“I can’t come to the burial,” Coltrane said, “but I thought, if I found out where his plot was, I could drop by later and pay my respects without having to ask someone from his family to come and show me where he is.”
“Of course,” the man said. “Please accept my condolences about your friend.”
“Thank you,” Coltrane said. “Believe me, it wasn’t his time.”
“If you’ll tell me what your friend’s name is . . .” The man started toward his office.
“Daniel Gibson.”
“Oh.” The man stopped.
“Is something the matter?”
“Not at all. But I don’t need to look up your friend’s name in my records. Earlier this morning, someone else asked me where his plot is. I distinctly remember the location.”
“Someone else?”
“Yes. A phone call. Like you, he said he was a friend who couldn’t attend the burial but wanted to know where the grave would be so he could pay his respects later.”
“I think I might know him. Did he happen to have an Eastern European accent? Slavic?”
The man thought a moment. “I really can’t remember. I was too busy concentrating on the deceased’s name and his plot number.”
“Sure. Maybe I’ll see him here later.”
“Possibly. One never knows. Your friend’s grave site is . . .” The long-legged man walked onto the lane and pointed toward the middle of the cemetery, toward activity beyond various gravestones, two lanes over. “Our maintenance staff is preparing it.”
Across the distance, Coltrane saw the descending claw of a yellow backhoe and heard the rumble of an engine.
“You might want to reconsider going over there. We discourage the bereaved from seeing this part of the procedure. It might seem unfeeling.”
“But it has to be done,” Coltrane said.
“Exactly.”
“I understand practicality,” Coltrane said. “Thanks for your concern.”
“If there’s anything else I can do for you . . .”
“I’ll definitely remember how helpful you were.”
As the man stepped into the cottagelike building and closed the door, Coltrane stared beyond the various grave markers toward the rumbling backhoe in the distance. He got in his car and tried not to glance around as he drove down the lane. His stomach churned. His palms sweated, making his grip slick on the steering wheel. Had it been Ilkovic who phoned, wanting to know the location of Daniel’s grave? Ilkovic would need that information. He would have to find out which section of the cemetery to watch. Around this time tomorrow, Daniel’s hearse would arrive. His mourners would walk along this lane and gather among the tombstones, directing their mournful gazes toward the coffin supported on braces above the open grave. Of course, the mourners wouldn’t actually see the open grave, Coltrane thought as he stopped his car near the clank and rumble of the backhoe. There would be a sash of some sort covering the pit; probably it would be colored green, just as imitation grass would cover the nearby pile of earth that now grew larger as the backhoe deposited another clawful.
Coltrane’s tear ducts ached as he got out of the car and locked it. Come on, Ilkovic, get a good look at me. I know you’re here. It’s two-thirty. It’s dress-rehearsal time. You want to find out where the best view is for tomorrow. I bet you’re surprised to see me here. You’re looking sharply around to find out if anybody else is with me—like the police. You’re ready to run at the first sign of trouble, but you’re hesitating—because you don’t see anybody who’s a threat and you can’t believe your luck that I showed up, and you wonder what I’m doing here. But in a minute, it’ll be obvious, and then you really won’t believe how lucky you are.
The workman on the backhoe glanced with puzzlement toward Coltrane as he maneuvered the machine’s controls and the claw dropped back into the grave-sized trench, digging up more earth. A bitter cloud of exhaust floated from the engine, irritating Coltrane’s throat. He had never felt so exposed and threatened, totally certain that Ilkovic was somewhere close watching him, but at the same time absolutely confident that for as long as he stood next to Daniel’s grave, he was safe. Ilkovic didn’t want to shoot him. He wanted to torture him. For that, Ilkovic needed privacy and leisure.
He certainly isn’t going to try to rush up, grab me, and drag me to his car, Coltrane thought. Not in plain sight. Not when I have a chance of fighting back. He’ll watch and follow. He’ll make his move when he has every advantage. But he’s still suspicious, wondering if he should run.
Coltrane folded his hands in prayer, so immersed in sorrow that it took him a moment to realize that his gesture was exactly what was required to make Ilkovic understand why he had supposedly come here. Ilkovic would conclude that Coltrane feared it would be too risky to show up at the cemetery the next day, that he felt compelled to come a day early to pay his respects and participate in his own private ceremony.
When he lowered his gaze from the sky, the backhoe’s claw slammed into the trench again, gouging up earth. Unnerved, Coltrane seemed to be back in his gravelike pit on the slope above the mass grave in Bosnia, staring through a telephoto lens at an identical yellow backhoe, except that it wasn’t gouging up earth, but skulls and teeth and rib cages and shattered leg bones. The overlapping of the past on the present was so powerful that he shuddered and feared for his sanity. He watched the backhoe drop its burden, a welter of bones onto . . .
A pile of earth. It was only a pile of earth. And the trench was apparently now deep enough, for the driver didn’t drop the claw back into the trench. Instead, he directed it into a neutral position and drove from the grave, rumbling along the lane. Later, Coltrane knew, someone would come around with a winch to lower a concrete sleeve into the grave, to shore up the sides and prevent earth from falling in. Eyes stinging, Coltrane stepped between other graves, plucked up a few blades of grass, and came back, dropping the blades into the grave, watching them flutter to the bottom.
I won’t forget you, Daniel.
When he stepped away, he made no attempt to look around as he returned to the car. Either Ilkovic was here or he wasn’t. Either Ilkovic would follow or he wouldn’t. Unlocking his car, he had the sense that events were controlling him, not the other way around. When he got in and started the car, he was surprised to see that the dashboard clock showed 3:06. He had been standing there, grieving, far longer than he had thought. I can’t let that happen again. I can’t let myself lose track of time like that. I have to pay attention to what I’m doing. But then, in a sense, that was exactly what had happened—he had been paying attention to his grief.
Now it was time to pay attention to his rage.
9
T HE PLAN HE AND N OLAN HAD AGREED UPON WAS THAT HE would lead Ilkovic to Packard’s house, where Nolan and a SWAT team would be waiting. Jennifer would come out of the house as Coltrane arrived. Ilkovic would see the two of them and conclude that Coltrane hadn’t wanted Jennifer to go with him to the cemetery, that he’d needed to be alone. With Jennifer’s absence explained and with Coltrane’s hiding place now discovered, Ilkovic would take time to reconnoiter the area, to assure himself that the police weren’t around (they would be in the house, but Ilkovic wouldn’t know that until it was too late). He would plan his entry onto the property, presumably through the back. He would make his move at night, after the house lights had been turned off and his targets had plenty of time to drift off to sleep. As soon as he was in the house, the police would spring their trap.
It’s a perfectly feasible plan, Coltrane thought as he drove across the valley. It was simple. It had the merit of surprise. It had only one flaw. Ilkovic might be captured instead of killed. The UN tribunal might sentence him to life imprisonment instead of having him executed.
That’s not good enough. I know another way, Coltrane thought. He accessed the San Diego Freeway and drove south, grateful for the congested traffic, needing a reason to drive slowly so that Ilkovic wouldn’t have trouble keep
ing him in sight. He exited onto Sunset Boulevard, where traffic was only slightly less congested, and headed toward the Pacific Coast Highway. There, he proceeded north. He had always enjoyed this drive, the majesty of the Palisades on his right, the allure of the ocean on his left, the glinting waves, the gliding sailboats. But not this time. The only thing that occupied his attention was a plan that he rehearsed. Past Malibu, just when he began to fear that he wouldn’t find the road he was looking for, he saw it on the right, next to a weathered wooden sign that read MAYNARD RANCH . The road hadn’t changed since the first time he had used it three months previously. It was unpaved and narrow, and it led him up into the Santa Monica Mountains.
Since the cemetery, everything around him had seemed out of focus, in a haze. But now his perception sharpened. He had the sensation of seeing everything with the intensity of peering through a zoom lens. Every detail of his surroundings seemed magnified. He was struck by an overwhelming sense of the buckthorn, greasewood, and other scrub brush on the hills into which he drove. December rains had caused the chaparral to turn green, in contrast with the sand color of the desert soil, and under other circumstances, he would have stopped to photograph the differences in color and texture. But as he bitterly reminded himself, in place of a camera, he had brought a shotgun.
Near the highway, there had been service stations, restaurants, and motels. Along the base of the hills, there were occasional dilapidated ranch houses. But once the road twisted up into the hills, he had the impression of entering another time, of experiencing the solitary beauty of what Southern California had been like 150 years ago.
Just before steering over a ridge that cut off his view of the sloping land behind him, Coltrane checked his rearview mirror and thought he saw the dust of a following car. It was hard to be sure. The dust might merely have been nudged up by a breeze. Or it might have been the remnants of dust that he himself had raised. Or if the dust had been raised by someone else’s car, there was no certainty that the car belonged to Ilkovic. Someone who lived in one of the ranch houses might be returning home from an errand.
But Coltrane didn’t think so. Soon, he told himself. This is going to end soon. He kept seeing a mental image of his grandparents standing on tiptoes on the bench, with their arms tied behind them, duct tape across their lips, and a noose around their necks. He kept remembering the way his grandfather struggled to plead through the duct tape and how his asthmatic grandmother’s chest heaved. He had never wanted to get even with someone so much.
The road made a dogleg turn to the right, taking him higher and deeper into the brush-covered hills. But Coltrane knew that shortly the landscape would change from a faint December green to an appalling blackness. The section of hills that he drove through had escaped a raging brush fire three months earlier. A valley on the other side of these hills hadn’t been so lucky. Once owned by the western star Ken Maynard and used as the location for numerous cowboy movies in the thirties and forties as well as several western TV series, including Rawhide, during the late fifties and early sixties, the area had been devastated by the fire, which destroyed a replica of a western town that had doubled countlessly as Tombstone, Dodge City, and Abilene, and along whose streets everyone from Randolph Scott to Gary Cooper had walked.
Coltrane knew about the place because, just after the fire, Premiere magazine had asked him to go there and take photographs of the destroyed set, which the editor planned to juxtapose with stills from the famous movies that the set had been used in. With a fondness for some of the classics in which the valley and its set had been featured, Coltrane had turned down an important assignment in the Philippines. He had walked the ash-covered land, climbed burnt-over bluffs, and studied debris-filled streambeds, identifying many of the vistas with scenes he recalled from favorite movies.
The area fit all of his requirements. It was remote. It was abandoned. Equally important, it was familiar. Once he photographed a place, it became part of him.
As the road crested a ridge and the valley lay below him, spindly black skeletons of scrub brush punctuated the thick black ash that stretched in all directions. With the scorched timbers of the town in the distance, it was as thorough a wasteland as many war zones he had photographed.
Minus the corpses, he thought.
But if he had his way, there would definitely be one corpse here by nightfall.
10
J UST MAKE SURE THE CORPSE ISN ’ T YOURS , Coltrane thought.
At the bottom of the slope, the ash made the road hard to distinguish. He did his best to follow it, sometimes jouncing over rocks at the side. The ash wasn’t powdery. Rain had dissolved it into a paste, which hardened when the sun came out. Crusty, like dried black mud, it made a crunching sound as he drove over it. Glancing at his rearview mirror, he saw the tracks that his tires had made. Then his rearview mirror showed him something else: the bluff behind him, where a car appeared, stopping as its driver surveyed the barren landscape through which Coltrane proceeded.
That barrenness was another reason Coltrane had selected the area. There was only one set of tracks heading toward the blackened town, and those tracks belonged to Coltrane. If other people were in the area—a team of policemen, for example—their presence would be easily detectable because there was no place to conceal them. Their movements would have left scars in the ash, giving them away. Ilkovic would at first be on guard. But as the sterile nature of the site became manifest to him, his confidence would return.
The car, tiny in Coltrane’s rearview mirror, started down the slope.
Coltrane tried to put himself in Ilkovic’s place. What would Ilkovic be thinking? For certain, he’d wonder what Coltrane was doing here. It wouldn’t take him long to suspect that Coltrane might have lead him here. But for what purpose? To invite a confrontation? Apparently, Ilkovic found that notion appealing. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be descending into the valley, following Coltrane’s tire marks through the ash.
Coltrane slowed, letting the car, a dark sedan, gain on him. Ahead, the road dipped into a deep trough, then crossed a shallow stream, the site for innumerable movie ambushes. From those movies and from photographs that Coltrane had taken of the area, he knew that his car would be out of sight in the trough. He wanted Ilkovic to think that he was lying in wait for him down there. What he intended to do, though, was something else. The instant he reached the bottom of the embankment, he rushed from the car, opened the back door, and grabbed his shotgun from where he had hidden it under a sleeping bag before leaving Packard’s house. He raced toward a gully where another stream joined this one at a right angle. That second stream paralleled the road along which he had driven. Its bed was low enough that if he stooped, he couldn’t be seen as he ran along it.
Breathing hard, sweating, stretching his legs to their maximum, he charged along, avoiding a channel of water so that he wouldn’t make a splashing noise that would alert Ilkovic if his windows were open. Ilkovic would be wondering why Coltrane’s car hadn’t reappeared. Ilkovic would be slowing, then stopping, waiting until he knew where Coltrane’s car had gone. He wouldn’t go forward again unless he assured himself that he wouldn’t be entering a trap. Meanwhile, Coltrane sprinted closer, so close that he could now hear Ilkovic’s car, the faint drone of its motor. Flash floods had scoured the gully free of ash. There wasn’t any crust that his footsteps could break and cause noise. The only sounds he made were his labored breathing, which he struggled to restrain, and the brittle but subdued scrape of his shoes over gravel and rocks, which lessened when he reduced his pace, hearing Ilkovic’s car thirty yards to his left.
The engine stopped. A door opened. Footsteps crunched on the ash. Ilkovic had evidently decided to circle the trough where Coltrane’s car had disappeared. He was coming at it from an angle, which was leading him toward the gully in which Coltrane aimed the pump-action shotgun.
The footsteps crunched closer. Coltrane’s finger tightened on the shotgun’s trigger. Lining up the sights, focusing a
long the barrel toward the sound of Ilkovic’s approaching footsteps, Coltrane had an unholy sensation that he was concentrating through a viewfinder, about to press a shutter button, when a face appeared above him, so startling that Coltrane was barely able to jerk the barrel away, recognizing the surprised, lean, thin-lipped features of FBI Special Agent James McCoy.
11
J ESUS C HRIST !” McCoy gaped at the shotgun barrel and lurched back. His feet slipped from under him, his momentum throwing him to the ashy ground. He landed with a groan. “Damn it, put that thing down!”
By the time Coltrane scrambled to the top of the gully, McCoy was squirming to sit up. His blue suit was covered with black ash. He stood awkwardly and swatted at his clothes, belatedly realizing that he was only spreading the grit. He stared at his hands, which were totally black. His face was smudged. He recoiled when he saw that Coltrane still held the shotgun. “I told you, put that thing down!”
His surprise deepening, Coltrane obeyed.
“Look at this suit!” McCoy said. “Look what you’ve done to—”
“What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here? As if it isn’t obvious!” McCoy stepped angrily closer. “You might have fooled Nolan and your girlfriend, but this self-serving jerk, as you called me, didn’t believe for a second that you were going to try to make Ilkovic follow you back to the house where you were hiding.”
Coltrane didn’t flinch.
“Not to the house!” McCoy emphasized. “Somewhere else. I saw that look in your eye. I could tell you had something else in mind. In case you haven’t noticed, you wandered a little off track—about ninety minutes from where you’re supposed to be meeting Nolan in the Hollywood Hills.”
“You were at the cemetery?”
“Hell, yes. You were so convinced Ilkovic was going to be there, I thought I’d be criminally stupid if I didn’t show up, on the chance I’d spot him.”
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