by Phoef Sutton
By now Zerbe’s yelling had awakened Sonny from his nap by the campfire. Noel and Evan woke up and rushed over to ask what was going on. When they were told, they all hollered for Renee as loudly as they could. They must have awakened a flock of parrots, because the birds started screeching and squawking so loudly it almost drowned out the human cries.
Crush tried to pry one of the bars off the gate. Noel and K.C. made an effort to hoist each other up the fence. None of this worked. Angela called 911, but she couldn’t get a signal down in the depths of the Arroyo. Then Evan and Sonny got spooked by all this, but mostly by the parrots’ almost-human screams. They ran away, up the stairs to the top of the dam—to get help, they said. They never came back.
For the next thirty minutes or so Crush strained his muscles on the gate while the Zerbe brothers tried to find a way around it and Angela kept trying to find a spot with cell phone reception. Finally, Crush pried the gate open just enough to squeeze his bulky frame through the gap. He ran down the tunnel. It was dark, and he collided with the walls a few times, but kept on running till he reached the other side.
It opened onto a flat, marshy plain. He ran on, calling Renee’s name for what seemed like hours, with no answer, until he collapsed, winded and sweating. Since he was a kid he had relied on his strength to defeat whatever problem might confront him, but his muscles couldn’t solve anything this time. He clutched his aching side and gasped.
It started to rain then. Really pouring, as if the sky had been waiting for months to let loose. Raindrops thudded down on his back, and he shut his eyes and sank into the mud.
And that was how the police found him.
A couple of cops shined a flashlight on him and yelled at him to get up. When he didn’t, they pointed their pistols at him and told him to keep his hands where they could see them. They grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet.
“Where is she?” a cop hollered at him. “What have you done with her?”
“Why were the cops ganging up on you?” Gail asked.
Crush shrugged. “Because I was there. Because I was big. Because they’d just found her shirt with blood on it.”
“Where?”
“A few yards away from me.”
“But Renee? They never found her?”
“They never did. They took me downtown and questioned me. With their fists. Everything they learned about me made them more sure I was the one who’d grabbed her. They searched that rain-swept field for days. Went over every inch of it. Again and again. They couldn’t find a thing. Not a trace of her. So they had to get me to confess.”
“Is that why you don’t trust the police?” she asked.
“Oh God, no. I stopped trusting them long before that.” Crush blinked his eyes to keep them focused on the road. “Anyway, there I was. A drifter. The son of a whore. No known father. When they traced me back to Brighton Beach and the Russian mob, I was like their wet dream of a suspect. They didn’t need to look any further.
“There was only one problem. They never found Renee. They couldn’t find a body or any evidence, other than that shirt. And it’s pretty hard to charge somebody with murder when you can’t find the body.”
“It’s been done,” Gail said.
“Sure. But there was no evidence either. No blood on my hands or clothes. No hair. No DNA. They couldn’t pin it on me. No matter how hard they tried.
“Of course, it ruined my mom’s marriage. She demanded that Emil hire the best lawyer to get them to release me. Emil dragged his feet. Renee was his niece, and it didn’t look good for his own stepson to be suspected in her murder. It drove a wedge between them.
“Even after I was released, she wanted to sue the police department for false arrest. I told her they’d never actually arrested me, and she wanted to sue them for that, too. But Emil wouldn’t do it. He wanted to forget all about it. He even wanted to forget about her.
“One day, we went to see a lawyer on our own. When we came back to the house, the locks had been changed, and our belongings were out on the front lawn. There wasn’t very much, of course. Some dresses and jewelry for my mother. A couple of books for me. Including the Tacitus.”
“The what?”
“Never mind. Samantha came out and offered to drive us to a hotel. She’d never liked Toni, but I think she liked me and she felt bad about the way things had turned out. My mother had signed a prenup, so she wouldn’t get much out of the divorce. But even that didn’t come through, because he had the marriage annulled, claiming that my mother had conned him into marrying her and that she was still married to my father. Well, we didn’t want to bring my father into it. Blaz would kill us if he found out where we were. So she just let it go. Within a few months, we were living pretty much as we’d been before. Easy come, easy go.”
Gail let loose a long breath. “I want to say I’m sorry all that happened to you, but I know you don’t want to hear it.”
Crush shrugged. “It’s what happened. No use whining about it.”
“That’s my Crush,” she said with a wry smile. “But how did little Caleb feel about it?”
“Little Caleb? He wasn’t so little.”
“He was little on the inside. How did he feel?”
“He felt fine. What do you want me to say?” He thought it over. “I didn’t miss that house. I missed Zerbe a little.”
“And?”
Crush looked over at her. “Renee? That was unfinished business. Everyone thought she was dead. Some people thought she’d killed herself. A few people thought that I’d raped and killed her. I almost convinced myself she’d run off somewhere. Started a new life. A better life. Almost….”
“I wish I could have known you then,” she said. “I would have comforted you.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted it. Besides, if I’d met you then, I’d have just tried to…steal from you.”
“Thanks for clearing that up.”
“Don’t mention it.” Crush wanted to change the subject. He addressed the speakerphone. “How are you, Zerbe? Is that how it went down?”
“What?” Zerbe said through the phone.
“The night at the Devil’s Gate Dam. What do you think?”
“I wasn’t really listening. I fell asleep. And I really have to pee.”
“We’re almost there, Zerbe. Don’t hang up.”
Zerbe hung up.
“Goddamn it,” Crush muttered. He was getting closer to Lancaster. Taking the Avenue G exit, he drove for about ten minutes until he passed the sign that read “Musical Road.” He steered the car into the left lane and slowed down to fifty miles per hour.
The vibrations on the road played the familiar tune. Sort of.
“Wow,” Gail said.
“Wow,” Crush said. “But didn’t that sound a little off to you?”
“It was kind of sour,” Gail said. “But I guess it must be hard to tune road surfaces just right. You can’t tighten the strings.” Gail was always charitable.
They drove on for a few more miles, keeping their eyes peeled for phone booths or Quonset huts. After about fifteen minutes, they saw it by the side of the road, just standing in the dust like a relic from some forgotten time. An old-fashioned phone booth. The kind Superman used to change clothes in. Crush saw a truck parked next to it.
A poorly painted UPS truck.
“Shit,” Crush said.
Then he noticed the broken window on the phone booth. And the twisted pair of human legs sticking out of it.
The UPS truck roared to life and took off down the road. Crush had a second to decide what to do. Follow the truck or check on the person who was in the booth.
He stopped the car and opened the door. “Stay here,” he said to Gail. Whoever was in the booth, he wasn’t moving.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Zerbe hung up the pay phone and looked around for a place to go to the bathroom. If he’d only had to pee, like he’d told Crush, it wouldn’t have been much of a problem, but his situa
tion was a bit more complicated than that. He opened the door of the phone booth and looked around for a secluded place to do his business. There was nothing but flat, featureless desert as far as he could see. A few outcroppings of succulents were scattered here and there, but they afforded no protection from the blazing sun and little shelter from passing cars.
Now that he thought about it, there hadn’t been any passing cars for ages, but one was about to pass by. A brown UPS truck was kicking up a lot of dust as it drove slowly toward him. Very slowly. In fact, it was pulling over on the shoulder, just a few yards ahead of him.
Why? Did the driver need to use the phone? Had his cell phone died? Did he want to ask Zerbe for directions? He’d get a laugh out of that.
The driver’s door opened and a man got out. Instead of the familiar brown uniform, he wore khaki pants and a blue chambray shirt. As he walked over to the phone booth with a cheery smile, Zerbe noted that he appeared to be a very friendly African-American man…who was holding a gun in his right hand.
Zerbe froze. What now? There was nothing he could do; nowhere he could run. Nothing but open space all around him. He backed into the phone booth, knowing that it was a dead end. That it was nothing but a glass trap. With his bloody hands, he closed the folding door of the phone booth, then opened it again, wincing with pain from his dislocated thumb. The door afforded him no protection. He was at the mercy of this man.
The man stopped just outside the phone booth and smiled at Zerbe. “Hey! You escaped!” he said by way of greeting.
Zerbe’s brain whirled. He knew Zerbe had escaped. That meant he was the kidnapper. Or one of the kidnappers. This was it. Zerbe had escaped, only to be caught again.
“Did you kidnap me?” Zerbe asked.
“No,” the man replied. “I just helped. I told him he shouldn’t have left you there. You look dumb, but that may just be an act.” He laughed as if he’d made a good-natured joke, but the pistol in his hand belied his real intentions.
“What are you going to do to me?” Zerbe asked.
“Come on.” The man thrust the gun forward. “The Overlords can’t help you now.”
“The Overlords?” Zerbe asked. “What are you talking about? Who the hell are the Overlords?” Where had he heard that term before?
“I don’t want to have to do this,” the man said, looking distressed. “You’re not giving me a choice.”
Zerbe looked down at the gun and knew the man was going to shoot him. He decided to act. Well, he didn’t actually decide. If he’d had to decide he would probably have chickened out. He just did it.
He slammed the door shut on the man’s wrist. Hard. The man was thrown off balance and the gun dropped from his hand. It clattered on the floor of the phone booth. The door didn’t close all the way, so Zerbe pressed his body against the fold in the door to try to keep the man’s hand trapped while he bent down to pick up the gun.
The man threw his own weight against the door and sent Zerbe crashing into the back wall of the booth. Zerbe snatched up the gun and raised it at the man, who was coming toward him.
He didn’t even mean to pull the trigger.
The gun’s report was deafening. The man looked down at his chest in surprise. The splotch of blood that had suddenly appeared on his chest spread and grew. He dropped, falling onto Zerbe.
Zerbe screamed and clawed his way out from under the man. He dropped the gun, scrambled out of the phone booth, and sprawled on the ground. Still screaming.
Slowly, he came to his senses. Or some of them. This man was dead, but there was at least one more still out there. And then there were the Overlords.
But wait. Weren’t the Overlords trying to help him? Isn’t that what the dead guy had said? It didn’t matter. The thing was, he wasn’t safe. He went back to the phone booth and retrieved the gun. He looked over at the UPS truck. He went back to the phone booth and searched the man’s pockets until he found some car keys.
Just as he pulled the keys free, the man’s eyes opened and his hand grabbed Zerbe’s wrist. Zerbe pulled away and stared down at him.
“Help me,” the man said.
Zerbe thought about shooting him again. Finishing him off. But he couldn’t do it. He hurried to the truck and started it. Just in time, too. A red muscle car pulled up to the booth.
“He” must have arrived.
Zerbe floored the UPS truck and tore out of there.
The man in the booth wasn’t dead. Not yet. Blood was gurgling from his lips as Crush looked down at him. Gail pushed him aside and bent over the wounded man.
“Call 911,” she said to Crush as she pressed down on the man’s wounded chest. “You’re going to be all right,” she lied.
“He shot me,” the man wheezed.
“Don’t think about that,” said Gail. “Think about why you want to live.”
He shook his head. “They’ll win. They always win.”
Crush was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, giving them as little information as he could. He glanced back at the dying man and recognized him. When he got off the phone he went back to the booth and spoke to him. “Will? Is that you?”
The man turned his head to look at Crush. “Yes, I’m Will,” he said. “And I’m a Targeted Individual.” Those were the same words he’d used when he’d led the Targeted Individual support group in South Pasadena. “Do you have anything you’d like to share?”
“Who sent you? Why did you come here?”
“Crush!” Gail said, reprovingly. “You don’t have to answer Will. Just rest.”
“I have to fight them,” Will gasped. “The Overlords. Emil. The Zerbes. They’ve killed so many. They’ll kill more.”
“Who did they kill?” Crush asked.
“Victor,” Will said. “And Renee. And the seventy-six thousand. Who knows how many more…and me. They killed me.”
“Who killed you?”
“K.C. Zerbe. It runs in the blood. From the Templars through the Masons to the Nazis. They are the Overlords.”
Crush watched him for a few moments. Then he took Gail by the arm. “Come on.” She yanked her arm away and kept applying pressure to the wound. “Look, we have to go,” Crush said.
“We can’t leave him.”
“The paramedics are on their way. He’ll be taken care of. We have to catch up with Zerbe. He’s in that truck.”
“You go then.”
“Gail, he’s dead.”
Gail lifted her hands from his chest and looked at his staring eyes. “The poor man.”
“If Zerbe killed him, it must have been in self-defense. This is one of the kidnappers. Did you see that truck? Did you notice the cracked windshield? That’s the truck they were driving when they tried to nab Noel. That’s the same truck that delivered the bomb. They are crazy people. Some kind of cult.”
“The poor man,” Gail repeated.
“Come on.” Crush pulled Gail’s arm, and this time she let him lead her away. They got in the Buick, and Crush tore down the road.
“What was Will’s last name?” Gail asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We were the last people he saw on earth and we don’t even know his last name.”
“Yeah, well, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t think he even knew we were there,” Crush said. “He probably thought he was talking to his crazy friends. His last words were about Nazis, remember. Renee talked about Nazis, too. Why does everybody get all ‘Nazi’ when they go crazy?”
“What a horrible way to die. A person’s last moments should be peaceful.”
“They rarely are, Catherine.”
Gail looked over at him. He didn’t use her first name often. Just like she didn’t use his. “That’s very sad, Caleb.”
“Take it up with God. That’s the way he made the world.”
Then they saw it. Parked by the side of a Dairy Queen. The UPS truck. Crush pulled up next to it.
“What are you going to do?” Gail asked.
&nbs
p; “I’m gonna go in and get a Blizzard. What do you want?”
“What if the bad guys are in there?”
“Then I’ll get two Blizzards.”
They walked into the air-conditioned climate of a fast-food paradise. They saw him at a table in the back, in his Captain America T-shirt and sweatpants, dabbing his bloody fingers with napkins.
Zerbe looked up at them in surprise. “Crush. Gail. So it was you in the Buick. I thought about that after I pulled out. Listen, do you have any money? For a burger or something? I’m starving.”
Gail sat down in the plastic chair next to him. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know,” Zerbe said, thinking it over. “I don’t think so. But I’m better than I could be.”
“What do you want to eat?” Crush asked.
“One of everything. No, two. Two of everything. And some ketchup.”
So Crush got him a bacon-cheeseburger and a chocolate shake, and Zerbe ate it without pausing to take a breath. When he was finished he held his head in his hands, belched, and said, “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
“You want another round?” Crush asked.
“Yes.”
“Shouldn’t we be going?” Gail asked. “Won’t they be looking for you?”
“Who?” Zerbe asked.
“The police. Didn’t you just shoot a man?”
“Oh, yeah. I did do that,” Zerbe said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “But I didn’t mean to. It just sort of happened. You know how things happen.”
“I know,” said Crush. “I’ll get you another burger and we’ll go. You can tell me what happened on the way.”
“Are we going back to the loft?”
“We’ll see,” Crush said.
“Do you want to go back there?” Gail asked him.
“I do,” Zerbe said. “Very much.” He closed his eyes and started to cry.
A few minutes later, Crush was driving the Buick back toward Pasadena, while Gail sat in back with Zerbe and put bandages on his damaged hands, using a little first-aid kit Crush kept in the glove compartment. Crush was on the phone with Angela, telling her that they’d found Zerbe.