"He's good with weapons?" she asked Lloyd.
"He's great with them. The Skyhawks have under-wing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrikes. Weird how they name all that shit, isn't it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety-control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get them off the storage racks. So Hank says, 'We better get Trashy out here when he gets back and see if he can figure it out.'"
"When he gets back?"
"Yeah, he's a funny dude. He's been in Vegas almost a week now, but he'll be taking off again pretty quick."
"Where does he go?"
"Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He's a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there's nothing but empty desert and godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don't know how he lives out there, but he does. He looks for new toys, and he always comes back with a few. About a week after him and me got back from L.A., he brought back a pile of army machine guns with laser sights - never-miss machine guns, Hank calls them. This time it was Teller mines, contact mines, fragment mines, and a canister of Parathion. He said he found a whole stockpile of Parathion. Also enough defoliant to turn the whole state of Colorado bald as an egg."
"Where does he find it?"
"Everywhere," Lloyd said simply. "He sniffs it out, sweetbuns. It isn't really so strange. Most of western Nevada and eastern California was owned by the good old U.S.A. It's where they tested their toys, all the way up to A-bombs. He'll be dragging one of those back someday."
He laughed. Dayna felt cold, terribly cold.
"The superflu started somewhere out here. I'd lay money on it. Maybe Trash will find it. I tell you, he just sniffs that stuff out. The big guy says just give him his head and let him run, and so that's what he does. You know what his favorite toy is right now?"
"No," Dayna said. She wasn't sure she wanted to know... but why else had she come over here?
"Flametracks."
"What are flametrucks?"
"Not trucks, tracks. He's got five of them out at Indian Springs, lined up like Formula One racecars." Lloyd laughed. "They used them in the Nam. The grunts called them Zippos. They're full of napalm. Trash loves em."
"Neato," she muttered.
"Anyway, when Trash came back this time, we took him out to the Springs. He hummed and muttered around those Shrikes and got them armed and mounted in about six hours. Can you believe that? They train Air Force technicians about ninety years to do stuff like that. But they're not Trash, you see. He's a f**king genius."
Idiot savant, you mean. I bet I know how he got those burns, too.
Lloyd looked at his watch and sat up. "Speaking of Indian Springs, I got to get out there. Just got time for another shower. You want to join me?"
"Not this time."
She got dressed after the shower began to run again. So far she had always managed to get dressed and undressed with him out of the room, and that was the way she intended to keep it.
She strapped the clip to her forearm and slid the switchblade knife into its spring-loaded clasp. A quick twist of her wrist would deliver all ten inches of it into her hand.
Well, she thought as she slipped into her blouse, a girl has to have some secrets.
During the afternoons, she was on a streetlamp maintenance crew. What the job amounted to was testing the bulbs with a simple gadget and replacing them if they had burned out, or if they had been broken by vandals when Las Vegas had been in the grip of the superflu. There were four of them on the job, and they had a cherry-picker truck that trundled around from post to post and street to street.