The beetle took him out of his head and into the world and he backtracked a few hundred yards to the path along the creek. He had barely noticed the creek when he was pondering the subject of paranoia but now he sat down on a cottonwood log and stared at the moving water. It would have been a good brook trout creek had there been any brook trout this far south though he had read that there were rainbow trout in the mountains farther north in Arizona. He spotted some minnows swirling in unison in a deeper hole and then watched a blue heron fly over above him looking smaller than the great blues of the north.
He studied the thicket of mesquite trees across the creek. There was also a number of large green bushes that looked like the elderberry back home, and a number of vast cottonwoods. He heard only bird sounds and the sound of moving water, his two favorites beginning in his childhood. He noticed that he was more relaxed and breathing more deeply than he had since he left home. He smiled remembering a slightly religious experience on a small river down near Steuben south of Shingleton the summer before. It was a hot August morning and he had been trying to catch brookies under logjams with a short line and his preferred fly, a small olive woolly bugger. The fly had snagged under the logjam and he was in despair because it was his last one and he had forgotten to tie up anymore. He was also hungover, which he had noted dozens of times made him a little inattentive. He threw in the towel as it were, pulled himself up on the riverbank, and stripped off his waders and clothes down to his undies. He carelessly plunged under the logjam with a hand, following the fly line until he could detach the fly hooked on the slippery log, not quite a victory as he had to struggle violently to back himself out against the current thinking how odd it would be to drown while saving an olive woolly bugger. He emerged breathing hard and grabbing a branch to hold himself in the current, tossing the fly up near his rod on the bank. For no reason he let go of the branch and floated downstream rolling over and over in the water, then simply floating on his back looking up at the hot blue sky and the trees that bordered the stream. About a hundred yards downstream he crawled up on a sandbar and lay there, happier than he had been in the three years since Diane left.
The Tucson gun store was a mud bath, festooned with patriotic and anti-Obama signs, including the usual live free or die. The clerk was plump, florid, and middle-aged smug.
“I need a. 38 Smith and Wesson revolver,” Sunderson said.
“You look like you need a pistol,” the clerk chortled.
“Thanks.” Sunderson was impatient to get out of the place and pointed at the pistol he wanted under the glass.
It turned out that despite his expired detective license and still current Michigan concealed weapons permit he couldn’t buy a pistol because he was a nonresident. He was pissed off enough to feel his temples pounding. The clerk waited for the bad news to sink in, chortled again, and gave Sunderson directions to a public library.
“You get a library card and that’s proper Arizona ID and then I sell you the pistol.”
Sunderson was jangled at the insanity of it all but calmed down sweetly at the library because the desk clerk girl, though homely, smelled like lilac, a fatally sexy scent for him. He felt like a daffy old fuck as he proudly showed his library card from back home but she frowned at the Nogales address he gave.
“I love the next town, Patagonia,” she said.
“I do too. I eat menudo there every morning.”
“I can’t eat tripe.”
“It restores your strength.”
When he walked out after the second pass at the gun store he felt the unpleasant heft of the. 38 in a shoulder holster thinking that the. 38 had been following him around for nearly forty years like the longest-term tumor possible. Back in the car and heading to Miss Saigon for a pho fix he pulled over near the University of Arizona to make a cell call. Grungy young men and beautiful young women were passing on the sidewalk in such profusion that he thought about the failure of birth control in the world at large. He called a colleague back in Marquette.
“Sunderson! Gett’n much?”
“More ass than a toilet seat. I need information on an Arizona detective by the name of Roberto Kowalski.”
“Hold on, I’ll do it as we speak.”
The colleague, divorced twice, always gave the staff the impression that he was a prime pussy chaser but this was unlikely.
“No one by that name in Arizona law enforcement,” was the answer.
“Thanks for the favor.”
“You’re missing deer hunting.”
