Dufresne - I Dont Like Where This Is Going

ALSO BY JOHN DUFRESNE

No Regrets, Coyote

Is Life Like This?

Requiem, Mass.

Johnny Too Bad

The Lie That Tells a Truth

Deep in the Shade of Paradise

Love Warps the Mind a Little

Louisiana Power & Light

The Way That Water Enters Stone

for Cindy

Copyright 2016 by John Dufresne

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Book design by Ellen Cipriano

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Dufresne, John, author.

Title: I dont like where this is going : a Wylie Coyote novel / John
Dufresne.

Description: New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2015043955 | ISBN 9780393244687 (hardcover)

Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3554.U325 I3 2016 | DDC 813/.54dc23 LC record
available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043955

ISBN: 978-0-393-24469-4 (e-book)

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T HAT AFTERNOON, WHEN the unthinkable happened, my friend Bay and I were enjoying cocktails in the atrium of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. Although, as Bay informed me, here on the Strip, were not technically in Vegas. Were in Paradise.

Bay Lettique is a nimble sleight-of-hand man and a masterful illusionist who makes a respectable living playing Texas hold em. That afternoon he wore a seersucker suit and looked very much the crusading Southern attorney sent over from central casting, an illusion of gentility he gladly cultivated. He wore his fine blond hair modishly, one might even say rakishly, long. His eyes that afternoon were blue, to match the suit, I suppose. Those eyes were naturally brown, but Bay owned and wore a variety of tinted lenses, sometimes a green eye and a brown eye at the same time. Said he wanted to know who was paying attention. His nose was thin, his chin cleft, and his cheeks dimpled.

I watched the lights of an inclinator as it ascended to the apex of the thirty-story pyramid, and wondered about the four thousand rooms in the hotel and the eight thousand or so stories being played out behind their closed doors. I was a therapist in exile, and I thought, only half in jest, what a marvelous place this would be to set up shop. Right over there by the food court, maybe. I could help my clients who had just lost their life savings or their marriages, or who had behaved disgracefully, in ways so reprehensible they were paralyzed with shame and overcome with despair, help them shape their lives into narratives, so that their lives made some sense again, so they understood that the best story is a story of redemption, and that their personal story was only in its second act.

Bay plucked a yellow primrose out of the air and set it in his highball glass. I said, Do you think thats wise? And I reminded him of the several thousand video cameras in the hotel and how some uniformed security officer scarfing shrimp cocktail at his surveillance desk was certainly watching us right then, and if you really want to gamble in the casino, you might not want the house to observe your sleights of hand.

Bay says illusions work like dreams work, and like memories or fantasies do: you see quite clearly, right there in front of you, something that is not really present. He also says that a shared illusion is a collaborative creation of the performer, who passes his hand over the three of spades, and you, the observer, who now sees in its place the ace of hearts. You are unaware of what actually happened and are unaware of your unawareness.

On our first morning in town, I had gone for a walk in our new neighborhood, known by the oxymora Wild Haven at Desert Shores. I turned a corner a block from our house and saw an elderly man in a white boonie hat and a green short-sleeved jumpsuit clutching a trembling Chihuahua to his chest, trying to protect it from four large, terrifying, and snarling dogs. I yelled, threw up my hands, and made what I hoped were menacing but not provocative gestures. The dogs had the man pinned against a wall. I took out my phone. Two of the dogs snapped at the mans legs, another tore at his arm. The largest dog got hold of the Chihuahua and tugged. Before I could tell the 911 operator my location, because I didnt know it, a police squad car sped toward us and screeched to a stop. By now, three dogs were tearing at the mans face and neck. The merciless, coal-black dog grabbed the Chihuahua and whipped its limp body back and forth in its jaws with such ferocity that the little guys punctured skin split and the Chihuahua deflated.

I ran toward the scene without any idea what I could or might do. The police officer fired his service revolver and killed the largest of the dogs. I stopped dead in my tracks. The other dogs leaped in alarm, and two of them ran. The cop fired three more shots. One dog fell, another wailed, bit at the bullet in his rump, and hobbled off on three legs. It took a second shot, this one into the skull, to subdue the dog still gnawing on the poor mans face. The paramedics arrived and set about their grim work. I sat on the sidewalk, spent. The cop wanted to know what Id seen before he arrived. I told him. I asked about the victim. His lips and eyes are mush, the cop said. And some of the left ear is gone. Hell be okay if he survives the shock. Okay? I thought. The dogs, he said, are feral. Former pets, most of them, pets or fighting dogs, abandoned by losers, who are either skipping town or eluding Animal Control. The dogs roam the hills out west, out beyond the Beltway, come into town when theyre starving. You got any animals, he said, keep them inside.

Las Vegas looks the way I imagine hell would look if Lucifer had exercised his clownish sense of humora colossal and garish wreck of ironic architecture abandoned on the low and level Mojave sands, a city of gleefully appalling desolation, full of discordant sound and unavailing fury, a city built on a foundation of pretense and delusion. Yet there are those who find it delightful. Bay is one, so when we decided it would be prudent to leave Everglades County, Florida, for an extended vacation following a season of baleful unpleasantness, and while certain aggrieved parties settled themselves back into their respective cozy criminal routines and forgot about us, we came to Vegas. I brought my indoor cat, but left my gainfully employed sweetheart behind. Patience would be visiting soon and often. Bay leased a furnished two-story, four-bedroom, four-bath stucco house with a barrel-tile roof, attached garage, gas fireplace, and a pool, just off Lake Mead Boulevard. We bought a used Mitsubishi Mirage with just under a hundred thousand miles on it.

We were into our second drinks when Bay made the bowl of spicy nuts vanish. When I said I was still hungry, he showed me the bowl of snacks on his iPhone. I said, Can I eat those? He said, Its easy to make things vanish, harder to bring them back. Bay had explained the law of conservation of energy to me when I asked him how he made objects disappear. He said the object doesnt vanish; it just becomes something else. And he lifted his brow and smiled. And then his phone played Everybody Knows. He put the phone to his ear and said, Talk to me, Mikey. Open MikeMichael Lynchwas a sketchy but valuable friend of ours from back home in Melancholy, Florida. Mike knows where the bodies are buried, Bay saysand how deep. While Bay listened, he levitated the drink coaster and floated it around the coffee table. I shook my head like,