Luke - Sex, Violence and Vice in Sin City

by Aaron Cohen

  Chapter Five

  Artie comes awake. Little pains dance deep in the muscles of his arms and legs. He pushes toward consciousness. He trembles, like the Taser is still running a current through him. He wants to vomit, breathes in and out of his mouth, willing his insides to be calm.

  It is dark and hot. He’s on a bed, his sweaty head on a pillow.

  Why doesn’t someone turn on the goddamn air conditioning? It smells like arm pits and old cheese in here.

  He can’t see anything. He squints, staring into the dark, picking up a little light, dim images form just a few feet away from him.

  There is a bed next to his, someone in it. He leans closer. It’s a man with a mustache, sweaty, fast asleep. Who the hell?

  A sizzle, and a flame flickers alive across the room. A man lights a cigarette, an old man with big eyes and long dark hair. He looks like a ghost, the glow of his cigarette reflecting in his eyes, big bug eyes, bloodshot. He’s sitting, looking at Artie with no expression, no surprise, no acknowledgement, like everything is normal.

  Artie doesn’t want to cause a commotion or attract attention. The plan is to tiptoe out the door and away from wherever the hell he is, hopefully without vomiting. What is that smell? Moldy fish? Resisting the urge to run is difficult.

  Artie checks for restraints and there are none. He appears to be free to go. He slides over the side of the bed and lands on a wooden floor. The ghost man doesn’t move, doesn’t seem to care, just watches. A soft snore issues from the sleeping man.

  Artie walks around the bed and sees a door past four more beds. He seems to be in some kind of hostel or bunk house or something. A prison? A dungeon? People are sleeping in the beds, giant lumps covered in sheets that rise and fall as they breathe. Are they prisoners too? He knows the door is locked, just knows it. He is a prisoner. He is kidnapped and is going to be ransomed for…Who kidnaps dwarf accountants? It makes no sense. Why the hell am I here?

  He takes the door knob in his chunky little hand and turns it. Click. It isn’t locked. He pushes the door open and light floods the room.

  “Ooooo my eyes, man, can you please closethefuckingdoor?” says the smoking man in a heavy Mexican accent.

  “Sorry,” Artie croaks with a still parched throat. He walks into a dusty bar filled with neon beer signs and a pool table. A setting sun streams in from a picture window at the front, painting everything in gentle pinks, yellows and reds. Artie remembers that sun trying to kill him.

  He closes the door behind him, his eyes adjusting to the light, and looks around. He prepares for a fight. Someone is going to run at him, try and capture him again. He’s going to have to bite some more Mexican flesh, find some balls to punch.

  Bring it on. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.

  Three big, leather-vest-wearing guys are downing beers at the bar, watching a soccer game from a TV dangling from the ceiling. They don’t seem to care about anything other than the announcer’s excited rambling in Spanish. A couple of Latino girls sit in a booth behind the pool table, smiling, chit-chatting with….They are sitting on either side of…No way, could it be?…Cecil!

  “Cecil?” he asks.

  “Artie?” Cecil calls out. “It’s you! It is you! My fine little runt! Come here and meet my new friends!”

  Cecil looks relaxed and happy, which means he is freshly laid. You can tell with him. He’s in borrowed clothes, clothes he’d not be caught dead in, black T-shirt with a hooded grim reaper, black jeans (which Cecil banished from his closet in 1992 after a long run of being “in”), and cowboy boots, banned since the mid-70s. But here he is, making it work, with a girl on each arm, his face handsomely tan, goddamn him, while Artie’s own is sunburn fried.

  “Where the hell are we?” Artie asks and walks to the booth, his eyes now on a sweating pitcher of beer.

  “My friend, our journey from frying pan to fire has been detoured. We are now at The Oasis.”

  “Beer?”

  “Feel free.”

  The girls laugh as Artie lifts the pitcher of ice cold beer, which is as big as his head, and lifts it to his lips. He pours it down his mouth like he’s putting out a fire.

  “The little one is so thirsty,” says one of the girls is Spanish. “Is he okay?”

  “As okay as he’ll ever be, my dear,” says Cecil. “For a little man on a mission.”

  ***

  A few miles away, the red Cadillac El Dorado sits on the side of the desert road where Cecil and Artie left it. A massive black SUV pulls up behind it. The El Dorado — with its voluptuous curves and a cherry red paint job — looks lonely, sad, abandoned like a jilted lover after a quarrel.

  Three large, black-suited men with sunglasses get out of the SUV and get busy looking at the ground, the road, and the horizon, searching. One of them takes pictures of the car, interior and exterior.

  “Idiots ran out of gas,” he says to himself after examining the dashboard.

  He walks along the side of the road, rocky, dusty, dead scrub, no clue yet as to where the prey went.

  Another scans the horizon with a pair of binoculars, starting left and scanning right. Back and forth. Seeing nothing but desert and sky.

  The third walks out onto the unpaved desert road Artie and Cecil had strolled down, a road so thin and ill-kempt it can barely be called a road, more of a trail really.

  “Tracks!” he calls out.

  “They didn’t stay on the main road?” the other says.

  “Freaking idiots,” says the one with the camera, who takes photos of the tracks. “They’re probably baked by now.”

  “They won’t be hard to find. Just look for the buzzards.”

  “Just drive until you see a scalded midget and a naked old man wearing a white robe and gold earrings.”

  “Each tanned to a golden brown.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They pile into the SUV and crank the AC up as high as it will go.

  “Does anyone understand why we can’t take these jackets off?” asks the one in the back. “It’s like a thousand degrees out there.”

  “Because we work for a company with a dress code and that dress code is enforced at all hours of the working day,” says the driver.

  “I’m just asking,” says the guy in back, pouting a little.

  “If you’ve got a complaint, take it to David,” says the driver.

  “I heard,” says the guy in the front passenger’s seat, “that the last guy who complained about the suits to David ended up handing out fliers on The Strip wearing nothing but a Speedo in the Las Vegas sun. Not even shoes. Just a red, white and blue banana hammock on July 4th weekend. He got second degree sunburns on his ass cheeks. He was slathered in sun block, but the Speedo rode up on him throughout the day and he didn’t know it. He had his unprotected white ass hanging out for ten hours in the sun. Had blisters the size of quarters.”

  “You would look sexy in a Speedo,” the driver says to the guy sitting in back.

  “Just drive,” says the guy sitting in back and pouts a little more.

  Chapter Six

  The Oasis is a dusty roadside bar, the kind of place that serves cold beers and snacks to highway travelers, the kind of place that serves as the sole nightlife for a dozen or so locals who have nowhere else to go on a long hot evening. Out front, there are beer signs and a torn, faded banner advertising last year’s Monday Night Football schedule. “The party is inside,” the banner promises.

  There are lots of bars like this on the roads one takes to Las Vegas. However, The Oasis isn’t on a road that goes to Las Vegas. To get to it, you have to turn off of the road that goes to Las Vegas, onto another road, onto another road, which curves around behind a rock outcropping that is just big enough to provide shade when the sun is about an hour from setting. The road The Oasis is on is on no map.

  The Oasis is a bar, and does serve drinks and offers pool and video poker to those few who know how to get there. That is not its real purpose. It is a weigh
station in an underground railroad that leads from Mexico, through Arizona, and into Las Vegas where work can be found, construction and landscaping for men, maid work in hotels for women. The immigrants save for years to pay for safe passage to the land of the free and the home of endless need for inexpensive labor.

  Sometimes The Oasis is also a kind of employment agency, which is why Owen Walkenski is pulling up in his shiny white pickup truck with a bed big enough to hold 6 guys and a couple of lawn mowers. With him is his nephew Luke, who he raised since he was a baby, and now, at the ripe old age of 30, is hankering to leave the family business and build his own life. But there is work to do first.

  Owen runs three landscaping services, one in Pahrump, another in Las Vegas, and another in the suburb of Henderson. He specializes in desert landscaping, but would also be happy to sod your lawn in lush Kentucky bluegrass if you want to pretend you live in Florida and don’t mind enormous water bills. He thinks of himself as a kind of farmer with crops of well-placed rocks and cacti.

  Jerry, the owner of The Oasis, stands out front, a wiry little guy in a wife-beater T-shirt, mustache, faded jeans, big silver belt buckle and beat-to-shit cowboy boots. Owen has known Jerry for years and finds the man somewhere between amusing and annoying. Jerry claims he is half-Mexican, half-Jewish, and often jokes he’d converted to Judaism so his wife couldn’t make him mow the lawn on Saturdays. Whenever Jerry negotiates, and is asking for more money, he tries to lighten the mood, mentions the half-Jewish thing and laughs.

  Owen actually is Jewish and doesn’t think that shit is funny, but he likes Jerry well enough.

  Jerry smiles and waves as Owen and Luke walk up to the entrance.

  Jerry drops his smile and looks into the front door, looking annoyed. He lifts two fingers to his mouth and issues a piercing whistle that can be heard in states where gambling and prostitution remain illegal. “Pronto!” he shouts.

  Out walk eight tanned young men in T-shirts, jeans, and baseball caps. Jerry’s guys always wear just about the same thing. Nothing if not practical, he knows he can’t send his employees out to work wearing what they came to him with.

  Making the trip up from Mexico in the back of a truck with 50 other people means not taking a lot of luggage. The clothes you wear on the trip become so infused with filth and stink they become suitable only for burning.

  Jerry’s solution? A North Las Vegas thrift store, in exchange for cheap labor, gives him promotional ball caps and T-shirts left over from the hundreds of conventions Las Vegas hosts every year. In today’s lineup, the prospective employees are advertising the services of computer companies, industrial lubricants, medical supplies, anti-cholesterol drugs and, of course, internet porn.

  “These guys look a little scrawny,” Owen says. “Any of them speak English?”

  “Not a word,” Jerry says. “You really should learn their language. How do you get by?”

  “I’ve got my translator,” Owen says.

  Luke chats in Spanish to the guys, asking them where they’ve worked before, if they’ve operated lawn equipment, if they’ve ever been in trouble with the law.

  Cecil strolls through the door with a grin and approaches Owen like they are long lost army buddies. Cecil puts his hand out for a shake.

  “Translator, sir?” asks Cecil in his British accent. “My name is Cecil, and I believe I can be of help. I speak many languages and have a variety of skills.”

  Owen shakes the guy’s hand and wonders what planet he teleported in from.

  “I’d be happy to offer my services,” Cecil says. “In exchange for a ride to Las Vegas, and a small fee of course.”

  Owen has met a lot of wise guys in his time, worked with the Las Vegas Organization when it was truly an organization. In his younger days as a casino VIP guest host, he kept the Rat Pack fed and watered with alcohol, grass and broads. To keep high rollers rolling dice and on the property, he dealt with all manner of whores and pimps, exotic tastes and out-and-out perversions. Later in his career, he had been practically the founder of the gay community in Vegas because he was the producer of five running stage extravaganzas in need of hair, make up, costume design, set design, and quite often, a thin, tall body that could fit into the costumes, walk in heels and have a neck strong enough to wear a 50-pound head dress. What the guys in the audience didn’t know about their show “girls” didn’t hurt them.

  Cecil takes the cake. Here is a guy Owen can’t quite peg, and if there is one talent Owen has, it is figuring out who a person is and what they want in about 10 milliseconds.

  British? That is a bullshit accent, but not badly done. Slightly effeminate, but not gay, seems more like an act, probably for the ladies. Gold chains, gold earrings, gold bracelet, gold pinky ring, the guy likes jewelry more than a woman. Super tan, perfect white teeth, the smile of a salesman…This guy works the angles. This guy is trouble. What the hell is he doing here?

  “I said I don’t need a translator,” Owen says. “What brings you out here?”

  “Tragically, my car issued her last breath not so far from here and I was lucky enough to find this oasis before the sun reduced me to ashes,” Cecil says.

  “Why here?” Owen asks. “People don’t find this place unless they have a reason to.”

  “Sir, I assure you my presence here is a mere mistake, the result of a car that burns gas at a higher rate than I expected.”

  Owen knows this is bullshit, and knows he’s never going to get anything resembling the truth out of this guy. But what the hell? Why not? The guy is amusing.

  “All right, all right, we’ll give you a lift to Vegas,” Owen says.

  “Bless you sir, bless you,” Cecil says. “Your good deed will not go unrewarded.”

  Luke steps behind Owen and whispers into his ear: “The guy on the left there, with the diarrhea medicine T-shirt, he’s got prison tats. He did some serious time somewhere.”

  “Is there a problem?” Jerry asks.

  Owen puts his arm around Jerry and walks him five steps away from everyone else, whispering into his ear.

  “What are you trying to pull?” Owen asks. “One of those guys, who I’m going to have working in the backyards of my customers, has prison tats. I told you to keep criminals the hell out of my truck. Don’t pull that bullshit again.”

  “My apologies,” Jerry says. “I had no idea.”

  “Never again, you understand?”

  “Of course, of course, so sorry about that.”

  “But I will take the rest. We’ve got a few big jobs starting tomorrow.”

  “Excellent news!”

  Jerry barks commands in Spanish, tells the men to get in the truck. The one with prison tattoos slowly walks back into the bar, no emotion on his face.

  The seven illegal immigrants climb into the back of the pick-up with Cecil.

  The door to the bar bursts open and out shoots a trotting midget.

  “Wait for me! Wait for me!” the midget says.

  Cecil reaches down from the back of the pickup’s bed and pulls the little guy up.

  “What the hell?” Owen asks.

  Luke raises his arm in exasperation and says, “I don’t know! Didn’t you offer to give them a ride?”

  “Oh yeah,” Jerry says. “Forgot to tell you. Cecil has a friend.”

  “He is my assistant,” Cecil says. “Never go anywhere without him.”

  “Your assistant,” Owen says. “Whatever.”

  Owen’s bullshit meter is now pinging into the red, but he doesn’t care. He’s got work to do. What trouble could come from giving a ride to a couple weird dudes?

  ***

  Inside the bar, the two Latinas watch the scene. Not much happens at The Oasis other than idiot men getting into stupid fights and then trying to fuck after drinking too much beer. Cecil and Artie were excelante entertainment after a few months of putting up with that.

  They liked Cecil. He made them laugh, spoke perfect Spanish, and he gave them the names of four Vega
s strip joints where they could work without needing to speak a lot of English.

  Luke is who they think about now. They study him with long lingering looks. He is tall with flowing blond hair down to his shoulders and blue eyes you can see from a mile away. He looks innocent, vulnerable, and boyish, but at the same time there is something in the way he moves, something about the way he is built with his lean torso, long legs, broad chest, and muscled arms that makes a girl know this is a guy who would be a well-mannered, eager-to-please machine in bed.

  “That is one delicious gringo,” says one of them.

  “I’d like to fuck that boy, give him a bath and make him dinner,” says the other one.

  ***

  A few miles away, the black SUV slows to a stop. The gravel road they were following comes to a dusty end at a dried creek bed. There doesn’t seem to be anything around for miles even remotely friendly to human life.

  “Where the fuck did they go?” asks the driver.

  The guy in the passenger seat examines a map of Nevada. He looks confused.

  “The road we’re on doesn’t exist,” he says.

  “It’s not on the map, but it definitely exists,” says the driver.

  “You know what?” says the guy in the back seat behind the driver.

  “What?” asks the driver, who does not want to tell David he lost an old man and a midget on foot in the desert.

  “I just bought a new iPhone yesterday.”

  “What the fuck do I care about how you spend your money?” asks the driver, who fantasizes about strangling the guy.

  “I can get maps and satellite images.”

  “Oh.” The driver feels a little better.

  “There is a building, or something, about three miles south of here. It’s kind of small, but does have a parking lot, but this is weird, no roads around it. Nothing but dirt. What kind of business is that?”

  “I think I might have a guess,” says the driver. “I know who to call.”