No Immunity
you?”
It was a moment before she said, “Not yet.”
“What about Jeff Tremaine?”
Connie started, reached for her glass, realized it was empty, and signaled Milo. “Jeff? You mean does Fox hassle him?”
“I mean, what’s their relationship?”
“Jeff’s a closed-mouth kind of guy. Knows everyone. Hell, the guy’s a member of the Carson Club—”
“Carson Club?”
“Big Men in the State and junior Big Men. Not the first thing you’d guess for a small-town doctor, is it? But he’s a fifth-generation Nevadan.” She accepted her fresh drink and sipped slowly, staring into the glass. When she put it down, she glanced at Fox, who was still sitting by the jukebox, back to the wall, gazing straight ahead. For the first time she lowered her voice. “Jeff’s gone. No one knows where. But he didn’t go to Vegas for the weekend.”
“And you think—”
“No one... knows.” Without a glance at her nearly full glass, Connie turned and walked out.
Kiernan took a long swallow of her Dickel, her gaze on Connie’s departing figure. She liked this no-shit woman who was clearly worried about Jeff Tremaine. She turned to Milo. “If Fox’s likely to be in here for a while, I’ll go somewhere else and grab dinner. Anything open?”
“Bar on the far side of the morgue’s got burgers. Better than going hungry.”
Kiernan handed him a twenty. “For my friends.” To them she said, “See you in an hour.” As she hurried to the door, she gave a last look at Sheriff Fox, now sitting by the jukebox sipping his Scotch. He looked as if he was settling in for the night.
Jeff Tremaine was gone. Sheriff Fox was lying about the body. And she had only an hour to find out why.
CHAPTER 22
Tchernak squealed to a stop in front of Villas de las Palmas. Pie forced himself to sit in the Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo he had rented and get a sense of what he was about to charge into. Two-story cement slabs sat around a hard-dirt courtyard with a hole where a palm tree might have been. Twenty units were divided between two facing rows of five up, five down. Tchernak had banged on doors like these the summer between his sophomore and junior years in college, before he’d made his splash on the field and got enough of a scholarship to live on. Encyclopedias were what he’d been supposed to be selling then, the gift of knowledge, fast lane to the better life for your kids. Just a few hundred dollars, a few hundred more than any of those, or these, people had. He knew what he would find inside: twelve-foot-square living rooms with a wall heater for decoration, ten-by-twelve kitchens with dinette sets by windows overlooking the walkway. In the back there would be bathrooms and bedrooms with high aluminum windows over the parking lot. Tenements laid on end, the Sun Belt’s answer to poverty.
Some building owners tried to buck the tide with courtyard swimming pools, colored lights, landscaped gardens. Not here. Cement-slab stairs to the second-floor balcony were chipped and the bottom one was gone entirely. In the front upstairs apartment a broken window had been boarded on the inside.
He was wrong, this wasn’t encyclopedia turf; this was one of the places the sales manager would have gone right by. These tenants were not savvy enough to know well-managed property from bad. Or maybe they were too desperate.
In the courtyard, plants in plastic buckets pushed out fragile blooms. Yellow, purple, green, and red streamers wove around a pole that might once have sported a flag. A row of school-painted shoe boxes stood under the broken mail slots, like boxes on a rural route. The tenants were doing what they could. Even so, windows and doors were shut tight, and the only sound came from the televisions. Apartment 1 was dark. Apartments 2 and 3 showed lights only from their televisions. Number 4 was dark, 5 lighted.
The boys’ apartment was the corner unit nearest him. Unlike their neighbors’, their shades were up, their dark rooms bare to the courtyard. They weren’t there! Damn! This was his only lead; they had to be here. Tchernak forced himself to ease out of the Jeep and walk, not run, to their door. A big Anglo like him, he’d seem threatening even if he were wearing a Bozo nose, much less stalking over like a repo man. He stared through the window into a kitchen that screamed, “Teenagers home alone.” There couldn’t have been a plate, glass, or cup left in the cabinets. He knocked. They could be asleep in
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