“Where’d you get that knife?” I asked.

“Room service sent it up,” he said. “I wanted something to cut the limes.

“What limes?”

“They didn’t have any,” he said. “They don’t grow out here in the desert.” He sliced the grapefruit into quarters then into eighths ...then sixteenths ...then he began aimlessly at the residue. “That dirty toad bastard,” he moaned. “I knew I should have taken him out when I had the chance. Now he has her.”

I remembered the girl. We’d had a problem with her on the elevator a few hours earlier: my attorney had made a fool of himself.

“You must be a rider,” she’d said. “What class are you in?”

“Class?” he snapped. “What the fuck do you mean?”

“What do you ride?” she asked with a quick smile.

“We’re filming the race for a TV series—maybe we can use you.”

“Use me?”

Mother of God, I thought. Here it comes. The elevator was crowded with race people: it was taking a long time to get from floor to floor. By the time we’d stopped at Three, he was trembling badly. Five more to go. .

“I ride the big ones!” he shouted suddenly. “The really big fuckers!”

I laughed, trying to de-fuse the scene. “The Vincent Black Shadow,” I said. “We’re with the factory team.”

This brought a murmur of rude dissent from the crowd.

“Bullshit,” somebody behind me muttered.

“Wait a minute!” my attorney shouted ...and then to the girl: “Pardon me, lady, but I think there’s some kind of ignorant chicken—sucker in this car who needs his face cut open.” He plunged his hand into the pocket of his black plastic jacket and turned to face the people crowded into the rear of the elevator. “You cheap honky faggots,” he snarled. “Which one of you wants to get cut?”

I was watching the overhead floor-indicator. The door opened at Seven, but nobody moved. Dead silence. The door closed. Up to Eight ...then open again. Still no sound ormovement in the crowded car. Just as the door began to close I stepped off and grabbed his arm, jerking him out just in time. The doors slid shut and the elevator light dinged Nine.

“Quick! Into the room,” I said. “Those bastards will have on us!” We ran around the corner to the room. My attorney was laughing wildly. “Spooked!” he shouted. “Did you see that? They were spooked. Like rats in a death-cage!”

Then, as we bolted the door behind us, he stopped laughing. “God damn,” he said. “It’s serious now. That girl understood. She fell in love with me.”

Now, many hours later, he was convinced that Lacerda—the so-called photographer—had somehow got his hands on the girl. “Let’s go up there and castrate that fucker,” he said, waving his new knife around in quick circles in front of his teeth. “Did you put him onto her?”

“Look,” I said, “you’d better put that goddamn blade away and get your head straight. I have to put the car in the lot.” I was backing slowly towards the door. One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious. You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug—especially when it’s waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes.

“Take a shower,” I said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” I left quickly, locking the door behind me and taking the key to Lacerda’s room—the one my attorney had stolen earlier. That poor geek, I thought, as I hurried down the escalator. They sent him out here on this perfectly reasonable assignment—just a few photos of motorcycles and dune buggies racing around the desert—and now he was plunged, without realizing it, into the maw of some world beyond his ken. There was no way he could possibly understand what was happening.

What were we doing out here? What was the meaning of this trip? Did I actually have a big red convertible out there on the street? Was I just roaming around these Mint Hotel escalators in a drug frenzy of some kind, or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story?

I reached in my pocket for the room key; “1850,” it said. At least that much was real. So my immediate task was to deal with the car and get back to that room ... and then hopefully get straight enough to cope with whatever might happen at dawn.

Now off the escalator and into the casino, big crowds still tight around the crap tables. Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they’re real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them—still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.

Big strike in Silver City. Beat the dealer and go home rich. Why not? I stopped at the Money Wheel and dropped a dollar on Thomas Jefferson—a $2 bill, the straight Freak ticket, thinking as always that some idle instinct bet might carry the whole thing off.

But no. Just another two bucks down the tube. You bastards!

No. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing. The important thing is to cover this story on its own terms; leave the other stuff to Life and Look—at least for now. On the way down the escalator I saw the Life man twisted feverishly into the telegraph booth, chanting his wisdom into the ear of some horny robot in a cubicle on that other coast. Indeed: “LAS VEGAS AT DAWN—The racers are still asleep, the dust is still on the desert, $50,000 in prize money slumbers darkly in the office safe at Del Webb’s fabulous Mint Hotel in the bright heart of Casino Center. Extreme tension. And our Life team is here (as always, with a sturdy police escort. . .).“ Pause. “Yes, operator, that word was police. What else? This is, after all, a Life Special ...

The Red Shark was out on Fremont where I’d left it. I drove around to the garage and checked it in—Dr. Gonzo’s car, no problem, and if any of your men fall idle we can use awax job before morning. Yes, of course—just bill the room.

My attorney was in the bathtub when I returned. Submerged in green water—the oily product of some Japanese bath salts he’d picked up in the hotel gift shop, along with a new AM/FM radio plugged into the electric razor socket. Top volume. Some gibberish by a thing called “Three Dog Night,” about a frog named Jeremiah who wanted “Joy to the World.”First Lennon, now this, I thought. Next we’ll have Glenn Campbell screaming “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Where indeed? No flowers in this town. Only carnivorous plants. I turned the volume down and noticed a hunk of chewed-up white paper beside the radio. My attorney seemed not to notice the sound-change. He was lost in a fog of green steam; only half his head was visible above the water line.

“You ate this?” I asked, holding up the white pad.

He ignored me. But I knew. He would be very difficult to reach for the next six hours. The whole blotter was chewed up.

“You evil son of a bitch,” I said. “You better hope there’s some thorazine in that bag, because if there’s not you’re in bad trouble tomorrow.”

“Music!” he snarled. “Turn it up. Put that tape on.”

“What tape?”

“The new one. It’s right there.”

I picked up the radio and noticed that it was also a tape recorder—one of those things with a cassette-unit built in. And the tape, Surrealistic Pillow, needed only to be flipped over. He had already gone through side one—at a volume that must have been audible in every room within a radius of one hundred yards, walls and all.

“ ‘White Rabbit,”’ he said. “I want a rising sound.”

“You’re doomed,” I said. “I’m leaving here in two hours—and then they’re going to come up here and beat the mortal shit out of you with big saps. Right there in the tub.”