The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (25 page)

“Well, did
you
think I could trust you? You haven’t had both feet in this snuke since the start.” He turned to Allie. “You may find this hard to believe, but I honor your goals. Your life is yours to live as you see fit. You want to be a professional. Scientist. Save the world, I don’t care. But you’ve put my boy in a place of ambivalence, caught him between two things he knows he loves.

“Where I come from, there’s a saying: ‘The truth is revealed under pressure.’ What you call misdirection and manipulation, I call just an attempt to arrive at a certain truth. Radar’s truth. The thing that’s in his heart.”

“I know what’s in my heart,” I said. I put my arm around Allie.

“Yes, but now, unfortunately, she’s not so certain of hers. Because loyalty goes both ways. She wants what’s best for her but also what’s best for you. It forces choices.” He looked at Allie. “Isn’t that right, Miriam?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You adopted a role,” said Woody, simply. “You made a choice.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t unmake it.”

“True,” said Woody. “Everything is fluid.”

“Okay, that’s great,” I said, “but this conversation is netting us nothing. Let’s review what we know.”

“Very well,” said Woody, “This much is gospel: Wolfredian sweet-talks whales into bogus investment schemes.”

“And uses those proceeds to fund his art jones?” asked Allie.

“
Jones
is too weak a word,” said Woody. “It’s an obsession.”

“Which makes Mirplo a kind of harmonic convergence for Jay. Which you must’ve recognized the minute you met him: the perfect tool to crack Wolfredian’s safe.”

“With just a few complications like Miriam Plowright and Red Louise to keep things salty.”

“Speaking of Red Louise,” I said, “weren’t you kidnapped? Or was that staged for my benefit?”

“No, no, not staged. Jay wanted me on ice. I think he finds you less formidable than me. In that, of course, he is wrong. But he’s also thinking of another move to make.”

“What,” I asked, “hold you hostage so I’ll ransom you back?”

“You’ve done it before,” said Woody, referring to the money I gave Jay in Kingman.

“And said I’d never do it again.”

“Which Wolfredian obviously read as ‘protests too much.’ ”

“How do you like that?” I said, almost chuckling. “Jay thinks
I’m
repeat business.”

“Funny old world,” said Woody.

“I can’t help noticing,” I said, “that you’re no longer on ice.”

“What can I tell you? Ice melts.” He was thoughtful. “But it would certainly be better if Jay continued to think otherwise. So you might reinforce your concern for me next time you talk to little Martybeth. Did she try to seduce you, by the way?”

“Who’s Martybeth?” asked Allie.

“She’s frisky, that one.”

“Who’s Martybeth?” Allie asked again.

“No one,” I said.

“Oh, do I let cats out of bags?” asked Woody, a twinkle in his eye.

“There’s no cat and no bag,” I said. “Stop making trouble.” I turned to Allie. “Martybeth is a girl whose ample charms I resisted. I flipped her. She confirmed that Woody once had Jay’s ear, but now Jay can’t decide whether he likes Woody better as a partner or a stashed asset. Or,” I added thoughtfully, “a revenge tip.”

Woody waved that notion away. “Honestly, you have to like the play from Jay’s point of view,” he said. “He’s eyeing Mirplopalooza for an investment and working Miriam Plowright for the angel fund. If everything goes according to his plan, he’ll be using Vic’s own money, through his own investment counselor, to buy his own crown jewel.”

But just then it occurred to me that things might not be entirely on Wolfredian’s script. A snippet of Louise’s conversation came back to me.
“You fucked with me,” she said. Notice she didn’t say “fucked with my boss.”
I shared this observation with Woody.

“You think she’s going rogue?” he asked.

“Maybe it’s just improv,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah, me neither.” It struck me that this was the first piece of information I’d handed Woody since … ever? … that didn’t lay flat in the groove of his expectation. It seemed to rattle him. Which kind of rattled me. “Can you deal with that?” he asked.

“What?”

“Deal with that problem. Make it go away. Find some counter-improv.”

I looked at Allie. “We’ve still got a couple of trapdoor spiders,” I said. “I suppose we might.”

“It would be best if you did. A little conflict there, a little bad blood … it could help in the endgame—maybe rush the mark some.” I heard distress in Woody’s voice, and that distressed me. Unsettling as it was to have Woody outthink me at every turn, I realized I’d come to rely on him. Now here he was telling me he didn’t have complete control over the snuke and was counting on me to hold up maybe more than my end.

“Are you sure you can rule out revenge?” I asked.

“One can’t entirely ignore that scenario,” he said. “However, in my experience”—he quickly swept his doubt back under the rug of his confidence—“greed trumps revenge every time. Go sort out Louise. Best case, she’s not even around for the endgame.”

“Worst case?”

Woody smiled. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

Just then a text message arrived, including a street address and a cold warning concerning Woody’s fate—well,
someone
thought he was still on ice—if Miriam and I didn’t show. I turned to show Woody the text.

But all I saw was a hole where he’d been.

The jackalope had bounded off again.

H
alf an hour later, Allie and I were plunging past desolation row houses into the near North Las Vegas neighborhood known as the Alphabet Streets, an arid wasteland of vacant lots and dirt parks sequestered by freeways and railroad tracks from the downtown casinos (themselves a big step down from the glitz of the Strip). This was the part of Vegas the happy gamblers never see, bar those unlucky enough to be led astray by their onboard navigation systems or the need for crack at two
A.M
. Bulletproof mini-marts and sad window-barred Pentecostal churches bookended blocks of aging immobile homes and apartment buildings gone to demon seed. Permabums littered the sidewalks, pushing shopping carts of hoarded jetsam, or sprawled on bus benches swilling King Cobra from forty-ounce cans in paper bags.

If you’re ever wondering where
down and out
hits
rock bottom
, visit the intersection of F Street and Jackson Avenue in North Las Vegas. It’s there. Right there.

We stopped at a stoplight. A Metro PD car pulled up beside us, and the cop riding shotgun looked us over with a smug, How lost are you? look. The cruiser turned left and rolled on, its occupants confident that if we were here by accident, we were too stupid to be helped, and if we’d come by design, then we deserved whatever evil fate we found.

I looked at Allie, trying to get a shared laugh off the cop vibe, but she’d changed into her Miriam Plowright daywear—stiff white blouse with matching taupe jacket, skirt, and shoes—and her Plowright mood
had come along for the ride. Where her sunny smile should’ve been, a scowl had seized her face.

“You okay?” I asked.

“ ’Course I’m not okay. I’m Plowright. I hate me like this.”

“I’m no fan myself.”

“Plus, Radar, what are we even doing here? This whole play is so ragged. I gotta tell you, I’m pretty lost right now.”

“Confusion is the soul of understanding.”

“What’s that, a fortune cookie?”

“No, I’m just saying, we’re trying to solve a puzzle, right? Make all the pieces fit.”

“But the pieces
don’t
fit.”

“Exactly. And the fact that they don’t fit is, in itself, a puzzle piece.”

“You lost me.”

“I kind of lost me, too. So let’s boil it down. What does Wolfredian want?”

“Mirplopalooza.”

“Which he sees as what?”

“A solid investment and a collector’s wet dream.”

“Maybe. Or maybe that’s Woody’s bafflegab. He keeps dealing us out while saying he’s dealing us in. Does that say reliable partner to you? Does that say square deal? Comes the moment of truth, we’ll find out, but precedent says, Look out. We’ve been nothing but his yo-yo since day one.”

“The kind of toy you eventually toss away.”

“Yep.”

Confusion is the soul of understanding.

Whatever the hell that means.

Yet despite all the confusion, I felt pretty damn good. I was out on the edge again. If nothing else, the air here was fresh. Maybe the edge was where I belonged.

Couldn’t think about that now. We’d arrived at the front range of urban blight, a wall of dead businesses all along the west side of F
Street. Defabricated franchises. Gas stations with the tanks removed. Warehouses storing nothing. And at the end of the line, our destination, a derelict rectangle of tired stucco called the New Town Tavern Casino.

This sort of “casino” once proliferated in the lesser neighborhoods of Las Vegas. They were never much more than dive bars with short banks of slot machines, back-to-back blackjack spreads comprising the pit, a one-TV sports book, and a frayed-felt Texas hold’em table in a musty alcove tarted up with chipper signage: W
ELCOME TO
R F
RIENDLY
P
OKER
R
OOM—
C
AN
W
E
D
EAL
U I
N?
Such clubs stood or fell on the trade of shot-and-a-beer regulars for whom the first drink of Monday morning was just the last drink of Saturday night, and when these drunks and nickel-slot compulsives go south, as they will in a down economy, they take the clubs with them. Shells remain, like this shell here, boarded up and powered down, sunk into the sort of seed dormancy that the deserts know quite well. One good flash flood of prosperity would bring them back again, but who knows when the rains will come? Maybe never. Maybe this town turns into a ghost town covered up with sand and neglect for a thousand years, until some bright-boy archaeologists stumble across it and try to figure out what it all meant at the time. Meantime, in this time, the dives stay dark.

This one had failed worse than most. Evidence of fire could be seen on the soot-streaked exterior walls. Someone had used the club’s sign for target practice, so that a casual glance would place you at the N
EW OW
T
AVER SINO
. “Are you sure this is the right address?” asked Allie. By way of answer, I showed her the text message on my phone. She compared it against the faded numbers over the padlocked front door and said, “Let’s check around back.”

We rolled into the parking lot behind the joint, where I saw a familiar black Segue parked in the shade of a tired acacia. On the rear wall of the club, a cinder block propped open an emergency exit door. Allie and I exchanged looks. “You ready?” I asked.

“Bite me,” she barked.

“Yeah, that’s the Miriam Plowright I know and love.”

She jerked open the car door, stepped out, and slammed it behind her. I got out, too, squinting into the shadowed back entrance to the club. The thought crossed my mind that if Wolfredian were on a revenge tip, what could be more complete payback than erasing Woody’s flesh and blood? And where easier than inside this busted fun house, far from prying eyes? But I didn’t feel Jay’s presence here, and not just for not seeing his big-ass Buick. The more I mulled it, the more this seemed to be Louise’s off-the-reservation presentation, and the prying eyes we were away from, I suspected, were as much Jay’s as anyone’s.

Miriam Plowright, meanwhile, had taken her icy mien and strode it over the threshold into the club’s dark interior. I skittered after, manifesting the nervousness of the guy who’d brought the meat to market and was hoping, for the sake of getting Dad out of Dutch, that the deal would go down clean.

Red Louise met me at the entrance, fronting me and patting me down. Was she looking for weapons? Bugs? Both? She’d find neither, of course, and what did she expect? For the several times she’d already hit me, could she not assume that I was committed to being a good boy? Yet she went about the enterprise fully ungently. I think she smacked my Johnson on purpose.

Then she turned to frisk Miriam, who bristled at the prospect and shot me a look like,
Really? I have to put up with this bullshit?
My eyes replied with a silent plea for her cooperation. Louise intercepted the transmission—I’d made no effort to hide it—and her eyebrows arched. She seemed to think that somehow this scored a point for her. Miriam relented and allowed herself to be searched.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I started to get a sense of the space we were in. It was bigger than it looked from the outside, with plenty of room for slot consoles and table games. These were long gone, of course, but you could still see their footprints etched into the tired carpet, a gacky brown affair strategically patterned to hide the beer, barf, and blood stains endemic to a disaster area like this.

Satisfied that we were packing no no-no’s, Louise led us to a card table and four folding chairs in the middle of the room, presided over by a thrift-store floor lamp with a long extension cord running off into the dark. As we sat, my mind flashed back to IKEA, and I silently christened the products: Messa, Seet, Brīt. At the same time, I recognized this as the completely wrong setting for a money pitch. Usually, you’d set up shop in a suite of offices and lay on the glass and chrome, the spreadsheet projections, expert opinions, and glossy brochures. This place, with its whiff of mold and mouse droppings, was hardly likely to inspire investor confidence. So either we’re looking at total amateur hour or something altogether else.

I was thinking amateur hour. I decided to ping the target a little. “Where’s Jay?” I asked.