by Dixie Cash
Seconds ticked away before the operator returned and reported no listing.
“None at all? You looked under Heart Break Hotel?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“This is just crazy. Oops, sorry, ma’am, I wasn’t talking about you. Thanks for your help.” Debbie Sue hung up.
“What? What did you find out?” Edwina asked.
“You will not believe this, Ed. There is no phone listing for Adolf Sielvami. There’s no listing for Keeper of the King Museum. And nowhere in the operators’ computer is there a street in Las Vegas called Heart Break Hotel Lane.”
Edwina opened her palms. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Did you take Vic’s house slippers to Hogg’s?”
“Yep. They’re safe and sound in that clear plastic case.”
“Did Billy Don finish the interviews with the employees?”
Edwina gave her a wry look and a nod.
A new anxiety pricked Debbie Sue. “Oh, no. He screwed it up, didn’t he?”
“It wasn’t his fault altogether. None of them speak English worth a damn and Billy Don doesn’t speak much Spanish. With Judd’s help, he found out that the little Mendez girl that busses the tables was with her parents all evening and never left the house until this morning. I called Belinda Sanchez myself and confirmed that the two short-order cooks were home all of last night. They kept saying, ‘Aquellos zapatos feos?’ I didn’t know what that meant, but Judd said it means, ‘Those ugly shoes?’ They must not be Elvis fans.”
“They wouldn’t have to be fans to take the shoes,” Debbie Sue said, now chewing on her thumbnail.
“I know. But when they get off work at Hogg’s, they clean practically all of the businesses in town. I don’t know when they sleep. I don’t believe they stole the shoes anyway. If they took anything, it’d be the cash.”
Debbie Sue ceased chewing her thumbnail and began gnawing her pencil. “I still can’t believe there’s no sign of this odd-named guy in Vegas. This means we have more to worry about than who took the shoes, Ed. Now we have to find out who loaned them to Hogg’s in the first place.”
chapter three
Fort Worth, Texas
Avery Deaton adjusted her sun visor against the morning sun hovering low in the east. She could think of a dozen things she would rather be doing, but here she was on I–30, driving bumper to bumper to Dallas Love Field being the trouper she was known to be. She would soon fly to a part of Texas she had no desire to visit, on an assignment she didn’t want. Her life had become one long succession of doing things she didn’t want to do.
Her mind drifted to the conversation she’d had with her editor two weeks earlier: Now, now, Avery Bittersweet. I am not exiling you to Siberia. It’s a perfectly legitimate story. I’ve got reporters who would jump at this assignment…. She sighed.
This wasn’t the first time Hank Hodge, her editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, had resorted to using her unpleasant middle name to distract her and gain the advantage in a debate. Every time he did it, she rued the day she had, in an unguarded moment, revealed the name to him and a few of her co-workers.
This wasn’t the first skirmish with Hank over an assignment, either. Working for the Star-Telegram, with its more than a million weekly readers, was a great job. In an effort to gain credibility and respect as a reporter, Avery had often valiantly reported on stories no one else wanted to touch. But traveling to a small town located on the far reaches of the West Texas high plains the first week of January to cover a three-day celebration of a dead icon’s birthday was a harbinger that career-wise, the coming year would be no different from the previous one.
As far as Avery was concerned, the far reaches of West Texas and a tiny town that had never crossed her radar were very far indeed. Not to mention that at this time of year that part of Texas was known for freezing weather or even ice and snow. Siberia, for sure.
She wasn’t even an Elvis Presley fan. She had tried to talk Hank into letting her cover the president, who would be in Fort Worth the first week of January, but that assignment went to a reporter who had been with the newspaper an even shorter time than she had. She had begged Hank to send her out to the annual Fort Worth stock show and rodeo, told him she would even do a feature on llamas. None of that had made an impression on him.
But what had made an impression on her was when he had looked at her from beneath a furrowed brow and said, “I can promise you a byline.” He might as well have said I can hand you a pot of gold.
So here she was, now within a mile of her exit and the Southwest Airlines terminal at Love Field, about to fly to another world. She was within fifteen minutes of the airport, with more than an hour to spare before her departure.
Engaging the right turn signal, she checked her rearview mirror for clearance, then moved to the right lane. From out of nowhere a monster black Ford Expedition bore down on her, dangerously close to the rear bumper of her smaller VW bug.
It swerved to the right lane as if it were a roller skate rather than a tank and passed her on her right side, cutting her off from her exit. The driver, a dark-haired male wearing a white turtleneck, waved. She got a flickering glimpse of a Seattle Seahawks sticker on his back bumper.
Unable to make the exit, she pounded her horn with her fist. “That’s my exit, you ass!”
Frantically, she looked for the next exit, which had to be several miles up the freeway. By the time she reached it, made the U-turn under the freeway and battled her way back to the route she needed, she was close to being late enough to be denied boarding her flight.
A dozen nasty thoughts of revenge rushed through Avery’s mind as she pulled into the parking garage near the Love Field terminal and parked her VW. She fought her suitcase out of her trunk, smashed her finger and broke two nails. “Oh, hell,” she mumbled.
She began a half-walking, half-running dash to the elevator. About six vehicles up from her own, she passed a parked black Ford Expedition. And there on the back bumper, just as it had been moments before on the freeway, was a Seattle Seahawks sticker, declaring the driver a fan for life. She left her suitcase, walked over and touched the hood, noting that it was still warm. The Expedition had recently been parked.
It was the same vehicle. She knew it. In North Texas, a Seattle Seahawks bumper sticker was more revealing than DNA or fingerprints.
Avery would almost gladly miss her flight for this opportunity. Seldom did a girl get to exact the retribution she silently pledged. She glanced at her watch, then began digging through her cavernous shoulder bag until she found a retractable ballpoint pen. “Yes!” she hissed, yanking it from her bag.
She scanned the area to see whether she was alone. Assured that she was, she set her purse on the Expedition’s hood, unscrewed the pen casing and removed the narrow plunger that pushed the ink cartridge from its casing. She had learned a lot of things in college, she thought wickedly, and this was one of them.
She squatted and unscrewed the black valve stem cap from the Expedition’s right front tire and pushed the plastic pen plunger deeply into the stem protruding from the tire base. She returned the cap, leaving it only partially screwed on.
Even before she had straightened to her full height, she heard the hiss of air leaving the tire. Within a matter of minutes that tire would be flat as a flitter, as her grandma used to say. Avery couldn’t hold back an evil grin.
Squaring her shoulders, she smoothed the wrinkles from her clothing, gathered her purse and suitcase and trekked toward the elevator. As the elevator doors glided shut, she could see the Expedition already leaning to the right. “Don’t mess with Texas, asshole,” she mumbled.
She continued to smile and even found a jaunty little hum. Yes, sir. She hadn’t gone to UT for four years for nothing.
Sam Carter, Dallas Morning News rookie sports reporter, settled himself into a seat on a Southwest Airline flight from Dallas to Midland. He had never been to the small West Texas city, having relocated fro
m Idaho only nine months back. The farthest west of Dallas he had traveled in Texas had been to neighboring Arlington to cover a Texas Rangers baseball game.
The hour ahead of him gave him time to consider irony. And killing two birds with one stone, an old saying he had heard forever.
The Christmas holiday had caused staffing shortages at the News. The buzz through the office was that someone in the sports department was slated to cover an Elvis Presley event in a small town in West Texas. Soon after that he received an e-mail from sports editor Sid Cantrell calling for an after-lunch meeting. A sinking feeling overtook Sam. The new guy always got the stories no one else wanted, which meant it was his turn to face the music.
After a lunch that sat on his stomach like a bag of rocks, he found himself standing at his boss’s door, sucking in a deep breath, doing a quick ego inventory and wondering if he had the courage to remind his editor that Sam Carter was a respected sports reporter in Boise, Idaho. He had already been made painfully aware that fact carried absolutely no weight in Texas, but it was the only ace in Sam’s hand.
Without even looking away from his computer monitor, his boss had pecked away on his keyboard, all the while informing Sam he was being sent to a small town in West Texas to cover a celebration honoring the King of Rock ’n’ Roll on his birthday, January 8th.
Leaning back against his seat for the takeoff, Sam’s skin tingled and the hair on his forearms stood up as he remembered the next utterance from the editor’s mouth. “The town’s called Salt Lick. Caleb Crawford’s hometown. While you’re out there, get a feature story on his family, friends, old high-school coaches. All that personal shit the readers are dying to know about.”
The very idea had left Sam breathless. Caleb Crawford was the hottest news in the sporting world. When the Dallas Cowboys’ seasoned Pro Bowl quarterback, Jason Paxton, had been injured midway through a lackluster season, the rookie Crawford had come from what had looked to be his permanent spot on the bench to lead the Cowboys in a winning streak that had taken them to serious contention for a Super Bowl slot.
A rookie saving the day wasn’t exactly an earth-shaking event. It had happened before, though not often. The unheard of rest-of-the-story ingredient was that Crawford had played six-man football his entire high-school career, which had earned him a scholarship to a decent Division II college. He had set records and won championships for his high school, but a player going from six-man football to Division II, then on to the pros, just never happened.
But Caleb Crawford had done it. He had been picked up by the Cowboys as a walk-on and the astute, throw-caution-to-the-wind attitude of Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, had given the young guy not only a chance to play pro ball, but an opportunity to play in the biggest game of any football player’s life and dreams.
The fifty-million-dollar contract Jones had presented to him before the season ended hadn’t hurt either, Sam imagined.
Now Caleb Crawford’s incredible luck had extended beyond himself. It had given Sam Carter an opportunity at a career-launching story.
As Sam had turned to leave his editor’s office, willing himself not to trip over his own shoes in his excitement, his boss had stopped him, asked if he was a Cowboy fan and reminded him that sportswriters needed an unbiased, non-prejudicial approach to teams. But in Texas, in Dallas in particular, backing the Dallas Cowboys was expected, no matter who you were.
Sam made a mental note. When he returned from this assignment, he should probably remove the Seattle Seahawks sticker from his SUV’s bumper. Why spit in the eye of the gods?
chapter four
Mid-morning. Debbie Sue was nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. The investigation of the shoe theft called to her, but with the Styling Station’s appointment book filled, she and Edwina were stuck behind the hydraulic chairs. She had shampooed hair and blown it dry, applied acrylic nails in a rainbow of colors and even given Koweba Sanders a permanent.
But her mind was on Anderson’s Cactus Patch RV Park and Billy Don. You never knew when an important find could come from the slightest snippet of information. Questioning the RVers might be a monumental challenge for Salt Lick’s inept sheriff, but Debbie Sue had no choice but to rely on him.
Meanwhile, the Styling Station hummed with activity, lively conversation and excitement. Every customer talked about the Elvis celebration, while in the background, Elvis crooned “Love Me Tender” from the CD player. And through it all, Debbie Sue communicated with Billy Don between customers in furtive, hushed phone calls.
While passing each other in hurried trips to and from the shampoo room, Debbie Sue and Edwina had decided to close the shop at noon. Now, noon had come and gone and she hadn’t heard from Billy Don in an hour, an ominous sign.
Her last appointment was Etta Jo Carlson, a short, square woman with no neck. She looked older than her sixty years, mostly because she did nothing to improve her appearance. No makeup, not even lipstick. But she was blessed with a head of thick, luxurious hair. “Have a seat, Etta Jo,” Debbie Sue said.
Etta Joe slowly let herself down to sit. Debbie Sue could see her studying the string of Christmas lights surrounding the mirror.
The black nylon salon coats wouldn’t fit Etta Jo’s girth, so Debbie Sue draped her with a silver plastic cape. “What are we doing to you today?”
“I’m in the mood for something curly.” Now she studied herself in the mirror. “Those colored lights make my skin a funny color.”
“Hell, girl, colored lights are flattering,” Edwina said.
“They’re festive, Etta Jo,” Debbie Sue said. “Ed and I decided the Christmas decorations made the shop look so pretty, we’d just let them stay on display for Elvis’s birthday celebration.”
Etta Jo’s eyes cut toward the small Christmas tree still standing in one corner of the salon. “If you ask me, this Elvis celebration is a bunch of nonsense. All it’s gonna do is bring a bunch of foreigners in here and I don’t think it’s gonna help Hogg’s business one bit.”
As Debbie Sue bit her tongue and rolled Etta Jo’s hair onto tiny curlers, the woman continued to gossip and complain and throw out unsolicited weather forecasts. At last Debbie Sue finished and escorted her to the hair dryer, adjusted the temperature and handed her the latest edition of the National Enquirer.
Edwina sank into her own hydraulic chair and pointed to Debbie Sue’s chair beside it. “Sit down and let’s rest a bit. This is the first time I’ve been off my feet since early this morning. My dogs are barking.”
Debbie Sue plopped into her chair beside Edwina.
“Buddy left town this morning?” Edwina asked.
“Yeah. That’s why I hated getting that five-A.M. call, especially knowing he’s planning on being gone several days.” Buddy’s recent appointment as a Texas Ranger took him farther away from Salt Lick and more frequently than Debbie Sue had suspected it would.
“Did he say where he’s going?”
“Somewhere down by the border.”
“Drug smuggling,” Edwina said.
No doubt, Debbie Sue thought. All hell had broken loose somewhere down there. Buddy was part of some kind of hush-hush investigation, and Debbie Sue sensed it was big. And dangerous. But she had learned long ago she couldn’t let herself think of the danger her husband might encounter.
She forced her thoughts to the mystery that threatened to derail the Elvis celebration and the fact that Billy Don hadn’t called. “I vote for you to go get us some lunch,” she said to Edwina. “I’ve gotta comb out Etta Jo, then I’m locking up so I can think.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’m starving.” Edwina pointed to Etta Jo, who was absorbed by her reading, her glasses perched on the end of her nose. “How come you got her under the dryer? You always blow-dry her lovely locks.”
“I was just so damn tired of hearing her talk. I decided to shut her up for a while.”
“I know what you mean,” Edwina said. “I thought she might mellow some after her stroke, bu
t she still knows more about everyone else’s life than she does her own.”
“Yeah. And she’s got more opinions than a radio talk-show host.”
“She sure doesn’t show the bad effects you see in a lot of people who’ve had strokes. You know those tele-whatever powers she’s always bragging about? The ones that enable her to know everything about everybody?”
“Telepathic,” Debbie Sue said. “I think those must’ve shorted out. Lately, she finishes all her conversations with a weather report.”
Edwina chuckled. “Yes, but she’s funny.”
“Well, she must be about done. Time to get her out.” On a great sigh, Debbie Sue rose from her chair. “Don’t leave yet, Ed. We’ll probably get the forecast.”
Debbie Sue switched off the dryer, helped Etta Jo get to her feet and directed her to the styling chair affixed in front of a four-foot-wide mirror. “Just have a seat, Miz Etta Jo.”
Debbie Sue began removing curlers from the chubby woman’s hair, leaving a nest of tiny sausage curls all over her head. “We’ll be finished up here in just a few minutes.”
“I’m in no hurry, dear. Just take your time. A cold front from our neighbors to the north brings a promise of snow.”
“Oh, great,” Debbie Sue said, grinning at Edwina across the top of Etta Jo’s head. “That’s just what we need.”
Etta Jo smoothed out the creases in her skirt, apparently unaware she had uttered something out of the ordinary.
“Hey, girl,” Edwina said, tapping the arm of Etta Jo’s chair with a long acrylic nail. “What’s this I hear about you being sick a few months back? That was just a nasty rumor, right? ’Cause you look terrific.”
“Heavenly days, everybody in town asks me about that. I did have a little spell. My daughter took me to a doctor over in Midland. One of those fancy head specialists. He said I’d had a stroke.” She drew a deep breath. “But between you and me, he couldn’t be more wrong. I walk fine, I got good use of my arms, I don’t drool or nothin’. Those important-lookin’ degrees hanging on the wall don’t mean he knows everything. Besides”—she leaned toward Edwina and lowered her voice—“I think he’s H-O-M-O-sexual…. West Texas will be dry through mid-week, as earlier thunderstorms have stabilized the atmosphere.”