The Prince Of Deadly Weapons

  The Prince of Deadly Weapons Boston Teran St. MARTIN'S MINOTAUR New York

  THE PRINCE OF DEADLY WEAPONS. Copyright © 2002 by Brutus Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.minotaurbooks.com Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint an excerpt from "Comfortably Numb." Lyrics by Roger Waters. Copyright 2000 Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd. Warner/Chappell Artemis Music Ltd. London W6 8BS. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved ISBN 0-312-70903-X First Edition: November 2002 www.ebookyes.com

  DEDICATED TO THE BIG D For the flight over that labyrinth of a Delta Don't fly too high – Don't fly too low –If only–

  ALSO BY BOSTON TERAN Never Count Out the Dead God Is a Bullet

  It is the Minotaur who conclusively justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

  — Jorge Luis Borges

  The pilgrim entered the cathedral… walked a short distance… and found himself at the entrance to a large labyrinth on the floor. Starting from the west, from the direction of the setting sun, the place of death, he walked through the labyrinth's winding pathways….

  — Helmut Jaskolski, The Labyrinth: Symbol of Fear, Rebirth, and Liberation

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank John Cunning ham of St. Martin's Minotaur for having faith. Kelley Ragland of St. Martin's Minotaur for keeping it all beautifully in perspective. Mari Evans of MacMillan for being smartly steady. And my agent, David Hale Smith, of DHS Literary, and Seth Robertson of DHS Literary.

  On a personal note: as always, to Deirdre Stephanie and the late great Brutarian… to Mz El… to G.G. and L.S.… to Harriett Bara who has made an art form out of cleaning up my act… to Janet Wade for her music clearance… and to the late Ralph J. Hallman, Chairman, Social Science Department, Pasadena City College, for his richly observed study of alienation and tragedy, Psychology of Literature.

  January 2001 After the Murders

  DANE RUDD APPROACHED Rio Vista out of an unending dusk. The sky was a distant and seething reef of branded reds. With just his battered leather suitcase and a name, Dane Rudd's whole life now rested in a set of eyes borrowed from the dead.

  The shadow of earlier times moved across the California landscape. Some believe life should be viewed as a sacred loan, and what we leave behind measures the meaning of our days. With that in mind Dane Rudd continued on through a purpling flat of miles but he also understood that within every act of charity may lie the heart of an executioner.

  * * *

  PAUL CARUSO was on hands and knees in the back of his hangar at the Rio Vista, California, Airport. He should have been fixing the fuel line on his Navion. He should have been at his restaurant helping the old lady with the shift close and serving bar. He should have been doing a lot of things, but what he was doing was trying to get at a six-week-old kitten shacked up inside the wall where a configuration of pipes led through to the outside. He was wearing a leather glove and pleading with the little bastard to "come on out" when a shadow moved across the open hangar door.

  He looked up. His gray hair and hammered down Roman nose were streaked with grease. Sunset came red hard through the open hangar door so that the man standing there seemed not much more than a forged silhouette.

  "Paul Caruso?"

  Caruso stood. The voice was unusually deep and raspy. "Can I help you?" Paul asked.

  "I was at the airport restaurant looking for a pilot to take me up to see the Delta, and the woman at the bar… your wife, I believe, said I should talk to you."

  Caruso came around the Navion to get a better view of the man. It turned out he was young, maybe twenty-five. He wore a faded leather coat and sunglasses with gray-black lenses and what little bit of eye Caruso could see behind them looked almost fluid. The young man glanced at the huge leather glove on Caruso's right hand.

  "A god damn kitten took to living in the wall. I been feed in' her milk, though I don't know why in Christ I'm wastin' the time. She's got this infection in her paw and I was trying to catch her and get her to a vet."

  To the young man that glove looked like something more suited for snagging a lion. "It appears you have a real man eater hiding there."

  Caruso's heavily pockmarked face spread out in a smile and a set of teeth that had seen way too much bad work on them broke through. "I got a Cessna outside I can take you up in. And I got time tomorrow after—"

  "I'd like to go up now, if possible."

  "It's almost sunset. We wouldn't have—"

  "But that's part of what I want to see. The sunset."

  Caruso slid off the glove, walked over to his workbench. He took a rag and got to cleaning away spots of grease that ran up his arm. All the while he watched this young man, who stood waiting with a kind of stoic grace, and never once moved.

  "Sunset, hunh?"

  "Mr. Caruso, for the last two years I have been legally… blind. I got my vision back thanks to a transplant, and that just recently. There's a lot I need to see."

  The young man's response left Paul unable to jumps tart the next moment of conversation so he reached for a cigarette. He slipped it into his mouth with a half filthy hand, then said, "What's your name?"

  "Rudd… Dane Rudd."

  Paul found a wooden match in his tool case. He struck it across the underbelly of that workbench and a sparkline of sulfur fell to the floor. "All right, Mr. Dane Rudd… let's go on up and chase that sunset."

  * * *

  DANE FOLLOWED Paul Caruso through the unwavering heat that came up from the tarmac. Among the tie-downs was a sea-plane. The Cessna was up on floats with castered nose gear and wheels. Dane looked the plane over. "Takes off from land or water?"

  "Either one," said Caruso. "Takeoffs and landings. I do some search and rescue. Mostly boater fuck-ups in the summer. And when the old lady and me need to get away we fly up to the lakes."

  As Paul began to undo the tie-down chains connected to the wing spar and tail he told Dane Rudd, "I can't stay up long. There's a memorial tonight I have to attend in Sacramento for a young man who—"

  "It wouldn't be the Taylor Greene memorial, would it?"

  Caruso just stood there, his expression candid disbelief. "Yeah, it would."

  Dane Rudd walked past him, then past the hot red painted letters along the Cessna's nose that read THE BIG D. He slid under the wing and came up beyond it. "I'm here for the same memorial."

  June 2000 Before the Murders

  Chapter One

  ON THE BUREAU by the window was William Reynolds' wallet and a gun. Life boned down to its tragic simplicity. His features in the motel room window formed a brotherhood of lines and cracks men in their late forties begin to have in common, when all the systematic codes they've built their lives around prove to be irreconcilable with living.

  He had always made it his business in these situations not to think about the confusion of sacrifice and family, not to dwell on the tenuous truce between happiness and honor. He closed his mind to the stomach-wrenching memories of a wife and child lost to him and focused instead on that stretch of Route 166 coming toward him out of a rugged California emptiness.

  * * *

  WHEN TOMMY Fenn's Super Cub cleared the Calientes his younger brother Shane worked up a twelve-gauge like some magic wand as if he caused the lights of Cayuma to break about two miles out. Shane yelled over the drone of the Piper's single propeller, "A little magic from the dooms linger!"

  Tommy nodded. The
y followed Route 166 for about another mile as it bore on toward town. Shane got that shotgun good and packed. "I hope this guy's alone."

  Tommy's voice was pitched for a fight, "I'll bet I can tell you what the fuck he's hoping."

  Shane's mouth moved in agreement. He kept pressing shells into the chamber then yelled again to his brother, "Maybe we should save one of these for Taylor!"

  "That pussy deserves a little taste of moral outrage."

  * * *

  AS HEADLIGHTS breached the distance the phantoms of William Reynolds' life disappeared. The vehicle was coming on fast but when it cleared the gas station lights William could see it was a semi hauling cattle.

  The metal truck swayed with the crosscut wind and that juggernaut of steel slatting banged and shuttered and the high-set monster eyes satellited past the motel and empty coffee shop and on toward Bakersfield, leaving nothing but a thin wake in the dust that had collected on the road and a growing silence.

  The road silence grew around and within him, but he remained on guard close to the corner of the window, peering from the dark into the dark. As time crept on moisture began to collect along the bone line above his eyebrows. It was that age-old testimony that you are never much beyond what might, and could, go wrong.

  In the provence of those minutes William found himself reaching for his cellular phone. As it rang he kept vigil over that moonlit run of ground from where this Taylor Greene might come. Then, he heard his voice, he heard himself say, "I called because I needed to talk to someone, but… but no one is there. And I just needed to say it… I'm more afraid of being alone, than of dying."

  * * *

  USING THE lights of the Buck horn Café and the motel behind it as markers Tommy banked the Piper hard to the south. Cayuma was a desolate patch of frontage that went about a hundred yards back from the highway. Beyond it were sage fields and ravines, then a brace of harshly sloping hills. Beyond the hills there were long stretches of recently furrowed ground and traces of flat hard sand where more than one son of a bitch had made a night landing for fun, or profit… or out of sheer desperation.

  The first line of scarred hill tips that the Super Cub cleared south of Cayuma killed all ground light and then Tommy began to nose her down. Before them was a long pool of night and earth. They had flown into this valley the day before, scoping out a strip where they might safely land and then get away unnoticed after the killing.

  The descent was quick. Their faces moon colored in the glass as the night and earth took on tones and shapes. Their features showed the perilous bravado of youth as the tires first scored ground that rose too quickly to meet them.

  Their buckled down images were a narrative of dire invincibility as the plane shuddered then lipped left as the tail rose and for one instant a sensation went through both brothers that they would tip over. But they held on with an alien intensity until the earth went soft, and the plane came to a quick and violent stop.

  * * *

  WILLIAM BEGAN to tire, and all those physical disagreements when a man has outrun his strength had begun to play havoc with his nervous system.

  Maybe the Greene kid wasn't coming. Maybe this was gonna turn out to be a no-show thanks to some mind-smearing second thoughts.

  If he could just get a couple of hours alone with him, William knew he could turn that young man into an emotional liquidation sale. He would have him spewing out everything from the monstrous secrets he might have hidden away to the most trivial memories.

  Then he was hit by a shotgun thought that made him turn on the light to find his cigarettes. What if someone had found out about the meeting?

  * * *

  TOMMY AND Shane did a ghost crawl under the barbed wire separating Cayuma from the sage backdrop that stretched all the way to the hills. They worked the dark to a lineup of Dumpsters not forty yards from the motel.

  It didn't take them long to make out which was Reynolds' cabin. There were only twelve. They were set back from the Buck horn in three rows of four. His was in the last row, and on the side farthest west. It sat a little away from the others, as if it had at one time been a storage shed or caretaker's room. From there any car coming off the highway, either east or west, and into the Buck horn lot could be watched.

  They had spotted Reynolds when he turned on the light for those few moments it took to find his cigarettes. The light was off now.

  The brothers stared at that red clap board shack the dust and sun had turned to the color of rust. They were both sitting on the same anxious question: What if Reynolds had broken his word to Taylor— and he wasn't alone?

  * * *

  LOOKING OUT the motel window William, for a moment, drifted on what might be called a thought, that had of late unmasked itself. He could see it there in the tired sorrow around the eyes. Could feel its deep bitters in the anonymous reaches of his soul. It was powerful and perplexing and simply this: Given some chance to remanufacture life, would he again stumble into the same mistakes like some—

  An explosion of light blew through the glass like a violent passion flower. The right side of his face felt as if it were engulfed in flames. He was rocked back into the stale, dark room. His reflexes became bursts of chaotic overdrive reaching for his weapon which eluded him.

  Across some great distance a door was blown open and from the black depths of the room came a shocking jolt that lifted him over a chair and into the bathroom where the cold tiles hit flush against him. He tried to crawl but every terrible burst of gunfire tore him apart until he could move no more, until he was just a piece of naked, raw flesh being destroyed.

  And then the firing stopped and he thought he heard boots on wood running, and chalk shrill screams, and voices, weak but human say— say— say what—

  Everything about him felt of blood and its terrible meaning began to engulf him in silence. It spread like some great channel of water until all that had been him, all that he could name and feel and see and remember, was gone.

  Chapter Two

  TAYLOR WAITED IN his little house that overlooked a lazy stretch of Disappointment Slough. Paralyzed by feelings of apprehension he sat at his desk before the living room window. The room was streaked with moonlight reflecting off the water. He stared into the waving shadows that seemed to bend with the slow-moving current.

  Taylor found himself again staring at the newspaper, the determination of some will drawing his pallid eyes to that single column in the Sacramento Bee:

  CAYUMA, CALIFORNIA— A Federal Reserve officer from the Los Angeles branch was murdered on Monday, shotgunned to death at a motel just east of town, authorities said.

  William Dean Reynolds had just begun a two-week vacation and was on his way to visit friends in Morro Bay. Authorities believe the 51-year-old investigating agent was the victim of an attempted robbery, but are looking into the possibility this homicide may be connected to past or recent investigations—

  Taylor couldn't read on. He closed his eyes and prayed Reynolds had kept his word and told no one else about their meeting. Fear held tightly around Taylor's throat. He looked at the near corner of his desk, at the picture of his father, with his dark movie theater looks and faulted powers.

  For certain men, taking measure of another is a fixed science. They move through the labyrinthine turns our characters take with a soldier's steady march till they reach the spot where life is compromised. Taylor had always wondered if he was one of those men who could become victim to a threat, who would fall from the cliffs of courage to his death, thanks to a few well-placed words.

  How easy it had been for Charles to compromise him. He'd done it right there at the bank, with its silent lovely sunlight and those expensive celebrity guitars that Charles collected, lining the walls of his office like victory shields. Charles was a perfect part of the dream that enemies are made from. As much as Taylor's father was.

  Taylor had looked at Essie's picture on the far corner of Charles' desk. That's all Charles really needed. He'd had someon
e break into the house, probably one of the Fenn Brothers, and steal the photo.

  Charles stood, using as backdrop a ground-to-ceiling plate glass window where Taylor could see boats moving up the Sacramento toward the channel ways of the Delta. He stood and the light around his back from the window obscured his face, but not the photo he took from a drawer and placed on the desk in the tide of his rising shadow as he'd said to Taylor: "Any calls for help are made from here."

  Taylor told himself he was now unfit for human consumption. He'd left his conscience at the door, like an umbrella or a pair of shoes, to be retrieved as needed. That such a transparent idea should be so humanly popular turned his stomach. Later, he should have remembered, always left the party of your life long before you knew it.

  Taylor was twenty-six years old. Because of what he'd tried and failed, because he was afraid they would kill Essie, he would be twenty-six forever. His life would be a perfect metaphor to the notion of all that laundered money can buy.

  Tall willows on the shore brushed against the windy California sky as a thought climbed out of a small hole in Taylor's consciousness. Could he somehow be born again, in the quiet safety of somewhere else, where the rope of his past did not get to strangle him.

  From trickery to truth, and back again, as the magicians say. He could take money, leave and change his name. Travel and change it again. Dissolve and materialize through a succession of beings until he was lost in some dreamy, distant reality.

  Then his breathing went stiff as he remembered reading about those people who disappeared only to turn up years later, to be discovered with new names but the same old lives.

  What difference? He was now a futile gesture entrusted to a body. He thought about killing himself. From his desk drawer he took a plastic vitamin case. He opened it. There were enough Percodan and Valium to gamble on.

  He could hear a boat coming up the slough. The engine had a lazy, smooth cadence but it frightened him nonetheless, until he heard laughing on board and saw the reefy outline of partyers on the lamplit deck of a cabin cruiser moving up the channel toward Bishop's Cut.