“Did you call the cops?”
Holly flicked her eyes downward, to the street. “I didn’t have to. Someone else did. There were others around, everyone had a phone. The cops showed up pretty fast. I’d say they were patrolling just a block or two away when they got the call.”
I nodded. It was the kind of territory cops liked to cruise through. “So,” I said, glancing at her. “You took off, right?”
Holly squirmed uncomfortably. “Well, look. I was high, trying to turn my first trick, and had just witnessed my second freaky murder of the season. Wouldn’t you be walking away fast?”
“I guess I might.”
“OK then. You have to understand, Draith, it wasn’t about you or Tony. The cops are edgy these days. They don’t like whatever it is that’s going on in this town. Out on these streets at two in the morning, nobody wants to meet up with the law.”
Holly suddenly stopped walking. “This is the spot,” she said.
I halted in surprise. I looked around. There was the lamppost. It hadn’t been sheared off, but there was a big gouge in the paint and a dent at the base. I could see white lines scratched into the concrete where the metal roof of the sliding car had scarred it.
“You got away from the cops and walked home then?” I asked. I walked around the lamppost, but didn’t get any special memories from the location.
“No, it was already too late for that. There was a cruiser coming up behind me, I heard the engine purring. There were more cars behind that first one too. I could hear them, but I didn’t dare glance back. Flashing blue and red lights washed all over these walls.”
I looked at her, surprised. “More than one car, that fast?”
“Yeah. There were no sirens, just flashers, engines, and radios that buzzed with the voices of dispatchers. They always come in packs, you know?” Holly reflected. “Lately, they like to come in overwhelming numbers, like sharks scenting blood.”
“They questioned you?”
“They did more than that. They took me in. The cops in this town are bastards, Quentin. I think they’ve all gone bad.”
I nodded thoughtfully. I doubted I’d ever meet a stripper who was in love with the law. But I didn’t press her further, as I had heard enough. She had certainly kept up her part of the bargain.
All the rest of the way to her place, I thought about Holly’s incredible story. People inexplicably smashed to pulp. Tony Montoro’s body being filled with sand. She had found Tony and me on the sidewalk and watched Tony die. I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if I hadn’t just been transported across a building and opened a safe with what appeared to be a magical pair of sunglasses.
Eventually, Holly pointed at a sagging apartment complex from the middle of the last century. “My place is on the second floor,” she said.
As we walked up the cement steps, I asked, “Did you leave me a flower?”
Holly shrugged. “Yeah. I went to Memorial Hospital to find out if Tony made it after the police let me go. He didn’t. They said you were alive, but hadn’t had any visitors. I felt sorry for you.”
“So…you bought me a geranium at the gift shop?”
She looked embarrassed.
“Thanks for the thought. But I didn’t wake up at Memorial. I woke up in the Sunset Sanatorium under the gentle care of Dr. Meng.”
I was hoping she would react to that name, but her face was a blank.
“Maybe they transferred you after patching you up,” she offered.
At the top of the stairs, she opened the door without any mystical help from me. I followed her inside and accepted a beer while she told me some of her theories about what was happening to the city.
According to Holly, everyone working on the Strip talked about the decay of the city, wondering about the cause. Some blamed online gambling, or soaring unemployment, or the city’s famously high crime rate. Holly had a less complex answer: in her opinion, the city had “moved on.” It had gone from one century to the next and changed in character as inevitably as people did while they wended their ways through life. She believed a new presence had formed in the midst of the crumbling casinos. Something had replaced the old source of energy and vibrancy. Just as the city had once grown out of the desert sands like a mushroom.
“The economy has fallen apart in Vegas, just as it has everywhere else,” I said, unwilling to see something more sinister.
“I think it’s more than that,” she said.
“We used to have people flowing here, bringing their millions in gambling money,” she said, “but now this new source of energy has brought worse things.”
I thought about what she was suggesting. That a new kind of life force had come to the city. That this new attraction wasn’t as wholesome as a natural drive toward sex and greed.
“Sometimes, when enough sinning is done in single place,” she said, “I think it attracts the attention of bad things.”