“Celine?” I said.
“Yeah. There wasn’t any sound in that video, but the bitch freaked me out, saying that, told me she’d be my waitress and her name was Celine. She was like fifty or sixty, cigarette smoke in the air around her, in her clothes and hair. But then . . . that was all. She took my order and the cook in back made me an omelet, not a very good one, either. But I guess that old bitch made a video with a hidden camera, like in her hair or clipped to her shirt or something.”
“Wonder why she would do that?” Lucy said.
It seemed like a reasonable question, and Lucy hadn’t asked it in an aggressive way. A sign of progress?
Shanna shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe because she knew the pilot was Jo-X? Really, I don’t see how she couldn’t. There’s a big metal building in back of the restaurant where he keeps the helicopter. How could he keep himself a secret for however long, like a year or two or three? She’s got to know. So then she comes up and calls herself Celine, maybe to see what I’d do? Or”—she looked at me—“maybe my figure sort of gave me away like you suggested, but I doubt it. I think she knows more about Jo-X than about anyone else on the planet.”
Lucy and I left. I gave Danya my cell number, just in case. In case of what, I didn’t know, but this investigation had become a Hydra, with tentacles all over the place. No telling what might happen. Too bad I said all that out loud.
“A Hydra has a bunch of heads,” Lucy said. “Not tentacles.”
“My bad.”
“You should keep me around. Learn cool stuff.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ROAD RUMBLE AND wind. White noise. Unlike gangsta rap, white noise doesn’t interfere with thinking. Gangsta rap inhibits not only all semblance of thought but all emotional growth and maturity. You can see it when cars thump by, emitting rap like a person pounding an empty ten-thousand-gallon water tank with a sledge hammer, the person behind the wheel looking like the reincarnation of Attila the Hun. People who listen to gangsta rap should not be allowed to vote.
Beside me in the passenger seat, Lucy was quiet. The temperature was still in the nineties. The sun had gone behind the hills and high thin clouds were illuminated in orange and rose.
So, white noise and thinking . . .
Waitress goes outside and makes a video of a girl—Shanna—walking toward a helicopter with a guy dressed like a pilot. Odds are she knows the guy is Jonnie Xenon, has known it for a while. Next day she makes another video of the girl sitting at a table in the diner. The videos end up on a flash drive in Jo-X’s pocket in Shanna and Danya’s garage, and a note demanding a million dollars ends up in their mailbox. Add it up, big guy. Put two and two together.
Yeah, right. Like this was a two-plus-two deal.
How about this? The waitress kills Jo-X, puts his body in the girls’ garage, and demands money? Does that work? Uh-uh. That had so many holes in it I didn’t know where to start counting.
Someone put Jo-X in that garage. But who? Couldn’t be the newlyweds. That didn’t make a lick of sense.
Okay, try this: the waitress is Jo-X’s mother, stepmother, aunt. One way or another, they’re close. That explains why she’s willing to keep a secret that she could sell for tens of thousands. Then why wouldn’t Jo-X take Josie to the Midnight Rider Motel right next to Arlene’s? Why take her to the Pahranagai Inn?
To keep her away from mom, of course. To keep the police from snooping around mom’s place if things went bad with the girl. I doubted he would think that way, but she might—if she knew he was roofying girls, and I had no proof or hint of that.
But, wait. Mom has a son worth thirty million dollars and she lives in a decomposing shack attached to the back of that craphole diner? She’s not in a big luxury house somewhere with maids flitting around all day dusting stuff, a cook whipping up culinary delights?
I couldn’t see it.
I couldn’t see anything. But when you can’t figure out where to start, you grab a string and start pulling, so I pulled on the video string. The waitress made two videos. Why make videos of Shanna—or at least of an unknown girl about to meet Jo-X? She might’ve called herself Celine to see what kind of a reaction it got. That made sense. Maybe Shanna’s “figure” had entered into it. Then—how and why had the videos ended up in the dead rapper’s pocket?
I was tired. I still didn’t have enough information. So much for white noise enhancing thinking. Maybe this one was going to require gangsta rap to figure out.
I missed Ma. She would probably know where to go from here.
Something I’d heard earlier was lodged in my head, but it was staying there. My brain was a clotted mass of disconnected facts.
“Lot of boobs back there,” Lucy said, breaking the silence.
“An interesting and salient observation for sure.”
“Just sayin’.”
“Which is why it’s so interesting.”
She was quiet for half a mile. Then: “I’m starting to think maybe I got shortchanged.”
“Hey, kiddo. I’ve seen big and I’ve seen small. You’re about as perfect as it gets.”
She hit me with a two-hundred-watt smile. “Think so?”
“Yep. You got lucky, hit that happy medium.”
She settled back. “Well, okay then. If you think so, then tonight you should rub massage oil on ’em. That’d be nice.”
“Be still, my heart.”
“You wait. It’ll be good for you. Get another knot untied. Good for me, too. Really, there’s nothing like a good boob rub.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Trust me.”
The sky darkened to cobalt blue. The temperature slipped below ninety. Desert cools off quickly when the sun goes down.
Lucy looked over at
