Then I picked up the reflection of some taillights not far enough ahead of me.
Closing in rapidly, I honked and kept on honking. If you’re just aware that I’m here, I thought, and can see that I’m barreling down on you like a maniac, maybe you’ll understand what’s happening, turn your own lights on, speed up just a little …
Nope, it’s an astronomy geek who has no idea I’m in trouble. Thinks I’m a crazy who in addition to the reckless driving has no regard for the rules about keeping your headlights off and not polluting the mountain with light. I was not only going to have to keep my car on the side of the mountain, I was going to have to pass this idiot by switching to the outside lane. Please let it be on a swing to the left.
Nope, swing to the right.
Please let there be guardrails on this stretch.
Nope, no guardrails. I felt my car skid on the dirt followed by a sensation that the back wheels were swinging over nothing. My stomach followed. At this rate if I survived I wouldn’t have any organs left. I gunned the motor and the front tires caught hard and kept catching. The back wheels followed suit.
Some vestige of my mind made me unclick my seat belt on one short straightaway, and then crack my door on the next. If I was going to go over the edge, this way I’d have a chance of jumping to a less certain death rather than going down with the vehicle. It’s what you do when you’re descending on an eight percent grade with multiple switchbacks and no brakes.
At least I got past that jerk without either of us plunging into a bomb-like explosion. I yelled an obscenity at the top of my lungs as I sped by him. His windows were closed and for all I knew he had his iPhone plugged into his head, so I feel fairly sure he wouldn’t have heard what I called him.
Funny how as I look back I talk about speeding, but I couldn’t have been going more than forty, forty-two miles an hour. It’s all relative, and nearly impossible to take a 380-degree switchback turn while going that fast. After I got back in the proper lane I had the sense that the grade was easing now, maybe just five percent, and that would mean that the drop was only a few hundred feet. But three hundred feet would kill me just as dead as a thousand feet, and I wasn’t slowing down on my own.
One curve, two curves, three. I was operating on sheer instinct now. Like an animal with a driver’s license.
And then just as suddenly as I had begun the terrifying descent, I was free of the mountain, escaping from its curves as from the tentacles of a giant octopus that had finally let me go. My brights showed that nice long straightaway, and now that I was safe I let my hands shake a bit on the steering wheel and my lungs take in all the air they wanted. At least I still had my lungs. About midway down the road I coasted to a stop.
And stayed, shivering as frantically as an overcaffeinated Chihuahua.
Having continued on its way as a sane person who stayed within the speed limit would, after five minutes the car that had been behind me pulled up beside me. Time had gone by, but anger had not subsided. The passenger window rolled down, the other driver fumbled at something and cursed. Then a flashlight, not that strong but enough to blind me after the dark, and a man’s voice yelled in something like a British accent, “Don’t you realize this is neither the time nor place for joyriding? You could have killed both of us!” Maybe he was responding to my red sports car as much as his own adrenaline, but I really wasn’t in the mood just now for road rage, whatever the excuse.
My window was still down and I managed to say without shouting, “My brakes failed, you fucking nimrod. And turn off that fucking flashlight, motherfucker.”
That calmed him down in an instant, especially when he took a close look at my face, which may have been glowing white in the light he shone on me. He turned it off. He must have dropped it, because he cursed and bent over and fumbled around. When his head came back into view I still couldn’t make out his face, but I could see him lean forward and tilt his head to see that I was alone. His doing that made the nerve in my neck spark, but he didn’t get out of his car to offer help, he just asked if I had Triple A. That made me give my brakes an instinctive tap, to find that they were working just fine now. The brakes were working.
“Yep,” I said, mystified. “I’ll call them. You go on, I’ll be fine.”
His voice sounded doubtful when he asked if I was quite sure.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I said. I smiled cheerily to assure him. Then I thought about how we’d been in such a dry spell. “Did you hit that ice?”
I saw the brim of his baseball cap nod in the shadows. He said, “I managed to recover. Only the one spot. That was freakish.” I picked up an aged note in his voice now that he wasn’t yelling, reminiscent of bedsprings and a slow air leak.
Remembering that I had cracked my door open in anticipation of jumping for my life, I opened it wide in order to close it properly. When the man in the other car saw me do that, he gunned his engine and sped off, taking the left turn on the main road with his tires squealing. What was it with that? Did he think I was experiencing delayed road rage and was going to attack him with my tire iron? It was only much, much later that I thought his British accent sounded like an American actor portraying any other nationality.
Twenty–eight
I picked up Gemma-Kate in front of her dormitory and told her I wasn’t in the mood for a movie because I was a little shaken after losing my brakes on the road from Kitt Peak. Would she please come back to the house with me, spend the night, and drive Carlo’s car to Kitt Peak in the morning? I would follow until the mountain road started, and leave the Miata parked at the bottom while we fetched Carlo. That way we could drop her off at school again and continue on to the dealership. She agreed to do that while appearing unconcerned by my near-death.
On the drive up to Catalina I asked questions because she wasn’t talking.
“Have you been back to visit your dad?”
“No.”
“What about Christmas? Are you going home?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You should decide pretty soon before you can’t get a ticket. Do you need money?”
“No. Dad said he would pay.”
I sighed, thinking about spending Christmas Day in bed with Carlo alone, getting out only for a new book and occasional sustenance. “You could come spend the holiday with us.”
No response to that. Instead, “So do you have anything more on that Jerry Nolan character?”
“I got a print and sent it to Weiss, but nothing yet.”
We stopped once at Mr. An’s for some takeout sushi. Along the way I kept tapping the brakes, taking a long time to coast to a stop at lights so I wouldn’t hit the driver in front of me if the brakes failed again. It was like a different car from the one on the mountain road, as it had been up to that point, no trouble at all.
We walked into the house through the garage door and let the two pugs snort and bounce around us with unrestrained joy. Maybe even more joy than usual, which I attributed to Gemma-Kate’s presence.
Out of habit I yelled, “Couch time!” and we all headed to the living room and sat down for rubbings. Gemma-Kate didn’t sit down with us, but leaned over and patted the head of one of them the way she had the first time she met them, pat, pat, pat, no real feeling for animals. Or anyone else, for that matter. I never could figure out why the dogs liked her, seeing as how she’d nearly poisoned one. Perhaps pugs are forgiving creatures.
“Is this one Al or Peg?” she asked.
I confess to sneaking a peek at the dog’s privates. They looked alike to me, too, and we were still getting used to differentiating between them rather than calling them simply the Pugs. “Peg,” I said, seeing no male appendage. At that point both dogs had taken whatever love they needed from me, and jumped off the couch. Gemma-Kate, too, had moved on, undisguisedly checking out the place for anything that piqued her curiosity.
“Well, this is not like you,” she said, going to the back door. “Are you actually my aunt Brigid or h
ave you been taken over by aliens?”
No more distracted by either dogs or my thoughts about Gemma-Kate, I looked up.
“You left the back door unlocked,” she explained.
She was right, I don’t do things like that. I might forget which pug was which and whether I had my Miralax, but I don’t forget to lock the doors before I leave. Gemma-Kate inadvertently reached out to open it, but I stopped her with a whisper, almost just a movement of my lips. “Don’t touch it.”
Gemma-Kate was a cop’s daughter and understood when I removed my cell phone and my weapon from my tote bag. I tossed her the phone, which she caught neatly. I watched her press her thumb on the three numbers and then put the phone to her ear without speaking. All she did was breathe through her mouth loudly enough so that only I and whoever was on the other end at emergency services could hear her. Good girl, I nodded.
Her eyes were tracking as she did so, and now she pointed to the short hall that led to the master suite. On the yellow wall someone had spray-painted a good-sized circle in red, and inside it two lightning bolts.
I listened with all my ears until all I could hear was my mild tinnitus. Even the pugs were still, watching me. I moved first to the master bedroom area, clearing that and the bathroom. The room itself was a relative mess, drawers pulled out and clothes strewn about. The lid of my small jewelry box was open. I would deal with that later. For now I was just making sure we weren’t about to be killed by some burglar, cornered and desperate.
The drawer to my nightstand was pulled out more than I remembered leaving it, and knowing what was inside I took the time to pull it open. The box with my other weapon in it was still in the drawer, but when I lifted the lid I found it empty. So someone had it in their possession. Were they still in the house?
I really didn’t need this tonight. You might think someone like me could risk death on a mountain road and then come home and fight off a guy hiding in the shower. Well, maybe I could, but I’d rather not.
Gemma-Kate had been left unguarded in the living room. I moved more quickly now and found her where I’d left her. I motioned for her to go into the bedroom, and as she passed by me I whispered, “Lock this door, then go in the bathroom and lock that door, and tell the nine-one-one dispatcher there’s a break-in. Not sure whether perp is still on premises.” The pugs, who had been watching everything with mild interest but no apparent alarm, followed her when she silently tapped the side of her leg in a come gesture. Times like this, they were as useful as a fly swatter in a locust plague.
Weapon at the ready I moved to the front of the house, to the laundry room on the right, quietly throwing the bolt on the door to the garage so if he was hiding in the garage he couldn’t get in now. Then the TV room, then my office, noting that the fourth file drawer down had been pulled out. Some of the files had been taken out and thrown on the floor, but without any apparent reason. It looked random, like something vandals would do.
Then I went into the other room, which was the best place for someone to hide, with Carlo’s four shelves of books running through the middle of the room. The person had been in here as well. One of the sliding closet doors had been ripped off its track and thrown against the shelves, upsetting some books but not with enough force to turn over the shelves themselves. The closet in that room was crammed to the gills with more books and storage bins filled with Carlo’s dissertation notes, articles he had written for various academic journals, and several drafts of Asterisks and Idols. It would not have room to hide a small goat, so I didn’t draw aside the other sliding door to look inside for a person.
Finally the guest bath. Oh, that shower curtain. How much more contented our lives would have been without Psycho. I stepped forward in my bare feet without a sound, without turning on the light, and ripped the curtain aside as I fell to my knees in the opposite direction from which an attacker would instinctively aim a blow.
But no, the tub was clear.
It was only on my way back from the front of the house that I spied a plastic grocery bag on the floor by the window in the library. Carlo’s? I moved toward it cautiously and could easily see through the thin plastic that it contained my own things, including my other weapon. One that wasn’t registered. No matter what the cops found, they should not find this. I gingerly opened the top of the bag with the back of my hand and drew out the gun.
I started breathing again, and went to the bedroom door and knocked. Then I called out. Then I remembered GK couldn’t hear me because she was locked in the bathroom, which was a bit of a remove from the door of the bedroom. I pounded harder, and yelled, and was interrupted by the doorbell playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Funny how Jane could come to mind even at a time like this.
I tucked my extra weapon under my sweater in the back of my jeans, went to the front door, and threw it open to see Deputy Max Coyote in a defensive stance partly behind the wall where the front walk led to the driveway. Another deputy I hadn’t met before stood by the white thorn acacia in the yard.
“It’s clear,” I said. “Someone was here, through the back door, but they’re gone now. Except I haven’t checked the perimeter.”
Without bothering to greet me, Max walked into the house with his very young partner, who he introduced as Deputy Eric Stamen. He placed a call for another unit to patrol the area around the neighborhood and walk the arroyo in back of the house to see if there was any sign of them coming over the fence, any footwear impressions in the arroyo beyond it, or in the gravel in the yard.
Gemma-Kate merged from the bedroom still gripping the phone as if that was her job and by God she was doing it. “I saw the blue-and-reds reflected on the bathroom window and figured it was okay to come out,” she said.
Max didn’t sit on his usual place on the couch with the pugs banking him on each side, where he would have gone another time. He ignored Al and Peg as they snuffled around his cuffs, trying to figure out where and when they’d smelled this guy before. For his part, Max stared at me with narrowed eyes. We had been friends once, a bit more than a year ago, but we weren’t anymore. He would probably tell a different story, but the short version is that I’d saved his life once and he never forgave me for it.
“What do we do next?” I asked, deferring to his position.
This time he was all business. He pulled out a computer tablet and said, “Take me around.”
I showed him the mark on the wall first, and he blinked without comment, revealing his lack of surprise. That was the first clue that our home wasn’t the first.
“You’ve seen this before,” I said.
He continued into the bedroom.
I said, “Okay, in here he pulled out some drawers and messed up the clothes.” I looked in the wooden box with the glass top on my dresser. “All that’s missing from here is some junk jewelry, like a random handful. See, here’s an emerald cocktail ring.”
“They didn’t take that?”
“No, it’s still there.” I gave the room another cursory glance, saw that Carlo’s bedside dresser drawer was cracked open.
“Anything missing from there?” Max asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t say as I ever opened this drawer.” I peeked in there now, feeling as if I was invading a space, and feeling silly about feeling that way. My eye went to a pair of wedding rings, a man’s and a woman’s, tied together with a bit of yarn. Jane.
Max said something.
“Hm?”
“Medicine cabinet?” he repeated.
“I didn’t see it opened.” I went into the bathroom area and checked. What drugs we used were still there, some sleeping pills and Valium that I only take when I can’t rest and need to be on my game the following day. Carlo’s blood pressure meds. All there.
We came out of the master bedroom area and went into my office at the front of the house. I pointed out the filing cabinet drawer. Looked through that quickly, and pulled out the other three. “I wouldn’t know from this if he took out a single paper or someth
ing, but it didn’t look like he found the files important.” I thought about it. “Why would a burglar leave an emerald ring but take the time to look through a filing cabinet?”
Without an answer handy, Max went into the next room, the library. Whether or not you’re doing an investigation, I find there are two kinds of people in the world: those who look at the books that others have on their shelves, and those who don’t. Max and I were both of the latter kind. He walked up and down the rows that the metal shelving formed down the center of the room, ignoring those titles as well as those on the bookshelves that covered the walls from floor to ceiling on three sides of the room. He stepped around the closet door that was in the middle of the room and pulled aside the door that was still standing upright, to expose some large plastic bins, three of them stacked on top of each other. Max looked at me expectantly.
“As far as I know, these are manuscripts of books that Carlo has written, materials for the classes he taught, things like that. I’ll find out more when he’s back home if you want.”
“Where is he?”
“Overnight at Kitt Peak.”
“Nice.” Then Max shrugged, clearly as puzzled as I had become. Why would someone paint a gang sign on the wall and then look through file cabinets and libraries? This guy wasn’t looking for valuables or even prescription drugs. Whoever had been here was looking for information.
They were looking for something in particular, and they were either not professional or in a hurry. Maybe we surprised them. Or maybe they didn’t care if we knew.
Max made notes on his tablet about the materials thrown out of the file cabinet and the books shoved off the shelves, frowning at the more random acts of vandalism. This was new, I thought, not like the other incident, or incidents.
Also new was the fact that the stolen property in a plastic bag had been apparently forgotten on the floor of Carlo’s library. We both stared at it. When I looked over at Max he was blinking the way I had been. “I imagine all the stuff from my jewelry box is in there, but I haven’t touched it yet,” I said.
We Were Killers Once Page 14