Fugitive Nights(11)

The passenger, described as a "bald Latino in a khaki shirt," had looked at a large map on the wall in the hangar while the pilot and mechanic talked briefly. The mechanic later said that the bald man had pointed to some nearby towns on the map, said something to the pilot, and laughed. Then the bald man, clutching a red flight bag, headed toward the airport's public rest room.

Meanwhile, a sheriff's department pilot who was sick of drinking soda pop and reading a three-month-old Playboy draped his Sam Browne over his shoulder and headed for the john. He never knew what hit him.

The bald man with the flight bag hadn't locked the rest room door because it was broken. He'd been rooting around in the bag when the uniformed cop barged in on him. The bald man automatically threw a punch that George Bush would've envied. It bounced the cop headfirst off the edge of the door and when he slumped down, the bald guy booted him once in the solar plexus, then jerked the semiautomatic from the cop's Sam Browne.

The bald man, cradling the flight bag to his chest, jumped over the semiconscious cop, ran from the john, looked toward the plane on the tarmac, turned the other way and scooted toward the parking lot. Waving the cop's 9 mm Sig Sauer, he headed straight to a parked truck occupied by a plumber who'd been called to check leaking pipes. The bald guy jerked open the door, pointed the 9 mm at the plumber's bulging eyeballs, snatched the guy out of the seat and careened out of the parking lot in the stolen truck.

While several people scrambled toward the ruckus in the parking lot, the revived deputy hollered for help. The bald guy's pilot must have figured that something very bad had happened because he jumped back in his Cessna and took off, mechanical gremlins and all, causing detectives to later theorize that whatever the deal was, it was worth his risking his life. Naturally, nobody had gotten his plane's number during all that excitement.

Everyone figured it had to have been aborted drug smuggling. There was always a "load plane," carrying pot or Mexican heroin, landing on one of the little desert airstrips, usually at night. In fact, there was one county-owned emergency landing strip that was only that, a strip with a wind sock, and nothing more. You could bring in enough Mexican tar on any given night to goon out half the valley, not to mention a cocaine shipment bound for Palm Springs or L. A.

The plumbing truck was eventually found sand-locked up to the axle in a date grove near the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation, a collection of mobile homes, guns, satellite dishes, and clotheslines fluttering in the hot wind. The land belonged to a tribe that had had the misfortune to settle too far south, unlike their luckier cousins, the Agua Calientes, who'd stayed on a chunk of sand now called Palm Springs.

Just as on other Indian reservations, county ordinances were unenforceable on Torrez Martinez land, but beating the crap out of a cop and stealing a truck at gunpoint was more than a county ordinance. So pretty soon dozens of cops from various jurisdictions were swarming all over the reservation searching for the bald guy with a flight bag, who'd been spotted by a curious Indian kid after scuttling the truck.

The Indian kid had watched the bald guy with the flight bag do something strange. Before abandoning the plumbing truck, the guy found a can of grease and smeared it on his mouth and in his nose. Then he took some coins from his pocket and put them in his mouth before walking toward Devil Canyon and the Santa Rosa wilderness on that extremely hot winter afternoon.

An old Indian who'd been whiling away the time by watching the futile search talked to the shy Indian kid after he'd bicycled home. The old Indian explained the grease trick to a few of the cops: The guy had lubricated his mucous membranes, and the coins in the mouth were to diminish thirst. According to the Indian, this proved that the guy with the flight bag had to be a "man of the desert."

Meanwhile, Nelson Hareem, glued to the police radio, was going bonkers because he couldn't get out of town and head for Devil Canyon. He'd been ordered by his sergeant to stay on his beat in his own town.

It was later learned that the bald man had doubled back in the vicinity of Lake Cahuilla, climbed over a grape-stake fence, and kicked in the door of a modest two-bedroom stucco house. The bald guy apparently hid there for a bit, then hotwired a ten-year-old Ford sedan parked in the open carport. He was long gone while the search for him went on.

Not being a boozer herself, Breda mistakenly thought that coffee would help Lynn. She drove to a coffee shop on Palm Canyon Drive where they sat by a window, and she ordered cherry pie and coffee for two.

He hardly touched his pie, but squinted through the window at aging white-legged tourists, their figures squirming in the waves of heat rising from the pavement. Most of them wore dark socks and stretch pants.