The old man who was known as Doctor Leaky had apparently not heard. For a couple of seconds he tried to continue walking, then seemed to grasp the fact that he was being impeded by something. His bald, spotty head slowly turned around on his corded neck, and his eyes widened as if in vast astonishment when he saw that Betsy had taken hold of his sleeve. "Hah?" he said hoarsely. "Hah?" He was wearing an expensive gray suit, but somehow he always tugged the pants up too high. Right now the silver belt buckle was up around his solar plexus. And of course he could never manage to lift his slack lower jaw and close his mouth.
"Can't you smell it anymore, you worthless old jug? Sniff." sShe inhaled deeply.
"It's them!" exclaimed Doctor Leaky in his shrill, birdy voice.
She looked at him hopefully, but he was pointing at several life-size painted statues of men in togas under the Caesars Palace sign across the street. A tourist had wedged a Bic lighter into the outstretched hand of one of them and was having his picture taken leaning close to it with a cigarette in his mouth.
"No, it's not them." Betsy shook her head. "Come on." A few steps further up the sidewalk, when they were passing the west-facing Mississippi-showboat facade of the Holiday Casino, Doctor Leaky again became excited. "It's them!" he squeaked, pointing.
Statues in nineteenth-century dress stood on the deck of the boatlike structure, and in the fenced-off lagoon between the sidewalk and the building floated a moored raft with two Huck Finn-like statues on it. A red sign on the coping read: DANGEROUS CHEMICALS—KEEP OUT OF WATER.
"You moron," Betsy said.
Doctor Leaky giggled. Betsy noticed that a dark stain was spreading across the crotch of his suit pants.
"Oh, fine," she said. "God, why do I even keep you around?" In the middle of the sidewalk crowd she raised her hand, and a gray Jaguar XJ-6 pulled up and double-parked in the street.
She led the old man over the curb and across the pavement to the rear door. The driver, an obese bald man in a woolen Armani suit, had got out and was holding the door open. "My corpse pissed its pants, Vaughan," she told the fat man. "I guess we're going home."
"Okay, Betsy." The fat man took Doctor Leaky's forearm impersonally.
"It's them!" Doctor Leaky piped again.
Betsy sniffed the air again. The resonance was still on the hot breeze. "Who, Doctor?" she asked with weary patience and still a little hope.
"The people in Doom Town—the lady in the car, and the lady in the shelter in the basement, and all the rest of them. Those kids."
She realized that he was talking about the simulated town that had been built in the desert near Yucca Flats when the government had been testing the atom bomb in the early fifties, and false suns had seemed to rise instantly in the night sky beyond the Horseshoe Club and the Golden Nugget. To make it all more realistic, the Army had put mannequins in the houses and in the cars at the test site. Betsy could remember having gone out and looked at the fake city, which had been known to the locals as Doom Town.
"No, Doctor, get in the car, it's not them. Those were all fake people."
Doctor Leaky laboriously lifted one foot into the car. "I know that," he said, nodding with ponderous dignity. "The problem is that they weren't a realistic enough …"
"Unlike the plaster boys in front of Caesars, sure. Get in the car."
"As an offering, a sacrifice, they weren't realistic enough," the old man quavered. "The cards weren't fooled."
Vaughan leaned forward to help Doctor Leaky get the rest of the way into the car. For a moment Betsy could see the SIG 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol Vaughan wore in a shoulder holster under his coat.
Before getting into the car herself, she lifted her face into the breeze. Yes, at least one of the fish was grown to nearly keeping size out there.
Maybe it was the fellow who had swum up into her mind at the Dunes the other night. I wonder, she thought, who drink is to him.
The cycle took twenty years, but they did eventually ripen. Somebody's out there having a bad time right now.
Come Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, there would be another resurrection.
CHAPTER 5: Chasing the White Line
Crane got to his feet and carried a fresh beer out onto the porch. "What?" he said.
"I don't mean to be readin' your mail, Pogo," said Mavranos, "but you're gonna lose your house if you don't pay these people." He was holding out an unfolded sheet of paper with typing and numbers on it. The long gray envelope lay torn open on the table.
"Who's that? The bank?"
"Right. They're talkin' foreclosure." Mavranos was frowning. "You'd better pay 'em. I don't want to take my chances on a new neighbor who might object to a beery bum living next door." He leaned forward, and Crane could tell he was serious, for he used his Christian name. "Scott," Mavranos said clearly, "this is no joke. Get a lawyer, homestead the place, file chapter thirteen bankruptcy—but you gotta do something!"
Scott Crane held the paper up to his good eye and tried to make sense of it. He couldn't let himself lose the house, not now that it seemed Susan's ghost was here.
"I guess I've got to get back in business," he mumbled.
Arky blinked at him. "Are you still working at the restaurant?"
"I don't think so. They've called me a few times, but I haven't been in there … in weeks. No, I think that's gone. I've got to … get back into my old business."
"Which is what? It better get you a paycheck quick—and a big one."
"If it works, it does that. I quit doing it … eight, nine years ago. When I, when I married Susan, and started at the Villa. She never said anything, but I could tell it was time to get into something else. Yeah, that'll work, that'll work."
"So what is it? These people want their money yesterday."
Scott Crane had spilled some beer on his pants, and he rubbed at it ineffectually. "Oh, I—didn't I ever tell you?—I used to be a Poker player."
"You should have seen 'em tonight," he had told Susan at three o'clock one morning as he pulled wads of twenty-dollar bills from his pants pocket. "They were all quiet and grouchy, 'cause they didn't have any crank, and they kept looking up, real wide-eyed, every time they heard a car door slam, 'cause a friend who drives a tow truck had said he'd bring some by if he got a call to anywhere near the game. I could bluff 'em out any time with a five-dollar raise—they were having a terrible time, asking the guy whose house it was if he was sure he didn't have any old mirrors to lick, and even thinking about grinding up some of my No Doz and snorting that. Finally their friend did knock on the door and gave 'em a bindle, this little bitty folded bit of paper with about a quarter teaspoon of crystal meth in it, and then they were all happy and laughing and tapping the powder out on a mirror and scraping it into lines with a razor blade and then snorting it up through a little metal tube. Sudden cheer, yukking it up, you know? And suddenly they'd stay with any hand, and call any raise, and not give a damn if they lost. It was great. But then one of 'em's eyes go wide, you know, like this—and he gets up and runs for the bathroom. And a minute later all the rest of 'em are bowleggedying around in the hall like Quasimodo, banging on the bathroom door and cussing the guy in there. It turns out the crank was cut with some kind of baby laxative." Susan laughed, but was sitting up in bed and frowning as he took off his pants and shirt. "I don't mean to be critical, Scott," she said, "but these people sound like idiots."