgirl.

She unbuttoned my shirt and in a moment I, too, was naked. Melinda wrapped herself around me. I lifted her onto the bed, the raw heat rising inside of me. It was exactly as I remembered. I ran my hands along her thighs, stopping short of the cleft of her. Her nipples were hard and brown. I took one between my teeth, one between thumb and finger, and bit and pinched with exacting pressure. Melinda cried out, but did not move to stop me. She was open beneath me, ready. It was time. I licked and tasted her until her legs quivered on the brink. I stopped short of her orgasm and lay on top of her, breathing in the intermission. Finally, I pushed into her. She climaxed in waves, acute bursts of pleasure. I was close behind, teetering on that exquisite edge.

Melinda sensed this, as I knew she would, and stopped all her motion. At once my imminent climax was completely in her control. She slid from beneath me and sat up on the side of the bed. She opened the nightstand drawer. I waited, trembling, as she extracted a stainless steel tray and with slick efficiency prepared the injection. The glowing black fluid filled the syringe. My hardness raged. I swallowed against it all, my throat dry.

At that moment it was impossible for me to understand how I had stayed away from this drug — we called it “The Tik” — for all those years. I had never heard of it outside this room and had never looked for it elsewhere. Somehow I knew that it existed nowhere but here. This place was as much a part of The Tik as I, moments before, had been a part of Melinda. She lived here in a desert oasis with it, and the whole scene had always been one great, indivisible, seductive, eternal entity to me. I had once believed that I could escape it by running. Now I had run back, and was going to try to escape another way.

Melinda tapped the needle of the syringe with a long red fingernail. The sexual tension and my own anticipation had my heart nearly beating out of my chest. My bloodstream was primed to rush the drug to my brain. Melinda turned, ready with the needle. I closed my eyes and offered my arm.

The beautiful pinch.

As the hot fluid rushed through my veins, Melinda prepared another hypo and injected herself. Then she dropped the syringe onto the tray and kicked it, lunging into me. As the stainless steel and empty vial clattered to the floor, Melinda clutched my waist and took me into her mouth. The heat of The Tik inside of me and the heat of Melinda’s tongue outside of me combined into that perfect euphoria I’d known only within these walls. She held me on the brink for as long as she could. Then I yelled out, pumping into her.

The feeling of being alive poured over me, elemental and singular. We were finally together again.

The Tik.

We blinked in the aftermath, verifying it was real. I lay on my back, Melinda’s head on my stomach. Then she reared up and playfully bit me. I laughed and pushed her off. Full of new energy, I bounded out of the bed and down the stairs, returning with the bottle of bourbon. Melinda already had her panties on and was rolling up her fishnets. I sucked the bottle as I watched her dress. She grabbed it from me and took a big swallow.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said. She shoved the bottle back into my hand and pulled open the door of what had been my closet. I was stunned. Before me hung all my old clothes, just as I had left them.

I laughed. “Unfuckingbelievable. Do you still have the Jag too?”

“In the garage,” she said.

Nothing had changed.

Melinda and the drug were working in perfect harmony. My head spun with satisfaction and lust. I grinned wildly and shook on the leather jacket that had always fit me like a second skin. It still did. My boots, my jeans, everything was in place. I gulped some more bourbon and pounced on Melinda. We fell onto the bed and I ripped off the black lace bra she had just put on. She laughed as the zipper on my jacket scratched her. We fucked again, more perfunctorily this time, then got dressed.

After finishing the bottle of bourbon we went down to the garage. Melinda’s vintage Jag, a black 1967 XKE, was still in perfect shape, just as I, by now, expected everything to be. The car had also fit me. I slid into the driver’s seat and palmed the bulb of the stick shift. Melinda’s perfume blended with the smell of leather and night air. We squealed down the driveway and onto the moneyed side street. The ragtop was down and the wind blew Melinda’s hair all around. I flew through a red light. We vanished into the night.

We headed for the Strip, battling traffic. I didn’t mind. I basked in the stares this beautiful woman and car garnered beneath the streetlights and neon.

“Let’s go to the Barbary Coast,” I said.

“The Barbary Coast? You’ve got to be kidding,” said Melinda. “Why?”

“Dunno,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “The $3.99 prime rib dinner?”

Melinda laughed, throwing her head back. “Oh, Timmers,” she said. “I’d forgotten how you make me laugh.”

We parked off the Strip and starting walking hand in hand through the crowd. The Tik pulsed inside me and mixed with the bourbon. Melinda was on my arm. I was ten feet tall.

Overweight Midwesterners stared at the two of us, wishing they could be us. We were the Las Vegas they came to see. A middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts eyed Melinda’s long legs.

“Loosest slots on the Strip,” I said to him with a conspiratorial nod as we passed. Completely stunned, he looked up at me, his mouth agape. Melinda and I folded with laughter, then broke into a run.

After a few minutes, Melinda stopped, breathless, and turned to me. She squeezed my hand. Her nails broke the skin.

“It feels so good to have you back, Tim,” she said.

I pushed her against the cold brick wall and put my mouth on hers while pressing my thigh between her legs.

“I love you,” I whispered. My hand was sticky with blood.

She returned my kiss, our tongues rolling together until Melinda pulled back.

“Why then,” she said, “are you going to make me go in there?” She nodded toward the billowing entrance of the Coast.

“Come on,” I said. “I feel so good. I feel like slumming. And if we don’t find any action in there” — I indicated the space in front of me with a grandiose sweep of my arm — “the entire Strip awaits us.” We stepped through the forced air plenum and into the clanging miasma of the casino.

A semi-attractive blonde with a very large chest caught my attention. She was sitting alone at a blackjack table.

“I’m going to the girls’ room,” Melinda shouted over the cacophony of bells and chimes that rang from the slot carousels. “I’ll catch up to you in a couple of minutes.”

I nodded and watched her meander off, as did most of the people she passed. The fishnet stockings had that effect.

I sat down next to the blonde and threw a hundred dollars on the table. The dealer set a short stack of chips in front of me as a cocktail waitress in a bad pirate costume appeared at my elbow.

“A double bullshot,” I said, placing a chip on her tray.

“What’s that?” said the blonde as she slurped at a frothy blender drink.

“It’s beef bouillon and vodka,” I said, peering at my cards.

She wrinkled her nose into a grimace. “Ewww! Why are you drinking that?” The end of her straw was coated in waxy orange lipstick.

“I’m hungry,” I said. After all, I was. I nodded yes to a hit from the dealer.

“That’s so gross,” she said.

“Fuck you,” I said. Maybe semi-attractive was too generous a description for her, stacked or not. The bad casino lighting wasn’t shoring up her odds either. “Now shut up and finish your snow cone.”

“Okay, I will,” she said. “And then you can.”

“I can what?” I said, rolling my eyes. The waitress set down my drink with exactly the speed a pre-tip buys. I placed another chip on her tray and turned back to the blonde.

“You can fuck me,” she said as the dealer flipped over his jack and ace.

“Who the fuck are you?” With characteristically perfect timing and an equally perfect brunette, led by the hand, Melinda intervened. The blonde sized up the two women and picked up her drink. “I’m more than you could handle anyway,” she said, then collected her remaining chips and walked away, flipping us off.

“Tim, this is Teena,” said Melinda, not even looking after the blonde. “She’s new in town. Just got a job as a waitress over at the Peppermill.”

“After I finish the training course,” said Teena. “Of course,” she added, giggling at her own quip.

“Right,” said Melinda. “After you finish the training course.” She wrapped an arm around Teena’s waist and turned to me. “She’s coming home with us for a nightcap.” One look at Teena and I could see that Melinda had bribed her with the coke she always kept in her purse.

“Hi, Tim. I saw you walk in and thought you were really cute. I’m really glad to meet you,” said Teena. She seemed like a willing little lamb, naïve and very sexy. Exactly what I’d had in mind.

“With that perky attitude,” I said, “my bet is you’ll sail right through that training course.” Teena gave me a prom queen smile. Perfect, just like everything else so far.

“So what do you say, Tim?” asked Melinda, though she already knew the answer. “Nightcaps at our place?”

Our place. “That sounds just fine,” I said. “First let’s have a drink for the road.” I pushed a chip toward the dealer and steered the girls around to the bar. “Will you be riding with us, Teena, or do you have your own car?”

“Teena will follow us out to the house,” said Melinda, lifting an eyebrow down the bar.

I smiled at Teena.

“What can I get for you?” said the bartender, one eye eclipsed by a fake black eye patch.

Melinda looked at me. “Make a wish,” she said.

I motioned Teena to park next to the Jag in the garage. Melinda took Teena inside to show her around while I looked over Teena’s Honda and then locked up the garage. I went in the back door of the house and found Melinda and Teena necking in the kitchen. I didn’t seem to disturb them.

“Save some for me, Mel,” I said. “Anyone want a drink?”

“Tequila,” said Melinda.

“Got any champagne?” asked Teena.

I headed for the sideboard to crack open a new bottle of bourbon.

“Join us upstairs when you’re ready, Timmers,” Melinda shouted down the hall. She was anxious despite her cool veneer. It had been a long time for her too. I was eager to do a number on Teena, but something vague seemed to be holding me back. Fuck that, I thought, and took the longest drink of bourbon in my life.

By the time I got up to the bedroom, Melinda’s face was buried between Teena’s legs. Teena seemed a little dazed but was holding up her end quite well, no doubt aided by the small mountain of coke next to her on the nightstand. Melinda saw me and bolted upright. She was covered with sweat.

“Fuck her, Tim,” she said. “Fuck her proper.”

Teena rolled over and did another line, then she lay back on the bed. “Yeah, fuck me,” she said.

I did. I was rough but she took it. When I got off her, bruises started to form on the insides of her thighs. I reached for the bourbon and watched her and Melinda work on each other. I felt strange. The Tik still moved through me, though now at an even keel. I drank more bourbon.

I drank for a long time.

Melinda screamed and dug her nails into Teena’s skin. Teena threw her head back on the pillow. Melinda rolled over and beckoned me. My head was spinning. I placed my hands on Teena’s knees and opened her as Melinda reached for the nightstand. I centered all my consciousness on Teena. I focused my whole body on my mouth, and my mouth on her. Melinda moved on the bed. I heard a whisper of rushing air. Teena stiffened and bucked under me. A hot spray rained across my back. Something clinked against the wall. I squeezed Teena’s waist with all my strength. Tears came to my eyes. Teena’s body went limp.

I lay hugging her, my breath so fast. The room was quiet. After a time I looked up at Melinda. She smiled and wiped the blood from her eyes. She got off the bed and picked up the straight razor, which she had thrown against the wall. She dropped it in the nightstand drawer.

“You okay, Timmers?” she asked. “I know it’s been awhile.” She paused, then reached back into the drawer. “Maybe it’s time for another shot.”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

I picked up the bourbon and had a sip. Melinda closed the drawer and turned toward the bathroom.

“Suit yourself, but we shouldn’t wait too long,” she said. “I’m going to clean up. Will you take care of that?” She nodded at the blood-soaked bed and the still body, naked and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling.

“Of course I will,” I said. “Don’t I always?”

I finished the bourbon as Melinda closed the bathroom door behind her. Out the window, dawn announced itself quietly with a barely perceptible change of color in the east. A car started off in the distance and I reflexively glanced at the garage door. It was still locked. I really didn’t worry. Melinda and I had always led a charmed existence. I sighed and put on my pants.

“Wash my back, Tim,” Melinda called from the shower when she heard me enter the bathroom. I opened the curtain and soaped up my hands. I massaged her back as I washed it.

“Ahhh, that feels good,” she said. “Get in here. I’m ready for a good fucking.”

She put her cheek against the wall and closed her eyes. I pulled her razor from my back pocket. With one motion I grabbed her hair and drew the blade across her throat. For an instant she stretched her neck out, exposing it even more, and then she slumped quietly to the bottom of the tub. I turned off the water and went into the bedroom, dropped the razor into her nightstand.

I cleaned up and finished dressing in the clothes that I had arrived in the day before. I kissed Teena’s forehead. I kissed Melinda’s hand and held it to my mouth for a long time.

Downstairs I lit a small fire on the love seat in the living room, then went to the kitchen and turned on all the gas jets. On my way out to the garage I stopped and, as an afterthought, picked up my leather jacket.

I backed the Jag out of the drive and looked for but did not see the German shepherd. It suddenly occurred to me how very old he must have been. As I put the Jag into gear, my eyes paused at the mailbox, an unlikely witness. I pulled away and, driving down the road, watched it disappear in the rearview mirror. I thought about how badly I needed to sleep.

Pretty little parasite by David Corbett

Fremont

One hand on her hip, the other lofting her cocktail tray, Sam Pitney scanned the gaming floor from the Roundup’s mezzanine, dressed in her bright red cowgirl outfit and fresh from a bracing toot in the ladies’. Stream-of-nothingness mode, mid-shift, slow night, only the blow keeping her vertical — and she had this odd craving for some stir-fry — she stared out at the flagging crowd and manically finger-brushed the outcrop of blond bangs showing beneath her tipped-back hat.

Maybe it was seeing her own reflection fragmented in dozens of angled mirrors to the left and right and even overhead, or the sight of the usual trudge of losers wandering the noisy mazelike neon, clutching change buckets, chip trays, chain smoking (still legal, this was the ’80s), hoping for one good score to recoup a little dignity — whatever the reason, she found herself revisiting a TV program from a few nights back, about Auschwitz, Dachau, one of those places. Men and women and children and even poor helpless babies cradled by their mothers, stripped naked then marched into giant shower rooms, only to notice too late — doors slamming, bolts thrown, gas soon hissing from the showerheads: a smell like almonds, the voice on the program said.

Sam found herself wondering — no particular reason — what it would be like if the doors to the casino suddenly rumbled shut, trapping everybody inside.

For a moment or two, she supposed, no one would even notice, gamblers being what they are. But soon enough word would ripple through the crowd, especially when the fire sprinklers in the ceiling started to mist. Even then, people would be puzzled and vaguely put out but not frightened, not until somebody nearby started gagging, buckled over, a barking cough, the scalding phlegm, a slime of blood in the palm.

Then panic, the rush for the doors. Animal screams. Blind terror.

Sam wondered where she’d get found when they finally reopened the doors to deal with the dead. Would she be one of those with bloody nails or, worse, fingers worn down to raw gory bone, having tried to claw her way past so many others to sniff at an air vent, a door crack, ready to kill for just one more breath? Or would she be one of the others, one of those they found alone, having caught on quick and then surrendered, figuring she was screwed, knowing it in the pit of her soul, curled up on the floor, waiting for God or Mommy or Satan or who-the-fuck-ever to put an end to the tedious phony bullshit, the nerves and the worry and the always being tired, the lonely winner-takes-all, the grand American nothing...

“Could I possibly have another whiskey and ginger, luv?”

Sam snapped to, turning toward the voice — the accent crisply British once, now blurred by years among the Vegas gypsies. It came from a face of singular unlucky pallor: high brow with a sickly froth of chestnut hair, flat bloodless lips, no chin to speak of. The Roundup sat just east of Las Vegas Boulevard on Fremont, closer to the LVMPD tower than the tonier downtown houses — the Four Queens, the Golden Nugget — catering to whoever showed up first and stayed longest, cheap tourists mostly, dopes who’d just stumbled out of the drunk tank and felt lucky (figure that one out), or, most inexplicably, locals, the transplant kind especially, the ones who went on and on about old Las Vegas, which meant goofs like this bird. What was his name? Harvey, Harold, something with an H. He taught at UNLV if she remembered right, came here three nights a week at least, often more, said it was for the nostalgia.

“You are on the clock, my dear, am I right?”

She gazed into his soupy green eyes. Centuries of inbreeding. Hail, Brittania.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

Come midnight she began looking for Mike and found him off by himself in the dollar slots, an odd little nook where there were fewer mirrors and the eye in the sky had a less than perfect angle (he thought of these things). He wore white linen slacks, a pastel tee, the sleeves of his sport jacket rolled up. All Sonny Crockett, the dick.

“Hey,” she said, coming up.

He shot her a vaguely proprietary smile. His eyes looked wrecked but his hair was flawless. He said, “The usual?”

“No, weekend coming up. Make it two.”

The smile thawed, till it seemed almost friendly. “Double your pleasure.”

She clipped off to the bar, ordered a Stoli-rocks-twist, discreetly assembling the twelve twenties on her tray in a tight thin stack. The casino’s monotonous racket jangled all around, same at midnight as happy hour — the eternal now, she thought, Vegas time. Returning to where he was sitting, she bowed at the waist, so he could reach the tray. He carefully set a five down, under which he’d tucked two wax-paper bindles. Then he collected the twelve twenties off her tray, as though they were his change, and she remembered the last time they were together, in her bed, the faraway look he got afterwards, not wanting to be touched, the kind of thing guys did when they’d had enough of you.

“Whoever you get this from,” she said, “I want to meet him.”

From the look on his face, you would’ve thought she’d asked for the money back. “Come again?”

“You heard me.”

He cocked his head. The hair didn’t budge. “I’m not sure I like your attitude.”

She broke the news. In the span of only a second or so, his expression went from stunned to deflated to distinctly pissed, then: “You saying it’s mine?”

She rolled her eyes. “No. An angel came to me.”

“Don’t get smart.”

“Oh, smart’s exactly what I’m going for, believe me.”

“Okay then, take care of it.”

With those few words, she got a picture of his ideal woman — a collie in heat, basically, but with fewer scruples. Lay out a few lines, bend her over the sofa, splay her ass — then a few weeks later, tell her to take care of it.

“Sorry,” she said. “Not gonna happen.”

He chuckled acidly. “Since when are you maternal?”

“Don’t think you know me. We fucked, that’s it.”

“You’re shaking me down.”

“I’m filling you in. But yeah, I could make this a problem. Instead, I’m trying to do the right thing. For everybody. But I’m not gonna be able to work here much longer, understand? This ain’t about you, it’s about money. Introduce me to your guy.”

He thought about it, and as he did his lips curled into a grin. The eyes were still scared though. “Who says it’s a guy?”

A twinge lit up her lower back. Get used to it, she thought. “Don’t push me, Mike. I’m a woman scorned, with a muffin in the oven.” She did a quick pivot and headed off. Over her shoulder, she added, “I’m off at 2. Set it up.”

It didn’t happen that night, as it turned out, and that didn’t surprise her. What did surprise her was that it happened only two nights later, and she didn’t have to hound him half as bad as she’d expected — more surprising still, he hadn’t been jiving: It really wasn’t a guy.

Her name was Claudia, a Cuban, maybe fifty, could pass for forty, calm dark eyes that waxed and waned between cordial welcome and cold appraisal — a tiny woman, raven-black hair coiled tight into a long braid, body as sleek as a razor, sheathed in a simple black dress. She lived in one of the newer condos at the other end of Fremont, near Sahara, where it turned into Boulder Highway.

Claudia showed them in, dead-bolted the door, offered a cool muscular hand to Sam with a nod, then gestured everyone into the living room: suede furniture, Navajo rugs, ferns. Two fluffed and imperial Persian cats nestled near the window on matching cushions. Across the room, a mobile of tiny tin birds, dozens of them, all painted bright tropical colors, hung from the ceiling. Interesting, Sam thought, glancing up as she tucked her skirt against her thighs. Thing must torment the cats.

“Like I said before,” Mike began, addressing Claudia, “I think this is a bad idea, but you said okay, so here we are.”

Sam resisted an urge to storm over, take two fistfuls of that pampered hair, and rip it out by the roots. She turned to the woman. “Can we talk alone?”

“That doesn’t work for me,” Mike said.

With the grace of a model, Claudia slowly pivoted toward him. “I think it’s for the best.” For the sake of his pride, she added, “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

That was that. He sulked off to the patio, the two women talked. It didn’t take long for Sam to explain her situation, lay out her plan, make it clear she wasn’t being flaky or impulsive. She’d thought it through — she didn’t want to get even, pick off Mike’s customers, nothing like that. “I don’t want to hand my baby off to day care, some stranger. I want to be there. At home.”

Claudia eyed her, saying nothing, for what seemed an eternity. Don’t look away, Sam told herself. Accept the scrutiny, know your role. But don’t act scared.

“There are those,” Claudia said finally, “who would find what you just said very peculiar.” Her smile seemed a kind of warning, and yet it wasn’t without warmth. “I’m sure you realize that.”

“I do. But I think you understand.”

It turned out she understood only too well — she had a son, Marco, eleven years old, away at boarding school in Seville. “I miss him terribly.” She made a sawing motion. “Like someone cut off my arm.”

“Why don’t you have him here, with you?”

For the first time, Claudia looked away. Her face darkened. “Mothers make sacrifices. It’s not all about staying home with the baby.”

Sam felt backward, foolish, hopelessly American. Behold the future, she thought, ten years down the road, doing this, and your kid is where? In the corner of her eye, she saw one of the cats rise sleepily and arch its back. Out on the patio, Mike sat in the moonlight, a sudden red glow as he dragged on his cigarette.

Claudia steered the conversation to terms: Sam would start off buying ounces at two thousand dollars each, which she would divide into grams and eightballs for sale. If things went well, she could move up to a QP — quarter pound — at $7,800, build her clientele. She might well plateau at that point, many did. If she was ambitious, though, she could move up to an elbow — for “lb,” meaning a pound — with the tacit agreement she would not interfere with Claudia’s wholesale trade.

“I want you to look me in the eye, Samantha. Good. Do not confuse my sympathy for weakness. I’m generous by nature. That doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I have men who take care of certain matters for me, men not at all like our friend out there.” She nodded toward Mike all alone on the moonlit patio. “These men, you will never meet them unless it comes to that. And if it does, the time will have passed for you to say or do anything to help yourself. I trust I’m clear.”

The first and oddest thing? She lost five pounds. God, she thought, what have I done? She checked her sheets for blood, then ran to Valley Medical, no appointment, demanded to see her ob-gyn. The receptionist — sagging desert face, kinky gray perm — shot her one of those knowing, gallingly sympathetic looks you never really live down.

“Your body thinks you’ve got a parasite, dear,” the woman said. “Just keep eating.”

She did, and she stunned herself, how quickly her habits turned healthy. No more coke, ditto booze — instead a passion for bananas (craving potassium), an obsession with yogurt (good for bone mass, the immune system, the intestinal lining), a sudden interest in whole grains (to keep her regular), citrus (for iron absorption), even liver (prevent anemia). She took to grazing, little meals here and there, to keep the nausea at bay, and when her appetite craved more she turned to her newfound favorite: stir-fry.

She continued working for three months, time enough to groom a clientele — fellow casino rats (her old quitting-time buddies, basically, and their buddies), a few select customers from the Roundup (including, strangely enough, Harry the homely Brit, who came from Manchester, she learned, taught mechanical engineering, vacationed in Cabo most winters, not half the schmuck she’d pegged him for), plus a few locals she decided to trust (the girls at Diva’s Hair-and-Nail, the boys at Monte Carlo Tanning Salon, a locksmith named Nick Perino, had a shop just up Fremont Street, total card, used to host a midnight movie show in town) — all of this happening in the shadow of the police tower on Stewart Avenue, all those cops just four blocks away.

Business was brisk. She got current on her bills, socked away a few grand. At sixteen weeks her stomach popped out, like she’d suddenly inflated, and that was the end of cocktail shift. Sam bid it goodbye with no regrets, the red pleated dress, the cowboy hat, the tasseled boots. From that point forward, she conducted business where she pleased, permitting a trustworthy inner circle to come to her place, the others she met out and about, merrily invisible in her maternity clothes.

The birth was strangely easy, two-hour labor, a snap by most standards, and Sam shed twenty pounds before heading home. The best thing about seeing it go was no longer having to endure strangers — older women especially, riding with her in elevators or standing in line at the store — who would notice the tight globe of her late-term belly and instinctively reach out, stroke the shuddering roundness, cooing in a helpless, mysterious, covetous way that almost rekindled Sam’s childhood fear of witches.

As for the last of the weight gain, it all seemed to settle in her chest — first time in her life, she had cleavage. This little girl’s been good to you all over, Sam thought — her skin shone, her eyes glowed, she looked happy. Guys seemed to notice, clients especially, but she made sure to keep it all professional: So much as hint at sex with coke in the room, next thing you knew the guy’d be eyeing your muff like it was veal.

Besides, the interest on her end had vanished. Curiously, that didn’t faze her. Whatever it was she’d once craved from her lovers she now got from Natalie, feeling it strongest when she nursed, enjoying something she’d secretly thought didn’t exist — the kind of fierce unshakeable oneness she’d always thought was just Hollywood. Now she knew better. The crimped pink face, the curled doughy hands, the wispy black strands of impossibly fine hair: “Look at you,” she’d whisper, over and over and over.

By the end of two months, she’d pitched all her old clothes, not just the maternity duds. Some bad habits got the heave-ho as well: the trashy attitude, slutty speech, negative turns of mind. Nor would the apartment do anymore — too dark, too small, too blah. The little one deserves better, she told herself, as does her mother. Besides, maybe someone had noticed all the in-and-out, the visitors night and day. Half paranoia, half healthy faith in who she’d become, she upscaled to a three-bedroom out on Boulder Highway, furnished it in suede, added ferns. She bought two cats.

Nick Perino sat alone in an interview room in the Stewart Avenue tower — dull yellow walls, scuffed black linoleum, humming fluorescent light — tapping his thumbs together and cracking his neck as he waited. Finally the door opened, and he tried to muster some advantage, assert control, by challenging the man who entered, blurting out, “I don’t know you.”

The newcomer ignored him, tossing a manila folder onto the table as he drew back his chair to sit. He was in his thirties, shaggy hair, wiry build, dressed in a Runnin’ Rebels T-shirt and faded jeans. Something about him said one-time jock. Something else said unmitigated prick. Looking bored, he opened the file, began leafing through the pages, sipping from a paper cup of steaming black coffee so vile Nick could smell it across the table.

Nick said, “I’m used to dealing with Detective Naughton.”

The guy sniffed, chuckling at something he read, suntanned laugh lines fanning out at his eyes. “Yeah, well, he’s been rotated out to Traffic. You witness a nasty accident, Mike’s your man. But that’s not why you’re here, is it, Mr. Perry?”

“Perino.”

The cop glanced up finally. His eyes were scary blue and so bloodshot they looked on fire. Another sniff. “Right. Forgive me.”

“Some kind of cold you got there. Must be the air-conditioning.”

“It’s allergies, actually.”

Nick chuckled. Allergic to sleep, maybe. “Speaking of names, you got one?”

“Thornton.” He whipped back another page. “Chief calls me James, friends call me Jimmy. You can call me sir.”

Nick stood up. He wasn’t going to take this, not from some slacker narc half in the bag. “I came here to do you guys a favor.”

Still picking through the file, Jimmy Thornton said, “Sit back down, Mr. Perry.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I said — sit down.”

“You think you’re talking to some fart-fuck, asshole?”

Finally, the cop closed the file. Removing a ballpoint pen from his hip pocket, he began thumbing the plunger manically. “I know who I’m talking to. Mike paints a pretty vivid picture.” He nudged the folder across the table. “Want a peek?”

Despite himself, Nick recoiled a little. “Yeah. Maybe I’ll do that.”

Leaning back in his chair, still clicking the pen, Jimmy Thornton said: “You first blew into town, when was it, ’74? Nick Perry, Chiller Theater, Saturday midnight. Weasled your way into the job, touting all this ‘network experience’ back east.”

Nick shrugged. “Everybody lies on his résumé.”

“Not everybody.”

“My grandfather came over from Sicily, Perino was the family name. Ellis Island, he changed it to Perry. I just changed it back.”

“Yeah, but not till you went to work for Johnny T.”

Nick could feel the blood drain from his face. “What are you getting at?”

The cop’s smile turned poisonous. “Know what Johnny said about you? You’re the only guy in Vegas ever added a vowel to the end of his name. Him and his brother saw you coming at the San Gennaro Feast, they couldn’t run the other way fast enough, even when you worked for them. Worst case of wannabe-wiseguy they’d ever seen.”

Finally, Nick sat back down. “You heard this how? Johnny doesn’t, like—”

“Know you were the snitch? Can’t answer that. I mean, he probably suspects.”

Nick had been a CI in a state case against the Tintoretto brothers for prostitution and drugs, all run through their massage parlor out on Flamingo. Nick remained unidentified during trial, the case made on wiretaps. It seemed a wise play at the time — get down first, tell the story his way, cut a deal before the roof caved in. He was working as the manager there, only job he could find in town after getting canned at the station — a nigger joke, pussy in the punch line, didn’t know he was on the air.

“All the employees got a pass,” Nick said, “not just me. Johnny couldn’t know for sure unless you guys told him.”

“Relax.” Another punctuating sniff. “Nobody around here told him squat. We keep our promises, Mr. Perry.”

Nick snorted. “Not from where I sit.”

“Excuse me?” The guy leaned in. “Mike bent over backwards for you, pal. Set you up, perfect location, right downtown. Felons aren’t supposed to be locksmiths.”

“Most of that stuff on my sheet was out of state. And it got expunged.”

A chuckle: “Now there’s a word.”

“Vacated, sealed, whatever.”

“Because Mike took care of it. And how do you repay him?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Every time business gets slow, you send that fat freak you call a nephew out to the apartments off Maryland Parkway — middle of the night, spray can of Superglue, gum up a couple hundred locks. You can bank on at least a third of the calls, given your location — think we don’t know this?”

“Who you talking to, Mike Lally over at All-Night Lock’n’Key? You wanna hammer a crook, there’s your guy, not me.”

“Doesn’t have thirty-two grand in liens from the Tax Commission on his business, though, does he?”

Nick blanched. They already knew. They knew everything. “I got screwed by my bookkeeper. Look, I came here with information. You wanna hear it or not?”

“In exchange for getting the Tax Commission off your neck.”

“Before they shut me down, yeah. That asking so much?”

Jimmy Thornton opened the manila folder to the last page, clicked his pen one final time, and prepared to write. “That depends.”

Sam sat in the shade at the playground two blocks from her apartment, listening to Nick go on. He’d just put in new locks at her apartment — she changed them every few weeks now, just being careful — and, stopping here to drop off the new keys, he’d sat down on the bench beside her, launching in, some character named Jimmy.

“He’s a stand-up guy,” Nick said. “Looker, too. You’ll like him.”

“You pitching him as a customer, or a date?”

Nick raised his hands, a coy smile, “All things are possible,” inflecting the words with that paisano thing he fell into sometimes.

Natalie slept in her stroller, exhausted from an hour on the swings, the slide, the merry-go-round. Sam wondered about that, whether it was really good for kids to indulge that giddy instinct for dizziness. Where did it lead?

“Tell me again how you met this guy.”

“He wanted a wall safe, I installed it for him.”

She squinted in the sun, shaded her eyes. “What’s he need a wall safe for?”

“That’s not a question I ask. You want, I provide. That’s business, as you well know.”

She suffered him a thin smile. With the gradual expansion of her clientele — no one but referrals, but even so her base had almost doubled — she’d watched herself pulling back from people, even old friends, a protective, judicious remove. And that was lonely-making. Worse, she’d gotten used to it, and that seemed a kind of living death. The only grace was Natalie, but even there, the oneness she’d felt those first incredible months, that had changed as well. She still adored the girl, loved her to pieces, that wasn’t the issue. Little girls grow up, their mothers get lonely, where’s the mystery? She just hadn’t expected it to start so soon.

“He’s a contractor,” Nick went on, “works down in Henderson. I saw the blueprints and, you know, stuff in his place when I was there. Look, you don’t need the trade, forget about it. But I thought, I dunno, maybe you’d like the guy.”

“I don’t need to like him.”

“I meant ‘like’ as in ‘do business.’”

Sam checked the stroller. Natalie had her thumb in her mouth, eyes closed, her free hand balled into a fist beneath her chin.

“You know how this works,” Sam said. “He causes trouble, anything at all — I mean this, Nick — anything at all comes back at me, it’s on you, not just him.”

They met at the Elephant Walk, and it turned out Nick was right, the guy turned heads — an easy grace, cowboy shoulders, lady-killer smile. He ordered Johnny Walker Black with a splash, and Sam remembered, from her days working cocktail, judging men by their drinks. He’d ordered wisely. And yet there were signs — a jitter in the hands, a slight head tic, the red in those killer blue eyes. Then again, if she worried that her customers looked like users, who would she sell to?

“Nick says you’re a contractor.”

He shook his head. “Project manager.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Sometimes. Not often enough.” He laughed, and the laugh was self-effacing, one more winning trait. “I buy materials, hire the subs, make sure the bonds are current and we’re all on time. But the contractor’s the one with his license on the line.”

“Sounds demanding.”

“Everything’s demanding. If it means anything.”

She liked that answer. “And to relax, you...?”

He shrugged. “I’ve got a bike, a Triumph, old bandit 350, gathering dust in my garage.” Another self-effacing smile. “Amazing how boring you can sound when stuff like that comes out.”

Not boring, she thought. Just normal. “Ever been married?”

A fierce little jolt shot through him. “Once. Yeah. High school sweetheart kind of thing. Didn’t work out.”

She got the hint, and steered the conversation off in a different direction. They talked about Nick, the stories they’d heard him tell about his TV days, wondering which ones to believe. Sam asked about how the two men had met, got the same story she’d heard from Nick, embellished a little, not too much. Things were, basically, checking out.

Sensing it was time, she signaled the bartender to settle up. “Well, it’s been very nice meeting you, Jimmy. I have to get home. The sitter awaits with the princess.”

“Nick told me. Natalie, right? Have any pictures?”

She liked it when men asked to see pictures. It said something. She took out her wallet, opened it to the snapshots.

“How old?”

“Fifteen months. Just.”

“She’s got her mother’s eyes.”

“She’s got more than that, sadly.”

“No. Good for her.” He returned her wallet, hand not trembling now. Maybe it was the Scotch, maybe the conversation. “She’s a beauty. Changed your life, I’ll bet.”

Yes, Sam thought, that she has. Maybe we’ll talk about that sometime. Next time. “Have kids?”

Very subtly, his eyes hazed. “Me? No. Didn’t get that far, which is probably for the best. Got some nephews and nieces, that’s it for now.”

“Uncle Jimmy.”

He rattled the ice in his glass, traveled somewhere with his thoughts. “I like kids. Want kids. My turn’ll come.” Then, brightening suddenly: “I’d be up for a play date some time, with Natalie. I mean, if that doesn’t sound too weird.”

That’s how it started, same playground near the apartment. And he hadn’t lied, he hit it off with Natalie at first sight — stunning, really. He was a natural, carrying her on his shoulders to the park, guiding her up the stairs to the slide, taking it easy on the swing. He had Sam cradle her in her lap on the merry-go-round, spun them both around in the sun-streaked shade. Natalie shrieked, Sam laughed; it was that kind of afternoon.

They brought Natalie home, put her down for her nap, then sat on the porch with drinks — the usual for him, Chablis for her. The sun beat down on the freshly watered lawn, a hot desert wind rustling the leaves of the imported elm trees.

Surveying the grounds, he said, “Nice place. Mind if I ask your monthly nut?”

“Frankly?”

He chuckled. “Sorry. Professional curiosity. I was just doing the math in my head, tallying costs, wondering what kind of return the developer’s getting.”

She smiled wanly. “I don’t like to think about it.” That seemed as good a way as any to change the subject. “So, Nick says you wanted to ask me something.”

Suddenly, he looked awkward, a hint of a blush. It suited him.

“Well, yeah. I suppose... You know. Sometimes...” He gestured vaguely.

She said, “Don’t make me say it for you.”

He cleared his throat. “I could maybe use an eightball. Sure.”

There, she thought. Was that so hard? “Let’s say a gram. I don’t know you.”

“How about two?”

It was still below the threshold for a special felony, which an eightball, at 3.5 grams, wasn’t. “Two-forty, no credit.”

“No friend-of-a-friend discount?”

“Nick told you there would be?”

“No, I just—”

“There isn’t. There won’t be.”

He raised his hands, surrender. “Okay.” He reached into his hip pocket for his wallet. “Mind if I take a shot while I’m here?”

She collected her glass, rose from her chair. “I’d prefer it, actually. Come on inside.”

She gestured for him to have a seat on the couch, disappeared into her bedroom, and returned with the coke, delivering the two grams with a mirror, a razor blade, a straw. As always, a stranger in the house, one of the cats sat in the corner, blinking. The other hid. Sam watched as Jimmy chopped up the lines, an old hand. He hoovered the first, offered her the mirror. She declined. He leaned back down, finished up, tugged at his nose.

“That’s nice,” he said, collecting the last few grains on his finger, rubbing it into his gums. When his hand came away, it left a smile behind. “I’m guessing mannitol. I mean, you’ve got it around, right?”

Sam took a sip of her wine. He was referring to a baby laxative commonly used as a cutting agent. Cooly, she said, “Let a girl have her secrets.”

He nodded. “Sorry. That was out of line.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She toddled her glass. “So — will there be anything else?” She didn’t mean to sound coy, but even so she inwardly cringed as she heard the words out loud. The way he looked at her, it was clear he was trying to decipher the signal. And maybe, on some level, she really did mean something.

“No,” he said. “I think that’s it. Mind if I take one last look before I leave?”

And so that’s how they wrapped it up, standing in the doorway to Natalie’s room, watching her sleep.

“Such a pretty little creature,” he whispered. “Gotta confess, I’m jealous.”

Back in his car, Jimmy horned the rest of the first gram, then drove to the Roundup, a little recon, putting faces to names, customers of Sam’s that Nick had told him about: card dealers, waitresses, a gambler named Harry Thune, homely Brit, the usual ghastly teeth. After that, he drove to the strip mall on Charleston where the undercover unit had its off-site location, an anonymous set of offices with blinds drawn, a sign on the door reading Halliwell Partners, Ltd. He logged in, parked at his desk, and wrote up his report: the purchase of one gram Cocaine HCL, field tested positive with Scott reagent — blue, pink, then blue with pink separation in successive ampoules after agitation — said gram supplied by Samantha Pitney, White Female Adult. He invented an encounter far more fitting with department guidelines than the one that had taken place, wrote it out, signed it, then drove to the police tower, walked in the back entrance, and delivered the report to his sergeant, an old guy named Becker, who sent Jimmy on to log the gram into evidence. Jimmy said hey to the secretaries on his way through the building, went back to his car, moved $120 from his personal wallet to his buy wallet to cover the gram he’d pilfered, then planned his next step.

The following two buys were the same, two grams, and she seemed to grow more comfortable. Then he got bumped up to an eightball, and not long after that he rose to two. He always took a taste right there at the apartment, while they were talking, one of the perks of the job. Later, he’d either log it in as-is, claiming the shortage had been used for field-testing, or he’d pocket the light one, chop it up into grams, then drive to Henderson — or, on weekends, all the way to Laughlin — work the bars, a little business for himself, cover his costs, a few like minds, deputies he knew.

He found himself oddly divided on Sam. You could see she’d tried to cultivate an aura: the wry feminine reserve, the earth tones, all the talk about yoga and studying for her real estate license. Maybe it was motherhood, all that scrubbed civility, trying to be somebody. Then again, maybe it was coke-head pretence. Regardless, little things tripped her up, those selfless moments, more and more frequent, when she let him see behind the mask. Trouble was, from what he could tell, the mask had more to offer.

He’d nailed a witness or two in his time, never a smooth move, but nothing compared to bedding a suspect. As fluid as things had become morally since he’d started working undercover, he’d never lost track of that particular red line. That didn’t mean he didn’t entertain the thought — throwing her over his shoulder, carrying her into her room, dropping her onto the bed, watching her hair unfurl from the soft thudding impact. Would she try to fight him off? No, that would just be part of the dance. Soon enough she’d draw him down, a winsome smile, hands clasped behind his neck, a few quick nibbles in her kiss, now and then a good firm bite. And was she one of those who showed you around the castle — how hard to pinch the nipples, how many fingers inside, the hand clasped across her mouth as she came — or would she want you to find all that out for yourself? Playing coy, demure, wanting you to take command, maybe even scare her. How deep would she like it, how slow, how rough? Would she come in rolling pulses, or one big back-arching slam?

Then again, of course, there was Natalie. Truth be told, she was the one who’d stolen his heart. And it was clear her poor deluded mother loved her, but love’s not enough — never is, never has been. He remembered Sam asking, in their first face-to-face, about his marriage, about kids. You’re not a cop till your first divorce, he thought, go through the custody horseshit. Lose. Bobby was his name. Seven years old now. Somewhere.

When he found himself thinking like that, he also found himself developing a mean thirst. And when he drank, he liked a whiff, to steady the ride, ice it. And so soon he’d be back at Ms. Pitney’s door, repeating the whole sad process, telling himself the same wrong stories, wanting everything he had no right to.

Six weeks into things, he asked, “What made you get into this business anyway?”

She was sitting on the sofa, legs tucked beneath her, wearing a new perfume. From the look on her face, you would’ve thought he’d spat on the floor. “No offense, but that came out sounding ugly.”

He razored away at three chalky lines. “Didn’t mean it that way. Sorry.”

She thought about it for a moment, searching the ceiling with her eyes. “The truth? I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.”

He had to check himself to keep from laughing, and yet he could see it. So her, thinking that way. “Why not marry the father?”

Again, she paused before answering, but this time she didn’t scour the ceiling, she gazed into his face. Admittedly, he was a little ragged: His mouth was dry, his eyes were jigging up and down, his pupils were bloated. And his hands, yeah, a mild but noticeable case of the shakes.

“Some men are meant to be fathers,” she said. “Some men aren’t.”

Sam let one of Claudia’s Persians settle in her lap, pressing her skirt with its paws. The other cat lay in its usual spot, on the cushion by the window, lolling in the sun. Natalie sat in her stroller, gumming an apple slice, while Claudia attended to her ferns, using a tea kettle for a watering can.

“I usually charge thirty, which is already low, but I’d trim a little more, say, twenty-eight.” She was talking in thousands of dollars, the price for a pound — or an elbow, in the parlance.

“That’s still a little steep for me.”

“You could cut your visits here by half. More.”

“Is that a problem?” Secretly, Sam loved coming here. She thought of it as Visiting Mother.

Over her shoulder, Claudia said, “You know what I mean.”

“Maybe I’ll ratchet up another QP. I don’t want any more than that in the house.”

Claudia bent to reach a pot on the floor. “The point is to get it out of the house.”

Well, duh, Sam thought, feeling judged, a headache looming like a thunderhead just behind her eyes. She was getting them more and more. “There’s something else I’d like to talk over, actually. It’s about Natalie.”

Claudia stopped short. “Is something wrong?”

“No. Not yet. I mean, there’s nothing to worry about. But if anything ever happened to me, I don’t know who would take care of her.”

A disagreeable expression crossed Claudia’s face, part disdain, part calculation, part suspicion. “You have family.”

“Not local. And not that I trust, frankly.”

“What exactly are you asking?”

“I was wondering if she could stay with you. If anything ever happened, I mean.”

Claudia put the tea kettle down and came over to a nearby chair, crossing her legs as she sat. “Have you noticed any cars following you lately?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Any new neighbors?”

“That wasn’t what I meant. I meant if I got sick, or was in a car accident.” She glanced over at Natalie. The apple slice was nubby and brown, and both it and her fingers were glazed with saliva.

Claudia said, “I couldn’t just walk in, take your child. Good Lord.” Her voice rippled, a blast of heat.

Sam said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“A dozen agencies would be involved, imagine the questions.” She rose from her chair, straightened her skirt, shot a toxic glance at Natalie that said: Your mother can’t protect you. “Now what quantity are you here for? I have things to do.”

Sergeant Becker called Jimmy in, told him to close the door. He was a big man, the kind who could lord over you even sitting down. “This Pitney thing, I’ve gone over the reports.” He picked up a pencil, drummed it against his blotter. “Your buys are light.”

He stared into Jimmy’s whirling eyes. Jimmy did his best to stare right back.

“I’m a gentleman. I always offer the lady a taste.”

“She needs to sample her own coke?”

“Not sampling, indulging. And there’s always some lost in the field test.”

“Think a jury will buy that? Think I buy that?”

“You want me to piss in a cup?”

Becker pretended to think about that, then leaned forward, lowering his voice. “No. That’s what I most definitely do not want you to do. Look, I’ll stand up for you, but it’s time you cleaned house. You need some time, we’ll work it out. There’s a program, six weeks, over in Bullhead City, you can use an assumed name. It’s the best deal you’re gonna get. In the meantime, wrap this up. You’ve got your case, close it out.”

Jimmy felt a surge of bile boiling in his stomach — at the thought of rehab, sure, the shame of it, the tedium, but not just that. “Like when?”

“Like now.” Becker’s whole face said: Look at yourself. “Why wait?”

Jimmy pictured Sam in her sundress, face raised to the light, hand in her hair. Moisture pooling in the hollow of her throat. Lipstick glistening in the heat. He said, “There’s a kid involved.”

Becker stood up behind his desk. They were done. “Get CPS involved, that’s what they’re there for. Make the calls, do the paperwork, get it over with.”

“For chrissake, don’t overthink it. Sounds like the last nice guy in Vegas.”

It was Mandy talking, Sam’s old best friend at the Roundup. She’d stopped by on her way to work, a gram for the shift, and now was lingering, shoes off, stocking feet on the coffee table, toes jigging in their sheer cocoon. They were watching Natalie play, noticing how her focus lasered from her ball to her bear, back to the ball, moving on to her always mysterious foot, then a housefly buzzing at the sliding glass door.

“Dating the clientele,” Sam said, “is such a chump move.”

“Rules have exceptions. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be rules.”

Natalie hefted herself onto her feet, staggered to the sliding glass door, reached for the fly — awestruck, gentle.

“He’s got a bit of a problem.” Sam tapped the side of her nose.

“You can clean him up. Woman’s work.”

“I don’t need that kind of project.”

“If you don’t mind my asking, how long’s it been since you got laid?”

Admittedly, sometimes when Jimmy was there, Sam felt the old urge uncoiling inside her, slithering around. “To be honest, I do mind you asking.”

They weren’t close anymore, just one of those things. To hide her disappointment, Mandy softly clapped her hands at Natalie. “Hey, sweetheart, come on over. Sit with Auntie Man a little while.” The little girl ignored her, still enchanted by the fly. It careened about the room — ceiling, lampshade, end table — then whirled back to the sliding glass door, a glossy green spec in a flaring pool of sunlight.

“She doesn’t like me.”

“She can be persnickety.” Sam glanced at the clock. “Don’t take it personally.”

“You think if you let this guy know you were interested, he’d respond?”

Sam felt another headache coming on. Each one seemed worse than the last now. “It’s not an issue.”

“You’re the one playing hard to get, not him.”

Jimmy’s last visit, Sam had almost thrown herself across his lap, wanting to feel his arms around her. Just that. But that was everything, could be everything. “I’ve given him a few openings. Nothing obvious, but since when do you need to be obvious with men?”

Mandy crossed her arms across her midriff, as though suddenly chilled. “Maybe he’s queer.”

Once Mandy was gone, Sam tucked Natalie in for the midday nap with her blue plush piglet, brushing the hair from the little girl’s face to plant a kiss on her brow. Leaving the bedroom door slightly ajar — Natalie would never drop off otherwise — Sam fled to her own room and took a Demerol. The pain was flashing through her sinuses now, even pulsing into her spine. Noticing the time, she changed into a cinched sleeveless dress, freshened her lipstick, her eyeliner. Jimmy had said he’d stop by, and she still couldn’t quite decide whether to push the ball into his end of the court or abide by her own better instincts and let it go. Running a mental inventory of his pros and cons, she admitted he was a joy to look at, had a soldier’s good manners, adored Natalie. He was also a flaming cokehead, with the predictable sidekick, a blind thirst. Those things trended downward in her experience, not a ride she wanted to share. Loneliness is the price you pay for keeping things uncomplicated, she thought, pressing a tissue between her lips.

She heard a shuffle of steps on the walkway out front, but instead of ringing the bell, whoever it was pounded at the door. A voice she didn’t recognize called out her name, then: “Police! Open the door.” To her shame, she froze. Out of the corner of her eye she saw three men cluster on the patio — shirtsleeves, sunglasses, protective vests — and her mouth turned to dust. The front door crashed in, brutal shouts of “On the floor!” and shortly she was facedown, being handcuffed, feeling guilty and terrified and stupid and numb while cops thrashed everywhere, asserting claim to every room.

When they pulled her to her feet, it was Jimmy who was standing there, wearing a vest like the others, his police card hanging around his neck. The Demerol not having yet kicked in, her head crackled and throbbed with a new burst of pain, and she feared she might hurl right there on the floor.

“Tell us where everything is, and we won’t take the place apart,” he said, regarding her with a look of such contemptuous loathing she actually thought he might spit in her face. And I deserve it, she told herself, how stupid I’ve been, at the same time thinking: Now who’s the creature? She could smell the Scotch on his breath, masked with spearmint. So that’s what it was, she thought, all that time, the drink, the coke. Mr. Sensitive drowning his guilt. Or was even his guilt phony?

She said, “What about Natalie?” In her room, the little girl was mewling, confused, scared.

Jimmy glanced off toward the sound, eyes dull as lead. “She’s a ward of the court now. They’ll farm her out, foster home...”

Sam felt the room close in, a sickly shade of white. “Why are you doing this?”

Almost imperceptibly, he stiffened. A weak smile. “I’m doing this?”

“Why are you being such a prick about it?”

He leaned in. His eyes were electric. “You’re a mother.”

You miserable hypocrite, she thought, trying to muster some disgust of her own, but instead her knees turned liquid. He caught her before she fell, duck-walked her toward the sofa, let her drop — at which point a woman with short sandy hair came out of Natalie’s bedroom, carrying the little girl. Her eyes were puffy with sleep but she was squirming, head swiveling this way and that. She began to cry. Sam shook off her daze, turned to hide the handcuffs, calling out, “Just do what the lady says, baby. I’ll come get you as soon as I can,” but the girl started shrieking, kicking — and then was gone.

“Get a good look?” Jimmy said. “Because that’s the last you’ll see of her.”

He was performing for the other cops, the coward. “You can’t do that.”

“No? Consider it done.”

Sam struggled to her feet. “You can’t... No...”

He nudged her back down. She tried to kick him but he pushed her legs aside. Crouching down, he locked them against his body with one arm, his free hand gripping her chin. Voice lowered, eyes fixed on hers — and, finally, she thought she saw something hovering behind the savage bloodshot blue, something other than the arrogance and hate, something haunted, like pity, even love — he whispered, “Listen to me, Sam. I want to help you. But you’ve gotta help me. Understand? Give me a name. It’s that simple. A name and we work this out. I’ll do everything I can, that’s a promise, for you, for Natalie — everything. But you’ve gotta hold up your end. Otherwise...”

He let his voice trail away into the nothingness he was offering. For Sam knew where this led, she remembered the words exactly: I have men who take care of certain matters... The time will have passed for you to say or do anything to help yourself...

And there it was: her daughter or her life, she couldn’t save both. Maybe not today or tomorrow but someday soon, Claudia’s threat would materialize, assuming a face and form but no name — the police would promise protection, but the desert was littered with their failures — and Sam would realize this is it, that pitiless point in time when she would finally know: Which was she? One of those who tried to kick and claw and scream her way out, even though it was hopeless. Or one of those who, seeing there was no escape, calmly said, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for a long, long while.

Mitzvah by Tod Goldberg

Summerlin

That Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem. He hardly even thought of it anymore except when ordering breakfast down at the Bagel Café. He’d sit there across from Bennie Savone, that fat fuck, watching him wolf down ham and scrambled eggs, or French toast with a steaming side of greasy link sausage, and his mouth would actually start to water, like he was some kind of fucking golden retriever. He didn’t even think Bennie liked pork all that much — sometimes Bennie would order a cup of coffee and a side of bacon and would leave the bacon uneaten in, David assumed, not-so-benign mockery — though David knew Bennie liked letting him know who was in control of the situation.

But now, as he sat in his normal booth in the back corner facing the busy intersection of Buffalo and Westcliff, waiting for Bennie to roll up in his absurd black Mercedes that might as well have a personalized plate that said MOBSTER on it, he thought that he probably qualified as a Jew by now, if not in the eyes of God, then at least in his own eyes. It’s not that he gave a fuck about religion — his personal motto, before all of this shit, had been “everybody dies” — but it was true he probably knew far more about the Torah and the culture in general than the people who belonged to his temple. And had he grown up with it, David was fairly certain he would have appreciated the subtle nuance of kugel.

After fifteen years, though, he still couldn’t get used to the idea of baked noodles, raisins, apples, and cinnamon as a fucking entrée. Now pork loin. Pork loin was something he could get behind, especially this time of year, what with Christmas coming up. Back in the day, his wife Jennifer knew how to make it just how he liked it. Brined in salt overnight, covered with juniper berries, a bit of garlic, maybe some thyme, and then slow-roasted for three hours, until even the garage smelled like it.

Christ.

Fifteen fucking years and for what? He understood that his situation was fairly untenable these days, that those fucking Muslims had changed the way Family business was handled, particularly as it related to guys like David whose fake paperwork was fine in a company town like Las Vegas but which wouldn’t even pass muster in Reno. David wasn’t inclined to give too much thought to the whole Israel-Palestine issue, but he had to keep abreast of shit in case someone dared ask his opinion, though he never could confide in anyone that he shared some anger issues with the Palestinians, at least as it related to real estate, confined as he was to Las Vegas.

“Can I get you something, rabbi?”

David looked up from his reverie and saw the smiling face of Shoshana Goldblatt. Her parents, Stan and Alta, were two of the biggest donors Temple Beth Israel had, and yet here she was busting her ass on a Tuesday morning running tables. And that was an ass, David had to admit. She was only eighteen and he’d known her since she was five, but... damn. “A cup of coffee would be fine, Shoshana. I’m waiting on Mr. Savone, as usual, so maybe just a toasted onion bagel for now.”

Shoshana took down his order but he could tell that something was vexing the girl. It took her nearly an entire minute to write the words coffee and bagel on her pad, her eyes welling up with tears the entire time. It was always like this. He’d go somewhere to just chill out, maybe smoke a cigar and catch a ballgame over at J.C. Wooloughan’s Irish Pub, and next thing he knew, one of his fucking Israelites would pull up next to him with some metaphysical calamity.

“Is there something wrong, Shoshana?” he asked. When she slid into the booth across from him and deposited her head into her hands, thick phlegmy sobs spilling out of that beautiful mouth he’d just sort of imagined his dick in, he felt himself wince and hoped she didn’t notice. He’d spent the better part of his life avoiding crying women of all ages, never really knowing what to say to them other than “Shut the fuck up, you stupid whore,” and that hadn’t seemed to help anyone, least of all himself. Whatever was wrong with Shoshana Goldblatt would invariably ruin David’s whole fucking day. First there’d be the guilt he felt hearing her secrets and then there’d be the guilt associated with him finding it all rather humorous.

“Oh, rabbi,” she said, “I wanted to just come in and talk to you in private, but there’s always such a crowd, and my mom, you know, she’s always telling me to not bother you with my problems, that you’re a busy man and all, so I’m like, okay, I’ll just figure it out for myself, but then, like, you’re always saying that we should trust that the Torah has answers to all of our problems, right?”

“That’s right, Shoshana,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if he’d ever said such a thing. Most of the time, he just downloaded shit off the Internet now, but it seemed plausible that at some point he’d said something like that.

“I’m just so confused,” she continued, explaining to David a scenario that involved, as best as he could suss out, her having sex with three different black guys from the UNLV basketball team while a graduate assistant coach filmed the whole thing on his camera phone. It was hard for David to concentrate completely on the story since Bennie Savone had entered the restaurant about five minutes in and was stalking angrily about the bakery area, dragging his black attaché case against the pastry windows, like he was banging his cup against prison bars. So when David sensed that Shoshana had come to the basic conclusion of the issue — that she’d liked it, that she wondered what was wrong with her, but that she wanted to do it again, and with more guys — he reached across the table and took both of her hands in his.

“There’s a part of the Midrash that says, essentially, we are all allowed to find enjoyment in the company of others.” He’d found that if he simply dropped the Midrash into conversation, rejoined with the word “essentially,” and then paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen, people left him feeling like they’d learned something. It was true that he knew a few things from the Midrash, had even read a great deal of it, but in dealing with an eighteen-year-old girl just learning the joys of a filmed gangbang, he didn’t feel the need to reach too deep. “Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true, Shoshana? Of course not. It’s something far, far worse. Do you understand?”

He let go of the girl’s hands then and passed her the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sport coat. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and smiled wanly at David, though now he couldn’t even look her in the eye. “Thank you so much, Rabbi Cohen. I think I see that path now.” She slid out of the booth, not even bothering to return his hanky.

Bennie, unfortunately, took her spot. “Fuck’s wrong with her?”

“Confused about love,” David said.

Bennie nodded. “Who isn’t?”

It was weird. Over the course of their rather unconventional business relationship, Bennie Savone had found it necessary to use David as his father confessor too, even though he knew that Rabbi David Cohen was previously Sal Cupertine; that before he was a fake rabbi, he was a Chicago “associate” who’d accidentally killed three undercover Donnie Brasco motherfuckers on the same botched contract; and that, barring a sudden religious experience the likes of which only happened in prison movies, David’s moral center was still pretty opaque. Still, David reasoned that Bennie needed to talk to someone, particularly since the one person Bennie could depend on previously had been the guy David replaced three years ago, Rabbi Ronald Kales, who also happened to be Bennie’s father-in-law... or was until that unfortunate “boating accident” on Lake Mead claimed his life.

David knew that Bennie’s decision not to fish out of the same shallow, polluted pond of local and loyal Italian women or coke-whore strippers most of his friends and coworkers had, opting instead to get connected with the real Las Vegas money — the Summerlin Jews — was still a source of some lingering organizational shame; an issue David was certainly intimate with.

“Yes, well,” David said, “she’s still young.”

“My daughter tells me Shoshana likes black guys.”

Sometimes David tried to imagine what his life would be like if he were still in Chicago, if he’d somehow had a different kind of upbringing, so that now he was selling real estate on the North Shore or running a sports bar or deli or was just a fucking Culligan man, his ends meeting, his life happy. Would he still end up on Tuesday mornings gossiping about whom eighteen-year-old girls were or were not fucking?

“I have to prepare for a talk at the Senior Center this afternoon,” David said, “so I’m afraid I don’t have much time to chat. Can we get down to business?”

“Of course, rabbi. I’d hate to get in the way of your busy schedule of dick and ribbon cuttings.” Bennie reached into his attaché, pulled out a manila envelope, and slid it across the table. “You got a funeral on Thursday and one coming up next week too. Maybe two. Have to see how that one shakes out. Got a very sick relative. Could go anytime.”

David just nodded. The holidays tended to be Bennie’s busy season with murder, and now that they were flying bodies (or at least parts of them) in on private jets periodically from Chicago or driving them up from Los Angeles, David expected the news. Plus, David sort of marveled at Bennie’s ingenuity; the guy seemed like a dumb crook from the outside, but on the inside he had a real aptitude for business. Stan and Alta Goldblatt might have been big donors, but Bennie Savone, with his Jewish wife and three Jewish children, was like fucking UNICEF to Temple Beth Israel. He single-handedly financed the building of Summerlin’s first Jewish mortuary and cemetery behind the temple’s expansive campus on Hillpointe, championed the new high school that was breaking ground in the spring, and, of course, regularly met with the esteemed rabbi over at the Bagel Café to discuss the livelihood of the Jewish faith (or whatever the fuck that shit-rag mob columnist John L. Smith in the Review-Journal said in one of his weekly innuendo-fests; if David ever had the desire to start killing people again, he’d start with that hack). David imagined that Bennie’s long-range foresight could help a lot of Fortune 500 companies — it’s not like any other mobsters had the fucking chutzpah to bury their enemies and war dead in a cemetery, or the willingness to put all the pieces in place years before they’d even see them in action. That Bennie earned most of his living from strip clubs didn’t bother anyone at the temple. That’s where everyone did business anyway.

“Fine,” David said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, my wife wants to know what your Hanukkah plans are this year.”

“I’ll be staying home,” David replied, though the truth was that at least half the time would be spent at the temple making sure the young rabbi he’d entrusted with most of the social activities didn’t burn the fucking place down, literally. That kid was a menace around an open flame.

“You know you got an open invitation,” Bennie said. “Come over all eight nights. Spin the fucking dreidel. Eat fucking pancakes. Listen to Neil Diamond sing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ You like Neil Diamond, right, rabbi?”

What David really wanted, more than anything, was to get up from the booth, climb into his Range Rover, and drive it into a brick wall, just to feel something authentic again, even if it was pain. Because this shit with Bennie? This was an existential suffering he could do without. “The Jewish Sinatra,” David said.

Shoshana brought David his bagel and coffee and discreetly set his hanky back down on the table. He looked up at her and she seemed... happy. Like she’d had a tremendous weight lifted from her shoulders and could now go on living her life in perfect happiness, her every orifice filled with big black cock. David felt something shift in his bowels; something he thought might be his conscience picking up enema speed.

“Listen,” David said quietly after Shoshana left, “I gotta get out of here. A vacation. Something. I’m about to lose my mind. Promise me, after Christmas, you’ll look at this situation. It’s been fifteen years, Benjamin.” He said Bennie’s full first name just to piss him off a little. “You realize I haven’t even left the city limits since 9/11?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bennie said, “sure. Talk to me again after the holidays. We’ll see what we can do. Don’t want you getting soft... Sally.”

Rabbi David Cohen looked out the window again and wondered how it was he was the only fucking person who happened in Vegas and now had to fucking stay in Vegas. Put his old mug shot on a tourist brochure, then see how many people kept visiting.

When David first came to Las Vegas in 1993 — back when he was still Sal Cupertine — he couldn’t get over how wide open the desert was, how at night, if you weren’t on the Strip or downtown, the sky seemed to stretch for miles unimpeded. At dusk, Red Rock Canyon would glow golden with strands of dying sunlight and he’d imagine what his wife Jennifer would have made of the vision. She was always taking art classes at the community college in Chicago, though never with much success, but he thought then that if she were with him in Las Vegas and had tried to paint the sunset, well, he’d pretend to love her interpretation. Used to be pretending was hard work. He was only thirty-five when he got to this place, but still felt seventeen, which meant he wasn’t scared of anyone and didn’t give a damn if he hurt people’s feelings. It was a good skill set for his previous line of work, but David had long ago concluded it was shit on his interpersonal relationships. And the irony, of course, was that now all he ever did anymore was pretend while listening to people’s problems. David was inclined to believe that his adopted religion was right about heaven and hell being a place on earth.

It was 4 o’clock on Wednesday and David was already late for a meeting at the temple about next year’s Jewish Book Fair, but he couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the previous morning’s conversation with Shoshana and the one directly following it with Bennie had somehow clarified a few things that had been gnawing at his mind the last several weeks. So instead of attending the meeting, he drove his temple-purchased Range Rover the four blocks from his temple-purchased home on the fifteenth hole at TPC over to Bruce Trent Park, where he wandered among the stalls being set up for the farmer’s market and tried to line up his priorities.

He stopped and smelled some apples, made idle talk about funnel cakes with the Mexican girl fixing them over what looked like a Bunson burner, watched children fling themselves over and under the monkey bars. If he closed his eyes and just focused on what he could hear and smell, it was almost like he was back in Chicago, though by now the sounds and smells tended to mostly remind him of his first days in Las Vegas when he spent all of his time foolishly searching for things that reminded him of home. It had grown increasingly difficult for David to even conjure that memory accurately since the landscape, both mental and physical, had changed so drastically in the intervening years. Where there used to be open vistas, the Howard Hughes Corporation had built the master planned community of Summerlin, filling in the desert with thousands of houses, absurd traffic circles instead of stop signs, acres of green grass, and the commerce such development demanded: looming casinos that eroded his favorite mountain views, Target after Target, a Starbucks every thirty paces, and shopping centers anchored on one corner by a Smith’s and on the other by some bar that was just a video poker machine with a roof.

But something about today seemed to cloak everything in radiance. Orthodox Jews tended to talk about such things as if they were moments of vast spiritual enlightenment, though David tended to think the Orthodox Jews were a little on the fruity side of things — always dropping Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Bones like that guy wasn’t a fucking whack job of the first order — so it was a good thing Temple Beth Israel was reform, which meant David just had to know some of that hocus-pocus shit, but didn’t have to talk about it too much and certainly didn’t have to dress in that stupid black getup. Still, his mind felt clear today, and whether it was a religious experience or just the settling of some internal debts didn’t particularly vex David, because the result was the same, chiefly that he knew he needed to get the fuck out of Las Vegas before he killed himself and took twenty or thirty motherfuckers with him in the process.

That his life had become a suffocation of ironies didn’t bother him. No, it was the realization that in just three weeks he’d turn fifty and yet he constantly waited for his front door to be kicked in by U.S. Marshals, that he wasn’t some dumb punk anymore who could just live in blindness while other people controlled his exterior life, and, well, he missed his wife more and more with each passing moment.

The Savone family had been good to him, he couldn’t deny that — they’d set him up in this life when they could have scattered him over the Midwest one tendon at a time, even had Rabbi Kales privately tutor him for two years before he started this long con, first as an assistant at the temple’s Children’s Center (where he actually had responsibilities for the first time in his life), and then, steadily, they pushed him up through the temple’s ranks until, when it became clear that Rabbi Kales’s old age and inability to shut the fuck up had become a liability, he ascended to the top spot.

He had a beautiful home. A beautiful car. If he needed a woman, Bennie took care of that too. The problem was that the world around him was changing: Locally, only Bennie knew he was a fake, all the other players having gone down in a fit of meshugass over at the Wild Horse strip club that left a tourist dead and another one without the ability to speak. Eventually, Bennie would end up getting busted on some RICO shit (or, praise be, Bennie’s wife Rachel would get a fucking slit of conscience and/or retrospect and would roll on that fat fuck) and then one morning David would wake up and the U.S. Marshals would shove a big hook in his mouth and dangle him all over the press, the big fish that got away finally on the line.

And then there was the paralyzing issue of technology: When the Savone family moved him out of Chicago after the fuck-up, he had to leave everything behind, including his wife Jennifer and his infant son William. At first, it was easy to keep them out of his mind — it was either forget them or get the death penalty, which would probably be meted out by about fifteen cops in a very small cell. But as time went on and his life became a mundane series of mornings spent holding babies’ bloody dicks, brunch meetings filled with whiny plasticized rich bitches who couldn’t decide which charity should get the glory of their attention, afternoons spent in pink and yellow polo shirts as he golfed with men who would have fucking spit on him in Chicago, and nights spent alone in his Ethan Allen — showroom living room, flipping channels, jerking off to Cinemax, thinking about disappearing, just getting the fuck out, moving to Mexico, or Canada, or even Los Angeles, he began paving roads toward Jennifer and William.

It was so easy: He just typed their names into Google and came up with William’s MySpace page. William was seventeen now and if his pictures were any judge, was in desperate need of some guidance. Every single photo, his pants were half-way down his ass, he was throwing some fucking gang sign that actually spelled out MOB, and he had a Yankees cap — a fucking Yankees cap! — turned sideways on his head, which made him look like a retard, though not unlike half the kids David saw Saturdays at the temple. He only saw Jennifer in the background of a few shots and it broke his heart to see how old she’d become, how her straight blond hair was now silver, how her body had grown frumpy. Time and pressure had turned her into an old woman while he was busy fucking strippers and running a goddamned Jewish empire in the middle of the desert.

But she was there. He could see her. She existed. He checked the archives of the Tribune and Sun-Times to see if her name had been in any marriage announcements but came up empty. David knew that didn’t mean anything concrete, but he also thought that if she had remarried, William wouldn’t have turned into such a fucking putz.

Over the last several months, he’d started looking at Google satellite photos of his old house (where, according to a simple public record search, Jennifer and William still lived). Though all he could really see was the roof and the general outline of the house, he could make out bits of himself too: the pool, which he’d purchased after he got paid for his first substantial hit (a guy he ran track with in high school — Gil Williams — whose father was a city councilman); the towering blue ash tree in the front yard, where he hung a tire swing for William; the brick driveway, Jennifer’s dream, which he laid brick by brick over the course of a long weekend. Before he understood that the photos were static and not updated regularly, David would return each day to refresh the image, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife, who he was sure he could recognize even from outer space.

Did she know he was still alive? Did she spend nights searching for him too? Did she know he’d also turned gray, but that he’d stayed in shape all of these years, working out, still hitting the heavy bag at the gym when he could, keeping himself ready, just in case, knowing, waiting, thinking that eventually, if he had to, he could kill someone with his hands again, just like back in the day. Happy with the thought. Thinking, yesterday: You think I’m soft? I could shove that attaché case up your ass, Bennie. And now. Now. When would things ever be tenable if they weren’t now? Life, David realized, had reached a terminal point. Years ago, Rabbi Kales explained to David that when the end of days came, the Jews would be resurrected into a perfect state and the whole of the world would take on the status of Israel, and the Jews, he told him, would live in peace there. What about me? David had asked then, and Rabbi Kales just shook his head and said that he’d likely just rot in the ground, right beside him probably, in light of the experience they were embroiled in. He laughed when he said it, but David was pretty sure he meant it. Well, fuck that, David thought now. It was time to get tenable.

David purchased a small bindle of sweet-smelling incense from a hippie-looking girl with a barbell through her tongue. He’d seen this girl before — maybe fifty times, actually, since he was pretty sure she’d been there every single time he’d visited the farmer’s market — but had never bothered to really notice her apart from the fact that she always stood there placidly, selling fucking incense. What kind of life was that? Selling smell. She smiled sweetly at him and David wondered how much kids today knew about the fucking world, about how things really were, how it wasn’t all just iPods and MySpace and throwing gang signs on the Internet, that there was something permanent about the decisions being made around them. Ramifications. Spiritual and physical. If kids wanted to know what it meant to be tough, they’d take a look at the Torah, see how the Jews rolled, see how revenge and power were really exerted. David liked thinking about the Jews as Chosen People, liked thinking that maybe, after all these years, he’d been chosen too. You wander the desert for forty years — or just fifteen — you begin to change your perspective on things, begin to appreciate what you had before you got lost, begin to see signs, warnings, omens. Not everything is so obvious. Not everything has to be digitized to be real. Sometimes, man, you have to look inside of things.

“Let me ask you a question,” David said to the girl with the pierced tongue. “Do you know me?”

“Am I supposed to?”

When he was young, he liked a girl with a little sass, but now it just annoyed him. “You see me here every week.”

She shrugged. “If you say so.”

“What do you think I do for a living?”

“Is this some sort of market research bullshit?”

Rabbi David Cohen — who for thirty-five years had been a guy named Sal Cupetine, who used to like to hurt people just for the hell of it, who killed three cops and really didn’t think about that at all, never even really considered it, not even after they did an episode of Cold Case about it that he caught one night as he was drifting off to sleep after a long wedding at Temple Beth Israel — leaned across the small table and stared into the girl’s face. “I look like a market researcher to you?”

“Everyone in Vegas is so tough,” she said, and now she was laughing at him, tears filling up her eyes, and he could tell that she wasn’t a girl at all, was closer to thirty, had pinched lines at the corner of her right eye, smelled like baby powder and cigarettes and dried sweat. “I’ll say you sell cell phones at the Meadows Mall. Am I close?”

Thursdays were always busy for David. The children at the Barer Academy — the elementary school on the temple’s campus — visited the main synagogue every Thursday for lunch and it was David’s job to come by and smile at the children, say a few words to each, make them feel like God had just strolled in for a bite, and thus ensure that their parents wrote out a big fat check at the end of the month for no other reason than that their children were happy.

In truth, it was David’s favorite time of the week. It wasn’t that he loved children all that much — he didn’t, especially, not other people’s kids anyway — but that for the hour he spent going kid to kid, he didn’t have to pretend. He just sat down next to them and asked them about their day, their life, how things were going and never how things had been, which was different from what he dealt with normally. With the people of parenting age, it was always about their childhood, how someone had fucked them up and only God or, if he wasn’t available, David could help them deal with the past, like it was some constant growling beast that lived next door that only needed to be fed and watered and everything would be okay. The senior citizens all wanted to bitch about how things were better back then, whenever the fuck that was, and then wanted assurances that they were right, that the world had turned to shit but that they, of course, weren’t to blame.

Today, though, David had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to find the focus to deal with the kids, not with what he saw on the embalmer’s table down at the temple mortuary. At 3 o’clock he was supposed to bury someone named Vincent Castiglione, whose tombstone would read Vincent Castleberg, since Bennie liked to keep things simple. Bennie told David that morning that it was a Chicago guy so they didn’t need to worry about putting on too much of a show. “I rounded up a couple old-timers to throw dirt,” he told David, “so just keep it short and sweet on the last-words crap. Believe me, this guy doesn’t deserve what we’re giving him.”

David went down to the temple’s mortuary at 11:30 to check on the stiff, like he always did with the Chicago guys if they came in whole, so that way he wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone he grew up with on the off chance the casket opened. Since it was a Jewish cemetery, it was always closed casket, but in the years David had been tending to the funerals, particularly those embalmed and entombed by employees of Bennie’s, he noticed slightly less attention to detail when it concerned enemies of the state. Nonetheless, when he got down to the mortuary and found Vincent Castiglione belly-up on the embalming table still fully dressed in his police uniform, right down to his holster and gun, even though Vincent’s head was sitting on the counter inside a plastic bag, the ligature marks on his neck bright purple, it took David a bit by surprise.

“Sorry, rabbi,” the kid working the table said. “Mr. Savone said this is how he asked to be buried and so we, uh, we just, uh...”

David put a hand up to stop the kid from speaking. He could never remember this dumb fuck’s name. He was a Mexican, some gangbanger Bennie rescued from the pound a few years back and set up in mortuary science classes out in Arizona. Two years later he was wearing a shirt and tie and was cleaning the dead for the Family. A good job, probably. Ruben Something or Other. He’d done a nice job on Rabbi Kales, David remembered that.

“Shut the fuck up,” David said, and Ruben’s eyes opened wide. David couldn’t remember the last time he swore out loud in public, but from the look on Ruben’s face, it had the desired effect. “Strip this motherfucker clean, you hear me?”

“Yes, rabbi.”

“You get his clothes, personal effects, all that shit on his belt, including the gun, put it in a bag, something heavy. You got something canvas here?”

“Yes, rabbi.” Ruben reached under a cupboard and came up with a large black canvas bag marked with hazardous waste symbols on either side. “We use these for our uniform cleaning.”

David paused, tried to think, looked at Ruben, saw that the kid had a jade pinkie ring, two-carat diamond earrings, a thick platinum bracelet. Fucking thief was probably making six figures and he was still pinching from the dead. “You keep anything?”

“Like his organs?”

“No, you stupid wetback motherfucker,” David said, feeling it now, finding the parlance again, how easy it was to hear Sal’s voice in his mouth after so many years, though he felt a little sorry for calling the kid a wetback, particularly since he was probably born in Las Vegas. “You steal a clip? Maybe his badge? Something to show the boys later?”

Ruben exhaled deeply, walked back to a small desk in the corner of the embalming room, and pulled open a drawer, rifled around a bit, like he couldn’t find what he was looking for, though David knew better so he kept his glare on the kid, and eventually came out with a wallet. “I think Bennie told me I could hold onto this,” Ruben said, though he handed it to David like it was contagious.

“From now on,” David said, because it just felt so good to be on this train again, “you don’t think. Got it?”

“Yes, rabbi.”

David watched as Ruben removed all the clothes from the body. Aware that Ruben was probably coming to conclusions of his own today, David tried to remain nonchalant with the process, absently thumbing through the officer’s wallet. There was over three grand in folded hundreds in the wallet, along with a handful of gold credit cards. Fucking Chicago cops. When he was younger, David thought of them as the enemy even though half of them were more crooked than he was, but now he understood they were just guys with shitty jobs trying, like he had, to make the grass green. You earned it, partner.

When Ruben was finished stripping the body, he stuffed everything into the bag and then sealed it up with medical tape and set it down in front of David. “That’s all of it,” he said.

David hefted the bag up and bounced it a little, making sure he could feel the weight of the gun, probably a Glock. Ruben was still standing in front of him, though he didn’t look too terribly respectful. He had this sneer on his face that David thought made the kid look like he’d eaten some bad clams, but which probably scared a lot of people not used to seeing how guys really looked when they were angry. The one thing about being a thug and a rabbi, David had learned, was that it was nice always feeling vaguely feared and respected at the same time. Now, though, he’d have to do a little bridge building, as Rabbi Kales used to say, if he wanted to make sure things didn’t get beyond his control.

“I’m sorry I called you a wetback,” David said, and handed Ruben the cash from the wallet. Ruben nodded and pocketed the money. “I got a little caught up in the moment.” Ruben nodded again. Didn’t anyone know how to accept an apology anymore? David took one last look around, figuring that the next time he saw a room like this, he’d be the one on the table, and then realized he’d forgotten something important. “Tell me something, Ruben,” he added, back in the voice of Rabbi David Cohen, “what do you intend to do with the head?”

Ruben just shrugged. “I dunno, rabbi, what are you going to do with the uniform and gun?”

David thought about this, figured the truth would serve him here, figured that was where he was now, toward a path of more obvious truth. “I’m going to take them home, wash both, and then go from there.”

As far as exit strategies went, David had to admit that his was a little hastily drawn, but when it’s go time, it’s go time. It was 3:15, and though he didn’t need to do it, he’d gone full bore with his eulogy of the newly minted Vincent Castleberg, which didn’t seem to bother the five octogenarians Bennie had assembled for the funeral. He recognized a couple of the men from other funerals, but now couldn’t remember if they were for real ceremonies or fake ones. It didn’t really matter, since these guys were so old and so mobbed up that even if he’d pulled out his dick and jerked off onto the casket, they’d keep quiet about it. Bennie always plied the old wise guys with lunch and a couple bucks for their time and then had his boys chauffer them back to their houses in Sun City.

But since David had decided that today was his last fucking day cutting dicks and burying pricks and listening to the world’s problems while completely ignoring his own issues — the Hasidic rabbis always talked about this, David realized, saying that if you had proper remorse for your sin, you actually got closer to God, actually became a better person, whereas depression made you a sad, violent, insolent fuck, or, well, something a lot like that — he figured he ought to put things in proper perspective for the late Vincent Castiglione, née Castleberg. So he eulogized himself, instead.

He told the five men about his family life, about his father working as a union millwright, dying young from smoking and drinking (though he’d actually been thrown off a building), about how he ended up running with some guys from the neighborhood who taught him which joints broke the easiest (this got a knowing nod from the guys), how his mom ended up remarrying and moving to Florida after he graduated from high school, how he fell in love with this sweet girl named Jennifer who made him happy, how he ended up getting into the business and made some poor choices with regard to an important contract and ended up “retiring” to Las Vegas, finding God... and the rest was history. David changed a few important details, naturally, but found that the more he told his story, the better he felt about the choice he was about to make.

He finished with the burial Kaddish, surprised to hear the men each mutter “amen” at the proper times, and then watched as the faux mourners went about tossing clumps of dirt on the coffin. The most ambulatory of the men, dressed smartly in light-blue slacks and a white shirt, both originally purchased sometime in the ’70s, walked over and shook David’s hand. “A fine service,” he said. “Really got the spirit of the poor fucker, if you pardon the expression. I’m not a Jew, but ten, fifteen years from now, if I die, I’d be happy to have you put me in the dirt.”

David drove back to his house and packed up what he’d need for his trip — he’d been paid in cash for fifteen years and didn’t spend too much of his own money, so he had enough to last him a long time if he was able to last a long time, or, at least, Jennifer and William might have a chance for a decent life; a better life, anyway — and then took his laptop outside to poach his neighbor’s wi-fi signal, purchased a one-way ticket back to Chicago using Vincent Castiglione’s Visa card, first class, leaving McCarran at 7 p.m., a little over three hours away. And then David destroyed his laptop, beating it to death with the butt of Castiglione’s Glock.

It felt good smashing the computer, but it felt better to have a gun in his hand again. David tried to think of the last time he’d really beaten someone good with a gun, but couldn’t draw a bead. Used to be... well, fuck it, David thought, used-to-be’s don’t count anymore, just like Neil Diamond said. He worked up a nice sweat pounding on the computer, got himself warm for the task at hand.

Vincent Castiglione was a little thicker through the middle than David, but his uniform fit well enough. If he had more time, David would run it through the washer and dryer again, see if he could get the uniform to shrink, get some more of that dead stink out of it too. Still, he did stop to look at himself in the mirror before leaving the house and it was like getting a glimpse at an alternate life: Sal Cupertine looked pretty good as a cop, David decided. Sal Cupertine could have been Sergeant Cupertine. A real fucking mensch.

David checked his watch. It was nearly 5 o’clock. He took one last look around his home, thought about what he was giving up: the comfort of a predictable life, of money, of protection. Thought about what Bennie would look like when he saw David in a cop’s uniform, thought about what Bennie would look like with a hole in the middle of his fat fucking face courtesy of Vincent Castiglione’s service Glock. Thought about how, once he was on the road and the cops were swarming the airports in Las Vegas and Chicago, thinking a missing cop was on his way home, and, later, swarming the home of Bennie Savone, once Bennie’s wife found him without his face, thinking the same missing cop had done the deed, particularly since David was sure they’d recognize the uniform on Bennie’s video surveillance, that he’d stop somewhere and get a nice cut of pork loin for his troubles. Or maybe he’d just wait on that until he got back home.

Babs by Scott Phillips

Naked City

Visitor’s Center call you about a room?” I say to the woman behind the counter. It’s 11 o’clock at night, and I’ve been in the car since 4 in the morning. I haven’t yet hit the stage where the white crosses that have kept my eyes open have turned against me, but the time will be coming soon and I’ll crash and sleep the sleep of the damned, and I have business to take care of before that happens.

“Oh. You’re Mr. Gandy, hello. You’re lucky to get something. They got the Consumer Electronics show going on right now, good thing you thought to stop at the Visitor’s Center.” She’s shaped like a gourd, her hair long with ends split and dyed a shade of black that doesn’t occur in nature. Between the elastic of her paisley slacks and the bottom of her blouse, little black hairs dance obscenely around the milky white vortex of her navel. She takes a key hanging in front of a cubby in which three envelopes sit aslant and hands it to me.

“There’s mail in that slot,” I point out.

“There’s a fellow always gets this room when he comes through. Salesman.”

So I’m subletting someone else’s rented room, basically. I don’t care. I’m lucky to be getting anything, as the ladies at the Visitor’s Center pointed out to me when I pulled into town. It’s a modest little motel, the Visitor’s Center lady said, but super clean; you could eat off of those floors. I climb the open staircase to the second-floor balcony overlooking a swimming pool filled with cloudy water the color of urine. A couple are sitting next to the water smoking and glaring at one another without saying anything, and as one they swing their gazes upward toward me.

“What the fuck you staring at, faggot?” the woman says. She has on a shirt that says, I SUFFER FROM CRS. Her nipples are sticking straight out through the cotton, and at this moment there may not be a pair of tits on the planet I would less rather see, short of maybe Mother Teresa’s; this one can’t weigh much more than eighty pounds, with the emaciated face of a lifelong smoker. Even with her Jackie O shades on, her eyes look sunken.

“Seems like someone’s looking to get his ass kicked,” her companion says. He’s so obese I can’t imagine him able to get out of the lawn chair he’s overflowing from, but I stare straight at him and sense that he’s serious. I picture the fight and figure it could go either of two ways: He gets me down and crushes me under four hundred pounds of suet, or I dance around him and tire him out until he has a heart attack.

“Sorry!” I yell, and I head down the balcony looking for number 36. It’s around the corner, facing the back ends of some houses. A dog in one of the yards starts a vicious barking jag as soon as I come into view, and keeps it up once I get into the room.

Clean enough to eat off the floors, I think after a quick walk-through, wishing I could force-feed the chipper Visitor’s Center lady a nice, greasy fried egg off of the gritty shag carpet.

There’s a ratty terry cloth bathrobe hanging from the clothes hook inside the bathroom door, presumably the salesman’s. He must be balding, because there’s hair all over the goddamned place: on the pillow, in the toilet, around the tub drain.

I’m not here for a vacation. Having spent the last few months tending bar for my stepfather’s strip club in Wichita, I’m on my way back to L.A., where I am foolishly expecting to be able to pick up my old life where it left off. When I called my friend Skip to alert him of my return, he had a proposition for me: If I was coming through Vegas, he’d give me two hundred dollars to pick up a package from a stripper named Babs.

I didn’t have to ask Skip to know I’d be carrying crystal methamphetamine. I’m more of a pothead myself, with a taste for the occasional hit of acid or pharmaceutical speed. Meth makes my teeth itch. But I can use the two hundred, and Skip is a good guy. (Within a couple of years, though, he’ll transform into a violent monster whose ass I’ll be forced to kick off my couch and out of my house in a futile effort to save my marriage. Said marriage hasn’t happened yet, either, at this point.)

When I call the number Skip gave me, Babs doesn’t bitch about the hour or seem surprised, just gives me directions to a bar called the Tumblin’ Dice a few blocks off the Strip and says she’ll meet me in half an hour. I tell her I’ll be wearing a Dodgers cap.

It’s past midnight and my new friends are still out by the pool. I stare as I pass by them and wink at the lady, who gives no sign of remembering me from twenty minutes ago. Her boyfriend doesn’t react, having by this time fallen asleep.

The Tumblin’ Dice is a monument to skank. No one here looks close to sober, particularly the lanky, disheveled bartender, whom I take at first for the victim of some exotic neurological disorder. After a long wait, he lurches over in my direction and braces himself on the bar with a big bony hand, a large bandage stretched across his right knuckles, blood starting to seep through the beige fabric.

I order a draft beer and park myself in front of a nickel video poker machine with hearts and diamonds faded to a cheerful, blurry pink. I play one nickel at a time, which proves to be a mistake.

“Fuck a duck, baby, you gotta play more’n a nickel a pop, you’re fucked that way if you hit a big hand.” The woman next to me is small and junkie-thin, with puffy dark circles under her eyes. I have no theoretical designs at all on the woman I’m supposed to be meeting but I can’t help hoping that this isn’t her.

“I’m just killing time, waiting for a friend.”

“Fuck, I’ll be your friend,” she rasps, and then slaps my back harder than I would have thought possible, cackling. “Just kidding. I will, though. I’m Nicki.” She rolls up her sleeve to reveal an amateur tattoo of a nickel the size of a silver dollar on her upper bicep. Jefferson looks pissed, like he’s not happy about being tattooed onto a junkie’s arm, or maybe it’s the big infected whitehead erupting from his cheek. “Short for nickel’s worth, get it?”

I shake my head no, even though I do.

“I done time, baby. Five big ones. Know what I did?”

“No.”

“I’m not gonna tell you, either. Not till I know you better.”

“Okay,” I say, cursing the inborn Midwestern politeness that keeps me involved in the conversation and darting my eyes back and forth between the door and the machine. I drop another nickel and draw three nines and two queens, pat.

“Fuck, man, see that? You ain’t getting shit for that, baby. You should’ve bet five nickels, that’s the way you build up a bankroll.”

“Like I say, killing time.” Her short blond hair is spiky, but a stale odor emanating from her scalp makes me suspect that its body comes from a lack of washing rather than some salon product.

“What’s your name?”

“Tate.”

“Is your friend a lady, Tate?”

“Uh-huh.”

“A lady friend, like? Like a sex partner?”

I take a good look at her, trying to figure out exactly what she’s fucked up on. There’s glee in her face, childish and idiotic, and I can’t say whether it’s malicious or not.

“Probably not.”

“Cause I don’t want you getting any big ideas about me, cause I’m one hundred percent dyke, baby.”

“That’s okay with me.” I draw four clubs and a diamond, and trade the diamond for a spade.

“Aw, baby, that’s a heartbreaker there. Not that it matters when you’re betting nickels. You ever play one of those five-dollar machines?”

“No.”

“My girlfriend, the one who died, she won a cool two grand one time. She was trying to pay me back all the money she stole.”

The smart thing would be not to rise to the bait, but I’m finding her more fun than the nickel poker so I do the callous thing and bite. “How’d she die?”

Nicki leans toward me and hisses the answer in my ear, filling my nostrils in passing with a bouquet redolent of tobacco, stale beer, and gum disease. “I had her killed.”

“No shit,” I say, nodding, trying to strike the perfect balance between looking impressed and credulous and sympathetic.

“Bitch ran up a thirty-thousand-dollar tab on my fucking MasterCard. I said, Bitch, you ain’t getting away with that. But I fucking loved her. It fucking broke my heart.”

“Is that what you got sent up for?”

“Fuck no, that was just a little cocaine beef. This deal with Betsy was just last week. Don’t you fucking tell anyone what I just told you, got it? Cause I’d hate to have to have you killed too.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” I say, wondering how worried this should make me and cursing the white crosses popped in the course of the day’s drive. Five? No, six. Seven? No, six. Three at 4 in the morning at the first motel, and three in Utah. Was it Utah?

“Cause I really would fucking hate that, cause I like you, baby. You’re pretty good-looking, you know that?”

“Thank you very much,” I say, the way my mother taught me to respond to a compliment.

“When I said I was a hundred percent lesbian, I meant more like eighty, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh.”

“You have really big lips. Just like a spade’s, almost. Anybody ever told you that before?”

“Not in those exact words.” I look over at the bartender, but this apparently isn’t the kind of place where patrons are discouraged from bothering one another.

“I can’t help thinking how they’d feel on my pooss-ay. You like the taste of pooss-ay, Tate?”

In fact, pussy is one of my favorite flavors in the entire world; at this juncture, however, my gag reflex is struggling with the back of my throat, trying to force it open to disgorge the beer I’ve swallowed.

A strange hand on my shoulder ought to come as a relief, but it makes me spill my beer on the foul carpet. I turn to face a woman with long, dark hair drawn up behind her long, graceful neck in a ponytail.

“Tate?” she says, her voice high and surprisingly sweet. “I’m Skip’s friend, Babs.” She looks over at Nicki. “Sorry, Nicki, I need your new friend.”

Babs is apparently higher than Nicki in the pecking order, because Nicki scurries back to the bar without a word. “I came in a cab,” Babs says. “Can you drive?”

“Sorry about that,” Babs says as we leave the parking lot. She struck me immediately as pretty, with the kind of sweet, big-eyed face I love, but the more I look at her the more character her face shows; the truth of it is she’s a beauty. “If I’d’ve known I was going to be that long in coming, I would’ve told you someplace nicer.” She spends a few seconds appraising my appearance, which makes me a little nervous, since I’m wearing the clothes I slept in last night. “You’re a big guy. That’s good.”

I don’t know how to interpret the remark, favorable though it seems, so I file it away for future obsessive, feverish rumination. “Kind of hard to picture you as a regular back there.”

“I’m not, exactly. I own it.”

“Really?” Skip said you were some kind of stripper, I almost add. Because I’ve been expecting somebody more like Nicki and less like Babs. She has on a loose-fitting shirt and jeans and not much makeup, and I can’t help thinking that she sounds smarter than any woman I’ve talked to in months.

“Yeah, the last owner died and my boyfriend was a regular there, and I thought, what the fuck, I’ll buy it and let him run it. Well, that didn’t work out, did it? That was him behind the bar.”

“The, uh, that guy tonight?”

“Yeah, the shitfaced guy. He didn’t used to be like that. Guess I shouldn’t have bought him a bar.”

“I guess not.” I’m stopped at a long light and a tiny old woman shuffles across. She doesn’t look like she belongs in Vegas at all, let alone out on the street at 1:45 in the morning.

“Look at that poor old gal,” Babs says. “We should offer to take her home, except we’d probably scare her into a heart attack. So what brings you to Vegas?”

“Going back to L.A. Bugged out after the Northridge quake and spent a few months tending bar in Wichita.”

“Wichita? Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“I grew up in Wichita! For a few years anyway. My dad was stationed at McConnell. I had a little dog named Teenchie.”

“Teenchie? You a Song of the South fan?”

“Yeah, I love it. I know it’s supposed to be all politically incorrect and it probably is, but I saw it when I was little, so I can’t be objective. The other one I really love is Saludos Amigos. Ever see that one?”

“Part of it. I wrote my master’s thesis on Disney animation.” As a matter of fact I didn’t, my cousin did at USC, but I do know more than the average guy on the subject, and I’m truly bowled over to be asked such a nerdy question by this magnificent creature.

“Just loved all that shit when I was little. When I first started dancing, I used Teenchie as my stage name, can you believe that?”

So she is a dancer after all. I’m slightly more than half in love with her at this point in our ten-minute-long acquaintance, and I figure if the lush behind the bar at the Tumblin’ Dice is my competition, I’m in like Flynn.

But it’s late, so the aforementioned Midwestern politeness fails to stop me from asking the first question that pops into my head: “How can you afford to buy a bar on what a dancer makes?”

“Who said I was still a dancer?” She grins, a lopsided thing that shows a big expanse of teeth. She has, I finally notice, a slight overbite that makes her face perfect. She doesn’t offer any more than that, so I don’t pursue it further. “Turn left up here.”

Something that should have been nagging me all along starts doing so. “Hey, you know that gal Nicki I was talking to?”

“God, do I.”

“She told me she had her girlfriend murdered.” When I say it, I can feel microscopic particles of Dexedrine racing up my spinal cord to my brain.

Babs snorts. “Jesus.”

“Said this girl ran up a thirty-thousand-dollar tab on Nicki’s MasterCard.”

“Think about it, Tate. If you were the bank, would you give that crazy bitch a MasterCard with a thirty-thousand-dollar limit?”

“I guess not.”

“I mean, what would she put on the application where it says occupation? Crack whore? Meth cook?”

This sends the Dexedrine particles back down out of my brain, and a feeling of relative calm comes over me. We’re heading into a nice neighborhood now, a strangely empty subdivision. There aren’t any cars on the street, not even parked, and there aren’t any lights on anywhere; no late-night TV viewers or insomniac readers or dog walkers.

Finally, we get to a McMansion with all its lights blazing and two cars parked on the street in front despite a three-car garage.

“Did you ever see The Omega Man?” I ask. “This is sort of like his place.”

“Kind of spooky, isn’t it? The subdivision went bankrupt before it was all the way finished and the developer’s on trial. They managed to rent out a few of ’em to people who sublet the extra rooms.”

“Is this where you live?” I ask, hoping she’s bringing me home, even as I recognize the pathos of the fantasy.

“Hell no. I own, in a hell of a lot better nabe than this. This is where we’re getting your present for Skip. Park on the street, not too close to the streetlamp.” She opens up her bag and hands me a pistol. I’m a Kansas boy and I’ve hunted since I was little, but I’ve never had a real pistol in my hands, and to her consternation I hold this one like it’s a live fish.

“Hold it straight up and keep your index finger on the trigger guard.”

“What’s this for?” I ask.

“This guy’s an asshole. I just want you to stand there and look big, and if things get tense you pull the grip out of your waistband so he can see it.”

Not that I like anything I’ve heard in the last thirty seconds, but the thing I like least is the part where I stick a firearm down my pants. I can’t stand the idea of looking weak in Babs’s eyes, though, and by this time she’s out of the car, so I follow her to the door.

When the door opens, an expressionless woman about seventy years old lets us in without a word. She has on a tank top and a pair of shorts that reveal a big scab on her shin. It looks like she slid all the way down her driveway with only one leg of her pants on.

There are three medium-to-hot young women in the living room watching Cops. The action is taking place in North Las Vegas, and they’re excited because the bust onscreen is happening on a street they know.

“There’s Lonnie’s, look,” one of them says. She has long, frizzy red hair and freckles as big as moles, and like the old lady, she has a big scab on one knee. She’s picking at it with one long, red fingernail as she watches.

“I’ve totally seen that dude,” one of her friends says.

“Which? The cop or the pimp?”

“Wannabe pimp, more like. He comes in for a drink when he’s got cash.”

“Gross.”

“Where’s Kleindienst?” Babs asks, and when they ignore her she grabs the remote and shuts the TV off, which prompts a volley of protest until she asks again, louder.

The redhead stops picking at the scab and half rises. “In the dining room, bitch. Gimme my fucking remote.”

Babs throws the remote behind the television to another chorus of abuse, and I follow her through the kitchen into a dark room where a man in what I take to be a blackjack dealer’s vest and starched white shirt sits with an overhead light shining down on him.

He’s playing solitaire and wearing a clear green visor, which gives him the pallor of a reanimated corpse and makes him look to my eye more like a dealer from a film than a real one. Remembering my role, I lean against the doorframe and fold my arms across my chest while Babs walks up to the table. I’m expecting something out of a movie, a tense, quiet negotiation followed by a quick exit, so I’m feeling suave and invulnerable, especially with the gun down my pants. It feels pretty cool, actually, like a second dick.

Babs opens with, “You lying, ripping-off piece of shit.” This gets the man to glance up from his game for the first time. “You owe me, Kleindienst.”

“I don’t owe you shit.” He looks over at me. I rise to my full height and move my hand toward my crotch. The adrenaline is pumping. “Who’s this cunt?” he asks. “One of your johns?”

He has just insulted the woman I sort of love, and I’m still feeling the effect of too many cross-tops — I just remembered numbers seven and eight, popped at a filling station around 8 p.m. just in case — and between those and my instinctive gallantry and the drama of the thing, I commit what will in retrospect seem an error in tactics: I pull out the gun and point it at Kleindienst’s face.

Babs looks at me for a millisecond, stricken. Then she pulls another pistol out of her bag and points it at the man’s face as well. “Turn the light on, Tate.”

“Tate?” Kleindienst says. “Your muscle’s name is Tate? Oh, my goodness gracious.”

I turn the light on. “Family name,” I say, trying to sound like a killer.

The room is white with brass fittings and mirrors. It doesn’t look as cool now as it did in the dark, and I see that Kleindienst is quite a bit younger than I’d imagined, maybe thirty or thirty-five. “Tell that bitch Darva to get in here with everything you got,” Babs tells him.

He yells through the kitchen and a girl appears who looks like a teenage runaway in a TV movie, complete with cutoff hot pants and a shirt tied at the midriff. “Run fetch me the whole batch,” he says. Then the three of us stand there feeling awkward, or at least the two men do. Babs looks perfectly comfortable.

A minute later, Darva reappears in the doorway holding up four good-sized packages wrapped in aluminum foil.

“Take ’em,” Kleindienst says. “No hard feelings?”

“You douchebag,” Babs says, and she opens one of the packages, snorts a little bit off the end of her finger. Jangly as I am, I’m relieved when she doesn’t offer me a taste, and after a cursory glance at the other three packages, she seals them back up. “Don’t ever fuck around like that again.”

We start toward the living room and before we get there Kleindienst yells something at us. I turn to find him holding a big fucking gun pointed in our general direction. I yelp and pull the trigger, and to my horror it just makes a clicking sound. I click again and again in Kleindienst’s direction as Babs fires, hitting him in the knee. He drops his gun, which sounds like a dumbell hitting the wooden floor, and falls clutching the gory knee, howling in an almost canine register. Poor Darva stands in the doorway of the dining room looking like she’s waiting for someone to tell her what to do.

“You’re going to need to take Billy to the hospital,” she says to the paralyzed trio of Cops fans on the way out.

We run to the car and I peel away from the curb. I don’t speak until we pull out of the subdivision. “How come mine didn’t go off?” I ask, mortified by my own whining tone.

“Yeah, like I’m going to give you a loaded gun. I don’t even know you,” she says, and though my heart breaks a little, the events of the last five minutes have prepared me for the idea that there may be more to Babs than I previously fantasized. “Jesus, I didn’t tell you to pull the fucking gun on him. That could have gotten us both killed.”

“Is the mob going to hunt you down now?” I ask.

“What mob? Why?”

“For robbing a big-time dealer?”

“Billy Kleindienst? Give me a break. Billy’s a fucking courier. Was until tonight, anyway, now he’s just a crippled black-jack dealer. He’s about as low as you on the totem pole. What we took belongs to me and my friend Sandra anyway.”

“You think they’re going to drive him to the hospital or call an ambulance?”

She shakes her head. “Don’t give a shit, really. I did feel kind of sorry for that little Darva, though. I think she’s his girlfriend, which is just as pathetic as can be.” She looks over at me, shaking her head. “It all came out good, though, except for him getting it in the leg,” she says with a rueful, easy smile. “Billy fuckin’ Kleindienst.”

I drive her to her house, in another subdivision. It’s on a rise, and we can see the lights of the Strip in the distance. She’s calmed down considerably, and the conversation is back in the realm of friendly flirtation. “You want to come in and taste some of this?” she asks.

“No thanks,” I reply. I half-way think she’s going to insist, that the taste of speed is just a pretext for taking me inside and fucking me, but she doesn’t push it, just hands me Skip’s share of the crank and opens her door.

“Nice meeting you,” she says.

“If you ever come out to L.A., call me and we’ll go see an old movie,” I tell her. I wait until she gets inside before backing out of her driveway.

Heading into town, I watch those lights blinking and illuminating the early-morning sky, no longer dreading the crashed-out sleeping jag that lies ahead, and for the first time it occurs to me that there’s something I really like about Las Vegas.

This or any desert by Vu Tran

Chinatown

Six months ago, before all this, I drove into Las Vegas on a hot August twilight. My first time in the city. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the far distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light, glowing alien and purplish in the sky. My tired, pulpy brain at the time, I thought it was a UFO or something and nearly hit the truck ahead of me. Fifteen minutes later, at a gas station, I was told about the beam of light from atop that pyramid casino and how you can even see the beam from space, given no clouds were in the way. My disappointment surprised me.

The drive from Oakland had taken me almost a full day, so I checked into the Motel 6 near Chinatown and fell asleep with my shoes on and my gun still strapped to my ankle. I slept stupid for nine hours straight and woke up at 6 in the morning, my mouth and nostrils so dry it felt like someone had shoveled dirt over me in the night. The sun had not yet come out, but it was already 100 degrees outside. Not a cloud in the sky.

After taking a long cold shower, I walked to the front office. The clerk — Chinese probably — was slurping his breakfast behind the counter and ignored me. I thought about flashing him my badge, but instead I brandished three days’ stay in advance, cash, which made him set down his chopsticks easily enough. He said nothing and hardly looked at me before handing me a receipt and walking back to his noodles or whatever the hell he was eating. When I asked him where I could get some eggs, he mumbled something in broken English, his mouth stuffed, glistening. In my younger days, I would have slapped him for his rudeness, just so I could. But I’d learned after Suzy left me to control my temper.

I did see a phó. shop across the street and hoped they made it like she used to — the beef not too fatty, the soup not too sweet. Turned out theirs was even better, which didn’t surprise me, but it reminded me of something her best friend — a Vietnamese girl named Happy of all things — once told me four years ago when she was over at the house for Sunday phó. Suzy had been mad at me that morning for nodding off at church, as I often did since my patrols didn’t end until midnight, and though she knew I’d only converted for her and had never really taken churchgoing seriously, she chewed me out all the way home, and with more venom than usual. So when she stepped outside to smoke after lunch, I asked Happy, “What’s bugging her lately?” Happy knew her better than anyone. She had been Suzy’s bridesmaid, and they talked on the phone every day in a mix of English and Vietnamese I never did understand — but she just shrugged at my question. I chuckled and said, “Only 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 ten years at the time. She’d leave me two years later.

At the phó. shop, I stared out into the parking lot and watched a stout, middle-aged Asian man climb into a red BMW. It could have been him, but on his driver’s license Suzy’s new husband had broader cheeks and more stubborn eyes, and also sported a thin, sly mustache. DPS did list a silver Porsche and a brand-new red BMW under his name — Sonny Nguyen. The master files at Vegas Metro confirmed he was my age, that he owned a posh restaurant in town, that he once shot at a guy for insulting him — aggravated assault, no time done. It was Happy who told me he was a gambler, fully equipped apparently with a gambler’s temper and a gambler’s penchant for taking risks with little sense of the reward. Something in that reminded me of myself.

In my twenty-five years on the Oakland force, I’d shot at people several times, in the arm, in the fleshy part of the thigh, mostly in response to them shooting at me; I had punched a hooker for biting my hand, choked out a belligerent Bible salesman, wrestled thugs twice my size and half my age; I once had to watch a five-year-old boy bleed to death after I night-sticked his mother, who had stabbed him, coked up out of her mind; and three or six times other officers have had to pull me off a scrotbag who’d gotten on my bad side. But never, not even once, had I come close to killing anyone.

I walked down Spring Mountain Road and quickly regretted not taking my car. Vegas, outside of the Strip, is not a place for walkers, especially in this brutal heat. 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 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.

Hardly surprising that a Vietnamese would own a sushi joint — Happy’s uncle owned a cowboy clothing store in Oakland. What did startle me was the seven-foot, white-aproned Mexican 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 whatever reason, handed me his broom and disappeared behind the two giant mahogany doors. A minute later a young Vietnamese man — late twenties probably, brightly groomed, dressed in a splendidly tailored charcoal suit and a precise pink tie — appeared in his place. He smiled at me, shook my hand. He relieved me of the broom and leaned it against one of the two wooden pillars that flanked the patio.

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

“I’d like to see Sonny.”

“I am sorry, but 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 an innocent mistake, 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 said, “I am not sure what I can do for you, sir.”

“How about this. I’ll come back in two hours for some sushi and tea. And then, for dessert, all I’d like is a word or two with Mr. Nguyen. Please tell him that.”

I turned to go, but then felt a movement toward me. The young man was no longer smiling. There was no meanness in his face, but his words had become chiseled.

“Your name is Robert, isn’t it?” 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 understand my seriousness. Go back to your city and try to be happy.”

That last thing somehow moved me. It was like he had patted my shoulder. I suddenly realized 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. Ph. 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 all the time, even if intuition had never been 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. My second inkling was that his dapper guard dog stayed on duty from open to close, and that he was just itching for the chance to eat me alive. I had a long night ahead of me. Before shutting my eyes, I decided to put my badge away, deep in the recesses of my suitcase. I would not need it.

When Suzy left me two years ago, it was easy at first. No children. Few possessions to split up. And no one we knew really cared: Her family all still lived in Vietnam, my parents were long dead, and in our thirteen years together, I’d never gotten to know her Asian friends and the only things my cop 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.” Then she carried away my empty plate and I heard it shatter in the sink.

The first time I met her I knew she was fearless. My partner and I were responding to a robbery at the flower shop where she worked. She’d been in America for a year. Her English was bad. When we arrived, she stood at the door with a baseball bat in one hand and pruning shears in the other. Before I could step out of the patrol car, she erupted in an angry, torrid description of what had happened. I barely understood a word — something about a gun and ruined roses — but I did know I liked her. The petite sprightly body. Her lips, her cheekbones, full and bold. Eyes that made me think of firecrackers. We found the perp two miles away limping and bleeding from a stab wound in his thigh. The pruning shears had done it. Suzy and I married four months later.

Her real name was Hong, which meant 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, even though her friends still called her Hong.

Our first few years were happy. She took over the flower shop and I’d stop by every afternoon during my patrol to check in on her. We had a third of the week together and we spent it trying out every restaurant in Chinatown, going to the movies (she loved horror flicks), and walking the waterfront since the smell and the waves reminded her of Vietnam. At first I didn’t mind losing myself in her world: the Vietnamese church, the crosses in every room, the food, the sappy ballads on the stereo, all her friends who (with the exception of Happy) barely spoke a lick of English, even the morbid altar in the corner of the living room with the gruesome crucifix and the candles and pictures of dead grandparents and uncles and aunts. That was all fine, because being with her was like discovering a new, unexpected person in myself. But after two years of this, I finally noticed that she had no interest in discovering me: my job, my friends, my love for baseball, my craving for a burger or spaghetti now and then, the fact that until her I had not thought of Vietnam since 1973, when my unit just barely missed deployment. Vietnam was suddenly everything again... until she made it mean nothing. The least she could do was share her stories from the homeland, like how poor she’d grown up, or what cruel assholes the Communists were, or how her uncle or father or neighbor had gone to a concentration camp and was tortured or starved or something; but she’d only say her life back there was difficult and lonely, and she’d only speak of it with this kind of vague mysteriousness, like she was teaching me her language, like I’d never get it anyway. So I got nothing.

When we made love, she’d whimper, a childlike thing a lot of Asian women do, only her whimper sounded more like a wounded animal’s, so that eventually it was just another way of making me feel like a stranger in her presence. An intruder.

I suppose our marriage became a typical one: petty arguments, silent treatments, no sex for months, both of us spending our free time more with friends than with each other. And still we kept at it, God knows why, until I came to believe, in an accepting kind of way, that she was both naïve and practical about love, that she’d only ever loved me because I was a cop, because that was supposed to mean that I’d never hurt her.

The night I hit her was a rainy night. I’d just come home from a shooting 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 on Suzy’s spotless kitchen floor, or to listen to her when she saw the mess and began yelling at me. Couldn’t she understand that brains 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 fuck off — which I rarely throw at anyone. She glared at me, and then she started with something she’d been doing for the last few years every time we argued: She began speaking in Vietnamese. Not loudly or irrationally like she was venting her anger at me, but calmly and deliberately, as if I actually understood her, as if 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 fucking gibberish for all I knew and that I could do nothing of the sort to her. I usually just 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 backhanded her across the face as hard as I could. It shut her up, sent her bumping into a dining chair.

I had never before raised my hand at her. I’d arrested men who’d done worse to their girlfriends and wives, and I always remembered how pathetic and weak those guys looked when I confronted them. But when I felt the sting in my fingernails, saw the blood curling down Suzy’s busted lip and her just standing there in a kind of angry stubborn silence, I hit her again. She yelped this time, holding that side of her face and still staring at me, though now with a look of recognition that told me she’d never been as tough as I thought, which somehow annoyed me more. Would I have stopped if she had hit me back, as I’d expected? Her nose began bleeding. Her eyes teared up. But her hand fell from her face and she stood her ground. So I hit her a third time. 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 one knee, her head bowed, like she was about to vomit. She spat blood two or three times. As I walked upstairs, I heard the TV from the living room and the rain pummeling the gutters outside and then the kitchen faucet running, and everything had the sound of finality to it.

In the divorce, she was true to her word and I was left with a house full of eggshell paintings and crucifixes and rattan furniture. Months later, someone told me she had moved to Vegas. I sold the house and everything in it and tried my best to forget I had ever married anyone. I also went on a strict diet of hamburgers and spaghetti.

But then a month ago I bumped into Happy at the grocery store. To my shock, instead of ignoring me or telling me off, she treated me like an old friend. She had always lived up to her name in that way, and actually she looked a lot like Suzy, a taller and more carefree version of her — and, in truth, a version I’d always been attracted to. I asked her out to dinner that night. Afterwards, we went home together. We drank wine and went to bed and it wasn’t until we finished that I realized my other reason for doing all this. With her blissfully drunk and more talkative than ever, I finally asked about Suzy. She told me everything: how Suzy had become a card dealer in Vegas and met up with this rich, cocky Vietnamese poker player who owned a fancy restaurant and a big house and apparently had some shady dealings in town, and how they got married and she quit her job, and how everything had been good for more than a year.

“Until he begin losing,” Happy declared soberly, sitting back on the headboard. She said nothing more and I had to tell her several times to get on with it. She glanced at me impatiently, like I should already know. “He hit her,” she said. “She hit him back, but he very strong and he drink a lot. Last month, he throw her down the stairs and broke her arm. I saw her two week ago with a sling, her cheek purple. But he too rich for her to leave. And he always say he need her, he need her.”

I stood from the bed, a bit tipsy. I knocked the lamp off the nightstand.

Happy flinched. 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 bit before I break his arm.”

This time she laughed hard, covering her mouth and looking at me with drunken pity.

“You such a silly, stupid man,” she said.

I returned to Fuji West at 7:30 that evening, just 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, those were the tags. 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 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, which stood in the center of the restaurant like an island, manned by three sushi chefs in white who with their hats resembled sailors. Flanking the bar were two enormous aquariums, filled with exotic-looking fish that were staring out calmly at the twenty or so patrons in the restaurant, most of whom easily out-dressed 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, just as casually as if I’d invited him.

He was now dressed in a black pinstripe suit, set off by another beautiful pink tie, looking very ready to be anyone’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.

“I appreciate the wisdom — but my business with Sonny is important.”

“I know it is,” he said, nodding agreeably. “Except my father has no business with you.” 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.

“Your father, huh? Well, I guess that makes some sense.” I downed half my beer, wiped my mouth with two fingers. “So how do you know who I am?”

“Your friend Happy is also a friend of mine. She visits here often. She came to me last week and told me what you have been planning to do. She told me for your sake. She likes you, Mr. Robert, and she knows you can be a foolish man. She did not tell Suzy, of course, or my father. So only I know that you are here. And that, Mr. Robert, is a good thing.”

“Because your father is a dangerous man?”

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

A waiter came by and whispered something into his ear, and Sonny Jr. looked to the front doors where two large parties of customers had just appeared. He stood from the table and gestured at the hostess, who walked quickly over to our table, and he gave her and the waiter rapid orders in Vietnamese. He glanced at me, a bit distractedly, then turned again to them and went on with his instructions. He watched them walk away and continued watching as they saw to the parties. His father might have been a poker-playing gangster or maybe a gangster-playing poker player, but I was getting the feeling that Junior was nothing more than what he appeared: the young manager of a restaurant.

He appeared to sigh and finally turned back to me, adjusting his tie, his face once again as calm as the fish. “You are a police officer, so I should not show you this. But I know you are here with other, less official concerns, however silly they might be. Please come with me then.”

“And where are we going?”

“As I said, you are the police officer here. It should be me who is nervous.”

I offered him a smile, which he did not return. I stood and followed him to the kitchen.

We passed two private tatami rooms, each being prepared by the staff for the new parties. Foolishly or not, the presence of so many people eased my mind a bit.

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 and approached a huge, life-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 counter-clockwise. The painting slowly swung open from the wall like a door, revealing a passageway and a dark descending staircase. He walked down and without looking back at me said, “It will close again in five seconds.”

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 further away from the others. He punched a series of numbers on the keypad and something clicked. He pushed the door open completely before moving inside.

I heard soft Oriental music. The room glowed bluish and shimmered. It was no more than a thousand square feet, but felt cavernous, with walls of glass surrounding us — behind them water and fish. I had entered a gigantic aquarium. Each wall showed the flushed faces of four separate tanks, framed in quadrants like enormous television monitors, their blue waters filled with stingrays and sharks and what appeared to be piranha and other odd-looking fish, all swimming around beds of corral and white gravel. Against the brick wall behind me were three aisles of smaller aquariums, with smaller fish, stacked on two rows of iron shelves. 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. went to the table and took a cigarette from the pack lying there, lit it, and approached the tank of stingrays. I felt a movement behind me and turned to see, at last, the seven-foot Mexican standing in the hall just outside the doorway, his forehead out of view. God knows where he’d come from. His white apron looked like an oversized bib, and he still wore that heavy, dull-eyed Frankenstein expression. Junior spoke Vietnamese to him and he stepped inside the room, bowing to do so, and closed the door. So that was at least three languages the Mexican understood.

“Is Dad making an appearance too?” I asked.

“He is not here, Mr. Robert,” Junior replied calmly, and ashed into an ashtray he held in his other hand — yet another annoyingly formal mannerism. He gestured at the entire room and said, “But I have brought you to meet his fish. These are all illegal, you see. And all very expensive. This one here,” and he pointed at a foot-long fish with a huge chin and an elongated, undulating body, “is a silver Asian arowana, also called a dragonfish, as you can see why. Our clients will pay over ten thousand dollars for one.”

“I can sell you my car for half that.”

He turned his back to me, ignoring the comment, and continued, “We installed a couch and a stereo because my father likes to come here and relax. The fish, the lights, and the music give him peace. For all his flaws, he is a man who values peace.”

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 and expelled smoke through his nostrils, dragon-like. “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 he also appreciates them because they 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? No irony, you think, in you and your father owning a Japanese restaurant?”

“Shut up, Mr. Robert, and listen.” He put out his cigarette and walked over to take a seat in one of the dolphin chairs. He unbuttoned his jacket and crossed his legs elegantly. He offered me the face of a boy, but sounded like an old man. “More than twenty years ago, my parents and I escaped Vietnam by boat. Two hundred people in a little fishing boat made for no more than twenty, headed for Malaysia. On our second night at sea we hit a terrible storm and my mother fell overboard. It was too dark and stormy for anyone to see her or hear her cry out, and the waters were too rough to save her anyway. She drowned. 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 sixteen days, our boat finally made it to the refugee camp in Malaysia, on the island of Pulau Bidong. The first day my father and I were there, the ruffians in the camp made themselves known and threatened us. My father was once in a gang back in Vietnam, so he was not afraid. He ignored them. A week later, one of them stole my rice ration. The thief slapped me across the face, pushed me to the ground, ripped the sack out of my hand. To scare me even more, he grabbed my wrist and ran a knife across it, barely cutting the skin. I ran to my father, bawling, and he shut me up with a slap of his own.”

Junior stared at his hands for a moment, like he was studying his nails. Then he went on.

“He took me by the arm and dragged me to the part of the camp where the ruffians hung out. He made me stand under a palm tree and ordered me to watch him. There were many people there, minding their business. A few shacks away, the man who had attacked me was kneeling and playing dice with two friends. On a tree stump nearby, someone butchering an animal had left his 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 and his two friends pounced at my father, but he was already brandishing the cleaver at them. They backed off. My father then grabbed the man by the back of his shirt and dragged him to the tree stump. In one swift motion, never once hesitating, he placed the man’s hand on the stump and threw down the cleaver and hacked off his hand at the wrist.

“Blood spurted and the man screamed. I do not remember how horrified the people around me looked, but I remember hearing a few women shriek. My father dropped the cleaver, bent down, and muttered something in the man’s ear as he writhed on the ground, moaning and clasping his bloody forearm to his chest. His severed hand still lay on the tree stump. My father wiped his own hand on his pants and held mine as we walked back to our shack. We stayed in that camp for two more months before we came to the States, and those ruffians never once bothered us again.”

Sonny Jr. stood from the chair and walked over again to the stingrays. He took out a handkerchief and wiped the glass where his finger had pointed at the arowana. He turned to me thoughtfully.

“I still occasionally have dreams about that afternoon. But I have not told you this story so that you will pity me, or anyone for that matter. I have told you so that you will understand what kind of man my father is — and in a way respect it. Think of this conversation — this situation — as an exchange of trust. Remember that I have brought you, a police officer, here to see my father’s illegal business. I am trusting that you will forget your plans in this city, go home, and not say a word of what you have seen. In exchange, since I have made this rather foolish gesture for you, you will trust that I am trying to help you, and you will do all those things. A man of your sentiments should appreciate the sincerity of this offer.”

I watched him neatly fold his handkerchief and place it back in the breast pocket of his suit. His logic was giving me a headache. I walked over to the couch and sat down, facing him. 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. It was my turn to talk.

“Why do you want so badly to help me?” I said. “Why do you care what happens to me? Is it really me you’re protecting? Or is it your father? Because somehow I feel he’s no longer — maybe never was — the hard man you say he is. 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 and looked at him squarely. “Your father is a thug. Not only that, he’s an asshole, and a coward too. He threw a woman down the stairs and broke her arm. Who knows what else he did, could have done, or might do in the future, but men like him only have the guts to do that to a woman. And the fact that you haven’t blinked yet tells me all of this is true. You’re a smart boy, and you seem to be a good enough son to want to protect him. That’s fine. It’s even admirable. But my business with him has nothing to do with you. So fuck off.”

I stood up and walked around the table and stopped a few yards from him. I took a long drag off my cigarette and then flicked it at his feet. “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. And they all hate sushi.”

He was glaring at me. Behind him, the stingrays swam languidly around his thin, stiff figure like a flock of vultures.

His eyes looked past me and he nodded his head, and before I could turn around I felt the Mexican’s enormous arms wrap around my chest, hugging me so tightly I could hardly breathe. I soon felt a fumbling at my ankle holster, and then saw Sonny Jr. with my five-shot, which he deposited in his jacket pocket. He said something in Vietnamese, and the Mexican pushed me down 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 back and held my other arm 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. Sonny Jr. kneeled and planted his shoe on my palm. Then he steadied the blade across my wrist.

“Wait!” I gasped. I struggled but could hardly budge under the Mexican, his boulder of a knee still lodged in my lower back.

Sonny Jr. slowly, gently dragged the blade. I could feel its icy sharpness slice the surface of my skin. The pain was no more than an itch, but waiting for it had made me clench my jaw so tightly that it now ached. Sonny Jr. lifted his shoe. A thread of blood appeared across my wrist.

“You and I,” Junior murmured casually, “now share something.” He wiped the blade with two fingers, 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 only makes you naïve. Happy told me you were a silly, stupid 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. And 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 flight of stairs and broke her arm.”

His 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. “You see, we keep most of these fish separated not because they will eat each other — though that is true — but because they like it this way. Just like we like it this way. Why do you think, when you walk into any casino in this city, that nearly every dealer 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. It is a very simple reality, Mr. Robert. A primal reality.”

He bent down, speaking closer now to my ear.

“What made you think she ever belonged to you, or more importantly that you ever belonged with her? America, Mr. Robert, is not the melting pot you Americans like to say or think it is. Things get stirred, yes, but like oil and vinegar they eventually separate and settle and the like things always go back to each other. They have made new friends, perhaps even fucked them, but in their heart they will always wander back to where they belong. Love has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

He sighed dramatically and stood back up.

“That is enough. I am tired of speeches.” With this, he lifted his shoe and stomped on my hand with the heel.

I screamed out and he let me. The Mexican dismounted me then. After a long writhing moment I forced myself to sit up. I was holding my injured hand like a dead bird. I couldn’t tell if anything was broken, but my knuckles and fingers felt hot with numbing pain, right alongside the ache in my shoulder where the Mexican had twisted and held my arm.

Junior now stood before the tank of piranhas, in his jacket again and with his hands in his pockets. As though he was 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, and 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 handed Menendez my gun and Menendez led me out of the room by the arm, almost gently.

Junior’s voice followed me out: “Go home, Mr. Robert, and try to be happy.”

I let the Mexican drag me to another door, which revealed another staircase, which ascended into another office, which opened out into what looked like the pet store next door to the restaurant. Everything was dark, save for the shifting shadows of birds in their cages, dogs and rodents in their pens. We passed aquariums with goldfish and droning water pumps. Something squawked irritably in the putrid darkness.

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 perhaps. I must have looked at Menendez with shock, because he said to me, in a gruff but pleasant voice: “Monsoon season.” He handed me my five-shot, closed the door, and I saw his giant shadow fade back into the darkness of the store.

I drove down Highway 15, toward California. My right hand was wrapped tightly in a handkerchief. I could move my fingers, but didn’t want to. It was 10 o’clock, an hour after I had left Fuji West, and the rain had not yet stopped. On my way out of town, I saw three car accidents, one of which appeared fatal — a Toyota on its side, a truck with no front door, no windshield, a body beneath wet tarp. I had worked so many of these scenes in my time, and yet that evening they spooked me — chilled me. Rain must fall like an ice storm upon this town.

I kept thinking of the night I hit Suzy. But soon I was remembering another hot rainy night, many years ago, when I came home from work all drenched and tired and she made me strip down to my underwear and sat me at the dining table with a bowl of hot chicken porridge. As I ate the porridge, she stood close behind my chair 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.

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 around and began driving in the direction of their house. I had wanted all along to avoid this — I knew she might be there. It took me half an hour to find it. By the time I turned into the neighborhood, the street curbs were overflowing with ankle-deep water and I could feel my tires slicing through the currents.

Their house, like many of the others, was a two-story stucco job with a manicured rock garden and several giant palm trees out front. It looked big and warm. All the windows were dark. A red BMW sat in the circular driveway behind the brown Toyota Camry I’d bought Suzy eight years ago. Who 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 was coming down even harder now, blinding sheets of it, and I was drenched within seconds. On their patio, I saw the same kind of potted cacti that stood on our porch years ago, except the pots were much nicer. And also, there in front of me, like I was staring at the front door of our old house, was a silver cross hanging beneath the peephole.

The rain soothed my injured hand. I unwrapped the wet handkerchief and tossed it on the driveway. I tried to make a fist and realized I could, though the ache was still there, and also some of the numbness. I rang the doorbell and stood there waiting, shivering. I didn’t know who I wanted to answer the door, but when the porch light turned on and he finally opened it, I understood what I wanted to do.

He looked exactly as he did on his driver’s license, but was shorter than I expected, shorter than both Suzy and his son. He was wearing a white T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, his arms tan and muscular, his face a mixture of sleepiness, curiosity, and annoyance. “Yes?” he muttered.

I noticed the tattoo of a cross on his neck. I raised my gun at his face. He snapped his head back, but then 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 didn’t want to be afraid but couldn’t help it either.

“Open the door and then put up your hands,” I ordered calmly.

He did as I said, slowly, withdrawing into the foyer of the house, then into the edge of the living room as I followed him inside, leaving some distance between us. I kept the front door half open, then turned on a small lamp by the couch and caught the familiar scent of shrimp paste in the air.

Their house was furnished with all the fancy stuff required of a wealthy, middle-aged couple, but what caught my eye was the large aquarium against the wall, the tall wooden crucifix above the fireplace, and the vases everywhere filled with fresh flowers. Daffodils, pink tulips, Oriental lilies, chrysanthemums — I had become used to all of them over the years.

The rain was pummeling the roof above us — a steady, violent drone. I watched him watch me and imagined what I must have looked like to him: a pale bald stranger with a gun, still pointed squarely at his face, standing there in his dark living room in drenched clothes, dripping water onto his wife’s pristine carpet. She used to yell at me for merely walking on the carpet in my shoes.

“You take what you want,” he said in a loud whisper. “I not gonna stop you. 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. “Take my car too,” he added. “Just go.”

I picked up the phone, listened for the dial tone, and then placed it face-up on the table.

“Anyone else here in the house?”

“No,” he said immediately.

“No? Your wife — where’s she?”

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

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

“Then why are there two cars in the driveway?”

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

He sounded irritated now, but his eyes were still wide and wary.

“So if I make you take me into the bedroom, I won’t find anyone in there?”

He didn’t say anything at first. He glanced toward the dark hallway to my left and then returned his scowl back on me. “I told you,” he growled, but then lowered his voice. He didn’t want to wake her. “Take my car. My wallet. Take anything you want and go.”

“I tell you what,” I said. “I’m gonna let you go. Walk out the door. Call for help if you want. You’re free to leave.”

“What?” He lowered his hands a bit.

“Go.”

“What wrong with you?”

“I’m giving you a chance to leave without me shooting your face in. If no one’s here, then you have nothing to worry about.”

He just glowered at me. Then his hands fell. “Who are you?” he said in a thick voice. “What you want?”

I took a step closer to him, and he slowly put up his hands again without adjusting his glare on me.

“Last chance,” I said.

“I not going anywhere.”

I could still see fear in his eyes, but there was an angry calm in his demeanor now, in the flimsy way he held up his hands like I was an annoying child with a toy gun. I decided to believe everything his son had told me, and it filled me with both disappointment and relief, and then suddenly a heavy decisive sadness, like I no longer recognized that shrimp paste smell in the air or any of the outlandish flowers in this strange house — like a stone door had just closed on the last fifteen years of my life.

I edged closer but he did not budge. When my gun was finally within a foot of his face, I said, “Okay then,” and struck him across the cheek with it. He staggered back and threw up a hand to shield himself.

I backed away. With his hand on his cheek, he watched me move toward the front door. I glanced at the hallway, at the doors in the darkness, 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. I took a last look back at Sonny. His cheek was bleeding, his eyes dark and wide. How many more times would he save her like tonight?

I turned and ran out into the rain, stumbling across the gushing lawn, through the surging water in the street, toward my car. My engine roared to life. As I drove frantically past the house, I glimpsed Sonny standing on their front porch with his arms at his side, watching me speed away. I could have sworn I saw a darker, slimmer figure looming behind him.

I drove like a maniac for a few miles, cars honking at me as I passed them one by one. Then I slowed 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. I turned off the radio and let the droning rain fill my ears. The night was like a tunnel. I drove a steady clip down the highway, promising myself that I would never again return to this or any desert.