Lee said, “How much does this Frank control?
“He’s got the Johnsons’ place and Grady’s stables. He’s bought out the Conner place, and those three alone are squeezing us out of water. What the endgame is, besides owning the valley, I don’t know. Maybe nobody does. No way to fight a guy who has the money and the determination. Drought didn’t help. Worst damn weather we’ve had in a hundred years and he’s taking advantage. It’s a war and he’s winning.”
“How much debt does this place have?”
“We’re carrying over a hundred thousand.”
“Jesus. You serious?”
“Hell, yes. The old man, before he cut out, drained the credit line. We’re really screwed. We can’t even buy hay.”
Lee sat in grim silence. He knew things were bad by the phone calls, he just didn’t think they were this bad. “You got tight with the daughter, she never said anything about what he was up to?”
“He kept her in the dark. Man, she’s something. You’d love her. First time I set eyes on her, she was coming out of Nardi’s Market. I was a deer in the headlights. You never saw eyes like that. Lot of pretty fine girls in the world, but she above and beyond. She gave me this little smile and I’m tellin’ you, bro, I stopped breathing. She went on down the sidewalk and I watched her with that great, cocky, how-do-you-like-this walk. She had me big time. Took a week before I found out it was that bastard’s daughter. I finally got to talk to her about a week later. That’s when it started. And then, just when it was getting serious, she was gone. I wanted to go up there and put a gun in that bastard’s face. I was scared what might have happened to her. Still am. But I held back on account of Mom. That’s when I called you.”
Lee stared at the barren hills under the moonlight. “I think I need a beer.”
Jeremy went in and brought out a six-pack. They drank silently for a time, before Jeremy said, “Sometimes I see Mom crying, talking to the horses like they can understand. She’s in this depression. You showing up brought some of her old self back, but it won’t last. We can’t let it happen.”
“You have something figured out?”
“I’m gonna put Superman down before he gets this place. And I’m gonna find Mandy and bring her back. That’s how it is. I thought about just stealing some of those comics, getting the money that way. But he’d find a way to put me in prison. Or worse, get some of his friends from south of the border to deal with me. Mandy’s mother wouldn’t sell them on account of they were her father’s. Mandy said her mother had maybe the best collection on the planet. An issue of Action Comics from nineteen thirty-eight worth millions. Detective Comics number twenty-seven. And he’s got Superman number ones that go for a quarter mil or more apiece. This guy was nothin’ until his wife died and he got to sell some of the comics. Goes to New York and makes deals. Now he’s rich and he’s looking to take over everything.”
Lee said, “Let me go talk to the bank tomorrow. I need to know what options are there. I got credit and savings. Maybe I can deal with this on a different level than what you’re thinking.”
“Do what you gotta do. Just do it fast.”
3
Lee walked into the Carson Valley Bank the next morning determined to find a solution, a way out that would stop his brother from taking an irrevocable and potentially disastrous action. But after two hours with the bank manager, he found that the situation was worse than Jeremy had let on. Lee walked out of the bank having achieved nothing except a grim awareness of just how bad things were. He didn’t like the manager’s attitude or the realization that the ranch couldn’t be saved by a credit line as small as Lee’s.
Jeremy had returned from the feed store and waited next his Ford pickup.
“Any luck?” he asked with a bit of I-told-you-so certainty that there wasn’t any.
Lee glanced up the street. “No. You were right. He wasn’t enthusiastic, didn’t think there’s much we can do without a pretty big cash infusion. I didn’t like the guy’s attitude, not after our family dealt with his bank for decades.”
“Yeah, that’s Chris Baker,” Jeremy said. “He’s kinda like Frank’s wingman in deals these days. Did he say how much might forestall the fire sale?”
“Sixty thousand would be a good start. And real soon, or the creditors are going to force her into bankruptcy. That is, unless Frank steps in and makes an offer she can’t refuse.”
“That’s what he’s waiting for. Superman’s got us by the short hairs.”
Lee watched people coming and going. It hadn’t really changed much. Half the vehicles were trucks.
“Frank ain’t messin’ around,” Jeremy said. “He’ll own the whole valley by Christmas unless somebody stops him. Time to get serious. Or, given how I’m looking at things, maybe it’s time for you to get out while the getting is good. You going to re-up?”
“No. I’ve had enough of the military. It was an escape from this place, but it was jumping from the pan into the fire.”
“This isn’t really your fight if you don’t want it to be. At least now you see what I’m dealing with.”
Lee didn’t bite on that. He said, “Mom have any idea what you’re thinking?”
“Of course not. And don’t be talkin’ that kind of shit to her, Lee. It won’t stop me and won’t do her any good. Besides, she’s kinda hoping you’ll figure something out.”
Lee said, “Right now, I want to check some things out at Records in City Hall.”
“Like what?”
“Property sales, geological surveys, what they have. You go get some coffee or something. It won’t take me long.”
It didn’t. If there were geological reports, he couldn’t easily get access to them. But maybe that was on purpose. Had someone discovered minerals, deep springs, oil, or gas? And so what? Nothing they could do.
Lee left City Hall and went around the corner, into the hardware store.
“Lee! Well I’ll be go to hell,” Henry Moore exclaimed, a beaming smile on his round, ruddy face. “Man, good to see you. I heard you were back.”
Moore was one of those guys who knew everything. Lee pushed him away from all the questions he had about Lee’s experiences overseas and back to what was going on in the valley.
Moore motioned him into the back, where they could talk in private. “I’ll level with you, Lee. This guy is serious business. He’s got a ton of cash. Everybody in this town been struggling for a long time. He’s got free reign. He’s bought more friends than a lottery winner. To some in this small, broke town, he’s gonna be the great savior. Superman.”
“Yeah, I heard that description,” Lee said.
“Believe it. Money talks, broke folks walk. I’d like to say there’s a chance, but I’m just being straight as I see it.”
“I appreciate it,” Lee said.
“We got to have a drink,” Moore said.
“We will. Soon,” Lee said.
As he and his brother drove back to the small ranch—Lee sitting in the passenger seat, getting a really bad feeling, his brother behind the wheel of the big Ford 350—they spoke little.
Jeremy got waves and honks from just about every passing vehicle and responded in kind.
As they pulled into the ranch feeder road, Lee said, “There’s got to be a better way to handle this then going up there and doing this guy. That’s got a real good chance of getting you in prison and won’t do Mom any good.” Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t going to have much impact.
Jeremy gave Lee a glance. “Depends on what I got figured out. Depends on if it’s an accident. Guy gets drunk out of his mind on weekends. Man could take a fall, hit his head. Lot of ways a drunk could get himself killed with no evidence of any foul play.”
“This is your big plan?”
“I’ve been working this out, brother-oh-mine. I’m not some wild-haired fool. You handle things right, helping a guy out of here who needs to be gone can be very hard to prove. And if there’s no hard evidence, they won’t even
make a big deal out of it. Like this bastard’s wife falling off the cliff. Nobody could take that anywhere. Accidents happen. Secret is, you don’t leave tracks. No Internet searches, no weird phone calls, nothin’. I’ve been real careful about even badmouthing the guy in town.”
Jeremy pulled in by the barn, next to Lee’s Ram 1500. They sat for a time in silence.
Lee said, “What’s this great plan of yours?”
“Nothing complicated. A drunk falls off his porch, hits his head on this concrete platform that holds one of the big cement lions on either side of the steps. I’ll tell you all about it, but right now I’m starved. Let’s get something to eat.”
Lee frowned as he got out. Just asking what the plan was meant to his brother that he already was in.
4
They didn’t talk about it again until well after dinner, the day done, chores out of the way, and their mother off to bed. She hadn’t even asked about the trip to town. She knew it had come to nothing. She knew there was something going on that she didn’t want to know about and didn’t ask. That’s how she’d always been. Hear no evil, see no evil, even if you’re sleeping with it.
They went out to the barn to talk as dark fell over the valley. They sat on crates by the horse stalls. Lee stared at his brother in the darkness and waited to hear this great plan of his.
“I been up to his place couple times,” Jeremy said. “I’d go meet Mandy there when he was in town, and I got a good idea of the layout and how to get in. How this can work. There was a time I thought of stealing some of his big-deal comics and not taking him out. But that’s ridiculous. Like I told you, he’s got serious resources. He’ll put some heavy bastards onto me. They’d come up across the border, and I’m history. But if he’s dead, well, he’s dead. Nobody’s gaining anything by assuming he was killed. It’s a perfect crime situation if handled right. He’s dead, some of those big-money comics nobody else knows about? I get some money from them in the black market.”
“What black market?”
“There’s an underground market for comics like there is for all stolen merchandise, whether it’s art, jewelry, comics, coins. Porter Holmes told me about that. You know Porter—he’s always going to the Comic-con stuff. These days he buys and sells, goes to Comic-Con in San Diego and another one in New York. And he’s got his own grievance about Frank. His uncle lost his place, went off to Texas, died in a car accident.”
Lee stared into the unbridled enthusiasm of his brother, familiar from past capers Jeremy had often pulled Lee into. “You got it all figured out. Give me the details, because I know something about how you operate.”
“Don’t get all hotshot military on me. This isn’t Afghanistan. It’s Carson Valley.”
“Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Superman’s got dogs. Badass Dobermans. No problem when Mandy was there, but going in over the fence without her isn’t a good idea. So I got those sedatives we give to animals when they’re hurt. It’ll put those dogs down for a couple hours. Give us all the time we need. Saturday night is the best time to do this. The comics are in a secure room he had built off the main living room. We get what we want, then we wait until he comes home drunk.”
“No alarm system?”
“There is. But there’s a way into the house through a window he never locks on the bathroom second floor. Cut the heavy padlock on his comic room. Get this box he keeps the big boys in. Then we wait until he comes home drunk and deactivates the alarm. Take care of him. Get out of there. Not that big a deal.”
Lee realized he’d been part of his brother’s plan all along. They were dealing with a big guy. He needed help.
“This guy gets wiped every Saturday night?”
“Like clockwork. Let me show you the layout,” Jeremy said.
He went into the tack room and brought out a backpack. He first took out a map. He turned on a single light and showed Lee where they could park up on Lost Canyon Road, then hike up across the hill through the woods to the old Miller place.
“He’ll come home around two in the morning. Be drunker’n a skunk. He rants and raves up there like some lunatic, then pretty much passes out.”
He pulled out some pictures of the house and pointed to the statues in the front. “There’s these big concrete lions he bought down in Phoenix and put them on either side of the steps. They sit on big concrete blocks. Man fell off the porch or top step, hit his head on one of the corners, he could very easily kill himself.” Jeremy looked proud, excited.
Lee said, “He’s a big guy. How you going to get him to fall off the porch and hit his head?”
Jeremy went into the backpack. “I got a little present for Superman. A bit of kryptonite. You remember the saps the Italian gangsters were always using back in their day. Well, I made me one.”
He handed his homemade kryptonite “sap” to Lee. It was heavy, looked to be very thick leather, had a solid handle, and what was inside had edges.
“I stitched it up with fishing line. No way it’ll break. It’s hammered down lead with edges. It’ll break a skull real easy. And I treated the leather.”
“Treated the leather. How?”
“Well, I’ve been up there. I rubbed in the stone surface. So if there’s microscopic residue, it’ll be the right kind.”
Jesus, Lee thought. He’s either completely nuts or he’s really got this worked out so he believes he can’t fail.
Jeremy put the sap back. “A drunk takes a hard fall. Being a big man, he could easy break his skull and that’s the end of the story. Nobody gonna get all CSI on this. And the house won’t look broke in.”
Lee sat back against the stall. “That’s it? We wait for him to come home drunk on Saturday night, break his skull. Take some of the comics, and Porter helps us get money.”
“That’s it. Here’s the deal. He keeps the comics in this box behind one of the bookcases. Mandy showed me. He keeps the office padlocked and a big bookcase hides the shelf with the metal box. With those big Dobermans out there, the alarm system, he figures nobody is gonna be messing around. Me, I’d put them in a bank vault.”
“You see the comics?”
“Sure. Mandy showed me the comics he’s got in there. And besides the big boys, he’s got glass doors on the bookshelves, and they’re stacked with comics as well. He’s also got cash and jewelry in the safe. We can take some of it, or all of it. But the big bucks are in the comics. The thing is, we leave no break-in evidence behind. We cut a lock, we replace a lock.”
Lee stared at his brother.
Jeremy showed him bolt cutters and held up a replacement lock. Then he put everything back in the backpack and put it up on the shelf in the tack room.
He came back out, sat down, and said, “That’s the plan. I got no problem bringing justice to this bastard. He’s a murderer and a thief and worse. So what you have to do is figure out if you’re in, or out. Let’s get a beer. You think about it.”
Lee followed his brother out of the barn. “This thing about his wife getting killed. You know much about that? Besides what Mandy told you.”
“What was in the papers. The sheriff up in Utah did the investigation of the accident. Happened in those hiking trails in Bryce Canyon. You want to read about it, you can find out. Never had any evidence they could nail Frank on. But get this—seems Frank had a girlfriend died kinda mysterious a decade ago. Drowned. We’re not talking about some good guy, here.”
They went up on the porch. He sat in one of the wooden, cushioned chairs and Jeremy went in to get some beers.
There was no escaping the guilt that lay heavy on Lee. That he’d just up and run off to get away from the mess their father had created. At the time, he felt he had no choice, but he’d left his young brother to deal with it, and that had put something between them that wasn’t going away easily. He didn’t see how he could let his brother and mother down yet again.
Lee saw no alternative that would get the two things he wanted more than anything at the
moment—the relationship with his brother, and the ranch for his mother. He wished his brother’s scheme was harebrained and easily dismissed. But Jeremy had thought it through and prepared, and Lee could see it actually working.
Still, it was killing a guy. Murdering him. Not that he didn’t deserve it. But the reality of their mother losing this place, after all she’d gone through with their father, the humiliation of it, his rages, women. And then he takes everything he can get his hands on. If she lost this place, Lee thought, that’ll be the end of her. It’ll kill her.
When Jeremy came out and handed him a beer, Lee said, “I’m in.”
“I never had a doubt,” Jeremy said.
5
Saturday morning, after a breakfast of grits, eggs, ham, and toast, Lee stood at the sink washing dishes, musing soberly in his mind about what they were planning that night. His mother came over to help dry. Grim-faced, she asked Jeremy to clean stalls but for Lee to stay a moment.
“Lee, what’s going on?”
Lee handed her a plate. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.” She dried the plate with a bit more intensity than necessary to get the desired result. “You and you and your brother are out talking all the time. I’m just curious as to what’s going on.”
“We’re working things out.”
“What does working things out mean? You boys are up to something, and I want to know what it is. I’m worried about Jeremy. He’s gotten really bitter over all that’s happening. You know how he can be. Too much, in some ways, like his father.”
“Mom, we’re just looking at the possibilities.”
She gave him a skeptical little smirk as she put the plate in the cupboard and took another. “I thought, you being home, you would find out what he’s thinking, maybe get him calmed down. But the two of you are acting like you’re up to something, and that worries me. It feels to me a little like when you were boys.”
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