“This is a wild animal we’re talking about here,” I said. “We need to be on the lookout as if there was a brown bear out there, or a wolf.”
“With all due respect to wild animals.” Jimbo again.
“Has a police report been filed?” asked Marci.
“I filed one,” I said. “But you know how it goes.”
Everyone murmured agreement. As an unincorporated area of Riverside County, there are no police here, never have been. From time to time a sheriff’s cruiser will travel through. If there’s a serious crime, something to do with bodily attack, a shooting, what have you, they’ll come up and investigate. But calling the cops here is an exercise in faith and patience because it will take them at least forty-five minutes to an hour to get here, depending on where they are. We don’t have cops and we don’t want cops. We’ve learned to take care of our own up here, which is why we all have big dogs and why all these people showed up today.
“Whoever it is gonna go into the wrong house with dogs, protective ones, and get her bony ass tore up but fucking good,” said Donner, who had traded bounty hunting for herding mountain goats fifteen years ago.
“She’s too smart,” I countered. “She’ll just avoid houses with dogs.”
“What if it’s one of them quiet dogs?” Donner said.
“There’s no such thing as a quiet dog, Don. All dogs bark, particularly at strangers.”
“Not all of ’em. My dog’s not a barker. Whenever he tries it I blast him with my cane.”
“I don’t know a single person, other than you, who will hit a dog for barking,” I said, feeling like an idiot for letting Don Donner trap me into one of his arguments again. What type of man admits to hitting his dog for barking in public, just to win an argument? He knew I had him, so he launched in another direction.
“You know, if any of you dumb cocksuckers gave a shit you would post a description of this low-life piece of shit,” Donner said, his eye on me. “If she is doing what people claim she is, then she will get what’s coming to her. I guarantee this person isn’t stealing my keys.”
“And here I thought it was my neighbors, the ones with the cabin tent and the too many kids,” said Denver Abernathy, an unlit cigarette in his hand. “We have two sets of keys missing... time for new locks, I guess.”
Having said what he had to say, Abernathy sauntered outside for a smoke.
“How you all so sure she’s a she?” asked Marci Day.
“I seen her,” I said. “Loiters at Circle K, hair same color as a banana.”
“If you seen her why didn’t you catch her?” said Donner.
I took a deep breath. “Because, Don, you gotta catch her in the act. I can’t just lasso her and force her to confess. That will get me arrested.”
“Jesus can help her if only she’d ask,” said Marci.
“Come off it, Marci,” Donner said. “What the fuck has Jesus ever done for you?”
“Plenty,” countered Marci with a puff of her chest that would have made a pro wrestler weep.
Talk of Jesus always brought these meetings to a halt and Marci Day knew it. Donner would have none of it.
“The broad’s an ankle,” he said, “which is ’bout two feet lower than a cunt.”
Donner narrowed his eyes at Marci now, waiting for something sanctimonious, but got none. Unlike me, she knew better than to argue with Don Donner.
“May I suggest we do the right thing,” Marci said, her eyes fixed on Donner, “and leave the poor creature be. The level of desperation driving her to a life of crime, I hope we never know.”
“I say we find her and stomp her out,” Donner said. “But everyone just wants to chew the cud, hear theyselves talk like words matter.”
“They do matter,” I said. “It’s why we’re all together. We need some good ideas, we need ideas that are legal and aren’t going to land any of us in jail.”
“Lock your doors!” shouted Jimbo Lure, then let out a big dumb laugh. No one joined in.
I looked at Jimbo. Poor man can’t help that he’s an idiot. “Thank you, Jimbo,” I said. “In a perfect world that would be a great suggestion. But all it takes is that one day you’re in a hurry. That one day you get careless.”
Jimbo looked at me with a strange expression, not used to anyone actually talking reason to him when he flies off with one of his idiocies.
Teddy Elderberry, resplendent in tie-dye shirt, tie-dye pants, and tie-dye do-rag, made his way to where Firth was standing. Elderberry had done time before cannabis was legal. Now, he wants those years back, but he’s not going to get them. Elderberry whispered in Firth’s ear and Firth nodded his head up and down in agreement.
“Our friend Teddy Elderberry picked up a lot of useful info in the clink,” Firth said. “I suggest you all pay close attention.”
“Thank you for that introduction, bud,” Elderberry said with a wide grin. He was proud of the time he had served and survived. “What you guys need to do is send in a decoy, friend her, hang with her, find out where and with who she is affiliated. Then you set her up with some keys and an addy. Have authorities waiting to take her down. Don’t just sit around waiting to see who gets hit next. Operation Ninja Takedown’s what you need. Fight fire with fire, you dig?”
“That’s the fucking stupidest idea I’ve ever fucking heard,” said Donner, picking up his cane and ambling out the back door, his cane making a tap tap tap sound because he thought rubber tips were for dicks. “You wanna catch her,” he called from the door, “you fucking go get her. Where you say she go, that Circle K?” He pointed across the highway, the convenience store being set right across from the meeting hall.
“Yeah, right over there, Donner,” I said. “Go get her, man. Take her down.”
Donner lifted his cane and swung it through the air like a golf club meant to clobber. I had meant to be funny, but no one laughed, not even Jimbo Lure.
The cat burglar was not at Circle K that afternoon. Just as the meeting was wrapping, Kimberly Miller (her actual name) was riding shotgun in a truck, sailing down the mountain on her way to Indio, the lowest of the low desert, with every intention of getting to the night market before the sun came up. The truck wasn’t new, and she’d had to cram her shit in the space not occupied by bags of chlorine and leaf skimmers, but it took the mountain roads with ease.
Behind the wheel was Justin Alvarez, the only friend she had left from down below. Even as she got in the truck she knew he wouldn’t be her friend for long. She just needed him to stay her friend long enough to get to Indio. They’d met in Palm Springs five years ago, when she still had a house and a husband, a kid and a teenage pool boy.
Justin was no one’s idea of what a Palm Springs pool boy might look like. At least he wasn’t her idea of what a Palm Springs pool boy might be. Bernard had passed on the tanned and muscled blonds who applied and hired the one that mostly resembled an adolescent garden gnome. He was a fully bearded man now and taking the mountain roads with ease. They were well out of Anza in no time and traveling through the pine tree forest that links Anza to the desert floor. She wondered how much fighting and screaming Justin had witnessed in that house with the manicured cactus garden, the crystalline pool.
“You’re going back to Betty’s!” Bernard had shouted the last time she’d been in that house.
“I’m not going to Betty nothing,” she’d slurred. She didn’t want to go to rehab. Rehab is where the party ends. She was too young for that. Sure, she’d regretted that Baby Carol had seen her like that, and on Mother’s Day, no less.