Nobody Dies in a Casino

  “I’m ‘safe’ on a forbidden and undisclosed military installation where probably even the cleaning ladies have permission to shoot me on sight? If the snakes don’t get me first.”

  “But mostly, we’re out here to give your exceptional garden-variety common sense a chance to study some uncommon phenomena and hopefully come up with some logical explanations.”

  “Is that all? Why didn’t you just say so?”

  * * *

  Tucked in their blankets and munching cold fries, they watched the amazing heavens. Charlie raised up on an elbow occasionally to look down on a supersecret air base that didn’t exist. It looked more like an oversized, well-lighted factory complex with runways.

  Charlie, convinced her companion was suicidal and intent upon taking Libby Abigail Greene’s mother with her, consoled herself that at least Libby was seventeen. She’d inherit Charlie’s winnings in Vegas and the equity in the Long Beach condo and the college fund. And a trust would dole it out until the kid was twenty-one, in case a jerk boyfriend decided he should spend it for her.

  She had her grandmother. And Maggie Stutzman, Jeremy Fiedler, and Betty Beesom, who all lived in their little gated compound. Larry Mann would keep an eye out for Libby too. And someday Libby would get her grandmother’s money as well, not that there was much of that. The kid would not be without resources just because she would be without Charlie.

  But who would take on Edwina Greene and her hot flashes?

  The stars so very clear, the heavens so full. “This is probably the last night sky I’ll ever see.”

  Bradone laughed aloud again. Why couldn’t she go back to that safe silent laughter? “You are so melodramatic and droll. I thought you’d be happy to solve some of the mysteries that surely lie out here where Patrick Thompson flew workers who come and go from the Janet Terminal, where the bicycle cop felt he had to go before alerting the whole department, and got himself killed. It’s not Patrick we keep coming back to in our investigations, Charlie, it’s here. I maintain that Ben Hanley was a natural death. So we’ve taken care of almost half the dead bodies already, and we just got here.”

  “We don’t know who ordered any of the murders, Bradone, and we only know who performed the first one. But not to worry, I’m peaceful, composed. My stomach isn’t even hurting.” Charlie stuffed another cold, greasy A’Le’Inn fry in her mouth. “I’m resigned to my own death.”

  “No dear, the stars are with us tonight, trust me. That is, if you were accurate about the date and time of your birth. Were you, Charlie? Many people don’t know.”

  “Well, I am one of them. I’m adopted. Edwina has that information somewhere.”

  Bradone was silent for so long, you could almost hear her holding her breath. But when she spoke, the melody was gone. “You fool. You crashing imbecile. You fucking cretin. You slathering cunt. You—”

  “Well, the day is right, and the place. But the time—I think I was remembering Libby’s birth.” It felt kind of nice to be upsetting Bradone the detective for a change. “I mean, what’s the big deal?”

  “What’s the big deal?” The woman’s invective continued and grew even coarser. That generation really knew how to swear. But it was interesting that after all Charlie’s pleading before, now Bradone whispered.

  She ranted on until even her whisper grew hoarse, then sat up, letting the covers puddle around her waist. Her arms flung gestures at the sky and Charlie and the creepy earth around them.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done, Charlie Greene? You’ve added two more bodies to your death count. Ours.”

  CHAPTER 30

  THE A’LE’INN fries felt better to Charlie’s ulcer than the ground did to her butt. “Okay, so now what?”

  “Shut up.”

  Charlie lay back in her bedding, awaiting death by murder. “You sound like my mother.”

  “Then I’m elated that I never had children. Charlie, why do you hate me so?”

  “Because your presentation sucks. You come on like a spy novel. ‘Trust me, Charlie. Follow me behind enemy lines. With full unquestioning cooperation. Because I am your friend. I know all and you are stupid.’ And then it’s, ‘Oh my, it’s your fault, Charlie. You’ve put us in dire and deadly danger.’ Hell, I’m the one with a kid and a crazy mother—all you’re responsible for is a fun life, two cats, and a houseboy.”

  “You’re right. I’ve been stupid.”

  “No, babe, you’ve been manipulative. I’ve been stupid to let you get me this far. And you know what we’re going to do about it? You are going to tell me in plain language your full agenda here.”

  “Or you will do what?”

  “I will walk down to that nonexistent base and turn myself, my blankets, my pillow, and my backpack in to the authorities. And I’ll turn you in too. Your story better be good. You got yourself ten minutes, max.”

  “How do you know they won’t shoot first? Before you can say a word? Deadly force is authorized, don’t forget.”

  Charlie sat up and began rolling her blankets.

  “Okay, but you’re such a skeptic, I didn’t think you’d understand.” Bradone’s phone call from the naked telephone pole in Rachel had been to the guru astrologer who led her field trip here just a month ago. He had confirmed her reading of the charts by doing his own and helped her remember how to get to the mine tunnel. “His name is Merlin.”

  “The guy who rented you the Cherokee and told you to cut the wires on the ground sensors.” Charlie rolled up the other blanket. It was cold out here. “Cut to the chase, McKinley.”

  “He’s Merlin Johnson.”

  “You are so squirrelly, I don’t know how I could have thought you fascinating.”

  “Keep your voice down.” Bradone pulled the puddled blanket up over her shoulders.

  “Why? We’re dead anyway.”

  “Not necessarily, but our chances of being in that condition are better than they’ll probably ever be in our lives.”

  Oh yeah? You never hung from a cliff in the Canyonlands of Utah with Mitch Hilsten. But Charlie sat on one blanket and wrapped the other around her shoulders for warmth. This place was weird. The air even smelled sweet.

  Bradone, Merlin, and the rest of the group had come here to study the stars. The constellations were so snapping clear behind the astrologer now that it was really dark, Charlie could see why. But there had to be other remote areas away from city lights where they could have done that at less risk. For sure Charlie and her stargazer would have to spend the night if they weren’t captured. They’d never be able to find their way back to the mine tunnel in the deep of this night.

  “Your coming here before to study stars does not explain why you dragged me out here tonight. Nor what you plan for us now. Bradone, I really liked you. If you’d just been up front with me.”

  “There’s something about this place, Charlie, that clears the mind. Something in the air like no place else. And this place could be related to all of the deaths but Hanley from Kenosha and I don’t know about Ardith Miller. The three men who invaded Evan’s house and died for it could have been looking for those boy toys and the films of Area Fifty-one Evan showed at his screening, right? And I think either Evan or someone working for him killed them.”

  “You couldn’t have figured that out in Vegas? Tell me something new or I turn us in. I’m not kidding, Bradone.”

  “You saw the two bouncers kill the pilot. They probably killed the bicycle cop because he went to the Janet Terminal to look into things he wasn’t supposed to know about. So we’ve solved five murders and they’re all related to this place. And when we came out here before, we got more than we bargained for.”

  “Those ground soldiers got their computers together and were out to kick butt.”

  “No, we saw more than stars and airplanes. And Charlie, one of our members swears he was seeing everything through an orange haze for a week. He’d gone off on his own and disappeared for over an hour, and he too is psychic.”

&
nbsp; “Give me a break—”

  “He’d been abducted, Charlie. You may have been too.”

  This woman was logical and deductive one moment and totally off-the-wall the next. “Look, give it up. Evan Black may be able to beat a dead horse and make it live again, which I doubt, but you don’t stand a chance. Conspiracy theories are dying in video stores even, but alien abduction is out, babe. What’s that noise?” But Charlie knew.

  “Quick, cover yourself completely with both blankets and curl up around your pack and the pillow. Breathe shallow and don’t move a muscle.”

  “What, they’re going to think we’re rocks again?” But Charlie did as she was told.

  “The blanket ends mustn’t flutter in the wind. Try to keep them battened down all around. And keep your smart mouth shut.”

  This helicopter was but a whisper of the one trying to flush them from the boundary line. This one whished, where the other slashed the air. Charlie was torn between wanting to hold the blanket down and throwing it aside to see this stealthy machine. This might be a more controlled chopper, but the air it heaved around tugged at her hiding place. The earth under her vibrated.

  Fine, so the military was developing new weapons with which to defend Charlie and her livelihood. It made sense to do it in secret. She had no business being here. This was not a conspiracy. It was not an other-world experience. It was a senseless intrusion on her country’s vital secrets, which she had no need to know and wouldn’t have understood if she did.

  Maybe they’d give Charlie a chance to say that and not just shoot her first. Maybe she could promise to never talk about being here. Maybe they’d put her behind bars so Libby would not only have an “UM”—her label for unwed mother—but a jailbird for a mom.

  Charlie burped Little A’Le’Inn merlot; her stomach had the good sense to start the familiar burn. She loved her country—well, most of it. She wanted to live to see Libby graduate from high school and college. And Charlie wanted Edwina beside her so she could say, “See, I can be successful at motherhood.”

  “Charlie? You can come out now.” Bradone pulled the covers off Charlie’s head and appeared as a shadowed silhouette against the star dazzle. “Sounded like you were crying. Human, after all, are we?”

  “Go to hell.” Charlie pulled the blankets back over her face.

  “Okay, but you’re missing the best part of the show. It’s even better than—oh no. God, Charlie, don’t—”

  Charlie was trying to pull her cover aside to see what brought on the sudden panic. But the covers fought back. Damn near smothered her. “Let me out. I have to throw up.”

  By the time she’d heaved up everything she’d eaten for the last year, Charlie was tasting blood. But she was seeing orange.

  “You do a lot of that, don’t you? Keep your eyes closed.” Bradone sounded mesmerized instead of mesmerizing. She sat on her blankets in a lotus position, legs pretzeled, forearms resting on knees, hands cupped with thumbs and forefingers pressed together. The stars either gone or diluted in the brightness of the light around them.

  “Ulcer. Why should I keep my eyes closed?” Charlie moved her bedding away from the stench of vomit and sat on the other side of her companion. No point trying to hide in this brightness anyway.

  A yellow-orange globe thing rose slowly into the sky. When it stopped, it hung over the base like an artificial moon. It was not the orange thing that made her pass out the night the Mooney burned, the thing that Charlie dreaded from somewhere deep and hidden.

  “There’s medication for ulcers.” Bradone had her eyes closed, like she was in a trance. “If you look at it, it will get you.”

  “That’s for the bacterial kind.” The scene reminded Charlie of sitting on the edge of a volcano. At least the lighting did, not the temperature. Or the smell. It was a heavy citrus now. “My ulcer is caused by stress.”

  Every building on the base was lighted. The runway lights streaked along in front of the buildings and out until they were hidden behind a peak on another ridge. A higher set of ridges behind the base stopped the stars from reaching the ground. The lights of the giant complex twinkled back at the stars as the orange cleared from her vision.

  “They can be cauterized now, you know,” Dr. McKinley proclaimed. Why did older people think they knew everything?

  “Been there, done that. My ulcer is ‘persistent’ as well as nonbacterial.”

  The blinking lights of a plane approached, circled, and landed—tiny on the vast runway.

  “I am sorry, Charlie. I should never have brought you out here.” Her hat gone, her hair tousled, bathed in the odd light, Bradone made Charlie think of a high priestess in an old Stewart Granger movie.

  “Exactly what I’ve been saying all day and half the night.” They were not on the first ridge next to the nonexistent base, but on the second one back. It was higher and angled differently. She couldn’t see the entire base, but a good deal of it.

  “Be sure and keep your eyes closed, Charlie. Concentrate on keeping your mind your own.”

  “Right.” Like, you drag me all the way here to see something and then I shouldn’t look at it.

  The helicopter hovered out over the base now and Charlie couldn’t hear it at all. It began to bob up and down before the orange globe as if inviting it to dance. This orange globe was solid.

  Nothing more than a black shadow in front of the lighted globe, the helicopter had a triangular shape, no tail or tail propeller. The only propeller sat atop the point of the triangle and rotated so fast, it looked solid. The machine under it reminded Charlie of a flying pyramid with four stubby legs, one at each corner of its base.

  A flat, elongated triangular craft flew circles around both the globe and the bobbing pyramid. It flew on its side at dizzying speed.

  “As soon as we can open our eyes, Charlie, I’ll get you some bread for your stomach from one of the breakfast subs and some water. Hang on.”

  Another more conventional helicopter joined in the dance. It hovered and zigged and zagged instead of bobbing. The three smaller craft looked like dancing shadow moons around a planet.

  “Doesn’t your doctor offer dietary advice?”

  “Last time, it was ‘Stay away from raw vegetables and stress.’ Changes every time he reads about a new study in the health section of the L.A. Times. Hey, if I carried some doohickey into the Hilton that shut off power, why did it stop shutting off the power?”

  Something, somewhere, throbbed. More an air-pressure thing than a sound.

  “It could be remote-controlled, or like the little bug that warned us of the ground sensors—only built to last for a short time after being activated,” Bradone said, actually making a little sense. Maybe there was something in the air here.

  The one thing they couldn’t have found when searching her room was her purse, because she’d had it with her. Now she pulled it from her pack and felt the linings inside the compartments. Nothing. She felt along the strap and the metal things that connected it to the purse. But when she felt along the bottom of the outside, one side had two studs and the other three. And that third was about twice as big as the rest.

  “Maybe you could marry Mitch and not have to work. Yours is a stressful job.”

  “My work is the one part of my stress I enjoy.” Unlike dead bodies, menopausal mothers, hormonally overdosed daughters, and the prospect of dying right here. Or going to jail because I am right here. Could Charlie offer the stud to the armed response personnel?

  At least her government appeared to have a handle on cool new technology. That yellow-orange globe wasn’t suspended from anything visible, sitting on anything, moving in any way, not even floating. That ought to keep aggressors restrained until they could be tranquilized with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Pizza Hut, theme parks, and shock/schlock movies.

  The stationary sphere seemed too far away to be responsible for the glow from below their ridge that had reminded her of sitting on the edge of an active volcano.

  Cha
rlie was sure of that when the thing that had made her see orange the night the Mooney burned, the thing she’d dreaded asleep and awake since, the thing that was responsible for tonight’s volcano glow, rose up out of the valley between their ridge and the one bordering Groom Lake on the throbbing pressure in the air.

  The throbbing filled Charlie’s head. The orange thing filled the world.

  CHAPTER 31

  BRADONE STOOD ON the edge of the ridge, perilously close to the sickly orange mist. She screamed with her hands over her ears, as if she didn’t want to hear herself either.

  Charlie would never say so if captured, but she thought her government was beginning to overdo this. Sure the woman was about to topple into the mist, Charlie squirmed across jagged earth on a sore belly to grab her by the ankles and yank her feet out from under her.

  Bradone fell forward and would have gone over the precipice if Charlie hadn’t hung on and dug the toes of her shoes into the jagged earth.

  Duh—why wouldn’t she fall forward? You pulled her feet out from under her.

  Look, it’s easy for you to show up whenever you feel like it to be critical, but I live in this body, okay?

  Yeah, well, heads up, this body is trying to slide over a cliff again.

  The problem was not only Bradone. The problem was also the shoes Charlie had dug in the toes of to stop their slide into oblivion. Keds don’t have tough toes. It’s not like they were rushing to their doom, more like a slow, inexorable slippage. Bradone, inert and silent, as if she’d been knocked out or killed in her fall, hung about halfway over the side. All Charlie could see was her rump.

  Any more of Bradone McKinley over the edge and the weight would increase the speed of their slide toward death. Didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

  More of Bradone went over the side. Charlie couldn’t see much through the orange fog by now but knew this because her sore belly was scraped of clothing as she followed Bradone.

  Any common sense worth its salt would have commanded Charlie to let go of the dead weight of the astrologer, but there wasn’t time anyway. She had only two thoughts before death. The first was anger. Charlie was too young to die.