See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

by Bart Paul

  It was a bobtail truck with a rental company logo on the box. The truck revved and lurched towards us. Blinding mist and smoke spun white in the headlights. At first, the windshield was just orange reflection from the fire across the yard. Then the truck cleared the shed. The front wheels turned, and I could see the driver. VanOwen hung on to the steering wheel with his left hand, the automatic in his right resting across his body on the door panel. I could barely make out Audie flattened against the passenger door.

  The truck rocked on the uneven ground and picked up speed. Then shots were fired from the driver’s open window. I brought up the .270. I could see Audie sit up when I did.

  VanOwen flinched when he saw I was finally armed. The engine wound out as he floored it and aimed the truck right at me, his eyes wide and orange in the reflected flame. I set my feet and didn’t move. In the next instant I squeezed off my shot and heard the pop of a hole bursting in the windshield, and I saw VanOwen’s head jerk sideways. Audie flattened against the door to get away from the blood.

  The truck turned up the slope towards the highway, veering enough to the right so that the cargo box protected the cab from another rifle shot. It swerved toward the feedlot fence and smashed into the gas tank, taking out the front legs and tilting the tank forward so the remaining gas spurted over the truck grille.

  The bobtail came to a stop with one hind wheel still spinning slow, like VanOwen’s foot hadn’t quite left the pedal. I ran around to the passenger door to yank Audie out before the tank exploded. I gathered her up and squeezed her tight, looking over her head at VanOwen. He leaned back against the headrest bleeding from the neck. I was still watching him when I heard a whimpering, almost human sound like a baby goat makes. VanOwen’s eyes sort of flickered as I jerked my head toward the sound. He didn’t move, but he tried to grin. He was wheezing like a guy who’d just jogged a couple of miles. There was a lot of blood. I set Audie down.

  “Now get out of here.”

  “I wanna stay with you.”

  “No. Run like hell before this explodes.” I pointed over to Jack curled up under my jacket. “Run to Jack and stay with him. He needs you right now.”

  The bleating sound started again as she ran off. I hustled around the cab, jumping over a puddle of gasoline. I hadn’t seen a trace of livestock in the barnyard corrals and was clueless where the sound could’ve come from. I yanked open the driver side door and reached over VanOwen just careful as could be. He was stretching for his flashlight on the dash when I heard a shotgun blast a dozen feet behind me—metallic and echoing and loud as hell, like it came from the cargo box. I stumbled around to the back of the truck. Jack leaned against the roll-up cargo door breathing hard through his nose, his own blood all over his hands. He looked at me, too breathless to talk, and nodded at the lock he’d just mangled with buckshot. Audie got on one side of him and I got on the other and we helped him stumble away from the truck.

  “The kid said unlock it,” he said.

  We all heard the crying baby goat sound then.

  “We gotta open it, Tommy,” Audie said.

  “Then we gotta do it damn quick.”

  I told Audie to stand back with Jack. I pried off what was left of the padlock and grabbed the handles and hoisted the roll-up door. I peered into the dark until the human stink hit me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In front of me sat two nice Harleys and boxes and duffels of all sorts of crap. One of the duffels was spilling out with pistols, rifles, shotguns, and ammo. Another was stuffed with cash. I heard whimpering and goat bleating, then saw the light of the burning house reflected in tiny pairs of eyes. Twelve feet back in the gloom they could’ve belonged to a den of coyotes or a mess of possum or even puppies. Then a child started weeping and Jack yelled.

  “What the hell is it?” he said.

  “Kids.”

  There were four of them. Four girls, three of them not much older than Audie, one of them with duct tape over her mouth and around her wrists. In the dark they whimpered and moaned and generally acted like they’d been drugged. The fourth was about sixteen and all whored up in stripper shoes and skimpy clothes and a ton of makeup. She looked badly used and quivered but didn’t speak. She was the high school kid who made malts at the Sno-Cone in Paiute Meadows. The girl I’d seen purring at VanOwen’s elbow as he stroked her arm in the bar of the Sierra Peaks. I called Audie over, and we dragged them out of there fast, all of them too weak or stoned not to stumble or fall. We took two each and walked them away from the bobtail and the spurting gas, Audie just as determined as hell. We got them a safe distance, then I circled back to the cab.

  VanOwen sat where I’d left him. He kept his eyes on me as I patted him down, looking for the thumb drive. I found it in a pocket of his hoodie. I had to reach across him to grab it, trying to avoid the blood. He laughed, then put his hand to his throat. I stepped back, my .270 in the crook of my arm.

  “You’re the freakin’ rifleman, after all,” he said. His voice was weak and raspy.

  “Pretty obvious this was your exit plan. How come you didn’t take it sooner? You’d be long gone. A clean getaway.”

  “Damn straight. Got my Reno boy Carl hidin’ down the road in the willows in another rental. Once I got the doohickey from Erika, him and Tiny were gonna switch this load into that truck.” When he spoke blood pumped from his wound. “He was gonna drive me to a charter plane at the Mammoth airport and meet me later down south.”

  Blood bubbled from his mouth as he smiled. “I was gonna be gone. Fresh start for me. Helluva plan, huh dude?”

  “Foolproof. Teenage whores, guns, and a bag stuffed with cash. A total gangster starter kit. Any regrets?”

  “Only that I didn’t do your wife.”

  He tried to spit at me. Blood ran out his nose into his mustache.

  “Nice. Hard guy to the end.”

  He grinned and coughed.

  “So what went wrong?”

  “Jesus, you’re slow.”

  “You weren’t leaving Audie behind. I know that much.”

  “Well …” he stopped for air. “Well, pin a rose on your nose. I thought you woulda figured that out by now.” He was taking long breaths, and he stopped to gag on a mess of blood. Then his eyes rolled back like he was going to pass out. He recovered and laughed. “She’s my kid, dumbshit.”

  He turned in my direction with the automatic in his fist. it might’ve been a Walther 9mm. His big hand wrapped around it so it was hard to tell.

  “Too slow to live, dude.”

  His finger barely fit through the trigger guard but I could see it squeeze. I jumped sideways as he fired. I didn’t have time to raise the Remington anywhere near my shoulder, but I’d been rehearsing this shot in my head since I first saw the truck. The soft point took off the top of his skull.

  I walked back toward where Jack and Audie waited with the four girls. For the first time since that night when Audie staggered into the pack station she wasn’t dragging the sleeping bag. She was tending those children with a blanket and water bottle just like Sarah would have. She’d already stripped the tape off the mouth and wrists of the bound girl and held Jack’s radio while he guzzled water.

  “That was Sarah,” Jack said. He slipped the radio back on his belt.

  “She said she’s five or ten minutes out. Her and Mitch. I told her you and the girl were okay but pretty much everybody else was shot to shit.”

  “Including you.”

  “I ain’t so bad,” he said. “Hey, I didn’t say nothin’ about these kids. We can show Mitch when he gets here.” He started taking long, slow breaths. “Sarah said he’s expecting us to turn Erika over, no questions asked.”

  We both looked at the house falling in on itself into the flames.

  “We can tell him where to find her.”

  “Can we?” Jack said. he looked grim. “Buddy must’ve been tied up inside or somethin’.”

  “I guess.”

  “Erika was brave as
they come,” Jack said. “She died trying to save that useless bastard.”

  “Yeah.” I looked at Audie with the other girls. That kid had seen some bad stuff in her ten years. She didn’t do shit with a doll a stranger gave her because she didn’t see the point in make-believe, but she hovered around these four girls and Jack and never looked up.

  “He done this before,” she said out of nowhere. “With other girls.”

  “If you hadn’t told us, the truck might’ve blown with these four inside. You saved their lives, Audie.”

  She looked up like there was just no hope for me. “No shit, Sherlock.” Then she almost smiled. “Just like you saved mine.”

  She watched the ranch house when half the roof caved in. Sparks rose a hundred feet. I caught her looking at me.

  “It’s okay,” she said

  “So you knew?”

  “That he was my dad? Yeah, I knew. From how my mom acted and things she said, I kinda guessed, but I never wanted to ask.”

  She watched me pull the gizmo out of my jacket pocket.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  I held out the drive on the flat of my hand. “Trouble.”

  She reached out and touched it, then yanked her hand back like it was hot.

  “I know he shot my mom.” She looked up at me like she was wondering what I’d say. There was nothing to say.

  “I was in the next room and heard them yelling about him and me. I never said nothin’. I was afraid he’d shoot me, too.”

  She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked at the ranch house. By now we could feel the heat radiate from the ruins all the way across the yard. One of the girls held out a water bottle when she was done with it. Audie took it and gave it to another girl.

  I could see tears now, but they sure didn’t seem to be for VanOwen.

  “I knew the spirit lady wasn’t real,” she said, “but it made me happy to think so. I saw that lady and I could pretend I was gonna see my mom again someday.” She was silent and more tears came. She wiped them away like they made her mad.

  I looked towards town and could see flashing red lights, either sheriff’s or fire or EMTs, still just a glow a mile distant.

  “So don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not mad at you or nothin’. Sonny was a douche-nozzle.”

  “You even know what that means?”

  “No,” she said. “But it sounds gross and he was gross. I told you up at Sarah’s dad’s place that if you shot him, I wouldn’t mind.” She looked over at the truck like she was afraid he’d roar back from the dead. “I don’t mind.”

  I asked her to stay with Jack while we waited for the emergency crews, and I told her Sarah would be there before she knew it. I wondered where the switch to the yard lights might be, but there was no one left alive to ask. Jack and I looked at each other a second, and he laughed. A what-the-hell laugh, like he just couldn’t help it. Even in the damp night we were both sweating like a hungover haying crew, with dirt smudges on our faces and clothes, and blood all over.

  I walked up to the house and stood as close as I could in the heat. Only part of the walls were left standing. There was no trace of Erika, but then I didn’t expect to find any. I walked across the yard back to the truck and poked around through VanOwen’s duffles until I found what I was looking for. I pulled out my granddad’s old lever-action shotgun and set it on a post away from the truck, then walked down the corral boards of the feedlot. Maybe I could give that shotgun to a grandkid of mine someday—if I lived that long.

  Growing up, I’d never spent much time on the Hornberg place, so the layout wasn’t really familiar. Not like Becky Tyree’s ranch or Harvey’s pack station. I rounded the corner of the feedlot to the brick slaughterhouse. The light inside was still the only electric light burning on the ranch.

  The glow was coming from the center corridor, a single bulb hanging from a single cord throwing its weak beam on the steel rail that hung from the ceiling and connected the two rooms on either side. The refrigerator door of the meat locker on the left was open just as it had been the week before when I first came to see Buddy, and the random junk and furniture inside looked untouched. I pushed open the door to the slaughter room and looked into the dark.

  I could make out Buddy hanging from the gambrel hooks over the killing floor. He was upside down, his head about three feet off the ground, his eyes open, his ankles spread apart by the gambrel and his stiff arms dangling. Long straight bruises covered his face and arms. Other than the blood, the floor was spotless. Something shone in the light for a second. It was like a twisted bit of copper wire or maybe a piece of fishing lure sitting on the concrete next to the iron drain. It was hard to make out in the gloom. I picked it up and put it in my shirt pocket, then got out of that place.

  Someone had found the switch to the yard lights and turned them on. The first ambulance crews were already on the job, tending to Jack and the rescued girls. Sarah and Mitch pulled into the yard with firetrucks close behind. Mitch saw me walking across the ranchyard and got out of his SUV to head me off. Sarah moved faster than he did. She put her arms around me, and we ignored him a minute.

  “My god, baby,” she said. “This is like a war zone.” She looked sorry the minute she said it. I held her close and let her wipe the sweat from my face. Audie ran up to Sarah, and we both held her close as she made gasping sobs in Sarah’s arms. Then Sarah saw Jack, his shirt off as an EMT worked on him.

  “Oh, god,” she said, “is Jack—”

  “He’s okay,” Audie said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “He’s a tough old bird, ya know.”

  Then Audie told Sarah about the four girls, and we went to where the EMT’s were evaluating them. Sarah recognized the girl from the Sno-Cone and called her by name as she hugged her. Then the crews loaded the four into county ambulances.

  “I’ve known that child her whole life,” Sarah said.

  “Tommy Smith.” Mitch said. He was hustling towards us. “You’ll turn over that Hornberg woman now.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “You will do it. I want her in custody when the FBI gets here or there’ll be hell to pay for you two sneaking her past us tonight.”

  “No can do, Mitch.”

  “She’s over there, mister,” Audie said.

  Mitch looked across the yard where she was pointing. Then Sarah did, too. By now the ranch house had burned down to a raging bonfire, a jumbled red-hot mess of beams and rubble and part of a brick fireplace and some iron pipes that so far had only half melted. The highest point left was a piece of tiled wall behind a bathtub on the second floor.

  “The lady just got burned up,” Audie said.

  Even in the patchy moonlight I could see a tear on Sarah’s cheek. “Nobody could survive that,” she said.

  The piece of wall and the bathtub and the floor underneath them all fell through into the embers with another blast of sparks. The sparks set a poplar next to the house afire, and the flames rushed up the deadwood branches into the new leaves. Now only the front of the ramshackly screened-in porch was left untouched.

  Mitch looked around the yard at the rental truck wedged under the gas tank with its driver’s side door hanging open, and at Tiny’s body sprawled about sixty feet away. An EMT was poking and jabbing Tiny, making preliminary examinations. Sorenson wore latex gloves as he picked up the big guy’s chopped 12 gauge then started clearing a path for more Paiute Meadows Volunteer Fire Department trucks.

  I led Mitch and Sarah over to the bobtail where a firefighter was spraying the cab with foam so Mitch could see VanOwen’s body. Two more volunteers and an EMT followed behind. We watched the volunteers as they tried pulling VanOwen from the cab. He was so big they got him wedged behind the steering wheel. Mitch turned away before he retched.

  “How’d the house catch fire?” he said.

  “VanOwen’s guy torched it.”

  “Why?” Mitch said.

  “I think he wanted to kill Erika Hor
nberg in the gruesomest way he could and still keep his hands clean.”

  “How the hell—?”

  “He let her think her brother was inside.”

  “Was he?” Sarah said.

  When I didn’t answer her right away, Sarah just nodded.

  The three county folks kept yanking on VanOwen’s stuck body, then quit to catch their breath.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Mitch said. “So who shot Sebastian VanOwen?”

  “Me.”

  “Crap, Tom,” he said, making a face. “You gave him the full Zapruder.”

  He walked over to Tiny’s body, getting away from the truck as quick as he could. We all followed him.

  “And you shot this fat guy, too?”

  “That was Jack.”

  Mitch bent down for a closer look. “Dang it, this guy is shot all to hell.” he said. “Glad Jack’s gonna be okay.” He peered around the death scene looking pretty chipper, all things considered. “So, Buddy Hornberg wasn’t in the burning house. He’s okay, then?”

  “Nope.” I pointed to the slaughterhouse. “He’s down there. Somebody beat him to death with a steel rod. You know, Mitch, like a cane.”

  Mitch looked at me half pissed, half whipped.

  “And there’s a couple of fellas up Aspen Canyon who got thrashed by some pack stock tonight, plus the body of a packer called Twister Creed up in the old snow cabin. They’re VanOwen’s guys, and they’ll need to be found.”

  “Well, holy crap. I’ll need a statement from you and Jack both, then.” His eyes moved back to the burning house. “Some families—” he started to say.

  “We better take a look at Buddy,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Mitch said. “Lead the way, Tommy. Jeezo Christ.”

  We were almost to the slaughterhouse when the punctured gas tank set off the bobtail truck like a bomb.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  We waited another half hour for Agent Fuchs. He was driving his own Explorer with bike racks and not the usual government sedan. He pulled in as the fire crew was just mopping up the flames from the gas tank and bobtail. Aaron was half-buried in a North Face fleece and a Heavenly Valley ballcap and looked like he just got out of bed, though as it was close to four in the morning, he had to have been up for hours. We sat on the tailgate of the Silverado, the three of us and Audie, just as we had more than once at the pack station. Audie slept on Sarah’s lap, and we drank lukewarm Indian Casino coffee from cardboard cups that Aaron had brought us. I told him the story that began the night before at Little Meadows with Erika showing up out of nowhere. I stopped a few times when he asked questions. He basically called me nuts for the dead-run horseback stunt but allowed it had worked pretty well.