The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 31

When he saw the man step out of the Quonset hut, a tiny figure nearly a quarter-mile away, Bobby Onions eased up on the accelerator and coasted forward.

“Who is the guy?” he asked.

Vern said, “He calls himself Eliot Rosewater.”

“You don’t think that’s his name?”

“No.”

“What’s it say on the check?”

“He pays cash.”

Slowly the Land Rover rocked across a series of potholes.

When Bobby consulted the rearview mirror, Vern knew what he would see. They had traveled little more than a quarter of a mile from the county road, but it looked like a long way back.

Directly ahead, the board-flat plain began to rise to foothills about a thousand yards beyond the buildings. To the east, the land dwindled into a haze of dust, and far away to the west, it melted into the declining sun.

Bobby asked, “Why’s the meet have to be in such a godforsaken place?”

“The desert has its own stark beauty,” Vern said.

“What’re you-pimping for the Mojave Chamber of Commerce?”

“Come on, Bobby, pick up some speed. He’s waiting.”

The land was as colorless as concrete, and most of the sun-parched vegetation bristled gray, except for swaths of struggling purple sage.

“Too lonely,” Bobby said.

“Will you relax? He doesn’t want to risk being seen with me. I committed a couple felonies for him today-remember? And since I’d rather not lose my PI license, discretion is fine with me, too.”

In these last hours of the day, the desert light hammered down through the parched air as hard as it had done at noon. The gnarled and stunted mesquite resembled wrought-iron sculpture, and the curved profiles of the Quonsets had edges sharp enough to cut the sky.

“Besides,” Vern said, “he’s not gonna leave his plane untended out here just so we can all meet in a cozy doughnut shop. I’ve dealt with him before. It’s all right.”

“When before?”

“Eight months ago. I searched this architect’s place for him.”

“What architect?”

“That’s already more than you need to know.”

“Back then, the rally was here?”

“The meet was here, yeah.”

“You didn’t use me. Who’d you use for backup?”

Vern sighed. “If you have to know, it was Dirk Cutter.”

“For God’s sake, Vern, he’s brain-dead. You’d use Dirk Cutter before you’d call me?”

“At least that’s his real name, he didn’t change it. I used him because he had a four-wheel drive. You didn’t have the Rover then.”

“Yeah. All right. I was still driving that crappy Honda.”

“And my Chevy couldn’t handle this terrain. How do you afford a Rover, anyway?”

Bobby grinned and winked. “A grateful lady.”

Wincing, Vern said, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I’ll tell you on the way home,” Bobby promised, and pressed gently on the accelerator. “So why the architect?”

“You never shut up, do you? You never stop.”

“I’m a procto. I bore right in. I’m all curiosity.”

Because he didn’t want to give Bobby the satisfaction of asking him what procto meant, and because he worried that he would ask him if he didn’t say something else, Vern relented: “The architect has a thing with the bounce. This guy wanted to know all about him because he was dating the bounce.”

“The bounce from today?” Bobby asked.

“What other bounce do I know?”

Letting their speed fall, Bobby said, “He wants to know about the architect because the architect’s bouncing the bounce, then eight months later he has you do a job on the bounce. What’s that about?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s real interesting, isn’t it?”

“Not that interesting,” Vern said.

“You could ask him.”

“If he didn’t tell me up front, it’s none of my business. You don’t ask the client why.”

“Get out of the Stone Age, Vern. He’s the wallet.”

“The client, the wallet-it doesn’t matter. I don’t ask if he doesn’t volunteer.”

“Where’s he fly in from?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“It’s really mysterious, isn’t it?”

“Not that mysterious,” Vern said. “And don’t you ask him anything, either. You do, he won’t throw more business my way.”

“He must pay well.”

“Brilliant deduction. I don’t agree to burglarize a place for chump change.”

“The plane’s too far away to read the registration number.”

“Forget about the plane. You’re making me crazy.”

As Bobby braked to a stop near the Quonset hut, he said, “Hey, he’s a nobody.”

“He pays like a somebody.”

“I mean, he’s harmless. He’s a fat-faced bald guy like you.”

“The lady is an idiot.”

“What lady?”

“The grateful one behind the Rover.”

Bobby actually glanced at the rearview mirror, as if expecting to see a woman standing behind them, and then said, “Oh. Yeah. Well, she’s not an idiot, but she’s not that smart, either.”

Carrying the white trash bag that contained everything he had confiscated at Redwing’s house, Vernon Lesley walked forward from the Land Rover. “Mr. Rosewater, I hope we didn’t keep you waiting.”

“No, no, Mr. Lesley. I like the desert. The air’s invigorating.”

The air was hot, dry enough to chap lips in thirty seconds, and tainted by both an alkaline trace odor and exotic desert pollen that made Vern’s eyes burn.

He had not been born for the outdoors. He didn’t much like the indoors, either. He just wanted to get this finished, go home, and step into Second Life, where there were no tarantulas or scorpions.

He had forgotten to tell Bobby Onions to stay in the Rover, and now the procto swaggered forward to join them.

Eliot Rosewater had the good sense to pretend that Bobby wasn’t there. “Did you find what I hoped, Mr. Lesley?”

Tendering the trash bag, Vern said, “Yes, sir, and maybe a bit more than you hoped for.”

“Splendid,” Rosewater said, accepting the bag. “She would have taken pains to hide evidence of her past.”

“Nobody could’ve used a finer comb in that bungalow than I did, Mr. Rosewater. I didn’t miss anything.”

“You’re quite sure.”

“I value your business, sir. I’m dead sure.”

Bobby started to say something that would no doubt have been inane, and then his head exploded.

Maybe Vern heard a sound issue from within the nearest Quonset hut or saw a glimmer of movement in the darkness beyond the open door, because a split second before Bobby’s skull came apart, Vern was reaching under his shirt for the holstered revolver in the small of his back.

While the blood spray still hung in the air, he squatted and squeezed off three rounds through the open door.

Rosewater flung himself down, and rolled, as though he’d had some experience at this kind of thing.

Vern wanted to run to him and stand over him and pop him, but he couldn’t be sure that he had hit the shooter in the hut, and if he lingered, he would be making an easy target of himself.

The engine of the Land Rover had been switched off. Bobby probably had not left the keys in the ignition.

For a quarter of an instant, Vern considered running away among the buildings, but these guys knew the layout better than he did, and any cat-and-mouse game wasn’t likely to turn out well for him.

Instead, he sprinted west, directly into the low sun, because the glare would make him a harder target.

The plain offered no hiding place, but Vern was faster than he looked. Maybe fifteen years younger and thirty pounds lighter than Rosewater, he was confident of being able to outrun him.

If the shooter in the hut had not been wounded by the return fire, if he gave pursuit, Vern might be in trouble, but he didn’t glance back because he wanted to have hope.

He ran as fast as he had ever run, heart slamming, and then he demanded more of himself. In the still air, he created a wind of his own. Without realizing what he was doing, he had raised his arms, trying to get some lift.

But Vern Lesley didn’t have wings. Von Longwood had the wings, over there in Second Life, where he owned a car that could fly, too, and where he sometimes enjoyed sex four times a day.

Hope shaken, he glanced back and saw a guy closing on him. His pursuer looked as young as Bobby Onions but bigger and smarter.

Von Longwood didn’t take crap from anyone, and if Vern had to go down, he preferred to do it with Von’s style. He stopped, swiveled, and squeezed off all of the remaining rounds in his revolver.

The pursuer didn’t weave or dodge but came boldly through the deadly horizontal hail, as if he were the real Von Longwood.

Now Vern’s only hope was the Rapture, float straight up to Heaven without a change of underwear or breath mints, but that didn’t work out, either. A bullet burst his gut, another knocked the air out of him, and he rode a third round into oblivion.