"Expected when?"
"We can't precisely say, sir, but her room has been guaranteed for late arrival."
A glance at the clock radio on the bedside table told Feydor it was nearing six thirty-five. Again, the woman on the bed painfully, mournfully moaned, her legs kicking out as if a bad dream were chasing her.
The clerk, hearing the moan, asked, "Is everything else all right, sir?"
"Yes, yes… thank you," he told the clerk and hung up.
He removed the handkerchief gag from the woman's mouth to allow her to breathe easily. The gag no doubt had his prints on it from earlier touching, but this mattered not. The fire would obliterate any hint of it.
He had earlier laid open the Samsonite bag he'd carried to the room, and he began preparations, laying out all the tools he'd brought in his case. Lifting a Polaroid Instamatic camera, he took a before shot and mumbled, "The right tool for the right job."
The sight through the camera lens gave him a slight rise in the heat of his body, the red returning, a volcanic, liquid fire below the epidermis. His penis hardened but little, semen stirring slightly, sluggishly with his blood, but that part must await the burning flesh as promised by Satan, his reward.
It was a feeling he had not had in many, many years, not since childhood. He knew now that the Antichrist had likely spawned him, fed a fiery liquid mush to him as a child, coddled and nurtured him. That it had been Satan in his head all those times he'd burned things both inanimate and animate. A bit of fear along with anticipation and remorse rose in him along with his sexual organ.
After having been caught and punished many times, young Feydor had simply stopped burning things when he became older. The consequences were too great, the suffering at the hand of his earthly father too much. He'd become interested in psychology and psychiatry largely to understand himself. In college and graduate school, he'd excelled and had come out a practicing psychiatrist, believing he now could control the fire that raged within. He'd practiced medicine for only three years when the voices inside him began. It was the voices of the phantoms behind the irises of his eyes. Next came the years of hospitalization and treatments, all amounting to nothing. No one could help him. Not even Wetherbine.
No one until now…
Satan would be angry with him if Coran was a no-show.
He tried to shake off the fear that Satan would punish him, but a sense of dread overwhelmed as he pictured the spread of the red rash to all parts of his body and brain.
It wouldn't matter to Satan that it wasn't his fault that Coran hadn't arrived. Wouldn't matter if she canceled and was a no-show. The punishment would be the same. It didn't matter that it wasn't his fault.
He busied himself with the materials he'd brought for the occasion. Wasting no more time, he dug around for the screwdriver, located it, and laid it on the dresser alongside the pint-sized can of petroleum he'd brought, and beside this, the small canister of butane with its praying mantis-like wand. The torch would set off the fire instantly and quickly, and it would be over, and Feydor would once again feel some relief from his demons, and he'd be a step closer on the journey, saving his soul from the everlasting tortures already assaulting him.
As for the girl… he truly didn't want to think about the girl, but Satan had selected her, not him; and he had said she was a traitor, and so punishment must be meted out. And if not her, it would be Feydor branded as a traitor and someone would come after him with petrol and butane and a plan that would return him to the Devil's Well…
The hotel was jam-packed with not only forensics experts but also two other conventions going on simultaneously. The hallways were littered with men in hats and name tags. On the elevator going up, Jessica gave a thought to the Forensic Science Association of America, the FSAA. She'd been a member for nearly twenty years and had never actively participated as a board member, nor did she wish to now. She wondered how people as busy as she could possibly find the time to be treasurer or secretary or to steer such a cumbersome organization down a direct path to such a thing as a successful convention. She believed there was no more cursed a thing on earth than the possibility that someone would ask her to direct a committee of forensic people to organize such an extravaganza. Obviously, now, she had gotten what she deserved. Some committee of her peers had decided that Vegas, of all places, would make for a great place to hold their annual convention. Like complaining over an election when she hadn't voted, she had no right; she had gotten precisely what she and the other hands-off members deserved, because she had not gotten involved.
But now that she was here, she would make the best of it, she scolded herself.
When she settled into her room atop the Flamingo Hilton, Jessica did as always when entering a hotel room. She immediately turned on the air-conditioning unit, flooding the place with as much cool air as possible, and she tore back the drapes over the window to take in the full view of the city from atop the skyscraper. She felt as if she were a mile above the city, overlooking the busy, frenetic world that money and gambling had built, this modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
The entire city paid homage to P. T. Barnum's famous line "There's a sucker born every minute." Watching the comings and goings of the air traffic, Jessica said aloud to the now winking lights of the city, ''And the airline industry would add, 'a sucker flown in every minute…' "
Barnum would be on his knees at this altar, his eyes welling with tears, his wildest schemes eclipsed by this town. It was a city where Mafia gambling was not only tolerated but also how the city got its payroll. It gave her pause, recalling poor little Grand Cayman and its graft problems, so inconsequential to this.
Vegas was gambling's greatest temple, the world's largest roulette wheel, and perhaps that was its greatest appeal-the fact that it imitated life as most people felt it, knew it, believed it to be: a boundlessly huge, universal gamble.
The gamble might one day pay off; in the meantime, you kept coming back to drink of it, always hoping that one day your "luck" would change before life simply crushed you. The gamble might be fun in and of itself, but no one was getting out of the game alive. Consequently, the more dangerous, the higher the stakes, the more the payoff in feeling for those otherwise dead nerve endings; the higher the stakes, the deeper the fall, the pain, the suffering when you lost your gamble with relationships, with life.
Cars, trucks, moving vans, trains on tracks-industry was moving far below her now where she stood, all those working machines and people twenty stories below her. She wondered how many, at the end of the day, blew their hard-earned cash at the massive casino downstairs, which filled a football-field-sized lobby with wildly flashing Christmas tree colored lights, slots, and gambling tables.
Jessica turned from the window, inspected the place where she intended living for two nights. She'd best unpack, hang out her things, especially what she intended to wear tonight, and ready herself for a shower. As she did so, she found her thoughts returning to life's ever-changing game of chance.
In her line of work, gambling often meant taunting death itself, and while she had been lucky on many occasions, Jessica believed in luck only insofar as she could control it, make it work for her, create it by action and deed. In her worldview, there was no such thing as some entity called Luck sitting out there like a Rumpelstiltskin to be tapped into, or to fall in debt to. Chance, coincidence, the roll of the dice all occurred independent of personality and action, just as one molecule chanced into another. But when a person put faith and self-reliance and confidence on the line to assert herself, she became lucky-lucky even to be around.
It wasn't luck that befell any hapless one. This regardless of the housewife who steps into a 7-Eleven, purchases a ticket, and wins the lottery. There was no luck involved, only random chance. Jessica believed luck to be a conscious lifestyle, a choice.