“Only movie villains tell all in the final reel.” Goddess had arrived.
Angel cut her off. “L.A. is built on failure, baby. I’m a carnivore. All that pain has to go somewhere. Can’t keep it inside: it would eat me up sure as I eat up dreams. Gotta have it for when I need it, to share with the world.”
“The picture of Dorian Gray,” Stewart said.
“Call it the picture of L.A.” She studied my face for a long time before she smiled. All that innocence, and all that cool calculated savagery just under the surface of her eyes. I wondered who’d she’d been before she died. If she’d worked her tail off for L.A., before L.A. claimed her. “Smart boys. Imagine how much worse I would be without it. And it doesn’t affect the local ecology all that much. As you noted, Jackie, Nevada’s got a way of making things be gone.”
“That doesn’t give you the right.”
Angel shrugged, as if to say,
What are rights?
“All chiseling that date off would do is remove the reason for Las Vegas to exist. It would vanish like the corpse of a twenty-dollar streetwalker dumped in the high desert, and no one would mark its passing. Boys, you’re not
real
.”
I felt Stewart swelling beside me, soul-deep offended. It was my city. His city. And not some vassal state of Los Angeles. “You still haven’t said what happens in a hundred years.”
Goddess started to say something, but Angel hushed her with the flat of her outstretched hand. “L.A.,” she said, that gesture taking in everything behind her—Paris, New York, Venice, shadows of the world’s great cities in a shadow city of its own—“Wins. The spell is set, and can’t be broken. Work for me. You win too. What do you say to that, Jack?”
“Angel, honey. Nobody really talks like that.” I started to turn away, laying a hand on Stewart’s arm to bring him with me. The sledgehammer nudged my leg.
“Boys,” Goddess said. Her tone was harsh with finality.
Stewart fumbled in his pocket. I knew he was reaching for his knife. “What are you going to do,” he asked, tugging my hand, almost dragging me away. “Shoot me in the back?”
I took a step away from Goddess, and from Angel. And then Stewart caught my eye with a wink, and—
Stewart!—
kept turning, and he dropped my hand . . .
The flat clap of a gunshot killed the last word he said. He pitched forward as if kicked, blood like burst berries across his midsection, front and back. I spun around as another bullet rang between my Doc Martens. Goddess skipped away as I lunged, shredding the seam of my pants as I yanked the sledgehammer out. I had it up like a baseball bat before Stewart hit the ground. I hoped he had his knife in his hand. I hoped he had the strength to open a vein before the wound in his back killed him.
I didn’t have time to hope anything else.
They shot like L.A. cops—police stance, wide-legged, braced, and aiming to kill. I don’t know how I got between the slugs. I felt them tug my clothing; one burned my face. But I’m One-eyed Jack, and my luck was running. Cement chips stung my face as a bullet ricocheted off the wall and out over Lake Mead. Behind Angel and Goddess, a light pulsed like Stewart’s blood and a siren screamed.
Stewart wasn’t making any sound now and I forced myself not to turn and look back at him. Instead, I closed the distance, shouting something I don’t recall. I think I split Goddess’ lovely skull open on the very first swing. I know I smashed Angel’s arm, because her gun went flying before she ran. Ran like all that practice in the sands of Southern California came in handy, fit—no doubt—from rollerblading along the board walk. My lungs burned after three steps.
The lights and sirens were coming.
Almost nobody
runs
in Las Vegas, except on a treadmill. It’s too fucking hot. I staggered to a stop, let the hammer fall clanging to concrete as I stepped over Goddess’ shimmering body, and went back for Stewart.
His blood was a sticky puddle I had to walk through to get to him. He’d pushed himself over on his side, and I could hear the whimper in his breath, but the knife had fallen out of his hand. “Jack,” he said. “Can’t move my fingers.”
I picked it up and opened it. “Love. Show me where.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Who the hell knew they could shoot so fucking well?” It came up on his lips in a bubble of blood, and it had to be
his
hand. So I folded his fingers around the handle and guided the blade to his throat.
The sirens and lights throbbed in my head like a Monday-morning migraine. “Does it count if I’m pushing?”
He giggled. It came out a kicked whimper. “I don’t know,” he said through the bubbles. “Try it and see.”
I pushed. Distorted by a loudspeaker, the command to stop and drop might have made me jump another day, but Stewart’s blood was sudden, hot and sticky-slick as tears across my hands. I let the knife fall and turned my back to the road. Down by my boots, Stewart started to shimmer. We were near where Angel had been leaning out to look down the face of the Dam. The Plexiglas barriers and the decorated tops of the elevator shafts started five feet on my right.
“One-eyed Jacks and Suicide Kings are wild,” I muttered, and in two running steps I threw myself over the wall. Hell, you never know until you try it. A bullet gouged the wall-top alongside the black streaks from the sole of my Doc.
The lights on the Dam face silvered it like a wedding cake. It didn’t seem like such a long way to fall, and the river was down there somewhere. A gust of wind just might blow me wide enough to miss the blockhouse at the bottom.
If I got lucky.
From the outside northbound lane on the 95, I spotted the road: more of a track, by any reasonable standard. I dragged the white Ford pickup across the rumble strip and halted amid scattering gravel. It had still had Stewart’s jacket thrown across the front seat after I bribed impound. Sometimes corruption cuts in our favor. A flat hard shape patted my chest from inside the coat’s checkbook pocket, and the alarm armed itself a moment after I got out.
Two tracks, wagon wheel wide, stretched through a forest of Joshua trees like prickly old men hunched over in porcupine hats, abutted by sage and agave. The desert sky almost never gets so blue. It’s usually a washed out-color: Mojave landscapes are best represented in turquoise and picture jasper.
A lot of people came through here—enough people to wear a road—and they must have thought they were going someplace better. California, probably.
I pitched a rock at a toxic, endangered Gila monster painted in the animal gang colors of don’t-mess-with-me, and sat down on a dusty rock and waited. And waited. And waited, while the sun skipped down the flat horizon and the sky grayed periwinkle, then indigo. Lights rippled on across the valley floor, chasing the shadow of the mountain. From my vantage in the pass, I made out the radioactive green shimmer of the MGM Grand, the laser-white beacon off the top of the Luxor, the lofted red-green-lavender Stratosphere. The Aladdin, the Venetian, the Paris. The amethyst and ruby arch of the Rio. New York, New York. And the Mirage. Worth a dry laugh, that.
Symbols of every land, drawing the black energy to Vegas. A darkness sink. Like a postcard. Like the skyline of a city on the back of a one-eyed jack in a poker deck with the knaves pulled out.
It glittered a lot, for a city in thrall.
There was a fifth of tequila in Stewart’s coat. I poured a little libation on an agave, lifted up my eyepatch and splashed some in my
otherwise
eye. I took a deep breath and stared down on the valley. “Ben Siegel, you son of a bitch. You fixed the chains tight, the ones the Dam forged. Didn’t you?”
I drank a little tequila, poured a little on the ground. If you’re going to talk to ghosts, it doesn’t hurt to get them drunk. Ask a vodun if you don’t believe me. And I had ghosts to call, that evening.
I like the plain, soft-spoken magic. A little offering, a few muttered words . . . and then deal with the consequences.
The American and the Russian.
Somewhere in New Jersey, 1964.
Three days—and a successful field deployment—after their rooftop chase of the MI-6 assassin had left them with nothing but a mouthful of feathers, the American wore a path from the sofa to the door, his pistol still in his hand, cursing the bare-boards safe house they found themselves in.
The Russian’s clean, cluttered apartment—littered with its piles of books, and books used as bookmarks for other books—even
smelled
foreign; it smelled of tea and caraway seeds and most strongly of roses. Russia had never quite abandoned the medieval penchant for rosewater in favor of Western scents, lemon and pine.
He wished with all his heart he were smelling those roses now.
This
place reeked of dust and stale cat piss, and his pacing wasn’t enough to cover the sound of his partner gagging behind the closed bathroom door as if he were trying to cough his heart up his throat.
Another particularly hideous retching fit. The American cursed and stopped pacing, tapped lightly on the flimsy hollow-core door. “Alive in there, boy?”
A pitiful moan, followed by an even more pitiful mumble. “Yes. Unfortunately.”
If the Russian couldn’t be troubled to dig up some wrath over being called
boy
, he was in worse shape than the American had thought. The American tried the handle: latched. “Open the door.”
“Can’t—” More coughing, followed by heartrending choking.
“
Open
the
god-damned
door.”
A creak of floorboards that the American hoped was a shuffling step. And then the rattle of the latch, and a tired voice muttering imprecations before it was silenced by another coughing fit. The American opened the door carefully so he wouldn’t strike his partner, but the Russian staggered back to the toilet and hunched over it again.
God, he looks terrible—
The American crouched beside his partner and laced fingers through the Russian’s hair, raking damp, streaked strands out of his face, ignoring the acid reek of vomit and the nauseous slickness of phlegm. The muscled body in his arms strained and twisted; the American held the Russian steady through another wrenching spasm. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
“I want to go home,” the Russian said weakly.
“It’s not safe to go home yet.”
“Logic has nothing to do with it.” The Russian shook his head gingerly against the American’s hands, his strained neck obviously tender. “Next time, my friend. You will get captured and interrogated with the drugs and the beatings, yes? And I will take the pretty girl to dinner.”
“Yes,” the American answered, and closed his eyes in silent thankfulness that his partner was well enough to snipe.
“Delightful,” the Russian said, and closed the Olsonite toilet lid so he could lay his forehead against the cool porcelain of the tank. “I’ll hold you to that.”
“We did learn something from your misadventure, however,” the American said. He rose from his crouch and went to the medicine cabinet, rummaging until he found a cup and a new, wrapped toothbrush and a bottle of mouthwash. “There’s no toothpaste.”
“I’m not ready to stand up yet in any case,” the Russian said. “What did we learn? I assume you don’t mean about the availability of dentifrices.”
“We learned that the assassin isn’t working for our usual opposition, for one thing—”
“Or we wouldn’t be here having this conversation, yes. I don’t suppose there are any aspirins in that cabinet?”
“There’s Dilaudid,” the American answered, over the sounds of his own digging.
“And a sledge-hammer if we spot any cockroaches? At least head-quarters is prepared to help a man die in peace if he drags himself in here gutshot and bleeding, but I’m not sure I want to mix narcotics and veridicals; the result might be worse than a red-wine hangover. Is there aspirin in the wound kit?”
The Russian’s voice was stronger already. Perhaps the truth serum—whatever it was—was wearing off without more severe after-effects. “That’s in the kitchen. We’ll check in a minute. I contacted the old man while you were sick—”
“—I’m still sick—”
“—and they’re sending a pickup squad to bring us home safely. But moreover, you’re not the only one the assassin has taken a pot shot at lately.”
“Who else?” The Russian was interested enough to lift his head. The American poured mouthwash into a Dixie cup and unwrapped the toothbrush, tearing cellophane with his teeth. His partner wouldn’t mind.
Much.
Wasn’t in any position to protest, in any case. “A female British agent—well, one of their paid amateur investigators, a widow and a scientist, something of a crack shot, I understand—if you know their unaffiliated-agent program—”
“I do; it has some silly overblown name, like every other British or American intelligence operation. Is she alive?”
The American crumpled cellophane, hearing more than professional concern in his partner’s dismissal.
Interesting.
The Russian had attended university in England—“She’s expected to survive.”
“So he attempted to assassinate another MI-6 agent?”
“Apparently.”
“It isn’t like him to miss. And even less like him to miss two targets in a row. Has MI-6 confirmed that he’s gone rogue?”
The American let his expression answer the question, smiling at the Russian’s wry flinch.
“Ah, the spirit of inter-agency cooperation.”
“Something you should be intimately familiar with, my fine KGB spider—” The American tossed the toothbrush wrapper in the garbage and extended his hand to the Russian. “You haven’t barfed in seven minutes, by my watch. Upsadaisy.”
“I have run out of organs to vomit up, and my toes are too firmly attached,” the Russian answered, but accepted the assistance and stood. The American guided him to the sink.
“Brush your teeth and I’ll bring you some water and aspirin, and you can try lying down. I’ll wait up for the retrieval team.”
“You are a true friend.”
“Don’t let it get around.” The American stood back, permitting the Russian access to the sink. “I’d really like to know how he knew where to ambush us.”