No Immunity

glad of it. Other’n that, if you’re going to Vegas, there’s the senior bus, runs Tuesdays, and from the look of you, you’d have to wait years to get on that.” He grinned and passed her the drink-He was big enough to have played offensive line with Tchernak, broad-shouldered, but now, at about broad-gutted too. His fair hair was short, his brush mustache trimmed a mite too short over his surprisingly pink lips, and the eager look on his square face belied his closed-end comments.
    “How about a used-car lot?”
    “I’ll tell you what we do when we want to buy a car. We go to Vegas.”
    “Right.” The gray-haired woman pushed her spiky bangs away from her eyes. The cut might have been thought of as a pixie had it not been for her decidedly unpixielike jaw, a jaw that said, “Any Peter Pan in front of me better be swinging pretty dammed fast.” Kiernan liked that. She watched as the woman lifted a brandy snifter that would have better suited the bar in the Del Coronado Hotel. It was about the last thing she’d have expected in her rough, veined hand. But the woman took no notice of her observer. Her caramel eyes were almost shut amid squinty lines, lines from looking long, not peering into the eyes of the person across the glass. “Or, Milo, we get a truck from a friend.”
    “Ah, Connie, how often does that come up?”
    Kiernan had guessed her to be mid fifties, but then realized she’d been using urban markers to judge: creases in skin from years of wind and sun without the emollients city women take for granted, and gray hair that always adds a decade. This woman was closer to forty than fifty.
    Connie straightened her shoulders. “Guys get sudden needs for cash. It happens. You remember Artie Mayeno, the time he ‘sold’ the cafe twice in one day…“
    “The cafe Mayeno didn’t own,’” Milo put in.
    “—and he had to disappear for a month. He cashed in everything he had before he headed for the hills. That old truck of his was the last thing he sold.”
    Kiernan put a hand on her arm. “If you know someone—”
    “You’re real anxious to leave our little town.” The indictment was Milo’s, but it could ¡have come from anyone in the room. The two women had moved to one end of the bar, the elderly couple to the other.
    “No aspersion on the town, but all I’ve seen is the inside of the sheriff’s department.” She wished she could cut through all he already knew, but this, like all games, had its rules. “I was here earlier today as a guest of Jeff Tremaine. We were in medical school together.” She almost added “in San Francisco,” but caught herself in time to avert the danger of a detour into travel talk.
    “Oh, you’re a friend of Jeff’s?” Connie set down her glass. She didn’t add, “and his wife?” but that question hung in the air.
    The room had gone silent. All ears were cocked for her response to “and his wife?” Were they waiting because the answer had so often been no? Was Hope Mkema not the love of Jeff’s life, but merely his first extramarital fling, or not even the first? Kiernan could see Hope again, sweat sparkling on her dark, delicate face, sweat mixed with blood, her hands quivering beyond control. Hope would have died, Jeff Tremaine or no, but it didn’t make Kiernan think any better of Jeffrey Tremaine, as a habitual user of women.
    She had had her own share of lovers, but consecutively. Being straight with them mattered; she liked crisp edges in her life. More than one lover on the way out had called her cold, labeled her unfeminine in her apparent ease of dismissal. Maybe.
    But Jeff Tremaine, he was one guy she had not seen through. Her hand tightened on the shot glass and she pressed the edge of her palm into the bar to keep from jerking the glass to her mouth. “Yes,” she said , just a friend of Jeff’s, not a friend of Jeff’s wife. She took a swallow of mash, not as much as she wanted, but she didn’t know how long this scenario would go on. If she ended up here overnight, three hours on the Greyhound tomorrow would be bad enough without bouncing along hung over.
    She glanced over the Saturday-night crowd, so seemingly safe here in their isolated town, in their friendly saloon. There was no way to alert them, she knew that. Her head throbbed and her hands were tingling from the tension. If she could find out the truth about Jeff, maybe with that leverage she could make him talk. If she could find him.
    Or maybe the dead