Murder in Vegas Read online

  “Get outa here. I thought anything goes in this town.”

  “It does, but it’s also a strong union town.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Because the big hotels and casinos can’t pull up stakes and fuck off to Mexico or Malaysia. That’s how.”

  “Oh. Can I still get that drink?”

  “You ready for one?”

  “Tracy’s last show starts in ten minutes, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m ready.”

  Yilmaz two-finger waved the bartender over.

  “Your bosses okay with this?” asked Hughie.

  “I’m okay with this.”

  “Okay, okay. I wanna check out the street again.”

  The place was called Candee’s, and it offered just what it said in red-and-white neon, like a candy cane that’s bad for your teeth. Earl parked his truck curbside and walked up to the entrance. Two big guys in suits looked his truck over, and rolled their eyes at each other as he went inside.

  The one who was smoking said, “This just keeps getting better.”

  But Earl had been suckered twice on his way to the land of enchantment, and he wasn’t taking any more detours. He sidled up to a stool at the edge of the runway and straddled it heavily, the cushion deflating with a faint pffff as his well-worn trucker’s butt settled in for a ten-hour ride. Then he ordered a double bourbon with a beer chaser from the waitress who appeared instantly at his elbow.

  Now this was more like it. Definitely more like it. Warm, welcoming atmo-sphere. No one looking at his grease-stained jeans. Instant service. His every desire fulfilled. And her. She was beautiful. She was marvelous. She gave him everything she had to offer, yet she still seemed to be holding back. The contradiction was excruciating.

  “She’s the real thing,” he said, throat dry.

  “Huh?” said the guy next to him, bewildered by the suggestion, given the vast anatomical evidence before his eyes.

  Earl felt a keen electrical tingling, as if Tracy’s pendulous orbs were positively charged particles which repelled each other on exposure to air and gave rise to goosebumps as pristine as the bright mountains of the moon.

  He erased the memory that there were no more dollar bills in his pocket by ordering another double shot and beer, then another, then some others, as he stared, dazzled by the glitter, and wooed by the dark, seductive valleys between her perfectly smooth golden globes.

  When they asked for money, he drew some loopy dollar signs on a Candee’s cocktail napkin with a flaky yellow pencil and tried to fill in the numbers, but the napkin kept getting wet and it was hard to draw those screwy fives when the paper kept tearing and he was laughing so hard and by then the bouncers were hauling him off, anyway.

  Constellations had spun half the night away before Earl dribbled his name on an IOU or something and passed out on a mildewy mattress whose springs rose up like bits of ironwood in a furrow of hard-packed earth.

  Now he sat there, rubbing at the grit around his eyes. His eyeballs felt like there was sand in them, somewhere deep inside where he couldn’t reach.

  He had been dreaming of somebody’s white ancestors meeting a group of natives, hands held out in greeting, but they did not speak a word of each other’s languages, and the whites ended up slaughtering the redskins with repeating rifles.

  He sat there for quite a while, rubbing the images from his mind, not knowing what to do with a truckload of sand and too little money to have the only kind of fun that would get a man through a lonely Sunday in this heartless land. But when he reached into his pockets and found no reassuring crinkle of paper, just the dull clink of a few humble coins, he realized something:

  He didn’t remember a thing.

  About last night, that is.

  In fact, the only thing he remembered was that he had another day to kill.

  He sat there mumbling, “How am I going to make it to Monday?” And he turned toward the corroding aluminum window frame and looked out at the truck.

  For a moment he thought it had been knocked over by the wind, then his vision corrected for hangovers and he realized that the rear gate was open and swinging in the early morning breeze.

  He shivered reflexively while peeing, then he pulled on his heavy work boots and got a cool whiff of distant prairie as he stepped over the puddles in the gravel parking lot and approached the creaking metal door.

  The sand was missing.

  He went back to the diner first, driving his empty rig along the highway under heavy gray clouds that made the wet black asphalt look blacker still, thinking about that desk guy at the motel who didn’t know squat. I’m just the night I’m just the night clerk. Jee-zus!

  As he pushed the glass door’s tubular metal handle, the sharp smell of frying onions bit into his nose hairs and the smoke seemed to leave a layer of grease on his skin.

  He fished around in his pockets and came up with a handful of nickels and quarters, blew the lint off the coins, and got himself coffee and two donuts, then a couple of refills on the coffee.

  He sat and stared at a sticker on the cash register declaring UNITED WE STAND in red, white, and blue letters. But the shifts had changed, and nobody remembered having seen a rig with a bone-white cargo container coming through around two in the morning.

  He drove slowly back downtown to see if somehow—somehow—he could have possibly lost the load on the way to the motel. But even as he scanned the reddish-brown-encrusted hubcaps and broken bottles lining the edge of the road, he knew this was one of those silly dead ends your mind races into when it can’t separate the maybes from the are-you-kiddings because it isn’t quite ready to face the reality that it managed to lose track of five tons of mother-loving sand.

  Get a grip, dude. Reconstruct. No. What’s the word? Retrace. Yeah. Retrace your steps. That’s it. Because he was sure that his cargo was still there when he had pulled into town. And that was only a few hours ago, really. Well, it was—let me see—twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours ago. Shoot. Had it been that long?

  The music twanged, familiar and comfortable, describing a love gone sour in a collection of metaphors relating to farm equipment with bad traction. The light was smoky and warm, just dim enough to bury the grime in the shadows. God, he felt at home here.

  Old Glory’s stripes hung horizontally on the wall behind the bar, not stretched too tightly, so the thing kind of sagged in the middle.

  “What’ll it be, sugar?” The hostess smiled at him from her spot over by the plastic-topped beer taps.

  “I was here last night.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “Sure I was.”

  “You must be thinking of somewhere else.”

  “You must’ve been drunk.” Others cut in.

  “Buddy, we’re gonna have to ask you to leave.”

  Several minutes later he realized he was back in the parking lot.

  Thrown out of a bar? Just for asking if they saw his truck? Unless he really was in the wrong place.

  No, that’s crazy. He remembered the flag.

  He pulled into a truck stop and let the engine idle, filling the cab with burnt, intestinal smells. No. Was somebody yanking his chain? He figured he’d have noticed a big pile of sand along the road if someone had decided to take it for a joyride and dump it in the middle of an intersection as their idea of a prank.

  He had retraced his steps, and they led nowhere. So much for trying to figure this out on his own.

  Well, I guess it’s time to bring the law into it, he reasoned.

  “You’re a-telling me that someone stole your sand?”

  “Well, yeah, okay?”

  “Five tons of sand.”

  “Yeah.”

  The flag curled around the sheriff’s sleeve, the only color on the crisp tan fabric. It caught his eye.

  “Let me see your license.”

  He handed it over.

  The sheriff squinted at it.

  “Earl Q. Sparer,�
� the sheriff said. “What’s the Q for?”

  “Cucumber.”

  “Smart guy, eh?”

  “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  The sheriff looked at Earl’s rig. Dark gray clouds were rolling across his mirrorshades.

  “Must’ve been a long night, too, huh?” he said finally. “There’s no sign of sand in the parking lot. You’d think they’d have spilled some.”

  “Well, I don’t figure they stole it off the truck while it was parked here,” Earl explained. “They took the truck and dumped the cargo somewheres else.”

  “And brought the truck back to you, all vacuumed, with the gas tank full? Sure they didn’t leave a mint on your pillow at the motel, too?”

  “That would explain the sticky stuff I found on the back of my neck this morning.”

  “You leave it idling?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then they must’ve had a key. Any idea how they’d get a key? Anybody in this town got a copy of the keys to your truck, mister?”

  Cars whizzed wetly by, indifferent to his puzzlement, patriotic colors stamped on their windows and bumpers.

  “Must’ve been some mighty special kind of sand, I guess.”

  “Yeah, it was real coarse—”

  “Quit wasting my time, ya drunk.”

  He watched the sheriff go.

  This place was smack in the middle of some of the friendliest country on earth, but it was starting to feel like the flat butthole of the universe right now.

  He sat inside the truck, put his head down in the crook of his elbow for a second and awoke, stiff and numb, about two hours later. It was getting late.

  The neon lights were all ablaze, and he drove around staring at them, his eyes bulging and tongue drooping out like a fish slowly expiring in a bucket. So when he caught a glimpse of the curvy red-and-white letters spelling out the magical name Candee’s, it seemed like he had rediscovered a lost treasure from his youthful days gone by.

  The inside of the club was both new and familiar to him, but when he saw her strutting across the boards with the old red, white and blue snapping the air behind her, he knew he had found his way back home.

  He accepted the immediate offer of a drink before he remembered that there was nothing but lint in his pockets. Oh well, he thought, placing his elbows on the edge of the glorious runway. He propped his head up with his hands, and stared at the heavens above.

  He was feeling fine enough to order another round when four hands dropped from the heavens and gripped his arms in a firm, friendly way.

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  “You ran up quite a tab here last night,” said Yilmaz.

  “Oh. Was that here?”

  “Sure was,” said Yilmaz. The other guy said nothing.

  Nobody took their hands off him, either.

  “Hey, no hard feelings,” said Yilmaz, easing Earl off the stool and leading him over to the bar.

  “Yeah, it’s Vegas,” said Hughie. “Crossroads of the world. We’ll work it out. No problem.”

  “You sure?” asked Earl.

  “We can work it out,” said Hughie, letting go of Earl’s arm.

  “And just to show you there’s no hard feelings—” Yilmaz laid a huge hand on Earl’s shoulder and called the bartender over. “Hey Eddie, bring my friend here whatever he wants.”

  “Really? No kiddin’?” asked Earl.

  “Really.”

  Behind his back, Yilmaz crossed two fingers and shook them twice, the sign for the bartender to spike the chump’s drink with a couple of grams of chloral hydrate.

  “Say, you guys are all right,” said Earl, turning to watch Tracy grind away. She was getting near the climax of her act. “Ain’t she something?”

  “She sure is,” Hughie assured him.

  Yilmaz spoke close to Hughie’s ear: “It’s slow-acting. It’ll take a good half-hour.”

  “Oh, great. Another half-hour of this B.S.,” said Hughie.

  “What’s your problem? It’s the club’s money.”

  “He’s a distraction.”

  “We could always hit him with a baseball bat.”

  “Wood or aluminum?”

  “Call me old-fashioned.”

  “Wood it is, then.”

  But Earl was oblivious to their words. He was mesmerized. Then as he watched the music of Tracy’s perfect hemispheres tracing geometrical arcs and bisecting them on the return swing, something seemingly unrelated clicked in his mind.

  Where would you hide a twenty-foot high pile of sand? And suddenly he knew the truth in his heart.

  In the refinery.

  But just as he was finishing his drink, the double doors swung open, flooding the floor with neon, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a sharp-nosed biker with a thin vato mustache come in and stride too quickly toward the runway.

  “That’s my guy! It’s Crowell!” said Hughie, dropping his cigarette on the floor.

  Tracy froze in mid-pivot, horrified, but the music kept on pounding as the two big guys jumped on the biker, took him down with a pair of knees in the back, and slammed his face repeatedly into the linoleum floor tiles in near-perfect accompaniment to the slamming beat.

  Yilmaz held Jimmy C. down and twisted one of the punk’s wrists up so Hughie could slap the handcuffs on it. Tracy was screaming something nasty, Jimmy was flipping like a shark on a hook, and Yilmaz and Hughie had broken out in a sweat trying to get Jimmy’s other wrist shackled up. But finally it was all over. Hughie stood up, wiped his brow with a couple of bev naps the waitress handed him, and looked around the room.

  “Hey, where’s the freaking truck driver?”

  He looked outside and saw that the truck was gone.

  The dusky wind blew up great puffs of dirt, blocking out the sky in a small region of this wide planet. Then the rain picked up, and that settled the dirt some. Earl parked the truck a little way past the big steel gate, and walked slowly downhill to the refinery, loose chunks of asphalt and broken glass scraping under his thick-soled work boots.

  The ground had been excavated, the dirt mined. The soil had fallen away in so many places it was easy for a big guy like him to slip in under the chain link fence. But the grade was steep and loose, and he slipped half-way down the pile of dirt and pebbles, which skittered after him and hopped into his boots.

  He carefully slid the rest of the way down the sloping walls of the big sand pit and landed on a reassuringly flat surface of dark granular crystals. Pulverized rock of some kind. Coal or garnet, maybe. He shook the pebbles out of his boots, and kept wandering, searching for a particular kind of sand.

  The amber glow of the security lights licked the curved wet surfaces of three metallic storage towers, making them look like three tall church candles standing in a row. The glow turned the treetops orange, too, as if they were about to ignite into flames. Sporadic clumps of dead leaves clung to the branches like tiny pterodactyls, ready to spring.

  He was staring up at them when he stepped off the flat granular path and slipped more than a dozen feet down a loose dirt hill, so soft he sank up to his ankles and got dirt in his shoes.

  And it rained hard blows.

  Damn! So much frustration.

  He was so tired of looking. Tired of having to go from here to there, and always having to make repairs, and fill out forms, and wait, and wait to fill out more forms. Tired of always stumbling through the mud.

  The rain was softer now.

  He thought of Tracy’s tender touches.

  Yes. It was good to finally sleep in the sand.

  He went through the power screen six times, until he was as refined as the sand they mixed him with.

  DEATH OF A WHALE IN THE CHURCH OF ELVIS

  LINDA KERSLAKE

  “I’m not marrying your mother.”

  Amanda Duncan whipped her head away from the window, the full force of her icy glare hitting Ken Marvin in the face. He immediately regretted the words, and began concentrating intent
ly on opening his in-flight packet of peanuts.

  “She’s been planning a church wedding for me for years,” she explained, “and it’s just easier to go along with her. Our running off to Vegas is killing her. She had such a fit when I told her, I’m surprised she even agreed to come. And please, don’t tell her we’re sharing a room tonight.”

  “The mighty Deacon Duncan in Sin City. I’m glad we brought a camera!”

  “Ken, stop it! She’s afraid your mother will tell everyone back home about this.”

  Both women attended The Mt. Hope Church of the Redeemed, Faith Through Works Synod, where his mother was choir director and hers served as a deacon. Whenever they met, there was a subtle competition for recognition of good works, or as her father called it, gaudy business.

  “Well, my mother will be there too! They’re flying in for the ceremony tomorrow, then on to help Habitat for Humanity in Atlanta.”

  “There, you see? She’ll spread the rumor that while she rushed on to house the homeless, Mom stayed to gamble!”

  He didn’t see, but he pretended that he did. He munched his peanuts, which were as stale as this conversation was getting to be.

  They sat in silence, both staring at the clouds zooming by. The trip to Las Vegas had been his idea. When Amanda’s dad, George Duncan, promised them twenty-five grand for a wedding present, he said they could use it for whatever they wanted: a wedding, the down payment on a house, or the honeymoon. Amanda ran right out to buy the latest issue of Bride’s Magazine. Ken, a financial advisor in a tight market, started house hunting. He wasn’t about to let this opportunity pass them by.

  He found a stately ten-year-old brick house in a posh suburb not far from his work with a lap pool, wine cellar, multi-media room/office, total security system—including the grounds, and a five-stall garage. And best of all, it had an impressive circular driveway leading up to a portico with white pillars.

  The house screamed success.

  He needed this house.

  It had been a hard battle, but here they were on their way to the Bellagio for a short, and hopefully sweet, honeymoon. The only problem was the wedding.