“About that—”
“It’s okay, Mort. You were snoring and drooling, right? It’s not an attractive image.”
“I don’t know about me since I was asleep, but she sure was.” Holiday’s eyes flicked up at me, then back at the menu.
“Okay, then,” Jeri said. “See what you can turn up in Gerlach about Allie. Try not to find more pieces of Reinhart, and meet me at the airport, day after tomorrow. I’ll text you with that time and flight number.”
“Nine thirty in the evening, flight 1168, Southwest. Got it.”
“Mind like a teal strap. Gotta go. Elimination rounds start in an hour. Love you, Mort.” Then she was gone.
“I sure was what?” Holiday asked as I folded the phone and set it on the table.
“Snoring and drooling in your sleep. Unattractively, too.”
Her peal of laughter turned heads all over the room.
At the register I was about to buy Holiday another Corti’s shirt, next size larger, but she said it wasn’t necessary. We went outside and she opened the trunk of her car. She got out a duffel bag, pulled out a shirt, went into the room and changed. While she did that, I found my gun under the bed and stuffed it under the front seat of my Toyota. When Holiday came out she was wearing a yellow short-sleeve T-shirt with a front that read:
The biggest piece of pi is three
“Nerd,” I said, after I finally got it, which took long enough that I knew she was going to laugh.
She didn’t, though, at least not out loud, but she wrinkled her nose at me. “Actually we nerds prefer the term geek on Fridays. Sets us up for the weekend.”
“Geek, then.” In fact, neither nerd nor geek captured the essence of the shirt since it was pretty full.
We walked over to the Texaco station. Hank Waldo was disheveled, eyes bloodshot and rheumy. He looked as if he’d had a typical Waldo night. Terrific. I handed him a picture of Allie. “She might’ve been in that Mercedes SUV you told Deputy Roup about,” I said, giving his memory a nudge.
He pulled out a pair of cheater glasses with enough grease on the lenses to lube a Volkswagen—perfect for ID purposes—and gave the photo a five-second look, shrugged, handed the picture back. “Coulda been her. Can’t say for sure, though. Anyways, I’ll keep an eye out.”
“You said you saw that SUV two days ago. A woman was putting gas in it?” This was covering ground he’d already covered, but I thought it might be what Jeri would do since she was a bulldog.
“Yep,” Waldo said. “Fairly tall, dark hair, thirty-five, coulda been forty, had a diamond ring on her finger big as an Easter egg.”
That was new. Jeri would be proud. “Big diamond, huh? So she was probably rich.”
“Didn’t need no diamond to see that. That car of hers’d run a hundred twenty thousand bucks, tricked out like it was. And she was dressed rich. She had that look.”
“What look?”
He squinted at me. “Rich. You oughta listen harder.”
“Any other jewelry?”
He shrugged. “Not that I saw. Just that big-ass rock, must’ve set some poor sumbitch back forty thousand smackeroos—unless it was that fake zirconia stuff.”
Smackeroos. Nice. I filed that away for future use.
“Was she wearing makeup?” Sarah asked.
“Coulda been. How would I know?”
Sarah lifted an eyebrow at me, then turned and looked up at the dark bulk of Granite Mountain to the north.
I said to Waldo, “Yesterday morning in the restaurant you said when they took off the night before, they went south.”
“Yep.” He pointed with a fingernail full of grit. “That way.”
“Later that evening I was outside the casino when a Mercedes SUV came through town from the north, headed south. About three hours after the one you saw.”
He looked at me through one eye. “One I saw went south. You might’ve seen a different one.”
Maybe so, but the other morning he said he’d seen it going through both north and south in the last week or two, just passing through, so maybe he’d gotten things mixed up. I didn’t think pushing him harder on that would get us anything useful. When Jeri came back from the East Coast, she might ask him something that would shake something else loose.
“Well, thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”
“No, I ain’t.” He turned and disappeared into a service bay.
“Okay, that was fun,” Sarah said. “Now what?” She had her hands shoved into the back pockets of her jeans.
“I don’t know. Ask around?”
“You don’t know? Maybe I missed something. How long have you been a PI?”
“About as long as you’ve been a hooker.”
“Oh, good. Jeri said this was gonna be pro bono, no charge. That’s looking like a good thing.”
We asked around. My nephew Gregory, for whom I’d worked for three days in July, had told me—warned me—that PI work was boring, that my expectations were unrealistic. A few days later I found his decapitated head on his desk so it turned out he was dead wrong, but that’s a different story.
Turns out, he was right.
Sarah and I wore out shoe leather walking up and down the main street—Highway 447—showing Allie’s photo around, asking folks if they’d seen her. No one had. Deputy Roup pulled to the side of the road in his cruiser and said hi, read the front of Sarah’s shirt, grinned, told us he’d been keeping his eyes open, then took off.
Investigation-wise, however, the morning gave us nothing.
We ate lunch at the restaurant, then I drove us to Empire in my Toyota, five miles away. I hit sixty miles an hour to impress Sarah with the yodeling mirror. She told me gluing a rat to it would work, just let her know if I did because she wanted a YouTube video of me doing it, then we went into the convenience store.
I showed Allie’s picture to a couple of clerks. A thin, stoop-shouldered kid with long red hair and freckles, nineteen years old, said, “Yeah, I saw her.
