I ran toward the lights of Verdi. Fell. Got up. Fell again. An unseen branch sliced into my left cheek. I barely felt it. I had to get to Lucy. Which meant I had to stop the car.
How?
A log across the road. Or a rock big enough to take out the engine, oil pan, transmission, something in the drive train. Only thing I could think of, and all of that was moot if I didn’t reach the road below the house before the Charger went by.
I ran. Couldn’t see the headlights, couldn’t hear the engine. I fell again and my ribs slammed into a rock. I felt one go. I got up. Suddenly each breath was a knife in my side, but I had to go, run, sprint, ignore the pain, get down that fucking mountainside, and now I saw a flicker of headlights off to my left, maybe half a mile away. The car was past that tight northern switchback and coming fast.
No time, no time, and I raced downhill and then the land in front of me looked weird, wrong, and I damn near ran right off that cliff I’d seen as we were coming up. I was eighty feet above the road, car racing toward me, no way to get down to the road in time. I looked around wildly in the dark, saw a rock, tried to lift it, couldn’t, move, Mort, move, and I heard that big engine, car doing sixty miles an hour, and I found another rock, big sonofabitch, at least a hundred fifty pounds, but this was for Lucy goddamnit and I got it up and over to the edge of the cliff, the road down below, and I lofted it over the side, praying that it would land in the middle of the road, gut the car’s engine, blow transmission parts all over, rip out the differential. It hit a jutting rock and fell spinning into space. The glare of headlights on the road below revealed a tumbling black silhouette and then it was all about Lucky Lucy and her four lucky planets because that beautiful sonofabitching hunk of rock hit the hood of the car and blew right through the windshield on the driver’s side, tore through the car, came flying out the back window a tenth of a second later in a shower of glittering ruby glass in the taillights as the car shot by.
The Charger jerked right, wheels up on an embankment by the cliff, slowed as it traveled another hundred yards then it went off the road to the left, crashed through trees, came to rest with a crunch of metal against something solid. Its headlights went out, but the taillights were twin bloody eyes in the night.
I had to get down there.
I moved away from the cliff edge and went south along the hillside, past granite outcroppings, loose rubble, finally worked my way down to the road.
No sound. Nothing.
I jogged over to the car not knowing what I would find. The Charger was still upright. Its front end was crumpled against a granite monolith the size of a Greyhound bus.
“Lucy,” I yelled. “Luce!”
No answer. Ramon or Dooley might still be conscious, still dangerous, so I opened the driver’s-side door in front first, ready to kill anyone I found, Ramon or Dooley, surprised when the dome light came on. Dooley wasn’t going to be a problem because there was nothing but a bloody stump on his shoulders where the rock had ripped off two-thirds of his head. Guy had a concussion that made mine look like nothing.
A glance at the passenger side and there was Ramon with a shard of mirrored glass sticking out of his left eye. His head was turned and he would’ve been looking right at me, if he could see past that sliver of glass.
“Help.” His voice was a breathy sigh. “Help me.”
Lucy.
I opened the back door, driver’s side. Lucy was on the back seat, facedown, both seat belts wrapped around her like snakes, hands behind her back, plastic ties around her wrists and ankles and around the belts. She was gagged. They’d arranged her for safe transport, out of sight of the police.
Lucky Lucy. That rock had blown through the car over the top of her, never touched her as it went by.
Carefully, I got the gag off her. “Don’t move. You’ve got glass all over you.”
“Ohmigod, you’re okay,” she said, already crying. “How did you … how …”
“In a minute,” I said. “Ramon’s hurt but not dead. I don’t want him to pull a gun on us.”
“Kill him, Mort.”
“Don’t move. I won’t be long.”
I went around to the other side of the car, opened the door cautiously in case Ramon was ready to go with that automatic. He wasn’t. I grabbed his hair, pulled his head back. The sliver of mirror poking out of his eye was an inch wide, no telling how deep. It looked almost like the blade of a knife, which was well deserved and poetic.
“Hurts,” he whispered. “Help me.” The impact had broken his body cast. That would hurt too. His left hand scrabbled against his thigh as if searching for something. A seat belt held him in place. I grabbed his left wrist to keep him from finding his gun and pulling it, then I searched him, not gently I have to admit. I found a Kimber Super Carry still wedged between his legs where he’d kept it ready, probably for police if they’d been stopped. It figured that the drug dealer would have a gun worth over sixteen hundred dollars. I tossed the gun outside the car.
I wanted to shove that sliver of mirror deeper into his eye, down into his thinking jelly, then give it a few twists to put his lights out forever. I’d played God once. Could I do it again?
Maybe, but not yet.
I needed a knife. Ramon was the knife fighter, but Dooley had cut the plastic tie around my wrists when we’d arrived at the cabin, so he had a knife too. I searched Ramon again, ignoring his feeble cries as I went through his pockets. No knife, so I went around the car to Dooley. About the time I found a knife in a front pocket of his jeans, my wrists started screaming. I’d been too keyed up, too full of adrenaline, to feel the burns, but they were bad. With Ramon and Dooley out of it, the pain came on abruptly and it was almost more than I could stand.
With tears in my eyes I got the knife open and cut the ties holding Lucy in the back seat. She scrambled out and held me so tight I could barely breathe. My busted rib didn’t help. She was blubbering so hard I thought she might drown.
She was banged up, not seriously hurt, and alive. I couldn’t have asked for more.
“How?” she said when she could finally speak again. “How on earth did you do this?”
In my peripheral vision I saw the blown-out rear window of the Charger. “Gumshoe Rock,” I said.
Couldn’t help it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ACCORDING TO O’ROARKE, the new girl, Traci Ellis, was about to be turned loose in the Green Room, on her own, ready to fly solo. She was a real pip. Not only beautiful, but after I’d hit up O’Roarke for a few measly free drink coupons for having solved the Soranden murder, made national news again, and sustained injuries worse than anything he’d ever endured, and then been refused coupons because of my tendency to play havoc with the Green Room’s bottom line, Traci slid a big stack of coupons my way when O’Roarke’s back was turned. I got a friendly wink, too. Trouble was, she was also one of those cleavage-rich girls, not shy, able to circumvent the female bartender dress code by two buttons’ worth—just enough that I thought the place would fill up with a bunch of drooling poli-sci grad students who didn’t see much coed thumbing of dress codes in the classroom as October approached November. With their honking laughter and nightly salt-tequila-lime contests, grad students would ruin the place, so I thought those buttons needed buttoning up.
“Nice view?” said my young assistant.
“A view is a view,” I said. “You look because that’s what eyes do, the scenery is interesting but transitory and irrelevant, so you turn away and, hey, right about then someone suggests a shower, orders up a boob rub, and that irrelevant view moseys off into the past and doesn’t matter in the least because you’ve got your hands full and busy with the real thing.”
“Cool,” she said. “Okay, fill your eyes.”
Then Ma came in wearing navy pants, a hot pink shirt, and bright green jogging shoes. I smiled. Until, that is, Munson and Warley came in behind her like ducklings waddling after mama—IRS Commissioner Munson and Northern Nevada’s IRS c
hief Warley Sullivan, both of whom had been compromised by Ma and me and were therefore in our pockets. I stared at them, then at Ma. “Shit, Ma. Seriously? You brought in upper management IRS? The ambience of this place just fell below a single star.”
“For twenty-five grand, boyo, who cares?”
* * *
But that was ten days after a caravan of paramedics, police cars, and fire trucks had come roaring up Dog Valley Road in the dark in search of fire, took a left up Three Butte Trail—thank God for triangulation, trigonometry, and GPS—and ended up coming our way.
First, we heard sirens, then headlights flickered in the tops of distant trees, then red and blue flashing lights appeared.
Lucy and I stood on the road. I had opened the Charger’s trunk and found plastic ties, put one around Ramon’s neck and around the headrest of the seat to make sure he stayed put, didn’t come after us like a grade-B movie psycho. Insurance, though that glass sliver buried in his eye was likely to slow him down quite a bit. I know it would me.
The rock had shattered the rearview mirror as it ripped through the car and Ramon had stopped a shard. Nice. There was a God after all. I’d never seriously doubted it, but now I had proof.
First vehicle up the road was a fire department paramedic van, which made sense because saving lives is always the first priority. The next vehicle, half a mile behind, was a lumbering fire tanker trying to haul eighteen hundred gallons of water up the mountainside. A police car was next, then another tanker, then a bevy of police cars and a trio of news vans.
We stopped the paramedics and convinced them that no one at the fire was in need of their services, but we were. The van pulled as far off the road as it could, and the tankers were able to squeeze by. Following the tankers and police cars, news crews went up and filmed the fire, missed the first hour or two of the real story, God love ’em. Of course, they made up for it later using yellow journalistic principles taught in universities.
The driver of the paramedic van was a woman of thirty, Heather, outdoorsy and damn good-looking. Riding shotgun was a tall, angular guy in his mid-twenties, Rick.
They got out. Lucy pulled me over to them and said, “He’s burned real bad. Do something fast, please.”
These guys were good. It may have helped that we didn’t mention Ramon until my wrists were coated in Water Jel and Cool Blaze burn dressings, and I had a bandage on the gouge in my cheek where a branch in the dark had tried to end up in my mouth, and Lucy had a cold pack on the side of her face, and I’d whined about my broken rib, and they’d told me that wrapping it was actually a big no-no and here’s three ibuprofen and don’t play rugby for a day or two, ha, ha. Great roadside humor. And now we’d better load you two up and get you to the hospital for MRIs and patching and such.
About then it seemed as if telling them about Ramon’s little problem over there in the Charger where taillights were still aglow in the dark was the right thing to do—at which point Lucy’s and my complaints got second billing and Ramon got a ride to the hospital in what was slated to be our paramedic van because, in spite of all our pains and whining, we weren’t critical. Heather ordered up a replacement for us and I was given a cold pack for my ribs, ten minutes on, ten minutes off, and don’t worry, an ambulance will be here in twenty minutes, give or take. Oh, and try to take deep breaths as soon as you can so you don’t get pneumonia. Bye.
So, shit, we stood around chatting with six or eight cops who got a look at the Charger and the granite cliff and what was left of Dooley’s head, gathering fodder for the war stories they tell at briefings and during shift changes. And I still had a bit of diesel fuel in my shoes. I mentioned it, but all it got was a laugh. One cop asked if I wanted a light. Cops are a riot. I took off my shoes and socks and rubbed powdery dirt on my feet.
Our ambulance missed the turn and got lost up Dog Valley Road and had to backtrack six miles, so of course Russ Fairchild showed up before we left because the name Mortimer Angel was being bandied about by various emergency services on various radio frequencies.
“What the hell, Mort,” he said, leading Lucy and me away from our latest band of admirers.
“Solved another one for you, Russ,” I said.
His head jerked around. “Which one?”
He hadn’t heard that part. Well, it was early times.
“The Soranden murder.”
“Aw, shit, no. Really?”
“And another one, higher up in the hills.”
His eyes jittered. “Who?”
“Sixteen-year-old girl going on forty-six. Kimmi. She got two lowlifes to kill Soranden because she wanted a new Jetta and all she got was a beat-up old Honda Civic. That, by the way, is just between you, me, and Lucy. I’ll explain later.”
His jaw sagged. No words followed.
“And I killed one of the lowlifes with a rock. His name is Dooley. He’s over there in a Dodge Charger. Not much head left, but he’s still got fingerprints you can play around with.”
He stared at me. “You killed some guy with a rock?”
“Not just any rock, Russ. A big-ass rock. Oh, and I kicked out a wall and escaped from a burning building.”
Lucy put an arm around my waist. “He’s like a superhero or something, but he lost his cape in the dark. And he’s barefoot and a bit stinky because he had diesel in his shoes.”
His eyes bugged out.
About then the ambulance pulled up. Two guys got out. One of them said, “Where’s the awesome-lookin’ chick and some old guy they said was pretty banged up?”
Awesome-looking chick and “some old guy.” Everyone in the vicinity of Lucy plays second fiddle. Man, I hate that.
* * *
We ended up at Renown Medical Center. I got my feet washed and rubbed with some kind of cream, and an MRI, and they checked me for a concussion, fourth one in two years. I was informed that it wasn’t much of a concussion by a woman doctor with gray hair and the kind of smile they learn in med school. Sort of a baby concussion, she said, but I had a lump on my forehead which warranted a five-second look and a shrug and a cold pack that I had to hold in place myself.
My rib got a “tsk, tsk” and a second shrug, which is often the treatment for a cracked or broken rib. My gouged cheek got cleaned up, five stitches, ointment, a bandage.
All of that was out-patient stuff, but my burns got me into a minor burn unit overnight. Nice. I think when you kill someone and you’re damn near murdered, you’ve earned a little downtime in a hospital with hot and cold running nurses. I’ve learned to enjoy hospital stays. Not even in a Las Vegas casino suite does anyone offer to change your bedpan at four in the morning.
But this was observation and bandage changing, not a lot of bedrest with catheters and drains, no bedpan needed, so at two fifty a.m. I was awake and on my feet, and Lucy and I went down one floor in an empty elevator to the general surgery floor where Ramon Surry had a private room and a good-sized cop planted in a chair outside to keep him safe.
“Can’t go in there,” the cop said, getting up and standing in our way.
“I’m the one who put him there.”
“Then you deserve a medal, but you still can’t go in. Wish you could, though. You did a good job on the son of a bitch. I heard he killed some high school girl.”
“Among other things, but hold on,” I said, pointing to a cell phone on the cop’s belt. “Can I borrow that for a minute? And what’s your number?”
I called Russ who was, as always, happy to hear from me in the cold dark hours after midnight. He then called the cop in front of us, Pete Wells, who smiled and came in with Lucy and me to have a peek at Ramon. Surry was strapped in bed with a terrific patch over his left eye that covered half his head, arm and shoulder cast immobilizing his right arm, handcuff holding his left hand to the raised side rail of the bed. It looked like it would be a bitch if he had to scratch his nose. I’ve had itches as bad as gunshot wounds.
“Hi there, bud,” I said. “We were in the neighborhood, s
aw the light on, and thought we’d drop by, say howdy.”
“Fuck you,” he said in a post-anesthetic rasp.
“You look a little worse for wear, dude. Maybe knife fights and arson-murder aren’t your thing. You should see a counselor about different career options and training opportunities.”
He was still slightly groggy, but he was still Ramon Surry, extreme lowlife. “Fuck you.” His right eye blazed with hatred.
“How articulate,” Lucy said. “Beautiful sentiment, really. He might be able to read poetry or Hallmark on YouTube—if he doesn’t end up on Death Row.”
Surry’s right eye swiveled, locked on her.
“Hey, cool patch,” I said. “Makes you look like a pirate. Girls really go for that—just look at Johnny Depp—though the girls in prison go by the names Earl and Bubba. Can I get you anything? Enema, a bigger catheter, designer handcuffs? How about a balloon with a smiley face on it? Those’re nice.”
“Fuck you, man.”
I stood over him. “Like you said up at the cabin, ‘Enjoy the ride.’ Oh, and because we’re eyewitnesses, we’ll probably meet again. At the trial. We’ll be with the prosecution. In the state of Nevada, it’s against the law to blow a person’s head off. You’d think they’d teach that in school, at least give it a mention, but they didn’t in high school when I was there.”
I turned to go, then Ramon whispered hoarsely, “How? We were gone. We were home free. How’d you do it?”
I turned back, forming a response, then Lucy stood beside me, smiled at him, and said, “Gumshoe Rock. Dude.”
Stole my line.
* * *
Twelve hours later, Ramon died. So, no trial, and he’d had no chance to talk to the FBI, which was probably just as well. A four-inch length of glass shard in the eye is an iffy thing and brains are complicated. Four inches, wow. At least two and a half inches of that went into the jelly. No telling what damage it had done. He was lying peacefully in bed, not what he deserved, then he flatlined and headed for the Pearly Gates, not that he would get in when he rang the doorbell.
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