Stay Vertical (4 page)

“We’ve already got a cool name for the store,” said Iso. “The Strain Train.”

“I thought we were going with Pipe Dreams.”

“The Strain Train rhymes.”

Lytton was skeptical. “Why didn’t you just ask me for my secret?”

Zelov looked at a light bank, his face screwed up. “Didn’t occur to us to ask?” Serious again, he waved his Sig Sauer as though it were a fairy’s wand. “Now take that piece out of my man’s brain or I’m going to bring this whole smelly warehouse down around your head. It’s going to be biblical.”

“I don’t think so. I let you go, every epic asshat between here and Juarez is going to be sashaying into my farm and walking out with weed. I’ve got all day. I’ll just stand here waiting for the cops.”

Zelov rolled his eyes. “Well, we ain’t
got
all day, you savvy, Scoobie Doobie?”

Iso finally yanked himself away from Lytton. Like a snobby waiter, he straightened out the bottom hem of his cut and glared at Lytton. “Besides, you don’t want to kill me. I’m your fucking new best friend, with the information I’ve got.”

“Iso,” Zelov said warningly.

Apparently whatever information Iso had was more important than a shootout in a pot greenhouse, so of course Lytton’s curiosity was piqued. Lytton looked from Iso to Zelov, from Zelov to Iso. “Holster your weapon too,” he growled.

Both men did so, Lytton sticking his in his jeans waistband at the small of his back. Iso staggered a few steps off and had to grab onto a pot plant to stay upright, his lower jaw jutting angrily.

Lytton lifted his chin at Iso. “Talk. What do you know that makes you my new best friend?”

“Whoa,” whined Iso. “I’m weak from blood loss.”

“See?” Lytton heard the faraway whine of a cop’s siren over the nearby whine of the Cutlass sergeant-at-arms. Lytton didn’t bid on sports memorabilia at the Pure and Easy annual policeman’s benefit dinner for nothing. Those guys knew which side their bread was buttered on. “Doesn’t take them long to get here. Now speak.”

“Ah,” said Zelov, “why don’t you just let us leave the way we came in and we’ll call it even? Iso doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s delirious from blood loss.”

“I’ll let you go if you tell me what’s so damned important.” Lytton made as if to reach for his piece again, and Iso cracked.

“It’s about your dad!” Iso held like a monkey to the trunk of the plant, swaying back and forth.

Zelov rolled his eyes again and stepped away, as if washing his hands of the entire affair. Lytton’s heart near about stopped.

My dad.
For the first twenty-five years of his life, he had thought his father was Kino Driving Hawk, upstanding member of the White Mountain Apache Tribal council. “What about him? He owns the land you just trespassed on.”

Iso shook his head and chortled evilly, like some cartoon moustache-twirler. “No. It’s not about that redskin. It’s about your
real
dad.”

Lytton actually went weak in the knees. Since that awful day five years ago, he’d been living in mortal terror that someone would talk like this. The MIT scholarship committee had discovered that Kino wasn’t Lytton’s real dad when his mother had finally sent them his birth certificate. She had sobbed and torn her hair out apologizing to Lytton, but the damage was done.

She had lied to protect him, and Kino was game to go along with it, being a nice guy. As for
who
Lytton’s real father was—clearly not a tribal member, but someone of dark countenance—Sadie never let on. She claimed not to know who he was, claiming to have been gang-banged by some out-of-town bikers.

The story had never set well with Lytton, for some reason. Now he cautiously asked Iso, “What are you talking about?”

Iso’s nostrils flared nastily. “You know. You know that redskin’s not your real dad. You know you’re a fucking half-breed.”

“Leave it alone, Iso,” warned Zelov from a safe distance. “You’re just opening up a can of worms.”

Now Lytton
did
remove his Glock from his waistband, although he allowed it to dangle at his side until he heard Iso out. “No, I want to hear this shit. What’re you rattling on and on about?”

Iso jutted his jaw triumphantly, although he still clung to the feeble plant. “Your mom. That slutty squaw. Went and spread her dirty slutty legs thirty years ago for Cropper Illuminati. Yeah, that Cropper. You’ve heard of him, maybe?”

The cops had reached Lytton’s front gate a quarter mile away. It sounded like two cop cars in tandem wailing away, suddenly not a salvation, but another new threat.

Zelov yanked Iso away from the pot tree. “Cumon, let’s go. We’ll discuss this later. Right, Driving Hawk? We’ll talk about the pot dispensary, Pipe Dreams? We could really use a top scientist like you to help us out with all the tagging and labeling and shit like that.” Zelov pushed a button on a radio attached to his cut. “Toddler Tyke, Toddler Tyke, this is Big Kahuna, do you copy? What’s your location? We need to make like a baby and head out.”

Lytton felt as though his brain was bleeding. Of course he knew Cropper Illuminati. Everyone in Arizona knew Cropper Illuminati. He had died last year in a strange accident down near the Mexican border. He had been president of the huge Illuminati Trucking empire and owner of a buttload of other businesses in and around Pure and Easy.

And president of The Bare Bones motorcycle club, the Cutlass’ mortal enemy.

Iso sneered. “Prez of The Bare Bones. Yeah, you heard right. You’re a spawn of those twisted motherfucking Boners, so we shouldn’t even be doing business with you.”

Iso didn’t even need to add the rest. It was all like so much water off a duck’s back as Zelov grabbed his sergeant-at-arms and dragged him down the aisle of white buckets toward the front door.

Lytton barely heard what Zelov was saying. Now
he
felt like holding onto the marijuana trunk for dear life.

“You walking hard-on. Don’t you have the sense God gave you? We need Driving Hawk on
our
side, not going over to the enemy. We need his fucking expertise. He knows all that weatherman shit like climate control, lighting, and airflow…”

JUNE

“I
ngrid has pancreatic cancer.”

For weeks on end now, I had imagined sitting next to Madison and giving her Ingrid’s diagnosis.

Not once had I expected it to be like this.

For one, we were sitting in an airplane hangar. Yes, one of those old decrepit airfield hangars with all the broken windowpanes, the no air conditioning, the corroded underground storage tanks leaking jet fuel into the soil.

Built in the forties on a flat butte on Mescal Mountain, now the hangar was headquarters and corporation yard for Illuminati Trucking—and also, apparently, The Bare Bones biker club. I had forgotten how much I loved the red sedimentary rocks of the Pure and Easy area. Looking now out the window I could see the upthrust plates of hematite-stained strata where erosion had eaten away the softer sandstone underneath, leaving grand, dramatic citadels and towers of rock.

These were the sorts of hills Madison had slept in as a forgotten kid, and I wondered how she was able to handle the view. However, it wasn’t even the same person who sat next to me now. For one, she had ten years of responsible, practical nursing experience behind her. I could see it in every plane and curve of her face, the maturity, the responsibility.

I know it sounds corny, but you have to know it was nothing short of a miracle that we’d both made it out of there alive. Madison was poetically calling the old Cottonwood ranch house our “House of Early Sorrows” for all the grief it had caused us. It was a downright fucking miracle that we both hadn’t turned to drugs or prostitution—or worse, turned into a twisted, bitter old witch like our mother. Against all odds we had risen from that muck—and now Madison even had a baby!

It sounds even cornier to say a baby is a miracle, but Fidelia truly was. She toddled around Ford’s office in her achingly adorable little tennies, at that age where she had the need for speed. She had her father’s lush, black mane of hair, satiny curls tumbling over her shoulders. There was a wedding photo of the two of them on Ford’s desk, and I was surprised how much it wrenched my heart to see his devilishly handsome face again.

I had never found anyone to love the way Maddy had. The closest I had come was some British guy serving as a volunteer near Lake Turkana. I had imagined it was love with Randy—after all, we had so much in common. We both loved Africa with a passion. We agreed on every tiny political agenda. We even liked the same beer and food. We really had everything in common on paper, which was why I overlooked how awful he was in bed—if you called a square of fabric in the sand a bed—and how little old ladyish he was about his spice rack.

I know. Everything in life is a trade-off. No one is going to be that perfect soul mate, your exact mirror image the whole way.
Vive la difference
. Opposites attract. Why, God, why, of all the fucking things that a guy could possibly have going wrong for him, would I fixate on his god damned
spice rack?

Well, I thought it was a sign. He wouldn’t let me use the last of the garam masala because he wasn’t going to Nairobi for another three weeks, and God forbid he run out of garam masala in the meantime, and isn’t that what garam masala is for in the first place, to
cook with?

But I took it as a sign that he’d be stingy and selfish about other things, and I supposed I wasn’t that in love with him after all if I let something small like that prevent me from moving to Khartoum with him, like he wanted when he was transferred. Maybe I was scared of commitment or maybe I wasn’t ready to follow someone else around the globe, or maybe my job was that important to me. I was broken-hearted without Randy, and would cry myself to sleep with my face pressed against the warm sand, Randy’s
kanga
wrapped around me, singing along to the mournful songs of the tribespeople.

Turk Blackburn stopped by to take Fidelia somewhere. I remembered Turk from the Cottonwood days when sometimes they’d have club meetings—called “church”—at our house. He had been Ford’s best friend growing up.
Damn,
that was one hella fine babe. He was one of those men so painfully gorgeous that people on the street would stop dead in their tracks and drop their jaws to the ground. It was said people used to rush up and ask him to be in their TV commercials, though I don’t know if he actually ever did any.

He was a polite, sort of mild-mannered biker, if such a thing was possible. He kept his beard neatly trimmed, and he had the softest expression, his long lashes framing glittering eyes. As Maddy’s little sister, I’d always known Turk was way out of my league too. He still didn’t wear a wedding ring, and I was a lot more mature and filled-out, but I knew I didn’t dare hit that.

“I heard something was wrong with your mother,” said Turk now, bouncing Fidelia on his lap.

“Yes,” Madison said thinly, and I couldn’t read her tone. “She’s got pancreatic cancer.”

Turk raised his eyebrows. “Pancreatic? That can be quite…” Tactfully, he didn’t finish.

“Aggressive,” I filled in for him. “Yes, it is. She’s estimated to be stage three, but like I was just telling Maddy, she’s only been to one doctor.”

This was the part where, normally, Turk would have reminisced something pleasant about Ingrid, but I could tell there was nothing there for him to say. I could see him look desperately into the corners of Ford’s office, at the bookshelf, at his collection of toy loaders and excavators, floundering for something positive to say.

Madison didn’t help him out, either. She was just going to leave him high and dry. She sat with her lips firmly compressed, and I didn’t have big hopes for this meeting. Finally Turk said, “She was always such a character.”

It was Madison who snorted, not me! “That’ll be on the old witch’s gravestone. ‘She was such a character.’ If anyone shells out for a gravestone.”

Turk was trying to be more charitable. “No, no, I meant that…she’s always been a very unique and singular person.”

Now Madison made a lip fart. “You don’t need to step so lightly, Turk. You know she was just a mean old bitch.”

Turk smiled and nodded. “Yes. I guess I just feel there must be some good in everyone. I mean, she must’ve had a reason to be the way she was.”

“Her childhood trauma?” I blurted out, surprising even myself. “Try causing
us
childhood trauma.”

Madison laughed fully now, and looked about to high five me. She pointed at me instead. “See?” she said to Turk. “Even the chosen one can’t find a single good thing to say about her.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” I protested. “I can think of lots of good things to say about Ingrid. She tried. You have to hand her that. She tried, in her own twisted way, to be a mother.”

Madison was back to snorting. “Yeah. She just should’ve never
been
a mother. I don’t know why she didn’t stop at me. Why’d she keep on, having you and Speed?”

“Oh, cumon,” said Turk. “You must have some good memories.”