My sneakers were soaked, so I slipped into the only other shoes I’d packed-the heels I brought to wear with my leather pants. As I dressed, I started to feel like a hooker making a house call, but it was either my nice outfit or cargo pants with heels and that would have been too weird, even for me.
Unlike his counterpart at Titans, the parking attendant at the casino was cheerful and energetic; at that hour of the morning it was downright creepy to be so perky.
“Welcome to happy Hunting Ridge, ma’am.” He said it as if “happy” was part of the casino’s full name. “Have you been with us before?”
I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t with Hunting Ridge and would probably never be and that the last time I was out at 4 A.M. it was with a flashlight and I was looking for slugs, but this time I was meeting a probably delusional woman who thought she knew something about a murder and a kidnapping. But I decided to spare both of us. I forced a toothless smile and fished out a five, hoping for a better reaction than I’d gotten from the attendant at Titans.
“Don’t bury it. I won’t be long,” I said, handing him the folded bill. “Know where the Coyote Café is?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He beamed, eager to be of service. I couldn’t remember the last time five dollars had provoked such a rapturous response. “Straight in, past the Chilulhy sculpture, then make a left. Have a lucky stay!”
Jeez, what did they put in the water here?
If I was expecting to see glamorous model types and men in tuxedos playing baccarat and passing the shoe, I would have been sorely disappointed. I’d been to Vegas plenty of times when I was in the television business, and although it had changed dramatically in the years since, there was still a frisson of rat-pack glamour if you looked hard enough for it.
Not at Hunting Ridge. The exuberant use of wood, slate, and river stones gave the place the look of an upscale lodge with incongruously placed slot machines and designer boutiques-Chanel and Cavalli sharing space with Squanto and Sacajawea. There were any number of ways to leave your money there.
The Coyote Café’s sandwich-board menu was bordered with a blanket pattern and offered, among other things, Chippewa chips and Navajo pancakes. I didn’t know where the Chippewas came from, but we were a good two thousand miles from any Navajos. Oksana was behind the sign, pacing and chewing her nails. Then she spotted me.
“It’s too crowded in there,” she said, walking over to me. “Come this way.”
“Oksana. I’m running on fumes. What’s all this about? What do you know about my friend Lucy?”
She pulled me over to a bench near a diorama of a Native American village. Every few minutes one of the resin natives offered resin corn to a resin settler who looked suspiciously like Brad Pitt.
“Was she your friend?”
A chill crept through me. “What do you mean, was she?”