The Prince Of Deadly Weapons Read online

She leaned forward. "Do people like him just infuriate you on some primal level? Is it because Nathan likes him? Essie? Is it because that first night he questioned you on Taylor's murder?"

  "Suicide."

  "Is it because he's decent? That he's willing to try and give something back for the good that was given him?" Her stare became much more deeply impassioned. "Or is it that you just don't believe people act out of goodness. That they're just not capable of such feelings and can direct their lives accordingly?"

  "In one short, blunt, honest, cynical, logical, straightforward word… no."

  Her long, lean body wilted.

  "People are selfish not selfless. People are hidden motives, not honest motives. They do good for one reason, and that reason is themselves. They want power, they want money. They are so greedy they want both. More often than not they will lie, even when the truth sounds better. They will lie because that is who they are and they are afraid they will lose the edge in getting. Dane Rudd is just one more of those."

  "Talk is sometimes such air pollution."

  "Why has everything Rudd told us about himself turned out to be a couple of shades untrue?"

  "I'm getting out of here on the chance that what you feel is like some airborne virus I could catch."

  "Because he has an agenda. And if he told the truth about himself, it would get in the way of that—"

  She cut him off. "All this says a lot more about Roy Pinter's agenda than it does about Dane Rudd's."

  She started for the door.

  He began to pull at his ponytail. He wanted to tell her that he intended to prove her wrong and put it up her ass when he did. But he knew better than to say it.

  Flesh stopped at the door. Turned. She concocted a mean little smile from her best features. "It's my opinion the cock is the worst enemy the world has ever known."

  Chapter Thirty

  ESSIE WOULD NOT die waiting, so she added one more lie to the day telling Nathan Dane's truck had broken down and she needed to pick him up.

  She pushed that Futura hard through a slowing rain toward Locke. She kept speed-dialing Dane's cellular but the line remained eerily busy.

  Troubling ghosts were rampant inside her. The speedometer rose at the violence that she imagined had overtaken him. She cared too much to be careless and foolish. The practical thing to do would be to call for help. Call Roy and explain.

  She speed-dialed Roy's number but when it came time to press SEND, she could not. She cared too much to be careless, yes… she cared too much to be foolish, yes… but even so, at a more secret heart core level she felt making that call would be an act of betrayal.

  * * *

  SEARCHING SLOWLY Essie rode the streets of Locke to the spot she last talked to Dane. The rain had stopped, the asphalt turned to dirt. She stepped from the Futura and looked up at the television tower she'd told him to use as a guide mark spiring above the distance.

  She tried to call him again as she lined up that tower on her right shoulder and looked out into the direction of those acres of untamed brush. A busy signal was all she got for the effort.

  She leaned back against her car. She frowned and plotted at the possibility the ugly and unthinkable had happened. And Nathan, by him she felt utterly victimized, utterly vandalized. Was he just a fiction who had pawned her? Were her affections and allegiance and sympathies just so much maid service for his greedy, and in this case, nefarious self-interests?

  Had he worked her as only a father could do, as a surrogate of authority, as someone feigning generosity and kindness? And what about Taylor? How had he been used?

  A sudden barrage of crows drove skyward from that unkempt field of undergrowth and caught her eye. As she followed their black tracer mark across the high trees she saw Dane.

  Bits of sunlight were just starting to break through the gray. He was walking down a rutted pathway toward her carrying a gas can. His rough shape framed by shanty porches and overhanging drenched branches. He was so utterly matter-of-fact in the way he maneuvered pools of slick-faced road mud and waved, so utterly everyday in nodding to her as if nothing at all of consequence had happened.

  A moment washed through her of him that night on the deck of the river boat in the dark world of Nathan's shadow and she knew. She knew as the crows swooped and rose where he walked among their fleeting caws like the cry of angels in the afterglow of some brandished dream. She could not see his clear-cut face, but she knew nonetheless.

  They reached each other at the remains of a wooden white roadside fence. "I thought you might be—"

  "I ran out of road," he said. "Then I ran out of gas. After that I just plain ran out."

  "You're all right, though?" she asked.

  "I would have called you but I dropped the phone somewhere. Maybe it's in the truck, I don't know."

  "It doesn't matter."

  "At the gas station I tried to get you."

  "It doesn't matter. You're all right."

  In the rise and fall of human emotion, in the bewildering measure of its beauty, the wind shook raindrops from the leaves all about them, and she embraced him.

  They stood together like that and he felt her head against his chest and it frightened him, knowing who he was and what he'd agreed to, to save himself from prison.

  She could feel his heart as she stared at the ground and watched the great tree shadows around them plume and scatter like the rustling motion of some rousing crowd.

  "I caught where they went," he said, "and I saw them come back."

  He could have been any boy, in any town, at any time. And she could have been any girl. To her the moment was that clear and simple in its voice to voice silence.

  "I was very scared," she said. "Very scared."

  He brushed at the wet in her hair with his hand to tell her he understood. And then he thought, he should not even have done that.

  "You're bleeding," she said.

  He looked down. His T-shirt sleeve had been cut through and without letting him go she pulled the sleeve up and he saw the lightning bolt on his arm had been scored by something rusted and nasty.

  * * *

  AL THE Wop's was a historic saloon and steakhouse on the "street of overhanging porches" in the town of Locke. Of course, thanks to the self-serving national penchant for political correctness, it was now referred to by its more boring proffer—"Al's Place."

  The inside walls were lined with antique signs telling you what had been and there were enough gewgaws for even the most trivially driven minds. But the centerpiece of Al's was the twenty-foot ceiling. What really brought in the sightseers was that carpet of dollar bills stuck there. A quarter million George Washingtons, the most recent tally said, looked down on you from behind that wooden stare.

  There was also a long, dense mahogany bar and this was where Essie and Dane sat hunched together like conspirators or lovers.

  Between their beers Dane mapped out on a napkin in blue pen the railroad tracks he had followed, the bridge over one slough he finally crossed. "The boat," he said, tracing another slough that veered to the northeast, "went there."

  "Lost Slough."

  "What's in Lost Slough?"

  She took the pen for another napkin and started to draw. Just abaft from the bar steaks were being grilled. There were pockets of laughter and conversation so when she spoke it was in an intense whisper with her mouth up near his cheek and ear. "It's a six-mile loop," she said, "of turns and tule islands… and more tule islands and turns. It's narrows that stream off into heavily wooded nothing. Only a small craft, or one with a shallow draw can navigate most of it."

  He watched, he thought. He took the pen back. She was practically on his shoulder now. His black hair, still wet, shined. As did his eyes.

  "When I finally crossed the bridge, I walked. Maybe twenty minutes later I heard a boat coming. I hid in the reeds." He drew parallel lines extending the slough that ran under the bridge to the northwest. "It was them. Only a fourth man was on the boat now. He w
ore a suit. Had a moustache. He was short and heavy-set."

  "They picked someone up in Lost Slough."

  "Yes."

  "He wasn't on the boat back at Giustis?"

  "Not that I saw." Dane ran an arrow up that slough he had just extended. "That's where they went."

  "The Meadows."

  "What's that?"

  "It's a long channel that veers back toward Locke. The water is as calm as a lake. Great place for boaters. The shore property is private but people tie up there anyway. It's all very easy and free so you'd think you're back in the nineteenth century. But," she took the pen from him and began to extend those twin lines for the slough he'd drawn downwards, then curled them around like the backwards upside-down top of a question mark, "all the way back in, where the channel narrows and ends"— she marked the spot in ink—"the Boyz have a place."

  He looked at Essie and in the small bit of half darkness they shared all that talk around them seemed a trivial season long.

  "Where do we go from here?" she said.

  He did not answer. He eased around her and reached for another napkin.

  She watched him as he began to write. Bits of feeling began to take force in her body. When he was done he slid the napkin toward her. In simple capital letters was the word PLYMOUTH and balanced appropriately underneath it in fancy script was the word ROC.

  "What's this?"

  "That is what was painted in red on the back of their boat today."

  She held the napkin and Dane came around on his barstool with beer in hand. He blotted his shoulder with another napkin where the blood was drying. He leaned back and looked up at that dollar bill sky of a ceiling. "So, that's what the heavens look like." He drank down some beer. Tossed aside the blood spotted napkin. "Think of the power one simple wooden match would have in the right hand."

  "How do we deal with all this… with Nathan?"

  He did not answer, his attention was firmly on that ceiling, and only finally did he say, "Gives one pause to hope, doesn't it?"

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THEY STEPPED OUT into the street where the sunlight reflected up off ground puddles and mud flecked windshields. They walked side by side up that tunnel of overhanging balconies tilting on aged stilts. Their boots clopped and echoed on the plank sidewalk.

  "Nathan is a liar," said Essie. There was a profane surety to the tone of her pronouncement. "He's a liar and a money launderer. And no telling how much more of himself he's sold out."

  Dane wondered how many people he'd exploited said the very same thing, the very same way about him. "Yes," said Dane, "I believe you have described him very well."

  They reached the corner and the sky opened before them on that narrow street. The few clouds left were bits of gray flaw in an altogether overwhelming stretch of blue cloth.

  They walked on toward where they had left the cars. On through this narrow streeted and unadorned "Chinese town." They walked in silence through deep stretches of shadow cut with light and past storefront windows that had been painted in to keep out prying eyes.

  "How do you feel," Dane asked, "inside? About what's happened."

  She stopped and looked at him and as she did she caught sight of herself on the wavering glass of a painted-in storefront window. Hers was a compressed portrait of hate.

  "That's how I feel," she said, pointing.

  His eyes came around to find her reflected stare looking out from blackness.

  "And I feel," she said, "as if my legitimacy as a human being has been defiled."

  "Everything of and about you bought and sold, right?"

  "Exactly right."

  "And the remains divided."

  "Exactly."

  "And you can understand why people put a brake on their dreams, if they have any dreams at all after the soul-shredders cut a few good decades out of them."

  "I can."

  "And there's no real virtue in values 'cause the gods come and go like presidents—"

  "Faster."

  "— and lies abound, and appear so well-packaged, so commercial-proof, as to defy your scrutiny."

  "Fuckin' right," she said.

  "And you say to yourself, why fight? Why think? Why care? Why try? Why vote? Why complain? Why run? Why be at all?"

  She began to tremble.

  "So, what are the alternatives left to us?" he asked. "Do we cop out… rot out… burn out… or just die out?"

  Her chest held and held as if daring her to breathe. Her stare on painted black bared down back at her with pinched eyelids above wide eyes. This feeling, was it a forewarning or just the fundamental law of the incomprehensible making itself known?

  She looked down at the napkin she still held in her hand and on which Dane had written PLYMOUTH ROC. A thought slipped through the anger and uncertainties. Am I to become another spiritual tragedy?

  "What?" he asked.

  It was as if Dane had half heard her thoughts. The sunlight had brought out the tourists with cameras and Essie avoided their glances at all costs.

  "What?" he again asked.

  She started up the street. He followed as she folded the napkin and found a safe spot for it in her purse. They took an alley between buildings that fed into a steep plank stairwell. This led to River Road, which itself was the top of the levee that held back the big river, the Sacramento.

  This is where their cars were parked, and while they smoked leaning against the hood of his Rampage they looked back silently at the town of Locke as it descended into a short fall of land below the level of the river.

  "What were you thinking back there," said Dane, "on the street? I saw something in your face."

  She stared at the wooden buildings. They were stained dark from the rain and now, with the heat of the coming sun, steam rose from the wet wood so Locke appeared like some smoldering apparition from the halcyon days of our history.

  "I wasn't thinking… I was feeling what you said, and it frightened me with its accuracy."

  Watchingher Dane became painfully aware of a feeling that was moving against him. He wanted to hold Essie. To somehow, some way take on what he saw in her face so she would not be frightened. But he held himself back.

  In the yards and fields crows picked at the rains oft western soil, and when the wind blew they rose in swift flocks to the corrugated roofs of long-since joss houses and opium dens, of fan tan parlors and pauper hotels where they watched and waited like some telling omen of time.

  "The town looks like it still holds mysteries, doesn't it?" said Dane.

  "We know now Taylor was killed. And we know now why."

  "Do we?"

  "He found out what we found out. And either the fuckin' Boyz… or Charles Gill… or that man on the boat… the General… maybe even Nathan… had a hand in what I have said since the beginning. What I have felt since the beginning. What I knew since the beginning."

  "The town does look like it still holds mysteries."

  "Are you listening to me?"

  "More than that."

  "And I will tell you something else. I know now why Taylor was so unhappy that last week. And I know now why he never opened up to me. He meant to keep me safe. I'm sure of it. That's how he was. He would rather suffer than have you suffer."

  That, Dane could clearly understand.

  She turned and looked across the hood of that pickup out at the Sacramento. There were boats on the river now and they shone in the sun and the wake from their outboards looked like white spun gold. She turned again as boys with bikes sped past then took the corner of River Road on skidding mud spun tires.

  A waking jealousy made her say, "I wish I was twenty-five without all the baggage." She tossed down her cigarette then dug it under her boot heel. "But I'm not, am I?"

  "I should have taken the box," he said.

  She was not sure she heard him right.

  "What could they have done if I just drove away? If I just took the box and simply drove away." He turned to her. "If we just took
it."

  She had heard him right. And there was not a touch of ambiguity or reticence in his voice, or in his stare.

  "It's too late now, of course. But there will be a next time. This is what they do."

  "Why are you talking like this?"

  "We could be ready. Waiting with a plan."

  "Are you trying to tempt me?"

  "They used you, right? And they're using me, right?"

  "Is that what this is?"

  "Maybe I am trying to tempt you. Maybe I am trying to tempt myself. You know, temptation is a good thing. And I should know. I did temptation, and it did me. Yes, temptation is a good thing. It strikes at boundaries. It contrasts priorities. It draws that infamous line in the sand."

  He looked down at those corrugated roof tops where the steam rose like some testimony of phantom gestures. Then he turned to Essie, his face an underplayed smile. "Yeah, I may be trying to tempt you. But maybe, I'm just trying to clean up the rough edges on a little personal history."

  A wrinkle broke above her eyes. "I wouldn't," she said. "Not ever."

  "Good," he said. "Because we have to be sure of who we are. And you shouldn't be surprised now, not now, with all you've seen, how fragile your being 'sure' can be."

  "I hear you."

  "I'm going to ask for your trust on something, so I have to know what it is you want."

  She was going to tell him she wanted to be strong enough to define her own place in the future. But it was more than just that driving her. It was part judgment, part pain. There was rebellion and malfeasance inside her. She knew, she knew.

  And so Essie began to explain herself by saying, "I'm standing on a subway platform and the express goes by." Her eyes were quietly possessed. "Someone on that train throws chemicals in my face and I can feel my eyes burning… fuck, I want what you want."

  Dane found himself suddenly reaching out and putting a hand on Essie's face. His fingers climbed and combed through the hair at the nape of her neck. He pulled her toward him and her face slipped into the turn where his throat and shoulder met. Her breath was warm and gentle. His eyes closed.

  For a moment she again felt he was just a boy and she was just a girl and there were no black gardens to walk through where all of life's traps lay hidden.