I’d only glanced away for a second or two, but Sonny had already reached into the adjacent room and reappeared with a kitchen knife in his hand. He moved willfully, almost casually, and was coming at me like he either knew I wouldn’t shoot him or didn’t care if I did. I stumbled back a few steps, aiming at his chest, but I bumped hard into something and lost my balance, tumbling backward onto the coffee table, which met my back with a crashing thud.
He lunged on top of me, a rock of a man, and I managed somehow to grab his wrist in the crook of my bad hand, holding off the knife as best I could, but his other hand had seized my right wrist, his fingers digging into the bone so hard I thought it would snap and I lost my grip on the gun and it fell to the floor. He was dumb strong but I was still bigger, and growling through my teeth I heaved him off me and he pulled me with him onto the carpet. In our struggle I was able to get enough space between us to knee him in the groin, which knocked the breath out of him and freed my good hand. A glass ashtray from the table lay overturned on the carpet and I grabbed it and struck him across the temple. He grunted and still clawed at my arm, so I struck him a second time and was about to bring down the ashtray again. But he’d gone limp.
My lips were trembling, my mouth dry as I swallowed that animal urge to crush his head. I snatched the knife from his hand and tossed it across the room.
I got up, backed away. I found my gun on the floor and trained it again on him. For a second, I thought he might be dead. In my fingers, I could still feel the thud of the ashtray on his skull. But he moved a little now, holding the side of his face with one hand.
Part of me was ready to shoot him while the rest of me rummaged through the consequences of walking away. I glanced at the dark staircase and nearly expected Suzy to be standing there, gazing down at me with horror. I hooded myself.
Sonny had raised himself on an elbow. He watched me slink toward the front door, ignoring the blood crawling down the side of his face, his eyes brimming with some unspoken promise. Behind him, in the aquarium, a pair of football-size fish were writhing around in the black water as though awakened by our violence.
I ran out into the rain, stumbling across the gushing lawn and through the surging water in the street to my car. My engine whined to life. As I sped past the house, I glimpsed Sonny standing on their front porch with his fists clenched at his side. I could have sworn a slimmer figure lurked behind him in the dark doorway.
I careened down the slick Vegas streets like an ambulance and passed cars one by one, my windshield wipers yelping back and forth. Only after I’d driven a few miles did I slow down. I turned on the radio. I reentered the highway. My body felt cool, and the rain was soothing on the roof of the car.
My bandaged hand, a claw now, began throbbing again. I looked at it several times like it was some talisman, amazed that I’d been able to use it. Then I remembered Suzy’s red journal in my back pocket and managed to pull it out. Cradled there in my lap, it too seemed miraculous and inexplicably precious. Stolen treasure with no value.
The Strip receded in the distance, a towering shining island in the night. I turned off the radio and let the rain drum in my ears. The night was a tunnel. I drove a steady clip down the highway and thought of nothing and everything all at once.
3
THE KID HELD THE GUN inches from my head, its proximity like a brace on my neck so that I could only stare straight ahead and lock eyes with his partner. They seemed disarmingly calm, my two intruders — and thoughtful, like they had heard what Sonny had said and were now, like their boss, waiting for my response.
When I was six, I watched my father grab my brown terrier by the collar and slam it headfirst against our porch wall. It had pissed on his shoe — this, after a month of him warning me of its messes around the house. It instantly went limp and he held it up and looked at it and walked to our curbside trash can. Hours later we heard scratching at our front door, and there it was, limping sleepily around the welcome mat. I remember the shiver that coursed through me when I saw its small head bobbing in the doorway, the same shiver I felt now as Sonny uttered Suzy’s name. I realized that in the last five months, as I tried my best to close every door that led to Las Vegas, I’d been waiting all along to hear bad news about her.
I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “What do you mean, where is she?”
“I ask you. Four days now she been gone. She just disappear?”
He said “disappear”the way an adult would say it to a wide-eyed child. Poof! In a puff of smoke!
“Wait,” I said. “You think I know where she went, or you think I took her? I haven’t heard from her since she left Oakland two years ago. Since she left me.”
“But you come here to Vegas, right?”
“Look, I heard you hurt her and I had to do something. It was stupid and you can come at me with what you think I deserve. But whatever this is with Suzy, I don’t know anything about it. I told you — I haven’t said a word to her in over two years.”
“How I know you not lie to me, huh?”
“I got no reason to. I know you think I do, but she left me, man. A long time ago.”
I heard ice cubes clinking in a glass, like him finishing off the last of a drink, like he was beginning to believe me.
“Sonny, can you please tell your boy here to point his gun at something else?” I could hear the kid breathing through his nose.
“Don’t call me fucking Sonny. Give the phone to him.”
“He said to give you the phone.”
The kid snatched it out of my hand, said “Yes” in Vietnamese a couple of times, then backed away from me. I had to blink several times, breathe out, like the gun had been a hood over my face.
He handed the phone to his partner, who listened intently without saying a word. A minute later he hung up.
“We’re leaving. You’re coming with us to Las Vegas.”
“What for?”
He slipped on a pair of black leather gloves, then turned away all of a sudden, seized by hacking coughs. He recovered himself, wiping his mouth with renewed calm. “Your clothes. Change them.”
The kid was kneeling on the floor, tying his shoelaces with his gun on the carpet beside him. He peered around my apartment, then up at me. “This a sad place, man. Not even a Christmas tree?”
IT WAS DARK by the time we got on the 580 going south, toward Vegas. As I sat in the backseat of a morbidly tinted Lexus with the kid beside me and his partner driving in front, I felt more a guest than a captive. No guns pointed at me, my hands free, the car doors unlocked. It was like I had asked them for a ride. Their remaining gesture at seriousness was their silence, though the kid was soon singing under his breath, tapping his fingers to some beat in his head.
It dawned on me that I’d been spared for the last five months — that Sonny had known all along who I was and where I lived and for some reason had decided to do nothing, because whatever this was now, whatever he was planning for me, it didn’t smell of him settling a score. What actually troubled me was that he was dangling Suzy over my head, certain that I’d be desperate to find out what happened to her, that if my escorts had stopped the car and let me out, I would have climbed right back in.
Around midnight, we stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through by the highway. For the first time since we left, the quiet one spoke, regarding me in the rearview mirror. “You eat meat?”