The Prince Of Deadly Weapons Page 21

  Shane sloshed the inside of his mouth with beer as carefully as possible then spit the bloody residue on the asphalt. He stiffly looked up at Dane and daubed at his wounds using a rag that had also been wet down with beer. He winced at the pain. "You enjoyed watchin' it, didn't you?"

  Dane stood in certain silence knowing that would make Shane all the more angry.

  Nathan returned within half an hour. He was controlled, absorbed. A true hazard come to life. "You're gonna stay with the plane," he told Shane. "If we're not back by morning, leave."

  "It wasn't us. I swear it."

  Nathan took hold of Shane's shirt and dragged him from the cockpit doorway. Nathan pulled out the carryall. "You can go back to the bars, or the work farm, or the food stamp line. I don't give a crap. But you're done."

  Nathan motioned for Dane to follow him. As they walked off Shane flung the wet rag at the ground. "It wasn't us!" he yelled.

  "I got a friend," Nathan said to Dane, "who's setting us up with a taildragger I'll fly. He's also gonna soup up some passports for when we cross. 'Cause I have no intention of using the real ones for this."

  Dane followed him toward a hangar shed. He did not speak. Nathan stopped, Dane stopped. Nearby a double prop had begun to turn. The rotor sound growling louder with each moment. Nathan stared at Dane as if he were trying to discover something locked away inside the boy.

  "Am I still safe with you?" asked Nathan.

  "Shouldn't you be?"

  Dane could see the turmoil working at Nathan's sudden tailored control, but he rode the line between self-confidence and defiance. "Well, answer me, Nathan. Or aren't I safe with you now?"

  Nathan threw back, "Shouldn't you be?"

  * * *

  ESSIE SAT at the edge of the garage where she had that first time with Dane. The door was open. Dust filled the light across the invoice she'd finally found after hours of painstaking page by page by page.

  The antique piece had cost twenty-seven hundred dollars. It had been delivered to TG IMPORTING, 1100 Rio Vista Road, California, from ROGERS, OLSON AND CARTER, 80 Plymouth Cove, San Raphael, California.

  Why should a twenty-seven-hundred-dollar antique find its way to a Dumpster in back of the airport just days after it was delivered? The sky had darkened since she entered the garage. A light rain fell. The ground dust was spotted with wet droppings. The concrete began to smell of the changes that come with a storm.

  She absorbed the image of the page wondering if, how, all things connected.

  Words bring with them their own phantoms. They touch us in ways we don't know. They talk to us even as our mind is somewhere else. Then it struck her. Rogers, Olson and Carter. ROC. With a Plymouth Cove address.

  The rain drove at the Falcon windows, and the passing cars on the freeway kicked out flumes of water that Essie's wipers could hardly handle.

  She'd thought about waiting for Dane to return, but waiting would be to deny her own identity. It would acknowledge she felt the unknown or the inconceivable had power over her. She understood, she needed to be able to defend her place in the future or what would be left for her but to complain and brood in dark rooms. To condemn the world from that closed off part of the self. Yet her hands around the steering wheel were white grips and there was a threatful pounding in her head.

  On her cellular she again called the number for Rogers, Olson and Carter. Again she listened to a recorded voice say, "This is Mr. Rogers of Rogers, Olson and Carter. No one is here now to take your message—"

  She needed to see, to see would tell her something, but what she didn't know. She crossed the San Raphael Bridge in a slip-stream of rush-hour cars. Along the bay the water crested in white huffs to the walls of San Quentin on the far shore. And to the south, the barely discernible buildings of San Francisco looked like metallic shields against a warning gray sky.

  With all that much world around her she felt smaller and more alone than ever and she cranked open the windows just enough to let in the cold wet air.

  Her street map led her from Spinnaker to Catalina to Plymouth Cove. This was the Marin County of decades-old courtyard apartments and summer-style waterside shacks that had survived long enough to reap the glories of gentrification

  Plymouth Cove was no different. It was a short thread of a street and the address Essie searched for was the last house on the north side. Small, white stucco, set back behind a throw line of manzanitas, it was eminently unassuming.

  Essie parked beside a low stone wall that ended the cove. Beyond it was an enclosed lagoon and beyond that the bay. Lights were already going on in anticipation of nightfall.

  There is always a lie to meet your needs, that is one of life's lesser assurances. Essie knocked on the door and waited. Her plan was simple. She was selling off the last antiques from Taylor's importing business and as Rogers, Olson and Carter was in the same business, might they be interested?

  Simple enough. But no one answered. She tried looking in the windows, but the shut blinds defeated her. She called on her cellular from the rain-swept porch and again from her car to hear the same voice, the same message.

  She watched the house but in her mind saw the plane taking off from Rio Vista for Mexico. She saw that dead thing in the weeds by the shed. She sustained herself through a dark breath and the bondage of small horrors she imagined.

  She had to subordinate all that to another thought, one as close as that short stone wall which she jumped to find herself walking alone along the lagoon that paralleled the side of the house.

  * * *

  THE TAILDRAGGER followed the coast down the Sea of Cortes. Both men's faces bled with dusk. The world looked to have been cleaved in half; one side water, one side land.

  Nathan had said so little as to mean nothing, and Dane reacted in kind, so both were like chess pieces poised for the play to come.

  The towns grew fewer and more meager till they were barely noticeable blots on a barren floodplain or beside a scorched crag of coastal rock. Under a fired sunset the world looked like some atavistic vision formed from brimstone and sand holding back a vaster wash of flat blue that was as beautiful as it was hostile, each and together.

  "I lied back in Mexicali to the Aduana," said Nathan. "We're not going to Punta Final."

  Dane did not try to speak over the sound of the propeller. "Where are we going?"

  "To Puerto Calamajue."

  The plane climbed to clear a wall of rock and the sound of the engine pull grew louder. Below in a long valley were volcanos, great black dormant holes deep with ash that looked to have been at one time fire pits for the gods.

  "And what is there?" asked Dane.

  "Nothing," said Nathan, "but some road, and the sea."

  * * *

  ROY PINTER requested a tour of the Serendipity Tissue Bank in Alameda, California, under the auspices of wanting to become a public voice on the importance of tissue donation. He told the managing director he had been inspired by his friendship with Taylor Greene, then meeting and getting to know Dane Rudd.

  For Roy the tour itself was hateful. There was no science that would change the simple fact that he would be forever destined to crawl if it were not for his crutches, that his lungs would always be a stooped quagmire of phlegm because his body sagged under the struggle to be upright, and that his only alternative was a wheelchair which he considered "a shopping cart for weaklings."

  Of course, all this hate he kept to himself as he listened outwardly thoughtful to the managing director's dissertation on tissue and organs that bored Roy shitless. Roy shared everything from metaphysics to personal memories as a friendly way of making oblique references to Rudd, trying to elicit information on his background that the managing director might unwittingly discuss.

  The managing director was at all times polite, even deferential, but he was not forthcoming until the end of the tour when he said, "Before I did this work, I was a funeral director. And being a funeral director is not unlike being a prosecutor… Now, don'
t laugh, it's true, in that we both have to ask subtle questions to get an answer we need, or want. Now, what is it you really want, Mr. Pinter, because as you know everything here is confidential, unless you've come with a court order."

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  IN A SWALE by the gray lagoon was a stand of trees shaped like an upturned fist. From there Essie watched shivering in the rain, protected only by a black oil skin slicker with a hood as night closed in upon the house, until the house was darkness within darkness. She could hear the break water behind her and see the bleak shape of San Quentin Prison's walls under the distant patrolling searchlights.

  There was an alley behind the house and an access gate between the garage and the property line fence. An easy climb. Like a thief ghost she jumped the gate and the labor it took to scale was all emotional, just free-falling fear.

  Crouched low she slithered up the concrete walkway, along the garage wall, seeing with her hands as much as her eyes, past garbage cans where the rain hammered out steel drum sounds until she could steal a view of the house.

  It had an untaken-care-of feel. The same could be said for the yard which was mostly pools of mud. The rear of the house was U-shaped around an arbored patio that led to two french doors. The dense branches across the arbor were bare and could easily be mistaken in the darkness for a destroyed heap of iron palings from where sporadic rain dropped onto the brick below.

  She called up the number; the dark house stood undisturbed as the voice machine answered. That same impulse more profound than reason found Essie again and she moved across the backyard as if watching herself in a dream, as if each step she saw herself take had been foreshadowed by some mysterious force before the thought of it had been made. The ground was soggy and her boots squeashed and the light from the adjoining properties was kept back by the trees.

  By the time she reached the patio she knew she was going to break in. She didn't know what, if anything, she would learn or find. But she was going to break in.

  The french doors were old and had screens on them, inlaid screens that covered smaller sections of door and opened like windows during the summer decades ago to capture the breeze.

  She took out her keys and found the sharpest, longest one, and stabbed the mesh until it punctured. She dragged the key downward in a gutting motion, forcing it and watching, pushing it and listening so she could get at the glass inside and the latch behind it.

  Who am I doing this, she thought. Who am I—

  She pulled her hand back inside the slicker until it was a deformed fist.

  Break the glass—

  Her eyes closed. Not to see and to see.

  Break the glass and run—

  It all felt like some obscene infection she needed to get out of her system.

  Run, wait and see if the neighbors hear, or an alarm goes off and security shows—

  Ruled by some outraged discipline her hand obeyed. It jabbed like a prizefighter's and in the slice of an instant the glass shattered and she had jumped another wall.

  * * *

  GUARDIAN ANGEL Island was a smoke gray reef they flew over well after dusk. Over Roca Vela thousands of birds ran before their engines. Punta Final with its spartan lights was there, then gone. They flew on now into the blind pitch with only the instrument panel to light their way.

  The sea, sky and earth became a mingle of one vast shadow and Nathan said, "You won't see it, the road, till it's right there."

  They began the descent. Nathan guided the taildragger with smooth, precise judgments. An old war hand working a long, slow bank and then the ground began to enfold them.

  A black parapet of asphalt appeared. How many times, Dane wondered, had Nathan landed in places like this for just this. He could feel the tires set down and the landing lights offered pathetic little so that at any moment if something unseen arose, or the road fell away, they would be destroyed. And in the backspace of that windshield Dane watched their faces reflected side by side and what it made him feel was almost ghostly.

  The plane was walking now. The road crossed a long shelf that eased to the sea. Nathan taxied off the asphalt and onto hard patch desert.

  Both men stepped out into the night. The silence and darkness settled in. It was noticeably warm and Dane saw that across the road the ground began to rise quickly to low scrub hills where a dirt truck path led in and he could pick out decaying shacks and oddly fitted runs of pipe and what looked to be a small refinery tank on a hilltop.

  "What is all that?"

  Nathan was coming around the plane. "The Mexican Interior had a storage depot here. It shut down."

  Dane turned and saw Nathan had the carryall in one hand, the gun in the other. Nathan pointed the gun toward the sea. "That way."

  * * *

  NO ONE heard the glass break, the police did not show. Essie managed the latch on the inset door easily. She brought a rag this time to insure against anything she touched.

  The french doors led to a tiny dining room, it was empty. To the left was a kitchen, to the right a door to a rear hallway. The living room was ahead through another set of french doors. Essie pulled the slicker hood back. Water streaked down her face she brushed at with the rag. Half breathless she stared at the dark, another broken law to her credit.

  She glanced in the kitchen and down the back hallway, which led to a bedroom in each direction. There was no furniture anywhere, the walls were barren. Not one personal or human touch to be found. The house echoed with a vacant empty silence.

  Through the french doors she could make out bits of the living room where a bend or crack in the blinds let thin blades of street light slip through along with the distant whispering of night sounds. The room looked empty. The doors gave way without a creakor sigh. There were built-in bookshelves and cabinets on the near wall. They were empty. The room was empty, until she got far enough in to see along the back wall.

  There was a desk, a chair, a multiline phone, and a fax machine. The barest accoutrements of an office. A rolling sheet of rain drenched the roof and sent a stark reminder about where she was, what she was doing. She remained frozen within herself. She listened harder, watched harder, paranoid now that someone could be approaching under the cover of that rising storm as she herself had.

  She tried to think what she could take from this, if anything. She could feel the seconds running through her body as if it were an hourglass.

  The desk had no drawer. She looked in a closet by the front door. It was empty. There were no files, no filing cabinets. She ran her hand up into the mail slot. It was a cold empty hole.

  She stood there sweating inside that oil skin slicker, her shirt stuck to her clammy skin. She stared at the desk and chair, at the fax machine and phone with pinched down eyes and a sense of panic.

  There had to be something. There had to be a place all those missing pieces went. There had to be. But it wasn't what she saw that finally struck her, it was what she didn't see.

  The answering machine. She'd heard it outside when she called. Where was it? She checked the phone on the desk, it didn't have one built in. Neither did the fax. She looked on the floor around the desk. Nothing.

  But she heard it. She reached in her coat. She took out her cellular, pressed send and waited. A line on the desk phone lit as it began to ring. Something clicked, then from the black face of that room behind her came a voice—

  She clipped around, not at first even realizing.

  "This is Mr. Rogers of Rogers, Olson—"

  She followed the voice to the bottom cabinet shelf on the far wall and there it was, the answering machine— along with three other answering machines.

  She bent down closer as the first machine went through its mundane ritual. A red light said four messages were saved. When the phone clicked off the red light registered a fifth. She pulled the machine toward her using the rag. She pressed the playback. Listened. Each call was a hang-up.

  The wooden floor hurt her knees but she stayed there staring
into that shelf space. Each of the other machines was hooked up and working. None had saved messages. But why all the machines?

  She reached for the second and pulled it toward her as best she could using the rag, making sure she left no prints, the sweat now coming off her forehead to burn her eyes.

  She fought the dark searching for how to start the greeting check. When she found the button she pressed.

  "Hello, this is Mr. Carter of Rogers, Olson and—"

  Another machine, another name, but the same voice as the first.

  She grabbed the next machine, found the greeting check.

  "Hello, this is Mr. Olson of—"

  The same voice again.

  She grabbed the next machine and while voices beside her puppet like repeated she pressed the greeting check.

  "Hello—"

  The same voice again only—

  "— if you're calling about the boat for sale, you can see it at the Big Break Marina. The number is—"

  Chapter Fifty

  YOU LIED TO me," said Nathan.

  They had reached the last of the asphalt road. From there a rubbled outwash fell away to the Sea of Cortes.

  "Which lie are you talking about?"

  The older man stood facing the younger. "Not even 'what lie'?"

  "You either lie, Nathan, or you don't. You assume I've lied, so I might as well be honest and say 'which lie' rather than be dishonest and say 'what lie'."

  "That's fourteen-karat crap."

  "I'm only as good as what I work with. Now, which lie are we talking about?"

  "You had the Fenns open that box you delivered."

  "I sure did."

  "If you knew what was inside… why then?"

  "For all I knew they were exploiting you, like your son might have been exploited. But we know better in your case, don't we, Nathan?"

  Even gripped by suspicions there was no getting away from the strange injury Nathan felt at what Dane had said.

  "Why didn't you tell me?"