When Pigs Fly

by Bob Sanchez

  “I can’t chew the damn stuff!”

  “You ought to mind your language, sir.” She refilled his coffee cup. “I’m putting you on decaf.”

  “I have a broken jaw!” He screamed at her, and a couple of elderly tourists looked over from their booth. He flipped them the bird and the color drained from their faces.

  “So I see. Did somebody forget to tell you before you ordered breakfast?”

  “Take this crap away. Just give me a shake.”

  The waitress cleared the food from the table. He still held the serrated knife, but she clenched her teeth and pointed, so he handed it over meekly. “You need a whipping, not a shake, but my manager says the customer is always right, so hold on.”

  After a few minutes he decided she was taking forever, and he thought all he really needed was a half-dozen OxyContin with a vodka chaser. Finally she brought him two jumbo-sized cups with straws bent partway down. He’d forgotten to ask for chocolate, and he wondered what flavor she’d brought him. “Drink ‘em outside,” she said. “No charge, just never come back.”

  Which he never would anyway. He stood outside in the blistering heat, wondering why the shakes weren’t cold. He worked a straw into his mouth and managed a long sip. It tasted like steak, eggs and blueberry pancakes pureed together in a blender for the goddamn Gerber baby. This was humiliating, and he would hunt the waitress down and teach her to respect the King if he didn’t have Cal Vrattos to deal with.

  He took another sip. Actually, it didn’t taste all that bad.

  Chapter 22

  After he filled his gas tank on the outskirts of Tombstone, Mack backed his Dodge off to one side of the lot near a Dumpster and a dead teddy bear cholla. Cal found him quickly and slid onto the passenger seat. She unscrewed two bottles of cold water and handed him one as Ace and Frosty shambled back to the pickup truck. “Those are your bad boys,” she said. He nodded and watched, wondering where they were headed. Ace looked in Mack and Cal’s direction, but only seemed to notice her. Frosty and Ace both wore wraparound sunglasses with the tags still on the frames; if any cash had changed hands over those specs, Mack thought, he’d eat road-killed rattlesnake.

  “They say they’re on the trail of big money,” Cal told Mack.

  “That should leave me out of it. They’ll never get rich following me. They’ve got to be up to mischief.”

  “What are you going to do? Raise the threat level to red? Launch a pre-emptive strike?”

  Mack followed the pickup truck and kept it in sight. “For now we’ll just watch them,” he said.

  “We? What’s this we stuff?”

  “I’ll watch them, then. You can avert your eyes.”

  Cal laughed, and Mack loved the sound. “I mean, two jokers blow through town, and you happen to know them. It’s a cosmic coincidence. So what?”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence. They traveled twenty-seven hundred miles, so I assume they want to see me. The question is do they want me to see them?”

  “Do they have a grudge against you?”

  “Can’t see why they would. Twice I could have put them away and I didn’t.”

  “Wherein lies a tale, yes?”

  “There was a string of housebreakings a few years ago. An elderly lady, a shut-in, had been robbed and beaten up. I’d suspected Ace and Frosty, since they lived in the neighborhood, and sure enough I nabbed them coming out of her place a second time. Turns out they’d broke in and left her money, about two hundred, which was more than she’d lost in the first place. When I spoke to the woman, she said they weren’t the guys who’d assaulted her but were in fact angels from heaven.”

  Cal looked puzzled. “If they were just bringing a gift, why didn’t they just knock?”

  “Going in the front door isn’t their style,” Mack said. “Besides, their bulbs only burn at about forty watts. But I learned these guys have something resembling a conscience. Not very well formed, more like a prehensile tail that might evolve in the right direction over the next million or so years. You can bet they didn’t donate that money out of their hourly wages. I guarantee they stole from someone else and shared with her.”

  “Still, it’s sort of sweet. Urban Robin Hoods, giving to a little old lady.”

  “Let’s not get mushy over them, Cal. They’re thieves.”

  “Don’t talk like that to me, Mack. I know what they are.”

  “They don’t rob only the rich. They rob anybody.”

  “Okay. So why didn’t you put them away?”

  “Because jails are graduate school for criminals, and they would come out a lot worse than they went in.”

  “That’s true of so many people, I’m sure. But you see potential in these boys?”

  Mack laughed.

  “You like them, then?”

  “Nope.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I’m listening to my intuition here.”

  “Instead of listening to me. Let it go, Cal.” His tone had a barb, and he didn’t like the sound of it himself. She looked away from him, past scattered mesquite and palo verde that grew behind a roadside wire fence. Numberless saguaro seemed to charge up a range of low-lying hills like T.R.’s Rough Riders. The road headed directly at a shimmering lake as mountains waited on a distant shore, and an eighteen-wheeler emerged from the lake, whooshing past them. He maintained a steady sixty-five on cruise control. This conversation was tanking. Correction: It had tanked.

  “Sorry,” he said, tapping her shoulder while he kept his eyes on traffic.

  “You didn’t say anything wrong,” she said in a flat tone that said he damn well did.

  “When I was a kid, we had a saying when one of us screwed up. ‘Nice play, Shakespeare’. So I guess I botched the play.”

  “Not necessarily. Most of the Bard’s plays have five acts.”

  Mack woke up early the next morning, eager to meet Cal again and show her around. Something—no, everything—about her excited him. He showered and shaved, carefully trimming the hint of hair inside his ears and wondering if Clint Eastwood ever had to do the same. A widowed watercolorist once told Mack he had a face full of character: a dimpled chin and strong eyebrows and a face built with layers of Weltschmerz and Gemütlichkeit. That had sent Mack running to the German-English dictionary in the library, where he learned that he was world-weary but happy about it. He pulled on a pair of jeans, a denim shirt and a pair of hiking boots, thinking his face wasn’t all that complicated. When the corners of his mouth pushed up against his cheekbones and formed symmetrical fault lines, he was happy. When his jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed, he was unhappy. When neither circumstance held true, he was most likely feeling just fine.

  He put on his Red Sox cap and thought about how much he’d like to make a pass at Cal. Just then, she pulled into the driveway and tapped lightly on the horn. “We’ll take my car,” he called out. “I’ll pull out of the carport and you pull in.”

  Cal had long, slender legs, tanned and toned. Her straw hat, sunglasses and Mack’s SPF-40 shielded her from the sun’s morning rays. God, Mack would like to have applied the sunscreen on those lovely limbs himself.

  Later, they walked in the Desert Museum just west of Tucson among the endless saguaro cactus. “I wish you could see this in the spring,” Mack said. “The flowers are incredible.”

  “The heat is incredible.”

  Mack handed her his water bottle. “Want to head back?”

  “No.” A rattlesnake slithered across their path, maybe fifteen feet in front of them. It had a large, diamond-shaped crosshatch across its body and a string of beads on its tail. It disappeared into the shade provided by a rock. Cal stopped and held Mack’s hand. “Yes,” she said.

  “Maybe I should come back here,” Mack said, “with the ashes.”

  They walked back to the visitor’s center, where a docent spoke about tarantulas to a small group of tourists. A large, gray spider sat quietly in the palm of th
e woman’s hand. “They can inflict a painful bite,” she said, “but they are mostly harmless unless they feel threatened. Would someone like to hold out their arm?”

  Spidey sat still and appeared to stare at Mack with a thousand black eyes. You just try it, big boy, it seemed to say. Cal held out her slender arm, and the docent placed Spidey there while Mack held his breath.

  “Reminds me of a guy I dated,” she said, laughing as they walked back out into the sunshine. “Big and hairy, nothing much to say.”

  “He had eight legs?”

  “He had big dark eyes, and he gave me a look that I guess was supposed to be smoldering passion.”

  “Did you two combust?” Mack suddenly felt jealous—of what? A guy who looked like a spider?

  “That’s rather personal, but no. Why?”

  “Just kidding.” In his pocket, Mack’s cell phone rang to the tune of Beethoven’s Fifth. He let it ring twice.

  “Answer the music in your pants,” she said. Mack smiled and fished the phone from his right pocket.

  “Hello, Dear,” his mother said. “Why didn’t you tell us you changed your telephone number?”

  “Oh hi, Mom. This is my new cell phone. Hardly anybody has the number yet. How’d you find it?”

  “Your father is a resourceful man. We would like to come out and see you.”

  “Great! Did you want to fly out here in the fall?”

  “Oh my goodness, no. We’re here already and thought you could meet us for dinner. We have something special for you.” Mack suggested a restaurant in Tucson, and they agreed on a time to meet there. “Tell Dad to wear a tie,” he said.

  Mack put the phone back in his pocket and looked at Cal, mystified. “The folks are in town. Do you mind them joining us for dinner?”

  “You mean would I join you folks for dinner. Thanks, but I’d be the odd one out.”

  “No, you’d make it even. Think of it as a double date.”

  The roses hadn’t worked. Juanita had to get out of bed when Zippy came home with them, even though the sun hadn’t gone down yet. She set the flowers in a glass of water, then went back into the bedroom and locked the door, where he heard a man’s voice smothered in passion. It had to be Mack Durgin again, he decided, but instead of knocking the damn door down, he stormed out of the apartment. A plan began to gel.

  Later that afternoon, Zippy hid his Hummer behind a rock outcropping and walked around it to look at Mack Durgin’s adobe house about a hundred yards away. The house had a cactus cluster in the front yard and a gravel driveway leading into a carport. Zippy had slathered SPF-40 on his skull and waited for signs of life while he smoked cigarettes, drank beer and relieved himself on a prickly pear cactus. It was hot enough to bake a rattlesnake, dry enough for Zippy to go through a six-pack of beer. There was an annoying whine that was either the mating call of horny beetles or the aftereffects of last night’s mescaline. The edge of Tucson shimmered in the heat several miles across the desert, and even the highway that cut through it was quiet. The nearest other houses were fifty yards away, and there had been no sign of life on the street for the last hour.

  The easiest way to take Mack down would be with a rifle and a scope, but what was the fun in that? Zippy put the palm of his hand on the sheathed knife that hung from his belt. Wait for Durgin in his house, scarf up his food and greet him from behind the front door with a snap of his neck and a blade through his jugular. Reach out and cut someone, that was Zippy’s new motto.

  He slipped on a pair of latex gloves, checked up and down the street one more time and headed toward the house. Chances were good he would have to wait a while longer, and he didn’t want his prints all over the place when the cops began investigating the bloody beating of Mack Durgin.

  He walked around to the back, hopped a short wall and landed in a shaded patio that had a grill, a glass table with an umbrella and a couple of webbed chairs. A sliding glass door was locked, no obstacle for a man with steel-toed boots. He kicked the door into a thousand satisfying shards. A couple of pieces hit him in the leg and the chest, but flat so they didn’t cut. It was all technique, he thought, don’t you kids try this at home. Zippy’s boots crunched on the glass. He had made a hell of a mess, but Mack wouldn’t live to notice. The sucker had humiliated him twice. Now it was Zippy’s turn.

  But he had an ugly feeling, standing there in the silence of the kitchen, a stupid and paranoid feeling of being watched. Last night the place had been empty and the slider unlocked. Then he had let himself in and left immediately, waiting in the shadows to see if the cops responded to a silent alarm. They hadn’t.

  The kitchen was small and cluttered with unwashed pots and pans on the counter and a round table with two chairs, one dirty plate, a couple of crumpled paper towels and the Arizona Daily Star. Zippy opened the fridge. Mack at least ought to have beer or a little weed for his guest, but he didn’t. One or two more beers would boost his courage so he’d be able to stand the sight of blood. The smell of beef burritos hung in the air. That could mean only one thing: Mack had just been here—no, Zippy would have seen him leave. So he was still here, hiding in a closet, maybe with a cell phone dialing 911.

  The living room had the usual living-room junk: a couch, a TV with rabbit ears, a stuffed chair, a half dozen empty beer bottles on the floor. There was an office with a desk, a computer and a couple of bookcases. Nothing there. In the bathroom he pulled back the shower curtain. Nothing there. He checked a hallway closet. Nope, nothing. He pushed open the door to the bedroom. Surprise, a bed. He knelt down to look under it, probably just like the old guy to—

  He suddenly rose off the floor and up toward the ceiling. One unseen hand lifted him by his belt and another pulled him up by the scruff of his neck. He held onto his combat knife, for all the help it was to him now. The hands shook his whole body, his gold chain swung from his neck, and his wallet fell out of his pocket. Then he flew like Superman until he crashed against the wall. He hit the bed’s headboard on his way down and rolled to a soft landing on Mack’s mattress.

  He was dizzy, but still held onto the knife. Standing over him was a monster who looked like a pro wrestler with a bandanna on his head and a ring in his left earlobe.

  “You’re trespassing, dude,” the guy said. “Bad idea.”

  Zippy slashed at the man’s face, missing his nose by an inch. The crazy goon didn’t even blink. Worse, he smelled like a garbage truck. “Hand me the knife,” he said, reaching out. “Handle first.”

  Zippy spit through a gap between his front teeth. The guy had to be at least three hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and grease, but eight inches of serrated chromium-steel blade made the two men equal. Zippy rolled off the bed and landed on his feet in a combat crouch, his dicer ready to draw first and last blood.

  “Nice artwork on your dome,” the guy said, pointing with a fat finger. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Zippy stroked his scalp. “You mean it about the tattoo? A lot of dudes make fun of it.”

  “Bet a lot of dudes are dead. I go by Diet Cola. Who are you?”

  “I’m the guy with no name. I’m the last guy Mack Durgin’s ever gonna see. I’m the guy who’ll make him gurgle blood.”

  “I like your spirit. Bold, direct. You’ve been across the street about an hour, casing this place, picking the right time to make your move. Then by crap, you did it. Now tell me your name.”

  “Zippy. You saw me?”

  Diet Cola belched a foul cloud into Zippy’s face and nodded. “From the living room window. You were out there roasting like a chicken while I was drinking the last of his beer. How do you know Mack Durgin?”