Step to the Graveyard Easy

by Bill Pronzini

  The kid was gone more than twenty minutes. Cape, sitting tensed on one of the benches, had begun to sweat and fidget by then. When he saw Gary appear from inside the lighted unit, he was up and over there in a hurry.

  “No listing in the phone book, Matt. But I got his name another way.” Grinning, pleased with himself.

  “Good man.”

  “Lilith’s computer,” Gary said. “She works at home sometimes, she’s got all her Lakepoint files stored here. And I know her access code. She wouldn’t like it if she knew I tapped in, but for fifty bucks…”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tarles, T-a-r-l-e-s. Some first name—Rolando.”

  Rolando Tarles, Rollo for short. “Address?”

  “Four-sixty-five Columbine Road.”

  “South Lake Tahoe?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know where Columbine Road is.”

  “I’ve got a map in the car.” Cape handed over another twenty, added an extra ten. “Thanks, Gary. You may have just saved my ass.”

  “What’d Stickface do to you, anyway?”

  “Helped steal something from me that I’m going to get back, one way or another.”

  “Money?”

  “More important.”

  “What’s more important than money?”

  “Something that damn well does exist,” Cape said. “Freedom.”

  26

  Columbine Road.

  Short residential street, lower-middle-class neighborhood like the one off Black Bart Road. Number 465 was the last house in the block, butted up against the fenced perimeter of a cemetery. Shake roof, redwood siding, at least fifty years old. Screened-in front porch and plenty of shrubs, flowers in neat rows—advertisement for R. T. Landscaping Service. Driveway on the fenced side, pickup truck pulled in close to a detached garage.

  All of it was dark, not even a night-light showing. And no sign of the Chevy Suburban anywhere in the vicinity.

  Cape said, “Shit,” between clamped teeth. He made a U-turn, cut off Columbine on the nearest cross street, and went looking for a place to abandon the Corvette. Took him fifteen minutes to find one: grammar school, teacher’s parking lot behind an ungated chain-link fence, pocket of darkness under a big acacia tree. Safe enough there until morning. By then it wouldn’t matter one way or another if it was spotted.

  He found his way back to Columbine Road. Three sets of headlight beams picked him out of the dark; he walked through them and past them without hesitation, the way a resident would. None of the cars was official. Nobody hassled or paid attention to him. A middle-aged guy walking his dog even said hello as they passed each other.

  Rollo’s house was still dark, deserted. A porch light was on at the house next door, but the windows there were all black rectangles. Lights burned in the houses across the street; a woman moved behind an undraped picture window in the last one as Cape passed, but she neither glanced out nor paused. A TV set in there was tuned loud enough for the sound of canned laughter to reach all the way to the street. The woman’s attention was on the screen.

  Cape climbed the steps to Rollo’s screened porch. There was a bell; he didn’t touch it. The screen door was locked, so the one behind it to the house would be, too. He backed down the steps. The undraped window across the street showed him the TV blaring away, to an empty room now. He moved quickly to the driveway, followed it back to where the pickup sat. Black lettering on the driver’s door read R. T. LANDSCAPING SERVICE. He tried the handle. Locked.

  The backyard was another, smaller advertisement, cemetery-fenced on one side, tree-fenced on the other two. Dark, private. He checked the rear door to the house. Secure in the jamb, probably by a deadbolt. The window next to it was also secure; so were the windows set into the far side wall.

  In the backyard again, Cape ran his fingers along the edges of the window adjacent to the door. Single pane, not thick, the putty holding it old and cracked. One sharp blow ought to break it.

  Take the risk?

  Better than waiting out here in the cold. Christ knew when Rollo would decide to come home.

  Cape took off his jacket, wrapped it around his right arm. When the wind made some noise, he drove his elbow against the glass.

  It broke cleanly, the crash loud enough in his ears to freeze him in place. A dog began to bark somewhere, not close by. He strained to hear other sounds. Rasp of his breathing, thud of his heart, the wind. He kept on waiting, listening. The dog’s barking grew sporadic, finally quit altogether. Another minute. Two, three.

  Nothing.

  He moved then, picked jagged shards out of the bottom frame so he wouldn’t slice himself up when he reached inside. The catch was jammed or rusted in its groove. Took him another two or three minutes to wiggle it loose, and still more time to slide the sash upward far enough for his body to fit through. He was sweating again, shivering from the cold, when he hoisted himself over the sill. A glass sliver dug into the heel of his hand as he swung down; he barely felt it.

  Utility porch. He bumped into a smooth, hard surface that his fingers told him was a washing machine. He groped his way along the washer and a dryer next to it, found a wall, shouldered along it until he reached a doorway. Then he was in the kitchen. Enough moonlight dusted through a window in there to show him the shapes of a sink, refrigerator, dinette table and chairs.

  At the sink he began opening drawers that extended below on both sides. The fourth one yielded a flashlight. He shielded the lens with his hand before he switched it on. The batteries were good, the beam steady.

  Cape crossed the kitchen, letting just enough light spill out between his fingers to guide him through a swing door into a small dining area. Adjoining that was the living room. His nostrils dilated as soon as he started in there.

  Marijuana—the thick, acrid reek of it.

  He went all the way in, playing snatches of light. Ashtray on a coffee table overflowing with roach butts. Two dirty highball glasses, a mostly empty fifth of Jim Beam, plates littered with food remnants. Sleeper couch pulled out and made up with rumpled sheets, blankets, for a recent overnight guest—Boone Judson, probably. Rollo keeping the scapegoat fed, watered, and stoned before the slaughter.

  The living room had nothing else to tell him. The remainder of the house was two small bedrooms, one outfitted as an office, and a messy bathroom. In Rollo’s bedroom, the nightstand drawer held a well-used crack pipe and other drug paraphernalia. Heavy user, all right—high when he murdered Vanowen, no doubt stoned the afternoon he strangled Tanya and tonight at Cabins in the Pines. Much easier to kill another human being when you had chemical assistance.

  Cape checked quickly through the closet, the dresser drawers. Nothing. The office contained a beat-up rolltop desk, a Radio Shack computer and printer, a metal file cabinet. Desk first, then the cabinet.

  Know your enemy.

  Evidence. More than enough for him, if not for Captain D’Anzello.

  Release papers from Arizona State Prison in Yuma, dated six years ago. Four years served of a four-year sentence for unspecified crimes.

  Bill of sale, three years old, for a secondhand fourteen-foot boat and an Evinrude outboard motor.

  Receipts from Baxman Marine, Pine Beach, for boat storage.

  Thirteen thousand dollars in cash, a gold Rolex watch that belonged to J. T. Sturgess, and Vince Mahannah’s unique turquoise-and-silver ring.

  Cape sat in a butt-sprung armchair in the living room, a fireplace poker close beside him.

  Working it out and waiting for Rollo.

  Midnight.

  The silence was so acute it had the effect of pulsing sound in his ears, like surf in a shell. He’d been tight-strung for a long time. Now a kind of lethargy was creeping through him.

  Twelve-thirty.

  Emotions growing dull, thoughts sluggish. The aches in his body bone-deep, as if burrowing. His eyelids had a weighted feel.

  One-fifteen…

  Sudden noise.

  Cape heaved up ou
t of the chair, groggy with sleep, still caught in shredded fragments of the dream. For a few seconds Anna was still there with him, screaming accusations, and he could hear echoes of Mary Lynn’s voice saying, “If you don’t beg God’s forgiveness, you’ll burn in the fires of hell,” his old man down in Florida laughing drunkenly and saying in the raspy voice of the other old man tonight, “Life’s gonna grab you by the balls, you don’t watch out.” Then all at once voices and fragments were gone, replaced by a jarring awareness of where he was—the room, the darkness, the marijuana stink.

  And the noise again. No, noises, outside on the street.

  Car engine, percussive music.

  He rubbed grit from his eyes; shapes swam into focus. The front window was only a few steps away. He staggered to it, parted the curtains just enough so he could see the street.

  Kids, not Rollo. A Trans Am with its radio playing loud rap, drawn up in front of the house opposite, engine throbbing, headlights reaching all the way to the cemetery fence. Couple inside in a heavy clinch. The door to the house over there opened suddenly, and a man in striped pajamas came charging out, yelling.

  Cape quit watching. He made his way back to the chair but didn’t sit. His head ached fiercely, his heart still hammered. The luminous dial of his watch gave him the time: 2:57. He’d been asleep more than an hour.

  The Trans Am’s engine growled, its tires squealed. Seconds later those noises and the beat of the music died away. Silence came down thick again.

  Three A.M., and still no Rollo.

  Not home by now, he wasn’t coming. Spending the night somewhere else.

  Cape switched on the flashlight, not bothering to shield the beam now, and followed it into the kitchen. He splashed his face with cold water from the sink tap, drank thirstily from cupped hands. The bitter taste in his mouth remained.

  Weakness in his limbs, lower back pain, the fierce headache—rough shape all around. But it was only fatigue, stiffness from sleeping propped up in the armchair, the constant tension. He’d be all right. Just get moving. Bad-luck Cape, but still sound enough for a lot more miles if he could just get free and back on the open road again.

  First things first. He remembered keys in one of Rollo’s desk drawers. Spare key to the pickup in the driveway?

  27

  The Ford truck was a piece of crap. It took Cape nine or ten tries, the exhaust farting gouts of smoke, before the engine caught and held; and when it was running, it had a catch in it like an asthmatic’s wheeze and a tendency to misfire if you bore down too hard on the accelerator. The gearbox and clutch assembly were as cranky as the engine: the one ground, the other slipped and strained every time he shifted.

  Small price. The heater worked the way it was supposed to, at least, and the gas gauge showed an almost full tank. Along with the early-morning darkness, the pickup’s warm shell provided protective coloration. Proof of that when a police car passed him as he approached Stateline on mostly empty Lake Tahoe Boulevard. Neither of the cops inside even glanced at him or the R. T. LANDSCAPING SERVICE painted on the door.

  Cave Rock.

  Nobody home.

  Pine Beach.

  Long, tense drive back through South Lake Tahoe, north on Highway 89 through a precipitous stretch high above Emerald Bay that left him even more fatigued. Tiny hamlet strung along a deep curving inlet strewn with anchored pleasure craft. A pair of marine retailers and repair outfits, one at each end of the inlet; the second was Baxman Marine.

  Small place just off the highway: fenced-in boatyard, tiers of dry-docked boats, corrugated iron building not much larger than a house, long T dock with slips. And on the gravel strip in front of the fence gates, a bulky shape that the Ford’s headlights identified as a light-colored SUV. Cape slowed to a crawl as he passed by. Chevy Suburban, slewed in at an angle so that the rear license plate was easy to read: RTLDSCP.

  He kept going for another hundred yards, swung over onto the verge in front of a darkened grocery store. This late, the highway was deserted. It stayed that way as he made his way back to Baxman Marine.

  The only lights visible anywhere inside the fence were night-lights, some on poles along the dock that made the lake water gleam blackly, like an oil slick. Among the shapes and shadows, nothing moved that he could make out. He turned to the Suburban. The driver’s door wasn’t locked; he pulled it open long enough to determine that the interior was empty. At the front, he laid a hand on the hood—cold, the metal spotted with dew. Parked here for quite a while.

  The two halves of the yard gate were joined but not secured, a padlock hanging loose through one of the chain links. Cape slipped inside, picked his way past the dry-docked boats and a scattering of trailers and other equipment. On the near side of the corrugated building was a set of wide double doors; a regular-size door was cut into the near end wall. He tried that one first. Locked. An ear laid against the cold metal picked up faint wind-generated vibrations, no other sounds. He stepped away from the downspill from the nightlight above, went to check the double doors. Also secure.

  This place must belong to somebody Rollo knew well enough to entrust him with keys. He paid a cut-rate price for storage, too. Was that why he’d come here tonight, to take his boat out on another night run somewhere?

  Cape went down to the slips, out onto the dock. Halfway along he found a fourteen-foot skiff, its engine tilted up out of the water and tarp-covered. He lifted a corner of the tarp; the outboard was an Evinrude. The other boats moored here were a mixed lot, no two alike. Odds against more than one fourteen-footer outfitted with an Evinrude. Odds on that this one was Rollo’s.

  So where the hell was he?

  As Cape pivoted, started back, his attention caught and held on the rear of the warehouse building. He stopped again, looking up there.

  Lighted window in that wall, the glow framing it steady, bright. The window was high up, too high to see through without a ladder. The light might be an office nightlight, but there wasn’t much sense leaving one on inside with the grounds lit up the way they were.

  He slid a hand into his jacket pocket, brought out the ring of Rollo’s spare keys. Then he hurried up and around to the single door in the front wall. The third key he tried fit the lock, turned the bolt. He held a breath, edged the door open and himself through, shut it fast behind him.

  The light at the rear came from a desk lamp in what appeared to be an office walled off by dirty glass and particleboard. From this distance Cape could make out little of what was inside. The outpouring of lamplight extended only a few yards; most of the warehouse space was heavily shadowed, its concrete floor crammed with shapes large and small, identifiable and unknown. No sounds came from the office or anywhere else. The hush had a crackling quality that raised the hairs on Cape’s scalp.

  Ahead was an aisleway that seemed more or less clear. He moved that way, one slow step at a time, a hand extended to fan the air in front of him. Stacks of board lumber, plywood sheets, wooden forms, a boat skeleton on a davit. Lathes, drill presses, table saws. Smells, distinctive in the cool air: sawdust, paint, linseed oil, turpentine. And something else, as he drew nearer the office—faint, unpleasant, not quite distinguishable yet.

  Twenty yards away, he sidestepped a hand truck that appeared suddenly in front of him—and ran into another object. It cracked glancingly off his forehead, rattled and swayed sideways, then swung back at him in the darkness. He ducked, crouched, as metallic echoes rolled through the interior. The thing kept on swaying above him—some kind of caged droplight suspended from a ceiling beam.

  No one appeared inside the office, no other lights came on.

  The echoes died away. The faint swishes made by the droplight died away. Dead hush again.

  Cape straightened slowly. When his pulse rate dropped, he moved forward again. The lamp in the office must be a nightlight after all. Rollo wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere on the premises….

  Wrong again, Cape.

  Rollo was there, all right. He’d
been there all along.

  Cape saw him as soon as he reached the partly open door. Dirt streaks in the glass wall gave the office a wavy, surreal look, as if he were seeing it through a sheen of murky water. Desk, swivel chair behind it, and Rollo in the chair, sprawled backward, head hanging to one side, mouth open and eyes squeezed shut, the expression on his face one of agony.

  Cape pushed the door all the way open, went in by one pace. The unpleasant smell was strong here, ammoniac. He breathed through his mouth as he moved nearer the swivel chair.

  Up close, Rollo wasn’t much to look at—broad through the chest, thick-lipped, potbellied. The front of his khaki pants was urine stained. No blood visible on him, no marks of violence—but the left sleeve of his soiled white shirt was rolled up, a piece of rubber tubing tied tightly around the bare upper arm. Cape stepped closer. On the floor between the desk and chair, the broken remains of a hypodermic syringe glinted in the lamplight. Scatter of grainy white powder down there, too.

  Overdose. Self-administered.

  Dead?

  No. Breath hissed and rattled faintly in Rollo’s throat; the pulse in his wrist was a weak flutter. In a bad way. Coma, maybe. He’d die if he didn’t get medical treatment soon.

  Cape hesitated, scanning the office. The bottom drawer in the desk had been pulled out; inside, its lid thrown open, was a metal lockbox partly filled with plastic baggies. Grainy white powder, rock crystals, loose marijuana, rolled joints. Drug deli. The owner of Baxman Marine had a profitable sideline; Rollo was an associate, his best customer, or both.

  There was a phone on the desk. Cape lifted the receiver with a piece of paper, tapped out 911. Five terse sentences, the last one giving Rolando Tarles’s name and the address of Baxman Marine. The dispatcher asked him to repeat, asked for his name; he broke the connection.

  He was still boxed in, almost as tightly as before. If Rollo died, he could still lose his freedom for good. D’Anzello could claim he’d administered the overdose. No proof that he hadn’t. No proof that he wasn’t Rollo’s partner in the robbery, that he’d had nothing to do with the deaths of Tanya and Judson.