Binding Ties Read Free

to the man in the black suit.
    One tiny hope glimmered in Marvin’s mind….
    He knew that a letter opener lay on the nearby coffee table, under the morning paper and a stack of bills, if onlyhe could reach it. Eyes still squeezed shut, Marvin pawed helplessly in that direction, with his left hand, but his arm felt heavy, like trying to lift a refrigerator, not his own limb.
    The attacker slapped the arm down, and Marvin couldn’t find the strength to raise it again….
    As it got harder and harder to breathe, and surviving became more and more abstract, a thought jumped into his mind, between panic-stricken plans to somehow get loose: That thought was how stupid he had been to move to Las Vegas in the first place.
    Then his wife Annie popped into his mind: her pretty, smiling face, the way she had looked at him so often, before she left him last year.
    Though these thoughts lasted only a few seconds, they were profound: Marvin realized he still missed his ex-wife, and wished he’d been smart enough to stay in Eau Claire and try to patch things up with her, instead of throwing away his entire life to move to the city of dreams….
    He’d been an idiot. He still was an idiot. He knew as much, even with the breath being sucked out of him for what was probably the last time … a goddamned idiot, cashing in his retirement, driving away Annie, looking for a new life….
    Marvin Sandred, at the brink of death, did not have the time or luxury of acquiring a longer, more mature view of his life and where it had gone awry. Lots of people had come to this city of dreams, from Bugsy Siegel to Howard Hughes, from Liberace to Penn and Teller. Formerly an assistant plant manager at Eau Claire Steelworks, Marvin Sandred had been one of hundreds of thousands of dreamerswho’d migrated to the neon oasis, not just to visit, but to live.
    Marvin’s dream was modest, comparatively speaking, if typically unrealistic of Vegas dreamers. Just as Annie was entering menopause, Marvin’s midlife crisis kicked in, and the forty-six-year-old had felt life slipping through his fingers, opportunities and dreams betrayed by a lifetime of doing “the right thing.” Marvin had started watching poker on ESPN, and then played it on the Internet, till his wife put her foot down just when he was starting to win a little; so he’d practiced on a ten-buck computer game and did very well indeed, so well that he finally decided to come to Las Vegas to play poker professionally.
    His retirement settlement gave Marvin just enough money to get to Vegas and put a down payment on this little bungalow; he’d hoped his wife—they were childless—would view this as a fresh start. Actually, she saw it as a dead-end. The rest of his money he had used to fund his fantasy of becoming the next Amarillo Slim or Doyle Brunson.
    The dream had indeed gone quickly south, his poker skills faring far better against his computer game than real people. After two tournaments, Sandred got a day job in the sales department of a welding equipment company. The dream began its slow death from that point on, his meager earnings winding down the spiraling hole of Texas Hold-’em, casino-style….
    Still, Marvin had never given up, and his sick-gambler’s optimism stayed with him, right up to where his dream was swallowed by this full-fledged nightmare, the attacker applying even more pressure now….
    Marvin felt his head grow heavy, the weight of it trying to sag to the floor, the rope around his neck keeping his skull up, but a certain bobbing motion making his forehead occasionally brush the rough rug. Colored lights burst behind his eyelids in a tiny fireworks show, and for just a moment he was downtown in Glitter Gulch with the overhead display of Sinatra singing, “Luck be a lady,” and Marvin’s arms were rubbery things and tears mingled with sweat as his dream dissolved and his mind was filled