Wild Wild Death

by Casey Daniels

  “What’ll you have?” The bartender was talking even before she was out from behind the bar, her voice loud enough to be heard over the wailing of a steel guitar. She was forty or so, a stick-thin woman with bleached-out hair and the telltale pinched mouth of a smoker. She had a damp rag in one hand and she swiped it over the table, gave me a brief look, and did a careful once-over of the tote bag on the bench next to me. I understood her bag envy; I’d had the same reaction the first time I set my eyes on the glazed canvas bag with the studs on its straps.

  The jukebox switched off, and she lowered her voice. “Dollar beer night,” she said, her gaze still on the Jimmy Choo creation. “And if Ramon isn’t snoozing in the kitchen”—she swiveled a look from the swinging kitchen door to me—“I can get you wings or a burger.”

  My stomach was in no mood for food. I opted for a Diet Coke and she was back in a minute with it. “My name’s Norma,” she said. “If you need anything, flag me down.”

  I knew I wouldn’t, but told her I would. Then I settled back to wait.

  According to the time on my cell phone, it was already a couple minutes past ten when the front door popped open and two men walked in. They were both wearing jeans, dark sweatshirts, sneakers. Oh, and plastic Halloween masks. The kind that stay on with those funny, skinny elastic bands that loop around the wearer’s head.

  Green skin. Big, dark eyes.

  Aliens.

  Yeah, that’s right. I’d driven sixteen hundred miles to meet with a couple guys in alien masks.

  They made a beeline across the room and slid into the bench opposite from where I sat.

  “Are you kidding me?” I looked from one man to the other. “I kind of thought kidnappers would want to be a little more subtle. You don’t think somebody’s going to notice you two in that getup?”

  “This is the Southwest.” The taller of the two men used a fake, gravelly voice. Somewhere along the line, the elastic band had broken on his mask. The elastic was tied to a paperclip that was bent into a drunken figure eight and poked through one side of the mask. “Nobody around here is going to notice us. Heck, half the people here believe in aliens and the other half are aliens.”

  I guess he was right—not about how there are aliens in Antonito but about how nobody was going to notice two guys in goofy disguises—because Norma didn’t bat an eye when she trotted over with a pitcher of beer and two glasses. She poured, spilled a little, and swiped at the puddle with her bar rag. Maybe it was the low lights, but I could have sworn that when she did, her hand brushed Tall Alien’s arm, and not in an accidental sort of way. When she walked back to the bar, I kept my eyes on her.

  “Did you bring me Chester Goodshot Gomez?”

  Tall Alien’s raspy question snapped me back to the matter at hand, and I put the bag of bones on the table between us. I did not, however, take my hands off it. “How do I know Dan Callahan is alive?” I asked him.

  Tall Alien clicked his tongue. I bet he made a face at me, too, only I couldn’t see it. “How do I know that’s Goodshot Gomez in that bag?”

  I tipped my head and forced what I hoped looked enough like a cocky smile to make them think I wasn’t scared to death I’d do something wrong and Dan would pay the ultimate price. “You could go over to the local cemetery and ask him yourself,” I said, batting my eyelashes. “He’s visiting a couple old girlfriends. But if that doesn’t float your boat…”

  I kept my left hand on the bag and, with my right, reached into my purse and pulled out Goodshot’s belt buckle along with that picture of Queen Victoria presenting it to him.

  “The only place I could get the belt buckle was from his coffin, and if I was going to go through all that trouble, why would I bother to bring you someone else’s bones? Now where’s Dan?”

  “The bones first.” With one finger, Tall Alien tapped his side of the table.

  I slid the bag of bones back my way and wrapped both arms around it. “Some proof that Dan’s okay first.”

  “Told you she was smart!” This from Short Alien, who was instantly silenced by a look from the tall guy.

  This time when Tall Alien tapped the table, it was with a little more force. “Bones,” he growled.

  I leaned forward, the better to pin him with a look. “Dan,” I growled right back.

  He let go a breath of exasperation and dug around in the pocket of his jeans. Only that wasn’t so easy since he was sitting. He was forced to nudge Short Alien out of the booth, stand up, and fish through his pocket. He pulled out a photograph printed on computer paper and dropped it on the table and my heart thudded to a stop when I looked at it.

  It was Dan, all right. He was bound and gagged and somebody was holding a newspaper with the day’s headlines right behind him.

  Since my stomach was in my throat, I couldn’t exactly say anything, so I nodded to let Tall Alien know he’d convinced me. “When will I see Dan?” I asked.

  He tapped the table one more time.

  “How am I supposed to find him?”

  Another tap.

  I nudged the bag across the table, but still kept one hand on it. “I don’t know what you have in mind, but if you could bury the bones over at Goodshot’s pueblo—”

  One more tap, this one far more impatient than the last.

  I knew a game-ending move when I saw it.

  With a sigh, I slid the bag across the table and Tall Alien reached out to intercept it.

  That was exactly when all the lights in the bar went out.

  “WWhat do you mean, you lost my bones?”

  Remember how Goodshot was cool, calm, and collected when I told him how I’d brought his remains to New Mexico but I wasn’t going to bury them at the pueblo?

  Yeah, me, too.

  That’s exactly how cool, calm, and collected he wasn’t when I finally found him at the local cemetery and reported what had happened back at the bar.

  “You had the bones. In that ugly bag of yours and—”

  “Just for the record, it isn’t ugly, and the bag’s gone, too.” Okay, it wasn’t fair to get cranky with a guy who I’d just informed had all that was left of him vanish into thin air. It’s not like I could help myself. Redhead, remember. And I loved that bag. “It wasn’t a knockoff,” I pointed out because, let’s face it, Goodshot probably wasn’t all that into fashion even before he was dead so he wouldn’t recognize the genuine thing when he saw it. “It happened to be the real deal. And yeah, there were bones in it, but I was going to find a way to get it clean and—”

  “Not just any bones. My bones!” When I found Goodshot, he was sitting on a headstone, charming the hell out of a sweet little señorita in a flowing red circle skirt and white blouse who he introduced as Anarosa Rodriguez. It was her tombstone he was sitting on. Watching him jump to his feet and shake his fist at me, her ghostly face went a little paler.

  “Not a problem. I’m going to get them back.” I said this to calm him down, soothe her worries, and convince myself. “I have to. Or Dan…”

  I told myself it would get me nowhere, but I couldn’t help but relive the scene back at the bar. Once the lights went out, they’d stayed that way for a minute or so, and in that time, it was impossible to see anything at all. What I heard sure wasn’t encouraging. In the pitch darkness, the aliens across the table shuffled and grunted and banged into each trying to get out of the booth while the two old guys at the bar laughed and said something corny about ambience. And when the lights came back on again…

  “What the hell!” Tall Alien looked down at the empty table between us and practically choked. He shoved Short Alien aside and hotfooted it over to my side of the table to check the bench next to me and under the table. “What the hell did you do with the bones?” he demanded.

  “That was pretty much the question I was going to ask you,” I bit right back.

  “Well, I don’t have them.” Like it would prove the bag wasn’t hidden about his person, he held his hands out at shoulder level. Call me a cynic,
but that didn’t exactly convince me. I checked his side of the table, just like he’d checked mine. I looked on the bench and under it, and behind it, too.

  My Jimmy Choo bag was gone.

  So were Goodshot’s bones.

  My heart beating double-time, I reminded myself to think like the detective I was and studied the scene for clues.

  The two old guys didn’t look like they had the energy to move fast enough to scoop up the bones and get back to their bar stools, and Norma was behind the bar, right where I remembered seeing her last before the lights went out. She mumbled something about how she’d have to talk to the bar owner and have him fix the old, temperamental fuse box, and poured each of the codgers another shot. They lifted their shot glasses in our direction, toasted, and drank ’em down. And that hippie in the corner? He just kept sipping his beer and reading, like nothing had happened at all.

  That didn’t keep me from racing over to the table where he was seated and looking under it, and all around it. I did that at every table, and behind the bar, too. No luck.

  The bones had vanished.

  Panic is an infectious thing. By the time I got back over to the booth where we’d been seated, the aliens had been through the bar, too, looking behind and under everything in sight, and Short Alien was wringing his hands. Tall Alien had his fists on his hips.

  Never having been an active participant in a kidnapping, I wasn’t sure of the protocol. Then again, I didn’t much care. I closed in on both of them. “I kept my part of the bargain,” I said, stabbing one finger at myself before I turned it on them. “Now you… You hand over Dan.”

  A snort escaped from behind Tall Alien’s mask. “The deal isn’t done.”

  Yeah, I was afraid he was going to say that. My temper hit the roof and I kicked the leg of the nearest chair. “I took the trouble to steal the stupid bones in the first place. I brought them all the way to this middle-of-nowhere hellhole. Why would I—”

  “That wasn’t the bargain. You were supposed to turn them over to us. You didn’t. That’s not my problem, lady. It’s yours.” Tall Alien gave Short Alien a nudge to send him to the door and Tall Alien was on his way over there, too, when he stopped, turned around, and came back to stand too close to me.

  “I need those bones,” he said. “And if you don’t find them and bring them to me”—he leaned in even closer and his hot breath brushed my ear—“Your friend Dan is going to die.”

  It was a warm night there in the cemetery, but even so, just thinking about the steel edge in Tall Alien’s voice sent a shiver up my spine and across my shoulders. I wrapped my arms around myself. “We’re going to find your bones,” I promised Goodshot. “We have to. Dan’s life depends on it.”

  * * *

  Brave talk, all right.

  And by the next afternoon, it was looking more and more like nothing but wishful thinking.

  I spent the day investigating. Or at least I tried to. I went to Taberna early only to find it was still closed. I went back later to talk to Norma, but it was her day off, and apparently, I do not have as honest a face as I always thought. A guy named Buddy behind the bar refused to give me Norma’s address or her phone number, even when I did my best to flirt it out of him. He wouldn’t reveal her last name, either, but hey, it’s not exactly like it would have made a difference. I was pretty sure there weren’t any phone books for a town so small, it shouldn’t exist in the first place.

  I hadn’t seen Goodshot all day, and honestly, I wasn’t all that disappointed. Bad enough we’d had that little tiff the night before. Worse, since I was getting nowhere fast when it came to keeping my promise to him about finding his bones. That being said, there are times when even the sharpest investigator can’t go it alone. I was discouraged—not to mention hot, sweaty, and thirsty—and I needed someone to bounce ideas off. Back at home, I’d use Ella even though, more often than not, she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. Here in the boonies, a sidekick was a little harder to come by.

  I headed to the cemetery.

  Goodshot was there all right, this time with a blonde in a low-cut pea green gown who giggled and told me her name was Miss Kitty LaRue. Kitty was wearing too much lipstick, she had a phony beauty mark penciled on her chin, and her cheeks were painted a color that did not actually exist in nature. So not a good look, but I cut her some slack. The dead have enough to worry about.

  “So?” They were passing a spectral bottle of whisky back and forth between them, and Goodshot took a long swig, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and fixed his dark eyes on me. “You find my bones yet?”

  I guess the look on my face was all the response he needed, because he pushed away from the fence he’d been leaning against and sauntered over. “That bad, huh?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead, he shuffled his boots in the dust.

  “Been thinkin’ about how I wasn’t civil to you yesterday,” he said. “And how that’s not exactly fair seein’ as how you’re a woman, after all, and I should’a knowed better than to expect the weaker sex to do a lot of thinkin’ when that’s not what the Good Lord intended women for at all. And besides that… well, I just couldn’t help myself, I’m mean about gettin’ mad and all. It’s not everyday a fella learns that all that’s left of him has gone missin’.”

  Three cheers for me. Even though it would have been more than justified, I did not raise my voice. “Number one,” I said from between gritted teeth, “that whole thing about being the little woman doesn’t fly anymore, so get over it. Number two…” I thought about being stubborn, but since it didn’t exactly fit into my purpose for coming over to the cemetery in the first place, I relented. “I accept your apology.”

  He took my lecture in stride, and when Kitty floated over, he took the bottle from her, drank some down, and asked, “What’cha gonna do?”

  Exactly what I was there to ask him.

  What could we do now that I’d used up all my ideas, all my options, and every possibility I could think of?

  Funny, on my way over to the cemetery, they seemed like the most natural questions in the world.

  Standing there with two ghosts watching me with hope in their lifeless little eyes…

  I lied and told Goodshot that I had a plan, all right, and that I’d continue putting it into action in the morning. Then I turned my back on him and dragged back to the hotel before he could ask me to elaborate. Truth be told, all I wanted to do was take a shower, climb into bed, and hopefully figure out some way to make sure Dan stayed alive.

  Good idea.

  I actually might have had the chance to make some sense of it all if I didn’t scuff into my room, lock the door behind me, turn on the lights—

  And find a man sitting in the chair next to my bed.

  “What the—” I slapped a hand to my heart and sucked in a breath. Some of that reaction, I will admit, had to do with surprise. A little might have been because of fear. Most of it…

  Well, far be it from me to be accused of being shallow, but I will say this—this guy was as yummy as a showcase chock-full of Godiva chocolates.

  Eyes as dark as Goodshot’s. Hair, too. Long and silky, pulled back into a tight ponytail.

  High cheekbones. Dusky skin.

  Native American.

  Gorgeous Native American. Broad-shouldered, with a mouth that was rich and full and—

  “What the hell are you doing in my room?”

  It was a better than What’s your sign? or What are you doing later ’cause, see, I’m new in town and looking for some company. I was glad the question whooshed out of me along with a breath of surprise and an indignant, “Who let you in here, anyway?”

  Instead of answering, he stood. Taller than me. He was wearing dark pants and a tan shirt. Uniform. Badge. Gun.

  Cop.

  Which could have been good news if there was any way he could use his law enforcement connections to help me find Dan.

  Or really bad news if someone back in
Cleveland had gotten wind of the burgled mausoleum and my photo was now hanging in post offices across the country.

  I swallowed a little too hard and backed up until my butt slammed into the door. “Wh-What do you want?” I asked.

  “I hear you’re looking for something.”

  So much for small talk. Perfectly at ease with himself, he stood loose-limbed, his feet slightly apart, his expression unreadable. Call me crazy, but I couldn’t help thinking that if he was there to arrest me for the bone heist back in Cleveland, he might have had a hand on his gun.

  But then, I was used to Quinn’s way of doing things.

  And Quinn had way too much testosterone. Even for a cop.

  I didn’t want to give this cop any ideas so I made sure I kept my eyes on his face, and away from that gun. “You must have heard wrong,” I said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do. I’m—”

  “Not from around here. Yeah, I know.”

  I think this was supposed to be a compliment. I mean, what else could he have meant? After all, when he ran a quick but thorough look up and down my body, he no doubt noticed that I was wearing a brand of jeans they didn’t sell south of the toniest shops in Denver, a tank top that didn’t come from the local off-price emporium, and the cutest pair of peep-toe platform sandals this side of the state line. Either state line.

  “You want me to be impressed by your law enforcement mojo, but my guess is there was no magic involved. You saw my car in the lot. Hard not to considering it’s out there with a rusty pickup truck and a ’sixty-eight Volkswagen Beetle. The Ohio plates were a dead giveaway. I bet you already ran them.”

  “Bet you’re right.”

  “And you found…” I couldn’t afford to let him hear the tremor in my voice and catch on to the fact that there actually might be something to find so I laughed. “Nothing, right?”

  “No open warrants. Should I check again?”

  “Do I look like a criminal?”

  “No, ma’am, you do not.” He reinforced his opinion with a brusque nod, and the single light burning next to the bed reflected off his hair like liquid onyx.