The Desert Waits

by J. Carson Black

  “That was a good thing you did,” Alex said as Nick drove them up Devil’s Hearth Road toward the highway. “I don’t understand why the sheriff didn’t want you to call Game & Fish.”

  “Power trip, I guess.”

  The radio crackled. Nick picked up. “I’ll go. I’m only a mile away,” he said, setting the radio in its cradle with a sigh. “I don’t want to hijack you, but I’m really close and I’d like to answer this nuisance call.”

  “Nuisance call?”

  “They ought to put his name on it. Call it a Del Walker call. You mind?”

  “Actually no.” Alex was too wound up to go to bed now. She tried to blot the sight of the ocelots out of her mind, but the eyes of the one, staring up through the wedge of darkness, haunted her. Her anger, which had boiled down to an ugly simmer, congealed in her stomach and soured her mouth; it flared up again now as she thought of those cats, fastidious creatures, made to lie in their own waste.

  No, she doubted she could sleep tonight.

  They turned off at a scabrous shack set amid a garage sale of junk and desiccated cactus. A dark canine shape hurtled out of the night, its chain skittering behind it. Its bark could have been an ad for steroids.

  Nick stood just out of the dog’s reach. Alex noticed it had a fuzzy, curled tail. An old man stood illuminated by the porch light. He wore OshKosh B’Gosh overalls over a long underwear top and the biggest hearing aid Alex had ever seen. A white wisp of hair stood up on his head, making him look like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. His face was mean and pinched. “Who’s that with you?” he demanded.

  “Friend of mine.”

  “Well, tell her to stop teasing the dog. Laddie don’t like women.”

  Alex wondered if Laddie’s prejudice was only against women or if he extended it to authority figures. Nick was a lot closer to him than she was.

  “Restrain your dog, Del, so we can talk.”

  Ungraciously, Del ushered Laddie into his pen and led them inside the house. He didn’t offer to let them sit, and glancing at the swaybacked Early American couch covered with old towels (for the dog?), she decided to stand.

  “What took you so long?” Del Walker demanded.

  “I had a priority call. Plane crash. You hear anything?” he added. “You’re only about a mile from the crash site.”

  “Heard anything? Of course I did. That’s what knocked out my cable.”

  “Your cable,” Nick said.

  “I was in the middle of Jeopardy! Then wham!, there’s this flash out the window, and now look at it! Been like that for two hours.”

  Alex glanced at the portable television sitting on a good cherry wood drop-leaf table. At one time, someone had cared about this place.

  “Snow! Two hours it’s been like that, and I wanna know what you’re gonna do about it!”

  “You’ll have to call the cable company.”

  Delbert Walker gave Nick the look he must reserve for the village idiot. “They’re not open!”

  “I can’t do anything.”

  “Walter’s a friend of yours. You could get him out of bed and get him over here to fix it. Starting at midnight, they’re gonna air twenty-four hours of Silk Stalkings.”

  The idea of Delbert Walker sitting here in this dim, cluttered room watching such sexy, trashy fare brought a smile to Alex’s lips. She noticed that Nick was having a hard time remaining stern. “I can’t do that.”

  “Those the only words you know? It’s no thanks to you that guy with the truck isn’t around here anymore. Had to scare him off myself.”

  “You did what?”

  “I was perfectly within the law. He was on my property, so I showed him my 30-ought and told him to take his drug running somewhere else. Haven’t seen him since. So you can stop driving around here late at night looking for him, he’s gone.”

  Nick’s expression turned puzzled. “I haven’t been out here at night since last week.”

  “I know a sheriff’s vehicle when I see one. Wonder you get anything done, joyriding around here all hours of the night. Not only that, but now there’s some nut on a motorcycle riding around here! Now you gonna call Walter or will I?”

  “You’d better wait until morning.”

  “Try and stop me.”

  “I’ll walk you in,” Nick said.

  The hotel loomed up in the starlight like a white Spanish mission, snaring them in its deep shadow. The neon had been turned off; only a faint purple glow came from the bug light.

  He didn’t want the night to end. First at the plane crash and later at the lean-to and Del’s, he and Alex had fallen into an easy companionship. It reminded him of the time he’d had a female partner in Phoenix. There had been that unspoken link between them, that lifeline. He knew he could trust her and she could trust him. That was the way he felt about Alex. Although they had talked very little about anything personal, he felt he knew her well.

  Besides that easy rapport, and sometimes running counter to it, he sensed the undercurrent of her attraction to him, meeting his own like two exposed wires.

  As they climbed the shallow steps to the entrance of the hotel, Alex said, “Look.”

  He followed her gaze. On both sides of the hotel entrance were cactus gardens. Alex was staring at the senita cactus, which thrust thick-jointed fingers up above the stucco wall. The flowers adorning it tilted elegant faces to the night sky, imprisoning the moonlight within their pink petals. “Aren’t they beautiful?” Alex said, right before he kissed her.

  She responded, her lips shaped against his, her mouth drawing him in. He pressed a hand to the small of her back and she came willingly, her breasts straining against his chest. Her fingers wrapped lightly around his neck, then pressed harder, more urgent as he molded her to the length of his body.

  He drew back and looked at her. Her face was in shadow, but her eyes gave him the answer he sought.

  Like children on an adventure, they tiptoed in through the dark hotel lobby and out again into the courtyard. The night was redolent of jasmine and chlorine. A cricket chirped nearby.

  Alex fumbled with the lock to the door, and then they were in, the starlight washing over the hardwood floor, the cat like a wraith at their ankles.

  They wasted no time with amenities. Nick’s passion had taken on a harder edge as he’d felt this woman responding in his arms, and he shucked his clothes and hers with reckless abandon. And then they were tangled on the bed, like the mesquite and the cactus, so close it was hard to tell where one left off and the other began.

  He closed his eyes as they merged, savoring the halting sweetness, the opening petals of her soul. For he felt it was her soul he delved into, hoped it was, hoped that their hearts beating together meant something more than just sex.

  A wave of relief and gratitude crashed into him, staggering, overwhelming. For so long he’d felt that part of his life would never return. He thought his heart must have atrophied from disuse, that once Janice had left him he would never love anyone again. He’d slept with women, yes, and those times had been pleasant diversions, but he’d never hoped to come back inside that safe house where there was love, perhaps because the safe house he’d known for nine years had proved to be assailable.

  That he could be loved again, embraced again, assimilated again into a woman he thought he could love drove him into deep, resounding ecstasy before sending him spiraling into a warm and blessed darkness.

  Twenty

  STOP THE INSANITY—Stalking isn’t just Harassment Anymore

  —T-shirt commissioned by Ted Lang

  Alex was too excited to sleep. One o’clock in the morning and she was wide awake. Nick had gone home because he had to get up early, but she had nothing to do but think.

  On an impulse, she drove to Groves Canyon and hiked to the blind. Maybe she was getting to be a night owl. She sat in the tent, hugging herself around the glow which seemed to emanate from her core.

  Brian’s petition for divorce had knocked her flat. She’
d never seen the punch coming. After all this time she was still punch-drunk, vaguely bemused at finding herself lying on the mat, her life in shambles around her. It left her apathetic, tired. One thing she’d realized early on: she wasn’t interested in men. Attractive men were to her like a gourmet meal to an anorexic—not just unnecessary but downright repulsive.

  It had been difficult for her to come to grips with the knowledge that some part of her still loved Brian. Logic couldn’t override that simple fact. She was ashamed of wanting a man who had treated her so badly, but there was no ducking the truth.

  Until now. Suddenly Brian was gone, wiped out, finito. It was almost as though he’d never existed.

  Alex wondered what would come of last night. Nick lived in Gilpin County; she lived in Tucson. That was a goodly commute.

  “And maybe I’m jumping to conclusions,” she said aloud, between bites of a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.

  A one-night stand usually didn’t amount to anything important. But whatever happened, Alex would always be grateful to Nick for the knowledge that it wasn’t all over for her. Like a spring shoot poking out of frosted ground, Alex felt the first stirrings of desire—not just for sex but for companionship—and faced the reality that she was divorced, not widowed. And certainly not dead.

  She was jarred awake by a scratching sound. She shook the clouds loose, reached for the camera, and tried to hold steady. Her heart beat fast, not from excitement but from waking from a nap.

  it was morning. Milky turquoise, the sky still bore the discarded husk of the moon. The sun hadn’t yet made it over the cliff wall.

  Alex focused blearily. The cat wasn’t on the sycamore limb, wasn’t anywhere she could see. The scratching sound had probably come from some bird rooting around in the brush for bugs.

  Alex felt the clouds pass back over her brain, fogging her thoughts. She drifted, felt the camera slip in her hands, set it carefully down on the tent floor before she could drop and break it. Then, with a last sour breath of stifling nylon tent, she closed her eyes.

  In her dream, Alex saw the jaguarundi stride into a scimitar of sunlight, emerging from the shadows like a figment of the imagination.

  “Figment of the imagination,” she muttered, one hand floundering for the camera on the tent floor. Her arms felt disconnected, unable to follow the simplest impulses. And so for a moment she sat and stared as the exquisite creature picked its way among the rocks, sniffing daintily at a hackberry bush before rubbing its chin on one branch, marking its territory.

  The jaguarundi must have heard something, because suddenly it turned its face fully toward Alex, that well-shaped, jungle-cat face. Kohl-lined golden eyes, dilated pupils, the flared T of salmon-and-black patterned nose, ears like tiny cups way back on its head. Dark as sable.

  Felis yagouaroundi.

  And then it continued what it was doing, walking with a slightly humped back, a narrow, sinuous walk.

  Alex was wide awake now, the camera in her hand.

  She framed, got the shot. Click. The cat stopped again, eyes wide. Affronted but not scared. Suddenly, two little stuffed toys tumbled out of the weeds behind the jaguarundi.

  Kittens.

  They galumphed up behind their momma and one of them ran into her backside, reared up, clawed his way up her flank. Her tail lashed as the little guy pinned himself to her for a second, paddled desperately, then fell into a heap beside his brother. Winded, he lay on his back, the baby fur on his belly making him appear even more vulnerable. His sibling reared up and gave him an open-pawed swat, then pounced. They rolled in the dust—the battle of the killer teddy bears.

  Her heart ached with that odd combination of love, awe, and fear. Fear that this idyllic scene could be destroyed so easily by man. Alex experienced those bittersweet emotions every time she saw an animal in the wild, but this was all the more poignant. She could not bear to think that one day there might be no more jaguarundi kittens gamboling in the grass.

  Abruptly, she became aware of the camera in her hand. If she could catch them playing ...

  In her excitement, Alex knocked the metal frame of the blind with her elbow.

  The cat and her two little shadows dashed off and were gone in an instant, leaving only the quivering jojoba bushes to show they had ever been there at all.

  Nick was running late. He had to be at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office by 11:00 a.m. for the autopsy on the pilot of the downed Cessna. He noticed a truck parked on the side of the road beyond Quartz Springs, a red sticker pasted to the back window of the camper shell.

  As it flashed by on the right, his eyes registered the truck’s color—tan—and the camper shell. Where had he heard of one like that? He glanced in the rearview mirror. Ford. Not the latest model but recent, late eighties maybe. Despite the sticker, somebody would probably come for it as soon as they were able. It was far from junk. But if they didn’t, he might take a look at it on his way back.

  As he drove through the desert, his thoughts flitted from one subject to another. For a while, his mind lingered on Alex and what their lovemaking might mean to each of them. He didn’t know her well enough yet to be sure, but he was optimistic.

  He couldn’t have imagined the charged emotions, the link between them. Alex was too honest for that. She had to care about him. The relief he’d felt, knowing that that part of him was still alive ...

  He’d planned on stopping by today, but it had been a busy morning, and at the last minute, he’d been saddled with this autopsy, even though Doug Childers was the one who had handled the scene.

  Nick wondered if Deputy Doug had been faking the flu. He’d made a pretty good show of it—Nick suspected he’d pulled this sort of thing when he was kid to get out of school—but usually Childers liked going into Tucson, a chance to drink a beer with some of his old buddies from TPD.

  This time, though, Doug Childers obviously didn’t want to go. He seemed more jittery than sick, and when he’d asked Nick to take his place, his eyes had slithered away, as if Nick would be able to see through him if they maintained eye contact.

  A big contrast to the Booker Purlie case, where Doug had practically saluted when Sheriff Johnson told him to go instead of Nick.

  Davy Livermore met him in the waiting room outside the autopsy room at the medical examiner’s office. Short and stocky, tattooed arms like ham hocks, Davy looked more like a loading- dock worker than a pathologist. His grizzled hair was pulled back into a tiny knot, framing a square Irish face and playful blue eyes. When he wasn’t wearing the white garb of a medical examiner, he favored tank tops and sleeveless denim shirts. A black motorcycle cap was his trademark. Coors was his beer of choice.

  “Another drug runner bites the dust,” Davy hailed, his hearty voice ringing up the hallway. “What’ve you got?”

  “Name’s James William Meyer. At least that’s who the plane’s registered to.”

  Davy’s thick sandy brows knitted into a seagull. “Wasn’t he on the SWAT team with your department up in Phoenix a couple of years ago?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Davy rubbed his chin. “Now that’s interesting. I guess you can’t fight simple arithmetic. You wanna put your kids through the college of your choice, you see pretty quick where the money is and where it isn’t. Speaking of, how’s Ellie?”

  Nick tried to keep the pain out of his voice. “Missed her the other day. I was out on a call.”

  Davy Livermore nodded, his eyes knowing. “You’ll work it out,” he said, abruptly slapping Nick on the back. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  As Nick donned a disposable plastic apron, surgical mask, and shoe covers, he shared with Davy what the sheriff’s department had learned.

  The pathologist’s assistant removed the corpse from the storage locker and with Davy’s help transferred it to the autopsy table. He cut open the chilled body bag parallel to the seal, which bore the word EVIDENCE repeated at intervals along with Deputy Childers’ initials and badge number.


  Nick turned away at the sight of the corpse as the assistant pathologist photographed it. Because the body had been burned, there wasn’t any smell of putrefaction, just the strong odor of disinfectant in the autopsy room itself. Nick folded the body bag carefully and placed it in an evidence bag, glad to occupy himself and avoid staring. He’d known Meyer to talk to. Seemed like a nice guy. Maybe a little too gung ho, which made it all the more surprising he’d switched sides.

  Davy spoke into a pocket tape recorder, identifying and then describing the body. Nick was given the man’s shoes and a ring, the few intact pieces of clothing. He placed these in separate evidence bags, trying not to listen as the saw started up. But even though he breathed through his mouth, he could smell the cutting bone.

  “Not much left, but we do’s what we can,” muttered Davy as he went painstakingly through the procedure.

  As Davy finished up, Nick sealed the evidence envelopes and initialed them. He removed the booties, apron, mask, and green rubber gloves and threw them into a plastic bag marked BIOHAZARD. Davy washed his hands. “How about lunch?” he asked brightly.

  They ate at El Minuto, a Mexican-food restaurant situated beside the wishing shrine, where a romantic triangle had ended in murder and begun a new chapter in Hispanic folklore. Now the site bore an old adobe wall and votive candles burned in memory of the dead man.

  Over a topopo salad, Nick talked about Caroline Arnet, running his theory about her state of mind past Davy. Had she acted as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders, as the wardrobe lady had put it, because she was resolved to kill herself? But why use the gun when she had the pills? For dramatic effect?

  it nagged at him like a toothache. The key was Caroline’s state of mind, and he had no way of knowing what she’d been thinking. Had she planned to commit suicide? Had there been a change of heart, and if so, what had precipitated such an about-face? Considering the bleakness of her future, what would have made her want to live? It had to be something important. Had to.