When Pigs Fly (14 page)

There were mountains in every direction, and Ace thought it was like being in a shallow soup bowl, except it was dry and very weird, with cactuses instead of trees. Huge black clouds built up over a mountain with a humungous red “A” stuck on the side of it. Ace wondered if that had something to do with aliens, but he pretty much ruled out the possibility. Still, he suddenly felt lonely and vulnerable, wishing he was home with actual trees and all the cities and stuff bunched close together.

“Where the hell you going?” Diet Cola asked. This part of town didn’t exactly look like a tourist trap. There was trash everywhere, a car with the windshield busted in, and boarded-up store fronts. A stocky guy smoked a cigarette in front of a bar, and his eyes followed their car as it approached a red light. Contract killer, maybe.

“Watch out!”
Thump.

Ace had hit the back of a pickup truck, and two men jumped out and started yelling in Spanish. Ace didn’t know any of the words, but the way they sounded, the guys must have been swearing.

“What’s your problem?” Ace said.

“You dented my pickup!”

“It was hardly a tap.”

“You got an old heap there anyway,” Diet Cola said. “Nothing but dents.”

“Not like yours. Whooee, beautiful car you got here,
amigo,
beautiful. Nice leather interior.” He stroked the headrest.

“The a/c doesn’t work.”

“No kidding? I’ve driven these before, I’ll bet the a/c works just fine. Get out and I’ll show you.”

“Blow it out your ass,” Diet Cola said.

“Let me try again.” From under his t-shirt, the man pulled out a pistol big enough to stop a truck. “
Por favor,
don’t make me mess up the nice car with your blood.”

Everyone agreed getting out of the car was a good idea, and the new thieves were off in a flash. Ace and Frosty ducked between two squat buildings, followed by their new partner. They all watched from behind a Dumpster as sirens wailed and three cop cruisers raced by. “Man, that was a stroke of genius getting rid of that one so quick,” Ace said.

Soon the trio was driving in a ratty old Dodge with no alarms and no other virtue than a full tank of gas and windows that rolled down. Diet Cola insisted on driving this time, and in his own good time he dumped Ace and Frosty on the emptiest, most godawful stretch of pavement Ace had ever seen.

Mack and Cal finished up their excursion at Big Nose Kate’s where they ate burgers and drank Tecate with slivers of lime. The bar was named after a prostitute who’d consorted with the likes of Doc Holliday and many others lucky enough to pass through Tombstone over a century ago. Cal declined to meet again that evening, and Mack felt a pang of disappointment.

She touched her fingertips to the backs of his hands. “But how does your schedule look for tomorrow?”

“I can clear it,” he said brightly. “George can wait.”

“So can L.A. Can we do this again tomorrow?”

So the next day Mack and Cal checked out Indian ruins, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and a dude ranch where they both learned that they didn’t belong on horseback. Mack felt good around Cal, who had intelligent eyes and a bright smile that ended in dimples and lit up her face.

Late in the afternoon, they stopped at a roadside diner on the Tohono O’odham reservation, where they watched in silent appreciation as an eagle drifted across the molten yellow sun. Mack touched Cal’s elbow to lead her inside. The waiter had long black hair pulled back in a ponytail and wore old jeans and a t-shirt with a picture of a hawk. After he took their order he disappeared into the kitchen and came back shortly with two steaming plates.

“You haven’t told me why you came to Arizona,” she said as they dug into their tortillas.

“I haven’t? I thought I did.” Mack dumped sauce on his tortilla, then took a bite that made his eyes water. “Habañero. Hoo boy.” He pushed the bottle of hot sauce toward her, and she pushed it back.

“You must have lots of friends back east,” she said, and Mack nodded. “But you live alone here.”

“Mary and I had always thought we’d retire to the southwest. She hated the cold New England winters and made me promise we’d move here someday, which really didn’t take any arm-twisting. Then our last January in Lowell—well, I just had to get away after that.”

“And Mary?”

“Heart attack. Saddest day of my life.”

They finished lunch quietly as Mack wondered what to do with the urn and the ashes in his trunk. Maybe they could drive an hour east of Phoenix up to Superstition Mountain, with its splendid panorama of parched landscape that stretched for miles. George would have a vista that lasted forever.

Mack paid the proprietor-waiter-cook-cashier on the way out. “I could be a weatherman out here,” he said as they stepped outdoors and into his car. “Today will be sunny and hot. Tonight, dark.”

Cal laughed. “Tonight will be dark. That’s a George Carlin line, isn’t it?”

“Could be. Everybody steals from Carlin. His stuff is too good to leave alone.”

He waited for a white bus to speed by, then turned his car east and watched the reflection of the bus rapidly shrink in his rear-view mirror. Cactus and creosote bushes dotted the landscape with stunted shadows pointing east. About ten minutes later, Mack saw a couple of brightly-colored specks where the road converged with the horizon.

They were hitchhikers, going the other way.

“Seems awfully hot to be thumbing,” Cal said. “So far from anywhere.”

They weren’t wearing hats or carrying water, and they were a long walk from shade. One of them, the shorter man, had blond, almost white hair, and he looked agitated. The other walked with a melted swagger bursting with confidence. Together they looked like a swizzle stick and a Bosc pear. A pickup truck slowed to a stop alongside them, and the taller of the two smiled brightly at the driver. Mack didn’t slow down.

“Those guys! I know them!”

“Who? The hitchhikers back there?” Mack ignored her as he pulled to the side of the road, checked for traffic (there was none in sight but the diminishing pickup) and made a u-turn. “All right,” she said. “Silly question. Are they your friends?”

Mack pressed the accelerator.

“Hardly. These two guys come from Lowell. I want to know why they’re in my back yard.”

“Who are they? Don’t they have a right to be here?”

“They’re a couple of weasels. They don’t have three hundred pounds or eighty IQ points between them, and the kid with the white hair has most of both.”

“Wait a minute! You and I are out for a ride, and suddenly you’re chasing dangerous criminals?”

“They’re not dangerous.” Weathered fence posts and cactus blurred by. “As far as I know. Besides, I want to see where they’re going. Do you mind?”

“Do I—Of course I mind! Slow down!” Mack pushed harder on the accelerator, thinking maybe the truck would stop at the diner. Ahead, a mirage kept retreating as though getting out of Mack’s damn way. “Who are these people, anyway?”

“Kids I arrested a few times back in Lowell. Couple of times the court sprung them, but mostly I let them go. Ace Card is the beanpole, Frosty Card is the bleached stump. The last time I saw Ace, he was in a parking lot acting suspiciously. I was on a homicide case and wasn’t going to hassle him. But we talked, and he seemed relieved as though I was cutting him a break. The next day, a small package showed up on my doorstep and my wife called the bomb squad. Inside the package was a gold watch.”

“Let me guess. Ace stole a watch to pay you off.”

Mack held out his left wrist. The gold watch was on it, the Greek letter omega visible through the crystal. “We couldn’t prove it was him, of course.”

“
You kept a stolen watch?
”

“My Dad bought it fifty years ago and eventually gave it to me. It sat on my dresser for a year and had been missing for a week.” Mack laughed. “Returning stolen goods was Ace’s way of saying thanks.”

The driver appeared to be a Tohono O’odham. He stood outside his pickup at a gas pump while Ace and Frosty walked into the store. “It’s them.” Mack pulled into the parking lot and stopped on the other side of the pump where he could see the man laughing to himself. Mack and Cal got out of the car, and she headed to the store.

“Looks like a coupla dudes you gave a ride to,” Mack said. “They going in to buy sun block?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “What’s your interest?”

“None, really. They just have familiar faces.”

“Better they invest in Clearasil for those faces. Both boys got rashes like the wrath of God.”

“I saw you pick them up before I turned around for gas. What the heck were they doing, miles from anywhere?”

“Just thumbin’ into Tucson, they say. Why somebody dropped ‘em off where they did, I never got clear. Anyhow, the city’s on my way.”

Mack wasn’t a cop anymore, but he still didn’t place much stock in coincidence. He’d have bet the farthest Ace and Frosty had ever been from home had been the county jail, yet here they were in Mack’s sandlot. They had to be looking for him, but why?

Carrick and Brodie Durgin felt like the luckiest couple on Earth. They had survived a nasty assault, in large part due to Brodie’s fortuitous purchase of a bullwhip in Laramie a few years back. How many husbands were thoughtful enough to give their wives bullwhip-cracking lessons for their wedding anniversary? And my goodness, how many people were rescued from bodily harm by apparently conscience-stricken housebreakers? The Durgins owed their lives to those two young lads. Without them, that reprehensible, smelly beast would surely have killed them both. The police had taken statements from Carrick and Brodie but had no luck in locating the attacker or the two young men.

None of this hampered Carrick and Brodie’s plans. Three days after the attack, they flew into Las Vegas with a gambling budget of a hundred dollars each. Then they gleefully wrestled the one-armed bandits as they won a dollar for every two they lost. Dinner was a wonderful catalog of everything forbidden in their diets, but ah, the consequences were for another day. They made love in a luxurious bed, though it wasn’t quite so easy for them after sixty years of marriage. Carrick would challenge anyone to name a woman—albeit a very mature one—prettier than Brodie. For her part, she could name several older men more handsome than Carrick, but she had the good grace not to.

Their blessings were plenty: His prostate was healthy and her mole benign. Her arthritis didn’t act up every day, and his arteries had been Roto-Rootered—angioplasty was the fancy term—and their teeth held tight when they bit into apples. Each could finish the other’s sentences, but out of mutual consideration they didn’t do it unless the spouse’s train of thought had derailed. Each knew the other’s mind was slipping, and each was determined to compensate. Of course they were drifting downstream, headed toward the distant, inevitable rapids, but they planned to hold hands for as long as they could and marvel at the ride.

And the family, my goodness! Fine, responsible children, grandchildren galore, great-grandchildren just beginning to hatch in their nests, wild torrents of squealing joy.

Now as they drove their rented Cadillac east toward the Hoover Dam and Arizona, they mainly thought about their newest blessing: Their son Mackenzie was a doctor.

The ringing subsided in Poindexter’s head as he clambered up a hill, where the sunset shone the same bright red as the blotches on those humans. Ghostly shadows stretched out from saguaros and embraced him as he searched in vain for a decent prickly pear. More than anything else, he wanted to go home to eat dinner and watch
American Idol
with the girl, but he was quite lost and vaguely sensed that he could not go home again. Presently, he spied a pickup truck and a weathered gray shack at the top of the hill. The shack was the type of place that humans went into, and that was all he needed to know—the presence of humans meant Brussels sprouts.

Cal just wanted to see the fellows up close—if they acted like weasels, maybe Mack was telling her the truth. He hadn’t made any moves on her yet, nothing more than touching her arm a couple of times. Mack was a tall man who looked as though he might have been a wrestler or fullback in school and kept himself in trim, and he had certainly handled that Zippy creature well. The fading scar on his forehead must have a story behind it, which she would want to hear if only she planned to stick around and get to know him. When she talked, his blue eyes often twinkled as though she were about to make him laugh, and he had an easy, crooked smile. Elvis Hornacre had just about convinced her that men were a predatory, abusive breed, and now here was Mack Durgin, who talked to a dead friend’s ashes and hadn’t even made a pass. What if he kissed her? What if she kissed him?

She picked up two bottles of water and some mints before she got a good look at Ace and Frosty. There they were at the other end of the aisle, bozos both, Frosty the pear with the silver mop and Ace the beanpole who seemed to have an apple stuck in his gullet. She smiled at them, and they stared back, all reflected in the mirror up by the ceiling in the back of the store. They were two of the homeliest guys she had seen in a good while, with their mangy skin and bad teeth. Did they have poison ivy too?