Ivy Get Your Gun

by Cindy Brown

  Pink and I looked at each other. “You want breakfast?” he asked. His hair (what there was of it) was mashed down on one side from where he’d been sleeping on the couch.

  “No.”

  “Coffee?”

  I considered it. The fact that I was thinking about not having the best beverage in the world showed just how bad I was feeling.

  “It’ll probably taste good.” Pink grabbed the Pyrex pot from under the Mr. Coffee and began filling it with water. “Some guys swear that a raw egg with Worcestershire works for a hangover too.”

  I nearly heaved. “Maybe just coffee.”

  I eventually got my gag relax under control and sat down with a cup of coffee. I’d thought Pink was in the same shape as I was, but obviously not, since he scrambled himself a mess of eggs. I tried not to look at them (or smell them) as he sat down at the kitchen table across from me. “I can’t believe you can eat.”

  “I didn’t have that much to drink. Just a beer and that Campari stuff.”

  I thought back. No, I hadn’t seen him drink anything else, but…

  “I tell you what though, I’m never getting double-stuffed meat lovers pizza with extra onions ever again. Or at least I won’t eat a whole one.”

  Ah.

  “Did I hear you say something about guns last night?”

  “I’m going to be in a gunfight at Gold Bug Gulch. As Annie Oakley.”

  “You ever shot a gun before?”

  “Sure.”

  Pink gave me that look he probably gives motorists who say they didn’t know how fast they were going.

  “Just a few times,” I admitted. “Onstage. A rifle. Or a shotgun. Not sure which.”

  Pink sighed. “You really shouldn’t handle a gun without proper training.”

  “We’re just using blanks.”

  “You really shouldn’t handle a gun without proper training.” He now gave me the look he probably gave speeders as he wrote the ticket. “You know, I’m off for a few days. I could give you lessons. We could go out in the desert, do some target shooting.”

  I took a sip of my coffee, stalling. Detective Pinkstaff had been on the Phoenix PD forever, so he knew how to shoot. He was one of Uncle Bob’s best friends, so I knew he was trustworthy. But Pink had asked me out once. He’d taken it with good grace when I said no, but every so often I caught him looking at me in a more-than-friendly way. Plus there was the fact that I was a little afraid of guns with live ammo in them. And Uncle Bob wasn’t much of a gun fan. He often said that people with guns were more likely to get shot by other people with guns.

  “We don’t have to tell your uncle.” Pink read my mind. “And if you’re going to be using a gun—even with blanks—you really should know how to do it safely.”

  “All right.” My stomach flip-flopped as I spoke. I hoped it was just the hangover.

  Chapter 47

  “Wow.” I held the rifle in one hand and rubbed my shoulder with the other.

  “Yeah,” Pink said. “Wow.” He stared off into the near distance.

  I meant “wow,” real ammo has way more kick than blanks, but now I followed Pink’s gaze to the paper target he’d hung on a dead mesquite tree.

  “Pretty good, huh?” I admired the holes clustered within the paper head of the target.

  “You’ve never shot before?”

  “Nope. Hey, I missed one.” I pointed at a bullet hole outside the paper head.

  “By an inch. You never shot any kind of gun before?”

  “Just blanks onstage as Annie Oakley. So I did pretty well?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. You, lady, are the best natural shot I’ve ever seen.”

  “Does it always hurt this much?” I rubbed my shoulder again.

  “What?” Pink gazed at the target like it was a mirage. “Yeah, I suppose it does. But you get used to it. Let’s go for another round. See if that’s just beginner’s luck. Okay, check your form: feet shoulder-width apart?”

  “Check.”

  “Back straight? Head erect?”

  “Check and check.”

  “Breathe in. Now align the sights, breathing out as you do.”

  I did, but I didn’t say “check” since I was busy breathing.

  “Hold your breath as you pull the trigger and…”

  The rifle cracked and bucked in my hands, but I kept my eye on the target.

  “Hold up!” Pinkstaff shouted. He didn’t really need to since I’d put down the gun and was rubbing my shoulder again. “There’s someone out there.”

  I squinted out past the paper target. Sure enough, a figure was picking its way through the trail-less desert.

  “What in the hell?” Pink stared at the figure, which was beginning to look like a man wearing a cowboy hat. “Why would anyone be out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Hunting?”

  “He’s not carrying a rifle that I can see.”

  “Maybe he’s lost. We should go see if he’s all right.”

  We headed out through the brush. “Watch out for the cholla,” I said to Pink. He seemed like kind of a city guy.

  The figure was beginning to look familiar. “It’s Chance,” I said. “He works at Gold Bug, but nobody’s seen him since Billie died. Hey, Chance!” I yelled. “You okay?” I handed Pink my rifle. I didn’t want Chance—anyone really—to know I’d been practicing. Not sure why.

  I walked toward Chance. “We’ve been worried about you.” Maybe we shouldn’t have been. He was freshly shaven and wore clean clothes. He looked like someone who’d been on vacation, not grieving in the desert for three days. “Everybody’s been looking for you.”

  “Yes,” he said in that weird clipped voice he sometimes had. “I spoke to the police.”

  “Where have you been?” I looked in the direction he’d come from. “Oh, you must’ve been at Frank’s house.” It was the only thing around here for miles and Chance was on foot.

  “No.” He bit off the word. “Camping.”

  It was so patently untrue (besides the clean clothes, he carried absolutely no gear) that I didn’t know what to say except, “We have an extra rehearsal tomorrow. We’re adding a new gunfight.”

  Chance nodded and walked past us, tipping his hat at Pink.

  “What’s going on with him?” Pink watched him as he went down the road.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I just realized I skipped something really important.”

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t done a background check on Chance. Yeah, okay, I had checked out Mongo and Billie and Josh and Nathan, learned a little about the mine and the investors and The Golden Girls, but I hadn’t done my due diligence on the guy who started this whole thing by shooting Mongo. I silently berated myself as Pink and I bumped along the dirt road back to Gold Bug Gulch, going about five miles an hour.

  “Crap,” Pink said as a rock hit the undercarriage of his old Ford Taurus. “Remind me to take my Hummer next time.”

  “You have a Hummer?”

  “Do I look like the kinda guy who’d have a Hummer?” Pink wore a wrinkled short-sleeved button-down shirt, polyester pants, and hard-soled shoes. To go target-shooting in the desert. Not exactly a Hummer-guy kind of look. He shook his head, rolled down his window, and lit up a cigarette—the fourth one I’d seen him smoke that day. “Never have figured out why you’re such a good PI when you believe everything everyone says.”

  “I do not.”

  Pink looked at me sideways while blowing a stream of Kool-scented smoke out his open window. “Didn’t you believe in Jackalopes until you were eighteen?”

  “Fifteen,” I said. “And those postcards looked so real. Hey, is that the coolest house or what?” We’d come to the crossroad that led to Frank’s house. I pointed down the hill, where the house’s whitewashed walls stood
in cool relief to the brown desert. “It’s made of straw, well straw bale. It’s going to be on some green home tour coming up soon.”

  Pink peered through the dusty windshield. “Nice. As long as you don’t mind living in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I think the guy who owns it—Frank—prefers that. Sort of a desert rat. You should see where he used to live. Just a shack. Dirt floors, even.”

  “So what happened? What’s his story?”

  Dang.

  I forgot to do two important things.

  Chapter 48

  I sat on a bench in front of the saloon and booted up my laptop. No sense in fighting the traffic to go into the office for an hour, and okay, it just felt nice to sit in the sun. I couldn’t access all of Uncle Bob’s fancy databases from here, but I could begin my background checks on Frank and Chance with Google. It’s amazing what you can find out about people if you know where to look.

  Or not. I turned up a pitiful amount of information that told me nothing except that Frank was called “an environmental activist” by some and “a dangerous agitator” by others, depending on what side of the development fence they were on. Chance’s acting career was well-documented, but I couldn’t find anything else on him, and no mentions of him were more than a couple years old.

  I sat back on the bench to let my mind work on the problems, when, poof! A flour sack on the porch exploded. Then a bullet clanged against a bell. And finally, Chance lost his hat to my bullet.

  All in my mind, which had decided to work on the gunfight script instead of the investigation. I tapped away on my keyboard. Three good shots should do it. A squib in the flour sack could create the explosion. A little fishing line and a yank from Chance should take care of his hat. The cowbell I was thinking of hung from the roof of the saloon’s porch. Hmm…for the time being, we could use fishing line again. Someone would have to tug on it, but we could work that out.

  Okay. That was the action. Good. But the script, the actual words…I thought hard. I paced the creaky floorboards of the saloon porch. I even meditated. But I was an actor, not a writer. I was used to saying someone else’s words, not creating my own. Wait, someone else’s words…

  I had it.

  I typed away, happy. An hour later, I closed my laptop, put it in my duffel bag, and hopped off the saloon porch. I was headed to the parking lot when Josh’s hammer began echoing through the empty street. Ah. Finally, a chance to talk to him alone.

  I jogged partway to his forge, so I’d be sure to catch him. “Hi, Josh,” I said when I arrived, a little out of breath.

  Maybe I said it too quietly, since Josh didn’t turn around, just kept hammering. “Hi,” I said again.

  He looked over his shoulder. When he saw me, he moved awkwardly, placing his body in between the anvil and me. Huh. Why? “Hey,” I said, “I forgot to ask—”

  “I’m pretty busy,” he said. “So—”

  “Just a real quick question for the history tour,” I said. “You own this smithy, right?”

  “Yeah.” The forge glowed behind him in the dark room.

  “Are you open for customers? I mean, this blacksmith shop isn’t just for demonstration—people can buy your stuff?”

  “Sure. I mostly make decorative objects: chandeliers, fire grates, that sort of thing.”

  “Is this the only business you own?”

  “Yeah.” A little suspicion in Josh’s voice. “Why?”

  “Just wondering if you had any other outlets for your work, maybe a shop in Wickenburg or something.”

  “No. This is it.”

  I pressed on. “No other business deals in the works?”

  He pressed his lips together so tightly they almost disappeared. “No. Somebody been spreading rumors?” He hefted the hammer in his hand, as if testing its weight.

  I suddenly wondered about the wisdom of confronting a man with a legendary temper by myself in a remote place with many heavy tools at hand. “No,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.” I left the smithy, and Josh’s hammer took up its rhythm again. But once outside, I crept back toward its entrance, staying hidden behind the front wall. I peeked around the corner. What was on the anvil that Josh didn’t want me to see? I peered into the darkness, and saw…nothing. Josh was not creating a new tool or a piece of art. He was pounding with all his strength, on an empty anvil.

  Chapter 49

  The sun was just setting when Matt called. “You still on the west side?” he asked.

  “I’m on the road into town, almost to Sunnydale.”

  “Great. Meet me at Sunny Palms Golf Course. I have something I want to show you.”

  When I pulled into the parking lot, Matt was waiting with a cooler. “Follow me,” he said as I got out of my pickup. “But be quiet.”

  He led me to a little grassy hill on the edge of the fairway, sat down, and patted the ground next to him. I took a seat and watched him open the cooler, which held cold fried chicken, two apples, and two beers. Matt opened one for me. “Just wait.”

  I was still feeling a bit raw from my bartending lesson at Bob’s, so I sipped the beer politely, then set it down in the grass. I grabbed a piece of chicken, leaned against Matt, and watched the sun set, the sky turning from orange to gold to purple.

  “There.” Matt pointed not at the sky, but at a place where the golf course bordered the desert. “Do you see?”

  I peered into the growing darkness and saw movement. Small figures that nearly blended into the desert brush and the gray dusk light. Only when they hopped onto the grass could I see them properly.

  “Bunnies.” I hugged Matt around the neck. “I love bunnies.”

  “I know.”

  Dozens of cottontails made their way slowly, tentatively, out of the cover of the desert and onto the cool green grass of the golf course, nibbling and hopping and generally being the cutest things on earth.

  “I saw them when I came to look for Lassie the other night.”

  “You came out by yourself?”

  “I knew you were busy with the Gold Bug investigation and everything, so…” Matt shrugged. “I thought I’d see if I could find anything. No Lassie, unfortunately, but…” He waved at the busy party. A few long-eared jackrabbits had joined the crowd. “I thought you’d like this.”

  “I love it.” I kissed him, then put down my chicken leg and kissed him again properly. So properly, in fact, that we both had to stop. “Van Morrison aside, I’m pretty sure we could get arrested for making love in the green grass,” I said, panting a little. “But my house is safe.”

  “I can’t stay over tonight,” Matt said. “Big day tomorrow, you know.”

  Did I? What was happening tomorrow? It was Friday. I had a rehearsal for the gunfight, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it.

  “I mean, I’m looking forward to it, but…” Matt sighed. He leaned back on his elbows. “You know. Family.”

  “Yeah.” I had no idea what he meant. “You know, you don’t talk much about your family.” I hoped he would, right then, so I knew what was up tomorrow.

  “Well, we’re Irish-American.” Matt rolled over on his side and looked at me. “My great-great-great grandfather came to America during the Great Bacon Famine.”

  “You mean the Potato Famine?”

  “Well, there wasn’t any bacon either.”

  I really wanted to know about Matt’s family, so I smacked him, in a nice way. “Would you be serious?

  “Would you please let us be?”

  We both looked surprised that he said it.

  “Sorry, Ivy. This sneaking around is getting to me. I feel like we’re having an affair or something. Or that you actually aren’t really into us, that maybe you’re keeping your options open.”

  “No. Not true. You’re the only option I want.” I kissed him again for proof. “So, your family…”
/>   “I don’t know. You’ll meet my mom tomorrow. You can see for yourself.”

  “Tomorrow?” Dang. My mouth spoke before my brain had a chance to put the brakes on.

  “Tomorrow.” By the inflection in Matt’s voice, I knew he’d caught the question in mine. “Don’t tell me you forgot.”

  “Um…”

  Matt stood up and brushed the grass off his jeans. “My mom is coming in tomorrow so she can be there for the party that your brother and the guys at the group home are throwing in honor of my graduation. I hope you can make it.”

  He left.

  Had Matt really told me about the party? How had I forgotten? “Because you’re so self-involved,” my mother’s voice said in my head. She was right this time.

  I sat in the dark a few more minutes, hoping that the sight of happy little bunnies would make me feel better.

  It didn’t.

  Chapter 50

  I texted Matt when I got home: “Looking forward to your party.” I should have apologized. But I didn’t. And he didn’t respond.

  After a sleepless night, I got up and drove into the office. Uncle Bob was with Bette in Sedona, so there were no Friday morning donuts and only enough coffee in the can for half a pot. I made some anyway. I could go to Starbucks after I ran a background check on Chance and an asset search on Frank.

  But when I finished running them through our databases, I just sat in my chair for a minute. Or ten. Then I called my uncle. I needed some extra brainpower. “I’m on a well-deserved vacation,” said Uncle Bob’s voicemail. “So I’m off the grid for a few days.” Arghh.

  A walk to Starbucks and coffee helped my mood (a little) but not my brain. I stared at my computer screen a few more minutes then made another call.

  “There’s gotta be something,” Pink said.

  “Hardly more than I got off Google yesterday. Frank’s been in a couple of altercations having to do with his environmental activism, but nothing else. And a quick asset search shows that his house is mortgaged, but whose isn’t?”