by Bart Paul
Random granite chunks as big as horse trailers parked on the meadow grass where the glacier left them when it had melted twelve thousand years before, rocks inching into the valley then settling as the world changed. There was a horse trail that climbed to the top of the ridge through sage and mahogany. You could turn in your saddle and see Becky’s ranch a thousand feet below like a village out on the grass, and see the Hornberg place at the far side of the valley, a scar against a yellow cutbank. At the crest you could look down the backside of the ridge to the blue of Summers Lake. It would take a while for a rider to climb to that altitude, but then it took a few hundred thousand years for the glacier to push all that dirt.
The paved road bore left through the sagebrush to the far side of the moraine and followed a line of tamarack along Summers Creek, all that was left of that big ice flow.
“What the hell are you thinking?” Sarah said. “You look demented.”
“Just thinking how this canyon gets narrower and narrower.”
“Well … yeah.”
“Like a mustang trap.”
“What do you mean?”
“One way in, no way out.”
“Baby,” she said, “it’s a good thing I’m crazy about you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I was thinking about VanOwen and wondering who’d be trapping who. I drove the last couple of miles to the resort, vacation cabins in the trees on the right, moonlight on the dark water to the left, with that big timbered ridge rising up black over the far shore.
We got to the café before our customers. It was just a diner with a bar attached. This was the place where VanOwen said he was drinking the night before I’d dropped a loop on him at the pack station. A place he knew. There were booths in the front room and windows looking across a dirt lot to the lake a hundred feet away. We told the guy there would be six of us and he had to push another table next to the booth. The Newport Beachers got there about fifteen minutes later. They looked around like folks whose flight had just landed on the wrong continent.
Sarah and I knew the menu, so we let our customers negotiate with the waitress on the changes they wanted—if they could have the dressing on the side, what kind of bottled water was stocked, what kind of lettuce was in the salad, where the wine list was, and such. Sarah and I had a side bet about kale. I lost, and she called me a cynic. The second couple were the folks who’d flown in that morning. There was a nice looking dark-haired woman who said she was the first guy’s law partner. Her name was Tess. She had an older husband who was an air-conditioning tycoon. That would be Bill, the pilot. He ordered a vodka rocks and talked about his house on a place called the Back Bay, and about his sailboat and his tennis game. He definitely had the best tan at the table—if you didn’t count the back of my hands. When the waitress left, he asked about pack trips and what to expect. I tried to do what Sarah asked—be entertaining. I told them about the first party of fishermen I’d helped Harvey take up to Boundary Lake when I was twelve or so. Harv was old-school, from the days when packers supplied everything including food and the customers were tough and thought it was bad form to whine. I told how the three doctors we’d packed in reacted when they saw that the only food he’d brought was a sack of potatoes, a sack of onions, a side of bacon and a can of Folger’s. Anything else they wanted to eat they’d have to catch. I laughed. Sarah sort of grimaced. Dead silence from Newport Beach. Then Bill laughed real loud.
“Folger’s!” he said, like it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a week.
Bill had just asked for the check when I saw a single headlight reflected in the glass behind us. It came across the lot past the cars then circled down by the boat dock and looped past the cars again, slower this time. I stopped in the middle of another Harvey Linderman story to turn and stare out the window. It was a motorcycle headlight, and the bike came to a dead stop behind Sarah’s Silverado, then revved and blasted off towards the campgrounds.
“Tommy …” Sarah said.
I nodded to the folks. I was already half out of the booth. “Sorry. Back in a sec.”
When I got out the door, there was no trace of the headlight and no one walking among the parked trucks and cars and campers. A couple of boys shot hoops on a patch of pavement next to the café, and a girl stood under a pine tree staring at her phone, her face glowing from the screen—city kids not happy with the whole car-camping thing. I walked away from the café and away from the lake, out of the yard lights and into the dark. Through the trees I could see the flickering blue-white of television and computer screens in the campgrounds, then I turned back to the lake. It was pretty easy to see a couple of guys talking, hugging the shadows along the fake log wall of the boat rental building. I circled around the campground’s check-in kiosk and was up against them fast. One of them reached for something on his belt, and I shoved him back against the wall. He was wearing one of those baggy shirt jackets over his tee shirt and I could just see the pistol-butt on his waist. It was a revolver, maybe a Colt, in a scuffed leather holster. No nylon for this old rancher. I yanked the pistol out and almost took his pants with it.
“Lookin’ for me, Buddy?”
The pistol was a Colt .38 Police Positive with a four-inch barrel and fake gutta-percha grips, a gun like every cop in America carried from the end of the old six-shooter days to the eighties, when 9mms became the thing. A collectible.
“What the hell?” Buddy said. “You got no right.”
“Shut up. Tell me why you’re riding VanOwen’s Harley, or he’s riding yours.”
He just stared up at me, sullen as hell. The other guy moved in the shadows. It was the big red-headed cop called Carl from the Reno Italian place.
“Kinda outta your jurisdiction, Slim.”
“Watch it,” he said. “It’s a free country.”
“Not for a shady vice cop. You need to be bought and paid for.”
His look told me I’d guessed right. “Run along now, Slim, but keep your hands where I can see ’em.”
Carl looked at Buddy, and Buddy nodded. The guy started to walk across the dirt over towards the boat rental. Then he stopped after he’d gone twenty feet.
“I better never catch you in Reno,” the guy said.
He hustled over to a little German convertible he had trouble squeezing into.
“I could tell Carl to phone Sonny,” Buddy said. “I could have a dozen guys from The Nogales down here in two hours. They’d kick your ass.” He gave me a strange look. “You think that’s funny?”
“Yeah. I do. It’s a pretty sorry-assed pecking order if you’re calling the shots.”
“Screw you, Tommy,” Buddy said.
“C’mon.”
I grabbed his arm and walked him towards the lake. There was some stoutness there under the fat—like he still had some muscles that remembered what work was—but he went where he was dragged, just passive as hell. We came to the water’s edge. I watched the convertible bounce over the broken pavement under the log arch, it’s silver-blue beams marking the road along the shore of the lake. I walked Buddy towards the rental docks where twelve-foot aluminum outboards were tied in rows. We walked out on a man-made breakwater that paralleled the docks. It was covered with grass so kids could play on it during the day and jump off its vertical sides into where the water was shallow and the lake bottom sandy. When I was little, my mom used to take Lester and me swimming there if the day was really hot and we pestered her enough. Now, it was just Buddy and me.
I let go of his arm and looked at him. I scoped out his pistol, rocking the cylinder of the .38 open to check the rounds—old Western factory loads. When I played with the ejector rod just a bit I could feel a couple of the waxy casings drag in the cylinder like they’d been parked there for a long time. He took care of that pistol the way he took care of his family’s ranch. I snapped it closed.
“You gonna let me go?” he said.
“I’m not keeping you. You came here looking for me, remember? Sonny send you
?”
“No.” Buddy looked around all antsy, like we weren’t the only two people for a hundred yards. “Look, Tommy, I thought maybe you and me could work something out.”
“Like?”
“Like maybe I know where my sister hid the money she stole.”
“Yeah? How’d all that happen? How’d Erika get herself in such a mess?”
He just slumped and didn’t answer right away. “I borrowed some money. From Sonny. Couple times, actually.”
“How much?”
“A few thou.”
“Like maybe thirty-eight thousand?”
“How the hell did you—? Oh, yeah. That FBI guy told you. Your big friend. Yeah, VanOwen was all friendly, too, when I was up against it. But he … I signed a note. He made me. A recorded deal all filed and legal with the ranch as collateral. Then he wasn’t so helpful. Said I better pay.”
“And you told your little sister that he had you by the balls and she went apeshit.”
“Something like that. Nothing I ever did was good enough for her. But she said she’d get me the money to pay Sonny if it meant stopping foreclosure. Plus a couple thou extra to make it a nice round number, an easy mistake. From the bank. She said she could sell some jewelry and stuff over time and replace the cash before the bank found out.” He looked like a surly kid. “She said taking the money would be easy. Like she’d thought about doing it before.”
“And the rest? The big hit?”
“Sonny was surprised I could pay him back. He hadn’t figured on that. He wanted to know where I got the cash. I wasn’t gonna tell, but up in Reno he and some of his guys—”
“Don’t tell me. They didn’t hurt you. They just scared you, right?”
“Not everybody’s you, you prick.”
“And?”
“Let’s just say Sonny went after Erika. He threatened her, and I don’t know what-all. It was just when the bank was figuring they had some screwed up bookkeeping—money they couldn’t account for—stuff like that. Sonny wanted a big payday or he’d rat her out for the thirty-eight thou before she could replace it and she’d go to prison. She didn’t tell me the details but I—”
“But you guessed it was pretty grim.”
“At first he hid her out at his strip joint,” Buddy said. “She said it was worse than grim. Let’s just say Sonny knows how to sniff out folks’ weak spots.”
“What was Erika’s weakness? Besides her lame-ass brother.”
He kind of shrugged. “The ranch, I guess. She said she’d do whatever it took keep the ranch in the family.”
“You told me she was the one wanted to sell.”
“I might have shaded that a bit,” he said. “But it didn’t start that way. Before Sonny got wind, she thought she could pull it off. Then when he leaned on her, she told me she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d have to disappear—at least for a while. That’s when I think she decided to double-cross Sonny. She told me the money was parked in a dummy account she set up that only she could get her hands on. Something about access codes. When Erika …” He stopped himself from saying whatever it was he was going to say. “Look, she’s dead, and the money is gone but getable, but I can’t get it by myself.”
“What you mean is, you can get it but you need somebody to keep VanOwen from killing you when you do.”
“Okay. Yeah. I wouldn’t cross that guy without somebody watching my back. He’s not a guy you cross.”
“What was the point of the fake search for the kid? What difference did it make if your sister was already dead?”
“I don’t know squat about that. He said it was something about letting the trail get cold. Making it look like she’d taken the cash into the high country.”
“So people’d think the money was gone for good.”
He kinda shrugged like that seemed like bullshit, even to him.
“You’d have to ask Sonny.”
“So Sonny killed Erika, then found out he couldn’t access the account?”
“You’d hafta ask Sonny that, too.”
“What a dumbass honyocker.”
Buddy looked kinda hurt. “Him or me?”
“Both of you. Why the hell would he think I had a clue? I haven’t seen your sister for maybe eight years.”
“’Cause something went wrong. He was supposed to be able to get his hands on the codes. Now he can’t.”
“But why me?”
“You had a kinda high profile since you came back. Now you got that nice new cabin on the meadow where there wasn’t jack shit a year ago. Your wife’s a deputy. You’re pals with the FBI. Shit, I don’t know. Ask Sonny.”
I really wanted to strangle him right then.
“Anyway, you gonna cover me if I can get into that account?”
“So you’re a slick cyberthief, now?”
“I said I could get it,” he said. “I can get it.”
“What do I get?”
“Half?” he said.
“You’re ready to cross VanOwen. You’ll cross me if you get the chance. Besides, the FBI will be on the trail of whoever gets into that account.”
“That mean you don’t want half her money, then?”
“It’s not her money, dumbass. Or yours either.”
“But I can get it,” he said. “She told me how. How to get it so nobody knows.”
I looked past him to the rental boats tied under the dock lights and watched the little quiver the breeze made on the surface and how the lapping water rocked the empty skiffs just so, then looked beyond to the patch of moon on the black water out in the middle of the lake and beyond that to the shape of the ridge under the peaks. I never knew a thing about boats, but I always liked the feel of walking on a dock and stepping into one, and the gasoline smell from the outboard.
“It was you.”
“Whaddya mean?” He sounded scared. He knew what I meant.
“You were the one who told VanOwen I was messing in his plans. Your sister was dead. You say you know how to get the money. You needed somebody to pin it on if you did. You’ve been setting me up since the day I went looking for that kid.”
I knocked him over backwards with a straight-arm to the chest before I even knew what I was doing. He lit on the grass close to the water’s edge. It occurred to me I might shoot him right there with his own revolver.
“I figured you could stand up to him.” He was on all fours.
“I oughta let VanOwen rip your goddamn colon out.” I had the .38 in his face. “If anything happens to my family because of this …”
I went for him again. He scrambled backwards on the grass till he was about to fall into the lake. I stood over him, breathing hard.
“And how could you do that to your own sister? Ruin her life to cover your sorry ass. She worked in a bank in a job she didn’t give one shit about to support a ranch you were running into the ground because you’re a lazy dumbass daydreaming gunsel who wanted that life but couldn’t hack the work it took. You pissed away money the ranch didn’t have on motorcycles and whores and you got your sister murdered.” I stepped back from him before I actually did kill him.
“It’s pretty damn easy to see what your weakness is.”
I stepped further back. I opened the cylinder of the Colt again and ejected the six rounds into my hand and backhanded them into the lake. Now the only way I could kill him would be to pistol-whip him in plain sight of my customers in the café. It’s those little things that make a new business take off.
“Stolen money’s got a life of its own, dipshit. It outsmarts losers like you and VanOwen every time. You think you got a shot, but all you got is a circular firing squad. Whoever stays, dies.”
I grabbed his wrist and yanked him close. Then I jammed the Colt into his holster. I should’ve thrown it into the lake with the cartridges, but it would be a waste of a cool old gun.
“Mind you don’t blow your pecker off.”
I walked out of the shadows heading for the lights of the café.
>
“Sonny knows what your weakness is, you cocky bastard,” he said. “It’s that kid.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It didn’t take me long to figure that the only one I’d chased into a trap was me. I’d done it the day I’d taken Audie from Reno. The customers and my wife were waiting out where the cars were parked.
“All good?” Bill said.
“All good. See you at six?”
Scottie sort of groaned, and her husband, Drew, laughed.
“We’ll be there,” Drew said.
The four of them piled into the Range Rover and shouted their goodbyes, then drove out around the lake towards their motel in town. I climbed into Sarah’s truck on the shotgun side before she noticed, then took off my hat and leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes.
“You okay, babe?” she said.
“Terrific.”
I told her about my little parley with Buddy. What he told VanOwen, and what he wanted from me. Sarah got a scary look on her face—sort of seething rage. She knew how much he’d put us at risk. We talked it out and hoped that with the law finally targeting VanOwen we’d passed the worst of the threat.
“Buddy’s such an idiot,” she said. “Since we won’t be blindsided, I think we’ll be okay. But he’s going to get himself killed, just like he got his sister killed.” She reached across the seat and put her hand on my shoulder. “I’d feel way better if I were going with you tomorrow.”
“Me too, babe. But you can’t put your job on hold for a ‘maybe.’ I’ll only be gone the three nights.”
We kicked around Dan’s offer to camp at the pack station and help Harvey keep an eye out for VanOwen. We both thought that safety in numbers was the best of a crappy situation.
“I wish it wasn’t coming to this,” she said.