I shrugged. “Don’t have it.”
McKesson looked like he wanted to lunge at me from across the table. “Just taking it from me was your sixth felony by my count.”
“You’ve got a fair number of them racked up yourself,” I said, enjoying the process of baiting him for a change. I saw his face grow purple. I knew he couldn’t go back to the station having lost his gun and his suspect. He would be humiliated.
I put up a flat palm to halt his next tirade. “Calm down. I left it in the car. Before you ask, your cuffs are there too.”
The detective showed me his teeth and gave a tiny snort, nodding. “Smooth,” he said. He stood up then and fished inside his coat. I thought for a second he was pulling out a twenty to pay for the meal after all. I was disappointed when he threw down a business card with his name and cell number on it. “If you ever feel like turning yourself in, or you have a wild flash of returning memories, give me a call, Draith,” he said.
As he left, I called out after him, “You want to know how to find me?”
“I’ll find you,” he said, pausing at the door. “All I have to do is follow the trail of bodies.”
I paid the tab with Tony’s folded twenties and walked out soon afterward. Somehow, I didn’t feel relieved in the slightest after my encounter with the law. I now understood much more thoroughly why Holly had told me to avoid them. Still, I had made a connection. McKesson and I had met, sized each other up, and both lived through the experience.
What the hell, I thought. For all I knew, it would blossom into a wonderful friendship. Somehow, however, I doubted it.
I wandered the Strip for an hour or so, thinking hard. There were tourists and palm trees everywhere. The tourists seemed to fit the scene. I tried to recall if the city had always had so many palm trees, but couldn’t. Maybe they were more noticeable because they were moving. Their fronds waved and rattled in the cool autumn winds.
I’d learned a lot about what was going on in this town, and some of it was very hard to believe. I did believe it, however. My acceptance of the situation taught me something about myself. I decided that this had to be one of my personality traits, or based upon a personal philosophy. I knew I believed in playing the cards life dealt me, rather than whining or dreaming about a better hand. I was a pragmatic person. I didn’t believe in witches or aliens—but if you plunked one down in front of me and it performed as advertised, I would change my mind on the spot. Maybe that sort of flexibility had allowed me to survive in this tough city full of strange people, things, and events.
As best I could sum up the whole situation, I was caught up in the center of a struggle between powerful people. They called themselves “The Community” and they were a distrustful, secretive bunch. I was reminded of the organized crime families that had run this city in the past, when this was the center of vice in the nation. In recent years, with the spread of vice into the diffuse online environment, their power had faded somewhat. Something new and possibly worse had come here in their place.
This new power was based, as far as I understood it, on objects or locations. They performed various tricks, such as Tony’s sunglasses making metals soft and flexible. I supposed Meng’s object, that hood ornament, gave her the power to teleport people here and there. I could see how useful that could be. Being able to open a lock was one thing, being able to pop a rival into a room with no exit was quite a bit more powerful. Meng had indicated, however, that her object worked within a domain. I suspected that meant it would only work in and around the sanatorium.
Tony’s sunglasses seemed to be different. They had worked at different spots around the city. Looking back on our conversation, I had to surmise that Meng had decided to let me go with the sunglasses to snoop around for her. Perhaps during our interview, while I sat there smugly with my pistol, she had really been deciding my fate. Maybe it had been within her power to instantly kill me. If she could have sent me anywhere, she could have popped me ten floors up into the air and dropped me onto the concrete. Or, maybe she could have put me into a sewage tank full of bubbling liquid far below the earth to drown. Instant death had been facing me, and I had been blissfully clueless. I guessed she had given me the sunglasses and let me go so I could use them to gather information. So far, they had been a significant help.