I said, “How did you do that?”
“Magic.”
“Do you have a florist on retainer?”
He smiled and said, “I took Loomis’s phone to check out his contacts, see if he knows any of our nasty friends.” He took out Loomis’s phone in its Darth Vader case and put it on the table.
“You took his phone? He’s going to be looking for us, you know that.”
“I’ll make it disappear.”
“Our work here is done.”
Bay’s phone chimed. A text from Little Bob. The deputies have arrived. So has the baby. Before Bay could respond, Loomis’s phone wailed like a siren. Bay read the text to me. Bang! Bang!
I said, “We should be going.”
We hurried out of Aurora and had made it as far as the reception desk before I realized we hadn’t paid our tab. Bay waited by the guest check-in while I hustled back to settle up with Xena. And then suddenly Bay appeared beside us. He showed me a texted photo taken just now from one of the upper floors of the Lux of him standing by check-in. Xena said sure, she could get us out through the kitchen. She led; we followed. She opened the swinging doors and yelled out that we were not the INS. “Mis amigos,” she yelled. Xena brought us to a service door. Pointed to the right, and from there we found our way to an exit.
I said, “I knew we should have just gone home.”
Bay said, “Chill. Lose your head, lose your chips.”
And then Loomis’s phone lit up and we saw ourselves right where we were—walking down East Reno.
I said, “What do they have—drones?”
“They’re tracking us.”
“How?”
“The phone!”
And then a text: Nothing personal. This is business.
We crossed Las Vegas Boulevard along with a clutch of Kafka impersonators. One of them told me, “Guilt is never to be doubted.” Bay slipped Loomis’s phone into Franz’s coat pocket. Guilt is the way we punish ourselves for our sins. We walked into, through, and out of the Tropicana, crossed Trop Ave. to the Grand, and made our way to the monorail station. I chose to hope that we had finally lost the bad guys. As we boarded the train, Bay pointed out the cameras. And then we saw K-Dirt and Bleak standing at the other end of the car staring at us. They were, predictably, dressed alike in white polo shirts, green slacks, blue suede loafers, and Google glasses. At the Paris Station, an assembly of swaggering young Asian men in rockabilly suits, cowboy boots, and Oakley shades got on and stood between us and the ruthless twins. No beekeeper among them.
Bay said, “Next stop: we go.”
I couldn’t see our stalkers through the great wall of Asians, so I assumed they couldn’t see me. But then I thought that their smart eyewear might be linked with the monorail’s surveillance cameras, or maybe they’d gotten some app for X-ray vision. When the train eased into Flamingo Station, we made for the door. The sea of Asians parted, and the towheaded Jack Mormons followed us, and a wave of Asians followed them. K-Dirt caught my eye and grinned. One of the Asians stood between the train’s doors and prevented them from closing with an iron bar. One Asian who looked like Gram Parsons in his Grievous Angel phase spun Bleak around and dropped him with a sucker punch to the throat. Bleak lay writhing on the platform, gasping for air, clutching his throat. He would not be rising soon. The man between the doors lobbed the iron bar to Gram and blocked the doors with his slim body. When K-Dirt lunged for the nearest Asian, he was clubbed in the face with the bar. The Asians hopped back onto the train and departed.
I looked at the Google glasses in the pool of blood by K-Dirt’s rearranged face, and I coveted them as if I knew what I could do with them. Bay saw the lust in my limpid eyes, and said, “You can’t walk into a casino wearing those.”
We heard what sounded like thunder and saw that it was raining. I said, “Looks like the Asians got bored with home invasions.”
As we walked down the ramp to the Flamingo, a column of uniformed security guards ran past us toward the station. Bay said, “We must be the luckiest guys in town.”
“Or not,” I said, and as if to prove me right, on the large TV screen above our heads, which should have been displaying an ad for Burlesque University or a promo for the holographic Michael Jackson/Elvis Presley/Frank Sinatra extravaganza coming to the Flamingo in August, displayed instead Eli’s saurian face.
I said, “He wants us to know he’s following us.”
“And now we know that Loomis’s phone was not the only tracking device.”
“Maybe he’s hooked up to some municipal surveillance grid or something.”
Eli’s transmitted image shivered and vanished from the screen and was replaced by Donnie and Marie onstage genuflecting, acknowledging the adulation of their cheering fans. So Eli’s employer’s IT team had hacked into the Flamingo’s computer system. Heads would roll.
I said, “They can track us anywhere.”
“And we don’t know how.”
“We don’t want to lead them back to the house.”
“More than likely we won’t get that chance. The next ambush is now being choreographed.”
“I know a place where there are no cameras and there’s no chance of getting a GPS signal.”
“Let’s go.”
15
WE WALKED OUTSIDE into a monsoon. Sheets of rain blew down the Strip. The boulevard was nearly empty of pedestrians, the exception being a few somber Kafkas ambling along, damp as rescued burlap-enshrouded kittens.
We turned more than a few heads as we tramped through Caesars, leaving our wet footprints in the grotesque carpet. We found the Hummer laughably hemmed in by an unmanned golf cart. All we needed was the flashlight from the auto rescue kit in the backseat. We got it, scooted down the parking lot’s embankment, and entered the flood tunnels. I said, “Maybe Mario will have a change of shirts for us.”
Bay said, “Goddamn, they’re good.”
“Who?”
And then we saw the figure running for the embankment, headed our way. Exeunt, both, pursued by a Ronan.
The water in the tunnel rose above our inappropriate footwear—sneakers and canvas slip-ons—as it trickled its way toward Lake Mead. All we needed to do was follow a tunnel to another outlet. I didn’t know how far that would be or how long it would take, but the tunnels would all surface somewhere. When we got to Mario’s chthonic home, we’d ask for directions. I used the almost alarmingly bright flashlight beam to show Bay the gallery of graffiti that some artist had tagged THE SATANICAL GARDENS. Bay said none of this was doing his claustrophobia any good. I shouted ahead to alert Mario that we were coming. Elwood’s friend and the friend’s friend, I yelled.
Bay said the air down here was stinging his nose and burning his throat. I saw Mario’s camp ahead, flicked my flashlight on and off, but got no answer to my hello and heard no jazz playing on the CD player. Mario and Carolyn, still in her red scrubs, lay dead on the cardboard floor. The camp stove had been knocked over. The bed was made, sheets tucked, and pillows fluffed. Zoë the cat was nowhere to be seen. A hypodermic syringe lay beside Mario’s body. They must have died recently but long enough ago for some critters to have chewed through the soft meat of Carolyn’s left forearm. We heard dogs howling in the distance. Bay looked unnerved. I told him I’d read that in canine language, a howl was a summons to pack members in the vicinity. Bay said that all depended on the tail. The position of the tail is a mark of punctuation. “It’s like the difference between, ‘Let’s eat, guys,’ and ‘Let’s eat guys.’” And then he tapped my shoulder and pointed behind to approaching flashlights.
We had walked about a quarter mile without putting any distance between ourselves and our pursuers when we came to a fork in the tunnel. We listened for the howls and chose the tunnel less clamorous. We chose wrong.
So what are the odds, I said, that we’d walk right into the den of the ravenous feral dogs? Bay the gambler said evidently pretty good, given the unsettling sound of things—the yelping, bar
king, howling, and whining—all of it, by the way, getting louder. And the odds that our pursuers would choose the appropriate tunnel? Fifty-fifty, Bay said. So why, then, did they all—there seemed to be about six of them now—make the correct turn into our tunnel? And now all of their flashlight beams melded into one glaring beacon like the phosphorescent eye of the Hound of the Baskervilles. And then a gunshot rang out, and the bullet ricocheted along the walls of the tunnel.
Sometimes you get lucky. We came to a ladder in the form of iron rungs bolted into the tunnel wall and leading up to a manhole cover under some Vegas street. Bay boosted me up onto a pipe running across the tunnel a foot under the roof. He took the flashlight. I lay flat on my stomach in my sopping clothes and wrapped my arms and legs around the pipe. Bay leaped to the bottom iron rung and pulled himself up to the ladder. He stood on the bottom rung and pushed up at the manhole cover. It did not budge, but it did clang when run over by an occasional automobile. And then our hellhounds arrived, barking like mad, snarling, and biting one another’s necks. The howling was over; the prey had been treed; the killing would commence momentarily. My pipe, a foot in circumference, was getting slippery. I said, “I hope we’re in a movie, not a book.”
Bay said, “What are you talking about?”
“In a movie you can kill dogs with glee and impunity, the grislier the better. But you can’t kill a dog in a book. You get letters.”
Bay pulled himself up the ladder and set his feet on the second rung, just out of reach of a maliciously crossbred mongrel, part Rottweiler, part wolf, the alpha male of the pack. We heard the approaching felons sloshing their way to us. The dogs’ ears perked up, and they turned as one to the darkened tunnel. Easier prey, they may have thought. They bounded away toward the hoodlums. Bay tried the cover again, managed to raise it an inch or two, and we dared to hope we might soon be free, but the cover was slammed shut by a passing automobile.
We heard a barrage of gunshots, and then several of the hideous dogs ran past us. The dogs were followed by a pair of gun-toting thugs, having the time of their lives firing at the dogs. I said, Bay, make us disappear. This was all so surreal that I expected one of the Kafkas, pants rolled to his knees, to stroll through the tunnel walking a Cesky terrier on a leash. I closed my eyes and imagined I was back home in Melancholy, where I feared I would never be again, and I was on the beach with a drink and a book, reading and listening to the surf, and then I could actually feel the ocean breeze and hear the surf, and it was getting louder as if the waves were all breaking at once, and then I saw the goon squad come running by us, followed by the panicked dogs and a wall of raging floodwater.
Bay took this moment to tell me that he didn’t know how to swim. I said no one could swim in this. On the other hand, he said, his claustrophobia was now a thing of the past. The water was four feet high and rising. A dog hurtled by, just his muzzle above the raging river of detritus. These were Class IV rapids. Bay and I clung to our perches, and I thought that we might be okay after all, but now a rolling surge of water washed over me. I told Bay to keep his feet ahead of himself if he fell in. That way he could kick away any dangerous flotsam. And try to stay on your back, I said, but I doubted he could hear me over the din of the resounding torrent. The flashlight was swept out of his hand, and I fell into the drink, blind as a cave fish.
I shot down the rapids, rolling, tumbling, scraping against the tunnel walls, and bouncing along the floor, which was the only way I could tell up from down in the dark. I tried to right myself in the position I had suggested to Bay, but without much success. I tried not to swallow the filthy water when I did manage to take a quick breath. I hoped not to be knocked out by a forklift pallet or by someone’s chest of drawers, and I prayed that my terrifying journey would be blessedly short.
I wasn’t worried as much about going under, staying under, drowning—water is an anti-gravity machine; just ask any whale—as I was about getting slammed into the wall at the inevitable fork in the tunnel somewhere ahead of me. When I did hit the wall my impact was softened by a mattress or cushion of some kind, pinned against the wall by the flood. The agglomeration of debris had allowed the formation of an eddy behind it, and I was able, briefly, to stand, inhale, and press my back against the mattress, but then I was bumped and carried away to the left fork, and I hoped Bay would be driven the same way. And then, finally, the current seemed to slow, and I knew I would be okay. I caught a glimmer of crepuscular light and saw an outlet, and then I was spit out of the tunnel onto a gravel wash. I saw a pair of haggard dogs loping away toward I didn’t know where.
Just when you think the worst is over, it isn’t. I wanted to sleep where I had dropped on a stony bed in several inches of water, but then I remembered Bay, and I got to my hands and knees, but couldn’t manage to stand, so I sat, and that’s when I noticed I had no shoes and my jeans were torn, but I looked better than the Ronan standing unsteadily fifteen away. His ridiculous mask was around his neck. His face had been scraped along the tunnel wall, which had shredded his skin and left the face a raw and bloody pulp. He raised his pistol.
I said, “We both just went through hell, friend. Why don’t we call it even and go home. What do you have to gain by shooting me?”
“I’m doing my job.”
“You fire that gun and the cops will be on us like buzzards on a shit wagon. And you’re in no shape to make a getaway.”
He aimed the pistol but had a coughing fit. If I’d had any energy, I would have charged him, I suppose. I like to think I would have, anyway. I said, “What’s your name, Ronan?”
He re-aimed the pistol and squeezed the trigger, but the waterlogged gun didn’t fire. Clearly not Ronan’s day. He got furious with himself and his uncooperative weapon, slammed the gun against his thigh, and shot himself in the foot. He dropped to the ground.
I said, “You’re a goddamn mess. Time to cut your losses, bub.”
He shot again, but his eyes were shut, and he missed. But that got my attention and kindled my drowsy adrenal glands, and I was up and able to avoid the next erratic shot as well. I picked up a hefty boulder, about a foot wide and three inches thick, and while the reprobate writhed on his back in agony, I dropped the stone rather emphatically on his face, and I didn’t hear from him again in the hour I sat there against the concrete abutment, waiting for Bay.
The skies had cleared; the rain had stopped; the voluminous moon was glistening. The gravel wasteland beside me was littered with dozens of plastic milk crates, assorted scraps of busted furniture, a rusted oil drum, strewn garbage, agitated crawfish, two dog carcasses, tattered clothing, and a wire birdcage sans canary. I walked to the tunnel entrance and called Bay’s name.
I climbed up the abutment to an empty street, not knowing if Bay was dead or alive, and if alive, was he wandering lost and alone in the pitch-black tunnels? I would have walked to Caesars if I had known where I was. My cell phone was kaput. I walked toward the distant light of the Luxor’s blue beam and wondered if they would let my bruised blue and contused barefoot self on the bus should I see one. I had a pocketful of damp bills in my sopping wallet. I saw a young woman on the corner in front of a Laundromat. She wore a lacy white summer shift, drop earrings, and platform boots. I kept my discreet distance and asked her where we were. Where in Vegas? I knew that much.
She said we were a few blocks from Boulder Highway near Duck Creek, where, apparently, I had taken a bath. I asked her if I could please use her phone to make a brief call. I’d give her ten bucks. She said I could make the call free for nothing. I called Patience’s number, and Bay answered and said how happy he was to hear my croaky voice. He had feared that I might have become an ex-therapist. His own phone was dead, he told me, so he borrowed Patience’s and came looking for me.
He told me that right after I had floated off, he’d opened the manhole cover and climbed out. None of the passing motorists paid him any notice. “I could have been a zombie rising from my tomb, for all they knew.” He took a ca
b home and tipped the cabbie well for the aesthetic damage to the seats and the foul-smelling air in the cab. He said he was driving west on East Sahara. Where was I? I told him, and he told me to sit tight. He would call Patience and tell her I was alive and kicking. I gave the phone back to my benefactor. I heard the sizzle of tires on wet pavement. A car pulled to the curb, and my new friend poked her head in the window, turned, and waved goodbye to me, whistled, said, “It’s off to work we go,” got in the car, and away she went.
Bay and Mercedes pulled up in her car. I collapsed in the backseat. Bay handed me a bottle of cognac, a towel, and a UNLV sweatshirt. He showed me a photo of a baby and said, “It’s a girl.”
The pink baby, swaddled in a white blanket, wore a purple knit hat. Her eyes were shut, her brow lifted. The vermilion border of her upper lip rose to an adorable piquito, like a tiny peak of cherry icing. I said, “What’s this sweetie’s name?”
“Emma Grace. Seven pounds, two ounces. All the requisite fingers and toes.”
BACK HOME AT LAST, I showered and threw out the rank clothing I’d been wearing. I wouldn’t realize this for months, but I also threw away my father’s broken pocket watch with the jeans. I had kept the watch as a memento and a good-luck charm. And you see how well that turned out. The watch was correct twice a day at 11:20. I would tell you that my father died at 11:20 P.M. AKST, but you wouldn’t believe me.
Patience had cooked up a pot of green chili stew and a pan of jalapeño corn bread. We sat at the kitchen table and ate. Mike said we should eat all of the food in the fridge since we were leaving tomorrow.
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