High Desert Barbecue (3 page)

L
ani 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.”

T
he 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.”

L
ani 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.”

L
ani 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.”

H
e was right. The omelettes were good.

S
cott 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.”

S
cott 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?”

S
cott 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.”

L
ani 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!”

S
cott 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.

C
hamp 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.”

L
ani 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?”

S
cott smirked.

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

L
ani 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’?”

S
cott shrugged. 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.”

L
ani cocked her head.

“
Rollo stole a Forest Service truck?”

S
cott 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.”

S
cott casually stuffed the carton back in the refrigerator.

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

R
ather than concede the point, Lani changed subjects.

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

S
cott 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.”

L
ani 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?”

S
cott shook his head.

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

Chapter 6

R
anger 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.

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

V
an 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?”

J
ason nodded.

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

J
ason shook his head.

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

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

V
an Kamp pulled up short—shorter anyway.

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

J
ason nodded.

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

V
an 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.”

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

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

H
appy 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.

E
xcept for him!

T
here 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.

W
ait! 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?”

J
ason’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.”

V
an 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.”

J
ason 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.