“I feel god-awful.”
“Sure you do. They say that life is a bitch and then you die, Jefferson.”
“Feel like death now.”
“They also instructed us to live fast and die young and make a beautiful corpse. I fear that I qualify on some of those conditions.”
With a struggle, he made it back to his feet again, blinking in the semidarkness. Now he could see the dead men, lying between him and the silvery ghost of the Mercedes-Benz, sprawled so artistically it looked as if they’d been placed there by a stage designer.
“They got on uniforms, Nanci,” he shouted, his voice dropping quickly as he realized how loud it sounded in the stillness.
“Badges?”
Jeff stooped over the nearest corpse, when a hand shot out, clutching his ankle with feverish strength.
Jeff let out a panicked squeal, kicking in shocked horror and very nearly losing his balance again. A lance of white pain burned behind his right eye from the jerking movement.
“Kill him, Jeff,” she called out, a note of panicky desperation in her voice, revealing a terrified weakness in Nanci that unsettled him even more than the sudden attack.
As the dying man on the ground muttered a string of curses, Jeff’s right cheek was twitching down at the corner of his mouth, making it look as if he was trying to placate the man with a sickly, jerking smile.
With a surprising ease, the Smith & Wesson .45 was in his hand, his index finger on the trigger.
He put three of the eight rounds into the skull of the figure at his feet. For a second the lethal grip on his leg tightened with an awesome ferocity, then relaxed.
“Finished?”
“Yeah, Nanci, finished. Bastard’s head must be in at least three hundred pieces.”
“You were checking for badges.”
This time he was more careful, but the other three were undeniably dead.
“A golden arrow through a silver sun. Least, that’s what it looks like.”
“Uniforms?”
“Right. Like the ones back at Calico. Kind of semimilitary. Dark blue pants and camouflage tops.”
“Sounds like the way Flagg’s security men used to look. But he can’t…”
“Who’s Flagg, Nanci?”
“A dead man.”
“Then he can’t hurt us.”
“Dead have long nails.”
“Where’d he live?”
“Vegas.”
“Not all that far away.”
“True.”
“When?”
“Not now, Jeff. Come here. You have to help me. Just do what I tell you.”
He bolstered his gun and picked his way across the uneven ground to where he could see her. She was lying in a peculiarly hunched way, her hands jammed between her thighs.
On the way Jeff stepped over the pair of matched Heckler & Koch P-111s, resting right by the torn remains of her sleeping bag.
There was enough light for him to see that Nanci was bleeding. A pool of glistening blackness oozed from between her fingers. The wound was high in her leg, close to her groin.
“Knife?”
“Long thin blade. Tried to roll and kick it away, but he was quick. Quicker than I expected him to be. I missed.” A long, painful pause. “He didn’t.”
“How bad is it?”
“He got the femoral artery. Guess I’ll never know if he was lucky or really, really good. Lost a lot of blood. I’m holding it pinched, but I’m starting to cramp up.”
The Port Royale was a yard or so from Nanci Simms’s feet and Jeff picked it up, slinging it over his shoulder.
“Put that in the auto. Rifle’s there. Get the automatics, as well. Then give me a hand. Think it’ll need stitching. I can do that if you can hold it shut. Not too long a wound, but it’s deep enough. Let go and it’ll spurt twenty feet and I’ll be dead in three minutes.”
“There might be more of them coming out after us.”
“Yeah. Quicker we get moving away from here, the better our chances.”
“We, Nanci?”
There was a long stillness. Then she said, “Ah, I get it, Jefferson.”
“Time I moved on.”
“You won’t make it on your own.”
“I can try.”
“Sure. Prince among men, Jeff, aren’t you?”
He turned away from her, toward the sports car, feet sinking in the soft mud.