Cape Disappointment (25 page)

“Why don't you call him now?”

“I will if you close that window. What do you want me to say?”

“Find out where he is, but play it coy. Set up a meeting.”

“Have you ever seen me not play it coy?”

“About a million times.”

“Are you going to close that window?”

“As soon as my eyes stop watering. Just be subtle. See if you can find out where he is. And don't let on you're with me. I don't want to spook him.”

“Listen, Thomas. I'm your friend. I can guarantee there's nothing bogus about this plane crash.”

“You can't possibly know that.”

“Sure I can. The preponderance of the evidence suggests it.”

“The preponderance of the evidence isn't in.”

“Your wife and some other people got onto a plane and it crashed
into the Pacific Ocean, and now there are government agencies handling it. That's all there is. Anything else is just quackery. The feds investigate plane crashes for a living. When was the last time you investigated a plane crash? What you need to do is butt out. I know you don't want to hear this, but you tell me the truth when I need it, so I'm telling you. Just look what you've found out so far. Zilch.”

“You're kidding, right? Freddy Mitz—”

“Saw some jackass on the street he thought he recognized. So what? I bet the joker was having an affair and didn't want his wife to find out he'd been in Seattle.”

“Four days before the flight your brother warned me to keep Kathy away from Sheffield. You told me he warned you before Oklahoma City. And before 9/11. He's got some sort of conduit.”

“You don't want to mess with my brother. He's the baddest thing you've ever met.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I told you he was a government-trained killer. I know you think he's a flake, but he's also dangerous.”

“I'm supposed to back off because I'm afraid of your brother? Try again.”

“I know he presents like a second-rate thief or some pencil dick with anger management problems, a drunk and all of that, and he is those things, but only in the last couple of years. I can only liken it to a sleeping cobra. You don't want to be petting it. That stuff I told you with the dead kids in South America? It broke his spirit and turned him into what he is now. I didn't tell you this last night, but he once told me his personal kill count in the army was a hundred and seven. God knows what it was by the time he retired. You need to stay away from him.”

“If he's as bad as you say, it makes it more likely he had something to do with the accident. Or knows who did.”

“Why would he be involved?”

“That's what I want to find out.”

Snake flipped open his cellphone. “Bert? Gee, I didn't think you'd be there so quick … Yeah, yeah. I spoke to him. Uh, huh. Well, if you want my take on it, he's not doing so well.” Snake glanced at me. “Tell you the truth, bro, I think he's going paranoid on us.” Snake listened for a while. “Can't say, really. Just … weird. Wanders around all night.

Yeah. I spent the night there. Now? Right now? He's going … somewhere … I don't know where. Listen, Bert, if we're going to keep talking I think we should do it in person. When are you going to be back in town?” Snake listened for a few moments and said, “Because I don't want to do this over the phone.”

I hadn't had much of a chance to review what Snake told me about his brother the night before. I'd known Snake and his brother had a tumultuous upbringing, but the details of Bert's early life had come as a shock. The more Snake told me, the more I knew he was leaving out. I'd thought of Bert as a lightweight, and now Snake claimed that when his brother was in the military he had killed more than a hundred people, combatants— at least I hoped they were combatants— and that there was a high probability that at the tender age of fourteen he may have murdered his own father.

After some brotherly banter, most of it not repeatable, Snake flipped his phone shut and said, “He's at the trailer.” When I gave him a questioning look, he added, “In Enumclaw. With Grams. She's ninety-six. Part Cherokee. Her grandfather actually had some white scalps in the house. We found them in her attic. Maybe that's where Bert gets it.”

“Don't tell me Bert's scalped people.”

“I wouldn't put it past him.”

“He tell you he was in Enumclaw?”

“He didn't tell me diddly, but in the background I could hear the crummy old radio he keeps in his trailer. He's forty miles southeast of here in his sardine-can mansion in Enumscratch.”

“I thought he was forbidden to go back because of a restraining order.”

“I don't know that Grams even knows he's there. Or cares. She's got her soap operas. Besides, her trailer's a couple hundred yards away. She can't see his place.”

“He still have all those guns?”

“He may not have five thousand rounds of ammo, but he'll have something. When we get there, we're going to talk to him nice, right?”

“Maybe.”

“That's exactly the attitude I was afraid of.”

ENUMCLAW WAS SITUATED
in the shadow of Mount Rainier, but today the low clouds formed a gray blanket that obscured even the nearby rolling hills. We'd driven south on 405, where the traffic had been gridlocked as usual, then traced Highway 169 down through the valley to Enum-claw.

Though the region's developers were working like ants, the town itself retained a distinct rural character, and there were still a few one-man farms dotted with six or eight head of beef grazing behind fences, rural farmhouses surrounded by fields, and milk cows and horses staring at us from paddocks. We drove past brick storefronts on one of the main streets in town, and as we were stopped at a red light, I caught a glimpse of a woman getting out of a parked car and entering a nearby bookstore. I'd been confused before, but this time I was certain. Or certain enough.

“Thomas! What the hell are you doing?” Snake yelled.

Without being aware of how it happened, or where my brain was in time and space, I leaped out of the car. A delivery truck behind us honked. A second truck traveling from the other direction almost clipped me. Snake barked from the passenger window, but I ignored him and followed the woman into the Lindon Bookstore. Inside I saw three or four customers, including a woman with a baby in a stroller and a woman working an espresso machine.

“I'm sorry,” I said to the employee at the espresso machine, “but somebody just walked in here. Young woman. Jeans and a blue ski coat?” She gave me a peevish look, probably because in addressing her I'd interrupted her conversation with a customer.

“Are you a friend?” the woman asked warily.

“She dropped a wallet in the street,” I said, pulling out my own wallet and displaying it as if I'd just found it.

Holding her hand palm out, she said, “We'll see she gets it.”

“Is she in the back?”

“Listen. If you don't identify yourself …”

“I found a wallet. Geez.” I slipped the wallet back into my pocket. Maybe it was my eyes— they'd been bloodshot for days— or my short-tempered and imperious manner, but both women at the espresso machine were on alert. I might have pulled off this stunt ten days ago without incurring a shred of suspicion, but something in my deportment had altered. When the door to a small restroom in the back of the store opened, I thought my heart was going to jump into my mouth. Carrying a yellow watch cap, a short Asian woman with her hair in a long plait stepped through the doorway. When I approached, she jumped backward and gave me the startled look of someone who'd just missed tangling with a freight train. I didn't see how I could have inspired that much alarm, but I had. Intensity can sometimes be mistaken for mental illness, and I knew in the last week or so my demeanor had been mistaken for that by any number of individuals. I peered past her into the darkened, empty bathroom, then fled the store.

“Aren't you going to give her the wallet?” somebody yelled.

When I got back into the car, Snake was uncharacteristically silent. The detour had befuddled me but had shaken him. I had no idea what was going through his mind, but he had to be wishing he'd brought along a tranquilizer gun and maybe a couple of burly assistants. For a minute or two I actually believed the woman in the store was Kathy. It had seemed so plausible when it was happening and so
Twilight Zone
now. It made even less sense than dying in a plane crash. The incident had spiked adrenaline through the top of my brain like a Roman candle. It was the sort of momentary deflection from sanity that made you question everything about yourself.

Snake, who had earlier been giving a nonstop running monologue about his brother and the five wives he'd ditched, some of which I'd already heard and most of which I'd been ignoring, now spoke only when he needed to post an addendum to the driving directions. I couldn't tell how much of the acreage belonged to his grandmother, but as we pulled off the highway, it appeared to be a large piece of property, perhaps fifteen or twenty acres, some of it treed, some just knolls and weeds. The entranceway was an unmarked driveway, the kind of place you would never locate without a guide.

We parked under a tree heavy with aging crab apples and got out, inhaling the aroma of rotten fruit in the cold, moist noon air. There were no trailers in sight. Throughout the funerals, including Kathy's, I'd been as dull as a rock, but now as we walked to meet Bert I was hyped to the point it almost scared me.

Snake led me along a barely discernable path over a nearby hillock. It was closing in on noon as we paraded past a ramshackle trailer surrounded by fifteen or twenty car hulks in various states of degradation, a chronicle of one family's economic fortunes, the wrecks ranging from the most recent, a twenty-year-old Chevy Impala, down to the six or eight vintage Ford pickups. All of the windows in the trailer were obscured by curtains or objects inside. “That belongs to Grams,” Snake said. “Bert's place is over yonder.”

We hiked past the trailer without incident and followed the faint car path over another hillock. “This the only way in?” I asked.

“There's a dozen ways in and out. That's why Bert likes it here.”

On the other side of the small rise we found five small outbuildings, two of them falling-down barns that stood like old men leaning into a storm. All the wire fencing on the property was either missing or sagging. Judging by the age of the barns and the state of disrepair, it had been at least thirty years since anybody had worked this land.

Bert was staying in one of those tiny camping trailers that reminded me of the trailer in the old Mickey Mouse cartoon when Minnie and Mickey take a vacation. I had a vision of ten or fifteen SWAT team members surrounding it while Bert sat inside watching TV and drinking beer.

The sounds of “Bad Moon Rising” were so loud one of the windows rattled to the heavy bass beat. The small wooden makeshift porch
vibrated beneath our feet. Snake tried shouting and, when that didn't attract his brother's attention, began banging on the aluminum door with his fists. For a while even that didn't work.

When he finally pulled the door open, Bert Slezak was dancing like a drugged-out rooster. “Hey, bro,” he said to Snake. When he recognized me he lost the beat to the music, turned around, and disappeared into the darkness. Snake followed him inside, and I followed Snake, ducking so as not to strike my head on the doorway. The moment I closed the door behind me the dim lights were extinguished.

Later, we figured it was some sort of stun grenade or maybe a gas canister without the gas. If it had been a military-issue grenade, we would have all three been dead, but as it was, Snake and I turned into a ball of panicked arms and legs as we battled our way back out the front door and rolled off the porch into the wet weeds. The explosion had come close to blowing out both my eardrums. I was on my hands and knees trying to clear my head when Snake landed on top of me, poking a bony knee into my shoulder. One of the guns he was carrying clonked me on the back of my skull. When I looked up through the snarl of limbs, I spotted Bert hightailing it past one of the old barns.

I scrambled to my feet and started jogging unsteadily after him. When he saw me giving chase, he produced a pistol and fired two rounds. Knowing I wasn't going to be discouraged by gunfire, he tucked the gun into the folds of his clothing, put his head down, and began running in earnest. Why had he attacked us and why was he now running? Guilty conscience? Or had he, like the women in the bookstore, sensed something malignant, even monstrous, in my deportment?

He darted through a copse of fir trees, ran along a small creek, and found his way under a wire fence. I'd been gaining rapidly, but each time he scaled, eluded, or hurdled an obstacle, I had to make my way around it, too, and I didn't have all the shortcuts memorized the way he obviously did. By the time I got to the highway, there was a stream of fast-moving traffic between me and Bert, who was already on the other side.

The area on the far side of the highway was cluttered with new housing. Bert sprinted through a backyard with two portable basketball hoops, into a cul-de-sac, through another yard, and over a wooden
fence. A dog nipped my trouser leg as I followed him over the fence. Who would have guessed spindly little Bert Slezak, who more often than not had trouble walking a straight line, could remain in front for so long? To be frank, I was out of shape and amazed at how much damage eight days on a sofa and the loss of a spouse could do to the human physique. I was breathing so hard it felt as if the insides of my lungs were sloughing off. I kept spitting up phlegm that seemed as if it had blood and maybe gravel in it. I was light-headed. My knees hurt. My left calf was beginning to cramp.