Lucy said, “So what? Here’s what—he didn’t roofie anyone so you couldn’t catch him. So you killed him instead.”
“And hung him in our garage to stink up the neighborhood and get the police involved,” Danya said. “That’s brilliant.”
“You killed him and someone else put him in your garage.”
Danya stared at her, then at me. “When you pick up women—well, high school girls—you should have them checked for rabies before taking them out in public. She’s delusional.”
Rabies. Interesting. That had never occurred to me. “Okay, now tell me about the helicopter,” I said to Shanna.
She looked down at her hands. “The video was at that place where I first saw this girl this afternoon”—she nodded at Lucy. “Arlene’s Café, Diner, whatever. A lot of people think Jo-X has a secret place, some sort of a hideaway somewhere, no one knows where. Turns out it’s true. I don’t know who all knows about it, or exactly where it is, or how he managed to keep it so secret, but I was there. Before that, I was with him for almost three weeks, then one afternoon he gave me an address and told me to be there the next day at one p.m., not to be followed, and not to arrive as Celine, but as me, since by then he knew I was white, but not my real name, who I was, or even that I was from Reno, so he called me Celine like everyone else.
“So I did. I put the address into the system and left his house in Vegas as Celine in a car with dark tinted windows. I had to get rid of some media lice, which took a while, but all they knew was they were following a car from Jo-X’s place, didn’t know it had ‘Celine’ in it, so they probably didn’t try as hard as they would have. I pulled off the highway and changed back into myself, which took some scrubbing to get off the black, but it’s just body paint, expensive stuff meant to do just what it did. When I finally got to that diner, I went into the bathroom and made sure all the body paint was off, then I waited. I was there for over an hour, then a helicopter flew over the diner and came down behind the place. A few minutes later, there’s Jo-X, but you wouldn’t know it since he was wearing mirrored sunglasses, a hat, and a flight suit like the kind a real pilot would wear with a bunch of pockets and zippers. I guess that was in case anyone else was at the diner, but if you think about it, the owner, maybe that waitress since she was kinda old and didn’t really act like a waitress, has to know that the guy was Jo-X. If so, she probably phoned him and told him I was there, waiting.”
“Two hours ago the waitress there was young,” Lucy said.
“I saw her. That wasn’t the same one. The one who took the video was in her fifties or sixties. Jo-X came inside and got me. We walked out to the helicopter and he flew it. I didn’t know he could fly one of those. Turns out he really was a pilot. I don’t think anyone in the media knows. If they did, you would’ve heard about it on TV—more Jonnie Xenon hype to thrill the girls. He took off, kept low, circled around a bunch of canyons and hills and made a lot of turns, then finally landed at this place in a sort of valley way up in the mountains. What we flew over was all dry desert, like a maze. I couldn’t find the place now if I had to.
“He was more relaxed, not so wild or hyper, not like the Jo-X everyone sees onstage and television, but he tried like hell to get me into bed. Maybe that was why he took me there. Probably was. Thing is, I’m a lot stronger than I look. Meaner, too. And I knew he’d roofied Josie so I didn’t drink anything but bottled water from bottles where the cap was still sealed at wherever they bottle those things. I figured he could even roofie an ice cube. And I slept in a different bed, different room, with the door locked and the back of a chair stuck under the knob. He tried, but didn’t even get to first base.”
“First base. That’s tits, right?” Lucy said.
Shanna glared at her. “You oughta know, girl.” Then a glance at Lucy’s chest—“Okay, maybe not.” She looked at me. “Anyway, he flew me out the next morning, back to that diner, and that was the end of Celine since Celine didn’t put out and she maybe called him a few pretty bad names. He told me to get my stuff out of his Vegas house by noon since I was staying there, which didn’t give me much time. He told me Celine was done, gone, adios, he never wanted to see her again.”
She shrugged. “And that’s it. I didn’t get him. I was at five parties and sort of young girls were all over the place, but I didn’t catch him roofying anyone. Maybe I should’ve fucked the fucker at his hideout to stay with him, I don’t know.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Danya said, kissing Shanna’s shoulder. Shanna’s eyes were on me as Danya did it, a defiant stare with a fair amount of carborundum in it.
“Then you ate at Arlene’s,” I said, working on the timeline.
“I was hungry,” Shanna said. “Starving. That asshole flew me out of there early that morning, before I could get anything to eat. The diner was right there. The
