The curious thing was, the man had been forgotten by the others, by this time. He had been the centre of attention when he had been winning, but the fickle interest of this crowd had already moved on to other subjects. He had become all but invisible.
Fred and the woman started ambling towards the exit. The detective followed, taking great care not to close the gap.
This turned out to be one of the worst mistakes that he had ever made. Just as the couple reached the Strip, some coaches out front began disgorging their passengers. They were elderly to the last. The sidewalk became immediately snarled up with arthritic doddering and Zimmer frames. Trying to get past without bowling over some frail octogenarian became an almost impossible challenge. Holmes watched desperately as the two figures dwindled away from him. As soon as he found a passage through, he ran in their direction.
He was just in time to see the couple reach a corner and a van pull up. The rear doors were flung open, and — as though on some invisible cue — a group of people, maybe eight of them, detached themselves from the passers-by and surrounded Bonner, shielding him from view.
He was bundled into the van. The others followed him inside. The doors slammed shut. The Oriental-looking woman climbed in by the driver, shouting something. The vehicle roared away.
Holmes, who had his revolver half-drawn, watched it disappear. The only thing he could do now was call Lieutenant Capaldi and instigate a search.
Except he
“It’s my fault,” he was murmuring at dawn the next morning. “Poor, poor Fred.”
The desert sprawled around them, the temperature of its air already rising. Fred Bonner was lying in his boxers near the foot of a massive saguaro cactus, his skin so robbed of color that it might be alabaster.
“No use blaming yourself,” said Vince Capaldi. “Wasn’t you killed him.”
“Wasn’t it?” the great detective barked back angrily. “I should never have used an unwitting man as an instrument of such deception. No, I should have played the role myself!”
“In which case, you’d be lying here, and we’d be no closer to solving this. You say, apart from the woman, all the rest were normal-looking?”
That was not exactly what he’d said. Holmes recalled his brief glimpse of the people who’d abducted Bonner. There’d been nothing outstanding about them, certainly, but they all shared a quality that he had previously perceived in the casino.
They’d been cheaply dressed, their faces drawn. Their brows had been furrowed, their eyes squinting, like they were unaccustomed to the natural outdoor light. Some of them had been sporting pale bands of skin at their wrists where watches had once snuggled. They were, in short, the same kind of gambling addicts Holmes had mentally remarked on in the Paris.
Guilt gnawed at him on the ride back into town. Did Bonner have a family? He did not even know, but finally, a fresh sense of resolve gripped the detective. This terrible death would
Capaldi dropped him off at his hotel. Holmes, as soon as he was in his room, pulled on a new disguise: an old shirt, which he rumpled up before slipping on, a pair of grey nylon trousers and some old brown shoes. He took his wristwatch off and put it in a drawer, and mussed his hair up in the mirror before taking a wad of cash from the safe and going out.
At the Luxor, he converted the entire sum into chips. Then he went across to the blackjack tables and sat down; deliberately losing every single hand over the next two hours.
Were there eyes on him? He thought
When practically all his chips were gone, he stood up with a defeated sigh, wandered over to the bar area and ordered a straight scotch.
He was careful to sit round-shouldered, and feigned a melancholy air. A shabby, grey-haired, rather dumpy figure eased herself onto the barstool next to his.
“Down on your luck, huh?”
Her tones revealed her as a Brooklynite. Holmes affected not merely an American accent but a convincing Deep South drawl when he answered her.
“Ma savings are all gone. Ma daughter’s college fund. Cain’t even afford a ticket home. What in the Lord’s name am I gonna do?”
A look of understanding filled the woman’s red-rimmed eyes.
“Try this place.”
She handed him a card which read,
Holmes frowned. “Another casino?”
“Nah, not a gaming house. A house of worship.”
He squinted at her. “How’s that gonna help?”
“If you join in…” and the woman’s lips pursed deviously, “it might just change your luck a little. Don’t take my word for it, son. Come and see for yourself. Directly after sundown, tonight.”
She was gone from the stool the next instant, with a nimbleness that belied her age.
Holmes was left with hours to kill. Ought he call in the police? If, as he had already decided, this city was laced with underground informants, then the sudden emergence of conventional law officers might give the game away. Forewarned, the perpetrators might escape. No, he had got this far by himself; so he would have to carry it the rest of the way.
Holmes trudged along the Strip for a while, the bizarre sights around him melting to a tepid blur, the urgent sounds reduced to a static-like hissing in his ears. In his numerous decades on this Earth, he had seen society give up its quiet dignity in favour of spectacle, indulgence and excess, and it irritated him greatly sometimes.
This was precisely one of those occasions when a seven percent solution of cocaine would give his mind the few hours of sharpened perspicacity and tightened focus that it needed. Unfortunately the laws had changed and his conscience would not let him break them while he was still taking the LVPD’s shilling.
He finally wound up back in his room, sprawled out on the bed watching old reruns of
That was so beautifully succinct it almost made a tear well up.
Sleep practically overtook him, and he emerged from it with a jerk. Through his hotel window, he could see the sky had darkened. The colored lighting on the street below glowed with a lurid brilliance.
The entire town was being swallowed up in shadow. Holmes felt his heartbeat speeding up again. He was close to getting to the bottom of this whole affair — of that, he was certain. The same frisson which had to overcome a hunter had him in its clutches.
He reminded himself that adrenalin was also a drug, just as potent and confounding as the gambling addiction he had seen so often in this city. So he forced himself to slow down and think clearly. He was just one man, and headed into possible grave danger. He could not be killed, certainly, but he could be overpowered, imprisoned, even hurt. He could still remember, with agonising clarity, every bone-crunching knock he’d taken on his descent down the Reichenbach Falls, and had no wish to suffer anything like that again if it could be avoided.
How many congregants might be gathered at this ‘house of worship’? His gaze drifted towards his trusty revolver on the nightstand.
Then it turned away, because he might need more than just five shots. In his time here in America, Holmes had purchased several brand-new items of equipment. So he vaulted off the bed to where his bags were stored.
To blazes with his trusty revolver. Where the devil were his trusty Glocks?
Holmes re-studied the small card that he’d been given on the way out. House of Good Fortune. The name described nothing, and was perfectly anonymous in its own way. In a city of this kind, it could be a small casino or a Chinese restaurant. It was in this manner that the people he was on the search for stayed below the radar.
