Fangs Out

by David Freed

  “When your ass is on the line,” he’d bark, his halitosis melting your face, “all you got to go on is knowing who’s who and what’s what and where’s where. The more you see and remember, the easier it’ll be for y’all to make it through any shit storm and come out smelling like a rose.”

  Nobody ever accused Oren Ernstmueller of being a poet, but he was one outstanding self-defense instructor. Thanks to him, though enveloped in blackness, I could still see in my mind what was what and where was where. My memory was all I had to work with if I hoped to live—that and the shattered taillight of a vintage Plymouth coupe. As fast as my bindings would permit, I rolled and inch-wormed my way toward the car.

  Broken glass littered the floor below its left rear fender. I groped around blindly for a shard from the shattered taillight, accidentally stabbing myself in the palm of my right hand.

  “Son of a . . .”

  I grasped it as best I could, the glass slick with blood, and began working blindly at the duct tape binding the wrists behind my back. I lost all track of time as I poked and pulled, struggling to free my hands. Every other jab seemed to produce a painful new wound, but it was either that or die.

  I still had a long way to go when I heard the MINI Cooper coming back.

  Twenty

  My wrists came free just as Ray Sheen’s car pulled up outside the storage unit. Like a man possessed, I tore through the tape binding my ankles, flung open the Plymouth’s passenger door, and, groping in darkness, found an ignition key on the floorboard. Amazingly, the seventy-year-old engine fired up like new. Then I smashed down on the accelerator, blasted through the metal roll-up door, and made good my escape.

  Actually, that’s not what happened. That’s what I wished had happened.

  My mouth, wrists and ankles remained taped as Sheen rolled up the door of the storage unit and strode in, leaving his car engine idling. Clearly, he was planning to stay only long enough to haul me off and do to me whatever he was planning to do. Everyone says a highlight reel of your life is supposed to flash before your eyes when death comes calling. But there were no highlights in my case, only lament. Who would take care of Kiddiot? Who would fly the Ruptured Duck? Who would make love to Savannah?

  Sheen grabbed me by the shoulders and began dragging me toward his car as the glass shard from the broken taillight slipped from my grasp. Without seeming to notice my bloody wrists, he stuffed me into the Cooper’s tiny backseat. I had to bend at the knees to fit. Then he ran back, rolled down the door to the storage unit, locking it, and jumped in.

  After a series of sharp turns, we accelerated onto a freeway. The car crossed under a sign that told me we were eastbound on Interstate 8. He turned the radio on and dialed in a news station. The top story detailed a Predator drone strike on Al Qaeda’s latest second-in-command.

  “That number two guy gets blown up all the time,” Sheen said.

  I wanted to say, “If I was the number three guy, I’d definitely turn down the promotion,” but it’s hard to say anything when your lips are literally sealed.

  The digital clock on the car’s dashboard read 11:23 P.M. I strained to free my wrists, twisting and pulling at the tape binding them. By the time I looked up again at the clock, it was nearly midnight.

  Sheen’s phone rang with the opening bars to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” He glanced down at the number displayed on the phone as he drove, then put the call on speaker.

  “Hello?”

  “Where are you right now?”

  “You don’t need to know that,” Sheen said.

  “Look, I just got a frantic call from Frank Jervis’s wife. He’s at Scripps Memorial. They think he had a heart attack.”

  I recognized the voice on the other end of the phone. It was Sheen’s boss, Greg Castle.

  “I dropped him off there,” Sheen said. “I was with him when it happened.”

  “You should’ve called me, Ray.”

  “I’m trying to minimize your exposure in all of this. I’m trying to protect you, Greg. Plausible deniability. The less you know, the better.”

  “You’re right. I certainly appreciate your efforts, Ray.”

  Castle indicated that his own wife was out of town with their children, visiting his in-laws outside Salt Lake City. He’d called Sheen, he said, hoping to get a lift to the hospital, to be with Jervis and his family.

  “Take a cab.”

  “I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do,” Castle said. “I just wish I could see well enough to drive myself at night.”

  Greg Castle couldn’t see at night.

  Someone else I’d recently met couldn’t see at night, I realized as I lay contorted in the backseat of Sheen’s clown-tiny car: Hub Walker’s granddaughter, Ryder. Congenital stationary night blindness. Isn’t that what Crissy Walker said Ryder had? I’m no geneticist, but I certainly knew what “congenital” meant—that the little girl had likely inherited the exceedingly rare condition genetically. If Greg Castle couldn’t see well enough to drive after dark, and Ryder Walker could barely see in the dark, what were the odds that the two could be anything other than related by blood?

  In the final moments of his life Dorian Munz claimed that Castle had murdered Ruth Walker, or arranged to have her killed, after she’d refused to terminate her pregnancy, and before she could spill the beans about what she supposedly knew of Castle Robotics’ alleged financial improprieties. But hadn’t Castle voluntarily taken, and passed, a paternity test? And why, if his company was dirty, would he have agreed to open Castle Robotics’ books to an independent audit? My head pounded trying to figure it all out as Sheen continued driving east, toward that great dumping ground for dead bodies that is the Anza-Borrego Desert.

  “I’ll call you,” he told Castle, “as soon as I’m done taking out the trash. Keep me posted on how Frank’s doing.”

  “Just be careful, Ray.”

  “Oh, it’s way past that,” Sheen said, and hung up.

  At first I thought it was my imagination, but it wasn’t: the tape around my wrists was starting to loosen a little. I fought off the pain and kept twisting.

  Sheen reached back and ripped the tape off my mouth.

  “Tell me about the truck.”

  “What truck?”

  “You know what truck, Logan. The one registered to Lazarus. How did you find out?”

  I bluffed.

  “Actually, the cops did. They’re looking for you, Ray. You’re just making things worse for yourself. Turn yourself in and let’s call it a day.”

  “You’re lying,” Sheen said. “If the cops knew about the truck, they would’ve already tried to contact me.”

  I bluffed some more.

  “They also know that C.W. Lazarus is an alias for Ray Sheen.”

  Sheen smiled up at me in the mirror.

  “Now I definitely know you’re lying.”

  “Then who is he?”

  Sheen said nothing, staring straight ahead as he drove, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching. I kept twisting and pulling at the tape.

  “How much is Hub Walker involved in all of this?”

  “Hub Walker is a has-been who has no idea how lucky he is to be with the lady he’s with. Crissy deserves better. She always wanted kids, but he didn’t. Said one for him was enough.”

  “You got any bambinos, Ray?”

  Sheen said nothing.

  “Your boss has a passel of ’em.”

  Stony silence. A few more tugs and my hands would be free.

  “OK, maybe you can answer this one for me: how is it that Greg Castle and Ruth Walker’s daughter can’t see at night, but the paternity test showed Greg wasn’t her father?”

  Maybe it was the way Sheen looked back at me in the rear-view mirror and smiled smugly, but that’s when I knew.

  “You took the test for him. You passed yourself off as Castle.”

  Sheen cut the wheel and exited the freeway. We turned south onto a two-lane highway, wending past an Indian gambl
ing casino and, within minutes, through dark, desolate hills.

  “The least you could do is tell me where you’re taking me to die.”

  “I don’t owe you any explanations, Logan.”

  The duct tape binding my wrists tore apart. I was good to go.

  “OK, Ray, be that way.”

  I sat up and rammed my elbow into his right ear, then nailed him with a knife-edged left to the right side of his neck—your basic judo chop.

  The tiny car veered sideways, careened off the road and flipped over, coming to rest on its right side in a concrete drainage culvert. Only I was no longer occupying the backseat. I was sitting in a daze on the side of the road, about seventy-five feet behind the wreck, having been ejected through the MINI’s now-mangled convertible roof. That I was uninjured beyond some scrapes, a pain in my lower left leg, and a throbbing left thumb, was not what amazed me. It was the fact that my ankles were no longer bound. The force of the crash had apparently ripped the duct tape clean away, along with my left shoe.

  A bee buzzed past my head. Then another, this one closer. In my stupor, it took me a half-second to remember that bees navigate by the sun. They rarely fly at night. Casually, I looked down the culvert at Sheen and realized those weren’t bees zipping past. They were bullets.

  He was standing in a two-handed combat crouch beside his wrecked car, blasting at me with a .45 caliber pistol. Another round sparked off the pavement inches away.

  I got up and hobbled for the cover of a copse of scrub oaks across the road, as Sheen climbed out of the culvert, firing at me on the run.

  The Buddha teaches that all things in life are to be treasured no matter how mundane. This includes Saturday mail service, two-ply toilet paper, and, I came to realize as I fled, a matching pair of shoes. Outdistancing a gunman bent on killing you is no easy task with bleeding wrists, an aching lower leg, and a possible broken thumb; it’s even harder in inky darkness over rock-strewn ground, when all you’ve got protecting one foot is a crew sock from Costco. I vowed never again to take shoes for granted. Assuming I survived the night.

  A bullet clipped a low-hanging branch to my right, followed a split-second later by the sharp report of Sheen’s pistol. Turning to face an onrushing enemy is often the most effective means of defeating him. But given my physical condition, discretion at that moment seemed the better part of valor. I zigzagged through the trees, angling upslope toward a dense forest of pines.

  Another gunshot. This one thudded into the trunk of an oak just as I passed by it, stumbling uphill, gasping for breath. When I glanced back over my shoulder, I could see Sheen, a shapeless form in the darkness. He was less than fifty meters behind me.

  “Save yourself the trouble, Logan!”

  Three more shots ripped past.

  The pines towered above me on the steeply rising slope. All I had to do was get there and I’d be home free. Find a place to hide and regroup. Hell, maybe I’d even fashion a makeshift wooden spear and go on the offensive.

  Thirty meters.

  My legs and lungs were on fire.

  Twenty meters.

  Exhausted and dizzy, I began crawling.

  The tree line was now less than fifteen feet ahead, the pines looming sentries, beckoning safety. They could have just as easily been fifteen miles away for all the good they offered me. I was spent. Out of steam. Done.

  “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the Rolling Stones intoned, but once in awhile, life’s got a funny way of giving you what you need.

  “Hombre.”

  The man was crouched just inside the tree line, motioning me frantically toward him, a young man in jeans and a black, oversized LA Kings hockey jersey. Perched on his forehead was a pair of night vision goggles. “Vámonos, rápido!”

  My legs no longer worked. All I could do was look up at him. He and two others were on me in seconds, pulling me up the hill and into the trees, where four other men, older and heavier, hunkered on their bellies behind a large rock formation like troops sweating out a mortar barrage.

  None dared breathe as Sheen approached. He paused not twenty feet away, breathing hard, listening.

  One of the men lying beside me quietly picked up a rock and held it at the ready, but there was no need. We were invisible in the night.

  Sheen moved on, deeper into the trees, as my new friends and I waited, scarcely willing to breathe. About ten minutes later, about a half-mile away, came a single gunshot. It sounded smaller than a .45, but I couldn’t be sure. I was too exhausted.

  The man in the Kings jersey issued a series of hand commands as complex as any I’d seen in my service with Alpha. The other men rose in unison and began moving in well-disciplined silence, away from the echo of the gunshot.

  Somehow, I found a second wind and fell in behind them.

  THEY NEVER asked why I was being chased or why somebody was shooting at me. They were being polite, I suppose, which made us even. I never learned what they were doing out there at night, in the middle of a California pine forest, just north of the U.S.–Mexico border, but it wasn’t hard to guess. Up in Oxnard, there were strawberries to pick and, out in Beverly Hills, pricey cars to wax. There were construction ditches to dig and buckets of scalding hot tar to be hauled onto rooftops. And somebody had to do all that spine-snapping work because no American ever would, not for the money his fellow citizens were willing to pay.

  One of the men gave me a sip of lime Gatorade while two others gently bandaged my wrists by flashlight. The biggest of the bunch reached into his backpack and insisted I take from him a pair of Air Jordan knockoffs to replace the shoe I’d lost. He wouldn’t accept no for an answer.

  “Gracias.”

  He gave me a thumbs-up and a smile.

  The “Air Jordans” were purple and black. They actually fit.

  I shook their hands, one after the other, and watched them move off single file, silently, through the trees.

  “Good luck, you guys.”

  “Buena suerte, señor.”

  Every inch of me hurt. My left thumb had swollen to nearly twice its normal size. I sat with my back against a boulder. The night was warm. An 18-wheeler let loose its air horn somewhere to the north. In the woods nearby, an owl hooted greetings to its mate, who hooted back. I found comfort in their dialogue. The birds, I knew, would go silent if Sheen were approaching. I lay down on a bed of pine needles and closed my eyes, too tired to think. When I opened them again, it was dawn.

  I had no phone, no wristwatch, no food or drink, and not a clue as to my specific location. I did, however, have two matching Air Jordans, and for that, I reminded myself, I was grateful. I began walking downhill because downhill is how water flows, and it is always near water where people will be found.

  The pines soon thinned, giving way to arid, rolling chaparral speckled by manzanita and chamise. Below me and to the east, a Jeep Wrangler negotiated a twisting dirt road at high speed, kicking up dust plumes in its wake.

  Getting down to the road was easy. Not only because both of my feet were now uniformly and properly clad, but because, with the sun up, I could now see where I was walking.

  Daylight. Another reason to be grateful.

  I picked up my pace. After what I guessed to be about fifteen minutes, I stepped out onto the road just as a Chevy Tahoe with a throaty muffler rounded a blind curve and came barreling toward me.

  The driver was a teenaged girl with long dark hair and big designer sunglasses. Her left hand was hanging out the window, a cigarette between her fingers. She rumbled past me without slowing, ignoring my waving. I couldn’t say I blamed her for not stopping, not after catching my reflection in one of those pole-mounted convex mirrors that help alert motorists to traffic converging from the opposite direction:

  My face was a grotesque pastiche of cuts and abrasions. My hair was matted stiff with blood. I looked like an extra in a zombie movie.

  I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

  I headed northbound along the
road without a trace of civilization in sight, when I heard a car coming up from behind me. I turned to see a San Diego County sheriff’s cruiser approaching. The driver skidded to a stop, threw open his door and took up station behind it, leveling an AR-15 assault rifle at me. His partner was similarly positioned behind the black-and-white’s passenger door with a Glock pointed in my direction.

  “Am I glad to see you guys.”

  “Kiss the ground! Hands outstretched! Do it now!”

  Odd questions can rumble through your head at such moments. Questions like, “Who kisses the ground anymore other than the Pope?” And, “What happens if I lie down in the road, another car comes by and I get run over? Do these guys really want to assume that kind of liability?” But I said nothing. They clearly meant business and I was in no shape to cross swords with them.

  I got down. But I did not kiss the ground.

  The deputy with the assault rifle covered me as his partner holstered his pistol, kneed me in the small of my back, and yanked my left wrist back to handcuff me.

  “Don’t move.”

  “My thumb’s broken.”

  “Shut up.”

  He hooked me up, smelling faintly of Old Spice, and hauled me brusquely to my feet. His partner read me my Miranda rights.

  “Do you understand these rights I have just read to you?”

  I said I did. He keyed a coiled radio mic clipped to the left epaulet of his uniform shirt.