“Huh? What guys?”
“All those guys who thought I was a hooker.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“I never let anyone buy me more than one drink, either. Most of the time I didn’t take more than a couple of sips. What I did was, I let them look at me and I asked about Candy.”
“Candy?”
“That’s what Allie called herself when she was hooking. She told me she never used her real name. She called herself Candy, so that’s who I asked about.” She was quiet for a minute, then, “She said she chose that name for a reason. She had this thing she would do. She would tell the guys her name was Candy, then, after a while, she would say, ‘Would you like some Candy?’ She said it was a way to proposition guys without getting caught. She even kept a few Snickers bars in her purse just in case. If anyone tried to bust her she’d get out a couple of bars and ask what the hell was illegal about offering someone some candy. No one could say she was soliciting, but it got the conversation headed that way.”
“Smart.”
“In a way. But not really. It was prostitution, selling herself. How smart is that?”
Other than agreeing, I had no answer to that.
“You were something else, though,” she said.
“How so?”
“You wouldn’t buy me a drink. Gave me that story about your stupid howling mirror. Pretty much chased me away, actually.”
“That’s the IRS in me. Antisocial stuff gets ingrained. Useful on the job, but it’s hard to turn off.”
She laughed. “Pissed me off. But later, when I thought about it, it was kind of refreshing. Anyway, it told me you wouldn’t know anything about Allie . . . Candy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So here we are, headed for Alturas.”
“Or farther. I want to see if anyone up this way has seen a Mercedes SUV lately. I think Gerlach’s about played out.”
Sarah thought about that. “Why would Allie be up this way at all? I mean, what on earth for? This doesn’t feel right. It’s like we’re chasing a really wild goose here.”
“Might be. But Allie said she was phoning from Gerlach and no one in Gerlach saw her outside the car. She didn’t go into the casino or the motel, so she and the woman were passing through. And they were headed south, which means they came in from the north. So, passing through from where?”
That stopped her.
Finally, she sighed. “Yeah. I can’t explain that. Anyway, you’re the investigator.”
“That’s right,” I said, even though she was wrong. Jeri was the investigator. I was a half-assed trainee and it was taking a lot of getting used to. I was back to square one in life, as if I’d come right out of high school. With the IRS I knew what I was doing. I was raking in the dough so politicians could pork-barrel it and get re-elected, waste it, maybe send it to Iran so Ayatollahs could build nukes. Here, cruising through the desert, I was just following a thread. Less than a thread. The only part of this PI thing that was still on track was Sarah beside me, filling out her nerd shirt.
“Warm out here,” she said. “Indian summer. We could put the top down. I could get some sun.”
I pulled to the side of the road, which wasn’t necessary since there wasn’t anything on the road for miles ahead and behind. We were forty miles north of Gerlach in the middle of the Smoke Creek Desert. We snugged the top into its well, then kept going.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WE PASSED THROUGH Eagleville. At sixty miles an hour it would have taken twenty seconds, but signs suggested I knock it down to twenty-five. Next up was Cedarville, which was bigger. Stops at Chevron and Arco stations didn’t produce a single Mercedes SUV sighting.
We rolled into Alturas at two twenty that afternoon. Three minutes later, at the first gas station we came to, I caught a whiff of that Mercedes. A woman in her fifties said she’d seen it about four days ago when a woman stopped for gas in a green Mercedes SUV.
“How old was the woman?”
“Thirties. Coulda been forty I guess. I didn’t ask.”
Sounded familiar. “Was anyone with her?”
“Like who?” She read the pi joke on Holiday’s shirt, shook her head a little, then looked back at me.
“Like anyone.”
“I didn’t see anyone, but it was night so there coulda been.”
“She got gas, huh?”
She smiled. “That’s pretty much what they do in this place. I had to close the bowling alley in the service bay.”
Sharp. Caustic, too.
“Which way did she go when she left?”
“Up north, hon.”
I like it when ladies call me “hon”—gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling, but the north thing didn’t give us anything useful since there was a big junction a few miles north. From there, cars could keep going north or head south to Gerlach.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yeah. I could use a car like that Mercedes. Not the payments though.”
“You and me both.”
I left her with my number, told her to call if she saw the SUV again, said it was worth a hundred dollars. If she got the license it was worth two hundred. My standard deal.
Back on the road, we headed north to Lakeview, Oregon.
“Got a decent maybe back there,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Be even better if we knew what it meant.”
We got no hits at gas stations in Lakeview. I gave that some thought and decided it made sense. Alturas was less than fifty miles away. There wouldn’t be any reason to gas up at both places.
“How about Bend?” I said. “We could go check out the FedEx place where Reinhart’s hand was shipped.”
“What does that have to do with Allie?”
“Nothing, except it’s likely that SUV was somewhere up here, and we’re already this far north, and that package was sent to me. When Jeri gets back, she’ll probably
