Dying For LA by Ian Jones (top fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

lying naked on her back on the grubby bed, ribs sticking out of her emaciated, pale body, angry track marks visible on her arms and feet. To an observer, she could actually be dead, something which he had thought many times before.

But not anymore, he had got used to that.

He glanced at the clock next to the bed, nearly twelve, and sat up.

He looked around the room, he had ended up here, with no other place to stay. The police had warned him against vagrancy but he had bigger problems with being out on the street, he owed a lot of money around, doing deals that didn’t really exist. He couldn’t even risk begging anymore, so had resorted to thieving out of cars again, but this wasn’t so lucrative as it once was. He had managed to steal an iPad from a tourist’s convertible in the car park behind the Wynn hotel a couple of days ago, but had made barely a hundred bucks. He checked his pockets, he had less than five left. He was fully dressed, half in and half out of a tatty, smelly sleeping bag. The room was a tip. It was tiny, just a single bed and a chest of drawers but there were dirty clothes and crap everywhere, needles and burnt foil scattered across the top of the drawers.

He hadn’t met the apartment’s other occupants, Angie had only been living here a week or so. He wasn’t even totally sure where he was in the city, but he knew he was way north of the strip. He’d been walking for hours last night, or so it had seemed.

He sighed deeply, and pulled his feet out the bottom of the sleeping bag, staring at the holes in his socks.

Life sucked.

He’d been broke and on the street for way too long. The only positive in his life, and it had been a close call, was that he had stayed off the hard drugs. He was absurdly grateful for that, considering just how crap the last ten or more years of his life had turned out, but he knew all too well it could have ended up worse. He’d witnessed that descent many times. Angie spent pretty much every cent she earned in alleyways and on the back seats of cars all over Vegas on heroin, and always needed more, she was only just out of hospital after yet another trick beat her badly. And she looked fucking awful, but despite his meagre lifestyle, he still had his baby face and puppy fat. He stood up, and looked in the small mirror on the back of the door. He wasn’t looking good either, he had to admit it, fading black eye and greasy spots. His shock of bright red hair was a curse, it was easily recognisable from a distance. He had dyed it but it never really took, so now whenever he was out he always wore a beanie.

There were too many people looking for him, way too many. All of them no good, some really bad, and the rest pure fucking evil. He’d sought out Angie down to pure desperation, with luck nobody would know where she was either. He needed to make some fucking money, that’s what he needed to do.

He looked around the room again wanting nothing more than to hide away. But he couldn’t stay here. He needed to sort his shit out. He looked in a couple of drawers and rooted around inside, knowing there was no point. There was no cash in this room, that was for damn sure.

He pulled on his trainers, which had maybe just weeks left until they completely disintegrated then shrugged into his jacket and with a resigned look back at Angie left the room. He was in a short narrow hallway, a door open on his left showed a small sitting room, with several people lying on the floor. The place stank. The next door was a bathroom, which he used. Then a tiny, filthy kitchen. There were two other doors on the opposite side of the hall which were closed, and he ignored them. He knew of old there was no point minesweeping this apartment, nobody here would have anything worth stealing, so he let himself out the front door.

He put on the hat and walked down two flights of worn litter-strewn steps then he was back on the street. He checked his jacket pockets and was relieved to find his cellphone, he’d managed to not try and sell that for a couple of bucks. He frowned, there was a message.

From Tibor.

Fuck. He knew exactly what that would say. He was going to spend the day hiding. Again. Fuck, he needed to raise some cash, he was never going to do it tucked away out the back of a store or a restaurant, hoping for some scraps.

But he pressed the button anyway, and was for the first time pleasantly surprised. Tibor was offering him something!

The message said ‘I got a job for you. You’ll see five g’s once I get my three. If I was you I’d do it.’

Five grand! Yes please!

He saw the message had been sent a couple of hours before, shit! He sent a reply with a lame excuse about his girlfriend being ill. Tibor knew Angie, so he wasn’t expecting any sympathy. He got a message back immediately that said ‘Be at Caesars for 2. Car park level 4.’

That gave him a couple of hours to get down to the strip, he should be able to do that, wherever the fuck he was right now. He stood still and looked around, and spied a medical centre he knew. He’s taken Angie there a couple of times, and knew it was only ten minutes to Freemont.

He set off, willing his trainers to stay together as he had quite a walk in front of him.

***

John was enjoying being in Vegas with Tom Reed. The big man seemed to be having a good