Nailed (32 page)

Chapter 43

Terry Castlewood was out of surgery when Ron got back to Community Hospital. His prognosis was guarded. Maybe he’d walk again, maybe he wouldn’t. There were a lot of people in the hospital chapel saying prayers for him. Others congregated in the lounge outside the recovery area and talked in hushed tones. It was these people the chief wanted to see. He wanted to know who among them would react so violently — dementedly — to the lion attack on the young football star.

Ron was sure the firebombing at What the Hell had as much to do with sports as it did with race. Most of the outrage people felt was focused on the fact that Terry Castlewood had been a local hero, one who showed the potential to be a big league jock. Hell, even Ron, who didn’t follow any team except the Los Angeles Lakers, had remembered seeing the boy’s picture on the sports page of the
Goldstrike Prospector.
So it stood to reason that Terry’s fans would be the ones who could point the finger at the most twisted among their number.

The problem was, Ron had been anticipated. By the feds and the media.

He saw Horgan and his minions talking to a distraught middle aged couple — Terry Castlewood’s parents, the chief would guess — in a glass walled office behind the nurse’s station at the entrance to the intensive care unit. Reporters buttonholed people right and left. Ron was amazed the FBI men were allowing the newsies to conduct their interviews without hindrance. Maybe the feds hoped to get their leads from the nightly news or the morning paper.

Or they figured he’d show up and play the heavy. He could give the media the bum’s rush. He could suffer their noisy wrath when he did. Ron was about to run that risk when his BlackBerry chimed again.

Sergeant Stanley was calling once more, this time with good news.

“Somebody dropped a dime on the firebombing,” the sergeant said.

Ron looked around. Nobody had noticed him yet.

“Does it sound legit?” he asked.

“Woman says she’s the perp’s mother.”

“Was she broken up about calling in?”

“Oh, yeah. Tears, sobs, the whole nine yards.”

Regret was always a good indicator of a snitch’s sincerity, especially when it was a parent turning in a child.

“What’d she say?”

“She overheard sonny-boy bragging on the phone in his bedroom about what he’d done: ‘Charbroiled a nigger.’ He went on about how it was tough to know when they were done cooking, though, since they’re black to begin with. Mom didn’t appreciate his comedy routine. She said she hadn’t raised him that way.”

“Is this moron a kid, still at Goldstrike High?”

“He’s thirty-four, unemployed, lives with Mom. Dad’s dead. Junior is supposed to be a former jock himself. Now he’s a booster. He’s taking a nap after his busy morning.”

“You’ve got cars at the house already?”

“Front and back, Chief. I just called to see if you wanted to be in on the arrest.”

Ron looked around again. This time Horgan was staring at him. Ben Dexter, too. Both doubtlessly wondering who the chief was talking to.

Ron told the Sarge, “No, go get him right now. Bring him in quietly. Call the mayor, Annie Stratton and the DA. Let them figure out how they want to handle everything.”

“Will do, Chief.”

Ron hung up. He walked past Horgan who’d come out of the room where he’d been conducting his interview. He walked past Ben Dexter who’d been talking to a high school kid. He acknowledged neither of them.

He stopped a nurse and asked if Carolyn Mason was in the intensive care unit. He wanted to find out how she was doing. He wanted to see Sherm and Geneva, and tell them the man who had hurt their daughter and burned down their restaurant had been arrested. They had the right to be the first to know. But he doubted the news would give either of them much comfort.

It certainly seemed poor compensation to him.

After she’d sucked him dry and laid twenty grand cash on him, straight out of a floor safe in her bedroom, Didi DuPree had finally agreed to help Gayle Shipton with the dialogue for her screenplay. Of course, he didn’t know spelling and he certainly didn’t know typing. So he had to dictate to Gayle what all the characters should say to each other.

Didi had made it only to the eighth grade before he found his life’s work, but he noticed a few things about rewriting a screenplay right off. Like they started with a scene he knew she’d already finished a couple days back. So ol’ Gayle was not only rewriting somebody else’s dog poop dialogue, she was also rewriting her own. Worse than that, she was rewriting him, changing what he had to say right as it came out of his mouth.

He’d give her lines that were funny and sharp. But she’d type them out her own way. Change a word here or there. Do just enough to fuck up the rhythm, take out all the sly fun.

If he hadn’t needed a place to lay low, he’d have slapped the shit out of her.

Wasn’t right to hire someone with talent to do a job and then fuck with him. It was no wonder movies sucked the way they did. You ran beef through a grinder you got hamburger not sirloin.

Gayle looked up at Didi when he stopped talking.

“What’s next?” she wanted to know.

Didi put his artistic ire aside and swiveled her chair around. He slipped his hands under her arms, and lifted her to her feet. She’d been amazed how easily he’d picked her up the first time he’d done it. Told him she’d never have believed how strong he was. It made her hot just thinking about it.

Didi had said she didn’t know the half of it.

“What,” Gayle asked, “you want more? Now? Can’t you get enough? We’re working here.”

“Don’t frown, baby. You’ll sprain your face-lift.”

“God, you’re such a natural,” Gayle enthused, taking no offense. “I think we can use that line in act two somewhere.”

Didi sat down on Gayle’s chair and pulled her onto his lap. He felt almost paternal toward her now. Maybe he should have kids someday, he thought. He’d be good with them. Teach them to deal with the world on their own terms.

“Listen to me now,” Didi said gently, stroking Gayle’s bare inner thigh. “The show’s gonna go on. I’m gonna hunt and peck around this computer, and write some stuff that’d make you pee your pants, if you ever wore any. But right now, I got a favor to ask.”

“What’s that?”

Didi heard the uncertainty in her voice, so he hugged her a little closer and licked her spine at the base of her neck. Goose bumps popped up all over her shoulders and back, and a tremor ran through her. He had her now. No doubt about it.

“It’s nothing
illegal,
is it?” Gayle wanted to know.

“Of course not, baby. I’ll do all the law breaking around here.”

Gayle quickly squirmed around so she was straddling Didi; he wasn’t wearing any pants, either. “You keep talking like that, I’m going to fall in love with you.”

“Mmm, mmm, mmm,” he said as he felt her warmth surround him. “I believe you already have.”

Didi knew enough to keep quiet then, except for some pro forma sound effects, until they finished. When Gayle slumped in his arms, she asked him what he wanted her to do.

“There’s a man I want to meet. An Englishman. Name of Colin Ring. Big red-faced guy is what I hear. The way I got it worked out, he’s going to be at one of three places tonight between ten and midnight. All I want you to do is find him for me. You smile at him real nice, and invite him back here. Tell him there’s somebody he’s just got to meet. Can you do all that?”

Gayle Shipton said she could and she would.

Just as long as Didi kept writing and let her take the credit for it.

As the late afternoon sun slouched toward evening, Corrie Knox decided to call it quits. She remembered all too clearly what had happened the day before when she and Tuck had pushed their hunt too far into the twilight. Oliver Gosden was truly a brave man, she had decided, one who didn’t let his obvious fear keep him from doing an important job. But when it came to being an outdoorsman, he was never going to remind anyone of Lewis and Clark.

Martin and Lewis, maybe.

No, that was uncharitable. After several hours in the woods, he no longer made all the noise of a marching band. Even so, there wasn’t a creature in the forest that wasn’t going to hear the deputy chief coming from a long way off; at one point, before she suggested he stop it, he’d even been clicking a cigarette lighter open and shut. The only way they were going to spot the mountain lion they wanted was if it got pissed at Oliver for interrupting its sleep.

They had seen signs of the animal, though. They’d followed his tracks, his blood and his dung. They’d chased the tracks right through the bed of a crystal clear mountain stream. The icy water must have helped the cat’s wounded paw to stop bleeding, because there was no more blood to be found on the other side of the stream. Then the footprints disappeared as the mountain lion moved onto a patch of rocky terrain. From there, the only way the hunters could try to follow the animal was on pure instinct. Corrie’s not Oliver’s.

Still, there were times when Corrie thought all she had to do was look up and there it would be, perched on a tree limb like the Cheshire cat from
Alice in Wonderland
. But no such luck. Not even a ghostly, mocking feline smile to shoot at.

Most likely, the animal had ultimately done just what she predicted hours ago: found a hidey-hole in which to lick its wounds.

“Let’s head for home, Deputy Chief,” Corrie said.

Oliver, who was one big raw nerve by that time, didn’t argue. Instead, he asked, “You think the state will have someone here to help you tomorrow?”

“Let’s hope,” she answered.

They made it back to Corrie’s 4x4 without incident. When they were underway, Oliver turned to Corrie and said, “You know it was out there with us today, don’t you?”

“Most of the day, anyway. Right up ’til the end. But then where else would it be?”

“I mean, it was watching us.”

There was no question, Corrie knew, that people could feel when they were being stalked. The awareness came without the aid of conscious sensory input. You didn’t see, you didn’t hear, you didn’t smell the predator … but just like a lobster at a seafood restaurant, you were aware that something was sizing you up for dinner.

Corrie told Oliver a story.

“There was this trapper name of Caleb Marsh who lived in Idaho a little over a hundred years ago. Guy was something of a local legend. He routinely shot grizzlies and wolves, and thought nothing of it. Then one day he felt he was being followed, and he spotted this mountain lion.”

Corrie glanced over to see if Oliver was paying attention. His eyes were as big as a kid’s, one listening to a ghost story. “This isn’t bullshit, is it?”

The game warden shook her head, put her eyes back on the road, and continued.

“Anyway, this went on for almost two years, the lion stalking this guy. The really strange part was, the lion seemed to be teasing him, giving old Caleb Marsh little glimpses of himself. Because, normally, if a mountain lion doesn’t want you to see it, you don’t.”

Corrie interrupted her narrative to negotiate a sharp curve in the road.

Once that was taken care of, Oliver demanded to know, “So what happened? Marsh shot the lion?”

“That’s not the general conclusion. Caleb Marsh disappeared. The only way anyone ever learned of his story was from a journal that was found in his abandoned cabin.”

Oliver waited until Corrie braked for a stop sign and then he said, “I hate that story, but it fits right in with a theory I’ve got about this animal.”

“What’s that?”

“I think it’s gotten personal with him. I think he’ll keep right on going after people.”

Corrie believed that there were always sound, scientific reasons to explain animal behavior … but she’d come to the same conclusion.

“I do, too,” she said.

Oliver stopped into Ron’s office before he went home. He dropped like a sack of cement into a guest chair, and regarded the chief bleakly. “I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed my day,” he said.

“Didn’t get the cat, huh?”

Oliver shook his head. “We managed a draw, though. He didn’t get us either.”

“Just so you know, I’d have gone out there myself if it were politically possible.”

Oliver understood. He even believed the chief.

“Wasn’t a great day here in civilization, either,” Ron said. He told Oliver about the attack on What the Hell.

“How’s the girl?” the deputy chief wanted to know.

“Alive but suffering. Clay had her flown out this afternoon to a burn specialist in San Francisco. Her parents went with her.”

“You get the asshole who did it?”

Ron told him the story of the idiot’s mother dropping the dime on him.

“Good for her. The DA going for attempted murder?”

The chief shook his head. “Not immediately, anyway. The mayor turned the perp over to the feds. They’re going to prosecute him for hate crimes and civil rights violations. If he gets less than fifty years, then the state will prosecute. This way, we get Horgan out of our hair. Maybe for good, but at least for a little while.”