Ross Thomas - The Fourth Durango

“What about a friend?”

Vines gave Adair a nod. “You’re looking at him.”

Loom turned to Adair with yet another scowl. “No idea where you’ll be staying either, right?”

“A motel tonight, I suspect. After that-well, who can say?”

“Parents? Wife? Children? Old friends-besides him?” said Loom, giving Vines a dismissive nod.

“That’s all in my records,” Adair said. “But to save time, both parents are dead. My son, as you know, died fourteen months ago in Mexico while I was here. A suicide. My wife and I were divorced in seventy-two and she’s long since remarried. My daughter’s confined to a private psychiatric hospital.”

Loom’s eyes leaped back to Vines. “The same one your wife’s in?”

“His daughter is my wife,” said Kelly Vines.

Four miles south on Floradale Avenue, Vines pulled the Mercedes to a stop on theroad’s shoulder next to a quarter acre of blazing scarlet flowers. Jack Adair stared at them, fascinated, as he slowly twisted the curved handle of the black cane to the right rather than the left.

“What are they?” he asked as the cane’s handle came off.

“Iceland poppies.”

Still staring at the field of scarlet, Adair placed the cane’s curved handle in his lap, removed the silver cap that held the cork, lifted the glass tube flask out of the cane and drank. At the taste of the whiskey, he closed his eyes and sighed. A moment later he opened his eyes and smiled, as if enormously relieved that the scarlet poppies were still there and the whiskey was just as he remembered it.

“After we left Loom and them back there,” Adair said, “and after it finally struck me that it really was adiós to durance vile, guess what I smelled?”

“Good intentions.”

“No, by God, ripe persimmons. And I haven’t smelled a ripe persimmon in fifteen, twenty years.”

“I’ve heard good intentions can smell like almost anything. Even ripe persimmons.”

Adair nodded and passed Vines the glass tube flask. The drink that Vines took was scarcely a sip.

“So tell me about it,” Adair said. “This city that God forgot.”

“Durango,” said Vines, handing back the glass tube. “About nine thousand souls, give or take a few hundred, who’re scratching out a living with no industry to speak of and some magnificent weather they can’t eat or pay their bills with.”

“What about tourists?”

“There’s no Spanish mission because of an oversight by Father Serra-and God, of course. Consequently, no tourists.”

“He a saint yet?”

“Father Serra? Rome’s still mulling it over but the odds are he’s a shoo-in.”

“Well, if the weather’s so great and it’s right on the ocean, why no tourists?”

“Because there’s no beach,” Vines said. “The Southern Pacific railroad tracks hug the coastline along that stretch and what beach there was, the storms ate.”

After nodding his understanding, Adair had a small swallow from the flask and asked, “How’d you send out the feeler?”

Vines started the engine and glanced into the rearview mirror before pulling out onto the road. “It came to me through Soldier Sloan.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Adair said, his eyes wide, his tone almost reverent. “What is he now-seventy, seventy-one?”

“Seventy-one.”

“Still a bird colonel?”

“Promoted himself to brigadier.”

“That must impress the widow women.”

“At his age, Soldier says, being a mere retired colonel won’t hack it anymore. So this time he retired himself from the Royal Canadian Air Force as a brigadier and affects a very slight British accent that must charm the hell out of the widows down in La Costa, Palm Springs and especially La Jolla, which is where I ran into him.”

“How much is he charging us?”

“Five thousand.”

“How’d you work it?”

“I followed Soldier’s surprisingly explicit instructions and turned off U. S. One-Oh-One at exactly ten P.M. and onto a state blacktop that’s the only way in and out of Durango.”

“When? Last night?”

“Last night. Eight minutes later, just as Soldier promised, I spotted a disabled car. I knew it was disabled because the hood was up-or bonnet, I suppose-and Dixie was staring down at the engine as though she’d never seen one before.”

“Dixie the fair, I presume.”

“Dixie was blond and more than fair. The car was an Aston Martin.”

Jack Adair had a small final swallow from the glass tube and chuckled with pleasure. “Spare me no details, Kelly,” he said. “Not even the dirty stuff.”

Kelly Vines got out of the Mercedes and walked slowly toward the woman who was illuminated by the headlights of both cars. She looked up from the Aston Martin’s engine with no sign of alarm. “If you’re thinking of bopping me over the head and taking my money, I’ve got six dollars and change.”

“I’m not the highwayman.”

“The mechanic?”

“Not him either.”

“Then you must be the Samaritan who knows damn all about cars.”

“I can drive one,” said Vines. “Although I’ve never driven one of these.”

“It’s simple,” she said. “You just put it in second and keep it there-unless you want to back up, of course.”

“What happened?”

“It coughed once, sputtered twice, died and no, I’m not out of gas.”

“You going to leave it here?”

She shrugged. “If you’ll give me a ride into town.”

“Which town?”

“Durango.”

“All right.”

“I’m Dixie,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Kelly Vines,” he said, taking her hand and finding it to be cool and dry and surprisingly strong.

The only customers in the Holiday Inn’s bar and cocktail lounge that night-other than Vines and the blond Dixie-were two serious male drinkers, one white, the other black, both in their mid-forties, who sat at the bar well separated from each other. As mute testimony to their solvency, both kept piles of wet change and damp bills in front of them, silently paying for each drink as it came.

Vines sat at a banquette, an untasted bourbon and water in front of him, waiting for the blond Dixie to complete a call to the Triple-A in Santa Barbara, which she thought might send a tow truck for the crippled Aston Martin.

As Vines waited, the white man at the bar gathered up his bills, leaving the pile of wet change for the gray-eyed Mexican bartender. The man climbed carefully down from his stool. Once safely on the floor, he looked around the room, a thoughtful expression on his face, and said in a clear and pleasant voice, “Fuck California.”

As the man left the lounge, his tread a bit measured, Dixie returned and slipped into the banquette next to Vines. Watching her cross the room, Vines realized she was older than he had first thought. If looks alone were the gauge, she could easily be twenty-five. But Vines had found her mind older than twenty-five, at least ten years older, and her attitude even older than that. She had that hard gloss of women who travel into their forties over rotten roads all the way but arrive more burnished than bruised. So he put her real age at thirty-two or thirty-three and wondered about her past.

After two sips of a Scotch Mist, Dixie put the drink down and said, “They’re sending the tow truck.”

“Good.”

“Now I have to find a place to stay.”

“You don’t live in Durango?”

“God, no. Do you?”

“No.”

She glanced around the room. “I suppose I could stay here.”

“Think they’d have a room?”

She smiled-a very wry smile. “In the only money-losing Holiday Inn west of Beirut there’s always a room.”