I STARED AT the bed. It hadn’t gotten any bigger since I’d last seen it. “How the hell are we gonna do this, Harp?”
“You take one side; I take the other. Then we conk out. Easy peasy. You’re probably overthinking it.” She removed her towel and tossed it over the back of a chair.
“Overthinking it? With you naked as a cue ball? I’m not overthinking a damn thing, woman.”
“Sure you are.” She grabbed the comforter and yanked it off me, fluffed it over the bed as I grabbed the towel off the chair and wrapped it around my waist.
She rolled her eyes. “You really need that?”
“In this situation it seems like a good idea.”
“We wouldn’t be in this situation if you hadn’t slashed that tire thingie.”
“That’s right. You would be in a motel in Ely, and I’d be standing in the rain at the side of the road with a thumb out, trying not to freeze to death or get hit by lightning.”
“Didn’t I already say I was sorry?”
I shrugged. “Few times, yeah. I still like hearing it.”
She smiled. “That’s the very last time, so treasure it.”
“I am. I will.”
She gave the bed a thoughtful look. “How about this, since you’re so skittish? You get under the sheet; I’ll get on top of it. It’ll be like short-sheeting. That way I can’t touch you and you can’t touch me, even by accident.”
I thought about that. “Might work.”
“Why wouldn’t it?” She put her hands on her hips and gave me a serene look. “We’ll be fine, Mort, I promise. But if you wear that towel to bed when there’s a sheet between us, I will snicker all night and keep us both awake.”
“Which would suck. I’ll keep it in mind.”
She went around the bed, adjusted the sheet, pulled the comforter back. She was an inch shorter than Lucy and a few pounds lighter, but they were almost the same size and shape. In the past year I’d gained a deep appreciation for the beauty of smaller breasts.
She caught me looking at her.
“What?” she said, straightening up, smiling a little as she looked at me across the width of the bed.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that you look good, that’s all.”
She tilted her head. “Like Bob in the MONOLOGUES, you like to look at it. Lucy hinted at that.”
I pulled the towel an inch higher. “I’m a normal male, Harp. I don’t know how to turn it off, not that I want to.”
She smiled. “I’m glad. I mean, I like it that you’re not turning it off.” She hesitated. “If you don’t mind my saying, Mort, you’re a sexy guy—not that that’ll lead to anything. But you sure have a lot of scars. What’s up with that?”
“Things got rough after I left the IRS. You’d think it would be the other way around, especially if karma works the way people think it does or should—but, no.”
She came around the bed and stood in front of me. She looked terrific. She touched a gentle finger to a small round scar on my left shoulder. “How’d you get this?”
“Got a sword run all the way through my shoulder. A foil, actually. It’s pretty much like a bullet wound, except foils don’t expand as they go through.”
“A foil? How the hell did that happen?”
“You remember me telling you about that girl in the mansion, Winter?”
“The one whose bra you wouldn’t hook up in a dark hallway? She did that?”
“Yup. Under the house, right before I killed her. Well, I didn’t, black widow spiders did, but I kicked her into a bunch of them, and they didn’t like that, so I was nominally responsible.”
“Not sure I want to hear all of that story.” She touched another scar. “What about this one?”
“That’s a real bullet wound, .38 caliber. That one came the closest to killing me.”
“I’m so glad it didn’t.” She took my hand, turned it palm up. “And this burn on your wrist?”
“I had to stick my wrists in a flame behind my back to burn my way out of a zip-tie. That wrist got the worst of it.”
She sighed. “I can’t begin to tell you how strange that sounds. All of it. And the top of your right ear is missing, which I mentioned earlier.”
“The same .38 that put a bullet in my shoulder clipped my ear. Happened about a year ago. It was sort of an ugly twenty or thirty seconds.”
“You look like you’ve been through a war, Mort.”
“A habit I’m trying to quit.”
“I hope you do.” She looked up at me. “You still look kind of tense, not sure why, now. But I’ll put a towel back on if you want me to.”
“Up to you, Harp. I’m okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Quite a bit better than okay, if you must know.”
She gazed at me for a moment. “You like women. And the way they look.”
“Yes, I do. They’re one of my favorite species.”
She smiled. “When they don’t pull guns on you, that is.”
“It’s better that way.”
“You do realize there was a message in the things Lucy said in the kitchen, don’t you?”
I smiled. “How about you parse it for me.”
“That nudity is okay. It’s harmless. It doesn’t have to lead to anything. And Lucy trusts you implicitly.”
“You’re a pretty bright girl.”
“Thanks. She was also connecting with me, making friends. Friends don’t steal each other’s guys.”
“Actually, they do, then they’re no longer friends, not that I think that was your point. But Lucy was turning you into a friend, period. She’s like that.” I backed a few feet away and looked at her. “You and she have the same body types. I don’t suppose you’re hyper-flexible too?”
She tilted her head and smiled. “Flexible physically or emotionally? Either one would be interesting.”
“I said body types.”
“Okay, then—physically. Still interesting.”
“More like startling. Lucy is about ninety-nine percent boa constrictor. She can bend over backward and touch the back of her head to her rear end. Even worse, she makes it look easy.”
Harper stared at me. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. If they check her DNA, they’ll find a reptile in the woodpile. Her lower spine bends almost double. There can’t be any vertebrae in there. At least not bone. It might be a kind of tough, spongy plastic.”
“That’s … wow.” She bent over backward, making it about as far as I thought most women her age would, able to see the top half of the wall behind her. Lucy could look down and see her own feet, put the palms of her hands on the floor beside her ankles and go right into a handstand from there.
Harper straightened up, then sat on the bed. “I’ll have to see her do that sometime.”
“It’s a sight. It hurts to watch when she does it. And the splits, side to side, front to back, twice a day, every day, for fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“She’d have to, to stay that flexible.”
“Yep. I’m still working on touching my toes.”
The evening was humming right along. I thought this was as good a time as any to see if I could shake anything loose, in case I was missing something important.
“Will anyone be wondering where you are?” I asked.
Her forehead knitted in a frown. “Like who?”
“Anyone. Boyfriend, ex-husband, brother, father.”
“No. But it’s an intriguing question, especially the ex or the boyfriend.”
“I don’t want our being together like this to run afoul of some guy in your life and give you problems.” Like a rough-looking guy in a big-ass black truck, I didn’t say, but I still wanted to know who he was.
She smiled. “Run afoul, Mort?”
“A phrase used by higher-class PIs. We get more per hour if we say things like that.”
“I’m educated. I’ve read Agatha Christie. And Dickens. I know what ‘run afoul’ means, and no. My being here isn’t going to be a problem that way. Or any other way.”
“Okay. Good to know.”
“I hope so. I do know a guy, though, but that won’t be an issue—unless, of course, you think it is.”
“Not me. If you’re good, I’m good.”
She sounded sincere. I was probably being paranoid. All the same, I was going to keep an eye out for a big black Ram pickup with a partial license of ZJX5.
She turned and looked at the bed, then back at me. “I don’t suppose you’d have a toothbrush and toothpaste with you?”
“Matter of fact, I do.”
“Oh, good! Gimme.” She held out a hand. “If you can see me naked, I can use your toothbrush. That’s gotta be a rule somewhere.”
I rummaged in my bag and handed them to her. She opened the door and started to go into the hall.
“No towel?” I said.
“What on earth for?” Then she was gone.
Yup. What on earth for? But I wasn’t giving up mine because I’m backward and my blood pressure gets spiky.
She returned and I left, with toothbrush. When I got back, Harper was in bed on top of the sheet, the comforter pulled up to her chin. I slid in under the sheet. Under it.
“Night,” I said.
Harper made a little growling sound but didn’t say a word. She got out of bed, came around to my side, reached under both covers and yanked my towel off, tossed it in a corner all the way across the room, then got back in bed.
“That’s better,” she said. “Maybe I can sleep now. Stay on your side of the sheet and everything will be hunky-dory. If you don’t, everything will still be hunky-dory. Oh, and look. You didn’t turn off the light.”
“So? Get it now. It’s on your side.”
“It was your turn to get the light, sugar.”
“No, it wasn’t. I kept track and it was your turn.”
“The switch is way over there by the door. It’s gotta be at least twelve feet away.”
“So?”
“So twelve feet is a long way and you tossed my towel into the next state over—Utah.”
She smiled. “Again, I ask, so what?”
Jesus. I got out, hit the switch, and came back.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it, Mort?” she said. “At least it didn’t look hard.”
“Fuckin’ English language,” I muttered.
She laughed.
Dark as hades in the room. No streetlight outside, no moon out and not a hint of starlight making it through the dense cloud cover. Staring up at the ceiling, I might have been in a cave at midnight for all I could see. I was tired but still wide awake after the events of the past four hours. I stayed quiet so Harper could sleep.
She’d opened a window a crack to let in a little night air. It was cool, smelling of rain and wet earth.
She fit perfectly into the inexplicable karmic turmoil in which I’d become embroiled when I left the IRS and became a private eye, turmoil like an unending drumbeat—women, flocking to me like pigeons to a statue, one after another. I had seen more undressed women in the past two years than in the forty-one years previous. I had no way to account for it except karma, a reward for having managed, no thanks to the IRS, to cling to a functioning soul.
It was possible, even likely, that the dark pickup that had stopped for several seconds in the street outside was the one I’d seen up in the hills, that the bearded guy was still looking for … someone. If he was hunting Harper, then the older guy who had picked her up in Goldfield was connected to the guy in the Ram, two guys, in two different vehicles, which meant Harper was—
“Mort?”
“What?”
“I can’t sleep.”
Here we go. “Try harder, lady.”
“You’re not either, I can tell by your breathing. I know it’s late, but we don’t have to get up early, do we? I’m still kind of wound up.”
“Wound up how, or shouldn’t I ask?”
“Not that way. But maybe we could talk for a while.”
“About what?”
“Anything. It doesn’t matter.” She moved closer and pressed herself against me. “Is it okay if I kind of hold you like this since we’ve got this sheet between us and the bed is so small? I’m right on the edge over here.”
“I guess—since you’re already doing it, and as long as the sheet stays put.”
“Even if it didn’t, it wouldn’t lead to anything, which I think I’ve said about a hundred times. Lucy said to ask you about a poster on your partner’s wall.”
Great.
“Mort? A poster?”
I sighed. “It’s a picture she took of me during that bike ride at the WNBR a year and a half ago.”
Harper got up on an elbow. I sensed her looking down at me. “A picture of you without clothes, you mean?”
“I believe that’s the gist of it.”
“Cool. I’ll have to see it sometime. This partner is the lady who’s sixty something?”
“Sixty-three. Maude Clary. Ma.”
“Wow. Uh, how naked were you?”
“We could talk about the last presidential election.”
“No, we couldn’t.”
“Think of it as a sleep aid, Harp.”
“Not ready yet.” She sank down and snuggled closer.
“Enough about me,” I said. “You said there’s a man in your life. Tell me about that.”
“Terrific segue. And, yes, as a matter of fact, there is. Kinda, sorta.”
“Good guy? Kinda, sorta?”
Silence for several seconds. “I guess. It’s only been five weeks so I don’t know for sure. You know how it is.”
“I know how it is with most people, but Lucy told me she’d marry me less than an hour after we met, so I’d say she and I aren’t like most people.”
Harper raised up again and I could tell she was trying to see me in the dark. “Are you kidding? An hour?”
“Yep. Ask her. I almost wish I’d taken her up on it so we’d have an even better story to tell. We were headed to Vegas at the time. We could’ve been married five hours after we first met in McGinty’s Café in Tonopah.”
“Wow.” Harper settled down against me again. “Think she would have if you’d said yes?”
“At the time I didn’t. Now I know she would have.”
“That’s so … romantic. And a little bit weird.”
“It is, yes.”
“I wish I had something like that in my life. Which I don’t. This guy I’m sort of with isn’t … isn’t like that. He’s eight years older than I am, kind of smooth and rich, into possessions and status, a lot more distant than you, though you were pretty darn standoffish when Olivia snagged our clothes.” She laughed quietly as she said it.
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
“You aren’t smooth,” she went on. “I like that. I don’t know about possessions or rich, but my guess is you don’t care about owning a bunch of expensive stuff to show the world how successful and special and wonderful you are. What I do know is you’ve got a tender, nice-guy streak in you a mile wide and a mile deep.”
I smiled. “A tender streak. Right.”
“I mean it. You’re kind, considerate, easygoing.”
“Aw, shucks,” I growled.
“Nice try, but I mean it. Not just tender, which isn’t exactly the right word, but trustworthy and honorable in a strange way. What I mean is, I can tell you like looking at me, but it’s just like. It ends there. My being undressed around you doesn’t make you lose your moorings or feel as if you have to do anything or even want to, which I’m sure is why Lucy trusts you the way she does.”
Another “aw, shucks” would’ve been one too many, so I let the quiet take over, except for Olivia’s distant snoring which made me wonder if I ought to get up and shove the back of a chair under the doorknob. I could visualize her sleepwalking with a gun in her hand, or an axe. Scary.
Harper said, “Actually, I think this thing I’ve got with this guy, Tony, is about on its last legs. But that’s been my kind of luck with guys. At least I’ve got my own place. All I’d have to do to end it is say goodbye, not even pack up any clothes since we’re not living together or anything.”
Again, I didn’t know what to say to that.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a twin brother, would you?” she asked. “Someone exactly like you?”
“Just my luck. I shouldn’t have asked.” After a minute she said, “Listen. The rain has stopped.”
“Huh. When did that happen?”
“I don’t know. I just noticed it.”
“Maybe we won’t get drenched in the morning.”
“And the dryer’s stopped. You could trot downstairs and get your clothes, Boy Scout.”
“Just mine?”
“Well, ours. Not that I need mine right now.”
“Can’t,” I said.
“Oh? Why not?” I heard the smile in her voice.
“Someone threw my towel across the room. I’d have to turn on a light to find it.”
“That’s right. So you’re stuck here like this.”
“But you aren’t. You could go get our stuff. You don’t embarrass the way I do.”
“Empirically true. But it’s gotten kind of chilly in here, and I’m finally warm and perfectly happy right where I am. So, no. We’ll cross that bridge in the morning, one way or another.”
I remember the word empirically because that late at night it was as unexpected as a frog in a wineglass. And I remember her saying she was happy where she was, but I don’t remember anything after that. I woke with a patch of weak orange sunlight on the wall to my right, a girl tucked against me to my left with an arm flung across my chest—which should have registered as impossible, but I passed out too quickly to analyze it. By then I’d only had three and a half hours of sleep and it wasn’t nearly enough.
When I woke again, the sunlight had brightened and shifted down the wall almost to the floor. I got my watch off the night table. It was 8:45 in the morning.
I sat up, which lifted the sheet since I was under it. It was then that I discovered the girl was also under the sheet and the aforementioned arm had been across my chest, skin on skin. It would still have been across my chest if I hadn’t sat up, but it wasn’t. Somehow the sheet had ended up over both of us. I didn’t know when that had happened, but I know I don’t sleepwalk.
I decided it would be a mistake to panic about where her arm ended up. Instead, I tried to extricate myself with the kind of infinite care you see during brain surgeries, things getting moved and adjusted one micron at a time.
Which, of course, didn’t work. Things like that never do. Check the PI manual, page 331, for the reason why the world fucks with you like that.
“Morning,” Harper said sleepily.
“Good morning. Move your arm, woman.”
“My arm is perfectly happy right where it is, thanks.”
I laid down, dragged her arm up to my chest and said, “When did you get under the sheet that you were supposed to stay on top of all night long?”
“When this comforter slid partway off me for the third time and I got chilled and couldn’t sleep. Once I got under the sheet with you, I dropped right off. You were warm and very cozy, so thank you.”
“Uh-huh. You get to tell Lucy how and why you ended up under the sheet with me.”
“Nothing happened, Mort, and nothing was going to happen, and nothing is going to happen as we speak. From what Lucy said last night, she’ll be fine with this as long as your blood pressure doesn’t skyrocket, so calm down.”
“I am calm. I am the very picture of tranquility.”
“If you say so, spike.”
I snarled, then handed her arm back to her. But I still had what’s known as a towel problem so I stayed under the covers.
“Your towel is over there in the corner if you need it,” Harper said, reading my mind.
“Gee, I wonder how that happened.”
“You gonna go get it?”
“Maybe, maybe not. What’s it to you?”
She smiled. “The towel, Mort? If we’re going to get up sometime today? If not, I’m warm and comfortable. This is a good bed. I’m quite happy here. I could sidle up a little closer to you. I’ve never actually copped a feel in my life. I might never get another chance, either.”
Well, shit. Sometimes you have to give up and go with the fuckin’ flow so your fuckin’ blood pressure doesn’t spike, or so I’ve been told. I swung my feet out of bed, then sat there for a moment.
“The towel, Mort?”
“Gimme a few seconds here, woman.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
I gave up, got to my feet and started across the room, being careful to keep my back to her.
“Finally,” Harper said, grinning, head propped up on an elbow, watching me. “Good boy.”
I was halfway to the towel when the door opened and Olivia came one step into the room. “Here’s your clothes, kids. I folded them. Oh, good, John, you’re up. And don’t worry, I seen my share of male plumbing.” She looked past me to Harper. “And, my goodness, aren’t you a lucky little gal, Angel?”
“Why, yes, I certainly am,” Harper said.
Olivia gave me a wink. “Anyway, here you go.” She set the bundle on a chair inside the door. “There’s breakfast things in the kitchen. I’ve been down in the store. I only popped up to get you your clothes. Come on down when you’re ready. I have to keep the place open.” Then she left. Finally. Proof that life is all about timing.
Harper convulsed with laughter. “Oh. My. God,” she said, throwing the covers back. She got up, walked to the corner and picked up the towel, came over and put it in my hand. “My goodness! Aren’t I a lucky little gal? Lucy will die when I let her know. Absolutely die.”
Sonofabitch.