Burn Out (3 page)

A natural wonder restored, a man-made resort dying.

Suddenly I didn’t feel as sad about the Willow Grove Lodge’s demise. Long after whatever replaced it was gone, the lake would endure.

The book I’d brought along wasn’t very engaging—a long-winded narrative about a former alcoholic holed up in the woods to contemplate what he claimed wasn’t a midlife crisis, but that damned well sounded like one, as I should know. After I finished my lunch, I dozed off while reading and woke to a chill wind gusting off the lake. The shadows of the trees had moved over me.

I sat up, disoriented. In my peripheral vision, something moved through the dark grove to the right. I turned my head, narrowed my eyes. Nothing there. Then I saw it again—a figure that darted from trunk to trunk, creating a ripple effect.

An animal? A person? Either way, I was the interloper here. Time to get going.

I folded the blanket, grabbed the book and the sack of leavings from my picnic. At the Land Rover I looked back at the grove. No more motion, but a prickly sensation arose at the base of my spine, spread up to the back of my neck. Something colder than the wind washed over me.

My old woolen peacoat was in the Land Rover and before I drove out I put it on. As I stopped at the top of the drive, I saw the yellow-leafed aspens in the declivities of the hills to the far side of the highway swaying softly in the breeze; the late afternoon sunlight made them gleam like a river of molten gold.

There had been gold in these hills long ago and some poor veins remained. Normally the beauty of this view would have entranced me, but now its glow was dimmed by the aura of what I’d felt at the lodge. I thought of the ravages that cyanide—which the big mining companies had used to extract gold from the waste dumps and tailings of played-out claims—had wreaked upon the land.

The thought took me back to the case I’d been working here when I met Hy, investigating a conglomerate that planned to start up a large-scale and environmentally unsound mining operation above a semi-ghost town called Promiseville. I remembered us fleeing hand in hand from a dynamite blast that took out a part of a mountain. And Hy saying, as we lay on the ground gasping and panting from our flight, “. . . You’ve got even more of a death wish than I do.”

Not any more.

I waited for a logging truck to pass, then turned left toward town. The highway topped a rise, then began a gradual descent into Vernon. Halfway down I saw an old brown pickup truck, its paint spotted gray like a piebald horse. It was pulled onto the opposite shoulder and, as I approached, its passenger-side door flew open and the figure of a woman hurtled out into the ditch. The truck’s driver—bearded, with a knit cap pulled low on his brow—got out and stood on the edge of the ditch, yelling down at her.

Reflexively I U-turned across the highway and pulled onto the shoulder. As I jumped out of the Rover the man turned, his features mostly obscured by his hat and turned-up collar.

“Just a family fight, lady,” he said in a rough voice. “No need to get involved.”

“The hell you say!” I started forward just as the woman clawed her way up the incline. It was the Indian girl whose face had been haunting my dreams. Now her long hair was tangled, and she looked dazed.

The man made a menacing gesture toward me. I braced for an attack, feet spread wide, arms flexed. He stood still, studying me, then muttered something that sounded like “Ah, fuck it!” He whirled and got into the pickup, revved its engine, and sped off, spraying gravel.

I went over and helped the girl to her feet. I couldn’t tell if she recognized me or not; her expression was blank.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“. . . Yes, I’m okay. No big deal.” She brushed at her clothing, smoothed down her hair. She was dressed more warmly than she had been the last time I saw her, in a quilted jacket, jeans, and hiking boots.

“What happened here?”

She shrugged. “I said it was no big deal.”

“Do you need a ride someplace? I can—”

“Look,” she said, “it’s none of your business. Okay? I take care of myself, nobody else does.” Then she turned and began walking the way the truck had gone.

I watched until she disappeared over the rise, berating myself for trying to intervene in a private matter. It was as if I had a compulsion to get involved in things that didn’t concern me—just as I’d often involved myself too deeply in cases I’d handled. Dammit, why couldn’t I leave people alone? That was what I wanted to do, wasn’t it? It was what I’d been telling myself.

I got back into the Land Rover. A fight with a relative or her boyfriend, I thought. They live someplace up the highway and by the time she gets there he’ll be sorry.

But the way she shot out of that truck, it looked like he pushed her. He’s an abuser and all abusers feel sorry—until they do it again.

As she said, it was none of my business. She didn’t want my help.

I could ask around in Vernon. . . .

No, I couldn’t. Or, more correctly, wouldn’t. That kind of uninvited snooping had no place in the new life I was hoping to create.

I stopped by the Food Mart because I was getting low on milk. And only for that reason.

But as the tired-looking woman at the checkstand was ringing up my purchases—I can never go into a grocery store and buy just one item—I said, “There was an Indian girl waiting for a ride outside here last Tuesday night. I wonder if you know her?” I described her and what she was wearing.

The checker nodded and began bagging my groceries. “That’s Amy Perez. She stocks shelves here a couple days a week. What d’you want with her?”

Don’t go on with this, McCone. Don’t.

“She . . . dropped something, and I’d like to return it.” God, the lies that rippled off my tongue after so many years in my business! It had gotten to the point that I didn’t need to think them up ahead of time.

“You can give it to me, I’ll see she gets it.”

“Actually, I’d like to return it in person. It’s a bracelet, and I want to ask her where she got it, so I can buy one for myself.”

The checker shrugged. “Well, I don’t know where she’s living these days. She moves around a lot, you know what I mean?”

I asked, “Is she any relation to Ramon Perez up at the Ripinsky place?”

“A niece maybe, I’m not sure. There’re Perezes all over Mono County, some related, some not. But, yeah, I think Ramon’s her uncle.”

I thanked her, paid, and left.

It wouldn’t hurt, I thought, to ask Ramon about Amy, tell him what I had witnessed that afternoon. If she was in trouble, maybe her uncle could help.

“Yeah, Amy’s my niece.” Ramon was sitting on the bale of hay inside the stable door.

Lear Jet was already in his stall. I glared at him, and he glared back.

I said, “Tell me about her.”

His gaze shifted to the darkness gathering in the empty stalls beyond Lear Jet’s. “My sister-in-law’s youngest. She was such a beautiful little girl, and she loved her Uncle Ramon.”

“And now?”

“She’s still beautiful. You saw that.”

“And she still loves you?”

He sighed heavily. “Who knows? Who knows anything these days?”

I couldn’t debate the latter question. “She’s in trouble, Ramon.” I told him what I’d seen that afternoon, and Amy’s reaction to my offer of help. “The clerk at Food Mart said she ‘moves around a lot.’”

“One boyfriend, another boyfriend, sometimes she crashes at my sister-in-law’s house.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighteen in three months. She looks a lot younger.”

“Still underage, then. Can’t her mother rein her in?”

He looked at me, eyes sad. “Look, Sharon, it’s not that simple. Her mother has her own problems.”

“There’s no father in the picture?”

“My son-of-a-bitch brother Jimmy took off when Amy was a year old. Miri—that’s his wife—did her best by all five kids, but it wasn’t good enough. Her older girl left town nine years ago, before she finished high school. We don’t know where she is. Last I heard was a postcard from Las Vegas, and that was over a year ago. The two older boys’re in prison. The younger boy was killed in a car wreck—his fault, he’d been drinking.”

“And now Miri’s in danger of losing Amy, too.”

He looked down at where his thick-fingered hands were spread on his denim-covered thighs. “I don’t think she’d even notice if Amy was gone.”

“Drugs? Booze? Men?”

“You got it. When Vic—the youngest boy—died, Miri totally fell apart.”

“What about the kids’ Uncle Ramon? Where do you fit into the picture?”

“I don’t. Miri and I had a big fight, four, maybe five years ago. The times I came around to apologize, she ran me off with a shotgun.”

“D’you think Amy might listen to you, let you help her?”

“Like I said, I don’t know how she feels about me these days.” He paused, and in the silence Lear Jet whickered. “You say this guy pushed her out of a pickup?”

“Yes. Brown, probably a Ford, with a lot of Bondo on it.”

“You see him?”

“Yes. He has a dark brown beard; I couldn’t really tell about his features. After he threw Amy out of the truck he went to the edge of the shoulder and was shouting at her. When I intervened, he thought about attacking me, then took off.”

“Boz Sheppard. That asshole. If she’s hooked up with him, it’s statutory rape.”

“How old is this Boz?”

“Late twenties, maybe thirty. Hard to tell. Too damn old to be messing with a young girl like Amy.”

“Who is he?”

“Local lowlife—not that we haven’t got plenty of them. Claims to be a carpenter, but he’s usually so stoned he couldn’t drive a nail in straight if his life depended on it.”

“He from around here?”

“No. Showed up in Vernon one day, took a trailer at that crappy park up the highway. Does odd jobs, but I hear mostly he deals drugs. Rumor is he’s got a record.”

If he did, I could get Derek Ford, Mick’s assistant at the agency, to access it. “Definitely not good company for your niece,” I said.

“Yeah. Which way you say she was going when she walked off?”

“North from town.”

“Toward that trailer park.” Ramon stood. “Think I’ll take a run out there, pay a visit. Want to ride along?”

“Ramon, it’s a family matter—”

“One that could use a woman’s touch.”

Well, why not? I had nothing else to do that evening.

The park extended from the edge of the highway to the hillside—two dozen or so old-model trailers up on cement blocks. No amenities such as a rec center, plantings, or even paved parking areas. No trees. Only a sagging barbed-wire fence between it and the outside world.

Personally, I’d rather have lived in a cave.

Ramon stopped the truck in front of a one-windowed shack with a sign saying
OFFICE
. Got out, but came right back. “Nobody there.”

I looked around, pointed out a woman walking a dog. Ramon nodded and approached her. When he slid into the truck he said, “Last trailer, last row in back. From the look the lady gave me, I’d say Boz’s dealing, all right.”

We drove back there in silence, gravel crunching under the truck’s wheels. The rows were dimly lighted—minimum county requirement—and most of the trailers were dark. Boz Sheppard’s was by far the worst of them all—ancient, small, humpbacked, its formerly white paint peeling off to reveal gunmetal gray and rust. There was a glow in its rear window.

Ramon took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to say to her.”

“Tell her you love her and want to help.”

“What if she doesn’t think she needs it?”

I pictured the look of defiance in Amy’s eyes before she’d turned her back on me that afternoon. Underneath there had been fear—and not of me.

“She does, whether she knows it or not,” I said. “This Boz—he’ll try to intervene. We should separate them.”

“How?”

“Leave that to me.” I didn’t have a plan, but once we confronted Boz, my instincts would tell me what to do.

We got out of the truck and went up to the door. Ramon knocked.

No answer.

He knocked again, rattling the flimsy door in its frame.

Nothing.

“See if it’s unlocked,” I said.

“That’s not legal—”

“You have probable cause to be concerned for your niece.”

“Damn right I do!” He turned the knob and pushed the door inward so hard it smacked into the wall behind it. Moved up the two low steps and inside.

A growl. At first I thought it came from a watchdog, then realized that Ramon himself had made the sound. I pushed around him. And stopped.

The room was tidy, the pullout bed made up into a couch. A woman lay collapsed beside it, her arms outflung on the bloodstained carpet, long dark hair covering most of her face. Freshly spilled blood. It pooled beneath her, and the front of her black silk dress was torn and scorched where a bullet—or bullets—had entered. The scent of cordite was strong on the air.

Before I could stop him, Ramon went to the woman and brushed her hair from her face. Gasped and recoiled.

I went over and pulled on his arm. “Go outside. This is a crime scene. We can’t disturb anything more than we already have.”

He hesitated, then went, shaking his head.

I looked down at the woman’s face. Not Amy, but someone older who closely resembled her. The dress looked expensive, her costume jewelry gaudy. One red spike-heeled shoe had come off her foot and lay on the carpet. I glanced at the breakfast bar on the counter: a half-full shaker of martinis and two glasses, one lying on its side, broken, liquid pooling beside it.

I backed up, left the trailer without touching anything. Ramon was leaning against his truck, trying to light a cigarette with shaking hands.

“You know her?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Who is she?”

He took a deep drag on the cigarette and exhaled. “Hayley.”

“And Hayley is . . . ?”

“Amy’s older sister. The one I told you sent me a postcard from Las Vegas.”

How the hell did I get myself into this? I came up here to make plans to leave this kind of thing behind me—the stench of death, the flashing lights, the paramedics, the radios and official voices droning on and on and on . . .