With a crick in her neck and a sour taste in her mouth, Jane woke to the bass purr of an engine. No Lawrence Welk. She opened her eyes as day was breaking across grasslands low between two mountain ranges, early sun tracing volcanic slopes to broken crests softened by millions of years of erosion and swales of forest.
Bernie Riggowitz had made good time to El Paso and across the southwest corner of New Mexico into Arizona, about three hundred miles in less than four hours.
As Jane powered her seat into an upright position, Bernie said, “You slept like a kitten full up with cream.”
“Yeah, well, I feel like a cat that’s been fighting all night.”
“Say we stop in Wilcox for gas and breakfast, say you take the wheel from there, we can make Nogales by ten o’clock, eleven.”
Massaging the back of her neck, she said, “I’m not sure about the ‘we’ part. My plan was to put you out somewhere on the south side of Tucson and make the last hour to Nogales on my own, before any stolen-car report you filed could be a worry.”
His smile sagged in the sad-clown folds of his face, but then he declared, “Shmontses! Are we partners here or are we partners?”
“We’ve never been partners, Bernie.”
“Then what have we been, I ask you?”
“Kidnapped and kidnapper.”
“Are you going for crazy here? Do I look kidnapped? You thumbed a ride, I give a ride, we’re in a thing here.”
“The man in Nogales is dangerous.”
“I know from danger. All my life, I’ve had IRS up my toches.”
“You’re forgetting this,” she said, drawing her pistol.
“Again with the gun? We’re past guns, if you haven’t noticed.”
She thought about it awhile. “This guy in Nogales is expecting me Saturday. Just me. When you do business with him, he doesn’t want you bringing your grandfather. I need to call him, move up the meet, but I’ll need a story. You can’t be Bernie Riggowitz, king of wigs.”
“I never said king. Tacky. We’ll be in Wilcox in forty minutes. They have a Best Western, we’ll cook up a story over breakfast.”
“You leave the cooking to me.” She considered the situation in Nogales for a few minutes. If she took the Mercedes there without Bernie, she’d have to leave it for Enrique to ship to Mexico when she left in her new wheels. She knew Bernie too well now to jack his car and swap it to Enrique. She said, “Do you have a hat?”
“Absolutely. Do I have a head? I’ve got hats.”
“If you’ve got a hat that works, then we have a story.”
“The story is a hat?”
“The story depends on how you look in the hat. And everything depends on you doing exactly and only what I tell you to do.”
“I would give you trouble? I wouldn’t. This will be fun.”
“It won’t be fun, but it’ll be interesting. And we could end up in a shitstorm.”