Man alive, she’d wanted to bash him then. She could see it. A roundhouse kick clipping the point of his chin. Or a kick to the balls, her Nocona boot digging in hard, his eyes crossing up, face going white, precious little cojones cracking like walnuts.
A little voice in her head warned her it might not be so easy, that this was a man who went toe-to-toe for a living, but she shook it off. Professional boxer, hell. She didn’t care anything about that. She’d seen the pug’s fight with Sugar Ray Sattler. Baddalach cut and bled worse than a hemophiliac, plus he was slower than the Mummy. He dragged his right foot around the ring like it was stuck in a bucket of horseshit. He couldn’t do anything with a mover like Sugar Ray Sattler.
And that was pitiful, because Wyetta Earp owned moves that would make Sugar Ray Sattler break out in a cold, cold sweat. She had the paper and pot metal to prove it. Mounted on the wall directly in front of her were a dozen framed certificates signed by a half-dozen senseis, and a glass case filled with martial arts tournament trophies stood on the wall to her left.
She’d signed up for Tae Kwon Do lessons at sixteen, the day after she decided to make her given name work for her. It was her first step on the road to becoming a superhero, and she’d taken her lumps without complaint at a dojo above a Korean market in Tucson.
Three years later she earned her first black belt. A month after that she broke her father’s jaw with a roundhouse kick when he took after her mother one time too many. Two more months and she booted the son of a bitch out of their house for good.
Now her mom lived in one of the mobile home parks in Pipeline Beach, happy as a clam, and she never even mentioned that her ex-husband had used her for a punching bag for twenty long years. Nope. All Mama Earp talked about was how proud she was of her only child.
You could read something into that, sure. But as far as Wyetta was concerned, you could leave all that bullshit about self-actualization in the psych texts, thank you very much, because she had done it the old-fashioned way, with hard work and lots of lumps and plenty of flying by the seat of her pants. And in the end she had become everything she’d set out to be-a sheriff and a hardcase of the first stripe, just like the man she’d decided to emulate so long ago.
She stared at the framed tintype on her desk. Wyatt Earp stared back at her. His sepia eyes were hard. You couldn’t see his lips at all because they were hidden by a moustache, but Wyetta was sure that they formed a firm, unsmiling line.
Wyetta pulled open the center drawer of her desk and withdrew what looked like a wooden valentine-a flat piece of cedar that sprouted three stubby legs on the bottom. Then she lifted the blotter from the top of the desk and set it aside.
Below was a Ouija board.
Wyetta had purchased the board in Los Angeles. A prominent antique dealer had staked his reputation on its authenticity, but she’d had it verified by a recognized Earpana expert before laying down her long green. So there was no doubt in her mind that the Ouija board had once been the property of Josie Marcus, just as there was no doubt in her mind that Josie Marcus had been Wyatt Earp’s wife.
Wyetta set the heart-shaped planchette on the board. Doing that always gave her a chill, because she knew Wyatt must have done the same thing a century before. Her fingers hovering over the wooden heart, light and ready. At the same time, she stared at the iron picture frame on her desk and found and held Wyatt Earp’s sepia gaze.
“Does Baddalach know anything?” she asked.
The cedar heart hesitated. Wyetta’s heart skipped a beat.
Three cedar legs scraped across the board as the planchette darted to the corner marked YES.
“Is he going to give me any trouble?”
Wyetta held her breath. The heart drifted to the center of the board. She exhaled in relief. . until it pulled back.
To the same spot, the spot marked YES.
Her anger rose. Words spilled out of her mouth in a rush, and when she bit them off the taste of lipstick was bitter on her tongue.
“What kind of man is he?” was the question she asked.
The heart moved surely, quickly, picking out one letter after another.
B. . A. . D. .
. . A. .
. . S
. . S
The muscles in Wyetta’s shoulders knotted. Her arms tensed, and the cedar heart bolted forward and escaped her fingers, clattering against the photo of Wyatt Earp, knocking it to the floor.
Glass shattered. Wyetta stared at the Ouija board, shaking as if she’d taken a mean left hook to the temple.
A knock on the office door brought her around.
The words came automatically. “It’s open.”
Deputy Holloway entered the office. “Vegas PD just returned my call.”
“And?”
“Baddalach’s telling the truth-the promoter dropped the charges last night.”
Wyetta nodded.
Deputy Holloway watched her, pretending that she didn’t see the Ouija board on the sheriff’s desk or the tintype in the iron frame with glass busted out of it that lay on the floor next to a faded cedar heart. It was better not to speak of these things. This the deputy had learned through long, hard experience.
Instead, the deputy asked the obvious question. “What do you want me to do with him?”
Wyetta swiveled her chair, turning away from the door, away from the deputy. She stared at her trophy case, at the framed certificates papering the wall. Wyatt was wrong about this one. He had to be. Because Wyetta was a badass herself, a certified badass with trophies and sheepskins aplenty.
“Sheriff?”
“Let the pug go. Deputy,” Wyetta said.
She smiled when she said it.
FIVE
In a way, Jack hated to leave the jailhouse so soon. There was a real interesting water stain on the ceiling of his cell and he hadn’t had enough time to decide if it looked more like a thundercloud hijacked from Heaven by disgruntled angels or the Monster from the Id from Forbidden Planet.
He worked up a good sweat walking back to the five-and-dime. Thankfully, the Range Rover was still sitting in the parking lot. At least Jerry Caldwell hadn’t had his car towed.
Jack notched the air-conditioner to MAX and headed for the highway. He’d put a mile between himself and Pipeline Beach when he spotted the billboard:
Surf’s up at
THE SAGUARO RIPTIDE MOTEL
Cable TV * Air-Conditioning
Swimming Pool
Surf guitar nightly
THIRD LEFT OR YOU’VE MISSED IT, AMIGOS AND AMIGETTES
Someone had made an attempt to paint over the second-to-last line, but it was still visible. Jack didn’t care about that, though. He only cared about the name of the joint. The Saguaro Riptide-the same name stenciled on the ashtray he’d found at Vince Komoko’s place.
The same name on the pencil he’d seen in Wyetta Earp’s pocket.
It could be nothing more than a coincidence. Pipeline Beach was a small town. Or it could be that Wyetta Earp had been sniffing around the motel, looking for Komoko.
And maybe, just maybe, there was something more to it than that.
Jack knew he was getting ahead of himself. He passed a dirt road that lead to a cemetery, an old-time boot hill with leaning tombstones and strangely stationary tumbleweeds.
Jack found himself wondering how many pistoleros Wyetta had put there with her blazing six-gun. He smirked at the notion. Not that he was sexist or anything. But, Jesus, if ever a woman thought that the sun rose and set out of the crack of her ass, it was Wyetta Earp.
The cemetery blurred past on the left, only to be replaced by more desert, more saguaros, more tumbleweeds. Jack notched another mile on the odometer before he came to the second left, which lead to a junkyard. He slowed down a bit, because the next turn would be for the Saguaro Riptide.