“Don’t.”
“Well, I promise I won’t touch you or anything. Just in case you get uncomfortable and can’t sleep like that.”
“Good to know. I’ll keep it in mind. Might write it on a Post-it and stick it on my forehead.”
“Hey! I mean it.”
“Uh-huh. Good night, Sarah.”
“Yeah, fine. Good night.”
Two minutes later:
“Mort?”
“Yeah?”
“A sword wound? You weren’t kidding?”
“A foil, actually. That’s a thin sword. In my chest, all the way through and out my back. It was that psycho girl, Winter.”
“Jeez. Real bitch, huh?”
“She was, yeah. I ended up killing her.”
Silence.
So I got about three hours’ half-assed sleep, which put me in a nice surly mood when daylight started to brighten the room. The girl beside me, Sarah or Holiday, not sure which, slept peacefully—of course, since she wasn’t twisted up in a bunch of clothes. But I’d made it through the night without irreversible damage, so I was going to be able to look myself in the mirror without having to snarl at a mangy cur staring back at me.
I got up without waking her, put on shoes, then slipped out the door into the new day. The sun was still behind the hills in the east, the sky over there turning a purple-blue color. Every vehicle outside was filmed with dust. A faint smell of coffee was in the air, wafting from the restaurant. It pulled me over through the morning chill and through the door, sat me at a table, and ordered a cup of itself while I tried to wake up, yawning, starting to feel amazed and pleased with myself that I’d slept three whole hours next to Holiday-Sarah who happened to be female and mostly or entirely naked, not sure which. I was a gumshoe with the self-control of a saint. I was a gumshoe like no other.
Sonofabitch.
Surly.
A cup of coffee and my eyes began to focus. I saw a clock. The time was 5:08. I hadn’t been up that early in months. Half-hidden in an alcove by the cash register I saw T-shirts hanging on a rack that I hadn’t noticed last night. I got up and ambled over, bought a white one with the words “Corti’s Casino, Gerlach, Nevada” on the front in blue letters, utterly generic—ten bucks. I marched it over to the motel room, opened the door, tossed it on the bed, then walked back to the casino.
Two more cups of coffee gave me time to glance at the first few pages of a day-old newspaper abandoned on a nearby table. There was more about the fire in Jayson Wexel’s house that had killed him—Wexel was Senator Reinhart’s chief of staff, which was the only reason he wasn’t buried on page eighteen. Nothing gets by those wunderkinds at the Gazette-Journal. The fire was either an accident or murder—apparently that was still up in the air. Then Sarah came in. The new T-shirt was tight as a drum across her chest and looked mighty full. No bra, but at least the shirt didn’t plunge. She looked about as normal as a girl with her figure can get in a shirt one size too small—a fact I was about to find out. She set yesterday’s FedEx package on the table in front of me and sat. “Thanks for the shirt, Mort. It’s a size too small. You eaten yet?”
Great. Another of my failings—I can’t figure women’s sizes in clothing. I set the newspaper aside. “Nope. Just coffee. And, hey, look, you brought in the mail.”
“I’m starving.” She slid the package an inch closer. “Open it. If it’s from your mom, it might be cookies.”
“From my mom it’ll either be a book or an RPG.”
“An RPG?”
“Rocket-propelled grenade. Mom’s a corker.”
She laughed.
I checked the label on the package. I didn’t recognize the return address, which was Abe Handy on Hacksaw Road, Reno.
I pulled out my cell phone and took a few photographs of the shipping label, got close-ups of both addresses.
“What’d you do that for?” Sarah asked.
“What you just observed was a month and a half of PI training poppin’ right out of the core of my soul. I can’t turn it off.” And the fact that the package was sent to me on Ralston Street without a street address, that popped out, too. Whoever sent it didn’t have my house number. Interesting. Guess it wasn’t mom, so it wouldn’t be an RPG, which would’ve been fun out there in the desert.
Sarah rolled her eyes.
I pulled the tab on the package and zipped it open, lifted the flap, took out something wrapped in bubble wrap. A piece of paper on top read: “Shake the hand of an honest politician.”
Right away, I didn’t like the looks of that.
I peeled the bubble wrap off, got down to something rolled in a few layers of clear Saran wrap.
Aw shit, no.
CHAPTER SIX
SARAH STARED AT it, eyes widening, then she jumped up with a yelp. “Omigod! What is that?”
Heads turned. Still early, but there were half a dozen people in the place and her voice was shrill. She backed away, bumped into a chair occupied by a guy in his fifties in a camo ball cap, camo shirt, boots, hunting knife on his belt.
By then I was on my feet, hoping the thing in plastic wasn’t real, wasn’t what it looked like. But I knew it was, because I’d been with the IRS long enough to have racked up karmic demerits by the truckload and this was what life had in store for me from now on.
“Sonofawhore,” I said, not really aware I’d said it.
The waitress who’d brought my coffee came over, frowned at the thing on the table, then said, “Aagggh,” and backed away, face white. A little pinkish slime was visible through the plastic, and a palm, thumb, fingers, fingernails, even a bit of dark hair between the knuckles.
But I’ve gotten used to this sort of thing—finding body parts, that is—so I recover faster than your basic civilian. I was the first
