by Draker, Paul
“Thanks for your support, Senator.” Without turning, I waved my free hand at the door. “McNulty can show you out.”
CHAPTER 7
Roger’s third beer was half empty. I was nursing my first and tried to pay attention to what he was saying.
“You’re in a shitty mood,” he said. “Especially for a guy who just blackmailed twelve million out of a tough son-of-a-bitch Washington power broker in a four-thousand-dollar suit.”
Shifting on the barstool, I caught my own tight-jawed reflection in the huge etched mirror behind the bar and tried to relax.
“Blackmail? Hardly. Linebaugh saw the value of my research.”
“Come on, man.” Roger grinned. “Don’t be coy. We all knew what your phone really said—you had him by the balls. Classy, the way you played it off.”
I shrugged. “You don’t have much faith in our elected leaders.”
“No shit.” He slugged back his beer and signaled for another. “This is still a great country, but not for much longer. You know why? We’ve handed the wheel to guys like Grayson Linebaugh—a bunch of fat cats and bureaucrats sitting in Washington and on Wall Street. Guys that never had to earn a living, busy stealing our money and taking our freedoms one by one.”
Fabulous, I thought. Now he was going to start in about guns and the Constitution again. That was the problem with living in Nevada—you got that a lot here. I liked guns just fine, but they were only big-boy toys to me, like the four-hundred-horsepower Waverunner I took out on the lake most weekends. But for guys like Roger, guns seemed to fill some kind of spiritual or existential void in their lives.
Roger gulped half of his beer. “In California, they’re trying to pass a ban on AR rifles. Again. This new state bill, SB247…”
I let his words fade into the background noise while I scanned the elk heads and antlers on the walls, looking for some distraction from the relentless press of my thoughts. Roger was right: I was in a shitty mood.
Jen had done it to me again.
Roger had run out of steam during our drive down to Reno, probably anticipating that I’d be lousy company. We’d stopped in smaller Spanish Springs instead. The bar he’d chosen, Buckhorns, sported a hunting-lodge theme: dark, with large-scale woodwork and antlers everywhere.
Buckhorns shared a parking lot with a shopping center built around a SaveMart, but despite the high turnover of cars outside, only a few other patrons were in the bar with us. I turned my attention to them and tried to forget the conversation with my ex-wife.
A couple close to my age sat in one of the booths, having dinner. They spoke in quiet, familiar tones, just as they had for the entire half hour Roger and I had been at the bar. The guy looked mixed Native American—probably Paiute, given our proximity to the Pyramid Lake Reservation. He had one arm thrown casually across the back of the booth cushions and wore a long-sleeved white T-shirt under a grey hoodie vest, faded jeans and scuffed tan cowboy boots. He had a buzz cut like mine.
Across from him, the girl paused mid-sentence to sip from a mug, then resumed speaking with animated gestures. Dangling silver earrings sparkled from a trail of piercings that curled along the top and outer edge of her ear. Her dark hair was cut short on that side, but it angled across her bangs and the nape of her slender neck to hang shoulder length on the other side, highlighted by a single wavy streak of pale greenish blond. The emo hairstyle and piercings made an interesting contrast with the sleek dark business suit and high heels she wore, but somehow, it all worked.
She laughed—bright white teeth and light freckles against prominent cheekbones. I could see she was at least part Indian, also. And pretty. She and her boyfriend were doing a lot of catching up.
On second thought, nix “boyfriend”—the body language was wrong. The two of them were comfortable together but not intimate. Brother and sister, maybe.
Something Roger said caught my ear. I turned to face forward again, tuning him back in.
“…like that team of MIT students a few years back. Worked out a system for counting cards—took the casinos for millions. Were you in on that?”
“The MIT blackjack team,” I said. “Before my time.”
Roger’s beer was empty again. The bartender brought him another.
“Look, man,” he said, “I won’t say shit, but I know what you’re planning to do. I’ve seen those DVDs lying around your lab.”
I was puzzled for a moment, but then I realized what he meant. The World Poker Tour DVDs—hundreds of hours of video that were stacked against the walls and spilled under the tables.
I relaxed my fingers, releasing the beer coaster I’d been crumpling into a tighter and tighter ball.
“Okay, genius,” I said. “You want in on the action?”
“I didn’t say that, man.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his lips, and looked around nervously. “It’s cool. You just need to be careful, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Are you in or out, Roger? Right now.”
He pulled out a soft pack of Camels and fumbled with them. “That software of yours’ll tell you exactly who’s got what around the table and who’s bluffing. It’ll be like stealing candy from a baby.” He pulled out a cigarette. “I don’t know. Casinos take this stuff seriously, man. They fuck people up if they catch them doing shit like this. We could get hurt.”
“I need an answer right now.”
“Oh, shit.” He lit a cigarette with an unsteady hand. “I’m in.”
“You dumb-ass,” I said. “We’re going to carry a ninety-ton supercomputer into a casino?”
Roger’s face flushed. “Don’t be a dick. Just the camera. One guy sits at a slot machine or whatever near the table, has a lens rigged in his cap—”
I laughed.
“I’m serious,” Roger said. He sounded angry now. “Frankenstein’ll read their faces and buzz the phone in your pocket. Tell you when to fold, call, bet, go all-in, or whatnot.”
I smirked and shook my head.
The door opened, letting in a burst of parking lot noise. Two guys came through and made a beeline for the bar. As the door swung shut behind them, I glimpsed the hood of an oversize blue pickup truck at the curb—probably one of theirs. They were big, steroid-pumped guys in their mid-twenties, probably local, one in a muscle tank top, the other wearing a tight black T-shirt. They elbowed up to stand at the bar next to where we were sitting, and the bartender went to pull their beers.
“This place is just as dead as Bully’s,” Tank-Top said to his buddy. His big biceps and deltoids flexed and bunched. “Told ya we should’ve headed into the city.”
I swiveled my back to them, turning to speak to Roger.
“Bandwidth, O evil mastermind,” I said. “That’s the problem with your little camera ass-hat scheme. You were planning to run a hundred-gigabit fiber-optic line down your pants leg and out the casino door, maybe? Across thirty miles of desert and under twenty-five miles of lake?”
“The hell you talking about? Ten-eighty-P video only wants about twenty-five megabit—”
“Compressed,” I said. “Motion blurred. And, therefore, useless. For straight, clean HDMI you’d need five gigabit, and even that wouldn’t provide enough temporal resolution—”
Tank-Top slapped the bar top next to my forearm. Hard.
“Stop talking that shit,” he said. “You’re hurting my ears. Nobody wants to hear your computer geek bullshit right now.”
The back of my neck tightened. I didn’t look at him. “We’re having a private conversation,” I said. “No one’s speaking to you, asshole.”
“What did you just say?” He slapped the bar again and moved behind my stool, leaning into my space to loom over my back. He had fifty pounds on me, easy. I could feel his stare on the side of my face.
Shit. Now this, too, on top of my call with Jen. I kept my mouth shut and hunched my shoulders. Staring down at my beer, I held completely still.
Roger didn’t say anything, either. I hoped he wasn�
�t packing, because he was drunk and I didn’t trust his judgment. With a gun in the mix, things could get a lot uglier.
“Take it easy, Ray.” The bartender reached over and tapped Tank-Top on the shoulder.
“Come on, bro,” his buddy in the T-shirt said. “Don’t waste your time on this loser.”
Tank-Top Ray’s breath tickled my ear—hot, moist, and smelling of alcohol already. But I wasn’t hearing whatever he was saying. All I could hear was Jen’s voice on the phone, telling me Amy wasn’t coming to see me this weekend.
Jen always waited until the last minute to spring the news on me, and the canceled visits were happening more and more often. I looked down at my fingers, pressing hard into the bar top, tips whitening. I raised my gaze and met my own eyes in the mirror. They were narrow slits.
“Nothing to say, you little pussy?” Ray hissed in my ear. “That’s what I thought.” I felt him turn away, and then his voice climbed in surprise. “Holy shit, look who’s sitting over there. It’s Pocahontas!”
He was talking about the Native American girl. Mocking her. She’d come here to enjoy a quiet dinner with her brother or cousin or whoever, and now that poor guy would be forced to defend her, and he’d get hurt bad, and she’d have to watch it happen.
“Pocahontas, you’ve changed.” Ray said, and laughed. “What happened to your hair?”
I stared down at the bar top. Whatever plans the girl had for the weekend were off now. She’d be doing something else instead. Nursing her injured brother and feeling guilty, blaming herself even though none of this was her fault. She’d be looking at the bloody cotton gauze in her hand and wondering what she’d done to deserve to feel so bad.
Which was the same thing I’d be wondering, sitting alone in my lab all weekend now, staring at two unused Cirque du Soleil tickets taped to the corner of my monitor, and missing my daughter so much my chest hurt.
The words were out of my mouth before I knew I was going to speak.
“Is that the ‘roids talking, Ray? Or were you a bigoted retard before you started juicing?”
He shoved me hard from behind, rocking my barstool. My upper lip mashed against the rim of my beer glass, knocking it over.
Roger said, “Come on, man, be cool—”
“Get up.” Ray’s breathing was hot on my neck again.
My mouth stung. I touched two fingertips to my upper lip, and looked down at them. Dabs of blood glistened on my fingertips, maroon in the soft lighting of the bar.
“Come on, asshole—right now. We’re going outside.” Ray loomed over my shoulder. He shifted position, getting ready to slap his palm down on the bar top again. “Get up.”
I didn’t move a muscle… Ray was a lot bigger than I was.
He leaned forward to drop his weight onto his palm, and I slid off the barstool fast, shouldering his arm aside and grabbing his wrist as I pivoted around behind him. Off balance, he tried to pull away. I palmed the back of his head with my other hand and kicked his legs out from under him, using his forward momentum to bounce his face off the edge of the bar with a solid, meaty thunk. He went down hard, knocking barstools over.
Standing over him, feeling almost disappointed, I nodded to myself. Ray was a lot bigger than I was—and in my experience, big usually meant slow.
He pushed up to his hands and knees and shook his head to clear it. Drops of blood pattered onto the floor.
“Get up,” I said.
He tried.
I hammered him—a nice downward shot, knuckles straight along his cheekbone, hurting my hand. He went face first into the ground.
I strode around to his other side with bouncing steps, kicking aside a fallen barstool that was in the way. “I said, get up.”
Motion on my left—Ray’s buddy in the T-shirt, moving in. I pivoted, bringing up my guard, and drove a quick jab into the center of his face.
He stumbled back, raising a hand to his bloodied nose. “What the fuck did I do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Keep it that way.”
Shoving off the ground, Ray tried to lunge for my legs. I’d never been much of a grappler, so I sidestepped and hit him hard above his eye, hurting my left hand, too.
It took the fight out of him. He curled up on his side and covered his head with his forearms. “You broke my tooth,” he said, gasping. “I’m gonna come find you later, motherfucker.”
I reached down and yanked his wallet out of his back pocket, flipped it open, and pulled out his driver’s license. Raymond Cullinan, 18 Virgil Circle, Spanish Springs.
Slipping Ray’s license into my own pocket, I tossed the rest of the wallet back at him. It hit him in the chest.
“Don’t get brave,” I said. “I know where to find you now.”
A slender shape in a dark suit slipped between us to squat beside my opponent, balancing gracefully on her heels. The Paiute girl. I took a step back, surprised. She pulled Ray’s arms away from his face, sucked in a breath, and looked up at me.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked.
I blinked, unsure what to say. Up close, her eyes were very big and very dark. She was even prettier than I’d first realized. Her earrings jingled as she shook her head at me, distaste on her face. And wariness, too, as if she was dealing with some kind of lunatic.
“Cliff, get me some ice,” she called to the bartender.
I wasn’t feeling real good about this.
“Come on, man.” Roger grabbed my elbow, pulling me toward the door. “Time to roll.”
The bartender handed the girl a dishtowel full of ice with one hand. Holding a phone to his ear with the other, he spoke calmly into it—to the cops, no doubt. Then he held the phone out toward me, and its small flash lit the room.
Taking my picture.
“Get off the floor, Ray,” the girl said. She held the towel against his face, the white terrycloth already turning red.
“Ah, Christ, that hurts.” Ray sat up and pressed his back against the bar. He wouldn’t look in my direction.
The brother joined his sister. He bent to slip an arm under Ray’s shoulder, helping him stand. The girl stood up, too, and I realized she was tall—as tall as I was.
She glanced at me again, and her expression hardened. Turning to her brother, she shook her head in disgust. “Now I remember why I was in such a big hurry to move away.”
On our way to the door, Roger and I passed Ray’s buddy, sitting on a barstool and holding a napkin under his nose.
“You’re an asshole,” he said without looking up. “Today was his birthday.”
“Someone should buy him some better friends, then,” I said. “Ones that’ll stick up for him.”
Outside, I took a couple deep breaths, and turned my face up to the sky. My hands hurt. Amy wasn’t coming this weekend. This was what my life had turned into.
Roger was already halfway to his car—a modified milsurp Humvee known as “the Beast.”
“You’re too drunk to drive,” I called.
“Cops’ll be here any minute.” Roger said. “I don’t have my class-three paperwork with me. I don’t want to have to explain what I’ve got in the trunk.”
Great—he had brought something full-auto.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll bring you back to get your car tomorrow.”
The cool outside air felt good on my face. Pulling out my keys, I stepped off the curb, beeped the locks on my Mustang, and swung the driver’s side door open. Roger hurried toward the passenger side. I started to duck into my car, and froze.
Ray’s blue four-door pickup was parked two spaces away. I could see little stickers on the window—Dora the Explorer, Hello Kitty. And through the glass, the familiar shape of a child’s car seat.
I closed my eyes and laid my forehead against the top of the doorframe, feeling sick.
“I have to go back in,” I said.
“What the fuck, Trevor? Get in the car.”
“I have to apologize.”
“So
you’re gonna buy the guy a drink, and we’ll all talk about our feelings? Use our words?” He laughed. “Worst. Idea. Ever. Get in the car.”
I got in the car.
• • •
The miles unspooled in headlight-length increments of dashed yellow centerline, with vacant sagebrush desert on our left, and the lake a dark, silent presence on the right. My hands throbbed painfully in time with my pulse as I loosely gripped the wheel. At least I hadn’t broken any bones this time. I knew what a busted hand felt like—I had fractured metacarpals enough times to know they were only bruised right now. Still, the middle-finger base knuckle on my right hand was swelling like a golfball. Bursitis, probably.
I focused on the ribbon of road ahead, remembering Amy’s face when she was five, her big blue eyes wide with wonder as she watched the performers and acrobats in their bright costumes. She had squeezed my hand so tight with her little fingers, staring open-mouthed, amazed by the colorful sets and the uplifting music. For days afterward, it was all she wanted to talk about—Jen beaming at me, too, as Amy described Cirque du Soleil’s Ovo show again and again. “You’re the best dad ever,” she said when we came out of the tent.
Nowadays, she sounded so much older, more reserved. Every time I saw her, she was taller than I remembered.
My daughter was growing up. And I was missing it.
“Jesus Christ, Trevor,” Roger said, “you fucked that guy up.”
I kept my jaw clamped shut. From the size of that car seat, Ray’s kid was maybe 3 years old. His truck was brand new, pristine. He had waxed it till it shone—guys like Ray loved their trucks. But he had let his kid put her stickers all over the window and he’d kept them there.
She would be scared—probably cry—when she saw what I’d done to his face.
“I mean, you Tyler-fucking-Durden-ized him.” Roger laughed. “I was going to jump in, but you never gave me a chance.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Ass-kicking 101 isn’t an elective at MIT. I thought that bag hanging in your lab was just for show. Where’d you learn to fight like that?”