High Desert Barbecue Read online

  “Take it easy, boy. You’ll see Scott in a minute.”

  She hauled back on Champ’s leash, pitting her 120 pound against Champ’s 65 pounds of slobbering enthusiasm, to allow herself enough reach to wriggle her hands into her purse for her keys to Scott’s house. With the maneuver accomplished, she allowed the black-and-white mutt to lead the way to Scott’s back door. Champ promptly nosed the door open, snatched the leash from Lani’s hand, and disappeared into the house.

  Lani glanced at the splintered rear door frame, then at the keys in her hand.

  “Scott!”

  She passed through the kitchen, glancing at the polished wooden cabinets on the wall. The kitchen had been a sore spot when she and Scott began dating—actually, it was how they began dating.

  Dragged from bed early one morning by the sound of a power saw screaming its way through lumber, she’d quickly dressed in the previous day’s clothes, left scattered on her bedroom floor. The narrow hallway of her cluttered cottage was lined with shelves crowded mostly with children’s books. Gaps showed where books had been loaned to students.

  Trotting behind her, Champ whimpered with concern. Recently acquired from a shelter where he’d landed after being found wandering the street dirty and emaciated, the dog had quickly attached himself to Lani. He’d also demonstrated his appreciation for his new home and good treatment by taking a proprietary interest in the woman’s well-being. One of Lani’s more-aggressive dates learned the extent of Champ’s devotion when he talked his way through the door and tried to force the evening past her comfort zone. Lani sincerely hoped Champ’s teeth left permanent scars.

  Now she rarely went anyplace without him. She grabbed the dog’s leash from a peg by the front door.

  Five-feet, two-inches of blonde fury, she’d stalked across the driveway to the newly purchased neighboring house with Champ by her side. She’d marched to the back door, from behind which the cacophony seemed to originate. She’d put her full body weight into pounding on the door. A tall, muscular, balding man wearing dirty cut-off shorts and protective goggles pushed to the top of his head, with raccoon eyes of clean skin surrounded by an even layer of sawdust, answered her knock.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I live next door. Right next door. Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  The man shifted his gaze to a wall clock mounted above the arch leading to the living room. It’s … whoops! It’s just 6. Sorry if I woke you up. I couldn’t sleep and I thought it was later.”

  Lani glanced around the construction zone that had replaced the house’s kitchen. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Champ easing forward and sniffing curiously at the stranger. The dog grinned. She tugged back on the leash.

  “You’re renovating?”

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t see a permit posted.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “You may not know, but the city requires—”

  The man shook his head and interrupted.

  “I know, but I don’t care. The city doesn’t own this house. I do. The mayor doesn’t have to ask my permission to make city hall even uglier than it already is, and I’m not gonna ask his permission to install some cabinets and an electric oven that won’t burn my dinner.”

  Lani stood at the doorstep with her mouth open. Then she smiled.

  “You don’t like being told what to do, do you?”

  The half-dressed man smiled back.

  “Nope. But I also don’t like bugging people. I’m really sorry about that.”

  He reached out of Lani’s sight and grabbed a t-shirt as ratty as his shorts. As he slipped the shirt over his head, Champ pushed forward and nuzzled the man’s bare knee.

  Lani quickly jerked back on the leash, harder than before.

  “I guess we can call it a rough meeting. I’m Lani. I live in the house over there. And I usually get up right about now to go to my job as a teacher.”

  The man ruffled the fur on Champ’s head with one hand and reached out the other.

  “Pleased to meet you Lani. I’m Scott. I sleep at strange times when I’m not telecommuting to my office back east.”

  “You telecommute? What do you do?”

  “I write and edit an online business magazine.”

  “You’re a writer? Cool. Do you read a lot too?”

  “Oh yeah. You should have heard the movers bitch about carrying my crates of books.”

  Lani smiled again. Actually, she stifled a laugh at his raccoon eyes. She coughed to cover a giggle.

  “So … You moved here from back East?”

  “Boston, most recently. I wanted a raise and easier access to the outdoors.” Scott brushed at his forehead, leaving a flesh-colored streak in the sawdust. “I realized I could give myself both if I moved away from East Coast taxes and closer to the trails, and Flagstaff is surrounded by beautiful country. My boss thought that was a swell idea, since he could save a bundle on benefits by paying me as a contractor. Everybody walked away happy.”

  “Except for the tax collectors?”

  “True.” Scott smiled. “Making them cry is just gravy.”

  Lani snickered. Then she caught another glimpse of the wall clock.

  “Oh. I have to get my day started. Maybe you could show me your book collection sometime.”

  “I’ll be happy to. Hey—do you want breakfast? I make mean omelettes over a campstove.”

  He was right. The omelettes were good.

  Scott was jigging with Champ when she turned the corner. Bare-chested, in sunglasses and a cowboy hat, he hopped up and down, feet flying, to whatever music flowed through the wire that disappeared under his hat. The dog leaped around him, making his own music of excited yelps. A stack of papers lay in disarray at the base of the fax machine.

  “You look like a demented porn actor.”

  Scott doffed the hat and headphones. Something heavy on pipes and fiddles escaped into the room before he tapped his finger to pause the music.

  “What’s that, baby?”

  “I said … never mind. Did you know that somebody forced your back door?”

  Scott stopped jigging and bent to pet Champ. The dog responded to the attention by flopping on his back, exposing his belly for a rub.

  “Yep. Rollo dropped by for a visit. He’ll fix the lock later.”

  Lani made a face, and then bent to land a kiss on Scott’s lips that left them just shy of bruised. She unhooked the leash still trailing from Champ’s collar.

  “Is he still living on Forest Service land?”

  “It’s not the Forest Service’s land, much as they’d like us to think otherwise. But no, for now he seems to be living on my sofa.”

  “What?” Lani shot to her feet. She felt her face flushing with blood. “No fucking way!”

  Scott stood quickly, stepping back as if to give himself a safe clearance from Lani’s stabbing finger. He held his hands high and apart in a defensive posture.

  Champ languished on the floor, belly to the sky, wondering at the loss of all of the attention he’d enjoyed just a moment before.

  “I didn’t say he’s moving in; he just needs a place to crash until he … uh … finds himself another den or something.”

  Lani closed her eyes and breathed deeply, then looked back at Scott. There were times when she really didn’t understand the guy. Here was a smart man with a house and a life hanging around with a crazy old hobo. Why?

  “What happened to the rat hole he was living in?”

  Scott smirked.

  “It got de-ratted. The Forest Service burned him out and stole his truck.”

  Lani reached with her left hand to scratch gently between Champ’s ears. Unwilling to lie on the floor waiting for people to come to him, he had stood and now leaned his full weight against his owner’s legs, content in the knowledge that now he couldn’t be ignored.

  “What? What do you mean the Forest Service ‘burned him out’?”

  Scott shru
gged. He reached to shut off his computer, closing down software and then tapping the “Start” icon to power the system down.

  “I just know what he told me. The rangers found his latest shack. He ran away before they could catch him. As he was driving away in one of their trucks he saw smoke rising from where the shack was.”

  Lani cocked her head.

  “Rollo stole a Forest Service truck?”

  Scott shrugged again, then wandered from the office toward the kitchen. Lani heard him rummaging in the refrigerator. Freeing herself from the dog’s weight—Champ flopped to the floor as if he’d been rendered boneless—she wandered into the kitchen herself just in time to see Scott guzzling from an orange juice carton.

  “Hey,” Scott called to her. “It was a fair trade. The rangers got to keep that old junker he was driving around.”

  “Yeah, right. Y’know, if he wasn’t your friend, I’d have called the cops on him a long time ago.”

  Scott casually stuffed the carton back in the refrigerator.

  “Baby, if he wasn’t my friend, you wouldn’t know anything about his intriguing activities.”

  Rather than concede the point, Lani changed subjects.

  “Do you have much more work to do today?”

  Scott winced, doffed his hat and ran the fingers of his right hand through the tightly cropped fuzz that represented the last stand of his hairline.

  “Oh, that’s the other thing I have to tell you. I finally got fired. Right in the middle of the meeting—I had a meeting today, by the way—Todd and that bimbo shadow of his start pointing out that I really have nothing left to do since they downsized my department into an expensive photocopying operation.”

  Lani buried her face in her hands.

  “Anyway, I turned it around on Todd and asked what his responsibilities are.”

  “Did you get him fired too?”

  Scott shook his head.

  “Nope! It turns out the jerk has a lot of responsibility. He sounds pretty productive too. Who knew?”

  Chapter 6

  Ranger Jason Hewitt of the National Forest Service (Richard Wilson District) squirmed on the plastic seat of the cheap tubular-steel chair. His face, above the collar of his green polyester button-down shirt, was smudged and a strong odor of wood smoke hung about him.

  “Strictly speaking,” he began, a little hesitantly, “we don’t know what happened to my vehicle.”

  “No,” a slightly scratchy, nasal voice interrupted. “We don’t know what happened to your vehicle.” Jason’s own emphasis on “know” was repeated, but drawn out with singsong quality that made the ranger wince.

  Jason wished he were somewhere, anywhere else than across a desk from his boss and co-conspirator, Chief Ranger Martin Van Kamp.

  Van Kamp sat tall behind his battered sheet metal desk—tall, that is, on an office chair cranked all the way to the top of its elevatory capacity, and then a bit taller on a Phoenix telephone book placed on the cushion. His full five-foot, four-inch, 125-pound frame bounced in agitation atop its makeshift throne.

  “But we can make an educated guess now, can’t we?”

  Jason nodded.

  “Do you think an elk made off with your vehicle?” Van Kamp rasped.

  Jason shook his head.

  “Maybe a hawk? Perhaps a red-tailed hawk hot-wired your Chevy Blazer and hauled it off to a chop shop?”

  Jason grimaced and raised both hands in front of him like a shield. “Actually, the keys were in the ignition.”

  Van Kamp pulled up short—shorter anyway.

  “Keys were in the ignition,” he repeated, seeming to exhale the phrase through his nostrils.

  Jason nodded.

  “So, pretty much anybody could have made off with your truck.”

  Van Kamp leaned forward in his chair, face red and nostrils flaring. An image of an enraged baboon passed through Jason’s mind and he involuntarily hunched in his chair, bracing for attack.

  “Except that the only fucking person out there, other than your team, was the squatter you were supposed to be grabbing.”

  “As far as we know,” Jason protested, drawing his legs up on the chair as Van Kamp leaned forward across his desk.

  “Jason, the squatter was out there because there’s nobody else around. Your vehicle disappeared from a wash a couple of hundred yards from his shack. I think there’s a really good chance he’s now driving around northern Arizona in a Forest Service-issue Chevy Blazer.”

  Knees under his chin, arms folded across his shins, Jason couldn’t even nod acknowledgment. He made do with a whimper.

  The office fell silent for several minutes as Van Kamp came to terms with his rage and Jason grappled with his fear.

  Happy thoughts, Jason told himself. Think happy thoughts. He visualized a world of pristine wilderness where forests and deserts were untouched by the hand of man—no people, anywhere.

  Except for him!

  There he was, deep in the forest, naked, with no man-made implements of any sort to sully nature’s purity. He was somehow taller in his vision, more muscular than the image he saw in the mirror in the morning.

  Wait! And there runs a deer. It’s a beautiful white-tail doe. Such soft fur. Such limpid eyes. Come here you pretty-

  “Um hmmm,” Van Kamp cleared his throat. “Do you have anything to say?”

  Jason’s eye snapped open and he shuddered at the view in front of him.

  “Uh yeah. There’s no reason why we can’t still pin the fire on the squatter. The fact that he stole a government vehicle should make it even more believable on top of the fact that he was trespassing on public land.”

  “We’ll do that. It’d be a lot easier if we had him in custody, and if we were sure that he didn’t see you light that fire. Chances are the cops will find him anyway. We’ll have him nailed as an arsonist and a car thief. Even if he saw something, nobody will believe a word he says.”

  “You bet!” Jason nodded. His eyes took on a bright glint. “After the Carthage Option cleanses the land, people will want this guy to hang.”

  Van Kamp rolled his eyes.

  “Uh … yeah. All right, get out of here—and be more careful. We can’t afford any witnesses.”

  “Will do.”

  “And stop throwing around that ‘Carthage Option’ crap. Jesus, but that’s a bit obvious.”

  Jason nodded, but repeated the phrase to himself. Carthage Option. Carthage Option. He really liked the way it sounded—like he was a secret agent on a mission.

  Van Kamp rose again in his seat, leaning toward his cowering underling.

  “Now get that damned truck out of the front of my building.”

  Jason unfolded his legs, letting blood flow back into the extremities he’d clutched so tightly. Hobbling on tingling feet, he eagerly fled Van Kamp’s office, then set to figuring out how to extract an old, junked pickup truck from a cinderblock wall. Stranded as his team had been in the forest after their Blazer was stolen, they’d fled the fire with the only vehicle at hand—Rollo’s junker.

  It wasn’t until Jason and his team arrived at the Forest Service office that they discovered the old truck’s handicap in the matter of brakes.

  Chapter 7

  That evening, Rollo wandered back to Scott’s house by foot, following a weaving course through the streets leading to the small stone-and wood-sided cottage. He sipped slowly at a beer smuggled to the street from a downtown bar and enjoyed the pleasant glow of a day of vice in the city. In his left hand was a paper bag sporting a hardware store logo.

  He gave a sharp rap to Scott’s front door with the base of the beer bottle, and then let himself in through the unlocked entryway. Within seconds he found himself warding off Champ, who launched an enthusiastic greeting directly at his crotch and could be dissuaded only with a vigorous scratch behind the ears.

  A flurry of motion caught Rollo’s eye as he entered the living room. He made out a brief glimpse of something slim and blonde in mid-leap fr
om Scott’s lap.

  “Nice tits, Lani,” Rollo said. He chuckled as the woman promptly pulled and tugged at the top of her sports bra. He hadn’t actually caught a glimpse of anything, but he never passed up a chance to needle his friend’s girlfriend.

  “Did you find another refrigerator box to live in?” Lani shot back.

  Scott remained motionless, sprawled across the sofa, a broad grin spreading across his face. He wore running shorts and a t-shirt. He and Lani both looked like they’d been through a workout. For Scott’s sake Rollo hoped it was the same kind of workout he himself had enjoyed not long ago, especially since the younger man didn’t have to pay for his fun in hard cash.

  “Hey, Rollo,” Scott called out. “You’re looking shaved, showered and happy. I take it you found what you were looking for.”

  “Yep,” Rollo answered. “Flagstaff is still worth a damn after all.”

  Lani looked back and forth between the two.

  “I’m not sure what you guys are talking about, but I’ll bet it’s disgusting.”

  “What we’re talking about?” Rollo asked, raising his eyebrows. “I’m sorry, I should have been clearer. I went to a whorehouse and got my pipes cleaned. Then I went to a bar and got piss drunk. Which I am now. Well, I would be if I could still drink without feeling like crap. Actually, I barely have a buzz.”

  Scott doubled over in laughter.

  “You really are disgusting.” Lani folded her arms and leaned back on the sofa, distancing herself from both men.

  Mostly recovered from his bout of hilarity, Scott jumped in.

  “Is that my new back door latch?” He pointed to the bag in Rollo’s hand.

  “Yep. Get me a beer and put some music on the radio and I’ll go make your house safe and secure. Well, as safe and secure as it was before I broke in. Heh.”

  Scott rose from the sofa and headed for the kitchen, followed by Rollo and his paper bag. Champ trailed them both, grinning and wide-eyed with hope that whatever the two men had planned would involve food.

  “We’re out of beer. You can have water or … huh … water. That OK?”