"It's all right, Mr. Henreid," he whispered. "You don't know any better."
"Shut up, you mouthy old bastard! " Lloyd screamed. He fired again and Glen Bateman's face disappeared. He fired again and the body jumped lifelessly. Lloyd shot him yet again. He was crying. The tears rolled down his angry, sunburned cheeks. He was remembering the rabbit he had forgotten and left to eat its own paws. He was remembering Poke, and the people in the white Connie, and Gorgeous George. He was remembering the Phoenix jail, and the rat, and how he hadn't been able to eat the ticking out of his mattress. He was remembering Trask, and how Trask's leg had started to look like a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner after a while. He pulled the trigger again, but the pistol only uttered a sterile click.
"All right," Flagg said softly. "All right. Well done. Well done, Lloyd."
Lloyd dropped the gun on the floor and shrank away from Flagg. "Don't you touch me!" he cried. "I didn't do it for you!"
"Yes, you did," Flagg said tenderly. "You may not think so, but you did." He reached out and fingered the jet stone around Lloyd's neck. He closed his hand over it, and when he opened the hand again, the stone was gone. It had been replaced with a small silver key.
"I promised you this, I think," the dark man said. "In another jail. He was wrong... I keep my promises, don't I, Lloyd?"
"Yes."
"The others are leaving, or planning to leave. I know who they are. I know all the names. Whitney... Ken... Jenny... oh yes, I know all the names."
"Then why don't you - "
"Put a stop to it? I don't know. Maybe it's better to let them go. But you, Lloyd. You're my good and faithful servant, aren't you?"
"Yeah," Lloyd whispered. The final admission. "Yeah, I guess I am."
"Without me, the best you could have done was small shit, even if you had survived that jail. Correct?"
"Yeah."
"The Lauder boy knew that. He knew I could make him bigger. Taller. That's why he was coming to me. But he was too full of thoughts... too full of..." He looked suddenly perplexed and old. Then he waved his hand impatiently, and the smile bloomed on his face again. "Perhaps it is going bad, Lloyd. Perhaps it is, for some reason not even I can understand... but the old magician has a few tricks left in him yet, Lloyd. One or two. Now listen to me. Time is short if we want to stop this... this crisis in confidence. If we want to nip it in the bud, as it were. We'll want to finish things tomorrow with Underwood and Brentner. Now listen to me very carefully..."
Lloyd didn't get to bed until past midnight, and got no sleep until the small hours of the morning. He talked to the Rat-Man. He talked to Paul Burlson. To Barry Dorgan, who agreed that what the dark man wanted could - and probably should - be done before daylight. Construction began on the front lawn of the MGM Grand around 10 P.M. on the twenty-ninth, a work party of ten men with welding arcs and hammers and bolts and a good supply of long steel pipes. They were assembling the pipes on two flatbed trucks in front of the fountain. The welding arcs soon drew a crowd.
"Look, Angie-mom!" Dinny cried. "It's a fireworks show!"
"Yes, but it's time for all good little boys to be in bed." Angie Hirschfield drew the boy away with a secret fear in her heart, feeling that something bad, something perhaps as evil as the superflu itself, was in the making.
"Wanna see! Wanna see the sparks!" Dinny wailed, but she drew him quickly and firmly away.
Julie Lawry approached the Rat-Man, the only fellow in Vegas she considered too creepy to sleep with... except maybe in a pinch. His black skin glimmered in the blue-white glare of the welding arcs. He was tricked out like an Ethiopian pirate - wide silk trousers, a red sash, and a necklace of silver dollars around his scrawny neck.
"What is it, Ratty?" she asked.
"The Rat-Man don't know, dear, but the Rat-Man got hisself an idea. Yes indeedy he does. It looks like black work tomorrow, very black. Like to slip away for a quick one with Ratty, my dear?"
"Maybe," Julie said, "but only if you know what all of this is about."
"Tomorrow all of Vegas gonna know," Ratty said. "You bet your sweet and delectable little sugarbuns on that. Come along with the Rat-Man, dear, and he show you the nine thousand names of God."
But Julie, much to the Rat-Man's displeasure, had slipped away.
By the time Lloyd finally went to sleep, the work was done and the crowd had drifted away. Two large cages stood on the back of the two flatbeds. There were squarish holes in the right and left sides of each. Parked close by were four cars, each with a trailer hitch. Attached to each hitch was a heavy steel towing chain. The chains snaked across the lawn of the Grand, and each ended just inside the squarish holes in the cages.
At the end of each chain there dangled a single steel handcuff.