The first band of cerulean blue fringed the sky to the east; I’d pulled enough all-nighters to know sunrise was a little more than an hour distant. I needed to get near enough to frame the loading gates through the Nikon’s telephoto lens. One of the old, box-shaped Volvo sedans had parked wheel to wheel against the curb down the street. I made for it, back hugging a chain-link fence until a quick sprint and dive dropped me to the pavement behind the rear fender. The van had backed halfway through a roll-up door that yawned open to a dim spill of amber light. Cardboard boxes stacked on wooden pallets blocked a clear view of the warehouse beyond the entrance. The telephoto lens wobbled in my supporting hand as I spun the focus ring, trying to sharpen the image. Nikons are rugged cameras but I doubted that wielding one as a mace was among the manufacturer-approved uses.
I caught the face of the gamine from the Tercel coming around the corner of stacked pallets, the first of six figures, each dressed in black and none looking as though they’d yet bid farewell to their teens. The gamine was shadowed by a boy her approximate age in a black watch cap, and each of the three faces that followed regressed in age until the final figure, that of a strangely familiar-looking Goth girl in black hair and a silver nose ring, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen. I clicked the shutter, knowing that even with high-speed black-and-white film the image would be underexposed, the faces shadowed by the light spilling from the warehouse behind.
The group clustered for a moment outside the warehouse, then moved toward the rolling chain-link gate. I’d expected to see Theresa among the faces. I tried to think it through as I watched the teens step past the gate toward the Volvo. If she was nothing more than a confused kid, no more or less naïve than normal for her age, she might have told them about her visit to Scandal Times. But the teens continued moving up the street, toward the Volvo, leaving me no time to think about anything except where to run or how to hide.
A flash of movement caught my attention and though what I saw compelled me to keep my eye to the lens my supporting leg began to tremble in anticipation of flight or fight. I yielded to fear—a sometimes sensible thing—and ducked behind the trunk. If I ran they might not catch me but they’d know I’d followed from Wonder View Drive. I’d have to settle not only for the shots I’d taken but for the little I understood about what was happening. I’d seen Theresa in that flash of movement, walking toward the side of the van, and though my glance through the lens had been brief and the scene dimly lit, I thought I’d seen something wrapped around her mouth, maybe a gag, and she held her hands clasped in front of her waist as though bound.
Feet scuffed along the pavement some yards in front of the car. Voices, low and dispirited, sounded startlingly near. I bellied down to the asphalt and crawled beneath the Volvo, heart pounding in my ears. To run or fight was much easier than waiting in a space the size of a coffin, unable to defend myself if caught.
“What do you wanna eat?” a boy asked.
“I dunno. What do you wanna eat?”
“I dunno.”
“How about Mexican?”
“We had Mexican last night.”
The driver’s door creaked open and the weight of the driver tilted the car streetside. The car was too old to have four-door automatic locking and from beneath the chassis I noticed the shift in weight as the driver leaned across the passenger seat to unlock the opposite side.
“They’re going to hurt her, aren’t they?” a girl asked.
“Not seriously,” another boy said.
A distant motor caught—the van’s—and revved a moment before tires chirped and the sound of the vehicle raced forward. The Volvo’s passenger door clicked open, followed by the two rear doors. The car settled noticeably with the front passenger, then sagged as the first two piled into the rear. I glanced over my shoulder at the back springs, stained rust-orange and sagging with weight. Not a hopeful sign.
The last two passengers squeezed into the backseat of the Volvo and the doors slammed shut in stereo. Something pressed heavily into my back as the motor ignited and sputtered, shaking my body like the hand of a giant. I craned my neck off the ground and peered out the corner of my eye; the Volvo had settled on top of my back, the drive train pressing between my shoulder blades. I exhaled the air from my lungs and pushed palms against the chassis as the transmission shifted to first. The car ripped at my hands and roared away, leaving me flattened like a lizard stunned by the windblast of a passing truck. I felt at my lip and watched my finger come away sheened in blood. I’d been so scared I’d nearly bitten off my lip.
The speed of the van was spinning the meter to a blur when I jerked open the door to the Cadillac. The numbers continued to gain velocity as I jetted from the curb. Direction to target read north by northwest—the Hollywood Freeway. I thought about calling the cops and realized that not only didn’t I have the van’s license number, I wasn’t sure of what I’d seen or what it meant. Theresa hadn’t been initially kidnapped; she’d gone to them willingly. If I called the police they’d laugh. The four AM streets were deserted. I floored it. The Rott jittered back and forth on his forepaws and barked like a speed junkie thrilling on sheer velocity.
Freeway merged into freeway after freeway, the van heading consistently north against a thickening stream of headlights; the morning commute begins early in Los Angeles, drivers eager to get from outlying areas into the city center before seven AM gridlock. A stone began to grow in my heart when the van veered onto the Antelope Valley Freeway, a route that crosses a pass in the San Gabriel Mountains and shoots down into the scorched flatland of the Mojave Desert. I could think of no good reason for the van to be transporting Theresa out of the city and one very bad one. The Mojave Desert extends from the San Gabriel Mountains through the southern tip of Nevada, twenty-five thousand square miles of arid wilderness easily accessible to every killer in Southern California and Las Vegas. Nobody knows how many murder victims have been buried in its sand or dumped amid the creosote and blackbush, but every few weeks one hiker or another stumbles over a set of bones scattered by rodents and picked clean by ants.
I lifted the crowbar onto my lap and rubbed obsessively at the metal. The bar wasn’t perfectly round; my fingers traced eight ridges, the octagonal shape improving the grip. The van descended from the freeway at Elizabeth Lake Road. I followed it east, toward the network of arroyos flaring from the eastern slopes of the San Gabriels. In the rearview mirror the sun speared bloodred above the distant ridge. The van kicked up a dust devil’s plume when it turned off the pavement and onto a dirt road that slashed across the desert floor. I hung back, aware that dust kicked from the tires would rise above the Cadillac like a neon cloud, and rolled down the window to study the terrain. Creosote brush, sage, and the tortured, spiked figures of cholla cacti jutted from a desert floor that sloped gradually toward the foothills. The land provided some cover but little of it more than waist-high. The crowbar warmed to my grip like an old friend.
The van pulled to the side a little more than a mile ahead, the dust cloud thinning and drifting away like a beige stain in the bluing sky. I ordered the Rott to the floor. He obeyed reluctantly. I pulled the lever securing the ragtop and powered it back into the compartment behind the rear seat. Across the sage two bulky figures walked a silhouette of a girl deeper into the desert, away from the van, toward a spot shielded from the road, where what they did to her would not be seen or heard and where what remained of her when they were done would not be discovered unless by creatures that, like them, were expert at digging up bones. I eased the Cadillac forward, careful of the dust, and when the distance to target showed at half a mile I floored it.
At the sound of the Cadillac the one on the right turned a look over his shoulder and the one on the left stuck what looked at that distance like a hand against the girl’s ribs. They didn’t know my car by sight. I could have been a hiker or hunter, no more dangerous than a cloud of dust on the horizon and gone in another minute. I jerked the wheel. The Cadillac ra
mped off the road doing sixty miles per hour, all four wheels momentarily airborne before nosing into a flat patch of salt brush. Nobody mistook my intentions after that. The Cadillac bucked violently on landing, front bumper gouging into the brush and the back scraping the dirt as the chassis canted forward and back. I fought to keep the wheels straight and shot more gas to the engine, creosote brush and sage scraping the fenders, rocks kicked by the tires clanging against the undercarriage. The guy on the right kneeled and pointed at the grille. I hit the horn to startle his aim and used the Cadillac’s laurel-wreath hood insignia like a gun sight, intending to run him down. I heard the bullet pop a split second before the firing crack of the gun. No reason for caution. I floored it through a prickly pear cactus tall as a man, spine, fiber, and needles spraying on impact.
It takes considerable courage—or stupidity—to stand and fight a four-thousand-pound hunk of charging metal with the momentum to kill you even if you shoot out the driver. The sight of the prickly pear disintegrating must have demonstrated what the same grille would do to a man, because the kneeling figure broke and ran. I twitched the wheel a couple of degrees, intending to shave the remaining gunman from Theresa’s side. As the distance closed I noticed a white bandage butterflied across his forehead—he was the one I’d whacked with the crowbar. That made it a grudge match. He pointed the gun at the girl as though that might stop me and when it didn’t he turned and fired at the Cadillac, spidering the windshield on the passenger side. Theresa bolted away, hands bound before her. Smart girl. I yanked the wheel. The Cadillac spun broadside and the rear fender swatted the gunman like the tail of a killer whale. He screamed as he went airborne. He should have been happy I wasn’t driving a 1959 Caddy, the one with knifelike tailfins.
I turned the wheel in the opposite direction of the skid, dirt pluming as the tires scraped against the desert floor. The car hit a clump of sage and nearly rolled, the two driver’s-side wheels coming clear off the ground before bouncing down again. Theresa ran blindly twenty yards distant. Two bullets pinged against the driver’s door split seconds before the shots cracked out. I stomped the accelerator and honked the horn. Theresa glanced over her shoulder as she ran, stumbled, and fell. I braked where she fell. She pulled herself over the doorsill. I grabbed a fistful of shirt above her breasts and hauled her face-first onto the passenger seat, eye to eye with the cowering Rott. Her feet jutted almost straight into the air above the headrest as I jetted away, my forearm pressed to her back to pin her down. The Cadillac, solid as a tank, bounced and lurched onto the dirt road. Theresa twisted her legs into the car and buried her head against my side, her body shaking with the force of wild and inconsolable sobbing.
Twenty
THE WEAKEST point on any tank is its tread; a couple of miles from Elizabeth Lake Road the Cadillac sagged and the steering wheel jerked to the right, the front passenger tire slapping the wheel well at each revolution. I drove on the rim until a cutout appeared on the left, screened by a low ridge and the splayed trunks of a cat-claw tree. I noticed the bullet strikes in the driver’s-side door when I vaulted out of the car, two puckered holes toward the front fender that looked like the back end of Siamese twins. The Rott crawled from under Theresa’s legs and hopped out to join me at the trunk. I pulled out a bowl and filled it with water, then lifted free the spare tire and jack. The Rott lapped down the water and looked up at me, his expression expectant. I poured another dollop of water into his bowl and his glance turned reproachful.
“Sorry, buddy,” I said. “You’ll have to wait for breakfast.”
He woofed once in protest, then quieted when I gave his head a rub. I warned him to be careful of the cacti because I didn’t want to spend half the day pulling needles out of his hide, and when he trotted off to patrol the area I rolled the spare tire to the front. Theresa lay curled in a fetal ball on the seat, hands cradling her face. I touched her arm and dangled the water bottle. “You’ll have to pull yourself together and tell me what’s going on.” I pointed to the digital display beneath the dash. “In the meantime, warn me if you see the numbers start to move.”
I knelt to inspect the tire. The stunts I’d pulled while rescuing the girl had inflicted a mortal wound on the rubber, cracking the sidewall until a final bump in the road split and shredded it. I slid the scissors jack under the chassis and cranked until the wheel rose high enough off the ground to accept the spare, then went to work loosening the lug nuts. Theresa’s head popped above the dash and she took a long, greedy drink of water.
“They were going to kill me,” she said.
I grunted while muscling a lug nut and let that be my answer.
“I didn’t think they’d do that. I thought they were cool.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That my ex-boyfriend ratted them out to the tabloids.”
“You thought they’d be happy to hear that?”
“Grateful, maybe. I mean, it wasn’t my fault. I was just with him, you know? It’s not like the whole thing was my idea. I was his victim just as much as they were.”
I twisted off the last lug nut and pulled the rim free of the axle. “Did you ask them for money?”
“Of course not.” She shook her head as though that would have been a stupid thing to do.
“Then why did you call them?”
I lifted the spare onto the spindle, then fingered all five lug nuts onto their bolts. Theresa stared at the top of the water bottle as though it might be a well full of secrets.
“You thought they’d let you join the gang,” I guessed.
“Well, why not? I already knew about them.” She cast a spiteful glance over the door frame. “You weren’t going to give me any money, at least not enough to make a difference.”
“Frank wasn’t willing to pay for lies,” I said. “If you wanted bus fare, you should have told the truth.”
The girl’s bangs flew away in a burst of air from her lips. “If I told you the truth, they would have tried to kill me.”
I tightened the first lug nut, giving her time to consider how dumb that sounded. “Maybe you should tell me who they are,” I said.
“The people who decide who’s going to be movie stars.”
“You mean directors, producers, casting agents?”
Theresa leaned out the window and watched me work. “I’m sure some of them belong.”
“Belong? To what?”
“The secret society.”
“What secret society?”
“The one that decides who’s gonna be a star.”
It was like talking to a child lost in make-believe.
“I never heard of a secret society like that,” I said.
“If you heard about it, it wouldn’t be secret, would it?” She arched her eyebrows and cocked her head. Her eyes were green, I noticed. She’d lost her lavender shades in the night. “You’re exactly the kind of person they don’t want to know about this. I mean, you’re paparazzi, right? Do you think they want to see this blasted all over the tabloids? The minute this goes public the whole scheme might fall apart. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you anything. I was afraid how they’d react.”
I so intently listened to the girl, trying to make sense of what she was telling me, that I didn’t hear the vehicle moving at speed from behind the ridge, tires spitting gravel, until it was too late to do anything except watch it roar by our position, a blur of black paint and thick cloud of trailing dust. I waited for the red flash of brake lights that would signal they’d spotted us, but the dust settled over the hood of the Cadillac and still the van sped on until the road dipped from view. I leapt to my feet and leaned over the doorsill beside the girl, about to chastise her for not keeping an eye on the display, until I saw that the numbers representing distance and direction stood still as a photograph.
They’d found the transmitter.
Theresa spotted it first, hidden in the brush by the side of the road where the van had parked. It must have taken great patience not to
smash the transmitter on the nearest rock when the driver finally found the thing pinned behind his rear wheel. I was glad for his restraint—I didn’t have the money to replace it. The girl picked it out of the brush and trotted back to the car. I shut off the display and tossed the transmitter onto the dash. “Tell me about the other kids in the gang,” I said.
“I’m hungry.” She hugged her arms around her stomach. “We gonna eat soon?”
“Soon as you tell me something makes the trip out here worth my while.” I keyed off the ignition and settled against the door frame. “I know you think I’m a sucker. After all, I just risked my car, my life, and my dog to save your skin. Maybe you think it’s my responsibility to take care of you. It’s not.”
The girl stared straight ahead, eyes squinting against the brightening sun. I leaned within six inches of her face to make my point. “I’m a little cranky right now. I didn’t sleep or eat last night, I got bullet holes in my car and a shredded tire, not to mention dust in every crack and cranny of my upholstery, and my dog is angry at me because I haven’t fed him. If you don’t tell me everything you know about these people and what they’re doing I’ll leave you out here in the middle of the desert.”
“Don’t get mad at me,” she said, as though she wasn’t to blame.
“Who else am I going to get mad at?”
Digging James Dean Page 14