Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

At night in the Mojave, everything changes. A cease-fire is declared until the next day’s dawn and the desert stops trying to kill you. All the little creepers and crawlers that hide from the sun come out and go about their business and the coyotes sing their praises to the coming of the cool and the ten million stars overhead.

Looking across the huddled shape in the sagging bed, I could see a little patch of those bright, bright stars through the far window of the tourist cabin. I was forted up in the bathroom, sitting on what was available. It wasn’t elegant, but it was the only hidey-hole that kept me out of sight. It was kind of stuffy too because I’d shut down the cabin’s swamp cooler. I wanted to hear them coming.

Idly, I hefted the stumpy Colt automatic in my hand, wondering about how long I’d have to wait. I didn’t think it would be for long. I could feel them thinking over in the main building. They’d want to finish the old guy off fast, while it would still sell at the coroner’s inquest.

It was a race my bad-news ’57 Chevy hadn’t been able to win. Car, the Princess, and I had left Kingman, Arizona, at first light, intending to blast across Route 66 to El Cajon in the narrow band of cool that lingers between dawn and hell in the California high desert. What we hadn’t figured on was getting pinned behind a convoy of heavy earth-moving machinery lowboying in to the potash mines south of Barstow.

Now, the two-lane and the dammed-up backlog of cars it carried writhed like a snake in the road shimmer. Chunks of the rusty lava ridges flanking the highway broke off and hovered in the sun-bleached sky like a fleet of flying saucers. The auxiliary cooling fans moaned under Car’s hood and she grumbled through her dual exhausts in radical-cammed aggravation, incensed at our snail crawl.

The air stream through the wind-wings might have been blasting out of an open furnace door. I tried to be philosophical about the whole thing, but Miss Lisette Kingman had never studied philosophy.

“Kevin, you’re supposed to be the absolute automotive living end. Why can’t you install some air conditioning in this thing?”

The Princess sprawled on the front seat beside me, her model’s pretty face flushed, her dark ponytail limp, and her short shorts and Kerrybrooke blouse soggy. Only part of it was perspiration, the rest came from the thermos of water she’d emptied over herself. Lisette had been a hot-rodder’s girl for a comparatively short time so she didn’t realize she was speaking heresy.

Car and I forgave her.

“The compressor would bleed ten or fifteen horsepower out of the mill,” I replied patiently, “not to mention the weight of the unit. On a drag strip, that’d tack a good half-second onto your Estimated Time, easy.”

“Which would you prefer,” she arched back, “that half-second or a girlfriend?... Wait a minute. What am I saying? Forget it.”

I chuckled, and slouched lower behind the wheel, my sweat-soaked T-shirt bunching across my back. The Princess was learning.

“What about one of those deals,” she pointed at the vehicle running ahead of us. “That’s an air conditioner, isn’t it? You see a lot of people using them.”

The vehicle in question was a red-and-black ’48 Dodge pickup, ten years old but in good shape. Its cab windows were closed, and something that looked sort of like a sawed-off bazooka was fixed between the top of the passenger-side window and the doorframe.

“Kinda,” I replied. “That’s a swamp cooler, the automotive version of the window coolers a lot of the desert stations use. It’s packed full of ice and the air scoop catches your slipstream and forces it over the ice and through a straw filter that wicks up the melt water. It’s supposed to cool the air down before feeding it into the passenger compartment. They sort of work, but not all that well and they make your wheels look lopsided.”

“Which would you prefer, a car that looks lopsided or a... Never mind! Never mind!” The Princess unbuttoned her blouse, then knotted it closed under her breasts, baring a little more satiny skin.

There can be good in every situation if you look for it.

I edged Car closer to the center line. Squinting through my sunglasses, I watched for the long straightaway and the break in the oncoming traffic I’d need to blast around the road block of lumbering big rigs.

But then the Dodge pickup ahead of me also began a slow, erratic drift to the left. Weaving into the eastbound lane, it drew an angry blast of horn from an oncoming Imperial. The pickup’s driver jerkily swerved back, overcorrecting and kicking up dust from the right shoulder of the road.

“What’s his problem?” Lisette inquired, sitting up straighter.

“I dunno.” I backed off another precautionary car-length from the slaloming truck. “But something’s gone gestanko with this guy.” Through the rear window of the cab I could see the driver’s big-eared head bobbing unsteadily on a skinny neck.

“Do you think he’s drunk?”