have fixed it so she couldn’t do anything while he was away on those weekend road trips of his.
Priscilla shivered. If Ellis had known about Vincent Komoko. . well, forget about bruises on the ankle, he would have killed her. No question about it.
Vince, too.
God, but she’d loved that man. Every minute with Vince had been something special. All those times together at the Saguaro Riptide, and she’d never once gotten her fill of him.
She knew she never would, no matter how much time they had together.
Priscilla would have left Ellis if Vince had asked her to. She’d known that from the start.
But Vince never asked.
After a while Priscilla figured out that Vince was never going to ask. They were never going to run off together and start a new life. Things weren’t going to happen fast this time. Her life wasn’t going to change.
Not ever. That had already happened once.
It looked like once was all you got.
Priscilla didn’t think that was fair, your life changing just once and then you were stuck with it the rest of your days.
That was when she started hating Vince.
The hate built up inside her. When she couldn’t stand it anymore she asked Rorie if she remembered the guy they’d met in Vegas. Of course Rorie remembered. So Priscilla told her all about him, being sure to mention that he ran mob money from Vegas to Texas.
Rorie told Wyetta.
Wyetta liked the idea of that mob money.
Split three ways.
And now Vince was dead.
And her husband wanted her to make a couple of deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, sit down and watch
And some stranger was calling her on the phone, asking about the time she’d spent with Vince at the Saguaro Riptide Motel.
And the caller didn’t sound like anyone to mess with. And he knew where she lived. And he wanted to talk to her, face-to-face.
She couldn’t stay home with all that going on. So she’d come here, to the ruins of Graceland.
Only she wondered if you could really call a place a ruin if it had never been finished. Ellis had run out of money when the house was about halfway done. Lost his enthusiasm for it, like he did with everything else. To this day there wasn’t a single pane of glass in the windows. There wasn’t even a front door in the gaping entranceway behind the unfinished Georgian columns. What there was was a sand dune in the front hallway, and a nest of scorpions in what should have been the Jungle Room, and a family of kangaroo rats in the kitchen, and a whole lot of nothing everywhere else.
Except for that statue of Elvis up in the bathroom. And now even it was busted, missing its head, stained with Vincent Komoko’s blood.
Now it was a ruin, too.
Priscilla sat down on a rock. She rubbed her sore ankle. The dusky purple color might fade, but the bruise never went away anymore. Not really. Neither did the ache. Sometimes she could ignore it, but not tonight.
Quiet surrounded her. Her gaze wandered to the big bronze marker at the side of the house. In Memphis the area was called the Meditation Garden. Here it was just another patch of sand and scrub, though the grave marker was a twin to the one that covered Elvis Presley’s grave in Memphis.
She rose and walked past the grave, which was, of course, empty. She didn’t notice the burrow at one corner of the marker or the fresh earth heaped around the opening or the lone footprint in the fresh sand. She walked past those things as if they did not exist. She walked into the desert, moving slowly, searching for a spot where the earth had been disturbed.
The spot she was looking for had to be nearby. Rorie and Wyetta wouldn’t have dragged the body far. Not with a storm blowing all around them.
She walked for five minutes, then ten. Her ankle hurt and she began to limp, but she knew that the spot she was looking for had to be here somewhere just as surely as she knew that Rorie and Wyetta wouldn’t want her looking for it.
Just as surely as she knew that she had to look.
And if she found it. . why, if she found the spot she’d stand over it with her eyes closed. She’d let tears stream down her cheeks without shame, let them fall on churned earth out here where there was no one to see.
And next time she’d bring flowers. If she could find the right place. And she’d sit with Vince, and she’d tell him how pretty the flowers were. And she’d tell him about all the secret hopes and dreams she’d had for them that she’d never shared, and all the things she’d left unsaid because she was so afraid of the things he’d say in reply.
But now she’d tell him, and she wouldn’t be afraid.
Tumbleweeds, golden brittlebrush, teddy bear cholla, and rusty tangles of barbed wire at the property line- but she kept walking. The sun sank slow and easy into the west, guiding her progress like a friend who kept all her secrets, and she followed its path until it was gone and she was alone in the still shadow of twilight.
PART FOUR
ONE
Woodrow popped four excedrin, chewed, and dry-swallowed.
Having exhausted the supply of aspirin he kept in the Saturn, he had purchased the Excedrin in Tempe. But he had neglected to purchase a beverage. Hence the chewing and dry-swallowing.
It was odd. Just a few hours ago he’d felt tip-top. Leaving the dead cracker at the gas station, he’d donned a pair of sunglasses to ward off the afternoon glare as he headed south. Things had been just fine. He had enjoyed the drive, amusing himself with thoughts of the dead cracker locked in the trunk of his Camaro, cooking under the Arizona sun.
In spite of the sunglasses, the glare began to annoy Woodrow. It seemed particularly unforgiving in the desert-slicing the Saturn’s windshield into angry diamond patterns, riding the black freeway in shimmering waves, ricocheting off other cars with such lethal intensity that Woodrow felt he would rather meet a Medusa’s gaze than stare at the tinted window of one more Mercedes.
A Mack truck roared toward him in the northbound lane, its grille a blinding chrome nightmare.
Woodrow found himself squinting. Tears filled his eyes. .
And the taffy-pulling machine went to work on his brain, grinding. . twisting. . tearing. .
The Mack might as well have slammed him head-on.
The pain was supersonic.
It was ten miles to Tempe.
He barely made it.
He bought the Excedrin at a minimart. He swallowed two tablets in the parking lot and tried to sleep, but each time a car door slammed fresh needles of agony hammered his skull.
So, squinting, his jaws clamped together vise-tight, he drove out of Tempe and turned off on the first dirt road he found. He followed that road, and then turned off another. The second road was in miserable repair. That
