Nobody Dies in a Casino (23 page)

Charlie didn't know she'd dozed off until a roaring sound joked her awake. The car swerved all over the road. “Did we hit a bull?”

“No, but we're lucky we didn't crash into something. I went to sleep at the wheel.”

“But that sound—”

Bradone pointed ahead where something rose into the air on a plume of smoke while she fought the Cherokee to a safe landing on the shoulder. “God, I'm sorry. You were having such a good nap, I didn't realize I was too. Whatever that thing was, it may have saved our lives.”

“Let me drive for a while and you can sleep,” Charlie offered. Let me get behind the wheel and turn this baby back to Vegas.

“Thanks, but I'm fine.” Bradone's smile seemed to know that's what Charlie would do. “Rachel's not far, and after that encounter, adrenaline alone will keep me up and running for hours.”

“That was no flying saucer. I don't think they smoke.”

“Some military aircraft, more likely. He sure came in low. Lucky for us he did.” They scanned the skies for others.

But the only things on this road were dust devils and scattered cows watching them with suspicion. Then a gravel road stretched across the valley in a straight line to the next low heap of mountains. A dust plume followed a vehicle many miles off.

“I don't see how you could hide anything out here. Can't even find a private place to pee.”

“Hang on, Rachel's just ahead.” The Cherokee passed up the graveled road and stuck to the blacktop.

“I can see for a hundred miles and there's no town.” Charlie was only partly wrong.

*   *   *

They sat staring through the Cherokee's tinted windows at the Area 51 Research Center across the road. The Area 51 Research Center was a permanent mobile home house trailer with a pickup parked at its contrived wooden porch. Two tall antennas, a satellite dish, three wandering cows, and twisted metal wreckage served as lawn ornaments.

“Oh, come on, Charlie, you're too young to turn off interesting experiences. This whole place is a hoot.”

This whole place was a few dusty mobile homes with a couple of clapboard buildings thrown in for good measure, most of them acres apart.

“This is a long way to come for a hoot. Bradone, I don't want to meet up with that orange thing again, okay?”

But Bradone slammed the Cherokee's door and crossed the road, taking the keys with her.

Charlie raised dust when she hit the dirt.

Why do I get involved with people like this? I was sure she was an unusual and interesting woman. Instead, she turns out to be a nut, and here I am at the end of the earth with her.

I want to go home. I don't like this.

Well swell, when you figure out how, be sure and let me know.

By now, Charlie too had crossed the road. The trailer home next to the nut institute advertised alien T-shirts by hanging them outside as lures. A cow ambled over to take a lick at one.

Five cows, Bradone, waiting for her on the research center's wooden porch, and Charlie the gullible were the only living things moving in all of Rachel, Nevada.

Whenever Charlie left the fiction that was Hollywood to reassure herself in the real world, she found the real world stranger than fiction.

Inside the Area 51 Research Center trailer, a little guy dressed like a truck driver sat glued to a computer screen, a phone receiver tucked between a shoulder and an ear. “Be with you in a minute,” he mouthed, then said to someone on the phone, “Yes, sir, there's close-ups of the base, aerial and satellite pictures, and topo maps. Yes, sir, Visa and MasterCard.”

All the while, his fingers flew over the keyboard doing something else because he had to switch files to key in the guy's order, address, and credit card number.

Maps and photos clung to the ceiling and the walls above bookcases. A table in the middle of the room offered books, pamphlets, and UFO newsletters—stacks of them. No pictures of big orange things.

A normal-appearing woman in a midcalf dress and tennis shoes stepped out of a back room with still more stacks of stuff, and something brushed against Charlie's leg and stepped on her foot.

At her gasp, the truck driver stood to look over his desk to the floor at her feet. “Name's Underfoot 'cause that's where he lives. He's from Mars, isn't he?”

The woman stacking stuff under the table paused to think, then shook her head. “Venus, I'm sure. He's a she.”

Meanwhile, Underfoot had fallen madly in love with Charlie's socks. Bradone picked up the black-and-white cat and it fell madly in love with the stargazer's throat.

She bought a booklet and several maps from the guy who dressed like a truck diver. He swiveled in his chair to look out the front windows at the white Jeep Cherokee across the frontage road. “Sure hope you nice ladies aren't planning to take that ‘over there.'” He nodded in some vague direction. “Because ‘over there,' they know their own.”

CHAPTER
28

C
HARLIE SAT IN
the Cherokee, watching Bradone fight the wind for her floppy safari hat as she leaned against a wooden telephone pole and talked into a pay phone in a black box attached to it. Probably one of the more ridiculous sights in a given lifetime. Indiana Jones's mother meets V. I. Warshawski.

Bradone didn't trust the cellular to work out here and worried that the mysterious technology at Groom Lake would find a conversation on the airwaves easier to pick up than one on wires anyway.

The wind grew chilly as the afternoon wore on and Charlie punched the windows up. A turpentine smell permeated the enclosed space.

Besides the Cherokee, two pickups and a motorcycle parked in front of the Little A'Le'Inn Motel/Restaurant/Bar/RV Hookups. The sign on the side of the shedlike building, and another out at the roadside, pictured an oval bald head with those giant black almond-shaped eyes, sloped upward at the outer edges, so popular in extraterrestrials these days. It assured Charlie
EARTHLINGS WELCOME
.

A grand, if scruffy, tourist trap with tongue in cheek, out in the middle of nothing. The Little A'Le'Inn, a gas station, the T-shirt trailer, and the Research Center comprised Rachel's commercial district—all located along the frontage road and separated by weed acres. What else did the people around here have to do? It looked like welfare-check city.

Well, this earthling has to pee.

Inside the A'Le'Inn, an older couple with drinks in hand played at the one tiny bank of slots. Four guys in baseball caps, plaid shirts, tight jeans, and cowboy boots leaned on pool cues to watch her. Along one side of the room stretched a saloon bar with bottled libations on the wall behind it and diner stools in front of it. Eight or ten dinette sets, mostly fifties chrome and tape-patched red plastic, helped the pool table fill up the room.

Charlie was about to ask directions when one of the guys pointed a cue at a door opposite the bar. A vertical poster covered it:

WARNING, THIS IS A RESTRICTED AREA. DO NOT ENTER. IT IS UNLAWFUL TO MAKE ANY FILM, PHOTOGRAPH, MAP. SKETCH, PICTURE, DRAWING OF THIS INSTALLATION. TRESPASSERS ARE SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE ARREST AND CONFISCATION OF ALL PERSONAL ITEMS. USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED. 18, U.S. CODE 795/797 AND EXECUTIVE ORDER 10104
.

Having taken time to read the door, Charlie nearly didn't make it on time into a one-commode bathroom with a window that opened to a world of jumbled house trailers. They had to be the motel part of this joint. The only warning inside the room was to please not flush sanitary pads et cetera because of the primitive plumbing and Rachel's earthbound sewage system.

When Charlie stepped out, Bradone, obviously still enjoying an adventure, raised a Coors to her from one of the chrome dinette sets. Two more men sat at the diner bar. A florid guy stood behind it and watched Bradone.

“I've ordered us alien burgers and fries for dinner. We can save the dinner subs for breakfast.”

“Bradone—”

“And I've ordered you a glass of red.”

“Bradone—”

“I didn't ask. Probably dago, but we'll need—”

“We just had lunch and I am
not
—”

“Here's your dago.” A cheerful woman in comforting stone-washed jeans and Reeboks set a glass in front of Charlie. “Actually, it's a not-too-bad merlot.”

“You have merlot?”

“See, this seriously finicky extraterrestrial left it behind. I don't figure he's coming back. Probably got shot out of the sky by the government or Steven Spielberg.” She set another Coors in front of Bradone and winked at Charlie. “Be back with your aliens minus the secretions in a sec.”

“Secretions—”

“Cheese.” Bradone drained the first Coors and reached for the next. “I didn't think we needed the extra fat.”

The alien burgers differed from earthly burgers in that they came in oblong sesame-seed buns instead of round. Charlie ate half the burger and a fourth of the fries but, unfortunately, drank all of the wine.

Bradone insisted on a doggy box for the rest of their dinner and retrieved two large thermoses from the Jeep to have filled with hot coffee.

“Now you ladies be good girls and drive straight back to Vegas, hear?” the proprietor cautioned with a wink when he took their money.

“Just don't do it too fast,” his wife added.

The boys around the pool table leered.

Knowing it was the wine talking, Charlie pointed out two things that should have been of interest as they drove out of town. The first was that she had no intention of sleeping, let alone breakfasting, near some forbidden military installation and, second, the proprietress of the A'Le'Inn had warned Charlie, when Bradone visited the restricted potty, about the real danger in this “neck of the woods.”

“What we really need to worry about is cattle mutilation.”

“Oh well, that's a relief.” Bradone made a shooing motion with one hand. “Tell you what, you worry about it for me. I've got a lot on my mind right now.”

Then why did you drink three bottles of Coors? “No, listen to me, the cattle mutilate us. That's why she didn't want us to drive too fast.”

“Right, they crawl in the Jeep and cut us up with their horns. No more wine for you, my dear.”

“No, they wander onto the road in front of us and we and the Jeep get mutilated. I suppose they do to, but we wouldn't know by then. Just slow down, will you?”

The intrepid adventuress was already slowing down, not because of road cattle, but to turn the Cherokee onto a side road where a large white graffiti-riddled mailbox stood out like a lone sentinel. A wooden sign tacked to its base read
STEVE MEDLIN
HCR80.

“Is that—”

“The black mailbox.” Bradone let the low melodious laugh loose. It was a lot like her voice. “Charlie, cheer up. This is going to be so much fun. Aren't you even a bit curious about Groom Lake?”

“No.” Actually, she was a bit, but knew there was no way Bradone McKinley was going to get them into the base or would know what to do next if she did.

Charlie argued all the way to the warning signs. Her astrologer had gone over the edge. They'd left a plume of dust along the washboard gravel, marking a trail that had to be traceable by satellite.

It was nearly dark when they pulled up behind three other vehicles, one a pickup camper. Charlie planned to ask someone in them for a ride back to Vegas. But they were all empty. Her panicky feelings began to interfere with her breathing. She knew Ardith Miller was dead and she
knew
she didn't want to be even this close to that orange light again.

“Were we supposed to meet somebody here?”

“Let's get out and stretch a little. Be noticed.”

“By who?”

“Whom.” Bradone pointed to tripods on rock inclines on each side of the road. Spikes on top of them sported what appeared to be white-painted coffee cans on their sides and small antennas pointing northwest. “They look fake, don't they? Might well be.”

Signs similar to the one on the Little A'Le'Inn's potty door peppered the low hills, as well.
USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED
seeming to stand out in the decreasing light down here. Up there, the sky began to glitter.

Bradone crawled up a forbidden incline and sat next to an orangish post. “Don't worry, Charlie, I'm not trespassing until I step around this stake. Enjoy the night sky.”

“So, what are we waiting for? I demand we get back to Vegas tonight. I'm not kidding.”

“This is what we're waiting for.”

“This” was the thrashing blades of a helicopter.

Which weren't nearly as noisy as the squealing, swearing, laughing figures who came charging over the incline and past Bradone, shoving Charlie aside. Two women and five men and everyone of them sporting video cameras on straps around their necks.

“Out of here,” a guy roared in her ear, and before Charlie could control her surprise, the helicopter blades above threw grit in her contact lenses. Three vehicles almost ran her down in their haste to turn around and head “out of here.” The nutty astrologer pushed her back into the white Cherokee.

“Show time,” Bradone yelled, and gunned the Jeep to follow the other trespassers.

Charlie, busy trying to find eyedrops in her purse, didn't realize they were not staying on the gravel road that eventually met the paved highway like the vehicles ahead of them until the Cherokee bucked like a tortured rodeo bull and she and her purse and her eyedrops landed on the floor under the dash.

She yelled, pleaded, and swore before Bradone hit the brakes and the bucking stopped. “Get back in your seat,” she said patiently, “and this time, put on your seat belt.”

Before Charlie could regain her seat and composure, she found herself deserted. The dash and headlights were out. Only a small button stayed lighted on the dash. Suddenly, it went out too. No helicopter hovered above. They were obviously off the road and the keys were not in the ignition.