“Might be later, though. You might have to hold me. Where do you think she’s going?”
“Caliente.”
“You think? Just ’cause of some matchbook covers?”
“And a motel receipt. Let us not forget that.”
“That sounds really thin,” said my trainee. “Fifty bucks says you’re wrong.”
“You’re on. You should stick to roulette.”
“Hah.”
Twenty-two miles out of Vegas, Shanna turned left onto US 93 and headed north. We were half a mile back.
“Caliente,” I said. “We’ll see.”
We took the turn. The world got even more dry and empty, hot enough that you could safely eat roadkill. The billboards thinned out. We passed a rusty sign that read: Caliente 101 miles.
“Caliente,” I said.
“Well, poop. Anyway, we’re not there yet.”
More emptiness, almost no traffic. Lucy let the Focus get nearly two miles ahead. We lost sight of it on the bends, picked it up again on the straightaways, and the road was mostly straight.
“So,” Lucy said. “Gifting.”
I stared at her. “Huh?”
“Gifting. What is it? You said you’d tell me later. It’s later now and this road is really boring.”
“Forgot I’d mentioned it. Any explanation I give you pretty much depends on how open your mind is, kiddo.”
She laughed. “Like I’ve got a problem with that.”
So I told her. I didn’t know who came up with the word gifting, but I’d first heard it from Ma as we were driving to Bend, Oregon. The concept, however, was Holiday’s. She’d come up with it as we were leaving Tonopah last year. It wasn’t a difficult concept, but its ramifications ran dark and deep in the subterranean caverns of my mind. Still did, truth be told. In a nutshell, my fiancé, Jeri DiFrazzia, had “gifted” me to Holiday, loaned me out on Tuesdays.
“To do what?” Lucy asked.
“To watch and observe Holiday in various states of undress.”
“Why?”
“To get her going. Revved up.”
“Sounds like fun, like something out of the Monologues. What else? I mean, after she got revved up?”
“Last year when this was going on . . . nothing else.”
She stared at me. “Nothing?”
“I believe a boob rub was discussed in the early stages but not acted upon.”
“That’s too bad. Boob rubs are fun.”
“About the time I thought Jeri would seriously approve of things getting even that far, she was murdered.”
Silence for several seconds. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “You mentioned that earlier, but I’m still sorry.”
“Me, too.” Turns out, some scars never heal.
“They ever catch who did it?”
“No.” Which probably meant Julia Reinhart would’ve gotten away with it, like Ma and I had thought back then. “And that,” I said, “brings us to Borroloola.”
“The workout routine that got you totally buffed.”
“Totally, huh?”
“Well, I did see something like two ounces of fat around your middle yesterday. It must be a pretty great routine.”
“It is. What you do, you lift a sixteen-pound iron bar up two and a half or three feet, and slam it down into the earth about three hundred thousand times.”
She stared at me. “Tell me you didn’t really do that.”
“Borroloola is a town in Australia, Northwest Territories. It’s a tiny little nothing place. I was digging holes for fence posts, every eight feet for nearly a mile. The holes were the hard part, hence the iron bar, but there was also setting the poles in slurry and putting in side rails. I did forty feet a day, twelve hours a day in the sun, in temperatures of about a hundred degrees. That’s the Borroloola Routine. Highly effective and recommended.”
“I’m thinking that’s not going to catch on.”
“Yeah? I was hoping to go national by October. Tours down under, weight loss guaranteed.”
“If I were you, I’d rethink it.” Lucy glanced in the rearview mirror. “There might be someone following us.”
I turned and looked. A mile or so back, swimming in and out of the heat mirages, was a vague dark dot.
“How long’s it been back there?”
“Ever since the interstate.”
“We’re doing seventy. There’s nowhere to turn off. If that’s fast enough for them, they’d stay behind us.”
“Just sayin’,” she said. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“You do that, Honey Bunch.”
She slapped my thigh, then rubbed it. She looked over at me. “Hey, I gotta do something to keep myself awake.”
“Do what you gotta. I’m gonna catch a nap.”
She looked ahead at Shanna’s car, a mile and a half away. “Borroloola, huh? At least the name’s catchy.”
Twenty miles later, Lucy said, “Uh-oh.”
I’d been dozing off, drugged by the heat.
“Uh-oh?” I sat up straighter.
She pointed. “Got a few buildings coming up ahead. She’s turning off.”
“How’s our gas situation?”
“Little over half a tank.”
“Probably good enough. Let’s see what this place is.”
Lucy took it down to fifty-five. The buildings began to take shape. The smaller one was Arlene’s Diner, a dried-up place of peeling clapboards. I didn’t get a good look at it because I had to sink down below the level of the windows as we got near, but the roof looked like it could use work. Lucy pulled off the highway. I kept out of sight so Shanna would think the girl in the car was alone. Trouble is, I didn’t think that all the way through.
“There’s a motel here, too,” Lucy informed me. “Midnight Rider Motel.”
“Spiffy name.”
“Suits the place. You oughta see it. It’s only got four rooms. It probably has dead bodies decaying in the floorboards. And there’s a little house trailer behind the diner that looks like total scurvy crap.”
“Where’s Shanna’s car?” I was curled up beneath the dash, squashed between the shifter and the passenger door. They ought to design Mustangs with more leg room for times like this.
“Parked in front of the door to the diner. She’s not in the car, so she’s inside, eating or using the restroom, speaking of which.”
“Pull off. Park away from her car, far as you can. Did she see you taking her picture back in Vegas at Jo-X’s?”
“I don’t think so. I was just some no-name girl, and she was staring at his house like it was on fire. She never looked at me.”
“Okay, go in, see what’s what.”
“If I can get some food, you want anything?”
“Yeah, beer and a restroom would be great.”
She laughed, eased the car to a stop. No shade anywhere around, which figured. The sun was blazing straight down on my head. I should’ve had her put the top up, but I need stuff to hit me between the eyes before it makes an impact.
“Don’t wander off,” my smart-ass assistant said as she got out and headed for the diner.
Hundred nine degrees, me hugging the floor wondering if I was going to die there, end up rendered into a blob of tallow.
Three minutes.
Five. Five is a long time at a hundred nine fuckin’ degrees.
Then footsteps on gravel. They stopped. I looked up. A huge guy in grimy coveralls was looking down at me.
“Whatcha doin’ down there, dude?” he asked. He had a black beard as dense as a bramble thicket, inch and a half long, eyes that looked like two narrow-set bullet holes.
My impression was that this was not the brightest flame in the candelabra, but I’m often wrong about that. “Got a cramp in my calf,” I said.
“Yeah, those suck. You oughta get out, walk around. And drink more water.”
He left. A minute later a diesel engine snorted to life. I raised my head far enough to see a big rig pass by thi
rty feet away with a huge backhoe on a flatbed trailer, headed for the highway. I caught a glimpse of Buddie’s Excavating printed on the driver’s-side door.
Another three minutes and Lucy was back. She stood outside the car and handed me a bottle of cold water and a plastic bag.
“Damn,” I said. “They were out of beer?” I was still on the floor, sun blasting down.
“Alcohol’s bad for you in heat like this. I was afraid you were gonna die out here. Drink up.”
I did. Opened the bag and found two more bottles of water, two Snickers bars, Oh Henry, Mars bar, Twix. “No beer, but these’re good for you?”
“It’s all the waitress girl in there had at the register.”
“Girl, huh?”
“Probably midtwenties. I didn’t know what you’d like so I got a selection. And that girl, Shanna—she’s like, wow—tall and beautiful and . . . you know . . .”
“A little bit busty.”
“Totally. About to fly out of that halter she’s wearing. And her hair was long and red, so if you say she’s blond, then she was wearing a pretty good wig. Anyway, she was getting a sandwich to go, so I couldn’t order anything and have us keep up with her, so I got what I could.”
“You forgot the restroom.”
“No, I went.” She grinned, then said, “Okay, that’s not fair. I could drive you around back. There’s a shed back there you could maybe pee behind.”
Well, hell. Things were approaching critical. “Do it,” I said.
She got in the car, jumped back out. “Ow, ow, ow! Son of a bitch, that seat is hot!”
“I coulda told you that, Sweetheart.”
“Well, why didn’t you?”
“Heatstroke?”
She poured cold water on the seat, then got in, ignoring the wet, and drove around behind the diner. As I ducked behind a wooden shed that offered all the privacy I was going to get, Lucy said, “She just got in her car. She’s leaving. Better hurry.”
Some things don’t hurry as well as others. But US 93 was a flat, empty strip. I didn’t think hurrying was strictly necessary. We were in a hot Mustang, Shanna was in a Ford Focus—so, no contest.
A Chevy Impala with scabrous paint was parked behind the diner. No one in sight. I faced away from the diner/motel combo, peed away from the shed. To my left and around the corner of the shed was that house trailer Lucy had mentioned. Old, no sign of life. In weeds behind the shed were lengths of rusting iron pipe, a tree saw with teeth three-quarters of an inch long, tangled coils of baling wire, old paint cans, an aluminum ladder. A quarter mile away in the desert, an industrial building of some sort gleamed in the sun, big enough to house four or five motor homes. Glare off the roof was like looking into the face of the sun.
When I got back, Lucy had the car facing out, ready to go.
“She kept going north,” she said.
“As expected. I doubt that many people come this way for a sandwich at the diner here, then hustle on back to Vegas.”
“Smart-ass.”
“Gumshoe 101. She’s headed to Caliente.”
“We’ll see. By the way, that car I thought might have been following us went by. Small red sedan. I don’t know cars all that well so I don’t know what kind it was. I mean, who gives a darn about cars?”
“Or about the kind of planes that were flying overhead in or around the Philippines in, say, nineteen forty-three.”
She gave me the same look Jeri used to give me. Dallas still does on occasion, when we’re together.
“Sometimes, Mort, you’re unintelligible.”
“Yup.”
She smiled. “And inarticulate.”
“Yah.”
As we left Arlene’s, I sat up and looked back. The building was the color of dust, a scorched place in the middle of nowhere. A lone gas pump sat beside the building. The Midnight Rider Motel was thirty yards from the diner, just four units and as sand-blasted and dehydrated-looking as the roadside diner.
Then we were on the highway and the Focus was four miles away. Lucy took it up to a hundred for a while then settled down to a sedate seventy, keeping two miles back.
“Back there,” I said, “that’s the diner in the video.”
Lucy looked at me. “I know. I even saw the table where she was sitting. By that window.”
“That shed a quarter mile out in the desert? I’ll bet that’s where he kept the helicopter.”
“Maybe we need to get nosy around that place.”
“Uh-huh. Later. Right now we’ve got to stay on Shanna.”
“Which—observe—I’m doing.”
“And a great job of it, too.”
Ten miles out we passed the big rig with its backhoe on the trailer. No sign of life, trees, anything, in the mountains rising up around us, just a few buzzards looking for something tasty that had finally given up. I ate the Oh Henry bar and a Snickers, then drank another bottle of water.
“Next time I buy the lunch, kiddo.”
“Fine. If we end up following Timothy Olyphant, I’ll stay in the car and you can go inside and check him out. He’s got a great butt. Otherwise, quit complaining.”
“You’d stay in the car? Really?”
“No way.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PAST ALAMO AND Ash Springs to the junction of US 93 and Highway 375. We turned right onto the Great Basin Highway.
“Caliente,” I said.
“Well . . . poop.”
Up ahead, the red car passed Shanna’s. Lucy stayed a mile behind the Focus.
Forty-three miles later, after winding through a canyon, we pulled onto Front Street and into the town—population just under twelve hundred, previously known as Culverwell. Flat and hot and dry, but it had a casino, Sinclair and Exxon gas stations, a bank, a few motels, all contained within low, scorched hills. We stayed two hundred yards behind Shanna as she cruised through the business section and out the other side. She pulled into a tree-shaded parking lot for the Pahranagai Inn at the north end of town. Lucy sped up as Shanna turned off, trying not to lose her.
“Motel receipt in a kitchen drawer will do it every time, Sweetheart,” I told Lucy. “Pay attention. And notice that we’re in Caliente, so you owe me fifty bucks.”
“Well, crapola. I don’t have that much with me so you’ll have to accept fifty dollars’ worth of something else later.”
“What’ll fifty bucks get me?”
“Wait and see.”
We pulled into the lot just in time to see Shanna disappear into room nine. Lucy parked forty feet from the Focus. The place was nicer than anything else we’d seen in Caliente—cedar siding stained a dark brown, probably one of those indeterminate names on the paint can like Sunrise Sienna or Overland Umber, which meant you had to look at color swatches.
“Now what?” Lucy asked.
“Now we go see what’s what.”
“You said they were married.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So, you might want to give them a little privacy for like, I don’t know—half an hour or something.”
Christ, the things that never cross my mind. “Nope, let’s get in there before anything like that gets fired up.”
“Your call, boss.”
Boss? I gave her a sidelong look as we walked to the room. Curtains were pulled across the windows.
“Tell ’em you’re from the office,” I whispered.
“Okay. Then what?”
“Wing it, partner. Show me your stuff.”
“Showed you pretty much all of my stuff yesterday.”
“Not that. Let’s see how well you improvise.”
She shot me a sudden panicked look as I knocked on the door and stepped to one side, pressed myself against a wall. At the last moment I pushed her in front of the security peephole and told her to smile.
“What is it?” Shanna’s voice called out.
“Office, ma’am.”
I gave my assistant two thumbs up and did a little side step to avoid
a kick in the shin. Testy.
Shanna’s voice through the door: “What d’you need?”
“There’s a blank spot on the registration form you didn’t fill out.”
The door opened. It hit the security chain and stopped. Like all security chains, it was a joke. Good enough. I set my foot against the bottom of the door to hold it, then gave it a good bump with my shoulder, tore a few screws out of the door jamb, and went inside.
“Well Christ on a moped,” Danya said, sitting cross-legged on the bed. “Look who. Thought I fired you, Mortimer.”
“Mort,” I said.
I pulled Lucy into the room, then shut the door. Shanna had her wig off. She was back to short frizzy blond hair with the pink streak in it. She had backed away, trying to catch up to this unexpected development. And, like Lucy said or implied, she was wearing a halter that wouldn’t hold another ounce without coming apart. But it was hot as hades outside, so I didn’t think badly of her for it.
“I can see why my dad doesn’t like you,” Danya said. “You really are a maverick. And unprofessional. Who’s gonna pay for that busted chain and stuff ?”
“Not a problem,” I said. “You are.”
Danya looked past me at Lucy. “Who’s the teenybopper in the ‘fuck-me-like-crazy’ outfit?”
“Who’re you callin’ a teenybopper, Chicklet?”
“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “Let’s back up and take another run at this. Turns out we’re all on the same team here.”
“Who says?” Danya uncurled her legs and stood up. She was in lime green panties and a scoop-neck T-shirt held out in front by a couple of Texas Ruby grapefruits, or something like that.
“Me,” I said loudly, hoping to cut through the estrogen and this round-robin jealousy thing that had erupted. “Danya, this is Lucy, and she’s a lot older than either you or Shanna, so have a little respect for her age.”
“No way,” Danya said. “She’s older than me?”
“Than I,” Lucy said, no sugar-coating on the tone.
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, grammar will not be an issue right now. Right now, it’s all about truth and a dead Jo-X, and I’d like to keep it that way, so if it looks like there’s gonna be a catfight, I’m gonna pull my gun.”
“Since you obviously don’t have a gun on you,” Danya said, “I assume that means you’re gonna pull out your dick.”
Gumshoe on the Loose Page 16