Desert Hearts

Chapter 2-1

Chapter Two

Lance

He hadn’t gone home after the muted goodbyes the three men exchanged, right before Paul and Michael climbed into Paul’s truck and Lance got into his Jeep. They’d all been pretty quiet as they walked back to the vehicles — maybe it had been stupid to think the aliens wouldn’t come back sooner or later, but he’d found himself hoping as the weeks and then months had stretched on, and there hadn’t been any sign of them. There also hadn’t been any chatter about a renewal of activities out in Secret Canyon, though, so maybe the aliens had decided to switch their base of operations.

Anyway, neither Michael nor Paul had seemed too interested in conversation, and Lance never liked to initiate a discussion if he didn’t have to. He guessed the two of them were coming up with their own worst-case scenarios. Well, maybe not Michael Lightfoot. He’d always been pretty Zen. Most likely, right now he was sitting on the banks of Oak Creek, meditating on the situation. The man’s house wasn’t much, but the location was spectacular — fifteen steps would take you out the back door and right down to the water.

Paul, of course, would have gone straight home to Persephone after dropping off Michael. Lance didn’t even need to use remote viewing for that; those two might as well be joined at the hip. They sure as hell didn’t keep any secrets from one another, and especially not something of this magnitude.

Fine. If that worked for them, great. But he’d known exactly where he wanted to go.

Thanks to the internet and sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, even Sedona’s few remaining neighborhood bars could be overrun with tourists. But Lance liked the Sundowner because it was cheap and because Rose, the bartender, seemed to instinctively know when to simply hand him a cold bottle of MGD and leave him alone.

This was definitely one of those nights. He took the beer from her and laid a fiver on the bar, then grabbed a stool and surveyed the crowd. For a Wednesday night, the place was pretty full. It was the usual mix of locals and those tourists — mostly kids in their twenties — who were brave enough to get off 89A’s main drag and go prospecting. There were a few exceptions, though….

The woman looked like she was probably in her mid-thirties, tanned and with hair a little too blonde to be natural. Great body, though, and in that clingy tank dress, she obviously didn’t mind showing it off. He noted the diamond studs in her ears, the gold bracelet draped over the Omega watch on her left wrist. No wedding ring. Either she was doing well for herself on her own, or she’d gotten the worst of some poor bastard in a divorce. Either way, he didn’t really care. It wasn’t as if he planned to settle down with her.

She apparently noticed him looking and flashed him a smile. Great teeth, too.

He didn’t exactly smile, but gave a little nod. That was about all the effort he was willing to put forth. If she came over and engaged, great. It had been a while, and after seeing the huge ship hovering over the desert, he was thinking it might be a good thing if he could distract himself, if only for an hour or two.

It seemed to be enough. She moved toward him, and he caught a drift of perfume. Something familiar. Chanel, maybe.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he returned. “Don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.”

“No, it’s my first time in Sedona.”

Her voice was higher-pitched than he liked, with a little bit of a nasal quality he instinctively associated with Southern California. The Valley, to be precise. Well, he really hadn’t planned to have a long, drawn-out conversation with her.

“Liking it so far?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah. The red rocks are so gorgeous!” It almost sounded as if she said “gah-jous,” and he tried not to wince.

“Here alone?”

“In the bar or in Sedona?”

Maybe that was her version of trying to be cute. He took a drink of MGD and replied, “Both.”

“Alone here at the bar, but I’m visiting Sedona with my friend Lindsay. But she was pooped after going on one of those massive Pink Jeep tours today, so I came out alone tonight. I wanted to get a taste of the nightlife before we bailed.”

“You’re not here for long?” This could be great. If she was leaving tomorrow, then he really wouldn’t have to worry about there being any strings to this encounter.

“No, unfortunately. We’re sort of making the rounds. Tomorrow we’re going to a spa in Scottsdale, and then after that it’s back to Newport Beach. We’ve got a wedding to go to.”

He would have preferred she not said the “W” word, but he just replied, “Oh.”

“So….” she said.

“So?”

“You a native?”

“You make it sound like I should be wearing a loincloth or something.”

“Oh, you!” she exclaimed, and gave him what she most likely thought was a girlish slap on his arm. It stung a little bit more than she’d probably intended; it looked like Ms. Newport Beach had already had a few. “You know. You live in Sedona?”

“For the past ten years. My condo’s just up the road.”

There was no mistaking the gleam in her eyes. “Is it?”

“Yes. It’s not all that much, but it works for me. And I have much better booze there.”

“I’m dying for a martini. This Corona is okay, but….”

Lance allowed himself a smile. “Gin or vodka?”

Kara

I awoke to the sound of the television drifting down the hall toward my bedroom. For a second or two, I had the muddled thought that Kiki must have come over and plunked herself in front of the TV, as if trying to relive the Saturday mornings of her childhood and adolescence. However, these were more or less adult-sounding voices I heard now, not the kids’ fare Kiki used to watch.

Then it came back to me. The stranger. He must be up already. Odd — you’d think with the shape he’d been in, he would have slept for at least twelve hours or more. I sat up in bed and realized that my madness of the night before seemed even crazier in the clear light of day. Well, it couldn’t be helped now. Besides, if he’d intended to rob the place…or worse…he would have done the deed and taken off already. I doubted anyone intent on committing a crime would have paused to watch the Saturday morning newscast before looting the house.

Normally, I would have just crawled out of bed as-is, in my tank top and underwear, but I thought that probably wasn’t a very good idea, given the circumstances. Instead, I pulled a pair of cropped yoga pants out of the bottom drawer of my dresser and put them on, then stopped in the bathroom to run the brush through my hair a few times. Probably lip gloss would be a bit too much, but I did give my lips a quick flick of some Burt’s Bees balm before I headed out to the living room.

The stranger was sitting on the rug in front of the couch, much as he had the evening before. This morning, however, his eyes seemed bright enough, and I had to keep my mouth from dropping open in shock at how much he’d recovered in just a single night. I’d expected his skin to still be bright red and flaking from the repeated sunburns he’d obviously suffered, but now all I could see were a few reddish patches high on his cheekbones. Otherwise, his skin looked as bronzed and healthy as that of someone who’d paid a lot of money for tanning sessions, followed by heavy-duty moisturizing treatments.

Despite the baggy T-shirt and high-water pants he wore — he had several inches on my grandfather — he looked good. Okay, scratch that. He looked amazing. Last night, I would never have been able to guess he was even semi-attractive, let alone someone Kiki might refer to as “smokin’ hot.” Judging by his skin tone and the high cheekbones, I guessed he might have some Native American a generation or two back, something that was pretty common around these parts. Maybe he really was a local.

I noticed that Gort again lay by the stranger’s side, getting his head scratched. Strange, as the dog really wasn’t a big fan of strangers, especially male strangers. Since Gort was a rescue dog, I had always assumed he must have been mistreated by a man at some point in the past. In fact, I usually exiled Gort to the backyard whenever I had male guests, since I could never be sure how he would react to them. But there he was, sitting next to the stranger with his eyes half-closed, obviously in the doggy equivalent of nirvana.

“Feeling better?” I asked, forcing myself to concentrate on the matter at hand.

The stranger nodded. I noticed that he had a Dixie cup of water on the table in front of him — carefully set down on one of my sandstone coasters. “Much. Did the television wake you?”

“No. It was about time for me to get up.” A quick glance at the clock on the wall above the TV told me it wasn’t quite seven-thirty. The shop didn’t open until ten.

Oh, great, the shop. What the hell was I supposed to do about that? I couldn’t even call in Kiki for backup, since she was heading out to L.A. in a few hours. I hadn’t been that thrilled about the Los Angeles trip from the start, but now I was even less happy. What was I supposed to do with the stranger? Drag him along to the store?

That didn’t seem like much of an option, but neither did just leaving him here.

He said, “You’re troubled.”

Oh, God, please not another psychic. Right then, I felt as if I’d met my monthly quota of weirdness. I shook my head. “No, it’s just — well, I have to go in to work in a few hours, and I’m not sure what I should do with you.”

His gaze didn’t flicker. “I can leave. You’ve done enough already.”

Any protests that he wasn’t well enough to do so would sound silly, considering he looked like he’d just spent a weekend getting expensive spa treatments instead of wandering around in the desert. Then again, just because he seemed okay didn’t mean he necessarily was. I cleared my throat. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. You probably still need to get hydrated, and it’s supposed to be a hundred degrees today.” He still looked uncertain, and I added, “Besides, where would you go? Do you know anyone in town?”

“I know you.”

From anyone else, I would have said such a remark was disingenuous at best, but I could tell he spoke what he thought was the simple truth. That must have been some knock on the head he’d gotten, even though there was no longer any evidence of the injury. It couldn’t be simply sun exposure that had cooked the memories right out of his brain.

“Yes, you do,” I replied, in tones that sounded a little too hearty even to me. “Anyway, if you don’t mind hanging out here while I’m at work, then that’s cool. I can come home at lunch and check on you.”

“All right.” His gaze shifted from me to the two talking heads on the television set. “I was hoping they might have some actual information to impart, but it doesn’t sound that way.”

“Well, that’s what you get for watching the local news. Except it’s not even that local — all the stations are based down in Phoenix, and they pretty much ignore what’s going on in this part of the state unless it’s something pretty spectacular.” And what had he been looking for, anyway? I’d hadn’t heard of any bus accidents or plane crashes in the area within the past few weeks, and surely he couldn’t have been wandering around for much longer than that. It was a mystery, all right.

An even bigger conundrum was what I was supposed to feed him. I’d never been much of a breakfast person, but he looked like the sort of guy who could routinely eat large helpings of protein each morning. Well, he’d have to make do with the multigrain waffles I had in the freezer.

“You like waffles?” I asked.

He looked puzzled, then gave a half-hearted nod. “I — I don’t remember.”

“Well, let’s find out.”

It felt odd to be at the shop, knowing my house was occupied by a stranger who at the moment could be cheerfully clearing the place of everything valuable it contained. Somehow, I didn’t think that was the case, though. He’d offered to clean up the breakfast dishes so I could get ready, and when I left, he was watching a broadcast of the BBC news on cable, a slight frown pulling at his dark brows. Nothing about him seemed to give the impression of someone who was just biding his time until he could call his friends to back a van up to the garage so he could take everything that wasn’t nailed down.