Текст книги "Voodoo Ridge"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

“Think I’ll go out and check on my plane,” I told Marlene.

“Certainly.”

She buzzed me through a glass security door. I pulled the collar up on my leather jacket and walked out to the flight line. Gordon Priest, I decided, could wait. My grilling him about his possible involvement in his nephew’s murder would’ve only antagonized him and probably gotten me in trouble with the sheriff’s department, accused of interfering with Streeter’s investigation.

The Ruptured Duck was tied down directly in front of Summit Aviation, between a Cessna Cardinal and a notoriously unstable V-tail Bonanza – a “Doctor Killer” as they’re commonly known in general aviation because more than a few physicians have been known to buy them and die in them. I grabbed a green, six-foot fiberglass folding ladder leaning near the front door, propped it in front of the Duck’s right wing, climbed up, and began brushing off eight inches of wet snow with my forearm.

“Thought you might want this,” Marlene said, emerging from inside, sans coat, carrying a snowbrush in hand.

“ ’Preciate it.”

“You know,” she said, “it occurred to me, if you’re interested in an Australian shepherd puppy, you really should talk to my friend, Liam. He and Gordon, they’re sort of business partners. Liam knows everything there is to know about Aussie shepherds. He’s from there, you know, the land down under.”

* * *

Liam was Liam McMahon, proprietor of Sundowner Sports, a ski and kayak rental shop situated about a half mile from the gondola station at the base of the Heavenly Mountain Resort. Marlene had described him as a middle-aged charmer, an expert snow and water skier popular with the ladies. Sitting in my Yukon outside his small but bustling shop and observing the activities within, it was easy to comprehend why:

A wiry man with Goldilocks tresses that he wore in a ponytail, craggy, sun-burnished features, and a quick, dazzling smile, McMahon moved easily among his customers, teasing and laughing as he fitted them for boots, skis and snowboards. I waited until the crowd thinned before going in. If I concluded that McMahon was in any way complicit in Savannah’s disappearance, things could get ugly in a hurry; I didn’t want anyone else but him getting hurt.

What I assumed would be a short wait turned into nearly an hour. A steady procession of customers came and went, most of them young and laughing, eager to hit the slopes the next day. As the sun went down, I found myself growing increasingly antsy, unable to sit still—shpilkes in my toches, Mrs. Schmulowitz called it – needles in my butt. Customers or not, I’d decided I couldn’t wait any longer when my phone rang. Caller ID showed a number in Lake Tahoe’s 530 area code.

“This is Logan.”

“Yeah, you, like, came by and showed me a picture this morning. Some lady you’re looking for?”

The voice was young, male. It took me a second: the high school kid who’d paused from shoveling snow out of his parents’ driveway as I approached him.

“I remember. What’s up?”

“Yeah, well, like, I can’t be a hundred percent sure, OK? But I’m, like, pretty sure I saw her this afternoon.”

ELEVEN

The kid said his name was Billy. He told me he hoped to be either a firefighter and help people, or a downhill racer on the Pro Ski Tour and get laid a lot. He said he’d ditched his last period chemistry class when he stopped off for a fish taco and saw Savannah try to get out of a van behind the Los Mexicanos restaurant on Herbert Avenue. A man, he said, forced her back inside the van.

“When was this?”

“I dunno. Three hours ago.”

“Why didn’t you call me then?”

“Had a trumpet lesson I had to go to. Plus, I didn’t even think about it until just a couple of minutes ago.”

“Did you get the license plate?”

“Um, no.”

“What kind of van was it? The make?”

“I dunno. A van.”

“What did it look like? How old? What color?”

“I dunno. Green, sorta, I guess – it didn’t have any windows, I remember that. Except for, like, you know, the ones on front. What was the other question?”

“How old was it?”

“I dunno. It didn’t look new or anything, but not real old.”

“A panel van, though?”

“What’s a panel van?”

“They don’t have windows except for the ones in front.”

“Yeah. I guess. Whatever.”

Panel vans are popular among small businesses. I asked him if he’d noticed the name of any company advertised on the side.

“Not really.”

“ ‘Not really’ meaning you did see a name but can’t remember, or you didn’t see anything?”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“What about the driver? What did he look like?”

“A guy. I dunno. Regular, kind of.”

“A regular guy. Young? Old?”

“In the middle, I’d say. Sort of.”

I asked him to call me back if he thought of anything else relevant.

“Is there, like, a reward or something?” he wanted to know.

“The reward is in the doing, Billy. The journey is the reward.”

“Oh…. Cool.”

He was in high school. He had no clue what I was talking about.

A green van that wasn’t new and wasn’t old. A regular-looking guy who wasn’t young and wasn’t old. A woman who may or may not have been Savannah. Not much to go on, but still, I decided, worthy enough to let Deputy Streeter know, even at the risk of Crocodile Dundee finding out. Dundee had threatened Savannah’s life if I went to the police, but it’s been my experience that kidnappers and other miscreants rarely keep their word about anything. I called Streeter and left a detailed message on his voice mail.

I doubted the sheriff’s department, based on so thin a tip, would flood the area surrounding Los Mexicanos restaurant, hoping to scare up potential witnesses on the thin hope that somebody might’ve seen something. I knew I’d have to do that myself. For the moment, though, I was focused on Australian import Liam McMahon.

* * *

A little bell over the door tinkled as I entered. McMahon was hunched over a workbench, flirting with a twenty-something snow bunny while fitting her rental boots to her rental skis.

“Be with you in a jiff, mate,” he said, adjusting the bindings with a wrench and flat-bladed screwdriver. “Just finishing up with this sweet young thing.”

The voice was low, like Crocodile Dundee’s, but I hadn’t heard enough of it yet to persuade me that Dundee and McMahon were the same man.

“Take your time.” I looked around the shop, pretending to be interested in skis.

He chatted up the girl for another few minutes, rang her up at the cash register, and even managed to get her telephone number.

“Dinner tomorrow night, love,” he said. “I’ll call you, deal?”

“OK.”

“Have fun out there. Ski safe now.”

She gathered up her gear and smiled at me on the way out. McMahon strode from behind the cash register and watched her go, focused on her butt. A fat shark’s tooth hung from a gold chain around his neck.

“God help me, I do love the sheilas,” he said. “Now, mate, how can I help you?”

“I’m Cordell Logan.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Cordell Logan.” He had a firm grip and friendly blue eyes. “Liam McMahon’s the name. Don’t wear it out.”

Had McMahon known my name and been genuinely surprised by my presence, his face would have registered telling involuntary muscle movements that scientists call “micro expressions”—an eyebrow lifted almost imperceptibly, the subtle opening of an eye or parting of lips that can speak the truth far more accurately than words alone. But I perceived nothing in McMahon’s facial movements, involuntary or otherwise, to suggest that he regarded me as anything other than a paying customer.

“Australian?”

“Born and bred. Ever been?”

“Several times. Good people. How’d you end up in Tahoe?”

“What else? Chasing a sheila. We fell out of love and I fell in love with where she lived.”

“A lot of other Australians around here?”

“None at all, hardly. Ten, twelve, maybe. I probably know ’em all. Half are retired buggers. Lack the strength to even stand up. The other half are too drunk or doped up to get out of bed most days. What about you? You’re not from around here.”

“Rancho Bonita.”

“Well, you couldn’t have timed it any better, mate, what with all this fresh powder. I can put you on a set of Rossi parabolics that’ll blow your mind.”

“I’m not here to ski. I’m trying to locate somebody.”

I showed him Savannah’s picture and explained the circumstances of her disappearance.

“Gorgeous lady,” McMahon said. “I’d be bent out of shape, too, if somebody like that had vanished from my life. Tell you what, let me Xerox a copy of that. I’ll put it in my window and ask everybody who comes in if they’ve seen her around.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“You’d do the same for me, mate.”

He took the photo into a back office where his copying machine was.

McMahon, I realized, wasn’t Crocodile Dundee. If what he said was true, that there were no more than a dozen native Australians residing in the greater Lake Tahoe area, then whoever had taken Savannah had to be among the dumbest Aussies who ever lived to front himself the way he did, and Dundee sounded anything but dumb over the phone. The more I pondered it, the more I became convinced that the accent was fake.

I drove over and cruised the strip mall that was home to Los Mexicanos. The restaurant had mirrored front windows and a pretend brick facade painted bright orange. Every employee I approached leaned away from me when I showed them Savannah’s picture, fear in their eyes, like they were about to be deported. Nobody remembered seeing Savannah or a green van parked outside that day. The other mall shops were closed for the evening. There was nobody else to ask questions of. I ordered a chile verde burrito to go and ate it sitting in my car.

A few customers drove in, skiers and snowboarders. It seemed pointless to ask them. Shortly after seven thirty, a black, dinged-up Dodge pickup with tinted glass, chrome mag wheels, and a plow blade pulled in and began scraping snow off the lot, piling it along the edges. I got out and walked over, holding up my hand in the truck’s headlights. The driver braked and his window came down, giving way to the pungent odor of marijuana, and a glassy-eyed young man of about twenty-two with an Oakland Raider’s baseball cap. His earlobes were stretched out like an African tribesman and there was a hole in each the size of a quarter.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” He waved away tendrils of pot smoke, snubbing out his blunt on the top of a Budweiser can. “What’s up?”

I showed him Savannah’s picture, explaining what had purportedly happened in the parking lot earlier in the day. He shook his head apologetically.

“I’ve been sleeping all day, dude. I was supposed to be over here this afternoon, plowing this shit, but I dunno, man. Fell asleep. Next thing I know, it’s like, ‘Where am I? What planet is this? What time is it?’ You know what I’m saying?”

“We all have our off days.”

I asked him if he knew anybody in town who drove a green van.

“A green van… a green van…” He closed his eyes, trying to focus, working the question like a contestant on final Jeopardy. “No, dude,” he said after several seconds, “can’t say that I do. My buddy, Twitch, he’s got this totally tricked-out blue van with a Porta-Potty in it and everything, but it’s, like—”

“Blue.”

“Exactly.”

“Look, if you do happen to spot any green vans, or the woman from that picture,” I said, handing him my card, “I’d appreciate a call.”

“No worries.” He grabbed his own business card from above the sun visor and handed it to me. “You need any snow plowed, firewood, run some errands, there’s my number, right there. Ask anybody, OK? I’m, like, totally reliable.”

“I’ll, like, keep you in mind.”

Back inside the Yukon, I glanced at his card in the glow of the dashboard instruments. His corporate DBA was, “The Plowman Cometh.”

Clever. I wondered if I’d ever smile again.

* * *

The red message light was blinking on my beige-colored room phone when I got back to the Econo Lodge. It was Streeter. He’d called about an hour earlier to apprise me that the fingerprint dusting of the room where Savannah and I stayed had proven inconclusive. The only prints the sheriff’s technician had been able to find and identify were left by Johnny and Gwen Kavitch, which didn’t set off any bells considering the couple ran the B&B and handled room cleaning themselves. Streeter noted that he’d received my message about the green van and had passed it on to his department’s patrol units as well as surrounding law enforcement agencies.

“Don’t think we’re giving up, we haven’t even started,” he said on the machine. “I’m still confident we’ll find her. I also have an update on the Lovejoy homicide I thought you’d find interesting. Call me when you get a chance.”

Streeter had been unable to reach me on my cell phone. The thought occurred to me: what if Crocodile Dundee had the same problem – tried to call me with instructions and couldn’t get through because I had yet to figure out all of my phone’s mind-numbing, over-engineered features. What if he’d taken his frustration out on Savannah? My face felt flush and my mouth went dry.

Walking quickly into the bathroom, I filled a plastic cup with water and gulped it down, refilled the cup, and drank that, too. Suddenly, I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart began pounding crazily, like it was skipping beats, and for a moment, I thought I was dying. Not even in a firefight, or diving in on a heavily defended target, had I ever felt anything remotely close to panic. But that’s what it was. A panic attack. Complete, unbridled terror.

I went and sat down on the corner of the bed, closed my eyes, and concentrated, trying to will my heart to normalcy. When that didn’t work, I rolled onto the floor and did stomach crunches to the point of exhaustion. That seemed to do the trick; the skipping beats stopped. I lay back on the carpet, my right triceps in spasm, too tired to move.

The Buddha believed that fear is the result of attachment – to ourselves, our possessions, the people we love. Everything in life is transient, including life. Embrace that transience, recognize that all those attachments are fleeting, Buddhists reason, and you’ll ultimately shed your fear. Could be all of that is true. I don’t really know. But if the Buddha had sat in the same room with Savannah for even five minutes, he might’ve better understood the erratic beating of my heart and my sense of near-paralytic dread at the prospect of never seeing her again.

My cell phone was on the nightstand above me. I pushed myself off the floor and grabbed it, peering closely at the screen, trying to figure out if I’d missed Dundee’s call or text message. Whether he’d tried to reach me or not, I couldn’t tell; advancements in digital communications are an anathema to the analog me. I lay down on the bed, not bothering to undress or pull down the bedspread, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the sun was coming up and my phone was chiming with an incoming text message:

Behind Applebee’s. Suitcase. You got 10 minutes. Will call to confirm you have it. No cops or she dies. You’re late, she dies.

The room clock read 7:35 A.M. The text had come in two minutes earlier. I grabbed my duffel bag and bolted, throwing open the motel’s office door on my way to my car.

“Where’s the Applebee’s?”

The college kid manning the front desk pushed her stringy brown hair behind one multipierced ear and looked up at me from a copy of the Hunger Games.

“Excuse me?”

“Applebee’s. Where is it?”

She pointed. “Take a right on Lake Tahoe Boulevard. It’s about three and a half miles. But I’m pretty sure they don’t open ’til—”

I reached the Yukon, tossed my duffel into the passenger seat, hopped in, fired up the engine, and roared out, onto the boulevard.

The road was still snow packed and icy in spots, but traffic fortunately was sparse. I fishtailed around a garbage truck and a snail-like Mercedes 450 whose driver, a wizened old man, looked to be steering with one hand and conducting Beethoven’s Fifth with the other. As I glanced back to pass him, a deer and her spotted fawn bounded out of nowhere, directly into my path. I cut the wheel hard left and slid along the shoulder, fighting to keep 5,200 pounds of SUV from going off the road. How I avoided hitting Bambi and his mother, I’ll never know.

The Yukon’s odometer told me I had another two miles to go. That was assuming the desk clerk was correct in her distance estimate. Assuming the clock on the dashboard was set correctly, I had six minutes to get there, find a suitcase, and send a text message acknowledging that whatever was in that suitcase was in my possession, or Savannah would die.

The traffic light ahead was red. Vehicles were beginning to back up in either direction. I cut right, laying on the horn and blew through the T-intersection.

Four minutes.

I gunned the accelerator on the straightaways, the speedometer creeping past eighty, and eased up on the curves. Every fiber in me screamed go faster. I probably could’ve, too, but not without upping the risk past what Indy race car drivers like to call “being stupid.” We’d learned all about high-speed and evasive-driving techniques at Alpha from an instructor who’d spent more than thirty years running guns in Latin America for everyone from the Sandinistas to the Medellin Cartel. Jose Camacho was a slight little man with rotted teeth who’d dropped out of school in third grade, but who fathomed inherently and intimately the physics of wheeled vehicles. He didn’t drive them so much as strapped them on. “A car is like a woman,” he’d tell us, “each different, yet each the same. Learn to touch her in the way she desires to be touched. Never push her beyond what she desires, and she will fill your heart forever.”

Ever so subtly, I could feel the Yukon swaying left and right as the front tires danced on patches of black ice.

I heeded the words of Jose Camacho and slowed down.

Three minutes.

The landscape passed by as a blur. Towering pine forests and minimalls punctuated by stand-alone ski shops, banks, burger joints, cafés, and budget motels. Ordinarily, I would’ve mentally catalogued them all, consciously and automatically mapping my exfiltration route – the byproduct of escape and evasion training. But I was so laser-focused on making it to Applebee’s in time, I barely noticed any of it.

Two minutes.

The road faded left and suddenly I was tapping like crazy on the brakes, hook-sliding on the ice to a stop. An eighteen-wheeler had jackknifed 200 meters ahead of me. The road in either direction was blocked with traffic.

I pulled out of line, bouncing over the sidewalk in front of the Highland Inn, jumped out of the Yukon, and sprinted.

Where the hell was Applebee’s? How much farther up the road? I ran like I did back in the day, with lightning bolts on my football helmet. I was never the fastest receiver, but I had good hands and a nose for the end zone. I used that nose now, racing toward my objective as fast as my calcified knees would carry me.

I’d run about 200 meters when Applebee’s came into view on my left with its green shingled roof and stone façade. The expansive, snow-covered parking lot in back was empty save for a weathered, silver Honda Civic with Nevada tags. The car was unoccupied.

I looked around frantically. Not a suitcase in sight.

There was, however, a battered gray Dumpster adjacent to the restaurant’s rear door.

One minute.

I threw open the Dumpster’s hinged steel top. It crashed against the back with a loud clang. Inside, piled high, were plastic trash bags stuffed with fetid table scraps, used paper napkins and the other disposable detritus of dining out. I began heaving bags onto the snow like a homeless man possessed, one after the other.

And there it was: an old suitcase.

I leaned in, hauled it out with both hands, breathing hard, and set it down. It felt like it weighed about fifty pounds. The sides were fabric, scotch plaid, darkened by stains of who-knows-what. A small padlock secured the suitcase’s single zippered opening.

My Casio G-Shock showed 0745. I’d made it just in time. I reached for my cell phone, waiting for it to ring with further instructions from Crocodile Dundee. Then I remembered:

I’d left my phone in the car.