The Secrets of Harry Bright Read Free

think a pair a big town cops can clear a no-leads seventeen-month-old case?" Coy Brickman tore disgustedl y a t a meatball sandwich he'd got at the town's only deli, washing it down with a quart of orange juice.
    Paco settled back, letting the desert rays have at his bronze belly and said, "Wonder if they'll send any a the dicks I used to know?"
    "You don't clear a no-leads, seventeen-month-old case very often," Coy Brickman repeated.
    "So?" Paco shrugged, closing his eyes. "They can have a week in a Palm Springs spa getting a facial, a body wrap and a blowjob. Speakin a which, what's the wind look like?"
    "Therapeutic breeze," Coy Brickman said, watching the dust devils and whirlwinds forming in the valley.
    Paco Pedroza sighed and said, "A breeze in this freaking town could blow the nuts off a ground squirrel. Bring me a snack next time ya drive by Humberto's."
    "Three, four chicken tacos okay?"
    "Make it four," the chief mumbled, never opening his eyes. "With frijoles. One thing about this freaking wind. You learn to fart silently and nobody ever knows."
    And while Paco dozed and his sergeant ate an early supper of ersatz meatballs on the roof of the police station, a Mineral Springs wino named Beavertail Bigelow was 86'd from a gin mill for picking a fight. A grimy wrinkled desert rat who looked as though he'd lurched into town with his bedroll lashed to a double-parked donkey, Beavertail drank a fifth of gin, they said, every day it didn't snow in town, and never went home when the cops told him to, and respected authority about like Sacco and Vanzetti.
    The cops wished that some night when he was sleeping it off on a table at the oasis picnic ground, a flash flood would wash the son of a bitch clear to Indio. But he was a true desert rat. He hated people, understood hostile environments and could survive fifty megatons at ground zero.
    Beavertail Bigelow was sixty years old, weighed less than 130 pounds, was chinless and watery-eyed, and was described as having shoulders like Reagan--Nancy that is. He got his sobriquet from the flat oval cactus of the same name that proliferated in the Coachella Valley, a specie s t hat looked harmless but bore minute barbed hairlike spines. The saying went, "You think the little wimp's spineless till you press him."
    As darkness fell so did Beavertail Bigelow, onto his favorite table at the oasis picnic ground. He was ten fathoms deep in a Beefeater slumber when a tall dark figure hoisted him up and hauled his carcass toward a waiting car, which roared toward the highway to Twentynine Palms.
    There was a diner on that highway where a bus driver made regular rest stops and lots of passes at a counter waitress. The unattended bus was parked in the light by the road sign, but no one saw the dark-clad figure carrying his shabby bundle. Beavertail Bigelow was found thirty minutes later on the back seat of the bus when his snoring woke two marines on their way to their base. He got kicked off the bus, minus his cowboy hat, and had to hitchhike back to Mineral Springs, therefore adding bus drivers to the list of things he hated.
    By the time Beavertail reached the outskirts of Mineral Springs the rising sun was smacking him in the eyes. His cerebellum was fogged by gin fumes and his soggy cortex was giving conflicting orders to his ravaged little body. All those millions of marinated brain cells were firing aimlessly. Beavertail Bigelow was parched and confused.
    He decided to cut across a mile of desert directly to the oasis picnic ground where there was a water fountain piped from a natural spring. He kept his mouth clamped shut and breathed through his nose to keep the mucous membranes moist, but his narrow skull was already heating up. The sun was just above the horizon but soaring fast, and throwing purples and pinks and crimsons and blues across the Santa Rosa Mountains.
    Beavertail realized that the gin was accelerating dehydration like crazy. The marrow in his bones was sizzling. Might