Free Two for the Show by Jonathan Stone Page B

dance, the four of us, a discordant music swirling around us. I eventually gave in to complete exhaustion, curling into my mattress in a dizzy haze, my hyperwakefulness suddenly overwhelmed, collapsing into slumber. Done in by the events of the past few days.
    Which is why it still seems dreamlike, nightmarish, caught initially in some state between dreaming and wakefulness, when I wake to find Sandi Stewartson on top of me.
    A blonde on top of you as you wake—this is of course a Vegas dream. But I awaken, in fact, a few stumbling seconds later, to the click of handcuffs (which could still be part of a Vegas dream, of course, but in this case are not), and I am hustled in my underwear out of my dark bedroom into my living room, where Archer Wallace my houseguest is attached to one of my dining room chairs, his arms, legs, and mouth duct-taped, and his eyes wide, staring at me and at the scene. I am shoved into the chair next to him. All the lights are off. The Stewartsons check the windows, where I drew the shades and curtains earlier, and once they see they are all closed (my own thoroughness of privacy, suddenly working against me), they turn on a low kitchen light that still keeps us all in shadow.
    “What did you think?” says Dave Stewartson snidely, leaning down into my face. “Did you think that when we turned around to check behind us, we didn’t see you? Did you really think that going in and out of the Bellagio, we didn’t see you waiting in the lobby? That we didn’t see you in the market? That we didn’t see your nondescript piece of shit car in our mirror? Why’d we keep turning around, you moron? To make sure you were still there.” He seems irritated, somehow insulted at my amateurism. “We could see how incompetent you were. We were afraid we’d lose you. And we had no way to know anything about you—who you were, what you knew. Hell, we couldn’t very well just turn around and ask you, God knows you weren’t going to tell us anything, and we figured threatening you might not accomplish anything either. So we had to wait until we could see where you live, get you at home, and the only way to do that was to offer you our prize here.” He gestures to Wallace. “We figured you’d just come in and look horrified and not touch, and when you left, we’d follow you home. But we also knew you might want to be a hero, and rescue the prize from us, which worked just as well, still told us where you live, and at least a little of who you are and how you see yourself.” He grabs another of my dining room chairs, spins it to face us, sits. His irritation seems to ebb a little. “We would have been here earlier, but we wanted you to get comfortable, start to feel safe, drop your guard a little, while we were checking other things. Making sure nobody else lives here with you. Making sure the girlfriend is out of the picture. It all took a while, and none of it’s as complete as we usually like, because as you know, Chas, you’re pretty well scrubbed from the world. You’re practically a spy. A spy here in Vegas. A nonentity. A ghost. Now what exactly would you be doing out here with a background like that?”
    I am obviously dealing with a certain level, or at least a certain kind, of professionalism. I’ve always known that the highly democratic Internet—its databases, sites, passwords and codes to be cracked by hackers—is a boon to law enforcement, and the same boon to scam artists. I see now that I’m not the only technologist in Vegas.
    Stewartson, I notice (my eyes adjusting to the low light), is holding an orange from my fruit bowl. Now he peels it. Detaches and sucks slowly on a section. “And this actually works out better. Because while you may not respond to the threat of harm to yourself, now there’s our pal Archer here, and we’re sure you’ll respond appropriately to the threat of harming him, fragile as we both know he is . . .”

    They were settling in, I saw. Stewartson