by Joseph Flynn
Tall Wolf had a clear view of the path from the parking lot where he’d left his car.
It would take some nerve on Wilkins’ part to both break a promise to Marlene and interfere with a federal agent in the performance of his duty. But gold could make people do strange things. If Wilkins did have some friends shadowing his movements, Tall Wolf would see them at the same time they saw him.
And the way Wilkins had his shoulders hunched up said he was tense about something.
Tall Wolf said, “I didn’t see anyone follow us here, but maybe you know some really sneaky people. It would be a terrible mistake for anyone to try and mess with me. Especially since I’m here to help you.”
Wilkins barked out a short laugh.
“I went to college,” he said.
Tall Wolf nodded. “So did I.”
“You know what Ronald Reagan said?”
“Mostly stuff other people wrote for him,” Tall Wolf replied.
“Reagan said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ Of course, the first time anyone ever said that it was a white man talking to a Native American.”
“Probably was,” Tall Wolf conceded, “but times change.”
“You’re not going to tell me you’re a red man?” Wilkins asked.
“I have a copper complexion, but that isn’t what you mean. If you’re just stalling, waiting for help to arrive, it’s time to reconsider. If you don’t want me to help you, just say so. I’ll take you back to your job … and make sure someone else gets the gold.”
Wilkins’ head jerked back as if he’d been punched.
“Yeah,” John said with a nod, “I know where it is now. Not precisely, but close enough to make discovery inevitable.”
The special agent saw six Native American men step onto the path leading to the picnic area. He took his sidearm, a Beretta 92FS, out of its holster and put it on the table in front of him. Then he sighed.
“You try to be a nice guy.” He shook his head and told Wilkins, “Leave if you want. But if any of your friends tries to mess with me, the blood will be on your hands. The prison time, too.”
Wilkins held up his right hand and the six men halted their approach.
“You don’t know where the gold is,” Wilkins said.
Tall Wolf gave him the grid location as laid out by the county surveyor.
Told him the name of the estate that currently held title to the property.
Wilkins’ eyes bulged, looked like they might bug out of his head entirely.
Tall Wolf said, “That suggestion you gave me, to see who was suing Hale Tibbot before he got killed? That was all I needed to find the gold. Now, maybe you thought you could persuade Marlene to get rid of me. Maybe you thought I was too dumb to make my way through a bunch of court filings and find the one that was important. That’s more likely. You didn’t know I’d had a good education, too, until I just told you.”
Wilkins looked over his shoulder and called out to his friends in a language Tall Wolf didn’t understand. There had been over three hundred native languages spoken in pre-Columbian North America. He didn’t know any of them. Wilkins and the boys knew at least one.
They turned around, grumbling to themselves, and walked off.
Looking back at Tall Wolf, Wilkins said, “That gold should be ours.”
“Your tribe’s, you mean.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“I agree,” Tall Wolf said. He put his gun back on his hip.
That was a step in the right direction, but Wilkins was still straining to take Tall Wolf at his word. “Why should I believe you?” Wilkins said.
“That’s for you to work out,” Tall Wolf said. He got to his feet. “Come on, I’ll take you back to work … and pretend I didn’t notice you have a gun in your lunch bag.”
Wilkins gave him a startled look.
Tall Wolf shook his head and said, “You dropped the bag in the car, remember? Month-old meatloaf doesn’t make a clunk like that when it hits the floor.”
“Didn’t think you were paying close attention,” Wilkins told him.
“I get people to underestimate me that way. I was just glad the damn thing didn’t go off accidentally.”
“The safety is on and the chamber is empty.”
The two men got back into Tall Wolf’s car.
Wilkins said, “You still want to know the exact location of the gold, don’t you? Save you the trouble of finding it.”
Tall Wolf looked at him. Lowered his sunglasses so the man could see his eyes.
“No, I don’t. I don’t care about the exact location. That’s not why I came to see you.”
He put his Ray-Bans back in place and started the car.
“So why’d you come then?” Wilkins asked.
“I want to know which party to the lawsuit over the land, if either, has found the gold.”
Wilkins told him which one.
“Has he been taking much of it?” the special agent asked.
“Enough that some people have talked about killing him.”
Tall Wolf said, “Hold off on that.”
“Why?”
“That help I was talking about giving you? I think I know a way you can get the title to that land legally.”
There was a minute of silence before Wilkins asked, “What’s in it for you?”
“I have my interests, but I don’t want any of the gold.”
Wilkins tried to understand that and came up empty.
But he remembered the look in Tall Wolf’s eyes, and hadn’t heard a lie in his voice.
He said, “You want to tell me what you’re thinking, I’ll listen.”
Ron Ketchum took Keely Powell out on Lake Adeline in one of the police department’s patrol boats. He used the prerogative of rank to give the officers who had been scheduled to start their shift another hour of paid lunch. The chief wasn’t just showing Keely a good time or the perks of running your own cop shop, he was trying to keep the town safe.
That and sort out his own future.
While keeping his eyes on nearby watercraft, looking for signs any of them was helmed by a zealot with malice in his heart, he asked Keely, “You think John Tall Wolf is smarter than you and me?”
“Well, you, sure. Me? It might be a nip and tuck race.”
Ron took his eyes off the search for evildoers and looked at his old friend.
His new lover.
“I’m the slow kid in class, huh?”
“Well, you’ll remember I made it through Loyola Marymount in four years, with honors, before becoming a cop. I’m pretty sure Tall Wolf took a similar path. You, I believe, took three times as long to get through UCLA in your spare time.”
Ron resumed scanning the lake. “Dogged determination doesn’t count for anything?”
“Counts for a lot. Shows you won’t let your shortcomings keep you down.”
She laughed before Ron could ask if she was serious. Then he had to laugh, too.
Keely said, “It’s been a long time since we’ve had any competition in the smart-cop department. If you think Tall Wolf has been a half-step ahead of us, remember that he hasn’t had to worry if maybe his boss or his dad was involved in a homicide. He isn’t distracted by a gorgeous woman from his past reentering his life. His take on things isn’t blurred by the emotions he feels for his new hometown.”
Ron spared Keely a glance. “You’re right; you are definitely smarter than me.”
Keely nodded. “It’s better you came to that realization on your own.”
Ron gave the wheel a sharp turn. Keely started to pitch sideways when Ron grabbed her, sparing her a fall. She growled at him and said, “You did that on purpose.”
“Yeah. Sometimes the best comeback isn’t verbal.”
He kissed her and let her go. She patted his backside. All was well.
“You’ve also been distracted by this idea of your becoming mayor,” Keel
y said.
“I’ve decided I’m going to go all out when I run for office.”
“Didn’t we used to hate pols, pretty much all of them?”
“We did. That’s why I’ll see if I can avoid most of the sniveling, sneaky stuff they trade in every day. I don’t have the star-power to rule the way Clay does. I’ll just try to play things straight … with one exception.”
“You’re not going to loot the town budget, I hope,” Keely said.
“No, but I’m thinking about enriching a friend.”
“Anyone I know?” Keely said, waggling her eyebrows.
“I’d like to take you up on your consulting detective idea, give you a five-year contract at a good rate of compensation with the perks we discussed.”
“Huh. This is where I have to ask: What’s the catch?”
“We’d both have to agree on who the new chief of police would be.”
“You’re still thinking about your current deputy chief?”
“Yeah, if he hasn’t gone and found another job. That and if think you can work with him.” Ron killed the motor. The boat drifted forward.
“Some reason we’re stopping out here in the middle of the lake? You going to throw me overboard if I don’t agree to your plan?”
“It was your idea, if I remember right and, no, that’s not why I stopped here. This is the spot where the bomb was when I got to it. Pretty much the deepest point of the lake.”
Keely nodded. Sometimes people needed to revisit the site of a near-death experience just to remind themselves they really had survived. And that they weren’t all that easy to kill.
“You checked the location by GPS?” Keely asked.
Ron nodded.
“We find this bomber,” Keely said. “I’ll shoot him for you, if you want. I would not have been happy to learn you’d gotten blown up.”
The chief smiled, “You sweet talker, you.”
Keely embraced Ron. Looking over her shoulder, he could see a dark smudge on the distant shoreline. The site of the Jade Emperor, darkened by the fire-bombing, was already being rebuilt. The project’s completion date wouldn’t be delayed by more than a month.
Ron turned Keely around and pointed out what he was looking at.
“I’ve come to think of that fire as a course correction. More like what a real eco-terrorist would do. Strike out at a gaudy example of greedy, despoiling capitalism.”
“Whereas poisoning a natural wonder like this lake isn’t their cup of tea.”
“I tossed that detonator over the side right about here. I think Tall Wolf is right; it’s time we got it back. Find out, if we can, whether the timer really malfunctioned or stopped the countdown right where it was supposed to.”
“How deep is the water here?” Keely asked.
“A little over twelve hundred feet.”
“And how would you get way down there?”
Ron was about to tell her when a call came through from Sergeant Stanley.
He wanted the chief to get back to headquarters right away.
Bevin Trent, M.D. was sitting eight feet away from Walt Ketchum at Patisserie Leroux when the elderly man toppled from his chair. Trent was a heart surgeon who once a month lived dangerously by consuming a plain croissant at the patisserie. Seeing no point in being entirely reckless, he always brought his medical bag with him.
Trent, an exemplar of good health at forty-two years old, grabbed his bag and leapt to Walt’s aid. He was comforted by the fact that California’s Good Samaritan Law would shield him from civil damages that might otherwise result from his rendering emergency care. He found no sign that the figure on the ground before him was breathing.
In a voice whose calm tone surprised him, he called out, “I’m a doctor. This man is in respiratory arrest. Call 911. We need an ambulance immediately.”
He didn’t notice but it appeared that every diner within the sound of his voice called for an emergency response on their cell phones. He could have told them the diagnosis was heart attack, but he was sure that would be everyone’s first guess.
It was cardiac arrest to be precise. Not only was the man in front of him not breathing, he had no perceptible heartbeat.
Trent began compressing Walt’s chest, performing the CPR in perfect form, doing his best to get the old guy’s heart to start beating again. After thirty seconds of fruitless effort, he popped open his medical bag. By now the people in the café were divided between watching him work and looking for the ambulance. Trent withdrew a syringe from his bag. It was filled with heparin. Its purpose was to break up blood clots. He carried the medicine as his little personal joke. If he ever needed it, he’d just shoot himself up.
The doctor injected his patient. The medical literature said a heart attack victim had a better chance of survival if thrombolytic medication was administered within ninety minutes of the start of the episode. By that measure, Walt’s chances of surviving should have been improved, but he still didn’t resume breathing.
Trent went back to compressing the victim’s chest. He felt he’d been at it for hours by the time the paramedics arrived. In reality, it had been three minutes. He grabbed the paddles of the automatic external defibrillator from the first responder and shocked the old man. He was nonrespondent.
In cases of cardiac arrest without ventricular fibrillation, the heart didn’t respond to electric currents. It required medication. Which Trent had already administered without result. He got into the back of the ambulance and rode with the victim to the hospital, as attempts at resuscitation continued en route.
The ambulance arrived at Community Hospital and the ER team relieved Trent of the victim. They would do all they could for him, of course, might even call on him to assist with the surgery. Except Bevin Trent now felt sure the old man, whoever he was, could have been pronounced dead the moment he fell to the ground.
The old man’s identity remained a puzzle for the better part of an hour. He carried no identification. A call to Patisserie Leroux revealed that he’d been a regular customer the past few months but was known only by his first name, Walt.
He’d been friendly and a good tipper, if that was any help.
Walt had seen no need to carry ID. He didn’t drive anymore. He didn’t use credit cards or checks to make purchases. Paid cash for everything. Didn’t like to owe money. Didn’t want government snoops to know every last thing he’d bought.
His fingerprints were scanned and that would have turned up both Walt’s career with LAPD and his service in the army. Before that could happen, a cop working a traffic accident that had sent two teenagers to the hospital had spotted Walt as he was being wheeled from the ER to the morgue. The old man’s face was covered but his left hand was exposed. The cop thought the wedding ring he saw looked familiar.
“Hold on,” he told the orderly. When the man complied, the cop took a look at the dead man’s face. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “this is Chief Ketchum’s father.”
Art Beltran had been the cop who’d taken Walt Ketchum to the mayor’s house when the old man had forgotten which way was up. The orderly directed Beltran to the doctors who’d tried to resuscitate the victim. Learning the cause of death and that he’d been the first one to identify Walt Ketchum, Beltran found a quiet room and called the news in to Sergeant Stanley.
For just a moment, Beltran’s news produced only silence.
“You there, Sarge?” he asked.
Sergeant Stanley’s voice came back, as on top of things as ever.
“I am, Officer Beltran. Thank you for letting me know. I’ll make the notification.”
The first call Sergeant Stanley made was to Mayor Steadman.
Ron saw Clay Steadman waiting for him on the police dock as he cut the engine and let momentum carry the patrol boat forward. Even by the standards of a man who had earned his fame and made his fortune by looking grimmer than any reaper, the mayor’s countenance was one of desolation. Abandon all hope, his eyes said.
The boa
t bumped the dock and as waiting cops tied off the lines, Ron’s heart all but stopped.“My father?” the chief asked. “He’s really …”
Clay nodded. He extended a hand to Ron. Helped him jump onto the dock. Put an arm around his shoulders and walked him into the Muni Complex, whispering the details of what had happened.
Keely watched them go, tears running down her cheeks.
Sergeant Stanley did for her what the mayor had done for the chief.
Provided comfort, support and information.
She noted the flag flying over the Muni Complex was already at half staff.
John Tall Wolf and Abra Benjamin pulled into the parking lot at Goldstrike’s government center bumper to bumper. In keeping with the manners his mother had taught him, Tall Wolf let Benjamin take the closer available space, opting for the more distant one. Showing consideration not common among rival federal agents, Benjamin waited for Tall Wolf before starting for the Muni Complex’s main entrance.
She told him, “I took the precautions you suggested, in case we need more hands on deck before we’re through here. I gave more than a few people back in Washington the willies by making my requests. My boss even suggested we move the assets in close, in case we need them. A plane should be landing in Reno within the next several hours.”
“A 747?” Tall Wolf asked.
“Wouldn’t be surprised. You think about it —”
They both saw the flag flying at half staff at the same time.
Looked at each other and said in unison, “Who died?”
As if in answer, Clay Steadman and Ron Ketchum emerged from the building.
It was easy to see who the bereaved was. The mayor raised a hand and a gleaming black SUV pulled up in front of him and Ron. They got in and drove off.
Benjamin said, “Who do you—”
Tall Wolf remembered helping the elder Ketchum.
“My guess is it’s the chief’s father.”
“Damn.”
The feds saw Keely and Sergeant Stanley step outside. Keely was still crying and the sergeant looked like the mayor’s understudy in bleakness. The sergeant and the retired LAPD detective stood face to face, talking in tones Tall Wolf and Benjamin couldn’t hear.