Levitating Las Vegas

9




Her panic whirled so vividly in his mind that he grew afraid of panicking himself, abandoning the gun, and dashing from the bus. He had to keep a grip on himself and whatever sanity he had left, for his sake and for hers.

“Do what I say and you won’t get hurt,” he whispered, because that’s what people said when they were kidnapping somebody. He spread one hand on her bare thigh to exercise more control over her, and also to convince the other passengers, should they glance in Elijah and Holly’s direction, that they were a couple, and that it wasn’t strange for him to keep close to her with his hand in his pocket.

Then he wished he hadn’t touched her, because her thoughts only intensified in his head. She shivered like a frightened rabbit as she tried to puzzle out whether he was crazy or she was crazy, and whether both of them being crazy would make one sane person. And whether he was going to kill her.

He took a breath to say, I told you I’m not going to hurt you—what do you take me for? Just before he said this, he remembered that he’d borrowed Shane’s gun to threaten her. It was important for her to suspect he might hurt her. That’s what the gun was for, stupid!

Instead of discussing the situation with her and getting himself in more trouble, he gripped her thigh harder and squinted out the window. There was her street sign, and the bus brakes squealed. “Get off in front of me, slowly,” he murmured into her ear, a perfect, petite ear with one tiny beauty mark on the lobe. His breath swayed the sparkling rhinestones of her long earring.

He stood and let her edge past him. He cringed as she went over his words in her mind. Get off in front of me, slowly. He meant the bus, right? Or was he asking her to masturbate? She took a few slow steps in her high heels, half expecting him to order her to shove her hands down her panties right then and there.

Elijah couldn’t very well whisper another order in her ear. All he could do was wait for her to figure it out and keep moving forward. This was his luck. Of all the tortures, he had to believe he was able to read a beautiful girl’s dirty mind.

Finally she proceeded up the bus aisle and down the steps, her visible shaking accentuated by the trembling of the baubles on her bikini bottoms. Elijah glanced around, but the other passengers and the driver didn’t seem to take undue notice of him and Holly. Gorgeous, scantily clad girls pursued by dangerously unbalanced losers with guns in their jeans pockets were a dime a dozen in Vegas, apparently.

Standing above her, he wasn’t in a position to help her off the bus, but he watched her for signs she was tottering in her heels. He would have jumped forward to keep her from falling in that case. But Holly was a showgirl, never wavering on her feet, keeping her balance without touching the handrail despite the blind fear Elijah felt coming off her in waves. She hopped down the stairs and then half turned on the sidewalk, waiting for instructions.

Elijah watched the bus roar up the street, careen around the corner, and disappear behind the palm trees. A café faced the main road at the edge of the quiet neighborhood, with Holly’s apartment complex a block down. The café was closed at ten thirty at night, and it had no surveillance cameras in back. He’d checked. No witnesses. “Walk behind the building,” he ordered her.

She obeyed. As she clacked across the parking lot in her heels, her hairdo bobbed. Holly fashioned her thick brown hair in many different ways. After she’d broken her prom date with him, the highlight of Elijah’s sad excuse for a high school life had been to get to class before her so he could watch her walk in and see what she’d done to her hair that morning. Currently the top section puffed in a bouffant bun while the lower half was gathered into a curly ponytail that swayed against her back and occasionally caught in the sequins on the straps of her top. It was very retro, and as they approached Shane’s Catalina, Elijah had the feeling they’d stepped out of a 1960s gangster movie. The only thing that didn’t fit in was Elijah. He needed a tux like Shane’s work costume, yet he was schlepping along in jeans and a UNLV LACROSSE T-shirt, as usual. He couldn’t even commit a felony in style.

Holly didn’t care. She was terrified, bouncing between sympathy for him because he was sick and horror at what this might mean for both of them. In her mind they were both dead already, facedown in the puddles of this parking lot, rainbows of gasoline floating around their heads. Glancing around curiously, Elijah didn’t see any puddles. It hadn’t rained since May. But he told himself that whatever her mind conjured, it was good for his plan if it kept her afraid.

Suddenly she snapped out of her visions of death and stopped short a few feet from the car. “This is Shane’s car,” she cried. Now Shane lay facedown in the puddles in her mind.

“I stole it.” Elijah had planned to say this—not because it had occurred to him she might think he’d murdered Shane, but because she might be less likely to try to escape if she thought the police were already after Elijah and would be coming to rescue her shortly. In reality Elijah had asked Shane if he could borrow his car and his gun to kidnap Holly Starr and drive to Colorado to get their medicine. Shane had said, “Sure,” and had given Elijah a crash course in driving and gun safety.

Careful to keep one hand in his pocket with the gun pointed away from Holly—Shane had made him promise to keep the bullets in the glove compartment, but he’d said an unloaded gun should be treated like a loaded one just in case—Elijah unlocked the passenger door and opened it for her. The door was long and heavy like the car and seemed to open for days. Finally he stepped back and nodded to the interior. “Get in.”

Without moving her head, she scanned the half circle of parking lot in front of her with her eyes. Elijah saw what she saw and thought what she was thinking: if she ran now, he might shoot her. Her chances for escape would be better later. So she eased into the car, ducking her head to prevent her bouffant hairdo from hitting the roof.

He slammed her door and hurried around the car, concentrating carefully on her to make sure she didn’t change her mind and bolt. He slid into the driver’s seat and said, “Lock your door.” If she wanted to bail, at least she would have to think about pulling up the old-fashioned button first. Elijah would have warning and could grab her before she did it.

She put out one shaking hand, perfectly manicured in pink, and locked the door.

He bit his lip as power surged through him. He’d been tingling ever since the Mentafixol began to wear off, and the tingles intensified the more he delved into someone’s mind. But he couldn’t let MAD take him over completely. He was a nice person with a hereditary mental disorder. No matter what happened now, it was crucial that he remember his one task, to get that medicine.

For him, and for Holly.

He took a deep breath and squeezed the steering wheel. “Get out your cell phone.”

She dug through her purse.

“Text Kaylee,” he said. “Tell her you’re spending the night with me, like you’re happy about it. Be convincing.”

Holly’s heart beat violently. She was scared to death. But she’d felt close to him on the bus, and she didn’t want to let go of the hope that the Elijah she liked so much was still inside him somewhere. She touched the keypad with her thumb. The screen lit, illuminating her beautiful face, her false lashes casting long shadows as she closed her eyes and said a little prayer. Then her thumbs moved.

Spending the night with Elijah Brown. We started talking about the night at Glitterati and it just sort of happened.

Elijah leaned close to watch her enter the characters. She smelled like oleander. He removed his hands from the steering wheel and balled them into fists, cutting his fingernails into his palms to keep himself from touching her. “Squee,” he said.

Squee! Catch u tomorrow morning.

“We won’t be back tomorrow morning,” Elijah said. “Put ‘later.’ ”

Holly backspaced over “tomorrow morning,” panic rising with every keystroke. Elijah couldn’t stand much more of this without putting his hands on her, MAD or no MAD. But the more turned on he got, the closer she moved to tears. As she typed “later,” she was thinking of the few mornings Kaylee and she had walked to this very café, and the many mornings she’d come here alone because Kaylee was almost always working. When Kaylee came, she read the newspaper. Holly brought racy romance novels. She wanted a do-over of those mornings now. This time, instead of ordering coffee with skim milk and artificial sweetener, listening to her mom’s voice in her head demanding that she count calories, she would splurge for the chocolate muffin she’d dreamed about the entire year she’d lived in this neighborhood. What would it matter that her corpse carried a few extra pounds? Would this be bad for publicity for her dad’s show? Surely they wouldn’t have an open casket at her funeral, or bury her in this godforsaken bikini? She didn’t want to die without a muffin.

Elijah’s stomach growled, and he swallowed. “Fasten your seat belt.” He cranked the huge engine.

“Do you know how to drive?” Holly asked in a small voice. “I never learned how to drive. It’s dangerous to drive on Mentafixol.”

“Well, I’m off Mentafixol.”

“You are way off Mentafixol,” she whispered, hoping she wouldn’t be as crazy as he was in a few hours, when her own last pill had worn off.

“It ought to be perfectly safe.” He put the gearshift in first, pressed down on the gas, and let up on the clutch, as he had seen Shane do a million times.

The car lurched forward and stalled. Elijah extended his arm just in time to prevent Holly from hitting the dashboard. His hand touched her breast, and she felt it. Elijah felt it times two: the shape of her breast under his hand, and also what she felt. Awareness, pleasure, horror, guilt. He snatched his hand away.

She crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “Safe?” she squeaked.

“Definitely, as long as we’re not moving.” He started the engine again, pressed down on the gas, and let up on the clutch more slowly this time. The car lurched but kept rolling, and he maneuvered it onto the main road. For Vegas, the traffic wasn’t too bad at the late hour. But as he cruised this straight, easy road, it was all he could do to focus on keeping the car in his lane. Each time he passed a car going in the opposite direction, he could hear the thoughts of the drivers and passengers.

Then there was Holly’s terror, forcing him to the edge of a meltdown. They paused at the wide intersection with the Strip, and Holly gazed longingly past the towers of cheerful lights toward their casino, wondering if she would ever see her parents or Kaylee again. Elijah gripped the steering wheel and accelerated onward. Luckily the entrance to the interstate was straight ahead. He looped around the ramp, onto the elevated highway.

And then the gun in his pocket wiggled. This wouldn’t have startled him so much, because they did hit an occasional bump on the interstate. But Holly was concentrating hard on that gun, willing it to move, using her mind to tug it toward the opening of his pocket. If she was successful, it would tumble to the floorboard and she would make a grab for it under the steering wheel while Elijah dared not take his eyes off the road and kept driving.

Of course, Holly could concentrate on the gun as much as she wanted and nothing would happen, because people couldn’t move things with their minds. So when Elijah thought it really did shift a quarter inch upward in his pocket, defying gravity, he nearly jumped out of his skin.

Another bump in the road had jostled it, he assured himself, gripping the steering wheel harder with sweating palms. He stared into the traffic, focusing on the eighteen-wheelers zooming past them rather than on Holly tugging at the gun and now shoving him a bit, trying to push him out the door of the car. She wasn’t moving him at all, and she knew this. She didn’t really want to kill him. But she had no idea Elijah not only sensed she was trying to shove him but also actually felt little pushes on his shoulder.

This was crazy—and not your run-of-the-mill mental adolescent dysfunction crazy, either, but Las Vegas, midnight interstate, telekinetic showgirl, mind-reading carpenter crazy. He wasn’t sure anymore how long he could withstand this hell he’d constructed for himself. The drive to Icarus was ten hours.

The gun made its biggest movement yet, its hilt clearing his jeans, spilling out of his pocket completely. As he felt this, he also sensed Holly seeing her chance. He put one hand down to grab for the gun, his reflexes slowed and his hand missing its target because his eyes were on the traffic and his head was too full of everything.

F*ck. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the blur of bright spangles and brown hair as she swept up the gun and pointed it at him, plastering her slim body against the passenger door, as far away from him as possible. “Pull over and let me out,” she gasped, big dark eyes hard under false lashes.

Shit, shit, shit. He was the shittiest kidnapper ever. But not that shitty. “I’m not going to let you out on the side of the interstate. Not while you’re wearing that. And the gun isn’t loaded.”

She didn’t believe him. He was telling her that to convince her to put the gun down. She leveled it at his ear. Her finger twitched on the trigger.

“Aim it away from me if you don’t know how to work it.” Keeping one hand on the wheel, he used the other to point the gun away from both of them and off the road, toward the tops of the palm trees peeking from behind the concrete barrier—but her hands were shaking, as was her mind, and his, so he turned his attention back to the traffic before he got completely disoriented.

“We’re going to Icarus, Colorado,” he told her. “That’s where they make Mentafixol. I can’t go through life crazy like this. My pills have gone missing for almost a week now, and nobody seems to be able or willing to do anything about it. I’m driving to Colorado to get some before I land in an institution. And I’m taking you with me, because without Mentafixol, tomorrow you’ll be just as crazy as I am now. I don’t want that to happen to you, Holly. I don’t want you to have to go through what I’m going through. I want to get medicine for you and for me. And at the very least, we can go crazy out of the state, where you’re less likely to sabotage your own publicity. You want to start your own magician act soon, right?”

“Is that all?” she shrieked. “Is that all you want from me?”

He glanced over at her. Her dark eyes were wild, and the Strip glowed through the window, shining in her curls. The enormous billboard advertising her dad’s magic act with her likeness crept up behind her and flashed past her shoulders.

She was relieved Elijah didn’t plan to kill her. She was touched that he said he wanted to save her. But she didn’t trust him. And there was something dark and ugly and twisted in her head too, something very unbecoming a pretty twenty-one-year-old innocent: disappointment. I’m driving to Colorado to get some echoed in her mind.

“Is that all you wanted?” she repeated.

He eyed her, careful not to let his glance dip to her cleavage. He honestly didn’t know what to say.

“Then why did you threaten me with a gun on a freaking public bus?” she demanded, shaking the gun for emphasis.

“It’s not loaded, but it’s not a toy. Put it in the glove compartment.”

She punched the button on the dashboard in front of her, dropped the gun out of sight behind the folded maps, blinked at the box of bullets, and slammed the glove compartment shut.

He cringed. Rob blowing a hole in the ceiling had left him gun-shy for a lifetime.

Then Holly turned back to Elijah expectantly and folded her arms across her breasts again, showing him not her discomfort but her anger.

“I wanted you to come with me,” he said, “but I needed enough time to explain it to you. I knew I wouldn’t get the chance. I couldn’t risk people overhearing us in the casino or on the bus when we’ve got one foot in the loony bin already.”

“We?” she demanded. “That would be you. You’re the one who pointed a gun at me and kidnapped me. Do you realize you did something crazy to prevent yourself from being crazy?”

“The irony of this does not escape me.” Neither did the fact that he never would have attempted such a stunt if not for his imagined superpower.

His comment made his case. She recognized this Elijah as the one she’d bantered with on the bus, and she relaxed a little. “You really think they have our medicine up there?”

“We’ll know in ten hours. When’s the last time you went on a road trip to save your own sanity? It’ll be fun.”

She laughed and quickly pressed her lips together to quell it. Looking around the car, she asked, “Is Shane okay?”

Elijah nodded. “I didn’t steal his car. He knows where we’re going.” Then, because his stomach still rumbled sympathetically with hers, he reached behind his seat with one hand, fished around for the small cooler, and placed it on her bare thighs.

“What’s this?” she asked. “If it’s Shane’s head, I’m going to be really mad at you.”

“Dinner,” Elijah said.

She unzipped the top of the cooler. His mouth watered with hers, and his brain sensed the aromas of garlic and ginger as she opened the plastic container of Chinese food. Or maybe he actually smelled the food from across the car. He couldn’t tell his sensations and hers apart. She dug in with the plastic fork he’d brought. The flavors exploded in his mind.

“Where’d you get this?” she squealed her approval with her mouth full.

“I made it,” he said.

She drew an imaginary chart in her head and titled it Elijah. Under Pro she wrote Great cook and Funny and, after a pause, So hot. Under Con she scribbled, COMPLETE NUTCASE. She laughed at herself, both in her mind and in real life beside him in the car, a warm, husky sound through a savory mouthful.

She ate. He drove, the lights of Vegas melting back into the scrubby desert from which they’d sprung in the 1940s, the bare mountains in the distance outlined by starlight, and he listened to her thoughts. She would go with him to Icarus. He was right: Better that they both went off their rockers outside Vegas, where she was less likely to be recognized. She didn’t want to do something crazy and ruin her chances at her own magic act. By the time they made it back to town or called Kaylee to rescue them, surely the pharmacy would have their medicine, and these dark days would be over.

Then her thoughts spun in different directions, ricocheting at random angles. But her attraction to him—that colored everything else in her mind. He constantly chided himself that his entire hallucination of mind reading was a symptom of MAD, some self-aggrandizing delusion. It was the wishful thinking of the teenage boy he’d been, jilted for a prom date with a girl who’d been too good for him, and wanting to prove she’d been wrong: Someday she’ll be sorry. Now his someday had arrived.

He knew full well that the two storylines progressed in parallel: his delusional adventure story about saving himself and Holly, and what was really happening. He had no way of knowing which was which, or what borders they shared. He could only assume that what he processed as reading her mind was actually information he gained by some other method, like talking to her, or reading her body language, or subconsciously capitalizing on four years of college psychology classes. He could only work with the information he had.

She dropped the fork and empty container back into the cooler, zipped it, and tossed it into the backseat. She wanted to thank him for a delicious homemade dinner, except as a general rule she did not thank her kidnappers. She was still kind of mad at him. Instead she said, “Your plan is to drive to Icarus, Colorado, and go to the drug factory that makes Mentafixol.”

Candy company, he almost corrected her. That would sound crazy, so he just nodded.

“You have the address?”

“I looked it up on the web. It’s on the main street of the town.” He’d broken out in a cold sweat at his computer when he saw that the address he’d pulled from the pharmacy clerk’s mind was a real place. But if the candy company actually made his medicine, he’d probably remembered the address from a pill bottle, back in the heady days when his pills were at his fingertips. And if the candy company didn’t make his medicine, he’d unknowingly remembered the address from some gift catalog in his mother’s apartment.

The upside was, he’d also seen on the web that the candy company was famous for its fudge. If in fact he’d imagined the entire connection between the candy company and Mentafixol, when they arrived, perhaps he could buy Holly some fudge to placate her—especially if she was crazy by then, too.

“I doubt we can walk up to a drug factory and ask for drugs, even with a prescription,” Holly reasoned. She’d been working through the scenario as she talked. Now an awful possibility occurred to her, and her heart thumped harder again. “You’re not thinking of holding up the drug factory?” She folded one leg and braced the toe of her glittering shoe against the glove compartment in case he dove for the gun.

“I’m thinking of casing the joint,” he admitted. “All I know for sure is that we need that drug, there’s none in Vegas, and I suspect there’s lots in Icarus. Beyond that, we’ll play it by ear.”

She decided to humor him. He seemed honestly intent on “saving” her, and she could at least return the favor by keeping him out of trouble. She kicked off her high heels and cranked down the window. She stretched her long legs in front her and put her bare feet out the window, wiggling her toes in the roaring wind. Her pink toenail polish twinkled in the streetlights over the interstate. “So, now that we’re finally being honest with each other . . .” she began.

He winced internally and tried not to show it on his face. He really hated deceiving her about how crazy he’d gone. He wished he were rescuing her for real.

“. . . what does it feel like to be off Mentafixol completely?” she asked. “In case our field trip to the drug factory doesn’t work, I want to know what I’m in for tomorrow afternoon.”

He didn’t want to scare her about what she was in for. He didn’t want to terrify her by revealing his current state of mind, sending her skittering into a convenience store the first time they stopped for gas, seeking the protection of the clerk and the panic button and the shotgun behind the counter. But he didn’t want to lie to her, either. He told her as much of the truth as he could. “I feel like something’s going to happen.”

As he spoke, a rock song she loved whispered through the radio. He dialed up the volume. Sure enough, as if he could really read minds, she relaxed into the seat and lost herself in the beat of the music. The song made the midnight drive through the desert more bearable. She was embarrassed that she’d asked him on a date and he’d responded by kidnapping her. She was humiliated that he’d probably been charming on the bus only so he could stay close to her and pull a gun on her, not because he’d been coming on to her. But to the background noise of this song, she could pretend that it was a normal crush gone bad, and that she wasn’t teetering on the edge of madness herself.

Elijah relaxed too, finally. His head filled with how much she loved this song, especially the cool part coming up. He liked the song himself. Tune after tune they both liked came on Vegas’s best alt-rock station. The weight of the last few days didn’t lift from his shoulders, exactly, but underneath that burden he was at least able to enjoy listening to Holly’s colorful mind.

The rest would wait until tomorrow.