There was a kind of galley kitchen — surprisingly, quite spotless and clean — and beyond it, dimly seen through the haze, a narrow bedroom with a well-made bed and clothes hanging in orderly rows in an open closet. The entire front section of the trailer, and the only part of it in any kind of disarray, was taken up with a long table covered with stacks and heaps of paper: reports, drafts, letters, computer printouts, in the midst of which sat a brand-new pearl-gray Dell Inspiron laptop.
In front of the Dell was an old wooden office chair excessively padded with ripped and yellowing foam rubber. An ashtray beside the laptop was overflowing with stubbed-out butts and tubes of gray ash. A greasy tumbler half-filled with some amber liquid sat next to a large black cat with a chewed left ear, sitting on top of a stack of books and licking itself — a strong, lushing sound — with the kind of contemptuous disregard that only cats can convey.
The tomcat paused for a moment to consider — and disapprove of — Dalton, with one green eye and one yellow eye over a vertical hind leg, and then went back to his business, pink tongue rolling. Barbra Goldhawk put a finger to her voice box and buzzed at him.
“Fuck off, Woodstein. Company’s come.”
The cat straightened up, flared out, bared his oversized yellow fangs, hissed at her, and then flowed down off the desk, scattering her papers across the threadbare carpet. She dragged her little blue-and-silver oxygen tank behind her — Dalton had a fleeting image of what R2D2 would be doing after he retired — and set it upright next to her chair, where, through a series of practiced gyrations, she got herself safely sat down without strangling herself on the oxygen tube. She leaned back in the chair, lips smacking, looking like a grizzled old Munchkin Madame about to broker a deal for a kinky night with Dorothy — Toto ten francs extra — staring at him through her glasses, her huge brown eyes blinking… blinking… blinking…
Dalton looked around for a chair, saw a milk box full of newspapers, dragged it over, and sat down.
“Writing a book,” she buzzed at him. “Sorry for the mess. Beer’s in the icebox, if you want one.”
“No, thanks,” said Dalton. “I appreciate your taking the time to see me. What’s the book about?”
“You boys. Spooks. What complete fuckups you are.”
“Can I help? I know a lot about fucking up. It’s my life’s work.”
She blinked at him awhile, trying to figure out if he was being saucy, and decided that he was. She showed him her unnaturally even Chiclet-size teeth and clacked them at him again.
“Funny. I guess you were doing your stand-up routine in Vegas while those raghead muff-uckers were taking their flying lessons.”
It took Dalton a few seconds to successfully decode “muff-uckers” and one more second for him to conclude that whatever else Barbra Goldhawk was, she was no Paphiopedilum sanderianum.
“No. I was in the Poconos. Got a publisher yet?”
“Yes. Me. I’m doing it myself.”
She pushed some papers aside and showed Dalton a shiny computer CD.
“Seven hundred and sixty-three pages of pure muff-ucking Pulitzer. Unless you’re here to try to stop me, son. Don’t even try.”
She leaned down and reached into the wastebasket, coming up with a small stainless-steel Llama .32 pistol with ivory grips and a gold-plated foresight. Dalton felt his vitals retracting as he stared down into the unwavering black dot of the muzzle.
“Not at all,” he said, in an unsteady voice, thinking that if he died this way they’d bury him with his ass in the air and a plastic daisy stuck where the sun, in any decent, God-fearing world, ought never to shine.
“Good,” she buzzed, lowering the muzzle and resting the little pistol in her lap. She crossed her legs and took a pull at her cigarette. “Well, what do you want? This about Connie Goliad?”
“Yes. Consuelo Luz Goliad. Died—”
This triggered a long dissertation in that electric buzz.
“Consuelo Goliad. Died in a multiple-car crash while traveling northbound on Interstate 25 near the town of Trinidad, Colorado, on Monday, November seventeen, 1997, at approximately five forty-five Mountain Time. I know her. I know a lot more than you think I do. And I got it filed away where you can’t get it too.”
“Look, Miss Goldhawk—”
“Call me Barbra, like the singer.”
“Barbra—”
“You like Streisand, son?”
“Well…”
“Me neither. You ever hear of a place called Red Shift Laser Acoustic?”
“No. What is it?”
“It’s a tech business, laser research, big outfit over there on Tierra Rejada Road, on the way to Ventura. They do government work, laser analysis. Pour me some of that Jamaica there, will you?”
Dalton looked around for the bottle.
“In the icebox,” she buzzed at him, shaking her head sadly.
He opened the refrigerator and saw a half-full bottle of 150-proof black Jamaica rum lying on its side in a nearly empty fridge that gleamed as if brand new. He pulled it out and poured her a tumblerful. She found another tumbler on the floor beside her and offered it to Dalton, who filled it to the very brim.
She took a long, loving sip, smacked her lips, clacked her teeth together again — Dalton was going to pay for her implants out of his own retirement if he ever had to talk to her again — and then leaned back into the creaking old chair, gathering herself. Dalton lifted his own tumbler to his lips and took a tentative sip.
“Okay,” she croaked, crackling a bit, “Red Shift Laser. Short story, they do real high-tech stuff, contracted out to Lawrence Livermore, CalTech. If you’re really CIA you know exactly what I’m talking about. I was working for the Clarion at the time and this Consuelo Goliad calls me up one day — I was the feature reporter and I’d just done a big series on how screwed-up the security was at Livermore — which by the by the networks stole from me…”
She stopped to pull in some air and recharge.
“…which they… stole from me… so Consuelo figured I’d be interested in what she had. Wanted me to meet her at some motel way out on the coast. I drove out there, she was this heavyset matron-looking woman with all this Navajo silver on her — a real Comanche she was, honest-to-God Indian — well, she was real upset…”
A gasping sigh… another… please God don’t let her die yet.
“…and I figured, well here’s another one, you know, one of these cranks with a bug up her ear, all this la-di-da about government conspiracy, but I stayed to hear her out. You ever hear of Goyathlay’s Throat?”
She might have been far older and even less redeemable than the glory of old France, as well as four-fifths into the crypt, but she was a reporter and she knew a poorly suppressed reaction when she saw it.
“I see you do. I find that interesting. I find that illuminating as all hell. Well, long story short, Connie Goliad was a member of this church, called the Native American Church—”
“I know it.”
“Yes, I expect you do, if you know about Goyathlay’s Throat. Anyway, not the regular branch of this church, but what you might call a breakaway sect. She didn’t tell me all this at once, mind — I sorta got it outta her — but talking makes me tired. I had more stamina before the Internal Revenue folks cleaned me out.”
“They did?”
She shot him a hard, cold look. “You know damn well they did,” she buzzed at him. “And it was no muff-ucking coincidence neither. Happened right after I got onto the Goliad story — all of a sudden I’m being audited, three years in a row. They force me to go back nine years, nine muff-ucking years, young man. They bankrupted me, they ruined my… Anyway, that’s all over with now, another sorry-ass old-broad story.