Going Nowhere Fast

  GOING NOWHERE FAST

  A Joe & Dottie Loudermilk Mystery

  Gar Anthony Haywood

  Other Titles by Gar Anthony Haywood

  In the Joe & Dottie Loudermilk Mystery Series

  Bad News Travels Fast

  In the Aaron Gunner Mystery Series

  Fear of the Dark

  Not Long For This World

  You Can Die Trying

  It's Not a Pretty Sight

  When Last Seen Alive

  All the Lucky Ones Are Dead

  Standalones

  Man Eater*

  Firecracker*

  Cemetery Road

  Assume Nothing

  (* written as Ray Shannon)

  Copyright © 2013 by Gar Anthony Haywood

  Original copyright © 1994

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Gar Anthony Haywood

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Gar Anthony Haywood's website: www.garanthonyhaywood.com

  For my Nana

  FRANCIS PILAR RAY

  whose love made all things possible

  Acknowledgments

  The author is deeply indebted to the following people whose generous contributions of time and expertise made this book possible:

  Ken Eckley, President Region XII,

  Wally Byam Caravan Club International, Inc.

  Joyce Vaughn, Grand Canyon National Park Lodges

  David R. Swickard, Law Enforcement Specialist,

  Grand Canyon National Park

  John Beaver, Thor Industries, Inc.

  Russ Burkland, TVETEN RV Company

  And the CompuServe Commandos:

  Bob Zambenini

  Larry Hewin

  Carol Meredith

  People always ask my husband and me, "How did this happen? How did you ever come to be living such wild and unpredictable lives?" And then they always add: "At your age?"

  And I say, "I don't know."

  And Joe says, "Parenthood."

  Which is true, Lord knows, but it's only part of the story.

  I think more than anything else, what we're doing—at our age—is a product of us both being the inquisitive type. We like to seek answers to questions most people don't even think to consider. We enjoy prodding and poking the world around us, taking nothing at face value alone. We are unabashedly curious, and what better way to solve the great mysteries of life than in a state of constant motion?

  We left Los Angeles for good at 9 AM on a Friday morning, May 22, 1992. That was in the days when the City of Angels still had two professional football teams, and you could pass through airport security with greater ease than a supermarket checkout stand. Movies were on VHS tape and if you wanted to call somebody when you were away from home, you had to find a working pay phone. There was no internet, no iPods, no widespread use of email. Joe and I were in our mid-fifties.

  Just babies.

  I can't remember everything that's happened since, and I don't want to remember it all. But some of our earliest adventures were exciting enough to warrant a retelling or two.

  This would be one of them.

  We thought we had lost Bad Dog in Las Vegas.

  He had followed us there from California, acting on a wild hunch, and come upon us as we were watching all the wrong numbers light up on the keno board at Bally's. He reeked of all the usual odors, liquor and sex and low-grade motor oil, and looked like he hadn't had a square meal in over a month. Naturally, he was also broke, and was counting on Big Joe and me to carry him for the weekend. Joe decided early on that we would kill him and bury his body out in the desert somewhere, well off the highway so that it might never be found, but I voted that idea down, though it did have a certain appeal. Eventually, all we did was let Dog make a nuisance of himself all day Saturday and Sunday, then ditch him bright and early Monday morning. We were probably halfway to New Mexico by the time he woke up in the mirrored motel room we had dumped him in the night before.

  We thought that was the end of him.

  Then one day, eight months later, he turns up again, at a state-operated trailer park on the south rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. He was waiting for us at the back of a dark closet, with a gun in his right hand and an empty can of Budweiser in his left. I pulled the closet door open and there he was, hunched over uncomfortably beneath a canopy of hanging clothes, his eyes wild with anticipation and his grip on the gun unsteady. He was still heavy with baby fat and his hair was as unruly as ever, a dark brown tumbleweed someone had glued to his head, and when he saw me, he grinned, just like a little boy, and belched extravagantly.

  "What's up, Moms?" Bad Dog asked.

  Knowing full well how much I hate it when he calls me that.

  1

  "You left the door open again, didn't you?" Big Joe asked me. I could almost feel his loving hands closing around my throat.

  "Yo, Pops," Bad Dog greeted his father cheerfully, stumbling out of the closet toward him. One of Joe's favorite polo shirts was tangled hopelessly around his left ankle.

  ''I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to your mother," Big Joe said.

  "Cool. I'll just go in the kitchen and—"

  "You go near that refrigerator, boy, and I'll drop you like a bad habit!"

  The threat froze Dog dead in his tracks. The child is slow, Lord knows, but he isn't stupid.

  Joe regarded him a moment, daring him to move, then turned his gaze on me again, making a show of crossing his arms in front of his chest. He's a big, handsome man of fifty-two, my husband, bronze-skinned and bald like an eagle, and when he strikes this particular pose, the muscles in his forearms defy you to tell him the slightest thread of untruth.

  I smiled and shrugged. "I thought I locked it, baby," I said sweetly.

  Sometimes the "baby" helps in situations like this, sometimes it doesn't.

  "You always say that. 'I thought 1 locked it.' You're gonna wait until you get us both killed, woman. Just keep it up."

  The "baby" hadn't helped.

  "If you're talkin' 'bout the gun," Bad Dog said, trying to defend me, "it ain't even loaded."

  He waved the weapon in his hand around like a harmless grapefruit, just to prove the point.

  Only now did he realize his mistake: Big Joe hadn't even noticed the gun before now.

  "Waitaminute, waitaminute. A gun? You brought a gun in here?" my husband asked him, in total disbelief.

  Bad Dog didn't say anything.

  "You brought a gun into my house? Have you lost your mind?"

  Now, there were a number of ways our son could have responded to this question, of course. Some of them smart, some of them not so smart. Bad Dog's options were unlimited—and yet, from among them all, he chose the absolute worst of the lot. For rather than accept the well-intentioned—though admittedly mind-numbing—lecture his father was about to bestow upon him with all the grace common sense should have dictated, he looked Big Joe right in the eye and, with total irreverence, told him, "This ain't no 'house.' It's a Winnebago."

  And with that, I closed my eyes and began to pray. Out loud.

  Because the boy was doomed now, without a doubt. He had taken his mindless insubordination too far. Men always have their limits, as any woman can tell you—personal lines of demarcatio
n they are forever defying others to cross—and Dog had just crossed one of his father's. For Elvis, the primary rule of thumb had been, tread lightly around the fancy blue shoes on his feet; for Joseph Loudermilk II, as of a full year ago anyway, the rule is, never—ever—refer to our trailer home as a "Winnebago." For he and I did not sink $35,000 of our hard-earned retirement money thirteen months ago on anything quite so ordinary as that. We are the owners of an Airstream—a beautiful, colossal, luxurious silver god on wheels—and we are damn proud of it. Cedar-lined wardrobes, a queen-size bed, double porcelain sinks, four-burner range with oven, a pull-out pantry, microwave oven—the works!

  Not that our children have ever understood the difference, of course. They like to think we've lost our minds. When they first heard of our intentions to purchase an Airstream, and what we consequently meant to do in it, Delila accused us of being senile, Walter wanted to take us to court, Edward claimed our doctors were guilty of overprescribing, and Theodore—known to his parents and older siblings alike as Bad Dog ever since he celebrated his second Christmas by leaving a Yuletide log of his own making beneath the family tree—insisted we had fallen in with a religious cult. Only Mo, our oldest and most consistently sensible offspring, seemed to have any appreciation whatsoever of the path we had decided to take in retirement.

  Fortunately, Big Joe and I didn't give a hoot.

  We had made up our minds, together, that we were not going to live out the rest of our lives in the conventional, turtle-on-its-back manner of most retirees. No thank you. Big Joe had no affinity for shuffleboard and I had no patience for bridge. So we came up with a more stimulating scheme for our remaining time together: We were going to hit the open road and never look back. Buy ourselves a land yacht and see every inch of the world we could find with a broken yellow line running through it. Vacationing somewhere in Europe once a year sounded like fun, sure, but this promised to be more exciting, and for months at a time, not just a few days or weeks. Discovering America, mile by incredible mile—that was the new Loudermilk manifesto. And no one was going to talk us out of it.

  No one.

  Big Joe only spent one weekend trying to explain this to our children, then he shut up. He just pulled our brand new Ford pickup truck and twenty-five-foot Airstream Excella into the driveway of the house we'd sold only two weeks before and told everybody good-bye—after introducing us all, that is, to a long-winded song of praise and hype we have since come to know and dread as "The Battle Hymn of Jackson Center, Ohio."

  Jackson Center, Ohio, you see, is the home of Airstream, Incorporated, and the Hymn is a seemingly interminable sales pitch for the brand Joe apparently inherited, word for word, from a salesman named Bucky Overton out at World on Wheels, the recreational vehicle dealership in Long Beach where Big Joe bought our trailer home. Watching my husband recite this epic paean is akin to watching a virgin bride recite her wedding vows, and I should know; I've seen and heard him do it more than a hundred times since that first fateful day of ownership. Joe raises his gaze skyward, speaks the hallowed name in breathless, awe inspired tones—Airstream—and then cuts loose with a long and unvarying list of the brand's most admirable qualities, as in state-of-the-art aerodynamics; a distinctive, polished aluminum skin; and unbeatable American craftsmanship.

  In a word, class.

  Over the last thirteen months, I have learned to take our Airstream ownership very seriously, but for Big Joe, faith in the Airstream name has become a religion, leaving him convinced that anything else calling itself a trailer home is just a laughably inferior pretender to the classification. An Airstream is a home that just happens to have wheels for a foundation, Joe likes to say, and anyone who doesn't realize this—who lacks the insight necessary to distinguish a true home from a rolling bungalow of some other make and model—is a fool. A fool, in fact, who must be looking for a fight.

  No one knows this any better than Bad Dog. He's heard the Battle Hymn himself at least a dozen times, more than all of our other children combined. And yet, there he stood: foot firmly planted atop one of his father's most cherished pieces of clothing, armed like Dirty Harry, referring to Lucille—the name Joe bestowed upon his most prized possession our first week on the road—as a Winnebago.

  And people wonder why some animals eat their young.

  "What'd you say, boy?" Big Joe asked Dog, edging ominously forward toward him.

  "I said I gotta go to the bathroom," Bad Dog said.

  I told you the child isn't stupid.

  "So what's stopping you?"

  "Well, you know. The dead guy."

  "What?"

  "There's a dead guy on the toilet. Don't tell me you didn't know?"

  "Jeez Looweez, Dottie," Big Joe said, screwing his face up in disgust before turning it toward me. "This boy's come in here on some kind of trip! I've been drinking Budweiser for forty years, and I haven't once seen any dead people sitting on the toilet!"

  "Hey. Look for yourself," Bad Dog insisted. "Man's got his pants down round his ankles and everything."

  Joe had no intention of looking for himself, of course, so I did it for him. Dog's story was just too imaginative for a child who never received a grade higher than a C-minus on an English paper to make up. I turned to the bathroom door behind me and slid it open all the way. Dog and his father just stood there behind me, peering over my shoulders. And guess what.

  "See? What'd I tell you?" Bad Dog asked.

  * * * *

  "You ever see this man before?" Park Ranger Will Cooper asked us again, referring to the dead, middle-aged white man perched atop our chemical toilet.

  "No. Never," I said. Cooper, Big Joe, and I were standing just outside the open bathroom door as a second park ranger looked the corpse over, scratching the side of his head and trying to keep a smile from taking over his face. We were all grouped together in the narrow space between Lucille's bathroom and closet door, fighting a common feeling of claustrophobia that Joe and I were ordinarily immune to.

  "You sure?" Cooper asked.

  "Yes."

  "Maybe if you took another look at him—"

  "She doesn't need another look at him," Big Joe cut in, snarling. He was not a jealous man by nature, but I could tell he was growing less and less tolerant of the way Cooper kept addressing most of his questions to me. Frankly, I had begun to wonder a little about that myself. "We don't know the man. How many times do we have to say it?"

  Cooper showed my husband a smile, as thoroughly professional as it was condescending. The young man had a huge red mustache that spilled over his top lip like an overfed Chia pet, and bright, energetic eyes. He put his pen and notepad down and said, "This is tedious for you, I know, Mr. Loudermilk. But this is a homicide we're dealing with here, and, as there was no identification on the body … Well, you being a former law enforcement officer yourself, I'm sure you can understand why I have to ask these questions more than once."

  I liked the way the red mustache wiggled when he talked.

  "Okay. So I understand," Big Joe said. "But that doesn't change the fact that we've told you everything we know. At least a dozen times. We don't know who that man in there is, we don't know what he was doing using our bathroom, and we sure as hell don't know who killed him before he could finish. My wife left the damn door open when we went out for our daily run, just like we said, and the Thinker was there when we got back, exactly as you see him. We never touched a thing."

  "And your business here today is strictly recreational. Is that right?"

  "Of course. We're just tourists visiting the park like everybody else."

  "And him? What about him?"

  "Who? Theodore?"

  "Yes sir." Cooper was looking at Bad Dog like something rancid he had found in his refrigerator. Our son was sitting up at Lucille's front end watching Oprah on television, one hand submerged in a bag of potato chips, the other clamped around a fresh can of his father's beer. He didn't seem to have a care in the world.

  "What abo
ut him?"

  "He didn't know the deceased either. Is that your understanding?"

  "Yes. It is. I heard him tell you that himself, not five minutes ago."

  "Yes sir, but—"

  "It's the truth, Officer Cooper," I said flatly. "Theodore never saw that man before in his life." It was what he had told us before the ranger's arrival, and I believed him. Dog can tell his father any lie and never flinch, but he always falls apart when he tries to lie to me. In that sense alone, he is a mother's dream.

  Cooper gazed at me and smiled. His mustache twitched to the right. "Yes ma'am," he said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the crown of Big Joe's hairless head turning red, like the burner on an electric stove coming slowly to life.

  "Look—" he said to Cooper, just as the door to our trailer opened and a fat man toting a heavy black leather case stepped inside to join us. I could hear Lucille's suspension groan a mild complaint beneath his additional weight.

  "Ah. Henry," Cooper said. "Glad to see you could make it."

  "Where is he?" Henry said, apparently in no mood for amenities, huffing and puffing as he dabbed at his face with a giant white handkerchief.

  "In there. He's all yours," Cooper said, gesturing toward the bathroom.

  "You did have the decency to flush the toilet, I hope."

  The ranger just looked at him.

  "Aw, damn," Henry said. "This job of mine isn't revolting enough, is that it?"

  Cooper grinned. "Relax, Henry. The bowl's clean. Either our man got shot before he could get his engines started, or the killer propped him up on the seat as a gag."

  "Hmph. Some gag. What the hell's this world coming to, sitting a stiff up on a toilet's supposed to be a gag?" Without waiting for an answer, Henry took a deep breath, squinched up his nose, and started toward the bathroom, shimmying like a bowl of Jell-O to slip past us along the narrow corridor.