by Susan Dunlap
“Anything I should know about the truck?” she asked.
“Leaks oil.”
“And?”
“That’s it. She’s been a good ride.”
She shot a glance at First Street. No action there now; the sheriff had moved out. To Jesse she said, “How do I get to the highway south?”
He was still telling her as she climbed in, started the engine.
Connie slid in front of Jesse but kept her head well outside the open window. “Be careful. Fox is a loose cannon. There’s no one here can tell him not to fire.”
She grabbed Connie’s arm before she could move back. “You’ve helped me all the way tonight. Why? Why do you want me out of town?”
Connie’s shoulders rose. She braced her free hand against the cab as if to push.
“We’re talking possible epidemic here. If the dead woman’s contagious and nothing’s done, everyone in this town could be dead. So what’s your agenda with me?”
Connie leaned in till her face was inches from Kiernan’s. “You know things about Jeff. I’m not chancing them getting back to the sheriff. Jeff’s in deep enough.”
“Is he running the safe house?”
“How safe …” Connie’s laugh cut the night silence. Kiernan hadn’t noted the rumble of talk by the Chevy until it stopped.
“What about you, Connie? Are you the safe house?”
“No, not me.”
“But you know who is, don’t you?”
“I can guess.”
“And you guess who?”
She laughed, this time softly, dismissively.
“What’s Jeff so involved in he’d call me here and hand me to the sheriff?”
“Just take your good fortune and get out of here. The highway’s to your left.” Connie pulled free, loped to the Chevy, and climbed into the cab.
Kiernan watched the Chevy take the sharp curves down the hill. From her vantage point she could see First Street, Jeff’s office, and the mortuary on the far side, and on her side the back of the saloon.
It didn’t surprise her that Connie knew who ran the safe house. Nor that she knew a lot more about Jeff than she had admitted.
Kiernan expected to lose sight of the Chevy as it pulled up in front of the saloon and the gang headed inside to help Jesse spend his five hundred. But it stopped in the same spot it had left from—in back—and only the passengers got out. Connie, the driver, headed east. She drove two blocks and made a right.
Kiernan started the engine of her new vehicle and followed.
CHAPTER 30
TCHERNAK TURNED ON GRADY Hummacher’s computer and sat in his chair. Was his machine at home this slow, flashing self-congratulatory graphics on the screen and all these numbers no one gave a shit about? He didn’t have time for this. Should have been out of Vegas an hour ago. Should have thought to check the e-mail when he was here before. At least Grady’s password was easy—Grady—or it would be taking weeks.
Ah, but there was one message. He pulled it up. From BakDat Information Services. Bless Persis. “Your request filled, cher. Unwise to leave at unauthorized address. Call me.”
A bolt of fear shot through Tchernak. Was she right? Had he been too green to see the danger? But this was Persis. He shook his head and grinned. Then he called her.
“Tchernak, honey, you know I love talking to you, but collect? From out of state? This is going to go on the harridan’s bill.” She laughed, a little trill.
Tchernak had never seen Persis McEvoy, creator, owner, and by herself, the entire staff of Kiernan O’Shaughnessy’s preferred background service, but he pictured her as a tiny, voluptuous blonde, with bouncy blond curls and baby blue eyes. Just a bit plump all over. Pleasingly plump. He liked that. He pictured her in bed, in a teddy. He didn’t figure she conducted the rest of her business that way, and when he made the mistake of describing this scene to Kiernan once, on a drive back from L.A., he found himself scrambling to defend the illogic of Persis hearing the phone, sensing it was him, tossing off her businesslike beige jacket and slacks, her one-size-fits-all running bra and cotton boxers, and slithering into the lacy black teddy before the third ring.
“Right,” Kiernan had said, “this nubile charmer would choose to spend her days home alone with her computer.”
“She’s self-employed like you are. She can go out.”
“You’ve called her, day and night; when hasn’t she been there?”
He hadn’t bothered answering that one.
“Tchernak, here’s what she really looks like. She’s—”
“Stop! I get whatever data you need from Persis, and I get it tout de suite, right?”
“Sure, because she thinks you’re such hot stuff.”
He had nodded seriously in the face of her sarcasm. “Persis comes on to me because I’m a sexy guy. No, wait! The reason I’m such a turn-on on the phone is because I’m picturing her stretching her plump white legs on her rumpled sheets while she takes down the data you need. If suddenly I’m picturing Mrs. Khrushchev, we’re not going to get our order bumped to the front of the line.”
Kiernan had groaned.
He had called Persis from the office only a couple times after that, but more gratifying than Persis’s come-hither voice, or his own double entendres had been the joy of watching Kiernan biting her tongue.
Of course she hadn’t bitten it hard enough or soon enough, and among the terms Persis used for her, harridan was relatively kind.
“Bill the call to me, Persis. I’m on my own now.”
“Super, Tchernak. Every case you take, you call me right away and I’ll get you every little thing you need, you hear?”
He gave a low laugh, picturing those golden-blond curls bouncing, her plump white breasts jiggling with enthusiasm. “So what you got for me now? My first case, this is really important.”
Suddenly she was the woman in the beige suit with cotton underwear. “What do you want first, Grady Hummacher or Adcock Explorations?”
“Adcock.”
“Hocked to the gills. You want figures?”
“No. Gills are enough. And Grady Hummacher?”
“Okay. There isn’t much on him. Not surprising. He’s kept an address in Las Vegas for two years. Only membership is the Carson Club.”
“The Carson Club?”
“It’s more legit than it sounds. Lots more. Association of young movers and shakers throughout the state. Speaks well of Hummacher to get accepted. As for work history, a couple of movie companies—”
“Fifteen years ago? I know that.”
“Got a graduate degree in geology. Then signed on with Exxon for two years, then Aramco, then Nihonco—”
“Never heard of that one.”
“Japanese exploration company. You know how desperate the Japanese are for oil. They’re hot for a good find in a country that will give them sole export.”
“Countries like?”
“Central America, for one area. That’s where any data on Hummacher comes out of. So then he quit Nihonco and signed on with Adcock Explorations.”
“Quit? Not fired?”
“Nope. Nothing to suggest anything but normal job movement. That’s not the interesting area with Hummacher.”
She paused long enough to make Tchernak antsy. He didn’t exactly beg, but was starting to picture himself as a Chihuahua, panting a little.
“What’s interesting, Tchernak, is that Hummacher was detained—not arrested—but questioned about the company employees whose visas he’d arranged.”
“I thought people arranged for their own visas.”
She let a beat pass before saying, “That’s the normal way. But the two essential workers he brought into the country last month were never seen at the embassy in Panama or the INS in Las Vegas. Two seismic aides.”
So that was how Grady Hummacher got two deaf teenagers into the country. He knew the answer before he asked, “Names?”
“Juan Gomez, Carlos Rios. And here’s the thing you’
re really going to find interesting, the source of the INS complaint. You can guess, right?”
He didn’t have to picture her at all to sound desperate now. “Persis!”
“The INS was notified by Reston Adcock.”
“But didn’t these two come in as seismic aides to Adcock Explorations? You mean he called the INS and said he had nothing to do with them?”
“You got it.”
“Whew!”
“Well, Adcock Explorations is not exactly a blue-chip stock. Adcock was a senior vice president of explorations for Exxon before they split off a number of their operations four years ago.”
“Was he fired?”
“No. You’d think being a big shot in a new offshoot company would be a good deal, but here’s the thing, Tchernak. Big oil cuts these operations loose, so if there’s a disaster, like the big Alaskan spill, it’s not big oil with deep pockets that’s liable anymore, it’s the little offshoot with wee little pockets. One spill and it’s history, and the public’s left paying for the rest of the cleanup. But if there’s no spill and the offshoot does find oil, they’ve got to sell it to big oil.”
“So they’re damned if they don’t, and if they do, they don’t get much cash for it?”
“You got it, my man.”
“And so, Adcock figured rather than head an offshoot, he’d do better on his own.”
“Safe guess.”
Normally Tchernak liked these little guessing games, but this one was beginning to irk him. “So, then, why is Adcock Explorations mortgaged up to its derricks?”
“He’s a little guy now, competing with the deep pockets of multinationals. He needs a big strike quick before they bury him. The geologist he had before Hummacher … in Yaviza … ?”
“Yes?”
“Shot.”
“Really?”
“Really. Six months ago. No suspects. But the last person seen having a drink with that guy, Ross Estes, was a representative of Nihonco.”
Tchernak leaned back in Grady Hummacher’s chair. “Would Grady have known that?”
“It was in the papers down there.”
“Not here?”
“No. But—”
“Yeah, sure, it would have buzzed around the grapevine down there and made a new circuit every time someone arrived from the States—”
“Especially Estes’s replacement. And Tchernak, no one would be more anxious to meet that replacement than the guys from Nihonco. Too bad Estes was shot, but that doesn’t help ninety million Japanese with tanks to fill.”
“Are there any data to indicate Grady was negotiating with the Japanese?”
“Nope. But there was nothing on Estes till the bullet.”
Tchernak fingered his beard, pondering Hummacher’s trips back and forth to Panama. As far as he could see, frequent travel indicated nothing perfidious. “If it had been Tokyo Grady’d been heading to, that’d be one thing, but coming home to Adcock headquarters isn’t the first thing a turncoat would do. And he definitely wouldn’t go to all the trouble of getting ‘seismic aide’ visas for two deaf teenaged boys from Panama so they could have a better life in this country, not if he was going to be moving right away.”
Persis was laughing, not the sexy little blond-curl giggle he’d come to expect from her, but a series of sharp hoots. “Tchernak, who do you think those boys are?”
“A couple of deaf kids who weren’t getting adequate medical care down there.”
“You must think Grady’s quite the decent guy, huh?”
“When I saw him, he was real concerned about his responsibility for them.”
“Well, it does make a good story, and I guess there’s no reason not to believe it if you don’t know better.”
“Better is?”
“I did some research on oil-exploration methods down there. South of Yaviza it’s rain forest. What they call impenetrable rain forest, which means you can’t drive through it and you’re not going to walk any too fast if you’re not a tribesman born under the banana trees. The oil companies are trying to get the Pan-American Highway cut through. This is the last link they’d need and you’d be able to drive from Canada to Chile. They’re not going to all this trouble to add a couple of gas stations and fill up a few more VW vans. The reason they want the road through is so they get the infrastructure to get into that rain forest and explore for oil.”
“But they don’t have it yet, right, Persis?”
“Right. But they’re still after the oil, so who do you think they count on to lead them into that rain forest?”
“Ah, the indigenous tribesmen. So, okay, Grady’s boys are not street urchins but tribesmen or tribe boys. Still, why bring them to Las Vegas where they are useless, and helpless?”
“No research is going to answer that one. Maybe tribesmen were murdered down there, but that wouldn’t be likely to make an English-language newspaper.”
Tchernak sighed. He liked his banter with Persis, and no one touched her when it came to research. But she had her limits. And now when he wanted to speculate back and forth, it was clear that Persis had hit those limits and stopped dead. If Kiernan were here …But she wasn’t.
“You need anything else, Tchernak, you know where to call.”
“You got it, Persis. You’re going to hear from me lots.” He hung up, but stayed in Grady Hummacher’s chair. The Grady Hummacher he remembered was a college kid, a good-time guy, fun to have around if you wanted to blow off steam. Was he really the kind of guy who would make the commitment to care for two teenaged boys? Tchernak could picture Grady fuming that no one was bothering to test the kids’ hearing, much less teach them to communicate. He could see Grady in one burst of energy getting them visas and shepherding them onto the company plane. And he could imagine only too well how those boys had ended up alone in a rented apartment among people with whom they could no more communicate than if they had lived next to Cassie Marengo. Grady was like the kid who got bunnies for Easter, and lost interest when he discovered they didn’t retrieve or roll over.
But Grady hadn’t forgotten the boys. When he got off the plane from Yaviza, he hadn’t even slid between the sheets in his own apartment before going to the boys’ place and spiriting them out of the city. Maybe Grady had done the sensible thing and taken them back to Yaviza.
Tchernak hit Redial. “Persis, can you check airline rosters this last week? Grady flew in from Panama a week ago Friday. Then he made another quick trip and got back Wednesday morning—”
“Wednesday morning, you sure?”
“He checked out of his hotel down there at four A.M. Where would he go besides the airport?”
“I can’t answer that, Tchernak, but I’ve done enough eyeballing of airline schedules from that part of the world to know there are no flights from Panama to Las Vegas at five A.M. No commercial flights. What leaves at that hour are corporate jets, angling to get their execs stateside while there’s still time for meetings.”
“Adcock Explorations—”
“They could have leased a jet, but they don’t own one.”
“Grady wouldn’t have leased one without Adcock’s knowledge. He must have made that quick flight south with some other company, like Nihonco. No wonder Adcock’s going crazy.” Again, Tchernak paused for input, and again he was reminded that with data, Persis gave, she didn’t ponder.
If Kiernan were here …But he didn’t need Kiernan to realize that if Grady had used the boys to find oil, then they were the only ones who knew where that find was. If Grady was selling out to Nihonco, he wouldn’t want to leave the boys in Yaviza for Reston Adcock to follow.
Tchernak jumped up and raced for the door.
CHAPTER 31
THE CHEVY WAS NEWER, bigger, and Connie knew where she was going. Kiernan pressed on the gas and narrowed the distance between them. She was off First Street in a dark land of small buildings set far back on lots. Connie picked up speed; her taillights were dots in the distance. Kiernan stepped harder on the gas. T
he truck sounded like a mariachi band. She thought of the auto club warnings about driving into the desert. Know your route. Did she even have a route? Have adequate food and water. Not. Have your vehicle checked by a mechanic before embarking on the trip. Ha! She didn’t even have a full tank of gas. But Connie was her only lead.
Suddenly the taillights were gone. In front was blackness. She was heading into a wall of dirt. A hillside grew out of nowhere. The street evaporated. She spotted tail-lights up the hill to her right before she made out the narrow corkscrewing road. Pulling the wheel hard, she took the hill in third gear. The old truck sputtered. She jammed in the clutch and slammed the gear stick back and to the left till it found its niche and the engine took a thankful breath and pulled itself uphill. Connie’s taillights flashed and were gone as she whipped around curves she had probably known since childhood. The black of the night was blacker here, devoid of even lamp glow muted by curtains. Sand and scrub pine walled in the winding road.
The engine coughed. Kiernan shifted the truck to first gear. Christ, she might as well be walking. She had to keep Connie in view. Connie’d know someone was following. In such a small town, could she recognize her friends’ trucks from their headlights? Probably some, and one as old and battered as this would be a good candidate for uneven lights. Without slowing, she leaned into a curve and then pressed harder on the gas. If she ever needed her own fine Jeep from home, this was the time.
The road leveled off, dipped, and climbed again. Surprisingly the taillights were larger. Connie hadn’t whipped through the curves like a teenaged boy. Lucky thing—unless the sheriff had spotted two sets of taillights. There was not one side road. And the road itself was getting narrower. Even if Fox was on Route 93, he would be back soon and then he’d be eyeing alternate roads. Was this one of many options leaving Gattozzi, or the only road out of town?
She crested a hill, and a sudden swatch of moonlight showed a road to the left, angling up a higher peak, then down. Connie’s taillights blinked in and out of her range of vision. Depressions could have been turnoffs, but Kiernan couldn’t spare her gaze from the taillights ahead to check. She didn’t know how long she’d been driving when the lights disappeared altogether. She floored the gas; the truck bounced and shrieked into a curve. She swung her gaze from it to the road ahead, desperately searching for the red lights.
