It was ten o’clock, half an hour after I left Fuji West. The rain had finally stopped, but on my way out of town I saw two car accidents, one of which appeared deadly: a truck on its side, the other car with no front door, no windshield, a body beneath glistening tarp. I had worked so many of these scenes in my time, and yet that evening they spooked me. In the desert night, rain falls like an ice storm.
I remembered another rainy night many years ago, when I came home from work all drenched and tired and Suzy made me strip down to my underwear and sat me at the dining table with a bowl of hot chicken porridge. As I ate, she stood behind me and hummed one of her sad Vietnamese ballads and dried my hair with a towel. I remember, between spoonfuls, trying to hum along with her.
I had often felt bitter in the moments I loved her most. What Junior said was only partly right. I did come to Vegas to save Suzy. Maybe whisk her away if she’d let me. I’d also had some hazy notion of punishing Sonny, though the farther away I drove from his son’s threats, the more I understood that I had actually come to punish Suzy — to give her a reason to regret leaving me. She had stayed all those years only because I was not yet replaceable. She then found a man who would come to hurt her more than I ever could, but at least he felt right to her, in a way I never did. “How can I be happy with children,” she once said, “if I’ve never been happy with anything else?”
Sonny Jr.’s parting words flashed through my mind. What did he know about other people’s happiness?
I took the very next exit and turned back toward Vegas, driving in the direction of their house. I had memorized the address, even looked it up on a map before the trip. It took me over an hour. By the time I turned into their neighborhood, the rain was coming down hard again and I could feel my tires slicing through the water on the streets.
Their house was two stories of stucco with a manicured rock garden and two giant palm trees out front. It looked big and warm. All the windows were dark. A red BMW sat in the circu lar driveway behind the white Toyota Camry I bought Suzy years ago. God knows why she was still driving it, with what he could buy her now.
I parked by the neighbor’s curb and approached the side of the house, beneath the palm trees that swayed and thrashed in the wind. The rain fell in sweeping sheets, and I was drenched again within seconds.
On their patio, I saw the same kind of potted cacti that stood on our porch just two years before, except these porcelain pots were much nicer. And also there, like I was staring at the front door of our old house, was a silver cross hanging beneath the peephole.
The cool rain soothed my injured hand. I tightened the wet napkin, then donned the hood of my jacket.
I rang the doorbell and waited, shivering. I didn’t know who I wanted to answer, but when the porch light flicked on and the door finally opened, I understood what I wanted to do.
He looked exactly as he did on his driver’s license, except shorter than I expected, shorter than both Suzy and his son. He was wearing a tight white T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, his arms tan and muscular, his mustache underlining the furrows of curiosity and annoyance on his face.
“Yeah?” he muttered sleepily and ran a hand over the hard, bald contours of his scalp.
I raised my gun. He snapped his head back and froze. He was looking at me, not the gun. There was a stubborn quality in his expression, like he’d had a gun in his face before, like he was trying to decide if he should be afraid or not.
“Open the door and raise your hands above your head,” I said. “Then back up slowly until I tell you to stop.”
He obeyed and withdrew into the foyer, then farther into the living room as I followed him inside, leaving some distance between us. I left the front door open, and the porch light spilled into the darkness.
I turned on a small lamp by the wall and another one next to the couch, which flushed the room with a warm light that did not quite reach the high ceilings or the darkness of the open rooms behind Sonny, but it was enough to get my bearings.
Their house was furnished with all the fancy stuff required of a wealthy, middle-aged couple: the big-screen TV, the lavish stereo system, the large aquarium by the foot of the staircase. It was hard not to notice the tall wooden crucifix above the fireplace and the vases on every table, filled with snapdragons and spider mums, oriental lilies, bluebells and gladioli. I had learned all their names over the years.
Rain was drumming the roof above us. I must have been a sight to him: pale and hooded, one hand swathed in bandages and the other wielding a gun, a stranger dripping water onto his wife’s pristine white carpet. She used to yell at me just for wearing shoes in the house.
I caught a whiff of shrimp paste in the air, that nostalgic smell I would forever link to the Vietnamese.
“What you want?” He spoke in a quiet but strained voice. “You want money, my wallet right there.”
He nodded at the table beside me, where his wallet lay by the telephone and some car keys. Behind the phone stood a photo of him and Suzy on a beach, in front of waters bluer than I’d ever swum.
“I got no other money in the house.”
His was a voice that liked being loud, that liked dancing around its listener. I could tell it took him some effort not to fling his words at me.
With the free thumb of my injured hand, I managed to pull the receiver off the phone and leave it face up on the table. “Anyone else in the house?”
“Nobody here.”
“Nobody? Your wife — where’s she?”
I could see him about to shake his head, like he was ready to deny having a wife, before he realized that he had all but pointed out the photo.
“She not here. She sleep at her mother house tonight. Just me.”
“I see two cars in the driveway.”
“What do that matter? I tell you it just me here tonight.”
“So if I make you take me upstairs, I won’t find anyone there?”
He looked stumped, like I had tricked him. He glanced, as if for answers, at the giant crucifix above the fireplace before returning his outrage on me. “I tell you nobody here,” he growled. “Take my wallet. My car. Take what you want and go.”
I kept my gun trained on him and walked over to the fireplace. Sure enough, on the mantelpiece, by a rosary and some candles, lay Suzy’s red journal. I wondered if Sonny understood or even cared about its contents. The crucifix peered down at us, a contortion of dark anguish on the wall. I tucked the journal into my back pocket.
Sonny’s eyes narrowed and he lowered his hands a bit. In the dim light, his shaved head made him look like some ghoulish monk. From the open door, I could hear rain slapping concrete, a violent sound.
“Tell you what,” I said, “I’m gonna let you go. Walk out the front door. Call for help if you want.”
He threw me a baffled scowl.
“Go on. If no one’s here, then you have nothing to worry about.”
Now his hands fell. “What this shit, man? Who are you?”
I took a step toward him, and he slowly raised his hands again without adjusting his glare on me.
“Last chance,” I said.
“I’m not go anywhere, man.”
There was a calm now in the flimsy way he held up his hands, like I was an annoying child with a toy gun. He was ready to fight to the death. He didn’t know, though, that he’d already won. He’d passed the test. Except how many more times would he save her like tonight? And what did that prove anyway?
I glanced up the stairs, at the dark hallway of doors at the top, wondering which room was their bedroom, which room might she be sleeping in, which door might she be standing behind right now, cupping her ear to the wood, holding her breath. A heaviness fell over me, like I no longer recognized that shrimp paste smell in the air or any of the outlandish flowers in this strange house — but I shook off the feeling.