by Betty Webb
I stared at the wall for a while, then asked, “What’s for dinner?”
“Meaning you want to stop thinking about Mother Eve for a while. Okay, barbeque.”
My gorge rose. “Maybe I’ll pick up a salad on the way home.”
Jimmy’s face pantomimed shock. “Did you hear that, world? Lena Jones just turned down barbequed ribs.”
My cell phone played a blues guitar riff, sparing me from reacting. It was Sylvie.
“We just got an ID on that Beeline Highway corpse, the male, if you’re interested.”
“Lay it on me.”
“Ford J. Laumenthal, age twenty-six. Last known residence, Casper, Wyoming.”
“He had a record then.” Once a felon’s in the system, his prints, blood type, and now even his DNA stay in the system, which makes ID-ing criminals a breeze.
“Nope, no record. Turns out he was wearing one of those medical alert bracelets. Type 2 diabetic. We’ve already contacted what’s left of his family—early death by diabetes seems to be a problem with them—and his father’s flying in tomorrow morning for the formal ID. Appears our Mr. Laumenthal was married, wife’s name is Arlene or Darlene or Lurleene or something like that. The father can’t be sure because he never met her or saw a picture of her. Apparently, Mr. Laumenthal and his son haven’t spoken in something like eight years since he took off from home. The mother’s dead, committed suicide not long after sonny boy left. Don’t you just love these happy families?”
“They make my life worth living.” I thought of Reservation Woman’s vacant eyes, her spindly limbs, her sad blue dress. She’d been in her twenties, the right age to be married to Ford J. Laumenthal.
“Polly Yamaguchi said the Ford guy was emaciated, just like Megan Unruh and the woman I found on the Rez.”
“Polly told you? That bitch! One of these days...”
“Sylvie. Answer me. Was Laumenthal emaciated?”
A tired sigh. “Poor guy was nothing but skin and bones.”
Hours later we were sitting around the fire pit near Jimmy’s trailer. The Rez having worked its magic, I had passed on the salad and was licking barbeque sauce off my fingers when my cell rang again.
“Your friend Chelsea is no more with us!” The coyotes yipping in the brush couldn’t disguise the anxiety in Gabrielle’s voice. It made her French accent stronger than ever. “A group of us, we drive to Tucson to view double films at the CinePlex, and between those she has excused herself to buy the popcorn. She never returned.”
I put it on speaker so Jimmy could hear. “Did you mount a search?” A stupid question, but necessary.
“We have looked everywhere, mon amie. The theater, the restroom of the men, the mall, the streets, but she is but nowhere.”
“Did you call the police?”
“The gendarme I spoke with said to me that since Chelsea is of age, they do not worry about adult people with such a short time missing, but they will be on the…the...
“Lookout?”
“Oui, on the lookout. He said if she does not come back to us by tomorrow, to call them again and then they will do serious worry.”
Serious worry. I threw a look at Jimmy. A neater eater than myself, he was cleaning his fingers off with a napkin, only partially listening to the conversation. “Have you contacted Harold Slow Horse?”
At the mention of his friend’s name, Jimmy looked up.
A brief silence from Gabrielle as she took a breath. “We at Kanati have experienced problems with Mr. Slow Horse and we hoped that you would...”
“That I’d do your dirty work.”
“Oui. Ah, yes. And I am sorry of this.”
Not half as sorry as I was. Chelsea Cooper-Slow Horse had always been a wrecking ball of a woman. Chaos followed her everywhere she went. It followed her to the fancy school her father sent her to but which threw her out even before the first term was up, then followed her when she’d started her own jewelry line and wound up dealing in hot jewelry, and then had moved in with her when she’d discovered the joys of oxycodone. Just when I’d thought she was at least safe among the lousy potters of Kanati, here she was in trouble again. But maybe, just maybe, this time it wasn’t her fault.
“Did she have her purse and phone with her?”
“Certainement.”
“Yet she hasn’t called to tell you she’s okay?”
“Non. We are worried, mon amie. Adam especially, who has grown quite fond of her, as have we all.”
“Okay, I’ll call the ex-husband, and let him know. I’ll call her father, too, and her friends. Then I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, relax, if you can.”
After an assurance that she would “je vaix me relaxer,” she ended the call.
“That didn’t sound good,” Jimmy said. “I hope it’s just Chelsea being Chelsea.”
Jimmy was concerned for Chelsea’s safety, but I was more concerned for Harold’s. Chelsea’s disappearance from a planned trip to a movie theater had “cult extraction” written all over it. My suspicions deepened when Harold didn’t answer his phone. Clint Moran didn’t answer his, either. I wanted to be wrong, but what was the alternative? Chelsea kidnapped by a stranger? At least Moran had never raped or killed anyone—not that I’d heard, anyway—so if he had her, she was more or less safe. However, if he had her, she was about to be subjected to a form of deprogramming that sometimes included electroshock therapy.
After sharing my own fears with Jimmy, I cleaned the remaining smears of barbeque sauce off my face and got to my feet. “I’m driving over to Harold’s.”
Jimmy stood up, too. “Not alone, you’re not.”
“You think big bad Clint Moran can take me?”
He snorted. “Not even in his younger days. But I do think big bad Clint Moran won’t be there, and neither will Harold. I plan on being with you when you go off on your next wild-ass search. I’m tired of being left behind.”
Since Jimmy had never complained about my solo investigations before, I had thought he was content with his computers. Things appeared to be changing, but why? Surely not because I was living with him in his Airstream rather than in my own apartment.
“Are you sure coming with me is a good idea?”
“It probably isn’t, but I’m doing it anyway.”
That sounded so much like my own way of thinking I had to laugh. Maybe we were both changing. “Then saddle up, Pardner. We’re going for a ride.”
When Jimmy’s pickup rolled onto Harold Slow Horse’s property, the centerpiece of which was a three-bedroom adobe bungalow similar to the one Jimmy and I were building, Doofus, his yellow Lab trotted out to greet us. Behind Doofus came Barry Tuukwi, Harold’s fifty-something Hopi/Pima neighbor. He was brandishing a toilet plunger.
“Harold asked me if I’d fix his toilet while he was gone.”
“He needs a new toilet, not the old one fixed,” Jimmy said.
“You know Harold. He’d rather fix old stuff than buy something new and shiny, says older things have more character.” He glanced at me. “Ya ta hay, Lena.”
“Ya ta hay, Barry.”
“It’s a pretty night, isn’t it?”
It never pays to be too direct with Hopis or Pimas; both tribes think it’s rude, so I smiled and agreed. “Out here you can see every star in the sky.”
Barry smiled. “I’ve always liked looking up at the stars.”
“Me, too,” Jimmy said.
“Earth Doctor’s walking stick is bright tonight.”
I was familiar enough with Pima legend to know that by this, Barry was referring to the Milky Way, which the world’s creator had forged by rubbing his walking stick into a pile of glowing ashes, then drawing the ashes in a pattern across the sky.
“‘I have made the stars!’” Jimmy quoted Earth Doctor’s words. “‘Above the earth I threw them. All th
ings above I have made, and placed them to make for my people a glowing highway.’”
While all this chit chat about stars was nice, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Say, Barry, you wouldn’t happen to know where Harold is, would you?”
Barry made a big show out of adjusting his bifocals, then smoothed his hair. Unlike Jimmy, he kept his hair short, which he believed better suited his work environment at Intel, where he’d been an electrical engineer for almost two decades. “Hmm. Where Harold is. That’s something to ponder, isn’t it?”
I wanted to sound Pima laid-back, but living with Jimmy hadn’t relaxed me yet. “But here you are, fixing Harold’s plumbing, and probably feeding his animals, right? And you did say he was gone, right?”
Still that serene smile. “Well, his Bronco not being here and all. Harold never lends it to anyone.”
“He usually takes Doofus along wherever he goes,” I pointed out. “Unless it’s Walmart or some other ritzy place.”
Barry chuckled politely. “I prefer Costco, myself.”
Throughout this, Doofus kept looking back and forth at us, as if watching a tennis match. I felt like I was in one.
“So does Jimmy,” I said. “Except for pastries. For those, he goes to AJ’s.”
Recognizing that this would go on forever, Jimmy said, “Their fruit tarts are killer. Say, Harold’s ex-wife has disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and we’re concerned.”
“That pretty Chelsea?”
“Yeah. Her.”
Barry studied the stars again. “Do you think that is a comet? Or a satellite. There are so many satellites in the sky these days, I sometimes have trouble distinguishing one from the other.”
“We need to find Harold, Barry.” I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice.
“Probably a satellite. At least I think so. Find Harold? Why would you need to find him when it is Chelsea who is missing?”
I was ready to scream, but Jimmy was used to reservation slow-talkers. “Where is he, Barry?”
Barry looked down at Doofus. “Did Harold tell you where he was going, boy? Because he didn’t tell me.”
Great. Now we were conversing through the dog.
Trying to move things along, I butted in again. “Harold can get in serious trouble if he and Clint Moran took Chelsea,” I said. “Kidnapping’s against the law. Federal law.”
The mention of the Feds worked. Barry looked away from Doofus and straight at me. “I didn’t know Clint Moran was involved in this, and so I didn’t ask Harold anything, not where he was going or who he was going with. When he pulled up at my place in that Ford Bronco of his—nobody else was in there, except for Doofus—he asked if I’d take in his dog and feed his horses while he was gone. And that was it.”
“Did he say when he was coming back?”
“Said his trip was open-ended, which is why Doofus is staying at my place. A dog gets lonely. Horses, not so much, because they have each other. Now, if you will excuse me, a stopped-up toilet awaits.” Still brandishing the toilet plunger, he walked back into the house.
As we reached Jimmy’s truck I recalled a conversation I’d overheard once between Harold and Jimmy, something about an old homestead.
I asked, “Didn’t Harold’s grandmother—the white one—leave him a place up in Yavapai County?”
“I remember him saying he was thinking of selling it.”
“But it might be worth a drive.”
He sighed. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
“You can hold down the office while I make the trip.”
He gave me the look I was beginning to know well. “That’s not the way it’s going to work, Lena.”
Jimmy’s memory being even better than mine, the first thing he did the next morning was run Evelyn Wheelright’s name through the system, and after some hunting and pecking, discovered that her property, fifteen acres plus cabin, had indeed been transferred to her grandson after her death. Harold remained the legal owner.
“So what are we going to do if they are holding Chelsea prisoner up there?” Jimmy asked, as we drove north on I-17 toward the Prescott Valley turnoff. “Call the authorities? Crash through the front door, guns ablazin’?”
“Much as I’d enjoy that, the whole purpose of this operation is to get Chelsea released without anyone getting hurt.”
“I still say we should contact the authorities.”
“Did you not hear the ‘without anyone getting hurt’ part?”
He grunted. “Point taken.”
Prescott Valley is little more than an hour’s drive from Phoenix, but temperature-wise, at an elevation of five thousand feet, it’s another world. When we’d left Scottsdale, the temps had been in the cool-but-comfortable sixties, but up here it was in the forties, and my thin desert blood didn’t much like it. Especially not the autumnal wind. After making the turnoff to SR-69, we drove for another few miles, then took a side road that led us past the Fitzmaurice Ruins, a crumbling twenty-seven-room pueblo built by the Patayan people more than a thousand years ago. Evelyn Wheelright’s own grandparents had homesteaded on the other side of the ruins, building a two-room cabin to house their family of eight.
Jimmy parked his Toyota at the bottom of the rise that separated the Patayan ruins from the old Wheelright property. After hiking up to the top, we could see down into the narrow valley, and noted that the original cabin had been added on to over the years. It had expanded to at least four rooms, and the big propane tank in the back signaled that it also had heat. Electric lines and a windmill boasted of further improvements. To complete these frilly mod-cons, Harold Slow Horse’s Bronco sat in the driveway next to a plain white panel truck, the better to kidnap ex-wives in.
“Now what?” I asked, thankful for the dense brush that hid us from the house.
“I thought you were the one with all the plans.”
“And I, you. Guns ablazin’, then?” I patted the holster strapped to my thigh.
“This isn’t the Wild West and you’re not the sheriff.”
“You think we’re going to have a nice, civilized talk with those idiots?”
He shook his head. “But, granted, it would be nice.”
“At least we’ve got the element of surprise.”
Jimmy liked that, so continuing on foot, we circled around to the back of the cabin where a screen door flapped back and forth in the wind. Excellent. That would help cover any noise we might make during our approach to do whatever we were going to do. We weren’t worried about Harold, nor about Clint; he was slime, but other than zapping “extracted” cultists with Tasers once in a while, he wasn’t particularly violent.
“Now?” I asked.
“I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“This wasn’t my idea, you know.”
“Nobody forced you to come along. Let’s go.”
We stopped bickering and crept down the hill, making as little noise as possible. Upon reaching the house, Jimmy held the screen door back while I tried the doorknob.
They hadn’t even bothered to lock it.
Treading softly, we entered what appeared to be a mud room. It was cluttered with several pairs of well-worn boots and a .32-40 Remington so old it could have been used by the original owners. I hoped Grandpa Remington was the only firearm in the house, but just in case, I drew my .38 Colt. The windows being small, the light was dim as we tiptoed down a short hallway, inhaling a century of dust overlaid with what smelled like bacon. We would have made it all the way into the main room without incident, but Jimmy—not the smallest man in the world—bumped into a clothes tree, knocking it to the ground in a great clatter.
With that, a door on the left side of the hall flew open, revealing Clint Moran brandishing a Taser. “What the hell are you two doing here?”
“Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I
said, then kneed him in the balls and kicked the Taser aside.
“Help!” Chelsea’s soprano made a fine counterpoint to Clint’s basso howls as he writhed on the filthy floor. “Untie me and get me out of here! That man’s crazy!”
Leaving Jimmy to deal with the cult extractor, I peeked into a tiny bedroom and saw her duct-taped to a chair. To my surprise, Harold sat duct-taped to a matching chair.
“He tased her!” he yelped. “He tased my wife!”
“Ex-wife,” she snarled.
I felt like shooting them both, but contented myself by pulling out the knife I’d slipped into my jeans pocket before leaving the Rez. “Shut up, you two. This isn’t the time for ex-marital spats.”
“Me first!” Chelsea whined, as I sawed on Harold’s bonds. He’d appeared the least hysterical, thus the least likely to cause further problems.
“Chelsea, did you not hear me tell you to shut up?”
“But he helped kidnap me!”
“Whine, whine.”
Once freed, Harold rushed to his true love’s side and fell on his knees. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry!”
She tried to kick him, but due to her seated position, wasn’t able to connect. Meanwhile, scufflings and grunts from the hallway revealed that Clint was recovering. I must not have kneed him hard enough.
“Harold, go help Jimmy,” I snapped.
“But my wife…”
“Do it, by God, or I’ll tase you myself!”
Muttering, Harold lumbered into the hall and joined the fray.
“If you’d hold still, this would go faster,” I told Chelsea, whose constant wriggling threatened to pull the duct tape even tighter.
She obeyed, but not happily. “I’ve been in this chair for fucking forever. I even slept in it!”
The last of the tape finally fell away. “You can get up now.”
“Those bastards are gonna pay for this.”
“I said, you can get up.”
She stood, but if I hadn’t grabbed her arm, she would have fallen back into the chair. “There you go. Easy. Easy.”
