On the way to her place, she had asked if I liked being a cop. Her first personal question since we met. I told her that it depended on the day, that some days it’s just one idiot human being after another. When she asked if I had ever saved anyone’s life, I told her about the guy I once pulled from a burning car and how he survived despite third-degree burns to half his body. He’d also just robbed a convenience store, led me on a high-speed chase, and T-boned a minivan, killing a mother and her nine-year-old daughter. I’d wished at the time that he had burned in his car, but I didn’t tell her that. Helping the wrong people often felt as bad to me as hurting the wrong people.
She came back with some toiletries and what looked like a wooden statuette of Buddha, which she shoved into the outer pocket of the suitcase.
She finally went to her books, packing first a small stack of worn paperbacks. The Narnia Chronicles.
“I read those way back,” I said. “Can’t remember any of them except that one where they go through the wardrobe.”
“I’ve read that one eight times.” She snatched a cigarette from a pack on the windowsill and lit up as she picked through the other books. “This is gonna be tough.”
“Don’t take forever.”
“We still got more than an hour, don’t we?” She offered me the cigarette and went back to the books, sometimes lingering on a cover for a few seconds before making her decision. “Yeah, I used to go into my aunt and uncle’s closet and look for a door behind their clothes. I wanted so bad to find one. Just walk into another world like the kids in the book. Close the door behind me, never come back.”
“Was that the kid in you, or was that LA?”
“Both.” She threw in a book on meditation, then a book on the stock market. “LA never felt like home to me. Neither does Vegas, but at least here you can be anonymous. Everyone’s from somewhere else. Passing through for a few days, a few years. Being temporary can be a good thing.”
“Maybe. Being permanent ain’t possible anyway.”
“Permanence is overrated.”
She zipped the stuffed suitcase, stood up, and looked around. She took back the cigarette. I glanced again at my watch but didn’t want her to stop talking. It was calming to hear her so chatty and relaxed, so perversely in denial of the circumstances. She smoked with her arms half crossed, her rigid posture giving her an air of both authority and wariness. The elbows of her leather jacket were frayed like her jeans and cowboy boots, but she wore it all well, with hushed purposefulness, as though she had chosen this uniform — the haircut too, the lack of makeup — to moderate her beauty. Help her blend into the background.
She said, “Do you miss her?”
“Depends on what’s missing.”
“Okay, what do you not miss about her — besides all the crazy shit she did.”
“I don’t know. I guess I was never a fan of all the praying and churchgoing. All that devotion to God. I indulged her, of course, but I haven’t set foot inside a church since she left.”
“It’s a Vietnamese thing. Ingrained in all of us. Total waste of time.”
“That wasn’t it. Your mother always seemed like she was hoping for a fucking revelation or something. You know what I do miss? When she wasn’t being so goddamn serious. When we traveled, on our road trips, she lightened up then. She hated leaving town at first, but she got to liking it over the years. It put her at ease — being on the road, seeing new things.”
“I get that,” Mai said. “Wish I did it more.” She bent down to stub out the cigarette in the ashtray. “I’ve been saving up for a trip to Vietnam. I want to travel the entire country. Start in Saigon and go up to Hanoi, maybe find an apartment by Halong Bay. Live there for a year and see how it goes. That’ll all be easier now. Shit, I almost forgot.”
She went back into her closet and returned with her hand in the belly of a small stuffed bear. She pulled out a passport, slipping it into her back pocket, and tossed the gutted bear on her bed.
“Finally got one four years ago and still haven’t used it,” she said. “I’ve never even been to Mexico.”
A cell phone rang, but it wasn’t mine. Mai rushed to retrieve hers from her purse and threw me an eager look.
She answered it in a low voice and listened intently. Yes, she replied in Vietnamese and then asked a question. After a long pause, another yes. Then, eyeing me, she said, “Okay, okay,” and hung up.
“Was it her?”
She nodded. “She’s at a pay phone across the street. She’s coming over right now.”
“How did she know to come here?”
“Betty must have described me.” Mai hit the light switch and doused us in darkness. “Stay in here and I’ll answer the door. She sounded nervous. It might scare her to see you right away. Let me talk to her first.”
“She could have anyone with her.”
“Well, if she does, you can come out and shoot them.” She nudged me back a step, leaving the door slightly open.
With my gun again in hand, I watched her through the narrow opening. She stood waiting at the edge of the kitchen. After five minutes that felt like twenty, footsteps finally approached and stopped outside the front door. Two quick knocks. Mai disappeared from view.
I heard the front door open and Mai say “Hello, big sister” in Vietnamese. A soft voice replied in kind, but I couldn’t make out if it was Happy, only that it was a woman.
The front door closed, the lock clicking loudly.
They continued speaking in Vietnamese, their voices closer now, Mai’s calm and careful, the other quick and hushed. Mai started explaining something in a reassuring tone. She sounded like someone else entirely when she spoke her mother tongue.
Suddenly I heard my name. A silence followed. Mai’s voice called out for me. I wedged my gun into the back of my jeans. My heart was thumping, and for a moment I thought it was possible someone else had come.
When Happy saw me, she looked more confused than frightened. Under her black peacoat, she was wearing a uniform identical to Betty’s. Her bow tie was askew, her arms at her side with one hand holding on to the strap of her handbag, which nearly touched the carpet.
“She was at the casino after all,” Mai explained with pride. “She’d just left her shift and was about to leave the casino when Betty caught up to her.”
I said to Happy, “How much does Betty know?”
“She don’t know nothing,” Happy replied quickly, still eyeing me with suspicion. “I tell her somebody hit me. That it.”
I inched closer. Despite her makeup and her glasses I could see the shadowy bruises around her left eye and the left corner of her mouth.
“She and me — we not good friend.”
“Then why did you tell her about it?”
“Three day I not leave the house and she come find me. She live in my neighborhood. Why you in Las Vegas, Bob?”
“Sonny. He made me come here and find Suzy for him. I found Mai instead.”
This made even less sense to her, but I didn’t feel like explaining.
She said, “You know she is. .”
“Suzy’s long-lost daughter? Yeah. Found that out about three hours ago. Don’t think Sonny planned on anything like that.”
My mention of Sonny again brought a flash of venom to her eyes.
“Did his men do that to you?” I said.
She blinked away the question. “Why you try find me? I don’t know nothing.”
“Did you know about Suzy’s plan?”
“What plan? She don’t tell nothing to me. They come and they say about the money, but I don’t know nothing about the money. They hit me and they say they kill me and they kill Suzy too, but I not say nothing.” She looked at Mai. “That why I come to you Tuesday — to get you tell your mom leave town.”