“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What gives with the brush this afternoon? You damn near took my head off, Lisa.”
“I apologized for that.”
“Jeez, well then, I guess I’m sorry for bringing it up.”
“You know what I mean. I was wrong. I’m sorry. There, I said it again.”
“What the hell brought it on? And what about the dam bursting when I walked in the room? I bought you a present, for Christ sakes.”
Lisa turned away from him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been edgy. I think we have problems we can’t solve right now.” She looked around herself. “Not here, anyway. Not in Las Vegas.”
“Oh, well, what the hell, then. Next time use a tire iron. We’ll solve our problems in an emergency room.”
“I’m through saying I’m sorry, Charlie.”
“Right. Of course you are.”
He was frustrated. It was obvious Lisa was holding something back. He knew he was drunk, but he wanted her to tell him the truth. He finished his third gin and tonic. He set the glass on a ledge alongside his chair and craned his neck to look for a waitress.
“I thought Las Vegas would be good for us,” he said.
“So you could walk,” Lisa said, with a touch of sarcasm in her voice.
Charlie ignored her.
“Well?” she said.
“I thought we’d have things to occupy us,” he said. “I like to walk. You used to like to walk. Now you like to shop. There’s plenty of both to go around. I thought we wouldn’t be on top of each other here. I made a mistake.”
Lisa huffed.
He thought about the affair she had been involved in two years earlier. She had met another lawyer on the West Coast during a corporate case they were involved in together. They met secretly for more than three months before she finally confessed to Charlie.
“Have you talked to John lately?” he asked.
“Let’s not go there, okay?”
He downed his drink. “I guess that’s an answer.”
“You’re drunk,” Lisa said. “I won’t talk to you while you’re drinking.”
“Then I’ll make it easier for you,” Charlie said. He spotted a waitress near a row of slot machines to his right. He called to her.
“I’m not going to watch this all night,” Lisa said. “You getting drunk.” She stood up from her chair.
Charlie looked his wife up and down. She was still a beautiful woman. She had recently turned forty years old, but there was no way of guessing her age. At 5-foot-4, 108 pounds, she was both lean and muscular. A month ago she had changed her hair color from auburn back to her original color, brunette. She was wearing her hair short again, instead of the long cut Charlie preferred. In the tight black slacks she was wearing, Charlie saw Lisa for the knockout his wife truly was.
Of course she is having an affairhe was thinking.
“Waitress!” he yelled.
A chubby woman in a much too tight waitress outfit stopped to write his order.
“I think you’ve had enough,” Lisa said.
Charlie lit a cigarette. “I think maybe we both have,” he told his wife.
Chapter 3
Early the next morning, Charlie woke up in a ditch behind a construction site. A big man wearing a construction helmet was holding a towel spotted with blood.
“You all right?” the big man asked.
Charlie had trouble sitting up. His body was sore. His hands felt bruised.
“Where am I?”
“The Palermo,” the big man said. He was waving somebody over to them. “Bring it over here!”
Charlie strained to see through the glare of the sun. Flashing lights made him dizzy.
“You’re cut pretty bad there, mister,” another man said. “Looks like you were mugged.”
Charlie immediately checked for his wallet. The fingers of his right hand hurt from trying to jam them inside his front pants pocket.
“I think one of those fingers is broke,” the big man said. “Maybe another one. Looks like you still have your wallet, though.”
At Valley Hospital, Charlie learned the damage. He had a slight concussion. Two of the fingers on his left hand were severely bruised. His nose was fractured. Eight stitches were required to sew a cut along his hairline behind his right ear. He had a severely bruised rib on his right side and bruises to his chest, shoulders, and back. When he saw himself in the small mirror on the back of a door, Charlie saw that both his eyes had turned black and his upper lip was swollen. A small gauze bandage covered the stitches behind his right ear. The knuckles on both his hands also were bruised.
An emergency room doctor was asking him questions.
“Do you want to fill out a police report?”
Charlie shook his head. “No.”
“Do you know who did this to you?”
“No.”
“Is there someone here with you I should contact?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. There’s no one.”
“What about back home? Is there someone we should contact back in New York?”
Charlie shook his head again. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”
He was still trying to piece together what had happened the night before. He had spent a lot of time at one of the casino bars playing dollar slot poker while he drank gin and tonics. He remembered that he was pretty drunk. He had won a small jackpot.
Four aces, he remembered. He had hit a four-aces bonus polka machine for five hundred dollars.
He remembered making friends and singing with people at the bar. He remembered some guy and his girlfriend. They wore cowboy hats. They sang something country-western.
Charlie also had made friends with the barmaid, Samantha Nicole, or something like Nicole. She was a pretty redhead with freckles and a bright smile. He couldn’t remember where the barmaid had said she was originally from, but she also had spoken with an accent.
He wasn’t sure what time he had left the bar, but he knew it was pretty late. He had wanted to get some air before heading back upstairs to his room. He knew Lisa was still pissed at him for being drunk. He also remembered never going back to the room. He remembered drinking again instead.
When he finally asino bar, Charlie had walked across Las Vegas Boulevard to watch the Pirate Show up close at the Treasure Island Hotel. He was standing in the middle of a huge crowd of spectators. A man had befriended him there, a short, bald man.
The two of them had stood there watching the show, making small talk. The short man was from Chicago, out to Las Vegas on business, he had said. He was with the construction company building the new hotel, the Palermo. Charlie told the short man how he had watched some of the cranes working through the night from his room at Harrah’s.
“We have them working twenty-four hours a day out here,” the short man had said. “Or they’d never be built in
