I flipped through five pictures on the little screen. Good shots. Lucy had come through.
“That her?” she asked.
“Yep. Wearing a wig and sunglasses, but it’s her.”
“It’s she, you mean.”
“So you’re colloquially challenged, Miss Prissy. I’ll have to keep that in mind.”
She smiled. “Okay, now what?”
“Now we try to follow her.” Which meant I couldn’t ditch the moustache, wig, or Stetson for a while.
“How about I drive? You could slump down, keep out of sight better that way.”
“Got your license with you? Think you can keep up, not lose her?”
“Does a bear poop?”
I stared at her. “Something’s missing from that time-honored aphorism, doll.”
“Listen very, very carefully, Mort. Does a bear poop?”
“Well, yeah. They don’t hold it until they die. If they did, they wouldn’t last long.”
“Okay then. The bear thing is like a total yes, I can keep up with her. What’s the problem? Change places with me.”
I did, head whirling slightly. I still couldn’t keep up with her. Quixotic damn broad.
We sat there for another ten minutes. The Focus stayed at the curb. Finally it pulled away, slowly, as if Shanna were reluctant to leave but had no choice.
Lucy waited a moment then eased out behind her. She kept Shanna’s car within view but hung back nicely.
“You’ve done this before,” I said.
“Nope. But believe it or not I’ve watched all the seasons of Justified and I think I picked up a few pointers. And, by the way, Timothy Olyphant is a hunk and a half.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Trust me. Don’t feel bad about it, though. He’s not real. You are. And you’re totally Borroloola’ed, whatever that is.”
Olyphant wasn’t real. Good to know.
North on Decatur to I-215, a jog over to I-15, then through the heart of Las Vegas, parallel to the Strip. Lucy waved bye-bye to the Luxor as we went by.
Through Vegas, North Vegas, past Nellis AFB, signs telling us we were headed for St. George, Utah, Salt Lake City. Shanna held it at seventy and on we went, staying nearly a mile behind.
Road trip, motion, heat, freedom, cute girl in a crochet top, and Shanna in a Focus. Shanna, last seen leaving a bank parking lot in Reno wearing a Goodwill dress and bad shoes. Finally I was getting somewhere.
“Hope it doesn’t get cold wherever we’re going,” Lucy said. “What I’m wearing is all I’ve got. Everything else is back at the Luxor.”
I pointed to the temperature readout on the dash. “Right now it’s a hundred seven degrees. Unless you slam us into the back of a refrigerated tractor-trailer, cold isn’t an option.”
“Might be later, though. You might have to hold me. Where do you think she’s going?”
“Caliente.”
“You think? Just ’cause of some matchbook covers?”
“And a motel receipt. Let us not forget that.”
“That sounds really thin,” said my trainee. “Fifty bucks says you’re wrong.”
“You’re on. You should stick to roulette.”
“Hah.”
Twenty-two miles out of Vegas, Shanna turned left onto US 93 and headed north. We were half a mile back.
“Caliente,” I said. “We’ll see.”
We took the turn. The world got even more dry and empty, hot enough that you could safely eat roadkill. The billboards thinned out. We passed a rusty sign that read: Caliente 101 miles.
“Caliente,” I said.
“Well, poop. Anyway, we’re not there yet.”
More emptiness, almost no traffic. Lucy let the Focus get nearly two miles ahead. We lost sight of it on the bends, picked it up again on the straightaways, and the road was mostly straight.
“So,” Lucy said. “Gifting.”
I stared at her. “Huh?”
“Gifting. What is it? You said you’d tell me later. It’s later now and this road is really boring.”
“Forgot I’d mentioned it. Any explanation I give you pretty much depends on how open your mind is, kiddo.”
She laughed. “Like I’ve got a problem with that.”
So I told her. I didn’t know who came up with the word gifting, but I’d first heard it from Ma as we were driving to Bend, Oregon. The concept, however, was Holiday’s. She’d come up with it as we were leaving Tonopah last year. It wasn’t a difficult concept, but its ramifications ran dark and deep in the subterranean caverns of my mind. Still did, truth be told. In a nutshell, my fiancé, Jeri DiFrazzia, had “gifted” me to Holiday, loaned me out on Tuesdays.
“To do what?” Lucy asked.
“To watch and observe Holiday in various states of undress.”
“Why?”
“To get her going. Revved up.”
“Sounds like fun, like something out of the Monologues. What else? I mean, after she got revved up?”
“Last year when this was going on . . . nothing else.”
She stared at me. “Nothing?”
“I believe a boob rub was discussed in the early stages but not acted upon.”
“That’s too bad. Boob rubs are fun.”
“About the time I thought Jeri would seriously approve of things getting even that far, she was murdered.”
Silence for several seconds. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “You mentioned that earlier, but I’m still sorry.”
“Me, too.” Turns out, some scars never heal.
“They ever catch who did it?”
“No.” Which probably meant Julia Reinhart would’ve gotten away with it, like Ma and I had thought back then. “And that,” I said, “brings us to Borroloola.”
“The workout routine that got you totally buffed.”
“Totally, huh?”
“Well, I did see something like two ounces of fat around your middle yesterday. It must be a pretty great routine.”
“It is. What you do, you lift a sixteen-pound iron bar up two and a half or three feet, and slam it down into the earth about three hundred thousand times.”
She stared at me. “Tell me you didn’t really do that.”
“Borroloola is a town in Australia, Northwest Territories. It’s a tiny little nothing place. I was digging holes for fence posts, every eight feet for nearly a mile. The holes were the hard part, hence the iron bar, but there was also setting
