“I haven’t either, to tell you the truth, Mr. Holt.”
“You know those guys?”
“Seen them around. I live out here.”
“They know where?”
“I don’t see how they could.”
Valerie looked down at Rusty. “You train that dog?”
John looked down at Rusty, too, and Holt saw on his face an expression of tragic surprise. “To sit and stay. When he saw that guy choking you, he started growling like I’d never heard. He was just a stray when I got him, so he must have learned from someone else. He was a real good dog. Shit, now he’s dead.”
“I’d like to give you another one,” said Valerie.
“Well . . .” said John. “Uh . . . I need to use the sandbox. Excuse me.”
Holt gathered with his party while John went to the bathroom in Olie’s. Titisi examined the red inflammation across his stomach and felt for broken ribs, then pronounced himself unhurt.
Fargo was still checking the trucks, down under the red one for a look at the gas tank. Randell sat in the shade with Holt and Valerie and the Ugandan.
Ten minutes passed before John returned. To Holt’s eye, his face had become more ruddy, his movements were no longer quite so slow, there was a quickness in his glance. He went to his truck, removed the revolver and appeared to stash it under the seat. Then he started up the reluctant old Ford and pulled it into the shade of a pepper tree. Holt could see a big chocolate labrador licking John’s face as he reached across to roll the window down a little more.
When John approached, he held his hat in his hand. “What, exactly, was happening here?” he asked.
“That’s a story we might want to tell somewhere else,” said Holt. “Let me ask you something, John—are you clean with the law?”
“So far.”
“Because we’d like to get out of here without filing any statements. Those bikers won’t be talking—no reason we should, either. Unless you want to explain that revolver in your coat.”
“Yeah . . . I mean, no. You’re right.”
“Can we take you home?”
“I’ve got the truck.”
“I mean, can we escort you home? We all need somewhere to settle our nerves. You close to here?”
“Just a few miles. But really, I—”
“I insist,” said Holt. “It’s the right thing to do.”
“Well, okay, then.”
Holt threw a set of truck keys to Randell, then helped Valerie and John lift the big dog into the bed of John’s old pickup. It lay there will all the innocence of the dead, a helpless mass held together by skin. The labrador watched through the rear cab window, puzzled.
“Lead the way,” Holt said. “We’ll follow.”
A few miles out Highway 371, Holt noticed that John’s pickup truck was accelerating, fast. The Land Rover kept up easily, although doing seventy miles an hour on the narrow, winding two-lane seemed foolhardy. He checked the rearview to find Lane Fargo right on his tail, a senselessly aggressive act wholly indicative of Lane’s shame at being overcome by lowly motorcycle thugs. Holt lowered his window and waved Fargo off.
He didn’t even notice it until rounding a gentle bend, where John’s right-turn signal began to flash. Holt saw the brake lights, the abrupt slowing of the Ford, the turnoff to a dirt road leading back into the hills, and, only then, the column of deep black smoke rising from somewhere in the middle distance.
“No,” he said.
Keeping up with John on the rutted dirt road wasn’t easy. The Ford threw up clouds of dust as it skidded around the turns and braked heavily before the drops. Lewis, Clark and Sally bounced savagely in the back of the Rover—at one point Holt glanced back to see all three of them suspended between floor and roof, twelve legs scrambling for a purchase that wasn’t there. The road snaked on, twist upon turn, cutback upon rise upon dip. Then it widened into a straight-away that banked into a steep climb. The Ford’s back end slid left and right as it raced up the hill and disappeared over the crest. Holt laid back a little, then punched the Rover up and over the ridge, where before him lay a gentle meadow marked with a few trailers, a cinderblock building, and what must have been a house trailer, far on the perimeter of the place, flaring up like a struck match, gushing black smoke into the blue desert sky.
A short heavyset man stood about thirty yards from the inferno, a water hose in both hands. The arc of water feebly vanished into the flames. The Ford skidded to a stop beside him and John jumped out, followed by the dog. Holt braked early and pulled in behind the Ford. He yanked his fire extinguisher free of the floorboard by the seat, but he could see that it was already too late: the trailer looked like a box of fireworks set on fire. The propane tank already had blown, judging by the gaping hole at one end. He saw the heavyset man nodding violently, taking one hand off the hose to point down the road.
“Those pigs,” hissed Valerie. “Those absolute human swine.”
Then, as Holt watched, John returned to his truck, threw forward the seat and pulled out a cloth case, from which he extracted what looked like a 12 gauge Remington automatic. He hurled the case back behind the seat and slammed it back. From somewhere in the cab he took a box of shells, pried open the top and grabbed three, which he loaded into the gun. Then he was back in the truck and the labrador had jumped in with him and the Ford fishtailed in a wide, gravel-throwing turn that threw up a cloud of dust as John gunned it back down hill toward the dirt road.
“Stay with him, Dad.”
“I’m staying with him, Val. Hold on tight.”
John must have known every foot of the miserable dirt road, because he took it at an astonishing velocity. A mile from the trailers he shot up a wide, well-tended drive to a ranch house set in a meadow of grazing horses. By the time Holt caught up, John was talking with two men by a corral, then he jumped back into his truck and skidded back out in Holt’s direction. John nodded at him as he flew past. Lane Fargo, Randell and Titisi had to swerve to miss him. Then another stop a half mile further down. Again John was conferring with neighbors as Holt finally arrived, and again the young man was in his truck and blasting back to the road by the time the dust cleared and Holt could make sense of what was going on. Another half mile down, the Ford skidded to a stop beside a run-down little batch of trailers. Three women sat in the shade, drinking beers and smoking. This time, Holt saw that John took his shotgun with him as he walked past the women and threw open the door of the largest trailer, a sun-faded slum of a unit, slouching off-center and unshaded by a very large and very dead tree. John disappeared inside, then came out and pushed past the women, who appeared to be cussing him mightily. John snapped something back at them, but Holt was too far away to hear it. Beside him, Valerie was scanning the desert with her dark brown eyes. “He’ll never find them out here. They’re miles away by now.”
“He needs to play this out.”
Two more miles of anguishing dirt road, three more fruitless stops, all transpiring under the growing desert heat. Finally the Ford slowed and grunted to a stop where the dirt road met the highway again, and the door flew open and John got out, slammed it hard, took three steps to the wooden fence running alongside the road and kicked one of the dry twisted posts, his boot shattering it and the three strands of rusted barbed wire shivering with the impact. He walked back to the truck and looked down into the bed. Then he opened the driver’s side door, pulled out the gun and a small, six-pack sized cooler. He walked to the edge of the dirt road and hurled the cooler into the air, then raised the gun and blasted it three times before it landed, each shot reducing the thing to smaller pieces that threw off wobbling jets of dark liquid until the mangled former box landed in the sagebrush, bounced, and rolled off into the sand. John pitched his gun back into the truck cab, looked at Holt, then turned his back to them, shook his head, and lowered it.
“Righteous anger,” said Holt. “It’s the best thing he can have right now.”
“Besides a home and a live dog.�
��
“Well put.”
“Poor man. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I’ll make it up to him.”
“We’ll make it up to him, Valerie.”
Then she looked at her father with an expression he had come to both love and fear. He loved the way it came so directly from Carolyn and himself, passed on like a gift, the way her pupils dilated and her wide lips formed a slight frown and the vertical lines between her eyebrows furrowed—all of her conviction gathering force, being brought to bear. He feared it because Valerie was intractable when she looked like this, ferociously stubborn. And he knew how that ungovernable determination had led to the best things in his life, and the worst. It was the Holt energy, passed from generation to generation, powerful as a runaway big-rig, and as difficult to stop.
So he simply waited for his daughter to speak.
“We’re taking him home,” she said.
Holt’s heart sank a little. “That’s not a good idea for anyone,” he said. “But maybe he could spend a few weeks here at the lake house—time to get a new trailer.”
Valerie continued to look at him, disbelief mounting in her dark brown eyes. Holt wondered how a twenty-two-year old woman could turn his logic to mush, make him feel idiotic.
“So they can find him, and burn up our house, too?” she asked. “No. He needs a home, a base to operate from. He needs safety and time to regroup. He saved my life. He’s coming to Liberty Ridge, Dad.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to come to Liberty Ridge.”
“He does. Look, Dad, what did you say about thirty seconds ago?”
“I said righteous anger—”
“—You said ‘we’ll make it up to him.’ So, this is how we make it up to him. Simple!”
She reached across the truck with both hands, grabbed her father’s face and kissed him once on each cheek, then once on his forehead.
Then, with all assumptions made but not another word, she got out of the truck and walked toward John, the man who had, at great price, saved her life. Vann Holt watched her approach him, his heart pounding not only from the punishment of the chase, but from colliding emotions of gratitude, impotence, jealousy and shame. He watched her place her hand on John’s arm.
“Not like that, we won’t,” he said. “Not like that, girl of mine.”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Josh Weinstein and Sharon Dumars watched the scene unfold from the privacy of a 1986 Dodge van parked across the highway at a feed and tack store. The van featured one-way windows, an antenna tuned to the transmission frequency of a beeper-cum-radio attached to John’s belt, a parabolic microphone mounted on top, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and large magnetic signs on each side that said “Empire Cable Services.” Anyone calling that number would find it disconnected and no longer in use.
They sat on two stools in the oven-like heat, peering through the windows with binoculars.
When Rusty met his double-barreled end, Sharon gasped and tightened, and though Weinstein found himself profoundly shaken by the sight of a perfectly good Bureau dog blown to smithereens by Bureau part-timers, he told himself that Rusty did not die in vain.
The stunt-packs of blood had gone off perfectly, assuaging Weinstein’s second-biggest worry. They’d worked hard on the choreography, but he knew that a lucky, unanticipated move from Valerie could dislodge the wiring duct-taped to Sam’s shoulder beneath the t-shirt and denim vest. They’d been thorough enough to use a half pint of Sam’s own blood, on the off chance that a suspicious Holt, or, more likely, Lane Fargo, might try to run some lab work on what would surely splatter all over Valerie’s body and clothes. Weinstein’s greatest fear, though—that some genuine innocent bystander would come by and skew the whole delicate charade—never materialized. The Riverside County Sheriff was a worry, too. So Weinstein, Dumars and all four of their teammates had flooded the Indio Sheriff’s Substation with calls just before noon. Posing as property owners, they reported hunters trespassing onto posted property many miles from Anza Valley—a common enough occurrence in many parts of the desert on any October 15. Not a deputy was seen.
Watching through the binoculars while the sweat ran down his back, hearing the soundtrack projected wonderfully by John’s transmitter, Weinstein had been anguished at how slowly the whole thing seemed to take place. But later when he checked the time it was almost exactly as they’d planned: one minute and thirty-three seconds from the bikers’ surprise encore to their final departure. Josh had taken a deep breath as he watched the war party roar away, and noticed the high-pitched, anxious smell of his own body.
Weinstein could only hope that Mickey—the giant—and Sam would make it to John’s trailer undelayed, open the propane valves and toss in the flare without interference from Tim, the groundskeeper at the High Desert Rod and Gun Club. If necessary, Mickey would engage the groundskeeper. But twenty minutes after he’d set the fire, Mickey called on the cellular phone—stashed in the tool box of his Harley—to say that all had gone well. He reported that Tim had looked on from a few hundred yards away as the two bikers did their biker thing on John Menden’s helpless domicile. The four men and three bikes had zoomed up the lowered ramp and into the back of a “State-to-State” moving trailer waiting at a turnout on Highway 371, which is where Mickey had placed the call.
Of course, the best laid plans didn’t amount to much without luck, and luck was what Weinstein had been praying for ever since Norton had green-lighted him after lunch that afternoon in Santa Ana. They could lead Wayfarer to water, but they couldn’t make him drink. And all John could do was save the day, be polite and a little recalcitrant, and use his native likeability to sway Wayfarer toward meaningful gestures. Josh had told John to “aw-shucks the sonofabitch to death.”
An invitation to stay at the Lake Riverside Estates home would be the best they could reasonably hope for. If Holt went even this far, however, there was at least a small chance that John’s generous refusal (“They’d find me here pretty easy, Mr.
Holt—then we’d both be out of a home.”) could lead to the ultimate goal: Liberty Ridge. It was the kind of common sense pessimism that would appeal to Vann Holt.
The backup plan, if Holt offered John no sanctuary whatsoever, was to let John appeal directly to Wayfarer—at some point—for work, shelter, perhaps a little start-up loan to get a new trailer. Burning down the trailer was John’s idea, and Weinstein was impressed by his informant’s sense of follow-through. Weinstein also saw that John was profoundly moved by the thought of losing the trailer, nasty little piece of aluminum that it was.
Things were out of Joshua’s hands now, and luck was what he needed. He had always been a lucky man, except with Rebecca Harris, and, by extension, John Menden. Guiding the van from the feed and tack parking lot after the pickup and Land Rovers had caravanned away, Josh Weinstein could not deny the faint nausea he felt at so brazenly tempting the Fates.
But one hour later, after John’s mock chase of his tormentors through the Anza Valley desert, Josh’s nausea was banished by pure elation. Josh parked the van two houses away from Holt’s Riverside Estates home, assuming that, after the fire, this would be the logical place for Holt and his party to take John. He watched as the two Land Rovers pulled into the wide, semi-circle of a driveway, and John’s Ford lumbered up behind them. Weinstein’s ears roared with blood.
“God, I’m good, he whispered to Sharon.
“Yes, I am.”
“We’re good. We’re just too damn good, Sharon. We get done with this, they’ll want us to run the whole country.”
“You’re really not worried about that radio on his belt?”
“He’s a newspaper editor, and the only full-time reporter. He’s always on call. If Wayfarer has an allergic reaction to a beeper at this point, we’re sunk. But we’re not sunk. What we are is damned good.”
The transmission came through clearly, even when John and his benefactors disappeared into the large ranch-style home.
/> HOLT: Get comfortable everybody, make calls if you want. There’s bathrooms all over this damned place.
TITISI: Not what I expected for a hunting lodge.
VALERIE: We’ve got everything to drink. John?
JOHN: Not for me, thanks.
VALERIE: Some cold water at least?
JOHN: That might hit the spot.
“Listen to him,” said Weinstein, actually rubbing his long-fingered hands together in a parody of enthusiasm. “My Joe. My man. My secret agent. My handsome little goy-boy nobody can resist.”
“I think he’s scared,” said Sharon.
“I hope so.”
The transmitted conversation followed John, of course, and for ten minutes amounted to little more than polite mundanities. At one point Titisi said that he could use a few hundred men like John in Uganda. The reel-to-reel took it all. Then the moment of revelation that Weinstein had been careful not to expect, was thrown at him like a firecracker:
HOLT: I was thinking we could put you up at my home in Orange County for the night. It’s comfortable. I realize it would be a long commute out here to work, but I don’t see any sense in stranding you here with those scum on the prowl.
JOHN: That’s really nice of you to offer, but it wouldn’t sit well with me.
HOLT: Relatives around here? Friends?
JOHN: Well, not exactly. I’ve only been in Anza Valley for a few months.
VALERIE: Then what doesn’t sit well?
JOHN: Well, it’s an imposition for one thing.
VALERIE: You ought to see Dad’s house. He’s got enough room for Juma’s army, then some. Really, it could work out just fine. It would give you a chance to let the trouble blow over, then set up a new trailer. If you plan on staying out here, that is.
HOLT: He saved your life, Valerie, that doesn’t mean you can run his.
JOHN: (laughter) You know, that’s really a generous offer, but I don’t know. It’s—
HOLT: It’s our way of saying thank you. A small way. Please, let us be generous. What you did today was beyond generosity. It still hasn’t really sunk in.
The Triggerman's Dance Page 13