by David Freed
The address on Sequoia Way that Pete McManus’s wife had provided me matched an attractive, two-story log home with three dormer windows and a wraparound porch. No cars or trucks were parked in front or nearby, and there was no garage. I waited in my truck for approximately fifteen minutes without observing any movement. Most of the curtains were open. Maybe McManus was taking a nap. I decided to go find out.
I snugged the .357 into my belt, under my shirt, got out, and began walking toward the cabin. For a long time after leaving Alpha, I felt naked without a weapon on my person. I was glad to be carrying the revolver. I hoped it wouldn’t be needed.
A mud-strewn pair of men’s hiking boots leaned against an antique rocking chair on the porch. I peered in through the glass insert of the front door. Inside the living room, a moose head and a trophy cutthroat trout hung on knotty pine walls, each a testament to the art of taxidermy. On a side table inside the entryway, I could see a stack of unopened mail and the folded front page of a newspaper, the Mountain Enterprise. “Fire Destroys Motor Home,” was the lead headline. Below that was the date the paper had gone to press. The date was Friday. Today was Friday. Somebody was home, or had been recently.
I knocked and stood aside. No use catching a shotgun blast in the gut when you don’t have to. Call me paranoid, but you can never anticipate how some people will react if they fear they’re being hunted.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Pete, you in there?”
No answer.
My stomach reminded me that the only thing I’d had to eat all day were those two overcooked hotdogs. I drove a half-mile down the hill to what passed for the tiny central business district of Pine Mountain Club, a block of mostly gift shops and real estate offices. There was a bakery, but it was closed. Nearby was a Mexican restaurant, Casa Roberto’s, with seven tables, all of them unoccupied. The neon sign in the window said, “Open.”
The dearth of customers should’ve been my first clue that Casa Roberto’s was hardly a bastion of haute cuisine. The chicken enchiladas I ordered, awash in grease and a pale yellow soup that passed for cheese sauce, affirmed that reality. As a child, your parents teach you not to waste food, but my guess is that your parents never ate at Casa Roberto’s. A couple of bites and I was done.
I drove back up and parked down the hill from the cabin on Sequoia Way, far enough away not to be seen, yet close enough to see that there was still no vehicle out front. I reclined my seatback and waited.
A handful of SUVs and pickups drove past over the next half hour or so. None of their drivers or passengers so much as looked my way. A chubby adolescent riding a dirt bike with high fenders, no muffler, and a tinny, two-stroke engine slowed long enough to glance over before bombing up the hill. A minute later, he was back. I rolled down my window. He raised the visor of his Darth Vader helmet. He had braces on his teeth and rolls of fat under a sleeveless white T-shirt.
“You lost or something?”
“Nope,” I said, “just chillin’.”
“Cool.” He kept looking at me, gunning the bike’s throttle.
“You live around here?”
“Over there,” he said, pointing to a distant mountain.
A long, awkward lapse in conversation followed.
“It seems like maybe you want to ask me something,” I said.
“Yeah, I, uh . . .” He wiped his nose with the back of his right forearm. “I was just wondering if you’re, like, selling weed?”
“Do I look like a weed dealer?”
“I dunno. Kinda.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Oh. OK, cool. Cuz it’s just, like, you know, you look like somebody who would.”
“Yeah, I believe you said that already.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended. He kicked the dirt bike into gear and went bombing back up the hill. Two minutes later, a silver BMW convertible came cruising up the hill with the top up. Pete McManus was driving. He didn’t look over.
I watched him get out of his car. He was wearing jeans, and a flannel shirt with red and green checks, untucked. From the trunk, he removed two dead rabbits by their hind feet. Then he reached into the backseat and hauled out a bolt-action hunting rifle with a scope, black synthetic stock, and leather sling.
Like I said, I was glad I was packing.
I waited until he went inside before I started toward the cabin once more. At an elevation of 5,000 feet, the late afternoon air was pleasantly cool on my face and smelled of pines. Still I was sweating. Should I have called police? Perhaps. But I knew that it would’ve taken me nearly as long to explain my suspicions about McManus as it would have for them to show up and question him themselves. And what if I was wrong? What if he had nothing to do with the murders, and that his only sin had been carrying on with a married woman? McManus was already facing divorce. Did I really want to compound a fellow pilot’s misery by having him questioned needlessly by law enforcement, or harassed by the likes of TV reporter Danika Quinn and her ilk?
No.
I knocked on the door and stood aside as I had before, only this time with one foot slightly back, my shooting hand on my hip, ready to draw if need be.
“Who is it?” McManus said from inside.
“Cordell Logan.”
He gazed at me through the glass, then opened up, wearing a puzzled smile.
“What the heck are you doing here?”
His hands were empty. Good.
“Just passing through, Pete. Thought I’d stop by and say howdy. That’s what you say up here, isn’t it—howdy?”
“Nobody just ‘passes through’ way up here. What can I do for you, Logan?”
“Actually I wanted to talk with you about your relationship with Toni Hollister.”
His smile faded. “I wouldn’t call it a relationship. We were friends.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s one way to put it.”
“Maybe you’d better come in,” he said.
The living room was comfortable in an old, cowboy-and-Indian sort of way. There was a steer-hide-covered sofa with wooden arms like wagon wheels and a pair of matching easy chairs. The table lamps were converted kerosene lanterns. Along with the dead animals on the walls was a framed painting of actor John Wayne on horseback wearing an eye patch, the butt of a lever-action carbine propped on his thigh. Leaning in a corner next to the kitchen was what appeared to be the rifle I’d seen McManus remove from his car.
“You want a beer or something?”
“Water if you’ve got it.”
“Water it is.”
He strode into the kitchen. The dead rabbits were heaped in the stainless steel sink. I walked over to the rifle and took a closer look: a Winchester Magnum. The same make and model of rifle used to kill Toni and Roy Hollister. My heart beat a little faster. McManus noticed my interest in the gun.
“Shoots super sweet,” he said, returning with a longneck Budweiser and a glass of water.
“It has that look.”
“Know anything about guns?”
“Some.” He handed me the glass. “Your wife says you know a lot about them.”
McManus was frowning. “You talked to Peyton?”
“I did.”
“She told you what’s going on, between her and me?”
“She did.”
He lowered himself onto the sofa and gulped some beer. “So, Peyton, she tells you about Toni and me, then you drive all the way here, two hours, just to ask me about our relationship? What the hell do you care?”
I sat down in one of the steer-hide chairs opposite him. “The man Rancho PD has in custody, Dino Birch, you could say is a relative of mine, by marriage.”
“The animal rights dude. Yeah, I read about him,” McManus said. “He was some sort of sniper in the army. The dude had a big-time hard-on for Roy because of Roy’s business. And you think I shot them?”
“I’m not saying you did, Pete.”
“You’re not saying I didn’t, e
ither.” He set the bottle down on a log coffee table and was suddenly on his feet, pacing agitatedly, pointing his finger at me. “Let me tell you something, Logan. I loved that woman, more than any other woman I’ve ever known in my life, including my wife. Toni was beautiful, inside and out.”
“She was also married.”
McManus glared. “Roy didn’t deserve her. He used to slap her around when he got drunk. The things she went through with that guy . . .”
“Sounds like you and Toni were pretty serious.”
“We talked about her getting a divorce, moving away somewhere, but she just couldn’t leave him. That’s just who she was. Loyal to a fault.”
“So you decided that if you couldn’t have her, nobody could. Is that how it went down, Pete?”
His eyes were flat, brimming with rage. “You made a big mistake coming up here.”
That’s when he lunged for the rifle.
TWENTY
Pete McManus was younger than me and bigger. He was also faster. What he wasn’t, though, was schooled in close quarters battle. Like all Air Force Academy cadets, he’d learned basic hand-to-hand fighting. But he had never served on the ground, in a Tier One, direct-action unit. He’d never trained in combative techniques like Israeli Krav Maga, or practiced methods by which to stop an assailant from gaining control of a loaded firearm before you can. I had practiced such methods over and over, and if I’d been taught anything, it was that you don’t worry about the weapon. You worry about the man who can kill you with that weapon.
Could I have shot him with my own gun and claimed self-defense? Sure, but that would have required considerable explaining after the fact, like why I’d been carrying a gun without a concealed weapons permit to begin with. I would have had to explain my background in the intelligence community and that, I feared, might raise questions about what had happened in Prague, and the man I’d shot dead.
I wasn’t going to win the race to the rifle. I didn’t want to. As McManus leaned down and reached for it, I booted him in the head like I was kicking a football, my right foot to his right ear, then pivoted and knocked him into the wall with a hammer fist to the throat. He didn’t get up.
The rifle was now mine.
“You OK, Pete?”
He nodded, grimacing and clutching his throat. I helped him sit up.
“For you to even think that I’d ever hurt Toni or Roy is just . . .” He coughed a small amount of blood into his hand and showed it to me angrily. “Jesus, look at what you did.”
“My bad, but you gave me no choice. You were gonna shoot me.”
“The hell I was.”
I slid the Winchester’s bolt back. The rifle was empty. McManus had apparently unloaded it before I’d walked in. I immediately noticed that the firing chamber was appreciably bigger than what I presumed I’d find on a rifle built to shoot 7.62-millimeter ammunition, also known as .308 caliber. I looked closer: Engraved in steel on the side of the barrel were the words, “Made in the USA, Winchester Trade Mark Model 70, 338 Win. Magnum.”
Roy and Toni Hollister had been killed with a different caliber rifle than the one I was holding.
“What were you planning on doing with this?” I asked McManus.
“I wasn’t planning on doing anything,” he said, angrily pushing my helping hand away as he scraped himself off the floor and sat back on the couch, rubbing his neck. “I just wanted you to leave, that’s all. I loved Toni. I would’ve never hurt her. Whoever did is going to hell.”
“Three thirty-eight’s a pretty sizeable round to be hunting Bugs Bunny with, Pete. Bullet that big’ll put a hole in a cottontail big enough to walk through.”
“It was my father’s rifle,” McManus said, rasping. “The only one I keep up here.”
“Did he ever own a .308?”
“No.”
“Do you?”
“What’s so important about a .308?”
“The Hollisters were shot with a .308.”
“Well, it wasn’t mine,” McManus said, “and it wasn’t me. I’ve never owned a .308 in my life.” He got up and walked back into the kitchen, pulled an ice tray from the freezer, dumped the cubes in a plastic ziplock bag, and held the bag to his neck. “Feels like my throat’s broke or something.”
“If I’d done serious damage, you’d know it.”
He returned to the sofa, holding the ice bag to his neck and wincing.
“You didn’t squeeze off a couple rounds at my place last night, did you, Pete?”
“I don’t even know where you live. Besides I’ve been up here for two days. Goddamn, this hurts.”
I asked him about the BMW he was driving. At first he insisted that Toni had merely let him borrow it after the transmission blew out in the rattletrap Buick Regal he’d inherited from his father.
“Your wife told me otherwise,” I said. “The ragtop wasn’t a loaner. It was a gift.”
“Call it whatever you want. I really don’t care.” McManus rubbed his neck. “And I really don’t see how it matters. Toni had money. She’d been salting it away for years. She even wanted to leave me some. That’s how much she cared about me. As much as I cared about her. If you think I killed her, you’re nuts.”
“Toni wrote you into her will?”
“I didn’t want any of her money. I told her that. I don’t want any of it now. I just want her.” He began to blubber, burying his face in the crook of his arm. “I miss her so much,” he wailed.
If you’re a man, little is more uncomfortable than watching another man weep, especially if you only know him in passing. A part of you wants to comfort him and assure him you know what it feels like. Another part, however, wants to tell him to stop being such a weenie, shake it off, and get back in the game. If you choose to neither comfort nor condemn, the only options left are to sit there mutely, hoping he stops crying, or get up and leave.
I exercised the latter.
NIGHT HAD descended by the time I headed down out of the mountains and turned south onto the Golden State Freeway—directly into what can only be described as a traffic jam of biblical proportion. Some eighteen-wheeler had jack-knifed up the road, or a car had overturned, or the CHP had pulled over somebody for speeding and everybody else had slowed down to look, as if they’d never seen anyone get a ticket before. What specifically caused the delay didn’t matter. It never did when you were stuck in the infuriating, ever-worsening impasse that is Southern California’s freeway system. Ranting and changing lanes, I told myself, would get me through motorist purgatory no faster than if I calmly sat back and endured it.
The logjam only reinforced my belief that the drive up to see Pete McManus had been a bust. His demeanor and body language were hardly those of a murderer. As for whoever had taken those potshots the night before at my garage abode and, indirectly, at me, that wasn’t him either. The hunting rifle of a different caliber, McManus’s disposition, his genuine grief at Toni’s death. None of it was an exoneration or proof of innocence by any stretch, yet all of it left me convinced that I’d gone down a rabbit hole and come up with nothing.
My thoughts kept returning to Congressman Pierce Walton. The Buddha once said there are three things that cannot be hidden for long: the sun; the moon; and the truth. The truth was that it was Walton who had more to lose than anyone if the true nature of his relationship with Roy Hollister were made public. It was Walton who would’ve had abundant reason to fire a warning shot across my bow—or paid somebody to do it for him—to get me to back off and to send a message to the White House that he was not to be trifled with. Paying the congressman another visit was definitely high on my agenda.
Southbound traffic came to a complete stop. I heard on the radio that there was a big accident somewhere ahead of me near Castaic. The Highway Patrol had shut down the freeway to bring in a medevac helicopter. With no off-ramps for miles in either direction and going nowhere fast, I joined every other trapped motorist and turned off my engine. People got out of their cars to stre
tch and walk their dogs. Some climbed over the metal guardrails to relieve themselves in the brush below. Stopped directly ahead of me was a big, boxy camper truck with Iowa plates. The driver, a stooped and wizened geezer in oversized shorts and a plaid, button-down, short-sleeve shirt, climbed down with great effort and hobbled back toward my truck. He waved in a friendly way and offered me a Fig Newton.
“We’re not going anywhere for a while,” he said. “Gotta maintain our strength.”
“Very kind of you, sir. Thank you.”
I helped myself to two.
He was one of those old-timers who, without prodding, was only too willing to share with strangers his personal history, unabridged. I listened politely for nearly an hour, nodding in all the appropriate places, while he told me about growing up on a pig farm outside Sioux Falls and trying to join the service during World War II, only to be classified unfit for duty because of a punctured eardrum. I learned all about his career as a high school math teacher and track coach and his five surviving children and eleven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and how he was on his way to Long Beach to visit his youngest daughter, and how his wife had passed away a week before last Thanksgiving. They’d been together sixty-five wonderful years, he said, the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. Then word filtered back that the road ahead had been cleared. People began piling back into their vehicles and firing up ignitions. It was time to be moving on. He asked me my name. His, he said, was Warren. We shook hands. I wished him luck.
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it, young man,” he said.
Though I couldn’t have known it then, I would nearly have to die before fully grasping the wisdom of his words.
IT WAS close to midnight by the time I pulled into Rancho Bonita. I was hungry. Rancho Bonita may be a world-class destination and a great place to call home, but it’s not exactly known for its late-night dining. Most restaurants stop serving after 2100 hours. I pulled into the McDonald’s on Majorca Street, in what passed for the bad part of town, and ordered a Filet-O-Fish sandwich, if only to delude myself into believing that I was eating healthy. I don’t know what species of fish they put in those things. I didn’t especially care. You slather enough tartar sauce on anything, all you taste is the sauce. I sat in my truck and tried not to make a mess.
