by Bart Paul
She unlaced her boots and tried to shake the dirt out of her shirt, then just said the hell with it and stripped down to her underwear and waded out thigh deep. She tensed in the cold water, but she didn’t complain.
“You want me to turn around?”
“If you have to ask, it probably doesn’t matter,” she said. She shivered. “I’ve had boyfriends I haven’t been as close to as we just were under that house.”
She almost fell face down in the water at the boom of the propane tank blowing. That was loud enough to hear up at the campgrounds. It echoed in that mountain pocket hard enough we felt the shock wave before we saw the flame shoot up above the treetops lighting up the sky.
“Oh my god” was all she said.
She finished washing up in a hurry then. She pulled her bra away from her and shook out the dirt. Her underwear was indoor stuff, not outdoor. I set the rifle upright in the rocks and went as far as taking off my shirt and neck rag and shaking them out, and rinsing my face and hair and neck as fast as I could with that icy water. I kept my eye on the fire. The whole hillside was lit up like a torch. When she was done I helped her out of the lake and over the rocks. She was shivering more, and I wrapped her in the old shirt and rubbed her down.
“You scared me when you pulled out the knife,” she said.
“Probably not much I could have done.”
She sort of leaned in to me and her heat just poured out. I held the shirt tight around her. “I doubt that,” she said. “It was like you were on a mission or something.”
“Was that your car or a rental?”
“Mine,” she said.
I let go of her and handed her her own shirt. She shook it out again and put it on.
“What were all those white plastic things they were scattering around?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Probably inhalers, cold medicine, that sort of junk. They most likely had solvents and stuff in the soda bottles they tossed around so it’d look like Callie and her pals were running some sort of meth lab in the kitchen.”
“Her pals,” Nora said, “being you and Lester Wendover.”
“That’d be about right.”
“You can turn around for a second,” she said. But she was halfway out of her wet underpants before I got turned. She shinnied into her shorts and sat on a rock to pull on her hiking boots.
“You knew they were going to blow up the house,” she said.
“When I heard them closing all the doors and windows, yeah. I figured they’d be dousing the pilots and turning on the gas so it’d be just another accident, like oh gee that stupid Callie Dean and her pals left the stove on. No crime, just a dumb tweaker getting careless.”
She started rooting in her bag and pulled out a big cell phone. “Shouldn’t we call the fire department?”
“It’d be the Forest Service, and somebody most likely has. You probably won’t get service with that anyway.”
“It’s a satellite phone,” she said.
“Then I’ll be borrowing it.”
“So what did you learn under the house that was worth almost getting us both killed?” She said it with a smart-girl look, like she figured not a damn thing.
“Well, now I know you’ll never find the old man’s body.”
“Why?”
“They most likely dissolved it in a barrel of lye like the Mexican cartel guys do to each other. The fella who does it they call El Pozolero.”
“What’s that?”
“The soup-maker.”
She made a grossed-out face.
“Now we got to figure what to do with you tonight.” “What do you want to do with me tonight?”
When I didn’t answer, she almost laughed. “I don’t suppose they have car rentals here in town?”
“Get real.”
“Then I’m stranded,” she said.
“If you got friends down in Mammoth, have them come get you. Was your car registered there or L.A.?”
“Santa Monica,” she said.
“Then you’ll be safe in Mammoth.”
“I have a condo for skiing,” she said. “I don’t know a soul in town.”
“Then you need to get your butt back to that office on Wilshire Boulevard. Once they run your registration, they’ll know the widow’s troops are all over this county, same as them. They’ll know they got to pick up the pace.”
She took my hand again and we climbed up the rocks to the road. You could almost feel the heat from the fire, but she was shaking. When we got back to the truck I set the .270 upright between us and asked her for her phone. She handed it over and showed me how to work it. First I called Power Line Creek. May answered. She was crying. She said Mitch had just left after telling her and Harvey that Albert was dead. She said that Harv had driven out to the Bonner and Tyree ranch to tell Dan Tyree, whose dad had been Albert’s cousin and gone with him to Vietnam and didn’t come back. She figured Harvey had gone in person because Dan’s mom would be sure to pour him a stiff one. Then she apologized for blubbering and said she was okay and that Albert was at peace now, free of his demons. Lester was there, and he’d sit with her till Harvey got home. I told her to hang on to Lester and not let him leave until I picked him up tomorrow. Then I dialed Dave Cathcart’s to see if Sarah was home, but I punched the off button before it rang and just handed the phone back to Nora.
Chapter Ten
“So what are you going to do with me tonight?” she asked. We were in my pickup creeping along the lake road toward the burning house. We could see the Forest Service fire trucks zipping our direction with lights flashing at the far end of the lake.
“Stash you in a motel in town under my name. In the morning you can call a rental car company in Reno and have them drive something down for you if you want to stick around.”
“Will they do that?” she asked.
“What else they got to do?”
“Will you go back to your pack place?” she asked.
“Not till morning. There’s probably somebody watching the logging road. It’ll be safer by daylight. I’ll catch some winks parked in some ranch lane somewheres.”
When we got opposite the house, it was falling in on itself and the fire was burning uphill away from the lake. The Forest Service crew would have themselves a hike. There was a smudge of black smoke from the Infiniti that stood out from the orange flames and white smoke against the night sky. I looked over and Nora was just staring.
“That could have been us,” she said.
Now she had time to think about being scared all over again. She started shaking like she was going to puke.
“Hey. You did good back there. I had guys on patrol weren’t as calm as you.”
“But you weren’t scared,” she said.
“I was so scared I would’ve pissed my britches, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of a pretty girl. That’s why I squeezed you so tight.”
She knew I was bullshitting, but it loosened her up.
“I thought that was some primitive cowboy courting ritual,” she said.
“Up here everything is a primitive cowboy courting ritual.”
It was too bad about the cabin. I told her about the buffalo over the fireplace and that I was sorry he’d be joining his ancestors in the great beyond. I liked that buffalo even if he didn’t belong in this country. I said that burning him would be bad medicine for the Cubans. She just looked at me like I was nuts.
When the Forest Service got close, I stopped the Dodge in my lane until they shot by me, two pumpers and a crew truck. There was no place to pull over without landing in the lake. They’d need more help before the night was over.
“So this,” she looked at the mountain on fire, “this still won’t be on anyone’s radar.”
“Nope. Just another meth fire fifty miles from Albert’s. Just another sorry accident. But when Gerald’s guys find me, they’ll have to shoot me and Lester too. That won’t look like an accident, so they’ll probably shoot one of thei
r own and leave the surprised sonofabitch with some cash lying next to us so it’ll look like a meth deal gone bad. Frémont county will have this little mini shit-kicker crime wave, and that’ll be that.”
“Deranged veteran dies in drug double-cross,” she said.
“That’s me. Then Gerald will call in the wreck a couple of days later and folks will get distracted and forget all about us.”
“We shouldn’t get killed over this,” she said. “It’s not in an associate’s job description.”
“What the hell is an associate, anyway?”
“An errand-girl with a quarter-million dollar education.”
I just kept driving.
“So. What if when GQ calls that wreck in, it ain’t there?”
She gave me a funny look. “I don’t get it.”
“If there’s no wreck, it’s old Gerald who gets put in the middle of a lie. A big-time hoax on cable news. The county’ll send in a chopper and there’d just be a bare hunk of mountain. The law will start asking him questions he can’t answer, and Nancy Grace and Anderson Cooper will be on his ass. Once folks call you a liar nowadays, you’re branded a liar for good.”
“That would be brilliant,” she said. “But how do you make an entire airplane disappear?”
“Hadn’t got that far.”
“I thought you said you can’t lie yourself to the truth,” she said.
“I’m way past the truth.”
We didn’t talk much the rest of the way in to town. I cruised side streets looking for Cubans and Escalades and finally dropped her off in front of the county sheriff ’s. I parked in the lot behind the bank and walked the dirt alley to the back side of the Ponderosa Motel, watching the shadows. I left the .270 in the truck. Carrying it into the motel office would be a little too Western, even for Piute Meadows. I rented a motel room from a woman clerk I didn’t know and said it was for my girl cousin from Winnemucca. When I got back, Nora Ross was sitting on the curb outside the sheriff ’s station like a dirty teenage runaway, not some hot L.A. lawyer. If any deputy walked out and saw her, I don’t know what she would have said. I picked up her bag and led her down the back alley to the Ponderosa parking lot. We didn’t see a soul on our way to the room. I unlocked it, handed her the key, then did a quick look-through of the closet and bathroom. The walls were painted-over cinderblock and would slow down a high-velocity round if it came to that. She wanted me to stand guard while she showered off, so while I waited I turned off the lights and watched the street. I heard her open the bathroom door and felt her walk up warm and steamy behind me and felt her finger run along my back.
“I don’t want to be alone here tonight,” she said.
I watched the street for another minute. It was bright under the arc lights and quiet as a tomb.
“I’ll just get my rifle.”
I drove her down to Mammoth before sunup so she could get clean clothes and rent a car. Just a quick hundred mile round trip over two eight-thousand-foot passes. We put twenty-five miles behind us before we stopped for breakfast in the little town at the foot of the Tioga road. She ate like a trucker and asked me more about making the plane disappear. Then she said she was afraid she was going to die there under the house the night before. She had only heard about such people and always figured that her family and her job and her education made her safe from that part of the world. I started to say something lame but pretty much just let her talk.
We went outside and walked toward the truck. The town was on the high side of the basin, and she was admiring the big blue prehistoric lake off in the distance. Up close it was all salt grass, alkali mud, and swarms of flies. In the bright sun we just blended in with the tourists stopping off on their way to Yosemite.
We were kind of quiet for a while. She’d been pretty sweet the night before, but scared. When she woke up at three a.m. and found me standing at the window in the dark, she’d got out of bed and without saying anything we watched the street together, empty except for a big-rig every now and then, or some fisherman just pulling into town after driving half the night up from L.A., her leaning back smooth against me and me just holding her with the Remington in easy reach.
“You look sad,” she’d said.
“My dad always said if you lived right and told the truth, you could look any man in the eye and tell them to go to hell.”
“Can’t you do that now?”
“No ma’am. I sure couldn’t.”
“I’m not your mother,” she said. She took my hand and led me back to the bed. “Don’t call me ma’am.”
I followed her. I guessed all the Cubans and acid cooks were all tucked in for the night.
We were coming off Deadman Summit fifteen minutes outside Mammoth when she started to kind of laugh to herself.
“Moving the plane would be a fantastic trick if it wasn’t so absolutely illegal.” She looked happy, like the lawyer brain was working overtime.
I dropped her off at her condo. It was just wood and glass like eight thousand others on the way to the chair lifts, which always looked ugly once the snow melted. She gave me her satellite phone number and an awkward sort of kiss, and said she’d track me down that afternoon. When I drove back out to the Reno Highway, I saw she’d left a balled up wad of something purple on the seat. It was her damp underpants she’d taken off at the lake. I hung them on the rearview mirror like I was in high school and headed back north. It was only about eight in the morning.
I picked up Lester at Power Line Creek. Harvey was gone to Frémont Lake Reservation to talk to Albert’s relatives, so I didn’t tell May about seeing the cabin burning the night before, only about being up at State Line.
“I always knew that Callie Dean was bad news,” she said when Lester was outside. “But I never thought Albert was into that junk.”
She noticed my filthy clothes but didn’t say anything. I could tell she was trying not to cry. I gave her a hug, grabbed Lester, and got the hell out of there. Lester looked like crap too, but he was doing his best to maintain. Once we were in the truck I told him about the cabin. And I told him that GQ wasn’t his pal anymore. He got pretty depressed about Callie’s stuff burning up so he wouldn’t have as much to remember her by. He made a crack when I pulled the panties off the mirror and stuffed them in my glove box, but his heart wasn’t in it. He never asked whose they were.
I hit the bridge below town too fast with my eyes on the Ponderosa Motel and was in the 25 MPH zone before I knew it. When I looked sideways to check out the Highway Patrol office, Lester hollered to slow down. Up ahead Albert’s Firebird was dangling behind a tow truck right in the middle of the street. I pulled over just past the tow truck. Sarah was standing in front of the Dunbar garage talking to a tall guy in a Hawaiian shirt and mesh cowboy hat. Before I got out I wagged my finger at Lester.
“Just once in your life, do exactly what I say like your damn life depends on it, which it probably does.”
“What’re you talking about?” he said.
“Just stay in the damn truck.”
“Jesus, relax,” he said. ”But don’t take all day.”
I got out, and they watched me walk up like they’d been talking about me.
“Hey, Tommy,” Sarah said. “How’s Dad’s colt?”
“Settling in.”
“Did you hear about the fire at the lake last night?”
“I was there.”
The man looked up then but didn’t say a word. Sarah reached out to brush some dirt from the night before off my sleeve. The dirt didn’t come off.
“I called the owner down in Palo Alto,” Sarah said. “Told her it looked like a chemical or gas fire. The Forest Service found Pepsi bottles full of solvent like you use for making meth along the drive and pseudoephedrine pills scattered everywhere. She was pretty steamed.”
“Hard to blame Callie when she’s dead.”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “But it was a Forest Service lease. They probably won’t let her rebuild.”
&nbs
p; “That sucks.”
“Meth,” the guy said. He smiled like his spaceship had just landed. “Hillbilly heroin.”
“This is Jerry from Florida,” Sarah said. “Or I should say Gerald. It was his father who disappeared last winter.”
“Yeah, I know. The famous GQ.”
He didn’t stick out his hand and neither did I. He wore a big gold watch. It looked just like the one that Lester stole. I pointed at the car on the hoist.
“If you’re strapped for cash, you can probably pick up this Firebird cheap.”
“Someone named Albert Coffey left a message with my dispatcher last winter about seeing my dad,” he said. “I just found out about it. That’s why I’m up here. Boy am I sorry he died before I got a chance to ask him about it.”
“Hey, you missed him by a whisker, bud.”
“When he heard about Albert’s accident,” Sarah said, “Gerald recognized the name and called our office to see if anything of his father’s turned up.” She held up a clear plastic evidence bag with a blue windbreaker inside. “We just pulled this out of the trunk.”
He looked at me real smirky. “Pretty amazing, huh, guy?”
“This is Tommy Smith,” Sarah said.
He made a salute with one finger to his hatbrim. “I know all about him,” he said. “Bronze Star. Purple Heart. You’re quite a man, man.”
Sarah tensed up, but she didn’t say anything.
“Deputy Cathcart said you worked with Albert Coffey,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. But you and your friend are hard guys to track down out here in open country with dirt roads and no phones.”
“Oh, I ain’t hard to find.”
“No,” he said, “now that I know where you live I ought to be able to find you real easy.”
“Albert never said shit about missing airplanes, though.”
“But he was a drunk, right?” he said. “My dad must have left his jacket in his car, and the guy forgot all about it.”