Danya didn’t answer. The call went to voice mail—a generic message that gave me no information. I checked the number, tried again. Nothing. I left a message that I’d called as requested, then put the car in gear and took off.
Women. Easy come, easy go. Danya wasn’t going to be a bit of trouble, so Ma could rest easy.
I was rolling north on Kietzke Lane doing forty miles an hour when my cell phone rang. I picked it up and answered it—illegally. I had a hands-free headset somewhere. Maybe in the glove compartment or under a front seat. I wasn’t on the best of terms with the Reno police department, in particular, a detective named Russell Fairchild, whom I’d embarrassed last summer by solving his big case for him—finding the two women who had decapitated Reno’s mayor and district attorney. Oddly enough, when Senator Harry Reinhart’s right hand had been shipped to me via FedEx two months later, which was a big breakthrough in that missing-person case—that still hadn’t patched things up with him. Fairchild was a hard man to please.
“Mort,” I said.
“Mr. Angel? Mortimer?” A woman’s voice.
“Wrong number, kiddo. I don’t know any Mortimers.”
“I mean . . . Mort.”
“Speaking. Is this Danya?”
“Yes.”
Sometimes new relationships are like this. Awkward before they blossom. But I had a nice three-dimensional image of her in my head, the way she’d filled out that dress the night before.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I . . . well, last night I was going to have you come over to my place today, my house, so we could talk. In private.”
She got that far, then stalled.
“I hear a ‘but’ in there. You were going to have me drop by.”
“But . . . there’s a guy snooping around my house. I don’t know what he wants, and . . . he looks kind of creepy. Right now I can’t . . . can’t . . .” Her voice drifted off.
“A guy?” I was suddenly on high alert, which is what gumshoes like me are known for. Damsels in distress and all that. In the IRS we took damsels for all they were worth, young, old, didn’t matter. Things had changed since King Arthur’s day.
“I was in the kitchen,” Danya said. “I looked toward the front of the house and saw him peering in a living room window. I went out the back and over our back fence. My car was parked on the street. I . . . well, I took off. I can’t talk to anyone right now. Except for you, I mean. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I forgot to lock the back door when I went out, so now I don’t know what to do.”
“Call the police.”
“I can’t do that.”
Okay, that was fishy, but being a sensitive guy I didn’t tell her that. Last night she’d wanted a maverick PI, which was also fishy, but fishy was a big part of my growing repertoire as a PI. And that maverick thing really had me going. I wanted to explore it further—which meant I might not live to see fifty, but . . .
“Am I on the payroll yet, kiddo?” I asked.
“We’ll have to talk about that later. Right now, there’s that guy skulking around.”
Skulking. The plot and the prose was thickening.
“What’s the address?” I asked. “I’ll come check it out.”
Exactly as if I hadn’t learned a goddamn thing last year, having almost been murdered twice in less than three months, but in the category of slow learners I reign supreme. Or . . . it might’ve been that Hammer-Magnum-PI thing—getting tangled up with stunning women. Now that I was a gumshoe, I attracted them like white cat fur to a black wool suit.
She gave me a street address on Elmcrest Drive in northwest Reno. “Hang tight,” I said. “Where are you now?”
“I . . . well, I’d rather not say. I mean, I don’t know what’s going on right now, and there’s that creepy-looking guy.”
Still fishy. Perfect.
“Keep your phone on,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”
I hit the interstate, I-80, and took the Toyota up to yodeling speed—sixty miles an hour. At that velocity, the side mirror sounds a lot like Madonna. Jeri’s house—mine now—was more or less on the way, so I got off the freeway at Keystone, swung by and got a .357 Magnum revolver, stuck it in a shoulder holster and covered it with a dark-blue windbreaker, then continued north and west on surface streets—up West Seventh, right on Stoker, left on Elmcrest, a residential street that meandered up into the foothills, and started checking house numbers.
The house was set back about twelve yards from the street, dark beneath good-sized elms. A driveway went along the west side of the single-story house, ending at an unattached garage in back that had a slight lean to the left. The house itself was an older ranch-style affair, gloomy-looking with brown siding and dark-green trim. A gutter was loose in front, awkwardly wired to an eave. The lawn was patches of grass struggling to survive, but most of it had given up long ago. Reno was in the midst of yet another drought. With population growth out of control, lawns were becoming a thing of the past. It didn’t look like the kind of place I’d expect a girl like Danya to live in, as beautiful and intelligent as she was. Which was a kind of prejudice, I know, but there it was all the same. The house didn’t seem to fit her.
I drove by slowly, didn’t see a creep hanging around, peering in windows. That didn’t mean there hadn’t been one. I parked two houses up the street and walked back, loosening the gun in its holster, keeping it out of sight under the windbreaker.
The neighborhood was quiet, no kids running around. Maybe they were still in bed. It was the end of the last week of June. School was out for the summer, but no kids? Maybe all their electronic shit was keeping them indoors and obese. No cars were moving on the street. About that time, it occurred to me that Danya had said “our” back fence.
