Burning Moon

by Richard Barre

  Wil set his last clip on the table. “A helicopter’s what I thought, too, but listen to me: There’s still time to come to your senses on this.”

  “Just wave at your taillights, huh? And the girl?”

  “The smart money says bail, Den. You know it does.”

  Denny paused from a hit of coffee and grinned. “Smart hasn’t happened to either of us yet, why figure on now? Besides, I’d only sweat up a storm trying to sleep. And about the rest of your plan, are you going in with a wire?”

  Wil shook his head. “Even if I had a wire, they’d find it. Same with a pocket recorder.” And at Denny’s glance at the loaded clips, the .45, and the Mustang: “They’re to give them something to be concerned about. It’d look wrong if I came in light. Re the other, I have an idea I’m working on. Unless you know of a high-tech eavesdropping store that’s open at this hour.”

  “Not with this deadline.” Denny put a pair of night-vision glasses in the nylon bag, zipped it closed, settled the bag on his shoulder. “Good to go,” he said. “I’ll be as close as you need.”

  “You have to know what it means, Den.”

  “Damn straight,” he said, “another dawn patrol where I keep your ass from grief.” Turning at the door to add, “Which I intend to kick roundly if you don’t watch it yourself.”

  ***

  Lisa was hunched over her computer. As Wil popped his head into the office, she looked up, fatigue evident in the monitor’s glow. That and frustration.

  She said. “If I only had two more hours…”

  “You and me both,” he answered her.

  She drained the Diet Coke she had going. “Still not going to tell me why it’s so important to have this now?”

  “It’s not my call, Leese. Over and out.”

  “Which means what, the world ends?” she flared. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. Five minutes, okay?”

  “Five minutes,” he said. “Mind if I use the phone?”

  She waved it off, returned to her spreadsheets. Wil entered the office next to hers, Bev’s from the family photos. Facing the empty street outside, he punched up a line, dialed Frank Lin’s number, got a tired female voice.

  “Wil Hardesty, Andrea. Sorry for the hour, but I need Frank. It’s important.”

  Murmurs, then Lin: “Four in the goddamned morning? You never heard of tomorrow?”

  “Frank, it is tomorrow. And listen to me: I’m about to trade something for Mia Tien. Maybe some information that’ll help clear her old man.”

  Pause. “Somebody has the girl?”

  “That’s right,” Wil said. “Somebody who’ll kill her if they smell you coming. Somebody I believe when they tell me that.”

  “All right, slow it down. I’m getting there.”

  “Here’s the deal: If it goes bad, the guy you want is Maccafee, maybe in a chopper. He killed Lorenz. If you listen, I might be able to find out why. You might even be able to memo it.”

  “Memo what? A wire?”

  “Not a wire, Frank, a phone call. Open line, that’s why I’m calling you now,” Wil said. “Pick it up when I call back, but don’t talk into it. You might get us killed.”

  “Us…”

  “Myself and Mia Tien. Are you getting this?”

  “What’s the trade?” Lin asked.

  “Spreadsheets I’m hoping they’ll think came from Luc’s backup files. Records they missed when he crashed his system. Since you’ll hear it mentioned, a CD.”

  There was a pause; then, “Spreadsheets…I fucking don’t believe it. Lisa’s in on this, isn’t she?”

  “No.”

  “Bullshit,” Lin said. “Put her on, I want to talk to her.”

  “The phone, Frank. A little less than an hour.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Wil. In an hour I can have people around you. Armed people”

  “And who knows, we might even make it out…assuming you can get Rudy to go along,” he said. “The call, Frank. And pray it works.”

  He was hanging up when he turned and saw Lisa in the doorway. For a long moment she looked at him without speaking, eyes shining in the hall overheads. Then she handed him the disk, stepped back into her own office without speaking, and shut the door.

  68

  The two-lane that wove up San Marcos Pass and down the valley side, had until the late 1800s been a stagecoach route. Bandits with Navy Colts and sawed-off double-barrel 12-gauges had waited in its hollows and around its bends, beneath the ledges along its rutted grades. Now they waited with cell phones, Wil thought, his headlights rounding on the occasional turnout and passing lane, construction sites and traffic cones awaiting the return of Cal Trans.

  With the road largely free of traffic, he was able to make out eucalyptus giving way to oak and toyon and, through a curving slice of uptilted sediment, ridgetop pines silhouetted like the parapets on a castle. The chaparral rose with him—ceonothus and chamise, yuccas looking like armless scarecrows—the asphalt switching back as Maccafee’s imagined eyes relayed his approach.

  He wondered who else waited up there.

  With luck, Denny.

  Wil thought about the ex-ghost reappearing in his life, the feeling that just maybe life decided you deserved another crack at it. But like this? At five minutes to midnight? Their times together flashed: the boys of summer hellbent after outlaw surf mystique and the perfect break. Their lives as men, then, how each had formed up along an invisible line. Of where the line really was, and if it didn’t meander at times.

  He thought about the cancer eating its way through his friend.

  Of the healer in Bali.

  Of luck in general.

  Then he was at his turn, into it and winding though the few houses tucked into Camino Cielo’s base. Crossing a creek, Wil thought he glimpsed Den’s Explorer angled in near a roofline, the oaks and bay trees as overarching as any tunnel. Here, the road was old and cracked, wide enough for two cars, if one yielded. Through the mother of all hairpins, then, a grass-fringed drop-off, a row of mailboxes for the houses below the ridgeline.

  By mile two, they were behind him.

  He passed shed-sized boulders, outcroppings against the blue-gray dawn. Promontories offered glimpses of far-below lights and dark ocean, the islands as if outlined with a drafting pen. Just visible on the other side, the San Rafael Range and wilderness backcountry disguised desolate, parched, triple-digit heat. Hiker rescues and thunderheads, flash floods that could carry a camper van miles downstream or bury it to the windows in mud.

  The road was rougher now, increasingly pocked and fissured. Half a mile ahead and on the right Wil could see the roof of an outbuilding he knew was on the shotgun range. Four minutes till five. He punched up Frank’s number on his speed dial; for a tense moment the call didn’t go through. He dialed again, and a third time.

  “Wil?”

  Jesus God. “Fingers crossed, Frank. Almost there.”

  “Listen and hear, Wil. Wherever you are, it is not the OK Corral.”

  “So we hope. Just don’t wander off.”

  Pocketing the phone, he passed the left-side road leading to the pistol and rifle range, then eased off beside a gray Yukon with smoked windows. The area beyond the gate was graded, relatively treeless, and overlooked the valley side. Seventy yards in, the cinder-block structure stood shut tight and backed by a low wall. Past it the competition areas were gridded out in concrete walkways: wood fence and an open-roofed shelter; two launching bunkers, low and dug-in; straw target backings against a berm on the left.

  Pines on the hill behind it.

  Silent…shadowed…empty…

  Wil got out to chill air laced with blackened manzanita, no one around. Then the Asian man who’d nearly broken his ribs rose from cover, gestured with the machine pistol he now held for Wil to step through the gate’s open frame. Wil did and the man followed, pointed beyond the cinder blocks to the fence and shelter, shoved Wil ahead.

  They reached the shelter, around and out of sight
of the gate and road. At which point Sonny stepped out with a pistol, then Maccafee in his gray slacks and nylon shell. In one fist Maccafee held the other end of a length of dog chain wrapped around Mia Tien’s neck. In his other, which rested casually on her shoulder, he held a matte-finish military knife. Mia’s wrists were duct-taped in front of her, her ankles in a short loop of it, a strip across her mouth. Her eyes were red with fatigue and tension, wide with something resembling relief at seeing Wil. Looking into them, he could feel his furnace thump to life, his blood course faster, a buzzing behind his eyes.

  He took her hands in his, felt the chill in them.

  “Did they hurt you?”

  She shrugged, shook her head.

  “Overall, you’re okay.”

  Nod.

  “It’s going to be all right, Mia. A little longer and you’re out of it.” Behind her in the growing light he could see the shards of countless blown-up sporting clays like a field of orange wildflowers fanning out to the rim.

  “Well?” Maccafee said to Sonny. “You going to greet our man or just stand there?”

  As Machine Pistol backed up a step, Sonny waisted his own pistol and bent to the task. First he found the .45 in Wil’s shoulder rig, then the tape around his ribs, grinning as he got a wince in reaction. Then down to the ankle gun—unholstering it and depositing both handguns in the rusting drum beside signs reading PLEASE PICK UP HULLS and THINK GUN SAFETY.

  Pants pockets, then the ones in Wil’s windbreaker: Pausing there, Sonny came out with the CD Lisa had worked on taped to Harmony’s locker plaque in one hand, Wil’s phone in the other. Holding up the case and plaque, he looked at Maccafee as Wil felt time stop. Then, as quickly as it came, the moment passed. Switching the knife to his leash hand, Maccafee extended his right for the articles, slipped the phone into his own jacket as Sonny waved a wand scanner over Wil’s front and back and down each arm.

  “He’s clean,” Sonny said. “No wires.”

  But Maccafee was fixed on the CD and case, checking for the backside crown mark after untaping it from the plaque he tossed aside. As though marveling it was there, he turned the case in his hands.

  “All for this, fucking hard to believe,” he said, holding it out for Sonny to take back. “Okay. Run it up and let’s have a look. Not that we don’t trust Mr. Hardesty.”

  Sonny reached into a gear bag behind him and came out with a laptop; turning it on and waiting a moment, he activated the CD drawer and backed in the disk. For a longer moment, he tapped keys, scrutinized the screen as Wil let eyes roam casually for signs of Denny.

  He saw none.

  “The hell is this shit?” Sonny glancing up.

  “It’s a Vietnamese poem,” Wil said, angling a look. Catching Mia’s eyes widen and swing his way, just as quickly slide off. “Jimmy’s girlfriend wrote poetry. He must have left it on as a decoy, because the spreadsheets come after.”

  Sonny looked at Maccafee, who shrugged, Sonny returning to the keyboard to skip over, pause, then nod.

  “Here,” he said to Maccafee. “Grids and numbers.”

  “What we’re looking for?”

  Sonny scrolled, stopped again. “Can’t tell. Before her, Luc never let anyone but Jimmy in the loop. But it looks like it.”

  Maccafee reached up and yanked the tape off Mia’s mouth, Mia recoiling, gasping at the sudden pain. He forced her eyes down to the screen. “Lie and it’s over, Missy,” he said. “Here and now, and I will know: This is what you worked on?”

  She took a long look, then in a hoarse voice, “Not worked on, entered, and not these specifically. The ones I did came later.”

  Good girl, Wil thought, not even a glance in his direction.

  “What about the format?” Maccafee asked her.

  “Yes. Now can I have some water?”

  “All you want in a few minutes.” Checking his watch.

  “What about my father?”

  “Ah, him,” Maccafee said. “Can you say lethal injection?”

  Mia’s eyes widened and she was about to respond when Wil said, “We have a deal.” A message for her in its sharpness: Not now. “Her for the disk, remember?”

  Maccafee snorted. “Don’t you hate when that happens. Or did you really think you were going to cross me and make it out the other side.”

  “Straight trade,” Wil said. “That was the deal.”

  The snort became a laugh, Sonny joining in. Then, “You two ever tried bungi jumping from a helicopter? That feeling of freedom without the annoying cord and harness.”

  “Bag it, Mia, let it go,” Wil said. Forcing his eyes from the mask her face had become. “He’s about played out and he knows it.”

  Maccafee nodded to Sonny and the big man drove a fist into Wil’s ribs. Curled against the fire and knives, the roaring in his throat that had replaced air, Wil saw Maccafee reverse his grip on the knife and underhand it to Machine Pistol, who caught it easily.

  “He’ll drop as good cold as warm,” he heard Maccafee say. “Do it.”

  Sonny grinned, stepped back to give him room, Maccafee jerking Mia that way. Machine Pistol set his gun on the numbered concrete walk and advanced a step. As he flipped the knife without looking at it, anticipation on his face resembling hunger, Wil caught movement from the shadow side of the bunker.

  Suddenly the air blew apart and Machine Pistol was hurled backward as if by a cable. His body arched, flattened, arched again and lay there, one clawed hand scrabbling the ground.

  For a moment nothing moved. Not even slow motion.

  Then Sonny’s pistol was out from behind his back, and he was firing, driving Denny, who’d had to hesitate because of Mia and his angle in front of her, down behind the dug-in bunker. Sonny’s rounds raised dirt and trap shards, ricocheted off the concrete, sang in the air. Wil lunged for the machine pistol, raised it, and as Sonny noticed and swung toward him, triggered a burst that sent the big man crashing off the wood fence and onto his face.

  That quickly, it was over. Except Maccafee had his Beretta out and pressed under Mia’s ear, his other arm crooked around her neck.

  “Lose it or she dies,” he said to Wil.

  “Then what?” Wil said. “I drop you?”

  “Everybody just stays calm until my ride comes.”

  Wil steadied on the machine-pistol grip. He said, “You have one chance of getting out of here with what you came for, and it doesn’t involve her. We both know that.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “My word, Maccafee. She lives, you still win.”

  “Then who in hell would that be?” Squinting as Denny walked toward him; his jaw dropping as it dawned.

  “Son of a bitch…”

  “He’s right, Mac, it’s not in the cards,” Denny said to him. “Neither are your two up at the pistol range.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Maccafee said. Shaking his head in disbelief. “I heard the Australian got you…what’s-his-name.”

  “Funny thing about that. Wil here got the Australian.”

  “Hold it, just hold it,” Wil spoke up. “The whole time, you knew this meltdown?

  “It’s a small fraternity,” Denny said. Then to Maccafee, “Here’s how this thing plays, Mac. Drop it and turn her loose, tell my man what he wants to know, you walk with the disk. Settle up with me another time.”

  “And if now suits me better?”

  Shrug. “I dust you and hope I miss the girl. Either way, you wind up dead.”

  Maccafee glanced at Wil. “What about him?”

  “Unlike me, he won’t risk hitting her.” Then, “Sorry, Mojo. Drop the piece and walk from it.”

  Running odds on the outcome and not liking them, Wil held on as Denny beaded the shotgun on Maccafee, hence Mia.

  “Ain’t asking, bro,” Denny said. “Do it.”

  Whoever it was that Wil had known, knew, thought he knew, had disappeared. Eyes, body language, expression, voice. Or had that Denny Van Zant ever existed?

  Wil set down th
e machine pistol and eased away from it.

  “Now you, Mac, count of three. One…two…”

  Maccafee backed off the hammer, regripped and grounded the Beretta. Smiling, he turned Mia loose. “Your party,” he said as Wil cut the tape off her hands and ankles with the K-Bar. “Enjoy the next few minutes. They’re you’re last.”

  69

  “You all right?” Wil said to Mia when he’d straightened up.

  “I think so,” she said, massaging her neck with both hands. “God, I hardly know anymore. Who is that?”

  “No one,” Denny answered for him. “Now you, girl: The disk still in that laptop?”

  Surprised, Mia just nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “Set it out there ten yards, the whole thing. Move.”

  She did, walked back to stand by Wil. Denny said to him, “Go ahead and ask your questions. You don’t like the answers, I blow it up.”

  Maccafee said, “The fuck are you doing? The deal was the disk and I walk.”

  “New deal,” Denny said. “Your page, your book. Now or never, Mojo.”

  But Wil already was into it: a patchwork of fact, deduction, and guesswork. Saying to Maccafee, “You killed Luc because Under Heaven wanted the Dragons and said they’d cut you in if you delivered his records. Right or wrong?”

  “That what you think I work for, some cut?” Maccafee sneered. “Try it as the man.”

  Denny fired and a plume of dirt and shards rained down on the laptop.

  “Goddamnit, right. Yes.”

  Wil said, “You made Inez look like a suicide because she was going to turn you in. She was vulnerable at ATF and you got wind of it and used her.”

  “My ass,” Maccafee said, and as Denny aimed again, “All right!”

  A few more minutes, Wil thought.

  Stay with us, Inez…

  He said, “More: She gave you legitimacy, protective coloration. You took her in by convincing her it was Luc’s people who killed her father. That she could help bag Luc and save her career by getting Luc to admit it. But it was you who set up Russell Lorenz, wasn’t it?”

  “So what?” Maccafee said. “The sucker was going soft on me. Russ had been waking up with the zips we’d done over there sitting on his bed. Haunting him. He was going to ruin our side deals. That what you want to hear? And talk to me about loyalty and the feds in the same breath, I dare you.”