Tahoe Killshot

by Todd Borg

  Willard Kilpatrick, the environmental consultant who played rough in politics and who was killed years ago just after Senator Stensen’s opponent had hired Kilpatrick to dig up some environmental dirt on Stensen. Kilpatrick was supposedly shot by Glory’s brother Luther just before Luther himself drowned.

  Wheels Washburn, the mountain biker who helped me analyze tracks on the Flume and who got information from Bobby Crash on where Glory died. Bobby Crash knew Faith Runyon and maybe got the information from her.

  I also noted the things I hadn’t had a chance to track down:

  Who and where were Martin Elgin and Adelina Kercher, the two stockholders of Camp Twenty-Five, Inc.?

  Who were the other board members?

  Why was Glory killed?

  What was the involvement of her bodyguard Tyrone Handkins?

  Where was his boss Tony Nova?

  Why did the senator get involved in Diamond’s suspension, and was the senator’s support for Camp Twenty-Five genuine or a sham?

  Did Violet Verona have any reason to make trouble for Diamond? Was she connected to Camp Twenty-Five?

  Was Deputy Rockport’s desire to become Sergeant ahead of Diamond just natural competition, or was it something else?

  Did K.D. Scarrone know or suspect that Camp Twenty-Five wasn’t what it seemed?

  Who was K.D.’s ex, and was he the person who inadvertently revealed something to Faith?

  Where was Bobby Crash and what else did he know?

  When I finished writing my account, I made six copies, folded them and put them into envelopes.

  The counter guy was kind enough to pull out phone books for both Nevada and California and I found the addresses for the sheriff’s offices in Placer County, Washoe County, and Douglas County, as well as the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. I also addressed a set to Diamond and a set to Glennie at the Herald. Kinkos had a stamp vending machine and a scale. I stamped the envelopes, carried them outside into the parking lot and set them on the roof of Mrs. Duchamp’s 4-Runner. Spot had his head out the window, trying to sniff the envelopes. It was dark and his eyes glistened in the parking lot lights.

  A squeal of tires came from the side. A red Nissan SUV raced into the parking lot as if to cut through to the next street. At the other side of the lot a white limo with smoked windows was pulling in from the other direction. It looked like they were on an intersecting course. The limo honked and stopped near my vehicle, but the Nissan kept coming fast. Another honk. The Nissan rushed toward the limo, then braked at the last moment. It didn’t look like it was going to stop in time. The Nissan turned toward me, just missed the limo and hit the rear corner of the 4-runner.

  Spot barked and growled.

  “It’s okay, Spot. Just a fender bender,” I said.

  A man got out of the Nissan. It was too dark to see his face. He yelled an obscenity at the limo and pointed to where his car had hit mine. The Nissan had an expensive-looking winch on the front bumper, but it looked okay. Only the corners of our bumpers were munched. The driver’s door of the limo opened. I tried to see through the reflections on the windshield. A chauffeur looked to be unbuckling his seatbelt.

  “The damage doesn’t look bad,” I said to the man who’d been yelling, hoping to calm him. “Both vehicles are still drivable.”

  I started to turn back toward the limo when a bone-cracking blow rang off my skull above my right ear. At the same moment, the man who’d been yelling struck me in the solar plexus. It paralyzed my diaphragm. I went down.

  FIFTY-ONE

  I still hadn’t gotten a look at either one as they grabbed my arms and jerked my hands behind my back. I felt nylon zip cuffs ratchet around my wrists.

  One grabbed my hair, lifted my head off the pavement and the other pulled a dark plastic bag over my head. I was gasping for air, but I couldn’t breathe. My gut was in spasm. I pushed my diaphragm out and finally sucked a little bit of air in. The air in the bag smelled like something in a hospital. My thoughts went swimmy. I heard Spot barking as my head lolled and I passed out.

  I woke up in a dark place. I was lying on my side, my hands still cuffed behind my back. My gut ached from the sucker punch. My head pulsed with fire. Someone had drilled into my brain with a rusty bit. Jammed hot needles into my gray cells. Hooked up electricity. Poured on salt and alcohol.

  I gritted my teeth against the pain.

  At least the bag was gone.

  The place I was in moved. A gentle motion of hot air hit my face and with it a nauseating, spare tire smell.

  Many new car trunks have a safety release on the inside. But my hands were cuffed. Besides, the spare tire smelled old which suggested an old trunk and no release lever.

  I tried moving. I was bent at the waist, but I could straighten my legs. A big trunk. I tried to spread my legs. They were shackled.

  The car drove for a long time, fast at first, then slower. Then came many curves. I was pressed one way, then another. Now and then was the rush of sound from an oncoming vehicle. Mostly the soft whoosh of cars, occasionally the louder sound of a truck. Twice, an oncoming truck roared with the staccato blat-blat of the Jake brake. Which meant that the truck was going down a long hill and using the engine brake to control speed. Which also meant we were going up the long hill. The long hill with many curves that came to mind was the Mt. Rose Highway from Reno back up to Lake Tahoe.

  In time, the tire-stink air washing over me became cooler. Even on hot August nights, the temperature drops in the mountains. The pass on the Mt. Rose Highway is 9000 feet, good for 20 degrees colder than Reno.

  The car braked hard, then turned off to the right. There were no major roads that I knew of that went to the right off the Mt. Rose Highway. The car bounced and jerked its way over an uneven surface. We braked again and became still.

  The engine went silent. I heard a door open and shut. Then another. I was considering if there might be a way I could overwhelm the men while wearing zip cuffs and shackles when I heard the sound of another vehicle. That engine turned off and two more doors opened and closed.

  The trunk lid popped open and two flashlights shined in my eyes. I looked away, but not before I was night-blinded. Hands grabbed my arms and jerked me up. I knew it was stupid to kick at them, but I’m not the kind of guy to go gently into the dark night. My feet hit something soft. A man grunted. A piece of handrail flashed in from the side. There was a blinding crack on my temple and I went numb.

  I had only the vaguest awareness of being dragged out of the trunk and dropped. I lay there, teeth to the ground. I heard sounds I couldn’t identify. Like an electric motor under duress. In time, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I could see nothing but the dirt in front of my face.

  A man had his boot on the back of my neck. His leg weighed a hundred pounds. I managed to turn my head sideways so I could breathe without sucking dirt.

  I became aware of light in my peripheral vision. I coughed and jerked and managed to turn my head and body a few degrees. The man standing on my neck didn’t seem to notice.

  The light was the beam of headlights. It shined on a small Lodgepole pine. There was a rope looped around the pine maybe twenty feet up and a cable that stretched back to a winch on the bumper of the vehicle. The pine was being bent back.

  I remembered what Agent Ramos had said about the shape-shifter killer, the guy who liked his murders to have flair. I now understood how Eduardo Valdez had fallen from the sky. McKenna was about to do the same, attempting a space launch from a medieval catapult.

  The pine was pulled back to the breaking point, then stopped. When the winch turned off, the night was silent. No one had spoken a word.

  The man standing on me stepped off and shined the light in my eyes again. He bent down, grabbed my belt and picked up my 215 pounds like I was a medium-weight suitcase. He set me on my feet and waited a few seconds to see if I could balance, then pushed me in the small of my back. I made baby steps in my shackles toward the launch site.

&nbs
p; A soft sound came from the darkness by my side. Air moving. Something rolling on the dirt. There was a thud of stick on skull. The man pushing me collapsed to the ground.

  “Get on the handlebars!” A frantic whisper. “Lift your legs up so your leg chains don’t catch!”

  I tried to do as told. A strong arm reached around my chest and pulled me back until my butt came down on a horizontal bar. My legs came off the ground. I did my best to hold them up away from the front wheel of the mountain bike. We rolled away into the dark as the man on the ground rose up and the man working the winch ran toward us.

  The bike went faster. A branch slapped at my face. We pitched down and sped up in what seemed like a free-fall into the dark forest. I started to lose my balance. The zip cuffs bit into my wrists as I reached back and down and found the center post that supported the handlebars. My fingers were vice-grips on the smooth metal.

  “You made me so angry the other day,” the man behind me said as we arced to the left, then right, on a dark trail he must have known by heart. “I was driving past Kinkos and recognized you by your dog. I stopped, thinking I might teach you a lesson.”

  The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. We went over another pitch and the front wheel beneath me hummed with speed. The vibration multiplied in my head. The pain was excruciating.

  I could see nothing in the dark. We bounced, and I almost flew off. It was amazing that he could tell where the trail was. He was expert at handling the bike.

  “Then those men grabbed you,” he said. “I followed and parked in the forest a ways back. Lucky I had my bike with me.”

  The trail curved into a huge sweep to the left as a valley cut through the slope. We sped up to a frightening pace.

  “Can’t you slow down,” I mumbled. My legs were straightened out before me, the chain between them dancing on the tread of the front wheel.

  “Don’t worry, I used to race these,” the man said. “BMX, Motocross, mountain bikes, road racing. If it had two wheels, I was the man.”

  I finally recognized the voice.

  Tyrone Handkins.

  FIFTY-TWO

  When we were a safe distance from my abductors, Tyrone slowed and stopped for a few seconds. I got off, and he used a pocket knife to cut the zip cuffs. I stretched and tried to relax my muscles. Then I once again balanced on the handlebars, and Tyrone took it slower than before.

  “I’ve been riding these trails for a couple years now,” he said as we swooped down and around through the forest. “I know all of the drainages below Mt. Rose. This area is crisscrossed with trails. Some are old Jeep trails, and some are single track like this one.”

  We descended a couple thousand feet and coasted out of the forest and onto the desert. A spectacular vista of Reno lights opened up before us. The trail smoothed out, and I concentrated on holding my legs and shackles up and away from the front wheel as Tyrone raced through the night.

  Soon, we came up behind the estate of Tyrone’s boss, Tony Nova. There was a gate in the fence not far from where I’d pried an opening several days before. Tyrone stopped and unlocked it. The final ride was a quick descent down to the gardens around the house.

  “I’ve timed that ride before. You can get down the mountain faster on a bike than in a car. If we hurry,” Tyrone said, “we can get up to Reno and get your dog before those men get there to wait for you to show up.”

  “How many men did you see?” I asked.

  “Two.”

  I remembered three or four car doors shutting, but I was in too much pain to think clearly.

  Tyrone rushed me into the huge garage where there was a black Suburban with smoked windows, the burgundy Mercedes I’d seen before, and another mountain bike. Tyrone found a hammer and chisel. He went to work on the chain between my feet, hammering the chisel against the concrete floor.

  “You left a car up on the mountain,” I said.

  “Yeah. My old Jeep. I’ll get it later.”

  “Now you can move,” Tyrone said as he cut through the chain between my ankles. “We’ll cut the ankle cuffs later.”

  We jumped into the Suburban, backed out into the night and headed up to Reno. “There’s aspirin in the glove box. Water bottles in the center storage compartment.”

  I ate four aspirin, then leaned back and shut my eyes for the rest of the drive.

  Spot was still in Mrs. Duchamp’s 4-Runner. I got in to an eager reception. I started the car and followed Tyrone back to Tony Nova’s house. The big gate automatically shut behind us as we turned into the drive.

  Two garage doors opened as we approached. Tyrone pulled into one bay, and gestured me into the other. I let Spot out and he explored while Tyrone tried to figure out how to work the chisel on the ankle cuffs without cutting me. I finally lay on top of the Suburban’s hood and positioned my feet against the metal post of a bike stand while Tyrone patiently swung the hammer against the chisel.

  When we were done, we walked out of the garage, past the fountain to the house. Tyrone pushed alarm buttons next to the front door, then shut it behind us. He fetched beers and we sat out on the dark deck next to the covered hot tub. Spot lay at the edge of the deck, nose pointing toward the lights of Reno. I slid down on my chaise lounge so I could lean my head back and rest.

  “Now do you believe that I’m not trying to kill you?” Tyrone said.

  “Yes, no, maybe, all of the above.” I sipped a little beer. “But thank you for giving me a ride down off the mountain.”

  “I couldn’t figure out what I saw,” he said.

  “They were going to stick me up on the mast, whipsaw the boat and see if I could fly.”

  “What?”

  I didn’t answer. After a minute I said, “Tony Nova is still out of town?”

  Tyrone took a deep breath. “I’m going to take a chance on you. There is no person named Tony Nova. I filed a fictitious name statement giving me the legal rights to the name Tony Nova.”

  “I thought it was Tony Nova who owned the company called Remake Productions.”

  “That’s correct.”

  I tried to figure it out, but my head hurt too much. “Why all the names?”

  Tyrone drank some more beer. “Because they are useful when you’re wanted for murder.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  I drank beer as I thought about what Tyrone said. “Only way it makes sense,” I said, turning to look at him, “is that your real name is Luther Washington. You’re the kid who stole motorcycles, and Glory was your little sister.”

  Tyrone’s eyes went to the deck boards, then out to the city lights. “Yeah,” he said, his voice somber.

  “You’ve changed a lot. I never recognized you.”

  “Kids grow up.”

  “Before you supposedly drowned in the San Francisco Bay, you were alleged to have killed Willard Kilpatrick. You’re going to tell me that you weren’t his murderer.”

  “Correct. I wasn’t. I’ve never known why I was the one they framed. Maybe it was because I ran with a gang in the area where he was killed. I’d been in trouble a lot, so it made me an easy scapegoat. Mom always kept the door locked. I think someone waited until she was taking the garbage out, then sneaked in and put the gun under my bed. Then they phoned in an anonymous tip.”

  “And the kid they pulled out of the water who looked like you?”

  “A sad day for him, whoever he was. Even mom thought it was me. That was the hardest day of my life, having mom think I was dead. But, hard as that was, it would have been worse if I’d gone to death row on the Kilpatrick killing.” He paused. “Then Glory gets killed, and everything else pales in comparison.”

  “I don’t understand why you stayed in this area. It would have been safer to leave.”

  “I did leave for a few years. Glory stayed with mom. I learned something about the music business, then came back to help grow Glory’s career. My plan was to find the man who framed me. Glory wanted the same thing. But first we had to earn enough money to giv
e us options. Then we needed to figure out what happened and learn who had set me up. After I jumped bail, before they thought I drowned, I headed east and stopped in Minneapolis. I got a job at Paisley Park, Prince’s recording studio. I spent a lot of time working out and getting fit. I went to community college and studied acting and even got some parts at the Penumbra Theater in St. Paul. Another thing I did was to take classes from a voice coach. I learned to enunciate and speak with correct grammar. Well, mostly correct, anyway.”

  “So you came back west and started Remake Productions,” I said. “You and Glory made a bunch of money in the music business, and you bought this house under the name of Tony Nova?”

  “No. The real estate is owned by Tyrone Handkins. Tony Nova was only for the music business. My employees believe their boss Tony Nova is a reclusive music promoter. Work instructions come by email, and occasionally through Glory’s bodyguard, Tyrone Handkins.”

  “When did you become Tyrone?”

  “Changing your name is easy in some states. A friend came to court with me and testified that I was changing my name for personal reasons and not because I was trying to evade the law.”

  “You lied.”

  “Of course. Otherwise, I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison or be executed for a crime I didn’t commit. What would you do?”

  “Lie.”

  “So the judge granted the name change,” Tyrone said. “That’s why I called it Remake Productions. For remaking my life. Then I remade four ghetto kids into the boy band Meen Tyme, and their concerts are overflowing with suburban girls. Hot Summerz is two unwed mothers and a recovering crack addict. I designed a look, a sound, a name, and their second CD went gold.”

  “What about Glory? Did she need remaking?”

  Tyrone shook his head. “No. Glory was herself from the beginning. The only thing she needed was exposure. She had the voice, the style, the personality...” Tyrone stopped.