Desert Noir (9781615952236)

by Webb, Betty

  And sang.

  On Tecalote field, the corn was growing green.

  Growing green.

  I came down to the land and I saw.

  I saw the tassels waving in the wind.

  And I sang for joy.

  No tassels waved here. The Hohokam were gone, their forgotten fields reclaimed by sage, cactus, and coyote. They dreamed in the Underworld now with Earth Doctor.

  The Pimas had taken their place.

  As the white man had taken the Pimas’ place.

  When do sins stop?

  I walked over to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the fallen bighorn, its picked-clean bones now gleaming in the sun. In the way of the desert, a few beetles—the tail end of the food chain—still scurried there dining on what tasty morsels still remained. It occurred to me that at the same time the bighorn had fed a small army of scavengers, Clarice’s body lay decomposing in a lead-lined casket, protected from predators and benefiting no one, not even the grass growing on her grave.

  Modern life made no sense.

  Suddenly a wave of sorrow engulfed me for the woman I’d once considered a friend. I thought about the wounds she’d inflicted on others—on Magadalena Espinoza, Dulya Albundo, Cliffie, George Haozous, what she was about to do to her own mother, about to do to me. I thought about all these things, the actions of a soul-twisted woman who would ravage anyone’s dreams for her own self-centered desires.

  I thought about it as the beetles ran through the bighorn’s ribcage, until the sun disappeared behind the mountain and darkness engulfed the valley. I thought about it until I finally figured out who’d killed Clarice.

  Chapter 26

  When I got home, I showered off the dust and nightmares. Then I poured myself a giant glass of iced tea and sat in front of Haozous’s painting for hours, listening to Big Bill Broonzy wail the “I Got Up One Morning Blues,” Elmore James crying out “Blues Before Sunrise,” Jimmy Reed sliding through the incomparable “Bright Lights Big City.”

  Unlike so many people I knew, their pain was not self-inflicted. Instead, it arrived as clean, sharp, and clear as their stories. Their babies done left them, their jobs went bust, their lives weren’t nuthin’ but bowls of shit. Yet they sang on, creating a legacy of beauty that remained long after their own lives had ended.

  Around midnight I finally staggered off to bed. To my surprise, I slept well.

  Chapter 27

  I got up at four a.m., climbed into the Jeep and headed north. Before I called Kryzinski, I needed to make sure that what I suspected—no, what I knew—could be proven in a court of law. For that, I had to hand Kryzinski an illegal entry. I’d do the deed in the darkness, tell him what I’d found, then he could get his own squeaky-clean search warrant. All it would take would be a “belated” memory from me, a little lie in service of a greater truth.

  The construction trailer was dark, the parking lot empty. Dawn was at least an hour off. After driving the Jeep around to the back (just in case), I pulled my lock pick from my carryall, jimmied the lock, and went inside. The only light was from the soft glow of the button on cell phone, which was being charged again at the electrical outlet. The sculpture was where I’d seen it last, on the rosewood table in front of the sofa. I picked it up— damn, it was heavy!—snapped on my flashlight, and looked more carefully at the ground underneath the horse and rider.

  There was the carved signature : Frederick Remington, 1888. As I continued to study it, I saw the crispness of the lines, the lack of the usual seam ridge left behind on cheap copies.

  Because this was no cheap copy. The sculpture was an original casting made by the artist himself, a piece of priceless art the Remington-loving but alimony-paying Evan had told Gus to bring back when he’d sent him out to kill Clarice wearing a pair of Jay Kobe’s old Nikes.

  “I couldn’t let him leave it there,” Evan’s voice said behind me. “What if one of those sticky-fingered cops took it home?”

  I spun around, at the same time reaching for the gun in my bag.

  But I wasn’t fast enough. Something hard slammed into my head, light exploded all around me, and I began to fall.

  Just before I lost consciousness, I heard Evan sob, “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone? She wasn’t worth it. She wasn’t worth anybody’s tears.”

  I came to in total darkness, my knees tucked under my chin. The air around me smelled like gasoline and burned rubber. Where was I? What was happening? Was I stuffed in a storage room somewhere about to be burned to death?

  Frantically, I lifted my hands—mercifully untied—and began to feel around my small prison. I encountered a hard, metallic object and fumbled along it like a blind woman reading Braille. I found another object, this one larger and more rectangular, that appeared to be a tackle box or a tool kit. The soft, round mass in back of me felt like a pillow.

  Then I noticed that the floor was moving, that I was being jostled back and forth. A soft purring, the hushed urrrrrr-urrrrrr-urrrrrr of a finely tuned engine, issued through the walls of my prison. When I raised my hands straight above me, I could touch the ceiling.

  I was in the trunk of a car.

  Being taken somewhere.

  Then I understood that the thick metal object shoved up against my face was probably a jack, the rectangular thing the car’s tool kit. The pillow was no doubt a car cover.

  My fingers scrabbled through the trunk again, hoping to find my carryall with its fully loaded .38 still inside, but it wasn’t there. Evan had probably dumped it someplace else, hoping it wouldn’t be discovered with my body, hoping to put off identification as long as possible. I fingered the throbbing lump at the back of my head and felt something sticky. I was bleeding, but considering the thickness of the blood’s texture, I estimated that the wound had already begun to coagulate. So far, so good. I cocked my head and listened carefully, but I couldn’t hear other traffic sounds over the motor’s murmur. The jouncing I was enduring was getting worse, sometimes flinging me all the way up against the trunk lid.

  Evan was taking me off-road somewhere, probably to dump me in the desert. Just as he had done to Gus.

  How stupid I had been! When I thought back, the signs had all been there. Evan was living in the trailer and just because he wasn’t there when I arrived didn’t mean he wouldn’t come back. It was the tail end of Saturday night, for Pete’s sake, and he’d probably been out yowling with all the other tomcats.

  But it was too late for “I shouldda’s.” I needed to be thinking about the future—such as what I’d do the minute that car came to a stop and Evan unlocked the trunk to finish the job.

  How hard did he think he’d hit me? Strong enough to kill? He probably thought he’d killed me, but I’d been turning, in motion, and the blow had been a glancing one. I could see a faint glimmer of hope in my situation. If Evan thought I was already dead, I would at least gain the element of surprise when he opened the car’s trunk to dispose of my body.

  My body.

  I didn’t like the way that sounded. Not at all. Then, for some reason, an odd question occurred to me…

  Had Agnezia prayed for me last night?

  Well, well. They say there were no atheists in foxholes and now I had proof that there were few atheists in car trunks, too. But not believing in miracles, I shook the thought out of my head. The only thing that would save me now would be my own actions.

  A particularly severe lurch of the car threw me against the side of the trunk and smashed my nose against the jack. Stars again, a rush of hot liquid—blood, not tears. I was too terrified to cry. Trying not to injure myself further, I probed the bridge of my nose and found it misshapen. Another probe again—more stars—and to the accompaniment of a scraping sound, the bridge moved.

  My nose was broken.

  The car lurched again but I was able to brace my arms against the side of the trunk and keep my ruined face away from the jack.

  The jack.

  It wasn’t my .38, but now I had a
weapon. I only hoped that I’d get a chance to use it.

  Was it still dark? I raised my head again and stared at the area where I thought the trunk lid might connect to the body of the car. A cat’s whisker of light bled through the darkness. It was already growing uncomfortably hot in the trunk and I knew it would soon become an oven. How long had I been unconscious? Minutes? An hour? How long had Evan been off-road?

  And where off-road?

  I remembered Evan’s car, an Infiniti I-30 sedan, not a vehicle known for its off-road capabilities. So he probably wouldn’t be heading up a dirt track into the mountains.

  Just out into the desert.

  With difficulty, I smothered a hysterical laugh. Just the desert? With the last monsoon rain days in the past and daytime temperatures averaging around 115, I’d be lucky, even if I managed to escape from the car trunk, to survive a full day out there. Not unless…

  I searched the floor of the trunk again, hoping to find that plastic jug of water most desert-savvy Arizona residents always carried in their trunks. No such luck. Evan had apparently not been a Boy Scout.

  I lay there quietly with my fingers clutching the jack, and conserved my strength until I felt the car slow down. Then I lifted my head off the floor of the trunk and listened.

  The up and down bumping motion I’d endured changed to a slow, sideways rocking. The purr of the Infiniti’s motor lowered to a troubled growl.

  We had to be in soft dirt. Or sand.

  The river bottom, maybe?

  I began to feel hope again. If we were in the river bottom, my chances might not be so bad. Water from the monsoons frequently collected in small pools and stayed there for days. Water might even be still running in some places. Then I remembered how low an Infiniti rode, how few inches of the undercarriage cleared the pavement. Nobody, not even poor ol’, dumb ol’, murdering ol’ Evan, would be fool enough to drive an Infiniti down into the Salt River bottom. With its low-slung carriage, it would be certain to belly out on the rocks that tumbled down from the mountains.

  The Infiniti’s growl changed to a whine as the car slowed even more. Within a few more seconds, the car stopped moving.

  When I cocked my head, I could hear a muffled noise which sounded human. A curse? The engine’s whine shrieked up the musical scale into a soprano’s register as the car began to rock furiously backwards, then forwards, then backwards again. Evan must have gotten it mired in sand and now he was trying to rock it out. But he was doing it too quickly, too forcefully, and it was all I could do not to yell at him not to burn up the engine.

  While the car continued its relentless back-and-forth, I took the opportunity to scrunch around in the trunk, to hunch over and get my feet under me. Even though I angled my body to the side to gain maximum space, my head still pressed painfully against the trunk’s lid. My spine creaked, my heels jammed into my butt, my knees savaged my chin. But I was balanced on my toes, ready to spring.

  If I only got the chance.

  The Infiniti’s rocking movement continued for a few more minutes until the engine’s shriek became almost unbearable. Stop it! I wanted to call. Look at your tachometer!

  The shrieking continued until I heard the Infiniti give a final desperate wail, then fall silent. I smelled the acrid, metallic odor of overheated metal.

  The fool had burned up the Infiniti’s engine.

  “Fuck!” Evan’s voice was quite clear, now.

  The hair stood up on my arms as I heard a door slam and footsteps crunching around the side of the car towards me.

  Showtime.

  As a key scraped at the trunk lid, I tightened my grip on the heavy jack. Evan probably had a gun and I knew I’d have only one chance at him—and not a very good one at that. After all the time spent in the darkness of the trunk, the morning’s light would probably blind me as soon as Evan lifted the trunk lid.

  Then light exploded into the trunk and I exploded out. Totally blind, I swung the jack in a wide arc with all the strength left in my aching arms.

  I connected.

  I heard a crunch, a grunt. The sound of something big falling.

  A soft, bubbly moan.

  Leaning down and aiming the jack in the direction of the moans, I swung again.

  And again.

  Soon all I could hear was the hot wind rushing through the mesquite.

  Panting, I stood there, cramped muscles screaming. But I kept the jack at the ready until my retinas adjusted to the morning light. When I could finally see again, I stumbled over to Evan’s crumpled form to discover a gaping wound on the left side of his head. He was bleeding profusely and the forehead just above his eye looked slightly misshapen. I pressed my fingers to the carotid artery under his jaw. His pulse was regular, but weak.

  At least I hadn’t killed him.

  I tossed the jack back into the trunk and disentangled the gun from his limp fingers. It was a .45, probably the very .45 he’d shot me with from a rented Taurus. Then, the gun trained on him, I sank onto the sand and tucked my head between my knees. When the dizziness finally passed, I stood up and took a good look around.

  I was surrounded by miles and miles of desert in every direction. Far to the east, under a hot sun which had only just begun its merciless ascent, stood a range of jagged peaks which looked like the western end of the White Tank Mountains. Evan had driven us at least seventy miles out into the desert from Phoenix. The Infiniti, its engine now probably residing in Infiniti heaven, was stuck up to its axles in sand. Even if I’d been able to crank the engine over, there’d still be no digging it out.

  And the day was heating up.

  In disgust, I glanced at Evan. Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us into, Ollie. Then I got up, walked over to him, and—just in case—tied his hands behind him with his own belt, and his ankles with more strips of cloth from his shirt. The dilated pupil didn’t bode well, but I’d seen people injured more severely get up and swing a tire iron at someone. I didn’t want him trying to kill me again when I was busy trying to keep us both alive.

  The knowledge of the severity of our plight made me want to vomit but I didn’t dare. In the next few hours, I’d need all the liquid I could conserve.

  But even if I could conserve the very sweat that dripped from my body, we might both be dead by sundown.

  Chapter 28

  But I wasn’t dead yet.

  Gun firmly in hand, I scrambled onto the Infiniti’s hood, stood on tiptoe and looked around, hoping for a sight of a windmill or a water tank. Nothing. The dirt track Evan had driven the car down curled off to the horizon, passing nothing that looked even remotely man-made. Then I held still for a few moments, listening for any sounds of civilization: machinery, traffic, laughter. But all I heard was the whisper of the wind and a few peeps from cactus wrens.

  Trying to walk out of the desert was a fatal mistake, the very mistake which killed so many tourists and even desert-dwellers every year. Without a survival kit and at least a gallon of water, I had no hope of surviving more than an hour or two out there. First would come the thirst. Then the stomach cramps. Then the hallucinations.

  Next would come the buzzards.

  The climbing sun sent waves of heat rising from the desert floor. I had to do something fast, find us some protection before it became too hot to move. I scanned the landscape again, this time for the presence of any wildlife which might indicate a local water source. I saw none, but my sinking heart lifted somewhat when I spied a patch of barrel cacti. After noting their location, I jumped carefully off the Infiniti. This was no time or place to sprain an ankle.

  Now it was time to inventory the car, and after that, get Evan into some kind of shelter. I didn’t like the sound of his breathing.

  I found the car keys where Evan had dropped them when I’d bashed him in the head, but as I put them in my pocket, I realized how little good they’d do us. While the battery was probably still good, the car’s air-conditioning would only run off it for a few minutes.

&nb
sp; Then the battery, too, would die.

  At this point, the Infiniti was of little more use than scrap metal.

  And the few items I could scavenge from it.

  The open trunk was empty except for the car cover, which was stuffed into a duffel bag; the tool kit; and a battered paperback by Tom Clancy. Still keeping an eye on Evan—head wounds frequently looked worse than they really were—I walked around to the passenger door and rummaged through the glove compartment. There wasn’t much there to help me, either, just his car registration, a few Burger King coupons, and some women’s telephone numbers written on bar napkins. Somehow it didn’t surprise me to discover that Evan was a habitue of the Bourbon Street Circus, a strip club, and Babe’s, a Scottsdale nudie bar. Already looking for wifey No. 4, I guessed.

  “Evan, Evan,” I said, though I was doubtful if he could hear me. “You’ve already been reduced to living in a trailer, eating at Burger King, and here you are, still thinking with your hormones.”

  He didn’t reply. His eyes remained closed.

  The Infiniti’s back seat yielded Evan’s laundry wrapped in a sheet of clear plastic upon the end of which was stamped in red letters, 24-HOUR LAUNDRY AND DRY-CLEANING, A VALLEY

  TRADITION FOR 32 YEARS. The thought that Evan had stopped off last night to get his laundry, and then proceeded to try and kill me seemed sicker than hell. But then again, he was a Hyath, wasn’t he? Those people invented the word sick.

  I hauled my treasures out of the Infiniti and put them in a pile by the trunk. Then I walked back to Evan. Calmer now, I noticed the largest wound I’d inflicted on him had stopped bleeding, and I thought his breathing was easier.

  “Evan!” I shouted, prodding him with my foot. “Wake up!”

  A moan.

  I shouted at him some more and continued to prod him until his left eye opened. The pupil was dilated.