Part 52 (1/2)
Stewart gazed upward, his eyes trained on Vegas Vic: the famous neon cowboy who used to wave a greeting to visitors cruising into town in fin-tailed Cadillacs-relegated now to headliner status in the Neon Museum. He doesn't wave anymore: his hand stays upraised stiffly. I lifted mine in a like salute. ”Howdy,” I replied.
Stewart giggled. ”At least they didn't blow him up.”
”No,” I said, looking down. ”They blew the f.u.c.k out of Bugsy, though.”
Bugsy was a California gangster who thought maybe halfway up the Los Angeles highway, where it crossed the Phoenix road, might be a good place for a joint designed to convert dirty money into clean. It so happened that there was already a little town with a light-skirt history huddled there, under the shade of tree-lined streets. A town with mild winters and abundant water. Las Vegas means the meadows in Spanish. In the middle of the harsh Mojave, the desert bloomed. And there's always been magic at a crossroads. It's where you go to sell your soul.
I s.h.i.+fted my eyepatch to get a look otherwise. Vic s.h.i.+mmered, a twist of expectation, disappointment, conditioned response. My right eye showed me the slot-machine zombies as a shuffling darkness, Stewart a blinding white light, a sword-wielding spectre. A demon of chance. The Suicide King, avatar of take-your-own-life Las Vegas with its record-holding rates of depression, violence, failure, homelessness, DUI. The Suicide King, who cannot ever die by his own hand.
”I can see why she feels at home here,” Stewart said to Vic's neon feet.
”Vic's a he, Stewart. Unless that was a f.a.ggot 'she,' in which case I will send the ghosts of campiness-past present and future-to haunt your bed.”
”She. G.o.ddess. She seems at home here.”
”I don't want her at home in my city,” I snapped as if it cramped my tongue. It felt petty. And good. ”The b.i.t.c.h has her own city. And sucks enough f.u.c.king water out of my river.”
He looked at me shyly through a fall of blond bangs. I thought about kissing him, and snorted instead. He grinned. ”Vegas is nothing but a big f.u.c.king stage set wrapped around a series of strip malls, anymore. What could be more Hollywood?”
I lit a cigarette, because everybody still smokes in Vegas-as if to make up for California-and took a deep, acrid drag. When I blew smoke back out it tickled my nostrils. ”I think that empty inscription is what locks us to L.A. ”
Stewart laced his arm through mine again. ”Maybe we'll get lucky and it will turn out to be the schedule for The Big One.”
I pictured L.A. tumbling into the ocean, G.o.ddess and all, and grinned back. ”I was hoping to get that a little sooner. So what say we go back to the Dam tonight and give it another try?”
”What the h.e.l.l do we have to lose?”
The trooper shone his light around the cab and the bed of the truck, but didn't make us get out despite three A.M. and no excuse to be out but stargazing at Willow Beach . Right after the terrorist attacks, it was soldiers armed with automatic weapons. I'm not sure if the Nevada State Police are an improvement, but this is the world we have to live in, even if it is under siege. Stewart, driving, smiled and showed ID, and then we pa.s.sed through winding gullies and out onto the Dam.
It was uncrowded in the breathless summer night. The ma.s.sive lights painting its facade washed the stars out of the desert sky. Las Vegas glowed in the pa.s.senger-side mirror from behind the mountains as Stewart parked the truck on the Arizona side. On an overcast night, the glow is greenish-the reflected lights of the MGM Grand. That night, clear skies, and it was the familiar city-glow pink, only brighter and split neatly by the ascending Luxor light like a beacon calling someone home.
I'd been chewing my thumb all evening. Stewart rattled my shoulder to get me to look up. ”We're here. Bring your chisel?”
”Better,” I said, and reached behind the seat to bring out the tire iron and a little eight-pound hammer. The sledge dropped neatly into the tool loop of my cargo pants. I tugged a black denim jacket on over the torn s.h.i.+rt and slid the iron into the left-hand sleeve. ”Now I'm ready.”
He disarmed the doors and struggled out of the leather jacket I'd told him was too hot to wear. ”Why you always gotta break things you don't understand?”
”Because they scare me.” I didn't think he'd get it, but he was still sitting behind the wheel thinking when I walked around and opened his door. The alarm had rearmed; it wailed momentarily but he keyed it off in irritation and hopped down, tossing the jacket inside. ”It's got to relate to how bad things have gotten. It's a shadow war, man. This Dam is for something.”
”Of course it's for something.” Walking beside me, he shot me that blue-eyed look that made me want to smack him and kiss him all at once. ”You know what they used to say about the Colorado before they built it-too thick to drink, and too thin to plow. The Dam is there to screw up the breeding cycles of fish, make it possible for men to live where men shouldn't be living. Make a reservoir. Hydroelectric power. Let the mud settle out. It's there to hold the river back.”
It's there to hold the river back. ”I was thinking just that earlier,” I said as we walked across the floodlit Dam. The same young girl from that afternoon leaned out over the railing, looking down into the yawning, floodlit chasm. I wondered if she was homeless and how she'd gotten all the way out here-and how she planned to get back.
She looked up as we walked past arm in arm, something reflected like city glow in her eyes.
The lure of innocence to decadence cuts both ways: cities and angels, vampires and victims. Sweet-eyed street kid with a heart like a knife. I didn't even need to flip up my eyepatch to know for sure. ”What's your name?” I let the tire iron slip down in my sleeve where I could grab it. ”G.o.ddess leave you behind?”
”G.o.ddess works for me,” she said, and raised her right fist. A s.h.i.+ny little automatic glittered in it, all blued steel with a viper nose. It made a 40's movie tableau, even to the silhouetting spill of floodlights and the way the wind pinned the dress to her body. She smiled. Sweet, venomous. ”And you can call me Angel. Drop the crowbar, kid.”
”It's a tire iron,” I answered, but I let it fall to the cement. It rang like the bell going off in my head, telling me everything made perfect sense. ”What the h.e.l.l do you want with Las Vegas , Angel?” I thought I knew all the West-coast animae. She must be new.
She giggled prettily. ”Look at you, cutie. Just as proud of your little shadow city as if it really existed.”
I wished I still had the tire iron in my hand. I would have broken it across her face.
”What the f.u.c.k is that supposed to mean?” Stewart. Bless him. He jerked his thumb up at the light smirching the sky. ”What do you call that?”
She shrugged. ”A mirage s.h.i.+nes too, but you can't touch it. All you need to know is quit trying to break my Dam. You must be Jack, right? And this charming fellow here-” she took a step back so the pistol still covered both of us, even as Stewart dropped my hand and edged away. Stewart. ”This must be the Suicide King. I'd like you both to work for me too.”
The gun oscillated from Stewart's midsection to mine. Angel's hand wasn't shaking. Behind her, I saw G.o.ddess striding up the sidewalk, imperious in five-hundred dollar high-heeled shoes.
”I know what happens,” I said. ”All that darkness has to go somewhere, doesn't it? Everything trapped behind the Dam. All the little ways my city echoes yours, and the big ones too. And Nevada has a way of sucking things up without a trace.
”The Dam is a way to control it. It's a way to hold back that gummy river of blackness. And Las Vegas is the reservoir that lets you meter it out and use when you want it.
”Let me guess. You need somebody to watch over Hoover . And the magic built into it, which will be complete sometime after the concrete cures.”
Stewart picked up the thread as G.o.ddess pulled a little pearl-handled gun out of her pocketbook as well. He didn't step forward, but I felt him interpose himself. Don't! Don't. ”Let me guess,” he said. ”The early part of 2100? What happens then?”
”Only movie villains tell all in the final reel.” G.o.ddess had arrived.
Angel cut her off. ”Gloating is pa.s.se.” She smiled. ”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. ”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 pa.s.sing. Boys, you're not real.”
I felt Stewart swelling beside me, soul-deep offended. It was my city. His city. And not some va.s.sal state of Los Angeles . ”You still haven't said what happens in a hundred years.”
G.o.ddess started to say something, and 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. n.o.body 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,” G.o.ddess 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 G.o.ddess, and from Angel. And the 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 Docs. G.o.ddess skipped away as I lunged, shredding the seam of my pants as I yanked the sledgehammer out. It was 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 G.o.ddess, a light pulsed like Stewart's blood and a siren screamed.
Stewart wasn't making any sound now and I forced myself not turn and look back at him. Instead, I closed the distance, shouting something I don't recall. I think I split G.o.ddess' 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 were coming.