Part 13 (1/2)

”Hey,” I said. ”I told you I didn't remember where I'd heard the name.”

He stared. I stared back. He glanced down at the Gameboy with a rude noise.

”Hey,” I said, to make him throw a pillow, ”what was your name again?”

n.o.body sleeps in Las Vegas, and so neither do I. But if I did, I have to admit, ghosts would have a pretty good means of waking you up. Nothing like a hovering cold spot on the back of your neck to get you out of bed in a hurry.

I managed not to shriek, which was good, because Stewart was sort of curled up on my chest watching a Burt Reynolds movie-I know, but far be it from me to complain about my boyfriend's taste-and I might have shocked him into apoplexy. Instead, I sucked in a breath and disentangled myself-over his protests-before sliding out of bed to face my molester.

The ghost looked awfully familiar, as if I had seen him somewhere before. But he was just one of the little ghosts of the dam, harmless and inoffensive. By the rocking and beckoning, he wanted something from me.

”La.s.sie wants something,” I said to Stewart, because the ghost's demeanor reminded me of a worried dog.

”Shh,” Stewart said. ”This is the good bit.”

”But the ghost,” I repeated, ”wants something.”

”Oh, and I'm supposed to figure out what?” But he hit the mute b.u.t.ton, sat up, and drawled, ”h.e.l.lo, sailor.”

I winced mostly out of habit. He wasn't actually camping it up all that much.

”I feel like I know him,” I said, while the ghost stared at me with hemorrhage-spotted eyes.

”Jeff Soble.” Stewart stood. Of course he'd know the guy's name. ”Died on the dam. People die all the time, you know. They get unlucky. Something random and stupid goes wrong.”

”I know,” I said. We both knew. You don't get to be a genius until you're buried and sung over. Stewart and me, we died young.

Looking at Stewart, I realized I didn't remember how I'd died. I opened my mouth to ask, scratching idly under my eye patch, and realized something else. That s.p.a.ce-that hollow place of just not knowing-felt like a cold shadow had slid off my soul. Whatever had happened, it hadn't been pretty or pleasant, and I breathed easier in its absence.

The ghost beckoned again. I caught the motion in my peripheral vision; I was still looking at Stewart. ”What do we do?”

”Follow him,” Stewart said.

So we did, Stewart grabbing his keys on the way out the door.

Stewart's mode of transportation is inevitably some terrifying old beater replete with rust spots-hard to come by here in the desert-and hard-light peeling. The Nevada sun can fade even automobile paint to creamy yellow in a decade or two. This old Corolla had been red once, about the color of tomato soup. You could still see the color around the frame when you opened the doors. The amazing thing was that it was in perfect working order, which was the other inevitability about Stewart's old cars. He loved to tinker with them, and if you ignored small inconveniences like the lack of modern safety features, they ran like dreams. He usually wound up reselling them for 50 percent of book value to random people who needed them more than he did, and then finding another old junker to fix up the next week.

I like Stewart a lot. I mean, besides the obvious.

Anyway, I piled into the pa.s.senger seat-the desert night hadn't actually turned chill, but by comparison with the day, the mid-eighties felt on the cool side-and turned the radio off before he got the key into the ignition. He shot me a dirty look, but trust me, Stewart's taste in music isn't any better than his taste in movies.

Or men.

The car started right up, though he had to thump the dash to make the headlights glow. We had been staying at the Suncoast; it's a locals place, low-key and off the Strip. So we just headed back down the slope where the western side of the city rises toward the mountains. It's all indistinguishable, interchangeable new construction up there, and every year the cougars come back to their winter range to find houses have sprung up where there was nothing but cactus before, and there's nothing for them to eat but bug-eyed rat dogs.

Unfortunately for the cougars, people get upset when they behave in this perfectly understandable fas.h.i.+on, even though the houses reach all the way up to the canyons now.

The ghost surfed in our headlights, almost washed away by their glow and the light rising like steam from the valley. We didn't have to descend far to lose the view; once we were on the Summerlin Parkway the city dropped out of sight, vanis.h.i.+ng because we were now a part of it. Even this late, there was still a steady stream of cars once we reached the 95. The highways don't really grow quiet until after three.

Decatur still had some traffic, too, but it wasn't anything like rush hour. Our gridlock isn't bad by West Coast standards, but people keep moving in and it keeps on getting worse. It doesn't help that there's a shortage of streets that go all the way through, either north-south or east-west. A lot of them end mysteriously in a desert lot or the wall of a housing development, only to pick up again as if nothing had intervened, like a relations.h.i.+p on the other side of a secret affair.

By the time we turned onto Carey, I had a p.r.i.c.kly feeling, and the traffic had thinned to nothing. I could still see the cars if I leaned over and glanced in the rearview mirror; they flowed north and south on Decatur in a soft intermittent stream, red and white like signal fires. I longed to be among them.

But Stewart was driving, and the ghost was leading us into darkness. I settled back and crossed my arms over my seatbelt, wondering why I felt the urge to strike out, to escape.

”Oh, G.o.d,” I said. ”Pull over. Pull over.”

When Stewart pulled off onto the crunching hardpan shoulder, I bailed out of the little car and crouched in the shadow of the door, vomiting. The ghost hovered, as if my illness concerned it. Or maybe I was slowing it down. It didn't matter. We were here. The ghost led us down a gravel drive past a ranch sign and a mailbox adorned with the name Bukvajova in reflective letters. ”I feel like I should know that name,” I said, and Stewart looked at me funny.

He stopped the car well back from the house and touched the headlights off. We opened the doors in unison, like thugs in a Tarantino movie-you ever stop to think how much Hollywood has changed the way we perceive and pattern reality?-and slid out into the warm, windy dark.

The breeze had risen. I could hear howling and chiming from the bottom of the drive. ”I bet the neighbors love that,” Stewart said, locking his door.

”It's a bottle tree,” I said.

”How do you know that?”

I checked to make sure my own door had latched. ”It's been here for years.”

”And you don't remember where you've heard the name Bukvajova before?”

”Should I?”

”Oh, Jack-Jackie,” he said. ”Something is definitely up.”

I should probably have understood what he was driving at, but I just wound up shaking my head. It was a funny sensation, like when you know the answer to a question, or the name of a thing you're pointing at, and just can't pull it forward into the conscious part of your brain.

”So who lives here?”

”A-” I started to say, and realized I didn't know the answer to the question. ”I don't know.”

”Of course you know,” Stewart said. ”What were you just about to say?”

”A hedge-witch.” The bottle tree howled torment in the meandering wind. ”She's a hedge-witch. She drinks ghosts. I was just here today.”

”Vegas forgets things,” Stewart said. ”You had better not be picking up that particular power. Because I'm not going to visit you in the home.”

The words were hard, the voice fragile and tight-strung. I reached out and squeezed Stewart's hand. You spend a hundred years with somebody, you get to know their defense mechanisms. ”We'll figure it out.”

”You're not going to argue with me?”

I shrugged. We were close enough to the house now that the light from the kitchen window washed his face. ”What would arguing get me? Something is obviously weird around here, and we have to figure it out.”

”Right,” he said. ”So the hedge-witch Bukvajova lives here, and you don't remember why you know that or why you know about her bottle tree. And the ghost of Jeff Soble is leading you.”

”Leading us.”