“You’ll see me soon,” he corrected but didn’t exactly know how long that might be.
The arrangement would surely accelerate what had already started; the two of them pulling apart in different directions.Like a rubber band stretched to its limit, sooner or later, it’d snap.
With no love lost, Amelia didn’t say goodbye to Jack. It wouldn’t have mattered. Jack climbed into his car, and Mirabelle did the same.
Emory started down the long drive from Liam’s estate and set a meandering pace through the neighborhood of colossal mansions that’d always struck him as nonsensical and gaudy.
I’m going home,he thought with a smile touching his lips. His elbow sunk into the center console, and he rested his hand on Amelia’s thigh. She shifted nearer, her cheek nuzzled against his bicep and her free hand caressing his forearm.
“What did you tell Miri back there?” he asked.
Amelia stirred against him. God, how quickly he’d come to know her body, the subtle movements that telegraphed her needs. She’d crawl into his lap there in the car if she could and rest her head against his shoulder. Instead, she craned her neck to kiss his jaw, the playful affection masking her palpable unease.
“I told her what I’m afraid of.”
At the neighborhood’s gated entrance, Emory turned left onto the two-lane road winding toward the valley.
“Well, are you gonna tell me too?” he laughed and slinked his arm across her shoulders.
He stroked her hair and counted her sharp breaths, three and then four. He knew her mind too, the heaviness she carried with secrets she’d rather not keep.
“I think you already know,” Amelia said.
Emory followed her eyes to the rearview mirror. In the reflection, he watched Jack’s car creep down the road in the opposite direction and disappear around a shadowed bend.
“I think I do too.”
FORTY-EIGHT
CAL
The cold snap would set records for Las Vegas. The weatherman said so from the television static in Cal’s motel room just the other day. Portland burned, Vegas froze, and Cal was caught in the middle because a chill to desert folk still felt balmy to him.
For the past week, he’d kept his head down, but strangers looked askance whenever he ventured out in shorts and a t-shirt. “You gotta blend in, Cal. Bland as unbuttered toast,” was Kingsley’s advice, so Cal picked up a canvas jacket and cargo pants from a consignment shop up the road. Discretion had a price, though. Toasty, indeed, he was burning up.
He’d traveled from Oregon through high desert along rain-shadow terrain that was an arid echo to his hollowed-out heart; the best of him scooped out the middle and the rest of him struggling to survive. Along the way, he encountered little more than jackrabbits and Joshua trees and vibrant skies set against the vermillion desert. It would’ve stunned in other circumstances, but Cal couldn’t shed the feeling that he was retracing Amelia’s steps across empty land so far from home.
He put down shallow roots at a motel on the southern edge of Las Vegas. Cash was king in that kind of place. No one asked for a credit card or probed for his home address. He’d slid the clerk awad of bills that bought him a room for the week. “It’s got a nice view. Arealnice view,” the clerk said and smacked his lips.
Beyond the room’s rubber-coated curtains, the window overlooked The Strip Mall, a titty bar wedged between a tanning salon and a Chinese restaurant. The restaurant advertised “The Wanton Special” after midnight—orange chicken, a side of cream cheese-stuffed wontons, and a soft drink for $12.99.Clever,he’d thought, and yanked the curtains shut.
The first few nights, the neon bleed still reached his window, and Cal reasoned if he couldn’t beat them, he ought to join them. Not the strip club, of course, but orange chicken after midnight. Some leaky valve in his chest nagged, though, at the prospect of greasy food that late. Probably for the best.
In the morning, Cal woke, shrugged into his cargo jacket, and drove to the local diner. Along the way, he passed a billboard that advertised bus tours of Vegas’ old mobster haunts. Tourists could follow in the footsteps of Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz and hear the blood-soaked tale of how Bugsy Siegel put the gilded city on the map for mafia elites.
You’re in gangland now,Cal thought butdidn’t need a billboard to tell him that. The hostile specter loomed, dangerous and wild. While everything back home was velveteen and lush, there things seemed brittle and menacing right down to the sun-bleached bones on the side of the road.
Cal pulled into the diner as the sun triumphed over McCullough range. A smattering of storm clouds rolled in from the west and would soon snuff out the light. He’d add that to the pile of oddities. Rain was a novelty there, and the locals treated storm clouds with the same hushed reverence as bible-thumpers receiving the good word on Sundays.
Even as Cal settled into a corner booth by the window, he watched as diner patrons climbed from their cars and pointed to the black mass on the horizon. It left his stomach in knots, so he gazed down into the coffee mug snug in his palm and watched a nebula of cream swirling inside.
Kingsley turned Cal onto the place. Greasy-cheap, he calledit. That meant good eats on a budget, indigestion the real cost. The place was old enough that a defunct cigarette machine collected dust in the corner. They’d probably make out like bandits filling the machine’s coils with antacids and milk of magnesia.
Out the window, Kingsley’s truck backed into a parking space. He’d arrived in Vegas three days before and worked out of the FBI field office in town. They gave him a hot-desk and left him alone to run down leads. How long would it last? “Long enough to matter,” Kingsley had said, but Cal still didn’t know how to bookend the statement.
Kingsley crossed the diner’s sticky checkered floors, his rubber-bottomed shoes squelching as he went. Everything was slightly misted in grease and covered with grime. Kingsley slid into the red vinyl booth across from Cal and peered out the window at the aberrant sky.
He didn’t comment on the weather or opt for other mainstays of small talk—how Cal slept, if he caught that last inning of the Dodgers game, what looked good that morning.
