Dallas and I were on good terms, and not for the sake of the kid either. The “kid,” Nicole, was no longer a kid, a fact to which I was having trouble adjusting. Twenty years old, over two thousand miles away, taking dance and theater classes at Ithaca College in New York. She wasn’t the reason Dallas and I weren’t at each other’s throats. Hatred and grudge-holding, I’ve found, aren’t inevitable by-products of divorce. Dallas and I have always been friends. She had no reason to hate me, before, during, or after the divorce. It wasn’t my fault that the football career hadn’t panned out, years ago. It hadn’t been much of a career—it hadn’t been any sort of a career, in fact—just a will-o’-the-wisp dream of a kid too wet behind the ears to have a clue. What’s great in high school is second-string in college is nothing at all to the NFL. So Dallas and I were still friends. And, as I kidded her a month after the divorce was final, she might not have wanted any trouble with the IRS. The comment earned me a punch on the arm that still bothers me on rainy days.
I paused under a streetlamp to check my watch. In nine hours forty minutes I was going to report to Carson & Rudd Investigative Services, to my nephew, Gregory Rudd, my sister Ellen’s oldest, age twenty-eight, and as dull and as staid as they come, as if he’d been born in the wrong century, but a good kid nonetheless, especially if vanilla’s your flavor. I’d once changed his diapers, back when I was fourteen. Emergency situation. I told him about it two months ago. Now he was about to become my employer—an unsettling reversal of roles, fortune, or some combination thereof, but one I’d brought upon myself. I could’ve toughed it out with the IRS. Maybe I should have. But…no way. Some things in life are unspeakable. I have a soul. Sometimes I can even feel it down there plugging away.
I trudged through pools of light spilling from streetlamps, not quite as drunk as I thought I’d be when I’d hiked down to the Goose earlier that evening, but the world had a nice glow all the same. Its edges had softened. Drinking wasn’t my strong suit—damned if I knew what was—and I didn’t want to show up at Greg’s smelling like a brewery, even if Gregory was likely, due to the diaper incident, to forgive his old uncle an occasional weakness.
Sleuthing, I figured, would require a clear head and razor-sharp reflexes.
CHAPTER TWO
FROM ACROSS INTERSTATE 80 in the hills north of downtown, the casinos rose up in a gaudy roar of light. The city’s rough edges and dirt lay hidden beneath this high-rise blaze of neon. I faced it for a moment, sensing the magic in Reno’s lights, its surreal, improbable beauty. Like rectangular crystals, casinos erupted from the dark desert earth. A hundred years ago there was nothing like it on the planet. In another hundred years there might not be again, if one was a cynic about such things, which I tend to be. In a geologic blink we will return the Jurassic swamps and dinosaurs to carbon dioxide and water, leaving behind a brief burst of light and UHF that will blow past the Andromeda galaxy in one and a half million years. If they have TV, and better cable than we do, maybe they can snag I Love Lucy, then, fifty years later, Fear Factor—dimwits drinking blended rats in Times Square. Entertainment for the masses. No doubt they’ll be impressed by the progress we’ve made.
The neighborhood was quiet on Ralston Street, north of the freeway, half a mile west of the UNR campus, between Eleventh and Twelfth. I didn’t see any vans parked near my house. No media types skulking about, hoping to peel a nice, controversial sound bite out of me. The skulking had gone on for a few days, but had tapered off. Maybe they’d given up on me—reporters, hoping to dig up inside dirt on Jonnie via Dallas, thinking the ex-husband of the girlfriend of the missing mayor might be happy to sing.
Being the ex, and the wronged party, if one views divorce as a contest of right and wrong, I even had something of a motive for making Jonnie disappear, if his disappearance was seen as a possible crime, which more and more people were doing, one way or another. I’d even been questioned by a pair of detectives who showed up on my doorstep Tuesday evening, five days ago. I told them what I told the media rabble: I don’t know shit about this thing with Jonnie, but how’d your 1040 turn out last April?
The subject of tax forms, I’ve found, has a pretty much universal effect—roughly the same as a narc lurking in a corner of the room taking notes and photos at a frat party.
I went up the walk, unlocked the deadbolt, then the door, and went inside.
Years ago, the house belonged to my parents. I’d grown up in it. It held a host of childhood memories, most of them good. My father died nine years ago in what was loosely said to be a golfing accident, and my mother, Dori Angel, is in Hawaii now, Maui, sharing a multimillion-dollar condo-mansion with two other widows and having the time of her life. Her hair is dyed a phosphorescent shade of red and she drinks a lot of gimlets, Green Dragons, and other gin-based
