He paid no attention to the big tan Winnebago RV with a bicycle-laden luggage rack on top and a GOOD SAM CLUB sticker on the back window. They passed it, and then it just chugged laboriously along in their dusty wake, never quite receding out of sight.
They stopped at a Burger King for lunch, and Crane ate two cheeseburgers while Mavranos managed to drink most of a vanilla shake. Crane thought Mavranos seemed to be having trouble swallowing.
They got a room for cash in a little motel on Maryland Parkway, and while Mavranos slept, in preparation for going to a pet store for a goldfish and then setting out on yet another night of chasing his statistical phase-change, Crane bought a succession of Cokes from the machine in the motel office, and for two hours he paced around the pool, staring into the water and trying to figure out where he might find a dead King.
When Arky came reeling back to the room at midnight, Crane was sitting up in the sleeping bag on the floor, doodling on a pad.
"Lights out, Pogo," said Mavranos, his voice harsh with exhaustion, as he fell fully clothed across the bed.
Crane got up and turned out the light and got back into the sleeping bag, but for a long time he lay awake and stared at the ceiling in the darkness.
The moon was two days short of being full, and as Georges Leon carefully hung up the telephone, it irritated him that out here east of Paradise the moonlight shone in through the window of the big Winnebago more strongly than any artificial lights did. He didn't like natural light, especially moonlight.
He wasn't going to let himself get angry at the things Moynihan had said on the phone, or the kind of money Moynihan had demanded.
He could hear Trumbill clunking around in the little bathtub, and even with the air conditioner turned all the way up the chilled air smelled of celery and blood and liver and olive oil. Leon would wait for Trumbill to come out; he didn't want to go in there and see the gross, tattooed naked body kneeling on the floor, the head and arms buried and rooting away in the appalling salad that the man had flung together in the tub.
Leon was in the bandy-legged old Benet body now—he'd have to make sure no one went on calling it Beany—and he dreaded trying to give harsh orders, convey authority, with it. The face was too round and red, the cheeks and eyes were too deeply etched with the fatuous grin Leon had let the thing assume when he had left it to its automatic-pilot job as a Poker shill at several casinos. He looked like Mickey Rooney. Even the voice, as he had helplessly noticed on the phone just now, kept trying to be squeaky.
Of course the beautiful Art Hanari body still rested in physical perfection in a bed at La Maison Dieu, but he did very much want to debut that body Wednesday night, at the first of the Holy Week games on the lake.
Well, that was only four days away. He could work out of Benet for that long.
And then on Holy Saturday he could begin assuming the bodies he had defined and paid for in 1969.
High damn time. This had been a long twenty-one years. It would be good to get into some fresh hosts. That Scott Crane looked all right—Leon glanced out the window to make sure Crane's motel room was still dark—and several of the ones Trumbill had already captured and sedated looked damn good. People took better care of themselves these days.
He could hear water running now, and Trumbill grunting as he toweled himself off. The RV rocked a little on its shocks.
A few minutes later Vaughan Trumbill came stumping into the narrow room, his voluminous pants cuffs billowing around his bare blue and red feet, buttoning a sail-like shirt around his enormous belly. The bandage above his ear had begun to blot red again. The man's blood pressure must be like the penstocks in Hoover Dam, Leon thought.
"They coming?" Trumbill asked.
"Not until tomorrow, he said. And it's got to be away from crowds, and all he'd agree to do was haul away an unconscious body. I don't think his guys will even be armed."
The bandage wobbled as Trumbill's eyebrows went up.
"Moynihan doesn't know me," Leon went on, keeping his voice level. "I said I was Betsy Reculver's business partner, and he said I should have her call him, or at least Richard Leroy. I told Moynihan he should ask you about it all, and he just said he heard you'd been shot. How's your arm and leg?"
Trumbill rolled his massive left shoulder. "Just feels strained now, like I've been digging ditches. Not numbed anymore. And I've been eating stuff to restore all the lost blood." He glanced out the window at the dark motel room. "I hate head wounds."
"You were lucky. Richard and the guard both took it square." Leon touched the forehead he had now. "Twice in a week I've been shot right out of a body."
Trumbill turned away from the window and stared at him impassively. "A drag, right?"
Leon grinned, then stopped when he remembered how the expression looked on this clown face. "At dawn I'll call the garage," he said "and have them send the Camaro over here. This thing can follow, but it can't chase."
" 'Kay. And I've got the tranky gun loaded up."
Leon sat down and shifted the chair to face the window. "I'll take the first shift watching," he said. "I'll get you up at"—he glanced at the clock on the plywood wall paneling—"four."
" 'Kay." Trumbill shuffled sideways into the back of the RV, where the bunk was. "Bathroom might be a little high by morning."
"As soon as we've got Crane in a cage, we'll sell this thing as is."
The sun was up and the air was already hot when Crane, still disheveled from sleep, walked back from the motel office and kicked the room door. When Mavranos opened it, blinking in the daylight, Crane handed him one of the cold cans of Coke.
"They don't have coffee," Crane said, stepping inside and closing the door. "This'll do; it's caffeine at least."
"Christ." Mavranos popped the top, took a sip, and shuddered.
Crane leaned against the battered dressing table. "Listen, Arky," he said, "did you ever do any scuba diving?"
"I was a city boy."
"Damn. Well, you can wait in the boat."
"That's what I'll do, all right. I'll wait in the boat. Your dead King's underwater somewhere?"
"I think he's in Lake Mead," said Crane. "I think his head is, anyway."
Mavranos took another sip of the Coke, then put it down and stalked outside. Crane heard the truck door clunk, and when Mavranos came back in, he was carrying a dripping Coors can.
"I did see the flies buzzing around the cards," Mavranos said slowly, after he'd taken a deep sip, "and I heard that guy Snayheever's words coming out of Buggy Joe's mouth. And those things were weird. And I'm willing to admit that there's a lot of weird shit going on. But how the hell are you going to have a conversation with a cut-off head, underwater?" He laughed, though not happily. "And with a scuba gadget in your mouth?"
"Oh," said Crane, slapping the air carelessly with the back of his hand, "as to that—I don't know."
Mavranos sighed and sat down on the bed. "Why do you think he's in the lake?" he asked quietly.
"When Snayheever was on the phone to Diana, he said somebody tried to sink a head in Lake Mead." Crane was pacing up and down the room now, talking rapidly. "Snayheever's aware of a lot of this stuff, even if he is nuts, so maybe sinking severed heads in the lake is something people involved in this kind of shit do. And he made it sound like the lake didn't take it and that it was foolish of the guy to have even tried, like the lake already has a head in it, see? And couldn't hold another, not that kind anyway. Tamed water Lake Mead is, remember Ozzie saying that? Maybe it tames any stuff in it, too, so that'd be a good place to put an old King's head, if you're the new King and want to keep an old one down. And I don't think it was my real father, the current King, who had me … shit, kill some poor Englishman at a Poker table at the Horseshoe. I think it was the king in the lake that did it, that made me do it, I think it was him that was grinning at me out of the Two of Wands card, with his head cut off and two metal rods through his head."