Tahoe Killshot

by Todd Borg

  “Taking risks is universal even if it isn’t rational?” I said.

  “Yes. In fact, we’re starting to discover that our brain isn’t organized according to rational principles at all. More and more, it appears that our behavior follows emotional principles. Think how many times you’ve seen someone do something that appears ineffective or dangerous or needlessly repetitive and you’ve thought to yourself, ‘Why would someone do that? It makes no sense.’ The answer is that, viewed through an emotional lens, such behavior may make perfect sense.”

  “And make the person feel good.”

  “Or give the person some release. Like scratching an emotional itch.”

  “Any thoughts on how to find this guy?”

  Morrell was silent for a moment. “You don’t know why he killed the young prostitute or the singer. But he’s after you because you are interfering with his plans.” Morrell paused again. “I think the killer will keep coming after you as long as you pursue him. So, if you want to catch him, keep the pressure on and he will present himself, one way or another. But be very careful. He may kill you first. He has obviously been successful in the past.”

  “I appreciate the information,” I said. “If I have more questions about him, can I call you?”

  “Please do,” Morrell said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The next morning I was waiting at the Spooner Lake Campground when an old rusted Subaru flew into the lot. I knew it was Wheels when he got out. The guy shook and jerked and twitched. His right foot slapped the ground as he walked.

  He came over to me and introduced himself. His long brown hair flipped around a weathered face about 30 years old. He had a thin, hard build and probably weighed 150, 20 pounds less than Spot who stood to the side. Watching. Wary.

  “Good of you to come,” I said.

  “Forgot me double-brimmed cap and me pipe. But sage and discerning me middle names, mate.” He saw Spot. “Hello!”

  “Wheels, meet Spot.”

  Spot stood his ground as Wheels jerked his way over to him. The guy obviously knew dogs and, save for the twitching, had mastered the art of approaching a canine. Showing no fear, but also showing no threat, Wheels sidled up to Spot and held out his hand for Spot to sniff. He didn’t look Spot in the eyes. “Big guy,” he said.

  “I can see you know how dogs think,” I said.

  “Had a Mastiff once. Called him Bull. Bull was a big dog, too. But not as big as this guy.”

  Wheels left Spot and opened the back of his car. The inside was littered with splinters of wood. Wheels dragged out his mountain bike. “Been splitting and hauling wood,” he said as he pulled a piece of bark out of his rear spokes.

  I’d expected a gleaming, high-tech bicycle. His machine looked like it’d been dipped in mud. Wheels walked his bike over toward Spot. “Spot, my man,” Wheels said. “Ready to run?”

  Spot looked at Wheels, then over at me.

  “Heeeaaahh!” Wheels screamed into the early morning air and took off, spinning his rear tire as if he’d popped the clutch on a motorcycle. His legs churned, his pedals spun, and he shot up the trail. Spot ran after him. Wheels went past a patch of woody brush, grabbed a dead branch and broke it off as he went by.

  “Yo, Dr. Watson!” he shouted at Spot. “I think it’s a clue!” He hurled it far off the trail.

  Spot ran after it, picked it up and ran back to Wheels. Spot crunched on the stick, and nothing but pieces fell out of his mouth.

  The trail to the Flume rose 1100 feet to a crest and then made a short descent to Marlette Lake. On the west side was the ridge that held Marlette Lake in place. Below that was the blue mass of Lake Tahoe looking like an ocean in the mountains.

  Back during the heyday of the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, there was a huge demand for logs to shore up the mine tunnels. The mining companies looked with lust on the forests of Tahoe and schemed up ways to get logs from Tahoe to the mines.

  A wooden, trough-like flume was built starting from Marlette Lake. Essentially an aqueduct designed to float huge logs, the flume used water from Marlette Lake to carry the logs north along the mountainside to a spot above what is now Incline Village. There, the mountain was narrow enough that they dug a tunnel through it. The flume was extended through the tunnel to the east side of the mountain. From there the flume went down the mountain at a steep angle. The logs slid at high speed down to the Washoe Valley, sometimes with daredevil loggers riding on them.

  Wheels and Spot were waiting for me at the beginning of the Flume Trail. Wheels had one foot on a pedal, ready to ride.

  “We should walk our bikes off to the side of the trail so we don’t mess up the tracks,” I said.

  “But the, ah, accident was close to a half mile from here, so we can ride the first part, right?”

  “How do you know where it happened?”

  Wheels hesitated. “Lemme see. Heard about it when the news first went around. Bunch of us mountain bikers were talking about it. I can ask Spider, see if he remembers.”

  “Could you call him tonight?”

  His eyes glanced out at Tahoe. “Sure. Don’t see why not.”

  We walked our bicycles along the narrow trail, and watched for the three streamers that marked the place where Glory went off.

  “Let’s stop here,” I said when I saw them 50 yards ahead.

  We leaned our bicycles against a boulder. I took hold of Spot’s collar, and we walked down the path, carefully stepping on the tiny edge to the side of the worn trail. Wheels followed.

  “What do you want me to look for?” he said, grunting. Now that we were off our bikes I heard his right foot flopping.

  “Just tell me what you see.”

  We came to a line of logs that had been placed to divert bike riders to the mountain side of the trail. Just inside the logs was crime scene tape marking a long, narrow portion of the trail.

  Wheels bent over and studied the trail. “First thing I see is a Velociraptor. Makes a distinctive track in soft dirt. The marks won’t hold in sand, but then nothing does.” He pointed. “The Velociraptor’s been obscured by another track that came later. Can’t tell what it is. Lot of tires like that.”

  “Why do some leave recognizable marks and others don’t?”

  “Knobbies are just like car tires that way. If the tread is bold and unusual in its shape, then you can tell what it is by the tracks. With less bold tread, it gets harder to tell.” Wheels walked along the side of the trail, studying the dirt.

  He made a grunting noise and pointed. “Here’s another one. El Gato markings peeking out from under other tracks.”

  I turned and resumed walking. Spot was on my left. If my dog felt any qualms about being on the edge of the drop-off, he didn’t telegraph it.

  When we were 20 yards away from the three plastic ribbons, I stopped and told Spot to sit. I pulled his leash out of my pocket, hooked it from his collar to a skinny Lodgepole pine that grew where the ground dropped away toward Lake Tahoe. “Sorry, Spot, but I can’t have you pawing up the trail.”

  “I’ll go on ahead and check it out,” Wheels said. He headed down the edge of the trail, careful to not step in the tracks.

  Spot sat watching Wheels, his ears perked up high.

  When I got to Wheels, he was squatting down on his haunches, twenty feet before the three ribbons. I let him look at the dirt uninterrupted. He stood, walked slowly alongside the trail toward the ribbons, squatted down again. Next, he about-faced and traced his way back. He went past me almost to Spot.

  Wheels twitched and flopped his foot. He scowled at the dirt. I worried that his flopping gate would mark up the trail, but he remained off to the side. Soon, he turned and came back. “Trail is better back by your dog. It gets worse where she went off. More sand. Doesn’t want to hold a tread mark.” He got to the ribbons and grunted. “But here you can see a bit of El Gato mark. Goes at an angle, right off the trail into the air.” He looked down over the drop-off and winced. “Definitely not a
good place to go off.”

  Wheels turned back toward me. “So we know she had the El Gato tires. The guy followed on Velociraptors.”

  “What makes you think he followed? Maybe he went before her on something that doesn’t make a track.”

  Wheels shook his head. “Look here.” He pointed to the trail just past the point where Glory went off. “The Velociraptor marks go into a skid, just like what would happen if she were in front and suddenly went off. He would hit his brakes.”

  “But the Velociraptor tracks go past the point where the El Gato marks go off the cliff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Doesn’t that seem strange? If I were riding behind someone who went off the cliff, I’d stop immediately.”

  “You’d brake immediately,” Wheels said. “But if you were going fast, you’d skid for moment before you came to a stop.”

  “You are presuming they were going fast,” I said.

  “Not presuming. Come back here, I’ll show you.”

  Wheels walked back down the side of the trail. He stopped and pointed to a depression in the trail. “They gapped this dip, so they were obviously booking.”

  “Gapped the dip?”

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “Their tread marks stop at the edge of the dip and then reconnect on the other side. Four feet through the air. Means they jumped up with their bikes as they approached the dip and they were going fast enough to completely gap it. Not a lotta girls do that. She must have been hot on her wheels. She went first. Then her boyfriend followed.”

  “Her bodyguard. Who said he was her boyfriend?”

  Wheels fidgeted, but I couldn’t tell whether from nervousness or from Tourettes. “Boyfriend? Just a figure of speech, I guess.”

  “No one said that to you?”

  He frowned, thinking. His left eye blinked and his left cheek twitched. “Like I said, Spider and the boys were talking about her death and how it happened. Maybe one of them referred to the guy as her boyfriend. But I’m not sure. Anyway, you can rule him out as a murderer.”

  “You can tell that from tire marks?”

  “’Course. Her tracks swerve before she went off the cliff. Probably took a good blow on her right side. His tracks show that he was riding behind her, not on her side. He couldn’t have delivered the blow.”

  “You said he was close behind, based on him going past where she went off before he was able to stop.”

  “Right,” Wheels said.

  “Then couldn’t he have reached out and struck her rear tire? Or swung a stick at her shoulder?”

  “Sure, but I don’t think that would be sufficient to drive her off the trail.” Wheels was shaking his head. “A fast-moving bike has a lot of gyroscopic stability in the rotating wheels. The way her tracks suddenly careen to the side suggest the kind of blow you could only get from something else.”

  “Like a person jumping out and pushing her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Except,” I said, “that the bodyguard would have seen such a person.”

  “Quite the scenario, eh?” Wheels grunted. “Bodyguard didn’t push her, and didn’t see anyone else push her, either. So what made her go off the cliff?”

  I looked down at the drop-off. The best answer I could think of was that Tyrone hired someone else to come up the trail in advance of their ride and run out at the precise moment to give Glory a shove. I walked over to the place where it would have had to happen, squatted down and pointed at the tracks. “This is where the El Gato tires first swerved before she went off?”

  “Yeah.” Wheels squatted next to me. “It’s an S-shape. Here and here.”

  I looked at the trail.

  Wheels knew what I was thinking. He said, “If someone ran out from those trees and pushed her, they’d leave tracks. Unless they got a branch and rubbed them out, huh?”

  I couldn’t see any marks to the side of the trail, footprints or erasure marks. The trees on the mountain side of the trail were a short distance away. I ducked under the stiff, scratchy branches of red firs, bent down and crawled into a little space that was darkened by the thick canopy. A red squirrel screamed at me from somewhere above my head.

  I heard Spot whine as I waited for my eyes to adjust. The depression under the trees was a perfect hiding place. It was surrounded by drooping branches, yet had several sight-lines to the Flume Trail. The ground looked as if something, a deer or bear or maybe a human had spent some time lying in the dirt. I scanned the ground looking for a boot imprint or cigarette butt or Jim Bowie knife. There was nothing.

  “Hello?” Wheels called out. “You lost?”

  I crawled back out from under the thick, heavy boughs.

  TWENTY-NINE

  That night I thought of pulling out some candles and making Street a romantic dinner. She rarely has her cell phone on, so I tried both her condo and her lab. I got her machines at both. Maybe she was in transit between the two.

  I opened a Silver Rose cab in case she came to join me and poured myself a glass to drink now in case she didn’t. I made a teri-yaki stir fry. Spot was lying on the rug in front of the woodstove as if it were fired up on a January night instead of sitting cold during the relative heat of August. Street still hadn’t called back when the stir fry was ready, so I served it up. Spot lifted his head and sniffed the air. His ears were perked up high and taut. One of them flicked toward the window, then turned back.

  I pointed to his food bowl which I’d earlier filled to the rim with dog food. “Mmmm!” I said. “Tantalizing treat of savory sawdust! Compressed into delicious bite-sized nuggets!”

  Spot looked at me, ears relaxing and eyes drooping with disappointment. He glanced toward the microwave, then shifted into a peculiar position he favors, front leg curled, elbow tucked under. He stuck his snout into the crook of his wrist, nose jammed straight into the rug.

  His deep breathing became forced, sucking air through the rug fibers. I tried to ignore him as I ate. But his breathing became more labored until I felt out of breath just listening to it.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. “Spot. Stop it.” He kept up the sucking sound. “Spot!” He lifted his head and looked at me with sad eyes. His ears perked up again. But this time they swiveled sideways.

  Spot swung his head around, suddenly alert, hearing something outside the cabin.

  I was about to speak when he jumped to his feet, a deep rumble in his chest. He trotted to the big window that faces the deck. Because the view falls off to the lake a thousand feet below I have no blinds there. Spot growled louder. I could see nothing in the black glass other than his reflection.

  The phone rang. I reached it off the kitchen wall.

  “Hello?” I said as Spot turned and ran to the window in the front wall of the cabin. I’d shut the blinds on that one when we came home. Spot forcefully nosed the blinds aside, bending the strips to get to the glass, although I doubted that he could see out at the black night any better than I could.

  The voice on the other end of the phone made my skin prick up into goose bumps. “You’ve really irritated me, McKenna.” It was a non-human voice, synthetic and metallic. “Now it’s time for your punishment.”

  I shouted. “SPOT! COME! GET AWAY FROM THE...”

  The window exploded.

  Spot screamed. Sparks flew from the woodstove as a round from a high-velocity rifle struck the iron and ricocheted into one of the kitchen cabinets. My old police instincts took over. I dove to the floor, my hand flicking at the kitchen light switch as I dropped the phone.

  Spot was still turning sideways from the impact. He was out of balance and went down onto his rear. My wine glass seemed to fall in slow-motion. It hit the floor after I did and shattered. I belly-crawled toward the living room light switch. Pieces of window glass glinted on the floor. A mist of glass dust hung in the air. Wine had splashed across the room. But the shade of color was off. I realized it was Spot’s blood. I reached up and turned off the light switch.

  Spo
t had gone silent. “Spot! You okay?” I said, my throat so dry that my words were a rasp.

  The only sound in the dark cabin was his wheezing breath. I scurried on my hands and knees over to him. He pushed up off of the floor, his legs quivering. “Come into the bathroom,” I said, pulling on his collar. I got him into the bathroom and shut the door. There is a night light that stays on. In the dim glow of the tiny light I could see that the bullet had creased Spot’s side. It was an ugly eight-inch gash down the side of his back that parted fur and flesh like a farmer’s plow. There was no pulsing from a severed artery, but blood flowed profusely. I had to slow the bleeding, or he’d go into shock.

  “Stay here,” I said. Spot sat still, his front legs spread wide and shaking violently. His eyes were dazed.

  I scrambled on hands and knees through the dark to the kitchen. The phone dangled on its cord. I pressed the button several times, but got no dial tone. The caller was still on the other end. I hung it up. My cell was off and would take too long to boot up.

  The roll of duct tape was in a drawer. Paper towels were on the counter. Back in the bathroom, I folded several towels into a narrow strip and laid it along Spot’s wound. He cried. I covered the towels with two strips of duct tape. Blood had soaked the fur below the wound and the tape wouldn’t stick. I ran three loops of tape all the way around his chest. It would be hard for him to breathe, but it would compress the wound.

  Spot looked at me, alarm and worry in his eyes. He needed surgery and plenty of stitches, but this was going to have to suffice for now.

  It’s difficult to judge a shooter’s position when you’re being shot at, but my cop’s sense told me he was up my neighbors’ communal driveway.

  Bandaging Spot had taken long enough that the shooter could have come up to the cabin. He could be waiting just out the front door or out on the deck. Maybe I could make him think I was staying inside.

  There was a broom in the closet nook. I draped a towel over the bristles. With my back against the heavy log wall, I reached out with the broom and pushed aside the window blinds. Nothing happened. Maybe the ambient light from Mrs. Duchamp’s yard light wasn’t enough to illuminate the moving towel. I moved it some more.