The Fourth Durango by Ross Thomas, Sarah Paretsky

scratch biscuits.”
    “What about dessert?”
    “Vines doesn’t much look like a dessert eater. I don’t know about Adair.”
    “Okay. Let’s skip dessert. If they want sugar, I think I’ve got some B and B left.”
    A sullen Norm Trice returned and silently served the two martinis. After he went away, B. D. Huckins tasted hers, sighed and said, “What’s he like?”
    “Vines?”
    She nodded.
    “Well, he’s kind of low-key, more smooth than slick, and he’s still got all his hair.” Fork ran a palm over his own bald head. “About my age. Pretty good bones but not much meat on ’em. Real dark eyes, maybe black, and real dark hair with a nose not near as bad as mine or the eagle’s over there. He’s tall enough and looks—well, cagey-smart, the way a one-eyed jack looks.”
    “How long do they need?”
    “He didn’t say.”
    “What about money?”
    “Vines won’t deal till he talks to Adair.”
    B. D. Huckins finished her martini, put the glass down and said, “Why was he disbarred?”
    “Some money disappeared.”
    “Whose?”
    “Adair’s.”
    “How much?”
    “They’re not sure but they say it was close to half a million. Just before the state started investigating Adair on that bribe thing, he put every dime into a blind trust and made Vines the administrator or trustee or whatever you call it.”
    “Administrator.”
    “After the bribe thing was dropped, the Feds went after Adair on tax evasion. But when they went to freeze his assets, they found he didn’t have any. Or hardly any. Vines swore he’d lost it all through imprudent investments. He even had records to show how he’d lost a lot of his own money along with Adair’s. But they brought Vines up before a hearing panel of the state bar court anyway and nailed him on four separate counts of misconduct that, from what I hear, were pretty vague. Then the state supreme court—the same one Adair’d been chief justice of—disbarred Vines. Just like that.”
    “None of them recused themselves?”
    “Nope.”
    “What really happened to the money?” the mayor said.
    “Who knows?”
    “Guess.”
    “I’d guess Vines managed to squirrel it away out of the country.”
    “Where?”
    “Jesus, B. D., I was on the phone long-distance part of the morning and most of the afternoon, finding out what I just told you. How the hell do I know what country?”
    “Okay,” she said. “Let’s assume they’ve got money somewhere. The next question: who’s after Adair?”
    “That’s easy. Somebody who doesn’t want him to tell what he knows.”
    “Which is what?”
    Fork replied with a shrug and finished his martini.
    “Suppose you knew something you could blackmail somebody with,” B. D. Huckins said. “Somebody nasty as lye. You’d need a safe place to operate from, wouldn’t you? A sanctuary.”
    Fork’s mouth went down at the corners as he shook his head. “I wouldn’t want any sanctuary,” he said. “Sanctuary always sounds to me like some little locked room in the church basement with maybe an army cot and a slop jar. Or like some wildlife preserve with a ‘Keep Out—No Hunting’ sign that’s been all shot to hell. So if I was them, Vines and Adair, I wouldn’t be looking for any sanctuary.”
    “Right,” B. D. Huckins said. “So we’ll offer them just what we offered all the others. A hideout.”

Chapter 7
    After parking the blue Mercedes in one of the four empty metered spaces in front of Figgs’ department store on Main Street in Durango, they went in just before closing and bought Jack Adair four Arrow shirts, two pairs of Levi corduroy pants, four pairs of socks and six pairs of Jockey shorts, Adair taking great pleasure in specifying his fifteen-and-half-inch neck and thirty-four-inch waist sizes.
    Vines paid in cash as a bemused Adair watched the fiftyish woman sales-clerk with the golden beehive hairdo wrap the sales slip around the twenty-dollar bills, stick everything into a metal cylinder and pop