No Immunity (11 page)

Potter jerked his head to the right. His mouth opened, froze open, then slowly closed as if he had realized the insubordination he was about to commit and caught himself just in the nick of time.

Kiernan smiled; the silence was getting to him. She decided to give it another few minutes. What other possibilities were there with the dead woman and Jeff Tremaine, her newly discovered man of principle? Did he know the woman who ran the safe house? He was the only doctor for miles. The keeper of the safe house had to have had medical emergencies before this one. The only reason for the safe-house keeper not to
know
Jeff Tremaine was if that keeper was Jeff himself. She smiled. That would fit the principled man.

And his wife, how would she feel about that? Kiernan nodded thoughtfully: Jeff would be the type not to tell her—on principle, of course.

She shifted restlessly in the backseat, and watched as Potter reached for the radio knob, then seemed to remember that there were no other stations from which a deputy might choose. She eyed him. “Do you have any water?” she asked, going for the most innocuous question in the desert.

“Yeah, but I can’t give you the bottle back there. You’re just going to have to dribble it down the wire mesh. You can hardly get enough that way to know you’ve drunk.” The guy was positively garrulous.

“Let me try. Jeez, I keep thinking of that poor woman who died. You know what her throat looked like?”

He was tempted, she could tell. He wouldn’t have seen the body. As soon as Jeff called him, the sheriff would have shoved it back in the freezer and locked the door. By now the dead woman would be the main topic in every bar and cafe in Gattozzi. A lurid detail or two would buy Potter drinks all night. As he poured water from a plastic bottle into a paper cup on the dashboard cupholder, she said, “Poor woman. I guess she was the type who’d go to Dr. Tremaine.” She held the paper cup between her fingers on the driver’s side of the mesh. The water spilled down her shirt, but she managed to drink half of it and realized that she was actually thirsty after all.

Potter cleared his throat. “Dr. Tremaine—”

His radio growled.

“Potter here.”

“Potter, how soon’ll you be back here?”

“Half an hour. Maybe less.”

“Okay. I’m waiting. Ten four.”

“Ten four.”

Kiernan kicked the seat back ahead, but Potter was too absorbed with replacing the radio to notice. Her moment was gone. She ran the two words—Dr. Tremaine—back in her mind, but Potter was like a cold engine groaning and sputtering in a way that revealed nothing of the purr it would give off minutes later. Had Potter been about to disparage Dr. Tremaine? Or not?

Coming up on the right was the Doll’s House. She considered demanding a bathroom stop but vetoed the idea. Even if she could shake Potter, where could she escape
to
?

Ten miles on, they passed a patch-paved road leading to the right. Spikes of gold from the setting sun touched the ground and were gone, supplanted by darker grays. In another mile she noted a macadam road paralleling the first. “What’s back there, Potter?”

“Just—” He cut off the word as if suddenly recalling his personal no-fraternization rule. “It’s … nothing.”

“Two paved roads leading to nothing?” She waited a moment, then goaded, “The sheriff trusts you to talk about where roads go, doesn’t he? Triple A can do that.”

The back of his neck flushed. “It’s one of those military places. State’s chock-full of them. Half the state’s off-limits.”

“What’s this one?”

“Navy.”

“Navy? Here?”

“Yeah, Great Admiralty of the Sands. That’s just our name for it, not the official one,” he added quickly.

“Uh-huh. But what do they do there?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a sullen stubbornness to his voice, and she knew more questions would be useless. But she couldn’t resist a final try. “I’ll just ask Sheriff Fox. I’ll tell him you pointed them out to me.”

“Hey, don’t do—” He caught himself, swallowed, and said in a more controlled voice, “Don’t think you can trick Sheriff Fox. He’s real sharp. He’s way ahead of those criminals who think they’re so smart.”

“Oh yeah?”
Keep talking.

“Yeah.” He shot a glance out the right window and smiled. “Won’t hurt to tell you—everyone knows. There was this high-profile guy, foreigner. Sheriff let him escape, let him
think
he escaped, and then followed him to his confederates. Big case. When he made the bust, it sure put Gattozzi on the map.”

“Sheriff must have gotten a lot of publicity, huh?”

“No. Sheriff’s not one for the limelight. Sheriff believes that law enforcement officers should keep quiet and …”

Kiernan sighed. The sheriff might as well have been sitting on Potter’s shoulder.

By now the sky had darkened. Only the occasional headlights and reflective road signs illuminated the backseat cage.

Potter turned off into Gattozzi, the rumble of the engine growing deeper as it pulled the car up First Street. There were no streetlights; the dark was broken only by headlights and by the light from windows of old miners’ houses renovated a century after their creation, from the picture windows in the cafes, and from the dimmed saloon windows. And the round white light globe in a protective cage outside the county sheriff’s department, Gattozzi Station.

She walked into the plain, serviceable, government-issue tan room that smelled of tobacco and Pine Sol. A bearlike man was sitting on a swivel chair behind the counter. There was no flag or state seal. The only decoration was a large photograph of a small, dank old slab building. In it cells and mattressless cots were visible through the doorway to the main room, and in that room she could make out the metal eyes to which leg irons were hooked. “The old county jail, behind the old courthouse in Pioche. Not a place you’d want to visit twice.”

“Nor is this. I assume you’re Sheriff Fox?” she said.

“Right, there, lady.”

“And you need a second opinion about the body Dr. Tremaine called me here to view?”

“It’s the truth we need. About the woman you brought here and dumped in the morgue before you sped out of town.”

T
HERE IS A “RULE
of living” in California: “Keep clear of windows in an earthquake.” In New York it’s “Don’t make eye contact on the subway.” Brad Tchernak added to himself,
In Las Vegas,
“
Never drive on the Strip when you’re in a hurry.
” Not at midnight, not at dawn, not at four on a Saturday afternoon. He idled in the number-four lane. The sun was already inching toward the calm cover of the mountains. But here on the Strip, life fizzed. Banks of utility lines transformed the power of Hoover Dam into millions of lights in the dozens of casinos crammed into these few blocks. Lights glowed, crackling, snapping on and off in wildly clashing colors, huge, soaring, screaming, trying vainly to shout down their neighbor. To his right sat a glowing green casino large enough to hold the entire Emerald City; to his left, King Arthur’s Palace; and ahead on the left, a miniature New York City, Brooklyn Bridge nudging the Empire State Building. Coming up on the left, a huge pyramid gleamed the black of the Underworld. Ahead of him the Stratosphere tower soared more imposing than McCarran Airport’s. All dazzled, beckoning, promising.

Tchernak loved it. The enchantment stopped at the casino door, and Kiernan hated the predictable disillusionment of it all. The City of Dependable Disappointment, she called it. But for Tchernak, Las Vegas was one great party with ever-new friends, endless diversions, beautiful women, and few inhibitions. It was the party of all parties, and the morning after, you were expected to have no memory of it.

After he found Grady Hummacher and collected his first fee, he’d treat himself to a night in New York, New York.

Eight, or was it ten, lanes of cars idled between the casinos. Good that it’s me and not
her
, Tchernak thought, grinning at the picture of his employer—his
former
employer—fuming, muttering, opening the window to stick her head out and cause trouble. By now she’d have cut in and out of every one of the lanes, cell phone to mouth as she bitched to the highway patrol.

He, on the other hand, had used this lull to study the map. Louisa Larson’s clinic looked to be a couple miles north. He shifted into second gear as the casinos thinned, and was in third by the time he passed through the civic center and on north. When the first barred window came into sight, he rechecked the address. Boarded windows led to broken windows, to a neighborhood of mom-and-pop stores struggling between deserted buildings like clover in sidewalk cracks. Horseshoe apartment complexes surrounded bare-dirt courtyards. Louisa Larson’s address was on the next block.

Behind a macadam parking area the Larson Clinic sat crisp and white in the predusk haze. Browning cacti lined the sides of the long narrow building. The whole sad area looked like it had been sucked dry by the thirsty dice palaces to the south.

Tchernak pulled up next to a dark blue BMW and strode to the door, relieved that he’d made it before Louisa Larson packed in her black bag for the day.

Office Hours: Monday, Thursday 9:00-6:00, Saturday 8:00-12:00.

It was hours past noon already, but the car was here and the license said
MD.
Maybe she spent her Saturday afternoons cleaning up her files or whatever in her clinic. Tchernak knocked, waited, rang the buzzer, waited, rang again, holding his finger to the button. Tires squealed at the stop sign behind him, coughs of music burst from open car windows and were gone. He knocked again, harder.

“We’re closed!”

“Doctor Larson?” he shouted.

“Closed!”

“Louisa, I’m a buddy of Grady Hummacher. Brad Tchernak. Give me a minute, huh?” The door was solid, the speaker shielded.

“Grady’s not here.”

“Right. And that’s the problem. You know how Grady is.”

A bus ground to a stop, brakes squeaking, engine belching, passengers calling back and forth as some disembarked.

“Louisa? Louisa, I can’t hear you. There’s too much going on in the street.”

No answer.

“I flew in from San Diego to find Grady. I know Grady and I’ll tell you, I’m worried about the guy.”

Still no answer, and the traffic noises were too loud to allow him to guess what was happening inside the building. Why didn’t she just open the door and get it over with? Tchernak’s shoulder tightened and he caught himself an instant before pounding again. Brad Tchernak was not used to women ignoring him. If he could just get face-to-face, he’d be on the fast track. But what good was charm, or whatever it was he had with women, when the woman was behind a closed door? “Louisa, this’ll only take a minute. Look, if you’d told me where to find Grady, you’d already be done with me.”

Now he could make out something, feet moving but not away, voice muffled as if it were revving up its vocal cords.

“I’m staying right here on your doorstep. I’m a big guy; I’m going to be a real impediment to your business. Your patients’ll have a hard time clambering over me.”

“Really?”

She ought to have been grinning by now, but that voice didn’t ring with smile tones. Still, it was as good as he was likely to get.

“Picture a casino on your stoop. Maybe Hercules with slot machines all up one arm.”

“Okay.” The woman’s voice was tentative. “What do you want?”

This was one woman who’d never make a tourist-bureau ad. No endless party for her. She was the voice of the day after. “Grady,” he said. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

A bus harrumphed to a stop.

“Louisa, can we talk about this inside? I’m broadcasting to the whole neighborhood. Open the door. Five minutes. I’m too rushed to stay longer.”

“No!” Louisa’s voice. Panic.

“Okay. Then leave the door on the chain and just open it enough so we can talk.”
And don’t think how easy it’d be for me to snap that little chain.

“There’s nothing I can tell you.” But the door opened an inch.

“Grady landed at McCarran yesterday, Friday. Have you seen him?”

“No.”

“Talked to him?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I’m not an idiot!”

It was the first sign of life that nervous squeak of a voice had shown. This was a woman used to barking orders. The Lady Napoleon tone. This voice was out of place in a woman hiding behind a closed door.

Tchernak narrowed his eyes, vainly trying to pierce the building’s darkness. All he could see was a black strip, bisected by a silver linked chain. From Louisa’s voice, Tchernak figured her to be about five eight. Two tones of voice, two personae. Kiernan would have chosen to deal with the snapper. Tchernak took the softer route. “Grady’s in a lot of trouble.”

“Look, I haven’t heard from him. I don’t know where he is. Got it?”

“He’s somewhere. He landed here and vanished.”

“It’s a big empty state.”

“Does he have another house? A hideaway? Friends he’d go off with, hide out with?”

The door shifted but didn’t close.

“Look, Louisa, I’m a detective. Once I get ahold of Grady, he’ll be out of your hair. Guys like me will stop looking for him. We won’t be pounding on your door and bugging you. Point me in the right direction and you can eat your dinner in peace.”

On the sidewalk a clutch of teenaged boys shouted at each other in Spanish. A car raced by, thumping bass smacking the air against her ears. Still, Louisa neither answered nor shut the door.

Tchernak grappled for a wedge question. “A week is a long rime to be missing. This is desperate, Louisa. Desperate enough for his boss to call me here from California. Grady could be lying off the road somewhere bleeding to death.” He strained for any sound of acquiescence. “If you know Grady as well as I do, you can imagine him taking a shortcut that leads him fifty miles from the main road and getting stranded there. Without food or water.” Still no response. He was sweating. Why didn’t the woman trust him? What proof—“Grady and me, we were in college together. Maybe he mentioned me? Did he ever mention the raid on Tasman Hall across campus when ten of us pushed a VW bug up the stairs to the fourth floor? Not easy around the corners. Took all ten guys. And then—this is the Gradyism of it—we get to the top and there’s only a little person-sized door. Not even a landing for the car. No place for us to leave it. So, we have to lower the thing down again, all four flights. That’s real work when you’ve gone all out pushing the damned thing up. And of course when we got down to street level, the campus cops were waiting.”