“That’s the plan.”
“Suits me. What’re you gonna do there? Investigate this thing with Jo-X?”
Again I stared at her. “Goddamn television.”
She laughed. “You are, aren’t you? I mean, you found him.”
“Wouldn’t concern you, one way or the other, since you and I are going to part company in—best guess—eight minutes.”
She lifted her arms above her head and stretched, which did wonders for everything beneath that tank top. “Really? You won’t take me with you?”
“Not a chance.”
Her arms came back down. “I could help. I’d be a big help. I’m smart. I know things. I can get into places you can’t. People trust me. I can act. I could distract people, guys mostly, so you could get past them.” She lifted her boobs half an inch. “Think what you could do with a nice little rack like this.”
I stared at her—them—her.
She picked up another fry. “What I mean,” she said, “I’ve got attributes you could use. I’ve got good legs, and like I said, I’m real smart.”
I was still speechless, but words were tumbling around in my head. I was sorting through them when she said, “Are you listening to any of this? Am I getting through?”
“A little. Mostly I wonder what your high school guidance counselor would think.”
“That was Mrs. Lambros. And it’s been a while.”
“How long is a while? Two weeks?”
She laughed. “So?”
“So what?”
“So I was about to say—not that you were paying attention, because I think you’ve got a problem in that area—boobs like these are almost like keys. They open doors. Think how much help I could be.”
Je-sus. “Okay, it’s settled. You can’t go with me.”
“Why not?”
“You’re too withdrawn. We would have long silences during which I would never know what you were thinking.”
She tilted her head and smiled. Her eyes sparkled. “So that’s a yes, right? I get to go with you?”
“You don’t have a car? This is America. Everyone has a car.”
“Not me. I’ve been traveling by bus.”
“Which you could still do.”
“But not with you, and that’s the point here, Mort.”
“Got a driver’s license? Some ID that gives your age?”
She pursed her lips, then opened her suitcase and dug out a wallet, opened it, handed me a California license.
Lucy K. Landry, five-five, brown hair, blue eyes, a hundred eighteen pounds. And, doing the math, thirty-one years old.
Thirty-one.
I laughed and flipped the license back to her. “Nice try, but I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“It’s real.”
“Looking real and being real aren’t the same thing.”
“So we’re good to go, right?”
“I am. You’re not.”
Ten miles out of Tonopah, a hundred five miles an hour, Lucy said, “Might want to cool it a little. Truckers say there’s a speed trap somewhere around the next whorehouse.”
So I cooled it, took it back down to seventy-five.
“What’s the rush?” she asked.
“No rush. Just cooling off my brain.”
She laughed.
I glanced over at her. “You might be eighteen, but you’re not thirty-one. There’s no freakin’ way.”
“I am. Since April. You saw the license.”
“It’s a terrific fake, even got a hologram. It might keep me from being arrested, giving a minor a ride. A minor girl at that. Where’d you get it?”
“California, of course. And it’s not a fake.”
“Twenty bucks says it is.”
“Great. Now you owe me twenty.” She held out a hand.
“Not yet, I don’t.”
“Hey, no one can ever guess my age. I can pass for sixteen if I need to. You might be able to use that.”
“How? To spend twenty years in prison?”
She smiled. “And if I get dolled up just right, I can pass for thirty, maybe thirty-two. I have to really work at that, though.”
I glanced at her. “What you’re wearing now . . .”
“This’d be like eighteen. You’re not so bad with ages. Want to hear my Valley Girl impression? Makes me sound fifteen.”
“Please don’t. You’re not married, are you?”
“Nope. No boyfriend, either, in case you want to know, which is why I’ll marry you if you ask.” She gave me a look.
I felt a shivery feeling in my belly, like maybe the fried chicken was acting up. “Please don’t say that again.”
“Maybe later.” She sat back and lifted her face to the sun, eyes closed, let the wind buffet her hair around.
We went another three miles in silence.
“How old are you really?” I asked. She couldn’t be older than Jeri would’ve been. Six years older than Holiday? No way. I could probably trip her up if I asked a few more times.
“Thought we covered that already.”
“With a fake license, yeah.”
“It’s not fake.”
“Yeah, it is. I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck, kiddo.”
She looked over at me. “I can tell. You’ve got little crow’s feet in the corner of your eyes.”
Shit.
“I’ve been around,” she said. “And around and around. I have a degree in art history from the University of San Francisco. I can tell early Renaissance from late Renaissance, spot a Grant Wood at forty paces, tell you all kinds of weird stuff about Picasso, van Gogh. Know how many homeless people have degrees in art history? It’s like, if you don’t want to be employed, that’s the degree you get. It’s sort of like an educational death wish, especially if you don’t much care for art.”
“Which, of course, you don’t.”
“No, I like art—now. Not so much when I first started out. The degree’s okay with me. I could get a job as a waitress or checkout girl just about anywhere with it. And I did the Vagina Monologues last year.”
The Mustang swerved two inches. “Say what?”
She looked over at me. “Vagina Monologues. You’ve heard of vaginas, right?” I caught a little smirk in her voice.
I had trouble getting air. “Yep,” I said. She still looked like a high school kid to me. No way was she thirty-one. I just needed to come at her in a new direction, and this wasn’t it.
She leaned back again, eyes closed. “I played two parts. I did My Angry Vagina. That’s where a woman rants about all the injustices done to
