Take Down

by James Swain

  They took the stairwell to ground level. Went outside to the employee garage, climbed three levels, and got into the Camaro’s front bench seat, sitting three across. It was tight, but Billy wanted to talk to Ike and T-Bird during the drive and gauge their facial expressions. Ike made his tires scream going down the spiral exit ramp, and hit the street doing sixty.

  “Think you can make it to Lake Mead in thirty minutes?” Billy asked.

  “Who said we were going to Lake Mead?” Ike said.

  “That’s where all the cheaters get buried.”

  “Is there anything you don’t know, man?”

  The deserts of Las Vegas were pockmarked with shallow graves that had no tombstones or markers. The nameless dead surrounded the city and often became unearthed during new home construction and road projects. In the past two decades, 150 had been discovered; it was believed there were many more. The police told the media that these deaths were the work of hit men and roaming serial killers, but Billy knew otherwise. The dead, in fact, were cheaters who’d gotten caught one too many times plying their trade. Not all cheaters met this gruesome fate, just those damn fools who didn’t know when to quit. The casinos got tired of busting them, so they whacked them instead.

  Where the bodies popped up often indicated where the cheater was caught. The Apex area near Nellis Air Force Base was used by casinos on the north side of town, the roads leading to Mount Charleston were favored by old downtown’s casinos, and State Route 160 from Blue Diamond to Pahrump was popular with casinos on the Strip’s south end. But in terms of sheer numbers, the recreation area around Lake Mead won the prize, with half the city’s nameless graves having been found there, usually near campsites or hiking trails.

  Ike took the 215 east into Henderson, got off on Lake Mead Parkway, and followed the signs toward Boulder Basin, a brightly lit Albertsons and Walmart the only stores for miles. It was a different world out here, the vast space easy to get swallowed up in. Billy realized he had broken into a cold sweat, and glanced at his car mates. Ike and T-Bird were sweating as well.

  “Tell me how this is going to work,” he said.

  “There’s a campsite up the road where we buried Ricky,” Ike said. “We’ll pull in there, and me and T will dig a grave. You’ll shoot the bitch, and we’ll plop her into the ground. That’s about it.”

  “What’s Doucette’s role?”

  “Doucette sits in his car with his sick wife and watches. They get off on this shit, especially her. She enjoys seeing people suffer.”

  “Has she always been like that?”

  “Once upon a time, she was cool. Wasn’t she, T?”

  “Way cool,” T-Bird said.

  “So what happened?”

  “Doucette happened,” Ike said. “Shaz went to work stripping for him, and he started sending her down to Tijuana to get naked in a club he owns. Each time she came back, she was loaded with blow. The stuff is ninety percent pure, worth forty grand an ounce. All the strippers in Doucette’s clubs move blow for him. Rock fronts the operation, sells the stuff on the streets.”

  “How did she get so messed up?”

  “I’m getting to that part,” Ike said. “The girls carry the blow inside of them. Doucette’s rule—he thinks it’s safer that way. Some girls swallow the bags; others shove them up their assholes. Shaz used her pussy. One day she’s driving back from Tijuana and the bag broke. She passed out, crashed the car. Two days later, she woke up half-dead in a hospital bed with a diamond ring on her finger. Doucette married her while she was out.”

  “So if she got arrested, she wouldn’t testify against him.”

  “You got it.”

  “Was she okay with that?”

  “Yes and no. She got off on the ring. What made her crazy was that she couldn’t have no babies. The doctors had to take out her sex organs to save her life.”

  “They gave her a hysterectomy.”

  “Yeah. It screwed up her head. Shaz got out of the hospital and was arraigned. Judge felt sorry for her, gave her probation. That night, she was in the club, drinking champagne at the bar with Doucette. Another stripper comes over, kisses him on the mouth. Shaz grabs the bottle off the bar and crushes her skull. Poor kid bled to death. Shaz laughed over her dying body.”

  “She got off on it?”

  “Uh-huh. It was scary.”

  “She’s a liability. Why doesn’t Doucette get rid of her?”

  “She’s his wife. If she disappears, people will start asking questions. He’s stuck with her. Here’s our turn. So what are we going to do? You going to kill this bitch?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Billy said truthfully.

  “Well, you’d better decide, because if you don’t, they’re gonna kill you.”

  Ike drove down a bumpy gravel road to a deserted campsite. Lake Mead offered cheap lodging to campers and RVs, which included electrical hookups along with water and sewer, and the campsites were often full. This particular campsite was deserted, without a single tent or recreational vehicle. A sign tacked to a pine tree explained the situation.

  CAMPSITE CLOSED FOR REPAIRS

  USE BOULDER BEACH, CALLVILLE BAY,

  OR ECHO BAY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

  A pair of headlights blinked from the other side of the campsite.

  “You make up your mind yet?” Ike asked.

  “I need to play this situation as it lays. I won’t put either of you in jeopardy.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Ike parked and they climbed out of the Camaro. Billy’s skin was tingling and butterflies filled his stomach. Ike grabbed two shovels from the trunk and tossed one to this partner, striking him in the chest. T-Bird cursed him.

  “Chill out,” Ike said.

  They crossed the campsite to where the Mercedes was parked beneath the pine trees. The driver window came down and Doucette stuck his head out. He was holding a cell phone and appeared to be taking a call. “What took you so long? You forget how to get here?”

  “My car don’t go as fast as yours,” Ike said.

  “Here, take this.” Doucette passed Ike a handgun enclosed in plastic wrap. “It’s only got one bullet in the chamber, in case he tries to do something stupid.”

  Ike lifted the front of his shirt and slipped the gun behind his belt. Then he and T-Bird walked into a clearing and started to dig, their bodies silhouetted by the moon’s glare.

  Billy lingered behind, staring at the Mercedes’s trunk.

  “Is she still alive?” he asked.

  “She cried all the way here,” Doucette said.

  He told himself not to think about it and walked into the clearing. Near where Ike and T-Bird were digging was a fresh mound of earth. Ricky Boswell’s final resting place, he guessed. A flashlight’s beam hit him in the face. Shaz, watching from the car.

  “Are they going to join us?” he asked under his breath.

  “They don’t want to leave fingerprints, so they stay in the car,” Ike said.

  Shaz ran the flashlight’s beam over their faces. She eventually grew bored with the procedure and shut the flashlight off.

  “You make up your mind yet?” Ike asked.

  “Still working on it,” Billy said.

  Soon the grave was ready. Coffin shaped, three feet across, six feet long. Ike tossed his shovel to the ground and went to the Mercedes to tell Doucette it was time. The Mercedes’s trunk popped open. Ike returned to the campsite dragging Mags by the collar of her blouse. She looked bad, hair in her face, sobbing through the duct tape, losing it.

  Ike brought her to the edge of the grave, then retreated. Mags found the courage to stop crying and gazed at Billy with the same bewitching eyes that had frozen him on the street corner in Providence so long ago. If he hadn’t jumped into her car that day, he would have gone on t
o become an engineer or a college professor the way his old man had wanted him to, his life filled with endless repetition and boredom. Mags had changed his universe, and if she died here tonight, a part of him would die as well.

  He made Mags face the grave. His lips brushed her ear. Four words came out of his mouth, barely a whisper. Then he stepped back.

  The campsite was quiet. No one around for miles. He had never shot anyone before. There was a first time for everything, he supposed.

  “Give me the gun,” he said.

  Ike drew the gun and tore away the plastic before handing it to him. “You ever shoot a Glock before? There’s nothing to it—just aim and squeeze the trigger.”

  “Got it.”

  The gun felt heavy in his hand. It was black, boxy, with a dull polycarbonate sheen. He spent a moment finding the sweet spot on the back of Mags’s head that was his target. He took a deep breath. Raising his arm, he aimed, then stole a sideways glance at Ike and T-Bird to gauge their reactions. They had turned into statues, their mouths wide open as if catching flies. He squeezed the trigger. The bang reminded him of a firecracker going off. A tuft of hair flew into the air, and Mags tumbled into the grave. One second she was there, the next, gone. The shot echoed across the distant lake before finally coming to rest.

  “Fucking A. I didn’t think he was gonna do it,” T-Bird said.

  “Me, neither,” Ike said.

  He lowered his arm, unsure what came next. Shaz rushed into the clearing clutching a Maglite. Grabbing his wrist, she pulled him to the edge of the grave. Her flashlight found the back of Mags’s bloodied head and she squealed with perverse delight.

  “You did it,” she gushed.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I didn’t think you had it in you. You whispered in her ear. What did you say?”

  “Have a nice eternity. I saw it in a movie once.”

  “That’s cool. I’ll remember that.”

  “Are we done?”

  “We’re more than done. Good job.”

  “You want the gun?”

  “Bury it with her.”

  He tossed the gun into the grave. She had not let go of his arm, and he walked her back to the Mercedes. The sparkle in her eyes said he’d won her over, but what about the others? As she got into the passenger seat, the car’s interior light came on. Doucette was still on his call and shot Billy a thumbs-up. Crunchie was retrieving e-mails on a handheld device and ignored him. Whatever reservations they’d had were gone. He’d passed the test.

  The Mercedes’s taillights grew faint as it rumbled out of the campsite. Billy waited until he was certain they were gone before returning to the clearing. Ike and T-Bird had remained by the grave, prepared to finish the job. P. T. Barnum once said that you couldn’t fool all the people, all the time. Barnum was wrong. You could fool all the people, if you played your cards right.

  He got down onto the ground, lying flat on his stomach. Reaching into the grave, he tapped Mags on the shoulder.

  “Get up. It’s safe now,” he said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  They entered the urgent-care clinic on the corner of Eastern and Flamingo at just past ten. Mags had a bloody towel pressed to her ear, and fit right in with the rest of the clinic’s walking wounded. The clinic was run by a drunk named Dr. Gregorio Ibarra. Ibarra specialized in treating the city’s criminal element, the reception area’s cheap plastic seats filled with drug dealers and tattooed gang members. Ibarra treated their gunshot and knife wounds without bothering to report their injuries to the police, as the law required. That was his racket, and he made a good living from it.

  A female receptionist reading a celebrity magazine sat behind a plate of bulletproof plastic. Billy sweet-talked her, his breath fogging the plastic. Soon Mags was being ushered into an examining room ahead of the other patients.

  The examining room was without decoration. Mags sat on a steel table bolted to the wall and kept shaking her head, pissed off that she hadn’t been taken to a regular hospital. Billy stood against the wall with his arms crossed, refusing to wilt under her hostile gaze.

  “This place is a dump. The floors aren’t even clean.”

  “I can’t take you to a regular hospital without the cops getting involved. You’ll be fine here. Your wound isn’t that bad.”

  “You could have blown my head off with that crazy stunt.”

  He had shot Mags on the side of her head directly above her left ear. He hadn’t meant to take a sliver of her ear off, but shit happened. To everyone in the campsite it had appeared that the bullet had entered her skull, when in fact the bullet had only grazed it. The timing of her fall into the grave had sold the play, and he didn’t think it could have gone better.

  “You’re alive, aren’t you? Show some gratitude,” he said.

  “A piece of my ear is gone. I’ll be scarred for life.”

  “So wear your hair long.”

  “My hearing’s fucked up as well.”

  “Learn sign language.”

  She angrily threw the towel at him. “I thought you cared about me.”

  He started to steam. He’d risked everything to save her. It had seemed the right thing to do; now he wasn’t so sure. But he was stuck with the decision, and he decided to let the situation play itself out. If he played her right, maybe she’d tell him what her deal with the gaming board was.

  “I do care about you,” he said.

  “Then why didn’t you use the gun to shoot those bastards instead of me?”

  “The gun had only one bullet.” He retrieved the towel from the floor and placed it on the examining table. “Let’s not talk about this right now, okay?”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  A noise in the hallway ended the conversation. Ibarra entered, his eyes watery from too many liquid meals. In his hand was a clipboard containing Mags’s personal information, all of it lies. Ibarra gave her wounded ear a cursory examination before addressing Billy.

  “Gunshot?” the doctor asked.

  Billy acknowledged that Mags had indeed been shot.

  “You look familiar.”

  Billy acknowledged that he’d visited Ibarra’s clinic in the past.

  “I’m assuming you know the drill.”

  Billy said that he did.

  “Six hundred, cash, and I’ll make your friend as good as new.”

  Ibarra’s rates had gone up. Billy was in no position to argue, and he extracted six crisp hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. Ibarra held the bills up to the overhead light to ensure they were not counterfeit before stuffing them into his lab coat. Then he got busy stitching Mags up.

  The closest Walgreens was on the corner of Flamingo and Maryland Parkway. The aisles were empty as they walked to the back of the store to where the twenty-four-hour pharmacy was located. The pharmacist on duty was a pleasant guy with a goatee and a silver ponytail and said it would take fifteen minutes to fill Mags’s prescription for painkillers.

  They waited on a short bench outside the pharmacy window. Mags’s ear was covered by a flesh-covered bandage that didn’t look so bad, until you saw her face and knew that she’d just stepped one foot in hell. He felt bad for her, even if she was a snitch, and held her hand.

  “You going to be okay?” he asked.

  “I’ll survive. I want to finish our conversation. What was going to happen to you if you didn’t shoot me? Were the people in the car going to kill you?” she asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The good-looking guy is named Marcus Doucette. He runs Galaxy. The wacky blond’s his wife. The old guy is a grifter I once ran with who switched sides.”

  “What’s your deal with them?”

  “They caught me cheating their casino and blackmailed me into doing a job for them. I’ll be don
e tomorrow afternoon, and then they’ll let me go.”

  “What happens tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I can’t tell you that. What’s wrong?”

  “My ear’s starting to throb.”

  He coaxed the pharmacist into giving him a single pain pill. Mags swallowed it dry and thanked him with a thin smile. He decided it was time to level with her. “I followed you out of the casino the other night. You got into a Jeep Cherokee on the corner of Sahara. There was a guy behind the wheel. You want to tell me about him?”

  She hesitated, the gears shifting, thinking hard.

  “He was my partner,” she said.

  “Was, as in past tense?”

  “We’re splitting up. I’m done with him.”

  “He treat you bad?”

  “The fucking worst.”

  “Explain why you came back to Galaxy.”

  “I wanted to see you again. I want to run with your crew. It’s what I wanted my whole life. When you made me the offer the other night, I thought, shit, it’s finally come true.”

  He didn’t believe that was her motivation for coming back to Galaxy. The gaming board had made her do it, then left her hanging in the wind. They were bastards that way. But maybe she was being truthful about being done with them. After what had happened tonight, he didn’t think she was very useful to the gaming board anymore.

  “Your prescription’s ready,” the pharmacist announced.

  He paid for the drugs. The pain pill had taken hold and Mags was acting spacey. Taking her by the arm, he guided her to the front of the store.

  “I’m dying for a smoke,” she said.

  “You still smoke Kools?”

  “You remembered. How sweet.”