“Drove my Caddy.”
“No shit, Shirleylock.” I tried to follow up that beauty of a comeback with a fierce look, but it was too soon after surgery and I looked, Ma told me later, like Winston Churchill after three pints too many. So . . . probably not fierce.
“I owe you one, Ma,” I said. I would never tell her I’d been shot trying to keep her away from Arlene, or that Lucy and I had been about to escape unscathed and Ma showing up right then was what got me shot. Ma is tough, but not that tough.
“Yes, you do.”
“Now that that’s out of the way, let’s try this again. Why are you here? You were in Memphis, which, in case you didn’t know, is in Tennessee.”
“What I do,” she said, “is listen between the lines. You found that subhuman, Jo-X, then got yourself an unauthorized assistant, you were on TV damn near every time the news came on, next thing you’re down in southern Nevada acting coy on the phone, not wanting to tell me what you were up to—”
“Well, shit. Between those lines you probably didn’t have to listen very hard.”
“Not very. And to top it off, you’re a world-class flake.”
“You knew I was a flake before you left Reno.”
“Which is why I shouldn’t have gone, so here I am. Just in time, too.”
“None of which explains exactly how you ended up at that diner-motel in time to put a bullet in that poor woman’s head.”
“Poor woman?”
“Kidding.”
“With you, I never know. Cliff and me—that’s Day’s first name in case you didn’t know—drove down from Reno, got to Caliente at two in the morning and woke up Detective Fairchild, who said something about wishing he hadn’t given Cliff his motel and room number. He said you’d gone back to that motel where shit apparently happens. That seemed ominous, knowing you, so Cliff and I drove over to see what was what.”
“You and ‘Cliff,’ driving around together. Cool.”
Her eyes got sly. “He and I have . . . traveled together. It’s not our first rodeo.”
“Rodeo, Ma. I like that.”
“Thought you might.”
“So you hustled on over to the Midnight Rider Motel in the Chariot of Fire.”
Ma’s Cadillac was good for about fifty miles an hour before it started to float and wander on the road, a weird combination of good shocks and soft springs. I’d dubbed it the Chariot of Fire last October when it took forever to get back to Reno from Bend, Oregon. But the seats are comfortable, so there’s that.
“It rides better with Cliff in it,” Ma said. “He weighs three-thirty. I got it all the way up to sixty and kept it there.”
“You could’ve done seventy with Buddie in the trunk.”
“Who’s Buddie?”
“Dead guy at the diner lying in two gallons of blood.”
“Oh, him. Exsanguinated.”
Sounded like a sneeze so I said, “Bless you.”
Then Lucy wandered into the room in her hospital gown, the one with backdoor ventilation that allows everyone to see your bum if you don’t hold the drapes shut.
She bent down and gave me a gentle lingering kiss. “How you doin’, big guy?”
“I chortle in the face of death.”
“Good. You’re practically normal already.”
She backed up a step and looked at my shoulder. “Spiffy bandage, Mort. Lookit mine.” She held out her arm and pulled her sleeve up to the shoulder.
“Spiffy. But take note—I’ve got a drain and two bandages.” I touched my ear, felt the adhesive.
For the rest of my life, unless I had plastic surgery, which I’m not inclined to do except for possible augmentations, a bit of the top of my right ear would be missing where Arlene had come within an inch of turning out my lights. And she’d done it with a piece-of-shit snub-nose revolver at nearly thirty feet, too, which was a lucky damn shot, getting that close, so it’s all a crap-shoot and God doesn’t play favorites.
“Show-off,” she said.
“And they gave me a pint of blood.”
“Yeah? How’d it taste?”
“We ain’t been introduced yet,” Ma said to her, “and Mort’s social skills are in the toilet because he was with the IRS, so I’m Ma. Maude Clary, but only my enemies call me Maude.”
“If Arlene is any indication, your enemies end up dead, so they don’t call you Maude for long,” said my spiffy assistant.
Ma gave me a big smile. “She’ll do.” Then she gave Lucy a hug, something she’d never done to me. “Mort tells me you want to be a private investigator.”
“If I don’t have to get shot very often, sure. Last week has been fun. Lot more fun than the crap jobs I’ve had lately. Except when we were buried alive, that is.”
“Big problem though—you have to be at least twenty-one to get a license, so you’ll have to wait a while. Mort said you were thirty-one, but he obviously lied.”
“I am thirty-one. Since April.”
Ma stared at her, then at me.
“Yep,” I said. “She checks out. And it’s been useful to have an assistant with one foot in the grave who looks nineteen.”
Ma stared at Lucy again, then shook her head. “Jesus.”
The TV was on, sound turned down low. I looked up and there was a big Case backhoe, Department of Transportation on the side, working on a hole in the desert heat. A huge tow truck was standing by, a bunch of guys in orange vests looking on, holding shovels, police cars scattered around in the background. I turned up the volume. A talking head I didn’t recognize, Ginny Fernandez out of Vegas, was fifty yards from the action, telling the story of bodies in cars being dug out of the desert behind a place called Arlene’s Diner on Highway 93, seventy miles north of Vegas. Three cars had been recovered so far. The most recent appeared to have cleared up the eight-year disappearance of one Lawrence Emory from Tulsa, although the body found in the trunk of Emory’s Mercedes had yet to be positively identified, which would have to be done via dental records. Earlier finds were those of Peter Windham, missing for ten
