by Avery Duff
“In my pocket,” he said. “Keeping it safe for you and your daddy.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’re at the beach now.”
Then Gia came on again.
“Any idea where Reyes is?” he asked her.
“‘On the trail to Glendale,’ he told me, whatever that means.” Following Sharon Sloan.
“Oh, and he said he was taking over as your top investigator.” Reyes jerking Erik’s chain. “Find the do-re-mi?” she asked.
“No dough yet, but trending, yes,” he said.
After Robert finished his own seven-minute shower, he huddled with Erik. They both wanted to hit the park ASAP but had concerns about rangers patrolling campsites for parked cars, checking permits, ending the park’s day in good order.
“Trail bikes, right?” Robert asked.
“Bikes it is.”
Afterward, they’d drive the Beast as close as possible to the park’s West Entrance gate and from there, ride into the park proper.
The girl renting bikes said, “Raining cats and dogs next valley over. Sure you two want bikes?”
Erik told her, “Cats and dogs we can handle. Unless it’s raining buckets, we’re going.”
At the time, Robert smiled at the exchange.
A couple of hours later, there was nothing to smile about.
CHAPTER 38
Nothing about the desert agreed with Kiril or, for that matter, with Penko. Dry air, windblown sand, deceitful cactus with soft spikes that, if touched, caused pain and blistering.
“I ever get chance, I murder the desert,” Penko said, drunk again.
Kiril wondered: Has Penko been sober once since we followed the Yukon SUV from LA? Followed it into this godless high desert?
Even so, Kiril shared Penko’s frustration. Only one Bulgarian desert existed: Pobiti Kamani. The Stone Desert, near the Black Sea. He’d never bothered with it. Sand dunes, rock columns, and lizards, all better left to eurozone tourists with their strap sandals, socks, and short pants.
From the start, following that tricked-out Yukon in this flat terrain, with its five-mile straightaways, had presented difficulties, starting with the SUV’s first turn off the main highway. Right after, the SUV had pulled into the ranger station. If he’d had any idea what the SUV was about to do, he’d have never made the turn and exposed himself. As it was, he parked on the shoulder, a hundred yards up the road from the station.
“Why don’t I kill them right now?” Penko had asked, looking back at the ranger station.
In the ranger station? Are you insane?
“We must wait,” Kiril told him.
“For what?”
“Gospodar will tell me when, and we cannot disobey him.”
Hearing Gospodar, Penko quieted down. Kiril was lying to Penko. Gospodar had already ordered the right time to kill them—but what was the use in Penko knowing beforehand?
The same went for the two kurovi glavi in the back seat: Niko and Petar. All attitude with their gold chains, mirrored shades, and headphones, heads bobbing to Russian rap, loaded on rakia and talking their constant street shit.
Two turds, Penko called them. The same two Gospodar picked to man the Westlake and Playa Vista offices, back when that charade was going on. The pair of men offered so little, Kiril was certain they’d been sent along for only one reason: to make sure that the money, once in hand, came back to San Bernardino.
So far, no one had noticed Ilina’s rental car trailing them.
“First,” he’d told her, “you follow my car to the desert. Check in to motel.” He gave her the name. “Buy food in LA, and do not leave your room. I will come for you.”
“How long should I wait?” Ilina had asked.
“Until I come for you,” he’d said again.
But absolute clarity on this point mattered to Ilina. She was driving at something else and had pressed him. “How many days before I know you will not come?”
“Three days,” he said. “But I will come for you. You believe that, right?”
Enough so that she’d cashed out all her bank accounts—$30,000 total. And he’d believed enough in her to trust her with his own $50,000: his life.
She’d been afraid; he didn’t blame her.
For the first time since arriving in America, she’d slipped her higher-ups. As far as they knew, she was with a regular client. But her phone—its location function still switched on—was in an off-lobby restroom towel dispenser, not upstairs in her room.
After eight hours, Ilina would be considered missing. After that, Kiril believed Ilina would rather kill herself than return to LA and face the streets, unprotected like the girl, Radka.
On Kiril’s first night in the desert, keeping tabs on the lawyer and cop had proved difficult. Indian Cove campsite lay at the end of a straight road with no turnoffs. Only one reason to drive in—camping. And only one narrow entrance into the campground, making their own entry by car too obvious.
The best option: he and Penko had jogged over to the campsite perimeter. Taking a high position on nearby rocks, they would watch their targets for the night. If at any time the two other men took off on foot into the desert, he and Penko could simply follow them from there and do what needed doing.
Holes in his plan? Many. It was the best he could do on the fly.
That night on the rocks, watching the men camped next to a fire pit, Kiril cursed the wind that found him, even hunkered down in a crevasse. By 10:00 p.m., Kiril had run back to the car, banged on the window, and jumped inside. Niko and Petar were passed out, drunk.
Kiril took the keys from Niko, drove to Ilina’s motel, and found her room. The light was on inside. When she let him in, she was crying. No surprise; often, she cried. About a sweetheart back home or about one of her customers, he did not know.
“What is wrong?” she asked.
“Cold. Blankets, I need them.”
Top of her closet, she found two and handed them over. He pulled her to him and told her, “Whoever it is makes you sad, you will forget about him with time.”
“I know,” she said. “Stay warm, be careful.”
An hour later, Kiril climbed back up the Indian Cove rocks and tossed Penko one of the blankets.
“Don’t need,” Penko said, draining his last bottle of rakia.
“Good,” Kiril said, taking both.
He passed the rest of the night in peace; when he woke before dawn, Penko had passed out between two rocks. Below him, the targets stirred. Once Kiril saw them packing up the SUV—leaving, not trekking into the desert—he boot-heeled Penko. Hard enough to break a normal man’s ribs. Penko stirred.
“We go now,” Kiril told him, dropping the blankets between boulders.
In thirty minutes, coffee and Egg McMuffins in hand, they waited on the highway until that SUV exited Indian Cove Road. Twenty seconds later, Kiril pulled out to follow.
Again, everything conspired against him—stoplights, next to no traffic, and long straightaways.
Once into the desert—at a place called Boy Scout Trail—Kiril rolled up on them too fast. The SUV had already stopped. Too late to back up and take a position. Kiril drove past until he came to a parking lot a few miles down Park Boulevard.
He wondered what to do next—go back and risk detection, or wait here—when the SUV passed by. Pulling out and lagging behind them again, Kiril caught his first break. The SUV parked in a lot across from a place named Skull Rock; he pulled onto the shoulder, five hundred yards back.
Rest of that day, through binoculars, Kiril watched the two men searching the area; his mind wandered to his youth in the Pirin Mountains, south of Sofia. Camping in the Rila range to prey on tourists. His favorite targets had been the spiritualists who danced and meditated near the monastery. Dressed only in white robes, they left their passports at their lodgings—for safekeeping with their trusted Draganov guide. That same day, those passports would find their way onto Sofia’s black market.
Grown men and women dancing in
white robes? Kiril wondered. They would fit in on Westside of LA.
By afternoon, back from Skull Rock, the two men had come up empty-handed; they’d driven their SUV past Kiril’s stakeout, out of the park.
Two hours later, Kiril knew the situation had changed at last: the two men rented trail bikes, parked the SUV, and rode the bikes back into the park. Three and a half miles in, they steered their bikes off-road, ditched them, and began hiking into the desert.
“This will be it,” Kiril told Penko, pulling a U-turn. “Ready to kill them?”
“More than ready,” Penko said.
“Kill them and get home,” Niko said. “I have tickets to Hollywood Bowl concert.”
Kiril could’ve just as easily asked the three men: “Tell me this, Niko, Petar, Penko: Is each of you ready to die by my hand?”
As he parked at the North View Trail parking lot, his thoughts shifted to Ilina’s tears last night. Best girl of the group, she was strong, smart, and beautiful. Even though her body was his, he thought about asking her who it was she cried for. But what good would that do? She would lie or tell the truth, and still he would not know the answer. Better he earn her respect first and worry later about earning love.
Jarring him from his reverie, the sound of Penko vomiting bile and booze into the parking lot storm drain. So Kiril opened the Ford’s trunk. Instead of guns, he’d picked Tasers, knives, and telescoping batons.
“In a national park, possession of firearms is legal,” Gospodar told him. “But noise and ballistics tests, who needs that?”
Kiril agreed. Firearm reports would carry for miles out here. One word of a discharged weapon to rangers could kill his chances of escaping this flat, hostile land.
Kiril and the others ran from the parking lot to the ditched bikes, about a hundred yards off Park Boulevard; they climbed partway up a nearby rock formation, where Kiril glassed the two hikers out in the desert.
For the first time since this trip started, Kiril smiled. Guns to kill those two? With Penko along, guns would be unfair.
CHAPTER 39
Walking toward Samuelson’s Rocks, Robert and Erik agreed: John Samuelson qualified as a desert legend. According to Baker, Samuelson had worked his own mining operation, won a gunfight, did serious jail time off it, and had an unquenchable thirst for solitude. Even though Samuelson’s gunfight and jail time happened back in LA, Robert and Erik awarded him legend status anyway, given what was carved into the rocks spread out ahead of them.
“A Swedish immigrant,” Robert said. “One of your crazy homies.”
“Respect,” Erik said.
After riding into the park, they’d ditched their bikes off-road at a rock-mound formation and began the manageable hike toward these rocks. Each wore a near-empty backpack. They believed the trust’s money lay less than a mile across the sandy plain ahead, where a short stretch of granite rocks jutted from the desert floor.
“No path,” Baker said, “leads out to the rocks.”
The rocks remained an island of private property inside a public park. The hike out to them appeared to be flat and slightly down-sloping, but the terrain was actually more a series of dips and rises, sandy waves invisible to their unpracticed eyes. Along the way, they avoided the occasional prickly pear and let themselves be awestruck by armies of Joshua trees, burnished gold by the last strands of sand-filtered desert daylight.
Halfway there, Robert turned around to check their bearings. Park Boulevard had blended into the desert. He had no way to locate it, other than knowing it lay just beyond that rock formation.
“Hey, look at that,” he called out.
Erik had walked forty yards ahead. By now, given the dips, only his head and upper torso were visible. Robert caught up with him; together, they eyed an apocalyptic bank of gray-granite weather rolling over the mountains beyond Park Boulevard, tumbling down onto the distant desert plain.
“How far away, you think?” Erik asked.
“Three, four miles,” Robert said, a layman’s guess.
“Gonna get wet,” Erik said.
“Gonna be worth it,” Robert said.
They took off running toward Samuelson’s Rocks.
Kiril crouched beside Penko and the other two halfway up in the rocks; he again glassed the two hikers. Without binoculars, the pair was already impossible to pick out of the landscape. Even so, Kiril believed the time to act was at hand—the other men had ridden in on bikes and worn backpacks for the first time. And they hiked into the desert even now, with night coming on.
Through his binoculars, he watched the pair start running toward the large bank of rocks in front of them; nothing in his guidebook clued him to that formation’s name.
Kiril stood up. “It is time.”
“My God,” Niko said, pointing behind them. Petar even removed his mirrored Oakleys.
That storm marched down the face of a mountain. Thunder rumbled against lightning that jabbed a doomsday sky. Kiril’s hair tingled with electricity.
They made the desert floor beside the two bikes; the first fat raindrops pelted the sand.
Kiril thoughts turned to the lawyer and the cop:
Find my money now, you two. Find it, so I can take it and get out of this desert.
Even before reaching the rocks, Robert knew they were right on target. Just ahead, he singled out two carved words on Samuelson’s closest granite inscription: Truht and Faiht. Misspelled, same as Carlos’ work notes; both words, and many others, had been chiseled into granite.
Five feet tall, Samuelson’s Rock of Faiht and Truht must have broken from a larger section of stone and fallen to earth, where it leaned at a twenty-degree angle against the rocks behind it.
As they stopped in front of it, Robert took in the eccentric Swede’s labor-intensive inscription:
THE.ROCK.
OF.FAIHT.
AND. TRUHT.
NATURE. IS. GOD.
THE. KEY. TO. LIFE.
IS. CONTACT.
EVOLUTION. IS. THE MOTHER.
AND FATHER OF MANKINE.
WITHOUT THEM. WE. BE. NOTHING.
JOHN SAMUELSON
1927
Each letter, other than signature and date, ran five inches tall. Robert found it hard to imagine anyone with patience enough to use extra punctuation. Each period must’ve taken hours to chisel by hand.
“Unbelievable,” Erik said.
And it was. Baker had mentioned nine other rocks nearby with Samuelson’s inscriptions, touching on everything from the genius of Henry Ford to the greed of banker Andrew Mellon and of all politicians with their hands in your pocket.
“Me and Samuelson might’ve hit it off,” Erik had told Baker.
At the moment, Robert tried to imagine John Samuelson’s typical day. Out here in the raw elements, his house somewhere nearby, long ago burned to the ground. This place vibed shrine to Robert. Shrine to a half-crazed, hard-assed man doing exactly what he wanted to do, saying to hell with anyone who didn’t like it.
“See a cairn anywhere?” Robert asked.
“Nope,” Erik said. “You do the honors.”
Robert dropped to his knees in front of the rock, reached into the dark space behind it. Nothing at first. Then he reached in farther, shoulder-deep.
“Talk to me,” Erik said.
“Nada so far.”
He began circling his hand. At his circle’s nadir, he touched something man-made—cloth or canvas—and grabbing what felt like a strap, he pulled. It weighed forty pounds or so, and as he dragged the canvas backpack into the light, the first raindrops splattered the rocks.
Erik knelt beside him. “Can’t believe it.”
“Can’t, either,” Robert said.
He unzipped the backpack’s main compartment. Stacks of currency lay inside. Pulling the first stack out, he counted ten $1,000 bills. The other nine stacks were the same: a total of $100,000.
They both gazed at what lay underneath those bills: loose granite stones.
&n
bsp; Taking out one of them, Robert looked around; rocks like it littered the area. Carlos hadn’t hiked them in. He’d filled his backpack once he was here.
“A hundred grand,” Erik said. “That’s it?”
“You shitting me, Carlos?” Robert asked.
Searching the side pockets, Robert found Carlos’ handwritten note, read it out loud:
Teo, if it’s you, you know how to find the rest. You already know I love you.
I’m sorry. Don’t Forget!
Your brother, Carlos.
If you’re not Teo? Go pound sand! Ha!
“Ha?” Robert said. “That’s it? Ha!”
Erik sat down, rested his back against the Rock of Faiht and Truht.
“Forgive me, Jesus. I hate Carlos Famosa’s guts.”
Robert couldn’t find any words. So he did some simple math instead: $18,000 cash, plus the $5,000 from the hashish, another $30,000 from Reyes’ Risky Business event, plus this $100,000. That meant about $150,000 in the trust’s kitty.
If this is all there is . . .
Erik sprang to his feet.
“Heads up. Behind us, no kidding.”
Robert stood. Looked upslope, back the way they’d come, didn’t see anything.
“What?”
“Wait,” Erik said, slinging Carlos’ backpack onto his shoulder, along with his own pack.
Another ten seconds, Robert spotted them. A quarter mile away—four men. One in the lead. All of them now emerging from one of those dips, running headlong at them, like they were pulling that dark storm behind them.
“Boris,” Robert said.
“Let’s book,” Erik said.
In sync, they ran around Samuelson’s huge pile of granite rocks, taking themselves farther away from Park Boulevard but putting these rocks between them and their pursuers.
Along the way, Robert pictured that big man, out in front of the others. Not running with the grace of a long-distance runner, his legs pistoned like an NFL running back, punishing anyone in their path. That fierce gait looked familiar—but he couldn’t place it.
Still keeping Samuelson’s rocks between them and Boris, Robert and Erik made three on-the-fly notes: Boris wanted the money, Boris would kill them no matter what, and stay together.
