“I’m revising my previous statements. It could have been a female,” Kenny said, directing his eyes at Jessie, “easily.”
“Could have been,” Jessie agreed, “but it wasn’t.”
“How can you be sure?” Nina asked.
“Because the person shooting at my house was Atchison Potter, that’s why,” Jessie said. “He knew my place. He had just sent a process server there. I should have taken off earlier. That’s the reality.”
“Why would he try to kill Kenny?”
“I didn’t say he tried to kill Kenny.”
“Preposterous,” Kenny said, dipping a French fry into ketchup, “that there would be two such similar unrelated events in such close proximity, geographically and temporally, especially if you consider me and my gun as connecting threads.”
“Maybe he did go after Kenny,” Jessie said. “Maybe Kenny’s right and he found out about the marriage. I keep telling you, Mr. Potter’s not just mad at me. He’s out of his mind. He’d do anything to hurt me. The last time I saw him, he screamed—accused me—I’m beginning to understand there is no escaping him.”
“These are affiliated events, that I promise you,” Kenny said.
“There is another possibility,” Nina said. “Someone else who might have done this.”
“Who?” they asked in unison.
“Charlie Kemp. The Englishman who thinks it’s his jackpot.”
“How could he get my gun? Not when he was sitting next to me. Not when he pushed toward Jessie after the jackpot. Because Paul took it later, at your office.”
Nina told them about her conversation with Kemp. “But he never called,” she finished. “We need to involve the police.”
“We did involve the police. But we didn’t see enough of him to recognize him.”
“We could talk to them some more and provide some context, which I’ll bet you didn’t provide.”
“What’s the point?”
“Protection.”
“I’m leaving Markleeville anyway,” Jessie said.
“Me, too,” Kenny said. “I’m going somewhere.”
“Jessie,” Nina said, “you have a court hearing on Monday. You can’t go far. We talked about this. Potter’s lawyer has obtained a court order that you appear for the Examination of Judgment Debtor.”
“I know, I know. Will Potter be there?” She had asked this before. Her dread and the defiance she used to fight it were such disabling emotions that Nina decided to waffle. Potter had a right to be there, though he didn’t have a right to sit in on the examination.
“Mr. Riesner doesn’t seem to think so. Riesner gave me some excuse, said Mr. Potter isn’t feeling well. I don’t even know if he’s in California.”
“Do I have to go? What do I have to do? Can you prevent it?”
“I’m going to protest, but if I lose, you have to be there. Because of the judgment, Mr. Riesner has the right to ask you questions about your assets and liabilities. You have to bring your income tax returns.”
“That’ll be easy. Except—this time he can’t find out where I’m staying?”
“He will want to know that. You see, he doesn’t just have to take your word for it, that you rent for a certain amount of money, for instance. He can gather information from you that will allow him to make an independent inquiry about your finances.”
“Why does he get to do this?”
“Because, you see, the judgment—according to the law, unless and until I can change the situation, you owe this enormous sum of money to Mr. Potter based on this judgment. That’s why the legal papers you received called you a judgment debtor.”
Jessie’s shoulders slumped. She said, “Clever man.” “Monday morning,” Nina said. “Come to the office by eight o’clock, so I can prepare you. And please call on Friday so that I know you are all right. Both of you. Oh. Where will each of you be?”
Kenny looked uncertain. Jessie looked stumped. “I have to be pretty close,” she said. “But not findable. I don’t know.” They all sat there. Nina scratched her head.
“Well, I have a place about an hour and a half from here, and nobody knows it exists,” she said. “It’s a trailer out in the desert. A client gave it to me last year. I haven’t even recorded the deed yet. There is room for both of you for a few days.”
“Won’t it be hot?” Kenny asked.
“It can be at this time of year in the middle of the day, but we’re heading into a cool stretch, if today and the news are anything to go by. If it gets too hot, head into town. Go to the library in Minden or get an ice cream in Carson City.”
“Him too?” Jessie said.
“He’s in trouble, too,” Nina said. “But you come first. You’re my client. You decide.”
Jessie took a deep breath. “I’ll think about it.”
Kenny and Jessie waved as Nina pulled out.
“This trailer out in the desert she offered—it sounds kind of primitive.”
“Sure does,” Kenny said. The minute Nina described the desolate, isolated trailer she owned in the desert, he wanted to go there. He would be with Jessie.
“Remote,” Jessie said dubiously.
“You have a cell phone, remember. With a phone, you can be anywhere.”
“She said it isn’t totally reliable there.”
“We’ll be fine. Nobody will find us. She says there’s electricity. I can use my laptop.”
“If they do, I have the rifle. You know, this doesn’t necessarily mean we should stick together. I told you . . .” Her eyes were troubled.
He talked fast, hoping to change her thinking before her ideas got set in concrete. “I won’t be a pest. I won’t talk much and I won’t make a pass or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Ha! You’d be so sorry.”
“I’ve got nowhere else to go. I need a place to run to as much as you. I’m not going back to Caesars.”
“Why not? I bet it’s nicer than some trailer.”
“That guy knows I was there. And it’s just for a week.
Nina said there was a bed in back and that the dining area makes into a bed. I’ll take that one. I’ll help protect you.”
“That’s a good one!” But his wheedling made her smile.
“I can help with Gabe. We’ll camp out. Barbecue.”
“You cook?”
“My family runs a restaurant.” He hoped his return smile looked as well-intentioned as he felt. “Pack the soy sauce along with the rifle, okay?”
“It’s not that far from Markleeville. I can get Gabe over there if I need someone to watch him. Aunt Anita just loves him.” She breathed deeply. “Okay. Let’s go. Just get back to the cabin, pick up Gabe at my aunt’s, and pick up your car. . . .”
“Why don’t you tell Nina about Gabe?” Kenny asked, climbing into Jessie’s Honda.
“Gabe’s none of her business. Yours either, for that matter. Don’t mention him to anyone if you want to keep those legs of yours.”
People were threatening him left and right these days. He supposed it was a symptom of the times, this tough talk and gunplay. He preferred his clean, well-ordered universe, made of pixels, light, and color. Harmless.
He rolled his window down. The summer squall had cleared and the weather had warmed up. He really loved feeling the heat and cold together, the blasting of the air conditioner, and the hot summer air outside. Things you didn’t get from a computer. The milky smell of Gabe’s breath . . . she would let him stay. He felt outrageously happy.
“I wish I could leave,” Jessie said. “I wish I could ignore the money and just go. We can go far away from Potter with that money. He’ll never need to know about Gabe.”
“It’s kind of sad, though.”
“Sad?”
“He’ll never know about his grandson. I mean, that would kill my dad, never knowing about his grandson.” A pang, as Kenny ignored the improbability of his father mourning a grandson he didn’t know he had, and thought about hi
s family. They would be wondering where he was, wondering at his silence. Well, better that than reading in the morning paper about his brains speckling the bathroom at Prize’s.
“Don’t feel sorry for Potter. He doesn’t deserve it.”
Back in Markleeville, they made a quick stop at the cabin, packing supplies into both of their cars. “What’s it mean?” Kenny asked, lugging a final bag out of the kitchen. “The name on this house, Memdewee. Do you know?”
“Deer run,” she said. “It’s Washoe.”
“Appropriate. That’s what we’re doing, running like deer.”
“Kenny, you’re what my auntie would call an odd duck.”
“Where is the rest of your family?”
“Dead. Father and mother and younger brother dead in a car crash when I was six years old. Middle of winter, a logging truck on Spooner Pass. But I was real young. I hardly remember them. My Aunt Anita raised me. But I have a family of my own now. I have Gabe.”
He thought, but didn’t say, and you have me, too. He didn’t want her to know about that yet. She might make fun of him. She would probably leave him. She barely tolerated him as it was. Kenny had thought of a way to win her. He wasn’t good enough for her yet, but he could be.
He followed her to her aunt’s part of the house, but didn’t go inside while she collected Gabe and talked with her aunt. After stopping at the small general store in Markleeville, they caravaned back to Highway 88, made a right, and drove past the turnoff for the Washoe Indian Reservation and farther into Nevada. They traveled some distance north on 395, then turned onto a dirt road in the Carson Range west of Genoa and followed it for a long time, making more turns here and there.
They had been alone on the road for miles, under a hazy sky. They were not being followed. The desert wasn’t flat: they seemed to be on a gradual slope bearing toward a mountain range to the north. They wound between rocky bluffs and scrub. Some old rusting mining equipment lay dumped by the roadside. They were in prospecting country.
He followed the Honda Civic without any worries. Jessie would not let them get lost.
In the shadow of the mountain’s late afternoon light, as Kenny was watching the horizon, bumping along the sandy road, a green flash lit up the horizon. The sunset came after, magenta and gray, but that green—he had read about it in a book but never thought he would see it, some sort of rare visual effect of the sunset.
He thought, It’s a sign. My luck has turned.
They pulled their cars up beside the trailer and got out.
It was very quiet. Nights in the high desert were often cool, even in summer, and tonight was no exception. He saw a dirt front yard with a row of prickly pear cacti guarding ripe orange fruit. A padlocked metal shed, a car-port, even a small empty corral with an unused horse stall. A ranchito, the Mexicans would call it. All neat and orderly, as a lawyer’s hideout should be.
What did Nina Reilly use it for? Nina had impressed Kenny as the sort of lawyer who would be rich if she had set up in Silicon Valley—intelligent and experienced, but with a crazy streak. He imagined various scenarios for Nina in this trailer, all of them involving intrigue and drama.
The sky a luminous blue, Venus on the horizon. Stillness.
Maybe she just came here to sit in the metal folding chair by the side of the trailer and watch the rattlesnakes and think up legal arguments.
“I don’t know if I like it. It’s very exposed. But that could work in our favor. No hidden approach.” Jessie didn’t waste time looking around, but got the door open and checked out the trailer. Books and more books stacked on the table, on the bed in back, next to the tiny stainless-steel sink. Books on psychology, medicine, law, books of poetry, mystery novels, courtroom dramas.
Kenny had his answer. Nina read.
“Dust everywhere,” Kenny said. He picked up a Steve Martini novel lying open on the floor. “I’ll clean up while you get Gabe settled in.”
He wiped a wet cloth around and made beds while Jessie found a spot for Gabe’s portable crib. The moment she set Gabe in his bed, he began to cry.
Kenny went outside and fiddled with the propane tank. After a while, he admitted to himself that he would blow them all up and was going to have to ask for Jessie’s help if he didn’t want this brief idyll to end with a bang.
He went back in and started cutting up vegetables, waiting for Jessie to get Gabe to sleep. “What’s the matter?” Kenny asked finally, after watching her fuss over the baby for quite some time without result.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He cried nearly all the way here. He usually sleeps in the car. But—he gets this way sometimes lately. Irritable. He just cries. I think that’s normal with kids, isn’t it?”
Kenny picked Gabe up. “He seems kind of—warm, doesn’t he?”
Gabe was burning hot.
This time Kemp wouldn’t meet Red in his room. Unhappy memories, Red had no problem with that, but when Kemp wouldn’t tell him over the phone if he had the husband, Red got an unpleasant tremor in his gut, which he knew well. He felt separated from the action, left out. No control. He couldn’t stand that feeling except when the money was on a number. Even then he couldn’t stand it, but the pleasure was there, the hope.
It was past ten o’clock when Red parked out in front of the Pizza Hut in Minden. Kemp was already inside, sitting at a table in the crowded place, with a pitcher of beer in front of him. Red got out of the Boxster and locked up, then took a walk around the place looking at the security. Video cam facing the cashier. That seemed to be the sum total of their security measures except for a simple burglar alarm setup on the doors and windows. No outside cams. Kemp’s silver Chrysler was empty. No sign of the kidnappee.
Okay. It could still be okay. Hear Kemp’s story. Stay smart. He went in, skirting around the edges of the monitor’s visual field, pulling down on the baseball cap.
A kid brought a large pizza with canned pineapple strewn over it to the table as Red sat down with his back to the cam. More brats at the table in front of them, no sign of the parents, booths full of young jocks in nylon T-shirts that read “Pau Wa Lu,” celebrating some athletic triumph. Nobody else in the place was over twenty-one.
“Well?” Red said, standing there.
“Relax, man. Tell you in a minute. I have to eat. I’m starving. Have a beer on me.”
Red had no choice. He sat down. Kemp’s hair reeked and his eyes bulged red. His glove compartment was probably full of grass. He was a walking disaster, not a committed, organized criminal.
“What the fuck happened?” he said. “Where is he?”
Kemp worked his way through his second piece of pizza. He waved a hand, his mouth full. “Been a long day,” he said.
He drank some beer. Red considered him, considered the restaurant, wondered how it had all come down to a Pizza Hut. Big score, rapidly dwindling in the distance as the rest of the pack headed into the home stretch. He was getting a stomachache watching the Englishman.
A toddler tried to climb off his chair, fell against Red. He didn’t move. The teenaged mother picked him up and put him back in his chair, ignoring Red. Some people were rude, no way around it.
“I suppose you have guessed,” Kemp said. “Slight postponement, I fear. The dish ran away with the spoon.”
“Meaning?”
“I went after our boy. Tried to knock him down so I could get him into the car, but he managed to run. I followed him out to some godforsaken village across the mountains. The girl was there. She came out on the porch. I could have done them both right then, but that wasn’t the plan, was it? I was just going to wait and see if he came back out, and then I was going to grab our boy when he finally leaves. So I reconnoiter and what should I hear but this girl yelling that she’s going to shoot me. I jump off the porch and she sends a blast after me that bloody well almost took my ears off. I went as deaf as Winston Churchill. I step back, not wanting to be picking bullets out of my ass for the next hundred years. The neighbors are
peeking out their curtains, I’m nipping under the porch for a second of shelter. It’s nasty under there, they must have a lot of dogs.”
“And?”
“And, I decide it’s time to bloody well move out and wait my chance. I get out just in time. Police cruiser, red light flashing, on me left as I left.”
“He saw you?”
“Two of them. Paid absolutely no attention to me. So there’s only one highway out of this place. Deep forest all round. I pull off the road behind a tree and wait. And wait. And wait all bloody night.”
“Poor you,” Red said.
“Yeah.” Kemp ate some more, his face working industriously through each bite with the deprived look of someone who had grown up malnourished. He hadn’t looked this way when he was on a winning streak. Red caught a glimpse of his own face in the window reflection. He thought, I look old. Using a paper napkin, he brushed some of Kemp’s crumbs off the table onto the floor, which was already a lost cause.
“And when I woke up, they was gone,” Kemp said.
“What do you mean, when you woke up?”
“A man’s got to sleep, last I heard. I was up at the crack, no lie, but they didn’t come, so finally I took a chance and cruised by the place. Cars gone. I felt like beating something up, I did. So I went back to Tahoe, looking for them everywhere. Checked the lawyer’s office, but she was gone.”
Red considered this.
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t my fault, though. You wouldn’t have had no better luck.”
“Fuck,” Red said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The mom at the next table turned and shot him a shocked look.
He turned to her and said, eyes glittering, “You have a fucking problem?”
“I’m telling the manager,” she said, jumping like a little girl whose brother has just pinched her. She grabbed her kid and marched toward the cashier.
“Come on,” Red said. He pulled the baseball cap lower, made sure the goatee was on straight.
“Oh, no. Not after last time in my room. I want lots of witnesses. Look, it’s just a matter of time. I’ll get him.”
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