Death Orchid

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Las Vegas was touted as the city of your dreams. Unfortunately it was also a wood chipper for many people’s personal nightmares. If you were transient, poor, homeless, mentally ill, a drug addict or any other kind of addict, down on your luck, Las Vegas was usually a great place to hang your coat.

If the Strip was paradise, other parts of Vegas, especially the dangerous and deadly turf’s of North Las Vegas was its opposite.

The rich, the privileged never went near the place.

Street gangs of every imaginable race ruled, rumbled and the Special Gang Unit of the Las Vegas Police Department was the busiest of the busiest of any unit in the outfit.

Downtown, Fremont Street, the surrounding streets of Old School Vegas was a favorite gathering spot for those seeking the last remnants of any soul Las Vegas still possessed.

There was The El Cortez Hotel, The Golden Nugget, Binion’s, The Fremont Street Experience. All fake, hype, neon facades, hiding some young girl, a syringe bleeding out of her arm, ten buck tricks, covered in vomit in some alley, a body bag her last home.

Hosts of other second tier motels, hotels, bars and gambling spots lined the area like needle tracks on some junkie’s arms. Though constantly boasting how development would soon turn the original Vegas into a place of beauty, glamour and prosperity, it just never seemed to happen in N. Vegas.

It was a boom or bust town and now the bust had come.

The City government knew a little secret and that puzzle was that people needed places that were depraved, seedy and where crack whores, pimps, gangsters and the poor could frequent.

Keeping the riff-raff and the thousands of homeless from The Strip was paramount if Las Vegas was to continue to be the fastest growing city in the nation. What better place to house the trash of the human experiences then downtown and the slums surrounding it. Sometimes illusion is just so much better than reality.

Fucking Las Vegas and the Strip certainly were living proof of that.

The real winners were the embalmers, morticians, flash coffins, or City anonymous graves, cold, stark, boom or bust, that was Vegas too.

***

He had been roaming all night, walking, looking and prying as was his custom. As usual he had found the inner guts of N. Vegas enticing, not to say the least, cinematic as well as horrifying. Death was nothing new to him. It had been a part of his life since those first years in South America. After Rio, he’d killed and he had through the decades seen so many more deaths, many in war, many within greed and lust and sometimes many for a simple act of sadism.

After so many years in Africa, he’d left a wealthy man, though more corpses were left behind as a memory of his visit there. Decades later he had ended up in Las Vegas, a fact that often left him laughing. Fate he knew never understood where it would deposit a man who was on a journey with no beginning and no ending. That thought also left him amused, though a very broken and mentally unbalanced genius of a man he was.

For a moment he hesitated, wrapping his long coat around his tall, muscled torso. He enjoyed winter in Las Vegas. It gave an entire new bend to the place. Hesitating near another alley mouth, he stared deep within it. His eyes jerked to his hands that were covered with something red. His fingernails were short, callused, seemed to have black oil carved into them. Groaning he looked at the red liquid on his hands, remembered, moaned.

Being a pure artist of many mediums as well as a most dangerous character, he held the eye of an artist, a mind of an autistic savant as well as the hands, strong, violent, gifted hands that were of a creator as well as taker.

He was a man who had many secrets. Set off by dreams, nightmares. That maze for so many years crippled him, almost killed him more than once. No matter how brilliant he was, or how intelligent he was, his brain mal functioned and that fact brought him massive grief from depression more at times then he thought he could bear.

Suffering from a laundry list of various mental illnesses, that mind also brought him manic glee, another emotion he could hardly deal with or possibly understand. How many people had violently died because of him, he could hardly remember any longer?

Never being a coward, except at the beginning some thirty years earlier when he’d taken that first step into Mexico, he had corralled his mental illnesses, lowering the pistol from his mouth when he was in Rio, after “SHE” had been murdered and he somehow had survived.

Digging through his fear he had refocused it into his work, sometimes insidious, sometimes beautiful. Though a man who seldom felt pride, he felt his new work and his survival had gained from his continuation of life.

Staring down into the guts if the alley, he saw something, lifted his old Leica 35 mm camera, focused, clipped off several black and white photographs of something he saw, or thought he saw.

Several moments of thought passed, he gave the back of the alley one more glance and with knee length coat flapping at his legs, began to walk back towards his home, if a home it could be described as.

The knife in his boot felt cold, wet, yet welcoming.

Past mid-night, he felt comfortable walking along the most dangerous part of N. Vegas. There was little he feared in his life, especially death. He was a free man and before he had become “The Chameleon King” he’d been once known in another life as “The Traveler.”

As he neared his most unique dwelling, he hesitated near a street corner as a light turned red. Across the street there were several prostitutes and the men that fed off of them like dying locust. Drifting along the street there were several homeless, other lost souls malingering in alleys aligned neatly next to two, neon lit motels. Lifting his camera, he took more photographs, lowered the camera, something odd nudged at his eyes.

Across the street, waiting for the light to turn green, was a black, very out of place convertible shiny new Porsche Boxer.

Crinkling his brow, his eyes focused as he recognized the man driving it. Feeling his glare, the cool man driving looked hard right back at him.

They locked eyes, each recognizing one another. The light pulsed green, the man in the Porsche passed. He smiled at the photographer, gave him a small wave and was gone down the street.

“Him.” The man in the long coat whispered.

The Boxer reached a street corner, hesitated and roared left disappearing out of his sight, its throaty engine echoing off the glass and chrome of the buildings.

“What was he of all people doing down here?” He thought.

He tried to piece that little puzzle together.

There were few people he detested in his life. The rich man in the sleek Porsche was on the top of that short list.

When he’d first arrived two years earlier he’d gone head to head with the valueless man, out bidding him for the warehouse he now called home. He had never forgotten the malice the man exhibited when he had been out monied and out bided for the property. Because the man was fabulously wealthy, he was a respected member of the Las Vegas elite. He’d not taken lightly to being beaten by what he thought at the time was a disheveled nobody.

Unknown to the man in the Boxer, that “Disheveled Nobody” had more money than he could ever spend, yet having no reason left to ever impress anyone with the trappings of glitz and wealth, he looked the part of an artist, a poor artist.

Still, as he stood there watching as a man in a Mercedes rolled up and procured a w***e, he wondered why “That Man” was cruising around as morning neared on his turf; a most dangerous turf.

Finding no answers, and feeling tired for the first time, he stepped from the curb and crossed the street. Once on the other side he began to walk through the night once again, forgetting for the moment that killers, much like he, came in every shape and form known to man.