Saguaro Riptide, page 6
If Wyetta Earp had had a dick, that is.
Jesus, this was dangerous. Jack knew it. But he couldn’t help himself. He felt like he was headed for a quick ten-count, and it was time to go for the long shot, the sweeping left hook that came from the canvas.
His mouth slipped open, and the few words that came out were spoken with casual ease. “So, you know quite a bit. I’m wondering if you know about a guy named Vincent Komoko?”
The sheriff tried to dodge the bullet. She failed, jerking in her snakeskin boots as if someone had pounded her iron backbone with a sledgehammer.
She opened her mouth, but the deputy returned before any words came out. “Range Rover’s a rental out of Tucson,” the deputy said. “No wants, no warrants.”
The sheriff nodded. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. The dispatcher wasn’t sure, but she thought the newspaper said that our friend here was out on bail in Nevada. And I think I read the same thing.”
Grinning, Wyetta Earp turned to Jack. “That’s right. I almost forgot. You beat up a poor defenseless boxing promoter, you naughty boy. And you’re a pro. Your fists are considered lethal weapons. That makes it felony assault. Whatever are you doing in our fair state of Arizona? You wouldn’t be jumping bail, would you?”
Jack said, “I suppose it wouldn’t help if I told you that the guy dropped the charges.”
“I don’t know. We have to be careful. We just can’t go running around half-cocked." Wyetta shrugged. “We’ll just have to make some phone calls, won’t we?”
Jack figured there wasn’t anything else to say.
The sheriff reached for her handcuffs.
Jack held out his hands.
Knuckle to nail, they ached like hell.
MAN ALIVE, DID THIS GUY BURN HER UP, him with his little appraising squint the first time he glimpsed the badge pinned to her chest, his eyes ping-ponging between the polished star and her breasts like she was some fantastic wet dream with a gun and a pair of shiny handcuffs who couldn’t wait to check out his long hard nightstick. Nothing scorched her worse than that kind of look, especially from a guy dressed in cactus-patterned turista wear. She was the law in this town, goddamnit, not some goddamn trophy. No jerk who reeked of Old Spice was going to mount her pelt on the wall of his goddamn game room. No fucking way.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Uh-uh. Not by a long shot. The worst of it was when the guy said her name, the way it slipped through his lips, practically drooling sarcasm.
Wyetta . . . Earp?
Not that she wasn’t used to that kind of reaction. She’d taken plenty of grief over her name ever since she was knee-high. Being a girl and being named after Wyatt Earp was a fate that notched pretty high on the adolescent misery scale, as bad as being the boy named Sue that Johnny Cash had sung about back in the sixties. She’d spent a good part of her youth hating her name and the drunken highway patrolman father who’d given it to her. She’d wanted to change it a million times, and as a girl she’d sworn she’d do just that as soon as she turned eighteen.
But names were funny things. They could turn you into someone you never thought you’d be. That was how it had been for her. On her sixteenth birthday it had dawned on her, a crystal-clear vision of the person she wanted to become. That was the day she decided to make her given name work for her, to become all the things that it stood for. She’d felt kind of like a superhero then, as if she’d discovered a Wonder Woman costume hanging in her closet, a costume that had always been there—waiting and invisible—until she was ready to see it.
But this pug in her lock-up . . . Wyetta flipped her braid over her left shoulder. The way he said her name, that little grin tickling the corners of his mouth while the remnants of his scarred-up eyebrows arched above his sunglasses like a goddamn bascule bridge.
She wasn’t going to forget that look anytime soon. No way, Jose.
And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d asked her about Komoko, asked her straight out, his voice completely devoid of respect, like she was a goddamn secretary who was supposed to bow and scrape and give him a goddamn cup of coffee along with his answer.
Man alive, she’d wanted to bash him then. She could see it. A roundhouse kick clipping the point of his chin. Or a kick to the balls, her Nocona boot digging in hard, his eyes crossing up, face going white, precious little cojones cracking like walnuts.
A little voice in her head warned her it might not be so easy, that this was a man who went toe-to-toe for a living, but she shook it off. Professional boxer, hell. She didn’t care anything about that. She’d seen the pug’s fight with Sugar Ray Sattler. Baddalach cut and bled worse than a hemophiliac, plus he was slower than the Mummy. He dragged his right foot around the ring like it was stuck in a bucket of horseshit. He couldn’t do anything with a mover like Sugar Ray Sattler.
And that was pitiful, because Wyetta Earp owned moves that would make Sugar Ray Sattler break out in a cold, cold sweat. She had the paper and pot metal to prove it. Mounted on the wall directly in front of her were a dozen framed certificates signed by a half-dozen senseis, and a glass case filled with martial arts tournament trophies stood on the wall to her left.
She’d signed up for Tae Kwon Do lessons at sixteen, the day after she decided to make her given name work for her. It was her first step on the road to becoming a superhero, and she’d taken her lumps without complaint at a dojo above a Korean market in Tucson.
Three years later she earned her first black belt. A month after that she broke her father’s jaw with a roundhouse kick when he took after her mother one time too many. Two more months and she booted the son of a bitch out of their house for good.
Now her mom lived in one of the mobile home parks in Pipeline Beach, happy as a clam, and she never even mentioned that her ex-husband had used her for a punching bag for twenty long years. Nope. All Mama Earp talked about was how proud she was of her only child.
You could read something into that, sure. But as far as Wyetta was concerned, you could leave all that bullshit about self-actualization in the psych texts, thank you very much, because she had done it the old-fashioned way, with hard work and lots of lumps and plenty of flying by the seat of her pants. And in the end she had become everything she’d set out to be—a sheriff and a hardcase of the first stripe, just like the man she’d decided to emulate so long ago.
She stared at the framed tintype on her desk. Wyatt Earp stared back at her. His sepia eyes were hard. You couldn’t see his lips at all because they were hidden by a moustache, but Wyetta was sure that they formed a firm, unsmiling line.
Wyetta pulled open the center drawer of her desk and withdrew what looked like a wooden valentine—a flat piece of cedar that sprouted three stubby legs on the bottom. Then she lifted the blotter from the top of the desk and set it aside.
Below was a Ouija board.
Wyetta had purchased the board in Los Angeles. A prominent antique dealer had staked his reputation on its authenticity, but she’d had it verified by a recognized Earpana expert before laying down her long green. So there was no doubt in her mind that the Ouija board had once been the property of Josie Marcus, just as there was no doubt in her mind that Josie Marcus had been Wyatt Earp’s wife.
Wyetta set the heart-shaped planchette on the board. Doing that always gave her a chill, because she knew Wyatt must have done the same thing a century before. Her fingers hovering over the wooden heart, light and ready. At the same time, she stared at the iron picture frame on her desk and found and held Wyatt Earp’s sepia gaze.
“Does Baddalach know anything?” she asked.
The cedar heart hesitated. Wyetta’s heart skipped a beat.
Three cedar legs scraped across the board as the planchette darted to the corner marked YES.
“Is he going to give me any trouble?”
Wyetta held her breath. The heart drifted to the center of the board. She exhaled in relief . . . until it pulled back.
To the same spot, the spot marked YES.
Her anger rose. Words spilled out of her mouth in a rush, and when she bit them off the taste of lipstick was bitter on her tongue.
“What kind of man is he?” was the question she asked.
The heart moved surely, quickly, picking out one letter after another.
B. . . A . . . D. . .
. . . A . . .
. . . S
. . . S
The muscles in Wyetta’s shoulders knotted. Her arms tensed, and the cedar heart bolted forward and escaped her fingers, clattering against the photo of Wyatt Earp, knocking it to the floor.
Glass shattered. Wyetta stared at the Ouija board, shaking as if she’d taken a mean left hook to the temple.
A knock on the office door brought her around.
The words came automatically. “It’s open.”
Deputy Holloway entered the office. “Vegas PD just returned my call.”
“And?”
“Baddalach’s telling the truth—the promoter dropped the charges last night.”
Wyetta nodded.
Deputy Holloway watched her, pretending that she didn’t see the Ouija board on the sheriff’s desk or the tintype in the iron frame with glass busted out of it that lay on the floor next to a faded cedar heart. It was better not to speak of these things. This the deputy had learned through long, hard experience.
Instead, the deputy asked the obvious question. “What do you want me to do with him?”
Wyetta swiveled her chair, turning away from the door, away from the deputy. She stared at her trophy case, at the framed certificates papering the wall. Wyatt was wrong about this one. He had to be. Because Wyetta was a badass herself, a certified badass with trophies and sheepskins aplenty.
“Sheriff?”
“Let the pug go. Deputy,” Wyetta said.
She smiled when she said it.
IN A WAY, JACK HATED TO LEAVE THE JAILHOUSE SO SOON. There was a real interesting water stain on the ceiling of his cell and he hadn’t had enough time to decide if it looked more like a thundercloud hijacked from Heaven by disgruntled angels or the Monster from the Id from Forbidden Planet.
He worked up a good sweat walking back to the five-and-dime. Thankfully, the Range Rover was still sitting in the parking lot. At least Jerry Caldwell hadn’t had his car towed.
Jack notched the air-conditioner to MAX and headed for the highway. He’d put a mile between himself and Pipeline Beach when he spotted the billboard:
Surf’s up at
THE SAGUARO RIPTIDE MOTEL
Cable TV * Air-Conditioning
Swimming Pool
Surf guitar nightly
THIRD LEFT OR YOU’VE MISSED IT, AMIGOS & AMIGETTES
Someone had made an attempt to paint over the second-to-last line, but it was still visible. Jack didn’t care about that, though. He only cared about the name of the joint. The Saguaro Riptide—the same name stenciled on the ashtray he’d found at Vince Komoko’s place.
The same name on the pencil he’d seen in Wyetta Earp’s pocket.
It could be nothing more than a coincidence. Pipeline Beach was a small town. Or it could be that Wyetta Earp had been sniffing around the motel, looking for Komoko.
And maybe, just maybe, there was something more to it than that.
Jack knew he was getting ahead of himself. He passed a dirt road that lead to a cemetery, an old-time boot hill with leaning tombstones and strangely stationary tumbleweeds.
Jack found himself wondering how many pistoleros Wyetta had put there with her blazing six-gun. He smirked at the notion. Not that he was sexist or anything. But, Jesus, if ever a woman thought that the sun rose and set out of the crack of her ass, it was Wyetta Earp.
The cemetery blurred past on the left, only to be replaced by more desert, more saguaros, more tumbleweeds. Jack notched another mile on the odometer before he came to the second left, which lead to a junkyard. He slowed down a bit, because the next turn would be for the Saguaro Riptide.
The third left was almost on top of the second. A narrow road lined with tall neon tombstones cut a jagged trail to the east.
Jack made the turn, peering at the bizarre roadside display from behind his sunglasses as he slowed his speed. Instantly, he realized that he’d been wrong. The objects he’d mistaken for tombstones were actually surfboards. A couple dozen of the things had been planted along the road, one every ten feet.
Still, Jack couldn’t quite discard his first impression. The notion of neon tombstones sent a chill up his spine. And that was funny, because the real graveyard hadn’t bothered him at all.
He didn’t figure that Vince Komoko was hanging out on that dusty boot hill, though. And he was certain that Vince had been known to hang out at the Riptide.
The road wasn’t dirt, but it was pretty beat up nonetheless. Jack dodged potholes, taking it slow. Then the surfboards were behind him. The motel lay up ahead. Not a bad-looking joint, but definitely a creation of the cinder-block sixties.
There were plenty of parking spaces. Jack pulled to a stop in front of the office.
He got out of the car, stretched, and walked inside.
***
The woman behind the counter was older than Jack, but that didn’t matter because she was a dusky brunette of the barefoot variety. That was a definite point in her favor, as was the fact that she wore jeans and a T-shirt, the added bonus being that the outfit looked good and simple and right on her. Her skin was the color of polished mahogany and her eyes were blue. Her nose was twisted just a little bit. Jack wondered what she’d done to get it broken, and why she’d never bothered to get it fixed.
He couldn’t ask her that, though. Not right off. But the tombstone surfboards were still on his mind, so he asked, “What’s with the surfboards, anyway? Are you expecting California and Nevada to sink into the Pacific?”
“I wish, ’cause that’s the only way I’ll see a wave again, brudda.” She smiled. “Those boards are mine, but planting them . . . that was my husband’s idea. His name was Dale Dayton. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”
Jack shrugged. “Sorry. Can’t say as I have.”
She pointed at a series of framed album covers hanging on the wall behind her. Mostly shots of surfers and hot rods and women wearing bikinis. “Dale had a couple hit records way back when. Dale Dayton and the Daytonas. Surf music.”
“Like the Beach Boys?”
“Nope. Dale didn’t sing. Just played the guitar.”
“Hey, I’d probably know his stuff if I heard it. But I’m not a wizard when it comes to remembering the names of songs.”
“Well ... it was a long time ago.” She held out a hand. “Sandy Kapalua-Dayton. Part Hawaiian, part Navajo, with enough Irish thrown in to make me surly in the morning. Women’s National Surfing Champion, 1965-67, and winner of the Pipeline Invitational five years running.”
“Jack Baddalach. I’m retired, too. At least, I think I am.”
“I know.” She winked at him. “I saw the fight.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You look a lot bigger on television, Mr. Baddalach.”
“That’s what people tell me.” Jack took out his wallet, handed over his brand new corporate credit card. “Nothing fancy.”
“That’s about all we’ve got, so you’re in luck.” She grabbed a registration form from a little box on the counter and started filling it out.
“So, how’d you end up in Arizona?” Jack asked.
“Retirement plan. When the surf craze died out, me and Dale figured we’d pull up stakes in LA and buy ourselves a hunk of the desert. You know what they say, build a better tourist trap and the world will beat a path to your door. We had big dreams—a surfin’ oasis in the middle of the big lonesome. And I mean lonesome; in ’68 there wasn’t anything else around here but Gila monsters and rattlesnakes.
“Of course, a couple of mobile home barons moved in about ten years ago and threw up instant retirement villages, changing everything. Now we’ve even got bus service to Tucson and our own public library. But Dale and me, we built this town. We named it, opened up the first motel, the first coffee shop, and the first gas station. We wanted to buy ourselves one of those wave machines, the kind they’ve got at that fake beach up in Phoenix, but we never came up with the cash to build ourselves a miniature Pacific.”
“Too bad.”
She smiled. “Don’t get out the violins just yet, Mr. Baddalach. We did all right . . . and maybe we could have done a whole lot better. But my heart kind of went out of it when Dale died. I sold the coffee shop and the gas station and—”
The sound of a barking dog severed the woman’s words. She swore and poked her head through the window behind her. From his vantage point Jack caught sight of a chain-link fence and what looked like a junkyard beyond.
“Dale!” the woman yelled. “You want any dinner, you’d better shut up . . . and I mean now!”
Jack spotted a black and tan pit bull in midleap. The animal slammed against the chain-link fence, then came back for more, launching itself from the battered hood of a junked Barracuda.
“Dale! You coconut brain! Knock it off!”
The pit bull yipped as Sandy turned away. The yipping turned into a growl but she ignored the sound, returning her attention to the registration form. Finally the dog settled on an anguished whimper that seemed both pitiful and practiced.
Jack couldn’t help himself. “You named your dog after your, uh . . . ” He searched for the right words. “After your deceased husband?”
Sandy laughed. “Look, brudda, you want my life story or you want a room?”
“Just curious.”
She sighed, thinking it over, then gave in. “It’s like this. Two days after Dale died, a pregnant pit bull bitch got hit out on the highway. Gave birth to a litter in a ditch on the side of the road. This one was the only pup that lived.”
“So you think it’s some kind of reincarnation thing? That’s why you named the dog after you husband?”
“No. Not exactly.” She looked as if she were doing her best to hide a rather sizable smile. “It’s just that Dale is the only name he’ll answer to, and he chases his butt like a pup every time I pop one of Dale’s tapes into my boom box.”
