Preston Allen: Las Vegas Noir

“Ooh, Las Vegas,” sang the pioneering country-rocker Gram Parsons. “Every time I hit your Crystal City, you know you’re gonna make a wreck out of me.” As Las Vegans, we regularly read about these wrecked lives in newspapers and magazines. We routinely observe people going about their wildly destructive antics on mainstream TV. Often we can’t believe these stories are unfolding in our city. They almost seem like put-ons, elaborate pranks borrowed from atrocious cut-rate screenplays. But there they are, these inhabitants of our city, their mug shots staring us down, making us wonder if what Parsons said is really true — that in Las Vegas your only real friend is the queen of spades.

How crazy does crime get in Las Vegas? Well, consider these tales taken from local papers:

Husband-and-wife champion bodybuilders strangle their personal assistant, torching her body in a red Jaguar in the Vegas desert. Eventually police apprehend the couple in a shopping center, where the killers are drinking root beer and getting manicures.

Failing in his effort to sexually assault a female parishioner, a Catholic priest clobbers his intended victim with a wine bottle before going on the lam. According to a police report, he tells the church worker, her consciousness fading, “I am over the edge.”

And then there’s this: O.J. Simpson, who years ago was found “not guilty” of decapitating his wife and her lover, storms into a hotel room with armed accomplices to “retrieve items that belonged to him,” sports memorabilia like his Hall of Fame certificate and photos of him standing beside J. Edgar Hoover.

On it goes, a litany of wicked behavior and stupid folly. People come from all over the world to do dumb, dangerous things in Sin City, whether it’s someone locking himself in a Fremont Street motel to kick a nasty heroin habit, hooking up to an oxygen tank in a last-ditch scheme to double his nest egg at the downtown slots, or shooting a weekend porn flick that goes disastrously wrong once a rabid pit bull is introduced. In these true-life narratives, no one shows up in Las Vegas to do anything smart, tactful, or even kind. Instead, they come here to fuck up. Big time.

The sheer range of true Las Vegas crime — no doubt spurred on by the city’s explosive growth (which recently passed the two million mark) — can be intimidating to crime writers and readers alike. How can literary fiction surpass the strangeness of this place? Indeed, it takes a lot to top the gaudy spectacle that is Las Vegas, and we’re happy to report that the writers who contributed to this volume have done just that. They’ve beaten the odds to conjure characters and stories that transcend any of the lurid dramas of Vegas you’ll read about in newspapers or watch on the tube.

The stories gathered in Las Vegas Noir are written by longtime residents and avid chroniclers of Sin City, authors who take you far beyond the neon of Caesars Palace and into neighborhoods too dangerous for CSI . Absolutely cliché-free, these stories are full of flesh-and-blood characters trapped in dire circumstances that only real Las Vegas neighborhoods can spring.

The late John O’Brien, author of Leaving Las Vegas , gives us the story “The Tik,” in which a junkie hooked on a mysterious drug reunites with his wealthy ex-lover to embark on a thrill-killing expedition. In David Corbett’s mystifying “Pretty Little Parasite,” a Fremont Street cocktail waitress plagued by Holocaust nightmares believes coke dealing is the best way to become a stay-at-home mom. In Lori Kozlowski’s “Three Times a Night, Every Other Night,” an Irish pub singer banished to North Las Vegas and at the end of his professional rope is destined for a mobbed-up fate. Jaq Greenspon’s “Disappear” centers on a down-and-out magician whose former assistant steals money — and may be fingering him to the bad guys. And in Celeste Starr’s chilling “Dirty Blood,” a simple pickup in a gay bar takes an unusual twist when the protagonist finds more than lubricant in his date’s sock drawer.

There is plenty of heartbreak and humor (albeit of the blackest order) too. In Tod Goldberg’s “Mitzvah,” for instance, a con man masquerading as a rabbi feels trapped in the suburbs until he plans a brutal means of escape. In Scott Phillips’s “Babs,” an ex-stripper turned bar owner drags along a visiting Midwestern cartoon aficionado to reclaim some meth for a mutual friend. And Vu Tran’s devastating “This or Any Desert” explores the fractured psyche of a renegade cop looking to avenge his Asian ex-wife’s physical abuse at the hands of her new husband, a Chinatown businessman, with searing emotional and psychological insight.

Like we said, as fantastic and diverse as the Strip can be at night, it’s got nothing on the vast array of stories collected here. Indeed, Las Vegas Noir , as you will soon discover, brings you into the gaudy bosom of our fair city — that is, the gaudy, lethal bosom that eventually presents itself once you wander far away from the Strip.

Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

Las Vegas, Nevada

March 2008

Scotch 80s

Part of me wished that I had asked the cab to wait. I hadn’t. I stared up at the big double doors, weathered from the desert sun, yes, but still so imposing that you half expected to see a muscled bodyguard when they opened. The doorbell didn’t work. It never had. I felt the familiar quiver begin in the back of my neck as twice I dropped the ornate knocker, an upside-down black iron cross. I peered over my back to see if the cab was still in sight. The long drive was empty.

Despite the impending nightfall, I noticed the German shepherd asleep on the grass, his white face a beacon in the otherwise black lawn. I knew this dog and wondered if he would remember me. I walked over to nudge him awake.

When I had last left this house over ten years ago, I was certain that I was through with this all-consuming part of my life, but as I bent over to pet the dog, it was clear this place was far from finished with me; rather, like the dog, it was merely lying in wait for some new awakening. The shepherd lifted his head and growled, but whether the snarl was for me or something else, I did not know. I followed his gaze and was startled to find that I was being watched by a tall slim figure, standing where only moments before the closed doors had been.

“Timmers, you’re back,” she said, not at all surprised to see me.

I cringed at her easy, reflexive use of my nickname; at her prosaic manner of observation, as if I’d just returned from a short walk — when in fact I had been gone for a decade. This meeting was nothing less than heart-stopping for me.

“Melinda, I... I didn’t hear the door open. You startled me...” So much so, in fact, that I couldn’t remember anything that I had planned to say. “You sound as if you’ve been expecting me.” She ignored this.

“Come in,” she said.

As I followed her through the foyer and into the heart of the house, I began to feel a sort of resignation; a feeling that, now that I had set things in motion, I could sit back and relax, free from the burden of decision making. It was not an unpleasant outlook.

“Christ,” I said as we walked into the living room, its windowed ceiling a full twenty feet above me. “I’d forgotten how damn big this place is.”