“The people who come in here aren’t like that.”
The deputy looked over his shoulder at the large, hairy, fat man in the tight T-shirt. “Um-hm.” The chair creaked as the deputy shifted positions. “Did any of these men threaten you?”
“One of them was going to cut the phone line. I told them I was going to call the police. That’s when the one with the ponytail started for the phone. It’s behind the bar.”
“What made you think he was going to cut the phone? Did he say so? Did someone tell him to cut the phone?”
“Yes. Well, not exactly. The leader, the one with the white hair, made the phone signal.” The deputy raised his eyebrows. Linda extended her thumb and little finger and put it to her face. “Like this.” The deputy looked at her for a moment, then wrote some more in his notebook. Linda waited. He was taking a long time again. He closed his notebook and tucked it in his shirt pocket.
“Ms. Reyes, I can understand that you were upset about the fight, especially since someone was hurt, although I don’t think he’s hurt seriously. I think he’s just going to be very sore for a while.” He paused, looking at Linda, closing his eyes for a moment. “The point is that no threats were made.”
“What about—”
The deputy held up his hand. “Let me finish. No threats were made that can be substantiated. These individuals were bikers, violent types, tough and scary, but not nearly as tough and scary as a blast from a ten-gauge shotgun. Someone could’ve been killed. It’s fortunate that no one was injured.”
He stood up. “You finished up there, Martinez?”
The other deputy nodded and shoved his notebook in his rear pocket. “Thank you for the information, ladies. I appreciate your taking the time.” He flashed a wide grin, going from cop to Latin lover. The dark-haired woman dropped her lashes, and the taller brunette returned the smile. The deputy reached into his shirt pocket and gave each of them a card. “If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call.” He hitched up his equipment harness and swaggered toward the door. Frank could hear Raphael Mendez’s trumpet playing “Blood of the Brave Bull.” The brave bullshit, he thought.
The deputy in charge looked down at Linda, who sat rigid with anger and exasperation. “Next time, if you feel threatened, make the phone call. That’s what we’re here for.” He placed his card on the table.
Linda met his look. “This is Red Mountain. How long did it take you to get here?” The deputy’s jaw tightened. “It took you twenty-four minutes,” she said. “Where were you when you got the call?” She waited. No response. “Probably somewhere on the road, or it might have taken more than a half an hour.”
“We do the best we can, Ms. Reyes. There’s a lot of San Bernardino County.” His tone was flat. Frank knew, as far as the deputy was concerned, she’d become part of the problem.
“I’m sure you do. But I didn’t have the time. These men are dangerous, whether you choose to believe it or not.”
“That may be, but until they do something—”
“Until?”
“We’ll be on the lookout for them, ma’am.” He held up his hand again. “Leave the shotgun under the bar. Better yet, leave it at home.”
Linda turned as the deputies were leaving and caught sight of Frank standing just inside the door. She jumped to her feet. “Frank, oh my God, am I glad to see you. They were here, the brothers. They’re really horrible. They injured a man for nothing. They know where I work, and they’re coming back.” The words came spilling out of her in a rush. Frank went to her, giving her a hug made awkward by the chair that stood between them. He reached down and jerked it impatiently aside, flinging it on the floor. They stood there in the silence of the afternoon. Then Linda looked up, a small smile on her face.
“That’s the first time I’ve seen you lose your cool.”
Frank looked puzzled. “How’d I lose my cool?”
Linda smiled. “The chair.”
Frank looked at the chair lying on its side on the floor. “Oh,” he said, and rocked her gently back and forth.
Jack Collins sat at the table in the back room. The last of the sunlight cast a glow on his round face, which had hardened into a grim mask. Bill Jerome stood in motionless concentration, for all the world like a stork about to spear a small fish, his sharp features made more angular by the slanting light. Ben Shaw puffed carefully on his pipe, now and then lifting eyes bright with fury.
Linda had finished recounting the afternoon’s events. They had listened almost without interruption. When she told about cocking the shotgun and then blasting a hole in the wall, Collins’s mouth had turned down in a sardonic smile. Shaw had made only one remark: “You should have taken out the one with the pink eyes.” He’d said it so casually that Linda realized that despite the fact that she had known this man for years, there was a great deal she didn’t know about him.
Frank stood against the wall, watching in silence.
“So he knows where we live, does he?” Collins looked thoughtful.
Bill Jerome cut in. “Tonight, I’ll be on the roof of Linda’s place with the two seventy. If they come back, it would be too easy to set fire to the club. They’ll be thinking about someone on guard inside, not someone with a night scope.” Jerome looked at his companions and then at Linda. “I’ll have a shotgun, as well.”
Jack smiled at Jerome. “Let’s think it through, Bill. We don’t want to shoot the hell out of one another.”
“I like Bill’s way. Wait for ’em and end it.” Shaw gave them a nasty smile. “I’m in fear for my life already. Those dead boys were terrorizing us old farts. Didn’t have a choice.” His face was momentarily lost in a cloud of pipe smoke.
Collins shook his head. “I don’t want Linda in harm’s way. You know what happens to plans when things start to move.”
“Wait a minute, gentlemen.” Linda eyed her father. “I’m right here in this room, thank you. I’d like a voice in what’s going to happen next, since it seems to concern me. So just hang on a minute.”
Frank grinned. He’d been wondering how long Linda was going to let someone else decide her fate.
Jerome looked crestfallen. “You know, I was just … I figured that you …”
“I know, Bill, and I appreciate it. I’m not so sure I want to know more of what you’re planning, Ben.” Shaw tamped his pipe. “But I do think you’re right about one thing. They’re evil people, and someone, not you or Bill or Dad, needs to stop them before they hurt someone.” Jerome looked uncomfortable. Frank could see that Collins regarded his daughter with a degree of surprise.
Linda looked at each of them in turn. “Those men are the police’s business.” Collins opened his mouth to speak. She held up both hands. “Wait a minute, Dad. The deputy was right. They’ll be on the lookout for them now, even if they acted like it was nothing but a barroom brawl. I don’t want to have to worry about you, Bill, and Ben winding up in jail or something worse on my account. They won’t be back. They know the police have been alerted.”
Shaw said softly, “Know where you work. Know where you live.”
The light had turned from gold to a deep orange tinged with red. It filled the silence of the room with the colors of day’s end and turned their faces into masks of dark bronze.
“Shit.” Collins stood up, looking down at his daughter. “Honey, I don’t want you here. I want you to go back to Los Angeles and stay with one of your friends.”
“I can’t do that, Dad.”
Frank heard himself saying, “She can stay at my place.” They all turned toward him, his presence in the room remembered now. “She’ll be safe there. No address, hard to find, but mostly no address. I have a PO box. So she’ll be safe.”
Collins wheeled on Frank. “Right, Mr. Ranger. Where were you when those bastards were beating the shit out of people and threatening Linda?”
Frank met Collins’s glare, his face thoughtful. “Up in Jawbone Canyon, changing a flat tire.” He paused, his brow furrowed in
concentration. “Somebody left a bunch of those funny little spike things lying around. One of ’em punctured my tire. I think they’re called caltrops.” He held Collins’s gaze. “So where were you when the Millers showed up, out putting up signs to scare kids or scattering spikes to cut them up?” He turned his attention to Bill Jerome, who managed to look guilty and angry at the same time. Then he shifted his gaze to Ben Shaw, who was leaning back from the table, puffing on the ever-present pipe. Shaw looked up at Frank and grinned. “They work pretty good, don’t they?”
19
“You were kind of hard on Dad.” Linda’s face was in darkness. Frank wished he could see her, read her expression. He’d have to settle for the words.
“Yeah, I guess I was.” Noncommittal was best. He wondered how much she knew of her dad’s activities.
“Seeing the canyon torn up makes them angry.”
“They’re not alone.”
The Sierras rose up on their left, dark and jagged silhouettes against a moonless sky.
“You passed the turnoff, didn’t you?” Linda glanced back through the truck’s rear window, not quite sure of where she was.
“Yup, just in case someone decided to follow along. We’ll turn up the Cottonwood Creek road. There’s a long straight stretch going up the hill. If someone’s following, it’d be hard to miss, even if they killed their lights.”
“Oh.” Her reply was barely audible. She seemed subdued by the thought that they could be followed, that the danger was still present, that the Millers were somewhere out there in the vastness of the Mojave. Her brows knit, invisible to Frank. “You could’ve cut him—them—some slack. At least they were doing something about it.”
He drove on in silence, thinking about what she said. “I did.”
“Did?”
“I cut them some slack. I wasn’t talking to them as law enforcement.” He downshifted as the grade grew steeper. “I just wish to hell they had been at the club instead of fooling around, trying to roll back time.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know where they were. Neither do I.”
He paused, searching for the right way to put it. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” He let out a sigh. “I wish to hell I’d been there.” His voice was barely audible above the engine noise. “I was scared thinking about it—you know, feeling helpless.” Frank rested his hand on hers. “Something bad could’ve happened, and I wasn’t there. And your dad and his pals weren’t there, and you were alone, so I was angry for not being there and angry at them for the same reason.”
He felt her shudder. The back of her hand felt soft and dry to his touch, making him conscious of his nicked and roughened palms. “It’s very unlikely Miller and his buddies will be stirring around tonight. I think you gave them enough to think about for one day.” He gave a dry chuckle, shaking his head at the thought of the blast from a ten-gauge shotgun. “Probably still trying to get their hearing back.”
“I can believe that.” She nodded in response. “I didn’t know it was going to be so loud. It seemed like everything was frozen. I mean right afterward. It was like there wasn’t any more sound. At first, I had trouble making out what people were saying. She hunched into herself. “I hope it was worse for them. I hope it scared the hell out of them.”
He pulled the truck onto the shoulder of road. They were downslope of a small rise. They walked to the crest of the hill, overlooking the road where it climbed up from Highway 395. She held on to the crook of his arm, standing close, so close that he could feel the warmth of her body through his shirt. He concentrated on scanning the road. The narrow pavement stretched away into the darkness. The lights from the distant cars on 395 gave the highway an oddly corporeal quality, as if it were an artery of light pulsing across the desert floor. Little capillaries branched away from it here and there and petered out in the distance.
“Looks like we’re all by ourselves.” He turned toward the dark shape of the truck.
Linda turned with him, keeping hold of his arm. “You’re full of surprises, Mr. Flynn.” Her voice sounded thoughtful. “How’d you know I’d accept your offer to come stay in your caboose?”
“I didn’t.” He trudged along, his boots crunching on loose dirt. “But it seemed like a good idea.” He knew he’d better make that clearer. “You’d be safe.” That was the point to make, the main reason. “Well, safer anyway. There’s no guarantees as long as they’re around.” The dark profile of his face seemed expressionless, his long, slender nose poking out from under his hat into the faint light. He turned toward Linda. “We’ll have to be very, very careful.”
She nodded in agreement. “Yes, you’re right. We will.”
“So, let me show you the secret way to my place. Come on. You’ll like this, another walk in the dark,” Frank said, guiding her back to the truck.
“See that berm.” They had stopped in the middle of the road, where it crossed the old right-of-way. “It’s the old roadbed for the high line.” Linda peered into the night shadows, which were only distinguishable by their degrees of darkness. “About a quarter mile back that way”—he pointed in a southerly direction—“is La Casa del Flynn. When we cross Cottonwood Creek—the same creek that runs by my place—there’ll be a turnoff to a campground.”
The truck thumped across the bridge, and they turned to the right and dropped down onto the sandy bottomland, where huge old cottonwoods hugged the creek. The Bureau of Land Management had developed campsites under the trees that sheltered the creek from the heat of the sun. The sign at the campground entrance informed campers that there was a host on duty.
“We’ll leave the truck here.” Frank pulled the truck into an empty campsite, where it disappeared under the cottonwoods in the shade of night. “This is a BLM campground. I know the host here, a retired teacher. He’ll recognize the truck and keep an eye on it. Now all we have to do is follow the creek for about a half mile back to the caboose.”
Linda reached for the soft flight bag that contained her overnight stuff. Pulling the strap over her shoulder, she followed Frank, who had already started moving along the stream. They followed a path that had been made by generations of trout fishermen seeking the perfect fishing hole. The water was deep and cool, a home to flashing brookies and voracious browns. Where there was a stream, you could be sure fishermen had beaten their way through the brush to find the undiscovered spot.
“Well, at least this time I don’t have to leap around on the face of a cliff. Good thing, too, ’cause I can’t see a thing.” She placed her feet down tentatively, taking care not to go sprawling in the dark.
“Nope, no cliffs, but watch out for the snakes.” He paused. “Especially the Owens Valley adder.”
“Not a problem. I’m familiar with all kinds of snakes. I’ll keep an eye out for the caboose viper, as well.” Her eyes probed the darkness. “Are you serious about the snakes?”
“Yup. But I’ll probably scare ’em up first. By the time you get to them, they’ll be really pissed off.”
“Oh great. Dating you is such an adventure.”
“Is this a date? Guess I’ll have to comb my hair.”
Frank had taken a side trail that led up the cutbank to a rocky and uneven surface. It was easier to see now that they were out of the shadowed darkness of the streambed, but still dark enough to require slow going. The moon lay hidden behind the upthrust escarpment of the Sierras. They made their way by the light of the stars, which were bright in the rain-washed sky.
Frank stopped and pointed up at the night sky. “See that? That’s the Big Dipper.”
“I know that one.”
“Use those last two stars that make up the cup as a pointer, and you’ll find the North Star.” He moved his arm in a small arc. “See?”
“Is that it?” Linda pointed up at the canopy of stars.
Frank tried to gauge the direction of her outstretched arm. “I think you’ve got it. Now think of the North Star as the last star in the handle of another dipp
er, smaller and not as bright. Can you see it?”
“Yes, only the handle’s the other way around. So that’s the Little Dipper. I’ve never seen it before, or at least never recognized it.”
“You’ve probably never seen it, at least not all of it. In cities, the light pollution is so bad that only the brightest stars and constellations are visible.” He reached for her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Now that you know how to find the North Star, you’ll never be lost in the desert.”
She turned toward him, standing so close that he caught a faint whiff of shampoo mixed in with the tangy smells of creosote and sage made fresh by the recent rain. The starlight revealed only the reflection of her eyes and the top of her head. He touched her face, lifting it up, pulling her gently closer, and kissed her, her face cupped in his hands.
He could feel the warm flesh of her cheeks pull into a smile. “Guess I’ll just have to stay in the desert so I don’t get lost again.”
“That’s a good idea. Being lost is no fun.”
They sat on camp chairs on the end of the caboose, feet propped up against the railing. Frank hadn’t lit any lamps. Light would make them visible for miles. At night, the desert seemed more populated than by day. The lights from scattered dwellings winked in the darkness, mirroring the stars in the sky above. Linda sipped Jameson over ice from a jelly glass. Frank drank his neat, holding back, careful not to get boozy. He didn’t want to fumble his feelings, cloud up his judgment with drink, be like his foolish da.
“Tomorrow, I’ve got to go up to Bishop.” He let the remark drop in a matter-of-fact way. Linda remained silent. She was good at listening, too, but he could sense the question in her mind. “To feed a guy’s cat.”
“I have a cat, Hobbes.”
“Hobbes?”
“As in Calvin and Hobbes. Of course, Hobbes was named for—”
“A gloomy philosopher. I miss that comic strip. Is your cat a gloomy philosopher?”
“Hardly. He’s a clever clown. But why are you feeding someone else’s cat when you could be feeding Hobbes?”
Shadow of the Raven Page 19