“I think it would probably be bad policy to pay for your speeding tickets,” I told him.
“And expensive,” put in Shotgun.
“Jeez. It was a speed trap. You saw. I wasn’t going very fast.”
“Yeah, eighty-five’s standing still for Mongoose,” said Shotgun.
“I’m gonna pop you, jackass.”
“Gentlemen, there’s a lady present,” I said.
Mongoose lowered his head and gripped the steering wheel. I’m not saying his hands were tight, but his knuckles turned white.
“You can pay this at the courthouse in town,” said the policeman, returning with a ticket. “I wouldn’t let it go, because they’ll start charging you interest. That’s what gets a lot of people. That and the fees. If they have to come after you, they charge you. Then you’re talking big money.”
“Yeah,” muttered Mongoose.
“What movie are you making?” said the cop, all friendly now.
“It’s a western,” grumbled Mongoose.
“Good place for it.”
“Is it?” I leaned forward from the backseat. “Wide open spaces around?”
“Puhl-lenty of wide open spaces.” The cop smiled, then gave me a quizzical look. “Have I seen you in something? Are you famous?”
“Not famous,” I said.
“I know I’ve seen you somewhere.” He scratched his chin. “Pro wrestling?”
I shook my head.
“My kid’s got a video game,” he said. “What do they call that—capture or something. Where they take a picture and put it into the game?”
“Not me,” I told him.
“You have to be in pictures,” he told Veronica, catching a good glimpse of her for the first time. “You’re an actress—have I seen you in something?”
“We’re just back lot people,” she insisted. “Working for the producers. Have to find a good place to shoot. Small town, that sort of thing.”
“You came to the right place.”
“Any place we ought to stay away from?” I asked.
“How’s that?”
“Dangerous or anything like that?”
“In Rabbit Hole? Nah.”
“Old mine shafts? Hazardous waste?”
He laughed. “All the mines were dug up, mister, back in the early 1900s. They started doing strip-mining. As for hazardous waste, the only hazardous waste around these parts is the county jail about two miles out of town. There, they’re under lock and key. Otherwise, this is God’s country. Beautiful and clean.”
“Where’s there a good place to eat?” asked Shotgun, just as the cop was going to leave. “And get snacks?”
“Snacks? Best place is the grocer, center of town. That or Exxon. As for restaurants, take your pick. There are a dozen, one better than another. Tell ’em Charlie sent you.”
I thought for sure Shotgun would ask if any gave a discount if you’d been ticketed by the police, but he didn’t.
“Sorry about the ticket. Have a good day.” He went off singing a little tune.
Mongoose stewed in the front seat as he pulled out.
“Aw come on, Mongoose, how bad can it be?” said Shotgun, trying to cheer him up. “Place out here in the wilderness like this, they probably aren’t going to charge much. I’ll bet you that ticket’s like ten dollars.”
* * *
“Five hundred dollars! Five hundred dollars! Shit.” Mongoose shook his head so violently I thought it was going to fly off. “I don’t have no five hundred dollars on me. For a traffic ticket? Five hundred dollars?”
“That’s what the fine is, if you plead guilty,” said the clerk. She was a shortish woman with bleached white hair held back in a tight ponytail. I’d guess she was only in her late twenties, but her face and arms were leathery from being out in the sun. “Now, you could plead not guilty and have a court date set. If you’re going to be in town awhile.”
“How long?”
She leaned over behind the window where she was standing and pulled up a binder. The Rabbit Hole courthouse was a two-story building at the far end of the Main Street stretch, painted bright white and constructed to look as if it had been there since the town’s incorporation in 1830 or thereabouts. But it was actually all prefab metal and vinyl stucco not three years old.
“We have an opening November.”
“November?”
“That’s right. November, two years from now.”
She said this with a straight face. Shotgun and I were practically doubled over, trying to keep from laughing out loud a few feet away.
“We do take credit cards,” said the young woman.
“What if I don’t have a credit card?” said Mongoose.
“Then I guess you’d have to just do it by mail. I can give you a form,” she said, reaching back under the window. Mongoose was in such a bad mood he didn’t even try to steal a glimpse of cleavage, which was ample and sunburned. “There will be a fifty-dollar posting fee, and then there’s interest. We compound every twelve hours. I think it’s quite fair.”
“Damn.”
She gave him her best school marm expression. I walked over.
“How much did you say it would cost him to plead guilty here and now?” I asked.
“Five hundred. Plus the processing fee.”
“And how much is that?”
“Fifty dollars for a credit card.”
“How about cash?” I asked, taking out my wallet.
“Oh, that’s different. Then it’s just the cash processing fee. Fifty dollars.”
“So they’re both fifty dollars,” I said. “What’s the difference?”
“Well, one’s the credit card processing fee, and one’s the cash fee.”
I counted out six big ones30 and handed them over. She smiled and put the money away in a drawer.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Well I was expecting my change,” I told her.
“But you gave me six hundred dollars.”
“You said the fine was five hundred and the cash fee was fifty dollars. That makes $550.”
“And then there’s the clerk fee. That’s another fifty. Do you want a receipt?”
“How much is the fee for that?” I asked.
“Fifty dollars.”
“I think we’ll live without it.”
* * *
The clerk was quite friendly now that we were all on the right side of the law, and gave us all sorts of tips about where to eat and what to do. She also gave us a Chamber of Commerce map of the local sights, such as they were. We split up—Mongoose and Shotgun went off to check out the restaurants, while Veronica and I took a stroll down Main Street.
“Maybe they’re prisoners in one of these basements,” said Veronica. “Someplace we wouldn’t suspect.”
“Might be,” I said, not bothering to point out that it would be the rare house with a basement in this area.
“Nice little town,” she said.
“It’s pretty.”
“Shame about the ticket.”
“Mongoose shouldn’t have been going so fast.”
The grocery store was about half the size of a chain drugstore back east, with a large plate-glass window and a decor that reminded me of the 1950s. A pair of choppers rode up the street, driven by older men whose long gray hair flowed back behind the motorcycles as they passed. The store across the way sold Native American art and artifacts; there were arrowheads in the window, along with stone knives and a snakeskin purse. I liked the knives and would have gone in to have a look, but the place was closed.
“Sleepy little place,” said Veronica. “I wonder if de Sarcena gave us a bad steer.”
“It’s possible.”
We turned up the last road before Main became a highway again. There were a variety of small gift shops and boutiques stuffed into very small buildings. We walked slowly past, playing tourist. When the boutiques ended, we kept up our stroll, pretending to admire the fancy tiles and the carefully arranged cacti in the
gardens.
The mayor’s house was on the right at the very end of the road. I had thought it would be a big place, an estate with a large iron fence surrounding it—I’d seen the fence in the Google Earth image we’d checked out before leaving. But what looked like a tall fence on the two-dimensional Google Earth turned out to be only a small rail and shadow in real life. Take away the overhang and the porch, and the house was very small, not much bigger than the shotgun shacks across from it. There were no guards, and not much pretense. You’d never know the guy was running for Senate, let alone sucking the teat of the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” said Veronica as we continued past.
“That can be deceiving.”
The hard-packed road continued into a curve to the left, fading out in some rocks and scrub. I got the impression it had been created by a bulldozer some seventy or eighty years before, then completely forgotten.
“Security system?” Veronica asked when we were out of sight.
“Nothing elaborate. I think there may have been one of those Internet cameras stuck on the windowsill. If so, Shunt should be able to track it down. Might just be a local system though.”
“You think my grandparents are dead?” Veronica stopped and grabbed my arm. Her fingers were trembling.
“It doesn’t look all that good, to be honest.”
“I saw the cemetery.”
I shrugged. Neither of us spoke for a moment. When Veronica broke the silence, she had regained her composure.
“Should we start asking people about Mayor Vincent?” she asked, loosening her grip.
“I don’t think we’ll get too much out of them in a small town like this. There’s a place I want to look at first.”
“The cemetery?”
“The prison.”
VIII
Arizona is one of several states that contract with private companies to run prisons, or as we say in PC land, “Detention Facilities.” Most of these facilities are run by fairly large corporations with a good deal of experience and an extensive staff of experts. The one outside of Rabbit Hole was not.
According to the public filings that Junior turned up on the Internet, the Copper Mine Correction and Reeducation Complex was run by a privately held company of the same name. The contact person was a secretary at a law firm in Delaware, who told Junior when he called that he was welcome to send a letter with any questions he might have.
“I’m sure it will be answered within the time period allocated by law,” she told him, before hanging up.
Junior went to work seeing what he could find out about the officers named in the paperwork. He discovered a remarkable coincidence. All were dead. And, in fact, had been practically since the company was started. But that’s what often happened when you were well into your nineties and a resident of a nursing home.
All four were residents of the same nursing home in Arizona, though surely that, too, was a coincidence.
While relatively close to the town as the bird flew, to get to the prison by car we had to drive three miles up the county highway, then find a much smaller road to the northwest. Though paved, this road was only wide enough for a single car to pass. There was quite a drop-off from the pavement in a few places. I’m not sure what the locals did when there was two-way traffic.
Then again, that didn’t seem to be a common occurrence. The road was deserted, flanked by empty fields where even the scrub seemed lonely. I’d left Mongoose and Shotgun in town—Shotgun was in the process of bankrupting a restaurant owner who foolishly ran an all-you-can-eat special on Wednesdays. Veronica didn’t seem much in the mood for talking, so I put on the radio and listened to a little old school country and western as we drove.
The turnoff to the jail was marked by a single sign. It wasn’t a big sign either—the nameplate on my agent’s door is twice the size. I passed it before I realized what it said.
“Damn,” I said, slapping on the brakes.
“Maybe we should just give up the whole thing,” said Veronica before I could back up.
“What?”
“I know they’re dead, Dick. You don’t have to pretend. I’ve been in denial. Now I have to face it.”
“It’s not time to give up,” I told her.
“I’m not. I’m facing reality.”
I reached my hand over to comfort her. As I did, I noticed a set of tire tracks running off into the desert.
“What are you staring at?” Veronica asked.
“Tire tracks.”
We got out to have a look. The tracks were wide and thick. They belonged to a tractor-trailer.
“Let’s follow them,” I told Veronica. “And see where they go.”
“But the road’s only ten yards away. Not even.”
“I know. That’s why I’m curious.”
* * *
The tracks started parallel to the other road, then curved sharply to the north. A quick S and we were going up the side of a hill. We came to a narrow ledge overlooking a steep drop.
“Crap, don’t fall off the side,” said Veronica.
“If the truck could make it, I can,” I told her. “Just don’t look down.”
I followed the tracks to a gentle bend and found myself at the entrance to a large open mining pit. From the looks of it, it hadn’t been used in years; there was a defunct bulldozer, a Caterpillar from the early fifties, sitting in the dust at the south. The side of the hill to our left had been removed in flat, triangular-shaped wedges; the dirt floors of each level looked like neatly sliced pieces of cake.
Stopping the car just past the center of the pit, I got out and stretched my legs. Then I began looking in the dirt to see if I could spot tire tracks—I couldn’t—then at the sliced hillside above me.
“Were we following a dump-truck trail?” asked Veronica.
“An old trail, maybe. But the mine hasn’t been used for years, it looks like.”
“Maybe they took a few loads of the ore out.”
“It could be.” The place did look level and clear; maybe that was why.
“A lot of minerals are pretty expensive now,” added Veronica. “Something that wasn’t worth using forty or fifty years ago might be pretty valuable now.”
It was certainly possible, though I couldn’t see any evidence of recent work. I looked at the side of the hill where the mining had been. There were no caves or other hiding places—it was just a carved pit.
Veronica walked to the far side of the mine and pointed down the hill. “Is that the jail?”
It certainly looked like it was—a double-fence topped by razor wire, towers in two corners. There was a cluster of buildings in the center, some open fields.
“The main entrance must be over there,” said Veronica, pointing. “Behind that hill. I can see the road over there—they paved it.”
There was another road, this one hard-packed dirt, that came to a side entrance on the west. The road swung around and met the same road that the main entrance used.
But neither of those roads connected in any way to the mine where we were standing. We got the binoculars out of the car, and began looking for tire tracks. Veronica finally spotted them in the back.
“There, making that curlicue down. See them?” she said, pointing.
“Yeah.”
“They can’t go to the front because of the rocks,” she added. “Do they hook up with the side entrance?”
I took the glasses and looked. The terrain between the back of the prison and the side was fairly rough. It wouldn’t be easy for a tractor-trailer to get down it, but if it did, it would tear up the brush lining the side road.
“I don’t think anything’s been through there,” I told her, handing the binos back. “The truck went down, stopped, then did a U-turn over there. You can see the marks.”
“OK. But why? There’s no opening to the gate there.”
I started walking to the extreme northeastern end of the pit. There was
a narrow dirt road with recent tire tracks from the truck.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I told Veronica. “It’s a lovely day.”
“If you’re a lizard.”
The trail came down the hill at a gentle angle, curved to the left, and then turned back in the direction of the prison. We stopped when we could just see the guard tower at the corner. The tower was part of the fence line, and there was a door at the base. The door was wide, though not nearly big enough for a tractor-trailer.
Still, you could drive a truck up through the gravel pit, down the hill, and park right in front of the tower.
Why, though?
Trace’s marvelous adventure sprang to mind. But I couldn’t quite see how that might work, and more importantly, why.
Then I had another thought. If I wanted to kidnap someone and keep them prisoner, what better place to put them than a jail? The facility housed a few hundred people, according to what Junior had discovered; who would notice if a few were seniors?
It seemed like a stretch. But de Sarcena had said they weren’t dead.
The only way to figure it all out, I thought, was to get thrown in jail.
IX
There’s a common myth that SEALs, when they’re not fighting terrorists and other enemies of the state, spend most of their time fighting in bars. In my experience, that’s absolutely not true—SEALs fight on streets, in hotels, shopping malls, even bowling alleys. And one of the best SEAL fights I’ve ever heard about took place at the White House.
But with limited time and even more limited possibilities, we decided to stick to expectations. So the fight that landed Mongoose and Shotgun in the pokey took place in a bar. Or rather “club,” as the neon sign in the window they broke declared it to be.
The Miners Club was a high-class tourist joint, done up in fake mining style, with faux timbers and pseudo dirt walls. Rusty lanterns hung from the ceiling, and an assortment of antique mining equipment was strategically scattered around the room. The menu featured drinks with names riffing off mining themes, and the wait staff wore helmets with little lanterns on them.
The kind of place that deserves to be trashed, when you come right down to it.
Shotgun started the fight by slapping down his beer glass on the bar and declared in a loud voice that Mexicans were slimy pieces of walking shit. Mongoose, speaking Spanish, took exception. A loud disagreement ensued. The bartender attempted to intervene. Mongoose threw him to the floor. Shotgun tossed a bar stool through the mirror behind the bar, insuring seven years bad luck.
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