Wild Horses (23 page)

If nothing else, at least he was now armed again, even better than before. He collected the pistol, a Browning 9mm. With another key from the deputy’s Sam Browne, Gunther raided the cruiser and freed the pump shotgun from its rack. Plus the vest made a nice bonus. As an afterthought, he grabbed the flat-brimmed sheriff’s hat from the seat before running to the Cadillac.

Madeline pointed to the hat. “You’re not going to fool anyone with that thing.”

“Who am I trying to fool? This is our proof-of-purchase.” He slammed the trunk lid on the deputy and waved Madeline toward the driver’s seat. “What I’ll do is ride in back. We meet anybody else on the road, what I’ll do is wave this hat and point to the trunk, make like if they don’t back off, I start blasting through the backseat. See if that doesn’t get them thinking twice.”

The road back into the heart of Coyote Ridge was clear, and Madeline gunned for it. He saw something lying off to one side, had her brake immediately. Opened the door and snatched it up as she rolled past. Fortune had smiled again. He held the opened can of Drano across the front seat and shook it like a rattle.

“Still feels half full!” He grinned. “I got to start remembering to carry this with me, that’s all there is to it.”

*

After leaving Coyote Ridge on U.S. 93, they cut over onto secondary roads as soon as they could. Unfamiliar territory, all of it, and too insignificant for the maps. The best they could do was navigate southeast to Phoenix, losing whatever pursuers they might have earned. For sure, backup had been on its way to Coyote Ridge even before that deputy had set foot in the trailer, but apparently he’d been too much of a hot dog to wait.

Gunther figured they had less than twenty miles before the county line into a new jurisdiction. If the state police from the DPS hadn’t already been called in, they soon would be, although he was counting on the deputy’s disappearance to sow enough seeds of confusion to buy them sufficient time to make it to Phoenix. Had they left a dead deputy at the trailer, they could’ve counted on a helicopter or two being scrambled almost immediately.

They kept zigzagging southeast after crossing into Maricopa County, twice having to turn off onto private property when they thought they’d spotted, far ahead, an oncoming car with a flashbar on the roof. Once it was a luggage rack; once the real thing.

Twenty miles or so outside of Phoenix, Gunther decided they should cut due east awhile, toward the interstate. Maybe come into the city from the north, or even loop around and enter from the east, through Scottsdale.

The Cadillac streaked toward the vanishing point on an arid horizon, the endless flatlands punctuated by clusters of saguaro cactus. With the interstate a few miles ahead, Gunther spotted a dirt road branching off to the left, leading into a low climb to a red rock formation jutting from and crumbling back to the ground.

“Pull up in there a few minutes.”

“What for?”

“Time to dump the garbage.”

He’d been weighing the diminishing odds of being stopped this close to Phoenix with the mounting liability of carrying in a hostage. The middle of the city wasn’t the place to go yanking people from the trunk when you were trying to blend. If worse came to worst later on, he could always bluff with the deputy’s hat.

Madeline stopped the car beside a pair of tall, narrow boulders that looked like the fossilized fins of ancient sharks. Smaller rocks lay heaped around their bases, and from the shadows of a tiny cave they were watched by the impassive eyes of a horned toad.

In the trunk, the deputy was conscious by now, but sapped by heat and tomato-red. His brown uniform slacks and white T-shirt were soaked through with sweat. He tried and failed to focus his eyes as Gunther pulled him from the trunk and set him upright.

“You think you got problems?” Gunther said. “I got a thirty-four-thousand-dollar comic book and no place to sell it.”

The deputy grunted past the whip of bloody towel stretched across his mouth. Gunther relented — who was he going to call out here? — and untied the gag, tossed it aside. The kid stretched his mouth, working his tongue around like a scrap of leather.

With the pistol, Gunther prodded him over to the rocks, felt Maddy’s eyes on their backs. Felt, in some small way, that he was performing for her, a redemption for the day’s blunders.

He found that he wasn’t hating Boyd quite as much now that he had somebody else to take it out on. Found he could even admire Boyd’s guile. Ninety-nine guys out of a hundred couldn’t even begin to think of talking themselves out of a situation like that. Could never have put a plan together. All they could do was beg.

“Don’t kill me,” the deputy rasped.

Gunther patted his shoulder. “You think that’s what we’re here for?”

He laid the kid out on a slab of rock, back on his pinioned arms. As Gunther squatted by him, the deputy looked up, pleading with his eyes, the right swollen half shut. Gunther empathized.

“Don’t. I have a family. I have … have a little boy.”

“Family, that’s important to you. Being with them.”

A slow nod.

“Over time,” said Gunther, “you got more dead relatives than live ones, is the way I look at it.”

Tears began to squeeze from the deputy’s eyes. Not so badly dehydrated after all. This was good. Moisture was good right now.

“I’ll give you a chance. More chance than you were planning on giving me back there. I like playing the odds. I’m giving you every chance to walk out of this desert.” He took the can of Drano from behind his back, where he’d been holding it out of sight, and set it on a rock beside the deputy’s head. “There’s just one catch. This one thing. I just got to get this out of my system.”

*

He’d already changed clothes in the desert so he wouldn’t come into Phoenix looking as though he’d fallen down a cliff. They pulled into a strip mall with a pharmacy and bought medicated eyedrops and circular gauze bandages and white tape, then ducked into a four-shots-for-a-dollar photo booth so Madeline could treat him and secure a bandage in place. Outside the booth, he looked into the primping mirror with approval, then decided what the hell, as long as they were here. He fed a dollar into the slot and dragged Maddy back inside, onto his lap, as the camera flashed at five-second intervals. As soon as he saw the strip of pictures, they seemed a waste of money — Maddy hadn’t kept her mouth shut for a single one.

Next stop was a florist shop, to browse their Yellow Pages for a cut-rate body shop where he could drop the Cadillac for an overnight budget paint job. Get that white Caddy off the road, and return to it tomorrow in one that wouldn’t flag attention.

“What color you think we should go with?” he asked.

“Painting the car? Why not just steal one?”

“Because stolen cars get reported. Makes no sense to go from one car they’re looking for to another they’re looking for.”

“Gray,” Madeline said. “We should go with gray.”

Back outside at a telephone carrel, he called a body shop to clear an appointment for later in the afternoon, then made a mental checklist. Paint the car, lay low in a motel until tomorrow. He would have to retire the license plates, but it shouldn’t be any problem to find a car down from Nevada and make a switch that was likely to go unnoticed. The average traveler paid about as much attention to his plates as he did to speed limits.

Next, he called Joey Ferret at Two-Eyed Jacks.

“I need you to run a license number for me.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re asking right now?” said the Ferret. “Right now you are skating on extremely thin ice out there on your own and you have somebody we both know very pissed off over this. Am I getting through to you?”

The tone of his voice came as a shock. Joey Ferret had never talked to him this way; had never had any reason to do so. Another sudden mystery, something rumbling beneath the surface. Outback deputies who knew his name, and now this.

“What’s going on?” Gunther asked.

“I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“Then let’s make it easy for you. You run me this plate, dig up the particulars on the guy, and what I do is drop out of sight and all our problems are solved. You, me, and any interested third parties. How’s that sound?”

The Ferret gave a weary sigh. “As far as I know, this is a secured line, but I’m not taking any chances. You find yourself a fax machine and send it to me that way, and sit tight for a reply. Think you can do that without leaving a mess behind?”

Gunther said he could manage fine, took down the number for the fax line, and turned to Madeline for advice. They sought out a photocopy center in the strip mall, full of college kids who fed papers into rows of whirring machines. Madeline took care of it, paying two dollars to fax a single sheet to the Ferret’s office, with the license number that Boyd had spotted through the window when Allison’s ride had picked her up.

Florida tag,
the note read.
ST JOHN.

Twenty minutes, and the information came. They took the reply fax outside, drinking Snapples that Maddy had picked up at a juice bar two doors down, reading as the sun’s heat bounced at them off the asphalt.

The black van that Boyd had seen belonged to Thomas St. John, of Panama City, Florida. Five feet eleven, 165 pounds, thirty-six years old, black hair, brown eyes … the standard driver’s license trivia. The Ferret had done some supplemental digging to provide them with not only St. John’s home address and phone number, but those of his business, a custom leatherwear firm called St. John’s Apocalypse.

Below this was a more personal message from the Ferret:
Your favors here are used up. Call if interested in knowing why.

“Not a bad day’s work, Gunther,” said Madeline. “You got yourself worked over by someone who couldn’t move, and it looks like you’ve managed to alienate opposite sides of the law.”

There was no pleasing this woman. He returned to the phone and fed in more coins.

“Just keep your mouth shut and listen to this story,” the Ferret told him. “Story about a guy we both know. What this guy did last night was take a boxful of comic books to a place to try selling them. You know the thick-headed guy I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” Gunther said quietly.

“Fabulous. We’re communicating. The guy that owns the shop, soon as he saw the contents of the box, he started to get nervous, see, because he recognized them. Some of those comics in that box were so old and rare that not just anybody’d have them lying around. And grouped together like that, the collection’s about as individual as a fingerprint to a guy like that comic shop owner. He’d never in a thousand years expect somebody to walk in off the street with it, acting like he doesn’t even realize what he’s got. But then, along comes Thickhead. Are you following this so far?”

“Yes,” Gunther whispered.

“It wasn’t the first time the comic shop guy had seen this collection. He’d appraised it already, last year, for one of his regulars. And what made him so nervous when he saw these comics again was because he knew from the newspaper that his old customer had been found capped in the head a week ago, in his own bedroom. So, guess who he figures is standing right there in front of him.”

“Sure,” said Gunther. “Who wouldn’t.”

“My point exactly. So after stone cold Thickhead leaves, what the shop guy does is have one of his customers run out and catch the license on the car that’s driving away. Now, here’s the part where it gets really weird. The shop guy closes up and immediately starts trying to cut a deal with the Vegas PD and DA’s office, so he can get a reward for turning in the killer. But he doesn’t want money. What he wants is the rest of the comic books Thickhead brought in, after they’re no longer required as evidence. He’s got a big hard-on for this book from the late thirties — Batman’s first appearance. There’s only fifty or so of them left in the world. He’s wanted the thing ever since he first appraised the dead guy’s collection, found out the dead guy got it from his grandfather, who’d bought it new for one thin dime because he liked detective stories. So. Do you see where this is heading?”

“Hey,” said Gunther, “I’m not blind.”

“The shop guy picks Thickhead out of a mug book, and by this morning the cops are most seriously interested in finding out what he knows about the dead guy. Some brain in that Thickhead, huh?”

Gunther was slowly banging his frontal lobe against the edge of the phone carrel. “Any word on Thickhead having any accomplices or traveling companions, like that?”

“Unidentified redheaded female. You want the exact wording from the comic shop guy’s statement? This is from a friendly source in the department. You want to hear it?”

“Go ahead.”

“‘Attila the Hun, with cleavage.’”

Gunther straightened up, bristling. “Now
that’s
out of line.” If and when he got back to Vegas, he was definitely going to have to take that Calvin geek from the comic shop and tie him down for a long, long demonstration of various industrial solvents.

“So if you see Thickhead,” said the Ferret, “you might want to tell him to come on back into the fold, under some protection, until this blows over.”