The mummy case (11 page)

“
I graduated from pads long ago.”

More laughter.

“
I’ll hit the Whitey,” said a big kid from the back.

“
Come on up,” I said.

He came up and stood before me, face sweating profusely behind the facemask. Skin so dark it looked purple. A big boy, he outweighed me by about a hundred pounds.

“
I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“
I promise I won’t cry,” I said. “Now get down in your stance.”

He squatted down as sweat dribbled off the narrow bars of his facemask. He reached forward and knuckled the grass in front of him with his right hand, a classic three-point stance. Most of his weight was on his hand.

I assumed a similar position about seven feet in front of him, but my weight was more evenly distributed.

I nodded to Samson.

The coach blew his whistle.

And the kid
burst
forward, charging recklessly headfirst. With my arm and shoulder, and a lot of proper technique, I absorbed his considerable bulk and used my legs to thrust upward. He went careening off to the side. Landed hard, but unhurt.

Some gasps from the players. I think I had just brushed aside their best athlete. I helped him to his feet and patted him on his shoulder pads. He was embarrassed.

To help him save face, I said, “I got lucky.”

He grinned and shook his head in what might have been amazement and went back to his place in line. I looked out at the other players. Others were smiling, laughing. Maybe, just maybe, Whitey wasn’t so bad after all.

“
It’s mostly about technique and heart, and some skill,” I said. “But you can make up for lack of skill with heart and hours in the weight room.” I surveyed them. “So who wants to hit like that?”

All hands shot up.

I grinned. “So who else wants to hit the Whitey?”

The hands stayed up. Despite himself, Coach Samson threw back his head and laughed.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Sanchez and I sat in my Mustang outside Harbor Junior High in Anaheim. A low vault of cobalt gray clouds hung low in the sky. We were eating donuts and drinking Diet Pepsis, the staples of surveillance. In a few minutes school would be out.

“
You ever going to get a new car?” asked Sanchez, sipping his diet soda with one hand, and working on a glazed with the other.

“
No.”

“
How about some air conditioning?”

“
How much is air conditioning?”

“
Eight, nine hundred bucks.”

“
No.”

We waited some more. I think I dozed. I felt an elbow in my rib, but might have dreamt it.

“
You’re snoring.”

I sat up. “Not anymore.”

“
Some detective you are.”

“
You’re the one detecting,” I said. “I’m sleeping.”

“
I bought the donuts, which means you’re on my time.”

“
Fine,” I said. “You have a picture of the kid?”

Sanchez removed from his shirt pocket a folded up page torn from a school yearbook. He pointed to a goofy-looking kid with big ears. “He’s our man.”

“
What’s his name?”

“
Richard.”

We drank some more Diet Pepsi. Occasionally, a cold wind rocked the Mustang, whistling through the cracked windows.

Sanchez dozed.

Later, I elbowed him, pointing.

Richard had emerged from the school’s central hallway with a pack of kids. The pack boarded a waiting bus. We gave pursuit. Along the way, we watched Richard shove a red headed kid’s face into the bus’s rear window. Perhaps amplified by the glass, the freckles along his forehead were huge. Judging by the way that the redhead resigned himself to his fate, I surmised this was a daily routine.

“
I really don’t like this kid Richard,” said Sanchez.

“
Yup,” I said. “Then again, the other kid is red headed.”

“
True.”

The bus dropped Richard off, along with a half dozen other kids. We followed Richard home from a safe distance. Along the way, we watched him turn over three trashcans and knock over a “For Sale By Owner” sign in front of a house.

Sanchez said, “I ought to bust his ass for vandalism.”

“
You realize we’re trained investigators following a twelve-year-old kid.”

“
Kid or no kid, he took part in a pre-meditated beating of a defenseless eleven-year-old. My defenseless eleven-year-old,” said Sanchez. “And I’m the only trained investigator here. You’re just a rent-a-dick.”

“
Hey, we both fell asleep.”

The kid turned into an ugly white home, and promptly chased away an ugly orange cat off the wooden porch. He went inside. Sanchez pulled out a notebook and wrote something down.

“
What are you doing?”

Sanchez checked his watch. “Noting the mark’s time of movements, assessing the daily routine.”

“
Did you include abusing the redhead?”

Sanchez ignored me. When finished, he snapped the notebook shut. “Same time tomorrow, but this time we bring Jesus.”

“
Good,” I said. “I could use some more ice cream.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

I was in the desert city of Barstow, otherwise known as the Great Las Vegas Rest Stop. I wasn’t resting. I was actually working, sitting in front of a microfilm machine on the third floor of Barstow Junior College library.

Earlier, a rather pretty college student with hair so blond it was almost white showed me how to operate the machine. I might have flubbed my first few attempts just to be shown the process all over again.

Now, after being thoroughly trained, I zipped through some of the oldest issues of the
Barstow Times
, currently scanning headlines in the 1880’s. Barstow is an old city, and its newspaper is one of the oldest in the region. Next to me, sweating profusely, was a regular Coke. I love regular Coke, and sneak it in when the mood strikes. After driving through 100-degree weather in a vehicle with no air conditioning, the mood struck and I ran with it.

The headlines were fairly mundane. Cattle sold. Drops in silver prices. Heat waves. Oddly, no mention of terrorists, nuclear fallout, Lotto results, or presidential scandals.

I was looking beyond headlines at what would be considered the filler articles. Most historians agree that Sylvester died no later than 1880. He was found in 1901. Like a good little detective, I was going to sift through every page of every newspaper published between January 1, 1880 and December 31, 1900.

I may need some more Coke.

Most of the news was indeed about Barstow, but there was the occasional mention of neighboring Rawhide and its wealthy family, the Barrons. From all accounts, the three Barron boys were hellraisers, always in some scrap or another, constantly bailed out by their wealthy family. Fights, shootouts, drunken misconduct, and wild parties. They were the Wild West’s equivalent to rock stars. Their raucous exploits often made the front page, along with pictures. I suspected I was seeing the birth of the paparazzi.

It took me two hours to go through the years 1880 and 1881. At this pace, I would be here all night. I wondered if the cute librarian would pull an all-nighter with me.

In March of 1884, I came across something interesting. One of the Barron boys, Johansson Barron, had been in a barroom fight with a silver miner. According to the article and witnesses, it wasn’t much of a fight: the Barron kid stabbed the miner from behind. The miner was later treated for a superficial wound to his left shoulder, but appears to have been okay.

A week later, the very same miner disappeared.

His disappearance rallied the whole town, probably because he had had the guts to stand up to a Barron. A thorough search of all the local mines was conducted. Search parties scouted the local hills. Nothing. The miner was gone, leaving behind a wife and five children.

The miner’s name was Boonie Adams.

I thought about Boonie Adams some more, then looked at my watch, in which I started thinking about lunch. I decided to get the hell out of Dodge. Or at least Barstow.

As I headed back out into the desert, with a fresh Coke nestled in my lap, I was feeling giddy. I was fairly certain I had found my man, and luckily there was one way to know for sure.

Chapter Twenty-nine

It was after hours and we were with Sylvester. Jones T. Jones was chain smoking. Wet rings circled his armpits. For the ninth time, I told him to breathe and not to get his hopes up.

“
This feels right,” he said for the tenth time.

If I had told him that I suspected Sly was really a woman and I had proof that her name was Bertha, Jones would have said the same thing:
this feels right.

“
Well, don’t get your hopes up,” I said.

“
Too late, they’re up. Way up. Besides, I’ve lived my whole life with my hopes up. I’m not afraid to get them dashed every now and then. Getting your hopes dashed builds character.”

“
Then this might be a character-building exercise.”

“
So be it,” he said. “I enjoy living life with my hopes up. Keeps me out of therapy and off of the mood-enhancers.”

It was after eight p.m. The store was closed for the night, and most of the lights were out. I was keenly aware that I was currently being watched by about two dozen shrunken heads. Rubber, granted. But shrunken nonetheless. And I was keenly aware that I was standing in front of a very dead man. One of the deadest men I had ever seen. Hell, if I wasn’t so tough, I might have been nervous.

“
This store gets creepy at night, huh?” said Jones. Perhaps he was a mind reader. Or perhaps he saw me look nervously over my shoulder.

“
Hadn’t noticed,” I said.

“
We hear voices at night, you know. And sometimes we show up in the morning and the displays are knocked over.”

“
Maybe it’s mice.”

Jones wasn’t listening. “Say, do you investigate the paranormal as well?”

“
No.”

“
Too bad, I could have thrown some more work your way.”

“
More publicity for the store?” I asked.

“
Sure,” he said. Jones was shameless. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get more customers in through those doors.”

“
Even make up ghost stories.”

“
If I have to,” he said. “But these are real.”

“
Sure,” I said. “Now help me move this.”

And so we spent the next few minutes turning the display case away from the back wall. Soon, Jones was gasping for air, which was funny since I was the one doing all the work.

“
That’s good,” I said.

Jones’s skinny body was crowding me. I glanced at him over my shoulder.

“
Sorry.” He took a step back, but I could still feel his hot breath on my neck, which smelled a little like chicken wings and tobacco.

For some reason, my stomach growled.

Jones jumped. “You hear that?”

“
That was my stomach,” I said.

“
Oh,” he said, but inched closer to me anyway.

We had already moved the heavy Plexiglas case away from the wall. Ignoring Jones, I stepped around the case and examined Sly with a handy pen flashlight I kept on my key chain.

Before me, the dead man’s back looked like the surface of some bizarre, distant world, complete with gullies and basins and arroyos. The splotchy skin, which looked shrink-wrapped to his bones, rippled in corrugated waves, giving the impression of perpetual motion, which was kind of ironic for a man frozen in place for all eternity.

I stepped closer, raised the flashlight up to Sly’s shoulder.

My breath fogged on the glass before me. Next to me, Jones’s own breath came quicker and faster. He was either going to climax or have a heart attack. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

Exposure to the elements had caused many irregularities in Sly’s skin. One such irregularity was near his left shoulder blade. It was about an inch long. A tear in his mummified flesh.

No, not a tear. It was a clean cut
.

An unhealed knife wound.

I stepped carefully around the display case and looked the dead man in the eyes, or what was left of his eyes.

“
Howdy, Boonie,” I whispered. “It’s been a long time.”

Chapter Thirty

I returned from my two-hour lunch break in time to see three men kick open my office door. Actually, one of them was doing the kicking; the other two hung back, crowding the upstairs iron railing. All were wearing stylish cowboy hats with the brims rolled into uselessness. Two of them were holding pistols.

Their backs were to me. I had been climbing the exterior stairs, coming up along the side of the building. My building is L-shaped. My office is located on the top floor in the nook of the L. They hadn’t seen me, and to keep it that way, I strategically stopped climbing.