security men on duty will have seen the evening news. Get my drift?”
“Can I go to the rest room? I’m a mess. I could use a quick washup.”
“Sure. Just don’t go onto the casino floor. And be back by the phones
in ten minutes, cause that’s where I’ll meet you. There’re no security
cameras by the phones. Sit tight, kid.”
“Wait!”
“What is it?” he asked.
“What do you look like? How will I recognize you?”
He said, “Don’t worry, kid. I’ll recognize you. Benny’s shown me your
picture so often that every detail of your gorgeous face is burned into
my cerebral cortex.
Remember, sit tight!”
The line went dead, and she hung up.
Jerry Peake was not sure he wanted to be a legend anymore. He was not
even sure he wanted to be a D.S.A agent, legendary or otherwise. Too
much had been happening too fast. He was unable to assimilate it
properly. He felt as if he were trying- to walk through one of those
big rolling barrels that were sometimes used as the entrance to a
carnival funhouse, except they were spinning this barrel about five
times faster than even the most sadistic carny operator would dare, and
it also seemed to be an endless tube from which he would never emerge.
He wondered if he would ever get his feet under him and know stability
again.
Anson Sharp’s call had roused Peake from a sleep so deep that it almost
required a headstone. Even a quick cold shower had not entirely
awakened him. A ride through rain-washed streets to the Palm Springs
airport, with siren wailing and emergency beacon flashing, had seemed
like part of a bad dream. At the airfield, at 8,10, a light transport
twin turbo-prop arrived from the Marine Corps Training Center at nearby
Twentynine Palms, provided as an interservice courtesy to the Defense
Security Agency on an emergency basis, little more than half an hour
after Sharp had requested it. They boarded and immediately took off
into the storm. The daredevil-steep ascent of the hotshot military
pilot, combined with the howling wind and driving rain, finally blew
away the lingering traces of sleep. Peake was wide awake, gripping the
arms of his seat so hard that his white knuckles looked as if they would
split through his skin.
“With any luck,” Sharp told Peake and Nelson Gosser (the other man he’d
brought along), “we’ll land at McCarran International, in Vegas, about
ten or fifteen minutes ahead of that flight from Orange County. When
Verdad and Hagerstrom come waltzing into the terminal, we’ll be ready to
put them under tight surveillance.”
At 8,10, the 8,00 P.M. flight to Vegas had not yet taken off from John
Wayne Airport in Orange County, but the pilot assured the passengers
that departure was imminent.
Meanwhile, there were beverages, honey-roasted beer nuts, and mint
wafers to make the minutes pass more pleasantly.
“I love these honey-roasted beer nuts,” Reese said, “but I just
remembered something I don’t like at all.”
“What’s that?” Julio asked.
“Flying.”
“It’s a short flight.”
“A man doesn’t expect to have to fly all over the map when he chooses a
career in law enforcement.”
“Forty-five minutes, fifty at most, Julio said soothingly.
“I’m in,” Reese said quickly before Julio could start to get the wrong
idea about his objections to flying. “I’m in the case for the duration,
but I just wish there was a boat to Vegas.”
At 8,12, they taxied to the head of the runway and took off.
Driving east in the red pickup, Eric struggled mile by mile to retain
sufficient human consciousness to operate the truck. Sometimes bizarre
thoughts and feelings plagued him, a wishful longing to leave the truck
and run naked across the dark desert plains, hair flying in the wind,
the rain sluicing down his bare flesh, an unsettlingly urgent need to
burrow, to squirm into a dark moist place and hide, a hot, fierce,
demanding sexual urge, not human in any regard, more like an animal’s
rutting fever. He also experienced memories, clear images in his mind’s
eye, that were not his own but from some genetic storage bank of racial
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