“Uh-huh. Allie.” The tires squealed again as she headed south, toward I-80. Nice. Wish my Toyota could do that.
“This’s a pretty powerful gun. What’d she do to you when you were growing up?”
I guess that didn’t warrant a response because Holiday glanced at me, then back at the road. “What’s in the package?”
“Who knows? My mom has a lethal sense of humor.”
Which earned me a faint smile but no comment.
“So, where to?” I asked. I had visions of more hours spent in one of RPD’s interrogation rooms, once again explaining things to my favorite detective, Russell Fairchild. Last time I’d seen him he’d given me the finger in the hospital, a few days after I’d solved Reno’s biggest case for him, biggest pile of related felonies the city had seen in a hundred years. Which was gratitude for you.
Holiday took more corners too fast, and for a moment I slowed things down by considering what had happened in the past twenty minutes. In effect, I’d been hijacked by one of Reno’s most beautiful girls, even if she was a roundheel. My being an impressionable pig gave her an almost insurmountable advantage, but Jeri probably wouldn’t accept that as an excuse. I looked at her as she took us down a ramp and onto Interstate 80, headed east. The top of the convertible was down. Wind whipped at Holiday’s silk blouse as she took the car up to seventy miles an hour. Her hair whipped around, too, its frizzy style getting more frizzed than usual. I could think of worse things than being hauled out of a bar by a girl this great-looking, but when we passed the last exit in Sparks and headed into the empty desert east of Reno, I decided I’d had enough. Another minute and I was going to pull my gun and get a few answers.
“Okay,” I said. “This’s fun, but where are we goin’?”
She dug the cell phone out of her purse, hit the screen a few times at eighty miles an hour, and handed it to me. “Listen.”
I listened. A girl’s voice said, “Sarah, it’s me. I’m in Gerlach. I got some money, a lot, so maybe I can—” squawk. “Hey, what—?” then the call ended.
I listened to it two more times, then handed the phone back to her. “Who’s Sarah?”
“Me.”
“Uh-huh. What about Holiday?”
“Just a name I was using.”
“Right. I should’ve known.”
I waited for more. Venus was becoming visible in a sky going dark as we passed through a cut in the surrounding hills. Holiday-Sarah remained silent, concentrating on the highway, so I pulled my gun, aimed the muzzle at the sky.
“Hey!” she yelped.
“Hey yourself.”
“Jesus. What’re you doin’?”
“Getting answers. Slow it down to seventy and start talking or let me out. And you owe me twenty-five bucks for the past half hour.”
She didn’t say anything for several seconds, then she let up on the gas. “My name is Sarah Dellario and I’m not a hooker.”
Dellario. Figuring I wouldn’t have to shoot her right away, I holstered the gun. “Yeah? So what are you?”
“A student. Civil engineering at UNR. I’ll graduate next year if I can keep it together in all of this.”
Aw, shit. Engineering of all things. Right then I knew I was going to have to glue a rat to that mirror on my Toyota. If I didn’t, Holiday was going to make my life a living hell.
Not Holiday, Great Gumshoe.
Sarah.
Dellario.
CHAPTER THREE
GOOD NEWS, BAD news. Good, she wasn’t a hooker—bad, she probably knew more math than I did. But she was dressed in full hooker garb—meaning half-dressed, ready for action—and I was in her car, headed out of Reno into darkness and the unknown. No doubt Jeri would be thrilled.
“If you’re not a hooker,” I said, “what’s with the outfit?”
She glanced down at herself, then at me. “Pretty great top, huh? Great as in awful.”
“Depends on your point of view. I’m good.”
She smiled, said, “Thanks,” which was interesting. Headlights came toward us on the divided highway, interstate traffic headed west into the city. “I’ve got a few things like this. I bought some at Victoria’s Secret, some on the Internet. I had to play the part.”
“Of a hooker? Why?”
“I’ve been trying to find my sister.”
“The voice on the phone.”
“Uh-huh. Allie. Allison. She’s been missing for two months. A little more, actually.”
Ah-hah. “And I find missing persons.”
Her eyes darted toward me, then she looked back at the road. “Early July, I hadn’t seen her in a week and her car was still at her apartment. I have a key to her place. She wasn’t feeding her goldfish. So I filed a missing person report with the police, but they checked out her apartment then pretty much blew it off. A week later I hired a private detective. Fifteen hundred dollars later he hadn’t found anything, so I had to pull the plug on that. Then I didn’t know what to do, so I did my own thing, making the rounds of casino bars pretending to be a hooker, see if I could get any hint of her or what might have happened to her. The police wouldn’t do that, or that investigator guy.”
Or me, I didn’t tell her. I look dreadful in a dress.
“I started hitting the bars around the middle of July. School was out, which made it easy. Now I’m juggling school and bars, which isn’t. It was creepy at first, trying to act like a hooker. I didn’t know what I was doing. After a while, though, it got to be . . . well, interesting. Fun, actually. I remember you, that time you told me you knew a Mexican girl in Tijuana—”
“El Paso.”
“Right, El Paso. A girl who could blow square smoke rings—which, by the way, is impossible—and then that idiotic story about the mirror howling on your car.”
“Idiotic? At sixty, that mirror sounds like Madonna.”
“I’ll have to hear it sometime. Anyway, the mayor and district attorney were missing for over a week and the
