Michael Connelly - Murder in Vegas

He might have answered, he might have turned with her, taken her arm, walked over the bridge and into the glass and neon palace across the way; might have, but he saw it coming, saw the smothering gray wave rolling toward him-he’d never seen it before, always been taken by surprise when it smashed him down-and so he stood and looked at her and then he shook his head. “Something I have to do,” he said.

She nodded. “Later?”

He didn’t have an answer to that. “Thanks,” he said.

“For what?”

“Luck.”

He turned, walked east.

The airport was close; half an hour of walking as the sun stalked higher into the sky, he was almost there. A plane was landing. Shirt-sleeved men, women in shorts would soon be grabbing their bags, jostling each other in their rush to get to the illusion, the lies. Some, so desperately eager to believe, would stop in the terminal to play the slots.

Another ten minutes and he was past it (it was so small, really, when you thought of airports and not of magic gates to fabulous kingdoms). He kept walking, following the road.

After another hour he was alone; everything had stayed behind. Or maybe the gray wave had come and swept it all away. Or maybe-this, he thought, coughing in the heat, the dryness, this was what was true-maybe everything was nothing, it had faded away, it was never here at all. This was here: the sand, the wind. In the shimmer at the corner of his eye he saw Angel. He turned. She was not there. In the other direction, Lily, and she also was not there. He smiled: looking into the swaying waves of heat above the asphalt, he did not see Bennie, so fuck you, Bennie.

Another hour, or maybe less, or more, and the road began to curve north, into the hills. It didn’t face into the sun now, so Taylor left it, stepped from it onto the hard flat sand to keep heading east, as though that were home. The sun blinded him, pushed against him like walking into wind. Or water. He was having trouble breathing, he was choking in the heat. Like the wave! The desert, the sun; the thick gray wave-no difference! The smothering heat, the enveloping fog-the same thing!

Taylor laughed, cracking the marble mask, laughed to finally know this.

East, heading east, he walked out over the sand. Grit scraped his face, clung to his skin like salt spray.

He walked.

Sweat poured down him.

He walked.

Like wading into the ocean, deeper, deeper, before the dive, the last, ecstatic plunge.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

The same thing.

10:00 a.m., April 20 Red Rock Canyon, Nevada

Pansy Reynard lay on her belly inside a camouflaged bird blind, high-power Zeiss binoculars to her eyes, a digital sound amplifier hooked over her right ear, charting every movement and sound made by her observation target, an Aplomado falcon hatchling. As Pansy watched, the hatchling stretched his wings to their full thirty-inch span and gave them a few tentative flaps as if gathering courage to make his first foray out of the nest. He would need some courage to venture out, she thought. The ragged, abandoned nest his mother had appropriated for her use sat on a narrow rock ledge 450 vertical feet above the desert floor.

“Go, baby,” Pansy whispered when the chick craned back his neck and flapped his wings again. This was hour fourteen of her assigned nest watch. She felt stiff and cramped, and excited all at once. There had been no reported Aplomado falcon sightings in Nevada since 1910. For a mated Aplomado falcon pair to appear in the Red Rock Canyon area less than twenty miles west of the tawdry glitz and endless noise of Las Vegas, was singular, newsworthy even. But for the pair to claim a nest and successfully hatch an egg was an event so unexpected as to be considered a miracle by any committed raptor watcher, as Pansy Reynard considered herself to be.

The hatchling watch was uncomfortable, perhaps dangerous, because of the ruggedness of the desert canyons, the precariousness of Pansy’s rocky perch in a narrow cliff-top saddle opposite the nest, and the wild extremes of the weather. But the watch was very likely essential to the survival of this wonder child. It had been an honor, Pansy felt, to be assigned a shift towatch the nest. And then to have the great good fortune to be on site when the hatchling first emerged over the top of the nest was, well, nearly overwhelming.

Pansy lowered her binocs to wipe moisture from her eyes, but quickly raised them again so as not to miss one single moment in the life of this sleek-winged avian infant. She had been wakened inside her camouflage shelter at dawn by the insistent chittering of the hatchling as he demanded to be fed. From seemingly nowhere, as Pansy watched, the mother had soared down to tend him, the forty-inch span of her black and white wings as artful and graceful as a beautiful Japanese silk-print kite. The sight of the mother made Pansy almost forgive Lyle for standing her up the night before.

Almost forgive Lyle: This was supposed to be a two-man shift. Lyle, a pathologist with the Department of Fish and Game, was a fine bird-watcher and seemed to be in darned good physical shape. But he was new to the Las Vegas office and unsure about his readiness to face the desert overnight. And he was busy. Or so he said.

Pansy had done her best to assure Lyle that he would be safe in her hands. As preparation, she had packed two entire survival kits, one for herself and one for him, and had tucked in a very good bottle of red wine to make the long chilly night pass more gently. But he hadn’t come. Hadn’t even called.

Pansy sighed, curious to know which he had shunned, an evening in her company or the potential perils of the place. She had to admit there were actual, natural challenges to be addressed. It was only mid-April, but already the desert temperatures reached the century mark before noon. When the sun was overhead, the sheer vertical faces of the red sandstone bluffs reflected and intensified the heat until everything glowed like-and felt like-the inside of an oven. There was no shade other than the feathery shadows of spindly yucca and folds in the rock formations.

To make conditions yet more uncomfortable, it was sandstorm season. Winds typically began to pick up around noon, and could drive an impenetrable cloud of sand at speeds surpassing eighty miles an hour until sunset. When the winds blew, there was nearly no way to escape both the heat and the pervasive, intrusive blast of sand. Even cars were useless as shelter.With windows rolled up and without the AC turned on you’d fry in a hurry. With the AC turned on, both you and the car’s engine would be breathing grit. If you could somehow navigate blind and drive like hell, you might drive clear of the storm before sand fouled the engine. But only if you could navigate blind.

People like Pansy who knew the area well might find shelter in random hollows among the rocks, such as the niche where the hatchling sat in his nest. Or the well prepared, for instance Pansy, might hunker down inside a zip-up shelter made to military specs for desert troops, like the one that was tucked inside her survival pack. Or navigate using digital GPS via satellite-Global Positioning System.

Not an environment for neophytes, Pansy conceded, but she’d had high hopes for Lyle, and had looked forward to an evening alone with him and the falcons under the vast blackness of the desert sky, getting acquainted.

Pansy knew she could be a bit off-putting at first meeting. But in that place, during that season, Pansy was in her métier and at her best. Her preparations for the nest watch, she believed, were elegant in their simplicity, completeness, and flexibility: a pair of lightweight one-man camouflage all-weather shelters, plenty of water, a basic all-purpose tool, meals-ready-to-eat, a bodacious slingshot in case snakes or vultures came to visit the nest, good binocs, a two-channel sound amplifier to eavesdrop on the nest, a handheld GPS locator, and a digital palm-sized video recorder. Except for the water, each kit weighed a meager twenty-seven pounds and fit into compact, waterproof, dust proof saddlebags she carried on her all-terrain motorcycle. The bottle of wine and two nice glasses were tucked into a quick-release pocket attached to the cycle frame. She had everything: shelter, food, water, tools, the falcon, a little wine. But no Lyle.