Anything Can Be Dangerous (23 page)

Across the road from the sheriff’s
office was Art Moore’s Exxon station, a Pioneer Chicken franchise,
and Hackett’s Pharmacy. On his own side of the road, out of
Ramsay’s line of sight, was Yates Hardware & Plumbing, the
Safeway, the boarded-up Rialto Theater, and the Pinyon Inn. That
was about it for Pinyon, except for the library and La Reina County
Hospital, which were built off the road on the high ground between
S31 and the mountains.

The storm that had hammered the town
for two days had moved on in the early-morning hours, leaving
everything wet and bedraggled. The landscape would need a couple of
days of sunshine to dry out.

Gavin Ramsay was more than ready for
some dry weather. The rain depressed him. Elise used to get poetic
about the rain. Literally. She would go to her typewriter and turn
out pages of tortured free verse whenever a few raindrops fell.
Then she would show it to Gavin and ask what he thought of it. In
the first year of their marriage he used to lie and say it was
good, really good. After that first year he started telling her the
truth. By that time it didn’t matter anymore.

Today was the last day of March, and
with luck there would not be another big storm until fall. Summer
would bring its own problems––motorcycle gangs, irritable tourists,
lost hikers, and campers with poison oak. Nothing that couldn’t be
handled as long as it was not raining.

Probably there would be fewer problems
with hikers and campers this year. Thoughtful people were not eager
to go into the woods since the Drago business. You couldn’t blame
them. It was peaceful now, but sometimes on a quiet night you could
still hear it. The howling.

In truth, there wasn’t a whole lot for
a sheriff and two deputies to do in La Reina County. Well, one
deputy and a trainee assigned here by the state, to be accurate.
Right now the prospect of a quiet summer suited Gavin Ramsay just
fine. After the double trauma of Drago and his divorce from Elise
he could use the time to reassemble his life.

The people of La Reina County were
happy to see things calm down again. Drago was enough excitement
for several lifetimes. It was kind of fun for a while. Now the
folks would just as soon not talk about it.

They still got a fair number of
sightseers who detoured off Interstate 5 hoping to see something of
the infamous village. They might as well have stayed home. There
was nothing left to see.

The asphalt road connecting Pinyon to
Drago had buckled and cracked with the heat of the fire, and there
were wooden barriers put up by Caltrans to block it off. Still,
determined curiosity seekers could get through in a tough truck.
Those driving something less rugged turned back to Pinyon, where
they searched in vain for souvenir shops. Some of the locals used
to joke down at the Pinyon Inn about printing up a bunch of Drago
T-shirts with bite marks and red splotches, but those jokes got old
in a hurry.

Gavin Ramsay had functioned with his
usual quiet efficiency during the Drago business. In a way it was a
relief for him to get away from home at the time. Now, like the
rest of the people in town, he didn’t want to talk about it. Not
about Drago or Elise. That did not mean he had forgotten. Nobody
who lived through Drago would ever forget. Elise, either, for that
matter. You just didn’t want to talk about it.

He picked up a paperback novel from
the other desk in the pine-paneled office, the one shared by his
two deputies. Ed McBain. 87th Precinct. It must belong to Milo
Fernandez. The trainee. Roy Nevins’s taste ran more to
Hustler.

Milo was an eager kid, still excited
by the idea of police work. Roy Nevins wasn’t excited by much of
anything these days, except finishing up his twenty years of public
service and living the rest of his life comfortably off the
taxpayers of California.

They should be returning soon. It was
after four and getting dark. Ramsay felt a little guilty about
sending them out on what he figured to be a wild goose chase, but
he could see Milo getting restless with nothing to do, and Roy had
been on the verge of falling asleep. They were not likely to find
Abe Craddock and Curly Vane in the woods. Those fearless hunters
were more likely holed up in some saloon down in Saugus, where
everybody had a tattoo and a pickup truck. Still, Abe’s wife had
called to say she was worried about him, and it had been three
days, so Ramsay was more or less obligated to look into it. Anyway,
Milo would probably enjoy getting out of the office, and Roy could
sure as hell use the exercise.

The gravel crunched outside and Orry
Yates’s panel truck pulled onto the parking area. YATES PLUMING was
painted on the side in no-nonsense black letters. Orry claimed the
misspelling was done deliberately to attract attention. Ramsay had
his doubts.

Orry got out of the driver’s side of
the truck, and two teenagers, a boy and a girl wearing backpacks,
climbed out of the other. Orry led the way toward the
office.

Ramsay swung his feet down to the
floor and waited for them to come in. A tightening in his gut
warned that this was going to be trouble.

Orry held the door open for the young
backpackers, then herded them over to Ramsay’s desk. “Got a little
problem, Gavin,” he said.

“
Oh?”

“
These kids think they
found a dead man in the woods.”

“
They think?”

“
You know how sometimes the
light plays tricks coming through the trees. A tree stump or a
mossy log can look like something else.”

The boy shot Orry a dark look. “If
that’s a log laying out there, I’m Beaver Cleaver.”

Ramsay studied the young couple. The
boy was thin and wouldn’t be bad looking if he shaved off the
apologetic, little mustache. The girl wore a UCLA sweatshirt and
elastic jeans that showed off her firm little ass.

The sheriff cleared his throat and got
businesslike. “Tell me about it.”

“
We were, you know,
hiking,” the boy said. “On a trail that leads off the old Drago
Road, and Debbie goes, ‘Hey, you smell that?’ And I go, ‘Smell
what?’ And she goes, ‘Like spoiled meat.’ And I
go
…
”

“
Never mind the dialog,”
Ramsay said. “Tell me about finding the dead man.”

“
That’s what I’m doing,
man.”

“
Could you speed it
up?”

The boy looked sullen and Debbie took
over. “We found him a little ways off the trail. A big guy, you
know. Smelled really bad.”

“
How big?”

The girl shrugged. “It was hard to
tell. He was laying down. Dead, you know.” She looked at the boy
and giggled.

“
What did he look
like?”

“
Like a dead man,” the boy
said.

“
His face,” Ramsay
prompted.

“
Who knows?” the boy said.
“There wasn’t much of it left. Like something had chewed on
it.”

“
Gross,” the girl
confirmed.

Ramsay levered himself out of the
chair. “Think you can take me to him?”

They nodded without
enthusiasm.

“
You gonna need me
anymore?” Orry Yates said.

“
Not now, Orry. Thanks for
bringing them in.”

They walked out of the small wooden
building that served as La Reina County Sheriff’s office. It was
built twenty years before as a sales office for an optimistic
developer who thought there would be a migration of Los Angeles
residents to the mountains. He was wrong.

Orry Yates climbed into the YATES
PLUMING truck, waved, and drove off. Ramsay led the teenagers
around to the back where the beat-up Dodge wagon was parked. His
Camaro had gone to Elise in the settlement. La Reina County could
afford only one sheriff’s car, and the deputies were using
it.

Ramsay wondered if the dead man was
Abe Craddock or Curly Vane. If it was, he owed somebody an apology
for mentally placing them in a saloon somewhere. However, if it was
one of them, where was the other? An argument? Too much booze and a
gun goes off? Better stop building a crime until he had a look at
the scene. He kicked the engine of the eight-year-old wagon to life
and took off for the old Drago Road.

* * *

Deputy Roy Nevins stopped to pull his
uniform pants free from the thorns of a wild blackberry bush. He
knew this drill was one big waste of time. Craddock and Vane could
find their way around these woods as well as anybody in the county.
The only trouble they were likely to get into was when they came
back to town and started drinking.

He knew Gavin Ramsay had sent him and
Milo out here just to keep them busy. If it hadn’t been for the
gung ho trainee, Deputy Nevins would have sacked out in the back of
the car until dusk, then gone back and told Gavin there was no sign
of Craddock and Vane. That’s what their search would add up to
anyway. Zip. Only difference was now he’d get all wet and scratched
up from these fucking thorns and his shoes would be
ruined.

“
Roy!”
Milo called unseen from off to the
left.

“
Yeah?”

“
Just checking our
positions.”

Yeah, great. Ten-fucking-four. Milo
could be a pain in the ass sometimes. But what the hell. He was
only twenty. When Roy Nevins was twenty he’d been gung ho, too. The
kid might grow up to be a good cop. Not in La Reina County, where a
couple of overdue library books was a crime wave. But it was a
start. Three months from now the state would put him somewhere
else. Nice gentle way to break in as a cop. Not the way Roy Nevins
had done it, on the grungiest street in the grungiest section of
Oakland.

Roy had been a cowboy back then
himself. No more. Now he was sitting on a pension, just putting in
his time. Couple more years and he could buy that mobile home down
in Baja. Sit around fishing with a cool Carta Blanca in his fist. A
man could still live pretty damn good in Mexico for peanuts. Until
then he would have to pass the days as comfortably as he could and
put up with a certain amount of shit like slogging through these
dripping woods.

“
Hey!”
he yelled in the direction of Milo
Fernandez.

“
Yo!”

“
Let’s take a
break.”

Roy stuck a Winston in his mouth and
lit it. He eased his broad butt down onto a boulder that looked
reasonably dry. Milo Fernandez, neat and slim in his uniform,
pushed through the wet underbrush and joined him.

The younger man looked up at the
patches of sky, they could see through the thick tops of the pine
and Douglas fir trees.

“
Not more than an hour of
daylight left,” said Milo.

“
Yeah.”

“
You think we’ll find those
guys before dark?”

“
Craddock and Vane? No way.
Not before dark, not before Easter Sunday. They gotta be lost
before we can find them. Those two ain’t lost. Shit-faced
somewhere, maybe, but not lost.”

“
How do you
know?”

“ ’
Cause I know them two
assholes. Why Betty Craddock wants us to find Abe beats the shit
out of me. Best thing that could happen to her, he falls down in
the middle of S3l and gets run over by an RV.”

“
Well
…
we can give it a try,
anyway.”

“
Sure. Old college try. You
go to college, tiger?”

“
Junior college, actually.
I need two more years for a degree.”

“
Waste of time. You want to
be a cop, don’t you?”

Milo Fernandez nodded.

“
They not gonna teach you
that in college. Only way to learn about being a cop is to be
one.”

Roy was about to launch into a war
story from his days as a real cop in Oakland, but the young
deputy’s attention strayed.

Milo looked around at the dark,
dripping trees. “Roy, where’s Drago from here?”

Nevins pointed off toward the south.
“That way. Four, five miles.”

“
I’d like to see it
sometime.”

“
Nothing to see. Dozen or
so burned out buildings.”

“
What was it like, Roy? The
fire and all. Was it exciting?”

Roy shrugged. He pulled on his
Winston, coughed, spat on the ground. “Sure, if you get off on
poking through ashes trying to make out which is human and which
is
…
something else.”

The young trainee caught the older
deputy’s hesitation and looked at him quickly. Roy studied the
glowing tip of his cigarette and stopped talking.

Milo Fernandez looked off toward the
south as though trying to see the burned out village through five
miles of forest. “What do you think was going on there, Roy? At
Drago? Before the fire?”

“
Who knows? Cult of some
kind. Los Angeles types. The people living there never went much
outside their own village.”

“
There were
stories.”

“
Yeah, I heard the stories.
Bunch of crap.”