Some things don’t hurry as well as others. But US 93 was a flat, empty strip. I didn’t think hurrying was strictly necessary. We were in a hot Mustang, Shanna was in a Ford Focus—so, no contest.
A Chevy Impala with scabrous paint was parked behind the diner. No one in sight. I faced away from the diner/motel combo, peed away from the shed. To my left and around the corner of the shed was that house trailer Lucy had mentioned. Old, no sign of life. In weeds behind the shed were lengths of rusting iron pipe, a tree saw with teeth three-quarters of an inch long, tangled coils of baling wire, old paint cans, an aluminum ladder. A quarter mile away in the desert, an industrial building of some sort gleamed in the sun, big enough to house four or five motor homes. Glare off the roof was like looking into the face of the sun.
When I got back, Lucy had the car facing out, ready to go.
“She kept going north,” she said.
“As expected. I doubt that many people come this way for a sandwich at the diner here, then hustle on back to Vegas.”
“Smart-ass.”
“Gumshoe 101. She’s headed to Caliente.”
“We’ll see. By the way, that car I thought might have been following us went by. Small red sedan. I don’t know cars all that well so I don’t know what kind it was. I mean, who gives a darn about cars?”
“Or about the kind of planes that were flying overhead in or around the Philippines in, say, nineteen forty-three.”
She gave me the same look Jeri used to give me. Dallas still does on occasion, when we’re together.
“Sometimes, Mort, you’re unintelligible.”
“Yup.”
She smiled. “And inarticulate.”
“Yah.”
As we left Arlene’s, I sat up and looked back. The building was the color of dust, a scorched place in the middle of nowhere. A lone gas pump sat beside the building. The Midnight Rider Motel was thirty yards from the diner, just four units and as sand-blasted and dehydrated-looking as the roadside diner.
Then we were on the highway and the Focus was four miles away. Lucy took it up to a hundred for a while then settled down to a sedate seventy, keeping two miles back.
“Back there,” I said, “that’s the diner in the video.”
Lucy looked at me. “I know. I even saw the table where she was sitting. By that window.”
“That shed a quarter mile out in the desert? I’ll bet that’s where he kept the helicopter.”
“Maybe we need to get nosy around that place.”
“Uh-huh. Later. Right now we’ve got to stay on Shanna.”
“Which—observe—I’m doing.”
“And a great job of it, too.”
Ten miles out we passed the big rig with its backhoe on the trailer. No sign of life, trees, anything, in the mountains rising up around us, just a few buzzards looking for something tasty that had finally given up. I ate the Oh Henry bar and a Snickers, then drank another bottle of water.
“Next time I buy the lunch, kiddo.”
“Fine. If we end up following Timothy Olyphant, I’ll stay in the car and you can go inside and check him out. He’s got a great butt. Otherwise, quit complaining.”
“You’d stay in the car? Really?”
“No way.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PAST ALAMO AND Ash Springs to the junction of US 93 and Highway 375. We turned right onto the Great Basin Highway.
“Caliente,” I said.
“Well . . . poop.”
Up ahead, the red car passed Shanna’s. Lucy stayed a mile behind the Focus.
Forty-three miles later, after winding through a canyon, we pulled onto Front Street and into the town—population just under twelve hundred, previously known as Culverwell. Flat and hot and dry, but it had a casino, Sinclair and Exxon gas stations, a bank, a few motels, all contained within low, scorched hills. We stayed two hundred yards behind Shanna as she cruised through the business section and out the other side. She pulled into a tree-shaded parking lot for the Pahranagai Inn at the north end of town. Lucy sped up as Shanna turned off, trying not to lose her.
“Motel receipt in a kitchen drawer will do it every time, Sweetheart,” I told Lucy. “Pay attention. And notice that we’re in Caliente, so you owe me fifty bucks.”
“Well, crapola. I don’t have that much with me so you’ll have to accept fifty dollars’ worth of something else later.”
“What’ll fifty bucks get me?”
“Wait and see.”
We pulled into the lot just in time to see Shanna disappear into room nine. Lucy parked forty feet from the Focus. The place was nicer than anything else we’d seen in Caliente—cedar siding stained a dark brown, probably one of those indeterminate names on the paint can like Sunrise Sienna or Overland Umber, which meant you had to look at color swatches.
“Now what?” Lucy asked.
“Now we go see what’s what.”
“You said they were married.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So, you might want to give them a little privacy for like, I don’t know—half an hour or something.”
Christ, the things that never cross my mind. “Nope, let’s get in there before anything like that gets fired up.”
“Your call, boss.”
Boss? I gave her a sidelong look as we walked to the room. Curtains were pulled across the windows.
“Tell ’em you’re from the office,” I whispered.
“Okay. Then what?”
“Wing it, partner. Show me your stuff.”
“Showed you pretty much all of my stuff yesterday.”
“Not that. Let’s see how well you improvise.”
She shot me a sudden panicked look as I knocked on the door and stepped to one side, pressed myself against a wall. At the last moment I pushed her in front of the security peephole and told her to smile.
“What is it?” Shanna’s voice called out.
“Office, ma’am.”
I gave my assistant two thumbs up and did a little side step to avoid a kick in the shin. Testy.
Shanna’s voice through the door: “What d’you need?”
“There’s a blank spot on the registration form you didn’t fill out.”
The door opened. It hit the security chain and stopped. Like all security chains, it was a joke. Good enough. I set my foot against the bottom of the door to hold
