“I had that near-immediate impression,” Bob said. “Like everyone smart left town.”
“Huh.” Tommy nodded a few times. “Trying to goad me like Vern. He can go off real hot sometimes… Don’t argue it, brother. You know it’s true. Me? I like to keep things smooth and simple.” He glanced back across the road, as if wistfully hoping any security cameras might have disappeared. “But we’ll settle this soon enough.”
He took a few steps sideways and grabbed his brother under an armpit, pulling him in the opposite direction. “Come on, Vern. Let’s leave Mr. Richmond to think about what he’s getting hisself into, whether he’d be a mite happier driving back to Los Angeles.”
He led his brother back to the truck. Vern climbed in as Tommy rounded it to the driver’s side. “Big city. You never know when someone’s going to be cleaning a rifle or shotgun, and it just goes off, kills some poor sucker across the road dead as dirt, ‘for he even knew what hit him.”
That’s how bullets work, idiot. “Okay then,” Bob said, offering them a cupped half-wave. “Bye-bye now.”
He waited until the truck had pulled away from the lot before heading back to the car. He inspected the back end. The rear bumper was hanging low, dented. It beat the alternative, he figured, but Sharmila wasn’t going to be happy.
He needed to call her, see if she was okay.
Then he needed to see a man about an oil company.
14
Bob parked the BMW down the block from Sharmila’s clinic. As he walked back, he saw the young physician standing in front of the clinic doors, her arms crossed.
“You don’t look happy,” he said.
“Bob… I know you haven’t been in town long, but Bakersfield… she’s a tough city, a real working-class place. Those attitudes are pretty common whether it’s rich or poor we’re talking about. People don’t tend to give up easily. Life here was never easy, so they don’t take it as such.”
“It is what it is,” he said.
“I appreciate you’re dead-set on helping your friend and finding out what happened to my father. I sure as certain am. But if you get killed as well, I don’t know if my conscience could rightly handle that. And I’m darn sure…” She gazed past him. “…That my car can’t take any more rough stuff. This isn’t your fight, not for real.”
She was a good soul, Bob figured. For all the city’s problems, fully half the people he’d met there seemed as nice as anywhere else. Doesn’t matter where you go, there’s always good and bad. At least this time, you’re working with the good ones. “The thing is… it is my fight,” he said. “Marcus is like family to me. I’m not going anywhere as long as he’s behind bars.”
She peered at him curiously. “How did the two of you end up becoming so close, anyhow? He’s an inner-city kid.”
“He’s really not. He’s from the suburbs. People just jump to conclusions. He’s smart. He’s a sweet guy. He helped me when…” Bob lost himself in the thought for a moment, struck by the reality of where he was versus where he’d been. “…when I was basically garbage to everyone else.”
That disturbed her. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“It’s okay. It’s a work in progress. I’m a work in progress,” Bob said. “Anyway, his guardian is probably the best person I know, and she asked me for help. Even if I didn’t know him, I’d be here if she needed me. At the park… you mentioned your dad met with the people at Jenkins Mechanical.”
“Sure.”
“Then we need to talk to Richard Jenkins,” Bob said. “He might be bankrolling this whole thing if he has a land stake. We need to see how he reacts to some tough questions.”
Sharmila didn’t seem to buy that. “Have you ever met the professor? No, you wouldn’t have.”
“Eh?”
“You’ll see. I’ll give his assistant a call, see if he’s available today.”
15
Professor Richard Jenkins owned a ranch five miles southeast of town, which Bob figured was par for the course—although Sharmila had been cryptic about it.
She’d just snorted when Bob asked what kind of guy Jenkins was. “You’ll have to meet him. He’s… well, you can judge for yourself.”
But a ranch was about what he figured he could expect from a steely, tough engineer, the kind of place to do man stuff, while feeling manly and reflecting on his manhood. The Team would have loved it.
He guided the Buick past a traditional wood ranch gate, a sign on chain loops hanging off it. “TEREDO” had been branded into it. A dirt-track driveway crossed a half-acre, past cacti, scrubby, straw-like grass, and a rock garden fronted by an old wagon wheel. Beyond them was a ranch house in white plaster, with an orange clay tile roof.
He pulled the Buick up in front of it. The red front door was adorned with a calf’s skull, horns intact. “Okay, before we go in,” he asked Sharmila, “can you tell me what you found so funny about me thinking he’s a cowboy type? The place sure looks the part.”
“He’s… more of a Western enthusiast,” she said. “Trust me, nobody’s going to mistake Professor Jenkins for John Wayne.”
A younger male housekeeper in a white shirt and black slacks answered the door on the second knock.
“Please, come in.”
They ambled past him. The front door opened directly into a living room area with low-slung chairs and a bell-shaped fireplace. The off-white walls were decorated with Western art, old oils of cowboys and Indians battling eternally, a brass statue of a cowboy on a wild, bucking bronc on a table by one wall. “The professor is expecting you,” he said, closing the door. “If you would follow me, please…”
He led them through the lounge to a long, tiled corridor at the back of the room. It took them past the adjacent kitchen and two more rooms, doors closed. They reached the back door. He held it open as they walked out onto a rear-facing wooden deck painted grey.
Professor Jenkins was sitting in a rattan armchair, smoking a pipe, reading a stapled document. He was a small man, his mix of brown trousers and a blue-yellow-green wool sport coat like something from a fifties’ movie about teachers. He had half glasses, his brown hair flecked with white, the creases and crow’s feet betraying a man in his seventies.
He looked up from his document as they approached. “Ah! You’re here. Good, good,” he said, his English accent clipped and formal. “I suppose you both must be having a rather difficult time of it. I was exceedingly distraught to hear about your father, Sharmila. He was a good man. Please… join me, won’t you?” He gestured to the rattan three-seater across from him.
Where the heck am I? Bob thought. If Bakersfield was lacking, it wasn’t in diversity. Sharmila’s so normal I could’ve plucked her out of any city in California. But the gangsters were straight-up Ozarks, and this dude is like an extra from a Benedict Cumberbatch movie.
“Your accent seems oddly familiar,” Bob said.
“I’m English,” the professor said.
