'Oh, is that detective stuff?' she asked archly. 'Well, if you have to stand around in the cold all the time waiting for some asshole you don't even know to show up, it's a pretty shitty job.' She started to move around the car toward me.
'Stay where you are.'
'Oh, give me a fucking break,' she snapped, but she stopped.
Gun still on her, I walked around, peered into the car that wasn't mine. It was as empty as the night around us.
'You're afraid I brought somebody?' Close enough now to read each other's faces, I could see amused contempt in her smile. 'Is that what real detectives do?'
'It sometimes helps.' I holstered the gun; I felt stupid, alone out there in the huge night, holding a gun on a tiny fifteen-year-old girl. 'Did you know I was looking for you? Is that why you're here?'
She frowned up at me. Although there were no stars, no moon, the gold of her hair seemed to shine. 'Looking for me? How do you know who I am?'
'Detective stuff,' I told her. 'You're Ginny Sanderson, and your father's worried about you.'
'Oh, him.' Impatience and disappointment equally filled her words. 'You work for him?' The idea didn't seem at all to surprise her. She slouched against my car and scowled.
'He wanted me to,' I said, 'but I don't.'
She glanced up at that, and I saw her eyes glow, like the sparkling of the stars and the snow and the air itself on the coldest of winter nights.
'You crossed my dad? You won't last long up here. What did he want you to do?'
'Find you. Where's Jimmy Antonelli's truck?'
With a laugh she pushed herself up to sit on the hood of my car. As she moved she brushed close to me, and I caught the scent of her perfume, a heady, complicated fragrance, rich and old-fashioned, not what I might have expected of such a young girl.
'I get it,' she said, swinging her legs against the wheel well. 'That's a dumb detective trick, right? You say something out of nowhere to confuse me?'
'Do you have it?'
She pointed to the Trans-Am parked between my car and the road. 'That's my car. I'm not supposed to drive at night until I'm sixteen, but it's mine.'
'That's not an answer.'
'Sure it is. Besides, you should like that car. My dad gave it to me. But he won't give you one. He's not that nice to his employees.'
'I told you I don't work for him.'
'Maybe you think you don't. Everyone around here does, whether they know it or not.'
I pulled a cigarette out of my jacket. She held out her hand automatically, unthinkingly. I gave her that one, took out another for myself. She waited for a light; I did that, too.
The match was a brief flare in the darkness, reflected in her hair, her eyes. I shook it out, threw it away. 'A man was killed Monday night by someone with the keys to that truck.'
'Yeah. Wally.' She pulled deeply on the cigarette. 'Dumb little shit.'
'You knew him?'
'Oh, sure. I know all those guys.' She tossed her head, elaborately uninterested. 'What kind of stupid cigarettes are these?' She looked at the Kent I'd given her, threw it away. She reached under the baggy sweater, brought out a filterless Camel, waited without speaking for another light.
The still-burning cigarette she'd abandoned lay among gravel and dry leaves. I crushed it with the toe of my boot, then lit for her the one she was holding.
'Shit!' she snapped, brushing ash from my own cigarette off her sweater, where it had fallen. 'Watch it! This is my mom's.'
'Your mom's?' I said, then stopped myself. Her family's troubles weren't my business.
'Yeah, you know all about it, right?' she said scornfully. 'Everybody around here knows all about it. So she walked out on my dad, so what? Who wouldn't? Fucking jerk-off. Anyway, when she comes back, she's gonna want her stuff.' She hugged the soft black sweater around her, looked away as she smoked.
I watched her in the empty night. She brushed again at the spot where ash had fallen. I said, 'I'm sorry.'
'Oh, don't be an asshole!' she hissed. She might have been about to say something else, but the bar's door opened, spilling light, music, and four laughing people out into the night. They stood briefly in the lot, ending the evening together, the men's voices loud, the women's harder to hear. Car doors opened and closed, engines growled, and two sets of headlights swept past us onto 30.
Ginny Sanderson jumped lightly off my car, moved beyond it to where the headlights didn't reach. 'Nobody better see me here,' she said.
'Why not?'
She looked at me with a nasty smile. 'Because if my dad knows you found me and didn't bring me home you'll be in really deep shit. He'll probably fuck you up anyway if you don't find me, but this would really piss him off. He said that, right? That he'd fuck you up?'
I didn't answer, but whatever she saw in my face made her nod. 'That's him,' she said. 'He never just asks you to do something. Like it never occurs to him you might want to anyway, or you don't but if he paid you or something
