my… shall we say peculiarities’? I refuse to call them handicaps.
Anyway, you’ve every reason to be disconcerted, kid.”
“I guess he didn’t have time to mention it, even if he’d given it a
thought,” she said, deciding to remain standing. “We parted in quite a
hurry.”
She’d been startled because she had known that Benny and Whitney had
been in Vietnam together, and on first seeing this man’s grievous
infirmities, she couldn’t understand how he could have been a soldier.
Then, of course, she realized he had been a whole man when he had gone
to Southeast Asia and that he’d lost his arm and leg in that conflict.
“Ben’s all right?” Whitney asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he?”
“Coming here to join me, I hope. But I don’t know for sure.”
Suddenly she was stricken by the awful realization that it might just as
easily have been her Benny who had returned from the war with his face
scarred, one hand gone, one leg blown off, and that thought was
devastating. Since Monday night, when Benny had taken the .357 Magnum
away from Vince Baresco, Rachael had more or less unconsciously thought
of him as endlessly resourceful, indomitable, and virtually invincible.
She had been afraid for him at times, and since she had left him alone
on the mountain above Lake Arrowhead, she had worried about him
constantly. But deep down she had wanted to believe that he was too
tough and quick to come to any harm. Now, seeing how Whitney Gavis had
returned from the war, and knowing that Benny had served at Whitney’s
side, Rachael abruptly knew and felt-and finally believedthat Benny was
a mortal man, as fragile as any other, tethered to life by a thread as
pitifully thin as those by which everyone else was suspended above the
void.
“Hey, are you all right?” Whitney asked.
“I ll be okay,” she said shakily. “I’m just exhausted… and worried.”
“I want to know everything-the real story, not the one on the news.”
“There’s a lot to tell,” she said. “But not here.”
“No,” he said, looking around at the passersby, “not here.”
“Benny’s going to meet me at the Golden Sand.”
“The motel? Yeah, sure, that’s a good place to hole up, I guess. Not
exactly first-class accommodations.”
“I’m in no position to be choosy.”
He’d entrusted his car to the valet, too, and he presented both his
claim check and Rachael’s when they left the hotel.
Beyond the enormous, high-ceilinged porte cochere, wind-harried rain
slashed the night. The lightning had abated, but the downpour was not
gray and dreary and lightless, at least not in the vicinity of the
hotel. Millions of droplets reflected the amber and yellow lights that
surrounded the entrance to the Grand, so it looked as if a storm of
molten gold were plating the Strip in an armor fit for angels.
Whitney’s car, a like-new white Karmann Ghia, was delivered first, but
the black Mercedes rolled up behind it. Although she knew that she was
calling attention to herself in front of the valets, Rachael insisted on
looking carefully in the back seat and in the trunk before she would get
behind the wheel and drive away. The plastic garbage bag containing the
Wildcard file was where she had left it, though that was not what she
was looking for. She was being ridiculous, and she knew it. Eric was
deadr reduced to a subhuman form, creeping around in the desert more
than a hundred miles from here. There was no way he could have trailed
her to the Grand, no way he could have gotten into the car during the
short time it had been parked in the hotel’s underground valet garage.
Nevertheless, she looked warily in the trunk and was relieved when she
found it empty.
She followed Whitney’s Karmann Ghia onto Flamingo Boulevard, drove east
to Paradise Boulevard, then turned south toward Tropicana and the
shelter of the shuttered Golden Sand Inn.
Even at night and in the cloaking rain, Eric dared not drive along Las
Vegas Boulevard South, that garish and baroque street that the locals
called the Strip. The night was set ablaze by eight- and ten-story