Don Winslow: While Drowning in the Desert

Karen answered on the third ring.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

Her voice was as warm as a January morning in Chicago.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Not pregnant.”

And hung up.

I stood pretending to be listening, then hung up and walked back to the bar to rescue Hope.

“Who did you call?” Natty muttered. “Time and temperature?”

Then he turned back to Hope.

“Well,” I said, “it’s probably about time to check out and head for the airport.”

They weren’t listening.

“Nice lounge,” Nate said.

“Very pleasant,” answered Hope.

“A little noisy, though,” Nate said.

Oh, God.

“Hard to conduct a conversation,” Hope agreed.

Nate said, “I wish there were a quiet place we could have a nice chat.”

“That would be lovely.”

I watched as Nate feigned deep thought, then said, “I have an idea!”

I’ll bet you do.

“We could go up to my room,” Nate suggested.

Surprise, surprise.

“By the time we check out,” I said, “park…”

“Room service,” Nate said.

“… get our boarding passes…”

“A little drink, a little chat…” Nate said. “Talk over old times. Nothing you’d be interested in, Neal.”

Hope looked over Natty’s shoulder and gave me a look. One of those significant looks. A “Help me” look.

“You just can’t get to the airport too early these days,” I said.

“Or you can always catch a later flight,” said Nate.

Hope slid off the stool and said, “Could I have a word with you, Neal? Alone?”

She took me by the elbow and guided me a few steps away.

I smiled and whispered, “Look, I know. Why don’t you make your excuse, I’ll get him on his plane and-”

She dug into her purse, doubtless searching for her car keys. “Neal, sweetie,” she said, pressing a twenty into my palm, “can I treat you to a movie or something?”

I slipped the bill back to her.

“Save your money.”

She looked at me with those big blue eyes.

She must have been something, I thought. In fact, she was not at all unattractive now. And there were still a couple of hours before the flight, the airport was close and I could still get Nathan back to Palm Desert tonight.

“You know how it is,” she said.

Yeah, I thought. I was young once myself.

Las Vegas is the weirdest place in the world.

I’ve been to some pretty weird places. Hell, I grew up-or failed to, depending on your perspective-in New York City. Weird. I’ve worked cases in San Francisco (weird), London (weird) and Hollywood (very weird). I even spent three months as a prisoner of sorts in a Buddhist monastery in the remote mountains of western Sichuan in China (very, very weird).

But on the general scale of weird, Las Vegas has all these places beat hands-down, so to speak.

I think it’s what happens when you have a combination of unlimited space and unlimited money unconstrained by common sense or good taste. Things can get pretty weird.

I mean here in a state run by Mormons you have a town founded by a Jewish gangster whose nickname was Bugsy. He gets the weird ball rolling when he builds the first casino and calls it what? The Flamingo.

In a desert.

A big pink bird that lives in the water.

In Africa.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m standing in the middle of a Nevada desert, one of the first things I think of is not an African bird that stands around with one leg in the water.

But, then again, the guy’s nickname was Bugsy, right?

So Bugsy built the Flamingo, came in way over budget and got a Mafia pink slip. After the funeral, a couple of other boys built casinos with names like the Sands (not weird), the Oasis (not weird), and the Sahara (confused, but not weird) but that’s where the non-weirdness stopped.

Because people started coming to Las Vegas.

To do what?

Lose money.

It became one of the great American pastimes. Save your money all year to go on vacation and lose the money. People started treating it as if it were some sort of wonderfully guilty pleasure. Yeah, I went to Vegas last week and really lost my shirt. Heh-heh-heh.

The gangsters couldn’t believe it. Here they’d spent all those years of effort and planning on crime and it all suddenly seemed like such a waste. Now all they had to do was build a bunch of hotel rooms, tell people they could stay in them for twenty bucks if they promised to lose five hundred at the tables, and people actually went for it. Yeah, I went to Vegas last week and dropped two grand. But guess what? My room? Twenty bucks. And the buffets…

Mob-organized bank robberies stopped virtually overnight. Why go to all the trouble and danger of robbing a bank when all you had to do was invite the bank to come to Las Vegas? And the beauty of it: it was all perfectly legal.

Anyway, the money kept coming in and the casinos kept going up and the weirdness quotient kept rising.

To the point where you could now walk, as I was doing that Sunday afternoon, from a casino where they have a mock volcanic eruption every two hours, to a pirate ship, to ancient Rome, to a paddle-wheeled steamboat, to a Chinese temple, to a circus where they have acrobats flying around over your head while you’re trying to drop twenty bucks’ worth of quarters into a slot machine while some waitress dressed like a lion tamer offers you free drinks.

Weird.

Not that I was gambling. I wasn’t. In the first place I don’t like gambling and in the second place I was too busy looking for Natty Silver and dreading the phone call I had to make.

I finally pulled my sorry ass into a phone booth and made the call.

“So how’s Palm Springs?” Graham asked.

“Uhhh,” I answered, “it’s a nice town.”

There was a long pause.

“You’re not there, are you?” Graham asked.

“Uhhh, yes,” I said.

“Yes, you’re there?”

“Yes, I’m not there.”

I don’t have any bananas, either.

Another silence.

“How’s Silverstein?” Graham asked.

“Funny,” I said. “He’s a funny old guy.”

A sigh of resignation then, “He’s not there, is he?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“That’s sort of the question of the hour, Dad.”

I hated saying it. Hated explaining it to Graham. Hated the sound of the words as they came out of my mouth. But it was the truth.

I’d given Nathan and Hope an hour and when I went back to the room no one answered. I ran down to the lounge, checked it and several other lounges, ran through the gaming tables, the slot machines, the sports room, the pool complex and then thought of the white tigers exhibit.

They weren’t there, either. Oh, the white tigers were there, just no sign of Nathan or Hope.

“How do you lose an eighty-six-year-old man?!” Graham yelled. “What did he do, Neal, outrun you? Cold-cock you with his cane? Gum you into unconsciousness?”

“He got out of my sight, I guess.”

Graham screeched, “Why did you let him get out of your sight?!”

So he could get laid or whatever, I thought. But I was too embarrassed to say it so I settled for, “We bumped into an old friend of his and they took off together for a few minutes.”

“Who was the old friend? Mother Teresa?” Graham asked. “She outrun you too?”

“Some of those nuns are pretty fast, Graham.”

Some of them are, too. Especially with a ruler in their hands.

Graham asked, “Who was the friend?”

“A woman.”

Sigh. “Name?”

“Hope.”

“Last name?”

“Dunno.”

“So, can you find him?” Graham asked.

“Dad, the way he’s dressed, Stevie Wonder could find him.”