“Don’t wink at me again, Geneva. You’re trying to pretend we’re in some sort of little conspiracy here, and we’re not.”
“Oh, dear, I know we’re not. You have Q-U-I-T, resigned, finito, and that’s perfectly clear to me.” She smiled broadly and refrained from winking — but gave him a vigorous thumbs-up sign with both hands.
Noah picked up his unbitten second cookie and bit it. Twice. The cookie was big, but with just two bites, he crammed more than half of it in his mouth. Chewing ferociously, he glared across the table at Geneva Davis.
“More vanilla Coke, dear?” she asked.
He tried to say no, but his mouth was too full to permit speech, so he found himself nodding yes.
She refreshed his vanilla Coke with a drizzle of cherry syrup, more cola, and a couple ice cubes.
When Geneva sat at the table again, Noah said, “Let me try this one more time.”
“Try what, sweetie?”
“Explaining the situation to you.”
“Good heavens, I’m not dense, dear. I understand the situation perfectly. You’ve got your plausible deniability, and in court I’ll testify that you didn’t help us, even though you did. Or will.” She scooped up the three hundred dollars. “And if everything goes well and no one ends up in court, then I’ll give this back to you, and we’ll pay anything else you bill us. We may need some time, may need to make monthly payments, but we honor our debts, Micky and me. And none of us will end up in court, anyway. I mean no disrespect, dear, but I’m sure your understanding of the law is weak in this instance.”
“I was a police officer before I became a PI”
“Then you really should have a better grasp of the law,” she admonished with one of those your-grandmother-thinks-you’re-adorable smiles that exacerbated his case of the warm fuzzies.
Scowling, leaning across the kitchen table, resorting to a display of his dark side, he tried to jolt her out of this stubborn refusal to face facts. “I had a perfect grasp of the law, but I was stripped of my badge anyway because I severely beat a suspect. / beat the crap out of him.”
She clucked her tongue. “That’s nothing to be proud of, dear.”
“I’m not proud of it. I’m lucky I didn’t end up in prison.”
“You certainly sounded proud of it.”
Staring unblinkingly at her, he consumed the last third of the cookie. He washed ii down with cherry-flavored vanilla Coke.
She wasn’t intimidated by his stare. She smiled as though she took pleasure from the sight of him enjoying her baked goods.
He said, “Actually, I am half proud of it. Shouldn’t be, not even considering the circumstances. But I am. I was answering a domestic-disturbance call. This guy had really pounded on his wife. She’s a mess when I get there, and now he’s beating his daughter, just a little girl, like eight years old. He’s knocked out some of her teeth. When he sees me, he lets her go, he doesn’t resist arrest. I lost it anyway. Seeing that girl, I lost it.”
Reaching across the table, Geneva squeezed his hand. “Good for you.”
“No, it wasn’t good. I would’ve kept going until I killed him — except the girl stopped me. In my report, I lied, claimed the creep resisted arrest. In the hearing, the wife testified against me … but the girl lied for me, and they believed the girl. Or pretended to. I made a deal to leave the force, and they agreed to give me severance pay and support my application for a PI license.”
“What happened to the child?” Geneva asked.
“Turns out the abuse was long-term. The court removed her from her mother’s custody, put her with her maternal grandparents. She’ll graduate high school soon. She’s okay. She’s a good kid.”
Geneva squeezed his hand again and then leaned back in her chair, beaming. “You’re just like my gumshoe.”
“What gumshoe?”
“The one I was in love with back when I was in my twenties. If I hadn’t hidden my murdered husband’s body in an oil-field sump, Philip might not have rejected me.”
Noah didn’t quite know how to respond to this. He blotted his damp brow again. Finally he said, “You killed your husband?”
“No, my sister, Carmen, shot him. I hid the body to protect her and to spare our father from the scandal. General Sternwood — that was our daddy — wasn’t in good health. And he …”
Puzzlement crossed Geneva’s face as her voice trailed away.
Noah encouraged her to continue: “And he…?”
“Well, of course, that wasn’t me, that was Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep. The gumshoe was Humphrey Bogart playing Philip Marlowe.”
Geneva clapped her hands and let out a musical laugh of delight.
Although he didn’t know why he was smiling, Noah smiled.
Geneva said, “Well, it’s a delicious memory even if it’s a false memory. Honestly, I must admit, I’m something of a wimp when it comes to being naughty. I’ve never had it in me to be a bad girl, so if I hadn’t been shot in the head, I’d never have had a memory like that.”
The sugar content of cookies and cola provided sufficient mental lift to deal with a wide spectrum of intellectual challenges, but, by God, for some things you needed a beer. He didn’t have a beer, so instead of making an attempt to deduce logically the meaning of what she’d said, he asked another question: “You were shot in the head?”
“A polite and well-dressed bandit held up our convenience store, killed my husband, shot me, and disappeared. I won’t tell you that I tracked him to New Orleans and blew him away myself, because that was Alec Baldwin and not a part of my real life. But even wimp that I am, I’d have been capable of shooting him if I’d known how to track him down. I’d have shot him repeatedly, I think. Once in each leg, let him suffer, then twice in the gut, then once in the head. Do I sound terribly savage, dear?”
“Not savage. But more vindictive than I would have expected.”
“That’s a good honest answer. I’m impressed with you, Noah.”
She turned on one of those ice-melting smiles.
He found himself smiling, too.
“I’m enjoying our little get-together,” she said.
“Me too.”
Chapter 61
Saturday: Hawthorne, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho. Four hundred forty-nine miles. Mostly wasteland, bright sun, but an easy haul.
A cloud of vultures circled something dead in the desert half an hour south of Lovelock, Nevada. Though intrigued, Preston Mad-doc decided against a side trip to investigate.
They stopped for lunch at a diner in Winnemucca.
On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, swarms of ants were feeding on the oozing body of a fat, crushed beetle. The bug juice had an interesting iridescent quality similar to oil on water.
Taking the Hand into a public place was risky these days. Her performance on Friday, in the coffee shop west of Vegas, had been unnerving. She might have gotten what she wanted if the waitress hadn’t been stupid.
Most people were stupid. Preston Maddoc had made this judgment of humanity when he’d been eleven. In the past thirty-four years, he’d seen no reason to change his mind.
The diner smelled of sizzling hamburger patties. French fries roiling in hot oil. Bacon.