didn’t know who else was in that house.
Besides, Bobby J. wasn’t the important issue here. Finding Court Spicer, reuniting Kevin and his mother, was. He hated the idea of letting a man like that get away without paying; but he wasn’t a crusader, he wasn’t even a law officer-it was not up to him to dispense justice. Sooner or later Bobby J. would take a fall, a hard fall. His kind almost always did.
Fallon started the car and headed back to the Best Western to tell Casey the news about Laughlin.
PART III. LAUGHLIN
ONE
THEY LEFT FOR LAUGHLIN early Monday morning. Fallon would have preferred to make the drive alone, but Casey wasn’t having any of that. Not that he blamed her. If her son was somewhere in the Laughlin area, she needed to be there when he was found. Compromise: she’d agreed to stay in the background, let him handle things in his own way. She followed him to McCarran International and left the Toyota in long-term parking, and they went together in the Jeep.
Laughlin was ninety-five miles south of Vegas, on the Nevada side of the Colorado River boundary with Arizona. The state’s newest gambling hot spot, with a string of big hotel and casino resorts along the riverfront. Another desert-consuming creature spreading out on both the Laughlin side and across the river in Bullhead City, where most of the casino service people lived. Fifty thousand population in the area now and more coming in all the time, for the gambling and the related jobs, the fishing and boating on the Colorado and Lake Mohave, the lure of desert- country retirement living. And every day, more open space disappeared and the creature spread closer to Spirit Mountain on the east, the gold-and-silver-bearing hills beyond Bullhead City-wilderness areas that Fallon had explored when he was stationed at Fort Huachuca, and again on a packing trip with Geena not long after they were married.
Casey had wanted to leave right away last night, as soon as he told her Sharon Rossi’s news, but he’d talked her out of it. There was no good reason to make the long drive until daylight; their only lead was Co-River Management, and whatever kind of business it was, it was bound to be closed at night. Only the casinos ran twenty-four hours.
She’d been upbeat and animated then-a glimpse into the kind of woman she must have been once, before the deterioration of her marriage and the loss of her son and the rape and beating that had driven her to attempted suicide. Animated, trusting, likable. Attractive, too. She had a nice smile, a warmth that softened the hard edges created by adversity and depression.
This morning, though, she’d retreated inside herself again. She had little to say as they headed south on 95. She sat stiff and tight-drawn, hunched forward a little on the seat, eyes steady on the surface of the highway; the only time she spoke in the first thirty miles was to ask him to drive faster, even though he was pushing it as it was, at seventy-five.
He tried to start a neutral conversation, draw out some details about her life. All he could get were thumbnail sketches: Born and grew up in Chula Vista. Two years at San Diego State, majoring in business administration and “more drunken parties than I can remember.” A couple of menial jobs before she answered an ad and Vernon Young gave her a chance to work first as a receptionist and then as a sales agent. Interests? Kevin. Reading-biographies, mostly. Romantic movies. Music, but not jazz, she’d had all she could stomach of her ex’s brand of music. Future plans when she had the boy back? Keep him safe, make sure he grew up to be a better man than his father. She didn’t answer when Fallon asked her what she wanted for herself.
After a time, he found himself shifting the conversation to his relationship with Timmy, the things they’d enjoyed doing together. She listened, but all she contributed were monosyllables. She didn’t ask him about his background, and he didn’t volunteer any information. He didn’t like talking about the early part of his life.
But he couldn’t keep the memories from intruding as he drove. The near-slum neighborhood in East L.A., his low-income civil servant father, his alcoholic waitress mother, the crime-ridden streets, the crappy schools, the daily struggle during his teenage years to avoid the lure of gangs and drugs. If he hadn’t gotten out by joining the army when he turned eighteen, God knew what direction his life would have taken. He might have ended up in a dead-end job like Pop’s, living poor and eventually dying in that miserable neighborhood the way his parents had, Pop of a heart attack at fifty-four while Fallon was at Fort Benning, Ma two years later of too much booze, too many long hours waiting tables, too much grinding poverty.
The army had given him hope, discipline, pride, a sense of honor and justice, the desire to build a better life for himself. And then Geena had given him the rest of what he needed. He’d met her in Tucson in the last year of his tour. Driven over from Huachuca with a couple of buddies, and there’d been a party, and there she was-pretty, sweet-natured, as lonely and as hungry for love as he was. They’d gotten married as soon as he was discharged. Moved back to the Encino area when the Unidyne job offer came up, Geena already pregnant the first time. Difficult pregnancy; she’d miscarried in her fourth month. Three years later, after another difficult pregnancy, Timmy had been born. And the future looked as bright as his boyhood had been dark.
Until Timmy’s accident. Until it all collapsed.
Now he was ready to rebuild another future, one that suited the man he’d evolved into after his son’s death. The third stage of the life of Richard Fallon. Put on temporary hold by Casey Dunbar and his commitment to her, but that was all right. True peace of mind didn’t come easy; sometimes it came only after you were put to a test. This was his test. This was the price he felt obligated to pay.
It was midmorning when they reached the junction with State 163, near the Arizona border, and turned there toward Laughlin. Hotter down here than it had been in Vegas; heat mirage pulsed liquidly off the asphalt ahead. The desert country in this corner was more sun-baked, even, than Death Valley. The hottest day anywhere in recorded U.S. history, Fallon remembered reading somewhere, had been in Bullhead City in 1983-132 degrees in the shade.
When they were traveling on 163, Casey stirred and asked, “How much farther is it?”
“Less than twenty miles.”
She ran her hands along the front of her thin skirt, then extended them out toward the air-conditioning ducts. “I keep wondering,” she said then.
“About what?”
“Kevin. If he’s all right.”
“Dry heat like this should be good for his asthma.”
“Yes, but how is Court treating him? Is he allowed to go out, go to school? Is somebody watching him when Court’s working? Or is he being locked up in some sweltering room somewhere?”
“Don’t. You can make yourself crazy with that kind of worrying.”
“I’m half crazy already,” she said. “You ought to know that if anybody does.”
Despite its rapid growth in recent years, Laughlin was still a small town. The population sign they passed on the outskirts read 8,629, which made it five times smaller than Bullhead City. Most of the growth seemed to be to the south and east in the direction of bare, raggedy Spirit Mountain- housing tracts, schools, malls. The main drag, Casino Drive, followed the line of the river and was crowded with tourist-related businesses on the east side, the big casino resorts all fronting the Colorado like a miniature version of the Vegas Strip-Don Laughlin’s Riverside, named after the town’s founder, Colorado Belle, Edgewater, River Palms, half a dozen others.
As early as it was, people streamed along the sidewalks and on the river walk that wound its way behind the casinos, and you could see pleasure boats trailing milky wakes on the sun-bright water. The Colorado, the West’s most important water source, had a shrunken look-the result of the worst drought in a century, nine years long now and counting. Another couple of years and a shortage would probably be declared and the Department of the Interior would reduce water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada, if not southern California. Nature paying humanity
