She had gone, perhaps in triumph.
Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclotron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a battery. His eyes blazed with dark fire. He bellowed and kicked, kicked and bellowed.
Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney - they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it.
Only Lloyd waited - not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.
He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd's head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood.
Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form wrapped in a drape.
"Get rid of that," Flagg said.
"Okay." His voice fell to a husky whisper. "Should I take the head?"
"Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and burn it. Do you hear me? Burn it! You burn the f**king thing! "
"All right."
"Yes." Flagg smiled benignly.
Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. The underside was sticky. It made a U in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it again, clutched it, and staggered toward the door.
"Lloyd?"
He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room.
"W-W-What?"
"Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?"
"Yes."
"Keep it handy. The time is coming."
"A-All right."
He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mind-boggling Hindu fakir's trick, looking outward, smiling gently.
Lloyd left quickly, happy as always just to go with his life and his sanity.
That day was a quiet one in Vegas. Lloyd arrived back around 2 P.M., smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o'clock it was howling up and down the Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against the sky like tattered battle flags. Clouds in strange shapes scudded overhead.
In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies - the Weird Sisters, everyone called them - kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling happily around on one of the crap tables with an array of plastic soldiers.
"Lookit that little squirt," Ken said fondly. "Someone ast me if I'd watch him an hour. I'd watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out." He looked up as Lloyd came in.
"Hey, Dinny!" Lloyd called.
"Yoyd! Yoyd!" Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard.
"Got kisses for Lloyd?" he asked.
Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses.
"I got something for you," Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey's Kisses from his breast pocket.
Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. "Yoyd?"
"What, Dinny?"
"Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?"
Lloyd smiled. "I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who's your mom now?"
"Angelina." He pronounced it Angeyeena. "Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too."
"Don't tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd."
Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON'T COME line of the crap table, generating his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm's.
"Thanks," Lloyd said. "Looks great."
"That's homemade Syrian bread," Whitney said proudly.
Lloyd munched for a while. "Has anybody seen him?" he asked at last.
Ken shook his head. "I think he's gone again."