“She said that? And laughed?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My engine?”
“That’s what she called it.”
“I’m gonna have to have a long talk with that woman.”
Sarah shrugged. “Whatever. I’m just telling you what she said. And for the record I really like being able to wear whatever I want when I’m around you.”
“Or not wear.”
“Well, yeah, that’s kind of the point. And . . .” “And? Don’t tell me there’s more.”
“And not having to worry about it getting out of control. She said you’re like that, trustworthy as a Buddhist monk, something of a super Boy Scout.”
“Aw, shit, no. A Boy Scout maybe, but not a monk.”
“Anyway, I like the way things have been the last two days. I wouldn’t have told you any of this except you’re starting to get a little weird.”
“Me weird?”
“Uh-huh. I’m okay with it. Turns out Jeri is, too. You’re the one who’s getting his knickers in a twist.”
“Knickers?”
“That’s British. It’s like getting your panties in a wad, but—”
“—I don’t wear panties, kiddo.”
“Which I think is a good thing, just so you know. I prefer guys who are guys.”
Something still didn’t feel right, like there was a piece of this puzzle I still wasn’t getting. And I was going to have to quash that monk thing. Where’d Jeri get that? But women are like that—they toy with us because they’re more subtle and because they can.
“How long have you known Jeri?” I asked.
“Known her? I’ve never met her.”
Huh. In theory I was a PI, but sometimes theory and practice reside on opposite ends of the universe. Something was going on, something in the background, and I didn’t know what it was.
I looked at Sarah and she looked back at me.
“What?” she said.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
She pooched her lips out in what looked like indignation. The indignation could’ve been real, but didn’t feel like it. “About what?” she asked.
“You. Jeri.”
“Hey, we’re television buddies, that’s all.”
“Television buddies?”
“She saw me on TV yesterday and today—we’re all over the place, Mort—and I saw her on TV back when you two killed those two crazy women last month. So she knows what I look like and I know what she looks like, and that’s how we know each other.”
“Television buddies.”
“Yup.”
Sonofabitch. I could feel something slippery puttering around in the shadows, but it was pure gossamer. I could’ve been wrong, since that’s my MO when it comes to anything female. But I don’t even know myself, much less anyone else on the planet, much less my fiancée who I haven’t known two months. How the hell would I know if she’d like to put on one of Holiday’s tops—not Sarah’s—then go out and make guys sit up and take notice? If so, she damn sure wouldn’t be the first.
I went back inside the convenience store and bought a map of Washoe County and a map of the western United States.
“What’d you get?” Sarah asked when I came out and crammed myself in behind the wheel.
I handed her the maps.
“What’re these for?”
I fired up the engine. “So we don’t get lost. Sometimes when you don’t know where the road’s going, you get lost.”
I headed back to Gerlach, five miles away. Holiday-Sarah was silent beside me. As we passed the Texaco station, she said, “Was that like a metaphor or a simile or whatever?”
“What?”
“That road thing.”
“I don’t know. We don’t use metaphors in the IRS, kiddo. We use handcuffs and prison time.”
She didn’t say anything to that. I pulled in at the casino and said, “Let’s take your car.” I got out.
She hopped out on the other side. “Where’re we goin’?”
“North.”
I walked over to her car and she trailed along. “North where?”
“Whatever’s up there. I don’t know, some little towns, I guess. Gimme your keys. I’ll drive, you navigate.”
She handed me her keys, and I got behind the wheel. She got in as I glanced at the fuel gauge—three-quarters full, good enough. I backed out and drove through town, which took forty seconds, then we went past a few trailers sitting on hardscrabble desert dirt and into the kind of emptiness for which Nevada is world famous.
Maybe this Holiday thing was a test.
But no. Jeri wouldn’t do that. Didn’t think so anyway.
I don’t own you, Mort.
Nor did I own her, didn’t want to. She was free to do whatever she wanted. Making demands of someone is like saying you own them—a part of them anyway. Maybe this was exactly what Jeri said it was. Not a test, just the freedom to be who I was—whatever that was, and if something were to happen between Holiday-Sarah and me, Jeri and I would figure out what that meant, just like she’d said. Which wasn’t going to be necessary.
“If I’m navigating, where am I navigating to?” Sarah asked, interrupting the nonsense spinning webs in my head.
“What’s up north of here?”
A map rustled. “There’s Cedarville and Alturas in California. Lakeview in Oregon. Cedarville and Alturas are both kinda far, and there isn’t much else up that way unless you go quite a bit farther.”
“How far to Alturas?”
She studied the map for a while. “About a hundred miles.”
“How far from there to Lakeview?”
“Another forty, give or take. Why?”
“I’m sure I saw a dark Mercedes SUV coming in from the north two nights ago, two or three hours after people said they saw it leaving Gerlach, headed south.”
She studied the map. “If it went south from Gerlach, it couldn’t have come in from the north later. Not without going back through Gerlach. Not in only two or three hours.”
“That’s the working theory.”
She looked up. “Yeah? You have a theory?”
“Not even a ghost of one.”
“Great. Maybe it wasn’t the same SUV.”
“Which is what Waldo said.”
She frowned. “So what’re we doing?”
“Burning gas. Looking around. Basic investigative technique.”
“Sounds basic all right.”
“You have no idea.”
We drove in silence for a while. The road was almost empty. Every fifteen or twenty minutes a vehicle of
