Undercard

by David Albertyn

“Bashinsky had a team of corrupt cops working for him for over twenty years. They did all kinds of shit for him, including hits. My father and the Shaws were killed by these men on the order of Bashinsky.”

  Keenan’s world is spinning. He swallows, trying to return saliva into his mouth. Antoine hasn’t budged. “How could you know all this?”

  Antoine gives a half-smile. “This is my life,” he says, his voice no longer flat. “Ever since you knew me, this is what my life has been about. Everything else was a front.” He smiles in earnest now, but to himself, not to Keenan. “My real life.”

  Such fulfillment on the face of a man who just committed a double homicide makes Keenan’s stomach churn. He raises his gun. “Get on the ground, Antoine.”

  Antoine looks at him, the smile gone. “You can’t stop me with your hands,” he says. “Which means you’ll have to shoot another unarmed man. Are you ready to do that?”

  A bead of sweat drips from Keenan’s eyebrow into his left eye. He shuts the eye against the sting. He is perspiring everywhere. His hands are slick with it. “Get on the ground.”

  Antoine juts his chin in the direction behind Keenan. “I think my friend has a problem with that.”

  Keenan doesn’t take the bait. He motions with his head for Antoine to get down.

  There is a low whistle from close behind him. “Gringo.”

  Keenan glances back and sees a young, wiry Hispanic man, with black tattoos creeping out from beneath his shirtsleeves onto his hands — which hold a large grey handgun a foot from the back of his head.

  Keenan lets his breath out. Deflates with the escaping air. There’s no hope against the two of them. But I’ve fucked up too many times to fuck up again.

  He feels nauseous. A thought strikes him. Dying like this wouldn’t be too bad. Everyone wins.

  He whips the gun around as the wiry man swipes at him with the butt of his pist—

  11

  10:38 p.m.

  Outside one of the Reef’s nightclubs is a large aquarium inset in the wall where small sharks move quietly through the water, their hollow eyes and slightly parted jaws looking mechanical in their fixed positions. Naomi finds Tyron standing before the glass — or plastic polymer that looks like glass but is stronger and better-suited for viewing, as she learned from a Reef guide on a previous trip to the resort. Tyron starts awkwardly when she calls his name.

  “What’s up?” she says, after hugging him to celebrate Antoine’s victory.

  “Nothing,” he says. He checks the time on his phone. “How was the fight? The big one?”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “Bar was too crowded. And I didn’t need to see any more after what Antoine did.”

  “Right? Wasn’t he incredible?”

  Tyron nods. “Incredible. I never would’ve thought it.”

  “I did. I knew he could do it. But it was good you missed Gibbons-Suarez. Gibbons won in a decision but nothing happened. Antoine’s was the fight of the night.”

  “Where’s Ricky?”

  She laughs. “He met some people and went off with them. Said he had to ‘network.’”

  “Network?”

  “Whatever that means,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I just feel . . . I just feel like Antoine winning that fight . . . and you being back here and Keenan not going to prison . . . it’s like . . . it’s like we’re all going to be back together again. I’m just so happy. I missed you guys so much.”

  Tyron’s features are immobile, but she can see the concern and doubt in his gaze. “I hope so,” he says, finally. Suddenly, perhaps affected by her words, embarrassment flushes his face and he says to her, “There’s a woman coming to meet me. She’ll be here any minute.”

  “A woman?”

  “Like, a girl.”

  She laughs again. “Is that why you’re being so weird? I’m married, Ty. You’re allowed to do what you want.”

  He gives a shrug. “I thought you were getting a divorce.”

  “As of tonight, I’m still married. You have fun, Ty. I want you to.” She smiles, but more to herself than to him. Mission accomplished, she thinks. He wouldn’t be embarrassed about this chick if I hadn’t sparked something in him. “So, who is she?”

  “A waitress from the casino.”

  “Look at you. Picked up some game in the Marines, did you?”

  He shakes his head and smiles self-consciously, and she grins to see that smile again. It always amazed her how humble this man could be when there was so much he could be arrogant about.

  She catches herself being too happy. Too, too happy. Too much as always. And what always happens after happiness like this? A dip. A fall. A plummet. Always. She tries to be cool, to stay level, but she can’t help it; she is on a high from the fight that she hasn’t felt since she retired from pro ball. It doesn’t feel like she will ever come down. Everything around her is wonderful and bright and amusing and to be appreciated: the sharks lazily gliding before them, the long line of scantily dressed people waiting to get into the club, the gamblers, boxing enthusiasts, and tourists walking past them in a never-ending stream.

  “What are you going to do?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you going to do now with your girlfriend?”

  “Come on,” he says, failing to repress a smile. “I don’t know what we’ll do, but you should . . . you’re welcome to —”

  “Really? Your fiancée won’t mind if I tag along?”

  “I forgot how sassy you can be.”

  “My only hope is that your wife is more demure, as a wife should be.”

  “Hey!” A woman’s voice. High-pitched.

  Naomi turns to see a young woman with green eyes and soft brown hair streaked with blond. She wears heels and a short forest-green dress, so thin and tight it looks like it should be peeled off like cellophane. Naomi’s satisfaction over tugging on Tyron’s heartstrings curls up like a salted slug.

  “Hey Layla,” Tyron says.

  He leans in to hug her and the girl kisses him on the cheek, half catching him on the lips.

  “Layla, this is Naomi, one of my closest friends from back in . . .” He glances at Naomi and says, “She’s one of my closest friends.”

  The girl nods to Naomi and says, “What are we all doing?”

  “You guys do your thing,” Naomi says. “I don’t want to intrude.”

  “Please, you’re coming with us, babe.” The girl motions with her hand at the club beside them. “Let’s go in there. This is my spot, I can show you guys a good time.”

  Naomi and Tyron share a look between them. Tyron shrugs and Naomi grins. She wanted a night out and it looks like she’s going to get one. She checks her phone for messages but there are none. Keenan must still be working. She nods, and Layla leads them forward.

  “Affectionate girl,” Naomi says quietly to Tyron, as Layla kisses the cheeks of the bouncers.

  “You see why I like her.”

  Naomi smirks, and Tyron returns the smile.

  One of the bouncers, a hulking man who dwarfs Naomi and Tyron, pulls aside a red rope for the three of them to pass into the club. At the threshold, Naomi looks back guiltily at everyone waiting in line.

  12

  11:12 p.m.

  Neon lights cut through the darkness like blades, fused to the rhythm of the pumping music. At long last, Tyron begins to understand the appeal of nightclubs. He has never experienced this scale before in a bar, and he wonders where and how it connects with the rest of the casino. Whisked down endless halls and indoor pavilions, he finds it so easy to lose his bearings in this place, even when navigation is what he prided himself on in the Corps. And especially easy with the alcohol swirling in his skull.

  He has decided to give up worrying about te
rrorists for the night. For all nights, in fact. Let that be the duty of others from now on. Otherwise, why come home if he is just going to live as he did over there? While everyone else grumbled about the invasive pat-down and search to get inside, he was impressed by the bouncers’ thoroughness. Can’t take any chances in a terrorist’s dream.

  He shakes the thought away. Fuck, it’s time to live, man. You’re not an athlete no more, you’re not a soldier, you’re . . . He almost has the thought you’re no one, but catches himself in time. You’re thirty-two years old, it’s time to live. Whatever you are these days.

  The club is huge, and initially overwhelming. There are booths, tables, bars, a large dance floor, an upstairs, a downstairs — and that is just the inside. The back of the club opens onto a large outdoor space with pools, fountains, cabanas, more bars, and another dance floor, joined to the indoor one by a wide black stage that sits on the precipice of the two worlds. A bleached-blond DJ is at work at his mixing tables, while several sets of people chill on the edges of the stage.

  Layla yells into his ear, “Some really big names are playing tonight because of the fight. It’s only going to get crazier. Come on, let’s get some shots.”

  Outside, at a bar on the far side of the glittering fountains and pools, far enough from the music to speak without having to talk directly into each other’s ears, Layla’s bartender friend lines up three shots of tequila, each with an accompanying lime wedge on top. Tyron looks at the short, round shot glass and the clear tequila inside. He looks at Naomi and Layla beside him.

  He reaches for his glass as they reach for theirs, yet his hand halts midway. A voice inside tells him: Your responsibilities don’t end just because you’re discharged. And you got that meeting with Marlon at 6 a.m.

  Lime in the left hand, shot glass in the right, Naomi and Layla are waiting.

  He counters the voice: If not now, then when?

  He picks up the shot, which draws smiles from the women. “To Antoine,” Naomi says. He gives a nod to her, good call, and the three of them tap glasses.

  As the tequila drains down his throat, the answer to his internal question comes to him. Never. Your responsibilities are never done. There is too much to do. There is always too much to do.

  Naomi shimmies her head, recoiling from the heat of the distilled liquid, and Tyron is reminded of their life together in college. That same shimmy has been with her since the first time she tasted liquor. It was rare for them to get drunk, usually only at the end of their sports seasons, but those nights, and their lovemaking after the drinking, left an indelible mark on him. She had that shimmy then, the same as now. He never realized before how much he liked it.

  His own throat and chest burn from the alcohol. Responsibility turned you into a eunuch, he thinks. You’re allowed a few mistakes.

  Layla has her friend line up three more shots. “One more round, then we hit the dance floor,” she says, her eyes sparkling.

  He looks at Naomi and they hold each other’s gaze longer than they should. This time her toast is to the crew being back together again, adding as she puts her arm around Layla’s shoulders, “And to our newest member.”

  Layla laughs, they tap glasses, and drink. Tyron looks up at the Reef Resort rising all around them and at the soft black sky above, much too well-lit for any stars to shine. In Vegas, the stars are down here, he thinks, and we all get to pretend to live like them.

  Growing up, the Strip was for tourists. No one he knew had the money to experience its sights and sounds. He used to wonder why people would spend so much to come to his city, because all he knew of Vegas was its poor and their underserved communities. That was the world his parents brought him up in — endless fundraisers and food drives. But he understands the attraction for tourists now. On the dance floor, the lithe bodies of two beautiful women flowing with his to the pulse of the music, the night air cool as their temperatures rise, he understands that the Strip is meant to be transportation to a world away. A world of shimmering sexiness and possibility. A world so opposite to the one he knew in Vegas.

  Though he can see through the facade, he is caught up in it nevertheless. He smiles at these young women, and they smile back at him as they brush their bodies against his.

  A.M.

  1

  12:24 a.m.

  “Quinn, I don’t know if you intentionally fuck up like this, or if you are actually this incompetent. I can’t figure it out. You got an answer for me? Maybe you are the unluckiest son of a bitch on earth, always at the wrong place at the wrong time, but fuck it, Quinn, I would think you of all people would pull the trigger when you needed to. You couldn’t even be consistent in your incompetence.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t say sorry again. Don’t fucking say it, Quinn. Jesus Christ. I’m going to explain something to you, and I’m going to do it real slow for that pea-sized rock you call a brain. When it’s an unarmed Black kid running away, you don’t shoot him. When it’s a perp who just committed a double homicide, you do shoot him. Understood?”

  “Sir, I knew him growing up. We were friends. I had him contained, I didn’t know his accomplice would sneak up be—”

  “No shit, you didn’t know. What a news flash. Thompkins, go tell the reporters that Quinn was ignorant of something. Fucking hell, Quinn. Fucking hell. Do you understand that that man in there was the fifth-richest man in the world? The entire world, Quinn. He was worth forty billion dollars or some crap like that. He bankrolled politicians. He financed construction projects across the globe. He brokered meetings in his resorts between government and business elites. Hell, he even influenced foreign policy. He was a big fucking deal. A big fucking deal. There will be major fallout from this. And what were you doing out here while he was getting strangled to death? Twiddling your fucking thumbs?!”

  “Sir, forensics believes the blow to the skull killed Bashinsky before the strangulation.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Thompkins!”

  “Yes sir.”

  Undersheriff Jake Fischer opens his mouth to continue his tirade, but Thompkins’s interjection has him apoplectic. The tall, red-faced man huffs like a cartoon character, which Keenan would find funny if he weren’t the one being chewed out.

  The lump at the back of Keenan’s head has grown. It continues to throb. His nausea also remains, but at least his dizziness has subsided. The paramedics’ initial assessment is that Keenan has a concussion, though he will have to see a doctor when he is allowed to leave the crime scene, which doesn’t look like anytime soon.

  “The undersheriff is right,” Detective Clyde Miles says, taking the opportunity to provide his input while Fischer catches his breath. “Bashinsky’s death is a big deal. The feds will be on it in no time.”

  “Which is why we need this mess cleaned up before they arrive,” Fischer says, halfway calm.

  Miles stares at Keenan. “Monk’s death is a big deal too. He was one of us, even if he was off the force.”

  “Fuck Monk,” Fischer says. “A more corrupt cop you couldn’t find.”

  Miles’s eyes flick to Fischer, then flick away as if there had been no reaction at all.

  Anti-corruption is the platform on which Fischer has built his tenure as undersheriff, which everyone in Metro has found hypocritical, as there are stories about Fischer when he was younger. Of course, no one would ever say anything about it to Fischer directly — a man in his position is not someone to cross. It was Fischer who came down hardest on Keenan after the killing of Reggie Harrison. He proclaimed, after Keenan retired, that such egregious misconduct and lawlessness would no longer stand in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Miles, on the other hand, had stood up for Keenan, and fought for him to keep his job.

  The undersheriff smooths down what is left of his thinning hair. “What were you doing, Quinn, while your boyhood sweetheart murdered a former cop
and the fifth-richest man in the world?”

  “Sir, my assignment was to guard the door against anyone trying to get in to harass Deco. I didn’t think —”

  “You didn’t think? I’m glad you finally said it. No, you didn’t think. Just like you never think. Just like your father never had a fucking thought in his head either.”

  Keenan stares at Fischer. Miles does too. Fischer stares back at Keenan, smug and confrontational, daring him to try something.

  “With all due respect, sir, the room is soundproofed. I didn’t hear anything. How could I have imagined that right after Antoine became a star he would throw it all away by killing two people? Is that something you would’ve expected?”

  Fischer opens his mouth to rifle more shots, but Keenan cuts him off.

  “And Monk was with Bashinsky, and armed. Deco was unarmed. I would assume Monk would be able to handle himself and protect his boss when up against an unarmed man, but clearly he didn’t imagine Deco would turn on them either.”

  “What happened exactly?” Miles asks. “How did you first become aware of what he’d done?”

  Keenan looks around him. They are outside the dressing room, standing right where he was when Antoine committed the murders. The police have cordoned off this entire section of the arena. No one, outside of them, the crime scene investigators, a handful of Reef employees, and the upper crust of Reef Resorts executives, knows what has occurred. And Antoine, of course, wherever he is now.

  While there are investigators inside the dressing room, outside in this stretch of hallway are only Keenan, Fischer, Miles, and Fischer’s underling, Thompkins, the only one of them clean-shaven, despite the late hour. A slight, thirty-something man with wire-rimmed glasses, he is also the only one under six feet. The other two are within an inch of Keenan’s height of six-three. Clyde Miles has a wizened, sunbaked face and curly salt-and-pepper hair, looking like he just rode in from the Wild West. The creases around his eyes and mouth, and in the hollows of his cheeks, look like they were carved with a knife. His mouth is small and his lips thin, as though his genetics knew he would not open them often. Jake Fischer’s genetics seemed to have had a read on him too; his lips are fleshy and red and always flapping.