HARPER WAS QUIET, pensive. The road had little traffic and the desert looked the same whichever way you looked, mile after mile. I had time to think about everything that had happened the past two days, about coincidences that couldn’t possibly be coincidences.
Attorney General Annette Leeman had been missing for several days. Then the radiator in her daughter’s car blows and Harper is picked up by an old guy, Chase, who dumps her at gunpoint—hers, not his—at the side of a lonely road. Then Max comes along looking for someone, which pretty much had to be Harper. So Chase and Max were connected. Max comes into the Denny’s restaurant; Harper and I leave. Three minutes later Max is up on our floor after sitting down in the restaurant, which meant Max was interested in us, not food. Chase and Annette end up dead in Chase’s car in Harper’s aunt’s driveway, and Max’s stolen Ram pickup is burned to a crisp a few miles west of Ely. Things were happening. As usual I was in the dark, no idea what was going on. But what I circled back to, over and over, was that Harper’s part in all of this started with a blown radiator.
Radiators don’t pop seams on the whim or the prayers of bad guys. Which didn’t add up if Eystad and Max were in this mess together. Not yet, anyway.
I looked over at her. “Tell me again how that old fart, Chase, picked you up. If he and Max knew each other, him giving you a ride couldn’t have been an accident.”
“It was, though. I mean, it had to be, didn’t it?”
“It couldn’t have been. Run through it again, from the time right before your radiator blew.”
“Well, I was driving along and it just … blew up. It must’ve overheated and it was old and the pressure or something got to be too much and it … bang.”
“Bang?”
She smiled. “Bang. You know, sort of like a gun went off.”
“Half a mile south of Goldfield.”
“Yes. The guy at the gas station said he couldn’t fix it with some sort of radiator leak-fixing stuff you pour in. He couldn’t even fix it with some other stuff like putty that would fix a split seam an inch or two long. He said it blew a seam eight or ten inches long and some of the rest of it was sort of shredded. He said he’d never seen anything like it. So like I told you earlier, I was lucky it happened that close to Goldfield.”
“Uh-huh. A happy coincidence.”
“What else could it be?”
“A setup.”
She stared at me. “How is that possible?”
I thought about it. How would I do it if she were in a car and I wanted to get her into my car, get her alone? For a while nothing came to me, then a glimmer appeared in the mist. I worked on it, but it never exceeded a glimmer, never felt at all likely. Still, I had nothing else to work with.
“Did you stop anywhere before you left Vegas?” I asked, clutching at the only straw in sight.
“I filled the tank at a gas station.”
“Did you leave the car, go inside the store there?”
She pursed her lips. “Uh-huh. I bought some water for the trip north.”
“Where was your car when you went inside?”
“Not by the pumps, if that’s what you mean. They don’t like that. I parked it at the side of the store.”
“Could you see your car from inside?”
“I didn’t try, but … probably not. I was only inside for a few minutes.”
Long enough, if Chase had exactly the right thing, the only thing that fit what had happened, and which seemed so unlikely as to be laughable. And if not laughable, then absolutely frightening.
An idea slowly filtered into my head like a sunrise chasing away the dark. A chill went up my spine. Up ahead I saw a few buildings at a place called Currie, sixty miles north of McGill. I checked the rearview mirror, didn’t see anyone behind us. I pulled off the highway and into a dirt lot beside a Texaco station that stood next to a ramshackle country store.
“What’re we doin’?” Harper asked.
“I gotta check something.”
I climbed out. Harper got out on her side. I lifted the hood and looked in at the radiator. Didn’t see anything I didn’t expect to see. I got on my back under the front of the truck and looked up at the radiator, didn’t see anything for a moment, then my eyes adjusted to the dimness, and I saw something on the underside I couldn’t identify. I touched it gently. Hot. I got out from under the engine compartment and trotted into the station. A guy in his late twenties, red hair, in greasy bib overalls, was kicked back in a wooden chair reading a paperback. He looked up as I came in.
“Got some gloves I can borrow for a minute?” I asked.
“What kind of gloves?”
“Whatever will take engine heat.”
He found me a pair of filthy leather gloves, then came outside with me. His face lit up when he saw Harper in shorts and her body-hugging tank top.
I slid back under the truck and got hold of the thing I’d seen. Hard to get a grip on it and it didn’t want to come off, but it didn’t look like part of any radiator I’d ever seen before. I had to pry it off. It was attached with some sort of sticky gunk that might’ve hardened on the hot metal, but it eventually peeled loose.
I scooted out from under the truck. In the sunlight I looked at what I’d found. A small black plastic box the size of an old match-box, two wires coming out of it into a foot-long strip of something that looked like grimy black cord half an inch in diameter covered in gray putty.
“Huh,” the station guy said. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know. I heard a strange noise under the hood and stopped to have a look, then I found this.”
No point in bringing this guy into it. The noise story was pure cross-eyed bullshit, but I had a good idea of what I’d found, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to toss the thing, but I didn’t want it in my hands, either. Not if it was what I thought it was. The black box had a tiny switch on the side. I wasn’t about to mess with that.
“Got wire cutters in your shop?” I asked, holding the thing by its box, letting the cord dangle. I didn’t even want to hold it that way.
“Sure. C’mon.”
He found a greasy wire cutter. I used it to clip the wires that led into the black cord, thanked him, then went out to the truck and put the pieces in the bed of the pickup by the tailgate. Then I got Harper and me out of there.
“What was that thing?” she asked when we were a few hundred yards down the road.
“Huh?”
“That’s what blew your radiator as you were getting near Goldfield. A receiver and very likely a battery wired into an explosive strip—probably a small shaped charge of some kind. Chase could’ve been half a mile behind you on the highway, hit a button on something that might look like a garage door opener and blew your radiator.”
“A shaped charge? What’s that?”
“An explosive that cuts in one direction. A big one can cut through a steel plate two inches thick. This one wasn’t that big, but it was big enough to take out a radiator.”
“That’s … unbelievable. Also amazing, Mort. I mean, you finding it like that.”
“Every so often I impersonate someone who has a vague idea of what they’re doing.”
“Maybe more than ‘every so often’.”
“What this means, Harp, is that you’ve got some very serious people after you.” After us, now, I didn’t add. “It has to be related to what happened to your mother. This is a lot more than you being given a ride to Ely by some nice old guy. If he hadn’t hit on you, no telling what would have happened to you, so be thankful he did. I have the feeling it cost him his life. We knew something more had to be going on when Max came by that night looking for you. Now we find that these people, whoever they are, can come up with remotely detonated explosives.”
“That’s crazy, Mort.”
“Yes, it is. We’ve got a lot more trouble than we knew about five minutes ago—except now we do know. It would be a big mistake to underestimate people like this.”
“You keep saying ‘we.’ You shouldn’t be around me if this is really dangerous. Maybe I should go to the police.”
I looked at her. “And tell them what?”
“You put that bomb thing in the back. If I show them that and ask for help, maybe I’d be safe then. You would, anyway.”
“I hate to say this, but the police weren’t able to keep your ex away from you and he’s a nobody. They don’t have people hanging around for long-term assignments like that. Anyway, I’m in this now. I found your mother, not that I want to keep bringing that up, but I did and that’s already in the news, so like it or not, I’m in this. I can’t say I’d be more effective than the police in protecting you, but at least I care and I can stay with you full time.”
“My very own full-time bodyguard.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
She smiled. “Guarding my body.”
I looked over at her. “Are you taking this seriously?”
“Of course. I’ll expect you to stay real close, Mort.”
She might not realize how much danger she might be in, not that I did, but it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around something like this if they haven’t been in the kinds of situations I’ve been in the past two years. I’ve had three concussions, two mild, one bad; I’ve been buried alive, tied to a chair in a burning building, and my fiancée, Jeri DiFrazzia, was murdered two feet away from me by a homicidal woman who blew Jeri’s head off and dumped her body down a mineshaft. This PI gig wasn’t what I had thought it would be when I first started out in my nephew’s PI firm. Three days after he told me how boring PI work was, I found his decapitated head on his office desk. So much for boring. This job had a dark side.
What I didn’t tell Harper, yet, is that in addition to a device to blow the truck’s radiator, we might have picked up a tracker, something so small and easily hidden that we wouldn’t find it in an hour—and if we searched for an hour and found nothing, we might conclude we weren’t being tracked, which could be even more dangerous. I could see Max there in the parking lot sometime before we left Hotel Nevada, putting the shaped charge on the radiator so he could blow it anytime he wanted. That would be safer than trying to grab us—or her—in a hotel room. I could also see him installing a highly sophisticated GPS tracker. It could be anywhere. If he opened the cab of the truck like a locksmith, he could’ve slit the upholstery and inserted a tracker in the padding of a seat, sealed it inside.
Sometimes I let my imagination run wild.
Sometimes that’s a good thing.
I didn’t like the idea of hauling around a bomb or whatever it was in the bed of the pickup, so I left both the receiver and the explosive in a plastic bag hidden in weeds behind mile marker 3, south of Wells. That switch on the receiver must’ve been active when it was attached to the radiator, otherwise what was the point? It was safe to turn off now, no longer connected to the charge, so I switched it off to save its battery, but I would remember where I’d left it. You never know when an explosive will come in handy, like to crack a safe or blow through a locked door.
Harper and I pulled into Wells at 6:45 p.m. My burner phone had a signal so I called Lucy.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Never better. Harper and I are in Wells at the Flying J, getting gas, about to head over to Elko.”
“So you’re safe? No sign of that Max guy?”
“I haven’t seen him since yesterday, and now we’re a hundred forty miles north of Ely, so yeah, we’re safe.” If we hadn’t picked up a GPS tracker, I didn’t tell her. I also didn’t tell her about the explosive on the radiator. I didn’t want her anywhere near this. I didn’t want me or Harper near it either, but she and I didn’t have that option.
“Good. And Mom chugged a big bottle of magnesium citrate a few hours ago, so things are underway here.”
“Tell her I wish her joy and luck.”
Lucy laughed. “I don’t think that would go over very well. I sure wish I could be with you right now, but it’s not a good time for me to take off. She’s practically drowning in that other crud she has to drink. Eight ounces every ten minutes and she’s still got more than a liter to go.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’re fine.”
“You’re bouncing all over the state. The way things are going, that’s probably a good thing. I’ll catch up with you when I can.”
“Soon, I hope.” No, I didn’t.
“Me too. But it won’t be tomorrow. I’m thinking I’ll pass on colonoscopies. Mom has to drink two liters of icky crud in three hours. Then she gets a break, but she has to be up at four in the morning to drink the last two liters. Her procedure is at twelve fifteen tomorrow afternoon.”
“I can’t imagine that much fun,” I said.
“I’m sure. Say hi to Harper for me, okay?”
“Will do.”
“Gotta go, Mort. Talk to you later.”
I gassed up the truck, then Harper and I took off for Elko. Maybe we were being tracked, maybe we weren’t, but one way I was being tracked was on the radio. Ten miles from Elko, the big news on a local AM station was that private investigator Mortimer Angel had found Attorney General Annette Leeman, dead. More to come.
I wondered if Max was catching the news. If so and if he didn’t know my name before, he did now.
Nevada is a big empty state, which is why the forever-benighted folks in D.C. think it’s a terrific place to dump the nation’s radioactive waste. Empty? Only three cities in Nevada are big enough to have a car rental agency—Reno, Vegas, and Elko. Our first order of business was to return the truck to Avis. If it had been infected with a tracker, I wanted to be rid of it, fast.
Note to self: Mortimer Angel had rented the truck, so returning it to Avis in Elko would put Mortimer Angel in Elko for anyone with the ability to track credit cards and car rentals. These days, it’s not easy to get around without leaving digital footprints, especially when credit cards are king, not cash.
Avis was inside the terminal of Elko Regional Airport. Harper and I exited I-80, went south on Mountain City Highway, turned right on Terminal Way, and found Avis’s parking lot. The time was 7:25 p.m. I donned a dirty blond wig with hair over my ears, glasses with thick black frames, topped it off with a ball cap, and we went inside.
The rental desk at Avis was buttoned up. A sign on the countertop gave instructions, so we went back outside and I parked and locked the truck, left its keys and the rental agreement in a lockbox, and we went back in the terminal with our bags. Enterprise car rental was shut down but a sign on their counter indicated they would be open for one hour, from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m.
“We can stick around awhile and get wheels,” I said, “or Uber off to a motel and come back tomorrow.”
“A room would be great, and a personal bodyguard would be super, but wheels sound like a necessity.”
We stuck around. No sign of Max so the Z71 might not have picked up a tracker. No way of knowing, however.
By 8:20 we were rolling toward downtown Elko in a dark blue 2020 Ford Explorer. To rent it, I had to use my last fake ID, the one for David J. Peterson. I didn’t want to do it but I didn’t have a choice. Stephen Brewer had rented the room at Hotel Nevada in Ely, and the same guy had found Annette Leeman and Chase Eystad, and his name, according to the police and the news, was Mortimer Angel. If Max was still around and listening to radio or TV, it would take him three seconds to put two and two together—if he hadn’t when we did that do-si-do in the Denny’s and the fourth floor of the hotel. I hoped it would take him longer—as in never—to connect Brewer and Angel to David Peterson. Fake IDs that hold up under close scrutiny are damned expensive, at least Doc Saladin’s were, currently running about ten grand each. Even so, I thought I might need another one, maybe sooner than later. If not, I would have a new fake ID in a few days. I could think of worse things to have ready to go.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“Pretty much starving.”
“How about we hit a Denny’s for a Grand Slam since we didn’t get our freebie pancakes this morning?”
“How about we don’t?”
We ended up at a Mexican place half a block off the main drag, Idaho Street, that was doing a brisk business. A lot of the customers were Hispanic, so I figured the food would be good. It was. We left forty-five minutes later.
Six blocks away on Elkhorn Road I spotted a tiny red neon VACANCY sign. Ruby’s Hideaway was a motel so out of the way it was almost invisible—eight dark, narrow units tucked beneath three good-sized oak trees.
An obese woman in her fifties was behind the desk peering at a cell phone when we came in. She looked up, gave us a smile and an eager look. Good. I liked eager.
“Got a little problem,” I told her. “We’re trying to keep Angela’s ex from finding her, so I don’t want to use a credit card. I’ll pay extra if we can use cash, keep off this guy’s radar since he’s something of a nutcase.”
“Works for me,” she said. “I’m Ruby, by the way. I own the place, so I make and break the rules as I see fit.”
I leaned on the desk. “How much for a room, Ruby?” I didn’t ask about the bed situation. Personal bodyguards are not only flexible, they’re as tough as railroad spikes.
“Seventy-five fifty with a credit card.”
“How about a hundred, cash? And if some guy comes around asking about us, you never saw us.”
“Works for me. Trouble, I don’t need.”
We got room 6, two doors down from a grumbling ice machine and a vending machine tucked into an alcove in the middle of the Hideaway.
Another queen bed, basic bathroom, small flat-screen TV on a wall, his and hers lamps bolted to night tables on either side of the bed. It wasn’t easy to tell Ruby’s place from the Desert Rose, or vice versa. I had to look twice and ignore the déjà vu.
“These places are starting to grow on me,” Harper said as she kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the bed. She looked up at me. “Now what?”
“It’s still early. I might try to find Olga, see if that gets me any closer to the dubious and itinerant Elrood.”
“What’s the population of Elko these days, anyway?”
“Somewhere around twenty thousand. Why?”
“About half will be women, and half of those might be around the right age, so you only have to ask five thousand of them if their name is Olga. Shouldn’t take more than a month if you get right on it and go like gangbusters.”
“If you go, I’m coming with. No way I’m staying here by myself with Max out there somewhere, even if I have a gun ready to mow him down.”
“Mow him down. You sound very Eliot Ness. But you should try to avoid that. When you kill someone, even if they’re trying to kill you, the paperwork is murder. Also, they take your gun away and don’t return it until they’re good and ready.”
“Another reason for me to tag along. And you’re not totally bad company. Besides, you might need my advice or help. What if this Olga is pretty, has a fantastic body, and you get sidetracked since you’re so impressionable?” She looked at me for several seconds, then said, “Not.”
I didn’t follow up on that.
“You can’t go dressed like that,” I said.
She looked down at herself. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s too … hell, are you really gonna make me say it?”
“Yes. Too what, Mort?”
“Sexy, girl.”
She smiled. “You really think so?”
“Okay, let’s get this straight. Yes, you’re a hell of a girl. As such, you’ll attract attention. People will remember you. That’s exactly what we don’t want. So if you’re going to help me find Olga, I want you in the black jeans you got in Ely, and this.” I tossed her the black T-shirt I’d bought at the mercantile, which I still hadn’t worn.
“No freakin’ way. This thing’s an extra-large.”
“Exactly right.”
“Ugh. I’ll be super baggy, and dressed all in black.”
“Right. And I want you to wear a wig, too.”
“Which, luckily, I don’t have.”
“Which, luckily, I do.” I dug a straight black wig out of my duffel bag and tossed it to her. The longest wig in my disguise arsenal, it would cover her blond hair nicely and hang halfway down her back.
“You’re kidding,” she said, holding it up like a freshly killed muskrat with a hair problem.
“Nope. Put it on. Let’s see how it looks.”
She settled it on her head. “It doesn’t fit very well.”
“It looks fine, makes you look different. Sort of like Cher, back in her Sonny days.”
“Seriously? Cher?”
“Or Stallone when they filmed First Blood. Although we might want a second opinion on that.”
“How about I give you an opinion right now?”
“It wouldn’t count. You’re too close to the issue.”
“I’m gonna get up at three in the morning and slap you silly when you’re dead asleep.”
“Jeans,” I said. “And the shirt.” The front of which had an impressionist drawing of a huge Harley on it, the kind of thing a terrorist foaming at the mouth might ride.
She held it up. “I’ll get lost in this thing. And I’ll look like a biker chick, sort of a dumb one, too.”
“Uh-huh. If we get a chance, I’ll buy you some black lipstick and black eyeliner.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to stand out.”
“You will, but you won’t look at all like you, and that’s really what we want.”
She sighed, got off the bed, took off her shorts and put on jeans, then hesitated with her hands gripping the hem of her tank top. “Should I wear this top under the T-shirt, or take it off?”
“Up to you. It’ll get cool later tonight.”
She shrugged, put the shirt on over the tank top, then stood in front of a mirror on a wall outside the bathroom. “Awful. I don’t recognize myself.”
“Again, that’s the idea.” I put on the latest and ugliest in a long line of ugly wigs—silver hair slicked straight back with the ends flipped up at the back of my neck, the Wild Bill Hickok look. “How’s this?”
Harper gaped at me. “Mesmerizing.”
“Thanks.” I put on wire-frame glasses with amber lenses and a battered green ball cap. I snugged a black ball cap on Harper’s head that had NAPA AUTO PARTS on it, and we went out the door. We took our guns, but they would remain in the car.
“I’m way overdressed,” Harper said as we got in the Explorer. “Not overdressed as in high fashion, but this clothing is too warm and bulky. Fair warning, I’m gonna take a shower when we get back and I’m not going to wear anything afterward. I’m gonna be who I am, period.”
“Miss Nudist.”
“That’s right, cowboy.”
“Good deal.”
She smiled. “You think I’m kidding, don’t you?”
“No. I might run screaming into the night and I might not. Time will tell.”
Right then, Lucy phoned. I told her Harper and I were fine, that we’d gotten a room in an out-of-the-way motel, Ruby’s Hideaway.
“That’s not a house of ill repute, is it? What I mean is, you’re in Elko and … you know.”
“How would I know? And a house of ill repute costs something like a hundred bucks an hour, sweetheart.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because I’m a private investigator?”
“Oh, right. Sometimes I forget.”
She told me her mother had polished off two liters of crud, and Ma had already contacted Doc Saladin in New Mexico. Lucy would bring me a new ID the next time she saw me, if she got it in time. We spoke a while longer then ended the call.
The new ID was a rush order, twelve thousand bucks, Lucy had said. Doc would overnight the documents to Ma in Reno and Lucy would get them to me once Val was done with her “procedure.” For now, I had to make do with the David Peterson ID. I might be able to use the Brewer credit cards as misdirection, but that would take some thought.
The sun had gone behind the hills. Pink and lavender clouds were backlit by a fading glow as I took us to Idaho Street and headed east.
“I gotta see how you find this Olga person,” Harper said.
“This is where pure, blind, staggering luck comes in,” I told her. “All part of being a private eye. I give us about one chance in fifty of getting so much as a whiff of her this evening.”
“A whiff of Olga. That’s fabulous, Mort.”