by A. S. Patric
‘Enough, hey? Does that mean over a hundred?’
He chuckles. ‘Over a hundred? Vegas ain’t a fucken war zone!’
‘Would you have a problem killing a hundred people? All at once?’
‘I’m not a terrorist.’ Joseph turns up a Springsteen song on the radio.
‘No, of course not. To be honest, you don’t even look like a regular kind of killer. What’s with the shorts? And the sandals over socks? You’re a suburbanite.’
‘Everyone lives in the suburbs in Vegas.’
‘They don’t all look like fathers of four; loving husbands who wouldn’t dream of forgetting to get the milk on the way home.’
‘I don’t kill women or children.’
‘Why draw the line there? Some women do terrible things. And what’s a boy but a very young man?’
‘Is that who you want me to kill?’
‘No. Just a regular man. Middle aged. Someone like me. I don’t understand why it’s okay to put a target on my back and not on a brat or some adulterous woman.’
‘If she’s been cheating on you, we can fix her. Poison her lover and pin it on her. That can be done.’
‘What?’
‘Poison’s the way women kill.’
‘No. There’s no woman.’
‘Cherchez la femme.’
‘I’m suffocating. Open this window please.’ I click the window button and cough. The Nevada heat rushes in along with the traffic fumes. ‘Look, maybe we should forget this,’ I mumble. ‘Maybe I don’t need a hit man.’ I wind the window back up and look over at him. I blink when he looks at me. ‘I’ll give you something for your time, of course.’
We continue up Fremont, drawling along with the traffic— passing Binion’s Horseshoe, the Eldorado Club, the Golden Nugget and the Pioneer Club.
During the day all the lights are dead or drowned out by the desert sunshine and the whole town feels calm and clean, as though sleeping or catatonic.
Joseph chooses a long route out to my hotel and pulls up at the front doors as though we’d just taken a scenic drive of Las Vegas. He doesn’t seem frustrated or angry with me for wasting his time. He rejects any notion of me paying him for the cruise in his silver bullet Escalade.
‘Let me know if you change your mind,’ he says, and passes me a card. ‘Joseph Macela Enterprises’ is printed in silver curlicue lettering.
There are postcards spread across the bed, all from Las Vegas and addressed to me. The Bellagio Fountains illuminated in full flow, the ‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’ sign, the neon Cowboy with a smoke in his mouth from the Pioneer Club, aerial shots of the whole place lit up in blazing neon—each one of those cards a death threat, hand-delivered to this hotel room.
One of the postcards says, ‘A blade will find your heart and cut to black,’ another says, ‘There will be a sudden fury of speed banging on your Coffin.’ None of them is a simple message that actually uses the word ‘death’, and some of the phrases roll around my head for days afterwards. ‘The lost souls of Utopia,’ is scrawled on the back of a desert postcard with those cactus shapes that always remind me of a Looney Tunes landscape.
When I started writing those postcards to myself it was to leave proof behind that I wasn’t a suicide. Over the weeks I’ve been here I realised there could be no possible motive for this kind of murder. It was a cinematic lie that let me play out my little drama. I’ll have to destroy them as evidence of what I’ve set in motion.
A random act of violence is more believable. Living it up in Las Vegas. High rolling in Sin City. Speeding through my fall into a ready grave. It was a more believable lie, even if it was still a postcard holiday declaration. My children wouldn’t stumble across the body. I think it’s a good thing we bury the dead far from home. A suicide is only ever buried below the floorboards and the stink never gets better. It gets worse.
I have a blank postcard from the Casino Royale. On the back I scribble a phrase that’s been going through my head for a while. ‘No Silence, just a Roar as the world Rushes away.’
I place it on the bed, sunny side up. A mosaic of Vegas images that fills the king-sized hotel bed. I got the idea from my mother, though that hadn’t even occurred to me until I decided these postcards were evidence that needed to be destroyed. Even buying the postcards had been innocent to begin with. I had a stack of them to send back home but they kept piling up and I couldn’t think of writing anything until I started using a thick black pen and slashing those poisonous words into the paper.
My mother collected postcards. She arrayed them on a wall in the kitchen. Sometimes they wouldn’t change for years and then there would be enough for a whole new set of postcards. It was a cascade that reminded me of the letters on the destination board at airports that were in use when I was a child.
When my parents died, I put those postcards into boxes, and packed them all away in my garage. I didn’t look at them, even when I began mourning. I’d never grieved before. I felt like a man snatched up by the jaws of an alligator and taken down into the mud below the river in a death roll, somehow never dying, and going into that roll time and again.
It wore my wife down and I became a father only on Sundays and then every second Sunday (sometimes even less often), though of course our family had already been falling apart for a while. Those postcards got chucked out with a stack of old books and clothes.
Everything gets jumbled though and maybe we were fine. We were a regular couple with a regular set of kids, and we had regular troubles, but then there was the sickness and there was the death and a few months of grieving and the second death and everything got lost for us in the tumble of those days.
I tell Candy we’ll go out on a date rather than hole up in the hotel room as we’d done every other time. I ask her to wear a very short black skirt with white panties and meet me at the Red Rock Lanes on Charleston Boulevard. She arrives with a smile on her face and says she hasn’t been bowling since she was a child. I don’t reply to that. The dress she’s wearing is barely legal as it is.
‘How’d you find out about this place, anyway?’ she asks.
I realise this might be a bad idea. The bowlers on the other lanes are going to watch us. They’ll swivel their heads like carnival clowns. There are families in every babushka size, smallest to largest, and I imagine sock-hop sweetheart couples at nearby tables with milkshake smiles, sipping their drinks with interlinked elbows.
Or maybe no-one cares or notices a middle-aged man with a paunch and a prostitute young enough to be his daughter’s best friend. Maybe. Also possible is that my idea about Candy’s trailer-trash soul is the most poisonous thought I’ve ever had in my life.
And because she’s still looking at me with that smile melting away, I know I’ve got to speak. ‘Ah, I think it was in my Lonely Planet as a good place to take someone your age.’ She laughs but I say, ‘Maybe we should do something else.’
‘We can do something else. Or you can do me. Ever fuck in a toilet cubicle? I bet you haven’t.’ She grins when I say it doesn’t sound comfortable. She leads me away from the lanes, our fingers interlaced as we make our way to the rest rooms.
We put on the Red Rock shoes when we return and start casting down the heavy bowling balls. The pins don’t explode so much as teeter and topple over when we don’t roll into the gutters instead. I buy bottles of beer for us and a barman asks me whether she’s old enough. Candy giggles like a schoolgirl when I tell her.
We both look over to see if the barman is likely to act on his suspicions and we see Joseph Macela sitting at the bar. He lifts his Scotch glass at me with a raised pinkie.
Candy asks me who he is and for a moment I can barely breathe, let alone come up with a story about how I might know anyone in Las Vegas well enough to get a pinkie waved at me. Eventually I take a breath and explain that I’m thinking of buying some property and Joseph Macela is a realtor.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask him.
‘What am I doing
here?’
‘You heard me.’
‘I heard you.’ He takes a sip from his whisky. He doesn’t look away from my face. ‘Now explain the meaning of the question.’
‘Well, I’ve got a woman over there waiting and I told you to meet me at Stoney’s at nine. After dinner. In the restroom. I didn’t want you here at seven during a set.’
‘I’m busy later. It’s got to be now.’
‘See, this is a problem. If you can’t keep to a schedule … if you can’t follow basic instructions …’
‘I ain’t fucking under instruction.’ The glass wobbles midair for a moment. He leans forward and I can feel his breath on my ear lobe. ‘You’ve got no idea what the fuck it means to take a man’s life. I might as well be a surgeon, because believe me, when it’s done right, it’s that type of procedure. Especially if what we’re talking about is cutting a man out of this world and leaving everyone else hospital-grade clean. Now tell me, if you came to a surgeon asking him to cut you open ’cause he’s got to reach a faulty valve in your heart, would you be fucking him around like you’re fucking with me or would you shut your fucken mouth and trust his fucken expertise?’ He doesn’t raise his voice but I can feel him coiling on the chair.
‘Alright! Easy with the fucking swearing.’
He takes another sip from his whisky, not even blinking now. ‘I don’t recommend you test my patience.’
‘How would I be doing that?’
‘With another false alarm.’
‘I wasn’t false on Fremont. I wanted to make sure you were the man for the job. I want a professional for this. I need someone who will make sure there will be no mess. It’s a onebullet job.’
‘You made that clear. And I’ve told you already, that’s not a problem. But this will be the last time for cold feet.’
‘Now I’ve got cold feet? I could dance a fucking jig if I knew what that looked like. Should I hop around like a madman?’
‘You don’t have to do anything except pass me the money with an envelope that has the dead man’s details. And then we’re done. You won’t see me again and when you look in the papers a week from now there might be some small notice about a man gone missing and call this number with any news about his whereabouts.’
‘Somewhere in the desert?’ I ask.
‘Somewhere in the desert,’ he answers.
I place the bag with the money and the envelope at his feet by the bar. He finishes his drink, sucking up the ice cubes so he can chew on them.
‘How many bodies out in the desert?’
‘It’s a big fucking desert.’
‘I saw someone get hit by a car,’ Candy says when I open the hotel room door.
I tried other prostitutes but they all fucked like whores and made it clear I was a john and nothing more. Candy is still new enough at her job that the memory of boyfriends still overrides the professional performance that will soon take over whenever she attends to men in their hotel rooms.
I had called her again and she didn’t need me to tell her who I was. As soon as I said hello, she greeted me with so much enthusiasm I almost hung up again. I closed my eyes instead, and told myself that perhaps she was just a great actress. For her sake I really hope that’s true because while I don’t want the kind of whore who’s out the door before I’m even flaccid again, a sweetheart like Candy can be hard on the conscience.’
‘We were standing at Bonneville and North Boulevard.’ Candy walks into the hotel room. ‘And he must have got something from the Strip Sandwich Shop because he looked down into his bag of food and then he stepped out into traffic. The driver didn’t even have a chance to brake so the man rolled over the car and hit the concrete. And he wasn’t unconscious because he was trying to get up again. All he could move was his head, straining so much I could see all the cords in his neck pulling.’
‘I’ll order us up some cocktails,’ I say. ‘A Cosmopolitan for you and a Manhattan for me. How’s that sound?’
‘Lovely. Thank you.’ After I dial the number and make our order, she adds, ‘I looked at the man on the road and wished I could do something for him but I walked away as though he was a dog hit by a car.’
‘They say you should never touch someone when they’ve been hurt like that. There’s the risk of aggravating a spinal injury.’
I want to tell Candy that even family is road kill. What can we do but keep moving? I’m thinking about my father, sitting in his garage, the car playing Ravi Shankar on repeat until it runs out the battery, his engine rumbling to a halt after the full tank of petrol has been used up. By the time I find him there is a stench in the garage, of those fumes—and of rotting meat, because it’s the height of summer. The music spins some sitar noise when I open the car door. One more burst of power in the car’s battery. I walk away quickly, and dial the appropriate numbers. I don’t return. I just listen to that agonising sound of sitar at half speed.
‘So we’re supposed to leave a man dumped down in the street?’
‘My realtor tells me we’ve got to trust in the expertise of others.’ She looks at me, unsure of why I’m smiling, so I continue. ‘And I want to trust myself to your expertise.’ She grins and the cocktails come up soon after and there’s no more talk of a man who stepped out into traffic.
I spend hours on my balcony with my Zeiss Victory binoculars. They cost me a pretty penny, as my mother would have said. I didn’t spend much time in the store. I simply asked for the top of the line and paid for them. The salesman said that using these binoculars once would spoil me for any other kind.
Earlier in the week, my masseuse told me there were hundreds of unique species of plant and animal living in the Mojave Desert. I’ve bought a book that has details and pictures of what I might find out there. All of those creatures living within the very limited ecosystem spread across the surface of the desert, their survival based on a few incontrovertible methods of finding nourishment.
It’s not that different to the green desert my parents found for me to grow up in. They told me to go out and play in it yet kept my head ringing with the mantra that everything I touched was sacred. My school friends didn’t live in the desert with me. It was hard for me to ignore the carcasses of animals, expertly arranged in family fridges, their parents bringing out slices of animal flesh to me and their own children—to feed on. I wasn’t able to eat meat. My body hadn’t learned how to process animal flesh. Even after going to the Double Eagle Steak House, I came back to the hotel room and vomited the entire meal, as though I were still living in the green desert and I still believed that everything I touched was sacred.
I spend a lot of time looking for snakes in the desert with my Zeiss binoculars and have spotted what might be a diamondback rattlesnake and a few jack rabbits, and I’ve also noticed hummingbirds in the Joshua trees. Most of the time I’m not sure what I’m looking for. There are days when I can’t leave my hotel room and the desert seems the only thing worth looking at.
Our answering machine clicks on after three rings. The four of us say we aren’t home. I don’t leave a message. I listen to all our voices—speaking together. I hang up before the beep. A few moments later the phone rings and I’m stoned enough to think it might be a friend calling me, even though all those kinds of connections dissolved over the last few years. Sometimes you start drowning and everyone you know moves along with the current thinking you’re happy to wave goodbye.
‘Hello,’ I say.
I’m so wasted I don’t realise my eyes are closed. Flashes of Vegas showgirls dance across my vision. All those tall pink feathers arrayed behind the women like Hindu flame auras and diamond-bright sequins almost melting in the heat of the lights and the tanned, oiled flesh dancing in sequence in some festival of the eternally out of reach.
‘Hunter?’ My wife’s voice. I can’t hang up even though I’ve got nothing to say to her. ‘Hunt?
‘I wasn’t calling to talk,’ I say. ‘How’d you get this number?’
‘You
know we’ve got callback. I thought it was someone ringing for the house and not wanting to leave a message.’
‘You’re still trying to sell it?’
‘I had a landscaper in for the garden. And I’ve lowered the asking.’
‘OK. Good luck.’
She breathes for a few moments. I know she’s probably rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand. A little green mixed in with a little blue below that palm. Eventually she says, ‘Happy birthday for Sunday.’ I open my eyes when I hear her break the connection.
‘Cristal and caviar sounded so cool on the menu. Caviar’s gross though,’ Candy says. ‘I thought it was like pomegranate seeds. I didn’t know it was fish ovaries.’ She turns to look at me, a bounce in her hips on the mattress. ‘Do they kill the fish?’
‘You’re still drunk on that champagne,’ I tell her. I pull the bed sheet up. ‘Who cares about fish?’
‘I’m vegetarian.’ Candy knows it’s a mood killer. She blinks and adds, ‘I sometimes think about going vegan.’
We lie in bed staring out the windows at my desert view with nothing more to say. Any moment now I expect her to lean over and kiss me goodnight, take the money from the bedside table and leave—but she doesn’t. After a few minutes I hear Candy’s breathing change and I realise she’s fallen asleep.
I can feel the insomnia as a light in the back of my skull, and I know it won’t be an easy transition for me tonight. I’ve spent years basking in that sick glow of lime—my time measured out in six- or seven-hour instalments as heavy doses of sedation give me an hour or two of unconsciousness. I’ve been sleeping well in Vegas so it’s almost a surprise to feel that green light switch on again.
Candy was five or six mother-of-pearl teaspoons into the beluga, her tongue going black, when I noticed her grimacing after each mouthful. Eating it because of its exotic reputation or to please me or because she did all manner of things that had nothing to do with what she wanted.
A blade will find your heart and cut to black.
My mother used to write poetry when she was young. That seemed sweet until she began writing poetry again as she started disintegrating in the brutal rush of Alzheimer’s. There were only a few months after her diagnosis. She kept writing until she couldn’t use her hands and my father wrote the words for her. They went on until neither could do anything more than moan or wail.