Karyne and Deuce drive from Dallas to Las Vegas in about twenty hours, popping black beauties to keep themselves awake. It’s a hard and panicked trip, all 1,215 miles of it. They go northwest out of Dallas, across the southwestern edge of Oklahoma, then straight across the stark, sere plains of the Texas Panhandle, stopping for gas whenever necessary, and taking the shortest of breaks in Amarillo on Interstate 40. They stay on the interstate all the way and, except for a break in Albuquerque, push across the blurred green and tan of New Mexico, then on and into Arizona, where the remarkable red-rock beauty of the land is lost on them. They make a harried pit stop in Flagstaff, halfway across the state. The final leg along Interstate 40 takes them to the Nevada border. From there it’s just a short roll north to Karyne’s place in Las Palmas Apartments, an ill-kept complex on a road with the unlikely name of Paradise.
The city’s famous Strip is nearby and as busy as ever. Karyne’s apartment looks the way she left it. In the kitchen’s double sink sits a tangled jungle of greenery—pots of asparagus ferns, variegated coleus plants, and philodendrons that Deuce had watered before the couple left town. Karyne returns each of the plants to its customary place. In the process she notices that a screen on one of the apartment windows has been torn.
“I think somebody was here,” she says.
Deuce hears Karyne’s words, but they don’t trip any alarms; he is too muddled by the amphetamines. He has presumed death is coming from the East, behind them, leaving Karyne and him out front with time to make a move. Never did it occur to him that Chucky’s call to Dallas could have come from Las Vegas. If his head were clear, he might kill himself and save Chucky the trouble.
Deuce mumbles that they should look around the apartment. They find clothes from Karyne’s wall closet in a heap on the floor. She had a modest stash of marijuana, and it’s missing.
Maybe just a local burglar? Deuce is still trying to force the fog from his head, but crashing from amphetamines isn’t like drinking so much alcohol that you go past drunk and on into sober again. Black beauty fog has a different kind of weight; it’s slippery and elusive. Deuce is fighting for alertness and can’t quite reach it. Then he picks up a sound, the hard and all-too-familiar click-click, click-click, click-click of leathern footfalls along the apartment walk. Chucky has come for him.