by Nadia Gordon
Two cars came from the other direction. Sunny waited for them to pass, then did a U-turn against the red, gunning the big engine and cranking the wheel around. Up ahead, Ronald Fetcher cruised through a yellow light and continued under the freeway toward Mill Valley. Sunny looked both ways and blew through the red light after him. She fumbled in her purse for her cell phone. The Mill Valley or Sausalito police were the logical people to call. The difficulty would be explaining why they should pull over the beige sports car. Sergeant Harvey could compel them to action, but by the time she reached him, explained the situation, and waited for him to get the local cops on the move, Fetcher could be long gone. If she was right about what had happened to Heidi, she wouldn’t be surprised if the car and the name were borrowed. Ronald Fetcher wouldn’t move to Guerneville and list his name and phone number in the local white pages to be looked up at anyone’s convenience. Any day now, maybe right now, he would simply vanish. The license plate was one tangible way to track him, at least until he landed another ride. It might even make sense to stay with him until he arrived wherever he was headed. If his business took long enough, she might have time to get Sergeant Harvey on the phone and get the professionals on the scene. That was thinking too far ahead. More important to get that license plate.
Fetcher breezed through another yellow light. Sunny stopped at the red to let a stream of early commuters turn toward the freeway in front of her. She rounded the corner to the next intersection just in time to see the last of Ronald’s car head west. They began the climb up Mount Tamalpais. She followed, catching occasional glimpses of the beige car as they ascended the curvy road. Ronald’s coupe took the curves appreciably better than the truck. Sunny couldn’t be sure exactly what he was driving without a better look, but it looked like some kind of old Jaguar. It was definitely a vintage model, probably from the seventies. Two door, conservative lines. None of the curves of the sexier, earlier models. That would be too flashy for Ronald. He went for the country club classic style. He wasn’t flying around the corners in a rush, he was cruising, but it was still good work for Sunny to keep the pace. She leaned forward, as though to urge the truck ahead.
He had chosen an excellent road if his intention was to outpace her. There wasn’t a stop sign or traffic light for miles. From here on, the narrow two-lane road twisted up the mountain, switchbacking across steep ravines lined with towering eucalyptus. At the ridgeline, there were various options, some that headed down the other side toward the Pacific in switchbacks just as sharp and steep, some that followed the spine toward the summit. If she didn’t get close enough to read his license plate soon, she never would. Her best hope was a bus or traffic to hold him up. At this hour, when the sky was just beginning to lighten from black to navy blue, and headed as they were toward open land and open sea, away from houses and cities, they were less and less likely to run into another car, let alone traffic. She was going to lose him. She realized now she should have called Sergeant Harvey the instant she saw Fetcher driving away from Pelican Point. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe Steve could still get somebody to intercept him. She flipped open her phone and watched it search for a signal in vain. They were too far out, wending between too many tall trees and steep hillsides. The name of the game now was to stick with him. If she was lucky and he headed down to Stinson Beach, he would hit stop signs in town. She could jot down the license number, head back over the hill, and still be at work before the day got out of hand.
Where could he be going at this hour? If he had decamped from the Mendels’ houseboat and was making his getaway, it was a strange direction to make it. Narrow, winding country roads weren’t the fastest route out of town, and it was harder to blend in with fewer cars around. He said he found a place in Guerneville. What if she was wrong about Ronald Fetcher? There was always that possibility. In that case, this drive made more sense. A man who liked Guerneville liked countryside. He could be on any number of errands. Maybe he wanted to see the sunrise from the top of the mountain. One thing was certain, with every mile, she was getting farther away from work.
A deer appeared on the bank. Sunny braked and it jogged across the road, trotting up the other side to a place were it could dip back into the forest. She downshifted, accepting the possibility that she had lost him and wondering what Ronald Fetcher did all day. How had the Mendels met him? How did he come to be staying at their place? Who really knew who Ronald Fetcher was, anyway? The thought chilled her.
The road dipped down sharply and flung itself around a hairpin turn and back up the other side of the ravine. The forest crowded in from either side and shut out the faint blue light of morning, cloaking the road in dense darkness. Sunny rolled down the window and smelled the mossy air. She quit driving so hard and let the truck take the corners at more manageable speeds. She told herself she would turn around at the next opportunity. It was getting too late. She would drive back to where there was a signal and telephone Steve Harvey like she should have done to start with, then leave it to them and go to work. Way out here, the police would be able to track down the beige Jaguar, even if it took time to convince them to do it.
There was nowhere to turn around. The road fell away steeply to one side and was carved into the hillside on the other. As far as Sunny could remember, it climbed another ridge up ahead, then ran along the top for half a mile or so before it dove over the side again. There ought to be a place to turn around up there. It was with this thought in mind, watching for a wide spot in the road more than Ronald Fetcher’s bumper, that Sunny accelerated out of a turn and nearly crashed headlong into the beige sports car wedged perpendicular across the road.
29
The wheels locked up and the truck went into a slide. All Sunny could think of was what would happen if the truck went off the edge. There would be nothing to stop the fall but bush lupin and sagebrush. Unless the truck slammed into a boulder, it would roll all the way to the bottom of the canyon. She turned into the slide and remembered she was supposed to ease up on the brakes. There wasn’t time. All she could do was hope the wheels didn’t go over the edge. Even if she avoided a freefall, she’d still be stuck until a tow truck came to get her out of there.
The truck came to rest within a foot of the beige coupe and nearly parallel to it. Ronald Fetcher was not in the driver’s seat. Sunny decided not to hang around to find out what happened to him. It would be tight, but it if took twenty tries she would turn around and get out of there. She put the truck in reverse and looked over her shoulder. She never saw Ronald Fetcher emerge from the edge of the road, open her door, and jerk her out of the truck. The first thing she felt was his arm around her neck, cocked under her chin, dragging her backward.
While he was off balance from pulling her away from the vehicle, she took the opportunity to backpedal toward the bank. They went over in a sickening fall and crashed through the brush, landing hard on the rocks. Sunny’s head slammed against the ground and she felt something sharp drive into her scalp. Ronald lost his grip on her with the impact and she scrambled away from him, tearing her fingers and gouging her knees as she scrambled back up the rocky bank. She still hadn’t had a good look at Ronald Fetcher, but she soon felt his fingers close around her ankle and pull her back down the slope. Her hands gripped at the crumbling rocks. Ronald whipped her onto her side and lunged forward, gripping her throat between his hands. The sensation overwhelmed her. She had never felt anything so debilitating. It was clear, obvious, that he would suffocate her in a matter of minutes, even seconds. He was crushing her esophagus. Even if he let go, she doubted she would be able to breathe again. Her hands pried at his fingers. For a man, Fetcher wasn’t particularly strong. His grip was wiry and desperate. Nevertheless, it was doing the job without trouble. Sunny pulled her knees up and tried to force him off her with her feet. Fetcher responded by lifting her up and slamming her back into the dirt. Her head bounced off the ground and vibrated like a tuning fork. She looked into his pale white face flushed red with the effort
of strangling her, the reptilian eyes lined in red, the nose too narrow for the span of flaccid cheeks. He was older than she thought. At a glance she would have guessed forty-five, but from this angle she could see his skin slipping forward away from the bone. He was closer to fifty or fifty-five. What a thought to have while dying, she thought, that Ronald Fetcher could use work.
She struggled against him, and Fetcher leaned into her all the harder, pushing with all his weight on her throat. Soon what little light there was would fade, she would lose consciousness, her body would go limp, and it would be over. She stared at the face, distorted with effort, glowering over her. A thread of blood had run from a gash on his cheek. She blinked slowly, for relief from the sight of him, for a taste of the black peace that would come soon enough.
“So you’re the one who found my installation,” he said, shaking her, staring at her with a wet smile. Saliva had gathered at the corners of his mouth. “That was some of my best work. How did you like it? She looked beautiful, didn’t she? Admit it. You liked it. Otherwise you wouldn’t keep coming around.” Sunny stared into his eyes. She was curious now, with nothing to fear any longer, what the eyes of a killer revealed. He looked back at her with mud-colored eyes that said nothing. There was no passion, no anger, no fire. It was as if they were disconnected from his words, disconnected even from his thoughts.
“She was perfect,” he said, swallowing. “The perfect body, the perfect white skin. Most women are too fat. The flesh bulges out when you tie them. She was like a drawing.”
Every few seconds, he sucked back the saliva and swallowed. “I hope Bruce Knolls is crying like a baby. I wish I could have been there to see his face. Of course, you had to blunder in with the police and take all the drama out of it. He never even got to see his little whore strung up in front of his precious winery. You robbed us both of that pleasure.”
His words were distracting him and his grip loosened. Sunny let go of his wrist and skimmed her hand over the ground as far as she could reach in search of some kind of weapon.
“I’m glad he’s stuck with that bitch Kimberly,” he said. “He deserves her. The greedy bastard deserves an ungrateful whore like her.”
She stretched her fingers over the rocks, prying at them. Those that came away did so by crumbling into tiny, jagged pieces. She wiggled over to gain new ground, causing him to squeeze her throat with renewed force. More than pain, what she felt was immobility. He had found the place where she was utterly vulnerable. She reached blindly for some rock or stick to use before her breath ran out. Her mind was already beginning to let go. She could feel her will to struggle waning as the last of the oxygen in her blood expired.
“We had all the time in the world,” he said coyly. “But you had to rush things. Now look what you’ve done. You’ve ruined everything, again. Now I’ll have to leave you here to rot. There will be no glory for you. Nothing left behind but a dirty corpse. You could have given yourself to art, but instead the buzzards and the maggots will have you.”
She pushed with her feet and wiggled another inch to the right, stretching out her arm. At first, when she felt the cold touch of glass on her fingertips, she almost forgot what it meant. She was slipping away from her circumstances and she registered the coolness without thinking anything beyond the sensation. It took a second for her mind to register glass, bottle. She gripped it with her fingers and felt the round open end with her thumb. Gathering the last of her strength, she seized it by the neck and slammed it with everything in her power into Ronald Fetcher’s temple.
He let go of her and leaned back, stunned. She rolled away and gasped for air. Her throat burned and she convulsed, gagging. Her head hung between her arms as she tried to breathe for what felt like minutes, hours. At last she could sit down and pull a ragged, painful breath into her chest. Across from her, Fetcher was kneeling, his eyes dazed and staring dully at her. A nasty abrasion oozed a thick stream of blood from his temple where it met his hairline. She turned and climbed up the bank, clawing at the rock face as it slipped away under each attempt to move up it. She fought the burning in her chest and the urge to lie down and surrender to unconsciousness.
At the road, she staggered to her feet and ran for the truck, certain she could hear Fetcher behind her. The way the truck had come to rest, the passenger-side door was closest to her now. There was no time to get in, roll up the window, and lock the door. She flipped open her knife kit and pulled out the knife in the middle, her favorite, the seven-inch, forged steel fillet knife, the one sharp enough to slice through a chicken bone with the most tender of downward thrusts. He would be coming up the bank even now, and he would see the knife and know she was not afraid to use it. Her fingers closed firmly around the base and her mind hardened with resolve as she turned to face her attacker.
He had moved more quickly than she expected. When she turned, he was already lunging toward her. She did nothing but hold the blade steady and feel the soft flesh of the abdomen give way as Ronald Fetcher impaled himself upon it.
He sounded bad. Curled in the ditch at the base of the embankment, his breath came in short gasps thick with saliva and blood. She stood over him. The light had come at last, in the form of diffused pastel pink and gold along both horizons. Blood seeped out from under Fetcher’s hand where he clutched at his side. His eyes met hers but he said nothing. Fat beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. She watched him, deciding how seriously he was hurt. He didn’t seem capable of getting up, but she went over to the old Jaguar, leaned in, and removed the keys from the ignition, just in case.
Sunny set the knife on the floor of the truck and got in. The truck had slid partway around when she stopped, but it still took several tries to get it headed in the right direction on the narrow road. No cars had come since they’d stopped. She realized with surprise that their struggle had taken no more than a few minutes.
She drove slowly. Operating the steering wheel and the pedals felt like new, alien tasks she wasn’t quite sure how to perform. Her hands shook as she flipped open the cell phone. It found a signal at the top of the ridge.
Once the police were on their way, she left the truck and walked up the hill to where the view opened up facing the sea. Sitting in the truck, she kept imagining him in the window behind her, in the rearview mirror, crouching just out of sight beside the door. It was better to be outside. The grass was lush and scattered with early wildflowers. The first spray of California poppies, a scattering of lupin, a splash of tiny white daisies, and nearby, a lone buttercup. Songbirds announced the sunrise as if nothing had happened. As she stood there, she imagined a deeply reassuring peacefulness untouched by human aggression emanated from the mountain. It was people who where sick, she thought. People who destroyed things and caused each other pain. She studied the distant slopes with their patches of deep green forest and open meadow. Nature gives and grows, humans take and consume. Humanity has abandoned the pursuit of peace. It is no longer even a virtue. Now aggression and greed and power are what matter.
The coming light lifted her spirits even as bitter thoughts drove them downward. Ronald Fetcher’s face still loomed over her, her throat still ached with the crushing force of his fingers. She thought of him lying in the ditch by the side of the road, enduring the pain of his injury. She hoped no cars would come. He might still be dangerous. She looked back toward the empty road. As she did so, a movement in the grass caught her eye and she turned with animal alertness. It was a large cat, not thirty feet away. She recognized it from pictures in the wildlife books she read as a kid, though she had never seen one in real life before. It was not a mountain lion, it was a bobcat, with the trademark spots, short tail, and flanged cheeks. It glanced at her, then went back to staring at a spot on the ground directly in front of it with the intensity of those responsible for their own sustenance. It crouched, pulled up on its toes as if about to pounce. Sunny watched for several minutes. The bobcat didn’t move. She turned back to staring at the open horizon of the s
ea.
Some tiny adjustment made her look again, just in time to see the bobcat pounce, coming up with a soft bundle in its mouth. There was no noise and no squirming. The tiny prey lay quietly in the bobcat’s jaws. The cat turned immediately and disappeared into the bushes.
Sunny felt a tickle and put a hand to her head. Her fingers came away wet with blood.
30
Wade Skord lifted the paellera from the ground like a man lifting a pot of molten steel from the forge. Monty ducked in and fed the pit fire with dry lavender clippings and oak chips. Lavender-scented smoke rose up, filling the backyard with its ancient smell. Wade lowered the simmering paella back into the pit and backed away, shaking off the heat on his face. Rivka squatted next to the fire and edged the corner of a spatula under the thick stew, revealing a crusty golden-brown layer on the bottom of the pan. She looked up at Wade with obvious pride. “Nice. We’ve got a perfect layer of socarrat.”
“That’s some kind of Mexican field hockey, right?”