“Why would anyone think you could pay a million dollars?” I asked.
“She was Celine,” said Lucy the Trainee, nodding at Shanna. “Whoever put him in the garage probably knew that.”
“Well, hell,” Danya muttered.
“Yeah, what’d that pay?” I asked. I gave Lucy’s waist a little squeeze. Good job.
“Not enough,” Shanna said.
“You told him you would do it for the money. It must have been enough to convince him. How much?”
She shrugged. “I got twenty a concert.”
“Twenty?”
She stared at me like I was the guy texting who walked off a cliff. “Twenty thousand. What’d you think? Twenty bucks?”
Great. Love it when a gorgeous girl puts a sneer in her voice.
“And,” she added, “a thousand a day, just to go around with him, be seen, wear revealing clothes.”
“How many concerts?” I asked.
“I went to four.”
Eighty thousand. “Did you get the money up front?”
“What d’you think?”
“She did,” Lucy said. “For sure.” Shanna shot her a baleful look, then nodded.
“How many days were you with him?” I asked.
“Nineteen or twenty. About that. I didn’t get my thousand a day for those.”
Kids hadn’t written that note. It was someone who thought the girls had money. Might not have known how much, though.
“Anyway,” I said, “there’s a road into Jo-X’s place and you know where it is.”
“It’s not like it’s invisible from the highway. But it’s just a dirt track with ‘No Trespassing’ signs and a wire gate. The gate isn’t locked or anything. It’s one of those wire loop things. Then, if you get up into the hills, still like about three miles from the house, there’s a sign saying the place is a private hospital or something, like a detox place, and Keep Out signs are all over. And there’s one of those tire-shredding things, and a call box and a camera so they can see who’s there if someone shows up and wants in.”
“He’s got a tire shredder?”
“Uh-huh. Like those ugly steel teeth you see in parking lots where they warn you not to back up. I figure there’s got to be a switch or something in the house that someone can throw to lower the teeth. If you tried to drive over it going up to Jo-X’s place, you’d blow all your tires. And they put big rocks beside the shredder and dug trenches. All that is right at the mouth of a canyon. It’d be hard to get up there in a car or truck if someone didn’t want you there.”
After Shanna had driven Jo-X’s SUV out of his hideaway, he’d flown out in his helicopter. Then, according to Melanie, he’d walked hunched over to his SUV. Now I knew he might’ve had something tugging on his pecker. Like his belly. Talk about your basic all-purpose revenge move. But it still wasn’t as bad as Lorena Bobbitt’s solution to life’s little ups and downs. Lorena and her Ginsu knives had spawned a song: “Lorena’s in the car takin’ Willie for a ride.” She was born in Quito, Ecuador. Maybe they did things differently down there. Like cut off the offending member and chuck it out a window on the way to Walmart.
Hurts just to think about it. Superglue was bad, but not that bad. I wondered where Lorena was now, if she had found another boyfriend or if guys were keeping their distance.
Back on the road, top down on the Mustang. Lucy and I had eaten breakfast at the casino on Front Street in Caliente and were on the road by eight twenty, temperature already approaching ninety.
I looked for the turnoff to Jo-X’s hideaway, thought I spotted what might be it, but wasn’t sure. Shanna told us it was on the west side of the highway, eight or ten miles north of Arlene’s Diner and the Midnight Rider Motel.
Speaking of which, as we passed Arlene’s, Lucy was sitting up on the back of the seat with her top off, eyes closed, and we were doing fifty-five miles an hour. And Ignacio was in front of his motel room with what looked like a cup of coffee in his hand, eyes bugging out as we blew on by.
We reached the Vegas city limits at ten fifteen. Lucy put her top on two miles before we reached I-15, but she had a forty-mile topless run in good morning sun, hair blowing around in the blast of wind. I was inordinately proud of the fact that I’d looked up at her only eight or ten times and whistled at her only once when I caught her with her back arched and her eyes closed.
In my white wig and moustache, I valet-parked the Mustang at the Luxor and we went inside. I kept the key that opened the lockbox in the trunk. It might raise eyebrows if some curious kid were to open it and find guns and disguise paraphernalia.
In our suite we found two maids working on the room. There wasn’t much to do since we hadn’t been there in twenty-four hours, hadn’t used the towels or the bed. I gave them each fifty dollars and chased them out.
“Jacuzzi,” Lucy said, shedding clothes as if they were on fire. “The shower in that motel sucked.”
“I thought you had fun.”
“I did. A lot. But the water was only tepid and the pressure was low. Now get naked, Mort.”
“Naked? Moi?”
“People often bathe naked. It’s like a custom.” She came over, pulled my head down, and gave me a kiss. “But I’m not a tease and this is still just getting clean, nothing else, I mean nothing that you’d call exercise or aerobic—so you don’t actually have to participate if it would leave you unfulfilled and unhappy. But you did earlier, participate, I
