by Todd Borg
I glanced at Carol, and saw her sadness at the subject.
Ryan shook his head again. “You don’t understand. Nobody liked me. The jocks who purposely veered my way when I was coming down the hallway so that they could hit my shoulder with their arms and knock me down. The goths and the dirtballs shunned me because I played by the rules and went to class on time, and gave the teacher the answers when she asked, and, God forbid, did my homework. Even the preppies, who knew I was smart, called me Injun to my face. And in my senior year, somebody found out that my long-disappeared mother was white. So they changed their taunts and started calling me half-breed.”
Ryan paused. “I think even the teachers didn’t like posting the test scores because my name was usually at the top.” Ryan looked at Carol. “Carol, maybe you can tell me if I’m wrong. But I always got the feeling that the only way the smart kid could really get accepted was if the smart kid was a joiner and could gain approval based on sports skills or social skills. Smarts by itself was always a detriment to acceptance. Am I right?”
Carol looked down into her tea mug. “Yeah, I think so.” She blinked her eyes as if they stung. “And I’ve got to tell you something else.” She pushed away her mug, then leaned her elbows on the table and mashed her mouth into her hands, bending her nose and making the beautiful face look ordinary.
“I’m one of them,” she mumbled. “I was a joiner. Everything I did was about approval from my peers. I didn’t see people as individuals with wants and needs and hopes and fears. I just saw them as part of this group or that group. Either you’re with us, or you’re the enemy. Like two football teams fighting it out, each one thinking that the other guys are somehow lesser stuff. It’s like countries going to war. What’s that called? Nationalism. Like we’re better than you. Why? Because we’re born in this country?
“That’s the way I was, thinking that I was better because I was pretty and I’ve got blue eyes and blonde hair. Then we do bad things to the other group, the other country, the other race. We dehumanize them in our mind because that makes it easier for us to treat them so crappy.
“My group was about being popular and good looking. I used to think that was my achievement, being pretty. Like I deserved credit for it. Even worse, I thought that the not-so-good-looking kids were less valuable.
“So I’m sorry, Ryan. Please forgive me for being such a stupid kid. In fact, I think I’m only just starting to grow up now. I’d been trying to understand why my career never went anywhere, while yours skyrocketed. Then Owen said something in the car on the way out of Preston’s place. It wasn’t these exact words, but in essence he was asking, ‘What do you know? What are your skills? Can you do anything? Have you worked and worked toward a goal? Or do you just stand around and try to look good and hope that someone will give you a morsel for it even though you never did anything to earn it.’”
Carol got up and walked over to the kitchen counter, pulled out a couple of tissues and blew her nose. She came back and sat down and wiped tears from her eyes.
“I never disliked you for any specific reason,” she said. “But I disrespected you by acting as if you didn’t exist. Like you were an outsider. I’m very sorry about that.”
She and Ryan stared at each other. I expected Ryan to look away first, to bend as he always had in the past. But he held her look, and she swallowed and then mopped her eyes.
“You remember Monty Wales, right?” she said.
“I never knew him. But I always heard about him. The great football player,” Ryan said. “The quarterback. He was in your class, right? A couple of years ahead of me?”
She nodded. “I dated him. He took me to the prom. It’s probably a real long shot, but I’m just trying to do what Owen said about looking for anyone who might hold a grudge.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan said.
“I wonder if Monty might still have a grudge against you.”
Ryan shook his head. “That’s a ridiculous notion. He was big and strong and handsome. He was the star jock. He dated you. And anyway, we never even knew each other.”
“But you were his undoing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you remember when you worked at the coffee shop?”
“Of course,” Ryan said, puzzled.
“Do you remember those guys you called the cops about?”
Ryan stared. “One of them was Monty Wales?!”
Carol nodded.
“But I... None of them looked like him. Was he... Oh, man. He had the long hair and the handlebar moustache?”
She nodded again.
“Nothing like the buzz cut he had in high school. I can’t believe that guy was Monty.”
“Fill me in?” I said.
Ryan paused, remembering.
“During my senior year in high school, I worked at a coffee shop, kind of like Starbucks but sitdown-style, with waiters. I had a group of three guys in my section. They were...” Ryan looked at Carol, “Sorry to say this, but they were natural jerks.”
She shut her eyes and made a little nod.
“They were loud and obnoxious, and they immediately started needling me. I had pretty bad acne back then, and I’d broken out really bad that day. So they started making cracks about my face, and how the girls must be all over me, and how my dating schedule must make it hard to find time to be a waiter. The guy with the moustache - Monty, I guess - he would say things like, ‘It must be hard to find time to be a waitress, I mean waiter.’ Anyway, after a bit I realized that he and one of the other guys were bragging to the third about a theft that they had put together and how they made thousands of dollars. They went on about it at some length, so I went in back and called nine-one-one on my cell and explained to the dispatcher that I was working in the coffee shop and that I was overhearing a crime being described. I told the dispatcher that if she was silent on her end, I could put my phone near the people talking.
“So I turned my cell phone on speaker mode and put it in one of those paper napkin holders behind a couple of napkins. Then I brought it out along with sugar and cream as if to freshen up.
“The guys kept talking. I came back a bit later and poured them more coffee to keep them going. Fifteen minutes later, a police car pulled up, and two officers came in. I nodded my head toward the guys, and the officers started asking them some questions. When they all went outside, I retrieved my phone. They didn’t arrest them. I never heard what happened.”
“I did,” Carol said. “The news spread through my neighborhood pretty fast. Jamie Nye and Monty Wales. Jamie went to prison for two years. Monty was the leader, so he went three years and some months.”
“Do you know if they found out that it was Ryan who put the police onto them?” I asked.
Carol said, “I saw in the paper that the nine-one-one recording was used in the trial, so they maybe figured it out.”
“What did they steal?” I asked.
Ryan shook his head. “I never found out.” He looked at Carol. “Did you?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Horses.”
FORTY-NINE
“Did you ever hear how Monty got involved in stealing horses?” I asked.
“I never knew him to be a thief when he was in high school,” Carol said. “But he was always involved with horses. He worked at a ranch. And he was a trick rider. He competed in rodeos.”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“About a year ago,” Carol said. She looked at Ryan. “Not long after I saw you at the governor’s dinner. I was in the grocery store in Reno. He saw me and talked about his time in prison like it was summer camp. He wasn’t ashamed of it at all. He showed me some tattoos he’d gotten there. I was put off by him. His tattoos, and his casual attitude toward being a criminal. And he’d switched from smoking to chewing tobacco. It was revolting.”
“Have you seen him since?”
“No.”
“Did he give you any indication of where he was living?”
“Yeah. He said he moved to the Bay Area after he finished probation, and was back visiting his parents. He also said that his girlfriend had a plan to start a business in LA. So I told him about the good temporary housing deal that I’d heard of.” Carol looked guilty. “I didn’t give him any personal names,” she said. “Just the Village Green name I’d heard from Preston.”
Ryan made an involuntary jerk that was so prominent it made Carol wince.
She said, “I didn’t care about him, but I figured it would be nice if it could help his girlfriend.”
“So Monty or his girlfriend could have ended up renting at a project that I invested in,” Ryan said, his voice bleak. “I wonder if Monty would have made the connection to me.”
“You’re presuming that they rented, but you don’t know it,” I said. “Any idea what her business was going to be?” I asked.
“Some kind of cleaning company, I guess, because Monty made that old joke about sanitation engineering.”
Ryan’s sudden look of shock was acute. “The woman who died might have been Monty’s girlfriend. And I got Monty sent to prison. If he knew that Eli and Jeanie and I were investors in the project, he could be thinking that we destroyed his life.”
“We don’t know if the woman who died was his girlfriend. And if it was, we don’t know if he was still in contact with her. Carol, do you know where Monty went to prison?”
“The Carson City Prison.”
I recalled what Maria had said when she was telling us about Mustangs. I said, “They have a program for wild Mustangs at the Carson City Prison. They train them so they can be adopted.”
“Heat is somewhere in this, isn’t he?” Ryan said.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve learned over the years not to trust coincidences. Let me get on the phone and see what I can find.”
Ryan got a phone call. Carol said she was going to lie down.
I went out by the lake and called Maria. The sun was setting.
“Have you learned anything more about that poor Mustang?” she said when I told her who was calling.
“That’s why I’m calling. Have you heard of any horses that have been stolen recently in Carson Valley or nearby?”
“No. But I only have contact with a few horse people, so I am not a good source of information.”
“Could you do a little investigation on that for me?”
“Of course. But how should I do it?”
“Just think of all the horse groups you know. I don’t know what they would be. Riding clubs? Boarding stables?”
“Ah, sí, sí,” she said. “I have an idea. Let me call you back.”
We hung up.
I sat out at the fire pit and got out the piece of paper with the tuning code on it. Looked for order in the chaos. The fact that Herman left a message was obvious. I just couldn’t see his meaning.
Twenty minutes later, my phone rang. It was Maria.
“Owen, I think I know where Heat came from. I just got a callback from a woman who teaches riding lessons in Sparks. She’d heard that I was looking for info about a missing Mustang. She said that two of her horses were stolen a month ago.”
“Should I call her?”
“Yes, but she’s in lessons for the next three hours.”
“Did you learn anything about it?” I asked.
“One of the horses was a Rocky Mountain gaited horse, very valuable. The other was a Mustang, cherry colored, triangular blaze. She said the Mustang had been gentled at the Carson City prison program. But like many Mustangs, while his bond with her was strong, he remained suspicious of other people, and he always ran from everyone but her. So it makes sense that the thief brought the horses to his stable in Tahoe. Or maybe he had a Tahoe buyer. Maybe the thief didn’t even realize that he’d stolen a Mustang. So it could be that when he unloaded them, he wasn’t careful to hang onto them at all times, and the Mustang ran away, and he’s been running from people ever since.”
“Did she witness the theft?”
“It was at night. A noise woke her up. She looked out to see a pickup and a horse trailer driving away.”
“No identifying marks?”
“I thought to ask her. I could be a detective, no?”
“No doubt,” I said. “What did she say?”
“The only thing she saw was that the trailer was silver, and the pickup was white. She thinks there might have been one of those big toolboxes in the pickup’s cargo bed.”
“Great, Maria. Thanks very much.”
“One more thing I have to tell you. The woman said that he is trained to a wolf whistle. She said, if you blow it three times, he comes expecting grain. It might work. Except, I don’t know what a wolf whistle is.”
“You use your fingers,” I said. “A wolf whistle is what boys used to do when they saw a pretty girl.” We said goodbye.
I called Diamond.
“I just found out from Maria that a Mustang and another horse were stolen in Sparks, and the pickup hauling the trailer was white. The owner of the Mustang thought the truck might have had a big toolbox in the bed.”
“Lot of white pickups out there,” Diamond said.
“Yeah, including one that belongs to Lana Madrone that her nephew Tory uses to haul her silver horse trailer. Street found some bug evidence in it that indicates that the truck was recently at lower elevations. But I’m also thinking of the tourist cowboys in the muscle shirts that your guys busted in my office lot.”
“Right. Carrying the beers. They spent one night in the cell, then bailed themselves out the next day.”
“Do you remember their pickup? It was white, but did it have a toolbox?”
“I don’t recall,” Diamond said. “But it’s a possibility.”
“If Ryan was kidnapped into a pickup instead of a van, it must have been a four-door version based on his description.”
“A six-pack,” Diamond said.
“Lana and Tory’s truck is a six-pack,” I said. “Do you remember if the cowboy’s truck was a six-pack?”
“Not sure. I think so. I do remember that the guys were from the Bay Area.”
“Carol could look at their mugshots. Tory, too. She said there was a guy named Monty Wales from her high school. He liked to steal horses, and he took a vacation at Carson City Prison as a result of Ryan’s tip. She said that he moved to the Bay Area when he got out. I’m wondering if he could be Tory or one of those cowboys.”
“I’ll look it up soon as I get out of this meeting.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were working late,” I said.
“No problem. We’re taking a quick break.”
I thought of the other thing Carol had said about Monty.
“Any chance you noticed if either of them had tattoos?”
“Hard to miss it on the one guy,” Diamond said. “Sappy stuff like, ‘Love my mama forever,’ and stupid stuff like, ‘Born to be bad.’ Why don’t people ever tattoo something intelligent?”
“Like Shakespeare?”
“Yeah. ‘A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ That would be something, high on a woman’s thigh.”
“Diamond, you were born in the wrong century.”
“Don’t I know it. Meeting’s reconvening.”
FIFTY
In the morning, I left Spot with Lily and Ryan, and took a long walk through the forest. I puzzled over the tuning code, looking at my notes, trying to figure another way to convert beats to a message. Nothing made sense. After a couple of miles of trail, I saw Lana and Tory’s Mondrian barn through the trees. The white pickup was parked nearby. I walked over. No one was around. The horse stalls in the barn were empty. I looked at the pickup, which had recently been to lower elevations according to Street’s glowworm-lunch evidence.
The truck was a six-pack. The toolbox in the bed wasn’t silver as described by the woman whose Mustang had been stolen, but a dull gray. Maybe it could look silver at night. But as Diamond had pointed out, there are a lot
of white pickups with toolboxes.
An hour later, I was back at the lake, no wiser for my thinking.
In the afternoon, Ryan took Lily to the doctor for her next blood test. Carol went along. They were going to stop at the Lake Tahoe Community College, pick up a class schedule, and look in on the drama department. Ryan had told her that he’d be happy to pay for acting classes.
Ryan asked me if I might take Spot again. I realized that he was uncomfortable leaving Spot alone in the house. I understood. Never know when a Great Dane gets up on his hind legs and noses open the freezer to check on the steak supply.
“Maybe you all should grab a bite out on the town when you’re done.” I said. “Be good to do something once in awhile without me around.”
So we made a plan to meet back at Ryan’s house by 9:00 p.m. After they left, Spot and I headed into town on errands, then to Street’s lab for a visit, then eventually left her lab to head back up toward Ryan’s as it got dark.
There was a thin line of sunset glow over the mountains across the lake. Silhouetted by the glow were several thunderstorms growing their cloud columns toward the sky. Heat lightning flashed orange in one of the gray clouds.
I was just past Lakeside Inn when a white, six-pack pickup with a toolbox passed me. It had a trailer hitch on it that looked heavy enough to haul a horse trailer. Maybe it was cowboys. Maybe it was Tory or Lana.
I couldn’t see in the dark if there was one or two people in it. It turned off on a side street and stopped. I pulled off on the shoulder some distance back. No one got out, and the pickup didn’t move for a minute. I envisioned its occupants realizing that they’d passed me, and that I was now following them. Perhaps they were just lighting up a cigarette. But maybe they were pulling out the bullwhip from under the seat.
The pickup pulled back onto the highway and accelerated.
I stayed hard on its tail as it raced north past the Roundhill shopping center, around the big curves at Zephyr Cove and on toward Skyland.
The pickup driver tried to tempt me into passing him by suddenly slowing. But his truck was much bigger than my Jeep, and I knew that if I drew alongside of him, he could jerk the wheel to hit me and bounce me off the road. I stayed behind him as he dropped to 30 mph.