“Bulletproof.” Skip snorted as though this precaution solidified his already poor opinion of the mobster.
“Is he dead?” I whispered. I couldn’t see any blood or obvious wounds on the body.
Skip raised his arm, and I saw that he’d been holding a gun—with a silencer attached—at his side. He fired two shots into Ochoa’s abdomen, just below the vest. “Let’s hope so.”
I blinked, staggered backward, slipped. Tried to say something. I don’t know—it was a keening sound. That man—that man who looked and sounded like Skip. That was not—not what Skip would do. Yet even as those thoughts spread, I knew how little I knew. These months on the run—running toward me, wrangling his plan the whole way, trying to turn the fractured pieces back toward his goal, whatever that was. Had I ever really known him?
I couldn’t breathe. I was making squeaking, clicking sounds in my throat.
Skip grabbed me around the waist, hauled me back toward the ATVs. At some point along the way, I recovered enough to put up some resistance, tried to walk for myself and carry my own weight, and noticed that he was limping, badly.
“Come on. I don’t know where the other guy is.” Skip’s voice was rough with urgency. He held my wrist in a vice grip and pulled me along.
“What promise?” The words blurted out by themselves, surprising me with their strength.
“That he would kill my family if I failed to perform the services I was offering.” We’d reached the closest ATV. He was holding me up. My legs had quit working again. He set the gun on the seat of the ATV and tilted my head up with a thumb under my chin. “Before I met you. I assumed my mom was going to drink herself to death. I wasn’t going to have a family, so it was a risk I was willing to take—then.” A little smile flitted across his face. “Things change.”
“How long have you—”
“A few days. I just needed to see you again before—” He pulled me close and pressed a kiss into my forehead. “This is not how I wanted to have a moment alone with you. Baby, it’s all over. I left you a note.”
A mechanical, droning buzz sounded overhead, close and low. The blades whop-whopped with reverberating intensity, but the helicopter’s approach was hidden by the thick canopy of tree branches.
The muscles in Skip’s jaw rippled. “Walt’s been taking care of you.” He said it in a hoarse whisper, his lips against my ear. It wasn’t a question. “Good. Let that happen, baby. You won’t see me again. I’m doing this so you can truthfully tell them you didn’t help me. I’m sorry.” Another fierce kiss, and Skip shoved me.
Hard and down, with a twist. My ankle crackled when it rolled, and I pitched sideways through the brush. My head bounced off something on the way down, and I landed on my shoulder and hip, an arm pinned beneath me.
CHAPTER 22
An ivy leaf daintily shivered under the weight of the tiny puddle in its cupped center. It dripped with reassuring regularity onto the thatch of pine needles next to my outstretched hand.
Later, I would remember that I did hear an ATV start up and then race away. And I would recall Violet’s face a while after that, flushed and furious, blocking my view of the delicate ivy leaf. And the man in camouflage being strapped to a board and carried out with an IV bag held aloft over him. And shouts in the woods as things were found and zones were cleared.
They made me go to the hospital too. I was X-rayed with cold efficiency and then sat for a long time until someone wearing a lab coat wrapped my ankle in a tight bandage, daubed antiseptic in various places, and said that, since I didn’t have any extra holes in me, I could go home as long as I was mindful of the concussion.
It was late, and waves of fatigue exacerbated my dizziness. Des drove. I think he would have insisted even if I had been steady and fully functional on my own. He should start a taxi service. Probably would pay better than being sheriff.
And he filled me in on some of the things I’d missed. When the FBI team had found Ochoa, he’d been alive—barely. They called in a Life Flight helicopter, and two armed agents accompanied him to the Oregon Health & Science University hospital in Portland.
That was not the helicopter I’d heard. The first helicopter was the FBI sending in backup agents as quickly as they could while other teams were en route by road. And that massive reaction had been prompted by a series of frantic, persistent phone calls from Judge Trane.
“Judge Trane?” I asked, wondering if my hearing was still messed up from the gunfire.
“Apparently she also left you a message. They found your phone in the pocket of the red jacket you ditched. The ringer was off.”
Because of the memorial service. I’d forgotten to turn it back on. Des, as usual, reported these facts in a mild, unhurried manner, but my stomach lurched at the belated information. What was I supposed to have known? Would it have changed the outcome?
“Theo Gandy,” Des continued. “Sound familiar?”
“Uh, Theo? Do you mean Judge Trane’s assistant?”
“That’s the one. He made a mistake and accidentally copied her on an email about you which he forwarded to some unapproved recipients—one of which was Felix Ochoa.” Des shook his head with a short chuckle. “I’m fuzzy on the details—you’ll have to get those from Matt. But I do know she fired this Gandy fellow on the spot and that the FBI has locked down the email servers for the bankruptcy court so they can figure out who all Gandy was talking to and about what.”
If that was the case, then all my efforts at seeding Ochoa with reasons to come out of his shell—and buy my company—had been for naught. But he’d come anyway. For another reason. The promise he’d made to Skip. Maybe the pressure I’d exerted had pushed him over the edge, just a different edge.
Des broke into my spinning thoughts. “Are you sure there were only three men, Nora?”
“Yes. Three men and three ATVs. Well, besides Skip. Why?”
“And Skip took off by himself?” Des persisted.
“I already told them—I didn’t see him leave. But there was no one else. Why?” I shifted for a better view of Des’s profile in the dark Jeep.
“Some of the counts aren’t matching up, and now that it’s dark, the FBI had to put a hold on further searching until tomorrow. It makes them—us, me included—nervous when not all the people or weapons are accounted for. Too bad Trudy’s taken her dogs to a training convention, or I’d have suggested we bring them in. The dogs don’t care what time it is.”
“Des, I’m a little slow here.” I sighed. “Could you go over that again?”
“Three men are in the hospital—Ochoa, the one who was shot near the ATVs, and the one who fell down a muddy embankment and broke his leg. Two handguns, both with silencers, were located. One was in the possession of the guy with the broken leg and the other was on the trail near your red jacket. So one man and two guns are missing.”
In other words, my husband was still a fugitive, and now Skip was considered armed and dangerous. In a way, I appreciated the fact that Des hadn’t come out and said it point blank.
“He won’t be back. You don’t have to worry.”
“Nora.” There was warning in Des’s tone. Probably a warning against unrealistic hopefulness.
“He promised. I won’t see him again.”
The sobbing came out of nowhere, and Des reached over and held my hand.
oOo
The next morning, I launched a scavenger hunt—after I ransacked my own bedroom to no avail and after I engaged in a wrestling match of the wills with Clarice who thought I should be recuperating in bed. But I won, and then I had to beg for her help because it wasn’t a task I could manage by myself. Humility comes in all forms.
Clarice is fiercely loyal—both ways. Either for you or against you. I’d been immeasurably blessed by having her on my side. But Skip was now irreversibly in her against camp, and she made no bones about airing her opinions on the matter, even though she had to resort to muttering under her breath at the breakfast table so that Lore
tta wouldn’t hear.
We started with the coal room because it was the only point in the basement with outside access and because we’d used it before for a couple of clandestine activities. It was a logical place to begin. It was also a concrete box of a room with a chute from the delivery hatch and a few steps up to the people-size door. The ceiling consisted of joists and the bottom side of the subfloor of the room above. There were no good places to tuck a note.
“Huh,” Clarice grunted, fists firmly planted on her hips. “How long did he say he was here?” With her toe, she nudged the edge of a thin mattress that was on the floor under the high end of the coal chute as though it might harbor bedbugs. Skip had left scant signs of his habitation.
“A few days.”
“Then you can’t tell me he confined his movements to the coal room.”
“How’d I miss him?” I braced myself against the wall and shifted my full weight onto my good leg. My sprained ankle was throbbing with a vengeance inside the wrap.
“Easy. You were grieving. We all were.” Clarice relented and came over to clamp a supportive arm around my middle. “We didn’t have reason to come down here. I think the last time I got into the linen supply was on Tuesday, and that’s way at the other end of the basement. He would have had free rein of this level, which means”—she gave me a little jostle to make her point—“that note could be anywhere.”
Of course, she was right. Hope mingled with despair is such a difficult emotion. A little goes a long way, and I felt as though I’d overdosed on it.
“I should have noticed anyway,” I whispered.
“What, like ESP? Balderdash,” Clarice growled. “We all—you, me, Loretta, the FBI if they’d been paying attention—knew he was coming this way, moving toward you. It was his choice to remain hidden. Did you think of that? How simple it would have been for him to waltz up those stairs to the kitchen and say, ‘Yoo-hoo, honey, I’m home,’ huh? But he didn’t. And if I know Skip—which I do, unfortunately—then there was a reason he kept his presence secret from you.”
“Like wanting to avoid prison,” I murmured. Besides, he had come upstairs at least once—to search my room and steal my gun.
“Yep. That’s a good reason,” Clarice said. “Come on, girl. Get your rear in gear. Are we going to find this note or what?”
“But how did he get here?” I asked as I limped behind her toward the infirmary.
“Like mother, like son?” Clarice pitched an eyebrow at me over her shoulder. She meant hitchhiking. It was a possibility—one among many. And since Skip owned Mayfield, he wouldn’t have needed navigational help.
An hour later, we found the note. In the icebox with the money from the gold bar conversions. Of course.
Skip had placed his note—really a large packet of papers—in the one spot that was reasonable to assume I would access the most often. Because who doesn’t need money? I couldn’t tell from just looking, but I wondered if Skip had helped himself to some of the cash. It was his, after all. Or at least he’d been the one in possession of the funds when he’d disappeared.
The first time—I reminded myself, clutching the packet to my chest—the first time he’d disappeared. Not this most recent disappearance. I shuddered and scrunched my eyes closed. I was going to have to readjust my paradigm, such as it was, all over again.
Clarice gripped my elbow, and I opened my eyes to see her frowning, with the wrinkles deeply puckered around her lips.
“Listen,” she hissed and pointed over our heads.
Loretta was chattering in the kitchen. Occasionally, Emmie would answer her. Nothing of consequence, just mundane comments about lunch and school and Pea and Queue, the new donkeys. But it sounded as though they were both easing out of the dull black cocoon of grief, emerging again into the everyday interests of the living. Hints of their underlying personalities were shining through. I grinned at Emmie’s remark about the Terminator’s particular preference for spelling tests as a source of dietary fiber. Apparently one of the Clayborne boys had come up with the idea, and it was a big hit with the goat.
Clarice squeezed my elbow hard and glared at me.
And then it struck me—I could hear every single word they were saying. Clearly.
“Who needs an intercom when you have a dumbwaiter shaft?” Clarice muttered hoarsely.
For those days when Skip was hiding in the basement, he would have—could have, at least—known exactly what was going on. Because we always talked in the kitchen, including—and perhaps especially—when discussing sensitive subjects after Emmie went to bed. I’d told Loretta and Clarice about everything that had happened in San Francisco while sitting directly over where I was now standing.
oOo
We didn’t have a lot of time. Matt had called the night before, after my return from the hospital, and promised that he would arrive at Mayfield in the early afternoon and would handle round two of my questioning personally. Which I was grateful for because Violet and I hadn’t exactly seen eye-to-eye on several matters during the brief interrogation she’d conducted while I was being loaded into the ambulance.
She’d instigated the altercation by yelling at me about taking unnecessary risks. I’d thought her definition of risk needed a reality check and told her so. Our relations had deteriorated from there.
So Clarice and Loretta and I did note reading by committee. I separated the papers and laid them out on the kitchen table. I sat with my swollen ankle propped on another chair, and Emmie snuggled on my lap. Clarice and Loretta leaned over my shoulders. We all quickly scanned.
And then re-scanned. And then read every word.
At least I did, and judging by Loretta’s sniffles, she was dwelling on the same paper I was.
“I never knew,” she whispered. Her hand was heavy on my shoulder. “Did he tell you?”
I shook my head.
It was a copy of a medical record—documenting a hernia surgery and the resulting complications. Follow-up test results and confirmation. Skip was sterile due to extensively and irreversibly damaged vasa deferentia. Simply, the hernia, or perhaps the attempted repair of the hernia, had caused an involuntary vasectomy.
I counted backward from the dates on the record. When he was twenty-four years old, Skip had found out that he’d never father children.
Which meant that the little girl on my lap wasn’t his. I gulped, but for the first time in a long time, my tear ducts were dry.
“So you’re not married,” Clarice muttered.
Another stapled bunch of papers were a copy of our marriage annulment—on which Skip had forged my signature beside his own—because fraud is a legal basis for annulment in California. And fraud includes knowingly concealing from your spouse the inability to produce children. The papers were stamped “FILED” and dated nine days ago. I’d become single on the same day I’d boarded the flight to San Francisco.
Skip had written the name and phone number of the lawyer who had processed the annulment on a separate slip of paper. I grabbed that and stuffed it into my pocket.
It appeared a Washington-based lawyer, under the direction of the California lawyer, had processed a couple of property transfers. The deed to Mayfield had been signed over to Walter P. Neftali. The freight terminal was now mine—officially and legally, although not by means of communal property law anymore.
“What’s haywire mean?” Emmie asked. She held Skip’s handwritten note—the one piece of paper I’d been specifically avoiding in an effort to save the best (worst?) for last—and was puzzling over his somewhat illegible scrawl.
“Hell in a handbasket,” Clarice muttered.
I scowled up at her then tugged the page from Emmie’s hand. “Let’s save this one for later, sweetheart,” I murmured. I folded it into a tiny square and stuffed it in my pocket with the lawyer’s contact info.
A phone on the kitchen counter rang. Clarice’s apparently, given the way she lunged for it.
“What?” she answered. “Uh-huh. Righ
t.” She emitted a dry, prolonged cackle. “Yes, well, the FBI’s not trusting her with phones right now.” She thrust her phone under my nose. “Josh wants to know why you’re so hard to get ahold of.”
It took some explaining.
“Damn,” Josh muttered when I finished. “Guess we don’t need those recordings now.”
“Nope.” I agreed. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”
“Ah, well, you’re wrong there.” Josh perked up. “The night before last, the ATF raided that barn we found, right while the Mongrels were holding church.”
I blinked. “Church?”
“What they call their weekly club meetings. Gives the confab an air of piety, doesn’t it?” He guffawed rather raucously.
I felt like I was on the wrong side of an inside joke. “Josh?”
“Yeah. So guess who that barn belongs to, besides a CHP dispatcher?” Another chuckle.
“I have no idea,” I replied dryly. “How about we quit with the Socratic method and you just tell me?”
“One William Robinson,” Josh announced.
“Who is—?” I prompted.
“Reggie Bolton’s son-in-law.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I’d never heard of these guys before, but I already felt sorry for the wife/daughter who linked them. “Josh—” I tried again.
“Reggie Bolton, also known as Roots Bolton, is the current national secretary-treasurer of the Mongrels Outlaw Motorcycle Club. Ebersole likes to keep his top officers close—under his thumb I guess you could say, both positionally and geographically. Guess where Roots keeps all the club records—membership, finances, the works? You know, because he sure wouldn’t want those items in his own house, given how incriminating they are.”
“In his son-in-law’s barn?” Now I felt a little giddy myself.
“You got it. Along with about twenty guns, including a couple automatic rifles, a bunch of knives, and some C-4. Naturally, the ATF is hyperventilating and engaged in a mad dash of indictments. The early analysis indicates Ebersole was skimming big time, pocketing the bulk of the membership dues from the Mongrels chapters. The IRS is going to want to get in on the fun too.”
Tried & True (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 5) Page 16