Astonished, Sparky said, “I scared Hakeem?”
In fact, he hadn’t scared Hakeem, but his granddaughter had alighted on an argument that Sparky found potentially convincing. She pressed it hard. “Oh, you scared him silly, Grandpa. Didn’t he, Quinn?”
“Silly,” I agreed.
“So if we go down there to see Mr. Beebs and he turns out to be a pitiful eccentric and a fragile soul like Hakeem, which I suspect he might be, judging by this sign of his, he’ll take one look at you and freak out. He’ll be certain you’re FBI or something worse, that you’re there to entrap him, and then we’ll never make a deal. But if I go down there with just Quinn, it’ll be a whole different story. My Quinn can handle himself—you know he can—but he looks like a big goof, a whiffet, about as threatening as Mary Poppins, which is just the kind of backup I need for this.”
I thought Sparky might come to my defense and insist that I looked at least as threatening as Tinker Bell, but he said, “Okay, yeah, I get your point.”
He passed rolls of hundred-dollar bills to us. I distributed five in my jacket pockets, and Bridget tucked five away in hers.
My moon goddess and I got out of the car, and I met her at Wallace Eugene Beebs’s sign.
As Sparky came around to occupy the driver’s seat, Panthea put down her window and said, “I’m pretty sure neither of you will die tonight.”
Although I knew she was capable of jujitsuing me into a human pretzel, she looked like such a tiny person there in the back seat, heartbreakingly vulnerable, as is everyone ever born. “Stay alert,” I urged. “Be careful.”
“I’m not saying that one of you won’t be grievously injured or seriously wounded,” Panthea explained, “but it’s most unlikely that you’ll die here tonight.”
“Thanks for the clarification,” I said.
Sparky got into the Explorer and pulled the door shut, and Panthea put her window up.
Bridget and I turned and stepped off the highway, into the autonomous zone, where the laws of the United States did not apply.
|?27?|
Bridget and I stayed off the unpaved track, proceeding overland approximately fifteen yards parallel to it, in case there might be sensors or a guard to alert Wallace Beebs that we were approaching. The terrain gave us little to use as cover; but we were wearing dark clothes, and the moon was half wrapped in ragged clouds.
“Mary Poppins?” I whispered.
“You can be my governess any day,” Bridget said, “and I’ll do exactly what you tell me. Thanks for backing me up on that bit about scaring Hakeem.”
After the downpour, I expected the ground to be muddy, but for the most part it wasn’t. I supposed this territory was essentially a sandbox, and water quickly drained through.
Now that the night was clearing, I wondered if seething swarms of spring insects would erupt into the air, as advertised, followed by a pandemonium of bats feeding in flight. Having been delayed by bad weather, maybe they would just say to hell with it and wait until tomorrow night.
As anticipated, the flats led to a long slope and a glen that lay about a hundred feet below. The floor of the vale wasn’t a realm of gravel stone and mesquite and sagebrush, as I had expected, but in part an oasis with palms and other trees, which must mean that an aquifer provided ample water effortlessly obtained.
Porch lamps and soft light spilling from windows suggested a prefab log house that looked no less out of place in this territory than would have an igloo. It wasn’t a weekend-getaway cabin but a sizable residence, perhaps as much as three thousand square feet. Like Hakeem Kaspar, Wallace Beebs evidently produced electricity with a sound-shielded propane-powered generator.
Moonlight shaped another structure about fifty yards from the first, although that one didn’t appear to be a house. As large as the residence, its lines simpler, at the moment without lights, it might have been a barn or a storage building, and it, too, was shaded by trees.
We descended the slope far enough to avoid being silhouetted against the sky, and then stood watching, listening. There seemed to be no jackbooted autonomous-zone police, no machine-gun emplacements protected by barbed wire, no slavering pack of attack dogs, not even a border checkpoint with an officious bureaucrat wanting to see a passport. As the trailing garments of the storm grew threadbare and the moon had greater influence on the glen, this unguarded compound—the quaint log house, the warm amber light in the windows, the grace of trees in an otherwise hard land—seemed to be nothing more than a retreat for an eccentric who sought refuge from the bustle and demands of our increasingly authoritarian society, a man who preferred seclusion and privacy, perhaps to meditate or to pursue some talent. He might be a painter, a sculptor, a sensitive poet. He might be a philosopher, seeking meaning in the quiet of nature, an Arizona Thoreau. Whatever he was, curmudgeon or gregarious bard of the Sonoran Desert, the sign at the entrance to his property made it clear that he had issues with authority, suggesting that he might be delighted to be overpaid for a vehicle and then fail to report it stolen for a week or two.