We went in. I kept sunglasses on, but Lucy settled hers on top of her head.
A guy in his forties was behind a gouged countertop with a hoagie in one hand, a Danielle Steel paperback novel, Magic, in the other. Half a dozen tottering stacks of romance novels sat on a table beside him, ninety or a hundred novels. A rackety air conditioner had taken the temperature down to the mid-eighties. The hoagie was leaking vinegar and oil onto his T-shirt. All in all a fine tableau. The guy had four or more chins. Easy to lose count. His gut flowed and sagged around him, much of it in his lap, but five hundred pounds will do that.
Five hundred.
Easy.
“Hi, there,” Lucy said to him. “What’s your name?”
Prettiest girl who’d spoken to him in twenty years. He stared at her with a bit of lettuce hanging out of his mouth, made him look like a cow that had paused while grazing.
“Stan.”
“Well, Stan. My dad here wants me to get one of those storage shed thingies, so whatcha got?”
Dad? Shit. We’d talked it over, how to do this. If it was a guy, she would do the talking. If a woman, I’d take over. That was as far as we’d taken it. She hadn’t said anything about me being billed as her father. But, of course, it worked since she was in shorts, that skintight tank top, looked about nineteen, and I had “good-old-dad” written all over me.
Pinned down by gravity, Stan struggled to his feet. It took him half a minute to get in position behind the counter. “What size unit you lookin’ for?” His eyes lingered on her chest for five seconds before finally getting up to her face.
A partly open door to a back room showed an unmade bed, clothes on the floor, a kitchen counter buried beneath fast-food containers. A popcorn and dirty-clothes smell hung in the air.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “How ’bout you show us around? I need to see how big they are to decide.”
In spite of the little she was wearing, movement—showing us around—evidently didn’t appeal to Stan. Maybe his forklift was parked too far away. Or the hundred-seven-degree outside temperature was daunting. He glanced at a wall-sized diagram of T&T’s facility, covered by a yellowing sheet of Plexiglas. Units were marked up with grease-pencil.
He said, “You kin go have a look around. Available units are open, so check ’em out. Bay six is small, thirty-five a month. Fifty-one is a medium, fifty bucks. Seventy is large, sixty-five a month. If you want to store an RV, it depends on size.”
“Yeah? How much for an eighty-foot yacht?”
He gaped at her.
“Kidding, Stan.” She tittered like a girl I sat next to in first-year algebra, freshman year. Stan grinned, eating it up.
He gave us a sheet with a map of T&T’s yard on it, put Xs on the units he’d mentioned, and pointed at the door to the yard. “Out thataway. Have yourselves a ball.”
We went outside. Stan had a golf cart parked outside the door. It had a substantial frame, beefed-up suspension. Lucy gave it a little pat as we went by. “Hi, ho, Silver,” she said quietly.
Without sunglasses, two minutes in the yard would have liquefied my retinas. The place was doubling as a blast furnace, all one and a half acres. No shade, dark asphalt, glare off steel-sheet doors.
“Holy cow,” Lucy said. “Must be a hundred fifty out here. You oughta at least take off your shirt.”
“You, too. At least.”
“Yeah, right. In case you hadn’t noticed, Stan has cameras all over and a monitor in his office to keep an eye on the place.”
“You could probably get yourself a nice discount.”
“That would be so worth it, Daddy.”
“Which reminds me. Dad?”
“Worked, didn’t it? So where is this unit of Arlene’s?”
I checked Stan’s map. “Down this way. Number seventy-two. Look for security cameras. I’ll mark them on the map.”
“Security cameras?”
“They could be a problem. Later.”
“Groovy.”
Unit seventy-two was twelve feet from seventy. Seventy was marked on the map as a large unit, available. I tested the handle before grabbing it. Good thing. Best guess, it was running about two hundred ninety degrees.
“Shirt,” Lucy said.
“Come again?”
“Take off your shirt, use that.”
“You just want me out of my shirt.”
“You’re being difficult because you want me out of mine.”
So I took off my shirt, folded it, used it to lift the articulating door to unit seventy since Stan was probably watching. We went in for show, looked around.
“I totally love it,” Lucy said. “I could like live in here.”
Ten by twenty-four feet, dust on the floor, ten-foot ceiling, interior running a hundred forty degrees. Lots of things wouldn’t survive a summer in there.
Back outside.
“Now what?” Lucy said.
“Have you noticed that the padlocks on the sheds are all the same?”
“Uh-huh. So?”
“So, I’ll bet you fifty bucks he won’t allow any other kind of lock on a door and that he sells ’em in his office.”
“Why? You want one?”
“Two of ’em, yeah. Now that I’ve seen ’em.”
“Don’t know why. But that fifty-dollar bet reminds me I still owe you fifty for when that girl ended up in Caliente.”
“You can pay me later. But getting back to the locks, which are the issue here—they look pretty goddamn husky.”
“Means you’re thinking of getting into Arlene’s unit, right?”
“Right.”
“But probably not with Stanley watching, so tell me we’re coming back tonight.”
“We’re coming back tonight.”
“Groovy.”
We went through T&T’s yard, noting the placement of cameras, checked the small and medium units for show, looked at the chain-link fence and the desert scrub beyond it, then I put on my shirt as we walked back to the office.
“See anything ya like?” Stan asked.
“Still thinking about it,” Lucy said. “But probably.”
“You sell locks here?” I asked.
“Sure do.” He set one on the counter. “Only padlock I allow in the place. This one’s one secure son of a gun,
