“Corsica. That’s in England or Holland, right?”
“Yeah. One of those.”
“Guess I can be kinda bitchy, huh? Hope it’s not enough to scare you off.”
“I’ll let you know.”
We showered. I read. Lucy stretched awhile, but there’s only so much of that a person can do before their bones are so flexible they can no longer take Earth’s gravity, so she went out to the car, found a battered James Lee Burke novel in the trunk, Cadillac Jukebox, and settled down beside me on the bed. I wondered when or if we would hear something more about our walking tour out in the desert.
Hunger eventually drove us back to the diner. A car had pulled up and a couple with two boys about six and eight years old were in the dining room—the boys running amok, playing grab ass, toppling a few chairs while the parents took a break from parenting.
Arlene came out of the back, went back, came out again, went back, didn’t pay us any attention. Melanie took our orders. They were out of lobster thermidor again so we settled for greasy fried chicken, baked potato, cole slaw in a side dish.
“Yum,” Lucy said, picking the skin off a chicken breast.
“Calories, dear.”
“That’s about all it is.”
The sun went below the hills. Long shadows crept eastward across the shallow bowl of the valley.
“Got apple or berry pie for dessert,” Melanie said. “And ice cream, vanilla or chocolate.”
“Berry pie with vanilla ice cream for me,” I said.
Lucy looked up at her. “Nothing for me, thanks. I’m saving myself for my wedding night.”
Melanie stared at her, then shook her head and left.
“Not sure you should do that to her,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll have a little of your ice cream when it arrives.”
“Don’t. You won’t be able to wear white at your wedding. People will talk.”
“I’ll wear white. You’ll see, since you’ll be there.”
Dessert arrived. Lucy nipped a single spoonful of ice cream. I paid, we went outside. To settle the food, we walked half a mile up the highway and back. The land grew dark and infinite around us. The Milky Way filled with secrets.
“Nice out here,” Lucy said as we stood outside the motel. The world was dead quiet. “Except for . . .” She nodded toward the diner. “Those two weirdos, Lizzie Borden and Bigfoot. Still got your gun on you, right?”
I slapped my hip. The revolver was on my belt under my shirt and it would stay there, maybe even when I was in bed. Which I told Lucy.
“In bed? That’s so cool. I could put that in my diary. I slept with Wyatt Freakin’ Earp. You are gonna wear the hat, too, aren’t you?”
“Of course. And spurs.”
“Oh, great. I hate it when those dig in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE SMOKE ALARM above the bed went off seconds after I woke to the smell of smoke. First Alert gave off that ear-piercing shriek that catapults you out of bed and yanks your brain inside out. Lucy was out of bed on the other side, a ghost in the dark. She grabbed the blanket as I tried to find my clothes on a chair beside the bed. Too late. The smoke drove me away. I headed for the door naked, eyes stinging, watering.
Lucy ran outside with the blanket in her arms. I followed on her heels and ran into a brick wall outside the door that slammed me back into the room on my back, dazed. Then something grabbed my foot, dragged me out into the night, and a weight like a Jeep Cherokee landed on my chest. Then something grabbed my head and banged it onto the concrete walkway, hard, and all the lights went out.
I woke to a murmur of sound that slowly got louder. In time, I recognized Arlene’s pre-cancerous smoker’s rasp, interspersed at intervals with Lucy’s voice. When I finally cracked my eyes open, Arlene was in a chair ten feet away, a cigarette drooping at the corner of her mouth, smoke curling up past her face. She held a snub-nose revolver loosely in one hand and was looking a little way off to my right.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” Lucy said.
Kill who? Me? I wasn’t dead. Yet. I wanted to tell Lucy I was still alive, then Arlene said, “That little shit was in our shed, the one out back. He saw the safe.” Her cigarette bobbled as she spoke, sending ash down the front of her sweater. She took the cigarette out, held it between index and middle fingers as she brushed her sweater. “I could’ve handled that, but he also found a solid silver sculpture of a mountain lion bringing down a nine-point buck. The artist was famous. One of those western guys, like Remington. The thing was on display in one of the bigger Vegas casinos for half a year. They’d presented it to that Jonnie-X guy with all kinds of whoop-ti-do, so thousands of people had seen it, knew it belonged to him. It weighs forty-four pounds. At today’s silver prices, it’s worth about fourteen thousand dollars so Buddie just had to have it. He doesn’t know when to leave something that could ruin us. We’ll have to melt it down, of course, and soon. It’s worth over fifty thousand as a work of art, but it’s too well known so there’s no way to sell it like that.”
“So you killed him,” Lucy said.
I still didn’t know who’d been killed.
Arlene shrugged. “What was I supposed to do with him?”
My eyes felt droopy and I was having trouble making sense of the conversation. Maybe I had another fuckin’ concussion. Goddamn things were gonna be the death of me yet.
“Wrrr-mi-cloz,” I said. I heard my own voice and the words hadn’t come out the way I’d hoped. Not even close. I was in a chair in jockey shorts, nothing else, wrists held together in front of me by a plastic strap. A loop of rope was around my waist to keep me in the chair. The knot was somewhere behind me, out of reach. I’d asked where my clothes were, tried to anyway, but my voice wasn’t working right. The gravel sound of it, however, drew Arlene’s grackle eyes in my direction.
“Ah, it’s awake.”
“Mort!” Lucy said. “Are you all right?”
“Shuuu,” I said. “Yeauuu.” Didn’t sound right to me, so I tried clearing my throat, which about took the top of my head off, then I said, “Sor’v. Yep.”
“He needs a doctor,” Lucy said.
“As if,” Arlene responded.
So, no doc.
I felt chilled. We were in a room with a washer and dryer, a deep sink, cupboards, rolls of toilet paper on shelves, cleaning supplies, old refrigerator, cardboard boxes, a water heater. A door behind Arlene was closed. An overhead light fixture full of bugs cast a yellowish glow into the room. The floor was bare concrete with a few spidery cracks in it. Off to my left, a window was black, so I figured it was still night.
“Whz time zit?” I asked.
Arlene glanced at the wall behind me. “Two forty, not that it matters.”
“Wer’s Bud-d-dee?”
“Digging. Got a little backhoe work to do.”
“Got ano’er steptic t’brry?”
She tilted her head at me.
I gathered up my tongue, blinked to try to get her to quit being double since one of her was more than enough, and tried again. “He bury’n anoth’ sebtic tank?”
She laughed. “He told you that old story, huh? No, Mr. Angel, we don’t bury septic tanks out there.”
I didn’t want to know what they did bury, but even in my sorry state I had a pretty good idea. My telling her wasn’t likely to give them any new ideas, so I said, “Cars.”
She tilted her head again. “Bravo. Give that man a giant stuffed panda.” Her voice held not a trace of humor.
Still, she’d tried to be funny. I thought killing her would be even more amusing.
Lucy said, “They killed the Wharf Rat, Mort.”
Arlene stared at her. “Wharf Rat?”
“Vincent Ignacio,” I said, the words coming out quite a bit better that time as my mouth and brain finally connected. I felt sick, though, knowing he was gone. Knowing we were next.
“Who?” She still looked perplexed.
“You might know
him as Bill Hogan. He drove a red Chevy Cruze.”
“Oh, yes. Mr. Hogan. He was snooping around the shed out back, got inside, and ended up rather dead.”
“Is ‘rather dead’ more dead or less dead than just plain dead?”
She smiled, lips pressed together as if they’d been sutured. “You’re quite famous, Mr. Angel. Too bad your legion of fans will never know what became of you.” She looked at Lucy. “Or you, but you’re nobody special.”
“Says you,” Lucy said.
I looked over at her. She had a raw patch on her left cheek and a cut on her forehead that had bled a little. Her hands were also bound with a plastic strap, feet, too. I tried to move my legs, but they were strapped together at the ankles. Second time in less than a year I’d been tied up. That part of this PI thing was starting to get on my nerves.
“How long’ve I been out?” I asked.
“Two hours,” Arlene said. “Give or take. Enjoy your life while you can, Mr. Angel. Soon the lights will go out forever. You and this little woman-child can race off to eternity together.”
Lucy was in shorts and her pink tank top. Her feet were bare. She gave me a sad smile and said, “I’m sorry, Mort.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . everything. This . . .”
“Not your fault, kiddo.” To Arlene I said, “Lot of smoke, but there wasn’t any fire, was there?”
“Of course not. Not in the room. That isn’t cost effective. We got a smoky fire going at the intake to your air conditioner. Fills the room quickly. People tend to panic, come running outside with their eyes watering, not looking around.”
“What hit me? Buddie?”
“Well, it wasn’t me, Mr. Angel. Of course it was Buddie, and I imagine it was like running full tilt into a redwood tree. And I’d like to know where you heard his name.”
“So would I.”
Her eyes looked like bullet holes in sheet metal. She lifted the revolver, aimed it at me. Short barrel, not worth a shit at long range. A Rossi .38 special, wouldn’t take plus-P ammunition, but I still didn’t like it pointed in my direction. I also thought I was looking at the gun that had killed Jo-X. “A bullet in the knee would hurt,” she said. “Quite a bit, I should think.”
I did, too. “How about Buddie’s Excavating, printed right on the side of that flatbed truck of his. Which might be nothing but a wild-ass guess on my part, but I thought it was—”
“Okay, enough. Shut up.”
So I shut up.
She sat there and stared at me, then at Lucy. Her cigarette burned down and she used the butt to light another.
“Cost effective,” I said. “Chain smoking saves on matches.”
She said nothing, but a corner of her mouth lifted a sixteenth of an inch.
“Gets the lung cancer going faster, too,” I said. “Which, in your case, is good for the entire country. Patriotic, even.”
Arlene huffed out a cloud of smoke. “I could put a bullet in her knee instead. Maybe that would shut you up.”
So I shut up again.
We sat in silence. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere behind me, a very faint click, click, click. And, in the distance, the barely audible on-and-off diesel growl of Buddie’s backhoe.
Finally Arlene said, “How did you get onto us, here?”
“Onto you how?”
She lifted the muzzle of the gun half an inch. “Here you are. You’re nosing around. This place isn’t for shit. And don’t bother giving me a surprised look. No one sniffs around here. People only stop when they have to. Crappy little oasis in the empty desert, and there you two were, snooping around two nights ago. What put you onto us? I know you, Mr. Angel, were the one who found Xenon. You were in the news for days. But that was up in Reno. How on earth did any of that get you pointed down here?”
The only hope we had was to make her think the police were about to land on her and Buddie with both feet. And soon.
“The videos,” I said. “You shouldn’t have taken them. I still don’t know what that was all about.”
“What videos?”
“The ones you took of Celine. Who, by the way, isn’t black, but you know that. You made a video of her walking with Xenon over to his helicopter. Then another one, the next morning, when she was in the diner. You walked up and gave her a menu.”
Her eyes took on a murderous shine. “That isn’t possible. Those videos are on my computer and nowhere else.”
“Except, of course, on my cell phone. I showed them to a cop yesterday. He’ll be along anytime now.”
She levitated out of the chair, not a bad sign. “Show me,” she said in a choked voice.
“No problem. I’ll get right on it. Just get these straps off my wrists and ankles.”
She sank slowly back onto her chair. “You described those videos, so I’m forced to believe you. Now how did they get on your cell phone, Mr. Angel?” She said it with deadly calm, gun aimed at Lucy.
If I clowned around right then, Lucy was dead. I could see it in Arlene’s eyes. “They were on a flash drive in a pocket of Jo-X’s jeans when I found him in that garage. I kept the flash drive, copied the videos to a computer, then e-mailed them to my cell phone. This is the digital age.”
“A flash drive,” she said slowly. Then a light dawned. “That stupid, stupid son of a bitch. It was Buddie. Had to be.”
“He’s your kid, so son of a bitch sounds right,” Lucy said.
Don’t, I thought.
Arlene’s gaze swiveled to Lucy. “I’m going to let that go since we’ve got something more interesting than a bullet for you and bullets are messy, but you should watch your mouth, girl. You could end up without teeth for the last few hours of your life. You might find that unpleasant.”
To distract her, I said, “You knew Buddie put Xenon in their garage?”
“But of course. That was my idea. Buddie would never have come up with it. When that girl, Celine, left here that morning, Buddie followed her all the way up to Reno. She stopped only once for gas, in Tonopah. He phoned from there, told me where they were. He wanted to know if I wanted him to keep after her and of course I did. He found out where she lived. I had him take pictures of the house and yard, so when he came back, I told him to take that piece of shit rapper up there, dump him in their laps. I saw that garage in the pictures he took. It looked old. He could get it open, one way or another. I thought it was a marvelous idea to have Xenon turn up four hundred miles from here, right where ‘Celine’ lived. Once he was found, the police would go crazy, as would this entire silly country, as it so often does. Celine would be exposed. It would be a typical American circus, Celine in the center ring, media over it like maggots, the entire country agog at what she’d done.”
“So why would you tell Buddie to leave that flash drive in Jo-X’s pocket?”
“I wouldn’t. I videoed that phony Celine girl inside the diner and put the video on my computer. And on a flash drive that I left in my desk. That goddamn thing pointed a finger right back at us. Buddie did it because he’s an imbecile and a moron.”
Family. The ones who know you best. Not much love there. I thought it likely that she would kill him at some point, haul him into the desert, let the coyotes and buzzards have him. He would make a hearty meal.
“Why make the video in the first place?” I asked.
“Insurance. No specific reason. At the time, I realized it was the one and only chance I would ever get to do it. I didn’t think I would need it, but if I did, I would have it.”
“Then it was Buddie who wrote the note,” I said. “Figures. It looked like it was written by an eight-year-old.” If her love for him was as wobbly as I thought, the note might put her over the edge. Worth a try.
Her dark eyes locked on mine. “What note?”
“A note was left in their mailbox. In Celine’s mailbox, at the house where she lived.”
“What on earth did it say?”
“It asked for a million
dollars.”
“A million . . . oh, good Lord, what a stupid . . .” Her gaze turned inward for a moment. “I will skin him alive. That stupid damn kid of mine. Always so greedy.”
“Like his mother.”
“Not like me. I control it. I am patient. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve kept him under control.”
“Until you turned him loose to follow Celine. Four hundred miles from mom, he got ideas.”
She shook her head. “What else did that damn note say?”
“I left it with a cop yesterday, but I took a picture with my cell phone. The spelling and grammar will make you proud.”
“That’s Buddie. He almost made it to the eighth grade.”
Almost. I liked that. Seventh-grade education in a country that promotes kids based on age, not accomplishment. See Spot run would probably tax his little brain.
“Did you kill Jo-X down here or up in Reno?” I asked.
“Neither. We found him dead in that hideaway place of his, up in the hills.”
“Sure you did.”
Arlene gave me a funny look. “We did. That girl flying off in his helicopter was a bad sign. I figured Xenon was about to go off the rails, taking that girl up there. He’d never done anything like it before. Maybe it was the size of her bust. Men are like that. Buddie found the place over a year ago. We figured Xenon had to have all kinds of stuff up there, worth a lot of money. But he was giving us three grand a month to keep quiet about who he was. Thirty-six thousand a year, just to keep his secret, let him know if anyone came snooping around, let him know if the diner was empty and it was safe for him to fly in. Buddie doesn’t even make that much with his backhoe.
“But all of that would end if people knew where he was hiding out, then that damn girl goes up there. The next morning she came back in Jo-X’s SUV, alone. He flew in later, looked like he was hurting, then he flew back up to his place that afternoon. I didn’t like any of that, so when Buddie got back the next day after tailing that Celine girl to Reno, I sent him up there the next day and he watched the place for a while, told me he didn’t see anyone moving around, so he came out of the hills where he’d been watching. Doors weren’t locked, so he went in. He looked all over, finally found Xenon dead, shot twice.”
Gumshoe on the Loose Page 29