“When Craig wants to be alone, it’s best to leave him alone,” Rosie says, glancing away from the television, then fixing her gaze back on the screen.
“What about Antoine?”
Rosie leaves her eyes on the TV this time. “I know Antoine. He was a good kid. He’s not after Craig.”
Naomi frowns. Nowhere to go. No one she can get a hold of. Just the television incessantly reminding her that the planet these days is just one crisis after another. And that she can’t do anything about it but tune in for the conflagration.
Cops start coming out of the Reef’s shiny double doors. SWAT officers surrounding a couple of plainclothes cops and —
Rosie lets out a moan, like she will be sick. Naomi rushes to the TV. Keenan. One of the handcuffed men is Keenan. Naomi unconsciously places her hand on Rosie’s shoulder. And Rosie places her hand overtop, neither of them looking away from the newsfeed.
The reporters’ words fade away. Keenan. What has he gotten himself into now? He wears a listless expression as he stumbles along to the convoy of police vehicles.
Naomi spots Brian Fitzgerald among the cops, talking animatedly to someone in a grey suit. Fitz can help her.
Naomi grabs her keys.
“Where are you going?” Rosie asks.
“The Reef. I have to do something.”
“But he’ll be gone by the time you get there. They’ll take him in for processing.”
Naomi looks at the screen. “I have to do something!”
“I’m also scared,” Rosie says. “But —”
“If Keenan’s detained, then he can’t look for Craig. I can do that.” Naomi nods to herself. “I can do that.”
“Naomi, please! Don’t go.”
But she is already rushing to the door, flinging it open. She looks back one last time. Rosie’s forlorn face halts her on the threshold. Naomi opens her mouth to speak. There is no comfort she can offer. Not for Rosie, not for herself.
She walks back. Leans down. Kisses her mother-in-law on the forehead. Hugs her. “It’ll be okay,” Naomi says.
With that she is gone, and she doesn’t look back this time.
10:47 a.m.
Keenan jolts awake to the migraine waiting for him. He shivers. Tries to rub his temples but his hands are cuffed behind him, wrists and shoulders sore. All he can see is blinding light. His back is stiff. He arches his spine and shifts up in his seat, blinking. The light begins to split into shapes and colours, shades of red, beige, and brown.
He is in the back of an unmarked police cruiser. A metal grate divides him from the front. The only other person in the car is the driver: Miles. Outside he sees mountains and the desert. He cranes his neck around, but there is no Vegas skyline behind him, just the black road disappearing into the horizon, a thin pencil line drawn into the craggy landscape.
He catches Miles’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, roving up to stare at him, then sliding back to the road.
Keenan starts to speak, but his throat is so dry that his words catch. He swallows and says, “Where are you taking me?”
Again Miles’s faded green eyes in the rear-view mirror.
Keenan feels a chill in his shoulders. He hunches them in. What is Miles up to?
“You’re really not going to tell me where we’re going?”
No answer.
There’s only one reason to take a bound man into the desert, and it’s not to let him go. What Keenan can’t figure out is why Miles would want to kill him. Then it comes to him: Thompkins killing Fischer; Miles showing up with a SWAT team immediately after; his look of disgust, like Keenan had ruined his plans. Miles was working with Thompkins. Keenan knows too much.
He strains at his cuffs for a moment, just long enough to confirm the futility of the action, then wonders if he can kick through the grate — or if he should try to smash a window with his heels. But he’s doubtful he could throw himself out the window of a speeding car with his hands cuffed. Even more doubtful that he could survive it.
Keenan is surprised that his heart is not pounding. Nothing like it had in that hotel corridor. It should be, though. It should be pounding, but he just doesn’t care anymore. Not about himself, at least. The truth, though, he cares about that.
“Why?” he asks.
The green eyes study him in the mirror, then shift back to the road, no answer given.
“Why did Thompkins kill Fischer?”
Miles ignores him.
“Why did Thompkins kidnap that guy?”
No response.
Though the engine purrs and the tires rumble, the scenery, so open and monotonous, seems almost still out the window, and though the air-conditioned interior is cool, the auburn sand outside looks ready to combust beneath the scorching sun.
Keenan’s eyes pop wide. My father. He leans up to the grate.
“Let me call my father. Please. Antoine Deco is coming for him. I won’t tell my dad anything, I just need to —”
“He’s not after Craig.”
“What?”
“He’s not gunning for your father.”
“How do you know?”
“Because your father didn’t kill Raul Deco. I did.”
Keenan stares at Miles. “Why?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Look, I know where we’re headed. I know what you’re going to do. I don’t care anymore. But tell me. Tell me why. Tell me all of it. Raul Deco. Bashinsky. The Shaws. Fischer and Thompkins. That man he kidnapped. Why? What possible reason do you have for fucking up so many lives?”
Miles purses his lips and keeps on driving. Keenan waits, crouched forward on the seat, his face an inch from the grate. Minutes pass. The yellow-brown mountains are in sharp relief against the cloudless sky. Keenan leans back in his seat. So, no answers, he thinks. A fitting end for a wasted fucking life.
“Raul Deco was a thief. We had him run jobs for Bashinsky. He pulled a big one for us; Bashinsky didn’t want the loose end.”
Miles’s dry, deadpan voice, confiding these past crimes, awakens Keenan. His back straightens as he leans forward, unsure why Miles would reveal the past to him but grateful that at last he may get some answers.
“What was the big job?”
In the mirror Keenan spots the tiniest of smiles on Miles’s thin lips.
“Bashinsky had worked in the casinos a long time, but he couldn’t get his own resort. Especially not on the Strip. So he planted a woman in the life of an old man who owned a casino, and he paid off the people around that man to encourage him to marry the girl and to wedge conflict between him and his kids. The old man married the girl and left her controlling shares of his casino in his will. Someone must’ve snitched, or maybe he started investigating, but he found out that the girl was working for Bashinsky. He had a new will drawn up fast, giving the casino back to his kids. That’s where Raul Deco came in. He cleaned out all the copies of the new will. Monk and me took care of him. Then we took care of the old man. Made it look natural, though. The girl got the casino. She handed it to Bashinsky and got a fat payout. Bashinsky tore it down and built the Reef.” Miles’s eyes flick to the mirror, amused at the story. “No one ever knew how to get his way like Norman Bashinsky.”
Keenan swallows. He flexes his shoulders and pulls at his cuffs. “And the Shaws? Why did they have to die?”
“How do you know about the Shaws?”
“Antoine told me about them too. I didn’t trust you or Fischer enough to tell you about it. One of the few good decisions I’ve made.”
“The Shaws were warned. They should’ve known better.”
“Warned about what? What did they do?”
“They were a threat.”
“The Shaws?”
“They were agitators, making us look bad in the media and the public. And their following was signific
ant. They wanted the casinos to pay higher taxes and hire more minorities. That’s not how this town works. That’s not how this country works.”
Keenan remembers the Shaws’ funeral. Tyron’s tears. His own tears. Antoine’s too.
“You’re not worried about Antoine?” he asks.
“I’ll find him before he finds me.”
Miles pulls at the wheel and they bounce off the highway onto a dirt road.
“Anything else?” Miles asks. “Now’s the time.”
“The shit today, what was that all about?”
“I told you to get out of my crime scene, didn’t I? Now you have to pay the price.”
“How the fuck could you kill Fischer? Why do something so —”
“Fischer had to go. He was sticking his nose in places it didn’t belong. And long-term, Black Lives Matter isn’t good for business. Marlon Joseph, the man you found, isn’t good for business. We faked texts from him to Fischer with info on a Black power extremist cell. All bullshit. A well-known Black activist kills Fischer, then kills himself: it gets Fischer out of the picture and defames the movement. Two birds, one stone.”
“Two birds, one stone, you —” Keenan shakes his head. “It’s sick. You’re sick. Bashinsky’s dead, what the fuck do you care about business anymore?”
Miles gives him a look through the rear-view mirror that seems to ask, How stupid are you? “Is the Reef dead? Is the Strip dead? Business is business. It keeps rolling. Someone falls off, someone else takes his place.” His faded eyes flash. “It’s the natural order of things.”
Keenan glances left and right, his breath quickening. The road curves around the base of a rocky hill and descends into a valley between tawny peaks.
“But your plan didn’t work. Marlon Joseph’s alive. You’re fucked.”
“Wrong again, Quinn. Thompkins takes the fall for everything. I can thank you for that.”
“What are you going to tell them, huh?” Keenan leans back and kicks hard at the grate. It rattles but holds fast. “You take a man into custody and he disappears? Pretty fucking obvious what happened.”
Miles doesn’t bother looking in the mirror. “I’ll think of something,” he mumbles.
“They’ll put you away for this.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Keenan lies back and slams his feet into the glass window. Other than a scuffed thud, the window is unmarked. He pulls his knees in again for another savage kick, when the car swerves and he slides across the seat to bump headfirst into the far door. He sits up and sees that they have left the dirt road for a track through the sandy brush, winding deeper into the hills. The car bounces over striations in the ground. He looks out the back window, but there is no visibility through the cloud of dust kicking up in their wake.
He stares at the back of Miles’s leathery brown neck. Contemplates begging for his life. No, he thinks. Not to this scumbag. This corrupt hitman. Fuck him. Antoine wouldn’t make a mistake, he must know that Miles is his guy. My dad’ll be okay. And with any luck, Antoine will finish off this motherfucker.
The car slows, then eases to a stop in a shadowed basin surrounded by mountains.
Miles opens his door. His leather boots crunch the dirt with each step. He opens Keenan’s door, gun drawn.
“Get out.”
“Fuck you. Shoot me in here.”
Miles’s dry eyes don’t blink.
“Splatter my brains all over this fucking car. Explain that to Metro.”
“Out.”
“No.”
Miles lunges inside the vehicle. Keenan leans back and kicks at him; the quarters are too close, no room to unload. Miles shoves his legs aside and pounds the butt of his pistol into Keenan’s unprotected solar plexus. He gasps. His breath, his soul, his life sweep out his mouth. He doubles over, unable to breathe, the pain through his abdomen and chest unbearable. He feels Miles dragging him out of the car, and thinks the man won’t have to shoot him; the blow might do the trick.
He falls into the dirt, still gasping, wriggling like a worm. His starved lungs strain at his ribcage. Miles drags him further from the car.
At last he sucks some breath back in, and then he is a man quenching himself, inhaling air as fast as he can. Focused on his breathing, Keenan doesn’t immediately register the whining of a second car engine. He looks up, still gasping. Miles stands a few paces from him, pistol pointed at his face, head turned in the direction they came. The roaring engine grows louder. Miles shifts his stance to meet the interruption, raises his pistol with both hands, and braces to fire.
An old green sedan, long and wide, skids around the outstretched arm of one of the mountains, clouds of dust swirling around it. The engine revs furiously and the vehicle charges down the track.
Miles pulls the trigger. Keenan recoils from the gunshot. He tries to stand and staggers back to the ground, his knees, shoulders, and face hitting the hard earth without his hands to protect him. Miles keeps firing. Keenan spits the bitter sand from his mouth. Cranes his neck.
The heavy car bounces a foot off the ground over a divot and continues rumbling. Its windshield shatters. Miles fires again and again. Keenan’s feet slide in the dirt as he tries to push himself away.
The vehicle is almost on them, a huge hurtling thing, its engine screaming.
Miles takes one last shot and Keenan cringes.
10:48 a.m.
Tyron sits behind the wheel of Auntie Trudy’s two-decade-old beast of a sedan: ancient and sturdy, engine stout, she’s kept it in fine condition. He glides over the asphalt, across the desert, hanging back out of sight, with Tara and Ricky far ahead, in front of the target. Running a rotating tail was one of the many useful things he picked up in the Middle East. His phone is in the cup holder, on speaker, Tara and Ricky’s updates coming in and his orders going out.
After he told them to leave the march they cabbed back to the Convention Center parking lot to pick up Tara’s car, and she drove to Las Vegas Boulevard. Tyron remained at the Reef to watch Marlon and Keenan get taken away. There was a lot of commotion outside the resort, with the police trying to keep the public and the press at bay. There was also a short, plainclothes cop accosting a rangy guy in a suit, who seemed to be running the operation; it looked like they were arguing over Keenan, as the young cop with a beard kept pointing at him. All in all, it took a while before Marlon and Keenan were loaded up and sent on their way, which gave Tara and Ricky time to get into position. Marlon was put in the back of a police van while the rangy cop took Keenan alone in an unmarked car. Tyron didn’t know who to track, but Marlon had told him to look out for Keenan so that is what he did. He relayed the colour, make, and licence plate to Tara and Ricky, who picked up the vehicle as it passed them by. Then he cabbed to the Convention Center where Auntie Trudy was waiting for him with her keys. She wanted to come along, but the moment he heard from Ricky that the unmarked car had not gone to a police station but was instead on the highway heading out of the city, he knew something was up.
“I got to be alone for this,” he told her. The further they go, the more certain he is of that fact.
Ricky’s voice comes through over the phone: “Ty, they turned off onto a dirt road. What do we do?”
Tyron hammers the gas. The car picks up speed and then it soars.
“Which dirt road?”
“You’ll hit it soon. There’s a big grey rock in front of it. What do we do now? Should we turn around?”
He tears past intermittent cars. Pulse steady. Sees the grey rock up ahead.
“Go straight for another minute, then turn around. Turn onto the dirt road but pull over. Wait there for further instructions. I’m out.”
He picks up the phone, taps the call closed with his thumb, and drops it onto the passenger seat. No civilians chattering in his ear for this.
He skids onto the di
rt road, gravel shooting out from beneath his tires. Vehicle handles better than he expected.
He rumbles along at a speed he is barely able to control, taut arms keeping the wheel steady. His lips peel back in a grimace, so intense is the exertion. It is worth it. Up ahead a trail of dust leads into a cluster of hills and mountains. He gains on the sandy cloud.
Around a hill and down into the shadows between slopes, the shark chases the wisp of blood, evaporating as he inhales it, and so he cannot slow down, he cannot rest a moment, he can only speed up, only pursue harder. The scent leads him off-road altogether, and he almost spins out skidding onto the tracks his prey left behind. The blood is thick in his nostrils now. The scent of sweat too. Perspiration beads on his face and across his arms straining to navigate the desert scrub.
He pulls around the thrust-out ridge of a mountain, and there, up ahead, what he has been searching for: a stationary car and two men, one on his knees, one standing with a pistol. He slams the pedal to its limit.
The gunman opens fire. A shriek as the bullet pierces the windshield. Tyron holds his course. Fortune favours the brave, motherfucker.
More bullets. An excellent shot: the windshield is pockmarked. Tyron ducks low in his seat. The vehicle hits a hole and pops off the ground. Lands with a screech. The wheels want to spin out. Tyron fights them straight. Don’t hit Keenan, he thinks.
Crack. The windshield shatters. Glass cascades into Tyron’s face. But he is on them. Only a moment now.
Keenan’s too close. Fuck, he’s too close.
And the gunman has Tyron lined up. Time freezes, like that morning in Baghdad.
This is the one. The bullet with your name on it. And there are no Marine snipers to save you this time.
He leans low into the steering wheel. A burst from the barrel, a whistle by his ear; a searing gash across his cheekbone. Tyron doesn’t flinch.
The gunman dives out of the way, but Tyron wrenches the wheel.
A crunch of metal and a fleshy thud. Another crunch as a body disappears under the wheels.
He crushes the brake. Skids to a stop.
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