The Collection

'I didn't want to say anything in front of the girls, be­cause they don't know how much a service like this costs, and some of them are barely making ends meet as it is. So I collected fifty dollars apiece from them and let them think that was enough to cover it. I made up the rest.'

She withdrew from her purse a folded check. He un­folded it and looked at the amount.

Fifty thousand dollars.

He tried to press it back into her hand.

'What's the matter? Not enough?' She looked at him. 'Sixty? Seventy-five? A hundred? Name the amount.' She reached into her purse.

'No,' he said. 'It's ... it's too much.'

She placed a cold hand on his. 'It's worth it.'

'I can't-'

'She'll never be right internally, not after what he did. I mean, last time he put her in the hospital. She was in inten­sive care for two days. I'm afraid that next time he'll do more than that.'

'Ida-'

'Bob...'

He looked into Ida's eyes, and he had the feeling that she'd known all along he wasn't who they'd kept insisting he was. He looked back at the check.

'I... I seem to have misplaced her address,' he said.

'That's all right.' Ida reached into her purse, withdrew a folded piece of paper on which she'd already written Libby's name and address.

He cleared his throat. 'And when was it she wanted me to ... do it? I seem to have forgotten that as well.'

'Tomorrow night. After eleven.'

He nodded, found a pen, wrote it down on the paper.

She stood, closing the clasp on her purse, and he fol­lowed her silently out of the living room. In the entryway, she turned to face him. She stared at him meaningfully. 'Thank you, Bob.'

He nodded. 'You're welcome,' he said.

She smiled at him, then turned and waved to her friends as she walked down the front walkway toward the blue minivan parked on the street.

He closed the door behind her.

Bumblebee

This was one of my first attempts to write for a 'theme' anthology. Generally speaking, I don't like to write stories following specific guidelines. I find it difficult to work within constraints, and invariably the stories turn out to be stilted and inferior. 'Bumblebee' came quickly, however, and turned out pretty well.

Bumblebee, by the way, is a real place, a ghost town off Black Canyon Highway between Phoenix and Prescott. When I was a kid, the buildings still had furniture, but it's been looted over the years and has become something of a tourist spot. There's even a sign for it on the highway. I restored it to its former ghost town glory and moved it to the southwest corner of the state for the purposes of this story.

Trinidad was still alive when I found him. Barely. Julio had called and told me that he'd seen the redneck's pickup heading through the desert north of Cave Creek, hell-bent for leather on the old dirt road that led to Bloody Basin, and while Julio wasn't exactly the world's most reliable songbird, I believed him this time, and I decided to follow up on it.

I found Trinidad lying facedown in a low drainage ditch. He was easy to spot. The ditch ran right next to the road, and the coyote's red flannel shirt stood out like a beacon against the pale desert sand. I jumped out of the Jeep without both­ering to turn off the ignition and slid down the side of the ditch. The redneck hadn't made much of an effort to either cover his tracks or hide the body, which made me think he hadn't intended to kill the coyote, only scare him, but Trinidad was still badly hurt. His face was a swollen demon­stration of various bruise types, blood leaked from his nose, mouth, and both ears, and it was clear from the awkward an­gles at which he held his arms and legs that there'd been a lot of bones broken.

I knelt down next to the coyote. His eyes were closed, and he did not open them even when I called his name. I touched my hand to his bloody cheek, and he moaned, try­ing to pull away. 'You okay?' I asked.

'Bumblebee,' he whispered, eyes still closed.

He was obviously far gone, delirious, and I cursed myself for not having fixed the CB in the Jeep. It was a ten-minute drive back to Cave Creek, and nearly an hour's drive back to the nearest hospital in Scottsdale. Phoenix Memorial had a chopper and theoretically could fly over and pick him up, but there was no way to get ahold of them.

I was afraid to move Trinidad, but more afraid to leave him, so I quickly ran up the side of the ditch, opened the Jeep's back gate, spread out a blanket, and slid back down to where the coyote lay. Trinidad was heavier than I thought-it's never as easy to carry a man in real life as it seems to be in the movies-but adrenaline strength let me lift him up the incline. Carefully, I placed him down on the blankets, my arms soaked with the warm wetness of his blood. I closed the gate. 'Don't worry,' I told him. 'I'll get you home safely.'

He moaned in agony. 'Bumblebee,' he repeated.

By the time we reached Cave Creek he was dead.

The sun rose precisely at five forty-five. By six thirty, the temperature was already well into the nineties. The television weatherman on the morning news told me while I was drink­ing my wake-up coffee that it was going to be 'another gor­geous day,' and I flipped him off. To him it might be 'another gorgeous day,' but to those of us with no air conditioners in our cars, who had to work outside of climate-controlled offices, it was going to be another sentence in hell.

I finished my coffee and quickly scanned the newspaper to see if Trinidad's death had made the back pages or the obituary column. Nothing. Nada. Zip. I wasn't surprised. Print space in Arizona newspapers was generally reserved for those with Anglo ancestry. Even Latinos who had crossed over into mainstream success got short shrift, and the pass­ing of people like Trinidad, who were successful only in the immigrant underground, weren't acknowledged at all.

Some days I was ashamed to be white.

Last night, I'd told everything I knew to the police. They dutifully took it down, but the case against the redneck was weak at best, the evidence based solely on hearsay accounts by notoriously unreliable witnesses, and I knew the investi­gation into Trinidad's death would get the 'Phoenix Spe­cial'-a two-day open file with no accompanying legwork, and an UNSOLVED stamp on top of the folder. The situation might have been different if Trinidad had been white, if he'd been respectable, but then again it might not. Heat seemed to make a lot of people lazy, especially cops.

Bumblebee.

I'd been puzzling over that all night, unsure if it was supposed to mean something or if it was merely a word dragged I from the depths of Trinidad's dying, hallucinating brain was going to assume that it was meaningful, that the coyote was trying to tell me something. I owed him at least that much. Besides, death lent weight to mysteriously muttered phrases whether they deserved it or not.

I finished my coffee, finished my paper.

Just before eight, I called up Hog Santucci, a friend of mine who worked downtown in Records, and ran the name; by him. It didn't seem to ring any bells, but then it had been a shot in the dark anyway. Even if Trinidad had been trying to tell me something, I still didn't know whether 'Bumble­bee' was the name of a man, the code word for a booked passage, or the identification of an item or process known only to him.

I figured I'd check with Julio next, see if he knew what the name meant, see if he knew any more about Trinidad's rendezvous with the redneck at the same time.

The redneck.

That son of a bitch was really starting to get to me. Usually, when I take a case or get involved in an investigation, it's easy for me to keep my distance, to maintain my professionalism. I don't make moral judgments, I simply do what I am hired to do, and I only take a job if its parameters are I well within the boundaries of legality. This Raymond Chandler crap about straddling the line, or those Bogart and Mitchum movies where the detective always falls for a pretty face and battles for her honor with the villain, that's all bullshit. Pure fiction. But the