Murder on the Horizon

by M. L. Rowland

  “I’m askin’ who’s at the gosh dang door!”

  The woman turned back toward Gracie. “Who are you again?”

  “Search and Rescue.”

  “It’s Search and Rescue.”

  “Ma’am, there’s a fire—”

  A man with a cane tottered into view, his face a scowling mass of wrinkles, suspenders holding pants up to his chest. “What do they want?”

  “What do you want, dearie?”

  “Ma’am, did you know there’s a wildfire heading into the valley?”

  “A what?”

  The man pulled the door open wider. “A fire, you say?”

  “Oh, my, no,” the woman said. “We didn’t know there was a wildfire. Did we, Daddy?”

  “How’d you expect us to know there was a gosh dang fire? We got no TV.”

  “Used to have, dearie,” his wife said. “It broke. Last year.”

  “In gosh dang 1999,” the man yelled.

  “You don’t have a radio?” Gracie asked.

  “Oh, my, yes. But Daddy likes to listen to his records on the Victrola.”

  Gracie smiled again. “Ma’am, sir, there’s a mandatory evacuation.”

  “Land sakes!”

  “What in tarnation does that mean?”

  “It’s not safe here,” Gracie said. “I’m afraid you need to leave your home.”

  “We look like we can leave here by ourselves? Look like a coupla Jack LaLannes, do we?”

  “You don’t have family or friends who can help you leave?”

  “Oh, no,” the woman said. “Our boy, Billy, he died, why, just last year, I think.”

  “Twenty-four years ago, gosh dang it!”

  Lordy Lord, Gracie thought.

  CHAPTER

  28

  THE Ranger, with Gracie and Carrie inside, sat at a dead standstill on the highway leading down the back side of the mountain to the desert. Even with the windows rolled up and the air-conditioning recirculating the air, smoke had wheedled its way inside the truck.

  Ahead of them, bumper-to-bumper traffic snaked along the two-lane highway, eventually disappearing into the smoky gloom.

  As Carrie continued on with their search assignment, Gracie had waited the forty minutes for a Citizen Patrol unit to arrive and drive the delightful old couple away to safety, absorbed by thoughts of what would have happened to them if they had still been sitting in their nice armchairs in their nice home listening to Bing Crosby on the Victrola when the fire roared through the valley.

  Fifteen minutes later, the Ground Four team had completed its assignment and been issued another over the radio—a long, narrow neighborhood skirting the west and south shores of Greene’s Lake at the east end of the valley.

  As the afternoon progressed, the wind direction shifted from southeast to southwest. Over the course of two hours, a creeping veil of smoke had obscured the surrounding mountains, blotted out the sun, and filled the entire valley. Two in the afternoon looked like twilight.

  What was good news for Camp Ponderosa boded poorly for Gracie’s own neighborhood. She had no idea exactly where the fire was now and where it was headed, how many acres and what structures, if any, had been consumed. Even now her little cabin on Arcturus might be engulfed in flames.

  “Gawd,” Carrie said, startling Gracie out of her morose thoughts. “I knew traffic was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad.”

  Gracie ripped open the Velcro on her radio chest pack and hauled out a piece of grape bubble gum, passing one to her partner. “We’ll turn off onto a side street up ahead there,” Gracie said, pointing to the gravel road branching off from the highway. “Leave this mess behind.”

  Immediately in front of the Ranger sat a red F-150 pickup. At first, it hit Gracie with a sickening jolt that the truck was Ralph’s, until she noticed through the back window what appeared to be a small woman behind the wheel with a child in the passenger’s seat and an infant in a car seat between them.

  The Ranger’s headlights lit up the pickup’s open bed overflowing with boxes and multiple suitcases with two enormous Rottweilers, the size of small bears, chained at the front.

  “Those dogs look like they weigh more than me,” Carrie said.

  “Für Elise” played from the cell phone in the front pocket of Gracie’s shirt. “They look like they weigh more than me,” she said, pulling the phone out and peering at the caller ID. “It’s my mom. I know we’re on duty, but . . .”

  “Answer it,” Carrie said. “It’s not like we’re doing anything really important at the moment.”

  Gracie pressed Answer. “Hi, Mom. How are you? How’s Morris?” She let up on the brake. The truck drifted forward several more feet. Gracie turned toward Carrie and silently mouthed, shit.

  What? Carrie mouthed back.

  “I’m so sorry,” Gracie said into the phone. “I know you love him very much . . . Okay . . . Try not to worry about that now.” She listened. “You know I’d be there if I could.” Her voice broke in spite of herself. “I’m at work right now. You know, my boring life.” She shot another look at Carrie. “I’ll try to call you later, okay? Maybe not tonight, but tomorrow. Okay. Bye.” She hung up the phone and dropped it back into her pocket.

  Carrie was watching her. “Bad news?”

  “My stepfather just died.”

  “Oooh. Sorry.”

  “Thanks.” Gracie sighed. “I feel bad for my mom. She’s all alone now. She said something once about selling her house and moving out here to live with me. She doesn’t have any idea. She’ll take one look at my cabin and hightail it down to my sister’s McMansion in Laguna. Much more her style.” She glanced over at Carrie again. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to air my dirty laundry.”

  “At least you talk to your family. When’s the funeral?”

  “Saturday. In Detroit.”

  Gracie stared at the two massive black heads looking back at her from the F-150 ahead. So Morris finally kicked the bucket. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what she was feeling. Sadness for her mother. Maybe for Harold and Lenora, Morris’s two children from a previous marriage. She doubted they would be heartbroken by their father’s passing. More likely they’d be chomping at the bit for his will to be read and his substantial estate to be distributed. Gracie knew she didn’t have anything to worry about on that score. Morris had cut her out of his will a long time ago.

  But the news of her stepfather’s death left her feeling strangely empty, untethered, as if something against which she had been leaning had been yanked away.

  A gap opened up in front of the Ranger. Gracie let up on the brake. The truck rolled forward and stopped again.

  “Wow. Ten whole feet,” Carrie said.

  “Für Elise” played again from her shirt pocket. “What is this, Gracie Central Station?” She lifted out the phone and looked at the number. Her breath caught. It was a Los Angeles exchange. “It’s Rob,” Gracie said. “I don’t know if I want to answer it.”

  “Rob Christian?” Carrie asked, turning in her seat. “Are you batshit insane? Answer it!”

  “Crap, my hands are shaking.”

  “Answer the damn phone before he hangs up!”

  Gracie pressed Answer. “Hello?”

  “Gracie love, are you all right? It’s Rob.”

  As if that voice, as rich as warm molasses, wasn’t instantly recognizable. “Hi,” Gracie said, eyes flicking across to Carrie, whose entire face was lit up with a smile. “How are you? Where are you?”

  “Who gives a bloody damn about me? We’re here . . . We’re . . . I’m here in L.A. Where are you? I just heard it on the news. They’re evacuating your valley. Come and stay with us . . . me.”

  “But . . . what about . . . ?”

  “There’s plenty of room. I want you here with me. I want yo
u safe.”

  “But . . . I’m working,” Gracie said. “Search and Rescue helps—”

  Carrie screamed, staring out the windshield, a horrified look on her face.

  One of the Rottweilers had jumped over the side of the F-150. Caught by the chain attached to its collar, it was hanging by the neck, strangling, legs kicking several inches off the ground.

  “Shit!” Gracie yelled.

  As they watched, the woman driver scrambled out of the F-150, ran back, and threw her arms around the flailing dog

  “Gotta go!” Gracie yelled into the phone and tossed it aside. Slamming the truck into Park, she jumped out of the Ranger.

  Acrid smoke stung eyes and nose and lungs. With Carrie right behind, Gracie ran up to where the tiny woman was trying to lift the dog up and over the side panel of the truck bed.

  They threw their arms around the huge animal.

  Claws raked Carrie’s arm and Gracie’s stomach.

  “Take the collar off!” Gracie panted. “We’ll lift!” She fell to her knees on the uneven pavement, put her shoulder beneath the dog’s haunches, and shoved upward with all her strength. Muscles strained. She gulped in smoky air.

  The woman picked frantically at the dog’s collar. “I can’t get it!”

  The dog scrabbled against the side of the truck, strength failing. Then it went limp.

  “Champ!” the woman screamed.

  Urine dripped onto the pavement.

  “He’s dying!”

  Gracie shoved her hand into her pants pocket. Fingers closed around the jackknife. She pulled it out, opened the blade, inserted it beneath the dog’s collar, and sawed away at the heavy leather.

  The Rottweiler hung without moving.

  Gracie sawed.

  The leather broke.

  The dog dropped to the ground and lay unmoving on its side.

  Gracie fell backward onto the pavement.

  The woman fell sobbing to her knees beside the animal. “He’s dead!”

  “Just stunned,” Carrie said, out of breath and kneeling on the ground, a hand on the dog’s rib cage. “Heart’s beating.”

  The dog opened its eyes.

  “Oh, Champ!” The woman laid her head on its shoulder.

  Chest heaving with the effort, Gracie sat on the pavement, staring down at the jackknife in her open palm.

  * * *

  ASH FLOATED DOWN from the sky like snow, cloaking the eastern end of the Timber Creek valley in a fawn-brown haze.

  Gracie sat behind the wheel of Timber Creek SAR’s Suburban. Before its headlights, the smoke was so thick she could barely see the road ten feet ahead. Her breath condensed behind her air filter, making it slippery with sweat. Her eyes and throat burned. Her lungs hurt.

  The world was eerie, silent, devoid of life. The Suburban crept through the empty streets, houses looming up like specters, then sliding back into the brown gloom.

  For the most part, evacuation of the valley residents had been completed the night before. SAR teams now patrolled the empty streets and neighborhoods, keeping an eye out for looters or suspicious circumstances. Road Patrol Twelve consisted of Gracie and two men from a neighboring team whom she had met for the first time that morning.

  Ken was riding shotgun. With gray brushing his temples, the man was thin with a sallow complexion. Breath, warm and moist, from behind his mask was fogging up his glasses so that every four or five minutes, he removed them, wiping them clean on a shirttail.

  Staring sullenly out the window from the backseat directly behind Ken was Bryan. Topping six foot five, knees practically up to his chin, everything about the man seemed square: glasses, head, jaw, shoulders, hands.

  In the three hours they had been in the field that day, Bryan had spoken barely a dozen words. Gracie had no way of knowing if it was because he was a man of few words or if he was pouting because, as a local who knew the streets and neighborhoods, she had been assigned to drive and he had been relegated to the backseat. Or if he simply couldn’t get a word in edgewise because, for the past three hours, his teammate Ken hadn’t stopped talking. As if volume equaled veracity, he regaled Gracie in a loud voice with stories of his heroic exploits during the eight months he had been on Search and Rescue, expounding upon his vast knowledge as a tracker and winter mountaineering expert, how many searches he had been on, how many times he had saved the day. Gracie listened, with half an ear, considering Ken to be a harmless attention seeker, until the man launched into a story about how, on a search for a missing woman, as he was clinging to the side of a steep and rocky incline in the mist, he realized the women’s husband, several feet away from him, had probably killed her.

  Gracie glanced over at Ken, who was staring straight ahead. She recognized the story. She had been on that search and Ken hadn’t been there. In fact, the incident occurred several years before he was even on Search and Rescue.

  Gracie steered the Suburban around the corner and wondered how much else of what Ken had been saying was pure bluster. Most of it, she thought, and tuned the man out altogether.

  The night before, Gracie’s shift had ended at ten o’clock. She had set up her one-person bivy tent among the other tents in the field behind the Convention Center and crawled inside. Sitting in the doorway, she tugged off her hiking boots and heavy cotton outer socks by the light of her headlamp. Rather than leave the boots outside in the little vestibule, she zipped them inside the bivy, not wanting to discover in the morning that creepy crawlies or even a snake had found them a cozy place for a nap. Stretching out her legs, she wriggled out of her shirt and pants, folding them neatly and pushing them down with her feet to the bottom of the sleeping bag. In T-shirt and panties, she set the alarm on her watch for five thirty, slipped inside the bag, and closed her eyes with a sigh.

  “Rob!” Gracie’s eyes flew open and she sat up. She had hung up on him when the Rottweiler had jumped out of the truck, and she’d never called him back. Unable to wait until morning, she pulled her pants back on, climbed outside the tent, and clumped in unlaced hiking boots back into the Command Post, where she had left her cell phone charging behind a pile of boxes of Gatorade.

  Even in the middle of the night, the Command Post was brightly lit and humming with activity. But it was quieter, voices softer, conversation more muted. The deep breath before the morning plunge.

  Hidden by the Gatorade, Gracie slid down the wall to a crouch as she dialed Rob’s number.

  He answered almost immediately.

  “Hi,” Gracie said in a low voice. “It’s me. Sorry . . .”

  “Where the bloody hell are you? I’ve been worried sick . . .”

  “I thought I . . . I’m still up in the valley. Search and Rescue helps with evacuations.”

  “You’re still up there? Where’s the fire then? Are you in danger?”

  “I’m in the Command Post right now.” She looked around. “This is about as safe a place as anywhere in the valley.”

  She heard him mutter, “Bloody hell.” Then he said, “I don’t suppose I could convince you to abandon your post, light a shuck out of there, come down to L.A. and stay here with me until it’s over.”

  “But . . . what about her? Your fiancée?” Unable to keep the snarkiness out of her voice, she said, “You’re getting married, remember?” She added under her breath, “Pretty damn fast if you ask me.” She closed her eyes, rubbing her forehead with her fingers, waiting for the executioner’s blade.

  Silence on the other end of the line, then, “I called it off.”

  Gracie’s eyes flew open. “What?”

  “I couldn’t go through with it. It hurt her. A lot. She cried. Bugger it all.”

  Gracie’s heart began a slow steady throb in her temple.

  “I thought it was the right thing and all that,” Rob said, “The right time. The right girl. But when I get marr
ied again, it has to be the last time I get married. And, effing bloody friggin’ hell, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about you. It wasn’t fair to her.”

  Gracie couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “Will you come down to L.A.?” Rob asked. “I really want you here.”

  “I can’t. I’m working.”

  “No. After the fire.”

  “You mean to visit?”

  “To live.”

  “In L.A.? I hate cities. And I love the mountains.”

  “They have mountains in L.A.”

  “Barely.”

  “A visit then. You can stay as long as you want. A week. A month.”

  “I have a job. I can’t just take off—”

  “You can find something else,” he said, a hint of exasperation in his voice.

  Gracie felt the hackles rising. “I don’t want to find something else.”

  “You can have your own room.”

  “I have my own cabin.”

  “Your own wing then. You can have anything you want. You wouldn’t have to worry about anything.”

  “I don’t want to be a kept woman.”

  “You wouldn’t be a bloody kept woman!”

  “Quit pushing me!”

  “I’m not pushing you! I—” Rob stopped and cursed under his breath. Then he chuckled. “You’re right. You have your job. Your cabin. Your own life. I understand that. I’m sorry.”

  The air cleared. The hackles vanished. Gracie blew out a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, I guess. I shouldn’t have gotten . . . I get all . . .”

  “Look, love,” Rob said. “I hate not being able to reach you. To hear your voice. To talk to you.” A sigh. “I just want you near . . . nearer.”

  “I . . . uh . . .”

  “Will you at least think about it?”

  Gracie opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Yes,” she said finally. “I’ll think about it.”

  In a voice that smiled down the line, Rob said, “God knows why, but I’ve really missed you.”

  Gracie spread her fingers wide and stared unseeing at her dirt-rimmed fingernails. “God knows why, but I’ve missed you, too.”