I had no idea where I was. But the helicopter hadn’t needed much time to find us when I was having my little race with the Trans Am, so I guessed that we couldn’t be too far from Las Vegas, and it didn’t really matter for the moment. Everything in its season. Now was the time to run.
A road led off to the left and I took it, urging the old desert buggy to as much speed as it could manage and finding the headlight switch in the dark after only a couple of tries.
The speedometer was calibrated in kilometers (who had owned this thing last?) and I did the mental arithmetic that told me 70 km was something like 45 mph and tried to urge a little more speed, but the pedal was to the metal. Any way you sliced it, I wasn’t going to be quite a mile away when things began to happen. I wished, irrelevantly, for my vanished wristwatch and its night-glowing dial and then wondered why. Knowing how much time had passed wouldn’t change anything.
Still...
I began to count off the seconds, but that made no sense, either, and I was ready to have a real argument with myself when I heard the first explosion and braked the half-track and ducked into the armor plating.
Which was just as well. The first blast hadn’t been much, but the second was a head-rattler and touched off another wave of dizziness and disorientation even while it was triggering the other explosions I’d hoped for back in the hangar.
Something hit the side of the vehicle with a loud clang and went whining off into the night and I heard several other things hitting the ground nearby and then the night blossomed briefly into full daylight and I stuffed my fingers into my ears but it still wasn’t enough to make the sound bearable, and the following blast-wave tilted the half–track and probably moved its front wheels half a foot or so.
After that, the night quieted a little.
But I was in no hurry to make myself vertical and vulnerable again, and I lay still for a while, waiting for the light to die and thinking about what else had to be done before dawn and feeling very, very tired indeed.
At last, however, I forced myself to sit up and look around for the light-loom of the city. There it was—easily distinguished now from the still-bright flickering of the flames consuming what little was left of the hangar-arsenal—and I started up the half-track again and moved off toward Las Vegas, amusing myself a little with the thought of what kind of reaction I would get if I tried to park the thing in the VIP garage and then realizing that I was not only debarred from doing that but would need to find some likely hiding place for the old crock if I was going to use it in the way I was beginning to think I might.
Little by little, the lights ahead got brighter and the one behind continued to fade.
I took deep lungfuls of the night air and tried to get the taste of the cigarette out of my mouth and the scent of gasoline and gunpowder out of my nose, but it was no use.
They were facts of life. Reality.
Like so many other things I couldn’t change, I was just going to have to live with them.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Power? How odd that so many should pursue it so avidly.
For each of us is powerful; the mind and the soul that distinguish us from other members of the animal kingdom are a source of power limited only by the scope of our dreams...and the prison of our fears.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Getting inside the hotel promised to present problems of its own.
Las Vegas innkeeping personnel are virtually shockproof. They have seen it all. Twice. And coped.
But they are also trained to head off disaster before it can occur, and in my present state of disrepair I would look like the advance man for an earthquake. Security guards would pounce on me at the door, and access to the premises would be granted only at the price of a thorough identity check. Which would mean questions. And I still didn’t have a single answer that would satisfy anyone, including me.
So I came in the back way, avoiding people in the rear parking lot and heading for the subbasement door that Corner Pocket had used when he brought me out to see Jorge Martinez’s body earlier in the day. Amazingly, it was still unlocked, and I ducked through into cool darkness and stood still for a moment or two, listening to the sound of my own pulse.
Waves of dizziness were still coming at fairly regular intervals, and the distance I had walked since finding a likely place to ditch the half-track hadn’t helped much.
The wonder was that a cruising police car hadn’t locked onto the skinny one-eyed wreck wandering along the quiet sidewalks in the wee hours of a moonless desert morning. Their questions would have been as searching as those of the hotel personnel—and just as unanswerable. I leaned against the doorjamb and waited for the basement to stop playing games.
Key.
The key to my room had vanished along with everything else I’d had in my pockets. All right, then. Get a spare from the room clerk. Sure. And wait while he dials the emergency numbers for hotel security, the police, the FBI, and a straitjacket. Thank you, no.
Well, then...?
The dizziness gradually subsided, and I let myself have another lungful of conditioned air and put my full weight back on my feet and commanded my legs to move them forward. Toward someone who could help. And would.
Toward Maxey.
Luck is for losers. Marks and mooches talk about how their luck was good or how it was bad; they complain about it and hope for it and make jokes about it and build their lives around it and wonder why nothing ever seems to work for them. So depressing.
But not entirely unfounded.
The elevator that took me upstairs was unoccupied when its door opened in the subbasement, and there were no stops before Maxey’s floor, and no one was walking around the corridor to see me and remember, either. Which was pure luck. As was the response when I hammered my knuckles under her room number.
The chance of her being in the room was not a good one. The odds on her being awake to hear the commotion were even worse.
But the door opened before I could knock a second time, and Maxey was smiling as she opened her mouth to greet whomever she had been expecting—and stopped short at the sight of me.
We played living statues for a moment.
“Hi, there,” I said. “I was in the neighborhood and I wondered if you might need any Avon products...”
But Maxey had stopped smiling.
Snake-swift and accurate, her right hand reached out to grasp the remains of my coat and pull me inside. She slammed and locked the door as soon as I was out of the way and then turned to look me up and down with eyes that were pure violet wonder. I was out of words and out of ideas and if she wanted explanations we were both in for a big disappointment. But one of the best things about Maxey had always been her sense of priorities. First things first. I was hoping the passing years hadn’t changed things too much, and from that angle her eventual vocal reaction was all that I could have hoped.
“Holy...shit!” she said.
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Priorities continued to hold the questions at bay for the next few minutes, while Maxey aimed me at a chair and let me collapse into it instead of holding still for the walkaround inspection that was clearly in prospect.
But it didn’t keep her from forcing me to sit up while she removed what little was left of the coat, vest, and shirt—and it didn’t keep her from muttering under her breath over assorted bruises, cuts, and scrapes as they were uncovered.
She was still shaking her head when there was another knock at the door, and I came to instant alert.
But she waved a restraining hand and jerked a thumb in the direction of the suite’s mini-kitchen.
“Room service,” she said in a quiet voice. “I was expecting them when you turned up. Just stay out of sight.”
I did as I was told.
Door opening and word exchanges and tendering of tip took less than a minute and then the door closed again and I heard her throw the dead bolt.
“Talk abo
ut serendipity!”
I moved back into the living room to find Maxey carrying a tray decorated with a bucket of ice and a bottle of Raynal Napoleon. Now it was my turn to smile.
“Same ol’ Maxey,” I said. She had never been a heavy drinker, but I had a vivid memory of the Raynal bottle that was always on the sideboard in her apartment. No wine with meals, but once in a while an ounce of brandy afterward—or poured into the coffee. And, on widely spaced occasions, a nerve-calming sip at the end of a particularly improbable day.
“And a damn good thing, too,” she said, moving the tray to the top of the handout bar between living room and kitchen and snapping the seal from the bottle with the ease of long practice.
“No,” she said, heading me off as I moved back toward the chair. “Stand still a minute. I’m going to use some of this to disinfect you.”
I shook my head.
“Wasted effort,” I said. “And wasted brandy, too. That stuff’s strictly for internal use, and anyway what I really need to do is get back into my room.”
Maxey halted in midstride, bottle in hand, and regarded me with undisguised astonishment that turned almost instantly to real anger.
“You know,” she said in a voice that would have frozen a salamander, “with just a little effort, you dumb son of a bitch, you could get to be a perfect stranger!”
Listening to what else she had to say, I could understand why she felt as she did. And what a good thing it had been that I hadn’t risked coming in the front door.
Quite a bit had happened while I was away.
“First,” she said, “there was the judge. Little Happy Apodaca. They found his body with a knife in the chest—and those same five cards, too—down in the VIP garage. Right beside that rented car of yours. Which, of course, meant they came looking for you. And couldn’t find you. So naturally you are now suspect number one on their list.”
“Terrific,” I said.
“There’s more: About an hour after they took the judge away, the highway patrol found two big cars—limousines—turned over and on fire about ten miles south of town. No witnesses to what happened, of course. Nobody dumb enough to admit a thing like that. But when they got the fire put out and got inside there, they found bodies. Seven of them. Cremated. But the license plates on the cars and some stuff that didn’t burn told them who it was.”
“Manny,” I said, realizing that it wasn’t a guess and that I might be the only one who still knew about the aces and eights that had been in the envelope he got just before he tried to get out of town. “Manny Temple and six of his buddies.”
The violet eyes never wavered. But the message I got was not a happy one.
“Your friend, Singleton,” she said. “Corner Pocket. He’s going to want to hear what you know about this.”
I nodded.
“But later,” I said.
She thought it over for a moment and went on without comment.
“I heard all of that,” she said, “sitting here watching television, waiting for you to show up or call me about putting up bail. Just waiting. And then, an hour ago, there was more. An explosion, the news said. Out on the desert away from town, but a big one that got all kinds of people calling up the police to find out what was going on and making noises about another atom bomb test or maybe an accident there at the test center.”
“That was me,” I said.
She nodded solemnly.
“It figures,” she said. “But the hell of it is, then you turn up at my door and make like it’s all some kind of a joke. Funny! Christ, I just wish you would kind of give me a little warning when you are going to do things like that.”
“Warning?”
“Yes, warning. You stupid bastard, I heard about the explosion and you were still missing and hadn’t called me or let me know anything, so I put two and two together and I sent for that bottle of brandy to drink myself drunk.
“This morning—yesterday morning—was bad enough. When I thought you’d been shot, there in the penthouse. But twice in one day is too much. Just entirely too damn much.
“Why do you think I married Sam Goines instead of you all those years ago—just because he was going to be rich and you weren’t? Idiot! It was a good enough reason, sure. But not the main one. I married Sam because if I stayed with you, I knew damn well there would come a day just like this one, when I’d get a phone call or hear some news or read a paper and there would be your name and all the details of how you’d finally found a really neat way to get killed.
“So now it’s happened to me anyway. Twice over!
“Goddamn you, lover. Goddamn you to hell—I don’t know whether to cry or swear or kiss you or kick your ass, but one thing for sure: I was right in the first place. You’re not just stupid. And you’re not just careless. And you’re not just suicidal, either.
“What you are, you’re just plain crazy!”
It’s nice to know people care. By the time all the words were out, Maxey had managed to work herself into a fine Polish rage, and remembering a couple of those from years long past, I wondered if I might be safer taking my chances with a mob of contract killers.
But the moment passed and so did the anger, and Maxey’s curiosity took control.
“So,” she said when her breathing had slowed down again. “Aside from that, General Lee, how was your trip to Gettysburg?”
I grinned. And she grinned. And there was no more talk about trying to get back into my room. And as the first rays of light began to sprout around the silhouette of the hotel tower across the Strip, I gave her a thumbnail account of the evening, beginning with our missed dinner date and going on to Happy Apodaca’s death and the chase out into the desert.
I edited the part about the hangar. Jorge de la Torre wasn’t in it. I was alone out there, and there was no atom bomb and no half-track, either. Just a car that I stole and drove back to town after arranging the explosion. It left gaps in the fabric, but if she noticed them she didn’t mention it and I played the whole thing as straight as I could and finally we got back to the immediate problem of what to do with Preacher’s beat-up carcass.
It was tired. And dirty. And getting kind of crumpled around the edges. Turn it in for a newer model, soon as the dealerships are open for the day. Trade up. Next time, a Schwarzenegger sedan.
Meanwhile: “Open,” Maxey said, holding a two-finger dose of brandy in front of my nose.
“Maxey, I don’t—”
“Open!”
I opened, and she poured.
“Now close,” she said. “And swallow.”
I did, happy to get the fiery lake off my tongue, and felt the lining of my esophagus dissolve as the liquid made its way down into the abdominal holding area, and exploded.
I took a deep breath. And another.
“God,” I said. “In...heaven!”
Maxey nodded approvingly. “He’s an applejack fancier, so I hear tell,” she said. “Now walk—that way. Into the bedroom. Strip. And shower. All things considered, I don’t think this would be a good time for me to ask room service for bandages and antiseptic, but unless there’s some kind of internal damage or one of those is deeper than it looks, soap and hot water ought to do almost as well.”
“But I don’t—” I began.
“Lover,” she said, settling her feet into a stubborn, hipshot posture I remembered well, “don’t argue with me. You’re a nice fella and plenty smart about a lot of things, but I’m the one with the nurse training. Remember?”
“Well—”
“Just do it.”
She moved out of the way, and I put one foot in front of the other in the direction of the door to her left and went through it and stopped cold on the other side.
The bedroom was a real specialty number.
Pink and peach, with an oversized round bed draped in waterfall tulle and the coverlet turned back to display silk sheets. There was a mirror on the ceiling, and through the doorway opposite I could glimpse a baronial-sized bathro
om complete with a sunken heart-shaped tub.
I started to laugh and couldn’t seem to stop.
Maxey’s head angled inquiringly round the door frame. “If you’re having hysterics in here,” she said, “I am going to send for the house doctor, and that’s for sure.”
I tried to explain, but had to settle for shaking my head and waving a hand.
Maxey didn’t get it.
She was looking more and more suspicious, and I supposed hysteria did have some part of the action, so I made a major effort and finally managed enough control to be able to speak again.
“The...room,” I said.
“What the hell about it?”
“The room,” I repeated, controlling another wave of mirth. “Do you think the hotel’s own decorator did all this? Or did he have to call in a sex maniac?”
Kinky decor or no, the master bedroom of Maxey’s suite was a soft and forgiving place—conspicuously short on hard edges and pointed corners—and I was grateful for that as I eased out of boots, socks, and trousers.
Of the lot, only the boots looked salvageable, and I considered stuffing the rest into the wastebasket but settled for dragging the pants onto one of the hangers and hanging them behind the mirrored door of the walk-in closet.
The man I saw when the door was closed again was not a bundle of charm.
He was a chiropractor’s fantasy—an offhand collection of bones, more or less supporting a layer of sinew and skin. Living proof that humankind is close cousin to the other primates. Bend the knees, support the weight on the second knuckle of the fingers, and pick at the head lice. Do not feed the animals...
Cut it out, Preacher.
Go admire yourself on your own time.
Maxey seemed to be right. None of the visible damage looked especially serious, with the possible exception of a bruise I hadn’t noticed before on the sole of my right foot. The final worldly legacy of Big Jorge de la Torre’s neck, most likely. That would be the foot that had done the damage...
Suddenly the dizziness was back.
And my stomach came to an adverse decision about the brandy.
Aces and Eights Page 28