A Killer Closet (15 page)

P.J. glared at him. “What did you just say? Sometimes you
think
? Didn't I tell you leave the thinking to me?”

“Pussy,” Sagan said. “You may be a smart lawyer, but you're a goddamned pussy.”

Before P.J. could respond, Webster opened the pantry door and yelled, “All right, here it is. I got the crowbar.”

“Crowbar? What's that for?” Sagan asked, as Webster entered the room.

“Bailey says we got to check the goods,” Webster said, moving toward the crates. He placed the end of the tool on the top edge of one of the boxes and pried upward.

“Oh vy God, ve careful,” Adelle said. “You'll danvage the furs!” Her swelling mouth was making her speech even more imprecise.

The crate made a loud cracking sound as the box opened. It held a painting. A beautiful western scene of a waterfall.

“My God! A Bierstadt!” Angel said. “How did you get your hands on—”

“Shut up!” P.J. barked.

“That's not furs!” Adelle said.

“Where's the O'Keeffe?” P.J. asked.

“In one of the other boxes, Bailey,” Sagan said, emphasizing each word as if he might be speaking to a slow-witted child.

“I'm not opening no more,” Webster said. “I know for sure the boss won't want 'em opened. We got to nail this one back. You satisfied?” he added, glaring at P.J.

“What was that?” Sagan asked. They had all heard it—the muffled sound of a motor.

“Must be the boss,” Webster said. “Looks like he's early. Said he wouldn't be here until late tonight or tomorrow.”

“Quiet!” Sagan ordered, holding up his hand. He paused for a moment, then spoke again. “That's somebody driving away. What the…” He started toward the stairs and bounded up to the top.

Irene felt her heart leap. It had to be Rafael. She glanced at Angel and knew he was thinking the same thing. Rafael would go for help. At least that's what she hoped.

Webster's face had grown pale. “I thought Sagan said there was nobody else here.”

“I don't trust Sagan,” P.J. said.

“He's not turning us in, is he? You think he's in bed with the Feds?”

“Sure,” P.J. sounded sarcastic. “What else? So's the boss,” P.J. said. “The boss is in bed with Feds.”

“Who's the voss?” Adelle asked.

“You're full of shit,” Webster said. “The boss is too smart for that. I ought to kill you for saying it.”

“Who's the voss?” Adelle asked again.

“Shut up and sit down, Adelle!” Irene said.

“How dare you talk to your vother that vay!”

“Adelle, please!”

“See what I mean?” Webster said. “The bitch will drive you crazy. I say we plug her. Drag her body out in the woods,” he added, echoing Sagan's plan.

“You vouldn't dare,” Adelle said.

Webster made a lunge toward Adelle, holding his pistol by the barrel, ready to knock her unconscious. Irene stepped in front of her mother, blocking the assault. The handle of Webster's pistol came down. She ducked, but the bullet grazed the side of her head. She felt a trickle of blood along her ear. He raised the pistol again, ready to strike, but P.J.'s angry shout distracted him.

“Goddamn it, Webster! Control yourself.” He jerked the man away from the two women.

Webster turned his gun around and pointed it at P.J. “Don't mess with me, Bailey. The boss wouldn't like it.”

P.J. used the side of his hand to knock Webster's gun to the floor, causing it to fire as it landed. P.J. picked it up in a quick move. “He left me in charge, so shut your fuckin' mouth,” he said, speaking over Adelle's terrified scream.

Webster's face was flushed with anger. “Give me back my gun!”

“I'll decide when you get it back,” P.J. said. “Now go up to the kitchen and find a towel. Some ice, too, so she can stop the blood on her head.”

“Why?” Webster asked. “The bitch won't bleed to death.” Angel moved to Irene's side and pulled his T-shirt off over his head to place against the wound above her ear.

P.J. jabbed the pistol barrel hard into Webster's ribs. “Evidence, dickhead! I want no evidence. No blood on the floor. Nothing! Now do as I said.”

Webster started toward the stairs, but he stopped short and turned around. “Hear that? Somebody just came in the front door.”

Irene had heard the sound, too, but it wasn't clear to her that it was the front door. Her head hurt, and blood was now running down to her chin and onto the jacket she'd chosen for herself from some of her stock. It was a nice jacket—an Eileen Fisher organic linen—but that was of little concern to her now. She waited, remaining as quiet as everyone else in the room, not knowing what to expect and praying that Adelle would continue to be too frightened to speak.

“Hey! Maureen's here with the truck.” It was Sagan's voice coming from the kitchen. “We can move these crates out now.”

“They're taking the vaintings?” Adelle's eyes widened as she spoke and she dabbed at her lip with P.J.'s handkerchief. “They must be stolen! They must be selling them to—”

Irene saw P.J. give her mother a look that could only be described as dangerous. She, herself, was too busy looking at the woman coming down the stairs. Maureen—the same woman who had bought the dress from Angel, the same woman who had followed her here earlier and then had tried to kill her. She was speaking as she came down the stairs.

“Somebody tipped off the Feds. We got to get the goods out of here fast. He said to kill the old lady first.” Maureen's eyes met Irene's. “You!” she said. “Kill her, too. Get it over with. We've got to move!”

Irene glanced at Adelle. Her face was colorless except for her swollen lip, which had now turned a garish purple. Irene reached for her hand. It felt cold and dry, and it trembled, like the rest of Adelle's body. She heard P.J.'s voice over the buzzing in her head.

“All right. I'll take care of these three. The rest of you get busy loading the boxes.”

“And you!” Maureen said again, her eyes on Angel this time. “I didn't see you over there in the corner.”

“Hello, Maureen.” Angel's voice was calm, polite even. “Those jeans look good on you, but we have a designer pair in your size at the store. You'd look marvelous in them.”

A faint smile played at Maureen's lips. She opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, but instead she gave a quick glance at the men in the room and said nothing.

Webster looked first at Angel and then Maureen. “What the hell is he talking about?”

“We sell designer clothes on consignment,” Angel said. He smiled at Maureen.

Webster frowned and looked at each of them again. “You sell designer…What are you? Some kind of fag?” he asked, turning to Angel. The smile Angel gave him was dazzling, maybe even flirtatious. Webster started to lunge at him, but Maureen stopped him.

“Leave him alone. He's no fag.”

Webster sneered at her. “Your boyfriend? A little young for an old broad like you, ain't he?”

“How would you know?” Maureen said, with her own sneer. “I'm betting I'm too much woman for you. I'd scare the shit out of you.”

“Enough of that!” P.J. shouted. “These three are going outside with me. I'll take care of things.” He waved his gun toward Irene, Adelle, and Angel. “The rest of you stay here and try to keep from killing one another. Or better yet, don't try.”

“We got no time to kill nobody,” Webster said. “We got to get this stuff loaded.”

“I'n not going outside!” Adelle said. “I'n not going to let anyvody kill ne. Certainly not you.” She pointed a long finger at P.J. “Irene said you were a nice nan. She even said she liked you. Irene doesn't usually like anyone. Esvecially not nen.”

“Will you get her outta here before I kill myself!” Webster said.

Adelle sat down and folded her arms across her chest. “I'n not going.”

Irene looked at Adelle, annoyed at first, and frightened for her, but in the next second she sat next to her and folded her arms in front of her, just as Adelle had done. “I'm not going, either.”

Angel appeared momentarily confused just before he sat down in the same posture. “I'm with them.”

Irene saw P.J. frown, then his face went white with something that looked, oddly, like fear. “What the hell?” he said, glancing from one to the other of the three who sat in front of him.

“You'll have a really vig vess if you kill us here.” Adelle was still holding P.J.'s handkerchief to her swollen lip.

“Fuck it!” Sagan said. “Just kill 'em. To hell with evidence!” He grabbed the gun from P.J.'s hand and aimed it at Irene first.

Getting out of the house was easier than Rafael thought it would be. There were more windows and doors in the Delgado hunting lodge than there were in all of the houses in the village of Pecos. It was easy enough to unlock one of the doors at the back of the house just by turning the latch to release the deadlock. He'd done just that after he made a quick check on what was going on in the basement. He knew Irene had seen him, and he tried to send a mental message that he was going for help. He wasn't sure she got the message. He didn't know if gringos understood the principle.

Although getting out of the house was easy, getting away from the lodge was a different matter. He had parked his pickup in the trees at the edge of the property, out of sight of anyone who might drive up to the front of the house. He sat there in the driver's seat for several minutes trying to decide what to do. The pickup had a big engine. A loud one. Everyone in the house would hear it, and they had weapons they would not hesitate to use on him. The only thing to do was to start the engine and then tear out of there fast.

He was still considering when he saw the small moving van pull into the circular drive in front of the house. It was there to haul away those boxes in the vault. The ones marked
FURS.
The ones he knew damn well were not furs. He was pretty sure there was something else in there. Something illegal and worth a lot of money. You pick up a lot of information when you keep your ears open in a bar. What he hadn't known, however, was who was behind it. That is, he hadn't known until today. He would never have guessed it was P. J. Bailey. Damn good lawyer. Made plenty of money. It must have been that he was exposed to a lot of opportunity, associating with high-roller criminals the way he did. It must have been that he got greedy.

It wasn't that he blamed P.J. for making money. He liked him. P.J. helped him out of a jam once, the time he got caught growing pot deep in the forest wilderness. P.J. got him off because he was able to show that there wasn't any proof it was Rafael who was tending the patch. Never mind that the entire village knew whose it was. Never mind that there was evidence that someone had been hoeing weeds in the patch or that he was driving toward home only a couple of miles from the plot with a dirt-encrusted hoe in the back of his pickup when a cop stopped him.

P.J. got him off because he was a smooth talker. By the time he finished talking to the jury, even Rafael himself wasn't sure he was guilty.

P.J. only laughed when Rafael tried to compliment him. He said it wasn't that he was so smart, it was that the prosecution was lazy. “Can't let 'em get by with that,” P.J. had said. Then, when Rafael asked him if he ever felt guilty for getting guilty people off, P.J. said, “Hell, no! I'm upholding Blackstone's Ratio.” Rafael had no idea what that meant, and he'd had to get his granddaughter to Google it. He had only a dim notion of what people did when they Googled, and he had an equally dim understanding of the Blackstone Ratio after he read what his granddaughter printed for him, except that it meant something like it being better for a guilty man to get away with something than for an innocent man to be condemned. He'd turned it over and over in his mind and wasn't at all sure he understood it, and if he did understand it, he wasn't sure he agreed. All he knew was that he didn't have to go to jail.

Not that what he was doing was so bad, anyway, he reasoned—just growing a little weed for his own use and to share with friends now and then. It wasn't anything like what P.J. was into. Big-time crime. He was sure it was big-time. You wouldn't see that many fancy cars driving up there if it wasn't big. They weren't going up there just to spend the weekend hunting. He'd seen no signs of hunting rifles or other hunting gear, and he'd made it a point to keep his eyes open. Nothing visible when he glanced in the windows of the car in the bar's parking lot. No one dressed like a hunter when they stopped by for a drink.

He didn't
want
to believe P.J. was part of it. But the evidence was there. Just like that hoe in the back of his pickup.

While all of that was running through his mind, he still had his eye on that truck, sitting there with its motor still running while someone—it looked like a woman—was preoccupied with something in the cab of the truck. Maybe she was trying to figure out how to turn off the motor. In the next instant it occurred to him that maybe God was watching over him. Maybe God had set it up this way.

With that loud truck motor running, he could start his own motor and leave with no one noticing. Once the motor started, rather than gunning the engine to move away quickly, he moved slowly, giving the pickup as little gas as possible, trying not to make too much noise.

Rather than driving to the front of the house and the road, he drove toward the forest and stayed along the periphery, where the trees had been cleared away as a fire break, mandated by the forest service. He knew the clearing circled the property and eventually led out to the main road. He followed the glade, grateful for his four-wheel drive because the stretch, though devoid of trees, was full of rocks, crevices, and stumps that an ordinary vehicle would never be able to navigate.

Once he reached the road, he sped up, driving in a dry mist of dust all the way to the tavern. It was late enough that plenty of people, mostly men, had already begun to gather at the bar. He scanned the room, taking in who was there. He spotted the Sena brothers, José and Manuel. They were barely in their thirties, too young and hotheaded. Juan Hernandez sat next to them, trying to ignore them. He'd known Juan all his life, went to high school with him. He was trustworthy, but he was all crippled with arthritis now.

He saw Carlos Gutierrez with his back to the door. He was the same age as Juan and strong as an ox, perfect for the job. Rafael was still scoping out the room when Jeraldo Werner walked by, slapped him on the back, and asked him in Spanish what the hell he was doing just standing there gawking. Jeraldo was half gringo, but he'd spent his entire life in Pecos, which was his mother's hometown. He'd inherited his brawn and height from his German father and knew how to handle himself. He'd even spent a few years on the rodeo circuit. He came home with a few broken bones, but he was still tough as a mule. Before Jeraldo and Carlos had finished their drinks, Rafael had enlisted both of them to help him.

“What is it, exactly, that you want us to do?” Carlos asked in Spanish.

“We got to rescue some friends,” Rafael said.

Jeraldo reached for his hat, which he'd placed on one of the tables. “Rescue from where?”

“Mariposa lodge.”

“Mariposa?” Jeraldo said. “Since when do rich people need rescuing?”

“It ain't rich people,” Rafael said. “Couple of
mujeres
and a boy.” Rafael, like the others, was mixing his Spanish with English.

“Couple of women?” Jeraldo said. “What women?”

“Remember the two gringas that came to the bar several days ago? Not young chicas, but of a certain age, as they say in English. Nice-looking, too. Especially that one named Adelle,” Rafael said.

“Yeah, I remember,” Jeraldo said. “The one you were flirting with. You better hope your wife don't find out about that.”

Rafael dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “She'll forgive me. I was a little bit drunk. She'll understand.”

“Like hell she will,” Carlos said. “Not when she finds out you're wantin' to
rescue
her, as you call it.”

“You got a dirty mind, Carlos,” Rafael said. “Adelle is up there with her daughter and some dumb kid named Angel. They're in bad trouble. Coupla gringos holding 'em against their will. Crooks. Been usin' that big old house to store something illegal, I think. When I left they was trying to get P.J. to take the women and the boy out in the woods and shoot 'em.”

“Who the hell is P.J.?” Jeraldo asked.

“My lawyer.”

“Your…Oh, the one that got you off for growin'…”

“Yeah, that one.”

“All lawyers is crooks,” Jeraldo said.

“Maybe so,” Rafael said, “I never woulda thought he'd be mixed up in something like this. I still can't see him killing people, but you just never know. We got to get there before it's too late.”

“Wait a minute,” Jeraldo said. “They probably got guns, don't they?

Rafael nodded. “Probably.”

“So you want us to go up there and take 'em down when we ain't got but one gun. That old pistol that used to belong to Carlos's dad.”

“There's three of us and two of them,” Rafael said. “Well, three, counting P.J.”

“Three against three,” Jeraldo said, mulling it over. “Any cops?”

“No cops,” Rafael said.

“Why didn't you call 'em?”

“You kiddin'? Me? Call the cops?”

Jeraldo clamped his hat down on his head with a firm push. “Hell, let's go. It might be fun.”

Carlos was wedged in the narrow backseat of the pickup, his long legs doubled up and almost touching his chin. Jeraldo's half-German body was even bigger, so he sat in the front with Rafael.

As they approached the lodge, it looked like a dark hulking monster in the shadows of the approaching night. Rafael stopped the pickup almost one hundred yards away from the house. “Don't want 'em to hear the motor. Don't want 'em to know we're here,” he said.

Carlos looked through the fading light toward the house. “No lights on. Maybe they left.”

“Their cars are still here,” Rafael said. “I can see both of them there in the driveway. See? Right there. But the truck's gone. Guess they must have loaded up all their loot and left.”

“What kind of loot?” Carlos asked.

“The boxes are all marked
FURS,
and they all got it wrote on there that they are the personal property of Susana Delgado.” Rafael said.

Jeraldo snorted derisively. “How many furs does one woman need?”

“Don't know,” Rafael said. “But I don't think it's really furs in them boxes.”

“Then what is it?” Jeraldo asked.

Rafael shrugged. “How would I know? I'm no criminal, so I don't know how this stuff works.”

Carlos laughed. “The hell you ain't. You got, what? Ten? Twelve plants in the woods.”

“What does that make you for mooching it off me?” Rafael said.

“Are we going in or not?” Jeraldo asked. He opened the door and stretched his legs outside.

“There's a light on down low,” Jeraldo said. “Looks like it's in the basement.”

Rafael nodded. “That's where the loot is, or was. It's probably in that truck I seen.” He squinted toward the house. “Maybe the truck ain't gone yet. Maybe they pulled it around back, outta sight.”

“Where's the women and the boy?” Jeraldo asked.

“Last time I saw 'em they was all in the basement,” Rafael said. He watched Jeraldo, who looked distracted. Rafael knew he was anything but distracted. Jeraldo was the thinker, the planner. He could almost see the wheels turning in his brain.

Carlos walked toward the edge of the forest and unzipped his fly. Before he had finished, the muffled sound of gunshots came from somewhere on the other side of the house.

Rafael heard them, too. There were three of them. One each for the two women and the boy.