For the two weeks Mikey and his mom had been in Las Vegas, they had been living out of the Motel 6 facing the freeway onramp.

From the motel it was a long walk down Sahara to the desert lot where the bus picked up Mikey and a dozen other sullen-faced kids, to deliver them like a daily human sacrifice to their penitentiary-looking middle school. So each morning, Mikey ducked through a hole in the chain link fence behind the motel and took a shortcut to the bus stop through the neighboring apartment complex.

It was in this apartment complex, one Sunday afternoon, that Mikey’s mom took him dumpster diving.

“Look for something good,” she told him.

But holding his breath inside a dumpster, all he saw was slimy, oozing garbage. He pushed through trash bags, trying not to puke as the whole waste heap shifted underfoot. A rat came ripping out of the toxic depths, skittering over Mikey’s shoe.

Mikey had no idea where the rat went. He was too busy shrieking and clambering over the dumpster walls.

“Gah!” said the old man he nearly crushed when he landed on the outside. As Mikey landed on the asphalt, the old guy went stumbling back, dropping his own trash bag, before steadying himself on his four-pronged metal cane. He pulled his washed-out San Diego Chargers bathrobe closed and regarded Mikey with soft, crinkly eyes.

“What in the world were you doing in there, son?” he asked with a gentle Mr. Rogers voice.

But Mikey was no kid, even though he had skipped two years and was the youngest boy in eighth grade.

“Mind your own business,” he told the geezer as he brushed off real and imagined gunk from his clothes.

A half dozen kids from Mikey’s new school were clustered around the gate to the complex’s swimming pool—laughing at Mikey, freshly emerged from the dumpster. The humiliation of it all made him want to crawl back inside that foul-smelling coffin. Shut the lid and disappear completely.

A hand shot up from another dumpster, holding a dinged-up DVD player skyward.

“Bingo!” yelled his mom, her gravely smoker’s voice amplified within the dumpster walls. “Get your butt over here, Mikey. Let’s go see if we can’t pawn this.”

♢

The following morning, on the way to the bus stop, Mikey saw the old man again. He was standing in the open doorway of apartment number three. In his Chargers bathrobe, he raised a steaming mug to Mikey. Mikey just looked away as he passed.

That afternoon, after school, Mikey was running back up the apartment complex drive, several kids sprinting after him in hot pursuit. His nose was bleeding, iron-tasting goop clogging his throat as he sucked in air.

Far ahead lay the fence to the motel. His backpack flailing side to side, his legs growing leaden, Mikey could hear the kids gaining ground on him.

A man’s roar split the air like a sonic boom. Mikey turned to see the old man standing in the street between him and his pursuers, shouting Fuck off you little delinquents as he swung his quad cane through the air.

The wide-eyed kids scattered. But they didn’t disperse far, making a wide berth around the geriatric madman. They reassembled on the other side of the driveway, between Mikey and the fence.

“Just wait ‘til your grandpa breaks a hip,” one yelled with a cracking voice at Mikey. “We’re gonna fuck you up.”

The old man shuffled alongside Mikey and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Maybe it’s best you come inside, son. Until the coast is clear.”

Mikey looked down at the liver-spotted hand on his shoulder. Then at the open apartment doorway he gestured to. Before the Sheriff’s warrant for his mom’s arrest and their fleeing California, the guy who lived in the apartment above them in Imperial Beach invited Mikey inside to play Nintendo.

Later, after the man tried to put his hand down Mikey’s pants, after Mikey threw the controller at his head before running home, he told his mom what had happened. She looked up from the joint she was rolling and said, “What are you, stupid? Don’t go up there again.”

Now boiling under the bloodthirsty Las Vegas sun, with the old man’s hand on his shoulder, he didn’t want to be stupid again.

He looked at the mob preparing his public execution, then back the other way—to the road lined with video poker places and liquor stores that wound the long way to the motel—and knew there would be no outrunning these pimple-faced assholes.

So he looked up at the old, smiling man and sighed, “Alright.”

♢

The old man locked the front door. Mikey took a quick survey of the apartment, the sad couch and ancient television, the dusty framed photos scattered across the beige walls. It reeked of old people.

“Goddamn bullies,” the old man muttered, looking through the window blinds. When he turned, the murderous look on his face sent Mikey’s heart racing. But it quickly became that Mr. Rogers smile again.

“We bumped into each other yesterday,” he said. “You were in the dumpster.”

“My mom collects the bottles.”

“How much do you get for a beer bottle these days?”

“Five cents.”

“Whoo, that was a lot of money in my day. Oh, where are my manners?” He stuck his hand out as he limped over on his cane. “I’m Ray.”

The old man’s skin was cold and papery. It gave Mikey the shivers.

“Mikey.”

“Strong name. My brother was named Michael. He died in Korea. How old are you, son?”

“Twelve.”

“Why, you’re practically ready to ship off to war yourself. I turned twelve the day World War Two ended, if you can believe that. Do you know how old that makes me?”

“I don’t know, a hundred?”

“Close! Ninety-four years young. I don’t look half bad for my age, do I? It’s okay, I know I look like the Crypt-Keeper.” His raspy laugh bent him over even further. “They still put out those comics?”

“I don’t know. I like Batman.”

Ray clicked his tongue and pointed at Mikey. “World’s Greatest Detective,” he said. “Hey are you missing something?”

His hand emerged from his bathrobe pocket and held up a plastic watch, dangling it by the strap.

“My watch!” Mikey snatched it out of the old man’s hand and cinched it back across his wrist. Batman stared up at him from the watch face with a grim expression.

“Sorry. I thought kids liked magic. Figured it might make you feel better. Say, you hungry, Mikey?”

Mikey didn’t want to say yes, anxious as he was to get the hell out of that nursing home, but his stomach had been rumbling for hours. No breakfast and the mystery-meat free lunch at school was barely edible. There would be no food back in the motel room.

A few minutes later, he was wolfing down a feast at Ray’s sticky kitchen table. Ham sandwich on white bread with mayo, Cool Ranch Doritos, a whole plate of Chips Ahoy. Ray shuffled over to the window and looked out the blinds again.

“So what’s the story with these knuckleheads?”

“They were just messing with me,” Mikey said, washing down a mouthful of cookies with a big gulp of milk. On the bus ride home, a kid leaned over the seat, close enough for Mikey to see the volcano craters erupted on his face, and sounded out the title of the Hardy Boys book Mikey had open. After first asking Mikey if he was gay for reading, he got a look of gleeful recognition and announced to the bus, The dumpster kid.

“I told them to fuck off,” Mikey said.

“That’s good,” said Ray. “You spoke directly. But you’re going to need to follow up with action. Stand your ground.”

“Then why don’t you go out there and chase them off?”

“It’s different. I’m an old man. The years have sapped all the meanness out of me. But you’re young. You need to learn now or you’ll be a punching bag your whole life.”

In the staring contest that followed, Ray’s eyes pierced Mikey like wire. The boy lost his nerve and looked away.

Mikey pointed to photographs spread across the coffee table, desperate to change the subject. “What’s that?”

“Oh… that’s nothing,” Ray said, but Mikey was already walking towards the coffee table. Ray scrambled after him, speed-walking on his cane and angling in front of Mikey.

“With all the commotion, I forgot these were out,” he said, hastily gathering up the photographs. “What am I doing, looking at these? Guess I’m getting nostalgic in my old age. These aren’t for kids’ eyes.”

“I’m not a kid.” Mikey tried to crane his neck around Ray, getting a passing glance at one of the black-and-whites—a crying woman sitting on the floor. Was it from a movie? “They look like crime scene photos.”

Ray snapped around to look at Mikey. Tufts of white hair whistling out of his bulbous nose. “What do you know about crime scenes?”

“A lot. From books, I mean. My dad liked to read true crime stuff before he… they sometimes have crime scene photos in them. Were you a cop or something?”

Ray turned his head and with his back to Mikey said in a low voice, “You got me, kid.”

“Detective?”

“Homicide. Las Vegas PD for fifty years.”

“And that’s one that got away? An unsolved murder?”

“Aren’t you perceptive. You can retire from the job, but you can’t shake your failures.”

“Come on,” Mikey said. “I’ll be thirteen in a few months. You can show me.”

“I guess I could, Mikey. But are you sure? Do you really want to know?”

Somewhere along the way, the old man’s expression had changed, revealing a face that looked perfectly at home in the late-day shadows that had descended over him.

“I want to see,” Mikey said. “Show me.”

♢

“Tell me, son. In those crime books… did you ever come across the Atomic Rose murder?”

Mikey shook his head no, overcome by a sneezing fit from the cloud of dust expelled by the old flowerprint couch he sat on.

“Aren’t you in for a treat then,” Ray said as he shuffled over to the hallway closet.

Mid-sneeze, Mikey looked over Ray’s shoulder into the closet, a cacophony of papers and photographs and file folders exploded on the shelves. Ray delicately lifted a purple cigar box and removed an overstuffed file folder from underneath it.

“November first, nineteen fifty-one,” Ray said as he sat next to Mikey. He opened the folder and began spreading yellowed newspaper clippings across the table. The top one displayed a mushroom cloud blooming in a desert landscape.

“Sixty-five miles outside Las Vegas, the United States Military detonated the largest nuclear weapon man had ever created. An hour later, they called me.”

“Why?” Mikey heard himself whisper.

Ray leaned over, fanning out the clippings with a showman’s flair. With one gnarled finger, he pointed to the headline: Murder at the Nevada Proving Ground—double-tapping the word Murder.

Ray explained to Mikey how he was a young detective on the job, with his buzzcut and Dragnet charcoal suit, when they drove him out to the blast radius at Frenchman Flats to see what the commanding General called the “situation.”

“Wouldn’t the radiation kill you?” Mikey asked, spellbound.

“I didn’t know. They called it the science of the future. Afterwards, they brushed my clothes off with a broom.”

In the aftermath of the detonation, Ray continued, the military marched troops into ground zero, which was composed of a scattering of houses that the military had seized through eminent domain and left standing to simulate the effects of nuclear warfare.

There, in the wreckage, they found her.

“The body,” Ray said. “Or what was left of it.”

The skeleton was in what had once been the living room. He described how the ankle was still cuffed to a heavy piece of blackened and twisted metal. The radiator. Some flesh was still on the victim’s bones and a few strands of hair still stuck to her skull. A scrap of floral-print dress twisted around the torso snapping in the wind.

Mikey's heart thumped in his chest. "Who was it?" his voice cracked.

“One Elizabeth Friedlander. Twenty-three years old. Aspiring model. We didn’t know any of those details at the time, of course. No identifying features remained. The papers simply called her the Atomic Rose.”

It didn’t take Ray long to map out the sequence of events. The victim had been abducted at an unknown location—most likely close to her home in Las Vegas—and brought to this abandoned house in the atomic test site, where she had been chained to the radiator shortly before the bomb was detonated. But as to the how and who and why of it all, they hadn’t the foggiest. The test site had been in complete lockdown for twenty-four hours, impenetrable under the tightest security known to man.

“But you know her name now,” Mikey said.

“We only learned who she was later, when we got these in the mail.”

From the end table, Ray picked up the stack of photographs Mikey had originally seen and began dropping them, one by one, on top of the newspaper clippings lining the coffee table.

The photographs were old black-and-whites, spiderwebbed with cracks and tears. In grim timelapse, they showed a woman in various positions on the floor of a dark house—only dim, ambient light illuminating her bouffant hair, a style from a long-ago decade, and knee-length floral-print dress.

Elizabeth Friedlander had fresh blood on her bottom lip. Her face was streaked with mascara tears. As Mikey looked through the series of photos—taken one after the other in a macabre sequence, a horrid flipbook of Friedlander crying and shielding her eyes from her captor—it took a moment for Mikey to notice the rusted, odd-looking manacle clasped around her ankle, chaining her to the large metal radiator.

Mikey was only vaguely aware when Ray pulled himself to his feet by his cane and shuffled off. The air crackled, as if the photos themselves were radioactive. In the pleading eyes of Elizabeth Friedlander—upturned to face her inquisitor behind the camera, whose position Mikey now took—he felt something cold and deathly rise up in him.

“Did the killer send a note?” Mikey asked, unable to look away.

“Not a word.” Ray peered out the blinds onto a street that had grown dark.

“We cross referenced the photos with missing persons, which is how we finally identified the victim. There were a lot of comparison photos on account of her having been a model.”

“And the murder was never solved?”

“Never got him.”

“Were there any suspects?”

“One or two,” Ray said, turning away from the window. “Listen, it looks like the Lord of the Flies outside has cleared up. I think it’s time you head home. Your mother must be worried to death about you.”

♢

The door was locked when Mikey returned to the motel. From inside came the sound of classic rock. A man’s voice, then his mom’s hoarse laugh.

He knocked for a long time before the door opened a crack, the chain lock inside pulling taut. Through the sliver of open doorway appeared a single one of his mom’s bloodshot eyes.

“I have company,” she said. A cloud of smoke billowed behind her, a powerful chemical smell burning his nose. “Come back in a couple hours.”

“But I’m thirsty,” Mikey said.

She disappeared for a moment, then unlocked the door so she could pass through a half-empty two-liter of Coke.

As Mikey looked down at the soda sloshing inside the bottle in his hand, he said, “I told you I didn’t want to go in that dumpster.” But the door had closed on him.

By the laundry room, Mikey threw his backpack against the wall and laid back with his head on it. It was nighttime, hot and suffocating. The Coke was warm and flat and syrupy. He looked out on the parking lot, the buzzing freeway traffic, the radioactive glow of the Strip. Beyond all that was the desert. A lonely and endless landscape, in which a terrified woman once sat chained to a radiator in an abandoned house.

Of course her killer would have told her what was coming. Mikey imagined her, sitting alone in the predawn dark, the panic spreading through her veins as she pulled futilely on the chain.

A pillar of flame rose thousands of feet into the irradiated air. It sheared the roof from the house, revealing the lightning streaked sky. Heat and terror rushed at her. White light that swallowed her whole.

She was obliterated in the nuclear fire. There one moment. Gone the next.

♢ 

The next morning, Mikey was banging at Ray’s door.

When Ray eventually opened up, he was pulling on his bathrobe and rubbing the sleep from his rheumy eyes. “Hey, kid, who put a bee in your bonnet?”

“The chain wasn’t right,” Mikey said.

“What’s that now?” he asked, as if he didn’t follow. But there was a beat—a moment of hesitation, brief but undeniable.

“The one the killer used to chain Elizabeth Friedlander to the radiator. I couldn’t put my finger on it yesterday, but something about it wasn’t right. It wasn’t just that it was old and rusty. It was somehow antique-looking. Then it hit me. Detective Comics issue three eighty six. When Batman is tied up by Messier Magique on a conveyor belt feeding into a giant croissant oven, he frees himself and figures out the chain is an antique from the French Revolution. He traces that to the antique store Messier Magique operates in his secret identity. Maybe if this chain is antique, too, you could have tracked it to the killer.”

Ray’s bushy white eyebrows furrowed. Like yesterday, his normal grandfatherly appearance vanished for a split second, replaced by a diamond-sharp edge in his eyes. The detective of old, Mikey thought.

“You better come in,” he eventually said.

Inside the apartment, Ray poured water from the tap into a coffee mug, then put the mug on a minute blast in the microwave. “You drink coffee?”

“I drink soda.”

Ray took a two-liter of Barq’s from the fridge and poured it to the brim of a Reno pint glass.

“There’s a dangerous glassful.”

The Biggest Little City in the World, the glass read in chipped red-white-and-blue lettering.

“When I was a boy, I liked detective stuff, too. That and magic.” He unscrewed the cap to a Folgers can and spooned instant coffee into the steaming mug he took from the microwave. “You know Edgar Allan Poe? I tell you, when I first read The Murders in the Rue Morgue—"

“I’m right, aren’t I? About the chains.”

Ray stared into the depths of his bitter-smelling coffee.

“I can’t believe a kid figured it out faster than we did,” he said eventually. “At first, we called police supply stores, farm equipment dealers, anybody in a hundred-mile radius who might sell heavy duty chains. Then the feds came butting in and deduced that the chains were old, like you thought. But old old. Eighteenth century German leg irons, to be exact.”

“And you traced them?”

“It gave us a lot of trouble at first. But it planted an idea in my mind. Whoever the killer was he had a certain… dramatic flair. There was intention behind the tools he chose. Then one day I found myself downtown, looking up at the stage shows advertised on the Horseshoe marquee, and it hit me.”

He snapped his fingers. Mikey flinched.

“Magic.”

Nineteen fifty-one was the golden age of Las Vegas stage magic, Ray explained. And if anyone might know about something as arcane as eighteenth century German leg irons, why not a magician? After all, many used antique props in an effort to prove they weren’t gimmicked. The feds thought Ray was crazy, but he interviewed every performer and stage manager in town, and learned that out of the half dozen magic shops in town, only a couple trafficked in antique props. And one of those had recently held auditions for a print advertisement they were planning on rolling out for a new girl-sawed-in-half kit.

“And can you guess who was on their audition list?” Ray asked, beaming as Mikey hung on every word.

“Elizabeth Friedlander,” Mikey breathed.

“You’re goddamn right.” Ray smiled, relishing in the reveal. Then he looked down at his bare wrist. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

“It’s closed today,” he lied. “A holiday. Tell me about the magic shop.”

“Flores Magic.” Ray sneered at the name, angrily swallowing the last of his coffee.

“Owned and operated by one Porforio Flores.”

At the time of her murder, Elizabeth Friedlander hadn’t yet officially booked the girl-sawed-in-half job, which is why it wasn’t on her agency resume of past employers. But after they learned about the audition, Ray and the feds questioned Flores, who denied ever having met Friedlander. Yet the photographer for the ad claimed that Flores interviewed all the models himself, one-on-one behind closed doors.

“Flores said he had nothing to do with it. Yet what is a magician but a good liar?”

In the end, Flores had no alibi. But he did have a rap sheet a mile long, with more than a dozen cases of assault stretching from Nevada to Florida to (presumably) his native Cuba.

“Here’s the kicker,” Ray said. “Flores Magic had exactly one pair of eighteenth century German leg irons listed in their inventory book… which coincidentally enough, had gone missing.”

Ray pulled himself to his feet with a big grunt. Leaning on his cane, he walked over to the hallway closet.

“Then why didn’t you arrest Flores?” Mikey asked, frustrated with Ray for not spilling every detail, wanting evidence and timelines from the old man to connect like strings of yarn on a pinboard movie murder map.

“We interrogated him.” Ray’s voice was partially muffled as he rifled through the closet. “But we were told to drop the case.”

“What? But it sounds like he was the one.”

“That’s a story for another day,” Ray said, turning slowly on his cane. In his free hand, he held a pair of weathered boxing gloves by their drawstrings.

“I was thinking about those bullies that were messing with you. It’s time you learn the sweet science, kid.”

“There are too many for me to fight.”

“Oh, they’ll bust you up alright. But not before you wallop a couple first.” Ray’s eyes grew soft as he looked fondly down at the gloves twisting in the air, covered in dried spatters of dark blood. “We’ll make those bullies think twice before they come knocking at your door again.”

♢

Later that day, dead-armed and hands throbbing from the pad work Ray had put him through, Mikey took three city buses to UNLV.

He found his way to the campus library, where a librarian set him up at a microfiche machine to read through all available issues of Las Vegas Review between November 1951 and early 1952.

“It’s for a school project,” he told the librarian.

The next morning, in Ray’s living room with the boxing gloves on—throwing awkward punches at the single mitt Ray could hold up while leaning on his cane—he said to the old man, “I’m trying to understand the case, but it doesn’t make sense.”

Mikey leaned over with his hands on his knees, huffing and puffing.

“In every article I found about the Atomic Rose murder,” he said, “they didn’t say anything about the photographs the killer sent. They didn’t even mention Elizabeth Friedlander’s name.”

The old man lowered the pad, hesitating before saying, “Does your mother know you’re here with me?”

It was Mikey’s turn to hesitate. Last night, over a parking lot dinner of 7-11 nachos, his mother asked him, “What do you talk about with that old man?”

Mikey shoved a chip dripping with globbing, molten cheese sauce into his mouth and said, “Murder.”

His mother lifted her tallboy to her lips and chugged the remainder. Her hair fell long and greasy as she lifted her face to the night sky. No stars visible through the light pollution.

“I don’t think it’s right you spending so much time with that old man,” she said. “But I know you’ll just do whatever you want. You always do.”

Now Ray was explaining how the papers didn’t say anything because the photographs were mailed directly to LVPD, who kept it discreet, both for the victim’s family and for the investigation.

“Detective work is like magic,” he said. “The first and only rule is you don’t spoil the illusion.”

From the closet, Ray took the familiar stack of black-and-whites and fanned them across the table.

“Look again, son. What do you notice about Friedlander? Look closely now.”

Mikey stared into the photographs for several minutes, tracking every visible detail, noting Elizabeth Friedlander’s expression and posture and visible terror photograph to photograph.

“She’s clutching her hand,” he finally said. “It’s hard to see in some pictures, but it’s there in every one. He hurt her.”

“Precisely,” Ray said, unable to hide his giddiness. “When we found her, she was in such gruesome shape that we didn’t think anything of the fact that the skeleton was missing its left pinky. But then we put two and two together.”

“He took a souvenir,” Mikey said.

“Exactly,” Ray exclaimed, his face beaming. “We just needed to find a finger and we’d have our man.”

“Did you? Find the finger?”

“You should know by now, Mikey. Elizabeth Friedlander’s murder was never solved.”

♢

Mikey did not go to school the rest of the week.

After a couple more trips to the university microfiche archives, he showed up at Ray’s with a theory that had been coming together in his head, building pressure.

“The Atomic Rose was not a single murder,” he blurted out on his doorstep.

Jutting his head through the doorway to see if any of his neighbors heard, Ray ushered him inside. Mikey could barely get the words out, adrenaline jumbling up his speech.

He explained how, utilizing geographic data and the detail of the missing pinky finger, he was able to identify similar murders beyond Vegas. A series of young female victims spanning Nevada and California. The methods and circumstances were different—ranging from being locked in the trunk of a car sent hurtling off a bridge, to being straitjacketed in a burning building—but the one grisly constant of each murder was that every victim was missing their left pinky finger.

“The Atomic Rose killer sent the photographs to LVPD because he wanted to share his work,” Mikey explained to Ray. “It was the start of something. A bigger game.”

“But that was the only communication we ever had.”

“He lost his nerve then,” Mikey said. “Went dark. Kept it all a secret.”

“He did not stop you mean?”

“No. He continued his life’s work, over the years and across several states, but doing it in quiet.”

“A lonely career,” Ray said, looking at his feet and chewing his lip. Nodding to himself as if it all made sense. “With no one having an inkling of who he truly was.”

“What happened with Flores?” Mikey asked.

“The feds said all the evidence was circumstantial, that I had come up with a bum theory and was obsessed with finding phantom connections to prove it correct.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“I told you. Detective work is like magic. Every good trick has a twist. You don’t see it coming because you were misdirected, lied to somewhere along the way. But the answer is staring you right in the face. You just have to open your eyes.”

♢

The next day, Ray was under the weather.

“Just my ulcer acting up,” he said. “I’ll be right as rain in a couple days.”

In the university library, Mikey read microfiche newspapers, trying to open his eyes and peer past the illusion of the cold case. But he found nothing but frustration. It was the perfect crime, every trace of the killer covered up by an atomic bomb.

Back in the motel, he laid in the bed hooked up to the quarter-fed Magic Fingers machine, his mom passed out and snoring next to him, and drew imaginary string lines across the murder map of his mind. He felt doomed to circle the opaque facts and dead-ends of the case for this rest of his life, like Ray.

When he went back to the apartment, he found Ray sickly yellow and laying on the couch with a blanket pulled up to his neck.

“If Flores went to such lengths to take fucked-up souvenirs,” Mikey explained to him as he spoon fed him Cream of Wheat, “he wouldn’t just throw the fingers away. He’d keep them somewhere close. Somewhere safe.”

“What are you getting at, son?” Ray asked quietly.

“I looked up Flores Magic. The shop is still open.”

Ray closed his eyes for so long that Mikey figured he fell asleep. But he eventually said, “Don’t go digging up graves, son. My obsession drove off my wife. My daughter won’t talk to me anymore. Some things there’s just no coming back from.”

“But Flores can’t get away with it,” Mikey stammered, his tongue twisted by the injustice of it. “We need to know the truth.”

“Life’s not like those comics you read. Flores died a long time ago. He won. It’s just another unsolved murder. Let it stay that way.”

“You’re just an old man who’s given up,” Mikey said. “I’ll finish what you couldn’t.”

“Oh, Mikey. What a brain you have. But there’s so much you don’t know.”

“Then tell me.”

“I can’t. I’m afraid all adults do is disappoint children. But I’ll tell you someday. I promise. For now, just let it go. Please. Come by later tonight. I’ll order the Rodriguez fight on pay per view. We’ll get a pizza.”

 ♢

But that night, Mikey went downtown to Flores Magic.

The next morning, he walked to Ray’s with a bounce in his step, excited to tell him about everything he had seen. The dim and narrow passageways of the magic shop, which reminded him of the antique shop in Gremlins. The posters of Las Vegas yesteryear lining the walls—Nightly at the Stardust and Presenting the Haunting Magic of Mandelbaum—interspersed with framed pictures, spanning the years, of a man with piercing and haunting eyes.

There he was, the monster himself. The man who had watched Elizabeth Friedlander plead for her life, before leaving her to burn in the bomb site.

Porforio Flores.

Mikey noted the family resemblance to the old lady behind the register. She wore a plastic coil keychain around her wrist, from which dangled a single key.

Mikey peppered the old lady with questions on sleight of hand and misdirection. She took Mikey’s hand in her own and commented how lovely it was to see a boy interested in magic. She confirmed that the man in the photos was indeed Porforio Flores, her father, and described how she kept the shop just the way it was on the day he died. His office in the back was perfectly intact, every book on the shelf and drawer of knick knacks undisturbed.

Mikey was anxious to tell Ray how, when he asked the woman about the Atomic Rose murder, she feigned confusion, lying that she vaguely remembered something about that from when she was a girl. When Mikey pressed on, questioning her as to if she knew that her father was the prime suspect, her mood soured. She told him to leave. Which he did, albeit with her coil keychain and the store key in his pocket—a little touch of Detective Ray misdirection—which he now spun around one finger as he came whistling up to apartment number three.

Mikey knocked on Ray’s door, buzzing to run through his plan to return that night, after the shop closed, and search Flores’s office. He knew that hidden somewhere, where it had waited decades for Mikey to come along and discover, was a box of finger bones.

He knocked again, his anticipation waning. But there was still no answer. He figured Ray was out, so sat on the stoop and waited. He sat there for what his Batman wristwatch told him was an hour. Then two. But Ray never came home.

As it began to get dark, he went to the manager’s office.

“I think something’s wrong,” he said.

When the building manager who accompanied him back to the apartment slid in the master key into the door of apartment three, he said, “You might want to stay out here, kid.”

But Mikey went in after him.

Ray was still on the couch. His eyes were closed, but he was not sleeping. Mikey felt ice cold and emptied as he took in the body—the blanket flung back, the bathrobe open to reveal his hairy white chest—as if his heart too would never beat again.

On the pay per view replay on the television, a boxing announcer said, “What a remarkable return for the former champion Robbie Rodriguez. We hope you enjoyed the night of violence.”

“If anyone was here,” Mikey asked one of the EMTs who arrived, “could they have helped him?”

“There’s no way to know, kid,” she said. “He was old. It doesn’t look like there was any pain. He went peacefully.”

 ♢

Mikey didn’t go back to Flores Magic, that night or any other.

He carried the stolen keyring in his pocket for a few days, then one night flung it over the fence surrounding the freeway overpass, where it sailed into dark, trash-filled underbrush and disappeared forever.

On the last morning he lived in Las Vegas—before they moved to the middle of nowhere Arizona, where a friend of a friend had a plot of land a hundred miles from nowhere and a trailer with their name on it—he took the shortcut through the apartments one last time.

When he passed number three, he was surprised to see the door open. As he approached it, he saw the house in disarray. Kitchen cupboards open, moving boxes on the floor.

Rapping on the open door sent a shooting pain through his hand. The day before, a group of kids had surrounded Mikey in the desert lot. Just like Ray taught him, Mikey swung haymakers to disperse the crowd, then dropped the one closest to him with a one-two right on the chin. Eventually they swarmed him, throttling and kicking him on the ground, but Mikey bit and clawed at their legs until his hands and mouth were covered in blood. When he managed to get to his feet and run away, no one pursued.

A middle-aged woman in a Harley Davidson tank top came out from the bedroom in the back, a full trash bag in one hand.

“Can I help you?” she asked, stepping into the light, which dazzled her silver hair and illuminated the tattoos running up her arms. She dropped the trash bag on the floor, one sleeve of Ray’s Chargers bathrobe falling onto the carpet.

“Was that your dad who lived here?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said warily. “I guess you could say that.”

“I knew him,” Mikey said. He pointed to the bathrobe. “Can I have that?”

She looked down at the trash bag, then picked it up and pushed it into his arms. “Knock yourself out.”

“My name’s Mikey,” he said, hugging onto the bag. “Like your uncle, I guess.”

“I never had an uncle.” She crossed her arms, sizing Mikey up. “You’re the kid who found him.”

“I wanted to come to the funeral.”

“We didn’t have one. I just wanted to be done with everything. Everyone is dead anyways.”

“I thought maybe the police might come to pay respects.”

“Why in the hell would the police come?”

“Because he was a detective for fifty years.”

“A detective?” she laughed. “Is that what Raymond told you? The closest he ever came to being a cop was working security at the Test Site. Before they shit-canned him, like everyone eventually did.”

Clutching onto the trash bag, Mikey suddenly couldn’t catch his breath.

Sinking deeper inside himself, he asked, “Did he… ever mention a magic shop? Somebody named Flores?”

“I think I remember the name. Raymond tried to do photography for some local businesses. But it didn’t work out. His temper, you know. So we bounced around a lot. Here, San Diego, Reno. Listen, I have to lock up soon.”

“Yeah, sure,” Mikey rasped. The breath just would not come. “I have to go, too.”

But he was only halfway down the drive, hyperventilating as he lugged the trash bag along, when he heard the woman’s voice behind him.

She was holding something in her hands when she caught up to him.

“Mikey, right? I guess this is for you.”

She held out the purple cigar box from Ray’s closet. Mikey let go of the trash bag to take the box in his hands, light enough to be empty, but rustling with something shifting inside.

On top was a yellow post-it note.

To Mikey, it read. World’s Greatest Detective.

He looked up at her. The way she glared and furrowed her brow, she was the mirror image of her dad. But he did not dare tell her.

“You didn’t open it?” Mikey asked.

She looked down at the box in his hands as if it were something obscene and terrifying.

“I learned a long time ago to just accept Raymond’s secrets.”

After she went back inside the apartment, Mikey stood there for a long time in the blinding sun, sweat beading on his neck as he looked down at the box shimmering in his hands.

He forced himself to lift the lid. Inside, the box was filled with bunches of dark tissue paper, like he was opening a special gift, meant for his eyes only.

As he unfolded the paper, Mikey remembered what Ray had said to him about how the truth stared you in the face, if only you opened your eyes to see it. Mikey realized now that this wisdom was only a half-truth, a flash of misdirection to pull him into the ever-tightening artifice. Behind the detective work, hidden within the magic trick he had no idea was playing out, was the old man’s real lesson: Never believe your eyes, kid.

Because there under the tissue paper, waiting patiently for him, lay a row of at least a dozen pinky finger bones, the joints held together by loops of beautifully colored twine, lovingly arranged on a square of blood-red crushed velvet.

♢

November 21, 2025