And then something occurred to me.
* * *
—
The door to my mother’s lodge was still open.
I walked in.
The silence blared.
Kara had taken the Kimber, but that wasn’t why I had returned.
I went upstairs, found the bedroom Kara had been using. The closet was still full of her clothes. A glass of water rested on the bedside table.
I entered the bathroom. Kara’s toiletries covered the vanity, and among them I saw what I’d been looking for. I picked up the hairbrush, examined it closely, and registered the faintest glow of hope.
Still trapped among the bristles were several strands of my sister’s hair, and one of them still had the follicle attached.
I LEFT LATE THAT night, heading west out of southern Colorado, and as the first hint of dawn brought color to the sky, I found myself on the deserted roads of Monument Valley, the sandstone spires catching rays of early sunlight, even as the lowlands lingered in the purple, predawn gloom.
I pulled over onto the shoulder to give myself a break.
Stepped outside.
The silence was towering.
Not even a breath of wind, a wisp of cloud.
And as I watched the light advance down the otherworldly buttes toward the floor of a valley that had once been a Paleozoic sea, I took comfort in the permanence of this landscape.
The desert lay under a fragile inch of snow, and all around me were red mesas and pinnacles that had existed for hundreds of millions of years before humans ruled the Earth and would continue to exist long after we were gone.
* * *
—
It was a late January evening, and still a hundred degrees as I sped down I-15 toward Vegas. Several miles away, the spectacle of the Strip exploded from the desert basin like the fantastical bloom of some alien flower.
I approached the clusterfuck of casinos, passing the Meta Frame at the north end—a supertall hotel built in the shape of a one-thousand-meter picture frame, where the picture was a continuous projection of random social media wall feeds.
Amid the gravity-defying statement pieces of casino architecture cowered the smaller, dingier, nearing-their-expiration-date relics of forty, fifty, and sixty years ago.
Rolling down the Strip, wafts of weed and vomit and urine and alcohol and the perfumes of showgirls infiltrated the van.
I passed the radiant, sunlit water of the Bellagio fountains. Once a day, they used real water. The rest of the time, it was holograms.
Caesars Palace had been razed, and in its place a global multiconglomerate had built Tower of Babel—a veritable man-made mountain that soared exactly one mile over the Strip. A greenway called the Hanging Gardens started at the base of the tower, made a winding ascent around the structure of the building, and finally topped out, after ten miles, at the pinnacle. All along the greenway, there were gardens, stores, restaurants, cafés, long stretches of walking paths, digital water features, places to stop and sit and observe the shimmering sprawl of the city and the desert beyond.
At the south end of the Strip, the newest, most striking feature of Vegas shone blue against the early evening sky. It was called Blue Earth—an immense sphere that glittered like a disco ball in the desert sun and glowed like a striking replica of Earth at night.
The Strip was surrounded by shitty-looking tenements—block housing for the people who made Vegas run.
And surrounding the tenements, like an outer circle of hell, was the rest of Las Vegas, abandoned twenty years ago after Lake Mead dried up.
I drove through the empty streets, dodging trash and debris.
To the west, the sun was sinking into California, augmenting the color of the Mojave Desert from orange to red to magenta to purple.
And then it was gone, the Vegas suburbs dark, the casinos a neon bloom.
* * *
—
I parked several blocks away from a building that had once been an abandoned Walmart, climbed out of the Sprinter, and started walking down the silent street.
As I approached, I pulled the bottle of whiskey out of the old coat I’d bought at a thrift store on my way out of Colorado. I opened the bottle, poured a bit of whiskey on my coat, then took a swig and spit it out.
The parking lot was empty. Light poles were toppled everywhere. And there were burned-out husks of cars and the remnants of several homeless encampments—shredded tents and oil drums and the detritus of hopelessness.
There was no moon, but the starlight guided my way.
The old entrances on the fa?ade of the store had been boarded up and rendered impassable.
I walked along the side of the building, my gait a drunken shuffle, and even before I turned the corner, I could smell the cigarette smoke and the imperceptible scent of cheap cologne.
I came around the back side of the building. In the distance, midway down its length, I saw four black SUVs parked in the vicinity of the loading bays.
Voices reached me. They were speaking Russian.
Five men. No. Seven.
I was fifty feet away before they turned their attention to me. I had no doubt they had seen me several minutes ago. There would be cameras placed around the exterior of the building. But I’d been taken for a vagrant, stumbling around drunk in the dark.
They went silent, watching me, waiting to see if I would pass on by.
I stopped and turned and faced them.
A mountainous man in a black tracksuit stepped out of the small crowd.
“Keep moving,” he said, waving his cigarette down the alley.
I started toward him, maintaining my faltering stride.
“You deaf?”
He met me ten feet from the others, moving with a light-footedness and grace that belied his size. The man towered over me—it was as if a boulder had sprouted arms and legs.
“Is Feld inside?”
I absorbed his reaction in the starlight: surprise. He lifted his left arm and spoke in his native tongue into the end of his sleeve. After thirty seconds, his eyes shifted; he was listening to someone in his earpiece.
He responded, “Da, da, da.”
The corners of his lips upturned into a smile that was completely disconnected from his eyes—he was about to hurt me, and the prospect of violence delighted him.
His right arm moved for a gun in the back of his waistband, which I could see in the chrome reflection of one of the SUVs’ side mirrors.
I kicked his left knee straight on. It made one of the worst sounds I’d ever heard—a cracking pop—and as he stumbled back, I reached into his waistband, pulled an MP-443 Grach, spun it in my hand, and cracked his head open with the butt of the pistol.
As he dropped, I shot the third, first, fourth, and sixth man in the precise order of who displayed the most coordination and grace. None did, really. It was inelegant chaos as their friends dropped all around them and they clumsily pulled their weapons.
The second man had been smoking a cigarette, and his hesitation saved his life. The fifth, and wisest, of the group had simply raised his hands.
“These bay doors the way in?”
“Yes,” the fifth man said.
I pulled a zip tie out of my belt loop and tossed it to him.
“Tie him up,” I said, keeping the gun trained on them as he cinched the second man’s wrists behind his back but also watching the cameras pointed at the alley.
If they were watching me, they had several options. Send more men—assuming they had them—or try to escape another way.
“Is Feld here?”