by Neil Russell
As I picked my way from one trace to another, I created several small avalanches while thorns took nicks out of my bare chest and legs. Sixty yards down, I reached a clearing invisible from where I had begun. Here the trees were as thick as any mountain forest, and I had to remind myself I was in the middle of the Mojave.
I made a methodic, 360-degree visual search of the perimeter and saw nothing. Same result at eye level. Dogs are taught to track the ground. Their physiology doesn’t give them any advantages even a few feet above their heads. People who hunt clever killers don’t like to publicize it, but there are bodies stashed in trees all over the country. Eventually, insects, elements and time break down connective tissue, clothing disintegrates, and bones fall for animals to drag away. As a result, very few of these victims are ever found. Not a pleasant thought for families of the missing.
I shifted my gaze to the ten-foot level, then twenty, making the same circular sweep. And then I saw it. Halfway up a forty-foot California pinon, a camo-painted metal box was tucked into a confluence of limbs. Its door was open, and a squirrel was sitting inside.
I made a careful search of the area immediately beyond the tree and found an empty plastic carrier for a tubular assault ladder. The fully extended item had been tossed another dozen feet downhill. I retrieved it and climbed.
There were two hooks inside the camo box. One was empty, the other held a black, North Face backpack. I lifted it out, slung it over my shoulder and descended. When I unzipped it, I found standard-issue survival gear: compass, Maglite LED, first-aid kit, MREs, two Mylar emergency blankets, magnesium fire starter and three bottles of Arrowhead water.
Under that, however, standard-issue went out the window. First, money. A large freezer-weight Ziploc contained ten grand in used bills. In a second, a U.S. passport, Social Security card, California driver’s license and two birth certificates—all blank—plus a MasterCard in Lucille Brando’s name. A third bag held a cell phone and charger and a car key clipped to a Jeep Wrangler fob. And in the final Ziploc, a loaded Smith & Wesson .38-caliber snubnose. Not high tech, but concealable, easy to fire, and you could bury it in mud, and, a month later, it would operate like it had just come out of the box.
It looked like whoever had used the shower escape had left with resources. I tried to imagine the chaos of that night. Knowing Chuck, he’d made the intruders concentrate on him while his houseguest escaped. And based on the FedEx guy, the guest had most likely been a woman.
I took out the phone, turned it on, and got the Verizon logo and a full complement of bars. I checked the call history. None. But there was a single number in speed dial. Area Code 702. Vegas. I hit send.
It rang seven times, and I was about to hang up when a male voice answered, “Who’s this?” I didn’t say anything, and the guy switched to, “Wail”
I speak several languages and understand a few more, but I struggle with everything Asian. However, I recognized the standard Chinese salutation. When I remained silent, the guy disconnected.
A few seconds later, the phone rang. More accurately, it bonged. Like Great Tom, the hour bell at St. Paul’s. The LED readout said restricted. Not necessarily meaningful, but interesting. The best way to disguise your voice is to whisper an octave above your normal speaking voice. I let the phone go five bongs before I connected and breathed, “This is Chuck Brando. Who’s calling?”
I could have read War and Peace in the interval. Then, I heard him speaking to someone nearby in rapid Chinese. When he got back to me, he was aggressive. “You are definitely not Chuck. Where did you get this phone?”
So he knew Chuck was dead. Interesting and meaningful. “How about we meet for coffee and catch up? Maybe we dated the same cheerleader.” There was another pause, and I assumed the guy was getting more instructions. While I waited, I heard more chimes, only these didn’t remind me of London. Somewhere, a slot machine was paying off.
Finally, he returned. “Fuck you,” he said, and was gone. I pressed send again. I knew he wasn’t going to answer, but I thought I might get his recording. Instead, I got a polite lady robot from Verizon telling me the voice mail on that number had not been activated.
Birdy’s voice cut through my thoughts. “Hey, you down there somewhere?”
“On my way up.” I turned off the cell and put it back in the pack. Something was nagging at me. I climbed halfway back up the ladder and slowly took in what the woods would give me. Farther down the hill and well right of where I’d been earlier, something scurried along the ground, moving leaves as it went. I traced its path backward. Flies. Lots of them.
The guy was on his face, the back of his black vest stiff with dried blood. Two neat slices in the leather indicated entrance wounds. He was six-five, at least, with long black hair and biceps as thick as my thighs. I didn’t relish turning him over, but with the slope, I was able to use the sole of my shoe to get him rolling. A family of rats skittered away, and what they’d been doing to his face wasn’t nearly as poetic as eternal sleep.
From what was left, he could have been Asian ... or Martian. Only the rats knew for sure. But there was no secret what had incapacitated him. His head lolled awkwardly on the downhill, his neck broken. I tried to imagine a young girl with a flashlight in one hand and perhaps a baby in the other, running in terror, trying to follow the markers. Most likely, the guy had tripped early in the chase, and it was possible he passed her as he cartwheeled down the steep grade. She’d have been lucky not to start screaming. Maybe she had.
His chest was ripped away by the two exiting explosions. The girl had definitely had a steady hand. But why shoot him if he was no longer a threat? The best answer was that he had still been alive, perhaps moaning, and once she had the gun from the backpack, she went the extra mile. Hard to blame her.
I searched his pockets and came up empty, but he was wearing a gold bracelet with Chinese characters on it. He also had a death grip on a roll of duct tape. There was some justice in that.
Just beyond him, I saw another of the whitewashed stones, then a second a little farther down. They would lead to where the water could be crossed, then probably to a vehicle hidden on the other side. Now, the shooting made more sense. She might have had to step over him. Maybe he even grabbed her leg.
“Hey, I don’t like it up here by myself.” Birdy’s voice was a little anxious.
I left the body to the residents and went back up the hill.
“I thought I heard a bell,” she said when she saw me. “There a church around here?”
I didn’t answer.
Birdy had put on a navy blue LAPD T-shirt that covered almost nothing that mattered. Modesty, however, didn’t seem to be something that kept her up nights. She came into my arms, and when she pulled back to look in my eyes, I noticed shaving cream on her cheek.
“It’s some kind of emergency escape, isn’t it? But why put it there?”
“You answered your own question.”
She thought about it, then nodded. “Because nobody would guess, right?”
“Right.”
She followed me back into the shower and watched while I worked the lever again, and the opening closed. Even though she saw me check that it was tight this time, she said, “You know, I’m still not going to be able to be in here alone.”
She turned both showers on full blast and stripped off her T-shirt. While I was deciding my next move, she knelt and unzipped my shorts. I stepped out of them, and she took me in her mouth. I had a lot on my mind, but it suddenly slid to the back burner.
A long time later, and very clean, we headed for the bedroom. We were a lot of man and woman for a queen-size, but we made it work. She had an active mouth, and never a slacker, I joined in. At the moment of no-return, we disengaged and joined together, our stomachs slapping against each another. Seconds later, her X-rated cries sent us over the edge. As we fell into deep, sex sleep, our arms and legs hooked together, I silently thanked a snake.
I awakened an hour later, her
warmness still under me. I started to move off, but her tongue found mine, and her hand guided me inside her again. This time we moved so slowly it became a sweet agony, and when we finally dropped into the abyss once more, I felt her muscles hold me in place like I never had felt before. I buried my face in her hair and fell asleep once more.
* * * *
We sat on a big swing in the shade of the front porch, laughing the laugh of the recently intimate. My sub, along with a couple of Rolling Rocks I found in the fridge, was as fine a meal as I’ve ever eaten. And Birdy, her arms newly bandaged, matched me bite for bite—except for the Rocks. But I’m pretty sure she sneaked an extra handful of Doritos when I got up to get my second beer.
I liked the way she ate. The food got manhandled, not nudged. And she licked her fingers unapologetically. She had her cutoffs back on but had replaced her bloody blouse with pink Polo a size too small. She said she never went out without a change of clothes in her purse. I complimented her on her foresight while I admired the way Ralph Lauren stretched over its contents. Byron Frankel never came up.
When we finished, Birdy scared up a bag of carrots, and we walked down to the corral, a fifty-foot square enclosure abutting a low red barn with the side doors open so the horses could come and go. Before we got halfway there, two Arabian mares bolted out of the barn and charged toward us, ears up, tails in their trademark high-carriage position. They were an identical dark chestnut, but one’s mane and tail were coal black, and the other’s a reddish blonde. Magnificent is the word often used to describe fine horses; these were magnificent plus.
Birdy handed me a carrot, and our new friends went after the offerings with the same zest we’d used on our subs. Seconds later, they were trying to get at the bag.
“Looks like we found their sweet spot,” I said.
“It’s more than that. They’re ravenous, and they shouldn’t be.” Birdy pointed at a long, green metal feed trough inside the fence to our left. It was three-quarters full, but even if it hadn’t been, it was bracketed on both ends by stacked bales of high-grade horse hay. Plenty of available calories, but everything looked untouched.
“Let’s try something,” she said.
I followed her around the outside of the enclosure. The Arabians watched us attentively, but didn’t follow. Birdy handed me another carrot, and we held them over the fence directly above the feed. The mares whinnied, pawed the ground and tossed their heads, but they wouldn’t come within ten feet of us, not even when I deliberately dropped my carrot in the trough.
I bent and examined the ground beneath the feeder. There were some large, rough-shaped rocks there, which seemed out of place around expensive animals, and the earth bulged ever so slightly for several feet along the inside of the fence.
“Birdy,” I said, “I want you to take the horses back inside and stay with them.” She won me once again by not asking why.
* * * *
11
Panamaxes and Countesses
I walked up the road to the whitewashed shed. The cops had backed Chuck’s seven ATVs into a neat, tight row, but somebody had carelessly left a surgical mask dangling from a handlebar. I pushed the memory it evoked back into its cage.
The backhoe was a new John Deere, but the ignition slot was empty. The padlock on the shed door had been cut, and on an inside wall, I discovered two long rows of nails holding a dozen tagless keys. Fortunately, only one was die-stamped jd. I also took a round point shovel and a length of three-quarter-inch chain with a grab hook on each end, both of which I tossed into the Deere’s front loader.
Heavy equipment isn’t my strong suit. Neither are planes. But I can handle both given a little time and a lot of room. I was proud of myself for not rearranging any of the ATVs but deducted points when I made a stab at widening the corral entrance.
The livestock feeder’s legs were set into concrete footings that looked recently poured. I wrapped the chain around the two center struts and attached the hooks to the loader. The green steel pulled away with a sickening, bending sound, and I dragged it to the middle of the enclosure. The hay bales offered even less resistance, then I went to work with the hoe. Five feet down, I struck metal.”
I dismounted and took the shovel into the hole. I was standing on what appeared to be a rectangular sheet of tin, and as I threw the rest of the dirt up and out, the smell of decaying flesh wafted over me.
Donnie Two Knives hadn’t died in his sleep. Lying on his back, he was still wired to a straight-backed wooden chair, eyes wide, mouth frozen open in a silent scream. I didn’t need a pathologist for the cause. Somebody—my bet was Chuck—had left a thin-bladed stiletto protruding from each of Donnie’s ears. One should have been enough, but either Donnie hadn’t been lucky enough to die after the first, or Chuck’s sense of irony had intervened. Either way, they had been inserted at an upward angle until the quillions hit facial bone, leaving a pair of pearl-handled dreadlocks. I saw no other obvious marks, so maybe Chuck had sweet-talked information out of him before administering the coup de deuce—but I doubted it.
Wrapping a handkerchief around my face, I went through the corpse’s pockets and came up with a wallet—Donnie’s last name was Martin—a wad of cash and a crushed pack of Camels. No car keys and no cell phone. If Donnie had driven in here, Chuck would have needed his keys to get rid of the vehicle, but then they would have gone into the hole. That meant he’d had a driver. The cell phone was easier. Chuck was an experienced homicide cop; he would have burned it.
I tossed the items aside and started to climb out. In the distance, I heard a truck turn from the main road onto the property. Probably the guy coming to collect the horses. Nice timing.
I yelled to Birdy, hoping she was within earshot. She was a step ahead of me. I saw her bolt from the barn on one of the Arabians, riding hard to head the guy off. Despite the situation, I couldn’t help but admire the vision of her hair flying, bare legs clamped tight against the horse’s flanks, two fistfuls of mane in her hands. She might as well have been glued down. The girl could ride.
I fished my cell phone out of my hip pocket, but as I was trying to remember Yale Maywood’s number, it rang. Jake. “Can’t talk,” I said. “Call you back.”
He got out, “It’s important,” before I hung up and dialed Maywood. The deputy chief picked up on the second ring. “Yeah?”‘
“Rail.”
“You sound stressed.”
“Who’d you send to pick up the horses?”
It took him a moment to get on the same page. “Rancher in Riverside. Nat Tappan. Why?”
“He know the score?”
“Fuck no, he’s my ex-wife’s cousin.”
“Then call him and tell him to go home. Come back some other time.”
“Now?”
I glanced down the road. Barely a hundred yards from where I stood, Birdy had intercepted Mr. Tappan. They were conversing, but I could tell from the way he was waving his arm out the window, she wasn’t going to be able to hold him much longer.
I said to Maywood, “Unless you want to see one helluva headline.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“I’d rather not wait. Doesn’t one of those mouth-breathers who drive you around have a phone?”
I heard him grunt something, then some rustling and clicks. Finally, Yale’s voice came through my phone as he talked to the rancher. “Nat, that you? Listen, there’s been a major screwup. Make it tomorrow, okay? Dinner on me. You pick the place.”
I watched as Nat Tappan jerked his arm one last time at Birdy, then made a slow U-turn and headed back the way he’d come. The rubber he burned getting on the old road pretty much summed up what he was thinking.
“He gone?” Yale was talking to me again.
“Yep.”
“Then tell me what the fuck you’re doing back out there?”
I hung up.
* * * *
I reburied Donnie and covered my work as best I could with the bales. Even so, my backho
e aesthetics left something to be desired. So to deter the casually curious, I piled the wrecked feeder on top, creating a rickety sculpture that would probably collapse if somebody blinked hard. The Arabians would have to live in the barn until Mr. Tappan got back. Birdy stayed clear until I finished, but I suspect the stench told her all she needed to know.
I helped her get the horses settled, then left her at the house while I took one of the ATVs back out to the Lady Lucille for another look around. Before I went inside, I dialed Jake.
“I don’t like being hung up on,” he said. I ignored him and waited. When he decided that was it for an apology, he got down to business. “I’ve just been over the Brando assets with Ernie DeHoff, their estate lawyer.”