Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories by Hunter S. Thompson Page B

suddenly disappeared. . . .
    The last place they would look for it, I felt, was in a rental-car lot at the airport. I had to go out there anyway, to meet my attorney. He would be arriving from L.A. in the late afternoon.
    I drove very quietly on the freeway, gripping my normal instinct for bursts of acceleration and sudden lane changes—trying to remain inconspicuous—and when I got there I parked the Shark between two old Air Force buses in a “utility lot” about half a mile from the terminal. Very tall buses. Make it hard as possible for the fuckers. A little walking never hurt anybody.
    By the time I got to the terminal I was pouring sweat. But nothing abnormal. I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates. My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating
stopped.
That would be the danger point, he said—a sign that my body’s desperately overworked flushing mechanism had broken down completely. “I have great faith in the natural processes,” he said. “But in your case . . . well . . . I find no precedent. We’ll just have to wait and see, then work with what’s left.”
    I spent about two hours in the bar, drinking Bloody Marys for the V-8 nutritional content and watching the flights from L.A. I’d eaten nothing but grapefruit for about twenty hours and my head was adrift from its moorings.
    You better watch yourself, I thought. There
are
limits to what the human body can endure. You don’t want to break down and start bleeding from the ears right here in the terminal. Not in this town. In Las Vegas they
kill
the weak and deranged.
    I realized this, and kept quiet even when I felt symptoms of a terminal blood-sweat coming on. But this passed. I saw the cocktail waitress getting nervous, so I forced myself to get up and walk stiffly out of the bar. No sign of my attorney.
    Down to the VIP car-rental booth, where I traded the Red Shark in for a White Cadillac Convertible. “This goddamn Chevy has caused me a lot of trouble,” I told them. “I get the feeling that people are putting me down—especially in gas stations, when I have to get out and open the hood
manually.”
    “Well . . . of
course”
said the man behind the desk. “What you need, I think, is one of our Mercedes 600 Towne-Cruiser Specials, with air-conditioning. You can even carry your own fuel, if you want; we make that available. . . .”
    “Do I look like a goddamn Nazi?” I said. “I’ll have a natural
American
car, or nothing at all!”
    They called up the white Coupe de Ville at once. Everything was automatic. I could sit in the red-leather driver’s seat and make every inch of the car
jump,
by touching the proper buttons. It was a wonderful machine: Ten grand worth of gimmicks and high-priced Special Effects. The rear-windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond. The white canvas top ran up and down like a roller-coaster. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights & dials & meters that I would never understand—but there was no doubt in my mind that I was into a
superior machine
.
    The Caddy wouldn’t get off the line quite as fast as the Red Shark, but once it got rolling—around eighty—it was pure smooth hell . . . all that elegant, upholstered weight lashing across the desert was like rolling through midnight on the old California Zephyr.
    I handled the whole transaction with a credit card that I later learned was “canceled”—completely bogus. But the Big Computer hadn’t mixed me yet, so I was still a fat gold credit risk.
    Later, looking back on this transaction, I
knew
the conversation that had almost certainly ensued:
    “Hello. This is VIP car-rentals in Las Vegas. We’re calling to check on Number 875-045-616-B. Just a routine credit check, nothing urgent. . . .”
    (Long pause at the other end. Then:) “Holy shit!”
    “What?”
    “Pardon