You did give her a nice kiss, he thought as he remembered the bourbon and beer.
When he and Mavranos had stripped all the camouflage from the Suburban, they got moving again. Mavranos kept the speedometer needle at around seventy, but they didn't catch up to the car in which Crane had possibly seen the ghost of Susan.
After a while they drove past the bright oasis of Nevada Landing, a casino built to look like two ornate east-facing Mississippi riverboats. The mock vessels had risen from the horizon ahead, and soon they sank below the horizon behind, and then the Suburban was driving in darkness again.
Maybe she stopped there, Crane thought, climbed aboard a boat. He looked back, wondering if she'd find him again.
"Two moons," said Mavranos around his cigarette.
Crane blinked and shifted on the rocking seat. "Hmm?" He had nearly been asleep again.
"Doesn't that look like any-second-now moonrise up ahead? But we got the moon behind us."
"The one ahead of us will be Las Vegas."
Mavranos grunted, and Crane knew he was thinking about the castle of randomness.
And, slowly, the ripplingly molten white and blue and orange towers climbed up out of that bright quarter of the horizon and dimmed out the stars.
They got off I-15 at last at Tropicana Avenue, then turned left onto Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip. Even down here at the south end it was glaringly lit, with the Tropicana and the Marina and the not-yet-opened Excalibur crowding back the night sky.
"Damn," said Crane, staring out the car window at the Excalibur's gigantic white towers and brightly colored conical roofs. "That looks like the grandest hole in God's own miniature golf course."
"Excalibur," said Mavranos thoughtfully. "Arthurian motif, I guess. I wonder if they've got a restaurant in there called Sir Gawain, or the Green Knight."
Ozzie was staring back at the place. "I read there's going to be an Italian restaurant in there called Lance-A-Lotta Pasta. Restraint and good taste all the way. But yeah, Las Vegas seems to be sort of subconsciously aware of—of what it is. What Siegel made it."
"Ben Siegel made it Arky's perilous chapel?" asked Crane.
"Well," said Ozzie, "I guess he didn't exactly make it here; he invoked it here. Before Siegel this place was just ripe for it."
"Keep on north?" Mavranos asked.
"Yeah," said Crane. "There ought to be a fair number of supermarkets on Charleston; that's the first big east-west street after the Sahara." Which, he thought, is where we found the infant Diana in '60. God knows where we'll find her now. "Left or right—play it by ear."
"And find us a coffee shop sometime," said Ozzie. "Or no, a liquor store, we can get some Cokes and ice and put 'em in this cooler. Diana's shift probably ends at about dawn, and we're gonna need some caffeine to keep our eyes open till then." He yawned. "After that we can find a cheap motel somewhere."
Mavranos glanced at Ozzie in the rearview mirror. "Tonight we hit the grocery stores," he said, "but tomorrow we hit the casinos, right? So I can start trackin' my … phase change."
"Sure," Ozzie said. "We can show you the ropes." He shifted on the seat and leaned against Mavranos's Coleman stove with his eyes closed. "Wake me up when you find a supermarket."
"Right," said Crane, staring blearily ahead.
After the grandeur of the Tropicana intersection the street dimmed to normal urban radiance until Aladdin's, and then Bally's and the Dunes and the Flamingo raised their towering fields of billions of synchronized light bulbs.
Crane stared at the Flamingo. The entrance doors and broad driveway sat in under a rippling red and gold and orange upsweep of lights that made the place seem to be on fire. He remembered seeing it twenty years ago, when there had only been a modest tower at the north end and a freestanding neon sign out front; and he dimly remembered the long, low structure it had been, set back from the highway by a broad lawn, when he had gone there with his real father in the late forties.
Siegel's place, Crane thought. Later—maybe still—my father's.
Even at midnight Fremont Street's three broad one-way lanes shone in the white glare of the lights that sheathed Binion's Horseshoe, and the tourists getting out of the cab were blinking around and grinning selfconsciously. The fare was eleven dollars and some change, and when one of the tourists handed Bernardette Dinh a twenty, she looked at him with no expression and said, "Are we okay?"
As she'd hoped, he took it as meaning something like Is this downtown enough for you? and he nodded emphatically. She nodded, too, pocketed the twenty, and unhooked the microphone as though about to call for another fare. Too embarrassed now to ask for his change, the tourist closed the door and joined his companions, who were huddled uncomfortably in the sidewalk limelight.
Stage fright, she thought. They think everybody's looking at them, and they're afraid they don't know the moves and the lines.
Strikers from the culinary and bartenders unions were walking back and forth carrying signs in front of the Horseshoe, and one of them, a young woman with very short hair, had a megaphone.
"Baaad luck," the striker was chanting in an eerie, flat voice. "Baad luck at the 'Shoe! Come on oouut, losers!"
God, Dinh thought. Maybe I'd have stage fright, too.
Every Thanksgiving Binion's gave a turkey to each cabdriver, and Dinh, known as Nardie to all the night people of Las Vegas, had always dropped off her downtown fares in front of the place. She wondered if she'd soon have to start unloading them back by the Four Queens.
A couple of police cars were parked across the street in front of the Golden Nugget, but the officers were just leaning against the cars and watching the strikers; the tourists on this Saturday-night-or-Sunday-morning were plentiful, ambling along the sidewalks and drifting from one side of the street to the other, lured by the racket of coins being spat into the payout wells of the slot machines, a rapid-fire clank-clank-clank that was always audible behind the car horns and the shouting of drunks and the droning blare of the striker's megaphone. Nardie Dinh decided to wait for another fare right where she was.
Down here between these high-shouldered incandescent buildings she couldn't see the sky—she could hardly make out the traffic signals in the sea of more insistent artificial light—but she knew that it was a just-about-half-moon that hung somewhere out over the desert. Dinh knew she was working at half power—for the next few days she'd still be able to handle pennies without darkening them, to touch ivy and not wither it, wear purple without fading it and linen without blackening it.
But she was vulnerable, too, and would be all week—only able to really see through the patterns of the initialed dice at her other job, and able to defend herself only with her wits and her agility and the little ten-ounce Beretta .25 automatic under her shirt in her waistband.
In nine days the moon would be full—and by then she would have beaten both her brother and the reigning King … or she would not. If she hadn't, she would probably be dead.
A bearded man in a leather jacket was walking, apparently drunk, toward her cab. She watched him speculatively, thinking of some big losers who had in the past decided that this short, slim young Asian woman would be an easy target for robbery or rape.
But when he opened the rear passenger door and leaned in, he said, hesitantly, "Could you take me to a—a wedding chapel?"
Should have guessed, she thought. "Sure," she said. The man's face was pudgy and uncertain behind the bushy beard, and she knew she didn't need to call in his ID and destination; and he looked prosperous and out of shape—no need to get a ten in advance; he wasn't the runout type.