Nobody Dies in a Casino (27 page)

“Merlin's Cave and Merlin's Ridge?” Bradone was coming alive again. “That imposter, that motherfucking bastard, that—”

“Man, that generation knows how to swear, huh?” Toby managed to choke off the unwarranted hilarity. “Evan had a deal with Merlin to contact him when the time was right to go out to Mer—uh, the ridge and get footage. How'd you get out here?”

“We followed the stars,” Charlie answered dryly, “and cut the wires on the ground sensors for you. And solved five murders in the clear air.”

“You solved five murders?” Toby feigned astonishment for the rearview mirror.

Charlie explained their deduction, which didn't seem as logical as it had last night in the orange glow.

“You think Evan killed those guys in his house? He wouldn't kill anybody.”

He might ask you or Mel to. Which would be the same thing. Then she remembered where she'd heard of Merlin's Ridge, at McCarran, where she'd first seen the first-to-be body. Patrick the hunk had mentioned it to someone over his cellular. Probably someone at the Janet Terminal.

Charlie barely missed a sickly Joshua tree and did kill the engine as they rounded a hill and saw two dark helicopters above an advancing contingent of white Cherokees sending up dust for the choppers to chop into clouds.

Libby Abigail Greene was about to become an orphan, or worse—the daughter of a jailbird.

CHAPTER
33

“M
AN, MOST OF
that stuff coming at us is Merlin's Cherokees,” Toby Johnson said. “Start your engine, damn it.”

“How can you tell?” Through holes in the mushrooming dust, Charlie noticed a pickup camper about third in line and then more of them interspersed among the white Jeeps farther back.

“We have a chance,” Bradone said low and more vengeful than melodious, her tone reminding Charlie of Caryl Thompson. “Don't flood the goddamned motor.”

“Chance for what? There're two helicopters this time.”

“Yeah, but they got all Merlin's friends to baby-sit here.” The second-unit gofer grinned around his loosened tooth. It was not a pretty sight. “Go for it big time, agent lady.”

Charlie saw one of those motion sensors Bradone had cut, unwittingly abetting Merlin Johnson, before she ran over it to avoid the barrage of pickup campers and Cherokees coming at them. It resembled a big rusty can connected to an oblong box by wires, something like an amateur bomb might look. The helicopters appeared to have help in their attempt to round up the herd of curiosity seekers and nuts from two official white Cherokees with light bars on top.

Charlie almost overshot the gravel road when they came to it because of the dust still in the air. One of the helicopters peeled off to head their way. She gunned her unofficial Jeep onto the road, throwing up a plume of white-gray rock dust herself. That plume couldn't be missed from the sky, probably couldn't be missed from outer space. She'd get them as far as she could.

“Just pray there aren't any cattle on the road this morning.” Charlie floored it. “Just get us to Alamo, baby.”

Car chases were one of Charlie's least favorite kinds of scene in action movies, ranked right up there with vivisection. Now she knew why.

“Wait, stop a minute,” Toby ordered after a few miles. The windows were so covered with dust, he had to step out of the car to use the binoculars commandeered from Bradone's endless supply of expedition provisions.

“Hurry up,” Charlie warned, “or I'll leave without you.” She'd thought he needed to relieve his bladder. They were off again before he could get the door closed.

“That chopper isn't following us. He's parked behind Merlin's caravan and the other one's in front. God, I wish we could have got some footage of that.” His eye was swollen in a permanent wink now. “Maybe somebody back there's getting it on video and can smuggle it out in camper bedding or something.”

They didn't turn off the way they'd come on the road to the black mailbox, now white, connected to the paved highway leading into Rachel. Instead, they headed straight on the gravel road until it reached the pavement on its own, putting them much closer to the road to Alamo. Charlie's inner ears tickled unbearably from the vibration of their washboard journey.

“What makes you think we're going to get away with this?” Charlie asked Toby.

“All we got to watch for now is the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department, which Merlin says is getting fed up with having to use manpower to back up a government installation that's not there. That Merlin, he's really something, I tell you.”

“Wouldn't it be simply lovely,” Bradone said, “if that Merlin were in the captured caravan back there?”

“He's got to be nuts if he thinks they're going to let him continue to run a scam like this. How could he invest in all these Cherokees knowing they'd be half-ruined by going off the road and he'd be closed down in a week or less anyway?”

“Seeing as he's so smart, Mel and me figure he leases the Cherokees from other dealers.” Something in the gofer's expression in the mirror reminded Charlie of someone else, but the memory byte was gone before she could nail it. “I mean, hell, he's renting these out of a tent, probably never planned on being around long.”

“For what purpose?” Bradone tried to turn around in her seat to look at Toby and groaned. Her ribs had to be bruised from hanging over ledges and Toby's shoulder.

“Who knows? Very mysterious, that Merlin. Did I tell you he's a magician too? Maybe he's just trying to annoy the nice people at Area Fifty-one. Maybe it's a scam we haven't figured out yet.”

“That's a lot of effort and money just to annoy someone. How long has he been in business?”

“Couple days. I'd be willing to bet, we get back to Merlin's, there's no Merlin. Checks cashed to a drop somewhere, he and the cash disappeared already. I just hope we won't be turning this sucker in to the police.”

“How is it you know so much about Merlin?” Bradone asked.

If Bradone ever caught up with her mentor, Charlie figured he'd be left holding a whole bunch of regret.

“Me and Mel checked him out for Evan.” Toby opened the back windows, that almost goofy delight with life everywhere on his battered face, except for the deadly serious look in the one eye remaining open. “He was into astrology, voodoo, and this deal where you could get credit cards good all over the world, no matter your credit rating.”

“Why would Evan check out Merlin? Bradone, when you were here before, did you come in white Cherokees?”

“Two of them. I never questioned where Merlin got them.”

“Hell, he's probably into all kinds of other stuff too. Reminds me of Mel and Evan, and damn near all of Hollywood, for that matter.”

“If you knew this about him, why did you rent from him?”

“Hey, we do fiction, you know? It's all grist, babe.”

Bradone seemed to have forgotten her exceptionally personal close encounter of the orange kind. She leaned toward Charlie to watch Toby in the rearview mirror. “Have we met before?”

“Saw you at Evan's the night of the screening. We weren't introduced. I'm just a gofer—Jesus, what's that?”

Charlie, still flooring the poor machine down the road, pumped the brake and the windshield washer to see whatever it was, praying it was not a great huge stupid bull standing on the center line. She just wasn't up to cattle mutilation.

A machine of some kind, an aircraft, flying lower than a crop duster, streaked down the center line toward them. It tipped a nose with a hummingbird proboscis straight into the air at the absolute final moment, soaring over them with a sucking sound instead of a roar.

Charlie and the Cherokee fought each other and her heartbeat all over the road and off it and back onto it and then off it again before coming to a phenomenally abrupt halt.

“Get us out of here,” Bradone shouted. The second unit gofer, who had not been belted in, grunted in the backseat and Charlie sat there, stunned to find the engine still running.

Her contacts were dry and gritty, there was grit between her teeth. Buzzy from lack of enough sleep, coffee, water, eggs, and vacation, Charlie wanted a hot shower to quell the itches in the most private of her parts. She wanted to tell the whole world to go to hell, beginning with the inhabitants of this car.

But Charlemagne Catherine sat tall and pulled back onto the two-lane highway that was in good repair but seemed to have more cattle and airplanes on it than it did cars.

She mashed the pedal. At least she wasn't falling asleep like she had on the way in. “We are going to make it to Alamo.”

It couldn't have been ten minutes before her passengers were screaming at her again and Charlie mashed the brake instead. The Cherokee screeched and zagged all over the pavement and shoulders on both sides. This time, they came to a stop up against a poor Joshua tree with a rock behind it.

The rock won.

The lumbering animal that had caused this event stopped lumbering and began to trot toward them, testicles and such swinging in the wind.

“God, that's a lot of beefsteak,” Toby murmured.

Merlin's white Jeep Cherokee eeeeked, sputtered, and died.

“Toby, find the eyedrops in my purse. My contacts are killing me.” Charlie turned back to her task of restarting the engine, to find eyes much larger than hers and just as bloodshot staring in her open window. The beefsteak snorted, lowered his head, and farted.

“Punch your window up.” The stargazer coughed.

The big red bull with the big curved horns pawed the desert floor, lifted his head and then his tail, and, before Charlie could get her wits and the window under control, squirted out two days' graze.

“What purse?” Now the gofer was coughing.

“Mine's up here.” Bradone pointed to the floor at her feet with the hand not covering her nose.

The engine eeeked, growled, and purred into being.

“It was in my backpack.”

The bull, apparently satisfied with his statement, lumbered off to the middle of the road, where he seemed more at home.

Charlie backed the bruised Cherokee in the same direction, her eyes watering from that portion of the bull's statement that had joined them. Tears floated her artificial lenses. She opened all the windows from her center console to clear the air.

“I got no pack, no purse. I got a big canvas thing. I got a grocery bag with one apple—”

“What do you mean, no pack? There were two.” Charlie drove more sedately now. “Keep looking.”

“Oh, Charlie.” Bradone had tears in her voice, if not in her eyes. “We left the packs and your purse with your identification back at—”

“Merlin's Ridge,” Toby finished for her, sounding like doom incarnate.

CHAPTER
34

C
HARLIE AND HER
companions made it to Alamo, with a sheriff's car in not very hot pursuit. They bought gas and snacks and water and a pint of whole milk for Charlie's ulcer. The sheriff's car roared past as if the deputy didn't see them. Toby cleaned up his wounds in the men's room.

“My purse had my identification, lots of cash, and an extra metal stud on the bottom, which probably turned the lights out at the Hilton. Not too incriminating.”

Bradone had left her purse, too large to fit in the pack, in the Jeep in the mine tunnel. Charlie certainly wished she had. “When Toby abandoned me, I put what I thought I needed to walk to the base in one pack. I'm sure not going back for it.”

Toby came out of the little convenience store all smiles, hair dripping where he'd washed the blood out. They remembered to turn the license plates but never saw the representative of the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department again.

Merlin's tent office on 1-15, just outside of Vegas, resembled a fireworks stand, striped with red, white, and blue. They turned the Cherokee in to a kid, maybe Libby's age, who kept glancing at Toby with suspicion but would give out no information on Merlin. He didn't even charge Bradone for the dents and scrapes that driving off the road in Area 51 had put on the Jeep.

Charlie should have suspected something right then, but she just wanted a shower.

They called a cab to get back to town, then looked at one another, undecided, when the driver wanted to know, “Where to?”

“Well, don't look at me.” Charlie had no plan, no money, no credit cards, no plane ticket, no clean clothes, no ID to retrieve her belongings, which had probably been removed from her room at the Hilton. She might well lose her job and her freedom when that stud was found on her purse. And her eyesight. Her contacts were scratching again.

And her government, which she stoutly supported, could even now be tracing her life's history on the Internet using the information on credit cards, phone numbers, and the driver's license in her billfold. She wouldn't be hard to find. She'd have to rat on Evan to explain the stud.

Bradone suggested they try to retrieve Charlie's luggage anyway. “I expect the paparazzi have followed your Mitch Hilsten elsewhere.”

But she sent Toby into the Hilton to use a house phone to see if Charlie still had a room and to do the same with Richard Morse. “I've got a card key to Richard's room. We'll see if we can't jimmy the connecting door.”

Toby returned to say Charlie and her boss, still registered, did not answer their phones.

“Maybe we can move your luggage to Loopy Louie's until we think of something better. I'm not registered under my own name.”

“Louie Deloese knows who you are by sight,” Charlie pointed out, “and why wouldn't your paparazzi have followed Mitch to Loopy's? That's where he was staying.”

“We'll go in the back way both places.”

They rode up the Hilton's glass elevator on the outside of the building to avoid the lobby, Charlie wondering why the stargazer trusted the gofer, since she was so paranoid.