The Desert King: A Jack Trexlor Novel

by T. F. Torrey

  “They probably don't have a fire,” John said without looking up.

  “Then what do they have?” she asked.

  “Probably nothing, for the same reason we don’t,” John said, adding, “if they’re out here at all.”

  “Well,” she said, “somebody has a fire.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” she said, “I can see it from here.”

  We all scrambled to the hilltop, following her gaze off to the west.

  There, in the area where we’d lost sight of the poachers’ truck earlier, a little fire flickered. The light was too distant and too little to make out any details of the area around it, but it was definitely a fire.

  “Wow,” John said.

  “Do you think it’s the poachers?” Macy asked.

  “I don’t think they would build a fire,” John said. “They wouldn’t want us to know where they are.”

  “So who could it be?” Erica asked.

  “Maybe it’s some other hunters or fishers or campers or something,” Macy suggested.

  “Maybe,” John agreed, “but it’s Monday night, and there’s usually no one up here during the week.”

  “But if the poachers wouldn’t build a fire then it has to be somebody else, right?” Erica asked.

  “Somebody else might help us,” Macy suggested hopefully.

  “They can give us some real food!” Sharon said.

  “Maybe they have a gun,” I said.

  “They can give us a ride back to Phoenix,” John said soberly, adding, “if it’s somebody else and not the poachers.”

  “What do you mean?” Sharon demanded. “You just said the poachers wouldn’t build a fire.”

  “I also said that nobody else would be out here,” John said.

  We were all quiet for a while.

  “Well,” Sharon said, “if it’s someone else, we can’t just let them go.”

  “And if it’s the poachers,” John said, “we can’t just go up to them and ask them for a ride.”

  “So what do we do?” Erica asked.

  John thought for only a moment. “Here’s the plan,” he said. “Macy and I will go down to see who is at the fire. Jack, you stay here with the girls. You should be safe here. If the fire belongs to someone else, we’ll come back for you and get out of here tonight.”

  “What if it is the poachers?” I asked.

  “I’ll think of something,” he said.

  I knew what he had in mind. He would add them to the scoreboard that included the dog, the thugs, and the rattlesnake. John Lupo: two. Poachers: zero.

  “When are you going to go?” Erica asked.

  John looked up at the sky, then off at the fire. He sighed. “Right now. They just lit the fire, so they’ll probably be around for a while. They might leave if it starts raining.” He paused. “We have to go now.”

  So that was that. Sharon wanted to go, but of course Macy wouldn’t let her. Erica wanted to go too, but of course John insisted that she stay on account of her ankle. Macy put his shirt back on and John adjusted his hat.

  “So, uh, we’ll just wait for you here, then, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” John said. “You’ll be okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Erica had to give John a kiss “for luck”, so of course then Sharon had to give Macy one. As Macy and John made their way upriver to cross at the wash where John had earlier, I had to turn away. The idea had suddenly occurred to me to ask Erica for a “kiss for luck”. I had to bite my lip, lest I be tempted.

  Sharon distracted me. “Great,” she said sarcastically, “if the poachers come here while John and Macy are gone, Jack is all we have for protection. We might as well just surrender to them right now.”

  “You can’t,” I pointed out. “We don’t know where they are.”

  “You make me sick, Jack,” she said. “I’m going down by the bluff to watch them.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You should stay here. We can see the fire from here, and you can’t see anything else, anyway.” She started walking on down the hill, ignoring me. “Sharon,” I said, “we really should stick together here.”

  “Quit your whining, Jack,” she said back over her shoulder. She carefully made her way down the hill.

  “Great,” I muttered to myself and Erica. I sat down on the rocks to watch the fire and Sharon. Erica sat down beside me, acting strangely.

  “Jack,” she said quietly. “I’m really worried.”

  So was I. The wind had abated. I could feel her heat. I could smell her body. This had to stop before I did something stupid. It wasn’t right to feel this way. Still … I’d just sit here and enjoy it a little longer.

  “We’ll be safe here,” I said.

  “I don’t mean that,” she said. She sighed and looked around cautiously. “I just feel like—like our luck’s about to run out, that’s all.”

  “What luck?” I asked. “During the course of today we’ve been shot at, chased, our truck was blown up, we lost all our food and our guns, and we’ve been stranded way out in the middle of the desert.” I laughed a little. “That’s bad luck to me. And I hope that runs out.”

  She wasn’t convinced. “We were lucky, Jack. They must have shot at us twenty times—”

  “Seemed more like a hundred.”

  “—but they didn’t hit us once.”

  “Got you in the ankle.”

  “Not with a bullet, though.” She paused and looked into the darkness for words. “Jack, I just can’t help feeling like we’re really close to getting shot. I mean, what if the people at the fire are the poachers?”

  “Relax,” I said. “John says the poachers probably left us for dead.”

  “What if they didn’t, Jack? Then Macy and John are just traipsing up to them unarmed.”

  “Well, if it is them, John can take care of himself. He’ll see them or their truck before the poachers even know he’s there.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Jack,” she said thoughtfully, “if it is someone else, why didn’t we hear them drive in there?”

  “Maybe … uh … maybe they drove in really slowly, like the poachers did when they were leaving.”

  “Maybe,” she said, still not convinced.

  We watched the fire and waited. Below us, Sharon sat down on the rim of the bluff, also watching the fire. I figured it would take John and Macy at least a half hour to reach the fire, moving that far with stealth and without light. The previous night, the desert creatures had come alive as the sun died. Tonight they were quiet, ominously calm before the storm.

  After a few moments Erica spoke up again, perhaps to take her mind off our predicament.

  “Do you have a girlfriend, Jack?” she asked.

  “No,” I admitted quietly, like I was a criminal for it, or a leper.

  “Why not?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I guess I just have particular tastes.”

  She laughed. “So you just pick up drunk girls at bars for sport?”

  I smiled. Despite our past intimacy, we still didn’t even begin to know each other. “I don’t pick up drunk girls,” I said.

  “You picked me up.”

  “Well, you were the first,” I said. “And the last. After I met you I stopped driving my car to work so I’d stay out of that kind of trouble.”

  She was surprised. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s the truth. If a girl gets too drunk now, I have to call her a taxi. I walk to work.”

  “Really?”

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded. “It’s not much of a car anyway, kind of a hand-me-down junker that used to belong to my uncle, but it’s the thought that counts, right?”

  She laughed again. It was nice hearing her laugh.

  I smiled and looked into her eyes. “You were the first, and the last.”

  She sat there with her mouth open for a second. “Why me?”

  “Well …” I had to think. I really thought I shouldn�
�t be talking about it. “Well,” I began again, “I thought you were special.”

  “Why? Because my boyfriend dumped me?”

  “No, because of the way you took it. Like it was the end of a dream or something.” I paused for a second. “Most people don’t fall that far in love.”

  “Does that turn you on?” she asked. “Women in love with someone else?”

  “No,” I said, “but I see lots of couples only attached to each other by a thread, flirting around and getting phone numbers and stuff like that whenever the other one goes to the bathroom.” I shook my head. “When I get involved with someone, I like her to be as attached as I am.”

  “And you get strongly attached?”

  “Like superglue.”

  “So why aren’t you still stuck to your last girlfriend? Why aren’t you married, Mr. Superglue?”

  I shrugged. Diane, actually, had been my last real girlfriend. “I still haven’t found Miss Right.”

  She laughed again. “Still looking for Miss Right. Still finding Miss Right Now.”

  I laughed with her, a gentle, easy laugh.

  “So what’s Miss Right like?” she asked.

  I said I didn’t know.

  “So how will you know when you find her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again. “She’ll be special, irresistible.”

  “And you’ll run away together and get married.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Sounds very romantic,” she said.

  “Hmm …” I said. “Sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”

  Lightning flashed a jagged web off in the western distance. In its light, I saw the face of the beautiful, blond-haired girl sitting beside me. After the flash I could still see her, looking the way she had months ago in her apartment. I could almost feel the teeth hard and soft in my shoulder.

  “Four … five …” She counted the seconds slowly. “Six … seven … eight … nine—” The thunder rumbled menacingly overhead. “That’s just under two miles away.”

  I looked around us. “Hey,” I said, “isn’t it kind of dumb for us to be sitting on this hilltop with the storm coming?”

  “More than kind of dumb,” she said.

  “Let’s go down by Sharon,” I said.

  She didn’t disagree.

  As we made our way down the slope, lightning flashed several more times. Each time, Erica counted the seconds till the thunder struck. The closest it got was one bolt that was seven and a half seconds close, or a mile and a half away. The wind picked up, blowing from the southwest. The lightning was west and northwest of us. With a little good luck, the storm would blow past us and not over us.

  The lightning flashes lit up the desert around us like a scene in a black and white movie. In the brief pulses of light, I looked for any sign of Macy or John around the fire. I saw nothing but bushes and saguaro, no sign of anyone, just the fire flickering low in the gusts of wind.

  Erica and I sat down beside Sharon to watch the display.

  “That wind sure is cold,” Sharon said as we sat down.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  While we waited and watched, the lightning grew more intense, but I was relieved to notice that it didn’t get closer. Maybe the rain would miss us, too. Sharon managed to complain about every single element of the desert, our predicament, being pregnant, Macy and John, and life in general. Erica and I did not encourage her. I told myself that she was just anxious and worried. Erica looked like she might rather take her chances on the hilltop.

  So we were much relieved when we heard John and Macy’s footsteps on the hillside behind us. “Cool,” I said, standing up. “With the thunder and all I didn’t hear—”

  Lightning flashed.

  It wasn’t Macy and John at all. It was the poachers. They were only about twenty feet from us, and the thunder hadn’t distracted them at all. They held their rifles at their hips, leveled right at us. And they were smiling.

  “Hi,” one of them said, “you guys havin‘ a party?”

  Chapter 17

  “Well,” I said. “We’ve been wondering where you were.”

  “Well,” the first one said, “you seem to have found us.”

  “I think you should know,” Sharon piped up, “that I’m pregnant, so if you shoot me you’ll really be killing a defenseless baby.”

  “Thanks,” the other one said, “I’ll remember to write that on my scorecard.”

  They laughed. Just then thunder clapped. My heart leapt into my throat, thinking at first that they’d fired their rifles.

  They hadn’t.

  I tried desperately to think of a way out. There was none. They stood between us and the hilltop. We stood with our backs to the bluff. To our left and right they could shoot at us forever, but they wouldn’t have to. The only way out was over the bluff. Only the water might be shallow, or we might land on the rocks.

  Screwed again.

  “Where’s your little friends?” the first one asked.

  Before I could say anything Sharon spoke up. “They went to get the police,” she said. “You’re really going to be in trouble when they get back.”

  They laughed again. “They went to get the police, huh?” the first one said. “Shit, they should be back sometime tomorrow, then.”

  They took a couple steps toward us. Lightning flashed behind us, glinting menacingly off their barrels. In the blink of light I could see them, two giants wearing dark clothes and boots and hats.

  “Look,” I said desperately, “you don’t want to do this.”

  “We don’t?”

  “No. If you just let us go, we’ll go on our way, and we’ll say we never saw anything.”

  “You will?”

  Thunder struck again, and my heart jumped again.

  “Yeah,” Erica said. “We’ll just go home and never say anything about it to anybody.”

  They took another couple steps toward us. All three of us instinctively took a half-step backward.

  “Well,” the first poacher said, “that sounds nice and all, but I don’t think so.”

  “Honest,” Erica pleaded, “we’ll swear we never saw a thing.”

  “You know,” the second poacher said to the first. “She sure has got some beautiful lips.”

  The cold blood running through my veins chilled to ice. The first poacher smiled. They stepped forward. We stepped back.

  The gunshot boomed louder than thunder.

  We all jumped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Erica start to fall over the edge of the bluff. I turned toward her and lunged as she fell, eyes wide, arms stretched out to grab something—anything.

  And I caught her, snagged her right hand with both of mine.

  As she disappeared over the edge and I fell to the ground, holding her hand with all my strength, I realized something.

  The poachers hadn’t fired the shot.

  They did now, but I knew they weren’t shooting at us. They were shooting back—at John and Macy. The cavalry to the rescue.

  I had other things on my mind. Erica’s palm was sweaty, my palms were sweaty.

  Her hand was slipping.

  Sharon had ducked to the ground when the first shot exploded. I called to her to grab Erica’s other hand. She looked at me like she didn’t know who I was, paralyzed with fear. I didn’t dare try to pull Erica up because I thought I’d lose my grip. I just held on.

  Lightning flashed.

  Another gunshot cracked behind us. The bullet ricocheted off the rocks and whined over my head toward the fire.

  I heard their footsteps as the poachers ran for cover.

  Three more gunshots pounded in rapid succession, two from the poachers and one back at them.

  Apparently they felt they were losing, or maybe they wanted to wait for a better chance at us, or maybe they had other people to torment.

  Whatever it was, I heard their footsteps as they ran farther away—and kept going.

  The thunder struck. This time my heart kn
ew the difference.

  Suddenly John was there, reaching over the edge of the bluff. He grabbed Erica’s other hand, and we hauled her back onto the rim.

  There was no time for thanks.

  “Come on,” John said urgently. “We have to get out of here.”

  We got.

  John trotted ahead of us. Macy brought up the rear. John led us upriver. We went on for what seemed like quite a ways. I was wondering if he planned on crossing the river again when he took a right turn and headed east, away from the river. This confused me, but not for long. He turned right again quickly and led us back to the hill. He stopped in a different depression partway up the north side, where we could see the fire, but not so high as to make us lightning rods.

  John stood. The rest of us collapsed, mostly exhausted and panting, onto the ground.

  “That,” I said, “was a close one.”

  “Yeah,” Sharon said. “It took you guys long enough to get back.”

  “We’d have come back sooner,” John said, “but we stopped for ice cream.”

  “I take it that was their fire, then?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Macy said. “When we saw they weren’t there we figured they were going after you, so we ran all the way back.”

  “Right,” Sharon put in sarcastically. “You probably walked.”

  “How many guns did you get?” Erica asked.

  “Just this one,” John said. “Just my baby. It was on the front seat of their truck. We didn’t have time to look around.”

  “Do you think they’ll come back soon?” I asked.

  “No,” John said. “They have to get back to their truck before we do.”

  “Do you think they’ll come back later?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I know they don’t like being shot at.”

  We were all quiet for a while. Lightning flashed and I heard Erica slowly counting off the seconds. The lightning was mostly north of us now. It looked like the storm was going to miss us.

  “Well,” John said finally, “they’re back at their truck.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “They just put their fire out. Now that we’re armed, they don’t want to be targets, either.”

  “So I guess this means we still can’t build a fire, right?” Sharon asked.