I looked at Hawk.
'I don't think I'm winning this conversation,' I said.
' Tears not.'
'Okay,' I said.
'You want to go back to your hotel?'
Bibi was quiet for a bit, looking at me.
'Yeah,' she said, 'I do.'
'Would you prefer to walk back alone?'
She took a deep inhale.
'Yes,' she said.
'I would.'
'You know if Marty can find you, he'll kill you. Anthony too, I think, if he had the balls.'
'He doesn't,' Bibi said.
'Can never be sure,' I said.
Bibi looked at me grimly with her lips clamped shut.
'Okay,' I said and made a be-my-guest gesture with my hand and stepped aside. Bibi began slowly to walk back along Las Vegas Boulevard toward Convention Center Drive. After a few steps she turned.
'I get some money,' she said, 'I'll pay you back.'
'Sure,' I said.
She went a few more steps back along the empty street. Again she stopped and turned.
'I appreciate what you've done, both of you.'
'Glad to help,' I said.
CHAPTER 49
She kept walking. Hawk and I watched her as she went past the Desert Inn and turned right onto Convention Center Drive.
'We spend weeks looking for her,' Hawk said.
'And a lot of dough. And we fly three thousand miles and when we find her she gives you a speech and you let her walk.'
'Always had a soft spot for feminism,' I said.
'Of course,' Hawk said.
'Me too. Wouldn't be correct, I suppose, if we sort of kept an eye on her while we having it?'
'Paternalistic and exploitive,' I said.
'What if she don't spot us?' Hawk said.
'Then it's fine,' I said.
The rest of the way back to The Mirage, Hawk and I had a lengthy discussion as to who would tail Bibi in the morning and who would sleep in. My argument was that early rising was in his genes from all those ancestral generations of chopping cotton before the dew had faded. He felt that this was a racist stereotype.
He decried racial stereotyping, and explained to me that I was a white-bread paddy with a plantation mentality. I argued that, being of Irish descent, I had no mentality at all, plantation or otherwise. And he insisted that no one was too stupid to be a bigot. He had me there, but I didn't admit it and when we got to The Mirage we stopped in the lobby and flipped a coin and he lost.
As it turned out the argument was aimless, because forty-five minutes after I got to my room the phone rang and it was Bibi.
'I'm in the lobby,' she said.
'Marty's here.'
She sounded out of breath.
'In the lobby?'
'No, I saw him in the lobby of my hotel when I came back from walking with you.'
'He see you?'
'No, I ran all the way here.'
'Room ten twenty-four,' I said.
'Come up.'
I had my pants on, and a pair of loafers, when she rang my doorbell. Being a careful person I picked up my gun before I opened the door, but she was alone.
