The Eyes of Darkness (20 page)

Tina glanced both ways along the street as Elliot swung the car out of the driveway. “No black van,” she said.

“So far.”

Several blocks to the north, an ugly column of smoke rose into the twilight sky from what was left of Tina’s house, roiling, night-black, the upper reaches tinted around the edges by the last pinkish rays of the setting sun.

As he drove from one residential street to another, steadily heading away from the smoke, working toward a major thoroughfare, Elliot expected to encounter the black van at every intersection.

Tina appeared to be no less pessimistic about their hope of escape than he was. Each time he glanced at her, she was either crouched forward, squinting at every new street they entered, or twisted halfway around in her seat, looking out the rear window. Her face was drawn, and she was biting her lower lip.

However, by the time they reached Charleston Boulevard—via Maryland Parkway, Sahara Avenue, and Las Vegas Boulevard—they began to relax. They were far from Tina’s neighborhood now. No matter who was searching for them, no matter how large the organization pitted against them, this city was too big to harbor danger for them in every nook and crevice. With more than a million full-time residents, with more than twenty million tourists a year, and with a vast desert on which to sprawl, Vegas offered thousands of dark, quiet corners where two people on the run could safely stop to catch their breath and settle upon a course of action.

At least that was what Elliot wanted to believe.

“Where to?” Tina asked as Elliot turned west on Charleston Boulevard.

“Let’s ride out this way for a few miles and talk. We’ve got a lot to discuss. Plans to make.”

“What plans?”

“How to stay alive.”

While Elliot drove, he told Tina what had happened at his house: the two thugs, their interest in the possibility of Danny’s grave being reopened, their admission that they worked for some government agency, the hypodermic syringes. . . .

She said, “Maybe we should go back to your place. If this Vince is still there, we should use those drugs on him. Even if he really doesn’t know why his organization is interested in the exhumation, he’ll at least know who his bosses are. We’ll get names. There’s bound to be a lot we can learn from him.”

They stopped at a red traffic light. Elliot took her hand. The contact gave him strength. “I’d sure like to interrogate Vince, but we can’t. He probably isn’t at my place anymore. He’ll have come to his senses and scrammed by now. And even if he was deeper under than I thought, some of his people probably went in there and pulled him out while I was rushing off to you. Besides, if we go back to my house, we’ll just be walking into the dragon’s jaws. They’ll be watching the place.”

The traffic light changed to green, and Elliot reluctantly let go of her hand.

“The only way these people are going to get us,” he said, “is if we just give ourselves over to them. No matter who they are, they’re not omniscient. We can hide from them for a long time if we have to. If they can’t find us, they can’t kill us.”

As they continued west on Charleston Boulevard, Tina said, “Earlier you told me we couldn’t go to the police with this.”

“Right.”

“Why can’t we?”

“The cops might be a part of it, at least to the extent that Vince’s bosses can put pressure on them. Besides, we’re dealing with a government agency, and government agencies tend to cooperate with one another.”

“It’s all so paranoid.”

“Eyes everywhere. If they have a judge in their pocket, why not a few cops?”

“But you told me you respected Kennebeck. You said he was a good judge.”

“He is. He’s well versed in the law, and he’s fair.”

“Why would he cooperate with these killers? Why would he violate his oath of office?”

“Once an agent, always an agent,” Elliot said. “That’s the wisdom of the service, not mine, but in many cases it’s true. For some of them, it’s the only loyalty they’ll ever be capable of. Kennebeck held several jobs in different intelligence organizations. He was deeply involved in that world for thirty years. After he retired about ten years ago, he was still a young man, fifty-three, and he needed something else to occupy his time. He had his law degree, but he didn’t want the hassle of a day-to-day legal practice. So he ran for an elective position on the court, and he won. I think he takes his job seriously. Nevertheless, he was an intelligence agent a hell of a lot longer than he’s been a judge, and I guess breeding tells. Or maybe he never actually retired at all. Maybe he’s still on the payroll of some spook shop, and maybe the whole plan was for him to pretend to retire and then get elected as a judge here in Vegas, so his bosses would have a friendly courtroom in town.”

“Is that likely? I mean, how could they be sure he’d win the election?”

“Maybe they fixed it.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Remember maybe ten years ago when that Texas elections official revealed how Lyndon Johnson’s first local election was fixed? The guy said he was just trying to clear his conscience after all those years. He might as well have saved his breath. Hardly anyone raised an eyebrow. It happens now and then. And in a small local election like the one Kennebeck won, stacking the deck would be easy if you had enough money and government muscle behind you.”

“But why would they want Kennebeck on a Vegas court instead of in Washington or New York or someplace more important?”

“Oh, Vegas is a
very
important town,” Elliot said. “If you want to launder dirty money, this is by far the easiest place to do it. If you want to purchase a false passport, a counterfeit driver’s license, or anything of that nature, you can pick and choose from several of the best document-forgery artists in the world, because this is where a lot of them live. If you’re looking for a freelance hit man, someone who deals in carload lots of illegal weapons, maybe a mercenary who can put together a small expeditionary force for an overseas operation—you can find all of them here. Nevada has fewer state laws on the books than any state in the nation. Its tax rates are low. There’s no state income tax at all. Regulations on banks and real estate agents and on everyone else—except casino owners—are less troublesome here than in other states, which takes a burden off everybody, but which is especially attractive to people trying to spend and invest dirty cash. Nevada offers more personal freedom than anywhere in the country, and that’s good, by my way of thinking. But wherever there’s a great deal of personal freedom, there’s also an element that takes more than fair advantage of the liberal legal structure. Vegas is an important field office for any American spook shop.”

“So there really are eyes everywhere.”

“In a sense, yes.”

“But even if Kennebeck’s bosses have a lot of influence with the Vegas police, would the cops let us be killed? Would they really let it go that far?”

“They probably couldn’t provide enough protection to stop it.”

“What kind of government agency would have the authority to circumvent the law like this? What kind of agency would be empowered to kill innocent civilians who got in its way?”

“I’m still trying to figure that one. It scares the hell out of me.”

They stopped at another red traffic light.

“So what are you saying?” Tina asked. “That we’ll have to handle this all by ourselves?”

“At least for the time being.”

“But that’s hopeless! How can we?”

“It isn’t hopeless.”

“Just two ordinary people against
them
?”

Elliot glanced in the rearview mirror, as he had been doing every minute or two since they’d turned onto Charleston Boulevard. No one was following them, but he kept checking.

“It isn’t hopeless,” he said again. “We just need time to think about it, time to work out a plan. Maybe we’ll come up with someone who can help us.”

“Like who?”

The traffic light turned green.

“Like the newspapers, for one,” Elliot said, accelerating across the intersection, glancing in the rearview mirror. “We’ve got proof that something unusual is happening: the silencer-equipped pistol I took off Vince, your house blowing up. . . . I’m pretty sure we can find a reporter who’ll go with that much and write a story about how a bunch of nameless, faceless people want to keep us from reopening Danny’s grave, how maybe something truly strange lies at the bottom of the Sierra tragedy. Then a lot of people are going to be pushing for an exhumation of
all
those boys. There’ll be a demand for new autopsies, investigations. Kennebeck’s bosses want to stop us before we sow any seeds of doubt about the official explanation. But once those seeds are sown, once the parents of the other scouts and the entire city are clamoring for an investigation, Kennebeck’s buddies won’t have anything to gain by eliminating us. It isn’t hopeless, Tina, and it’s not like you to give up so easily.”

She sighed. “I’m not giving up.”

“Good.”

“I won’t stop until I know what really happened to Danny.”

“That’s better. That sounds more like the Christina Evans I know.”

Dusk was sliding into night. Elliot turned on the headlights.

Tina said, “It’s just that . . . for the past year I’ve been struggling to adjust to the fact that Danny died in that stupid, pointless accident. And now, just when I’m beginning to think I can face up to it and put it behind me, I discover he might not have died accidentally after all. Suddenly everything’s up in the air again.”

“It’ll come down.”

“Will it?”

“Yes. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror.

Nothing suspicious.

He was aware of her watching him, and after a while she said, “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think . . . in a way . . . you’re actually enjoying this.”

“Enjoying what?”

“The chase.”

“Oh, no. I don’t enjoy taking guns away from men half again as big as I am.”

“I’m sure you don’t. That isn’t what I said.”

“And I sure wouldn’t
choose
to have my nice, peaceful, quiet life turned upside down. I’d rather be a comfortable, upstanding, boring citizen than a fugitive.”

“I didn’t say anything about what you’d choose if it were up to you. But now that it’s happened, now that it’s been thrust upon you, you’re not entirely unhappy. There’s a part of you, deep down, that’s responding to the challenge with a degree of pleasure.”

“Baloney.”

“An animal awareness . . . a new kind of energy you didn’t have this morning.”

“The only thing new about me is that I wasn’t scared stiff this morning, and now I am.”

“Being scared—that’s part of it,” she said. “The danger has struck a chord in you.”

He smiled. “The good old days of spies and counterspies? Sorry, but no, I don’t long for that at all. I’m not a natural-born man of action. I’m just me, the same old me that I always was.”

“Anyway,” Tina said, “I’m glad I’ve got you on my side.”

“I like it better when you’re on top,” he said, and he winked at her.

“Have you always had such a dirty mind?”

“No. I’ve had to cultivate it.”

“Joking in the midst of disaster,” she said.

“‘Laughter is a balm for the afflicted, the best defense against despair, the only medicine for melancholy.’”

“Who said that?” she asked. “Shakespeare?”

“Groucho Marx, I think.”

She leaned forward and picked something up from the floor between her feet. “And then there’s this damn thing.”

“What did you find?”

“I brought it from my place,” she said.

In the rush to get out of her house before the gas explosion leveled it, he hadn’t noticed that she’d been carrying anything. He risked a quick look, shifting his attention from the road, but there wasn’t enough light in the car for him to see what she held. “I can’t make it out.”

“It’s a horror-comics magazine,” she said. “I found it when I was cleaning out Danny’s room. It was in a box with a lot of other magazines.”

“So?”

“Remember the nightmares I told you about?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“The monster in my dreams is on the cover of this magazine. It’s him. Detail for detail.”

“Then you must have seen the magazine before, and you just—”

“No. That’s what I tried to tell myself. But I never saw it until today. I know I didn’t. I pored through Danny’s collection. When he came home from the newsstand, I never monitored what he’d bought. I never snooped.”

“Maybe you—”

“Wait,” she said. “I haven’t told you the worst part.”

The traffic thinned out as they drove farther from the heart of town, closer to the looming black mountains that thrust into the last electric-purple light in the western sky.

Tina told Elliot about
The Boy Who Was Not Dead.

The similarities between the horror story and their attempt to exhume Danny’s body chilled Elliot.

“Now,” Tina said, “just like Death tried to stop the parents in the story, someone’s trying to stop me from opening
my
son’s grave.”

They were getting too far out of town. A hungry darkness lay on both sides of the road. The land began to rise toward Mount Charleston where, less than an hour away, pine forests were mantled with snow. Elliot swung the car around and started back toward the lights of the city, which spread like a vast, glowing fungus on the black desert plain.

“There
are
similarities,” he said.

“You’re damned right there are. Too many.”

“There’s also one big difference. In the story, the boy was buried alive. But Danny
is
dead. The only thing in doubt is how he died.”

“But that’s the only difference between the basic plot of this story and what we’re going through. And the words
Not Dead
in the title. And the boy in the story being Danny’s age. It’s just too much,” she said.