Las Vegas Noir (19 page)

When he woke up, he was in a hospital. There were police there. There was his mother crying hysterically. His sister was gone. His body was broken. His face. His legs. A few years later, his mother was gone too. Out a window.

Two nights in a row, Crip got to his throne four hours later than he normally did. On the third night, he did not show at all. On the fourth night, when he got there four hours late again, Snake was waiting for him.

“What the fuck?”

Crip said, “What do you mean,
what the fuck?
”

“I mean what the fuck when I say what the fuck. Where you been? What’s been happening to you?”

“The hell with you. What are you, my mother?” Crip pushed past him and sat down on his throne, and set his hat and cane in his lap. He scowled at Snake, which usually would have been enough to scare him off. But tonight, something was missing in his scowl. Snake stood his ground. Crip grumbled, “What do you think has been happening, man? What do you think? I gotta take care of the kid. I gotta feed her. I gotta make sure one of the girls is there with her while I’m here. Last night, the kid was sick. Had a temperature of a hundred and one. Sapphire was supposed to come sit with her. That bitch Sapphire never showed up. I’m gonna wring her neck when I get ahold of her. I got this kid, what am I supposed to do? Leave her there watching TV all night?”

“You got a TV now?”

“Yeah, I bought a TV. And a VCR with tapes. Cartoons and stuff. Yeah, that’s right. Is that a problem? What am I supposed to do? She’s a kid.”

Snake said, “You should just tie the brat up like you do the rest of ’em. She’ll still be there when you get back.”

“She’s a kid. You think I’m gonna tie up a kid?”

“I would.”

Crip’s voice was cold as ice. “I would fucking tie you up, Snake. I would tie you up real tight. So tight you couldn’t breathe.”

This time the scowl was working. Snake backed away with his hands raised in surrender—he backed all the way into the club. It was only when Snake was gone and Crip sat back down that he realized he had stood up out of his seat as though ready to go after Snake. Little Josh Ho the security guard and Candy Apple were staring at him. They had never seen him talk so much. He gave them the scowl too, and they went back to doing their jobs.

On the fifth night, he had to get there early, he just had to, but he got there late once more (Sapphire didn’t show again—he had to wait for Diamond to show up, but she showed up high, so he had to wait for Ebony Rainbow, who was drunk, but what the fuck, he had to get to work), and just as he got there, lucky break, he saw the father go into the club. Crip put on his hat and he gripped his cane, and he waited. When the father came back out, with a blackened eye and a kerchief against a bleeding nose, Crip gripped him by the arm and took him around back where the cars were parked. He drove off with him in his Lincoln, took him to an alley that was nice and dark. He said to him: “You know you have a sweet kid. Do you know what you have?”

The father whimpered, “Ohmygod. What have you done to her? What have you done?”

“I’ve done nothing to her,” Crip said. “What have
you
done to her? She’s got no mother. She’s got no grandmother. And you, you, look at you. She’s got no father. Do you realize the Gold Man will kill you? He will do it. I’ve seen him do it. I’ve helped him do it. He will kill you, and then what’s gonna happen to your kid? Look at me. I grew up with no mother, no father, no beauty to me at all, and this goddamn limp. The world is an ugly place. Your beautiful girl will become a whore, I can tell you that. She will suck dick and take it up the ass from the ugliest forms of life you have ever seen, and I know because I have seen these ugly forms of life. I live with ’em. I’m one of ’em. We’re like this goddamn city. We’re all dressed up, and we twinkle with all these bright lights, but behind it all we stink rotten like a sewer. You’re her father. You’re supposed to protect her. You’re supposed to give her a chance at the good life. This kid, you know what she tells me she wants to be when she grows up? She wants to be a nurse. I tell her, Nurse? Why not be a doctor? She says, Okay, I’ll be a doctor. I can be anything I want to be, she says. And she can be, but not if her father is throwing away every penny he has in these goddamned casinos. Casinos are for suckers and men who want their daughters to sell ass. I don’t wanna see that happen to that kid, do you hear me?” At that point, he had the father by the collar and was shaking him. The bloody kerchief fell from his nose. “Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

The father whimpered, “I hear you.”

And Crip released him and patted down his shirt, which he had rumpled up in his rage. The father’s eyes were the little girl’s eyes. He was a man with beautiful eyes, despite the shiner. They were teary eyes. Crip said to him, “I got something for you. I got some money for you.”

“What?”

Crip reached into his mustard jacket and pulled out the envelope with the ten grand in it and pressed it into the father’s hand. “It’s all there. It’s everything you need. Give this to the Gold Man the next time you come. Then be a father to your daughter.”

“Ohmygod,” the father said, looking at the thickness of green bills in the envelope. “Ohmygod. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. I gotta get back to my life. Babysitting kids is way too hard.”

On the sixth night, Crip got there on time. Slap her around a little and Sapphire not only stays off the weed real good, but she shows up where she’s supposed to show up and on time. Crip was happy. In a few nights, it would all be over. The father would pay the Gold Man and the kid would be free to go on and grow up to be a doctor. Plus, it was a nice crowd tonight, no troublemakers, no college guys, mostly tourists, men in their fifties and sixties wanting to see the titties dance, wanting to maybe get a little bit of the old special treatment in one of the back rooms.

When Goggles came out, Crip was on his throne, sipping his bourbon like the way it used to be, with his hat and his cane in his lap. He smiled at Goggles trying to put the moves on Candy Apple, riding his hand on her ample buttocks during a slow spot in the line. Candy Apple was a good kid, working her way through college. A man like Goggles was not her type. Thank God.

Goggles caught Crip smiling at his failed attempt with Candy Apple and sauntered over to the throne and slapped him five. “What are you smiling at, old black man?”

Crip grinned his lopsided grin. “Smiling at you, no-game white man.”

“So you didn’t go with ’em, huh?”

“Go with who?”

“Snake and Radney.”

“Go with ’em for what?”

Goggles lowered his voice. “Shit. They didn’t tell you about that asshole? The father?”

Crip’s heart sped up. “Whose father? The kid’s?”

“Asshole went into the casinos last night and blew a big wad. Huge. Then he packed up his shit and caught a plane outta the country. One-way ticket to Germany or some shit like that. Don’t look like he’s planning to come back—”

Crip jumped out of his chair and hobbled as fast as he could to the parking lot to his car. He knew the deal. He didn’t have to stick around to hear Goggles say the rest: “—so the Gold Man sent Snake and Radney to deal with the collateral.”

If all they were going to do was deal with her, then, well, her old man did owe the money, and a debt is a debt. You gotta pay back your debts. But she was such a pretty little girl, and Snake was not called Snake for nothing. Crip punched the accelerator and the Lincoln roared through the glittering nighttime streets. He was praying the only prayer he knew—
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”
—and sustaining himself with a vision of the girl all grown up and wearing all white with a stethoscope around her neck and a name badge on her chest that said
Doctor
.

When he was a boy, he had wanted to be a doctor, but he had grown up in the streets and become a killer. Maybe it had something to do with the seven foster homes he had run away from. Maybe it had something to do with how ugly he was. Maybe it had something to do with the babysitter who had stolen his sister and caused his mother to give up on life and jump out of that window. He had hate in his heart, a hate uglier than his face. A doctor is not much good if he has hate in his heart. And the only thing this pretty little girl had in her heart was hope and courage and good wishes for everybody, all the things that make a good doctor. And the only chance she had was him.

When he got to the house, the light was on inside and Radney was standing guard outside, which meant Snake was alone in there with her. Radney watched him as he lumbered up the stairs. Radney had his gun hand under his coat and fear in his eyes.

Crip just wanted to get close enough to him before he took that gun out. He was half-way up the stairs when he waved at Radney and said, half-joking, “What? You guys start without me? What, you break into my house when I got the key right here? You’re gonna pay to fix my door, I swear to God.”

Radney, showing his teeth, withdrew the gun hand from the coat. “Don’t blow a fuse. It’s Snake. He said we hadda do it now. He outranks me.”

Crip was at the top of the stairs with Radney smiling at him. Crip smiled back and shoved the blade between Rad-ney’s ribs, stepped over him when he fell, and pushed through the front door. In a flash, he took it all in. The TV was on. He could hear Sapphire locked inside one of the bedrooms, pounding on the door and screaming to be let out, probably because of what she saw in there. You didn’t want to be locked in one of those rooms, alive or dead. Snake was on the bed—there was a bed now. And the girl was on Snake’s lap and his hand was under her shirt and his other hand was pointing the gun straight at Crip, who lurched forward because there was nothing else he could do. He was her only hope.

The first shot ripped through him, though he didn’t feel it much, but his blade was gone, so maybe the shot through his ribs had caused him to drop it. But he wasn’t worried too much about that because his hands were around Snake’s neck now. Trying to muster his strength. Rolling on top of Snake on the bed. Trying to snap his neck. He was slippery as a snake. The second shot, that one he felt. That one went through the guts, zapped his strength. The girl screaming. Sapphire pounding to be let out. The TV on too loud. Snake was slippery as a snake. Trying to stop Snake from raising the gun. Snake was trying to shoot him in the head. He lowered his head. Face to face like he was kissing Snake. His stinking gold-teethed mouth. The pervert. The child molester. He found his strength. He felt it and heard it loud when Snake’s neck snapped. It felt like his own fingers had snapped too. He lay on top of Snake like a lover and caught his breath.

Crip called the girl over, told her to stop screaming, stop crying. She was a brave kid. She stopped crying. He told her, Take this key, go to the closet, close your eyes, don’t look inside, there’s stuff in there I don’t want you to see, get on your knees, feel around for shoes, there’s something in the shoes feels like a wad of paper, bring it back to me. She did as she was told and she came back with all the money he had left in the world. He took the money, four grand in hundreds, and rolled over on his back next to Snake. He told her, Now take the key, go get Sapphire out of the room, then close back the door, don’t look inside, tell Sapphire to come here.

A moment later, the pounding and pleading to be let out stopped. When he opened his eyes, Sapphire was looking down at him. He handed Sapphire the money. “You gotta get her back to Tennessee. You gotta get her there now. She’s got a grandmother. You can’t find her grandmother, find somebody. An aunt. An uncle. Somebody. She has to have somebody. What money’s left over, you keep.”

Sapphire said, “Gold Man is gonna kill me. What about Gold Man? What about him, huh?”

“Come here,” he said to Sapphire. “Lean down.” When she leaned down, he grabbed her by the throat and slapped her around a little bit. “Get the kid outta here. Get her back to Tennessee. You hear me? She’s just a kid.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Okay,” said Sapphire, hollering and crying.

Then he called the girl over again and shoved a couple hundred in the pocket of the pants he had bought her. “Run,” he told her. “Run. Soon as you get a chance, run. Grow up and be a doctor. Save lives.”

Then he scowled at her and made his bug eye jump in its socket to make her laugh one more time. She hugged him around his face as he died.

A nobody.

Just an ugly, coal-black man who didn’t take kindly to people hurting kids.

That was back in the early ’90s, about fifteen, twenty years ago. You look around Las Vegas today and you’ll see the casinos are more lavish, more prosperous, and the gamblers are even more desperate. They still don’t have a state lottery in Nevada, only casinos. And they still got that Air Force base at Nellis. Still got problems with the boys stationed there and their gambling. The Gold Man’s Gentlemen’s Club is still doing good business with those who like to see the titties dance, though the Gold Man himself is partially retired because of his stroke. He has a son who runs the place now. The son has a degree in business from UNLV, but he’s just as cruel as his old man and just as slimy as his brother they used to call Snake.