Stateline

by Dave Stanton

  It took a month to make it to the small settlement that was Salt Lake City, and then the party was faced with eighty miles of featureless salt desert, near what is now the Bonneville Salt Flats Speedway. The sun baked them by day, and the winds turned freezing at nightfall. They lost most of their livestock, horses, and ox teams, as well as a handful of people, to thirst and Indians. Once they made it beyond the salt flats, five hundred miles of high desert remained to be crossed. They set out on foot, down to one wagon, running low on all provisions and now without cattle. A few of the weaker died of thirst and hunger, but the worst was yet to come.

  In November the group reached Reno, in poor shape and badly demoralized, but decided to press on westward over the Sierras toward Sacramento. They were within a few miles of the summit near Truckee when winter unleashed its fury upon them. The snow quickly became so deep it was impassable. With little option, the party made camp on the shores of Donner Lake and spent the months of December, January, and February completely snowbound and isolated from civilization. They were a group made up of mostly farmers, with a high percentage of elderly, women, and children. Their ability to hunt, fish, and otherwise live off the land was minimal, and they began to die of starvation and exposure.

  A number of attempts were made by the healthiest pioneers to escape the wilderness, but even in the most protected areas the snow was so deep they would sink up to their hips. They fashioned homemade snowshoes, and, in mid-December, a group of ten men and five women, named “Forlorn Hope” by those left behind, set out on a desperate attempt to cross the mountains. A month later, two of the men and the five women reached a cabin a hundred miles away on the Bear River near Sacramento and were rescued, more dead than alive.

  It wasn’t until early March that rescue parties were able to reach those who remained trapped at Donner Lake. More than half had died, and many of those who survived did so by eating what meager flesh remained on the corpses of their dead comrades.

  ******

  I drove through the night, west on 80 toward Truckee. A local classic rock station announced it was “reality-is-for-people-who-can’t-handle-drugs Thursday.” I relaxed, grooving on the radio, remembering the stoned visions of my youth. The lazy days and psychedelic nights, the teenage chicks with bellbottoms and flowing hair looking for astral revelations, psychic communion, or maybe just good old wild times. A twelve-pack of discount beer, a baggie of homegrown, and guilt-free sex without head trips. My friends and I had been too late for the hippie era, but I guess we didn’t realize it at the time. Those were good days while they lasted, days when the next morning meant nothing more than waking up and waiting for the party to begin again. At least that’s how I remembered it. But that was a long time ago, back before AIDS, and before recreational drugs became big business. After that, all the fun had gone out of it. Or maybe I just wasn’t young anymore.

  The miles fell behind me, and I crossed the state border into California. Scattered pine trees became visible as the desert started its gradual transition to forest.

  The road came over a mild crest and fell into a steep downhill curve, sweeping to the left. I pushed on my brakes, and the pedal felt slack and mushy, so I pushed down harder, but the car seemed to accelerate. My foot jammed the brake pedal to the floorboard, and when I let up, the pedal stayed on the floor. Sonofabitch, no brakes!

  I stabbed my foot repeatedly against the dead pedal and cursed myself for not trusting my instincts back at the airport.

  The Nissan was picking up speed as I held it tight into the bend. Swearing through clenched teeth, I eased up the emergency brake, but it had no effect on the car’s increasing momentum. The tires were squealing as the turn reached its apex. I dropped the gearshift into second, and the motor revved loudly as a pair of lights came up close in my rearview mirror. I jerked the transmission down into first, and the engine howled like an air-raid siren, the tachometer bouncing off the red line. The Nissan was slowing, the transmission holding off the pull of gravity. Then the motor backfired twice, sputtered, and died.

  The wheel jerked in my hand when the power steering cut out, but I held the car steady, seeing the end of the curve where the grade flattened, and I thought I could manage to slow to the point where jumping out the door wouldn’t be suicide. And I probably would have, if it weren’t for the truck that came up behind me again, its headlamps blazing in my rear window. My head snapped back as the truck’s bumper slammed into my trunk, then I was skidding sideways, the tires shrieking on the course pavement, my headlights scanning the banks of the canyon walls beyond the edge of the road.

  I fishtailed around 180 degrees and looked directly into the truck’s headlights for a long moment, long enough to feel the dread and rage boiling in my gut. Then my car crashed violently into the low steel guardrail. The chassis bounced and shuddered as the car leaned on the mangled rail, then it tilted over with a wretched screech, and tipped down into the darkness below.

  The Nissan rolled once, crushing in the roof on the passenger side and shattering the windshield into a dense spider web. My head snapped to the side and clipped the edge of a piece of jagged metal. The car came around upright on all four tires, then a stout pine caught the front end and spun the vehicle around backward. The wheels were locked, which was a stroke of luck. I held the steering wheel straight and skidded down the hillside in reverse, thrashing through sagebrush and thistle, bouncing over rocks, until the Nissan fell off a short drop at the bottom of the canyon and was thrown onto its side, coming to a stop with a bone-jarring splash in the Truckee River.

  I was still belted in, which kept me from bathing in six inches of icy water that flowed through the passenger side of my car. The Nissan lay on its side, precariously balanced on the river rocks. My head stung, and I reached up and felt the sticky ooze from a minor gash. I was shaken, but I didn’t think I had any broken bones. I had left my gear case on the seat beside me, and I pulled it out of the water. My door was jammed, so I kicked the glass out of the windshield, climbed over the high side of the car, and jumped down onto the riverbank.

  One of the Nissan’s headlights was shining up the river, reflecting off the black water and patches of snow. I looked up the hill to the road, realizing I had somehow survived a fall down at least a 250-foot canyon. A dark pickup truck, American made, was parked on the highway. The truck’s interior light flashed on, and I saw a person climb out, then heard the clunk of the door as the light went out. The full moon clearly silhouetted the man as he jumped over the railing, pistol in hand.

  A large boulder lay near the river behind my car. I moved behind it with my suitcase, shrugged into my vest, and jacked a hollow-point round into the chamber of the Beretta.

  A minute later I saw the man above, sliding down the scree toward the car. Pebbles and rocks slid past me as he continued to move forward. He was perhaps fifty feet away, standing against a snowy background up the hill to my right, when I drew a bead on him.

  “Drop your gun!” I yelled over the rush of the river.

  There are times in life when people do things that are inexplicably stupid. The kinds of things that make you wonder what they were thinking, if anything, at that moment. This was one of those times, and the man couldn’t have picked a worse moment to have a mental breakdown. He fired two blind shots in my direction—I heard one bullet thud into the dirt, and the other ricocheted off some rocks behind me.

  I fired low, aiming at his leg, but he took a step downward as I pulled the trigger, and the bullet hit him in the gut. The impact blew him backward, leaving a red smear on the snow, then his body fell forward, skidding and tumbling down to the water’s edge. He came to a stop twenty feet from where I stood, his legs strewn in the river like broken sticks, his chest heaving in the glare of my headlight.

  I approached him, kneeling once I was sure he no longer held his pistol. He was throwing up and choking on his vomit. I helped him turn his head so he could clear his mouth, then splashed some water on his face to clean him u
p.

  He was in bad shape. The bullet had blown through him, leaving a gaping, sucking wound in his stomach. His guts pulsed, glistening, and blood drained steadily down his side into the dirt.

  “Mr. One Eight Seven?” I said.

  “I guess the joke’s on me,” he said, trying to smile.

  His eyes were clouding over. He didn’t have long.

  “You’re dying. It’s time to confess your sins,” I said, hoping I made a convincing priest.

  “Gulp yump, motherfucker.”

  I started to stand. His face was drained of color, his tongue gray in his open mouth.

  “Hey,” he wheezed, and I knelt down to him again.

  “The sheriff…” he whispered.

  “What?” I said, but his head fell to the side, and I heard his breath leave him. His eyes were fixed and staring, and his lips were split in a small smile, as if he died laughing at his own joke.

  I checked his pockets and pulled out a soggy wallet. The name on his driver’s license was Michael Dean Stiles. It listed a Reno address and a birthday three days after mine. His wallet held four dollars, an assortment of cards, and a small baggie of white powder. I looked at his still, bloody corpse. His jeans were soaked through, and water rippled around his legs. The sleeve of his black leather jacket was unsnapped and pulled up to the elbow, revealing his tattooed forearm. The long beard off his chin looked old and brittle, and moved back and forth stiffly with the breeze that whispered through the canyon.

  When I stood, a short burst of machine-gun fire shattered the night. I dove behind the Nissan as a series of slugs plowed into Mr. 187’s corpse, bouncing it further into the river. I reached in through the busted sunroof and switched the headlights off, searching the hillside for movement. Another burst rang out, and half a dozen bullets punched into the car’s undercarriage. Two of the rounds came up through the roof, narrowly missing me. I sprinted through the shallow water back to the boulder where I’d left my suitcase. The machine gun barked again, sending more shots into my ruined car. I saw the muzzle flash about halfway up the hill, and I fired five shots at it as fast as I could pull the Beretta’s trigger. The blast was deafening.

  My ears rang in the silence. Five minutes later I saw a heavy figure, stark in the moonlight, climb over the guardrail. The truck parked on the roadside pulled away and sped off into the night.

  CHAPTER 20

  By the time the Nevada County sheriff arrived from Truckee, I had cleaned out the Nissan and carried all my stuff up to the highway, save for the tire chains. In the event some crazy mechanic ever got the car back on the road, he could have the chains with my blessing. I’d taken off my soaked boots and socks and was thawing my feet in my sleeping bag when they pulled up.

  Sheriff Bill Cooper and his deputies seemed to be an efficient group. Within an hour, a search-and-rescue team arrived and lit up the hillside with portable lights. I waited in the back of a squad car while an electric winch pulled Michael Dean Stiles’s body out of the canyon on a gurney. A deputy also found his gun near where I told him to look.

  “What about my car, fellas?” I said.

  “You better get a hold of your insurance company and get that wreck out of our river,” a deputy said as he walked by.

  “Thanks,” I called out to him.

  It was ten o’clock when we left for the sheriff’s office. Sheriff Cooper had given me a plastic garbage bag for the miscellaneous junk from my car, which included jumper cables, a stack of papers from my glove box, an old football, and my sleeping bag. I asked him to stop at a 7-Eleven and he obliged, even went in with me and paid for my dinner, a couple of stale chili dogs. At his office we went over everything repeatedly, and I told him the truth, or at least what I figured he was entitled to know. I started with the murder of Sylvester Bascom, told him I tracked down a hooker in Vegas who was involved with what may have been a botched robbery, and added that I suspected she called her boyfriend, and he came after me. He asked me how the boyfriend would know to find me at the airport. I didn’t have an answer.

  The questioning went on and on. I had a headache and was tired. Finally Cooper finished up around midnight and drove me to a hotel on Main Street in Truckee. He had not impounded my weapon as evidence. Apparently he believed my contention of self-defense, but he told me to expect a call from the Truckee PD detectives in the morning. I checked into the hotel and lugged my gear and the green garbage bag to my room. I thought about going to the bar next door, but I lay down on the bed briefly, just to rest my eyes, and a minute later I was out.

  I woke at dawn in the strange room, still immersed in the surreal landscape of my dream. I was in a coffee shop, sitting at a table with Mr. 187 and Sheriff Grier from South Lake Tahoe. Mr. 187’s hair and beard were completely white. A birthday cake was brought to the table, and I tried to light the candles, but the flame kept going out. My father appeared and also tried to light the candles, without success. He made some reference to things not always happening as they should, then he and Mr. 187 walked away together. Sheriff Grier laughed and cut himself a piece of cake. In my peripheral vision there were blurry people and muted voices, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  ******

  While I was contemplating the dream that early morning, there was no way I could have known that two men were having a conversation that would have given my nocturnal visions a different perspective. They were fifty miles west of Truckee in the foothills above Sacramento, meeting in a room barely lit by the gray dawn. One man, with a salt-and-pepper mustache over yellowed teeth, looked at the cigar between his fingers, then broke it in half and dropped it in an ashtray.

  “You let this thing get out of control. That’s not like you.”

  “Look at it this way—Stiles was a liability,” the other man said, his eyes opaque against his dark face.

  “Stiles? You’re becoming a liability. I hired you to protect my business interests. So you go kill some rich man’s son during a pointless robbery, then you and Stiles go fixin’ to whack this private eye, without my okay, and Stiles ends up dead. Stupid. I never expected that from you.”

  “Maybe Stiles is best in a grave. Dead men can’t talk.”

  “Well, now. Ain’t that the truth.”

  The room was quiet, then the man with the dark skin and barrel-shaped body stepped from the shadows, his eyes glowing with a primal luster. He smiled and took another step, and Sheriff Conrad Pace involuntarily leaned back. He blinked, surprised at his own reflex. It was not like Sheriff Pace to be frightened. It was an emotion he hadn’t experienced in years. But when he looked at that wet smile, he felt oddly out of his element. It occurred to him that, given the right motivation, the man standing before him would tear him to pieces with his bare hands.

  The feeling was gone in an instant, and Conrad Pace walked behind his desk. He sat and stared out his window to the wet, rolling pastures, where spirals of silver mist reached down from the sky and touched the jade hills. Had he made a mistake in enlisting Julo Nafui? As an enforcer, the man had no equal. But Nafui had run amuck; killing Bascom might well get Nafui arrested, even though half the force was on Pace’s pad. And Pace harbored no illusions about the eventual outcome once Nafui faced a murder charge. The big sheriff’s jaw tightened as he imagined Nafui implicating him in exchange for a plea bargain. That was unacceptable. He would have to do something about it. Pace looked up at Nafui, at the unnatural hulk of his torso, at his ugly, merciless face. Killing him would be easier said than done. Perhaps there were other options. Sheriff Pace raised his finger and pointed at Nafui.

  “I’m gonna straighten this shit out, starting with the private eye,” Pace said. “You lay low, and I’ll call you when I need you.”

  Nafui smiled widely, his teeth glistening with saliva. “Don’t make me wait too long,” he said. “I get antsy when I got nothing to do.”

  ******

  The main drag of Truckee was deserted at 6:30 A.M. The wind blew through the streets, echoing
hollowly against the storefronts, sending bits of paper and trash swirling across the icy pavement. I had never felt it so cold. For a second I looked up and down the street, searching, then with a jolt realized my old faithful Nissan was on its side in the Truckee River. I walked about half a mile to a 7-Eleven, shivering, my hands deep in my coat pockets. The warmth of the store was a relief. I poured myself a large coffee.

  “Damn, it’s cold,” I said to the clerk.

  “This is nothing for Truckee. Hit forty-six below one year. It’s only about ten below now.”

  I rubbed my unshaven mug and hiked back to the hotel. At eight-thirty I called my insurance company to report my car was totaled. They took down the information, then gave me the number of a local towing company that would recover the vehicle. My vehicle. Or now my ex-vehicle. The fucking Nissan—the car I had driven through my marriage, my divorce, through countless drunken episodes, and through three years of sobriety. I had owned it for almost my entire adulthood. It seemed unreal I would never drive it again; to my surprise, I felt a twinge of nostalgic sadness. The car and I had been through a lot together.

  My cell rang, snapping me out of my despondent reverie. There were more important things to worry about, I told myself. Like finding out who was trying to kill me.

  “Dan?” Cody’s voice said.

  “Hey, Cody.”

  “I’m all packed up and ready to go, man. Where should I meet you?”

  Suddenly, having Cody around didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I gave him the name of the hotel in Truckee.

  “I thought you were in South Lake,” he said.

  “Yeah, I was on the way there and had a little car trouble.”

  “It may be time to get a new car, Dirt.”

  “I think you’re right. The Nissan’s totaled.”