“Okay,” Maynard Rivas sighed, pressing the accelerator and heading for the outskirts of Mineral Springs.
There were a few houses scattered in the path of the wind funnel, houses unprotected by eucalyptus. The residents, who got in there for very low rent, usually called it a wrap after one winter of living in the gales. Not so Shaky Jim. He wanted to be out of town but he was afraid of the crank dealers in the canyons. He settled for the wind, but he always had nightmares of being blown, like Dorothy and Toto, clear into another county.
Shaky Jim had lots of fears. He feared that if he got arrested one more time for dealing pot, the cops might contact the welfare people and try to cut off his monthly checks. Knowing this, Prankster Frank liked to cruise down the highway and suddenly whip into Shaky Jim’s driveway. He’d jump on the brakes so hard he’d go into a locked skid, and start yelling and slamming all four doors of the police car like it was the biggest dope raid since the French Connection. After which, Shaky Jim would invariably run to his stash and flush it all-maybe $500 worth of grass, which was all he could afford to deal at one time-thereby clogging his pipes. The local Roto-Rooter man just loved Prankster Frank who had brought him lots of business since joining the Mineral Springs P.D.
Prankster Frank and Maynard Rivas were out there on the highway terrorizing Shaky Jim when Sidney Blackpool and Otto Stringer came driving by. The detectives looked curiously at the Mineral Springs patrol car, which did a wheelie in the driveway of a lonely house, after which two uniformed cops started slamming car doors and yelling commands in different voices and languages.
“Hands up!” Prankster Frank yelled.
“Más arriba!” Maynard hollered.
“Dung lai!” Frank bellowed, calling on his memories of Vietnam.
And so forth. They yelled nonsense and any gibberish that came to mind and then jumped back in the car ready to do a U-ee and scorch back toward Mineral Springs, except that Sidney Blackpool got out of his Toyota and waved them down.
“Were on a hot call!” Prankster Frank said, figuring a lost tourist needed directions. “We gotta go!”
“Were Blackpool and Stringer from L.A.P.D.” The detective showed them his badge.
“Oh, yeah,” Prankster Frank said, and Maynard cut the engine. “You were in the Eleven Ninety-nine the other night. Heard all about you.”
As he was satisfying the curiosity of the detectives as to what the hell the performance they’d witnessed was all about, Shaky Jim came shaking out of the house in his undershirt and bare feet with his hands high in the air, hands all green from processing pot.
He was younger than Harlan Penrod but not by much. He was smoking a cigarette, or rather, one dangled from his trembling lips.
“I can’t take it no more!” he cried. “I’m moving away. I can’t take it no more!”
“ ‘Shoot if you must this old gray head!’ ” Prankster Frank said. “He gets real dramatic sometimes.”
“I quit! I had enough!” Shaky Jim cried. “I’m moving to Sun City. You can just go wreck Billy Hightower’s business. You ain’t gonna have me to kick around no more.”
Shaky Jim stood like that in the beam of the headlights while the detectives looked on in amazement.
“I think maybe you guys went a little too far,” Otto said. “He’s quoting Richard Nixon.”
“Who’s Billy Hightower?” Sidney Blackpool asked.
“A biker lives up in Solitaire Canyon. President of the local chapter of an outlaw motorcycle gang that does nothing but cook methamphetamine and ride their choppers and hogs all over the desert.”
“Why don’t ya never bust Billy Hightower?” Shaky Jim wailed. “He deals more in a week than I made all year. You let the spook slide just cause he was one a you.”
“What’s he babbling about?” Otto asked.
“Billy Hightower’s an ex-cop,” Maynard Rivas explained. “San Bernardino sheriffs, I think. He was fired for knocking his captain into a punch bowl or something at some kind a cop party. He’s a Nam vet like most a the bikers in the gang. A crank dealer. I never heard a any those lowlifes having the class to deal real big. Crystal’s their thing. A lowlife drug.”
“Yes, he does!” Shaky Jim said, approaching the patrol car with his arms still in the air. “Billy Hightower deals big to kids from down Palm Springs. You never bust Billy cause he’s one a your own!”
“Go back to bed, Jim,” Prankster Frank said. “You’re spoiling my prank with all this hollering.”
While Shaky Jim trembled back toward the house, Sidney Blackpool looked up the canyon to the lights twinkling by the dirt roads on the plateau. “Think he’s smoking it or what? I mean, about Hightower dealing to Palm Springs kids?”
“I never heard it,” Maynard Rivas said. “But you never know about Billy. He’s got a little more class than the rednecks he runs with.”
“A brother running with redneck bikers?” Otto said. “An ex-cop to boot?”
“That’s why they like him,” Prankster Frank said. “He knows police work. Also, he can beat the living shit outta any two of them at once. He’s got more redneck admirers than any spade this side a Charlie Pride.”
“He ever come into town?” Sidney Blackpool asked.
“Every night just about,” Maynard Rivas said. “Remember the other night at the Eleven Ninety-nine? That dude sporting his colors?”
“Colors?”
“His bike jacket with the Cobras logo on the back. That big mean-looking motherfucker in the corner was Billy Hightower.”
“He drinks in a cop bar?”
“Guess he still likes to pretend,” Maynard Rivas said. “Maybe he’s snooping. Anyway, he behaves himself and don’t bother nobody and nobody bothers him. Course none a us ever sit with him or talk with him or anything. Except Sergeant Harry Bright. He used to always buy Billy a drink. Harry Bright’d see some good in a sidewinder if it had him by the nuts. Harry Bright had a stroke. Ain’t around no more.”
“So we heard,” Sidney Blackpool said. “Back in Solitaire Canyon over to the right there’s a bunch a shaggy trees. Just past the fork in the road, I mean. Was the Watson car found there?”
“Those’re tamarisk trees,” Maynard Rivas said. “Big ol dirty things. They shoot em on sight down the other end a the valley. Yeah, that’s where they found the car all right.”
“We saw a biker out there tonight nosing around,” Otto Stringer said.
“Could be he was dumping a load a drug garbage,” Maynard Rivas said. “There’s always a lot a syringes laying around below those shacks and I don’t think there’s a diabetic up there.”
“Awful dark in the desert at night,” Prankster Frank warned. “I knew a local cop shot his own car to death chasing a burglar. That’s almost suicide, I guess.”
“We gotta go now,” Maynard Rivas said. “Better stay out a the desert at night or that Toyota’s gonna have more dimples than Kirk Douglas.”
CHAPTER 12
There were two women employed by the Mineral Springs Police Department, but only one was a sworn law officer. Ruth Kosko, the department’s sole detective, was known of course as Ruth the Sleuth. The other woman was Paco’s secretary, record clerk and radio operator, Annie Paskewicz, called Anemic Annie from the days when she worked for the crime lab in San Diego, drawing blood from arrestees suspected of being under the influence of drugs.
There seemed to be someone like Anemic Annie in crime labs and county morgues everywhere. She was pallid in winter and summer, not albino white but close, and she’d formerly spent her days drawing and analyzing blood while seeming to have none of her own. Anemic Annie always wore sensible shoes that made clunky footsteps like Boris Karloff, and she was yet another law-enforcement burnout, biding her time for a pension. It was because of her ravaged nerves that she’d left her job in San Diego and come to Mineral Springs. She’d gotten so nervous in mid-life that she couldn’t make a clean hit anymore.