The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [92]
She pushed her way back up front and assessed the men onstage one at a time. The drummer had a wedding ring. The guitar player had a photo taped to the back of his ax. It might have been a girlfriend or it might have been a daughter—Nada wasn’t close enough to see—but either one was a deal killer. She slid over and squared herself with the bass player, looking into his eyes, never letting her irises leave his, and when he moved onstage, she moved with him. He noticed her almost immediately and, song after song, Nada caught him sneaking glances at her, tracking her position. He nodded. She didn’t reciprocate. She never smiled. She just never took her eyes off him.
When they broke at the end of the first set, the bassist tried to make her react with a wink, but she refused, only staring, staring, staring. He laughed and turned to walk offstage, but he looked back at her, which was all the confirmation Nada needed.
31
ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS, Wayne had pushed the eight cylinders of his Mustang past one hundred miles per hour over this stretch of I-15. Now he edged his powerful car through the desert at barely half that, an excruciating slow-motion getaway. Getting pulled over now would mean something a lot worse than a ticket.
He had panicked. Eventually, they would piece things together back in Amoyo’s apartment. Old Hoover wouldn’t remember how many minutes Wayne had been in the apartment, but he would remember Wayne’s name, or at least his Colossus badge, and some tech would compare the fingerprints in the apartment with the ones in his HR file, and that same file had this car and license plate registered for his employee parking tag. It wouldn’t be long before the NHP was looking specifically for red Mustangs, which weren’t known for their stealth. They would find him covered in the victim’s blood and still carrying the knife that helped torture Amoyo.
The hours were going to rat him out for sure.
In his wallet, he had about sixty dollars in cash. “Once you’re on the run, you can never use your credit or ATM cards,” Peter once said during one of his unsolicited tutorials on disappearing. “Not even once. Cut ’em up. Even if they haven’t frozen your accounts yet, credit cards will tip them to your direction. They can narrow the search. Concentrate their resources. It’s just about the worst mistake you can make.”
Cars carrying people with far less on their minds passed him on the left. Wayne used to smile over the difference between cars leaving Vegas and cars headed for it. The same with planes landing at McCarran and planes departing. People on the way to Las Vegas were all kinetic anticipation, their wallets and suitcases filled with cash and condoms and multiple bathing suits and e-mailed spa appointments and paperback books and high hopes. All this in contrast to the tourists leaving the city, tanned and tired and beaten up good by the slots and the dice and the cards, making the return trip home from Sin City, dreading their depleted bank statements and their first, endless hours back in the office. Wayne saw it every day in the lobby of the Colossus—Peter once joked that an optimist is a person checking into a Vegas hotel and a pessimist is a person checking out.
Wayne was certainly driving in the pessimist lane now. Things were bad and they were going to get worse.
Across the median, a state cop on a motorcycle was headed in the other direction. Glancing in the rearview, Wayne saw brake lights. Shit. Were they looking for him already?
A road sign marked twenty miles to the town of Tornillo. He had been there once for a high school football game. The Tornillo Bulldogs. He didn’t know the geography of the place, barely remembered what the field looked like, but he knew the town because he’d grown up in a border town just like it. Ten to fifteen thousand people settled along a river. Used to be a farming village. Gambling arrived to serve day-trippers from Arizona. Now the town fed off a single casino along the interstate, an enterprise that supplied