By around nine thirty, I was getting really hungry, but Perkins said he wanted to go out to the shooting location.
“Now?” I asked.
“Yes, now.”
“But it’s late at night.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “We have to go prevent another murder.”
CHAPTERTWELVE
I’d never been out to the shooting location at night. Why would I? Why would anybody? It gets cold in the desert after the sun goes down, and you have no orientation in the dark, no way of judging where you are or how far away you are from anything. I just followed the road up the mountain in my headlamps for half an hour until I finally saw the sign for Old Tucson and turned off.
Perkins, I should say, was very excited. He had been getting more wired all night long and his professorial reserve was wearing thin. By now he was hardly able to sit still in the passenger seat while I drove. He was like a kid dressed up in a good suit. I asked him what he meant about preventing a murder.
“I was being cryptic,” he said.
“I’ll say.”
We drove toward the town. I parked in a little side lot, and we got out and started looking for the night watchman. Did I mention it got cold at night? The daytime temperatures were over a hundred, but it was near freezing now.
“Seriously,” I said, shivering. “What are we doing out here?”
“I’ll probably need a ladder,” he said.
“What?”
“Just keep your eye out for a ladder.”
We found the watchman. I showed him my identification, and he let us onto the main street. I was still shivering, but Perkins’s energy was extraordinary. He was rubbing his hands with enthusiasm.
“Excellent, excellent,” he was saying. “Now where is the site?”
“The site?”
“For tomorrow’s stunt.”
I led him down the street, which was now dimly lit with naked wall lights, to a storefront. The sequence of action was that Clete would square off with Black Jed, and shoot him, and Jed would be blasted back by the impact into a plate glass window, into the store.
Perkins walked around the site. “No glass in the window now,” he said.
“No,” I said. “They’ll have candy glass in there tomorrow.”
“Now, the ram will be back here, inside the building. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“So the wire will pull him back. Uh-huh... Uh-huh.” He went into the storefront.
The nitrogen ram wasn’t there, of course. It was too valuable a piece of equipment to leave out at night. But its position was marked on the floor in chalk.
“They’ll do the stunt twice?” Perkins said.
“Yes,” I said. “Once with the stuntman, once with a dummy.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh...” He was looking at the ceiling. Or rather where the ceiling would be, if the store had a ceiling.Bloodrockhad built this storefront, and it was just a shell, so it had no roof at all except for some tarps hung to keep the light out.
“Now,” Perkins said, “I need that ladder.”
