by Rosa Foxxe
Brian cleared his throat before speaking.
“When he found out how much trouble you get in for bringing girls illegally from Italy to work as prostitutes he backed off that whole scheme REALLY fast,” Brian said.
Could this be true, or were they just trying to divide them? It was hard to tell with how they were talking about it. Surely, Vinnie wouldn't do anything like that. Or maybe he did because he had to and then he ended it when he felt badly. Or at least that's what she wanted to think it was true. What kind of person could ship another human being across the globe to work in the sex trade?
It didn't sound like something Vinnie would do, but the more she was around Vinnie, the more things that she'd never thought would happen, happened. She never thought they would go to the desert and end up getting arrested. She never thought that she'd end up downtown talking to a few detectives about it. She never thought the detectives would be telling her about some of the more immoral crimes that Vinnie was involved in.
“And you realize that he used to be a foot soldier, right?” James said. “You know that in Italy, he was one of the people who showed up at your place if you fucked around with the wrong made guy. For a long time all he did was collect debts from people.
Then there was the war that happened a few years back that fractured all of the families so badly that they had to go into cease fire mode simply because that's how fucked up everything was. You see, in Italy, the mob runs everything. Or pretty much everything. Yeah, sure, they probably aren't out there running street teams that are filling in potholes and stuff like that. They probably aren't in the schools trying to help little kids learn how to do math. You can bet that nothing like that is going on. But everything else, like who can trade with who, who can go where, and how all the money gets spent—that's something that they control.”
“And the whole bodies in the desert thing,” Brian said. “Is a message to Vinnie. He showed up a little while ago like he was the shit. Well, now I guess it was a few years, but you know what I'm saying. So he shows up and starts to flex a little bit. He's got men and everyone is armed all the time and he wants to act like he's the nice version of the guy in Scarface, and that's all well and good. Everyone likes the good-looking broody Italian guys. Or so it seems in this town, anyway. But this doesn't go over too well with the locals because, in all reality, Vinnie doesn't know what he's fucking with.”
James jumped in. Brian gave him an irritated look, like this was something that happened fairly regularly.
“The people in power here have been in power here for years. Decades. And they don't take kindly to some young pup showing up and wanting to take a big piece of the pie for himself. That just really isn't in the cards, as far as what the people that run this town will tolerate. Maybe if Vinnie was willing to work his way in, or pay his way in, or I don't know what the fuck these people with so much money do, but I'm saying that if he'd gone about it another way then maybe there wouldn't be this need to send everyone out in the middle of the fucking desert to look at some dead bodies.”
The room was quiet for a moment, save for the ticking of the clock. The white walls looked like the color of eggshell, now that she'd been in it long enough to see the yellow stains on the ceiling and the way that some of the wallpaper hung down ragged. The building was old and she wasn't the first person to sit in her chair wondering what exactly was going to happen and if she'd end up all right, she was sure of that.
The detectives were looking at her, gauging her reaction, but she was too tired to have a reaction and she didn't know if they could see that. She wondered what they saw. Could they could tell that she was just ready to be done with all of this, although she didn't know what she was going to do when they let her go. She didn't know anyone in Las Vegas besides Vinnie. That was it. If Vinnie was in jail she'd probably have a hard time doing anything she wanted in the casino. She might not even be able to get back into the place.
“M’am,” James said. “I know that you're probably in quite a bit of shock but I do need to know that you are understanding everything we are saying. I mean, at this point we are pretty much here for your benefit. We know that you don't know very much. So we're just trying to clue you in to what is going on behind the scenes and all of that.
Just so, you know, you don't go any deeper into a relationship that might get you killed at some point. And make no mistake that is a very real possibility. In this town, one of the ways the bigger players touch each other is by snuffing out the women they are fooling around with. It's almost like some sick game they have going, because none of them seem to care when the female ends up dead.”
“I'd bet some money that a few of the bodies out in the desert are some of those,” Brian said. “I know that's maybe a little morbid to think about, but I'm just saying that when it comes to bodies this town seems to have a certain way to produce some of them.”
James flicked a glance over at Tyra, then a glance over at the two way mirror.
“You know how people say that you say weird shit during interrogations?” James said. “That was a weird comment.”
Brian squinted at James.
“How is that weird to say when we just found a bunch of bodies out there just chilling? That really isn't that weird to say at all. How about you, Tyra? Do you think it's weird to make an observation about bodies when we just found a bunch of them where they shouldn't be, out in the desert in a mass grave?”
Tyra didn't know what to say. All of this was just too much for her. What was she supposed to do, anyway, engage in witty banter with the police officers about dead people in their town? The idea didn't really appeal to her at all. She just didn't think it was something she wanted to talk about.
“I, uh, I don't have an opinion,” Tyra said.
“But if you did,” Brian said. “Lady, just do me a favor and speak your mind for a second.”
“It's not that weird,” Tyra said. “It would be normally, but with everything else it's kind of normal.”
“See!” Brian said, turning to James. “And this is a good time to bring up how you always put me down in the interviews! Always trying to look bigger by pointing out some small thing I say like anyone gives a fuck.”
“What are you even talking about?” James said.
“Look!” Brian shouted. “Look! He's smiling! This asshole is fucking smiling! His little fucking smirk. God I just want to fucking hit you sometimes.”
“All right, all right,” James said. “I get it. I need to shut the fuck up and let you say weird shit to petrified strangers because you watch too much television and think you are some kind of Magnum fucking PI character or some shit.”
“Magnum PI?” Brian said. “That's who you compare me with?”
They both looked at each other without speaking for a moment, then turned back to Tyra.
“Ma’m,” James said. “All we can do is tell you what we know because you deserve to know who you're spending your time with. I realize this might not be the easiest stuff to hear, but at the same time, wouldn't you rather hear it than not? What if we didn't tell you and you had no idea who Vinnie really was and then you went on to marry him or have his kid or something. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. I think you should do whatever you want.”
“But!” Brian said holding a finger up in the air. “If you think the next time you have to come down here, you won't be getting all dressed up in an orange jump suit before getting booked, then you are sorely mistaken. And once you have an arrest on your record it doesn't go away. In fact, that's what most FBI background checks look for.”
“You see,” James said. “There are a lot of people who can beat out the system in court. It's not really that hard to do unless we have a really solid case. And most of the time we don't have a solid case because this is an imperfect world. So people get charged and fight it out and then act like they are the baddest dudes on the planet because the court system is either overwhelmed or their lawyers know how to beat out cer
tain charges. So, in order to get a really good idea of what kind of person someone is, the FBI does checks on arrest records.”
“And, miss,” Brian said. “We'll be notifying your work that you got arrested. Just to be fair to everyone involved. That's something else we realized a while ago, the whole 'what happens in Las Vegas stays in Vegas,' thing. So believe me when I tell you that what happens here will not stay here when I call your boss and have a lengthy chat with him.”
Tyra’s mind was reeling. This was a lot of information to digest at once, and the two cops in front of her, although humorous at times, certainly knew what they were doing. There little back and forth comedy routine of a few minutes before was probably something they did often to try to break the ice with people sitting across the table from them. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe that had been an actual thing that had passed between them and she'd been lucky enough to see the detectives be human for a second.
In all reality it didn't matter and she didn't really care. What she did care about was all this talk about her being arrested in the future and the way the detectives were talking about calling her boss. What kind of people would call her boss and try to get her fired because she was seeing a guy that she didn't really know, and he happened to be a shady character. And was she even seeing him? She was just hanging out with him at his casino and going out into the desert with him. This trip was the second one, not the third or more advanced number in a series of visits.
“So what do you guys want from me?” she asked.
“Not a whole lot, actually,” James said. “We just want you to be aware of what is going on and what will happen if we pick you up again with this guy.”
“Oh! Speaking of what's going on,” Brian said. “The dead bodies’ thing, in the desert. That was a message. One of the old, long-in-the-tooth bastards was sending a message. And what do you think that message was?”
Tyra shrugged.
“War,” Brian said. “Las Vegas is going to plunge back into the bad old days of the mobsters fighting it out in the streets.”
“And although Vinnie has a lot to do with that,” James said. “Let's not give him all the credit. Some of the old fuckers living high on top of their casinos are seeing death approach them year by year. And you know what? They don't want to die in bed. They think about how their fathers died, shooting it out in the streets. And they think about how, as death approaches, people forget the legacy of this town and all of the bodies out in the desert. And they want a little bit of that action, you understand? They don't want to just go to sleep and not wake up. They want to die with their boots on, not in some hospital bed.”
“So there will be armed conflict again,” Brian said. “And open hostilities. People are going to die in the street like dogs, gunned down by people who don't care about anything but themselves.”
“That's the problem with this town,” James said. “The real problem. People don't look at Vegas as their home, or even as a place where they live. Vegas to them is a little fiefdom off by itself in America's west and they want to rule it. They don't just want a big slice of the pie, they want the whole pie. They want the whole pie and they want a pot of coffee right by it, and outside they want to see their men shooting it out with other men, and they want people to live in fear. That's what they want. And that's what Vinnie wants as well, even if he does feed you some highfalutin talk about why he's here.”
Tyra looked at the table. The talks she'd gotten from Vinnie about his motives and his intentions really hadn't been full of ideals. It had been all business. He wanted to be the best. He wanted to make the rules and run the show. He wanted respect and even fear.
“I see he hasn't even had those talks with you,” Brian said. “Well, I'm not judging you at all. Seriously, there is no judgment from me or James. As detectives in Vegas, we've seen it all. But seriously, just think about the things we've talked about right here.”
They both stood up.
“Am I free to go?” Tyra asked.
“One more thing,” James said. “I want you to watch something. I think it would be really enlightening for you.”
Both of the men left and Tyra sat at the table wondering what the last thing would be. How much longer were they going to chew her ear off? At some point the whole thing was a little bit asinine. She got that Vinnie was in the mob. She knew that now, what she had only the inkling of when she'd first come out here. So Vinnie was in the mob and engaged in some kind of power struggle here in Las Vegas and his family was pulling the strings from far away in Italy, maybe.
But what else was there to go over? They'd just talked about how they would try to ruin her life if she got picked up again with Vinnie. They'd gone over how her arrest would show up on background checks and stuff like that. There had been a lot that they'd gone over.
The room was still as she waited. The kind of stillness she imagined deer felt when they looked across a meadow during hunting season. There was a lot going on that she didn't know about, and she knew that. It was something she'd heard Dick Cheney call a “known unknown.” The detectives had told her some interesting stories, and she had no doubt that all of them were true to some extent.
But there had to be a lot of untruth as well. There was no way that the two law men she'd just talked to had told her the whole truth. That just wasn't how things worked. The detectives had a job to do, and right now they were trying to create some division between her and Vinnie in hopes that it would rattle
Vinnie up until that point would just want to back off the entire thing. The law wanted Vinnie out of the town to prevent some kind of impending gang war, some kind of conflict that would drag the town decades back to when armed men openly ruled the streets and the towering casinos not only filled the skyline but also levitated above the law.
Tyra put her head down on the table in exhaustion. She wondered when the cops could be back to get her. And slowly, she drifted off to sleep.
*
It was the kind of dream that Tyra immediately knew she was dreaming. She stood on a hill top in a grassy field. All around her the forest stretched out from the hill’s bald head. Tyra started to turn and look around to get her bearings and found a huge mountain range behind her. On the other side of the hill opposite of the range a flat prairie ran as far as her eye could see. She thought about sitting down and waiting to see what would happen next, but something told her she had to get moving.
Just when she started to walk down the trail leading into the forest, away from the mountains, she heard the clap and roll of thunder behind her. Somewhere, deeper in the range, a storm was raging. She tried to see over the mountain tops but couldn't quite make out what was happening. All she could see were the very top of some clouds and a flash like a strobe light forming the lightning. Turning her back on the barely visible spectacle, she headed down into the forest.
As soon as she entered the forest the sound from the storm became inaudible. The forest was silent. And it wasn't just silent as in the absence of sound, but as in a stifling, smothering presence of non-sound. She stepped lightly down the path, peering into the darkness of the forest. It wasn't long before she was far enough away from the hilltop that the light from the opening into the forest was nothing but a pin prick.
Tyra wasn't scared though. When she'd been a kid she'd loved running around the forest and playing with her friends. She'd grown up on the edge of a bad part of town, but luckily the edge she'd inhabited had been the one right next to a bunch of public land that had been annexed by the state because in years past, the government had made chemical weapons in a secret base deep in the wooded area.
Tyra and her friends knew where to find the abandoned government compound, now ringed with razor wire, but they never went inside. Not because they were scared, but because they knew from some of the sick animals they found dying in gruesome spasms, that the compound still held some kind of vengeful ill will toward the living, as if the chemicals the government had created stood guard’ waiting
for interlopers to cross the threshold.
The forest she was in now was very different from the wooded area of her youth, though. There were sounds from far off in the trees, sounds that had to be made by someone or something. They sounded like there was more than one, and sometimes the sounds would lift up into the trees and travel rapidly through their crowns. Tyra didn't know what to make of all this, but knew she was dreaming, so she wasn't scared. At least not scared enough to worry about her safety.
She pressed on into the forest not knowing where the path was leading. Eventually she got tired, though, and started to question if the path was really leading anywhere or if she was in some kind of labyrinth like in the myths of old. If she was, she hoped there was no Centaur waiting for her. She thought about stepping off the trail to get a stick that she could maybe use to defend herself, but the forest was so thick that she would have to crawl, and even then she'd risk having her clothes and skin torn on some of the meaner looking branches.
