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  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 William Lashner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099355

  ISBN-10: 1611099358

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012920550

  Contents

  Start Reading

  I. VEGAS, BABY

  1. Silence

  2. Spring Valley

  3. Message from the Past

  4. A Little Rough

  5. Flamingo Road

  6. The Big Ditch

  II. MY THREE SUBURBS

  7. East of Eden

  8. Philly International

  9. Anyone Home?

  10. Shelby

  11. Spirals

  12. Eric

  13. Caitlin

  14. Stems

  15. Fighting Harry Conahan

  16. Splitsville

  17. So Long to All That

  18. Last Sunday

  19. A Mr. Clevenger

  20. Trifecta

  21. Chandler Court

  22. Frenchy Finds a Snorkel

  23. Pickup

  24. Kitty, Kitty

  III. PHILADELPHIA STORY

  25. My Strip

  26. Oh, Madeline

  27. The Stoneway

  28. The Pilot Fish

  29. Tony Grubbins

  30. Death in Guaymas

  31. Devil’s Brew

  32. The Fat Dog’s Kid

  33. Rattle Rattle

  34. Rampage

  35. The Club

  36. UnWilling

  37. Unsafe at Any Speed

  38. On the Beach

  39. Nocturne

  40. The Morning After

  IV. EVERFAIR

  41. The Final Third

  42. 52 Pickup

  43. Second Chance

  44. Derek

  45. Oceanfront, Nebraska

  46. A Cold Wind

  47. Rumble, Rumble

  48. Jacob and Esau

  49. Spark

  50. Lurch

  51. The Piper

  52. Slim Chance

  53. The Dentist

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I took a piss at fortune’s sweet kiss,

  It’s like eating caviar and dirt.

  Bruce Springsteen

  “Better Days”

  I. VEGAS, BABY

  “Las Vegas. If we can’t get in trouble there, boys, we’re not trying.”

  —Augie Iannucci

  1. Silence

  WE TALKED EVERY week, Augie and Ben and I. We grew up together, closer than brothers, and though we went our separate ways, and barely saw each other anymore, we stayed forever in touch. Every Tuesday, by phone. At least that was the plan. We didn’t say much, most of the time there wasn’t much to say. How’s it going? How are the kids? Same old, same old. Sometimes we’d call just to say we were rushing somewhere and couldn’t talk. Augie didn’t want to hear the details of my suburban life, and I didn’t want to hear the details of his self-destruction, and neither of us wanted to hear Ben whine anymore about his ex-wives. But it really didn’t matter what we said, so long as we said something. We were each other’s canary in the mine shaft. As long as we were talking, it meant we had still gotten away with it.

  Which was why I was flying into Vegas out of Philly International. It was a Wednesday morning and the day before, Augie hadn’t chirped.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Ben from his home in Fort Lauderdale. “He’s probably just stoned or shacked up with a whore. The problem isn’t that he hasn’t called, the problem is that he didn’t invite us to the party.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “But my call went straight to voice mail. He always has his phone.”

  “Remember that time a couple years ago when Augie had us sweating for a week and a half before he finally called from a Mexican jail?”

  “He blamed it on the worm.”

  “It’s like you always say, J.J.: anything that happens to Augie, he’ll have done it to himself.”

  “He does love his pornography,” I said.

  “Let me know when he finally rings up, hungover like a buzzard, with some new tattoo he doesn’t remember getting,” said Ben. “So, how are the kids?”

  I didn’t tell Ben I was flying out to check on Augie, but Augie hadn’t called, and so there I was swooping down toward the gaudy Vegas strip in a 757 with my seat back up and my stomach clenched, not knowing what the hell to expect. Though with Augie, it was always safe to expect the worst.

  I didn’t much care for Las Vegas. I went there only to see Augie, and there wasn’t much fun we could have together anymore. Augie liked to gamble, could play poker in the casinos for days at a time, and was pretty damn good at it when he was sober, but I never took to the tables. For me the pain of the losses always outweighed the charge I got from winning; heaven knew my money had been too hard earned. And Augie liked to end his nights with a lap dance at his favorite stripper joint, but as far as I was concerned, if I wanted to see a naked woman who wouldn’t screw me at the end of the night I could just lie in bed and watch my wife undress. We used to play golf together, Augie and I, but after that crank dealer in Reno shot off his ring finger Augie didn’t much play anymore, even though one-handed he could still bludgeon me on the course. And frankly, online pornography is not something one forty-year-old man wants to share with another. When I visited Augie we mostly drank, watched sports on TV, and ate at the Applebee’s by his house.

  Vegas, baby.

  We landed with a jolt. I put on my sunglasses and my game face as the plane slid into the gate. The Vegas airport was a party I wanted no part of. The slot machines whirred, the bartenders poured, hawkers hawked their wares as the great screens high above the baggage carousels advertised the production of the year, the comedian of the decade, the sexiest showgirls on the strip. If Vegas didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be able to dream it up, and if by chance you did, before you could tell anyone about it a white rabbit would have chewed off your face.

  All I had was a briefcase, so my journey through the airport was mercifully brief. I took the shuttle to the rental car center, checked in at a kiosk to avoid any face time with a clerk, picked the most generic-looking midsize I could find in the garage, and followed the arrows to the highway. No GPS, thank you. It’s not that I knew my way around, it’s that I didn’t want to leave a record anywhere of where I’d been.

  “Mr. Moretti, yes, how good to see you again.”

  “Thank you,” I said to a bank clerk I had never seen before. I suppose obsequious customer service is better than no customer service, even in a strip-mall bank branch not far from Augie’s Applebee’s.

  “Just show me your key and your identification and sign here,” said the clerk, “and we can get your box for you right away.”

  It took me a moment to remember which signature I had used when I first rented the box. An oldie but goodie. Two looping Js, each followed by a period, before a scrawled, half-legible Moretti. I showed her the key and a license that had me living at Augie’s house in Nevada, the same license I used for the flight and to rent the car.

  “Very good,” she said after she compared my signature with the one in the file.

  She put
me and the box in a room smaller than an airplane toilet and left us alone. I sat there for a moment and felt nothing, felt dead. My son had a ball game that afternoon that I was missing, my daughter had a choral concert at the high school that night, and I was booked on the red-eye back, which meant my next day would be a sleep-deprived mess, all to fly out to a city I hated to make sure an old friend, with whom I no longer had anything in common, was okay because he hadn’t phoned, even though he was a drug-addicted drunk, which might have had something to do with the lapse. And all of this was in service to something that happened almost a quarter of a century ago. I closed my eyes for a moment, fingered the scar on my neck, and thought what it would be like to be done with it all, to be finished, to let the fear bleed out of me one last time. What would it be like to be normal?

  I let the weakness overtake me for a moment, let it pass through me and out of me. And then I opened up the box.

  No surprises, nothing popping out like a stuffed clown atop a Slinky, just the same stuff I grabbed from the box each time I came to Vegas to check on Augie. There were the keys to his house. There was the wad of hundred-dollar bills bound in a purple-and-white wrapper, a little pillow of security if things went wrong. There was the automatic wrapped in newspaper and stuffed in a plastic bag so that it wouldn’t rattle in the box, something that scared the hell out of me but that Augie insisted on. And oh yeah, there were a couple boxes of condoms.

  I jammed the keys in my pocket, along with the money. I removed the gun from the bag, unwrapped it, checked that the clip was loaded and the chamber empty like Augie had taught me, and put that in the briefcase. I was about to close the safe-deposit box, when I thought better of it and grabbed one of the condom boxes. Augie always told me, with a jaunty voice over the phone, that when I stopped by I shouldn’t forget the jimmy hats. The condom boxes were old already and still unopened, but I took one anyway in case he needed a few; dealing with Augie meant it was always better to be prepared.

  Look at me there, leaving the bank with my sunglasses on, a wad of cash in my pocket, my briefcase holding condoms and a gun. Look at the swagger, at the hint of a smile, like I have the world beat, look at the utter fatuousness of the middle-aged suburbanite playing at being a torpedo. If any man was ever in need of a punch to the face, it was he, me, and it was coming, yes, it was. Sometimes the aardvark imagines he’s a lion, but the hyena always sets him straight.

  Before returning to the car I slipped inside a drugstore next to the bank and bought a box of chocolates, the biggest they had, bound with frills and goofily shaped like a brontosaurus heart, a deranged greeting-card magnate’s idea of a romantic gesture. Then it was back to the sun-drenched morning as I steered the rental across West Sahara to South Rainbow Boulevard.

  The residential parts of Vegas are lousy with walls. Every development is surrounded, every backyard. If Robert Frost had ever seen Vegas he would have had a breakdown. I was stopped at a light on West Twain with walls all around me, when a motorcyclist pulled up beside me and revved his engine. At the sound, my blood fizzled like I was mainlining Alka-Seltzer and I felt a throb at my throat.

  I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help myself. The rider was older, with a gray beard and a denim vest. He seemed to be ignoring me, and I turned my face to the windshield so it seemed I was ignoring him, too. But I wasn’t, with all my concentration. I was always jumpy when I saw a biker, felt the twin urges to run away and to run the bastard over. When the light turned, my foot stayed on the brake as the motorcycle zipped away.

  After a few bleats from behind, I started up again down South Rainbow. A hundred yards on, I turned into a gap in the wall to my right. SPRING VALLEY, read the dusty old sign. Why, if I didn’t know any better it might have sounded like the sweetest little place on earth. Spring Valley. Where the sun always shone down softly and pussy willows waved in the breeze. But I wasn’t entering Spring Valley for the scenery.

  An old friend hadn’t called, and I was paying him a visit to see if I still had a life.

  2. Spring Valley

  ALL THE HOUSES in Augie’s Vegas development looked alike, sunbaked squat boxes offering nothing to the street but drawn curtains and garage doors. The place was as amiable as a rock. For a time Spring Valley had been hot, prices had more than doubled, fancy cars had been parked in the driveways, lawns were green and shrubs were blooming and SOLD signs sprouted like desert flowers after a rain. And then the bubble burst.

  Now the development was littered with forlorn FOR SALE signs and every other house seemed to be abandoned to the bank. The cars on the street were old, battered, a few draped with pale covers like the furniture in haunted houses. The street signs were so caked with red dust it was impossible to read them. It looked like the place had been hit by a neutron bomb. And it had.

  Is anything more destructive in this world than easy money?

  Augie lived on a road that ended in a cul-de-sac. When I reached the mouth of Augie’s street I slowed for a bit but kept going. I didn’t see any motorcycles parked at the entrance, or anything at all suspicious, but still I sure as hell wasn’t pulling into his driveway. When I asked him why he had bought on a cul-de-sac, he said it was great for kids. He also mentioned something about the schools, and the park a few blocks away. The whole thing made me laugh, considering that Augie had been fixed years ago. It was obviously part of the real-estate agent’s spiel as she sold him more house than he needed when the market was rising, houses were selling at above the asking price, and every mortgage seemed like a license to steal. It was only later that everyone realized who was actually doing the stealing. Augie was repeating the patter to convince me of the quality of his purchase, which was sweet and all, but frankly I didn’t care. Truth was, I didn’t mind him blowing his cash on more house than he needed—hadn’t we all done that?—I just thought he should have been a bit more careful in his choice of location. One way in means one way out.

  I turned left one block past Augie’s cul-de-sac and backed into the empty driveway of the eighth house, a small ranch with its windows curtained and a patch of dead sand in the front, like an ironic comment on the very idea of a suburban lawn. I knocked at the door with the briefcase by my side and the heart-shaped box of chocolates clutched to my chest. I had to knock twice before I heard the shuffling.

  “Who is it?” came a rasp of a voice from inside.

  “Is that you, sweet Selma?” I said.

  The peephole darkened for a moment and then the door opened. The woman standing in the doorway with the help of a metal cane was short and thick, with skin supple as jerky. A cigarette drooped from her lips, her eyes were squinting from the smoke, her hair was so jet black it would have looked false on a Chinaman. “What’s that nonsense in your hand?”

  “Chocolates,” I said.

  “Are you trying to seduce me with bonbons?”

  “Would it work?”

  “Thirty years ago, with a little charm, maybe. Now, honey, it’s liquor or nothing. But since you’re here…” Selma grabbed the box, gave it a shake, opened the door wide. “Get on in if you’re getting in. I don’t want to lose the air-conditioning.”

  Selma’s house was dark and cool, overstuffed with overstuffed furniture pushed against the walls of her tired little living room. Along with the couches were piles of magazine and books, a television on a folding table, a broken chair, a statue of a mermaid in fake stone. The whole place was as cheery as a waiting room at the Port Authority, but the photographs on the wall of Selma as a perky showgirl circa 1962, along with Joey and Sammy and Dean, bespoke a jauntier history. I once asked her where Frank was. “Between my legs, honey,” she said with her hoarse smoker’s croak. I didn’t come to Vegas to make friends, but once I saw where Augie had bought his house, I had made friends with Selma.

  When we were both inside the living room, she plopped down in the lounger marked with cigarette burns, ripped open the frills on the box, took a bite out of one of the chocolates. “Where’d you g
et this crap?” she said.

  “I had it shipped from Paris.”

  “It tastes like it came from a drugstore,” she said, dropping the half-eaten piece back into the box.

  “A drugstore in Paris,” I said. “You don’t want it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then quit your whining. How are you doing, Selma?”

  “Oh, I can’t complain.”

  I laughed. “That doesn’t mean you won’t. So how’s Augie? Any suspicious strangers lurking about? Any wild pool parties?”

  “Not since you were in last.”

  “That, I want to explain, wasn’t my doing. For some reason Augie felt compelled to show me a good time.”

  “And you boys had it, too, by the sounds of things.”

  “He did, at least. Where he finds those girls, I’ll never know. They had more tattoos than the Sixth Fleet. I prefer quiet nights spent with distinguished elder ladies with jet-black hair.”

  “You won’t get much of that, honey, if all you’ve got is drugstore chocolates.”

  “Has he had any visitors?”

  “Not enough. I’m worried about him, J.J.”

  “How so?”

  “I wanted to call you, but I couldn’t find your number.”

  “Go ahead, Selma.”

  “He’s been crying.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sometimes he sits by the pool late at night and cries. And it’s not quiet either. Quiet desperation I understand.” She took a long inhale from her cigarette, let it out slowly. “But this is something else.”

  “Augie goes through things.”

  “He needs a friend, J.J. He needs help. He needs to get sober.”

  “That’s nothing new.”

  “But he’s at the point where he needs it now. I’ve been there, I know. It’s not enough for you to just fly in for a day and then fly out. He has no family that visits, no one who he cares about, just you. You need to be a friend.”

  I looked to the kitchen, as if I could see through walls. “Have you heard him crying in the last couple of days?”