William Bernhardt - Dark Eye

I didn’t say anything.

With one powerful move, he pushed me to my knees, then swung me around until I was spread stomach down across the trash can. No talk, no warning, no foreplay.

“Ahhh-!”

It was my first time and the pain was searing. I wondered if he had done this before, used the same lines, gotten what he wanted the same way. I wondered where he came from, what he really liked, what he saw when he looked into my eyes. I didn’t think he was heartless or even particularly selfish. He just had needs, like we all did. When it was over and he woke up the next day, he might feel a little guilty about it.

But I wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t care if he did. I needed to feel something. Pain. Humiliation. Rage. It was all the same. I just wanted to feel alive again.

The next morning, I hurt like hell. My head throbbed, sure, always, but that wasn’t the worst of it. I could barely walk. Somehow I managed to stumble out of bed and make it to the front door before the bell had rung more than, oh, fifty times or so.

“Susan. My God, what happened to you? We were supposed to have breakfast, remember?”

Lisa. “I, uh, slept in. I had kind of a rough night.”

She rushed in, putting her arms around me. “You look like someone beat the hell out of you.”

“No, no, just trouble sleeping.”

She stiffened slightly. “Susan, I’m sorry. I know I’m not your mother, but the counselors told me that the best way to be your friend was to try to help you keep your promises. Have you been drinking?”

“What? Are you kidding? No.”

“Really?”

“ ’Course. You called last night.” Thank God I could remember that much. “I was home, remember?”

“But-”

“Wanna smell my breath?” What a bluffer I am.

“Frankly, no.” She guided us both to the sofa in the living room. It was green and faded and showed traces of all the cop butts that had been on it the night before. “I got enough of that last night.”

“The new guy?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Memorable?”

“Human Dental Pik. Tongued every incisor in my mouth. Thought he was attempting a root canal. Do you still want to see Rachel?”

“Right. Damn.” I brushed my straggly, stinky hair out of my eyes. “I forgot.”

“How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”

“Well, uh…”

“When I talked to her last night, she said you hadn’t been in for several days.”

“Well, she should know.”

“Susan, this is exactly the kind of behavior that caused you to lose her in the first place.”

“Look, Lisa, I had a horrible night. That killer, the Poe guy, he called me. Here.”

Her eyes ballooned. “He called you ? Why?”

“Hard to say. I think he was threatening me. Or trying to help me. Or none of the above.”

“Oh, my God.” She cradled my stinky head in her hands. “No wonder you’re a wreck.”

So here I was, using a serial killer to excuse my erratic behavior. I felt pathetic.

“That explains why you were so weird when I called. What did he say?”

“Well, I think he may have given us some clues.”

“My God, Susan. Should you be working on this case? He knows who you are.”

“True.”

“I don’t think this is good for you at all. Especially not now. You need out.”

“I need work.”

“I’m talking to your doctor.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Susan, it’s for your own good. I’m just trying to help.”

My blood burned. “I don’t need help!”

“You do.” Despite my nastiness, she hugged me all the tighter. “I love you, Susan. I’m not going to let you kill yourself. I’m not.”

“May I come in?”

We had left the front door ajar, and Darcy was standing just outside, peeking through. Lisa still had her arms around me, and I could see he was confused. “Is that one your girlfriend?” Darcy asked.

I cleared my throat. “Well, yes…”

“Did you know that four percent of all women prefer other women to do sex with?”

“Darcy…”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, do you? But my dad says it’s bad.”

“Darcy…”

“But the weird thing is he loves his videos where women are with other women and-”

“Darcy!” He fell silent. I had to remind myself-he doesn’t see faces; he can’t read facial expressions. He’s not going to get any nonverbal cues. You want him to be quiet, you gotta say so. “What are you doing here?”

He looked nervously at Lisa, fidgeted with his hands, then started again. “I think maybe Mr. Granger figured out what that ‘neon’ remark meant. He called my dad. The killer wanted us to go to this place where they store old neon signs.”

“Why would he want us to go there?” But I was certain of the answer before I had finished asking the question. “Let’s go.”

The usual rant against Vegas is that it isn’t really a city, just an oversized vacation destination. After all, there’s no urban blight, like cooler-than-cool New York. There are no high-rises, other than the hotels. How can that be a city? What some of these geniuses don’t get-Hunter S. Thompson, for one-is that this is a Western city. It’s out in the fertile desert plains. It’s meant to be flat. The houses were designed to go out, not up, in the traditional hacienda style. It was built for the automobile, not the pedestrian. No one wants to walk in Vegas. It’s too hot. You don’t walk home from work. You don’t walk to the store for a loaf of bread. That doesn’t make it any less of a city.

I got to see a lot of that flat landscape on my way to the Vegas Neon Graveyard. We parked and walked down a lovely pine-bordered alameda till we arrived at the main lot. A lot of memories were stored there, especially for someone like me who’d lived in Vegas all my life. Remember Sassy Sally’s, on Fremont? That huge neon marquee was here, in all its glory. Or the gigantic guy in the leisure suit who used to shoot pool on the marquee for Binion’s? Also here. Some of this stuff went back to the very earliest days of postwar Vegas. Remember the crown that used to sit atop the Royal Nevada? Well, neither did I. I’m not that old, for God’s sake. But one of the lab techs pointed it out to me.

Apparently the guy who owned this place was a collector who just couldn’t bear to see these Vegas icons destroyed. So whenever one of the casinos or hotels replaced their signage, he bought it, usually dirt cheap. He’d had to move his collection three times, on each occasion to a larger tract of land. He was outside the city now-probably too far from the Strip to attract much tourism, not that the average Vegas visitor was all that interested in historical memorabilia. He sold new signs, too, but I got the impression that was mostly a front to finance the acquisition and upkeep of this gaudy but sentimental collection.

It must’ve seemed like a unique and harmless specialty field. Until the headless corpse turned up.

The other half, the head, was hanging separately.

“Half off,” I muttered, wishing to God I had something to drink. “I guess that’s a joke.”

Darcy looked at me, puzzled. “Is it funny?”

“No, but-” How was I going to explain this? His father had warned me that most humor passed Darcy by, and given all the language oddities associated with autism, he was less likely to get wordplay than anything. “Never mind.”

Darcy turned away, staring at what looked like the old frontispiece from the Horseshoe. Poor kid. I remembered what a gentle spirit he had-how he wouldn’t even hurt a spider. And here I was dragging him around to see decapitated corpses. Well, technically, he’d dragged me, but still. Maybe Granger was right.