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“Why were you pounding on the window?”

Inside the limo, he shrugged those ripped shoulders of his. “Saw someone I knew.”

The other guy, small, stocky, a Special Forces type, sat very close to Conroy. It was a big space, the back of the limo, plenty of places to sit and stretch out, but these two were joined at the hip.

She also thought there was a bruise on Conroy’s face. Maybe it was just grime, but Tess thought it was a bruise.

She unsnapped the strap to her holster and kept her right hand near her weapon.

“Out of the car. Now.”

They complied. Conroy and the guy with him still joined at the hip. Guy’s hand on his arm.

“License and registration?” The driver handed it to her. His name was Hogart, and the limo belonged to a leasing company in Phoenix.

“Have we broken any laws?” Hogart asked, after she came back from her cruiser, having run the plate.

“No, sir.”

“Good. Then we’ll be leaving.”

Tess looked at the guy. Max Conroy, the movie star.

Whatever else this was, it was a lie. There was no Sally “uh, Dorman,” she of the fictional baby and the fictional hospital.

Tess moved fast, pulling Max around and walking him to the back fender and shoving him down against it. Secured him with cuffs. “Anything in your pockets?” she demanded.

He shook his head. She patted him down, careful with the pockets, worried about needles. Movie stars had been known to shoot up.

“Hey, what is this?” yelled Hogart.

Tess ignored him and said to her prisoner, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

“Look, this is a misunderstanding,” Hogart said, coming close to invading her space.

She drew her weapon and held it by her side. “Back up. Place your hands on your head.”

He complied. Quickly, automatically.

“On your knees.”

He sank to his knees immediately. Either he had really good knees, or he was used to taking the position.

“This man is under arrest.
You
are free to go.”

“What’s he charged with?”

“Are you interfering with the lawful duties of a duly sworn sheriff’s deputy?” she said.

He backed off, as she knew he would. The two men got back into the limo and drove away. By then, Tess had her prisoner in the backseat of her cruiser.

And she didn’t know what to do with him.

“So you put him in jail,” Pat said.

“Safest place I could think of.”

“That place has more holes than the Alamo.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think those guys were gonna come storming in.”

“You know they’ll be back.”

“Not much I can do about it. At least I bought him some time.”

“You have any idea what they wanted?”

“Nope.”

“And Hogart?”

“No wants or warrants. Same with the other guy.”

“License number?”

Here we go again
, Tess thought. He never tired of the game. She reeled the plate number off.

“What did Hogart’s license say?”

She rattled off the info on his driver’s license: five foot nine, one sixty, brown and brown, restricted to corrective lenses, his domicile in Flagstaff. She gave him the address.

“Wish I could get you on
Jeopardy!
We could split the winnings. You run Hogart?”

She nodded. “Works for the Desert Oasis Healing Center in Sedona.”

“
Healing
center? One of those fancy-dancy places where celebrities go for the cure?”

“Maybe Max didn’t want to be there anymore.”

“You think they’d try to make him stay?”

“I have no idea.”

Chapter Six

The Desert Oasis Healing Center

G
ORDON
W
HITE
E
AGLE
didn’t spook easily. He was a master at assessing people—that was his stock in trade. But
this
one, the twelve-year-old kid…

Scared him.

Maybe it was the eyes. They were predator’s eyes, which didn’t surprise Gordon at all, because the boy’s mother was more wolf than human. Two nights ago, he’d dreamed about her, that he was trapped in a deep fissure in the earth, his body impossibly broken, and she was staring down at him behind dark glasses, her face impassive.

Gordon White Eagle paid attention to dreams.

Funny, but he couldn’t remember, during his interactions with Shaun over the last three years, if she’d ever mentioned a kid. He’d always assumed she was childless.

He shrugged. She lived in LA, and had done only a few jobs for him. She kept her private life private. Maternity aside, she was here now. And he needed her.

First thing, he gave them the tour. Gordon took every opportunity to show the place off to his visitors, even though Shaun had been there many times. But the boy, Jimmy, barely looked up from fiddling with his phone.

“Can’t he stop texting for one minute?”

“He’s not bothering anybody.”

“He’s bothering
me
. I don’t want him texting his friends. This is a private conversation.”

“He won’t.” She looked at Jimmy. “You won’t text your friends about where we are or what we’re doing. Do you get that?”

He nodded dismissively, still thumbing the phone like a virtuoso.

Gordon didn’t trust him. He bent down from his six-foot-four height and put his hands on his knees. “How’d you like to go for a swim, young man? Danny here can fix you up.” He nodded to their attendant, a burnished Adonis in white linen drawstring pants and huaraches.

Danny, an actor studying his lines for the part of an Australian cow farmer at the Clarkdale Dinner Theatre, was still in character. He said, “Off we go,
moyte
,” and steered Jimmy toward the cabanas.

The kid taken care of, Gordon led the way to a table shielded from the sun by a royal palm. “As I told you, things have changed.”

Shaun said nothing, just stared at the vista. And why not? It was a beautiful vista. Most of the Desert Oasis was tucked away along a stream, but there was one place—it took some walking to get to—that yielded a limited view of the Verde Valley. An infinity pool, like a plane of dark glass, mirrored the massive mountains above and delineated the sheer drop-off to the valley below.

Gordon said, “Our erstwhile friend has flown the coop. Taken a powder. Made tracks, so to speak.”

Shaun stared impassively at him from behind her Dolce & Gabbana aviators. Gordon shivered despite the heat. She always made him nervous. “Apparently, he bribed one of the laundry crew to drive him out in his truck.”

Shaun said nothing. There was no curiosity at all. He realized for the hundredth time that she was a beautiful woman but she left him cold.

She had perfect features. A model’s cheekbones and a model’s posture. But Gordon, who was naturally attracted to pretty much every woman on earth, no matter how dumpy or plain, shuddered at the thought of fucking this one.

It wasn’t that she came off a bit mannish. It wasn’t even that god-awful haircut, a man’s haircut, what you’d call a “fade,” clipped close to her skull.

No. Sex, no matter if it was with one of the maids from housekeeping or an alcoholic socialite or the hottest movie star in LA, was special to him. Performance art in the sweetest possible way. But he knew, with this woman, it would just be…mating.

Shaun finally spoke. “What did Max see?”

Gordon didn’t know for sure if Max Conroy saw
anything
. And frankly, it was a side issue. The fact that he saw anything at all was only relevant to the fact that it might have spurred him to leave.

“So what did he see?” Shaun repeated.

“Nothing that important.” It was just another problem in a string of problems Gordon had to deal with. And problems invited scrutiny.

“He might have seen a body,” Gordon said at last.

Deedee Wertman, an inbred socialite from Montauk, had come out to Arizona to recover from a bad love affair. It was easy to see why she got dumped. She was fat, loud, and abrasive.

She was also headstrong. She insisted on going into the sweat lodge.

Thing was, Gordon had put a temporary moratorium on sweat lodges after the tragedy at another self-help place just up the road. The insurance costs were way too high. But Deedee Wertman kept at him, hectoring like a magpie. She wanted the sweat lodge experience. She’d
paid
for the sweat lodge experience. It said “sweat lodge experience” right in the brochure—was this a case of false advertising?

He should have refunded her money. He should have told her to go to hell and never darken his doorway again. But Gordon had too much on his mind, and so he relented. He’d instructed Mike, his sweat lodge man (during the interim, Mike had been relegated to gardening and landscaping duties) to keep the temperature down and provide plenty of air vents. He insisted Deedee drink ten glasses of water before going inside, and if she was in there for more than fifteen minutes he would pull her out personally.

Deedee Wertman was so excited at the prospect of the sweat lodge experience, she didn’t watch where she was going. She tripped over a tree root at the entrance to the lodge and speared herself on the finial of one of the two waist-high ceremonial lamps outside.

Deedee Wertman bled to death before they could summon the paramedics.

So they didn’t. Summon the paramedics.

In a panic, Gordon directed her to be taken to the storage room and put on ice.

This was a liability problem he just couldn’t face right now. It was his sixtieth birthday, there was a big party planned, and there was the Other Thing.

The timing was impossible.

Fortunately, Deedee Wertman had virtually no friends and, better yet, was estranged from her family. She was childless and hadn’t spoken to her only sister in twenty years. Deedee loved “adventures”—she globe-trotted around the world by herself, spending her inheritance down.

It was amazing what Gordon could learn through hypnosis. From what she’d told him, he figured that Deedee had only a hundred thousand or so dollars left, and he’d planned for her to spend most of it here.

The best-laid plans…

“So you think Conroy saw her?” Shaun said.

“Why else would he take off like that?”

“Because he hated it here?”

Gordon had to admit that was a possibility. Not everyone took to the Desert Oasis Way.

“You said he wasn’t right in the head.”

“He was royally fucked up, all right. I did a pretty good job of screwing with his psyche, not to toot my own horn. Kids, don’t try this at home.”

Shaun ignored this. “Where is the dead woman now?”

“Don’t you worry about that.”

“So what do you want me to do? Kill him?”

“No, I don’t want you to kill him!” He leaned toward her, trying to keep the pleading tone out of his voice.
“You have to get him back here.”

Chapter Seven

F
ROM THE ALLEY
behind the diner, Max made his way to the motel. The place seemed quiet, no cars in front of the units. Certainly no stretch limos. After ten minutes or so watching the Rat Motel from a shaded yard across the street, he realized that he couldn’t go back to his room. That was the first place they’d look.

Instead, he walked a block over to the Subway/Short Hop Trucking Center. There, he bought stick deodorant, a $2.99 pair of pull-on shorts, sunglasses, a ball cap, and an extra large T-shirt with the words “Arizona: Rattlesnake Capital of the World” printed on the front. He took his purchases into the restroom and came out a new man.

After dining on a sub sandwich while sitting in the back booth with a good view of the doors, he went looking for a place to think. He needed a dark place, a busy place, an anonymous place. It just so happened Paradox had a game arcade for the disaffected youths who were forced to grow up here. He found himself a dark corner to play a video game while he tried to think about what to do next.

Jerry wasn’t giving up. All Jerry wanted was to get Max back to the gulag so he could stumble through another vampire epic. To Jerry, Max was an ATM machine.

The thugs were over the top, but Jerry always did have a flair for the dramatic. Max felt a little embarrassed by the way he’d overreacted. It was pretty clear to him that Jerry’d sent guys to scare him into going back to LA, but it wasn’t going to work. What were they going to do to him, really? Break his kneecaps? He was a valuable commodity. No way they’d hurt him. The limo, the guys in suits—that was all for show, to intimidate him into doing what they wanted.

For the first time in days, Max asked himself if starring in another vampire epic was such a bad thing.

He was the luckiest man on earth. He was married to one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. In two weeks’ time, Talia would come winging her way back from Africa with their adopted baby girl, just in time for the premiere of the next installment of the
V.A.M.Pyre Chronicles
. Their reunion on Piers Morgan’s show would be Hulued and YouTubed and TMZed.

Lots of red meat here. The rekindled romance with his former/current wife, the new theatrical release, the sweet orphan baby girl from Africa. And Max’s stint in rehab was the icing on the cake. It was all about redemption—the bad boy movie star brought to heel by true love.

Fans—especially female fans—loved to see the bad boy tamed.

Max suddenly asked himself, why was he being so stubborn? What was so bad about his life? He wasn’t an impoverished tenant farmer in Appalachia. He wasn’t a starving child in Bangladesh. He was a star, for Christ’s sake. He was
lucky
.

Would it hurt to be just a little bit thankful for all his good fortune?

He could
go back to his old life, no problem. In fact, he could start now, by walking across the street and plunking down some of his hard-earned cash at the Branding Iron. Go from one cave to another, but that cave would be soothing and have that cool, slightly dank smell of beer. Budweiser signs, quiet darkness, middle of the day.

He pictured an icy bottle of Rolling Rock. OK, they wouldn’t have Rolling Rock in a backwater like this. Heinie, maybe. They’d have Heineken, wouldn’t they? He could see the green bottle, the amber waves of grain, the droplets of sweat cold and crisp in his hand. He pictured pouring it into a bar glass, lifting it to his lips—