I was starting to hate hospitals, but they’re a lot like enemas. When you need ’em, you need ’em, so you grit your teeth and take it and try not to let the whining leak out to where people can hear it and fuck with your gravitas.
“How’d you get there, Ma?” I asked her. My mouth had that gummy, after-surgery medicinal aftertaste that comes up from the lungs. I was in bed in a room that was costing between two and three dollars a minute. I had an IV in one arm and a drain in my shoulder with stuff I didn’t want to look at collecting in a bag attached to the side of the bed. Later I found out the bullet had hit a fair-sized blood vessel and Day had compressed the wound all the way to the hospital and possibly saved my life. I would never hear the end of that. And, shit, now I owed him one.
“Get where?” Ma asked.
“To that diner last night. You and Officer Day.”
“Drove my Caddy.”
“No shit, Shirleylock.” I tried to follow up that beauty of a comeback with a fierce look, but it was too soon after surgery and I looked, Ma told me later, like Winston Churchill after three pints too many. So . . . probably not fierce.
“I owe you one, Ma,” I said. I would never tell her I’d been shot trying to keep her away from Arlene, or that Lucy and I had been about to escape unscathed and Ma showing up right then was what got me shot. Ma is tough, but not that tough.
“Yes, you do.”
“Now that that’s out of the way, let’s try this again. Why are you here? You were in Memphis, which, in case you didn’t know, is in Tennessee.”
“What I do,” she said, “is listen between the lines. You found that subhuman, Jo-X, then got yourself an unauthorized assistant, you were on TV damn near every time the news came on, next thing you’re down in southern Nevada acting coy on the phone, not wanting to tell me what you were up to—”
“Well, shit. Between those lines you probably didn’t have to listen very hard.”
“Not very. And to top it off, you’re a world-class flake.”
“You knew I was a flake before you left Reno.”
“Which is why I shouldn’t have gone, so here I am. Just in time, too.”
“None of which explains exactly how you ended up at that diner-motel in time to put a bullet in that poor woman’s head.”
“Poor woman?”
“Kidding.”
“With you, I never know. Cliff and me—that’s Day’s first name in case you didn’t know—drove down from Reno, got to Caliente at two in the morning and woke up Detective Fairchild, who said something about wishing he hadn’t given Cliff his motel and room number. He said you’d gone back to that motel where shit apparently happens. That seemed ominous, knowing you, so Cliff and I drove over to see what was what.”
“You and ‘Cliff,’ driving around together. Cool.”
Her eyes got sly. “He and I have . . . traveled together. It’s not our first rodeo.”
“Rodeo, Ma. I like that.”
“Thought you might.”
“So you hustled on over to the Midnight Rider Motel in the Chariot of Fire.”
Ma’s Cadillac was good for about fifty miles an hour before it started to float and wander on the road, a weird combination of good shocks and soft springs. I’d dubbed it the Chariot of Fire last October when it took forever to get back to Reno from Bend, Oregon. But the seats are comfortable, so there’s that.
“It rides better with Cliff in it,” Ma said. “He weighs three-thirty. I got it all the way up to sixty and kept it there.”
“You could’ve done seventy with Buddie in the trunk.”
“Who’s Buddie?”
“Dead guy at the diner lying in two gallons of blood.”
“Oh, him. Exsanguinated.”
Sounded like a sneeze so I said, “Bless you.”
Then Lucy wandered into the room in her hospital gown, the one with backdoor ventilation that allows everyone to see your bum if you don’t hold the drapes shut.
She bent down and gave me a gentle lingering kiss. “How you doin’, big guy?”
“I chortle in the face of death.”
“Good. You’re practically normal already.”
She backed up a step and looked at my shoulder. “Spiffy bandage, Mort. Lookit mine.” She held out her arm and pulled her sleeve up to the shoulder.
“Spiffy. But take note—I’ve got a drain and two bandages.” I touched my ear, felt the adhesive.
For the rest of my life, unless I had plastic surgery, which I’m not inclined to do except for possible augmentations, a bit of the top of my right ear would be missing where Arlene had come within an inch of turning out my lights. And she’d done it with a piece-of-shit snub-nose revolver at nearly thirty feet, too, which was a lucky damn shot, getting that close, so it’s all a crap-shoot and God doesn’t play favorites.
“Show-off,” she said.
“And they gave me a pint of blood.”
“Yeah? How’d it taste?”
“We ain’t been introduced yet,” Ma said to her, “and Mort’s social skills are in the toilet because he was with the IRS, so I’m Ma. Maude Clary, but only my enemies call me Maude.”
“If Arlene is any indication, your enemies end up dead, so they don’t call you Maude for long,” said my spiffy assistant.
Ma gave me a big smile. “She’ll do.” Then she gave Lucy a hug, something she’d never done to me. “Mort tells me you want to be a private investigator.”
“If I don’t have to get shot very often, sure. Last week has been fun. Lot more fun than the crap jobs I’ve had lately. Except when we were buried alive, that is.”
“Big problem though—you have to be at least twenty-one to get a license, so you’ll have to wait a while. Mort said you were thirty-one, but he obviously lied.”
“I am thirty-one. Since April.”
Ma stared at her, then at me.
“Yep,” I said. “She checks out. And it’s been useful to have an assistant with one foot in the grave who looks nineteen.”
Ma stared at Lucy again, then shook her head. “Jesus.”
The TV was on, sound turned down low. I looked up and there was a big Case backhoe, Department of Transportation on the side, working on a hole in the desert heat. A huge tow truck was standing by, a bunch of guys in orange vests looking on, holding shovels, police cars scattered around in the background. I turned up the volume. A talking head I didn’t recognize, Ginny Fernandez out of Vegas, was fifty yards from the action, telling the story of bodies in cars being dug out of the desert behind a place called Arlene’s Diner on Highway 93, seventy miles north of Vegas. Three cars had been recovered so far. The most recent appeared to have cleared up the eight-year disappearance of one Lawrence Emory from Tulsa, although the body found in the trunk of Emory’s Mercedes had yet to be positively identified, which would have to be done via dental records. Earlier finds were those of Peter Windham, missing for ten years, and Vincent Ignacio, a journalist out of Chicago.
“Journalist,” Ma said. “That was magnanimous of them.”
“At least they didn’t call him the Wharf Rat,” Lucy said.
“Wharf Rat?”
“Long story, Ma,” I said, yawning, then my eyelids turned to lead plates. It happened suddenly, which was startling. I tried to keep them from banging shut, but they got too heavy and I slipped away.
When I awoke, Ma and Lucy were gone. Russell Fairchild and a pair of Clark County detectives were in the room, talking quietly. Finally, Russ noticed that I was awake, so then I got all the attention. Which was only as it should be.
The smile muscles of the two Clark plainclothes guys had atrophied, a medical condition that no doubt served them as well in their professional lives as it did mine in my IRS days, back when I was rounding up tax dodgers who thought, oh so wrongly, that the money they had earned was rightfully their own. People who actually work for a living have funny ideas.
I had a hospital lunch of fruit cocktail fresh out of the can, and lime Jell-O,
while Detective Bache and Detective Webber, both with that same unusual first name, asked their questions and listened with job-related expert skepticism to answers.
Russ mopped his forehead several times during this initial Q&A session, but I managed to keep Danya and Shanna out of it, which left the story rather unlikely and a bit thin—but like I told Detective and Detective, luck happens—like the time I opened the trunk of my ex-wife’s Mercedes and found the decapitated head of Reno’s mayor. Pure dumb luck. So—Lucy and I were at the motel a few days ago when a Lexus left late at night—same night a backhoe was digging out in the desert not long after. That of course piqued our interest—the backhoe, not the Lexus. Then we were out there looking at the Milky Way when a searchlight over by the diner came on and scanned the desert, which piqued our interest even further. So Lucy and I went out there in daylight and Bigfoot rolled up in a pickup truck wondering what we were doing out there and, yes, that did nothing to keep our interest from piquing even further—which, as this continuing saga of dumb luck would have it, evidently piqued the interest of Buddie and Arlene to the point that they smoked us out of our motel room and tried to kill us.
“Talk about luck,” I said.
“Talk about a lot of piquing,” Webber said laconically. I’d finally identified him as the younger of the two, the one with the Groucho moustache and the overlapping incisors.
“Sure was,” I responded laconically.
“So you found that Jonnie Xenon character up in Reno,” he said. “What brought you down to these parts?”
“These parts?”
His eyes narrowed. “Vegas, Caliente, that motel, diner.”
“Vacation.”
“Vacation.” His voice was as flat as a slab of concrete.
I looked around. “This room has a hell of an echo.”
“You find that fuckin’ Xenon, get on national TV all over the country, then take a vacation.”
“A very concise summation. Good job. After all that success, I was pooped. You would be, too.” Back in your court, Detective.
I’ve been told that talking with me is like talking with your average tree stump. Speaking of stumped, Webber just stared at me for a while after my last comment.
“Huh,” he said finally.
“Then,” I elaborated, “we got caught up in all that piquing of interest stuff, which turned out badly, since, look, I’ve got a drain in my shoulder, except that it probably saved taxpayers a million dollars since no trial is needed, so you’re welcome.”
“By ‘we,’ you mean”—he checked his notebook—“you and this Lucy Landry, age thirty-one, address in San Francisco?”
“That’s her. And I wonder if I could have a brief moment alone with my compadre here,” I said, nodding at Russ. “Who is also acting on my behalf as an interim legal advisor.”
That earned me a pair of lifted eyebrows and flinty looks, but they stood up, and the older one with the encouraging affable smile and the ball-bearing eyes, Bache, said, “Let’s go find some coffee.”
They left.
“Legal advisor?” Russ said. “Good one, Mort.”
“Notice that they’re gone. Is Lucy well enough to travel?”
“Probably. No IVs or drains. What’s up?”
“Find Ma—Maude Clary—get Lucy checked out of here and on her way to Reno. My story didn’t include Danya and Shanna, but hers might. We need to be on the same page.”
“Probably a good idea, but it might not be necessary. That Lucy’s a pretty sharp gal.”
“Knew that. And it sounds like you’re on a first-name basis with her, which is interesting considering that she threatened to throw you out a window a few days ago. What’d she do?”
“Cliff and Maude drove you to the hospital. In my car, since Maude said her Caddy is a ground sloth. Lucy made me hang back. She took me into the diner, into the back rooms where those two murderers lived, and got into their computer. She deleted one of the videos, the one where Shanna is walking with Xenon to that helicopter of his.”
“Just that one? Why?”
“Because she’s sharper than you, Angel.”
“I know that. But I’m at something of a disadvantage right now, wounded like this. Gimme a few minutes.”
“Take your time.”
Russ looked up at the TV where the sound was off, vehicles being dragged out of holes in the blazing sun. I thought about those videos, what they might mean. Shanna walking with Xenon to the helicopter. That tied her directly to Xenon. The second one didn’t, but it put Shanna at Arlene’s Diner, which was . . .
“Ah-hah,” I said.
Russ turned to me, eyes bright, a half-grin on his face. “So, why’d she do it, hotshot?”
“It explains, sort of, how Xenon got in the girls’ garage. Not directly, but it gives the police a way to piece it together, in the absence of other information. Buddie put him there. He’d seen Shanna at the diner. He killed Xenon, must’ve followed Shanna all the way to Reno since he might’ve been infatuated with her, the way she was dressed at the diner. Or Arlene told him to do it to get Xenon far away from them. Either way. So Buddie stashes Xenon in her garage, leaves a note demanding money. Records might show that his IQ was in the low teens. No telling what an idiot will do. It isn’t as if he’s around to tell a different story. Getting rid of that first video unhooks Shanna from Xenon.”
“Okay, you’re a hotshot.”
“Think it’ll hold up?”
“Don’t know. It’s thin, but like you said, those two, Arlene and Buddie, won’t be telling any tales. Cops will find that one video on her computer and come up with a story. I’ve got to talk to Danya and Shanna, get them tuned in. Shanna can say she was at the diner, but that’s all she knows. She won’t have any idea that that woman made a video of her, or why. Danya could also have been there in the ladies’ room when the video was made. They can back each other up. They’ll need to act surprised as hell to hear that there’s a video. But it explains how two murderers latched onto them and, as weak a link as that is without that first video, it must be how Xenon ended up in their garage. End of story. Which also means none of us knows anything about any video of Shanna. Not until we’re told, at least.”
“Lucy wants to be a private investigator.”
“She’s definitely got the smarts for it. But she’ll be another fuckin’ maverick, I can tell.”
“No doubt. But you should still have Ma get her out of here. The fewer stories the cops hear, the better. And get Ma thinking about all of this, figuring out what to say, what not to say. She’ll be real good at that.”
He stared at me for a moment, maybe wondering about why I thought Ma should chew on this, then he took off.
Bache and Webber returned with coffee and more questions, which I answered—truthfully whenever possible, evasively when evasion was necessary, and I tossed out a lot of “I don’t knows,” which would be impossible to disprove.
Russ returned, gave me a wink, which put a final seal on our buddyship, and I said to Clark County’s finest, “I can barely keep my eyes open, guys. How about coming back when I’m awake and feeling more like myself.”
“More like yourself, meaning what? Finding bodies?” Bache said.
“That’s good. If I use that in a TV interview, I’ll give you the credit, Detective.”
Apparently that reminded them they might be walking on eggshells here, career-wise. One wrong move and they could end up as IRS agents, which was the kiss of death if you were human. They closed their notebooks and stood up. Bache turned at the door and fed me Schwarzenegger’s line, complete with accent and dead-fish eyes: “I’ll be back.”
Funny guy.
Three days later, I left Vegas in the Chariot of Fire. Ma had stashed Lucy in her house in Reno and then came back to pick me up. We went north on US 95, so I’d seen the last of Arlene’s Diner and the Midnight Rider Motel. I never found out what happened to Melanie and Kirby, but cooking, room cleaning, and waitressing are trans
portable life skills so I didn’t worry.
Russ told me Arlene’s safe deposit box had been opened and they’d found forty-four ten-ounce gold bars. With the ones Lucy and I found in the storage shed, and a spot price of $1,205.66 per ounce, that came to a little over five hundred seventy thousand dollars, which would eventually be distributed among surviving family members of those who’d been murdered by the Hickses.
We’d lost the suite at the Luxor—inactivity—but we got the roulette money, so financially the entire southern Nevada venture turned out great. Medically, not so great. I paid the taxes on the winnings using the Stephen Brewer ID. I’d been with the IRS not long ago and still remembered some of the better dodges, but most active IRS agents don’t attempt an end run around the IRS because that bunch of folks would eat their own young.
For a while, television was interesting but depressing. They eventually dug fourteen bodies out of the desert, identified every one of them. Arlene and Buddie Hicks, mother and son serial murderers—not mass; glad they got that straightened out—were right up there with Bundy and Dahmer. If I’d been able to travel, I would’ve attended the Wharf Rat’s—okay, Ignacio’s—funeral service. I’d sort of liked the guy at the end. He didn’t deserve what he got. Celebrity News played it up big, of course, losing one of their own. Never let a story get away. So there I was with Vince, front page as people went through checkout lines. I sold two million copies and got a check from the News for $6,500 so they could use my picture. Worth it to them, too, now that I was once again a household name. Like Ty-D-Bol.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I WAS IN the Green Room at the Golden Goose Casino with Ma and Lucy when Holiday walked in. I was slowly working my way through my first Pete’s Wicked Ale since I’d been shot. The barkeep, Patrick O’Roarke, had given me a fistful of free-drink coupons. Lucy got the same. She and I were comparing gunshot wounds, but the poor girl was outclassed. Her scar wasn’t going to compare to my chunk of missing ear, even though she said not that much was missing and her scar was going to be bigger. I said mine would be more interesting and was likely to generate more comments. We could’ve played ping-pong with that all night long and gotten drunk, but the shoulder wound was my ace in the hole. In and out, two scars. She’d only been grazed. She’d had an IV for a few hours, no drain, no surgery with anesthesia, no extra pint of blood, and I had that sword wound from last year that had damn near killed me, so she was out of the running, scarwise.
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