Ivy Get Your Gun

by Cindy Brown

  “You are really smart!” said the clock on the wall.

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” said Arnie.

  “Did you hear Gold Bug is clear to serve water now?” asked Marge. “The police are still investigating Billie’s death, but Nathan paid some private company to expedite the testing. No cyanide anywhere.”

  “Bet he’s happy.” Concessions were the backbone of the operation. Most of the money was made from the burgers and beer in the saloon, the popcorn and lemonade sold at the opera house, and the crank-your-own ice cream Josh sold in a stand outside his forge. Of course, it also meant that someone probably tampered with the water for the cookout, but Nathan seemed much more concerned about the business than the deaths.

  “Nathan spent a bundle,” Arnie said, “but he’s breathing easier now.”

  “Whose money?” I bit into a jelly donut and red goo slithered down my hand. “Gold Bug can’t have very much in the bank yet. Which brings me to another question: Nathan is more of a manager than an owner, right? I mean, he doesn’t even own twenty percent.”

  “What?” Marge looked hard at Arnie. I took the opportunity to lick the jelly from my hand.

  Arnie shrugged. “He’s got bad credit.”

  “Like father, like son,” she said.

  “Hey.” Arnie took the cigar out of his mouth so he could look properly wounded.

  “Whose money did he spend?” said Marge.

  I stood up to make my getaway. “Would you look at the time?”

  “Sit down, Ivy,” Marge said. “This could be important to your investigation. You are still investigating, right?”

  Double whammy. I sat down. Time to start thinking like a detective. “Why is Nathan so invested in this venture? Seems like he doesn’t have that much to lose.”

  “He does get a salary. For managing the place.”

  “I’ve seen the accounts. It’s not that much money, and I’m sure he could find other work.” I remembered Nathan sweating over the plumbing. And again when he met the investors. “He treats Gold Bug as way more than just a job,” I said. “There must be another reason.”

  “For one, he doesn’t want to let me down,” said Arnie. “You know, he finally finds his old man, offers him this great investment opportunity, and then bankrupts his poor old dad.”

  “Bankrupts?” I said.

  “Just a figure of speech,” Arnie said, but Marge took a deep breath.

  “You said, ‘for one.’ What’s the other reason?” I asked.

  Arnie chewed on his unlit cigar. No, chomped, as if it were a piece of really tough celery.

  “Come on, chickie,” Marge said, though the endearment sounded forced. “What’s up?”

  “You know how I hired Ivy to make sure everything was on the up-and-up out there?” Arnie’s jaw worked furiously. “It wasn’t just because I was worried about the project.”

  “Yeah?” Marge said.

  “Nathan…well, he doesn’t really know his investors.” Chomp, chomp, chomp.

  “That’s not unusual. But…” I prompted.

  “They’re friends of friends back in Philly.” Arnie took the soggy cigar out of his mouth. He’d chewed it in half. “And he thinks they’re Family.”

  Chapter 56

  “What?” Marge’s face was red. “You knew this and…”

  “The investors are related?” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Babe, I didn’t know until we were already in.” Arnie pleaded with Marge. “And by then, there was Nathan to consider and…”

  “Are they the wild cousins or something?” I said. “The bad sheep of the family?”

  “I cannot believe you put us in bed with the mob.”

  Oh.

  Shit.

  Marge picked up her purse from the kitchen counter and walked past the couch to the garage door without so much as a glance at Arnie. “And I hope you’re comfy there, because no one else is going to be sleeping with you.”

  I knew next to nothing about the mob. Sure, I knew organized crime existed, and from time to time I’d hear about the Mexican mob, La Familia, but it all seemed like something out of an old movie.

  This new information threw another wrench into the works. Maybe the investors killed Mongo and Billie in order to send a message to Nathan. But what sort of message? That he needed to make Gold Bug work? Or did Nathan have debts or ties he didn’t tell Arnie about?

  I called Uncle Bob. “I’m not available right now but if you’ll leave a—”

  I hung up. Still in Sedona with Bette, I guessed. I didn’t want to leave a message about organized crime on his voicemail, and besides, Arnie had said Nathan thought the investors were mafia. I started to call Matt, to talk things through, like I always did. Luckily I remembered his ex-fiancée before his phone even rang. I hung up and dialed again. “Hey, Pink,” I said, then stopped. What exactly did I want to talk to him about? Impulsively spilling my guts had got me in trouble before. I needed a little time to think through my questions before I asked them. So when he said, “What’s up, Ivy?” I didn’t tell him I was worried about the mob. I just said, “Do you have time for a little target practice this morning?”

  Bam! Bam! Bam!

  “Dang,” I said. “Missed that last shot.” I squinted at the target Pink brought. Two of my shots had hit the paper head, but one was several inches past the left ear.

  “You seem tensed up. Keep your legs straight, but relaxed. And don’t tighten your fingers—don’t want to slap the trigger. Now, try again.”

  Bam! Bam! Bam!

  “Huh.” Pink stared at the target. “Exactly like the first time.” Even the missed shot was nearly in the same place as the first one. “Try again.”

  I did. Same results.

  “Interesting,” Pink said as we drove back to the Gulch in my pickup. “You’re off your game today. Any reason why? Maybe it’s the same reason you asked me out here today?”

  “Let me see, I had a fight with my boyfriend, can’t find my friends’ dog, and I’m worried that the Mafia is somehow mixed up in Gold Bug Gulch.” Okay, I just thought it—didn’t say it out loud. Not yet. Instead I said, “Hey, I forgot to tell you. Chance is really Gunther Schmidt from Munich. A German cowboy. Wild, huh?”

  “Not as much as you might think. The Wild West is big in Germany. They even got theme towns like the Gulch there.”

  “You sound like Uncle Bob.”

  “Who do you think told me?”

  The strip of cottonwoods came in sight, a beautiful soothing green. I rolled down my window to catch the cool air from the creek, inhale its scent.

  Hey. There was a cowboy hat where it shouldn’t be, behind a boulder overlooking the creek. It was attached to Chance, who was hunched down behind the rock. Then, movement on the other side of the rock. I slowed down the car. Was the person Chance was hiding from about to find him?

  “Why’d you slow—”

  I shushed Pink, who’d been blowing smoke out the passenger window. Too late. Don’t know if he heard Pink’s voice or the sound of my truck, but Chance turned around. So did the other man. It was Frank.

  A look I couldn’t define—fear maybe?—flashed across Frank’s face in the second before he recognized me. Then his expression relaxed into the easygoing one I knew. “Hey, Ivy.”

  “What’re you boys up to?” I said. “Looking for gold?”

  “Bats,” Chance said. “We’re looking for bats.”

  “Yeah, I thought I saw some a few nights ago,” Frank said. “Might be roosting in those trees down there.” He pointed toward the creek, but not in the direction he and Chance had been looking.

  “Good luck. See you soon, Chance.” Our first of the day’s three gunfights was in an hour.

  “I’ll be back,” he said in a very good Schwarzenegger imitation. Ah
, now I knew why his voice often sounded forced and clipped. He was trying to hide his German accent.

  “Ivy.” Pink watched the men in my rearview mirror as we drove away. They hadn’t moved.

  “Yeah, they were lying.” I swerved to avoid a big rock in the road. “Even I know bats don’t fly during the day.” I went around a bend and pulled the pickup off the shoulder, where it’d be hidden from Frank and Chance. “Wanna go see what they were really looking at?”

  “If I’d have known I was going to be tromping through the dirt, I’d have worn different shoes,” Pink grumbled as he followed me down a sort-of path to the creek, slipping and sliding in his hard-soled shoes.

  “You did know you’d be tromping around in the dirt when you agreed to help me practice shooting,” I said. “And watch out for the quicksand.”

  “In the desert?”

  “There’s some near that old snag.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me. Quicksand in the desert.”

  “Fine, take your chances. See if I help you out of the muck as it swallows you whole. Hey, shhh. Listen.”

  I crouched down behind a fallen tree, where I could just see the boulder where Chance and Frank had been hiding. Where they still hid—I could see movement behind the rock.

  “Shhh,” I whispered to Pink, who had joined me. “Can’t you breathe softer?”

  “Gotta stop smoking,” he wheezed.

  I peered over the log in the same direction Chance and Frank had been looking. Only the creek, sparkling in the sunlight, trees swaying above it in the breeze, birds flitting from branch to branch and singing of their love of water and trees in the desert.

  “There.” Pink pointed. “Just to the left of that big tree.”

  I squinted. “The big tree. Thanks. That narrows it down a whole bunch.” I heard it then. Josh’s voice. I followed the sound to, yep, the left of a big tree. Josh stood on the edge of the tall grass, in the shade with his back to us.

  “You see who he’s talking to?” whispered Pink.

  “No.” Whoever they were—it looked like a small group of people, maybe three—stood back in the woods. Their silhouettes blended into the trees and tall brush around them.

  I looked over at Frank and Chance. They were so intent on Josh and the group with him that they hadn’t noticed Pink and me at all.

  “Can you hear what they’re saying?” Pink cocked an ear toward the creek and frowned. “Damn, I’m getting old.”

  “Shh.” I listened hard. And above the sound of birdsong and the burbling creek, one word floated up to me. “Gold.”

  Chapter 57

  “Bats, huh?” Standing outside the stage door, I put my Annie Oakley hat on my head, tugging it down snug so it wouldn’t fall off. “I never knew they flew during the daytime.”

  “Didn’t today.” Chance took the blanks I handed him and filled his pistol. “Let me see your bullets too.”

  I opened the breech of my rifle and slid out the rounds. “See, all blanks. I marked the ends of them with red nail polish so it’s easy to tell.”

  Chance grunted his approval and I placed the rounds back into my rifle. “I didn’t know you and Frank were friends.”

  He shrugged and looked down the street, where about a hundred people had gathered for the upcoming gunfight.

  No way he’d answer any questions about him and Frank shadowing Josh, so I chose another, more innocent question: “Is that where you went after Billie’s death?”

  “Thought you said you weren’t single.”

  “What? No, I mean, yes, I mean, what?”

  “I saw you with him again. Your man. In your truck.”

  “Pink is not my—why does it matter?”

  “It matters to the man you are with.” He snorted. “Women.”

  I turned on him. “I have had it with you guys saying ‘women’ all the time. It’s offensive and it doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

  “It means you are all the same.”

  “We are not. This is obviously about Billie, but that’s not fair. You already knew about her and Mon—” Dang. He’d distracted me. I needed to wrestle back control of the conversation. “Let’s not get off topic here. We’re not talking about me or Billie. We’re talking about you, Gunther.”

  Chance didn’t move, but something clicked behind his eyes. “You talkin’ to me?” he said in his best De Niro.

  “Yes, I am, Gunther Schmidt from Munich.”

  “So you know.”

  “Why hide it?”

  “Who would hire a cowboy named Gunther?”

  “You could go by Gun.” I thought of Arnie. I wondered if Marge had come home.

  “Gun. Gun. Shit, you’re right.”

  “And why make up the whole story about Wyoming?”

  “Because no one would hire—”

  “A cowboy from Germany. Right. But you’re an actor. You can play lots of roles. Is being a cowboy so important to—”

  “Yes.” Chance cut me off. “It is. And it’s time for our shootout.”

  “Folks, we hear word there might be a gunfight coming up,” Nathan’s voice said over the loudspeakers mounted on the front of the buildings. “So we’d like you to line up on the sides of the streets, for safety’s sake.” The crowd obediently got into place, and Chance and I did the same.

  Nathan played the beginning of the musical accompaniment for “Anything You Can Do” over the speakers as Chance and I opened the show with the bit of dialogue I’d written. The audience laughed appreciatively at all the right places. Then right on cue, Chance sang, “Everything I can do, you do much badder. Everything you do is badder than me.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it’s not.” I aimed at the bell hanging from the saloon porch.

  “Yes, it—”

  Bam! Clang!

  The audience applauded madly.

  Chance scowled and sang, “Any bell you can ring I can ring louder, I can ring any bell louder than you.”

  We bantered back and forth until Chance squeezed off a shot. The bell tinkled (via a pull from the fishing line).

  “I rang it louder, didn’t I, folks?” I shouted. The crowd roared in my favor. Audience participation was always a hit.

  I sang the opening line to the song’s bridge: “I can shoot my dinner.”

  “I’m a breadwinner,” sang/boasted Chance.

  “I can really bake.” I aimed at the flour sack.

  “You should see my cake.”

  “Without no flour?” Poof! The sack exploded. “Don’t look so sour,” I sang to Chance.

  The rest of the song went swimmingly. We finished the gunfight at one fifteen. We had two more scheduled showdowns, one at three and one at five, with melodrama shows at two and four, then I needed to tend bar from five ’til nine. I could change into my melodrama costume in five minutes, so if I were quick about it, I had just enough time to do a little investigating.

  Chapter 58

  I moseyed down the street, nodding at oldsters and chatting with little kids, until I reached the mouth of the blacksmith shop. A small crowd had gathered outside. I joined them, standing on tiptoe to see over their shoulders.

  The orange light of the glowing forge reflected off Josh’s face like the devil light at a haunted house. His hammer clanged against the anvil, and sparks flew from the piece of iron he held with his tongs. His eyes narrowed behind his safety glasses as he concentrated on the next blow. Then those eyes flicked up and looked straight at me.

  Had he seen Pink and me spying on him?

  “Not someone you’d want to be mad at you,” said a guy in the crowd.

  Josh must have heard the comment. He held my eyes for a moment longer, then
said, “Actually, it’s sort of the opposite.” He lifted the piece of iron, now curled upon itself like a snail shell. “Before I found smithing, I was an angry man.” Frank’s crooked nose flashed in front of me. “Now, this work burns away the rage like an impurity in the metal.” He dunked the piece of iron into a vat of water. It sizzled, and steam rose like an instant thundercloud. “Smithing is actually very calming.”

  He didn’t look calm to me—the muscles in his arms tight and ropy, his hands clenched, his jaw jutting forward…

  Someone beside me made a little noise, like a chuckle stuck deep in his throat. He had his back turned to me and wore a plaid Western-cut shirt, so new it was still creased from the package. He turned and I recognized him, along with his group of similarly clad friends. Nathan’s investors. Right behind them was Frank, whose weathered face was scrunched up in concentration. Was he trying to listen to the investors’ conversation? I slipped behind him, so I could listen too.

  “Pounding stuff makes me feel better too,” said New Shirt. His buddies all laughed.

  “Me, I like shooting things,” said a guy in a new black cowboy hat.

  “I’m a man of simple tastes,” said another. “I just like money.”

  Someone jostled me right into Frank. “Oh, Ivy,” he said, “Crap. Am I late for the show?”

  I followed his gaze to an old clock mounted on the front of the bank across the street, which was being retrofitted into the Saguaro Savings and Loan Shooting Gallery. “Yeah,” I lied. “I thought I’d better find you. Let’s go.”

  We wove through the crowds of tourists in the streets. “So you and Chance are friends?”

  “Not really. He seemed interested in the bats though, and I’m always looking for more allies in the fight against—”

  “But you’re really not friends? So he didn’t stay at your house after Billie died?”

  Frank sighed and scratched the top of his head. “Okay.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been helping him out, so he came to me when Billie died. He was heartbroken. A couple days before, they’d been out at some bar. Chance was happy he’d been cleared and was acting all goofy. Billie accused him of faking his grief over killing Mongo. They fought, never got a chance to make up. He couldn’t get over it, wanted a place to hole up for a few days. No crime in that.”