“Priceless. You made the pit boss very happy.”
“I’m glad. I bet they’ll let us keep the suite for a month after that show since we’ve still got forty thousand of their money.”
Ten miles north of I-15, in the middle of nowhere, we’d been riding along in silence for five minutes, Lucy in her sun hat, when she let out an abrupt laugh that faded into a round of girlish giggles.
“What?” I asked.
She grinned at me. “Superglue.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Yeah. But what I wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall when he woke up and had to pee.” She looked over at me. “Well, maybe not. That’d be gross. But for the record, I’ve heard his lyrics, so he deserved what he got. And if he raped that girl, then he deserved the bullets, too.”
We’d learned things. I didn’t know if any of it was useful, but anything new added to our store of knowledge, which gave me an idea. I hadn’t spoken with Russell since last night, so I gave him a jingle. Maybe he’d found something useful up there in Reno and hadn’t gotten back to me yet.
“You find her yet?” Russ asked without preamble.
“In fact, I did.” He’d forked over five thousand smackeroos so I figured I owed him that much. Smackeroos was a word I’d picked up in Gerlach last year at Waldo’s Texaco. It filled a niche.
“You did? Where?”
“Caliente.”
“Caliente? What’s she doin’ down there? How’d you find her, anyway?”
“Do you have any idea who you’re talkin’ to?”
Dead air for a few seconds. “Well, yeah.”
“Doesn’t sound like it. You are talking to the most successful locator of missing persons in all of North—”
“Oh, for chrissake, yeah, yeah, yeah—”
“—America, and you oughta stay away for a while. She’s with Shanna. They’re fine, keeping their heads down. Until we get a handle on what’s going on and who might’ve killed Jo-X, I’m of the opinion that they’re in as good a place as any. Pick them up and you’ve got a circus on your hands.”
And you’d also have a bubbling fountain of information on your hands, I didn’t tell him—if he could get it out of the girls. Last thing I wanted him to know was that Shanna had roofied Xenon and super-glued part of his anatomy to another part of his anatomy. Which, if I thought about it, wasn’t a topic I wanted to pursue in any depth now or in the future with Russ or anyone else. Odds were Jo-X’s autopsy had already given Russ that tidbit. No need to bring it up, which I couldn’t anyway without revealing more than I wanted to at the moment.
“Where at in Caliente are they?” Russell asked.
“I’m gonna protect you from yourself and your inclination to do exactly the wrong thing and not tell you—or tell Lucy what you said because she’d correct your English.”
“Jesus Christ, Angel—”
“Seriously, Russ. Don’t go there. Leave ’em alone.” Which was up to him now. If he went to Caliente, it would take him about ten minutes to find them; the place was that small.
“Where’re you staying? Caliente?”
“Nope. Suite at the Luxor.”
“A suite? Je-sus, Angel. But, look, I paid you to find—”
“Hello,” I said. “Russ? You there? You’re breaking u—”
“I hear you just fine and—”
“Russ, you there? Damn it, call must’ve dropped out—”
“I’m here, Angel. I’m right here. Hey—”
“Guess he’s gone,” I said to Lucy, and into the phone. “Cell coverage out here must not be that g—” and I ended the call.
Ten seconds later, my phone rang. “Monster Mash” played for a while, then the call went to voice mail.
I looked over at Lucy. “You takin’ notes?”
“Yeah. You need a new ringtone.”
“Not that. What I said to Russ.”
“How to screw your client and run a maverick operation? Uh-huh, I think I’m gonna be good at this.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The shimmering motel-diner oasis rose out of the afternoon heat mirage like a ghastly ghostly rotting galleon emerging from the murky depths. I told all that to Lucy.
“Don’t count on a Pulitzer. Are we stopping?” she asked half a mile before we got there.
“Let’s see if we can find that road to Jo-X’s. Shanna said it was west of the highway, eight miles past the diner.”
“Eight to ten.”
“Good. You’re keepin’ notes.”
At the Walmart where Lucy had bought her dark clothing, I’d also bought a small backpack to carry food and water. Shanna had estimated that the tire shredder was three miles from Jo-X’s house. Not far, but in hundred-degree heat and no shade it would make for a hot hike. The longest day of the year was only a week or so ago. The sun would be up for four more blazing-hot hours.
As we went by the motel—no sign of the red Chevy Cruze—I reached over and reset the trip odometer.
At seventy-five miles an hour, the miles piled up quickly. Lucy slowed when we’d gone eight of them. I looked ahead for any sign of a road. After another mile, I saw something.
“Slower,” I told her.
At nine point two, a dirt road appeared to the left. Lucy made the turn onto a rutted washboard trail. Fifty yards off the highway we came to a gate of sorts—a section of barbed wire fence held across the canted trail by a loop of wire around a wooden post, a common arrangement in western rangeland. Lucy stopped the car and I got out, lifted the loop of wire from the post and dragged the gate—four strands of limp wire nailed to a vertical board in the middle of the road—out of the way.
As Shanna had said, NO TRESPASSING signs were nailed to each of the posts flanking the trail. And a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign, and one that read: KEEP OUT. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Given the condition of the road, the number of signs seemed like overkill. Ignoring the signs, the unlikely prosecution, and an even less-likely protracted trial by a jury of my peers, I waved
