Just Add Trouble Read online

  Fame really is a fleeting thing.

  Now that we were once again mere mortals instead of international celebs, we fostered a plan to find Granny Yee.

  Jan called Chino and casually grilled him if he’d heard anything from his grandmother, and whether he was the only one on the planet who didn’t know we were big news. Nothing from Grans Yee, and not a hint he’d seen us on TV. We were golden on that end.

  We needed a car, preferably a tank. Our sailboater friend, Smith, volunteered the use of his pickup, which we gratefully accepted, even after seeing the antiquated Ford. Beggers cannot be choosers, they say, and Santa Rosalia was devoid of car rental agencies.

  Early the next morning, we loaded up a change of clothes, a roll of toilet paper—we’d learned from experience that public restrooms in Mexico often have no paper—a couple of gallons of water, a map of Baja, and Trouble. I didn’t have the heart to leave him locked up in the boat for who knew how long.

  By some miracle, the old Ford truck chugged along just fine. We weren’t in a hurry, so we stopped off at Burro Beach in Conception Bay for breakfast at Bertha’s, a small café we’d eaten in years before, while on a kayak trip.

  Conception Bay, like everywhere else in the world, was becoming more populated, but their saving grace was still not having electricity. We even ran into an old friend, Baja Geary, who actually remembered us. Well, he remembered Jan, but who wouldn’t? His palapa beach home had undergone some updates, including one of those new composting toilets and satellite Internet service, but little else had changed.

  As we drove south, I wondered aloud, “Jan, ya think you could live here, like Geary does, year round?”

  “I plan to, with Chino.”

  “Yeah, but you guys will be on the west coast. Down here it gets really, really hot. No electricity, which means zero air conditioning. It would be like living in Houston with no AC.”

  “I don’t think I could do that.”

  “Me neither. At least Geary can go sit in the water, but even the bay water is ninety or higher in summer. Remember the year before you got a decent job, and you lived in student housing in Austin? No AC, and cockroaches that needed license plates?” I shuddered, recalling a visit I’d paid her one weekend. Ended up checking into a hotel when, in the middle of the night, I flipped on the kitchen lights and hundreds of monstrous roaches scattered, a couple of them running over my feet.

  “What a hell hole. Who was that guy you—tope!”

  The nice Mexican family who towed us into Loreto, where we could buy two new tires to replace the oddly bulging ones we dared not drive on after hitting a speed bump at forty miles an hour, seemed totally perplexed that two gringas were wandering around Baja alone. They were terrified of Trouble, even though he made no move to attack. I had revised my thinking on his selective attacks, deciding they had more to do with protecting me than an abiding hatred for Mexican men. Time would tell.

  Trouble was having a grand old time. He, Jan, and I settled into the bed of what had to be a 1940s Chevy truck that was in some sort of reincarnated state, reborn with spare parts from other dead vehicles. No two fenders or doors were the same color. Every time we hit a bump, rust rained down in powdery form. I won’t even bother describing the tires. We prattled down the road at a breathtaking five miles per hour, with Trouble singing his heart out above the clatter.

  From our vantage point in the rotting wooden truck bed, we’d watch cars and SUVs, mostly with US plates, roar up behind us doing eighty or ninety, pass us like we were in reverse, most times on a continuous stripe. There were several close calls when an oncoming bus or semi sent them swerving back within a hair of our rear bumper. To save on nerves, I closed my eyes and kept them that way until, eons later, we were cut lose at la llanteria.

  The owner of the tire repair shop sold me practically new retreads for thirty bucks apiece, but felt Smith’s axel or somesuch was bent, and repairs could take a day or two. Or three. Mañana, at any rate. We grabbed a taxi to the airport.

  Lucky for us, we just beat a deplaning load of tourists to the Budget desk. Well, I did. After the verbal set-to with the taxi driver over taking Trouble on as a passenger, I felt the car rental folks needn’t know about my feathery compadre. I left Jan and the parrot outside while I acquired a nifty little Neon, appropriately named if the iridescent blue paint job was any indication. Iridescence was becoming a way of life, first on my hair, and now my car.

  I wondered what this shiny new paint job would look like after we returned from Agua Fria. If we made it to Agua Fria.

  Forty-five minutes later, we streaked by the turnoff, skidded to a stop, made a U-turn on a particularly nasty curve, narrowly missed getting creamed by a Canadian RV, and read the sign. Agua Fria 41km.

  “Forty-one kilometers. Hetta, that’s uh…”

  “Twenty-five and a half miles, or right at it.”

  “Twenty-five miles of bad road.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who wants to go there. I’d just as soon return to Loreto, check into a hotel, have a Margarita.”

  Trouble broke into song. Above an earsplitting rendition of “…wastin’ away in Margaritaville,” Jan yelled, “Put a sock in it, bird. Agua Fria, here we come.”

  We found the rockslide thirty kidney-jarring minutes, and three miles, later. Checking for a detour around the slide, it was obvious that, with something a tad sturdier than a lunar rover, we might get to the other side. Certainly not in a Neon, even if it was a rental.

  “So much for Granny Yee.”

  “Oh, well, we tried. Chino will be so disappointed.”

  “Might I remind you that Chino does not know we’re here? Where’s the disappointment?”

  “I wanted to surprise him.”

  “You wanted to get old Gran’s approval of your precious self.”

  “And that.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth—what’s that noise?”

  The distinctive boom of subwoofers suddenly filled the desert, followed by the thunder of a fast moving vehicle. Jan screamed and shoved me to the ground just as a jacked up muscle truck literally flew over our heads. Trouble took flight as if to dive bomb the vehicle when he could catch it, which was going to be very soon, as the truck landed smack dab on top of the Neon.

  Screeching music, screeching bird, screeching metal, then, except for the whir of tires spinning in the air, and the hiss of escaping steam, all was quiet.

  “Holy crappola!”

  “I couldn’t have said it better. Wonder if they’re alive?”

  “If they are, Trouble seems set on making them wish they weren’t. You grab Trouble before he bites someone. I’ll check the truck.”

  Jan whistled for the parrot, who obediently returned to her shoulder, and the shirt pocket where she kept peanuts.

  I walked toward the wreck. Wrecks. “Hello, anybody in there?”

  Nothing. I smelled gas.

  Now, in Hollyweird, someone rushes to the trapped victim, breaks out the window, hauls the unconscious body to safety, just as the car explodes. In real life, it ain’t that easy. For starters, I couldn’t even reach the door.

  “Hello!” I yelled, louder. “Hey! Wake up.”

  Nothing.

  Jan, who was at a higher vantage point, hollered, “Hetta, there’s a guy in the driver’s seat, but I don’t see anyone else.”

  “Is he moving?”

  “No. Wait, yes, he’s trying to open the door. You’d better move—”

  I didn’t hear the rest of that, because I was too busy dodging the truck door that fell from its hinges, damned near flattening me. Following the heavy door, the driver landed with a rib-cracking thud that knocked the air from his lungs. He sat up, wild-eyed and gasping for breath, as I grabbed his shirt collar in an attempt to pull him clear. He fought me, so I let go and snarled, “Okay, you jerk, crawl out of this mess by yourself.” If he was in need of Florence damned Nightingale, he’d picked on the wrong dame.

  I stomped away until he
gasped, “No, please, wait. Help me.”

  “You won’t fight?”

  “No. I…can’t.”

  He was a fairly big guy, and dead weight, to boot. Jan scrambled down the hill and, between the two of us and a peck or two of “encouragement” from Trouble, we dragged him fifty feet from the—yep, just like the movies—explosion.

  A wave of heat sucked the oxygen out of the air, and the percussion, or rather percussions, knocked us flat. Trouble took to the air and disappeared over a hill.

  “Holy shit!” Jan yelled.

  “Ditto,” I said. Actually, I didn’t hear her so much as read her lips. My ears rang like church bells. “Somebody heard that blast, don’t you think?” I pointed at the black plume of smoke soaring into the blue sky, “Or at least they’ll see the smoke.”

  “Huh?”

  Jan was as deafened as I was. I waved her off. “Never mind.” I sat on a rock and waited for my ears to clear. Jan went in search of Trouble, but came back alone.

  “Don’t you worry,” I told her, “he’s not that easy to get rid of.”

  As we hoped, the smoke plume, visible for miles, brought help. Within a half hour, while Jan and I tried to decide on a plan, we heard engines and then two more pickups flew over the slide, barely missing the tangle of smoldering metal. Our luck had changed.

  Or had it? With a sinking heart, I recognized the drivers. I mean, who could forget the handsome one?

  I sincerely hoped they hadn’t taken offense when Jenks and I threatened them with a gaff and a flare gun at Isla San Francisco. I’d offer them some gas now, but it just blew up.

  Chapter 17

  “An-Jay.”

  “Huh?”

  “An-Jay. Isten-lay. E-way ont-day eek-spay nglis-eh.” I was never good with words starting in vowels in Pig Latin.

  “E-way ont-day?”

  “O-nay.”

  She shrugged, awaiting my lead. If I said we didn’t speak English, she probably figured there was a reason.

  The guy we dragged out of the wreck was barely conscious by the time his buddies arrived. His friend dumped bottled water over his head, then discussed, with furtive glances in our direction, what to do with Jan and me. Little did they know I possess extrasensory ears, even when they ring a bit.

  “It’s that redheaded bitch from the yacht.”

  I need to think about trying a less flamboyant coiffure.

  “Oh, yeah, I remember her. But she ain’t got no flare gun, or boyfriend, this time. Just the dish.”

  Jan heard the dish part and plumped her hair, until she remembered she didn’t speak English.

  “Think she remembers us?”

  Handsome shrugged. “What’s it matter? Question is, what’s she doing here?”

  “Let’s just off ‘em, plant ‘em in the desert and be done with it.”

  I gulped and tried to look nonchalant, but it’s hard to do when someone is talking about doing you in and leaving you for buzzard fodder.

  Handsome shook his head. “Don’t think we oughta do that until we check with the boss.”

  “What will he care?”

  “What if these two told someone where they were going? Could bring in the heat.” I was warming up Handsome's sense of reason.

  “We own the heat. Hell, we are the stinkin’ heat.”

  “But we’re dealin’ with foreigners here, not a bunch of ignorant fishermen.”

  I suddenly remembered their names. Nacho and Paco. Nacho of the Calvin Klein look, Paco of the weird druggie persona.

  Whatever was going on in Agua Fria was obviously not going to do much for their Chamber of Commerce ads. Visit Beautiful Agua Fria by the Sea, Owned and Operated by goons.

  And now that they mentioned it, who had we told we were going to Agua Fria? Okay, there was Smith, the sailor back in Santa Rosalia. And Geary, the guy who lives at Conception Bay. He’s a ham operator; if we didn’t come back, would he put out an alert on us? We told him we’d stop back by, and the way he was eyeing Jan, I figured he’d be looking for us. But then maybe he’d just think we passed by when he was gone. Who else? Certainly not Budget. Far as they knew, we rented a car to pop over to Lopez Mateos, get in some whale time. To paraphrase Leonard Bernstein, why-o, why-o, why-o, did we ever leave the boat-o?

  The man we saved was coming around, shooting menacing glares in our direction. He croaked something to his friends, who glanced our way, then they huddled and broke into Spanglish. I couldn’t hear it all, but what I picked up was, “Stupid putas…mi trucke!”

  The ungrateful wretch. We save his life and he calls us whores. Stupid whores, at that.

  “An-Jay, et-gay eddy-ray oo-tay un-ray.”

  “Er-whay?”

  Where to run, indeed? I surveyed the desolation surrounding us. It was miles back to the main road. Jan could probably jog it, but I knew I couldn’t. Hell, I probably couldn’t walk it.

  “Damned if I know," I said, a little too loudly. It-shay. The at-cay is out of the ag-bay.

  Three heads snapped around and six sets of suspicious eyes zeroed in. The one we’d pulled from his wrecked truck growled, “See, I told you they spoke English. I remember them yelling at me.”

  Jan looked indignant at his obvious lack of gratitude.

  “Yeah, then we saved your sorry ass in spite of yourself.” With her hands planted on her hips and yards of tanned legs showing from under her short shorts, Jan managed, despite scratches, dust and disheveled hair, to look sexy.

  From their grins, Paco and Nacho seemed to think so, too. Paco shot a hip forward in what is probably some Latino move designed to look manly and drawled, “I’d say Blondie’s got your numero, Chingo.”

  Well, well, well. Paco, Nacho and Chingo. Wonder where they left Taco? I’d say East LA was certainly well-represented in Agua Fria.

  Chingo snarled at Paco, “Hermano, you got a chitty attitude.”

  “Hey, turds for brains, I ain’t the one who got us into this mess.”

  “Me? They’s the ones sittin’ in the middle of the fuggin’ road.”

  “Would you like my fuggin’ insurance card, hermano?” I threw in.

  Jan sniggered, Paco took a menacing step in my direction, but Nacho broke into a belly laugh and pointed at me. “You got some cajones on you, gringa. First you threaten us”—he pronounced it trettin’—"with a flare gun, and now you want to exchange insurance cards? What are you, some kind of nut case?”

  Jan shot me a squint and a shrug, as in what flare gun? She’d have to wait for the rest of the story that story.

  I pulled a business card from my pocket, where I always keep money, cards and an ID, because you just never know when you’ll need it. Them. Like when your car blows up? I offered the card. “Hetta Coffey, Sierra Vista Observer. And you are just the guys we’re looking for.”

  Paco swaggered my way, snatched the card, and gave his buddies a, this should be good, look.

  I hurried to make it good. “We’re on a special assignment to find the best off-road Baja destinations, and judging by those nifty looking trucks, you guys know your off-road. No sissy-assed dune buggies here, nothing but macho trucks and macho dudes. Well, except for old Chingo there. Don’t suppose we should feature him, ya think, Jan?”

  “I guess not,” Jan huffed. “He blew up my camera.” Then, picking up my drift, she added, “So, what you got in there?” She lowered her eyes to Nacho’s crotch for a couple of beats, then pointed to his bright yellow pickup, “Four fifty four?”

  Good question, but did Jan have any idea what she was talking about? What’s a 454, anyway?

  Nacho gave her a once-over slowly, then grinned. “Naw, 327.”

  I had to remember to give Jan a raise.

  Hoping the men were uncertain about their next move, I rushed in with, “Perfect, you and your trucks. Just what we’re looking for. Only thing is, we have to get back to Loreto, report the accident. You know, what if I just say the car blew up by itself? That way, my rental insurance will take c
are of the Neon.”

  “What about mi trucke,” Chingo whined.

  “What about it? After all, you plowed into a parked vehicle. If I were you, I wouldn’t push the issue.”

  He balled his fists. “I’ll tell you what I’ll push—”

  Nacho grabbed his arm. “Easy, compadre, the gringa might be right. With the boss gone, I think we’d better just let things go for now. Cool your jets.”

  Chingo looked for a second as though he was going to challenge Nacho, but he must have thought better of it, because he threw his hands up in a disgusted “whatever” gesture. Now I knew who was in charge.

  Nacho walked over to us. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. We're gonna take you to Agua Fria with us, then you can call your rental company from there.”

  This is not what I wanted to hear. I saw that Oprah show, the one where we learned, in a possible hostage situation, to never, ever, let them take you to a second location. Never.

  “That’s a great idea,” Jan piped up, leading me to believe that the explosion had rattled more than her ears. My mouth must have dropped open, for she pulled her lips in to signal me to shut mine, a code we’d used for years. I reluctantly let her go on. “I mean, we did want to go to Agua Fria, and even though I lost my camera, we can at least do interviews, stuff like that. We’ll get the story, take photos later.”

  They must have thought we didn’t hear their earlier discussion—the one where they converted us to carrion—because they seemed to buy Jan’s insane agreement.

  I was on the verge of throttling my best friend, who smiled sweetly at Nacho while Paco helped Chingo into his truck. Before I could grab her by her swanlike neck, she winked at me, then turned and batted her Betty Boops, wiggled her butt and cooed, “Can we ride with you, Nacho? Your friend,” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “well, he sorta stinks of smoke and gasoline.”