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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. The underside was sticky. It made a U in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it aga...
“Lloyd?”
He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room.
“W-W-What?”
“Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?”
“Yes.”
“Keep it handy. The time is coming.”
“A-All right.”
He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mind-boggling Hindu fakir’s trick, looking outward, smiling gently.
Lloyd left quickly, happy as always just to go with his life and his sanity.
That day was a quiet one in Vegas. Lloyd arrived back around 2 P.M., smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o’clock it was howling up and down the Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against...
In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies—the Weird Sisters, everyone called them—kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling hap...
“Lookit that little squirt,” Ken said fondly. “Someone ast me if I’d watch him an hour. I’d watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out.” He looked up as Lloyd came in.
“Hey, Dinny!” Lloyd called.
“Yoyd! Yoyd!” Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard.
“Got kisses for Lloyd?” he asked.
Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.
“I got something for you,” Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses from his breast pocket.
Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. “Yoyd?”
“What, Dinny?”
“Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?”
Lloyd smiled. “I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who’s your mom now?”
“Angelina.” He pronounced it Angeyeena. “Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too.”
“Don’t tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd.”
Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON’T COME line of the crap table, generating his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of...
“Thanks,” Lloyd said. “Looks great.”
“That’s homemade Syrian bread,” Whitney said proudly.
Lloyd munched for a while. “Has anybody seen him?” he asked at last.
Ken shook his head. “I think he’s gone again.”
Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play.
“I think he’s around somewhere,” Lloyd said finally. “I don’t know why, but I do. I think he’s around waiting for something to happen. I dunno what.”
Whitney said in a low voice, “You think he got it out of her?”
“No,” Lloyd said, watching Dinny. “I don’t think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She… she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn’t happen often.”
“It won’t matter in the long run,” Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same.
“No, it won’t.” Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. “Maybe he’s gone back to L.A.” But he didn’t really think so, and his face showed it.
Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as he had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two ga...
The wind blew hard all night.
Chapter 63
On the late afternoon of September 10, Dinny was playing in the small city park that lies just north of the city’s hotel and casino district. His “mother” that week, Angelina Hirschfield, was sitting on a park bench and talking with a young girl who had drifted into Las Vegas about five weeks before, ten days or so aft...
Angie Hirschfield was twenty-seven. The girl was ten years younger, now clad in tight bluejeans shorts and a brief middy blouse which left absolutely nothing to the imagination. There was something obscene about the contrast between the tight allure of her young body and the childish, pouty, and rather vacuous expressi...
Angie wished she would go have sex with someone and leave her alone. And she hoped Dinny would be at least thirty before he ever worked around to having this girl for a mother.
At that moment Dinny looked up, smiled, and yelled: “Tom! Hey, Tom!”
On the other side of the park, a big man with straw-blond hair was shambling along with a big workman’s lunch bucket slamming against his leg.
“Say, that guy looks drunk,” the girl said to Angie.
Angie smiled. “No, that’s Tom. He’s just—”
But Dinny was off and running, hollering “Tom! Wait up, Tom!” at the top of his lungs.
Tom turned, grinning. “Dinny! Hey-hey!”
Dinny leaped at Tom. Tom dropped his lunch bucket and grabbed him. Swung him around.
“Airplane me, Tom! Airplane me!”