CoverBoys & Curses (20 page)

Chapter
Fifty-Eight

Starr
Pass

AS
SELF-PROCLAIMED Trail Guide, Sterling was the first to awaken. The tantalizing
aroma of brewing coffee forced me to open my eyes and roll off the bed. I
tossed on my robe and joined her out on the patio.

For a
long time and only as you can do with good friends, we sat in a sheltered
silence.

“I do
love it here,” Sterling said after a slow sip on her coffee. “I loved the
brilliant city lights last night. Not an L.A. glitz kind of brilliant, but
beckoning. Sitting here now, I love how the sunlight begins to paint the
mountains with strokes of inspiration. Kind of a
da
Vinci inspired light.”

I tilted
my head and nodded in appreciation.

“Don’t
get me wrong. I’m a city girl all the way,” Sterling said.
 
“I don’t like snakes.”

Always a
caveat with Sterling, but I loved her hidden qualities. Smart, for one.
Computer savvy. And an appreciation for Mother Nature? These are things I
didn’t know about my childhood friend. Sterling? She grew up with that sterling
spoon in her mouth.

She
filled in my lack of words. “I’m only a ditzy blonde when I have an old man
walk into the store. He doesn’t know it when he enters through the door, but
he’s going to drop a wad of dough right into my lap for more diamonds than he
wanted. Lots more. I even get away with charging them extra for gift-wrapping,
but only if I play dumb enough.

“One
customer came in and asked for two custom pieces. Mind you, his wife’s name is
in our files. He wanted gold dicks with Prince Albert diamonds on the heads, and
not one was for the
wifey
.”

“And you
can accommodate that order?”

           
“Our business is custom. But this
request? Well, it was extraordinarily custom. We have a gay goldsmith that was
perfect for the job. He probably got a rise out of it.

           
“But get this. He wanted the same
size gold dick for both of his girlfriends. But one got two carats and the
other one got three.”

           
“Wow. That’s a hefty load for any
dick to carry,” I said, “given any Prince Alpert.”

           
“That’s Albert, with a
B
.”

Funny
girl, too. And now I would begin to take her for the smart and calculating
blonde she was. She could even spell.

“So you
think we should just pack up and drive to the east side?” I asked.

“That’s
what my lovely Ranger Jeremy suggests. Might as well while we are here.”

“We look
for three saguaro spines, upright or felled. And then what?”

“Then we
look for the secrets of the Sisterhood of Skeletons.”

Carly
stumbled out to the patio, with bleary eyes and a cup of coffee steadied by
both hands. She flipped a sealed envelope onto the table.

“Where
did that come from?” I asked.

“I
opened the door to get the morning paper and the envelope fell out of it.”

Studying
my name printed in calligraphy on the front, I smoothed my fingers over the
shaky but honorable old style of formal writing.

“Come
on! Open it!” Sterling said.

Having
had more death threats circulating around me, I thought better of the idea. I
passed the envelope over to Sterling.

She
snatched it in midair and ripped the seal. Then she stopped.

“I’m too
chicken. I don’t play this game as well as I pretend,” she said. She passed the
envelope back to Carly.

Carly
studied the writing. “It’s difficult to decipher. The writing is horrible,” she
said.

“Okay.
The message is plain and simple. She read it aloud:

                       
“Good girls. It
was no suicide.”

Sterling
withdrew deeper into her seat cushion and pulled her lanky legs up toward her
chin. She drew a long breath. “You see! We have more friends on board with us,
right?”

I
scoured the note. And then each and every word. Every letter.

It was
surely that from the old man that had sent me the reward of a few bucks after I
returned his wallet. And that claim check for the stupid set of golf clubs. But
how could that be?

“At
least he’s not scaring us away,” Carly said, unable to understand where my
deductions had taken me.

I
wondered. Was he trying to scare us? At the very least he was a stalker, if it
was the same old man that
 
had spied me
dining alone in
Cattrozzi’s
and now knew three of us had
arrived in Tucson on an uninviting mission. It didn’t feel, to me, that the unknown
welcoming committee really welcomed us on our journey.

No. He
wouldn’t scare us away. But maybe he was inviting us into his web.

Chapter
Fifty-Nine

On
the Trail

WE
CHECKED OUT OF Starr Pass without the luxury of enjoying the pool or the golf
course. We made the drive to Saguaro National Park East.

           
“You didn’t fail us, Sterling,”
Carly said. “I can’t believe what you dug up.”

The same
kind of amazement I felt. Smart dumb blonde.

           
All three of us were a united front,
if only words on any faded T-shirt. We told ourselves that if we had seen three
saguaro skeletons in the west park we would have remembered such an unusual
sight. Plus, we had photographs to back up our memories.

           
Sterling confirmed that no one
outside of the forest ranger knew of our impending hike. Still, I watched the
rearview all the way across town, down
Tanque
Verde
Road, and even well into the park’s parking lot. Be they friends or foes, it
seemed that we were rich with persons interested in our pursuit.

           
Sterling navigated us toward our
trailhead on to the Cactus Forest Trail. Equipped with hiking boots, heavy work
gloves, and a couple of small hand trowels we’d picked up at yet another Tucson
hardware store, we headed up the trail.

           
Once on the trail, Carly was the
first to falter, but only after tripping twice and catching her fall with
gloves that only protected her hands. Stickers shot up out of the skin on her
arms.

           
“This is a waste of time,” she said.
“Why would Payton come all the way across Tucson to this park when she lived on
the west side? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of hiding places there.”

           
“Keep walking. Keep looking,”
Sterling said, with a sudden healthy outburst of a Boy Scout’s attitude.

           
And we did.

           
A trio of troopers. Naive in desert
country and even more naive about what the hell we were trying to accomplish.

           
Still, as all little troopers go, we
marched forward like amorous dogs in search of tail. Any tail.

           
Sterling forged ahead on our ominous
mission, sweeping branches and stickers out of our way, and even pointing out
the horny toad taking shelter under a massive rock. Dust swirled around us and somehow
we took relief in the hot breeze.

           
Carly grumbled something again about
stumbling into three human skulls. We laughed and refueled on the water bottles
with electrolytes we’d picked up at Trader Joe’s. The water was warm. We didn’t
complain with the wet sensation on our dry mouths and tongues.

           
We continued for another mile or so.
The trail wasn’t steep. Carly and I took turns taking photographs. Of nothing.
When we came upon a cluster of boulders it took no communication for all of us
to decide it was time to rest. Drawing on our bottled water, we swung our necks
at the sound of snapping twigs behind us.

           
“It’s a public trail,” I said, with
water dribbling down my chin.

           
“Yes,” Sterling mumbled, taking in
the vista that surrounded us with ample viewing opportunities for anyone that
may care to look. Or spy.

           
Carly forced a laugh. “We’re
paranoid. Look at us! We look like punk Desert Rats. Nobody gives a damn about
what the three of us are up to.”

           
Little doubt none of us believed our
own words. We felt vulnerable. Exposed to both the desert sun and the
juxtaposed danger of mankind, we remembered Victor Romero’s warning.

           
We shared one question, for we knew
we were being watched.

Friend or
foe?

Chapter Sixty

Snake

COMMON
SENSE DICTATED we stick to the trail. Carly had procured a walking stick from
the desert brush and now took the lead. At the sound of castanets where no
castanets should be in the middle of
fricking
nowhere,
she froze.

           
The coiled rattlesnake sprung left,
then right. He was near enough I could see the diamonds on his back and his
forked tongue biting at the air.

           
Sterling neared me. With a low voice
she demanded the potion.

           
“What?” I said.

           
“Don’t fuck with us now, Lauren. The
voodoo potion. You have it in your backpack. Slowly pull it out and use it.”

           
Both Carly and Sterling had given me
plenty of crap about Geoff’s crazy grandmother’s potion. Sterling knew I had it
when I’d long ago forgotten I’d tossed it into in my backpack to journey
through the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

           
I slid the small vial from the stiff
denier of the outer pocket on my backpack. I fondled it. I tried to recall
Geoff’s words when he gave it to me. I closed my eyes.

 
I placed one drop on my tongue, then spat it
out. That is what Sterling and Carly told me later as I have no clear recall.

           
The snake’s rattling grew fiercer.

           
Two drops dripped onto my tongue.

           
The snake reared its head, prepared
to strike at any or all of us.

           
Something inside of me continued
with
her
tongue sticking out of me,
the vial of liquid catching glints from the high sun. I turned to Sterling and
spat the liquid into her face. I turned to Carly and spat in her face.

           
I could hear myself. I had no
control. I began to ululate in a voice more customary of ancient cultures,
times, and places.

           
The snake uncoiled. Wary, watching,
then turning to slither away.

           
“Let’s go,” I suddenly announced. I
felt a lift of opaque fog that had clouded my memory, and maybe my judgment.

           
Carly and Sterling were still frozen
in their hiking boots, but eager to get away.

           
Sterling backed up. Carly cowered.

           
“No,” I said. “We have to follow
it.”

           
“You have to be out of your fucking
mind,” Sterling said.

           
“We follow it,” I demanded.

           
The encounter is one I will not
forget. I stood almost trancelike but fully cognizant, in the middle of the
desert.

           
For me, it amounted to a trust that
materialized out of the dust that day. A knowing trust.

           
We followed the snake as it winded
away, and within minutes we stood before three fallen saguaro.

           
Other than Carly’s shoulder
twitching, we came to a still stop in front of the skeletons. Once again took I
the vial of potion, stared at my friends, and placed four drops in the position
of the four directions.

           
I said we must fall to our knees and
bless the earth. Three city girls and with a rattlesnake nearby. But they did
as I somehow instructed, in silence and with jaws dropped.

Chapter Sixty-One

Voodoo
& Who

IN
ONE MOMENT of eternity we watched the snake slither away.

I
regained a sense of purpose. I pulled out the hand rake wedged into my belt. Sterling
and Carly followed suit. None of us spoke about what had just occurred. Not one
word.

           
It was I that pulled at the arm of
the furthest skeleton. It shattered under my hard tug, and beneath it I could
see the corner of a clear plastic bag.

           
Sterling dropped to the ground.
“What is it?” she said in her own calm but upbeat voice.

           
“It’s a flash stick,” I said.

           
A severely damaged flash stick that
looked like it had endured years on a populated railroad track.

It was
then that I heard Geoff’s words replaying in my mind when he handed me his
magic potion: “My grandmother had one more message. You will sing and have no
memory of it, and that will be a good thing.”