She drove us past the entrance to 184 without stopping, but it was clear in the headlights that that the gates were sealed with a strip of chequered crime scene tape. If there was a police presence at the house they’d taped themselves in and were keeping a low profile.
We followed the road in a gradual winding curl up the hillside, every bend bringing yet another increased incline. On one side was a jagged line of rock, while on the other was a dense black nothingness composed mainly of trees and who-knew-what open space. Our lights occasionally caught flashes of white water where a fast-flowing stream came near the road, and the rounded bulk of heavy boulders covered in dark lichen.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked as we ground round another bend and growled up yet another incline. If we continued climbing at this rate we’d soon be in open air somewhere above the Milky Way.
‘Back entrance,’ said Lilly-Mae. ‘I told you, I know a secret way in.’ She looked ready for skulking around, too. She had tied her hair back in a ponytail and swapped her dress and shoes for jeans, shirt and hiking boots. I wondered how many other surprises she had in store. While the air of made-up and manicured elegance had gone, concealed by the finest products Levi and Timberland had to offer, she still possessed an aura of sexiness which I doubted she could lose if she dressed in an old hessian sack. But there was now something steely about her which I guessed came from far back in her past. Whatever it was, I found it intriguing. Or maybe I’d just discovered I have a thing for sexy women in jeans and big boots.
The lights picked out a sudden shadow in the rock face, and Lilly-Mae swung the wheel and took the Toyota through a gap and up a pot-holed track which burrowed like a tunnel through the trees. We bumped and lurched for about a mile before we reached a clearing and she pulled up and switched off the lights and engine.
‘From here on, we walk,’ she announced.
I climbed out and stood in the dark, listening to the engine ticking and the noise thousands of trees make as they’re growing. Overhead a few stars were visible through the canopy of leaves, and somewhere in the distance something barked. The feeling of our fragility and lack of importance in the sheer immensity of it all was awesome.
‘Just one thing,’ I said softly, when Lilly-Mae joined me. ‘Are there any creatures in these woods I should be aware of?’
‘Creatures?’
‘You know… the kind that bite lumps out of people who are dumb enough to go walking in the woods in the middle of the night.’
She gave a ghost of a chuckle. ‘Oh. You mean bears and things?’
‘I wish you hadn’t said bears.’
‘Well, we’ve got them, sure. Probably not right here, but further over towards the Smokey Mountains.’ Her voice trailed off and I resisted the urge to dive back into the Toyota. Coming from a country where the only thing to avoid is a bad-tempered rabbit, anything larger or fiercer was, in my book, worth worrying about. Especially if it was liable to be sitting in a tree waiting for me to pass by underneath.
‘How about snakes? Don’t you have rattlers around here?’
She leaned across and brushed my face with her lips. ‘You’re my hero, you know that?’
‘Hey, don’t mock. I should warn you I left my Swiss army knife back at the house.’
‘Don’t worry, you won’t need it. The last man injured by a bear around these parts was a tourist over near Ashville.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes. It was a stuffed black bear outside a souvenir store. It fell on him. And as for snakes, well, try not to think about them. The terrain’s all downhill from here.’ She sounded amazingly calm, as if she was planning a casual afternoon’s hike through a grassy meadow. She reached into her bag and took out a small flashlight. ‘I’ll go first – I know roughly where the path is, but we can’t use this too often. Stick close to me and you’ll be fine.’
Stick close to you, I thought, and I’ll be more than fine. ‘Okay, kemosabe,’ I agreed, and took out my own slim travel light which I never went anywhere without. It had been a godsend on many occasions when electricity in some backwater had proved unreliable. ‘You lead, I’ll follow.’
It was easier said than done. Even using the flashlight in brief bursts, the vegetation was so thick I lost track of where Lilly-Mae was within minutes, and only re-established contact when I bumped into her from behind. That bit was quite pleasant, I have to admit. Which was more than could be said for the branches waiting to slap me in the face every few steps, and the wicked lengths of thorn waiting to catch me below waist level and tug at my clothing, or the muddy wallows which Lilly-Mae seemed to avoid as if by instinct, but which I trod in every time. I don’t know what it was about them, but the smell was appalling, as if something had fallen in and died at the bottom. The path bore no resemblance to any kind of footpath I had ever known. All in all it made for slow and painful progress.
Eventually Lilly-Mae came to a stop and flicked on her flashlight to warn me. I stopped and hunkered down next to her, and wiped a film of sweat from my face. I felt like the rawest kind of recruit at boot camp: hot, bothered and wishing I’d never joined up. The atmosphere among the trees was oppressive and devoid of fresh air, and I was beginning to feel the exertion in my legs. Walking through airports is no preparation for any kind of romp in the woods.
‘We’re about a hundred yards from the house,’ whispered Lilly-Mae. ‘The backyard’s right ahead and over a fence. If we keep walking in a straight line after that, we’ll hit the pool.’ I felt rather than saw her face turn to me in the dark. ‘What should we do next, Jake?’
‘Do?’ I looked at her in amazement. ‘What do you mean, do next? You were the one with the gung-ho plan. You said you knew a back way in. I thought you had it all worked out.’ I couldn’t believe it. There we were having tracked halfway across the southern Appalachians in pitch darkness, surrounded by hunger-crazed bears, snakes and wild cats and suddenly I was voted jungle leader.
I heard a faint chuckle in the dark and her hand brushed against my face. ‘That’s okay. I didn’t want to deny you the opportunity of going all macho on me if you wanted to and demanding to take the lead.’
‘Perish the thought. After you, Penelope Pitstop.’
She stood up and crept away, and I stuck to her like a shadow, wishing I could switch on my torch and see her shapely bottom twitching in front of me. At least it would have given me something to occupy my mind.
We found the fence a few minutes later. Beyond it lay the swimming-pool, a faint patch reflecting remnants of ambient light. Further on I could just make out the regular oblong of the roof tiles. The smell of chlorine made me wonder whether the pool man had come back to clean the pool, and whether his description of me had been clear enough to do a number on me when I tried to leave the country.
We took it in turns to slide through the wire strands of the fence, and sat watching the house for a couple of minutes. If the police were waiting, I was hoping they would betray their presence before we moved off. A cough would do, or the jangle of handcuffs or the creak of leather. I kept getting horrible visions of being caught halfway across the open grass by the sudden ping of a security light and the shouted command to freeze and hit the dirt – or whatever the locals called out when they caught a suspect.
‘Come on,’ I said finally. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
We scuttled across the grass and approached the house from one side, where Lilly-Mae had said there were fewer windows. Our footsteps sounded much too loud in the darkness, and I was half expecting the glare of floodlights. But we were soon up against a wall, breathing heavily and listening hard.
Two careful circuits of the house revealed everything was locked and sealed, with more police tape across the doors and windows, and around the pool. I couldn’t help throwing a quick glance towards the water, but Frank had evidently been taken away.
Lilly-Mae stopped at the front door on the second circuit, ducked beneath the tape and fiddled with the lock. Secon
ds later we were inside and closing the door behind us. Lilly-Mae switched on her flashlight and shone it around the foyer.
‘A back window,’ I said. ‘We should leave one open just in case.’ If anyone did come up the drive our quickest and most unobtrusive way out would be through the back and across the grass into the trees.
Lilly-Mae gave me a quirky look. ‘Good thinking, Jake. Are you sure you’ve never done this before?’
‘Positive. Didn’t I tell you, I’ve led a blameless life?’
I followed her into the room where Gus had his desk and waited until she had unlocked the French window and left it barely open. Then I looked around, flicking on my own flashlight. I would have preferred the main lights but there was no guarantee the house wasn’t under surveillance from somewhere close by.
The laptop still lay on the desk, but now the power light was off. A thin dusting of white powder covered the casing and the desk where the police had checked for fingerprints, and elsewhere were signs of disturbance where they had conducted their search.
I turned the laptop on. I was wondering why the police had left it behind. If it had been me, I’d have taken it in for inspection by IT specialists, in the hope it might yield some useful information. Gus wouldn’t have been the first villain to have left incriminating evidence in the most obvious of places, and I was betting the local police were sufficiently well-informed about his business to be drooling at the mouth at the prospect of taking a peek inside his private files.
‘I need to go upstairs,’ said Lilly-Mae. ‘Can you manage there for a few minutes?’
I nodded. ‘Sure. But don’t be long. There may be file names you recognise. I’ll just trawl through in the meantime and check for the last documents opened.’
She skipped out and I waited for the machine to show some sign of life. Nothing. Dead as a piece of roadkill. Probably the battery, used up by the police taking a sneaky peek at Gus’s data.
I checked the desk drawers. They were all unlocked and mostly bare of anything other than standard office equipment such as pens, letterhead, envelopes and the like. And a power lead. I plugged it in and switched on at the wall, and watched the power light glow in the dark.
But that was all it did. The laptop itself remained solidly unhelpful and completely blank, other than a faint ghosting of tiny flecks. No programs. No files. Nothing.
It had been wiped clean.
Just then I felt a ghost of movement across the back of my neck, and remembered the French window. Instinct was telling me it was time to go. I switched off the laptop and took a quick look round for signs of other drawers or a filing cabinet, but Gus evidently believed in keeping his paperwork somewhere else.
Lilly-Mae came clattering down the stairs lugging a large rucksack. She stared at the laptop, then at me. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s been wiped. There’s nothing on it.’
She looked puzzled and tried switching the machine on again. ‘I don’t understand,’ she muttered, tapping the keys. ‘There was stuff on there, I know it. Gus used it for some basic things. Why would he wipe it?’
I recalled Gus switching on the laptop when I’d first arrived, and the whirr of programs firing up. There had definitely been something on there then; something he had felt necessary to check up on the moment he returned. But not now.
‘Maybe we can take it with us,’ I suggested. ‘An expert might be able to salvage something from the hard drive.’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ said a deep voice from over near the door. Then the room lights clicked on. Lilly-Mae and I spun round like marionettes.
It was Gus Mekashnik, and he was holding a rifle again, this time pointing somewhere between us.
THIRTY-TWO
‘Gus?’ Lilly-Mae was the first to recover. She was staring at the rifle as if seeing it for the first time, which seemed weird to me; living in this house, in this neck of the woods, she must have seen Gus and his buddies with guns more than just a few times. ‘Gus, where have you been?’
‘Seeing to business, hon,’ Gus replied. ‘Seeing to business.’ He looked at me with a faint frown on his granite face. ‘What are you doing?’ He sounded perfectly calm but his tone sent a shiver through me. I noticed the rifle was still midway between Lilly-Mae and me, but it wouldn’t take more than a twitch of his finger to direct it, so I kept very still.
‘Gus, we were trying to find out what was going on… why Frank was killed.’ Lilly-Mae was speaking quickly, and I realised she wasn’t as comfortable with the situation as I’d imagined she would be. Maybe seeing Gus at the other end of a rifle put a new slant on their relationship. ‘Did you know Selecca got arrested? The police nearly got Jake as well. We got out just in time.’
‘Sure, I knew that.’ Gus smiled and nodded towards the laptop on the desk. ‘You know how to get the hard drive out of there, Lilly-Mae? There’s a release catch in the base. Be a doll and take it out for me, would you?’
We waited while Lilly-Mae reached over and found the catch. The hard drive clicked out and slid into her hand. She handed it to Gus, who sidled over to the French window and pushed aside the curtain. The rifle barrel remained solidly on us all the way.
‘The trouble with this technology,’ he said casually, as if we were friends gathered round a log fire, ‘is you just can’t trust it. Hell, it’s like I’ve said all along: it’s likely to turn and bite you in the ass the moment your back’s turned. Ain’t that what I’m always saying, Lilly-Mae?’
Lilly-Mae said nothing. The expression on her face told me she was as puzzled by Gus’s actions as I was and didn’t trust herself to speak. However long she’d known him, this must have seemed a real key-change in his demeanour.
‘Which is what Dwight Selecca’s now finding out,’ he continued with a grin. Then he gave an almost casual flick of his wrist and the hard drive spun through the open door and into the night. There was a faint splash as it entered the pool.
‘Problem solved.’ He returned to his position by the door. ‘As I was saying, all this technology–’ He broke off and looked at Lilly-Mae with a pretend look of concern. ‘What’s up, girl? You look like a bear got her paw stuck in a grinder. You figured old Gus was a big dumb-ass who couldn’t figure one end of a computer from another, right? Well, you figured wrong. Just because I play dumb, don’t mean I am.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lilly-Mae’s voice was as taut as a violin string.
Gus smiled like the cat who’d got the cream and was only marginally sorry for the kitty who lost out. ‘Gee, sorry, girl. I gotta tell you things have changed around here. I ran into a little local difficulty, y’might say and had to sell off a lot of holdings. Got drained, finance-wise… Lost some money in a deal which Selecca recommended to me a while back, had a couple of deliveries go sour. I should never have trusted that greasy little snake. He pulled me in and let me take a beating on some equipment turned out to be sub-standard. By the time it was noticed it was too late. There’s no way back from that in this business. You get a bad rep, it stays with you.’
‘What sort of equipment?’ I couldn’t help it. Maybe if we kept him talking he might not do anything rash, like pulling the trigger.
‘Military hardware. Surplus to requirements down in Georgia. Only what Selecca forgot to mention was, it was basically trash, heading for the dump to be crushed and melted down. Selecca had the contacts and I put up the money. When the customers found the hardware wouldn’t do nothing he turned round and told ’em I must’ve done a switch. They wasn’t best pleased.’
‘They?’
‘Yeah. Some folks down south.’ Gus looked pale, as if he’d been reminded of something nasty that was eating at him.
South. That was an awful lot of territory, but after what Clayton had told me, I didn’t have to ask where. Unfortunately, Lilly-Mae did.
‘You mean Latin America?’ It came like an accusation, and from her tone I got the impression she was more surprised by the location than the fact that Gus
had done something he really shouldn’t have.
He nodded and looked even sicker. I didn’t blame him. I’d made several trips down that way, to areas where development was much needed but not always welcome without a hefty slush fund and local government assistance. Then there were the non-governmental groups you had to deal with on the side; the ones amounting to private armies with a willingness to leave behind a lot of dead bodies in the name of la revolucion or la libertad or whatever the current local cause might be. If they saw an opportunity to hone in on a development deal by mounting obstacles which could be ‘removed’ by an exchange of hard cash, they would do it. If Gus had been supplying arms south of the border, he’d no doubt broken several dozen US Federal and possibly international laws in the process, as well as mixing it with people who had a reputation for being very poor losers.
‘What happened to Frank?’ Lilly-Mae’s eyes were burning into Gus like lasers. No doubt she was only just realising that whatever Gus had got himself into could have repercussions for her, too. Like it had for Frank.
Gus didn’t want to answer that one. He pulled a face and looked at me, then motioned impatiently at the French window. ‘You. Outside.’
‘What for?’ There are moments to be argumentative, and this probably wasn’t one of them. But right then the last thing I wanted to do was walk out of the door into the night with Gus Mekashnik standing behind me with a big gun. Something told me it wasn’t likely to end well. And there was Lilly-Mae to worry about, too, because she knew him better than anyone and was looking as if she wanted to throw up.
Smart Moves Page 21