Ramsay studied the young couple. The boy was thin and wouldn’t be bad looking if he shaved off the apologetic, little mustache. The girl wore a UCLA sweatshirt and elastic jeans that showed off her firm little ass.
The sheriff cleared his throat and got businesslike. “Tell me about it.”
“We were, you know, hiking,” the boy said. “On a trail that leads off the old Drago Road, and Debbie goes, ‘Hey, you smell that?’ And I go, ‘Smell what?’ And she goes, ‘Like spoiled meat.’ And I go…”
“Never mind the dialog,” Ramsay said. “Tell me about finding the dead man.”
“That’s what I’m doing, man.”
“Could you speed it up?”
The boy looked sullen and Debbie took over. “We found him a little ways off the trail. A big guy, you know. Smelled really bad.”
“How big?”
The girl shrugged. “It was hard to tell. He was laying down. Dead, you know.” She looked at the boy and giggled.
“What did he look like?”
“Like a dead man,” the boy said.
“His face,” Ramsay prompted.
“Who knows?” the boy said. “There wasn’t much of it left. Like something had chewed on it.”
“Gross,” the girl confirmed.
Ramsay levered himself out of the chair. “Think you can take me to him?”
They nodded without enthusiasm.
“You gonna need me anymore?” Orry Yates said.
“Not now, Orry. Thanks for bringing them in.”
They walked out of the small wooden building that served as La Reina County Sheriff’s office. It was built twenty years before as a sales office for an optimistic developer who thought there would be a migration of Los Angeles residents to the mountains. He was wrong.
Orry Yates climbed into the YATES PLUMING truck, waved, and drove off. Ramsay led the teenagers around to the back where the beat-up Dodge wagon was parked. His Camaro had gone to Elise in the settlement. La Reina County could afford only one sheriff’s car, and the deputies were using it.
Ramsay wondered if the dead man was Abe Craddock or Curly Vane. If it was, he owed somebody an apology for mentally placing them in a saloon somewhere. However, if it was one of them, where was the other? An argument? Too much booze and a gun goes off? Better stop building a crime until he had a look at the scene. He kicked the engine of the eight-year-old wagon to life and took off for the old Drago Road.
* * *
Deputy Roy Nevins stopped to pull his uniform pants free from the thorns of a wild blackberry bush. He knew this drill was one big waste of time. Craddock and Vane could find their way around these woods as well as anybody in the county. The only trouble they were likely to get into was when they came back to town and started drinking.
He knew Gavin Ramsay had sent him and Milo out here just to keep them busy. If it hadn’t been for the gung ho trainee, Deputy Nevins would have sacked out in the back of the car until dusk, then gone back and told Gavin there was no sign of Craddock and Vane. That’s what their search would add up to anyway. Zip. Only difference was now he’d get all wet and scratched up from these fucking thorns and his shoes would be ruined.
“Roy!” Milo called unseen from off to the left.
“Yeah?”
“Just checking our positions.”
Yeah, great. Ten-fucking-four. Milo could be a pain in the ass sometimes. But what the hell. He was only twenty. When Roy Nevins was twenty he’d been gung ho, too. The kid might grow up to be a good cop. Not in La Reina County, where a couple of overdue library books was a crime wave. But it was a start. Three months from now the state would put him somewhere else. Nice gentle way to break in as a cop. Not the way Roy Nevins had done it, on the grungiest street in the grungiest section of Oakland.
Roy had been a cowboy back then himself. No more. Now he was sitting on a pension, just putting in his time. Couple more years and he could buy that mobile home down in Baja. Sit around fishing with a cool Carta Blanca in his fist. A man could still live pretty damn good in Mexico for peanuts. Until then he would have to pass the days as comfortably as he could and put up with a certain amount of shit like slogging through these dripping woods.
“Hey!” he yelled in the direction of Milo Fernandez.
“Yo!”
“Let’s take a break.”
Roy stuck a Winston in his mouth and lit it. He eased his broad butt down onto a boulder that looked reasonably dry. Milo Fernandez, neat and slim in his uniform, pushed through the wet underbrush and joined him.
The younger man looked up at the patches of sky, they could see through the thick tops of the pine and Douglas fir trees.
“Not more than an hour of daylight left,” said Milo.
“Yeah.”
“You think we’ll find those guys before dark?”
“Craddock and Vane? No way. Not before dark, not before Easter Sunday. They gotta be lost before we can find them. Those two ain’t lost. Shit-faced somewhere, maybe, but not lost.”
“How do you know?”
“ ’Cause I know them two assholes. Why Betty Craddock wants us to find Abe beats the shit out of me. Best thing that could happen to her, he falls down in the middle of S3l and gets run over by an RV.”
“Well… we can give it a try, anyway.”
“Sure. Old college try. You go to college, tiger?”
“Junior college, actually. I need two more years for a degree.”
“Waste of time. You want to be a cop, don’t you?”
Milo Fernandez nodded.
“They not gonna teach you that in college. Only way to learn about being a cop is to be one.”
Roy was about to launch into a war story from his days as a real cop in Oakland, but the young deputy’s attention strayed.
Milo looked around at the dark, dripping trees. “Roy, where’s Drago from here?”
Nevins pointed off toward the south. “That way. Four, five miles.”
“I’d like to see it sometime.”
“Nothing to see. Dozen or so burned out buildings.”
“What was it like, Roy? The fire and all. Was it exciting?”
Roy shrugged. He pulled on his Winston, coughed, spat on the ground. “Sure, if you get off on poking through ashes trying to make out which is human and which is… something else.”
The young trainee caught the older deputy’s hesitation and looked at him quickly. Roy studied the glowing tip of his cigarette and stopped talking.
Milo Fernandez looked off toward the south as though trying to see the burned out village through five miles of forest. “What do you think was going on there, Roy? At Drago? Before the fire?”
“Who knows? Cult of some kind. Los Angeles types. The people living there never went much outside their own village.”
“There were stories.”
“Yeah, I heard the stories. Bunch of crap.”
“Not human, people said.”
“Crap.”
“There was howling, they say. In the woods. At night.”
“So what? There’s lots of funny noises in the woods at night.”
“People still heard things out here after the fire. After everybody in Drago was burned up.”
“Look, amigo, some other time we’ll sit around a campfire and scare the shit out of each other with ghost stories. I’m not in the mood now, okay?”
“Sure, Roy. I’m just curious.”
Something rustled the bushes up ahead. The two deputies raised their heads, listening. They looked at each other, then back toward the sound.
“Who’s there?” Roy Nevins called.
Silence.
Another rustle of brush.
“Craddock…? Vane…?”
No answer. A flash of movement. A head rose above a clump of brush twenty feet ahead of the two deputies. A face looked at them. A pale face streaked with mud. Dark, matted hair. Eyes wild, with lots of white showing.
“Hey!”
The face ducked out
of sight. Squishy sound of running feet on the wet ground.
“Son of a bitch.” Roy mashed the Winston out under his shoe and took off. Milo was already ahead of him, chasing the fleeing figure, who ducked and weaved among the trees.
The runner left the trail and fought through the undergrowth. The two deputies followed. Roy Nevins swore as the thorns clutched at him and mud seeped over the tops of his shoes.
“Halt!” Milo Fernandez called out. “Sheriff’s officers!”
Roy pounded on, the breath wheezing through his open mouth. He fumbled at the leather strap that snapped to the holster over the butt of his .38 police positive. Regulation.
Never could free the damn thing in a hurry. The hell with it. Firing your piece only meant trouble these days. You had to account for every fucking bullet. Nothing in sight to shoot at anyway. He could only catch glimpses of Milo’s back as the young deputy charged after the fleeing figure.
There was a thump of colliding bodies up ahead and a damp thud as they hit the ground. Roy floundered through the brush and almost fell over Milo. The young deputy was applying an armlock to the fugitive, who lay prone on the damp pine needles.
“I got him, Roy.”
“So I see. Suppose you flip him over so we can see what we got.”
Milo warily eased his hold. When the figure on the ground did not move, he grasped a shoulder and turned him over.
“A kid,” Roy said disgustedly.
The face that looked up at the deputies was pale and frightened. Oddly, he seemed not to be breathing hard.
“What’d you take off for?” Deputy Nevins said. The large, frightened eyes flicked from one of the deputies to the other. The boy made no attempt to answer.
“Get up.”
The boy rose to a crouch.
“And don’t think about running anymore. We’re taking a ride into town.”
Nevins took the boy’s arm and raised him to a standing position. The muscles were firm under the smooth flesh. He gestured with his head for Milo to get going. The younger deputy was staring at the boy’s face.
“Let’s go,” Nevins said. “I want to get him back to the car before it gets dark. What’s the matter?”
Milo Fernandez hesitated. “Take a look. There’s something funny about his teeth.”
2
The room on the second floor of La Reina County Hospital was pleasant and bright. Outside the window of the small private room a night bird sang. The boy sat propped in the bed in a half-sitting position. His green eyes skipped around the room as though searching for an escape.
Holly Lang stood at the foot of the bed and smiled down at him. She was tall and supple, with short dark hair and hazel eyes. Her smile was good, and it usually made other people smile in response. But the boy’s expression did not change.
“Well, you look a little better now that you’re all cleaned up,” she said.
The boy’s eyes flicked over her and away.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
No answer.
“A little scared, I guess.” Holly kept her tone soft and conversational. “I don’t blame you. Hospitals can be scary. My name’s Holly. Do you want to tell me yours? It’s all right if you don’t. There’s no hurry.”
The boy’s fingers moved restlessly on the edge of the sheet.
“I’m a kind of a doctor.”
The green eyes met hers for an instant.
“Not the kind that sticks people with needles,” she said quickly. “Mostly, I just talk. And I listen, too, if you want to talk to me.”
The boy turned away and stared through the window at the dark trees. His expression told Holly nothing.
Holly waited, watching his face. “What happened to you out there?” she said, more to herself than to the boy. “What’s haunting you now?”
La Reina County Hospital had more the look of an expensive mountain resort than an institution. It was tucked into the picturesque wooded hillside overlooking the town of Pinyon. Behind it the Tehachapi Mountains rose from gently sloping foothills. The facilities and the equipment at La Reina were excellent, courtesy of the California taxpayers. The same could not be said of the staff.
Somehow La Reina County Hospital had become caught in the backwash of bureaucracy and was known as a haven for medical misfits. Med school graduates from the lower third of their class found a home there. Doctors with a questionable past, nurses with borderline records… these made up the staff at La Reina County.
There were always more beds than patients in residence. The administration lived in fear that during one of the periodic budget battles in Sacramento someone would ask why the hell they needed a hospital down there at all. The funds would be cut off and a lot of people would be out of work. Somehow, the budget checkers in Sacramento kept missing it.
Dr. Hollanda Lang, known to everyone as Holly, did not belong with the staff of misfits. She had passed up a lucrative private practice as a clinical psychologist to work for the state Social Services Department. When people asked her why, she told them she was absolving her liberal guilt. Holly found it embarrassing to admit how deeply she cared about helping people.
And La Reina appealed to her precisely because of its quirky reputation. Her opinion of the medical establishment was not high, and here among the outcasts she found some original thinkers she could relate to. Her one disappointment had been in the lack of challenge in her cases. Until they brought in the boy from the woods.
Holly looked down at the pale boy now, wondering what it would take to communicate with him. In the two hours since he’d been brought in, the boy had not spoken. She had finally gotten the curious onlookers cleared out of the room and felt the boy was at least beginning to relax with her.
There was a sound at the door behind her. She turned, annoyed at the interruption.
Sheriff Gavin Ramsay stuck his head into the room.
“All right if I come in?”
“Could I stop you?”
“Sure. Just say go away.”
Holly felt the muscles tighten at the back of her neck. She knew her aversion to police was an unreasonable throwback to her campus protest days, but she couldn’t help it. “Come on in,” she said.
Ramsay nodded to her. “Thanks, Miss Lang. I’ll make this as short as I can.”
“It’s Doctor.”
“Oh, right. Dr. Lang. Sorry.”
She made herself relax. “That sounded pompous, didn’t it? Shall we try first names? I’m Holly.”
“Gavin,” he said.
Not a bad looking man, Holly decided, if you liked the macho type. Sort of a younger Marlboro Man. She had seen him around Pinyon and thought it was a pity that he had to be a policeman.
“How’s the kid?” he asked.
“Doing well enough.”
“Has he said anything yet?”
Holly looked quickly at the young patient. The green eyes regarded the sheriff warily.
“We’re just getting acquainted,” she said. “So far I’ve done all the talking.”
“I’d like to ask him a few questions.”
The boy seemed to shrink a little in the bed.
“Suppose we step out into the hall,” Holly said.
“Sure.”
She followed Ramsay out through the door and looked up at him when he turned. Holly was five-eight in her stocking feet, and well built. Not many men could make her feel small. Gavin Ramsay could, and she resented it.
“I wish you’d give me some warning before you barge into the room.”
“Sorry. The door was ajar.”
“Well… no harm done, I suppose.”
“I’m relieved to hear that.”
“You must understand it’s part of my job to keep my patient from being disturbed.”
“Fair enough,” Ramsay said, “but you’ve got your job and I’ve got mine.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I’ve got a couple of hunters missing and a dead man downst
airs in the pathology lab.”
“What has that to do with this boy?”
“I don’t know that there’s any connection, but I want to find out. From the looks of the kid when they brought him in, he was out in the woods for at least three days. That’s about how long our man downstairs has been a corpse.”
“You’re not suggesting that this boy has anything to do with it?”
Ramsay’s eyes flashed blue fire. “Why not, because he’s a minor? Last week a twelve-year-old in East Los Angeles set his mother on fire because she found his heroin stash. A seven-year-old girl in Beverly Hills drowned her baby brother in the swimming pool because he got too much attention. Two boys in Glendale hung a baby girl from a swing set. The boys were six. Want to hear more?”
“No, thank you. I’ll concede that there is no age limit on criminal behavior, but I won’t jump to the conclusion that this boy is guilty of anything.”
“Holly… Dr. Lang… all I want to do is talk to him.” Gavin raised his arms. “See, I didn’t even bring any handcuffs.”
“Well, he isn’t talking yet. He’s had a frightening experience, and it may take a while. Shouldn’t you be trying to find out who he is?”
“I should and I am. I’ve put his description out on the wire. So far he doesn’t fit any missing-boy report.” Gavin looked back over her shoulder into the room. “You will let me know if he says anything?”
“Certainly, Sheriff.”
He started to go, then turned back. “Is there any chance we can get back to using first names?”
She held a stern expression for a moment longer, then relaxed. “What the hell… See you, Gavin.”
“See you, Holly.”
The boy’s eyes followed her as she came back and sat in the chair next to the bed. She smiled at him, studying his face. The two deputies who brought him in had said there was something ‘weird’ in the way he looked. Probably a trick of twilight and their imaginations. Holly saw only a frightened boy of perhaps fourteen. High forehead, straight nose, firm mouth. The eyes were a deep, lustrous green. Certainly nothing there that could be considered ‘weird.’
“Getting sleepy?” she said.
The Dead Parade Page 29