Dragonfish: A Novel Read Free

to scare me, entertain me, or make fun of me.
    His partner looked on with glassy, tired eyes. We exchanged an awkward glance before he looked away as if embarrassed by this brief talent show.
    His cell phone chimed and he brought it carefully to his ear, nodding at the kid to take a post by the door. He spoke Vietnamese into the phone as he gave me another once-over. He moved into the hallway between my bathroom and bedroom, murmuring into the shadows. After a minute, he came back and handed me the phone.
    The line was silent.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “You. Robert Ruen.” It was a declaration, not a question—an older man’s voice, loud and somehow childish, the accent unmistakably Vietnamese. “Say something to me.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “ You . Your voice, man—I don’t forget thing like this.”
    It might have been his broken English or how quickly he spoke, but he sounded something like a puppet. He was smoking, sucking in his breath fast and exhaling his impatience into the phone.
    “You’ve made a mistake,” I said.
    “You got bad memory? You know who I am.”
    “I have no idea—”
    “Las Vegas, man. I know you come here. You think I’m dummy I not figure out?” He snorted and spat, as if to underlinehis point. “In Vietnam, we say beautiful die, but ugly never go away. For policeman, you do some bad fucking thing. You know how long I wait to talk to you? I been dream about this. I see your face in my fucking dream.”
    My houseguests were stirring. The tall one slowly unzipped his jacket, and the kid drifted behind me. I could still see curls of his cigarette smoke.
    I spoke calmly into the phone, “What do you want me to say?”
    “Tell me.”
    “Tell you what?”
    “You fucking know.”
    “I don’t know anything about anything. Just what the hell are you talking about?”
    He sounded like he was thinking. Then he replied, as if repeating himself, “Suzy.”
    The name drained me all at once of any effort to deny its importance. It was like he had slapped me to shut me up.
    I think back on it now, and this was the moment I felt the full weight of the things I’d already lost—the last moment before everything that would later happen became inevitable.
    I heard movement behind me. On cue, the goateed kid appeared at my shoulder. I did not see the gun until it was pointed, a dark hard glimmering thing, squarely at my temple.
    The voice spoke again over the line. “I ask you one time. Where is she?”

2
    F IVE MONTHS BEFORE ALL THIS , I drove into Vegas on a sweltering July evening just before sunset. From the highway, I could see the Strip in the distance, but also a lone dark cloud above it, flushed on a bed of light and glowing alien and purplish in the sky. I was convinced it was a UFO and kept gazing at it before nearly hitting the truck ahead of me. That jolted me out of my exhaustion.
    Half an hour later, the guy at the gas station told me about the beam of light from atop that giant pyramid casino, which you can spot from anywhere in the city, even from space if no clouds are in the way.
    “Sorry, man,” he said like he was consoling me.
    I must have looked disappointed.
    The drive from Oakland had taken me all day, so I checked into the Motel 6 near Chinatown and fell asleep with my shoes on and my five-shot still strapped to my ankle. I slept stupid for ten hours straight and woke up at six in the morning, my mouth and nostrils so dry it felt like someone had shoveled dirt over me inthe night. The sun had barely risen, but it was already a hundred degrees outside. Not even a wisp of a cloud.
    After a long cold shower, I walked to the front office. The clerk from last night—an old Chinese guy who spoke English about as well as I spoke Chinese—was slurping his breakfast and watching TV behind the counter. He looked up when I knocked on the counter, but did not set down his chopsticks until he saw me brandish cash. I’d already paid him for last night’s stay, and now I