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Maybelle was first to sight the helicopter in the distance. She pointed and screamed and when the spotter knew they’d blown their cover, Pigasus closed in on Abner and Maybelle. Abner was like a monkey with his closed fist in a jar trap. He just couldn’t let go even after they jumped in the car. He was still fussing with the suitcase lock when Maybelle pulled a bogus carbine from the backseat and aimed it at the bubble of the chopper.

“To scare them off,” she later said.

While Maybelle was speeding northwest on Dillon Road, Abner took a peek out the window at the trailing chopper. A muzzle flash was the last thing he ever saw.

Abner didn’t die right away and Maybelle didn’t die at all even though she had a bullet in her leg and another lodged near her collarbone when the chase ended.

It was a typical police chase. Before it was over, six different law-enforcement agencies were in on it, which is very common. Everybody did sliding U-turns, which is very common. Shots were fired by several units, which is very common. This one nearly turned into an intramural fire fight with cops shooting each other during the thirty-five-minute high-speed chase, and this too is fairly common.

It was a semispectacular chase, as desert chases go. In open country they often last a very long time. It was fortunate for O. A. Jones that this one lasted all the way to a remote canyon not far from Mineral Springs where he had decided to hole up and rest because he thought he was hearing banjos and car engines and singing voices in the middle of nowhere.

By the end, there was fear and pandemonium and adrenaline leaking everywhere. When Maybelle did her last sliding U-ee and crashed near a canyon road leading to O. A. Jones, the result was exactly the same as it always is in high-speed pursuits. The first thirteen cops to jump out of their cars, or point guns out the car windows, yelled thirteen conflicting orders to the suspects.

All of the conflicting orders had one thing in common: they all ended with the word “motherfuckers.”

While all the yelling and motherfucking and gun waving was going on, a car skidded in driven by Chief Paco Pedroza. He jumped out and ran toward the lead cops hiding behind the first chase unit with handguns and shotguns pointed toward the steaming wreck.

The loudest uniformed cop outyelled everyone. He bellowed: “You motherfucking sonofabitch cocksucker, put your hands out the window or we’ll blow your fucking face off!””

And Paco Pedroza with his badge pinned to his aloha shirt ran up yelling, “Everybody shut up! I’m in charge!”

But the big loud cop was operating in another zone. His eyes were bulging and his face was raw meat and his shotgun was shaking, and he bellowed: “You motherfucker sonofabitch cocksucker, put your hands out the window or we’ll blow your face off!”

So Paco screamed: “SHUT UP! I’LL DO THE TALKING!” which got everybody’s attention.

Then Paco, finally in command, turned his own face toward the suspects’ car and his eyes were bulging and his face was raw meat and Paco yelled: “You motherfucker sonofabitch cocksucker, put your hands out the window or we’ll blow your face off!”

Maybelle complied, but Abner was lapsing into a coma from which he would not recover.

It was over. And then, since nobody wants to admit that he was doing some very dangerous shooting, especially in case some bullets landed where they shouldn’t, all the chase cars started to find reasons to leave the scene almost as fast as they came in. This is also very common at the scene of high-speed chases. It’s like lifting a rug in a wino hoteclass="underline" they scatter like cockroaches.

No one ever found out for sure who put all the slugs in Maybelle and Abner. Not that it mattered. Everyone agreed they deserved getting ventilated, and the cops only wished they could’ve dipped their ammo in cyanide since Maybelle didn’t croak.

Before the chopper pilot turned back toward Palm Springs police station where Victor Watson was now waiting with the F.B.I., he spotted what looked like a large animal scrambling up a hillside. It was a strange animal, white on top and dark on the hindquarters. Pigasus soared in a little closer and saw that the white on top was the sunburned flesh of O. A. Jones who had foolishly removed his shirt in his delirium.

They picked him up on the side of a little ridge. On the other side of the ridge was a trail leading into the canyon. Off the trail, down in the canyon where it had plunged sixty feet, was a burned Rolls-Royce containing the remains of Jack Watson.

The first cop into the canyon almost gagged when he saw the charred corpse, which had been dined on by turkey vultures and coyotes. The coyotes had almost destroyed the skull with their gnawing. If they had, a bullet hole would have been impossible for the pathologists to locate. The case might have been classified as a car accident and closed.

Paco Pedroza was absolutely ready to fire his surfer cop for driving out there in the first place, except that O. A. Jones provided the only possible clue to the murder. After the F.B.I. pulled out of the case, Palm Springs P.D. was left with a whodunit homicide, and all they had was O. A. Jones who convinced everybody that he was not delirious when he heard the guy playing the banjo and singing, followed by the sound of a vehicle racing away. It was theorized that the killer of Jack Watson had returned to the burned car two days after the murder. Perhaps to retrieve something. Officer O. A. Jones had heard a music man.

O. A. Jones persuaded a local reporter to write a story calling him “the key to the riddle.” The reporter also dubbed him a “courageous officer” who took it upon himself to scour the desert canyons for the missing Palm Springs lad.

Paco Pedroza would still have liked to send his freaking hero back to fighting kelp in Laguna Beach on his potato-chip surfboard. Only he couldn’t because the Mineral Springs City Council was giving O. A. Jones a citation for extraordinary police service.

CHAPTER 4

PRESIDENT McKINLEY

Otto Stringer looked like the winning ticket in a state lottery. He was waiting on his front porch with two suitcases and a set of golf clubs. He saluted his neighbors like Ronald Reagan at the door of Air Force One. He was wearing a brand-new pink polyester golf shirt that matched his plump cheeks, an acrylic sleeveless sweater with a pink-and-green argyle pattern, and a green Ben Hogan golf cap. He’d considered investing in plus fours but figured a guy should maybe break a hundred one time before blowing into Palm Springs all gussied up like a quarter-ton Byron Nelson.

When he got Sidney Blackpool’s phone call about the Palm Springs holiday he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe any of the good things that had happened to him since he’d gotten out of a crazy narc job and into a crazy homicide job at Hollywood dicks where at least he felt safe. During his last months at narcotics he’d been getting a whole bunch of obvious messages from The Man Himself. Otto wasn’t a very religious person-a lapsed agnostic, he called himself-who reverted to his early Presbyterian ways only in dangerous situations. The hints he figured The Big Boss was giving him weren’t those “for your eyes only” messages he used to fear Jimmy Carter would think he got while sitting by the nuke hot line. No, these were plain enough for everyone to see. And they were ominous.

For example, there was the time near the end when he let himself get talked into going in on a coke buy with an undercover snitch, and why a sixteen-year cop nearly forty years old didn’t know better was in itself a mystery and a portent. The snitch was one of those hepatitis hypes who bragged to every cop who busted him that he worked for the F.B.I. or the Drug Enforcement Agency. Otto Stringer told him that as far as he was concerned anybody who’d pal around with feds was about as welcome as a crotch full of herpes since the DEA was always trying to steal the city narcs’ credit when they weren’t stealing their informants.