I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  He smiled. “Places.”

  Once I was back outside, I saw Mike holding a pistol at arm’s length and aiming it at the Dumpster. And then I heard pop! He must have slipped a noise suppressor over the barrel. I looked up at the apartment window. Ginger’s woman and child were gone—she to call the cops, I was certain. I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I hate rats.”

  “Is that rat bothering you?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Rats don’t want trouble; they want food.” I opened the passenger door.

  “What animal do you hate?”

  “You mean hate it so if I saw one, I’d kill it?”

  “Right.”

  “None.”

  “Not even those fish that swim up your dick and stay there? Not them?”

  “Fish?”

  “Toothpick fish. Jesus, Coyote, your knowledge of the animal kingdom is pitiful.”

  “Can we get a move on?”

  “Now I have to pee.”

  “So pee right here.”

  “Like a dog? No, thank you.”

  When Mike returned and drew out the pistol he’d tucked into the back of his slacks, he opened a storage space beneath the cargo deck where you might expect to find a spare tire and a jack. What we found were two rifles, a shotgun, another pistol, and an AK-47.

  I said, “What if that cop had searched us?”

  “All legal.”

  “All necessary?”

  “We’ll see.”

  WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a sweet and leisurely evening for Mike and me turned sour and turbulent in an Albuquerque minute. Mike had dozed off to sleep in our room at the Rodeway Inn Midtown while I watched the local news and learned that we had won $5,000 in the lottery. I couldn’t help myself. I slapped the arm of the chair and said, “Goddamn!”

  Mike stirred. “What?”

  I told him what. He said we should celebrate.

  We drove down Central Avenue looking for a bar that sang to us. Zinc Bar, nope. Kelley’s Pub. Nope. Scalo’s? Too grand. Two Fools Tavern? Too close to home. Something Brew Pub. Something Else Bistro. Cantina Lobo—that’s it! We found a parking space across the street and down the block. And then we found a guy slapping a woman in the face down the alley beside the cantina. Strapping fellow, wispy woman. Then the asshole grabbed her by the throat and shoved her against the brick wall. I looked at Mike and thought, We can’t even go out for a drink without finding trouble. Mike grabbed the guy’s shoulder, spun him around, and head-butted him. The goon’s shattered nose gushed blood; he dropped to his knees and threw up. The woman cried.

  I said, “Are you okay?”

  Mike said, “He won’t bother you again.”

  I said, “We should call the cops.”

  Mike said, “But we don’t want to see the cops.”

  “Right,” I said. I took the trembling woman’s elbow. “Come with us.”

  The assailant tried to speak. Mike planted a foot in the guy’s ribs and rolled him over onto his back. His Duke City Gym T-shirt was soaked in blood and dribbled with vomit. The guy said, “You’ll be sorry.”

  Mike cupped his hand behind his ear. “I don’t hear so well in the dark.”

  I said, “We really need to go,” and we hurried to the car. I hopped in back with the remaining gas cans.

  Mike opened the passenger door for the woman and said, “Pardon our appearance while we’re remodeling.”

  Her left cheek was swollen and bruised. She did not want to go to the ER, and she was afraid to go home, and she didn’t want to get friends involved. She asked us to drop her off at the Best Western in Old Town.

  I said, “I’m Wylie, and this is—”

  “Paul,” Mike said.

  “Tracy,” she said.

  Mike said, “Here comes the cavalry.” Tracy’s assailant and three other bald, tattooed, pinheaded prednisone freaks with bitch-tits were waddling toward us, one of them wielding a baseball bat. There would be no reasoning with these four cock diesels in the throes of ’roid rage. Mike started the engine. The four jamokes surrounded the car. The batsman swung at the passenger window, sending Tracy into hysterics. The window shattered but did not break.

  When Mike backed up, we heard a nightmarish scream. The dashboard monitor showed that we had pinned one bonehead against the car behind us, and that sent Barry Bonds into a frenzy of window-clubbing. Another lummox climbed up the hood and onto the roof and began stomping. Mike excused himself to Tracy, reached across her to the glove box, took out a pistol, and fired a bullet through the roof. The stomping ceased. Tracy’s bloodied mugger stood in front of the car, pointing his finger at her, and slamming his mighty fists onto the hood. Mike ran him over, and we headed down Central away from the lights of the city center. I looked behind us and saw our flattened beast struggle to his feet. We made a right at the first dark street we saw, and the rooftop passenger slid off the car, onto the pavement, and rolled to the gutter.

  At the Best Western, Tracy thanked us for saving her life. We told her she should give the cops a call. She said she would. We watched her walk to the lobby. I said, “Her name’s not Tracy.”

  “What I was thinking.”

  “And Sluggo was her boyfriend.”

  “She’ll probably bring him soup at the hospital.”

  Mike dropped me at the Rodeway, said we needed a new car, and I’d only be in the way. He’d see me in the morning. I thought I’d never sleep, given the violence we’d just endured—all very disturbing, of course, but I was relieved, if not elated, that we had survived. After a glass of cognac, I was out.

  When I got out of the shower in the morning, Mike was sitting at the desk reading the complimentary newspaper. He told me that Paul Reed’s virtual cousin, Walter Becker, had rented a new car, and Mike led me out to the parking lot to see the sparkling silver Rogue, complete with fuel cans, arsenal, and beverages. I didn’t ask. I did beg for coffee. We stopped at a drive-thru place in a dingy neighborhood near I-40 for breakfast burritos and coffee. Mike called my attention to a burned-out shell of a car that was still smoldering on the swale of a dead-end street. He shook his head. “Someone’s having a worse day than we are.”

  WE CRESTED A BARREN hill at dusk, rounded a curve, and as we descended into Las Vegas Valley, there below us lay a sea of glistering light in the blank and pitiless expanse, and I agreed with Mike that the view was both exhilarating and miraculous, especially after driving so many hundreds of etherizing miles through empty and inhospitable desert.

  Bay called me on Mercedes’s cell and told me that Mike and I had reservations at the Aria. I was to go to our suite and stay put. My lawyer, Meyer Cohen, would be by at seven in the morning to escort me to police headquarters. Bay would meet us there. We’d enter through a side door, thereby avoiding any newspeople who might be lurking out front. We were actually doing the cops a favor. They were a little embarrassed, what with the revelations they accidently uncovered in their rush to judgment. The interview should be brief, and I’d be released. The hotel video showed me leaving the building and did not show me returning. The clerk verified the video. The video at Emeril’s showed me dining with Bay and Mercedes at the time of the alleged assault.

  “Your accuser admitted her mistake to the authorities, who then took her to Refuge House. Someone who wants you out of the way got to that girl.”

  “We need to go home, Bay. This town is preposterous.”

  “We have Layla’s case to solve. And maybe that’s what’s pissing someone off. Maybe you got hold of a loose thread, and someone’s afraid that if you keep tugging at it, you’ll unravel the whole valuable fabric of whatever it is they’re trying to keep secret.”

  I told Mike he was doing a hundred, and wouldn’t this be a silly time to get busted.

  He apologized and slowed. “I get excited.”

  Bay said, “I don’t know what that fabric might be, but we do know, as you said, there are a lot of people conspiring to keep her death a s
ecret. A confederacy of the culpable.”

  “Why?”

  “Because all the felonious libertines know who killed her. And they also know that crime is the engine driving the local economy. Even the cops depend on it. And the criminals need the cops to keep the other criminals in line so no one gets the upper hand. Otherwise—chaos, and that will get the entertainment czars to fold their silken tents and slouch off to Macau, and this place becomes a waste of desert sand once again.” And then he said, “I’m going to be a brother.”

  Bay’s dad, Little Bob, it seemed, had indeed gotten his forty-three-year-old inamorata, Lorena Linkletter, pregnant. “If it’s a boy, they’re naming him Pierre.”

  “Pierre Lettique,” I said. “Sounds like an expensive men’s fragrance.”

  “I’m thinking about suing the Viagra people for child support.”

  “Is he sure it’s his?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does he feel?”

  “He’s all swollen up like a bullfrog about to croak. The Flaubert Stud.”

  “And how’s the expectant mom?”

  “Lorena looked radiant in the photo they sent. Hair’s cantaloupe-colored, but that could be the light.” And then he told me to take the SIM card out of my phone, destroy it, and toss the phone when we hung up. Then he said he thought he and I should send flowers to the happy couple. And I agreed. And maybe money for a crib. Or maybe the crib instead of the money.

  7

  I SAID, “We need more data.”

  Bay said, “About?”

  “About Layla’s death. It’s a mistake to theorize before you have sufficient data. You begin to twist the facts to fit your theory, instead of the theory to suit the facts.”

  Bay cited my source. “Sherlock Holmes, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’”

  I said, “On the other hand, Einstein said that if your facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”

  Bay held out his hands, palms up, as if weighing the merits of our experts. “Sherlock?” He raised his left hand. “Albert?” His right. “And do we even have a theory? And what is a fact?”

  We were standing—actually, I was pacing—in the hallway of the police station while Meyer Cohen had a preliminary conference with Detective Sergeant Spooner and the Vegas Metro PD spokeswoman, Celia Rojas, who was both pregnant and perky, and evidently in the wrong line of work.

  Bay said, “A photograph is real. You can hold it in your hand. A photograph is a fact. But the image that the photograph depicts is not necessarily a fact.” He opened his wallet and slipped out a photograph of Little Bob in the seat of a John Deere tractor and little Bay on his lap, both of them smiling beneath their tractor hats and squinting into the camera.

  “You look blissful,” I said.

  “Not a fact,” he said. And then he fanned his fingers, and the photograph vanished.

  We were out of the police station by eight. I did not receive an official apology nor an explanation for the harassment, unless “These things happen” is one or the other. When I changed the subject and asked Spooner about the investigation into Layla’s baffling death, Meyer squeezed my elbow and shook his head. Rojas looked at Spooner; Spooner looked at his watch.

  The three of us went out for breakfast at Your Eggsellance. Eggs Benediction came with wafers of unleavened bread. I got the Benedict Arnold. Bay and Meyer built their own Sin City Omelets. Bay told us that he’d heard from Julie Wade. Blythe, aka Fawn, had shown up in Memphis ready to move into her deceased sister’s condo and to claim her inheritance. She arrived on the arm of a Vegas attorney named Lester Daum. Meyer smiled. He knew Daum. Crooked as a sack of snakes. And just as cold-blooded. A man fond of letting people know that the courtroom injunction to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth does not apply to the lawyers in the case. He practiced with his brother Leslie, in a firm known to other lawyers as Daum and Daumer or Less and Less. “Lester once defended a white man who had murdered three of his Mexican neighbors over in Pahrump by invoking the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes, saying his client only murdered the neighbors before they could murder him, a simple act of anticipated self-defense.”

  When Daum heard that Layla had left all of her assets to St. Jude’s Hospital and not to Blythe, he booked the next flight out. Julie knew the lawyer handling Layla’s estate. Julie found Blythe, fed her, got her into detox, and was hoping to find out what else Blythe might know about Layla’s passing once she was coherent. Julie told Bay her assistant Anita had resigned to have a baby, and if he knew anyone looking to get into detective work, to let her know.

  Bay said that Ruby Tuesday/Misty Roses/Audrey Blick had not resurfaced as far as he knew. And with that verb I remembered that Ruby had told me about the tunnels and the mole people. After Bodhi, our waiter, refreshed our coffees, I asked Meyer what he knew about the tunnels. Three hundred miles of them under the city, conduits for rainwater, he said. And, yes, folks live down there, some of them for years. Safer than the streets. Black as pitch, for the most part. Some people have furnished their camps with the mattresses and furniture the hotels discard. Bay asked me if I was going to eat those last couple of Marmite soldiers.

  DJANGO HAD LEARNED a new trick in my absence: the Prisoner. He enters a room, gets behind the door and up on his back legs. Then he walks the door to the jamb and pushes until it clicks shut, and now he’s stuck inside. He was clever, all right, but he still couldn’t turn a slippery doorknob, so he ended up scratching like crazy to be sprung. We’ll have to start shutting all the doors when we leave the house, Bay said.

  I found Django locked in my bedroom. When he saw me open the door, he blasted by me and into the living room, ran over the sofa, the chair, the TV, and up the curtains. I sat in the chair and he leaped to my lap. And then he who will not be cradled climbed my chest and licked my face.

  Bay made Irish coffees, told me Mike was asleep in the guest room and Mercedes was on her way. I called Elwood and asked him if he’d like to explore the tunnels with me this afternoon. He most definitely would. He’d be by soon. He told me he was working on a story about Lake Mead, the city’s shrinking reservoir. It seems all the male fish in the lake were becoming hermaphrodites. Probably a good idea to drink bottled water, he said.

  Mercedes arrived with a bouquet of red tulips and blue irises in honor of my vindication. Bay set out a tray of cubed pepper jack cheese and garlic-stuffed olives. We toasted the delusive judicial system.

  I asked Mercedes about her creative writing class. She told us that there were two warring factions in the class, the realists—of which she was one—and the fantasists, the people who don’t believe in climate change or evolution but do believe in elves, angels, and werewolves. Django hopped on her lap and gazed at me over the tabletop like I could so easily be replaced. Then he closed his golden eyes when Mercedes scratched the sweet spot on the top of his little noggin.

  Mike padded into the kitchen in his Venetian Casino robe. He said to no one in particular, “I’m not a has-been; I’m a will-be.” Mercedes said she was working on a story about identical twin brothers who’d been separated at birth. Django licked Mercedes’s fingers and stared at me. Mercedes said, “The one named Nyler was raised by their biological mother, the one named Teyton by their biological father. They never had contact, never knew that they were half of a matching pair until Nyler’s mom, on her deathbed, told him so, and Nyler went looking for his brother. And found him.”

  I said, “And then what?”

  “That’s as far as I’ve gotten. One’s happy, the other isn’t.”

  • • •

  WE PARKED ELWOOD’S tiny car at Caesars Palace. Elwood had come prepared with two Maglite incandescent flashlights, two headlamps, two pairs of size-ten green Wellingtons, and a five-inch butterfly knife—just in case. He’d been down in what he called the Drain before, with social service workers who were trying to convince the tunnel dwellers to move to more conventional, if temporary, housing above ground. We walke
d behind the casino and entered the Drain below Caesars’ parking lot. Elwood estimated that there were thirteen thousand homeless people living in Clark County, two thousand kids living on the streets, and two or three hundred people who called the Drain their home.

  The graffitied walls gave way to unpainted cockroach-dappled walls about a hundred yards in. It smelled sour, dank, and mildewy, but not as funky as I had feared. We sloshed through an inch or two of standing water, slick with algae, beneath colonies of spiders dining on their feasts of ensnared mosquitoes, past solitary scorpions, and past bright red, six-inch-long crawfish that Elwood told me had migrated from Lake Mead.

  “Hermaphrodites?” I said.

  “Shall we check?”

  We stopped and listened: rattling crickets, trickling water, a dog’s bark, and a radio set to a cool jazz station, it sounded like. Elwood said, “I think we’ve found Mario.” We trudged ahead. Elwood announced our approach. “Mario, it’s Elwood, Elwood Wingo, Channel Fourteen news. I got you a carton of smokes. My friend Wylie and I want to talk with you a minute.”

  We found Mario sitting on his cardboard floor in his blue medical scrubs and flip-flops. He turned down the flame on his camp stove burner and told us to have a seat. A woman in red scrubs was asleep and snoring on a makeshift bed—a mattress atop forklift pallets atop plastic milk crates. An orange tabby nestled into the woman’s neck and purred like a raccoon. Mario said, “Zoë keeps the rats away and gives Carolyn someone besides me to talk to.”

  I pointed my chin at the pot of now-simmering water on the stove. “Making lunch?”

  “Crawfish.”

  “Taste like chicken?”

  “Taste like shit. But if I had me the right spices—cayenne, garlic, cloves, paprika, allspice—I could make a boil that would make those mudbugs sing.”

  Elwood told me that Mario had been a sous chef at Charlie Palmer’s place on the Strip.

  Mario said, “Lots of drugs in restaurant kitchens. Pretty soon I liked the taste of crack better than the taste of bone-in rib eye.”

  Mario had been living in the Drain for four years and had hooked up with Carolyn eight months ago. Carolyn had been an ER nurse at Mountainview Hospital with a key to the drug locker. I noticed a shit-stained bucket and two piss cups beside the bed. Before Drainville Mario had been happily married, with two kids, and lived in a snug two-bedroom house in Henderson, but the guy he was renting from, it turned out, did not own said house. He’d just changed the locks on a foreclosure, had the utilities turned on, asked for first, last, and deposit, and signed a one-year lease with Mario. “One night the cops came and tossed all our belongings out onto the street.” The phony landlord never went to trial, Mario said. “If I ever see that dago motherfucker again, I’ll kill him.”