BEFORE LEAVING RUBY’S the next morning I donned an unkempt dishwater-blond wig, John Deere ball cap, non-prescription glasses with thick black frames.
“Nice,” Harper said. “Very Farm Bureau. A lot better than last night’s nasty-awful wig.”
By 8:45, after breakfast at a place called Marlene’s Kitchen, Harper and I were wandering the hallways of the Red Lion Inn, tracking down Olga.
Which turned out not to be difficult, even for a newbie PI backed up by an English teacher in jeans and a tank top. I asked a pretty Hispanic girl in a maid’s outfit if she knew Olga, and she gave me a blazing smile of even white teeth and said, “No entiendo, Señor.”
Yeah, right. No entiendo.
I didn’t follow up on that and we kept going. Harper asked the next maid, in a pale blue dress with a name tag that read Bridget. “My sister?” she asked.
“If her name is Olga, yes.”
“Um, what about?”
I said, “We’re trying to find a guy who might’ve called her a few days ago from Ely.”
Bridget’s eyes narrowed. “You mean the butthead?”
“That sounds right. Is Olga somewhere around?”
She pointed. “Down in 205. They always put us on the same floor. We work good together.”
Good thing English Nazi Lucy didn’t hear that. Harper gave me a look, smiled, didn’t say anything.
Bridget came with us as we went into room 205. Olga was a plain girl in her early twenties, five-seven, with thick eyebrows, mouse-brown hair in a chunky pigtail, wearing a pale blue uniform dress like her sister.
It took a minute to get past the butthead part of who and what Elrood was, and that Olga had given him a loan of four hundred dollars which she would never see again. “Then he took off,” she said. “He was supposed to come back in two hours, but he just—took off, the butthead.”
So we weren’t done with the butthead part, but I’m a patient guy.
“Took off for where?” I asked.
“Jackpot, I think. I mean, I’m pretty sure, probably. And he took my car.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “With your car?”
“Yeah. He said his car needed new tires and he had to have four hundred to get new ones, and then he would pick me up after work and take me to Jackpot with him to see this guy who owed him like eight hundred and he’d, uh, you know, get me, well, us, a real nice room there at Cactus Pete’s, and we would come back the next day and I’d have my money back, and an extra fifty. But he didn’t show up after work yesterday, so maybe he’s still in Jackpot and, I don’t know, maybe not.”
A muddled story with logical difficulties, unlikely to be true in any of its particulars, but it was the only lead I had so Jackpot was in my—our, I amended because I had acquired an assistant—immediate future.
“What make and model is your car?” I asked.
“A Toyota Avalon.”
“Our car,” Bridget piped up. “It’s mine too.”
Olga rolled her eyes. “That’s what I meant.”
“Which means now we have to walk like a mile to get to work here,” Bridget elaborated. “And a mile back to our apartment when we’re done. With sore feet.”
“I said I was sorry,” Olga said. “And it’s only been one day. He took off yesterday morning after he dropped us off at work here.”
I was closing in on the butthead. “What year car?” I asked.
“A 2011. I think. I—we—paid almost seven thousand for it. It still runs real good.”
“It would if we had it,” Bridget said, and Olga gave her a look that would set a flying duck on fire.
“Color?”
“Green, kinda.”
“Mint green,” Bridget said, arms folded across a fairly substantial chest.
Probably not a lot of mint-green Avalons on the road, and Jackpot was nothing but a wide spot on Highway 93 on the Nevada-Idaho border—a casino town that siphoned money out of the wallets of folks around Twin Falls who’d succumbed to the gambling bug. Elrood might be up there, or might not, but we had to check it out. No choice, and keeping on the move wasn’t a bad idea.
Something wasn’t adding up. I thought there had to be a bit more to the Elrood story. I asked Olga, “He phoned you from Ely a few days ago?”
She looked down at her feet. “Um, yes.”
“So he knew you from sometime before that?”
“Yeah.”
Time to tread gently here. Elrood had probably taken her for money in the past. Elrood was a classic scamming shithead and Olga was a classic patsy—nice girl, not overly bright, a soft touch, and, best guess, emotionally needy.
“How long ago did you know him?”
“Like about a month. Then he called and asked if we could like get together again.”
And of course, she’d said yes. Elrood was making the rounds. No telling how many girls he had on a string, and accumulating more along the way, the cad—which is an antique, underutilized word that means shithead.
Or butthead.
“So we’re headed to Jackpot?” Harper asked as we walked back to the car.
“Uh-huh.”
“Keeping an eye out for a mint-green Toyota Avalon?”
“You really oughta be a detective.”
She slugged my shoulder, then hugged my arm. “Are we staying the night in Jackpot?”
“One never knows.”
“Depends on what we find when we get there, right?”
“You oughta be a—oof!”
“Anyway,” Harper said, as if she hadn’t hit me twice in ten seconds, “I’ve never stayed overnight in Jackpot. I’ve been through a time or two on the way up north. I think there’s at least one hotel-casino that doesn’t look too icky.”
“That would be Cactus Pete’s.”
She looked at me. “You’ve stayed there?”
“When I worked for the IRS rounding up tax dodgers. We used to ship them off to federal penitentiaries without any of that habeas corpus, fair-trial nonsense.”
She stopped walking. “No, you didn’t.”
“We wore black jackboots and an armband, a luger in a leather holster on a wide belt, the whole nine yards. You should have seen the salute we gave the commissioner’s picture on the wall Mondays before we headed out.”
She sighed. “I take it you really didn’t like the IRS.”
“Smashing understatement, Harp. I gave them sixteen years. I haven’t gotten over it yet.” We reached our car and I opened the door for her. “Next stop, Jackpot.”
Was Elrood a car thief? He was opportunistic, but car thief didn’t seem to fit his usual M.O. I wondered what had happened to Judy Alcott’s Pontiac Vibe. Elrood might be a serial car borrower.
Thief, however, did fit, but in an understated way. He didn’t use a gun. Women gave him money of their own free will. The law might not see it that way, though. Elrood was flirting with jail time if a few of these girls would testify, which I doubted. I wondered what the charge would be. Failure to stick around? Misrepresentation? He’d found himself a lifestyle that worked for him, got him from girl to girl, bed to bed, wasn’t going to make him rich, but maybe he was in training for the big time when he would go after an older woman who had millions, not that he could think that far ahead with a brain the size of a kidney bean.
Which wasn’t my problem, but I was feeling less and less like completing this assignment. Elrood didn’t deserve a five-dollar bill, much less seven hundred grand.
We were on Idaho Street headed toward I-80 when I slowed abruptly, came close to standing on the brakes.
“What?” Harper asked, one hand on the dash.
I pointed. “Is that Max?”
She looked. A big guy with a beard was headed for a McDonald’s up ahead.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “I think so. At least it’s a definite maybe.”
The guy opened the door then stopped and glanced back at the McD’s parking lot, the street, the sidewalks. His eyes passed over us but didn’t linger. After that scan of his surroundings, he went inside. Gone.
“Omigod,” Harper breathed. “That’s him for sure. He found us.”
“Probably not. But he made it as far as Elko.”
“Which is way the hell too close, Mort.”
“I agree.”
“So, now what?”
An interesting question. Call 911 on a burner phone and tell them … what? I think the guy who murdered the attorney general is in the McDonald’s on Idaho Street here in Elko.
First thing they would ask is, Who are you?
Then what? Hang up? Tell them I’m Mortimer Angel? Give a bogus name and hang up? Fake a signal dropout?
Suppose police went into the McDonald’s and spoke to the guy? What evidence would they find on the spot that he had killed the old guy and Leeman? That he had ever been driving that Ram truck? Would they hold him long enough to find evidence? Would they detain him at all based on an anonymous call? I doubted it. I was the only one who had seen him up in the hills, asking if I had seen “anyone else” up there. What did “anyone else” mean? It could mean any number of things. It didn’t necessarily point to Harper, and even less to Chase Eystad or Annette Leeman. Even a bumbling half-assed defense attorney would laugh at any such suggestion. I’d given Sheriff Taylor a fair description of the guy, but I was only one person. Was that enough? How many guys would fit that description?
And if Max were picked up, did he have an accomplice I might’ve been getting a glimpse of from time to time? A glimpse that might be nothing at all, or an accomplice who might keep after us, someone we wouldn’t see coming?
“You don’t know what,” Harper said after a while. I had gone past the McDonald’s and pulled to the curb eighty yards away, watching the place in the driver’s-side mirror.
“You got it. I’m at a loss here.”
“Want a little advice from your assistant?”
“As if I don’t know what that’ll be.”
“Let’s get the hell outta here. Now. Go to Jackpot. I bet Max doesn’t know anything about Jackpot.”
“Might do that,” I said.
“Might? What else, Mort?”
“I could drop you off at the airport. You could catch a flight to Vegas, keep out of this.”
“What terrific advice, since my mother was in that car. I’m already in this, more than you. If he finds out I’m not with you, the first place he’d look for me is in Vegas since that’s where I live and work.”
“Uh-huh.”
Five seconds of silence, then she said, “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“No, I’m trying to keep you safe.”
“You don’t think I’d be safer with you instead of on my own in Las Vegas?”
“Hell, Harp, I don’t know. We don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then, “Keep your friends close, your assistants closer.”
I smiled. “Not sure that’s an exact Sun Tzu quote. It sounds a bit off.”
“Sun Tzu? Where are you getting that?”
“Judo lessons. I know fifty Sun Tzus. It’s part of my training. I actually used one of them last year.” I didn’t add that a few weeks later I had to kill the guy I’d used it on. With a big rock, too. Better to leave that for another time.
“You’re taking judo?”
“I’m up to a green belt.”
“Huh. I’ve got a brown belt in Tae Kwon Do. Another year and I’ll go for my black.”
“Tae Kwon Do, cross country, track. No wonder you’re so, so …”
She smiled. “So what? Let’s hear it.”
“Solid?”
“Gee, thanks—I guess. You and I ought to go to a gym and spar sometime. Judo versus Tae Kwon Do.”
“Or not.”
“We can think about that. But right now, what are we gonna do, Mort?”
While we’d been talking, I’d been keeping an eye on the McDonald’s. Max hadn’t come out yet. “I’d like to find out what he’s driving so we’ll know what to watch for.”
“Now that he cremated his stolen truck.”
“Yeah, that.”
I pulled away from the curb, went up a hundred yards and turned around, came back facing the McDonald’s and hugged the curb again. I was still wearing a wig and a ball cap, glasses with black frames. I reached into my duffel bag and handed Harper a shoulder-length black wig.
“Seriously?” she said.
“Seriously. Put it on. Last thing we need is for him to recognize you.”
She sighed, stuck it on her head, then stared at me with her lips pushed out. “It doesn’t fit.”
“It’s better than your blond, lady. Tough it out. And put on sunglasses.”
She did. She toughed it out and we waited.
And waited.
“Think he’s still in there?” she asked after a while.
“Probably. Unless he went out a bathroom window.”
“No one actually does anything like that, Mort.”
“Little do you know.”
She gave me a strange look, but I didn’t tell her about the Mexican Chickadee, Sophie, in Bend, Oregon.
Ten minutes later, Max came out. He gave the street a long look then headed away from us. He went past the side parking lot and kept going. I had to fire up the engine and trail along behind, pulling to the curb every hundred feet or so. It wasn’t an optimal solution to the problem, but I had no choice.
Max strolled three blocks up Idaho Street, then into a first-floor room of a generic-looking place called the North Elko Motel. Spiffy name.
“Now what?” Harper asked.
“One of us could go knock on his door.”
“Yeah, right. I’m serious.”
“We wait a while, see if he comes out and gets into a vehicle of some kind.”
So we waited.
Ten minutes.
Fifteen.
Twenty.
“Boring,” Harper said quietly.
“Such is the PI’s life.” Unless someone’s trying to kill you, I didn’t say.
“Boring,” she said again.
“You should have that echolalia checked out.”
She sighed.
Ten minutes of blessed silence later she said, “I’ll bet Mike Hammer never had to do anything like this.”
My head whipped around. “Say what?”
“Mike Hammer. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”
“Hell, yes. He and I are on almost a first-name basis. He and Sam Spade.”
She smiled. “Those are fictional characters.”
“Says you.”
She rolled her eyes. “How long are we gonna sit here and stare at that place?”
“We’ll give it another half hour.”
“Great. If he doesn’t show, then what?”
“Jackpot.”
“Which we could do right now.” She looked over at me. “I read I The Jury. Mike Hammer would go kick in his door with a drawn gun and beat the snot out of him.”
“Hush, Bubba.”
That got my shoulder backhanded. Like Lucy, she was a testy critter and prone to violence.
We gave it the half hour, then gave up. No sign of Max. Not so much as a twitch of a curtain.
“Probably asleep,” I said, starting the engine.
“Like me.”
“And you an English teacher. Shame on you.”
She laughed. “Drive.”
Fifty miles to Wells on I-80, then sixty-eight more to Jackpot on U.S. 93. Harper and I got there at 12:55 in the afternoon, temperature 96 degrees, about typical for mid-to-late August. Two crows were dining on roadkill ten miles south of town. They hopped four feet to one side as we blew on by, then hopped back and kept at it. Yum.
My burner phone rang when we were a few miles from Jackpot. It was Lucy. She’d stepped out of the room where her mother was in the midst of her colonoscopy and was calling to give me an update.
“Not holding her hand, sweetheart?” I said.
“She’s so gorked right now, she’s like comatose. She doesn’t know I’m out of the room. I doubt that she knows her own name.”
“Probably a good thing, considering what’s going on behind her back.”
“For sure. Anyway, are you all right, Mort?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Oh, you know—dead bodies, some guy trying to find Harper. She’s still with you, isn’t she?”
“Still is.”
“Where are you now?”
“About two miles south of Jackpot.”
“Jackpot? That mean you’re still trying to find that Elrood character?”
“Yup. He’s a slippery little eel.”
“No match for my favorite PI, though.”
“No comment, since he’s been as elusive as a Denver omelet in Saudi Arabia.”
“You’ll get him. Love you, Mort.”
“Love you too.”
We ended the call and I cruised the highway through town, speed limit 25 past the casinos, keeping an eye out for a mint-green Avalon. We made it to the last place in Jackpot, then pulled over, hung a U-turn and headed back.
“Now what?” my assistant asked.
“You say that a lot.”
“I’m seeking professional guidance here.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Uh-huh. Now what?” she asked again.
“Now we cruise the casino parking lots.”
“After hitting a bathroom in one of them, right? And maybe finding something to eat?”
“What a terrific little assistant.”
“And, look! There’s a casino right there, Mort!”
“What sharp eyes.” It was seven stories tall, biggest one in Jackpot—Cactus Pete’s. I took us into a parking lot and we got out, headed for the casino and bathrooms and a restaurant, looking for a mint-green car of any description, but didn’t see one. It wasn’t a common color.
We ended up in the Desert Room, a café more elegant than the Denny’s in Ely, though “elegant” was subjective and defined regionally. I had a Monte Cristo sandwich and Harper had what girls have to keep the poundage under control—a salad with a bunch of inedibles on it, like beets, sprouts and something like watercress or unfresh seaweed.
Harper settled back in the booth when we were done. She grinned and said, “Now what?”
“You’re fired. Turn in your badge.”
“Don’t think so, flyboy.”
We hit the parking lots around Cactus Pete’s, and the upper and lower RV parks. No luck, so we went off to the other casinos, cruised the parking lots of Barton’s Club 93, the Horseshu, which had a spelling error on the sign out front that would be expensive to fix, the Four Jacks casino, and the lowest-rated hotel in town, the West Star.
Still nothing.
“Maybe he’s not in Jackpot,” Harper said.
“Possible, since Olga wasn’t the most reliable source of information I’ve ever come across.”
“Well, then—”
“If you say ‘now what,’ I might have to hurt you.”
“Uh-huh. Now what, Mort?”
I had to smile. “Now we cruise the neighborhoods.”
“This place has neighborhoods?”
“It’s almost like a real town, Harp.”
“If you say so.”
We headed east and motored along Poker Street, Ace Drive, Casino Way, Keno Drive, Lady Luck Drive, Twenty-One Drive.
“It’s as if there’s, you know, like a theme to the way they named the streets here,” Harper said.
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“I’m sure. Hey, look!” She pointed at a mint-green Toyota Avalon parked beside a trailer broiling under the white-hot sun. Heat waves roiled the air above the trailer’s metal roof around a big swamp cooler.
I slowed as we went by, stopped forty yards up the street, then backed up and parked on the street in front of the trailer. I couldn’t see anything inside. All the curtains were pulled.
Harper smiled. “Now what, Sahib?”
Now I was conflicted. I’d probably caught up to the twerp, but I didn’t want to do what I had been hired to do. Odds are, Elrood was in that trailer, scamming some poor girl out of a few hundred bucks. He didn’t deserve a dime of Mildred Castle’s money. But it wasn’t my call because it wasn’t my investigative agency. It was Maude Clary’s.
“Now I go knock on the door and say howdy to the shithead,” I said, opening the car door.
“Oh, boy. This I gotta see.”
We walked to the side of the trailer, and I knocked on the door. It was a smallish double-wide, eighteen by thirty-two feet. Thirty years ago, it might have been maroon and white—back when things like this were called trailers. Now they’re manufactured homes, as if that’s better. The Avalon was right outside what passed for the front door. An old Honda Accord was parked farther in on a cracked concrete pad, blocked in by the Avalon. Overhead, the swamp cooler rumbled diligently.
I knocked again. With two cars in the drive someone had to be home. Probably. I knocked a third time.
A minute later, the door opened a few cautious inches and a woman in glasses and tangled hair peeked out.
“What?” she asked.
“I need to talk to the guy who’s driving this car.” I nodded at the Avalon.
“Um. Juss a sec.” She sounded sleepy.
The door closed. I looked at Harper. She arched an eyebrow. “We might’ve interrupted something important,” she said.
“One never knows. You should ask.”
That got me a poke in the ribs.
Three minutes later, the door opened and the woman said, “Um, who are you guys?”
“I’m a private investigator and this is—”
The door shut.
Shitfire.
“Maybe you should wave a gun around,” Harper said.
“I might do that.”
Two more minutes passed. Hot minutes, even though we were in shade on that side of the trailer. Then the door opened and the woman said, “C’mon in.”
She stood aside and we trooped in. Not knowing what was in there, I took the lead. The temperature inside was twenty degrees cooler, the air humid enough to grow mold. The lady was in a bathrobe, bare feet, hair mussed. She was in her early thirties, plain, twenty pounds overweight, toenail polish bright blue and chipped on splayed toes.
“Where’s Elrood?” I asked.
“Um, he’ll be out in a few minutes. Can I get you some water or something?” She had to speak loudly to be heard over the swamp cooler blasting air overhead.
“I’m fine.”
“Me too,” Harper said.
So we all looked at each other, which took some doing since the room was dim with the curtains pulled.
“Do you want to sit?” the woman asked. “I’m Beth, by the way.”
“I’ll stand,” I told her. “I’ve been sitting all day.”
“Me too,” Harper added.
So we stood and stared at each other, gazing around the room. Then the front door opened and a kid about ten years old came in, thin, big feet, needed a haircut.
“You do what you was told?” Beth asked him.
He stared at me and Harper. He had a goofy grin on his face, a devilish light in his eyes, then he looked down at his feet. “Yes’m.”
“Okay, good, Bobbie. Now go on in the back an’ play or something.”
The kid opened a door and disappeared into a back room. Seconds later I heard another door close softly.
“Now what?” Harper asked Beth, then she looked at me and smiled.
Beth shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Weird.
About then I heard a car’s engine fire up. It sounded close, right outside, so I flipped a curtain aside in time to see the Avalon back out, fast. I went out the front door like a shot, right as the Avalon’s tires threw dust as the car took off, headed north.
“Let’s go,” I called out to Harper.
“Right behind you,” she said. She’d bailed out of the place right on my heels. What a great assistant.
We ran to the Explorer. As we approached, I saw that it didn’t look right. And, slumped in front, it wasn’t. The two front tires were flat on their rims.
Sonofabitch.
You do what you was told made sense now. I caught the last two seconds of mint green as the car whipped to the left and roared west toward Highway 93.
“Next time,” Harper said, “use your gun.”
Across a field and beyond Cactus Pete’s we could see intermittent stretches of the highway. Half a minute later the Avalon was visible, heading toward Wells, Ely, Elko, and points south. Gone. I went back to the trailer, didn’t knock, just went in and said, “Your kid flattened the tires on my car.”
Beth shrank away from me. “Eddie tole him to.”
“Eddie?”
“The guy you called Elrood. His name is Eddie Tower, but he tole me some guy calling him Elrood was after him, thinking Eddie knew where his sister was.”
“Whose sister?”
“Yours. I just said.”
I could tell I wasn’t going to get through to this lady any time before the Second Coming. No point either. “How much did you give him?”
“Huh?”
“Money. How much did you give him?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Like that’s any of your business.”
“He’s a good-looking guy, been scamming women all over the state. Three hundred here, four hundred there. I hope you didn’t give him anything.”
She stood there, lips working as she thought. “He said you might say something like that.”
“Didn’t that strike you as strange?”
“Strange? Why would it?”
I sighed. “How long have you known him?”
“Like that’s your business.”
“How long?” Harper asked gently.
Beth looked at her, then sagged a little, sat heavily on an old couch as reality hit home. “Since … since yesterday afternoon.” Then she looked up at me with sad eyes. “Shit.”
“Yup. How much did you give him?”
“Six hundred.”
“If I catch up with him, I’ll try to get it back to you.”
Beth started to cry. “He … he said … back there in the back when you came to the door … he said he’d come back after you was gone.”
“Don’t count on it,” I said.
“Well … shit.” She left the room, went into the back, and we could hear more crying.
Harper took my arm and we went outside. “Elrood is one rotten, slippery fucker,” she said. “Lady in there has a kid, too. What the hell was she thinking?”
“She wasn’t.” I stared at the cross street where Elrood had disappeared. “And I’m trying to get him almost seven hundred thousand dollars.”
“Don’t.”
“There’s a thought.”
I went house-to-house and finally found someone who had a tire pump. I didn’t think a garage or gas station in Jackpot was hooked into Triple-A. I might’ve been wrong, but sometimes it’s best to work out frustrations doing physical labor. Like using a cheap bicycle pump to inflate two big-ass tires enough to limp to the nearest gas station.
I got one tire up to maybe 10 psi—good enough for a half-mile trip to the Chevron across from Cactus Pete’s, disconnected the pump and attached it to the other tire, then Harper said, “My turn.”
“Go get ’em, girl.” I handed her the pump.
She went to it, hard, sweat starting to glisten on her forehead, muscular arms working like pistons. I could see her sailing over a bar thirteen feet off the ground. She was a hell of a sight. She looked up at me. “We sure are having a lot of trouble with tires, Mort.”
“Terrific observation. Keep at it. You’re a dynamo.”
“Yeah, right. Are you gonna keep after Elrood?”
“Have to. After today I’ve got to beat the tar out of the lad then get myself a cold beer.”
“Cool. Can I watch?”
“You get to take the YouTube video.”
“Even better.”
Before we took off, I went back inside and gave Beth six hundred dollars from the stash in my lockbox. Made her cry again. I wouldn’t miss six hundred, but she would, and I might recover it from Elrood, you never know.
Back in the car, Harper said, “You old softie.”
“Watch who you’re calling old, teacher.”