Lucy bounced on the bed, which I decided is something women do. Maybe they test for squeaks to see if it could be a problem later. “Which side do you want?”
“We could be back at the Luxor in an hour and a half,” I said. “An hour and fifteen minutes if I push it.”
“And here I thought you were a PI.”
“I’m used to nineteenth-century conveniences.”
“Which would be the eighteen hundreds, Mort. Outhouses or chamber pots. Not much in the way of TV back then either.”
“No television would be a big improvement.”
“Of course. Back then, people still knew how to read.” She got up and peeked out the window at the highway. “That video of Tits Galore was taken over there in the diner. Which I thought was why we’re here, sleuthing like crazy. Which means we have to stay here tonight, so—no Luxor.”
“Tits Galore. Nice.”
“I forgot her name.”
“And sleuthing like crazy. I’ll have to remember that.”
She looked around. “There’s only one bed. No choice about the sleeping arrangement.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And there appears to be a shower in the bathroom. Water might even come out of it. Don’t know how hot, though.”
“Rugged little pioneer chick, aren’t you?”
She unhitched her top, took it off, and dropped it on the bed. “I thought you were okay with little.”
“I’m fine with it. And look at you, Miss Speedy.”
She stepped out of her running shorts. “It’s been a hot day. You up for a shower?”
“Go ahead. I’m going to have a look-see around this place before it gets completely dark.”
She stood there in bare feet and panties. The look on her face might have been disappointment. “I could get dressed again,” she said. “Go with you.”
I was still wearing dark khaki shorts and the green shirt. “I was thinking of keeping a low profile. In that white top you’d stand out like a beacon. I’ll be back in a while.”
I went out the door, left her standing there, then looked around at the night. Empty highway, sliver of moon hanging over the western hills, fluorescent lights in the diner, small floodlights illuminating an old sign on the roof that read Arlene’s Diner, temperature still dropping, faint breeze drifting in from the west. Country and western music was playing so far away it was like an aural hallucination.
Dim light leaked between curtains from unit four. The Lexus parked in front of the room reflected tiny pinpoints of light.
I went around behind the motel and let my eyes adjust to the night, which took a while. The moon looked like a tooth, stuck in the black top of a hill. A minute later it was gone.
My cell phone rang. I’d forgotten I had it with me. Not a good idea to have phones ringing in the night when you’re trying to skulk around.
“What’s up, Ma?” I said quietly after checking the screen.
“Just makin’ sure you’re not gettin’ into any more trouble, boyo.”
“Who, me?”
Silence. “Okay, that don’t sound good. Where are you?”
“At a motel between Caliente and Vegas.”
“There ain’t nothin’ between Caliente and Vegas except Gila monsters and vultures.”
“And a motel. And a diner. Not sure about Gila monsters, Ma. I’m thinking that’s New Mexico.”
“What the hell are you doin’ down there? Do I want to know what you’re up to?”
“Probably not.”
“Okay, then. You’re fired.” She hung up.
She was so cool, I could hardly stand it.
I was about to turn the phone off when “Monster Mash” started up again. “Sonofabitch,” I hissed. “Yeah? What?”
“You find anything yet?” Russell asked.
My favorite pudgy cop, talk about luck. I looked around, didn’t see anyone headed my way to check out my new ringtone. “Workin’ on it, Detective.”
“That’s not what I asked, Angel.”
“If I find anything that you oughta know, I’ll let you know.”
“Anything you find out, I oughta know about it.”
“Well, okay, if you insist, pi is approximately three point one four two. Got that last year from Holiday. There’ll be a quiz on that in the morning, so study up.”
He disconnected. Maybe he knew Ma.
I called him right back.
“Yeah?”
“I need you to check on someone. Name’s Lucy Landry.”
“Lucy? That assistant you ‘came across’? I thought you said you trust her.”
“I do. A lot. Just get her birthday for me.”
“Birthday?”
“Date of birth, Russ. Month, day, year.”
“I know that,” he growled. “What I want to know is why.”
“If I miss it and don’t get her a gift, I’ll never hear the end of it. You know women.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“Do it, Russ. Get back to me within ten minutes. She’s got a California driver’s license, if that helps. Middle initial K.”
I ended the call.
The night pressed in dark and quiet around me. I set the phone on vibrate, then walked slowly around the back of the diner. The ground was black on black. Maybe I would get lucky and not fall into an open pit.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MEANWHILE, BUDDIE WAS rubbing Arlene’s feet, as he did every night about this time. Her feet hurt, even if she wasn’t on her feet all that much. She didn’t do much waitressing. She had Melanie for that. The cook and his wife lived in the trailer behind the diner. Melanie was the dimmest of a wide selection of low-wattage bulbs, but the cook, Kirby, didn’t glow much brighter. Both were in their twenties, neither of them a high school graduate. Melanie also did the rooms at the motel in the morning, at which time Arlene had to do the waitress thing. Mostly she ran the cash register for the diner and the motel, ordered supplies, kept the diner and motel stocked up—food and sheets, little bars of soap. Buddie did basic maintenance around the place and ran the backhoe as far away as Hiko to the north, Moapa to the south, which brought in nearly twice as much money as the diner and motel combined.
Except, maybe . . .
Room four.
Room four was the cash cow. Four was the retirement fund, or so Arlene had thought in the beginning when she first came up with the idea. But it hadn’t worked out quite as well as she’d hoped it would, back when she told Buddie to install two video cameras with lenses so small they looked like fly specks up in the corners of the ceiling. He’d also installed the microphones and put the wireless in the wall. He could use a drill, do basic tasks if they weren’t too complicated. Arlene had had to hook up the system to the monitor in their private living space in the diner’s back rooms where Melanie and Kirby weren’t allowed.
Arlene’s eyes were closed. A cigarette burned in a corner of her mouth. This was the best time of the day, Buddie rubbing the pain out of her feet—maybe there was something to that foot reflexology crap after all, she thought. What was it about feet that connected them to other parts of the body? Rub a certain spot and it helped settle the liver? Did she really believe that? Oh, but it felt so good. And her son, Buddie Junior—Big Bud dead of an altercation with a lawn mower twenty-three years ago, the dumb ass—had worked on her feet from the time he was eight years old, twenty-six years ago, when he was just a little thing. Now he was six-seven, a three-hundred-fifty-pound monster, but pretty good with a Case 695ST backhoe digging septics and trenches, and great with his big hands on her feet, kneading out the pain. Twenty-six years of it, he knew what she liked.
“Got that nice Lexus outside four,” Buddie said, breaking the silence.
“Uh-huh. Don’t stop.”
“Think the guy’s worth it? It’s been a long time. Ten months since we got us one.”
“Maybe.” Arlene’s eyes were still closed. “Let’s hope.” She sent a stream of smoke toward the ceilin
g. Ten months. About average. The longest had been sixteen months between catches. Longer than she’d thought when they’d started, thinking they’d catch one every month or two. But maybe it was for the best. So far the law had never come around, at least not in any official capacity, although her heart about skipped a beat whenever a cruiser pulled in, Nevada Highway Patrol guys coming in to eat. Which didn’t happen often. Arlene’s Diner was a last resort.
“What’d you see?” Buddie asked.
“Money belt. He put it under the mattress.”
“Yeah? That’s good. Sure wish we could sell the car, though. That’d be worth a lot. Lot more than the belt, most likely.”
“We’ve talked about that, Buddie.”
“I know. Still wish we could.”
He was an idiot. She found it hard to be patient. “Not easy to do something like that and not have cops all over us.”
“Big sonofabitch, that Lexus.”
She laid back, sighing as Buddie’s thumb worked a groove up the sole of her right foot.
“When will he be completely out?” Buddie asked. He looked at the monitor. Looked like the guy was out now, crashed on the bed. But he’d had trouble in the past when he’d gone in too soon. Trouble made noise. He liked it quiet and easy.
“Better plan on midnight, maybe one o’clock.”
“After the Tonight Show,” Buddie said. “Good deal. Hate it when I miss that.” He stood up and stretched his back. “It’s gettin’ late. I better get the backhoe out there, ready to go.”
“You do that, Sweetheart.”
“We got someone in one,” Buddie said. “I seen a car.”
“Some guy about forty and a young girl looks like she’s a high-end hooker, outfit she was wearing. Don’t see any money there. I put them as far away from Four as I could.”
“Okay, good.”
Just then the buzzer for the motel rang, doorbell push-button on the jamb to the restaurant, someone wanting a room.
“Hell,” Arlene muttered, putting her feet into flip-flops. “It’s like frickin’ Grand Central Station around here tonight.”
Not good, but she really wanted that money belt.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I HEARD A car engine moments before headlights swept over the ground between the diner and the motel, illuminating gravel, weeds, dirt, aluminum cans. Then the engine went silent.
Footsteps on gravel, a moment of quiet, then they headed for the diner. I stood in shadow at the back corner of the motel as Vince Ignacio appeared in a pale wash of light spilling from the diner’s windows.
The Wharf Rat. Terrific.
I went around the front and saw a red Chevrolet Cruze nosed in between the Mustang and the Lexus.
I wanted to keep my night vision intact, so I waited in the lee of the building. Six or eight minutes later, Ignacio came out and headed back toward the motel.
“Hsssst.”
He stopped, night blind. “Who’s there?”
“Over here, Vince.”
He hesitated, peering into the gloom. I came closer, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and hauled him squawking into the darkness behind the motel. I told him to shut up, rammed the suggestion home with a knuckle to his chest as I pinned him to the back wall.
“What’re you doin’ here, Ignacio?” I asked. I almost called him Wharf.
Took him a moment to recover, then he said, “Hey, it’s still a free country, Mr. Angel. I’m just ridin’ the highways.”
“Sure you are.”
“You could turn loose of my shirt.”
“I could, but I won’t. I told you you couldn’t use that picture of me. So now I’ve got this big sonofabitching lawsuit in the works. Once the dust settles, I’m gonna be rich. I figure you made a bundle with those Jo-X pictures.”
That slowed him down for a few seconds.
“Didn’t hear nothin’ about any lawsuit,” he said.
“You’ll get the subpoena when they finally track you down. If I were you, I’d be thinking Brazil, maybe Uruguay.”
He chuckled. Which meant he was over the shock of being dragged off into the night. “Subpoena. I’ll believe it when I see it. Anyway, you finally got that ‘Celine’ thing nailed down, right? Things come together for you today in Caliente? Like maybe you’re not engaged to her like you said?” He snickered. “I still don’t think you’re her type . . . Stud.”
Man, I hate it when intimidation fades off into burlesque and low comedy. The sky was nothing but stars, Milky Way glowing bright. White as he was, Vince’s face was a pale blob against the black side of the motel. Good thing I couldn’t see his grin.
I heard distant scuffling noises, then the big backhoe’s diesel engine fired up, thirty yards behind the diner, beyond the shed I’d been forced to use as an outhouse earlier. Headlights came on. The rig backed off its trailer, warning beeper chirping away.
I shoved Ignacio toward the front of the motel. “Keep away from me,” I said. “Keep following and I’ll put you in a dumpster somewhere and lock the sonofabitchin’ lid down.”
He went. I watched him scuttle ratlike around the back of his Cruze. I went behind the motel again to see what this backhoe business was all about. Who fires up a backhoe this late at night?
I stood in the dark, watching. The backhoe swiveled and bounced, headlights briefly illuminating the helicopter shed, then it surged away, churned west into empty desert, lights dipping and swaying over the uneven ground. It went out a little beyond the helicopter shed, then stopped. Moments later the engine died, lights went out, and the night was quiet again.
My phone vibrated.
“Yeah?” I said softly.
Fairchild gave me Lucy’s birthday. She was born on April Fool’s day. Interesting. And the planet for Aries was Mars—the planet that wasn’t lined up with four others when she was born. Also interesting.
Russ said, “She’s thirty-one. Isn’t that a little young for you?”
“In what way, Russ? She’s my assistant. How old does an assistant have to be?”
“Yeah, right. I pulled up her picture. She’s an assistant like I’m Brad Pitt.”
“Not sure that analogy works, but if it makes you happy, use it.” I hung up.
Thirty-one. Yes, indeed, I was hopeless with ages, but I had a hell of a girl on my hands.
I waited in the dark. Three minutes. Four. Then a dark figure emerged in the night and went into the back of the diner, where the owner lived. Looked tall. Huge, actually. Had to be that big guy with the beard I’d seen earlier that day.
Again, the land went deathly quiet. Then that ethereal sound of western music got me moving quietly around the back of the diner, alert for further signs of activity.
As I passed the shed, the music got louder, coming from the vicinity of the house trailer.
I walked closer, not knowing what to expect. If anyone asked, it was a nice night and I was out for a stroll. Weak, yellow light came from the trailer’s windows. I was circling around the far side of the diner when a woman’s low voice said, “Whatcha doin’?”
“Walking,” I said. I couldn’t see her. I headed toward the sound of her voice.
“Pretty dark out for walkin’.” Sounded young, a lot younger than the fiftysomething lady in the diner who’d taken our money for the room and very likely made the Shanna videos.
“Uh-huh. Stars are bright though.”
“Always are, out here. Most nights, anyways.”
Finally I saw her, a dark shape in what might’ve been a lawn chair beside the trailer. The end of a cigarette flared as she took a drag, then it was just a dim red-orange glow again, like a firefly about out of gas.
“You live here?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.” Silence. Then, “You in the motel?”
“Room One,” I said.
“Shower head in there drippin’ all the time.”
“That’s the one.”
Five seconds of quiet, then, “Anyways, hi. I’m Melanie. Not many fol
ks come out back here, ’specially in the dark like this.”
“Mort,” I said.
“What’s a mort?”
“That’s my name.”
“Funny name. Sounds like, I dunno, some kind of a bug.”
“Blame my mother.”
She laughed. “I do the rooms. Cleanin’. In the morning if the people’re gone. Then I waitress all day till six or seven. Later if we got enough business. That don’t happen often, though.”
“You work a lot.”
“Not so much. Four rooms is all. Half the time nobody rents one, even in summer. Diner is empty a lot, too.”
She wanted to talk. Good. “I’ve heard there’s a helicopter that comes and goes out there in the desert.” I was at the edge of a yellow glow emanating from a window. I pointed out behind the diner.
“Yeah, it does.”
“Know whose it is?”
“Nope. Just some tall skinny guy’s.”
“I think a girl flew out with him a while back. Not long ago. Maybe a week or two.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Girl was in the diner for about an hour, had an ice tea, then off she goes with that guy.”
“Were you her waitress?”
“Nope. Arlene tole me to take a break, said she’d handle it.”
“So, the guy left with the girl, then he flew her back the next morning.”
Melanie was quiet for a moment, then: “I don’t think so.”
“No?”
“Uh-uh. I mean, she come back all right, but in a car. One of those SV whatchamacallits.”
“SUV?”
“Yeah, that. It was a big one. Black.”
“She didn’t fly back?”
“Nope. Some guy at the motel left early. I was doin’ the room when that girl come back in what you called it, that SVW? Big one—almost like new.”
“Tall girl? Blond?”
“Yep. Great big titties, too, like holy Jesus big.”
Nothing identified Shanna like her breasts.
“Pink streak in her hair?” I said.
“Uh-huh. You know ’er?”
“I’ve seen her around. She been in here before?”
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