Now, stopped for a red light in the right-turn lane at the Flamingo Road traffic signal, Mavranos dug out of his pocket the penciled list of Roulette numbers and scanned them.
"Light's green," said Ozzie after a few moments.
"How I need a drink …" said Mavranos thoughtfully, taking his foot off the brake and turning the wheel but still staring at the list.
"Watch the road!" said Ozzie sharply. "You've got a beer between your knees, as usual, and frankly I think you drink way too much."
"No," said Mavranos, "I mean pi, you know, pi?
Ozzie was staring at him. "You want a pie? Instead of a drink? What the hell kind of pie? Can't you—"
Mavranos passed the list to the old man, eyed the traffic, and stepped on the gas pedal. "Here. Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, you know? Radius times pi squared, you've heard that kind of talk. Pi's what they call an irrational number, three and an infinitely long string of numbers after the decimal point. Well, there's a sentence you memorize, a mnemonic thing, to remember the numbers that are pi, out to something like a dozen places. I read it in a Rudy Rucker book. It starts, 'How I need a drink …'—that's three, one, four, one, five, get it? Number of letters in each word. But I can't remember the rest of the mnemonic sentence."
They had crossed over I-15. Ozzie squinted through the dusty windshield and pointed. "That's our motel on the right, don't miss the driveway. Archimedes, I really am not following—"
"See where the Roulette numbers were three, one, four, fifteen in the middle there? Look at the paper, I can see where I'm going. What numbers come after that?"
"Uh … nine, twenty-six, five, thirty-five, eight …"
Mavranos turned into the lot, parked near their room, and turned off the engine.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm pretty sure that's pi. Well now that's got to signify, don't it? Goddamn Roulette wheel just spontaneously starts reciting off pi? I wonder what numbers the other tables were listing. The square root of two, I suppose, or the square root of minus one."
Ozzie pulled on the handle and pushed his door open, then stepped carefully down to the hot pavement. "I don't know," he said, frowning, when Mavranos had locked his own door and walked around the car, "I guess so, if those numbers are this pi business of yours … but it seems to me this isn't the thing you're looking for. This is something else; something else is going on here—"
A sporty-looking young man was taking an overnight bag out of the back seat of a white Porsche in the next parking space. He was studiedly looking away from them, so he didn't notice that Ozzie had stepped forward, and he hit the old man in the shin with his bag when he swung it out of the little car.
"Watch it," said Ozzie irritably.
The young man muttered and hurried to the door of number seven, rattling a key against the lock.
"Goddamn zombies, you got in this town," Ozzie remarked to Mavranos.
Mavranos wondered if their neighbor had heard the remark. A moment later the young man was inside his room and had slammed the door hard.
I guess he did hear it, Mavranos thought.
A wind was blowing southeast from the jagged Virgin Mountains, tossing the yellow brittlebrush flowers on the miles of canyonside and rippling the wide, deep blue waters of Lake Mead. Vacationers were awkwardly bumping the docks with their rented boats at the Mead Resort Circle, and gasoline made a volatile perfume on the breeze and rainbowed the surface of the water around the docks and slips.
Ray-Joe Pogue gunned his jet boat straight out across the water for a hundred yards, away from the waterfront grocery store and bait shop, but the wind-raised waves made the lake choppier out here, and after a few seconds of being slammed up and down on the tuck-and-roll upholstery of the seat, he took his foot off the gas and let the rented jet boat rock in the water under the empty blue sky.
In the sudden relative silence he squinted around at the wide-scattered islands and the far reaches of the Boulder Basin coastline. There were a lot of boats out on this Sunday afternoon, but he didn't imagine he'd have any problem finding a secluded shore where he could sink the head. The metal box had bounced off the seat beside him onto the floor, and he carefully picked it up and put it back and laid the coiled line on top of it.
The head in the metal box.
He had killed several people in his life, and it had never bothered him, and so he was surprised at how much it had hurt him to kill Max. He felt disoriented now, as if he were seriously hungover, and he felt uneasy whenever he looked at the box.
He had met Max in high school—at one time Max had been in love with Nardie, Pogue's Asian half-sister—and he and Max had for years been preparing for this summer, this election year, this once-every-two-decades changing of the king. Max was to have been his … who, Merlin, Lancelot, Gawain? But last night, after failing to find the mysterious bus vehicle on I-15, Pogue had ordered Max to pull over and get out of the pickup truck, and had then fired the 12-gauge shotgun into the man's back.
He shuddered now in the harsh sunlight, the wind cold on his face, and he didn't look at the box. He gripped the white plastic gunwale of the jet boat and stared out across the water.
He had had no choice. Ideally he should not have had to perform this old Phoenician Adonis ritual, but there were too many uncertainties right now. Some jack had got past him last night on the highway, and there had been something suspicious about those three guys, the pirate, the old man, and the retard, in that blue Suburban with all the ribbons and crap all over it. And he couldn't get a line on Nardie Dinh; for months now he hadn't picked up any of her dreams. How the hell could she not dream? Was there some drug that suppressed it?
He had to find her, and before Easter. As his half-sister she was the only one who could serve as the moon goddess, his queen. All the fertility gods and kings mated with women who were in some way their sisters—Tammuz and Belili, Osiris and Isis, even King Arthur and Morgan le Fay—and he had thought he had effectively broken her will during the month-long confinement in that parlor house outside Tonopah. The diet regimen he'd had her on, the blood rituals, the room with the twenty-two pictures—he had groomed her perfectly to assume the goddess-hood, and then, when he had thought she was the broken sleepwalker he wanted, she had knifed the house's madam and stolen a car and fled to Las Vegas. And now she wasn't even dreaming anymore.
He squinted across the waves at a rocky little island a couple of miles away, and then looked at his Lake Mead map, folded to show Boulder Basin. Deadman's Island, the place was called. That sounded appropriate.
He turned the wheel, then stepped on the gas. The acceleration pushed him back into the seat, and as he straightened out of the turn, the wind threw the high rooster tail of spray out ahead of him, and heavy drops of water stung his face and knocked his black hair down onto his forehead.
He dug out his comb as he steered one-handed, and he swept the hair back up where it belonged. From now until Easter, physical perfection was going to be absolutely essential.
The man who takes the throne can have no flaws.
He circled the island in a series of jackrabbit starts, and on the far side he found a little rocky beach with no picnickers on it. He got in fairly close and then threw over the cinder-block that was the anchor.