Then came the night Holly found Lavita, a showgirl who claimed to be from Jamaica, but who was rumored to really be from Houston. Holly found Lavita dressed in her sequins and feathers, facedown under the makeup table. Holly described her as resembling a roadkill pheasant, with her tail feathers pluming up from her head and butt.
Holly made the mistake of turning her over, thinking maybe she could help. There was blood everywhere, and Holly should have known Lavita was dead, but she had to check anyway.
It was horrible. Face smashed in, the front of her body flattened as if she’d been crushed in a trash compactor—but only the front of her. Holly let go of the body as if she’d been stung, but instead of flopping back down into the pool of blood, the corpse had rolled slowly over onto its back in a grotesque, boneless fashion.
By this time, Holly was screaming her head off. Cooling blood ran down her fingertips. She’d thought of the man from Boston who had apparently fallen from a great height onto a bathroom floor. This was similar, if not quite the same. People soon flooded the room and asked her questions she couldn’t answer. The police talked to her at length, but she had nothing useful for them. They stared at her with hard-eyed irritation. The killings were freaking them out, she thought. Like mean dogs, they had turned their fear into anger and suspicion.
The rest of the dancers had shunned Holly after that. Somehow, finding her there with blood on her face, having obviously disturbed the corpse, had put her into the untouchable category. She learned then what it must have been like to be declared the village witch when the crops failed.
When new girls came to audition, the bosses treated Holly like old meat. She’d pushed away their grasping hands on many occasions and she thought they’d come to accept she wasn’t going to go for that kind of thing…but she was wrong. When the new girls were hired, no one had a kind word for the girl who had found Lavita. They dropped her off the list. After less than two months as a showgirl, she was back on the street again.
Her next job took longer to land. Money was tightening up around town as it headed into the cooling, windy period that passed for autumn in the desert. Her rent money came due and she found herself hiding in a dark apartment, listening to hammering and threats from outside her door until her landlord gave up and stomped away, muttering curses. She knew eviction was coming, as relentlessly as the desert winds.
Holly had headed down to the end of the Strip that night—to the seedy side—then walked a few blocks away from the boulevard. There she found bars with patrons who didn’t want to be identified. The streets were dimmer, as every other pale orange sodium-vapor streetlight had been knocked out. She walked into the first strip club she found, which turned out to be Tony’s place. She found the Pole Dance Palace discouraging, but she was desperate. The establishment specialized in something called “friction dancing,” and after a ten-minute audition followed by a five-minute training, she found herself out on the floor.
Friction dancing was just what it sounded like and she was having a hard time with it until another of the girls grabbed her by the arm on her break.
“Here,” the older girl had said, pushing a black ovoid pill into Holly’s palm. “Try this. It makes things easier.”
Holly dry-swallowed the pill without looking at it or thinking about it. She didn’t want to think at all. After that, the night slid by and at quitting time she had over a hundred in tips alone. Four nights later she paid up her rent. The future had brightened.
Before two months had passed, however, she was hooked on cocaine and pills and when the next month’s rent came due, she didn’t have it again. Her habits ate money like a hungry flame.
Tony Montoro had finally fired her on a Tuesday night.
“Come back if you clean up, doll,” he said with a serious face.
Holly understood they were kind words. In truth, perhaps the first ones she’d heard in a long time. Walking the streets again, she eyed the girls who walked there with her. They had glazed eyes and painted faces. No one had heels less than three inches high.
Holly opened her purse and sucked in all the special medications she had left inside it. When there was nothing left but makeup, she felt a little better and a little worse at the same time.
An hour later she was still wandering the streets. By this time, she had decided to turn things around—to go into business for herself. She needed more money, she needed it fast, and she needed it easy. She knew how attractive young ladies in Las Vegas made things like that happen. She had to turn a trick. She’d had a number of bad boyfriends that had made her feel like a hooker, but she’d never really been one. Maybe this was the night to take that last step.
Holly eyed the other streetwalkers, but didn’t want to try her first play with witnesses nearby. She didn’t want the pros to laugh at her. She stumbled down a street that was darker than the rest and waited until a big car came cruising along with two men in it. The car was weaving a bit, and she figured they were probably as high as she was. She glimpsed the passenger’s face. He didn’t look too old or too ugly. She flagged them down.
To her surprise, the car swerved toward her. After a stunned second in the headlights, she scrambled to move out of the way. The car’s engine revved high, as if the driver were flooring it. Did they want to kill her? Shock melted into fear.
The front tires twisted, throwing the car into a half spin. Sliding sideways, it hit the curb and flipped over. She threw herself out of the way, but what really saved her was a lamppost. The car plowed into it, sliding on its back.
It was then that Holly recognized the car. It was purple and black. Made long ago when cars were heavier and longer and full of thick steel. It was Tony’s Cadillac.
Holly got to her feet, shaking. She took quivering steps forward. Was Tony trying to kill her now?
The passenger had been ejected and was lying on the sidewalk, motionless. The driver caught her attention first, however. It was Tony himself, the man in the silver suit who had fired her only an hour ago. He crawled out of his window. The jagged safety glass cut his hands but he kept crawling slowly, relentlessly.
She walked close and stood over him. “Are you crazy, Tony?” she asked.
Tony rolled up his eyes to look at her, and she saw
sand
burbling from his mouth. She thought at first it was vomit, but then she realized it really was
sand
. Some of it was wet and dark, but as more gushed out, it turned dry and seemed endless. It gushed from him as he lay there at her feet shivering and dying.
The sand inside him was
dry
, she thought. Didn’t that mean there had to be an awful lot of it? Didn’t that mean it had to be fresh? It wasn’t possible. His eyes were open. They were bulging and every red capillary stood out on the round whites. He appeared to be just as surprised at his death as she was to witness it.
At this point, I touched her shoulder. We both stopped walking. I looked into her face, frowning. She didn’t have the look of a liar, which I found very disturbing considering
the insane nature of her story. She had the look of someone who was remembering something traumatic. She was staring at the street, lost.
I told myself I shouldn’t doubt her. After all, hadn’t I just encountered some very strange people at the sanatorium? Wasn’t I using sunglasses as universal lock picks? How could I doubt Holly after what I’d seen?
“How could he have been filled with
sand
?” I asked.
She shrugged, shaking her head. “I don’t know. I just remember staring down in a daze. I didn’t even scream. Being mildly high helped.”
I started walking again. She joined me. “Am I in this story?” I asked.
“Yeah, I was getting to you.”
“Keep talking,” I said. “It’s just getting good.”
She went on.
Tony was so full of sand, she said, that his belly looked distended with it. She backed away from the bizarre sight. She wanted to comfort him, but she could not. She was so stunned and horrified by what she saw—something that could not be.
When Tony had finally stopped squirming and lay still, she remembered the second man and stepped around the car to where I lay.
“You were a crumpled lump on the concrete,” she told me. “Really, I can’t understand how you are walking next to me now. You were in worse shape than Tony—but you weren’t choking out sand. You had a lot of cuts and bruises and your leg was twisted at an impossible angle.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I made sure you were breathing,” she said. “After that, I thought I recognized you. I knelt beside you and realized who you were. It took me a minute or so, but I remembered
your picture from your blog, which I’d spent some time reading when I was trying to understand Lavita’s murder.”
“Did you call the cops?”
Holly flicked her eyes downward, to the street. “I didn’t have to. Someone else did. There were others around, everyone had a phone. The cops showed up pretty fast. I’d say they were patrolling just a block or two away when they got the call.”
I nodded. It was the kind of territory cops liked to cruise through. “So,” I said, glancing at her. “You took off, right?”
Holly squirmed uncomfortably. “Well, look. I was high, trying to turn my first trick, and had just witnessed my second freaky murder of the season. Wouldn’t you be walking away fast?”
“I guess I might.”
“OK then. You have to understand, Draith, it wasn’t about you or Tony. The cops are edgy these days. They don’t like whatever it is that’s going on in this town. Out on these streets at two in the morning, nobody wants to meet up with the law.”
Holly suddenly stopped walking. “This is the spot,” she said.
I halted in surprise. I looked around. There was the lamppost. It hadn’t been sheared off, but there was a big gouge in the paint and a dent at the base. I could see white lines scratched into the concrete where the metal roof of the sliding car had scarred it.
“You got away from the cops and walked home then?” I asked. I walked around the lamppost, but didn’t get any special memories from the location.
“No, it was already too late for that. There was a cruiser coming up behind me, I heard the engine purring. There were more cars behind that first one too. I could hear them,
but I didn’t dare glance back. Flashing blue and red lights washed all over these walls.”
I looked at her, surprised. “More than one car, that fast?”
“Yeah. There were no sirens, just flashers, engines, and radios that buzzed with the voices of dispatchers. They always come in packs, you know?” Holly reflected. “Lately, they like to come in overwhelming numbers, like sharks scenting blood.”
“They questioned you?”
“They did more than that. They took me in. The cops in this town are bastards, Quentin. I think they’ve all gone bad.”
I nodded thoughtfully. I doubted I’d ever meet a stripper who was in love with the law. But I didn’t press her further, as I had heard enough. She had certainly kept up her part of the bargain.
All the rest of the way to her place, I thought about Holly’s incredible story. People inexplicably smashed to pulp. Tony Montoro’s body being filled with sand. She had found Tony and me on the sidewalk and watched Tony die. I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if I hadn’t just been transported across a building and opened a safe with what appeared to be a magical pair of sunglasses.
Eventually, Holly pointed at a sagging apartment complex from the middle of the last century. “My place is on the second floor,” she said.
As we walked up the cement steps, I asked, “Did you leave me a flower?”
Holly shrugged. “Yeah. I went to Memorial Hospital to find out if Tony made it after the police let me go. He
didn’t. They said you were alive, but hadn’t had any visitors. I felt sorry for you.”
“So…you bought me a geranium at the gift shop?”
She looked embarrassed.
“Thanks for the thought. But I didn’t wake up at Memorial. I woke up in the Sunset Sanatorium under the gentle care of Dr. Meng.”
I was hoping she would react to that name, but her face was a blank.
“Maybe they transferred you after patching you up,” she offered.
At the top of the stairs, she opened the door without any mystical help from me. I followed her inside and accepted a beer while she told me some of her theories about what was happening to the city.
According to Holly, everyone working on the Strip talked about the decay of the city, wondering about the cause. Some blamed online gambling, or soaring unemployment, or the city’s famously high crime rate. Holly had a less complex answer: in her opinion, the city had “moved on.” It had gone from one century to the next and changed in character as inevitably as people did while they wended their ways through life. She believed a new presence had formed in the midst of the crumbling casinos. Something had replaced the old source of energy and vibrancy. Just as the city had once grown out of the desert sands like a mushroom.
“The economy has fallen apart in Vegas, just as it has everywhere else,” I said, unwilling to see something more sinister.
“I think it’s more than that,” she said.
“We used to have people flowing here, bringing their millions in gambling money,” she said, “but now this new source of energy has brought worse things.”
I thought about what she was suggesting. That a new kind of life force had come to the city. That this new attraction wasn’t as wholesome as a natural drive toward sex and greed.
“Sometimes, when enough sinning is done in single place,” she said, “I think it attracts the attention of
bad things
.”
“What kind of bad things?” I asked her.
Holly caught the smile I’d tried to suppress and glared at me. “Imagine
you
being the skeptic. You should read your own blog, Draith.”
“I suppose I should, but tell me what you mean, anyway.”
She went on to describe a frightening scenario. In her imagination, strange shadows were being drawn to this spot like insects gathering around a flickering bulb at night. This had all started years ago, she believed. There had been stories…small things at first. People disappeared, but that was not unusual, especially in Vegas. Soon, the disappearances had turned into outright murders—weird ones. These weren’t just simple gangland killings—there had always been people beaten to death with baseball bats, shot and left for dead on the Strip, hookers found in garbage cans—no, this was worse than all that. These crimes were…disturbing, unusual, even
bizarre
.