“Picasso,” my assistant said, not giving up.
“That’s the guy who doesn’t know where noses and eyes go on people’s faces, right?”
Lucy laughed.
“I did that sort of thing in the second grade,” I said. “Dogs looked like cows or chickens. No one gave me a million bucks for my work, though, so how’s that fair?”
“It’s called Cubism.”
“What is?”
“Picasso’s style.”
“Right. No one ever called my art Cubism, either. Bunch of Mickey Mouse no-nothing tourists. I oughta sue.”
Half a mile from Arlene’s Diner I pulled off the highway onto a wide patch on the verge. I killed the lights, and we sat there with the engine ticking in the quiet as it cooled.
“Slight change of plans,” I said.
“That backhoe, right? We’re gonna go see what it was doing in the middle of nowhere.”
“It was out there at one in the morning, so, yeah. We’re right here. Might’s well have a look.”
She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “This’s why I want to be a PI. Sneakin’ around, having fun.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a spooky kid?”
“My dad. Lots of times. Makes me wonder why he bought me a BB gun when I was ten.”
We got out and walked up the highway toward the diner in ball caps, dark clothing, guns on our hips. And flashlights, but we kept them turned off.
Headlights appeared, north of Arlene’s, a few miles away. We had plenty of time to ease off into the desert and hunker down as a pickup truck went by. Then back out to the highway. Two hundred yards south of the diner we headed west into the desert, skirting the diner, motel, Melanie’s trailer.
Only one light was on, the one illuminating the sign on the diner’s roof. I guided off it, trying to estimate where the backhoe had gone. We kept going west, into starlit emptiness behind the buildings, wending our way through tough, gnarled sage.
A car glided by almost silently on the highway, a quarter mile away. Minutes later the diesel growl of an eighteen-wheeler went by in the other direction. Then all was quiet except for a lone coyote yipping in the distance, farther in the hills.
We went past the helicopter shed, kept going. After a while, I stopped and looked around. “Somewhere around here, I think.”
“Sure is dark out here.”
“Beautiful and observant.”
Something backhanded my ribs in the night. Didn’t see what it was. Stars were bright. The Milky Way was a glowing ribbon, but the dirt and scrub around us was all but invisible.
I risked turning on a flashlight, aimed away from the diner and motel. I swung it around, didn’t see anything.
I clicked it off and we walked another thirty yards west before I tried again. Still nothing.
We did that a few more times, then Lucy said, “What was that over there?” She aimed her light at a place where the dirt didn’t look natural. We headed that way.
It was a rough rectangle of loose, scuffed dirt, ten by twenty feet, several inches high, different color than the rest of the desert floor. Twisted bits of broken sage poked out of the torn-up dirt, scenting the air. Huge tire tracks were pressed into the earth.
“What do you think it is?” Lucy asked.
“Dirt.”
“Huh. Do you need a PI license to get that, or should I have figured it out without all that training?”
“It was the license. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“I won’t, since you don’t actually have a license. And on a somewhat more serious note, what do you think this is? What was he doing out here?”
“Vince and I thought he was putting in an outhouse, but now that we’re out here, that’s probably not right.”
Lucy flicked her light to the right. “There’s another one.”
We headed that way, found another patch of dirt twelve by twenty-five feet, sagebrush torn up, older than the one we’d just seen. I swung the light farther to the west. The beam dissipated into darkness after about sixty yards, but in that distance I saw three more almost-invisible mounds.
Like graves.
“Kinda spooky out here,” Lucy said, half whispering.
A huge spotlight came on, over by the diner. Several million candlepower blasted the desert floor forty yards to our left, then swept toward us. We hit the deck, flat out in the dirt as the light passed over us. It kept moving, sweeping to the north.
“Well, poop,” said my vocabulary-challenged assistant.
“Run.”
I lunged to my feet. Lucy was already up. We ran south. I tried to keep up with her, but it was like trying to keep up with Shanna or Vince.
Man, being forty-two sucked.
The light raked the desert to the north, then came back, panning like the searchlight of a prison. We ran another twenty yards then hit the dirt before the light rolled over us. I’d seen The Great Escape, Steve McQueen as the Cooler King. I didn’t have much faith in the ability of a searchlight to pick out people in the dark but I wasn’t about to stand up as it went by, either.
We got up, ran. It headed back, scything across the desert. I hit the dirt. Lucy landed beside me.
“Still want to be a PI?” I said.
“Of course. This’s so cool. Want me to try to shoot out that light?”
“Half a mile away with a .38 revolver? Why not? No telling who or what you’d end up hitting.”
The light hunted us for three or four minutes, then went out. Twenty minutes later, Lucy and I arrived back at the Cadillac. I was breathing hard. She wasn’t. She took the driver’s seat.
“We’re probably not gonna get that
