Table of Contents
Cover
Recent Titles by Corey Lynn Fayman
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One: The Bite
Chapter Two: The DJ
Chapter Three: The Hospital
Chapter Four: The Shop
Chapter Five: The Ballpark
Chapter Six: The Collection
Chapter Seven: The Tower
Chapter Eight: The Shocker
Chapter Nine: The Cop
Chapter Ten: The Plans
Chapter Eleven: The Cantina
Chapter Twelve: The Rez
Chapter Thirteen: The Mountain
Chapter Fourteen: The Garden
Chapter Fifteen: The Camper
Chapter Sixteen: The er
Chapter Seventeen: The House
Chapter Eighteen: The Jail
Chapter Nineteen: The Memorial
Chapter Twenty: The Return
Chapter Twenty-One: The Relics
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Interview
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Patents
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Sneaker
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Blog
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Number
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Constant
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Trailer
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Ascent
Chapter Thirty: The Mine
Chapter Thirty-One: The Conjoinment
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Rockers
Chapter Thirty-Three: The Chief
Chapter Thirty-Four: The Homecoming
Recent Titles by Corey Lynn Fayman
The Rolly Waters Mysteries
BLACK’S BEACH SHUFFLE
BORDER FIELD BLUES
DESERT CITY DIVA *
* available from Severn House
DESERT CITY DIVA
Corey Lynn Fayman
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This first world edition published 2015
in Great Britain and in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.
Trade paperback edition first published 2016
in Great Britain and the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2015 by Corey Lynn Fayman.
The right of Corey Lynn Fayman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Fayman, Corey Lynn, author.
Desert city diva.
1. Private investigators–California–Fiction.
2. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 3. Cults–Fiction.
4. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title
813.6-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8548-7 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-657-2 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-711-0 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,
Stirlingshire, Scotland.
To Maria, for the roads we’ve travelled, and the solitudes shared.
ONE
The Bite
It was a bad idea to go out for Mexican food at 2:30 in the morning, but that hadn’t prevented Rolly Waters from stopping by the Villa Cantina for a plate of machaca after his gig. It wasn’t the machaca that was going to kill him, though. It was the bite on his leg. It was a whole string of bad ideas that had brought him to this wretched state, on the nauseous edge of mortality. Bad ideas, bad decisions, bad choices – whatever you wanted to call them – each one had inexorably led to the next. And each had led to this moment, as he barfed his guts out in the emergency room at the hospital. He didn’t even know the name of the hospital. He didn’t know the name of the town it was in. He only knew that he’d never felt this sick. He knew he was going to die.
Medical personnel dressed in grubby green scrubs gathered around him, thwarting his passage into oblivion, perhaps hastening it. One of them jabbed his left arm with a needle. Another wrapped his right arm in a blood pressure cuff. They pulled his pants off and inspected his ankle as the vital signs monitor beeped in his ear. His left leg felt like burning coals had been inserted under his skin. A woman made him swallow two pills. She gave him a shot glass of liquid that smelled like rotten eggs. Stomach acid swirled up in his throat. The doctors and nurses floated on a bilious green cloud. He lifted his head and leaned over the bucket. His stomach heaved but nothing came up. He closed his eyes and lay back on the bed. The air smelled like old fish. He surrendered to the vivid manifestations of an unsettled sleep.
Poisson. It was the French word for fish. One letter different from poison. There were no fish in the desert. There was no water. The aliens drank gold in their water. The people drank poison. The people couldn’t breathe. They gasped for air like fish in the living room.
He opened his eyes. The harsh light of the emergency room glowed with a creeping softness. A nurse came by and gave him two more pills. He laughed. Valium always made him loopy like this. If he was going to die, he would be defiant in death, laughing his way into the great darkness. There were worse ways to go. He would die laughing, with a smile on his face. Out of his mind. Definitely Valium. Over and out.
The man had a gift for him. The man was a bird. The bird sang a song. The song had gold notes. The girl had gold eyes.
He awoke. There was no one around. He watched with dull fascination as the blood pressure cuff on his right arm inflated again. It was going to blow up in his face. As it was about to crush his arm into fractured bits of bone gravel, the cuff exhaled and collapsed. He turned his head on the pillow and looked up at the ceiling. The tiles in the ceiling were damaged. Crumpled and stained. His left leg still burned, but less so than before. His stomach seemed steadier.
A nurse appeared next to him, acting like she wanted to take his temperature. He opened his mouth and took the plastic tip under his tongue. She checked the number, nodded and removed the thermometer.
‘Coming down,’ she said. She looked at the display on the blood pressure monitor. ‘Blood pressure’s down too.’
‘I’m not gun’ die?’ Rolly said, nodding his head in affirmation.
‘No. Doesn’t look like you’re going to die today,’ the nurse said. She smiled at him. ‘Of course, we’ll need the doctor to confirm that. He’s the one that gets to decide.’
The nurse was cute. Real cute. Macy Starr was cute, too. In a different way.
‘How’s your leg feeling?’ the nurse asked.
‘Bedder,’ said Rolly. His mouth felt like it had been blasted with fine sand.
‘Good. I’ll check back in a little bit. It’s going to be a couple more hours, to make sure you get down to normal.’
‘Where am I?’
‘Brawley General Hospit
al. Do you remember checking in?’
‘I remember driving in a rocket ship. There were some blue lights. It smelled like fish.’
‘That’s Brawley, all right. It’s the fertilizer that smells. I don’t know what the rocket ship part’s about.’
‘Something bit me.’
‘A black widow spider. Probably not a good idea to go tramping around barefoot in Slab City like your friends said you were doing.’
‘My friends? Are they here?’
‘I can check if you want. Do you feel ready to see people?’
‘In a little while,’ Rolly said, feeling sleepy again. The nurse closed the curtains and left. He lay back on the pillow.
He was sitting in a rowboat on a sandy hill. His father was there. They were in the same boat. His father shouted at him, giving orders. His father handed him a ukulele. He said there was a bomb in the boat. His father saluted, then jumped out of the boat and swam away.
Rolly opened his eyes. He remembered where he was. The Brawley General emergency ward was quieter now, last night’s hubbub reduced to a muted hum. He wondered if the staff had forgotten about him and closed the place down, gone to lunch, or breakfast, or whatever meal it was time for.
The monitoring equipment they’d hooked him up to continued to beep at regular intervals, but it seemed less alarming now. The swelling in his leg had gone down, along with the pain. He felt almost normal. He felt ready to check out. That didn’t count for much. He knew how it went in the emergency ward. Like Zeno’s arrow, each minute got longer the closer you got to being discharged. He lay back on the bed, stared at the crumpled, stained tiles in the ceiling.
Three days ago, he’d gone out for Mexican food at 2:30 in the morning. That’s when he’d met Macy Starr, at the Villa Cantina. If he’d gone home right after his gig, or just gone to the grocery store, he would never have taken her case. He wouldn’t be lying in the hospital in the rotten fish city of Brawley with a black widow spider bite on his ankle. Things would get complicated with Macy now, accounting his hours, parsing them into the personal and the professional. Last night they’d had sex in the Tioga. The spider bite was a message. The message said he was an idiot.
Macy Starr had golden eyes.
TWO
The DJ
Macy Starr had golden eyes. She had strawberry-blonde hair. It hung down in dreadlocks that surrounded her tan, freckled face like a halo of soggy breadsticks. At this moment, she was drenched in sweat, the kind of sweat that pours off your body when you work a room with bright spotlights and poor ventilation. It was nightclub sweat, an affidavit of her vocation, and Rolly’s, the sweat that blooms off the bodies of musicians, strippers and stand-up comedians. No amount of antiperspirant or hygienic preparation would hold it back.
Macy was a dance club DJ, cranking out beats until the early hours of morning. She’d just finished her gig at the club adjoining the Villa Cantina restaurant in downtown San Diego. Rolly had stopped in at the cantina after his own gig that night, bending guitar strings at Patrick’s Pub six blocks away. Under normal conditions, an old-school guitar player like himself and a young beatmaker like Macy would have little to say to each other. They would not have crossed paths. Vera, the hostess, had introduced them. Macy needed help. She needed advice, the kind only a guitar-playing private detective could provide.
Macy had tattoos all over her thin muscular arms – geometric marks and mythical creatures, symbols of something. Rolly had no idea what. She was a small woman with the nervous energy of a flycatcher. Her eyes were amazing. They sparkled with bright flecks of gold that seemed to illuminate the dim light of the back corner booth. A bead of sweat dripped down Macy’s neck and fell into her lovely jugular notch. She was at least twenty years younger than Rolly.
‘Not much to look at down there,’ she said, interrupting his gaze.
‘Your shirt is, uh … kind of unusual,’ said Rolly, raising his eyes from Macy’s chest.
‘You like Stoner Mickey?’ she said, looking down at the front of her tank top, a rainbow-eyed Mickey Mouse wearing headphones and smoking a king-sized joint.
‘I assume that’s not officially licensed?’ said Rolly.
‘It’s a one-off. I made it myself. Disney’s lawyers would tear this off my body in copyright-induced rage if they ever saw it. They’re hardcore about branding. That’s what I heard anyway. What do you think?’
‘About Disney?’
‘No, dumbass. About that guitar thing. You ever seen anything like it?’
The guitar thing in question wasn’t really a guitar. It was a one-stringed instrument propped up on the booth in between them. It was well made, with a finely finished wood body, a gold-plated tuning peg and a vintage single-coil pickup. You could make some noise with it, but it lacked the refinements and playability of a real guitar.
‘I’d call it a diddley bow,’ said Rolly.
‘Diddley what?’
‘Diddley bow. They started in the South. Sharecroppers would attach a piece of wood to their house, drive in a couple of nails and stretch a wire between them so they could thump on it. Kind of a poor man’s guitar. Homemade. Not usually this nice.’
‘What about on the back?’ said Macy.
Rolly grabbed the diddley bow and inspected the back. A photograph had been laminated on to it, a black-and-white photograph of a teenage girl and a young man in a baseball uniform. The man had his arm around the girl. Both of them were smiling. There were palm trees in the background. Their smiles looked genuine.
‘You think this is your aunt?’ Rolly said.
‘I guess so. Daddy Joe called her Aunt Betty.’
‘Who’s Daddy Joe?’
‘I’ll get to that.’
‘You don’t know Aunt Betty’s last name?’
‘Not unless it was Harper. That’s Daddy Joe’s name.’
‘And you think it was Daddy Joe that left this here for you?’
‘Vera said the guy who left it was a big Indian.’
‘The woman in this photo doesn’t look Indian.’
‘Because she’s black?’
‘Well, she does look more African-American than Indian, don’t you think?’
‘You’re an expert on racial distinctions?’
‘No. I just … Are you … Native American?’
‘No. Not now that there’s money on the line.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing. I don’t care. I got out of that damn place. I don’t need their money.’
‘What money?’
‘They built a casino. If you’re part of the tribe, you get a share of the money. I ain’t on that list.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah. DNA.’
‘You mean your genes? They check your DNA?’
Macy pointed at three letters tattooed between her jugular notch and her left breast.
‘This DNA stands for Do Not Ask,’ she said. ‘Get used to me saying it.’
Rolly nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I’m an investigator. I have to ask questions.’
‘It’s my personal credo,’ said Macy. ‘Do not ask. DNA. Just do what you want to do. But if I say DNA to you, that means I want you to shut up.’
‘What about Daddy Joe?’ Rolly said. ‘Can I ask you about him?’
Macy stared at Rolly for a moment. He stared back. She broke first.
‘OK, just give me a second,’ she said, looking away. ‘You can fantasize about what my little tits might look like or whatever else you want to think about this crazy bitch you just met. But don’t ask me anything else until I say it’s OK.’
Rolly nodded. He tried not to picture what enticements lay under Macy’s shirt, but it was like trying not to think about pink elephants once somebody had mentioned them. He scraped at his plate, but there was nothing left worth eating. The refried beans had gone cold. He looked around the room. The cantina was busy. Staying open after last call had been good for business. At three in the morning, it became a refuge for the af
ter-hours crowd with no place to go, for the leftovers who needed sustenance, a greasy ballast to diminish the hangovers they’d be nursing the next day.
‘OK,’ said Macy. ‘I’m ready.’
Rolly nodded. He liked Macy. He liked her directness.
‘So here’s the deal,’ she began. ‘I was adopted. I think. Nobody ever explained a damn thing to me and I never cared much, I guess. You could say I’ve got some parental issues, if you wanna go all Doctor Phil on me. Anyway, I grew up on the Jincona Indian reservation. It’s out east, in BF Egypt.’
‘My band’s playing at their casino tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, great, whatever. Daddy Joe Harper and his wife were the ones that took care of me, until Mama Joe died. Then Kinnie took care of me. She’s Daddy Joe’s real daughter. Kinnie never liked me much. I don’t blame her. Aunt Betty was there, for a little while, when I was a baby. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’d remember her if it wasn’t for that picture there. Daddy Joe kept that diddley bow thing in his closet. He’d bring it out sometimes and tell me about Aunt Betty.’
‘What’d he say?’ said Rolly.
‘DNA.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No questions right now. Not while I’m trying to get through this.’
Rolly nodded. Macy fingered the gold charm that hung from her neck. The charm was shaped like a tube. There was some sort of inscription on it.
‘Anyway,’ Macy continued, ‘Daddy Joe always used to show me that photograph. He’d say “This is your Aunt Betty. She brought you to our house. She brought you here. We never want to forget her.” He’d tell me that, and then one day I asked him, you know, “What happened to Aunt Betty? Where did she go?”’
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