08 Illusion (48 page)

The scientist must have seen it in his face. “You’ve observed the same thing.”

The look she gave him when he first sat in McCaffee’s to watch her perform; her blue Bug at the bottom of his driveway; her being a little crazy, thinking she was someone else; the dinner she made and the dress she wore for his birthday; the young lady who just had to wear that blue gown, who danced with him; the young magician who dared to bill herself as Mandy Whitacre …

“It’s a simple matter of observation,” said Parmenter, “and I observe that you are afraid to trust your observations, so I’ll tell you mine: she’s in love with you too. She always has been, she always will be. I think it’s safe and reasonable—it might even be helpful—to act under that assumption.” He pointed a cautionary finger. “But before I lose you …”

Parmenter just about had. Dane forced himself back into the alley, back onto that five-gallon bucket. “I’m with you. God help me, I’m with you.”

“Don’t lose sight of the lesson here, and the pressing issue. Remember, we’re talking about control, about power, and this whole uncontrollable mess is reminding us we can only go so far, we can only control so much, and beyond that, we’re still nothing but amazed little creatures at the mercy of forces we forgot to respect.

“So to put the lesson simply, we are not God, and to put the pressing issue simply, nothing irks my colleagues more. They cannot afford for this experiment to fail.” He reflected a moment. “And for too long, neither could I, which explains—it doesn’t excuse, just explains—why I didn’t see what was plainly observable, entirely predictable: one little choice at a time, we justified ourselves out of a conscience.

“When the scientists have unlimited power within their grasp, when the military can envision unstoppable armies, when the government realizes it can send undetectable spies anywhere as instantly as a thought, they talk less and less about what is the ‘right’ thing to do and more and more about the ‘higher good’ that justifies all the little evils. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Now Dane’s food would have to wait indefinitely. “What are they going to do?”

Parmenter closed the lid on his lunch. “I predict, I fear, that they will do whatever’s necessary.”

Mandy felt … pretty safe. Big Max, a nearly three-hundred-pound actor, was a nice guy with a wife and kids, but his shaved head and executioner’s outfit made him look so sinister he even gave Mandy the creeps as he clamped the leg irons and manacles on her. Looking down at the crowd gathered around the outdoor stage, she saw dark delight in some faces, rapt anxiety in others, as if they’d come to witness a hanging—or a beheading. Well, that was the point, that was the showbiz, as Seamus explained. The whole point was tension, suspense, the dark side of things.

The music over the speakers was evil-sounding, she was dressed like a Middle Ages peasant, predominantly in black, and the big wooden trunk behind her—at last, the Dumpster was back in the alley, where it belonged!—looked like something from an evil castle, very rustic, with oversize black locks and chains. The aim was to get the folks tensed up, biting their nails, fearing the worst, and then, after just the right amount of waiting and suspense—ta-da!—escape in a big way and let the folks feel that wonderful, euphoric relief.

At least that was the plan. She felt nervous, and she let it show.

From the ground it looked great. Max the executioner put a dark hood over Mandy’s head, then he and another leather-clad killer—Carl, the stage crew man—plucked her up as if she weighed nothing and set her inside the trunk. They took the chains dangling from her manacles and leg irons and locked them to the outside of the trunk for an extra measure of escapeproofing, then scrunched her down inside and slammed down the lid. The chains and locks on the trunk were noisy on purpose; Max and Carl made them clink and clatter for added effect as they bound up the trunk and padlocked it shut.

The big crane was still around—yeah, a construction crane in the Middle Ages. Just had to roll with it. Max hooked the cable to the trunk, and the crane hoisted the trunk up to sixty feet above the stage.

The routine had a timer—an hourglass big enough for people in the back to see. Max turned it over, and the sand began to run down. Mandy had one minute to escape. (“Or what?” she’d asked Seamus. “It’s a time limit,” he said. “Every escape needs a time limit.”)

Every neck was craned, every eye was on that trunk as it rocked and teetered on the end of the cable, giving the appearance of a desperate struggle inside. Some folks began to cheer, and the crowd picked it up: “C’mon, Mandy! Man-DEE! Man-DEE! Man-DEE!” As the sand ran down to the last grains, some started a countdown.

BOOM! Before the countdown reached zero or the last grain of sand dropped through, there was an explosion, gasps and screams from the crowd, a puff of white smoke. The trunk fell open, its ends and bottom hinged together and hanging end to end, its sides swinging like doors on either side of the hanging bottom. The chains and locks dangled, conquered and useless, and second best part of all, the leg irons and manacles hung at the end of their chains, empty.

The best part was the four doves that flew out of the disassembled trunk and spiraled upward in perfect circles, as evenly spaced from each other as the points on a compass, drawing everyone’s eyes to a tiny figure perched on the very top of the building, twenty-four stories up. She was dressed in a white jumpsuit, harness, and safety helmet and was waving to everyone.

Was it really she? The folks couldn’t believe it but did, and they loved it. The tiny lady turned to face the towering wall, then rappelled down the side of the building, kicking away from the wall in wide arcs and throwing in some spins, putting on a show while the doves circled about her. She dropped to within Max and Carl’s reach, they guided her to a triumphant landing on the stage, and the doves landed, two on each arm.

Ta-da! “I am Mandy Whitacre!”

It wasn’t until Mandy was safe in her dressing room that she got the shakes, same as she did after the rehearsals. Adrenaline rush. Nothing like dangling twenty-four stories above the ground to drive out the lethargy. Every cell in her body was reliving it.

It seemed to have driven out the worry, too. Sitting at her dressing table and calming herself with chamomile tea, she warmed to the fact that it had been nearly two weeks since her perilous visit to Clark County Medical Center, where she could have been arrested, and her face-to-face with Doris Branson, the hotel manager who could have had her fired. Nothing had come of them: no police at her door, no pink slip from upstairs. Instead, the new escape had already gotten attention in the press and was sure to gain more; despite it being the slow season, she was more than holding her own in the lounge, and Mr. Vahidi was talking with Seamus about a new contract, maybe even a move from the lounge to the big room. Not bad for a first-timer in big, glittery Vegas.

As for her mental condition or gift or alien lineage or whatever it was, she was going with it, keeping it her own little secret. It helped to look down and see herself safe on the stage while she was hanging from that rope, and she’d been a good girl since the hospital; she hadn’t hurt anybody.

There was a familiar knock at the door. “Hi, Julio, come on in.”

He wasn’t quite himself as he handed her another envelope.

Now she wasn’t quite herself. “Who’s this from?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not from Ms. Branson, is it?”

He smiled grimly. “Oh, I doubt that.”

She turned it over and over. There was only her name on the front.

“Guess you haven’t heard,” he said.

“Heard what?”

“Doris Branson committed suicide on Wednesday.”

Now, that took a good piece of time to sink in.
Oh, wow. So much for feeling good or peaceful.
“You’re kidding.”

“She was gonna be fired ’cause of being drunk on the job. Guess she ended it first.”

“Wow” was all she could say.

Julio got his chocolate and left.

No wonder I haven’t heard anything
, she thought, and then felt evil and selfish for thinking such a thing. It wasn’t her fault, was it? She hadn’t come anywhere near Doris that day, hadn’t touched her at all, and Doris did have a history, didn’t she? Doris created her own problems and was trying to blame her, that’s what really happened. There was a prior mental and emotional thing going here, had to be.

No, no, don’t even go there. You didn’t ask for any of this, you didn’t have anything to do with it, let it go.

But now she was all the more nervous about the little envelope. She picked up her nail file and slit it open. Inside was a news clipping. Oh. Maybe it was about her new escape routine; maybe it was a favorable review. Maybe …

It was an obituary. Ernest James Myers had passed away in the hospital January 31, the day after their conversation in his hospital room—if you could call it a conversation. A simple, handwritten note was paper-clipped to the obit: “Just thought you should know.”

No signature.

chapter

41

T
he seven-o’clock show was the beginning of sorrows. Mandy kept smiling, charming, dancing, and making ’em laugh, but every routine, line of banter, and dance step felt like climbing uphill wearing lead weights. Ernie and Doris were dead, and though she managed to empty her mind of fears and questions that could be verbalized—how else could she do the stunts?—she couldn’t shake a sixth-sense connection with those two and that hospital and a debilitating dread that whatever got Ernie and Doris was crawling along that connection on its way to her. If ever she was in showbiz, it was that night; she was putting on the biggest act, the happiest facade she could muster.

The nine-o’clock show …

Of course, the dread played right into what happened. If she hadn’t been afraid to begin with, she might have found another way to play through the difficulty, get a laugh, and move on. She’d put up with hecklers before—a tipsy lodge member now and then, a smart-aleck kid all too often—but these men were denizens of a place she’d never been, an intentional evil she’d never encountered. They got to her, they scared her, and it was the worst of all nights to do such a thing.

The show was rolling along well enough, into its second half. She could feel her inner clock ticking down the minutes before she could take her bow, call it a night, and go home to sort things out. She was sitting in a chair, mugging and bantering with two handsome volunteers from the audience: Buck—now, there was a studly name, real or not—who was in the process of tying her to the chair with yards and yards of rope; and Jim, who was feeding quarter-inch slingshot pellets from a little box into her mouth so she could spit at balloons set up across the stage.

The first alarm signals came from the rude, invasive manner Jim stuffed the pellets in her mouth. She made goofy noises and tried to talk with her mouth full to get some laughs, but he was having a strange kind of fun that told her, too late, that she’d called up the wrong volunteers.

Buck was cinching the ropes so tight they hurt, but she kept smiling, making a joke out of it. “Don’t cut off my circulation, I still have half a show to do.” He wrapped the ropes around her body and the back of the chair, then planted his foot on the back of the chair and yanked them tight, making her grunt with pain and a foreboding she made a silly face about.

Four of Jim and Buck’s buddies were in the third row, loud and obnoxious, egging them on: “All right, Buck, she’s yours now!” “Make her moan, Buck!” “Tighter, Buck, she wants it!”

“Okay, back off,” she told Jim, and though she hoped the audience didn’t catch it, she really meant it. He backed off and let her try spitting the pellets at the balloons.

Pfft! Bang! One balloon down. Cheers from the crowd. She gave them a comical face, manipulating the pellets around in her mouth in exaggerated fashion.

Oh
! Buck tied one ankle to the leg of the chair and he wasn’t merciful.

I gotta get through this. Keep ’em laughing.

Pfft! Bang! Second balloon down.

Ouch!
Buck tied the other ankle, this time with some extra loops. Her foot was going numb.

Okay, this stunt’s getting scratched. Never again, not in this town. What was Seamus thinking?

Pfft! She missed, but as Dane once told her, you have to show a little vulnerability so people can identify with you.

Vulnerability? How much rope was there, anyway? Buck wasn’t wasting any of it. Now he was tying her hands behind the chair, and that hurt, too. She couldn’t let the audience know. She kept smiling.

“Take her, Buck!” a goon hollered.

“How?” another joked.

“Don’t worry,” said Buck.

Pfft! Mandy popped the third balloon and looked around for Andy. She might need him. The lights blinded her. She couldn’t see him.

One balloon left. One pellet still in her mouth. She decided to keep the pellet.

Buck finished the last knot, and Mandy was so fixed to that chair she couldn’t move an arm, a leg, anything. He walked around the chair, leering at her, very proud of himself.

The goons in the third row started to whoop. “Hey, still got one balloon left!” “Forget
those
balloons!”

The show must go on. Mandy followed the script. She was supposed to have one of the volunteers time her escape. “Okay, Jim, you got a watch?”

“Oh, I
want
to watch!” he said.

Some in the audience thought that was funny, but apart from the hoots of the Filthy Four, it got only a halfhearted laugh. Folks were beginning to have doubts about this show, and Mandy could feel it.

“No, a watch!” she said, keeping it all in fun. “I need you to be the timer.”

“Time you or Buck?” a goon hollered.