Holly understood they were kind words. In truth, perhaps the first ones she’d heard in a long time. Walking the streets again, she eyed the girls who walked there with her. They had glazed eyes and painted faces. No one had heels less than three inches high.
Holly opened her purse and sucked in all the special medications she had left inside it. When there was nothing left but makeup, she felt a little better and a little worse at the same time.
An hour later she was still wandering the streets. By this time, she had decided to turn things around—to go into business for herself. She needed more money, she needed it fast, and she needed it easy. She knew how attractive young ladies in Las Vegas made things like that happen. She had to turn a trick. She’d had a number of bad boyfriends that had made her feel like a hooker, but she’d never really been one. Maybe this was the night to take that last step.
Holly eyed the other streetwalkers, but didn’t want to try her first play with witnesses nearby. She didn’t want the pros to laugh at her. She stumbled down a street that was darker than the rest and waited until a big car came cruising along with two men in it. The car was weaving a bit, and she figured they were probably as high as she was. She glimpsed the passenger’s face. He didn’t look too old or too ugly. She flagged them down.
To her surprise, the car swerved toward her. After a stunned second in the headlights, she scrambled to move out of the way. The car’s engine revved high, as if the driver were flooring it. Did they want to kill her? Shock melted into fear.
The front tires twisted, throwing the car into a half spin. Sliding sideways, it hit the curb and flipped over. She threw herself out of the way, but what really saved her was a lamppost. The car plowed into it, sliding on its back.
It was then that Holly recognized the car. It was purple and black. Made long ago when cars were heavier and longer and full of thick steel. It was Tony’s Cadillac.
Holly got to her feet, shaking. She took quivering steps forward. Was Tony trying to kill her now?
The passenger had been ejected and was lying on the sidewalk, motionless. The driver caught her attention first, however. It was Tony himself, the man in the silver suit who had fired her only an hour ago. He crawled out of his window. The jagged safety glass cut his hands but he kept crawling slowly, relentlessly.
She walked close and stood over him. “Are you crazy, Tony?” she asked.
Tony rolled up his eyes to look at her, and she saw sand burbling from his mouth. She thought at first it was vomit, but then she realized it really was sand. Some of it was wet and dark, but as more gushed out, it turned dry and seemed endless. It gushed from him as he lay there at her feet shivering and dying.
The sand inside him was dry, she thought. Didn’t that mean there had to be an awful lot of it? Didn’t that mean it had to be fresh? It wasn’t possible. His eyes were open. They were bulging and every red capillary stood out on the round whites. He appeared to be just as surprised at his death as she was to witness it.
At this point, I touched her shoulder. We both stopped walking. I looked into her face, frowning. She didn’t have the look of a liar, which I found very disturbing considering the insane nature of her story. She had the look of someone who was remembering something traumatic. She was staring at the street, lost.
I told myself I shouldn’t doubt her. After all, hadn’t I just encountered some very strange people at the sanatorium? Wasn’t I using sunglasses as universal lock picks? How could I doubt Holly after what I’d seen?
“How could he have been filled with sand?” I asked.
She shrugged, shaking her head. “I don’t know. I just remember staring down in a daze. I didn’t even scream. Being mildly high helped.”
I started walking again. She joined me. “Am I in this story?” I asked.
“Yeah, I was getting to you.”
“Keep talking,” I said. “It’s just getting good.”
She went on.
Tony was so full of sand, she said, that his belly looked distended with it. She backed away from the bizarre sight. She wanted to comfort him, but she could not. She was so stunned and horrified by what she saw—something that could not be.
When Tony had finally stopped squirming and lay still, she remembered the second man and stepped around the car to where I lay.
“You were a crumpled lump on the concrete,” she told me. “Really, I can’t understand how you are walking next to me now. You were in worse shape than Tony—but you weren’t choking out sand. You had a lot of cuts and bruises and your leg was twisted at an impossible angle.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I made sure you were breathing,” she said. “After that, I thought I recognized you. I knelt beside you and realized who you were. It took me a minute or so, but I remembered your picture from your blog, which I’d spent some time reading when I was trying to understand Lavita’s murder.”