The Survivors Club

by J. Carson Black

  Outside, Tess said, “What do you think?”

  “I think ol’ Wade is one hell of a con man.”

  “Pat’s instincts are right,” Tess said. “But I can see how the guy can charm the pants off anyone.” She thought of the open, friendly face. The guy looked and acted like a big friendly dog. Like he’d bear hug you at any moment. “He’s good.”

  Helium Man—that’s how Jaimie thought of the son of a bitch—told her to take Harshaw Road out to Mowry, an old ghost town down near the Arizona-Mexico border. It was a remote area, and few tourists made it there. She was to bring a “reward”—ten thousand dollars in cash. He’d wait until she showed up with the money and left it at a prearranged spot, marked by one of those flags on wires they used for cable markers. She was to call him at a certain number when she’d done it. Once he had the money, he’d direct her to where she would find Adele.

  Not that she trusted him. But what else could she do?

  She knew he was serious, because he called the dog “Adele.” So he knew something about George Hanley’s dog, and he knew she’d adopted her.

  This scared Jaimie to the core. She entertained the idea of not playing along, letting him keep her, but he’d anticipated that, too.

  He’d told her, graphically, what he would do to Adele, and how long it would take to kill her. He told her he’d cook her on a spit.

  She knew he was telling the truth.

  “Why are you doing this?” she demanded. “Why hurt an innocent dog?”

  His answer: “I know what you did.”

  Jaimie could access the money. No problem with that. Briefly, she thought about calling Michael. But she knew what he’d say. She knew he’d tell her not to do it. And she had to do it. Adele was hers. Adele was more than just a dog—she was the embodiment of what they’d done. Everyone else had gotten a tribute, a prize, except for her. Even Chad, and he didn’t even know why. Just for buying the cougar, he had been given a surfboard, stolen out of Peter Farley’s house. But what did she get? Nothing. So she took her own tribute, her own prize. George Hanley was going to be hers. She’d found him, she’d targeted him. So what if she couldn’t do anything for at least a year?

  He was hers, and she’d been cheated out of it.

  She tried to tune out the fear she felt. But her mind kept going back to one question: Who would know about the Survivors Club?

  Whoever it was, was male. She was pretty sure of that. Even if he disguised his voice with the helium.

  But was she really that sure? Couldn’t it be the woman cop?

  Was this a trick? Was she trying to lure her out there? Maybe she should talk to Michael.

  She needed to get the ten thousand out, though. That would take time. But if this was for real, Jaimie was not going to let whoever it was kill Adele.

  She loved Adele.

  Jaimie would go and take out the money, first. Then, if she needed to meet this person, if this was really on the up-and-up and somebody had figured this out and it wasn’t the Patagonia cop and if it wasn’t the Tucson cop, then she would go out there.

  She ran out to the truck. The hand holding the car alarm button shook so badly she missed the first time. Then she was in the truck and taking off for Wells Fargo.

  “Now what?” Danny asked Tess as they drove back to the sheriff’s office.

  “I have no idea.”

  “It’s confusing, that’s for sure. So what are we thinking here? You really think he killed his wife?”

  “It would be hard to prove.”

  “Yeah, but what do you think?”

  Tess said, “I do. I think he killed Karen, and I think that her nephew was collateral damage.”

  “Why, you think?”

  Tess stared out at the blacktop winding through the golden hills. The sun baking the windshield, even though it was only April. “He was tired of her? He wanted to be rid of her?”

  “Wouldn’t divorce be easier?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he liked killing her. Maybe he liked getting away with it—you know, like that guy—”

  “Drew Peterson?” Danny said.

  “He reminds me of that guy. And don’t forget, Karen was five months pregnant.”

  Danny whistled. “You think he didn’t want a kid?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Damn, I can’t imagine that. If that’s true, I want to kill that motherfucker.”

  Tess could feel the violence in her usually easygoing partner. Coiled up, ready to strike. The new father—protective.

  He darted a glance at her. “What do you think?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he did it. Maybe because of the kid.”

  Tess could see Danny’s knuckles white on the steering wheel. She said, “What about George Hanley? Do you think he killed him, too?”

  “If he’s a killer, he might get off on it. First the daughter, then come back and finish off the dad. But why now?”

  Tess agreed. “There was a long time between the two killings.”

  “Yeah. Maybe George had figured it out about his daughter.”

  Tess could see that. “You think maybe George contacted him?”

  “What, and told him to come clean? How dumb is that?”

  “I don’t think George would be that foolish.”

  “Me either,” Danny said.

  When they got in, they went straight to Bonny. They shut the door and went through it, piece by piece.

  At the end of it, Bonny said, “What about Steve Barkman? You think Poole’s good for him, too?”

  Tess and Danny looked at each other.

  Tess said, “Could be. We’re also looking at Michael DeKoven for Hanley.”

  Bonny leaned back. “You saying you think two people could have killed him. And neither one of them is a cartel?”

  Danny said, “Might as well throw in the Zetas, Sinaloas, and Alacráns. Hey, it’s a party!”

  “Jesus,” Bonny said. “George Hanley couldn’t buy a break.” He looked at Tess and then at Danny. “So who killed Hanley? That’s your case. That’s who you two should care about.”

  Tess looked at Danny.

  Danny looked at Tess.

  “If you had to bet. DeKoven, or Poole?”

  She leaned forward. “I could be wrong, but I think it was Poole.”

  “The question is,” Danny said, “how do we find him?”

  He’d shopped at the Safeway in Continental, so he might be in the Green Valley area. All they had was the description of a white truck—Pat didn’t know one truck from another—but fortunately, Tess knew everything about the truck except for its license plate.

  That was because the truck had been muddy up to the wheel wells. She didn’t see the rear of the truck, but she guessed that he’d either muddied the plate or switched plates. What Tess did know was what he looked like, how he moved, how he talked. That broad red face, that friendly smile—open as the outdoors. He probably would continue to play the good old boy; he fit it so well. The other thing she had to go on was that he had been on Jaimie’s property at least once before, because he knew where she hid the key to her house. He had a sociopath’s easy way of lying—completely believable.

  Tess wondered what he had been doing in Jaimie’s house.

  She called Danny. After chatting about Elena—“She smiles at me!”—and how well Theresa was doing and the family’s participation, his brother surprising them with a homemade cradle—Danny listened to her theory. “So how are we gonna find this guy?”

  “I have no idea. We have an Attempt to Locate out there, but unfortunately, there’s not much to go on. Wish I’d seen his license plate.” She thought about it. “If we’re right, he met up with George Hanley at Credo.”

  “Which meant George went out especially to meet him. In the late afternoon when no one was around.”

  “We need to get a photo of him. I’m sure there’s one from when he worked homicide in Phoenix.”

  “Or his Califor
nia DL.”

  A half hour later they had a five-year-old picture of Wade Poole. A half hour after that, Tess drove out see Peter Deuteronomy.

  This time the dog must have been inside. When Peter saw her he came out without his rifle. Tess was clearly making progress.

  “Peter!” she called from her car, which she had once again parked diagonally so that the engine block was between him and herself. She’d opened the door and stood behind it. Better safe than sorry.

  “What do you want now?”

  “I want to ask you something about your friend George Hanley.”

  “I don’t tattle on my friends. So you’d better go away.”

  “Tell you what.” Tess rose and walked out from behind the car door and stood there so he could see her hands were away from her weapon. Just in case. “I think a bad guy killed George. The thumb drive you gave me showed that he was investigating someone, and that’s who I think killed George. You do want to help find George’s killer, right?”

  “Hardly knew him.”

  “But he trusted you. He gave you the thumb drive. He entrusted you with it.”

  Peter canted his head, thinking.

  “Just let me show you these photos, and if you see anyone familiar, you let me know. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Okay. But you can’t make me testify to anything! I will not set foot in a United States court. They’re liars and beggars!”

  “You won’t have to testify,” Tess lied. She reached for the small poster board with six photos. “I’m just pulling out these pictures. Is that okay?”

  “What do you take me for? Of course it’s okay. What do you think? I’m paranoid?”

  Tess eased the poster board out and walked toward him, held it out.

  He looked at it for one instant and said, “The fourth one, second row.”

  Tess hid her triumph. “You’ve seen him before?”

  “Saw him maybe two weeks ago.”

  “Can you tell me where?”

  “I saw him down in Credo. I think he was on a scouting mission.”

  “A scouting mission?”

  “I saw him from the road. I heard a noise—I’ve got really good ears, you gotta have good ears out here. And there he was, sneaking around. I noticed he had a rifle, and I keep track of stuff like that because I was meeting my—” He stopped. “What I noticed, see, was he had an AK-47, like the Mexicans do, only he’s Anglo. He went over to a tree and he fooled around some, and when he came back away from the tree he wasn’t carrying the rifle.”

  “Do you mean he put it in the tree?”

  He gave her a look that intimated she was completely clueless.

  “Of course he put it in the tree.”

  “You saw him put the rifle in the tree?”

  “No, but he fooled around, you know, like maybe he had duct tape or something, and hid the rifle. Like they do. You know. They do it all the time down here—it’s their cache. Scared me—there are white guys who run with these people but all of them are bad guys, ’cept for a few. I keep my eyes and ears open but my mouth closed.” He pulled an invisible zipper across his mouth. “Live and let live, that’s my motto.”

  And preserve your pot connection, Tess thought. “Which tree?”

  “One of the oaks. They give a lot of shade, and it’s easy to hide stuff.”

  “Whereabouts? In relation to the cabins?”

  “Not too far from the one farthest from the road. The one at the end—on the little hill.”

  The cabin where George Hanley died. Tess asked, “Which way from the cabin?”

  “Down by that little dry creek. There’s an oak there.”

  Tess remembered it. “How long ago was this?”

  “I’m not sure. Before what happened to George. I just assumed it was somebody doing something—you know, drug running, gunrunning, people running, that kind of thing. No way I was gonna poke my nose in that hornet’s nest.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this the first time we met?”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t connect it.”

  “So you saw him as you were driving by?”

  “Walking by, and you better believe I kept on going. Eyes forward, you know what I mean? You want to keep your eyes open and your mouth shut around here.”

  “You weren’t driving your truck?”

  “Didn’t you hear me the first time? I was walking. Made sure he didn’t see me, either.”

  “You just went for a walk?”

  He looked at her, defiant. “Uh-huh. Just a walk.”

  “Look, I’m gonna be straight with you. I don’t care what you do or whom you do it with. I just want to make sure what you’re telling me is accurate. All I care about is George Hanley and finding the guy who killed him.”

  “Well, that guy is him.” He tapped the paper with Poole’s likeness.

  “Sounds like he was pretty far away.”

  “I have twenty/ten vision. I was a sniper in the army.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “I don’t think so. It was getting dark.”

  “Did you see a vehicle?”

  “Nope. My guess is he left it way up or down the road, since he was sneaking around like that. I’ve seen stuff like that before.”

  “Did you ever see George Hanley meet someone out there?”

  “Only during daytime hours. I don’t walk down that road every night, though. Just once in a while.”

  “Thanks,” Tess said. “You’ve helped a lot.”

  “That’s good. Just being the Good Samaritan.”

  Tess drove down to the Credo gate. She didn’t have a key to the padlock, but it was easy to slip through the four-strand wire farther down.

  She walked to the cabin where George Hanley had been killed and then continued on down to the creek and the oak. The oak scattered deep shade on the mosaic of white stones and riverbed. There was a fork in the oak low down, and another place where more branches diverged. She spotted a small patch of duct tape hanging from the higher crook in the tree.

  Fingerprints, maybe.

  To get a job in law enforcement, you had to be fingerprinted. Wade Poole had been a homicide cop. His fingerprints would be on AFIS. She always carried latex gloves and evidence bags in a case in the back of the Tahoe. She went back to the Tahoe, donned gloves, and brought one of the larger bags. She also carried a knife. Back at the oak, Tess photographed the duct tape, then carefully peeled it off. Gingerly, she dropped the duct tape into the evidence bag, and back at the truck, she marked it.

  Any luck, it would come back to Wade Poole.

  Jaimie drove out on Harshaw Road, which led south toward the Mexican border. It was a graded road early on but then started to wind and get narrower. She was looking for a sign for the ghost town of Mowry. On her right, she passed the graveyard of another ghost town, Harshaw, for which the road was named. A lot of colorful fake flowers, whitewashed stones and crosses, and piled rocks to keep the coyotes away, although the people buried there were from the early part of the twentieth century and long past edibility.

  She tried to occupy her mind with stuff like that, but her heart was beating hard and all she could think of was what that thing—Helium Man—said he’d do to Adele.

  The road started going up higher, and the trees became thicker—mostly oak.

  She was driving into a tight curve when suddenly a white truck pulled out right in front of her. She slammed on the brakes and wrestled with the wheel of her big Dodge Ram, skidding across the narrow road down into the ravine on the other side.

  The truck came to rest upright. She took stock: banged up a little but her seat belt saved her. And whoever that asshole was who clipped her—

  Someone yanked open the truck door. Somebody coming to rescue her? She was okay, she needed to tell them that, but suddenly her belt was unlatched, a big man leaning over her, crushing her against the airbag that had whopped her in the chest and, she realized, broken her wrist, and he pulled her out by the shoulder and s
hoved her up against the side of the truck. “Police!” he yelled, and grabbed her arm and wrenched it around behind her back—agony. The next thing she knew, her hands were cuffed behind her back.

  She screamed.

  The man kicked her legs apart and patted her down, then grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up the embankment and over to his own truck, shoved her inside. “You move, and you’re going to jail,” he yelled, his red face right in hers. “Got it?”

  She nodded mutely. She couldn’t think of anything except for the excruciating pain in her wrist. And that she wet her pants.

  He drove her truck back out on the road, parked and locked it. Then he came back and got his truck and took off with a slew of dirt, up a two-lane track into the woods.

  Jaimie was confused. This guy was dressed like her friends in the ranching community. He drove with one hand on the wheel, slewing along the road, and one hand holding a gun trained on her. She had no doubt he would use it. But another part of her insisted that he was a cop. He treated her as a cop would. With authority.

  Cops wouldn’t kill unarmed citizens—and that was what she would hold on to.

  Her own revolver sat in a zippered bag inside her truck.

  Her wrist was screaming. She realized she was screaming too when he took his gun butt and smacked her mouth. “Shut up. Do it now. You are in deep enough trouble already.”

  They headed up a steep four-wheel-drive road, little more than a trail, up into the hills.

  They came to a camping spot screened by trees. In the truck, he duct taped her mouth and tied a rope around her neck. He jerked at the rope and told her to follow him. She scrambled to keep up, terrified of being literally hanged—her air cut off. She saw the remains of an adobe building among the trees, roofless, just two walls meeting in a corner, the adobe bricks slumping like a melting candy barn. There was a stake there, driven deep into the ground, and a chain. He replaced the rope with a choke chain and hooked it to the chain. She could only sit in one way, because she was snubbed up pretty close to the stake—about two and a half to three feet.