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Authors: Joseph Wambaugh

Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense

The Secrets of Harry Bright (6 page)

BOOK: The Secrets of Harry Bright
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In the desert you don't get very much mileage from your fuel. When you're walking, that is. You can get about ten good miles out of your body if you fill your body tank with a gallon of water. You get lots less if you're wearing a navy-blue police uniform and Sam Browne, lugging a 9mm pistol and a hideout gun in a leg holster. Especially if you have a severely sprained ankle and don't know diddly about the desert in the first place.

When
O. A.
Jones got so hot and tired he was about to drop, he plopped down prone and breathed through his mouth on the desert floor, which was about 25 degrees hotter than it would be one foot off the ground. When he could gather up the strength to continue,
O. A.
Jones ignored the many desert birds that would give a rat like Beavertail Bigelow a clue to water holes. He knew nothing of quail flying toward water in the late afternoon, and had never noticed all the times he shot at doves that they also flock toward water holes in the late afternoon and evening. He didn't know of indicator plants--sycamore, willow, cattail, cottonwood--where he might dig. He staggered right past a limestone cave that contained a large pool of cool clean water. He made a painful detour because he was scared of encountering a mountain lion, though one hadn't been seen in those parts for thirty years.

O
. A. Jones was having some very troubling thoughts: If only summer hadn't come so early this year. If only he'd stayed in Laguna Beach where he grew up. If only he hadn't got all hyped about the kidnapping of the rich guy's kid. If only he hadn't taken that trail off into the canyon because he thought he saw a campfire. If only everything would speed up so he wasn't seeing birds fly in slow motion. If only his arms and legs weren't tingly. If only he weren't turning bluer than his uniform.

Then
O. A.
Jones heard it: the music. And he thought
,
This is it! Fucking harps and angels! Then he heard it again. It was a banjo! Somebody was playing the banjo and singing!

O. A.
Jones lurched to a stop and listened. He didn't know how confusing sound can be out there as it bounces off canyon walls and ricochets like a rifle shot, especially if your body temperature is up four degrees and climbing.
O. A.
Jones heard what sounded like a car engine starting up.
O. A.
Jones started hobbling in slow motion on his swollen ankle. The wrong way.

Meanwhile, Victor Watson, with an F
. B. I
. agent monitoring, had received his second telephone call from the woman, who this time was calling from a place that offered no sound clues. She instructed Victor Watson to obtain $250,000 in tens and twenties and pack it inside a large suitcase. He was told to drive his white Mercedes on a circuitous route that made no sense whatever to the Palm Springs police who were playing second banana to the feds. He was to head out Whitewater Canyon, then to double back on Highway 10, then up Route 62 toward Devil's Garden, then back toward North Palm Springs. It was apparent that if the kidnappers were watching the drop car they'd need an aircraft to do it, and the only aircraft in the skies that day were commercial flights out of Palm Springs and choppers belonging to law-enforcement agencies. Victor Watson was ordered to call home at precise twenty-minute intervals, which was impossible given the desolate stretches up toward Little San Bernardino Mountains and back again.

After a third call the kidnappers stopped dicking around. Mrs. Watson received it while her husband was gone. She was ordered by the woman to tell Victor Watson when he called to drive out Highway 10 to the Thousand Palms turnoff, then to proceed north to the oasis by Dillon Road.

As It turned out, the kidnappers weren't kidnappers at all. They were a pair of drifters named Abner and Maybelle Sneed, who usually made their living growing pot in Oregon but had migrated south after the law started applying so much heat to the Oregon plantationers. The
y h
ad stopped in Palm Springs for a three-day holiday, heard on the news about the disappearance of jack Watson, and gone to the library to look through a copy of the Gold Book," Palm Springs's Who's Who. Then they'd stopped at the pharmacy nearest to the Watson residence, and while Maybelle Sneed kept the pharmacist busy, Abner grabbed the Rolodex from behind the register and found customer Victor Watson's phone number. It was all done in about 120 seconds by people with 75 I
. Q
.'s, this after Victor Watson had spent more than $15,000 for intruder alarms and sophisticated protection.

The only surprising move made that day by the would-be extortionists was that Abner rented a motorcycle and was lying in wait near Pushawalla Palms for the Watson Mercedes to pass north. The plan was to scan the skies for cops, and if it looked okay, to whip on out the highway, overtaking Victor Watson and holding up a sign that said: "Toss out the money and you will be told where your boy is."

Abner and Maybelle were very fine pot farmers, diligent and fair to customers. They took pride in their product and refined it carefully, putting it up like grandma's peaches, with jars, rubber gaskets and labels. But they were not kidnappers and were lousy extortionists. Abner scanned the skies for aircraft with a pair of brand-new binoculars, but never even thought about a radio transmitter in the Mercedes that was signaling the feds hovering far beyond his line of sight.

Just after Abner roared up on the Honda and made contact with the Mercedes, a signal from Victor Watson brought Pigasus driving in. Moments after Victor Watson threw the suitcase from the car window, the F
. B. I
. agent had Abner, the failed extortionist, in his scope sight.

Meanwhile, Maybelle was waiting at a date bar on Dillon Road. It was one of those roadside shacks that sell Coachella Valley dates and date candy and date milk shakes. Maybelle was on her third date milk shake when she spotted Abner roaring up on the Honda, all dust and teeth and giggles, the suitcase balanced across the handlebars. While Maybelle fired up the family sedan, Abner scoote
d w
est to the side trail and ditched the rented Honda behind a tamarisk tree where he tried to open the locked suitcase.

"Abner, git in the fuckin car!" Maybelle hollered with her squeaky little voice. "We'll open er later!"

But Abner couldn't wait to see what $250,000 looked like and he started cussing at Maybelle as though it were her fault that the bag was locked.

"We gotta git!" Maybelle squeaked, jumping out of the car and running toward the tamarisk tree where Abner was banging on the suitcase like the gorilla in the Samsonite luggage commercial.

Maybelle was first to sight the helicopter in the distance. She pointed and screamed and when the spotter knew they'd blown their cover, Pigasus closed in on Abner and Maybelle. Abner was like a monkey with his closed fist in a jar trap. He just couldn't let go even after they jumped in the car. He was still fussing with the suitcase lock when Maybelle pulled a bogus carbine from the backseat and aimed it at the bubble of the chopper.

"To scare them off," she later said.

While Maybelle was speeding northwest on Dillon Road, Abner took a peek out the window at the trailing chopper. A muzzle flash was the last thing he ever saw.

Abner didn't die right away and Maybelle didn't die at all even though she had a bullet in her leg and another lodged near her collarbone when the chase ended.

It was a typical police chase. Before it was over, six different law-enforcement agencies were in on it, which is very common. Everybody did sliding U-turns, which is very common. Shots were fired by several units, which is very common. This one nearly turned into an intramural fire fight with cops shooting each other during the thirty-five-minute high-speed chase, and this too is fairly common.

It was a semispectacular chase, as desert chases go. In open country they often last a very long time. It was fortunate for
O. A.
Jones that this one lasted all the way to a remote canyon not far from Mineral Springs where he had decided to hole up and rest because he thought h
e w
as hearing banjos and car engines and singing voices in the middle of nowhere.

By the end, there was fear and pandemonium and adrenaline leaking everywhere. When Maybelle did her last sliding U-ee and crashed near a canyon road leading to
O. A.
Jones, the result was exactly the same as it always is in high-speed pursuits. The first thirteen cops to jump out of their cars, or point guns out the car windows, yelled thirteen conflicting orders to the suspects.

All of the conflicting orders had one thing in common: they all ended with the word "motherfuckers."

While all the yelling and motherfucking and gun waving was going on, a car skidded in driven by Chief Paco Pedroza. He jumped out and ran toward the lead cops hiding behind the first chase unit with handguns and shotguns pointed toward the steaming wreck.

The loudest uniformed cop outyelled everyone. He bellowed: "You motherfucking sonofabitch cocksucker, put your hands out the window or we'll blow your fucking face dr"

And Paco Pedroza with his badge pinned to his aloha shirt ran up yelling, "Everybody shut up! I'm in charge!"

But the big loud cop was operating in another zone. His eyes were bulging and his face was raw meat and his shotgun was shaking, and he bellowed: "You motherfucker sonofabitch cocksucker, but your hands out the window or we'll blow your face off!

So Paco screamed: "SHUT UP! I'LL DO THE TALKING!" which got everybody's attention.

Then Paco, finally in command, turned his own face toward the suspects' car and his eyes were bulging and his face was raw meat and Paco yelled: "You motherfucker sonofabitch cocksucker, put your hands out the window or we'll blow your face off!'

Maybelle complied, but Abner was lapsing into a coma from which he would not recover.

It was over. And then, since nobody wants to admit that he was doing some very dangerous shooting, especially in case some bullets landed where they shouldn't, all the chase cars started to find reasons to leave the scen
e a
lmost as fast as they came in. This is also very common at the scene of high-speed chases. It's like lifting a rug in a wino hotel: they scatter like cockroaches.

No one ever found out for sure who put all the slugs in Maybelle and Abner. Not that it mattered. Everyone agreed they deserved getting ventilated, and the cops only wished they could've dipped their ammo in cyanide since Maybelle didn't croak.

Before the chopper pilot turned back toward Palm Springs police station where Victor Watson was now waiting with the F
. B. I
., he spotted what looked like a large animal scrambling up a hillside. It was a strange animal, white on top and dark on the hindquarters. Pigasus soared in a little closer and saw that the white on top was the sunburned flesh of
O. A.
Jones who had foolishly removed his shirt in his delirium.

They picked him up on the side of a little ridge. On the other side of the ridge was a trail leading into the canyon. Off the trail, down in the canyon where it had plunged sixty feet, was a burned Rolls-Royce containing the remains of Jack Watson.

The first cop into the canyon almost gagged when he saw the charred corpse, which had been dined on by turkey vultures and coyotes. The coyotes had almost destroyed the skull with their gnawing. If they had, a bullet hole would have been impossible for the pathologists to locate. The case might have been classified as a car accident and closed.

Paco Pedroza was absolutely ready to fire his surfer cop for driving out there in the first place, except that
O. A.
Jones provided the only possible clue to the murder. After the F
. B. I
. pulled out of the case, Palm Springs P
. D
. was left with a whodunit homicide, and all they had was
O. A.
Jones who convinced everybody that he was not delirious when he heard the guy playing the banjo and singing, followed by the sound of a vehicle racing away. It was theorized that the killer of Jack Watson had returned to the burned car two days after the murder. Perhaps to retrieve something. Officer
O. A.
Jones had heard a music man.

O. A.
Jones persuaded a local reporter to write a story calling him "the key to the riddle." The reporter also dubbed him a "courageous officer" who took it upon himself to scour the desert canyons for the missing Palm Springs lad.

Paco Pedroza would still have liked to send his freaking hero back to fighting kelp in Laguna Beach on his potato-chip surfboard. Only he couldn't because the Mineral Springs City Council was giving
O. A.
Jones a citation for extraordinary police service.

Chapter
4

PRESIDENT
McKINLEY

OTTO STRINGER LOOKED LIKE THE WINNING TICKET IN A
state lottery. He was waiting on his front porch with two suitcases and a set of golf clubs. He saluted his neighbors like Ronald Reagan at the door of Air Force One. He was wearing a brand-new pink polyester golf shirt that matched his plump cheeks, an acrylic sleeveless sweater with a pink-and-green argyle pattern, and a green Ben Hogan golf cap. He'd considered investing in plus fours but figured a guy should maybe break a hundred one time before blowing into Palm Springs all gussied up like a quarter-ton Byron Nelson.

BOOK: The Secrets of Harry Bright
9.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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