Jail Coach

by Hillary Bell Locke

  Thompson had called a friend in Simi Valley before flying the coop in Omaha. That figured to be Sue Ellen, who had apparently driven from LA to Tucson with what looked like a fair percentage of Thompson’s worldly possessions.

  With Luci in tow, I ambled over to the front desk and checked us in. Two rooms, paid for in cash. I got a little bit more of a fish-eye from this desk clerk than I had from the last two, and he wanted to see a picture ID. I thought about seeing whether a picture ID of Benjamin Franklin would improve his attitude, but then I just flashed the military card at him and that made him happy.

  Thompson told me that the luggage cart was ticketed for the room that she and Luci would have. No surprise there. As soon as we got the cart on the elevator, Luci climbed onto it and hid herself in between the hanging outfits. She giggled the whole way up to the second floor.

  “Thanks for coming all this way,” Thompson told Sue Ellen. “Arizona isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun place this time of year, I know.”

  “By next year the whole industry will probably have moved to Arizona. Thanks to the People’s Republic of California sticking its nose into—”

  Sue Ellen cut herself off because Thompson shot her a look, accompanied by a nod toward the cart where Luci was innocently giggling. Thompson didn’t want her little girl to hear a petulant complaint about California’s decision to make actors in porn flicks start using condoms. Couldn’t blame her for that.

  We’d lucked into adjoining rooms again so my blood pressure dropped slightly. After plunking Luci in front of the TV, Thompson pulled the suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it. Sue Ellen, meanwhile, raided the minibar for a munchkin bottle of Jim Beam and busied herself making two bourbon-and-Cokes. Thompson looked up from unpacking long enough to ask Sue Ellen if she could stay for dinner.

  Sue Ellen glanced at her watch as she sipped her drink.

  “I’m gonna try to get to five o’clock Mass at Virgin of Guadeloupe. The desk clerk said it’s about eight minutes away. So if you can wait ’til six-fifteen or so, I sure enough can stay for dinner—and lemme tell ya, girl, I could use some.”

  Mass?

  “That works just fine. I was thinking we could just get a mess of pizza up here and chow down in front of the tube.”

  “You got it. See ya then.”

  I noticed Thompson burrowing deeply into the Lycra, silk, and cotton stuffing the suitcase as the door swung shut behind Sue Ellen. She glanced up at me.

  “I’m hoping this is okay with you. I mean, I guess you have a vote—”

  “Especially since I’ll be paying for the pizza.”

  “—especially since you’ll be paying for the pizza. But I don’t see any other way to work it.”

  “I can live with it.”

  “Good. You still have that gun you took from Stan?”

  “Yep. And I’m planning on keeping it.”

  Thompson pulled a hard-leather pouch from the suitcase, popped it open, and took out an automatic pistol. It looked a lot like the one I’d run away from Chaladian with, except without any chips in the bluing. She pulled the slide back to show an empty chamber. Then she popped the clip out of the handle.

  “You go right ahead and keep the gun, bub. I just need the bullets.” She held out her left hand.

  If I was going to put my foot down, the time to do it was right now. If I didn’t, then she was officially calling the shots. If I did, on the other hand, then it was eighty-to-one I’d show up empty-handed at Trowbridge’s suite tomorrow morning. Two veterans from dirty, stinking little wars, we read each other perfectly. Nothing matters but the mission. For Thompson, the mission was Luci.

  I unzipped my gym bag. Took Chaladian’s piece out. Popped the clip free. Handed it to her. She gave me the empty clip from her gun. She slipped the loaded clip I’d given her into her gun’s butt and clicked it home. She did this with smooth, practiced motions, without any wasted effort. She took a look at the weapon to make sure the safety was on. Then she looked past me at her little girl.

  “Lucky Luci, look over here for a second, honey.”

  “Yes ma’am?” Luci’s head swiveled as the words came out. If seeing her mom holding a loaded pistol startled her, she didn’t give any sign of it.

  “What’s the rule about mommy’s gun, honey?”

  “I’m not to touch it, ma’am.”

  “That’s right. What happens if you touch it?”

  “You’re gonna wear me out.”

  “Bingo, girl. And we don’t want that, do we, honey?”

  Luci solemnly shook her head. Then she turned back to the television.

  I wondered if Thompson remembered that, even though I’d taken out the clip, there’d still be one bullet in the chamber of Chaladian’s gun. I figured she would.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I didn’t sleep with one eye open that night, but I did pull the mattress off the bed in my room and throw it on the floor. Sue Ellen Whoever—I never did get a last name for her—had left about an hour after we finished the pizza. I had the keys for the rental Buick, and its electronic ignition meant that Thompson couldn’t hot-wire it. So unless Sue Ellen doubled back, the only wheels Thompson had in Tucson came with me attached. That meant the odds were against her sneaking off with Luci and leaving me looking like seventy-six inches of schmuck. But odds can always be improved. I spent the night with my head three inches from the adjoining door.

  I woke up at five, about ten seconds before my watch would have started beeping. I’d slept fully clothed, just in case. First order of business was a cup of very hot coffee and a little recon. Before heading downstairs, I put my key card in the lock on Thompson’s door and gently pushed. Moved maybe two inches and stopped. She had the security lock on. Good. She was still inside.

  Coffee in the lobby, check; recon negative. Nothing suspicious outside the hotel, and no bad vibes. I paced around the sidewalk leading from the hotel’s main entrance, nodding politely at a couple of crack-of-dawn smokers, sipped coffee from a cardboard cup, and enjoyed the most comfortable outside temperature Tucson was likely to have that day.

  I’d been at that for about three minutes when a pick-up truck pulled into the parking lot. Ford F-250, black or dark gray, with Mexican plates. It drove past the entrance at a leisurely pace, then cruised to a parking spot on the part of the lot nearest the street. Dark canvas tarp stretched tight over the bed. Lever-action rifle horizontally mounted in the back of the cab and visible through the rear window.

  In other words, Oh shit. You don’t check into a hotel at five in the morning, and you don’t park as far away from the back dock as you could possibly get if you’re going to make a delivery. Unless it’s newspapers, and the weathered, leather-skinned, Stetsoned gent in his fifties that I’d glimpsed at the wheel didn’t look like any paperboy. I patted my shirt where it hung over Chaladian’s gun, stuck in my belt near my left hip.

  “Good morning.” Thompson’s voice came from behind me. She stood there with Luci and the baggage cart.

  “Good morning. Sleep well?”

  “Always do in the southwest. Almost like sleeping at home.”

  The driver started to get out of the pick-up. He took his time about it, as if his joints wanted to think things over before they decided to move. I spotted the six-shooter well before he was all the way out. Hard to miss. Old West-type hog’s leg in a holster that went more than halfway down his right thigh. Hoo boy. He wasn’t Chaladian, but no one was likely to mistake him for Mother Teresa, either.

  After slamming the truck door, he stepped over to a mini-cactus just beyond the concrete and spat a long stream of brown juice onto the sand around it. Back to the truck. Loosening one of the bungee cords holding the tarp down and pulling up the driver’s side front corner, he reached into the bed. He came out with two bottles of water joined at the neck by
plastic collars, and a large Stanley stainless steel thermos. He began ambling toward us. Not as tall as I am, but not all that far off.

  Without taking my eyes off him, I tilted my head toward Thompson because I was about to ask her if she knew who he was. Before I got my mouth open, Luci piped up in a delighted shriek.

  “Grampa! Grampa!”

  She pelted toward him, bright red flip-flops smacking the driveway pavement. He squatted, she jumped, and he gathered her up almost effortlessly with his right arm. Squealing happily, she buried her face in his neck as he stood back up. He reached Thompson and me in six more lanky, unhurried strides.

  “Grampa, will you kiss Annabelle?”

  “Sure I will.” His eyes and face rounded comically as Luci lifted the doll. “Clarabelle, you sure have grown since the last time I saw you.”

  “Grampa! Not Clarabelle! Annabelle!”

  “Ohhhhh, Annabelle. Why didn’t you say so?” He planted a quick peck on the doll’s face. “There’s your kiss, Annabelle.”

  He let Luci slide down his body to the ground. The eyes he turned to me then weren’t round and they weren’t comical.

  “You Davidovich?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well I am Kirby Smith Thompson, and I want to shake your hand. Trina tells me that you got in between her and Stan Chaladian. I am much obliged, sir.”

  We shook. Firm, dry grip, and a hand that had done some serious work in its time.

  “You know Mr. Chaladian?”

  “Never met him. If I had, one of us would be in Hell or glory now. Back in the day we woulda just shot him down in the street like a dog. Or strung him up, maybe, if it was a three-day weekend. But I guess times have changed.”

  “I guess they have.”

  I got a funny little feeling in my gut just then. Sergeant Rutledge liked to say, “shooting too soon in self-defense is murder. Shooting too late in self-defense is suicide. Your call.”

  I’d had the drop on Chaladian. I could have put him away for good—could have killed an unarmed but very dangerous man in cold blood. The reasons not to do it looked just as good now as they had then. But I couldn’t help wondering if I was going to regret the choice I’d made.

  “Okay, then.” He turned to Thompson. “You ’bout ready to load up?”

  Keeping my face bland, I choked back a protest. Don’t force the issue yet.

  “Sure am.”

  “All righty. While I get started, why don’t you be a good girl, take this water up to your room and make me a thermos-full of decent coffee?”

  “Yessir.”

  Without a murmur, Hurricane Thompson obediently took the stuff from her father and headed back into the hotel. First time I’d ever heard her say “sir.”

  Luci hopped on the baggage cart. Kirby took the front and I took the back. Getting the unwieldy thing across forty feet of pavement single-handed would have been an adventure. Even with two of us it wasn’t any picnic, but we managed it.

  “That a Colt on your hip there?” I asked as he started unfastening bungee cords.

  “No, sir. Starr Arms. Two r’s. Confederate officers swore by them in the War Between the States. That’s where Trina’s middle name came from. I knew she’d be a pistol.”

  I swung the suitcase that Sue Ellen had delivered into the Ford’s bed. I gaped a bit at the truck bed when I got a good look at it. There must have been seven-dozen bottles of water back there, crammed into the area just behind the cab in blister packs of six each. Kirby came around with two linen sheets that he must have gotten out of the cab.

  “Here, let’s spread these out on the bed liner. We can lay the hanging stuff on top of them.”

  “Fair enough. By the way, you think you have enough water back here? Where are you headed, anyway? Death Valley?”

  “Place we’re headed has a well. It’s ’tween here an’ there that’s the problem.”

  “I know water isn’t really plentiful in Arizona, but I didn’t think they were about to run out altogether.”

  “Pink water.” He spat as we laid stuff on hangers over the sheets.

  “‘Pink water’?” That was a new one on me.

  He turned around and looked me directly in the eye. A fierce, chip-on-the-shoulder expression re-made his face.

  “Pink water is what I said and pink water is what I meant. For fifty years American women have been pumping birth control chemicals into their bodies and then pissing all that excess estrogen into sewers all over this country. Well here’s what nobody will tell you: sewage treatment doesn’t break estrogen down or get rid of it. That stuff just builds up and builds up as the water is recycled. If you drink anything but well water or fossil water or spring water day-after-day, after thirty years or so you might just as well cut your balls off. Now that’s a fact, mister. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

  “Got it.”

  “And don’t get me started on fluoridation.”

  “I won’t. That’s a promise.”

  The last two things to load were the bag that Thompson had brought with her at the start of the trip, and Luci’s overnight bag. Nothing to it. Kirby folded his arms and leaned against the tailgate, parking his boot heel in front of a license plate that had CHIHUAHUA stamped across the top. I couldn’t think of any improvement on that, so I did the same thing. Luci took a good, long look at us. Then she folded her arms across her chest—over Annabelle—and leaned against the tailgate with a flip-flop heel planted on the bumper.

  “That’s why you gave Katrina the bottles? So you could have coffee made without pink water?”

  “Dadgum right.”

  Interesting. Sometime in the last sixty hours or so, while I thought Hurricane Thompson was worrying about what makeup to wear at her next soft-core shoot, she had managed to coordinate an exit from Tucson that was all her own. She didn’t need me anymore. Getting her here had exhausted my usefulness. She had found a hotel that Chaladian wasn’t likely to stumble over. She’d gotten two different people there from two different places at the same time she was there. And one of those people sounded like he was for sure crazy enough to blow me away if I gave her an argument. She’d apparently learned something in the Marines.

  I spotted her coming out of the hotel. Time for the showdown. Maybe I’d spent my whole life drinking pink water, but I wasn’t going to take this lying down.

  “Here’s your coffee, dad.”

  “Thank you. Now, boots and saddles. We’re loaded up. Let’s get trucking.”

  I had an indignant just a minute right on the tip of my tongue. Thompson beat me to it.

  “I already told you, dad. Six o’clock tonight. From the airport, unless I call you with a different plan.”

  “Trina, dadgummit, that’s just not thinkin’. We’re dealin’ with a tough customer here. No law says he has to wait for twelve hours while you take care of unfinished business. You need to make tracks.”

  She locked eyes with him while five solid seconds ticked by before she spoke.

  “Daddy, I gave Jay here my word of honor that if he got me to Tucson then I’d go see Mr. Trowbridge this morning. I can’t go back on my word.”

  As if word of honor were a magic formula, Kirby gave up the fight.

  “All right, then. Have it your way. But so help me, Katrina Starr Thompson, if anything happens to you or Luci, I’m not gonna wait for any dadgummed grand jury investigation before I do something about it.”

  She smiled at him. Leaning forward, she stretched her forearms up to rest on his shoulders, and kissed him.

  “That’s right, dad. Ride hard, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “The real west is here. Tucson, Prescott, Yuma, places like that. No way any movie will be more real than the real thing. What
we’ve tried to do in Prescott Trail is get the idea of the west right.”

  The local talent whose question had pulled this answer from Kent Trowbridge leaned forward to take her next shot. Trowbridge was Segment One on Daybreak! in Tucson this morning. He looked and sounded perfect. The only other person I’d ever known who could do “perfect” at 6:35 a.m. was Sergeant Rutledge.

  Along with Thompson, Luci, and Wells, I was watching Trowbridge’s performance on a big screen in a soundproof room about eighty feet from the KTUX studio where it was happening. I’d called Wells just before six to let him know that we were on the way to the hotel. He’d told us to go straight to KTUX and hook up with Trowbridge there. We were in the lobby waiting for him—not that he saw any of us but Thompson. When he laid eyes on her his face lit up like a loose slot machine. The guy is an actor, but if he was good enough to fake that he wouldn’t still be waiting for his first Oscar.

  “How long does his segment go?” I asked Wells.

  “Seven minutes. That’s an eternity, in case you’re wondering.”

  He nudged me and started walking toward a corner on the far side of the room. I grabbed a glazed donut and followed him.

  “What did you think of Trowbirdge’s answer just now?” he asked me.

  “Bullshit in a silk stocking.”

  “Perfect. That’s exactly what your demographic is supposed to think. Spent hours working on it. Did you notice his wink right there at the end?”

  “Missed it.”

  “Trust me, it registered subliminally. Six weeks from now you’ll be sitting in your apartment on Saturday afternoon and you’ll think, What the hell, might as well go see that western. And you won’t know why.”