“Now usually, you get crap. Quartz, ebony, glass. But sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes, you get emeralds, peridots, diamonds. Really, it’s hard to tell until you take a mess of these to a jeweler.”
“Man,” I said, teeth clenched in pain. “I really appreciate this, but I’d appreciate a trip home even more.”
McKesson chuckled. “Yeah. You wouldn’t want to get trapped here. See that slug out there in the pool? He’s out in the lava now, but you can tell he’s coming. He’s smelled you, or something. They sense flesh and blood. They are quicker in the lava, aren’t they? Not like on land. Heat makes them move faster.”
I craned my neck and stared out into the crater. I couldn’t help it.
McKesson squatted nearby. He put out his hand.
“What now?”
“Give me the clock.”
I looked at him, hating him. I put the clock in his hand. I found that, just as Rostok had said, I didn’t want to keep the thing. How often did I need to destroy a town?
McKesson palmed the alarm clock and pointed at the monster in the lava. “See him?” he asked, his voice husky and urgent. “Right there, about a dozen yards out. That hump isn’t a normal bubble. Normal bubbles don’t swim in one direction like a cockroach under a napkin.”
Did McKesson want to make me rich, save me, torment me, or was he just having fun? I couldn’t tell. But I did see the hump in the lava, and it was definitely swimming my way. I wished I wasn’t out of ammo—I would have drawn my gun on the detective and ordered him to drag me out of here.
But when I looked back toward McKesson, he was gone. A rip stood in his place. I dragged myself uphill by my elbows, sending up plumes of hot ash. I cursed the day McKesson had been whelped by an inhuman mother. I understood now that he’d wanted me to experience a little pain and fear, because I’d once done the same to him. But he’d made me rich as well. As I passed the broken nodule of black ash on my way to the rip, I scooped up the gemstones that had spilled out. I shoved them in my pockets, where they burned against my thighs and stomach. After all, who knew how long it would be before I returned here? I wasn’t the kind of man who passed up easy money.
It was nearly two months later when we officially closed the case of the Gray Men. Their murderous rampage had ended—for now. Most parties speculated that the structure of oily pipes we’d blown up had been some kind of a power source. Maybe the monster I’d released in the midst of the building had done the trick. In any case, the machine that allowed them to open rips into our world seemed to have been rendered inoperable.
In truth, we really weren’t sure why the raids ended. Maybe it was the shock of being counterattacked successfully. Maybe the Gray Men had their own regiment of government accountants and budget jockeys running their daily lives, just as we did. When the costs grew too high, the risks too great, perhaps someone on their side pulled the plug on the project. Whatever the reason, they had stopped coming, and I received the majority of the credit for stopping them.
Jenna drove out to see me soon after I picked up the keys to my new home. She was impressed, as she’d never seen the mini-mansion before. Standing in the golden afternoon light on the north terrace, the view was breathtaking. We looked down together over a yard full of freshly planted palm trees. Downtown Las Vegas sprawled in the distance, filling the flatlands encircled by stark moonscape mountains.
“Isn’t it a little creepy out here—at night, I mean?” Jenna asked me.
I smiled, refilling her glass with fresh chardonnay. “The cultists don’t hold their little meetings here anymore,” I said.
“But people have died here.”
“A few,” I admitted. “But I haven’t seen their ghosts yet.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, you’re wondering how I can sleep in a place that attracted the Gray Men more than most. They liked coming here. They did it multiple times.”
Jenna and I were friends again. She’d taken the news of Robert’s death hard, despite the fact he’d run out on her. I’d learned their whirlwind romance had been a brief, intense thing. Just the sort of relationship that Las Vegas weddings were famous for consummating. But in some ways, I think the brevity of her love affair with Robert helped her get over him faster. She’d been with him a few months, married, and then had it officially annulled on the basis of his disappearance. It was nothing to be proud of, but they were scars that would heal in time.
We sipped from our glasses and gazed down on the metropolis together. From this vantage point, I better understood why rich people liked to build houses on hillsides. It felt as if you owned the world.
“Did Rostok buy the house for you?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “No, I did that on my own.”
“You could afford this?”
“I had a bit of money, but not enough for this place. One thing that helped—it was a foreclosure and I got it at auction.”
“What else helped?” she pressed.