by Candice Fox
‘Hey now.’ The old guy gave a hacking, wet laugh. ‘Anything else I can get you, master?
‘A cell phone, maybe.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I’m just tired.’
‘You need painkillers?’
‘That would be nice,’ Kradle wheezed. The old man nodded and went away, and Kradle crawled into the small canvas tent that stood near them. It was black as pitch inside, smelled of sweat and mould and alcohol. He settled onto his stomach, felt objects beneath the thin blanket spread over the ground and spent a few minutes clearing them out of his way, identifying them by feel. A steel mug. A box of tissues. A tennis ball. A glass bottle.
He didn’t realise he had fallen asleep until he was shocked awake by the feel of the side of the tent shifting against his hand. Someone was entering. He turned and saw the outline of something huge and hairy against the gloomy orange streetlight. The odour of dog enveloped him, chokingly strong.
‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus!’ Kradle pushed at the beast. ‘Hey! Get out! Get out!’
Laughter outside. The big dog lay down beside him with its back to him, hitting the ground with a heavy sigh and shuffling into place on the blanket.
‘What the fuck, man?’
‘You said watch out for the law. Didn’t say nothin’ about no dogs.’
‘Come on! Get it out of here!’ Kradle groaned. But only more laughter answered him. The big animal was impervious to shoving, nudging, yanking by the thick, long hair of its neck. In the dark it felt like a shaggy bear, a mysterious collection of angles – elbows, hips, ribs under slabs of fur. The scarred man tossed a tiny baggie through the flap and Kradle examined it in the poor light, the sad little pill in the corner of the bag impossible to identify. Foolishly, he’d imagined the old man tossing him a box of Advil or something. The pill could have been anything, from ecstasy to fentanyl. Kradle threw it away and lay down beside the dog.
In time he reached out and touched the warm fur, sank his hand into it and felt the chest of the dog. Its heart was beating in there, ticking insistently. The bones rising and falling with gentle breath.
It had been half a decade since Kradle had felt the touch of another living creature given or received with any kind of affection. He noticed every bit of physical contact. He’d been medically examined at the prison, of course. He’d seen a dentist a few times. When he was removed from his cell for yard time, lawyer time or to be let into the shower room, a guard, sometimes Celine Osbourne, took his elbow occasionally, as though there was any reason to run off when his wrists were cuffed and several yards of brick, concrete, steel and iron stood between him and the free world. Once, a few years earlier, there had been an outbreak of hepatitis in the prison, and, as an unexpected novelty, he and five other guys had been chucked together, uncuffed, in a cell while the row was disinfected. He’d shaken a hand, and punched a guy while trying to intervene when the inevitable scuffle broke out.
Now, he stroked the dog tentatively for a while, discovered and worked a bramble from its fur and flicked it away. Then he shuffled over and wrapped an arm around the beast, hugged it to him, buried his face in its fur, breathed in the smell of it. He squeezed it, and the dog gave a little groan that might have been irritation, but generally didn’t object much to the hug.
Kradle lay there spooning the dog in the tent in the homeless camp, and he laughed quietly to himself at the furious stupidity of it all until sleep took him again.
CHAPTER 21
She’d been there the night of the bombing. Well, the bombing that was not. Becky Caryett knew that technically nobody had been injured when Abdul Ansar Hamsi walked into the Las Vegas Flamingo Casino six years earlier and deposited a bag of explosives right at the edge of the blackjack area. Nobody had been blown apart. Nobody had been incinerated alive. But, to Becky, it had happened, even if only in her daydreams, and its occurrence wasn’t something she had been able to brush off in the five years since. In her mind, sometimes, while she stood there sweeping and pushing cards across the green felt mat before her, spouting rehearsed lines and giving half-smiles to the gamblers who came and went in the chairs, the bombing had actually happened. She stood there in her ridiculous flamingo-pink waistcoat, and Abdul Ansar Hamsi walked in, just like he did that night, a dusty grey ball cap hiding his eyes, a black T-shirt and jeans hugging his petite frame, his get-up as carefully designed in its casual, forgettable nature as military camouflage. He walked right up to the blackjack area, stood for a while, pleasantly and unobtrusively, with the duffel bag hanging from one hand, playing the newly arrived tourist musing on the idea of stopping for a few hands before he headed up to his room. Trying to decide if he felt lucky.
Just like she did that night, in her fantasies Becky locked eyes with Hamsi, and he returned her phoney smile, wandered over to where she was dealing out cards to a heavy, old white couple from Idaho wearing matching I Heart Vegas shirts. Then he sidestepped and stood by the seat at the very edge of the table. He put his bag down right next to her. Right at her side. Maybe only two feet away. Practically touching her. At that moment, that fateful night, the wife from the Idaho couple decided to split her hand, and Becky got distracted, and Hamsi walked away. She didn’t notice he’d left the bag. Not until a pit boss came over after a few minutes and asked what it was doing there, if it was hers.
In Becky’s daydreams, the bomb went off at that moment. A colossal explosion erupted that consumed her first, of all the victims, a shocking white light billowing out, vaporising the pit boss, the couple from Idaho, the rest of the blackjack area, eating up the poker tables and roulette station, taking out the third floor of the Flamingo in a single compressive boom. It crunched through structural-support beams as if they were sticks of styrofoam. It collapsed the fourth and part of the fifth floor, leaving the huge building hollowed out like a lava cake and dripping concrete, electrical wires, plaster, brick, twisted steel, bodies. The blast killed hundreds of people, leaving dozens of others maimed and crawling, limping, dragging themselves through gagging smoke and roiling flames to try to find safety.
Technically, all that hadn’t happened. But tonight it was happening as Becky arrived at her station and set up her decks. The table was cold – empty, unlucky, not warmed up yet by the presence of smiling, cheering people winning small bets in their losing battle against the house. Becky tried to push the visions away, called out a little invite to a couple walking by, another matching-shirt duo fresh off the plane from somewhere, bags in hand. Try your hand, sir? Madam? Feeling lucky? As the booms and crashes and screams played out silently in her mind, Becky swept her cards expertly over the table, fanning them, gathering them, shuffling them in a wide, horizontal stream from one hand to the other. Sometimes it was the hand tricks that brought bored patrons over from the nearby poker machines, following their desire to interact with a human being, who could do more than bleep and flash and sing robotic tunes. She played with her cards and wondered, as she had a million times already, why Hamsi had chosen her that night. If it was because she was a woman. If it was because she was Black. If it was because she was a casino worker. If it was because he’d spied the crucifix hanging around her throat.
When a man sat down at the table before her, rushing in and flopping down quickly, his pulled-low ball cap made Becky’s heart leap into her throat.
‘Hey, Beck,’ Elliot said.
‘Oh my god.’ Becky dropped cards everywhere and stepped back, fanned her face, checked the blackjack stations around her. Everyone was distracted, warm tables full of happy players. ‘Elli, what the hell you doing here?’
‘I need help.’
Becky held her head. ‘Urgh. I knew this would happen. I saw the news yesterday and I said to myself, “Becky, Elli ain’t gonna make a run for it. Man’s got eighteen months left on his sentence. He’s gonna stay put. He’s for sure not gonna come right into the goddamn Flamingo goddamn Casino in front of three hundred people and ask his ex-wife, of all the people in the
world, for money. He’s not that stupid.” And then I said to myself, “Yes, Becky, he is.”’
‘We’re still technically married,’ Elliot said.
‘You need to get your ass out of here.’ Becky scooped up the cards and dealt Elliot a hand, growling the words through her teeth. ‘They probably have cops watching me, waiting for you to show up.’
‘They don’t.’ Elliot gathered his cards with his hairy hands. ‘They’ll be saving those guys for the big fish. There are rapists and all kinds of punks on the loose.’
‘I wouldn’t count on it. They did a special on the breakout on NBC last night. They said cops are gonna be sittin’ on friends and relatives of inmates. They said half of the guys will run away, half of the guys will run home.’ She smirked. ‘I guess you were one of the dumb ones who ran home, huh?’
‘Look. Hear me out. You can tell the bosses I threatened you.’ Elliot glanced sideways at the pit boss at the end of the row, who was watching a game with interest. ‘Tell them I showed you a knife, hell, I don’t care. All you have to do is go use your swipe card to unlock that door over there. After that, it’s all me.’
They both turned and looked at the door to the back halls, manned by a security guard in a pink blazer. Between them and the guarded door, a bachelor party of young men with big hairstyles was laughing too hard, carrying plastic cocktail glasses shaped like cowboy boots.
‘And then what?’ Becky snorted. ‘You going to march in there and rob the vault? It’s six levels underground, Elliot. There are about a hundred guys between you and it, and some of them have semi-automatics. Or so I hear – all that crazy shit starts at level minus two. I’ve never been down there and I wouldn’t know how to—’
‘I still love you, Becky.’
‘Oh, for the sake of all that is holy.’ She massaged her brow, pinched the bridge of her nose.
‘Just go with me. Play along.’ Elliot reached for her hand. ‘We’ll tell them you’re my hostage.’
‘It’s this table,’ Becky sighed. She smoothed the leather armrest of the table as though she was consoling an old, devastated friend. ‘This is a bad luck table. I never believed in them before, but I do now. I was standing right here when he came in. Hamsi. The bomber. He put the bag right there.’ She pointed to the colourful carpet. ‘I told myself I was going to go back to my table. I wasn’t going to let him change a single thing about me. I like this damned table. I can watch the basketball from here. And then your sorry ass comes in and sits here and tells me this shit.’
‘Becky—’
‘This ain’t Ocean’s Eleven.’ Becky shook her head. ‘You’re not George Clooney. You got locked up in the first place for stealing a truck full of shaving cream, Elliot. You gonna upgrade your criminal status from shaving cream bandit to casino robber and international goddamn fugitive just like that?’
‘You’re getting kind of loud.’ Elliot was rising to his feet.
‘Do you have any idea how much I need this job?’ Becky slammed her fist on the felt. A tiny old woman in a yellow dress, carrying a tray of casino chips in her withered hands, stopped a few feet out from Becky’s table to listen. ‘You think I want to stand here all night on my aching feet, taking retirement funds from grandmas and grandpas who can’t afford to eat in the downstairs bistro, and giving it to the assholes upstairs? You think I want to watch a guy blow his daughter’s college fund on bad hands, just so I can hear he went and threw himself off the roof so he wouldn’t have to call home and tell the wife? I need this job, Elliot, and you know why? Because your daughter needs pre-braces. Yeah, that’s a thing. Not only do they have braces, they have pre-braces now, and your kid needs them because she got nasty, crooked teeth from your side of the family, and those pre-braces are even more expensive than—’
Becky stopped. Elliot was staring at her. The group of young men with cowboy-boot cocktails were all staring at her. The old woman with the chips was staring at her, and so was her pit boss, and the pit boss from the nearby roulette station, and a few patrons turned sideways in their swivel chairs at the poker machines, fingers resting on un-pressed buttons. But Becky was ignoring all of the attention she was receiving, because her own attention was focused on a man standing hesitantly at the edge of the next table.
Hamsi wasn’t wearing a ball cap this time. He was dressed in a white pressed shirt, grey trousers, prison sneakers, the security tag hanging from the sleeve of the shirt telling Becky he’d probably grabbed the outfit, sans the shoes, from a mannequin somewhere and bolted. He wasn’t carrying a bag. He wasn’t smiling. But, aside from all that, he was as pristinely, perfectly identical to her memory of him the night that he almost killed her as if he’d opened a door and stepped right out of her nightmares. Hamsi edged towards her table, all time and sound and movement standing still around the two of them, and Becky found herself stepping towards him, too, around the back of the table.
The failed terrorist and the casino dealer he’d tried to murder came together at the edge of the blackjack section, and Hamsi spoke first.
‘You’re here,’ Hamsi said. He gave a little laugh. ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I just came here . . . I wanted to tell you that I’m sor—’
Becky Caryett had never punched anyone before. She’d never so much as hit a punching bag, a pillow or a wall. She didn’t like violence. Couldn’t even stand to watch it on TV. But she delivered an uppercut to Hamsi’s jaw that was so immaculately aligned and direct and powerful, using all the force of her shoulder, her neck, her ribcage, twisting and surging upwards, that the man was unconscious even before his head snapped back, before his legs buckled and he slumped to the ground. She fancied she could feel through her knuckles the man’s brain sloshing backwards in his head and whumping against the inner surface of his skull, too fast for his neurons to handle.
Becky stepped back from the liquified figure on the floor that, only seconds before, had been an animated, talking, moving man, and she shook her hand loose, shooting Elliot a vicious glare of parting as her ex-husband dissolved into the press of people around them.
‘Anybody else feeling lucky?’ Becky asked the crowd.
CHAPTER 22
It was still dark when Kradle emerged from the tent with fresh clothes clinging to his reeking body. The dog exited beside him, shaking itself, and he got his first good look at it in the light of a Budweiser truck rolling under the overpass. It was big, black, pointy-nosed and yellow-eyed.
‘Here’s your fee for last night.’ He handed some notes to the scarred man, who hadn’t moved from his wooden crate. ‘And I’d like to buy this dog.’
‘Sure,’ the scarred man said, his hand still out.
‘Fifty bucks cover it?’
‘About right.’
Kradle peeled off the notes and started handing them over, then held them back at the last second.
‘It’s your dog, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ the scarred man said, as if it was obvious.
‘Well, whose dog is it?’
‘Fucked if I know, man.’
‘Then why am I giving you the money?’
‘Because you’re the kind of idiot who would pay real-ass money for a stray dog any moron could grab off the street for free.’
The old man rocked back on his crate and laughed. ‘Look around, genius.’ Kradle did. There were dogs everywhere, pools of fur lying outside tents, silhouettes nosing around piles of trash, trotting through the camp with a sense of purpose.
‘I’m just trying to do the right thing here,’ Kradle said.
‘Yeah? Well fuck off out of my face then, and take your stupid dog with you.’
They walked for an hour, side by side, Kradle saying nothing, the hood of the jacket the scarred man had given him pulled up around his face, the dog stopping now and then to piss on trees or stare back the way they had come, examining noises or smells on the wind. Once, Kradle spied a squad car doing slow laps of the silent streets. He ducked into a driveway to crou
ch in the moon-etched shadow of a trailer. The dog sat beside him, waiting. He didn’t understand the beast’s sudden loyalty, could only put the way it had rushed into the tent to lie beside him down as a resemblance to some past owner who had treated it well. Christine would have called the appearance of the dog a sign, an omen. She’d had all kinds of knowledge about mythology, about animals that showed up in the middle of fairytales to guide lost wanderers through dark forests or give warnings about caves they were about to pass through. Kradle didn’t know about anything like that. He just felt happy to have someone by his side. It had been strangely quiet and lonely in the hours since he and the serial killer parted ways.
He waited half a block down from number seven Solitaire Street, Beaver Dam, for what he guessed was an hour, looking for the telltale signs of surveillance: men sitting in parked cars, leaning on trees, watching from the windows of neighbouring houses. He sniffed the air for cigarette smoke, leather, gun oil, fried food, strong deodorant – the kinds of smells he associated with law enforcement personnel – but found nothing but cold, clean desert breeze. Then the side door of number seven opened and a figure stepped out. Kradle grabbed the dog and moved forwards.
He held the animal with two hands by a hank of its neck fur and shuffled in an awkward crouch towards the boy, who was locking the door behind him, a backpack hanging on one shoulder.
‘Hey, kid,’ Kradle said.
‘Whoa, shit! You scared me.’
‘Sorry, sorry.’ Kradle pretended to struggle with the dog, who was surprisingly placid, letting itself be manhandled by its new owner on the pavement without a shred of protest. ‘I just caught this dog. I saw it run out of a driveway down the street. Number twenty. It bolted right here. Can you give me a hand?’
‘Oh, uh, yeah. Uh.’ The kid turned in a circle, bewildered, thinking, the way Kradle hoped he would. Ripe for instruction.
‘You got a rope or something in there?’