His jaw dropped. “That Celine? You gotta be shitting me.”
“Split the difference. Call it twenty-five percent.”
“Sonofabitch. How’d you get that? Which can’t be true, by the way. I looked into her on the Internet this afternoon—Celine—while you were cooling your heels in your favorite room. No one knows who she is. And she’s black as midnight, which Danya isn’t. Celine is a looker, but she’s taller, like about six foot two. And she doesn’t look anything like Danya. Well, not a lot.”
“There’s that whining thing I mentioned.”
“Fuck you, Angel. Celine?”
“Okay, if it makes you happy, I’ll go fifteen percent. It isn’t a sure thing. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it—Jonnie Xenon in their garage like that? Why him? Why there?”
He stared. “Sonofabitch.” Without another word, he headed for the station in a fast, choppy stride.
“Russ.”
He turned sharply, angry. “Yeah?”
“If the police turn up anything about Celine, anything at all, I want to hear about it thirty seconds later.”
He chewed on his lower lip. “Yeah, okay.”
“And—you know how to find your way to Rapscallion?”
“The restaurant? Sure, why?”
“I’m gonna be there getting a late lunch, since you didn’t feed me at the station. Drop by in the next hour or so with five thousand dollars. And bring enough to pick up my tab while you’re at it.”
He said “fuck” as he went through a back door into the station, just loud enough for me to hear.
CHAPTER SIX
I WAS AT a Walmart still digesting grilled salmon with rice and a pretty good pinot noir when Ma phoned at seven. She’d reached western Utah. She was in the dining car waiting for a New York steak, rare, and a beer. I could tell she hadn’t been getting the news since I was all over the place at six o’clock in Reno, four local channels, CNN, no telling how many others. Mortimer Angel does it again. I thought I’d surprise her and let her find out on her own, so I told her everything was copacetic on the home front. I hoped I’d still have a job once she found out just how copacetic things had become.
I wished her a terrific dinner and a safe trip—it was, after all, Amtrak, subject to sudden derailments—hung up, and went back to the Walmart clerk who was ringing up that burner phone—$12.99 and a fifty-dollar phone card with two hundred minutes on it. I got the Drug Dealer Special—though professional dealers probably went with the cheapo thirty-dollar card since the phone would be tossed within a week.
Out the door, the sun was behind the Sierras, nice pink glow on high wispy clouds, day cooling off. I drove to Jeri’s place—okay, mine. I was still getting used to it, still saw Jeri in the exercise room tossing me around like a sack of grain. I missed her. We’d been planning an entire lifetime together. What we got was two months, then Julia Reinhart happened.
I got a bottle of Pete’s Wicked Ale and sat in the backyard on a lawn chair, watching stars come out one by one, waiting for full dark. Waiting, in fact, for two a.m. to roll around.
Danya-Celine. Celine-Danya.
Weird. Didn’t make sense. Danya Fuller was a psych major at UNR. She shouldn’t have any connection with a nasty low-life rapper. When Russ had handed over five thousand dollars and paid thirty-six bucks for my lunch, plus tip, he’d given me a photo of Danya taken at his place last Christmas, and a picture of Danya and Shanna at the Grand Canyon last summer.
Celine was . . . unknown. An instant sensation, a media circus all her own, a one-namer like Cher or Beyoncé. Lots of speculation about Jo-X’s latest, a girl as black as Jonnie was white. She’d come out of nowhere, replacing some hot, slender bimbo with a nice ass and photogenic boobs revealed by dresses split all the way down to her navel—Krissy Something. Krissy was already old news, off the public’s radar, which no doubt pissed her off. It had taken Celine only three days to get on the cover of every tabloid in the country. Krissy might’ve put bullet holes in Jo-X’s forehead and strung him up in Danya’s garage knowing, somehow, that Danya was Celine.
But—was Danya Fuller actually Celine? With Jo-X hanging around in her garage, I mentally upped the odds to forty percent. Which left sixty percent that she wasn’t, so there was still a lot of room for debate and conjecture there.
And Vince Ignacio, Wharf Rat, was in the picture, snooping around. For some reason, he knew who Danya was and where she lived . . . but, wait. He’d identified Shanna by name, not Danya. But those two were an item, so, if he knew Shanna, he would know Danya. If he thought Danya was Celine and if he thought he had sufficient proof, Celebrity News might be gearing up to put out a special edition—Ignacio’s hot scoop. Which would put Fairchild in the eye of an epic shit storm.
Fairchild. My brand-new shining contact with RPD. Time to see if that was real or another broken promise.
I got out my phone, rang him up. “Hey, Russ?”
“Yeah? You find somethin’ already?”
“No. Xenon’s been removed from the garage, hasn’t he?”
“Forensics got done about two thirty this afternoon. Guy’s at the coroner’s office. Why?”
“All I want are answers, Russ, not questions to which you don’t want answers. Still got crime scene tape up at the house?”
“Yeah.”
“Any police up there, watching the place?”
“A car’s out front, in case Danya shows up. Or Shanna. Or your guy, Ignacio. Unmarked car.”
“Ignacio’s not my guy.”
“Right. I’m makin’ a note of that as we speak.”
Smart-ass. “Pull the car at midnight, Russ.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Just do it. Figure out a way. Send ’em home. Tell ’em their overtime is only good until midnight, that’ll get ’em out of there. If you can’t do it, call me back.” I hung up, then phoned the Wharf Rat. I had his card, but I’d also memorized his number.
