American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,113

his cab. But he does lift up his shirt and make sure the Desert Eagle is still in the right spot.

As he walks up the front steps, the swagger returns. He raps on the frame of the screen door with a feeling of genuine authority, and pastes a big smile across his face when he hears the footsteps coming to the door.

The dead bolt slowly turns. Then there’s a snap, and the door opens just enough for one small, watery, terrified eye to stare out at him.

“Morning, uh—” Dee cannot confirm the gender of the person on the other side of the door. He struggles before saying, “Morning! I was wondering if it’d be possible for me to check the creek out behind your house? My wallet fell in it last night—got up to some high jinks, I’m afraid—and it got plumb washed away. Won’t be a moment, and I’m terribly sorry to intrude.”

The watery eye continues staring at him. Then it bobs up and down in what might be a nod, and the door slams shut. There’s another snap as the dead bolt slides home again.

“Sheesh,” says Dee. “So much for hospitality.” He hops off the front porch and heads to his pickup. He looks back at the house. After confirming that there’s no one in the windows, he discreetly takes a small spade and a tough piece of canvas from the bed of his truck and hotfoots it around back.

Christ, he thinks. Everyone in this burg has gone nuts after what they did on the mesa. It was just one guy, too. Seems like Bolan has Zimmerman kill a guy every other month, and no one freaks out about it, or at least not like this. But then, the people Zimmerman kills are usually people everyone expects to die: druggies, lowlifes, small-time enforcers, etc.

He remembers what he’s come here for as he approaches the creek. He realizes now that his story about the wallet was a dumb one: the creek is completely dry. That doesn’t matter, though, not now. He hops down into the creek bed, takes off his sunglasses, and looks around.

Here’s the hard part: Dee never has any idea where his quarry could be. Conceivably, it could be anywhere. It’s in the fucking ground, after all, and there’s plenty of ground around here. And it can vary in size…

He shuts his eyes, counts to ten, and opens them. Nothing. He shuts them again, counts to twenty, opens them, and sees…

There is the very subtle suggestion of an unnatural bend in one part of the creek. Like the running waters get pulled to one side, rubbing up against the earth. If you didn’t know to look for it, you’d never see it; but once you did, you wouldn’t be able to stop seeing it.

Dee walks to the bend in the creek, reaches into a pocket, and takes out a nickel. (He prefers nickels because not only do they have more copper than pennies, they’re also easier to see.) He holds it out straight in front of him between two fingers, and lets it drop.

Theoretically, it should fall straight to the ground. But it doesn’t: about halfway down it swoops away from Dee, just very slightly, as if the wind is pushing it. But there isn’t any wind in the creek bed.

He steps back, shuts one eye, holds his arm out, and sticks up his thumb like an artist taking stock of a painting. He estimates the direction in which the nickel was headed, and lines it up with the wall of the creek bed.

“Bingo,” he says, and starts to hack away at the creek bed wall with the spade.

It doesn’t take long until he hears a high-pitched, metallic ping as his spade bites into the earth. He wriggles the blade of the spade back and forth, spilling more earth onto the ground. Then the wall of the creek bed gives and something small tumbles out.

The object is small, but the thud it makes when it hits the creek bed is not. It strikes the ground so hard Dee feels it in the soles of his feet.

He winces. He is not looking forward to getting this son of a bitch back to the truck.

He kneels and brushes the soil off the object. Underneath the pile of earth is a small block of what looks like a very dark, worn metal. It’s not more than four inches wide on any side, yet there is something about this block—perhaps the