She crawled back in the window—and sort of identified the odd smell of this place as a combination of old wood and campground outhouse—to that inside door and pulled and pushed and shoved and yanked. She was thrown on the floor on her back when it came off its hinges, well one of them. It hung into the room so she could crawl over it—into pitch darkness—with a musty smell added to the one upstairs and the sound of water dripping. Probably rats and spiders and—
“Hello? Anybody there?” There had to be below her, but she didn’t know where the steps were. A muffled groan and maybe a sob, cut off? It sure wasn’t rats.
Charlie reached for her cell, punched 911. As she settled down on the door to explain the emergency it gave way and she reached out with the other hand in an automatic grab, sliding down on what was indeed a set of stairs, her hand finding a light switch. And it worked.
She described in detail where she was and what she saw to the operator who soon had her connected to paramedics as well. Charlie tried to relay the urgency and the fact that there might be those who would try to stop them.
“We got paramedics not paratroopers. How do we know you’re not a nutcase, lady?”
“I have three people in this room in awful shape—one of them is Gordy Solomon of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. We need help and we need it fast.”
After a long pause—“We’ve got people on the way. I want two things of you. Your name, and put Detective Solomon on the line.”
“Charlie. They’ve been drugged, but I’ll try. Detective Solomon, try to talk to dispatch on the phone.”
“Sharlee?” he said. “Good girl.”
“Tell them I’m not a nutcase and we need help fast. There have been two more murders. We need police as well, Gordy.”
“Right. Dishpatch? Thish Gordon Solomon and we need the Nationalll Guard too. Lotsa bodies. Shtep on it—fast. The She-eye-aye hates the FBI who hates the IRS and everybody hates the San Diego Sheriffsh Department. Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh. How’d I do, Sharlee?” And then he started throwing up, again.
“What’s happening now? I’m tuned in to you. I’m a nurse.”
“He’s vomiting. His eyes are rolled back. All three have vomited before. Please hurry.”
“Turn him over so he doesn’t choke, Charlie. We’re just turning off the Pacific Highway. We’ve got another ambulance and sheriff’s deputies on the way.”
“Be careful. There are men with guns here and Caroline VanZant has a rifle. She killed a man wearing a tie and they kidnaped Mitch Hilsten and Kenny Cowper, just now. And there’s a dead FBI agent up here. And my daughter’s up here.”
“You getting this, Lloyd?” the female nurse asked someone who answered—
“We read. We’re on our way. You better wait and let us lead.”
“Okay. Charlie? I’m going to talk you through keeping those people alive until we get there. Please don’t panic. We need you as much as you need us. Now here’s what you do.” And the calm voice with the sirens in the background talked her through reading the pulse rate on all three of the captives, describing skin color, breathing, checking the eyes by pulling up the lids, feeling for muscle rigidity, describing the smell on their breaths, had them all turned over on their stomachs, mouths checked for vomit blockage.
“Charlie, what’s happening?”
“Now I’m gagging. The smell down here is so horrible.”
“Take your cell with you and go up the stairs till you can get to fresh air. Don’t overdose on it too fast. Tell me when you can control the urge to vomit.”
“I’m sweating all over.”
“That’s a normal reaction.”
“They’re going to turn you away at the gate you know. And then we’re all dead here.”
“Miss Greene? This is Lloyd. I’m vaguely familiar with the layout there. Can you tell me which of those cabins you’re in?”
“How do I know you’re not a kook? What’s that racket?”
“Well, how do we know you’re not a kook? And I’m flying a helicopter. This is costing somebody a lot of money. I’m going to try to drop some help to you, but with the weather, I’d kind of like to get in close. You going to trust us, or what? We got lives on the line up here too, you know.”
“Only because you’ve got a great drawl, Lloyd. And you’d better get your guy down here fast, because if someone’s listening in on this, my patients and I won’t be able to greet him.”
Lloyd laughed. Probably because the incoming was a she.
Charlie and the nurse were busy on the phone figuring out how to triage until the ambulances arrived. Charlie tried not to think about Libby. About Mitch and Kenny. She concentrated on helping those she could at the moment, increasingly aware of the non-human inhabitants of the room, which was actually a one-room apartment.
A futon bed and a small tattered couch, a computer table, with office chair and computer, bookshelves filled with CDs and tapes and videos instead, television, DVD player, small one-compartment college dorm refrigerator producing an unhealthy hum. Small sink and bathroom stool behind a folding screen. Too bad none of the patients had had time to reach either. Amateurish photos on the walls of women in the shower, disrobing, preening, stretching, slipping into tanksuits, sitting on the bathroom stool, etc. One of Maggie Stutzman almost stopped Charlie’s heart.
“I’m in. She’s here with the wounded,” a woman said behind Charlie and started her heart back up with a rush. “Situation as described and moderately under control. Noticed funny lights scurrying every which way on the way down.”
Thirty-Four
“How ya doin’, Charlie? My name’s Roy,” the apparition said, walking among the victims, holstering her flashlight, drawing her own cell. “Hello all, especially medics, we need you bad here, a female sheriff’s deputy, a male, and another female. I’d say things are critical. There’s a graveled maintenance road off the southeast side of the parking lot, wends its way around the east side of the main building. Follow the winding road to the third outbuilding, hang a right, stay focused for the second row of cottages and you want the next one left at the turn. My gut suggests you run minus sirens and lightbars and with as little notification as possible. Read?”
“Read. How do you know all this?”
“I used to work here.”
“Roy as in Rogers?” Charlie asked the apparition, so grateful to have some help, there were tears running down her face and the term “weak-kneed” took on a whole new significance. “And where did you leave your parachute?”
“As in Roylene and the chute’s up on the porch, wadded. Sort of figured you wanted me here in a hurry.” Roy looked as little like a James Bond movie as you could imagine—short, pudgy, dressed in black pants and hooded windbreaker, an interesting utility belt about her middle. She swept the hood back to reveal a short no-nonsense cut and brownish hair.
“You used to work here?”
“Cleaning lady. I got a kid. It don’t pay the bills. I ask myself what else could I train for, that might even be rewarding, fun, and keep us off welfare? And here I am, Roy-to-the-rescue. Panache or what?” All the while Roy-to-the-rescue was taking in details of the room, checking pulses with her wristwatch. Then she stopped to study Charlie. “On a scale of one to ten, ten being the most severe, how close would you say you are to losing it?”
Through a giggle, some tears, and a shrug Charlie answered, “Two? Now that you’re here.”
“Good. We all may need each other before this night’s over.” Roy’s face was blotchy, maybe from parachuting down in a storm, her movements brisk, her voice tone measured and reassuring. They found wash cloths and hand towels in a drawer, wet them at the sink, wrapped them around the wrists of the suffering trio, bathed foreheads hanging over the bedsides and couch too. Roy described the progress of the patients’ condition to the ambulance nurse and asked if she should try to administer water, and was told to wait till the ambulances arrived.
Roy found time to study the pictures on t
he wall. “Somebody got their jollies peeping, looks like.”
“You used to work here. Ever meet Dashiell Hammett?”
“Maids don’t get to fraternize with guests and not much with the rest of the staff either—wait, he the owner’s son?”
“Yeah, I think this was his little secret hiding place.”
“I was gone by the time he came, but word had it he was an addict and they barely got him off the street before he zoned on meth. Wouldn’t allow him off the premises. Heard he died recently.”
Roy worked for a private company that contracted out trained professionals—emergency, security, whatever—to law enforcement agencies strapped for money. “We cost more but local governments don’t have to pay all the benefits—medical, retirement, training costs, social security. So old Dashiell was a peeping Tom too, addict and pervert?”
But they both fell silent at the sound of gravel crunching—didn’t sound like the vehicles they were expecting, more like footsteps, furtive, tentative. Roy put a finger to her lips, pulled a handgun from her utility belt, motioned Charlie to crouch, and climbed the stairs far enough to switch off the light.
“I saw a light in here, I tell you.”
“Well come back out, there’s not one now. We’ve got to find Libby.”
“Keegan? Brodie? What?” Charlie tried to push past Roy on the stairs, but was shoved back. By the time she made it to her feet and to the stairs the whole world lit suddenly. It wasn’t lightning either.
“Hello ladies,” a sheriff’s deputy said. “I better be talking to Charlie and Roy, here.” The blinding searchlight/flashlight made the room light unnecessary. “Oh, Jesus. Get the ambulance up now. It’s Solomon and Saucier. Roy, are they alive?”
Charlie hid again. This time in the crawl space under the porch of the cottage in which Dashiell had kept his dirty little secrets and someone had drugged Luella Ridgeway, Detective Solomon, and Deputy Lydia Saucier nearly to death. One ambulance hauled them out with sirens blasting and to hell with the higher authorities. Several deputies and Roy-to-the-rescue hung around trying to find Charlie who was to be hauled out fast too and questioned at the station in Encinitas. Someone had shone a flashlight under here twice but Charlie lay in a trench up against the foundation that apparently hid her.
“Charlie, please come out wherever you are,” Roylene could be heard whispering in a widening circle around the cottage. “We want to help you, get you out of danger and find your daughter and friends. We need you to help us do that. We’re on your side.”
Yeah, right, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department is going to take on the FBI, the CIA, and the IRS. You’re just going to be sandbagged and helpless, and you know it, while higher ups figure out how to handle all this and control the spin so that “righteousness” overshadows a possible PR scandal. Meanwhile my daughter and friends will be held hostage, drugged, or killed by whoever is doing the kidnaping and murdering around here. I don’t think so.
Charlie had heard plenty of speculation going on among those looking for her and this end of the cell contact with headquarters. At least it didn’t seem as if there’d be a delay in racing the sick to an emergency room. The other ambulance pulled out quietly to wait in the parking lot for more wounded. As far as Charlie could determine there were about four deputies and Roylene out there. If she thought they’d help her locate Libby and the rest she’d have shown herself. But she’d heard the orders. Get Charlie Greene out of there and those left were to wait for further orders and keep a low profile until headquarters could determine what was going on.
Charlie needed to search for Brodie and Keegan as well as Libby and Maggie now, not to mention Kenny and Mitch. In all the excitement over the drugged trio and conjecture about the shady people deputies might go after, she’d managed to disappear this far.
Now she needed a moment or two to disappear again, away from here, skulk somewhere else out of sight and sound. Check her cell which was vibrating itself silly in her pocket. At first she’d been so freaked she hadn’t recognized the feeling. She was used to having it in her purse, tweedling, thought it must be ants or spiders or a muscle spasm.
Her chance came when they began searching for her further, discussing radius and pattern and, as it stretched out and away, one of them found the dead man wearing a necktie.
There was something else under here with her and it was a lot bigger than ants or spiders. It stopped to sniff her nose. It had whiskers. It scurried off and Charlie rolled out of the trench on the goosebumps it had created, scuttled out under the porch steps and crawled between shadows as those looking for her, she hoped, headed for the body near the crevice.
As would only make sense in retrospect, they’d left one of their own behind, but the search radius had spread so far she was able to slip behind one cabin after another until she spotted him and then behind the compressor in the redwood enclosure. She thought it might be safe to listen to any messages on her cell now but there was a dead man here too.
Charlie huddled on the concrete platform with the compressor and the late Charles Green when Roy whispered on the other side of the redwood wall, “You see her? We got to get her out of here and someplace safe. Poor woman’s been through too much to think straight.”
“She didn’t come this way. What about the dead man down there?”
“He’s not talking. Roger’s going through his pockets. He didn’t buy his suits at Wal-Mart.”
No way they wouldn’t check out what was inside the redwood fort. Too good a place to try to hide. How to avoid her well-intentioned but clueless saviors? It all felt so hopeless, she turned her head away from the Fed’s corpse. He didn’t smell that bad yet, just strange in a way that didn’t encourage introspection.
“I see something over there. Just past that window, a shadow.”
“I see someone. You work around to the side, I’ll go straight in. Don’t frighten her.”
Charlie felt something against her lips. Something warm like a finger. It wasn’t Charles’. She lay in a thin puddle of water with her cheek on the concrete next to the redwood wall. He was on the other side of her. There was, it appeared now, maybe a six-inch space between the concrete floor and the base of the redwood. There was someone on the other side, shushing her with an index finger. Charlie could feel that someone’s breath as she spoke.
“Mom? You got seconds to worm your way out and around to this side, before they come back. Think you can save your unneeded comments for later?”
Charlie did as she was told, actually kicking Agent Green’s head at the last minute, as she slithered around the barrier into the deeper shadow behind it, furious and relieved, building up questions and admonitions for her daughter every second of the way. She could and would not condone this behavior. Putting herself in danger was the absolutely last thing Charlie wanted from Libby Abigail Greene. Now and forever.
Her maternal rage nearly overcame her fear for them both and her own reason, but by the time she’d scuttled around the barrier, there was no one there. Everything in her deflated. The world had gone mad. This was the ultimate. She was going to lose it.
No you’re not. You’re just feeling scared and thwarted. And do not tell me to shut up aloud.
“Psssst.” What might well be a human hand beckoned from under a shrub not two feet away.
Charlie scuttled some more, the skin of her stomach and thighs in full revolt. She was suddenly yanked forward, rolled over, and had her mouth covered with a hand. It smelled like cocoa butter. Damn kid. This might well be the ultimate insult.
“Stuff it, Mom, you can change your will later,” the kid whispered ever so softly in her ear but did not remove the hand barricading Charlie’s mouth.
Who’d have thought cheerleading could make a teen this strong? And it was even wetter under the bush.
“Sorry, I thought I saw someone or something,” the male deputy whispered, very close by.
“You did, and so did I,” Roy answered. “Let’s call in the oth
ers and figure out what to do next. Maybe they have instructions from headquarters.”
“Shit, what’s this?” And somebody’s flashlight let there be light.
Charlie was sure either her feet or Libby’s were sticking out in the path somewhere and she tensed to defend her child, who tightened the grip on Charlie to two minutes to murder.
“Another fatality it looks like. Way dead, this guy,” Roy proclaimed. “We’ve really barged into a mess here, haven’t we? Get through to your chief.”
When he had, the deputy told Roy, “They say to stick tight and quiet until it’s determined whether or not foreign terrorists were involved here.”
“Crap, they’re going to try and bury this in that hole?” Roy said. “Maybe our friend Charlie had the right idea after all.”
Thirty-Five
“You barely passed the dummy track in high school. What makes you think you know how to handle all this stuff?” Charlie whispered.
“Hell, I live with a madwoman. I gotta learn survival skills, big time. I’m the only responsible adult in the family, except Grandma and she doesn’t live here. We ought to get together and have you committed. You have any idea the parties I’ve missed this week?”
They crouched in a towel closet off the pool area because that was near where they’d found an unlocked outer door when shots fired somewhere, heavy footsteps, grunts and groans, and the smashing of glass drove them away from their shrub outside the compressor fort. Maybe there were terrorists in on all this, besides the bunch of lunatics Charlie’d already met here. And Libby was right. Anybody who worked in Hollywood who could be surprised by lunatics was not operating on all cylinders—whatever they were.
“And I have to get my hair done tomorrow for the wedding. But no, I’m here trying to get my mother out of one stupid jam after another. I’m even beginning to sound like you. I hate this.”
“Libby, we’re surrounded by dead bodies, friends rushed off in an ambulance who could well be dead by now, others being held who knows where or by whom, who may have already been killed or soon will be, plus we may soon join them in that fatal situation, and you have to get your hair done for a wedding? God, what have I spawned?”
Voices in the Wardrobe Page 20
