Murder in Vegas Read online

  At the sheriff’s office I got the key ring out of the desk drawer. The bikers heard the jingle and were huddled in the far corner. They stared at me as if seeing a ghost. A welcome ghost.

  Leaning into the Dulcimer’s front desk, Betty spoke to the clerk. “Any news of Al Milledge?”

  I tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled.

  We gazed hungrily, thirstily. Often words get in the way of what we want to say. Our lips met and spoke for themselves.

  THE DOPE SHOW

  K.j.a. WISHNIA

  “You know, you’re probably the only guy I know who opens a porno mag and reads the fine print,” said Hughie, taking his eyes off the three-girl routine on the runway.

  “You gotta hear this,” said the big man from Turkey. “‘The photos, words, and illustrations in this magazine are intended for fantasy purposes only. The editors do not suggest or encourage readers to act out fantasies contained herein—’”

  “Tell me the sleazebag editor came up with that legal language—”

  “‘We encourage safe sex practices and present this magazine as a safe fantasy alternative to dangerous sex practices.’”

  “So now it’s a public service. Wonderful.” Hughie leaned against the bar and lit a cigarette. “I wish I’d have thought of that when Father Dougan caught me with a stack of his old Playboys. Jeez, they still cropped off the bush in those days.”

  Hughie exhaled up at the pin spots defining a smoky shaft of light over the bar, and looked around the place. It was small enough to be comfortable, with only one way in but four ways out, including two fire exits and the stage door, and that made him less comfortable. Too much craziness could take off in too many directions. Still, it was slightly off the beaten path, smoky and anonymous. Perfect. Or almost.

  His gaze returned to the twisting trio.

  Then the DJ broke into the thumping strip tune, interrupting Hughie’s concentration with a voice that belonged in a sports arena: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment pleasure, please give it up for Candee’s own vixen with the fixin’s, Tracy Tetons!”

  Tracy strutted on stage and started shaking those implanted things, just like she did five times a day, Tuesday through Sunday. Mondays off. Hughie watched her using the pole in a way that was functional but mechanical. Oh, it got the job done, all right, but something was missing.

  “She’s getting better,” Hughie said.

  Yilmaz either grunted something noncommittal or hocked up a loogie. Hughie couldn’t tell which.

  “How’d she come up with the name Tracy Tetons?” said Hughie.

  “Because Alyssa Alps and Pandora Peaks were taken.”

  “She could have called herself Plenty O’Cleavage.”

  “Also taken.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Yilmaz shook his head, his iridescent blazer outlining a pair of pumped-up deltoids. “I think she should have called herself Persistence Pays.”

  “It’s lyrical, but it’s not ironic.”

  “It’s not in on the joke?”

  “It’s too bitchy.”

  “Bitchy sells, too, my friend.”

  Hughie took a deep drag on his death stick and blew it out through his nose.

  Yilmaz said, “I need to get some air.”

  “Wait a minute, I’ll go with you.”

  Hughie took one more look around the dark interior of the club. His mark hadn’t come in yet, but it was a good habit to double-check even a sure thing.

  It was one of his few good habits.

  They leaned outside and breathed in the clean desert air. The street off Fremont was all quiet, and misty with late afternoon shadows, portending a shower.

  “Boy, rain in Vegas,” said Hughie. “What are the odds of that?”

  “That’s not real rain,” said Yilmaz, looking up at the sky. “That’s a special effect.”

  Earl’s butt was hurting. Eleven hours in the driver’s seat and it was starting to feel as if eyeless robots had spot-welded his can to the truck’s cold steel undercarriage as it rolled off the assembly line back in Flint, when they were still hiring. And for what? A long container full of sand. Nothing worth skimming from this haul. No compensation at all for a royal pain in the butt gig like this, and to make things worse, there was no one to laugh it off with.

  So when he finally saw the great pyramids of dirt rising over the leafless trees and razor wire-topped steel mesh along the narrow, deserted road, he started to expel the hours of pent-up venom, releasing all that nastiness through his hairy nostrils with several deep breaths.

  Okay, okay, under control—dump the load, check into the Motel 21 a few miles back, shower, and hit the bars on the edge of town until he found a semicircle of truckers who would understand the trip from hell and help him forget about it.

  Earl could practically taste the foam on that first beer when he pulled up and found the steel gate closed and padlocked.

  “Aw, fer chrissakes.” He honked a few times, long and loud, and sat there idling. Just twenty feet beyond the galvanized gate, two big pickup trucks and a rot-fringed four-door sat in front of a low white building. A six-foot-wide American flag was flapping on a pole as the sky darkened. Huge piles of broken concrete waited to be ground down into lofty ziggurats of rock and further refined into mounds of sand. Earl checked his watch. The dispatcher had told him that the place closed at 4 p.m. on Saturdays and here he was a few minutes early, so where the heck were they?

  He waited some more, as the rain started to pit-pat on the roof of his cab. Soon, tiny rivers of dirty water were running down the windshield. He honked again, three, four times, and sat there waiting.

  Finally some bone-thin guy came out of the building and trotted over to the gate, trying to button his after-work shirt, looking just like a scrap of newspaper as the loose white flaps were whipped by the wet wind. Earl threw the truck into gear, but the guy just stood there yelling something. Earl rolled down the window, letting big drops of dirty rain spatter his arm, but he still couldn’t hear the guy over the drone of the big diesel engine. So he set it in neutral, opened the door and leaned out into the hard rain and yelled, “What’s goin’ on, buddy?”

  “We’re closed!”

  “Whadaya mean, you’re closed? I’ve got a delivery here for you!”

  “We’re closed! Come back Monday!”

  “Monday? What the heck am I supposed to do till Monday?” But the guy was already running back inside, white shirt flaps flying behind him.

  Jesus, if they think I’m going to … Earl decided to sit there until whoever was in there wanted to leave for the night. They’d have to open the gate, and then he could at least push his way in and drop the load. He waited while the rain hammered out hard knocks on the metal roof. The office lights stayed off. No one approached any of the vehicles. It got dark.

  Two hours after nightfall, Earl cursed the heartless bastards inside the gate and turned the truck around.

  He laid out twenty-nine dollars for a room, then went to a roadside diner with a special seating area for truckers only, and sat there under the pale fluorescent lights staring blankly out the window at the dreary sheets of rain bathing his truck with slick reflections of cold blue and green neon. But thin gray burgers speckled with globular coagulations and single-serving slices of apple pie shrink-wrapped in another state were not enough to satisfy his appetite as he sat there wondering what he was going to do for two whole nights in a hot town like this with only seventy bucks in his pocket.

  “So what are you saying?” asked Hughie, lighting another cigarette.

  “I’m saying that some porn is arousing, but I don’t like these spread-fingered pussy shots. They make it look like a gynecology textbook,” Yilmaz explained, waving the sulfrous fumes away from his nostrils. “No mystery.”

  “You mean they’re giving porn a bad image?”

  “I mean there’s a fine line between seductive and repulsive.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Hu
ghie, nodding. “Like when you got a buzz on, those sixty-inch tits look fantastic. But when you examine them under the cold light of reason, they’re merely incredible.”

  “Okay, okay. Maybe because there was so much repression back in my country, you don’t appreciate how excessive it seems to me. But you’d think one of these would be enough. So why do guys subscribe to porno mags?”

  “Because they’re guys.”

  “Yes, but I mean, why do they keep consuming new images?”

  “Obviously, because we can’t get enough of the stuff.”

  “Exactly. You keep coming back for more. Why?”

  “You gotta ask why?”

  “Yes. Why the need to keep coming back? Most of it’s the same old stuff wrapped in a new package.”

  “Well, let’s hear it for new packages,” said Hughie, faux-toasting with a glass of sparkling water.

  “It’s all about consumption, even if it’s only paper. Because porn isn’t just selling you body parts, it’s selling a myth.”

  “You mean the myth that in any town in the world, there are girls who’ll fuck you ’cause they just love to have hot sex with total strangers.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. There’s all this build-up, and then nothing—just emptiness.”

  “Just like real sex,” said Hughie.

  “Maybe for you.”

  “Droppen-zie dead, you freaking Turk.” He went back to watching Tracy, who had started using the American flag as a prop. “She sure ain’t made of paper.”

  “And the emptiness creates a new search for fulfillment.”

  “It’s a vicious cycle.”

  “It’s the dope show.”

  “Tracy’s got talent, ya big bouncer,” he said, blowing smoke out with each word. Back when she was Sherri Kayne, she had stolen the show in Vampire Women of Mars. She had something special, Hughie thought, some kind of—presence. And she hadn’t asked for trouble. First that king-of-the-cheapies director pulls her from a crowd of hot-waxed bikini-lined extras and starts making her over into a B-movie up-and-comer. Natch he starts putting the moves on her. Then her friggin’ creep-of-a-boyfriend, Jimmy Crowell, aka Jimmy Crowbar, a three-time loser wanted by the LAPD for chopping up a few late model vehicles, gets his nuts in a knot and tries to wrap a tire iron around said director’s throat. And now lots of people want to talk to Jimmy C., but only Empire Studios laid down the real money, which is why this PI from East L.A. is hanging around this crummy Vegas strip club waiting to see if Jimmy the ex-boyfriend turns up or not.

  “Drink?” offered Yilmaz.

  “Too early. I’m working.”

  “Oh, right.”

  It was practically bounty hunting. But it wasn’t easy to find a guy like Jimmy C., if he wanted to stay hidden. Jimmy used to hang with the West Coast Hog Fuckers and so he had about a hundred ganged-up places to scurry into like a rat up a drainpipe. Yes, Jimmy C. was sure hard to find. But she was a whole other story. He found her easily enough. She had been pumped full of implants, had a few skin tucks, and changed her name to Tracy Tetons—and was still hot as hell at 43. But she could also hear her biological clock clanging away like a two-ton church bell in her ears.

  “You know where Jimmy is?” he had asked her, leaning against the coats in the tiny dressing room.

  “Who the hell cares? Men are pigs. Fuck ’em all,” she replied, jamming her eyeliner back into the tube.

  “A word to the willfully ignorant. If you don’t pay attention to what’s going on around you, you are in for a lifetime of being screwed. And the people who are doing the screwing would like nothing better than to hear you say, ‘Who the hell cares?’ Just a warning.”

  “Everything he ever told me was a lie, okay? So how am I supposed to know where he is? I just hope I never see the freakin’ SOB again,” she said.

  So he’d had no choice, really, but to pay a few subcontractors to spread the word around the ex-boyfriend’s most recent hangouts letting it be known where Sherri, aka Tracy, could be found, then sit back and wait for the schmuck to walk right into his hands. And to stop him before he broke her neck, which he had threatened to do. But then, every guy feels like killing his girl at some point, Hughie thought. The only difference is that this guy might actually do it.

  “You think he’ll show up?” said Yilmaz.

  “He’ll show up.”

  “Ain’t you confident.”

  “Only way to be in this town.” Hughie turned his eyes back to Tracy’s act.

  He said, “Now, that’s what I call wrapping yourself in the flag.”

  Earl looked up at the cloudless neon skies of downtown Vegas and thought that things were definitely looking better. Twenty dollars had effervesced into beer-and-shot combos, and he was just drunk enough to enjoy the feeling, with plenty of room leftover for some more fun. Then some local hick had walked him around and around the blocks promising him some face time with a legal 18-year-old named Crystal or Chrissy, till his mind was going in such circles that the guy pulled the old give-me-the-money-so-I-can-run-around-the-corner-and-get-her scam and he just handed over a twenty and watched the guy go, and immediately felt like a dope for letting himself get taken in like that.

  So when another local hick approached him on the sidewalk and asked,

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  He answered, “Screw you blue.”

  “Okay,” said the hick, ignoring the rest and handing him a blue card that said FREE PLAY on it. “You go in here with that and tell them I said you could have a free play.”

  Earl wandered up to a wooden shed in the gap between two buildings. Some fat guy who looked like a puffy-necked, cigar-smoking toad occupied a stool behind the painted green counter. On the wall in back of him were rows of numbers and an array of photos of smooth, rosy bodies cut from magazines that caused a stirring in his chest, and fire down below. Blemish-free photos of fecund and callipygous women who silently offered themselves to him in an unspoken promise of what he could do later with his winnings.

  The old gray toad took a look at Earl’s card.

  “Free play?” said the toad. “Free play it is,” and he had Earl roll six dice at once from a cup. “Hey! Good roll!” He added up the numbers on the dice. “Two, eight, thirteen, sixteen, twenty, twenty-four.” He pointed to the number 24 on the green felt square laid across the counter between them. “What’s that say?”

  Earl looked at the small green print under the number: “Fifty points.”

  “Fifty points. Remember, one hundred wins. You’re half-way there already. You wanna roll again for a dollar?”

  “What do I win?”

  “A hundred bucks and your choice of one of these fine gifts,” the old gray toad said, jerking his thumb toward a flimsy shelf behind him that held some electronic gadgets and other, unlicensed entertainments. One free roll and he was already halfway there. He looked at all those gorgeous females, and their smiles sweetly sang to him, urging him to do it.

  He bet a dollar and rolled.

  “Hey!” said the toad, counting up the score and pointing to the number on the board. “What’s that say?”

  “Twenty points,” said Earl.

  “Great, you’ve got seventy points. Just a dollar for another roll.”

  He rolled. Mr. Toad counted up the score. “Hey! Two for one! You get two dollars back. You’re doing great! Want to roll again?”

  Hell, he was getting closer, and so far it hadn’t cost him a dime. He rolled. The old toad counted up the numbers.

  “Twenty-eight! What’s that say?”

  “Bonus!”

  “Bonus! The pot doubles to two hundred dollars, for a five-dollar bet. Okay? Five dollars.”

  He rolled.

  “Three, five, six, ten, sixteen, twenty-two. What’s that say?”

  “Fifteen points.”

  “That’s eighty-five points. All you need is fifteen. Five dollar bet?”

  The women on the wall told him that if he kept going, the
y would soon be his.

  “Okay.”

  “One good roll will do it. Two, three, six, eight, eleven, thirteen—sorry, buddy, you lose. No play. Try again?”

  He plunked down a five and rolled.

  “Four, nine, twelve, seventeen, twenty-three—I don’t believe this. What’s that say?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  ‘Twenty-eight! Bonus! The pot doubles to four hundreds dollars for a ten-dollar bet. Ten dollars? One good roll will do it. Ten dollars?”

  He took up the offer.

  “Two, three, seven, thirteen, nineteen, twenty—what’s that say?”

  “Five points.”

  “You’ve got ninety points. One good roll will do it.”

  He rolled.

  “Twenty-eight! I don’t believe this! The pot is eight hundred, for a twenty-dollar bet.”

  He rolled. It was a winning roll. But the old toad counted wrong. He knew the numbers. He pulled the old “What’s that say?” bit and Earl shifted his eyes to the board for less than a second as the mottled old toad scooped the dice up.

  “Three points,” said Earl.

  “Three points. Ya got a ninety-three. All you need is seven for a twenty-dollar bet.”

  And suddenly Earl realized that he had dropped fifty dollars already. It happened so quickly. But his pockets were definitely empty. He had no more cash. How could that be? But he was so close! How could that be?

  “And this,” said Yilmaz, pointing to the text.

  “What?”

  “Boobalicious. Is that even a word?”

  “Aw, give it a rest already,” said Hughie, lighting another cigarette.

  “Wish you’d give it a rest,” said Yilmaz, waving the smoke away with the tit mag.

  “You picked a hell of a profession for a guy who doesn’t like the smell of smoke. It’s still legal here, isn’t it?”

  “For now.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The service staff are talking about getting a ban on smoking in the workplace.”