Jo-X was six-five, a hundred and sixty-four pounds, looked like a two-by-four with limbs. Onstage he was bare-chested, glinting with body piercings, blond hair whirled in a blender—a stringy punk with a sunken chest and a mouth so foul Clorox wouldn’t get the stench out, although I’d be willing to give it a try. A hundred million adults in the country wished him ill, so I think Ma was wrong about firing me if I came across him—which wasn’t going to happen. But if I did, it would be because he was dead, since that’s my MO, even though it has never been my fault, at least not in the state of Nevada. I wasn’t the one who decapitated Reno’s mayor and district attorney last summer, nor did I chop off the hand of our lying senator, Harry Reinhart, and FedEx it to myself, then chuck him down a mineshaft, all of which are other stories. Good ones, too, as far as they go.
Anyway, Maude Clary was my new boss. I was working on my ten thousand hours of training to become an actual PI, not a PI-in-training, which is what I’ve been for the better part of a year. She and I get along well even though she has a poster of me on the wall of her office in which I’m standing with a smiley grimace on my face, wearing nothing at all but a little red body paint on my . . . body that looks more or less like a lumpy jock strap, at least from a distance. Body paint, by the way, that Holiday brushed on that critical region a few minutes before she and I participated in San Francisco’s World Naked Bike Ride in March, three months ago—over fifteen hundred nude or seminude people riding bicycles through the streets in what was theoretically a protest, but was actually a happy, smiling bunch of people who wanted to ride naked through the streets. The slogan for the WNBR is “As bare as you dare,” which pretty much tells the story of how and why. Ma took the picture from the sidelines and turned it into an eleven-by-seventeen laminated poster. She keeps it hidden behind another poster that she can swing out of the way on a little hinge arrangement whenever she needs a laugh or to remind me of who’s the boss in the place.
“Check this out, Mort,” she’ll say, then voila! there I am, in the buff except for that body paint, listening to her cackle. If she wasn’t twenty years older than me, I’d beat the tar out of her. Thing is, I’m six-four, two hundred eight pounds—pretty much all muscle after digging six hundred fence post holes in Australia in four and a half months during a “summer down under”—so getting a jury to see my side of things would be tough. Worse, to explain roughing her up I would have to make that poster exhibit número uno in my defense, so . . . forget it.
Jo-X’s disappearance was wrapping up on the television. His latest girlfriend, “Celine,” mysterious, tall, beautiful, with skin so smooth and dark it was like fine obsidian, was also missing. She was just Celine—a one-namer like Cher and Madonna. I had no particular opinion about Celine other than typical male awe at her wardrobe and the size of her breasts, and disgust at her taste in boyfriends, but Jo-X’s disappearance was the best news I’d heard in a long time. Even better if he remained forever among those never heard from again.
“Ladies’ room?” Ma said to Holiday, sliding off her barstool.
“Sure.”
Off they went. I don’t know what women do in there, but they often go in pairs. Possibly a woman alone risks mugging. More likely, they talk about the guys they leave behind, then have to fix their mascara once they’re finished laughing. I’ll have to ask. All I know is that I’ve never said, “Yo, Earl, want to go to the men’s room with me?” If I did—and, worse, if Earl took me up on it—we’d arrive back to a pair of empty chairs.
But tonight, I stayed when they left, as I generally do, and this time it paid off. An incredibly beautiful black girl came in the door ten seconds after Ma and Holiday went out, looked around, then came over and settled onto the pre-warmed barstool to my right.
Which figured.
As a field agent for the IRS, one of Uncle Sam’s goons, women had avoided me as if I had signs of late-stage bubonic plague—not a big surprise since the IRS has a reputation for ruthlessness and a tool with which lawless administrations go after political enemies. On a more daily basis, Internal Revenue is used as an instrument of domestic terror. But a year ago I’d quit the IRS to become a PI, a gumshoe, and my life changed overnight—literally. Arriving home the night before my first day on the job, I discovered a naked blond in my bed. Friendly one, too. Now this sort of thing—the girl wandering into the Green Room and taking a stool next to mine—had become routine. I’d become a babe magnet à la Mike Hammer. Better than, actually.
The girl, probably not two years into her twenties, turned to me and said, “Mr. Angel?”
Damn—magnet theory right out the window. “I hope that was just a lucky guess, kiddo.”
“Hardly. My dad doesn’t like you. He says you’re a maverick and unprofessional. But, I think, maybe . . . that’s
