Lake Charles

by Ed Lynskey

  “Ten minutes is all I can afford. Then we have to get to his narcotics source.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, warming a little to her willingness to help.

  “Are Gil and Earl leading in the cavalry?” asked Mr. Kuzawa.

  “Naturally. They’re the regime in charge.”

  “Then we’ll wrap this up before they get here.” He spat. “Does Sizemore own any firearms?”

  “None are out in plain view, no.”

  “Is the pony car yours?” asked Mr. Kuzawa.

  “The blue Javelin is, yes.”

  “Carry your car keys or Sizemore might scoot off,” said Mr. Kuzawa.

  “No worry. My car stays locked and my keys are in my pocket.”

  Our hustling arrived at the mansion, and this time no gunfire strafed us. A square of plywood patched our hole bashed in the glass panes to the French doors. She unlocked them, and we filed inside. In spite of Agent Sutwala’s professional help, I felt overwhelmed. We’d dozens of places to scout for Edna. Suppressing a shudder, I racked a 00-buckshot round into my 12-gauge’s chamber.

  My clank made Mr. Kuzawa flinch. “Brendan, don’t do that again. Hearing it, I might turn and cut loose firing.”

  “Sorry. I’m a little tight.”

  The center hallway festooned with fox hunting murals funneled us to the library. Flanked only by the canyons of unread books diverted us on to the kitchen. Depressed by observing the sink of dirty silverware and plates, I pivoted to head on upstairs.

  “Hold up, Brendan,” said Agent Sutwala.

  This time a detail had arrested her trained investigator’s eye. I’d also given the yellow door behind the pie safe a second look on my last visit in the kitchen. She asked Mr. Kuzawa and me to move the pie safe away from the yellow door. We did. She pulled it out, and the expulsion of a sweet musk wreathed us. Pot smoke and Ashleigh’s favorite fragrance, I recognized. The wooden stairs sloped down into a brick-lined wine cellar. By now, I was a pro at exploring such dark, foreboding places.

  Before she could detain me, I crossed the threshold. Trying to avoid any squeaks, I put down my weight at the side of the first tread. After each step down, I froze and listened until I got to the landing. My next moves were even more ticklish. I picked up a chunk of loose masonry and sidearmed it to sail around the landing’s corner.

  The thump marked the chunk striking the concrete cellar floor. Braced for the reaction, I hunkered down, my hands covering my head for protection. Rattling automatic rifle fire sprayed out hot rounds and chiseled jagged holes in the brick wall behind me. The flying chips pelted my hands. The ricochets whined and pinged but didn’t nick me after their barrage quit. Not a brilliant move, I realized, the tinnitus singing in my ears.

  Nonetheless, we had a read on the drug mules’ position and numbers. Three or four, I estimated. Hearing scuffles meant they came inching closer to the bottom of the stairs. Wired and numb from all the violence, I decided to try for diplomacy.

  “You’re cut off,” I called out to them. “It’s gone down the tubes. You better give it up.”

  Nervous coughs instead of more gunshots came. “Who’s up there?”

  “The full force and authority of the DEA.” Agent Sutwala was at my shoulder on the landing. “There’s no exit out except through us.”

  “Maybe we’ll plow through you.”

  Mr. Kuzawa who’d joined us had a chilling laugh. “We’re packing 12-gauges, double-ought buck. We’ve trapped you in close quarters. So, bring it on, asshole. Dare you. I’ll take my chances on who comes out on top.”

  Nervous coughs sounded again. She knew the most effective way to parley with them.

  “Look, we know you’ve got the young lady. Don’t add a kidnapping charge to your rap sheet.”

  “Where’s Sizemore?”

  “He’s on the run. Be smart. Don’t take the weight for him. Surrender peacefully, flip on him, and plead down to a lesser charge.”

  “Either that or we charge in, shotguns blazing away,” said Mr. Kuzawa.

  They weren’t up for playing heroes. “What’s your idea then?”

  She laid down their surrender terms. “Slide your weapons on the floor within our view. Stand by the stairway in single file, your hands reaching high.”

  They had a survivor’s smarts. Banana-clipped automatic rifles scraped over the concrete floor. I counted three. We swept down the steps, our 12-gauges aimed, our fingers snug on the triggers. Keeping one eye on the upstairs, Mr. Kuzawa kicked away their weapons and protected our rear.

  The three drug mules, their arms held up, were squat, toad-skinned, and cruel but not dim-witted even when half-stoned. They knew the drill. Serve your time, make parole, and fall back in the queue toting the contraband. I’d been a customer of theirs but not anymore.

  “Brendan, snap to and round up Edna. She must be here.”

  Mr. Kuzawa’s command spurred me to act. I left them and probed a side tunnel appearing recently excavated. It angled into the danker catacombs. Expecting to see a hydroponics operation set up to grow the reefer, I darted into a chamber. This one contained a bunk bed, its three levels rumpled. The ladder-back chairs sat yanked away from a wood table. On top of it, I saw a pile of shelled crabs, a greasy deck of playing cards, and a plastic bong smudged black from usage. But I ran into no Edna.

  This far below ground, I felt too insulated to hear any noises made upstairs in the mansion. This chamber was the barracks to house Sizemore’s couriers transporting his illicit wares to peddle and enrich him. The narcotics profits had financed his political ambitions. Seething rage propelled me to cut down a narrower tunnel into an even more wretched, low-lit cavern. A movement in my peripheral vision spun me in a half-turn. A scruffy captive behind the panel of steel bars had sprung up from the floor.

  “Hey, Brendan . . .”

  Her husky salutation fell on my ears.

  “Edna—you’re alive.” I smiled at her. “And now safe.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  An ecstatic Mr. Kuzawa frisked the drug mules’ pockets to fish out the keys. I led him down to Edna’s cage, and he undid the padlock to open the barred door. She shuffled from her prison, mincing a few tentative steps and wobbled on her feet. Reaching out, Mr. Kuzawa steadied her. “Easy there, girl.” Smiling her thanks, she regained her balance, and we returned to Agent Sutwala holding the drug mules at gunpoint.

  Edna’s eyes were lusterless while abrasions and bruises marred her face. She moved her puffy lips. “I thought you’d never find me.”

  “Didn’t you hear our gunplay break out?” asked Mr. Kuzawa.

  “When?” she replied. “Down here stays quiet as a morgue, and you lose track of time. Where’s Cobb?”

  “He’s in town with the other agents,” lied Mr. Kuzawa, his leathery face unexpressive. “Agent Sutwala, please show Edna where she might get cleaned up. We’ll hold things together down here.”

  Agent Sutwala assisted Edna up the steps and then returned while Edna scrubbed off some of the grime.

  “You told us Sizemore left on horseback earlier,” said Mr. Kuzawa.

  “He saddles his Appaloosa and takes long trips over his bridle paths.”

  “Where do his bridle paths track?”

  “After tracking into the hills, they peter out near some old lake.”

  “Sizemore is at Lake Charles,” I said, remembering the horseshoe prints I’d seen there on Saturday. “He’s ridden to Lang’s Teahouse and the old marina. That’s where his goons attacked Cobb and me, but we beat them back.”

  The eavesdropping drug mule snorted at me. “I should’ve gone back to blow your shit away, especially since you—”

  “But you didn’t, did you?” My glare clashed with the drug mule’s hate-filled eyes. Mr. X, his partner mowed down by my bullets and now rotting on the bottom of Lake Charles, had no part in this conversation.

  “I remember Lake Charles is on our topographic maps,” said Agent Sutwala. “Is that where Sizemore grow
s the pot?”

  “Beacoup of it,” replied Mr. Kuzawa. “We saw it with our own eyes.”

  “Where is Lake Charles exactly?” asked Agent Sutwala.

  “North on this side of Will Thomas Mountain, and it shouldn’t be far the way the crow flies.”

  “Take me there,” said Agent Sutwala.

  She herded the drug mules down the tunnels to Edna’s former cage and padlocked them inside it. The mouthy one flipped us the bird, and I laughed at him. We found Edna, and Agent Sutwala led us from the mansion. Gil and Earl’s wine-colored sedan hadn’t breezed up the driveway, and there was still no sign of Sizemore. Edna, Agent Sutwala, and I squeezed into my cab truck as Mr. Kuzawa clambered over the tailgate. I saw him fork a thumb over his shoulder at the mansion.

  “Set a Zippo to it.”

  “Whose? Mine or yours?” I said, rotating the ignition key. He sure did like to burn stuff down. Just then, a flicker of recognition in me solved a riddle. “Just between us, do you set your Zippo to torch the woods for the fire crews to rush in and douse?”

  “Why not? The people need work, and Uncle Sam is plenty flush.”

  Agent Sutwala dealt us a glance. She didn’t realize after all these years and fires, I’d identified Jerry Kuzawa as our well-intentioned but misguided Robin Hood arsonist. His palm thwacked the top of my cab truck’s roof.

  “On to Lake Charles,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  My tire impressions left from our Saturday outing were still visible in the sand to the lane branching off the state road and leading to Lang’s Teahouse. I feared my guess Sizemore had come this way on horseback was wrong. The dance pavilion’s ruins came into sight where the lane veered to the left. The braking cab truck slew in the sand.

  I keyed off the engine parked on the same spot as on Saturday, more than a quarter-century ago now it seemed. Our trailered bass boats still loitered behind the bushy hedge. My roving glance halted a few strides shy of the T-dock where I’d sank Mr. X into his watery grave. After vaulting out of the truck bed, Mr. Kuzawa made a half-circle, absorbing our drab surroundings.

  “And to think the cream of the bands jammed here,” he said.

  “This marina turns my stomach.” Edna rubbed her goose-pimpled forearms.

  “We’ll soon be off,” said Mr. Kuzawa.

  “What happened after you left us on Saturday?” I asked her.

  She inflated her chest, and her breath wheezed out as a pained sigh. “Livid at Cobb, I gunned off on my jet ski. Speaking of the devil, where is he again?”

  My teeth clicked as the tragic words gummed in my throat.

  Mr. Kuzawa was blunt. “A grower guarding Sizemore’s dope plants killed Cobb while out searching for you.”

  I rebuffed her imploring eyes. “Death was fast. Sorry, Edna.”

  “Oh, my dear Lord.” Tears wrung out of her bleary eyes and leaked in hot tracks down her sore cheeks. “Cobb … he’s dead … oh, my dear Lord.”

  “Sis, pull it together,” I told her in a confidential whisper. “Give Agent Sutwala the rest of your story, so we can end this and go home. You’d headed off toward the earth dam and . . .”

  Edna’s knuckle trapped the salty trickles to her tears. She sniffed. “Cobb had pushed my right buttons. He always could.” She sniffed again. I hope she didn’t break down sobbing before she resumed her story. “I flew over Lake Charles. The rush of the air swooshing against my face was great, and it also helped to cool down my hissy fit.”

  “We heard your jet ski’s engine,” I said.

  “Right. When I reached the earth dam, I buzzed along it.” Throwing back her shoulders, she gulped to draw in more air. “A man carrying a crossbow schlepped out of the woods and stopped at the lake’s edge.”

  My nod encouraged her. “Yeah, I think we met.”

  Her fingers tucked away a strand of the red hair blowing into her lips. “Curious, I watched him. He crouched, scooped up a handful of the lake water, and shook his head. I yelled over to him. After glancing up at me, he startled and signaled, acting as if he’d something on his mind.

  “Completely clueless, I puttered over. As I pulled up on the jet ski, he lunged and walloped me over the head with something hard. I fell unconscious. Later when I came to with a monster headache and a big lump, I found myself tied up and sitting in a campsite not far from the lake. Did you happen to find my barrette I left behind?”

  I dug it out of my pocket to give her.

  “Thanks. The two men argued over who owned the baggie of dope. I knew they grew it there, and I’d learned their dirty, little secret. That scared me. If they wanted to shut me up, I was toast. So I pretended I was out of it. Later, the same one marched me at gunpoint out to the state road where they’d hid a jeep in the laurel. He drove me to the mansion and forced me into the hole to lock up where you freed me.”

  “Did the man left at the campsite keep the crossbow?” I asked her.

  “Yes—and he killed Cobb, didn’t he?”

  I nodded, my eyes roving over Lake Charles in the direction of their campsite in the high country.

  Agent Sutwala’s head shifted. “Hey all, an Appaloosa just wandered up and grazes near the cattail reeds.” Her nod directed our attention to the riderless horse with its hand-tooled saddle. Its scabbard held a scoped, high power rifle.

  “Sizemore has scrambled off,” said Mr. Kuzawa.

  But Agent Sutwala who’d studied her subject’s behavior since May understood the craven way he thought. “No, Sizemore is a coward. He’d never run willy-nilly into the bush. He’s hunkered down here, banking on the probability we’ll figure he’s fled on foot and strike out after him.”

  “Try to call him out,” I said to Mr. Kuzawa.

  Agent Sutwala nodded her approval.

  “Sizemore!” Mr. Kuzawa’s drill sergeant voice boomed. “It’s all over now. The DEA is here.” He brandished his 12-gauge and racked a shell into its chamber. “You killed my boy Cobb. So the DEA is your best deal. Or your ass is mine. You don’t want that, believe it.”

  A muffled response issued from under the T-dock. “Stand easy. I’m coming out.”

  “Toss all weapons.” Crouching in her stance, Agent Sutwala aimed her 9 mm straight on the T-dock. “Hands behind your head and move into the clear. Do it slowly. Nothing sudden.”

  Like the cornered rat he was, Sizemore did as ordered and duckwalked out from under the T-dock, the bright sun hurting his eyes. The flamboyant lawyer wore tan jodhpurs and a white shirt above riding boots sleek and black as his thoroughbreds.

  “You pay the piper,” said Mr. Kuzawa. “No more holing up in basements or lamming off.”

  His overconfident smile under the Van Dyke beard ridiculed us. “Pay for what? I’ve done nothing unlawful.”

  “Then why did you crouch under the pier?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I heard a truck engine and played it safe. It was a perfectly natural reaction.”

  “Uh-huh. This is a strange place to ride a horse.”

  “Not really. I do it twice every day, morning and evening.”

  Using his new revelation, I cobbled together the final stray ends. “I know why you do. You pick up your pot cuttings. Too bad you wasted your time by coming today because we trampled under your gardens.”

  “Then where’s your evidence for my alleged crimes?” He strutted over and gloated at me. Agent Sutwala covered him. “You’ve destroyed it all.”

  His blast of rancid breath repulsed me. “Those bulging saddlebags hold your harvested pot. Your growers pack it here. More than what is in your saddlebags streams out of Lake Charles. The larger gardens probably grow on the grassy balds. Your drug mules will grab a plea deal and testify about the rest of your set up.”

  “We’ve already sketched out the basics,” said Agent Sutwala.

  Sizemore switched his gray eyes to her. “You’re really the DEA?”

  “Duped you when you hired me, didn’t I?” She glanced off at Will Thomas Mou
ntain. “Finding this narcotics source is our linchpin evidence. You’re shut down for keeps.”

  “Snatch off the saddlebags,” I said. “That’s what lands our dope pimp behind bars.”

  “I’ll bury you,” he said.

  “Too late. You already drove my life underground.” My gape parried with his gray eyes that I last saw shine with sadistic glee in my prison cell before he sapped me to recover in a hospital ward with a concussion. “What did you pay Herzog to double cross me?”

  “You’re confused. I never brought in Herzog. He was a buffoon.”

  A pang of doubt stunned me. Had we misread Herzog’s treachery at the wayside? With Agent Sutwala standing there, I didn’t dwell on it but asked, “Why did you kill Ashleigh?”

  Sizemore was mute but his hate-blazed face just as well confessed to it.

  “She deserved better than you,” I said.

  Sizemore muttered for my ears only. “You think so? She was a murderous, little slut.”

  I crafted a likely scenario of her murder. “That night when we returned from The Devil’s Own concert, you heard our van pull up at your mansion. You knew Ashleigh and I went to the Chewink Motel. She’d partied there before, no doubt. You gave us plenty headstart before you cantered off after us in your Porsche.”

  Sizemore yawned but his droopy lower lip quivered, a telltale nervous tic I’d seen him use in my prison cell. I was driving my wooden stake into the monster’s heart, so I hammered even harder. “By the time you arrived, the bored DEA boys had left the parking lot, and Mrs. Cornwell was asleep. For a price, either she or the maid had slipped you a duplicate key.

  “So you stole into Room 7 and gave the toxic PCP to Ashleigh. How I don’t know. A syringe probably. Then you duct taped the junk PCP under the bed table. Your less-than-perfect frame job had pinned me in the middle.”

  The haughty Sizemore laughed. “You’ve got a vivid imagination, but no direct proof.”

  “On Ashleigh’s homicide, not yet. But on drug trafficking, big time. I’m sorry to foil your plans for a future cocaine ring. Maybe you can sell it in the yard.”