Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  And so he had to ask himself again: What is it I’m after? Why should I cross that bridge? By any standard, it was an ugly case, maybe the ugliest he’d taken since the turn of the millennium. Given the shakiness of his psyche, did he really need this?

  The answer, which came with his last drag on the cigarette, was as prefigured as the fractal pattern of the opposing shoreline, and, like most everything about Raszer, it came in shadow and light.

  As a dog senses the presence of bad spirits, Raszer sensed that behind events like Katy Endicott’s abduction, behind inexplicable acts of abuse great and small, there was often to be found evidence of grander malfeasance. The highway “detours” he’d spoken of to Hildegarde did not just spring up spontaneously—they were erected in the dead of night by an adversary wilier than the Coyote. The odds against the innocent and guileless in this world weren’t a matter of “natural selection”—they’d been set by a power whose abiding interest lay in seeing that the game was fixed.

  In its service, this power enlisted sociopaths, tyrants, and all those with great amounts to lose if the fix were off. Raszer knew this power couldn’t be vanquished; it was part and parcel of the world. But he hoped that by learning its name, he might obtain some leverage over it. The trouble was, the name kept changing. No sooner had he held it on his tongue than it was lost to him, forgotten like a dream that dissipates upon waking.

  This was the genius of all conspiracies and cabals: The links they forged through a transient common purpose dissolved as soon as the fatal blow was struck. You could try to pin it on the Bilderbergs or the Trilaterals, you could aim from right or left, but the true GamesMasters were beyond ideology and evasive as eels. And yet—Raszer was convinced—some resonance of their original sin must remain, some trace of the secret name whispered when their knives were first raised. Where there was design, there had to be evidence of its craft. Common felony left evidence that police agencies were quite good at following. But crimes of soul theft and subversion were of a different order, and that, Raszer knew, was why Silas Endicott had sought him out. Whatever entity plotted such skulduggery was beyond human justice, but it could be brought to heel by threat of exposure, and this was often enough to secure release of a captive. Of necessity, Raszer subscribed to the notion that the world was saved one life at a time.

  And there was this, too, as much a part of Raszer’s raison d’être as his pledge to gather orphans under his coat—the gold at the end of the rainbow. It was taunting him right now: An errant ray of western light had struck an outcropping on the mountainside east of the trestle, illuminating the possibility that just once, as payment for services rendered, he would pursue a stray beyond the edge of the familiar and find himself in another country, one where there was no market in souls, where poets stood taller than plunderers, and young girls were left in peace to blossom like orchids.

  In that alterworld would be his house, his daughter, the women and men he loved. It would not look much different, and humans would still be far from gods. But the fix would be off, and there would be no profit in dominion. He crushed out the cigarette, got back into the Avanti, and turned the wheels toward the East Fork Bridge.

  SIX

  Almost as soon as he’d crossed the bridge, color had drained from the landscape. It wasn’t unusual for California to go monochrome in the absence of sunlight, especially in the hills. It was all pastels and earth tones, shades that bled quickly in gloom. But this was stark, and Raszer had instinctively looked up at the sky to see if some even more ominous front was coming in. It wasn’t that. It was just the mined-out look of the San Gabriel’s east fork, the sudden feeling of isolation, and the fact that the murky part of the job had begun. He wouldn’t see bright colors until he’d found his first lead.

  Now, he stood ankle deep in mud, having hiked the ravine up to the location of Johnny Horn’s trailer. He’d parked in a gravel lot opposite the access road to the Burro Canyon Shooting Park, from which, even now, he could hear the reverberant pings of gunfire, a whoop or two, and the occasional cackle of an automatic weapon. One of the other cars in the lot had a Phish sticker on its bumper. California: sweet land of libertarianism. Where the “don’t fuck with me” gun culture meets the hippie ethos.

  He hopped a swiftly flowing runoff trench and scrambled over a cluster of boulders just beneath the wooded notch where Johnny’s trailer sat on cinder blocks. Trailer was a generous description. It was more like a large camper, vintage 1970, and wedged into its spot as tightly and improbably as Aquino had suggested. A road of sorts snaked its way up to the site, with space enough to pull in three or four cars on the triangle of land before the trailer, but it was impassable now, cleaved by the rain into a delta of tributaries. A monsoon season like this one would have killed both Johnny’s social life and his business activities.

  With its peacock emblazoned broadside blocking the mouth of a wider canyon beyond, the vehicle had an unmistakably defensive stance. The hammering rain and withering sun had chipped and faded the spray enamel, but the image of the big bird still telegraphed warning. It wasn’t hard to imagine that the trailer’s original owner had been a smuggler or a survivalist, and had positioned it so as to control access to the gulch. Its fortress elevation would have provided advantage over any IRS or ATF agents who came snooping, and maybe this—and memories of Ruby Ridge—was partly why the law had left Johnny alone. Maybe it was also partly why his killers had waited to strike until he’d left the nest. The embankments on either side were so steep that a visitor could not approach without being exposed—another guerrilla trick the boys might have picked up in Iraq.

  He took another look at the peacock before heading around back. Why a peacock? he mused. Why not a raptor of some sort? Something else to ask Hildegarde about.

  Whatever its original use had been, the area on the far side of the trailer was a natural dance floor, a massive slab of granite about the size of a small ice rink. Johnny and Henry had made this Party Central, and evidence of revelry remained in the cheap Japanese lanterns strung through the cottonwoods and dangling like sodden orange cocoons over the flat, gray expanse. Even muted color leapt from the monochrome backdrop, and Raszer paid attention. In contrast, the waterlogged mattresses strewn around the perimeter, some folded over or pulled back into the privacy of the brush, were virtually camouflaged by the drabness. Fire pits had become cesspools; in some of them, beer cans still floated and used condoms bobbed like dead, swollen fish against the banks. It was not a shot for the Sierra Club calendar.

  The initial survey told only the story Raszer already knew: that Johnny and his pals had, for a time, staged their own postmillennial version of Woodstock in this canyon. The mounts for Johnny’s huge loudspeakers remained where he’d placed them, braced with steel strapping halfway up the trunks of twin sycamore trees. A power plug hung impotently above a plywood shell that must have housed his generator. In its vicinity, Raszer could still smell gasoline fumes.

  He cast a sidelong glance at the dance floor, the ceremonial ground of Johnny’s nihilistic tribe, and, using his peripheral vision like a good shaman, could almost see the Endicott sisters dancing with their shirtless warriors, arms flailing, eyes glazed with amphetamine ice. Despite the evidence of orgiastic sex, the vibe of the place was distinctly unerotic, and the dope Johnny had dealt would not have altered that state. Speed, nitrous, and pet tranquilizer were not the makings of either love-fest or vision quest. They were, however, a recipe for collective paranoia, an all-too-familiar trait of the marginalized groups Raszer had come to know. It began with flight from society and proceeded to isolation and autocracy, then to the mythos of Us versus Them, and finallyto guns. Sooner or later, the guns brought on the very cataclysm the great leader had prophesied, for power had to be met with power.

  Johnny Horn, along with his minister of propaganda, Henry Lee, had been executed, but not by agents of the state. They had been executed, Raszer sensed, by a state without borders, governed by a constitution wi
thout principle. The longer Raszer stood, the more the poison of the place got into him, until he found himself almost unable to move. He realized he’d been stalling; he still needed to investigate the trailer.

  Begin, he’d once been taught by a Chumash tracker, with smell. Close your eyes. First, there was the pungency of locked-in damp, of mildew, of a hundred yeasty organisms replicating themselves behind the trailer’s fake paneling and exposed insulation. That odor dominated and had to be dismissed before the subtler scents revealed themselves. More precisely, it had to be normalized as the ambient smell of the place, then shifted to the background. Smell with your skin, the Indian had told him, not only with your nose. This was more difficult, but it could be learned and had a basis in both physiology and in the altered consciousness of synesthesia. The lingering effects of Hildegarde’s root tea gave him just enough of a boost to get there.

  Although the trailer had been stripped of everything absorbent but the rock-wool insulation in its walls, it retained the locker-room odor of men in their natural state. Underlying this, however, were a number of scents that fired off recognition in different parts of Raszer’s brain. Gunpowder. Grain alcohol. The alkaline signature of amphetamine sweat. And two distinctive smells that did not seem to quite belong there: the unmistakable aroma of cloves, as from an herbal cigarette, and patchouli oil. For some reason, Raszer immediately tied the cloves to Henry Lee, but he could not account for the patchouli. It was as if some residual trace of the trailer’s original inhabitants had imprinted itself there, as if some atomic memory of 1970 was etched on the stale air in this flimsy aluminum time capsule. For a moment, Raszer felt dizzy and put a hand out to steady himself. On occasion, such sensory dislocation led to blackouts, and the blackouts induced fleeting visions, but he was not ready for the kind of visions this place might bring. Recovered, he moved across the floor and picked up one more scent: wintergreen, as in lifesavers or breath mints. Funny, the molecules of scent that remained in a place. He reasoned there must be a wad of chewing gum stuck somewhere.

  The police had removed more than half of the wall paneling, and Raszer muttered, “Shit,” knowing that these must be the pieces etched or markered with slogans, insignias, and possibly even phone numbers. He could and would get access to the evidence, but it wasn’t the same as seeing it in situ. There were discolorations and mounting holes where the double bunks and drop-down dining table had been. These also had been taken away. All that was left in place, aside from electrical fixtures, were the plastic molding strips that ran along the base of the trailer’s walls, and the privy: a tiny sink with a foot pump for cold water, and a toilet with one of those foam-rubber seats popular in the ’70s, now yellowed and cracked in two dozen places.

  Raszer dropped down to his knees, removed a penknife from the pocket of his duster, and ran its blade behind the molding on all four walls, hoping its forward edge would strike something—a folded note, a hidden photograph. As there had been at least three permanent residents, plus the occasional girlfriend or comrade, crashing in this two-bed space, a lot of sleeping had probably been done on the floor, up against these walls. Raszer would have been content with a matchbook, a coin—any talisman once held by any of the principals—but he came up empty. With a grimace, he stood and faced the toilet.

  He lifted the seat with the toe of his boot and squatted down. Urine and vomit had hardened on the rim. Good DNA, if anyone cared to check it. He was about to rise, when he noticed that something had been scrawled on the underside of the seat with a blue ballpoint pen. For whom to see? Who writes on the underside of a toilet seat?

  The suppositions ticked in: someone on his knees, possibly nauseous, certainly stoned out of his mind, suddenly remembers something he doesn’t wish to forget and doesn’t want to share. The handwriting was poor, the hand shaky, but it appeared to be a website address and a name, perhaps a contact’s. Raszer took out his little Mamiya digital and snapped a bracketed series of exposures. The ink was smeared in four places, but from what he could make out, the inscription read: a—-n-uts.com, and the name Hazid.

  He took a small spiral notepad from his inside pocket and wrote out the letters with underlined blanks between them, like the child’s game Hangman. This was not the time for crossword puzzles. The game could be played in his moonlight hours, when he kept long vigils reading or learning a new language at his slate-topped bar, abetted by speedballs of espresso and absinthe. At least he had something. He stood up, took one more look around, and left the trailer.

  When he stepped out, he saw that the light had changed, marking what must be a break in the clouds, and that the false dawn of evening so characteristic of the mountain West—the last flare of golden light before the sun’s candle was extinguished—had settled over the canyon, making the mist slightly luminous. Only a slice of sky was visible from the ravine, so he couldn’t see the light’s source, but about two hundred yards deeper into Johnny’s gulch, where the chaparral grew thick, there stood an old California live oak whose tiny, reflective leaves shimmered as if spotlit. Passing beneath the string of dripping paper lanterns, Raszer proceeded toward the light.

  Back in the brush there was more detritus: beer cans, empty half-gallon bottles of Everclear and Jack Daniel’s, a girl’s abandoned halter top, and a spent nitrous-oxide tank. Fifty yards before the oak tree, the undergrowth gave way to what looked like it had once been a footpath. The San Gabriel Front Range was crisscrossed with such easements, most of them cut like ley lines almost a century ago, when weekend hikes were part of any healthy regimen and the spirit of John Muir loomed large. Beyond the tree, the path—though arched by creosote and mountain sage—appeared to widen. Could this be the passage that Johnny’s trailer was meant to seal off?

  With the light fading fast, his feet improperly shod, and the Coronado Lodge still to visit, an extended ramble was out of the question, so Raszer set a bend at the base of a rock face a quarter mile ahead as his turnabout. When he reached it, however, there was further enticement. It was a trailhead, marked by a small granite obelisk inscribed with the following:

  East Fork Trailhead .6 m

  Bridge to Nowhere 2.4 m

  Had he another two hours to spare, Raszer would not have hesitated, boots or no boots. How could any investigator of final things pass up something called the Bridge to Nowhere? But he was rewarded, in any event, for his curiosity, because on the rock face that revealed itself as he came around the bend, someone—evidently dangling from a rappel line—had spray-painted these travelers’ tips:

  Ex nihilo ad nihilo

  Suicide is the ultimate act of personal autonomy

  From nothing to nothing.

  If a thousand things about this case were still as muddy as the soles of his boots, one thing, at least, was becoming clear: Johnny Horn and Henry Lee had found in Iraq—if not before that—a symbiosis of action and ideology. With Johnny as heart and Henry as head, they had taken gameboy nihilism, anti-authoritarian resentment, and some novel blend of heavy-metal magick and near-Eastern myth, and captivated a group of small-town kids. On record, their World Anarchist Reform Movement seemed to have made little noise, but maybe—just maybe—they had attracted the notice of some big players who’d initially found them useful, and then—in a classic reversal—declared them just as expendable. But on the key question, the why of Katy Endicott’s abduction, there was so little to go on that even Aquino’s virgin-sex-ring idea had some weight .

  At this very early stage of his investigation, Raszer was inclined to stick with what he called identity motives—that Katy was a victim precisely because she was what she was: a formerly devoted member of a rigid Christian sect that insisted on unquestioning obedience. He doubted he would have much more than that until he’d spoken to two people: Emmett Parrish and Ruthie Endicott.

  The light from the low sun scrolled down the face of the rock, which was in fact the flat side of a boulder more than forty feet high. Other inscriptions materialized from the pink granite
like invisible ink—some no more than initials, others in the faded colors and Aquarian luster of Day-Glo paint—until the vast canvas stood as a chronicle of the past half century and a wailing wall reflecting the descent from postwar aspiration to postmodern despair.

  As he scanned the surface, Raszer came across one epigram in faint purple that he found especially wistful: Think Lovely Thoughts—P.P. It made him smile, but the smile faded when he noticed an accompanying arrow pointing toward the bridge and realized that the attribution was to Peter Pan. “Thinking lovely thoughts” was how the Darling children had gained the power of flight, and Raszer couldn’t help but wonder if the Bridge to Nowhere was not also a lovers’ leap.

  As he turned back toward the trailer, a distant smear of color caught his eye. In the far canyon indicated by the path marker and just visible at the outer limits of his sight, rain had begun to fall again, refracting the sunlight into a gentle arc of yellow, blue, and some deeper hue that appeared to span the gorge. Evanescing within the rainbow was a frail structure of stone and steel, somehow less real than the mirage that concealed it.