High-Desert Barbecue                                                                         J.D. Tuccille

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Chapter 1

    Rollo sat under the cover of the Ponderosa pines framing a steep ridge line, gnawing a piece of venison jerky and washing it down with sips of warm water from a dusty, fabric-covered canteen. He watched the Forest Service workers below. He watched them warily, back in the shade of the trees where he was lost in shadow beneath the wind-bent branches. Rollo didn’t get along well with the khaki-shirted federal employees. Forest Service personnel had but recently destroyed his house, stolen his truck and sent him fleeing into the forest.

    Of course, Rollo’s house was a hand-built shack on federal land and his truck was an unregistered beater he’d salvaged from a dump. But he’d really liked that little shack, what with its views off Arizona’s Mogollon Rim to Sycamore Canyon below and its mostly waterproof roof to fend off the monsoon rains, rare though they were during drought years. The shack he could build again – he’d done it before. But the truck was a real loss. Now he’d have to hoof it into town for supplies and to visit his friends. Williams was a long walk with a full pack, and Flagstaff was out of the question until he had new wheels.

    Such is the life of a modern mountain man. Or social drop-out. Or loser. Rollo’s ex-wife definitely would have gone with “loser.” But, then again, thought Rollo, Toni hated the outdoors and couldn’t build a campfire for shit.

    Rising on slightly creaky knees – 45 was just around the corner and Rollo hadn’t had time to properly stretch before donning his heavy backpack and sprinting (well, lurching) from the marauding rangers – he finished his water, capped the canteen, and looked around.

    That’s when he noticed the Forest Service Chevy Blazer parked at the mouth of a dry wash, out-of-sight of the cluster of workers clearing the debris that had recently been his hovel-with-a-view.

    “I’ll betcha … I’ll just betcha those dumbasses left the keys in the ignition,” Rollo muttered out loud.

    He started walking, slowly but eagerly, through the brush, descending to the wash and the concealed Blazer. The high, dry grass rustled as he passed, and pinecones crunched softly underfoot. Within a few minutes, he stood by the open window of the Blazer, and let out a low whoop – audible only to him and to a curious prairie dog watching from the edge of its hidey hole.

    “It’s only fair,” Rollo said to himself as he tossed his pack across the cab into the shotgun seat, slipped behind the wheel and took hold of the key. “They took my truck. Now I take theirs.”

    He paused and glanced back in the direction of the hidden Forest Service workers. He snorted, loudly. Then he shifted the Blazer into neutral, released the emergency brake, stepped out, and began pushing against the open driver’s door. The truck barely budged, then eased, slowly, onto the jeep road that had brought it to this spot. Silently, Rollo guided the truck around a bend and down a flat stretch of road.

    Glancing over his shoulder, the straining man saw a thin column of smoke rise into the sky.

    “Bastards can’t just wreck my house; they have to burn it, too,” he grumbled. Then he hopped behind the wheel and started the engine. For a few minutes he kept his speed down to minimize dust and engine noise. Then, as his old homesite shrank in the rearview mirror, he jammed on the accelerator and sped his new vehicle down the dirt road in the direction of the Interstate. A high column of dust kicked up behind, mingling with the smoky haze gathering in the air.

    Rollo howled with laughter.

    An hour later, the Forest Service truck sat in the driveway of a small house on the north side of Flagstaff. Rollo forced the flimsy latch on the back door, leaving a small spray of splinters projecting from the doorframe, grabbed a cold beer from the refrigerator, and planted himself on the sofa.

    Which is where the homeowner found him upon returning from the market.

Chapter 2

 
    When Scott entered his house through his front door – his unlocked front door – he saw a stocky, middle-aged man on his sofa. The man had long salt-and-pepper hair tucked under a wide-brimmed canvas hat, and wore a ratty plaid shirt with greasy corduroy shorts. A pair of heavy hiking boots rested on the floor, the feet they’d formerly confined stretched across the coffee table.

    The room smelled strongly of unwashed … well … everything.

    “The least you could do is open a window, Rollo.”

    “I’m on the lam, Scott. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.”

    Scott crossed the living room, passing through the archway into the kitchen where he deposited the plastic shopping bag from the supermarket on the counter. Then he helped himself to a beer from the refrigerator.

    “On the lam? Does anybody even say that anymore?”   

    The back door into the kitchen hung slightly open. Scott poked at the spray of splinters probing into the room.

    “Hey, you know the front door was unlocked, right?”

    “Unlocked? Shit.” A muffled shuffling noise, like that of greasy fabric rubbing against upholstery, came from the living room. “Sorry. I’ll fix that lock.”

    “Anyway,” Scott said, returning to the living room “if you wanted to keep a low profile, you probably shouldn’t have parked the Forest Service truck in my driveway.”

    “Too obvious, is it?”

    “Just a bit.”

    Scott perched himself on the lodge-pole pine sofa arm at the opposite end from Rollo. He fanned his hand at the older man.

    Rollo pointedly looked away, and took another long sip of beer.

    “That truck, Rollo. Is that something I’m likely to have to explain to anybody who sees it parked by my house?”

    Rollo shrugged.

    “Well, move it then.”

    “OK.”

    Scott took a deep breath, and then wrinkled his nose at his mistake.

    “All right, I’ll bite. Why are you on the lam?”

    “Those khaki-shirted bastards burned my house and stole my truck.”

    Scott squinted.

    “Are you talking about that shack of yours and the rolling deathtrap you got from the junkyard?”

    “That’s an unkind way of putting it. Anyway, I’m without a home at the moment, though I have new wheels.”

    “That would be the Forest Service truck.”

    Rollo brandished an index finger, wagging it back and forth so rapidly it seemed to have no bones. “Hey, they owe me a vehicle.”

    “It hardly seems a fair trade, seeing as how this truck has functioning brakes and the like.” Scott shook his head. “Anyway, what do you mean they burned your house?”

    “I saw it burning as I made my getaway.” Rollo paused. “At least, I think they did. They tore my house down and I saw smoke rising from the spot where the rangers were vandalizing my stuff.”

    “Huh. That’s the place overlooking Sycamore Canyon, right?”

    “Yep, the same one you saw on your last visit.”

    “That’s a hell of a place to set a fire. It’s full of brush and the place is bone dry – it will be until we get some decent rain.”

    Rollo snorted. “Rangers are a bunch of dipshits. They don’t know from dry.”

    Scott nodded. While they were a mixed bunch, he’d met some boneheads in the local Forest Service ranks, and he could think of a few who made Rollo look like a paragon of sensible life choices.

    “So you came here because …”

    “Any chance I can stay here tonight?”

    Scott closed one eye and pursed his lips.

    “Oh come on.”

    “Yeah, you can stay. But you have to shower and wash your clothes before you touch anything else – and I mean anything else. And the truck goes.”

    “Done.”

    “And you have to clear out for a while. Lani is coming over and she’s not your number-one fan.”

    Rollo shrugged. Then he rose from the sofa and drained his beer.

    “I’ll be back later. I have a few chores to run.”

    “Murphy’s raised their beer prices. And that escort service you like got busted.”

    “Shit.” Rollo clenched a fist. “Cities are only good for bars and whores. What’s the point of visiting ’em if they’re gonna make it a hassle?”

    “You’ll figure something out.”

    “I guess. See ya later.”

    Rollo walked toward the front door.

    “Don’t forget to get that truck out of my driveway.”

Chapter 3

    With Rollo gone, Scott took his half-finished beer down the corridor to the second bedroom, which was outfitted as an office. Without sitting, he flicked his computer mouse with the tip of his finger to get rid of the screen saver. A row of blue dots indicated a long line of new, unread e-mail messages and he groaned.  He quickly peeled off his light nylon jacket and short-sleeved, button-down shirt, and kicked off his shoes. That left him wearing denim shorts, sunglasses and a straw cowboy hat.

    He opened the first e-mail – and groaned louder than before. “A meeting?”

    Then he opened the attached file on a second e-mail and started printing. As the printer spit pages, he turned to the shelves next to his desk, hit the power switch on the stereo, and started the multi-disk CD player shuffling randomly through its full load of music. Toby Keith’s “I’m Just Talkin’ About Tonight” filled the room.

    When ten pages were stacked in the printer tray, with more on the way, he grabbed the pile of papers, shoved them in the fax machine resting on the file cabinet by the window, punched the button for a pre-set number, and sent an electronic stream of numbers and pie charts flowing through the telephone lines.

    The phone rang.

    Scott retrieved headphones from under the piles of paper on his desk, all held in place by a Colt Mark IV Series 80 .45-caliber pistol used as a paper weight, and plugged it into the stereo, cutting Toby off in mid-proposition. He donned the headphones under his hat, leaving his right ear uncovered, and then answered the phone.

    “Scott here.”

    “Hey Scott, it’s Bill here in the office, with Jennifer, Kathy, Todd and Justin.”

    “Hey guys!”

    He was answered by a round of “heys.”

    “How’s Arizona treating you?”

    “Oh, you know how it is. Another lousy day in paradise.” Scott danced slowly around the room, more or less in rhythm with the music in his headphones.

    “See any moose recently?”

    “Elk, Todd. We have elk here. I almost got mugged by one the other day.”

    Scott shot a glance toward the fax machine, which was slowly digesting the last page in the tray.

“Hey, did you guys get my Web-traffic report?”

    “No,” Bill answered. “I was going to ask you about that. Did you send it through?”

    The fax machine emitted a low buzz as it sent the last bits of data streaming off to New York.

    “Yep. If it’s not in your hands, it should be sitting on your fax machine. The news is good, by the way. Traffic is up and the new small-business section seems to be a big draw.”

     “Wait a minute.”

    Scott recognized Todd’s voice.

    “Are we really still e-mailing the data off to Scott, to print out and fax back to us?”

    The telephone speaker remained silent for a long moment as Scott promenaded across his office to the opening strains of a 1980s-era Pogues song.

    “Uh oh,” he mouthed to himself.

    “Well … yeah,” Bill answered. “The networking site is his baby. Scott is responsible for submitting all the reports for his area of responsibility.”

    “But that raises another issue,” Kathy said.

    You bitch, Scott thought. I’m being ambushed.

    “What exactly is Scott’s area of responsibility?”

    “I’m editor of the networking and development site,” Scott answered, slowing his fancy footwork so exertion wouldn’t show in his voice.

    “But what do you edit?” Kathy asked. “Didn’t we out-source all of our content something like two years ago?”

    “Well … he does write a column,” Bill chimed in. “You write a column, don’t you, Scott?”
    
    “Every week!”

    “And what about the newsletter?” Bill asked, grasping at a slender straw. Bill was Scott’s manager and had signed off on his continued employment through repeated reviews.

    “The newsletters are all automated,” Todd said. “They even send themselves.”

    A long pause ensued. Scott resigned himself to the inevitable

    “What about managing staff?” The voice sounded like Justin.

    “I’ll take this one,” Scott said, hoping to get the painful process done with. “Nope, we let go of the last of my staff sometime last year. That was Cathleen. Nice girl. We ran out of stuff for her to do.”

    “Then what is it we’re paying you for?”

    Scott thought long and hard, keeping his feet in motion to the music as he did so. He banged his shin against a fully loaded backpack perched atop a pile of camping gear that occupied the corner of his office, winced, and then turned his attention back to the conversation.

    “Well, aside from the column, you’re pretty much paying me to print out e-mails you send me and fax ‘em back to you.”

    Another long pause ensued.

    “So, Todd, out of curiosity… What is it that you do?”

Chapter 4

    Fortunately for Lani’s peace of mind, she had no idea that her boyfriend had taken in a lodger. A woman of passionately held beliefs wrapped up in a petite blonde package, Lani passionately believed that Rollo was a lazy bum and at least a low-grade menace to the public good. The fact that the subject of her disdain wouldn’t necessarily dispute her description didn’t improve her outlook one bit.

    She also passionately loved Scott, so she tolerated his itinerant friend – barely.

     And she also liked kids. Which was good, since she spent a lot of time with them as a teacher.

    “Hey Miss Roche!”

    Lani peeled her eyes from the box of feminine pads in her hand. Regular or slender, she pondered. There were so many choices. She looked around for the source of the greeting. Nobody was visible up the aisle of the supermarket, and the large, dark-skinned woman in the other direction was facing away.

    “Miss Roche!”

    She looked down.

    “How’s it goin’, Miss Roche?”

    “Oh, Ozzie. How are you?” She tossed the box – regular it was – over her shoulder into the shopping cart.

    “He’s in summer school, Miss Roche.” The large woman she’d noticed before wheeled a cart that groaned under its load. “He don’t do so well in all his classes like he does in yours.” She shrugged. “He don’t do so well in summer school either.”

    Lani grimaced sympathetically.

    “I’m sorry about that Mrs. Begay. I wish I could help, but there’s not much I can do about summer school.”

    Ozzie tugged at Lani’s shirt.

    “They don’t let me cut class like you do.”

    “Ummm … Let’s call it independent study, Ozzie. Not cutting class.”

    “Yeah. They just make me sit there. It’s boring. I wish I could cut like I did in your class—”
    “Independent study, Ozzie.”

    “Yeah, but Mom says she’ll whup me if I do.”

    “I don’t care what you call it,” Mrs. Begay said. “You let him go in the forest and he reads books about the outdoors.”

    “Call of the Wild!” Ozzie shouted.

    “Yeah. And you finished it. But the other teachers, they make him sit at a desk and he doesn’t read anything. I know what works. But I don’t want him held back.”

    Lani smiled.

    “I don’t blame you. He won’t get through school doing his own thing, I’m sorry to say. The schools want everybody learning the same way, even if it doesn’t work for all the kids. I try to give my own students a little more space.”

    “Yeah. I wish there was more like you.”

    “Thanks.”

    Not wanting to spend the entire day chatting with a former student’s mother, Lani dropped her eyes to her shopping list. She hoped she wasn’t being too rude, but she had chores to do.

    “Hey.”

    Lani’s eyes rose – and froze. The box of feminine pads she’d tossed in her cart was being roughly examined from between Mrs. Begay’s large, calloused hands.

    “You use these? Don’t they hurt?”

    Lani bent her lips into a weak smile.

Chapter 5

    When Lani arrived at Scott’s house, Champ, as usual, surged ahead, straining at the leash.

    “Take it easy, boy. You’ll see Scott in a minute.”

    She hauled back on Champ’s leash, pitting her 120 pound against Champ’s 65 pounds of slobbering enthusiasm, to allow herself enough reach to wriggle her hands into her purse for her keys to Scott’s house. With the maneuver accomplished, she allowed the black-and-white mutt to lead the way to Scott’s back door. Champ promptly nosed the door open, snatched the leash from Lani’s hand, and disappeared into the house.

    Lani glanced at the splintered rear doorframe, then at the keys in her hand.

    “Scott!”

    She passed through the kitchen, glancing at the polished wooden cabinets on the wall. The kitchen had been a sore spot when she and Scott began dating – actually, it was how they began dating.

    Dragged from bed early one morning by the sound of a power saw screaming its way through lumber, she’d quickly dressed in the previous day’s clothes, left scattered on her bedroom floor. The narrow hallway of her cluttered cottage was lined with shelves crowded mostly with children’s books. Gaps showed where books had been loaned to students.

    Trotting behind her, Champ whimpered with concern. Recently acquired from a shelter where he’d landed after being found wandering the street dirty and emaciated, the dog had quickly attached himself to Lani. He’d also demonstrated his appreciation for his new home and good treatment by taking a proprietary interest in the woman’s wellbeing. One of Lani’s more-aggressive dates learned the extent of Champ’s devotion when he talked his way through the door and tried to force the evening past her comfort zone. Lani sincerely hoped Champ’s teeth left permanent scars.

    Now she rarely went anyplace without him. She grabbed the dog’s leash from a peg by the front door.

    Five-feet, two-inches of blonde fury, she’d stalked across the driveway to the newly purchased neighboring house with Champ by her side. She’d marched to the back door, from behind which the cacophony seemed to originate. She’d put her full bodyweight into pounding on the door. A tall, muscular, balding man wearing dirty cut-off shorts and protective goggles pushed to the top of his head, with raccoon eyes of clean skin surrounded by an even layer of sawdust, answered her knock.

    “What can I do for you?”

    “I live next door. Right next door. Do you have any idea what time it is?”

    The man shifted his gaze to a wall clock mounted above the arch leading to the living room. It’s … whoops! It’s just 6. Sorry if I woke you up. I couldn’t sleep and I thought it was later.”

    Lani glanced around the construction zone that had replaced the house’s kitchen. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Champ easing forward and sniffing curiously at the stranger. The dog grinned. She tugged back on the leash.

    “You’re renovating?”

    “Yep.”

    “I don’t see a permit posted.”

    “I don’t have one.”

    “You may not know, but the city requires—”

    The man shook his head and interrupted.

    “I know, but I don’t care. The city doesn’t own this house. I do. The mayor doesn’t have to ask my permission to make city hall even uglier than it already is, and I’m not gonna ask his permission to install some cabinets and an electric oven that won’t burn my dinner.”

    Lani stood at the doorstep with her mouth open. Then she smiled.

    “You don’t like being told what to do, do you?”

    The half-dressed man smiled back.

    “Nope. But I also don’t like bugging people. I’m really sorry about that.”

    He reached out of Lani’s sight and grabbed a t-shirt as ratty as his shorts. As he slipped the shirt over his head, Champ pushed forward and nuzzled the man’s bare knee.

    Lani quickly jerked back on the leash, harder than before.

    “I guess we can call it a rough meeting. I’m Lani. I live in the house over there. And I usually get up right about now to go to my job as a teacher.”

    The man ruffled the fur on Champ’s head with one hand and reached out the other.

    “Pleased to meet you, Lani. I’m Scott. I sleep at strange times when I’m not telecommuting to my office back east.”

    “You telecommute? What do you do?”

    “I write and edit an online business magazine.”

    “You’re a writer? Cool. Do you read a lot too?”

    “Oh yeah. You should have heard the movers bitch about carrying my crates of books.”

    Lani smiled again. Actually, she stifled a laugh at his raccoon eyes. She coughed to cover a giggle. Then she caught another glimpse of the wall clock.

    “Oh. I have to get my day started. Maybe you could show me your book collection sometime.”

    “I’ll be happy to. Hey -- do you want breakfast? I make mean omelettes over a campstove.”

    He was right. The omelettes were good.

    Scott was jigging with Champ when she turned the corner. Bare-chested, in sunglasses and a cowboy hat, he hopped up and down, feet flying, to whatever music flowed through the wire that disappeared under his hat. The dog leaped around him, making his own music of excited yelps. A stack of papers lay in disarray at the base of the fax machine.

    “You look like a demented porn actor.”

    Scott doffed the hat and headphones. Something heavy on pipes and fiddles escaped into the room before he cut the power to the stereo.

    “What’s that, baby?”

    “I said … never mind. Did you know that somebody forced your back door?”

    Scott stopped jigging and bent to pet Champ. The dog responded to the attention by flopping on his back, exposing his belly for a rub.

    “Yep. Rollo dropped by for a visit. He’ll fix the lock later.”

    Lani made a face, and then bent to land a kiss on Scott’s lips that left them just shy of bruised. She unhooked the leash still trailing from Champ’s collar.

    “Is he still living on Forest Service land?”

    “It’s not the Forest Service’s land, much as they’d like us to think otherwise. But no, for now he seems to be living on my sofa.”

    “What?” Lani shot to her feet. She felt her face flushing with blood. “No fucking way!”

    Scott stood quickly, stepping back as if to give himself a safe clearance from Lani’s stabbing finger. He held his hands high and apart in a defensive posture.

    Champ languished on the floor, belly to the sky, wondering at the loss of all of the attention he’d enjoyed just a moment before.

    “I didn’t say he’s moving in; he just needs a place to crash until he … uh … finds himself another den or something.”

    Lani closed her eyes and breathed deeply, then looked back at Scott. There were times when she really didn’t understand the guy. Here was a smart man with a house and a life hanging around with a crazy old hobo. Why?

    “What happened to the rat hole he was living in?”

    Scott smirked.

    “It got de-ratted. The Forest Service burned him out and stole his truck.”

    Lani reached with her left hand to scratch gently between Champ’s ears. Unwilling to lie on the floor waiting for people to come to him, he had stood and now leaned his full weight against his owner’s legs, content in the knowledge that now he couldn’t be ignored.

    “What? What do you mean the Forest Service ‘burned him out’?”

    Scott shrugged. He reached to shut off his computer, closing down software and then tapping the “Start” icon to power the system down.

    “I just know what he told me. The rangers found his latest shack. He ran away before they could catch him. As he was driving away in one of their trucks he saw smoke rising from where the shack was.”

    Lani cocked her head.

    “Rollo stole a Forest Service truck?”

    Scott shrugged again, then wandered from the office toward the kitchen. Lani heard him rummaging in the refrigerator. Freeing herself from the dog’s weight – Champ flopped to the floor as if he’d been rendered boneless – she wandered into the kitchen herself just in time to see Scott guzzling from an orange juice carton.

    “Hey,” Scott called to her. “It was a fair trade. The rangers got to keep that old junker he was driving around.”

    “Yeah, right. Y’know, if he wasn’t your friend, I’d have called the cops on him a long time ago.”

    Scott casually stuffed the carton back in the refrigerator.

    “Baby, if he wasn’t my friend, you wouldn’t know anything about his intriguing activities.”

    Rather than concede the point, Lani changed subjects.

    “Do you have much more work to do today?”

    Scott winced, doffed his hat and ran the fingers of his right hand through the tightly cropped fuzz that represented the last stand of his hairline.

    “Oh, that’s the other thing I have to tell you. I finally got fired. Right in the middle of the meeting – I had a meeting today, by the way - Todd and that bimbo shadow of his start pointing out that I really have nothing left to do since they downsized my department into an expensive photocopying operation.”

    Lani buried her face in her hands.

    “Anyway, I turned it around on Todd and asked what his responsibilities are.”

    “Did you get him fired too?”

    Scott shook his head.

    “Nope! It turns out the jerk has a lot of responsibility. He sounds pretty productive too. Who knew?”
 

Chapter 6

    Ranger Jason Hewitt of the National Forest Service (Richard Wilson District) squirmed on the plastic seat of the cheap tubular-steel chair. His face, above the collar of his green polyester button-down shirt, was smudged and a strong odor of wood smoke hung about him.

    “Strictly speaking,” he began, a little hesitantly, “we don’t know what happened to my vehicle.”

    “No,” a slightly scratchy, nasal voice interrupted. “We don’t know what happened to your vehicle.” Jason’s own emphasis on “know” was repeated, but drawn out with singsong quality that made the ranger wince.

    Jason wished he were somewhere, anywhere else than across a desk from his boss and co-conspirator, Chief Ranger Martin Van Kamp.

    Van Kamp sat tall behind his battered sheet metal desk – tall, that is, on an office chair cranked all the way to the top of its elevatory capacity, and then a bit taller on a Phoenix telephone book placed on the cushion. His full five-foot, four-inch, 125-pound frame bounced in agitation atop its makeshift throne.

    “But we can make an educated guess now, can’t we?”

    Jason nodded.

    “Do you think an elk made off with your vehicle?” Van Kamp rasped.

    Jason shook his head.

    “Maybe a hawk? Perhaps a red-tailed hawk hot-wired your Chevy Blazer and hauled it off to a chop shop?”

    Jason grimaced and raised both hands in front of him like a shield. “Actually, the keys were in the ignition.”

    Van Kamp pulled up short – shorter anyway.

    “Keys were in the ignition,” he repeated, seeming to exhale the phrase through his nostrils.

    Jason nodded.

    “So, pretty much anybody could have made off with your truck.”

    Van Kamp leaned forward in his chair, face red and nostrils flaring. An image of an enraged baboon passed through Jason’s mind and he involuntarily hunched in his chair, bracing for attack.

    “Except that the only fucking person out there, other than your team, was the squatter you were supposed to be grabbing.”

    “As far as we know,” Jason protested, drawing his legs up on the chair as Van Kamp leaned forward across his desk.

    “Jason, the squatter was out there because there’s nobody else around. Your vehicle disappeared from a wash a couple of hundred yards from his shack. I think there’s a really good chance he’s now driving around northern Arizona in a Forest Service-issue Chevy Blazer.”

    Knees under his chin, arms folded across his shins, Jason couldn’t even nod acknowledgement. He made do with a whimper.

    The office fell silent for several minutes as Van Kamp came to terms with his rage and Jason grappled with his fear.

    Happy thoughts, Jason told himself. Think happy thoughts. He visualized a world of pristine wilderness where forests and deserts were untouched by the hand of man – no people, anywhere.

    Except for him!

    There he was, deep in the forest, naked, with no man-made implements of any sort to sully nature’s purity. He was somehow taller in his vision, more muscular than the image he saw in the mirror in the morning.

    Wait! And there runs a deer. It’s a beautiful white-tail doe. Such soft fur. Such limpid eyes. Come here you pretty--

    “Um hmmm,” Van Kamp cleared his throat. “Do you have anything to say?”

    Jason’s eye snapped open and he shuddered at the view in front of him.

    “Uh yeah. There’s no reason why we can’t still pin the fire on the squatter. The fact that he stole a government vehicle should make it even more believable on top of the fact that he was trespassing on public land.”

    “We’ll do that. It’d be a lot easier if we had him in custody, and if we were sure that he didn’t see you light that fire. Chances are the cops will find him anyway. We’ll have him nailed as an arsonist and a car thief. Even if he saw something, nobody will believe a word he says.”

    “You bet!” Jason nodded. His eyes took on a bright glint. “After the Carthage Option cleanses the land, people will want this guy to hang.”

    Van Kamp rolled his eyes.

    “Uh … yeah. All right, get out of here – and be more careful. We can’t afford any witnesses.”

    “Will do.”

    “And stop throwing around that ‘Carthage Option’ crap. Jesus, but that’s a bit obvious.”

    Jason nodded, but repeated the phrase to himself. Carthage Option. Carthage Option. He really liked the way it sounded – like he was a secret agent on a mission.

    Van Kamp rose again in his seat, leaning toward his cowering underling.

    “Now get that damned truck out of the front of my building.”

    Jason unfolded his legs, letting blood flow back into the extremities he’d clutched so tightly. Hobbling on tingling feet, he eagerly fled Van Kamp’s office, then set to figuring out how to extract an old, junked pickup truck from a cinderblock wall. Stranded as his team had been in the forest after their Blazer was stolen, they’d fled the fire with the only vehicle at hand – Rollo’s junker.

    It wasn’t until Jason and his team arrived at the Forest Service office that they discovered the old truck’s handicap in the matter of brakes.

Taken from the forthcoming novel High-Desert Barbecue. Used with permission of the author.