He couldn’t help wondering briefly, as he reached the northern outskirts, if she’d been here yet with the new man in her life. His name was Macklin-a gynecologist, of all things. Good practice, plenty of money to give her the material possessions she craved. That was all Fallon knew or cared about Macklin or Geena’s affair with him or their future prospects together. You love someone, you live together and suffer and grieve together, and then you fall out of love and drift apart and move on. Happens all the time. Doesn’t have to be bitter or adversarial. All it really has to be is final.
He didn’t need a map to find the Rest-a-While Motel. The Jeep’s GPS navigator took care of that. North Rancho Drive was off Highway 93 in North Las Vegas, a few miles from the old downtown. It took him longer to get there crosstown from Highway 95 than the GPS estimate because of heavy Saturday afternoon traffic, like bunched- together platelets clogging the creature’s arteries.
Casey had described the motel as nondescript and cut-rate. Right. It took up most of a block between a Denny’s and a strip mall, in a section of small businesses and fast-food joints and discount wedding chapels. Low parallel wings stretched vertically from the street, ten units in each, facing one another across an area of dried-out grass that contained a swimming pool and lanai area. The desert sun had baked a brownish tinge into its offwhite paint job. A sign jutting skyward in front claimed that it had Las Vegas’s most inexpensive rates, free HBO. A small sign said VACANCY.
Either the Denny’s parking lot or the strip mall would have been a good place to watch and wait for an expected arrival; easy, then, to walk or drive over to the motel. Number twenty would be one of the rear units, farthest from the street, probably in the wing that backed up against the fenced side yard of an auto-body shop. If the rooms closest to it had been vacant, the sounds of a woman being beaten and raped, even in broad daylight, wouldn’t have carried far or alerted anybody. And Banning, the son of a bitch, had been careful, methodical in his assault: hand around Casey’s throat, panting threats in her ear to stifle her cries.
Fallon went inside the office. Small, but not too small to hold a bank of slot machines and a TV turned on to a sports channel. A chattery air conditioner vied with the voices from a row of talking heads. Behind the short counter, a man wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt had been perched on a stool staring at the talking heads; he stood up when Fallon came in. Middleaged, slightly built with a noticeable paunch and an advanced case of male-pattern baldness. He pasted on a smile as Fallon stepped up to the counter.
“Help you, sir?”
“I’m looking for a friend of mine.”
“One of our guests?”
“Probably not. But maybe you know him. Calls himself Banning.”
The clerk’s expression was as flat as a concrete wall. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Big, heavyset, tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon on his right wrist.”
“No. Sorry.”
“You work every day this week?” Fallon asked.
“Since Tuesday.”
“Here on the desk every afternoon about this time?”
“That’s right. Why?”
“Then you remember a young blonde woman, Casey Dunbar, who checked in around three o’clock on Wednesday.”
Flicker of something in the man’s eyes. They slanted away from Fallon’s, to a point above his right ear. “I see a lot of faces every day. Can’t remember them all.”
“You gave her number twenty. She didn’t stay long, not much more than an hour.”
“None of my business how long they stay.”
“Banning showed up right after she did, paid her a visit. He didn’t stay long either.”
“So? What’re you getting at?”
“The maid report anything out of the ordinary when she cleaned up afterward?”
“Such as what?”
“Such as bloodstains on the sheets.”
“Bloodstains?” Now there was a little twitch under the clerk’s eye, like a piece of the concrete wall that had worked itself loose. It took him a couple of seconds to smooth it down again. “Listen, Mister-”
“
“No. What’s the idea of all these questions? You’re not a cop or you’d have proved it by now.”
“Let’s just say I’m a friend of Casey Dunbar’s.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know anything about her or this guy Banning or any bloodstains Wednesday afternoon. You satisfied now?”
“Let me have a room for the night,” Fallon said. “Number twenty.”
The clerk was going to refuse; his mouth started to shape the words. But the way Fallon was looking at him changed his mind. “I don’t want any trouble here,” he said.
“Just a room. Twenty’s free, isn’t it?”
“… Yeah, it’s free.”
“How much?”
“Only one night?”
“That’s what I said. How much?”
“Like the sign says-forty-nine ninety-five.”
He took his time producing a registration card, sliding it across the counter. Fallon filled it out, transposing two of the numbers on the Jeep’s license plate. The name he printed on the card was in block letters, easy enough to read upside down.
The clerk read it aloud: “Court Spicer.” The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him.
Fallon laid three twenties on the counter, waited for his change and the room key. Still no eye contact. And no more words except for a by-rote, “Check-out time’s eleven A.M.”
A gamble, playing it this way. If the clerk knew Banning and reported to him, it might flush him out into the open-potentially a quicker way to make contact than trying to track him down on skimpy information. Poten- tially dangerous, too, but what Fallon had told Casey was true: he wasn’t afraid of men who beat up and raped and extorted money from women. The bigger risk was that if Spicer was still in Vegas, Banning would report to him and he’d spook and take Kevin somewhere else.
A gamble, sure. But this was a gambler’s town, and there was risk no matter what game you played.
Fallon drove to the rear and parked in the space in front of number 20, the last in the row on the far side as he’d guessed. He took his pack in with him. Not much of a room: bed, nightstand, dresser, one scarred naugahyde chair, TV bolted to an iron swivel, tiny bathroom with a stall shower. Stifling in there, the smell of Lysol disinfectant nearly overpowering; the room likely hadn’t been rented since Wednesday. You’d need a UV fluorescein detector to find the blood traces in here now.
He put the air conditioner on low, drew the drapes over the single window, made sure the door was locked. Then he sat on the lumpy bed, opened the phone book he found in a nightstand drawer. The Hot Licks Club and Casino was on Flamingo, probably in a section close to the Strip.
He debated calling Vernon Young in San Diego. Casey didn’t want Fallon to bail her out, but he didn’t see any reason to wait before getting in touch with her boss. The quicker the money issue was resolved, the better it would be for her. And if resolving it meant loaning her the two thousand, all right-another gamble. But he doubted it would come to that.
AT &T Information gave him the number of Vernon Young Realty. He put in the call, but Vernon Young wasn’t there. The woman who answered said he didn’t come in on weekends. Fallon persuaded her to give out his home number by saying, “It’s important that I talk to him. It has to do with some money he’s owed.” But when he called the home number, an answering machine picked up. He didn’t leave a message.
Fallon hauled his pack onto the bed, unzipped the side pocket where he kept his handgun in its supple leather holster. Ruger.357 Magnum revolver, four-inch barrel. Moderately heavy piece at two and a half pounds. More weapon than he needed for his routine security job at Unidyne and for selfdefense against snakes on his desert treks, but he was comfortable with it. The army had taught him to shoot, and he’d been comfortable with the heavier military sidearms. Ranked high in marksmanship in basic training at Fort Benning-good hand-eye coordination, steady aim, easy trigger pull. That was one of the reasons they’d assigned him to MP duty instead of
