Shel took the card, dropped it in her lap and put the truck in gear. “Thank you,” she whispered.
She pulled away in a shrieking jolt and fishtailed onto the road. He stared after her, watching the taillights flicker beyond a row of aspens. For the first time he felt the wind on his skin, cold and damp off the river. He turned back toward his own car and discovered Jill Rosemond standing there. She waited in the middle of the parking lot, casting a small round shadow in the lamplight. One hand clutching her purse strap, she called out to him in a tone of newfound resolve: “I still didn’t catch your name.”
CHAPTER
11
The two cars bearing Frank, the Akers brothers and the other gunmen sped north through the Delta. Frank and the Akers brothers rode with Dayball and Tully in the Lincoln, Hack and the others trailing behind in the old Le Mans. At a rest stop just beyond the Antioch Bridge, Dayball and Tully told Lyle to stop and let them out. They were due to return to Bethel Island, join the birthday celebration for Felix Randall’s niece which would serve as their alibi. Before getting out, Day-ball helped Frank roll up his sleeve, and with a fresh spike submit to a booster of his medicine. With his usual flair for theater, Dayball booted the liquor in the cylinder, drawing back blood and watching the thin dark threads waving in the fluid. Finally with his thumb he drove the plunger home, withdrew the needle tip from the skin and told Frank to roll his sleeve back down. As Frank buttoned his cuff, Dayball pocketed the spike and removed his spiral notebook, as always checking the time, then recording his secret notation.
Frank, feeling the first wave of humming warmth and a not wholly unpleasant nausea, pointed to the notebook and asked, “Lonnie, I gotta know, why you carry that around?”
Dayball gestured for Frank to wait a moment, completed his jottings, then capped his pen and put the notepad away.
“You gotta know?”
“I’m curious,” Frank admitted. He’d spent more time with Dayball the past three days than anyone else. He was beginning to feel a genuine bond. A bond that, at least, promoted curiosity.
“Doesn’t mean I gotta tell you,” Dayball said.
“I understand.”
Dayball withdrew the notebook and let Frank take it. Frank glanced up at Dayball to make sure it was okay, then cracked open the cover. He discovered page after page of small, spidery notations, written in cipher.
“I been in the joint just once,” Dayball explained. “When I got out, my probation officer, he was a very decent guy. He had a lot of good advice. One piece of advice was this: Keep a diary. ’Cause there are certain cops, they get an eerie, almost telepathic feel for you. They’ll work it out like astrologers. They’ll chart you, put you somewhere you don’t belong in that one stretch of time you can’t account for. Just for the fun of watching you get dragged back in.” He reached for his notebook and gently removed it from Frank’s hold. “Makes ’em feel all streetwise and pitiless. Real crime fighters.”
He opened his door and gestured for Tully to do likewise. They strolled beneath lamplight to a car parked at the far end of the rest area. Frank watched them get in as Snuff said, “I’ll tell you who we ought to be shooting tonight.”
“Cork it,” Roy said. “Nobody needs you piping off.”
“Listen to you,” Snuff said. “You speak for everybody now?”
Roy turned around in the seat and stared. “That’s right,” he said. “Open the door, you don’t like it. Open the door, get your runt ass out on the road back south and figure out who your next family’s gonna be.”
“Like that’d be punishment,” Snuff said.
“Come again?”
“A pox on your box, pal, hear me?”
Roy did a double take worthy of a cartoon. “A pox on my box? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Figure it out,” Snuff said.
“No. You tell me.”
“I’m done talking.”
Roy turned to Lyle. Nudging his arm, he said, “Hey, Lyle, you catch that? A pox on your box.”
“Don’t touch me,” Lyle said.
They continued in silence, driving north with the Le Mans two car lengths behind. The road was narrow and winding, running along the river atop a levee, the roadside dotted with darkened saltbox shacks advertising lugger rentals or live bait: anchovies, shad, mud-suckers. Comforted by the gentle rocking of the car, Frank stared out at the sword grass and cattails and eucalyptus trees lining the riverbank. Framed by the windshield and lit by headlights, it seemed like a sort of movie.
That afternoon at the El Parador Hotel, Frank had met for the final time with Cesar, the Mexican he’d dealt with over Felix’s materiel. The hotel was intended one day to be a real showplace, but for the time being it sat out in the middle of nowhere in a mosquito-infested area above the Sacramento River known as Montezuma Hills. Frank sat alone with Cesar in the hotel’s empty bar, explaining how the thing would go down. He’d connect with the shooters in a scrap yard on Andrus Island, then together they’d drive out into the Delta to a restaurant where Felix was throwing a birthday party for his niece. The story had been devised by Dayball. He’d made Frank recite it word for word, like a poem, until he got it down pat.
“The beauty of it,” Dayball had told him, “is that it’s half-true. Only gotta remember the other half.”
No one would be expecting anything and no one would be armed, Frank had told Cesar. As for the exact location of the restaurant, Frank added, that gets divulged when we connect tonight and I get paid. That was when Cesar dropped his own little bombshell—the men who would be coming to kill Felix were the brothers and cousins of Gaspar Arevalo, the seventeen-year-old that Dayball, Tully and the Akers brothers had murdered out on Kirker Pass Road.
“Frank,” Roy said from the front. He’d turned around and was facing the backseat. “You’re good with everything we went over with Lonnie this afternoon, right?”
“I remember,” Frank said.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“Tell it to me, then.”
Frank closed his eyes. A picture emerged. He described the picture.
“You wave them inside the killfire,” Roy said.
“Get them in close.”
“You gotta get them inside the killfire,” Roy repeated, “or it could get ugly.”
“I understand,” Frank said.
When they reached Andrus Island, Lyle stopped the car. Roy got out to remove a gate chain, and once he got back in they drove along a dirt road for a little less than a half mile where they came upon the scrap yard, barricaded in accordion wire. Roy got out again, this time to negotiate the gate to the yard, then they drove past towering aisles of wreckage. Moonlight reflected in pockmarked chrome and oily pools of water; it glowed through shattered windshields hazed by dewy filth. Cats flitted in and out of shadowy recesses. Everywhere, the smell of gas and rust filled the air.
They rounded a bend and came upon a clearing, banked by tire mounds twenty feet high. “Hats on,” Roy said from the front seat. He put out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. “Film at eleven.”
A sawbuck table sat at the far end of the clearing, silhouetted by the headlights. Roy got out and opened Frank’s door and led him to the table, sat him down. He handed Frank the flashlight needed to return the coded signal that had been arranged.
Removing a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, Roy tamped out two and offered Frank a smoke. Frank accepted the cigarette, then bent to the match Roy struck for them both, cupping it with his palm. Roy shook out the flame, smiled through smoke and looked at his watch.
“Not long now, bro. One more time, run it down for me.”
Frank recited the procedure again, this time being sure to use the term “killfire,” since Roy enjoyed it so much. The words came from a part of him he couldn’t quite locate. After a moment, he was not even sure he’d said anything, so he repeated himself. Roy nodded as he listened to both renditions, then put his hand on Frank’s should
er.
“I’m proud of you,” Roy said. The tone lacked warmth. He was probing. “I mean that.”
“Thank you, Roy,” Frank said. “We’ve been through a lot together, you and me, that right?”
“Time’s nigh,” Roy said. Looking up, he saw the others removing their shotguns from the trunk of the Le Mans. He pointed to where he wanted them.
Frank said, “Roy, remember that construction site we picketed in Turlock? The one where the contractor came out with an old M-1 and said he was counting to ten?”
Roy turned around and looked down at Frank with a troubled expression. “Not the time to shoot the breeze, Frank.”
“I was just remembering, Roy.”
“You want to remember something, remember what you gotta do.”
“I will, Roy.”
“Don’t let me down.”
Roy fled beyond a wall of wreckage with the others. They were situated so as to be able to hit the Mexicans from every side at once, spraying the area so heavily with buckshot there’d be no risk of return fire. Shortly Frank found himself humming a pleasant tune: “Don’t Let Me Down.”
Above him, the clouds fled past, brightened by the moon. They were exquisite tonight, finely shaped, complex, like puffy, cavernous seashells. He found himself wanting to ascend, enter them, travel their interiors.
A car approached slowly from the edge of the compound. It was a Mercedes sedan, one of the older diesels. The engine pinged and chugged as the car edged forward. There were seven men inside, packed so tight they created one large multiheaded silhouette.
As the headlights went on and off, relaying the coded signal Cesar had chosen, Frank reached for the flashlight on the table beside his hand. Three, he thought. He was supposed to flash back three times. Three was the age Jesse had been when he’d died. And that was three years ago. If Jesse had been born the day he died, Frank thought, tonight might be the very night he got murdered all over again.
By the time his thoughts circled back to the signal he was supposed to provide, it was too late. The Mercedes slammed into reverse. Lyle Akers, sensing the setup had failed, cut off the car’s retreat and opened fire from behind. The Mercedes’s rear window shattered to the sound of screams and bloodcurdling Spanish as the brothers and cousins of Gaspar Arevalo threw open their doors and clawed across one another in the tight-packed car. One by one, amid raining gunfire, they drove or fell or got pushed to the dirt and found cover in the scrap heaps nearby.
Frank dove beneath the table, curling into a ball. The ground was cold and wet; he burrowed into it, thinking: Mudsuckers. Live bait. Looking up through his hands he watched as one of the Mexicans fled to the back of the Mercedes and struggled with the trunk, as though that was where they’d stored the serious weapons. He was gunned down fumbling with his keys. The others resorted to pistols, returning fire by moonlight and by the sound and muzzle flashes of their attackers’ guns.
The smoke-filled air crackled with the reports of pump guns and pistols and shortly Lyle lay on the ground, clutching his midriff and screaming. One of the Mexicans ran to claim Lyle’s shotgun from the ground beside him and finish him off. Ducking, the Mexican then ran to the side of the clearing and fired into a muddy swale barricaded with tires. A second Mexican came up behind, reached into the spot where the bullets had gone and retrieved a second shotgun glistening with blood. One of Roy’s men came up behind and opened fire at the Mexicans’ backs. The two men fell but not without landing one shot in their killer’s leg. The man toppled, struggled back to his feet, limped to the front of the Mercedes and poured four shotgun rounds into the body of another Mexican writhing there.
Frank closed his eyes and wrapped his arms about his head until finally, as suddenly as it had started, the gunfire died. The stench of cordite hung in the air. Opening his eyes, he watched a vast shapeless cloud of smoke settle slowly, brightened by moonlight and drifting down in patches toward the dirt. Screams came from various places. Frank could make out Hack’s voice and another wailing in Spanish.
The Lincoln roared into the clearing, Roy behind the wheel. He slammed the car into park, engine running, and ran toward the spot where Hack had fallen. He picked his brother up beneath the arms and tried to move him but Hack kicked, clutching his midriff and screaming. Roy, searching right and left through the acrid haze, called out for Snuff, cursing him, telling him to come help. Snuff staggered from his hiding place, tottered in the open air for a moment then hustled toward Roy. Grabbing Hack’s ankles, he helped carry him to the Lincoln where they laid him out, crazed, howling, in the backseat.
Roy turned back around, lurched to the front of the Mercedes where one of the Mexicans lay dead, tugged the man’s gun from his fingers, returned to Snuff and forced the weapon into his hands. Snuff did not respond. He just stood there watching Hack, thrashing in the backseat of the Lincoln, clutching his exposed viscera, trying to shove them back inside, his hands slopped in blood.
“You shoot the motherfucker,” Roy shouted, pointing at the sawbuck table. “You shoot him dead.”
Hack screamed, “God … Please, you can’t … Roy, hey, Jesus, ah please, God, no …”
Roy shoved Snuff toward the table then ran to where Lyle had fallen, leaving Snuff standing there alone, the gun in his hands. He looked down at it as though it might fly up of its own accord. Lifting his head, he gazed all around him through the stinging haze at the fallen men, some still writhing in the mud. He scuttled toward the table beneath which Frank still lay hiding but he got no closer than ten yards before he raised the gun and opened fire, spraying the area in a berserk side-to-side motion. He was weeping. Frank felt the bullets connect with the table, the muddy grass nearby. Snuff dropped the gun where he stood and gripped his head, making a sound Frank had never heard before. Then Snuff staggered back sobbing to the Lincoln. He helped Roy lay Lyle’s body out in the trunk. They got into the car and Roy jammed it in gear, the wheels spun in the mud and the car swerved right and left as it dodged the Mercedes and vanished through the scrap yard gate.
Shortly one of Felix’s other gunmen appeared, the one with the wounded leg. He dragged himself out from his hiding place among the smoke-obscured tire mounds and, propped on one knee, called out and waved for his lone surviving friend. The Le Mans appeared. The driver got out, gathered up his wounded companion then dragged the dead one to the car and toppled the body into the backseat. A moment later they were gone, too.
Frank lay beneath the table, waiting, arms wrapped tight around his head. When it had been absolutely still for quite some time, he rose from the mud, inspecting himself. He was filthy, but unharmed.
His eyes watering from the cordite and smoke, he got to his feet, sneezed, and stumbled toward the Mercedes. Shattered glass covered the backseat, the car was riddled with holes, but from the looks of it all the shotgun fire had aimed high. The point, he guessed, was to kill the Mexicans, not the car. The upholstery and dash were shredded but the tires were good. The keys still hung from the ignition cylinder. He tried the door, struggled to get it open, swept the shattered glass off the upholstery, and sat. Gripping the steering wheel, his hands came away with blood. He rubbed his hands on his pant legs, wiped the wheel with his shirttail. He tried the ignition and gasped with joy when the engine turned over. He struggled with the gearshift, lodged the transmission into reverse, then backed out of the clearing and down the aisles of wreckage.
Abatangelo sat at a small, kidney-shaped table of yellow Formica in a place called Zippy Donuts. A fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, flashing dim shocks of light that caused the reflections in the window glass to jitter, like images in an old home movie. Across the table sat Jill Rosemond.
“I’ve been to a number of bars where the twins did their little act,” she said, “hustling pool. Three weeks, I’ve done this, from Modesto to Galt. You would not believe some of these places, or the creatures who inhabit them. That’s what I was trying to get through to your friend, Ms. Beaudry. I don’t have Frank Ma
as at the top of any list. From what I’ve seen, just about anybody could have killed those boys, given what they were up to.”
In the background the insomniac sweet-tooth crowd milled in and out. The donut shop was run by a Korean family, and the counter girl, her smile encaged in braces, rang the register brightly, thanking one and all with ferocious gratitude.
“No one ever forgot those two. None too many wanted to see them back. As for Frank Maas, I didn’t even know he existed till this afternoon. I got an address—”
“How?” Abatangelo asked, interrupting.
Jill Rosemond cocked her head. She looked a little older in this light. Sleep deprivation, maybe. Money worries. Abatangelo wondered if she had children. Or dogs. She seemed the sort to have dogs.
“Addresses aren’t hard to come by,” she said.
“Let me see the printout,” Abatangelo said, extending his hand. When she affected puzzlement, he added, “You got an address for somebody you say you didn’t even know existed till this afternoon. That’s quick. Either a cop gave it to you or you bought it from an information mill.”
She thought it over a moment, then reached into her shoulder bag and removed a sheet of coarse gray paper almost identical to the one Eddy had given Abatangelo his first night out. He took it from her, read the addresses, and noticed the combination matched Shel’s up to the three-year mark, then things were different. The most recent address, cross-referenced to the registration of Shel’s truck, was the one Abatangelo knew. The Akers’ place.
“I thought you couldn’t access DMV information unless you intended to serve process,” he said, handing the paper back.
Jill Rosemond froze. “Who told you that?”
He liked her response. “You’ve got some paper to hang on Frank. A subpoena? Summons?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Why didn’t you go out to the house, instead of the bar?”
“I did go out. No one was there.”
“When was this?”
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