“What’s the plan?” Lloyd said.
Hicks settled himself, scanned the property. Porthole-style windows studded the second and third floors. The top floor offered large bay windows for panoramic views of the Sierra Nevadas and Inyo National Forest. “That door there,” he said, pointing to a small, second-floor entrance at the top of a multilevel wooden path that wound decoratively up the side of the building. “That’ll do.”
They hurried across a corner of the field, paused at the first step, and then began to move sidelong up the stairway. They were positioned shoulder to shoulder, looking away from each other, trying to keep both corners of the building and the door in their sight. They were halfway up when a voice cut through their thoughts: “Stay right there, Sheriff.” Hicks and Lloyd, taken by surprise, skittered out of the sun, their boots banging on the wooden planks. They pressed themselves against the building, hoping they were lost in the shade.
“This is private property, Sheriff,” the voice said. “I kindly ask you to remove yourself from the premises.”
“Melvin?” Hicks called, looking up. He was pretty sure it was Melvin and that the voice was coming from the third floor. “Melvin, it’s Chief Hicks. We need you to come with us.”
Only a bird responded, a long, sharp caw from somewhere in the trees. Lloyd caught Hicks’s eye, nodded toward the door. The gun in the lieutenant’s hand quivered like a plucked guitar string. Hicks shook his head. He figured Melvin had ducked away from the window and was heading into the bowels of the building. Finding him would be a slow, dangerous undertaking.
“You got an arrest warrant, Sheriff?” the voice finally answered. “What’d I do? Is it illegal for a man to mind his own business in his own home?”
“We want to talk to you about what’s going on, Melvin. It won’t take long. Where’s your brother?”
Another round of nothing washed down on them. This time even the bird stayed quiet. At last a window shut with a clap. Hicks strained, but he didn’t hear anything at all from inside the building.
Hicks looked at Lloyd. “I think we have probable cause for entry,” he said.
Lloyd indicated with his head that Hicks should move first. Hunched over, the chief stepped forward, eased up the last level, and duck-walked to the door. He pressed himself against the side of the building again. Lloyd jogged up behind him, jumped in front, and tried the door handle. Locked. Holding his revolver with both hands, the lieutenant reared back and kicked. The door shook. Lloyd kicked again, and the handle jumped into the air. The door swung wildly into the building. Hicks heaved his bulk through the doorway, arms out, finger on the trigger.
Linoleum flooring guided him to a stone counter. A refrigerator hummed against a wall. He was in the kitchen. Or a kitchen. The building probably had three or four of them. The chief stayed low, willing his eyes to adjust to the new environment. Lloyd stepped beside him. The lieutenant swung his gun to the left, then to the right. A beam of sunlight from a porthole pocked a far wall. The rest of the room marinated in speckled gloom.
“Melvin! Come on out, now,” Hicks called. “We don’t want anybody to get hurt. No reason to make this a bigger thing than it has to be.”
The men stood still, listening. No footfalls. No pin-drop. Nothing. The building had swallowed Melvin Johnson.
Lloyd moved through the kitchen’s entryway into the long, white-walled room beyond. Hicks poked his head through the opening a moment later. The room didn’t have any furniture or carpeting. Lloyd was moving carefully, but every step declared his location. Easing into the next room, a hallway, he threw a look back at Hicks. He stuck a finger in the air: stairs.
Hicks joined Lloyd in the hall, followed his eyes to the end. This was odd. The building had an open design—big, high-ceilinged rooms, no doors, one room flowing into the next—but the staircase was enclosed. A small, elegantly lettered sign was affixed to the door. “Stairs,” it said.
“No need for breadcrumbs, I guess,” Hicks whispered.
Lloyd started to reply but a noise interrupted him—the sound of something falling and hitting an unforgiving surface. It sounded like it came from the floor below them, not above.
“Johnny!”
The voice pierced the floor, resounded in the souls of their shoes.
Hicks, stunned, dropped into a deep crouch, both arms out at his sides. It was Winnie Lloyd’s voice. What the hell? Hicks turned to his lieutenant, but Lloyd was already racing toward the stairs. Hicks wanted to call out, to stop him, but he knew nothing was going to stop him. He also knew that to call out to him, to order him to stop, would tip off their quarry, show that they were weak and undisciplined. Not in control.
The stairwell door closed behind Lloyd. Boots clomped down the stairs, two or three at a time. Hicks made it to the door a few moments later and flung it open. He stepped forward, listening to Lloyd’s footsteps dissipate into nothing. As the door closed behind him, he realized there was no light in the stairwell. He watched his hand and gun disappear into blackness.
“Winnie!” Lloyd yelled from below.
Hicks put his left foot down, secured it on the stair, and brought the right one down to join it. He heard something, way off in the ether. The chief wondered what it cost to heat and cool this building every year. The utility bills had to be steep. General maintenance costs, too. No wonder the Johnsons always seemed so stressed. The old man’s estate couldn’t be throwing off much income. The boys had to figure something out, and they clearly had no clue what that might be. They had no skills. No work ethic. Homer long ago sold his feed business. Of course Melvin and Gordon had decided to knock off the bank. Of course.
Feeling for terra firma with his boot, Hicks tried to locate the sound of Lloyd’s footsteps; was his lieutenant heading east or west? He found the next step, transferred his weight, dropped the other foot down. He shifted to his left to put his head over the railing, to try to judge how many steps he had to go—and lost his balance. His knee hit the railing, sending a spasm up his leg. He fell backward, a silent-movie pratfall, and his gun flew up, slamming him in the face and then hurtling beyond his head as if released into deep space. He hit the wall, bounced. This all seemed to happen in slow motion. He felt like he had hours to catch himself: to reach out for the railing and grab it, to jam his shoulder against the wall, to thrust his leg out. But he couldn’t do any of those things.
He crashed onto the landing, wrenching his shoulder. His left foot screamed. It felt like the foot had twisted all the way backward. He pictured an owl’s head swiveling around, and he grimaced. He turned onto his back and let out a quiet howl.
He didn’t know if he could get up. He had a sprained foot, at the least. He might have broken something. When he was in the hospital, the nurses told him every day he had to walk. They shook their heads and clucked at his protests, pulled him to his feet and steadied him with his arms over their shoulders. He hated those women. They always left the curtains open and paid no mind to his flapping gown, his bare buttocks exposed to anyone passing by the window. At least that wasn’t as bad as being harangued about his bowel movements. Whenever he heard a nurse padding down the hall, he wanted to escape, to hide in the toilet. But if he did that, she’d just knock on the door, maybe even open it up. The john had no lock on the door, in case the nurses had to come barging in to save him. One thing he knew for certain: now that he was familiar with hospital life, he wanted to die young. Which would have been ten years ago.
He forced himself to his feet, felt around for the walls to get his bearings. His foot ached but it wasn’t as bad as he’d first thought. He didn’t think it was broken. Shaking it, pressing it down to test the pain level, he thumped into something, sending whatever it was sliding away and then bumping down the stairs. A plastic bottle. He became aware again of the sound of shoes—or something like shoes—in the hallway below him. He held his breath for a moment. He still couldn’t s
ee anything. The gun had disappeared on impact. He lifted himself up a step, toward where he thought he heard the gun land. He kicked out with his good foot. He bent down, patted a stair with his hand. He grasped the railing and pulled himself up further, patted the next step. Nothing . . . nothing.
An explosion shook the building—a shotgun—and he dropped onto his side, slid back to the landing, and pushed himself into a corner. The noise bounced around like a pinball. Shoes padded away, a door clanged open. “Gordon! Where are you?” he heard someone say. Melvin. Hicks waited, making sure Melvin had indeed gone off to another part of the building. He thought he heard another door open far away. He heard something, anyway. He dropped onto his hands and knees, pushed himself upright. He forced himself down the stairs, threw open the door. He leaned against the doorframe and spun into the hallway.
Silence met him. He could see now. Not well, not clearly, but a static mist was better than blackness. Staying close to the wall, he moved as quietly as he could, trying to orient himself. The only light—muted, the source distant and diffused—leaked into the hallway in concentrated spills. It was natural light, more or less. The sun, passing through the wide windows on the outside of the building, crossing the exterior rooms, and finally pushing through beveled glass that broke up the wall at regular intervals. Hicks made it down one hallway, turned, and kept moving. More of the same: tile underfoot, doors, beveled glass, fractured light. This floor wasn’t open like the one above. Instead of high ceilings and large rooms, it resembled an old Art Deco office building. It was cramped, claustrophobic. “Lloyd?” he whispered, wondering if he heard something.
No, he’d heard nothing. He wasn’t even sure he was going the right way. He couldn’t trust his senses. The tight hallway bounced sound around indiscriminately. Melvin Johnson—and Lloyd—could have headed in the opposite direction than Hicks had thought. Hicks crouched down, hoping for a flash of inspiration. He realized he had no idea which way Lloyd had gone or how to find the Johnson brothers. He had lost his revolver and hadn’t brought a backup. He was defenseless. And Lloyd could be dead, the recipient of that shotgun blast. He had to consider the possibility. He gazed down to the end of the hall—or at least as far as he could see before the fuzzy darkness took over. The hall and the doors had an institutional feel to them, making him think of the nurses again. He figured this must have been the commune’s executive offices. Did a commune have executives? He squinted at a glowing, beveled-glass window as if he could see through it, out toward where he thought the soccer field was.
He thought of Elaine. Her graceless, stout-legged walk, the lulling jiggle of the fat around her waist. She had visited him in the hospital just the once, he reminded himself. She was there barely ten minutes before she started making excuses: the long drive back, an important meeting in the morning, her grown son’s various problems. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since. She was a middle-aged cop groupie, nothing more. Hicks had probably known it all along, but he’d ignored the signs for a chance to do something dangerous for once, something foolish. Sarah, to his surprise, drove to Mammoth View while he was still in the ER. Lloyd had called her. She put the house in order, cooked for him after his release from the hospital. She stayed a month, until he was back to his old self, more or less. Then she packed up her suitcase again—the blue canvas one she brought on their honeymoon thirty years ago—and drove back to Fresno. Their daughter, Joey, didn’t come up from L.A., not even when he was in the intensive-care unit. She called a few times, but only to talk to Sarah. She was her mother’s daughter. She might stay mad at him for a very long time.
Hicks rose, his knees popping. He knew what he had to do. He had to guess which way Lloyd had gone, where Winnie’s voice had come from. He chose east, into the mountain. It just felt right. Bent double, he sneaked past a door and moved further down the hall. He listened, turned around, and watched the misty air loosen up behind him. He continued forward, inching along the corridor, craning his neck to give himself the best possible chance of hearing Lloyd rounding a corner or Melvin Johnson cursing to himself. He picked up his pace, worried that he was going in a circle. He might come around to the stairs soon, assuming there was only the one stairwell. He needed to look for the gun again. He couldn’t leave it behind.
He stopped, took a step backward. He kneeled, steadied himself with a hand on the floor. The sound of fast, ragged breathing gurgled somewhere. He put his ear to the nearest door. Yes, it was coming from in there, he was sure of it. Something crashed to the floor inside the room, followed by a series of violent grunts. Hicks opened his eyes wide, straining to see through the beveled glass next to the door. He stared deep into his own indecision. He couldn’t see a goddamn thing. He had no weapon. He was useless. But he had to do something. He felt the scream a moment before he heard it, and when the sound arrived—thick and panicked, a woman’s voice—it released something in him, broke the dam in his synapses. He swung the door open and lurched forward, into the room. Darkness jumped up, like he was back in the stairwell. He threw a punch, a right cross, but he hit only air, his feet sliding.
He crashed into someone—a man. He grabbed hold: a neck, the back of an elbow, but the body parts slipped away like eels. The man went down, out of reach, but his stench swarmed over Hicks. Trying not to retch on the B.O., the chief threw another punch, his fist cracking on the linoleum floor. He punched again, connected with a thigh, a bare thigh. The man’s pants were down, bunched at his ankles. Enraged, Hicks swung wildly. He landed blows on the man’s chest and neck, and he heard him grunt and roll away.
“Got a gun,” the man said. It sounded like Gordon Johnson.
“So do I. I’m police.”
Hicks heard the man grunt again, and he prepared for a blow. Instead, the darkness wavered, followed by a stab of weak light. A few moments later, a distant door banged. The assailant was gone. Hicks had let him get away.
“Hello?” Hicks said.
“Chief?”
Hicks winced. Winnie. It really was her. He moved forward in the dark. He realized she was weeping.
“You okay?” he asked, not wanting to know.
Silence rolled out before him like the open seas.
“Yes,” she finally said, her breath a series of small, rattling heaves. “Yes. You showed up just in time.”
Hicks stood, brushed himself off. He watched Winnie’s silhouette rise as well—it looked like she was pulling her pants up. “Well—” he said. He turned away, tried to think what he should say. A sound stopped him from continuing. The noise came from down the hall. Or above them. He really had no idea where. It could be boots. The sound seemed to be growing closer. Maybe Lloyd. Maybe the other Johnson. Hicks mindlessly patted his pockets. He didn’t even have a pen he could use as a weapon. He turned and waved at the darkness, hoping to find Winnie in it. She had moved away, into the depths of the room. “Let’s go,” he whispered. “We need to get out of here.”
“Wait.”
“We can’t,” he whispered, urgently this time. “We have to go. We have to go now.”
“Hold on, goddamn it! He ripped my blouse. I’m almost naked.”
Hicks felt his face burn. He listened to Winnie scuffling around, pulling something metallic apart, piece by piece. Comprehension hit him; they were in a dressing room. She was opening lockers. After a minute, she grabbed hold of his arm. They stuck their heads out the door and, seeing no one, ran down the hall. Turning a corner, they pushed through a pair of doors.
The summer air washed over them. Hicks shivered, scared and shocked. He pulled Winnie along until they were out in the open, away from the building’s shadow. It felt safe—safer—in the open.
Winnie slumped against him, sucking in air. She was wearing a grey uniform top—for a waitress or a maid—over smudged white Capri pants. The nametag on her chest read, “Carmela.”
“The car’s right up there,” Hicks said, indicating
the road above them. “Your husband’s probably waiting for us.” Hicks couldn’t even guess where Lloyd was, but somehow it seemed like the right thing to say. He started to move toward the road, but Winnie stopped him.
“Chief.” She dipped her head toward the ground, reading the gravel like tea leaves. “I’m sorry about my language back there.”
Hicks relaxed, patted her arm. “That’s fine, Winnie. Just fine.” He started to move again, but she held him in place.
“We don’t have to tell Johnny about . . . you know. What was happening in there.” Her eyes bore into him.
Hicks realized all at once that he was going to lose control, start crying right in front of her. “No, of course not,” he croaked, struggling to keep his voice from breaking. “After all, nothing happened.”
He turned away so she wouldn’t see his face; he strode toward the Bronco. He wanted to get the rifle from the back of the vehicle—he needed a gun in his hands. He heard her padding along behind him and realized she was barefoot. He blinked hard as his eyes watered: what the hell was wrong with him? He was a police officer—he had to start acting professional.
He unlocked the Bronco and angrily wrenched open the door. He had gotten Winnie out safe. That was good, but now he had to go back in and get the Johnson boys. Lloyd was still in there, alone and probably outgunned. He’d lock Winnie in the back of the truck, tell her to stay down, out of sight. He brought out the department’s precision rifle, checked that it was loaded. Leaning the gun against his shoulder, he slammed the door and noticed what was in front of the Bronco: nothing. “Shit,” he said. The Eldorado. It was gone.
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