High Country- Pigeon 12 (4 page)

"Is this okay?" Anna heard Mary ask as she gingerly lifted a box of gym socks, still in their wrappers, from the cabin's only chair.

"Yeah. Sure," said the man who'd admitted them, the only one yet to speak.

Mary sat. Anna studied the doorman. At five-ten or so and maybe one-sixty, he was younger and fitter than his tent-mates. His weight was muscle. In the heat he'd stripped down to slacks and a tank-top-slacks, not jeans or sweats but much-abused pleated-front pants in charcoal gray. From the waist up he was ripped and carved with washboard stomach muscles hinted at through the thin undershirt. A poster boy for Gold's Gym. Though his legs were encased in gabardine, Anna guessed the glamour stopped at his belt. Men who buffed for show rather than practical application tended to give short shrift to areas not readily apparent in the bathroom mirror.

His face was surprisingly pleasant, so Anna forgave him the action-figure body. He was younger than his companions, not much more than twenty-one or so. A nice smile lit up a baby face roughened by a blue-black beard shadow. The kid probably had to shave twice a day.

To cover the awkwardness he took a swig from a beer camouflaged among its fallen comrades on the countertop. Even with a drink in his hand he didn't look as dissolute as the men on the cot. Several years in their company would fix that. At a loss for what to do, he fell back on early training. Gesturing at the fat man slumped in the corner he began: "This is Kurt Cl-"

"This isn't a fucking garden party," the fat one, the one Anna'd been thinking of as "Beer," snarled before his last name could be completed. Either these slimeballs were hiding or secrecy had become a way of life. Probably the former. The signs were there and writ large.

Parks, like tropical islands, were out of the way, distanced from the "mainland." Like islands, they attracted men and women who wanted to be anonymous, needed to remove themselves from the real world with its demands that one's metaphorical and literal papers be in order.

Had they not been encamped in the missing Dixon Crofter's cabin posing as climbers or hikers or whatever the hell they were trying to be, Anna wouldn't have thought to connect them with wilderness. They reeked of the city, right down to the fuel smell that permeated the place.

"You want to diddle this mother and daughter act you take it elsewhere," Beer-Kurt Cl-finished.

Anna was deciding whether anger or tears would best suit the situation insofar as finding out what these bozos were doing in Dixon's place when Mary took the decision away from her.

"We came here to find out what you guys think you're doing in Dix's tent," she said hotly. "You've just about trashed it as far as I can see. You've got no business-"

Cloaked in nothing but youthful innocence and righteous wrath, Mary had leapt in over her head. The doorman was taking the tongue-lashing and managing to look sheepish, but his two brothers in squalor were shifting in a way Anna didn't like. Faces hardened under the boozy blur, that instant sobriety hard drinkers can affect after enough years at it. Limbs stiffened and moved to positions of greater mobility.

The door banged open and a man of middling height and delicate bone structure pushed in.

"If that bitch's cunt were as hot as the shower I might be tempted to like this shithole." The words were barely out when he noticed they had company. Already Anna detested him. He'd used her least favorite word in the English language. The next few minutes did nothing to change her mind.

Vulgar jocularity vanished. He took in first Anna, then Mary, exposed in the gray wash of light from the fading day. His eyes were dark and sharp. They were also long-lashed and almond-shaped, and Anna might have found them pretty had his vocabulary not already established him as a truly ugly individual.

Mary's Goldilocks good looks didn't soften his demeanor. With no immediate use for her, she was just another object. "Get them out of here," he said. He didn't snap out the words or raise his voice, yet it was a command. There was no question that he was the leader of the strange little wolf pack.

Not wolves, Anna thought as she took hold of Mary's hand. Hyenas. There was more of the vicious scavenger about them than the clean-kill predator.

"Let's go," Anna said.

Looking close to tears, Mary rose and followed Anna toward the door.

As Anna passed the dark-eyed man, he grabbed her arm. Her whole body flinched with the effort of not driving her elbow into his larynx.

"What're you two doing here?" he asked in his even boardroom voice.

The lies that sprang to mind-Dix's aunt, mother's friend used to live here-couldn't be voiced. Mary would know she was lying and, being a bright girl, would begin to wonder why.

This close to freedom, Mary's courage returned. "We wanted to see who was squatting in Dix's house," she said. The black karma of the place had robbed her voice of righteousness and the words came out sounding like an apology.

His hand on her arm, Anna could smell the man's aftershave and the scent of the hapless girl, probably a maid at Yosemite Lodge, whom he used for showering and other bodily needs, and though the short winter dusk was nearly spent, she could see his face clearly. Eyes and skin and an abundance of beautifully barbered hair lifted an unremarkable face to where it might be called handsome. In the instant Anna studied it, it underwent a startling transformation. Ice, crudeness and steel vanished as if they'd never been. In their place his eyes sparkled with warmth and his mouth curved in a smile so nice his lips seemed to grow fuller.

"You're friends of Dixon's? Why didn't you say so? Did any of you jerks offer the ladies a drink?" Still holding on to Anna but not so tightly now, he turned his attention to the young doorman. "Bro, get out a couple more beers."

But for the salon hair, all at once he looked and sounded genuine, welcoming. Anna was not impressed. The "C" word was lodged firmly in her craw. He would have to rescue a gaggle of little girls from burning buildings for her to soften toward him. And then there was the "Bro." Intuition told her it was not short for brother but a way of covering the fact that he didn't want names bandied about.

"Where do you know old Dix from?" he was asking as he cordially turned Anna to bring the party back indoors. "Fellas, shake a leg!"

The others looked baffled but shuffled around in oafish domesticity, clearing places to sit, moving piles of gear and clothes from one place to another, getting in one another's way and generally accomplishing nothing.

In the span of a few sentences the new man had turned a viper's nest into something resembling The Country Bears meet I Love Lucy.

Anna felt plucking at her jacket sleeve. "We should go, Anna. It's getting late." Being nobody's fool, Mary wasn't ready to forget a whole lot of nasty because a teaspoon of honey had just been forced down her throat.

Anna needed to stay, see if anything rose to the surface from the muddy depths of these guys, but she didn't want to risk losing Mary's respect or friendship. She might need it again. Turning to the man still holding her right biceps captive, she sought his help.

"It really is kind of late," she said in that oddly porous voice women adopt when they want to be talked into an indiscretion yet maintain plausible deniability.

He laughed. It was a charming laugh, not at all the laugh of a man who had recently used, then verbally abused a hotel maid. "It's not even six o'clock. One beer." This he directed at Mary, pretending he believed her to be a woman of drinking age. "Any friend of Dix's got to be a friend of ours."

Mary was immune to the double flattery of being assumed older and friends with a man she admired.

"You want to stay, Anna?"

"Okay. One beer," Anna capitulated gracefully. The doorman and the slimeballs were introduced respectively as Bobby, Billy and Ben. Billy, to clear up old issues, amended it to Billy Kurt to cover the earlier lapse. Like the well-brought-up girl that she was, Mary was careful to remember their names and use them often in conversation.

Anna didn't bother. If she mentally squinted she could almost see the a.k.a. followed by "Turk," "Mojo" and "Junior." The leader gave his name as Mark. He seemed comfortable with it; if it wasn't his real name it was one he'd used before.

An hour passed amiably enough. Mary charmed by her mere existence, Mark by his art. Mark let them know he was a dear old friend of Dix's. Unwittingly Mary fed Mark his answers by embedding them in her questions.

Did you meet Dix climbing?

He'd met Dix climbing.

Was it on that expedition to Patagonia?

Yes, it was on that expedition to Patagonia.

From there, Mark managed without help, building on general human experiences. Dix had offered the use of his cabin should Mark ever come to Yosemite. He'd arrived to find the tent cabin empty and was hanging out, climbing, waiting for Dix to return. Without coming out and saying so, he managed to get across that Billy Kurt, Bobby and Ben were recent acquaintances who'd horned in on his quarters when the weather turned cold.

Anna listened and watched. By the end of the beer she might have believed Mark's version of events. He was that good. But she noticed Mark gave out very little information, yet deftly managed to get everything Mary knew about Dixon Crofter, his disappearance and the subsequent search.

And she remembered the man he'd been when he'd first opened the door, before he knew they were there.

CHAPTER 3

Anna and Mary skipped cocoa at Yosemite Lodge. The atmosphere of Dix's invaded tent had left its stench, both physical and metaphysical. Anna needed to be alone, Mary needed to call her mom. Both wanted to get to a hot shower and shampoo the reek of cigarette smoke out of their hair.

These were luxuries Anna was to be denied. When she entered her room her dorm mates were in a flutter. The two of them were young, just out of high school, and had fled California's central valley agricultural towns seeking adventure and romance in the high Sierra. Except for housekeeping habits that rivaled those of the Billy/Ben/Bobbsey triplets in Crofter's cabin, they were pleasant enough. Anna considered them dandelion fluff: lovely lighthearted, light-headed girls whose lives and thoughts were dispersed by any wind that blew their way.

During the first few days, she'd surreptitiously questioned them about Trish Spencer and learned only that she was "cool" and "fun." Anna suspected Trish, older by nearly ten years, was one of the winds that affected the two, blowing them into parties and introducing them to cute boys.

"Boy, it's a good thing you showed up," the plump one, Nicky, said as she pulled on her black uniform trousers. "Tiny's doing her Gestapo-waitress bit." The effort of standing on one leg while threading the other through a polyester tube proved too great and Nicky fell over sideways onto her bed. Further communication was lost to wild gales of laughter from Nicky and her partner in inanity, Cricket. It went on. And on. Anna guessed their natural good cheer had been chemically enhanced.

Drugs in the National Parks wasn't new. In Yosemite it was an old story, dating from the classic drug days of the sixties and seventies, complete with hippies, "pigs" and altered states. Since the early seventies, when the drug culture centered in San Francisco had decided to make Yosemite its summer playground, illegal substances had become part of the park's law enforcement history. The jail, a bleak modern set of cells walled into an historic stone building above the fire station, was kept busy housing the perpetrators of assaults, batteries and disturbers of the peace whose uncivil interactions were fueled by consumable evils imported from cities.

"What's Tiny on about?" Anna asked when the giggling finally subsided. The toking of busgirls was not her problem.

"They got this last-minute reservation for thirty-two. A wedding party or something. We got to take another shift. You too. We're to wait tables. Big promotion. She said if you didn't show she would fire your sorry ass."

The gale began again. While it rippled and guffawed at full blow, Anna took off her reeking clothes, stuffed them into the laundry bag, then began to dress for work.