Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (117 page)

Marco didn’t want to talk about it right away. He sat in the
kitchen with a tiny headlamp and went over Dutch’s files, notebook, computer,
and his security workup sheets—all of it on the kitchen table.

When he finally joined her on the deck, he decided to talk
about it. They sat in the dark, nothing on the lake but the moon.

Sydney said, “According to the Douglas County Sheriff’s
Department…an accident. He fell getting into his rock pool. Hit his head.
Knocked himself out and drowned. Apparently, he’d been lying in the pool for at
least a day or two.”

Marco said, “Your police-reporter friend believes the
accident theory?”

“I don’t think he’s got any contradictory information.”

“Who found him?”

“One of his friends couldn’t get ahold of him. Went up and
found him.”

They were silent for a moment.

Marco said, “Damn, that’s really hard to get my mind around.
Some people you grow up with, they seem indestructible. He was like that. One of
my favorite stories as I a kid was how he survived the bombing of Harvey’s
casino back in 1980. He was one of the guys who continued to play even as they
were evacuating before the bomb went off. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you
play one hand too many. He was a to-the-bitter-end kind of guy. A family trait.”

“Didn’t he win the Tervis Cup once?” Sydney asked. “I heard
stories about that. And some controversy?”

Marco said, “He courted controversy, for sure. He was
nothing if not provocative in everything he did. But the Tervis Cup was one of
the highlights of his life. He talked endlessly about it. I was about twelve
when he won it. He’d tell you every mile of the hundred-mile climb over the
mountains, always prefacing it with the fight he had with some guy in Squaw
Valley at the start of the race. Then the miserable climb in the heat and dust
up twenty-three thousand feet and how cold it got at night, and then the drop
down to Auburn over miserable switchback trails. I heard that story a hundred
times. Got better with every telling. If he’d lived to ninety, I’m sure he would
have added Indians he had to fight over the Sierras to the mix of things. It was
the highlight of his existence, winning that race.”

“What was the controversy?”

“Somewhere between Devil’s Thumb and Murderer’s Bar, just as
they were heading down toward the final victory lap at the Placer County
Fairgrounds, they got into it again. The controversy was over whether some foul
play was involved. The guy he beat out never finished the race, but he never
talked about how he got a broken arm and cracked ribs. Never lodged a
complaint.”

“Maybe he got a little drunk and slipped,” she said.

“Maybe. He definitely gave me some good moments in my life.
But he had a real dark side, for sure. I can’t help wondering if maybe because
he didn’t bring me in, he had to be punished.” After a long pause, he added,
“I’ll think about him and that part of my life later. Right now, we have work to
do.”

Marco took out his cell and called Kora North. No answer.
Called her again. “C’mon, Kora, answer the goddamn phone.”

“She’s probably drunk and asleep. Or she decided to run,”
Sydney said.

“We have too much on her. And she wants that money. I’ll go
with sleeping. But when their
Sicario
doesn’t return, there’ll be more
guys out there looking for him. And us. We travel by boat at night from now on.”

They stayed up until morning. Marco tried Kora twice more
and got nothing. Sydney sent her a text. If they were going over there, it meant
waiting until dark. They needed some confirmation from her.

***

Kora stared at her phone, then at the comatose killer. He’d
been out a hell of a long time. It was already daylight. She knew she couldn’t
continue to ignore the texts she was getting from Jesup and the calls from her
boyfriend. She tried to decide what the hell to do. Maybe she should just tell
this Marco guy that the killer was lying there on her couch unconscious. Let him
handle it.

The humming of her phone, mingled with the killer’s snoring,
had her getting crazy. Leon was in a sleep so deep that when she nudged him, he
didn’t show any signs of waking up. Maybe he was dying. She realized if he died,
that was a problem. If he lived, maybe a worse one. If she killed him, Thorp
would get her one way or another for it.

She now had Leon’s gun and her own. She had all the power.
Just didn’t know what to do with it.

Make a goddamn decision,
she admonished herself.

She fought off a sense of panic. If she shot him, she had to
do it in a way that wouldn’t mess up her expensive couch. She loved the couch.
She had expensive tastes.

She wondered if he was brain-dead or something. Then it
occurred to her that if she didn’t answer the texts or phone calls, Marco and
Jesup might just show up.

I can’t kill a man while he’s sleeping, she thought. That’s
not fair. He’s got to see me, look into my eyes and know he’s about to die.

Then she wondered why she thought that. What the hell did it
matter?
I’m nuts,
she thought.
Can’t make up my goddamn mind about
anything
.

She stared at her fish tank. The fish swimming lazily. All
damn day, every day. Trapped. No exit.

That’s when she looked at the buzzing phone and knew she had
to answer this time or the guy might just come over to find out what was wrong.
She picked up the phone.

It was the boyfriend, Marco. He said, “If you’re not okay,
say you have the wrong number and hang up.”

“I’m okay. I was sleeping.”

“Okay. Look, I need the drawings so we can
begin…construction.”

“I’m working on them.”

“Do the best you can,” he told her. “Inside and outside,
down to the water. The inside is the most important. Where the office will be
located. On the outside, where the fishpond, gazebo, boat dock, and that kind of
thing should be.”

“When do you want them?” She spoke to this stud, wondering
where he was. Maybe right outside close. She stared at the killer. He was now
snoring fitfully.

“Tonight. Make them detailed as you can. Contractors will be
coming in a couple days.”

She wondered if he really needed them, or if he was just
testing her. All this code language like the fucking FBI was listening in or
something. And again she wondered if she should just tell this Marco guy and
have him come over and kill the guy.
Go ahead, tell him,
she pleaded with
herself. But she didn’t.

Be real easy to kill the killer and then let Marco get rid
of the body, wouldn’t it?

She couldn’t think clearly about what it would mean. She was
in a state, caught between the killer, the guy on the phone, and Thorp. It
always amazed her how she got into this kind of shit.

Meanwhile, Marco was telling her he’d let her know when he
was there. Asked her again if everything was good.

Good?
No,
she thought,
not exactly.

“Yes. Everything’s good. At least as good at it can be under
the circumstances,” she said, walking to the window, back to the couch, then to
the bar as she talked.

“Sorry ‘bout that. It’s how things go. Contractors are
undependable. Let me deal with them.”

Yeah, right,
she thought sarcastically, looking at
this killer of men, and maybe of women. She was so tempted to tell Marco she had
the killer right there in front of her. But what would that accomplish? How many
more were out there?

Don’t tell him. No way, Kora thought. Not yet.

“Okay, I’ll be in touch.”

She closed the phone. Men and their bullshit.

She again looked at the fish tank. She saw herself in there
as a tiny fish swimming against glass walls in a permanent trap.

To hell with that.

She picked up the guns and tried to decide which one would
be best to finish this with.

Shoot the bastard in the head and be done with it.

Then call the police and say some madman broke in and tried
to rape her. He sure as hell fit the description of a madman.

She pointed one gun, then the other, at his face. All her
life she’d wondered, since the first time she was raped, what it would be like
to kill some sonofabitch. Now she was about to find out.

Bang-bang, motherfucker.

Still, she hesitated.

She hadn’t made up her mind, and that really bothered her.
I’ve fucking got to decide,
she thought.
If he doesn’t die, if he wakes
up, then what?

He kills me.

That’s what.

What is wrong with you, damnit? Either kill this bastard
or…or what?

44

Marco said, “Kora’s good to go. She’s looking at the end of
the rainbow.”

Marco went back into the files and tapes Corbin had on her.
It was heavy stuff.

Sydney pulled her chair next to him and said, “These guys
she and the other girls are partying with, they’re some of the most important
people around the lake.”

A couple tapes later, they found a senator, two congressmen,
and other politicos. “This outfit was busy,” Marco said. “No wonder they got
control of things. How far is it to Rouse’s place?”

Sydney said, “From here, in that speedboat, about half an
hour. You know what’s so scary? I’m now my opposite, my dark alter ego. I was
this straight-laced law chick, but now I’m a full-fledged criminal. It was so
easy and doesn’t really seem to bother me. That’s scary. You went through some
of those radical changes, didn’t you?”

“Here’s the thing. The way I look at it, there are two kinds
of law breakers—those who have no moral justification and those who do. It’s all
a matter of context. If the law can’t bring justice, well, maybe somebody has to
do whatever it requires.”

“The end justifies the means?”

Marco said, “Sometimes the means force the issue, determine
the end.”

They went over all the negative scenarios. They worried Kora
had gone to Thorp and there would be people waiting for them. But given they had
so much on her, so much of what she wanted, in the end, they agreed that was
unlikely…but they still needed to plan for the worst.

***

Sydney dug out Bernie Shaw’s many maps, and they looked at
the keys. The condos and house were on fingers of land that had been created out
of the wetlands. It looked on the map like a cluster of germs.

“I nearly bought a condo here when prices dropped,” Sydney
said.

“It looks like a nice place. What stopped you?”

She told him how unaware she’d been of some of the history
of the place. That it was carved out of Truckee wetlands, much of the building
material supplied by none other than Thorp’s grandfather and father. It
triggered one of the great battles over the destruction of the environment in
the fifties and sixties.

“You and the Thorps go way back.”

“I guess so. They stuck thousands of condos and houses right
on top of one of nature’s necessary places. This is where she lives, on Capri
Drive.”

“It seems like a big place,” he said, looking more closely
at the map.

“They dredged the wetlands so they had all these fingers of
land, so everybody gets a little waterway out front. Seven miles of interlocking
waterways.

“It
is
big.”

“Would have been even biggerhad they not been stopped. They
altered the natural channels that filtered the water before it reached the lake.
The paving and building on the Keys eliminated that filtering process, and that
had a lot to do with the lake turning gray-green. From high in the air, the
place looks like a big pond with amoeba-like creatures frozen in place. If Thorp
and his investors get their way on the North Shore, who knows if they won’t come
back and finish this? It was Thorp’s father and grandfather who supplied much of
the building material for some of the first homes. And across the lake, if they
find a way to open up any part of the Whittell legacy, Tahoe will just be a
really bad copy of Vegas.”

“Funny how my uncle changed,” Marco said. “He was a big fan
of keeping the lake in its natural state. You would have connected with him back
then.”

“It’s difficult to protect a place as beautiful as this,”
Sydney said. “Those who own property don’t want anybody else coming in. They
want an exclusive. Others want to turn it into Vegas North. But I see it as a
big park where everyone has a right to come and enjoy it, but no one has the
right to destroy. How you do that is the issue. But one thing I do know is that
Thorp has no interest in the lake. Just himself. He’s the opposite of George
Whittell, the man he supposedly worships. And he’s willing to do anything to get
what he wants. And has.”

They put everything that was spread out on the table away,
then decided to get some rest before heading over to see Kora at twilight.

Between the fight at Corbin’s and his uncle dead, Marco was
now totally committed to the mission. It was very simple—they would find a way
to get Thorp, or he would get them. And like it was in much of Mexico, the
police didn’t much matter.

45

The killer moved, shifted, let out a heavy breath, almost
like a sigh, and Kora backed up.

Shit! He’s not dead or dying.

He was alive and going to wake up. She pointed the gun,
pointed it at the killer’s temple, ready to do it, willing to do it.

Something was happening in her mind. An idea—one she knew
was completely nuts yet excitingly powerful—began forming. And that slowed her
down, made her stop, think.

She felt the heft and the power of the gun. It had a weird
trigger. She’d shot guns before. At the range, and when she went camping once
with this nutty cop from Reno who wanted to marry her so bad he was willing to
give up his wife and four kids. Mercifully for her, and them, he died in a bad
accident while chasing a drunk.