And where complications came in, trouble could follow.
The Cameron family was looking more and more complicated all the time.
8
Sam Vega accompanied Greg to the nameless tent city.
The place sprawled for what seemed like miles. Greg was amazed and not a little appalled. "I had no idea it had grown so much," he said as they approached it.
"The city's grown, too," Sam pointed out. "More people, more poverty. This place has been around for more than a decade, but it's never been this full before. There are shelters in the city, but they've had funding issues, and most of them are at capacity. The economy has really done a number on Vegas. We were one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and as long as we were booming, the construction jobs, tourist-trade jobs, even high-tech were booming, too. But when things skidded to a stop nationally, they slowed here, big-time – worse than in most places – and tipped a lot of people over the edge. More houses in foreclosure, more personal bankruptcies, more jobs lost, more families living in tents here."
They're not just tents, Greg realized. People there lived in tents, in parked cars, in shacks thrown together from cardboard, sheets of galvanized aluminum, carpet scraps, and whatever else they had been able to get their hands on. Some lived in cars or vans, sometimes with a piece of tarp propped up on posts or rods as a sunscreen. The homes – they were homes, Greg knew, however raw, however mean; they were occupied by human beings, and he didn't want to lose sight of that – were packed close together on a vast plain of bare dirt, arranged along pathways big enough for a small truck to travel. Some of the places had trash piled up around them; others were neat, as tidy as their residents could keep a thrown-together hovel in a field of dirt.
He couldn't see any source of running water. Someone, probably Las Vegas city officials, had put up some portable outhouses, but Greg guessed that anyone who wanted a shower had to find one at a shelter, a truck stop, or some similar public place.
In the space of a few hours, Greg had gone from a luxurious estate in one of the city's most expensive neighborhoods to a swath of ground where probably several hundred people lived. Some of the homes appeared to be occupied by individuals and others by families. Here and there, he could see signs of children: a doll in the dirt, a plastic play structure with one of those two-foot slides for toddlers, probably sturdier in a high wind than the blue tarpaulin lean-to it stood in front of. The combined wealth of all of the residents there probably wouldn't buy the land on which the Cameron house stood. From the city's richest to the poorest, Greg thought, in a matter of a few miles. Practically neighbors. With a pang of self-criticism, he realized he had felt more at ease at the Cameron estate than he did at the tent city, even though someone at the estate had just shot a man. As far as he knew, violence in the tent city was nonexistent.
He and Sam didn't have a specific destination in mind, and they couldn't see anything like a central meeting place, a town hall, or any real community organization. It appeared that if someone wanted to move in, all he did was pull up a square of dirt and erect shelter of some sort. There had been that agreement, the rules Greg had found, which were mostly commonsense behavioral issues for people living close together: no loud music after nine p.m., no fighting, no drug dealing, prostitution, or other illegal activity. But that had been from years ago, and for all he knew, whoever had instituted those rules and tried to enforce them had long since found a job and moved away from there.
So they walked from Sam's car up what appeared to be the main road in and out, dirt hard-packed by constant travel. People were out of their homes, sitting in small clutches talking, a couple openly drinking, some just walking without apparent purpose or destination. They spotted Sam and Greg, though, and most of them stared with suspicious frowns or downright hostile gazes.
"Didn't take long for us to be made," Sam said.
"I guess we don't exactly blend in." Even as he said it, though, Greg saw what looked like a middle-class white family, sitting on folding lawn chairs around a Jeep, drinking lemonade. Those people didn't seem to fit, either, but the more closely he observed the residents, the more he saw others who didn't seem as down-and-out as he would have expected. "Looks as if some of the locals don't like the police very much."
"Cops represent the system," Sam said. "Anyone living here, the system has failed."
"I guess that's true."
Sam and Greg approached one resident near the front entrance – entrance being a vague term in a place with no fences around it and little in the way of organizational structure but defined in this case by an open space around the dirt path. The man gave them a frank but not unfriendly gaze. He was an African-American guy, wearing clothes that had seen better days but were at least neat and mended. He had long hair, which years of exposure to the elements had turned mostly gray, and he was sitting in a faded and worn outdoor chaise-longue in front of a tent that appeared to be well cared for, reading a book.
"What's shakin', Officers?" he asked as they neared him. He put the book down gently on the chair and stood up. "Welcome to our home."
"Thanks," Greg said.
"I'd like to ask you a favor, sir," Sam said. He pulled a photograph of the dead man from the Cameron estate out of his pocket and showed it to the guy. "Do you know this man?" he asked.
The man shook his head. "Just 'cause a dude looks homeless don't mean he lives here."
"It's not that," Greg put in. "He had this, like a rental agreement from here. Who would have had him sign it? Is there some sort of hierarchy here? A controlling authority of some kind?"
The man showed a big smile. "You mean, do we got a government? I remember that agreement you're talking about. I signed it, too. That was with the mayor."
"The mayor of Las Vegas?"
"The mayor of the Happy Hunting Ground. That's what he called this place, anyway, but the name never stuck. And he's the one called himself mayor. Nobody else objected, though, so pretty soon everybody called him mayor." He nodded toward one of the tents with a trash pile behind it, flies buzzing around. "'Course, not everybody abided by the rules on that piece of paper, then or now."
"Can we see the mayor?" Sam asked. "Maybe he remembers this man."
"Wish you could," the guy said. "But he died, what, three years ago now. Hit by a city bus, you believe that? He had lived here almost nine years by then. Lived on in the hospital for three days after he was hit, and some folks said it was the cleanest they had ever seen him."
"This city, I believe anything," Sam said. "I'm sorry to hear it, though."
"And there's no new mayor?" Greg asked.
"Plenty of people wish they were the mayor. Some folks like to make others run through hoops, right? Walk some kind of line. But there's nobody like the mayor anymore. Everybody loved him, most folks wanted to make him happy, so they went along with things like that agreement and his rules."
"So if someone wanted to move in here now…"
"They'd find a space and fill it. There are social workers coming around all the time. They try to keep track of who's here, keep some sort of inventory, I guess you'd say. But lately, even they're coming around less. Some of them got fired, I guess, and the ones left got too many cases to follow up on."
"There's a lot of that going around," Sam said.
"Are there any of those social workers here today?" Greg asked. "Someone we might be able to ask about this man? It's important."