The sheriff came back to the table, poured another shot for himself and Michael, his hand agitated. “Consider nothing changed from what I’ve already laid out. Our team in Independence will provide support to the FBI, and you will cheerfully hand over the reins to them.” He knocked back his shot. “You will do one final thing related to the case. Can you contact this cocksucker?”
Michael nodded.
“I’m giving you forty-eight hours to meet with him and find out who his boss is. I want to know everything they know. I don’t care if you have to break legs. If you fail me on this, Long Shore, I promise I’ll have a long list of questions about your conduct in this case, and you’ll answer each and every one of them hooked up to a lie box. Are you clear on all this?”
“Yes, sir.”
Gorman went out through the dining-room doors, banging them behind him.
Chapter Seventeen
Two things about Death Valley made it unique. The first was that it had triple-digit temperatures for eight months out of the year, making it the hottest place for the longest period in the Western Hemisphere. The second was its pristine skies, making it the best place in the nation to stargaze. The jury was still out on whether or not global warming would make the valley even hotter; some experts thought it would get rainier instead, and Lake Manley would once more fill its bed of salty mud after thousands of years, bringing the sea to Michael’s mother if only to cover her hidden grave. But there was no question that the clarity of the valley’s skies was under assault from both Southern California smog and another form of pollution that crept closer by the day.
The stars were just fading as dawn broke and Michael drove down off the Nopah Range along State Route 178. For the second time in a week, he crossed the border into Nevada.
Florence said that the most damaging things happened so slowly you were barely aware of them. In the late 1950s, the Shoshone in Furnace Creek had begun to notice an occasional false dawn in the southeast quarter of the sky. It came from Las Vegas seventy-five miles away. However, the Spring Mountains, over 10,000 feet high in places, stood between the tribe and the growing megalopolis, blocking the worst of this neon glare. But then, slowly, a house at a time, the sprawl of Las Vegas began to inch westward, working its way around the fringes of the Spring Range and eventually spilling into the Pahrump Valley.
The Shoshone had named this place. Pah was their root word for the most precious commodity they knew: water. A prefix or suffix added to it usually described how that water occurred. In this case, the rump, or rimpi in some spellings, probably referred to a kind of rock formation from which a spring flowed.
Whatever—in the blink of an eye, it seemed, Pahrump had become an exurb, bustling with people who’d been willing to commute an hour each way to own a couple of acres on which they could have a ranch-style with three bedrooms and a corral. Because urban crime followed them out into the sticks, they bathed their properties in floodlights. This invasion, only forty miles from Furnace Creek, began erasing the lesser stars from a deep cobalt sky that was turning milkier by the night.
Michael could no longer perfectly recall what the stars of his youth had looked like. White fires, he believed, with the Milky Way splashing from horizon to horizon like sea foam. Now, you had to go one range west to the Panamint Valley for skies like that, even though Woody had said the floodlights for the construction of the test track were a temporary annoyance.
He pulled over to the side of the highway and took his cell phone from his Levi’s pocket.
Below, the massed lights of Pahrump seemed to lap over the edges of the valley. Among them somewhere was the prostitute Fanny’s own slice of mini-ranch heaven.
Last night, he’d phoned Dulcie’s home number, expecting her machine to kick in. Instead, she’d answered in person, having begged off work again due to her cold. Michael tried not to feel relieved, sensing that this was the same emotional quicksand Carl Kincannon had sunk into. But business had been his reason for calling, and he’d asked Dulcie where Fanny lived. The answer came grudgingly. The woman had recently moved from Vegas to Pahrump, and she was now on her days off, yet Dulcie refused to give Michael the address.
He let the matter slide for the time being. He had other pressing things to fill the late night hours.
Now at dawn, with her defenses at their lowest ebb, Michael would try Dulcie again. She answered on the second ring, sounding better this morning. “Hello...?”
“It’s Michael. Sorry to bother you again so soon, but I really need your help.”
“Where are you?”
“Furnace Creek,” he fibbed. “Dulcie, do you trust me?” He knew this to be an unfair question, but he was getting desperate. Fanny was only the name the woman used at the brothel.
“I think I do.” But it was in Dulcie’s voice—all the times she’d been let down before.
“I need to talk to Fanny today. You have no idea how much.” He stopped short of admitting that his life might be on the line. Chances were still good that the contract killer didn’t know Michael had been forewarned by his brother. It was an advantage he didn’t want to waste on a play for Dulcie’s sympathy. And in his own hesitation he realized the truth that he didn’t completely trust her, which seemed unfair at the moment.
Finally, Dulcie gave up with a sigh. “She lives at the end of this road called Wagon Spoke or something. I don’t know the address, but the road stops there. She has a steel fence around her corral.”
“Thank you. I’d like to give her fair warning I’m coming. You have her phone number handy?”
Pause. “I can’t do that, Michael. When do you plan to be there?”
“The sooner she and I talk the better.”
“I’ll phone her in a little while,” Dulcie said, “asking what time works for her.”
“What does she drive?”
“A red Pontiac.”
“Thanks again...” But he didn’t end the call. This had all begun with Dulcie leading him up Chloride Cliff Road and into a stench of death. In these past seven days, he’d never gotten the slightest hint from her that she’d known about Razin rotting at the bottom of that mine. In all their conversations, she’d seemed oblivious to the significance of her choice of route home that Monday afternoon. Now he wondered if Eureka Valley, where Horace had spotted a lime-green Hummer on the red-stained salt flats, would mean anything to her. “After I see Fanny,” he went on to her, “I’ve got to go up north today. I was thinking maybe I could drop by your place, if I decide to come back by Ninety-five. I will, most likely.”
“Where are you going?”
“Eureka Valley. I’ve got to check something out up there right away.”
“I don’t think so, Michael. I’m feeling better, and I’ve got a lot of work to make up. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” he said. “I appreciate your help, Dulcie. Good-bye.”
“Bye.”
He’d caught no particular reaction to his mention of the remote valley and would swear that that it meant nothing to her.
Buon.
Quickly now, he switched on the dome light, took his Pahrump street map out of the console compartment and spread it open over the steering wheel. There wasn’t a Wagon Spoke, but he found a Wagon Wheel Lane. Close enough. Turning off the light and tossing the map in the backseat, he drove down into the Pahrump Valley.
Gorman had given him forty-eight hours to flush out Carson, and Michael would use the stranger’s cell phone to do that. But on terms and turf Michael found favorable. Thirty-five hours remained. After that, the sheriff would clip his wings, and any work on the Kincannon case would have to be done outside the color of authority—in other words, on his own as a private citizen, with none of the legal protections and door-opening powers of a badge. There was also the possibility that Gorman would fire him come Wednesday afternoon.
Before anything else, he had to find out who had accepted the contract to kill him, and the only lead he had on that was Fanny. Se
condly, he had to learn why that lime-green Hummer had been out on the Eureka salt pan in mid-May.
Frankly, he’d known that there would be no time to drop by Dulcie’s this evening. He’d just wanted to hear what she would say, the possible regret in her voice.
Other than three hours of tossing and turning, he had devoted the night to disassembling the cell phone Carson had given him in Los Angeles. It proved to be the telecommunications equivalent of a throw-away gun. All identifying numbers had been removed or scratched out, and a dusting of the interior surfaces with black powder failed to reveal any latent fingerprints. As far as he could tell, Carson had told the truth in that the phone, a ten-year-old model, wouldn’t easily serve as a GPS locator.
All along, Michael had felt that he hadn’t been tracked electronically to Dulcie’s single-wide. Had that been so, why hadn’t Carson followed Michael up from the Carrara town site and into the pit? A lifetime in the desert had left Michael with a finely-tuned sense of when he was being shadowed, and never once on Saturday had he picked up a vibration that Carson was on his heels—until he got to Dulcie’s. Even then, according to her, the prowler was there prior to Michael’s arrival, drawing her outside with a revolver in a codeine haze to investigate the rattle of one of her early-warning tin cans.
For a man who’d said he was interested in anything related to the Kincannon disappearance, and someone who probably had sources within the Las Vegas field office, why had Carson skipped over the discovery in the quarry and gone to Dulcie’s instead? It was almost as if the convertible hidden in the pit was old news to him.
Michael located Wagon Wheel Lane and followed it through the growing daylight, past modest horse estates. What Dulcie had meant by the end of the road was a cul de sac. There were three ranch-style houses facing it, but only one had a steel fence around the corral, one made of used highway guard rails. A maroon Pontiac sedan was parked where a lawn might grow in better-watered country. On the porch was a chopper, the rear of the customized motorcycle facing Michael. No lights showed from the windows of the house.
Dawn was now bright enough for him to read the Nevada license plates. He reached for his microphone and raised his communications center in far-off Independence.
The dispatcher’s voice came back faint and crackly. “David-Four, I can barely read you but go ahead with your traffic.”
He requested a registration check through Carson City on the Pontiac’s plate. The number on the motorcycle he just jotted in his notebook for future reference, if needed.
“Copy your plate, David-Four.” Then the dispatcher asked drolly, “Per the watch commander, what is your location?”
“That’s ten-thirty-six per Adam-One.” Confidential per the sheriff. For once, Michael trusted that Gorman would back him up. It was in the man’s self-interest, and there was nothing more reliable in human nature than self-interest.
Registration came back to the correct year, make and model of Pontiac. “Registered owner is an Edna Boskovich of Fifteen-fifteen Wagon Wheel Lane, Pahrump.”
“Copy,” Michael signed off.
The light in a side window had just come on. Edna Boskovich’s bedroom, he would guess. Michael backed out of the cul de sac and down the lane a hundred yards before reaching through the bucket seats for his street map. He decided to set up his surveillance on the next lane over, so the woman wouldn’t make his cruiser if she decided to drive off. Whipping a U-turn, he sped that way, zeroing in a grove of cottonwoods he hoped would offer him some concealment.
He would bet that Edna had just received her phone call from Dulcie. He noted the time on his dash clock: 5:53.
There were no houses in the immediate vicinity of the cottonwoods, just a lot of trash and discarded beer bottles, even an old mattress, marking it as a party spot for local kids. By the time Michael pulled into the trees and stepped out into the warm, still morning with his binoculars, Edna’s light had shifted to a smaller window—her kitchen, no doubt. Her dim silhouette passed back and forth behind it as she paced, her hand clasped close to the side of her head as if holding a phone handset. Was she talking to Dulcie, or had she made a second call?
In stakeout mode, Michael had put the ringers to all his devices on vibrate, and now a buzz against his thigh made him reach for his department-issued cell phone. He read the caller ID on the screen, which ruled out Dulcie as the party Edna was talking to. “Hello, Dulcie.”
“I got ahold of Fanny a couple minutes ago. Do you know where the Saddle West Casino is in Pahrump?”
“Yes.”
“She’ll meet you in the rear parking lot at noon. I told her you drive a big blue Ford SUV.”
Michael frowned. The cover on his vehicle had just been innocently blown, but of greater concern was that he wouldn’t be able to interview Edna for six hours. “Did you explain to her the sooner the better?”
“I did, Michael. I told her you had important business up in Eureka Valley today and needed to see her early.”
“And what’d she say?”
Dulcie sneezed, then said, “Dang, I thought I was over this cold. Michael—Fanny doesn’t like cops, and I had to really beg her to meet with you, okay?”
“Why doesn’t she like cops?”
“She spent time at Florence McClure. Poor Fanny was framed on this cocaine deal a long time ago.”
The state female correctional center located in North Las Vegas, Michael realized. Cocaine might also explain her tie to Jimmy. But if she were his brother’s informant on the contract for the hit, why had she divulged this? It sounded as if she’d been around enough to know that this could be dangerous to her health. Had she owed Jimmy a favor this big? Or had it come out accidentally? “All right, Dulcie,” Michael concluded, “You tried your best, and I appreciate it.”
“Like I said, I’ve got to go in early today to make up for my sick days.”
“Right.” Though he wasn’t sure why she was telling him this for a second time. Unless...?
“Maybe you could drop by some other time, Michael.”
“Sure. Next time the wine is on me.”
Disconnecting, he raised the binoculars to his eyes and saw that Edna’s light had shifted to yet another room. The glass to this window was pebbled. Her bathroom. For a noon appointment, Edna Boskovich was very busy at six in the morning. Michael’s curiosity about this only grew when the front door opened and a bare-chested man in his forties stepped outside. He was a biker type with tattoos over much of his upper body that on closer inspection, Michael suspected, would show his gang affiliation. Yawning, he swaggered across the barren yard to the Pontiac and propped open the hood to tinker with what was probably the carburetor. Was he Jimmy’s contact? Bikers were the couriers of the drug trade, and no doubt his brother had associated with a number of them. Sitting behind the steering wheel, the man left the driver’s door open as he cranked the engine over. A coughing noise and a gust of blue exhaust followed, then silence. Showing his frustration now, he slapped the dashboard with his palms, then got out and bent over the engine again.
It took him ten minutes to get the motor running, and then another fifteen minutes passed between the time he went back inside the house and Edna, presumably Fanny, emerged, carrying an overnight large bag as if she had every intention of going out and staying out for a while. At last, here was a woman who looked like a hooker. She had fire-red hair and facial make-up laid on like a coat of stucco, an exotic transplant to an environment where every living thing did its best to blend in and not attract predatory attention.
Some of the cottonwoods had been cut off at ground level, and a blind of suckers had sprouted from their roots. Michael faded back into the foliage as Edna cast a glance all around.
Then she drove off.
He returned to his Ford to follow her.
Dulcie’s unintentional slip in describing his unmarked cruiser to Edna forced him to hang back at least a quarter mile. But as the red Pontiac barreled east toward Highway 160, Pahrump’s com
mercial district and link to Interstate 15, he was so convinced she was headed into Las Vegas he flipped open his glove compartment and grabbed Carson’s cell phone for a second time in minutes. He hit the first entry on the speed-dialer, and an automated voice—obviously not the stranger’s—advised him that no one was available to take his call and for him to please leave a message.
“Sorry I missed you Saturday night,” Michael said, keeping any irony out of his voice for the time being. “I’m back in southern Nevada today, Monday, the twenty-first, and would like to get together for a face-to-face talk. So I’m hoping you’re in the neighborhood. I’ve been giving consideration to your job offer, and I think we should take it to the next level. I’ve learned some interesting things in the past few days, but let’s find out how serious your boss is. I’m waiting for your call.”
Michael disconnected but kept the phone beside him on the passenger seat.
Then Edna surprised him. She didn’t turn right onto Highway 160, toward Las Vegas. Instead, she made a left and sped past the Saddle West Casino, where they were scheduled to meet at midday, and past two gas stations, the only other reason Michael could come up with for her having doubled back into town. But soon, as the strip malls and small casinos thinned out and the horse properties drifted by again, he realized that this was no detour. In twenty or so miles, the highway linked up with U.S. 95, which led to Beatty.
Was Edna going in to work? Or more likely, was she headed to the brothel to lie low, while Michael waited in Pahrump and in vain for her to show up at the casino parking lot?
Open range soon flanked the road, and the traffic was sparse enough that Michael had to fall back a few miles to keep out of her rearview mirror. Fortunately, the maroon vehicle shone like a beacon in the flat sunlight, and he had no trouble pacing her north.
He felt a scratch in his throat. A cold coming on, maybe.
Chapter Eighteen
There it was again, looming low against the horizon like a storm cloud. The eighteen-mile-long ridge to the east of U.S. 95 looked like it hadn’t changed in a million years. This was a country of virtually no rain, vegetation and human population. The adjacent lands of the Nevada Test Site were pocked with the craters of atomic blasts, some of them left there with the help of Michael’s nuclear technician father. However, Yucca Mountain remained unscathed, slumbering, waiting patiently for the government to fill its belly with radioactive waste.
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 15