"How about something to eat?" Quentin suggested, thinking that food might help sober him up. "The hamburgers here aren't bad."
"Sure," Mitch Johnson said easily. "I'll have one. Why the hell not? We're not in any hurry, are we?"
Shaking his head, Quentin leaned his arms against the edge of the bar to steady himself. "Not that I know of," he said. "I do have some good news, though."
"What's that?" Mitch asked.
"I used some of the money you gave me to buy myself some wheels. I picked up a honkin' big orange Bronco XLT. It's a couple years old, but it runs like a top. If you want, we could drive out to where the pots are in that. I don't know what kind of vehicle you're driving, but the terrain where we're going is pretty rough, and the Bronco is four-wheel-drive."
Mitch Johnson had to fight to keep from showing his disappointment. He had been planning all along that he'd be getting back almost a full refund of that initial five thousand bucks he had given Quentin. And he had less than no intention of giving the little creep his second installment. After all, once Quentin Walker was dead, he wouldn't have any need of money-or of a car, either, for that matter.
Instead of bitching Quentin out-instead of mocking him for his stupidity-Mitch was careful to mask his disappointment. "So, you bought yourself a car?" he asked smoothly. "What kind did you say?"
"A Bronco." To Mitch, Quentin's answer seemed unduly proud. "It's the first time I've had wheels of my own in years. It feels real good."
"I'll bet it does," Mitch Johnson agreed.
After that exchange, Mitch sat for a long time and considered this changed state of affairs. His plan had called for the next part of the operation to be carried out in the Subaru. That way he would have the canvas-drying crate to use to confine either Lani and/or Quentin, should the drugs somehow prove unreliable. The idea of changing vehicles added a complication, but the whole point of being competitive-of being able to capitalize on situations where other people faltered-was being flexible enough to go with the flow. The idea was to take the unexpected and turn it from a liability into an advantage.
"Hang on here a minute," Mitch said to Quentin. "And if my food comes before I get back, you leave my hamburger alone."
"Sure thing," Quentin said.
Mitch walked out to the far corner of the parking lot where he had left the Subaru. There, he unlocked the tailgate, opened the wooden crate, and checked on Lani, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Putting on his rubber gloves, he removed Lani's bike from the crate. Hurriedly he wheeled it over to the orange Bronco parked nearby, an orange Bronco with a temporary paper license hanging in the window next to a prominently displayed as is/no warranty notice. Predictably, the Bronco wasn't locked. Mitch hefted the mountain bike into the spacious cargo compartment and then went over to secure the Subaru.
"Sweet dreams, little one," he said to a sleeping Lani as he once again closed up the crate. "See you after your brother and I finish up at the house."
When Mitch went back inside, the food had been served. Mitch ate his lousy hamburger and watched Quentin wolf his. There was something about the man that wasn't quite right. There was a nervous tension in him that Mitch didn't remember from the night before, but he put his worries aside. Whatever was bothering Quentin Walker, that little dose of scopolamine Mitch had dropped into Quentin's first beer would soon take the edge off. In fact, Mitch's only real concern was that Quentin was far more smashed than he should have been. With Quentin drunk, Mitch worried that even a little bit of Burundianga Cocktail might prove to be too much.
The overheated afternoon had cooled into a warm summer's evening when Quentin and Mitch Johnson finally left the bar. Quentin blundered first in one direction and then in the other as he attempted to cross the parking lot. He finally came to a stop and leaned up against the Bronco to steady himself.
"Geez!" he muttered. "That last beer was a killer. Hey, Mitch," he said. "You wouldn't mind driving, would you? The food didn't do me a bit of good. I'm having a tough time here. I can give you directions, no problem, but with my record, I can't afford to be picked up DWI."
"No problem," Mitch said. "Where are the keys?"
It took time for Quentin to extract the keys from his pocket and hand them over.
"You don't mind, do you?" Quentin whined.
Mitch shook his head. "Not at all," he said. "After all, friends don't let friends drive drunk."
Detective Dan Leggett was pissed as hell. "What do you mean, you've recalled him?" he demanded.
"Just that," Reg Atkins, the night-watch commander, returned mildly. "We can't send a team of crime techs out there until Monday morning. You know as well as I do that Sheriff Forsythe won't authorize any overtime right now, at least not until the start of the new fiscal year. Overtime is to be scheduled only in cases of dire emergency. One busted Indian and a pile of bones don't qualify, at least not in my book. And in case you're wondering, the same thing goes for deputies. Brian Fellows is off the clock as of fifteen minutes ago and the guy you sent out to Coleman Road just got called to a car fire out by Ryan Field."
Less than six months from retirement, Dan Leggett was a member of the old guard. As someone who still owed a good deal of loyalty to the previous administration, he was a pain in Sheriff Bill Forsythe's neck. Anybody else in his position might have shut up and let things pass. Not Dan Leggett. He was an unrepentant smoker, a loner, and a rocker of boats.
"You called them off?"
"Damned straight. If you think we're going to have a deputy camped out by a charcoall weekend long, you're crazy as a bedbug."
"But I want those bones examined."
"Well, go get them and bring them back to the lab yourself, if you're so all-fired excited about them. There are plenty of people to work on them if you ever get them here."
Without another word, Dan Leggett stormed out of Reg Atkins's office. Ever since Brandon Walker had been voted out of office, this kind of shit had been happening-especially to older guys, the ones who had been around long enough to know the real score. He had been a rookie deputy toward the end of Sheriff DuShane's term in office. There had been lots of crap like this back then. It looked as though things had come full circle.
But if Sheriff Bill Forsythe thought he was going to run Dan Leggett off a day before his scheduled retirement day, he was full of it. And he wasn't going to be bamboozled out of properly investigating these two possibly related cases.
At the charco even though the deputy was long gone, nothing seemed to be disturbed. Since Deputy Fellows had already made plaster casts, Dan Leggett simply drove as close as he could to the pile of bones without getting stuck in the sand. After extracting a trouble light from the trunk, he examined the grisly pile by the trouble light's eerie orange glow.
There was nothing but partial skeletal remains here now, but Detective Leggett realized this had once been a living, breathing human being. A person. Somebody's loved one. As such, whoever it was deserved some respect, certainly more than being tossed haphazardly in the trunk of an unmarked patrol car.
"Sorry about this," Dan said aloud, addressing the skull whose empty eyes seemed to stare up at him. "But this is the only way I can think of to find out who you are and what happened to you."