"How you doing," he said.

He looked appraisingly at Hawk.

I introduced them.

"You as good as you look?" Fortunate said.

Hawk smiled.

"Or as bad," he said.

Fortunate nodded, and turned to me.

"She's still here. She went up to her room maybe an hour ago, hasn't come down. Room five twenty-one, I already duked the desk clerk."

"There a back way out of here?" I said.

"She either gotta come through the lobby," Fortunato said, "or use the fire stairs that dump out in the alley at the end of the building nearest the Strip."

I pointed.

"That end?" I said.

"Yeah."

I looked at Hawk, he nodded and left the bar.

"Where's the house phone?" I said.

"Lobby, near the desk."

I paid the bartender and Bernard and I walked to the lobby.

There was a small reception desk there and some phones to the right. A guy in a short-sleeved blue and white striped shirt sat behind the desk smoking a cigarette without taking it out of his mouth. Now and then he leaned away from the counter and flicked the accumulating ash into a receptacle I couldn't see. Or maybe onto the floor.

"How much you duke him?" I said to Fortunato.

"I give him a C," Fortunato said.

"It'll be on the bill."

There was a rack of Las Vegas guide magazines, advertising on their covers celebrations of infinite scope built around superstars of colossal magnitude, whom I, in my ignorance, had not always heard of. On the other hand, I had heard of Debbie Reynolds.

"Call Bibi," I said.

"Tell her who you are, that you work for Marty, and you want to see her in the lobby right now."

"And she scoots down the back stairs and your pal grabs her in the alley."

I nodded. Bernard picked up the phone and spoke into it. He listened and spoke again.

"You don't know me, but my name's Fortunato and I work for Marty Anaheim."

He paused, listening.

"Yeah, you do," he said.

"He's your husband."

He listened, moving the toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other.

"Have it any way you want," he said.

"I'm in the lobby. I want to see you. I can come up or you can come down."

He winked at me.

"No, no, sis, those are the choices, you come down or I come up."

He listened, nodding slightly.

"Okay, but I don't see you in fifteen, I'm knocking on your door."

Then he hung it up, and grinned at me.

"I guess she wants a head start," Bernard said.

"Says she was in the shower, has to get dressed, be down in fifteen minutes."

"Might be true," I said.

"Sure. I got a tenner says she'll be in here with the schwartza in less than three minutes."

"His name's Hawk," I said.

"No offense. Hell, I call myself the mini guinea."

I looked at my watch. We waited. A group of people who must have gotten off a tour bus from Kansas trouped in through the front door. They turned right and followed their tour guide down the corridor toward the ballroom where Debbie's next show was gathering momentum. As they cleared the lobby, Hawk walked in the front door with his hand gently on Bibi Anaheim's arm. It was two minutes and thirty-four seconds from the time Fortunato called.

"You owe me ten," Fortunato said.

"I didn't bet," I said.

CHAPTER 48

I paid Bernard J. Fortunato off, in cash, on the spot, expenses included. He folded it up without counting it and slid it into his right-hand pants pocket.

"You don't want to count it?" I said.

"Naw, my line of work you can't tell the difference between who you can trust, and who you can't… time to find another line of work."

Bernard tipped his hat forward a little lower over the bridge of his nose and we left him getting a drink at the bar in the hotel lobby. Probably waiting for Debbie.

It was about 11:30 and Convention Center Drive was the road less traveled at this time of night in Vegas. Hawk and Bibi and I were nearly the only people on the street, as we walked west toward the Strip in the neon-tinged late-night twilight, which was about as dark as it gets in Vegas. If Bibi was glad to see us, she had mastered her emotions completely. She had not spoken since Hawk had brought her into the lobby. And as she walked between us she seemed to be dwindling inside her silence, as if eventually it would become so thick we couldn't find her.

"Told her we ain't working for Marty," Hawk said.

I nodded.

"We've been looking very hard for you," I said.

She gave no indication that she'd heard me.

"Mostly we were worried about you. You've had a lousy life for quite a while."

We got to the Strip and turned left, heading south toward The Mirage. On the Strip the dry desert night was full of people and cars and lights, thick with the smell of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke, and deodorant spray and hair spray and mixed drinks and cologne and desperation. There was a lot of energy on the Strip but it was feverish, the kind of energy that makes you sleepless, that makes you drive too fast, and chain-smoke, and drink heavy. The Strip was choked with people in dogged search of fun, looking for the promise of Vegas that had brought them all from Keokuk and Presque Isle and North Platte. It wasn't like it was supposed to be.

It wasn't the adventure of a lifetime, but it had to be. You couldn't admit that it wasn't. You'd come too far, expected too much, planned too long. If you stayed up later, played harder, gambled bigger, looked longer, saw another show, had another drink, stretched out a little further…

"I was in Fairhaven High School a few days ago," I said to Bibi.

"Nice-looking old building. Looks like a real high school, doesn't it."

She didn't respond. As we walked through the crowd, people would occasionally stare covertly at Hawk.

"I met your friend Abigail," I said.

Nothing.

"Abigail Olivetti," I said.

"Hey, Abbey, where's the party?"

Bibi was silent.

"Almost twenty years ago," I said.

Bibi started to cry. Nothing dramatic, just some tears silently on her face. She made no move to wipe them away.

"Seems a long way back, doesn't it?" I said.

She nodded.

"Didn't work out so good," I said.

She shook her head.

"We might be' able to make it work better," I said.

She stopped walking and stood crying in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the Desert Inn. I put my arm around her shoulder. She stiffened and turned stiffly toward me and stood stiffly against me so she could cry on my chest. Hawk appeared to pay no attention, but I noticed he had moved in front of us so that he shielded her with his body and people couldn't see her crying.

We stood like that for a while and finally she stopped crying, though she made no visible effort to do so, and pulled stiffly away from my chest. She seemed no longer in concealment, as if the crying had revealed her and she had nothing left to hide.

"I met Marty my senior year," she said.

"Everybody was scared of him but me."

We began to walk again. The sidewalk was crowded but people seemed to give us room. When you walked with Hawk you never got jostled.

"Where'd you go when you got to L.A.?" I said.

"I had a friend in Oceanside, Dianne Lalli, I went to see her."