NOT THAT I had to get involved.
That’s right. Why the hell did this serendipity or bad luck or karmic foul-up mean I had to get involved? Just because I had a beautiful wet minx parked on my lap?
Hell no.
She was right up against the door. I could whip it open and she would tumble out. We were only going eight miles an hour. I could slow it down to five and throw the door open, problem solved.
That would be a big step, though. I’d have to give it a bit more thought, not act impulsively. The truck might tilt onto its naked rim which would turn the steering to shit. I would have to stop, probably go back and pick her up, try to look contrite, maybe even apologize, and she’d end up right back on my lap again. No gain.
“The attorney general is your mother? Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I’m not, but I’m sorry if it’s upsetting. I mean, it isn’t your problem. It’s … I don’t know. It’s not actually mine either, if you want to know the truth. Except I guess it is. Sort of.”
“Lot of circumlocution there, Harp.”
She turned more toward me, which made me slightly more aware of a nipple bump than I had been. Good thing I’m tough. It would be better if I wasn’t aware of things like that, but I’m a guy, not dead yet. Lucy would hear about that nipple too, not that she would care. She would laugh at me and tell me that under the circumstances if I wasn’t aware of Harper, she would worry that my usual interests had changed and electroshock therapy was in my future. I’ve always hated electroshock therapy.
I knew my Lucy. She’s secure in who she is. Jealousy isn’t her thing.
But, still.
“Circumlocution’s a big word, Mort.”
“Is, isn’t it? Lot of syllables all crammed together. Try it out on one of today’s teenagers, see what that gets you.”
“Anywa-a-ay, I told you my mother being missing isn’t actually my problem, but it sort of is. Which means you might be wondering about my relationship with her.”
“That did occur to me.”
“My mother and I aren’t close. We aren’t extremely far apart, either. Not like in some families. We’re somewhere in between. I worry about her. I guess I love her, but it isn’t the kind of love that … that … oh, hell. Not that things were great before, but she and I had a big falling-out over my marrying Brad. Huge, actually. It turned out she was right about him, but that’s not the problem. It was the things we said to each other at the time. Not nice things. My mother speaks her mind. She doesn’t pull punches. She has something of an overbearing, train-wreck personality, which I guess is probably excellent in an attorney general given today’s world, but not so much in a mother-daughter relationship—ours anyway, especially when I was twenty and dumb and still in college. Since my divorce, my mother and I have been trying to patch things up, but it’s been slow going, partly because I’m down in Vegas and she lives in Carson City since it’s the state capital.”
She fell silent.
The world is a minefield. Only two days ago, Friday, Ma told me if I came across Attorney General Leeman—her body or any disconnected body parts thereof since that’s how I come across famous missing people—that I was well and truly fired this time, and I might as well drive straight to the unemployment office, but she would keep Lucy.
She’s such a kidder. Lucy is mine.
“Your mother’s been gone since Wednesday?” I asked to jumpstart the conversation again. Not that I wanted to, but avoiding it probably wouldn’t make it go away.
“Uh-huh. Just … gone.”
“No hint of how or why? Signs of a struggle? A ransom demand? Anything like—”
“Mort?”
“What?”
“Not sure how to say this since I’m sure it’ll sound awful, but we can talk about Mom’s disappearance all you want if you want, but later. She’ll show up sometime. Right now, I’m more concerned about us.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Us?”
“Not us us, Mort—except that this has to be the most interesting situation of its kind I’ve ever been in.”
“Of its kind?”
She smiled. “In the arms and on the lap of a strange guy, especially dressed the way I am.”
“You think I’m strange?”
She gently slapped my face. “What I meant by us is this truck situation. And getting somewhere safe, getting dry, finding something to eat since I’m just about starving. There’s nothing we can do about my mother right now. But if you’re thinking I don’t care at all about her, I was going to Ely to see Aunt Ellen, Mom’s sister, to see if we can come up with some idea about what happened to Mom or where she might be. It’s sad, but Ellen has been a lot closer to her than I have for the past eight years, so she might know something I don’t.”
“Relationships aren’t always easy.”
“Tell me about it. Actually, don’t. I’d rather talk about us. Oops, I mean, you.”
“Boring.”
“And people think only women fish for compliments.” She put a hand on my chest. “Tell me about you. You’re a strong guy. You’re in amazing shape for sixty-three.”
“Forty-three,” I snarled.
“Gotcha.”
I smiled. “Good one, Harp.”
“See? We can be friends. I think we are. Definitely. So how did you get in shape like this? Or stay in shape?”
I gave her a thumbnail sketch of my four and a half months in Borroloola, Australia, but not the reason why I went there.
“You dug holes for a mile of fence? One every eight feet? For room and board, no pay?”
“Told you I was boring.”
“Uh-huh. Now that you mention it, you are, kinda. But you said that was a year and a half ago. How do you stay in shape, since being in shape at one time in your life doesn’t last if you don’t keep at it?”
“Yoga. And judo. Mostly judo, but I can almost touch my toes now because of the yoga.”
“How close is almost?”
“I can get within three inches. Almost. I do it to keep Lucy from laughing at me. That doesn’t work, by the way, hence the judo.”
Harper smiled. “You and Lucy sound great together. So even without a gun in your hand, judo means you’re not afraid of me?”
“Oh, I’m plenty afraid, all right.”
Her voice changed slightly. “Of me—or us?”
“Huh,” I said. “Are you flirting with me, lady?”
“I guess I am—have been. A little. Maybe I shouldn’t since you’re married, but this situation is something else, Mort. I don’t mean anything serious by it.”
I slowed the truck, came to a stop on a level straight stretch.
“What?” she said. “Why are we stopping?”
“Let’s get out for a moment. Walk around, cool down, stretch, jog in place. It’s not raining as hard as it was.”
“Are you kidding? It’s pouring. My top would get wet again, soaked. Unless, of course … that’s the plan.”
“It’s a consideration, but it’s not the plan. There is no plan. I think we need a little break, that’s all.”
She gave me a chagrined look. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault for … for … being dumb. It’s not like I’m trying to … to seduce you or anything. I’m just being … c’mon, Mort, a little bit of flirt is fun, that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes. I’ll stop if you want. I mean, like you said, this isn’t going to lead to anything. I know that, but it doesn’t have to be dull, either.” She got a look in her eye. “I’ll get out on the hood and be a counterweight ornament like you said earlier, if that’ll make you feel any better.”
“Okay, go.”
She hit my chest again. “All I’m suggesting is that maybe my sitting on your lap like this isn’t the worst thing that’s happened to you in the past year.”
“It’s not. I did my taxes in March.”
“Well, good. I was worried. But being compared to taxes is sort of a letdown.” She smiled. “But funny, too.”
“Not sure flirting is my thing, Harper. The only reason you’re on my lap is so I can drive this thing. I will admit that your being a very good-looking girl is a plus.” I got the truck going again, took it up to eight miles an hour.
She smiled. “Hey, you did it. Good for you.”
“Did what?”
“Flirted.”
“I did?” I can play dumb with the best of them.
“Without knowing it, it appears.” She sighed. “Here I am in wet skimpy running clothes. Really, Mort, this has got to be flirt heaven, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Don’t you think it would be pretty weird to pretend it’s not?”
I grinned. “Flirt heaven?”
“You know what I mean. You’re not that obtuse.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. I know you’re a good guy—and a freakin’ Boy Scout.”
My eyes jittered. There it was again, that Boy Scout image, poking its head out of a dark underwater cave like a moray eel.
“I am not a Boy Scout, sugar.”
“Sugar. I like that. Okay, tell me something that tells me you’re not a Scout in PI clothing. Not a bunch of failed attempts to build a fire in the wilderness, but something in your past that had to do with women.”
“Really? I have to prove it?”
“Prove it, or say the Scout oath, take your pick.”
Well, shit. Time to rack my brain and straighten this chick out. I kept wives, ex-wives, and fiancées off the list, then worked my way through what was left: Kayla, Winter, Holiday—wow, Holiday—Rachel, Danya, Shanna, Cheryl, Sophie, Rosa, Mira, Traci, Robin, possibly a few I’d lost track of in the mists of time. Christ, that was a lot of them. My life had become a whirlwind of unexpected women less than a month after I’d bid adieu to the IRS. Adieu sounds better than shove it, but it means the same thing.
“Can’t do it, huh?” Harper said, grinning.
“Give me another minute here. I’m trying to narrow down the field.”
“I’ve already given you three minutes. But you have a field to narrow down. That’s something.”
“Hush, child.”
She smiled, settled in against me.
Winter. I backed up two years, all the way to Winter. She would do. She was twenty years old, wearing a black thong the size of a credit card when she asked me to hook up her bra in a dim second-floor hallway. That was after she’d made sure I got a good look at the undersides of her breasts in a scissors-cropped T-shirt outside the mansion where she and her mother, Victoria, who was also her half-sister—hell of a story, that was—murdered Reno’s mayor and district attorney. Winter was a great-looking girl, but unfortunately psychotic, so we didn’t hit it off.
I gave Harper the Winter story with enough detail to win a Pulitzer.
Harper smirked. “She wanted you to check out the underside of her tits, and you did for two whole seconds. Hold the presses.”
“I didn’t say tits, I said breasts.”
“And, later, in a dark hallway you wouldn’t hook up her bra.”
“She was a very spooky girl, Harp.”
She rolled her eyes. “A two-second look and you ran from hooking up a bra. If that’s the best you can do, I rest my case, Boy Scout.”
I sighed.
She put both arms around my neck, kissed my cheek, then snuggled against me. “Anyway, you’re a dear.”
Well, shit. A dear? Time to bring out a bigger gun so I said, “Yeah, I always end up with the booby prize.”
She backed away and stared at me. “Holy cow! Maybe Boy Scout isn’t right after all.”
Still an hour out of Grange, Harper said, “I have to pee.”
“Thanks for sharing.”
She hit my chest, put a little muscle into it.
“It’s still raining like a sonofabitch,” I said.
“I know, and I wouldn’t have said anything except that I’m getting kind of desperate.”
I pulled to the right on what appeared to be a straight stretch, put the truck in park and left the engine running.
“See if you can get out on the passenger side,” I said.
She levered herself off me, then scrambled over the center divider. As she went, the truck tipped gently to the right. She looked at me. “Will this thing be okay?”
“I think so. Go. Make it snappy, though.”
“As if I was gonna dawdle. Uh, can you turn off the headlights?”
“We’re still kinda far out in the road. If anyone comes along, I don’t want them to slam into us. Shut the door and don’t worry. I won’t look.”
She stared at me, then shrugged. “Fine.”
Out she went. The truck reluctantly righted itself. I helped it by leaning as far to the left as I could.
She was back in less than a minute, water running off her head as if she’d stood under a waterfall for an hour. “Holy freakin’ cow, Mort. That was not fun.”
“I bet. My turn,” I said. “Hold the fort.”
I got out. Without my weight the truck tilted so far to the right that the half-flat left front tire lifted entirely off the pavement. Great.
I was about to unzip when a faint light appeared in the watery gloom. A vehicle of some kind was coming uphill toward us from the east.
I cracked the driver’s door and said, “Lights coming. If you want a ride back west in something that still has four tires, now might be your chance.”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Hey! I’m doing just fine with you. And why would I want to go back west anyway? Ely’s east of here.”
Good enough. Then I had a thought, or a premonition. You never know what these things are. “If that’s the case,” I told her, “then how about you get on the driver’s side and hunker down. Way down. Out of sight and stay down.”
She scooted over, which helped to right the truck. I put some weight on the left front bumper until the truck was upright and level, not looking like it had a problem.
As the vehicle got closer, my truck’s headlights glinted off the big Ram symbol on the front of a glistening black pickup. It slowed, stopped opposite me, and the driver’s window powered down.
“Trouble?” a big guy asked. In his early forties, one-inch aggressive salt-and-pepper beard. A glow off the dash lights gleamed off a bald head. He looked solid, with heavy shoulders and a thick neck.
“Nope. About to take a leak when you came along.”
He chuckled. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”
“Got that right.”
“Seen anyone else on the road out here, dude?”
A tremor rippled through me. “No. Yours is the first vehicle I’ve seen in a while, at least an hour and a half, two hours.”
“Nothin’ else, huh?”
“Like what?”
His eyes bored into mine for a few seconds, then he nodded. “Take ’er easy, man.” He hit the gas and took off. I caught part of the rear plate as he pulled away. ZJX5. Missed the last two numbers. I might’ve gotten all of it if I hadn’t had rainwater running into my eyes.
Who was the guy looking for? The answer might be in my rented truck, out of sight. But then, it might not.
Fuck.
The night and the situation had just hiked itself up a good-sized notch.
Maybe.
“Who was it?” Harper asked as I opened the door and got back inside, dripping.
“Some guy asking if I was in trouble.”
Who might’ve been looking for you, I didn’t say.
She crawled back onto my lap, squeegeed water off my face with a finger. “Hey, look at you. You got wet.”
“How ’bout that. So did you.”
“That rain was freaking cold, Mort.”
“Uh-huh. I see that.”
She smiled. “You see that? Exactly what do you see, Mister I-always-end-up-with-the-booby-prize?”
“What I meant, Drippy, is I see you got wet.”
“Uh-huh. I’m sure that’s all you meant.”