Pyramid Lake (43 page)

“Amy can’t come to the phone right now,” I said. “She’ll have to call you back.”

“And why is that?”

“Because she’s back at our table. Eating French food.”

“You left our daughter alone in a restaurant?”

“No, I’d never do that.”

“So who’s
there
with her now, Trevor?”

I squeezed my eyes tight. This just kept getting better and better.

“A friend,” I said, then realized how random that sounded. “A
good
friend.”

“Your
girlfriend
? That’s perfect. Just fucking perfect.”

Jen disconnected.

Furious with myself, I shoved off from the tourist kiosk. What the hell was wrong with me? A simple phone call from the airport could have prevented this misunderstanding. Frankenstein had even tried to warn me that Jen would be upset.

A fucking
machine
had seen this coming. But I hadn’t.

I took a calming breath, and rode the escalator up to the walkway.

Elmo was gone—on a cigarette break or something. Spiderman, alone now, continued to hand out pornographic flyers to people walking past. His costume looked cheap and handmade, his papier-mâché mask deformed and goofy looking. I really doubted that Marvel or DC or whoever would approve.

I pretended to watch the distant fountains for a couple of minutes while observing Spiderman from beneath the bill of my cap. He usually gave the flyers to guys walking alone or in groups. But he also pushed them on women and kids unaccompanied by guys. Whatever he said to the female passersby caused them to recoil and hurry away.

Across from the escalator, a handicapped-accessible elevator also serviced the walkway. I walked up behind Spiderman and pushed the call button. He turned to hand me a flyer just as the elevator dinged. The doors opened onto an empty elevator car.

I grabbed the front of Spiderman’s costume and threw him inside, bouncing him hard off the rear wall and onto the floor.

“Sorry,” I said to the surprised tourists on the walkway. “You’ll have to take the stairs.” I pointed at Spiderman. “This elevator’s for handicapped only.”

I stepped inside, and the doors closed.

Spiderman came up off the floor with a knife. I was expecting it, so I got a hand on his wrist before he could recover his footing. Crowding him against the back of the descending elevator, I punched him in the center of his mask a few times, crushing the papier-mâché and sending up a burst of plaster dust.

It loosened Spiderman up pretty good. I shoved his knife hand against the wall and forced it down through the narrow gap behind the elevator’s safety rail. His cheesy costume tore as his forearm wedged behind the rail.

Reversing my grip, I seized his wrist two-handed from below and yanked down as hard as I could, putting my body weight into it—pulling Spiderman’s arm through the gap, all the way to his shoulder. It jammed tight, but not tight enough—I needed it to stay there. Bracing a foot against the wall, I leaned back and wrenched his arm toward me. The crack of his humerus snapping echoed in the confined space of the elevator.

The mask muffled his scream. I didn’t want to injure my hands, so I used my elbow to pop him in the face a couple more times. His head banged into the wall with each blow, leaving dents in the thin sheet metal. The car jounced on its springs, bumping noisily against the sides of the shaft.

Spiderman went limp, hanging against the side of the elevator, his swelling upper arm already bulging around the edges of the metal rail. Amazingly, his fingers still clutched the knife.

I grinned.
That
wouldn’t be easy for him to explain.

Crouching next to him as the elevator came to a stop, I fished his phone out of his sloppy blue costume pants. Then, pulling the crumpled flyer out of my pocket, I jammed it into the broken papier-mâché hole where his mouth was.

The door behind me dinged and slid open. I rose and walked out, passing a family of five who stood frozen, holding ice cream cones and staring in shock into the elevator.

Their boy was about Amy’s age but overweight, his “Amazing Spiderman” T-shirt covered with chocolate smears. Mouth hanging open, he goggled at the costumed form slumped against the side of the elevator, then he looked up at me with awe.

“Mister, are you a…” He gulped. “Are you a
supervillain?
”

“No, just a conscientious parent.” I tousled his hair as I went by. “Son, the
real
good guys don’t hide behind masks, and they don’t need silly badges, either.”

I
hurried back toward the restaurant, blending into the Strip’s flow of pedestrian traffic. Diverting through the Miracle Mile Shops, I peeled off my borrowed cap and hoodie as I walked. I jammed the fluorescent hoodie through the flap of a trash can and tossed the cap into a clump of decorative foliage.

Exiting at the other end of the mall, I no longer looked anything like the “guy in an orange hoodie and baseball cap” that witnesses would describe. Walking fast, I pulled out Spiderman’s cell phone and dialed 3-1-1—the nonemergency police number painted on Vegas PD cruisers—because I knew all 9-1-1 calls were recorded.

“There’s a dude in an ugly Spiderman costume distributing porn to minors and threatening tourists with a knife up on the walkway in front of Planet Hollywood,” I said. “You might want to get there fast, before someone gets mad and does your job for you.”

I dropped the cheap plastic phone, ground it beneath my heel, and kicked the pieces into a storm drain, barely breaking stride.

Whether or not he woke up, Spiderman would still be there when the cops arrived. That broken arm would be swollen like a sausage now, wedged behind the metal rail. I chuckled—I probably should have told them to bring a hacksaw.

Having done my good deed for the day, I put it out of my mind. Something was starting to bother me now, sending ripples of unease through me. Jen’s question about Amy—
”Who’s there with her, Trevor?”—
kept coming back to me with increasing force.

Cassie was my friend—maybe even more than a friend, although friends were all we could ever be. In the short time we had known each other, we had grown very close. I would trust her with my life.

But that wasn’t the same thing as trusting her with Amy—not even remotely the same.

I’d had no business leaving our daughter with someone else, not even in a public restaurant, no matter how well I thought I knew that person. Jen had every right to be furious. I had fucked up.

My abdomen tightened. I sped up to a panicky run.

Whoever was setting me up as a multiple murderer would have learned by now that Cassie and I were close. What if they had gotten to her somehow? Anyone could be compromised. All it took was the right leverage. A good person could be coerced against her will to do bad things. To endanger the innocent.

Even a child.

Sprinting flat out now, I wove between pedestrians, desperate to get back to Amy. Had I made a terrible mistake?

My spine went cold as an even scarier possibility occurred to me.

A person under duress might indeed betray what she believed in. But a person fighting
for
what she truly believed in?

Such a person might do anything. Anything at all.

Cassie and I had made love. I remembered her body well, and I knew its capabilities. She was in good shape. But I was still sure she couldn’t have done the kind of damage I saw on Blake’s face. She couldn’t have jammed McNulty headfirst into the geyser, or overpowered Bennett and crucified him on the coolant tubes.

That fact did nothing to reduce the terror I now felt for my daughter. Because I also knew someone else, someone very close to Cassie, who was physically capable of all those things.

Her ex-Marine brother Billy.

Their uncle James Barry was the Pyramid Lake tribal chair. And James, along with their “guardian angel” Senator Grayson Linebaugh, had cynically sold out their tribe. A hundred sixty years after the Northern Paiute’s own unfair confinement to reservations, they themselves had become the unwitting landlords for Homeland Security’s rendition-and-detainment camp.

I had offered myself to Linebaugh in Cassie’s place, to keep her from discovering the betrayal of her family’s legacy. I was positive it would crush her.

But what if she and Billy
already knew
?

A slow-moving group of frat-boy types blocked the sidewalk in front of me. I plowed through them, sending two of them sprawling. Ignoring their outraged shouts behind me, I diverted off the crowded sidewalk and plunged into traffic, causing a screech of tires and an eruption of honking horns.

Running between cars was dangerous. But faster.

Cassie had shared her family’s history with me. This wouldn’t be the first time the younger generation of her ancestral line of chiefs had rebelled against the cynical, cowardly compromises made by their elders.

Poito—hard-ass Chief Winnemucca—
he
had known exactly how to deal with invaders who kidnapped and raped the tribe’s children. He killed the ones responsible and then calmly prepared for war. Unlike his white-friendly, appeasing predecessor Chief Truckee, Winnemucca had understood two things:

When someone walked all over you, you fought back.

And to win, you fought dirty.

After McNulty’s murder last week, Bennett’s questions to me had all been about Cassie. She had lied in front of Roger, Kate, and the MPs, saying she had been with me both times. But it wasn’t to give me an alibi for murder—I had been wrong about that.

She had been giving
herself
one.

According to her, Bennett had accused her of being a domestic terrorist—a modern-day Ghost Dance Wovoka. I didn’t know what that meant, but I did know that Cassie was Chief Winnemucca’s great-times-four-granddaughter, and she knew her own family history.

In 1860, Winnemucca’s clever ambush slaughtered the disorganized militia of vigilantes seeking revenge for five dead rapists. But the Pyramid Lake War had ended badly for the Paiute people. Their enemies knew exactly whom to go after. There was no one else to blame.

Cassie and Billy had learned from their ancestors’ mistakes. This time, they had found someone else to take the blame. Watching me beat up Ray and then learning that I was Cassie’s co-lead, they had realized they were looking at the perfect fall guy for their attention-getting acts of murder and sabotage.

Me.

Bile flooded into my mouth.

Fucking Frankenstein. He must have seen Cassie’s guilt written on her face. Why hadn’t he told me she was the one?

The reason hit me like a hammer blow, and I felt something inside my chest curl up and die. I had asked him only about Kate and Roger.

I had never asked Frankenstein about Cassie.

By now Billy would have my new .308—the high-powered rifle I had ordered, putting my name and signature all over the FFL paperwork I had asked him to handle for me. To protect my daughter’s life, I would do anything they demanded. Cassie would know that, just as I already knew who they wanted me to shoot:

Senator Grayson Linebaugh.

The veranda of Mon Ami Gabi lay just ahead, beneath the Eiffel Tower’s legs. The late-afternoon crowds milling on the sidewalk obscured my view of our table. Angling up the steps, I straight-armed through the doors of the casino and pivoted left into the restaurant. Ignoring the blur of shocked faces and bodies that scrambled out of my way, I plunged between the tables of the indoor dining room, burst out onto the veranda, and came to a sudden stop. My legs turned to rubber.

Our table was vacant.

Amy was gone.

A
squeal of desperation welled up in my chest. I spun in a rapid circle, ignoring the appalled expressions at tables all around me as I scanned the entire veranda.

I had been away less than fifteen minutes. They couldn’t have gotten far.

Hyperventilating hard, I forced down the choking fear and yanked my phone out of my pocket, ready to dial 911.

“Black-haired lady and little blond girl sitting here,” I barked at the nearby diners. “Which way did they go?”

“Sir?” The waiter appeared at my elbow, surprising me, and I barely caught myself before decking him. He took a rapid step back. “Your party—”

“
Where the fuck did they go
?” I shouted.

“Daddy?”

At the sound of my daughter’s sweet voice, relief jolted through me so powerfully I almost fell. I spun toward the sound and plunged into the indoor dining room that I had torn through a moment earlier. Now I could see Amy, at a table in the corner. She was staring at me with a frightened expression.

Why had Cassie brought her
in here
?

Next to Amy, Cassie sat rigid, a fork frozen halfway to her mouth. I stared at her and her eyes zeroed in on my face. She went pale.

The waiter had followed me in.

“The younger mademoiselle was too hot in the sun,” he said, “so I relocated your party inside. Truly, sir, there is no reason for alarming the other patrons or using vulgar language.”

I staggered toward the table. Amy was safe—my baby was safe. I was an idiot, but my stupidity hadn’t hurt her. Reaching her chair, I wrapped my arms around her from behind and hugged her, pressing my face against the top of her head to still my shaking.

I had let Jen down big-time. But I hadn’t endangered our daughter.

“Dad, you scared everybody in the whole restaurant,” Amy said. “And you dropped an F-bomb. It was embarrassing!”

I gave a shaky laugh. “This is Las Vegas. I’m sure they’ve seen worse.”

Sensing Cassie’s eyes on me, I felt a flood of remorse now. I kept my gaze lowered. I was too ashamed to look at her, because of the ugly things I had thought about her.

I had panicked.

I
knew
Cassie. I cared about her, and I knew she cared about me, too. I trusted her. How could I have thought she would ever do anything to hurt my daughter?