Matt liked the middle of the night. That was one of the things he had discovered while working for ConTact. Maybe he was a monastic throwback to a time and a tempo of life when monks heeded the canonical hours devoted to prayer around the clock.
Now would be lauds.
Las Vegas marked fleeting moments of meditation in its own inimitable way.
Hearing a hoarse roar in the distance. Matt let his fancy roam farther afield. Had the MGM
lion lived up to its own TV commercial and opened its gilded maw? Or maybe the Luxor's Sphinx had broken centuries of smug silence to unhinge its stony jaws for a good, noisy yawn. Or was it just Midnight Louie, taking a lauds stroll through the nearby shrubbery with his sizable stomach growling?
Matt knew what force really hurled the faint, howling challenge to the night: theme-hotel indigestion. The Mirage's volcano was preparing to belch its clockwork stream of ready-made fire.
Still, anything could happen in Las Vegas. Including crimes against a person who walked alone at night.
Matt always studied his surroundings on these long walks home. He wasn't particularly afraid, just cautious. Everyone knew the usual tourist pitfalls of the Strip--private dancers who performed the ever-popular routine called the Customer Shakedown, and that's all . . .
prostitutes who rolled high-rollers for high-dollar Rolex watches . . . creeps who sold dangerous designer drugs. The biggest danger in the city's neighborhoods was the same phenomenon that dogged all other large cities. Gangs. If you were unlucky enough to get caught in the sudden lethal spray of a gang shoot-out, it wouldn't matter whether you were walking or riding, or whether it was day or night.
So Matt felt a warning tingle at the back of his neck. A car was following him. A lone walker, a driver who perhaps was not alone. Businesses that opened at ten a.m. and closed at six--or ten p.m., tops--lined the street. ConTact kept the latest hours in this area. Its women employees were always escorted to their cars, a duty Matt often performed.
All the employees had cars, except Matt, though nobody at ConTact had noticed. He arrived on time, left on time, and always came back the next night. A man wasn't stalker-bait as women were. Nobody worried about him, including Matt. He knew he was always armed by the-formidable depth of his unhealed rage.
Still, a car was following him, creeping down the street about a hundred feet behind at an idling speed unnatural to anything made in Detroit.
Matt managed to kick a discarded Dr Pepper can, stumble, then turn as he regained his balance. He glimpsed a barge as broad as a boat, a late seventies Monte Carlo. Gang-bangers liked all that macho metal from Old Detroit, liked to keep their rust buckets in surprisingly good running order.
Yet this car did not broadcast the low, throaty growl of a souped-up street bomb. It crawled along with a discreet cough, fatigued tires hissing as the elderly rubber peeled over the asphalt.
Matt wasn't surprised that somebody was following him. He'd been tossing out so many lines of inquiry that one could have snagged anyone: a concerned but truculent supporter of Father Hernandez; Molina or one of her minions, annoyed that he had imitated Temple by playing amateur investigator; an aggravated associate who had heard Matt was looking for a man who wanted to stay missing.
Or it could be that man himself.
That thought stopped Matt's breath for a moment. Rage surged so strong that it felt, for a moment, like fear. Neither emotion was useful now. Matt calmed himself, tried to think.
If he had stirred up this kind of interest, he was on to something, in either area he was investigating. He could learn from his stalker. He could teach his stalker that a man walking alone at night is not always a target. Sometimes he is a mobile trap.
Ahead of Matt and the car a semaphore was blinking its timed changes: red, amber, and then green. Matt paced himself to arrive at the intersection when the light was red. He would be forced to stop. So would the car.
This bare, deserted corner offered no place to hide. Matt scanned ranks of locked shops with eerily ill lit display windows. There stood a cheap furniture store, its window infested with scabrous lamp shades. Here was a mailing center flaunting empty cardboard boxes. Next door a low-rent liquor store's windows were papered with hand-written specials on unrecognizable brands.
Matt buried his hands in his pockets and pretended to watch only the red light, waiting for it to change.
What changed was the discreet trailing behavior of the car and its unknown driver. With a squeal of protesting tires, the vehicle made a huge sloppy circle-turn in the empty intersection.
The big old car zipped up to the curb by Matt, its showroom sheen as much of a memory as its original olive-green color faded now to pale chartreuse.
The windows were tinted up-to-no-good, double-dark charcoal, but the driver leaned across the wide seat to roll one down.
Matt waited, ready to bolt, drop to the street, or dive in, whichever was called for.
''Need a ride, counselor?"
The light across the street turned green. Matt grasped the pitted chrome handle and yanked the massive door open. A sodium iodide streetlamp bled soft pink light onto an expanse of cracked vinyl upholstery. It also cast shadows into the lines that seamed the driver's face.
Matt got in and stretched out to swing the wide, heavy-metal door shut. ''How did you know I'd be walking this way?"
"I'm a detective, ain't I?" Eightball O'Rourke grinned into the rearview mirror. "Guess no one from the LVMPD saw that illegal turn. You always that easy to tail, and that relaxed about it?"
He glanced curiously at Matt.
"I wasn't relaxed," Matt said tightly.
Eightball nodded. "Good. It's not always bad to look easy, as long as you know better."
"Why didn't you contact me at a normal hour?"
"This is a normal hour in my line of work. And yours too, I reckon. Besides, I wanted to avoid calling at the Circle Ritz. I wasn't sure you'd relish Miss Temple Barr knowing your business."
"You're right. I should have given you my phone number at ConTact."
"No way. Ain't no way I'm gonna call one of those weepy lines. Might get mistaken for a wimp or something. Might get some soupy free advice."
"ConTact isn't like that."
"Sure. Maybe I'm not being modern about all this breast-beating and twelve-step stuff, but I'm from a generation that helps themselves."
''Helps themselves to a lot of things," Matt said with amusement.
''Will you forget those blasted silver dollars! That was what you call a youthful peccadillo."
"What do you call this crate?"
"A car, which is more than you have, Mr. Devine. Cars are important out here. I know Miss Temple lets you drive her cute little Storm hither and yon, but why don't you have your own wheels?"
"Because all my money is going to windy private investigators."
"Well, at least you get your money's worth." Eightball rotated the giant steering wheel in a slow arc, wallowing the car around a corner.
In minutes the scenery grew familiar. A block away, a stark canister of black marble hunkered like a World War II bunker in the dark, or a cemetery monument. The Circle Ritz.
Eightball pulled the car to the empty curb and shifted into park, turning off the engine.
Suddenly, the night was silent.
"You . . . found him?" When Matt finally asked that question, his voice was steady.
Eightball nodded, his face just visible in the pink puddle of another streetlight. The car's immense hood looked the color of cat vomit, an unappetizing combination of puke pink and pea green.
"Where?" Matt wanted to know.
"Around. He doesn't settle anywhere much. Keeps moving, like a man on the run. A man up to something. He's a bad sack of potatoes, but I 'spose you knew that."
"You mean . . . professionally."
"Professionally! Hah. This guy is about as professional as a wounded rattlesnake. Uses the name you gave me sometimes. Sometimes not. He's been seeing the wrong company, some out of town mob lookin' for an inside track on Vegas. Mean but not necessarily smart. He owed them money; now he owes them more. Half the time he's duckin' them; half the time he's huddling with 'em when they catch up with him."