Dark Rivers of the Heart (35 page)

“Unless he already got off the desert and back onto a highway before you put your men in place.”

“We moved quick. Anyway, in a storm as bad as that one, goin’ overland, he made piss-poor time. Fact is, he’s damn lucky if he didn’t bog down somewhere, four-wheel drive or no four-wheel drive. We’ll nail the sonofabitch tomorrow.”

“I hope you’re right,” Roy said.

“I’d bet my pecker on it.”

“And they say Las Vegas locals aren’t big gamblers.”

“How’s he tied up with the woman anyway?”

“I wish I knew,” Roy said, watching as lightning flowered softly under the clouds on the leading edge of the storm front. “What about this tape of the conversation between Grant and the old woman?”

“You want to hear that?”

“Yes.”

“It starts from when he first says the name Hannah Rainey.”

“Let’s give it a listen,” Roy said, turning away from the wall display.

All the way down the hall, into the elevator, and down to the deepest subterranean level of the building, Dubois talked about the best places to get good chili in Vegas, as though he had reason to believe that Roy cared. “There’s this joint on Paradise Road, the chili’s so hot some folks been known to spontaneously combust from eatin’ it,
whoosh,
they just go up like torches.”

The elevator reached the subbasement.

“We’re talkin’ chili that makes you sweat from your fingernails, makes your belly button pop out like a meat thermometer.”

The doors slid open.

Roy stepped into a windowless concrete room.

Along the far wall were scores of recording machines.

In the middle of the room, rising from a computer workstation, was the most stunningly gorgeous woman Roy had ever seen, blond and green-eyed, so beautiful that she took his breath away, so beautiful that she set his heart to racing and sent his blood pressure soaring high into the stroke-risk zone, so achingly beautiful that no words could adequately describe her—nor could any music ever written be sweet enough to celebrate her—so beautiful and so incomparable that he couldn’t breathe or speak, so radiant that she blinded him to the dreariness of that bunker and left him surrounded by her magnificent light.

The flood had disappeared over the cliff like bathwater down a tub drain. The arroyo was now merely an enormous ditch.

To a considerable depth, the soil was mostly sand, extremely porous, so the rain had not puddled on it. The downpour had filtered quickly into a deep aquifer. The surface had dried out and firmed up almost as rapidly as the empty channel had previously turned into a racing, spumous river.

Nevertheless, before she had risked taking the Range Rover into the channel, although the machine was as surefooted as a tank, she had walked the route from the eroded arroyo wall to the Explorer and checked the condition of the ground. Satisfied that the bed of the ghost river wasn’t muddy or soft and that it would provide sufficient traction, she had driven the Rover into that declivity and had backed between the two columns of rock to the suspended Explorer.

Even now, after rescuing the dog and putting him in the back of the Rover, and after disentangling Grant from his safety harness, she was amazed by the precarious position in which the Explorer had come to rest. She was tempted to lean past the unconscious man and look through the gaping hole where the side window had been, but even if she could have seen much in the darkness, she knew that she wouldn’t enjoy the view.

The flood tide had lifted the truck more than ten feet above the floor of the arroyo before wedging it in that pincer of stone, on the brink of the cliff. Now that the river had vanished beneath it, the Explorer hung up there, its four wheels in midair, as though gripped in a pair of tweezers that belonged to a giant.

When she’d first seen it, she’d stood in childlike wonder, mouth open and eyes wide. She was no less astonished than she would have been if she’d seen a flying saucer and its unearthly crew.

She’d been certain that Grant had been swept out of the truck and carried to his death. Or that he was dead inside.

To get up to his truck, she’d had to back her Rover under it, putting the rear wheels uncomfortably close to the edge of the cliff. Then she had stood on the roof, which brought her head just to the bottom of the Explorer’s front passenger door. She had reached up to the handle and, in spite of the awkward angle, had managed to open the door.

Water poured out, but the dog was what startled her. Whimpering and miserable, huddled on the passenger seat, he had peered down at her with a mixture of alarm and yearning.

She didn’t want him jumping onto the Rover. He might slip on that smooth surface and fracture a leg, or tumble and break his neck.

Although the pooch hadn’t looked as if he would perform any canine stunts, she had warned him to stay where he was. She climbed down from the Rover, drove it forward five yards, turned it around to direct the headlights on the ground under the Explorer, got out again, and coaxed the dog to jump to the sandy riverbed.

He needed a
lot
of coaxing. Poised on the edge of the seat, he repeatedly built up the courage to jump. But each time, he turned his head away at the last moment and shrank back, as if he were facing a chasm instead of a ten-or twelve-foot drop.

Finally, she remembered how Theda Davidowitz had often talked to Sparkle, and she tried the same approach with this dog: “Come on, sweetums, come to mama, come on. Little sweetums, little pretty-eyed snookie-wookums.”

In the truck above, the pooch pricked one ear and regarded her with acute interest.

“Come here, come on, snookums, little sweetums.”

He began to quiver with excitement.

“Come to mama. Come on, little pretty eyes.”

The dog crouched on the seat, muscles tensed, poised to leap.

“Come give mama a kissie, little cutie, little cutie baby.”

She felt idiotic, but the dog jumped. He sprang out of the open door of the Explorer, sailed in a long graceful arc through the night air, and landed on all fours.

He was so startled by his own agility and bravery that he turned to look up at the truck and then sat down as if in shock. He flopped onto his side, breathing hard.

She had to carry him to the Rover and lay him in the cargo area directly behind the front seat. He repeatedly rolled his eyes at her, and he licked her hand once.

“You’re a strange one,” she said, and the dog sighed.

Then she had turned the Rover around again, backed it under the suspended Explorer, and climbed up to find Spencer Grant slumped behind the steering wheel, woozily conscious.

Now he was out cold again. He was murmuring to someone in a dream, and she wondered how she would get him out of the Explorer if he didn’t revive soon.

She tried talking to him and shaking him gently, but she wasn’t able to get a response from him. He was already damp and shivering, so there was no point in scooping a handful of water off the floor and splashing his face.

His injuries needed to be treated as soon as possible, but that was not the primary reason that she was anxious to get him into the Rover and away from there. Dangerous people were searching for him. With their resources, even hampered by weather and terrain, they would find him if she didn’t quickly move him to a secure place.

Grant solved her dilemma not merely by regaining consciousness but by virtually
exploding
out of his unnatural sleep. With a gasp and a wordless cry, he bolted upright in his seat, bathed in a sudden sweat yet shuddering so furiously that his teeth chattered.

He was face-to-face with her, inches away, and even in the poor light, she saw the horror in his eyes. Worse, there was a bleakness that transmitted his chill deep into her own heart.

He spoke urgently, though exhaustion and thirst had reduced his voice to a coarse whisper:
“Nobody knows.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“Nobody. Nobody knows.”

“Easy. You’ll be okay.”

“Nobody knows,”
he insisted, and he seemed to be caught between fear and grief, between terror and tears.

A terrible hopelessness informed his tortured voice and every aspect of his face to such an extent that she was struck speechless. It seemed foolish to continue to repeat meaningless reassurances to a man who appeared to have been granted a vision of the cankerous souls in Hades.

Though he looked into her eyes, Spencer seemed to be gazing at someone or something far away, and he was speaking in a rush of words, more to himself than to her:
“It’s a chain, iron chain, it runs through me, through my brain, my heart, through my guts, a chain, no way to get loose, no escape.”

He was scaring her. She hadn’t thought that she could be scared anymore, at least not easily, certainly not with mere words. But he was scaring her witless.

“Come on, Spencer,” she said. “Let’s go. Okay? Help me get you out of here.”

When the slightly chubby, twinkly-eyed man stepped out of the elevator with Bobby Dubois into the windowless subbasement, he halted in his tracks and gazed at Eve as a starving man might have stared at a bowl of peaches and cream.

Eve Jammer was accustomed to having a powerful effect on men. When she had been a topless showgirl on the Las Vegas stage, she had been one beauty among many—yet the eyes of all the men had followed her nearly to the exclusion of the other women, as though something about her face and body was not just more appealing to the eye but so harmonious that it was like a secret siren’s song. She drew men’s eyes to herself as inevitably as a skillful hypnotist could capture a subject’s mind by swinging a gold medallion on a chain or simply with the sinuous movements of his hands.

Even poor little Thurmon Stookey—the dentist who’d had the bad luck to be in the same hotel elevator with the two gorillas from whom Eve had taken the million in cash—had been vulnerable to her charms at a time when he should have been too terrified to entertain the slightest thought of sex. With the two goons dead on the elevator floor and the Korth .38 pointed at his face, Stookey had let his eyes drift from the bore of the revolver to the lush cleavage revealed by Eve’s low-cut sweater. Judging by the glimmer that had come into his myopic eyes just as she’d squeezed the trigger, Eve figured that the dentist’s final thought had not been
God help me
but
What a set
.

No man had ever affected Eve to even a small fraction of the extent to which she affected most men. Indeed, she could take or leave most men. Her interest was drawn only to those from whom she might extract money or from whom she might learn the tricks of obtaining and holding on to power. Her ultimate goal was to be extremely rich and feared, not loved. Being an object of fear, totally in control, having the power of life and death over others:
That
was infinitely more erotic than
any
man’s body or lovemaking skills could ever be.

Still, when she was introduced to Roy Miro, she felt something unusual. A flutter of the heart. A mild disorientation that was not in the least unpleasant.

What she was feeling couldn’t have been called desire. Eve’s desires were all exhaustively mapped and labeled, and the periodic satisfaction of each was achieved with mathematical calculation, to a schedule as precise as that kept by a fascist train conductor. She had no time or patience for spontaneity in either business or personal affairs; the intrusion of unplanned passion would have been as repulsive to her as being forced to eat worms.

Undeniably, however, she felt
something
from the first moment she saw Roy Miro. And minute by minute, as they discussed the Grant-Davidowitz tape and then listened to it, her peculiar interest in him increased. An unfamiliar thrill of anticipation coursed through her as she wondered where events were leading.

For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what qualities of the man inspired her fascination. He was rather pleasant looking, with merry blue eyes, a choirboy face, and a sweet smile—but he was not handsome in the usual sense of the word. He was fifteen pounds overweight, somewhat pale, and he didn’t appear to be rich. He dressed with less flair than any Nazarene passing out religious publications door-to-door.