It was moving from beer to Jaeger to tequila and beyond the night before that gave him this head. He ran a dry tongue over his teeth. They felt like slimy fur and tasted like onions. That made him feel like it was all coming up, and he sat upright and opened his eyes.
Worst. Decision. Ever.
The pain in his head made him upgrade the size of the imaginary nail in his skull to a tent peg. His vision swam like his head was pinwheeling on his shoulder. He glimpsed something pink and blonde in his peripheral. He didn’t recognize the room he was in. So damned sunny with sheer curtains over peeling paint wooden frames. The bed was a double, and he was sharing it.
Lee steadied himself and looked over at a slim white body turned away from him and a tangle of bottle bleach hair atop it. She was naked, and so was he. There was a butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder.
His bladder was sending him urgent signals, and he began to ease on out on his side of the double bed. Butterfly made some noises and moved a bit and he gently raised himself to a standing position. Butterfly woke at that and turned over to pull hair from her eyes and looked at him with a bleary smile. Not bad, Lee thought. Blue eyes and a pixie nose. She was smiling, so whatever happened last night agreed with her. Damned if he could remember any of it after the first tequila round.
“Bathroom,” he rumbled and snatched up his jeans. She pointed a lazy hand at a door against one wall of the room.
“Don’t take too long,” she said languidly.
He hoped that meant she needed to piss, too. He stumbled into a half bath with a john and a sink and slung his jeans on a towel rack. He leaned hands on the wall over the back of the toilet and let fly with a long, splashing, spine-quivering piss.
Over the gurgle of water, he could hear Butterfly’s voice call out, but not to him. She was answering someone. A child’s voice followed hers, and Lee could tell from the timbre and tone that it was a young kid with lots of questions.
“Who’s in the bathroom?”
“Just a friend, honeybunch.”
“Uncle Beau?”
“No, it’s not Uncle Beau.”
“Uncle Fletcher?”
“Not him neither. You don’t know him.”
“Will he be my new uncle?”
“Could be. We’ll see, honeybunch.”
Oh, hell no, Lee thought and pressed his bladder to empty faster.
A third voice joined them through the thin bathroom door.
“If he’s staying for breakfast, I’m making eggs.”
An older female voice. Butterfly lived with her mom.
Oh, fuck no.
Lee was still dripping as he tore his jeans off the towel rack. He shook them and heard the reassuring jingle of his key ring. It was the work of five seconds to shimmy into them and somehow squeeze out through the tiny window of the bathroom to drop into a flowerbed crowded with weeds. Barefoot he made his way around the corner of the house to find his brand-new Raptor parked on the gravel beyond some wash hung on lines.
He heard Butterfly’s voice calling from the house. “But Mama made breakfast, baby!”
That picked up his pace, and he was in the truck and spraying gravel all over the Buzz Lightyear sheets hanging on the line. He left behind a brand-new pair of rattlesnake Larry Mahans, but that was a small price to pay.
Lee stopped at the first Walmart he came to and slipped the greeter a twenty to ignore the “no shirt, no shoes” policy just this once. He bought a new shirt, a bag of socks, a pair of Timberlines, a super-size bottle of Tylenol, a Payday bar, and two Cokes.
He was back in the Raptor finishing the second pop when one of the cells in the center console buzzed. He fumbled through the collection lying in the bin between the seats and came up with one that vibrated in his hand. He flipped it open. The caller on the tiny monitor was TIME2GO.
“You know who you’re talking to,” he said.
“This a secure phone?” Dwayne Roenbach’s voice. “Always.”
“How much do you know about gold?”
11
Salt Lake City
They met at the bar at the Hilton closest to the airport.
It was midday, and the place was mostly empty. Caroline had a salad, and Dwayne and Lee ordered ten-dollar burgers.
“This gold is from back then?” Lee said when their waitress had dropped off the plates and been shooed away.
“It was in the back of the cave they were holding me in,” Caroline said. “They had a kind of altar in there.”
“You went back there? Way back there?” Lee said.
“No damn way. We went back to the site a week ago and it was still there,” Dwayne said. “In the present. The Now.”
Lee set down his beer and looked at the two of them.
“I go to all the trouble to hide your asses from the outfit that bankrolled your little experiment, and you go back to dig around right under their noses? You know better than that, Dwayne.”
“I do know better, Lee.” Dwayne’s voice was level and low. “I was a Ranger too.”
Caroline leaned over her salad to hiss to each of them. “Look, we were there. We got the stuff. No one saw us. Can we stop the pissing contest and get on with it?”
Lee took a sip from his beer. “I need hot sauce.” He got up and walked to the bar.
“Sorry about him,” Dwayne said.
“You’re just as bad. Did you guys fight Al Qaeda or each other in Iraq?” Caroline said.
“Little of both.”
“Is it because there’s a girl here?”
Dwayne grinned at her, and she grinned back. They broke it off when Lee slid back in his seat with a bottle of habanero sauce. He sprinkled it on his burger. Without a word, he offered it to Dwayne, who did the same.
“You can’t sell this stuff legally. But I know some folks,” Lee said around a bite of burger.
“You mean criminals?”
