Spooker

by Dean Ing

  He could get the arm checked out at any emergency room; yeah, that was Priority One, or so he thought until he saw the road sign as they passed the hamlet called Academy. Another sign claimed that the cutoff to Briant Dam stretched off to the right. Suddenly he tossed all his priorities into a pile and drew out a different one. The town of Briant, and Millerton Lake behind its dam, were folded into foothills, a hell of a distance from Merced but only a few miles north of Fresno and its suburb, Clovis. He recognized landmarks a few minutes later, and slapped the pickup cab as they neared Herndon Avenue. From here in Clovis, he could take a city bus to something better than wheels. In Fresno he had wings.

  While he waited at the bus stop, he let his suspicions grow, now that he knew he'd been dumped so near to Fresno and his acting RAC, Paul Visconti. The arm ached so much he gave a lot of thought to calling one of the DEA guys just a half-hour drive away in downtown Fresno; McMilligan, maybe, a stand-up type who could get the arm tended to. Right, and Paul Visconti's there, and McMilligan could get his ass in a crack if it was Visconti who burned me. No, he decided, mounting the bus steps and returning the driver's curious stare; he would continue heading for safer ground, for somebody with no connection to the Department of Justice. He would try for Swede Halvorsen.

  In the opposite northern edge of Fresno, far out Herndon to the west, was the hangar of a two-place Cessna 140 that Gary owned with two other men: Carl Michaels, a house builder, and Dave Nathan, a professor at Fresno State. Thanks to the lawyers and the liability insurance they scrabbled for, it was no longer possible for an ordinary guy to own even a Cessna by himself. It had become common for two, three, or more people to own equal shares in a small aircraft, and Nathan lived in one of those housing developments called airparks. In an airpark you could land on its airstrip and, without breaking a law, taxi down the street to your hangar-equipped home.

  Dave Nathan owned a garage instead, but the airstrip had tiedown spaces and a ratty maintenance hangar of its own, and all three men knew where the keys were stashed. Gary's use of the old Cessna, one of the early all-metal stalwarts, tended to be in spurts when his caseload permitted. Visconti knows I have it, but at worst case there's no way he'd expect me to use it because I'm dead, Gary reflected, climbing down from the bus. All the same, he crossed Alluvial Avenue with a heightened sense of awareness, heading for the airstrip. Only a paranoid would imagine that anyone would expect a corpse to make a run for an airplane, but at this point Gary knew he qualified easily.

  The place was deserted, the keys left as usual beneath the lip of the sliding hangar door. Gary cursed his arm as he shouldered the door wide enough to roll the little tail-dragger Cessna into the afternoon sun, its aluminum hide shining like a beacon. After a moment's internal debate, he rummaged at the workbench, running a strip of masking tape across the work surface. Then he printed a brief bullshit explanation in flow pen and sighed. Nathan or Michaels might be pissed about it, and Gary felt a pang over that; but each of them used the Cessna more than he did. At least they'd know the plane wasn't stolen.

  He still felt rickety, but it didn't stop him from checking the fuel, making a cursory preflight inspection with a quick look through the logbook to make sure he wasn't trying to fly an unflyable machine, locking the hangar again. Now for the fun part. If even securing his lap belt was such a problem, flying a Cessna one-handed was going to be a real bitch. At least he could use his elbow to nudge the throttle.

  The radio hadn't worked for a while, and there was no tower controller at the airpark anyhow. When his engine oil temperature came off the peg, he taxied over to the strip faster than he should have, uneasy over the body parts he carried in his jacket. Calm down, he told himself. If you auger this thing in, it'll be somebody else's problem to figure out why there's a few too many bones in the cockpit. Lightly loaded, the little aircraft sprinted forward at maximum revs, leaped off the ground as if it weren't as old as he was. Gary kept it firewalled until he had banked to a 165-degree heading, southeast toward Bakersfield following Highway 99, and then discovered that his elbow didn't have an opposable thumb and hurt himself again before he got the engine throttled back a bit. It was just over a hundred miles to Bakersfield, an hour for a 140 at fast-cruise setting. Meadows Field? Hell, no, he reasoned. It was close in to Bakersfield but, klutzy as he was today, the last thing he needed was to share airspace with commercial jetliners for the same reason he would not want to share a highway, not even under the best of circumstances, with those goddamned triple-tandem rigs. He would land east of town at little Rio Bravo. The runway was short, but last time he'd stopped there, they'd had a courtesy car. Rio Bravo it was, then - always assuming he didn't pass out from that resurgent pounding headache.

  Be there, Swede, he implored. For all I know you've died by now, but just for me, be there.

  10

  MAY 1994

  The trouble was, Rio Bravo's courtesy car was in use. On the plus side, a landing of sorts can be managed one-handed. Shortly afterward, Swede answered his phone, sounding strangely buoyant after Gary mentioned where he was. "I think I can arrange to put wheels under you," he said. "Just a minute." And with that he put Gary on hold.

  The two-minute wait was forever, with Gary's arm killing him after a couple of hard corrections in his crosswind landing over a hill near Runway 26. When Swede came on line again, he said, "Okay, no sweat.

  Look for a Datsun 260Z."

  "You sold the heavy cruiser," Gary said. "I don't believe it."

  "Then don't. You druther jog?"

  "God, Swede, don't even mention it. You're talking to a man who's come in last in an ass-kick contest."

  "I'm listening."

  "Quit listening. Just hang up and come on, man. You're a half-hour away."

  "Thinks he knows it all, doesn't he?" the old man said as though to himself, but he hung up in mid-cackle and Gary went outside to see if he could manage tiedowns by himself.

  But he didn't have to. Within five minutes a car whrummed out near where he was fumbling with a tiedown chain, and he didn't look around until the door slammed, and she was standing there, arms akimbo, with that gremlin's grin he had remembered so often on lonely nights. "Still clumsy," she said, brushing away hair longer than he recalled it. Same golden eyes, though; same carriage and bod, but perhaps less insolent confidence in them. Jan.

  "Still homely," he managed to say, looking her up and down and trying to recover, but his astonishment was clear and he knew it. Then: "No, no no no," he added quickly, backing away as she approached with arms out, warding her off with his good hand, holding the other one against his belly. Even after all this time, he hadn't expected a hug. "I'm glad to see you, too," he went on, talking into her puzzled frown. "Can I take a rain check on that?"

  "I suppose," she replied, focusing on the way he held his left arm. "Let me guess: a fight with your barber. Hurt yourself?"

  He handed the tiedown to her. Its purpose was obvious, and so was the loop set into the wing. "Let me put it this way: if you'd bumped this arm, you would now be wondering how to lift me into your car." It was a 260Z, all right, though the daffodil-yellow paint job said there'd been a fire under the hood some time back and no one had repainted it since.

  Jan clipped the tiedown in place and looked around. "Was that all, sahib?"

  "Shouldn't be, but I can do the rest later. No kidding, Jan, I'm, uh, a little under par at the moment."

  "News flash," she announced in portentous anchorman's tones, holding a nonexistent microphone to her mouth. "Vandals with large erasers have scrubbed the big 'S' from the chest of Agent Gary Landis. Film at eleven." But her grin disappeared as he grabbed the tiedown chain for support and the wing bobbed. She stopped short of touching him. "Is it just your arm, Gary?"

  He nodded, eyes closed, beginning to realize just how near he was to total exhaustion. "That and my head. And a bruise on my breastbone, and some cuts on my legs, I think. And there's - " And that is as far as he got before he sagged to hi
s knees.

  She took his good hand, helped him fold himself into the passenger seat, muttering tender little curses at men who take macho jobs while she got the Datsun under way. She lived in a mobile home within a mile of the airport, she said, but first she would take him to the nearest emergency room. He countermanded that; before anything else, he said, he needed a sitdown with her grandfather. And while she was telling him what a fool he was, he fell asleep, waking only as she shut the engine off.

  Swede's place was in many respects like his old L.A. house, the old cop car filling half of his garage.

  Gary eased himself from the Datsun with help, Swede's welcoming smile a faded memory as he saw what came shambling in while Jan lowered the garage door. "I take it there was more'n one of 'em," he said.

  "Fuggers scalped you, that's a fact."

  "More than that," Gary said, moving stolidly to the living room where he sat, rubber-legged, on Swede's lumpish ottoman. "This arm needs looking at, but I don't want any record of it - not yet."

  He caught the look between the two of them; knew a few things had to be set straight immediately.

  "No, I haven't broken any law, and this isn't a gunshot wound - at least, I don't think so. I woke up this morning down a mine shaft where somebody dumped me last night. I have reason to think it might be, uh - Jan, maybe you don't want to hear all of this. Some of it could give you nightmares," he said.

  She began to remove his jacket very carefully, good arm first. "We may have to cut this off," she began. Then: "Nobody who's lived with Freddie Penrose has any nightmares left," she told him. "You've said the magic words: you're not shot and you're not hot."

  "I'm hot with somebody. They tried to cool me off about dark yesterday evening. I just don't know whether it was my own people."

  With that, grunting at times while Jan got the jacket off, he described what he could recall: the note, the spray of bullets, the setup at his car, and a hellish jumble of impressions as, he swore, his paralysis got as far as his heart.

  His arm revealed, Gary stopped his narrative for a time. No bone had protruded through the skin, but the flesh was too grossly swollen and discolored for any assessment beyond the fact that he had not been shot or stabbed. Then Gary descended into that pit again in memory to describe his awakening, the wallowing in what seemed to be brittle sticks, the long climb back. "And here are a couple of the sticks I was rolling in." He reached into the jacket Jan was now holding. He shrugged at her: "Well, you claim you're fresh out of nightmares."

  She needed a moment to realize what he held in his hand. "Mother of God!" she moaned softly, with an openmouthed grimace that showed her teeth. She let the jacket drop with a shudder, rubbing her hands as though to clean them. Swede had made no sound, but took a long breath and expelled it.

  "And by the way, there must be a pint of my p - urine in a Baggie there in my jacket," Gary went on.

  For Jan's enlightenment, he continued. "Sometimes they can tell what was in a hypo; some of it comes out again. It goes from your bloodstream to your blad - "

  "Women pee." Jan cut him off. "I hate to dash your illusions, Gary, it's just something we do. Call us irresponsible." She swallowed hard, but she was smiling.

  Gary smiled back. You're having to work at it, but you're tough enough, he thought.

  Swede moved over to his couch, set a cordless phone beside him, flopped a Bakersfield phone book on his knees. "Jan, bring us a pair of good Baggies for that stuff - it's evidence." His gaze on Gary now: "You oughta have X rays but that'd be tough without a record of it. I know a guy, disabled at Grenada, night security at a refinery. Claims the navy gave him great paramedic training in the SEALs. If that's a 'go,' I'll give him a call."

  "No possible connection with DEA?" Gary said.

  "One chance in a million. And he doesn't have to know who you are, I could say you're hiding from your ex. He'll identify with that," the old man added with a nod and wink.

  "Go for it," Gary said. He raised his voice. "Jan, I know Swede hoards his old Safeway plastic bags.

  These should be new." Now I get picky about bones left in a mine shaft for Christ knows how long, he thought.

  Jan returned with two fresh Baggies and, unasked, a dark brown plastic jar with a screw top. "Used to have those little plastic footballs of Vitamin E inside," she said softly, kneeling before Gary in a fashion so graceful, so unaffected, that his heart seemed to levitate toward his throat. "Better to store your pee in than the way you did it."

  "I'll take it to the bathroom and - " Gary began.

  "And fall on your face," she supplied, taking the urine-filled bag. She stopped on her way out of the room. "You know what's weird? After being on my own in the mobile home awhile, a little job like this has a nice domestic feel to it."

  He supposed he would learn some details in time: how and why she was on her own, why Bakersfield of all places, and when she had developed this flair for. domesticity.

  Swede cut into his reflections. "That was Jim Marcus - he's got a graveyard shift and can come by shortly. He won't ask, but you might offer him a twenty. By the way, your name is Nolan Cromwell."

  "I always knew that," Gary kidded back. "Listen, Swede, I've got about thirty-two bucks to my name.

  I'm happy to pay this guy but, uh, well, those bimbos took my wallet were but somebody stuck its cash in my pants pocket. The only other things they left with me were my pocketknife and sidearm," he said, pulling the Beretta from the small of his back.

  The old man nodded, idly brushing a speck of grit from the weapon, handing it back as Jan reappeared with the brown jar full and capped. "I'm not sure how to deal with the evidence yet," he admitted, enclosing the grisly skeletal bits by turning the Baggies inside out, reaching inside them expertly, grasping the bones without leaving his prints, flicking the plastic right-side out again. "But I don't like the fact that they left you with a weapon and money in your pockets."

  Jan: "Wasn't that a break for him?"

  Swede: "Sure. What I don't like is how sweetly it would all fit together if he hadn't been found for fifty years. Armed, no gunshot wound, no cash missing. He could've just lost his wallet. A very well-planned accident."

  "Sixty-seven hundred in cash missing," Gary corrected. "In my bag."

  "So maybe that's what they were after," Swede replied. "I know, you think maybe it was your boss, but folks get killed for less than that stash you had. How many people knew you were carrying it?"

  That put the turd back in La Familia's pocket, Gary said, but to most of those people, the money was small change. There was also Gary's job to consider: whoever might be dirty in DEA. If Gary played dead for them, too, his career with the Feds was over.

  Jan's car was out of sight. When a car pulled into the driveway, Swede suggested she hurry to the back bedroom. "Marcus isn't an M.D. so let's not worry him with an extra witness," the old man explained, heading toward his front door.

  It was lucky that Jim Marcus had such a winning smile because the scar across his nose and left cheek gave his face a villainous cast. Wiry, pale, and a few years Gary's senior, he carried a small fanny pack on a sling like a woman's shoulder bag, setting it down with care next to the younger man, doffing his own whipcord jacket. I wonder if SEALs wrestle sharks for amusement? Gary thought. The man's arms had taken worse damage than his own.

  Marcus took a blood-pressure cuff from his little pack and used it on Gary's right arm. Its tinny electronic beep was the loudest thing in the room. "One-thirty over eighty-two, pulse sixty-eight. Good," he mumbled, removing the cuff again. After asking when the fall had occurred, checking the forearm over with tender care, Marcus took up a pencil, holding it at one end by bringing all the fingers and the thumb of one hand together. In his gentle baritone he said, "See this? Try to hold the pencil this way." Then a sigh.

  "No, with the bad hand, Cromwell. Sorry, I know it'll hurt."

  Gary winced, but managed it. "Time to write my will," he hazarded.

  "You'll
live. Looks like you might have an angular fracture of the radius - the little bone - but it's not too bad and if there was any serious nerve damage you couldn't hold a pencil that way. 'Course, with such pronounced edema of the soft tissues it may be a little worse. What you need is a cast."

  "What I need is about a pint of bourbon," Gary muttered.

  "Maybe not," Marcus said with a lopsided grin that implied, ‘surely not.’ "I have a few odds and ends here, but I'd rather not be on the hook for dispensing them. If Duane, here, had some Tylenol with Codeine, and if I were a doctor, I might suggest popping one or two. I'm not, so I won't."

  "Got some." The old man rose. "I'll get it."

  The onetime paramedic continued to study Gary, head cocked. "Why do you keep shutting one eye like that? Got something in it?"

  "Got double vision in it," Gary said.

  Marcus put his hands on his knees and laughed gently. "Well, Christ's little keepsakes! Why didn't you say so? Any more surprises for me?"

  "Just scratches, nothing a little Merthiolate won't fix. But I got this when I fell," Gary said, touching the back of his head. "And my chest is bruised."

  "Fell into a running Evinrude, looks like," Marcus observed dryly, studying the goose egg on Gary's skull.

  Then he produced a flashlight and, with something like a jeweler's loupe, studied Gary's eyes thoroughly, so near that Gary detected bacon and garlic, reminding him that he hadn't eaten recently. Then, on command, Gary read various sizes of print from a magazine with each eye, then both eyes.

  At last Marcus sat back, nodding to himself, unsmiling. "That's a concussion you've got, pal. Think of your skull as a bowl and your brain as Jell-O. Shake the stuff too hard and it can shear nerves. Has the double vision got worse? Better?"

  "Lots better, but I still get a little dizzy using both eyes when I focus on things."

  "No numbness anywhere?"

  "Nope. I could use a little numbness about now," Gary admitted. "For the past twelve hours or so, in fact."

  At this point Swede reappeared with a pill and a glass of water, and Marcus watched him swallow it with satisfaction. "You want a prognosis, I'd say a couple of days flat on your back will do you a world of good. You're not in shock. But I've seen guys walking around as lucid as you are, and thanks to a little depressed cranial fracture they were dying by inches and nobody knew it until the onset of coma. That's the bad news, and someone should keep an eye on you in case you start vomiting or sounding stupid. The fact that you seem to've gotten better for most of a day tells me you're probably going to be okay. From what you say, twelve hours ago I wouldn't have risked a guess either way."