“You say you all had them?”
“Yeah, that’s right, but only two of the guys had them on their necks. The Millers, Roy and Donnie. The dead guy’s gotta be one of them, because they were the only ones who had it on their necks.”
The note on the matchbook from the Joshua Tree Athletic Club said, “Donnie, call home. Roy.” He resisted taking it out of his pocket and looking at it. Looks like it had to have been Donnie who died in Surprise Canyon, Frank thought. Was Roy the second person? Perhaps. But they were brothers. Maybe Cain and Abel.
Mitch went on explaining about the tattoos.
“See, the tattoos were part of the initiation. When a new guy came into the club, we had a ceremony. Roy ran it. He’d tell about where the different races came from. He was always reading stuff about history and how the white race started civilization and how it had been copied and corrupted by the other races. Anyhow, we swore to uphold the purity of the white race.” Mitch looked at Frank’s olive skin. “No offense, man. I didn’t believe any of that shit, but at the time, I went along, you know.”
Frank did know, and for a brief moment he had the urge to tell Mitch about reaping what you sow, reaping the whirlwind, but he needed to hear what Mitch had to say. “Yeah, well, we all make mistakes, Mitch. You’re not there now. You’ve started a different life. That’s the point. So, the initiation?”
“Yeah, that’s true.” Mitch leaned back in the plastic patio chair and peered into his beer. “After the stuff about being Aryan, Roy explained about the snake. How it had been a part of an earlier American flag that said ‘Don’t tread on me.’ Roy said that was our motto. Out here in the Mojave Desert, we could do whatever we wanted, and if somebody screwed us over, then it was like stepping on a rattler—they were going to get bit. After that, Donnie got out this cork with needles sticking out of it. They were all bunched together in the center. He dipped the needles in india ink and etched the tattoo on the new guy’s skin. Some guys wanted it on their back or arm, some on the shoulder. But the neck, that was just for Roy and Donnie.”
Mitch paused. Most people had a need to fill the silence, but Frank waited, saying nothing. Mitch raised his eyebrows, then nodded, as if answering an unasked question. “Oh, yeah. There was another brother, Jason; he had it on the palm of his hand. He’d hold up his hand and make the eyes wink by wrinkling the lines on his palm. Like this.” Mitch held his hand up toward Frank and bent the index finger and then the little finger, creasing the skin around the lines. “Roy said when Jason made death wink with both eyes, it was Adiós, motherfucker.’” He turned to Shawna. “Excuse me, honey, but that’s what he said.”
Shawna gazed up at Mitch, the beatific smile radiating martyrdom. Some victims worked hard at it, perfected the vulnerability until it cried out for injury. Frank had to look away.
“Tell me about the brothers. What was Donnie like?”
Mitch sneered. “He was okay most of the time, when his brothers weren’t around. We sorta hung out together.”
“What did he look like? Was he a big guy?”
“Naw, he was about five eight, skinny, maybe a hundred and thirty-five pounds. He had curly brown hair.” Mitch paused, trying to remember.
“Anything special about him? Scars, other tattoos?”
“Oh yeah, he had a bunch of tattoos on his arms, mostly girls’ initials. He said he was going to put the initials of all the girls he boffed on his arms, but he had to give up, because he would’ve had to be an octopus to fit them all. He was always bragging, trying to be tough like his brothers. He tried to act like a real badass. He was always walking around with a gun, shooting at something.
“One time, he sees this lizard on a rock, so he shoots at it from only about twenty feet away. The bullet ricochets off the rock and hits Jace in the leg. Jace grabs Donnie and starts pounding on him. Roy’s there, and he just watches until Donnie starts calling out for him to come and stop Jace from beating the shit out of him. After awhile, Roy comes over and lifts Jace off Donnie by the hair. He’s got both hands in Jace’s hair, the skin on his face all pulled up away from his eyes. He just hung there, looking up at Roy, his eyes looking like they could’ve rolled out of his face. It was weird. Donnie was crying.” Mitch shook his heard, as if clearing away a bad dream.
“They were always pounding on each other. But touch one of them, and you had Roy on your butt. So Donnie got away with a lotta stuff, ’cause of his brothers.” Mitch gulped down the rest of his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But mostly, Donnie was full of crap. Always coming up with some dopey scheme to make the big score. Nobody listened much, because it was all talk, except for the porno tape. The tape was Donnie’s big idea.” Mitch stole a glance at Shawna.
“Tape?” Frank felt like he was doing echo therapy.
“Yeah, they made a porno tape. Donnie said there was real money in porno flicks.” Mitch leaned forward, becoming animated, his sinewy arms resting on the table, white skin peeping out of the sleeveless Levi’s jacket around the ropy muscles of his shoulders. “So he talked his girl, Vicki, into making a tape. They were always doing it in front of somebody anyhow, so she didn’t give a shit who watched or not.”
From the corner of his eye, Frank detected a ripple of emotion disturb the placid calm of Shawna’s perpetual contact with a higher power. He wondered if she had had her fifteen minutes of fame in front of a cheap video camera.
Mitch’s tale gained momentum. “Donnie told Vicki that a lot of big-time actresses started out in pornos, so she got all excited about being in movies. Donnie gives her a porno name, ‘Moana Spasm.’” Mitch grinned conspiratorially at Frank. “Man, the Moana part turned out to be right. Donnie was really hyped. He wrote this script, and Vicki starts talking about production values, how she needs the right costumes and lighting. Right away, Vicki gets huffy when Donnie tells her she doesn’t need a special costume, ’cause it’s tits and ass.”
Frank could see that Mitch was waiting for him to appreciate the witticism. He mustered up a grin and nodded knowingly. Real compadres. During this recitation, Shawna fixed her tranquil smile on Mitch, avoiding eye contact with Frank. Mitch was getting into it, a regular raconteur.
“Anyhow, in the tape, Vicki’s supposed to be this nymphomaniac, can’t stop herself when she sees the big red. She read some book on acting that says you have to live the part. So she starts to moan, and, man oh man, she really moaned. She moaned through the whole tape. When we played it for a bunch a guys at the Pit Stop in Victorville, the guys at the bar started laughing. I mean, man it was loud. She was howling like a dog. Pretty soon, we were all cracking up. I mean it was pretty funny, but there wasn’t a woody in the room.”
Mitch laughed, shaking his head, remembering the good old days.
“Donnie tried to be pissed off, but he started laughing, too. Said Vicki needed some more acting lessons. Vicki left in a big huff. So no one made any money, and Vicki ran off with one of the guys she met at the bar. That’s pure Donnie. Without his brothers, just a sad-ass punk, but he was always a laugh.” He nodded, chuckling softly.
Frank decided there was a side to Mitch that hadn’t been born again. He caught glimpses of the old Mitch, the laid-back biker, with just enough mean in him to make it in tough company.
“How did Roy take all this?” Frank asked.
“He just watched, not saying a thing, not laughing. Roy never really goofed around much. He said the guys in the bar wouldn’t have thought it was so funny if Jace had cut Vicki up. That kind of shut things down. He said after listening to all that moaning, they would’ve probably paid double just to watch her finally shut up.”
Mitch’s mouth puckered, the good humor gone. He had the look of a trapped rodent. “Roy didn’t like Vicki. I’m glad she ran off and didn’t come back. Bad things happened to the people Roy didn’t like. And Jace, he liked to hurt things. Animals, people, it didn’t make any difference. Sometimes he set things on fire.” Mitch took a deep breath and
shook his head again, trying to empty it of bad memories. He went on in a quiet voice.
“Once he burned up this guy’s dog ’cause it barked at him when he rode by. It’d run along the fence, chasing after the bike. The first time it happened, Jace stopped, swung his bike around, and cruised back and forth, the dog barking and going crazy and Jace staring back. After that, Jace went out of his way to ride by the dog, both of them hating each other.
“Then one time, Jace noticed there were no cars around the guy’s place and that extra food and water had been set out. So he goes back that night. It was only a couple hundred yards up the river from the trailer, so he walked. He was carrying a gas can. Pretty soon, we hear the dog howling, and Jace was howling with the dog. When the dog would scream, Jason would scream along. Man, it was the worst thing I ever heard.”
Frank’s scalp tingled and his stomach knotted.
“Where was Roy when this was going on?”
Mitch’s face was taut with the sort of concentration that comes from fear. “He was sitting there with this little smile on his face. All you could hear was Jace and the dog screaming in the night, and he just grinned at us. He said Jace was doing karaoke, having a sing-along with the neighbors.”
“What about the police? Didn’t one of the neighbors call the police, or the dog’s owner when he got back?” Frank thought he knew the answer.
Mitch reached over for Shawna’s hand. “Nobody fucked with the Miller brothers, man, they’da had to have bodyguards for the rest of their lives. Naw, the guy moved out the day after he got back.” Mitch touched a scar on his eyebrow. “This is from Roy.” He tapped his front teeth. “These aren’t mine. I pissed Roy off when I called Jace a freak. He beat the hell out of me. Man, I’ve been beat before, but this was bad. After I was down and I thought it was over, I tried to move. He came over and kicked me. He was sitting in this folding chair, drinking a beer. Every time I tried to move, he’d get up and walk over and kick me, not saying anything, just kick me in the face, in the ribs, in the back.
“When I started spitting blood, Donnie took the party wagon and dropped me off at the emergency hospital. I had a rib in one of my lungs. That’s where I met Shawna—she was a volunteer. I never went back, not even for my bike.”
“Ever see any of them again?”
“I ran into Donnie a couple times after that. He told me I was smart not to come around. He said Roy and Jace were hiring out as bodyguards, beating up people for money. I got the impression that Donnie’d moved in with some woman, but he was being cagey about where he was livin’. But that was okay, because I was, too. By that time, I had the job at the mine. Shawna and I live up on Red Mountain, caretaking the old Ophir mine.”
Lupe came over to ask if anyone wanted anything more. Frank forced a smile. “No mas, gracias.”
Mitch searched Frank’s face. “Now maybe you can tell me something. Who died out there in the desert? Was it Donnie or Roy? Man, guess I don’t have to tell you I’m really hoping it was Roy.”
Mitch and Shawna were leaning into each other, Mitch looking more like a frightened kid than a biker. The pair had reasons to be afraid of the Miller brothers, especially Mitch, who no doubt had seen enough to be a threat, a loose end. Frank thought about telling Mitch the identity of the corpse was police business, but he decided against it. Officially, it wasn’t BLM business. It was only a matter of time before the identity of the dead man would be official. He wanted to know more, though.
“To be absolutely sure, Mitch, I need to have a better picture of what Roy and Jason Miller looked like.”
“Jace? Jace’s got nothing to do with it.” Mitch’s voice was tight. He leaned forward. “Jace is built like an ape, a redheaded ape. He doesn’t look anything like the others. Roy’s got white skin, white hair, real white, but nobody called him Whitey. Donnie told me never to call him that. He hated it.”
Frank drew small wet circles on the tabletop, waiting for Mitch to go on.
“He has weird eyes, pale blue, with pink rims. He’s no taller than me, and I’m six one. But he weighs more—about one eighty, no fat, works out all the time.” He looked at Frank expectantly.
An early-evening breeze gusted across the patio, flapping the umbrellas. The sudden coolness of the air raised goose bumps on Frank’s arms. “It looks like the dead guy was Donnie Miller. The corpse was that of a small man with curly dark hair. If your description is accurate, there’s no way it could have been Roy. Of course, we won’t know for sure until after a positive identification.” But Frank could see from the tight look on Mitch’s face that they both knew Roy Miller was still somewhere out there in the desert.
7
Frank switched off the truck’s lights. “On a bright night like this, you can see better without the glare.”
As they emerged from Salt Wash Canyon, the land lay bathed in moonlight. Searles Dry Lake stretched before them like a vast silver sea. The stark bareness of the Slate Range rose up from the east side of the valley floor, the moonlit ridges bright against the dark shadows of the canyons.
“More coffee?” Linda had to raise her voice to make herself heard over the tappet clatter of Frank’s truck. She held the thermos up, and Frank passed her his cup. He inhaled the aroma of the coffee and the faint smell of shampoo from her hair, still damp. He couldn’t see Linda’s face clearly. The soft light touched only her left cheek and the edge of an ear where it poked through dark hair.
“Dad buys Costa Rican beans and grinds them fresh every morning. He’s a fanatic about coffee, and now he’s ruined me for the regular stuff.”
“Lucky you, to have your own personal Juan Valdez in the morning.” Frank thought she was smiling, but he couldn’t tell.
“He doesn’t sleep the way he used to. Most of the time, he’s up early. I usually see his light on when I come home late. He reads everything in sight, then leaves little stacks of books on my porch with his own brief reviews. ‘Another Matthew Scudder, good read.’ Or ‘If you like Hiaasen, you’ll like Shames.’ ‘This one’s funny, great villain.’ Stuff like that. He’s been picking out books for me for years.”
Frank noticed her deliberate way of responding. Pauses in conversation didn’t seem to bother her. She turned to face him, a bit of her ear catching the light. “But yes, you’re right,” she told him. “It is nice to have someone to do things for you, have coffee for you in the morning. Can you make a decent cup of coffee, Frank, or do you settle for instant like most people who live alone?”
Somehow, the question was unsettling. He shifted around in his seat. “My coffee’s okay, but it’s not like this.” He imagined Linda wrapped in one of his old shirts, seated in one of his rickety folding chairs, drinking his coffee, her feet on the iron railing that rimmed the rear of the caboose. He swung the truck under the huge rolling mill that spanned the Trona road. They had reached what was called the West End Facility, part of the huge borax-processing operation that the Kerr-Magee Corporation had built on the edge of the dry lake bed.
The plant was the single reason for the existence of Trona. Frank loved the desert, but Trona was a place unto itself, a company town perched on the edge of Searles Dry Lake, an alkaline depression so inhospitable that it was nearly without life. The dry lake bed yielded up riches greater than the elusive gold and silver for which the prospectors wandered the desert. But not in rich pockets of quartz laced with spiderwebs of gold. Nothing all that exciting, just millions of dollars’ worth of borax spread across the lifeless bottom of an ancient lake bed, precious in the vastness of its quantity.
Frank explained the operation to Linda, telling her about the history of borax mining in the desert and the famous twenty-mule teams that had hauled the great wagons from below sea level up and over Wingate Pass to the railroad junction at Mojave. The mules were long gone, but the old road was still there. Marks on the land lasted a long time in the desert.
As they rounded the curve toward the scattered lights of Trona, Frank pointed out the skelet
al structure of a mine head, the tailings scattered down the slope of the hill in conical piles. “The Mojave has its share of scars. There are mines and tailings scattered all across the desert. It seems that people either come here to dig the desert up or get across it. Have you been up near Tecopa?” Frank turned the lights back on as they approached Trona.
Linda nodded. “Yes, Dad and I camped out near Dumont Dunes. He liked it out there until it became a popular place for dune buggies. The noise spoiled it.” She sipped coffee from the thermos cup, holding it with both hands.
“Well, from right there, where the Amargosa River turns to empty into Death Valley, to the next available water at Bitter Springs, it’s more than fifty miles. No big deal by car, but very tough on foot or by horseback.” Frank had this compulsion to tell her about the desert. It was like the guys in the army always talking about their hometown.
“Where the water reaches the surface along the Amargosa River, it’s so saline that it makes animals and people sick. Same story at Bitter Springs. The Spaniards ran pack trains from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. They called that stretch the Jornada de la Muerte.”
“The journey of death,” she murmured softly.
Frank stole a glance. She had a way of wrinkling her forehead and pursing out her lower lip when she was thinking about something. “That’s been the story. Not many people have come here to live. If it hadn’t been for mining, people would’ve just passed on through.”
Linda half-turned in her seat. “Dad came here to live. He used to kid around about coming out to live in the desert in an Airstream trailer with flat tires. It turned out he wasn’t kidding. When he told me he’d bought a bar and restaurant in the Mojave Desert, I couldn’t believe it. I almost stayed where we were living in Pasadena.”
Shadow of the Raven Page 7
