South California Purples

by Baron R. Birtcher

  The biker’s eyes bugged wild when I began to squirt him down from head to foot.

  “You think the two of us can lift this idiot’s fat ass?” I asked Caleb.

  I wound a length of duct tape around his ankles and we carried him through the door between us like a hammock, in the same way we would when branding a new calf. We hefted his body across the top rail of the breeding corral and I slit the tape binding his feet. The bull snorted and blew when he got his first whiff of the juice. Even in the dark, I could make out the whites of the animal’s wild eyes as he trotted over from the far side of the arena.

  “I’m going to leave your hands tied, to make it fair for the bull,” I said. “Just like you did for Emily.”

  The biker made a mewling sound as Caleb and I shoved him the rest of the way over the fence. I could feel the pounding of the bull’s hooves as he broke into a run.

  “He’s either gonna stomp you or fuck you to death,” Caleb said. “Either way, it sounds like something you’re familiar with.”

  WE CAUGHT the tail end of a message coming through the speakers of the handheld radio unit on Caleb’s desk as we came in. Caleb thumbed the transmit button and requested a repeat. The radios hadn’t been worth a damn for me out on the highway, but at least they functioned here on the ranch.

  “I’ve got one injured in the shed,” Taj Caldwell said. “He’s leaking pretty good.”

  “I’m going to the house,” I told Caleb.

  “Alone?”

  “Powell and Griffin are supposed to be in there,” I said. “You give Taj some backup and meet me in the house when you get his situation buttoned up.”

  Caleb picked up the transmitter and I thought of something else.

  “Tell Taj to try to get the barn fire under control. Take the pump and hoses to the cistern—”

  “I know how to fight a goddamned fire,” Caleb said.

  His manner changed when he read the expression on my face.

  “You’re going to find one of them in the barn,” I said.

  “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know, maybe,” I said. “Either way, I want you to leave him where you find him, exactly where he is. Let the medical examiner haul him down.”

  “Haul him down from where?”

  “You’ll see,” I said. “You gonna be okay, Caleb?”

  “Don’t say shit like that to me. I may be old, but I can keep my ass in the saddle same as you.”

  I hadn’t taken three steps outside before I heard a fusillade of shots echo down to me from the inside of my house. I fought the urge to run straight in, but knew it could turn into an ambush. Instead, I drew my Colt, crept up the slope between the trees, and circled toward the rear entrance of the house.

  To the north, the clouds and lightning I had seen before were growing in intensity. Some time tomorrow, the rain that they turned loose over the mountains would flow down into the valley, swelling creeks and rivers with brown water, mud, and driftwood. Overhead I felt the spectral presence of those bats again, careening in the dark.

  No lights burned inside the house as I cut wide around the far corner of the garden, underneath the willow with the chimes that hung inside, only a yellow glow that lit the windowpanes from flames that licked the logs inside the fireplace. One saddled horse grazed riderless and alone beside the fruit orchard, dragging its reins along the soil, too dark for me to see whose mount it was.

  The mudroom door was already ajar when I approached it, so I eased it back on its hinges as silently as I could and slipped inside. A man lay dead, seated on the floor, his back resting against the cabinets. A bullet had cored his forehead and removed the back side of his skull and the contents of his brainpan streaked across the panels.

  I stepped over the dead man’s outstretched legs and crossed the threshold into the kitchen. I heard a tapping sound at the far end of the room, somewhere deep inside the shadows. I crabbed sideways keeping the counter at my back, my eyes and pistol aimed inward toward a gap in the wall that opened onto the living room. The tapping grew louder, more insistent, and I saw the supine shape of another man pressed into the far corner of the kitchen.

  I recognized the boots and moved more swiftly toward him. Griffin lay in the dark, a puncture wound high up on his chest and a bullet hole pulsing dun-colored blood from his thigh. Moonlight from the window shone down on his face, shiny with perspiration and the color of a spent coal brick. His lips were drawn into a tight cone of pain, but his eyes were burnished with light. He was tapping on the wall with trembling fingers and spoke to me in a whisper.

  “There’s two dead in there,” he said, casting a glance in the direction of the living room.

  “Cricket and Jesse?”

  He shook his head slowly and his lips made a dry smacking sound as he tried to speak.

  It dawned on me I hadn’t heard the dog bark.

  “And Wyatt?”

  “Somebody kicked the hell out of that dog,” he managed. “Powell took ’em all down to the root cellar.”

  I grabbed the damp dish towels from the counter and pressed one into the pulsing hole in his leg. He grimaced and sucked in his breath while I stuffed the cloth inside and strapped it in place with another. His shirt had soaked up the leakage from the wound near his shoulder, and the blood did not appear to be spreading. I knelt down beside Griffin, and leaned in close to hear him.

  “I’m sorry,” he rasped. “We were late. Some of them were already inside.”

  I squeezed his good shoulder to tell him it was okay, and urged him to continue speaking if he was able. He told me that Powell and he had helped Paul Tucker set the wire, but it had taken longer than they’d expected. By the time they finally arrived at the house, two bikers were already inside. One had taken hold of Cricket, an arm locked around her waist and attempting to drag her to the floor. The other was coming for Jesse, but she caught him on the side of his jaw with a fierce swing of a fire iron that knocked him face-first into the box. Cricket slipped loose and picked up the iron Jesse had dropped and swung down on the back of the injured man’s head.

  “She wouldn’t stop,” Griffin told me. “It sounded like a rotted pumpkin being crushed by a ball bat.”

  The second one leapt over the back of the couch and grabbed hold of Cricket again. Jesse snatched up the carbine she’d tucked in the corner next to the sideboard and went after the one that had a hand on Cricket. Wyatt went after him and caught his pant leg in his teeth. The biker kicked him viciously and the dog slid, half-unconscious, across the hardwood floor.

  “That’s when Powell and me come in, Mr. Dawson. Jesse had the man backed up against the wall, but he still had hold of your daughter’s wrist. Jesse cut loose with that rifle I don’t know how many times, and dropped that man straight to the floor.”

  I cocked back the hammer on the Colt and held it up at a ninety-degree angle. I found myself in the living room, and it was just as Griffin had described. Several shots had stitched holes in the wall paneling and stuffing spilled out from rents carved deep into the pads on the sofa. Shell casings littered the floor.

  A denim-clad body lay half in and half out of the fireplace and the room stank of singed clothing and charred meat and hair. The back of the biker’s head looked like a crushed pomegranate and the case-hardened fire tool lay on the floor beside him, bent at an unnatural angle.

  I shifted around the edge of a table and saw the other man slumped at the base of the wall. His eyes were still wide open, as though he had been caught completely unaware. His zipper and the buckle of his belt had been unfastened and the loose end hung down between his thighs like a lascivious tongue.

  A pink halo of gristle and white chunks of flesh stained the wall where one of the blasts had taken him straight through the lungs. A red spume of pulmonary blood still frothed on his lips and seeped into the dark tangled mass of his beard. One perfect hole spidered out from a stray shot that had passed through the bay window and stared back at me like the all-seeing eye of a
mute witness.

  I returned to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed the emergency room at County General. I told them to send as many ambulances and medical personnel as they had on hand, then hung up and knelt down next to Griffin again.

  “You doing okay, Sam?”

  He nodded his head and the lids of his eyes began to flutter. I slapped his face gently with the pad of my hand and told him to keep his eyes open.

  “Old Caleb is coming any minute now,” I told him. “I’ll stay right here with you ’til he does.”

  Griffin nodded but said nothing.

  “Are you aware of the significance of your name?” I asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. I just wanted to keep him awake. “The mythology of the griffin goes back centuries before Christ. Half eagle and half lion, he denotes strength and military courage. Griffins were the guardians and protectors of a kingdom’s most priceless treasures. You knew all that, right, Samuel?”

  “No, sir,” Griffin whispered, and the corners of his mouth curved into a smile. “I didn’t.”

  “I’d say you lived up to the name,” I told him. “You protected the two people most precious to me.”

  “One of the men got away,” Griffin said.

  “He won’t get far,” I said.

  Caleb pushed in through the front door. I heard his footfalls on the wood floor as he stopped there, taking in the carnage spread across the living room.

  “In the kitchen, Caleb,” I called out. “It’s all clear in here.”

  He stopped in his tracks and inhaled deeply when his eyes first fell on Griffin lying there beside me in a viscous pool of his own blood. Caleb placed his Winchester on the table and tipped his hat back off his forehead with his fist.

  “Ambulances should be on the way,” I said. “Keep pressure on the wound on Sam’s leg, and make sure he stays conscious.” Caleb nodded and began to speak, but I cut him off. “Jesse and Cricket are in the cellar with Powell. They’re safer in there than up here, at least until help arrives.”

  Caleb glared at me, his expression blank.

  “Where in the hell do you think you’re going?” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART OF THE barn’s roof had caved in on itself and collapsed in a shower of orange embers. A vast cloud of steam and smoke rose into the sky behind me as I made my way back to the truck, and I knew Taj had begun hosing down the fires. A freight train sounded its pneumatic horn somewhere far up the valley and the sound echoed from between the walls of stone canyons and creek beds, propelled by the wind inside the storm. I could almost hear the grind of the steel wheels along the hot flanges of track as the train prepared for the steep climb up the grade.

  My headlights glanced off the rough surface of the corduroy road and I rolled down my window as the beams lighted the scene where the runaway biker had met up with my wrangler, Paul Tucker.

  Both of the entry roads into the ranch had been strung with loops of razor wire that had been placed in the low spots between rises, where runoff had carved natural gullies, knowing anyone unfamiliar with the place would not see the hazard until there was nothing they could do to avoid it. The original intent had been to keep the bastards out, but the call I had made to Caleb from the phone booth had obviously come too late for that. Even so, I knew it would be useful as a deterrent to an escape.

  “That’s gotta hurt,” I said.

  Tucker grinned and laid the barrel of his rifle across his right shoulder. His eyes shone inside the lean angles of his face, reflecting the glare of my headlamps.

  “He come barreling down that road like a bat out of hell,” Tucker told me. “Never saw it comin’ until it was too late. Sumbitch’s brakes wouldn’t grab on the loose dirt and he laid down that hog and slid straight into the coils.”

  “Looks like he’s tangled up good.”

  “I told him to stop fightin’, it just makes it worse.”

  “Doesn’t look like he took your advice.”

  Tucker turned and spit a stream of tobacco juice into the weeds, wiped his lips with the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Naw,” he said. “He’s a foul-mouthed sumbitch—stubborn too. What do you want me to do with him?”

  “Leave him be. If he gets loose somehow, shoot him in the leg,” I told him. “If that doesn’t stop him, shoot him in the other leg.”

  The corners of his eyes twitched, not with surprise but anticipation.

  “You joshin’ me, Mr. Dawson?”

  “I’m dead serious. There’s ambulances coming. But if this piece of shit gives you one lick of trouble, you put him down on the ground.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tucker said and spat again.

  “You think I can get this truck around the edge over there? I need to get out to the two-lane.”

  “I’ll guide you through. Follow me, just go slow. It’s slippery down there in the low spot.”

  SEVEN.

  I don’t know why it angered me so much to know that Wallace had lied to me. I counted again in my head. There had been seven of the bastards on my ranch. I was glad all over again that I’d left him strung up in the barn, and put it out of my head that some moral switch might have been permanently shut down inside me.

  I did not hold to an image of a vengeful or vindictive God, nor to the notion that His will held much sway with the improbable and grotesque mischief of venal and prehensile men. I wanted to deny, also, that their acts had been choreographed and were operating with the sanction of an organized society. But I had been made complicit in some scheme of which I had no prior knowledge nor had been given the opportunity to consent. If some arbitrary wheel was being turned, I would not allow me or my family to be strapped to it while it was being set to the torch.

  To the extent that I held to a code that I lived by, it had not included violence as a component tool, at least not since I’d come home from Korea. That code had now been revised in the extreme, and I felt no guilt or remorse for my actions, or the ones I may yet have the need to commit.

  These were the thoughts that accompanied me as I sped down the road to Lloyd Skadden’s ranch.

  FAT DROPS of rain exploded on the windscreen of my truck, one drop at a time, desultory and hesitant, and lightning forked high in the clouds.

  I parked my truck at an angle, intentionally blocking the exit for a marked patrol car and a dark-colored Harley shovelhead outfitted with ape hangers and a sissy bar. I placed my palm on the cruiser’s hood and it felt warm to the touch, as did the carburetor on the hog.

  Two uniformed officers and one biker had been shot dead on the stone steps at Lloyd Skadden’s front door, the apparent victims of a brief and close range firefight. Lights that had been constructed to resemble gas lamps flickered and cast jittering shadows across the bodies and the troweled swirls of an ornately plastered wall.

  I withdrew the Colt strapped to my belt and stepped between the pools of blood that had already begun to congeal onto the stones and mortar. The front door was cracked open, so I cocked the hammer and pushed it slowly open with my shoulder and slid inside. The interior was dim, the only light a golden glow that emanated from an open doorway at the terminus of a short hall at the far side of the sitting room. I had my finger looped around the trigger, ready to let fly, but saw no movement anywhere.

  I angled past a mirror at the entry and toward the source of the light, and heard the murmur of male voices coming from inside. Pressing my back against the wall, I crabbed sideways toward the sound, my footsteps muffled by the carpeting. When I peered around the casing, I found myself staring into the twin barrels of a cut-down Remington that I had seen before.

  The biker I called Rabbit had his right hand wrapped around the shortened stock. In his left he held a semiautomatic pistol, which was aimed at the side of Lloyd Skadden’s head.

  “Lower the hammer on your weapon, Mr. Dawson,” Rabbit said. “Do it slowly, then remove the cartridges and drop them on the floor. When you’re finished, put the gun on the table by the door.�
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  He was perched at the edge of Skadden’s desk, his weight resting on his good foot, while the bandaged one swung loosely in the air. His eyes were dry, the pupils spun down to pinpoints with painkillers and speed. He moistened his uneven teeth inside a crooked smile and waited while I thumbed the cylinder release and dropped the unspent shells onto the carpet.

  “You come out here alone?” he asked. “Or did you bring your nigger with you?”

  “Use that word again and I’ll find a way to slit your throat and pull your tongue out through the hole.”

  “You still mad about that girl at the motel?” he asked. “I thought a worldly man like you would understand a little milking through the fence. You need to learn to lighten up, man. In fact, why don’t you take a load off your feet?”

  “I’m good where I am.”

  “Then stand there in the doorway where I can keep an eye on you.”

  Beneath his Charlatans club vest, he had the sleeves of a flannel shirt rolled up above his forearms. The right one was disfigured by a sheet of purple scar tissue that looked like snake skin or wax paper that had been melted on his flesh.

  “Willy Peter,” he said when he saw the focus of my gaze. “A keepsake from the war that is not a war.”

  He tilted his head sideways and took on an expression of amusement.

  “I assume you know all about these things,” he said. “You’ve had some experience with armored tanks, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Everyone in this town has a big mouth. But that tidbit I learned from this one.” He jogged the pistol in his left hand in the direction of Lloyd Skadden.

  The back of Skadden’s khaki uniform shirt had been soaked through by a line of sweat that traced the humps along his spine. His hands quaked with a combination of fear and helplessness and anger as he knelt and stacked banded bricks of currency into a pair of saddlebags that rested beside the open door of a Hamilton safe that was bolted to the floor.

  “We had a spirited disagreement regarding compensation,” Rabbit said. “And the sheriff doubted the sincerity of my first request to open up his safe.”