The Devil's Redhead (22 page)

“I merely want to talk to Frank Mass,” Jill Rosemond said. “I think he can help me. Maybe. How can I know till I talk to him?”

“Oh Lord,” Shel groaned. “The scent. Go get 'em.” She leaned forward. “Horseshit.”

“I'm sorry, but this attitude of yours strikes me as just a bit hysterical.”

“Then, like I said, you're not from around here, honey. We're skeptical out this way. We're white trash. Your kind never brings good luck.”

Shel gathered her things and dropped off her bar stool. “I've got nothing else to say to you.” She headed for the door. Abatangelo left his change and scrambled to catch up with her in the doorway.

“Let's take my car,” he said under his breath.

“Danny, that's not a good idea. Go home.”

Outside, the parking lot glowed from overhead lamplight. Up the hill traffic rushed past on the Delta Highway, cruising west into Pittsburg or east toward Antioch.

Abatangelo took Shel's arm. “She's going to follow you.”

Shel shook off his hand. “She'll be in for a rude shock.”

Jill Rosemond stormed up from behind. Her face was flushed. Reaching them, she came to, adjusted her glasses and struck a pose of righteous fury. “I want to paint you a picture,” she said. “It's a picture the family's going to live with for a long time.”

Abatangelo tried to turn Shel away but she fought off his hold. She held out her finger as though intending to ram it through the other woman's chin.

“You listen …,” Shel hissed.

“No, I've listened enough,” Jill Rosemond replied, holding her ground. “It's your turn. I found the Briscoe twins in an upstairs room with their chests torn up by close-range gunfire. I had to wave through a cloud of flies to make sure it was them. Blood spread into the carpet like a paste, I still smell it sometimes. The twins, they were all of eighteen years old. Eighteen. Left there like meat, bloated, swimming with maggots. But that's just another day in the life of white trash, I suppose.”

Shel crossed her arms, made a low caustic laugh and said, “That it?”

“I want to talk to Frank Maas.”

“No no no,” Shel said. “My turn now. My turn to paint the scene.” She cocked her head. “You ready? This Frank Maas you want so bad, he had a baby boy once, know that? Name was Jesse. He was all of three years old when he died. Killed with a hammer through his skull. Killer made his mother watch all this till he beat her to death with the same fucking hammer. There's more, God yes, but I'll spare you the details. Here's a promise, though: I got you beat on the gore scale, sugar. His own damn kid. Frank's kid. And who do you think got dragged in for questioning. Right. Sorry-ass Frank. He didn't have money to hire an item like you, he just had to sit there and take it. Four damn days they grilled him. When they had to let him go they put him on surveillance, followed him up and down the county. He was the one, they were positive, no doubt. Go get 'em. Frank loved that boy. Loved him with every ounce of strength he had. But if the real killer through some thunderbolt from above hadn't heard his conscience calling, walked in and given himself up, they'd still be out to nail Frank for his own boy's murder. Just like you want to do with these twins. Don't tell me otherwise. Christ. Listen to you. Wouldn't know the truth if it bit you. Wouldn't care. The hell with you. I've seen your kind. Frank and me, we've been through this. And that, my dear, is another day in the life of white trash, if you so much as give a shit.”

She spun away toward her truck. Abatangelo stood there, not moving. No wonder, he thought. A boy. He shook himself from his stupor, offered Jill Rosemond a shrug and hurried toward Shel.

“You have my card,” Jill Rosemond called after him. Her voice seemed brittle and false now. Abatangelo started to run as Shel sorted through her keys. He reached the truck as she was getting in and lodged his arm inside the door.

“Tell me what's going on,” he said. “This is nuts.”

“I gotta run now,” Shel said, voice cracking. “It was nice to see you. I mean that.”

She turned the ignition key and released the parking brake. She did not put the car in gear, though. She leaned forward in the seat and rested her forehead against the steering wheel, inhaling through her mouth.

Abatangelo said, “I didn't know. I never heard about—”

“Danny, don't,” Shel moaned.

He pulled a pen from his pocket, scrawled his number and address on the back of Jill Rosemond's card. “In case,” he said, handing it to her.

Shel took the card, dropped it in her lap and put the truck in gear. “Thank you,” she whispered.

She pulled away in a shrieking jolt and fishtailed onto the road. He stared after her, watching the taillights flicker beyond a row of aspens. For the first time he felt the wind on his skin, cold and damp off the river. He turned back toward his own car and discovered Jill Rosemond standing there. She waited in the middle of the parking lot, casting a small round shadow in the lamplight. One hand clutching her purse strap, she called out to him in a tone of newfound resolve: “I still didn't catch your name.”

CHAPTER

11

The two cars bearing Frank, the Akers brothers and the other gunmen sped north through the Delta. Frank and the Akers brothers rode with Dayball and Tully in the Lincoln, Hack and the others trailing behind in the old Le Mans. At a rest stop just beyond the Antioch Bridge, Dayball and Tully told Lyle to stop and let them out. They were due to return to Bethel Island, join the birthday celebration for Felix Randall's niece which would serve as their alibi. Before getting out, Day-ball helped Frank roll up his sleeve, and with a fresh spike submit to a booster of his medicine. With his usual flair for theater, Dayball booted the liquor in the cylinder, drawing back blood and watching the thin dark threads waving in the fluid. Finally with his thumb he drove the plunger home, withdrew the needle tip from the skin and told Frank to roll his sleeve back down. As Frank buttoned his cuff, Dayball pocketed the spike and removed his spiral notebook, as always checking the time, then recording his secret notation.

Frank, feeling the first wave of humming warmth and a not wholly unpleasant nausea, pointed to the notebook and asked, “Lonnie, I gotta know, why you carry that around?”

Dayball gestured for Frank to wait a moment, completed his jottings, then capped his pen and put the notepad away.

“You gotta know?”

“I'm curious,” Frank admitted. He'd spent more time with Dayball the past three days than anyone else. He was beginning to feel a genuine bond. A bond that, at least, promoted curiosity.

“Doesn't mean I gotta tell you,” Dayball said.

“I understand.”

Dayball withdrew the notebook and let Frank take it. Frank glanced up at Dayball to make sure it was okay, then cracked open the cover. He discovered page after page of small, spidery notations, written in cipher.

“I been in the joint just once,” Dayball explained. “When I got out, my probation officer, he was a very decent guy. He had a lot of good advice. One piece of advice was this: Keep a diary. 'Cause there are certain cops, they get an eerie, almost telepathic feel for you. They'll work it out like astrologers. They'll chart you, put you somewhere you don't belong in that one stretch of time you can't account for. Just for the fun of watching you get dragged back in.” He reached for his notebook and gently removed it from Frank's hold. “Makes 'em feel all streetwise and pitiless. Real crime fighters.”

He opened his door and gestured for Tully to do likewise. They strolled beneath lamplight to a car parked at the far end of the rest area. Frank watched them get in as Snuff said, “I'll tell you who we ought to be shooting tonight.”

“Cork it,” Roy said. “Nobody needs you piping off.”

“Listen to you,” Snuff said. “You speak for everybody now?”

Roy turned around in the seat and stared. “That's right,” he said. “Open the door, you don't like it. Open the door, get your runt ass out on the road back south and figure out who your next family's gonna be.”

“Like that'd be punishment,” Snuff said.

“Come again?”

“A pox on your box, pal, hear me?”

Roy did a double take worthy of a cartoon. “A pox on my box? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Figure it out,” Snuff said.

“No. You tell me.”

“I'm done talking.”

Roy turned to Lyle. Nudging his arm, he said, “Hey, Lyle, you catch that? A pox on your box.”

“Don't touch me,” Lyle said.

They continued in silence, driving north with the Le Mans two car lengths behind. The road was narrow and winding, running along the river atop a levee, the roadside dotted with darkened saltbox shacks advertising lugger rentals or live bait: anchovies, shad, mud-suckers. Comforted by the gentle rocking of the car, Frank stared out at the sword grass and cattails and eucalyptus trees lining the riverbank. Framed by the windshield and lit by headlights, it seemed like a sort of movie.

That afternoon at the El Parador Hotel, Frank had met for the final time with Cesar, the Mexican he'd dealt with over Felix's materiel. The hotel was intended one day to be a real showplace, but for the time being it sat out in the middle of nowhere in a mosquito-infested area above the Sacramento River known as Montezuma Hills. Frank sat alone with Cesar in the hotel's empty bar, explaining how the thing would go down. He'd connect with the shooters in a scrap yard on Andrus Island, then together they'd drive out into the Delta to a restaurant where Felix was throwing a birthday party for his niece. The story had been devised by Dayball. He'd made Frank recite it word for word, like a poem, until he got it down pat.

“The beauty of it,” Dayball had told him, “is that it's half-true. Only gotta remember the other half.”

No one would be expecting anything and no one would be armed, Frank had told Cesar. As for the exact location of the restaurant, Frank added, that gets divulged when we connect tonight and I get paid. That was when Cesar dropped his own little bombshell—the men who would be coming to kill Felix were the brothers and cousins of Gaspar Arevalo, the seventeen-year-old that Dayball, Tully and the Akers brothers had murdered out on Kirker Pass Road.

“Frank,” Roy said from the front. He'd turned around and was facing the backseat. “You're good with everything we went over with Lonnie this afternoon, right?”

“I remember,” Frank said.

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Tell it to me, then.”

Frank closed his eyes. A picture emerged. He described the picture.

“You wave them inside the killfire,” Roy said.

“Get them in close.”

“You gotta get them inside the killfire,” Roy repeated, “or it could get ugly.”

“I understand,” Frank said.

When they reached Andrus Island, Lyle stopped the car. Roy got out to remove a gate chain, and once he got back in they drove along a dirt road for a little less than a half mile where they came upon the scrap yard, barricaded in accordion wire. Roy got out again, this time to negotiate the gate to the yard, then they drove past towering aisles of wreckage. Moonlight reflected in pockmarked chrome and oily pools of water; it glowed through shattered windshields hazed by dewy filth. Cats flitted in and out of shadowy recesses. Everywhere, the smell of gas and rust filled the air.

They rounded a bend and came upon a clearing, banked by tire mounds twenty feet high. “Hats on,” Roy said from the front seat. He put out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. “Film at eleven.”

A sawbuck table sat at the far end of the clearing, silhouetted by the headlights. Roy got out and opened Frank's door and led him to the table, sat him down. He handed Frank the flashlight needed to return the coded signal that had been arranged.

Removing a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, Roy tamped out two and offered Frank a smoke. Frank accepted the cigarette, then bent to the match Roy struck for them both, cupping it with his palm. Roy shook out the flame, smiled through smoke and looked at his watch.

“Not long now, bro. One more time, run it down for me.”

Frank recited the procedure again, this time being sure to use the term “killfire,” since Roy enjoyed it so much. The words came from a part of him he couldn't quite locate. After a moment, he was not even sure he'd said anything, so he repeated himself. Roy nodded as he listened to both renditions, then put his hand on Frank's shoulder.

“I'm proud of you,” Roy said. The tone lacked warmth. He was probing. “I mean that.”

“Thank you, Roy,” Frank said. “We've been through a lot together, you and me, that right?”

“Time's nigh,” Roy said. Looking up, he saw the others removing their shotguns from the trunk of the Le Mans. He pointed to where he wanted them.

Frank said, “Roy, remember that construction site we picketed in Turlock? The one where the contractor came out with an old M-1 and said he was counting to ten?”

Roy turned around and looked down at Frank with a troubled expression. “Not the time to shoot the breeze, Frank.”

“I was just remembering, Roy.”

“You want to remember something, remember what you gotta do.”

“I will, Roy.”

“Don't let me down.”

Roy fled beyond a wall of wreckage with the others. They were situated so as to be able to hit the Mexicans from every side at once, spraying the area so heavily with buckshot there'd be no risk of return fire. Shortly Frank found himself humming a pleasant tune: “Don't Let Me Down.”

Above him, the clouds fled past, brightened by the moon. They were exquisite tonight, finely shaped, complex, like puffy, cavernous seashells. He found himself wanting to ascend, enter them, travel their interiors.