The Ghostway jlajc-6

by Tony Hillerman

  It wasn't likely that anyone would be outside. The Santa Ana had started blowing early in the afternoon. It was blowing harder now, and Vaggan had picked this place carefully—the screened off-street parking apron outside the four-car garage of a massive, colonial-style mansion on Vanderhoff Drive. The owners of the mansion were elderly, their only live-in servant a middle-aged woman. The light went off early, and the parking area offered Vaggan an unobtrusive place to wait, out of sight of the Beverly Hills police patrol. The patrol prowled the streets at night looking for those, like Vaggan, who had no legitimate after-hours business here among the richest of the rich.

  In addition, it was near enough to Jay Leonard's home to make it convenient for Vaggan to scout his grounds. He had done that at 11 p.m., and again a little after midnight, and twice since midnight. And it was far enough from Leonard's to reduce the risk of being noticed in the event someone else was watching, Vaggan had considered that possibility—as he considered all possibilities when he took on a job—but it didn't seem to be happening. Leonard seemed to be content to base his safety on a triple line of defense. He had a rent-a-cop staying in his home with him, he'd installed a fancy new burglar alarm, and he'd rented two guard dogs.

  Vaggan found the thought of the dogs intruding into his concentration. The paragraph he'd just read concerned the taboo violations which could be counteracted by the Enemy Way ceremonial, a subject that interested him mildly. But the thought of the dogs excited him. He had inspected them (and they had inspected him) on each of his scouting trips. Dobermans. A male and a female. The dog man at Security Systems, Inc., had assured him that the dogs were trained not to bark, but Vaggan had wanted to check that out. Even with the Santa Ana blowing, even with the whine and howl of the wind covering just about every sound, Vaggan didn't want the animals raising a clamor. Leonard was a drinker, and a coke snorter, and Leonard might be out of it. But he would be nervous. So might the rent-a-cop.

  "You can ask Jay Leonard," the dog man said. "He's had 'em better'n a week now and they ain't barked for him. If they'd been bothering his neighbors, I don't think he'd have recommended us to you."

  "Maybe they haven't had any reason to be barking," Vaggan said. "But what if somebody walks along the fence there with a dog on a leash, or a cat, or if somebody wants to come through the gate. What if a cat gets in the yard?"

  "No barking," the man said. "One kind of watchdog, you teach him to bark when somebody shows up. Encourage it when they're pups. Another kind of guard dog, attack dog, you don't want barking. You teach 'em right away they bark they get punished for it. Before long, nothing makes 'em bark. We can rent you a pair like that."

  Vaggan had reserved two dogs for December, long after he'd be finished with Leonard. He used a name and address he'd picked out of the Beverly Hills telephone book and paid a $50 deposit to make sure the man would know the deal was made and wouldn't be calling Leonard about the barking business. Leonard was into the Man for $120,000, not counting interest and Vaggan's collection fee. And Vaggan's collection fee—usually 15 percent—was going to be a lot fatter this time.

  "Publicity," the Man had said. "That's what we need. You know what that silly little bastard said to me? What Leonard said? He said don't give him any of that crap about breaking kneecaps. Them days is past, he said. He said take him to court. Did I know you couldn't collect a gambling debt in court?"

  Vaggan had just listened. The Man was very, very angry.

  "I said I'd turn it over to my collection, and he said screw my collection. He said try to get tough with him and I'd end up in the pen."

  "So you want a kneecap broken?"

  "Something or other," the Man said. "Whatever is appropriate. But I want people to know about it. Too many deadbeats saying sue me. Let's get some publicity out of Leonard. Cut down on the bad debts."

  "Whether or not we get the money?"

  "I don't mean kill him," the Man said. "Kill him, I'm out a hunnert and twenty grand and interest. He ain't gonna name me in his will."

  Vaggan didn't respond to that. He sat easily in the telephone booth, receiver to his ear, and watched a woman trying to back a Cadillac into a space at the shopping center across the street. He let the silence tick away. Better to let the Man start the next phase of the negotiations.

  "Vaggan," he said at last. "There'd be a bonus for the publicity."

  "I can see that," Vaggan said. "What you're asking me to do is sort of challenge the cops to do something about it. Roughing up Leonard is one thing. Roughing him up so it's public is like daring 'em to catch me. And if I do it right, I'm putting myself out of the collection business. All you have to do is mention Jay Leonard and they hand you a cashier's check."

  "What's fair?" the Man asked.

  "I'd say all of it," Vaggan said. "You lose the Leonard money but you make the point with everybody else. All of it, if I really do it right. I mean, make the TV news shows, and the Times. Get a big splash."

  They argued for a while, haggling, each man objecting. But they settled on a price. Several prices, actually, depending on the nature of the publicity and on Leonard paying up promptly. Even the lowest one was enough to pay for putting in the reinforced concrete storage house that Vaggan was going to build into the hillside next to his place. It made the lost $50 dog deposit seem reasonable.

  Vaggan glanced at his watch. Twelve minutes now. He put down the book. The wind gusted against the van, shaking it on its springs and battering it with a barrage of twigs and whatever the dry Santa Ana gale picked up from the lush lawns of Beverly Hills. The sound of Götterdammerung muttered from the speakers—turned low in the interest of safety but, at this thunderous point in the opera, loud enough to be heard over the storm. The passage always moved Vaggan. The Twilight of the Gods, the end of the decayed old order, the cleansing. Blood, death, fire, chaos, honor, and new beginnings. "Nietzsche for thought, Wagner for music," his father would say. "Most of the rest of it is for niggers." His father…

  He turned his thoughts instantly from that, glanced at the watch again. He would leave a little early. He slipped off his shoes, pulled the chest-high waders from their box, and slipped his legs into them, the splint on his left forefinger making the action clumsy. Vaggan hated the splint for reminding him of his moment of carelessness. But the finger had healed quickly, and he'd soon be done with the bandage. Meanwhile, he'd not think about it. "Think about your strength," the Commander had said. "Forget weaknesses." The waders were heavy with the equipment he had stuffed in their pouch. He pulled the rubber over his hips and adjusted the suspenders. Even in the waders he was graceful. Vaggan exercised. He ran. He lifted weights. He weighed 228 pounds, and every ounce of it was conditioned to do its job.

  Vaggan picked up the canvas airline bag he used to carry his bulkier equipment, locked the van behind him, and walked slowly up the sidewalk, getting accustomed to the clumsy waders. At the corner, the view opened before him. The lights of Los Angeles, bright even at 3 a.m., spread below. Vaggan thought of a luminescent southern sea, and then of the phosphorescence of decay. An apt thought. He shuffled along on the waders' felt soles, keeping silent, keeping in the shadows, looking at the glow of sleeping Los Angeles. The glow of a rotting civilization. One day soon it would be sterilized, burned clean. Very soon. The article he'd clipped from Survival estimated fourteen Soviet warheads targeted on the Greater Los Angeles area, including lax, the port at Long Beach, and the city center, and the attendant military installations and industrial areas. Hydrogen bombs. They would clean the valley. When it was over, and safe again, he could climb these hills at night and look down into clean, quiet darkness.

  The dogs heard him coming or perhaps—despite the wind—smelled his scent. They were waiting for him at the fence. He examined them while he extracted his wire cutter and his pipe wrench from the wader pouch. The dogs stared back, ears forward, tense and expectant. The smaller one, the female, whined, and whined again, and made a quick move toward the wire, drawing her lips back
in a snarl. The Santa Ana had blown clouds and smog out to sea, as it always did, and there was enough late moon to reflect from white, waiting teeth. Vaggan pulled on his heavy leather gauntlets and snipped the first wire. The dogs wouldn't bark. He was sure of that now.

  He had made sure on his second visit to the fence, taking along the cardboard box with the cat in it. The cat was a big Siamese tom which Vaggan had adopted at the Animal Shelter in Culver City—paying $28 to cover the cost of license, shots, and neutering. The dogs had charged the fence, standing tense, and the cat had smelled them. He had scratched and struggled inside the box so frantically that Vaggan had to put it on the ground and hold the lid down with one hand while he cut the cord holding it. Then he had thrown the box over the fence.

  The cat had emerged in midair. It landed running and lasted a minute or so. Vaggan had wanted to learn if the dogs' training to silence would hold even during the excitement of an attack. It had. They had killed the cat with no more sound than their breathing. He had also learned something useful about how they worked. The female was the leader. She struck, and then the big male went in for the kill. Instinct, probably. It hardly seemed to Vaggan that it was something animals could be taught.

  Vaggan's sentiments, oddly for him, had been with the cat. For the cat was the foredoomed loser in this affair, and Vaggan had no regard for losing, or for those who did it. Vaggan, however, admired cats, respected their self-sufficient independence. He identified with that.

  Often, in fact, he thought of himself as a cat. In the world that would come after the missiles and the radiation he would live as a predator, as would everyone who survived more than a week or so. Cats were first-rate predators, requiring no pack to hunt, and Vaggan found them worthy of his study.

  Vaggan had started clippping wires at the bottom of the fence, wanting to be standing erect when he had cut enough to make it possible for the dogs to attack. But the dogs made no move. They waited, skittish and eager, aware that Vaggan was the enemy, wanting the wire out of the way for what was inevitable.

  He clipped the last wire, holding the severed fence between him and the Dobermans. He dropped the clippers, fished his buck knife from the waders' pocket, and opened it. He held the blade upward, like a saber in his left hand, dropped the fence, and snatched up the pipe wrench in his right. The dogs stood, waiting. He studied them a moment, then stepped through the fence onto the lawn.

  The male wheeled to Vaggan's left, whining eagerly, and the female took two or three steps directly backward. Then she lunged, fangs bared—a black shape catapulting at his chest. Had there been a single dog, Vaggan would have met the charge directly, to give the blow of the pipe wrench its full, killing force. But the male dog would also be coming. Vaggan wheeled to the right as he struck, taking some of the force out of the swing but putting the female's body between him and the charging male. The wrench slammed into the Doberman's skull in front of the ear, breaking jawbone, skull, and vertebrae. But the force of her lunge knocked Vaggan against the fence just as the male struck. It fastened, snarling, on the rubber leg of his waders, its weight pulling and tearing at him, jerking him off balance. Vaggan hit it across the lower back with the wrench, heard something break, and hit it again across the chest. The dog fell away from him and lay on its side on the lawn, struggled to get to its front feet, tried to crawl away from him. Vaggan walked after it and killed it with the wrench. The female, he saw, was already dead. Vaggan knelt beside the male dog's body, eyes on Leonard's house, listening. No lights came on. The Santa Ana had faded a little for the moment, as if it were listening with him. Then it howled again, bending the eucalyptus trees that shaded the swimming pool and battering the shrubbery behind him. Vaggan walked back to the hole in the fence and looked through it, up and down the moonlit street. The wind moved everything, but he could see no sign of human life.

  He dragged the male dog back to the shrubbery and hung it, head dangling, in the thick limbs. He extracted a rubber ice pack from his airline bag, unscrewed its oversized cap, and cut the Doberman's throat with the buck knife. He'd bought the ice bag at a medical supply store, choosing it because of its mouth, wide enough for ice cubes or to catch a flow of blood in the dark. He collected a pint or so from the dog's severed artery and then replaced the cap. Next he took out two plastic garbage bags and unfolded them on the grass. He decapitated both dogs and amputated the left foreleg of the male. He stuffed the bodies in one bag and the heads and foreleg in the other. That done, he stripped off his heavy gauntlets, blood-soaked now, replacing them with a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves.

  He stepped out of the waders. The male dog's teeth had torn through the heavy rubber at the knee, leaving multiple rips. He checked the leg of his coveralls. It, too, was torn but his skin hadn't been punctured. He put the gauntlets, wrench, and buck knife back in the airline bag. He took out his shoes, and slipped them on, and extracted a roll of adhesive tape, a small .32 caliber pistol, four pairs of nylon restraint handcuffs, a pressure spray can of foam insulation, and, finally, a pair of plier clamps and two cattle ear tags he'd purchased at a veterinarian supply store in Encino. He arranged this assortment in his pockets and stacked the waders and the bag containing the bodies under the shrubbery. If the situation allowed he would retrieve them. If not, it wouldn't matter because he'd left no fingerprints or any way of tracing anything. But having the dogs' bodies missing would add another touch of the macabre, and Vaggan was going to make it macabre to the maximum—macabre enough to make page one of the LA Times and the lead item on tomorrow's newscasts.

  He walked quietly across the lawn, carrying his burden. Dogs out of the way, the next step was the burglar alarm.

  Vaggan knew a lot about the alarm. The second time he'd scouted the house, he'd noticed a burglars beware sticker the alarm company had pasted on the side-entrance window. He'd examined the sticker through his binoculars, looked up the company's name in the phone book, and spent an afternoon as a potential customer, learning how the system worked. Jay Leonard was big in Los Angeles, a television talk show host people were proud to have as a customer. As he had with the dog trainer, Vaggan implied that Leonard was a friend. He mentioned that Leonard was well pleased with his alarm system and had suggested he get one like it. The salesman had shown him the model and explained how it worked, and Vaggan had bought one, saying he'd install it himself.

  He found the control box about where the salesman had said it should be put, mounted on an inside wall of the open carport near both a power source and a telephone line. It was equipped with an anti-tamper device that set off the alarm inside the house and flashed a signal to the Beverly Hills police if the power was cut off. Vaggan fished the aerosol can from his jacket pocket, shook it vigorously, and inserted the nozzle into the heat/moisture vent on the side of the metal box. He depressed the button and listened to the hiss of the foam insulation gushing in. The label specified a drying time of thirty minutes but, when Vaggan had checked it, it had been solid in eighteen minutes—solid and expanded to congeal all the alarm's relay switches and circuits into useless immobility. But he waited the full thirty minutes to be safe, leaning against the carport wall, coming down from the high he'd experienced in dealing with the dogs.

  There was no reason to think about what he'd do next. That was carefully planned. Instead he thought about the Navajo Project. The message from his answering service had said simply, Call Mac. That meant call McNair, which in turn meant that something must have come unglued again. Not surprising. In Vaggan's experience, jobs that started sloppily tended to continue to screw up. But it was no skin off his ass. He didn't even know what the operation involved. Something, he guessed, to do with getting rid of witnesses. McNair was under indictment, with some of his people. McNair was fairly big, and certainly very senior, in the West Coast car-stealing business, and fairly big in cocaine too, from what Vaggan had heard. And he had Koreans, and Indians, and Filipinos, and Mexicans, and such people doing his stealing. In Vaggan's estimation,
that was asking for trouble, since such people were poor stock. Some of them would surely screw up and get caught and talk. Had talked, already, to the grand jury, from what he'd heard, and would be ready to nail McNair in court. Which is what you should expect when you deal with such people. Losers. All of them, except maybe the Navajos.

  Something about the Navajos appealed to Vaggan. Since he'd gotten into this business, he'd been reading about them. They, too, were survivors. It was because, he was sure, of their philosophy of staying in harmony with conditions, being in tune with whatever was coming down. That made sense. He did it himself. The people who refused to believe the missiles were coming and tried to turn it off by denying it, they would die. He'd gotten in harmony with that inevitable truth, accepted it, prepared for it. He would survive. And he'd gotten in harmony with this Santa Ana wind. It didn't bother him. In fact, he'd made it a part of his cover, like the quills on a porcupine. He listened to the wind, battering and shaking things, and smiled slightly. He glanced at his watch and pushed the tip of his little finger against the foam insulation in the vent. It was stiff. Time for the final phase. Time for the rent-a-cop.

  Vaggan used his glass cutter on the window, removing a pane and reaching inside to unfasten the lock and then closing it behind him quickly, as soon as he had himself and his supplies inside, to shut out the wind sound. He stood listening, giving his eyes time to adjust to this deeper darkness. He'd made no sound himself. Vaggan could be quiet as the cats he admired. But opening the window would have changed the sound level of the storm for anyone awake inside. If that had alerted anyone it was better to know it now. So he waited, stock still, using up a full five minutes.