South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  “They were burned alive,” the doctor said.

  I was familiar with the signs, but did not care to speak. The scratch marks on the interior walls and the soot and ash around their mouths and nasal cavities told me everything I needed to know. I had seen this horror show before, a lifetime ago.

  “The clothing acted like a wick,” he continued, his tone dispassionate and professorial. “It absorbs the victims’ body fat and burns just like a candle.”

  “Those are human beings,” I said.

  The ME ignored my remark, bent at the waist, and cocked his head, gazed along the undercarriage, his stomach swelling over the edge of his tooled belt. The stones around the van’s perimeter had been blackened, but the gravel underneath appeared untouched.

  “I am aware that they are humans,” he said, blinking at me behind the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. His expression betrayed nothing, only the blank appearance of an obese owl. “An accelerant was used to cause this blaze. The lack of oxygen at the—”

  “So, they didn’t chain the doors themselves and immolate one another?” I asked. “How did you get through medical school?”

  “I was trying to—”

  “I don’t need to hear it from you. I can smell it for myself.” The ME was craning his neck, splayfooted and gazing past me, into the trees along the roadside.

  “Is there a reason you won’t look me in the eye when you talk to me?” I said.

  Dr. Hill removed his glasses and wiped the lenses with his shirttail. When he was finished, he tucked his shirttail back in place, put his glasses on, and finally looked at me.

  “I don’t like being stuck between factions,” he said.

  “What factions are you referring to?”

  “Just leave me be, and let me do my work.”

  “I want to hear you say my name,” I said.

  “Tyler Dawson.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “The new undersheriff.”

  I shook my head.

  “You performed an autopsy on a man who worked for me,” I said. “That killing wasn’t self-inflicted, either, by the way. You never had the decency to follow up with me. That man had a family too. Just like the two young men inside that van.”

  “I told you everything I could,” he said. “The investigation is out of my hands, unless I’m called to testify. I gave the sheriff and the DA everything I had just like they asked. I’m not lying.”

  “The level of your veracity is no concern of mine. You’re the one who’s got to look at yourself shaving every morning.”

  “I am sorry about your cowboy.”

  “You are a walking feed sack,” I said. “My cowboy had a name. But I don’t want to hear it on your lips.”

  His mouth moved like a fish left on the planking of a pier as I turned my attention to the trooper.

  “This doesn’t look like the work of the Charlatans to you, Wilkens? You are aware of the hippie protestors at Pineu’s—enough so that you drove all the way out there just to call me—but the presence of an armed gang of California bikers doesn’t register with you? Have you bothered to put out a bulletin on your radio?”

  “I don’t need you to—”

  “Shut up and write down the names of these two victims: one is Peter Davis; the other one’s first name is Sylvester. I do not know his last. Stop staring at me.”

  “I phoned you because it is protocol,” Wilkens said. The tendons on his neck stood out like steel cords.

  “You phoned me because someone told you to,” I said. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that the two men in that van were tortured to death by the Charlatans and their cameras and film stock destroyed? They were shooting a documentary about everything that’s been happening up here.”

  The gravel under my boots was dotted with balls of shattered windshield glass that glittered in the blinking lights of the patrol car.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Wilkens asked.

  “I’m leaving you to your crime scene.”

  “It’s your county, Dawson. This scene belongs to you.”

  “It appears to me that it’s Lloyd Skadden’s county,” I said. “And the state road is your jurisdiction.”

  My eyes fell on the departmental logo painted on the open door of his cruiser.

  “You’ve done your job, Trooper. You dragged me all the way out here for nothing. You can tell whoever it is who pulls your levers that they got my attention, and the next time they see me I’ll be flying a black flag.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I recalled the government vehicles that had so rapidly departed Teresa Pineu’s ranch on Easter Sunday.

  “You make a poor liar,” I said.

  He stepped in close to me then, so close our hat brims nearly touched.

  “Would you care to repeat that remark?”

  “What would be the purpose?” I said. “You heard me fine the first time.”

  I climbed into the cab of my truck and slammed the door, and the glowing eyes of a roving herd of deer stared back at me from deep inside the trees. I switched on the Motorola that we’d found at the Meridian substation, waited for the ready light, and thumbed the mic.

  “Caleb, this is Dawson.”

  Nothing answered me but silence, so I tried a second time and my pulse began to quicken. Another long moment passed with no reply. Far to the north along the edges of the mountain range a cloud lit up with lightning and I heard the static crack inside the speaker of my radio. The damned thing was useless, impeded either by the weather or the distance or the mountainous terrain. My tires spun in the loose stones as I floored the accelerator and fishtailed out onto the asphalt.

  The wind had begun to quicken. I could see it in the tops of the trees as I drove, their limbs whipping broadly against the black sky. Small branches had already snapped off from the cedars and I felt the truck frame jolt and shudder when I failed to maneuver around one of them. Fine beads of sweat ran down my back and I felt my shirt stick to my skin.

  Seven miles up, I pulled off the road at the first phone booth I could find. It stood adjacent to a Texaco gas station and a tire repair shop whose windows reflected dull blue neon light. I dropped a dime into the slot and dialed Caleb, stared through the graffiti-scarred plexiglass and up into the star-splattered sky while I impatiently counted out the ringtones.

  “Wheeler,” he said after the fifth one.

  “Tell Jesse it’s time,” I said. “Tell everybody to get ready.”

  “Say that again,” Caleb said.

  “It’s happening tonight.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ALL THE LIGHTS around the Diamond D had been extinguished by the time I arrived back home. I drove in through the dirt service road that traced a shallow arc from the two-lane to the barn through several acres of heavily wooded native timber. I turned off my headlights and drove cautiously by memory and the meager light that shone down from a half moon that floated behind a veil of rapidly moving clouds.

  I cut the engine and shifted into neutral, allowing gravity to let me coast the last hundred yards in silence, and pulled to a stop behind a stand of shrubs. I jumped out of the truck and blazed a trail through the overgrowth of timothy and June grass, stopping every few yards to squat down on my haunches and strain my ears inside the weeds. It took me several minutes to reach the outskirts of the ranch, where I hunkered down surrounded by a thicket of wildwood just short of the main house. I allowed my eyes to adjust more fully to the darkness and saw a string of gray smoke from the fireplace burning in the living room stitch a broken line between the chimney and the sky. The air was heavy with woodsmoke and ozone and the smell of rainfall and crushed grass.

  I had no way of knowing where, or if, any intruders had entered before me, but the outright absence of night noise set off alarm bells in my head. No insects chirred inside the brush, nor frogs making noise from the creek on the far side of the barn. The only sounds came from the sigh o
f the wind and the creaking from the limbs of conifers high overhead.

  As a young boy my father had told me a story about how my grandfather had acquired the Diamond D ranch. In that parable, my grandfather encountered a man listlessly pulling at the soil with a hoe beside a dugout he had carved into an esker. He asked the man how he had come to possess the property, and the man replied, “I fought for it.” A moment went by, and another, as my grandfather considered his options. After a while he said to the man, “Then, how about I fight you for it.”

  The story affected me strangely back then, sometimes filling me with a sense of unease so profound that I felt I may never be worthy to hold title to something for which someone else’s blood might have been shed. Squatting there in the dark I had no time to reflect on abstractions, but the full measure of the parable’s meaning had suddenly settled in on me.

  I caught a movement in my peripheral vision, little more than a shadow that crept across the darkness. The form moved quickly past the side of the barn and disappeared again as it rounded the corner to the rear. A bright and sudden flash of light sliced into my field of vision, and I had an instant confirmation as to what was going on.

  My experience with gangs, as with bullies of any stripe, was that they ascribed little value to advance strategy. Instead they relied almost exclusively on the full-frontal blitz of unexpected assault and on the chaos and the terror it is meant to inspire in its victims. I had laid down my chips on that conviction, and had wagered my own life and those belonging to my family and my friends on its legitimacy.

  The detonation of the points of fire ignited in rapid succession, explosions made by flaming bottles filled with gasoline being shattered against the slat walls of my barn. Though I had no prior knowledge as to what their specific methods might entail, I believed that the attackers’ first maneuver would be to create a diversion intended to lure me outside and leave Jesse and Cricket exposed and alone inside the house.

  I sprinted toward the barn, in the direction of the last of the explosions, arriving just as the bomber attempted his escape through the barn door, and slammed my shoulder deep into his sternum. We hit the ground together, and I rolled him on his back and straddled him, landing a swift kite to the hollow of his throat as he struggled to throw me off. He clawed and grasped and finally wrapped his hand around the fighting knife sheathed on his belt, and I leaped off as it sliced the air where my face had been only a fraction of a second before.

  Inside the barn, I could see the flames licking at the horse stall doors and climbing up the walls toward the hay bales. He moved in on me, slashing his blade through the air in-between us, and I backed myself toward the burning structure.

  I snatched a lariat from the hook inside the door and scythed it before me in defense. I slid my hands along the braiding until I located the knot beneath my fingers, never taking my eyes from the flicker of fire reflected on the planes of his face as he continued to angle in on me. In one unexpected motion, I slid backward, dug my bootheels deep into the dirt, and threw a heel-rope loop toward his feet. It noosed up tight around his ankles and I tipped him to the ground like deadfall. He landed hard and broke the grip on the handle of his blade and I dragged him facedown across the ground.

  He squirmed and reached down to his ankles to loosen the knot that bound him, but I landed a swift kick to the base of his skull that stilled him with the swiftness of a bolt gun. His head lolled forward. He was semiconscious, but I knew he’d come back around.

  I used the short time advantage I had gained to wrap the rope around his shins and run a line up to his wrists, then I dragged him all the way inside the burning barn. I pulled the loose end of pulley chain and strung the hook between the bindings on his ankles, raised him up and tied him off to a steel cleat bolted into the wall, and hung him upside down like a moth cocoon, about five feet off the ground.

  Hot smoke roiled inside the space and burned my eyes while I forked a stack of sawdust and dry straw underneath the dangling biker and watched him start to squirm and twist as he began to regain consciousness. I topped off the straw pile with an old inner tube from a hay barrow, an old and ugly trick I’d learned that intensifies the heat and duration of an open flame.

  “What the fuck?” he said, and fought against his bindings.

  “You’ve developed a dangerous fixation with fire, Wallace,” I said.

  The taste of smoke seared my throat as I collected my breath, and I watched a trickle of blood that had collected in his hair seep out and trace a narrow line along his forehead.

  “The boys are going to take turns skull fucking your old lady and your daughter, and they’re gonna make you watch.”

  “That is an ugly way to speak about my family.”

  “You’re not going to let me burn to death.”

  “The smoke’ll probably kill you first,” I said.

  He blinked away the tears that had gathered in his eyes from heat and smoke and squinted at me as the first trickle of his own blood dripped to the floor.

  “How many men are with you?” I asked.

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “See you later, Wallace.”

  “You’re not going to leave me here.”

  “Look in my eyes and tell me if you think I’m lying.”

  I pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of my jeans and rolled it into a tube. He shook his head violently as I tried to gag him, so I quieted him down with a swift right jab that cracked the bridge of his nose and sounded like a snapping twig. He choked and spat as his own fresh blood flowed freely into his mouth and gathered in his throat.

  “They’re going to kill you, motherfucker,” he coughed.

  “Says the man strung up inside my hayloft like a hog.”

  I patted him on the back as I stepped toward the door.

  “Six,” he called out.

  “Six men,” I said. “Including you?”

  “Let me down.”

  “Talk to me, Wallace.”

  “Yes, goddamn it,” he said. “Six including me.”

  “You and five other men come to my ranch to assault my family and I should haul you down?”

  I wrestled the handkerchief between his teeth and tied it tight at the back of his head.

  “You’re going to burn, Wallace, like the boys you torched inside their van. I wish I could stick around to hear you suffer.”

  I don’t know if he believed that I was bluffing or was counting on my mercy. The expression on his face was one of raw defiance until it disappeared in a single fleeting moment of epiphany as I turned to walk away.

  “It will not be easy going for you as you make your way into the next world,” I said. “Goodnight, Wallace.”

  I stepped out into the cool air as white billows from my flaming barn whirled skyward on the wind. A windmill at the edge of the breed-bull corral groaned and shivered as the wheel spun, and I rubbed my eyes with my bruised knuckles as the barn fire reflected in the sheet-metal blades of the fan.

  I glanced toward the main house, but it remained cloaked in darkness except for the thin ribbon of smoke that still wafted from the chimney. But a separate blaze had now erupted and backlit the maples next to the office.

  I ran to the structure where Caleb had stationed himself, and now saw that the fire I’d seen before was actually coming from twin blazes that had been set behind the storage room and the farrier’s shed. I took hold of the windowsill and raised my eyes up over the ledge to look inside the office. Caleb had the barrel of a carbine aimed squarely into the chest of a Charlatan he had wedged into a corner of the room. The biker’s lips were moving, but I couldn’t make out the words. I pressed my face up to the glass, shielded my eyes from the glare and scanned the recesses, and confirmed that they were alone inside. I crouched down low and moved to the door, pounded three times with the ball of my fist, my signal to Caleb that it was me about to enter.

  “There’s six of them altogether,” I said.

  “Figures,” Caleb said.
“The weak always travel in packs.”

  “We got any rope in here?”

  Caleb nodded toward the broom closet and watched as I bound the Charlatan’s hands. He wore the same insolent expression Wallace had, but this one’s teeth had been snapped off at the gum line, and the overall effect was that of an imbecilic character in a medieval troupe.

  “You know who this one is?” I asked Caleb.

  “Couldn’t care less.”

  “This one likes to sodomize young girls and burn their skin with cigarette butts.”

  “Emily Meeghan?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Do you know much about breeding cattle?” I said to the rapist.

  “Kiss my ass,” he lisped.

  “I used to have three breeding bulls,” I told him. “But one of them exploded. Still trying to figure that out. Thing is, it leaves the other two bulls with a lot of extra work to do, so we need to keep them pretty revved up. You know what I’m talking about, right?”

  I went back to the closet and returned carrying a plastic spray bottle. I shook the yellowish contents of the bottle before his eyes, and misted the air with a squeeze of the trigger.

  “Smells, don’t it?” Caleb said, and turned his head away.

  “Tell the rapist here what’s in this bottle,” I said. “I think he’d appreciate it more than most.”

  My foreman shot me a look out of the corner of his eye, and I nodded that I meant what I had said.

  “What we do to keep things moving in the breed pen is to spray pheromones on the cows,” Caleb said. “Now, bulls are goddamned mean to start with, but you give them a whiff of this shit, and Katie-bar-the-door. I mean it’s like a dozen drunken sailors on shore leave in Bangkok.”