Brian Freeman - Stripped

“That will be difficult,” Borden said, interrupting them. “When the boy came to see me that night, he was running away, leaving the city. Before he left, he burned down the Burtons ’ home. With them in it.”

Blake remembered vividly the first time he learned the truth about Amira.

It was an accident. A miracle, some people might call it. There were a million reasons why he should never have known, but he was there, and the magazine was there, and he felt the truth shudder through him like acid burning in his veins. Life hangs on a slender thread.

Several months ago, he had been in the waiting room of a dentist in Cancún, whose specialty was not root canals or cavities but connecting American tourists with hits of cocaine. The dentist had made the serious mistake of skimming cash from people higher up the supply chain, people who didn’t tolerate theft. Blake’s job was simple. Separate the dentist from two of his incisors.

While he waited for the man’s last patient to leave, Blake found that the dentist had another passion. Gambling. That was probably why he needed to take an extra slice off the top. His waiting room was filled with magazines from Las Vegas, Mississippi, and Monte Carlo, including a recent issue of LV. It happened to be the issue with Rex Terrell’s article about Amira Luz and the Sheherezade.

A slender thread.

He opened the magazine, and there, staring out from a forty-year-old photograph, was his mother. There wasn’t a shred of doubt in his mind. To him, looking at Amira was like looking in the mirror and seeing his own eyes. He didn’t need anyone to tell him. He didn’t need DNA. He knew. The connection between them seemed to leap off the page and into his bones.

When he read the article, the pieces fell into place, confirming what he saw in the photo. The missing time in her life, when Amira was supposedly dancing in Paris, was the same stretch of months in which Blake had been born. But you weren’t in Paris, were you? You were in Reno, a lost girl having a baby.

Even the mob connection was there, just as the man from the adoption agency had warned him.

Boni Fisso.

Right there in the office, his mother called him back home to Nevada, where he had once vowed never to set foot again. She cried out for justice.

Blake left the Cancún dentist on the floor, passed out from pain, his face bathing in the puddle of blood that streamed from his mouth. He washed the teeth and kept them in his pocket as good luck charms. Reminders of the day his old quest ended and his new quest began. He was already developing the list of people who needed to pay for their sins. Sins against Amira and her son.

He slipped back into the United States across the Mexican border in Texas. It wasn’t hard. He had spent most of his life finding ways across borders, in countries like Colombia, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Iraq. He had adopted dozens of identities, all of which came naturally to him, because he felt he had no true identity of his own. His own past stopped in Reno, when he had tied up his adoptive parents and doused them and the house in gasoline. Then, outside, he lit the match and watched the house of horrors erupt explosively into flame, and heard their last pitiful screams as the fire streaked up the stairs to find them, like a bloodhound on a strong scent. He took a deep breath, smelling the air as their flesh cooked, and then he ran.

A new life. Almost twenty-five years of running.

He had been shattered when the search for his mother turned into a dead end. The man from the adoption agency had begged him, in tears, his chest scalded, to believe that Blake had been a Mafia baby who came from nowhere. Ultimately Blake did believe it. A part of him even liked the mystery that came with it. It felt appropriate, being a nowhere man, someone literally with no past. The desire for the truth never went away, though, just like his mother never went away. Inside, in his head, she still talked to him. Guided him. There was still an umbilical cord that connected them and never went away.

Blake didn’t linger in the U.S. He was sixteen but could pass for early twenties. When Reagan invaded Grenada, he went down there with a few other mercenaries from Louisiana who smelled money. He found that there were always people ready to pay for someone to do a job. He didn’t need an identity, because no one wanted him to have one. He was smart, ruthless, and anonymous. That was all they asked, and they paid well.

From Grenada he went to Nicaragua, then to Africa. He circled the globe, moving in the shadows. For most of the past decade, he had been in the Middle East, where the risks were infinitely higher, but so were the rewards. He enjoyed the challenge, but eventually he tired of working with fanatics and suffering the desert heat. He relocated to Mexico, hooked up with the cartels when he needed cash, and found himself enjoying the gulf breezes and bronzed women that came to the coast.

He thought of himself as semiretired. There was plenty of money in an offshore bank. He only took jobs from time to time, and usually only jobs that kept him on the coast. For someone who had always been homeless, he felt at home in the sun and by the water. A parade of anonymous young women, some tourists, some locals, kept his sex drive fully satisfied. He bought a house. He taught himself to cook and fish, and he drank Corona and played poker with dockworkers and waiters on Wednesday nights.

But the empty black corner of his soul stayed dark. The light never shined there. Things moved invisibly, rustling and clicking. And always, from the darkness, he heard her voice. His mother, whispering to him and telling him of unfinished business. He realized he had become lazy and content. He was in danger of losing his edge, and he couldn’t afford that, not yet. After a summer not working, drinking too much and fucking a different woman every night, he stood on the beach outside his home and realized he wasn’t ready to retire. Something egged him on, and later he realized it was a hand somewhere, guiding him. Unfinished business.

A few months later, he found himself in the dentist’s office, staring at his mother’s face. If he had stopped working, he never would have found her. When he read the article, and felt his rage growing, he knew that he had been led to that place and that moment. It was meant to be. He was going home.

In Las Vegas, Blake found a cheap apartment in a sorry neighborhood on the wrong side of a crumbling stone wall that separated the lower class from well-funded Cashman Field. He could have afforded better, but he wanted a hideaway where the person next door never remembered your face, and no one talked to the cops.

There was a code in the mean streets. Keep your eyes to yourself. Mind your own business.

He devoured everything he could find about Amira Luz. He spent hours reading about her. He surfed the Web and found a pirated film on eBay with a grainy record of one of Amira’s performances in Flame. Blake reran the film over and over, watching transfixed as his mother stripped off her clothes in front of the leering crowd. She seduced him, along with everyone else. He memorized every detail of the performance and even began to recognize other people lurking in the showroom and other dancers onstage. It was like watching the magazine story come alive.

Helena Troy. There was a look she gave Amira at one point, a nasty glimmer that came and went. Sheer jealousy and hatred were written on her face.

Moose Dargon. Drunk onstage between the dances. His eyebrows furling and unfurling like black sails. Making nasty jokes. When God made Amira, he didn’t rest on the seventh day. He jerked off.

Walker Lane. Just the top of his head, taller than the others around him in the front row, but Blake could feel him panting when Amira came onstage. Lust was like that. You could see it in how a man cocked his head.