FOURTEEN

      Flensing knives of desert sun stripped the air to the bone, and the shimmers of heat rising off the airport Tarmac were as dry as the breath of a dead sea.

      The Learjet and crew would stand by to return Ryan to southern California the following morning.

      A black Mercedes sedan and chauffeur awaited him at the private-plane terminal. The driver introduced himself as George Zane, an employee of Wilson Mott’s security firm.

      He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. Instead of shoes, he wore boots, and the blunt toes looked as though they might be reinforced with steel caps.

      Two knots of pale scar tissue marked his shaved head at the brink of his brow. Tall, muscular, with a thick neck, with wide nostrils and intense eyes as purple-black as plum skins, Zane looked as though his lineage included bull blood, suggesting that the scars on his skull resulted from the surgical removal of horns.

      He was not only a driver but also a bodyguard, and more. After Zane stowed Ryan’s suitcase in the trunk, he opened a rear door of the sedan for him and presented him with a disposable cell phone.

      “While you’re here,” Zane said, “make any calls with this. They can never be traced to you.”

      Like a limousine, this customized sedan was equipped with a motorized privacy panel between the front seat and the back.

      Through the tinted windows, Ryan gazed at the barren desert mountains in the distance until a maze of soaring hotels and casinos blocked the natural world from view.

      At the hotel where Ryan would stay, Zane parked in a VIP zone. While Ryan waited in the car, the driver carried the suitcase inside.

      When Zane returned, he opened a back door to give an electronic- key card to Ryan. “Room eleven hundred. It’s a suite. It’s registered to me. Your name appears nowhere, sir.”

      As they pulled away from the hotel, the disposable cell phone rang, and Ryan answered it.

      A woman said, “Are you ready to see Rebecca’s apartment?”

      Rebecca Reach. Samantha’s mother.

      “Yes,” said Ryan.

      “It’s number thirty-four, on the second floor. I’m already inside.”

      She terminated the call.

      Away from the fabled Strip, Vegas was a parched suburban sprawl. Pale stucco houses reflected the bloodless Mojave sun, and many landscape schemes employed pebbles, rocks, cactuses, and succulents.

      The palm fronds looked brittle. The olive trees appeared more gray than green.

      Ribbons of heat, rising from vast parking lots, caused shopping malls to shimmer and shift shape like the underwater city in his troubling dream.

      Sand, dry weeds, and litter choked tracts of undeveloped land.

      The Oasis, an upscale two-story apartment complex, was a cream-colored structure with a roof of turquoise tiles. The privacy wall that concealed its large courtyard was inlaid with a caravan of ceramic Art Deco camels that matched the color of the roof.

      Behind the apartments stood garages, as well as guest parking shaded by horizontal trellises festooned with purple bougainvillea.

      Zane put down the privacy panel and both front windows before switching off the engine. “You best walk in alone. Be casual.”

      After stepping out of the car, Ryan considered returning at once to it and calling off this questionable operation.

      The memory of Spencer Barghest standing under the pepper tree with Samantha, his thatch of hair whiter than white in the moonlight, reminded Ryan of what he needed to know and why he needed to know it.

      Beyond the back gate lay a covered walkway to the courtyard, but the gate could be opened only with a tenant’s key. He had to walk around to the public entrance.

      The wrought-iron front gate featured a palm-tree motif and had been finished to resemble the green patina of weathered copper.

      At the center of the courtyard lay a large pool and spa with turquoise-tile coping. Faint fumes of chlorine trembled in the scorched air and seemed to vibrate in Ryan’s nostrils.

      Sun-browned and oiled, a few residents lay on lounge chairs, courting melanoma. None looked toward him.

      The deep deck that served the second-floor apartments formed the roof of a continuous veranda benefiting the first-floor units. Lush landscaping included queen palms of various heights, which did much to screen the three wings of the building from one another.

      He climbed exterior stairs and found Apartment 34. The door stood ajar, and it opened wider as he approached.

      Waiting for him in the foyer was an attractive brunette with a honeymoon mouth and funereal eyes the gray of gravestone granite.

      She worked for Wilson Mott. Although entirely feminine, she gave the impression that she could protect whatever virtue she might still possess, and could leave any would-be assailant with impressions of her shoe heels in his face.

      Closing the door behind Ryan, she said, “Rebecca is a day-shift dealer. She’s at the casino for hours yet.”

      “Have you found anything unusual?”

      “I haven’t looked, sir. I don’t know what you’re after. I’m just here to guard the door and get you out quickly in a pinch.”

      “What’s your name?”

      “If I told you, it wouldn’t be the truth.”

      “Why not?”

      “What we’re doing here’s illegal. I prefer anonymity.”

      From her manner, he inferred that she did not approve of this mission or of him. Of course, his life, not hers, was in jeopardy.

      In Rebecca Reach’s absence, the air conditioner was set at seventy degrees, which suggested she did not live on a tight budget.

      Ryan started his search in the kitchen, half expecting to find an array of poisons in the pantry.