“See if you can do that,” Russ said. “We’ll be here.” He looked at Danya. “Somewhere in Caliente.”
“Sundowner Motel,” Danya said. “Or the Double Down. I saw ’em on the way over here.” She put a hand on his arm. “It’s not like we don’t want you staying at our motel, Dad, but . . .”
“But you two don’t need me right next door.”
“Something like that. But actually, now that you’re here, I’m glad you are. I mean, we don’t know what’s going on. You’ve got my cell number and you’ll be less than a mile away since this is a really small town.”
After a moment of silence, Russ looked at Shanna. “I never got a chance to welcome you to the family, but . . . welcome. I’m still not sure about that Celine business. Looks like it attracted attention none of us needed, but we’ll deal with it. Somehow.”
“Not sure how this fits, if at all,” I said, “but I think those two at that diner, Arlene and her kid, Buddie, stole some stuff from Jo-X’s hideaway up in the hills before or after the place burned down. Most likely before. In fact, they might’ve burned it down to cover their tracks. I can’t tell when that happened, but it might’ve been right after they heard Xenon was dead. Soon as they heard that, they’d be at his place within hours, loading up.”
“What stuff? What’d they take?”
“A good-sized generator. Eighty kilowatts. And maybe a safe they can’t open. Probably a bunch of other stuff, as much as they could cart away. The woman who took those videos, Arlene, probably knew the helicopter pilot was Xenon. I think it would have been almost impossible for him to have kept that a secret. If I had to guess, I’d say he was paying her to keep quiet.”
Russ stared at me. “Christ, Angel, she probably killed him. Her and what’s his name again—Buddie? What’re we doing, tap-dancing around here?”
“It’s certain they’re opportunists and thieves, not necessarily murderers though.”
“Break one law, it’s easier to break another. Kid breaks into a house, next thing he’s pulling armed robberies in a parking lot and someone ends up dead.”
“If Xenon was paying her to keep quiet, killing him would have cut off the money spigot. Don’t see that happening.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t look convinced. “So where’d you learn about that generator thing? How’d you get that?”
“Officer Day dug up information on Arlene. She’s got a shed in a storage facility. I went in and had a look—”
“We had a look,” Lucy said.
“You weren’t there if I say you weren’t there,” I told her. “And you weren’t there.” I turned to Russ. “There’s an eighty-thousand-watt diesel generator in there. A generator is missing from Jo-X’s place in the hills. Two and two, Russ.”
“How the hell did you ‘have a look’ in her shed? Place like that is usually fenced-in, keypad access.”
“It was something of a maverick operation. Which is why you hired me. You would never have gotten a warrant—‘you’ meaning Vegas cops. You want details?”
He shook his head. “Not now. Maybe never. I could put the Lincoln County or state police on Arlene and her kid, though.”
“Not yet. There’s no telling how that’d screw things up. We still don’t know who killed Jo-X.”
“Yeah, well, horse pucky,” he said. “But I’m still thinking I’d like to keep a real close eye on that Arlene woman and her kid. Real effing close.”
“‘Effing,’” Lucy said. “Cool.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“HOT SPRINGS,” SHE said when we got back in the Caddy.
“First we clean our guns.”
“Of course. I was just thinking that.” She waited a moment. “Why?”
“All that dust diving we did last night.”
“Oh, yeah. That.”
We hadn’t given up our room at the Inn yet. Checkout time was in forty-five minutes. From the lockbox in the trunk I got out basic gun-cleaning supplies. We sat at a table in the room and wiped the guns down, ran patches with a splash of Hoppe’s No. 9 on them through cylinders and barrels, ran a few more patches through, put a single drop of oil in the mechanism, wiped off the excess, reloaded.
“We didn’t use that bed there,” Lucy said, eyeing the king.
“You didn’t sleep? That’s too bad. I did.”
“Very funny.”
“They’re gonna kick us out of here in fifteen minutes.”
She thought about that. “Okay, hot spring.”
Ryder’s Hot Spring was a six-minute drive north. Private room for an hour ran forty bucks. We got naked, took a quick rinse-off shower in a kind of alcove above the pool. The pool was down half a dozen steps, a ten-by-ten-foot concrete square just under four feet deep. The bottom was a layer of smooth pebbled gravel that gave a great foot massage. Water temperature was a hundred three degrees.
Lucy went down the steps first, then crouched down slightly. The water hit her at mid-nipple. She closed her eyes and leaned against a stone wall, letting the water support most of her weight. “Heaven.”
She opened her eyes and smiled as I came down the stairs. “Now there’s a promising sight,” she said.
“Says the nineteen-year-old vixen with the fake ID.”
“Get in here. I want to cop a feel.”
“If you must.”
She trudged through the water, producing a little swirling wake, put her arms around my waist, and pulled me close. “A week ago I was waiting tables at McGinty’s. Now look.”
“Yup.”
“So articulate.” She kissed my neck then put her left leg between mine, curled it around my right calf like a python. Off in a corner I thought I saw Sam Spade in a mask and snorkel blowing laugh bubbles.
“Yup.”
“A man of few words.”
“A man who knows when to keep his mouth shut.”
“Yeah? When did that happen?” Her lips brushed mine, then she backed away a few inches and said, “That sort of tickles. Not that I mind.”
“What?”
“This, Cowboy. What did you think?”
And so on.
I pulled the Caddy up in front of room one at the
