The same name that was stenciled on the ashtray at Vince Komoko’s house. Jack took a deep breath. This was the place, all right.
“I don’t like to be stared at, Mister. .?”
“Baddalach.”
The woman with the braid almost smiled. “I’ve heard the name.”
“And yours is?”
Her lips quivered, but just for an instant. When she spoke, her voice had dipped into a lower range. “Wyetta Earp.”
“Wyetta. . Earp?"
Instantly, Jack realized that it was the wrong thing to say and the wrong way to say it, because the sheriff’s backbone turned to iron.
“You can call me Sheriff.”
“Look,” Jack began, “I don’t want any trouble. And I’ve got a receipt for the magazines.”
Jerry Caldwell put in his two cents worth. “He threatened me, Wyetta!”
“No I didn’t. Here’s how it was … the guy wanted my autograph. I didn’t want to give it to him. I bought the magazines, though, and I threw them in the garbage can. Then he went and fished them out.”
Jack glanced past the sheriff. The woman in the black T-shirt was standing next to a battered Dodge Dakota, trying to decide whether to take off or stick around and enjoy the show.
“I own the garbage can!” Caldwell said. “So anything in it is mine!”
Jack ignored him. “I bought the magazines.”
The woman in the black T-shirt joined the fray. “He’s telling the truth. I was behind him in the checkout line. I saw him buy the magazines. I saw the whole thing.”
The sheriff glanced at the deputy. They traded imperceptible grins. “Gosh,” the sheriff said. “This is all really complicated. I don’t know if us girls can figure it out. . but I guess we’ll just have to do our darndest.”
She nodded at the deputy, who moved to the dented Jeep Cherokee with Jerry Caldwell in tow. The woman in the black T-shirt tagged along.
After a long moment. Jack said, “Nice day.”
“Just another day in paradise,” the sheriff said.
“So what’s the deal?”
“We’ll wait and see.”
Jack glanced at the Cherokee. The deputy was on the radio. Jerry Caldwell was gabbing in her ear, as was the woman in the black T-shirt, and the deputy was busy trying to wave them off and talk at the same time.
“I saw your last fight,” the sheriff said.
“Yeah? I wish I could have seen it. But my eyes were pretty busted up.”
“You never should have tangled with Sattler. You didn’t have a chance.”
Jack snorted. “Oh?”
Wyetta Earp smiled. “Yeah. You’re a natural middleweight, Mr. Baddalach. Sattler’s a cruiserweight who can sweat down to light heavyweight if he puts his mind to it, and you were stupid enough to meet him at 175. You shouldn’t have been carrying those extra fifteen pounds. Now, if you’d stop eating cheeseburgers and trim down, you might at least look good losing. Do some roadwork, you might even stand a chance with one of those young guns. You’ve still got a halfway decent left hook.”
“Gosh.” Jack laughed. “You must read Ring Magazine or something.”
“I get around, Mr. Baddalach. You might be surprised.”
Jack thought about that for a second. Deep down, he knew things were spinning away, heading somewhere he didn’t want them to go. Another second and they’d be dropping their flies, seeing whose dick was bigger.
If Wyetta Earp had had a dick, that is.
Jesus, this was dangerous. Jack knew it. But he couldn’t help himself. He felt like he was headed for a quick ten-count, and it was time to go for the long shot, the sweeping left hook that came from the canvas.
His mouth slipped open, and the few words that came out were spoken with casual ease. “So, you know quite a bit. I’m wondering if you know about a guy named Vincent Komoko?”
The sheriff tried to dodge the bullet. She failed, jerking in her snakeskin boots as if someone had pounded her iron backbone with a sledgehammer.
She opened her mouth, but the deputy returned before any words came out. “Range Rover’s a rental out of Tucson,” the deputy said. “No wants, no warrants.”
The sheriff nodded. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. The dispatcher wasn’t sure, but she thought the newspaper said that our friend here was out on bail in Nevada. And I think I read the same thing.”
Grinning, Wyetta Earp turned to Jack. “That’s right. I almost forgot. You beat up a poor defenseless boxing promoter, you naughty boy. And you’re a pro. Your fists are considered lethal weapons. That makes it felony assault. Whatever are you doing in our fair state of Arizona? You wouldn’t be jumping bail, would you?”
Jack said, “I suppose it wouldn’t help if I told you that the guy dropped the charges.”
“I don’t know. We have to be careful. We just can’t go running around half-cocked." Wyetta shrugged. “We’ll just have to make some phone calls, won’t we?”
Jack figured there wasn’t anything else to say.
The sheriff reached for her handcuffs.
Jack held out his hands.
Knuckle to nail, they ached like hell.
FOUR
Man alive, did this guy burn her up, him with his little appraising squint the first time he glimpsed the badge pinned to her chest, his eyes ping-ponging between the polished star and her breasts like she was some fantastic wet dream with a gun and a pair of shiny handcuffs who couldn’t wait to check out his long hard nightstick. Nothing scorched her worse than that kind of look, especially from a guy dressed in cactus-patterned turista wear. She was the law in this town, goddamnit, not some goddamn trophy. No jerk who reeked of Old Spice was going to mount her pelt on the wall of his goddamn game room. No fucking way.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Uh-uh. Not by a long shot. The worst of it was when the guy said her name, the way it slipped through his lips, practically drooling sarcasm.
Wyetta. . Earp?
Not that she wasn’t used to that kind of reaction. She’d taken plenty of grief over her name ever since she was knee-high. Being a girl and being named after Wyatt Earp was a fate that notched pretty high on the adolescent misery scale, as bad as being the boy named Sue that Johnny Cash had sung about back in the sixties. She’d spent a good part of her youth hating her name and the drunken highway patrolman father who’d given it to her. She’d wanted to change it a million times, and as a girl she’d sworn she’d do just that as soon as she turned eighteen.
But names were funny things. They could turn you into someone you never thought you’d be. That was how it had been for her. On her sixteenth birthday it had dawned on her, a crystal-clear vision of the person she wanted to become. That was the day she decided to make her given name work for her, to become all the things that it stood for. She’d felt kind of like a superhero then, as if she’d discovered a Wonder Woman costume hanging in her closet, a costume that had always been there-waiting and invisible-until she was ready to see it.
But this pug in her lock-up. . Wyetta flipped her braid over her left shoulder. The way he said her name, that little grin tickling the corners of his mouth while the remnants of his scarred-up eyebrows arched above his sunglasses like a goddamn bascule bridge.
She wasn’t going to forget that look anytime soon. No way, Jose.
And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d asked her about Komoko, asked her straight out, his voice completely devoid of respect, like she was a goddamn secretary who was supposed to bow and scrape and give him a goddamn cup of coffee along with his answer.