“With an old friend on the Kern Plateau.” Brother Rattlesnake, he meant, who’d finally settled down and probably gone out on his nocturnal rounds when it became obvious that Michael and his cruiser were no threat to his den. “How about you?”
“Pardon?”
“How’d you sleep?”
“Fine,” she replied, unconvincingly, “those three vodkas at the Homestead helped.”
They took a rear elevator to ground level, stepped out onto a sun-bright expanse of cement, and started down between two rows of lime-green vehicles. At the back of the lot was a Quonset hut that served as maintenance garage and motor pool office. Behind the counter was a middle-aged woman in AEI khaki who seemed perturbed to find herself confronted by her CEO and a camera-toting stranger.
“Marsha,” Joanna explained, “this is Investigator Long Shore from the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department...” The clerk gave him an unsmiling nod. “He’d like to photograph the same type of vehicle Dr. Kincannon logged out on the morning of July first.”
“It’ll take me to a minute to bring that information up on the computer again,” Marsha said.
Michael was noting to himself that the clerk had just said again when a male voice said from behind, “No can do.” A mechanic was standing in the door to the service bays, wiping his hands with a grimy blue towel.
“What’s that?” Joanna demanded.
“It was one of a kind, the biodiesel conversion. Dr. Kincannon always asked for it.” The man directed his next remark to Michael, perhaps not having heard Joanna’s introduction and assuming from the camera that he was with the media. “The Hummer H-One has great ground clearance and stability, especially for our hilly jobsites, but that Detroit Diesel V8 can sure guzzle the juice. So, Dr. Kincannon had me convert the oldest one in the fleet to biodiesel.”
“How’d he like it?” Michael idly asked, stealing a glance at the computer screen. The clerk was scrolling through column after column of figures—a log that probably stretched back weeks, if not months.
“He loved it,” the mechanic rambled on. “Better mileage, less pollution, hotter performance. See, your biodiesel has a higher cetane number than petrodiesel—”
“What do the records show?” Joanna irritably asked Marsha, cutting the mechanic off.
“It was the biodiesel all right,” the woman confirmed.
Joanna asked Michael, “General appearance of the vehicle is the object of your photograph, correct?” When he nodded, she ordered the mechanic: “Find one that looks most like the damned biodiesel and park it in sunlight.”
“Right away, ma’am.”
As he jogged out into the lot, Michael casually asked the clerk, “Did Dr. Kincannon take the same vehicle back on May seventeenth?”
“Uh, no,” the clerk replied after a second, glancing up at Joanna, “you did, Ms. Wallace, for the whole day. It came back all covered in that awful red mud. Remember...?”
Michael watched Joanna go rigid for a moment. She stood four or five feet away from him, her eyes darting back and forth as if she were running through the odds. Out in the yard, a diesel engine had grumbled to life, and she glanced that way, as if factoring it into everything else she’d paused to take stock of. “That can’t be right,” she said indignantly, then rushed around the counter to look over the clerk’s shoulder at the computer screen.
Instantly, Michael realized that she was using the clerk’s body to try to conceal the small, black object she’d drawn from a waist pocket in her jumpsuit. A palm-sized semi-automatic, Michael saw. He reached for his own pistol, but Joanna was skillfully using the clerk for cover. She fired once. Michael broke left and rolled across the floor. By the time he could rise behind the protection of the service-bay doorjamb, Joanna was pressing muzzle against the clerk’s temple.
“Drop it!” he shouted, keeping the aperture of his rear sight on the sliver of her face that was visible behind her hostage’s head. The report of the shot had been the tinny crack of a .25 or even a .22 caliber, the kind of insidious round that gave you a wound you might not notice for minutes. He felt no pain, no tingling, no wet spots, so he kept his focus on Joanna.
The clerk had begun to moan, as if wordlessly pleading for Michael to do something.
“I’m just the first obstacle you have to get past, Joanna,” he reminded her. “Only the first. Even before this, the FBI was only a few hours behind me.”
An eyelid twitched but she said nothing.
“I had a call from an agent this morning,” Michael went on. “He asked what I knew about you. Seems Carl’s disappearance and his link to Yucca Mountain concerned the feds enough to get a number of wiretaps—legal, of course—on you folks here at AEI. You’re the boss, so you were at the top of their list. Lucky the techie listening in was bilingual. Lucky for the FBI, I mean. Wasn’t much to your conversation—hola, como es usted, adios. But the question the bureau had was—who do you know at that number in Havana? Somebody on staff with the Riviera Hotel you could’ve sent Carl’s corporate Visa and PIN to be used at the ATM in the lobby? Had to be somebody on staff. Ordinary Cubans can’t go into the tourist hotels. I told the agent my guess was a distant relative. You said you were from Florida. Miami, maybe? Before you drifted out to California, where Carl found you in Haight-Ashbury and rescued you from God only knows what—”
“Rescued me?” she spat from behind her hostage. “Rescued me!”
“Joanna, put down your weapon before you do something you can’t undo.”
“That controlling son of a bitch wasn’t happy just to squeeze me out of his personal life. He was paving the way for that little moron to take over AEI!”
“In his succession plan, you mean?”
“Hell yes. I suspected he was drafting another one, so I confronted the bastard and he finally admitted it. He was actually going to make that stupid little harlot successor trustee. He said he’d created one business superstar in me, so why not a new one in her?”
“Were you to succeed Carl in the original document?”
“Yes, for all the fucking good it would do now,” she said acidly.
“So the only way to avoid a successor fight was to make the board of directors and the rest of us believe Carl was still alive and kicking. Complicated, I’m sure, but it was worth the trouble, especially now that the tax settlement with the county is just over the horizon. As long as your story held water, you could’ve gone on running AEI indefinitely. Right?”
She didn’t answer, but Michael felt some faint consolation. His mention of Eureka Valley hadn’t caused Dulcie’s death, just hastened it. Most likely, she’d been a marked woman as soon as Joanna had decided to eliminate Carl.
He saw that the mechanic had parked outside in the Hummer he’d been warming up. Only the front end of the vehicle showed in the opening. Michael would wait until the man appeared, then wave him off, preferably toward help that would call 9-1-1. He doubted that the small-caliber gunshot had been heard for what it was, mistaken instead for repair noise. He wanted to keep her talking. “Were you going to convince the board that Carl was communicating his instructions for the firm to you on the sly, like that call he supposedly made from Stovepipe Wells?”
She didn’t respond directly, but continued with a grim satisfaction, “He didn’t get away with dumping me. Not by a long shot. I knew too much about his ‘scientific’ methods, his trumped-up findings on Yucca Mountain. He had no choice but to leave me in place.”
Strangely, Michael found himself sympathizing a little—it was much the same situation he had with Gorman. “But wasn’t Carl worried about that coming out after his death? His reputation and all?”
“Are you kidding? That arrogant prick figured the whole universe would die with him.”
“Did it, Joanna?
At that point, she seemed to realize that she’d come close to saying too much.
There were two doors into the office: one to the service bays, in which Michael stood behind the jamb, and one
that led directly outside. The mechanic had exited through a bay but now, maddeningly, re-entered from the yard. His eyes slowly widened, but he plodded on toward the counter until Joanna barked, “Stop right there!”
He halted and, slack-jawed, took in his fellow worker, who was still quietly moaning under the pressure of Joanna’s pistol. “Ms. Wallace...?”
“Move toward the cop!”
“Come on, Joanna,” Michael said, using care not to make it sound like a taunt, “you’re not going to hurt either of these people.”
The mechanic remained glued dumbly to the floor, standing in the middle of her path to the Hummer idling outside.
Michael braced for the only shot he might have.
Joanna shoved the clerk around the counter and jostled her toward the door, which the mechanic had left open to his back. Michael tracked the movement of the two women, then gritted his teeth in frustration: Joanna continued to shield her own head and torso with the clerk as they shuffled toward the waiting Hummer. As she passed by the mechanic, she lowered her pistol and fired again. Another crack echoed around inside the office, but Michael was powerless to answer, not without at least grazing the hostage.
The mechanic collapsed backward, shrieking. He fell against Michael, glomming onto his lower legs as if afraid of being abandoned. His right hand was bleeding, leaving dark stains on Michael’s Levi’s. The pain of the man’s grip on his own gunshot calf grayed out his vision. In the seconds it took him to disentangle himself, Joanna had forced the clerk behind the wheel of the vehicle and taken the seat behind her. Michael was aiming through the glass of the side window facing him when Joanna flopped down, out of sight, and the Hummer sped for the gate.
“She shot me,” the mechanic cried in disbelief, “the boss shot me! Why?”
Michael knelt to inspect the wound. “Just keep pressure on it. You’re going to be okay.”
“You’re not the one who’s been shot!”
“Today,” Michael clarified, hobbling outside.
The Hummer had left the lot.
He was reduced to skipping on his good leg by the time he reached his cruiser. While gunning the engine to life, he unclipped the microphone from its dash mount. The fastest way to get this information out was through his own dispatch center. “Code thirty-three, Independence,” he transmitted, accelerating down the winding road out of the airport, “David-Four is in pursuit. Shots fired the AEI motor pool at Inyokern airport. Advise Kern S.D. suspect vehicle is a lime-green Hummer pickup. Stand-by for direction of travel. Break...” He gave the dispatcher the opportunity to clear the airwaves of routine radio traffic. Also, he used the interruption to catch his breath. “Continuing, Independence, suspect vehicle is southbound on the airport access road toward Route One-seven-eight.” Michael had gotten a glimpse of the Hummer again as soon as he cleared the parking lot—lime-green was easy to track.
“David-Four,” the dispatcher advised, “Kern County requests you switch to CLEMARS.”
“Ten-four,” he responded, flipping his selector dial to the law enforcement mutual aid radio system. “Ridgecrest, this is Inyo David-Four. Do you copy?”
“Affirmative.”
“Send an ambulance to the AEI motor pool. You’ve got a gunshot victim with a minor wound there. Where’s my nearest back?”
“Rolling from our substation. Are you still southbound away from the airport?”
Michael was about to reply that he was when he saw through a cloud of dust that the Hummer had left the access road and was bouncing through the rabbitbrush toward the closest runway. At one end, a single-engine Cessna was waiting for take-off, its propeller spinning. The pilot, alone in the cabin, seemed unaware so far that the motor-pool clerk was being ordered at gunpoint to cut him off. His aircraft began to creep forward.
“Negative on southbound, Ridgecrest,” Michael reported, his voice shuddering as his cruiser plowed through the brush toward the runway. “This might turn into a skyjacking.”
“Repeat your last, David-Four?”
Michael had no chance. At that instant, the Hummer stopped squarely across the runway, about a hundred yards in front of advancing Cessna. The pilot was caught between going ahead with the take-off, at least long enough to crow-hop over the vehicle, or slamming on his brakes. He decided to hit his brakes. The main wheels smoked as they laid down rubber.
The pilot veered off the tarmac onto the hard-packed dirt beyond.
His door swung open as soon as his propeller stopped, and he climbed down to tongue-lash the occupants of the Hummer. That was his mistake, one he must have realized as soon as he saw Joanna’s gun.
She had charged out of the vehicle and now backed the pilot toward his Cessna. He had the good sense to raise his arms.
The motor-pool clerk proved that she had more presence of mind than the mechanic. While Joanna was busy cornering the pilot, Marsha sped off toward the AEI hangar. Wallace swung around and drew down on the receding Hummer. Just when she seemed ready to fire at the clerk, she spun back toward the pilot, making him jerk his arms even higher in the air.
Michael hit the runway with a four-wheel skid that left the passenger side of his cruiser facing Joanna. He rushed out with his carbine held at the ready and sprawled over the hood.
By now, Joanna had herded the pilot back into his plane through the passenger door and was taking the right seat for herself. She clasped the little semi-auto flush to his throat without ever breaking contact. Then, reacting to something Joanna shouted in his ear, he re-started his engine and turned onto the runway again. It was a small plane, so the turn was tight.
Michael thought to riddle the main landing gear. But he feared how Joanna would react to the shot. Her nerves were on edge, and her finger tense on the trigger. Instead, he would try to ground her magic carpet. Once away from the immediate area, she could force the pilot to set the Cessna down on a dry lake, cap him in the head as coldly as she’d wounded the mechanic, and vanish into the desert. All the plans she’d put together to transform Kincannon into a plausible missing person could now be used to serve her own escape.
He rushed back inside his cruiser, fastened his belt and gave chase.
“David-Four,” the Ridgecrest dispatcher was asking frantically over the radio, “what’s your status?”
He caught up with the Cessna at mid-runway, close to where the clerk had turned off in the Hummer. The surest way of disabling the plane had to be clipping the prop. But Michael had little hope of getting out in front of the craft, even if could manage to swerve into that virtual buzz saw.
“David Four, in the blind—your backup is two minutes from the airport. Ambulance is right behind him.”
Michael settled on ramming the tail—just as the plane’s wheels lifted off. The pilot must have stood on his brakes at the first sensation of impact, for the Cessna suddenly nosed over.
Through a shower of sparks dancing over his windshield, Michael saw that the propeller had been curled back and the plane was skidding forward on its collapsed nose gear. The screech of metal on tarmac was ear-splitting. He stomped on his own brake pedal, trying to wrench his Ford free of the Cessna, but SUV and plane came to a stop as one.
Both engines sputtered and died.
In the silence that followed, Michael peered up through his windshield, which was a web-work of cracks: The weight of the fuselage had crazed the glass and bulged in the cruiser’s roof.
He’d tossed his carbine across the passenger seat. It had come to rest between the sliding rail and the trim panel of the door. Wedged in. Quickly, he gave up trying to free it and drew his pistol.
Sirens were approaching the airport. His backup and the ambulance.
He listened for the slightest sound from the Cessna cabin above. Nothing. But he did catch a whiff of oil smoke, even though there was no sign of fire.
A familiar voice came over the radio. “David-Four, this is Adam-One, come in, dammit,” Gorman badgered from the Motorola’s speaker. “Respond at once�
�have you gotten yourself involved in another shooting situation?”
“Adam-One, be advised that a Code Thirty-three has been declared. Emergency traffic only,” the Ridgecrest dispatcher reprimanded him.
Michael smiled to himself. Whoever she was, he owed her a beer.
However, he switched off his main radio, so Joanna couldn’t monitor the traffic from the cabin, and took his handset from the glove compartment. He hitched the portable radio to his belt and tucked the earpiece inside his shirt pocket. Stripping off the camera still dangling around his neck, he decided that exiting through any of the side doors would leave him exposed to Joanna’s semi-auto. He began crawling toward the back of the Ford, slipping quietly between the front buckets, over the backseat and into the cargo area. The glass lift-gate was cracked, but he turned the handle, and it rose, letting in some welcome fresh air. Plus another hint of smoke.
Once outside the back of the Ford, he dropped into a crouch. Emergency lights were brightening the access road: the Kern sheriff’s car, followed closely by the ambulance, and both trailed at quarter mile by a highway patrol unit. Michael keyed his handset mike: “Ridgecrest, David-Four, have responding units keep clear of the runway until I can find out if I still have a hostage situation...” The continued quiet above had given him hope that Joanna had been knocked insensible by the collision. “The ambulance should go directly on to the motor-pool office behind the AEI hangar.”
“Copy, David-Four.”
Gripping his pistol in both hands, Michael duck-walked alongside the fused wreckage. His calf ached, but he felt no warm wetness oozing through the bandage.
The cabin had come to rest at a steep angle.
He halted when the passenger-side window to the cockpit was just above the top of his head.
He peeked inside through the lower back corner.
Chapter Twenty-four
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 22