See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

by Bart Paul

  We waited until some on-duty deputies got there and took control of the crime scene. They huddled with Sarah a while, and she told them about the ex-highway patrol guy VanOwen and his possible knowledge of the corpse in the canyon and the corpse’s connection to this woman called Chrystal Dawn. Sorenson, the deputy who’d been talking about me in the Sierra Peaks a couple of nights before, took me outside and questioned me in the flashing blue and red lights. I told him what Audie had said about the dead woman and her role in the bogus search, and that the woman’s partner had been killed three days before by a bullet between the eyes.

  “That’s the guy you shot, right?” Sorenson said. The big doofus smirked like he was being funny.

  I told him my notions about the walking stick and its owner.

  “You’re saying this VanOwen guy still has the murder weapon?” he said.

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  The deputies were done with us in another fifteen minutes. They secured the murder scene, and we walked back to the SUV.

  “They don’t have a handle on how this woman might tie in to Jack finding Erika’s body,” Sarah said.

  “Neither do we, babe. Except for her partner getting shot dead a hundred feet from the body in the bog.”

  “You can tell Mitch how you think this all is connected,” she said. “He wants to brainstorm tomorrow morning.”

  “That shouldn’t take long.”

  She gave me her long-suffering look, then put a hand to her chest. “Let’s get home. My boobs ache.”

  We climbed into the SUV. Sarah had me drive us back to the pack station—to our pack station—while she snoozed.

  We pulled into the yard and stopped below Harvey’s trailer. The place was dark, and I left the headlights on so we could gather Lorena and her gear from May, who’d been sleeping in a chair with the baby in her arms. We piled back in the SUV, and Lorena nursed while we drove the last hundred feet to the cabin.

  We could see right away that something was wrong. Storage boxes from the second bedroom were opened and tossed out on to the dirt. When we got closer, we saw our half-finished kitchen was ransacked and our bedroom was a mess. Even the baby’s stuff was tossed around. It looked like there’d been a SWAT raid.

  “Who the hell?” Sarah said. “Who would do this?” She sat down on our bed. I heard the half-asleep murmur of the nursing child. Normally the sound would’ve been nice and reassuring.

  “I got a couple guesses.”

  “But how could they do this without rousting Harvey and May?”

  I fired up the generator and got some lights on. Sarah watched me come back inside and go to the back of our bedroom. The closet I kept locked had been kicked in, the doorframe splintered and a shotgun of my grandfather’s was missing. It was a cool old Winchester lever-action from the 1880s, and I’d never seen another like it. I’d used it as a kid, but now no kid of mine would have that chance. In the night breeze I caught a whiff of cigarette that could’ve come from Harvey, and a mix of sweat and some other smell that couldn’t. A city sort of stench that always reminded me of beer joints and strip clubs around Fort Benning.

  I heard Sarah fighting back a sob. I turned around. Lorena’s crib had been flipped over, the bedding tossed. I set it back up and could see the top rail was smashed so the thing would never be safe to use again. It was a mad cry, and I knew the sound. The crib had been Sarah’s when she was a baby, and her mother had tended her in it. I watched her face get hard. She held the baby in her left arm and rested her right hand on her pistol butt.

  “What do you think they wanted?” she said.

  “Something we ain’t got.”

  “Do you think this was the same person who left the money?”

  “No. I don’t know. The money was new. Like from a bank.”

  She looked around at the mess. “Well, we can’t stay here tonight.”

  “We can’t leave. We’ve got to secure this. We gotta make sure there’s someone here all the time—that this place is always safe. For Lorena.”

  “It’s not safe now,” she said. “Even with Harvey asleep close by, it wasn’t safe.”

  “I know that, okay?”

  Sarah looked at me, surprised as hell. I’d never spoke a cross word to her as long as I’d known her.

  “I’m sorry, baby. I shoulda been on this.”

  I leaned down, and she grabbed the back of my neck and squeezed it and I put my arm around her. We were both quiet for a minute, then I stood up.

  “Okay,” she said, “what are you thinking?”

  “We’ve got Jack shot across the ear, we got two grifters posing as Audie’s parents shot and beat to death, an embezzler who may or may not have been found, and fistfuls of money that may or may not have been part of the embezzlement.”

  “And now this,” Sarah said.

  “And the lost kid who wasn’t lost.”

  “And that ex-CHP biker who’s way too interested in it all,” she said.

  Lorena was dozing off now that she had something in her belly. Sarah handed her to me and walked over to the fridge and pulled out a couple of beers. She opened them and handed me one then slumped down on a chair next to the bed.

  “This would be the best place in the world if it weren’t for a few sons-of-bitches,” she said.

  “More than a few. So much for a romantic night with my hot, overworked deputy.”

  She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Go get your dad’s rifle,” she said, “then we can clean up this mess and rig a place to sleep for Lorena.” She kissed me again. “And then, who knows?” She didn’t look real positive.

  Folks always look behind locked doors, but doors can be smashed so I kept dad’s Remington .270 in the rafters of the outhouse. I thought I caught the bad smell of the dead woman who’d used it four days before, but hoped I was just imagining it. Sarah telling me to get the rifle was like her saying that we were about to cross a line. We’d crossed that line twice together in as many years. I reached over my head and felt the rifle right where I stashed it, running my hand over the walnut stock. I didn’t take it down. I wasn’t ready to cross that line again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I was walking back to the cabin and saw May coming through the trees from Harvey’s trailer in her bathrobe. She’d seen the yard lights come on and stay on and came over to see if everything was okay. Harvey was still sleeping.

  I told her about the vandalized cabin, and she walked back with me. When she saw the mess, she offered to help us straighten things up enough so we could get some sleep.

  “Any idea who did this?” she said.

  “No, but whoever it was has been watching us.”

  “You think they’re watching us now?” Sarah said.

  “Maybe.”

  I got up and stood in the open front room. Sarah was quiet as I studied the shadows.

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  “Just have a look around.”

  “I could go with you,” she said. “May can watch the baby.”

  “No need. I just need to know all my babies are gonna be safe tonight.” I kissed her cheek.

  The road leading away from the pack station back down-canyon wound through aspen, then turned right and crossed a wooden bridge over the creek, then climbed alongside the fence that marked the boundary of our forty acres. As the road topped out at the trailhead, I could just make out a hole cut in the fence about thirty feet below the locked gate. The gate was a twelve-foot Powder River steel outfit meant to keep vehicles from going any farther up-canyon or cattle from straying back down. Ten feet beyond that, a four-foot gate hinged to a Jeffrey pine was kept unlocked so horses and hikers could come and go. I guess whoever cut the wire in the dark didn’t have a clue that gate existed.

  I dug out my phone. By the light I could see that every strand of the barbwire had been cut and peeled back. I studied the ground. I had to walk out of the pine duff and onto the road to sort out the tire tracks, but after
a bit they told me what I needed to know. I could make out two sets of knobby dirt-bike tires and what looked to be one set of wider motorcycle tracks. In the faint light they looked more like a street bike pattern, but maybe that was what I wanted to see. There was no way to tell if the tracks had been heading up-canyon or down.

  I walked below the road among young tamarack and sugar pine until I was opposite our cabin across the creek below me. I was wishing Hoot wasn’t still up at my Mom’s. I started studying that ground. It was pretty much more pine duff over crushed granite so tracks would be hard to see even if the trees weren’t blocking the moonlight. A little farther on, and I was at the edge of a long break in the timber around a big depression. Fifty years back some genius thought he’d make a fortune in the tourist business by clearing the trees and bulldozing a hundred-fifty-yard-long man-made pond high above the creek where no water flowed. The guy ran out of money before he got the first cabin built or the first water diverted, but he did excavate down about thirty feet. Now as part of our forty acres Sarah and I owned a big hole in the ground.

  I found a spot on the berm where the pine duff had been cleared away by someone bored and squirming as they waited and watched. It was pretty much what I expected—Coors and Red Bull cans, burger and fry wrappers, a Copenhagen tin—all scattered about. The trash and disturbed ground made it clear this was a watching spot. I waited there for a bit, staying quiet and listening, trying to tell whether I was alone or not. Down through the trees I could see our yard lights between the corral and the cabin. Our new generator was so quiet there was no noise from it over the distant creek and the wind in the trees.

  I started up toward the road I’d driven the day before with Aaron’s crew. I’d be packing their gear the following day after the two of them choppered out with Erika’s body. I caught another whiff of cigarette and sweat in the night air, then a single hi-beam lit me up from the trees.

  “Why, howdy stranger.” It was a familiar voice, faraway, but deep and rumbly.

  I walked across the empty lakebed and climbed the bank.

  He straddled the bike and the night hid his face. I held an arm over my eyes to block the glare. It was a minute until he spoke.

  “Well if it ain’t the rifleman,” he said. “You look like you seen a ghost.”

  “I see ghosts every night.”

  “And they don’t scare you one little bit, right?”

  “Not the ones who like to scare little girls.”

  “Funny thing,” he said. “You’re a famous rifleman, but I don’t see you with a rifle. You lose it, or somethin’?”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Yeah, right. Let’s skip the bullshit, then,” he said. He turned the Harley’s front wheel so’s not to blind me. “You got something of mine, son. You better not’ve lost that.”

  “Which would be what?”

  “You got my money—or you know how to get it.”

  “The money that dead banker stole?”

  “See? Now that’s what I’m talking about, young man. The very same. About a million plus.”

  “So that’s what all this is about.”

  “Yeah. And a little birdy told me you knew how to get to it.”

  I just laughed.

  “And since I missed a real lucrative rendezvous a few days ago, I figure that birdy was talking straight.” He pulled what looked like an automatic from under his vest. “Well, rifleman, am I right?”

  “You’re the one talkin’ to birds.”

  He turned the forks of the bike so his headlight blinded me again. Now all that was left of him was his voice.

  “That banker lady and me had an arrangement, see.” He was working up a pretty good mad. “We had a deal.”

  “Got nothin’ to do with me. Besides, I thought that woman was long dead.”

  His voice got low and rumbly again like he was trying to sound in control. “The only thing changed since her and me made our little arrangement is you in this damn canyon messing in my shit.”

  “How so?”

  “You know about that banker, son. I think that’s why you showed up here.”

  “I been coming here since I was a kid.”

  He started to say something else, and I cut him off.

  “I do know that I saw your leavin’s at a motel tonight.”

  I couldn’t make out his reaction in the glare.

  “Killin’ off your weak links?”

  He just laughed like it was none of his affair and turned the headlight away from me a second time.

  “Say, that’s a nice big cabin you’re building.”

  “It was until some honyocker trashed it.”

  “It wasn’t here last fall.” He spit. “First time I saw this place, wasn’t nothin’ here at all.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “You know, I always thought it’d be nice to have a cabin in the mountains. If I don’t end up blowing your head off, you could give me some good ideas. Maybe even sell me yours.”

  I just let him talk.

  “That banker money was gonna be my last big score. A new start. Sell my strip joint, move back down south away from you shitkickers, dump the hookers. You got no idea what a needy pain in the ass those bitches are.”

  “Guess I wouldn’t.”

  “Trust me, you never want to find out. I could go legit. Use that money for a classy custom shop. Be like American Chopper.” He laughed. “Can you see me with my own cable show? ‘Sonny’s Cycles from Sparks, Nevada.’”

  He turned the headlight back into my eyes. The back-and-forth was giving me a headache. I guess we weren’t sharing our plans and dreams any more.

  “Now, you know how important that money is. Clock’s ticking, rifleman. Otherwise there’s no place you and that cute little family of yours can go that’ll—”

  “First thing, Sonny, I don’t have any money except what I earn. Second, it’s the Feds poking around missing bank accounts, not me. Maybe some computer hacker ripped off the bank and is sitting in the Caymans right now laughing at chumps like you.”

  “So is there a third thing?” he said. “You know so damn much. There’s always a third thing.”

  “Yeah. Never threaten me or my family again.”

  “Brave talk from a guy who don’t even carry a weapon.”

  “You think I need a weapon?”

  He kept his eyes on me then. Even from a distance I could hear him breathe, though in the glare it was hard to make out his expression. He pocketed the automatic, then raised one hand and made a little movement. An engine fired up from the road behind him with a steady whine, and a headlight lit him up from the back and lit me up, too. Then he shouted.

  “Tiny.”

  He brought his hand down and a shotgun blasted from the road and kicked up dust and pine needles and tree bark about eight feet to my left.

  I just stood there and watched the new headlight wobble down in my direction and stop a few feet behind VanOwen.

  “Where’s Flaco?” he said. In the second headlight he was nothing more than a big shape rimmed by flickering yellow.

  “He ain’t coming,” the guy called Tiny said.

  In that light I could make out that Tiny was about as wide as VanOwen was tall. VanOwen turned back to the guy. He tried to talk soft, but he was just too pissed.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  “Flaco ain’t coming. We found out the—”

  “Shut up,” VanOwen said.

  He started to raise his hand again when Sarah’s 9mm made a double click as she racked it in the dark not more than thirty feet away.

  “You’ll want to lower your hand slowly,” she said. “Very slowly.”

  I turned and could just make out Sarah on her mare coming up the slope from the pack station. She stopped a bit behind me in deep shadows. It was good positioning if shooting started, but I wasn’t too concerned. If these clowns were gonna shoot me, they’d have shot me.

  VanOwen did like she said. He turned to his g
uy. “Get on outta here.”

  Nobody said anything. All three of us followed the headlight with our eyes as the dirt bike picked up speed. I’d turned back to VanOwen when I heard the metallic wire-screeching sound every ranch kid knows from when an animal or vehicle hits a barbwire fence hard and stretches the twisted steel strands and pops the stays and staples as whatever it was that hit it plows through that fence, snapping wood posts and bending steel ones until the fence finally wins, and whatever hit it stops cold. The headlight disappeared for a second, then looked to be pointing straight up, lighting the tree canopy near the trailhead gate.

  “Ohh …” Tiny said in the dark. “Ohhh, shiit.”

  The guy had forgot where they’d cut the fence and missed the hole as he blasted on out of there. As tense as things were just then, Sarah and I both laughed.

  “Well, for chrissakes,” VanOwen said.

  He revved his bike and turned it again so his light was on both Sarah and me. I could see Sarah had put on a Cal Poly hoodie. Her duty belt was still buckled around her hips.

  We watched the light on the dirt bike go from vertical to level, and heard Tiny moan and whimper. We saw his headlight arc away from us and saw it lighting up the wire and posts as he finally found the hole in the fence. Then it picked up speed, and his light shone on the Jeffrey pines as it wobbled down the canyon road, flickers of red taillight bobbing behind it.

  “So how come you’re going to all this trouble for a lousy million bucks?”

  “Hey, I’m not greedy.” VanOwen laughed. “Just remember, I’m on to you, shitkicker. I’d say you and that banker-bitch been plottin’ this little rip-off for quite a while.”

  “Get over yourself. I never knew you existed till four days ago.”

  He revved the Harley a couple of times, starting off. Then he circled and stopped opposite Sarah and leaned forward.

  “Good to see you, blondie,” he said.

  He revved the bike a last time and chugged off till his taillights kinda blended in with Tiny’s.

  Sarah rode up on the mare, bareback with just a halter. She holstered her weapon as she rode closer, then waited for me to finish hiking over. I got to the top of the bank and she slipped off the horse. She gripped my arms up and down like she was making sure all the pieces were there. Then she looked off down-canyon into the shadows.