Finally, miles from the road, where tumbled rocks rose to a ridge shaded by a big Joshua, he indeed fell. Collapsed facedown on the sand. A minute, ten, twenty. But he didn’t die, clean, in the desert. He didn’t die at all. He just felt hot, sticky, tired, irritable. He rolled onto his back. Lay there, arms wide, chest heaving, staring up into the clear blue sky. High above, wings motionless, dwarfed by distance, a turkey buzzard rode the thermals, binocular eyes seeking dead meat.
What had he done? Trained too well? Forged a body and a will that knew no despair? But Mario Pucci, like the vulture’s meal, was dead meat. Along with Pucci, Dain’s planned revenge was also dead meat. Tears ran down the sides of his face to the sand at the thought of it.
Finally he sat up, forgotten arms still outstretched. Scrambled to his feet. Began dancing to some silent inner music. Faster and faster, like someone stoned, twisting, rhythmic, sensual. Improvising, sweat flying.
If he couldn’t run himself to death, he would dance himself to death.
He whirled in a circle, fell, leaped up, face transfigured, carried outside himself. Any moment now he would fall down dead of heatstroke. He ran right up a nearly perpendicular rock face and did a perfect backflip, a graceful parabola to land backward in the sand and do a back roll to shoot straight up into the air like an arrow, come down crouched — and freeze.
Dry deadly rattle. Lying on an exposed rock in the new sun, a massive rattler five feet long, red-brown with pale diamond markings. Still just slightly sluggish, but already drawing into its coiled striking position, tail vibrating visibly, vertical pupil slits in pale yellow lidless eyes almost closed against the direct sunlight. Red diamond rattler. Enough venom in its fangs, desert old-timers said, to fell a bull.
He stared at it, motionless. Even better. Totally sure. Let the snake kill him.
“All right, goddam you, do it!” he cried.
The rattler hissed but was motionless.
He began to move again, once more slowly, oh so slowly, slowly around the rattler, challenging it. Any moment now...
The snake hissed and rattled warningly, but did not strike.
Dain sprang in and out like a boxer dancing in and out to jab an opponent in the ring. That was it, a game. Once he had been a great, a tremendous games player. At chess. With his computer. With Marie’s and Albie’s lives. Now the game was to piss off the snake, so the game would have the ending he sought.
Belatedly, the snake struck. But because the man was already moving away it missed, went out full length off the rock to thump down on the sand. Dain yelled again, eyes wild.
“Yes! Yes! Goddam you, do it!”
The snake, aroused, was striking repeatedly, as quickly as it could coil and release. But Dain was beyond rationality, into the game obsessively. Once the snake’s fangs struck the sole of his shoe as he whirled with one leg extended. He was shouting with... what? Madness, perhaps.
He tried a pirouette, his foot slipped in the soft sand, he fell just as it struck again, fanging the air a foot above his descending head. It landed across him, he bucked and rolled, throwing off the bewildered rattler even as it tried to coil and strike again in midair.
Venom was dripping off its fangs, its timing was gone. Its strikes were slower. It was running down like a cobra fighting a mongoose. Which is what the mongoose waits for.
Here, now, this man was the mongoose, pure energy, the years of training in every discipline he could find coming together and paying off. He whirled about the rattler, reached in a lightning hand to give its smooth sleek hard body a tweak, leaping back and away in the same motion, too quick, the snake too exhausted, the inevitable coil and strike didn’t come within four inches of him, Dain was winning the game.
The snake, overheated, finally lay stretched out on the hot sand. If it had been a pit bull it would have been lying on its belly and panting. The man stopped, hands on knees, head down, panting himself in huge gulping breaths. He had won!
Won? No! He had lost! He was supposed to die...
Then he realized that his canteen full of water was on his belt. If he had really planned to die in the desert, why had he strapped on the canteen? He took it off his belt, opened it. Poured sweet cool water over the snake, then over his own head, down his throat. After long moments, the rattler slid away between a creosote bush and its sunning rock and was gone.
Dain saluted it. He started walking back toward the distant car shimmering in the desert heat. Began to trot. To run. The dance with the snake had sweated out his madness. No longer Saul struck blind on the road to Damascus. The scales had fallen from his eyes and along with them, his blindness.
Pucci was dead, but of course the two men he had hired wouldn’t be. And Pucci wouldn’t have dealt with them directly anyway, he would have used a go-between.
Dain’s excitement was growing, but he had to face certain realities. He’d treated what was serious as a game. He’d been a computer nerd who’d wanted to be Sam Spade. Marie and Albie were dead because he’d been a fool. Accept it, go on from there.
Accept also that, despite his new designer body, down deep he was still just Eddie Dain. With that shell of muscle and reflex around the old core, he’d thought he’d be the Terminator. But he was Eddie Dain, and Eddie Dain couldn’t do it.
Unless he could make other people think he was as hard, as impervious as he looked. Then, perhaps...
Making a game of life had gotten Marie and Albie killed, but how about making a game of death? He had been a private investigator of sorts when it had happened; now he had to make the mob think he was the greatest eye at finding people who had ever lived. He was smart and he was superb with the computer: he would learn how to find people nobody else could.
For the mob. His months with organized crime had shown him they’d become company men like everyone else. Easy for him to create an aura, a mystique, make himself the man the mob came to when nobody else could find who they were looking for. He’d need a go-between of his own, heighten that air of mystery that would move him through the underbelly until, someday, somewhere, he would run into three special men.
Would he know them if he did? Would they know him? He didn’t know, didn’t care; but he knew he wouldn’t find them here.
So first he had to get away from Vegas clean.
A week later, orders came for Travis Holt to report to the National Guard’s 72nd Military Police Company for two weeks’ “summer camp,” as the annual training is called. Holt dutifully took the order to his boss in casino bookkeeping; the 72nd had fought in the Gulf War, guarding Iraqi prisoners, so it was a popular outfit in Vegas. Permission was readily given for him to take his training without losing his accumulated vacation time.
Ten days after training was done, while the casino thought Holt was on vacation, a hand-scrawled letter from his brother Jimmy in Vero Beach informed the casino that Travis Holt had been killed in a training accident during the 72nd’s summer desert exercises. Was any back pay due? Send it to his bereaved brother if there was.
Holt fortunately had passed his ideas along to the bean-counters, so his death was no real hardship to the casino. A letter went to the asshole brother assuring him that no back pay was due, and the casino, shaking its collective head over slimeball relatives, closed the personnel file on Holt.
Who worried about dead men?
But even before he had died, Travis Holt had broken his tinted glasses, flushed his colored contacts, shampooed the dye out of his hair, shaved his mustache and goatee, and had left Vegas to become Dain. Yes, Dain.