Saguaro Riptide

TWO

Benteen didn’t let up for a second. First she bandaged Jack’s arm. Then she checked Sandy, even though Sandy insisted she’d been fine since Jack pulled that damn towel out of her mouth. After that, Kate attended to her own wounds.

Finally, she asked Sandy about some of the equipment in the junkyard. Jack wondered why she cared about that stuff, until she climbed into her truck and drove through the gap in the chain-link fence.

A few minutes later, the night was filled with the roar of heavy equipment. A few minutes after that, Kate returned.

On foot.

Sandy emerged from the motel office with a six-pack.

“Any problems?” Sandy asked, handing Kate a beer.

“No,” Kate said. “That truck is part of your scrap heap now.”

“I can’t believe you junked your truck,” Jack said, reaching for a beer.

“Had to get rid of the evidence,” Benteen said. “And it wasn’t my truck. I bought it at a bar near the Tucson airport. And I paid cash.”

“You were thinking ahead,” Jack said, rolling the cold beer bottle across his sore knuckles.

“And so was I.” Sandy handed Jack a credit card receipt form. “I knew that Komoko was with the mob, and I figured that he had something to do with laundered money or drugs, the way he came through town once a month. So when Wyetta came sniffing around with questions about Komoko, I got suspicious. And when Ms. Benteen showed up with questions of her own, I started to see visions of missing dollars or missing dope. So when you showed up asking the same questions-”

“You figured you’d take out a little insurance policy.” Jack smiled. “You took my credit card imprint, but you didn’t run it, figuring that if I ended up with the money I might be willing to part with a chunk of it to buy back that receipt.”

“Yeah,” Sandy said. “If I didn’t run your card, it’d be like you never checked in.”

“Pretty smart,” Jack said. “But this wasn’t my only stop in Pipeline Beach. I was arrested in this town. Someone’s going to remember that I had a run-in with the sheriff, and if they put that together with Wyetta’s death-”

“Get real, champ.” Kate laughed. “You were arrested over a stack of magazines. Doesn’t exactly seem like that’s sufficient motive for murder.”

“Anyway, as far as I’m concerned you were never here.” Sandy tore the credit card receipt in half and handed it to Jack. “You saved my life. I would have suffocated if you hadn’t taken that towel out of my mouth. A surfboard broke my nose off Maui back in ’66, and I haven’t taken a decent breath through it ever since.”

“I know just what you mean,” Jack said. “I’ve had my nose busted a time or two.”

“Well, you saved my life. I’m glad you showed up when you did.”

“Me too.”

They clinked their beer bottles and drank deeply.

“What about me?” Kate asked Sandy. “Was I here?”

“You were a little smarter-you paid cash.” Sandy handed Kate a registration card. “But you weren’t here, either.”

“Outstanding.”

“Yeah. . well, thanks for shotgunning that rapist bastard. That’s a load off my mind.”

“So what do we do now?” Jack asked. “I mean, we’ve got a few dead bodies lying around.”

“I’m only taking responsibility for two of ’em,” Kate said. “I shotgunned the hit man. And I shot the sheriff, but I didn’t shoot the deputy.”

“No,” Jack said, “you ran over her with your truck.”

“Hey. . she was already dead.”

“I’m not kidding,” Jack said. “This is serious.”

Kate sipped her beer. “I figure it this way: first, we put the hit man’s corpse up in room 23 along with Wyetta. We leave the Heckler in his hand, the Benelli near Wyetta. We put Ellis’s bootleg phones in the back of Wyetta’s Cherokee, and we park the Cherokee on top of the deputy, maybe leave the engine running and the door open-”

Jack nodded. “And the whole thing will look like a bootleg phone deal gone bad. But do you think anyone will buy it?”

“Not if we leave it at that. But if we leave an empty money bag in the hit man’s room and scatter a few hundred-dollar bills across the floor, it might look a little better. Hell, we can even toss a fistful of dollars into the wind, let ’em blow around the parking lot. It’ll look just like the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

“It might just work,” Jack said. “But what about Ellis and Priscilla?”

“Nothing to worry about there-Wyetta and Rorie killed Ellis, after all. No way anyone can tie us to that.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Jack said.

“What about me?” Sandy asked. “What was I doing while all this stuff was going on?”

“Hey-you heard a lot of shooting. You were afraid to come out of your house. And you saw the sheriff’s Cherokee parked outside, so you figured the cops already knew what was going on. That’s why you didn’t call them for, oh, maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“You really think they’ll buy it?” Jack asked.

“No sense worrying about that,” Kate said. “Either they will or they won’t.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“I think we’d better get the hell out of here, champ.” Kate gave Sandy a hug. “And I think when this whole thing blows over, maybe you better get out of here, too.”

Sandy smiled. “Maybe I can do that now. Something ended for me tonight. When that son of a bitch broke into my house … I don’t know, I guess it made me realize that I’m not going to live forever.”

“Closure’s a bitch, all right,” Kate said. “You and Dale, you find yourselves some greener pastures.'

“Oh, man,” Sandy said. “I forgot all about that damn dog.” She drained her beer. “Either of you seen him?”

Kate looked at Jack. Both said, “No.”

“Dale,” Sandy shouted, heading for the junkyard. “You coconut brain! You better not be dead!”

The sound that rose from the junkyard was only a dog’s bark. But somehow, it sounded more like an answer.