Hammer never had it so fuckin’ good.
News at Eleven, and there was Mortimer Angel again, a five-second shot of me getting stuffed into a police car, looking guilty. And photos of Danya and Shanna who were renting the house. Nice long mention of “Celine,” dark and luscious in a two-week-old clip of her and Jonnie-X as they got into a limo somewhere. No mention of Vince Ignacio. No floods, riots, no nukes in the Middle East, so the story was still the top item of the evening. It seemed as if it had happened a week ago, but I totaled it up and it had only been sixty hours since I’d found Jonnie-Boy. A lot had happened since then, warping time.
I turned off the television. Probably twenty million adults were cheering Jo-X’s passing while a million little souls were crying their little hearts out because, one by lonely one, there was no longer any hope that they might ever feel his manly arms pressing their trembling little bodies to his bony sunken chest. Tragedy, American style.
Waists wrapped in towels, Lucy and I spent a few minutes at a window, looking down at the lights of the Strip, a thousand people below, neon up the wazoo in the psychedelic night, traffic as thick and slow as molasses as midnight approached.
Finally she went up on tiptoe, kissed me, dropped her towel on a chair, and slid between satin sheets in the bed nearest the window. “’Night, Mort.”
“’Night, kiddo.”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy.”
I gave it another two minutes, then crawled into the other bed, closest to the door. I lay on my back looking up at the ceiling, dimly illuminated by a muddy wash from all the multicolored lights below.
Felt Lucy over there, eight feet away.
She still looked eighteen, except in that red dress, which put her at about twenty-four. Tangling with her was like being caught in a tornado, tossed around like a rag doll, but the truth is I’d made a choice back in Tonopah. I could have left her there. She would’ve been fine. I’d been under no obligation to haul her down here to Vegas, and had no obligation to keep her with me now. She could have all the money she’d won, and I could get on with this Jo-X investigation, such as it was. But all of that would have been like throwing the gift back in the face of fate. I was a gumshoe. I had cast off the IRS lamprey mantle. Girls flocking to me like pigeons to a statue was my reward for discovering I had a soul.
I heard her turn over. She sighed softly.
But forget the girl for a moment, big guy. Now what? Jo-X was dead, murdered, and I’d stumbled across his body, which is what I do, no skill involved, no idea how to follow up. Danya and Shanna were still missing. I was in Las Vegas with not much more to go on than the thinnest of evaporating vapor trails.
Lucy turned over again, thumped her pillow with a fist.
I had an inkling of the truth about the mysterious and elusive Celine, something the world at large hadn’t picked up on yet—except possibly for the Wharf Rat, Ignacio. And I had a connection between Shanna and what appeared to be an unknown little diner somewhere in a hundred thousand square miles of desert. And maybe there was a clue or something in Caliente, but I didn’t know what, other than it was a good place to go if you wanted a mud bath or needed to stock up on matches.
“Mort?”
A-a-a-and, here we go. “Yeah?”
“This doesn’t feel right. Would it be okay if I—?”
“Sure, kiddo.”
“Not to like do anything. But it would help me get to sleep if I could just sort of snuggle up for a while—if, you know, that’s all that I did . . . that we did, ’cause this isn’t working.”
“C’mon.”
She slid into bed with me and wriggled closer. “Thanks.”
“De nada.”
“Sure you’re okay with this?”
“I’m sure it’ll be a hardship, but I’ve endured worse.”
“Worse than this, huh?” She kissed my shoulder.
“Like you wouldn’t believe. Don’t give it a second thought.”
“Well, okay then. ’Night.”
“’Night.”
And that was that. In a dark corner of the room, Hammer and Spade were cat-calling and firing off rude names at me. Finally they left, disgusted.
I lay there with a dynamite girl tucked against my side, the rest of me humming happily, no bumping or thumping necessary. A real gumshoe might’ve had her flipped onto her back by now. A real gumshoe might’ve paid for her lunch and left her in Tonopah with a twenty-dollar bill. If I weren’t a trainee, I might have checked out leads the minute I’d hit town—alone. I might be out rustling clues right this minute, if I knew how to do that. A real gumshoe would at least have some idea of where to start, conjectures to explore, but the only real investigator I knew was in Memphis, Tennessee. I thought all that was true, but I had the feeling that Lucy would’ve been a game changer even for Mike Hammer.
Were we partners, or just two people sharing body heat, about to part company in the next day or two? Should I tell her about the “Celine” video? Could I trust her?
Trust her? Seriously? My eyes flew open at the thought. Trust her after we’d been together barely twelve hours? That sounded like the definition of an idiot on wheels.
And Holiday? Other than telling Lucy not to hurt me, she was so far out on the ragged edge of this Jo-X thing that she was invisible. Holiday wasn’t a PI, didn’t pretend to be. But she thought I could be hurt? Tough, invincible me? What did she know that I didn’t? Hurt Mort and I’ll break your legs. Which meant what? Make him happy?
I was happy. Very. And Lucy was already asleep, pressed up tight against me. The palm of my left hand was at the
