WE WERE BACK in Elko at 4:45 that afternoon. I drove the length of Idaho Street, wondering if Max was still in town. He was the last person I wanted to run into but I wanted to see what he was driving.
“Back to Ruby’s for the night?” Harper asked.
“You like that place, huh?”
“After pumping up that tire, I need a shower.” She gave me a look. “You need one too.”
Wouldn’t touch that with a non-conducting pole the length of a first down in the NFL. “I think we oughta move around, not stay in the same place two nights running. Not with Max out there somewhere.”
“As long as we end up in a place with a decent shower and a bed, I’m good.”
Uh-huh. Still not touchin’ it.
Right then I saw a mint-green Avalon, parked outside a place called Bud’s Discount Tires. I hit the brakes, pulled into the lot, and parked beside the Avalon. Harper and I got out and went inside. It might not be the same car Elrood was driving, but I was playing the odds.
“Help you?” a scruffy guy behind the counter asked.
“Hope so,” I replied, looking around the front room. No sign of Elrood. “There’s a green Toyota Avalon outside. I’d like to talk to the guy who’s driving it.”
The guy shrugged. “He drove up in it an hour ago, paid for the tires I put on his other car, a Pontiac Vibe, and took off, left the Toyota.”
Slippery butthead.
“He say what you should do with the Avalon?”
“Nope. Paid for the tires and hauled ass.”
“Did he leave its keys with you?”
“Nope. Probably left ’em in the car.”
“Thanks.” I took Harper by the arm and we went out to the cars. I glanced in the Avalon. Keys were dangling in the ignition. He wasn’t a thief, just an asshole. Time to be a good Samaritan again. “Might as well return the car to the girls,” I said.
“Of course. Cleanin’ up after the rude Elrood.”
“Nice.”
Right then my phone rang. It was Lucy.
“Hola,” I said. “How’s Mom doin’?”
“She’s fine. Still a little ditzy right now, but she knows her own name. And mine.”
“Sounds like progress.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe. How’re you doin’?”
“Great. I gave six hundred bucks to a lady in Jackpot then Harper and I pumped up two car tires with a cruddy bicycle pump. She and I are about to return a not-quite-stolen car to a couple of dippy girls in Elko.”
Silence for two seconds. Then, “I’m not even gonna ask why—about any of that.”
“Good idea. It would take a while. You still planning on staying with your mother tomorrow?”
“So far, since Dad’s still gone. Unless you need me.”
“I always need you, sugar plum.” I glanced at Harper. She smiled at me. I put the phone on speaker.
“I mean, need me like with a billy club or a gun,” Lucy said. “Not … you know.”
“Things haven’t gotten that serious yet.” I still hadn’t told her about the bomb on the radiator, which would’ve qualified as that serious and more.
“Uh-huh. How’s Harper?”
“She’s smelly, needs a shower.”
“Wowie.” Lucy’s voice held a smile.
“Here. You talk to her.” I handed the phone to Harp.
“Uh, hi,” Harper said.
“Hi. It sounds like Mort is being Mort, Harper.”
“He is, yes. I don’t know how you stand it.”
Lucy laughed. “I take Valium when he’s not looking. He gave some lady six hundred dollars?”
“Yes. That Elrood guy scammed her out of it.”
“And, don’t tell me. Mort gave it to her because she needed it. That sounds like my Boy Scout.”
Harper grinned at me. “Boy Scout is so right. Actually, I’m starting to think Eagle Scout.”
I grabbed the phone from her before that got out of control. “I’m back, sweetie pie.”
“Groovy. Anyway, Mom’s looking good for the next ten years, colonoscopy-wise.”
“Good to know. Tell her I’m thrilled for her.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
“I gotta call Ma now, Luce.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“Need an address for two girls here in Elko. Got to try to return a car.”
“That’ll take Ma about thirty seconds.”
“If that. Call me later?”
“Sure. As long as you aren’t in the shower.”
“Sugar plum …”
“Yes?”
“I miss you.”
“Miss you too, big guy. A bunch.”
We ended the call and I punched in Ma’s number.
“What now, Mort? I’m soaking in the tub so this had better be nothing so I can hang up on you.”
“You’re soaking? What timing. How about I give you a car license and you get me an address here in Elko?”
“As if that’s gonna happen with me in this tub, boyo.”
“See, Lucy told me something about you.”
“Oh, shit. What?”
“You keep your iPad within arm’s reach 24/7 so you can investigate at a moment’s notice. Like right now.”
“Well, shit. I’ll have to have a talk with that girl. So gimme the flippin’ plate so I can relax here.”
I read it off to her. Thirty seconds later she was back with an address. “Thanks, Ma. You’re the best.”
“I’ll take it out of your pay. And if you find any more bodies, being fired will be the least of your worries.”
“Yeah? What will?”
She hung up.
Looking back, my big mistake was in going over to the Red Lion first, thinking the girls might still be there. They would be happier driving home than walking.
Harper drove the Avalon and I drove the Explorer. We pulled up outside the Red Lion. As we walked toward the hotel Harper said, “He put new tires on someone else’s car. What a nice guy.”
“With someone else’s money.”
“Okay, there’s that.”
“Which might mean he’s thinking about keeping the Vibe. Pretty much stealing it.”
“Why, that dirty rotten son of a bitch.”
We went inside and ambled down the same hallway where we found Olga and Bridget that morning. Then we quickly walked all the hallways.
No luck. The maid work was done for the day. A few guests were coming and going—a family of four; two ladies in their seventies; a kid of nineteen, red hair, crotch of his pants shuffling below mid-thigh, several inches of boxers showing, face pierced in half a dozen places. A cool dude and every mother’s nightmare.
No maids, but we had an address. We went back to the cars, watched the redheaded kid get into a beat-up ’83 Volvo and sit there with the stereo system pounding out bass notes loud enough to loosen sphincters.
I found the girls’ street on an Elko map, then took off with Harper following in the Avalon. After a mile, I pulled up at an apartment building. Harper parked beside me and we walked to number 7B, knocked, and a few seconds later Olga opened the door.
I handed her the Avalon’s keys. “Your car’s parked in a visitor’s spot,” I said. “No charge.”
“You did … you … you got it?”
“Yup. Gotta run. Oh, and Elrood, or whatever name he gave you, is a scammer. Don’t give him the time of day, much less money.”
We turned and left. Olga’s voice followed us. “Thank you. You … I mean, this’s great.”
I held up a hand in a wave as Harper and I went back to the Explorer and got in. Somewhere in the distance I heard an idiot-thumping of bass, like someone pounding on an empty ten-thousand-gallon steel tank with a sledgehammer. Hard to believe anyone thinks that’s music; all it does is club your brain stem farther down your neck.
I asked Harper to drive, had her pull onto Idaho Street and head west. “You should think carefully before saying, ‘Now what?’” I said to her.
“Should I?”
“Yup. Very carefully.”
She pondered that for a moment. “Okay, now what?”
“I thought you’d ask. Now we get out of Elko.”
“Cool. A road trip. Where to?”
At this point I didn’t think it mattered. We’d lost track of Elrood. I didn’t know how to pick up his trail again. Or did I? I knew who had a shot at it.
I put my phone on speaker and called Ma. “Hola, Ma. You out of the tub yet?”
Harper smiled.
“What’s it to you?” Ma asked.
“Just keepin’ track, doll. Someone has to. I need you to put a trace on a plate, different plate than before, see if it shows up anywhere.”
“You ain’t gettin’ nowhere, callin’ me doll, boyo.”
“A trace, Ma?”
“This better be about that fuckin’ Wintergarden. Who, by the way, according to the DMV, doesn’t own a car.”
“It is, Ma. I’m all over Master Elrood. And good call. You’re the best.”
She sighed. “Gimme the plate.”
I read off the tag of Judy’s Pontiac Vibe then Ma hung up on me. As she does.
Harper smiled at me then looked back at the highway. “You’re lucky the women in your life haven’t throttled you yet, Mort.”
“And lose all that comic relief? No way. I’m safe.”
“Yeah, right. So … road trip. Where to?”
“Ever been to Battle Mountain?”
“Oh … shit. Do we have to?”
I bore easily, so I played around with my new burner phone and discovered I could download free ringtones. I located a new tone as Harper drove. This, I thought, was a surefire winner, best one yet.
Battle Mountain sits between Winnemucca and Elko on I-80. On the side of a mountain overlooking the town, in white for all to see, possibly as a warning, are the letters BM. The town was probably named long before it became popular to put the town’s initials on nearby mountains in letters a hundred feet high. If not, then someone didn’t think that one through all the way.
We pulled into the Big Chief Motel at 7:42. I parked in a temporary spot outside the office and we went inside. An old guy behind the reception counter was reading a worn Travis McGee paperback, Bright Orange for the Shroud. Which was interesting, because Hammer and Spade were up in a corner, ogling Harper and ignoring McGee, waiting to watch me order up a room with a damn good-looking girl by my side. Jealous, of course, the swine.
“Got two rooms next to each other?” I asked the guy, at which point Hammer’s and Spade’s mouths dropped in disgust. They blew raspberries and took off.
“Mort …” someone to my right said.
“Up on the second floor overlooking the pool,” the old guy replied. “Two eleven and two twelve.”
“We’ll take them.”
“Mort?”
I turned. “Overlooking the pool, Sis. That’s great. I can watch you swim.” I gave the old guy a smile. “My sister-in-law. Swims like a dolphin, does she ever.”
Harper stared at me. “Well … hell. I thought—”
“Hold that thought,” I said. I slid a registration form over to her. “Fill this out while I work on mine—Sis.”
She emitted a low growl, rammed an elbow into my short ribs, kinda hard, then picked up a pen. “We’ll have to talk about … about where to eat tonight, brother dear.”
“Sure thing, kid.” I paid cash for the rooms, used the name John Hansen, the quarterback of our football team when I was a senior and a gridiron hero. An easy name to remember if I were asked. I checked Harper’s form. She’d put down the name Emma Ennui.
Jeez. English teachers.
“Those rooms wouldn’t have an adjoining inner door, would they?” she asked the old guy.
“Nope. Got a few like that on the first floor, but they’re taken. You got the last two rooms that’re next door to each other. It’s summer. We fill up most days.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“Sure is. Takes care of the lean winter months.”
“I’m so happy for you.”
She didn’t look happy when we left the office. I waited for it; when it came, she said, “As a bodyguard, you suck.”
“Except you’ll be right next door. Shouting distance. Or thumping.”
“Why, Mort?”
“I’m something of an idiot, that’s why. And married. We might call this a reality check. Lots of fine reasons.”
“Hasn’t it been working out okay with one room?”
“So far so good.” I handed her a key to room 212.
She stared at it, said, “Cub Scout,” as she marched off toward the outside stairs to the second floor. “I’ll be up in my private room, Mort. You park the car.”
A bit curt, but I’d expected it. She would get over it, and I’d weathered worse storms. I’d also been demoted to Cub Scout. Sheesh.
I parked the Explorer closer to the stairs, retrieved our bags and took them up to my room. Now was not a good time to give her her travel bag. I gave the room a cursory look. Not much to see—two queen beds, a TV, chair, desk, bathroom, all generic so I kicked off my shoes, stretched out on a bed, closed my eyes, and …
Half an hour later she knocked on my door. I got up, a bit bleary-eyed, and opened it.
She came in dressed in ankle-length slacks and a long-sleeve shirt. “Okay, Mort,” she said quietly. “I get it. Sorry for acting kinda pissy.”
“No problem. And you should know, Harp, I’m not a Boy Scout or a Cub Scout. Not even close.”
“I didn’t really think you were. At least not very.” She looked into my eyes. “Is that why I’m in the other room? Because you aren’t a true-blue Scout?”
I smiled. “Partly.”
“Good to know. I think. Anyway, if I yell at night when Max is attacking me, will you come running?”
“Guns blazing, lady. You hungry?”
“How about Mexican? There’s a good place on East Front Street. El Aguila Real.”
“Mexican food two nights running?”
“Best place in town.”
“Sounds like you’ve been here before.”
“Yup. Rounding up tax dodgers for Uncle Sam. Train goes almost through the middle of town. We loaded ’em on boxcars and shipped ’em straight off to Leavenworth.”
“Hope their relatives don’t remember you and come after you with pitchforks and torches.”
“Wow … talk about a déjà vu moment.”
She smiled. “When we get back, can I hang out in your room and read for a while? Just, you know, to be safe for an extra hour or two.”
“Why not? I’m an old softie.”
We were back at the motel at 9:05. The sun was below the hills in the west, nice sunset starting to fire up. Harper showered in her room while I showered in mine. She came over in slacks and a short-sleeve shirt, book in hand. She was still working on Suspicion of Malice and I was halfway through The Day of the Jackal. She propped herself up on pillows on one bed to read and I took the other bed.
Forty minutes later I hadn’t turned a page. Nothing registered. Words floated without meaning in front of my eyes. I thought about Max in the pickup truck in the hills, in the Denny’s at Hotel Nevada, in the fourth-floor hallway soon after he was seated in the Denny’s, arriving seconds after Harper and I had gone out the door to the stairwell. Then, two days later, there he was in Elko.
Who was he? What was he after? What did he want with Harper?
No answers.
I thought about the bodies in the Nissan in Harper’s aunt’s driveway, one of them Nevada’s attorney general and Harper’s mother—a woman of substance likely to have a list of enemies the size of a small phone book, a woman whose disappearance had made national news in the past few days, a woman connected somehow to retired criminal defense lawyer Chase Eystad—a connection that may or may not run deeper than her being found in the trunk of Eystad’s car. No way of knowing at this point. I could turn on the television and get a rehash of all that, but television in the last decade has become so annoying and inaccurate that I and millions of others no longer had any use for it, a fact that should give advertisers and network executives second thoughts, but they were conspicuously immune to anything so obvious. Television had about run its course. “Reality” TV and propaganda “news” was killing it.
I glanced over at Harper. Engrossed in her novel, she didn’t notice that I was looking at her. Was she who she said she was and nothing more? How did I know?
I didn’t, really, other than trusting my gut.
But add this up: The attorney general is missing, then her daughter, Harper, is targeted, and the A.G. ends up at her sister’s house in Ely, dead in the trunk of a car. All of that meant something, and the attorney general was the focus, the primary target, not Harper. And now that the attorney general was gone, who was left?
Harper. The secondary target.
And, of course, the A.G.’s sister, Ellen Moore, but she was probably safely out of the way in Idaho. For now. The target had shifted to Annette Leeman’s two closest family members.
My role in all this was only a disturbance, a fly speck, an accident.
The tie-in between Max and Eystad was tight, but not rock-solid. Late Sunday afternoon, sun low in the west, Chase is forced at gunpoint to leave Harper at the side of a lonely highway. Later, Max cruises the road in the rain and dark, looking for someone, doesn’t say who, but who else could it be but Harper? Good enough for me, if not for a jury. Eystad and Max were in cahoots, even if I didn’t know what a single cahoot was. I looked over at Harper. “What the hell is a cahoot?”
She stared at me. “A what?”
“Cahoot. Singular.”
“I don’t know. A kind of weird little cigar?”
“I think that’s a cheroot.”
“Isn’t that what you said?”
“Never mind.”
She shrugged, went back to her novel, and I went back to my contemplation of this Max mess. His truck is burned to a crisp a few miles up Highway 6 early Tuesday morning. It looked like arson, getting rid of evidence, but it might’ve been a battery gone bad, a serious ignition problem. Hah to that. Not long after, Eystad is found in the back of his car, dead, with a hole in his forehead bigger than that of your garden-variety bullet hole. And Annette Leeman is in the trunk, also dead.
None of which made sense. Yet. But it had to be one big nasty interconnected mess.
It was too good to be true that Harper’s Corolla just happened to blow its radiator when Eystad was right there to pick her up, Eystad being connected to Max, Max being connected to Harper via Harper’s mother via the trunk of Eystad’s car. Eystad was not an accident. He was in this up to his rheumy eyeballs. And a bomb or shaped charge had been attached to the radiator of my rental truck, possibly with a remote detonator. Coincidence? I stifled a laugh.
I tried to add it all up, but it was gumbo, disconnected bits and pieces. I was missing the glue that would put it all together. I still sensed an accomplice lurking invisibly in the background, but Max looked like the main player, the guy for us to avoid at all costs.
I’d given up all pretense of reading my novel when my phone played the first ten seconds of the original “Li’l Red Riding Hood” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, starting with the wolf howl. My new ringtone.
“That’s so nice,” Harper said, not bothering to look up from her book. “What the hell is it?”
“A classic from 1966—don’t knock it.” I checked the screen. It was Ma. I put the call on speaker—no secrets from my assistant. Better to keep her in the loop. “Hiya, Ma,” I said. Harper looked up and set her novel aside.
“Jesus. Okay, boyo, you got lucky. That Pontiac with the license you gave me got a speeding ticket in Tonopah at seven forty-five this evening. I was checking license plates, not names, but the ticket was issued to Elrood J. Wintergarden.”
“Might’ve been a different Elrood Wintergarden, Ma. Did you check that?”
Silence for six seconds. Then, “You’re fired.” She hung up.
I smiled, waited, and Harper shook her head. “You’re lucky you’re still breathing, Mort. I mean it.”
“I’ve heard something like that before.”
It took almost a full minute for “Li’l Red Riding Hood” to fire up again.
“We were cut off, Ma,” I said. “So—Tonopah, huh?”
“He was doin’ forty-eight in a twenty-five zone.”
“That’s gotta be our boy. In a hurry to scam another gal out of a few hundred bucks—but the ticket will cost him a few hundred bucks. Karma, balancing her books.”
“Gotta be. Karma’s a bitch.”
“Je-sus. Seven forty-five this evening, Mort. Which means he might still be in Tonopah, if you get my drift.”
“Too late now. I couldn’t get there before two in the morning. He’s probably after more money from the girl he scammed a few days ago. We’ll drive on over tomorrow, try to get there before he moves on.”
“We?”
“Harper and me. That son of a bitch is running us in circles, Ma. I’m gettin’ dizzy.”
“Don’t shoot him when you catch up to him. I mean if.”
“If? It’s only a matter of time, Ma. He’s mine.”
“Whatever. Just don’t shoot him. If you do, we don’t get paid. It’s in the contract.” She hung up.
Harper stared at me. “Karma’s a bitch?”
“Near as I can tell.”
“And we’re headed to Tonopah in the morning?”
“That’s the plan. Evidently.” I phoned Lucy, gave her the news.
“Tonopah,” she said. “Groovy. You should see if they still have that heart-attack fried chicken at McGinty’s. If they do, don’t eat it. You do remember McGinty’s is where you and I first met, don’t you, Mort?”
“As if I could forget. That entire half hour is burned so deeply into my neurons it still gives me that eerie robbing-the-cradle feeling.”
“Sweet talker.”
“I mean it. How’s your mom doing?”
“Better. A lot. Hey, if you end up spending the night in Tonopah, you should stay at the Stargazer Motel. It’s only fifty yards from McGinty’s.”
“Mom and I are watching a DVD, got it paused right now. I better go so we can finish it without losing track of who Bruce Willis is supposed to be killing or whatever he’s up to since I’m not entirely sure. Love you, Mort.”
“Love you too, jailbait.”
She laughed and we ended the call.
“Jailbait?” Harper said, frowning. “I thought you said she was thirty-two.”
“Wait’ll you see her. It’ll make more sense then.”
Harper shrugged and went back to her book. I gave it another try but wasn’t successful. I lay there, trying to assemble the pieces of this Max/Eystad/attorney general mess in a way that made sense.
At 10:50 my thoughts were interrupted by a deep bass pounding, somewhere outside. It started slow, easing into my consciousness stealthily, finally registering maybe ten seconds too late. I opened the door a crack and looked out, didn’t see anything, then went out on the catwalk, heard the bass thudding somewhere off to my right, beyond the structure of the motel, slowly fading, finally gone.
I waited.
Harper came out and stood beside me. She looked out over the pool, the parking lot, the street, the starry night. “What’re you doing out here?” she asked.
“Came out to see what that dumb-ass bass thudding was a minute ago.”
“What about it?”
“Heard it in Elko. At the Red Lion, and later when we were returning that car to the girls.”
“Dipshits trying to be deaf by the time they’re forty. It’s everywhere now. They want everything to be as quiet as the inside of a cave in their sixties. They’ll communicate by sign language and texting. So what?”
“So I don’t like coincidences. Even little ones.”
“Paranoia R Us?”
“Paranoia R useful.”
She laughed. “Maybe it’s time to get some sleep. How about you walk me to my room? If you want to.”
“Nope.”
“Seriously? It’s twelve feet away. That’s a long way. I could get mugged walking that far in the dark all alone.”
“You’re staying the night in my room. Or we’ll stay the night in yours, but we’re staying together.”
“Oh, my. This is kinda sudden. Is your Scout gene on the fritz?”
“My gene is fine and working overtime. It doesn’t like that bass pounding. Let’s get whatever you want from your room, then lock ourselves in mine.”
She tilted her head at me. “Okay. I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.” She hesitated. “I suppose you’re thinking we’ll sleep in separate beds, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Which means it’s okay if I sleep in the nude.”
“Sleep anyway you want, lady.”
“Cool. I will. You should keep that in mind, and that I’ll be only six feet away.”
“Huh. Something to think about if I can’t sleep.”
“That’s the idea, cowboy.”
She took the bed closest to the bathroom. I had the one closest to the outside door. My .357 revolver was on the nightstand, arm’s length away. I turned out the light.
“Don’t shoot me by accident in the dark,” she said.
“I never do that.”
“Okay. Good.”