by Vu Tran
Her voice had gotten small, and she was picking at a thread on the bedcover. She became a child all of a sudden, as though she’d been spending the last ten minutes suppressing any part of herself that might seem young or feminine or weak. She was a clarified version of her mother, with all the carefulness but none of the mystery, and that somehow eased my mind amid the shock of all she was telling me.
The moment passed and she stood from the bed, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “By the way—what did you mean, ‘at least she’s alive’? Were you afraid she was dead?”
“Not exactly. I just want to find her as soon as possible and make sure she’s okay.”
She was studying me again with that hard burrowing stare. “She divorced you, didn’t she?” I must have shown some annoyance because she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
I swallowed and waved away the apology. “It’s all right. Your mother did leave me. And yes, I’ve never stopped caring for her.” She nodded sheepishly, so I pressed on, “Tell me about that third letter.”
“That was the oddest one. It came last Saturday. She says she’s going somewhere, and that before she leaves she has to give me something. She also says that one of these days everything will be explained to me. Still not sure what she means by ‘everything.’ I don’t know if it’s me or her English or if she’s just trying to be the most mysterious person on earth.”
“She had a habit of that too. Don’t take it personally.”
The girl almost smiled, which startled me, made me aware of how intimate our conversation had become.
I said, “Did she give you any indication in her letters that she wanted to meet?”
Her face fell, again that childish demeanor, that instant smallness, eyes averted and lips pursed. “No. I figured she might be here, waiting for me. I was all ready with things to say.”
I looked around the room. “So what did she leave you?”
She shrugged. “Didn’t have much time to look before you started knocking on the door.”
I walked into the bathroom and started searching the cabinets, the tub, the hamper. Mai was picking through the nightstand drawer when I came back out. “The dresser has nothing either.”
“Have you checked the closet?”
She shook her head.
The brown carry-on suitcase stood beside the ironing board in the closet, with a notecard taped to it. Mai, written in red marker. I carried it to the bed. It weighed a good thirtysomething pounds and looked brand-new.
“I’ll do it if you want,” I said, but she was already trying to unzip it. Then we both saw the small silver lock.
She grabbed her purse and rummaged through it until she finally fished out a tiny chrome key. “This was also in the envelope.” She shrugged apologetically. “I didn’t know yet if I should tell you.”
She inserted the key into the lock, and it opened. She hesitated a second before unzipping the carry-on and flipping it open.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she whispered.
It was packed with jumbled bricks of cash. She picked up one and flipped through the twenty-dollar bills. I did too. Fifty bills a brick. It took me a while to count all the bricks. About a hundred in all.
“Goddamn,” I said. “There’s got to be a hundred grand here.”
“They’re real,” she muttered, inspecting a bill under the lamplight and feeling it between her fingers. She plopped herself on the bed beside the carry-on. “She left this all for me?”
“I don’t think it’s hers to leave.” I gently took the brick from her hand. She gave me a defensive look. I replaced the money and zipped up the suitcase and went through the outer pockets and sleeves. Nothing but a few silica gel packets.
I turned to her. “Mai, listen to me carefully. Do you know a man named Sonny Nguyen?”
She shook her head.
“Are you sure? He plays a lot of poker in town. Short, bald, about fifty. Mean-looking.”
“Half the Vietnamese guys that play are balding and trying to look mean. One at every table.”
“How about a Jonathan Nguyen?”
“Am I supposed to know these guys?”
“Well, Sonny is your mother’s new husband. Jonathan is his son. This is their money.”
“You know this for sure? Why can’t it be hers?”
“A hundred grand? Your mother had nothing when she left me, and she stopped working when she married Sonny. I doubt he’s this generous. She took this money from him. No wonder they’re desperate to find her.” I banged my fist on the suitcase. “Goddamn it, how can she be this stupid! She didn’t think they’d come after you too?”
Mai gave me a moment before saying, “Maybe I should be scared, but I’m more confused than anything. Who are these guys?”
I turned away from her so she couldn’t see my face and that exasperated flush that only Suzy could inflict on me.
“I guess you can call them businessmen,” I said. “High-class smugglers, actually, gamblers in every way. The father’s got an ugly temper and has had more than a few run-ins with the law, so the son seems to run everything—a restaurant, a pet store, black-market shit, who knows what else. Anyway, it’s not about who they are. It’s about what they’re willing to do to get what they want. And now I know what they want.”
“But you said you were helping them.”
“I didn’t have a choice. Listen, I don’t have time now to explain. You need to leave this hotel. They can’t know you were here or who you are or that you even exist.”
She glanced again at the carry-on. “And what are you gonna do—stay here?” She gave me a stiff look, unsure of the accusation she was making but making it anyway.
“Hey, I don’t want any part of this. Trust me. If I had a choice, I’d be on the 15 back to Oakland.”
Her face tightened. I was using my severe-cop voice, but she wasn’t having any of it. We had a hundred grand in cash staring at us, and I was still as much a stranger to her as her own mother. That’s when it hit me, with relief but sudden melancholy, that Suzy had already come today and would not be coming again—that I no longer had a reason to be here.
I softened my tone. “How about this—I go with you. You barely know me, I know, but I need your help getting out of town, and you need my help too. We can’t be too careful about this. And the sooner we both go, the better.”
“Wait—you want me to leave town? Like, just up and go right now? And you’re just gonna explain this all later?”
Her voice was more shrill than it needed to be, like she was trying to convince herself not to take me seriously. I could see her mother’s stubbornness in her. All that loneliness that comes with refusing anything sensible the world gives you. And there it was again, my protective urge, heroic and sincere and ridiculous all at once. I wanted to shake her.
My father came to mind again. The same man who used to seize my mother by the neck in an argument, slap her hard sometimes if things got nasty—he once cuffed me on the back of the head for not holding the door for a woman at the store. “Be a man, would you?” he said.
I pulled out the surveillance photo of me and placed it on the bed in front of Mai.
“This is what they got on me. That’s Sonny on the floor. I put him there. Doesn’t look good, I know, but . . . last year he threw your mother down the stairs, broke her arm, nearly killed her. I came to Vegas five months ago to teach him a lesson. Turned out to be a pretty dumb idea. I put a gun to him here because he went at me with a kitchen knife. Asshole tried to plunge it into my fucking heart. You’ll just have to trust me on that one.” I pulled up my sleeve to show her the scar on my wrist. “The son did this and also broke all my fingers to warn me away from his father. I didn’t listen. Now they’re blackmailing me with this surveillance footage so that I’ll find your mother for them—though it’s apparently the money they really want. They might know nothing about you, but they might know everything, and until I can figure out what is wh
at, you and I need to go some where where they can’t find us. And believe me—they’ll find us in Vegas.”
Her eyes darted back and forth between me and the photo, blinking back the questions. A gambler’s knee-jerk skepticism. Or maybe she was finally scared.
“You don’t have to believe that I’m an upstanding guy,” I said. “But at least you know I’m not crazy. I wouldn’t make us both walk away from a hundred thousand dollars if these guys weren’t dangerous.”
“So we’re just leaving it all here?”
“Have you been listening?” I grabbed her purse off the dresser and handed it to her. “Now please tell me you fucking drove here.”
“Okay, okay. Yeah, my car’s in the parking garage. Casino level.”
I put the lock back on the suitcase and carried it to the closet. I remembered the five hundred dollars Junior had given me and stuffed it in an outer pocket, then grabbed the notecard with Mai’s name before closing the closet. I made a point of giving her back the tiny chrome key and also offered her the notecard. She gave the closet one last glance as she followed me out of the room.
Once we arrived next door, I started throwing all my stuff into the duffel bag. She looked around as though she’d been led into some labyrinth. She tried the knob of the adjoining door like a child poking a mannequin for signs of life. I went to get my Glock from the nightstand and she watched me stick it in the back of my jeans. I think it hit her then, the gravity of the situation.
“Ready?” I opened the door.
She didn’t move. Again, that stare. “You never told me how you knew to come here.”
I sighed and let the door slowly close. “Your mother,” I said. “She’s been coming to that room every Thursday night for a few months now. They had her followed but never found out what she was doing here. I can’t even begin to guess. She liked being alone. Always has. So maybe that’s all it was—a room to be alone in. Anyway, they were hoping she’d show up today since it was booked again in her name. She did, apparently.”
I had missed Suzy in the last few hours. In fact, she might have passed me and made herself invisible somehow, as was her way. She might have even read my note, left it there on the floor.
“She’s still in town then,” Mai pointed out.
“Maybe. But she’s made as big a mess as I have. I can’t clean up both at the same time. Not with you in the mix.” She was about to say something else, but again I opened the door. “We need to go. You can tell me once we’re on the road.”
At the elevators, I took a moment. “Describe your car for me. In detail.”
“An old black Jeep, a CJ-7. Big fat tires, ragtop. Real dirty. The passenger door is scraped pretty bad.”
“Okay. You shouldn’t be seen with me, in case Sonny has eyes here. Once we get down there, start walking to the garage. I’ll follow you from a ways back. Just go to your car and then drive up to the casino entrance in the garage, and I’ll wait for you there.” I tapped the elevator button.
She was looking askance at me.
I dug out my badge for her. “Here.” I placed it in her hand. “In case you’re still wondering.”
She weighed it in her palm as though weighing its authenticity, and mine. It occurred to me that I was supposed to be the good guy in all this whether I was wearing that badge or not.
The elevator dinged open. The cell phone in my pocket rang.
7
“WHO IS IT?” Mai whispered.
UNKNOWN CALLER appeared on the phone’s display.
“It’s the son.” I nudged her into the elevator. An old couple stepped aside and nodded at us with polite smiles, and the doors closed. I silenced the phone on the fourth ring.
“I’ll call him once we’re out of here,” I said under my breath. She was peering at the breast pocket of my jacket, where the phone was.
The old woman leaned over and tapped my arm, the gold bracelets on her wrist rattling. “Pardon me, sweetie—have you-all tried the buffet?” she asked, her southern accent as frail as her hands.
“Not yet, ma’am,” I said.
The old woman glanced at Mai and smiled, still talking to me. “I hear they got Chinese food too. And Japanese and Mexican and Italian. Little bit of everything.” She chuckled sweetly.
I tried to look impressed.
Her husband ignored her and so did Mai, who had taken out a pen and was scribbling something on a business card. When the elevator opened, she handed me the card and murmured, “The number to my cell—just in case,” and we walked out separately. I stood to the side and lit a cigarette as I watched her thread her way through the swarm of afternoon gamblers. It was a card for some place called the Midnight Room. Her number was written on the back.
Everyone had a cell phone in this town, even people who had no one to call. Always on the move, these people. Always ready for the next destination.
The old woman tapped me again on the arm, smiling and squinting through her owlish spectacles. “What a pretty oriental wife you got.”
Her husband, who was dressed in a bolo tie and a pea-green suit that looked as old as I was, pulled her by the hand. “Thelma, let’s go.” As they walked away with her holding his arm, I could hear him mutter to her, “That’s not his wife, dear.”
The cell phone was ringing again and I ignored it and started across the casino floor. Mai’s figure turned the corner and vanished. She moved like someone accustomed to walking away from people at the slightest provocation. She didn’t know how to trust people, or maybe she just didn’t on principle. My father once told me he was glad I was a boy because girls were either too trusting or too suspicious, and he had no patience for either thing, especially if he was to teach someone how to survive the world.
A waitress, all legs and bust, was approaching me with an empty tray, mistaking my stare for thirst or desire or whatever it was that men usually eyed her for. What I really wanted was to toss the cell on her tray and make a clean run for the city limits, cut my losses and abandon everything to this desert dust, consequences be damned. Knowing I couldn’t and wouldn’t do that pissed me off all the more.
Suzy had always been rash like this, blindfolded half the time—a hungry infant one day, a sullen child the next. And now she’d left her daughter a poisoned gift and somehow contaminated me as well. For two years I had mislaid that anger she was so good at stoking, and locating it again made me at once nostalgic and bitter, as helpless as I’d always been, and now with more questions than ever. Maybe getting Mai out of town was me protecting myself from all that old impotence.
I weaved through crowds of people whooping and high-fiving each other around the table games, then passed solitary men roaming the floor as though adrift on their cigarette smoke, deaf to the singing slot machines. A casino, I’d always thought, was a carousel of hope and hopelessness. I’d been to a few in California. They were all the same. You come for your drinks, your music and dancing, and of course your spin with fate, and then you win or lose, and then you either leave or go right back and seek shelter at another game, another chance at fortune. But when you’re there, you can’t hide. Not for long. Not with so much hope everywhere.
Maybe that’s what drew people like Sonny and Mai to this place. Its endlessness. The thought quickened me toward the exit.
In the lobby, a gaggle of young women in tight skirts and high heels were snapping photos in front of the giant glittering Christmas tree. One of them accosted me with her camera and begged me to take their picture. In the viewfinder, they raised their drinks and blew me bright lipsticked kisses. I walked away annoyed by my desire for them.
Outside the casino entrance, I waited several minutes before Mai’s Jeep finally lumbered up, tires as high as my waist. She was dwarfed by it, a schoolgirl behind the steering wheel. The Jeep was dusty and pockmarked and had a rusted foot-long gash on the passenger door, which creaked open.
“I need your room key,” I said, tossing my duffel bag inside.
“Why?” Sh
e was gripping the steering wheel with both hands.
“The money is all they want, and we’re giving it back to them. We’ll need to leave them the key somewhere here.”
She looked confused but fished the keycard out of her purse. I walked to a row of potted ferns by the wall and slipped the keycard into one of the large stone pots, pushing it into the dirt. Mai watched me carefully from the Jeep.
As soon as I got back inside, my cell started ringing, and again I silenced it.
“You’re not answering?”
“Not until we’re miles from this place. He’ll call again. Head for I-15 going south. Once we’re on the highway, I’ll answer and tell him how to get the money, and we’ll see what he says from a safe distance.”
We exited the parking garage and the desert sun hit us like a camera flash. I peered through the rear window, checking all the cars behind us. The facade of the Coronado went white in the sunlight, quickly receding as Mai barreled down the streets.
I was escaping a burning house again, I thought—but was I also abandoning someone inside?
Mai played with the heater, but it didn’t seem to be working. She spoke up, “There’s something I haven’t told you.” She stared hard at the road, shifting gears like she was restraining an angry animal. “On Tuesday a woman came to my door. Vietnamese woman. Woke me in the middle of the afternoon with her loud knocking. I’d never seen her before in my life. She had glasses on and was wearing a casino uniform and a baseball cap low over her eyes, and she asked me, real serious, if I was Mai. I noticed a cut on her lip and a bruise under her eye that she tried to cover up with makeup. When I said yes, she asked if my mother had contacted me. I was too stunned to say anything, but I guess she could see the answer on my face. She told me that if I saw my mother, if I had any way of reaching her, I had to tell her to leave town at once. Tell her Happy said this, she told me. Tell her Happy means it.”
