“There’s nothing out here. “I’m comin’ in.”
“Those two are very strange. I need to think about this.” She turned off the radio, watched the monitor a while longer, then went back into the diner.
We gave it an hour, then saddled up. Damn wig was too hot so I went without and the hell with it. I wore jeans and kept my short-sleeve shirt untucked to keep my gun out of sight. Given what Lucy was wearing, she didn’t have any way to hide her gun, so she left it in the lockbox in the Caddy’s trunk. She’d slathered herself with sunblock. She wore her sun hat, sunglasses. I wore my Stetson, which made me look like John Wayne—except for the sunglasses. Wayne was always riding around on a horse in bright sunlight, which is the reason he had a world-class squint.
We headed west. No sign of life, so I veered toward the diner as we went by to have a look at the back of the place in daylight. Not much to see, old Impala parked outside the back door, junk piled up behind the building—a refrigerator on its side with the door missing, four-by-eight-foot plywood sheets leaning against a scaly clapboard wall, a toilet still in a wooden crate, used tires. Buddie’s backhoe was on its flatbed trailer, parked near a power pole. Power lines looped black against the bright blue sky into a gooseneck head and a conduit that led down to a service panel. The old shed back there still had a slight, tired lean.
We were fifty feet past the diner when a panel truck pulled up behind the Impala in the dusty area between the diner and the shed, Henderson Lock & Safe printed on the side.
“Interesting,” Lucy said.
“We could go over and watch.”
“That bitch or Buddie would shotgun us for sure.”
Arlene came out a back door, followed by Buddie. Buddie was the guy I’d seen while crammed into the foot well of the Mustang a few days ago. He looked a full head taller than Arlene, which would put him at six foot six or more. Big guy, looked like Sasquatch. He gave Lucy and me a long look, said something to Arlene, then the guy in the panel truck was out with a clipboard in his hands, and they had to deal with him.
Good time to wander around where they didn’t want us to go. I was happy to have a .357 Magnum on my hip.
The sun bore down and did its best to broil us. The walk out was so pleasurable that I thought we ought to go up into the hills, a mile or more away, see what was on the other side. Lucy said go ahead, report back, so that discussion ended early.
We went out half a mile. Daylight made finding the place—whatever it was—a lot easier. We followed the backhoe trail and finally found tire tracks all over as the backhoe had made dozens of three-point turns. Low mounds of disturbed dirt were more evident, ten or twelve of them lined up on the playa where the land sloped up toward the hills.
“This one looks sort of new,” Lucy said, rubbing dirt with a shoe.
It was at the end of the row. The smell of torn sage was strong, the dirt was slightly darker, but there was still nothing to indicate what Buddie had been doing out there—although I was starting to get a fairly unpleasant idea.
We looked around awhile. Tire tracks, vague places where the earth seemed raised. Others that seemed slightly lower.
Then a pickup truck came bounding across the desert toward us from the direction of the diner.
“Company coming,” Lucy said. “Kinda fast, too.”
I unsnapped my holster, left the gun hidden.
The guy in the beard rolled up, cut the engine, got out. He was more than six-six, weighed well over three hundred pounds, arms with muscle like you see on anacondas. “Whatcha doin’?” he asked.
“Rock hounding. Lots of interesting minerals out here.”
“Yeah? Like what?” He came closer.
Now what? Let him get within reach? Pull the gun? This was a lousy situation. I motioned for Lucy to move away, let me handle it, which I did by drifting sideways, away from Lucy, keeping the guy at least ten feet away. I circled around a big sagebrush, didn’t think he could leap over it at me. I picked up a rock that looked about as likely to be valuable as a wad of used Kleenex. I gave it a scientific look. “Looks like you got some good kinorthosite out here.”
“What’s that?”
Kinorthosite was nothing at all, but it had a minerally sound and enough syllables to keep this guy off balance. “You find it where you find deposits of decomposed agarnalite.”
“What’s that?”
If I kept this up, he was gonna wear me out. “It’s used as a base in road construction.”
“Sounds like it’s worth about twenty cents a ton then. You’re staying at the motel, right?”
“So far.”
“So far. What’s that mean?”
“Might move on. Haven’t decided yet.” I pointed to a nearby place where the earth had been disturbed. “What’re you doing out here?”
“Burying septic tanks.”
“Probably have to flush twice to get shit this far out.”
His laugh was a baritone rumble. “Old used tanks, dude. I put in a new septic, people pay me five hundred bucks to haul the old one out. Suckers stink to high heaven, so I bury ’em out here, far enough out so you can’t smell ’em. You want, I’ll dig one up and you can have it, no charge.”
“That’s tempting. I’ll think about it.” Lucy was forty yards away, looking at me. “Well, nice talking with you. Gotta see what we can find up in the hills. Interesting geology around here.”
I started walking, headed away from the diner.
“Not much gold up there,” Buddie said, “but I’ve seen a lot of sidewinders. They’re hard to spot in the sand. Good
