Saguaro Riptide

FOUR

Man alive, did this guy burn her up, him with his little appraising squint the first time he glimpsed the badge pinned to her chest, his eyes ping-ponging between the polished star and her breasts like she was some fantastic wet dream with a gun and a pair of shiny handcuffs who couldn’t wait to check out his long hard nightstick. Nothing scorched her worse than that kind of look, especially from a guy dressed in cactus-patterned turista wear. She was the law in this town, goddamnit, not some goddamn trophy. No jerk who reeked of Old Spice was going to mount her pelt on the wall of his goddamn game room. No fucking way.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Uh-uh. Not by a long shot. The worst of it was when the guy said her name, the way it slipped through his lips, practically drooling sarcasm.

Wyetta. . Earp?

Not that she wasn’t used to that kind of reaction. She’d taken plenty of grief over her name ever since she was knee-high. Being a girl and being named after Wyatt Earp was a fate that notched pretty high on the adolescent misery scale, as bad as being the boy named Sue that Johnny Cash had sung about back in the sixties. She’d spent a good part of her youth hating her name and the drunken highway patrolman father who’d given it to her. She’d wanted to change it a million times, and as a girl she’d sworn she’d do just that as soon as she turned eighteen.

But names were funny things. They could turn you into someone you never thought you’d be. That was how it had been for her. On her sixteenth birthday it had dawned on her, a crystal-clear vision of the person she wanted to become. That was the day she decided to make her given name work for her, to become all the things that it stood for. She’d felt kind of like a superhero then, as if she’d discovered a Wonder Woman costume hanging in her closet, a costume that had always been there-waiting and invisible-until she was ready to see it.

But this pug in her lock-up. . Wyetta flipped her braid over her left shoulder. The way he said her name, that little grin tickling the corners of his mouth while the remnants of his scarred-up eyebrows arched above his sunglasses like a goddamn bascule bridge.

She wasn’t going to forget that look anytime soon. No way, Jose.

And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d asked her about Komoko, asked her straight out, his voice completely devoid of respect, like she was a goddamn secretary who was supposed to bow and scrape and give him a goddamn cup of coffee along with his answer.

Man alive, she’d wanted to bash him then. She could see it. A roundhouse kick clipping the point of his chin. Or a kick to the balls, her Nocona boot digging in hard, his eyes crossing up, face going white, precious little cojones cracking like walnuts.

A little voice in her head warned her it might not be so easy, that this was a man who went toe-to-toe for a living, but she shook it off. Professional boxer, hell. She didn’t care anything about that. She’d seen the pug’s fight with Sugar Ray Sattler. Baddalach cut and bled worse than a hemophiliac, plus he was slower than the Mummy. He dragged his right foot around the ring like it was stuck in a bucket of horseshit. He couldn’t do anything with a mover like Sugar Ray Sattler.

And that was pitiful, because Wyetta Earp owned moves that would make Sugar Ray Sattler break out in a cold, cold sweat. She had the paper and pot metal to prove it. Mounted on the wall directly in front of her were a dozen framed certificates signed by a half-dozen senseis, and a glass case filled with martial arts tournament trophies stood on the wall to her left.

She’d signed up for Tae Kwon Do lessons at sixteen, the day after she decided to make her given name work for her. It was her first step on the road to becoming a superhero, and she’d taken her lumps without complaint at a dojo above a Korean market in Tucson.

Three years later she earned her first black belt. A month after that she broke her father’s jaw with a roundhouse kick when he took after her mother one time too many. Two more months and she booted the son of a bitch out of their house for good.

Now her mom lived in one of the mobile home parks in Pipeline Beach, happy as a clam, and she never even mentioned that her ex-husband had used her for a punching bag for twenty long years. Nope. All Mama Earp talked about was how proud she was of her only child.

You could read something into that, sure. But as far as Wyetta was concerned, you could leave all that bullshit about self-actualization in the psych texts, thank you very much, because she had done it the old-fashioned way, with hard work and lots of lumps and plenty of flying by the seat of her pants. And in the end she had become everything she’d set out to be-a sheriff and a hardcase of the first stripe, just like the man she’d decided to emulate so long ago.

She stared at the framed tintype on her desk. Wyatt Earp stared back at her. His sepia eyes were hard. You couldn’t see his lips at all because they were hidden by a moustache, but Wyetta was sure that they formed a firm, unsmiling line.

Wyetta pulled open the center drawer of her desk and withdrew what looked like a wooden valentine-a flat piece of cedar that sprouted three stubby legs on the bottom. Then she lifted the blotter from the top of the desk and set it aside.

Below was a Ouija board.

Wyetta had purchased the board in Los Angeles. A prominent antique dealer had staked his reputation on its authenticity, but she’d had it verified by a recognized Earpana expert before laying down her long green. So there was no doubt in her mind that the Ouija board had once been the property of Josie Marcus, just as there was no doubt in her mind that Josie Marcus had been Wyatt Earp’s wife.

Wyetta set the heart-shaped planchette on the board. Doing that always gave her a chill, because she knew Wyatt must have done the same thing a century before. Her fingers hovering over the wooden heart, light and ready. At the same time, she stared at the iron picture frame on her desk and found and held Wyatt Earp’s sepia gaze.

“Does Baddalach know anything?” she asked.

The cedar heart hesitated. Wyetta’s heart skipped a beat.

Three cedar legs scraped across the board as the planchette darted to the corner marked YES.

“Is he going to give me any trouble?”

Wyetta held her breath. The heart drifted to the center of the board. She exhaled in relief. . until it pulled back.

To the same spot, the spot marked YES.

Her anger rose. Words spilled out of her mouth in a rush, and when she bit them off the taste of lipstick was bitter on her tongue.

“What kind of man is he?” was the question she asked.

The heart moved surely, quickly, picking out one letter after another.

B. . A. . D. .

. . A. .

. . S

. . S

The muscles in Wyetta’s shoulders knotted. Her arms tensed, and the cedar heart bolted forward and escaped her fingers, clattering against the photo of Wyatt Earp, knocking it to the floor.

Glass shattered. Wyetta stared at the Ouija board, shaking as if she’d taken a mean left hook to the temple.

A knock on the office door brought her around.

The words came automatically. “It’s open.”

Deputy Holloway entered the office. “Vegas PD just returned my call.”

“And?”

“Baddalach’s telling the truth-the promoter dropped the charges last night.”

Wyetta nodded.

Deputy Holloway watched her, pretending that she didn’t see the Ouija board on the sheriff’s desk or the tintype in the iron frame with glass busted out of it that lay on the floor next to a faded cedar heart. It was better not to speak of these things. This the deputy had learned through long, hard experience.

Instead, the deputy asked the obvious question. “What do you want me to do with him?”

Wyetta swiveled her chair, turning away from the door, away from the deputy. She stared at her trophy case, at the framed certificates papering the wall. Wyatt was wrong about this one. He had to be. Because Wyetta was a badass herself, a certified badass with trophies and sheepskins aplenty.

“Sheriff?”

“Let the pug go. Deputy,” Wyetta said.

She smiled when she said it.