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"Sorry the ride was so rough," Jill said when she finally jerked the Jeep to a stop before a ramshackle wooden building on the shore of blindingly blue Lake Mead.
"No problem. Not much out here, is there?"
"You visit Lake Mead much?"
"Not really. It's . . . well, for tourists."
After dismounting the Jeep--that's how Temple thought of it, for the step-up was higher than she was used to--they ambled to the water's edge.
Without the engineering feat of Hoover Dam only miles away, none of this lucent water would lie here, as rich as lapis lazuli against the red-rock roughness of the surrounding land.
The lake glimmered in the sunlight, a hundred-carat sapphire set in an unforgiving rocky rim of desert landscape.
"It's almost unearthly," Temple commented.
Jill smiled. ''You're not the first to think so. Remember the scene in Planet of the Apes when the astronauts' capsule crash-landed in water? That footage was shot here. This place could pass for another planet, if you look at it right."
Temple turned to her. ''You don't seem--"
"Like a late-night lounge singer's wife? Nope. I grew up on this desert. I only went into town to play poker--professionally. What are you smiling at? The idea of a woman poker player?''
Temple shook her head. Jill was sure touchy on the subject. "No. I'm smiling at the idea of calling Las Vegas 'town,' as if it was someplace you went to buy feed for the stock."
"You can," Jill said seriously, wrinkling her turned-up nose. "Heck, you can even buy the stock there. Las Vegas is a lot of things, but to me, it's just a gaudy belly-button in what really matters. This land all around here, and what's on it, what time and tradition stamped into it."
Temple turned back to the building of unpainted boards. Despite its sand-blasted look, it now had a mystique, thanks to Jill's insight. ''What was this?"
"Oh, some boathouse/roadhouse long ago. Crazy as a bar and grill out here looks, I think Spud''s onto something. The boys have plans for this area, maybe even a paddlewheel gambling boat on the Nevada side of the lake and a water park, all in the weathered-wood ghost-town look . . . natural, you know?"
Temple smiled again, this time at the Las Vegas idea of "natural." Such effects invariably took unnatural amounts of time and money.
"I know what you're saying," she said finally. "I'm creating a similar theme-scheme for the Crystal Phoenix."
"That's why I thought you could help Spuds out. He's a hell of a cook, let me tell you. And my grandfather's old bunch, they spent too long alone on the desert. It's time for them to get into the mainstream."
"Eightball has certainly gone mainstream, and then some. Doesn't it worry you, a man his age playing private investigator?"
"Hell, yes! It worries me, and I spent my younger years worrying about these old coots while they were fussing about me. But them doing nothing worries me more. They're like lifers, you know, in prison, whose sentence just got commuted. It's a new world, so they might as well live in it."
'' The boys,' " Temple repeated ironically.
Jill nodded seriously. ''They are that. Come on and meet Spuds."
Jill's boot heels dug into the soft sand as the pair edged around the sprawling building to the lakeshore side. The weathered wood was a soft, ashen gray. Temple noted with favor, and a broad deck edged all four sides, a perfect site for al fresco dining.
Up front, a crude hand lettered sign over the door announced 'Three O'Clock Louie's."
Smaller printing beneath promised "Around-the-clock fun and food for the entire family."
From inside came, not the aroma of food or the chatter and laughter of fun, but the sound of hell-bent hammering interspersed with the occasional curse.
Jill doffed her cowboy hat and sprang up the shallow steps to the deck. "Hey, fellas, cut your cussing. There's a lady present. Not me, gents, but the lady who shares the name of this landing.
Miss Temple Barr herself."
Temple was not pleased to have to live up to that introduction, especially in tennis shoes.
She soft-footed it over the wood planking and inside Three O'Clock Louie's.
Bare light bulbs draped the perimeter of a cavernous room filled with sawhorses, lumber, table saws and older men working away like the Seven Dwarves.
'This is what you call starting from scratch," said one, wiping a sawdust-covered hand on his baggy jeans, then coming to shake Temple's. "That's the way I cook, and that's the way I cook up a restaurant. From scratch."
"It does take a lot of scratch," put in another fellow.
They all stopped what they .were doing to ogle Temple, which was most unsettling. She had met them briefly at "Les Girls" strip club, where they also had a financial interest, but she had not had time to put faces and names together.
Now, here she was again, confronted en masse with a pack of males, trying to tell one from the other. Besides jeans, they all wore kerchiefs around their necks or foreheads, and suspenders, but some were portly, others lean. Some bald, some still hairy.
She recalled shards of the local legends about the Glory Hole Gang, who were a PR person's dream in a golden oldie package: how these senior citizen fugitives, then mere whippersnappers, had hijacked a shipment of silver dollars before World War II and buried the loot in the desert. How they could no longer find Lost Camel Rock that marked the buried treasure. How they hid out for decades at a ghost town called Glory Hole, with Eightball's granddaughter, Jill, growing up there. How Jill learned to be a crack poker player and supported the entourage when she was old enough by playing professionally in Las Vegas. How the lost silver dollars were found by some curious tourists, but the statute of limitations had run out on the old boys' heist by then, so they went scot-free after their long exile in the desert. How they turned Glory Hole into a tourist attraction and now were rich enough to expand their empire in other directions. Such as an eatery at Temple Bar.
All this flashed through Temple's mind in the wink of a butterfly's eye. History was fine, but her immediate problem, as with the brothers Fontana, was how to tell the Glory Hole Gang apart.
''You must be Spuds," she began, addressing the fellow who was still wringing her hand.
''Smart as a whipsnake, Jilly," he commented. "No wonder she catches all those murderers red-handed." He turned to Temple again. "I'm mighty pleased a big-time operator like you would bother with my little down-home restaurant. It's nothing fancy." '
"That's good," Temple decreed, stepping over strewn two-by-fours to get an impression of the place's size. "It's called 'atmosphere.' "
"Oh, we got atmosphere," another fellow said. "At our age, that's all we got, 'cept arthuritis.
Pitchblende O'Hara, at your disposal."
"Don't use that word. Pitchblende," put in yet another man. "Spuds plans to install a big, stainless steel maw of a disposal.
" You don't want to go down it by accident"
"Pitchblende," Temple said. "What a colorful nickname!"
"Mining term, ma'am. We all used to do a bit of prospecting when we was younger." He shyly ducked his bald head. "Pitchblende is uranium ore--dark, brownish black stuff, the way my hair used to be."
"When you used to have hair," guffawed a fourth man, whose own snow-white shock emphasized Lake Mead-blue eyes.
''Wild Blue Pike!" Temple guessed. At least this Glory Holer matched his name.
''So they've called me since Adam's apple was a pippin. I like to fly a bit when the weather's good."
"Yeah," Spuds suggested with long-time raillery. "Pilot that table-saw a little more, brother, and the work'll get done faster."
His words sent everybody back to their appointed tasks, which, as far as Temple could see, involved making as much noise as possible to little effect.