Still grinning, Goldmunsen lifted his fist high, up by his ear. He swung it around like some great hammer. It drove into the side of Chris’s head with a thud. Chris’s eyes rolled crazily. He pitched forward onto his face, unconscious.
Goldmunsen took hold of Chris by one arm, wrapping his big hand around the Born To Raise Hell tattoo. Flake took hold of Chris by the other arm. Chris’s feet scraped over the concrete floor as the two goons dragged him back through the hangar.
Ray Grambling kept his eyes down the whole time. Wilson Tubbs had pushed himself up on one elbow. He looked around and saw what was happening and then he turned his eyes down too. He watched the blood falling from his broken nose onto the concrete.
Neither Tubbs nor Ray Grambling looked up again as Goldmunsen and Flake hauled Chris out into the parking lot. Neither of them looked up at all until the two thugs had driven Chris away with them in their sleek, black car.
Forty-Four
About two minutes later, Jim Bishop’s Harley bounded into the parking lot. The bike skidded to a stop, gravel spitting out from under its tires. Bishop dismounted. He came toward the hangar quickly, his flight bag slung over his left shoulder, his traveling bag clutched in his right hand.
Ray Grambling had helped Tubbs to his feet by now. Tubbs was holding a rag to his bleeding face. “Fuck me!” he was in the midst of saying for about the fifth time. “Did you see that?”
Ray looked over the other man’s shoulder and saw Bishop coming toward them. “Tubbs?” he said. His voice was shaking.
“I mean, fuck me, did you…?”
“Tubbs!” Tubbs glanced at Ray around the rag. And Ray said, “Go get yourself looked at, y’hear me. You tell the doctor you bumped into the wing of the plane. You understand?”
“Ray, what’re you…?”
“Do it, Tubbsy. Nothing happened and you bumped into the wing of the plane. Now get the hell outta here and don’t tell nobody. Go on.”
Dazed, Tubbs nodded. Ray’s tone made him start moving. By the time Bishop stepped up to Ray Grambling, Tubbs was limping out of the hangar, nursing his face, bleeding into his rag.
Bishop glanced at him, then at Ray. “What happened?” he said.
“They took Chris away,” Ray said in a shaky whisper. He swallowed hard. Bishop was wearing his aviator shades. Ray couldn’t make out his eyes. He couldn’t tell what his reaction was. He rushed on. “He knows, man. Chris—he knows you’re a detective. He knows I brought you in. He came in here looking for Hirschorn, to tell him. But these two goons got to him, they wouldn’t listen. They just took him away. They just came in here and knocked him out and took him.”
Bishop said nothing for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly. “They knocked him out.”
“Yeah, but if he wakes up, man. If he wakes up and tells them, tells them about you and me, I’m dead,” Ray went on. “I know Hirschorn. He’ll kill me. He’ll kill my whole family, he finds out about this. I knew I never should’ve done this. Damn it, I never should’ve. What are we gonna do, Bishop? What’re we gonna do?”
Bishop stood there, stood there with his pale eyes hidden by his shades and said nothing. Ray was right. If Chris regained consciousness and convinced the goons that Bishop was a detective, Hirschorn would kill him. He’d also kill Bishop on the spot.
“I mean, what’re we gonna do?” said Ray again. “We can’t go to the cops. In this town? Hirschorn’d find out the minute we got there. Oh, I never should’ve done it. He wakes up, they’ll kill me. They’ll kill my wife, my kids. They’ll kill you. They’ll kill everybody. What’re we gonna do?”
“Nothing.” Bishop spoke quietly. “There’s nothing we can do. We’re gonna have to take our chances.”
“But what if he wakes up, man? What if he wakes up?”
“Pull yourself together,” Bishop snapped. “He’s not gonna wake up. You hear me? That’s why they knocked him out, that was the point. By the time he wakes up, he’ll already be dead.”
Ray Grambling started to say more but Bishop wouldn’t listen. He pushed past him, heading for Hirschorn and the plane.
Forty-Five
The woods three thousand feet below were deep green in the gathering twilight. The Cessna tilted in the air as Bishop guided it northward through the dusk.
Hirschorn’s voice came over Bishop’s headset. “It’s a whole lot of nothing down there, isn’t it?”
Bishop nodded, rolling the plane out of its bank. Flying on straight and level at the heading Hirschorn had given him.
“No way in. No way out,” Hirschorn went on. “No roads. No phones.”
“No runways either, far as I can see,” said Bishop.
He heard Hirschorn’s chuckle, cold and mechanical over the set. “You getting nervous?”
Bishop barely smiled.
The sun had dropped behind the western hills but the cool blue of the sky held on. Bishop drew off his aviators, slipped them into his pocket. Now, by the last light of day, he spotted something below. A glimpse, through the treetops, of a winding line, too brown for a river, too narrow for a road.
Hirschorn saw him looking. “Yeah, that—” he said over the engines. “—That’s a dynamite road. There used to be a mine down there in the gold rush days. They’d use that road to cart dynamite to the mine from camp. Not much use on the ground anymore. Just a track—twenty mountain miles from anything. But from the air—well, just follow it along and you can start to bring her down.”
Surprised, Bishop glanced at him. As in: Bring her down where? But Hirschorn only showed the white teeth beneath his steel moustache. He was a chilly dude was old Hirschorn, you had to give him that.
With a shrug, Bishop throttled back. He felt the plane pitch down smoothly. He banked as they descended to follow the dynamite road.
“Hell, you can land in the trees, can’t you?” Hirschorn said with a laugh.
And in fact, for a long time, it looked as if they would. The Cessna sank lower and lower. The crowns of the oaks and the points of the pines rushed toward them, swept under them and stretched out before them. The only break in the sea of green was that snaking brown miner’s track that Bishop kept just off their right wing. Even that was hard to see after a while as the darkness deepened, and the evening drew on. The blue sky turned indigo. The green of the leaves was submerged under colorless shadow. The dynamite road became a gray wisp.
“There!” said Hirschorn.
Where? Bishop peered through the gloaming. He saw nothing. Nothing. Then—yes—for a swift second—the runway at his one o’clock…and it was gone. Just like that, they had flown past it.
Bishop pursed his lips. Hirschorn laughed again. “Not much to land on, is it?”
It sure wasn’t. Two thousand feet of packed dirt, if that. With tall pines and oaks crowding it on both ends and either side. It would’ve been tough to drop a chopper in there let alone an airplane.
“Think you can handle it?” said Hirschorn.
Bishop didn’t even bother to answer. He wound the plane back around. Slowed her as she dropped even closer to the treetops. He ran back the length of the runway, measuring the strip of dirt with his eyes. It wasn’t easy. The runway too was disappearing now into the dark.
“Chris blew out a tire first time he did this, nearly spun us right into a fucking tree,” said Hirschorn merrily. “You can see why I needed a top-notch pilot.”
Bishop brought the plane onto final approach. Lowered the gear. Could almost feel, in his imagination, the tires scraping the branches. The beams of his landing lights dissipated in the rising forest mist. He could barely see ahead of him now, could just make out the strip through the dusk. In his mind, he was all flaps and low speed and just a pure silent hum as the dim shadow of the rising runway filled his consciousness. He picked his spot a yard or two beyond the trees. Cleared the last oak and pulled the nose up. The Cessna dropped in. Dropped like a flying brick, almost straight down. The cockpit jarred as the gear whomped against the ground. And Bi
shop was wrestling the nose high, pulling a wheelie, keeping the front tire off the soft earth as long as possible. Then, as the speed bled off, as the danger of a skid or noseover eased, he lowered her, pressed his feet against the brakes, steady and sure.
The last light died down here beneath the trees. The plane kept rolling. Bishop stared hard through the windshield. The forest up ahead was only a darker mass on the dark. Then suddenly, out of the shadows, there it was, a broken wall of stout trunks rushing toward him.
But the Cessna was under control. The night slowed around it. Stopped. The plane sat quietly on the runway, the engines chugging. They had landed.
Bishop allowed himself a sigh. He glanced over at Hirschorn, just a silhouette in the seat beside him.
“You like that?” Hirschorn said. Bishop didn’t answer. Hirschorn laughed, a jovial laugh. He reached across the pilot and plucked the key out of the Cessna’s ignition. “Wait’ll you see what you’re going to fly next,” he said.
Forty-Six
There were lights moving in the forest as Bishop stepped down from the cockpit. There were footsteps approaching on the fallen leaves. Another moment and two men emerged from the trees, came onto the runway. The men were wearing fatigues and watch caps. They were carrying Stinger flashlights. Each had a Heckler & Koch MP5—a machine gun—slung by a strap over his shoulder.
It was a lot of firepower out here in the middle of nowhere. Even Bishop, fearless as he usually was, felt suddenly very alone, very far from any chance of help, any avenue of escape.
“Let’s go,” said Hirschorn.
Bishop got his traveling bag out of the Cessna’s backseat. At a nod from Hirschorn, one of the gunmen started back into the woods. Bishop and Hirschorn followed him. The second gunman brought up the rear.
There was no trail. Patches of tangled roots sprung from the night under the swinging beams of the gunmen’s Stingers. Patches of forest in patches of swirling mist. Then those lighted places sank away again, were replaced by others in a confusing, moving jumble. Bishop couldn’t always make out where he was stepping. But the lead gunman moved fast. There was no choice but to march after him, to stumble after him, deeper into the trees.
It was cooler in the woods than in the town but muggier too. Bishop’s T-shirt hung damp on him within minutes. His face felt slick and clammy. As they went, the mosquitoes found them. Sometimes, in a flashlight’s outglow, Bishop could see them swarm. He heard their wearying high-pitched whisper of attack. He cursed at them. He swatted at his neck and cheek, smeared himself with his own blood as he dragged their corpses off his skin.
But the walk wasn’t long. Ten minutes, maybe less. Then the rumble of a generator reached him. Dangling vines and twisted branches appeared, black against a ghostly white glow, a light in the distance filtering to him through the rising mist.
Even with that warning, though, it was startling to arrive at the campsite. There was no clearing. Not much of one anyway. There were just a couple of instant buildings, set up and wedged between the trees. One building was a two-story barracks: two rectangular boxes of steel stacked one on top of the other. There was one window on each side of each box and even a stairway slapped onto one end of them. The windows were curtained and only that dim, ghostly glow escaped from them, seeping into the forest vapors and carried away in their slow, rising spiral.
The other building was larger, a shed. It was completely dark.
As he approached, marching with the little band, Bishop glanced upward instinctively. He saw one star, one jagged sliver of blue-black sky. The rest was blocked out by the canopy of leaves. And over the shed, where there was a wider break in the treetops, there was some kind of cover—mosquito netting maybe—hung to act as camouflage. You could fly over this site at two hundred feet, he thought, and never spot it. Especially in the dark. There was no question about it: If he didn’t make it out of here on his own, no one would ever find him.
The lead gunman stopped. Bishop and Hirschorn stopped. So did the gunman behind them. Now, as the crunch of their footsteps ceased, there was only the rumble of the generator, and the burr of crickets and the rattle of cicada and the bleat and belch of peepers and bullfrogs in the thickening night all around.
Hirschorn wiped his chiseled features with a white handkerchief. Bishop could just make him out in the light of the Stingers. The silver-haired man still looked elegant and composed as he daubed the sweat off his neck and forehead. Then he gestured with the handkerchief toward the shed.
“I’ll let you get washed up and settled in a minute,” he said, “but first I want to give you a look at my baby.”
He lifted his chin to the lead gunman. The gunman went to the front of the shed. At another gesture from Hirschorn, Bishop followed.
The gunman wedged the flash under his arm. By its unsteady light, Bishop could see him working the shed latch. Then the gunman drew one-half of the shed front open. He returned and drew the other half open the other way.
Bishop stood in front of the wide-open shed. He looked in. He saw the gunman’s flashlight jouncing here and there, but beyond that he made out nothing but blackness. Then with a queasy feeling, he began to distinguish a darker darkness, a blacker black hunkering in the shed’s depths.
The gunman slipped inside the steel box. He threw a switch. A pair of fluorescent lights attached to the shed’s sides began to work their way on. In that flickering blue light, Bishop saw what was in there.
He whistled. Hirschorn laughed, delighted by his reaction.
Bishop tried to think of something to say. He couldn’t. All he could do was whistle again. And finally he managed a stunned murmur: “Man oh man oh man.”
Forty-Seven
All Weiss was after at that moment was a drink. He was driving the Taurus home from the airport, home from his visit to Whip Pomeroy in the prison upstate.
While he’d been gone, the weather down here had turned crummy. The wide sky over the ballpark and the bay was thick with clouds. There had been no sunset. Night had just dropped as from a gallows high. Now the lights of Oakland across the water were blurring in a closing mist. He watched them idly. The traffic north was slow. The cars along the freeway ahead of him glared red and went dark and glared an angry red again.
It was what the drinking man calls time. As in, “It’s time!” As in, “The time has come.” Weiss could practically taste the scotch. He could practically smell it. His mind was practically crying out for a measure of greater stillness. It would be greater stillness than this anyway, this agitation, this obsessive imagining: the stairway, the locked door, the angel-faced girl in the halo of her own red-gold hair, blah, blah, blah. Oh, thank you, thank you, you saved me, saved me…
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” muttered Weiss as he drove.
Shouldn’t he have felt reassured at this point? Julie Wyant had made her escape, hadn’t she? Sure she had. She’d vanished in her wig, taken on a whole new identity. No one would ever find her now. The only person who had the faintest notion of who she’d become or where she’d gone was the man who’d given her the AKA, Pomeroy. And Pomeroy had himself locked up so tight and deep that even if the Shadowman were as unstoppable as the newspapers made him out to be he could never get to him. So for now, at least, Julie was safe. There was no urgency. No stairs, no locked door. No every second counts. What was he so goddamned worried about?
The SUV in front of him went red and slowed. He braked the Taurus. The traffic congealed and horns started honking here and there like geese passing over it. Weiss tapped his finger on the steering wheel impatiently.
Jesus, he thought. Jesus, who was this woman anyway? This Julie Wyant. Was she really that special? Was anyone? Where did she even come from? The cops had searched for her—so had he—and she seemed to have no past, no family, no one who really knew where she’d been before the moment she turned up in Moncrieff’s stable of girls. She seemed to have shimmered into being out of nothingness and dissolved again back into the nothingness when
ce she came. All that was left behind was a picture of her, a video of her, beckoning. And all those men, of course, in love with her. Obsessed with her. Her johns. Moncrieff. The Shadowman…
A flush crawled up Weiss’s neck as he thought about it. It was a flush of embarrassment, of shame. Because what about him, after all? Him and these daydreams of his, these feverish longings he felt at night? What about that prostitute he’d hired with the red wig? Talk about obsession. Jesus.
The traffic started moving again. The red brake lights along the freeway went out in swift sequence, like dominoes falling. As the Taurus edged forward, Weiss saw a clutch of cop cars with flashing racks on the shoulder of the road. Two civilian cars had collided, denting each other. An accident; a bottleneck. The Taurus squeezed through it. The traffic fanned out on the far side and he accelerated. To his left, in the murk of cloud and mist, the weary, yellow lights of the city skyline finally rose. That first sip of whiskey was as good as on his lips, the heat of it as good as in him. It was time.
But just then, something occurred to him. Occurred to him, that is, in the Weissian sense. That is, he felt a separate presence in his thoughts, the logic of another personality. That was his way, his Weiss-like way. People, their emotions, the progress of their emotions just came to him, just took up residence in his inner space so that suddenly he understood things, things they would think, things they would do, without exactly knowing how or why.
He had been thinking about Julie Wyant. And then about the Shadowman. And then he had been thinking about himself and then…and then there it was. This poisoned heart. The logic of this poisoned heart. Its rage—tremendous, living rage—rage like a second soul that worked its will in a man until his every act was just the rage in motion.
It was a weird thought. It was frightening. Because you didn’t think of a character like that falling in love. Sure, Weiss had known hit men who were good to their wives, mob bosses who were kind to their kids, even a serial killer who was sweet as hell to the old lady in the apartment next door. But the violence and the decency seemed to come from separate places in them. They loved whom they loved and killed whom they killed and it was not all one thing.
Dynamite Road Page 19
