From Grenada he went to Nicaragua, then to Africa. He circled the globe, moving in the shadows. For most of the past decade, he had been in the Middle East, where the risks were infinitely higher, but so were the rewards. He enjoyed the challenge, but eventually he tired of working with fanatics and suffering the desert heat. He relocated to Mexico, hooked up with the cartels when he needed cash, and found himself enjoying the gulf breezes and bronzed women that came to the coast.
He thought of himself as semiretired. There was plenty of money in an offshore bank. He only took jobs from time to time, and usually only jobs that kept him on the coast. For someone who had always been homeless, he felt at home in the sun and by the water. A parade of anonymous young women, some tourists, some locals, kept his sex drive fully satisfied. He bought a house. He taught himself to cook and fish, and he drank Corona and played poker with dockworkers and waiters on Wednesday nights.
But the empty black corner of his soul stayed dark. The light never shined there. Things moved invisibly, rustling and clicking. And always, from the darkness, he heard her voice. His mother, whispering to him and telling him of unfinished business. He realized he had become lazy and content. He was in danger of losing his edge, and he couldn’t afford that, not yet. After a summer not working, drinking too much and fucking a different woman every night, he stood on the beach outside his home and realized he wasn’t ready to retire. Something egged him on, and later he realized it was a hand somewhere, guiding him. Unfinished business.
A few months later, he found himself in the dentist’s office, staring at his mother’s face. If he had stopped working, he never would have found her. When he read the article, and felt his rage growing, he knew that he had been led to that place and that moment. It was meant to be. He was going home.
In Las Vegas, Blake found a cheap apartment in a sorry neighborhood on the wrong side of a crumbling stone wall that separated the lower class from well-funded Cashman Field. He could have afforded better, but he wanted a hideaway where the person next door never remembered your face, and no one talked to the cops.
There was a code in the mean streets. Keep your eyes to yourself. Mind your own business.
He devoured everything he could find about Amira Luz. He spent hours reading about her. He surfed the Web and found a pirated film on eBay with a grainy record of one of Amira’s performances in Flame. Blake reran the film over and over, watching transfixed as his mother stripped off her clothes in front of the leering crowd. She seduced him, along with everyone else. He memorized every detail of the performance and even began to recognize other people lurking in the showroom and other dancers onstage. It was like watching the magazine story come alive.
Helena Troy. There was a look she gave Amira at one point, a nasty glimmer that came and went. Sheer jealousy and hatred were written on her face.
Moose Dargon. Drunk onstage between the dances. His eyebrows furling and unfurling like black sails. Making nasty jokes. When God made Amira, he didn’t rest on the seventh day. He jerked off.
Walker Lane. Just the top of his head, taller than the others around him in the front row, but Blake could feel him panting when Amira came onstage. Lust was like that. You could see it in how a man cocked his head.
Leo Rucci. Hovering stage right, like a wolf. Blake could feel his hunger, too, in the way he eyed the girls. A man with a neck like a redwood tree. He had been the one to strip Blake out of Amira’s arms.
He began to feel as if he knew them all. As if he could crawl through the screen and find himself in the showroom, smelling perfume, brilliantine, and smoke. As if he could mingle with them, wearing a tux that made him stand a little straighter and strut a little cooler than the rest. As if he could swoop Amira off the stage and drive with her into the desert in a Coronet convertible, her raven hair flying in the wind. As if the whole world were a black-and-white movie.
The more he buried himself in the past, the easier it was to map out the game in the present. There was a bonus, too. David Kamen was in town, the marksman from Kabul who had his fingers in every black market in the Afghan theater. Blake had done plenty of wet work for Kamen, and the man owed him. Soon, Blake had a job that gave him access to the very people he wanted to reach out and touch.
Piece by piece, it all fell into place.
The night before he went to Reno, he sat in the dark, watching the film of Flame again. He kept the dentist’s teeth, his lucky charms, in a box on top of the television, but he took them out and juggled them in his hand as he watched. He was restless and anxious to get started. As he watched the film, he thought about himself, a baby, already in the vicious hands of Bonnie Burton while Amira was onstage. Blake didn’t feel any anger now. The next day, he would begin to even the scales.
He knew he wouldn’t sleep that night. His nerves were on edge, and he needed to calm them, to deaden himself for what lay ahead. The long drive to Reno. The few seconds of violence at Alice Ford’s home. He left his apartment and went out for a drink and a smoke at a club he had already visited several times before. The Limelight.
It was hard to believe, weeks later, that the game was almost over.
He sat in his car, a nondescript brown sedan, in a parking lot one block north of a popular strip club near the Stratosphere. It was night, but neon lit up the street. He could see the other car, the convertible, in his rearview mirror, parked behind the club. Ninety minutes had passed, and Blake figured it wouldn’t be long before the man would reemerge. He kept a close eye on the customers who came and went.
His window was open. He was smoking. Every few minutes a hooker drifted by, leaned her tits into the car, and tried to pick him up. Blake just blew smoke in her face and stared at her until she backed away, nervous and scared. He wondered if any of them recognized him from the sketch on television. In the shadows of the car, he doubted it. He also didn’t think any of the girls would be rushing to find a cop.
At eleven thirty, the man came out of the club. He was impossible to miss. Young and fat, his belly hanging over his gray slacks. A white shirt and a bright tie loosened so far it dripped between his legs. He was tall, dwarfing a tiny blond girl who clung to his arm. Her assets were squeezed into a pink form-fitting dress. Both of them walked as if they were drunk, but that didn’t stop them from climbing into the convertible.
Blake saw a bodyguard, who had been holding up the wall of the club while the man was inside, take a gander up and down the street. He was inexperienced and stupid and didn’t even pause to study the sedan. Blake could have walked up to the convertible with a crossbow and this guy would have kept chewing his gum.
Blake pulled out of the lot and into the Strip traffic in the right lane. Behind him, he saw the fat man and the blonde peel out in the convertible. The bodyguard climbed into an SUV, but he was slow. Blake let the convertible roar past him, then accelerated and kept them in sight. A minute later, the bodyguard’s truck flew past him, too. Blake stayed a few car lengths back.
They drove past wedding chapels, doughnut shops, bail bondsmen, and psychics who read palms and tarot cards. Traffic was heavy. Hot, dry air blew in through the window as Blake followed the convertible. He figured they were heading for one of the casinos on Fremont Street.
Blake had a wireless Bluetooth device hooked to his ear. He punched in a number on his cell phone, and a few seconds later, he heard a gruff voice answering through the earpiece.
“Yeah?”
“Good evening, Leo,” Blake said.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“This is Blake Wilde. Do you know who I am?”
There was a long stretch of silence.
“Okay, yeah, Boni told me about you,” Leo Rucci said. “So did the cops. You’re the guy who thinks he can bring his mama back to life by running down little boys. So what? I should be scared of you?”