The Prince Of Deadly Weapons Read online

  Dane tried to link together those dizzy turns of water. He flipped on his wipers. They did little more than change dust into dirty motes of wet mud.

  One glance told Dane Essie was right. The slough would start to pull away from the road in a mere hundred yards. The day boat leaned starboard and left a surge of white foam. Shane's shirt blew wildly outward.

  Through a snapping vignette of open slough where the trees fell away Dane rode the shoulder as best he could and tried to read the name painted on the transom of that cruiser as it cut into the charcoal distance.

  Rainspots dotted the map Essie held in place against the wind as she told him, "Walnut Grove Road will turn into Route 13. You take 13 north."

  He clipped a look at his gas gauge. The gas tank was not on empty, it was below empty.

  "The Locke Bridge crosses over the Canal Cut. If they come that way you'll—"

  He cut her off, "And if they go the other way?"

  Her voice flatlined. "Then we've lost them."

  * * *

  NATHAN, ARE you all right?"

  Watching the tape of that tribute had brought back the gray hours of his life. A dark graph of memories that rose from duty and honor to the vile and unsavory which he shipped through without the least shame.

  "My life is a pretty soiled record."

  Ivy put an arm around his shoulder and neck to comfort him.

  "Tell me I'm not selfish for going on."

  "You'd be selfish if you did not."

  He tried to get fixed on what he was working toward. Then it occurred to him Essie had been gone over half an hour. "Essie wasn't feeling well. Check on her, would you?"

  * * *

  LIGHTNING AGAIN cut apart the distance as Dane stood on the bridge just below Locke looking down into the heart of the Cross Canal. From tide to sky that cut of water was overlapping shades of overcast that bent and distorted perspective except for a spindle thin thousand-foot television tower that rose like a compass into the rained-out distance.

  In the southeast there was thunder. A broad and deepening burst sounded as it moved north over Discovery Bay that Dane could hear through the cellular before it struck the world above him.

  He squinted through wet eyes. "If they come this way, all right. But if they don't, there has to be a way to follow them."

  She held the soaked map to the hood and forcibly pointed her finger at the impossibleness of it, as if he could see and understand. "A mile up, Snodgrass breaks off into Lost Slough and The Meadows. There's no roads. None. And you can't go where there's no roads."

  "Why not?" he said. "People do it all the time."

  She explained to him about the land east of Locke which led to the junction of Lost Slough and The Meadows. He looked through the bridge spans to see for himself. The ground was as she had said, an uncharted overgrown spanse. An impractical emptiness of high weeds and brush. Of vined-over trees and marsh land, whose only real marker was the elevated track bed of the SPRR.

  Yes, he thought, yes. People do this all the time. There's a history of running roads that don't exist. Of running roads that won't, can't take us where we need, want, must go. It's what breeds conjurors and con men. What drives and devours, defines and redefines our being. It puts our flaws on such perfect display and leaves us with miracles and madness. It's what justifies the terrible and the meaningful and brings us closer to death and life, to necessity and loss, in the same breath. The last as first, the first as last.

  * * *

  FROM THE yacht club lobby Ivy looked out into the wet parking lot and spotted the bewildering scenario of Essie leaning over the hood of her Futura and vehemently talking on a cellular while she tried to keep the slanted rain off her face.

  * * *

  RIGHT AS she was repeating, "There's no road th—" he saw the day boat. It was a faint few seconds with its bow speared upward slightly against the tide.

  "They're going the other way."

  He looked again through the bridge spans toward that ground east of Locke. Behind him a car kicked out wheels of water as it sped past.

  "The tracks go through, don't they?"

  "Yes but—"

  "They cross the slough?"

  "Yes, at the junction of—"

  * * *

  DANE DIDN'T know how far he'd get but he was going to try and find those tracks and follow them if he couldn't drive right up on them.

  He sped into Locke, which was not just another bare four blocks of Delta waterside, but the only town in America built by the Chinese. It was a living anachronism, an ongoing monument of western tongue and groove or straightboard construction.

  He sped down Levee Road through this haunting piece of rain-shrouded history, past lonely parked cars, past a wet tourist trying to get in a few snapshots of Main Street before he moved on.

  The road curved past wooden sidewalks and false fronts with the dim lettering of forgotten lives. At Key Street it curved again past tiny homes with vegetable gardens. The tension rode his stomach like a stone as the asphalt turned to gravel turned to rocky mud, past sagging porches, past dogs that chased him from the far side of wire fences barking wildly, past ratty vacant lots, past dunes of stacked garbage.

  He'd been turned around and turned again and he was lost. Essie told him, she told him to look for that thousand-foot-tall television tower as a point to set his bearing. To keep it just on the back of his right shoulder.

  Through the grimy windshield he found the tower against a thinly gray sky. But it was straight ahead. He came to a hard mud-slapping stop. Out the driver's window there appeared to be a field of chest-high weeds that softly rose a half mile out.

  There were few trees to block his way. He righted the pickup. As he down shifted the lightning bolt on his shoulder flexed and using that steel spire as a compass needle he took off.

  He drove gun sight straight. The weeds bent and folded as he blew through them. His tail end slapped bottom. He braced himself. Shapes appeared and disappeared around him. The ground rose, the ground fell. A wrecked car rusting silently faced out of the oncoming weeds dead ahead like some vicious apparition ready to tear through him and he had to swerve hard.

  The ground rose again, it fell again. The truck pitched and tilted like a drunk. He could hear the shocks crying out and his teeth lockjawed.

  * * *

  ESSIE—"

  She pitched around at hearing Ivy's voice behind her. Her face stared out from beneath an umbrella. "What is going on?"

  The ground sloped upwards at a sharp angle before Dane's truck and the weeds peeled away leaving sky.

  "Essie, why were you yelling like that?"

  The engine stalled. Dane floored the gas pedal. The engine kicked over. He pumped and pumped with his boot and tried to press the pickup on using the palm of his hand against the steering wheel but it was flat-out dead.

  Essie's heart was pounding as Ivy asked, "Who are you yelling at?" Her tone seemed to demand an answer. Her face was distorted, concerned.

  The pickup was out of gas. Signed, sealed and certified DOA in the heart of God's country. It began to slide back down the hill until Dane jammed on the emergency brake.

  "I was talking to Dane," said Essie, pointing to her cellular.

  He fought his way on foot up through yards of rain slick weeds and shapeless undergrowth.

  "He needed directions." Ivy took a firm step forward, her eyes moving from the phone to the map to Essie. "He was lost."

  Dane reached the hilltop.

  Essie knew she sounded nervous. "That's why the map."

  The tracks moved like a fixed line through the marsh land before him.

  "I'm not questioning you. It's just… you sounded so angry, frightened."

  He ran the tracks trying to use the ties.

  "He just couldn't hear me so well."

  His boots caught gravel. His ankle bent. He stumbled.

  As Essie spoke into the cellular Ivy took a step closer. "Dane?"

  The gray a
bove him again was broken apart by lightning.

  "Dane?"

  The trees along the tracks were a wild and violent fanfare.

  All Essie got was silence.

  He could see the bridge now. Its black steel outline a doorway to the horizon.

  "I must have lost him."

  Dane's lungs grasped for air.

  Ivy tucked in alongside Essie now. Face to face, was she being read?

  He flashed on what it must have been like for Essie that night.

  "Nathan said you weren't feeling well."

  Having to swim the dark of Disappointment Slough only to find death.

  "I wasn't. I'm not—"

  Spent, he sagged into the slick wet steel and held on.

  Ivy reached for the map. "You better come in, then call him again."

  From the lee side of the bridge he looked out to where the sloughs converged.

  Do nothing, Essie thought, to arouse suspicion. Nothing. He'll have to understand.

  The junction was a deeply wooded Eden of silence. Of still waters pocked by rain.

  Ivy's face was coolly affectionate. "Get under my umbrella."

  He listened for a boat as he moved stealthily out across the bridge staying as low as he could.

  Side by side they walked back. Essie felt Ivy's arm against her own and it disgusted her.

  Thunder rolled in from the distance like a great hood of terror, then he caught sight of something on the water at the entrance to Lost Slough.

  Essie looked down at the map now in Ivy's hand. It was a dripping, dangled mass.

  The last bits of foam sat like curdled milk on the water's surface. A boat had left its mark but was it their—

  * * *

  THE GROUND beneath him began to shake and as the thunder died away Dane heard it coming out of the distance. Its sheer power hurtling toward him.

  He stood. He saw the locomotive. Its black speeding force eating up the shadows. There was no time to get off the bridge. None to even jump. It was all he could do to press back against the steel, grip a truss and hope and when that train surged onto the bridge everything shook in a way he had never imagined possible. He felt it down within the well of him.

  The engine horn blew and he was sure his eardrums would be shattered. He went to close his eyes, but didn't. He wanted to see. To see.

  The train was just inches from his face. It was a blur of smeared colors and blades of light. It felt like something living whose velocity and power could just pull you in and sweep you from the earth.

  The air it drove at him was ferocious cold, he could almost feel its steel on his skin. The train spit gravel and water and filth from its wheels that he could taste. And he could smell the wet heavily tarred ties. His senses were like fine sharp knives.

  Do you put the brake on your dreams, he thought, if you dream of anything? Is who you really are what you want to be left with? He thought of all the truths and lies he'd told and heard. What people will do for justice and money, for greatness and greed is no different. The con man and the honest man suffer in the end the same, for they are forever in jeopardy from themselves as well as others.

  He needed to remember why he was here.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  IN COURTROOM 412 Flesh watched Roy manhandle a defendant who had been indicted for armed robbery. During the hour-long confrontation Roy stood, his questions coming rapid-fire from memory.

  The level of self-punishment for pride that Roy Pinter rose to in making a case never ceased to amaze Flesh. She had seen him stand on those metal crutches till the pits of his arms bled.

  There is in the human condition such defiant nobility as well as a troubling absurdity that seem to walk in each other's shadows, and more paradoxically Flesh had begun to feel of late, they were one and the same.

  Roy whispered to her during a break. "Meet me in my office. I have something you need to see."

  * * *

  ESSIE HURRIED past Nathan's office, her hair streaked with wet, and then Ivy entered carrying that map which was now a useless mass.

  In a bathroom stall Essie listened to Dane's cellular ring busy and she whispered, "Where are you?"

  * * *

  AS FLESH poured coffee Roy said, "Rudd doesn't have a valid California driver's license."

  She reached for a wooden stirrer.

  "He doesn't now… he never did."

  She licked the stirrer dry. She turned. "He was living in New York a long time."

  "He doesn't have a valid New York driver's license."

  She walked to Roy's desk and sat opposite him.

  "He doesn't now… he never did."

  She sipped coffee then said, "Maybe we should run right out and arrest him."

  "Maybe there's more."

  From just above the brim of that coffee cup she eyed him.

  "No Dane Rudd ever graduated from Harvard."

  She waited.

  "No Dane Rudd was ever registered at Harvard."

  And waited.

  "He didn't graduate from Berkeley either."

  She put the cup down.

  "And the only Dane Rudd that was ever registered at Berkeley was back in '68. And that couldn't be him. No matter how clever he is."

  She watched Roy begin to play with his ponytail in that way he had when he was anxious and aggressive.

  "Just to set the record straight, Roy. Dane never said he went to Harvard or Berkeley."

  "He most certainly did."

  "Sorry, darling, lover, maniac, you were listening with your ego and not with your ears."

  "He said—"

  "He said he got scholarships to 'Harvard and Berkeley–type schools.'"

  "The only people who talk like that are bullshit artists."

  "And certain successful prosecutors."

  "I think he's pulling some kind of scam."

  "I don't like wasting goodwill chasing bad ideas, so if you don't mind I'm going back to my office where a real workload is waiting for me."

  She was about to stand when he said, "I have more I want you to hear."

  She waited. Sat back. Reluctantly she would give him the benefit of a few more minutes.

  He reached down and opened a desk drawer. From it he took a file folder. As he laid it on the desk Flesh wanted to know in no uncertain terms, "What have you been doing?"

  He opened the file. "I have been very low-key. I haven't used this office in any official way."

  "Roy, you're trying to build a name for yourself to get into politics. We don't need any flagrant fouls right now."

  "I say Rudd is pulling some kind of scam."

  "Please."

  "Trying to anyway."

  "No need to check your life contract. I can see the clause dealing with the idiocy of male pride is still in full force and effect."

  "This is not about pride… well, professional pride maybe." He opened the file. "The truck Rudd's driving—"

  "That little black piece of shit."

  "It doesn't belong to him."

  "In a junk pile is where it belongs with all the toxic waste collecting in your head."

  "The truck belongs to a William Singleton, with an address in San Luis Obispo."

  "Terrible to have a friend or two."

  Roy took a thin sheaf of clipped-together pages and handed them to Flesh. "Mr. Singleton has quite a rap sheet."

  Reluctantly she took the pages, reluctantly she began to read. "Disturbing the peace… vandalism… hollering and shouting… curfew laws broken… trespassing… picketing…" Her eyes got needle thin as she looked at Roy. "Picketing…?" He stopped playing with his ponytail. "This is all 415 penal code shit."

  She flipped to another page. "There's no jail time…" She flipped to another page. "The judges always seem to have given him probation." She held the pages up. "This is a fuckin' social activist's rap sheet, and you know it."

  "He broke the law."

  "He's not Dane Rudd."

  "He's a friend of Rudd's."
/>
  "Guilt by association now?"

  "Call it whatever you want. But this is about a lawbreaker with a rap sheet. And if you keep reading you'll see there's also a marijuana possession charge."

  "Marijuana possession. Well, Happy Birthday. I think the law is at its best, in this case, when it lays low. Don't you?"

  "Rudd's got some kind of game going. Otherwise he wouldn't be such a fraud and a liar. All his information wouldn't come out in such vague-faced snippets."

  "I don't want to break in on your little rant," she said. "But—"

  "Listen, I'm going through all this because I'm concerned about Nathan."

  "You're concerned about Roy Pinter. Pinter's personal machismo."

  "Mr. Well Spoken is a bullshit artist." Roy scratched his fingers together holding his hand in the air just above his eyes. "This is what he's after."

  Flesh mimicked Roy with her most mean spirited stare.

  "Here's what I think," he said. "Rudd got into trouble somewhere. This is why he skirts the information about himself. He's got shady friends. Maybe they're druggies besides radicals. He needs money. Wants money. He sees a scam right in front of his eyes. A way to play Nathan, Essie. To endear himself to people with money. Money is why he's hanging around."

  "He probably got into trouble?"

  "Yeah."

  "Like going blind?"

  "I haven't made any calls about that yet to the hospital and eye banks."

  "Don't even go there. 'Cause if you do and word gets back to Nathan or Rudd you will come across like some vile idiot unfit for any public office. And then, you will have to deal with me."

  "I've been low-key."

  Her mean spirited stare became something so much darker, so much more demanding that he do as she say or else, he backed off. "I'm not gonna fuck us," he said.

  She shook her head in fatigued despair. She stared out at the window. The rain spotted the glass and above the roof tops lightning pricked the heavens. It was all just a silent play, a moment of visual music that spoke of eternals. Her mind wandered. Roy's flaws were suddenly not so cute and had to be checked. "What is it, Roy? Really?"