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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the desert. She saw two big Las Vegas High School buses trundling west on US 95 in the hot sunshine, headed out toward the Indian Springs airbase, where, she knew, a daily seminar in the art and craft of jet planes went on. There were over a dozen people in the We...
But they were learning. Oh my, yes.
What was most important for her right now about the Judge’s demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. Was there a spy of their own back in the Free Zone? That was possible, she supposed; spying was a game two could play at. But Sue Stern had told her that the decision to send spies into the West...
That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known.
Dayna had been in Las Vegas eight days as of today, and as far as she could tell she was a fully accepted member of the community. She had already accumulated enough information about the operation over here to scare the living Jesus out of everyone back in Boulder. It would only take the news about the jet plane train...
That was by day. By night, if you would just sit quietly by in the Cub Bar of the Grand or the Silver Slipper Room at The Cashbox, you heard stories about him, the beginning of myth. They talked slowly, haltingly, not looking at each other, drinking bottles of beer mostly. If you drank something stronger, you might los...
And he was never referred to as Flagg in these nightly discussions; it was as if they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle. They called him the dark man. The Walkin Dude. The tall man. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas.
If he had known about the Judge, didn’t it stand to reason that he knew about her?
The shower turned off.
Keep it together, sweetie. He encourages the mumbo jumbo. It makes him look taller. It could be that he does have a spy in the Free Zone—it wouldn’t necessarily have to be someone on the committee, just someone who told him Judge Farris wasn’t the defector type.
“You shouldn’t walk around like that with no clothes on, sweetbuns. You’ll get me horny all over again.”
She turned toward him, her smile rich and inviting, thinking that she would like to take him downstairs to the kitchen and stuff that thing he was so goddam proud of into Whitney Horgan’s industrial meat-grinder. “Why do you think I was walking around with no clothes on?”
He looked at his watch. “Well, we got maybe forty minutes.” His penis was already beginning to make twitching movements… like a divining rod, Dayna thought with sour amusement.
“Well, come on then.” He came toward her and she pointed at his chest. “And take that thing off. It gives me the creeps.”
Lloyd Henreid looked down at the amulet, dark teardrop marked with a single red flaw, and slipped it off. He put it on the night table and the fine-linked chain made a little hissing sound. “Better?”
“All kinds of better.”
She held out her arms. A moment later he was on top of her. A moment after that he was thrusting into her.
“You like that?” he panted. “You like the way that feels, sweetie?”
“God, I love it,” she moaned, thinking of the meat-grinder, all white enamel and gleaming steel.
“What?”
“I said I love it!” she screamed.
She faked an orgasm shortly after that, tossing her hips wildly, crying out. He came seconds later (she had shared Lloyd’s bed for four days now, and had his rhythms timed almost perfectly), and as she felt his semen beginning to run down her thigh, she happened to glance over at the night table.
Black stone.
Red flaw.
It seemed to be staring at her.
She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.
It sees me, she thought with hopeless horror in that defenseless moment before rationality reasserted itself. More: it sees THROUGH me.
Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on.
“Glad I wasn’t that Bobby Terry,” he said. “No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart’s head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two .45 slugs into his face. At close range. I guess he deserved what he got, but I’m glad I wasn’t ...
“What happened to him?”
“Sweetbuns, don’t ask.”
“How did he know? The big guy?”
“He was there.”
She felt a chill.
“Just happened to be there?”
“Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there’s trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to LA with…”
“What did he do?”
For a long time she didn’t think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-be-forgotten words of her kid sister) King Shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeli...
“He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run… we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash—he ain’t all the way together himself, you know—was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric’s pacing back and forth like he’s ad...
He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. Then he slung an arm around her. “Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?”
“I don’t know… how’s it going out at Indian Springs?”
Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. “Good. Real good. We’re going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he’s a fucking genius. About some things he’s not too bright, but when it comes to w...
She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the others—Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man—saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck c...
“He’s good with weapons?” she asked Lloyd.
“He’s great with them. The Skyhawks have under-wing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrikes. Weird how they name all that shit, isn’t it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety-control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get...
“When he gets back?”
“Yeah, he’s a funny dude. He’s been in Vegas almost a week now, but he’ll be taking off again pretty quick.”
“Where does he go?”
“Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He’s a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there’s nothing but empty desert and godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don’t know how he...
“Where does he find it?”