Jeri DiFrazzia and I investigate—privately. Well, she does. It says so on the door to her house-office. I’m a PI-in-training, having quit a thankless IRS job the first week of July in order to prowl dark alleyways and dodge bullets. I hadn’t counted on sword fights. In Nevada it takes ten thousand hours to become a licensed PI. Ten thousand freakin’ hours—a requirement that weeds out the wannabes by the truckload. Five years of training. Currently I was 6 percent of the way through that thicket of bullshit. Bet Spade and Hammer didn’t have to slog through any of that. I figured it took them about as long as it took to pound a nail and hang a shingle. I know McGee—Travis—hadn’t gone that route.
Jeri was working on an End Wrench with a twist of lime and a cherry. I had abandoned my usual—Pete’s Wicked Ale—and had a longneck of Moose Drool brown ale in front of me. An End Wrench, I’d learned, was orange juice and tonic water, something I wouldn’t put down my throat to win a bet under a hundred bucks. But Jeri was in training. She had a national competition coming up in three days in Atlantic City. She had a flight out on Southwest at 8:35 in the morning. My job, starting at 8:36, would be to hold down the fort and keep out of trouble while she was away, which was going to be a while since she was meeting her brother Ron and his wife the following Monday. Ron was competing in the Pan American Judo Championships the following week in Manhattan. The whole family was type-A like that. I’m more B-minus, but I compensate with luck. Jeri would be gone for twelve days, the longest we’d been apart since she’d taken me on as an investigator-in-training midsummer at the urging of my ex, Dallas, who’d probably wanted a good laugh.
Back to our lying senator. His absence had become bigger news than his poll numbers, so ditching that rally at Wingfield might’ve been a way to get even more attention, though that might just be my churlish take on politics in general. Reinhart’s absence was made more ominous when his chief of staff, Jayson Wexel, was killed in a house fire two days ago. The fire started in a fireplace, no surprise, except the daytime high temperature was eighty-five—and when the place had cooled, investigators found Jayson, age forty-nine, burned to a crisp. It looked like an accident, but . . . maybe not. Police were looking into it and “no comments” were being flung at reporters by lawmen as they entered buildings and climbed into cars, so it made for dry viewing and languid ratings, even with Senator Reinhart’s disappearance.
Jeri nodded at Reinhart on TV. “You oughta find that guy while I’m gone.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
“Last August I wouldn’t have put it past you. You and Kayla.”
A neat little dig there. Kayla, the missing mayor’s beautiful daughter, and I had gone off to Austin in the middle of Nevada, ignoring Jeri’s suggestion—okay, order—not to “horse around” with the investigation until she got back.
“My forte is decapitations,” I said. “Not missing dimwits.”
She smiled and sipped her drink. “Senator Dimwit would put you back in the spotlight again. That’s something.”
“No need, I’m still hot on Google. And our missing politician is probably in disguise in Puerto Vallarta boffing senoritas, trying to boost his numbers by getting himself in the news.”
“Boffing?”
“It’s in the dictionary. Look it up.”
“With that guy Wexel dead, Reinhart might not be laughing it up in Puerto Vallarta.”
“Right. He might be in Cancún.”
“Mort—”
That was when the Shriners rolled in. To a pile of drunks in red bucket hats, too-white shirts and red vests loaded down with merit badges, pins, and whatnot, half-blind as they were, it’s surprising Jeri ended up on the big Shriner’s radar, but she did. Fast, too, so the old guy had an eye. But maybe not so surprising. As usual, Jeri was looking good, dressed in tight-fitting plum pants and a long-sleeve ivory shirt. She had a face that drew stares, she’s that beautiful. She’s not much into jewelry—rings interfere with judo, karate, and aikido—but that night she was wearing gold hoop earrings that gave her a subtle gypsy look, especially with her dark hair cut in a feathery layered style. The reddish highlights, of course, were invisible in the green lighting, but the big guy didn’t know that.
In his funky fez, he looked about seven feet tall. In fact, he ran six foot six, an inch taller than the bartender, O’Roarke, two inches taller than me. Bunch of big guys in that bar, except that the rest of the Shriners were shrimps, all of them six feet or less.
Man Mountain passed by Jeri then hung a sloppy U-turn and sidled up to her on the side opposite me. He stuck an elbow on the bar, leaned in close, and stared at her. “Man oh man, you are some kinda hellacious pretty, sugar.”
Jeri leaned away from his breath. A lit match might have blown Bigfoot’s head off. “Yeah, thanks,” she said.
The two hints—Jeri’s body language and the arm’s-length voice—didn’t take, and things proceeded from there.
“You an’ me, little lady, we oughta dance.”
“I’m pretty sure we oughtn’t.”
“Y’all don’t dance with strangers? Well, allow me to fix that apace. The name’s Earl. Earl Eberhard.”
“You sure?”
Earl didn’t know what to say to that. He blinked a few times, squinted at her, then said, “Hah?”
Jeri stared at her drink. “Is it just me, or did it get a whole lot stupider in here in the last thirty seconds?”
I put a hand on her arm. “Whoa, there, little lady.”
She gave me a look that could have etched glass, an industrial process involving hydrofluoric acid, then she caught my meaning and nodded. Some of the tension went out of her. This gaggle of fools wasn’t mean, just drunk. Happy drunk, actually. The big guy was away
