“No. Not at all.”
“There you go. Isn’t that what’s important? She wants to help find Allie—which she can. If her sister is in Tonopah, Sarah would be more likely to recognize her than you. I’m going to stay here and keep working on our lists. You two go check out this guy, Martin Harris, see if there’s anything there.”
“It felt awfully thin. Like you told Ma.”
“It might very well be nothing, but you never know. And if this Martin guy goes out, like to a bar or someplace, even a post office, Sarah—Holiday—might be useful. There’s no telling what she could find out that you couldn’t.”
Hell, yes. Holiday could wring information out of a washrag, if that washrag were male.
We took the Toyota. She wanted to take her Audi, but I told her it was possible we’d end up on a stakeout. Tonopah isn’t a big place. That hot-red Audi would stand out like a flamingo in a bird bath.
“Here we are again,” she said as we headed toward Fernley on the interstate. She was wearing a T-shirt with Pi are not square, Pi are round, cornbread are square printed across the front. Another pi shirt. Engineers were hilarity incarnate. Who would’ve guessed? The shirt was easy to read, too, stretched as tight as it was.
“Yeah, here we are,” I said. “Which means I’d give a month’s pay to know what you and Jeri talked about the other night in the Green Room.”
She laughed. “Be worth it, too.”
“How ’bout I bribe you? One month’s pay. Cash.”
“Not a chance.”
“Underhanded, Machiavellian broads.”
“Uh-oh. You figured us out. That’s trouble.”
“I don’t have diddly-squat figured out.”
She gave me a look. “Jeri and I agreed that . . .” Her words slid off into silence. She looked out the side window.
“What did you two agree? Keep talkin’, college girl.”
“Anyway,” she said, apparently losing track of what she’d been about to say. “Your stupid mirror’s whistling. It’s really annoying. Either pick up the pace, or slow down. Something.”
I picked it up to seventy. Tonopah was two hundred forty miles from Reno. Might as well get there, see if we could get a handle on Martin Harris. It was, after all, Sunday, the day retired folk typically cut loose and really paint the town, right after church and a nap.
We arrived at seven fifteen with the sun half an hour above the western hills. We traveled up a miles-long incline coming in from the north. The town sprawled over the hillside, over 6,000 feet above sea level—no surprise that the day was starting to turn chilly.
We’d ridden in silence ever since passing through Fallon, sixty miles east of Reno. Sarah was in full-blown study mode with a textbook open on her lap, chuckling at all the fun stuff in there. Or maybe chuckling was only my imagination. Snarling might have made essentially the same sound.
On the way south I interrupted her only once.
“Holiday?”
“Mmmm?” Still nose-deep in her textbook.
“What is this with you and Jeri? And me?”
“God, I hate eigenvectors. I mean, calculus is easy. This crud is something else.” She pulled her nose out of the book and gave me a perplexed look. “Huh? What’d you say?”
“Nothing.”
She went back to her textbook. I looked at her and thought I caught a little smile. Not entirely sure about that, though.
“Almost there,” I told her.
Sarah put her papers and book aside. We were a mile north of the town limit, slowing to forty-five.
“Lovely,” she said as we passed by weedy lots and run-down buildings. Everything looked sunbaked, frost-heaved, weathered, old. The place had been losing population slowly but steadily the past two decades. Median income was down, the median age of its residents was up. It had become a retirement mecca, “mecca” being a relative term. It was a place for people who’d had their fill with the crime, traffic, noise, foul air, and chaos of the cities. Add drive-by shootings to that list. Given all that, the mecca thing was working for many of Tonopah’s residents. A quick getaway from a crime spree here would take three to five hours at high speed. Might as well drive straight to the county jail, save everyone a lot of time and aggravation.
We passed McGinty’s Diner and a fifties motel, the Stargazer. A Texaco station was next door. Farther on we passed a gaudy place called the Clown Motel.
“Now there’s a fun-lookin’ place,” Holiday said.
“Ain’t it, though.”
“Where’re we staying?”
“Mizpah Hotel and Casino. Jeri made reservations.”
“Reservations? Plural?”
I sighed. “She might’ve said a reservation.”
“Jeez, Mort. You almost stopped my heart there.” She gave me a Cheshire cat’s grin.
I pulled around to the rear of the Mizpah, a five-story edifice of reinforced concrete and brick built in 1907, now registered as one of the Historic Hotels of America.
Recent events had made my face one of the more memorable ones in the country, so I put on a blond wig that felt dumb and a big blond moustache that felt even dumber, then dumb and dumber and Holiday went in the rear entrance of the Mizpah and down a short, wide hallway of blood-red fleur-de-lis wallpaper into a good-sized lobby with more blood-red wallpaper, mahogany trim, and balusters. I looked around, felt history oozing out of the walls. My mother was younger than this place. A dozen or so people were sitting in chairs, chatting in groups, standing around. The last few minutes of sunlight came through cut-glass windows and put a glow on the red carpet, potted plants, burnished wood, crystal.
Holiday ducked into the Wyatt Earp Bar, gave it a look, came back out. “Promising,” she said. I didn’t ask.
We went to the hotel desk and I rang a bell. Seconds later a girl in her twenties showed up. Short dark brown
