“What hit me? Buddie?”
“Well, it wasn’t me, Mr. Angel. Of course it was Buddie, and I imagine it was like running full tilt into a redwood tree. And I’d like to know where you heard his name.”
“So would I.”
Her eyes looked like bullet holes in sheet metal. She lifted the revolver, aimed it at me. Short barrel, not worth a shit at long range. A Rossi .38 special, wouldn’t take plus-P ammunition, but I still didn’t like it pointed in my direction. I also thought I was looking at the gun that had killed Jo-X. “A bullet in the knee would hurt,” she said. “Quite a bit, I should think.”
I did, too. “How about Buddie’s Excavating, printed right on the side of that flatbed truck of his. Which might be nothing but a wild-ass guess on my part, but I thought it was—”
“Okay, enough. Shut up.”
So I shut up.
She sat there and stared at me, then at Lucy. Her cigarette burned down and she used the butt to light another.
“Cost effective,” I said. “Chain smoking saves on matches.”
She said nothing, but a corner of her mouth lifted a sixteenth of an inch.
“Gets the lung cancer going faster, too,” I said. “Which, in your case, is good for the entire country. Patriotic, even.”
Arlene huffed out a cloud of smoke. “I could put a bullet in her knee instead. Maybe that would shut you up.”
So I shut up again.
We sat in silence. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere behind me, a very faint click, click, click. And, in the distance, the barely audible on-and-off diesel growl of Buddie’s backhoe.
Finally Arlene said, “How did you get onto us, here?”
“Onto you how?”
She lifted the muzzle of the gun half an inch. “Here you are. You’re nosing around. This place isn’t for shit. And don’t bother giving me a surprised look. No one sniffs around here. People only stop when they have to. Crappy little oasis in the empty desert, and there you two were, snooping around two nights ago. What put you onto us? I know you, Mr. Angel, were the one who found Xenon. You were in the news for days. But that was up in Reno. How on earth did any of that get you pointed down here?”
The only hope we had was to make her think the police were about to land on her and Buddie with both feet. And soon.
“The videos,” I said. “You shouldn’t have taken them. I still don’t know what that was all about.”
“What videos?”
“The ones you took of Celine. Who, by the way, isn’t black, but you know that. You made a video of her walking with Xenon over to his helicopter. Then another one, the next morning, when she was in the diner. You walked up and gave her a menu.”
Her eyes took on a murderous shine. “That isn’t possible. Those videos are on my computer and nowhere else.”
“Except, of course, on my cell phone. I showed them to a cop yesterday. He’ll be along anytime now.”
She levitated out of the chair, not a bad sign. “Show me,” she said in a choked voice.
“No problem. I’ll get right on it. Just get these straps off my wrists and ankles.”
She sank slowly back onto her chair. “You described those videos, so I’m forced to believe you. Now how did they get on your cell phone, Mr. Angel?” She said it with deadly calm, gun aimed at Lucy.
If I clowned around right then, Lucy was dead. I could see it in Arlene’s eyes. “They were on a flash drive in a pocket of Jo-X’s jeans when I found him in that garage. I kept the flash drive, copied the videos to a computer, then e-mailed them to my cell phone. This is the digital age.”
“A flash drive,” she said slowly. Then a light dawned. “That stupid, stupid son of a bitch. It was Buddie. Had to be.”
“He’s your kid, so son of a bitch sounds right,” Lucy said.
Don’t, I thought.
Arlene’s gaze swiveled to Lucy. “I’m going to let that go since we’ve got something more interesting than a bullet for you and bullets are messy, but you should watch your mouth, girl. You could end up without teeth for the last few hours of your life. You might find that unpleasant.”
To distract her, I said, “You knew Buddie put Xenon in their garage?”
“But of course. That was my idea. Buddie would never have come up with it. When that girl, Celine, left here that morning, Buddie followed her all the way up to Reno. She stopped only once for gas, in Tonopah. He phoned from there, told me where they were. He wanted to know if I wanted him to keep after her and of course I did. He found out where she lived. I had him take pictures of the house and yard, so when he came back, I told him to take that piece of shit rapper up there, dump him in their laps. I saw that garage in the pictures he took. It looked old. He could get it open, one way or another. I thought it was a marvelous idea to have Xenon turn up four hundred miles from here, right where ‘Celine’ lived. Once he was found, the police would go crazy, as would this entire silly country, as it so often does. Celine would be exposed. It would be a typical American circus, Celine in the center ring, media over it like maggots, the entire country agog at what she’d done.”
“So why would you tell Buddie to leave that flash drive in Jo-X’s pocket?”
“I wouldn’t. I videoed that phony Celine girl inside the diner and put the video on my computer. And on a flash drive that I left in my desk. That goddamn thing pointed
