from your ex-husband. Stop looking for him and the kid. If you don’t, he’ll find you and do what I just did to you and then he’ll kill you. And if you go to the police, I’ll find you and fuck you again and then I’ll kill you.’ ”
“That all?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
She had begun to rock slightly, back and forth. There were goose bumps, he saw, rising on her bare arms. The conversation, the chilly air in the room, physiological reaction to the sunburns.
He said, “That’s enough for now. You’d better lie down for a while, get some rest.”
“I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not. Not yet.”
He got up to turn the air-conditioning unit down to medium cool. She wouldn’t let him help her to the bed. When she was lying down with a sheet over her lower body, she said, “What are you going to do now?”
“Go see about your car. It should’ve been towed in by this time and if it’s not too badly damaged, the mechanics ought to have it ready to drive by to- morrow. You won’t be ready to travel before then anyway. Probably not until Monday.”
“I can’t just sit around in this cabin for two more days . . .”
“You will if you want my help.” He went to the writing desk, found a piece of cheap motel stationery and a pen. “What’s your cell phone number?”
She gave it to him and he wrote it down. Then he tore the paper across the middle, pocketed the top half, and on the clean bottom portion wrote his cell number. He put that piece on the nightstand.
“Call me if you need to at any time. Otherwise I’ll call you.”
“From where? Where are you going?”
Fallon smiled wryly. “The other side of silence.”
“What?”
“Vegas,” he said, “where else?”
ONE
F ALLON HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT of Vegas as a massive, amoeba-like creature slowly inching its way across the flat desert landscape, absorbing more and more of it in little nibbling bites. No head or tail, no intelligence, its only purpose to grow larger, fatter, like the others of its kind that had covered the Los Angeles basin and the Phoenix area and were now swallowing parts of the Mojave Desert. Its veins and arteries pulsed and glowed, new cells made up of housing developments and strip malls and big-box stores expanded in every direction as it grew. Heat radiated from it, but it wasn’t the dry, natural heat of Death Valley. It was sweaty, oily, carbonized. Body heat. Engine heat.
Worst of all was the noise it generated. Growls, snarls, howls, roars, siren shrieks, and all the other sounds that came from its writhing bowels in a throbbing, never-ending din. There were louder assaults on the eardrums— NASA rocket launches, supersonic jets on takeoffs and flyovers—but they didn’t go on and on and on. Only two places were worse than the city beasts. One was a military training base during ongoing preparations for war. The other was war itself, the deadly thunder of bombs and rockets, grenades and small-arms fire—hellsounds that by pure chance he had never had to endure himself.
This creature, the Vegas creature, seemed to be spreading even faster than he recalled. Only five years since he’d been there last, on a concessional weekend with Geena, but it might’ve been decades. Accelerated metabolism, increased hunger: proportionately less desert. One of the fastest-growing cities in America. One of the fastest-dying open spaces in the West.
Geena loved it, of course. Not so much Vegas itself as its pulsing, pounding heart—the Strip. The skyscraping, weirdly shaped casinos like New York, New York, Bellagio, Bally’s, Luxor, the Venetian; the lounge acts and musical extravaganzas; the eye-stabbing neon colors that obscured the night sky—all the gaudy, tawdry, money-driven glitz the City Where Anything Goes could supply. To her it was the epitome of excitement. Worked on her like an aphrodisiac, he remembered. Their sex life had never been as lush and experimental as it had been on their few short stays
“That all?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
She had begun to rock slightly, back and forth. There were goose bumps, he saw, rising on her bare arms. The conversation, the chilly air in the room, physiological reaction to the sunburns.
He said, “That’s enough for now. You’d better lie down for a while, get some rest.”
“I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not. Not yet.”
He got up to turn the air-conditioning unit down to medium cool. She wouldn’t let him help her to the bed. When she was lying down with a sheet over her lower body, she said, “What are you going to do now?”
“Go see about your car. It should’ve been towed in by this time and if it’s not too badly damaged, the mechanics ought to have it ready to drive by to- morrow. You won’t be ready to travel before then anyway. Probably not until Monday.”
“I can’t just sit around in this cabin for two more days . . .”
“You will if you want my help.” He went to the writing desk, found a piece of cheap motel stationery and a pen. “What’s your cell phone number?”
She gave it to him and he wrote it down. Then he tore the paper across the middle, pocketed the top half, and on the clean bottom portion wrote his cell number. He put that piece on the nightstand.
“Call me if you need to at any time. Otherwise I’ll call you.”
“From where? Where are you going?”
Fallon smiled wryly. “The other side of silence.”
“What?”
“Vegas,” he said, “where else?”
ONE
F ALLON HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT of Vegas as a massive, amoeba-like creature slowly inching its way across the flat desert landscape, absorbing more and more of it in little nibbling bites. No head or tail, no intelligence, its only purpose to grow larger, fatter, like the others of its kind that had covered the Los Angeles basin and the Phoenix area and were now swallowing parts of the Mojave Desert. Its veins and arteries pulsed and glowed, new cells made up of housing developments and strip malls and big-box stores expanded in every direction as it grew. Heat radiated from it, but it wasn’t the dry, natural heat of Death Valley. It was sweaty, oily, carbonized. Body heat. Engine heat.
Worst of all was the noise it generated. Growls, snarls, howls, roars, siren shrieks, and all the other sounds that came from its writhing bowels in a throbbing, never-ending din. There were louder assaults on the eardrums— NASA rocket launches, supersonic jets on takeoffs and flyovers—but they didn’t go on and on and on. Only two places were worse than the city beasts. One was a military training base during ongoing preparations for war. The other was war itself, the deadly thunder of bombs and rockets, grenades and small-arms fire—hellsounds that by pure chance he had never had to endure himself.
This creature, the Vegas creature, seemed to be spreading even faster than he recalled. Only five years since he’d been there last, on a concessional weekend with Geena, but it might’ve been decades. Accelerated metabolism, increased hunger: proportionately less desert. One of the fastest-growing cities in America. One of the fastest-dying open spaces in the West.
Geena loved it, of course. Not so much Vegas itself as its pulsing, pounding heart—the Strip. The skyscraping, weirdly shaped casinos like New York, New York, Bellagio, Bally’s, Luxor, the Venetian; the lounge acts and musical extravaganzas; the eye-stabbing neon colors that obscured the night sky—all the gaudy, tawdry, money-driven glitz the City Where Anything Goes could supply. To her it was the epitome of excitement. Worked on her like an aphrodisiac, he remembered. Their sex life had never been as lush and experimental as it had been on their few short stays
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