Temptation Town Read Free Page A

he'd drop into Binion's to play a little poker after
getting off work. That's where I met him.
    He'd been driving in this town for over thirty
years, since back in the days of the "old Vegas". He was full of
stories, but more importantly, full of knowledge about how this town works. If you've
got your eyes and ears open, he always said, you can learn anything you ever
wanted to know while driving a cab.
    He lived a couple of blocks from the cab yard. It
was theoretically downtown, or at least on the lip of it. But you wouldn't find
downtown tourists anywhere near here. Only a grouping of grim, single-story
buildings along Main Street, housing bottom-level businesses: cheap furniture
outlets, body shops, greasy diners, and the like.
    Move one block off Main and you enter the land of
the lost. Ramshackle apartment courts and duplexes lined First Street, the last
stop for many of those who never made the Big Las Vegas Score.
    Hollow-eyed and ashen, each one of them carries a
story of a life that jumped the tracks somewhere. You can see them shamble
along the emptiness of First and Second Streets, running out the clock.
    Very little vegetation intruded into this expanse
of flat, white concrete. Just a few blocks away, though, sat the silvery downtown
hotels and office buildings, sparkling cold beneath the winter sun.
    Ronnie Wills lived here, along First Street, but
he wasn't like the rest of them. He didn't have a drug problem and he drank no
more than a few beers after work. He lived here for one reason only: because it
was two blocks from the cab yard and he didn't own a car.
    I parked in the front lot of his apartment
building, right outside the office. Even though I drove a ten-year-old car, I
didn't want to get careless. I couldn't afford to let it get stolen. The moment
I stepped out, the cold wind slapped my face. I zipped my jacket up all the
way, but the chill still sliced through me.
    Steps creaked on my way up to the second floor. As
I meandered down the landing past graffiti and dirty windows, I heard yelling
in one or two of the apartments, and it wasn't from a TV. Ronnie's place loomed
alone down at the end.
    The wind picked up, and I turned the collar up on
my jacket. I figured he'd be watching a DVD, so I knocked on his door a few
times, with hard raps so he would hear me through his headphones. Eventually, I
heard him fiddle with the locks. Down on the street, two police cars roared
past, sirens blaring.
    The door opened. "Jack!" he said. His
full beard tried to hide his gap-toothed grin. Headphones hung around his neck.
"Well, what the hell are you doing here on a day like today?"
    "Hey, Ronnie." We shook hands.
    "Yeah, hey. Come on in, man. Really, now,
what brings you over here? No game at Binion's?"
    "I don't play day shift. You know that."
    We sat down. He took the easy chair, I took the footstool.
They were the only seats in this private, inner universe of his. A quick look around
showed me the mattress and box spring still over in the corner, along with a
tidy kitchenette tucked off to one side. A portable floor heater tried its best
to warm the room up, with little luck. I kept my jacket zipped.
    Two other
doors were closed — a bathroom and a closet, as I recall. The only window
was blacked out by a blanket tacked to the wall. What light there was in the
room came from a plain overhead low-wattage bulb covered by a frosted glass
bowl. No phone, no TV. Neat stacks of DVDs covered the floor. Hundreds
of them.
    He showed me his DVD player. It was a small item
that fit on his lap with maybe an eight-inch screen. A black-and-white image,
frozen in pause mode, was visible on it.
    " The Roaring Twenties ," he said. "Cagney and Bogart. A
Warner Brothers classic. This's the scene where Cagney gets killed and Gladys
George is standing over his corpse. The cop is taking information from her and
asks her what Cagney did for a living. So she goes, 'He used to be a big
shot'."
    He spoke
with a lot of passion. I could