Page 32 of Redeemed
“I told you, no permit, no room.”
“Then I’ll try someplace else.”
“Won’t matter. No permit, no room. City ordinance.”
“Twentynine Palms?”
“You’ll need a permit there, too.”
She stares at me with just enough of a smirk that I still think she’s fucking with me. “Good night. Thanks for nothing.”
I turn to go and about the time I get my hand on the door, she says, “Wait. I know where there’s a cave.”
I glance at her over my shoulder. “Does it smell like wolves?”
“Nah.” She scratches behind her ear and I imagine she has fleas, too. “It’s about a two mile hike, and it’s deep enough to keep you out of the sun.”
“Does it have a door that locks?”
That makes her laugh. “Shoulda done your homework, dude.”
I give her a mocking salute and head for the Range Rover. I try the Best Western Joshua Tree and the Joshua Tree Inn, and a couple other places whose names I can’t remember. They all give me the same bullshit about a permit. In theory I have time to make it back to LA, but the closer I get to home, the louder Jacques’ voice gets, so I decide to see a wolf about a cave.
When I come back through the office door, the clerk laughs so hard I’m afraid she’s going to rupture something. I cross the room and plant both hands on the counter, waiting till she’s at the gasping for breath stage to speak.
“So, can you tell me where the cave is?”
“For fifty dollars,” she wheezes.
Gritting my teeth, I ask, “Can you break a twenty?”
“Oh, did I say fifty? I meant sixty.”
If she didn’t smell so bad I’d be tempted to drain her on principle. She must see it in my eyes, because her laughter dries up and she waves me toward the back of the room.
“Come this way. I can’t leave the desk long enough to take you there, but I’ll show you the trail.”
She takes me out a rear door and points up the road running behind the motel. “Follow that past the last house and you’ll see a path. There’s a big-ass Joshua tree right where it starts. Follow it for a couple miles, and every time it forks, go left. The cave’ll be on the hill side by a big saguaro cactus. I’d say you can’t miss it, but you totally can, so pay attention.”
This is sounding sketchier by the minute, as David would say, but I don’t have much choice. Taking directions from the flea-bitten desk clerk of a fleabag motel, I hope to hell I’m not piling more trouble on my head.
“But he won’t really die,” she says, her voice layered with a resonance she didn’t have before. “You’ll think you killed him, but the stars say you’re wrong.”
“What?”
She blinks at me, like she’s just waking up. “No need to get pissy. I just—”
It’s all I can do not to close my hand around her throat. “You just said that he wouldn’t really die. Who the hell were you talking about?”
“Oh.” She laughs weakly and wave a hand toward the trail. “Just ignore me when I go off like that. My brain is weird.”
My glare isn’t drawing anything else out of her, so I shrug and leave it for later. Either she’s referring to Jacques or to Connor or to a victim-to-be-named later. None of those options give me a whole lot of hope.
She runs through the directions one more time and I take off up the road. I aim for about a three-minute mile pace, slow enough that I won’t miss anything. Her instructions are accurate; I pass the houses, find the trailhead by the Joshua tree, pick the left branch of every fork.
I make my best guess at a mile and a half and slow down so I won’t miss the cave’s entrance. Still, I almost jog right past the saguaro cactus, because the cave I think I’m looking for is big and black and the reality is more like a crevice between tumbled rocks.She didn’t tell me about the rocks.
Still, I like that it’s hidden and I like the lack of footprints. Anybody who wants to rob me while I’m down for the day will have to know just where they’re going.
