Luke - Sex, Violence and Vice in Sin City

by Aaron Cohen

  I decided to lose some weight. And lucky me, I live in America, where everyone is trying to lose weight. I started with a regular diet, eating more vegetables and working out. My workouts were an hour long walk a day (my knees can’t take running, thanks to my college football career) and lifting weights.

  I lost ten pounds right away, and that was it. The shrinking stopped.

  So then I tried a few different diets. They all kind of worked, and then they would stop. I even did Weight Watchers, went to the meetings and everything. It was just me and seven middle-aged soccer moms looking to slim down to keep hubby happy. I didn’t lose weight, but I did feel sexy for the first time in my life. Overweight soccer moms are way into giant Samoan dudes who drive Cadillac Escalades and can cook gourmet French food. Who knew?

  I gave up. I’m fat. I just stopped worrying about it. And, lucky me, I live in America, the land of fat people.

  I’m not interested in fighting anyone anyway. If my size isn’t enough to make you reconsider assaulting my partner, I have a really big gun. Like I said, I live in America.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Luke sweats in the dark, feeling cramped and claustrophobic, eyes stinging from the acrid pot residue smell. He wants to get the fuck out of this hellish little box, but he’s got to wait. Ben said to wait.

  He can hear Ben’s voice, talking to whoever is now in the SUV. He can’t make out what they are saying.

  The voices get louder. A thump. Another thump. Ben yells, long and loud.

  What are they doing to the poor guy? Christ, he’s an old man. Why be rough with him?

  More muffled thumps, then a loud one, like someone dropped onto the floor. More screaming, but now another guy’s voice. Maybe Ben has his brass knuckles out again?

  Ben yells, and yells, and yells. Then quiet.

  Luke wants to do something, now, take action, but Ben said to wait.

  Luke is trying not to panic, but that didn’t sound good. That sounded like a friend of his in extreme pain. He balls his fists, wanting to hit something. He thinks about pushing the couch from on top of him, bursting into the SUV and hitting guys, hitting them hard, hitting them until they could no longer hit back. But Ben said to wait.

  More thumps, but this time quieter. A dragging sound. They are dragging Ben away, it sounds like.

  Motherfuckers. Luke pictures Ben knocked out, his face bloody, his body limp, his feet dragging on the floor as goons drag him away to see David. Someone is going to pay. Someone is going to pay for all this shit.

  He thinks about his aunt and uncle. He thinks about Leanne. He thinks about how the entire world seems fucked, run by evil people, built to be cruel, everything meaningless. He wants to do something about it all, and he wants to do something right now.

  But Ben said to wait. Just a few more minutes, until everything is silent and it is safe to come out. Just a few more minutes. And then David Vaddio will begin paying his debt.

  ***

  A few minutes earlier…

  Ben parks. He waves and smiles at the crowd of security goons, more and more convinced they are grown on some kind of farm somewhere, fed red meat and steroids, bred to be big, strong, obedient idiots.

  Pounding on the door. Ben gets up and opens it. He smiles.

  “Hiya boys!” he cheerfully says. “David around?”

  Two goons barge into RV and push Ben backward. One of them takes out a pair of handcuffs.

  “Mr. Vaddio said to cuff you,” the goon says.

  “I’m an old man,” Ben says and holds up his empty hands. “What could I possibly do?”

  “Mr. Vaddio said you’d say that. Please turn around and place your hands behind your back.”

  “Oh alright,” Ben says, turns around slowly. When his back is to the guards, with barely a flick of his wrist, he slips his brass knuckles from the front pocket of his tracksuit jacket onto his right fist.

  Ben extends his left arm out, his hand high in the air, knowing that the guards will look at it. An old magician’s trick. Wave one hand as a distraction, while your other hand is doing the real work, sliding a card into a deck, tucking a quarter into a palm, slipping a dove into a velvet bag the audience thinks is empty.

  He rests for a moment, then spins, bringing around his brass covered right fist squarely into the jaw of the closest goon. Blood and teeth fly.

  The other goon smiles. Uh-oh. These boys were expecting trouble. The ox has a metal club in his right hand.

  Ben is still off balance from his haymaker swing. He put everything into to it, trying to eliminate the threat of at least one of the goons. He was successful there. Goon One will be sleepy-bye for a while. But now he is out of position to defend himself against a club to the side of his head.

  He ducks in time to prevent his skull from being caved in. The metal glances off the crown of his head. It hurts like hell. He screams out.

  ***

  Outside, David arrives. The massive piece of shit Winnebago in front of him makes him almost feel sorry for Ben. Is this how he’s spending his retirement?

  “What’s going on?” he asks the guards who are watching the battle through the door.

  “The old guy doesn’t want to be cuffed,” a guard says.

  “Excellent,” David says.

  He smiles at the sound of Ben in pain.

  “That’s a sound I’ve wanted to hear for a long time,” David says.

  ***

  Inside, Ben charges the guard with the club, grabbing it, keeping it from being swung again. The guard shakes it, trying to get it free, using both hands.

  Idiot. Does this guy really not get that while he’s working so hard to get back his precious blackjack that he is vulnerable?

  Ben issues a right upper cut, made more impactful with the brass knuckles, into the cock and balls of his foe. It connects. Something pops. The man howls in pain and drops to the floor. The noise he makes is as loud as anything Ben has ever heard.

  I got kicked in the nuts like that once. I probably sounded just like that, a ball-punched high tenor.

  Ben looks down on the goon and feels bad for him, but great for himself. He hasn’t felt this energized in years. He loves a good fight, the satisfaction of breaking another man, seeing his defeated, bleeding form lying at his feet. Ben never had the hand speed to be a pro boxer, but he had the jaw and the smarts. And his reflexes remain intact. That’s a big deal at his age. He thanks his personal trainer, his almost-vegan diet, and those Gingko pills he takes every day, which maybe aren’t bullshit after all.

  He turns to the door and gets into a fighter’s crouch, ready for the next asshole brave enough to walk into the door.

  David himself comes to the door and surveys the scene, looks disappointedly at his two crumpled, defeated men lying on the floor.

  “Having fun, Ben?” David asks.

  “I am, thanks for asking.”

  “A Winnebago? Are you that old now?”

  “A guy has to have a hobby. I like to go bang the widowers who hang around RV parks. Shall we chat?”

  “Sure. Let’s talk some business.”

  Ben walks out of the SUV, not wearing cuffs, the brass knucks disappeared from his hand.

  The guards drag away their two fallen comrades, one unconscious, one moaning.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Luke listens, breathes shallowly because the acrid pot fumes are making him want to throw up. He hears nothing but silence. The plan is to wait for ten minutes, ten full minutes. He can’t see his watch. No one had thought of that. He waits, waits, tries not to think, tries to count his breaths and meditate, make time flow. He can’t do it. Images of Ben being beaten pop into his head. Images of his aunt and uncle being buried in shallow graves out in the desert. That woman in the video, Leanne, looking desperate and scared.

  Nothing makes sense. His life has gone haywire. This morning, he was just a guy trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Now, he is a guy risking his life to save some
one he has never met, and to avenge people he has known and loved his entire life. Also, he is hanging out with a famous gangster, a guy who knows The Code.

  With a little work, he manages to get his father’s brass knuckles out of the back pocket of his jeans. The weight in his hand is reassuring.

  My father owned these. Unbelievable. How can that possibility be true? Ben needs to stay alive just so he can tell me more about him.

  His entire life Luke had dreamed about adventure, fighting the good fight, of raging against the people he thought were truly evil: the corporations, the system, The Man, the whole crooked, rigged machine.

  And here he is, on his adventure, cramped, sweating, his nostrils burning, and fuck it, ten minutes is too long. It’s time to go, he thinks. If someone is up there, it will be worth the fight just to take a breath of fresh air.

  He pushes up on the door and feels the weight of the couch slowly give way and until it finally falls over, fresh air rushing into his face, bright light making him squint. He rises from his pot-scented hole and looks around. No sign of anyone. The doors are closed. He’s safe. Time to get everyone up and ready to go into the tower.

  He goes to the big double bed first, worried about Charlie. A guy that big is not meant to be stored in a space that small.

  He lifts the bed, the corners of it on hinges, and it rises with ease.

  This is one well-engineered smugglers van, no matter how shitty it looks on the outside.

  Inside is the massive Charlie, an angelic look on his face, sleeping peacefully, his giant bush of hair spread out in tangle over his pillow. He looks so at peace Luke is sad to wake him.

  “Charlie,” he says. “Hey, big guy, wake up.”

  Charlie’s eyes spring open and he grunts, saying something, like he’s saying good morning with a mouth full of oatmeal.

  “I don’t understand, big guy,” Luke says. “But it’s time to go.”

  Charlie says something else, this time more urgently, but Luke has no hope of understanding.

  “I’m sorry but I don’t understand,” he says.

  Charlie sits up and points to something behind Luke.

  Luke turns and sees two more goons standing there in their stupid uniforms with the black turtle necks and blue blazers that make them look like refuges from a 70s movie about singles bars. The goons are holding guns.

  More security assholes. How many dumbass rent-a-cops does this place employ? They need to be out of the way, right fucking now.

  “Just put your hands up,” Goon One says. “Let’s not make this difficult.”

  Luke sighs. Nothing is going to go right today. He raises his hands quickly, putting his right hand, which still has on the knucks, behind a support beam.

  “You too, Big Foot,” goon two says. “Out of your nest.”

  Charlie rises majestically out of his hold, getting taller and taller, until fully erect at his glorious six-foot-five, his 350 pounds making him mountainous and terrifying.

  “I don’t think we have cuffs that are going to fit him,” Goon One says.

  “Oh shit, is that Mr. Vaddio coming back?” Luke asks, looking through the front wind shield.

  The goons turn and look. Luke can’t believe it worked. Everyone around here is terrified of that guy. Just the mention of him makes people want to pee their pants.

  Luke charges forward and smashes the guy on the right dead in the jaw with his knucks. The goon crumbles like a puppet with his strings cut. Success! Luke is triumphant, for just a second. The remaining goon lifts his gun and jabs the barrel into Luke’s neck, thus revealing the flaw in Luke’s plan, which granted, was hatched in a split second. Luke now knows he acted a little quickly, with not perhaps the most thorough evaluation of all the options.

  “If I pull this trigger,” the goon says. “Your head will literally pop off. Don’t even think about moving. Now put your arms behind your back.”

  “Do you want me to not move, or to put my arms behind my back?” Luke asks.

  He’s not trying to be a smart ass. He actually does want to know, as he really did want to keep his head connected to his body.

  Charlie emits a noise somewhere between a scream and a howl, a painful tortured, chilling noise that has its desire effect. The goon moves the gun from Luke’s neck to the direction of the noise. Charlie grabs the man’s wrist, his hand massive around what now looks like the dainty wrist of a child.

  The goon’s eyes grow big with fear and his mouth drops open, as now he is standing next to a man twice his size, a man with a face like a pit bull and a voice that seems to make animals noises instead of words.

  CRACK. Little bones crumble in Charlie’s grip as the goon’s wrist snaps. The gun hits the floor. The goon feints and does the same.

  “Thanks, Charlie,” says Luke.

  Charlie nods his acknowledgement as if to say, “Don’t mention it.”

  “You two want to blow each other or can we get going already,” Hank asks, rising from his hole in the floor.

  Cecil and Artie emerge as we’ll, both of them looking grumpy.

  “It’s a wonder I didn’t die from asphyxiation,” Cecil says. “What did you eat last?”

  “Can I help it if I’m lactose intolerant?”

  “Yes, you can help it! You can stop drinking milk. I think you’ll find that relieves your problem.”

  “I’ll take my milk farts over your cologne any day. What is that shit? Cougar piss and sandalwood?”

  “Enough!” Hank says. “We’ve got to get inside.”

  “It is impossible,” Cecil says. “Security guards are everywhere and heavily armed. We should leave immediately!”

  “Quit your bitching,” Artie says.

  “Hold on. I’ve got an idea,” Luke says, looking down at the two unconscious goons.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  A few minutes later, Luke and Hank are dressed in black turtle necks, blue blazers and black trousers, the uniform of The Dark Star security team.

  “I don’t know, kid,” Hank says. “This is a big risk.”

  “It will work. We get inside. We don’t talk to anyone. We act like we’ve worked here for years. We just need to get to the security office where the cameras and computers are. We figure out where Leanne is, grab her, and get the hell out.”

  The guards are in white T-shirts and boxers shorts, hands and legs bound, mouths gagged. The one with the broken wrist also has a splint, courtesy of Luke, who felt bad about all the pain the guy was in. A couple pills from Hank’s personal stash fixed him right up though. The goon was in such a good mood that he didn’t mind being laid flat in the big pit under the bed.

  The other guard is less happy, keeps trying to scream through his gag. Hank lowers the bed down on top of them and the muffled yelling goes away completely. He slides the locking bolt closed and pulls back the bed’s comforter.

  “Will they be able to breathe?” Luke asks

  “It’s not air tight,” Hank says. “But it’s not comfortable. We should be back soon and then well cut them loose.”

  “Cool. Alright, Charlie, we’re going to have to put hand cuffs on you.”

  Charlie growls in protest.

  “It’s not for long,” Hank says. “Take it easy. It’s just for show.”

  Charlie gives a compliant grunt, but it is not a happy one.

  ***

  Ben and David walk through a massive casino floor so opulent it’s like Elton John, Boy George and the ghost of Liberace collaborated on the decor. Gold fixtures, crystal chandeliers, and red velvet wallpaper go on for acres. Ben wonders how many football fields you can fit into the room. He thinks maybe eight.

  “Cozy place you have here, David,” Ben says. “And subtle, so subtle.”

  “People bet big money in a room that feels like big money,” David says. “You taught me that.”

  “You think this is what I taught you?”

  “You’d give your left nut to own a place like this.”

  “Is
that all it cost you? Or are you fully neutered by your corporate bosses?”

  “Give it a rest old man. You’re just bitter the business has gone legit.”

  “Legit? Kidnapping. Murder. You’ve got your own private army who runs around shooting up brothels. What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “I do business as I see fit. I get the job done. It’s not personal…”

  “Ah god, don’t say it.”

  “…it’s business. You taught me that. The Code taught me that.”

  “Not my Code. My Code says everyone in the business is family, that we are in it together. And you’re looking to put everyone out of business, looking to crown yourself king. It’s not honorable, what you’re doing.”

  “Okay, enough of the friendly chit-chat with an old friend. You have something for me?”

  “As soon as I see Leanne walk out of here, you’ll get what you want.”

  “I’m going to get what I want, no doubt about that.”

  “Then what are we talking about?”

  “I want something else.”

  What the hell does this maniac want? This might have been a bad move. Gotta keep my cool, keep him talking.

  “What might that be? A hug? A pony? Justin Bieber tickets?”

  “I want to kill you, but I want you to suffer the way I suffered that day. Remember that day? I want you to wonder if you’ll make it. I want you to have a little bit of hope, and then see it snuffed out.”

  “Always with the blame, David. Everyone is at fault but you.”

  “I can kill you right now, or we can roll. If I win, I get the thumb drive and I beat you to death. And I might kill Leanne. I haven’t decided yet. If you win, then you walk out of here alive with Leanne. Either way, I get the data stick, of course.”

  “This is how you negotiate? You turn it into a game?”

  “Life is a game, yet another lesson you taught me. You don’t want to roll? How about this? I beat you in the kidneys until you piss blood for a week. How about that?”