Story #2 – “What Happens in Vegas“ – March, 2024

Hell.

Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash

🚨 The genre here is horror and not by half-measures. Trigger warnings galore.

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7:50PM

Samuel Simmons lurched backwards and came to in a surge of danger and adrenaline. Information flooded in.

Plane.

Business class.

They were landing.

He was towering over a guy in a window seat. The guy’s arms were jerking in front of his face. Samuel was pressing him up against the cabin wall. A college kid. The guy wore a letterman’s jacket with a football on the sleeve.

And he had a party store mask of a playing card. A big rectangle of the King of Clubs. Blood all over it.

Samuel’s free arm was pulled back with his fist cocked. He must have been about to smash this kid in the face.

He had no idea why.

Samuel looked up and around, scanning for other threats. Runway sped by outside the window, the plane steadied, then scrambled to clear the runway.

Confident he was safe elsewhere, Samuel hammered the kid out of violent inertia. The chicken-bone crack of dislodged jaw made the woman in the row behind him scream. She covered her child with her upper body.

The college kid blinked back at Samuel through the torn mesh openings in his mask. He whimpered to demonstrate he wasn’t a threat.

Begging, not broken.

Close to broken, though. Very close.

*

Samuel knew the sounds before they broke. He knew the straight shot descent all the way down to prayer. He must have been taking a break beating the guy. Not because he was tired. In the fights he started, he didn’t get tired.

Samuel took breaks because he liked what it did to the other guy’s surrender, the fear that emerged from having the time to think, the fear it might never end. The pause that’s sweeter than the punch. The eternal beating.

But he didn’t know how he got here or who this kid in the football jacket was.

*

He had popped.

This one was bad. One of the worst. They would arrest him coming off the plane. Handcuff him on the jetway.

Outside the window the last edge of sun dropping beneath a city skyline.

The Strip.

He was in Vegas.

He had no idea why.

7:55PM

The all-clear ding sounded at the gate, but instead of commotion around the violence, there was the normal stirring of seatbelts clicking unfastened, aisle jockeying, stretching for carry-ons. The flight attendants stood with their hands clasped at attention and chatted with each other.

“Happy Memorial Day, Mr. Simmons,” the flight attendant chirped as he passed her and headed out. She looked straight at him smiling. In his confusion he could only nod back.

But the inevitable post-fight dread struck before he got to the terminal gate.

“You pop but then you always panic, you fucking coward. Tell your drunken friends that,” his second ex-wife said on their last drive home.

“The whole world from the beginning of time is about nothing but consequences,” he whispered at her when he passed by her at the arraignment.

“Oh, I sure as fuck hope so,” she hissed back at him before her attorneys pulled her away by the arm.

*

Samuel was mid-forties. He had the cheap meat leftovers of a college linebacker: the thick neck, the broad back, the crew cut, but these days he could only strap his belt over his gut by feel.

He’d racked up a hat trick of failed marriages. The wedding ring from his second marriage had fattened into his finger so tight he couldn’t get the thing off.

“Tighter than a restraining order,” he told the third ex-wife the night of their wedding. “The bitch won’t let go.”

Number three still laughed at his jokes then.

She still couldn’t understand why he’d been so blind as to marry those two bitches.

Fucking rabbits, all three of them.

9:32PM

The girl at the Four Kings reception asked whether he was in Vegas for business or pleasure.

He had no idea.

All he knew was he always stayed at the Four Kings, so he came here.

He looked out towards the casino floor stalling for an answer. The monumental Four Kings casino signage flooded in through the skylights and lit the floor up. As if it wasn’t bright enough already.

Giant playing cards of the Four Kings flashed through the skylights. Digital fireworks and red waterfalls poured down their faces.

“No idea, sweetheart,” he answered, turning back to her. “But two room keys in case it turns out to be business.”

“Well, I hope business is good, Mr. Simmons. It always seems to be,” she added warmly, handing him the keys. “Your room is ready. Everything’s set up exactly like you like it.”

Rabbit chitchat, chitchat, chitchat...

He imagined her looking after him in the lobby mirror, watching some fat fuck drag his suitcase.

9:41PM

Waiting for the elevator it suddenly came to him. He remembered the entire secret to blackjack. It was so simple.

Before you go up to your room you find the ugliest blackjack dealer on the floor and gamble at her table. There is always one. It’s math.

But it has to be before you go up.

The game was “99.”

Ninety-nine beautiful girls and one ugly one. Like an airport strip club.

He went looking for her. While dragging his suitcase through the casino backwaters, he saw a thirty-something hooker leaning over her kid on a bench. The kid was maybe 5th grade.

She wore a school backpack, those jeans with the holes, a t-shirt of some pop star. A regular fucking kid. The mother, if you could call her that, wobbled on her heels. Pink velvet Raiders jacket. Cheeks of her ass coming out of her shorts.

Samuel got close enough to hear her tell her daughter not to move, telling her to study, to watch her phone “or something.”

“Or something.” Fucking child abuse.

“An hour tops. I’m going to see some friends, sweetheart.”

“Friends.”

It turned your stomach. Then the hooker wouldn’t leave her daughter alone and kept flicking the long strap of her cheap pink handbag away from her kid’s head, kissing her like a drunk, smothering her, knocking the kid’s glasses sideways until the kid was practically shoving her mother away to get free.

“Zero fucking dignity. Zero… Heroin hand-jobs in hotel bathrooms.”

Samuel was beginning to talk out loud.

The Four King’s was infested with these streetwalkers. “The whores here will survive a fucking nuclear war and still patrol the Goddamn casino like cockroaches.”

He was working himself into a foul mood, and it began to spill over into something like smiling.

“It’s Take your Daughter To Work Day,” he interrupted two businessmen coming towards him and indicated to the prostitute with his head. The men wore hotel conference tags. They only looked for a second. They didn’t know what to say.

Weak guys.

“Place is infested. Absolutely infested,” Samuel continued, but he wasn’t talking to them anymore.

He caught his reflection in a gift shop lugging his suitcase. “You fat fuck,” he said to the crew cut fat fuck in the shop window with the red face and the high blood pressure.

What the fuck are you doing in Vegas, Samuel?

Every time you’re here you swear you’ll never come back.

10:08PM

He found his “ugly one,” and Jesus Christ, she rang the goddamn bell. Stringy black hair. Jowls. On her last spindly legs. Money in the bank. A “hard 21.”

He forced his luggage under the card table until he had to kick it to keep it there.

“You know statistically you’re worth a goddamn fortune,” Samuel told her and swept his hands broadly over the green felt, marking territory from other gamblers.

*

The secret to blackjack was this: when you play “99,” you know everybody’s cards before the hag deals them, but you can’t go up to your room first. It’s easy, and the same cards show up every time. Same order. Everybody’s.

“The nine of Spades,” he told her.

And she dealt a nine of spades.

“Two of Diamonds.” He tapped an aggressive paradiddle on the felt with his ring fingers.

Two.

“Jack of Hearts. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hit me.”

Jack.

And 21.

“Your hole card is a Queen. You would have bust anyway,” he told her.

“That’s correct. It always a Queen on the first hand,” she said, squinting and taking a drag on her cigarette.

10:22PM

Three college kids crashed into open seats at the table. Jocks. Taking no notice of anyone. He didn’t turn to greet that bullshit. Have some dignity.

His hag perked up. “Your friend, Mr. Simmons here, says I’m statistically worth a goddamn fortune.”

“Playing 99,” Samuel muttered.

“You’ve got time? Play 99,” the three football players said in catchphrase chorus. They erupted into exaggerated, forced laughter and high-fived over each other’s heads. He remembered all that shit.

One of them kicked into Samuel’s suitcase without apologizing.

“Hey, big guy, let’s clear up some room.”

Samuel turned. The guy wore a playing card mask of the King of Spades. The three were all wearing masks. Hearts. Spades. Diamonds. Kings.

Samuel didn’t move his suitcase, not a fucking inch. He read these clowns immediately. Spades was the weak one. Three guys and there’s always a weak one. This one practically has a “pussy” sign on his head.

Hearts was the leader. Yeah, he knew all this shit. Flying high, these fraternity clowns.

Not three guys, Samuel. Four guys. You forgot about the King of Clubs on the plane.

What if he shows up? These guys are big, and they aren’t forty-six years old…

Samuel needed to get moving.

He slid his entire pile forward.

Seeing he was all in, Diamonds made a whoop.

“The big guy is going for it,” Diamonds called out.

He was the noisy one, the joker. There’s always one of them, too. The jokers are rich, but mean.

“Maybe you take the Halloween masks off as a sign of respect for 99 here,” Samuel said without turning, indicating the dealer.

“Or even better as a sign of respect for me,” he added quietly, but with a hard edge of threat. Spades still had his hand on the back of Samuel’s stool. Samuel looked over his shoulder at Spades’ arm. The pussy moved his hand. Samuel was a hair away from cold-cocking him anyway, dropping him to the playing card carpet.

Boom. Straight shot. He’d be down to fighting two of them.

But two was still a lot, and these guys would fight. Zero doubt. Even this fucking hag would be in there, coming around the table to take shots at him. Jesus, look at that face of hers.

Hearts tapped the felt.

“King of Hearts.”

And King of Hearts it was.

The three erupted in whoops and shouts of “99, baby! 99!”

“King of Diamonds, 99. Hit me,” said Diamonds.

The joker snapped his fingers up and down over his cards like he was sprinkling magic dust.

King of Diamonds it was.

The dealer waited on Spades. “You can wait all night,” Hearts leaned all the way across the table towards the dealer. “But you’re still gonna give him a King of Spades, 99.”

“And there it is, baby!” The three clowns erupted like a stripper just showed up at their frat party. “Blackjack and a three of a kind!”

Attention turned to Samuel.

“Don’t let us down, big guy,” Hearts came all the way around the table and then he put his hand on Samuel’s neck, shaking him front and back. “King of Clubs for the big guy,” Hearts said. His grip was tight. The guy was cocky, and he was strong. Really strong. A hand like a claw.

“Four of a kind, big guy,” Diamonds said.

Samuel needed nine not ten. He wasn’t trying to win a poker hand, but Hearts had already called it. He was fucked and why were they touching him? He was confused.

The hag waited on him. Her stringy dyed hair falling over her face. She held her cigarette back away from the table but still exhaled over him.

The three of a kind kings faces fanned out to his right, their rectangular heads pointed at him in a clean row.

You know them, Samuel.

Oregon State. Senior year. The four of you walked side-by-side on the quad.

The quad.

That’s where they cuffed you. Spades couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He’s the one that fucked you.

“What’s it gonna be, Clubs?” the hag croaked through her exhaling smoke.

Hearts gave him another tug forward and back. Samuel had to reach for the table to balance himself. The guy’s hand was really strong. He wondered if he could take him, and he got weaker with the guy’s hand on his neck.

“Fuck it. Hit me.”

The hag took her sweet time turning the card over.

“Busted on a King of Clubs,” the hag announced like it wasn’t fucking obvious. She flicked each of the four Kings to the center of the table in perfect alignment, picking aside Samuel’s King of Clubs from the other three like it was garbage.

The three Kings cleaned up big. Big-big. A fucking fortune. He’d lost everything.

“Busted on a quad, but, sorry to say, it ain’t poker! Wrong fucking game,” Spades said to Samuel. “What are the odds of that?”

“99 to 1,” the hag said scraping her nicotine fingernails through her stringy hair.

“Isn’t that right Mr. Simmons?”

11:07PM

The elevator was closing when a woman’s hand flapped between the doors to keep them open. It was the hooker who’d been talking to her kid. She wobbled in, a whole fucking production.

She didn’t turn around to face the door when she got in. She stared straight at Samuel leaning against the back wall. Three middle-aged women from Bumfuck, Fatville moved to clear space for her. They had been talking about some magician’s show, but that conversation wound down fast.

The hooker focused on Samuel.

“I know you,” she whispered, loud enough for the whole elevator to hear.

“Yeah. Don’t think so. I’m $100 and up.” The hooker didn’t say anything. One of the three women hit a floor immediately above them, but it wasn’t their floor and the light wouldn’t stick.

The hooker moved closer to Samuel.

She supported herself on the back wall with one arm. With the other she pulled at the long dangling gold chain of her purse. She struggled to thread it through her arms from one shoulder to the other without moving her arm off the wall, watching Samuel the whole time like he was going to steal it.

“Let’s pull it together, sweetheart. It’s almost showtime.”

The hooker closed her eyes like she was taking a rest or thinking of something to say. “They’ll catch you, but you’ll get away with it.” She was barely whispering.

Then she reached out to push Samuel away from her hard. High and sloppy, but aggressive. He knew the type.

A rabbit.

Won’t hold still when you fuck them and then a thousand fucking new needs every day.

The hooker was done with him. She clapped her hands and wheeled herself around with a let’s-do-it energy, but she lost her balance on the slut heels and stumbled sideways into Samuel.

It was going to be a long sixty minutes with her “friends.”

“Jesus Christ, your fucking daughter would be proud,” he said pushing her off him roughly.

She spun around and spit on him. One of the three women, the big one, turned around and said, “This needs to stop.”

The hooker raised her drunken hands and shook her hands in surrender to show she was done. Good thing because he came this close to taking the bitch down.

But she wasn’t done.

As he got out and pushed by her, she had more to say.

“It’s very bright in here, isn’t it, Samuel Simmons? You’re gonna see how bright it can get.” He didn’t turn, but he felt her getting off behind him.

“Whatever, bitch.”

“Very, very bright.”

“Nice wig, whore.”

But you’re afraid of her, aren’t you, Samuel?

11:10PM

When Samuel got to his room at the far end of the corridor, she was way back but headed towards him, navigating around a room service cart. He closed his door behind him and threw the security latch.

That’s not like you, Samuel. Throwing the latch.

You think she’s going to break in?

He listened at the door.

Someone let her in to the room next door.

11:15PM

Looking outside his room window, the Four Kings on the casino signage exploded into life. Samuel went to shut the blinds, but the curtain wouldn’t slide shut, and he yanked on it. His tug broke the track, and the entire curtain fell to the floor. Jesus Fucking Christ. Every twenty seconds those kings were going to be lighting him up.

The hooker called it. Give her that. He got on the phone with the desk.

“The room is exactly how you like it Mr. Simmons. I’m looking at your notes. Is the connecting door right? Gosh, I wish you’d mentioned something earlier,” she said.

“Oh, gosh,” he repeated then hung up on her.

They were loud, and there was more than one of them next door with the hooker. They were hollering and blasting their shit music.

He checked the handle on the connecting door.

It came ajar.

He closed the door, tried to lock it, but the lock spun freely in its housing. The people next door could get into his room. He could get into theirs. Jesus, the whore will be coming in here telling me how bright it is.

“Holy shit! Focus,” someone said in the next room. “Need your full attention, babe.”

It was them. That was the lead one, the King of Hearts.

“I’m awake. Let’s do it, boys,” the hooker blurted out. “Let’s dooooo it.” There was an edge of hysteria in her voice.

“I don’t like the masks. Take the fucking masks off… No, I’m telling you to take the fucking masks off.”

What a nightmare. That’s why you don’t want to be a whore.

“Fuck man, how much did you give her,” said the voice with the burr in it. It was Spades, the pussy.

His question slithered like a nine-foot racer snake across Samuel’s carpet and under the bed.

500 milligrams.

You doubled it, Sam.

Samuel didn’t like the door situation at all. He took his car keys and draped them over the lock. If the lock turned a motherfucking inch, the keys would drop.

But then what?

There will be three of them and a runaway streetwalker in the hallway crawling for the elevators. Dragging the purse by the chain.

Everything was on the tip of his tongue. Right there.

He leaned against the windowsill to brace himself with his dumb, fat fuck, bruised-meat hands, but he couldn’t remember.

You hate Vegas, Samuel. You’ve always hated Vegas. And every time you say you’ll never come back…

*

He tried to focus on the casino attractions, memorizing it as it cycled through its screens: a middleweight title fight, a magic show, a shit comedian, the worst odds on the Strip… getting ready, getting ready, then an explosion of four kings. Every twenty seconds forever.

Boom. Kings. Digital fireworks and red waterfalls running down their faces.

Samuel was about to take his fat fuck underwear off to go to bed, but he stopped short and left them on.

He was fighting with big league dread out of fucking nowhere.

*

He lay there for ages, nowhere close to falling sleep.

As a kid, he used to listen to his dad’s Friday fight nights from the top of the stairwell. That was fucking dread.

He dreaded stripping down to his socks and his tight old underwear all torn up, hanging onto the wood banister. He’d listen to the match, round by round, waiting to get called down when his dad’s fighter lost. His mother always hid in the kitchen playing her oldies radio.

She used to suck in her breath when she prayed. She made that fucking breathe-in sound. But she never came out to actually help him, even when he was the littlest kid. She helped by praying for her husband’s fighters and eating leftover fish sticks.

They all knew she knew those prayers wouldn’t work. Just like they all knew his fighters wouldn’t win. The three of them knew everything. They were a family with no secrets.

By the time Samuel was nine years old he’d learned everything he needed to know about boxing getting his head crushed into the ottoman, the furniture buttons grinding into his temple.

“You want me to lose. I can smell it on you both. The house fucking stinks of losing. Your mother stinks of it.”

He was thirteen the first time he popped.

The neighbors had called the cops. While they knocked on the door, his father paced back-and-forth in front of it. His mother got on her knees in the kitchen praying with her hands on her forehead staring up at the ceiling like Jesus was listening through the floor.

He wasn’t.

But this time his mother came out of the kitchen for once. She finally had something to offer. She begged his father to hit her so they could say it was the two of them fighting. A marriage not a home.

He didn’t waste any time. He clocked her right and then clocked her left for having the idea in the first place.

*

And that did it.

After the cops left, Samuel came down the stairs dressed and wearing boots.

He was thirteen, but a big thirteen, and his father ended up in his own baggy underwear face down on an ottoman begging a thirteen-year-old to stop.

Afterwards Samuel went into the kitchen where his mom was sucking in and sucking in and sucking in.

“Don’t pray one more fucking word. Not even in your head.” He held his finger up to his mother’s face.

“Not even in your fucking head,” he repeated years later for his own wives. He was “this close that night” he told them, but he wouldn’t say this close to what.

*

Popping was like fucking oxygen.

The relief of it. It was like being free for once in his life, blank, still. For a few minutes all the dread left him.

Everyone wanted to see what he would do, and he showed them. He showed it to the ninth grader in the bottle room, to the wide receiver he put in St. Ann’s, the buyer at the hardware chain in Tucson that cost him his best job, but worth it.

The memories cleared Samuel’s mind, and his dread of the hooker and the football players in the neighboring room faded.

Samuel Simmons took his underwear off with disgust and fell asleep naked.

Like a man.

Come and get me, motherfuckers...

2:15AM

Their noise woke him up.

Their bed slammed so hard into the wall it shook his mirror. The reflection of the casino signage kings bounced around.

Samuel checked the time on the bedside alarm clock. Why was this still going on? The hooker told her kid it was supposed to be an hour. Jesus Christ, that girl down there waiting all fucking night.

Child abuse. Nothing lit him up like child abuse.

He popped and charged in through the adjoining door.

*

It was not what he expected.

It was a full hotel suite. The rooms were dark and empty. He could barely make out two queen beds, both perfectly made, untouched.

Somehow, in the span of thirty seconds, they’d gotten from shaking the headboard to leaving the room in perfect condition.

There was no way.

They were there, hiding somewhere, fucking with him.

He looked into the bathroom, the closet. Nothing. He moved carefully through the living room and kitchen area. He opened the curtains and looked out onto the casino signage.

The Four Kings lit up outside the window with their fireworks and blood red waterfalls.

And the moment they lit up he heard the football players again.

They were behind the suite’s dividing wall. Near the bathroom.

“Get her arms,” one of them was whispering. “I can’t get a fucking grip, asshole.”

On the kitchenette counter the gold chain from the hooker’s purse dangled to the floor. It had not been there a moment ago.

And now casino chips were practically spilling off the side table.

The light from the signage faded, and just as quickly the purse and the casino chips were gone.

*

He watched the signage cycle count down the twenty seconds again: the fight, the magicians…

The room exploded in the light of the Four Kings. This time there was commotion in the bathroom.

“Fucking help!” one of them was yelling, digging down into low frustrated growling. Diamonds. Another one was whimpering.

Spades. The pussy.

Circling around the wall of the living room suite, he saw movement in the bathroom mirror.

Spades was cramped between the toilet and the bathroom wall. Hearts and Diamonds were bending over something on the floor. Spades had his hands in his hair like a cartoon. Hyperventilating. Hysterical.

Hearts and Diamonds were struggling with the hooker’s body in the tub. They were spraying her with the shower head to wake her up. She was still wearing her pink velvet Raiders jacket.

Diamonds shouted back towards Samuel. “Shut him the fuck up.”

You grabbed a towel from the rack over the head of the King of Spades and shoved it into his mask breaking it. You smashed his head into the towel rack. You never liked him.

“Wake her up. God, wake her up. Please, please wake up.” Spades begged through his mask even as Samuel smashed him into the towel rack.

He’s the one that gave you up, Samuel.

For beating the shit out of him. He never forgave you. None of them ever forgave you.

“What did you do to her?” Hearts was shouting at him. It wasn’t a question. “She’s a fucking junkie, Sam.”

Samuel turned and saw a naked guy looking right at him. The guy was a powerhouse. Too strong to fight. He wore a King of Clubs mask.

He was him in the mirror somehow. It was too much for him.

He threw himself towards the bathroom door and hit the light switch. He supported himself leaning on the bathroom counter.

You were naked.

Remember you wanted to go last? You didn’t want to wake her.

He had to see her again. Something terrible had happened, but he couldn’t remember.

He flicked the switch on.

The others had left this time, but the hooker hadn’t. She’d slid into the bottom of the tub. Wet towels were thrown everywhere on the floor.

He struggled with her body. His bare skin against hers, her knees clanging against the edges of the tub.

She was breathing, thank God. Alive. A light rasp. He needed her out of there.

Fucking half dead.

She wasn’t a rabbit now, was she, Samuel?

As small as she was, he strained to move her out of the tub. He didn’t care that the shower head was raining down on both of them. She was covered head to toe in oil.

Wrestling her out was impossible. She was slick with whatever the fuck it was.

It was massage oil, from the gift store, an entire bottle of it on her.

She’d said no...

Samuel gave up. She slid into the base of the tub with her arms propped up like she was on a rollercoaster.

He barely noticed the oil was getting warm on his bare skin.

Ever so slightly.

.*

“A little rope. A little oil,” you said.

The four of you joked about it the whole flight down to Vegas.

Business class, remember? Diamonds treated everybody. Diamonds was the only one that ever had money.

It was your last Rope & Oiler. Spades bought the masks in the gift shop. Diamonds checked in with a fake ID. You wore the masks everywhere you went. Called each other by your card names. It was funny. Even gambled in them.

The three of them cleaned up that night.

You all fucked wearing the masks even after she told you to take them off.

But it was you, Samuel, wasn’t it.

Not them.

You.

You were the weak link, Samuel, not Spades.

You snuck her the roofie — a bad combination for a junkie.

Because you didn’t want to “fuck a rabbit.”

You were afraid, and you saw how she looked at you. She knew.

And she’d whispered to you before she passed out.

“Coward.”

You took it out on her. You popped. Is it coming back?

*

Samuel’s mind raced, sitting on the edge of the bathtub wiping the oil off his arms when the hooker’s eyes suddenly opened, and she stared at him.

Samuel’s legs gave out and he fell away from the tub, then crab-walked backwards from her.

She was trying to get her mouth over the lip of the tub, pursing her lips up to spit at him again.

Samuel Simmons raced out of there.

He did not turn the lights off behind him.

3:45AM

Back in his room, his hands were trembling so bad it took him three tries to balance his keys over the adjoining room door handle.

Samuel hurried to stuff his clothes into his suitcase.

He was just dripping with massage oil, but wiping it with a towel only made it worse. He was slick everywhere: on his palms, his arms, his legs, his face. His hair. He was covered in oil.

And it was definitely hot now, stinging bad, and when the casino signage lit up, his palms were red raw.

3:53AM

When his keys splashed to the floor, his back was turned.

The hooker stood at the hotel room door naked except for her velvet jacket which was soaking wet. She was stock still, staring at him. She held her hand on the entryway light switch. Samuel almost fell into the suitcase to catch his balance.

She turned the light off and disappeared.

As suddenly, she turned it on again and reappeared.

Taunting him.

She has all the time in the world now.

An eternity, Samuel.

On and off.

On and off.

Red light, green light for you, motherfucker…

Pauses worse than punches…

Samuel needed to get out of the room. Out of the hotel. Out of Vegas.

Yes, you do, Samuel Simmons.

You most definitely need to get out of Vegas.

*

He only had one option. The only way out was through.

He closed his eyes to make her go away and blindly shut his suitcase, his trembling hands fumbling with the zipper in his darkness. Then he groped his way hunched over towards the door pulling his suitcase behind him. His hand slipped on the oily handle.

But still the room lights flashed on and off through his eyelids.

Samuel threaded himself along the oily surface of the desk, then, groping in dread, crossed to the edge of the second bed, guiding himself along the wallpaper to the bathroom door. He was close enough to hear her breathing.

Samuel let go of the bathroom doorway and held out his free hand in her direction to protect himself. While he probed for the door handle, he felt the soft velvet of her Raiders jacket. Her cold hand removed his hand. Her hair lightly brushed her face.

She was fucking with him.

The second he found the handle, he lurched to open it and escape, but the door caught, banged and stopped short. He didn’t understand why, and without thinking, he opened his eyes.

It was the sliding security latch he’d thrown, and she was also staring at him. Blank and unreachable.

“Bright. Very, very bright,” she whispered.

Once he was out in the light of the corridor, the heat from the hallway lights hit him like a sunburn head to toe.

3:55AM

At the far, far end of the corridor, a digital mural of the Four Kings faced him down, one by one. Scarlet waterfalls flowed down their faces.

When he’d moved twenty feet from his hotel room, the hooker appeared in front of him.

She was crawling down the corridor five or six rooms up, escaping, towards the elevators, naked except for her underpants. Her purse dragged behind. Her pink velvet jacket had tangled on one arm. She stopped for a moment and struggled to remove it before giving up.

Samuel kept walking towards her, but she disappeared as he got close. Then moments later she was ahead of him again, further up the hallway.

This time she was raising herself onto an empty room service cart, struggling to her feet by the metal shelf, pulling on the tablecloth. Dishes clattered to the ground in the empty corridor.

As she struggled ahead of him, he walked past her wet pink jacket abandoned on the floor. It was another city block to reach her before she disappeared again.

Then she appeared a third time.

She was leading him somewhere.

He was starting to burn.

She stopped her room service cart by the emergency exit entryway. She rested over it spent.

Samuel couldn’t take it anymore.

When he reached the stairwell, he wrestled the cart and her body inside the fire door to get her out of eyeshot in the hallway.

The moment he opened the door, the exit alarm sounded and white fire alarm strobes began to pulse in the stairwell.

They cast a hot white light on his skin. The pain seared him.

The hooker stirred on the top of the cart and angled herself sideways to look up at him.

“Bright,” she said, and she made a face to spit on him again.

She hates you. All the rabbits hate you.

“The whole world is about consequences. Remember?” She struggled to get it out.

*

He popped.

Samuel Simmons gave a violent kick to the cart and sent her tumbling down the cement stairs. She wound up at the base of the stairwell next to the thick red fire department plumbing. A jumble of dishes and cart and woman.

Her lifeless eyes looked back at him.

He kicked her purse down the stairs after her, and then stood holding the metal banister looking at her.

Well, she isn’t a rabbit now.

From his vantage point at the top of the stairs it wasn’t clear to Samuel Simmons who the real victim was.

*

Felicity Baker died draped over the toppled room service cart like she was bent over an ottoman, naked except for the underwear she’d struggled to cover herself with before escaping into the hallway.

Standing in the flashing emergency strobes, the oil began to burn Samuel for real.

There were blisters on the back of his hands.

4:01AM

The hooker’s daughter was in the elevator when Samuel stepped in, and the moment he cleared the elevator doors the girl rushed to push the close button.

The kid pressed on the button for the next floor down. The floor light wouldn’t stay on.

Then she tried two floors down.

Multiple floors.

She tried to do it casually but almost couldn’t help stabbing at the buttons. Her anxiety was getting away from her.

The girl turned to Samuel suddenly and asked if he could open a floor for her.

The pop star surrounded in rainbows on her t-shirt smiled cheerfully.

She told you she’d forgotten her room key…

But she was looking for her mother, searching floor to floor, fighting to hold it together, trying to hide her fear from the stranger in the elevator and from herself, trying to convince herself there was nothing to worry about, telling herself her mother was okay.

A few floors down, the elevator slowed to let another passenger on. The girl jumped at the chance to get access to a floor. Any floor.

In the last few seconds before the door opened, she turned back to Samuel.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to press on all the floors. I just remembered that this is my floor,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She was polite, a child that’s been taught to be polite.

The girl squeezed out and began speed-walking down a long empty corridor. She was calling out before the doors fully closed.

“Mom! We have to go. I’m not kidding. Mom!”

Stabs of hot pain shot through his palms and radiated up into his forearms. He gripped the elevator handle for balance and stumbled on his suitcase. He had to close his eyes until he got to the casino’s ground floor.

There was no choice but to open them there. To get to the pick up area he needed to cross under the white-hot skylights blazing over the Four Kings casino floor.

He felt the blisters on his face now.

“Bright,” the hooker said.

“Very, very bright.”

4:42 AM

In the ride-share to the airport, Samuel booked the first flight he could find, a pre-dawn flight back to Portland. He could barely press his fingertips against the heat of his phone’s touch screen. He leaned on one side then the other to lessen the pain.

Inside the terminal the scorching on his palms made pulling his suitcase torture. On the flat conveyor out to Terminal C, there was a small relief when Samuel took a moment to close his eyes, but when his feet bumped into the ramp off on the far side, he gasped. It was worse than ever.

He abandoned his suitcase.

By the time he got to his gate, his torso started to cook. He felt blisters on his feet and stomach. His underwear was slick with oil.

The check-in agent patiently watched him struggle to scan his phone for boarding.

"Oh, Mr. Simmons. Let me see if I can’t help you,” said the agent.

“I thought… too late… to get out of Vegas.” He struggled with his words.

The agent took no notice of his pain. She gave him a helpful, friendly smile returning his phone.

“Why you’re not late at all. It’s 4:42. Your usual time. I’ve even upgraded you into business class. Happy Memorial Day.”

Samuel navigated the jetway by the knuckles on the back of his hand. At the plane door, a flight attendant took his arm and gently guided him to his seat. He still gasped from the pressure.

“You should be all set,” she said. “Can I get some water for you, Mr. Simmons?”

“The window,” was what he could muster, vaguely pointing.

“Please,” he added.

“Please.”

5:00AM

Only when they dimmed the cabin lights and the plane began to taxi did the agony begin to subside.

But even then, in the darkness, endless flows of oil continued to stream down like sweat after a hard workout, silently, but gaining ground, spreading coolly into his clothing. Over his lips. Into his shirt collar and over the expanse of his stomach. Into his eyes. Deep into his groin. His penis. His testicles. He was covered now.

It was painless in the darkness, but dormant, spreading, waiting to explode in the light.

In exhaustion and the relief of the dimmed cabin lights he fell asleep.

He did not hear the muffled voice of a man stepping across him to take his place in the adjacent window seat.

7:39PM

An announcement from the captain woke him.

"Well, it looks like we’re going to need to get you guys back to Las Vegas.”

Groans erupted in the cabin.

“We’ve had a red warning light pop on, and the guys paid the big money think we ought to circle back to be on the safe side. Nothing to worry about. We’re doing it by the book. That’s why we put two engines in these babies,” he joked.

“We should have you back in Vegas right around sundown.”

The cabin erupted in concerned chatter.

Samuel sensed the flight attendant hovering over him.

“Water, Mr. Simmons? You fell asleep before I could bring it.”

When she passed it to him, he dropped it like a hot coal.

She bent to retrieve the plastic cup and then bumped into his lower leg. Lightning shot through his shin and into his foot. He cried out with pain.

A muffled voice laughed to his left and elbowed him conspiratorially.

“Let me crack the blind for you, sweetheart and get you some light while you’re poking around down there.”

The guy was talking to the flight attendant.

Somebody cocky. Young. He might as well have told her, “Suck me off.”

The guy slid the cabin window open, and light poured in like wind off a blast furnace.

Samuel gasped in falsetto. The man took no notice and whispered to Samuel confidentially.

“What an ass on her…” he laughed.

“Little rope, little oil.” The guy was getting way too close, whispering straight into his ear.

He had to look.

A college kid in a football jacket turned from the cabin window towards Samuel.

He wore a King of Clubs party mask.

“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, you fat fuck,” the King of Clubs said, leaning over and hissing at him.

*

Sam popped for the very last time.

He rose up and towered over the King of Clubs and began to beat him, even through the scalding pain of burning fists.

The kid did not fight back. He took it. Leaned into it even.

At first, Samuel attacked through the darkness with his eyes closed, punching by feel, but as his rage swelled, and the King of Clubs continue to laugh at him, something bottomless opened in the yawning pit of Samuel’s soul.

He didn’t care about pain anymore.

He embraced the pain.

Every blow became a balm.

Through the fog of the assault other passengers began to cry out around him.

“He’s going to kill him. Oh my God, he’s going to kill him.”

“Record it. Record it,” a woman behind him was saying.

Nobody dared get near.

As the King of Clubs protected his masked face, Samuel let himself surface into the light of a blast furnace of pain, then he dove down to beat the kid, and having punished him, closed his eyes again, gathered his forces, and rose up to crash down on him, again and again and again like a pumping oil derrick.

The King of Clubs laughed at him even as he was being murdered.

You will smash his face in for an eternity, Samuel Simmons.

From the corner of his eye, the tarmac rushed up outside the window. They were seconds from landing.

He needed more time to finish him off.

Samuel began to punch with both fists simultaneously, holding them high in the air, clenching and unclenching, then driving down with all his strength.

His wedding ring glowed red and ignited the oil on his skin. Very quickly flames raced over his entire body. His fists were engulfed in streaming trails of orange flame as they rose and fell.

When the plane first scraped the tarmac, the mask on the King of Clubs ignited like a magician’s flash paper and his victim’s face was revealed.

Samuel Simmons met Samuel Simmons.

7:50PM

Moments later, the last ray of daylight winked out over the snow caps of Mount Charleston as the tires skipped a second time. Samuel Simmons cocked a flaming fist to kill himself off with one final blow.

But night fell.

And yet again Samuel Simmons blacked out.

And the lights of Las Vegas began to shine very, very brightly, indeed.

---

#3 – “The Male Heart” – April, 2024