They were silent, but they were not afraid. Neither I nor they needed to say anything just then.
Boo was lying on the floor at Verena Stanhope’s feet. The girl gave me two thumbs up.
I withdrew my head, and the window purred shut.
“I’m not sure how we handle it from here,” I said.
“Mrs. Fischer will know exactly.”
“Yeah,” I said, as I began to take off my shoulder holsters. “I guess I’d be surprised if she didn’t.”
He pointed to the moon. Although the night sky appeared to be clear around that sphere, there must have been thin mist or dust at some altitude to diffract its light, for the moon had developed a corona, concentric circles changing color outward from pale blue to purple-red.
“Quite a visual,” he said. “Nicely moody. You could do it as a trick shot, of course, but the real thing is prettier.”
“I still can’t get used to you talking.” I turned my back to him, and he unbuckled the bulletproof vest. “I sure wish we had time to discuss your movies. I have at least a thousand questions.”
“I’m not about movies anymore, Mr. Thomas.”
Turning to him, I said, “Will I be seeing you again, sir?”
“One cannot say.”
“Cannot or will not?”
He put a forefinger to his lips, as if to say that we must not discuss such things.
As he began to rise off the ground, he said, by way of good-bye, “Oddie.”
“Hitch.”
He didn’t merely ascend straight up, but also moved away from me laterally as he rose into the darkness, fast and then faster, until he vanished behind a remaining patch of clouds.
What a wonderful ham he was.
An owl hooted and another owl returned the call. Two ordinary owls in an extraordinary night, in a world unfathomed and perhaps unfathomable by the living.
Thirty-eight
ALTHOUGH THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A TAXING DAY FOR a woman of Mrs. Fischer’s age, she appeared to be fresh and alert as she piloted the Mercedes limousine down from the forested heights toward the flats where cactus and mesquite flourished.
Glancing at me, she said, “How are you, child?”
After a long moment of silence while I considered my condition, I said, “It’s getting easier, and that scares me.”
“You mean the killing.”
The guns, the Kevlar vest, and the utility belt were piled on the floor in front of my seat. My feet straddled all that gear.
“Yes, ma’am. The killing.”
“How many.”
“Five.”
I thought of Jinx. How blue the eye beneath the yellow contact lens. I wondered how much different she would have looked without the Goth makeup and the attitude.
Mrs. Fischer said, “You know what they were—those people. You know what they had done and would have done.”
“Yes, ma’am. And I only did what I had to do. But it was still too easy.”
“Maybe that was because they were such worse people than you’ve had to deal with before.”
“Maybe.”
We reached the flats, passed Jeb’s Trading Post, the clusters of modest houses, and then the sprawling complex of large buildings that might have been warehouses. At the interstate, Mrs. Fischer headed east toward Las Vegas.
Four of the children had been snatched from Vegas, but not the others. “Where are we going, ma’am?”
“Exactly where we need to go. You’ll see.”
After a while, we left the interstate for Las Vegas Boulevard South, where the night was splashed with neon pulsing-rippling-spiraling in different rhythms that somehow all seemed to suggest the thrust and throb of sex, where fountains gushed and waterfalls foamed, where the architecture promised elegance or wild delight, or both, where every nuance of design said that money was bliss and that godlike power could be bought or at least rented, where marquees announced the royalty of entertainment, where multitudes surged along the sidewalks, going to or from a show, moving from one casino to another.
I suppose those tourists might have been portraits of gaiety, rejoicing, sweet contentment, and happiness in all its shades. But where I saw those expressions, they seemed to be masks, and often I saw faces shaped by disquiet, misgiving, trepidation, confusion, and doubt, with body language that translated as anxiety and impatience. Perhaps it was my mood, the head collection and other atrocities still so fresh in my mind, but these people seemed like refugees from places that had gone drab and lusterless for reasons that they could not fully understand. They had come here to find the fun that had been lost elsewhere, fun and brightness and freedom and hope, but they were beginning to suspect, still on some unconscious level, that this hundred-billion-dollar biggest carnival in the history of the world was not an oasis, after all, but just another version of the desert from which they’d fled.