Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
TEN DAYS GONE
I
have made a call: to make a call. The meeting can’t
happen until this evening – there are predictable
complications – so I kill the day by primping and prepping.
I clean myself in a McDonald’s bathroom – green gel
on wet paper towels – and change into a cheap, papery
sundress. I think about what I’ll say. I am surprisingly eager.
The shithole life was wearing on me: the communal
washing machine with someone’s wet underwear always
stuck in the rungs at the top, to be peeled out by hesitant
pincered fingers; the corner of my cabin rug that was
forever mysteriously damp; the dripping faucet in the
bathroom.
At 5 o’clock, I begin driving north to the meeting spot, a
river casino called Horseshoe Alley. It appears out of
nowhere, a blinking neon clump in the middle of a scrawny
forest. I roll in on fumes – a cliché I’ve never put to practice
– park the car, and take in the view: a migration of the
elderly, scuttling like broken insects on walkers and canes,
jerking oxygen tanks toward the bright lights. Sliding in and
out of the groups of octogenarians are hustling,
overdressed boys who’ve watched too many Vegas
movies and don’t know how poignant they are, trying to
imitate Rat Pack cool in cheap suits in the Missouri woods.

---

I enter under a glowing billboard promoting – for two
nights only – the reunion of a ’50s doo-wop group. Inside,
the casino is frigid and close. The penny slots clink and
clang, joyful electronic chirps that don’t match the dull,
drooping faces of the people sitting in front of the
machines, smoking cigarettes above dangling oxygen
masks. Penny in penny in penny in penny in penny in ding-
ding-ding! penny in penny in. The money that they waste
goes to the underfunded public schools that their bored,
blinking grandchildren attend. Penny in penny in. A group of
wasted boys stumble past, a bachelor party, the boys’ lips
wet from shots; they don’t even notice me, husky and
Hamill-haired. They are talking about girls, 
get us some
girls
, but besides me, the only girls I see are golden. The
boys will drink away their disappointment and try not to kill
fellow motorists on the way home.
I wait in a pocket bar to the far left of the casino
entrance, as planned, and watch the aged boy band sing to
a large snowy-haired audience, snapping and clapping
along, shuffling gnarled fingers through bowls of
complimentary peanuts. The skeletal singers, withered
beneath bedazzled tuxes, spin slowly, carefully, on replaced
hips, the dance of the moribund.
The casino seemed like a good idea at first – right off
the highway, filled with drunks and elderly, neither of whom
are known for eyesight. But I am feeling crowded and
fidgety, aware of the cameras in every corner, the doors
that could snap shut.
I am about to leave when he ambles up.
‘Amy.’

---

I’ve called devoted Desi to my aid (and abet). Desi, with
whom I’ve never entirely lost touch, and who – despite what
I’ve told Nick, my parents – doesn’t unnerve me in the
slightest. Desi, another man along the Mississippi. I always
knew he might come in handy. It’s good to have at least one
man you can use for anything. Desi is a white-knight type.
He loves troubled women. Over the years, after Wickshire,
when we’d talk, I’d ask after his latest girlfriend, and no
matter the girl, he would always say: ‘Oh, she’s not doing
very well, unfortunately.’ But I know it is fortunate for Desi –
the eating disorders, the painkiller addictions, the crippling
depressions. He is never happier than when he’s at a
bedside. Not in bed, just perched nearby with broth and
juice and a gently starched voice.