by A. W. Hill
For those disinclined to believe in “signs” of any sort, Raszer’s sense that the bridge had utilized an optical effect in order to reveal itself to him might suggest that a stay at the Betty Ford Center or the Menninger Clinic was in order. But these were people who’d never opened a book to the very passage they were looking for.
He accelerated his pace as he neared Johnny’s trailer. It was late, the Coronado was another treacherous two or three miles up the road, and he’d seen all he wanted to see here, at least for today. In truth, he was anxious to leave. If he hadn’t brushed his head against the Japanese lantern or turned to see the gold string hanging down, he’d have been on his way. As it was, he had no choice but to stop.
There was something inside the soggy, misshapen paper lantern, a dark shape nestled against its translucent skin. The knotted gold string—about three inches long and resembling the drawstring of a fine jewelry bag—was the cord asking to be pulled, the party favor with the fortune inside. But what might be delivered into his hands, Raszer couldn’t guess.
The lantern resisted at first; its wire frame narrowed at the mouth and appeared to have been squeezed even tighter to secure its cache. Once Raszer had widened it, though, the contents slipped out with a speed and heft that made him jump back. What he held at arm’s length was a small, wet pouch of midnight blue velvet, embroidered in Persian style with the same gold thread used to make the drawstring. It felt like about eight ounces, but allowing for the water, whatever was inside would weigh in around six. Raszer held it up to the light. The needlework was elegant, the pattern abstract and unrevealing. A dozen possibilities raced through Raszer’s mind. Diamonds? Iraqi jewels pilfered from a mullah’s private stash? A sacred artifact from the ancient city of Babylon, or one of the ‘weird little statues’ Aquino mentioned? Dope? A roll of bills?
Whatever it was, his impulse was to obey the instruction of both instinct and police procedure and leave the pouch securely tied until it sat on Aquino’s desk. Continuing to hold the dripping sack away from his torso, Raszer made his way slowly back down the muddy path to his car and set the evidence on the passenger-side floor mat to drain.
East Fork Road ran almost level with the San Gabriel River and mirrored its every bend. With the rains, the usual trickle had swollen to a bankless torrent of whitewater, with the two-lane road’s narrow shoulder acting as an uncertain levee. Other states might have preemptively closed the road, but this was outback California, whose motto could well be “Proceed at your own risk.”
Every year, hundreds of teenagers did just that, stopping to hop boulders or pose for hero pictures, and every year, a few of them drowned. Only a mudslide or a blizzard would prompt the Highway Patrol and Forest Service to drag out the barricades, and even this was controversial, for, remarkably, people lived up here. They lived in mobile homes long since rendered immobile, in ramshackle cabins propped on the slopes amid stands of Jeffrey pine, andthey lived—though not freely—in the confines of State Department of Corrections Fire Camp No. 39.
Since his time was running short, Raszer drove past the paved bridge leading to the fire camp without much regard, except to note that the forested riverbank prison seemed—at least from his distance—not all that unpleasant. He wondered if it took fleecing some grandma of her life savings to rate such easy time, but then reasoned that white-collar criminals would make lousy firemen. They were more likely to be the first out of a burning building.
Beyond the prison compound, the river widened into shallows where ridges and bars of scree and silt diffracted the rushing water into a dozen currents flowing at different rates. Amid these were hip-booted fisherman—not weekend anglers, but weary hunter-gatherers with nicotine-cured skin only a shade or two off from that of their soiled yellow ponchos, and small, mostly Latino children playing on the muddy banks in patent leather shoes and lacy dresses, waiting for Daddy to reel in dinner.
Just ahead, another bridge spanned the San Gabriel, this one leading to what looked like a pioneer village. In the rain and mud and darkening mist, it resembled a prospector’s camp removed from time, if somehow entirely in place. Raszer glanced down at the Post-it note on his instrument panel. Aquino’s directions were a little unclear about the next turn, so he decided—as much in fascination as out of disorientation—to consult the locals. He crossed the bridge and passed under a large, painted billboard announcing the Follows Camp, est. 1862, then proceeded past a Residents Only sign to a small parking lot adjacent to a raised picnic area and a rustic log structure with a Miller beer sign lit up in its window.
He stepped out and glanced around, suddenly very much aware that the roar of the river blanketed even the cries of the children playing nearby. The settlement buildings came in browns so darkened by damp that the most distant cabin was barely distinct from the clay soil around it. It was both comforting and dismal, as such places can be: comforting because it had the rainy-day smell and smoked patina of an eternal summer camp; dismal because it was evident that for the wary souls who eyed Raszer from its perimeters, this squatters’ village was home.
A plaque beside the picnic area informed him that, indeed, the Follows Camp had been established as a gold-mining community and was now open to families on a year-round or seasonal basis. The full-timers, Raszer supposed, must be an intrepid lot by the slack standards of twenty-first-century America. The nearest supermarket was a good thirty minutes away; a trip to the mall would amount to an expedition.
Raszer flinched. Standing beside a picnic table not twelve feet away was an old-timer in stained overalls, with broken, caramel-colored teeth and a yellowish beard that came to a point at his solar plexus. He wore a misshapen brown hat and highwater boots. Raszer sensed that the man had been there in the fog, watching him, from the moment of his arrival, as still as a mule deer in the brush.
“Hello there,” Raszer called out.
“Hello there,” the bearded statue came back.
“Can you point me to the old Coronado Lodge?” Raszer asked. “With this rain and fog, I’m afraid I may wind up in Palmdale.”
“Won’t get to Palmdale on this road,” the man creaked. “Won’t even get to Manker Flats. She’s closed above four thousand.”
Raszer waited for him to continue, but apparently the man had retained only the last part of his question, and now hung there in suspended animation, rain dripping from his brim. “And the Coronado?” Raszer recapitulated.
“The Coronado?” he exclaimed, in the way that cranks have of making a question a reproach. “Whatcha want up thur? It’s a ghost town. Closed since the big washout in ’38.”
“1938,” said Raszer, and looked around at the erosion the rain had caused to the surrounding slopes. “Was it worse than this year?”
“Hell, yes!” his informant barked. “Took out the new road. Up at the Bridge to Nowhere. That would’ve gotten you to Palmdale. That was the plan, anyways.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Raszer. “I didn’t know that.” And he added, for safety’s sake, “But you can still get to the Coronado, right?”
The ancient gold-digger, which was surely what he appeared to be, squinted hard and asked, “Why?”
Raszer operated on the share-and-share-alike principle. Caginess would get him nowhere with witnesses, and certainly not with locals. “I’m a private detective,” he said. “I’m looking for a lost girl . . . and maybe some new ghosts. Can you help me?”
The man cackled. “God, I love that Mickey Spillane. Y’ever read ’im?”
“I’ve run across his stuff,” said Raszer. “His guy gets more girls than I do.”
Rumpelstiltskin looked him over. “Doubt that,” he said. “Unless yer a fairy.”
“If I don’t get up to the Coronado pretty soon, I may turn into a pumpkin.”
The old man chortled and aimed his right arm northeast. “G’wup to just before the Camp Williams trailer park ’n make a sharp right on Glendora Mountain Road. Almost as soon as y’do, there’ll be an old fi
re road on yer left, goin’ into Cattle Canyon. It’s still got a little pavement at the bottom, ’cause it was the main road to the lodge for the fancy folks, back in the ’20s.” He twirled an index finger in the air. “Shit . . . bootleggers, movie stars, ladies of the night! Use to be able to get drunk and laid up here for a fin. Anyhow, you’ll follow that road as far as”—he glanced dismissively at Raszer’s Avanti, then just as doubtfully at his shoes—”as far as your wheels will take you. Might have to hoof it a bit. When you can see the snow line, you’re there.”
Raszer looked down at his mud-caked boots and indicated the little camp store across the lot. “I don’t suppose they’d sell me any galoshes over there?”
“Nope,” said the old man. “I’ll sell ya mine for a sawbuck.”
“Thanks,” Raszer said, “but I think you’d miss them.” He started to get into the car, then paused. “I take it you heard about those boys who got killed up there a year or so ago. The kids who broke into the lodge for that big dance party.”
“Heard about it!” he exclaimed. “Hell, mister, I live up in the topmost cabin, and those fools with their music had my heart jumpin’ from two canyons away.”
“Ever hear anything about the men who did the killing?” Raszer asked. “I know the police and the FBI were up here, so y’might know the killers drove a black Lincoln.”
“No, sir. Keep to myself.”
“Uh-huh,” said Raszer, then paused,because the man’s jaw was still moving.
“But when ya get up there,” he said, “sniff around the old buggy sheds out back the place. There’s an old squatter named J.Z. A fella I used to dig with. He used to make his crib in the sheds. Could be he saw something. If he’s still alive. You never know.”
Raszer gave his new friend a nod. “Thanks,” he said. He fished out his keys and set one muddy boot in the car. “Say,” he added, “is there still gold in these mountains?”
“Sure, yeah,” said the man. “But I lost my nose for it.”
“About that squatter,” said Raszer. “Did you tell the police or the feds?”
The man chuckled. “They never bothered to ask.”
Almost as soon as he’d closed the door, Raszer became aware of a sweet, heavy scent with a faintly putrid undertone. The little velvet sack, sitting right in the path of the heat vent, had begun to exude aromatic traces of myrrh, musk, and patchouli.
By the time Raszer had hiked his last yard, it was nearly dusk. There was barely enough light to reflect yellow from the police tape still draped on the Coronado’s barricaded doors and between two trees up the road—the spot, evidently, where the killing had been done. It was colder than he’d expected. The snow line was indeed close. A harsh, wet wind scooped out the canyon, and the uppermost branches of a few of the taller pines on the property were flocked with ice. Raszer felt an ache in his chest.
It was an ache he knew well, equal parts loneliness, dread, and perverse exhilaration. It was a feeling, he was certain, that had been known to every scout or tracker who’d ever gone ahead of the war party or the wagons. It was accompanied by an awareness ofthe heartbeat behind his left ear and the hollowness in his stomach.
Aquino had neglected to mention—although it probably went without saying—that the police had boarded and padlocked the Coronado’s once stylishly rustic buildings. The main lodge had a stonework portico fit for a Bentley, and eight-foot doors of solid oak. The huge logs of which the lodge was made had claimed a small forest of old-growth trees, but now looked as sad and sunken as the walls of an abandoned outhouse. Three long, one-story outbuildings of knotty pine had accommodated the resort’s guests in comfortable, if not exactly luxurious, fashion. All but one of them looked to have been badly damaged by fire. The dance hall, angled forty-five degrees from the lodge and connected to it by a covered stone walkway, was a scaled-down version of a vintage Jazz Age pavilion, built to hold a big band and a couple hundred ginned-up swingers. Though its roof had partially collapsed and its walls had succumbed to dry rot and termites, Raszer saw instantly why Johnny Horn had seized it for his last rave.
He circumnavigated the hall, looking for a way in. It would be bad form to break the police tape or jimmy the locks, but he wasn’t about to leave without going in. In the rear of the building, at shoulder level, was a small casement window that presumably opened into a dressing room or toilet. Raszer spent five minutes trying to force it, then gave up and broke the pane without compunction. It was a small marvel, he rationalized, that it had remained unbroken for this long.
He dropped down inside with a krruunch that informed him the foundation was no more solid than the roof. He was indeed in the ladies’ room, where fragments of an art deco mosaic, and the corroded remains of a makeup mirror, were scattered on the floor and walls. The door was off its hinges, and Raszer stepped out into the ballroom. A gaping hole in the arched roof provided a bit more light.
An empty dance hall is as empty as empty gets. A quick scan confirmed that it was little more than a shell, and that the police had scoured it. Nonetheless, he wanted to cover every warped square foot of its hardwood floor, to stand where Katy had stood, breathe the air that she had inhaled. He regarded this as an empirical exercise, rather than a mystical one, but that was because mysticism was ingrained in his method. If, for one moment, he could feel the morphic resonance of her past presence, he might better sense it when she was truly within his grasp.
From the same deep pocket that held his penknife, he removed a small, high-powered flashlight and swept its beam across the floor as he walked. There was no debris, no matchbooks or cigarette butts, but the hall’s very emptiness seemed to reflect the fevered breath of the dancers and the jackhammer rhythm of Johnny’s music, driving his acolytes to a place where nothing was true and everything was permitted. Raszer recalled reading that as the rave scene in England had degenerated from ecstatic community to paranoid dystopia, the ravers had talked of “obliviating,” of entering a state of “bewilderness.”
Ecstasy and oblivion were, of course, two sides of the same coin, the difference being that for a Zen monk, nothingness was a glass at least half-full, where for the nihilist, it was well below half-empty. He wondered where Katy’s glass had stood.
The thought of music caused him to pause and regard the raised bandstand. On the night of the rave, there would have been no trombone section, no torch singer, just a solitary DJ with two turntables and a microphone. There was a single item on the bandstand: a common folding table, the type used in cafeterias. Raszer beelined for it, narrowly skirting an open gash in the floor. He vaulted up onto the stage and approached the table. No piece of furniture could possibly have held less promise: no hidden drawers, no deep cracks in its Plasticine surface. And yet Raszer had a feeling. He remembered something he’d once seen at a club. It was in his mind’s eye now, and the question was whether it would manifest itself for him.
He squatted, took out his penknife again, and ran its point along the hairline gap between the particleboard underside of the table and its aluminum base. DJs—or MCs in club argot—leapfrogged from gig to gig on the strength of their last mix, and if someone staggered up and shouted, “How do I hire you?” there wasn’t time for talk or free hands to write a number. They kept business cards at the ready, wedged into any available cranny for fast access. There was only one such crevice on this table.
What Raszer had seen in his mind’s eye was a train of business cards, lined up in the crack under the table’s edge, easy to grab between needle drops, but all he needed was one, and one was what he found when the knife edge suddenly stopped. With great care, he extracted it.
MC Hakim
-TranceMaster-
213/666-0230
A good DJ kept his hands on the platters and his eyes on the dance floor, monitoring the vital signs of every ass, searching every face for hints of ennui, gauging his command of the crowd. “God is a DJ, and this is his church,” went one famous “callout hook.” The DJ saw the whole
and its parts, and he was especially on the alert for walkouts. MC Hakim, whoever he was, might have seen Katy Endicott leave the building. He might recall the pretty girl with the ’40s movie-star hair and doe eyes, and whether her expression as she left had suggested delirium or coercion, lassitude or terror. Raszer slipped the card into his pocket and went back out through the window.
Starting at the front doors, Raszer took the walk that Katy and her four male companions had taken, through a stand of pines to the road, and up the slope to where the yellow police tape marked the killing ground. It took less than three minutes, but by the time Katy would have reached the parked Dodge convertible, her teeth would have been chattering. Whose car? Were there, as Silas suggested, drugs in the trunk? Had that been the lure to get Katy outside? There was nothing at the site to evidence the horror that had occurred, no X to mark the spot. Only the slack yellow tape, flapping in the icy downdraft, and the hiss of the pine needles. Something stirred in the underbrush—a deer, or maybe an opossum—and the hair on Raszer’s neck bristled.