Homesick Blues

by Steve Brewer

  HOMESICK BLUES

  By Steve Brewer

  Copyright 2016 Steve Brewer

  Cover design by Denise Weaver Ross

  ISBN-13: 978-1540300720

  ISBN-10: 1540300722

  Chapter 1

  Jackie Nolan saw the smoke from miles away, a thick black column italicized by the ceaseless New Mexico wind. She topped a rise in the arid landscape and found the source of the smoke: a compact car burning on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 550.

  She couldn't tell the car's make or model or original color. Just a black hulk now, its tires and windows gone, its interior still filled with flames.

  Jackie slowed. She could see for miles in every direction: Sandstone mesas and wind-scoured plains, but no houses, no people, no cops. Just a burning car in the middle of nowhere.

  She steered her aged Ford pickup onto the paved shoulder, stopping across the highway from the car and upwind of the roiling black smoke.

  She checked her phone, and was unsurprised to find she had no service out here, fifty miles northwest of Albuquerque. She pocketed the phone and turned off the engine.

  Jackie sat there a few more seconds, working up her nerve, then forced herself to open her door. The summer wind rushed into the cab, and she gagged on the stench as she got out of the truck.

  "Jesus Christ."

  She coughed and gagged some more, resisting the urge to jump back into her truck and scream away from there. The air reeked of burning gasoline and scorched paint and melted plastic, but underlying it all was a sickly barbecue-grill smell that could only be the scent of charred flesh.

  Jackie lifted her black sunglasses so she could wipe her watering eyes. The wind whipped her long ponytail across her face, but she pushed it out of the way. She put the sunglasses back on, as if they would offer some protection from the horrid sight.

  Still coughing, she pulled the collar of her loose chambray shirt up over her nose, trying to keep out the worst of the stench. Breathing through her mouth, she approached the burning car.

  She could see the silhouette of the driver amid the flames, a thin, blackened husk only vaguely shaped like a human. No others in the little car, as far as she could see, but one burned-up person was enough to make plenty of stink.

  Jackie looked up and down the empty highway. Had the car caught on fire by itself, so quickly that the driver couldn't escape? Had the driver set it on fire? Seemed an unlikely place for a suicide, out in this barren country, all alone.

  She couldn't get closer because of the heat radiating from the blaze. The asphalt felt sticky underfoot as she circled the car, trying to get a better look inside. She stepped off the pavement, and nearly stumbled over a purse.

  The maroon leather purse lay just off the shoulder of the highway, among clumps of September-dry broomweed. It was a clutch-style bag, unzipped and yawning open. Jackie could see a thin leather wallet inside, along with a glinting brass lipstick and a black hairbrush.

  After looking around once more, she bent and picked up the purse. The usual stuff inside. Kleenex and ballpoints and makeup and loose change. No phone or keys, but she presumed they burned up in the car. She checked the wallet. Empty of cash, but there were two credit cards and a debit card and a New Mexico driver's license, all bearing the name "Nancy D. Ames."

  She assumed Nancy Ames was the crispy critter behind the steering wheel. But what was her purse doing out here in the grass? Not likely that she tossed it out the window as flames swallowed her up. The purse was clean and undamaged. Clearly, someone took it out of the car before it caught fire.

  A chill crawled up Jackie's sweat-damp back. Had someone killed Nancy Ames and left her here in the burning car? If so, where was that murderer now?

  She looked around the windswept landscape. The long straightaway of asphalt narrowed to a point as it disappeared over a distant ridge to the east. Still nobody, but someone would come eventually to investigate the smoke.

  Jackie looked inside the wallet again, questions buzzing through her mind. Could she make use of these credit cards? The ID? She took out the driver's license and studied it a moment. The photo showed an unsmiling woman in her early thirties. She wore a plain blue blouse and she had short, spiky hair. Jackie tilted the license away from the sun's glare so she could read the fine print.

  Date of birth made Nancy Ames thirty-one years old, three years younger than Jackie.

  Hair: Brown. Same as Jackie.

  Eyes: Brown. Same as Jackie.

  Height: Five-foot-eight. One inch shorter than Jackie.

  Weight: One hundred and fifty pounds. Only a few pounds less than her. (Okay, maybe ten.)

  The photo didn't look much like Jackie, but adjustments could be made. Could she pass for Nancy Ames?

  Jackie needed a new identity. She was on her way home to Albuquerque after two years away, and she worried about who might be waiting for her there. But could she walk away from this fire with the victim's purse and papers? What about Nancy's family? What about the police investigation to come?

  Stop wasting time, she told herself. You already know what you're going to do. Do it.

  Jackie put the driver's license back in the wallet and the wallet back in the purse. She tucked the purse under her arm and strode across the blacktop to her pickup truck, not once looking back at the waning fire.

  She climbed behind the wheel and set the purse on the seat beside her. Then she cranked the pickup's trusty old engine and roared away from the scene of the crime.

  Chapter 2

  Jackie Nolan flinched as a car topped the ridge, headed toward her. It was a dark sedan and, for a second, she thought it must be a cop. But the car sped past and she saw it was a streamlined Toyota carrying a young couple, the clean-cut man behind the wheel. They were staring at the smoke in the distance rather than at Jackie's passing truck. Nothing to see here. Just another twenty-year-old Ford F-150 pickup, the most common vehicle on the rough roads of Indian Country, though this particular truck was shiny-clean and sported a matching red camper shell over the bed.

  She checked her mirrors and saw the dark sedan reach the burning car. Brake lights flared as it stopped on the shoulder not far from the dwindling fire. Jackie lost sight of the Good Samaritans as she crested the ridge.

  Another twinge of guilt over taking the purse, but she shook it off. Sometimes, you had to do the expedient thing to survive. She'd learned that much over the past few years. The hard way.

  She'd gotten mixed up with some bad people in Albuquerque, and it was her own damned fault. She'd turned to theft as a way to save her from her parents' mounting medical bills, but the end result hadn't been healthy for anyone. Some people died. She'd come close to death herself, close enough to know that death wasn't for her.

  After it was over, Jackie made a deal with the feds and let herself be swallowed up by the Witness Security program. She'd uprooted her ailing mother, taking her to a small town in the Colorado mountains, where they assumed new identities. Not that her mother ever answered to anything but "Marge." She suffered from early-onset dementia that started in her late fifties. Jackie had become her caretaker after her father died. She'd had no choice but to take her mother undercover with her.

  Marge went downhill rapidly after they moved away from Albuquerque's familiar environs. A heart attack took her in the night four months ago. By that point, her mind was so far gone, death had seemed a blessing.

  Under WitSec, Jackie had become Gwen Rogers, an office worker at a used car dealership in Montrose, population 13,000. Beautiful country, though Jackie hadn't cared much for the sleepy town itself. She hadn't liked the job, either, doing paperwork all day in a windowless office while the Rocky Mountains were just outside. She sure as hell hadn't liked answering to the name "
Gwen."

  She'd left all that behind now, chased out of the WitSec program by the amorous attentions of a U.S. marshal named Ellis McGuire, who operated out of a satellite office in Grand Junction. McGuire was her "handler" in the WitSec program, and he seemed to take that title literally. Whenever they were in the same room, Jackie stayed busy dodging his passing touches and lingering hands. She came away from every weekly meeting feeling like she'd survived a prizefight.

  McGuire could make her life miserable if he chose – pulling her in at odd hours, dropping incriminations into her federal file, even letting her enemies know she was in Montrose – and he'd hinted he was willing to take such measures if she didn't give in to his advances.

  So goodbye, Gwen Rogers. And goodbye, Marshal Ellis McGuire.

  Jackie wanted to take her life back. She'd never had that many close friends, but the few who remained were in Albuquerque. She missed her sprawling hometown – its lively mix of cultures, the spicy cuisine, the summer thunderstorms, the dance of sunlight and shadow across the craggy face of the Sandia Mountains.

  In Montrose, she'd always felt the surrounding mountains were closing in on her, looming, menacing. She'd literally put herself in a hole, escaping from her troubles, and now she was back out into the sunshine of New Mexico's wide-open spaces.

  Just in time to find a car burning car by the highway.

  She fished the wallet out of the dead woman's purse and flipped it open. Slots facing the driver's license held a debit card, a MasterCard, an American Express card and a library card.

  So Nancy Ames was a reader. Just like Jackie.

  The address on her driver's license was on Mackland Avenue in midtown Albuquerque, not far from the university neighborhood where Jackie grew up. She couldn't picture the exact block, but in that neighborhood, it probably was a standalone house rather than an apartment. Jackie wondered whether Nancy Ames had a family waiting for her at that address. A husband? Kids? Were they worried about her yet?

  Or maybe she lived alone. Perhaps Nancy Ames was a woman like Jackie, one who preferred the quiet of her own company. Maybe she'd given marriage a try and decided it was better alone. Thirty-one was old enough to have been burned in a divorce or two. Once had been enough for Jackie.

  She looked at the photo of Nancy Ames more closely. The spiky hair. The unsmiling expression. Perhaps a touch of disillusionment in her eyes.

  "You're projecting," Jackie said aloud. "You don't know anything about this woman."

  But she could find out. She could go to Nancy's home, see how she lived. Maybe find out why she died.

  If Nancy had no immediate family, perhaps Jackie could become her, at least for a while, long enough to reap whatever assets she left behind.

  Nancy Ames certainly didn't need them anymore.

  Chapter 3

  Joe Dog thumped across the wooden porch and let himself into the pale-yellow house with the keys he'd taken from Nancy Ames' purse. He resisted the urge to look around the quiet neighborhood as he went inside. No reason to act furtive. If anyone did notice him, he appeared to be all business. He was dressed in pressed black jeans, a white Western-style shirt and polished black cowboy boots. Mirrored aviator-style sunglasses – favorite of cops everywhere – covered the upper half of his broad face. His most distinctive feature, the black braid that reached past his shoulder blades, was tucked inside the collar of his shirt, so it appeared that he wore his hair short and parted in the middle.

  Nancy Ames' stucco house was a modest ranch-style number on a square of mottled green sod. Smallest house on the block. Like a lot of the fifty-year-old homes along this street, it had a pitched roof rather than the flat roofs more common in arid Albuquerque.

  The living room had the standard layout of a sofa and two chairs arranged around a coffee table, the sofa facing a wall-mounted TV. The furniture had once been dark blue, but it had faded to a softer shade with age and the brutal Albuquerque sunshine.

  Nancy apparently had liked flowers. A few prints on the walls depicted bright blossoms, and a wall clock was shaped like a yellow daisy. Area rugs with floral designs were spaced about the hardwood floor, which creaked under his feet as he went into the tidy kitchen.

  He discovered the house's surprise when he looked out the back door. Past the usual patio stretched a two-block-long parkland of irrigated lawn and shaggy old elm trees. The narrow park was surrounded by houses, so it seemed they shared a vast back yard.

  To Joe Dog, who'd grown up playing on broken asphalt and glass-littered gravel, the hidden park seemed like a green paradise. Hard to tear himself away from the view, but he needed to get busy. It wouldn't take the authorities long to figure out that Nancy Ames was the corpse in that scorched car. They'd send officers to her address. Joe Dog wanted to be long gone by then.

  He took thin white rubber gloves out of his hip pocket and stretched them onto his hands. Then he started a methodical search of the house, beginning with the kitchen cabinets. He opened every canister and cereal box and checked inside each one. He didn't bother with the smaller containers; his boss had said the missing money was enough to fill a slim briefcase. Not particularly heavy, but it would take up space.

  He looked inside the freezer, the dishwasher and the oven. No dice. He checked behind the appliances and under them, and climbed up onto the countertop to check the tops of the cabinets. Nothing but dust.

  He sighed as he moved into the living room. He was beginning to have a bad feeling about this.

  Joe Dog had expected the money to be in Nancy's car with her, so he hadn't taken time to question her. She'd been so screechy and loud, once she recognized him, that he'd felt forced to silence her immediately. Then he'd searched the car and the trunk, only to find she didn't have the money with her. The only sign she'd ever had the missing cash was three one-hundred-dollar bills he found folded inside her wallet. He'd pocketed those before tossing her purse aside and splashing gasoline all over the interior of Nancy Ames' car.

  He sniffed at his fingers, which still smelled of gasoline, even through the rubber gloves.

  Joe Dog looked under the furniture in the living room and lifted every cushion, but found no briefcase full of cash. He moved quicker now, more determined to check every cranny as fast as he could. The money had to be here somewhere.

  He sure as hell didn't want to go back to his boss empty-handed. Grant Sheridan was the demanding sort, expecting everything in his world to be as manageable as his sleek black hair. He didn't respond well to disappointment.

  You'd think, given that most of Sheridan's fortune came from real estate, he'd be accustomed to occasionally getting "no" for an answer. Deals fall through. People change their minds. But Sheridan always expected to come out on top. Sometimes, he needed help. Some muscle to keep a contractor in line, or a little menace to persuade a reluctant landowner to sell, and that's why he kept Joe Dog on the payroll.

  Joe Dog was not a tall man, but he was built squarely, so his body seemed to go straight from his broad shoulders to the ground. His round head sat flush atop this cube with hardly any neck to get in the way. A woman told him once that he was so square and stiff, he seemed to come from a set of Legos. That had pretty much ended their friendship.

  Giving up on the living room, he moved to Nancy's bedroom, quickly checking under the mattress and under the box spring, and pawing through the closet.

  A shelf held two brightly patterned hat boxes, and those gave him hope for a moment. But one box was full of photos and mementos, and the other held, guess what, a hat. Pink, with a flower on the brim.

  He returned the boxes to the shelf, then checked the back corners of the closet for a briefcase. Nothing. No money stuffed among the shoes that littered the closet floor, and nothing in the pockets of her coats. The bedside tables held the usual pills and creams and lubricants, but no money.

  Frustrated now, Joe Dog tossed through Nancy Ames' dresser drawers. Nothing but undies and socks and sweaters.

  Where had sh
e hidden that goddamned money? She couldn't have gone far with it. There hadn't been time. Mr. Sheridan got word almost immediately when she failed to deliver the money. He'd sent Joe Dog after her right away, and Joe Dog had arrived here just as she was leaving the house. So how long was that money in her possession before he caught up to her? An hour? She would've had time to pack the overnight bag he'd found in her trunk, but not much more.

  Maybe she had the bag packed already. Maybe she'd been waiting for such an opportunity and was ready to run the first time she was trusted with cash. Maybe she already had a place in mind where the money would be safe.

  Of course, she could've simply stopped at a bank on her way home and put the money in a safe deposit box. The thought made him wince. Mr. Sheridan would never get his hundred grand out of a safe deposit box, not with Nancy Ames dead and cremated.

  Joe Dog moved to the bathroom, checking under the neatly folded towels and lifting the lid off the toilet tank. A corner cabinet held cosmetics and curlers and Q-Tips, but no cash.

  Spare luggage was in the second bedroom, stacked neatly in the closet. All empty. Nothing under that bed, either, and the dresser drawers were all empty. A guest room. He had trouble picturing Nancy Ames ever having overnight guests. The few times he'd seen her around Mr. Sheridan's office, she'd always seemed sort of shy and standoffish.

  Maybe she just didn't like Indians. He got that reaction sometimes, especially from old white people who still believed that the only good Indians were dead ones.

  Joe Dog told people he was full-blood Apache, just like Geronimo, and he looked the part. But his real name was Joseph Dominguez, and he suspected he was at least as much Mexican as he was Native American. His mother had birthed seven babies with five different men, and Joe Dog, the youngest, was the only one who looked Apache. The others came in a variety of hues. One of his half-brothers, Ricky, was clearly from African-American stock; all the schoolgirls said he looked like Kobe Bryant. It was Ricky who'd first started calling Joseph by the street name "Joe Dog." The name stuck, and now, twenty years later, most people didn't know he'd ever been called anything else.