“Little hint of exhibitionism there?”
Her mouth turned down. “That’s a word I really dislike. It has such a negative connotation.” She glanced at me. “Do you think it’s wrong, me wearing things like this?”
“Nope. Don’t see it as a problem, kiddo. Fifty million women in the country would hate and envy you. Millions would do what you’re doing if they could. A lot of women do. That’s how Victoria’s Secret stays in business.”
“Not sure what to say to that, except thanks.” She turned the heater up a notch.
“De nada.”
We went a few miles in silence, then I asked, “How old are you, Sarah?”
She gave me a look. “Old enough.”
“Humor me.”
She sighed softly. “I’ll be twenty-five in a few months. First week in December.”
Jesus, I was lousy with ages.
“How old is Allie?”
“She’ll be twenty-one in May.”
“Not yet twenty-one, and she’s been hooking in casino bars?”
“She had a fake ID. And she’s pretty and has a great figure. She told me she was making something like twelve thousand dollars a month. Trying to talk her out of that was like talking to a wall. She got mostly D’s in high school, barely got her diploma.”
Trying to keep up with her hyper-studious, white-sheep perfect sister, she’d fallen flat on her face. But she was beautiful, too, like Sarah, and she’d ended up making more than a civil engineer with ten years’ experience. Probably rubbed Sarah’s nose in it, too. I could’ve been wrong about that, I usually am, but I wouldn’t have wanted to walk in Sarah’s footsteps either. In college I barely eked out a C in business calculus, which is like real calculus on training wheels.
“I’ve probably talked to two hundred guys since I started looking for her,” Sarah said. “All ages, all types. I didn’t know what I was looking for.”
“Didn’t catch a whiff of Allie in all that time?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t go out with any of the men?”
She gave me a sharp look. “No, I didn’t. That’s not me. I mean, I guess I looked the part, even acted it, sort of—at least I think so, after I got the hang of it, but that’s as far as it went, ever. I wasn’t there for that.”
“All I’m doing is gathering information. I do this every time I get shanghaied.”
“Well, I thought I’d made it perfectly clear already.”
We reached the turnoff to Gerlach a few miles before Fernley. Sarah gave me her phone as she swung the Audi onto Highway 447 and headed north on a midnight-black, two-lane road beneath a sky studded with stars. “Hit call back,” she said. “See if you can reach that phone she called from.”
Ah, a challenge to my technical prowess. Just what I needed. Great Gumshoe fumbled with the damn thing for a few minutes, then said, “I’ll steer. You work the phone.”
She grabbed the phone, I grabbed the wheel. Good thing the road was a straight shot, empty, aimed right at Polaris.
A minute later Sarah put the phone down and took control of the wheel again. “Same thing,” she said. “It didn’t even go to voice mail, which is strange.” Her voice was tight.
I looked over at her again.
Stunningly beautiful. Curvy as hell. Not a hooker. Studious and repressed, then she’d stumbled on a way to cut loose . . . sort of.
And here I was, headed north in her car. That old PI magic was still in overdrive, big-time. Man, I wished I knew how to crack my knuckles.
We traveled in silence for ten miles. Finally, I said, “So what’s the plan here?”
“I don’t have one. You’re the PI.”
Great. Now was not the time to tell her I was in training, still working on my first thousand hours. There never seems to be a good time to bring that up.
“Gerlach’s a little place,” I offered.
“Uh-huh. I’ve been through it a couple of times.”
“Why would she phone from there? You know anyone up that way? Friends, family?”
“No. No one. She might know someone, though. It’s not like we’ve been super close lately.”
I shrugged. “So we’ll go up and look around, see if there’s any sign of her.” Hell of a plan.
Sarah didn’t say anything.
I said, “She indicated she has money. A lot of it.”
“She’s been hooking for nearly a year. She might have a hundred thousand dollars saved up.”
“I got a different impression. She was cut off. She was about to say more, then it’s like someone took the phone away. Which pretty much means she’s with someone. Someone who didn’t want her talking to you, or maybe to anyone.”
“I know. That has me worried more than anything.”
“Any idea who she might be with?”
“She’s been gone a long time. Two months. I haven’t heard a word from her in all that time. And given what she was doing . . . I really wouldn’t have a clue.”
I did, sort of. Girl tries to phone her sister, gets cut off. That was a clue. Not a happy one, either.
So here we were, headed for Gerlach, a town with a population of maybe two hundred. The place was littered with hot springs, some of which were lethal. In the past, people had died jumping into hundred-eighty-degree water, which gave me the willies. It was also the only town in the region, about as isolated as any place in Nevada. Hunters would stay at Corti’s Motel, eat at the restaurant in Corti’s Casino. I’d been through the town a few times on IRS field audits. It wasn’t the kind of place you hankered to go to unless you wanted to get away from it all and vegetate for a while, maybe regroup. During the Burning Man Festival, however, the population nearby in the desert would run into the tens of thousands. Then it was a place to avoid, although it did have unclothed girls running hot and cold the entire week. Lots of nudity going on in or around
