Shadows of Death

by David Sundstrand

  23

  •

  The Sierra loomed up out of the valley close enough to touch, made huge by the lingering moisture in the air. Frank leaned forward, squinting into the late morning light at a truck pulled off on the opposite side of the road. An eddy of vultures wheeled overhead. He brought the BLM Expedition to a slow stop, so he could approach on foot. The desert lay in front of him washed and clean from the rains. The morning air was crisp and tangy with wet creosote bush. Frank wanted to keep going.

  “Why are we stopping?” Eddie wanted to know. He leaned forward to get a better look.

  He glanced over at his seemingly indestructible companion; Eddie’s obsidian eyes glinted out over high, dark brown cheeks. Wovoka ready to lead the Ghost Dance, Frank thought.

  “Hey, what happened to your bell?” Frank said.

  Eddie reached a hand into very grubby jeans. “Took it off when I was down in the hole. Didn’t want to lose it.” He extended a small brown hand, thick with dirt, and wiggled the bell back and forth, the sound bright and clear in the desert stillness.

  Frank had met Dave Meecham, Jesse Sierra, and Greg Wilson at the Hazlitt talc mine. They had backed a tow truck up to the edge and lowered a cable and sling down to bring up Eddie Laguna. When Eddie told them about leaving Cece behind, Frank shifted his priorities from locating the dead man’s body to rescuing Cece Flowers. Eddie had insisted on going along because, as he explained, he knew where she was. Now they were headed back with a chastened Eddie in the backseat and a peeved and grumpy Cece riding up front alongside Frank.

  Frank pulled himself reluctantly from the SUV, not wanting to find what he suspected would be decaying in the truck. “Stay there, okay?” he said, not looking back at Eddie, who was already climbing out. Frank’s steps made a soft crunching in the crushed rock surface of the road as he approached the pickup. He leaned forward, peering into the truck’s cab, and was relieved to find it empty. Frank looked up at the wheeling vultures. Now there were more of them, a silent vortex, pointing to something dead or dying in the desert west of the truck.

  “They found something,” Eddie said, shading his eyes with his hand.

  Frank nodded. “I better take a look.” He turned to Eddie. “You didn’t see anyone along this part of the road, did you?”

  “Nope.” Eddie scrunched up his face. “Say, did anyone check on Prowler?” Prowler was Eddie’s black and white cat.

  “We’ll get you back as soon as we can.” Frank looked out over the desert and headed through the rabbitbrush in the direction of the birds, followed by Eddie, hurrying along to catch up.

  The dead man lay slumped to one side, as if he’d been sitting on the ground and then fallen over, which was what had happened after Parker shot him the second time. However, that wasn’t immediately apparent because the vultures had been at his face, so most of the damage to his eye inflicted by the .22 had been eaten away. Only after the medical examiner found the spent slug in Ortman’s braincase was the cause of death made official.

  Frank had no doubts about what killed the dead man. He’d been shot. While Eddie kept the vultures at bay, he made a cursory examination and discovered the exit wound behind the victim’s right ear and noted the dried and caked blood on the back of his shirt. The man had been shot twice, once in the forehead and a second time in the left eye. After Frank found the lifeless form of smashed flesh and feathers that had once been a bird, he put it together. The dead man was Parker’s present.

  He bent down and searched the dead man’s shirt pockets and discovered the note. And the eye of the sleeper waxed deadly and chill. “ ‘And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still,’ ” Frank murmured. I’d forgotten about the poetry, he thought.

  After he and Eddie covered the corpse with a plastic tarp weighted down with rocks, they returned to the vehicle, both of them worn down and ready to leave.

  “What’s that?” Eddie lifted his head.

  Frank turned in the direction of Eddie’s gaze. “What’s what?”

  Eddie put a hand to his ear, then dropped to one knee. “Over there.”

  He rose and trotted toward a cutbank, Frank in his wake.

  They paused on the edge of the cutbank where a man lay propped against the dirt wall, the right side of his khakis soaked in blood.

  “Help me,” he croaked.

  The man screamed before passing out as Frank put a pressure bandage on the leg to stem the flow of blood. Then Frank and Eddie fashioned a makeshift stretcher from a tarp and eased the man down the wash to the road.

  •

  “What took you so long?” Cece asked.

  “There’s a hurt guy,” Eddie said. “We got to get him to the doctor’s.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Anything I can do?”

  “Yeah, you and Eddie can ride in the back with him and keep him from rolling around,” Frank said.

  Cece climbed into the back of the vehicle, where Frank and Eddie had made a sort of bed for the injured man. “Looks awful,” she said.

  Frank picked up the radio to report to Dave Meecham. They needed a helicopter.

  •

  “Jammed in like a cork in a bottle.” Greg Wilson peered into the main shaft of the Hazlitt talc mine. “Man oh man.” He whistled under his teeth. “How’d you like to take a ride like that?” He grinned over at Jesse Sierra.

  Dave Meecham frowned down into the shaft and then let his gaze travel up to the head frame. “Maybe we can rig a cable through the hoist wheel. Bring it straight up.” He stepped back, a hand to his forehead sheltering his eyes from the light.

  “That’s the radio, Chief.”

  “Well, you might think about going on down and answering it, Greg, if you’re not too tied up.”

  Sierra smirked. Greg was a magnet for flak, and he had a gift for getting under Meecham’s skin. That meant that Sierra could duck under the radar—most of the time. Dave Meecham seemed to have eyes in the back of his head.

  Greg came trotting back up the hill. One thing you could say for Greg was that he was never tired—lazy sometimes, but energy to burn. Not even Jesse Sierra could match him running up hills, or down hills, or stairways, or ladders, or doing anything that didn’t have to do with labor. If it had to do with cleaning stuff up, Greg moved like molasses on a cold day. Today he was trotting effortlessly up a fifteen-degree slope.

  “Hey, Dave, Frank found the dead guy, but there’s an injured man, and Frank says they could use a helicopter.”

  Meecham walked back to the truck and picked up the mike. “Meecham here.”

  Frank’s voice was broken by static but understandable. “Hi, Dave. The bad news is that besides the corpse, Parker forgot to mention they shot the man’s partner in the leg. He’s in a bad way from loss of blood. The good news is that we found Ms. Flowers. She’s doing fine. Thought you’d like to know.”

  “That’s good. We can get a medevac from Independence. Where will you be?”

  “Where the Saline Valley Road connects to 190.”

  “Meanwhile, I’ve got to figure out how to get this damn truck out of the shaft.”

  “I think it belongs to Collins,” Frank said.

  “How’d his truck wind up down in a hole with Eddie Laguna?”

  “A long story, but it seems Collins loaned it to Eddie so he could help Ms. Flowers look for her lost mine.”

  Meecham’s frown deepened. “Well, Collins’s got no complaint coming, then, lending his truck to Laguna.” He shifted gears. “Who’s the dead man?”

  “Don’t know. The vultures were at him, so I covered him with a tarp and weighted it down.”

  “How about the injured victim?”

  “Haven’t gone through his pockets for identification. I was too busy trying to stop the bleeding. He passed out when I put on the pressure bandage.”

  “Why do you suppose Parker killed this one?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I can make a good guess. Linda says he killed him because he was killing
vultures. There was a dead vulture nearby, damn near torn in half, and there was a Ruger Redhawk lying next to the victim.”

  “You’re saying Parker killed the victim over a vulture?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  They were both silent.

  “I’ll get the county on it,” Meecham said.

  “I’d like to get Eddie checked out at the medical center in Bishop. He says he’s okay, but he took a pretty good ride down the mine shaft, and he’s worried about his cat. Think you could send someone over to keep an eye on things while I take Eddie to Bishop?”

  “His cat, huh? First Tucker’s dog, now Laguna’s cat. Well, it’s not a problem. I’ve got just the right man in mind.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be back to give you a hand with the truck after I get everyone back to town.”

  “That’ll have to be tomorrow, Frank. Lots to set up. Maybe you could break the news to Collins about his truck.”

  “Actually, I plan on letting Eddie do that.”

  “Good plan.” Meecham hung up the mike, grinning to himself. “Hey, Greg, got an important job for you.”

  Wilson looked crestfallen. His boss’s “important” jobs were usually something he didn’t want to do.

  “Go on over to the Saline Valley Road and find Flynn. His vehicle is parked near a truck, about six or seven miles from 190.”

  “Right. Uh, what for?”

  “Want you to keep an eye on a corpse. Keep the buzzards from finishing it up.”

  “Oh shit.” Greg made an icky face. He hated dead things, especially rotted, gory dead things. All through his teens he’d avoided slasher movies, and now this.

  “Don’t worry, Greg.” Meecham grinned. “The meat wagon should be there before dark, and I don’t think the corpse is going anywhere, right?”

  24

  •

  Frank awoke at daybreak with his motor running. He brewed a short pot of coffee and took his cup out to the rear platform of the caboose to greet the morning and get his bearings. Streaks of color suffused the scattered clouds, casting a pale rose light across the eastern sky. His mind raced ahead, making a list of the things piled up in front of him. He tried to put thinking about Linda and the impending job at the L.A. Times aside and concentrate on the loose ends in the wake of the failed effort to trap Parker.

  Cece and Eddie were safe, but both of them had been lucky. It looked as if Jack Collins’s truck was the main casualty among the good guys. The plunge down the main shaft of the Hazlitt mine had pretty much destroyed it. It was irrational the way a person could bond with something inanimate, but Jack loved his truck, and Frank knew he would miss it sorely.

  From any perspective, the operation had been a disaster, and Dave Meecham was damned unhappy about it. Parker had made fools of them all. He’d wandered around under their noses and managed to kill Walter Ortman in the bargain.

  Ortman’s death had probably been a matter of bad timing. The so-called Brotherhood of American Sportsmen had been running an empty threat on their Web site. They weren’t even a real organization, more like a drinking club. Had they had a real organization, they might have been spared the death of one of their members, that is, if the FBI had been able to find them before the Sandman.

  As it turned out, they were a bunch of middle-class hotshots with too much money and not enough brains. Their grandiose image of themselves as rugged individualists protecting the American way had bumped into nasty reality in the person of a professional shooter. Now one of their number was gone, one of the two unlucky enough to actually have met the Sandman face-to-face—and one had lived to tell the tale, the lucky one.

  Parker had pointed out to the dead man’s partner, Preston Hill, that his experience was unique, encountering the Sandman and living to tell about it. That had been the point, carry the message, and he had, babbling out his story in a rush of fearful wonderment to his fellow club members gathered around his hospital bed. The Brotherhood was nothing if not a chastened group of wannabe warriors.

  Frank reflected that so much about living and dying was a matter of chance. Time and place determined fate without fore-thought, without mercy. If Oedipus had stopped at a Starbucks, he wouldn’t have killed his father on the road to Thebes. Ortman had been unlucky as well as bloody-minded. Frank recalled his own suggestion to the dipwads shooting the pinyon jays that they would be safer if they went home. They’d been lucky they’d crossed an offduty ranger instead of Seth Parker. Walter Ortman’s last act of random violence had been observed by the Sandman, and he had paid for it with his life. Parker planned; the rest of them reacted. He’d taken luck out of the equation, and they were falling all over themselves.

  Frank sipped his coffee and breathed in the morning perfume blowing down from the high country. He had to get ahold of Eddie and see if he would take care of Tucker’s place for a few days. That would mean he would probably wind up feeding Eddie’s black and white cat, Prowler, while Eddie was feeding Tucker’s goats. Frank scratched Jack’s head. The dog seemed content to ride around with Frank, but he didn’t like being left alone. Who did?

  Before he started spinning his wheels thinking about Linda, he needed to check his e-mail, which had been piling up for a while, the important stuff mixed in with the garbage, and see what lay in store. He stepped into the dim light of the empty caboose and switched on the battery-powered electric light above the fold-down desk, where generations of conductors had worked out train orders by kerosene light. He opened his iBook and selected Mail. Then he scrolled down checking for names he recognized and almost passed it. SANDMAN was on the subject line. Frank supposed it would be easy enough for Parker to find his e-mail address. The message itself posed a different problem:

  Sarge, I’ve posted a few pictures on my Web site, so the people who planned the mission have an opportunity to debrief and do a better job next time. It wasn’t very professional. Well, what can you do with the brass hats? So to keep things moving along, here’s a new operational challenge. When I finish up this message, our team is headed for Barstow. Dogfights are big out that way, a magnet for maggots. We’ve pulled garbage detail again. You’re on final cleanup. Sandman

  He forwarded Parker’s message to Dave Meecham and followed it with a phone call. Meecham immediately contacted Miles Cross, chief district ranger for the eastern Mojave, to give him a heads-up. While Cross was mobilizing law enforcement in Barstow, Meecham called Pete Novak to fill him in.

  “Dogfighting is mostly gang stuff. You think there’s a connection there?” Novak asked.

  Meecham made a grimace. “I thought it was redneck stuff, but I don’t think it matters to the MDG. Taking the dogfighters out fits Parker’s pattern. He claims he and his partner did in Mike Travis. If he gets there first, the people in Barstow will be picking up bodies, ‘final cleanup.’ Makes you want to take your time, doesn’t it? Pretend I didn’t say that.”

  “Say what?” Novak said, playing along.

  Meecham returned to the problem. “I think his plan is to get there before us. He’s a crafty son of a bitch, but I think he likes cutting it close, adds to the thrill.”

  “Yeah, I got you. Drew and I have been chasing down leads on the kids who blew up the cats. Real pieces of work, those two, felons in the making. Their attitude was ‘So what, just cats, and we’re just kids. Can’t touch us.’ I let Drew do the FBI routine and scare the crap out of them.”

  “I bet he’s good at it,” Meecham said.

  “Yeah, he is. The point the kids seemed to miss is that they have every reason to be scared. Somehow they think because we know about this guy, they’re safe,” Novak said in a weary voice.

  “I wouldn’t want to be on Parker’s list,” Meecham observed.

  “Keep us posted, Dave, and thanks. We’ll be in touch with Barstow.”

  Meecham hung up feeling useless. He was in Ridgecrest, the FBI was in the San Joaquin Valley, and the killer was somewhere in the desert, seventy miles to the east in Barstow. Better
there than here, he thought.

  •

  Frank wondered why Parker would tip him off. Did he want to get caught? Was he looking for suicide by police? Parker was what they called high-strung in World War II movies—they always bought it somewhere near the beginning of the second reel. The bad boys in the Fifth Platoon considered Parker a pathetic wimp—that is, before he learned to shoot. Parker had undergone quite an evolution, from crybaby to celebrity terrorist, given his due by press and public. Now he was all ready for interviews and the afternoon movies.

  Maybe Parker supplied the tip because he thought his targets were too easy, no challenge. Maybe the dig about shooting people down without giving them a chance pricked his ego. The message the Brotherhood had posted referred to the killings up on the flats as back shooting. Maybe that was what was driving him, pride in his craft. So his new modus operandi might be to give a heads-up, then take the target out from under law enforcement’s collective noses.

  Parker had implied he kept a list. Was it an actual list or just in his head? Who else was on it besides the ones that had spilled out that day at Ralph’s? He and Linda had been following the local papers for incidents of animal cruelty, especially the Los Angeles Times, but there were so many, too many to anticipate Parker’s next move. When it came to inflicting pain and suffering on animals, there was no end of candidates for the Sandman’s rage. Then there was the matter of timing. Careful planning meant Parker would act when it was safe, out of the public eye, unless he meant to make an immediate point. Frank’s thoughts kept returning to the invisible list.

  Would he find Stuller’s name on Parker’s list? It had been seventeen years. He wondered what had happened to Stuller and his group of thugs. Frank went to the veterans’ Buddy Finder site and entered Charles Stuller’s name, rank, unit, and approximate dates of service. There it was, Charles W. Stuller, E-4, 1st Infantry, Fort Lewis, Washington. Discharged, March 1994.