Pretty Like an Ugly Girl (Baer Creighton Book 3)

by Clayton Lindemuth

  More cheers.

  “The Arizona legislature will soon pass the Vallejo Bill, and I will sign it. I will take your fight all the way to the White House. May God, Arizona, and the United States bless you!”

  She stepped away. Patterson and a contingent of state police security men shepherded her toward the limousine.

  “Governor!”

  It was Clyman.

  Chief of Staff Patterson stepped forward to deflect the minority leader. A state trooper opened the limousine door and Rentier slipped to the seat. She watched Patterson and Clyman between elbows and torsos that gathered at the vehicle until Patterson leaned close to the window, his blank eyes searching the darkened glass. She lowered it.

  “Clyman wants a meeting tomorrow morning,” Patterson said. “It’s urgent.”

  “I can’t. You know that. I’m with the Girl Scouts tomorrow morning.”

  “Governor, you need to see him.”

  Patterson’s Marine Corps bearing, like his flat top haircut and Hitler mustache, touched a nerve. His cropped grey hair often made her think of the day her father burned her—it was one of the reasons she kept Patterson around.

  She touched her cheek. Plastic surgery, concealer, foundation, powder, and still her fingertips found the shiny-smooth cigarette scar.

  “Mick, it just struck me you look like Adolph Hitler. Shave your moustache.”

  “What?”

  “Tell Clyman to get in. He can ride back to the tower with me.”

  Patterson’s jaw clenched.

  “What?” she said.

  He turned away.

  A moment later Clyman was beside her. His arms poked from his barrel chest like legs on a blood-gorged tick. He’d escaped a childhood in Jerome, Arizona with his closed mind intact—before gays, bikers, and painters made the mountain copper town chic. He was a lineman on the Sun Devil football team in the seventies, then matriculated to a Catholic law school in Pittsburgh. Now he was a fat Republican who panted after climbing into a car seat.

  He was too close. He regarded her with wide-set eyes that lorded a secret.

  She drew her knees together. “I hope this isn’t about Vallejo.”

  His lips thinned and the right side curved upward. She’d seen that look years ago, when he defeated a minimum wage increase she’d asked a junior representative to submit on the House floor. The same leer graced the front page of the Phoenix Times when he lambasted her for visiting Mexican President Vicente Fox. Behind those pinprick eyes, his brain was as tight as a sparrow’s ass. Why did conservatives elect such ugly men?

  Clyman shifted. “I have information that might help you avoid a public relations problem. Thought we might come to an understanding.”

  She caught the driver’s glance in the rearview mirror. “Mitch, I’m sorry. Will you raise the divider?”

  The window climbed and nestled to the roof.

  “What are we talking about, Dick?”

  “Veto Vallejo.”

  “No way. That bill has a long history, and I’m going to be the governor that signs it.”

  “It’ll kill the state.”

  “Only a Republican would say more power in the hands of the people is bad. Or are they the wrong kind of people? We’ve argued this to death in the papers. Talk radio. The House floor. Why stake a proslavery position? Twenty-two states in the past had no citizenship test to vote. The country did fine.”

  “That so? I have a different story. My mother—seventy-five years old—comes home from the grocery store. Finds two spics busted in. They knock her around, tie her so tight her hands turn blue and rob her blind. When the police catch the perps, not only are they illegals—they’ve been caught and released twice before! Like goddam fish!”

  “I didn’t know about your mother.”

  “She had gangrene. Doctors had to amputate her hand to save her life.”

  Rentier drank water. Stared forward, then at Clyman.

  Clyman’s face changed. “Let me do you the favor of being candid.”

  She waited. The car turned to a highway onramp and accelerated.

  “There’s photos floating around,” he said. “You know, queer stuff. No one really cares when a woman eats pussy anymore, but the compromising stuff is who the pussies belong to. Now, if word gets to other Republicans—hell, Democrats—they’ll cry for impeachment. That’s the last thing I want. I think you and I can work together. Am I communicating with you?”

  Rentier studied his face. Clyman smiled.

  The Secretary of State—who became governor if Rentier became incapacitated—was a Republican. Clyman didn’t want her removed because he thought he could control her.

  “And you can make this problem go away?”

  “No; I don’t have the photos. I’m not even sure they exist. Let’s say if you and I were allies on Vallejo, you might assume my help in this matter.”

  It was her fault, in a way. Heat flushed her face; her scar pulsed. She rapped the glass divider and it lowered. “Pull over.”

  The limousine stopped a mile short of the Executive Tower.

  “Dick—I appreciate your candor enough to return it. Put those pictures in your personal collection, right next to the Vaseline. It’s the best use you’re going to get out of them. Now get the fuck out of my limo.”

  *

  Yellow Horse drives a pick into the ground. We’ve been up all night and I’m running on fumes. We took Forest Road Forty-Four deep into the woods outside Flagstaff; I looked at his gas gauge to make sure we’d make it out. We came to a place so arbitrary and lonely it seemed fit for a clandestine burial.

  The pick wedges between a rock and a root. “Son of a bitch,” Yellow Horse says. He pries it loose.

  The body rests under a tarp on the ground, one leg splayed and visible in the moonlight.

  I didn’t used to be like this. Before Gretchen died I managed a section at Honeywell. Had an MBA and a secretary named Cyndi.

  I left for work at four a.m. and always kissed Gretchen’s forehead. That last morning she had her leg kicked out from under the blanket. I passed around the bed in the dark and her toes caught my suit pant. I rubbed her sole and along her outer arch. Her feet always hurt, maybe from the weight of being pregnant. Her foot was soft as her inner thigh. She died that night.

  I kick Murray’s leg under the tarp.

  “You could’ve let him go,” I say.

  “And let the Machine grind me to dust? Inject my veins with poison?”

  “They don’t do that for talk.”

  “It was the wrong kind of talk.”

  I drink from my flask. “Keep digging. It’ll be dawn soon.”

  Murray’s blood has curdled in the bed of the truck; the clots glisten like cherry pie filling flung with a spatula and worked with an oil rag.

  “No problem,” Yellow Horse says.

  “They have chemicals that make blood show up.”

  “Not after I take a torch to it.”

  “You might try Clorox.”

  He shakes his head and his eyes light up; they don’t fit the face of a man that just murdered another. “This is a 1972 F-150,” he says. “It gets burned.”

  “I figure you have a couple of hours. I’m surprised they weren’t on us when you stuck him.”

  “It was a recorder, not a transmitter,” he says.

  Yellow Horse grabs Murray’s arms and I get his feet. His ass drags as we work him to the pit. The body’s getting stiff. We drop him in.

  “You better pull that blade out,” I say.

  “Why?”

  Doesn’t seem right to send him off with a knife in his forehead, so I jump in the hole and yank at it. His jaw falls open and each pull pumps dead air through his lungs. It stinks. I climb out.

  Yellow Horse shovels dirt on Murray. I suppose he thinks he’ll be able to tuck away the killing in a corner of his mind. Or maybe he thinks he’ll revel in it. But human beings aren’t built that way. He’ll be running from the law and himself the res
t of his life.

  We cover the grave with dirt and pine needles and soggy oak leaves, then get in the truck and head back to Flag. Last night’s storm fizzled at the damp wind stage. Wet air collects on the windshield.

  I look at Yellow Horse and wonder if he’s plotting his next moves, maybe running to Mexico this afternoon.

  I’m going to sleep. No one but Yellow Horse knows me as Nat Cinder. The secessionists think I’m Tom Davis. When I get out of this truck, Tom Davis disappears, and Nat Cinder never heard of him.

  “You can drop me off here,” I say.

  Yellow Horse pulls to the curb two blocks from the house where I left my bike—where I plan to spend the morning in the arms of a skinny blonde named Liz. She lives with Rosie, a big-boned woman liable to quote the Constitution the way some women quote psalms. I hear “we the people in order to form” and I get a chub like to club a seal. Liz and Rosie are rednecks, bar girls prone to throaty laughter; they view tattoos as the same kind of vanity as big earrings and big hair. They embrace all three.

  I stand beside the truck with the door open. The sun’s been up for hours but the air is brisk and damp.

  “You’d best get out of town,” I say. “See what shakes out.”

  “There were a lot of witnesses,” Yellow Horse says. “Eight, counting you.”

  “And half of them fairly new to the group. We’re gonna have to start over. One person at a time. Work in cells.”

  I expect him to turn away when I open the door, but his eyes are narrow. “You gonna be alright?”

  “What do you mean, Charlie?”

  “Last night. I don’t want to have to worry about you.”

  “Wait a good while until you get in touch.”

  He pulls away and I walk toward the house. Under leafy maples, shade outweighs light and brief splashes of sun warm my skin. I need sleep and I think of Liz. It ain’t love but she beats Miss Palm and her sisters. I see her like I remember her, legs spread, and just as I can damn near smell her musk, tires squeal and two brown sedans swerve front and back of Yellow Horse’s truck. They skid to a stop. I’m fifty yards away. Four guys in suits jump out waving guns. They wear sunglasses in the shade and they converge on the driver’s side door.

  Yellow Horse bolts from the passenger side and sprints across a lawn to the woods behind. The men fan out and chase. After a few seconds the trees hide them, but their shouts mark their paths.

  There’s no one on the street either direction; no parked cars. I trot across a lawn and behind a house. A Rottweiler lunges but a chain jerks him short. I jump a half-rotted fence that almost collapses and cross a lawn to a parallel avenue. FBI men bellow in the distance. Yellow Horse used to be a distance runner and I have the feeling these patent-leather chumps will be sucking wind inside a mile.

  Liz and Rosie live in a small house with sooty white siding and a rusted bike collection under the eaves. I approach from the back yard and push my Triumph from the porch. It’s a coldblooded machine and I choke it. While the engine steadies out, I rap the back door.

  Liz stands in her underwear and a shrunken T-shirt with a mug of coffee. Her legs bear the sheen of a fresh shave and I take a third of a second to debate whether I should save Yellow Horse’s ass, or pound hers.

  “You better clear out,” I say. “FBI was layin’ for Yellow Horse. They’ll be checking houses if they don’t get him. They were outside, so they know this place.”

  “You takin’ off without a goodbye kiss, Tom?” Liz says.

  Rosie watches from the kitchen window, her face illegible.

  I give Liz a peck on the lips and she grabs my mess. She smells of cigarettes.

  “Get out,” I tell her, and drink from the mug.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Not much.”

  “Can’t I ride with you?”

  “No.”

  She slams the door and the pane rattles.

  I told her my name was Tom Davis when I met her at a bar a couple years ago. Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis. I’d been scouting Flagstaff to get an understanding of grassroots thinking on secession. I had the time and the bucks, and figured other folks saw the same freedom meltdown. After Ruby Ridge and Waco, you don’t let government know who you are or what you’re doing. I set up a fake name and did a few credit card transactions to support it. I have two more identities, unused.

  One more gulp of coffee and I climb on the bike—a Triumph Rocket. It has a car-sized engine but no cup holder. I take a final drink and toss the mug to the lawn, then cut a mark across the grass and over the sidewalk.

  At the junction with Maryland Street a black sedan pulls to the corner on my right. A suit watches me from inside. I drive straight and the car turns left. He stays in the open, an FBI harassment technique. It’s also what disinterested strangers do.

  I take Madison and then Santa Clara; the car falls back but remains in sight. He weaves. There’s no traffic so I figure he’s fiddling with the radio or a cell phone. Checking his email. One more turn and I’m on the road to Interstate 17. I’ve made a loop and I’m parallel to where Yellow Horse left his truck and sprinted into the woods. If it was me, I’d be sticking to the flat ground and making distance. He’s covered a mile and a half, if I’m right.

  Soon the houses thin to one every hundred yards and the pavement weaves between a dirt bank on the left and a hollow on the right. Tall trees choke the undergrowth with permanent shade. It’s like driving through the dank air of a tunnel.

  Yellow Horse runs like a raped ape to my right. The air whips his hair and I recall last night, when the illusion was strong. He’s in his element. If he lives only ten minutes, he’ll be glad these were his last. I’m not as exhilarated.

  Three men follow at a distance; their white shirts flash through the trees. I bump my horn and Yellow Horse angles to the bike. The sedan behind me accelerates.

  We meet fifty yards ahead. I skid on the pavement and Yellow Horse leaps aboard, rocking my balance. I pop the clutch and the bike rights itself. The engine screams like a dago tenor with a wine bottle rammed up his ass. I yell, “hang on!” too late and Yellow Horse claws at my side to keep from falling off the back. The bike explodes. The rear tire chirps; the front tire lifts. It’s as close to instant travel as man can come. I push it hard—the car is right on us and there’s a hand with a gun sticking out the window.

  We bank right and left and when we’ve gone a mile I swerve on a left fork and press the bike again. The wind has fists and bugs feel like sling-shot rocks. Yellow Horse doesn’t have sunglasses and he buries his face to my back. I come to another turn and take it. We’ve lost our pursuers and I skid to a stop.

  “If I was you I’d visit Mexico,” I say.

  “If I was you I’d get rid of that yellow flag.”

  I look at the back of the bike where I’ve mounted a small yellow pennant—the Gadsden flag—with a coiled rattlesnake and the words, DON’T TREAD ON ME.

  Yellow Horse slaps my back and disappears into the woods.

  I figure every federal dick in Flagstaff and Phoenix is scouring the land looking for a Triumph Rocket. They have cars, motorcycles, and thanks to Janet Reno, Abrams tanks. They probably have helicopters after us by now and I won’t be shocked if the NSA offers up a satellite. The sum of the facts is I’m not taking Interstate Seventeen back to Phoenix. I wouldn’t make it to Mund’s Park.

  I head down 89A through Oak Creek Canyon toward Sedona and mix with tourist traffic. The famous red rocks stand bright in the sky; grass ripples as cars pass. The double lane winds along the creek. I’m behind a string of cars a mile long—people that saw the Grand Canyon yesterday and will visit the O.K. Corral tomorrow—when a helicopter flying NAP of the earth pounds overhead. I hunker down without thinking and when I look up I’m under heavy tree cover.

  The bird continues along the road and by the time it banks right it looks more like a dragonfly than a chopper. I can’t see any markings. Mountain-sized boulders block the
left, Oak Creek the right. Every turn dead-ends in fifty feet. I go straight but watch the sky.

  One of the witnesses called the FBI. Like Yellow Horse said, Murray wore a recorder, not a transmitter. Unless it had GPS, which I wouldn’t put past the wily sonsabitches, there’s no other way they know Murray’s dead.

  I could turn on Yellow Horse and save my ass, but what kind of choice is that?

  Break things down to black and white, the grays have to pick a side.

  Two miles before Sedona, on the right, a stone wall gaps at a driveway with a twelve-foot gate. The top of the worked iron rolls into an eagle crest. Wings spread as if braking for prey; outstretched talons hang ready to rend whoever passes unauthorized through the gates.

  A hundred yards distant, at the top of a knoll, a log cabin with a wraparound deck peeks through the trees. It dates to 1891, built by one of the first settlers in Sedona. A later owner planted an orchard on the field to the right, and between us, Oak Creek gurgles over rocks.

  The governor of Arizona, Virginia Rentier, escapes the desert here. She could be inside right now, cutting a deal with another cutthroat or scoring a business transaction. A security element patrols the cabin whether she’s there or not.

  I’ve mused about this ranch.

  In Sedona, tourists fight for parking spaces and wander with cameras and plastic shopping bags, searching for meaning at souvenir shops, tarot readers, psychic healers, and food service joints. Want a genuine Navajo trinket? From China with love.

  Nobel Prize-winning economists tell us the global economy is a positive thing; it isn’t a zero-sum game. But deep inside, I can’t help but think there’s something good about being able to manufacture our own trash.

  Tree cover thins after Sedona. I follow 89 to Cottonwood and cut across to Jerome. The old copper town tugs at my heart; climbing the switchbacks I pass eight biker bars. The air chills and my hands grow stiff. I stop at the rest area at the crest and take a leak, then replace the lost fluid with fresh Jack Daniel’s from my flask. Back amid trees, I park the bike in the sun and think. I’d be smart to hole up. I’m confident they don’t have my name, but my bike marks a trail like fresh blood on snow.