Saguaro Riptide

“You really think so?”

“I don’t have a clue, cowgirl. But I aim to learn the truth before I let any one of ’em leave this town.”

A pale cloud mushroomed behind the sheriff’s Jeep Cherokee as it headed for the highway.

Women cops. Now there was one slice of nineties reality that got Ellis Aaron Perkins all shook up.

Elvis Presley had been a law-and-order man. Ellis Perkins knew that. The King had compiled a collection of law enforcement badges and credentials from all over the country. Even got a DEA agent’s badge from President Richard Nixon himself. Elvis hung out with cops, too. Went on drug busts with them down in Memphis. Illegal drugs. The King only used prescription medications. That was a different ball game.

Ellis knew that. Himself, he liked those diet pills. That’s what the King had used in the early sixties, mostly. If the King would have stuck to that stuff, he would have been fine. They gave a man the energy he needed. Elvis had had a whole lotta energy goin’ on back in the sixties.

They hadn’t had women cops in those days. Ellis Perkins knew that, too. Back then, women had known their place.

Ellis knew a woman’s place. Priscilla was there, right now. Home in the trailer. And she wasn’t going goddamn anywhere without his say-so. He’d fixed that for sure, and his fix was as solid as solitary confinement at San Quentin.

Uh huh-huh. Priscilla wasn’t going to say a word about it, either. He’d slapped six inches of duct tape over her mouth himself, and he didn’t figure it was coming off until he was good and ready.

He’d show her what it was like, not being able to talk. It was horrible. He knew that. When he lost his voice to cancer, he thought he’d never talk again. The doctor’s had shown him the little throat-buzzer things that patients used as artificial vocal cords. The devices set up a vibration against your throat, gave you a little robot voice. But Ellis didn’t like the ones the doctors had. Every one had a whiny tremolo that drove him nuts… Besides, lots of cancer survivors used those things, and they all sounded the same as a result. Ellis didn’t want to sound like everyone else. He wanted to have a distinctive sound, even if it was robotic.

So he made his own throat-buzzer. Went looking for something with a deeper buzz, a slower vibrato. And it was a stroke of genius, finding the right thing. Because one day he was in a sex shop, and he noticed the vibrators. . and the wheels started turning up there in his brain. .

Like they say, necessity is the mother of invention. He customized the sucker, of course. Painted it silver. Covered the head with a hunk of black foam rubber that looked like a microphone cap, so no one could tell that the thing had been a vibrator. And then he had his own voice. A distinctive voice. Even if it was the voice of a robot.

So anyway, he’d slapped the duct tape over Priscilla’s mouth, just to remind her how much he’d suffered. It was kind of good, seeing ’Cilia that way. Slapping some tape over her mouth always made her eyes that much more lively. Put a little teary gleam in ’em that was kind of sexy. Fact was, a little tape over her mouth and ’Cilia could have passed for Ellis Aaron Perkins’s idea of a perfect woman.

Nova in those first two Planet of the Apes movies. That woman Big Chuck Heston fell in love with when those talking gorillas tossed him in their zoo. Now there was a woman with real lively eyes. She also had dark hair. Plus she looked real good in animal skins. And the topper was that she couldn’t talk a lick.

’Cilia wasn’t going to do any more talking, though. Not for a good long while. She knew better than to peel off that duct tape when her husband had a mad on. And the fact that she’d set up a meeting with the ex-light- heavyweight champion of the world had definitely made him mad. Not that she knew how he knew about it. Hell, she probably believed what he told her.

'THE NIGHT. . HAS A THOUSAND. . EYES BABY.”

Uh-huh-huh. He had to tell her something, didn’t he? He couldn’t tell her that he knew about Baddalach. Tell her about that and he might as well admit that he knew about Komoko, too. And that would ruin everything.

So he’d hit her with an explanation that was really no explanation at all. Let her worry about how much he knew. He’d just play it frosty.

Ellis checked his sideburns in the rearview of his scar-colored Caddy, smoothed them down. They needed trimming, and some white was showing through at the roots. Looked like he was about due for another dye job. The Caddy could use something, too. Man, painting it with pink Rustoleum had been a bad idea.

But what was done couldn’t be undone.

Ellis knew that.

Return to sender, address unknown. Think about it. No way you got anywhere with that one. Uh-huh-huh.

The cop cruiser turned onto the highway, leaving the mushroom cloud behind. Ellis watched the cloud dissipate as it drifted over ragged yucca spears.

That goddamn sheriff. She was so goddamn willing to believe that he was such a goddamn idiot.

Like he hadn’t figured out what was going on.

Like a guy who was smart enough to rig up his own electronic throat-buzzer wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to tape his wife’s phone calls when she started playing around with some velvet-voiced dickwad who ran mob money out of Vegas.

Like a guy who was smart enough to do those things wasn’t smart enough to fill in the blanks when he listened to those phone calls and got a bonus-the calls his wife made to her badge-carryin’ dyke sister. Like a guy who could put that puzzle together wasn’t smart enough to kick his own plan into gear when he figured out what the whole bunch of them were up to.

Like a guy like that couldn’t figure out how to send a jerkwater sheriff on a wild goose chase.

A torrent of dry laughter crossed Ellis’s lips. He sounded like that damn dog in that damn cartoon. Stupid little dog with a wheezy laugh. He couldn’t remember its name.

It didn’t matter, anyway.

He popped the Caddy’s trunk and grabbed a shovel.

He looked around. The mushroom cloud was gone. No people around anywhere. Nothing but desert as far as the eye could see. Real clear. Everything right out in plain sight.

Ellis put the pieces together. A duster had blown up the night Wyetta and Rorie killed Komoko. He’d heard Rorie tell Priscilla all about it during one of the phone calls he’d taped.

A duster. . now, a man couldn’t move too far in weather like that. Especially a velvet-voiced dickwad like Komoko. Hell, a Vegas lounge lizard like Vince Komoko probably couldn’t find his ass in the dark with both hands.

It was purely obvious that Wyetta and Rorie didn’t have Komoko’s money. If they did, they wouldn’t have come nosing around the minute Ellis mentioned that a stranger had shown up at Graceland. And the ex-light- heavyweight champion of the world didn’t have it, either, or he wouldn’t have come looking for answers about Komoko.

So it had to be that Komoko’s money was still around here somewhere.

Ellis Aaron Perkins was going to find it.

Uh-huh-huh.

TWO

The baseball cap said OLD FART. Wearing it, Jack looked like he’d dropped fifty IQ points.

He stared at his reflection in the motel room mirror and removed the cap. Without it, his IQ rating plummeted another twenty points, easy.

His ears looked especially big. That was because the barber with the hairy forearms had razor-cut the hair on the sides of his head, leaving him looking like a white sidewall tire with stubble.

At least the butcher had left some long hair up on top. In the front, anyway. And in the back, where a magnificent cowlick sprouted. But between those two points Jack’s hairline resembled a particularly short crew cut. If his head had been a highway, a road crew would have been forced to install a DIP sign up on top.