Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  But I had a belief that I understood the movements of dogs. And compared to Spot, the Bouvier was relatively small.

  When the Bouvier got close, he burst forward as if doubling his speed, then leapt into the air. He rose from the ground on a rising arc. I dropped to my knees to be below him.

  Like a large cat, he twisted in the air, lowering his head toward his moving target.

  I waited an excruciating moment. A feint only works if it comes at the last beat.

  When the dog was a mere three feet from locking onto my face, I raised my left hand to the side.

  Dogs always go for the movement. He jerked his head to the side, his mouth open, ready to crush my hand bones. At the last instant, I snatched my left hand from in front of his jaws as I shot my right hand to the side of his neck in a fast swipe.

  I hit him hard, grabbing a thick handful of neck fur in my right hand as I rotated my body and followed through with the weight of my body.

  I drove him down onto the ground. He was as shocked as I was. I held the back of his neck fur as I landed on top of him. He struggled and writhed beneath me.

  A one hundred-plus-pound dog is very strong. And a dog’s jaws and teeth are sufficient to kill an animal four times his size if he can get a good grip on his prey. But a hundred pound dog is no match for a man who has his neck from behind.

  I gripped his collar with my left hand, grabbed a better handful of fur with my right, and picked him up, front paws off the ground. I didn’t want to choke him, just control him, so I kept his rear paws on the ground.

  He stopped struggling, the reaction to domination. His life was in my hands and he knew it.

  I walked over to an oak, lowered him down to all fours, and leaned against the tree with his body between me and the tree bark.

  I released his collar with my left hand, but kept a firm grip on his fur with my right. I took Diamond’s cord from my belt pack, stuck it through his collar and ran it tight around the oak so that his neck was immobilized against the bark. I tied the rope tight, stepped back, hands out, ready in case he got loose. But he was held firm. He didn’t even growl or bark.

  I turned toward the buildings below.

  A man was thirty feet down the slope. He shined his flashlight in my face.

  I was about to speak when I sensed the barest hint of a lightning-bolt striking the back of my head before the world went dead.

  FORTY-ONE

  I awoke slowly. Felt slime over my face. Thick goo. Stink like rotting meat. Odor worse than the gagging smell outside of the dumpster. A hundred times worse.

  I realized that I was in the dumpster. My hands were tied behind my back.

  My breath burbled through a gelatinous goo that filled my left ear, mashed around my left eye, over my nose, under my chin and into my mouth. The goo was warm and seemed to bubble. A garbage pudding made of rotting flesh. Shivering movement, as if the gelatin were alive.

  Maggots!

  Street had once shown me a great, writhing maggot mass in the rotting insides of a bear carcass.

  I was face down in a maggot mass.

  I exploded into a full-body convulsion, knees pulling down into the deer-guts garbage, shoulders twisting, head thrusting back. Spitting, yelling, choking on maggots. I blew the goo out from inside my cheeks, then vomited. Dry heaves. Spit and gag. Spit and cough. More spitting.

  Threw myself sideways, banging into the side of the dumpster. Wiped my face on the rusted metal inside of the dumpster. Spit again and again, great, wracking, hacking, throat-gouging spit.

  My head pounded as if it had been hit into the left field bleachers with a Louisville Slugger. My shoulders ached from having my arms pulled back. But nothing compared to the inside of my mouth. My tongue found a soggy bit of goo stuck on the inside of my cheek. A maggot. Spit. Another mashed onto the insides of my front teeth. Another pureed between my upper left molars.

  I vomited again.

  I raised my knees and wiped my gooed-over face on soaked jeans.

  I leaned back against the inside of the dumpster, unable to breath, unable to think.

  The torture of physical or psychic pain can be incapacitating. Yet the torture of revulsion can be as strong as either. In the space of a couple of minutes, I’d been broken. I would have signed any paper, confessed to any trumped-up charge, run through any fire if I could suddenly be clean and dry and wearing fresh clothes and in a place that was far from any maggots.

  The best way to find calm in a seriously stressful situation is to take a deep breath, hold it, then breathe out slowly. But I couldn’t take a deep breath. The gas in the dumpster was so thick with putrescence that I could barely tolerate the tiniest sip of air.

  After five minutes of mind-over-matter struggle, I managed to replace horrific disgust with anger.

  There was a line of light to the side above my head. I got my feet pulled in beneath me. I raised up just a bit, pushing my feet down into unknown gunk until they hit something firm. My upturned face rose to hit the metal at the inside corner of the dumpster. A tiny stream of fresh air came in past the edge of the lid and hit my face. I sucked it in, desperate for air that wouldn’t poison me. But my thighs were holding me just above a deep squat so that I could keep my mouth and nose near the crack at the edge of the lid. My thighs began burning and quivering from the deep flex. I had to relax and sink back down into the garbage.

  I leaned forward onto my knees, took a knee-walk step forward through the gunk. I looked up at the dumpster lid. There was another line of light, another infinitesimal bit of air coming in. I realized that the dumpster had two lids, side-by-side. I straightened up until my head hit one of the lids. I pushed against the lid with the crown of my skull, my temples throbbing with the pain of being knocked out. The lid moved a half-inch or so, but no more.

  I knee-walked sideways, under the other lid. Pushed up with my head a second time. That lid also moved just a bit, but no more. I sat back on my haunches and cranked my head back to try to see through the crack between the two lids. I had to rock sideways, back and forth, to get a sense of that line of light, to see that the line was interrupted by a dark object about six inches across.

  Maybe the two lids were padlocked shut. I tried to recall what I’d seen when I’d come into the compound and hidden in the shadow of the dumpster. No image came to mind. I remembered seeing the dumpster. I’d hidden behind it. It had so reeked of dead, rotting flesh that nothing about its lids had registered.

  Now, as I looked at the dark interruption in the thin line of light between the two lids, I envisioned handles or brackets welded to the lids. It looked like a 2 X 6 board had been slid in under the handles or brackets. If, in some way, I could slide that 2 X 6 out from the handles, maybe I could open the dumpster and escape.

  I needed something to poke up through the crack between the lids and use to move the board. For that I needed my hands.

  My hands were tied tight enough that my wrists burned. I pushed and pulled my hands from one another, seeing if there was any give in the cord that bound them. There was no flex. I needed some kind of tool, something sharp. The only possibilities were in the garbage beneath me.

  So I sat down on my butt, leaned back, and thrust my hands down into the garbage. I felt and grabbed and squeezed. The garbage was mostly in plastic garbage bags. But many of the bags were old and the plastic disintegrated as I reached with my hands. The more recent bags had tough plastic, but were still easy to rip apart. Everything was covered with the slippery slime of rotting deer guts.

  Each time I came across something of substance, I put it between my hands, explored it by feel. I stayed on the perimeter of the dumpster, avoiding the maggot mass that I thought was toward the center. I stabbed my hands down into the gunk, pulled up whatever I found. Then I scooted sideways and repeated the process, attempting to identify each item by shape and heft and texture and determine if it could be of aid to me.

  I found a large boot, a drip coffee maker with no pot, a
glass bottle, a large-caliber empty shell casing, a thick, bendy book like a big-city Yellow Pages, a bolt stacked with washers held in place by a nut, a dull chainsaw chain, an aluminum can, an old candle that was burned down in the center until the wick was gone, a disposable razor, a DVD disk, a plastic bag with unused tortillas… Wait. A disposable razor.

  I felt around behind my back, trying to find the razor again.

  It wasn’t there. I went left, then right. I found a 9-volt battery, a crumpled pile of foil, a plastic bottle, broken eyeglasses, a piece of window screen, and, finally, the disposable razor.

  I tried to figure how to work it. My hands were tied so that the inside of my left wrist was against the outside of my right wrist. As a right-handed person, that position made it difficult to get the razor into contact with the cord. I hoped that they’d used the cord that Diamond had given me as it seemed like something a razor could cut. Twisting my arm hard, I was able to rotate my right wrist so that both wrists were inside-to-inside. That position stressed my right shoulder and elbow and substantially limited my ability to manipulate my right fingers. I couldn’t do anything with the razor. So I rotated my wrist back to its original position and, careful not to drop the razor, shifted it so that I was holding it by its very tip, then waggled it until I could catch it with the fingers on my left hand.

  To make a shaving razor work, you have to hold it almost perpendicular to your face. And I couldn’t get the end of the handle far enough out from my wrists to get the cutting edge to contact the cord.

  I shifted it around so that I was using my thumb and index finger to hold the razor by its head, while the handle poked out the opposite direction. It was a terrific strain on my hand muscles, but I was able to scrape the razor head against the cord.

  I heard a sound like a door opening, swinging out hard and banging against a wall. I went motionless.

  Voices. Two men. Five times louder than needed for communication. Slurred words.

  “I tol’ you, Manny, dint I? I tol’ you good.”

  “What? That you’d nail that sucker? So what, Gaver? If it hadn’t been for Big Bear, that guy wouldn’t’a been distracted. You think that tall guy woulda let you play tee-ball with his head if he wasn’t dealin’ with Big Bear? You ever seen a man who could take Big Bear on a charge? Have you? Answer me.”

  “I dunno.”

  “’Course you haven’t. Jackson trained that doggie. No dog Jackson ever trained has been taken by a bare-handed man. It’s like he had some kinda James Bond training, grabbing that dog out of the air like he was a butterfly or something, and then tying him to a tree. Gentle with the dog, too. Like he’s one of those martial arts dudes, all calm and into the Buddha thing. Then you whack him with your stick. Big deal. If he wasn’t tying up Big Bear, he woulda been hog-tying you.”

  “Not with this S ’n W on my belt, he wouldn’t.”

  “So you say, Gaver. But saying ain’t the same as doing. If I’s you, I’d be careful. There probably isn’t a chance he’s still alive, considering the way he flopped face-first into those deer guts.”

  “Hell, no, he din’t even move, din’t even jerk for air. Hard to think he was breathin’.”

  “Even so, until you know for sure, I’d watch your back.”

  “Even if he’s still sucking intestines, by eleven tomorrow morning, when the sun gets high, that dumpster’ll be hot enough to bake bread. By noon or one, he’ll be baked dead as that deer. Teach him for hitting Big Bear. Davy’ll be okay with me using the backhoe. Come one o’clock, I’ll put his body where we put that ATF guy. Jus’ like before, you’n me’n Davy will be the only ones who know. I got plenty of time to get rid of the body.”

  “Better not put it off, because the weather’s supposed to turn. You won’t even get that backhoe up the hill when it starts raining and the path turns sloppy.”

  “Who you think he is, anyway?”

  “Gotta figure it’s that guy Davy warned us about. The private cop from Tahoe. Davy said he might come ’round askin’ about our group. Davy will be glad when he finds out what we did with him.”

  “Hey, check the time, we gotta spell the Mauer brothers on their watch.”

  The voices got softer as they moved away.

  In time, I heard nothing more, and I went back to work with the razor.

  I could feel the little blade bite into the cord. By using a short, repetitive shaving motion, I worked it over and over. Because a shaving razor is designed to take a tiny bite, it took many minutes. I had to transfer the razor from my left hand to my right so that I could straighten and flex my left fingers and prevent them from cramping. Then I shifted it back to my left hand to keep working.

  Ten minutes later, I had cut the cord.

  My shoulders ached as I brought my hands around in front of me. Now I had to get out of the dumpster.

  I reached up and tested both dumpster lids to verify what I’d discovered with my head. Both lids moved just a little before stopping, possibly held in place by the six-inch object that I could make out in the crack between the lids.

  If the lids were locked with something much more substantial, my only hope would be to find in the garbage some kind of a lever strong enough to use as a crow bar between the crack where the lid came down on the dumpster, and then bend the metal enough to get out. Which was about as likely as a SWAT team descending on the camp before the morning’s sun baked me to death.

  I began searching the garbage for a tool.

  Twenty minutes later, I found an old, rusted, 14-penny nail in the gunk at the bottom corner of the dumpster.

  I poked the nail through the crack between the lids and pushed it into the six-inch obstruction I’d seen earlier. The nail was barely long enough to reach the object. The material felt like wood, giving just a bit as I pushed the nail point up through the crack.

  I levered the nail sideways. The wood didn’t budge. I pushed the opposite direction. Maybe it shifted a tiny bit. Maybe not. I changed the angle of the nail, pushed it up and to the side, levering it again. The wood – if it was wood – possibly shifted a little more. I worked the nail over and over. I couldn’t tell if I was merely gouging a groove in the material or moving the material. The possibility of escape seemed very remote. But I kept up the nail movement.

  Ten minutes later, the wood made a thunking noise as its weight shifted. I envisioned the wood as a teeter-totter of sorts, first leaning a tiny amount one direction, then leaning the other direction. It gave me hope because it indicated that I was succeeding at moving the wood.

  After another ten minutes, the wood came free from whatever brackets or handles held it, and it fell to the ground, banging the side of the dumpster with a loud thunk.

  I didn’t wait to see who would come to investigate. I pushed up one of the dumpster lids, standing up into cool, fresh night air. I held the lid so it wouldn’t flop over and bang onto the back of the dumpster. Keeping a strong grip on the lid, I swung my leg up and over the dumpster edge, followed with my other leg, folded my body over the ledge, my feet contacting the ground, and closed the lid gently so that it wouldn’t bang. I slid the board back under the handles.

  The grounds were quiet, the men and the dog gone. The sodium vapor light was still bright, but the light that had earlier spilled out from the Quonset-style building was off.

  I moved around the far end of the building, staying well into the darkness, watching for the silent rushing attack of the dog named Big Bear.

  No dog moved, and I saw no man.

  What I did see now that I hadn’t seen before was a small dark cabin in the distance and behind it a pole building that backed up to a steep hill.

  In the side of the pole building were windows, and in one of them shined a weak light.

  FORTY-TWO

  My impulse was to rush in, but I kept my distance. I moved sideways through the darkness, moving in an arc around the cabin. I felt for my belt pack and its flashlight, but it was gone, as was my headlamp, my jackkni
fe, and everything else that had been in my pockets.

  I went by a Jeep, a CJ-6 model from the ’70s with the open top. I felt in the dark for the ignition. There was no key. I reached and felt above the visor. Nothing.

  I came by a mound where someone had been piling compost. Near it was one of those large mobile utility carts mounted on two bicycle wheels. I stepped around it and continued moving in the dark.

  The front of the pole building came into view as I came even with the back of the cabin.

  The pole building had a tall garage door that was wide enough to fit four cars side-by-side and next to it a human door.

  In front of the human door was a small, dull, orange glow. I moved closer. Slow. Silent. Creeping up at about the speed a vine grows on a hot summer day.

  When I got closer, I saw that the glow came from the embers of a small fire. Two men sat in folding chairs in front of the fire. Their mission may have been guard duty, but it looked like they were asleep. Or drowsy drunk, their bodies slid down in the chairs, feet stretched way out, heads tipped back on the top edges of the chairs.

  One of them moved and mumbled something. The other groaned.

  Manny and Gaver, the night guards.

  I worried that my stink would be obvious if they were downwind from me. But the air seemed motionless. I stopped and sat down in the dark and watched them. In time, one of them made a startled jerk and sat up straight. He stared into the dark for a bit, then put another log on the fire. He pushed himself off his chair, kneeled in the dirt and blew on the embers. Over and over. Eventually, a flame grew under the new log. He sat back in his chair, reached a bottle off the ground and took a drink. Then he bumped the bottle against the other man’s arm. That man sat up, took the bottle, and swigged a longer drink.