knees.”
“No, no-that’s okay. This is fine.”
“Well, okay then. Is there anything I can get you? Are you hungry?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
“Uh…you can sleep in the bedroom. Katie put clean sheets on the bed, so I know she meant for you to. So… whenever you feel like it, just…you know, make yourself comfortable.”
“Thank you.”
Her voice sounded breathy and rushed, as if she couldn’t wait for him to go away and leave her be. He couldn’t blame her for wanting some privacy, after the kind of invasions she’d had to put up with, and since he’d run out of things to say to her, or ask her, he gave her a “good-night” nod, got himself a cold beer out of the fridge and took himself outside. Feeling like an intruder in his own house, he sat in an old aluminum folding chair beside the steps, and Moonshine came and flopped down beside him with a gusty sigh, as if she was more than happy to turn over sentry duty to him.
He put his hand on her head, took a big swallow of beer, gave a sigh of his own and growled, “Yeah, it’s been one helluva coupla days, hasn’t it, old girl?”
The dog didn’t reply, so J.J. leaned his head back and looked up at the sky, which wasn’t showing too many stars on such a moon-bright night. He listened for a moment to the sound of the wind shushing through the desert shrubbery, and for some reason felt a little bit lonely.
He thought about Rachel and what he’d seen her do yesterday, and what he was going to try to talk her into doing for him in the near future, and the thoughts made him feel itchy and restless.
He muttered under his breath, a couple of phrases his mama wouldn’t have approved of, then reached down and unlatched the guitar case that lay on the ground beside the aluminum chair. He took out his guitar, tuned it up and then cradled it against him and began to diddle around. Just chords, at first, and then the chords sort of found their way into a Springsteen song, one from one of his old acoustic albums, kind of mournful, which suited his mood.
He stopped playing when Moonshine suddenly lifted her head up off her paws, and a moment later he heard the door of his trailer creak open. He set the guitar back in its case and watched Rachel come out, silhouetted for a couple of seconds against the light inside before she made her way down the steps, holding on to the wooden railing with both hands. He got up and went to get her, meaning to help her to the chair, but she shook her head and seated herself gingerly on the next-to-bottom step.
“You didn’t have to stop playing. I just wanted to give you this.” She held it out to him-the envelope he’d last seen when he’d copied her name and address off the front, the one she’d had taped to her belly, that he’d removed from her yesterday morning along with her clothes.
He gave a little snort of surprise as he took it from her. “Where’d you have it stashed this time?”
He could barely make out her hint of a smile. “Not on me-I don’t think it would stick. Right now my stomach’s pretty much like a big bowl of pudding. I had it under the cushion in the baby carrier.”
“Well, it must be pretty important,” J.J. drawled.
She nodded, and when she spoke, she sounded tense. “It-that letter-is what made me think I could finally get away from Carlos. That’s where I was planning to go.”
He held the envelope, weighing it in his hand. “So…why are you giving it to me now? Does this mean you’ve decided to trust me? A little?”
Again she had her arms wrapped around herself, huddled on that hard wooden step, and her face was turned away and in shadows. Her voice sounded whispery and exhausted. “Please understand…it’s been very hard for me to know who to trust. But-” she exhaled audibly “-as you said, I guess if you’d wanted to kill me and take my baby back to Carlos, it would have been very easy for you to do that. Instead, as you pointed out, I have you-and your dog-to thank for saving our lives. So, since I can’t do this by myself and am going to have to trust someone, it might as well be you.”
“A ringing endorsement if I ever heard one,” J.J. said dryly. He opened the envelope and took out several sheets of paper, some of it heavy and obviously expensive. “You gonna tell me what this is, or let me figure it out for myself?”
“It’s a letter,” she said, in a voice that was suddenly completely devoid of expression. “From my grandfather, Sam Malone.”
“Sam Malone?” He glanced up at her and grinned. “Not
She stared blankly back at him. “I didn’t even know there was a
“Come on. Reclusive multibillionaire, struck it rich out here on the desert somewhere during the Great Depression, made a fortune during World War II, hung out with the rich and the famous before he dropped out of sight sometime in the sixties. Not as notorious-or as crazy-as Howard Hughes, but in the same general category. Don’t tell me you never heard of him. My God, I didn’t know he was still alive.”
She shook her head in a bewildered kind of way and said faintly, “I don’t know if he is.”
He stood up and clicked on a switch in a cord dangling down alongside the front door, turning on a string of Christmas lights that looped across the front of the trailer. “From what I recall,” he said as he sat back down in the folding chair, “the guy was quite a character. Worked as a stuntman in old Hollywood for a while-knew all the big stars. I think he married a starlet, or maybe it was a folksinger…” He lost the train of what he was saying right about then, because he was studying the letter.
The first page was a cover letter from an attorney, and he skimmed it quickly before he set it in his lap and moved on to the next one. This was a handwritten letter, written on lined paper torn from a cheap notebook, the kind J.J. remembered writing school reports on when he was a kid, in the days before his folks had been able to afford a computer. The writing was old-fashioned and hard to read, but underneath that, on more of the lawyer’s expensive paper, was what appeared to be a typed version. He pulled that out and began to read.
My name is Sam Malone, though for some reason some have preferred to call me by the nickname, Sierra, and I happen to be your grandfather. I am a very old man now, and I’ve lived a full and interesting life, during which I managed to amass a considerable fortune and squander the love of three beautiful women. As a result, I was not privileged to know my own children, a fact that I deeply regret. But this is not the time for regrets, and I can’t do much to change the past anyhow.
Since I have outlived all of my wives and my children, it is my desire to share my treasure with my grandchildren, any that may chance to survive me, and it is this last wish that has led me to write this letter to you. If you are not too dead-set against me and would care to come to my ranch to collect your inheritance, I do not believe you would be sorry.
I have enclosed a little map, in case you should decide to take me up on my offer. And I’m sure my lawyer will add some instructions as to how to get in touch with my staff, to let them know…
“Wow.”
J.J. looked up, hands full of the pages of the letter, and stared at the small form huddled in the pool of light on his front steps. “Good Lord, woman, do you even know what this means? Do you have any idea what kind of resources you have?”
She lifted her head and gazed back at him, her eyes only dark shadows. “You say he was a movie stuntman in old Hollywood…I guess that would explain why my grandmother liked to watch old Western movies, wouldn’t it? He was probably in some of them.” Her laugh had a liquid sound. “He might even have known him-the Duke. Don’t you think?”
J.J. was trying to get his head around the fact that he’d not only delivered the grandson of notorious crime family boss Carlos Delacorte, but also the great-grandson of Sierra Sam Malone, one of the true legends of the twentieth century.
“Wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” he said.
Rachel gazed out the windows of the anonymous late-model white pickup truck at the desert landscape
