“If that’s what you want, sure.”
Her eyes flashed. “No!” Her voice got softer. “That’s not what I said. I just don’t want to be . . . in the way, like baggage you don’t want. That’s the last thing I’d ever want to be.”
“You’re anything but baggage, Lucy.”
She smiled hopefully. “Does that mean you’re gonna keep me around a while? Like I might be useful and I’m sort of fun to be with?”
“More than sort of. It’s been a terrific day. All of it—the topless show, the conversation, the gambling, the outfit you’re wearing right now.”
Her smile blazed in the dim room. “Good.” She pushed her drink away. “Enough of this. What I’m really in the mood for is that Jacuzzi upstairs. With company, if you can stand it.”
“If I can stand it, huh?”
“Well . . . yeah. Knowing it won’t lead to anything later. Not tonight anyway. That hasn’t changed just ’cause we had this talk.”
“Hey, I’m tough. I can take it.”
Tough. That’s me.
And then . . .
“Hey, look,” Lucy called to me from the bathroom. “Bubble bath. Really good stuff, too.”
I came into the room. She had a towel around her waist as hot water filled the tub. I had the towel’s twin around my waist. Lucy took a look at me and straightened up. “Whoa.”
“Whoa?”
“You . . . uh, you’re kinda, wow, Mort.”
“Went off your Prozac again, huh? That’s what happens.”
“I’m serious. I mean, you’re not like Schwarzenegger, which is actually a good thing, but you . . . you’re buffed. Totally.”
“It’s the Borroloola workout.”
“Borroloola? What’s that? Is it anything like Pilates?”
“Probably not. Tell you later.”
“Got a lot of stuff to tell me later. Gifting, Borroloola workout. You might tell me about that girl who told me not to hurt you, too. Sarah, Holiday, whatever her name is.”
“All in good time.”
She looked great, standing there topless in that towel as hot water poured into the Jacuzzi and the room filled with steam. She’d put on soft music, easy listening stuff sans lyrics.
She crumbled a bar of Rose Jam Bubbleroon under the faucet as the tub filled, and the air took on a humid rose scent.
“Tough guys don’t take bubble baths, Sugar Plum.”
“Too late, tough guy.” Bubbles multiplied like hell, piling up in the tub. Bubbles, for Christ’s sake. I had a sudden vision of my ex, Dallas, in a similar tub last year. I had a second vision—that of my hard-won tough-guy image flying off into yesteryear never to return. Rambo never took a bubble bath. Too busy killing bad guys and stopping his own bleeding.
“Hop in,” Lucy said. “Don’t worry, I won’t peek.”
I dropped the towel and got in. Lucy unwound her towel and tested the water with a foot. Man, she was something. Slender and tight, with a short, neat triangle trim, not a Brazilian. And, like she said, not a tattoo anywhere.
“You didn’t jump right in, Sally Rand,” I said.
Her grin took on a Cheshire look. She struck a little pose.
“You look . . . strong,” I said.
“That’d be gymnastics. Five days a week from age five until I was sixteen. I was pretty good on the balance beam. I keep up with some of it. Want to see me stand on my hands, arch my back, and touch the soles of both feet to the top of my head? I can still do that.”
“Sure. Since no one can do that.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Right now? That’d be a hell of a sight.”
She laughed. “Maybe later. Like in a day or two or three.”
She got in, sank down into a froth of iridescent bubbles with a sigh, leaned back, closed her eyes. “Omigod, Mort.”
Yep.
Neither of us said a word for the next five minutes. We faced each other in water up to our chins, legs touching, not moving. Lucy slid a foot along my calf. That was all, no words.
Then I said, “We could turn on the jets on this thing.”
“Uh-huh. If we want bubbles all the way out in the hallway, get management thinkin’ they made a big mistake with us.”
Another five, wet, warm, silent minutes went by.
“Mort?”
“Yeah?”
“If I ever get so grown-up and serious that I don’t want to do anything like this anymore, will you please shoot me?”
“Sure thing, Sugar Plum.”
A smile in her voice. “Thank you, Daddy.”
“You’re welcome. By the way, very little of what’s happened in the past twelve hours feels real to me.”
“Uh-huh.” Her voice was soft, dreamy.
“Sure you’re thirty-one years old?”
“Shut up, Mort.”
We floated weightless in bubbles and music with our legs entwined, hers silky, mine not so much. Hammer never had it this good. Or Spade, Moto, any of those guys. Didn’t know about Hercule Poirot. With a name like that, bubble bath might’ve been the norm, but I was fairly certain Spade and Hammer had never bubble-bathed with the dames. This, then, was a whole new chapter in the pantheon of the world’s greatest PIs.
PIs—that would be private investigators.
Wake up, Mort. What about Jo-X?
Lucy’s comment about us not getting any closer to looking into his murder began to drift around in my head like a shark circling meat. My newly discovered PI gene was acting up. We had work to do, and this wasn’t it. She wanted to help, wanted to “stay with me.” A few hours with America’s preeminent locator of missing persons, and she wanted to learn the innermost secrets of the gumshoe’s tradecraft.
Well, so did I.
Too bad Ma was in Tennessee, a lady who actually knew a few innermost gumshoeing secrets.
Warm. Drifting. Jo-X fading back into oblivion . . .
“Mort?”
“Yep?”
“Water’s cooling off.”
“Um-hmm.”
“We probably ought to shower off these bubbles.”
“Right.”
“Hey, wake up.”
“Yup. Wide awake.”
“Are not. We could shower together or separately.”
“Yup.”
Her foot nudged my knee. “So? Which one? Together, I could scrub your back and you could scrub mine. But I can see where that might lead to a series of escalating complications.”
Seventeen-year-old girls do not use phrases like “escalating complications.” Good deal.
“You go ahead, kiddo. I’m good.”
I kept my eyes closed, my erection under water where I thought it belonged. I heard her get out, pad over to the shower, heard the shower come
