“Omigod, yes. You get it. I mean, you really get it.”
“Yep. Except right now, I’m not sure who I’m talking to, Sarah or Holiday.”
“Hey, I’m both. It’s not like I’m schizo or anything.”
“I didn’t say you were. But we’re talking engineering and hot outfits all in the same breath, so there’s a lot of ambiguity floating around this car.”
“Well, I’m . . . I’m . . . oh, Jesus. I’m Sarah, but I feel . . . right now with you . . . oh, hell. Never mind.”
She went silent. The ride was like traveling inside a coal mine, except with stars. She ran it up to eighty for a while, black jagged mountains off to the right, temperature dropping outside, thrum of tires on asphalt, me unable to think of a single thing to say in this minefield of conversation. Twenty minutes later we passed a small convenience store at a place called Empire. A minute after that we topped a rise, and Gerlach’s lights were visible four or five miles away, a little sprawl of lights beneath the dark bulk of Granite Mountain.
CHAPTER FOUR
WE PULLED INTO a Texaco station at the east end of town. Its lights were off, but the sign was illuminated. Sarah stopped beside a row of pumps. No one came out. I got out and checked the pumps. No credit card readers. They looked forty years old and their nozzles were padlocked in place. A sign on the door said the station would open at six a.m.
“That’s it for gas in this burg,” I told her, getting back in.
“Great.”
My sentiments exactly. Maybe I could find someone to open the place up. If not, we were stuck here for the night. I heard Spade or Magnum chuckling in the dark, one of those guys. When it came to women, they were a riot.
Corti’s Motel was a hundred yards west of the Texaco station. Beyond that, Corti’s Casino was a low cinder block structure next door, lit up in neon. A market up the street was another little neon spark, closed for the night, but the rest of the town was dark except for two or three streetlights. The sidewalks, patches of hardscrabble dirt, had been rolled up and put away till morning.
Pickups and several utility trucks were nosed into slots in front of the motel—a well digger, plumber, Department of Transportation, a power company rig with a bucket lift.
Sarah pulled up in front of the casino and cut the engine. The time was 9:50, Wednesday evening.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Got a picture of your sister?”
She dug a photo out of her purse. It looked like a high school yearbook picture—pretty girl with blond hair, big eyes, pouty lips, generic abstract background of swirly colors. She looked a lot like her sister, almost as beautiful but not quite. Even so, she would turn heads. People would remember her.
“Stay put,” I said. I unhitched my shoulder holster, shoved it and the gun under the seat, then got out. Sarah got out on the other side. I stared at her. “What part of ‘stay put’ wasn’t clear?”
“Just stretching my back,” she said, stretching her back. Which did amazing things to that filmy top of hers and put the problem of feminine attire in a small town at night in sharp relief.
Jesus.
“Stay put.” I went into the casino and waited by the door. When she came in, I took her by the arm and escorted her back to the car. “Stay put must mean something different where you come from.”
She gave me an accusing look. “You waited for me in there.”
“I get these premonitions.”
“Maybe we could look around separately. No one has to know we’re together.”
“ ‘Stay put’ has a pretty much standard colloquial meaning in the United States. It means, stay the hell out of the casino, sugar, and let the PI do what you hired him to do.”
“Really? ‘Stay the hell out of’ and ‘sugar’? ‘Stay put’ implies all that?”
“You come bouncing in in that top and no one would hear a word I had to say.”
“Bouncing?”
“Don’t know how else to describe it.”
She gave me a sultry look. “Gosh, thanks.”
Jesus. She’d metamorphosed into Holiday the minute we hit town. “How about you sit in the car and wait?”
“I could scout around out here, look the place over.”
“How about you sit in the car and wait?”
“This place has a terrible echo.”
“In the car.” I opened the driver’s-side door.
She made a face. “You sound like you mean it. The thing is, I might see something useful. I mean, Allie was here, right? At least that’s what she said.”
“Okay, kiddo, you asked for it. Now I’ve gotta tell it like it is. Your tits are magnificent and that top isn’t covering half of what tops generally cover. It’s hunting season so this can be a rough little place, and I don’t see how any of that’s gonna help us track down your sister right now.”
She looked down at herself. “Magnificent? You think so?”
Sonofabitch. “Now isn’t the time to get all shivery, Holiday.”
She wrinkled her nose at me, then shrugged. “Okay. Don’t get bent out of shape. Just don’t be too long in there, all right?”
“I’ll be as long as I need to. Now stay put.”
I went back inside and waited by the door for a full minute. The Holiday half of Holiday-Sarah didn’t come in, so I finally got to look around. Bar along the back wall, tables and chairs closer to the door, menus stuffed in metal racks on the dining tables, small casino set apart from the bar and restaurant—thirty slot machines, a single blackjack table. Twenty people were inside the building, nineteen of them male, which meant Holiday had better stay the hell outside like I’d told her.
I sat at the bar, put a ten-spot and Allie’s picture in front of me, said, “Draft, dark,” when the bartender drifted over. Bald guy about my age with a one-inch beard, earrings, tattoos, a scar on his cheek. My scars were better, more recent. It would be a freezing-ass day in hell before
