South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  “Have you seen this girl, Wallace?”

  He slid a pair of mirrored shades from his face and made a show of examining the picture.

  “Can’t say for sure,” he said. “Gash all tends to look the same to me after a while.”

  An ambiguous thought had been troubling me for some time, but I could not put a name to it until now. The man I called ‘Wallace’ had eyes that were lit up from inside like he was plugged into a wall socket, and the planes of his face twitched with the static electrical buzz of the amphetamines that surged through his bloodstream. But there was some other agenda operating inside his head. The collective IQ of his companions wouldn’t break double digits, and it was clear to me that he was in charge. Now the thing that had been troubling me had begun to take form, and I wondered where the rest of the Charlatans were. Lloyd Skadden had been warned of a massive rally of outlaws, yet I had only encountered this small band.

  “I believe this girl is here with you now,” I said. “Care to study on the picture again?”

  He passed it back to me without a glance, adjusting his scrotum with his free hand.

  “Now that you mention it, she does look familiar.”

  I felt the rough crosshatch press into my palms as I gripped the Colt tight in my fist.

  “I’m going to ask you this only two times,” I said. “The first time is going to be polite: Is she inside that room behind you?”

  He smiled and shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. Griffin and Powell saw it too.

  “I think she’s grown fond of the attention she enjoys from the boys,” Wallace said. The two standing beside him broke into grins. “Although she was a little hesitant at first.”

  “You’ll need to stand aside,” I said. “All three of you. Hands out to your sides, palms out.”

  They complied, and I patted them down for weapons. None carried firearms, but the collection of fighting blades was impressive. I tossed the entire haul of boot knives, karambits, and switchblades into the bed of my truck. Then I came back for the ignition keys to their Harleys and slid them into my pocket.

  “You got a warrant?” Wallace asked me.

  “I’ve got a boot-heel warrant,” I said. “Would you like to take a closer look?”

  Griffin and Powell moved toward the men, the carbine stocks still tucked in tight at their jawlines. The two cowboys loose-herded the bikers into the shade of the motel’s roof overhang and lined them up along the wall. The grins had disappeared from their faces.

  “Do you see the guns these men are directing at you?” I said. “They’re Winchester model 94 repeating rifles. They fire .30-caliber bullets that will pass through your internal organs and leave a hole on the way out that’s the size of my fist. There are eight rounds in each chamber, so there’s fifteen left. If you can’t do the arithmetic in your heads, it works out like this: Five holes apiece. At this distance, I guarantee that these men will not miss.”

  I moved toward the locked door of the room at their backs, felt the knurled surface of the hammer of the Colt against my thumb, and cocked it. I reeled back and planted a solid kick beside the handle, and the door gave way in a shower of chipped pressboard and plaster dust, ripped the chain from the anchor bolts, slammed open, and bounced against the wall.

  I shouldered past the threshold and into the darkened room, illuminated only by a narrow strip of daylight where the cheap vinyl curtains had parted and the rectangle of light that now shone through the shattered doorway. One Charlatan stood at the side of a filthy and disheveled bed holding a Polaroid camera, a bandana tied tight across his brow. He had been snapping images of his porcine companion as he thrust himself between the upraised knees of a female whose face I could not see, his road-soiled jeans and underwear pulled down and pooled around his boots. The fat rapist rolled off the girl and gaped into the black tunnel of the Colt’s barrel, his eyes wild and unfocused and deranged with rut. The warning shot that Powell had planted in the doorway hadn’t been enough to distract them from their recreation.

  The room was dense with the raw, glandular odors of copulation and sweat and a charred, pungent chemical smell I could not identify. The girl on the bed lay battered and prone, immobilized, one wrist shackled to the bed frame with a pair of steel handcuffs. Her face and chest were marbled with bruises, her abdomen spattered with drops of perspiration and dried semen and the blistered scars from burning cigarettes.

  She stirred and tried to sit upright, but was caught short by her manacles. Despite the dimness of the light and the physical damage inflicted on her face, I knew without a doubt that I had found Emily Meeghan.

  The biker wearing the bandana bounced the Polaroid off the mattress and made a swift turn on me, a push-knife locked inside his fist. I held the Colt in a two-handed stance and stared down the sight and into his jangling eyes.

  “I will drop you where you stand,” I said. “I shit you not.”

  The twin edges of the blade reflected in the band of light that streamed in between the curtains and he moved it slowly back and forth, like the searching head of a snake.

  I cocked the hammer on the Colt, and the ratchet of the mechanism snapping home appeared to awaken him from a trance.

  “Last chance,” I said. “Drop it on the floor.”

  I tried to whistle for Powell, but my mouth had gone bone dry, and I fought the urge to empty my entire cylinder into this guy’s bandana. I hollered out for Powell instead, and the biker dropped his blade. The fat rapist had slid off the bed and onto the floor where he was struggling to pull his pants up over his pink and pockmarked buttocks.

  Powell appeared in the doorway and leveled his rifle at the half-naked man on the floor. Together, we directed them to kneel on the carpet and press their palms flat to the wall. I relieved them of their knife blades and keys, then went to unlock the cuffs that still bound Emily Meeghan.

  She rubbed the raw red indentations where the cuffs had bitten into her wrists and passed a vacant gaze over the room. I had seen the look before, in the eyes of combat veterans and the victims of sudden and unspeakable horrors.

  Powell covered the bikers while I handcuffed the rapist then stepped outside to collect ropes from the cabs of our trucks.

  “Get down on your faces,” I said and went to work hogtying them both. I looped a second length of rope around a single leg of each man, securing each one to the other.

  When I was finished, I hoisted them to their feet and herded them outdoors, hobbling like drunks in a three-legged race, and tossed them facedown into the bed of Powell’s pickup.

  I stepped up beside Samuel Griffin while Powell finished anchoring the two captives to the cargo hooks of the truck.

  Fat beads of sweat had popped out on Samuel’s forehead and darkened the seam of his hatband. His Winchester was leveled at Wallace’s chest, and when I looked at Sam’s face, he gave me a wink that told me he still had things under control.

  Fear has an odor, like vinegar and sweat and milk that’s gone sour in the bottle. Despite the façade of bravado, it clung to the three bikers like a second skin.

  I uncocked the Colt and breathed a deep breath, slid the gun inside my holster. The engraved scrollwork on the frame and barrel was a hallmark of my grandfather’s time, when men such as these would have been bounced off the limb of a tree. I thought he might well be looking down upon me now, with disgust and contempt at my cowardice in not having done exactly that already.

  I returned to the motel room and helped Emily cover herself with a bedsheet, averting my eyes out of respect and the deep-seated shame for the barbarity she had endured at the subhuman hands of the worst examples of my gender. She hadn’t spoken a word, and neither had I as I carried her outside and lifted her into the passenger seat of my truck. Sly and Peter sidled up behind me, their distorted images reflecting off the curvature of the windshield.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” I said. “You get out of this girl’s face with that thing.”

  I took
the five sets of keys I had liberated from the Charlatans and walked to the edge of the parking lot. Across the paved road, the forest was dense, impacted, and choked with a tangle of wild berries, thistle sage, and nettle. One by one, I pitched each set into the bramble, where I knew it would take hours to find them, if they ever did find them at all.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE PHONE CORD had been ripped from the wall in the room where Emily Meeghan had been held captive, so I called Jesse from the motel office. I gave her only the most minimal of details, but asked that she get in touch with Emily’s father to have him meet me at the substation in Meridian.

  The manager complained bitterly about the damage that had been done to his motel, without a word or question in regard to the abused young girl who sat waiting for me, wrapped in a filthy sheet and blanket, in the cab of my idling truck. I suggested he send a bill for the damage to Charlatans’ headquarters in San Bernardino and left him in the office, shouting a string of obscenities and threats at my retreating back.

  Emily was shivering, catatonic, and suspended inside a haze of thoughts that I could only guess at. Her bare feet rested on the seat cushion, arms encircling her knees, drawn up into a trembling fetal ball. She stared, unblinkingly at the fading light of afternoon, disappearing right before my eyes, neither living nor yet dead, hovering somewhere in between and wedged into the farthest corner of my truck.

  We drove the state route north in silence, Powell and Griffin in my rearview, accompanied only by the whisper of the road beneath my wheels. Half an hour later, we turned onto the county road and passed through mile after mile of woodland blanketed in cattail moss and broken stumps of hemlock overgrown by wild mushrooms. A deer trail switched back through the forest into a barren clear-cut where raw logs and rough timber had been hauled off to pulp and lumber mills chained to the beds of stinger trucks.

  Emily had given in to sleep, her head rocking gently where it rested against the window. I switched on my headlights, lit a cigarette, and made a mental catalog of the anguish I would like to bring to bear on any man who would do what had been done to her.

  THERE WAS a private entrance to the Meridian substation at the rear of the building, but the sodium lamp back there was dead and the lot was far too dark. The main street was practically deserted, so we parked along the curb outside the front door instead.

  Chandle Meeghan paced back and forth within the pool of pinkish light beneath the lamppost, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his coat, and I could hear him muttering to himself. Emily’s eyelids fluttered as she came slowly awake, then her eyes filled with tears and something else when they fell upon her dad.

  “I’m sorry, Chandle,” I said. “But she needs to see a doctor, and this is the quickest way to get her to one.”

  “Is she all right?”

  He moved stiffly, his expression dazed and empty, like a man suddenly awakened from deep sleep.

  “Bring your car around, and I’ll help put her inside.”

  I unlocked the door to the substation and snapped on the overhead lights. Griffin untied the prisoners, dragged the taller one from the rear of his truck and onto his feet then prodded him into the precinct.

  Yellow headlights rounded the corner and Chandle pulled up to the curb. He held open his passenger door while I carried Emily from my cab and placed her gently on the seat of Chandle’s car. Her body felt limp and weightless and she had begun trembling again. Chandle pushed on his door until the mechanism clicked shut, taking care not to slam it and break the fragile quiet.

  By this time, the fat rapist had been dragged out of Powell’s truck bed, his boot soles shuffling on the sidewalk, still tightly bound at the ankles and wrists, the barrel of Powell’s carbine pressed into the hollow of his back.

  “Is this the man who hurt my daughter?” he asked me.

  “Please step away, Mr. Meeghan.”

  “Is this him?”

  Meeghan moved up on the sidewalk and blocked Powell’s path. Without warning, he swung on the biker and landed a crushing blow to the bridge of his nose. A spatter of blood caught the light and arced onto the front of Chandle Meeghan’s collared shirt. I could tell that the man had likely never been in a fistfight, nor properly taught how to throw a punch. He cocked back again for another, and Powell made a move to prevent it, but I shook my head.

  I allowed Meeghan to unleash his rage, exhausting himself with three more body blows. Blood from the biker’s ruptured septum dripped in a free-flowing sheet off his chin. He showed Meeghan a smile stained in pink, leaned toward him, and spat blood in his face.

  Powell reacted with a swift stroke from the butt of his carbine that cracked off a front tooth along the gumline. The broken tooth fell to the ground and Meeghan smeared a pink streak of spittle across his face with the back of his hand. His eyes filled with the scalding tears of impotence.

  Meeghan’s chest heaved and we both watched in silence as Powell frog-marched the prisoner inside and kicked the door shut behind him.

  “Take Emily to County General,” I told Meeghan. “We’ve got this now.”

  WE LOCKED the prisoners in two of the three separate cells upstairs, and I left Powell to keep an eye on them for a while. Griffin and I took seats at the desks on the first floor.

  “What happens now, Mr. Dawson?” Griffin asked me, but I had no answer.

  I phoned the diner and ordered some food while Griffin set about searching the office for any equipment that might have been left in the lockers. When I hung up, I ran my finger down the typewritten list of telephone numbers that had been tacked on the wall beside the phone and landed on one belonging to the district attorney’s office. This being Easter Sunday, I figured they’d be closed, but I dialed it anyway and left a message with the answering service.

  I called Jesse next and told her I wouldn’t be home that night.

  “Is Emily okay?” Jesse asked.

  “Not even close.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Keep Wyatt inside with you, and make sure all the doors are locked. There’s a .38 in the night-stand. I want you to keep it underneath your pillow.”

  “What’s happening, Ty?”

  “Please tell me you’ll do what I asked.”

  Griffin was making a racket as he rifled the cabinets and drawers, so I plugged one ear with my finger and listened to Jesse breathing on the other end of the line. I told her I loved her, and placed one final call. This one was to Caleb Wheeler.

  “I found some stuff,” Griffin said when I’d finished my call to Caleb. He crossed the room carrying an armload of the crap he’d found, and dumped it on my desk.

  We picked through a tangle of batteries, chargers, and the cables that went with a set of handheld radios. They looked to be at least ten years old, and had likely been left there because they either were broken or never had functioned properly at any distance in this valley. I had some unfortunate experience with equipment much like this when I was in Korea.

  “Plug ’em into the wall and let’s see if they work,” I said. “What else did you find?”

  “Two pairs of handcuffs and an old billy club.”

  “That’s it?”

  “The rest is just papers and outdated phone books,” he said. “What’s that smell in here, anyway?”

  “Dysfunction.”

  Tiny red lights glowed on the chargers that Griffin plugged into the wall. We sat in silence and watched them blink and listened to Powell tap his boots on the floor overhead.

  A face appeared in the sidelight window next to the door. Rowan Boyle’s breath fogged the glass as he cupped a hand to his cheekbone and peered inside. I could see the shadows of two others right behind him.

  “It takes three of you to deliver sandwiches?” I asked, as I turned the key in the lock and let them inside.

  Boyle set a cardboard box in the space Griffin had cleared on the bookcase. I peered inside at a plate stacked with a dozen sandwiches he’d cut in half
and covered with waxed paper. Ribbons of steam drifted up from lidded paper cups brimming with coffee, tucked tight beside a six-pack of Diet Rite Cola.

  Boyle’s lips squirmed like he was rehearsing a speech he had memorized, and his companions kept running their eyes toward the stairwell in back.

  “Can we get a look at the prisoners?” he asked finally.

  “You ever slopped hogs?” I asked.

  “Surely have.”

  “Then there’s nothing up there you haven’t seen before.”

  “I thought maybe—”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m going to need you to take back these cola bottles,” I interrupted. “You got something else that comes packaged in cans?”

  “I can probably find something.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said and held the door open for them. “Thank you, Rowan.”

  Powell came down the stairs when they’d gone, and eyed the box on the bookcase.

  “You two go ahead and eat,” I said.

  I took three of the sandwiches upstairs and passed one to each of the bikers through the bars. I sat down to eat mine while I watched them. The room already smelled like a musty barn where rodents had nested in soiled linen, defecated, and died. There was no solvent, bleach, or astringent that could ever be sufficient to scrub the opprobrium from these walls; nothing short of fire ever would.

  “This is it?” the tall one asked.

  “Shut up and eat.”

  “I thought these small towns were supposed to be hospitable.”

  “I told you to shut up.”

  “I’m thirsty,” the rapist lisped.

  “Don’t care.”

  I finished off my sandwich and stood at the top of the stairs, turning the light off behind me.

  “It’s goddamned dark in here.”

  “You’ll see light in the morning,” I said. “Consider yourselves lucky. You should be tree decorations by now. Now shut the fuck up.”

  Powell had a row of brass cartridges lined up on the desk and was running a long-handled bore brush through the barrel of his carbine while Griffin hummed something under his breath and rocked back and forth on his rolling chair. I leaned my back to the wall and stared out the glass at the lighted storefronts along the street.