Lucky Bang by Deborah Coonts Page A

waste—this car is a work of art."
    Dane and I had just circled the wagons in the vast lots surrounding the stadium at a point that I thought was the furthest from human life, when the bomb squad rolled in sirens blazing. I let Dane give them the skinny as I found a curb to sit on, well away from the car. The fact that we were very close to the site of a rocket fuel plant that had exploded, leveling a huge area of Henderson surrounding it, was sort of ironic. I hoped it wasn't an omen. I grabbed my phone and began making calls.

    ***

    The day had expired, but thankfully no one else had. Defusing the nitro situation had taken far longer than I'd imagined. Of course, not only did we have Metro to deal with, we also had the Feds. Despite the widely held opinion that most branches of the government were masters at making big goddammits out of hangnails, the ATF was anything but. They dealt with serious shit and a bomb really lit their fuse. Using a crane, they'd lifted the box of dynamite, then burned it in a far corner of the parking lot far away from humans. The whole thing would've been fun to watch, except one missing stick of volatile dynamite kept my feet to the fire, prodding me to action. Time was slipping away.
    Firmly in the clutches of nightfall, Dane and I motored back to the Babylon. With no threat of immediate immolation, I once again let the horses run. This time, Dane didn't feel the need to hang on. Tonight, the lights of the Strip didn't hold their normal magic for me. Instead, they reminded me how hard it would be to find a dynamite needle in this huge haystack. Clearly I needed to narrow my search.
    Bert, my Ferrari man, was waiting for me in the dealership when I returned the car. "Lucky, I'm sorry I wasn't here when you called. I'm working the late shift tonight—in fact, I just punched in. When I'm off, I turn the cell off. I work hard, but they don't own me."
    "Clearly I'm not as adept as you at establishing boundaries." I admired a new, shiny red car turning on the dais under a lone spotlight. "The new California?"
    "Sweet machine. You'd look fine wearing one."
    "Nice try." I wandered over to the car, running my finger down the hood as I admired the new lines—a compact departure from the normal Ferrari. "Did they tell you what I wanted?"
    "Yeah, something about the name of a guy who had one of our cars yesterday." He pulled a white envelope out of his back pocket and extended it to me. "We had six cars out, all rented by males. I pulled the list for you."
    The list was short, names and addresses, not much else. "This really doesn't help." I bit my lip as I looked inside the California and tried to think. "I need some way of narrowing the list down."
    "Tell me what you know."
    I gave him Frenchie's description of the dynamite buyer.
    Bert blew out some air. "I could ask around, see who might've rented a car to a guy looking like that, but it could take awhile."
    "Time isn't something I have a lot of." I hoped he didn't ask me why. I didn't want to elaborate—nothing like a potential explosion to create a panic— and I didn't want to lie.
    "You don't happen to know where the car went, do you?"
    I stopped ogling the California, turning my attention to Bert. "I have an address. Why?"
    "Give it to me." Bert didn't wait. Instead, he stepped behind the counter and logged into the store computer as his mouth kept motoring. "I don't need to tell you how much dough we've got tied-up in these cars. If one went missing, well, insurance would give us a huge hassle. It would be better to recover the car." He looked up at me expectantly, a twinkle in his eye. "So we put GPS trackers in all of them."
    I punched up Jimmy G's place on my phone, highlighted the address, then handed it to Bert. "Try this one first. I have another route he took out the 95 toward Tonopah."
    "We'll overlay the address with the tracking system." He bent his head in concentration.
    On the theory that the whole watched-pot-not-boiling thing