Fangs Out

by David Freed

  He glided his hand along the wing. “Yeah, I was gonna be a pilot once. I don’t know, man. Life, ya know?”

  “I do indeed.”

  He snapped his fingers as though hit by a great idea. “Hey, you know what? There’s a gas pump at the Independence Airport, just up the valley. Tell ya what, we could drive you up there. Got a couple jerry cans in the trunk. Fill ’em up, drive you back, get you on your way.”

  “We sure would certainly appreciate that, young man,” said Dutch Holland, done with his business behind the hangar and walking toward us. He dug into the front pocket of his trousers and pulled out a fat roll of cash. “Be happy to pay you for your trouble.”

  The driver stared at the wad the way a hungry man stares at a ham sandwich as Holland peeled off a couple of twenties.

  “Awful nice of you, Mister,” he said as he stuffed the bills in the back pocket of his jeans. “Isn’t that awful nice of the gentleman, Jodi?”

  Jodi flicked the butt of her cigarette out the window and tried to smile.

  “I’m . . . Mike, by the way,” her boyfriend said, hesitating for a split second, like he first had to come up with the name.

  “Pleasure. I’m Dutch Holland. This is Mr. Logan.”

  We shook hands. Mike’s palm was as slimy as a mackerel.

  “Well,” Mike said, holding the left rear door open for Holland, “let’s get ’er done.”

  Holland seemed to suspect nothing as he eased into the backseat of the Olds. I suspected plenty. “Mike” was way too eager to help us. Either he was an Eagle Scout, or he was up to no good. My money was on the latter.

  There’s a given in escape and evasion tactics. The odds of surviving a kidnapping decline radically the second you set foot inside the kidnapper’s vehicle. Better to resist any abduction attempt, forced or coerced, on open ground, where you still have a fighting chance. I wasn’t too worried about whether I could incapacitate Mike and his stringy girlfriend. Even armed, neither struck me as much of a threat. But there’s that weevil that lodges at the base of your throat when you don’t know what’s waiting for you up ahead. It’s the same feeling you get just before you touch down in a hot landing zone, or when you kick a door, not knowing who’s waiting on the other side, and with what. The unknown. You never get used to it. You just learn to put it aside.

  We needed fuel.

  I climbed into the back of the Olds with Dutch Holland.

  THE HIGHWAY was empty. Jodi sucked on her cigarette, staring straight ahead in heavy-lidded, narcotic-addled silence.

  “So where’d you guys fly in from?” Mike looked up in the rearview mirror with his sunglasses on as the speedometer pushed past seventy-five.

  “San Diego,” Holland said.

  “Nice. They got those big whales down there,” Mike said. “Always wanted to see those whales.”

  I rolled down the window to vent Marlboro smoke and asked Mike what he did for a living.

  “Me? Uh, construction. Framing, mostly. Yeah, it was pretty slow around here for awhile but things are starting to pick up. I’ve been working pretty steady lately.”

  He was lying. The local construction trade may well have been on the upswing, but Mike was no part of it, not with callous-free palms like his.

  We passed Manzanar, where thousands of Japanese-American citizens were forced to relocate during World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Long gone were the guard towers and barbed wire fences. Little beyond concrete foundations remained of the camp’s tar paper barracks. That and the lingering air of injustice. Dutch Holland appeared to notice none of it.

  “We’re looking for my buddy Al’s cabin,” he said, squinting at the landscape whizzing by, trying to get his bearings. “It’s just up the road, to the west, into those hills a little, I think. He’s got his own airstrip.”

  Mike was quiet. Then he said, “I know exactly where that is. Just up the road, into the hills. We can cruise over there right now if you want.”

  Holland brightened. “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all. It’s on the way.” Mike glanced over at his girlfriend. “Isn’t it, darlin’?”

  Jodi stared straight ahead.

  I knew one thing. Wherever Mike was taking us, it wasn’t to see Al Demaerschalk.

  There was a turnoff just south of the town of Independence. Mike hooked a left and headed west. The terrain rose quickly from the valley floor as we pushed higher into what soon became pine-dappled foothills.

  Holland peeled off his glasses, polished them on a trouser cuff, and slipped them back on, peering out the windows. “This doesn’t look very familiar to me at all. You sure Al’s cabin is up here?”

  “Just a little further,” Mike said, his jaw set.

  The pavement soon gave way to a rutted dirt road. Dust swirled behind us. We bounced over a cattle crossing guard doing fifty, suspension and tires chattering across the metal grate like machine-gun fire. Mike eased off the car’s accelerator as we approached a metal mailbox mounted to a weathered four-by-four leaning precariously into the road. To our right was another road that led perpendicularly up a short draw, so overhung by a thatch of tangled vines as to be all but unnoticeable. Mike made the turn.

  “I’m sorry,” Holland said, “but this is definitely not the way to Al’s place.”

  No kidding, Dutch.

  The top of the draw gave way to a collection of junked vehicles, an unpainted Quonset hut, and a dilapidated, freestanding mobile home from which two long-haired men, both the approximate age of our driver, emerged on the run. The shorter and heavier of the two sported a scruffy beard and a pump-action, 12-gauge shotgun. The other man toted an AK-47.

  Mike jammed on the brakes. He reached under his seat, then jumped out, waving a cheap .25-caliber pistol and yelling, “Get out of the car!” as the two men from the trailer converged on us with their weapons at the ready.

  Holland looked left and right, confused. “Where are we?”

  “In deep guano,” I said, stepping out with my hands up.

  The odor of ammonia wafted in the dry, hot air from the direction of the Quonset hut. Somebody was cooking a batch of crystal meth.

  “Who’re these jokers?” the guy with the shotgun demanded. He was wearing flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a John Deere baseball cap, backwards.

  “Dude, they’re Fort fuckin’ Knox,” Mike said. He pulled open Dutch Holland’s door. “Get outta the car, Gramps. I mean it. Now!”

  “You heard him,” Jodi said from the front seat, almost like she was bored. “Get out.”

  Dutch got out.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, confused.

  “It’s gonna be OK, Dutch.”

  “I saw ’em land, down in Fair Vista,” Mike was telling the others. “Check this out.” He jammed his hand into Holland’s front pocket, holding up the cash roll like it was a scalp. “Plus they got their own airplane. Is that chill or what?”

  “They got their own plane?” said the man with the AK-47. He wore a “Jugs, Not Drugs” T-shirt.

  “Real nice one, too,” Mike said.

  “That means people must’ve seen ’em come in, you moron! They probably got tracked on radar or something. What the hell were you thinking, bringing ’em up here? Seriously, dude, I’d like to know.”

  “I thought . . .” Mike stopped to ponder the question. “I thought, you know, we could, like, I dunno, jack ’em, or somethin’. Take their plane. Whatever.”

  “Then what, shoot ’em?”

  Mike looked down at the ground like he hadn’t really planned that far ahead, then shrugged. “I guess. I dunno.”

  The guy wearing the backward John Deere cap smacked him on the side of the head.

  “Just so you know,” I said, “I’m an employee of the United States government. I work for one of those alphabet agencies you’ve no doubt heard about, and I just happened to be on a mission with my distinguished colleague here when your friend ‘Mike’ offered us a lift. Now, you probably want to
know what kind of a mission I’m on, and I could tell you, but then I’d have to, well, I think you know . . .”

  Jodi turned to Mike and asked, “Have to what?”

  “Kill us,” Mike said, rolling his eyes.

  I went on. “One thing I can tell you, because most foreign intelligence services hostile to the United States already are aware of these things, is that I’ve been implanted with a microchip, which is standard procedure for operators in the field, by the way. My chip transmits a discrete transponder code. And that code,” I said, unfurling a finger skyward, “goes directly to an NROL-25 satellite in geostationary orbit, programmed to monitor my every movement. The National Reconnaissance Office is actually watching you right now. Everybody say cheese.”

  They all craned their necks and gaped as if to see the aforementioned recon bird in orbit. Even Jodi looked up.

  “So here’s the deal, kids: my colleague and I will borrow Mike’s car, and we will go about our mission here in the beautiful Owens Valley. After we’ve completed our mission, we’ll drop the car back at the Fair Vista Airport, where you can pick it up tomorrow at your convenience.”

  The guy with the shotgun scratched his chin, pondering my offer. “What about the cops?” He gestured toward the hut.

  “You mean am I going to tell them about your little chemistry project? Not as long as Mike here gives my colleague back all the money he stole from him and if you young gentlemen promise to consider contacting the Betty Ford Center.”

  Shotgun man thought about it, then said, “OK.”

  Mike returned Holland’s cash. “Sorry, mister.”

  The old man struggled to come up with an appropriate response. “Just try to keep your nose clean,” he said finally. “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

  I climbed in behind the wheel of the Olds. Dutch got in on the passenger side. The last thing I saw driving away was Jodi lighting another cigarette and the guy with the AK punching Mike in the face.

  “WHAT THE heck was that awful smell back there?” Dutch Holland said, glancing back through the rear window.

  “Drugs.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Bad drugs.”

  The old man was quiet for a minute as we drove along the dirt road.

  “You really work for the government?”

  “If I did, Dutch, do you really think I would’ve said I did?”

  He mulled my answer.

  “What about the computer chip, the satellite, all that. That made up, too?”

  I looked over at him as if to say, of course it was.

  “Well, you sure had me bamboozled—and those dope fiends, too,” Holland said, smiling. “Boy howdy, now there’s a story to tell the grandkids.”

  It took two hours cruising up and down the valley floor before we turned up a canyon west of Lone Pine that Dutch Holland thought he recognized, and found Al Demaerschalk’s cabin.

  It was located along a short, straight section of dirt road, which doubled as Demaerschalk’s runway. Hewn from rough barn wood, the cabin itself was little more than an oversized shed, probably 200 square feet tops, with a flat, corrugated metal roof set at a steep angle so the snow could melt off. There was a raised wooden porch with a pole railing around. Flanking the front door, chained to the floorboards, were two rusting metal milk cans bearing clutches of fake black-eyed Susans.

  I pulled off the road, parked in front of the cabin, and got out of the Olds.

  “Al drives a Kia,” Holland said.

  The man shoots down North Korean MiGs and sixty years later drives a car made in South Korea. You’ve gotta love that kind of consistency.

  There wasn’t a Kia in sight, unfortunately. Or any other motor vehicle except the commandeered Olds we were driving.

  I tried the front door. Locked. There was a double-hung window on either side of the little porch. Both were lashed tight and covered over from the inside with butcher paper. The cabin appeared to have been unoccupied for a very long time.

  Holland took off his baseball cap, rubbed his smooth, pink crown, and said, “I don’t know where else he could be.”

  We headed back to the car and were almost there when a loud crash erupted from inside the cabin. Holland froze and looked over at me in alarm.

  “Stay here, Dutch.”

  I eased silently along a side wall and peeked around the corner, to the back of the cabin. No one was there. I stepped around an outhouse and past a decomposing wooden wagon wheel. A box spring stripped of fabric was leaning vertically against the cabin’s rear wall, partially obscuring a back door.

  Which was cracked open by about two inches.

  “Al? You in there?”

  Another loud crash from inside the cabin. I retreated and pried a spoke off of the wagon wheel—a makeshift weapon in the event that whoever was inside wasn’t Al. I was heading toward the back door again when I sensed movement behind me, whirled with the club raised, and nearly took off Holland’s head.

  “I told you to stay put,” I whispered, a little too loudly.

  “I thought you could use some help.”

  “It would help if you went back to the car.”

  His shoulders sagged, his feelings hurt. He turned and started walking away.

  “OK, hold up. Just stay there, Dutch. I’ll call you if I need you, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Whatever tactical element of surprise I once held was gone. I shoved the box spring aside, booted open the door to make what operators call a “dynamic entry,” and stormed into the cabin.

  Waiting for me just inside the doorway, aimed and ready, was a skunk.

  The sneaky little bastard let me have it with both barrels.

  Fifteen

  “Mary Mother and Joseph,” Dutch Holland said, craning his head out of the passenger window for fresh air, “you stink.”

  I drove as fast as the Oldsmobile would allow until we found a general store in the humble hamlet of Independence, our eyes watering from the overpowering stench of skunk that was me.

  The cashier, a porcine blonde with black roots and an attitude, started coughing uncontrollably as she tried to find a price tag on the bottle of hydrogen peroxide I’d set down in front of her, along with vinegar, baking soda, liquid detergent, bib overalls, and a chartreuse “I ♥ California” T-shirt.

  “Tell ya what,” she said, gagging as she tossed the bottle into the bag, “thirty bucks for the whole kit and caboodle and we’ll call it even.”

  “My day’s just getting better and better.”

  I tried to hand her the cash. She backed away from the cash register like I had leprosy.

  “Just leave the money on the counter.”

  I did as she asked, stuffed my purchases in a plastic bag, and got out of there before she threw up.

  THERE WAS a run-down, eight-unit motel out on the highway south of town boasting “Free Cable TV!” Dutch paid for a room—the least he could do, he said, considering it was me and not him who’d been unfortunate enough to go mano-a-mano with Pepé Le Pew—then waited in the car while I went inside to de-skunk.

  The bathroom sink was stained hard-water green. A centipede ran laps around the bottom of the chipped white bathtub.

  “Moving day, crazy legs,” I said, trapping the squiggling insect in a wax paper cup before turning him loose outside.

  I plugged the tub’s drain with a hard rubber stopper chained to the overflow and ran the water as hot as it would go, squeezing in the entire bottle of detergent. My skunky jeans and shirt went into the plastic bag from the general store, and from there, outside my room. When the tub was half-full, I poured in the hydrogen peroxide, most of the vinegar, and all of the baking soda. Then I lowered myself in and made like a submarine, grateful at having remembered an article in Boys’ Life I read growing up that said vinegar and dish soap, not tomato juice, did the trick when skunked.

  The scalding water helped steam the stench from my pores, but did little to resolve the conundrum that swir
led in my head. Where was Dutch’s buddy, Al Demaerschalk? What insights, if any, could he offer on who had tampered with the engine on my airplane, and how much of it, if any, was connected to the slaying of Janet Bollinger?

  Four days had passed since Hub Walker had hired me to help clear the good name of the man his murdered daughter had once worked for. In that time, I’d crashed my airplane, been accosted at gunpoint by various assorted lowlives, and managed to dig the schism between my ex-wife and me only deeper. I’d also made a fast ten grand, but the money hardly seemed worth it.

  The water was beginning to burn. I pulled the stopper and stood while the tub drained, slathering dish soap on a thin washcloth and scrubbing my scalp and body until it hurt. Then I showered off and scrubbed all over again.

  Dutch Holland was snoring in the passenger seat of the Oldsmobile, his head back, mouth open, when I emerged a half-hour later and dropped my old clothes in a Dumpster behind the motel. I could’ve used some sleep myself, but I was eager to get back to San Diego before nightfall. No use tempting fate, flying a single-engine airplane over mountain terrain you can’t see.

  I checked the Olds’ trunk for the jerry cans that “Mike” said were inside. Of course, there was none. He’d been lying the whole time. As if I didn’t know that already. Dutch and I would have to land and refuel somewhere en route back to San Diego. That meant part of the flight would be in darkness. Hopefully, we’d be out of the mountains by then.

  I climbed in on the driver’s side, my hair wet and uncombed, closed the door as softly as I could, and turned over the engine. Holland barely stirred. He didn’t wake up until we were on the highway southbound and well on our way toward the Fair View Airport. He yawned, rubbed his eyes and nodded toward the new T-shirt and bib overalls I was wearing.

  “You look like you just stepped out of the Grand Ole Opry.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  I wanted to say that I was dressed that way only because I couldn’t find anything else in my size at the general store in Independence, and that beggars can’t be choosers. But I kept my mouth shut. I’d change clothes after we landed.