He asked if she’d gotten the clerk’s name. She hadn’t. But she remembered the man well enough: midforties, balding, slightly built but with a noticeable paunch.
“How long were you in the room before Banning showed up?”
“About ten minutes.”
So he’d either had surveillance on the motel, so he knew when she arrived, or he’d got a call from the clerk. He’d been somewhere close by, in any case. “Describe him.”
After a few seconds she said, “Not handsome, not ugly. About your height, six feet. Heavyset but not fat. Strong. I couldn’t fight him. I couldn’t even scream with his hand on my throat. He-”
“Don’t dwell on that. How old?”
“Thirties. Maybe thirty-five.”
“Hair color?”
“Black. Short and kinky.”
“Distinguishing marks? Scars, moles, anything like that.”
“A tattoo. On the back of his right wrist.”
“What kind of tattoo?”
“A dragon. Breathing fire.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Brown leather jacket. Slacks, shirt, cowboy boots…” She paused, frowning. “He had something odd in the jacket pocket. It fell out when he took the jacket off and he grabbed it and stuffed it back-quick, as if he didn’t want me to see it.”
“Did you get a good look at it?”
“No, but I’m pretty sure it was a garter. Gold, with black ruffles around the edge. I think it had writing on it.”
“Writing?”
“A name of some kind.”
Not a woman’s garter, then. A sleeve garter. Some casino employees- floor bosses, dealers, croupiers, stickmen, bartenders-wore them. The name on it could be that of a casino.
“Can you remember anything else about him?”
“He wore a ring, a big gold cat’s-eye ring. One of the times he hit me, it cut my cheek.”
“You’re doing fine,” Fallon said. “Now, what about his car?”
“I didn’t see it. I didn’t even hear him drive up.”
“Okay. What did he say to you when you let him in?”
“Just… ‘I’m Banning.’ He was smiling.”
“And then?”
“He asked if I’d brought the money and I said yes and took it out of my purse and gave it to him. He counted it before he put it in his pocket. Then… then his smile changed and he said, ‘All right, now you get what’s coming to you,’ and that’s when he grabbed me and threw me down on the bed. It all happened so fast…”
“When did he deliver the warning? While he was attacking you?”
“No. After he… afterwards.”
“Can you remember his exact words?”
She’d picked up her coffee cup; the question made her put it down again, hard, so that it rattled the saucer and nearly tipped over. “I’ll never forget it. ‘Message from your ex-husband. Stop looking for him and the kid. If you don’t, he’ll find you and do what I just did to you and then he’ll kill you. And if you go to the police, I’ll find you and fuck you again and then
“That all?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
She had begun to rock slightly, back and forth. There were goose bumps, he saw, rising on her bare arms. The conversation, the chilly air in the room, physiological reaction to the sunburns.
He said, “That’s enough for now. You’d better lie down for a while, get some rest.”
“I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not. Not yet.”
He got up to turn the air-conditioning unit down to medium cool. She wouldn’t let him help her to the bed. When she was lying down with a sheet over her lower body, she said, “What are you going to do now?”
“Go see about your car. It should’ve been towed in by this time and if it’s not too badly damaged, the mechanics ought to have it ready to drive by to- morrow. You won’t be ready to travel before then anyway. Probably not until Monday.”
“I can’t just sit around in this cabin for two more days…”
“You will if you want my help.” He went to the writing desk, found a piece of cheap motel stationery and a pen. “What’s your cell phone number?”
She gave it to him and he wrote it down. Then he tore the paper across the middle, pocketed the top half, and on the clean bottom portion wrote his cell number. He put that piece on the nightstand.
“Call me if you need to at any time. Otherwise I’ll call you.”
“From where? Where are you going?”
Fallon smiled wryly. “The other side of silence.”
“What?”
“Vegas,” he said, “where else?”
PART II. LAS VEGAS
ONE
FALLON HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT of Vegas as a massive, amoeba-like creature slowly inching its way across the flat desert landscape, absorbing more and more of it in little nibbling bites. No head or tail, no intelligence, its only purpose to grow larger, fatter, like the others of its kind that had covered the Los Angeles basin and the Phoenix area and were now swallowing parts of the Mojave Desert. Its veins and arteries pulsed and glowed, new cells made up of housing developments and strip malls and big-box stores expanded in every direction as it grew. Heat radiated from it, but it wasn’t the dry, natural heat of Death Valley. It was sweaty, oily, carbonized. Body heat. Engine heat.
Worst of all was the noise it generated. Growls, snarls, howls, roars, siren shrieks, and all the other sounds that came from its writhing bowels in a throbbing, never-ending din. There were louder assaults on the eardrums- NASA rocket launches, supersonic jets on takeoffs and flyovers-but they didn’t go on and on and on. Only two places were worse than the city beasts. One was a military training base during ongoing preparations for war. The other was war itself, the deadly thunder of bombs and rockets, grenades and small-arms fire-hellsounds that by pure chance he had never had to endure himself.
This creature, the Vegas creature, seemed to be spreading even faster than he recalled. Only five years since he’d been there last, on a concessional weekend with Geena, but it might’ve been decades. Accelerated metabolism, increased hunger: proportionately less desert. One of the fastest-growing cities in America. One of the fastest-dying open spaces in the West.
Geena loved it, of course. Not so much Vegas itself as its pulsing, pounding heart-the Strip. The skyscraping, weirdly shaped casinos like New York, New York, Bellagio, Bally’s, Luxor, the Venetian; the lounge acts and musical extravaganzas; the eye-stabbing neon colors that obscured the night sky-all the gaudy, tawdry, money-driven glitz the City Where Anything Goes could supply. To her it was the epitome of excitement. Worked on her like an aphrodisiac, he remembered. Their sex life had never been as lush and experimental as it had been on their few short stays in Vegas.
