The Secrets of Harry Bright (5 page)

It was from a woman who said that Jack Watson was being held close by in the desert" and to await instructions. Of course close by in open desert could mean anywhere within five hundred square miles. Victor Watson thought he heard the sound of air brakes in the background and cars whizzing by at high speed. It was the only clue except that an elderly neighbor had seen a red pickup truck turn around in the Watson driveway the day before. It may have meant nothing, but it was all they had.

A telephone call from Palm Springs P
. D
. to Mineral Springs P
. D
. was made at 7:00 P
. M
. when Chief Paco Pedroza was home mopping up five thousand calories and neither of his sergeants was in the station. Unfortunately for Paco, the cop who was in the station that night was Officer Oscar Albert Jones, a twenty-four-year-old former surfer who'd worked a year for the Laguna Beach P
. D
. and a year for the Palm Springs P
. D
. before he felt it was wise to move on. While still with the Palm Springs police,
O. A.
Jones spent most of his time in Whitewater dove country blazing away with his 9mm automatic at doves and jackrabbits who were perfectly safe in that
O. A.
Jones couldn't have hit them with a shotgun. Still, he'd shoot up a box of reloads nearly every night. Once he'd gotten so carried away he shot up every silver-tipped hollow point he had and was caught bulletless by a sergeant, after which
O. A.
Jones became known as Outta Ammo Jones.

On the night that encouraged
O. A.
Jones to resign from Palm Springs P
. D
. and get picked up on waivers by Mineral Springs, he was patrolling Indian Avenue and happened to spot a drunk staggering across the street against the red light.
O. A.
Jones followed the drunk, who wore shorts and a tank top and was shuffling north on the sidewalk.

When
O. A.
Jones got abreast of the guy, he saw that it wasn't a drunk at all. It was Hiram Murphy, eldest son of Moms Murphy, boss of a clan that, Gypsy-style, traveled all over the desert valley pulling pigeon drops on the many retirees, stealing their life savings in confidence scams and using the money to buy speed to slam in their arms. In fact, the narcs had found fresh tracks on the arm
s o
f Moms' youngest son, Rudolph. He was nineteen but had the mind of a six-year-old, and his brothers shot him up not with crank but heroin since it kept him quieter. That was the kind of family Moms Murphy shepherded, so
O. A.
Jones was delighted to see Moms' oldest boy, Hiram, in a state of stagger from an overload of crystal and bar whiskey.

Hiram had been in a gay bar trying to expand the family business to include fruit-rolling. Except that he was so ugly he couldn't score. He had eyes and ears like a bat and he smelled like a ruptured appendix.

"Hello, cretin,"
O. A.
Jones said, rolling up beside Hiram Murphy in his patrol car. "You're too loaded to walk. Let's ride."

Hiram Murphy was as surly and mean as usual, but he was also a coward. He wouldn't pick a fight with anybody, let alone a strapping young cop like
O. A.
Jones, unless he had at least one brother lying in wait with a claw hammer. He mumbled a few "pricks" and "motherfuckers" under his breath, but got in the backseat of the police car, his hands cuffed behind him.

While driving to the station, the blond cop gave Hiram Murphy a "screen test" which Hiram didn't like at all. The former surfer whispered something that Hiram didn't hear, and when Hiram said, "What's that?" the young cop turned in profile as he drove and whispered it in a slightly louder voice. But it was still unintelligible to the cranked-out thug.

"Speak up, goddamnit," Hiram Murphy said, feeling very grumpy about going to jail without his mama.

It was dark enough now to turn on headlights, and
O. A.
Jones switched his on, turned toward Hiram Murphy in the backseat and said it again.

This time, Hiram Murphy got very testy. He leaned forward and said, "Speak up, asshole! What's a matter with you anyways?"

And then: WHANG1 Hiram Murphy's face was flattened against the heavy steel-mesh screen as
O. A.
Jones stood on his brakes going into four-wheel lock.

After Hiram Murphy stopped cussing and yelling
,
O
. A. Jones said, "I was just trying to tell you that a poodle ran out in front of us. I had to hit my brakes to save the poor little thing! I'm s0000ry." Hiram Murphy had his screen test.

They were only three blocks from the station when a sheriffs unit went into pursuit on Highway 111 and announced that he had been fired on. Within ten seconds
O. A.
Jones s pink ears were leaking adrenaline and he was roaring toward the pursuit car, which was having trouble keeping up with a stolen 1983 BMW sedan.

Thirty minutes after dark, twelve other police units from Palm Springs, CHP, Riverside sheriffs, Indio P
. D
. and even Mineral Springs P
. D
. had joined the chase on Interstate 10, first toward Indio and then back, as the pursued car kept doing sliding U-turns, wheeling off and on the freeway.

The BMW, it turned out, contained a pretty good catch. It was the stopwatch bandit, so called because during the robbery of four valley banks, he checked his watch before and after vaulting the tellers' counters and was long gone before the cops could respond to a silent alarm. On this night, the stopwatcher had been on his way home from robbing a bank in Indian Wells when a sheriffs car tried to stop him for being a bit late on a traffic light. The chase was on.

The stopwatcher was careening down Monterey Avenue in Palm Desert when
O. A.
Jones, listening to the radio pursuit, intercepted him coming the other way. The young cop played chicken with the approaching headlights, veering at the last second, but was a little late. With Hiram Murphy screaming in his ear,
O. A.
Jones got clipped on the right front by the speeding BMW and was spun in a terrifying 360, crunching against a forty-foot telephone pole, which bent the police car in half. The rocketing BMW went airborne, crashing against a date palm and throwing the stopwatcher into the street alongside a handcuffed and very dead Hiram Murphy, who was himself blown from the backseat of the police car at the second of impact.

O. A. Jones remained belted in the front seat wit
h o
nly a bloody nose and a mild concussion, realizing foggily that he was in trouble. That was the best he could manage with his head feeling mushy and his brain slogging around in there, but within minutes, while a dozen sirens converged on the crash site,
O. A.
Jones was understanding that by going into that suicidal pursuit with a prisoner helplessly handcuffed in the backseat, he could be charged with manslaughter. He could see quite clearly in the headlight beams that Hiram Murphy looked like a speed bump in the asphalt.

O
. A. Jones began pulling himself out of his totaled patrol unit, trying desperately to put together a "Gee, Sarge!" story that was remotely plausible, when a CHP officer came running into the headlight beam and said, "You okay?"

"For the moment,"
O. A.
Jones mumbled, hoping that he would get put in the. cops' tank at the county jail, because a twenty-four-year-old former surfer, who was also a former cop, would be Sadie Thompson'd in the regular tank within three minutes.

Then the Chip said, "You didn't have to handcuff that pukus delicti. He's deader'n gramma's clit. So's the other one!"

O
. A. Jones was trying to make sense of that when two more units skidded to a stop. More were coming, the sirens whooping from three directions.

The second cop on the scene, a sheriffs deputy, said, "Damn, I thought there was only one in the BMW! The second one musta been hiding in the backseat. May as well take your cuffs off him, he's deader'n John De Lorean's MasterCard."

And so they did. They gave the handcuffs to
O. A.
Jones who was starting to be able to add two digits, and who wisely kept his mouth shut.

The newspapers announced the death of the stopwatch bandits, both of them, one of whom was a member of a Gypsy-like pack of desert confidence men who screamed to no end that their kin, Hiram, was only a crank dealer and a burglar and a pursepick, but had never robbed a bank in his life. But pretty soon Moms Murphy had secand thoughts. Maybe her boy Hiram wasn't the slimy little fuck they'd always thought. He led a secret life! Hiram was wheelman for the famous stopwatch bandit! Moms Murphy was actually kind of proud.

But a Palm Springs sergeant who checked the crashed cars felt some confusion. How did the blood, which
O. A.
Jones said was his, get on the back window of the patrol car? There were some strange questions about that smashup.

He took a sly look at
O. A.
Jones and said, "I'd like to retrieve the black box from this crash and see what really happened."

And since his sergeant didn't like
O. A.
Jones any better than his lieutenant who didn't like him at all,
O. A.
Jones said, "Gee, Sarge! You know, Chief Pedroza at Mineral Springs is looking for an experienced man. I been thinking about going up there and talking to him. Maybe tonight?"

"You can wait till tomorrow," the sergeant said. "He should be glad to hire the cop who brought down the stopwatch bandit. And his crime partner."

So
O. A.
Jones decided to trade his Palm Springs tan for Mineral Springs blue. He met Sergeant Harry Bright who convinced Paco that
O. A.
Jones was a "good lad" and deserved to stay in law enforcement. And
O. A.
Jones happened to be on duty when the call came in to the Mineral Springs police station concerning the ransom demand for Jack Watson.

The Mineral Springs P
. D
. had been notified in the first place only because Victor Watson thought, in addition to the whine of speeding cars in the background, he might've heard the blast of air brakes. The F
. B. I
. concluded that the call might have come from a truck stop or diner. All jurisdictions were being given that information with instructions not to go near a likely truck stop, but to give the F
. B. I
. and Palm Springs P
. D
. its whereabouts if they had one in their area.

That was all it took for
O. A.
Jones, who was anxious to make an impression on his new boss, Paco Pedroza. He vaulted the counter at the police station like the late stopwatch bandit and jumped in his patrol car, scorchin
g o
ff toward the truck stop on the highway to Twentynine Palms. He discovered belatedly that he was driving the out-of-service patrol car with the bum radio.

O
. A. Jones spent the rest of the night blowing up dust clouds on every road or trail within ten miles of the truck stop, almost getting his rear wheels sand-locked on two occasions. The desert night, being quite cool even during a hot season, would have provided him with a decently comfortable trek to the highway, except that
O. A.
Jones waited until his graveyard shift was just about ended and the dawning fireball was visible over the mountains before he managed to lock his patrol unit into three feet of the softest desert powder. After which he turned his ankle trying to dig out.

There were soon two searches going on in the desert. One for the son of Victor Watson, one for Officer
O. A.
Jones of the Mineral Springs Police Department.

The F
. B. I
. agent riding shotgun with the sheriffs chopper pilot was enjoying some very spectacular scenery late that afternoon. The pilot was a hotdog Vietnam vet called "Skypork" by the street people but preferring the nom de guerre of "Pigasus." They had already refueled and had flown to the Salton Sea, a lake 228 feet below sea level, occupying the site of a prehistoric lake whose waterline was etched in white travertine along the granite hillside.

They then powered north over the Painted Canyon and northwest toward Thousand Palms. They flew back into Palm Springs and up the sheer rock face over Andreas Falls where Frank Capra filmed part of Lost Horizon, and into local canyons on the theory that the kidnappers were being truthful about being "close by." Pigasus soared west to the Palm Springs tram, showing off for the tourists on the tram car, then veered north toward the Little San Bernardino Mountains with their canyons and hiding places and desert accessible only to four-wheel-drive vehicles.

The air show was mostly cosmetic for the benefit of Victor Watson, and because Pigasus enjoyed scaring the living shit out of the F
. B. I
. agent who was turning green from the mini-aerobatics. There were lots of red picku
p t
rucks in a valley this large and even more that appeared to be red from the sky, and lots of others that were not quite red but could appear to be so when seen at ground level by an overheated seventy-eight-year-old Las Palmas gentleman with trifocals.