Shadowfires

the vicinity of the public telephones and sat on a red leatherette bench nearby, where she could see everyone who approached from the front of the hotel lobby and from the stairs that led out of the sunken casino. Most people remained down on the bright and noisy gaming level, but the lobby concourse was filled with a steady stream of passersby.

She studied all the men as surreptitiously as possible. She was not trying to spot Whitney Gavis, for she had no idea what he looked like. However, she was worried that someone might recognize her from photographs on television. She felt that enemies were everywhere, all around her, closing in — and while that might be paranoia, it might also be the truth.

If she had ever been wearier and more miserable, she could not remember the time. The few hours of sleep she'd had last night in Palm Springs had not prepared her for today's frantic activity. Her legs ached from all the running and climbing she had done; her arms felt stiff, leaden. A dull pain extended from the back of her neck to the base of her spine. Her eyes were bloodshot, grainy, and sore. Although she had stopped in Baker for a pack of diet sodas and had emptied all six cans during the drive to Vegas, her mouth was dry and sour.

“You look beat, kid,” Whitney Gavis said, stepping up to the bench on which she sat, startling her.

She'd seen him approaching from the front of the lobby, but she had turned her attention to other men, certain that he could not be Whitney Gavis. He was about five nine, an inch or two shorter than Benny, perhaps more solidly built than Benny, with heavier shoulders, a broader chest. He was wearing baggy white pants and a soft pastel-blue cotton-knit shirt, a modified Miami Vice look without the white jacket. However, the left side of his face was disfigured by a web of red and brown scars, as if he'd been deeply cut or burned — or both. His left ear was lumpy, gnarled. He walked with a stiff and awkward gait, laboriously swinging his left hip in a manner that indicated either that the leg was paralyzed or, more likely, that it was an artificial limb. His left arm had been amputated midway between the elbow and the wrist, and the stump poked out of the short sleeve of his shirt.

Laughing at her surprise, he said, “Evidently Benny didn't warn you: as knight-errant riding to the rescue, I leave something to be desired.”

Blinking up at him, she said, “No, no, I'm glad you're here, I'm glad to have a friend no matter… I mean, I didn't… I'm sure that you… Oh, hell, there's no reason to…” She started to get up, then realized he might be more comfortable sitting down, then realized that was a patronizing thought, and consequently found herself bobbing up and down in embarrassing indecision.

Laughing again, taking her by the arm with his one hand, Whitney said, “Relax, kid. I'm not offended. I've never known anyone who's less concerned about a person's appearance than Benny; he judges you by what you are and what you deliver, not by the way you look or by your physical limitations, so it's just exactly like him to forget to mention my… shall we say 'peculiarities'? I refuse to call them handicaps. Anyway, you've every reason to be disconcerted, kid.”

“I guess he didn't have time to mention it, even if he'd given it a thought,” she said, deciding to remain standing. “We parted in quite a hurry.”

She'd been startled because she had known that Benny and Whitney had been in Vietnam together, and on first seeing this man's grievous infirmities, she couldn't understand how he could have been a soldier. Then, of course, she realized he had been a whole man when he had gone to Southeast Asia and that he'd lost his arm and leg in that conflict.

“Ben's all right?” Whitney asked.

“I don't know.”

“Where is he?”

“Coming here to join me, I hope. But I don't know for sure.”

Suddenly she was stricken by the awful realization that it might just as easily have been her Benny who had returned from the war with his face scarred, one hand gone, one leg blown off, and that thought was devastating. Since Monday night, when Benny had taken the.357 Magnum away from Vince Baresco, Rachael had more or less unconsciously thought of him as endlessly resourceful, indomitable, and virtually invincible. She had been afraid for him at times, and since she had left him alone on the mountain above Lake Arrowhead, she had worried about him constantly. But deep down she had wanted to believe that he was too tough and quick to come to any harm. Now, seeing how Whitney Gavis had returned from the war, and knowing that Benny had served at Whitney's side, Rachael abruptly knew and felt — and finally believed — that Benny was a mortal man, as fragile as any other, tethered to life by a thread as pitifully thin as those by which everyone else was suspended above the void.

“Hey, are you all right?” Whitney asked.

“I… I'll be okay,” she said shakily. “I'm just exhausted… and worried.”

“I want to know everything — the real story, not the one on the news.”

“There's a lot to tell,” she said. “But not here.”

“No,” he said, looking around at the passersby, “not here.”

“Benny's going to meet me at the Golden Sand.”

“The motel? Yeah, sure, that's a good place to hole up, I guess. Not exactly first-class accommodations.”

“I'm in no position to be choosy.”

He'd entrusted his car to the valet, too, and he presented both his claim check and Rachael's when they left the hotel.

Beyond the enormous, high-ceilinged porte cochere, wind-harried rain slashed the night. The lightning had abated, but the downpour was not gray and dreary and lightless, at least not in the vicinity of the hotel. Millions of droplets reflected the amber and yellow lights that surrounded the entrance to the Grand, so it looked as if a storm of molten gold were plating the Strip in an armor fit for angels.

Whitney's car, a like-new white Karmann Ghia, was delivered first, but the black Mercedes rolled up behind it. Although she knew that she was calling attention to herself in front of the valets, Rachael insisted on looking carefully in the back seat and in the trunk before she would get behind the wheel and drive away. The plastic garbage bag containing the Wildcard file was where she had left it, though that was not what she was looking for. She was being ridiculous, and she knew it. Eric was dead — or reduced to a subhuman form, creeping around in the desert more than a hundred miles from here. There was no way he could have trailed her to the Grand, no way he could have gotten into the car during the short time it had been parked in the hotel's underground valet garage. Nevertheless, she looked warily in the trunk and was relieved when she found it empty.

She followed Whitney's Karmann Ghia onto Flamingo Boulevard, drove east to Paradise Boulevard, then turned south toward Tropicana and the shelter of the shuttered Golden Sand Inn.

* * *

Even at night and in the cloaking rain, Eric dared not drive along Las Vegas Boulevard South, that garish and baroque street that the locals called the Strip. The night was set ablaze by eight- and ten-story signs of blinking- pulsing-flashing incandescent bulbs, and by hundreds upon hundreds of miles of glowing neon tubes folded upon themselves as if they were the luminous intestines of transparent deep-water fish. The blur of water on the pickup's windows and the cowboy hat, its brim turned down, were not sufficient to disguise his nightmarish face from passing motorists. Therefore, he turned off the Strip well before he reached the hotels, on the first eastbound street he encountered, just past the back of McCarran International Airport. That street boasted no hotels, no carnivalesque banks of lights, and the traffic was sparse. By a circuitous route, he made his way to Tropicana Boulevard.

He had overheard Shadway telling Rachael about the Golden Sand Inn, and he had no difficulty finding it on a relatively undeveloped and somewhat dreary stretch of Tropicana. The single-story, U-shaped building embraced a swimming pool, with the open end exposed to the street. Sun-weathered wood trim in need of paint. Stained, cracked, pockmarked stucco. A tar-and-crushed-rock roof of the type common in the desert, bald and in need of rerocking. A few windows broken and boarded over. Landscaping overrun by weeds. Dead leaves and paper litter drifted against one wall. A large neon sign, broken and unlit, hung between twenty-foot-tall steel posts near the entrance drive, swinging slightly on its pivots as the wind wailed in from the west.

Nothing but empty scrubland lay for two hundred yards on either side of the Golden Sand Inn. Across the boulevard was a new housing development currently under construction: a score of homes in various stages of framing, skeletal shapes in the night and rain. But for the few cars passing on Tropicana, the motel was relatively isolated here on the southeastern edge of the city.