kitchen swing door. He asked the tall, sunken-cheeked chef named Alex. Edwards had left by the alley door. Back at his table, Dave frowned at the manila envelope. Edwards had forgotten his pictures.
8
P EREZ DIDN’T APPEAR TO have any point, unless it was the wild flowers—lupines, poppies—blue and gold, that carpeted the desert for miles around in all directions these few weeks in February. A road sliced through the town, kept minimally paved, probably for the sake of those same few weeks. Perez had a gas station for wild-flower viewers. It had what a faded signboard boasted was a DESERT MUSEUM & GIFT SHOP , where a two-headed rattlesnake could be seen, and where maps were sold of abandoned mines and ghost towns. A board structure with a high false front claimed to be an EATERY . A tired wild-flower viewer could even sleep in Perez, at the ROAD RUNNER MOTEL , six scaly stucco units, each with a weedy patch of cactus garden. VACANCY —naturally. On the bone-gray wooden side of the grocery store, the paint faded on a sign for OLD GOLD cigarettes. Wax shone on ten dented wrecks in the dirt lot of JAY’S GOOD USED CARS . The tavern was called LUCKY’S STRIKE . From at least one window of every structure in sight hung a rusty air-conditioning unit.
Dave had already seen Azrael’s ranch, three sad shacks painted blue, doors and windows lately broken out, the wind moving through them, through the littered rooms, stirring cheap Indian cotton hangings in the doorways, shifting pathetic scraps of clothing, tufts of mattress stuffing, feathers from ripped pillows across cracked linoleum. Death and desertion. Behind the buildings, in what had been a sometime attempt at a vegetable garden, the wind had begun filling in the holes from which, two weeks ago, had been dug up the rotted bodies of Azrael’s pitiful young disciples. Serenity among them? Each corpse had a gap in its chest. None had a heart. At Azrael’s ranch there had been nothing to see, nothing to remember. So why did Dave know that he was never going to forget it?
A pair of big, dusty motorcycles stood in front of Lucky’s Strike. The place inside was cavernous and dim. Country-western music twanged from a jukebox. At the far end of the room, beyond a sleeping pool table, the riders of the motorcycles—boots, filthy Levis, scabby insignia on jacket backs—operated electronic games that knocked and beeped and winked. The barkeep—Lucky?—appeared to have been beaten about the head a good many times in the remote past. His nose and ears were crumpled, scar tissue jutted above his eyes. He set the beer Dave had asked for in front of him, blinked at Dave’s P.I. license, and looked obediently at the snapshot of Serenity standing at the ranch with the blond, bearded, mad-eyed Azrael and the other smiling girls.
“I seen her with him. They wouldn’t come in here: he didn’t believe in booze, you know. But I seen them in town, when he come in, in that van of his, to pick up supplies for his place. Yeah, I seen her.”
“The important thing,” Dave said, “is when. Was she with him any time close to the end, when he killed the sheriff’s men and cleared out?”
“They was friends of mine,” Lucky said. “You know why they was there? Sanitation. To serve a paper. Some preacher wanted him and his girls out of there. Sex cult, he says.” Lucky laughed grimly. “Worse than that, wasn’t it? Only nobody knew it then. We was all on their side. Hippies, forty miles from noplace—nobody to see them but lizards and kangaroo rats. If they wanted to do it on the roof, who cared? But this preacher couldn’t rest. He must have watched them through a spyglass. Claimed the place was filthy, a pigpen, not fit. Raised hell with the department of health and sanitation. County. They wrote up the paper just to get the son of a bitch off their back. And Lon and Red drove out there to serve it. Marked car, of course, uniforms, revolvers on their hip, of course. And
8
P EREZ DIDN’T APPEAR TO have any point, unless it was the wild flowers—lupines, poppies—blue and gold, that carpeted the desert for miles around in all directions these few weeks in February. A road sliced through the town, kept minimally paved, probably for the sake of those same few weeks. Perez had a gas station for wild-flower viewers. It had what a faded signboard boasted was a DESERT MUSEUM & GIFT SHOP , where a two-headed rattlesnake could be seen, and where maps were sold of abandoned mines and ghost towns. A board structure with a high false front claimed to be an EATERY . A tired wild-flower viewer could even sleep in Perez, at the ROAD RUNNER MOTEL , six scaly stucco units, each with a weedy patch of cactus garden. VACANCY —naturally. On the bone-gray wooden side of the grocery store, the paint faded on a sign for OLD GOLD cigarettes. Wax shone on ten dented wrecks in the dirt lot of JAY’S GOOD USED CARS . The tavern was called LUCKY’S STRIKE . From at least one window of every structure in sight hung a rusty air-conditioning unit.
Dave had already seen Azrael’s ranch, three sad shacks painted blue, doors and windows lately broken out, the wind moving through them, through the littered rooms, stirring cheap Indian cotton hangings in the doorways, shifting pathetic scraps of clothing, tufts of mattress stuffing, feathers from ripped pillows across cracked linoleum. Death and desertion. Behind the buildings, in what had been a sometime attempt at a vegetable garden, the wind had begun filling in the holes from which, two weeks ago, had been dug up the rotted bodies of Azrael’s pitiful young disciples. Serenity among them? Each corpse had a gap in its chest. None had a heart. At Azrael’s ranch there had been nothing to see, nothing to remember. So why did Dave know that he was never going to forget it?
A pair of big, dusty motorcycles stood in front of Lucky’s Strike. The place inside was cavernous and dim. Country-western music twanged from a jukebox. At the far end of the room, beyond a sleeping pool table, the riders of the motorcycles—boots, filthy Levis, scabby insignia on jacket backs—operated electronic games that knocked and beeped and winked. The barkeep—Lucky?—appeared to have been beaten about the head a good many times in the remote past. His nose and ears were crumpled, scar tissue jutted above his eyes. He set the beer Dave had asked for in front of him, blinked at Dave’s P.I. license, and looked obediently at the snapshot of Serenity standing at the ranch with the blond, bearded, mad-eyed Azrael and the other smiling girls.
“I seen her with him. They wouldn’t come in here: he didn’t believe in booze, you know. But I seen them in town, when he come in, in that van of his, to pick up supplies for his place. Yeah, I seen her.”
“The important thing,” Dave said, “is when. Was she with him any time close to the end, when he killed the sheriff’s men and cleared out?”
“They was friends of mine,” Lucky said. “You know why they was there? Sanitation. To serve a paper. Some preacher wanted him and his girls out of there. Sex cult, he says.” Lucky laughed grimly. “Worse than that, wasn’t it? Only nobody knew it then. We was all on their side. Hippies, forty miles from noplace—nobody to see them but lizards and kangaroo rats. If they wanted to do it on the roof, who cared? But this preacher couldn’t rest. He must have watched them through a spyglass. Claimed the place was filthy, a pigpen, not fit. Raised hell with the department of health and sanitation. County. They wrote up the paper just to get the son of a bitch off their back. And Lon and Red drove out there to serve it. Marked car, of course, uniforms, revolvers on their hip, of course. And
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