Either a car with one defective headlight was behind him, or another motorcycle was taking this same route.
He couldn’t make out much beyond the reflected Cyclops eye of light tailing him. Whatever sped behind was black and cloaked by the night itself.
He swerved suddenly left at an empty intersection with no stop signs.
The light swerved with him, showing up in his left mirror.
No car could maneuver that quickly.
Matt accelerated, the lighted dashboard dials seeming to intensify with the increased speed, as if the Vampire, given its head, was grinning like a Jolly Roger and showing neon teeth.
He knew the route; otherwise he wouldn’t have dared hit … fifty, fifty-five. The area was industrial, not residential, at least.
He didn’t know why, but he felt impelled to shake the shapeless form behind him.
It was like being a kid again, this visceral panic, this unshakable sense that something ugly was gaining on him.
Basements sometimes did that to you. Dark placessymbolically and implicitly connected to the blackest regions of imagination and primal fear.
Usually open streets had no potential for terror, not to men who thought they knew how to defend themselves, or at least to avoid obvious trouble.
But this burr of light that kept to the same, tail-gating distance, waltzing with the Hesketh Vampire in a dance nobody had requested or assented to … he had to lose it.
Matt recalled an abandoned service station coming up at the next intersection.
He would zip into it, through the empty gas lanes, around back and out the other side, onto a small road leading to an office park with a maze of buildings. He’d lose the thing that followed him there.
Islands of gas pumps looked like totems in the sick light from too few street lamps. He zoomed between them. A hard right almost had him reaching a foot to the ground to keep the cycle from overbalancing. But the Hesketh held, or he did, and the perilous, semihorizontal turn was history.
He fought the inclination to slow down as the maze of one-story buildings hunkered ahead like a Monopoly-board Stonehenge, lacking all rough edges and romance, but still a complex trap of confusing turns and dead ends.
He’d never navigated this place, but at least he knew it was there, and what it was. Whoever hid behind that single eye of light behind him couldn’t know even that.
A few security lamps spread a thin layer of light between the buildings. Matt turned left, and then right and right and left, angling for the complex’s opposite corner.
He lost the following light on the first turn, but the noise from both machines boomeranged from the glassand-stucco canyon they shot through.
He recognized that losing someone else meant risking losing himself, but by now his hands were sweating inside the leather gloves, and all pretense was lost. Someone was following him who didn’t mean to let him escape. He must escape.
Simple.
The tight maneuvers were making him breathless. This was insanely dangerous, to him and his menacing shadow. It had come down to who would survive the insanity first, and last.
The Vampire spurted out onto the empty freeway access road, jolting over potholes left by the searing summer heat. Matt’s teeth and bones were starting to ache from the grinding pace, from tension.
He decided to head for Highway 95 and the Strip. Maybe a crowd would be the best place to lose himself. His mirrors reflected empty, black night.
He couldn’t tell anymore if the noise thrumming in his head was the Vampire’s or another motorcycle’s or his own adrenaline-driven body’s magnified function.
The lights of Highway 95 flowed as slow as lava ahead. Above, a hunk of canary-yellow rock as big as the Circle Ritz mooned Las Vegas. His mirrors remained black and vacant.
He glided onto the entry ramp alone. No need to accelerate to freeway speed; he was already doing it, and then some. He couldn’t believe the needle: eighty.
And then … a pinprick in the mirror. A firefly. Growing.
Ninety.
The light clung, then grew again.
Matt tried to gauge the oncoming traffic. It was suicidal to enter the flow at this speed.
The moon in his mirror was swelling as if to duplicate its sister in the sky.
Crazy, crazy, crazy. Plus, he could get arrested.
He swerved onto the freeway, racing to beat a huge semi lit up like a Christmas tree. He was going way fast enough, but the semi was too close to cut in front of.
He did it anyway, feeling the tremendous wind-drag of the behemoth trying to suck him into its vortex. Pastit, he slowed his speed, clinging like a moon to the obscuring planet of a double-long trailer.
He glimpsed the driver’s face in the semi’s left mirror. A dirty look, maybe an obscenity. At least this rider of the night had a face.
Only double-eye lights flared in his mirror, solid rows of them.
After a couple of minutes, he allowed himself to drop back until the semi surged ahead at its steady sixty miles an hour. No motorcycles shared the crowded lanes with him.
On the parallel access road, though, a single red taillight skated away at an oblique angle until it became a tiny infrared laser dot fading into the absolute darkness of the surrounding desert.
Chapter 34
Playing for Keeps
(Recorded in 1956, when Elvis was taking control of his sessions with great energy)
ELVIS DIES! The headline was the usual supermarket tabloid screamer in tall, 72-point Helvetica bold type … except that the news reversed the usual claim.
Invariably, the tabloids announced that Elvis Lives! Temple was willing to bet that some blasé copy editor had jumped up and down for joy at the chance to write Elvis Dies! for a change.
Of course, this was the Las Vegas Scoop. Apparently Crawford Buchanan had finally dried off and coughed up what the police wanted to know. Then he had scurried back to the Scoop to paint a breathless account of the gruesome discovery in the Medication Garden.
The one fact he managed to ignore utterly was how he happened to be on the premises at that particular place and time.
Temple was intrigued to read that “busybodies-abouttown PR woman Temple Barr and justice of the peace Electra Lark” had “stumbled over” the body (pretty hard to do unless she and Electra had a hidden talent for walking on water), “sending up a wail that would do an electric guitar proud.”
Temple cringed to imagine Lieutenant C. R. Molina reading that line. Then she brightened. Molina would not be caught dead reading the Las Vegas Scoop, although Elvis might.
The account was full of lurid grace notes, including the design of the victim’s jumpsuit (Fourth of July explosions) and the anaconda’s exact length (eighteen feet), but it contained remarkably little news.
The morning Review Journal had been put to bed too early to report the murder. Instead, their feature page headlined: “Seeing Double?” Elvis, that is, a story on the multitudes of Elvis impersonators in town. Velvet Elvis had made it into a photograph. So had several more conventional male models, none of whom much resembled the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll except for the uniform hair, sideburns, and jumpsuits. Reviving Elvis was an imprecise art.
The Sun had the full-meal deaclass="underline" it identified the dead man as an Elvis impersonator, so far unidentified. The jumpsuit, it mentioned, was an expensive version, not the usual costume-shop model. The victim’s hair was not only high, wide, and handsome, but also costly, and had clung throughout the impromptu rinse cycle in the pool.
As for the snake, it had “escaped a nearby animal exhibit.” An autopsy would determine its role in the death, if any. The authorities had no evidence that the death was a drowning, and there were no witnesses, except for two Las Vegas residents who had discovered the floating body while visiting the hotel’s herb garden.
Temple felt relief soften her muscles. This was such a ridiculous death to have discovered. It didn’t seem real.