"Time to go home, looooozers!" quacked the striker in jarring counterpoint.
The people on the sidewalks were moving jerkily; apparently they were unwilling participants in some degradingly mechanical dance.
Suddenly Crane was near panic, and he opened both eyes wide and breathed deeply. He smelled exhaust fumes, and sweat, and the eternal hot desert wind.
He was on Fremont Street, and the people around him were just random tourists, and he was just drunk.
The cigarette still hung from his lower lip, and he thought that if he could get it lit, he would feel better, would sober up a little.
"Need a light?" asked someone next to him.
With a relieved smile Crane turned—then froze at the double exposure with which he found himself face-to-face.
Through his left eye he saw the fat man who had ransacked his apartment, the fat man who had had on the seat of the gray Jaguar the envelope with the URGENTLY FOLD note about Diana, the fat man who had eaten the leaves from the ginger plant across the street from his house in Santa Ana.
And through his right eye Crane saw a man-size black sphere, with a black, warty head and stubby, bristly black arms; away from the boundaries of it, excluded by it, boiled away a Kirlian aura of green tendrils and teal carapaces and green fishtails and red arteries.
Handlebar! thought Crane—no, the Mandelbrot Man—and then Crane was running away, ignoring the blazing pain in his cut leg, blundering through the crowds and hearing only the whimpering in his own head.
Some traffic light must have been green under the blue-white neon suns of the Horseshoe, for the crowd stretched entirely across Fremont Street, and he found himself on the opposite sidewalk before he had even realized that he had stepped off the curb.
The crowd was sparser to his left, and he ran that way, his shoes flopping on the stained pavement. A street opened to his right and he spun around the corner, nearly losing his footing when his left knee refused to flex, and half hopped and half jogged toward the blue and red beer signs of a liquor store ahead.
This street, disorientingly, was nearly empty; a cab idled at the curb ahead of him, and a solitary man in overalls was trudging along the opposite sidewalk under the high shoulder of a parking garage. Crane ran for the cab … but out of the corner of his good eye he saw the man in overalls look alertly toward Fremont Street and then point at Crane.
"Yes!" yelled somebody from behind Crane.
The man in overalls was suddenly facing Crane, crouching and holding his clasped fists toward him.
Bam.
An instant's smear of white light had obscured the man's fists, and concrete chips were hammered out of the wall at Crane's back.
Without thinking, almost as if something else were acting through him, Crane unzipped his jacket and hoisted out the .357; another shot exploded the edge of the curb in front of him, but he raised the revolver in both hands and pointed it at the man across the street and pulled the trigger.
He was deafened and dazzled by the explosion, and the recoil seemed to shatter the bones in his sprained wrist; he stepped back and sat down heavily on the sidewalk.
Two sharp bangs echoed down from Fremont Street. Crane looked in that direction, blinking against the red glare-blot floating in his vision, and he saw the thing that was both the fat man and the black sphere; it was growing in size, waving its misshapen arms as it rushed toward him.
He stood up and cocked the pistol, dreading the thought of what another recoil would do to his wrist. Then out of the corner of his false eye he caught a glimpse of a woman standing beside him, and once again he involuntarily turned to look.
This time she was there: a short Asian woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties; she was wearing a cabdriver's uniform, and she grabbed his arm.
"Shoot 'em from the cab," she said quickly, "as we're driving away. Hurry, get in!"
Crane's thumb lowered the revolver's hammer as he scrambled into the passenger side of the cab; the young woman had already got in behind the wheel, and sudden acceleration pushed Crane hard into the seat as he pulled the door closed.
CHAPTER 29: Mr. Apollo Junior Himself
Crane tucked the revolver back into his belt. Lights out, the cab made a squealing left turn onto Bridger, gunned past the dark courthouse, and caught green lights right across the Strip and into the dark tracts beyond.
"Did I hit that guy," panted Crane as he gripped the armrest and stared ahead at the rushing asphalt, "the one … I shot at?"
"No," said the driver. "But the fat man following you did. Two shots, both hits—knocked Mr. Overalls right down. Who was the fat man?"
Crane frowned, drunkenly trying to imagine a reason for the fat man to save him.
He gave up on it. "I don't know, actually," he said. "Who are you?"
"Bernardette Dinh," she said. She had turned right on Maryland Parkway and was now driving at a normal speed through a neighborhood of trees and streetlights and old houses.
There were two baseball caps on the seat between them, and she picked one up and with a practiced motion pulled it on from the back of her head so that her long black hair was caught up under it. "Call me Nardie. And put on that other cap."
"What," Crane asked as he put on the hat, "are you, in all this?"
"In a minute. Open the glove box; the thing in there that looks like a mouse skin is a fake mustache, okay? Put it on."
Crane opened the glove box. The mustache looked more like a strip of horsehide, and when he stuck the adhesive side of it onto his unshaven upper lip, the bristles hung down over his mouth. He thought he must look like Mavranos.
He slouched down in the seat so that the cylinder of the .357 wouldn't poke him in the hip-bone.
A lot of guns on Fremont Street tonight, he thought.
The thought raised an echo in his head, and then he was laughing, softly and unhappily, for he realized that that must have been what the doomed Englishman had meant by a lot of goons.
"We'll circle the block around the Flamingo windshield," said Nardie, "to make sure they don't sense you."
Crane wiped his eyes on his shirt cuff. "The Flamingo windshield?"
"Circle the place windshieldwise," she said. "The old term is 'widdershins,' means counterclockwise. Opposite of 'diesel,' clockwise."
Crane remembered Ozzie's having used those terms when he'd had him and Arky reverse the tires on the Suburban. So that's what the old man had been talking about. Useless bullshit. He sighed and sat back in the rattily upholstered seat.
"You reek of liquor," said Nardie, sounding surprised. "Hard liquor! Are you drunk?"
He thought about it. "Soberer than I was in the casino," he said, "but yes, I'm definitely drunk."
"And the dice still led me to you," she said wonderingly. "You must be the biological son, all right. Any mere … ambitious contender, like my half brother, would be disqualified forever by just a sip of beer. I've never tasted alcohol."
"Don't start," said Crane. The streetlights swept past overhead in bright monotony, and he was getting sleepy. "It's not for amateurs." He saw the lights of Smith Food and Drug ahead, where Diana had worked, but mercifully Nardie turned right onto Sahara Avenue.
"I'm not an amateur, buddy," she said, and her voice was so fierce that he looked over at the lean profile against the passing lights. "Okay?"
"Okay," he said. "What are you?"
"I'm a contender. Look, I know you just met the front-runner Queen of Hearts. I … felt it when you and she touched for the first time, Monday night. And yet here you are tonight acting against your better interests—getting drunk, letting Neal Obstadt's guys nearly kill you."