Gumshoe on the Loose

by Rob Leininger

  “How the hell did you ‘have a look’ in her shed? Place like that is usually fenced-in, keypad access.”

  “It was something of a maverick operation. Which is why you hired me. You would never have gotten a warrant—‘you’ meaning Vegas cops. You want details?”

  He shook his head. “Not now. Maybe never. I could put the Lincoln County or state police on Arlene and her kid, though.”

  “Not yet. There’s no telling how that’d screw things up. We still don’t know who killed Jo-X.”

  “Yeah, well, horse pucky,” he said. “But I’m still thinking I’d like to keep a real close eye on that Arlene woman and her kid. Real effing close.”

  “‘Effing,’” Lucy said. “Cool.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “HOT SPRINGS,” SHE said when we got back in the Caddy.

  “First we clean our guns.”

  “Of course. I was just thinking that.” She waited a moment. “Why?”

  “All that dust diving we did last night.”

  “Oh, yeah. That.”

  We hadn’t given up our room at the Inn yet. Checkout time was in forty-five minutes. From the lockbox in the trunk I got out basic gun-cleaning supplies. We sat at a table in the room and wiped the guns down, ran patches with a splash of Hoppe’s No. 9 on them through cylinders and barrels, ran a few more patches through, put a single drop of oil in the mechanism, wiped off the excess, reloaded.

  “We didn’t use that bed there,” Lucy said, eyeing the king.

  “You didn’t sleep? That’s too bad. I did.”

  “Very funny.”

  “They’re gonna kick us out of here in fifteen minutes.”

  She thought about that. “Okay, hot spring.”

  Ryder’s Hot Spring was a six-minute drive north. Private room for an hour ran forty bucks. We got naked, took a quick rinse-off shower in a kind of alcove above the pool. The pool was down half a dozen steps, a ten-by-ten-foot concrete square just under four feet deep. The bottom was a layer of smooth pebbled gravel that gave a great foot massage. Water temperature was a hundred three degrees.

  Lucy went down the steps first, then crouched down slightly. The water hit her at mid-nipple. She closed her eyes and leaned against a stone wall, letting the water support most of her weight. “Heaven.”

  She opened her eyes and smiled as I came down the stairs. “Now there’s a promising sight,” she said.

  “Says the nineteen-year-old vixen with the fake ID.”

  “Get in here. I want to cop a feel.”

  “If you must.”

  She trudged through the water, producing a little swirling wake, put her arms around my waist, and pulled me close. “A week ago I was waiting tables at McGinty’s. Now look.”

  “Yup.”

  “So articulate.” She kissed my neck then put her left leg between mine, curled it around my right calf like a python. Off in a corner I thought I saw Sam Spade in a mask and snorkel blowing laugh bubbles.

  “Yup.”

  “A man of few words.”

  “A man who knows when to keep his mouth shut.”

  “Yeah? When did that happen?” Her lips brushed mine, then she backed away a few inches and said, “That sort of tickles. Not that I mind.”

  “What?”

  “This, Cowboy. What did you think?”

  And so on.

  I pulled the Caddy up in front of room one at the Midnight Rider Motel. The time was four twenty p.m. We’d run an hour over at the hot spring and paid another forty dollars. Then there was lunch at Dottie’s Kitchen and a leisurely walk around Caliente to see what the place had to offer. The town was pretty basic. Not many people in Manhattan or San Francisco were going to be in a rush to sell their high-rises and move out there. At a dim saloon called Jerry’s, I found a Pete’s Wicked Ale and Lucy had iced tea.

  Ignacio’s Chevy Cruze wasn’t anywhere around the motel or Arlene’s Diner when we got there, so it looked as if we weren’t going to pick his brain anytime soon.

  “Well, poop. Where’d that dodo-head go?” Lucy wondered.

  “He’ll turn up when you least expect it. Or want it. Next time we see him we’ll tell him about that dodo-head thing.”

  “Are we gonna stay here tonight?”

  “Might’s well. Weird things happen around here. But I think we’ll keep our guns ready just in case.”

  Arlene had the register’s cash drawer open when we went in. When she saw us, her fingers stopped in the midst of counting a thin wad of bills. Her eyes were bright on us, searching.

  “How about a room?” I said.

  She gave me an appraising look. “What’s the attraction here? You could be in Vegas in little over an hour.”

  “That’s a pretty high-pressure sales pitch,” I said. “I’m not sure I can resist.”

  “It can’t be the food.”

  “It’s the unbeatable views and the curb appeal. You oughta be on a list of Best Western motels.”

  If a virus could smile, that’s how it would look. Her eyes had all the warmth of an alligator’s. “I’ll put you in number four.”

  “How about that first room? We’re used to it.”

  “Shower head was leaking. I’ve got my kid working on it. He has to get a part at Lowe’s, down in Vegas. I’ll put you in Four. It’s a better room anyway, same price.” She pushed a check-in form toward me, and a pen, then said, “Was that you two, out back in the desert last night?”

  I stared at her. “Out where?”

  She aimed a crooked finger. “Behind the place here, half a mile or so west.”

  “Nope.” A lie works best without elaboration.

  I filled in the form, gave her three twenties, got change, and we headed for the door.

  Just then a two-way radio on the counter beside the register squawked. A man’s voice said, “Got tracks in the dirt out here, Ma. People been walkin’ around, but I don’t see nothin’ much.”

  Arlene didn’t answer, didn’t pick up the radio. Eyes like the muzzles of machine guns tracked us to the door.

  I opened it, then stopped and offered Lucy the open door with a little sweep of my hand. “After you.”

  She took the hint. “You opened it. You should go first.”

  “Really, kiddo, I insist.”

  “I think the saying is ‘age before beauty’.”

  “That was during the nineteen hundreds. Now it’s more like ‘if you don’t go first, I’ll kick your butt’.”

  “You and who else?”

  “Ma?” said the radio. “You there?”

  Good. I was hoping we’d hear more about tracks in the dirt out in the desert.

  Arlene put the radio to her lips. “Hold your damn horses.” Her voice was a sharp smoker’s rasp. She stared at us.

  And that was that.

  I went outside and Lucy followed.

  She glanced through a window as we headed toward the motel. “She’s on that radio now, watching us. Spooky old bitch.”

  “Language, Sugar Plum.”

  “Spooky old cunt, then.” She hugged my arm. “And just so you know, that word is in the Vagina Monologues.”

  “I bet they don’t use it that way.”

  “Well, no. But it suits her.”

  As we walked to the motel, I saw a pickup truck out in the desert, a guy walking around. Buddie. I opened the trunk of the Cadillac. Lucy got out her suitcase and I retrieved my travel bag.

  I looked over at the diner. “Want to shake a tree, see what falls out?”

  She turned a full circle. “You see a tree around here?”

  “It’s an expression, kiddo. But to be clear, how about we take a stroll behind the motel here in broad daylight, meander up to where that backhoe was digging the other night—”

  “A meandering stroll, huh?”

  “—and see if our walk gets another mention.”

  “Or if that kid of hers tries to run us over with that backhoe. Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is parked behin
d the diner. Or maybe comes after us with a shotgun since they’re concerned about something out there.”

  “A shotgun would be a big something falling out of a tree. Shaking trees is an old PI’s trick. And I’ve got Russ’s number.”

  “He’s an hour away.”

  “Which is why we will go armed.”

  “Probably a good idea. But we better at least wait ’til Buddie gets back, since he’s still out there. You really want to yank this tiger’s tail?”

  “We need information. I want to shake things up, if there’s anything to shake up.”

  “There is. Pretty obviously, Mort. Not sure what, though.”

  “You got that lucky-unlucky feeling?”

  “Sure do. C’mon.” She headed for the room.

  Outside, attached to a wall in the shade between rooms three and four, a thermometer registered a hundred two degrees. Inside, the temperature was about ninety. The room was marginally nicer than number one—king-size bed instead of queen, the shower head wasn’t leaking, the carpet was somewhat newer. I turned on the air conditioner, set the thermostat at seventy-two degrees. It started up with a shimmy that shook the wall, then settled down.

  “Now what?” Lucy said.

  “Whatever you like. I’m gonna read.” I flopped down on the bed with Berney’s Whiplash River that I’d been carrying around since I’d left Reno.

  Lucy watched me for a moment, then removed her top and started doing inhuman “stretchies” in a small open space between the bed and a wall.

  I didn’t watch. Much. During the next half hour, I managed to read three whole pages.

  Arlene squinted at the monitor.

  “They still there?” Buddie asked on the two-way. “What’s goin’ on? What’re they doin’?”

  “He’s just reading. And, good heavens, that ridiculous little girl is in a handstand, doubled over, not wearing a shirt.”

  “There’s nothing out here. “I’m comin’ in.”

  “Those two are very strange. I need to think about this.” She turned off the radio, watched the monitor a while longer, then went back into the diner.

  We gave it an hour, then saddled up. Damn wig was too hot so I went without and the hell with it. I wore jeans and kept my short-sleeve shirt untucked to keep my gun out of sight. Given what Lucy was wearing, she didn’t have any way to hide her gun, so she left it in the lockbox in the Caddy’s trunk. She’d slathered herself with sunblock. She wore her sun hat, sunglasses. I wore my Stetson, which made me look like John Wayne—except for the sunglasses. Wayne was always riding around on a horse in bright sunlight, which is the reason he had a world-class squint.

  We headed west. No sign of life, so I veered toward the diner as we went by to have a look at the back of the place in daylight. Not much to see, old Impala parked outside the back door, junk piled up behind the building—a refrigerator on its side with the door missing, four-by-eight-foot plywood sheets leaning against a scaly clapboard wall, a toilet still in a wooden crate, used tires. Buddie’s backhoe was on its flatbed trailer, parked near a power pole. Power lines looped black against the bright blue sky into a gooseneck head and a conduit that led down to a service panel. The old shed back there still had a slight, tired lean.

  We were fifty feet past the diner when a panel truck pulled up behind the Impala in the dusty area between the diner and the shed, Henderson Lock & Safe printed on the side.

  “Interesting,” Lucy said.

  “We could go over and watch.”

  “That bitch or Buddie would shotgun us for sure.”

  Arlene came out a back door, followed by Buddie. Buddie was the guy I’d seen while crammed into the foot well of the Mustang a few days ago. He looked a full head taller than Arlene, which would put him at six foot six or more. Big guy, looked like Sasquatch. He gave Lucy and me a long look, said something to Arlene, then the guy in the panel truck was out with a clipboard in his hands, and they had to deal with him.

  Good time to wander around where they didn’t want us to go. I was happy to have a .357 Magnum on my hip.

  The sun bore down and did its best to broil us. The walk out was so pleasurable that I thought we ought to go up into the hills, a mile or more away, see what was on the other side. Lucy said go ahead, report back, so that discussion ended early.

  We went out half a mile. Daylight made finding the place—whatever it was—a lot easier. We followed the backhoe trail and finally found tire tracks all over as the backhoe had made dozens of three-point turns. Low mounds of disturbed dirt were more evident, ten or twelve of them lined up on the playa where the land sloped up toward the hills.

  “This one looks sort of new,” Lucy said, rubbing dirt with a shoe.

  It was at the end of the row. The smell of torn sage was strong, the dirt was slightly darker, but there was still nothing to indicate what Buddie had been doing out there—although I was starting to get a fairly unpleasant idea.

  We looked around awhile. Tire tracks, vague places where the earth seemed raised. Others that seemed slightly lower.

  Then a pickup truck came bounding across the desert toward us from the direction of the diner.

  “Company coming,” Lucy said. “Kinda fast, too.”

  I unsnapped my holster, left the gun hidden.

  The guy in the beard rolled up, cut the engine, got out. He was more than six-six, weighed well over three hundred pounds, arms with muscle like you see on anacondas. “Whatcha doin’?” he asked.

  “Rock hounding. Lots of interesting minerals out here.”

  “Yeah? Like what?” He came closer.

  Now what? Let him get within reach? Pull the gun? This was a lousy situation. I motioned for Lucy to move away, let me handle it, which I did by drifting sideways, away from Lucy, keeping the guy at least ten feet away. I circled around a big sagebrush, didn’t think he could leap over it at me. I picked up a rock that looked about as likely to be valuable as a wad of used Kleenex. I gave it a scientific look. “Looks like you got some good kinorthosite out here.”

  “What’s that?”

  Kinorthosite was nothing at all, but it had a minerally sound and enough syllables to keep this guy off balance. “You find it where you find deposits of decomposed agarnalite.”

  “What’s that?”

  If I kept this up, he was gonna wear me out. “It’s used as a base in road construction.”

  “Sounds like it’s worth about twenty cents a ton then. You’re staying at the motel, right?”

  “So far.”

  “So far. What’s that mean?”

  “Might move on. Haven’t decided yet.” I pointed to a nearby place where the earth had been disturbed. “What’re you doing out here?”

  “Burying septic tanks.”

  “Probably have to flush twice to get shit this far out.”

  His laugh was a baritone rumble. “Old used tanks, dude. I put in a new septic, people pay me five hundred bucks to haul the old one out. Suckers stink to high heaven, so I bury ’em out here, far enough out so you can’t smell ’em. You want, I’ll dig one up and you can have it, no charge.”

  “That’s tempting. I’ll think about it.” Lucy was forty yards away, looking at me. “Well, nice talking with you. Gotta see what we can find up in the hills. Interesting geology around here.”

  I started walking, headed away from the diner.

  “Not much gold up there,” Buddie said, “but I’ve seen a lot of sidewinders. They’re hard to spot in the sand. Good luck in those shoes.”

  I stopped for a moment.

  “They taste like chicken, sorta,” he said. “But you gotta cook ’em real slow or they’re tough as boot leather.”

  “Good to know.” I headed out again.

  He stood there and watched me go. I caught up to Lucy and we kept walking west, away from the diner.

  “What’d he say?” she asked.

  “Our shoes suck, and watch out for sidewinders.”

  “That’s what? Like rattlesnakes?�
��

  “Yep.”

  “Well, poop. How ’bout a piggyback ride?”

  So we walked that mile up into the hills, after all. Below, Buddie watched us for ten minutes then gave up and drove back to the diner. The panel truck was gone. The guy might’ve opened the safe like it was a cheap tin breadbox. Or failed quickly. Either way, he was gone and Lucy and I were alone with Arlene and Buddie. And Melanie and the cook, Kirby. Every ten or fifteen minutes, a car or truck would roll by on the highway. We didn’t see any sidewinders and, like Buddie had said, there wasn’t any gold in the hills, at least not decent-sized nuggets.

  We arrived back at the motel-diner, dusty, hot, and thirsty. Arlene wasn’t in the diner, but Melanie was wandering around, fussing with the tables, menus, salt and pepper shakers.

  “How about some water,” I said to her. “Four bottles.”

  She got the bottles out of a tall cooler with glass doors and a Pepsi logo. “Eight bucks.”

  I gave her a ten.

  She handed me two dollars change. “You were that guy I talked to out back a coupla nights ago, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You sort of like this place, huh?”

  “It’s a lot like Venice, only hotter.”

  “Really? Venice is like . . . like in France or Spain, right?”

  “Close. You nailed the right continent.”

  “Cool.”

  “Did they finally get that safe open?”

  Her face shut down. She turned and looked toward the back of the diner. “What safe?” she said, almost a whisper.

  I kept my voice low. “The one you said was in that shed out back.”

  “See, the thing is, I’m kinda gettin’ behind here, mister. I gotta fill the ketchup bottles on the tables, so if that water was all you wanted . . .”

  “Right. Nice talkin’ with you.”

  Lucy and I left. We headed for the far room of the motel. “When did they move Venice?” Lucy said. “I didn’t catch that.”

  “Place was sinking into the sea. They moved it a month or two ago, Sugar Plum. It’s in Corsica now.”