The one in the back seat slapped the shoulder of the man next to me and pointed at my car radio. “Turn that shit off,” he said. “I like it quiet.”
I pressed the eject button, Elliott Gould stopped narrating in mid-sentence and the car fell silent.
Just when I thought I had the perfect scenario worked out, the one in the back said, “Hey Chet. I almost forgot. Get his wallet.”
Chet reached into the inside of my sports jacket and plucked my wallet from the pocket. He pried it open and whistled. “Jackpot, Artie,” Chet said. “This one’s loaded, look.” He held up my stack of twenties and showed Artie. “Yeah this and the car will take us pretty far.”
Artie leaned forward in his back seat and put his mouth close to my left ear. “That was mighty nice of you to fill this baby up for us.”
I felt the heat of his breath on my neck and shivered.
Artie tapped Chet on the shoulder. “See what else he’s got,” Artie said.
Chet leaned toward me and felt around inside my jacket. His hand stopped on my shoulder holster. He grabbed the butt of my .38 and yanked it out. He looked back at Artie. “Didn’t you frisk him, Artie?” Chet said. “He’s packing.”
I could see Artie in my rear view mirror. He just shrugged. “Lemme see that wallet,” he told Chet.
Chet passed the wallet back to Artie, who rifled through all the cellophane windows. He slapped Chet on the side of the head. “This guy’s a cop,” Artie said. “Look at this badge. You dope. You grabbed a cop.” He threw my wallet back at Chet, who looked at the contents in the windows.
“This ain’t no cop,” Chet said. “He’s one of them P.I.s, like Magnum or Rockford.”
Or Marlowe, I thought.
Chet turned to me. “So you’re a snooper,” he said. “You on a case or something?”
I didn’t answer. Artie slapped me on the side of my head and my ears rang.
“He asked you a question,” Artie barked. “Are you on a case?”
“No,” I said, my anger burning. “Vacation.”
“We gotta get rid of this guy,” Chet said.
“There’s too many cars on this highway,” Artie told Chet. “Wait for the next exit and we’ll pull off.”
A few minutes later Chet pointed out the windshield at a green and white highway sign. “Baker, one mile,” Chet said and then turned to me. “Get off on highway one twenty-seven and just keep going right. Got it?”
A minute later the one twenty-seven exit came up and I eased off the Interstate. I continued southeast on one-twenty seven. Five minutes and five miles later Artie tapped my shoulder. “This is far enough. Pull over.”
I pulled onto the shoulder and put the car in park, killed the engine and waited. Chet unbuckled his seat belt and told me to do the same. “Now get out,” he told me.
I slid out of the car almost in unison with Artie. Chet got out on his side and came over to my side. He looked at Artie.
“What are we gonna do with him, Artie,” Chet said. “He’ll run to the cops first chance he gets.”
“Kill him,” Artie said.
“No, wait,” Chet said. “He hasn’t seen our faces and he doesn’t know who we are. How about if we just leave him out here for the snakes and the buzzards? We can be long gone by the time he gets out of this desert.”
“I don’t know,” Artie said.
“Look,” I said, “You’re not in that much trouble yet; just car theft so far. If you kill me, they’ll hunt you down like dogs. They tend to treat murder a lot more seriously than car theft. “Just take the car and go. You can have a good couple of hours head start. You got my cash and my piece. Just go.”
“He’s right Artie,” Chet said.
“We need more than just a couple of hours head start,” Artie said, and turned to me. “Gimme your shoes and socks. You’ll travel a lot slower without ‘em. And give me that shoulder rig, too.”
I did as I was told and peeled off my jacket. I slipped out of my shoulder holster and threw it on the ground, slipping back into my jacket. I bent over and pulled my shoes off and then my socks and stood there barefoot. Artie threw my shoes and socks into the back seat. Chet held his gun on me while Artie patted the rest of my pockets and removed anything that might identify me. He even took the wristwatch Gloria had given me for Christmas. They took my cell phone, flipped open the cover, saw it was working, and closed it again. Artie stuck it in his pocket.
As I was watching Chet’s eyes, Artie hit me with his gun behind my left ear and I tumbled to the ground. The last sound I remembered hearing was the sound of my Toyota’s tires on gravel as they drove away. A few seconds later my world went black.
The morning sun peeked over a mountain ridge and hit me square in the eyes. I blinked, squinted and tried to open my eyes. My hands were tied behind my back with some sort of cloth. When I tried to sit up, my head throbbed and I immediately lay back down again. I hear a familiar sound and looked up to see a car coming toward me on this desolate road. I lay still and just let it come. It skidded to a stop just a few feet from where I lay.
I hear footsteps get out of the car and walk around to the shoulder where I lay. A woman’s face looked down at me and she shook her head.
“My goodness,” she said, squatting down next to me. “What happened to you?”
I drew a blank and slowly shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just woke up on the side of the road and then you came along. That’s all I can remember.”
The woman looked to be in her late thirties or maybe even her early forties. She had long, brown hair that curled slightly on the ends. That was all I could see of the hair that hung out from under the wide-brimmed hat that sat on her head. Her face was smooth with petite features, and she couldn’t have stood more than five feet three. The woman put her hand around my head and tried to help me sit up. Her hand fell upon a soft, pulpy spot on the back of my head and I winced. She moved her hands to my shoulders and continued pulling into a sitting position. “Is that any better?” she said, reaching behind to untie my hands. She brought out a burgundy tie and handed it to me.
“Is this yours?” she said.
I didn’t answer, but just sat there trying to remember.
“What’s your name?” she said.
I paused and said, “It’s, uh. It’s…” I drew a blank. “I don’t know,” I said, frustrated with myself for not knowing.
The woman looked at me again. “How’d you get here anyway?” she said.
Again, I didn’t have an answer. “I don’t remember,” I said.
“What is the last thing you remember?” she said.
I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, I still couldn’t think of a thing to say. “I just don’t know?” I told her.
“Well, you just can’t stay here,” she said. “Come on, I’ll held you into my car and get you some help for that bump on your head.” She helped me slide into the passenger seat and closed the door. When she got back behind the wheel she extended her hand to me and said, “Oh, by the way, my name’s Fletcher, Jane Fletcher.”
My head was still spinning and I think I managed to acknowledge her but still said nothing. Fifteen minutes later Jane eased her car to a stop in the driveway of a house out in the middle of nowhere. I turned to her and said, “Where are we anyway?”
“That little town we passed a few miles back was called Kelso,” Jane said. “If you blinked, you missed it. Anyway, this is home, at least for me and Steve.”
“Steve?” I said. “Who’s Steve?”
Just then a large brown and black German Shepherd ran up to the car on my side and put his paws on the door just outside my window. I recoiled and shrieked.
Jane laughed. “That’s Steve,” she said. “And he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Tell him that,” I said and stayed put in my seat.
“Steve,” Jane yelled. “Down.” Steve pulled his paws off my door and settled down on the ground. “You can get ou
t now,” Jane said. “He won’t bother you.
I opened my door and slowly got out of the car. Steve stayed where he was as Jane came around to my side and walked me up to her house. We stepped up onto her porch and she pulled the front door open.
“Don’t you even lock the door?” I said.
“No need,” Jane explained. “No one bothers me out here.”
“Probably because no one knows you’re here,” I said. “How can you stand it?”
“I was born here,” Jane said. “The rest of the world doesn’t interest me. I have everything I want or need right here on my own twenty-seven acres.” She removed the wide-brimmed hat from her head and hung it on a hook. “And where are you from, if I may ask?”
I held one finger up and opened my mouth, but I had no idea what to say. I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Sit here,” Jane said, pulling out a straight-backed wooden chair from her kitchen table. She left the room momentarily and came back with a roll of gauze, a tube of some kind of cream and some white pads. She pulled several sheets off a paper towel dispenser, ran then under her sink tap and patted most of the water out of them again. She stepped up behind me and pressed the cold towels to the soft spot behind my ear. I howled and pulled away.
“I know,” Jane said. “It’s probably tender and sensitive, but I have to see how much damage was done. Sit still now, so I can bandage you up.” She spread my hair away from the spot, uncapped the cream and squeezed a dab onto my head. She placed several of the one inch square white pads over the cream and then wrapped the gauze around my head several times before tearing the ends and tying it in a knot. “There, how does that feel?”
I gently touched the spot and I had to admit that it didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had when she found me.
Jane pulled a glass off one of her shelves, ran it under the tap and handed me a glass of water. “Here,” she said. “Drink this. Your lips look a bit parched.”
I drank the entire glass of water, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, set the glass down on the table and sighed heavily. “Thank you,” I said.
Jane pulled out another chair and took a seat across from me. “So, you don’t know who you are or how you got to that place I found you. You don’t know where you’re from, so how are we going to get you back home? Do you have anything in your pockets that might identify you?”
I pressed my hands to my breasts and felt nothing. I reached inside the pockets and came up empty. I felt around inside my pants pockets. They were just as empty as my jacket pockets. I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said.
“Are there any labels inside the clothes?” Jane said, standing and coming around behind me to check my collar. “Nope, just the brand name of the shirt and these are a common brand available at almost any store. I give up. You’re a mystery.” She sat back down again.
It was warm in this kitchen. Jane obviously had no air conditioning and I was surprised that she even had electricity as remote as she was out in this desert. She did have a medium-sized fan on a two foot stand. It oscillated back and forth and the breeze felt good. I stood up and slipped out of my jacket, hanging it on the back of the chair.
Jane leaned in toward me and looked at my shirt pocket. “What’s that?” she said, pointing to two stitched letters. “E C,” she said. “Does that ring any bells? Could your name be Eddie Cantor or Elmer Cartwright or maybe Elijah Collins?”
Again I shook my head. “I just don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry, but nothing’s coming to me.”
“It’s no surprise,” Jane said. “Somebody must have hit you pretty good. It’s obvious you didn’t hit yourself and rob yourself of whatever you had in your pockets. You also couldn’t have gotten out where I found you on foot, especially not barefooted, like you were. Someone had to have driven you out there, hit you and left you for dead. That’s the only thing that makes any sense. But the big question is who are you?”
“Sorry,” I said, and shrugged.
“Well,” Jane said. “You just take it easy. Next time I go into town, you can come along and we’ll see if anyone else can help you out.”
“That will be great,” I said. “When are you going back into town, and where is town?”
“Town is Barstow,” Jane said. “And I go in once every other week for supplies. That’s where I was coming from when I found you.”
“You mean I have to hang around here for two more weeks?” I said.
Jane laughed. “No, of course not,” she said. I can drive you there day after tomorrow, if that’s all right with you.”
“I guess it’ll have to be,” I said. “I wouldn’t get five miles on foot in this heat.”
“No you wouldn’t,” Jane agreed. “And I’d drive you in tomorrow, except I don’t think my old heap could stand another trip so soon. It almost overheated this morning on the way back home. When it gets like that, I just have to let it sit for a day or so to let it cool off.”
“How on earth can it cool off in the desert?” I said.
Jane looked at me. “I have to park it in the shade and there ain’t no shade out here. I just let it sit in the night air for a couple of days and she’s good for another trip.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Since I don’t know who I am or where I’d want to go, I don’t suppose it matters much when we go.”
“Then it’s settled,” Jane said. “You’ll be my guest for a couple of days. Do you play poker?”
I thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I mean, I might, but I don’t remember.”
“You must be hungry,” Jane said. “Just sit there and let me fix you some breakfast.
“Okay,” I said. I watched as she got out a frying pan and a spatula. She retrieved a carton of eggs from her refrigerator and laid it on the counter. As the frying pan heated up on the stove, she pulled two plates from her cupboard and laid them on the table along with two forks and knives.
“How do you like your eggs?” Jane said.
“Over easy,” I said.
“Jane turned to face me. “See,” she said. “You didn’t forget everything, apparently.”
I thought about it for a second. “I guess so,” I said. “I remembered that I eat my eggs over easy. There’s hope for me yet.”
Jane finished preparing the eggs and slid two of them onto my plate and deposited the other two on her own plate. By the time she placed the frying pan in the sink, the toast popped up in her toaster and she put the four pieces on a plate between us, along with a small yellow butter dish.
After we’d finished eating, Jane cleared the table and invited me into her living room. The first thing I noticed was that there was no television set and no stereo. But there was a large shelving unit with several dozen DVDs and books on it. I walked over to the bookshelf and scanned some of the titles of the books. She had several books by an author named Lawrence Block and several by someone named J.A. Konrath, whoever that was.
But it was one book in particular that had caught my attention. I pulled it off the shelf and leafed through its pages.
“Are you a mystery fan, too?” Jane said, gesturing toward the book I was holding.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But this seems familiar to me for some reason.”
Jane came over and took the book from me, reading the spine aloud. “The Big Sleep,” she said. “Have you read it? Oh, that’s right, you don’t remember,” and started to slip the book back onto the shelf.
I stopped her and took the book from her hands. I stared at the cover for a moment. “This author,” I said. “This Raymond Chandler fellow, is he a mystery writer, too?”
Jane laughed. “He was,” she said. “And he was one of the best.”
“Was?” I said.
“Yeah,” Jane said. “He died more than fifty years ago, back in 1959, I believe. He didn’t write that many books, compared to some of these authors today, but may, every one of his novels was dynamite. He’s had a lot of imitators, but no one has matched h
im yet.”
“Chandler,” I said. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“I don’t suppose it’s because his name is a household word,” Jane said, and then shook her head. “No, I didn’t think so. “Could it be you’re read something by him?”
I shrugged and put the book back on the shelf. “Sorry,” I said and turned back to the bookshelf. “I see you have a pretty good collection of DVDs but you don’t have a television set.”
“I watch them through my laptop,” she said. “I have something like a hundred fifty old movies on DVD. I like the classics. The movies they make today are mostly crap. We can watch one later, if you like.”
“I guess that would be all right,” I said.
“Well, right now you’d better sit down and give that head of yours a rest,” Jane said, gesturing toward the couch.
I did as I was told and Jane sat across from me in an overstuffed chair. “What do you do?” I said. “I mean how do you earn your living?”
“Believe it or not,” Jane said, “I’m also a writer of sorts. I write a newspaper column. It comes out once a week.”
“And that’s enough to live on?” I said.
“Well,” Jane said. “It’s syndicated in seventy papers all across the country. So that equates to seventy paychecks every week. And at twenty dollars a column, I’m not hurting for money.”
“A real live columnist,” I said. “That’s interesting. What do you write about?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Jane said. “I’m a humor columnist. I make it all up. No research, no fact finding, just a vivid imagination and a warped sense of humor is all it takes.”
“Ever think about trying your hand at a full-length novel?” I said. “Sounds like you’d be good at it.”
“I’m not sure I could sustain for seventy-five thousand words. I’m probably run out of steam after ten thousand. I’m used to writing short pieces and that’s the way I like it.”
“How long have you been writing this column?” I said.
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 224