Woman Who Knew Too Much - Softcover

Johnson, Bett Reece

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573440450 ISBN 13: 9781573440455

Publisher: Cleis Press, 1998

Synopsis

First in the Cordelia Morgan Mystery series

In the New Mexico "outback," someone is experimenting with a new designer drug developed to give fellows a little boost, if some of its nasty side effects can be removed. Enter Cordelia Morgan, on a routine assignment that turns out to be anything but. Jet Butler has lived on an isolated mesa for more than twenty years ever since her feminist bestseller indirectly caused the deaths of eighty-three women and children living in a commune during an FBI-bungled siege. Now her best friend and next-door neighbor, Kit, is the prime suspect in the murder of a local recluse, a man Jet ranks as the single most unlikeable human being she's ever met. Enter Cord Morgan. She's a hit artist for The Company, an international "contracting" firm. Morgan is a few years past the ten-year limit prescribed for her line of work. The Company, sensing the beginning of a crack or two, gives her an easy vacation assignment in rural New Mexico. But when she meets up with Jet Butler, her facade really begins to crack and Cordelia Morgan finds herself on the run.

About this title

About the Author

Bett Reece Johnson was born on August 3, 1945 in Fountainhead, Tennessee. ("Actually, it's not even a 'town,' at least it didn't used to be; there's only a hospital there that I was born in actually, a sanitarium, but hospitals were scarce in the area, so women went there to have babies. Used to make my mother crazy when I told people I was born in a mental institution. She never had much use for literal truths.")

After her parents divorced in 1950, she moved to Indiana where her mother remarried a man who raised race horses. In the 60s, Johnson "worked at office jobs till I used up the sick pay, then found another." She went to beauty school and worked as a hairdresser in Indianapolis, Miami Beach, then California.

"Feeling inchoate biological clock (as termed these days); decided to have child. Spent some time looking for right genetic material-I've a poor memory, mainly; my creative writing teacher was not only a gifted writer, but when he quoted HOWL in entirety while driving breakneck through the streets of San Francisco, I knew I'd found a match." Her daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1972.

Johnson went on to earn a scholarship to the University of California at Riverside, where she entered the Ph.D. program in English Literature. She taught English in New Mexico ("Las Vegas, NM-a town so wild it was on the cover of TIME MAGAZINE one year ") and California ("After New Mexico, nothing ever looks quite the same. Like having your eyes scrubbed with acid: after the blindness, clarity.") Finally, in the mid-90s, Johnson left academia and moved back to rural New Mexico where she wrote THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH.

From the Back Cover

In the New Mexico "outback," someone is experimenting with a new designer drug developed to give fellows a little boost, if some of its nasty side effects can be removed Enter Cordelia Morgan, on a routine assignment that turns out to be anything but.

Jet Butler has lived on an isolated mesa for more than twenty years-ever since her feminist bestseller indirectly caused the deaths of eighty-three women and children living in a commune during an FBI-bungled siege. Now her best friend and next-door neighbor, Kit, is the prime suspect in the murder of a local recluse, a man Jet ranks as the single most unlikeable human being she's ever met.

Enter Cord Morgan. She's a hit artist for The Company, an international "contracting" firm. Morgan is a few years past the ten-year limit prescribed for her line of work. The Company, sensing the beginning of a crack or two, gives her an easy vacation assignment in rural New Mexico.

But when she meets up with Jet Butler, her facade really begins to crack-and Cordelia Morgan finds herself on the run

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

AUGUST 7, 1993 - SATURDAY MORNING

I figure the goddess would have made us all hack lawyers, necrophiliacs, or poor relatives if she'd expected us to enjoy funerals. Happily, I'm none of the above. Nevertheless, there I sat, listening to the old pastor mutter on, letting a pretty good Saturday morning get away from me-maybe not sitting up front with a hankie, but then neither was anyone else. That long first pew was as empty as the pastor's words bouncing around the adobe whitewashed walls.

From my corner near the back door, I counted seventeen spectators, mostly natives from the New Mexican village surrounding the church. I doubted any of them had known the deceased. But they didn't have to-they tiptoed up to death's threshold like a rookie Don Juan holding a bouquet in one hand and crossing his fingers with the other. Whenever the church held a ceremony, the locals cruised in for a song and a prayer. Villagers aside, it was a pretty meager turnout for Jasper Blankenship, the guy lying in the wooden box up front; not enough folks to make Juan Falcon, the county sheriff in the corner opposite mine, take out his pad and pen. Besides me and Juan, I counted three nonvillagers-Kit Willis, my best friend and next-door neighbor; Metzo Almanzar, a gallery owner from Tortuga, the nearest town of any size before you hit Santa Fe; and Marguerite Sanchez, an artist who bartends nights at the town's only serious tourist attraction-a historic inn where, so the story goes, both D. H. Lawrence and Greta Garbo had slept. Separately.

The pastor was winding down, nodding to the organist who began fingering the opening chords of "Amazing Grace." Metzo and several other men in the congregation stood up, shuffled their way between the pews, and filled up the center aisle toward the corpse. Hoping for a quick exit, I backed my way to the entrance, eased open the heavy wooden doors, and slipped quickly onto the porch. I turned straight into a blinding August sun, sweltering heat, and a profusely sweating woman who blocked the stairs and shoved a microphone in my face. Parked near the edge of the churchyard was a white van with a logo from an Albuquerque television station.

"Ms. Butler. You're Jet Butler? You found the body?"

I stepped sideways to put her between me and the fellow with the camera perched on his shoulder.

"Could you just tell us how he died? What was your relationship with Jasper Blankenship?" The woman had a manic glint in her eye, flitting from me to the camera to the church door that had drifted closed. She leaned her body sideways to give the cameraman a shot. I took the stairs two at a time while she kept pace, maneuvering the cracked concrete on her spike heels with the expertise of a seasoned high-wire artist.

"Is it true Blankenship was working for the Pecos Water Development Project, Ms. Butler? Is there any connection between that and his death?" The cameraman had circled around with the lightning speed of the passionately ambitious and now stood at the bottom of the stairs blocking my exit.

"I never knew Jaz Blankenship to work at all," I said as I leapt sideways over a deep crevice in the stairs and landed on solid ground. "You'll have to ask the authorities. Jaz and I were just acquaintances." I sprinted toward my truck parked at the other end of the church while the woman and cameraman rushed back up the stairs where the pallbearers had emerged with the coffin.

The Jaz was at last finding the infamy that I imagined he had dreamed about in life, although I was mystified about why his death was attracting statewide news coverage. I slammed the door on the hoopla in the churchyard, started up my truck, and torqued the air conditioner to warp speed. The temperature outside was already sweltering, and it wasn't even noon. In the rush of cool air, I watched the circus in front of the church at a safe distance: the woman with the microphone, flanked by the cameraman, had cornered Sheriff Falcon outside the church doors while the pallbearers hefted the box from their shoulders and slid it onto the bed of an old pickup backed to the bottom of the stairs. The congregation filtered out of the church and gathered around the television crew. The truck started up with a cough, died, started again, and pulled away, bumping down the dirt road toward the small graveyard on the outskirts of the village. Slowly, the men walking in front, the women and children behind, the group followed.

I sat there in the cab of cold air for a while, staring out past the dusty courtyard and the village that circled around the church, thinking that reaching the midlife hump had its good and bad points, but one thing was certain-you had some perspective from this angle. Death and funerals have a way of pulling you around so you can see back across the years, and if you haven't cultivated a good, solid stash of irony to soften the blow, the view can just about kill you.

Take Jaz Blankenship: effete, a confirmed elitist, a San Francisco native whose only positive words I could recall were about The City-its restaurants, writers, history; its music and wharfs and the chill wind that blew up and down the streets in every season. I had never asked, nor had he told me, why he left California in the seventies to come to New Mexico, or why he lived in a primitive cabin without electricity or running water. What I did know was that he had put in a short stint teaching at Berkeley, and that for the last fifteen years or so he had been working on his immortality, writing The Great American Novel. I also knew what everyone else in the area knew-that he spent lots of time drinking beer and cheap wine, or mescal if he could get it. But Jaz's greatest distinction, to my mind, was that he ranked as the single most unlikable human being I had ever met. This was a fellow who could argue for hours on end about the efficacy of the Nazis' extermination of the Jews, the economic value of ethnic cleansing, the physical and intellectual superiority of the Caucasian male-all while sitting in a locale where the white residents comprised only twenty percent of the total population. And now he was going to be lowered into a grave a few yards from the AmTrak rails where the sole reminder of his existence was the slim metal marker that the county puts up when the deceased cannot afford a proper gravestone.

The television crew had packed up in a sudden flurry of slamming doors, and their van disappeared down the road toward the freeway, leaving the churchyard completely deserted-except for Sheriff Falcon who was walking my way.

A tall man with slender hips and an inscrutable face, Juan Falcon was the new kid on the block. In the last election, he'd ousted the incumbent sheriff who had held office since the fifties-a prime example of rampant old-school nepotism who appointed every male relative in his sizable family to various local positions. Falcon, known less for the horses he bred on his ranch outside of town than for his crusade against drunk driving after his wife and child were killed on the highway, attracted voters of a younger generation. He wore faded Levi's, a plain leather belt, scuffed boots, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a battered tan cowboy hat-no conchos or feathered hatband or chunks of turquoise, no jewelry of any kind except for the plain gold wedding band on his left hand. His shoulder-length hair was pulled back in a ponytail, his face in shadow under the hat. I rolled down the window to a blast of heat as Juan propped his elbow over the door and leaned down.

"Hey there," he said in the deep bass voice that always reminded me of Sam Elliott's. "How you doing?" Up close, his face was a miracle of flawless dark skin and the kind of eyes that keep the imaginations of post-pubescent women working overtime. I had been paler and shakier the last time I'd seen him Wednesday night, at Jaz's cabin.

"Hanging in," I said. "You?"

"Hot."

But he didn't look hot, not from the weather anyway. His white shirt was crisp, no circles of sweat under the arms or dusty smudges along the front where the top three buttons were open. I could smell the odor of soap and leather coming through the window.

"You be around in a little while? Thought I might drive up," he said, in a voice as neutral as his expression.

Whether Juan was as imperturbable as he appeared was impossible to guess-he had been this way the night he walked into Jaz's cabin. He had been this way a couple of years back when I came to his ranch to take weekly riding lessons from his wife, Grace. Often, as I rode in the training ring while Grace called instructions at the center, I could see him working a young horse in a corral, or sometimes he dropped by and sat on the top rail, watching his wife. Their daughter, Jamie, was seven then, and in the summer when school was out, she was a whirlwind of energy-brushing the horses, oiling saddles, helping rake the manure into piles while her father followed behind and shoveled them into a wheelbarrow. The little girl had always worn plaid shirts and jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, and she had not yet lost her baby fat. After the collision with the drunk driver, she had lingered for over six months in a coma.

"I'll be home. What's up?" I said, knowing this wasn't a social call.

"Few questions. Routine." He looked past me, toward where the small crowd had disappeared. "Got to go down to the burial, then I'll be by." He straightened up, gave a slight nod, and began walking after the others.

I adjusted the air conditioner louvers to get the full blast of cold air moving in my direction, then pulled away from the church toward home. The village road was unpaved, spiraling out around the church and bordered by ancient adobe houses. A few leaned crumbling and abandoned, their mud bricks eaten away by years of rain and wind and sun, but most of them were neatly kept though shabby, fronted with porches shaded by tin roofs propped on wooden uprights. Some of the houses were set back from the road, surrounded by waist-high walls of flagstone or higher walls made of adobe with only the rooftops of the houses visible. But recently, the face of the village had begun to change-the Southwest had been discovered, had become a mecca for California burnouts and disenchanted yuppies. Real estate prices, even this far from Santa Fe, had skyrocketed, and many of the local residents were selling out for figures they had never imagined. Shiny new realtor signs had sprung up in front of the Martinez place and, farther down, beside Martin Lux's little trailer by the arroyo. One home I passed, recently purchased, had last year been surrounded by an inlaid rock-encrusted wall that was now smoothly stuccoed and painted pumpkin orange.

As I started up the incline toward the mesa, the village fell away below, its gentle patina of old tin roofs circling around the white adobe church at the center like a swirling mosaic, stippled here and there with splashes of sparkling turquoise or brick-red Pro-Paneled roofs, dabs of textured clay tiles, shards of new glass skylights reflecting the sun.

On a small rise overlooking the village perched a squat metal water tank, with an incline on one side leading to the graveyard where the pickup, its bed empty, sat next to a fresh mound of red dirt and the gathering from the church service. On the other side of the truck, a silver sports car was parked next to a pi-on too small to offer shade, and in the distance the figure of Juan Falcon walked steadily up a dirt path toward the assembly. While some niggling sense of loyalty had brought me to attend Jaz Blankenship's service this morning, a combination of claustrophobia and irreverence kept me from watching a human being, albeit dead, lowered into the earth and covered over. I passed the turnoff to the graveyard with relief, feeling that I had left the nightmare of Jaz Blankenship behind me.

Ahead, a dirt road ran alongside a set of railroad tracks for several miles. This was the road I pictured last week all the way from California, driving east on I-80 for twenty-four marathon hours, as the sun rose over the Nevada desert and set behind Salt Lake City, rose again over Cheyenne and then, as I headed south on I-25, sank behind the Sangrias. I drove seeing not the endless asphalt of the freeway, but this red dirt aisle between borders of purple asters and nodding sunflowers and silver-green wedges of chamisa that would turn a mustard color with the first touch of chill September air. But a drought lay across the Southwest. Throughout the spring and summer in California, though I had followed the daily reports of record-breaking temperatures and parched grazing land and failed crops, I had not been prepared for this change, as though the brilliant colors of the earth and the sky had been drained away, leaving behind this burned landscape, this dusty road flanked by nothing but dead weeds. Behind the barbed wire fences where cattle once grazed stretched deserted fields of cholla and dusty, gnarled pi-on pines. But to the west, the mesas still abutted the western sky, rising highest at the center with the point of the Rowe Mesa, the longest mesa on the continent, and descending on each side along the horizon like steps left behind by some long-extinct race of giants.

At the side road that led to the mesa top, I turned left, beginning the steep drive up the mountain with switchbacks threading alternately across exposed surfaces of granite boulders and through dense stands of pi-on. Here and there, ravens hunched in the branches. By the time I reached the top, the heat gauge was closing in on red. I passed a narrow road on the left, a driveway that led to the small guest house a few hundred yards behind my own place. My friend Kit had been staying there during her prolonged visit, nearly three years now, and I almost turned in for a quick hello until I remembered that she would still be at the funeral. In fact, knowing her distinct dislike of Jaz Blankenship, I had been very surprised to see her there.

I pulled into my own driveway and nosed the truck into a bank of juniper beside the tack shed. Jones, a wolf-sized Siberian husky, leapt toward me as I opened the door into a hot blast of air. Behind him, Fresca tossed her mane and kicked up a flurry of dust racing around her corral. Jones stood on his hind legs now, his front paws gripping my shoulders, staring into my eyes with his own strange, pale blue ones that could make the blood of a stranger run cold. I nuzzled my face into his deep, thick fur while the horse, a dappled grey Arabian filly, stood with her neck stretched over the top rail, her ears pricked toward us. She nibbled the handful of oats I dug from the sack inside the shed, and I stroked her neck and breathed in her musky horse smell.

I followed behind Jones, taking a narrow flagstone path to the front entrance of the house where the patio extended to the edge of the mesa that overlooked the Pecos River two hundred feet below. Inside, I poured a glass of iced tea and returned outside, climbing the stairs to the upper second-story deck where I sat under a shady bough musing for a while over the river and valley spread below. In the pasture across the river, behind groves of cottonwoods, the fields were brown and cows huddled near the watering trough beside a decrepit barn. Several goats spotted the field, and I imagined them feasting on the dead grass, content and forever chewing as their odd slotted amber eyes scanned the horizon. The heat lay like a blanket; my mind wandered, slowed, drowsed. Somewhere a crow screeched, and I woke with a start to drumbeats coming from the direction of the guest house. Kit was home from the funeral.

From my angle, I could look straight down into the river which was much lower than usual because of the drought, and across the tops of some pi-ons I could make out the edge of Kit's garden where she often sat. But she was not there. I lowered the back of the chaise, lay in the shade, and closed my eyes to the sound of the running river and the drumbeats, the rhythmic staccato notes that Kit used as a kind of mantra against whatever demons she fought to paint the works that she was just beginning to sell in local galleries.

Even though she was my closest friend, she kept her demons private-whether from embarrassment, jealousy, artistic perversity I didn't know. For Kit was something of an odd duck, even in the lackluster halls of academia where I'd first come across her. My thoughts went back five years, to when I had taught a one-semester creative writing course at a small Southern California college besieged by all the familiar gadflies of higher education-budget cuts, administrative incompetence, faculty rivalries. I was sitting in the back corner at the monthly faculty meeting held by the humanities department, swatting at a fly with a roll of handouts, checking my watch, and wondering whether the dean, who was droning on behind the podium up front, was as deadly boring to his students as he was to faculty. My money was on yes. As he began to enumerate the third reason for the art department's decline in student retention figures, he held up three fingers on his right hand, which made him look more like an elderly boy scout than an administrator. Someone snickered.

The woman in front of me with the Audrey Hepburn neck, however, was not amused. She jerked at the string of hair she had been twining around her finger, plucked from the knot twisted on her head and battened with long bobby pins. Pins, I began to notice, that were easing their way out, so that the knot had begun to sink slightly down the back of her head. Between reasons three and ten, I watched first one pin, then another, then still another spring out, the woman snatching them as they began the long slide down the back of her neck, stabbing them violently into the knot again. The dean, one eye on the clock, had revved up his drone and was racing to the finish line with his tenth point: he relinquished his grip on the podium and spread his arms wide as he held up both hands with five fingers spread on each. Though he was not a very good dean, and probably no better at teaching, he had the earmarks of a born traffic cop. Again, the anonymous snicker.

Again, Long Neck bristled-her skin had mottled red and white, and her jaw was clenched so tightly that her swan's neck was a column of tendon and bone. The diatribe ended; the meeting adjourned. She rose from her chair and unfolded to a spectacular height, as the old fellow who had been sitting next to her made awkward patting motions at her shoulder, quite a stretch for him, and muttered softly up to her. I filed behind them toward the door. From what I gathered, the woman held the dubious honor of being the department's toughest grader, provoking not only the wrath of the students who were dropping her introductory art classes like the proverbial flies, but also the wrath of the dean who had more than likely already been hauled into the president's office on the retention issue. This was a common enough scenario in schools across the country, and teachers everywhere were feeling the whip. The message was simple: lighten up and keep students, even if it means giving them the grades they want rather than the ones they deserve. Most teachers had given up the battle, having learned that tenure was little protection against joblessness in this era when there were hundreds of qualified applicants waiting for their positions.

But this woman, Katrine Melpine Willis, was having a tough time of it. I could see even in the poorly lit hallway, deserted of both students and staff at this hour in the late afternoon, that her skin had gone from mottled to white. The old fellow had fluttered off down a staircase, and she was bent over at her office door, fumbling with a large ring of keys. Just as I passed by, she hauled back and gave the door a whooping kick that would have made kindling of the one on my rented apartment.

"Trouble?" I asked. Call me subtle.

She peered around at me over a set of wire-rimmed glasses with murder in her eye. Then she collapsed against the door with a deep sigh. "I think I'm so mad I can't see straight," she said, extending the wad of keys, "I can't seem to find the right one."

Even seeing straight, it was a stretch in the dim hall with her impressive number of keys. I finally found the chunky bronze one stamped "Do Not Duplicate" and swung open her office door. She had furnished her space in Kitsch Clutter-every square inch designed to offend the sensibilities of the nineties yuppie. She fell into the nearest chair, an overstuffed rocking concoction covered in pink-flowered chintz. It looked like the hot spot where her irate students usually sat, for on the table beside it were a box of tissues and a pink-flowered lap desk that matched the chair. Her office had the same institution-issue laminated desk, set of bookcases, and grey filing cabinet as my own, but the walls were thumbtacked with posters, drawings, graffiti, note cards, newspaper clippings, and snapshots. From the ceiling dangled objects swaying in the air-origami fish, clothes hangers bent in the shapes of cranes, empty bottles painted with turtles, frogs, and other animals. Two large oil paintings on plywood covered one wall. They were slashes of primary colors and bold black lines from which sprouted surrealistic figures that combined the reptilian and the human. She caught me looking at them.

"They don't much like my painting here any more than they like me." She snatched a tissue from the box, took off her glasses, and dabbed at her eyes. Then she gave her nose a loud blast. "Motherfuckers. I hope they roast in hell." No longer shielded by the glasses, her eyes were a spectacular combination-the right one a deep chocolate brown and the left a greenish hazel. Before the days of enlightened science, she would probably have been called a witch and disposed of by fire. These days, the methods were more subtle, even if the results were pretty much the same. "Sons of bitches," she spat and gave her nose another blast.

I liked her Teamsters' diction, but it probably hadn't helped her case much here where tastes ran less to four-letter words than to four-syllable ones. As a campus brat reared in this tepid atmosphere, I knew the rules and could dance the dance. But part of me had always yearned for a wilder place-the same part that wanted to switch off the Beethoven and crank up Patsy Cline. The same part that twenty years ago left Berkeley for rural New Mexico. The same part that knew this spicy Amazon, Katrine Melpine Willis, was never going to fit neatly into the academic mold.

I leaned one shoulder against her office door, taking in the place, watching her wad the tissue into a wet ball and hurl it toward the wastebasket. Missed.

I said, "So fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," managing a pretty good Valley Girl imitation.

She looked up, startled. And then we both laughed. Later, we sat over towering hamburgers thick with onions and dripping with mustard at the local pub, and she gave me the full story, one that carried her through six beers by the time she finished up. She didn't know it yet, but her description of the campus fit colleges everywhere; only the names changed. I knew because every two or three years, depending on the slim royalties that trickled in from the books I wrote, I taught a course at various colleges across the country to keep my checkbook out of the red, and this story was as familiar as overcrowded classrooms and low pay. Another thing she didn't know yet was that if she ever managed to shove herself into the contortions necessary for a tenured position, she wouldn't have much of herself left over to paint with. But by the time I left campus that semester, she suspected it. And by the time she arrived unannounced in my driveway a year and a half later, she had accepted it.

She pulled up in an old green rusted-out Jeep truck, dragging behind it a trailer piled with everything she owned, including several unfinished oil paintings wrapped in an aquamarine tarp. This time her hair was loose and electric. This time she was laughing. She jumped from the Jeep, startling Jones who was used to strangers staying in their cars when he told them to. As I walked up the flagstone path toward her, she was holding herself in her arms and spinning around and around across the mesa. She'd done it, she said, left tenure, retirement, security, and was risking it all for Art.

The memory of her arrival always made me smile. I had stood watching, surprised less by her visit than by her hot pink Spandex body suit, the June sun touching it with silver as Kit swirled around the mesa with her hair spread around her like a wild cape. After all those years of twisting and pinning and spraying her unruly hair into a tight bun, camouflaging her extraordinary eyes behind thick lenses, and heaping several layers of fashionable long skirts and high boots over her body, even after doing her level best to weed out the colorful words from her vocabulary, Kit had failed to fit the academic profile. That evening over dinner, I set out my prohibitions against alcohol and drugs on the property and offered her the guesthouse in return for minimal caretaking during the mercifully infrequent times I was off teaching, and we left it at that.

In fact, I had driven the freeways last week not only with my brick-red road in mind, but with Kit in my thoughts. And the azure sky and the mesas and the way the wind tears across the high country and the river runs through it and ties it together and makes sense of it. I had pulled in from California late last Tuesday-red-eyed from lack of sleep, high from No-Doz, and not expecting to see a light on. But it was.

Kit had been waiting, and as soon as I pulled up she was running up the flagstone path with Jones, her hair flying behind her.

"I knew it," she said, hugging me, dragging suitcases out of the truck bed and lugging them both down the path. "I knew you'd drive straight through. I'd have bet any money on it," she said, talking over her shoulder as I followed along behind, fussing over Jones.

Inside she bustled around the kitchen, heating up the meal she'd prepared, and I tracked through the house to chat with the twelve cats I'd acquired over the years. Later, we sat in the living room balancing wooden bowls of rice and mushrooms and broccoli on our laps, eating with chopsticks, surrounded by the cats and Jones who sat among them with a look of disgust as they edged closer to sniff the bowls.

Kit rocked in the bentwood and talked nonstop: ". and then the asshole, can you even believe it, tells me to mind my own business. I mean here he is, so fucking drunk he can barely sit on the stool, and You want some hot oil ?" She leapt up, sprinted to the kitchen, and returned with a small bottle. Her hair had grown nearly to her knees, and she was wearing a Day-Glo orange leotard topped by a purple leather jacket with long cowboy fringes. She sprinkled oil over her rice and passed me the bottle.

" and he's telling me, he's telling me, that I have an attitude problem. He's just the kind of son of a bitch that gives the whole race of men a bad name, he's " She stopped mid-sentence. Her long neck stretched up several more impossible inches as she looked past me. "Shoo!! SHOO. !!" A tremendous clatter issued from the kitchen. "Shit, Jet, why in hell do you let them all over the table and counter? I was just getting them trained, and then the minute you walk in the door " Kit leapt up again. I sprinkled oil over my rice and twisted around to see her aiming a spray bottle at a particularly large yellow cat streaking above the table with something dangling between his teeth. "I just can't believe it," she said, bringing the spray bottle back to the living room with her and setting it beside the rocker.

"You can't believe Jaz is a son of a bitch?" I asked. Innocently.

"No," she glowered. "I can't believe how you let your cats behave. Everyone knows Jaz is a son of a bitch." She made a sour face and sat down, working the chopsticks over her bowl, talking in between bites. "This latest little escapade of his is just more of the same. Someone saw him out behind his house fiddling with one of those thingy-ma-jigs that the lab's installed in the river. It just figures that he's low-down enough to help them make this whole valley a wasteland." She paused to chew, setting her bowl back on her lap. A tortoiseshell cat who had been waiting beside the rocker stood on its back legs, peering into the bowl. "So anyway," Kit continued, swallowing, oblivious to the cat, "I was curious about it, so I asked. He acted like I asked him the size of his dick or something. He just started in raving like some fucking nutcase lunatic." The cat fished with its paw in Kit's bowl, snagged one morsel, sniffed, dropped it back, tried another.

"Well," I said, using the chopsticks to feed bits of mushrooms to the cats who had chosen me over Kit, "consider the source. And, anyway, it's not like Jaz or any one person is responsible for this whole water business." I lifted out a chunk of broccoli and tried it on Jones. He glared at it and then at me. Ever the wolf.

"Christ, Jet, we're all of us responsible. We hsssssttt!!!" Kit snatched her bowl up and aimed flat-tire sounds at the mottled cat who stalked away with her tail waving and leapt on the couch. I burrowed through the rice and offered her a mushroom. She took it gingerly, shook it, and began to chew.

"That stuff's not good for them, you know," she said, making another sour face. "But anyway, if we band together on this, we'll attract enough attention to make them stop. And there's not much time left. Next week, a week from today, August tenth, is D-day. Then it's a done deal. There'll be no stopping them after that, no matter what."

I vaguely recalled some details from Kit's letters over the last few months. Between updates on the animals and scuttlebutt about the neighbors, she had written about the Pecos Water Development Project. But the details had deteriorated into a long and dense political diatribe that I had scanned briefly and set aside. Nor was this the time for an update. The No-Doz was wearing off, and the weight of the last twenty-four hours was settling on me like lead. I ate what was left in my bowl and stretched out on the couch. I dimly remember Kit covering me with a blanket.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cleis Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573440450
• ISBN 13: 9781573440455
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 250