When Pigs Fly (15 page)

“If you gentlemen are looking for it, there are ointments for sale right here,” she said.

Frosty scratched a bright red rash on his neck. “Gentlemen? You called us that?”

“Of course. What else would anyone call you?”

“Ace and Frosty Card,” Frosty said. “A pair of cards, people call us.”

“Usually they say we’re a pair of deuces,” Ace said, staring at Cal’s chest. “Or a pair of jokers. And speaking of nice pairs—”

“Where are you boys from?”

“Oh, ah, we’re from Ohio.”

“No, really? You sound like you’re from Massachusetts. Maybe Lawrence, from your accents.”

“Lowell!” Ace blurted. His eyes hadn’t wandered; this lad had a case of optical lockjaw.

“No kidding? I’ve been there. Wow, small world, huh? So what brings you out to Arizona?”

“I want to undress you.”

“And I want to beat the crap out of you. Where do you get off, talking to me like that?”

Ace seemed to snap out of his trance, and both men blushed through their rashes. “It’s got nothing to do with getting off why we’re here,” Frosty said, his hands trying to shield his erection. Ace didn’t even try. “We’re on a treasure hunt. We could be millionaires soon. You could come with us.”

Cal backed away from Ace’s outstretched hand. She would rather be shot out of a cannon and crash-land in front of a fast-moving eighteen-wheeler than touch one of these boys. “I’m spoken for. Well, I wish both of you gentlemen luck.” She turned around, paid, and left quickly, anxious to rejoin Mack.

What would the King do? Elvis Hornacre pondered this philosophical question as he flew into Las Vegas and played the slots for a few minutes before leaving McCarran Airport. He won a fistful of quarters and knew his mission was true.

He rented a car, a cheap room and a porn video, which he thought hell, he could have done at home, let’s go get the real thing. So he hit the streets wearing a slicked-back wig and one of several freshly dry-cleaned, sequined white jumpsuits and got turned down by the first two hookers he talked to. “Ooooh, what happened to your
face
?” the third one said.

“Mike Tyson fights dirty,” Hornacre said through clenched teeth.

The hooker took his hand. “I can give you a discount,” she said. That night he checked Cal Vrattos’s whereabouts with his GPS locator and found out she seemed to be hanging around Tucson, about four hundred miles down the road. What he was going to do, he was going to send a message to women everywhere:
Don’t fuck with Jack from ElectroShak
, never mind his name was Elvis
.

The next morning he hit the bar and sucked down a couple of bloody Marys to take the edge off the biggest headache he’d ever had. Then he sauntered into the restaurant and ordered sirloin steak and eggs with hash browns, toast, coffee and juice, plus a side order of blueberry pancakes, all of which arrived at once. He cut and stabbed a piece of meat, dripping red and smelling like heaven. The fork made it halfway to his mouth when he remembered the wire in his jaw.

That bitch Cal had given him a lucky swat to the chops, was all. A sucker punch with a pussy weapon, pure and simple. Elvis Hornacre held the sirloin steady with his fork and stabbed the meat over and over again with the steak knife like he was stabbing her heart. Steak juice and greasy potatoes splattered on his jumpsuit and on the red and white checkered tablecloth. Coffee sloshed and O.J. spilled as he stabbed the poor sirloin, which had done nothing to him.
How…does…this…feel…you…stupid…cow!

“Is something wrong with the steak, mister?” The waitress held a coffee pot that had an orange lid. The pot looked like a deadly weapon, and she looked like she wasn’t afraid to use it.

“I can’t chew the damn stuff!”

“You ought to mind your language, sir.” She refilled his coffee cup. “I’m putting you on decaf.”

“I have a broken jaw!” He screamed at her, and a couple of elderly tourists looked over from their booth. He flipped them the bird and the color drained from their faces.

“So I see. Did somebody forget to tell you before you ordered breakfast?”

“Take this crap away. Just give me a shake.”

The waitress cleared the food from the table. He still held the serrated knife, but she clenched her teeth and pointed, so he handed it over meekly. “You need a whipping, not a shake, but my manager says the customer is always right, so hold on.”

After a few minutes he decided she was taking forever, and he thought all he really needed was a half-dozen OxyContin with a vodka chaser. Finally she brought him two jumbo-sized cups with straws bent partway down. He’d forgotten to ask for chocolate, and he wondered what flavor she’d brought him. “Drink ‘em outside,” she said. “No charge, just never come back.”

Which he never would anyway. He stood outside in the blistering heat, wondering why the shakes weren’t cold. He worked a straw into his mouth and managed a long sip. It tasted like steak, eggs and blueberry pancakes pureed together in a blender for the goddamn Gerber baby. This was humiliating, and he would hunt the waitress down and teach her to respect the King if he didn’t have Cal Vrattos to deal with.

He took another sip. Actually, it didn’t taste all that bad.

After he filled his gas tank on the outskirts of Tombstone, Mack backed his Dodge off to one side of the lot near a Dumpster and a dead teddy bear cholla. Cal found him quickly and slid onto the passenger seat. She unscrewed two bottles of cold water and handed him one as Ace and Frosty shambled back to the pickup truck. “Those are your bad boys,” she said. He nodded and watched, wondering where they were headed. Ace looked in Mack and Cal’s direction, but only seemed to notice her. Frosty and Ace both wore wraparound sunglasses with the tags still on the frames; if any cash had changed hands over those specs, Mack thought, he’d eat road-killed rattlesnake.

“They say they’re on the trail of big money,” Cal told Mack.

“That should leave me out of it. They’ll never get rich following me. They’ve got to be up to mischief.”

“What are you going to do? Raise the threat level to red? Launch a pre-emptive strike?”

Mack followed the pickup truck and kept it in sight. ll oFor now we’ll just watch them,” he said.

“
We?
What’s this
we
stuff?”

“I’ll watch them, then. You can avert your eyes.”

Cal laughed, and Mack loved the sound. “I mean, two jokers blow through town, and you happen to know them. It’s a cosmic coincidence. So what?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence. They traveled twenty-seven hundred miles, so I assume they want to see me. The question is do they want me to see them?”

“Do they have a grudge against you?”

“Can’t see why they would. Twice I could have put them away and I didn’t.”

“Wherein lies a tale, yes?”

“There was a string of housebreakings a few years ago. An elderly lady, a shut-in, had been robbed and beaten up. I’d suspected Ace and Frosty, since they lived in the neighborhood, and sure enough I nabbed them coming out of her place a second time. Turns out they’d broke in and
left
her money, about two hundred, which was more than she’d lost in the first place. When I spoke to the woman, she said they weren’t the guys who’d assaulted her but were in fact angels from heaven.”

Cal looked puzzled. “If they were just bringing a gift, why didn’t they just knock?”

“Going in the front door isn’t their style,” Mack said. “Besides, their bulbs only burn at about forty watts. But I learned these guys have something resembling a conscience. Not very well formed, more like a prehensile tail that might evolve in the right direction over the next million or so years. You can bet they didn’t donate that money out of their hourly wages. I guarantee they stole from someone else and shared with her.”

“Still, it’s sort of sweet. Urban Robin Hoods, giving to a little old lady.”

“Let’s not get mushy over them, Cal. They’re thieves.”

“Don’t talk like that to me, Mack. I know what they are.”

“They don’t rob only the rich. They rob anybody.”

“Okay. So why didn’t you put them away?”

“Because jails are graduate school for criminals, and they would come out a lot worse than they went in.”

“That’s true of so many people, I’m sure. But you see potential in these boys?”

Mack laughed.

“You
like
them, then?”

“Nope.”

“I think you do.”

“Not a chance.”

“I’m listening to my intuition here.”

“Instead of listening to me. Let it go, Cal.” His tone had a barb, and he didn’t like the sound of it himself. She looked away from him, past scattered mesquite and palo verde that grew behind a roadside wire fence. Numberless saguaro seemed to charge up a range of low-lying hills like T.R.’s Rough Riders. The road headed directly at a shimmering lake as mountains waited on a distant shore, and an eighteen-wheeler emerged from the lake, whooshing past them. He maintained a steady sixty-five on cruise control. This conversation was tanking. Correction: It had tanked.

“Sorry,” he said, tapping her shoulder while he kept his eyes on traffic.

“You didn’t say anything wrong,” she said in a flat tone that said he damn well did.

“When I was a kid, we had a saying when one of us screwed up.
‘Nice play, Shakespeare’
. So I guess I botched the play.”

“Not necessarily. Most of the Bard’s plays have five acts.”

Mack woke up early the next morning, eager to meet Cal again and show her around. Something—no,
everything
—about her excited him. He showered and shaved, carefully trimming the hint of hair inside his ears and wondering if Clint Eastwood ever had to do the same. A widowed watercolorist once told Mack he had a face full of character: a dimpled chin and strong eyebrows and a face built with layers of
Weltschmerz
and
Gemütlichkeit
. That had sent Mack running to the German-English dictionary in the library, where he learned that he was world-weary but happy about it. He pulled on a pair of jeans, a denim shirt and a pair of hiking boots, thinking his face wasn’t all that complicated. When the corners of his mouth pushed up against his cheekbones and formed symmetrical fault lines, he was happy. When his jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed, he was unhappy. When neither circumstance held true, he was most likely feeling just fine.

He put on his Red Sox cap and thought about how much he’d like to make a pass at Cal. Just then, she pulled into the driveway and tapped lightly on the horn. “We’ll take my car,” he called out. “I’ll pull out of the carport and you pull in.”

Cal had long, slender legs, tanned and toned. Her straw hat, sunglasses and Mack’s SPF-40 shielded her from the sun’s morning rays. God, Mack would like to have applied the sunscreen on those lovely limbs himself.

Later, they walked in the Desert Museum just west of Tucson among the endless saguaro cactus. “I wish you could see this in the spring,” Mack said. “The flowers are incredible.”

“The heat is incredible.”

Mack handed her his water bottle. “Want to head back?”

“No.” A rattlesnake slithered across their path, maybe fifteen feet in front of them. It had a large, diamond-shaped crosshatch across its body and a string of beads on its tail. It disappeared into the shade provided by a rock. Cal stopped and held Mack’s hand. “Yes,” she said.

“Maybe I should come back here,” Mack said, “with the ashes.”

They walked back to the visitor’s center, where a docent spoke about tarantulas to a small group of tourists. A large, gray spider sat quietly in the palm of the woman’s hand. “They can inflict a painful bite,” she said, “but they are mostly harmless unless they feel threatened. Would someone like to hold out their arm?”

Spidey sat still and appeared to stare at Mack with a thousand black eyes.
You just try it, big boy,
it seemed to say. Cal held out her slender arm, and the docent placed Spidey there while Mack held his breath.

“Reminds me of a guy I dated,” she said, laughing as they walked back out into the sunshine. “Big and hairy, nothing much to say.”

“He had eight legs?”

“He had big dark eyes, and he gave me a look that I guess was supposed to be smoldering passion.”

“Did you two combust?” Mack suddenly felt jealous—of what? A guy who looked like a spider?

“That’s rather personal, but no. Why?”

“Just kidding.” In his pocket, Mack’s cell phone rang to the tune of Beethoven’s Fifth. He let it ring twice.

“Answer the music in your pants,” she said. Mack smiled and fished the phone from his right pocket.

“Hello, Dear,” his mother said. “Why didn’t you tell us you changed your telephone number?”

“Oh hi, Mom. This is my new cell phone. Hardly anybody has the number yet. How’d you find it?”

“Your father is a resourceful man. We would like to come out and see you.”

“Great! Did you want to fly out here in the fall?”