“Was it noble?”

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t think,” said Beth, “I’ve ever met a more vile man.”

I was stunned by what she said. He seemed ornery, sure, small-minded and bigoted, with a foul word for everyone, but nothing worse than expected from a decrepit old goat. “You’re not serious.”

“Something about him, Victor, creeped me to the bone. His fake tears when you pressed him about being more concerned about the check than the death of his niece.”

“I thought they were genuine.”

“Please. And his little protestations of sacrifice, of how hard it was to take care of that family, of how much his firmness was needed.”

“You don’t think it was a sacrifice?”

“Do you remember in David Copperfield when David’s sweet mother marries Murdstone, and Murdstone comes in with his sister and takes over the house, bending everyone to his will until he destroys his new wife and forces David out?”

“Murdstone with the big black sideburns?”

“Yes. What did Uncle Larry say, the girls needed a firm hand in that house? I shivered when I heard that.”

“Your imagination is running amok. This explains her travel to Vegas. She didn’t go with a lover, she went to visit her uncle. And I was curious why Hailey transferred the bulk of her Gonzalez fee, after taxes, to Las Vegas, and now I know. To pay for the uncle’s nursing home.”

“But why?”

“Loyalty.”

“Maybe,” said Beth. “But if you ask me, there’s something else going on. Something that ruined him, too. Do you know what beriberi is?”

“Some exotic South Seas disease, it sounds like. How do you think he caught it in the desert?”

“Beriberi is not a virus. It’s a vitamin deficiency that sailors used to get because of unbalanced diets. You can also get it from drinking, but not just a little light tippling. They see it in drunks who drink so much that nothing matters but the drinking and the forgetting, who drink so much they forget to eat.”

A flight of warplanes flew low overhead, banking to the left, blowing away the soft rush of the wind with the roar of their engines, leaving thin trails through the pale blue as if the fabric of the sky itself had been ripped.

“Remember when I kept asking about the death of that boy?” she said. “What was his name?”

“Jesse Sterrett.”

“That’s right. You know what we should do? We should go back to Hailey’s old hometown and find out what really happened to him.”

“He said it was ruled an accident.”

“Maybe it was, if you can trust old Doc Robinson to know the difference between an accident and a murder.”

Behind us a white muscle car, its windows darkened, came up on us at a high rate of speed and shifted into the passing lane.

“If you ask me,” said Beth, “I’d guess there was a link between Hailey Prouix’s murder and the death of that boy. If you ask me, there’s something malignant that was alive back then that still exists, just as strong, today.”

“You’re creeping me out, Beth.”

“He creeped me out, Victor.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Neither do I. But you know what? It gets me to wondering. It gets me to wondering if maybe we don’t have it all wrong. It gets me to wondering if maybe-”

Just then the white muscle car roared alongside us. It was a Camaro, the noise of its engine exploding without the restraint of a muffler. I expected it to zoom on past, but it didn’t, it stayed even with us, like a shadow.

I pulled my foot off the accelerator and slowed down to let it go on by, and it slowed down with me.

I sped up, and it kept pace.

I tried to peer inside but the windows were tinted so dark it was impossible to see who was driving.

I glanced at the road in front and saw a huge red pickup truck, hauling a motorboat, coming our way in the muscle car’s lane.

The truck blared its horn.

I sped up.

The muscle car veered away to the left and then, as if it were a yoyo on a string, came back and slammed us hard in the side.

The crash of metal, the crack of glass, the horn of the red pickup, and then a strange sound like the flap of a huge wing, followed by silence.

The straight road twisted sharply to the left, the soft shoulder tossed us, the great singed desert opened its arms to us, and, like children of the earth, we fell into them, spinning into the arms of the earth as the pale blue of the sky and the rocky surface of the desert revolved one around the other and became for us as one.

25

MY FIRST words when I came to were for Beth. I called her name, I called her name and heard nothing. The sun was brutal in my eyes, three dark things circling about it in the sky. My back ached so badly I thought it was broken, but I realized that as long as it hurt like hell it was still together, still together, and I called out for Beth.

From behind I heard voices. I twisted my head and saw the car, our car, the convertible, on its side, twisted grotesquely, the windshield shattered, fingers of flame lapping out the side of the hood. The red pickup truck was parked off a ways in the distance, the huge boat still hitched behind it. A man in jeans and a tee shirt stood in front of it, talking into a cellular phone.

“Beth,” I called out as loud as I could. “Where’s Beth?”

And then a face appeared over me, blurry and in shadow against the harsh sun. A man’s face, round, with its ears sticking out.

“She’s all right,” came a soft, scarred voice, strangely familiar, though badly out of place. “I think something in her arm, it snapped, but other than that she’s doing fine. You, too, mate. You was both wearing seat belts, good thing, or you’d be vulture bait.”

“The car…”

“I hope you took out insurance on your rental, is all I can say.”

“Beth’s all right?”

“Yeah, Vic, she’s fine. Just fine. I took her out of the car first, you second. Didn’t want to move you but I had to with the engine burning like it was. What’s that?” he called out to the man on the phone.

He turned to hear what the truck driver had to say and the sun lit up his face and I recognized him, I recognized him. That bastard.

“The ambulance will be along any minute. Don’t worry, Vic. Don’t you worry. I’m here to help. I’ll take care of everything.”

And he would, I was sure. I recognized him all right, no doubt about it, and I knew he would take care of everything, that bastard, just like he promised.

Phil Frigging Skink.

26

IN A curtained alcove of the emergency room of the St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, Nevada, a uniformed police officer took my statement as I waited for the results of the X-rays. They had strapped me to the stretcher in the ambulance to ensure I wouldn’t further injure my back, and the doctor had urged me to lie still on the table until he could review the film.

“Any sudden movement could cause irreparable injury,” he had said.

So I was lying as motionless as I could manage while the cop asked her questions. She was slight and cute, and I would have flirted her up in any other circumstance, but just then she was not at all what I wanted to see in the way of law enforcement. Just then what I wanted to see in the way of law enforcement was a burly bruiser who would take Skink by the scruff of his neck and toss him straight into the slammola. I told the cute police officer what happened with the white Camaro, about the way it smashed me in the side and sent me spinning off the road and how I was ready to sign a complaint for attempted murder as soon as she had it prepared.

“The truck driver said you did a full turn in the air before hitting the ground and spinning onto your side,” she said.

“Degree of difficulty six-point-nine.” Well, maybe I couldn’t help doing a little flirting, and she did have a pretty smile, and I always admired a woman in a uniform with a gun strapped to her hip.