I Don't Like Where This Is Going Read Online Free PDF Page A

if all he had was what he saw as the shambles of his life. Clinging to the wreckage might keep him afloat long enough to get rescued. Then he said he was going down with the ship, like he had read my mind, and he thanked me for listening, thanked me for my concern and my efforts, said I shouldn’t blame myself, and he hung up, and I listened to hear the blast of the shotgun, which I imagined would drown out every other sound in Las Vegas.
    What I heard instead was a girl weeping in the conference room. My shift was over. I wanted a drink. I tried to imagine Konnor in his kitchen, staring at the shotgun, thinking about how he was going to be late for work if he didn’t get his ass in gear. If I could picture the scene clearly, maybe it could happen.
    I peeked into the conference room and saw a girl who looked to be about fourteen wearing one of the center’s EVERY DAY I MAKE A DIFFERENCE T-shirts over her floral-print dress. The left side of her face was swollen and bruised. Helen Lozoraitis, our director, comforted her. A volunteer I hadn’t met introduced himself. “I’m Gene. Woodling.”
    â€œWylie.”
    â€œLike the coyote?”
    â€œBut not spelled that way.”
    Gene told me that the cops had just brought the girl in. They found her crying her eyes out in Angel Park. She told them she’d run away from a brothel.
    I said, “What happens now?”
    â€œWe’re trying to reach her mom in Kansas. Meantime, we’ll take her to Refuge House.”
    The girl held her head between her knees and wept. Helen hugged her. We protect our money in this country with more vigilance than we do our children. I showed Gene Layla’s photo, but he didn’t recognize her. “All right,” I said, “I’m out of here.”
    â€œAdios, Coyote.”
    THERE ARE, I HAD read, over three hundred Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas, so I was not surprised when one of them, a Hefty Presley, boarded the monorail with me at the Sahara Station. He unbuttoned his gold-lined cape and folded it on his lap when he sat. I took the seat across the aisle and asked him how he liked his job. He looked at me over his gold aviator shades and told me he was living a dream. Not everyone gets to wear a white jumpsuit with sequined comets to work every day. He told me he’d just played a real estate open house in Centennial Hills and was on his way to a bachelorette party in a banquet room at the South Point Hotel. I asked if he had a Colonel Parker impersonator doing his bookings. He laughed and said, ”I’m going to use that.”
    At the Quad Station we were instructed to exit the monorail and proceed to the station. Service had been temporarily suspended. The exit to Las Vegas Boulevard was closed. I walked down Koval Lane and found out what the problem was a few minutes later. They were making a movie at Flamingo and the Strip. One vehicle seemed to have exploded, and the flames shot an implausible thirty feet in the air. I saw several cars on their sides and another wrapped around a light pole. The movie cops were holding the gawkers away from the shoot, and I imagined the hero calmly walking away from the mayhem he’d created, having saved our great and sovereign nation from ignominy.
    I walked through the atrium at the Luxor and stopped besidethe spot where Layla had died. I stepped back and looked around. Anyone at the Starbucks yesterday could have witnessed the fall. And anyone over at the wedding chapel. I asked the barista at Starbucks if he’d been working yesterday.
    He said, “Noon to six.”
    â€œThen you saw the woman who fell?”
    He wiped his hands on his apron. “The who that what?”
    â€œA young woman leaped to her death”—I pointed—“right there. At five-ten.”
    He shook his head. “I’d know about something like that if it happened.”
    â€œIt did happen. I was here.”
    â€œIf you say