Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (102 page)

He couldn’t stand the sound of her voice. “You stupid
bitch!” he yelled. But she just cut him off or something. He sometimes felt she
knew him and deliberately gave him a lot of shit. Goddamn robot.

Shaun reached the clinic’s empty lot. He needed a drink at
the moment more than he needed to be sober, so he took one, a strong one. His
hand shook so bad, he had to hold the flask with both hands.

He called Kora North again and it went to voice mail. He
left her a message. “You better start answering, Kora. You don’t, I’ll be coming
over and paying you a visit. You hear me?”

Kora North was now exclusive to Thorp and his party scene.
She’d know when Thorp was coming back from Vegas. And if things went to hell,
and he had to get out of Dodge, she always had a lot of cash, and he had plenty
of things on her she’d trade for.

Corbin knew he was running out of time. His cousin found out
what happened, every stinking hitman in Vegas would be heading up to Tahoe to
find
him
first.

11

Sydney watched as Marco pulled the lock rod and opened the
door of the boathouse so she could ease the Reinell 220 out into open water. She
was already feeling much better. The doc had done good.

“Nice,” Marco said, climbing on board and getting into the
front passenger seat. “It fast?”

“Fast enough, but we won’t be using speed unless something
goes wrong. We’ll be running with no lights along the shoreline, which the coast
guard patrols. If there’s one out tonight, they won’t appreciate it. Their
channel is on the boat’s radio, so we’ll know if there’s any activity.”

“Good,” Marco said, removing the Beretta clip, reinserting
it with a slap of the palm of his hand. “Are they still headquartered in Tahoe
City?”

“Yes. They have new rules thanks to the regional planning
agency. Like a no-wake zone six hundred feet from shore. The white buoys are the
ones to watch for. They show where the rocks and other obstacles are. It’s
easier on this side of the lake. Mostly wilderness, and I can run it blind. You
just have to know where the pilings from the old docks are, and the rocks. If we
need to run, nobody will catch us in this baby.”

He didn’t say anything more. She eased the boat away from
the Shaw house and headed down along the west side of the lake, riding a soft
chop. It was all designated wilderness along most of the west side, and pitch
black. As planned, they went lights-out, sliding along at a low purr.

Marco said, “Okay, be straight—what’s going on?”

She said, “I’ve made plenty of enemies, but none as obsessed
with me as Ogden Thorp.”

“I don’t know that name.”

“He’s the front man for some major casino and resort
investors. He’s from one of the big families who’ve been in the Sierra’s since
the beginning of the gold rush. He owns an estate at Incline, another at Fallen
Lake, and is buying up every piece of stressed property and whatever else he can
get. He’s planning on building one of the biggest resorts on the planet. Your
uncle is among the many who stand to profit from the land grab. There’s a lot
going on below the surface, and some of it isn’t very pretty. When it comes to
land, the territorial imperative kicks in big time.”

Marco said,” How’d you get in the middle of all of this?”

“I was dealing with two key witnesses—a girl and her
boyfriend—in an investigation of one of Thorp’s associates, and it spread to
hookers and drugs. The key witnesses ended up dead.”

“How’d they die?”

“They drowned in a supposed drunken post-party swim out at
Fallen Leaf Lake. It’s a long, sordid story. When I persisted in the
investigation of the drowning of my witnesses, I got myself fired. I had no idea
when I went into the questioning of various potential witnesses what we were
getting into.”

“And that’s a problem when you’re not backed by powers equal
to the task. But you got lucky—whoever tried to take you out wasn’t up to the
job. You’re alive. You should try and stay that way.”

She looked at him but didn’t respond to his suggestion.
“It’s like these guys have gotten control of much of the Tahoe Basin political
power grid by intimidation, blackmail, and murder. There’s nothing they won’t do
to get what they want. And what they want is to turn the North Shore into Las
Vegas Boulevard. It would have been unthinkable a short time ago. But now, with
state governments broke, city coffers near empty, they have a good chance of
pulling it off—getting long-standing land-use rules changed.”

“It sounds like you were way over your head and pay grade.”

“When two people who were doing what you wanted them to
do—forced them to do, in a sense—end up dead, you can’t walk away.”

“I understand the emotion of that,” Marco said. “I’ve been
there. But why are you still a threat? You don’t work for law enforcement. You
work in a fish hatchery part-time.”

Sydney stared toward Incline Village. “Thorp blames me for
dragging his name into the gutter. He’s not a man who forgives and forgets, even
when he wins. And they still think I’m running a clandestine investigation
looking for something, or someone, who can help me get them.”

“Are you?”

“If you can call it that. I don’t have much to work with. A
South Lake police reporter and I are friends, and he knows what I’m doing. He
helps out. If I want somebody checked out, he’ll run down whatever’s in the
public record. He’s been warning me for a long time to back off, but I’m a
little hard-headed.”

“I knew a girl like you who lived in a border town on the
Mexican side. Drug dealers overran the place. The police were either killed or
went over to their side. Nobody would take on the job of police chief. She did.
She was young and idealistic and, inevitably, ended up dead. The moral to that
story, and maybe yours, is don’t get in a war where you have no allies, no
support base, and no chance of winning. Idealist motives, or revenge motives—or
any kind of motives—aren’t enough.”

Sydney pulled as close as she could to the rocky shoreline
near an old, now unused boat dock. Marco was laying down the law, and she
realized he wasn’t going to get involved in her problem. His white-knight moment
was coming to an end. He was right, of course, but running was just so hard for
her to think about, or do.

“No rocks to worry about here,” Sydney said. “You’re about a
quarter-mile from where he’ll drive in. There aren’t any other access roads up
this far, and they closed the one that used to come here. You won’t have to
worry about somebody coming in behind you. Careful”—she pointed at the
dock—”that dock hasn’t been used or repaired in years.”

Marco checked Bluetooth communications with her in case
something went bad, then checked the Beretta for the fourth or fifth time.
Finally, he climbed out and headed into the woods.

Good luck,
she thought, staring after him, the woods
quickly swallowing him up.
This is where it ends,
she thought. If Cillo
had people coming in to grab Marco, or if his uncle convinced him he was
committing suicide, it could get nasty very fast. Now she couldn’t do anything
but sit and wait and hope it worked out in her favor.

What did she expect Marco to do? He had to protect himself.
And he was right about her. So was her police-reporter friend. So was everybody
who knew the situation.

She thought about the girl Marco had mentioned, the one in
that town taken over by gangsters. Tahoe was on the verge of being taken over by
a different form of gangster, and she knew she was a persistent, dangerous
irritant that had to be removed simply because she was someone who knew the
entire narrative of what was going on. And, to make matters worse, she had spit
in their faces.

I’m a dead woman walking
, she thought,
and Marco
Cruz knows that
. It was too bad, though—she needed help. A lot of help to do
what she’d always wanted to do, which was to find a way to break into Thorp’s
lawyer’s palatial estate and see if, as rumored, he had an impenetrable office
containing a vault with all the dirt gathered on everyone who might stand in his
way. People didn’t call lawyer Richard Rouse “Tricky Dick” for nothing.

12

Marco took his time moving through the pines, careful to
avoid the dry limbs as he made his way toward the meeting place several hundred
yards from where he’d come ashore. He wanted to see the parking areas near the
museum first.

He found his uncle standing by a small outbuilding near the
museum. Marco watched and waited for a time, reflecting how much his ability to
move quietly and swiftly in the woods at night came from those many hikes and
camping trips with his uncle. Some of his best times.

“You alone?” Marco asked quietly as he slipped up behind his
uncle.

His uncle turned, an unlit cigarette suspended in his left
hand. “I was beginning to worry. Yeah, I’m alone.”

As Cillo snapped his lighter, his bloated face illuminated
momentarily. He took a deep drag, the smoke drifting out as he spoke. “I’m going
to level with you. Deal with this real fast, or it’s going to be real bad.”

“What’s that mean?” Marco asked.

“It means, you don’t do the smart thing, you don’t just lose
the deal here in Tahoe. It means you’re a dead man, and maybe you’ll be killing
me, as well, if I fail to bring you to your senses.”

“Maybe when I understand—”

“What you need to understand is you owe it to yourself and
me…all I did for you and your family—”

“I know what you did for us, and I appreciate all of it,”
Marco said. “But that was then, and this is now. Let’s deal with now.”

“You have her somewhere, I know you do.”

“Just get to what this is about. No games. I’m way beyond
that, where I’m coming from.”

“I understand you got involved accidentally,” Cillo said.
“Nobody faults you for that. But what you do from this point onward is no
accident. You walked into something blind, but now your eyes are wide open—you
need to get smart and walk back out fast.”

“Are we talking about this Thorp character?”

“You don’t mess with guys like Thorp,” Cillo said, taking
another drag. “No future and no purpose to it. Come on, Marco, you’re a smart
guy. You’ve been around the hard blocks, so wake up and smell the roses before
you end up fertilizing them.”

Marco turned and looked around, making sure they stayed
alone, then said, “She told me about some girl and her boyfriend who got taken
out to put an end to an investigation. Drowned, supposedly.”

“Jesus.” Cillo shook his head, snorting smoke. “You really
buying into this? You can’t stand staying out of the line of fire, or what?
Don’t play the stupid hero shit up here, my friend. You don’t want any part of
any of it, and you don’t know squat about the truth of it. Whether they drowned
on their drugged-out own or were helped, doesn’t change anything. They were used
by Jesup. She might as well have drowned them herself. What you have to do to
clear this up is tell me where the hell she is, and then come on back and we’ll
get this party on track. It’s not too late.”

Marco said, “I can’t hand her over if she’s already gone,
now can I?”

“Well, that’s bullshit,” Cillo shot back. “Girl’s wounded.
She ain’t driving around by herself, and she’s got no friends here. Wake up. You
put me in a real bind I don’t much appreciate. I invite you up here and you run
me over because of some crazy woman you know nothing about. That doesn’t play.”

“Didn’t mean to, but—”

“The girl tied up on the railroad tracks doesn’t cut it.”

His uncle lit another cigarette off the butt of the one he
finished, before dropping that and crushing it in the dirt under the pine
needles. “Where’d you leave her? You want out of this, then the only way is tell
me where the hell she is. Listen, damnit, I got people on my neck.”

Marco stared at the dark rise of the mountain across the
lake. “These people you say are such big deals, how is it they sent some rank
amateur to do her in a hatchery, on government property, no less?”

His uncle said, “That’s the thing. Nobody knows who did
this, but it happened at a bad time. She probably was gonna get hit, but not now
and not there.”

“Nobody has any idea who it was?”

“If they do, they aren’t talking to me about it—you know
nothing about what’s going on. Some of the most powerful and richest people on
the planet are coming to the big party next weekend, the Great Gatsby Gala
Thorp’s putting on. These people are the ones gonna invest a hundred million
into this resort. What nobody wants right now is a scandal. People getting
killed. And that woman, getting shot up, isn’t good. She can do something to
upset this whole thing. End up on fucking TV or something.”

“She didn’t call the police or the news, so it’s obvious she
isn’t interested in this going public. Maybe if she agrees to stay away, she
won’t be a threat.”

Cillo gave him a long, hard stare. “You don’t understand
anything. And you aren’t listening to me.”

“You aren’t telling me much.”

Cillo stared at him, his face angry and tight. He looked
off. Then came back, saying, “You won’t listen to me, then maybe you’ll listen
to an old buddy of yours. Someone who can tell you what the hell you need to
know.”

“Who might that be?”

“Gary Gatts. He’s got a place up the mountain south of here.
A restaurant. The Mountain View, I think. Go talk to him. He knows everything
going on. He’ll straighten you out. Go up there now and see the guy.”

Cillo stopped and pulled out his buzzing cell phone. “Yeah.
Yeah.” He took some steps away from Marco and listened to whoever was on the
other end. Then he put the phone back in his pocket and walked back to Marco. He
had a tight look. Whatever the call was about, he didn’t like it much.