For a second I thought I might find a stray roach there, a hidden stowaway. The thought made my skin crawl and I had to pat my entire body down again until the jitters went away, but I was clean. Cleaner by the heartbeat as the water and the soap foam did its work, scrubbing away everything but my sins.
The pulse of the water drove out the sounds outside. It blanketed the world in white static and gave me some time alone with my thoughts. I spent a couple of idle minutes indulging in the One Last Score fantasy. Everybody in the life knows that one. It’s the dream where you pull a single heist, the heist, then hang it up forever. The one where you take a score big enough to float you all the way to the end of the line. It always has a happy ending, sipping frosty mixed drinks on a beach in Mexico or maybe Bora-Bora, dipping your toes in the warm surf.
Everybody has that fantasy. Most of us even have a target in mind, that big fish we could hook if all the planets lined up just right. The thing was, though, I’d known a lot of professional heisters in my day. Some were still working; some landed in a prison cell or ate a bullet. A couple retired and took on semi-legit jobs, hanging out at the edges of the underworld. Those guys, they understood: once you’re in, you can’t ever get all the way out. The life calls to you like a siren song.
Maybe that’s why not a single one of them had ever made that fantasy real. The One Last Score doesn’t exist, not really. And if it did, most of us would find some excuse not to reach for it. Because we don’t want to quit.
I wondered if it was the rush that kept me going. Every day I rubbed shoulders with solid citizens. People who lived in the daylight Vegas, far from the underbelly I called home. They could go their entire lives without someone sticking a gun in their faces, or taking the kind of job that ended with spilled blood and closed caskets. For that matter, they’d never find themselves forced into a death match with a necromancer from another dimension because some alien “king” wanted to see what would happen.
No. It wasn’t the rush. I was never much of an adrenaline junkie—I didn’t even like roller coasters that much—and I’d survived this long as a career criminal by balancing every risk against the potential for reward. That wasn’t it.
So why, then?
Answers eluded me as the shower steam wrapped warm arms around my weary flesh, tempting me with the pleasures of sleep. I wasn’t going to figure anything out tonight. I toweled off, stumbled to my bed, and crawled under a storm-gray comforter, losing myself in an oasis of soft linen.
19.
I dreamed of suburbia.
I recognized it on instinct, even as my sleeping mind took the scene—manicured lawns and white picket fences scrolling past my car window—for reality. I’d had this dream before. It usually popped up when I wasn’t feeling sure of my way. More and more, lately.
Neighbors were out and enjoying the warm desert sunshine. Cooking burgers on a grill, throwing footballs around. A couple of cherub-cheeked tots ran a lemonade stand on the corner. The air was clean and crisp, and on the other side of a plate-glass window, I watched a dad kick back on the couch with his kids to watch the big game.
I guess everyone dreams of the things you can never have.
My car stopped at the corner. I glanced to the kids at the lemonade stand.
They didn’t have faces.
The skin had been carved away with surgical precision, leaving wet ovals and glistening cherry bone behind. They grinned at me with skeleton mouths.
The car was gone. The street was gone. This was new. I ran along a corridor of black marble, walls yawning and twisting ahead of me like a fun-house mirror.
I emerged into a parlor, jolting to a stop. The only sound was the metronome tick-tick-tick of a grandfather clock. Elmer Donaghy perched on a regal chair, rubbing his spear of a chin as he studied a chessboard set out upon a French-styled dais.
“Check,” he said.
I stared at myself in the chair opposite his. The stumps of my arms and legs, cauterized black by fire, twitched as my sewn-together lips struggled to form words.
“Time’s up,” Elmer said to my mutilated twin. He reached over and moved another piece. “You can’t win if you don’t play.”
“He’s right,” said the voice behind me.
I turned and the parlor ripped away, dissolving to gossamer smoke. Now I stood at a forest crossroads, torches burning at the three points of the path.
“He’s a figment of your imagination, as your brain struggles to parse the events of the day through the process of dreaming,” the Lady in Red told me, “but he’s still right.”
She was a vision in scarlet, the train of her vintage dress sweeping out behind her as the pale woman strode toward me. A spill of raven curls flowed down her shoulders, and her pomegranate lips curled in a vaguely taunting smile. A silver antique key dangled from a chain at her throat.
“As for his unfortunate chess partner,” she said, “Elmer’s threat must have resonated with you.”
I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t know if the tableau was still there, but I didn’t want to see it again.
“I think the threat of getting turned into a living torso would resonate with anybody,” I said, trying to play it cool.
“True, but for you…I think it speaks to a fear you’ve carried for a very long time.”
She took hold of my shoulders. Then she spun me around and yanked me close, so I could feel her body against mine, her hot breath gusting against my ear.
“It was born in this room,” she whispered.
A plastic lamp with a tattered lampshade cast a puddle of yellow light across peeling powder-blue wallpaper. I knew this place by heart. The cheap beds, the toy chest with the broken lid, the two boys shivering under thin blankets.
“Dan,” my brother whispered, “I think Dad’s gonna kill us.”
I could hear him downstairs. Stomping, slamming the refrigerator. He’d gone on a beer run after work. Beer-run days were the worst. He’d come home with a case, half of it gone by dinnertime. He couldn’t drink on his meds, so he just wouldn’t take the meds. By midnight, the New World Order would be sending him commands through the television and the neighbors would be spying from electrical sockets.
“Teddy,” twelve-year-old me said from the bed by the door, “you know I’ll protect you, right? We’re brothers. You can always count on me.”
Downstairs, my father threw a lamp through the television screen. I knew he’d be here soon.
“I don’t want to see this,” I breathed. The Lady’s hands, long-fingered and cold, held my shoulders tight.
“You made your brother a promise.”
“I tried. I slept with a butcher knife under my goddamn pillow. I tried.”
“How did that work out for you?” she asked.
Court day. My father’s lawyer had dressed him up in an off-the-rack suit from Sears, gotten him a twenty-dollar haircut, and made sure he was on his medication. We were all wearing suits that day. I couldn’t remember where mine had even come from. It was too heavy, too scratchy, and I tried not to fidget while Teddy, eight and a half years old, took the stand.
“So you saw your brother, Daniel, attack your father without provocation,” the lawyer told him.
Teddy bobbed his head. “Without provo…provo…he did it.”
“And your father never hit you, did he?”
Teddy’s head swayed. He bit his bottom lip.
“Teddy,” the lawyer said. He crouched down, all fatherly now. “Tell us who broke your arm.”
My brother pointed at me. “Dan did it.”
I stood on the edge of the court now, invisible. I felt more tired than anything.
“I never blamed him,” I said. “Even then, I understood. I was going away, and he was going back to that house. Alone, with the man who probably killed our mother. The fuck was he supposed to do? He had to protect himself.”
“You blamed yourself, though,” the Lady said.
“Sure I did. If I’d stabbed my father two inches to the left, he would have died that night. First time I ever tried to kill a man, and I blew it.”
I watched the courtroom turn to smoke. Outlines of people wavered, gelatinous, their voices fading to indistinct murmurs.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked her.