DEDICATION
FOR SERENA
AGAIN, AND STILL, AND ALWAYS
And with thanks to Chris Arena, Bonnie Badenoch, John Bierer, Jim Blaylock, Russ Galen, Tom Gilchrist, Doug Goulet, Ann James, Delphine Josephe, Dorothea Kenny, Jim Crooks, Phil Mays, David Masesan, Kitty Myshkin, David Perry, Celene Pierce, Brendan and Regina Powers, Richard Powers, Serena Powers, Fred Ramer, Randal Robb, Jacques Sadoul, Marv Torrez, Rex Torrez, and Greg Wade.
EPIGRAPH
Her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give a coasting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the table of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader, set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity
And daughters of the game.
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world…
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented…
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
So long as you do not die and rise again,
You are a stranger to the dark earth.
—Goethe
PROLOGUE: THE DOLOROUS STROKE
LAS VEGAS—A small earthquake rattled Boulder City on New Year’s morning, and workers at the nearby Hoover Dam reported feeling the shock.
—Associated Press,
January 2, 1995
CHAPTER ONE
PANDARUS: …she came and puts me her white hand to his cloven chin—
CRESSIDA: Juno have mercy; how came it cloven?
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
A pay telephone was ringing in the corridor by the rest rooms, but the young woman who had started to get up out of the padded orange-vinyl booth just blinked around in evident puzzlement and sat down again, tugging her denim jacket more tightly around her narrow shoulders.
From over by the pickup counter her waiter glanced at her curiously. She was sitting against the eastern windows, but though the sky was already a chilly deep blue outside, the yellow glow of the interior overhead lighting was still relatively bright enough to highlight the planes of her face under the disordered straw-blond hair. The waiter thought she looked nervous, and he wondered why she had reflexively assumed that a pay-phone call might be for her.
The counter seats were empty where the half-dozen customers who lived in town usually sat chugging coffee at this hour—but the locals could sleep in on this New Year’s Day, and they’d be right back here tomorrow at dawn. This morning the customers were mostly grumpy families who wanted to sit in the booths—holiday-season vacationers, drawn in off of the San Diego Freeway lanes by the spotlit billboards beyond the Batiquitos Lagoon to the north or the San Elijo Lagoon to the south.
The woman sitting in the dawn-side booth was almost certainly a waitress somewhere—when he had taken her order she had spoken quickly, specified all the side-order options without being asked, and she had sat where she wouldn’t be able to see into the kitchen. And she was hungry, too—she had ordered scrambled eggs and poached eggs, along with bacon and cottage fries, and coffee and orange juice and V-8.
…And now she had set something on fire at her table.
The waiter clanked her plates back down on the counter and hurried across the carpet toward her booth, but he quickly saw that the smoking paperback book on the table was just smoldering and not actually flaming, and even before he got to the table the woman had flipped open the book and splashed water from her water glass onto the… cigarette butt!…that had ignited the pages.
The pay telephone was still ringing, but the overhead lights had gone dim for a moment, and a waitress back by the electronic cash register was cussing under her breath and slapping the side of the machine, and nobody else had happened to notice the briefly burning book; and the blond woman, who was now folding the soggy thing closed again, had gone red in the face and was smiling up at him in embarrassed apology—she couldn’t be thirty years old yet—and so he just smiled cautiously back at her.
“Yesterday you’d have been legal,” he said sympathetically; then, seeing that she was confused, he added, “Seven hours ago there’d have been ashtrays on the table, you wouldn’t have had to hide it.”
She nodded, pushing the book away across the tabletop and frowning as though she’d never seen the object until it had started smoldering in front of her. “That’s right,” she said to him sternly. “No smoking in restaurants at all in California now, as of midnight last night.” She looked past him now, with a forgiving, we’ll-say-no-more-about-it air. “Where are your public telephones?”
“Uh…” He waved in the direction of the ringing telephone. “Where you hear. But your breakfast is coming right up, if you want to wait.”
She was hitching awkwardly forward out of the booth and levering herself up onto her feet. “All I ordered was coffee.” The waiter watched as she walked away toward the telephone. Her left leg swung stiff, not bending, and he was uneasily sure that the dark, wet spot on the thigh of her jeans must be fresh blood.
SHE PICKED up the telephone receiver in mid-ring.
“Hello?” Again the restaurant’s lights dimmed for a moment, and the woman’s face hardened. In a harsher, flatter voice than she’d used before, she said, “Do I know you, Susan? Sure, I’ll tell him. Now, I don’t mean to be abrupt, but I’ve got a call to make here, don’t I?”
She hung up and dug a handful of litter out of a jacket pocket and dumped it onto the shelf below the telephone; from among these matchbooks and drywall screws and slips of paper and bits of broken green stucco she selected a quarter, thumbed it into the slot, and then punched in a local number.
After ten seconds of standing with the receiver to her ear, “Hi,” she said, still speaking in her rough new voice. “Is this the Flying Nun?” She laughed. “Gotcha, huh? Listen, Susan says to tell you she still loves you. Oh, and what I called about—I’m going to assume the Flamingo, you know what I mean?” She listened patiently, and with her free hand picked up one of the fragments of green-painted stucco. “Potent pieces of it…persist in percolating in the…what, pasture? Can you spell alliteration? What I’m trying to say, sonny boy, is that even though they did tear it down, I’ve got a chunk of it, and your ass is grass. Don’t waste time chasing the long stories on the front page this morning—skip right to the funny papers.”