by Todd Borg
Driving away, I noticed headlights turn on from up the street and come up behind me. I couldn’t see what kind of vehicle, but from their height and position I guessed it to be a sport utility vehicle. The headlights stayed with me as I drove up the East Shore toward my cabin. The phone message had left me a little paranoid, but if the person behind me was the firestarter, I didn’t want to lead him up to Street’s condo where she and Spot waited. I made a turn off the highway, trying to get a glimpse in my rear-view mirror as the vehicle went under the streetlight. It was an old pickup, a mid-seventies Chevy from what I could see. The pickup followed me. I made two more turns and then sped back onto the highway, flooring the Jeep.
I’ve got the biggest engine package that Jeep sells which makes my vehicle faster than most anything on the road. Yet the pickup stayed with me. The pickup probably had the 350 V8 that Chevy was using in the seventies. Even so, my guess was that there was a lot of custom work under the hood of the pickup. Realizing that I wasn’t going to speed away to an easy escape, I slowed and dialed Street.
“Hi, sweetheart. I just left the office to come home, but it looks like I’ve got someone on my tail and I don’t want them following me to your place. So I might be a bit.”
“Owen, what are you going to do? Do you think this is someone dangerous? Can you drive to the police station?”
“I would if I merely wanted to scare this guy off. But I’d rather learn who he is and what he wants.” As I said it, the pickup came up on my rear, tailgating me close enough that his headlights made a mockery of my tinted glass. I stayed at an even forty-five, not wanting too much speed in case he did something crazy like ram me.
“Owen, this sounds very scary. Please be careful.”
“I will. This guy might be the firestarter. I’ve got to find out.”
Street didn’t speak at first. “Could you at least get Diamond on your phone and arrange to meet him where the guy tailing you won’t expect?”
“Good idea. I’ll call you back as soon as I find out what’s going on.”
“Be careful,” Street said. “I love you.”
“You too,” I said, uncomfortable with good-byes that sounded final.
I dialed Diamond and left a message on his pager. Not yet sure of the best tactic, I continued heading up the East Shore. I next dialed Diamond’s voice mail and told him I had a general plan to lead my pursuer into the Spooner Lake campground where I thought I could trap him. I hung up, hoping Diamond would call back before I got that far.
There were other cars on the dark four-lane highway. I stayed in the right lane and the pickup stayed right behind me while other cars zoomed around us on the left. We crawled away from Lake Tahoe, up the big incline toward Spooner Summit like two slow night bugs on a mission that the rest of the universe knew nothing about.
I got in the left lane and turned off toward Spooner Lake, a vague plan taking shape. If the territory was more familiar to me than to my pursuer, I would have an advantage. When I approached the Spooner Lake campground, I took the entrance turnoff at high speed and hit the gas.
The Jeep fishtailed and shot though the campground, the pickup following closely. I made some sudden tight turns and the pickup missed one of them, slamming into a bear-proof garbage dumpster. In my side mirror I saw the pickup back up, turn and come after me again. I had gained some precious yards and intended to stretch them out.
I turned onto one of the hiking trails that led out of the campground toward Spooner Lake. If my memory was correct, there was a fence with a gate that kept vehicles from leaving the campground. I went up a rise, then down, scanning to the sides to see the lay of the land. There was an open meadow to the right. Just before the gate I braked nearly to a stop, then turned off my lights. Without touching my brakes again, I turned off to the right and circled around through the darkness.
The pickup came over the rise and down the trail fast. He flashed by me and then hit his brakes at the last moment when he saw the gate. There wasn’t enough distance and he hit the gate just as he came to a stop. I pulled out directly behind him, turned on my high beams and got out of the Jeep.
The pickup shifted into reverse, and the engine revved. The driver obviously intended to ram my Jeep. But his bumper had gotten hooked on the metal gate and his wheels spun fast, throwing a spray of gravel and dirt as they dug down into the ground.
The driver left his lights on and his engine running and got out into the wash of my headlights. I stood off in the dark.
He was a redneck cliché. A grubby, sleeveless undershirt was insufficient to cover his massive belly. Dirty jeans were held up by suspenders that arced over the fat and up toward tattooed shoulders. On his feet were scuffed, black combat boots. His eyes were bloodshot and seemed to glow pink in my headlights. He was a big man and there was a lot to look at. But my eyes settled on the tire iron in his right hand.
“Time to teach you a lesson, stretch,” he drawled, staring off into the dark where he presumed I was standing.
TWENTY
The obese man with the tire iron chuckled as he advanced roughly toward me. My headlights lit him up like a stage actor, while I was invisible in the dark.
“What is this about?” I asked.
“This is about no more checking out the fires.”
“Not while I’ve got this nine millimeter on you,” I lied. Off on the highway behind me came the welcome sound of a vehicle slowing and then turning into the campground. Diamond must have gotten my message. “You don’t move until I give you permission to move,” I said.
The redneck ignored me and started to move away from his pickup, out of the Jeep’s headlights. As his eyes searched the darkness for me, his grip on the tire iron seemed to tighten. He telegraphed a feral quality that frightened me. The most dangerous people are those who have nothing to lose. And the fat slob in front of me looked like a poster boy for those without any cares in the world.
He started to move again, watching and listening as Diamond’s Explorer wheeled up behind me, headlights flooding me from behind.
Only, it wasn’t Diamond. It was another old pickup.
The door opened and I heard the sickening sound of a pump-action shotgun.
“Now look here, Bobby,” a nasally voice behind me said. “What if I hadn’t gotten your call? I don’t know if it’d be smart for you to go up against Mr. McKenna yourself. He coulda got the drop on you.”
I slowly turned to look at the man behind me.
“Easy, boy” the man said, his voice almost falsetto.
The fat man started toward me, raising the tire iron. “He says he got a nine on him. I don’t see no piece.”
“Me neither,” the man behind me said.
“Good. Now I can finish what I started,” the fat man said.
“Not a good idea,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because, if I hurt you, your friend might want to shoot his cannon and in the dark he could hit you instead of me.”
“Not likely,” the nasal-voiced man behind me said.
“Which one of you is the firestarter?” I said, stalling for time while I tried to think of a strategy.
“Neither,” the fat man said. He advanced on me, the tire iron held out at his side.
“Instead of trying to take my head off with the tire iron, why don’t you drop it and we’ll fight the old fashioned way.”
“I don’t think so,” he said in a sing-song voice. He grinned, the headlights illuminating a sporadic assortment of brown teeth.
I considered sprinting off into the dark, but I didn’t know how determined the man behind me was. A shotgun didn’t need to be aimed accurately and it could still blow your head off.
“Your friend can put down the cannon and join in. Two against one. Kicking my butt with your bare hands would be a lot more satisfying than cleaving my brain with the iron.”
Judging by his giggle, the man thought that was a really good joke.
“Don’t do it, Bob
by,” the nasal voice called out from the dark behind me. “Use the iron. Let’s get this over.”
Bobby came closer, the tire iron in the air.
“Last chance,” I said.
He grinned once more, then his face got so serious and intense that it frightened me. I had to get the tire iron out of his hand and I thought the best way would be to draw him out with a fake punch.
I stepped toward him and made like I was trying to get in a serious right jab. He swung hard with the iron. He would have easily broken my arm if I hadn’t pulled away at the last moment.
The iron swished through the air next to my head.
I pretended to wind up a left hook, hoping to get him to step into me so I could grab him.
He was too quick with the iron and I misjudged my distance. The metal cut through the air like a scythe, grazed my side and made a ringing blow on the upper corner of my hip bone. The pain was excruciating. I grit my teeth and took the fast-moving wrist.
I grabbed onto the big, pudgy arm with both of my hands. He was already moving forward with the swing of the iron. I added a good pull to his momentum, bent down and caught his face with the upper crest of my forehead.
As his nose and few remaining teeth were lost to my head-butt, my focus had already shifted to the man with the shotgun behind me. Still holding the redneck’s arm, I spun around behind him and brought the tire iron up tight against his throat. But he had already sunk into unconsciousness and sagged down, a massive weight for me to hold up. A biting, acrid body odor rose up and made me want to gag and drop him. But I continued to hold him up, as his body was my protection against the shotgun in front of me.
“Your turn,” I said to the man with the shotgun, a man whose face I still hadn’t seen. I tried to sound casual, tried not to show my heavy breathing.
“Don’t move,” he suddenly said. His voice was a squeak.
I heard him reach for the door of his pickup. Not wanting him to get away, I summoned strength I didn’t know I had and virtually threw the limp man toward him. He hit the vehicle door and the other man simultaneously. The door slammed shut and the man with the shotgun fell back. I launched myself onto him, grabbing the gun.
As my fingers gripped the barrel, he fired the gun. The shock was as if the explosion went directly through my hands without the protection of the metal barrel. I was momentarily stunned. I regained my senses and wrested it from his hands. I threw the weapon into the darkness, picked the man up by his jacket and belt and slammed him up against his pickup. He didn’t move as I patted him down.
When I was certain that he had no more weapons on him, I carried him into the headlights of his pickup for a good look at his face. He didn’t fight back.
His complexion was gaunt, with dark bags under small eyes and a three-day growth of beard. I guessed him to be younger than me, in his mid-thirties, about the age of his obese companion. Although six feet tall, his frame was light enough that I could have thrown him through his windshield.
“What’s your name?” I asked, my voice a ragged whisper.
“I ain’t telling you nothing,” he said.
“Yes, you are.” Blood was running from where the fat redneck had lost his teeth on my head. It dripped into my left eye, angering me further. I lifted him by his belt and walked around the pickup, stepping on the prostrate body in the dirt to be sure that he was, indeed, unconscious.
I dragged the skinny man through the dark, stopping to pick up the tire iron and throw it into the forest.
The fence around the campground was made of large cedar posts strung with wire. With my right hand, I grasped the hair of the man I was dragging. With my left, I grabbed the back of his neck. I indelicately placed his open mouth onto the top of a cedar fence post, his upper incisors against the rough wood. Leaning hard on the top of his head so that maybe two hundred pounds of me was pressing his upper teeth down into the end grain, I spoke slowly and softly.
“While you’re playing beaver on the fence post, I’m going to ask you a question. If you answer to my satisfaction, I’ll show my appreciation by not breaking off all your upper teeth at once. Do you understand? You can just grunt if you do.”
He made a weak noise.
“Okay, here’s the question. What is your name?” With a tight grip on his hair, I lifted his head three inches up off the fence post and held it there as if to smash it back down.
“Jeremy Dodger,” he said, his voice tiny.
“And your companion?”
“Bobby Mackenzie.”
“Why did he want to put the tire iron through my head?”
“We were paid to do it by Joe.”
“Who is Joe?” I asked.
“The manager at the High River Saloon in Truckee.”
“He do this often?” I asked. “Give you jobs like this?”
“Once or twice.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“He paid us five hundred.”
“Cash?”
“Yeah,” he said. Drool was hanging from his open mouth.
“That proves nothing,” I said. “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.”
Jeremy Dodger thought a moment. “He wrote down your address on a bar napkin. I gave it to Bobby so he could watch your office. I watched your cabin. When Bobby saw you first, he called me on Joe’s cell phone so I could drive to wherever he followed you.”
“Where is the napkin and the phone?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe in Bobby’s pocket. Or his truck.”
“Let’s go have a look,” I said. I half-walked, half-dragged Jeremy over to where Bobby still lay. I planted him face down in the dirt next to the fat man and kneeled on his back while I went through Bobby’s pockets, ignoring Jeremy’s cries of pain. Something cracked under my knee. One of his ribs maybe. I found nothing. We repeated the maneuver at Bobby’s pickup only with me standing on his back while I looked in the truck. Jeremy groaned even louder.
The dome light was broken, so the only light was what came in from my headlights and Jeremy’s headlights. But it was enough.
The phone was on the seat. I slid it into my pocket. A napkin was paper-clipped to the visor. I held it up so my headlights shined on it.
The logo said High River Saloon, and my office address was written in pen. It would be easy enough to check the handwriting and see if it belonged to Joe. Easier still to check the number to which Joe’s phone answered. I put the napkin in my pocket, bent down and lifted Jeremy up just as another set of headlights pulled up.
Diamond got out. He looked around at the vehicles, then settled his gaze on Jeremy and me. “It looks like I got here too late,” he said. “Sorry.”
“No problem,” I said. “If you look on the other side of that truck you’ll find a well-marbled side of beef named Bobby. Bobby is the brawn of this duo. Which suggests that Jeremy, here, is the brains and the beauty. Isn’t that right, Jeremy?” When he didn’t respond, I shook him.
“Uh, sure.”
“Brains and beauty, huh?” Diamond said. “Can’t wait to see the brawn.” He walked around to the dark side of the pickup and poked at the prostrate body with the toe of his boot. He turned back toward me. “I guess I missed the whole play,” he said.
“As drama goes, it was pretty weak.”
“Maybe. But the denouement looks to have been exciting.”
“Denouement,” I said, repeating his ‘day-new-mah’ pronunciation which, knowing Diamond, was probably accurate. “I thought you were still focusing on English for your second language.”
“Can’t hurt to learn some others. It’s French for outcome. Besides, I got that word on a cop training tape at work. Surviving Street Fights. The announcer referred to taking away the suspect’s weapon as the key to a positive denouement.”
I gave Jeremy a little shake. “What do you think, Jeremy? Have we achieved a positive denouement?”
“I dunno,” he said.
“Let’s put him in the
back,” Diamond said.
I held Jeremy’s wrists behind his back while Diamond cuffed him. Diamond walked over and opened the back door of the Douglas County Explorer. I pushed Jeremy in headfirst and shut the door.
Diamond got in Jeremy’s pickup and jockeyed it so that the headlights shown on Bobby. Then the two of us rolled him over.
“Look at that,” Diamond said. “This beef is missing some teeth.”
Together, Diamond and I cuffed Bobby. I let Diamond do the honors of double checking his body for weapons. Then we lifted him up and slid him into the back of the Explorer, his head in Jeremy’s lap.
“Aw, man, he’s getting my pants all bloody! God, his teeth are coming out!”
“Your five hundred bucks will buy him a new one,” I said.
After we shut the door, I told Diamond what had happened.
“You’re thinking of paying a visit to Mr. Joe at the High River Saloon?” he asked.
“Out of your jurisdiction, so I guess I’ll have to.”
Diamond shrugged. “Let me know what you find out,” he said as he walked over to each of the two pickups, reached in, turned them off and pocketed the keys.
I followed him out of the campground, thinking about Joe in Truckee.
Jeremy said Joe had given them five hundred dollars to warn me off my investigation. Seemed like a lot of money to waste. Be good to find out more, but it would have to wait. Street was still with Spot. As I thought of her, I pictured the faceless Joe having hired someone else to watch my cabin. Anybody could have seen Street go pick up Spot, then followed her back down to her condo.
I floored the accelerator and shot up the highway. I pulled up to Street’s condo a few minutes later, jumped out and ran to the door, key in hand.
Street was sitting and reading in front of the fireplace. Spot was next to her, his head draped over her knee. His eyes were half shut indicating heat intoxication.
Street looked up and her eyes immediately went to my bloody forehead. She jumped up. “Owen! What happened? Are you all right?”