Jude Devine Mystery Series (77 page)

“I don’t watch animal movies,” Jude said.

Tulley caught Miss Benham’s eye and they both kept quiet. He fed Smoke’m some Zuke’s PowerBones, a treat Bobby Lee’s mom had told him about. She was a pothead, but she sure loved her dogs and she knew plenty about canine health. She was the one who told him that there was way too much stuff from China in dog food. She said they still ate dogs over there so why would they care if our pets got sick? That was before the recalls. Ever since then Tulley had been shipping Smoke’m’s food from a natural pet store run by hippies in Boulder.

“I’m going to Montrose to buy a new dress for the soirée,” Miss Benham said. “Something bright. Why should women of my age have to settle for mauve?”

“You don’t look a day over sixty,” Jude said.

Tulley had seen old photos of Miss Benham when she ran the schoolhouse. She looked exactly the same now as she did back then in the dark ages. He wasn’t sure how to turn that observation into a compliment, so he kept quiet.

The phone rang and Jude picked up. After a short silence, she asked, “When did she leave?”

Tulley recognized the tone. Normally Jude’s voice was low and husky. He and Miss Benham argued over who she sounded like most, Kathleen Turner or Barbara Stanwyck. When something came up, her tone flattened out and she seemed to bite the ends off her words. From the few things she said, he could tell there was a problem, so he got to his feet and combed his hair in the wall mirror just in case they’d been called out. He could do with a haircut, he thought, moving his thick black waves first in one direction, then the other. Sometimes he went to Le Paradox, but only if that weirdo friend of the hairdresser’s wasn’t around.

He wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong, but Sandy Lane had taken a dislike to him. She called him “Pretty Boy,” which, despite Floyd Mayweather’s accomplishments in the boxing ring, was not a nickname most guys would appreciate. Tulley thought she was deliberately egging him on, but he wasn’t about to pick a fight with her. If there was one thing his ma taught him, it was to never lay a hand on a woman.

Jude asked a couple more questions, then said, “Okay, I’ll be over in ten minutes.”

Miss Benham poured coffee in a paper cup to go. As she squeezed the lid down over the rim, she asked, “Shall I accept Miss Harwood’s invitation for all three of us? We’re invited to bring a guest each, as well.”

“Count me out,” Jude said. “Tell her I have a headache.”

“It’s a week away. You can’t predict headaches in advance.”

“Trust me, in this case I can guarantee it.”

“It’s not because of their sexual orientation, is it?” Miss Benham asked. “No one worries about that type of thing anymore. Besides, creative people have always explored boundaries and defied social mores.”

Jude rolled her eyes. “Agatha, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anyone’s sexuality. Bobby Lee will drive you. He can go in my place.”

Miss Benham stared at Tulley like he knew why their boss got irrational every time Miss Harwood’s name was mentioned. He said, “Dr. Westmoreland asked for us to tell you she hopes you’ll come.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet she does.” Jude swapped her uniform shirt for plain clothes.

Tulley checked out her muscles. His were bigger these days. In comparison to both of them, Bobby Lee look like a weakling with his Pilates for men.

“Will you be needing me and Smoke’m?” he asked.

“No, that was Debbie at Le Paradox,” Jude said. “Some kind of security issue. I’ll go take down the details and check the locks. That’ll keep her happy.”

“Your hair’s short enough,” Miss Benham said.

Jude smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but the sun lines crinkled around her eyes. Over time, Tulley had gotten used to her serious look, but when they first started working together he always thought she was mad at him. Jude didn’t put on a happy face like most people. Folks that didn’t know her wouldn’t see the little changes that gave her thoughts away, but Tulley had learned to recognize them. Her mouth was straight and hard-looking, and when she pressed her lips together in anger her chin tightened slightly. When she thought something was funny, the small hollows at each corner of her mouth deepened a fraction.

Tulley had a theory that most people didn’t notice Jude’s mouth because they were too busy staring at her eyes, which were flat-out beautiful. He wished he could stare right into them for as long as he wanted, but he only got to do that with Smoke’m. All the same, he took advantage when she didn’t realize she was being watched. It wasn’t just their mossy granite color that was unusual. She had a mess of eyelashes most females would flutter all the time, but that wasn’t her style. Instead she watched everything with a sleepy gaze that gave no clue as to her thoughts. Bobby Lee said she had bedroom eyes. Tulley had never understood that expression until he met Jude.

After she left the stationhouse, he said, “What’s with her and Miss Harwood?”

“It’s that dark side of hers,” Agatha said. They often talked about Jude’s silences and her tendency to go off into the mountains alone. “I suppose she has things on her mind.”

Tulley considered telling Miss Benham about the terrorists, but Jude said there was no reason to worry a woman of seventy-two with frightening information. Miss Benham was looking forward to the Telluride film festival and Jude was damned if a few cretins planning a bio-attack would spoil it for her.

“Deputy, that dog bed is filthy.” Miss Benham frowned at him across her glasses. “Take it outside and shake it right now before it gives me hives.”

Tulley said, “Yes, ma’am.”

He never argued about doing the chores. His ma had taught him better than that. He picked up the denim-covered beanbag and whistled to Smoke’m. Once they got out into the parking lot, he shook the bed into some bushes and gazed up at the huge Marlboro Man sitting on his horse, overlooking the station. That, Tulley thought, was a real man. Tough guys like him were the bedrock the West was built on. While Smoke’m lifted his leg at the base of the billboard, Tulley struck a pose like that of the bronzed cowboy. He couldn’t help wondering what the Marlboro Man would say to someone like Crystal Sherman.

Every time he saw that female, Tulley got embarrassed. She always pretended to flirt with him, saying she wanted to watch when they took his picture for the fund-raising calendar and such. Tulley wished she’d quit. Her husband was a buddy of his. Deputy Gavin Sherman had a seven-thousand-dollar Belgian Malinois detection dog from Adlerhorst International. That was one super-smart animal. He’d never track a felon like Smoke’m and he wasn’t a cadaver dog, but he could get around an agility ring like he was on banned substances.

Tulley was helping Gavin train him for the canine world games in Scottsdale in a couple of months’ time, so he stayed at their house when he was in Cortez. He wasn’t sure if that was such a good idea. Crystal had a habit of walking around in little tiny shorts when they were working the dogs. She was always bending down to pick up throwtoys and leaning seductively against the ramps and weave poles. The last time Tulley stayed overnight she walked in on him when he was taking a shower. He didn’t think it was an accident.

Taking another look up at the billboard, he tried to guess what the Marlboro Man would say if Crystal Sherman ran her hand over his butt while he was flipping burgers on the grill. The ideal brush-off came to mind and Tulley rehearsed the words in a convincing cowboy drawl.

“Darlin’, while I’m flattered, I think it’s time you ran along back to your
husband
.”

Chapter Three

The midsummer sun burned a hole in the afternoon sky, its molten glare too much even for Pippa Calloway’s high-tech sunglasses. Squinting, she rested her head on the steering wheel and contemplated her situation. She was parked at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, her cell phone was almost out of juice, and she was low on water. This was truly the road trip from hell.

A deep voice over the windshield repeated, “Recalculating.”

“Hal,” the voice of her Garmin GPS unit, liked to point out the error of her ways. Pippa extracted a fresh bottle of water from her cooler, took a few gulps, and then splashed some on her face. All she could think about was sleep. She’d left Connecticut five days earlier for her two-thousand-mile odyssey to the Southwest. Her Mazda CX7 looked like it belonged to a homeless person, with personal possessions piled to the roof. Pippa had crammed five years of her life into the car, forcing herself to throw away everything she hadn’t worn or looked at for a long time.

She pictured Uncle Fabian’s smooth, tanned face as she lugged all this crap into his spare room. He always rolled his eyes over her pack-rat habits, but he never made her feel unwelcome. Pippa had an open invitation to come to him anytime, for any reason, and stay as long as she liked. Usually, when family life got unbearable, she fled to Maulle Mansion, his home in the Garden District of New Orleans. This time, however, she wanted to put several thousand miles between herself and her parents.

She’d never been to the log cabin in the San Juan Mountains and had the impression that her uncle preferred to have the place to himself. Still, she had a front door key, one of the four he’d given her to his various homes. Earlier in the month Uncle Fabian had suggested she fly to London to chill out in his pied à terre near St. James Park. But her parents thought nothing of “hopping across the pond,” as her mother put it, to shop and go to the theatre. If Pippa wanted to avoid them, she would have to hole up some place her mother wouldn’t be caught dead in. Looking around, she knew she’d found that exact place.

As she left Farmington, she turned off the GPS and slid a couple of old Rolling Stones CDs into her player. The route was depressing, lined with a succession of pawn shops, junked cars, decrepit mobile homes, scrawny dogs, and scenery that was nothing like a western movie. She had expected red canyons, tall cactus plants, and cowboys on horseback. Such vistas were the norm somewhere around here, if Uncle Fabian’s e-mails and photos were any indication. Meantime she was driving toward an ochre-toned netherworld beneath a vast blue sky, a place where time and human foibles made only a transient impression on nature.

To her left loomed Shiprock, a dark bluish gray monolith that seemed to float above the desert plain. According to a brochure she’d picked up at a trading post en route. The Navajo had named the landmark
Tse’Bit’Ai
, or Rock with Wings. Pippa pulled over and found her camera. As she took photos, she thought she could almost see the wings of a celestial being struggling to break free of the volcanic stone. The illusion sent a small thrill of pleasure through her body and she squeezed her hands closed, imagining the feel of clay between her fingers. It had been months since she modeled or sculpted. She could hardly wait to get started again.

Wiping perspiration from her forehead, she got back in the SUV and set off once more. If she hadn’t driven through Kansas before detouring through New Mexico, she might have mistaken the benighted vista around her for the worst hellhole in the galaxy. But having endured hour after hour of highway hypnosis in the flat monotony of the Sunflower State, she had a whole new perspective on the meaning of doom. The distance markers never seemed to change, and she’d even started to suspect Hal of some kind of robotic revenge: force the know-nothing human to drive in a daze, seeing nothing but white lines, until she drifts into the path of an approaching semi.

A shattering horn evicted Pippa from her fugue state and she swung her gaze from a saw-toothed zigzag of sunburned rock to a sign that announced “Entering the Navajo Indian Reservation.” A few cars parked along the highway offered kneel-down bread from their open trunks. Pippa wasn’t hungry but the poverty around her made her sad, and she wanted to buy something from the people who lived in this miserable place.

She stopped under the shade of a twisted tree and requested some of the delicious-smelling bread. As the Navajo woman wrapped the filled corn husks, Pippa asked, “Do I just stay on this highway to get to Cortez?”

The woman turned her head to the right and seemed to point with puckered lips, her hands still busy.

Not sure if she’d been given directions or the brush-off, Pippa said, “Thank you,” and overpaid for the bread.

“Highway 491,” the woman said. “
Hágoónee’
.”