Free Las Vegas Noir by Jarret Keene

didn’t, especially, not other people’s kids anyway—but that for the hour he spent going kid to kid, he didn’t have to pretend. He just sat down next to them and asked them about their day, their life, how things were going and never how things had been , which was different from what he dealt with normally. With the people of parenting age, it was always about their childhood, how someone had fucked them up and only God or, if he wasn’t available, David could help them deal with the past, like it was some constant growling beast that lived next door that only needed to be fed and watered and everything would be okay. The senior citizens all wanted to bitch about how things were better back then, whenever the fuck that was, and then wanted assurances that they were right, that the world had turned to shit but that they, of course, weren’t to blame.
    Today, though, David had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to find the focus to deal with the kids, not with what he saw on the embalmer’s table down at the temple mortuary. At 3 o’clock he was supposed to bury someone named Vincent Castiglione, whose tombstone would read Vincent Castleberg , since Bennie liked to keep things simple. Bennie told David that morning that it was a Chicago guy so they didn’t need to worry about putting on too much of a show. “I rounded up a couple old-timers to throw dirt,” he told David, “so just keep it short and sweet on the last-words crap. Believe me, this guy doesn’t deserve what we’re giving him.”
    David went down to the temple’s mortuary at 11:30 to check on the stiff, like he always did with the Chicago guys if they came in whole, so that way he wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone he grew up with on the off chance the casket opened. Since it was a Jewish cemetery, it was always closed casket, but in the years David had been tending to the funerals, particularly those embalmed and entombed by employees of Bennie’s, he noticed slightly less attention to detail when it concerned enemies of the state. Nonetheless, when he got down to the mortuary and found Vincent Castiglione belly-up on the embalming table still fully dressed in his police uniform, right down to his holster and gun, even though Vincent’s head was sitting on the counter inside a plastic bag, the ligature marks on his neck bright purple, it took David a bit by surprise.
    “Sorry, rabbi,” the kid working the table said. “Mr. Savone said this is how he asked to be buried and so we, uh, we just, uh …”
    David put a hand up to stop the kid from speaking. He could never remember this dumb fuck’s name. He was a Mexican, some gangbanger Bennie rescued from the pound a few years back and set up in mortuary science classes out in Arizona. Two years later he was wearing a shirt and tie and was cleaning the dead for the Family. A good job, probably. Ruben Something or Other. He’d done a nice job on Rabbi Kales, David remembered that.
    “Shut the fuck up,” David said, and Ruben’s eyes opened wide. David couldn’t remember the last time he swore out loud in public, but from the look on Ruben’s face, it had the desired effect. “Strip this motherfucker clean, you hear me?”
    “Yes, rabbi.”
    “You get his clothes, personal effects, all that shit on his belt, including the gun, put it in a bag, something heavy. You got something canvas here?”
    “Yes, rabbi.” Ruben reached under a cupboard and came up with a large black canvas bag marked with hazardous waste symbols on either side. “We use these for our uniform cleaning.”
    David paused, tried to think, looked at Ruben, saw that the kid had a jade pinkie ring, two-carat diamond earrings, a thick platinum bracelet. Fucking thief was probably making six figures and he was still pinching from the dead. “You keep anything?”
    “Like his organs?”
    “No, you stupid wetback motherfucker,” David said, feeling it now, finding the parlance again, how easy it was to hear Sal’s