The Last Good Kiss (26 page)
139
they say that if I keep my quarter-section, it ruins the
development potential or some such shit, but if I don't
sell some more plots soon, I'll have to take their offer. "
"Better than nothing, I guess."
"Just like nothing," he said, "just money, and damn
it my great-grandfather was born on the Oregon Trail in
Applegate's second train, and my grandmother was
born in a log cabin that is still standing five miles up the
creek, so here I am sitting under a raft of plastic flags. "
"Like you said, times change. "
"Yeah," he murmured, "but you know what I hate
most of all?"
"What's that?"
"One of these nights, man, I'm gonna be sitting
down in Santa Cruz stoned out of my mind watching
the late movie, and some washed-up TV cowboy is
gonna come on the tube offering my land in piss-ant
lots, and man that's gonna be a bummer. "
"Maybe you could run a few cattle or something. "
"Hell, have you seen the market quotations lately?"
he said. "You've got to have a wad of capital just to get
into the cattle-raising business and lose your ass," he
said. "Besides, I've been lazy too long to quit now," he
said, then paused. "Say, man, you look like you might
have been high once or twice, and I've got this
dynamite number in my pocket. If you've got a couple
more beers, we can sit here and get high and wait for
the customers who ain't about to come here anyway."
We smoked his dope and drank my beer, watched the
sun ride the wide open spaces of high blue sky, talked
about wagon trains and trails, about what it might have
been like, talked about the motorcycle shop he might
open down in Santa Cruz, but we didn't talk about
Betty Sue Flowers and we didn't get very high.
140
1 0 ••••
Two AFrERNOONS LATER, I KNOC:KED ON RANDALL
Jackson's office door. He worked out of a cubicle in the
corner of a large warehouse filled with cartons of books
and magazines. He hadn't been hard to find. The clerk
in the first porno bookstore I had hit on Colfax told me
where to look. But I guess I arrived at a bad time. After
my knock, the voices inside the office stopped suddenly. The cheap door opened quickly, nearly jerked off its hinges, and a very large, very ugly man with a dark face
and a three-hundred-dollar suit stepped outside and
asked me what I wanted. I should have known, I
suppose. Where there's money, there's dirt, and when
you work my side of the street, you have to expect to
deal with those people. They're everywhere. Not as
well organized as they would like you to think, but
organized well enough.
"Can I help you?" he asked politely, a soft trace of a
Mexican accent in his voice. His twenty-dollar haircut
looked as if it belonged on somebody else's face.
"I'd like to talk to Mr. Jackson," I said, even more
polite than he had been.
"I'm sorry but he's busy right now," the big man
said.
"Who is it, Torres?" a voice from inside asked.
"Nobody," he answered, not meaning to insult me.
141
"Tell him to wait," the voice inside said.
"It's a nice day," Torres said. "Why don't you wait
outside?"
"I'll be on the loading dock," I said.
He nodded, and we went our separate ways. I was
just as glad. The hairy pie of pornography is a big
business with a small capital investment and a great
cash flow, and freedom of the press is a fine theory, but
none of it is any of my business. I waited outside,
watching two black dudes hand-truck cartons into the
rear of an unmarked blue van. It wasn't a nice day at
all, but I didn't complain. Denver had a dose of smog as
thick as L.A.'s, but I stared through the gray, dirty
haze toward the Rocky Mountains as if I could see the
peaks, standing like ruined cathedrals against a crystalline cobalt sky.
Randall Jackson wasn't the man with the voice inside
the office. He had a wheedling whine, as unctuous as
old bacon grease as he ushered the man with the voice
into the back seat of a black Continental with blank
silvered windows. The large dark gentleman drove it
away. Then Jackson turned to me, his whine gone.
"You wanted to see me, bud?" he said. Time hadn't
been kind to him. His gut had grown rounder, his hair
thinne!, and his legs more bowed. His wardrobe didn't
help, either-a maroon blazer with electric blue slacks
that sported a bright chrome stitch in the weave. His
fancy loafers had a new shine and dandy tassles,
but they were run-over at the heels. His name might
be on the business license, but he didn't even flush the
toilet without permission. "Well, what was it?" he demanded.
"I'm looking for Betty Sue Flowers," I said. I didn't
think he was going to tell me anything anyway, and I
knew I didn't want him to know my name, so I didn't
explain anything or show him my license.
142
"Never heard of her," he said quickly.
"Maybe she was using another name," I said. "I've
got information that you were with this girl in Oregon
several years ago."
"You got shit for information, bud, I ain't never been
to Oregon," he said, his tiny black eyes glittering like
zircons.
"Must be the wrong Randall Jackson," I said. "Sorry
to have bothered you, Mr. Jackson." Then I climbed
back into the El Camino and drove away.
That was that. For now. I couldn't muscle him with a
warehouseful of help watching. But he had lied to me,
probably out of habit, and I intended to find out why. It
had to be the hard way, though. His telephone would
be unlisted, his home address in the city directory
faked, and he had seen my El Camino, so I couldn't tail
him in it. I had to have another car.
One of the reasons that I spend so much time driving
back and forth across the country, aside from the fact
that airplanes scare me spitless, is that I can't rent a car
when I arrive in a strange city. I can't rent a car because
I don't have any credit cards. I don't have any credit
cards because I can't get one without stealing one. It's
easier to steal cars. I have more experience in that line
of w<;>rk.
Nobody likes to talk about it because it's such a
shoddy business, but private detectives spend a lot of
time repossessing cars. That's,how I got in the business,
in fact. After my third hitch in the Army, a friend of
mine got me a job on the sports desk of the Wichita
Eagle-Beacon, which is what I did in the Army when I
wasn't playing football, and since I was short of money
and bored, I started moonlighting for a finance company skip-tracing and repossessing cars and stereos and furniture and televisions. When I got fired from the
paper for being a lousy reporter, I headed out to San
Francisco, where I hustled runaways for a year, then up
143
to Montana, where my father had died, and took up
skip-tracing and repo's as a full-time job. I had stolen
lots of cars legally with court orders in my pocket, and
without, and I thought I could at least borrow one in
Denver without too much trouble.
I drove out to Stapleton Airport and parked in the lot
farthest from the terminal, then waited for the right
car, something inconspicuous in a company car preferably, driven by a tired salesman with his flight luggage in his hand. I didn't have to wait very long for the right
one, and as soon as the salesman was out of sight, I
lifted a brown LTD that belonged to the Hardy
Industrial Towel Company. With the right tools, it only
takes a minute. I was out of the lot before the salesman
hiked to the tenninal.
I had a supply of blank titles and a set of Alabama
plates in my toolbox, plus a batch of blank repossession
papers, but I didn't have time to fill any of them out, so
when Jackson pulled his plum-colored Cougar into the
afternoon rush-hour traffic on Santa Fe, I had to stay
close but drive carefully. He made it easy, and I stayed
behind him all the way back downtown to a topless
place on East Colfax. 1\vo hours later, when he stepped
out of the bar into the dusk, his face inflamed with
whiskey and visions of naked, dancing flesh, I stuck a
revolver in his ribs, and he drove us to a cheap motel
out in Aurora. We didn't even have to get out of the
car.
"Okay," he admitted, "I knew her, all right. We
came down here together, and I was flat busted, so I
put her on the street, and she took a soliciting fall the
first night. I couldn't make the fine, so she did thirty
days down on the county farm."
"And then?" I said.