When Pigs Fly (26 page)

“Thanks. I’ll think about it.” Like hell he would. He disconnected.

Fear had crept up on him like a tarantula, and now it inflicted a painful bite. Where was Dieter Kohl? What was happening to Mack’s parents? He watched every car that passed by, every passenger he could see, but no one looked familiar. Which road should he choose, which dusty path? He realized he hadn’t thought clearly at all—the low-battery signal, if that’s what he had heard, was enough to explain being cut off. So was going through the canyon. Either one or both were possible, so was there any reason for Kohl to lead Mack astray? No, not if he wanted something from Mack.

Mack drove to the police station and identified himself to the female officer at the desk. Her name tag read Sgt. Garcia.

“I’m concerned about my parents,” he said. “Carrick and Brodie Durgin, both eighty years old. They’re with a man named Dieter Kohl—nickname Diet Cola—who just got out of jail in Massachusetts. He’s forty-five years old, six feet two inches tall with a salt-and-pepper pony tail, weighs three hundred pounds and smells like a garbage truck. He has a spare chin and wears jade earrrings.”

“Have your parents been kidnapped?”

“I suspect so.” Mack explained the situation in detail. “So I can’t be certain they’re in Sedona now, but that’s where I’m supposed to meet him.”

“So he thinks you have a hundred million dollar ticket, but you don’t.”

Mack shook his head. “It’s not something I’d cart around. Would you?”

“No sir. I’d wait a heartbeat, kiss it, then cash it in. Give me a number where we can reach you.” Mack gave her his cell phone number and headed back to meet Cal.

She waved, and Mack stopped for her. She held a couple of paper bags as she got into the car.

“You’ve been shopping,” he said.

“You’ve been a long fifteen minutes. What did you find out?”

“Nothing. My parents are in danger and you’ve been shopping.”

Cal looked him in the eye. “You’re stressed, so I forgive you. Here, I bought us lunch.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Yes, you are. This is grilled javelina on pumpernickel, with pickles and chips. I have the same thing. It’s supposed to be like pork. Eat. Fill yourself up while I fill you in.”

Mack grudgingly accepted one of the white bags and began eating. He didn’t want to admit how hungry he was as he continued to scan each passing car. “This is the same kind of critter we sent to the vet. Maybe we’re munching on the guy’s mother.”

“Your folks’ ticket had the winning numbers.”

“No, they didn’t. I checked that myself.”

“I didn’t say they had the winning
ticket
. I said they had the winning
numbers
.”

“Don’t keep me waiting. What are you talking about?”

“They played the right
numbers
, but they played the wrong
game
. They bought a Megabucks ticket, but the big jackpot was for the Big Game. That’s the difference between a hundred million dollars and a worthless scrap of paper. I found a news story on the Web about the winner, a real estate broker from New Hampshire. Now he has three houses, a Maserati with gold trim, a swimming pool shaped like a Playboy Bunny and a couple of hot babes to replace the wife he dumped. The biggest house has a built-in forty-seat theater where he watches movies by himself. He’s been in and out of drug rehab and can’t understand where all his old friends went.” Cal munched on a potato chip. “Of course he has new ones to replace them. All this in only a year. Isn’t that the life?”

Mack allowed himself a half smile. “Some people have all the luck.”

“That’s what this guy thinks. You know what his hobby is? Betting on the lottery. Now he buys ten-dollar scratch tickets by the roll.”

“Let me tell you about real luck,” Mack said. “Real luck is having parents like Carrick and Brodie Durgin. It’s missing Vietnam and the guy who runs a stop sign at thirty miles an hour missing you. It’s meeting Mary McGee and getting to marry her and hold onto her for thirty years. And it’s not giving a rip about getting something for nothing.”

“You’re indeed a lucky man. That last part isn’t luck, though. It’s character.”

Diet Cola took a deep breath and steeled himself for a difficult crossroad in his life. Was he going to give in to temptation and satisfy his immediate lust? He had never seen any need to do otherwise. What was temptation for, if it wasn’t a brass ring to grab or an ass to snatch? The good life was a full stomach, a fat wallet and an easy woman, in that order, though if the woman had a nice ass she could wriggle it into second place.

“Turn around,” he told Zippy, who made a red rooster tail of dust as he banged a one-eighty. “Skip the all you can eat place. We’ll do Burger King take-out.” He felt all the stronger for making such a tough call.

“Four Whoppers with cheese, four large fries and a large Diet Coke,” Zippy said at the ordering station, following instructions from Diet Cola.

“That isn’t what I want,” Brodie said.

“We can’t eat this food,” Carrick said. “Too salty.”

“This isn’t for you,” Diet Cola said. “This is for me.” Zippy drove up to the delivery window, and Diet Cola reached into Brodie’s purse. She slapped his hand, and he laughed as he handed Zippy one of her twenties.

“You won’t let us eat? My husband needs his lunch, and I’m sure Zippy could use a bite as well.”

“Fact is, I’m starved,” Zippy said, pulling over to a parking space. “I’m going inside.”

Diet Cola pointed his gun at the back of Zippy’s head. “No, you’re not. You leave the car, you die. Now drive.”

Zippy’s expression froze, then he reached for the ignition, but Carrick grabbed the keys out of his hand and angrily turned to face the gun barrel. “Tell me something, Mister Cola. You plan to kill us anyway, don’t you? That’s where we were going a while ago. First we were part of some wild extortion scheme of yours, and now, lacking the slightest idea of how to pull it off, you are just going to kill us all, Zippy included. The trouble is that you’re in a Burger King parking lot and Zippy isn’t driving us anywhere. If you fired three shots—or even one shot—you wouldn’t have time to get out of this parking lot before the Sedona police shot you dead. You’re not suicidal.”

Zippy shrugged, trying to look unafraid and failing miserably. “D.C., I’ll do what you say, man. Just let’s be cool about this.”

When the food was ready, Diet Cola unwrapped a Whopper and tried to think. His gun lay on his lap. If the lady made a play for it, he’d blow her wide open and take his chances. His right hand still throbbed where she had whipped him, and he didn’t need an excuse to pay her back.

“Perhaps I can help you,” Carrick said.

“Perhaps you can shut up.”

“Of course. I was just going to suggest—”

“Do I have to shut you up?”

“My husband always has good ideas,” Brodie said.

Diet Cola took a half-hearted swipe in Brodie’s direction, but missed. Zippy must have thought he’d connected, because he reached over the front seat and lurched at Diet Cola’s neck. There was an insane fury in Zippy’s eyes. His forehead rippled and crinkled his tattooed brains. His face was suddenly red, and his frontal lobe pulsated. “You hit her again, and you won’t live out the day, I promise. We’re going to get that money, we’re going to split it and nobody is going to get hurt. Meanwhile, I’m hungry, they’re hungry, and I’m taking their orders.”

Brodie meekly asked for a vanilla shake, and Carrick said he’d like one as well, thank you. Zippy grabbed the keys from Carrick and slammed the door as he went inside Burger King.

There was momentary silence in the car. In what he felt was a major act of charity, Diet Cola offered a wrapped Whopper to Carrick, who waved it off. Brodie accepted, opened the sandwich, took out a piece of onion and ate it. She re-wrapped the sandwich, dabbed her lips with a napkin and nodded her thanks.

“So, um, tell me what you had in mind,” Diet Cola said.

“First,” Carrick said, “let’s think this through. It’s plain you plan to kill us. And when you feel you don’t need Zippy anymore, you will kill him too. But the main thing is that you want to be rich. If only you had the ticket, then murder would be a needless complication. Now Mrs. Durgin and I are eighty years old, and we don’t need that kind of money anymore.”

“So you gave it to your kid. I knew that all along.”

“Of course not. We lost the ticket. We suspected that you had stolen it, but we could never be sure.”

“Just like we think you stole our grandson’s birthday cake,” Brodie said. “You are the lowest of the low.”

“Brodie dear, please.” Carrick gave his wife a pained look.

“I never stole the ticket, I just moved it so I could find it later. There was business I had to do that was going to take me a few months, so I thought leaving it with you was the safest thing. You had this can with somebody’s ashes in it—”

“That can is called an urn, you twit.”

“Brodie, please!”

“An urn, I knew that. You’d stashed some jewelry in there like you thought it was a jewelry box, but I could tell right away it was meant for a dead guy’s ashes. Why did you send the can—excuse me, the urn—to your son?”

“An old friend of his died, and we took custody of the ashes. Then we realized that our son Mack was the right person to deal with this, so we sent the urn to him.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“A spur of the moment visit to see our son. Why not?.”

Diet Cola sat back and pondered this story. What kind of parents did a thing like that, just up and visit their kid for no good reason? “My dad came to see me once. I wish he hadn’t.”

“So what if we spoke to our son and persuaded him to share the prize with you and Zippy?”

“I don’t trust him. I don’t trust you.”

Zippy came back with a cardboard tray holding two shakes and a white paper bag.

“Fine, then,” Carrick said. “We’re at an impasse.”

Ace, Frosty and Elvis stood on a ledge that had a dizzying drop, wondering aloud where the pig had gone to. Actually, Ace just wondered what they were even doing here, a million miles from anywhere. If this place had saber-tooth pigs, it probably had hungry wolves and wildcats too.

He looked through the trees and began to think the wilderness went on forever. Tonight they would have to build a fire to keep the beasts at bay and still his trembling heart. As he looked out, he stifled a sob. He missed Lowell wicked bad—the changing seasons, the bustling city, the endless chances to shoplift. He remembered Officer Durgin putting his hands on Ace and Frosty’s shoulders as they ogled a boom box in a store window.
Don’t even think about it,
he’d said, so they didn’t. It was like he could read Ace and Frosty’s minds, knowing they planned to steal it. In fact, Officer Durgin had made such an impression that Ace didn’t steal again for twenty-four hours, when he went back for the boom box.

Now it was all so far away. Frosty and Elvis started carefully down the steep hill, holding onto bushes and starting little rock slides as they went. Ace stood quietly on the ledge, ignoring Frosty’s calls to join them. What was the point in going on with life? They’d come an insane distance to catch up with Mack Durgin and steal—steal what? Something worth a pile of cash, but Ace didn’t even know what it was. Worse, he could be a hundred miles from Mack Durgin and the prize his eyes would be on if he knew where to look.

“Face it, dude, you’re a failure,” Ace said aloud. Why not end it here? Why not end it now?

It was a no-brainer. He jumped.

But he landed on his feet and skidded down the hill, his arms outstretched like a surfer, afraid he would die and afraid he wouldn’t, finally tumbling onto his face next to a pair of pretty legs. There was a family gawking down at him. A car and a road. Civilization! He stood up, dusted himself off and saw Frosty and Elvis working their way to the bottom of the hill. “I beat you guys down,” he said. “Suckers!”

The family jabbered among themselves in some language that might have been Russian or Irish. They all looked up the hill, apparently wondering what the hell was coming down next.

Ace thought to be polite, because you had to give a good impression to foreigners. “Hi! My name’s Ace. Where you folks headed?”

“Germany,” the man said, already backing away. “As soon as possible.”

“Well, do you think you could drop us off at the next town?”

The man turned to his family and said some kind of gibberish that sounded urgent. They got in their car, locked their doors and drove away.

After twenty minutes with their thumbs hanging out, Ace, Frosty and Elvis rode a few miles into town in the back of a pickup truck while Ace thought of all the neat shopping possibilities. Then he had some depressing thoughts: he could steal this town blind, but where would he put all the stuff? Another thought was how grubby his companions were. He understood Elvis’s being kind of dirty, having been buried up to his chin and losing his jacket, but he didn’t get why Frosty looked such a mess. Dirt didn’t much stick to Ace, and he figured that Frosty’s sweat stains were one of his few personal failings.