turrets that was the Excalibur. The castle itself was tiny compared to the vast fortifications of the hotel that surrounded it, an establishment of some four thousand rooms.
“You go in first,” Max said, “and I’ll watch your back.”
“What are you being so paranoid for?”
“Pookie is behaving out of character. When a man behaves out of character, it’s a portent. We go in separately and we come out separately. I’ll meet you on the fourth floor in five minutes.”
Five minutes later they were outside room 4418, and they were in luck because the door was propped wide open by a housekeeping cart.
“I don’t like it.”
“Max, stop saying that.” Owen rapped on the door. “Pookie?”
They stepped inside, surprising an old Chinese woman in black and white housekeeping livery, who came bustling out of the bathroom. “He not here,” she said. “Nobody here. I clean.”
“Did you already make the bed?” Max asked.
“Why make bed? Nobody sleep in it. See? Chocolate still on pillow.”
“This is bad,” Max said, his bardic turn of phrase deserting him for once.
“Please,” the maid said. “Not your room, you must leave.” She made flicking gestures at them with a damp rag, and they backed out into the hall.
“We should check his car,” Owen said.
That was easier said than done in the vast parking garage. They marched round and round the dim concrete bunker looking for Pookie’s vehicle, muttering to each other over false positives and near misses.
“At least we know it’s a Taurus,” Owen said.
“Exactly. And why do we always rent Tauruses? Because they’re the commonest car on the road. Hard to notice, hard to pick out.”
“Yeah, but we know it’s got California plates and an Enterprise label.”
After another half-hour’s plodding, they found it parked in the shadow of an elevator shaft. Close inspection revealed the doors to be unlocked.
“Pookie would never leave it like that,” Owen said.
He opened the driver’s door and peered inside. There was nothing else that looked out of place. The radio was intact, CDs were splayed on the passenger seat, the Luigi’s parking stub was still on the dash. No blood or signs of struggle.
“Car looks fine,” Owen said, closing the door.
“That doesn’t.” Max pointed to the concrete floor. With the toe of his shoe he nudged the remains of a broken hypodermic.
TEN
All the way south on 93, sunlight streamed into the Rocket so that they had to have the air conditioning up full. The dashboard showed an exterior reading of ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit; inside, it was a comfortable seventy-two.
Sabrina sat quietly in the seat behind Owen, staring out at the passing desert. Owen couldn’t stop thinking about Pookie. One reason Max used him over and over again was that he was completely reliable. If Pookie said he was going to be somewhere at a certain time, he would be there, simple as that. The crushed hypodermic may have been totally unrelated to his disappearance, but it didn’t bode well. Owen hated to think that he might be hurt somewhere. One of the drawbacks of the criminal life is that it makes it difficult to call the cops even when you need to.
Max had found an AM station that played music from the forties and fifties-Owen had never heard so many clarinets in his life-but then the announcer recounted every last detail of the Vegas Stars game and Max switched it off.
“Tell me, O Lady of the Back Seat,” he said. “What path in life do you plan to tread?”
Sabrina sat forward a little. “I can’t really afford any plans. Twenty years old and no sense of direction-pretty pathetic, huh? My
“I’m starting at Juilliard this fall,” Owen said with a nervous glance at Max.
“Sheer folly,” Max said.
“I want to try acting.”
Sabrina smiled. “Oh, yeah? Get famous?”
Owen shrugged. “I’ve been in the drama club every year since grade school. I think I might like it.”
Max muttered something unintelligible and leaned on the horn for no reason. The sun was high now. The cactus and the tumbleweed cast no shadows, and there was nothing moving except their vast, chugging Rocket.
After many reddish mountains and ochre plains, they slowed in a convergence of holiday traffic heading through Boulder City.
“Looks like the suburb to end all suburbs,” Sabrina said.
“It was built by the government to house the people who worked on the dam,” Owen said.
As the name implied, the mountains here were like heaps of boulders, as if some super alien race had touched down on earth and left behind colossal cairns. They passed through a rocky no man’s land in a stately procession of vehicles. Then an octagonal visitors centre sprouted out of the rocks, encased in towers and wires that clung to the mountain at all angles. A weird profusion of generators and transformers followed, surrounded by metal fences and bales of razor wire. The sky was brilliant blue, but everything else, whether natural or man-made, was grey.
They rounded a bend and a vista opened up around them. On one side, Lake Mead, on the other, nothing as far as the eye could see.
“Where’s this bloody dam?” Max said.
“We’re on it,” Owen said. “We’re driving across it right this minute.”
“I don’t believe this,” Sabrina said. “We’re in the middle of the desert and there are people water- skiing.”
It was true. The lake was dotted with sailboats, motorboats and Sea-Doos. Parasails flew across the sun, sending thin shadows skimming over the water.
“Do you want to stop?” Owen said.
“Bloody tourist trap,” Max said. “I’m against it.”
“Me too,” Sabrina said. “Too much traffic.”
Several miles later, they pulled into a service centre that was itself the size of a small city-a collection of fast-food joints, video arcades, gift stores, newsagents, the entire thing overrun by obese adults with too many children. Owen and Sabrina got out to stretch their legs, while Max manoeuvred the Rocket through the gas pumps. The sun was hot, but not unpleasant; neither of them was sweating.
“Max is crazy about the Pontiff,” Owen said. “I mean your dad. He’s always saying what a great guy he is.”
“Sure. Meaning he was a laugh to be around. Generous. Funny. Full of ideas. He was all that …” She frowned a little, staring at the ground as they walked under a row of trees at the edge of the parking lot. “He was good to me, too, took me places, taught me stuff. He built me the most beautiful doll house you ever saw-all the little lights went on in every room. He was great-usually-when he was home.
“But he was hardly ever home. And depending how his work was going, we’d be in a great house with a swimming pool for three months, and then we’d get booted out and have to live in a tiny apartment. That happened so many times I lost track.”
Owen was about to say something sympathetic, but he didn’t want to interrupt. It seemed, once she got
