Five kids - well, too bad. And listening to Dick's conceited chatter, hearing him start to describe his Mexican "amorous conquests," he thought how "queer" it was, "egomaniacal." Imagine going all out to impress a man you were going to kill, a man who wouldn't be alive ten minutes from now - not if the plan he and Dick had devised went smoothly. And why shouldn't it? The setup was ideal - exactly what they had been looking for during the three days it had taken them to hitchhike from California to Nevada and across Nevada and Wyoming into Nebraska. Until now, however, a suitable victim had eluded them. Mr. Bell was the first prosperous-seeming solitary traveler to offer them a lift. Their other hosts had been either truck drivers or soldiers - and, once, a pair of Negro prize fighters driving a lavender Cadillac. But Mr. Bell was perfect. Perry felt inside a pocket of the leather windbreaker he was wearing. The pocket bulged with a bottle of Bayer aspirin and with a jagged, fist-size rock wrapped in a yellow cotton cowboy hand-kerchief. He unfastened his belt, a Navajo belt, silver-buckled and studded with turquoise beads; he took it off, flexed it, placed it across his knees. He waited. He watched the Nebraska prairie rolling by, and fooled with his harmonica - made up a tune and played it and waited for Dick to pronounce the agreed-upon signal: "Hey, Perry, pass me a match." Whereupon Dick was supposed to seize the steering wheel, while Perry, wielding his hand-kerchief-wrapped rock, belabored the salesman's head - "opened it up." Later, along some quiet side road, use would be made of the belt with the sky-blue beads. Meanwhile, Dick and the condemned man were trading dirty jokes. Their laughter irritated Perry; he especially disliked Mr. Bell's outbursts - hearty barks that sounded very much like the laughter of Tex John Smith, Perry's father. The memory of his father's laughter increased his tension; his head hurt, his knees ached. He chewed three aspirin and swallowed them dry. Jesus! He thought he might vomit, or faint; he felt certain he would if Dick delayed "the party" much longer. The light was dimming, the road was straight, with neither house nor human being in view - nothing but land winter-stripped and as somber as sheet iron. Now was the time, now. He stared at Dick, as though to communicate this realization, and a few small signs - a twitching eyelid, a mustache of sweat drops - told him that Dick had already reached the same conclusion. And yet when Dick next spoke, it was only to launch another joke. "Here's a riddle. The riddle is: What's the similarity between a trip to the bathroom and a trip to the cemetery?" He grinned. "Give up?"
"Give up."
"When you gotta go, you gotta go!" Mr. Bell barked.
"Hey, Perry, pass me a match." But just as Perry raised his hand, and the rock was on the verge of descent, something extraordinary occurred - what Perry later called "a goddam miracle." The miracle was the sudden appearance of a third hitchhiker, a Negro soldier, for whom the charitable salesman stopped. "Say, that's pretty cute," he said as his savior ran toward the car. "When you gotta go, you gotta go!"
December 16, 1959, Las Vegas, Nevada. Age and weather had removed the first letter and the last - an R and an S - thereby coining a somewhat ominous word: OOM. The word, faintly present upon a sun-warped sign, seemed appropriate to the place it publicized, which was, as Harold Nye wrote in his official K.B.I. report, "run-down and shabby, the lowest type of hotel or rooming house." The report continued: "Until a few years ago (according to information supplied by the Las Vegas police), it was one of the biggest cathouses in the West. Then fire destroyed the main building, and the remaining portion was converted into a cheap-rent rooming house." The "lobby" was unfurnished, except for a cactus plant six feet tall and a make shift reception desk; it was also uninhabited. The detective clapped his hands. Eventually, a voice, female, but not very feminine, shouted, "I'm coming," but it was five minutes before