The Deader the Better (30 page)

“A mile or so,” I said. “At least I think so. I’ve never
walked down.”

“I neber seen de Pacifeec Ocean,” he said. I checked my watch.
Three-ten. Looked at Floyd. “You mind holding down the fort?” He
said it would be no problem. Said he’d seen the ocean and thought
he could probably live without the hike.

We went out to the front of the yard and turned right, following
the Quileute west toward the Pacific. J.D.’d owned the last of the
trees. The minute we breached the tree line at the far end of the
clearing we found ourselves in a series of lowland pastures with only
a thin evening fog standing between us and the Pacific Ocean. Boris
wanted to know aboutthe plants, so I told him everything I knew. Lots
of Scotch broom, its wiry limbs gray and desolate in winter, giving
no hint whatsoever of the brilliant yellow blossoms that signal the
arrival of spring on the Northwest coast. Marsh grass and sword fern
and bracken. A collapsed corral and loading chute. And old fences,
bent and crumbling now. North and south, east and west, dividing the
valley into an irregular checkerboard of what must have at one time
been pastures. Robert Frost came to mind with that poem about good
fences making good neighbors.

Boris was amazed that land such as this was not being used.

“Who owns dees?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “The guy who was killed—”

“Spreenger?”

“Yeah. He told me there were a thousand private acres in here
that were surrounded by the Indian reservation.”

“I doan understand dees reservation beesnus.”

I did my best to explain the concept of a reservation.

“So dey vas here first.”

“Yeah.”

“So how come dey doan own eet all?”

“We had more and better weapons.”

This was a concept he understood. “Ah,” he said. “Veectors
and spoils.”

It took forty minutes before we stood on a bluff overlooking the
Pacific. Everything that wasn’t Indian reservation sat on a narrow
plateau between the Quileute and what I figured was Fox Creek, which
rolled over a mossy crag down into the ocean about a half a mile from
where I stood. Twenty feet below us, the Pacific roiled muddy green,
crashing white foam over and around the black rocks offshore. Pretty
much the same kind of property I’d seen on the Hoh reservation.
Only a man-made breakwater away from having a nice little protected
bay, safe from the murderous Pacific storms that rake this part of
the coast for six months a year. It was full dark before we picked
our way among the hillocks and fences and back to the homestead.
Floyd was sitting in a lawn chair with his rifle across his lap.

“Phone in the cabin’s been ringing,” he said. Turned out to
be a message from George. He’d checked the answering machine this
afternoon and was reporting that all five tax criminals had tried to
call yesterday afternoon. Said they sounded a mite upset. Especially
the Polster guy. Said he’s been practicing his spiel on Nearly
Normal and was ready to, what he called “ream some ass” come
Monday morning.

I tried Rebecca at home, listened as my voice apologized for
neither of us being there and then the clicks as voice mail forwarded
my call somewhere else, only to be told by Rebecca’s voice that Dr.
Duvall was unable to answer my call at this time, but that if I were
to leave a message she would be sure to get back to me as soon as
possible. Over sandwiches and beer, we decided it would be wise to
sleep in shifts. No telling what the manly types were going to do
after today. Lord knows there was no shortage of assholes in this
town, and if there’s one thing a redneck can’t abide, it’s
getting his ass kicked in public. We figured there was no sense in
taking any chances. Four-hour shifts. First Floyd, then Boris, then
me.

Around nine, Boris excused himself and headed to his cabin for a
siesta. Floyd got his rifle from the corner and went out into the
yard. I turned out the lights and lay in the dark for a moment before
snapping on the bedside light and dialing home. She answered on the
first ring. “Hello.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey yourself,” she answered.

I could hear the strain in the spaces between the words as we
traded news of the past two days. She said she stopped at the office
on Friday and that everybody’d made a big fuss over her and that
she’d spent most of today getting her clothes together for the
week. Doing laundry and taking stuff to the cleaners in a cab. How
everything took three times as long with one arm. As for me…I kept
it vague. Said I felt like I was making some progress, a statement
that, although not altogether true, seemed somehow to validate my
presence here. I left out the fight in the parking lot. Couldn’t
for the life of me see how telling her that was going to improve the
situation. When we ran out of news, we found ourselves listening to
one another breathe over the line, as if we shared some terrible
secret that neither of us wanted to be the first to utter.

“I feel us drifting apart, Leo,” she said after a while.

“Doesn’t seem like drift to me,” I answered. “Seems to me
it’s you doing the paddling, not the tide.”

“I’m just telling you how I feel.”

“And I feel like nothing in my life is ever going to be the same
again unless I say or do whatever it is you want me to say or do.
Which, no matter how much my heart wants to agree, seems like some
kind of betrayal.”

“Compromise is betrayal? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Compromise is the art of nobody getting what they want.”

“Stop being cute. Answer the question.”

“If you don’t believe in what you’re saying, it is a
betrayal. If you just agree so your partner will get off your case,
well, what’s that? Not only don’t the two of you agree, but now
the other person can’t even rely on you to tell them the truth.”

“I see, then. You’re in charge of defending the truth.”

I kept cool and didn’t rise to the bait. “Truth be told,
Rebecca…I don’t even know what it is you want. Honest to god. I
don’t have the foggiest.”

The phone company was right. You can hear a pin drop.

“I want a regular life. I want to go to parties with somebody
who wants to be there with me. I want somebody to strive with.
Somebody who I know is going to come home alive every night. Who’s
not sitting in some alley staking out some drug-crazed something or
other for a week at a time. A guy who doesn’t have to shoot his way
out of sex parties and then deliver broken little girls back to their
families. I just want a life, Leo. A life like everybody else’s.”

When she put it that way, I knew Jed was right. Ending up like
everybody else was my greatest horror. “I don’t know what to
say,” I said.

“Me either,” she sighed. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

I snapped off the light.

JUST AFTER NOON, KURTIS ARRIVED IN A RENTED JEEPCherokee. “Saw
Uncle Carl and his beast on the ferry,” he announced. “They
should be right along. He said they were stopping in PT for some
rental equipment.” He looked around. “How bucolic,” he
enthused. “I feel positively ruddy.”

I told him to take Cabin Number Five. The sight of Kurtis
sashaying toward the cabin, singing “Oh what a beautiful morning…”
in an operatic tenor caused Floyd to raise an eyebrow my way. “Best
B and E guy in the business,” I assured him. The look on Floyd’s
face said he’d better be if he was going to walk that way.

At ten, I’d sent Boris and the Boys off to make one last run at
finding Ben Bendixon in Port Townsend. Having passed out in the
middle of the afternoon, Ralph and Harold had been up since before
the crack of dawn. Knowing their habits as I did, I’d locked them
out. They work on the assumption that people are passed out rather
than sleeping. To them, this means they can make all the noise they
want, regardless of the hour. I’d heard ’em rattling the door
around three A.M., trying to get to something to eat, but I ignored
them. You snooze, you lose.

When Boris woke me for my shift at five, they were sitting on the
porch in the dark. Sullen and surly, they grumbled all the way to the
refrigerator and their first cold one of the day. They cheered up a
bit as they put together and then devoured scrambled eggs and toast.
Washed down, of course, by a couple more beers. They got surly again,
though, when I told them to wash their dishes and leave the kitchen
like they found it. I guess nomads don’t usually do housework. They
were still grousing when Boris packed them in the Blazer and went
bouncing up the driveway. Just after one o’clock, Carl Cradduck’s
motor home rolled into the driveway, followed by Robby and the rented
cherry picker. I introduced Floyd to Carl and Robby. Floyd showed
Carl where to park the RV. “Out of the field of fire,” Floyd
said, gesturing at the tree line behind the house.

“I got something to help out with that,” Carl said. He craned
his neck and yelled into the RV. “Robby…we still got those
sensors we took off those Nazi bastards?”

“Yeah…somewhere,” Robby yelled back.

“We did this wire job for the Pocatello, Idaho, police
department. They had the paperwork to wire this white separatist
group that they suspected of a couple of synagogue bombings, but they
couldn’t get anybody inside to plant the bugs. Seems like every
time they got anywhere near the place, the skinheads knew they were
there. Fuckers lived in this compound thing, like a frontier fort,
way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere. So they came to us. Wanted
us to see if we could figure out how they were surveilling the woods
around their fucking fort.”

“Motion sensors?” Kurtis asked.

Carl nodded. “First thing we did was run a sweep. Before we ever
got out of the van. The board lit up like Christmas. We sent out a
fucking signal that jammed every TV and radio within a
ten-square-mile area and then backtracked on the sensor signals. I
don’t know where the hell they got ’em, but they’d gotten their
hands on a dozen East German motion sensors. Same kind they used to
patrol the Berlin wall.”

As if on cue, Robby appeared at the RV door. He handed a cardboard
box out the door to Floyd, who walked over and set the box in Carl’s
lap. “Ya gotta see these suckers,”

Carl said, pulling open the box and rummaging around inside. He
pulled out a bird. A sparrow, it appeared to be. With incredibly
long, skinny legs. “Is this a pisser or what?” he asked. “Ya
just put the little fucker up in a tree, wrap the wire legs around a
branch and the little things are virtually undetectable. Good for a
hundred yards in every direction, long as you’ve got line of sight,
of course.” He laughed. “Robby was nose to nose with the fucker
before he figured it out.”

Robby poked his head out the door. “I kept waiting for it to fly
off. I’m way the hell up this tree, following the sensor signal,
and this little bird is just hunkered down staring at me. I couldn’t
figure out for the life of me why he didn’t get the hell out of
there. At first I thought he was, like, too terrified to fly off.
Like he’d never seen some idiot human climbing up his tree in the
dead of night. So I wave the signal reader at him and not only
doesn’t he fly away, he turns out to be the damn signal.”

He dropped the bird back into the bag and held the bag out to
Floyd. “We got six, which is probably more than we need. Space them
out.” He turned to me. “How deep is that tree stand?”

“It varies…but maybe fifty yards until you get up to the
road.”

“Take them about twenty yards in and put them up above eye
level. About as high as you can reach,” Carl instructed.

“Aye aye, Captain,” said Floyd.

“Take a radio with you so you can talk with Robby.”

Floyd stopped at the RV for a handheld radio and then he started
up the hill toward the tree line. Carl turned to Kurtis. “You have
a look at the City Building on the way here?”

Kurtis nodded. “I did a drive-by. Stopped at both the front and
back doors. Standard-issue contact alarms. I’ll have to get up on
the roof to know if they’ve got anything other than that, but the
system’s pretty new, so I’m betting they’ve got a direct line
down to the cop shop.”

“You find me a pole?”

“Back of the lot. Perfect. When you drive up the street, it’s
right there in front of you. From the top, you should be able to see
all the way down to the highway.”

“Good.”

“Somebody wire the cars already?”

“First thing in the morning,” I said. “I got the makes,
models and plate numbers. One of us can do it right there in the lot
when they show up for work on Monday morning.”

“Sounds together,” Kurtis said. “What am I taking in?”

“Robby,” Carl bellowed. “Bring me the hard goods.”

“What are you, crippled?” Robby shouted back. Carl pushed the
button on his chair and backed over to the door. Robby’s arm
appeared, holding a ziplock freezer bag half full of electronics.
Carl reached up and took it from his hand and then drove over to
Kurtis. “Got both magnetic and adhesive mikes.”

He reached into the bag and pulled out a bronze disk about the
size and thickness of a silver dollar. He placed it against the
bottom of the aluminum arm on his wheelchair. It stayed there.
“Depends on how old the cheap-shit furniture is. Old stuff is all
metal. Use these. The magnet makes the battery last longer. New shit
is all plastic.” He dropped the disk back into the bag and came out
with another. This one bronze on one side, white on the other. Carl
showed Kurtis, who took it in his hands and held it close to his
face. “You just peel off the paper and stick it where you want it.
Doesn’t even have to be dry.”

“What else?” Kurtis asked. “I don’t much like carrying
things in.”

Carl held up his hand. “Got you covered.” He pulled out a dull
metal tube about the size of a Magic Marker. “Problem with cameras
has always been power. Never could get any parity between the size of
the camera and the size of the batteries you needed to run the
goddamn things. Got cameras the size of your thumbnail, for
chrissakes, but you wanted to run the damn thing for a week you
needed something the size of a car battery.”