by Bob Sanchez
“Brodie! Why did you tell him!”
There were three quick beeps, like a low-battery warning on Carrick’s cell phone.
“What was that noise?”
“What noise? I didn’t hear anything.” Mack heard a scuffle and grunts. Was someone being punched?
“A cell phone. Did you call somebody, old man?”
Then the line went dead. Mack turned his car around, because the road to
Sedona was ten miles to the south. “I heard it all,” Cal said. “What do we plan to do?”
Diet Cola stared at Carrick’s cell phone and wondered if his instincts were right, that Carrick Durgin was calling his son. Mack must not have a clue about the value of the ticket, or he would have cashed it in long ago. Diet Cola found the call history and selected that number, but an computerized babe said to leave a message at the beep.
“Durgin? You there? Hey, I’m having tea with a lovely couple name of Carrick and Brodie Durgin. They say you’re going to Sedona, and I think that’s good for their health. We’ll meet there and do business, you and me. I’ll call with details later.”
He disconnected, thinking he hadn’t said enough. He re-dialed.
“Sedona. Don’t let your parents down.”
Mack went cold. Diet Cola had his parents? How was that possible? He wanted to pick up the telephone and call back, but he had to think this through first. Calling the police was not an option until he knew the danger—if they swooped in on Diet Cola, Mack’s parents might be hurt or even killed. How could Diet Cola have found them? He didn’t have Elvis’s GPS system anymore, and he hadn’t specified a time or an exact place. Mack decided not to wait for instructions. He called, and Diet Cola answered.
“You’re supposed to wait.”
“Let them go.”
“I’m in charge. I tell you.”
“Where do we meet?”
“I’ll let you know where and when.”
“Leave my parents out of this. They have nothing you want.”
“You do, though.”
“What is it?”
“Muchos dineros.”
“Let’s cut right to it. I don’t have any money to give you. If you hurt my parents, I will hunt you down and puree your brains. No Miranda warnings. Do you catch my drift?”
“I’m scared, man. Maybe I should just kill them now and run.”
There was silence on the line.
“Hello?”
Nothing. Mack switched off the phone and turned to Cal. “I think they’re a couple miles ahead of us on the road to Sedona,” he said. “Phone reception cuts off in some of these canyons.”
“If anything happens to your parents—” Cal left her sentence unfinished.
Mack accelerated through a curve, and Cal’s knuckles whitened as they gripped her knees. There was a wall of red sandstone on their right, the bottom of a cliff they could easily smash into; on their left were a narrow lane, a guard rail and a serious drop-off of several hundred feet. Mack stayed in his lane. Ahead of them a car held to the speed limit. Mack knew he couldn’t safely pass for a while. “Damn!” he said.
Cal exhaled audibly as Mack thumped the steering wheel. He waited for a car to pass the other way, caught a smidgen of straight road and stepped on the gas. “Oh no!” she said as he cut back into his lane just ahead of an oncoming car.
“Hang tight. We have a couple more miles to go.”
They rounded a bend, and Mack felt like he was regaining control. Nobody would harm his parents. Nobody! He was determined to catch up with Diet Cola here in the canyon, push him off to the side of the road and—
He slammed on his brakes. A car had pulled over as far to the right as it would go, but a family of tourists squatted right in the middle of the road looking at the pavement. A man with a camera stood up and beckoned to Mack. A woman and two young children pointed, flinched and smiled.
“Spinne!” the man shouted.
“German tourists,” Cal said. “There’s a tarantula in the road.”
Mack honked his horn, but the tourists didn’t budge. “They’ve never seen a spider before?”
“I speak a little German,” Cal said. “I’ll handle this.” She stepped out of the car and spoke with gestures that said we’ll drive right over it, we won’t hit it with our tires. The man must have misunderstood, because he shook his head angrily. His wife set up a tripod. Mack revved his engine. What would work better, he wondered. A palms-up supplication or his .38 Special?
Cal bent down very close to the spider, which Mack thought was about the size of a chipmunk. Slowly, she placed her hand on the ground, inches away. The children squealed with delight, and the woman pulled them away. Mack had seen Cal handle a spider rather calmly in Tucson She wouldn’t be so damn calm this time if it bit her. Meanwhile, he was losing Diet Cola.
Chapter 43
Ace and Frosty stared at Elvis’s head sticking out of the ground.
At first didn’t know what to make of the situation. Quite possibly they were hallucinating in the heat, because Elvis was blubbering and carrying on incoherently. Ace, being a sensitive person, said, “Hi, Elvis. What’s the matter?”
“He’s got ants all over him.”
“Phew. And he stinks.”
“Get that pig! It stole my jacket! And get me out of here!”
Frosty brushed some ants from Elvis’s head, but then his hand got sticky and they were all over his hand, biting like buggers. Ace ran off to find the jacket, but left his water bottle lying on the ground. Frosty thought to empty the contents on Elvis’s head to wash away some of the sugar that attracted the ants. Then he started scraping with his fingers and uncovered a shoulder. After a few minutes, Ace came back without the jacket.
“The pig is wearing it,” Ace said as he helped dig.
Poindexter didn’t know he had Elvis Hornacre’s favorite jacket, the one into which Elvis’s mother had lovingly sewn each sequin by hand, the one Elvis had worn the one and only night he’d ever been laid, in the back of a lemon-yellow Cadillac with pink plastic seats, a push-button shift and magnificent tail fins. He just knew the sun wasn’t on him so much, and some two-footed crazies were chasing him. Screaming. Throwing rocks. Ow! Ow! Ow!
This was turning out to be a day of rejection and disappointment for Poindexter, who didn’t look for much out of life—a few grubs, a little TV, a rear view of a lady javelina. Instead, he was running for his life, scrambling up a hill, getting screamed at for reasons that he couldn’t fathom.
Tiring after being endlessly pursued, he found temporary refuge in a tangle of jojobas while the crazed two-footers made an assortment of strange noises.
“Hey, I’m wiped out. We gotta stop.”
“We can’t, man. This jacket is my life. This jacket is me.”
“I don’t see it anywhere.”
“When I find that goddamn pig, I’ll turn him into goddamn pork rinds.”
“Ain’t really a pig. You notice those big teeth? They’ll tear new assholes two at a time.”
They were all breathing heavily, as was Poindexter. The jacket felt good on his back as he quietly drooled and listened.
“You never thanked us for saving you.”
“Thanks. Find my jacket and I’ll really thank you. I’ll be your friend for life.”
“Which won’t be a long time. We’re wicked lost.”
“What you come to Arizona for?”
“A broad named Cal Vrattos. I’m trying to win her back. You?”
“We’re here on business. Should we tell him, Ace?”
“Mack Durgin has something worth a huge amount of money, we don’t know exactly what it is. Naturally, we plan to relieve him of it.”
“So you two Einsteins don’t even know what you’re looking for?”
“We know it fits inside a can about so big by so big, and we know Mack Durgin has the can. We also know Diet Cola wants it more than all the pepperoni on the planet.”
“I help you find it, do we
share?”
“Sure. Okay by you, Ace?”
“Why not? Right now you’ve got a third of nothing.”
“I’ll tell you my guess. You want to hear my guess? Durgin’s got a million-dollar lottery ticket.”
“Nah. Too farfetched.”
None of which made a bit of sense to Poindexter as he snuggled in the safe, cool dirt and began to doze. In his dreams he saw the girl carrying a plate of Brussels sprouts. Then he was locked in mortal combat with the dominant male of a family of wandering peccaries. Tusks flashed and spittle flew. Soon Poindexter stood triumphant on the chest of his dead rival.
Poindexter felt content. He loved naps, because his greatest accomplishments took place when his eyes were closed. Now the widowed sow stood bathed in sunlight, waiting patiently for her new master. She exuded love-scent from the glands in her flanks as he propped his cloven feet on her back and prepared to have his way with her. He let out a deep snort of satisfaction.
“Jesus! What was that noise?”
“What? I didn’t hear anything.”
“The pig! I hear it somewhere.”
“He’s here in this bush!”
Poindexter’s eyes snapped open as a rock hit his rump. Through the bushes was the face of an angry two-footer. He turned and saw another, then twisting around in a panic, saw yet another. They were yelling, reaching, trying to grab him. There were three of them, which Poindexter didn’t realize—each time he looked he’d forgotten that he’d seen that face a second before—and the army of hostile two-footers multiplied with each terrified turn of his head. He tried to make a dash for it, but caught a tusk in the underbrush. He roared in his most fearsome voice and charged forward again, this time taking most of the bush with him. There was a good deal of screaming and shouting in the two-footer language, but as Poindexter clambered higher up the rocky slope, the noises grew quieter.
This presented a curious state of affairs. The pursuers seemed to be gone, but Poindexter wanted to get out of the tangle of bush right now. For this, the simple solution was to run. Unfortunately, he always seemed to be just on the edge of the bush no matter how far he went. He ran faster, but never made any progress in leaving the bush behind him. Running, stumbling, never quitting, he kept his elusive goal in sight. Presently, he arrived at a ledge at full tilt and kept on going, flying through the air as well as a wingless pig might expect.
Chapter 44
Diet Cola had had no idea what Sedona would look like, but its stunning beauty pissed him off. The little shops and cafés, the women with their nice figures and tans and happy smiles, the kids and their dads strolling without a care, the red rocks with their sheer cliffs rising into the sky only reminded him of all the good things in the world that he didn’t have.
He felt desperate now, with only two days to go before the deadline for cashing in the ticket and with diminishing hope he could ever pull this caper off. Even if he got the ticket from Mack, he’d have to kill all the Durgins and Zippy too—the whole damn bunch of them, so they wouldn’t talk. This time, there would be no burying them up to the neck like he did with that nitwit Elvis impersonator. No, this time he would put a bullet through each one’s temple and get it over with. Ace and Frosty were still on the loose, of course, but nobody would ever listen to those clowns.
Zippy seemed too comfortable as Brodie Durgin rubbed more aloe onto the top of his skull. “Turn here,” Diet Cola said. They turned onto a side road, where he hoped to find an isolated spot to kill them all.
“Where we going, D.C.?” Zippy asked without much concern.
“Mister Cola. Mister Cola?” Brodie Durgin said in her high-pitched, old lady voice.
He ignored her. He’d apparently made a good choice with this road, as the pavement had ended and given way to a long stretch of rutted red dirt. A couple of bends in the road put the group well out of sight of the town. Damn straight he’d kill them all. He had a plane to catch.
“Ouch!” Brodie cuffed Diet Cola on the ear; he turned and grabbed her neck. This time the wacky old bat was scared, and he let her go immediately.
“Don’t you ever touch me!” he said.
“I’m simply reminding you that it’s lunchtime. My husband is buying.”
Diet Cola’s stomach grumbled. “It can wait,” he said with great effort.
“A taco platter,” Carrick said with a forced grin, “so big even you couldn’t finish it.”
“Nothin’s that big.”
“With the most sinful mountain of sirloin strips and guacamole one might imagine,” Brodie said. “A haystack of fries.”
“Shut up,” Diet Cola said. The last thing he needed now was to think about food, but his stomach growled.
“Melted cheese dripping off the side of the plate.”
“Endless baskets of tortilla chips with bowls of salsa.”
“And plenty of beer to wash it down.”
Zippy looked into the rear-view mirror. “And chocolate cheesecake with strawberries and whipped cream for dessert,” he said. “I can just taste it now.”
Diet Cola’s stomach churned with food lust. He trembled at the temptation to turn back and eat, though he knew in his heart that killing them all was the right thing to do. Was he imagining the scent of char-broiled steaks and fried onions? Did he have the strength of character to stick with his mission? He pressed the button to close the power window and he cranked up the a/c to high so the smell would go away. It didn’t.
“An All You Can Eat Special,” Brodie said, “until two o’clock.” She smiled and pointed at her watch. “That’s in ten minutes.”
Mack and Cal hurried back to the car, relieved to finally hurry through the canyon with its narrow, winding road. “Ach, mein Gott! Was ist loss?” The damn Germans still stood rooted in the middle of the road, and Mack pounded his fist into the palm of his hand. What natural wonder had these starry-eyed Europeans seen this time? It looked like something tumbling down the hill. “Good God, a poor pig,” Cal said. She was back out of the car before Mack could slip the car past Fritz and his Frau.
“Javelina,” Mack said. The animal lay on the road’s soft shoulder, entangled in an impossible knot of brush and shreds of sequined cloth. It was breathing but apparently unconscious and Fritz started clicking his Nikon again. Cal stared and gasped in wordless horror.
“Let’s go! My parents’ lives are at stake!” Mack blinked at the motionless animal. “Is that Elvis’s jacket it’s wearing?” Cal nodded.
Mack sighed, opened the trunk of their car, picked up the javelina, put it in the trunk and slammed it closed, hoping the tourists would lose interest and get the hell out of his way. Then he and Cal got into the car. He revved the engine, but the tourists wouldn’t move. He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out his .38, just making sure that everyone saw it.
“My parents are going to die because we stopped for a pig dressed like Elvis.”
“Your parents aren’t going to die.”
“Damn right they’re not.”
Cal placed a hand on Mack’s arm. “Mack, take a deep breath.”
“There’ll be time for that later.”