Eyes wide, thoroughly nonplused, Lyle managed to swallow his mouthful of sandwich and to speak. “What’s this?”
“I went back to the nest this afternoon after the sandstorm blew out.” Pansy unfastened the bundle and two long, graceful wings opened out of the tarp chrysalis. “I found her in the canyon.”
“Oh, damn.” Lyle stood, ashen-faced now, tenderly lifted the mother Aplomado falcon and carried her to a lab bench. He examined her, discovered the deep crimson wound in her black chest. Through gritted teeth he said, “Poachers?”
“Looks like it,” Pansy said.
“What about the hatchling?”
“He’s okay but he has to be hungry.” With reverent sadness, Pansy stroked the mother falcon’s smooth head. “Another week or two and the baby will be ready to fend for himself. But in the meantime, someone needs to get food to him. Or he needs to be brought in to a shelter.”
Lyle sighed heavily. He was obviously deeply moved by this tragedy, a quality that Pansy found to be highly attractive.
“What are you going to do, Lyle?”
“I’ll ask for a wildlife team to come out,” he said. “Someone will get up there tomorrow to rescue the hatchling. Too bad, though. We’ve lost a chance to reestablish a nesting pattern.”
“Tomorrow?” There was a flash of indignation in her tone.
“He’ll be okay overnight.”
“What if the poachers come back tonight?”
Again he sighed, looked around at the cluttered lab and the stacks of unfinished paperwork. Then he turned and looked directly into Pansy’s big brown eyes.
“Pansy, I need help,” he said. “Will you watch the nest tonight?”
“Me?” She touched her breastbone demurely, her freshly scrubbed hand small and delicate looking. “Alone? Lyle, there are people with guns out there.”
“You’re right,” he said, chagrined. “Sorry. Of course youshouldn’t be alone. You shouldn’t have been alone last night and this morning, either. It’s just, I got jammed up here in the office with a possible plague case in a ground squirrel, Chamber of Commerce all in a lather that word would get out. I couldn’t break away.”
“Ground squirrels aren’t in danger of extinction,” she said.
“I am sorry, very sorry,” Lyle said, truly sounding sorry. “Look, Pansy, I really need you. If I join you, will you be willing to go back to the nest tonight?”
She took a long breath before responding, not wanting to sound eager. After a full ten count, during which he watched her with apparent interest, she nodded.
“The two of us should be able to handle just about anything that comes up,” she said. “I’ll meet you out front in five minutes.”
“In five,” he said as he peeled off his lab coat. “In five.”
THE KIDNAPPING OF XIANG FEI by Michael Collins
As we walked along the strip hunched in jackets to keep warm-Vegas can be damned cold in November-Kay said, “There’s a dark blue Lincoln following us.”
We were on our way back to the Mirage from one of those cheap all-you-can-eat dinners where gimlet-eyes watch for people who try to stash extra prime rib or cheesecake under their shirts or bras.
“I know.” I didn’t look back. “Don’t worry, but listen. That car’s going to pass us and stop at the curb up ahead. A man is going to tell me to get in. I’ll get in. If I haven’t called by midnight-”
“I’ll call the police. Dan, what-”
“Not the police. Call a lawyer named John Jeffries in L.A. His number’s in my Rolodex.” I slipped one of my business cards into her hand. “Tell him to call the numbers I’ve written on the card.”
I squeezed her hand, and we walked briskly on toward the hotel, but my mind was racing. It had taken me the better part of three days to smoke them out. Now they were here.
The call had come into my office in the back of the old hacienda where Kay and I live at 4:53 p.m. the previous Monday.
“Dan? Marty Gebhard. I need a favor.” Professor Martin Gebhard was once the pride of the UCSB political science department, and one of my Tuesday night poker game regulars. A year ago he’d taken the Tardash Chair of International Political Studies at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I don’t know if UCSB misses him, but the poker regulars sure do.
“There’s a grad student here, Donald Lewis, who wants to hire a private detective.” I heard the hesitation. “It’s sort of a difficult and, ah, delicate matter.”
“You want me to drive to Vegas?”
“He’d prefer a flying carpet, but do it your way. He’ll pay whatever you ask.”
I. was alone in the office, but I think I cocked an eyebrow. “Whatever I ask?”
“Money isn’t his problem.”
“Will he pay for Kay too?”
“He’ll pay for the cat. Just come as soon as possible.”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
Marty always smiled when he lost big at poker, which was most of the time, and “difficult and delicate” always gets my interest. Besides, he hadn’t laughed when I pushed Kay into the deal, and he sounded worried.
I went into the kitchen. “Vegas tomorrow? Free, with expense account?”
“I can visit all my stores.” Her business is what pays for Santa Barbara.
After Barstow, the high desert stretches all the way to Vegas, and 1-15 is so straight it lulls drivers into a trance. Sin-Mecca beckons, feet get heavy on the gas, and people die.
Then there were the billboards.
As I drove in the cool late November sunlight, Kay chatting about the buyers she would call on, the billboards came to meet us long before the city or even Nevada was in sight, scars on the austere beauty of the arid land with its tough bushes, thorny cactus, and tougher, thornier animals.
The early Spaniards, the hungry prospectors, the settlers heading west to California found in a barren desert valley a tiny oasis of springs and green meadows. The Spaniards named it Las Vegas, “the meadows,” and the Yankee drifters and land seekers welcomed the brief respite. But the billboards do the welcoming now, proclaim a different kind of oasis, and the meadows have long since vanished with the cactus and the thorny lizards.
The first trumpet call of glitter appears at the border with a clutch of casino hotels one inch into Nevada, and soon the whole rhinestone symphony rises up on that distant horizon. Sprawled across the desert like a skin condition, the Strip looms first. Bugsy and the boys did not want the marks from L.A. to drive one extra mile, time was money.
I dropped Kay at the Mirage where she would shower, change into her own line of high fashion clothes, and call on her buyers, and drove on to the university that is tucked conveniently close behind the Strip on Maryland Avenue, between Flamingo and Tropicana. A large but relatively compact campus of ultramodern buildings, rectangular, round and domed, basically in pale sand colors, but with a lot of bright primaries. Mondrian in sand and stone.
I parked as near to the political science building as I could, and walked.
Marty Gebhard is a pleasant man of forty-odd who wears jeans and a sweatshirt, sports a scraggly black mustache, and, today, three-day’s stubble. He knew I had only one arm. Donald Lewis didn’t, and most people have some reaction when they first see me. Lewis had none.
Tall, pale, bone thin, and so agitated he all but lunged at me. “You’ve got to find Xiang Fei and arrest those men who kidnapped her!”
“Okay,” I said, and sat down in the only extra chair. “Now tell me who Xiang Fei is, and when she was kidnapped.”
Lewis wasn’t sitting, and was so intense and distracted he couldn’t seem to comprehend I didn’t know Xiang Fei, or when she had been kidnapped.