He waved his boarding pass.
“No problem, sir,” she said, with a friendly apple-cheeked smile. The blue-eyed blonde looked just a little like Pat — or was he reading in? “I remember you — you seemed distracted. I hope your, uh... little boy?”
“Little girl.”
“Hope she gets better. You can use your ticket at a later date, no problem.”
Within two minutes he was again in the yellow-lit parking lot, unlocking the driver’s side of a wine-color Lincoln that he had never expected to see again. He unlocked and opened the back door, and threw the Samsonite in on the seat. He clicked the suitcase open, got the .45 out, stuck it in his waistband, closed the case, and soon was driving out of Tucson International Airport.
The terrible reality was he had only one option: driving to Lake Tahoe. The trip would take at least a dozen hours, possibly more, and he’d already had a long traumatic day. His soldier’s detachment had saved him so far, but fatigue could eat away at that, and emotions could get out of their cage...
Right now, as he headed north, he tried to decide whether Anna was in any immediate danger.
She was not Giancana’s target. But if the “Smith family” cover had been blown due to Anna keeping in touch with Gary Grace, the girl’s current whereabouts would be known to the Outfit. The nastiest scenario he could come up with was Giancana goons snatching her and using her to get at Michael. If they already knew where she was, such a kidnapping had probably already taken place.
Bad as that was, she stayed alive.
Associate Director Shore seemed unaware of Anna’s status, although admittedly that could have been a scam. If WITSEC did know about the girl running away, and where she’d gone, Michael could do nothing about it. And the feds were no threat to her, really.
Perhaps he should call that panic number again, and send Shore after Anna, to protect her in case Giancana sent his forces after her...
...But what if it hadn’t been Anna’s indiscretion with Gary that had blown the Smiths’ cover?
What if WITSEC had sprung a leak?
Pushing the panic button in that case meant handing Anna over to their betrayer.
No.
His only option was to go after his daughter himself; and she wasn’t going anywhere, not until after prom, which was Saturday night at eight p.m.
At Cal-Neva Lodge.
One eleven a.m., still near the airport, he pulled into a Standard station and told the gawky high-school-age attendant, “Fill ’er up.”
The Lincoln’s gas tank was what, twenty-one gallons? But he was getting around ten miles to the gallon. So he bought a canister of gasoline and two quarts of oil, as well as several big jugs of water, and put them in the trunk.
The coveralled kid, in the process of cleaning the windshield, grinned as he chewed his gum and said, “Must be gettin’ ready to do some desert driving.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re smart to do it at night.”
“Not sure ‘smart’ is the word. You got any coolers? Something on the small side?”
“Sure.”
“Throw some ice in one, and toss half a dozen cans of Coke in there, too. And a couple Snickers bars.”
“Sure thing!”
He gave the kid a twenty-keep-the-change, and then bore north on 89, going straight up through Tucson, barely noticing the slumbering city. He started with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner on low — cool enough outside without it, but he didn’t relish the rush of wind. Wasn’t like he was setting out in a buckboard into the wilderness — the Lincoln had comfy bucket seats, a Cartier clock, and plenty of headroom, not to mention horsepower.
Washed ivory in moonlight, the open plains of the desert, bordered by blue-tinged mountains, had a soothing, otherworldly beauty. Few other cars were on the road, and he had the two-lane stripe of concrete mostly to himself, often driving straight down the middle. He and Pat had taken this route to Vegas now and then, because they liked to spend the quiet time together, listening to music, enjoying the strangely peaceful landscape and the feeling that they were the only two people in the entire world.
He thought about her, various little incidents over the years, jumping from high school to just last year, from their early days in Chicago to Crystal Bay — nothing major, just tiny anecdotes that his mind kept playing for him, one memory triggering another and another.
An odd detached calmness settled over him as he drove and drove and drove. Whenever he came to a gas station, he would stop and fill up, since one never knew in the desert; many of these stations were twenty-four-hour, but the desert didn’t listen to reason, so better to keep the tank as full as possible.
Some stations had diners still open, but he didn’t eat, other than a Snickers bar about two hours in; and he drank Cokes, their caffeine helping out, and would stop and pee alongside the road, feeling weirdly serene as he sent a yellow arc into the ivory landscape under a vast sky of stars.
The third roadside pee break, he had his first bad moment. He looked up at the sky and said, “She was right, wasn’t she? Either you’re not fucking up there at all... Or worse, you are up there and we’re just some goddamn ant farm you lost interest in! Fuck you!”
He yelled all of this, and it sounded hollow in the night, not echoing exactly, more floating.
Despite the caffeine, he was getting tired, and about four hours in, the monotony stopped helping and started hurting. Suddenly he was weaving and ran off on the soft shoulder and woke himself up. He reached into the cooler on the otherwise empty rider’s bucket seat, and got another can of Coke going. He turned the air conditioner up until the car’s interior was damn near freezing. Then he stuffed a random four-track into the tape player, and Johnny Mathis came on.
“Chances are,” Mathis sang, and Michael remembered how much Pat liked the song — wasn’t her favorite or anything, just a song that when it came on, she’d always say, “That’s so pretty,” and he began to cry.
Losing control of himself and the vehicle, he had to pull alongside the road and get out, and he knelt on the sandy desert floor in the big empty cathedral of the night, cacti here and there like prickly votive candles. He wasn’t praying. He was weeping.
Ten minutes later he got shakily to his feet, pouting like a kid who suffered an unfair parental spanking, flashed the sky a middle finger, and again got behind the wheel.
The idea had been to tough out the whole twelve or thirteen hours, but by just after dawn, when the Lincoln rolled through suburban Henderson into Vegas, Michael had decided he needed a new plan.
His route didn’t take him to his one-time home away from home, the Strip, where the Vegas of the Sands and Stardust and Sahara was in the process of displacement by the overblown-themed likes of Circus Circus, Caesar’s Palace, and the MGM Grand. Howard Hughes had talked of Vegas becoming a “family” town (not meaning “family” in the Syndicate sense, either), a concept that longtime casino manager Michael knew had great potential.
In some respects the Cal-Neva had anticipated that, with its genuine resort-in-the-mountains attributes, boating, hiking, horseback riding; yet a certain nostalgic fondness for the Rat Pack glory days lingered in Michael even now, perhaps because on his periodic Vegas stints, he and Pat had shared laughter and love in this neon paradise, hobnobbing with celebrities, enjoying fine food and the lush life.
Near downtown, practically in the shadow of that leering electric cowboy Vegas Vic, he pulled into the Lucky Seven Motel, one of those space-age two-story courtyard affairs with glass flecks in the cement serving as glitz.