Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (33 page)

Elvis had loved the rush of speed, at first in any
wheeled vehicle, than in any kind of mood-altering pills
by
the fistful.

Matt only felt safe being sober, maybe sometimes in
the worst, humorless sense of the word. He really had
to look into buying a car, when he had a minute, now
that
he had the money. At least motorcycle helmets guar
anteed a measure of anonymity, as well as safety, he
thought, fastening his. He felt instantly
cocooned, muf
fled, disguised, and
glanced back at the dark knot of
people
gathered against the station building's lit panel
of glass door.

Then the
Vampire swooped him away on a rush of
air, sound, and motion, a magic
carpet that roared.
The
motorcycle thumbed its chrome tailpipes at the
deserted streets as he made his way toward the
lights
and the main thoroughfares.
Its Vampire whine lifted
into the wind and then skittered away like an
echo.

The full moon rode over his shoulder, almost as if it
was an unborn twin to the silver 'cycle . . . a high, shy
shadow of the machine clinging to the ground. Matt
could hear a distant howl borne by the wind. They kept
pace,
the moon and the motorcycle.

And then the second whine
accelerated.

It was gaining on him.

The moon hung in its same position, eternally fixed
to
match the Vampire's speed.

Matt checked the side
mirrors.

A single moon of blinding light flared in his right
mirror.

Either a car with one defective headlight was behind
him,
or another motorcycle was taking this same route.

He couldn't make out much beyond the reflected Cy
clops
eye of light tailing him. Whatever sped behind was black and cloaked by the
night itself.

He swerved suddenly left at an empty intersection
with
no stop signs.

The light swerved with him, showing up in his left
mirror.

No car could maneuver that
quickly.

Matt accelerated, the lighted dashboard dials seeming to
intensify with the increased speed, as if the Vampire,
given its head, was grinning like a Jolly Roger and
showing
neon teeth.

He knew the route; otherwise he wouldn't have dared hit .
. . fifty, fifty-five. The area was industrial, not resi
dential,
at least.

He
didn't know why, but he felt impelled to shake the shapeless form behind him.

It
was like being a kid again, this visceral panic, this
unshakable sense that something ugly was gaining on
him.

Basements sometimes did that
to you. Dark places
symbolically and
implicitly connected to the blackest
regions of imagination and primal
fear.

Usually open streets had no potential for terror, not to
men who thought they knew how to defend themselves,
or
at least to avoid obvious trouble.

But
this burr of light that kept to the same, tail-gating distance, waltzing with
the Hesketh Vampire in a dance
nobody had
requested or assented to . . . he had to lose
it.

Matt recalled an abandoned service station coming up
at
the next intersection.

He would zip into it, through the empty gas lanes,
around back and out the other side, onto a small road
leading to an office park with a maze of buildings. He'd
lose
the thing that followed him there.

Islands of gas pumps looked like totems in the sick
light from too few street lamps. He zoomed between
them. A hard right almost had him reaching a foot to
the ground to keep the cycle from overbalancing. But
the Hesketh held, or he did, and the perilous, semihori
zontal
turn was history.

He fought the inclination to slow down as the maze
of one-story buildings hunkered ahead like a Monopoly-
board Stonehenge, lacking all rough edges and romance,
but
still a complex trap of confusing turns and dead ends.

He'd never navigated this place, but at least he knew
it was there, and what it was. Whoever hid behind that
single
eye of light behind him couldn't know even that.

A few security lamps spread a thin layer of light be
tween the buildings. Matt turned left, and then right and
right and left, angling for the complex's opposite corner.

He lost the following light on the first turn, but the
noise
from both machines boomeranged from the glassand-stucco canyon they shot
through.

He
recognized that losing someone else meant risking
losing himself, but by now his hands were sweating in
side the
leather gloves, and all pretense was lost. Some-
one was following him who didn't mean to let him
escape. He must escape.

Simple.

The tight maneuvers were making him breathless.
This
was insanely dangerous, to him and his menacing
shadow. It had come down to who would survive the
insanity first,
and last.

The Vampire spurted out onto the empty freeway access
road, jolting over potholes left by the searing sum
mer heat. Matt's teeth and bones were starting to ache
from
the grinding pace, from tension.

He decided to head for Highway 95 and the Strip.
Maybe a crowd would be the best place to lose himself.
His
mirrors reflected empty, black night.

He couldn't tell anymore if the noise thrumming in
his head was the Vampire's or another motorcycle's or
his
own adrenaline-driven body's magnified function.

The lights of Highway 95 flowed as slow as lava
ahead. Above, a hunk of canary-yellow rock as big as
the
Circle Ritz mooned Las Vegas. His mirrors remained black and vacant.

He glided onto the entry ramp alone. No need to ac
celerate to freeway speed; he was already doing it, and
then
some. He couldn't believe the needle: eighty.

And then . . . a pinprick in the mirror. A firefly. Grow
ing.

Ninety.

The
light clung, then grew again.

Matt tried to gauge the oncoming traffic. It was sui
cidal
to enter the flow at this speed.

The moon in his mirror was swelling as if to duplicate
its
sister in the sky.

Crazy,
crazy, crazy. Plus, he could get arrested.

He swerved onto the freeway, racing to beat a huge
semi
lit up like a Christmas tree. He was going way fast enough, but the semi was
too close to cut in front of.

He did it anyway, feeling the tremendous wind-drag
of
the behemoth trying to suck him into its vortex. Past
it, he slowed his speed, clinging like a moon to the ob
scuring
planet of a double-long trailer.

He
glimpsed the driver's face in the semi's left mirror.
A dirty look,
maybe an obscenity. At least this rider of
the night had a face.

Only
double-eye lights flared in his mirror, solid rows
of them.

After a
couple of minutes, he allowed himself to drop
back until the semi
surged ahead at its steady sixty miles
an hour. No
motorcycles shared the crowded lanes with
him.

On the
parallel access road, though, a single red taillight skated away at an oblique
angle until it became a
tiny infrared laser dot fading into the absolute darkness
of the surrounding desert.

Chapter 34

Playing
for
Keeps

(Recorded in 1956, when Elvis was taking
control of his sessions
with great energy)

ELVIS DIES!
The headline was the usual supermarket tabloid
screamer in tall, 72-point Helvetica bold type . . .
except
that the news reversed the usual claim.

Invariably, the tabloids
announced that
Elvis Lives!
Temple
was willing to bet that some blasé copy editor
had jumped up and down for joy at the chance to write
Elvis Dies!
for
a change.

Of
course, this was the
Las Vegas Scoop.
Apparently
Crawford Buchanan had finally dried off and
coughed
up what the police wanted to know. Then he had scurried
back to the
Scoop
to paint a
breathless account of the
gruesome discovery in the
Medication Garden.

The one fact he managed to ignore utterly was how
he happened to be on the premises at that particular
place
and time.

Temple was intrigued to read that "busybodies-about
town PR woman Temple Barr and justice of the peace
Electra Lark" had "stumbled over" the body
(pretty hard
to do unless she
and Electra had a hidden talent for walk
ing on water), "sending up a wail that would do an
elec
tric guitar proud.”

Temple cringed to imagine Lieutenant C. R. Molina
reading that line. Then she brightened. Molina would not
be caught dead reading the
Las Vegas Scoop,
although
Elvis might.

The account was full of lurid grace notes, including
the design of the victim's jumpsuit (Fourth of July ex
plosions) and the anaconda's exact length (eighteen
feet),
but it contained remarkably little news.

The morning
Review Journal
had been put to bed too
early to report the murder. Instead, their feature page
headlined: "Seeing Double?" Elvis, that is, a story on
the multitudes of Elvis impersonators in town. Velvet
Elvis
had made it into a photograph. So had several more
conventional male models, none of whom much resem
bled the King of Rock 'n' Roll except for the
uniform
hair, sideburns, and
jumpsuits. Reviving Elvis was an
imprecise art.

The
Sun
had the full-meal deal: it identified the dead
man
as an Elvis impersonator, so far unidentified. The
jumpsuit, it mentioned, was an expensive version, not
the usual costume-shop model. The victim's hair
was not
only high, wide, and handsome,
but also costly, and had
clung throughout the impromptu rinse cycle in
the pool.

As for the snake, it had "escaped a nearby animal
exhibit." An autopsy would determine its role in the
death, if any. The authorities had no evidence that the
death was a drowning, and there were no witnesses, ex
cept for two Las Vegas residents who had discovered
the
floating body while visiting the hotel's herb garden.