The Devil's Redhead (2 page)

She licked her fingers clean, reached up and gathered her hair away from her neck so he could put it on her. As he fastened the clasp at her nape, he said, “This stone, incidentally, has a story to it.”

She could tell from his voice there was nothing “incidental” about it, but before she could call him on it, he continued.

“The maiden Amethyst was wandering through the forest one day, when she stumbled on the tigers of Bacchus, sleeping in the sun. Before she could sneak away, the tigers woke up. She panicked.”

“Bad idea with tigers,” Shel guessed.

“You know this story.”

“Every girl knows this story,” she said. “More or less. Go on.”

“Amethyst ran. The tigers chased her down. They almost had her when she was spotted by the goddess Diana. Taking pity, and to save Amethyst from being torn to shreds, Diana turned the girl into stone.”

Shel turned to face him, squinting in the sunlight. “What, this goddess, she couldn't just wave some kinda magic thingy?”

Abatangelo sat there a moment, considering it. “There's no magic thingy in this story. Sorry.”

There it was again, she thought. That catch in his voice. The necklace wasn't just a gift. It was a warning.

“This story,” she said, “you're gonna get to the ending before you break my heart, right?”

He clicked the felt box open and shut, nervous. “Bacchus,” he said finally, “in remorse for what his tigers had done, poured wine over Amethyst. It didn't bring her back to life, but it did turn the stone the color you see there.”

Shel nodded, then held the stone up to the sunlight to watch it flare. “Great story,” she said finally. “Spooky, but great. And I love my present. Thank you.”

“You are,” he said, “most definitely welcome.”

“That's not the only story goes along with this present, is it.”

He looked out at the wide blue bay, dotted with sails, taking a moment to frame his thought. “I want to give you the chance to walk away,” he said, “before things get sticky.”

And that was how the truth came out. He'd been smuggling since college, he told her, turning serious right about the time he lost his scholarship in water polo, the result of blowing out a knee in a motorcycle accident. He'd earned a nickname from his former teammates, some of whom remained customers. He was Bad Dan, The Man Who Can.

He ran the stateside crews, hiring the boys on the beach and managing distribution, while his partner, Steve Cadaret, worked up the loads in Bangkok. Over the preceding three years, the Cadaret Company had brought in two hundred tons of premium Thai pot. They landed it on remote beaches, in abandoned quarries, along heavily forested riversheds. For transport, they used anything that would float, from garbage scows to an old fruit freighter they'd salvaged from a shipyard in Panama. They'd formed a nexus of dummy companies to hide the money and mastered the ancient art of bribery.

For all that, he assured her, he and his buddies did their best to avoid the gaudier macho baggage. From the time he and Cadaret had started out, they'd lived by the credo: No guns, no gangsters. It's only money. Because of that, and a number of other factors—philosophical, socio-legal, what have you—he resisted conceding that what he did made him a criminal. A character, sure, deviant probably, maybe even an outlaw (“Got a nice, old-timey ring, that one,” he said). But criminal, no. He knew criminals. At the age of nine he'd watched his father disappear with three enforcers from a local loan shark. He'd grown up with guys who'd later be in and out of prison like it was a combination trade school and fraternal lodge. And, of course, he dealt with criminals in the business—the worst could be avoided if you used good sense. Regardless, he felt no kinship with such men.

In truth, he said, he was nothing more than one more aimless brat, born into a generation that dismissed the two core tenets of the American creed: Family and Honest Work. To his mind, families meant guilt, scheming, envy. That was his experience, at any rate. As for work, it amounted to little more than a lifelong resentment stoked by spineless greed. Friends alone legitimize duty. Only a dream makes work bearable, and nothing makes it honest. He held himself accountable only to the bond he felt for those he loved and the thrill of peering over the edge.

Shel heard him out, swishing her feet in the salt water as, every now and then, a crab crawled up onto the sun-bleached dock, or a spate of laughter erupted from the hotel bar.

“And that,” she said, “in the immortal words of Paul Harvey, is the rest of the story.” She looked up at him, trying to subdue the despair and panic and fury inside her. Too good to be true, she thought, should've known. Another handsome, sad-eyed liar. “So all that about being an
artiste
whatchamacallit, the gallery shows, it's just a crock.”

“No,” Abatangelo told her. “All that was true. It's just not how I make my money.” He gestured to include the surroundings. “If it were, I could hardly afford this, believe me.”

True enough, she realized. He wasn't really lying. And regardless what word got used to describe him, he wasn't evil. Well then, she asked herself, what's the problem? What did you expect, who are you to judge—more to the point, what is there to go back to that beats this? Dealing cards to drunks? You love him. Deny that, you're the liar.

“Overall,” she said quietly, “it's a lot less twisted than I've got a right to expect. Not like I'm some virgin bride.” She turned to face him, squinting in the late-day sunlight. “I like the part about no gangsters. No guns.”

“Me too,” he admitted.

“I see guns, I'm gone.”

PART I

CHAPTER

1

1982

Abatangelo stood on the porch of a safe house in western Oregon, watching with foreboding as an old Harley-Davidson shovelhead thundered up the winding timber road. The motorcycle turned into the long, steep drive to the house, spewing gravel and dust as it charged uphill beneath the pine shade.

Behind him, footsteps approached from inside. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched as Shel materialized through shadow at the porch door screen.

“Kinda early,” she said, nodding down the hill.

“Isn't it,” he replied.

Abatangelo recognized the bike. It belonged to a man named Chaney, one of the local throwbacks he'd hired for the beach crew. Not the brightest bulb, but he wasn't alone in that. This was probably the sorriest bunch Abatangelo had put together in years, comprised of Chaney and his wanna-be biker pals, plus an unruly and utterly toasted squad of pillheads from Beaverton and a few swacked Chinooks who at least knew the area. It underscored how right it was that this should be the last catch ever, a final nest egg against the looming unknown.

Chaney took the final crest of the hill at full throttle. The dogs, three spirited black Labs, barked from inside the fenced-in backyard as the bike left behind the thick shade of the drive and entered the hardpan firebreak surrounding the house. Chaney came garbed in denims and cowboy boots and aviator shades, with a black watch cap pulled down low on his head. Maybe all of twenty years old. Give him three years, Abatangelo thought, he'll be punching a clock for the timber companies, or whining because he isn't, same as everybody else up here.

Revving the throttle three times, legs sprawled for balance, Chaney walked the hog up to the porch. Abatangelo waited till he killed the engine, then waited a little longer for the dust to settle. Pines on all sides of the house swayed in the morning breeze. In the distance a lumber truck broke the valley-wide silence, groaning in low gear up a steep grade.

“What an unexpected pleasure,” Abatangelo said, making sure Chaney caught his tone. This location wasn't common knowledge, not among the hirelings. Only the Company captains knew where to find each other.

“Yeah, well,” Chaney said, clearing his sinuses of dust. “Eddy gave me directions.”

Eddy was Eddy Igo, the Company's transportation chief. He was also Abatangelo's closest friend.

“He's in trouble,” Abatangelo guessed.

Chaney lifted his shades, rubbing his eyes. “We were out last night,” he said, “put a serious package on. Eddy was driving. Got pulled over on the lumber road to Roseburg. Trooper made Eddy get out and do the stunts. You can pretty much imagine how that went.”

“Roseburg,” Abatangelo said. “Kinda far afield. You were over there why?”

“Truck hunt,” Chaney said.

It was Eddy's job to assemble the fleet of trucks they'd need to move the load off the beach to the remote barn they'd be using for temporary storage.

“Eddy in Roseburg now?”

“Drunk tank,” Chaney confirmed. “He was getting cuffed, said, ‘Tell the family for me, will ya? Have 'em make bail.' I figured he meant you, 'cuz I got no idea where his people are.”

“And he gave you directions here.”

“Kinda vague and cryptic, you know, hush-hush,” Chaney said. “Not so the trooper caught on. Don't think so, any rate. If I didn't live around here, I'd a been clueless, too.”

Abatangelo looked off, scanning the forest as he thought things through. The story could be horseshit. The locals may have turned the boy already, sent him out here to lure the next man in. Me, he thought. Worse, Shel. There was no way to tell without taking the next step, heading into Roseburg. If the kid was telling the truth, Abatangelo knew he had to get Eddy out soon, before the law caught on to who he was.

“I appreciate your bringing the news,” he said finally. A display of gratitude was called for, in the event Chaney was being straight with him. “You want to come on in? Stretch out, maybe have a bite?”

Shel recognized this as a cue. Opening the screen door, she stepped on out to the porch, dressed in a tartan lumberjack shirt and blue-jean cutoffs, barefoot, her red hair still tousled from sleep. Chaney, blinking, broke into a lovestruck smile.

“Come on in, roughrider,” she said, extending a hand.

Chaney froze, like she was asking him to dance. Shel wiggled her hand and Chaney came to, struggling to disengage himself from his machine and staggering a little as he got his legs beneath him, trundling forward, up the wood-plank stair and onto the porch.

As Abatangelo headed into the bath for a fast shower and shave, Shel led Chaney back through the house toward the kitchen. The kid ambled along, inspecting the place as though everything in it possessed a veiled meaning. He lingered at the framed photographs on the walls, taken by Abatangelo during his travels with Shel—Tulum, Barcelona, Pataya, Trinidad, Vanuatu. There were both landscapes and portraits, black and white mostly, but color, too, even a few hand-tinted prints. Chaney, eyes wide, probed the corners of his mouth with his tongue as he walked picture to picture.

In the kitchen, Shel pointed to a chair at the pine table near the window and asked, “Hungry?”

Chaney wiped dust from under his eyes and nodded. “Got any tuna fish?”

It stopped her cold. “We're talking breakfast here.”

Chaney shrugged. “Well, yeah.”

The tone in his voice, it reminded her, This is a boy. “Sure,” Shel said.

“Tuna fish and Thousand Island dressing. Slice of Swiss if you got it. You know, a sandwich.”

He pressed his palms together, as though to demonstrate what a sandwich was. Good God, Shel thought, gagging.

He sat down and shortly noticed a stack of prints and proof sheets Abatangelo had left out on the table. “Jeez,” he said, waving in the vague direction of the hallway, as though to include both groups of photographs in his remark. “These are like, you know, good.”

“Danny has an eye.”

“I mean, like professional good,” Chaney said. “You know,
Time. Newsweek. Penthouse.
”

Shel dumped a splotch of Thousand Island dressing into a bowl of canned tuna and started working the stuff with a fork. “He's sold a few to the wire services, AP, that kinda thing.” She slathered the stuff onto two slices of white bread.

Chaney sniggered and sat back. “Yeah right. And this load coming in, what's that?” He crossed his arms, snorting as he nodded toward the pictures. “Probably bought all this shit at some kinda … I dunno, sale.”

Shel put down the fork, wiped her hands, strode across the room and leaned down till she was nose to nose with him.

“Look at me,” she said, tapping the bridge of her nose with her finger. “You got something you wanna say?”

Chaney leaned back a little, glance jittering from one eye to the other. “I said it already.”

“You're sure of that.”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Shel straightened. “If not, let's hear it now. All of it.”

Chaney gnawed his lip. “What I meant,” he said quietly, “is, like, it's a good idea, you know? Make the place look artsy. Like that's what you guys do.”

“It is what we do,” Shel said. “Remember that.” She stormed back to the counter, threw his sandwich together and served it to him with a jar of pickles and a can of RC cola. “Chow down, Brown,” she said, then headed for the bath.

Abatangelo was finishing up, shaving himself, his lathered face reflected in a hand-wiped circle of steamless mirror. Shel sat down behind him on the edge of the tub. He was naked from his shower, dampness clinging to the hair along his legs, droplets dotting his back where he'd missed with the towel.

He glanced over his shoulder and nodded toward the kitchen. “You trust him?”

“He's hell-bent on putting my self-control to work, I can tell you that.”

“That could be stuff.”

“It's not stuff, believe me. It's him. Anyway, yeah, sure, what's not to trust? If the locals already rolled the kid, they'd have come up here themselves. You're the head man. Why wait?”

“Always looks good in the papers,” he said, “you take down the whole crew.”