Saguaro Riptide

FIVE

Eight-thirty in the A.M. and Jack Baddalach felt like an egg sizzling on a hot skillet, and whoever had ordered that egg liked ’em scrambled hard.

The highway stretched before him, blacktop shimmering under a blanket of heat waves. The former light-heavyweight champion of the world had been walking for fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen a single car.

He began to wonder exactly how many miles separated him from Pipeline Beach. Seven miles seemed an optimistic estimate; ten was more likely. In the old days, when he’d first turned pro, he’d run ten first thing every morning and gone on to spar ten rounds in the afternoon. But in those days he’d gone 155 soaking wet. These days his weight was closer to 180, and he’d been beat up real good a time or two. Most boxers didn’t like to admit it, but there was something about surviving a real solid beating that took something out of you forever. No matter how hard you trained, you could never get it back.

Jack hadn’t done his roadwork in Wolverine boots and Levis, either. That’s what he was wearing today. The only positive wardrobe choice he’d made was a white T-shirt. It didn’t soak up the heat the way a black one would, but it didn’t exactly make him feel like he was taking a stroll on the North Pole, either.

In fact, he felt like someone was roasting his backbone over a low fire. Still, all in all, he had to admit that his little constitutional was slightly more pleasant than the morning’s other option-a load of buckshot in the ass. And then there was that stuff Elvis had said about Jack’s family jewels hanging on a cactus spike or something. . Jack wasn’t sure of the precise quote, but it had definitely formed a mental picture that had moved into his cerebrum and set up permanent housekeeping.

So he kept on walking, and he tried to think about other things, but every time he looked at one of those goddamned saguaros he imagined his cojones dangling from on high like bloody Christmas ornaments.

So he looked at the sky instead. Still no clouds. No shade, no nothing.

And one less vulture, thanks to Elvis’s shotgun.

Hey, get off it, champ. What’s done is done. Sure you got scuffed up. But you survived. Get up off the canvas, take the eight count, and get back to business.

Yeah. Soon as I hump these ten miles.

Jack ran fingers through his hair, slicked it straight back, out of his eyes, and wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow. So he’d suffered a flash knockdown. So what. Elvis had come out of nowhere and put him on his ass. But only because Jack had gotten overconfident. After taking out the hit man, he’d figured he was on easy street. He’d figured all he had to do was meet Komoko’s sweetie, sweat her a little, and she’d turn over Freddy G’s bankroll most expeditiously.

He’d set up a meeting with the girl last night. Her name was Priscilla and she’d been real nervous on the phone-to Jack, she’d sounded like a woman who’d been downing straight shots of Maalox since his first call. Still, he should have known to watch his back walking in. Like the referees always said, protect yourself at all times.

Jack couldn’t decide if Priscilla had actually set him up, or if Elvis’s heartachin’ G.I. Blues blitzkrieg was a result of real jealousy. The mop could flop either way. But either way you figured it, Jack was sure of one thing-when Elvis talked about Vincent Komoko, his words came straight from his not-so-wooden heart.

Vincent Komoko was dead.

Buried.

Getting his mail from the gophers.

If gophers could live in a burnin’ hellhole like this desert.

Jack wondered about that. He really did. And he wondered about other things, too. Elvis had mentioned that “some people” he knew had “chopped” Komoko, and Jack wondered who those “people” might be. He wondered if a guy like Elvis might have a couple of friends who were especially good at chopping. Maybe a couple of friends who wore badges and brassieres.

It was something to ponder, all right. This Jack did. In fact, so intense was his consideration of the issue that he didn’t notice the battered Dodge Dakota until it was almost on top of him.

The truck pulled onto the shoulder and didn’t stop until the front bumper was about to get real familiar with Jack’s kneecaps.

The driver hung her head out the window and smiled at him from behind her shades.

“So, champ,” said Kate Benteen. “You want a lift, or what?”

Jack got into the truck and smelled strawberries.

There was a box of Pop Tarts on the seat next to him, along with a thermos. A raw tart missing a few bites lay on the dashboard. It was strawberry all right, and it was leaking.

“You hungry?” Benteen asked.

“Yeah, but not for that.”

“Your loss.” Benteen finished off the tart and poured herself a short cup of coffee. “Breakfast of champions.”

Jack squinted. “Hey, that’s my line.”

“So it is, champ.” She tossed down the coffee, capped the thermos, and hit the road. “Which way you headed?”

“Back to Pipeline Beach. I’m about ready for a real breakfast. Do you know if there’s a Jack in the Box in town?”

“Can’t help you there, champ.”

“Damn. How about MacDonald’s?”

“Jesus. I don’t work for the chamber of commerce.” Benteen’s gaze didn’t stray from the road. “And pay attention to the little details, champ. Like for instance, right now Pipeline Beach is in our rearview mirror. I’m heading the other way.”

“Leaving so soon?”

"Don’t you wish.” She grinned at him. Dark lipstick. Lower lip full and pouty. Pretty damned attractive.

“Well … if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

"What?”

Jack shrugged. “Something my mother used to say.”

“Your mother must have had the brains in the family.”

Jack thought about that, but trying to decide if Benteen had just insulted his mother made him kind of dizzy, maybe it was the heat. Or the fact that he’d missed breakfast. Anyway, he figured he’d better sidestep the whole thing, especially since Benteen was driving. He didn’t want to walk the two miles he’d already walked all over again.

Jack grabbed a raw Pop Tart from the box and peeled the wrapper. “So where are we going?”

Again, the grin. “Champ, I’ve got to see a man about a horse.”

The hell of it was, she wasn’t kidding. They drove past the trailer house with the pink Caddy parked out front-seeing it a second time. Jack knew it had to be Elvis’s place. About ten miles past the trailer they passed a sign advertising a horse ranch. Kate Benteen swung into a long driveway and followed a leaning fence line until she came to a corral where a guy dressed head to toe in denim that hadn’t been blue since the days of Eisenhower was waiting for her.

“This’ll only take a minute,” she said, pulling to a stop and ratcheting the emergency brake.

“You’re really gonna buy a horse?”

“Appaloosa.”

“Why?”

She lowered her sunglasses, gave him another little taste of her green eyes. “Sometimes it pays to have a back door, champ.”

Jack knew even less about horses than he knew about shotguns, but any fool could see that Kate Benteen had some serious knowledge of equestrian pursuits.

Which meant that she knew enough to steer clear of the horse hockey if she wanted to keep her combat boots clean, and then some. Which was another way of saying that she handled that little pony, all right.

Jack overheard the old-timer telling Kate that she should watch herself because the devil’s own fire burned in the Appaloosa’s belly, but the warning didn’t seem to slow Benteen down one bit. First she made a few turns, tugging the reins gently but firmly, the horse whinnying and snorting until it figured out who was boss. That done, she didn’t waste any time-she spun the sleek animal around, jumped the corral fence, and took off into the brush without so much as a hearty hiho Silver.

Horse and rider were gone about ten minutes. On the return they jumped the fence again and Benteen was off the animal before it even broke stride.

She handed the reins to the old-timer, who couldn’t do more than take off his busted Stetson and shake his head. Benteen pulled a wallet from the back pocket of her jeans. Money changed hands. She climbed the corral fence and came down walking, dusty combat boots making purposeful strides. Over her shoulder she said, “Fatten him up some. Give him some dog biscuits. And Frosted Mini-Wheats, if he wants ’em.”

“You goddamn right,” the old-timer said.

Jack watched Benteen come. There was a glow to her face now, a little sheen of sweat. It looked good on her.

Her T-shirt worried him, though. It was canary yellow and featured a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike. The legend beneath the snake was a familiar one: don’t tread on me.

Jack Baddalach was beginning to think that was pretty solid advice. He poured himself a cup of coffee and helped himself to another Pop Tart as Benteen slid behind the wheel.

“Don’t push your luck, champ,” she said, and she grabbed the Pop Tarts box and shoved it under the seat.

They were back on the highway, heading toward Pipeline Beach.

Jack asked, “Where’d you learn about horses?”

“I’m a Montana girl. My daddy was a cavalry officer-Air Cav-Vietnam, of course. Helicopters. But Daddy was the kind of man who wanted to live in another era. Wanted to charge up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt. Anyway, he got me started with my first little Paint when I was just four. I got serious about it later-from 1980 to ’83 I won my age division in barrel racing events from San Francisco to Calgary. Took a couple years off, came back and won the Grand Nationals in ’89.”

“What happened between ’83 and ’89?”

“College. Plus I got interested in platform diving. I won a silver at Seoul in ’88.”

Jack laughed. “Yeah. You mentioned that yesterday. I guess I can’t quite keep up.”

“You said it, not me,” she whispered, then fell silent.

Jack didn’t let it go. “’83 to ’88, huh?” he said. “What were you. . maybe twelve years old when you went to college?”

“I was fifteen. You’re a smart guy. You can figure it out. Home schooling. Child prodigy. All that kind of stuff. Hey, I can even play the piano. Anyway, I started college at fifteen. Graduated med school just shy of twenty and finished my residency at twenty-one.”

“A real-life doctor, huh? And here I was just getting used to the idea of you being a rodeo rider and an Olympic champion. Oh. . and a movie star, too. Not to mention the fact that you used to be an officer and a gentlewoman.”

“To put it all together for you, there aren’t too many patients who’ll accept a twenty-one-year-old doctor. So I joined the army. They were happy to have me. I was a flight surgeon-it wasn’t like I came up through the ranks. Major Kate Benteen. Like I said, you can look it up.”

“So what do you want me to call you-Major, Doc … or maybe you’re a lawyer and an Indian chief, too?”

She kept her eyes on the road. “For starters, why don’t you try Benteen.”

“Good.” Baddalach finished off his Pop Tart. “You can call me Jack.”

“Sure thing, champ.”

Once again, they passed the trailer with the pink Caddy parked out front.

“So,” she said, “how’s the Mike Hammer biz going so far? Any beautiful babes ask you to kiss me, deadly? Anybody beat you up. . maybe take a shot at you?”

Jack closed his eyes. The way she put things. Like she was playing with him. Like she already had everything figured out and was enjoying watching him stumble around.

“I can almost hear the wheels grinding up there in cranial central command. Don’t hurt yourself, champ.”

Jack opened his eyes. “Okay. You win. Fact is, the Mike Hammer biz could be a whole lot better. No one’s tried to kiss me. And this morning a guy took a couple of shots at me with a shotgun.”

“Ah … so you’ve met Pipeline Beach’s own King of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

“You know him?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I know a little bit about him. For instance, I know he uses a Winchester shotgun to enforce a strict vulture no-fly zone over his property.”

“He likes other men even less than he likes vultures. I think he worries about his wife’s extracurricular activities.”

“Yeah … but a guy like that, he’s not too hard to figure. I mean, think about it. Elvis impersonator loses his voice to larynx cancer, the old confidence meter has gotta clock dangerously low. I bet he would have rather lost his nuts.” Jack remembered the Elvis impersonator’s comment concerning cactus and castration. He didn’t share it with Benteen, but he figured her appraisal was dead-on.

And the part about larynx cancer-that explained the scars on the guy’s neck, the gizmo that looked like a microphone, and the guy’s robotic voice. His vocal cords had been surgically removed.

“What else do you know about him?” Jack asked.

“Ellis Aaron Perkins. Born Ed Klausthauser. He moved to Vegas shortly after the King’s death and became the first Elvis impersonator to hit it big. Had a five-year contract with one of the major hotels and was a big hit with all those fan club queenies, at least the ones who could still fit into their high school prom dresses. Apparently the guy was a sexually voracious predator, if you want it in Gold Medal paperbackese. He really got into some serious roll-playing. You know, he enjoyed that semimournful, seminecrophiliacal snatch.”

“You mean he liked the women to pretend he was the real deal?”

Benteen nodded. “If they were talking to his face. Carry on that conversation a couple feet lower, he liked ’em to address the royal member as Little Elvis.”

“Cute.”

“It gets better. After the cancer ended his career, he disappeared for a couple years. Drove around the country in that pink Caddy of his. Then, about five years ago, he moved here and settled down with the lovely Priscilla. She was the daughter of some fan club queen from Tucson-he’d known her since she was a little girl. Anyway, he bought himself a bigga bigga hunka desert in Pipeline Beach. Planned to build The Elvis Presley Museum and Memorial Miniature Golf Course.

“It would have been something, too. Ellis planned to create a copy of Graceland with a different miniature golf hole in each room. Paradise, tourist-trap style. He actually started construction, but the Presley estate found out about the deal and came down hard. Pretty soon our buddy Little Elvis had eight or ten lawyers jerking his balls. Ellis dropped some serious change on lawyers of his own, even tried to compromise, but the Presley people wouldn’t have any of it.”

“He should have put in windmills.”

“Huh?”

“Windmills,” Jack repeated. “For the miniature golf course. You want to be a success, you’ve gotta have windmills.”

Benteen nodded. “Yeah, windmills probably would have swung the deal. He had a pretty good eighteenth hole designed, though.”

“Yeah? What?”

‘The last hole was supposed to be in the master bathroom. There’d be a horizontal Elvis statue on the floor, mouth open. You’d putt your ball right through the King’s sneer. Game over.”

“It didn’t roll out his asshole or anything?”

She shook her head. “Nope. That would have been sacrilegious. Besides, if the first rule of miniature golf is that you’ve got to have windmills, the second rule is that you’ve got to get the ball back at the end of the game.”

Jack shook his head. “How’d you find out about Ellis, anyway?”

“Sandy Kapalua-Dayton. The woman who runs the Saguaro Riptide. Seems like she knows every story in town.”

Jack grinned. Talk about scouting your opponent. Kate Benteen was turning out to be one amazing woman. “So what’s Ellis do these days? I mean, besides shooting at strangers with his shotgun.”

“He’s an electronics wiz. You must have seen that battery-powered rig he’s got for talking-that didn’t come out of any medical supply catalog. He custom-designed it himself, wanted it to look like one of the big ol’ stage mikes Elvis used in Vegas.”

She brushed a stray strand of hair away from her face.

Her hair was auburn. And then it caught the light, turned the darkest red. .

Damn, Baddalach. You’re getting carried away.

Benteen hadn’t noticed. “Anyway, Ellis has a little electronics business. You know those emergency phones they’ve got along the highways these days?”

“You mean those solar-powered cellular things?”

“Yeah. The ones you use if you break down in the middle of nowhere.”

“Okay.”

“Well, our friend Ellis steals those phones. Guts them. Transplants the circuitry and programs the codes in another cell phone. He sells the finished product at flea markets around the state. Whoever buys one gets a couple of months free long distance courtesy of the great state of Arizona. After that, the phone company catches on and cuts things off. But, hey, in the meantime it’s a pretty good scam.”

“A real character.”

“A real psycho character. Sandy thinks he beats up his wife. He’s just around the bend from pathologically jealous, as you found out this morning.” Benteen took a deep breath, and suddenly her voice went cold. “I think that maybe Ellis killed Vince Komoko. Or if he didn’t, he knows who did.”

Jack shook his head. There it was, right in front of him. Kate Benteen was definitely dishing it up and putting it right on his plate.

He wondered why. He could think of a half-dozen reasons right off. Some good. Some not so good.

Maybe he could trust her. Maybe they could work together- get to the end of this thing without anybody getting hurt.

Maybe he should tell her what Ellis had said about Komoko- that Ellis claimed to know the people who had chopped Vince down.

She said, “Let me ask you a question, champ.”

“Shoot.”

“Did you know Vince?”

“No.”

"Then you’re just after the money, nothing else? This whole thing isn’t personal to you?”

He looked at her. A long hard look. She stared straight ahead, at the road, waiting for an answer.

He wanted to tell her about his last night in the ring and how he knew he could never climb through the ropes again, and his worries about the new career Freddy had in mind for him. And he wanted to tell her about the hit man who was on his tail, and what the guy had done to his dog, and what the guy might have done to Johnny Da Nang, and how just the idea of putting someone so completely innocent as Johnny in danger was driving him nuts.

But most of all Jack wanted to give Kate Benteen the right answer, the one that she wanted to hear. He didn’t know why. But it occurred to him that maybe if this whole thing was something personal to Kate Benteen, it might become something personal to him, as well.

He sucked a deep breath. That was crazy. Man, he didn’t know anything about this woman. She could be anybody. Sure she could dive into a swimming pool as smooth as Esther-fucking-Williams, but that didn’t make her an Olympic medalist. And sure she could ride a horse, but that didn’t prove she was a rodeo queen.

Let alone all the other stuff she claimed to be.

And she claimed to be one hell of a lot.

Man oh man. .

“I’m waiting, champ,” she said. “One more time: is it personal?”

“I’ve got to think about that,” Jack said, and the words were barely out of his mouth when she whispered, “Don’t think too long.”

They pulled into town.

“You still hungry?” she asked. “Want me to look for a Jack in the Box?”

“No,” he said. “I think I’ll take your advice.”

She raised an eyebrow.

Jack raised an eyebrow as well. “You can drop me off at the public library, Major Benteen.”