“What about the others?”
“They didn’t do anything.”
“Yeah, just laughing and thinking what hot shit you are.” He let them wait for a few beats, but they were silent. “Okay.” He lifted the cellar door. It was mounted at an angle, made of pine, heavy with layers of paint and moisture. “Come on up and take your medicine.”
“Help me with Jace. He can’t move,” Roy pleaded.
“You mean he won’t move. Shit.” Cass came down the cement steps into the half-light of the cellar.
Roy hit Cass in the left temple with a ball-peen hammer. Cass slumped down, but the blow hadn’t been hard enough. He was moving his arms and legs, scraping at the cement like an injured insect. Roy hit him again on the top of his head, driving the round end into Cass’s skull. This time, he heard a crunching sound. Cass’s body twitched some more, but Roy knew he was dead. He turned to Jace and offered him the hammer. “Here, you do it.” Jace sat staring at the fallen Cass. “Go ahead. It feels good. Do it, Jace. Do it.”
Jace got to his feet and shuffled over to the body of the man who had beaten him with such relish. He gave a tentative blow and then jumped back. The body remained motionless.
“It’s okay. He can’t do anything now.”
Jason hit Cass’s head again, then again, and then he began smashing the hammer into the back of Cass’s head, moaning softly to himself. Roy watched as Jace hit the dead man’s head with rhythmic regularity, keeping time with tuneless moaning. Donnie started to cry. They heard Betts yell from upstairs, from another world.
“What’s going on down there?” Then: “Cass? Cass?”
The boys waited for their mother to come down into cellar, to come and get them. Betts came tentatively down the steps. When she saw Jason with the hammer, his face and shirt spattered with Cass’s blood, she made a quick sucking sound. “Jesus, oh my Jesus. You’ve killed him. Oh my God.” She backed slowly up the stairs, murmuring, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” as if the words could exorcise the sight of the dead man and the upturned faces of her children in the pale light. When she reached the top step, she darted into the daylight, slamming the cellar door behind her. “Wicked boys. Wicked! Wicked! Wicked boys.” They heard the scrape of the hasp.
Roy kept an eye on Cass to see if there was any movement. He knew Cass was dead, but he was afraid he might move anyway. He had entered his own horror movie, and he wasn’t sure how it would turn out. He watched Cass for three days and nights, clutching the hammer, just in case. Then Cass began to smell, which Roy found reassuring. Cass was rotting. Dead was dead.
It was surprising how nobody missed them, but the other residents weren’t exactly neighbors. When the cellar door finally swung open and a young policeman with a flashlight peered down at them, Roy was disappointed it wasn’t Betts coming down the stairs. He still had the hammer. The last time he saw her was in juvenile court, when she told them how he was incorrigible—a word she had learned from Cass—how he was a defiant boy, nothing but trouble, how he had broken her heart. Roy had wanted to break other things then—things that would crunch.
After his release from the California Youth Authority, where he had been a model resident, acquiring all sorts of useful extracurricular knowledge, he set about to reassemble his family. Donnie had been the easiest to find. He was a constant runaway. When he skipped out with Roy from his fourth and last foster home, the family was relieved to be rid of an unpleasant fourteen-year-old who stole anything that wasn’t nailed down and refused to shower. Nobody made a real effort to find him after that. Jace had been harder to locate. He’d been institutionalized since the day they had been brought out of the cellar. When Roy finally found him, he’d been so medicated, he didn’t recognize Roy when he approached him in the recreation area. Of course, it had been almost seven years, and Jason had never tracked things well. But the drugs made him docile, and he went with Roy without knowing where he was going. Now and then, when he became too agitated, Roy would put him back on his meds for a week or so, but he wasn’t the same. The light faded from the bright little eyes into a soft confusion. Roy preferred Jace active, always doing something. Roy had a special reunion planned for Betts. So far, he hadn’t been able to locate her, but he was patient. They’d taught him to be patient. It was a virtue, one of seven. The others seemed less important.
Jason tossed a stick in a pool of brown water and peered intently as the filmy surface broke into tiny islands. Roy and Hickey sat in dilapidated lawn chairs under the huge cottonwoods that followed the course of the Mojave out into the desert.
Hickey took a swallow from a tall Budweiser tucked into a Styrofoam holder. The foam ran down the sides of his face and into his graying beard. “So you think this doctor dude left Donnie out there to die, or killed him, or something, that right?”
At the mention of Donnie’s name, Roy’s smile faded into blankness. “Yeah, that’s what I think.” His sandy voice was like dry leaves scuttling on pavement. “Probably figured he could do whatever he wanted to someone like Donnie. Nobody’d give a fuck.” He turned to fix his gaze on Hickey. “But he didn’t get it right, didn’t think about what might happen next. Now he gets a trip to the boneyard. Gets to join up with Cass and good old Calvin and his doggy pals.”
Roy leaned forward to yell something at Jason, then thought better of it and settled back into the chair. He fished a small foil-wrapped packet from his pocket and took out three joints rolled in brown cigarette paper. He leaned back and touched a match to the twisted tip of a tightly rolled joint, and quickly brought it to his lips, sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, and held his breath. He waited calmly for almost a minute, then slowly exhaled. He took in another deep lungful and passed the joint over to Hickey without looking away from where Jason waded barefoot in the water.
Roy exhaled the thin smoke in a long, slow sigh. “He lives in Pasadena, near the Rose Bowl.” He shook his head. “We’d be in town about fifteen minutes before the cops would be asking us questions.” He frowned, giving it some thought. “So what I want to have happen is for him to come to us.”
Hickey was making little wheezing sounds. A trickle of smoke slipped out from the corner of his mouth. His pent-up breath exploded in a strangled cough. “Yeah, how’re we going to do that?”
“Don’t know the answer to that yet, my man. But we got a few people to contact. That candy-ass Mitch was still hanging around Donnie. He might know something. He knows something about us.” Roy looked thoughtful.
Hickey took another big drag. Where his face wasn’t layered with grime, the effort of holding his breath was turning his skin red. A big whoosh of nearly transparent smoke rushed out of Hickey in a shuddery exhalation. “Whooeee, that touched base.” He reached into a Styrofoam chest that divided the space between them, grabbed another Budweiser, popped it open, and swallowed half the can in long gulps, the beer running down the sides of his face in little muddy rivulets.
Hickey nodded. “Yeah, I’d like to talk to old Mitch again. See how he is since he’s got religion. That skinny blond girlfriend, Shawna, ’member her? She useta be a real space case before she got God and old Mitch’s wang to guide her through life.” Hickey grinned and winked at Roy, calling over to where Jason Miller waded in the water. “Hey, Jace. How’d you’d like to make another movie? Whatta ya think, Jace? A little push-push sound good?”
Jason stopped splashing around in the water and stood spraddle-legged. He leered back at Hickey, cupping his hand around an invisible penis, stroking it up and down. His mouth hung partly open, making a sort of uunh, uunh, uunh noise.
Hickey laughed. “I guess that’s a big affirmative.”
Roy turned an unsmiling face on Hickey, his voice low and hard. “Don’t get him excited. How many times do I hafta tell you. He’ll be asking about it all the time now. If you say something, he expects it to happen. So don’t say it, goddamn it.”
“Hey, just kidding around.”
Jace’s eyes followed the conversation,
flicking back and forth between the speakers, straining to catch the drift. Roy leaned back in his chair, eyes half-closed.
Hickey twisted around to face him. “So who do we see besides Mitch?”
Roy motioned for Hickey to pass him a beer. He tipped the beer up to his lips. His Adam’s apple worked steadily under the white skin, the death’s-head tattoo at the side of his neck wriggling with each swallow in a lifeless pantomime.
Roy tossed the empty on the sand.
“There’s the newspaper lady who wrote up the story. She’ll know more than was in the paper. We’ll want to talk to her. And there’s the BLM cop who found Donnie. I want to know how it looked to him, what he saw.” He frowned in thought. “That might be tougher. We’ll start with the reporter. And the bars. Hit the bars and ask around.” The wind lifted his soft white hair in a wispy halo. “And I’ve got that number we took off Bates for the Indian who calls himself Redhawk. Before old Calvin cashed in his chips, he mentioned that this Eddie Laguna, Redhawk’s regular name, was a big-time guide, some sort of mountain man and Indian badass. He set the doctor up with this guy when things didn’t pan out for Donnie.”
Roy spit into the dirt. “Old Calvin was a real pus bag. He’da given up Jesus for a few more minutes of living. I hate that kind of coward.” He shook his head in disgust. “So we’re going back up the highway and chat with these folks. Have a little dialogue.” He grinned, his red gums dark in the shadow of the cottonwoods. He pointed over at Jace. “You’ve gone and gotten him all excited; so now we have to take him on an adventure. Right?”
Jace jumped up howling, holding his foot. Blood was streaming from under his arch.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!”
He hopped toward Roy on one foot.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!”
He sat down heavily on the ground, holding his foot, the blood dripping down into the dirt.
“Here, let me take a look.”
Jason lifted the injured foot to Roy’s lap. Roy wiped the dirt and mud away with the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s okay, Jace. It’s just a cut. We’ll wash it off and put a Band-Aid on it. And keep your foot out of the dirt.”
Roy shook his head. “Jesus, I shoulda told him not to wade in there barefoot. Hickey, go on back to the trailer and bring some peroxide and a Band-Aid.”
Tears welled up in Jason’s eyes, only to be swallowed in the red whiskers that sprouted out high on his cheekbones. “Jesus, it hurts, Roy.”
“Now maybe you’ll listen to me when I tell you there’s glass in there. You’ve thrown glass in there yourself, you dumb fuck.”
“It hurts. My foot’s bleeding.” Jason pulled the foot up to his chest and rocked in the shade of the cottonwoods. The wind ruffled his thick red hair as if it were being tousled by an invisible hand.
12
As Dr. Michael Sorensen hung up the phone, he wondered how he had become involved with another mental defective. First that mindless piece of tattooed filth that ruined the head. Actually, first it had been Bates, then the McDonald person and his endless chatter—well, not quite endless; more like a tree falling in the forest and no one to hear it. A trace of a smile crossed the handsome face. Now he had to deal with this self-styled Indian guide, Redhawk. Considering his fear of being caught by the invisible presence of Fish and Game, Yellowback seemed more appropriate than Redhawk. His encounters with these sorts of people had been confined to emergency rooms during his bondage as an intern, but he never purposely engaged them in conversation. A litany of endless complaint issued from their illiterate mouths. When this business of completing the grand slam was over, he’d put the pathetic camo-clad gun freaks and ersatz medicine men far behind him.
He leaned back in his special trophy-room chair, a pastiche of deer antlers from dozens of kills, arranged in an intricate interlocking pattern to form the shape of a high-backed throne. The seat, back, and arms were fitted out with leather panels in such a way as to be reasonably comfortable, despite the fact that it looked as if its occupant would be repeatedly impaled.
The chair flanked one side of the huge fieldstone fireplace in Sorensen’s favorite room, the trophy room. Over the years, the Sorensens’ place in Pasadena had appeared in various home and garden publications. Originally designed by Greene and Greene, it was one of their finest examples of the California bungalow and the Craftsman Style.
The grounds sloped gently toward the bluff overlooking the Arroyo Seco and the green parkway that stretched from Devil’s Gate Dam to the Colorado Street Bridge. The Sorensens hosted summer cocktail parties in their garden and on the patio, where his guests could exclaim over the view of the Rose Bowl, golf greens, and the fashionable houses decorating the hillside of the Linda Vista district across the canyon. Definitely a showplace. It never failed to impress his guests and business associates. It pleased his wife, Denise, and it pleased him.
But for Michael Sorensen, the heart of the home was the trophy room. It reflected money, masculinity, and power. In it were the mute witnesses to his skill as a hunter. The walls were crowded with the mounted heads of game that had succumbed to his marksmanship. The wall opposite the fireplace was the African wall, its centerpiece the head of an African bull elephant, the huge tusks protruding out into the room, the ears mounted in a forward position, giving the animal a look of perpetual inquiry. It was flanked by the heads of lion and leopard, mouths frozen in silent snarls. The lesser creatures of prey—gazelle, eland, springbok, ubiquitous wildebeest, the tiny pygmy deer—were gathered around the predators in fixed surprise.
It was all artfully arranged, as was the adjoining wall, where the animals of Asia gathered about the Bengal tiger and its Siberian cousin. Sorensen regretted never having had the chance to take a snow leopard, but they had become so scarce that it was doubtful they would be anywhere but in zoos. All in all, his hunting in Asia had been good, especially the Siberian tiger; the Russians had been eager to exchange their services for American cash.
But nothing gave him quite the same satisfaction as the representative mounts from North America, from the head of an American bison on the left of the fireplace to the jaguar, taken in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental. The illegal hunt had been easy to arrange—mordida here, mordida there, and presto, Mexicans more than willing to help the gringo in his quest. However, the kill had been a bit too easy. The jaguar had been resting under a tree. Twice it had tried to gain its feet at his approach, only to stumble and lie on its side, panting deeply. Sorensen suspected that it had been tranquilized, but no matter, it was one of the big ten, one of the rarest of the big ten, and it had provided an excellent mount.
The antlers of the Rocky Mountain elk, mule deer, and whitetail deer were all in the Boone and Crockett record book, as were the heads of the Dall sheep, Stone’s sheep, and Rocky Mountain bighorn above the fireplace.
This room was the perfect place to conduct business. Here, he could be the genial host, cordial and understated. The room spoke for him, reminding friend and foe of his presence, a testament to a successful life. Things went his way in this room. He looked about him with rising satisfaction, his gaze caressing special triumphs—the bison, the grizzly rug on the hearth, the Rocky Mountain bighorn.
A remembered voice intruded into Sorensen’s self-congratulatory thoughts, causing a slight frown to crease his tanned and rugged face and darken his blue eyes, as if a cloud had passed across a blue sky: “A very impressive room, Michael. We’ve been hunting partners in various corners of the world and haven’t known it.” Sorensen had experienced an unguarded moment, the pleasure of flattery momentarily sweeping away his habitual caution.
In conducting his life, Michael Sorensen normally remained relatively immune to the opinions of others. However, he did require the approval of a very few individuals whom he admired for their wealth and power, especially those who seemed to wear privilege as casually as good clothes. For him, position had been hard won. He had accumulated wealth and influence through the unceasing exercise of a clever mind and
a willingness to treat human relationships with detached expediency. On the other hand, his wife’s perfect twin brother, Dennis, Michael’s intellectual and physical equal, was to the manner born.
Sorensen had acquired an unwavering confidence in himself due to his triumphs over his counterparts in sport, business, and seduction. But Dennis Winthrop had been born with a confidence that required no affirmation. He used people like paper cups, dispensing with them casually and carelessly whenever he found them no longer useful. In the past, he had rarely taken the time to speak with Michael on his infrequent visits from Texas, but now, here in the trophy room, he had extended the hand of friendship—well, not friendship exactly, but at least of recognition.
Sorensen had been more than pleased. “Hunting partners in various corners of the world” had been an acknowledgment of Brahmin equality. The small triumph of acceptance had been quite brief, just enough for a taste, for the flush of pleasure to show in Michael’s face.
They had been looking up at the sheep over the fireplace, Dennis’s arm casually thrown across Michael’s shoulders. “Let me give you the name of a really good guide when I get back to Forth Worth. I’m sure he can bring you within range of a Desert bighorn. He led me to a head in Baja that was a hundred and eighty, Boone and Crockett. You’ll complete the grand slam one of these days. Just takes a bit of walking about and a well-placed shot,” Dennis had said. Sorensen could still see the condescending smile, the amusement over his having been taken in by the oblique offer of fellowship.
Now he had what he was sure was a record head. Redhawk had proved as good as his word and brought him within range of a trophy head. But then someone else had been in the canyon, perhaps a witness to the killing of the sheep. A hiker? Another hunter? Caution had dictated that they leave the head in an abandoned mine, where it was vulnerable to rot and decay. Now the ridiculous guide refused to go back to retrieve it. Sorensen was sure the Indian’s reluctance to return to the canyon was exaggerated. He would have to up the ante. It was only a matter of retrieving the head and his Weatherby from the mine and packing them out, but he’d need the Indian’s help to do this. They’d have to come in from the top, the way he had hiked out. From there, they could carry the head and his rifle down the canyon to a waiting vehicle—not an overwhelming task.
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