by J. Paul Drew
“Uh, gee,” I said, or something along those lines. “I guess I’m kind of under pressure. I mean, this has never happened before.”
Only with Maureen, anyway.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Don’t you ever have writer’s block?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Well, it’s the same thing. You’ve got lover’s block.”
“Oh.” Oddly, I was relieved. “Does it ever go away?”
“Sometimes.” She put her head on my chest and closed her eyes.
I couldn’t go to sleep, so I thought about the case. It was a way to keep from thinking about what had just happened. I thought the whole thing through, going over each separate incident, right from the moment Jack told me about it.
My mind kept going back to something that had happened the day before. It was something to do with the case, but it was an incident so trivial I couldn’t believe it meant anything. It had to, though— otherwise, why would it keep coming back?
I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 21
I slept about three minutes. I woke up because Sardis was beating on my chest and saying my name. I knew, of course, what had happened. The murderer had somehow got into the apartment. This was making Sardis nervous, which was why she was waking me up, but I knew, naturally, that there was nothing to fear, as he was making love with Maureen. I tried to tell this to Sardis, but she kept saying, “Wake up.”
So I woke up even more and she said, “I know where she is.”
“Lindsay?”
“Who’d you think?”
I couldn’t say “Maureen,” so I kept quiet.
“We have an old friend from college who owns a dude ranch.”
“A dude ranch?”
“Wouldn’t that be a natural place to take a kid? You said so yourself.”
“Did I?” I come awake fairly slowly.
“Yes, when we were thinking of places they might have gone. You said it and I forgot about it and then something kept bothering me. I couldn’t get to sleep.”
“I can understand that.”
“Well, it was what you said. About a dude ranch.”
“Oh.”
“Our friend Rachel Carroll, from Newcombe, lives on one. And she has a kid about Terry’s age. And here’s the best part— the place is practically inaccessible.”
“Oh again.”
“I was thinking that even if she’s traveling around to every amusement park in the country, she has to have a sort of home base. Rachel’s the person she’d go to. I’m sure of it.”
“Was she close to Rachel in college?”
“Like that.” Sardis crossed her fingers. That night she was big on hand signals.
“Where is this place, anyway?”
“Lassen County.”
“Why don’t we call her?”
“Now?” Sardis looked at her bedside digital clock. “It’s one-fifteen.”
“Okay, let’s wait till morning. Three people have been killed, but probably no one else’ll buy the farm for the next few hours.”
She was already dialing. I listened.
“Rachel? Darling, it’s Sardis. No, nothing’s wrong. I mean, a lot of things are wrong, but I’m not sick or anything. Listen, I have a very important question to ask you. It really is a matter of life and death, okay? Rachel, is Lindsay there?… She’s not.” There was a pause. “I need to know because things are very fucked up here. I’ve really got to talk to her…. Okay, dear, I know you’d help if you could.”
Sardis hung up. “She’s there.”
“I thought she wasn’t.”
“Rachel didn’t sound like herself at all. Lindsay must have told her under no circumstances to tell anybody where she is. All Rachel asked was why I needed to know, not why I thought she’d be there or what was going on or anything. I think she thought Jacob was holding me hostage or something.”
“You should have told her about Brissette and Tillman.” She pondered. “Maybe. But look, in the morning Rachel will tell Lindsay I called and she’ll probably call me.”
“We can’t take the chance. How long does it take to get there?”
“About six or eight hours. The roads are unbelievable.”
“Let’s fly.”
“Are you nuts? There’s no way to…”
She stopped, because this time I was already dialing, calling my friend Crusher Wilcox, amateur pilot and small plane owner.
“Crusher?… No, nothing’s wrong. I just need your help, that’s all. I have to get to Lassen County tonight.”
“You want to borrow my car?”
“No. I want you to fly me there. A friend and me. I’ll buy the gas.”
He brightened. “Oh, fly. Let me see— the forecast says, umhmm. The hmm, something or other.”
He didn’t really say that. It’s just that when Crusher starts talking about flying, it all sounds like that to me. I think he was figuring out if the weather was going to be good enough to do it.
“Looks good,” he said finally. “Where, exactly, do you want to go?”
“Just a second.” I asked Sardis.
“Little Valley,” she said. “Near there, anyway.”
“What else is it near?”
“Nothing, really. Little Valley’s on the edge of Lassen National Forest. Susanville’s not too far.”
I spoke to Crusher. “Near Lassen National Forest. It doesn’t bode too well for an airport.”
“This could be interesting,” he said. “Very interesting indeed. Meet me at the airport in forty-five minutes.” He meant the Oakland Airport, where he kept his Cessna 182, and we were there with five minutes to spare, even though we’d taken time to throw a few clothes in a bag.
One thing I’ll say about Crusher— he’s always ready to fly. Any time of the night or day, all you have to do is say the word and he’s Mr. Enthusiasm. He’d already gassed up and figured out a flight plan.
You can’t talk in a small plane until you’re five miles away from the airport, because this might distract the pilot from hearing the tower. So we were pretty well on our way by the time Crusher noted cheerily that weather conditions weren’t exactly ideal, but he was sure we’d be all right. Quite a challenge, he seemed to think.
I asked him where we were going to land, figuring he’d looked up the nearest tiny airport in some pilot’s manual or other. Good old Crusher. He’d probably have it all figured out.
“Let’s see.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s nearly three now. I think it’ll be okay. Yep. Should be okay. It’ll probably take us a couple of hours to get there.”
“What does the time have to do with it?”
“Can’t land until dawn.”
“How come? If you can take off at three A.M., why can’t you land when you want to?”
“No lights. Or anyway, maybe no lights. Fall River Mills is the closest airport to Little Valley and who knows what they’ve got there? See, a lot of little airports don’t have anybody there at night, so they turn the lights off. On the other hand, some of them have a great thing— you can turn on the runway lights by punching your microphone button five times. Very ingenious system. Not sure about Fall River Mills.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Well, let’s see, how close are you going to Little Valley?”
“About three or four miles,” said Sardis. “Southwest.”
“No good for Fall River Mills. It’s a good fifteen miles away. I can set you down within a mile or two. I mean, who’s going to be driving in a national forest at dawn?”
“What difference does that make?”
“That and the light are the two crucial factors. If it’s dark, we can’t see to land; and if there’s cars on the road, we can’t land on top of them.”
“You mean we’re gonna do it in the road?”
“Like I said, it’ll be a challenge.”
We encountered, as the airlines say, unexpected turbulence— unexpected by Sar
dis and me, at least. I guess Crusher pretty well figured on it because the four-seater was well-stocked with barf bags.
Sardis only threw up once. I regret to say that my record was somewhat worse. My nerves get a bit frayed when I’m in a plane that feels like it’s being hammered apart by Thor and half a dozen of his minions.
But do you think that bothered Crusher? The truth is, I don’t know. Either he kept up a line of relaxed patter to keep our spirits up or it didn’t faze him.
He told Sardis how he got his nickname (shortened from Bus Crusher after a traffic mishap involving a public conveyance), and in between heaves we told him why we wanted to go to Lassen National Forest in the middle of the night.
He nodded, as if three murders and a missing TV personality came along every day. He’s a mucky-muck at a Fortune 500 company, so I guess he sees dirtier stuff all the time. Anyway, he sure took it calmly. He had only one question: “Think Lindsay and the kid’ll come back with you?”
“Who knows?”
“Because if they do, I can’t give you a ride back. Plane only holds four,” he said apologetically. “But if it’s just the two of you, or maybe three, I could go to Fall River Mills and wait for you.”
“Great. We’ll phone you there.”
The hammering stopped after an hour or two and we were feeling relatively calm when we began circling the area of the forest where Crusher thought we could land.
It was dawn then, or just beginning to be, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything so pretty. The first pink streaks, the redwoods, your regulation dawn— but somehow, after that flight, the freshness of it was plain moving. No other word for it.
On the third circle, we found a great little landing strip, or so Crusher seemed to think. It looked to me like a tiny band of asphalt between two rows of giant redwoods. If you’ve ever flown into the Hong Kong airport, you know the thrill of squeezing between two rows of skyscrapers to land. This was a lot like that, as far as the thrills went, only it was eerily beautiful.
The amazing thing about redwoods is how still they can seem. They don’t have leaves that flutter in the wind or branches that stick out at this angle or that. They just stand there, tall and conical and green and primeval. If you’ve ever been to Wall Street on a weekend, when it’s uninhabited, you have an idea how eerie extremely tall things can get. When they are beautiful tall things, you just naturally get an eerily beautiful effect.
Crusher made what I called a perfect landing, and what he called an “A-minus” one. I thanked him, heaped praise all over him, and asked him the troubling question that had nagged at me for the last couple of hours: “What do we do now?”
“Almost forgot. Here’s a map for you.” And he taxied down the runway, or what passed for it.
It looked to be about a five-mile hike to Little Valley. Sardis said it was another seven miles to the Lazy C Ranch, which is what Ms. Carroll called her establishment. If we wanted to take the ranch by surprise— which we did— we could hardly ask them to send a car. So we started walking, thinking maybe we could reassess things once we got to Little Valley.
We’d gone about a mile and a half, I’d say, when a man in a truck stopped us. He was a ranger, and feeling macho: “What do you folks think you’re doing here?”
I did the talking. “Walking to Little Valley. Are we going the right way?”
“How’d y’all get here?”
“Friend dropped us off.”
“Friend dropped you off. Do tell.”
I didn’t really understand why a forest ranger was harassing two harmless citizens on a public road, and I said as much.
“Don’t get smart with me, buddy,” he said. “Let’s see what’s in that bag.”
“What? Are you crazy?” I didn’t get it at all.
But Sardis apparently did. “You think it’s dope of some sort, don’t you? Here, let me show you.”
And she opened it up, something I wouldn’t have done in a million years. It was the right thing to do.
“Oh, listen, I apologize. I mean, you see a private plane land on one of these roads this time in the morning, you got to figure something funny’s going on. Private planes mean dope, you know what I mean?”
Now that he mentioned it, I did. He kept on talking: “But now that I think of it, they’d be picking something up or taking it away, and they’d have cars and every kind of thing. It’d never just be two people walking along with a backpack. No way that fits in.”
He paused a moment. “It was a wonderful thing to see, that plane. Just went down right between the redwoods and landed. I mean, I didn’t see the part when it actually touched down because the trees were in the way, but it’s gone now so it didn’t crash. You folks didn’t happen to see it, did you?”
“Not exactly,” said Sardis. “We were in it at the time.”
“No shit! That was you folks?”
Of course he’d known all the time that it was. Now that he’d decided we weren’t dope distributors, he was curious as hell about who we were and what we were up to. So I didn’t see why we shouldn’t tell him. Maybe he’d be so grateful he’d be willing to do us a favor in return.
“Sardis,” I said, “I think we should tell him about it.” I spoke with what I hoped was an air of great solemnity. Sardis nodded, equally solemn.
“Maybe you could help us,” I said to the ranger.
“Why, sure. I’ll be glad to.” He paused and thought it over. “Uh… help you with what?”
“Well, you’re probably wondering why we landed a plane in here at dawn— I mean, you probably think it’s a little eccentric, right?”
“It doesn’t happen every day, exactly.”
I looked at him for a long time, hoping to give the impression I was sizing him up. “Can we trust you?” I said, after one of the longer pauses in recorded history.
“Well… sure.”
“It’s kind of secret.”
“Hey, anything I can do, you know? Like I said, you can trust me.”
“I’m Paul Mcdonald,” I said, “and this is Sardis Kincannon.”
“Bill Carver.”
“Bill, I work for a private detective. Miss Kincannon’s got a friend in trouble.”
Sardis looked very sad.
“You see, Bill, the guy I work for— the detective?”
Bill nodded.
“Murdered.”
“No!”
“I’m afraid so. And he’s not the only one. Three people have died so far. So you see why we’re so worried about Miss Kincannon’s friend.” I paused for dramatic effect. “And her little girl.”
“Yeah. I guess I do.”
“I mean, you might think the plane was a little melodramatic, but there’s just no time to be lost. Because we have to get there first. Do you understand?”
“I think I do. Because if they get there first…” he drew a finger across his throat.
“That’s right.”
“The only thing is…”
I was ready for him. I interrupted him in mid-sentence. “I know. I know. How do you know we’re not them? Well, listen, that’s easy. You don’t think we’d try an operation like this without friends, do you? No. The authorities know what we’re doing. We have allies. Have to in this business or you don’t survive, know what I mean?” I caught a glimpse of Sardis and saw her mouth twitching. “So look, here’s what you do. I’m going to give you a phone number. It’s the number of the Chronicle in San Francisco— ever read the Chron?”
“Never miss it.”
“Well, you call this number and you ask for the city editor— guy named Joey Bernstein. He’ll back us up. But listen, here’s the important thing. If they try to give you to somebody else, some assistant deskman or something, don’t talk to him, whatever you do. It’s very, very important to keep this quiet, you understand? I mean I can’t overstress the importance…”
“You can trust me, Paul.”
“Good. Because they will try to foist you off on someb
ody else.” I looked at my watch. “Joey won’t be in for three hours yet. So what you have to do, you have to say it’s an emergency and ask them to get Joey at home. He’ll take the call if you use my name.”
“Gee, I hate to wake him up.”
“Hey, Bill, I do too, but this is a matter of life and death, you know? I mean, if anything was ever that, this is. Look, Joey likes to sleep late as much as the next guy, but if he thought he could save a woman’s life…”
“Paul,” said Sardis, “you’re forgetting Terry.”
“…the lives of a woman and her child, what choice do you think he’d make? I mean, what kind of a man do you think he is?”
“Well, I think we can have it both ways.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Look, I believe you folks. You folks seem like real sincere people to me. What can I do for you?”
“Do you think you could give us a lift to Little Valley? I think we could get a taxi or something there.”
“Hah! You kiddin’? This time of the morning? Now, hop in. Where we goin’?”
“Lazy C Ranch.”
So that’s how we got a ride to Rachel’s. Bill made one quick stop at the ranger station and got us to the Lazy C by 6:30.
Rachel’s ranch house was aSpanish style, badly run-down for a place that took in paying guests, and completely charming, to my mind. Nobody was up but the dog. He went for my left heel.
“Sit, Ishi,” said Sardis. “Come. Heel. It’s Aunt Sardis, dammit. Down, you sucker. Paul, don’t!”
She squealed the last just as I raised the backpack to bean him with, and I would have hit him a good one except that Rachel, aroused by the ruckus, appeared and called him off.
She was a handsome woman, dark with green eyes. Sardis had told me she’d been running a ranch alone for the last two years— ever since she caught her husband with one of the wranglers and tossed him out. The Lazy C did have some female wranglers, it seemed, but that wasn’t the kind Rachel’s husband was fooling around with. According to Sardis, Rachel said if it had been a woman, she would have kept him around without too many hard feelings. But she didn’t like having her cowboy illusions shattered.