Writ of Execution (19 page)

Had to be an inside job. But an inside job would have shown up.

Jessie’s Greed Machine had been tested down to the binary code. Kenny didn’t see how they could find anything now after taking the machine down to its binary code. Nina didn’t need to worry.

He would call her and—Kenny had just remembered that someone had said something to Kemp while he sat on the stool. He remembered the girl in her wheelchair, gamely having a good time. Had she spoken a few words to him?

Or was it the boyfriend, the biker with the ponytail. And what had been said? Kenny couldn’t remember. Intoxication had affected his memory.

Somebody had said something to Kemp! An old rock song had gone through Kenny’s head when he heard it.

The boyfriend had worn Harley pins. Kenny went to motorcycle club sites’ membership lists. Nevada was full of bikers. No photos of this particular biker popped up. He pushed up his glasses and took another break, during which he cleaned up the harrowing results of Gabe’s play with the lamb.

Back to the dinette table.

He logged on to some casino sites. He had a strong subprogram for hacking into HR sites. He spent time examining payroll records for Tahoe casino employees.

He found no sign of Charlie Kemp. If a casino had employed him, he had managed to keep himself well hidden or was using an alias.

Then, just as Gabe began making small sounds in the back room that contained within them the implicit threat of high-decibel sounds to come, Kenny found something.

He had hacked into some employee newsletters. And there on the cover was a picture for an article on disabled employees. And smiling front and center he saw the girl in the wheelchair.

Her name was Amanda Lewis, and she was a cashier at the Horizon.

Gabe woke up and took over the proceedings. Another round of diapers and food. Gabe spoke intensely throughout of his feelings but Kenny couldn’t understand any of it.

Jessie got back about five, her arms full of groceries. “Any trouble?”

“Empty roads. No trouble. Anything happen here?”

“Only in my mind.”

“You found something on the computer?”

“I don’t think Nina needs to worry. If there had been cheating, Global Gaming would have caught it right away and never made the payout.”

“Great! How’s the boy?”

“Rowdy. I’m teaching him HTML.”

“No fever?” She dumped the bags in the galley kitchen and came over to the computer center, which consisted of the dinette table and the Portacrib. Gabe was waving his arms excitedly, and in a second she was holding him, cheek to cheek, her eyes closed. “He’s nice and cool.”

“I hope that fever thing hasn’t retreated to the cell cytoplasm level where it’s just waiting to break out again,” Kenny said.

“I hate it when you say things like that. Do you even know what you’re talking about? Because I sure don’t.”

“Sorry.” Here he went, irritating her again, when he was merely interested in sharing some intriguing tidbits of knowledge he had picked up in his browsing. He was a Renaissance man in a time when many talents were useless and one miserly, focused ability got you what you wanted.

“That was a higher temperature than ever three days ago,” she said. Gabe echoed that thought with a wail. “I was scared.”

“I thought medicine was a science,” Kenny said. “Why can’t the doctor look at him and figure out what is wrong?”

“You haven’t been around very many sick people, have you?”

“Did they give him antibiotics? Just in case?”

“No. Because he had no sign of an infection and if it’s a virus, that wouldn’t help. C’mon, Gabe, back into the Portacrib, Mommy’s right here putting stuff away. See?” She dropped her head back and rolled her shoulders, and Kenny watched, helplessly admiring the hollow below her clavicle and the swelling skin below.

“Lipton’s. I’ll put some water on and you can go nuts.

I bought myself a pint of vodka and Rose’s lime juice. You ever have a gimlet?”

“I’m not much of a drinker.”

“You can try one out, if you want. Anyway, he says babies get these ambiguous fevers often,” she went on. “Some of them even have seizures. As long as you catch it before the fever is too high, it’s no big deal.”

“Gabe’s seizure was no big deal?”

“He seemed to think it wasn’t. They’re common in infancy, he said.” She looked unconvinced. “I couldn’t tell if he just said that to make me feel better, either.”

She finished putting the food in the tiny cupboard and poured spring water into Nina’s saucepan on the stove and said, “Damn. I was thinking as I drove up the dirt road, it’s just us and the buzzards out here. This can’t go on much longer. I need a decent place to live, some land where I can . . . I need for this kid to get a thorough workup. I don’t care what that doctor says, this just doesn’t feel right to me.”

How tricky, to give life to another human being and then to have so little control over his survival. The water boiled and Jessie made tea and fixed herself a big vodka gimlet. The slow descent of the sun had begun again in the stillness of the late afternoon. Dry cool air, windless, amplified their words. Jessie let Gabe crawl around in front of the trailer and sat on the steps with Kenny.

Jessie drank the gimlet down pretty fast and her cheeks got flushed. “It’s nice to see you relaxing,” Kenny said.

“Don’t kid yourself. I can get it back together in a half second.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“You know, this whole jackpot thing—I’m not really expecting to collect. I just want Gabe to be safe and healthy. But, you know, that first moment when you said, ‘You hit!’ and I could see it on the machine, the three banks. For just that moment—oh, the feeling was—I felt this enormous burden on my shoulders. I had never noticed it before, but now I felt it, because now I could imagine it going away. It hasn’t been easy.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose your whole family,” Kenny said.

“I thought the Marine Corps would be my home. I lost that. And I lost Dan. After so many losses something happened here”—she put her fist to her chest—“and I wanted to give up. But then Gabe came and I had to keep fighting.”

“You kept me alive. I would be dead if not for you.”

“Don’t talk stupid.”

“It’s true.”

She frowned. “I get tired of your bull, Kenny. Is this your way of making a pass?”

“I’m going to fry that sausage you brought. And get the rice going.” He went inside the screen door and started banging around the pots, a comforting activity for him. “And I’m going to tell you a story. A true story. About me.”

He told it to her, all of it, about the restaurant and his father and the company, the people he had to lay off, the bad decisions, the money he’d lost. It was easier to be moving around, setting the table, checking pots so he wouldn’t have to look at her. She never interrupted once. She just sat out there on the steps, watching Gabe, frowning.

When he was through, so was their paper-plate dinner. Gabe went back to the Portacrib and they pushed aside the laptop.

“You have to make it right with your parents,” Jessie said.

“I either come to them with the money you’re giving me, or I don’t know.”

“You’re not going to kill yourself now, are you? After seeing how quickly your life can change?”

He decided to keep her guessing, maybe worrying about him for a stolen second here and there, in between the long runs through the desert, two hundred sit-ups, and caring for Gabe. “Hasn’t changed yet. How are the carrots?”

“Too chewy.”

“Gabe ate all his carrots. Bioflavonoids are important.

You don’t eat well.”

“As opposed to you, who eats all the time.”

“But usually nutritiously.”

“Your parents must be really worried about you.”

“Yeah.”

Jessie washed the dishes. Kenny drank his tea, saying, “I have to go up the hill.”

“Not a good plan.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Must be important. Considering everything. So go. I’ll be okay. No TV, no company except my aunt’s rifle.”

“You could read. I have a really good book in my pack over there. It’s by William Gibson. You know him?”

“No.”

“Visionary stuff. Futuristic.”

“Kenny, we don’t have the same interests. I read how-to and gardening books when I have time, which I never do.”

She didn’t understand yet that that was the intriguing part. The simple perfection of the two of them together escaped her. She was passionate physicality; he embodied the obsessed mental realm. They were complements, two halves that, combined, made a fascinating whole, and separate, existed only as fragments. Chemistry is all that matters, he wanted to say to her, but she would have taken it wrong and gotten mad and he wanted to leave her in a good mood. He put on his jacket. “Bye-bye, Gabe. Jessie, you’ll lock up tight?”

“What do you think? Can’t this wait until morning? Where are you going?”

“The Horizon.” “Not to gamble.”

“No fear,” he said. “I’ve got about thirty bucks Nina loaned me and I plan to use that for gas and food until our mega money pours through the door.”

“When do we expect you back?”

“After, I might make another stop.”

“Oh?”

“To see my family.”

“Yeah, do that. You’ll feel better. You’ll be fine. Go on and take care of your business.”

“Anyway, I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I may have to stay until morning.” Suddenly he saw Charlie Kemp’s face again and thought, What am I doing? Would she and Gabe really be safe?

He clumped down the trailer steps and went toward the Lexus, debating with himself.

“Wait,” she called, disappearing inside.

Lounging against the hood of the car, he let himself indulge in a brief fantasy in which he went back inside and everything was different, Jessie really became Joya, submissive to his every whim. A long, romantic desert night.

She came back with a ham sandwich. The offering wasn’t quite as good as his fantasy, but he smiled.

“I know you’ll get hungry later,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, taking a bite. Ah, his favorite spicy mustard.

She had remembered.

The drive took longer than he could ever have imagined, but he made it by seven-thirty, prime gambling time. He found Amanda Lewis in the change booth by the dollar slots. He stood in line at the counter, astonished at the number of people that found gambling so infernally fascinating. When he got up to her window, he asked for five dollars in quarters.

“That all?” she said.

Was she supposed to say things like that? Make a man feel like some small-time loser?

“For now,” he said, resisting mightily the impulse to toss the whole thirty and make a big show about it. He tipped her a buck. “Uh,” he said.

“Yes?” She gave him her nice smile.

He had been the last in the line, and right now, he remained last, so he felt he had some time to come up with something catchy. If only he could think what to say. There was something so hard about direct confrontation. Women, excepting Jessie, who didn’t give a damn about him—yet—often responded so awkwardly to his awkwardness.

“Oh, it’s you!” she said. “Hey, aren’t you married to that woman, what was her name—the woman that won the monster pot?”

“But—how would you know that? You left,” he said.

“My friend—the guy that was with me—he was interested in all that commotion, so we went back. We were only three rows down from you. Wow,” she said, looking hard at him. “You’re rich now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, filthy rich.” He nursed a brief vision of what it would be like if he really could experience even fifteen minutes of filthy richness.

“Buy me a drink?” she said. “I’m done with the shift as of ”—she peered down the aisle, and along came her replacement—“now. I want to know all about what people like you do when you hit big like that. I mean, did you tie one on?” Closing her window with a clatter she came rolling out, this time using her own steam to move the wheels of her chair. As she got closer he saw that she was laughing. “Oh, I forgot,” she said. “You already had.”

Her dark hair streamed down the back of her chair, and Kenny followed her, trying to remember how to flirt.

She steered up a ramp to a cocktail lounge overlooking the action on the floor. “Bourbon and soda, if you please. Or tell you what. I’ll buy, since I invited you.” She held her hand out and shook his. She had a good grip.

“Why are you here, anyway?” she asked him a few minutes later, taking a sip of bourbon. “You’ve got enough money now to blow this town. Or are you one of those guys, whatchamacallem, a compulsive gambler?”

“Not at all,” Kenny said.

“Well, then.”

“I came to talk to you,” he said, all plans to be devious completely abandoned in the face of her merry candor.

“Why? You want to talk to me? You want to know what it’s like to be in a wheelchair? You one of those freaks?”

“Don’t be touchy. I want to know,” Kenny said, “whether you know Charlie Kemp.”

“Charlie who?”

“Kemp.” Kenny described him for her. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “The man on the stool next to you.”

“You remember him.”

“No. Just that he was on the stool there. You were between us. Why do you care, anyway?”

“I need to find out about him.”

She shrugged. “Can’t help. Never saw him before in my life.” As far as Kenny could tell, she told the truth. She seemed relaxed but curious. “Why?”

“Come on. I saw you talk to him.”

“You never.”

“Then maybe it was your friend. I can’t remember. Somebody said something.”

“What’s the matter? Why are you quizzing me about this stuff?”

“I’m not just asking out of idle curiosity. Kemp—he threatened some people.” He didn’t mention that Kemp’s days of threatening people were over.

“Who?”

“What difference does it make, who?” he said, exasperated.

“I bet he’s threatening your wife. She got the jackpot. He wants some of it, right? It is such a bitch being rich.” She drew lines in the moisture on her glass with a pretty, pink-tipped finger, her face resentful. Some people have all the luck, her face said, but not me.