Bloody River Blues

It was parked across the street. I didn’t get tag numbers.” Buffett coughed. “I want some water.”
    Hagedorn went into the john and got a glass.
    He handed it to Buffett, who hesitated then said, “I might puke.”
    Gianno said, “I seen worse than cops barfing.”
    Buffett didn’t puke, though, and he handed the empty glass back to Hagedorn with triumph. “Best thing I ever had in my mouth.”
    The men laughed; there was no need to say aloud any of the three punch lines that materialized simultaneously in three different minds.
    Gianno asked, “The guy in the Lincoln. Was he getaway?”
    “No, he drove off by himself. Maybe it was somebody who had to ID the hit.”
    “Naw,” Gianno said, “everybody knows what Gaudia looks like. He’s a cover boy. Well, looked like.”
    Buffett said, “Well, maybe it was the guy who hired baldy.”
    “Some big fish? I wonder. Donnie, you got any idea who was inside?”
    “No, but I saw a guy who did.”
    “There’s a witness?”
    Buffett told them about the beer incident. “This guy was talking to the driver, saying something.”
    “Fantastic.” Hagedorn smiled.
    Gianno turned to a blank page in his notebook. “What’s he look like?”
    Buffett was about to give them a description, and that’s what did it. The Word came back to him. The magic Word .
    Buffett beamed. He whispered, “Pellam.”
    “Tell him?” Gianno asked and looked at Hagedorn with a frown.
    “His name’s Pellam.” The smile on Buffett’s face glistened and grew.
    “You got his name?” Gianno nodded enthusiastically. “He live around there?”
    “Dunno.” Buffett shrugged, which sent a stab of pain through his neck. He remained very still for a moment, frozen as the pain slowly receded.
    “We’ll find him,” Gianno said reverently.
    The smile slipped off Buffett’s face as he tried to shift his leg and found he was unable to. The sheet, he guessed, was tucked in too tightly. He absently pulled at the bedclothes and smacked his thigh. “Gotta get the circulation going. I’ve been on my butt too long.”
    “We’re gonna go find this guy, Donnie.” Gianno slapped his notebook shut.
    “One thing,” Buffett said, “you know witnesses. When it’s a hit like this? He’s gonna get amnesia. Bet you any money.”
    Gianno snorted. “Oh, he’ll talk, Donnie. Don’t you worry about that.”
    APPARENTLY SOME TROUBLE with the chili.
    The beer and whiskey were gone completely, but the whole pot of chili was pretty much untouched.
    Danny and Stile remained behind in the camper after the other poker players had left and they helped Pellam clean up. Danny, with his thick nose, twenty-nine-year-old’s smooth complexion, and shoulder-length black hair, resembled a Navajo warrior.
    “What’d you do to the chili?” Danny said to Pellam, crinkling his nose, then emptied some ashtrays into a trash bag. Although he often said blunt things to people they rarely took offense.
    The chili?
    Stile slipped Labatt’s bottles into another bag and twirled his bushy mustache. Although Pellam was descended—so the family story went—from a real gunslinger, Pellam thought Stile was a dead ringer for the ancestor in question, Wild Bill Hickok. Stile was lanky and had a droopy Vietnam vet mustache the shade of his dark blond hair. He reflected, “I remember this western I worked on one time . . . I forget whose. I was falling off a cliff. I think it was an eighty-foot cliff . . . and the compressor broke, so they couldn’t inflate the air bag as much as the unit director wanted to.”
    “Hm,” Pellam muttered, and stepped into the kitchenette to look at the chili. He’d eaten two bowls,piled with onions and slices of American cheese. Seemed okay to him.
    “No,” Stile reflected. “It was a hundred-and-thirty-foot cliff.”
    Bored again, Danny said, “Got the point.” An Oscar-nominated scriptwriter, Danny sat in deluxe hotel suites in front of an NEC laptop computer and wrote scenes that sent people like Stile off hundred-and-thirty-foot cliffs; he was not impressed.
    Stile: “Man, there we were in the middle of this desert, in a very Native American frame of mind, you know what I’m saying?”
    What’s wrong with the chili?
    Pellam tried another spoonful. Yup, burned. It reminded him of Scotch, the smokiness. But there wasn’t anything wrong with it. It could have been intended, as if he had tried a new recipe. If it tasted like mesquite, for instance, nobody would have