Tony got out her cell phone and fake-dialed her home. Not in a million years would her father let her visit a casino, never mind a federal prison, but her imaginary father was a man cut from a different cloth.
“Dad ⦠yeah, it's me. Listen, Danny's mom wants to know if it's OK to drive out to Correctional Institution Road? ⦠No! Don't be silly. The minimum-security prison next to the Supermax ⦠Oh, there's some kind of psychology expert there we want to talk to about the cat killings ⦠I will ⦠Thank you, Papa. Oh, and can we visit Danny's mom's casino? ⦠Thanks, Dad.”
She hung up.
Danny had seen through the lie immediately, and he marveled at her. On the surface Tony was a bubbly, typically extroverted teenager, but Tony's icebergian depths were a lot more interestingâshe'd probably (to extend the analogy) quite enjoy ramming into a passenger ship in the dead of night just to see what happened. And now that he was in the psych biz Danny had a go at summing up everyone else's personality, too. Tom seemed a pretty well-adjusted kidâa little fidgety, a little geeky, but doing OK considering his dad was off at war and his brother had died. Walt also had a few
nervous tics: He sang to himself with distressing regularity, and that Englishy accent was worse than Madonna's during her London years. Juanita was a hardworking, fairly typical Latina mother, and if there was a mystical Cherokee side to her, Danny never saw it.
That's everyone, Danny thought, and then shook his head.
No, not quite everyone. What about me?
While the others talked and finished their cake, Danny did something he rarely did, which was to turn his external sensors on himself.
What kind of a person is Danny Lopez? he asked. An only child who dug skateboarding and, until his laptop vanished into some UPS black hole, Halo 3 and YouTube. Shy? Introverted? Yeah, those were good words. He was also a bit of a dreamer, too: that day he'd tried to hitch to Chicago to see his father, getting Jeffrey from the Tropicana Wash andâ
He looked up.
Everyone was staring at him.
“Well?” Tom said impatiently.
“Well what?”
“Are you ready to go?”
“Sure.”
In ten minutes they were in the car. Predictably, Walt wanted them to split into two groups so he could show Tom the Tesla, but Juanita sensibly insisted that they all take the Volvo instead. Walt huffed a little in the front passenger's
seat, which made Danny oddly pleased. He did not want to sit in the middle between Tony and Tom, though, and he didn't want either of his “guests” to be forced into the middle, so they pulled out the third-row seat and Danny sat behind everyone.
Juanita turned on the radio but all they could get was Focus on the Family again, and Pastor Ted Swanson's local phone-in program, which was all “Gay soldiers are terrorizing their colleagues at Fort Carson” and “Mexicans in Colorado Springs worship the Devil,” so she turned it off.
They drove through the Ute Reservation, which to Danny's eyes didn't look that different from any other part of Colorado. The houses that he caught glimpses of between the trees were the same ranch-style homes as those in Colorado Springs. He didn't know what he'd been expecting, but it certainly wasn't like the pueblos he'd visited in New Mexico, with big communal buildings and a very distinct look.
“Where's the actual Reservation itself?” he asked his mother.
“This is it. It's all around you,” she replied.
The casino was also something of a letdown.
The exterior looked like a Motel 6, and a small simple neon sign declared,
THE GLYNN CASINO AT THE UTE AND CHEROKEE NATIONS FAMILY RESORT
, which wasn't the most memorable name he'd ever seen. Doubtless, with time people would just call it the Glynn. Inside, it reminded
Danny not of the new complexes on the southern part of the Strip but rather of the older casinos in downtown Las Vegas like the Golden Nuggetâbut admittedly a Golden Nugget without the cigarette-stained carpet or plaster-cracked walls, because everything, of course, was brand-new. Rows of slots, blackjack tables covered with tarp, roulette wheels, a sports book. There were bars, a restaurant, even a kids' play area. There were no windows but a lot of flashing lights and big extractor fans to suck out the cigarette smoke. Smoking was banned in bars in Colorado, but this was an Indian nation and thus exempted from the rule.
“So this is a casino?” Tony said with wide-eyed wonder.
“You never been in one before?” Tom scoffed.
“Have you?” Tony asked.
“Well, no, actually not really,” Tom admitted.
“What do you think?” Juanita asked.
“Wow, it's really cool,” Danny said. “And you're running the whole thing, huh?”
Juanita glowed with pride. “The whole kit and caboodle. Of course, we still have so much to doâ
so
much, you've no ideaâbut I think we'll open on time.”
They took a tour and as Juanita was explaining how the various games of chance worked to Tom and Tony, Danny was looking at the rows of slot machines and imagined the grim-faced retirees with their buckets of change sitting in front of them, putting in quarter after quarter of their savings, day after day, month after month, until one day it would all be gone.
“Listen, can I meet you guys back at the car? I'm feeling a bit funny,” Danny said.
Walt nodded. “We were climbing the whole time, we're up at nine thousand feet now.”
“That must be it,” Danny said.
“Are you OK?” Juanita asked.
Danny nodded and slipped away from the others. The sun was out now and it was into the forties. He sat on the curb by the car in the massive, empty parking lot.
“Help you, son?” a man asked.
Danny looked up into the face of a security guard. A lean, dark-skinned man in his sixties, with a short gray ponytail. Bit of a beaky nose and dark eyes. Obviously a Native American. He was carrying a walkie-talkie.
“I'm just waiting for my mom,” Danny said, and then he added: “She's the manager here. Juanita Brown.”
The man nodded. “Mind if I sit?” he asked after a long pause.
“Help yourself.”
The security guard sat down next to Danny on the curb. The effort made his lungs give off a rattly, wheezing sound, and Danny wondered if he'd be able to get back up again. “Thought you might be one of those protestors,” the security guard said when his breath was back.
“Protestors? What do you mean?”
“Oh, we've had a few protestors from town, about the casino. It was bad about six months agoâpeople chaining themselves to bulldozers, that kind of thing. Church folk.
Stopped now mostly. Mr. Glynn told us to make some donations to the right people. We did it, and it stopped.”
“Focus on the Family, the Metropolitan Faith Cathedral thingy ⦠those people?”
“Yes. And we had the Tesla folks, too. Did one of his big scientific experiments up here. Radio or radar or something. From here to his lab in Cobalt, where that school is now. There was only a shack left here, but those folks said we should preserve it as a national monument. Preserve the hut! Ha!”
“Did you preserve it?”
“Of course not. This is our land, Tesla had no business being here in the first place.”
“You're a member of the uh, the Ute tribe?”
“Cherokee Nation. Dan Flight of Eagles,” the man said, offering Danny his hand. Danny shook it. “Hey, my name's Danny, too. And you know, technically I'm Cherokee as wellâat least part Cherokee, I guess.”
The security guard nodded, looked at him closely. “You either is or you ain't,” he said.
Danny nodded shamefacedly and stared at his shoelaces, then at the pristine concrete of the parking lot stretched in front of him. Man and boy lapsed into a long silence.
Juanita and the others came back from their tour. The security guard got sprightly to his feet and gave Juanita a little nod.
“How was it?” Danny asked.
“Good. Everyone's hungry now. Are you feeling any better?”
“Fine,” Danny said.
They did McDonald's drive-through for lunch and as she was sucking down a strawberry milkshake, Tony whispered to Danny in the backseat, “A casino, a prison, and McDonald's in one morningâthis is, like, the greatest day ever. Don't ever mention this to my dad.”
The prison was not what Tony, Juanita, or Tom had been expecting. Juanita was clearly relieved, but Danny could tell that both Tom and Tony were disappointed. Peach tree groves, allotment gardens, and a series of mobile homes with wire mesh over the plastic windows was not anyone's idea of a prisonâespecially since to get here, they'd had to drive past the heavily armored Supermax ADX.
“There are holes in the fence!” Tom said.
Danny nodded. Great big holes that no one seemed to have any interest in repairing. Any of the prisoners could get out anytime they wanted if they put a little effort into it. Danny speculated that since most of them were nearly finished with their sentences, no one felt the need.
Juanita pulled up to the gate and Walt leaned across her to talk to the guard sitting in the little booth. It was one of the guards Walt knew from chain-gang duty.
“Hey, Trey!” Walt said.
“Mr. Brown, what are you doing out here on a Saturday? There's not a work detail going out today that I don't know about, is there?”
Danny was taken aback; people rarely called Walt mister anything. And certainly not people in uniform.
Walt laughed. “No, no work detail. Just thought I'd show my family around if that's OK, and I wanted to talk to Bob Randall if he's here? ⦠Wait a minute, âcourse he's here. Where else is he gonna be?”
Trey laughed and opened the barrier, and they drove into the prison.
Bob was working in a garden, brushing snow off little bushy things that had been wrapped in plastic bags. He was in jeans and an orange T-shirt and he was wearing a Rockies beanie cap. Houdini the cat was sunning itself next to him.
“That's Bob over there,” Walt said, pointing him out.
“He's not exactly Hannibal Lecter, is he?” Tom muttered sarcastically.
Walt introduced everyone, and Bob wiped his hand on his shirt and shook hands, giving Tony and Juanita little bows and saying, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma'am,” like an old-timey character from a Western.
They met Houdini. Houdini was clearly not impressed by any of them, for as soon as they tried to pet him he ran off and hid under a wheelbarrow.
“How do you like my vines?” Bob asked, pointing at the stubby bushes.
“Grapevines?” Walt asked. “You can grow grapes in Colorado?”
“Yeah, we get good quick frosts here and a lot of August heat; they make a nice Malbec-style red if you blend it with some of the grapes from around Trinidad. We sell six crates a year, makes a little money for the facility.”
“Oh, that's a wonderful idea,” Juanita said.
“Bob's too modest to say it, but I'll bet the idea was his,” Walt said.
Bob grinned and nodded. “I just hope they keep it up after I leave; none of my colleagues seems that interested, and these little guys take a lot of work.”
They talked grapes and wine and other subjects Danny couldn't care less about before Bob finally came to it. “So what brings you folks out here today?”
Everyone turned to Danny. His face glowed.
“Uh, well, we thought that maybe you could, uh, you know, âcause you're sort of an expert, not an expert because you're in here, Walt says you have a PhD, you know, that's why,” he began before Tony interrupted.
“Someone's been killing cats in Cobalt and we wondered if you'd help us catch him,” she said.
Bob rubbed his chin.
“Well,” he said. “I'll see what I can do.”
They repaired to Bob's trailer. As Danny recalled, it was a little cramped, but it wasn't that bad: toilet, shower, window with a grill over it, a desk, a bookcase stuffed full of books. There were only two chairs though, so Danny, Tom, and Tony sat on Bob's bed while Walt and Juanita sat in the chairs and Bob stood. He liked to stand, he claimed.
Behind Bob on the wall there was a painting of guys walking through the snow. It seemed an odd thing to have on your wall. If it had been Danny in prison in landlocked Colorado, he'd have a Pacific Ocean scene on his wall, not
snow. If you wanted snow, you could look at Pikes Peak any day of the year.
“Check this out,” Tom whispered, taking a huge book from under his butt called
The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
and thumbing through the index. “Let's flick to the Ls and see if Lebkuchen is in here,” Tom joked.
“Put that down,” Danny whispered.
Bob also appeared to collect little painted postcards from Europe and North America: the Eiffel Tower painted in an Art Deco style, Big Ben done like a watercolor, a cathedral in Barcelona in a surrealist style, the Empire State Building also in Art Deco.
“Those are nice postcards,” Danny said.
“I collect 'em. When someone gets out of here and they say they're going anywhere near any of the places on the postcards, I ask them if they'll mail one to me. So far I've gotten back New York, Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles. Harder to get the European ones, because of parole and stuff like that. Makes me think of the outside world.”
Danny didn't reply. Tom was fidgeting like mad and, worse, Tony was half reclining against the wall and the back of her hand was suddenly resting against Danny's thigh. Danny wondered if she knew that this was taking place or if she hadn't noticed. Danny certainly was aware of it, and he was finding it very hard to concentrate.
“And I like this big picture,” Juanita said.
Bob grinned. “Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565. Lovely,
isn't it?
Hunters in the Snow
. I came across it in a book and fell in love with it. The details are incredible. Kids pulling sleds, people making fires, the men with their dogs ⦠oh, it's wonderful. It's like a whole universe in there. When I get out, I'm going to go to Vienna and see the real thing.”