“Dell looked unhappy.”
“Dell only thought he was good. Anyway, Dave said you were over here in room six. He’s the bartender.”
“Yup. We’ve met. Even bumped knuckles.”
“I got two free Tequila Sunrises. Drank most of them so I’m a little woohoo. I went by your house in Reno earlier. Your car was gone. I figured you came back here, so I drove on up.”
“I’ll have your PI license printed up in the morning.”
“Also, Jeri sort of told me she told you to come back here to keep looking for Allie, so that helped a little.”
“Okay, forget the license.” I shoved my revolver under the bed then gave her a once-over. “Is that a new top?”
She looked down at it, then at me. “Sort of. I’ve only had it a month. Like it?”
“It looks like it fits okay.”
“It’s fun. And comfortable. Anyway, here we are. And I’ve just got to take a shower. Last one was last night, in that other room, nineteen.”
“Yeah, you’d be pretty ripe by now.” I got into bed, pulled the cover up to my chin, then removed the towel and tossed it onto the only chair in the room. Come what may, I wasn’t going to spend another night hunkered down in a suit of armor.
She ran a zipper down the front of her top then hesitated before taking it off. “You’re acting pretty cool there, Boy Scout.”
“I’ve given up the fight. But I do have one little question for you.” “What’s that?”
“What the hell are you doing up here?”
“Looking for Allie. I mean, helping you look for her. Really, I can help. I showed her picture to everyone in the casino tonight.”
“So did I.”
“I figured. I got a lot of repeats, but some of the people in there hadn’t seen her picture yet so maybe they came in after you left. Jeri told me I should come up and help out.”
“Did she say how?”
Piqued, she put her hands on her hips. “Which of us is more likely to spot Allie if she’s wearing a disguise of some kind, you or me?”
“Who said anything about a disguise?”
“Who says she looks like she does in that picture? We don’t know why she’s here or what she’s doing. Or if she even was here.”
Good points all. Guess I was still tired. And distracted.
“Jeri sent you?” I said.
“Yeah. She said go—if I wanted to drive this far, that is.”
I would have to have a talk with Jeri sometime soon, get this sorted out, but she hadn’t sounded the least bit upset by what had happened the other night, which made me think that discussion was going to be pretty interesting.
I turned onto my side. “Hit the shower, kiddo. I’m done.”
I heard a zipper go down, heard clothing rustle, footsteps went padding around the room, then I heard teeth being brushed, then the shower came on and the curtain rattled as she pulled it across the bar, and that’s the last thing I heard.
By the time she came to bed, I was out cold. For all I know, she broad-jumped in from across the room.
Morning, of course, brought a whole new set of problems. First up was that the chair was six feet from the bed, my towel and all my clothes were on or around it, and my arms wouldn’t reach—none of which would have been a problem except that Holiday-Sarah was awake and lying on her side, looking at me.
“Morning,” she said.
I yawned. “Same to you.”
She smiled. “Very cool. I like that.”
I checked the bedside clock: 8:25 a.m. I propped myself up on my elbows. “Up and at ’em, girl. We’re burning daylight.”
She sat up, legs crossed. The blanket pooled around her waist, which created the next problem, as if I needed another one. It didn’t help when she got out of bed and walked over to the chair, rummaged around for a moment, located her panties, stepped into them, and wiggled a little as she pulled them up.
She frowned at me, still in bed. “You said we were burning daylight.”
“On second thought, why rush into things?”
“Why not? I thought you wanted to . . . oh.” She smiled. “Well, you know, Mort . . .”
“How ’bout you get dressed and go next door, order me some coffee, black, no sugar. I’ll be along in a minute or two.”
“Got a bit of a morning issue there?”
“Coffee. Black.”
“For the record, I didn’t touch you or anything. And I wouldn’t, either. We’re okay here.”
In nothing but panties she was a stunning sight—like Jeri and Kayla and my ex-wife, Dallas, two months ago—each in their own way. I was impressed by how much my life had changed once I shoved the IRS job and joined the human race. Private investigative work is so underrated.
“Not sure about the dress code this far north,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure people around here wear more than that.”
She smiled. “Hold your horses. I’m gettin’ there.” She pulled on her jeans, put on her top, shoes, fluffed her hair, and gave me one last look before opening the door. “Don’t be long.”
She went outside.
I got up, got dressed, got the hell out of there.
“Did you sleep with her, Mort?”
“Literally, yes. Figuratively, no.”
I was at a table in the restaurant, sitting across from Sarah. She was studying the menu. I had the phone to my ear. It was twenty minutes before noon in Atlantic City.
Six seconds of silence went by while Jeri deciphered what I’d said. Then: “Well, okay, then. But, Mort . . . ?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t own you, you know.”
Uh-oh. Here comes a curveball. I can’t hit curveballs.
“No one really owns anyone,” Jeri said, and she said it with such gentle understanding that I wondered if I was talking to Jeri or a passerby to whom she’d just handed the phone.
No one owns anyone. That sounded like philosophy—not part of my skill set.
“Right,” I said.
“I mean it, Mort. I don’t own you. I don’t want to own you. I will never own you. I want to be with you as long as that works. So, if, you know, something were to happen with Sarah, then we’d have to figure out what that means.”
“Nothing happened. Nothing that matters is going to happen. I’ve seen a lot of naked women in my time, in case you’ve already forgotten Kayla. I’m immune.”
Holiday-Sarah looked up at me, then back at the menu.
“You are not immune,” Jeri said. “Not to that.”
“I’m not saying I mind the view. But it’s like being in a candy store when you don’t need a sugar rush.”
Jeri laughed. Actually laughed. I’d known her less than two months, so I didn’t know her like I would in another twenty years. Every time I thought I did, she would surprise me. I was trying my damnedest to keep this on the up and up, and she was laughing.
“So you slept with her,” she said. “Literally.”
“Yup. Snoring and drooling. Like that.”
“So what was this? An update?”
“Update. Full disclosure. I didn’t want to keep anything from you, you know, in case it was something you’d want to know.”
“If the sleeping were to turn figurative, I’d want to know that. Otherwise, I have the feeling that when I get back you’ll be ready to rock and roll.”
“Christ, yes.”
“Good. Me, too. I don’t see a problem here.”
“Jeri?”
“What?”
“You are some kind of amazing woman, woman.”
“Hold that thought. I’ll be back in Reno Sunday night at nine thirty, flight number 1168, Southwest.”
“I thought you were going to watch your brother compete in the Pan American Judo Championships.”
“I was. But you found part of a presidential candidate. I think that takes precedence. And you’re famous again. Every time I see a television, there you are. We might want to get a handle on that. And I i
magine Sarah’s got you going a little, so I might be needed in Reno sooner than I’d thought.”
“About that—”
“It’s okay, Mort. You were snoring and drooling, right? It’s not an attractive image.”
“I don’t know about me since I was asleep, but she sure was.” Holiday’s eyes flicked up at me, then back at the menu.
“Okay, then,” Jeri said. “See what you can turn up in Gerlach about Allie. Try not to find more pieces of Reinhart, and meet me at the airport, day after tomorrow. I’ll text you with that time and flight number.”
“Nine thirty in the evening, flight 1168, Southwest. Got it.”
“Mind like a teal strap. Gotta go. Elimination rounds start in an hour. Love you, Mort.” Then she was gone.
“I sure was what?” Holiday asked as I folded the phone and set it on the table.
“Snoring and drooling in your sleep. Unattractively, too.”
Her peal of laughter turned heads all over the room.
At the register I was about to buy Holiday another Corti’s shirt, next size larger, but she said it wasn’t necessary. We went outside and she opened the trunk of her car. She got out a duffel bag, pulled out a shirt, went into the room and changed. While she did that, I found my gun under the bed and stuffed it under the front seat of my Toyota. When Holiday came out she was wearing a yellow short-sleeve T-shirt with a front that read:
The biggest piece of pi is three
“Nerd,” I said, after I finally got it, which took long enough that I knew she was going to laugh.
She didn’t, though, at least not out loud, but she wrinkled her nose at me. “Actually we nerds prefer the term geek on Fridays. Sets us up for the weekend.”
“Geek, then.” In fact, neither nerd nor geek captured the essence of the shirt since it was pretty full.
We walked over to the Texaco station. Hank Waldo was disheveled, eyes bloodshot and rheumy. He looked as if he’d had a typical Waldo night. Terrific. I handed him a picture of Allie. “She might’ve been in that Mercedes SUV you told Deputy Roup about,” I said, giving his memory a nudge.
He pulled out a pair of cheater glasses with enough grease on the lenses to lube a Volkswagen—perfect for ID purposes—and gave the photo a five-second look, shrugged, handed the picture back. “Coulda been her. Can’t say for sure, though. Anyways, I’ll keep an eye out.”
“You said you saw that SUV two days ago. A woman was putting gas in it?” This was covering ground he’d already covered, but I thought it might be what Jeri would do since she was a bulldog.
“Yep,” Waldo said. “Fairly tall, dark hair, thirty-five, coulda been forty, had a diamond ring on her finger big as an Easter egg.”
That was new. Jeri would be proud. “Big diamond, huh? So she was probably rich.”
“Didn’t need no diamond to see that. That car of hers’d run a hundred twenty thousand bucks, tricked out like it was. And she was dressed rich. She had that look.”
“What look?”
He squinted at me. “Rich. You oughta listen harder.”
“Any other jewelry?”
He shrugged. “Not that I saw. Just that big-ass rock, must’ve set some poor sumbitch back forty thousand smackeroos—unless it was that fake zirconia stuff.”
Smackeroos. Nice. I filed that away for future use.
“Was she wearing makeup?” Sarah asked.
“Coulda been. How would I know?”
Sarah lifted an eyebrow at me, then turned and looked up at the dark bulk of Granite Mountain to the north.
I said to Waldo, “Yesterday morning in the restaurant you said when they took off the night before, they went south.”
“Yep.” He pointed with a fingernail full of grit. “That way.”
“Later that evening I was outside the casino when a Mercedes SUV came through town from the north, headed south. About three hours after the one you saw.”
He looked at me through one eye. “One I saw went south. You might’ve seen a different one.”
Maybe so, but the other morning he said he’d seen it going through both north and south in the last week or two, just passing through, so maybe he’d gotten things mixed up. I didn’t think pushing him harder on that would get us anything useful. When Jeri came back from the East Coast, she might ask him something that would shake something else loose.
“Well, thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”
“No, I ain’t.” He turned and disappeared into a service bay.
“Okay, that was fun,” Sarah said. “Now what?” She had her hands shoved into the back pockets of her jeans.
“I don’t know. Ask around?”
“You don’t know? Maybe I missed something. How long have you been a PI?”
“About as long as you’ve been a hooker.”
“Oh, good. Jeri said this was gonna be pro bono, no charge. That’s looking like a good thing.”
We asked around. My nephew Gregory, for whom I’d worked for three days in July, had told me—warned me—that PI work was boring, that my expectations were unrealistic. A few days later I found his decapitated head on his desk so it turned out he was dead wrong, but that’s a different story.
Turns out, he was right.
Sarah and I wore out shoe leather walking up and down the main street—Highway 447—showing Allie’s photo around, asking folks if they’d seen her. No one had. Deputy Roup pulled to the side of the road in his cruiser and said hi, read the front of Sarah’s shirt, grinned, told us he’d been keeping his eyes open, then took off.
Investigation-wise, however, the morning gave us nothing.
We ate lunch at the restaurant, then I drove us to Empire in my Toyota, five miles away. I hit sixty miles an hour to impress Sarah with the yodeling mirror. She told me gluing a rat to it would work, just let her know if I did because she wanted a YouTube video of me doing it, then we went into the convenience store.
I showed Allie’s picture to a couple of clerks. A thin, stoop-shouldered kid with long red hair and freckles, nineteen years old, said, “Yeah, I saw her. She was pretty hot.” He took a half-step back at the look I gave him and said, “Uh, you know, kinda.”
“When?” Sarah asked. “When was that?” Her look was eager, intense.
“Um, like day before yesterday, I think. Must’ve been. I was working the evening shift and she came in, got a Diet Coke and like a Cliff Bar or something.”
“Sure it was her?” I asked.
“Her hair was darker, dark brown, not like in that picture, but she was really pretty like that. I think it was her.”
“Was she with anyone?”
“Some lady. I didn’t notice her all that much.”
He would’ve noticed the good-looking girl about his own age, not the ancient broad pushing forty—assuming Roup’s and Waldo’s descriptions were in the ballpark. Looking back twenty-some years, I couldn’t blame the kid.
“Did you see which way they went when they left?”
“South. They went south.”
“You sure?”
He shrugged. “I was by the front window when they left.” Then he added, diffidently, “I watched ’cause she was really pretty.”
“Remember what time it was?”
“We close at ten. It was at least an hour before that. More. Probably between eight fifteen and eight thirty.”
Which matched the time Allie had phoned from Gerlach. And now we had another sighting of them going south, which made my sighting of that SUV coming in from the north even more iffy. But then, I knew what I’d seen.
“What’s your name, son?” I asked.
“Brian. Brian Jordan.”
“If you see her again, Brian, there’s a hundred dollars in it for you. Two hundred if you get a license number. Keep your eyes peeled for a green Mercedes SUV.”
“Sure thing.” He wrote down my cell number.
As Sarah and I went outside, my phone rang. It was Jeri.
“Hi, darling,” I
said.
A moment of silence. “Darling? Where’s Mort? If he’s there, put him on.”
“Very funny, kiddo. What’s up?” I looked around. My Toyota was the only car in front of the store; nothing was moving on the highway. Empty damn place.
“Just thought I’d tell you I made it through the elimination round. I got a total of five hundred ten pounds up on the three lifts, no sweat.”
“Bet I could do that with a fork lift,” I told her.
“They don’t let us use those.”
“Then you’re probably in violation of a bunch of OSHA regulations. Give me a call if I need to wire bail money.”
“I’m gonna go wander around the casinos this afternoon, do the tourist thing, rest up. Final competition is tomorrow. Is Sarah still there with you?”
“Yep.”
“You two gonna stay the night in Gerlach again?”
“It’s looking that way.”
“Not likely to get carried away, are you? I mean, figuratively speaking.”
“Not gonna happen, babe.”
“Okay, then. I’m going to catch a cab. Call you later, okay?”
“I’ll be here.”
A couple of mushy “love yous” and we ended the call.
“How is she?” Sarah asked.
“Maybe a little worried. Hard to tell since she didn’t sound at all worried.” I squeezed into the car.
Sarah got in on the other side. “Next time she calls, I’ll talk to her, make certain she knows nothing’s going to happen between you and me.”
“Think that’s a good idea? Having that discussion?”
She looked at me for a moment. “Okay, you’re a little bit out there with all of this, so you probably ought to know it went something like this—yesterday in the Green Room you gave me the phone and told me to talk to her. Remember that?”
“Vaguely.”
“After a while she wanted to know how we met, and I told her how I’d been dressing up like a hooker to try to find Allie—which, by the way, she said wasn’t likely to work—then we kept talking and I ended up telling her I like it when guys look at me in the kind of clothes I’ve been wearing. She said it sounded like I had a little bit of exhibitionist in me and that she understood.”
“She did, huh? She used the word you don’t like and said she understood?”
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