Sedona Law 4 by Dave Daren (free ebook reader for ipad .txt) 📗

is... this is... the coolest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Well, what’s in there?” I asked.

“That was the terms of the deal,” he said. “There were over two hundred bidders, and it had to be done sight unseen. We stood in front of the closed door. No one had ever opened the lock. The last person to open that door was Jimi himself.”

“Wow,” I said. “That sounds impressive.”

“It is,” he raved. “Now, I need you to come with me. I want you to legally certify that everything I pull out of that unit did in fact come from it.”

I sighed. “When?”

“Today,” he said. “I’m going out there right now.”

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll meet up with you.”

“Awww, man,” he gushed. “This is amazing.”

“I’ll see you in a bit, dad,” I laughed.

“Alright,” he said.

I got off the phone and filled Vicki in on the Jimi Hendrix locker saga.

“That’s actually really cool,” she said. “He could make a lot of money off that stuff.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Depends on what’s in there.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Hendrix’s storage room? You might need to be inoculated for every strain of STD in the last century.”

I groaned. “You might be right about that.”

I rolled out of bed, showered, and dressed for whatever traipsing through a sixty-year-old storage room might entail. Jeans, boots, and a layered shirt.

Breakfast came in from Jitters, and I took a coffee and bagel to go.

“What are you going to do today?” I asked Vicki.

“I don’t know,” she laughed. “A whole day without you? I might find some other guy. You’d better hurry back.”

I just laughed and pecked her on the cheek.

“Have fun,” I said.

“Don’t be too long,” she said.

I winked and headed out the door. I made the ten minute drive out to my parents’ house. They lived in a modest one-story house that changes colors. One day, it’s painted pink, another day, it’s painted blue. Today, it was hunter green.

I pulled up the drive and smirked at the grassless lawn. Phoenix had once gone through a save the earth phase and insisted they put rocks instead of grass. His logic escaped me. I did notice a bag of grass seed on the side of the yard. With Phoenix gone, were they getting grass?

My dad was out in the yard trying to hitch up a trailer to a... Jeep? He waved when he saw me, and I got out of the car to inspect his handiwork.

“When did you get the Jeep?” I asked.

When I had first moved back to town, the only vehicle the family owned was a Volkswagen bus. The Jeep was a new development. He smiled and patted the silver frame.

“I bought it last month,” he said. “With Phoenix gone and all, your mother and I have been talking about doing more traveling. We thought we could use a Jeep.”

“Did you get rid of the bus?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said. “We’ll never part with that.”

“This seems useful in this area,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’re going to need it for this trip.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“The unit is way up in the Red Rocks,” he said. “We’re going to need something that can climb.”

I helped him hitch up the trailer to the back of the Jeep, and then he smiled.

“Let’s get a move on,” his grin was huge.

“Jimi Hendrix,” I said, “here we come.”

We got into the Jeep, and he hooked up his phone.

“Pay your respects,” he said.

Then, he cued a Jimi Hendrix playlist and blared it at full volume as he gunned the engine and pulled out. It was an hour and a half drive, and we rocked out to Jimi the whole way up there. The only conversation we had, was the occasional music history lesson my dad felt I needed over the sounds of blaring guitars.

We drove west, to another small town near the Red Rocks, and turned off the paved road onto a dusty trail. We found an old backwoods community, with a dilapidated gas station and a Native American bead shop.

We drove further down. After about the fifth rendition of All Along the Watchtower, we finally arrived at a grocery stand. It was a wooden frame platform that was just a step up from the lemonade stands of childhood lore. But, according to the sign, as we got out of the Jeep, the produce stand sold watermelons, avocados, tomatoes, onions and…

“Chickens?” I asked.

“Yeah,” a voice came from the other side of the counter. “We raise those.”

The man running the stand was an old hippie burnout, with long, shaggy gray hair coming out in all directions, including his face, and it was all barely restrained with a tie-dyed headband around his forehead. He wore a button down Hawaiian shirt and gray cargo shorts, Birkenstock style sandals, and he smoked a pipe. He sat in a lawn chair, with his feet up, and watched an old TV with some sort of improvised antenna made out of wood and coat hangers.

“Hey, Alex,” my dad greeted him.

“Hey, Moondust,” Alex’s face lit up. “Good to see you. This your lawyer-son?”

“Yeah,” he said. “This is Henry.”

Alex nodded at me and took a long drag on his pipe and blew it out slowly.

“Your dad won the auction, but wouldn’t even open the door without it being certified,” he said. “Smart one, your old man.”

“Good to meet you, Alex,” I said, and we shook hands.

Three brown and white chickens wandered up to us and waddled around our feet. I grimaced as one of them checked out my boot, and I thought about how expensive it was, and as hard as I tried, in my heart I really was, ‘that guy.’

“Yep,” Alex said as he shooed them away. “We raise these, and we