“I was realizing it probably wasn’t a guys’ fishing camp; the urinal trough isn’t very high.”
“Oh.”
“You know, that wasn’t a very nice thing to say about a sincere fan of yours.”
“Don’t start with me.”
He laughed.
Petey came running up. “Mom, what’m I gonna do? I forgot my pencil sharpener!”
“Here, honey.” I opened my Girl Scout knife as Petey handed over his brown-umber pencil, its little lead flat to its cone of cedar. Whittling the wood, I said, “This is how they sharpened their pencils in olden times.”
Petey watched closely. “I want my own knife.”
“Well, soon enough, honey.”
After Petey dashed off, Daniel said, “Well, you’d think if Lance and Gina had stumbled upon this and needed shelter, they’d have stayed.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“It is?” They could be dead somewhere.
“Rita.” Daniel took my arm and turned me to him. Beneath the dripping bill of his parka hood, his blue eyes shone with kindness. “The sheriff was probably right, you know. They’re OK somewhere.”
I gazed across the lake.
A fish jumped, its silver body curving clear of the water. Was it rising to catch prey on the surface? Or leaping in panic to evade a larger predator moving in from the depths?
It flopped back into the water with a violent splash.
“I wonder how come this isn’t a camp anymore,” Daniel said.
Chapter 12 – What Bonechopper Wants
Gina woke to the sound of Lance’s tense voice a little ways off, then Bonechopper’s too. She listened for a while before giving serious thought to opening her eyes.
“You realize we don’t earn much money,” said Bonechopper.
“Earn? You guys are poachers,” said Lance. “I heard you last night. I can’t imagine you had to go to such trouble way out here.”
“The law sneaks around.”
Poaching? Gina hadn’t heard any gunshots, just the weird bubbling.
Bonechopper said, “We do what we gotta do.”
“Well, that’s a simple rationalization.”
“You could help us get out of this life. Into a more honest situation.”
“I doubt it.”
“Oh, come on, now, Mr. de Sauvenard. My friend.”
“Look,” said Lance frankly, “you and Alger and Dendra helped us. Come right down to it, you probably saved my life.”
“Damn right we did! You were at death’s door, my friend.”
It struck Gina that when Bonechopper said “my friend” he didn’t mean it.
“Well,” said Lance, “I was hypothermic, I realize.”
“Your girlfriend was pretty cold too.”
“Yes, she was.”
Gina breathed lightly, listening, smelling the wool of the blanket pulled up to her nose. She lifted the blanket half an inch with her chin and cold morning air poured in.
“I thank you,” said Lance, “and I’m glad to give you guys some money in gratitude. I’ve got about three hundred on me. Here, take it.”
“Ah,” said Bonechopper, “if I take that, you’ll think the deal’s done.”
“Deal?” In the space of that one short word, Lance’s voice grew ice-rock hard.
Bonechopper said, “You can arrange to get us more. I was hoping you’d think your life was worth more than that.”
“This land belongs to my family. These are my fucking trees in the first place.” Lance’s voice sounded bigger, and she realized his upper body had bristled the way it did sometimes; she could picture his chest thrusting out like he did in jest, only this time he was really angry. Lance was a well-built guy, and Gina could hear the iron in his voice.
She heard chuffing sounds from the direction of the fire, and realized that Alger or Dendra must be blowing on the coals to kindle them again.
“Hey,” said Bonechopper a little unnerved, “don’t get the wrong idea. I was just hoping you’d be able to do a little more for us, given how your family’s so well off.”
“Don’t threaten me.”
“I am not threatening you. Hey, cripe, we’re buds. Take it easy.” Backpedaling. “Come on, let’s get Alger to make us something to eat. Alger! Dendra! Break-faaaast!”
Gina knew well enough that she and Lance were at the mercy of these people, at least as far as reliably getting out of the woods went. Or—she paused to think a second—were they?
She sat up and yawned loudly. She scrambled from the blanket. Lance came over and told her, “As soon as we eat, we’re getting out of here.”
“Why don’t we just leave now?”
He looked at her face, which had grown gaunt in the last five days, notwithstanding the good meal they’d had last night. “Because we need the food. The weather’s trying to clear; see that ridge over there?”
“Yeah!”
“We couldn’t see it yesterday afternoon, so that’s proof. It’s a long way away; I think it’s part of the Harkett gorge. There’s a little waterfall coming down from that cleft, can you see it?”
“Yes, it’s pretty.”
“It’s the one I remembered. Wish I could get a picture of it for Kenner, but my camera’s gone; it must’ve fallen out somewhere. My cell battery’s dead, so I can’t take any more pictures, but at least I have a better idea where we are. I have to tell you, for all my fucking up where were at, this place is beautiful.”
She smiled, loving him. “It is, sweetheart.” He was so irrepressible, so spunky. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her. She whispered, “That Bonechopper’s a big bluffer.”
Lance smiled, the stubble on his chin spreading taut, but his eyes were not smiling. “We still need to get out of here.”
“How is your hand?”
“Fine.” He held it out. The tape was holding, no blood, no swelling. “They’ve got to have a pickup stashed around here. I mean, this is not a permanent encampment. Those eggs were fresh, and they’ve got too much equipment and stuff to’ve carried it in without Sherpas.”
“But how could they drive a truck through these woods?”
“I bet we’re close to an old logging road, or even a firebreak. When they’re trying to stop a wildfire, they’ll just doze a road right through the forest, usually along a low ridge if they can.”
“Would the keys be in it, though?”
“Probably.”
“Let’s go find it.”
He looked at her with admiration. “We can’t both just start spooking around; they’ll get suspicious. You stay here, make nice, and I’ll slip off like I’m going to take a dump. If I don’t find their truck—with keys—in a few minutes, I’ll climb that ridge while it’s clear and get a look down the Harkett, and then I’ll know for sure which route we should take. I can do it fast, and I’ll come right back.”
“OK.”
“You sure you’re OK staying?”
“Yeah! I’m not scared of them!”
He kissed her. “That’s my girl. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, I promise.”
Gina touched his back as he went off. She then joined Dendra, who gave her a coffee can full of warm water. She took it into the bushes to wash up.
Her period had not come yet, so partly thank God and partly oh hell, could I be pregnant? She couldn’t worry about that right now. She’d never been dirtier in her life. No hot shower for how many days now? Five?
Rita must be getting a little worried.
Gina washed with the warm water and dried herself with her sweatshirt. She wished it was hot summer and she could go for a dip in the river, which she now heard rushing close by. Shivering, she pulled her jacket back on.
She wished she and Lance were alone in a safe, warm place.
The breeze shifted and she smelled a sharp cedar smell, so unusually clear and astringent, as if thousands of pencil sharpeners had been emptied just on the other side of these shrubs
.
The shrubs, she now noticed, had been somewhat trampled.
She parted them.
What she saw made her put her hand to her chest. She stepped backward onto a root, stumbled, caught herself, and looked again.
A great tree lay before her, its cut end next to the stump. Jagged splinters stuck up in a line across the stump. The tree was far larger than any near the clearing. The cut end glistened with golden droplets. The wood was the color of rose gold, encircled by bark wider than Gina’s hand.
She saw that the tree’s crown, far from where she stood at the stump, lay in pieces, cut away from the main trunk. And the trunk itself had been segmented to lengths of about twenty feet. They lay in an almost perfect line, barely separated. There were four of them.
“Oh, there you are.”
She whirled.
Dendra stood beneath her red and yellow golf umbrella sucking on a cigarette, watching Gina. “All freshened up?” she asked, as if this scene of botanical carnage was not lying before them. “Where’s Lance?”
“Uh,” said Gina. “Uh.” She couldn’t help starting to cry.
“What’n the heck’s wrong?” Dendra came toward her.
Gina lunged to the stump and slapped it with both hands. “This! This is wrong!” Her hands came away gummy with sap. She flung out her arms, angry at herself for crying. “What’s wrong, you say? What’s wrong?”
“Oh, that?” Dendra was genuinely calm.
“It—this—this makes me sick, to see such a beautiful thing lying on the ground like this. Ugly! What’s going on?” Even though Gina had no experience with logging operations, she knew this was a strange deal: just one tree down, no clear-cut, no logging camp with checker-shirted guys running around in spiked boots.
Dendra’s non-reactiveness to the slain tree was unbelievable. Wonderingly, Dendra said, “Hey, hey, babe? Hey, take it easy. My gosh.”
But now Gina was sobbing. As much as she wanted to stop, she couldn’t, just yet. These woods were so thick, and the rain was so heavy, and these people were so weird.
Gina instinctively went toward the shelter of the golf umbrella, and Dendra, moved by Gina’s distress, put her arm around her. “Hey, babe, it’s OK,” she said, in her many-a-peace-pipe-smoked voice. “Don’t you see? We’re just doing what we know how. To survive.”
“You’re not Earth Puppets at all!” accused Gina.
“Oh, hey, in a way we are. In a way, everybody’s an Earth Puppet.” Dendra flicked away her butt and exhaled smoke luxuriously.
“I don’t think so,” said Gina, getting a grip. “Earth Puppets don’t do this to trees.”
“Well, yeah, you’re right,” Dendra agreed. “No Earth Puppet would ever achieve this level of honesty. Look, what’s your problem? That we’re cutting trees at all, or that we’re doing it on property that isn’t ours?”
Gina was at a loss.
“Essentially,” Dendra explained, “we’re freelance loggers.”
“But you just said this property isn’t yours.”
“Look. You know how the Animals Foremost people liberate the minks and the chickens and stuff? We do the same with trees. These trees are being grown only to be cut down by machines and turned into two-by-fours and pizza boxes. By clear-cutting, mind you, where a hundred acres comes down all at once. You should see what that looks like, you want to talk ugly, if you haven’t yet seen one. At least they do replant.”
Gina stood snuffling, trying to understand.
Dendra said, “Bonechopper and Alger used to work in the mills. Bonechopper even used to log for Silver Coast, matter of fact. It’s a tough life. You ever seen that TV show on logging? It’s all true, the bosses work the guys like borrowed mules, and half of them don’t know what the hell they’re doing. So the rest of ’em never know when a log’s gonna bust loose on ’em or what.”
“Why’s he called Bonechopper, anyway?”
“Yeah,” Dendra laughed, “it sounds axe-murderish, but it’s not that at all. His real name’s Rusty. Rusty Bjornquist. They were driving the last of the logs on Lake Quilmash, to the mill, you know the mill’s right there? So Jerome Del Valle, he was feeding logs in from the raft, and he slipped on a buckskin log and got his leg caught in the conveyor. He’s like thirty seconds from the debarker, it’s like this maw? Giant steel barbs, they just grab the logs and claw the bark off it; anyway he starts to go up the incline, screaming his bloody head off, his leg’s getting tore up, and you think about a human being going into that debarker—what a god-awful way to go.”
She paused to chuckle, picturing the situation, her stomach bouncing beneath her jacket.
“Renny Zed was on the switch inside, and since he was stoned at all times, everybody knew why even bother yelling to him? So Rusty thought fast and just grabs his axe and runs across the boom, climbs up in there, and takes off Jerome’s leg. Or takes him off his leg, more like. One blow, he’s real proud of that. The leg goes in, Jerome stays out, and on top of that he got full disability. He sent Rusty a case of Jack Daniel’s from the hospital. That mill’s defunct now.” Dendra smiled perkily. She was not pretty, but she had a decent smile—all her teeth were there, anyway. “Rusty can make that axe practically play music. It’s—it’s melodious, how he uses it. Anyhow, from that day on, he became known as Bonechopper. Jerome became Peggy.”
“Peggy?”
“As in peg leg, get it?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Plus, you should see him with a chainsaw.”
“Peggy?”
“No, Bonechopper. And see, that’s what we’re all about. We cut trees one at a time, by hand with chainsaws. It’s much more humane. Hey, if you wipe yourself with toilet paper, you use timber products. It’s a fact of life.”
“I wish I had toilet paper.”
“I should’ve lent you some. Sorry.”
Indicating the tree, Gina asked, “How’re you even going to get this out of here?”
“There’s a Forest Service road just over—” Dendra pointed.
“Oh?!” Lance was right. She listened for him, but the woods were silent.
“Yeah, maybe just a hundred yards. We’ll winch it up when the truck comes—that’d be Jack, our outlaw trucker! There ought to be a show called Outlaw Truckers. Or else we’ll cut it into bolts for shakes.”
“Bolts for shakes?”
“Hunks to take to the shake and shingle mill. You can get three hundred bucks for a pickup’s worth these days, price of cedar.”
“Oh. How come I didn’t hear anything last night, except this weird—”
“Ha! That’s how we muffle the chainsaws: they put a hose from the exhaust into a bucket of water. Sounds like a babbling brook, la, la, la, instead of a Husky 372xp with a bored-out cylinder. Just in case the law comes around, and they do sneak around. You work at night, and nobody’s the wiser.”
Gina listened dumbly.
“Hey,” said Dendra, “looks like somebody’s feeling better! Come on, let’s eat. But so anyway, where’d Lance go, huh? Did he tell you?”
Chapter 13 – Rowe Analyzes; Gina Makes a Dash
George Rowe missed his little apartment in Culver City. It wasn’t much bigger than this suite in the road warriors’ hotel in Renton, but it was Los Angeles, it was warm, it was home. There he could wear his cherry-red flip-flops without his feet getting cold. The building, in one of the last sketchy neighborhoods in Culver, had burned last year but then been fixed up again, and he got his old apartment back. It overlooked a parking lot and a strip plaza of crazy little businesses. He missed his new drum set, in its sound-curtained corner, a nice maple-shelled set with the sweetest little toms. It was three-thirty in the afternoon and he had been back from his interview with Adrian for about an hour, working on his notes. How long would this one take? His fingers twitched and he drummed a three-against-four pattern on the hotel’s urethaned desktop; then, absently, he shifted into a five-against-eight, like in “Kevlar Dreams,” recorded just this year
by Bent Jim Hoagland, with Christy Dawson on drums. Rowe admired the great Christy Dawson, his touch, his restraint on the skins. He stretched his toes in his wool socks.
He thought of Rita’s sister Gina and the ambition she brought with her to L.A. to be a torch singer. He wished he’d been more successful helping her find gigs, but the pickup jazz combos he played in usually didn’t need a singer. He imagined Gina yodeling the blues in the spectacular woods with Lance, and he smiled. As much of a pain in the ass as she could be, she was fun.
He sorted his thoughts on the Bertrice de Sauvenard-Leland Harris situation, also missing the whiteboards he used back home, where he could live with a case visually. The boards, one or two of them, stood on their easels in his living room, always ready to map out his ideas.
He opened the large spiral sketchbook he used when on the road.
HARRIS IN DEBT, he wrote in bold letters.
Beneath that:
BANGKOK HOTEL – MRS. DE S. QUESTIONS
$3M OUT – WHERE TO AFTER BANK?
HARRIS CO-DEPENDENT W/WIFE’S TASTES
CHOUDRY CLEAN – DASHWOOD DIRTY
STAY ON PLATONOV
STAY ON $ TRAIL
Rowe considered going to Thailand for a quiet conversation with the bank manager who had received the $3 million from Silver Coast on behalf of Dashwood-Choudry, the purported hotel development company. If he could only know where the money went from there.
He drummed his fingers in frustration. He knew the value of remaining cautious at this stage, if he really wanted to figure this out and not just scare Harris into dropping the whole thing, only to regroup with some other scam. Bertrice de Sauvenard didn’t want to just fire the guy—she wanted to nail him. Rowe liked that attitude. He’d just have to figure out this puzzle within a limited range of motion.
His cell phone buzzed and Mrs. de Sauvenard said in her straightforward matronly voice, “I’ve got Blaise on the case, my man in Eastern Europe? He’s based in Prague. I caught him just as he was going out to dinner. Said he remembered entertaining Leland and a few commodities traders a few years ago in Moscow. He acted cagey when I brought up the name Ivan Platonov.”
The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 74