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Chapter Seven

Dolly and I were stopped at a gas pump somewhere off of Interstate 70 in Colorado, where the whole world was trees and sun-sparkled creeks that shadowed the highway curves The state also offered long, lonesoirl had to pee by a backcountry gravel roadside if she et by driving all-electric or electric-gas hybrids, plug in at hoas dispensing stations Vintage car enthusiasts operated all-gasoline throwbacks like Dolly for an extra fee or for free if you were poor enough But out here in the boonies all you could get was pungent, pricey gasoline in old-fashioned pumps You still couldn’t beat fossil fuel for distance driving And no faras station (Deliverance West) had rest roo yokels in the Ford 350 across the concrete island from me Since I’d been on the road two days froed pickups were aggressive on the highway On solid ground they were as untrustworthy as vas

"Hey! We can help you with that great big hose, little lady"

That taunting, pseudo-friendly threat gave e when the older boys corneredto bluff and bully my way out of the trap Sweat prickled my scalp and sopped my palms Despite all the ti self-defense, the instant purgative spasms of visceral fear never retreated one step

And I couldn’t either Surprise was my shadow partner So was bluff I eyed theas puot it all wrong, boys I’m not little I’m not a lady And the help you need with your hoses is soeon about"

They took about ninety seconds to decipheroff the tank and not concerned about hway robbery price of gas Just get me outa here, Exxon, with no untidy oil spills Particularly mine

Theas their grins grew feral

"We seen ya on TV Looked ie doll, let us show you a real good tiie? NotThis little lady needed to hop into her driver’s seat and hit all the door locks But onethe driver’s side door The other had pennedup va is the house rule: you learn how to think on your feet if you don’t want to be solanced at the combo pay-and-junk-food shack Anybody remotely human inside had ducked out the back

So I pulled the pu my helpful dudes fro roadas and rew suddenly dauys were brawny and stupid, a fatal coonna turn it into ait on the concrete in two seconds flat You’ll both look good as holiday sparklers Giveat ht their eyebroould break their own noses But their narrow eyes, light-colored and totally hue to rape and pillage

I sent the gas hose hissing at the guy by my left front fender, and when he naturally backed up, I leaped forward and swung the heavy Detroit-steel door hard into his torso

His screaot me into the driver’s seat I hit the locks, turned the key, and reversed hard The dangling hose I’d abandoned swung like a pendulu sparks on the concrete island

I backed the other guy off unned out of the station onto the access road, then onto the entry ra that I aced an oncoht-hand freeway lane

If Achilles had been with me in physical form, he would have taken those yahoos off at the knees Now his ashes rode shotgun in the back seat, hostly talisman

What was the ie! Must have been serious Rod Stewart fans Right Of course the rocker was still at it, though, delivering greatest hits on stage It wasn’t clear if he was part clone, part holograery, or some entirely new hybrid of the I sche wheel but Dolly’s alignment was rock steady You could find these frozen-in-tihtly driven and stored in barns or garages for forty or fifty years at estate sales if you got lucky Gas guzzlers, yeah, but horsepower enough to tow a Titan missile

We sped at a sedate six as No irl Who can you trust in this wicked world? No one

Whenever I spotted a white Ford 350 in my rear-view mirror for the next one hundredwheel That attack had felt weirdly personal, and I didn’t know those bozos fro possessions were in storage in Wichita, so I drove into Las Vegas as on my back and in the back ofsilver collection courtesy of Frigidaire, Achilles’ ashes The trunk was large enough to hold a living rooular and vintage clothes had as Strip fringes still support sohts and obviously functioned more as an oasis for quickies both paid and unpaid and had hourly rates as well as nightly, weekly and monthly I took a room for a week I’ot the lay of the land

Within forty-eight hours I discovered this glitzy adult entertainment theme park was seriously bipolar Days were sun-baked and sweaty, but nights were dark and balht shows

This was not Kansas anyold landscape suras was the world’s biggest velvet painting, all dark of night lit up by neon pinks, blues, yellows, greens, reds, and purples Its daytime sunlit face seemed dull, a little sleazy, and oddly lifeless despite the crowds gushing like tides in and out of Strip hotel-casinos

What had been Vegas landmarks at the turn of the Millennium-The New York, New York faux skyscraper silhouette, the half-size Eiffel Toere barely visible today Even the concrete-needle condo towers that began sprouting in 2006 were ray exclamation points in a cityscape that sizzled, literally The roar of the MGM Grand’s golden gate-keeping lion and the Mirage’s volcano were lost in the fla torrents that washed down and spouted up froeneration hotel-casinos like the Gehenna and the Inferno, whose swooping architecture looked chillingly organic

My target was not the Strip’s new hellfire glory The street ht at Sam’s Town on the way in almost covered the chintzy bedspread of my Araby Motel room Yes, a fold-out paper map It provided the detailed overview I needed The Araby still had rotary phones, a wireless connection was out of the realhtwine Productions took up a whole block of Sunset Road, opposite Sunset Park Sunset Park Sunset City Maybe the word "sunset" was a good omen

At least I was out of the Araby Motel’s da by four that afternoon, just when the afternoon sun was at itsThe 60 SPF sunscreen lay on htwine productions but had given up on explainingan endlessIt was high time I was off to see the wizard in person

Sunset Park boasted a lot of what Las Vegas has little of: trees shading a ayaround a small, central lake Plaques near the trees dedicated thearden, if not an outright graveyard

Farther back around the lake h to rass the "green hair of graves" and back here I could believe it This swale you couldn’t see past, or be seen in, recalled the creepy reeds where black-clad Victorian ghosts as solid as ebony tombstones appeared in an old movie that had scared the heck out of hly solid phantoouts of blood ’n’ guts in teen slasher pics

Now that chilling memory drove me back to the trees dedicated to the dead, which seemed more norhtwine headquarters on Sunset Road, a nice, noirish address for a TV production co in criminal forensics All it needed to be a Sunset Boulevard was a nice, classic filmlandwalled estate occupying a full city block, not far from Wayne Newton’s spread, Shenandoah, on the saettable for the life-size 3-D bronze sculpture of horses galloping out of the wall onto a grassy corner area (Neas a noted horse rancher as well as a headlining Vegas vocalist and had looked preserved in so even before the Millenniuhtas as I studied the fa?ade of his enco, stay-out wall Obviously a er-than-life-size sculpture galloping out of his as were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse You could alhoulish berserker warriors on their backs representing War, Fah broad-axes, swords, and pikes to quell a riot

I crossed the boulevard, darting between traffic, to eye the scrolled-iron gate blocking the driveway That’s all there was No foot approach I retreated back to the park to sit on a shaded bench and plan htwine’s castle, obviously his home as well as his office

I’d ear: conservative blazer, blouse, and skirt No checks or prints to give the camera’s eye double vision Everyone else around me was casually dressed in shorts and sandals and tees

Except one

I caught the gold glint of cufflinks on French cuffs Custoht wool-silk pants, knife-edge pressed, also expensive A silk tie as smoothly blue as the cloudless sky, barely loosened at the collar A suit jacket draped over the corner of a picnic table Everything fit for a Fortune 500 executive in a boardroobone belt that curled around his narrow hips like a luxurious snake

I took all this in within two seconds Instant observation is a reporter’s first line of offense The expensive clothes played off a dark olive coered hands incongruously held a small dead branch fro black children dressed in rainbow colors

Their mother, thirtyish black velvet in Queen Latifah duds, relaxed at the concrete picnic table’s other end, watching thenarrow Hispanic features had an aristocratic grace, as did the relaxed length of hile hi up and down around hi "e it still put , even attention They said I was distant, a loner, but it got ainst the alpha toughs who ran the secret gangs institutional life spawns

A pig-tailed six-year-old girl in pink and lirass, the Y-shaped twig in her hands like bicycle handlebars, or as if she were pushing an invisible laer Mr White-collar Coolio walked right behind, s therapher withpicture: corporate Pied Piper leads urban kids Sohten Prince Charenuine interest and obvious enjoyirl stopped to bound up and down in frustration, he bent over her, put his fingertips just ahead of her beautiful dark little hands on the sticks and they walked on together

The girl squealed with joy and triurass Oh Dowsing for water

In Las Vegas? Except for cultivated water, like man-made Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, and this picture-book lake, or sprinkler systerass

I watched theboys around the same territory, where each one "dowsed" successfully in the same spot once he added his own touch to the process They were too young to realize they were all "discovering" the same "well" Probably a buried sprinkler head

The Millenniuht that "there are s in heaven and on earth than are dreae dose of Hell that would have really bummed out the Melancholy Dane But so them We had weather witches in Kansas who could play a lot of tricks with rain, wind, and fire, so why bother dowsing for water? It was a pre-Millenniuuy, another under-thirty, surely, returned his gullible little friends to a very gratefulit over one shoulder, then looked right at me

The tables had turned so fast that I couldn’t pretend to be glancing away And he was corass on those braided leather Italian shoes anyway

Chapter Nine

"You’re a skeptic," he said

"U is s children attention and a sense of accomplishment isn’t sant twit! Although I’d just been touched by his ease with the kids, it obviously didn’t translate to adults

"No," I answered, "but round water with Witch-Hazel’s twig is deceiving theood" I’d been deceived a lot in , which I hadn’t seen hih-barked

" Mesquite?" I scoffed "Doesn’t it have to be ?"

" Willow is traditional but not essential I can doith anything that has three legs A wood twig A reforet with a hard-on"

My shock couldn’t help co but his dark eyes glinted with huht have the gift"

"I doubt it I don’t have a gift for anything but ed and held out the stupid stick

I stood and took it It’d been oh, fifteen years since I’d touched a dead stick, probably to prod an icky bug out of ht What do I do? Walk around with the two branches in my hands and the third one pointed dead-ahead like-" Well, I wasn’t going to say what it was pointed straight out like

"Right"

Only then did I realize that he had no accent to go with the sleek Latin looks

"Watch rass, "driving" a featherweight twig ahead of me I went to where each child had jumped for joy, and then paused "This is the place, isn’t it? The sure-thing spot?"

He had perched on the picnic table to watch me "That’s the spot You’re an ace detective"

"I’ator, but not that kind"

"Don’t tell ate fraudulent pheno’s happened"

"That’s because I’ht be a sha his jacket over my purse so it wasn’t thief-bait, and came up behind me Then he put his arms around ers to the twig in front of my curled fists The touch brushedon h to give me an Indian burn The third branch jerked down as if drawn by an invisible hand, one that could pull as hard as a Great Dane on a leash It pointed straight down at the ground

"Ohod!"

"You did feel that?" he asked