The Big Dirt Nap

club with instructions from me to aim at the knees, shins, or forearms—a cute cop in Virginia had once told me those were the best places to go for. Minimal strength required, maximum damage inflicted.

The door creaked open and we stood flattened against the wall behind it. In seconds, as I hoped, bodies tumbled over the bungee cords; in the dark I couldn't tell how many. I threw the tarp over them and Lucy started maniacally flailing away to a chorus of screams and 'what the . . .' A figure in skintight jeans stood in the doorway, taking off a helmet and shaking out her hair. Babe Chinnery.

'Stop, stop.' I pulled Lucy back before she killed somebody and three unhappy men scrambled to their feet.

'How did you get here? I would have sworn you weren't even going to get my message,' I said.

'Alba's a good kid. She said you sounded funny, which at her age could mean anything from indigestion to an oncoming freight train. Then I remembered seeing you tear out of Springfield yesterday looking like the devil was chasing you, so I thought maybe something was up. Luckily Charlie, Danny, and Ken were in the diner when you called.'

They had been heading back to Marcus Dairy to pick up Danny's bike. Since men don't usually say no to Babe, she had had her choice among three Harleys and she got them to take her to the reservation and then climb the mountain.

'I'd just gotten my turkey and cranberry wrap,' Danny said, rubbing the life back into the thigh that Lucy had whacked. 'It's probably all soggy by now.'

'You have food?' Lucy asked, sidling up to him.

'You gotta be kidding. First you crack me in the leg with a poker and then you expect me to give you my dinner?'

'Some people might consider it foreplay.'

'Ooooh, I like this girl. C'mon outside, honey, dinner is served.'

'You're lucky Caroline Sturgis isn't here, too,' Babe said, following Danny and Lucy out to the bikes.

That stopped me in my tracks. 'Are you serious?'

'She's been camped out at the diner for thirty-six hours with some news she's itching to tell you,' Babe said. 'She needs to get out and have more fun . . . like you girls.'

Oh, yeah, this was big fun.

'The ride was sweet,' Danny said, climbing onto his bike with Lucy wrapping herself around him. 'Until we met those a-holes.'

'What a-holes?' I asked.

'Some big guy and a runt trying to get up the mountain in a crappy Toyota,' Danny said. 'They had a hell of a blowout. Looked like they drove over a steel claw.'

'Hey, we told them we'd help them out on our way back, but they got rude, yelling in some foreign language. They left their car on the road, and started back down the hill, smacking each other and taking turns swigging from a bottle of vodka.'

Thirty-four

The six of us made our way back to my car. With Charlie's help I backed the Jeep down to a spot where I could safely turn it around.

The Ukrainians' car had to be moved out of the way so the Jeep could pass. They'd left the windows open and the doors weren't locked, but they hadn't been so accommodating as to leave the key in the ignition.

With five hundred or so pounds among them, not including leathers, Charlie and the other guys tried moving the car with brute force but it wouldn't budge. They tried again and when the veins started popping out on necks and foreheads we made them stop. They looked at one another and I heard Danny say, under his breath, 'Dude, I know she's hot, but I'm not scratching up my bike to move that hunk of junk.'

The assembled brain trust gave it some thought, but pushing the car with either the Jeep or the bikes was not a good plan. Besides, we might overdo it and send the car sailing off the side of the mountain. In any event, it wasn't necessary. Babe Chinnery climbed off Charlie's bike and brushed the three men aside. She slid into the Toyota and her head disappeared under the steering wheel.

'Six years of hanging out with drunken roadies and musicians who frequently lost their wallets, their airline tickets, their wives . . . and their car keys,' she explained, calmly hot-wiring the car. Another of her not-so-hidden talents. Once the engine came to life, Charlie put the car in neutral and single-handedly pushed it into the brush and out of the way into one of the wider switchbacks. Macho man stuff, undoubtedly for Babe's benefit.

The Toyota was a junker—its owner was clearly not the kind of guy who took his car in for a tune-up when the little red light flashed and told him to. Red masking tape held one of the brake light covers on. Inside, the car stank of cigarette smoke; fast-food wrappers littered the floor of the backseat; and there were plenty of beer cans, as well as three empty bottles of Popov vodka.

'Nothing but the best,' Babe said. 'You know these losers?'

'Not in the biblical sense,' I said.

One of my hand weeders was embedded in the Toyota's left front tire and I poked around in the dirt road as much as I could by the headlights of the Harleys looking for the other one—I didn't want any of us to suffer the same fate the Michelin Man and his friend had.

'Find it?' Babe asked.

'No. Just didn't want to take any chances.' A ridiculous thing to say under the circumstances.

'I think this Toyota was the car I saw on the way to Oksana's. The same one that followed me to the gas station on the highway,' I said.

'What the hell for?' Babe asked.

Lucy was hovering, wolfing down Danny's soggy but still edible turkey sandwich. Danny stood by, wondering how she'd thank him.

'Why are you looking at me?' she said, mouth full.

'They were following me because they thought I was you.'

Lucy was used to being followed, at parties, at conferences; she'd even been followed into the ladies' room once at a bar on the Upper East Side, but that time it hadn't been entirely unexpected or unwelcome.

'Why would anyone want to follow me?'

'It has to be your story.'

'The Quepochas' fight for recognition has been going on for twenty years,' Lucy said. 'And people have been arguing about casinos for just as long.'

Maybe. But Titans's financial difficulties had only recently come to light. I was betting that they were connected and that connection was the catalyst for Nick's murder.

The bikers helped me load my gear and tools on top so that Babe and Lucy could ride with me. Once again the blue tarp and the bungee cords came in handy. In the car I brought the girls up to speed, as Charlie slowly led us down the mountain. They left us at the entrance to Titans with a standing invitation for a meal on the house at the Paradise; Lucy promised Danny a personal, gourmet thank-you in New York in exchange for his turkey sandwich.

I suggested we crash in my room and drive home in the morning. 'There are two double beds and a love seat. Does that work for you two?' Babe and Lucy agreed and we walked to Lucy's rental car to get her overnight bag. Even from a distance we could tell something was wrong. The trunk of the car wasn't closed properly. Inside it, Lucy's expensive red leather suitcase was zipped closed but with a small scrap of fabric stuck in the teeth.

'Hey, that's my Burberry.' She unzipped the bag and saw that her usually carefully packed clothing had been rummaged and thoughtlessly restuffed in the bag, her expensive scarf stuck in the zipper.

'You know, I'm used to this when I fly,' she said, pissed off and checking to see if anything was missing. 'Generally there's a slip of paper explaining why it's critical to national security for some lonely TSA guy to sniff my undies, but here, for crying out loud?'

'It was probably the cops,' I said. 'I reported you as missing.' I'd call Winters in the morning to tell her everything was all right.

'You did? That was so sweet,' she said, refolding her things.