“The point is, Flynn, there’s no way in hell I’m hiking around in this heat to go look at dead sheep and butt prints.” Frank had shared his suspicions about a second guy, and Harris had said, “Butt print. Jesus, Flynn. What are you, an expert on butt prints? Does BLM have a butt-print file? The dead sheep are for Fish and Game. The dead guy’s ours. So your worries are over, Flynn. None of this shit is in your jurisdiction.”
Already, Frank wished he hadn’t brought it up. Harris kept mumbling about butt prints all the way back to the vehicles. Somehow, Frank knew the word would get back to the BLM station in Ridgecrest. He could see Sierra’s grinning face now, imagine him saying, Hey, it’s Cisco Flynn, the world’s only forensic buttologist. It wasn’t the ribbing itself that would bother him but the invasion of his privacy. It was like pointing. His mother’s people didn’t point. It was considered more than rude, a personal violation. He’d have to learn to keep a lower profile, but the blood of Francis Flynn flowed in his veins, ever the Irish rebel. It was Frank’s heritage, although he didn’t pursue it as noisily as his father had.
Something about Frank’s sense of discomfort made him a target for the wise guys like Sierra. Well, if he got lucky, maybe Deputy Harris would be too tired and thirsty from his hike in the sun to indulge in cop talk. Maybe something else would come along to occupy Sierra’s talent for stand-up comedy. Still, he couldn’t help wondering about the possibility of a second guy. He’d have to go back and take another look around. He could check out some of the watering holes on his time off and see if there was any talk. The desert was a big place with few people. The word spread magically from bar to bar. Stories of felonious frolics and sexual adventures were the stuff of barroom conversation. He could count on saloon gossip to keep him informed. The booze grapevine was quicker than the wire service.
There were a couple of places he particularly wanted to check out. He’d heard that some odd characters had bought the bar in Red Mountain. He’d seen the sign announcing UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. GOOD FOOD AND DRINK NOW AVAILABLE. Time to pay a visit and see what kind of crazy person would buy a place named the Joshua Tree Athletic Club. No surprise there really. The Mojave was full of crazy people. Hell, he was living proof, an Irish mestizo living in a Southern Pacific caboose. No wonder Mary Alice had left him and gone back to L.A.
2
Roy Miller had been chasing around the desert bars looking for his brother Donnie for three long days. Hickey and Jason weren’t ideal traveling companions, a pothead and a loose cannon. He’d started with Donnie’s favorite hangouts in Victorville and then began working his way up 395, the north-south highway stretching from the Mexican border to Canada along the east side of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade mountain ranges. Where the highway spilled into the Mojave Desert and up into the Owens River Valley, it was mostly a two-lane ribbon of blacktop, shimmering in the summer heat, buckling and cracking in the dry cold of winter: Biker Alley.
Roy leaned his Harley into the sweeping exit curve from I-15 onto the old road, keeping an eye out for the speed traps on the downhill slope leading into Adelanto. Tracts of tiny houses huddled against the perpetual wind funneling through the pass. Strings of real estate pennants snapped and fluttered in the sandy gusts, an indication of what life might be like in a wind tunnel. The great sprawl of Southern California crept into the southern Mojave like a skin growth. People made the fifty-plus-mile commute from Victorville over the Cajon Pass into the conglomerate of borderless suburbs of greater Los Angeles in exchange for the promise of home ownership, the American dream marooned on a chunk of desert. Roy despised it. The real desert didn’t begin until he passed the truck stops and twenty-four-hour “food marts” clustered around Kramer Corners. Only then did he feel the freedom to do as he damn well pleased—no towns, no cops.
After the federal prison at Boron, there was nothing until Red Mountain. Red Mountain was a leftover from another era, a ghost town wheezing its last gasp of atrophied life in the hot breath of the northern Mojave Desert.
In Roy’s hierarchy of useful things, geezers were smelly, full of crap, and broke, not worth his attention, unlike duffers. Duffers were old guys in white poly pants, basket-weave loafers, and shirts with little animals on them. Duffers were full of economic potential. Menacing for money meant mixing business with pleasure, an opportunity crafted for someone like Roy. He smiled to himself, keeping his mouth closed against the wind. Having a biker bodyguard was like having brass balls.
As they approached Red Mountain, Roy eased back on the Harley’s throttle and pulled into a dirt lot next to the Joshua Tree Athletic Club, the last bar on Highway 395 in San Bernardino County. It was a false-fronted box with a cute name. He looked at the sign in disgust. He disliked cute names, cute crap in general. He was sick of cheap bars that stank of puke and urinal soap.
Jace and Hickey went zipping by, Jace making a honking sound, Hickey doing a rebel yell, his gray ponytail streaming in the wind: Roy’s gang having a good time. Traveling with a doper and a loony definitely had drawbacks. Roy watched as they figured it out. Tufts of ash blond hair protruding from under the front of Roy’s leather cap bobbed limply in the dry breeze. Hickey and Jace came zigzagging back down 395, crossing over the double line, still screwing around before bringing their bikes over to the shoulder. Roy removed his Ray•Bans and hung them in the V of his shirt front. People found it difficult to meet Roy’s gaze. With eyes of the palest blue, ringed in pink and framed by white skin and wispy, colorless hair, he exuded a tangy smell of suppressed violence and toxic energy.
“When we get inside, I want you to be cool, Jace,” Roy said, his voice like dry sand. “We’re not going to find out about Donnie if you start in with the weird noises and looks.” But staring his brother down was a waste of time. He just grinned back at Roy, bright blue eyes glittering vacantly from a face full of red hair. Getting Jace’s attention was like watching a flashlight bobbing around in the dark. Roy nodded until Jason’s mop of red hair bobbed along in exaggerated mimicry. “You and Hickey play some pool, or pinball or whatever, but stay away from the other people. Right?” Roy shifted his gaze to Hickey.
“No problem, man.” Hickey’s slack smile exposed yellow teeth rimmed in green. He took a sideways peek at Jason, who continued to nod, his eyes wandering to a Red Dodge pickup parked near the entrance. Suddenly, Jace sucked his tongue off the roof of his mouth, making a wet popping sound, like a cork being pulled from a bottle. Roy shook his head in disgust. “Shit.”
“Not in the bar, Roy.” Jace rolled his head from side to side, his grin huge in the thicket of red whiskers. “Not in the bar.”
Sometimes he wished his brother had an off switch.
Roy paused inside the door of the darkened bar, waiting for his eyes to adjust, taking it in. No music, no women, just the click of pool balls and an occasional dry cackle above the murmur of conversation—a geezer bar. At the far end of the polished bar top stood a heavyset bartender with a gray mustache. The more Roy looked around, the more he decided the place was a bullshit factory, a place for chickennecked old farts—a bunch of loony tunes.
A man reading a newspaper seated at the bar directed an angular face Roy’s way and caught him looking at him. Dark marble eyes met Roy’s gaze, then shifted to Jace and Hickey, and then returned to the newspaper. Roy looked at the guy’s old-fashioned leather lace-up boots. He was a tall man, taller than Roy, with big bony hands that were cracked and weathered, long fingers, and big knuckles like old knotted branches. After the eyes, look at a man’s hands—that was the only useful thing he’d learned from a succession of “uncles” who had taken up temporary residence with their mother, Betts, in the decaying Airstream trailer under the cottonwoods that grew along the Mojave River.
Betts and her three boys had crowded into the trailer in the dry, sharp cold of winter, but in the balmy days of fall and spring and during the heat of summer, they’d escaped the trailer’s confinement and slept outside. Sometimes Donnie had cried, afraid of
the dark. Roy’d let him sleep in the middle. Family life in Oro Grande.
Roy leaned his sinewy frame against the bar and pointed Jason and Hickey to the high-backed observer chairs along the wall near the pool table.
“What’ll it be?” Beer clung to the tips of the bartender’s mustache.
“Gimme a long-neck Bud.” Roy looked back at Jace and Hickey. “Bud?” he said. They nodded in unison. “Three Buds,” Roy said.
“No Bud.” The cigar waggled back and forth. “Sierra Nevada on tap or any of those up there.” The bartender pointed to a row of beer bottles lined up on top of the backbar. Bits of light winked back from the glass where shafts of sunlight filtered through cracks and holes in the wall above the bar. Roy recognized Corona and Dos Equis. Most of the others he had never heard of—Foster’s, Labatt, Bass, Guinness. The bartender’s expression said he didn’t give a damn one way or another whether Roy had a beer or not. Roy thought the guy lacked manners. “Make it three Coronas,” Roy said, turning to face the room, his elbows on the bar.
When the beer came, Jace jumped up, knocking over his chair, and headed for the bar. As he took exaggerated rolling strides, his large, muscular torso appeared about to topple off truncated legs. His body rocked from side to side like some movie villain from an old Western. He grinned back at Hickey, then swept the beer up, grasping a bottle in each hand. By now, everyone was watching his antics. He spun around and strutted back to the table, swigging beer from each bottle. He banged down a half-empty bottle in front of Hickey, belched loudly, and wiped his beard with the back of his hand.
“What’s up with your pal there?”
“He likes Westerns.”
The bartender nodded. “Mmm.”
Behind him, Roy heard a loud guffaw. “You see that asshole?” The beery voice carried into the room, interrupting the ebb and flow of conversation. Roy turned away from the bar, his eyes seeking out the speaker.
“That’s not polite, talking like that,” Roy said to the three men seated at a table crowded with empty bottles, unsure who had made the remark.
“Hey, you gotta admit that was weird.” The speaker grinned at Roy and looked around the room for approval, his eyes overly bright from drink. Tension seeped into darkened air, the easy rhythm of bar sounds broken and subdued. Roy let the time tick away in the gathering quiet. “It’s bad manners to make fun of people.” He shook his head from side to side. “You trying to make him feel bad?”
It wasn’t the reaction they had been expecting. They were in their early twenties, dressed alike in khaki T-shirts and desert camo pants and caps. They shuffled their feet and peered about in the silent gloom. Roy put them down as urban wanna-bes. Most likely, they belonged to the new red Dodge pickup parked near the entrance. He’d noticed the deer rifles in the gun rack on the way in.
Jason began making soft clicking sounds. Roy didn’t need to look. He’d heard it before. Something had caught his brother’s attention. He hoped it wasn’t a woman, but it was. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark-haired woman in a denim shirt and jeans moving across the room to the bar. He held the speaker’s gaze for a few more moments, then turned his attention to Jace.
“I’ve got it, Dad.” The woman lifted a hinged section of mahogany, ready to step behind the bar.
“Not for now.” The bartender shook his head. “You come on back later.”
Her glance shifted quickly around the room, taking in the tension. “Okay, see you in a bit.” She paused to push soft dark curls away from her forehead. Her hand patted the arm of the tall man. “How’s it going, Bill?” She raised dark eyebrows in inquiry.
“Just fine.” But the tall man’s eyes were on Roy.
She recrossed the room and disappeared through a swinging door.
Jason made little rhythmic clicking sounds as she walked.
“Something stuck in his throat?” said the one she’d called Bill.
“Yeah, he’s got an allergy.” Roy turned back to the bartender, raised his empty bottle, and put a twenty on the bar. “You got a minute?”
The bartender pulled his gaze away from Jace and looked at Roy.
“Maybe you can help me out here.” Roy flashed what he thought passed for a friendly smile. “I’m looking for a guy, a little guy with dark hair, tattoos on his arms and neck.” He paused. “He’s a friend of mine.” Roy waited, watching the broad face.
“Doubt if he’s been in here.” Watery blue eyes regarded him through a cloud of cigar smoke.
“Why’s that?” Roy sounded curious, interested.
“This isn’t a biker bar.” The bartender transferred the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Guess you can see that. Not their music. Not their beer.” He glanced over at Hickey. “Not their kind of place. Most of ’em find it about as interesting as your two friends.” He gestured with his head toward the far wall, where Jace and Hickey sat staring at the pool players. “We don’t see many bikers in here.” He met Roy’s game-show smile with a flat stare.
Roy thought about the surprised look that’d be on his face just before his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. “Hey, well if you do see one of those low-life biker types …” He paused, letting a touch of menace creep into his sandy voice. “It could happen, you know. Some nasty biker might come in by accident. I mean, there’s no sign outside saying low-life bikers keep out. Right?” He broke into a smile. “Lookee here, it’s already happened. There’s three of us here now, drinking beer, and being polite. You notice that?”
The bartender listened without expression. “No offense meant.”
Roy shrugged. “Maybe you could do me a favor before we move on down the road, okay? No reason to stick around, except we need to find the guy we’re looking for. So if you see the person I described to you, small man with tattoos and dark hair”—he fixed his eyes on the bartender’s face—“pass this on to him, okay? I’ll write it down for you.” Roy took a matchbook and a stubby pencil out of his shirt pocket and printed out a note on the inside cover: “Donnie, call home. Roy.” He paused, watching the bartender, waiting for a response. He could see the tall guy watching him out of the corner of his eye. Roy pushed the matchbook and the twenty across the bar. “See there, nothing but a little family problem.” The bartender nodded imperceptibly and stuck the matchbook cover between the bar’s mirror and the wood frame. There were matchbook covers with the same note in seven or eight bars up and down highway 395.
“Keep your money.” A stubby hand pushed the twenty back at Roy.
“No problem,” Roy said, thinking about what an uptight asshole the bartender was, too good to take his money.
“Anything else?” The bartender sent a cloud of smoke in Roy’s general direction.
Roy shook his head. The bartender turned his broad face away without saying anything more and spoke quietly to the hatchet-faced man still looking down at the newspaper.
Roy caught Hickey’s eye and nodded toward the door. As he slid off the bar stool, the hatchet-faced man listening to the bartender stood up and shoved his newspaper down the bar. A bony finger tapped a picture of a police sketch on the front page. “This the guy you’re looking for?” Roy sucked in his breath. The sketch on the front page of the Inyo Kern Courier accompanied a story about the discovery of a badly decomposed body in the Panamint Mountains, found by an Officer Francisco Flynn of the Bureau of Land Management.
The one-column story reported that the body of a bighorn sheep had been found not far from the unidentified body of a man the authorities presumed to have been a poacher. The sheriff’s spokesperson said that the circumstances surrounding the death indicated that the victim had underestimated the dangers of the desert and died of dehydration. The spokesperson went on to make some stale observations about ironic justice and the dangers of the desert in the summertime. The story finished with a recap about the poaching of bighorn sheep in the desert and ended with an appeal from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department for information leading to the
identification of the body, which had been taken to the morgue in Independence.
The police artist had made a sketch of a tattoo visible on the victim’s neck. There was no missing the crude death’s-head tattoo that Roy had scratched into Donnie’s skin with a pin and india ink when they had both been kids in Oro Grande. He could feel the bartender and his buddy watching him. They must have noticed the death’s-head tattoo on his own neck and guessed at a connection. Well, fuck them. He made an effort to breathe normally.
“Naw, that’s not him.” Roy looked away from the hawklike face and turned toward the bartender. “The guy I’m looking for rides a Harley. He wouldn’t go walking around in the desert like some dummy.”
The paper said they hadn’t identified Donnie, and they might not, at least not for a while. Donnie had been arrested and printed, but evidently the “badly decomposed body” was too messed up for prints. Roy tried to figure it out. What the hell had happened? Donnie knew his limits, cheating, petty theft, an occasional scam, nothing that involved violence. He just coasted along on the fringes. Nobody paid attention to his bullshit, except Roy, looking out for him, and for Jace, for all of them all the damn time.
He looked up at the lean face, all angles and edges, big nose, sharp and intense. He shut his eyes, memorizing the details. He’d remember him—and the rude bartender.
He gestured at Hickey and Jace, cocking his head at the door. “Time to hit the road.” He turned back toward the bar, catching the attention of the camo-clad trio.
“You watch your mouth now. Learn to be polite,” he said. His sandy voice cut through the murmur of talk. He lifted his hand in a casual wave.
The thick one with the weight lifter’s body and ropy arms decided he couldn’t let it pass. Roy had counted on that.
“Hey, fuck you and your soft-brain pal.”
Shadow of the Raven Page 2
