Free Righteous03 - The Wicked by Michael Wallace

the first time as a naïve teenage girl, tagging along with her brother Jacob while he investigated a murder. The city was just as aggressive six years later, still dripping with sin and corruption, but it no longer had the power to frighten her.
    It helped to picture the city naked.
    There was no reason for Las Vegas to even exist. It didn’t have a port, wasn’t on a river. It wasn’t surrounded by rich croplands and hadn’t grown organically from some trade advantage. It wasn’t even the capital of the state. Instead, Vegas was surrounded by dry, baking wilderness and survived only by upping the shock value from one year to the next. People came to gamble or be entertained, but these days you could do those things anywhere. What other places didn’t have was the continual growth of the lurid and obscene, the promise that every time you came back, there would be some sparkling new thing to catch the eye. A volcano! Pirate battles! The Eiffel Tower! Someday, that sparkle would fade and then the city would die. People would return to live in real towns and cities and leave Las Vegas to crumble in the desert until it became the biggest ghost town of all.
    In the meanwhile, the city’s outward appearance was a hulking, intimidating monster, but Eliza knew the beast was toothless. What was it Jacob had told her once? “The real monsters live inside us.”
    And so she fought down the neon, concrete shock, ignored the lurid, the obscene, and the aggressive and thought about her brother David. She stepped off at the Greyhound bus terminal, near the Strip, then stood on the curb with her suitcase in hand, while the buses huffed diesel fumes. Her eyes scanned the street for a taxi.
    Miriam and Fernie had returned to Zarahemla in the second car while Jacob drove Eliza to the bus stop in St. George, in the extreme southwest corner of Utah, just over the border from Arizona and Nevada. They had stood apart from the others as passengers shuffled onto the bus. Mostly older people, probably heading for Las Vegas for a weekend of gambling. But there were also a few shifty types, with drawn hoods and baggy pants or shaved heads and tattooed arms. One guy wore plugs in his ears and bristled with piercings.
    Eliza and Jacob swapped cell phones. “It only cost twenty bucks,” he said, “so you can ditch it without a second thought. And there’s nothing on the phone to identify you. Fernie and I have the number, plus Sister Miriam and Allison Caliari. Nobody else.”
    She tucked it into her pocket. “Thanks.”
    “Call me when you get there and every day after that.”
    “I’ll call you when I get there, if I can. But these guys sleep in dumpsters and eat trash. They don’t carry cell phones and if I’m going to blend in, I can’t either.”
    “You need to check in, Liz. You know I can’t let you go if you don’t.”
    “I’ll find a place to stash it. Let’s say twice a week until I’m out.”
    He frowned.
    Eliza put a hand on his arm. “You’ve got to trust me. I’ll find a way to let you know I’m okay, but it’s not going to be every twenty-four hours.”
    At last, he nodded. “I’m just worried,” he said as another dodgy-looking kid made his way past them and onto the bus. “I wish I could tell you not to be afraid, that there’s nothing to worry about, no real danger. But that would be a lie.”
    “I’ll sit up front by the driver.”
    No smile. She was surprised at how nervous he looked. “You know what I’m talking about. Those guys on the bus are about show, about looking like they mean business. The people you’re trying to find don’t need to show anything, but they’re ten times as dangerous. People have died in there, Liz.”
    “Thanks, that’s comforting.”
    “My point is, only idiots aren’t afraid of danger and you’re not an idiot. So you’ll be afraid. You can deal with that.”
    “I’m waiting for the part where you say something encouraging,” she said. “As in, ’you can