“Bumping into FBI guys?”
“It’s fun, trust me.”
“Bend isn’t all that close, Mort. It’s nearly two hundred miles from here.”
“One eighty-eight, according to a sign just before we got to Lakeview.”
“One eighty-eight rounds up to two hundred.”
“Fuckin’ engineers.”
She smiled. “If we go, we’ll probably have to stay the night. It’d be a long drive back to Gerlach if we didn’t.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Either way, we’ll have to find a motel.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, okay, then. You’re fun to travel with, and it’s still a nice day for a drive.”
“If you insist, but you should know I haven’t had my arm twisted like that in a long time.”
She rolled her eyes. “You gonna drive or just talk?”
The road to Bend would’ve been faster if we hadn’t gotten behind one eighteen-wheeler after another, and a few RVs whose owners didn’t know the summer tourist season was over. When I retire I’m going to buy a beat-up RV and tour the country at forty-five miles an hour, too. It looks like fun, wallowing along in a gas guzzler. You can see so much more that way, and if you happen to run off the road while rubbernecking, the damage would be minimal—pocket change—unless you’re near the Grand Canyon at the time, in which case the damage wouldn’t even be your problem.
Twenty minutes out of Lakeview we hit alkali flats. Sarah said, “I’m getting way behind in my classes, so I’m gonna disappear for a while, if that’s okay.”
“Sure is dark in the trunk, but have at it.”
She stared at me. “Disappear figuratively, Mort.”
“Far be it from me to toss gravel in the gears of science. Just keep down the noise so I can sleep.”
“Well, hell. You’re no fun. I usually read textbooks aloud while I’m snapping gum.”
She hauled out a thick textbook—Fundamentals of Structural Dynamics, which looked like a real hoot—and went into heavy-duty college student mode, total concentration, writing in a notebook, the pages of which fluttered in the breeze.
Half an hour into it she said, without looking up, “This math is so sucky. I hate eigenvectors and eigenvalue problems.”
“We used those in the IRS. Let me know if you need help.”
She laughed, then fell silent again. So here I was, out in the middle of nowhere working two cases—Allie and Reinhart—neither of which was going to earn Jeri and me a dime. Someone had sent me Reinhart’s hand. I wanted to know who did it and why. I was on someone’s radar, which was more than a little spooky. And, trying to narrow things down, that someone was hidden in at least a quarter of the adult population of the United States, so the winnowing process wasn’t going to be easy.
After another hour of hard study, Sarah put the book away and leaned back with her eyes closed, took in the autumn sun with a sigh. She looked like a supermodel and was into math that I would never come close to understanding. If I weren’t so good at finding body parts of famous missing people, I would’ve been intimidated.
We reached the outskirts of Bend at 6:35. I pulled off Highway 97 and we put the Audi’s top back up. One of us put on a new shirt in about five seconds, one with an equation on it that said something so cryptic about the number pi that I couldn’t decipher it. More intimidation. A quick check with the cell phone told us the FedEx shipping center was on Jamison Street at the northern edge of Bend. We went through the middle of town then circled around a bunch of unfamiliar streets for a few minutes until we found Jamison Street. A sign on the door of the FedEx place told us it had closed at five thirty and would open again at eight a.m. Lights were on in the back of the building, but the front door was closed, office dark. Reinhart’s case would have to wait till morning.
“At least we know where it is,” Sarah said. “Now what?”
“What d’you think?”
“How ’bout we find a motel?”
“If this place has one.”
She slugged my arm. “I’ve seen six of ’em so far, jerk.”
“Six? You counted them?”
She smiled. “Yeah. Good thing I didn’t run out of fingers.”
“Fingers. That’s geeky. See anything you liked?”
“The Slumberland looked good. Quiet. And there was a pizza place nearby.”
“Which way?”
“Back south. Off to the right on the main drag, but the rooms look like they’re facing a side street so it oughta be quiet.”
“Maybe we can get adjoining rooms,” I said to see how she’d react to what I thought was the best idea I’d had in a month.
“Coward.”
Which answered that. At least she didn’t stick out her tongue or call me a monk.
Five minutes later we reached the Slumberland. In the office she muscled me to one side and said to the lady behind the counter, “We need a room,” then shot me a lethal “shut up” look. Great. Ten minutes later and eighty-eight dollars poorer, I opened the door to unit twenty-six on the second floor and we went in. Yep, two queen-size beds, like the lady said who’d handed Sarah the keys.
Sarah—or more likely Holiday—stared at the arrangement for a few seconds.
“Which bed do you want?” I asked.
She bounced on one of them then stood up. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll figure it out later. I’m starving. Let’s go get us a pizza.”
Right then, my cell phone rang.
“I lost twenty dollars at the Tropicana, Mort,” Jeri said. “At a blackjack table.”
“You oughta arm wrestle drunks. It pays better.”
“Yeah, right. So, where are you now?”
“Bend. Oregon.”
“Bend? What’re you doing way up there?”
“About to get a pizza, looks like.”
“That’s a hell of a long way to go for pizza.”
“And, tomorrow, we’re going to check out that FedEx place where Reinhart’s hand was shipped.”
“We? Sarah’s with you?”
“Yep.”
“Is she there now?”
“Last I checked, but she’s fast.”
“Great.
