“Find out anything?” she asked. “You’ve been gone half an hour.”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
Her voice softened. “What? A car pulled up out front while you were gone. It was Timothy Olyphant, wasn’t it?”
“Close,” I said. “It was the Wharf Rat.”
Took her a few seconds to process that. “Wharf rat. That’s that scrawny guy in Reno you said took a picture of you?”
“The very same.”
“Well, hell. That’s interesting.”
“Ain’t it?”
“Ain’t ain’t a word.”
I squinted at her. “That was irony, wasn’t it? I have trouble with irony.”
“Uh-huh. So, where’s the rat now?”
“Probably six feet away, right through that wall.” I pointed. “He might have his ear stuck to a glass against the wall.”
Lucy hit the wall with the pad of her fist. “Take that, Rat.”
“So, how about we keep it down in here?” I said. “Unless you want to end up on the front page of a tabloid.”
“What else did you find out?” Lucy whispered.
“A big backhoe went out into the desert, then stopped.”
“A backhoe? Wow, News at Eleven. Hope you got video.”
“And the gal who cleans the rooms here said Shanna didn’t fly back that morning like she said she did. She drove herself. In a black SUV.”
Lucy thought about that for a moment. “The girl who cleans the rooms told you that? She could be wrong.”
“I don’t think so. She lives here. Don’t think she has a PhD in anything, but she was pretty specific. What she said and the way she said it rang true.”
“So, Shanna lied.”
“Apparently.”
“I wonder why. Might have to give that some thought.”
“Or track her down and ask.”
“That’d work. But now, how about that shower?” She let the towel unwind and held it in one hand.
“You didn’t get wet and clean while I was gone?”
“Uh-uh. I waited for you. The shower looks spooky. In fact this whole place is like that, including the name. I got scared, figured I needed someone in the shower with me to keep me safe and maybe help scrub these.”
Aw, jeez.
I never served in the military. Worse, I was an Internal Revenue thug for sixteen long years, so I’d done more damage to the country than good. Eventually I discovered I had a soul. But a guy by the name of Warley Sullivan was still at the IRS, and he was born without a soul and never managed to acquire one along the way. He was fifty-four, six foot two, had a beak nose and vulture’s eyes, and had never married since no one would have him, for good reason. His greatest joy was finding that mom and pop hadn’t paid enough in taxes four years ago and the penalties and interest had added up enough to make Christmas a mean season for their three kids. I figured I could finally contribute to the welfare of the country by giving him details about that shower with Lucy, at which point Warley would be forced to kill himself. It would be like having served in the Marines.
News at Eleven: Backhoe in the desert.
Lucy was snugged up against me like before, fast asleep. She wasn’t ready for things to go beyond that point. Couldn’t say I was either. Lucy wanted closeness, warmth, contact. We hadn’t known each other forty-eight hours yet. This was only our second night together, though it seemed like a long week. It might have come as a surprise to her that abstinence suited me—if I’d told her—but some things are better left unsaid. Naked and wet, she looked nineteen. Or eighteen. A nymph. My daughter, Nicole, is twenty-one. Lucy had ten years on her, verified so many times I finally had to accept it. It was still a stretch to see her that old. Impossible, really, but in fact she was two years older than Jeri would have been, so this thing, whatever it was, wasn’t the worst thing that had happened to me recently.
The shower took place quietly, though, because Wharf Rat was in the room next door. That put a little damper on things, for which I would have to thank him later without telling him why.
Midnight came and went. I was still awake at 12:55. Lucy was warm, breathing so softly I could barely hear her. We were covered by a sheet and a thin blanket. Every fifteen or twenty minutes a vehicle of some kind blew by on the highway creating a brief flare of light on the walls and ceiling.
Lucy had one of those bodies you don’t get tired of seeing. If she had an ounce out of place, I didn’t know where it was. If she needed an ounce more, I wouldn’t have known where to put it. And, how about focusing on the case, Mort?
Okay . . . Shanna hadn’t come back in Jo-X’s helicopter. She’d driven herself back in a big black SUV, which apparently belonged to the dipshit himself.
She’d lied.
I wondered why.
Later that same day, Jo-X had flown in, evidently in pain, and taken that SUV south, toward Vegas. Came back four hours later and flew away in the helicopter. No black SUV anywhere around now, so it had been driven away. By whom?
The rear window of the bathroom was open a few inches to let in fresh air. It also let in the distant sound of a diesel engine snorting to life. Being a world-class gumshoe, I lifted Lucy’s arm off my chest and rolled out from under, got to my feet to check on the continuing late-night action out back.
I put on jeans sans underwear, shoes sans socks, then went out into the night sans shirt. The Lexus was no longer in front of the motel. The red Cruze was there, so Vinny was in his room. The temperature had finally dropped into the high sixties.
I went around to the back of the motel. The backhoe was lumbering away, moving farther out into the desert.
“Where do you think
