Emily's Seams

We left the next morning. Los Angeles is two-hundred and sixty-five miles of road away from Las Vegas. This is nearly four-hundred and twenty-seven kilometres. At a reasonable speed of one-hundred kilometres an hour, this should have taken us at least four hours. Angus did it in three. I have no idea how. Maybe this whole ghost-now-trapped-in-my-old-failing-body was just a rouse. He might have actually been some kind of alien, able to bend the space-time continuum.

I had fallen asleep to a Star Trek: The Next Generation marathon the night before. No, Angus was probably just your run-of-the-mill spook...that was now in the flesh. If he could bend the space-time continuum, he probably would have done something much more impressive than shave an hour off our drive to Las Vegas.

We were there by noon. Angus and I had both been keen to stay on the strip but it turns out that pets weren’t that welcome. We thought about sneaking Mr. Puggums in, but he wouldn’t shut up for some reason. We ended up a mile from the strip in a Comfort Inn.

The cat calmed down once he had a bed to hide under.

“Alright, let’s head out.” Angus had just set our bags down and was already at the door.

“Yeah, alright. Let me just change.”

Angus sighed. “You look fine!”

I was in an oversized T-shirt and fat-ass sweat pants. Yes, I’m sure I looked great.

“I’ll be fifteen minutes, tops.”

If I didn’t know any better, I would have said that the cowboy was pouting.

Fourteen minutes later I was ready to go.

“See? That wasn’t so bad. And now you don’t have to be embarrassed to walk around with me,” I said.

Angus’s pouting face cracked a smile as we were heading out. It was only a mile to the strip, but this was the desert and Angus was old. We took the car and paid an outrageous amount to park it on the strip.

It was hopping. People milled about like ants in a frenzy over some dropped lollipop. Most people were easily passed, just like me and Angus. But some you just had to stop and have another look at. Double-D sized breasts dotted the crowd. Mile high purple hair on old ladies dressed in some kind of animal print poked through the throngs of people. The energy was palpable.

We settled on a buffet that just wouldn’t quit. We gorged, moaned, waited it out and then gorged again. But the staff didn’t care.

“I can’t believe we just ate all that.”

Angus patted his stomach and lit up a smoke.

“That Dolly, I could see her here in a heartbeat.”

I laughed. “Yeah. I wonder what it looked like when she was here.”

Angus took a drag and then eased out the smoke like one cool cowboy. “You never did tell me what happened to her.”

I shrugged. “Do you really want to know?”

Angus seemed to be chewing on my question. “Sure I do,” he finally said.

I sat up a little straighter. “Well, I wasn’t having any luck with her name just popping up so I called everyone Dolly could remember. I finally got a hold of this bartender she used to know, Tula. Said that on Dolly’s last night at Big Jimmie’s, the club she used to work at, the boss set her up with a private party for some cops. She was never seen again.”

“So she never made it to the Rivera stage, did she?”

I shook my head. “No. She had the costume because she was being fitted for it. Tula knows that the cops did something. When she tried to tell them where Dolly had last been seen alive she got nothing besides having her windshield smashed in.”

Angus was quiet for a long time after that. I just kept taking the complimentary Mai Tais the server was bringing me. I had polished off my fourth by the time Angus came to.

“That ain’t right.”

I snapped my head up. “What?”

“What happened to Dolly. It ain’t right.”

My head was swimming. Although the thoughts were there, they needed to be pushed beside one another before they made enough sense to be spoken aloud.

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Em, are you drunk?”

I looked at the cowboy and lined up a response. I pinched the air, to say oh, just a little.

“Come on. Let’s get you back to the room.”

I stumbled to our car. The short drive to our hotel was refreshing. Angus dragged me upstairs and got me settled in. He’d been asking me questions the whole way, none of which I remember answering.

Later that night I realized I must have answered some of his questions, and someone else had answered the rest.

When I woke, there was a fat, balding man tied up on our floor.