If he hadn’t thought the barman would see him, laugh at him and stop serving him, he would have allowed himself a blub.
Alex still had his eyes closed when Sherman emerged from the door of the washroom and started walking down the bar. The toilet, for reasons Sherman didn’t want to think about, was entirely painted in textured black gloss paint, and the bulb in there had gone. Sherman had been in this dive long enough – fifteen bottles of Molson long, ever since he’d lost most of his stack at blackjack up on Fremont Street – and the toilet had made his decision for him. Here, in the fanciest town he’d ever been in, he’d found a khazi that would have disgraced a rough pub in Plymouth.
He’d been standing tiptoe on sodden wads of bum roll, the closest he could get to the pan, leaning over forward with one hand steadying himself on the cistern pipe. Occasional glints of light from outside showed a seatless bowl, sprinkled with drops, in the general direction of which he had pissed with ferocious need. He had shaken off, nearly losing his footing as he did so on the slippery floor, and walked out with the full intention of finding somewhere very, very cheap to kip.
And it was then that he clocked the skinny kid at the bar, nodding his head to the music like a nonce. And it occurred to him that something about the kid was familiar.
No, he exhaled quietly. You are shitting me. That’s the prick that killed Davidoff.
Sherman’s first thought – which was his first thought in pretty much all circumstances in any case – was that something fishy was going on. What were the chances of the little bastard fetching up here? And why? He hadn’t seemed keen to speak the last time they’d met.
Could it be Ellis tying up loose ends? One of the reasons Sherman had chosen Vegas was that it was an easy city to get lost in, an easy city to make money safe in. If there was going to be a clean-up operation, Sherman had been determined to make sure he was out of the way of the mop.
He’d been careful – booked a flight to LAX, booked a ticket on a Greyhound bus east with his credit card, not taken it, and paid for another ticket on a bus to Las Vegas with cash. That one, he had got aboard. He’d been here less than twenty-four hours. If they had figured out he was here, they really wanted to find him. And that was very bad news for him.
It was the kid, though.
OK, smooth. The smart thing to do was slip out and get lost. But. But. The blackjack – dealer paying 21 twice in a row, Sherman doubled down both times and stuck on 20 – the beer, the fact he was going to be staying in some horrible hotel again, the crappy toilet and the general fuck-up Sherman’s life had become… all of these seemed in some way to be this lad’s responsibility. Sherman didn’t yet know whether the kid was going to get him killed, but it didn’t seem unlikely at this rate. And then there was Davidoff, also not to be forgotten. Sherman was buggered if he wasn’t going to take a run at him one way or another.
But what he wanted to do, which was pick nodding boy up by his scrawny little neck and push his face through the glass shelves behind the bar (it was possible; oh, it was possible, given a bit of a run-up), he was not going to do.
Smooth and easy. The kid hadn’t seen him, or if he had he was giving a very good impression of not having done so. Or not caring – which would mean… Sherman, pulling back against the wall, scanned the room. There was nobody else in the place. Barman? Unlikely.
The kid really might be there alone. The Gents had been empty. Sherman walked back to where he had been sitting and angled the table so his back was to the room, but he could see the kid in the glass behind the bar. He pretended to keep drinking his final bottle of Molson.
The kid wasn’t looking anywhere – he looked drunk, was what he looked. Sherman watched him order another Maker’s Mark, pay in cash. Head lolling a bit. Mouthing along to the jukie.
‘You, my son,’ Sherman promised him, ‘are going to get a very nasty bump on the head indeed before this evening is out. You see if you don’t.’
The song ended with a squeal, and then a jerk. Then there was a click as the mechanism changed and a tangled chord rolled out, fuzzy with static. A drumbeat thumped and limped behind it. ‘Like a Hurricane’ was starting again. Sherman, remembering the song for some reason, frowned.
Chapter 21
Alex left the bar, his eyeballs floating. The horizontal hold had gone on the room, and he could feel the fajitas moving in his stomach. He wanted fresh air. The jammed jukebox, playing that one song over and over again, had proved resistant to the barman thumping it, and after letting it play the same song for fifteen minutes the guy had finally gone and pulled the plug, with some violence, out of the wall.
Neil Young had stopped, and the circular riff of Alex’s own thoughts had continued: hate and fear, anger and grief, grief and hate, anger and fear, salt, pepper, vinegar, mustard…
Alex left the bar and turned away from the Strip and walked. Behind him, a shadow calved off from the shadow of the doorway and crept down the dark lee of the building, skipping occasionally through pools of light and back into darkness.
Alex wasn’t hard to follow. Sherman had had an hour to sober up. Alex had had an hour to get drunker. He was staggering like a cow that had been hit with a hammer, away from the bright light, into the darkened residential streets, dragging his tail behind him.
Alex stopped at the edge of a bare lot. They were building something there.
A rough fence of corrugated iron had been raised around it, the gaps covered over with panels of metal netting, through which you could see an uneven expanse of bare dirt, pocked and pitted. Blue-white lights on tall poles scored it with sharp shadows. Orange construction vehicles slept like dinosaurs in the cold lunar daylight.
Sherman stopped behind him. Alex put his hands on his knees, bent forward, rocked back and forth over the ground with his mouth open. It looked like he was going to be sick, but then whatever it was passed. Alex spat, instead, a long spool of saliva descending to the blue ground.
Then he resumed his progress, not once looking back, slipping through a wide gap in the fence and ignoring the signs that enjoined him to wear a hard hat. Sherman followed, stopping at the edge of the site in a pool of darkness cast by one of the tall panels. It was bright as day in that site, but dark outside. If the boy was bait, this would be a perfect killing zone. He didn’t want to move in until he was sure he was alone.
He watched Alex move with the aimless deliberateness of the seriously drunk. He seemed to be talking to himself. Then Sherman saw him double back towards him. He ducked his head behind the corrugated-iron sheet and stepped further into the dark. If the boy came out through the gap, Sherman would have the drop on him. He waited.
Then he heard a zip go, and the loud drum roll of someone pissing like a horse against the other side of the fence. A pool of hot urine leaked from under the fence and spread around Sherman’s shoes. The smell was pungent. If the boy was setting him up he was no sort of professional.
Step in and shoot? Let the kid die with his dick in his hand?
On second thoughts, if there was an accomplice, now might be exactly when he would anticipate Sherman making his move. Maybe professional was exactly what he was. So far the boy had done absolutely everything he could, seemingly, to invite Sherman to murder him. He had got drunk. He had shown no sign of even looking around to see if there was anyone following him. He had walked off to a deserted construction site, brightly illuminated, with clear sightlines in. And now he was taking a pee.
The gap in the fence spilled light. There was no way this sort of thing happened by accident. Hold back.