Tortoise Soup (22 page)

“Make any headway on those runaway tortoises yet?” Ruby inquired as she wiped off the counter with a brown, scummy rag.

“Not a bit,” I admitted. I had no desire to explain that so far, my major discovery was a can of neon-green spray paint.

“Word has it that a big shipment of those critters landed in Pahrump,” Ruby revealed. “But don’t get all riled up to hop on over there. Those four-legged Volkswagens have already been scooped up.”

“How do you know that?” I wondered if Ruby had somehow been involved in the deal.

“Heard there was some big-ass Chinaman’s festival over around Fresno a ways. A wedding or something. Those torts were on special order. At least, that’s what I heard. The evidence has probably all been eaten by now.” Ruby threw a dollop of thin, gray gravy over a hard lump of instant mashed potatoes on my plate. “By the way, I could use a can of hairspray the next time you’re around.”

I knew exactly what she liked: the kind of lacquer that would keep the Empire State Building from falling down.

When I finally headed back out, it looked as if someone had thrown an assortment of tempera colors into the sky, fingerpainting the sunset that appeared before my eyes. I pulled out a map, along with Lizzie’s piece of paper, and took off to track Dee Salvano down.

Night had closed in quickly by the time I found the wooden sign for Feather Lane Drive. I swung onto the dirt road and turned on my brights, dodging rocks and sneaky ruts along the way. Every once in a while a pair of eyes would flash in front of me, burning into the night with the intensity of meteors ablaze. Surprised by the intrusion, their owner would quickly scamper away. After a few minutes I spotted a glimmer off in the distance, smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

I approached to find the light emanated from a squat concrete structure with a battered red pickup out front. I pulled up next to it and studied the house. An array of colored bottles, all sizes and shapes, was perched on the windowsills. A wooden signpost pointed the way to Hong Kong, London, and Paris—the kind of places most people usually dream about going. A movement caught my eye as one of the window curtains, pulled slightly aside, quickly fell back into place.

I left Pilot in the Blazer and navigated the rocky path up to the house. I was just about to knock when the door was yanked open. Dee stood with a shotgun in hand, bathed in a pool of light. She took a quick glance around and then reached out to grab me. Pulling me inside, she shut the door.

Her mound of brown hair was askew, as if a rabid coon had been trying to claw its way out, and her eyes verged on bloodshot. There was the unmistakable scent of beer on her breath.

“You got a hell of a lot of nerve coming here, Porter,” she glared at me. “Maybe you don’t give a shit about your own ass, but now you’re putting my life on the line.”

I hadn’t expected this kind of outburst. After all, Dee had been the one who had tipped me off about the mine to begin with.

“It’s kind of hard to get you on the phone for an in-depth conversation. I felt face to face in private would be best,” I responded.

“You take an awful lot for granted, then,” she snapped back.

“What do you think? That there’s someone outside spying on you?” I joked.

“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Don’t you know who you’re playing against, Porter? Nobody screws around with the mining industry in this state. Especially not Golden Shaft. Hell, they just gave NDOW five hundred thousand dollars for being good boys and keeping their nose out of the way,” Dee groused.

I imagined that with five hundred thousand dollars you could buy an awful lot of fax machines—and a good deal of cooperation.

“Hell, if they’re out there, they’ve seen you by now. So you might as well sit down and have a beer.” Dee turned and walked over to the fridge.

The place was a lot homier than its outside would have led me to believe. Every spot was filled with knickknacks, as if a carnival had just passed through town, unloading its wares. Small stuffed animals dominated most of the space. I picked up a toy tortoise as Dee flipped me a Coors.

“My husband bought me those,” she commented, popping open a can.

“Does he work for the mine, too?” I asked.

“Used to.” Dee held the cold can of beer to her face. “He died three years ago. His first job was to pick up dead wildlife on the grounds and throw their carcasses into shafts in order to get rid of the evidence. Felt so bad about the whole deal that he’d go out and buy me a stuffed animal each time. I ended up with a hell of a lot of them.”

Dee plucked a toy dog from the pile and hugged it to her breast. “You got that dog of yours out there in that truck?”

I nodded.

“Well, bring him the hell in. No sense in him sitting out there, either,” she said, putting the toy back in the pile.

I went outside to get Pilot, looking to see if I could spot anyone. But the desert was quiet and dark. Pilot trotted into the house, where Dee gave him a bowl of water and a dog biscuit.

“Have you got a dog, too?” I asked, surprised not to have heard any barking.

Dee gave Pilot a pat on the head and then straightened up. “He was shot. Got onto the mine grounds, where one of the guards killed him.”

I started to say I was sorry, but Dee cut me off.

“Hell, Golden Shaft got my husband, as well,” Dee sighed. “He fell into a mine shaft one day. Usually you can survive that sort of thing, but he broke his neck on the way down.”

I opened the Coors and took a sip. “I’m surprised you still work there.”

Dee stared at me a moment. “Like I told you before, there ain’t much choice out here. I’m too old be a stripper and the 7-Eleven don’t pay near as well. What the hell else am I supposed to do? You gonna give me a job?”

Silence descended, broken only by Pilot lapping the water.

“Tell me, why is wildlife even kept in the freezer if no autopsies are done?” I finally asked.

A sly smile stole across Dee’s face. “Nice touch, ain’t it? That’s so a few can be handed over to NDOW every now and then. They do some kind of slapdash look-see. And sure enough, it always turns out that the critters died of natural causes. Funny about that, huh? Never seen so many things just keeling over dead in one place.”

Dee wiped her mouth with the back of her arm. Putting down her beer, she took a plate of stew out of the oven.

“A few autopsies a year by NDOW seems to keep you feds from snooping around, and business goes on as usual.” Dee sat down at the table, kicking out a chair for me with her foot. “You had supper yet?”

I looked at the plate of grisly meat and bones, and thought about the dead critters piled up in mine shafts. “I’m fine, thanks. Is the mine giving money to anyone else that you know of?”

Dee thought for a moment as she chewed on a piece of mystery meat. “There’s the county commission. They get a nice chunk of change. The mine calls it community relations. I call it more like greasing the monkey, if you know what I mean.”

“I met Ed Garrett the other day. He certainly didn’t seem too concerned about winning my vote,” I informed her.

Dee wiped up some greasy stew with a slice of bread and stuffed it into her mouth. “Garrett’s twenty-five percent jerk, seventy-five percent slime and a hundred percent asshole. But he sure as hell has been stopping by the mine a lot these days.”

“Any idea why?” I asked.

“Sometimes the management calls a meeting of all the employees, hoping to get us riled up about federal restrictions. It’s all because of Garrett’s agenda for county supremacy. But I can tell you that Garrett’s got a lot of backing from workers at the mine. Mining is Nevada’s gravy train and anything that gets in the way is bound to get run over.”

Dee wiped a trickle of gravy from her mouth and put her plate down on the floor, where Pilot promptly lapped up the leftover bits of meat and gravy.

Dee grinned at me. “Betcha didn’t know that Golden Shaft has filed a patent to purchase all the land they have claims on.”

She was right: it was news to me. Brian certainly hadn’t mentioned it. What I did have some knowledge of was the Mining Law of 1872, also known as the Eleventh Commandment. It allows mining companies to purchase public land they have claims on for just five dollars an acre—making it private property on which they can do as they please. One company had recently purchased twenty-seven hundred acres, containing 15.8 billion dollars’ worth of minerals, for a paltry sum. Some in Congress called it highway robbery and were working hard to change the law. I mentioned as much to Dee.

“That’s why Golden Shaft is pushing to get this patent through as fast as possible,” she explained. “They don’t want Congress screwing things up.”

My guess was that Golden Shaft’s next best hope lay with Ed Garrett and his resolution to force the release of all public land in Clark County.

“Do you know if Golden Shaft purchased any of Annie McCarthy’s claims?” I probed.

She shook her head. “Nope. Haven’t seen a thing on it. But it shouldn’t be too hard to sniff around and find out.”

I pulled out Annie’s quit claim deed that had been signed by Anderson, and showed it to Dee.

“Is that Brian Anderson’s signature?” I asked, holding my breath.

“Well, it says Brian Anderson, don’t it?” Dee stated, pouring two cups of coffee.

“But does it look like the real thing?” I persisted.

Dee studied it closely. “Sure does to me.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Can’t blame old Annie. Most small miners dream big-time of selling to a company like Golden Shaft. Otherwise their claims ain’t worth dogshit. God knows, prospectors don’t have the money to mine for themselves. But if a mining company buys them out, prospectors are usually cut in on a share of whatever minerals are found on that land.”

I wondered if selling to Golden Shaft had really been Annie’s dream. There were mining companies that played fast and loose, snatching up claims and patenting land without any plans to ever mine it. The land was bought for close to nothing, then immediately sold to a developer for a small fortune.

“By the way, do you know anything about helicopters flying around the Golden Shaft at night?” I inquired.

Dee clearly wasn’t counting calories as she dumped three teaspoons of sugar in her coffee along with a dollop of cream. “Oh, yeah. I hear they’ve been dropping off some equipment at the mine.”

“At night?” I asked. “Why would they do that?”

“How the hell should I know?” Dee pulled out an apple pie from the cupboard.

“Are they government helicopters?” I pressed.

“Listen, I usually leave the mine at six-thirty and come straight home, before any of that goes on. What do you want to know for?” she asked, slicing off two big hunks.

I took a bite of the pie. Fortunately it was better than Ruby’s. “A lot of ranchers think government helicopters are flying around, planning some sort of invasion.”

Dee guffawed. “Yeah. That’s their black ops conspiracy theory. Those jackasses are a bunch of loony tunes any way you slice ’em or dice ’em.”

She noticed I had cleaned my plate and loaded on another piece of pie before I could refuse.

“So how did you like sleeping with the enemy the other night?” she asked. “Or ain’t he the enemy no more?”

“I didn’t sleep with him,” I replied, guilty about the erotic fantasy that even now spun through my mind.

She gave me a sarcastic look. “All dolled up in that dress? I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe what you want,” I answered abruptly.

Dee shrugged. “Whatever you say—but it might have been better if you had. Seems our foreman found a bunch of tortoises missing from the freezer and is on a rampage. A word to the wise? Keep out of the way till things blow over.” She sipped her coffee. “Of course, if you were to hear of any autopsies verifying that haul paks ran them over, I’d sure like to know.”

“You’ll be the first,” I promised.

Harley had exacted his revenge. By the time I got home that night, every muscle in the lower portion of my body was moaning and groaning. I walked up to my front door with all the grace of a broken-down, eighty-year-old wrestler who’d taken on Hulk Hogan, and been whupped.

Santou was coming in tomorrow. I knew I should spend what was left of the evening cleaning up the debris that littered my house. Instead, I dug out a dirty pot and threw in some oil to pop up a hefty bowl of popcorn.

Pilot grabbed a rawhide chew toy, joining me in the living room, where I turned on the TV and plunked down on the couch, popcorn bowl firmly in hand. After today’s Dale Evans adventure, I figured I’d earned a few hours of unqualified rest.

An insistent drumming in the background verified that Lizzie was home and on automatic pilot, her tap shoes pounding to the strains of
42nd Street
. I made headway on the popcorn as an old James Bond movie reeled me in, forcing me to deal with the quandary of deciding who I’d rather be: Bond taking on the bad guys or an eternally young blonde who looked good in both a bikini and an evening gown while lolling on the French Riviera.

I was edging toward the good life as a blonde when Pilot suddenly started to growl, a low, primal rumble that began in his belly and worked its way up to a snarl, threatening to spill into all-out war. I watched in awe as the hair on the back of his neck rose like an unfurling flag. His eyes blazed with a deep reddish glow, reflecting the scarlet gown of the Bond babe, and my arms began to goosebump as I followed Pilot’s eyes to the door.

I picked up his chew toy and tried to renew his interest, a blatant attempt to calm my own nerves. But Pilot’s eyes remained fixed on the door as his growling escalated, growing more and more intense. Suddenly he broke into an ear-shattering bark, and I jumped, heaving the bowl of popcorn into the air.

A set of car headlights blasted through my front window, framing me in their glare like a deer being jacklighted for the kill. At the same moment, the shrill ring of the phone tore through the room. My heart pounding, I searched for the phone in the blinding light, cursing as I tripped over the popcorn bowl. I picked up the receiver and covered my other ear tightly with my hand.