Desert Run

by Betty Webb

  Oblivious to my gloomy thoughts, he smiled. “Happy to do it, if I can.”

  “An acquaintance of Erik Ernst led me to believe that he might have been having money troubles. I’d like you to find out the truth.”

  “If Ernst left Germany owing two Deutschmarks from a crap game, I’ll find the paper trail. When do you need the info?”

  I looked up at the clock. It was almost time for lunch. If I’d made it this far, there was a good chance I could make it through the entire day. “Think you can have it by five? I doubt if I got as much as two hours sleep last night, so I’m leaving early.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m so backed up I haven’t even been able to run that check on Warren yet.”

  Appalled that I had requested such a thing, I looked down at my desk so he wouldn’t see my guilty expression. Then I remembered the dismay on Alea Rinn’s face when she learned how her husband had been supporting the family. I looked back up. “Run both checks as soon as you can. But first, why don’t we drive over to Honey Bear’s for barbequed pork? It’s supposed to be good for jet-lag.”

  “Sorry again. I’ll be lucky if I have time to order out for a pizza. The house deal fell through. They received an offer from another buyer who was willing to pay more, so now we have to start all over again. Esther’s found a condo she’s interested in, and I’m supposed to meet her there at two.”

  First he was ready to leave the wide open reservation for a small house, and now for a condo. His world was narrowing by the minute. “Where’s the condo?”

  “Right in back of Scottsdale Fashion Square.”

  The mall was in the middle of Scottsdale, at the intersection of the city’s two busiest streets. “But the traffic will drive you nuts!”

  He shrugged. “Can’t do anything about that. Esther likes the idea because she could walk to her job at Neiman Marcus. And the condo’s not that far from here, either, so I could walk to work, too. See? An eco-friendly solution to the whole thing.”

  Here. “Jimmy, haven’t you forgotten something?”

  “What?”

  “Friday’s your last day here. You’ll be working at Southwest MicroSystems, and they’re located on the northwest side of Phoenix. Several freeway interchanges and twenty-five bumper-to-bumper miles are hardly walking distance.”

  Now it was his turn to look shame-faced. “Oh. You’re right. I forgot. Eco-friendly for Esther, maybe, not so much for me.” He dismissed the apparent inequity. “Relationships sure require compromise, don’t they?”

  All the compromise seemed to be on Jimmy’s part, but I wasn’t about to say so. I wanted our last few days together to be as peaceful as possible.

  Before deciding what to do about lunch, I placed a call to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office, hoping to find someone who might have access to the old Bollinger murder records. After being passed from one civilian to another, I reached a deputy who promised he’d try to hunt down the files as soon as he found the time. Which would be, of course, when pigs received their pilot’s license. After that, I called Reverend Giblin to find out how close his church and Tesema’s synagogue were to raising enough money for seven airline tickets.

  “Not close enough,” the Rev said. “Checked on the cost of airfare from Ethiopia to Arizona lately?” The figure he gave me raised my eyebrows.

  “That much?”

  “His wife refuses to leave without all six children, so it’s everyone or no one.”

  “What did Tesema say about that?”

  The Rev cleared his throat. “He told us he’d expect no less from her, that she was a good mother.”

  Feeling more tired and depressed than ever, I hung up. Being an orphan is no fun, but if you have a big family, you have big trouble. Just look at Alea Rinn. Once the legal system finished with her husband, she and her own children might wind up relying on the kindness of strangers. As I sat there musing on other people’s miseries, thinking I should call it a day and get some sleep, the phone rang. It was Warren, full of apologies.

  “Lena, I don’t know what I thought I was doing the other day, trying to order you around. Call it an attack of director-itis. Can you forgive me?” He sounded more emotional than I’d ever heard him.

  There’s nothing sweeter than hearing a man beg for forgiveness, so I said yes, but I made a mental note to have a serious talk with him about relationship parameters. Not that it mattered, since he’d be going back to L.A. soon. But then he threw a wrench into the entire conversation. “Listen, apologizing for my behavior wasn’t the only reason I called. I heard from Angel last night. The producers of Desert Eagle love the notes you made on the script and they want to hire you as a consultant.”

  When he told me how much his ex-wife’s producers were willing to pay, my jaw dropped. “Are they serious?”

  “When it comes to money, Hollywood’s always serious.”

  I didn’t immediately turn down the offer because I was intrigued by the idea of consulting for a television show. No real tragedy, no real blood, just a mere sixty minutes—closer to forty, if you counted the commercials—of safe make-believe. And I wouldn’t have to move, because as I’d once told Warren, Southwest Airlines flew to L.A. every hour. Desert Investigations could stay in business. If, and it was a big if, I could find someone as good as Jimmy at running the computer side of things. Still, it was best not to make any hasty decisions. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Great. Hey, if you don’t have any lunch plans, why don’t you stop by the set?” He paused for a moment, then added softly, “Please, honey. I’ve missed you.”

  I remembered the love-struck, unhappy women I’d met in the past few days. Beth Osmon. Alea Rinn. MaryEllen Bollinger. Disgusted by my own paranoia, I pushed my fears aside. “I’ll be right over, uh, honey.”

  When I hung up, I found Jimmy staring at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  ***

  The set had dried after last week’s downpour. The rain had coaxed even more wildflowers into bloom, and masses of desert goldeneye waved their buttery petals in the freshening wind. But not everything was beautiful. The food off the caterer’s truck—the caterer I myself had hired for the film crew—was terrible. The bun on my meatball hero turned out to be rubbery enough to bounce, and the meatballs themselves were crammed with as much soy “texturizing” as beef. “Told you to get the turkey club,” Warren said. “Want to trade?”

  Feeling guilty that I’d inflicted this food on my now-friends, I shook my head. “I don’t trust turkey off a cart. Especially when the bread has green spots.”

  “I tore them off.”

  “Thanks, but I prefer the feel of rubber to the taste of penicillin.”

  The temperature was a little cool for April, and the wind had picked up. Nearby, several “German” extras loafed around in a sunny spot, waiting for the order to climb into the shallow pit dug by the film crew. I told Warren the pit didn’t remotely resemble pictures I’d seen of the POWs’ escape tunnel to the Cross Cut Canal, but he assured me the final product would look realistic enough. “Camera magic and digital imaging. Plus a little judicious editing.”

  “Nothing’s real about Hollywood, is it?”

  He took another bite of his turkey club. “Nope. Not Hollywood or the people who live there. Or people anywhere, as far as that goes.”

  I looked at him. With the wind ruffling his streaked blond hair, and his sharp blue eyes squinted against the dazzling sun, he looked closer to thirty than forty. “Warren, that’s a strange comment.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes, I do think. What did you mean by it—that no one’s real?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing deep, only that most of us are careful to present to the world the face we want others to see. Usually that face is the opposite of what’s going on inside. Like Lindsey, for instance.”

  Lindsey was sitting on a rock at the edge of the set all by herself, making notes on the script. Even with the wind, she’d managed to keep her hair under c
ontrol and her chic black outfit dust free. “What about her?”

  “She seems like a self-contained woman, doesn’t she?”

  Self-centered would be a more accurate description. I let it pass. “Yeah. But?”

  “But why do you think she has to put up such a tough front?”

  The look he threw my way made me squirm, so I decided to turn the tables. “If what you say is true, what kind of false image are you careful to present?”

  He grinned. “Me? Oh, I’m the King of the World and always have been.”

  His eyes, I noticed, didn’t match his grin.

  ***

  Somehow I managed to make it through the rest of the day but by five I was ready to sleep the clock around. After locking up—Jimmy was away talking condos to the real estate folks with Esther—I went upstairs to my apartment and nuked a carton of Michelina’s Chili-Mac. I gobbled it down while listening to an old vinyl recording of Lowell Fulson performing “Reconsider Baby.” Once I’d eaten, I tossed the empty Michelina’s container into the trash, said goodnight to Lowell, and crawled into bed, surrounded by Gunter Hoenig’s journals.

  Talk about a surfeit of riches. Gunter didn’t seem to think any topic was too small to write about, so I spent another few hours reading through entries about vacation trips to Yosemite, his grandchildren’s birthday parties, and various pet dogs and cats. He was also a great fan of the Phoenix Zoo, and had purchased family memberships for the entire Mantz clan. Apparently he always took a sketch pad along when he visited, too, because the third box was filled with scores of poorly executed sketches of giraffes and zebras. Or at least I thought they were giraffes and zebras. Who knows? Given his lack of talent, they might have been long-necked deer and nervous donkeys. Mercifully, I finally drifted off to sleep.

  Even more mercifully, I didn’t dream.

  ***

  Just after sunrise the next day, I drove over to the set, curious to see how Warren would film the “Germans” emerging from their escape tunnel by the Cross Cut Canal. I eased the Jeep into the vacant space next to the Studebaker Golden Hawk, inwardly congratulating Mark Schank on his sales tactics. To know the Hawk was to love it, so he was making sure Warren saw it every day. I walked over to the canal, where I found the set swarming with activity, with crew members adding finishing touches to their equipment and extras slapping dirt on their clothing, faces and hair to make it seem that they’d been crawling through yards of tunnel. Once again I marveled at how hard film people worked.

  To help ward off the early morning chill, Warren handed me a Styrofoam cup from the caterer’s truck. Coffee the way I liked it. Black, no sugar, hot enough to blister my tongue. The man knew my tastes. Some of them, anyway.

  The Cross Cut Canal was a couple hundred yards east of the present-day boundary of Papago Park. Sixty years ago the canal had been nothing more than a shallow ditch, but since then it had been enlarged and paved into a deep concrete chasm able to swallow entire semi trucks. Like the other Arizona canals, it looked deceptively smooth on the surface. But I knew the Cross Cut contained an undertow so wicked that most unfortunates who fell in either immediately drowned or were battered to death against the concrete supports of the roadways overhead. Today it was swollen by the rains of a couple days earlier, and was even more dangerous than usual. If it had been this full when the Germans escaped, they’d either have been killed or made it all the way to Mexico on their raft.

  You couldn’t tell the Cross Cut’s danger by the faces of the merry crowd that stood along its banks. Housing tracts lined both sides of the canal, and now early-rising suburbanites eager to watch the morning’s filming stood shoulder to shoulder with the film crew, milling around three deep as the security people I’d hired pushed them behind the yellow-taped line. If any of them fell into the shallow hole the film crew had dug to simulate the end of the POWs’ escape tunnel, they’d probably break a leg. And we certainly didn’t want any of them going into the canal.

  “Amazing how cool the desert is in the morning.” Warren slyly used his comment as an excuse for a warming hug.

  “Mornings aren’t cool in August.” Since I didn’t pull away from him, I decided I was making progress. While crew members scurried around us, we huddled closer, and I was forced to admit that I liked being with him, touching him. Maybe it was time we advanced to the next stage of our relationship.

  In a casual tone which I could tell wasn’t really casual, he said, “I hope you’ve given some thought to our discussion yesterday. The Desert Eagle offer.”

  I looked down into the canal’s dark water. “It sounds tempting, that’s for sure.”

  He gave me another hug. “A little money never hurt anyone.”

  Remembering Beth Osmon, I wasn’t so sure. But not ready to get into a major conversation on the subject, I simply said, “I guess.”

  “Another reason I’d like you in L.A. is because, well, I think we might have a future together.”

  I dropped my coffee. “Jesus, Warren!”

  He bent down and picked up my now-empty Styrofoam cup. “Sorry. But we Hollywood types tend to move fast.”

  Which helped explain L.A.’s high divorce rate. While Warren fetched me another cup of coffee, I stood by the edge of the canal, trying to calm my nerves. I had only known him for a few weeks, yet here he was, talking about the future. I was tempted to get back in my Jeep and head for the hills. And yet…

  As I stood there stewing about this new wrinkle in my life, someone bumped against me. Hard. I attempted to balance myself, but whoever it was bumped me again.

  And knocked me right into the canal.

  My initial reaction was one of shock, not fear. The water from Northern Arizona’s melting snowpack remained so cold, even this far south, that it made my teeth chatter. I fought back the fear that threatened to paralyze me and tried to remember how long the human body could withstand hypothermia. An hour? Five minutes?

  At this point, the answer was irrelevant. Although I’ve always been a strong swimmer, drowning was the more immediate danger. Kicking desperately against the current, I managed to stay on the water’s surface for what felt like hours but was probably only seconds, listening to the screams of observers along the bank. I could see Warren struggle through the crowd to the very edge of the canal, start to take off his shoes as if about to dive in but stagger back as several men—probably locals who knew the canal’s immense power—grabbed him and pulled him back. Then the current began to sweep me downstream.

  I fought to swim back to the side of the canal where hands reached down to grab me, but my waterlogged clothes and shoes made that impossible. Pausing in my struggles to strip them off was out of the question; the undertow was so strong, so eager to suck me under, that only my unceasing strokes and kicks kept me on the surface. Yet with all that, the current pushed me past everyone who could help and carried me alongside the autoplex and toward the tunnel under McDowell Road. As I flailed to remain on the surface, the undertow began to win, to suck me down. I managed one long, deep breath before I went under and as the frigid water closed over my head, despaired that it might be my last.

  But I wasn’t ready to give up. While the current rushed me through the muddy, debris-filled waters, tumbling me end over end, I spread my arms, attempting to right myself. For a moment, it worked. How far away was the tunnel now? If the current slammed my head against its concrete supports, I might lose consciousness, and with consciousness, my life.

  Strengthened by desperation, I turned myself around underwater so that my feet pointed in the direction of the current. Just in time. My feet—thankfully still clad in those thick Reeboks—slammed against the tunnel walls with such savagery that I almost screamed. But realizing the fate that lay in store for me if I did, I clamped my jaws tighter. Then I allowed the current to carry me along underwater until my already inky surroundings turned even darker. Now I was in the tunnel itself. Above me, six lanes of morning traffic rushed by, oblivious to my predicament. For a momen
t, I thought I could hear tires on asphalt. Or was the roaring in my ears caused by oxygen starvation?

  I had been underwater so long that my lungs felt as if they were ready to explode through my chest. My eyes were fading, too. White spots danced in front of them, while in back of the white spots, the water started to glow a deep red. Mercifully, the water didn’t seem to be all that cold any more. In fact, it was almost comforting. All I had to do was relax and let the water…

  No! Such defeatism was nothing more than my oxygen-starved brain attempting to make its peace with death. For the first time I felt panic, brought on by this forewarning of what would surely happen if gave in. I had to rage and fight and keep on fighting or I would lose control of my body. Out of pure instinct, my mouth would open, eager to suck in anything—air, mud, water.

  I had to reach the surface or die.

  As soon as the McDowell tunnel swept over me and the water grew lighter, I thrashed toward the surface again. I had almost made it when something hit me hard on the shoulder, a log, possibly, carried along on the current. Whatever it was hit me again, spinning me around in the water to confront the corpse of a large dog. In my horror, I lost my sense of direction again, but then the dog twirled past, headed downstream. I looked up again to see the pale sky beckon and realized that it didn’t matter if I faced north or south, as long as I was headed upward, toward that wonderful pale blue.

  The second I broke the surface, I took a deep, gasping breath. Then the undertow pulled me under again.

  But not before I had seen the canal curve to the west, and at the point of the curve, what looked like an old maintenance ladder embedded in the concrete. If I could only reach it…

  I somersaulted so that my head faced downstream again, then—resisting the undertow’s attempt to drive me back to the bottom of the canal and certain death—began to fight my way back to the surface.