Mammoth

by Douglas Perry

  Mammoth

  Douglas Perry

  Amberjack Publishing

  New York, New York

  Amberjack Publishing

  228 Park Avenue S #89611

  New York, NY 10003-1502

  http://amberjackpublishing.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, fictitious places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Douglas Perry

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, in part or in whole, in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Perry, Douglas, 1968-, author.

  Title: Mammoth / by Douglas Perry.

  Description: First edition | New York [New York] : Amberjack Publishing, 2016.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-0-9972377-1-9 (pbk.) | ISBN 978-0-9972377-2-6 (ebook) | LCCN 2016931183

  Subjects: LCSH Murder—Fiction | Camps--California--Fiction. | California--Fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Crime.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.E79289 M36 2016 | DDC 813.6--dc23

  Cover Design: Red Couch Creative, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue

  Toby Berenson tapped the gun with his hand. “Ever seen something like this before?”

  Chief Kenneth Hicks leaned forward for a better look. He pressed his tongue against the top of his mouth and made a clucking noise, the sound of serious pondering. “No. Can’t say that I have.”

  “Pretty impressive,” Berenson said. The fat man massaged the gun’s scope, patted the handguard. He was the town’s dry cleaner, but he loved Robert Ludlum’s books. He thought he knew weaponry.

  Hicks nodded. It was impressive. An HK33 assault rifle. A West German gun with a Soviet cartridge. Certainly unusual around these parts.

  “Well, the day just got interesting, didn’t it?” Hicks picked the cartridge up from the desk, felt the weight of it, then placed it on the blotter. He sat back and put his feet on the desk. The heel of his right boot clipped the gun’s barrel, which rocked like a seesaw. The Mammoth View police chief hooked his hands behind his head, watching Berenson watch him, pleased with Toby’s expression. Hicks knew he didn’t look like a man who’d had a heart attack five weeks ago. Lloyd had found the chief on the floor of the john, his belt unbuckled. It made Hicks furious to think what he must have looked like. How he had to be carried like a child to the cot in the cell. Thinking about it now, his pride in his recovery capsized into despondency. He dropped his feet to the floor with a thump. Over the past month he had become a man of emotional extremes, a stranger to himself. He mindlessly grabbed his hat from the desk and put it on, just to give himself something to do. He had been indestructible once, he thought. A marine with a swagger in his walk and a tattoo of a bathing beauty on his arm. At least he still had the bathing beauty.

  He let his gaze lose focus, turning Toby Berenson’s face into oatmeal. “You really found it on the side of the road?”

  Berenson nodded, shrugged. “Fully loaded and ready to go.”

  The front door swung open and a bolt of sunlight hit Hicks dead in the eyes. He squinted, sending deep creases down his cheeks. He had an out-on-the-range face, someone had once said, trying to compliment him. Hicks remembered that and smiled to himself. No one here knew that he’d never been on a horse.

  Lieutenant Lloyd closed the door and stepped over to the desk. He pressed two fingers to the assault rifle’s barrel and whistled. “Nice toy.”

  “Yeah,” Hicks said. “Ain’t it?”

  Lloyd took off his hat and wiped his forehead, grinning at the gun. He was about to ask where the weapon came from, but the chief cut him off with a look. Hicks nodded toward the holding pen in the back. It was time to check on their prisoner. The chief watched Lloyd step past him and disappear around the corner. Otis had been yelping about something back there just a minute ago, but Hicks had ignored him. That’s what he had a staff for.

  The chief picked up the gun and held it like an appraiser at Christie’s. It looked brand spanking new.

  “What do you think?” Berenson ventured. “Coyotes?”

  Hicks cocked an eyebrow at him, amused by the dry cleaner’s use of slang. “In Mammoth?” He shook his head. They had illegals pass through town here and there, taking the long way north from the Weedpatch migrant camp, but human smugglers? This far off the beaten path? “Could just be a collector,” he said, not believing it.

  “Yeah. Could be.”

  Berenson jerked, frightened by a sudden noise. The steel door in the back banged again, and Hicks turned around to look for the sound.

  “Hey! Hey!” Lloyd yelled.

  The chief put the gun on the desk and stood up. Surely Jimmy Jamison wasn’t trying a jailbreak. Jimmy wasn’t as harmless as Andy Griffith’s town drunk—that’s why they called him Otis, after the character in the TV show—but he was definitely sober by now. He was always as timid as a kitten when he was dry. “Stay here,” he told Berenson.

  Hicks stepped through the tight hallway and hustled into the back room. In the cell, Jamison was sprawled on the floor, flailing like a dropped goldfish. His wrists leaked thin globs of blood onto the concrete floor. A knife, to butter the morning biscuit Hicks had brought in for him, glinted in the overhead light. Hicks stared in disbelief, his head fizzing.

  “Chief?”

  Hicks found Lloyd kneeling next to their writhing prisoner. The officer had wound toilet paper around his own hands, and now he grabbed Jamison’s wrists with them. Hicks crouched, felt himself blink hard and fast. The wounds didn’t look deep, but what did he know? They had to get Jimmy to the clinic.

  “Something’s happened,” Lloyd said, looking up as he squeezed Jamison’s wrists.

  “I can see that.”

  Lloyd’s eyes followed his boss’s, landed on Jamison’s contorted face. “Right,” he said. “But, I mean . . . out there. In the world.” His gaze again flicked to his patient. “What he was listening to.”

  Hicks noticed the black Japanese radio sitting on the cell’s cot, the same cot where the chief had been placed for safekeeping just a few weeks ago after his heart seized up. Some kind of explosion crackled from the receiver. Hicks moved closer. A man’s excited voice pushed through the static gauze. “. . . It’s spreading everywhere. It’s coming this way. About twenty yards to my right—” The speaker’s microphone screeched, then nothing, as if the radio had keeled over, just like its listener.

  “Where is this?” Hicks asked.

  “I think he said out by the mill.”

  The fizzing in Hicks’s head had become crashing waves. “We’d better get out there,” he said.

  The chief turned toward the hall. He prided himself on his stoic demeanor, but he was sure Lloyd had clocked his fear. He didn’t much care. He was thinking about whether he should take the HK33.

  Chapter One

  Tori woke with a ringing in her ears. She wondered if she was getting a cold.

  She rolled to her feet anyway and pulled on a pair of shorts. She shook out her limbs in the dark, squeezed her fingers into fists. Like always in the morning, she felt boneless and fuzzy, lost somewhere inside her body. A floorboard burped under her step. Liesel, in the bed next to hers, shifted like an old fishing boat. Tori tiptoed past her, slipped into her shoes. She eas
ed open the cabin door and was off, running down the gravel embankment with quick, scissoring strides, disappearing into the woods.

  The rush of air into her lungs shocked her. At first she thought she was going to gag, but then something inside her adjusted, something mysterious, and her breathing eased. She looked up. The night still grabbed at her arms and chest, but beyond the treetops, way out in space, the horizon shimmered like tinsel.

  Tori wanted to love this early morning ritual. She wanted it to give her spiritual insights, open her up to nature, her body, and endless possibility. Instead, she felt lonesome. She felt small.

  The morning dug deeper into Tori’s lungs, a familiar, annoying burn. She picked up her pace. She shot between two trees and into an opening in the forest. All the other kids in camp stuck strictly to the program. They didn’t work any harder than the coaches made them, which was plenty hard enough. But Tori knew she was behind the curve. She’d become serious about running only in the past year, and she was sixteen already. Her father had secured a spot for her in this girls’ training camp outside Mammoth View, up in the Sierra Nevadas, about two hundred miles from their home in Bakersfield. It was the only running camp in the country for girls, and she’d been stunned when her father proposed it. She’d wanted to go to camp, just normal summer camp, since she was twelve, and her dad had never even considered it. He expected her to work during the summers. Slinging pizza. Hawking newspapers. Anything. Got to do your part for the family fund, he said. Now, out of nowhere, he wanted her to do this special, two-week sleep-away program, and insisted on driving her up there himself.

  When she asked why he’d changed his mind about camp, he said he recognized her potential, that was all. Thought she could be good enough for a college scholarship. Good enough for the Olympics one day. With her dad’s sudden enthusiasm, she had started to believe it really was possible. She couldn’t be ready in time for the Moscow Games—she’d be just nineteen, and that was going to be Mary Decker’s Olympics—but by 1984 she would be for sure. Decker, the little pigtailed teen who’d become famous a couple of years ago after winning the 800-meters race at a U.S.-Soviet meet in Minsk, fascinated Tori. If Decker could outrun those big Russian women, maybe Tori could too. She would work hard at Spritle’s Racers, she’d promised her father, harder than she’d ever worked in her life. But hard work was only part of it; she knew that much. Did she have enough of that special sauce, enough extra red blood cells, to be really good? Good like the Kalenjin, whose bone marrow could send a rocket to the moon? She didn’t know. No one knew yet even if Mary Decker could run with the Kalenjin.

  Tori slowed as she moved into the center of the clearing, gazing skyward at an array of stars being blanked out by the morning. She thought about how everyone loved her father. People lit up when they saw Billy Lane coming. Slapped him on the back, ready for a quip, ready to laugh. But he was rarely Happy Billy for her. He gave her this hard, disapproving look all the time, like he was a hungry hawk ready to swoop down, and she was just this small, scrawny mouse, an unworthy snack. Tori thought she heard something—a hawk or a mouse, some kind of animal—and she picked up her pace again. Still in the clearing, still looking up at the sky, she thought how the world seemed too big out here, bigger than it should be. Her ears pulsed, the pressure jostling about inside her, thumping against the sides of her head. She stumbled, turning her foot awkwardly. She caught herself, but it didn’t matter. She kept stumbling and turning, finally dropping to the ground with a bang. She held on tight.

  By the time Tori made it back to the camp, she had calmed down. They’d all been told on the first day that the Mammoth Mountain area was geologically active and that an earthquake was always a possibility. This one hadn’t lasted very long. Thirty seconds, maybe a little more. No big deal.

  There was no damage at the camp. No trees or buildings had fallen down. Tori stepped into her cabin and looked around. Her book—Jane Austen’s Persuasion—had slid to the end of her bed. That was about it. Her lump of dirty clothes on the floor had been undisturbed by the tectonic ruckus.

  Everyone was in the dining hall having breakfast. Tori sat at a large table with her training group. No one moved over for her, so she teetered on the end of the bench, one buttock floating free in space. “You’re all still alive,” she joked.

  “Not for much longer,” Liesel said, dramatically holding her nose. “Go take a shower, Tor!”

  Everyone laughed, the sound exploding over the table and bouncing off the windows. Tori had grown accustomed to the teasing. She was the new girl. Almost all of the others had been in the camp last summer. Tori didn’t mind the teasing that much, but her face and neck still flared into a crimson rash every time. She hated that she was so transparent. She reached across the table, grabbed Liesel’s cup of orange juice, and hawked a loogie up from her toes.

  ______

  The quake had knocked out the phone line to the camp, though no one had noticed yet. The coaches discouraged parents from calling. Isolation was a powerful motivator. That’s how it was in Kenya and Ethiopia, after all. Coach Prinzano, like Tori’s high school coach, said that if you were going to be a real competitive runner, you had to think and act and live like an East African, like a member of the Kalenjin tribe. You had to force your body to rewire itself, if it could. That’s why Spritle’s Racers was at high altitude, more than seven thousand feet up the mountain.

  After breakfast and a round of stretching, the seventeen teenaged runners broke up into their training cliques. Tori, Sofia, and Summer would spend the afternoon together doing 800-meter repeats on the track, synchronizing their strides and pushing themselves to the brink. But first they would head off on an eight-mile run along the outer bank with Mary Bowen and her group. Tori enjoyed the slow group runs more than anything else in the program. They provided a sense of community, rather than competition, among the girls. When their various warm-ups were done, seven of them headed out along the nature path, keeping their elbows in tight but letting their legs casually swing like hammocks. It was a challenge—alternately frustrating and satisfying—to hold themselves back, to keep their form while lazing along like old ladies.

  The girls chatted during these runs—Liesel, for one, babbled constantly, about the University of Oregon’s interest in her, about the hair on her boyfriend’s back, about her favorite pair of short-shorts and what she wanted to eat for dinner—but Tori preferred to keep to herself, her head slightly down, watching the dirt path unrolling before her. She liked the way her insides felt when she ran. She liked how her body knew exactly what to do—her left knee springing up just as her right heel rolled forward and the toes pushed off—without her brain having anything to do with it. It was a relief, she thought, to not think at all. She had worked herself into a pleasant, numb state when Sofia nudged her.

  “Look at that,” she said. “What is that?”

  Tori squinted into the sun. She didn’t see anything and shrugged.

  Sofia pointed again. The girl was a wispy thing even for this crowd, Tori thought. Sofia’s black hair bounced. Her thin, coppery arm refracted the sun as she strained to maintain the alignment of her outstretched finger. More than any of them, Sofia seemed to love to run, just the pure act of it. Mile after mile. Liesel had commented on it one night while lying in bed. She joked that it was because Sofia’s mother had run across the border when she was pregnant with her.

  Tori followed the finger, squinting at the trees, the sky-glare, the precipitous drop beyond the edge of the path. This time a blob also caught her eye, something across the ravine. It was moving with them.

  “Do you see it?” Sofia asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it a coyote?”

  Tori stared across the gulch. She’d never seen a coyote, not in real life. She thought it looked like a bear . . . but it couldn’t be, right?

  She tried to squeeze more focus out of her gaze, but no dice. It wa
s too far away. It was just a blob. A blob moving along with them, like a speck in the corner of your eye.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m glad it’s over there.”

  Sofia didn’t like that answer. “Hey—” she said, reaching out and tapping the shoulder jouncing ahead of her.

  The back of a hand whacked Sofia’s wrist, causing her to jump in fright.

  The shoulder and the hand belonged to Mary Bowen—Coach P. always used her full name when talking to or about her, no one knew why. What everyone did know was that Mary Bowen was the queen of the camp, a junior trainer after two summers as the coach’s star pupil. Except she didn’t really care about helping the other girls train. Keen to start her freshman year at the University of Arizona, she cared about her splits. She cared about her regimen. She cared about her long, perfect legs, which she carefully shaved in the shower every morning until there was no hot water for anyone else. She cared about herself.

  All the girls admired her anyway. Mary Bowen was a jock through and through, with the rolling stride of a cocky drunk and the broad, indecent shoulders of a mannequin. She would chat now and again during slow runs, agreeing with or Hmmming at whatever Liesel was saying, but she was disciplined about her form. She did not want to be touched or bumped.

  “Mary . . .” Sofia said, her quiet voice now a little ragged. “Mary, what is that?”

  “What?” Mary Bowen said. She was looking straight ahead, concentrating on her feet gobbling up the path.

  “Over there.”

  Everyone followed Sofia’s finger across the ravine.

  “There,” Sofia said.

  The blob was still moving along with them, flashing in the sunlight. Tori strained to put it in perspective with its surroundings. It was big, she knew that much.

  “What is that?” Liesel parroted.

  “Is it a bear?” Tori asked, daring to offer her opinion.

  The girls had unconsciously picked up their pace. Tori’s jaw rattled with every footfall. This wasn’t a slow run anymore. They had to be doing a five-minute mile all of a sudden—while craning their necks, looking over and around each other. Mary watched the blob just like the rest of them, her eyes like gun slits. The others repeatedly turned to look at Mary, waiting for a sign. Should they run faster? Should they dash into the woods?