Preston Allen - Las Vegas Noir

I lifted her up, her lips still locked with mine, and set her on the “Impaled” table. The floor would have been more comfortable. The bottom half of “Impaled” was the receptacle. Perched above it, Murphy-bed style, was a rack of sharp metal spikes. Real ones. It was part of the gag. The magician would prove the spikes were real while the assistant was being chained to the table. A light would be positioned behind her and a thin curtain in front, so the audience could see her struggling. There was a time limit, artificially imposed, something to add more drama to the situation. When the clock ran out, the spikes would fall, and if the girl was still there, well...

At just the right time, though, the light went out, the spikes fell, and the girl reappeared someplace else, safe and sound. It was foolproof. There was a safety catch so the spikes couldn’t fall if the girl was still chained up, and she had a foot switch to release the spikes when she was in position. It looked dangerous and evil. It was the kind of illusion I could never perform on a cruise.

It was a new prop in the warehouse and I’d never before used it for this purpose. It supported our combined weight nicely, creaking and groaning along as if it were an active participant in our lovemaking.

Afterwards, we lay there in each other’s arms, slowly becoming aware of the cold metal table beneath us. She laughed as I shivered.

“Can you really get me out of here?”

I held her face in my hands and looked directly into her eyes. “I’m gonna get us a blanket first.”

She laughed again when I rolled off the table. I bumped my hip as I got to my feet. I looked over at her. She was beautiful. For just this moment, it was like it was. I went into the front office to grab a blanket. Raven had rolled over, away from me, when I returned. She was still naked.

I stopped and looked at her, wishing she didn’t have to go away. But I knew there was no other choice. If she was still here it was dangerous for everyone involved.

As I approached the illusion I hit the foot release.

I made myself watch as the spikes came down.

She turned her head at the sound, but there was no chance to get out of the way. She didn’t even have time to scream. With an illusion, there’s no point in a slow death. Of the forty spikes, no more than six or seven hit her, but it was enough to do the job. The rest slid into their proper channels with a sickening metal-on-metal grate. The blood channels, built into the table for show, worked just like they were supposed to, draining the red flow away from her body and collecting it in a basin at the foot of the table.

I threw the blanket I was still holding over the whole mess. I got dressed before I retrieved the diamonds from her pants pocket. I had plans for the little beauties.

The blood was overflowing, dripping on the floor. The basin was never really meant to hold anything. I grabbed a rag to sop it up.

The back door opened. Pierre Charon stepped in, cell phone in his hand. “She called me.”

“When?” I asked, not looking up.

“Now.”

I went to the other side of the table and lifted the blanket. Her eyes were still open, still filled with shock and horror. Her cell phone was in her hand, the connection still open.

“She fingered you from the beginning.”

“It had to be one of us.”

“You made the right choice.”

I stood up and tossed the velvet bag to him. It was caught and pocketed in one motion. I was on my honor they were all there.

“We good?”

He looked from the bag in his hand to the dead body and back again. He had the diamonds and someone to blame for it. “We’re good,” he said.

“Now what?” I asked.

He tilted his head toward Eastern Boulevard. “Eden Memorial. We’ve cashed in a few favors.”

By the time the hole was filled, the sun was just beginning to rise. Sunrise in Las Vegas is something to behold, the way the rays reflect off the gold and brass of the Strip hotels. With no way to know from which direction the light is really coming, there’s no way to set your compass. I lit a cigarette and basked in its directionless glow.

East Las Vegas

People in other academic disciplines made fun of American Studies. The joke went: If you check “undecided” one too many times as your major, they put you down for American Studies. Ortiz was in his fifth year as a graduate student in American Studies, and he still hadn’t decided on a topic for his master’s thesis. He hoped Professor Philippe Talon, the ethnographer, might become his thesis advisor, but he’d have to impress the man in some unusual way to earn this honor.

Dr. Talon, a burly Belgian, was the author of numerous studies of aboriginal peoples throughout the Americas. Talon was fond of debunking other anthropologists’ accounts of the innate peacefulness of native peoples — to him, violence was a constant universal, and he was full of tales of aboriginal violence. Rumor had it that he had eaten human flesh with cannibals in the jungles of eastern Peru, that in Venezuela he had been forced to take part in a ritual castration of a Yanomami captive, and that he had fathered a child among a war-loving, Stone Age people in Brazil. Students who had been to his home reported seeing a shrunken head on his mantel. Ortiz had never spoken to him at length, though whenever the redoubtable professor happened to be in his office, and Ortiz happened to pass by, he invariably glanced in to behold the man buried among his papers and journals, his thick, blondhaired fingers stabbing at his keyboard, his neck spattered with the red tattoo of some indigenous ceremony he’d participated in in the Amazon rain forest.

In that fifth year of his graduate program, Ortiz decided to go to the annual convention of the American Culture Association. The ACA conference was the main gathering for the American Studies crowd. Ortiz believed a couple of days listening to panel discussions by eminent figures in his field might inspire him to finally decide on a thesis topic. If he got lucky, some of those people might invite him to a few after-sessions drinks; the thought caused him to nibble the ends of his long hair with excitement.

The conference was being held that year in Las Vegas at a hotel-casino on the Boulder Strip in East Las Vegas called ¡Viva! a brand-new place with a Latin theme: dealers in sequined matador jackets, waitresses topped with fruit headdresses à la Carmen Miranda, that sort of thing. Ortiz had to go on his own nickel — his university would only pay for his trip if he were presenting a paper, which he wasn’t. But Las Vegas was just half a day’s drive from L.A., and he planned to stay at the Lucky Cuss, a cheap motel on the Boulder Strip not far from ¡Viva!

It had stormed in the Mojave that spring, and as he drove up I-15 the flowering desert spread vast and golden before him like the carpet of ¡Viva!’s casino floor, which he’d seen on an Internet virtual tour of the place. The air smelled fresh and washed, very unlike casino air, but he kept the windows of his vintage Mustang closed because his hair tangled easily.

His glossy black hair and high cheekbones occasionally led people to mistake him for an Indian. “Native,” he corrected them, and didn’t disabuse them of the notion. No doubt he did have Native blood, on his Latino father’s side. His mother was English, but his father’s people had been in California since the mission days, and their blood had surely commingled with that of some long-lost tribe. Even better, he might be kin to some still-existing group, one of these tiny tribes with its own casinos and whose members were all millionaires. Maybe he could take a DNA test to prove the connection. That would be something.