Jodi turned to Mike and asked, “Have to what?”
“Kill us,” Mike said, rolling his eyes.
I went on. “One thing I can tell you, because most foreign intelligence services hostile to the United States already are aware of these things, is that I’ve been implanted with a microchip, which is standard procedure for operators in the field, by the way. My chip transmits a discrete transponder code. And that code,” I said, unfurling a finger skyward, “goes directly to an NROL-25 satellite in geostationary orbit, programmed to monitor my every movement. The National Reconnaissance Office is actually watching you right now. Everybody say cheese.”
They all craned their necks and gaped as if to see the aforementioned recon bird in orbit. Even Jodi looked up.
“So here’s the deal, kids: my colleague and I will borrow Mike’s car, and we will go about our mission here in the beautiful Owens Valley. After we’ve completed our mission, we’ll drop the car back at the Fair Vista Airport, where you can pick it up tomorrow at your convenience.”
The guy with the shotgun scratched his chin, pondering my offer. “What about the cops?” He gestured toward the hut.
“You mean am I going to tell them about your little chemistry project? Not as long as Mike here gives my colleague back all the money he stole from him and if you young gentlemen promise to consider contacting the Betty Ford Center.”
Shotgun man thought about it, then said, “OK.”
Mike returned Holland’s cash. “Sorry, mister.”
The old man struggled to come up with an appropriate response. “Just try to keep your nose clean,” he said finally. “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
I climbed in behind the wheel of the Olds. Dutch got in on the passenger side. The last thing I saw driving away was Jodi lighting another cigarette and the guy with the AK punching Mike in the face.
“What the heck was that awful smell back there?” Dutch Holland said, glancing back through the rear window.
“Drugs.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Bad drugs.”
The old man was quiet for a minute as we drove along the dirt road.
“You really work for the government?”
“If I did, Dutch, do you really think I would’ve said I did?”
He mulled my answer.
“What about the computer chip, the satellite, all that. That made up, too?”
I looked over at him as if to say, of course it was.
“Well, you sure had me bamboozled — and those dope fiends, too,” Holland said, smiling. “Boy howdy, now there’s a story to tell the grandkids.”
It took two hours cruising up and down the valley floor before we turned up a canyon west of Lone Pine that Dutch Holland thought he recognized, and found Al Demaerschalk’s cabin.
It was located along a short, straight section of dirt road, which doubled as Demaerschalk’s runway. Hewn from rough barn wood, the cabin itself was little more than an oversized shed, probably 200 square feet tops, with a flat, corrugated metal roof set at a steep angle so the snow could melt off. There was a raised wooden porch with a pole railing around. Flanking the front door, chained to the floorboards, were two rusting metal milk cans bearing clutches of fake black-eyed Susans.
I pulled off the road, parked in front of the cabin, and got out of the Olds.
“Al drives a Kia,” Holland said.
The man shoots down North Korean MiGs and sixty years later drives a car made in South Korea. You’ve gotta love that kind of consistency.
There wasn’t a Kia in sight, unfortunately. Or any other motor vehicle except the commandeered Olds we were driving.
I tried the front door. Locked. There was a double-hung window on either side of the little porch. Both were lashed tight and covered over from the inside with butcher paper. The cabin appeared to have been unoccupied for a very long time.
Holland took off his baseball cap, rubbed his smooth, pink crown, and said, “I don’t know where else he could be.”
We headed back to the car and were almost there when a loud crash erupted from inside the cabin. Holland froze and looked over at me in alarm.
“Stay here, Dutch.”
I eased silently along a side wall and peeked around the corner, to the back of the cabin. No one was there. I stepped around an outhouse and past a decomposing wooden wagon wheel. A box spring stripped of fabric was leaning vertically against the cabin’s rear wall, partially obscuring a back door.
Which was cracked open by about two inches.
“Al? You in there?”
Another loud crash from inside the cabin. I retreated and pried a spoke off of the wagon wheel — a makeshift weapon in the event that whoever was inside wasn’t Al. I was heading toward the back door again when I sensed movement behind me, whirled with the club raised, and nearly took off Holland’s head.
“I told you to stay put,” I whispered, a little too loudly.
“I thought you could use some help.”
“It would help if you went back to the car.”
His shoulders sagged, his feelings hurt. He turned and started walking away.
“OK, hold up. Just stay there, Dutch. I’ll call you if I need you, OK?”
“OK.”
Whatever tactical element of surprise I once held was gone. I shoved the box spring aside, booted open the door to make what operators call a “dynamic entry,” and stormed into the cabin.
Waiting for me just inside the doorway, aimed and ready, was a skunk.
The sneaky little bastard let me have it with both barrels.
Fifteen
“Mary Mother and Joseph,” Dutch Holland said, craning his head out of the passenger window for fresh air, “you stink.”
I drove as fast as the Oldsmobile would allow until we found a general store in the humble hamlet of Independence, our eyes watering from the overpowering stench of skunk that was me.
The cashier, a porcine blonde with black roots and an attitude, started coughing uncontrollably as she tried to find a price tag on the bottle of hydrogen peroxide I’d set down in front of her, along with vinegar, baking soda, liquid detergent, bib overalls, and a chartreuse “I ♥ California” T-shirt.
“Tell ya what,” she said, gagging as she tossed the bottle into the bag, “thirty bucks for the whole kit and caboodle and we’ll call it even.”
“My day’s just getting better and better.”
I tried to hand her the cash. She backed away from the cash register like I had leprosy.
“Just leave the money on the counter.”
I did as she asked, stuffed my purchases in a plastic bag, and got out of there before she threw up.
There was a run-down, eight-unit motel out on the highway south of town boasting “Free Cable TV!” Dutch paid for a room — the least he could do, he said, considering it was me and not him who’d been unfortunate enough to go mano-a-mano with Pepé Le Pew — then waited in the car while I went inside to de-skunk.
The bathroom sink was stained hard-water green. A centipede ran laps around the bottom of the chipped white bathtub.
“Moving day, crazy legs,” I said, trapping the squiggling insect in a wax paper cup before turning him loose outside.
I plugged the tub’s drain with a hard rubber stopper chained to the overflow and ran the water as hot as it would go, squeezing in the entire bottle of detergent. My skunky jeans and shirt went into the plastic bag from the general store, and from there, outside my room. When the tub was half-full, I poured in the hydrogen peroxide, most of the vinegar, and all of the baking soda. Then I lowered myself in and made like a submarine, grateful at having remembered an article in Boys’ Life I read growing up that said vinegar and dish soap, not tomato juice, did the trick when skunked.