The Desert King: A Jack Trexlor Novel

by T. F. Torrey

“No, I’m serious,” I said emphatically.

  “So’s he,” John said. “Serious about fitness.”

  “He must be,” Macy said, “to be out here at two-thirty in the morning.”

  “No,” I said. “Why is he out here now, at this time of night?”

  “Maybe he came out to laugh at your shirt,” Macy said.

  “Maybe he knows what we’re up to,” I said, “and he’s going to call the police and report our suspicious behavior.”

  We enjoyed a brief moment of silence.

  “No,” John said, “it’s got to be your shirt.”

  The jogger was close now. The suit he wore said “Arnie’s Gym” on the front, but he couldn’t have been a regular there. His chest was soaked with sweat around the words on the shirt and down to the bulge of his stomach. His slightly glazed eyes had the look of a horse ridden at full steam for ten miles. His stringy hair was cut short on the sides in a military style, dripping with sweat and matted to his head.

  We moved a little to the right and he heaved past us on the left. Even walking on the right of John and Macy, I could smell the stale sweat on him.

  “Wow,” Macy said after the jogger had passed. “Quite an aroma.”

  “Like stale socks,” I said.

  “Yeah,” John added. “Fished out of the canal.”

  We reached Encanto Boulevard and continued marching steadily southward toward the major street, McDowell Road.

  “Why was that guy out jogging at night?” I asked. I didn’t really think he was out to get us; it just seemed strange that he was out running so late—or so early.

  “He probably just got up for work,” John said, “and he’d rather jog now than in the heat of the day.”

  “A guy like that’d die runnin’ during the day,” Macy said.

  That made sense. Even though it was probably eighty degrees now, the temperature soared up over one hundred ten degrees in the afternoon. Night was undeniably the best time of day to run in Phoenix.

  But the jogger had reminded me of another concern.

  “If the police start shooting at you, Macy,” I said, “don’t run where it’s dark.”

  “Why not?”

  “If you’re in the dark,” I said, “and the police shoot at the only part of you they can see …”

  “They’ll blow that blond wig right off your head,” finished John with a chuckle.

  Macy was silent, thinking. We walked on. Past Encanto Park was a garden center, and past that we turned left down a side street. Macy continued thinking while we walked. We were in a residential area now. We had to walk on the street because there was no sidewalk. On each side of the street, a developer had sold mostly-identical brick houses. I saw no lights glowing in any of them.

  As in my neighborhood, palm trees threw shadows everywhere, but this street was wider. I could feel the heat still coming off the blacktop from being in the direct sun all day.

  “I’ll just not get caught,” Macy said finally.

  “That would be my suggestion,” John said. We passed through an intersection of streets marked with stop signs. On the other side, just out of reach of the streetlight on the corner, in front of the driveway of the house on the corner, we stopped walking.

  Ahead of us was an empty lot big enough for a developer to plant a couple of houses. The wind picked up from the south, blowing dust and papers across the dirt. In the distance, lit even at this late hour, the skyscrapers on Central Avenue and Camelback Road rose from the horizon. Behind the buildings loomed the jagged form of Squaw Peak, one of the mountains the city had grown around.

  John looked up and down the street and, satisfied at seeing nothing, pulled the revolver out of his pocket. He looked to Macy and me. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Macy nodded.

  I said nothing. My breath had escaped me and it seemed I had lost my voice.

  When John raised his arm and pointed the gun at Squaw Peak, though, I found it. “Hey,” I said. “Isn’t this dangerous?”

  John lowered his arm and they both shot me irritated glances. The moonlight glinted in John’s eyes. I could see that he had just about reached his limit. “Of course it’s dangerous,” he said. “That’s why it’s so much fun.”

  I sprang to clarification. “What I mean is—we’re in downtown Phoenix. Those bullets are going to come down somewhere in the city. It’s miles in any direction to uninhabited land.”

  John looked at Macy, and Macy shrugged at John, and suddenly they both started laughing. John held the revolver in front of his chest and looked at it. “Bullets fired from a .22 pistol,” he said, “will go about two miles before hitting the ground.” He raised his arm again and leveled the sights at Squaw Peak. “There’s nothing moving up there this time of night.”

  That didn’t help. “Squaw Peak’s gotta be over five miles from here—”

  The little gun boomed like a cannon in the quiet night.

  He fired two shots, and both times my stomach almost jumped out of my mouth. I imagined the bullets screaming back to earth somewhere around 7th Street, tinking through someone’s living room window and punching through his TV Guide right into his chest. Instinct screamed RUN! through every nerve of my body.

  Macy looked like he could read my mind. “That’s the idea,” he said, smiling slyly.

  John shoved the smoking barrel back into his pocket and turned to me. “See you back at your place,” he said.

  And they were gone, sprinting different directions up the street, finding the patchy darkness between the streetlights and running through it.

  I stood there, dazed, for a moment, smelling the gunpowder, seeing the gray puffs of smoke rising in the moonlight, hearing the sounds of the shots and their footsteps echoing and mixing with the ringing in my ears.

  Then a light snapped on in the house on the corner and the dogs of the neighborhood started barking up a storm. My senses came back to me in a rush.

  And I fled, finding the patchy darkness for myself.

  Chapter 2

  Three days earlier, I hadn’t seen Macy Barnes in six years. When he walked in that Tuesday night, I didn’t even recognize him at first. He walked through the door of Gridlock and stood just inside, like most people do, blinking and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. I saw him come in, but I only recognized that he was not a regular. When his eyes finally adjusted, he walked over and sat down at the bar. He flashed a California smile and ordered a beer, and, because I was the weeknight bartender at Gridlock, I got it for him.

  Gridlock was a small neighborhood bar on west Camelback Road in Phoenix. Buddy Robinson had named it “Gridlock” to keep away the party animals and to limit the crowd to a bunch of regulars who wanted a good place to relax with their friends after work. So at almost seven o’clock on Tuesday night, when Macy walked in, only a handful of regulars sat at the bar, and a pair of nurses from the VA hospital sat at a table in the back. The nurses stopped in frequently, but I wasn’t sure of their names.

  The single most important aspect of bartending, I’d learned, was customer service. Taking care of the patrons would earn you big tips and a steady crowd, if you did it right. With this in mind, I moved in to apply some considerate attention to the new stranger.

  “What brings you to a bar named ’Gridlock’?” I asked.

  His head snapped around like it was on a spring. He looked into my eyes, placing my voice. We recognized each other at the same time and started laughing.

  “Jack Trexlor,” he said, “you old bastard. What the hell are you doing in Phoenix?”

  I shrugged. “Just pushing drinks and pulling tips, I guess. Everybody’s got to be doing something.”

  “That’s true,” he said, and laughed again. He took a sip of his drink and looked up at the place where the wall meets the ceiling. He sat there for a second, thinking. Then it was several seconds.

  I chuckled. Same old Macy. It always did take him a minute to think for a second.

  One of t
he nurses came to the bar for another pair of drinks. I poured them for her and watched her walk back to the table. She reminded me of someone else. Maybe it was the blond hair.

  “Last I knew you were up in … Kingman,” Macy said, interrupting my thoughts. “I thought you’d never leave that place.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I had to get out of that town.” This was true in more ways than I wanted to talk about. “Too many memories. Too much trouble. Too many … problems.” I chose my words carefully. “I’ve been tending bar here about a year.”

  Macy laughed and shook his head and, perhaps expecting to see someone with a camera, looked around the bar quickly. I did too. There wasn’t much to see. One of the regulars had staggered over to the nurses’ table. He was saying something to them and they were shaking their heads politely. It was ordinary, but I didn’t like it anyway. In the corner the jukebox glowed, droning out a song one of the nurses had played, a song by the Eagles about feeling peaceful.

  Then Macy was talking again, diverting my attention from the nurses. “Whatever happened to your girlfriend there in Kingman? What was her name?”

  “Diane,” I said. Then I paused, trying to pick the right words. Someone said once that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between “lightning” and “lightning bug”. I just try to be careful.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said, turning his head to look at me out of the corners of his eyes. “Don’t tell me that somehow you and Diane went sour.”

  “Let’s just say that I don’t see eye to eye with a lot of people in Kingman anymore.” It was a lightning bug of an understatement, true, but I didn’t want to talk about the lightning. Not just yet.

  “Shee-it,” he said, shaking his head as the memories hit him. “I thought you and Diane were going to go the distance.”

  “So did I,” I admitted.

  “So what happened?”

  The regular customer who’d been bothering the nurses was Eddy, a cab driver who worked the day shift and lived close by. At that moment he swayed back over to his stool and began wondering, rather loudly, who he had to know to get a beer in this town. I topped off his mug and got another scotch and water for one of his compatriots. When I got back to Macy, he was chuckling.

  “I don’t see you in …” he paused a couple seconds to think, then shook his head, giving up. “Years and years,” he finished. “And suddenly you turn up in a corner bar—in Phoenix, of all places.” He laughed again, and I did too, though we were laughing at different things. “What else you doing?” he asked. “You going to school? Studying to be a doctor or something?”

  “No,” I said. “This is it. Well, not really it. Sometimes I paint.”

  “Paint?” he asked. “You mean like houses?”

  “No, usually landscapes and things. Paintings. Mostly realistic pieces, but sometimes abstract stuff. Some of it turns out okay, but most of it’s just blah.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding rather disappointed. “How’d you get into that?”

  “Well, I’ve been drawing since I was a kid, you know. Remember?”

  I watched his face. He didn’t seem to remember, though he should have.

  “I got serious about art my senior year in high school, and I’ve been painting ever since.”

  Macy nodded thoughtfully. “Any money in that?”

  I shook my head. “At least,” I said, “not till you’re dead.”

  Eddy was complaining again. This time he was commenting on how this would be a great place to open a bar. I got him another beer and refilled two of the quietly thirsty regulars.

  “What have you been doing with yourself lately?” I asked, getting back to Macy.

  His eyes lit up like a kid’s at Christmas. “The desert,” he said mysteriously.

  “The desert?” I asked, not quite sure what he meant.

  “The desert!” he said emphatically.

  I didn’t get it. “What’s up in the desert?” I asked.

  “Ah, man. Don’t tell me you haven’t been there.”

  “Been where? This is Phoenix. Arizona. It’s all desert.”

  “Ah, man,” he said. “You’re missing out.”

  It was my turn to say something, but I was preoccupied. Eddy was back bothering the nurses again. They ignored him for a minute, but when he put a hand on one of their shoulders, he became rather difficult to ignore. When she brushed his hand off, he became adamant and intolerable—and bad for business.

  “Eddy,” I called to him.

  He ignored me.

  “Eddy!” I shouted. He looked up at me this time. “Why don’t you leave them alone for a while and finish your drink at the bar?” I tried to say it politely, but it came out more like a demand. I could feel my blood beginning to run cold.

  But Eddy backed down and lurched back to his bar stool. I watched him for a moment, then turned back to Macy. His eyes were still shining like the desert sun.

  “What do you do there?” I asked.

  “Everything, man. Fishing, hunting, swimming, name it.”

  “Where exactly is ’the desert’?” I asked.

  “Usually we go up in the mountains in Tonto,” he said, referring to Tonto National Forest, which lay northeast of Phoenix.

  I tried not to let on that it didn’t sound too great to me.

  “Last weekend me and John were up there fishing,” he said, “and John had this big ol’ carp on his line, and he just about had it hauled in, when this hellgrammite flies up and bites him right on the back of his hand. Rip!” He laughed. “He dropped his pole and whoosh! That carp was gone! Dragging John’s pole through the water behind him.” He laughed more, remembering.

  I was going to ask who John was or what a hellgrammite was, but I was distracted. “Excuse me a minute,” I said.

  Eddy was back at the nurses’ table. I stepped around the end of the bar and went over to him. According to Arizona law, that kind of made me fair game for a fight, but I didn’t much care. “Eddy,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder, “it’s time to go home.”

  He turned and glared unsteadily at me. “Trexlor,” he said, “leave me alone. I’m just being friendly to these girls here.”

  “No,” I said calmly, “you’re just going home. You’ve had enough to drink, and these girls don’t want your company.”

  “Trexlor,” he said, almost growling, “don’t give me no shit. I’ll fuckin’ knock you back over that bar.”

  “Eddy,” I said. “Go home.”

  For a second, I thought he was going to swing at me. And for a second, I was hoping he would. My hands shook and I had to consciously keep them from clenching. I could taste the adrenaline in my mouth. It had been quiet in the bar before, but now it was dead silent.

  But Eddy backed down again. “Shit,” he said. “This dump ain’t worth it.” He ambled over to the door and kicked it open. “Fuck you,” he said back at us. “Fuck all of you.” He slammed the door behind him and I watched as he walked by the windows out of sight. Then I started breathing again.

  “Thank you,” the blond-haired nurse said to me. She wore her hair in a perm and I thought her name was Melissa, but I didn’t want to chance it. “You’re welcome,” I said simply, then added, “Your next drinks are on the management.”

  Walking back to the bar, I noticed that none of the regulars had moved, except to turn around and look. Macy, however, was sliding back onto his stool. I cleared away Eddy’s glass, wiped the bar where he’d been, and went back to Macy.

  “That was nice work,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Drunks are bad for business.”

  Macy thought for a moment. “I thought you didn’t like to fight,” he said.

  “I don’t. But sometimes I just can’t resist.”

  He nodded understandingly and I was glad when he changed the subject. “Are they friends of yours?” he asked, glancing back at the nurses.

  “No, not really. They just stop in here now and the
n. They’re nurses over at the Veteran’s Hospital. A lot of regulars here work there.”

  Macy was lost in thought again. “I bet you get a lot of girls,” he said, “being a bartender.”

  “Maybe now and then,” I said. “Nothing spectacular.”

  Macy was obviously intrigued by the thought and thinking aloud. “A nurse gets stood up or … or maybe she comes in here with her boyfriend and he dumps her here. She drinks him out of her head. And you’re here to be nice to her.” He paused, waiting for me to respond.

  “Shit happens,” I said simply.

  “Yeah,” he said, still thinking aloud. “So you’re Joe Nice Bartender and offer to give this poor, drunk, dumped girl a ride home. And then on the way there she gets all sentimental and mushy and pow!” He slammed his right fist into his left palm. “You nail her.”

  “And another one bites the dust,” I said flatly.

  “Or the carpet.”

  “What happened to Sharon?” I asked, leading the conversation away. “Are you two still together?”

  “Yep,” he said. “We’ve been married for … years. In fact—” He looked up sharply. His eyes searched the wall above the back bar for a clock and found it. “Shit!” he said. “I’m late! I was supposed to pick her up at ten after seven.” He drained his glass and slid off the stool. He extended his hand across the bar and I shook it.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “For what? Being late?”

  “For getting married.”

  “Oh. You didn’t know? We sent you an invitation. I expected you to show up for the wedding.”

  “I never got the invitation.”

  “Maybe you already moved here,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I lied.

  “Hey,” he said. “You going to be working here all night?”

  “All by myself.”

  “Great. I’ll go pick up Sharon and bring her back by. I know she’ll want to see you.”

  I told him that sounded good to me.

  He started laughing as he headed for the door. “Sharon’s not going to believe this excuse,” he said.

  “I’ll vouch for you,” I said.

  He smiled. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he said, and went out the door. He waved through the neon OPEN sign as he passed the window.