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A guy walks into a bar.
Or, rather: a guy walks into a bar. And then his wife walks into the same bar. They have between the two of them $287 cash, some business cards for a jewelry store in New Orleans that doesn’t exist, several purposely maxed-out credit cards, and the urge to do something reckless. Nobody knows them here, and they both know, deep down, that something has gone wrong to have led them this far astray from the lives they lived before, but it no longer matters.
A woman walks into a bar on the edge of the abyss and she sees her husband, and says, Hey. A man and a woman are in love in a getaway car, but someone cut the brake lines, and the bridge ahead is out. But nothing bad has happened yet, and they'll drive off that bridge when they come to it.
A woman walks into a bar, and she waits for a sign.
Let's start with the bar.
The Tropicana Resort and Golf Club doesn’t really make sense to Kim. The tropical theme in Texas, why? There's nothing tropical about Texas. Not that she has a problem with that. Hill Country is perfectly pleasant, but but Kim’s heart lies in the New Mexico desert, the watercolor skies and sunsets that go down blazing adobe red every night, the sun baking the hot dirt and clay roofs like pots in a kiln. The desert is no man's land in the truest sense.
She'd never seen a tumbleweed before she moved to New Mexico. Growing up, she thought they only existed in cartoons and westerns. Now the summers last longer than any other season and the arid desert wind whips the tumbleweeds up alongside the car. The dry red wind never stops blowing these days.
The Tropicana's not the most luxurious resort in Hill Country, but it's up there, and it boasts a certain clientele they find attractive: middle-management types away on business conferences, looking for an opportunity to commit some long-mulled-upon infidelity. Gated community-dwelling vice presidents here for the golfing and the steak. Midlife crisis sorts with younger women glued to their side. Recreational cocaine users, probably, but not meth, not heroin, not the products with which they’re becoming more and more intimately familiar by street reputation: who's cooking, who's slinging, whose neck is on the line with the DEA and APD this week. The Tropicana is full of marks, easy money. The perfect place for two criminal lawyers in town for a weekend, looking to blow off a little steam.
This bartender, let's call him Tom; he doesn’t really matter. The bartender's been here a while. He never intended for this to become his career, but he doesn't hate it; he makes good money, slinging bar at the Tropicana five days a week. Shift work, irregular stuff, but he's good enough to hack it on weekends and that's when he makes a killing on tips. He's good at his job and the people-watching, he boasts, can't be beat.
Tom says: never seen these two before. Totally new to him. That’s a lucky break, but it doesn’t really matter. They’ve been here before, but only once. They probably won’t come back. There are lots of places like the Tropicana in their world, and they don’t do this anymore, anyway.
They really don’t do this anymore. Kim would swear on that.
So: a woman walks into a bar.
Jimmy’s been posted up at the curved mahogany bar for close to an hour by the time Kim makes her entrance. She eyes him warily from across the room, careful. Always careful. He nods, tips his glass in the direction of this evening’s mark.
Kim takes him in: in his fifties, a braying laugh and receding hairline, the cheapest Rolex on the market prominently displayed on his wrist. A polo shirt and sunburn that suggests having spent the day on the course. Wedding ring.
This one will be fun. Jimmy’s chosen well. She’ll be sure to give him a show for his trouble.
She slides onto the stool two seats down from the mark, conscious of her body language, her posture. When the bartender shows up to take her order, she makes a point of considering the wine list. “How well do you know these reds?” she asks, tapping the most expensive bottle on the list. “The Chateau Montelena cabernet — is it any good?”
Tom, the bartender, shrugs. “Never tried it. But for the price, I imagine you get what you pay for.”
“Hm.” Kim makes a show of considering, then shakes her head. “No, it’s just going to be me. I can’t justify buying the whole bottle.” Flipping back to the list of tequilas, she taps their old standby, their favorite workhorse. “I’m just going to do two shots of Zefiro Añejo. And I’d like to order food.”
A faint smile from Tom, who can sense a fat tip coming from this woman by the end of the night: her nails are polished, her clothes are tailored, her shoes have red bottoms, he noticed when she came in. “How long are you in town for?”
“Two more nights,” she says. “I’m based in San Francisco, but my division is headquartered in Houston. Once a year they drag the top performers down here for a leadership retreat, quote-unquote.” (Air quotes.) She can feel the mark’s eyes on her now. Good. “Might as well steel myself for another thrilling three days of bluffing my way through conversations about golf.”
“You don’t play?”
“Oh, good God, no,” Kim lies. (She’s actually always liked it, always had a knack for getting a ball exactly where she wants it. It’s the only thing she misses from S&C.) “It’s pretty confusing, to be honest. Too many different clubs, too many names. I find it hard to believe the weight of your club makes any difference in where the ball goes.”
There’s a split second before the mark interjects where she’s not sure that she’s laid this sand trap plainly enough, where she sees him hesitating in her periphery and prays he’ll step right in. But then he clears his throat and practically shouts, “That’s because you’re not playing with the best,” and offers a handshake with an ingratiating, artificially white smile attached. “Alan Buchwald. People call me Buck. Buck Wild on the links.”
“Giselle St. Clair.”
“Firm handshake!” He flexes his fingers, wincing, after she pulls her hand away. “Forgive me for being so forward, but I have to ask, what is it that you do?”
“I’m in corporate law,” she says. She knows it’s dangerous to be too specific — you never give a mark enough details to catch you in the lie, and furthermore, it’s a bad idea, period, to link herself to Madrigal when talking to a stranger who might eventually have reason to call the cops. But Madrigal Electromotive is, after all, a multinational corporation with nearly fifty thousand employees. It’s the safest cover story they’ve got. “Compliance. Pretty dry stuff, but whatever pays the bills, right?”
“Got that right,” says Buck with a wheezing laugh, smacking the bar as if she’s said something funny. She doesn’t dare glance over to catch Jimmy’s eye from here on out, but there’s a mirror behind the bar, and she can just see his profile reflected in it, a faint, proud smile playing on his lips, as Buck Wild slides over to the bar stool beside her. Another one bites the dust.
The tequila comes, and Buck insists on ordering a couple shots of his own, hardly glancing at the price.
For the next two hours, she allows him to regale her with golfing advice: which clubs to buy, which courses to play if she’s ever, by any chance, in Dallas. She feeds him leading questions, allows him to stroke his ego plainly and even gives it a couple halfhearted jerks herself. And all the while, she weaves in pertinent details, subtle and offhand enough to not feel forced, not feel like testimony or like she’s got something to sell him, but — earnest, in the way she’s learned normal people like to talk about themselves. This is what she loves about the game. This is what she’s good at, the storytelling, the art of it.
Where most con artists go wrong, she thinks, is that they lead with the sob story, the crisis. I lost my wallet and need money for a bus ticket, you broke my glasses, that was a priceless antique you just ruined. But that makes the mark suspicious. It puts them on guard before you even make the ask.
No, to really run a good scheme, you start with charm, with naïveté, with casual references to steak and golf and start-ups, and you build up from there, reference the obligatory hard times and perhaps a windfall of some kind. You do all this to make sure your guy deserves it. If they’re honest, there’s no real reason to go through with it. But the ones who see an idiot named Giselle getting drunk on $50 tequila shots while blithely oversharing her own financial troubles and think, bingo? Those are the ones you want. Those are the ones who had it coming. It’s not crime — it’s justice.
So: the game is on. They eat, and they drink more tequila, and Giselle peppers in details, setting up the fall. There’s an East Coast childhood, a father who golfed; an ex-husband who lost his shirt in the Dot Com bubble; a recently deceased great-aunt, one of the younger Titanic survivors, who left behind no living children but a wealth of antiques and oddities collected over her 90-something years in what she frames as a heartbreaking battle over a senile old woman’s will. “I think I ended up with her jewelry because that was our thing when I was a kid, she’d take out her jewels and tell me the story behind each one while I helped polish,” she says, letting one hand drift self-consciously to the necklace at her throat. “I know I should just get it appraised and see if there’s anything in here worth something, but I’m pretty sure it’s all costume jewelry. There’s no real reason to sell off all those memories, and if I did, knowing my ex, he’d probably come back for half of that, too. Anyway, you said you were in financial services—”
When the check comes, Buck conveniently doesn’t offer to cover the tab, looking away while Giselle slides one of her own cards into the sleeve. They’re chatting about Enron when Tom returns to ask in a low, tactful voice, “Ma’am, do you have another card we can try?” She gives it the requisite shock, she insists he try again, but when he returns she hands him another and then another. There’s nothing on them, and she groans, head in her hands.
Kim doesn’t have to feign humiliation here; even in this manufactured setting, this familiar shame feels uncomfortably real.
Finally, after rifling through her wallet once more, the moment of realization arrives: “Shit. My corporate card. I left it upstairs.”
Turning to Buck, she fixes him with what she knows is an earnest, pleading expression. “I need to run back up to my suite. I realize this looks bad, but—” She unclasps the ostentatious necklace at her throat and sets it in front of him, an offering. “You can hold onto this until I’m back. Like I said, I don’t think it’s worth much beyond sentimental value, but I don’t want you to think I’m running out on the bill.”
Buck eyes it, eyes her, not with suspicion but — as expected — with avarice. Tom, behind the bar, says nothing. “Fine by me,” says Buck. It sends a sizzle of lightning up her spine as she heads for the door.
Time for Jimmy to play his part.
They’re not staying at the Tropicana, of course. They’ve got some sense left, if not much. They’re staying at a Marriott in Houston, spitting distance from the Madrigal offices. Kim comes to Houston five, six times a year, putting in her requisite face time at the corporate office where she’s on the books as associate counsel in the compliance division. Jimmy doesn’t usually come with her — this is new. But —
(A week ago, in Albuquerque:
Everything Happens For A Reason!
Kim stared at the words emblazoned on the woman's tie-dyed t-shirt. She almost wanted to crack a joke, draw attention to it. Takes a lot of nerve to wear something like that to meet your court-appointed defender. Tie-dye, and Everything Happens For A Reason! and a woozy little smiley face underneath to boot. She could just see the Joe Boxer brand label in back, the scratchy kind of tag anyone with good sense cuts out. Brassy peroxide hair and half a mouthful of rotten teeth. Kim’s a long way from Mesa Verde, and she made peace with that a long time ago, but she recoiled when the smell of cigarettes hit her, instinctively reaching for a piece of Nicorette from her bag.
"Let me guess," she said, all business. "DWI? Possession?"
"Possession and solicitation," said her client. "Popped me in the parking lot of the Ramada."
"Ah." Kim nodded. "Right. Vice?"
"They've got new guys on the force," her client said. "'m Wendy, by the way."
"Pleasure to meet you."
"It's not really fair." Wendy coughed into her elbow, and Kim waited for her to finish before passing her a tissue from the pack in her bag. "Thanks. What I mean is, they've been on my ass for the last year and a half, trying to catch me with something on me. They don't have a reason to pull me over, I never drove fucked-up, so they send their vice guys out to catch me trying to make an honest living?"
She looked at Kim like she was waiting for her to agree, and Kim didn’t know what to say. So she agreed. “I completely understand," she said. ”Tell me more about the cops who busted you. Do you think there's any chance they might have had a personal connection, an axe to grind?”)
A week ago, she felt that old, familiar itch resurface beneath her skin.
A week ago, her husband came home with a duffel bag of cash, rolls and rolls of hundred-dollar bills in the back of his Cadillac, and she knew exactly which questions to ask.
They’ve been so good lately, no brushes with cartel goons, no real reasons to actively worry. Gus Fring promised to take care of them, and he has. Kim cashes her checks from Madrigal that allow her the plausible deniability necessary for a public defender with a second home in Santa Fe. She’s careful with her pro bono clients, never reveals more than she needs to Fring’s brittle, frosty right-hand woman at the Houston office. But she also remembers what Lydia told her at their first meeting, nearly eleven months ago: You will have to be careful beyond careful. I understand that you are quite the rhetorician — Lalo Salamanca, in particular, found you impressive — but you need to understand that the game you’re playing now is very, very real. Your margin of error has gone from slim to none.
There was an urgency to the way she said it, to the way her eyes darted around the dim conference room like a trapped animal, looking for a door ajar, any means of escape. Kim understands. She’s in the game now, has been for a long time. But she misses the safe kind of danger. She still yearns, from time to time, to make a mistake.
Jimmy is her finest mistake, and she makes him again and again. In for a penny, in for a pound. That’s love, isn’t it — giving someone the power to destroy you, but knowing them from the inside out, knowing they’ll never deprive you of your god-given right to destroy yourself.
So she’s sitting behind the wheel of her rented Audi in the parking lot, while inside, Viktor Babineaux, an estate jeweler here on vacation from New Orleans, is selling Buck Wild an elaborate story about the necklace she left at the bar, examining the enormous cubic zirconia pendant through a brass jeweler’s loupe, and telling him it could be worth hundreds of thousands.
She’s going to walk back in with her Ice Station Zebra Associates corporate AmEx and Buck will offer to cover the bill in exchange for the necklace, which he has suddenly decided his wife can’t live without. She’ll hedge and he’ll offer her a little on top, she’ll dwell on the sentimental value until he tells her to name her price — he’ll make the check out to cash when she brings up the deadbeat ex-husband. And when she’s gone, less one rhinestone necklace from the wholesale district in Houston, Viktor will leave Buck a card, telling him to call and set up a formal appraisal, congratulating him on the steal.
A long time ago, Kim thought that maybe, she didn’t want to be this person. That she could indulge herself only a little, never fully crossing the line, never doing something she couldn’t take back. That the law was reason, free from passion, after all, and that she could work with that.
The truth is, passion is all there is. Lex malla, lex nulla: a bad law is no law.
She’s smoking out the window of the getaway car. Jimmy’s looking at her with unguarded hunger as he drives through the hills, back toward Houston, velvet black sky laid out above them. “Kim, I’ve gotta tell you, that was… masterful stuff.”
She’s dizzy from the Zefiro, she’s riding the adrenaline rush of the game. Kim laughs, feeling a hot flush spread across her neck, tosses her cigarette out into the night. “It was, wasn’t it?”
“You should thank me for not blowing the whole thing up,” Jimmy says, his hot gaze unwavering. “When you made him write that check, I could’ve gotten down on my knees and ate your pussy, right there in the bar.”
She closes her eyes. “Jimmy.” It’s a warning and a promise. She knows he needed this as much as she did: the danger, the adrenaline, the rush. It used to be that she held him back, but now, she doesn’t know. Sometimes, before she comes back to herself, she feels like she could do this again and again into the abyss. Sometimes, she thinks, he’d drive off that cliff with her, hurl himself into the abyss with her if she asked. But she doesn’t ask. She knows exactly who they are, and what they’ve done, and she loves him because of it, loves to watch him dance with the knife in his teeth, loves him past the point of no return, which is exactly how he loves her. “Watch the road,” she says. “Drive.”
Jimmy drives.