“Now you’re talking.”
“And . . . I might pick up a Danielle Steel novel in Walmart before we hit a checkout lane.”
“And I’ll pick up a Bic lighter to set it on fire.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
NINE FORTY-EIGHT P.M. Ninety-five degrees. The last bit of sunset was a deep burgundy glow above the mountains to the west. We parked the Cadillac in the side yard of a raucous country bar called Little Joe’s—raucous because it was Friday evening—as far from the entrance as possible, then hiked a quarter mile through sand and sage with the glow of untold millions of watts of distant neon faintly illuminating the ground. Lucy was dressed all in black. I had on black jeans and a dark green shirt. We wore ball caps with good-sized bills pulled down low. Before heading out, we put dark blue body paint on our faces. I carried the bolt cutters and pipes, a thirty-pound load, so the trek to T&T’s yard was a high point of the evening. Lucy took along two small flashlights, a pair of gloves, and the lock I hadn’t destroyed at Home Depot.
We arrived at T&T’s east perimeter fence, nearest approach to unit seventy-two. The Klein cutter went through the chain-link like a Samurai sword through a chicken neck. I cut vertically up four feet, over three, peeled the section back, and in we went.
This was not the sort of thing to savor slowly, like dinner at Tavern On The Green. We went straight to number seventy-two, and I hit the lock with the bolt cutters. Well, hit the lock makes it sound easy. What I did was, I grunted and gasped, damn near did a barrel roll hanging onto those pipes, and finally with Lucy helping and the pipe pulled out another six inches for increased leverage, the lock gave up with a snap and a clang.
“Whew,” said my assistant. “We should cut off a few more while we’re here.”
“Go ahead while I check out the shed here.” I put the pieces of Arlene’s lock in a pocket then rolled the door up using a glove to keep from leaving prints. Going in was a squeeze because the generator was a big one, and parked next to it was an ATV with fat tires and dried mud on the frame.
“Jo-X’s generator, you think?” Lucy asked.
“That’d be my guess.” It was a Triton 80kW, painted yellow, with a slightly dinged outer shell. Six feet tall, three-and-a-half wide, nearly fourteen feet long, about three tons worth. I figured it wasn’t going to be here long. Even dinged and used it’d go for ten thousand dollars. Not sure how Buddie got it all the way over here and in the shed, but that wasn’t my problem.
“Arlene and Buddie killed Jonnie-X,” Lucy said flatly.
“Could have.”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“I think things are still weird. This generator probably came from Jo-X’s place. A serial number would tell the police that, if they can get a warrant to have a look at it. I’m pretty sure those two are thieves. They took this generator and probably the safe that girl, Melanie, told me about. Most likely more stuff out of Xenon’s place, like this ATV. But they might be more than just thieves. That video Arlene took of Shanna? How’s that fit? Why’d she take it? And Jo-X strung up in the garage with a video of Shanna in his pocket? It has to be connected to that note asking for a million dollars. Jo-X gets himself superglued, later that day he arrives at the diner in his helicopter, drives off in the SUV Shanna arrived in, probably sees a doctor, comes back later that afternoon and flies back to this hideout, ends up sporting a few bullet holes. It’s a mess. We’re not going to figure all that out right now, so let’s give this place a quick once-over and get the hell out.”
The generator was right up front. Stuff had been shoved to the back to make room for it—furniture so crappy it was unlikely that Goodwill would take it, a five-foot floor lamp, other junk, two sixty-inch televisions, couple of TiVo minis, and a metal box the size of a toaster oven with a cheap combination lock on it.
The bolt cutters laughed as I cut the lock. Five pounds on the handles did the trick. Lucy lifted the top and shined a flashlight in.
“I was right,” she said.
“Yeah, what?”
“Gold bars.”
Yeah, right.
I nudged her aside, and . . . gold bars. Not many, but size beats quantity every time.
There were three—not the one-ounce kiddie-size bars but big, fat ten-ounce Perth Mint bars, 99.99 percent pure, worth around twelve thousand dollars each at today’s spot prices. Tossed in like an afterthought were three or four little one-ounce Asahi bars, 9999 stamped on their golden faces.
“It’s amazing,” Lucy said, “how much you can accumulate when you save milk money starting in like the fourth grade.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” I found a little paper envelope, opened it, and a safe-deposit key slid out onto my palm. I put it back. Nothing else of interest in the box. I put the pieces of the lock in a pocket. A missing lock would say less than a lock that had been cut.
“Now what?” Lucy said.
“Now we get out of here.”
There was no thought of taking the gold. We weren’t there for that. We weren’t thieves. No telling where or how Arlene had gotten that gold, although I wasn’t thinking milk money.
I rolled the door back down and secured it with the second of the two locks I’d bought from Stan.
Speaking of which, something like a golf cart rolled around the corner of a line of sheds and Stan himself yelled, “Hey! Hey, you!” A heavy-duty flashlight lit us up.
We ran.
A golf cart carrying five hundred pounds doesn’t accelerate like a Formula One racecar. Doesn’t corner well either. It wasn’t a real contest. Lucy took the two pipes, and I had the bolt cutters. We made it to the fence well ahead of Stan, popped through, and high-stepped through the sage aided by the beam of Stan’s big flashlight, tracking us until we were over a hundred yards out.
Three minutes later, we were outside the Cadillac at Little Joe’s, scrubbing blue paint off our faces with washcloths we’d prepared in advance. Iron pipe and bolt cutters in the trunk. I got behind the wheel, nosed the car into the road, and a cop car went by with lights, no siren. Not going fast, either, so it was hunting.
“Probably looking for us,” Lucy said.
“Uh-huh.” I took off in the same direction as the cruiser, turned off south at the first opportunity. Back at T&T, Stan would look around but find nothing wrong with the units unless he happened to notice that one of them had a new lock on it. Arlene would have a fit next time she tried to get into the place.
I took a right at the next big intersection and went west until I saw Interstate 15 ahead, circled around to find an on-ramp, then took us north and east.
“Back to Arlene’s?” Lucy asked.
“Yep. Gotta hustle if we’re gonna get a room.”
“Good. I love that place.”
I took us up to eighty-five, held it there until we reached the turnoff to US 93, then went north at seventy.
Lucy rubbed my neck. “You were gonna tell me something. Said you’d tell me later. It’s later now, and this road is boring, especially at night, so now’s a good time.”
“I don’t remember. How about a hint?”
“It was something about a bathroom window, which sounds kinda iffy.”
“Iffy? It’s a true story and my finest hour.”
“Sounds like I’m in for it, but go ahead.”
So I told her about the chickadee in Bend, Oregon, last year and how I’d gone through a window in the men’s room to escape. The chickadee was Sophie, a voluptuous Mexican girl, and she’d called me a shithead in the back alley behind the bar after I’d landed on the ground. I still didn’t know how she’d thought to go out back in time to watch me slither headfirst out that window.
As it turned out, the road was so boring I ended up giving Lucy more of the story than it required. She was quiet for half a minute, then said, “All these women have huge tits, Mort.”
“Not my fault. I don’t plan these things.”
“Still.”
I glanced over at
her. She was a shadow in the dash lights. “I told you about my fiancée, Jeri. She was about your size.”
“On top, you mean?”
“Yes. She was perfect, too. Like you.”
She didn’t say anything for another mile. Then, “I would still marry you. Tonight, if you ask. We could go back to Vegas, be all hitched up two hours from now. You said not to say that again, but it’s been three days, and nothing’s changed.”
Sometimes words just get you in trouble. I reached over, took her hand, and kissed her palm. Didn’t say a thing.
She made a happy sound. “That mean we’re engaged?”
After ten miles of silence, Lucy said, “Picasso.”
“Gesundheit.”
She ignored that. “What do you think of his paintings, since it’s still boring out here?”
“Picasso’s?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is that what his stuff is called? Paintings?”
She sighed.
“Well,” I said, “most mornings before I get out of bed I give his work a moment of penetrating thought—”
“Seriously, Mort.”
Seriously—I had a flashback to a discussion I’d had with my ex-wife, Dallas, about orchestras, classical music, and my being a philistine. My position was that the conductor was nothing but a glory-hog who could be replaced by one of those wacky wind-puppet things that whip and twist in the wind, promoting fast food and tire sales. All those anorexic gals intently sawing their violins and cellos never look up at him. They’re focused on the music. They’ve played it before. They know how it goes. Once the conductor says, “go,” he could duck out and have a brewski or two and get back in time to take his unearned bows. All that arm waving, hair whipping around, and sweat flying off his brow was nothing but theatrics.
“Picasso,” my assistant said, not giving up.
“That’s the guy who doesn’t know where noses and eyes go on people’s faces, right?”
Lucy laughed.
“I did that sort of thing in the second grade,” I said. “Dogs looked like cows or chickens. No one gave me a million bucks for my work, though, so how’s that fair?”
“It’s called Cubism.”
“What is?”
“Picasso’s style.”
“Right. No one ever called my art Cubism, either. Bunch of Mickey Mouse no-nothing tourists. I oughta sue.”
Half a mile from Arlene’s Diner I pulled off the highway onto a wide patch on the verge. I killed the lights, and we sat there with the engine ticking in the quiet as it cooled.
“Slight change of plans,” I said.
“That backhoe, right? We’re gonna go see what it was doing in the middle of nowhere.”
“It was out there at one in the morning, so, yeah. We’re right here. Might’s well have a look.”
She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “This’s why I want to be a PI. Sneakin’ around, having fun.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a spooky kid?”
“My dad. Lots of times. Makes me wonder why he bought me a BB gun when I was ten.”
We got out and walked up the highway toward the diner in ball caps, dark clothing, guns on our hips. And flashlights, but we kept them turned off.
Headlights appeared, north of Arlene’s, a few miles away. We had plenty of time to ease off into the desert and hunker down as a pickup truck went by. Then back out to the highway. Two hundred yards south of the diner we headed west into the desert, skirting the diner, motel, Melanie’s trailer.
Only one light was on, the one illuminating the sign on the diner’s roof. I guided off it, trying to estimate where the backhoe had gone. We kept going west, into starlit emptiness behind the buildings, wending our way through tough, gnarled sage.
A car glided by almost silently on the highway, a quarter mile away. Minutes later the diesel growl of an eighteen-wheeler went by in the other direction. Then all was quiet except for a lone coyote yipping in the distance, farther in the hills.
We went past the helicopter shed, kept going. After a while, I stopped and looked around. “Somewhere around here, I think.”
“Sure is dark out here.”
“Beautiful and observant.”
Something backhanded my ribs in the night. Didn’t see what it was. Stars were bright. The Milky Way was a glowing ribbon, but the dirt and scrub around us was all but invisible.
I risked turning on a flashlight, aimed away from the diner and motel. I swung it around, didn’t see anything.
I clicked it off and we walked another thirty yards west before I tried again. Still nothing.
We did that a few more times, then Lucy said, “What was that over there?” She aimed her light at a place where the dirt didn’t look natural. We headed that way.
It was a rough rectangle of loose, scuffed dirt, ten by twenty feet, several inches high, different color than the rest of the desert floor. Twisted bits of broken sage poked out of the torn-up dirt, scenting the air. Huge tire tracks were pressed into the earth.
“What do you think it is?” Lucy asked.
“Dirt.”
“Huh. Do you need a PI license to get that, or should I have figured it out without all that training?”
“It was the license. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“I won’t, since you don’t actually have a license. And on a somewhat more serious note, what do you think this is? What was he doing out here?”
“Vince and I thought he was putting in an outhouse, but now that we’re out here, that’s probably not right.”
Lucy flicked her light to the right. “There’s another one.”
We headed that way, found another patch of dirt twelve by twenty-five feet, sagebrush torn up, older than the one we’d just seen. I swung the light farther to the west. The beam dissipated into darkness after about sixty yards, but in that distance I saw three more almost-invisible mounds.
Like graves.
“Kinda spooky out here,” Lucy said, half whispering.
A huge spotlight came on, over by the diner. Several million candlepower blasted the desert floor forty yards to our left, then swept toward us. We hit the deck, flat out in the dirt as the light passed over us. It kept moving, sweeping to the north.
“Well, poop,” said my vocabulary-challenged assistant.
“Run.”
I lunged to my feet. Lucy was already up. We ran south. I tried to keep up with her, but it was like trying to keep up with Shanna or Vince.
Man, being forty-two sucked.
The light raked the desert to the north, then came back, panning like the searchlight of a prison. We ran another twenty yards then hit the dirt before the light rolled over us. I’d seen The Great Escape, Steve McQueen as the Cooler King. I didn’t have much faith in the ability of a searchlight to pick out people in the dark but I wasn’t about to stand up as it went by, either.
We got up, ran. It headed back, scything across the desert. I hit the dirt. Lucy landed beside me.
“Still want to be a PI?” I said.
“Of course. This’s so cool. Want me to try to shoot out that light?”
“Half a mile away with a .38 revolver? Why not? No telling who or what you’d end up hitting.”
The light hunted us for three or four minutes, then went out. Twenty minutes later, Lucy and I arrived back at the Cadillac. I was breathing hard. She wasn’t. She took the driver’s seat.
“We’re probably not gonna get that room at the Midnight Rider, huh?” she said.
“Not tonight. Arlene and Buddie will be at DefCon One, then we show up in dark clothing covered in dirt.”
“DefCon One? What the heck is that?”
“Tell you later. So, do we head back to Vegas or keep going to Caliente? It’s seventy miles back, eighty miles if we continue north. You choose.”
“Caliente has hot springs,” she said.
“Uh-huh. Beds’ll do that when you really get ’em goin’.”
She stared at me
. “No way you just said that.”
Well, hell. Things pop out. My ex, Dallas, still gives me The Look on occasion, a kind of long-suffering incredulous stare. My mouth might be why she divorced me. That or she was terrified of the IRS, knowing agents will audit their own wives if it would get them a promotion. I’ll have to ask. She would level with me now that I have a soul.
I said, “Soaking in a hot spring might be just the ticket.”
“Just the ticket?”
“An expression of approval. And hot springs? What could be better, since it didn’t even reach a hundred ten today.”
She sighed. “Ever been in a mud bath? And don’t answer with something so wacky I’d have to shoot you.”
“Mud bath. Sounds like your basic oxymoron, but to answer the question without getting shot—no.”
“If they’ve got hot springs, they might have mud baths. Very therapeutic. We should find out.”
“You’re driving, Sugar Plum.”
As we sailed past the motel, I saw Ignacio’s Cruze parked outside. So the Rat was still nosing around.
First stop in Caliente was the Pahranagai Inn. I rang a buzzer on a countertop in the office, and a lady thirty years old came yawning out of a back room. She checked us into room six, told us the hot springs north of town wouldn’t be open that time of night, which by then was early in the morning.
“Well, poop,” someone said.
So . . . shower and sleep. It had been a long day, starting with Ma’s wake-up call before seven that morning. The shower was quick and workmanlike, goal-oriented, without the kind of undercurrent that might have delayed things. Lucy fell asleep on her side two minutes before I did, so I tucked her butt against my belly, got hold of a nice warm breast, and spooned her.
Outside the room the next morning, nine twenty-five a.m., temperature eighty-four degrees and rising rapidly, there was RPD Detective Fairchild, my buddy, pacing, puffing on a Camel. And, of course, Lucy came out the door right after me, wearing shorts and a tank top molded to her like a second skin, revealing rounded contours.
Gumshoe on the Loose Page 26