by G X Todd
She must be burning a lot of logs.
That made him smile, but again the dark hid it from view.
He sensed her lips part, felt her lungs inhale in readiness to release words on her next breath, but he didn’t give her chance to voice them. He whispered, ‘Let’s go,’ and took his hand from her head and placed it back on the cold shotgun. He dashed out into the parking lot.
He first aimed for an old station wagon fifty yards away. It sat low on its belly, wheels gone, hood raised, doors and rear hatch open as if the car had sprouted wings in an attempt to fly. It wasn’t going anywhere, however, and wouldn’t be for a long time to come. He covered the distance quickly and ducked low at its rear fender, waiting for the girl to drop down beside him. He looked through the missing windows and searched the hotel-casino’s front. No more sign of anybody. He found it peculiar they had no lookouts posted.
Scanning the parking lot, the moon slid from behind a soot-black cloud, streaks of light silvering over the top of the floodwater. A lot of the flooding blocked their way, making a stranded island out of the steamboat-shaped building.
It might sail away yet.
It would make a lot of noise to wade through all the pools, and it would slow them down considerably. Pilgrim spotted a single, narrow pathway through two bodies of black water, just wide enough for a person. It angled to their right, away from the main entrance. Pilgrim directed Lacey’s attention to it. She nodded. As if on cue, the clouds scudded back over the moon, and Pilgrim slid around the back of the station wagon and broke cover, running in long, loping strides, his wincing eyes fastened to the building, stubbornly ignoring the lancing pain shooting through his ribs. He heard the girl behind him, her footsteps swift and rabbit-light.
They made it to the corner of the building, all puffing air and thrumming blood. Pilgrim hopped over a railing and waited while the girl ducked under it and moved to his side. As soon as he felt her arm brush his elbow, he took off again, jogging along the building’s east flank, shotgun held ready, his one good eye scanning, scanning, scanning.
They entered a large covered portico that joined the main casino building to the neighbouring three-storey parking garage. Above them, the stern of the steamboat jutted out, joining the garage on their second levels.
A secondary entrance welcomed them, the ghostly spirits of valets and door greeters beckoning them in. The automatic doors had been wedged open with an upended garbage can. Pilgrim cautiously approached.
‘Look,’ the girl whispered, but he’d already seen.
On the glass of the automatic doors two large heads facing each other had been spray-painted. And inside each were black whorls, thick and heavy.
‘They’re tagging the places they’ve been,’ the girl whispered.
Or they’re warnings of what’s coming, Pilgrim thought.
He lifted his leg high and stepped over the can. Inside, the silence crushed down on him, the wind and misting rain evaporating almost at once. He pulled his neckerchief away from his nose and mouth. The place smelled of cold water and rot.
The interior of the building didn’t resemble a steamboat at all. The highly polished floors had barely lost their gleam, and the tall ceilings were decorated with lavish hanging strands of multicoloured glass: oranges and bronzes and ochres, and every colour in between.
Their footsteps echoed no matter how lightly they placed their feet, although their attempts at being silent appeared to be wasted. The place was a ghost ship, evidence of the man they had spotted nowhere in sight, as if theirs were the only two living souls aboard.
They passed an unmanned pretzel parlour, the warm, salty smell long since dissipated. Next came a gleaming stainless-steel cotton-candy stand. There, the sticky, sweet aroma of sugar lingered in the air, and Pilgrim knew that saliva flooded the girl’s mouth as she went by; he heard her swallow. Doors to restrooms and janitor cupboards were the only others they passed.
Next to an oversized plant pot, big enough to house an oak tree, a detailed colour-coded map was framed on the wall. Although Pilgrim couldn’t read the names of the different rooms and areas, he could plainly see where the escalators and elevators were located, as well as all the restrooms, ATMs and emergency stairways and exits.
At the end of the shining corridor, down a handful of steps, the area opened up into a cathedral-ceilinged atrium with two sets of frozen escalators leading up, and a ransacked gift shop directly opposite. A set of heavy-looking doors stood closed behind the escalators on the north wall. Moonlight spilled in from the main entrance, as the hotel-casino’s frontage was made up almost entirely of glass panels, some broken, most still intact. The gleaming floor shimmered under knee-deep water. Leaves and dirt and other bits of collected waste, including discarded gifts from the shop, floated in the impromptu pond, some of it batting up against the escalators’ bottom risers.
Man and girl sloshed their way slowly across like jungle explorers wading through a swamp. It was at the base of those metal-grilled stairs that they heard the first, distant signs of life.
Laughter. Followed by a crash as something heavy was overturned. More raucous laughter followed, but there was angry shouting, too, which fuelled a flurry of loud, mocking retorts. More crashes came.
Pilgrim and the girl exchanged looks.
Potjack, that new, separate part of him whispered.
They listened a while longer as the voices lost their volume and dispersed. Pilgrim knew it was a trick of the acoustics; the people were still up there, they were simply too far away to hear now that the storm of the argument had blown over.
He told the girl to keep close. He ascended the escalator, the hushed clang of their feet and the metallic drops of water pinging from their pant legs not loud enough to carry. Nearing the top, Pilgrim laid himself out along the cold, crooked steps, their serrated edges painfully digging into his sore ribs, and peered over the top riser. His eyes were jarred by an offensively patterned carpet. After a dozen yards of the concentric-hexagonal motif, the first line of slot machines stood in a dark row, each with its own stool perched in front. There were many machines, row after row, soon fading into darkness as the moonlight from the atrium failed to reach past the hulking gambling kiosks.
He watched for a long minute and then rose, motioning the girl to follow. He stepped on to the thick carpeting, his boots sinking into the plushness, and moved silently away from the wide centre aisle, weaving his way through the slot machines, using them as cover. His eyes quickly adjusted to the dark, although he could feel the heavy weight of the flashlight in his jacket pocket if he needed it. They met a wide intersecting aisle of carpet that led west to east, hundreds of gaming machines of all kinds standing mournfully tall like monoliths in a graveyard. A bank of roulette tables spread out on their right, maybe twenty in total. One had been heaved on to its side, gaming chips scattered, the red, black, green and blue tokens camouflaged against the garish designs of the carpet. The surrounding stools had also been knocked over.
A hand tugged on the back of his jacket and he leaned down to the girl so her lips could reach his ear.
‘Someone wasn’t happy about losing,’ she whispered.
Pilgrim wondered what these people could be worried about losing, other than a handful of plastic chips.
‘See the door?’ She pointed.
Sure enough, on the back wall behind the roulette tables, an ‘Employee Only’ door had been wedged partly open with a red fire extinguisher. He couldn’t see it was red from this distance, it was too dark for that, but he knew what colour it was, what colour all fire extinguishers were. It worried him, that fire-engine red. It reminded him of the swinging service doors in the loading bay of the mall. Of how he’d seen a hole blown through them and phantom blood spurt out. His whole plan hinged on not being seen and yet, without walking deeper into the snake pit, where someone could be waiting around any corner, they would never locate the woman.
In careful advancements – keeping slot machines b
etween them and it, and then dashing over the wide, carpeted aisle and staying low behind roulette tables – they headed for the back wall. They had almost reached it when voices came again, this time from somewhere behind the ‘Employees Only’ door, drawing closer.
Pilgrim dropped and crawled into the space beneath the nearest roulette table, reaching back to grip the girl’s shirt at the shoulder. The door wheezed fully open on its hydraulic arm, and he dragged the girl under the table so she ended up mostly sprawled across him.
The voices spilled out, a pool of amber light coming with them. Pilgrim froze. The girl stopped moving, too. Her bony elbow dug painfully into his gut. He could barely feel her breathing, although her jack-rabbit heart knocked clean through her body and into his.
A gravelly thirty-smokes-a-day voice said, ‘But he’s such a cock-sucker.’
A second, older: ‘Don’t matter what he is. You best do what he says or else he’ll carve your nose clean off your face and say he was told to do it by that thing in his head.’
‘He can damn well come and try it, the faggot.’ The words were filled with false bravado. The man was obviously scared.
‘Turn your face into scrimshaw.’
‘Scrimshaw,’ a third, younger voice hooted. ‘Good one, Teller.’
‘You don’t even know what scrimshaw is, you damn fool.’
Pilgrim had recognised that third voice. Lacey stiffened against him, and he knew she’d recognised it, too. He still gripped her shirt in his fist, and he tightened his hold on her in silent warning.
The three men moved close enough to smell, walking down between the roulette tables, heading for the carpeted aisle, needing to pass by the table where they hid to reach it. The lantern light glided along with them. Pilgrim noticed Lacey’s boot sticking out, clearly visible beyond the table.
‘I know what scrimshaw means,’ Posy said defiantly.
‘Oh yeah? Then why don’t you enlighten us.’
‘Ah, leave him be,’ said Teller. ‘He don’t know when to take a dump, never mind anything else.’
The two men laughed, very loud now, their voices practically on top of them, the pool of lamplight illuminating the floor, seeping in under the table where they lay hidden. Pilgrim loosened his hold on Lacey’s shirt and reached down, snagging the denim of her jeans at her knee and carefully, slowly, pulling her leg under the table, sliding her foot into the shadows.
The three men trudged past, Posy complaining while the other two continued to heckle him. They reached the aisle and headed back the way Pilgrim and Lacey had come.
The radio on Lacey’s belt bleeped twice to remind them of its dying battery. The girl flinched, and he felt a fissure of panic pin him in place.
One set of footsteps stopped walking. ‘You hear that?’ Teller said.
‘Screw you, guys,’ Posy whined. ‘I don’t gotta put up with this from you.’
The same set of footsteps that had halted now reversed course and came back towards their hiding place. Pilgrim watched a pair of boots appear and pause at the end of their table, where Lacey’s boot had been seconds before. He could imagine the guy’s head cocking, his ears straining, and Pilgrim had to fight his instinct to reach for the radio at Lacey’s waist and click it off. All it would take was one more bleep . . .
‘You’re right, Pose, it’s a free world,’ the smoker said from over in the aisle. ‘So why don’t you express your right to freedom and fuck off someplace else?’
‘Hey, you shouldn’t talk to me like that—’
Lacey flinched again when the roulette wheel above them spun, the grinding of ball-bearings reverberating through the table as the wheel revolved over their heads.
‘Only reason you got any leeway with us was because you was Red’s lapdog,’ Smokes said. ‘Right, Teller?’
Teller, no more than a foot away, grunted in agreement. ‘And she ain’t here any more. You don’t have any Get Out of Jail Free cards, boy, so you’d best watch your step from here on out.’ The roulette wheel continued to spin, slower and slower, as Teller’s boots turned and walked away. Pilgrim listened as the footsteps rejoined his companion’s and the two sets continued on their way, the muted yellow light going with them. Posy stood somewhere off to the right and muttered to himself for a short while until another light bloomed, this one whiter and more intense. Posy left the aisle and traipsed back through the roulette tables, still bitching under his breath.
The sound of his name stopped his muttering.
Pilgrim gently called it again, and the man cautiously, with uncertain steps, came to stand beside their table.
Posy bent down and pointed his flashlight in at them.
Pilgrim pointed his shotgun right back and said, ‘Unless you want another hole to breathe through, don’t say a single word.’
CHAPTER 5
Lacey watched Posy’s eyes go very wide, his mouth drop open.
‘Close your mouth,’ the Boy Scout said.
Posy closed it.
‘Good boy. Now back up.’
The ginger-bearded man retreated a couple of steps, and the Boy Scout gave Lacey a nudge. Taking the hint, she wriggled down under his arm, being careful to not block the shotgun, and squirmed out from under the table. The first thing she did once she was clear was to turn the hand-held radio off. She wanted to throw the stupid thing across the room, smash it and then stomp on the bits for good measure – her heartbeat still hadn’t recovered from the scare it had given her – but having a hissy fit over it would be a Bad idea with a capital B.
As the Boy Scout pushed his way out from under the roulette table, she noticed he was careful never to let the shotgun’s muzzles waver from Posy’s narrow chest.
‘H–how’d you get here?’
It took her a second to figure out that Posy was talking to her. He was gaping, obviously shaken by the fact that she was standing alive and well in front of him.
Don’t think his scarecrow legs will hold him up for much longer, Voice said.
She shrugged and offered a smile. ‘Drove Lou’s truck here.’
Posy slanted the Boy Scout a look, as if searching for confirmation that her claim was true, but before he could ask the question he blinked and his mouth fell open all over again.
‘C–christ—’ He trailed off and stared.
Perplexed, Lacey looked at the Boy Scout again, confused as to what Posy was gawping at. Then she got it. The last time these two were in each other’s company, Posy had been trying to lift the Boy Scout’s dead weight into the back of Jeb’s jeep.
‘Move over to the wall,’ the Boy Scout ordered, gesturing with the shotgun to indicate a corner where they wouldn’t be seen.
Posy didn’t move. All his concentration seemed to be focused on gaining control of his flapping mouth. When he spoke it was as though he were talking to a priest after witnessing a miracle from God. ‘You’re him, ain’t you?’
‘No,’ said the Boy Scout.
‘Who?’ asked Lacey at the same time.
‘Y–you are. Jeb killed you. I saw it. You was dead.’
‘I think you’re mistaking me for some other person who got shot in the head.’
Lacey almost guffawed, but her amusement quickly died when the Boy Scout squared off, lifting the shotgun up to point it at Posy’s face.
‘I won’t ask you to move again,’ he said quietly.
‘You better do as he says,’ Lacey advised.
Whatever Posy saw in the Boy Scout’s eyes did the trick; he wisely got moving, hurrying to the corner behind a rank of slot machines, away from the main aisle. He threw a pathetic Please don’t hurt me glance over his shoulder, which only made Lacey pity him more.
The Boy Scout asked Lacey to pull out the Zippo, and she did, flicking it to life. Its weak flame was preferable to the harsh white beam of Posy’s flashlight, and when he was ordered to switch it off, he shakily fumbled it until the bulb went dark. Lacey took it away from him.
‘Sit,’ the Boy Scout ordered.
Posy sat, sliding his back down the wall.
Lacey stayed standing while the Boy Scout hunkered opposite Posy, using his up-raised knee as a shelf for his elbow and, in turn, a brace for the gun. He pressed the barrels of the shotgun against the man’s scrawny throat.
Posy squeezed his eyes shut, his face collapsing in a mess of pockmarks and patchy beard fuzz.
‘P–p–please. I ain’t done nothing!’
‘Hush,’ the Boy Scout snapped, his voice a harsh whisper.
Lacey rested a hand on the Boy Scout’s shoulder, felt the slight tremble in it and glanced down at him in concern.
He’s hurting.
She knew that. She crouched beside him so she was on the same level as them both, wanting to diffuse the tension. It wasn’t good for either of them.
She spoke directly to Posy. ‘Listen, Posy, we just want some answers, OK? We don’t want to hurt you.’
Posy chanced opening an eye. ‘Y–you swear?’
‘We’re reading buddies, right?’ She made her voice as soft and persuasive as she could. ‘I don’t lie to my reading buddies.’
He opened both eyes and nervously shifted his attention from her to the man at her side and back again.
‘All we want is to find our friend,’ Lacey told him. ‘That’s it. Then we’ll go.’
‘You . . . you mean Alex?’
Hearing her name, Lacey felt a dizzying tilt, the floor suddenly becoming the heaving deck of a real ship, plummeting out from under her. If she had been standing, she would have staggered.
She could barely get enough air to speak. ‘Yes. Alex.’
‘Hmm, Dumont got her.’
‘Where?’
‘Upstairs.’ He made that humming noise again. ‘In the Lounge of Stars.’
After a little prompting – the majority of it done by the Boy Scout, if Lacey was honest – Posy also told them that the two men he had been with had gone to keep watch at the front of the casino and that most of the others were in the hotel part of the building in the west wing (raiding the guest rooms’ mini-bars), in the buffet dining hall, which could be accessed by the staff corridors through the ‘Employee Only’ door, or out in search parties and not due back until morning. Dumont, however, was on the third level.
