by Ann Charles
This corner of Arizona was littered with porphyry copper deposits inside masses of intrusive rock like the Middle Finger. With ninety percent of the state’s copper coming from porphyry deposits, Ruby could very well be sitting on a piece of land worth ten times more than the mining company had offered.
Unfortunately, mining copper was extremely capital-intensive, and Ruby currently lived on the south side of Hard-Up-Ville.
As he walked around the corner of the porch, he dug in his pocket for the Ford’s keys.
A pair of warblers perched in the crown of a nearby willow sang their hearts out. Mac whistled along with them. Not even Claire’s determination to change Ruby’s mind was going to pop his balloon on such a fine morning.
Then he saw Ruby’s pickup.
“Fuucckk,” he breathed more than spoke aloud as he skidded to a stop. He circled the truck, shaking his head. All four tires were as flat as cow pies.
He kneeled next to the front driver’s side tire, scanning the tread for a screw or nail. Instead, he found a small slice in the outer wall.
Someone had gouged the tire.
Mac scooted to the back tire. It also had a gash in the outer wall.
“Son of a bitch.” He pushed to his feet. This was no accident. It wasn’t a prank, either. First his Dodge, now Ruby’s Ford.
Somebody didn’t want him going anywhere in a hurry.
Could it be Claire trying to interfere? He shook off the thought. She had her quirks, but he didn’t think she’d do something that would cost Ruby money.
Maybe people at the mining company didn’t want him finding something in the mines only they knew about. Then again, the bank stood to lose an easy cash crop if Ruby paid off her loan before they could take the park and mines from her.
There were too many possibilities. He needed time to think things through. More than that, he needed some wheels.
He strode back toward Ruby’s front door, hesitating at the base of the porch stairs.
If he told Ruby about the flats, she’d want to pay for new tires with money she didn’t have. Maybe he could take care of the problem before she took her usual morning break from schooling Jess, and she’d be none the wiser.
It was time to call in a favor.
Minutes later, Mac stood in front of Claire’s Winnebago door. He could hear Johnny Horton singing the chorus to “The Battle of New Orleans” from the other side of the thin piece of aluminum.
Before he could knock, the door flew open. Claire frowned down at him, her hair tousled, her cheeks pink and pillow-lined. Oscar the Grouch stared at him from the front of her long pajama top.
“Mac?” Her voice sounded rusty with sleep.
“I need a ride,” Mac blurted, his manners forgotten at the sight of Claire’s bare legs and purple-painted toenails.
She rubbed her eyes, blinking. “What?”
“Ruby’s tires are flat. I need you to give me a ride in your grandfather’s car.”
Claire leveled him with her gaze. “Of course, a ride.” Pushing past him, she strode off without a backward glance across the sprouts of grass poking out of the ground.
What was that supposed to mean? He took off after her. “Did that qualify as a yes?”
She swerved around Mabel while mumbling under her breath.
Mac stopped in front of the Mercury. “Claire,” he said, trying a less bumbling approach. “Would you please give me a ride to the auto parts store in Yuccaville?”
“I heard you,” she shouted over her shoulder as she marched toward the concrete building housing the public restrooms.
“What’s going on out there?” a deep voice said from behind Mac.
Mac whirled around. An old guy with gray, bristle-top hair poked his head out the driver’s side window of an ancient, pea green Winnebago Brave.
“Nothing.” He felt like he’d been caught soaping Mabel’s windows. “Sorry we woke you.”
“Nothing, my ass. Who in the hell are you?”
“Mac Garner.” He glanced back toward Claire. She’d disappeared. He was on his own. “My aunt owns the park,” he added as extra credentials.
“Are you Señorita Jess’s cousin?” An even deeper voice thick with a Mexican accent called from the silver Airstream parked next to the bathrooms. A man looking remarkably like Jimmy Smits stepped out from under an awning draped with red pepper lights.
Mac nodded slowly. How did these guys know Jess?
“No kidding,” Bristle-top said, cracking open a can of Schlitz. “Word on the street is you want to do some snogging with Claire.”
“S-snogging?” Mac stuttered.
“Knock off this bullshit about snogging Claire.” A third old guy, his bald head rivaling Mabel’s chrome, shouted from the doorway of Claire’s R.V. “It’s too damned early for that kind of talk.”
“Says you,” Jimmy Smits Sr. said, grinning at Mac. “Some of us like our eggs over-easy with a side of sex.”
Mac ran a hand through his hair. Old guys were crawling out of the woodwork. Where in the hell was Claire?
“Before you lay a hand on my granddaughter,” the bald guy said as he stalked toward Mac, “you need to answer a few questions.”
Mac frowned. Where had the old man gotten that idea about Claire and him? Had he caught Mac looking at her legs?
“What do you do for a living?” Claire’s grandpa asked.
“Do you have any VDs?” Bristle-top shouted as he rounded the front of his Brave and waddled over on a pair of bowed legs.
“How many women have you dated in the last year?” Jimmy Smits Sr. threw out as he strolled up and leaned against Mabel’s front bumper. The scent of Old Spice smacked Mac in the face, making his nose twinge.
“What are your intentions toward my granddaughter?”
“Whoa,” Mac said, “I just need a ride to—”
“Do you practice safety sex?” Bristle-top cut him off.
“If you think you can get away with some kind of quick sex fling with her, you’d better think again.” Claire’s Grandpa’s eyes narrowed. “You’ll end up with my foot up your ass.”
“There’s nothing like a woman who wears a tool belt,” Jimmy Smits Sr. said, winking, making a gargling noise in the back of his throat.
Bristle-top knuckled Mac’s bicep. “When was your last physical?”
The three old men swarmed around him. A trickle of sweat ran down Mac’s back.
“How did you meet my granddaughter?”
“Here’s a tip, Don Juan. Her favorite flower is a black-eyed susan. You need to pay attention to details to win a beautiful woman like Claire.”
“Have you been HOV tested in the last year?” Bristle-top asked.
HOV? Mac felt like a paper boat caught in a whirlpool. He glanced at the restroom. Damn it, where was Claire?
Grandpa crossed his arms and glared up at Mac. “More importantly, do you know how to play Bid Euchre?”
* * *
“You could have told him no,” Claire said. She took her eyes off the two-lane road stretched out before her and glanced across at Mac.
“So you say, but you weren’t the one surrounded by a pack of cantankerous old men threatening to remove your testicles with fingernail clippers if I harmed a hair on your head.”
Claire couldn’t keep her grin from surfacing. “Which is why it makes no sense why you would agree to play cards with them tonight.”
“I wasn’t given a choice.”
She could tell by the way he sat ramrod straight in Mabel’s soft leather embrace that this morning’s chaos still had him strung up tennis racket-tight.
She sighed to herself. The guy didn’t know how to let the world parade by without trying to corral the clowns. Loosening up a bit would do him some good. But her job wasn’t to grease Mac’s joints, it was to stop the mining company from turning the Dancing Winnebagos R.V. Park into another Meteor Crater, like the one up near Winslow.
Unfortunately, the how-to part of her plan was still hazy
in her brain.
“How did your grandfather take the news about Henry?” Mac asked.
“He’s worried.” Claire didn’t feel like talking about it. Her heart still hurt from the pain she’d seen in Gramps’s eyes when she’d told him his dog had been kidnapped.
A bone, a missing dog, and now someone named Sam—her work was piling up. Which reminded her, she needed to ask Ruby if she knew anyone named Sam. “Maybe you guys could play cards at Ruby’s tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to take Ruby out for a drink at The Shaft, and somebody needs to mind the store.” She looked over to find him giving her a squinty-eyed stare.
“I don’t like the sound of that. You’re up to something, and I have a feeling whatever it is will piss me off.”
“Can’t two women go out for a drink with the sole purpose of sharing war stories over a cold brew?”
“If Ruby doesn’t pay off the bank, she’ll lose everything.”
“I know,” Claire replied with forced patience. While she struggled to keep her checking account from bottoming out every other month, she wasn’t an idiot about finances. “She explained the situation to me yesterday.”
“Selling the mines is her ticket out of debtor’s prison.”
“Selling the mines is one solution. There are others.”
“Such as?” Mac asked, doubt filling his tone.
“I’m still working on them.”
Claire saw the Welcome to Yuccaville sign up ahead. Thank God! If she didn’t pour some caffeine down her throat soon, she’d be taking the praying mantis approach to solving her difference of opinion with Mac.
Criminy, she’d shave her eyebrows for a whiff of second-hand cigarette smoke right now.
“At that first blinking yellow light,” Mac directed, “take a left. The store is a block down on the right.”
“Being that you’re a wall builder,” literally as well as figuratively, Claire thought with a slight grimace, “you must have taken a lot of geology classes in college.”
“I prefer the term geotechnician.”
“Right. Did you take any classes where they talked about how to date different rock samples?”
“Yes.”
“How do you go about figuring out how old something is?”
“There are several methods.” He sounded suspicious. She peeked at him. He was still giving her the squinty look. “Carbon-14, Potassium-argon, and Isotopic dating to name a few.”
That got her nowhere. She needed to find out how old this bone was so she could start trying to match it to its owner. “Which did you use?” Claire asked, turning at the light.
“None. My roommate interned at a local lab for the Arizona Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. He did the sample testing for me.”
Really? Now she was on to something. Maybe his roommate knew something about forensic anthropology, or at least someone working in that field. “Do you still keep in touch with him?”
“Why?”
“Because I need a favor, Mr. Suspicious Pants.”
“No.”
His immediate refusal to even listen to her needs made her want to wop him upside the head.
She pulled into an empty parking spot in front of the Roadrunner Auto Parts store. “What do you mean ‘No’? Did I hesitate when you asked me to give you a ride here?”
“Your exact words the third time I asked were, ‘Go fly a kite.’”
So she was a little grouchy first thing in the morning, was that a crime? “But we’re here now, aren’t we?”
“Because I threatened to squeal about how you scratched Mabel’s bumper when you backed into that ‘No Trespassing’ sign.”
She shut off the car and glared at him. “Quit splitting hairs. I drove you here as a favor, so maybe you could find a soft spot in your heart to do me a favor in return.”
Shoving open the door, Mac climbed out of the car. He took four steps toward Roadrunner Auto Parts, wheeled around, and strode back to the car.
Claire pasted on her tooth whitener-commercial smile.
Mac leaned down, his gaze raked down her T-shirt and back up before landing on her face. “What’s it worth to you, Claire?”
* * *
Sophy sipped on a glass of cold Coors, then lit another cigarette. She sat at a barrel-top table in a shadowy, smoke-filled corner of The Shaft—Jackrabbit Junction’s only watering hole.
The town’s resident alcoholic slouched at the bar, slurring his tale about the wife who’d up and left him four years ago, taking his only son, their basset hound, and the kitchen sink. Sophy had been to their house several times during their marriage for lingerie parties and whatnot. She would have taken the sink, too—it was dark blue.
Happy hour was long over, but several of the mining company’s first shift crew still lingered: knocking pool balls around, watching bowling on the black and white television, pumping quarters into the jukebox.
Sophy was glad Ruby Martino hadn’t seen her sitting in the corner when the redhead had walked in the bar over twenty minutes ago. She didn’t feel like fending off the widow’s death-wish glares tonight.
“You’re pretty good at this. I’ll have to take you out shootin’ with me.” Sophy heard Ruby shout over Johnny Cash, who sang about falling into a ring of fire.
Ruby must have been talking to the brunette who’d followed her in. The two women were taking turns shooting at deer with a plastic rifle. The Big Buck Hunter video game was a favorite at The Shaft, so much so that Butch, the owner, had had to replace the rifle three times in the last six months.
Sophy took a long draw from her cigarette, watching the two women from behind an Amazon-sized, fake fern. No living organism could breathe day in and day out in this dark, cramped tavern, so Butch had long ago resorted to man-made products.
“Did you find your dog, yet?” Ruby asked.
Dog? Sophy froze. Her cigarette dangled from her lips.
“No. Someone kidnapped him.”
“They did what, honey?” Ruby’s soft Oklahoma drawl had always grated on Sophy’s nerves, especially after Joe had sat in this very bar and pointed out how much more alluring it sounded than her own southeastern Arizona twang.
Nothing about her had ever been good enough for that man. But Joe sure hadn’t had a problem with her working two jobs to make ends meet while he took college classes and studied all day long. By her calculations, Joe owed her that R.V. park, at least.
She wiped the sweat from the outside of her glass. Watching Ruby suffocate over the last year from the weight of Joe’s medical bills had made living in Jackrabbit Junction tolerable.
“Someone took Henry.”
“How do you know that?”
“I found his dog tag out by Socrates Pit, and there were boot tracks over the top of his prints.” The brunette spoke in a crisp, uppity accent, like she’d lived in the city most of her life.
“Who would steal a dog?” Ruby asked.
“You tell me. It’s not like he has a pedigree. Henry is just a plain old beagle who scoots on the ground to scratch his ass and spends a good half-hour every morning licking his balls.”
Ruby laughed. “Reminds me of my old boyfriend back in Tulsa.”
“Mac thinks Henry got lost and someone took him home to feed him. But Henry doesn’t go to anyone except Gramps—unless he’s bribed. I’m leaning toward the kidnapping theory.”
Sophy squirmed in her seat. She stubbed out her cigarette. This chick was too close to the mark.
“How did you get my nephew to agree to help you figure how old that bone is?”
What bone? Sophy leaned closer to the plant separating her from the two women.
“I agreed to a little promise. Oh, hey, do you know anyone around here named Sam? Someone who may have lived here in the last decade or so?”
“No. But there used to be a guy living off Ocotilla Road who called his dog Sam. Why?”
Sophy knew a couple of different Sams—
one ended up buried in the mine when Drift Number Four caved in thirty years back, and the other got fried by lightening while adjusting the antennae on top of his trailer. Word around town was that his fingers fell right off when they tried to pry them from around the aluminum.
“I found this lighter while we were looking for Henry yesterday. It still sparks, but the lighter fluid has evaporated.”
Sophy carefully peeked through the plant.
Her heart lurched into her throat at the sight of a silver case. She knew that lighter. She’d used it several times in the past.
She knew who Sam was, too.
And now she knew one other thing—the nosey brunette needed to go away before she dug up anything else in Jackrabbit Junction.
Chapter Eight
“She claims her name is Fanny Derriere,” Chester said out of the side of his mouth, his lips wrapped around a cigar.
“And you believe her?” Mac asked, looking up from the two black Aces, Queen of spades, King of hearts, and nine of clubs in his hand.
A fog bank of smoke swirled under the humming florescent lights of Ruby’s rec room.
Manny sat next to Mac. The older man crooned along with Waylon Jennings on the radio about going to Luckenbach, Texas and getting back to the basics of love. Hound dogs were more on key.
“If her name is Fanny Derriere, my name is Hairy Butt,” Harley, Mac’s partner for the night, muttered around his cigar.
While Mac, Chester, and Manny all sported T-shirts and jeans, Harley had dressed for the evening’s event in a blue oxford shirt, beige suspenders, and brown and white polka-dotted tie knotted below his open collar. Add a fedora and he’d be an aged ringer for Paul Newman in The Sting.
“I don’t care if her name is Hindquarter Helen. That’s one juicy rump roast.” Chester swigged a mouthful of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
“You should have seen her pants.” Manny’s eyes crinkled at the edges, his moustache smiled. “They were so tight, I could see freckles.”