The Last Blue Plate Special (30 page)

“Capture him or kill him.”

“What if it turns out to be a woman?”

“Capture her or kill her.”

I’m always impressed by solid priorities, even though they often fail to provide for the unforeseen.

“Um, Sword isn’t likely to come anywhere near here,” I mentioned. “Your camp is sort of noticeable.”

“Meant to be,” the first one said. “Our expert agrees with Dr. Bouchie here. The guy expects to get caught. If he’s out here
he’ll regard our presence as inevitable and come in for the showdown. And of course we won’t be at the camp. It’s only a lure.
We’ll be nearby, though. We’ll get him.”

With that they strode out the door and into dusty glare that was already hot.

After Roxie left I packed some jeans, a sweatshirt, and tennis shoes in a duffel and threw it on the floor of the truck cab.
Wrapped in the sweatshirt was my little snub-nosed Smith and Wesson, now an illegal “concealed weapon.” Then I called Brontë
to take her seat on the passenger’s side and slammed the door. It was going to be a long day, I thought. Already the FBI agents
were invisible, holed up behind boulders somewhere with gallon jugs of water and binoculars, watching. They’d watch all day
and all night, I realized. They knew what they were supposed to do.

I didn’t, exactly. But at least I had a plan.

First I gassed up the truck in Borrego, then headed over the mountains to Julian, where I took State Road 79 to State Road
371. The route was the long way from my place to the little town of Anza, where 371 became the main street. There wasn’t much
there. Just a gas station, two roadside hamburger joints, and a convenience store that seemed to do most of its business in
video rentals. Then I saw what I was looking for. A Realtor’s office. I parked the truck under a sign reading
PEACEFUL DESERT HIDEAWAYS—RENT OR BUY—EASY TERMS
and pushed open the glass door.

“Hi,” I said to a huge blond man with a curly beard and mischievous blue eyes. “I’m curious about that old adobe line shack
on Coyote Road where Nance Canyon comes out. Do you know anything about it?”

“County declared it a hazardous structure and boarded it up years ago,” he answered. “It’ll collapse any day now. Even the
teenagers don’t sneak in there anymore. Why? If you’re interested in some nice desert property with a view, I can show you—”

“No, I’m, uh, doing some research for an art exhibit. Photographs. You know, ‘Desert Legacy, Places Time Forgot.’ An old photo
of that building was recently featured at a San Diego gallery, and it got me to thinking. There are so many stories out here.
Prospectors, ranchers, mule trains, and the Pony Express. Do you know if anything interesting ever happened there?”

He grinned, showing white and charmingly crooked front teeth. “Well, some kids knocked one hell of a wasp’s nest off the side
of the chimney a few years back. Got stung so bad one of ’em had to be hospitalized. Miracle the chimney didn’t fall on ’em
while they were at it. But you’re looking for history, right?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Is there any?”

“Let me call my mother,” he answered. “This is her agency. I’m just here helping out. Got me a place in Warner Springs, little
apple orchard. My wife loves it. But mom, she thinks the boom’s going to be up here. People from L.A. and San Diego buying
land to get away from the city. She’s probably right. She’s always right.”

“Is your mother from here?” I asked as he dialed the phone.

“Nah. Kansas City. I grew up there, was stationed here with the Marines. Loved it, moved out here when I got married. So after
my dad died mom just packed up and came out, too, eventually started the agency up here. She’s already worth six big ones,
but she says she wants to die rich and leave my kids enough money to support me.”

This wasn’t what I’d been fishing for.

“Mom,” he said into the phone, “lady here wants to know about the old line shack on Coyote Road. History stuff. Anything ever
happen there?”

I admired a changing display of color photographs on the agency’s computer monitor as he said nothing, apparently listening.
All the photographs were of bleached-out desert “hide-aways” that might have been the same hideaway photographed from different
angles. At least one tumbleweed appeared in each.

Then, “You think I should send her to Waddy? Jeez.”

“Waddy?” I said when he’d hung up.

“Old guy, hangs out at the Hamburger Corral or else you can find him at home. I’ll give you a map. But let me try the Corral
first.”

After another quick phone call he said, “Nope, he’s at the Corral. You can go on over there. He’ll talk to you, let me tell
you. He’ll talk your arm off. Waddy Babbick’s lived here since dirt. Used to run some cattle in the old days, I guess. He
and his wife raised six kids up here when there was just a one-room schoolhouse, back in the fifties. Had to build a school
just for the Babbicks. Mom says she thinks Waddy said something about that line shack being used for a diner a long time ago,
if that’s any help.”

Diner.

“Thanks,” I said with feeling, and gunned the truck three stops up the road to a place called Hamburger Corral.

Waddy Babbick had the leathery skin of a desert rat and narrow gray eyes under his bifocals. He wore an old-fashioned white
dress shirt, starched and ironed to a shine, with mud-caked jeans and cowboy boots.

“I’m eighty-seven years young and I know more about this place than God,” he informed me when I joined him at the Corral’s
Formica counter. “Lotta people don’t know this whole valley was a big Indian city before the white man came. Winter city.
Summers, they’d go to the mountains, of course. They moved around, the Indians did, left pots and arrowheads, flint knives,
bone fishhooks, all over. I’ve got a whole collection—”

“I hear you might know something about the old line shack on Coyote Road,” I interrupted. “Was it used as a diner at one time?”

“That place? Yeah, it was a diner here about thirty years back. The Desert Diner, it was called. Some woman ran it for a while.
Her and her daughter. My wife was still alive then, bless her heart, so I never ate there. Heard all they served was cheese
sandwiches and the like, anyway. Ate right at home, I did, unless I was out runnin’ the cows to pasture or bringin’ ’em down
to the railhead at Temecula before the spur went in. But let me tell you about these flint arrowheads. See, I’ve got about
four hundred in
museum
condition, and they tell a tale, they do.”

“I’m afraid my current research involves only the line shack,” I insisted. “What else do you know about it? And is there anybody
else around here who might know anything about it?”

“There’s nobody else around here who knows as much as I do about
anything,
” Waddy Babbick told me, chuckling. “I’m the oldest s.o.b. in the valley! Now, Reed McCallister, me and her used to fight
for the title, you know? Reed’s damn near as old as I am. She and her husband Bill had a spread over by Bucksnort, ran sheep.
Hell, Bill died from a rattlesnake bite twenty years ago, but Reed, she stayed on out at their place until, let’s see, five
years ago? Fell and broke her hip, had to have the replacement surgery. Now, her son Bill, Jr., he lives in San Diego, came
up here and took her down to some ‘retirement village’ down there in Carlsbad. Sagebrush Resort, it’s called. I go on down
to see her couple times a year, Christmas and all. Now, Reed, she had an interest in Indians, too. Used to make these baskets
like they did, and—”

“When did the diner close?” I interrupted, beginning to feel irrational, foolish.

“Like I said, close on thirty years ago. Something happened, the law was involved. I think that woman that ran it turned out
to be some kind of criminal hiding out up here, and they come after her. The wife and I, we’d gone back East so she could
help one of our daughters with a new baby, so we wasn’t here when they come after that woman. People talked about it for a
time, but I didn’t pay no attention. Now, my wife, she coulda told you. You know how women are.”

“Yes,” I answered, and slid off my stool. “Thanks so much, Mr. Babbick.”

“Just call me Waddy,” he said, waving a leathery hand. “And come on back when you wanna see those arrowheads!”

It was only four more miles to the line shack, so I drove up there and let Brontë run while I stared at it. In the bright
sunlight I could see bare spots where the adobe had crumbled away, exposing rotted boards beneath. No one had been there since
I kicked the door in. Everything was as I’d left it. In the light it looked like nothing in particular, just a crumbling shack
that could fall in on itself and vanish by tomorrow. It meant nothing, told me nothing, and I felt like an idiot for imagining
that it would. Still, I thought, it had been a diner, and diners used blue willow plates … but no, it was far-fetched. I’d
asked for Roxie’s trust in the middle of a serious professional obligation involving both of us. It was time to earn it.

“Come on, Brontë,” I called. “We’ve got real work to do.”

F
rom Anza the quickest route down into San Diego is I-15, which descends through broken granite foothills and fields of huge,
pale boulders. I was in a hurry, so I took that route. Advertising is not permitted on interstate highways, but a sign announcing
a large shopping mall in one of the suburban communities was nonetheless visible, perched on a hill. And a large shopping
mall would have what I needed. Ten minutes later I stood in an electronics chain store overflowing with unidentifiable merchandise.

“I want to buy a cellular phone,” I told a young woman with seven earrings in the cartilage of her left ear. She was reading
Moby Dick
and seemed delighted to put the book down and tell me about the differences between analog and digital.

“Just something cheap and serviceable,” I told her as though I were buying shelf paper. “I don’t expect to use it very much.
In fact, I may never use it again after today.”

“Oh, you’ll use it,” she said knowingly. “They’re addictive.”

Twenty minutes and a lot of paperwork later I showed Brontë a tiny phone with a flip-down mouthpiece. I grew up watching
Star Trek
. I knew what I had.

“Beam me up, Scotty,” I said to a Doberman, and then headed south toward Jeffrey Pond’s low-rent apartment.

He wasn’t there but his mother was, and she was asleep. Or had been until I woke her.

“I told those FBI men when they came in the hospital last night,” she said through the three-inch gap allowed by the chain
lock, “we don’t know nothing about whatever it is happened at Jeffrey’s clinic. Now my husband went in the hospital yesterday
afternoon with a heart failure from pulman eneema, they said, and Jeffrey and me, we been there straight through since four
o’clock. That’s four o’clock yesterday. Jeffrey, he’s still there, but I come on over here to get some sleep since I been
up all night. We sure would appreciate it a lot if you people would just go on and leave us alone, you understand? We got
our hands full here without all this trouble.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to the sleep-creased face regarding me with firmly controlled hostility. “Please tell Jeffrey that Dr.
McCarron sends best wishes for his father’s recovery. You go on back to sleep now. I won’t bother you again.”

I had lapsed smack into the heartland behavior that is my birthright. Nothing is dearer to the soul of a Midwesterner than
saying something polite and then getting the hell out of other people’s business. It occurred to me that as a model for human
interaction it wasn’t half bad.

It also occurred to me that Jeffrey Pond was one of those people who appear to be cursed. Disaster upon disaster. An ugly
divorce, false accusations of rape that destroyed his right to be comfortable with his daughter. Financial ruin, suspicion
of serial murder, the loss of his job with the closing of the Rainer Clinic. And now the additional burden of his father’s
serious illness. I hoped he had his Silly Putty with him at the hospital.

In the truck I made the first of twenty free cellular calls that came with my sign-up package. The call was to the Rainer
Clinic, and Jennings Rainer answered.

“It’s Dr. McCarron,” I said. “Is Dr. Bouchie there?”

“She’s right here,” he answered, sounding a little better than he had when I last saw him. “I do appreciate your help in referring
me to Dr. Bouchie,” he added. “This situation is terrible, but somehow I don’t feel as crushed by it as I did. I’ve already
seen the psychiatrist she recommended, and just having someone to talk to has helped, although he did prescribe a medication
for me, which I will take until my life is under control again. And I do feel that I’m helping the authorities now. I feet
that I’m doing what I can to help right this horrible wrong.”

“I was worried about you,” I admitted unprofessionally. “This must be the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”

“No,” he answered thoughtfully, “that was losing my wife. This was just a business and I was about to retire in any event.
What’s terrible is that someone I know and worked with every day has taken
other
men’s wives, other men who must now feel as lost and alone as I’ve felt. And I didn’t even see it. Neither did Megan. We
were responsible here. This was our clinic. Yet we saw nothing and now three women are dead and one of my employees has threatened
to kill a vice presidential candidate. It’s really more than I can comprehend. Oh, here’s Dr. Bouchie.”

“Rox, I’ve just been by Jeffrey Pond’s apartment,” I began. “Do you have any idea what a ‘pulman eneema’ might be?”

“At another time I might make rude references to lower g.i. practices performed aboard trains,” she answered. “But not now.
It sounds like somebody trying to remember ‘pulmonary edema,’ which basically means your lungs are a mess. Don’t tell me Pond
has it.”

“No, his father does. The father’s in the hospital and Jeffrey and his mother have been there with him since four yesterday
afternoon. I’m sure the FBI already has this information and has checked it out. They tracked Pond to his father’s hospital
room last night. If what Mrs. Pond says is true, Jeffrey couldn’t have orchestrated all that publicity about himself last
night. E-mails were sent to the papers, TV stations, the police. And to me. Pond wasn’t even near a computer. I’ll check it
out with Rathbone, but I’m afraid Pond’s not Sword. So what about the blood test on Kate? And is Pieter there with her? Has
he come around yet?”