Dragonfish: A Novel by Vu Tran Page B

intruders—and thoughtful, like they had heard what Sonny had said and were now, like their boss, waiting for my response.
    When I was six, I watched my father grab my brown terrier by the collar and slam it headfirst against our porch wall. It had pissed on his shoe—this, after a month of him warning me of its messes around the house. It instantly went limp and he held it up and looked at it and walked to our curbside trash can. Hours later we heard scratching at our front door, and there it was, limping sleepily around the welcome mat. I remember the shiver that coursed through me when I saw its small head bobbing in the doorway, the same shiver I felt now as Sonny uttered Suzy’s name. I realized that in the last five months, as I tried my best to close every door that led to Las Vegas, I’d been waiting all along to hear bad news about her.
    I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “What do you mean, where is she?”
    “I ask you . Four days now she been gone. She just disappear?”
    He said “disappear”the way an adult would say it to a wide-eyed child. Poof! In a puff of smoke!
    “Wait,” I said. “You think I know where she went, or you think I took her? I haven’t heard from her since she left Oakland two years ago. Since she left me .”
    “But you come here to Vegas, right?”
    “Look, I heard you hurt her and I had to do something. It was stupid and you can come at me with what you think I deserve. But whatever this is with Suzy, I don’t know anything about it. I told you—I haven’t said a word to her in over two years.”
    “How I know you not lie to me, huh?”
    “I got no reason to. I know you think I do, but she left me , man. A long time ago.”
    I heard ice cubes clinking in a glass, like him finishing off the last of a drink, like he was beginning to believe me.
    “Sonny, can you please tell your boy here to point his gun at something else?” I could hear the kid breathing through his nose.
    “Don’t call me fucking Sonny. Give the phone to him.”
    “He said to give you the phone.”
    The kid snatched it out of my hand, said “Yes” in Vietnamese a couple of times, then backed away from me. I had to blink several times, breathe out, like the gun had been a hood over my face.
    He handed the phone to his partner, who listened intently without saying a word. A minute later he hung up.
    “We’re leaving. You’re coming with us to Las Vegas.”
    “What for?”
    He slipped on a pair of black leather gloves, then turned away all of a sudden, seized by hacking coughs. He recovered himself, wiping his mouth with renewed calm. “Your clothes. Change them.”
    The kid was kneeling on the floor, tying his shoelaces with his gun on the carpet beside him. He peered around my apartment, then up at me. “This a sad place, man. Not even a Christmas tree?”
    I T WAS DARK by the time we got on the 580 going south, toward Vegas. As I sat in the backseat of a morbidly tinted Lexus with the kid beside me and his partner driving in front, I felt more a guest than a captive. No guns pointed at me, my hands free, the car doors unlocked. It was like I had asked them for a ride. Their remaining gesture at seriousness was their silence, though the kid was soon singing under his breath, tapping his fingers to some beat in his head.
    It dawned on me that I’d been spared for the last five months—that Sonny had known all along who I was and where I lived and for some reason had decided to do nothing, because whatever this was now, whatever he was planning for me, it didn’t smell of him settling a score. What actually troubled me was that he was dangling Suzy over my head, certain that I’d be desperate to find out what happened to her, that if my escorts had stopped the car and let me out, I would have climbed right back in.
    Around midnight, we stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through by the highway. For the first time since we left, the quiet one spoke, regarding me in the rearview mirror. “You