Tahoe Silence

by Todd Borg

  I pulled forward and drove up behind an old dark panel van. A Dodge. No doubt, Michael Warner’s.

  The van pulled away and I followed. I thought about ramming it, trying to rip it open so that I could grab Silence and carry her into the woods. But the gun barrel on the back of my neck was a strong motivator to do as Marky said.

  The van headed toward town, went toward the “Y” intersection and turned off into the supermarket parking lot. It stopped in the far corner, facing away from the few other vehicles that belonged to late-shift employees and the odd customer.

  The driver door opened and Tiptoe got out, leaving Silence inside. He shut the door, checked to make sure the other doors were locked, then came over to my Jeep. He opened the passenger door and got in, grunting with effort. His bulk filled the passenger seat almost to the dashboard. His head was jammed against the Jeep’s headliner. The suspension tipped to the right.

  “Watch his hands,” Marky called out.

  Tiptoe tried to turn his massive body toward me, jerking in his seat with the dexterity of a rhinoceros.

  “Okay,” Marky said, “turn out of the parking lot over there and head toward Emerald Bay.”

  I drove down Emerald Bay Road. For a time Marky and Tiptoe were silent, and I kept a watch for an oncoming cop that I could skid in front of. Any unusual maneuver might make Marky blow my brains out, but they intended to kill me anyway.

  I thought of Silence, tied up in the back of the van, scared beyond anything she’d ever known.

  We cruised by Camp Richardson and headed out the dark highway to Emerald Bay. As I drove up the switchbacks, the nearly full moon was high above Heavenly, shining on the white of the high-altitude snow, casting moon shadows from the giant Ponderosa pines along the highway and splashing a bright white glow on the mountains above Emerald Bay.

  “Let’s see what shorty here listen to,” Tiptoe suddenly said as he grabbed my stack of CDs off the center console. He flipped on the reading light and leafed through the CDs, saying the names haltingly, with excruciating pronunciation. “Count Bah-si-ee, Ss-chewbert, Lou Reed. Hey, I hearda him. London Phil-har-moan-ic, Mozz-art Con-ser-to for Obo-ee. Nothin’ I recognize. No Lynard Skynard, no Allman Brothers.”

  “See if he got Johnny Cash,” Marky interrupted. “Johnny played at Folsom Prison. He’s my man.”

  I was climbing the switchbacks, heading down the road toward the point of Emerald Bay.

  “No Johnny Cash,” Tiptoe said. He tossed all the CDs but one on the floor. Let’s see what this stuff sound like. This one is...” he paused, working his lips. “Kelsey Stanton Cho-ire.”

  He put the Kelsey Stanton CD in the player. One of the choral numbers came on, filling the jeep with a full range of voices, basses, baritones and tenors with the sopranos arching above all.

  “Whoa, Marky, listen what it say on the paper. ‘Kelsey Stanton is a all male chorus.’” Tiptoe turned toward me in his seat as much as a 400-pound slab of fat can turn in the confines of a Jeep seat. “You tellin’ me them high voices is all male? Hey, Marky, shorty like men with high voices.” He cocked a grease-darkened middle finger behind his thumb, reached over and flicked it hard across the tip of my nose. “That so, boy?”

  The pain was sharp. The ex-cop in me almost exploded. I could have killed him with an elbow chop to the Adam’s apple, but I knew the man behind me would splatter my brains across the windshield. Marky sensed my tension. He jammed the gun barrel hard into the back of my skull. After a long silence he said, “What’s the answer, McKenna?”

  “I like their music,” I said. “I’ve never met the men.”

  “Jus like I thought, Marky,” Tiptoe said. “Shorty like men with girlie voices. Now that I look at him, shorty look kinda soft hisself. You gonna tell us what you do with them high-voice types, shorty?”

  I didn’t speak.

  Tiptoe ordered, “Answer me, boy.”

  I was watching the road. The Emerald Bay parking lot was up ahead. If I said the right thing and timed it just so, their reaction might give me an opening... I said, “I can tell you about a scientific study that was reported in the New York Times. Psychologists at a university studied a large group of men. They found that the men who were the most homophobic were the ones who had the biggest response to male stimuli.”

  “What he mean, Marky?” Tiptoe asked, his voice small.

  Maybe Marky didn’t understand because he didn’t answer.

  “What it means,” I said, “is when they show pictures of well-muscled men to a group of guys, the ones who couldn’t care less what someone does in the privacy of their own bedroom don’t have a reaction. But the gay-bashers like you are the ones who get erections. The homophobia is really just self-repulsion.”

  The reaction took a second. Tiptoe tensed so much I anticipated his assault. He swung his right fist out toward my jaw. I stomped on the brake and jerked my head to the left. His fist rolled off my chin. I cranked the wheel and the Jeep slid sideways into the Emerald Bay parking area. I shoved the shifter into Park, hit the door handle and rolled out my door onto the pavement. I rolled again, saw a downed branch and reached out to grab it. It was thin, but seemed strong.

  Marky came out first, gun raised. I swung the branch onto the arm with the gun. The sound of wood on forearm was solid. The gun fell. I did a poor version of a front kick, but he was slow and the edge of my shoe caught his jaw on the outside. He went down. I dove, grabbed the gun, rolled again and came up as Tiptoe came around the Jeep.

  “You think I’m afraid of Marky’s little Glock, yer dumb as yer queer friends,” Tiptoe said.

  I took careful aim at his thigh in the darkness and fired. It was the first time I’d even held a gun since I left the SFPD. It didn’t feel good, but it did the job.

  Tiptoe screamed and fell to the ground grabbing his leg. He rolled over, bawling like a baby. “You killed me! I’m going to die! Oh, God, it hurts! I can’t stand it!”

  I saw where the bullet went in, and it was a good distance from his femoral artery, which meant he’d live. But the bullet possibly caught the outside of his femur and shattered it, which meant he’d be in serious misery.

  I turned to see Marky standing in the darkness, staring at Tiptoe. He was holding his arm where I’d struck him. He bent down and used his good arm to pick up the piece of wood I’d used. He advanced on me, swinging the wood from side to side.

  I thought about shooting him, but it would be like one of those hunting ranches where the prey is set up in advance. So I tucked the automatic in my belt and waited, arms out and ready, for him to come at me.

  He was a big man, almost as strong as Tiptoe, but not bogged down with 150 extra pounds of fat. He varied the swing so the stick went at my feet, then at my head. I jumped back, then ducked. On the third swing, I bent at the waist as it cut the air by my midsection, then I jumped inside. I made two quick jabs at his jaw, then put all my weight into a belly shot. He bent forward as the air went out of his system. I grabbed his head and pulled it onto my rising knee. I didn’t want to kill him or even knock him out. If someone picked up the van with Silence in it, I needed Marky to tell me where to find her.

  But my knee may have carried too much force.

  He went up and back and fell hard onto his back. I thought he was out. I squatted down in the dark and knelt on him with one knee on his chest and my other foot next to his shoulder. He surprised me.

  He turned his head and sunk his teeth into my ankle.

  I felt his teeth cut through sinew and into bone.

  One of his hands was palm up on the pavement, next to his ear.

  I pulled the gun out of my belt, put the barrel on the base of his thumb and fired.

  FIFTY

  The explosion was loud enough for me, ear shattering for Marky.

  He curled like a caterpillar into a tight ball. Unlike Tiptoe, Marky was soundless. His thumbless hand gripped the opposite shoulder. The blood from his thumb artery pulsed like a little geyser, but, lik
e Tiptoe’s injury, it was not life-threatening.

  I stood and tapped my shoe toe on the back of his skull. “Get up!” He rolled onto his knees and slowly pushed himself up.

  “Can’t hear,” he whispered. He held the bloodied hand to the side of his head. “Gun blew out my ear.”

  I directed him into the driver’s seat, then got in next to him. “Put your hands on the wheel,” I said. “Hurry!”

  He didn’t respond, just held his ear.

  I said it again, almost a shout.

  He did as I told him. I put the key in the ignition, turned and started the Jeep. The headlights came on and illuminated Tiptoe writhing in the dark parking lot.

  “Drive!” I shouted. “Hurry, or I’ll put your nose where your thumb is!” I put the gun barrel against his nose.

  “Where?” Marky said, shaking.

  “Back to the parking lot at the supermarket! Where Tiptoe left the van with the girl in it!”

  Marky pulled out of the lot and turned toward town.

  “Faster!” I yelled. I pressed the gun into his face.

  Marky whimpered as he raced around Emerald Bay and down the switchbacks.

  I fished under the passenger seat and found the roll of duct tape I keep there. I tore off a piece and stretched it over the stump of his thumb. Marky winced. The blood still oozed, but the tape slowed it down.

  We went through Camp Richardson at 60 or 70, the narrow road unwinding like film in our headlights, the giant Ponderosa pines flying by like nightmare trees.

  There were no cops as we came into town, engine racing, speedometer needle hovering around 80. Marky swerved around several cars and pickups. His last obstacle was a semi-truck making the turn on Lake Tahoe Blvd. Marky skidded sideways past him, then spun the other way into the supermarket parking lot.

  The van was gone. Marky came to a stop, his chest heaving with fear.

  “Where is the girl?” I said.

  “I dunno.”

  “Where were you going to take me?”

  “What?”

  I repeated myself, louder.

  “Bliss State Park.”

  “Why there?”

  “We were supposed to take you in there and question you. See if you knew how to make the girl talk. Then we were supposed to drown you in the lake.”

  “Rubicon Point,” I surmised. “Where the bottom drops off so steep my body might never be found.”

  Marky said nothing. He sat in the parking lot, hands shaking on the wheel, blood dripping onto the floor mats. It looked like a lot of blood. I didn’t think he was going to go into shock, but I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to call Street and Diamond, but I needed to get as much information as possible out of Marky while he was still lucid.

  “Pull out of the lot and drive south,” I said.

  Marky did as told.

  I wondered if Emerson Baylor was part of the connection between Tony Go and Michael Warner. I said, “Gomez ever mention Emerson Baylor?” I spoke loud enough that it was nearly a shout.

  Marky was slow to respond.

  “What?”

  “Tony Go. He mention a man named Emerson Baylor?”

  “No.”

  “Did Baylor ever call you?”

  “No.” Marky’s voice was weak. He sounded dazed.

  “What does Tony Go think Silence knows?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Something technical. He said it had something to do with storage. It was hard to hear over the phone.”

  “He tell you everything important over the phone?”

  “Yeah. That’s how he contacts us.”

  “What about storage?” I said.

  “I don’t remember. It sounded like poetry.”

  “What did?”

  Marky thought a moment. “The words,” he said. “The words were about poetry. Maybe.”

  “Try to remember the words.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Try to remember the words,” I said again, louder.

  “It sounded like he said paired rhyme and storage.”

  “A paired rhyme about storage,” I said.

  “Yeah. Only not ‘about.’ Just the words paired and rhyme and storage.

  I tried the words. “Paired rhyme storage?”

  “No. Other way around. Storage paired rhyme.”

  I thought about it while Marky drove. Then I said, “Could Gomez have said, ‘storage paradigm?’”

  “That’s it,” Marky said. “Whatever that means.”

  We were approaching the airport. “Turn in here and stop,” I said.

  Marky pulled into the airport entrance and drove down to the parking lot. He stopped in the corner. “Now what?”

  “Just sit.” I held the gun on him.

  What was a storage paradigm? Paradigm referred to a model or a format. The implication was that Michael Warner was working on a new storage model. It didn’t make sense. There were thousands of kinds of storage from lockers to shelving to rental garages to warehouses. But why would a physicist work on storage models? Physicists study the building blocks of matter, of the universe. They study energy, the flow of light and heat and electrons. They studied the basic forces. I still remembered them from high school. The nuclear forces and gravity and electro-magnetism. What did that have to do with storage?

  Unless it was some kind of nuclear or gravitational or electro-magnetic storage.

  Electro-magnetism. Computer storage. Hard drives. Computer chips.

  What if Michael’s invention was devising a new kind of information storage? A new storage paradigm could, what, put more information on a hard drive or on a microchip? Could it change computers?

  It fit with what Michael Warner had said to Emerson Baylor. Michael thought his idea could revolutionize a high-tech business and have consumer implications as well. A new computer model could change all of industry, all of personal computing, change the world.

  And Michael had told his daughter Silence, safe in the knowledge that she could not pass it on.

  Tony Go was trying to get the information out of her. One of his men had picked her up in the supermarket parking lot, bound and gagged in the back of a van. They would make another attempt at getting her to talk. If that didn’t work, would they sacrifice her tomorrow night in their full-moon ceremony.

  “I want you to call Gomez,” I told Marky. I pulled out my cell phone.

  “I don’t know his number. He always calls us.”

  “Then we’ll use your phone. Hit star sixty-nine.”

  “Tiptoe has the phone,” Marky said. “But star sixty-nine doesn’t work. I tried it. Tony Go’s number is blocked somehow.”

  I had the number Tony Go had given me. I was about to dial it when I stopped. “Where do you think they would take the girl?”

  “I don’t know. He just told us that if you came, we were to tape up the girl and leave her in the van in that parking lot.”

  “If you can’t call him, how does he know she’s there?”

  “He has a GPS transmitter in the van. It tells him whenever it’s moved.”

  “When was the last time you talked to Tony Go in person?”

  “I’ve never met him. He just calls on the phone.”

  “What about the kidnapping?” My voice was getting louder. “He just order that up on the phone, too, like goddamn room service?!”

  Marky paused. “Yeah. Like room service.”

  I turned and leaned against the passenger door. Again I lifted the gun and put the barrel against Marky’s lip and pressed it into the flesh. “Tell me how it worked. I want you to be very focused on how quickly you can give me the whole story, nothing missing, so that when you’re done I have no further questions.”

  Marky was breathing hard. “I can’t talk with that on my lip.”

  I pulled the gun back a half inch.

  “Tiptoe has a friend who lives in Tahoe. We came here three weeks ago for the Tahoe Heaven Biker Festival. We stayed at the friend’s house. He rents a condo up
in Tahoe City.

  “Our second day here we were playing a video game and the phone rang and someone asked for Tiptoe. So Tiptoe went to the phone, and the person said he’s Tony Go, and he got Tiptoe’s friend’s number from a business partner, and he needed some work from two good workers. Tiptoe said, sure, him and his friend Marky are real good workers. So they talked for awhile and pretty soon Tiptoe handed me the phone and said Tony Go wanted to talk to me.

  “So I answered and Tony Go asked me a few questions, like what is my cell number and I said what Tiptoe’s cell was ‘cause I don’t have one. Then Go said maybe I would be a better person to talk to than Tiptoe and didn’t I think maybe Tiptoe was a little dumb? So I said I didn’t know, but what could I do for him.

  “So he gave us a little assignment, kind of a test. We were supposed to ride down to the South Shore and find a panel van in one of the casino parking lots. The key was to be under the mat. We were supposed to leave our bikes there and take the van and drive over to this liquor store and take all their cash. He said we could rob them with a gun or break in at night or whatever. Just so we take all their cash. If we succeeded, we would be paid five thousand cash. Plus we could keep the cash from the store.

  “So we figured, what the hell, we’d be in someone else’s van, hard to trace to us, and there was money in it, right? So we did it. I used my piece and Tiptoe yelled what we were going to do if they didn’t hand over the money, and they did it. It was fast and easy.”

  “What about the five thousand? How did you get paid?”

  “Tony Go said he would put the cash in a storm drain about fifty yards behind the Cruiser Bar. He said he’d put the money in a coffee can and leave it inside the storm drain.

  “The next night, we went there and sure enough, there was a coffee can in the storm drain with fifty hundreds in it.”

  “And,” I said, prompting.

  “So I guess we passed the test. Then he called and said we were to take the van and one of our bikes over to the girl’s house and pick her up. He had a whole lot of specifics about how we’d do it and when we’d do it and that it had to be that day when the big caravan of bikes was going through Tahoe. So I drove the van, and Tiptoe and some other guys rode their bikes.