J Rain - The Mummy Case

I said to Sanchez, “Are we buying plane tickets to Florida?”

“No. We’re going to let this one slide.”

“Big of you,” I said.

“I still owe him,” said Jesus.

“Not so big of him,” I said.

“Hey, I’m only twelve.”

“And what have you learned from all of this?” I asked.

Jesus shrugged, and started crunching on the waffle cone. I had finished mine in precisely three bites, as had Sanchez, who dropped his big hand on his kid’s shoulders. “Answer him.”

“One girlfriend at a time,” said Jesus. He sounded as if this were a terrible punishment.

I said, “You do realize there are some guys who go their entire junior high and high school years without having a single girlfriend?”

“I know. I feel sorry for them.” Jesus looked at me, grinning. “I mean, I feel sorry for you.”

I looked at Sanchez. “You told him?”

“Hey, I was trying to make the same point. You just happened to come up.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, I used you because the kid happens to look up to you,” said Sanchez. “Why, I’ll never know.”

Jesus said, “You really never had a single girlfriend?”

“Girls are trouble,” I said. “Besides, I had plenty in college.”

“But I think girls are fun-”

“Not too much fun,” said Sanchez, looking at his kid.

“No, dad.”

“I was busy in high school,” I said.

“What could be more important than girls?”

“Football.”

“I played football in high school, too,” said Sanchez, shrugging. “And I had girlfriends. No big deal.”

“I took football seriously.”

“So did I.”

“I wanted to play in the pros,” I said. “I had a plan. Girls would just get in the way.”

“But that’s the idea,” said Sanchez. “Girls are made to get in the way. Sometimes it’s nice when they get in the way.”

“Right on, dad,” said Jesus. He raised his hand. “High five.”

Sanchez left him hanging. “But you made an exception for Cindy.”

I said, “Cindy just happened to be the most special girl in the world.”

“I think Cindy’s hot,” said Jesus, and Sanchez elbowed his kid hard enough to nearly knock him out of his seat.

“So do I,” I said. “So do I.”

I was in my office with my feet up on my antique mahogany desk, careful of the gold-tooled leather top, re-reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, when two things happened simultaneously: Jarred appeared in my office doorway pointing a rifle at my forehead, and my desk phone started ringing.

I did what any rational human being would in the presence of a ringing phone. I answered it.

Sherbet was on the other line. “We’re outside Jarred’s condo. He never showed.”

“No shit,” I said.

Jarred kicked the door shut behind him and stepped deeper into my office. He quickly scanned the office, keeping the rifle on me. It was an old fashioned Colt. 22. The kind one would find in a place like Rawhide, which is probably where Jarred got it.

Sherbet asked, “Any idea where he might be?”

“A fairly good one,” I said.

“Then where is he?”

“Take a guess.”

Jarred was walking around the desk, keeping the rifle on my face.

“He’s with you,” Sherbet said.

“Good guess.”

“You need help?”

“Probably not.”

“But it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“If you insist,” I said.

“I’ll send a car around.”

At that moment, Jarred yanked the phone cord out of the wall. The line went dead. “Have a good day,” I said, and hung up.

“Who the fuck was that?”

“Grandma,” I said. “She tends to worry about me.”

“She should worry about you, because you are fucked, Knighthorse. Fucked. Do you understand me? Fucked!”

“If I’m hearing you correctly,” I said, “I appear to be fucked.”

“Put your hands flat on the desk where I can see them.”

He caught me. I was inching toward my desk drawer, where I kept my Browning. I sighed, rested both hands on the tooled leather top of the desk.

“The oils from my palms might stain the tooled leather top of my desk.”

“Fuck your desk.”

Jarred had a sort of wild-eyed look about him. The sort of look my teammates had before big games, a look fueled by a lot of adrenaline and nerves and the certainty that you were going to hurt a lot of people in a few hours. Or be hurt. Jarred was still wearing his Rawhide-issued red cowboy shirt and jeans. He was sweating through his cowboy shirt. Must have gotten himself pretty worked up on the drive out here. His thinning hair was disheveled and his glasses had slid to the tip of his sweating nose. He didn’t push them back up.

“They were waiting for me outside my condo,” he said, spitting the words at me.

“They?”

He shoved the gun in my face, just inches from my nose. I could smell the gun oil, could see faint scratches along the steel barrel. “Don’t fuck with me, Knighthorse. The cops. The cops were waiting for me.” He snapped the gun away and started pacing in front of my desk, keeping the gun loosely on me. Jarred looked insane. He was sweating profusely now. Swallowing repeatedly. “Patty told me you spoke to her the other day. She must have told you something.”

“She told me you went back to the truck for water.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Except we have your prints on the gas cap, Jarred.”

“What do you mean?”

“We know you sabotaged the truck.”

He looked at me from over his glasses. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose, landed on my tooled leather. I would have to wipe that clean later. For now, I had bigger fish to fry.

“Give me the gun, Jarred.”

“I can’t.”

“If you shoot me, you get the death penalty.”

“Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”

I shrugged. “Where you stand now, a good lawyer talks the D.A. down to second degree murder.”

Jarred was shaking. I could literally see the sweat spreading from under his armpits.

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Say that to Willie Clarke.”

Jarred dropped into the client chair opposite me. The gun was pointed away from me. If I wanted to, I could lunge across the desk and wrestle it away from him. I wasn’t in the lunging mood. Besides, I didn’t think it would come to that.

“I didn’t mean to kill him.”

I said nothing.

“I just did it to scare him away, you know?” He paused, ran his hand through his hair. “I gambled on Rawhide. I visited there as a kid and fell in love with it. It stayed with me all these years.”

“Maybe it’s the cowboy in you.”

He ignored me. I was used to being ignored. He continued. “So when I was casting around for a theme for my masters, Rawhide naturally came to mind. It was a good fit. I had a true love for American history, in particular Western history. I did some research and discovered nothing of any significance had been done on the town, and I knew I had found my purpose. I sold my condo in Boston, moved out west. I’ve poured my heart and soul into that little town.”

“And then in waltzes Willie Clarke.”

Jarred instinctively gripped the weapon in his lap. “He was fresh out of graduate school, but there was a sort of-”

“Cockiness?” I offered.

“Yes. A cockiness to him that I found infuriating. Which is probably why I don’t like you.”

“Sometimes I don’t like me, either.”

“Seriously?”

“No; I love me.”

Jarred rolled his eyes. I think he might have thought about swinging his gun up to my face again, but decided against it. “Willie sounded so confident, so fucking sure of himself. As if he really thought he could unearth Sly’s identity.”