“I didn’t say it was. But where do we go from here?”
“We can’t work it out tonight,” he said wearily. “Not in our condition. We’re both wiped out, operating on sheer desperation. That’s dangerous. The best decision we can make is to make no decisions at all. We’ve got to hole up and get some rest. In the morning we’ll have clearer heads, and the answers will all seem obvious.”
“You think you can actually sleep?” “Hell, yes. It’s been a hard day’s night.” “Where will we be safe?”
“We’ll try the purloined letter trick,” Elliot said. “Instead of sneaking around to some out- of-the-way motel, we’ll march right into one of the best hotels in town.”
“Harrah’s?”
“Exactly. They won’t expect us to be that bold. They’ll tx searching for us everywhere else.”
“It’s risky.”
“Can you think of anything better?” “No.”
“Everything is risky.” “All right. Let’s do it.”
She drove into the heart of town. They abandoned the Chevrolet in a public parking lot, four blocks from Harrah’s.
“I wish we didn’t have to give up the car,” Tina said as he took their only suitcase out of the trunk.
“They’ll be looking for it.”
They walked to Harrah’s Hotel along windy, neon-splashed streets. Even at 1:45 in the morning, as they passed the entrances to casinos, loud music and laughter and the ringing of slot machines gushed forth, not a merry sound at that hour, a regurgitant noise.
Although Reno didn’t jump all night with quite the same energy as Las Vegas, and although many tourists had gone to bed, the casino at Harrah’s was still relatively busy. A young sailor apparently had a run going at one of the craps tables, and a crowd of excited gamblers urged him to roll an eight and make his point.
On this holiday weekend the hotel was officially booked to capacity; however, Elliot knew accommodations were always available. At the request of its casino manager, every hotel held a handful of rooms off the market, just in case a few regular customers—high rollers, of course—showed up by surprise, with no advance notice, but with fat bankrolls and no place to stay. In addition, some reservations were canceled at the last minute, and there were always a few no-shows. A neatly folded pair of twenty-dollar bills, placed without ostentation into the hand of a front-desk clerk, was almost certain to result in the timely discovery of a forgotten vacancy.
When Elliot was informed that a room was available, after all, for two nights, he signed the registration card as “Hank Thomas,” a slight twist on the name of one of his favorite movie stars; he entered a phony Seattle address too. The clerk requested ID or a major credit card, and Elliot told a sad story of being victimized by a pickpocket at the airport. Unable to prove his identity, he was required to pay for both nights in advance, which he did, taking the money from a wad of cash he’d stuck in his pocket rather than from the wallet that supposedly had been stolen.
He and Tina were given a spacious, pleasantly decorated room on the ninth floor.
After the bellman left, Elliot engaged the deadbolt, hooked the security chain in place, and firmly wedged the heavy straight-backed desk chair under the knob.
“It’s like a prison,” Tina said.
“Except we’re locked in, and the killers are running around loose on the outside.”
A short time later, in bed, they held each other close, but neither of them had sex in mind. They wanted nothing more than to touch and to be touched, to confirm for each other that they were still alive, to feel safe and protected and cherished. Theirs was an animal need for affection and companionship, a reaction to the death and destruction that had filled the day. After encountering so many people with so little respect for human life, they needed to convince themselves that they really were more than dust in the wind.
After a few minutes he said, “You were right.” “About what?”
“About what you said last night, in Vegas.” “Refresh my memory.”
“You said I was enjoying the chase.”
“A part of you . . . deep down inside. Yes, I think that’s true.”
“I know it is,” he said. “I can see it now. I didn’t want to believe it at first.” “Why not? I didn’t mean it negatively.”
“I know you didn’t. It’s just that for more than fifteen years, I’ve led a very ordinary life, a workaday life. I was convinced I no longer needed or wanted the kind of thrills that I thrived on when I was younger.”
“I don’t think you do need or want them,” Tina said. “But now that you’re in real danger again for the first time in years, a part of you is responding to the challenge. Like an old athlete back on the playing field after a long absence, testing his reflexes, taking pride in the fact that his old skills are still there.”
“It’s more than that,” Elliot said. “I think . . . deep down, I got a sick sort of thrill when I killed that man.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“I’m not. In fact, maybe the thrill wasn’t so deep down. Maybe it was really pretty near the surface.”
“You should be glad you killed that bastard,” she said softly, squeezing his hand. “Should I?”
“Listen, if I could get my hands on the people who’re trying to keep us from finding Danny, I wouldn’t have any compunctions about killing them. None at all. I might even take a certain pleasure in it. I’m a mother lion, and they’ve stolen my cub. Maybe killing them is the most natural, admirable thing I could do.”
“So there’s a bit of the beast in all of us. Is that it?” “It’s not just me that has a savage trapped inside.” “But does that make it any more acceptable?”
“What’s to accept?” she asked. “It’s the way God made us. It’s the way we were meant to be, so who’s to say it isn’t right?”
“Maybe.”
“If a man kills only for the pleasure of it, or if he kills only for an ideal like some of these crackpot revolutionaries you read about, that’s savagery . . . or madness. What you’ve done is altogether different. Self-preservation is one of the most powerful drives God gave us. We’re built to survive, even if we have to kill someone in order to do it.”
They were silent for a while. Then he said, “Thank you.” “I didn’t do anything.”
“You listened.”
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