Norman Partridge - Saguaro Riptide

Then she straddled the cycle and started it up. The roar of the engine rode a series of quick close-ups. The pilot wore heavy red lipstick, and her eyes were green, and man oh man did that leather outfit fit her like a glove, and. .

It hit Rorie like a ton of bricks. The actress in the movie … she was a dead ringer for that chicklet at the Saguaro Riptide-Kate Benteen. Of course, Rorie hadn’t seen Kate Benteen without her sunglasses, so it could be that the resemblance was coincidental, but still-

No way. This couldn’t be Kate Benteen. That girl, in the movies? The way she talked about Cosmopolitan? No way, it didn’t make sense.

Still, Rorie was real eager to see the credits at the end of the flick.

The chopper chick raced through the desert on her black cycle.

Cut to -a tank with a bunch of real grody-looking Arabs heading her way.

Rorie settled back on the couch. Man, things were going to get good now.

The phone rang.

Rorie answered it.

Wyetta didn’t even say hello.

What she said was, “Get your ass in the saddle, cowgirl.”

They rode together in the sheriff’s Jeep Cherokee.

Wyetta was driving.

Rorie could smell JD on her breath.

She kept her lip buttoned about it, but she didn’t want to. What she wanted to do was say, Jesus Christ, Wyetta. Wasn’t the other night enough?

She didn’t say anything, though. Not that she had a chance. Wyetta was rattling on like a holy roller caught up in the spirit. In a way, that’s exactly what she was. Only the spirit that had her by the short and curlies wasn’t Jesus Christ. No, Wyetta was caught up by the spirit of her own personal Lord and Savior, Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp.

She’d been talking to him through that damn Ouija board again. Or so she claimed.

She also claimed that Wyatt had told her where Komoko had hidden the money.

And she couldn’t shut up about it.

But that didn’t mean Rorie had to listen. No siree. She stared out the window as mile after mile of nothing whipped by. All that nothing had been out there the other night, but she’d seen a lot less of it then.

A duster had blown down from the north. Not that Wyetta was bothered by the storm. In pigheaded Earp fashion, she had ignored it.

She kept the pedal to the metal. Damn the torpedoes. Balls to the wall law enforcement and all like that.

Only Wyetta and Rorie weren’t going to enforce any laws on that particular night. They were going to break some. They were going to steal some money. Maybe murder someone.

Not that Wyetta saw it that way. Hey, they were stealing money from the mob. So that wasn’t really stealing, was it? And the only guy they might have to kill was a mobster. So that wasn’t really murder was it?

Wyetta made the whole thing sound like a public service. And she wouldn’t shut up about it. Talking and talking, like she was trying to convince herself.

And Rorie could tell that Wyetta had been trying to convince herself another way, too, because she could smell Jack Daniels on the sheriff’s breath.

Riding through that duster, Rorie wished she’d kept her mouth shut. She wished she’d never told Wyetta about her sister’s asshole lover. That was the conversation that had planted the seed. Once it took root, there was no getting away from it. Wyetta had insisted that Rorie bring her sister out to the rancho for a little dinner party.

They’d talked it out over margaritas and nachos. Wyetta made it sound like a joke at first-“Hey, ’Cilia, the guy deserves to lose some money,” she said. “He treated you like shit, didn’t he? This’ll bring him down a few notches. We’ll show him you can’t treat us Arizona girls like cow dumplings.”

Priscilla went along with it, of course. Hell, she’d fallen for Komoko’s line, and he was a minor-league shit-shoveler. What could stop her from falling for Wyetta’s world-class bullshit?

Nothing. So, Wyetta came up with a plan to get Komoko, and ’Cilia set him up. The next time he phoned, she told him that Ellis was out of town on one of his flea market trips. Said Komoko should meet her out at Graceland, because he’d never seen the place and was always asking her about it.

But the way Wyetta planned it, Priscilla wouldn’t be anywhere near Graceland when Komoko arrived. Instead, Wyetta and Rorie would be waiting for him. They’d have his money before he even had a chance to figure out that he’d been set up.

Only it didn’t work out that way. There was the duster, of course. It slowed Wyetta down. But what slowed her down more was the bottle.

Rorie didn’t say a word about the bottle that night, either. She just sat there in the shotgun position, waiting to get the whole thing over with, hoping Komoko wouldn’t see them coming.

With the duster, there was a good chance of that.

But with the duster, there was also a good chance that Komoko might bag the whole thing. Stop at a motel a hundred miles up the road. Not show up at all.

Either way, it was okay with Rorie.

That was what she was thinking as they neared the little dirt road that cut from the highway to Ellis Aaron Perkins’s personal Graceland. Rorie was thinking so hard that she didn’t notice until the last minute how fast Wyetta was going, or how close the turnoff was-

“Look out!”

Wyetta cut the wheel too sharply. The Jeep’s big wheels dug into the desert, kicking up sand and rocks and then the cab leaned over-it all seemed to happen so slowly in a crazy kind of way. The Jeep rolled, slammed down onto the driver’s side and kept on moving, body screaming over sand and rocks, headlights illuminating a stand of saguaros, the Jeep still moving forward, plowing through the sand, long cactus fingers bending toward the windshield like fingers closing into a fist and then Rorie couldn’t see a damn thing because she had a faceful of air bag and the Jeep suddenly skidded to a stop.

Wyetta was swearing. Loudly. But the wailing siren was louder and they couldn’t turn it off because the air bags were in the way and neither one of them could see the dashboard. Wyetta was cussing a blue streak, but Rorie didn’t dare say a word. The truth was that she was almost too scared to breathe.

The air bags deflated. Waves of gravestone-colored sand blasted the Jeep. A suicidal tumbleweed raced through the storm and exploded against the windshield, little stick shards making spidery scratching sounds.

The sticks scratching, Wyetta’s cussing, the siren-every sound was muffled by the ringing in Rorie’s head. The sheriff squirmed in her seat and flicked off the siren. The deputy hung sideways in the cab, suspended by her seat belt. Rorie turned with some effort, saw steel-colored clouds boiling overhead through the passenger window.

“Can you get the door open?” Wyetta asked.

Rorie didn’t answer. But she wanted out. She didn’t care how hard the damn wind was blowing. The seat belt was cutting into her belly like a backstreet abortionist’s scalpel. The shoulder strap had wrenched her shoulder and chafed her neck. She felt like a crash-test dummy strung up by some automotive lynch mob.

The cab closed in on her. She could sense it getting smaller as the storm grew stronger.

Rorie kept her eye on the window, on the sky above. Those steel clouds were going to fall out of the sky and crush the Ranger flatter than flat. She was sure of it.

Panic knotted her chest. She had to start moving.

She managed to open the door. She couldn’t unfasten her seatbelt and ended up cutting it with her pocket knife, at which point she dropped on top of Wyetta, who unleashed a fresh torrent of expletives.

Rorie didn’t give a shit anymore. Wyetta’s words couldn’t hurt her. Not the words themselves. But she could smell the drunken breath that carried those words, and that breath burned in her lungs like hellfire as she gasped for fresh air.