by Meg Gardiner
“You lied before, about wanting to hire Ruby Junior for a party. Go on. Get.”
“I came here earlier because I need to get in touch with Ruby Junior. We have a mutual acquaintance.” Or close enough. “But you chased me away with a forty-five. And now Lt. Tang has a few questions.”
Tang was half Ma Ratner’s size but showed not the slightest sign of feeling intimidated. “The flyer says he’s available not just to haul trash but to tend bar and organize parties. What kind of events—children’s birthday parties? Does his parole officer know this?”
“Get off my property.”
“And I take it you’re his business manager. Have you been forthcoming with prospective clients? Because I have to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Suburban might ask, every once and again, if the dude in the snap-button shirt is a violent felon.”
Ma Ratner muttered something, low and quick.
“What was that?” Tang said.
Evan said, “An Old West endearment. At least, I think ‘skanky dykes’ is meant to be endearing.”
“Oh.” Tang tilted her head, just slightly, like the flick of a knife. “I can call Ruben’s parole officer. He’d be interested in all of this. Especially in the possibility that Ruben may have left San Francisco without informing him.”
“I never said that. Don’t twist my words.” Mrs. Ratner shifted in the doorway. It was almost tectonic. “He ain’t working a children’s party. And it’s perfectly legal. Don’t you dare make trouble for him with the parole people.”
“Where’s he working, Mrs. Ratner?”
“It’s a twenty-first-birthday party. And he’s on the payroll for a corporate outfit.”
“What outfit?” Tang said.
“Edge Adventures.”
Tang wrote it down. “What kind of outfit is that?”
“They take rich folks on scare-you-silly weekends. To make ’em feel alive.”
“Have a phone number for Edge Adventures?”
“No. But you’re a smart fortune cookie, you’ll figure it out.” Tang scribbled in the notebook and underlined something, hard. “Gotcha.”
Evan heard clicking on the broken cement walkway behind her. Like Pepito’s little claws, but heavier. And breathing. No, snorting. And the clink of a chain.
She and Tang turned in unison.
On the sidewalk behind them in the dark was a dog. Maybe a dog. It came up to Tang’s shoulder.
“This is Calamity,” Mrs. Ratner said. “You’ll be going, now.”
“Call it off.”
“I didn’t summon her. She’s got a mind of her own.”
“Quite the bitch, then,” Evan said.
“You’d know, I expect,” Mrs. Ratner said.
Its teeth showed under the porch light. It looked like a cross between a Rhodesian ridgeback and a razorback hog.
It growled. Evan didn’t think it was a dog.
She turned to Tang. “Shall we retire to your salon?”
“Where we’ll consider warrants, and perhaps call Animal Control. Depending on what happens in the next ten seconds.” She looked pointedly at Ma Ratner.
Mrs. Ratner scratched under her pendulous bosom. Then clapped. “Sit.”
Calamity parked its rear on the cement and sat panting and drooling. Evan and Tang inched down the steps and across the concrete lawn, giving it a generous berth.
Tang opened the creaking gate. Mrs. Ratner called, “You leave my boy alone. You come back here, you’ll need more than a warrant to get in.”
“Thanks,” Evan said. “It’s been a blast.”
The sound of the whining gate worked like a starter’s pistol. From the house, Pepito bolted out the door, straight at them.
“Damn.” Tang rushed to the car and hopped in.
Evan jumped in a second behind and slammed her door. She stared back at Calamity. “What is that thing? A bear?”
Outside her window Pepito appeared, in pogo mode, leaping up and barking at her. Yip yip. Down. Up. Yip.
Tang started the engine. “Edge Adventures.”
“Already on it.”
Evan got the number and dialed. Tang put the car in gear. Pepito ran into the street and popped up in front of the grille. Yip.
Tang braked. Evan gritted her teeth. If they hit the dog, Ma Ratner would wail loud enough to summon folks from her prairie misanthropes reenactment society, wielding pitchforks and branding irons.
On the phone, the call was answered breathlessly by a voice that was young and female. “Terry?”
“Is this Edge Adventures?” Evan said.
“Kind of . . . who’s this?”
Kind of? “My name is Evan Delaney. I’m with Lt. Tang of the SFPD. I need to speak to someone in authority from Edge.”
Silence, abrupt and shocked. “Police?”
“Miss? Can you connect me to somebody from Edge?”
The brakes shuddered. Pepito landed on the hood of Tang’s car. From the doorway of her house, Ma Ratner gave an anguished cry.
“Pepito. You rammed Pepito.”
She charged down the steps, dress floating.
Tang gaped at the hood. “Get that thing off my car.”
“I’m not getting out,” Evan said.
Pepito yapped at the glass. Then, with its tiny snarling mouth, it sank its teeth into the windshield wiper.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Tang said.
“Go,” Evan said. “Ma Ratner’s coming.”
“Tell her to get the dog off my car.”
Evan leaned across to Tang’s side and hit the windshield wiper switch. The wipers started up. Pepito twisted and flew off the car with a high-pitched yelp.
Tang floored it.
Evan glanced out the back window. Pepito lay on the curb, feet pawing the air, sheriff’s hat cocked askew.
Friday night in the city. Who needed Disneyland?
She returned to the phone call. “Miss—I’m sorry. Are you still there?”
Nerves fizzed in the young woman’s voice. “Is it Terry? Is he okay?”
“I’m putting you on speaker.” Evan hit a key. “Who’s Terry, miss?”
“Terry Coates, my boyfriend. He owns Edge. Is he okay?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because he drove a speedboat out of the marina this morning, and disappeared.”
41
Haugen kept his hands in sight on the steering wheel. The young sheriff’s deputy walked toward the Volvo, a hand tented over his eyes. Haugen sensed Sabine’s tension, and said, “Happy citizens all are we.”
He put the window down. “Officer?”
The deputy hunched into his heavy winter jacket. His face was round and ruddy. He looked like any of a hundred thousand small-town boys who played on the high school football team and then, to maintain his position of authority, put on a badge. Eager and easily buffaloed.
Sabine was coiled in the passenger seat. Haugen felt her cool energy, husbanded, ready to lash out.
The deputy approached. “Evening, sir.”
“What’s going on?”
“Wondering if you’re on your way up the hill for the first time today, or whether you might have passed by this spot on your way down earlier.”
“We drove up from Los Angeles. Been on the road since this morning. Is there a problem?”
“Couple of people reported missing. That’s their truck.”
Haugen, Sabine, and Stringer dutifully looked at the blue Toyota pickup. Haugen adopted a look of surprised concern.
“What happened?” he said.
“Don’t know. I was hoping you might be able to offer some information.”
“Sorry, it’s a mystery to me.”
“Where are you headed?” the deputy said.
“Up the road a ways.”
“I ask because it’s possible these folks were hiking and got disoriented in the forest. They could have headed in the wrong direction. There’s a trail that meets the road about seven miles uphill. The trailhead’s cle
arly marked.”
“Understood. We’ll watch for them.”
“I appreciate it.”
The deputy was deliberately avoiding shining his big Maglite in the window—that being a provocative act, indicative of suspicion—but his country-boy eyes were running over Haugen’s face. This rube was sizing him up. He had to play the encounter at the correct pitch. Not disinterested, and definitely not antsy to leave.
Haugen nodded at the hard-driven Toyota pickup. “Who are they?”
“A doctor and an Air National Guardsman from San Francisco.”
Sabine turned at that. “What were they doing up here?”
The deputy paused. He eyed Sabine, which Haugen didn’t like.
“She’s a police consultant. She’s working on an investigation. They probably hiked up that trail there.”
He aimed the flashlight across the clearing. The beam swung toward the trees and illuminated the gleaming rainfall, bright and white. And something else.
The deputy stared. Raised a hand. “Hold on a minute, would you, sir?”
He walked across the clearing, past the blue pickup, focusing the flashlight on a spot on the ground. He stopped.
“I don’t like this,” Sabine said.
“Nor do I,” Haugen said. What was the deputy looking at?
“Go,” Sabine said.
“No.”
“Turn off the headlights and floor it. Get out of here before he gets more suspicious.”
“You idiot, he already has our plate number.”
“He didn’t write it down.”
“But he radioed the station. And look at his dashboard. He’s got us on video.”
Sabine saw the cruiser’s miniature camera, its lens aimed at the Volvo. “This is bad.”
The deputy crouched down and picked up something from the dirt. It was only a couple of inches long. It was brassy colored. He shined the flashlight on it.
It was the casing from a rifle cartridge.
Evan put the phone on speaker. “You can’t reach Mr. Coates?”
“He’s not answering, or replying to, my messages. Neither is his brother,” said the young woman. “I’m at his place. Calls to Edge’s office phone get forwarded here. That’s why I answered.”
Tang leaned toward the phone. Under the wash of streetlights, her face was grave. “This is Lt. Amy Tang of the SFPD.”
“Oh,” the young woman said. “I’m really worried about him.”
“Is it unusual for him to be out of contact while he’s—what did you say—running a scenario?”
“It’s not the first time, but I can’t get either him or his brother. That’s weird.”
“What can you tell me about his plans today? Who’s his client?”
“I don’t know. But it’s a twenty-first-birthday party.”
“Can you find out?”
“Can you find Terry?”
Evan said, “What’s his cell phone number?”
Tang handed over her little notebook, and Evan wrote the number down.
Tang said, “You check out his client. We’ll be back in touch.”
“Please, be quick,” the young woman said.
Evan ended the call and dialed Coates’s number. Tang raced up an on-ramp onto 280 and headed downtown.
Coates’s phone rang.
Tang made her own call. She identified herself and gave her badge number. “I need location services on a cell phone.” Reciting Coates’s number, she said, “Let me know ASAP.”
She changed lanes, not even looking. “If the battery in Coates’s phone is working, we’ll pinpoint its location.”
In Evan’s ear, Coates’s number rang.
Sabine sat forward in the Volvo and peered at the deputy through the gleam of the headlights. The downpour scattered like BBs from the deputy’s hat and jacket.
“He’s got the brass from Von’s AK-Forty-seven.”
The deputy stared at the cartridge casing for a long second. His head jerked up. He swept the beam of the flashlight across the dirt.
A glinting collection of cartridge casings littered the ground.
“We gotta haul, boss,” Stringer said. “This scene’s gonna get ugly, real fast. That kid’ll call in the cavalry.”
Haugen put his hand on the gearshift. Sabine turned her head. Her gaze was fierce.
The deputy stepped around the clearing, eyes on the cartridge casings. Then he aimed the flashlight at the trees.
Sabine said, “Dane.”
“I see it,” Haugen said.
He couldn’t let the deputy call this in. He put the Volvo in drive and jammed his foot on the gas.
The deputy looked up. He had only a moment to flinch before the Volvo hit him square in the midsection, like a wrecking ball.
The man buckled, his head hit the hood, and he stuck there.
Haugen continued accelerating. Sabine hissed and leaned back against the seat, bracing herself.
Haugen held the wheel and sped across the clearing. At the last second he braked. But still, the heavy SUV was going at noticeable speed when he drove straight into the nearest pine tree.
The brakes kept the airbag from deploying, but still they jerked to a stop.
The deputy made no sound. He hung pinned between the tree and the grille of the Volvo. By the time Haugen put it in reverse, Sabine had jumped out.
He backed up. The deputy slumped off the hood and slid to the ground, out of sight in front of the vehicle. Sabine ran to the spot. Haugen stopped. She bent and came up with the deputy’s service weapon. Swiftly she aimed it at the spot below the hood where the deputy had sprawled.
She fired twice in rapid succession.
Haugen said, “Stringer, put him in the trunk of the patrol car. Then get the other one out of the trees and put him in there too. And clean up the brass.”
Stringer looked at him like, huh?
“The deputy called in this stop. When the station can’t raise him, they’ll send another deputy to investigate. We have to dispose of the evidence that something happened here.”
He wasn’t worried about the blood. The rain was already washing it away.
Stringer got out. The wind swirled through the Volvo, wet and stinging.
Haugen should have been in the cabin already, tracking market movements and funds transfers. He needed to get up there, quick.
Stringer hunched against the downpour and ran to Sabine’s side. They dragged the deputy’s body toward the patrol car. Halfway there, Sabine stopped. She looked at Haugen, reached into her pocket, and took out her phone.
Correction. A phone.
“It’s Coates’s again,” she called to him.
He shook his head. Don’t answer.
When they had loaded the bodies, Sabine looked pointedly at the deputy’s car, and at the idling blue Tacoma pickup. Haugen rolled down his window.
“I’ll drive the cruiser. Sabine, you take the Volvo. Stringer, take the pickup.”
“We should dump it,” Stringer said.
“Later. We don’t want to discard a useful vehicle.” Especially since Von and Friedrich had wrecked one already today.
Stringer hopped in the pickup and put it in gear. The lights came on. Haugen got out of the SUV and headed for the cruiser.
Sabine said, “Once the sheriff sends another car to investigate, it will take maybe an hour to get up here. If we’re lucky, it will take longer. If we’re not lucky, they’ll declare their man missing and begin a search.”
“But we’ll be so far gone and so deep in the gorge, in the dark, that they’ll never find us. Come on.”
Sabine climbed into the Volvo. Haugen put a hand on the door. “Who was calling Coates—Peter Reiniger?”
“No. It wasn’t a four-one-five number. I’ll check to see who it was once we get away from here.”
Haugen got in the deputy’s cruiser. There was a shotgun locked beside the center console. The key for it was hanging on the ring in the ignition. Excellent.
&nb
sp; He pulled out and headed up the logging road higher into the mountains. The rain came down in sheets, thrown against the windows by the wind. It drummed so hard he could barely see the taillights of the Volvo twenty meters ahead. They crept toward the gorge at five miles an hour.
The cruiser’s radio squawked. A man said, “D.V.?”
The dispatcher sounded worried.
“D.V., you there? Deputy Gilbert?”
Haugen eyed the radio. Perhaps they didn’t have as much time as he’d hoped.
Then they reached the gorge, and Haugen saw a sight that thrilled and terrified him. The river was battering at the footings of the bridge.
42
The storm continued for hours. Inside the Hummer, everybody huddled together for warmth. Jo pressed herself to Gabe’s side. She had taken off her soaking outer shirt and left on her thin but dry thermal fleece. Nobody spoke. The rain needled into the undercarriage of the Hummer above their heads, driven by the wind.
Gabe kept his eyes on the windows and his buck knife in his hand. He was stiff, and Jo didn’t think it was simply from nerves and pain. Though he kept his arm over her shoulder, he seemed distant. She tried to draw him into whispered conversation, but he muttered brief replies.
About four A.M., chilled and thirsty and aching, Jo popped awake, unaware she’d even fallen asleep.
Gabe was no longer by her side. She pried her eyes open. Something had surprised her into wakefulness.
Noise. It had changed.
The rain had eased and the wind had dropped. She no longer heard the near constant, tumbling crack of thunder. But she heard something else.
Gabe was crouched by the window of the Hummer, scanning the terrain outside. Moonlight fell across his face, white and cold.
He was staring at the river.
The sound, the new, raw sound, was water roaring through the gorge. But that wasn’t what frightened her. What frightened her was the sound of the river lapping at the crushed frame of the Hummer.
