him.
He probably didn’t need to use the John, and he certainly didn’t need another breakfast beer. These were excuses to interrupt Micky’s story and thus dilute its impact. Leilani’s predicament had affected him, sure enough; but Farrel was determined not to be affected to the extent that he would feel obligated to help her.
From bitter experience, Micky knew how useful alcohol could be when making a morally bankrupt decision didn’t come naturally and when you needed to numb your conscience a little in order to do the wrong thing. She recognized the strategy.
Farrel wouldn’t return until he’d drunk the fortified Budweiser. More likely than not, he would visit the kitchen for a third serving before at last sitting down at his desk again. Tuning Micky out would be easier by then, and he would be able to convince himself that the wrong thing was the right move.
If she hadn’t known the great kindness he’d done for Wynette, she might not have hung in here as long as this.
But she also held on to a thread of hope because Noah Farrel clearly didn’t have long-term experience with morning drinking or perhaps with drinking binges at any hour. Evidence of his nouveau-drunk status was evident in the self-conscious way he handled the can, first pushing it aside as if shunning it, but a moment later turning it nervously in his hands, tracing the rim with one thumb, clicking a fingernail against the aluminum as if to assess by sound how much brew remained, utterly lacking the casualness of a seasoned lush’s relationship with his poison.
Micky’s history with drink convinced her that pressing Farrel harder, right now, would fail to move him and that this was one of those times when retreat — and special tactics — would prove to be the wiser course. She needed him for his expertise, because she couldn’t afford another detective; she was depending on the kindness that he had shown Wynette and on his rumored weakness for cases involving children at risk.
A lined yellow legal pad and a pen by among other items on the detective’s desk. The moment Farrel left the room, Micky snatched up the pen and pad to write a message:
Leilani’s stepfather is Preston Maddoc. Look him up. He’s killed 11 people. Uses the name Jordan Banks, but was married under his real name. Where were they married? Proof? Who is Sinsemilla, really? How do we prove she had a disabled son? Time running out. Gut feeling — the girl dead in a week. Reach me through my aunt, Geneva Davis.
She concluded the message with Aunt Gen’s phone number and put the legal pad on the desk.
From her purse, she withdrew three hundred dollars in twenties. This was the most she could afford to pay him. In fact, she couldn’t afford this much, but she calculated that it was a sum sufficient to make him feel obligated to do something.
She hesitated. He might spend this retainer on beer, of course. She had too little money to risk ten bucks on a gamble, let alone three hundred.
One thing about him, above all else, convinced her to put the cash atop the legal pad and weight it with the pen. Nouveau drunk or not, he was obviously a haunted man, and by Micky’s reckoning, that counted as a point in his favor. She didn’t know what loss or what failure haunted him, but her own journey had taught her that haunted people are not dissolute by nature and that they will try to exorcise their demons if a caring hand is extended to them at the right time.
Before leaving, she stepped around the desk to take a quick look at his computer. He was on-line. Skimming the displayed text, she discovered that it was part of an article exposing an epidemic of supposedly compassionate killing by nurses who considered themselves angels of death.
A shudder, less fear than wonder, traced the architecture of Micky’s spine as she sensed a strange synchronicity linking her life to Farrel’s. Gen often said that what we perceive to be coincidences are in fact carefully placed tiles in a mosaic pattern the rest of which we can’t apprehend. Now Micky sensed that intricate mosaic, vast and panoramic, and mysterious.
Leaving the apartment, she quietly closed the door behind her, as though she were a burglar making off with a treasure of jewels while her victim dozed unaware.
Hurriedly, she descended the palm-shaded stairs.
The rising heat of late morning had made the rats lethargic. Silent and unseen, they hung like foul fruit among the layers of collapsed brown fronds.
Chapter 51
Thanks to direct-to-brain megadata downloading, Curtis knows that whereas New Jersey has a population density of nearly eleven hundred people per square mile, Nevada has fewer than fifteen per square mile, most of whom are located in and around the gambling meccas of Las Vegas and Reno. Tens of thousands of the state’s 110,000 square miles are all but devoid of people, from the desert barrens in the south to the mountains in the north. Principal products include slot machines, other gaming devices, aerospace technology, gold, silver, potatoes, onions, and topless dancers. In Carson City Kid, Mr. Roy Rogers — with the courageous aid of the indispensable Mr. Gabby Hayes — successfully pursues a murderous Nevada gambler; however, this is a 1940 film, shot in a more innocent time, and it involves no bare-breasted women. If Mr. Rogers and Mr. Hayes were still engaged upon heroic deeds, they would no doubt these days be uncovering nefarious activity at Area 51, the famous Nevada military site widely believed to house extraterrestrials either alive or dead, or both, as well as spacecraft from other worlds, but which is in fact involved in far stranger and more disturbing business. Anyway, vast regions of Nevada are lonely, mysterious, forbidding, and particularly spooky at night.
From the crossroads store and service station — where the real mom and pop lie dead in the SUV, and where two tangled and bullet-riddled masses of preposterous physiology lie waiting to scare the living hell out of whoever finds them — Highway 93 leads north and isn’t intersected by a paved road until it meets highway 50. This occurs thirty miles south of Ely.
Piloting the Fleetwood with jet-jockey skill, coaxing more speed out of it than seems probable, Polly decides against turning east on Highway 50, which leads to the Utah state line.
Boasting a population in excess of 150,000, Reno lies to the west. Plenty of motion and commotion in Reno. But between here and there, Highway 50 crosses 330 miles of semiarid mountains, just the type of desolate landscape in which one boy and two showgirls— even two heavily armed showgirls — might vanish forever.
As the moon sets and the night deepens, Polly continues north on Highway 93 another 140 miles, until they intersect Interstate 80. One hundred seventy-seven miles to the west lies Winnemucca, where in 1900, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid robbed the First National Bank. One hundred eighty-five miles to the east stands Salt Lake City, where Curtis would enjoy hearing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir perform under the world’s largest domed roof without center supports.
Cass, relieving Polly at the wheel, proceeds north on Highway 93, because neither sister is in a touristy mood. Sixty-eight miles ahead lies Jackpot, Nevada, just this side of the Idaho state line.
“When we get there, we’ll tank up and keep moving,” says Cass. From the co-pilot’s chair, Curtis admits to a gap in his mission preparation: “I don’t have any info about the town of Jackpot.”
“It’s not much of a town,” Cass declares. “It’s a wide place in the road where people throw away all their money.”
“Does this have religious significance?” he wonders. “Only if you worship a roulette wheel,” Polly explains from the lounge, where she’s resting on the sofa with Old Yeller. Though she’s gotten no answers, she’s been whispering questions to the dog. She speaks in a normal voice to Curtis: “Jackpot’s got like five hundred hotel rooms and two casinos, with a couple of first-rate buffets for six bucks, surrounded by thousands of empty acres. After a satisfying dinner and bankruptcy, you can drive to a nice barren place, commune with nature, and blow your brains out in private.”
“Maybe,” Curtis theorizes, “that’s why so many people back at the Neary Ranch were buying Grandma’s locally famous black bean-and-corn salsa. Maybe they were going to use it in Jackpot.”
Polly and Cass are quiet. Then Cass says, “Things don’t often go over my head, Curtis, but that one cleared my scalp by six inches.”
“It was so far over mine,” Polly admits, “I didn’t even feel the breeze when it passed.”
