The Fourth Durango

by Ross Thomas

  “Drove,” Vines said. “But I had a girl guide.”

  The chief of police grinned. “If you’d said you flew in or took the train or bus, I’d’ve said you were dreaming because the Feds closed down our so-called airport two years back for what they claimed were safety reasons, and the last passenger train stopped here eleven-no, by God, twelve-years ago now, and even Greyhound called it quits after GE boarded up the steam-iron plant two years ago next month.”

  “Sounds like splendid isolation,” Vines said, this time taking two swallows of his bloody mary.

  “You a hermit?”

  “Not yet.”

  “We’ve got a few of those-folks who don’t mind being kind of cut off from the rest of the world.”

  Vines nodded his sympathetic understanding and waited to see what came next.

  “The rest of us keep up pretty good, though,” the chief continued after another taste of beer. “We’ve got our almost daily paper that’s owned by some chain out of London, England. For culture, there’s our one-hundred-percent automated FM station that plays nothing but commercials and root-canal rock from dawn to dark and then shuts down. As for TV, well, we can’t get any reception to speak of because of the mountains and because no sane cable company’ll touch us. But a man can always buy a dish to catch the news and maybe rent himself a slasher flick or two for his VCR-or even one about some rich high school kids fucking each other.”

  Fork stopped, as if curious about what his one-man audience would say. Vines took another sip of his bloody mary and said, “Paradise.”

  The chief welcomed the comment with a satisfied nod, but his contentment vanished as he ran an appraising eye around the nearly empty lounge. “This place’ll probably file for Chapter Eleven once summer’s over.”

  “The hotel or just the bar?”

  “The hotel. Want to buy it?”

  Vines ignored the question to ask one of his own. “How long’ve you been chief of police?”

  An expression that Vines took for bittersweet nostalgia swept across Fork’s face and affected his voice, giving it a reminiscent, even dreamy tone.

  “About nine of us back in ’sixty-eight were driving down from the Haight in an old GM school bus we’d painted up a sort of psychedelic Day-Glo-heading for the Colorado Durango. The Haight was dead or dying by then and we were aiming for the Rockies, heads all messed up with acid and dope and politics and God knows what all. You remember how it was back then.”

  “Dimly,” Vines said.

  “Well, sir, I’m driving and our navigator spots this California Durango on the gas station map. It’s late and everybody’s tired, so we turn off. The next morning after we woke up and saw how fine the weather was and all, we just stayed on. A few of us did anyhow. And ten years ago I got appointed chief of police and the navigator, well, she got herself elected mayor.”

  “She?”

  “Mayor Barbara Diane Huckins,” said Fork, finishing his second beer and pushing the glass away with the air of a man who knows his exact limit. “Or B. D. Huckins, which is what she calls herself now and how she signs everything, even though I keep telling her it’s reverse sexism or something.”

  Fork stopped talking and again looked longingly at the black cane that still hung by its crook from the bar. “I swear I’ve just got to buy that thing off somebody, Mr. Vines. What d’you think the owner might ask for it?”

  Vines framed his answer carefully. “I’m not sure he’d want money.”

  Fork looked surprised. “That a fact? Well, how about a trade?” Before Vines could reply, Fork’s glum expression returned. “Trouble is, I haven’t got much to swap except climate-and just one hell of a lot of privacy.”

  Vines seemed to consider the problem for several seconds.

  “He might like some of that,” he said. “Privacy.”

  “He here in town?”

  “No, but this afternoon, I’m going to help him find a quiet place to stay for a few weeks. Maybe longer. Probably in Santa Barbara.” Vines smiled. “Despite its rotten climate.”

  Fork sent his eyes roaming around the bar as he asked a question that obviously was far too casual. “Just how private has he got to have it?”

  “Extremely.”

  “And where’d you say he is now?”

  “I didn’t. But it’s just north of here.”

  Fork’s eyes stopped their roaming and settled on Vines with a cold and knowing stare. “Lompoc, maybe?”

  Vines returned the law’s cold stare with an indifferent one of his own. The silent exchange lasted only seconds, which was just long enough to reach a rough accommodation, if not the deal itself. “Would that matter?” Vines said.

  The chief replaced his cold stare with a warm and welcoming grin. “Hell, Mr. Vines, we take pride in being the live-and-let-live capital of the Western Hemisphere, especially since attitude’s damn near all we’ve got left to sell except a little weather.”

  Fork started to go on but hesitated, as if to make sure his next question was as politic and inoffensive as possible. “What line of work was the cane’s owner in before he came to be a guest of the Federal government up there in Lompoc-if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “He was a judge.”

  “What kind?”

  “A state supreme court chief justice.”

  “Not this state.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Think the judge might swap me his cane and a little to boot for just a whole lot of privacy?”

  “He might.”

  Fork cocked his head to the left as if that gave him a truer perspective of Kelly Vines. “And just what line of work are you in, Mr. Vines?”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Which brand? Corporate? Tax? Criminal? Catch-as-catch-can?”

  “Disbarred,” said Kelly Vines.

  Chapter 2

  For not quite four years during the Carter administration, the name of Jack Adair had been either second or third on a supposedly secret White House list of five names. It was his name and the names of three other men and one woman that were to be given immediate and serious consideration should any of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices either retire or drop dead while Jimmy Carter was in office.

  None did, as it turned out, but if one had, the betting in Washington was three to two that Adair would be nominated to fill the vacancy. Yet the same political bookies who were laying three to two on Adair’s nomination were also offering five to one with no takers that, if nominated, he would never be confirmed by the Senate.

  The long odds against Jack Adair’s confirmation came as no surprise. Although it was conceded he was smart enough to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court-too smart, some said-it was also conceded he was far too partisan, much too witty and, most damning of all, the owner of an acerbic mouth that never shut up about whatever interested or engaged him, which seemed to be almost everything.

  His ready wit and readier mouth had made Adair the media’s darling and the talk shows’ sweetheart. Only ten days before being indicted he had appeared on the Phil Donahue show and staked out a hyperbolic position on capital punishment (borrowed in part from Camus) that had created a political firestorm down home where almost everyone assumed he was dead serious.

  “If to deter murder,” Adair had said in his gravest judicial tones and with calculated disregard for the Eighth Amendment, “the state must instruct by example, then there is no deterrence more instructive than a public execution-and not just some run-of-the mill public hanging either, Phil-but a kind of old-fashioned drawing and quartering with those great big Budweiser Clydesdales pulling the guy apart on prime-time TV around eight in the evening just before the kiddies are tucked into bed.”

  The landlocked state that Jack Adair once served as chief justice had always held to the notion that members of its supreme court should run for their terms of office as did the governor, members of the legislature and just about everyone else on the state payroll down to and including the director of
weights and measures. This populist method of choosing a supreme court guaranteed that those who sat on the high bench would be glib lawyers of pleasing mien who were also keen students of politics, if not of the law itself.

  The often bizarre and always expensive television, radio and print campaigns waged by candidates for the supreme court made further rents and tears in the state’s already tattered reputation, which in recent years had suffered a series of embarrassments, not the least being the almost perennial revelations of graft, corruption and bribery. Other assorted stigmata included the state university’s doped-up and overpaid football teams; a recent plague of bank and thrift failures for which there seemed to be no known cure; and-on a different level-the annual state-financed Panhandle Rattlesnake Roundup, a revered cultural event that environmentalists and the SPCA set up a squawk about every year, much to the media’s delight, and where, on the average, 29.2 persons got snakebit, 9.7 percent of them fatally.

  The state’s ultimate embarrassment, however, had been its chief justice, Jack Adair. As the Adair scandal (or L’Affaire Adair, as a few immigrants from back East called it) dragged on and on, many a devout Christian fell to his knees and prayed God to send old Jack a ticket home and, if it wasn’t too much bother, Lord, maybe take some of those snotty out-of-state TV and newspaper reporters with him.

  But as faithless lovers do, the media eventually abandoned Jack Adair, much to the relief of those in the state who, quite properly, had blamed them for his giddy rise to celebrity status and, improperly, for his being where he was at 7:05 A.M. on that last Friday in June, which was in the shower room of the discharge area of the U.S. maximum-security penitentiary just outside Lompoc, California.

  Located in a mild coastal valley and laid out on a grid, Lompoc is about ten miles east of both the Pacific Ocean and Vandenberg Air Force Base and a few miles south and east of the U.S. Penitentiary. With a population of 26,267 at last count, Lompoc is also 147 miles north of Los Angeles, 187 miles south of San Francisco and only 26 miles north and east of Durango, California, the city that God forgot.

  As the “Flower Seed Capital of the World,” many of Lompoc’s streets are named Tulip, Sage, Rose and so forth. Most of them run at right angles to streets that are usually numbered or named with letters of the alphabet. The city’s avenues, however, apparently have been named after whatever was obvious or handy. For example, convicted felons are driven west on Ocean Avenue, then north six miles or so on Floradale Avenue to the U.S. Penitentiary, where, on that last Friday in June, hot water pounded against Jack Adair’s back in the shower room that offered four shower heads on one side, four on the other and was open at both ends.

  Located just next to the penitentiary’s discharge area, the showers were available to prisoners about to be discharged or paroled. Most usually took one before changing into their new street clothes that came from either J. C. Penney’s or Sears and were supplied free by the penitentiary.

  When Jack Adair had begun his sentence fifteen months ago he couldn’t-when naked-look down and see either his toes or his penis because of the 269 pounds he carried on his five-foot ten-and-a-half-inch frame. Most of this excess lard had settled around his middle, creating the forty six-inch waistline that blocked the view.

  But as the hot spray now drummed against his back and neck, he could, if he wished, look down and inspect a flat thirty-four-inch belly, ten unre-markable toes and sexual equipment that furtive comparative glances over the last fifteen months had assured him was still of average size and shape.

  He was soaping his crotch when they slipped into the shower room. Both were fully dressed, although the smaller of the pair was already unzipping his fly. In the left hand of the larger one was a knife with a blade fashioned out of a metal spoon and, for a handle, melted plastic from seven toothbrushes.

  The smaller one, who falsely claimed to be a member of the Mexican Mafia, was called Loco by everyone because he liked to eat lightbulbs and get sent to the penitentiary hospital where he could sometimes steal paregoric and even morphine. His real name was Fortunato Ruiz and he was serving twelve years for car theft and assaulting a Federal officer with a deadly weapon. The weapon had been a Mercedes convertible; the Federal officer was an FBI agent who correctly suspected the car to be stolen.

  “Hey, Judgie,” Ruiz called in his curiously sweet tenor. “You and me and Bobby here, we gonna have one real fine good-bye party, true?”

  Bobby was Robert Dupree, the man with the knife and, by trade, another car thief who had specialized in Peterbilts. He had liked to steal the rigs in his native Arkansas and sell them in either Texas or Missouri. Dupree himself had started the rumor that he carried not one but two concealed weapons, the first being the knife; the other, AIDS.

  The knife now moved in slow tight little circles as Dupree grinned and nodded at Adair. “Gonna have us some nice clean shower fun, huh, Judge?”

  Adair dropped the soap and backed against the shower wall, covering his genitals with both hands. He also smiled his most ingratiating smile, believing it to be the standard disguise for cowardice and fear. “Thanks, guys, but I really can’t spare the time.”

  “Won’t hardly take no time at all,” Dupree said, crossing to Adair in three swift steps and pressing the knife point against the throat where a vanished triple chin had once bobbled.

  Adair whistled. It was no melodic pursed-lip whistle, but rather that piercing, cab-stopping blast often used by pretty young New York women at rush hour on rainy days-or by activist diehards in convention assembled who still believed it could resurrect lost causes long dead. From a block away, such whistles can summon a child, a fairly bright dog or, in Jack Adair’s case, a savior.

  He seemed to flow into the shower room, although nothing but quicksilver flows quite that fast. He was the color of lightly creamed coffee and would have stood six-four, except he was bent forward as he feinted right, went left, used both hands to grab Bobby Dupree’s left wrist-the knife wrist-and break it over his raised right knee the way he would break a small stick.

  The knife dropped to the floor. Bobby Dupree sobbed and sank down beside it, clutching his broken wrist. The man who was the color of lightly creamed coffee kicked the knife away and turned to Loco, the lightbulb eater, whose right hand seemed trapped inside his open fly where he had been fondling himself.

  “Go jack off someplace else, sweet thing,” the man said.

  Loco started backing toward the shower room’s far exit. He suddenly seemed to remember where his right hand was, jerked it from the open fly as if it were scalded, blew a wet kiss at Jack Adair and said in Spanish to the man who had broken Bobby Dupree’s left wrist: “Fuck your mother, crazy goat.” After that, Loco turned and skipped like a child from the shower room.

  “Let’s go, Jack,” said the rescue man, whose name was Blessing Nelson and who weighed just under 215 pounds and had a Stanford-Binet-measured IQ of 142, which, Adair had assured him, was only eight points shy of perceived genius.

  “By the use of some rather restrained mayhem,” said Adair with no hint of a smile, “you just broke up what could well’ve been my last romance-for which, needless to say, I’m goddamned grateful.”

  Blessing Nelson shook his head in wonder. “Never shuts down for rest or repair, does it-that mouth of yours? Just goes on and on, night and day.”

  “What about him?” Adair said, using a nod to indicate the still kneeling, still whimpering Bobby Dupree.

  “Fuck him.”

  “Speaking again of romance, they’ll both try and clean your plow but good,” the former chief justice said, wondering whether his grammar would ever return from its long AWOL.

  “Loco might,” Nelson said, “on account of Loco’s stone crazy. But old Bobby here won’t try nothing else.” He kicked Dupree in the stomach. The hard kick knocked the breath out of Dupree and turned his whimperings into wheezing sobs.

  “How much, Bobby?” Nelson said.

  Dupree only shook his head and kept on wh
eezing and sobbing until Nelson threatened with his foot again. Dupree twisted his head around until he could look up at Nelson. “Twenty,” he said, gasping it out between the sobs and wheezes.

  “Twenty thousand,” Adair said, as if almost pleased by the price tag that had been hung on his life.

  Blessing Nelson’s long calculating look drove the price down. “Shit, Jack, somebody offer me half that in real money, you already be dead and gone.”

  “Despite what we’ve meant to each other,” Adair said with a half-mocking smile.

  Nelson nodded. “Despite that.”

  Before being arrested, indicted and sentenced to a plea-bargained four years in Federal prison, the twenty-nine-year-old Blessing Nelson-by his own secret count-had robbed thirty-four banks and nineteen savings and loan institutions, eight of them twice, all of them located in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley and none of them more than 180 seconds by stolen getaway car from either the Ventura or San Diego Freeways, his two preferred escape routes.

  It was on the advice of an aged journeyman thief whom he had twice represented as a young defense lawyer that Adair had retained Blessing Nelson’s services. The old thief, Harry Means, had spent twenty-three of his seventy-two years behind bars and was only seventeen months out of his last cell when Adair-less than ten days away from his own incarceration in Lompoc-had telephoned for advice on how to survive inside a prison.

  “You want it without horseshit and feathers, Jack?” the old thief had asked.

  “I really do, Harry.”

  “Well, pick out the biggest, baddest nigger you can find, jump right in his arms and tell him, ‘Honey, I’m yours.’” And with that the old ex-con had cackled merrily and hung up.

  Adair more or less had followed the advice, retaining Blessing Nelson’s services as protector and physical therapist for $500 a month in lieu of sexual favors. And since he was leaving the penitentiary alive, unraped, eighty-six pounds lighter and relatively sane, Adair regarded the money spent as an extremely prudent investment.