“Holy…” I recoiled and almost knocked over the lamp while turning it on.
Pale brown eyes fluttered in the glare of the light, my bedmate gazing up at me furtively.
“Look,” I began, “this is not going to work. I know this is your place, but I have to insist that you leave.”
Wilco set his head back down and sighed sleepily. I didn’t know whether to try to push him out of the bed or not. Well, I reckoned if he stayed on his side of the bed, he could remain. It had cooled down quite a bit (the attic was plainly not insulated), and the extra warmth was welcome. And frankly, I was too exhausted to care. As long as he didn’t start farting, I wasn’t going to risk an altercation. Dog farts are a line in the sand.
Great. Imagine Angie and me sharing a bed with a dog. Take a guess who’d get the small slice of the mattress pie in that scenario? I had to fight for half the bed as it was.
The next time I awoke, the gray of dawn was chilling the window. I realized what had woken me. Wilco was pressed up against my back, infringing on my side of the bed. You know, the way dogs slowly drive their bodies like a wedge between you and the mattress until you find yourself on the floor, the canine splayed across the bed like the Queen of Sheba in her barge.
I groused and started to shove Wilco back to his side with my butt. He growled. But what was he going to do, eat my spine? I drove him back farther. Damn, that dog was heavy. Then I felt his teeth gently bite my ear. I briefly considered abandoning ship and curling up in his dog bed.
But then the dog spoke, an imposter in my midst.
“Harder, baby…”
I flipped over faster than a burger on a Saturday night grill.
“Jesus, Amber…what are you doing here?”
She just smiled and hooked her arms around my neck, which I promptly removed. As I did so, I had an eyeful of her charms. She was stark naked. Stark? That word did not apply. Her copious black hair was down and spilling all over the pillow. A pair of comely round orbs emerged from the sheets.
“Look,” I began, “this is not going to work. I know this is your place, but I have to insist that you leave.” That little speech didn’t work any better on her than it had on Wilco. In fact, she did the exact same thing the hound had, settling down with a sleepy sigh.
There are those who will tell you that a man’s fidelity is no stronger than a trailer park in the path of opportunity’s tornado. I consider myself very fortunate for having found refuge in the bunker of devotion. Fidelity is a conscious act and thus reversible; devotion visceral and thus involuntary. I’m not inhuman—libido’s centaur did indeed caper about, playing his dissolute lute. But one can listen to the centaur’s song without humming along.
I rolled out of the bed and pulled on my chinos. My teeth were chattering from the cold.
“What a shame,” Amber purred. “Much warmer under the covers.”
I heard someone coming up the stairs, and snatched up my shirt in my hurry to dress.
“Don’t worry, baby, that’s just Wilco,” Amber purred teasingly. “He went out for a pee. Now would you get back in here and let me rock your world?”
“Amber, you’re a very nice girl—woman—and all, very attractive, but really…”
My attention was drawn to the doorway, suddenly filled by the shadow of a man.
I heard Amber inhale with surprise.
Though my instinct was to put wings to my feet, I was a statue. Mercury buttoning his shirt. Curiously, though, the shape didn’t betray Vargas’s deportment. Amber’s boyfriend? I sensed that whoever stood there was likewise frozen in place with surprise, taking in the scene.
There was nothing to do but hold our collective breaths until the figure spoke. But he didn’t speak. He whistled a familiar sliding crescendo of astonishment.
Then he spoke.
“Could this be my straight-arrow brother? In a love nest?”
“Damn it all.” Amber groaned. “You scared the hell out of us, Nicholas.”
“Hi, Amber.” He strode into the room, bent down, and gave her a kiss. Even at that hour he was wearing one of his tweed suits. I could just make out his sardonic eyes turning my way. “Helloooo, Garth.”
Those who have no siblings have been spared the joy of perpetual brinkmanship.
I’d just been brinked. Then he said:
“We’re going to Omaha.”
chapter 13
Silos, red barns, budding cornstalks, and Phillips 66 truck plazas slid by as Nicholas captained our voyage across the sea of Iowa to the isle of Omaha, me riding shotgun, the Chicken of Death behind us on the poop deck reading a lucha libre magazine. Amber, thankfully, was back at the streusel stand. But I could feel Wilco breathing down my neck from the backseat next to Vargas.
The vehicle we were driving was neither mine nor Nicholas’s rental, but the Vargasmobile, a white ’68 Pontiac Catalina hardtop. It was equipped with a figurine of the Virgin on the dash, red fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror, and an eight-ball steering wheel spinner. It had the familiar old-car sway and rumble, which was one small twinkle of reassurance as we headed off toward what I feared would be more trouble.
Unlike in the East, where semis tend to be lone wolfs, big rigs in the heartland travel in long packs. In effect, they are like a train, nose to tail, and one wonders why the haulers don’t just put their wares onto the rails and save some rubber. So to pass “a truck” takes about five minutes to get by the whole train, and just when you have them safely in your rearview mirror, there’s another convoy around the next bend. But passing trucks becomes a way of passing the time as one sails west on the ocean of crops and grassy plains.
We’d left the Lower Peninsula an hour after Nicholas had made his appearance, and the conversation had been kept to a minimum. My brother obviously knew about Draco, so the preliminaries of why we were headed to Omaha were largely moot. As we grabbed coffee and pecan swirls at the gas station on the way out of town, I managed to shoot off a call to Angie on the pay phone, using my calling card, which would disguise the origins of the call. I got the machine, left a message that I was all right and that I was headed to Aunt Jilly’s. That was an inside joke. We had a standing black bear mount at home we called Aunt Jilly, named after a relative with an abnormal amount of body hair for a human female. Long since deceased, this aunt lived in Omaha, Virginia. This was my roundabout way of signaling to my sweetie my destination. That way she’d know where to look for my remains when all hell broke loose, as it was apt to. Angie was good at puzzles, and I was confident she’d quickly figure out that I was headed for Nebraska, not Virginia, since last she knew I was in the Midwest.
Nicholas had said zero about the situation in which he’d found me at the streusel stand, for which I was grateful. But there was little doubt he was saving it for later. After passing a particularly long train of semis, I finally broke the silence.
“So, shall we lay our cards on the table?”
Nicholas shot me a glance. “Cards?”
“Yeah. Like what inspired you to come out here.”
“To help you. Hey, I can’t get married without my best man.”
“No, there’s something else, I can feel it.”
He rolled his eyes. “Feel it?”
“I know you, Nicholas, and I know when something is up with you.”
“My researcher uncovered the Draco connection.” He shrugged.
“And?”
“And, well, my researcher revealed some other interesting little facts.”
I merely waited, and under my scrutiny, my brother finally continued.
“There was once something called the Order of the White Geckos. A fraternal thing.”
“Vargas mentioned that Draco’s grandfather was one of the White Geckos. So are we talking about middle-aged guys in fezzes driving miniature cars in parades? That kind of fraternal thing?”
“Basically. And our grandfather, Kit Carson, was also a founding member. It was him and four other big-game hunters
, one of them Draco’s grandfather, who formed the lodge, and it was open only to big-game hunters.”
“You used the words ‘was once.’ Just a guess but sounds like they’re no longer around. What happened to them?”
“The five founding members died while traveling to a South African hunting trip. Their boat sank. In 1949. Soon afterward the Order of the White Geckos disbanded.”
“How did this lodge get started? What did the geckos symbolize?”
Nicholas rubbed his jaw. “Apparently it’s an ancient Native American symbol of some kind that they latched onto, the same one Draco has on his cape. Symbolizes power in the earth or something, which is partially why Draco adopted it as his badge. But also to honor the legacy of his grandfather. Lucha fans love that kind of thing.”
“Since when are you into Mexican wrestling?”
“A Web search for ‘white geckos’ brings you to Draco way before the fraternal order. When I saw the connection between the five White Gecko big-game hunters who were killed and the five on the cape of the big-game hunter wrestler, I had a researcher dig deeper. The inception of the Order of the White Geckos happened while the five founding members were on safari in Mexico in 1917 hunting something called a javelina.”
Aha. Fowler babbled something about javelinas.
Nicholas fished in his jacket pocket and came up with a few sheets of folded paper. “Grandpop was quite a famous guy in his day, at least in the hunting world. Here. Something my researcher summarized.”
I unfolded the paper and began to read while Nicholas left-laned past another queue of trucks.
Julius F. Carson was born in 1878 to a Lutheran minister in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At seventeen, he boarded a train west, abandoning his father’s hope for college and a career in the clergy. The next five years were spent in a variety of odd jobs for outfitters in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, mostly caring for pack animals, digging latrines, fetching water, and the like. He worked his way up to hunting guide. A turning point came when he and another guide, hunting for pleasure, were ambushed by a mountain lion. The lion had the guide by the neck, pinned to the ground. Julius came running with his gun, took aim at the lion, and the gun misfired and jammed. Throwing his gun aside, Julius pulled his hunting knife. He leapt onto the lion and stabbed it to death, but not before being clawed about the face.
Julius, half blind from his wounds, carried the guide twenty-six miles over rough terrain to town.
Even though the guide perished, Julius F. Carson became a local celebrity, and it only helped that he was instantly recognizable the rest of his days by the diagonal scars across his face and the eye patch. Several nicknames were attached to him, but the one that stuck was “Kit” Carson, after the famous American frontiersman. It was the nickname attached to an article published in The Field about his exploits.
He traded on this reputation to become a guide with a top Wyoming outfitter—if nothing else, the well-heeled hunters wanted to hear him tell the story of his tangle with the lion and to say that they had been guided by the famous “Kit” Carson.
From there, Carson started his own hunting camp and befriended visiting hunters who urged him to go to Africa with them. He did, and thus began a core friendship with four of the day’s most renowned hunters:
Charles Gateway III, of Gateway Munitions, manufacturers of some of the world’s finest hunting rifles; General Raoul Ovando, late of the Mexican cavalry; Bartholomew Jones, a tool and die magnate from Massachusetts; and Titan Harris, publisher of a string of newspapers.
On a hunting trip to New Mexico the five founded a society called the Order of the White Gecko, a name taken from Native American cave paintings they witnessed. The order was open only to fellow big-game hunters, and reached a membership of several hundred.
In 1949, Julius F. Carson and the other four founding members of the Order of the White Gecko died in a shipwreck off of Capetown, South Africa. Carson was survived by his second wife, Amelda, and his son from his first marriage, Stuart.
“Titan Harris.” I looked up from the summary, studying the distant horizon. “Titan Harris III was the one killed in Houston.”
“The men killed so far are all grandsons of the founding five members of the Order of the White Gecko. Charles Gateway III, of Gateway Munitions, manufacturers of some of the world’s finest rifles—his grandson was Sprunty Fulmore. Bartholomew Jones—his grandson was Bronte Jones, the TV actor living in Seattle. And Titan Harris’s grandson…”
“Titan Harris III, scotch receptacle, Houston, Texas—I get it. And Draco is the grandson of that Mexican general.”
“Then that leaves you.”
“Me? Why me?” And why did I find myself constantly having to say “Why me?”
“The killer already has you involved, you own taxidermy…Let’s face it, I don’t exactly fit the profile here as a taxidermy collector. Stuff gives me the creeps.”
The notion that I was the one being targeted didn’t alarm me as much as one might have thought. Against hope, I’d already come to the conclusion that I was a marked man in this whole mess. Just not by birth.
“Nicholas, this is way out there, doesn’t make any sense. I mean, the three that have been killed were all people I did appraisals for. It must be tied to that.”
“That’s what the FBI thinks. And maybe it is tied to that. But the coincidences in the rest of it are too huge.”
“Nicholas, wherever you mined this information, the FBI probably has it, too. They’ll be headed to Omaha also.”
“Not so sure about that. A lot of that information came from the library, not the Web. The FBI tends to rely on their own files and police computer databases. Electronic stuff. Not that I didn’t have my own Web spy check those same sources. So I had to turn to this musty old guy who wears shorts and Birkenstocks year round, Lanier Frankly. He hangs out at the main branch of the New York Public Library. He practically lives there, so the librarians let him have access to all kinds of out-of-print periodicals like The Field. This guy lives to do research. In return, I only have to buy Lanier a steak dinner with all the trimmings at Gunther’s. That’s his other hangout. Also, once the FBI thinks it’s a serial killing, they turn to profilers who look at behavior, not stray genealogy.”
“They know at least some of this information about Kit Carson. I was at an FBI tactical meeting and there was a woman, tough old broad, a colonel in the Air Force and also a doctor of some sort. Named Lanston. She had a complete dossier on me, and apparently on Kit Carson. She was busting my chops like I knew about Grandad.”
“That’s interesting. We found that the government files on him are sealed.”
“Sealed?” I briefly reflected on the penguin in the desert joke.
“Uh huh. And you’ll never guess which branch of the government had them sealed.”
I shuddered. “Air Force?”
“Right-o, buddy boy. Did this Lanston say anything else about Kit Carson? About what connection there was between him and these murders?”
“Nope. But this must mean the FBI knows all about it.”
“Not necessarily.” Nicholas wagged a finger at me. “She’s with a different branch of the government. She may have an agenda all her own. I’ll make a call and have someone check her out.”
“Wait. Back there in Hell, I overheard Lanston on the phone. She said something about how she’d been working on this for thirty years, and that she was after Fowler, too. And she said someone was being sent out to come take care of me. That make any sense?”
Nicholas shrugged and shook his head. “Did she say who they were sending?”
I scowled, trying to remember. “She said a name, but I can’t pull it back. Shoot.”
“Angie was talking about canceling her trip to the jewelry show. I convinced her to go, told her that I’d be sure to have you call her at her hotel as soon as possible. Doesn’t look like the killer is after her, but it’s better she beats New York for a few days to be on the safe side.”
“And then there’s Fowler.” Nicholas glanced at me. “He’s a kook. Read all about his TV archeology career, how he went gaga.”
“I actually remembered who Fowler was on my own. He found me somehow in Seattle, followed me to the Space Needle and ranted about my vuka, which Gabby tells me is some kind of spirit or something, I dunno. Fowler insisted he had a key or something to get rid of it, some sort of dog tag he was wearing. Oh yeah, and I think he thinks he’s a werewolf.”
“Come again?”
“You heard me. And get this: Gabby said she and Stuart put a spell on him to keep him away from them. He was after Dad about his vuka. She says they turned him into a werewolf. Find anything linking Fowler to Gabby and Stuart?”
“I’d think you were kidding if I didn’t know Gabby so well.” Nicholas shook his head. “I still have Mel looking into Fowler. There’s a connection between him and the Order of the White Geckos. Somehow.”
I suddenly felt that the moment was right to change tack, see if I could catch Nicholas off guard and get him to open up.
“You nervous about getting married, Nicholas?”
“Please, Garth.” He gave me a withering look. “No head shrinking, OK? I get enough of that as it is. I might as well ask you if you’re nervous about getting a dog.”
“Who told you we’re getting a dog?”
“Girls gab. Your girlfriend and mine do talk, you know. So how did you know Draco was a target?”
“Vargas.” I jerked a thumb at the backseat. “Did you know he used to be a Mexican wrestler? El Gallo de Muerte.”
Tailed Page 10