Bestiary (59 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
“What’s there?” Hector asked from the walkway below.
Carter wasn’t sure how to answer that. But then he said, “A grave, I think.”
Hector crossed himself.
Carter looked again at the mano stone, sitting in the stream like a kind of marker, and then at the turned earth on the bank where he stood. It was as if he had stumbled upon a prehistoric burial site.
“What do you mean, a grave?” Hector said. “Whose?”
That much, Carter knew. It was the grave of the La Brea Woman, who had died just a few hundred yards away, over nine thousand years ago—though who had dug it here, and how, he couldn’t even guess.
“Damn,” Hector muttered, “this is something we got to report.”
“Not yet,” Carter replied. First he needed to know more about how it had happened. And then, he would need some time to think through its consequences. “Just let me handle it. Okay?”
Hector looked dubious, but at the same time glad to be off the hook. “You’ll say that it isn’t my fault? You’ll say that I did my job?”
“Yes,” Carter said, reaching down to ruffle Champ’s fur in gratitude, “I’ll keep you out of it entirely.”
Hector’s mind appeared at rest.
But Carter’s was not. As he surveyed the marking stone, the last and most precious thing in the world to the La Brea Man, and then the earth that still bore the trace of bony fingertips, his own mind was decidedly in turmoil.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
FOR SADOWSKl, IT felt as if this night would never end. It was the night before the Fourth of July and it felt a hell of a lot like Christmas Eve, back when he was a kid. He remembered not being able to get to sleep or even stay in bed, and one year, when he was about five, he’d crept into the family room early, started unwrapping his presents, and gotten a good walloping for it when he was caught. But he was all grown-up now, and he had no excuse.
He couldn’t even talk about any of this to Ginger. It was all top secret. Not that she’d have understood it anyway. All she could talk about lately was going to Las Vegas to catch that faggot, Elton John, at some casino. “It’s for my act,” she kept saying, and Sadowski kept promising he’d take her some other time, though the point of taking a stripper to Las Vegas, on your own dime, eluded him. There were more strippers and more hookers per square inch in Las Vegas than anywhere on the whole fucking planet. Why bring your own? It’d be like carrying a six-pack into a bar.
“Stan, aren’t you ever coming to bed?” she asked now, from under the covers. “You’re keeping me up.”
There were only two rooms in the apartment and there wasn’t a real door between them—just a couple of louvered panels that swung back and forth. Sadowski had the TV on—another one of those
Cold Case
files—and he was swigging his fifth or sixth beer of the night. “I’m not sleepy,” he shot back, and she instantly retorted, “Then why don’t you go back to your place, because I am.”
Cold Case
files—and he was swigging his fifth or sixth beer of the night. “I’m not sleepy,” he shot back, and she instantly retorted, “Then why don’t you go back to your place, because I am.”
She had a point—though he would never have admitted it. He’d only come over here to get his rocks off—and he’d already done that—and there was only one reason not to go back to his own place now.
All his gear was there and he knew, if he did, he would start fiddling with it again.
He watched TV until the show ended—it was another one of those where the DNA from a semen stain caught up with the guy ten years later—and then, when he was satisfied that he’d made his point and kept her awake long enough, he tossed the can into the garbage pail, burped loudly enough to elicit a disgusted groan from the bedroom, and headed out.
The night air felt good—it was relatively cool, maybe high sixties, but it was still dry. The only thing that could have spoiled their plans was rain, and there was absolutely no fucking chance of that. During the commercials on
Cold Case
, he’d kept flipping back to the Weather Channel, just to hear more about the arid conditions in the L.A. Basin and the advisories for anyone planning some Fourth of July festivities: “The whole county is a tinderbox,” one blow-dried blonde declared, “so don’t even think about setting off those Roman candles or cherry bombs, folks.”
Cold Case
, he’d kept flipping back to the Weather Channel, just to hear more about the arid conditions in the L.A. Basin and the advisories for anyone planning some Fourth of July festivities: “The whole county is a tinderbox,” one blow-dried blonde declared, “so don’t even think about setting off those Roman candles or cherry bombs, folks.”
Well, it wasn’t any goddamn cherry bomb he was planning to set off.
Driving home in his black Explorer, he was careful not to go too fast or make any mistakes that some cop on patrol might pull him over for. Even a guy his size would never pass the Breathalyzer test with a six-pack under his belt. (Once, he’d been pulled over and failed the test after having only three.) No, easy does it, he kept telling himself. Easy does it.
His own place was a dingy apartment above a mechanic’s shop, accessible by a wooden staircase off the alley. Ginger had never been there; nobody had ever been there. And that was just the way he liked it. He’d replaced the landlord’s door, at his own expense, with one made of vulcanized steel, with a kick-proof base panel and a dead bolt that could withstand anything short of a battering ram. Inside, he had a warren of small, dark rooms, the last of which had its own locked door on it. He took his key ring out of his pocket, opened it, and flicked the switch on what he called his War Room.
A bank of ceiling lights came on, bathing the room in a stark, white glow. On the walls he’d mounted topographical maps of L.A., along with some free gun posters he’d gotten from Burt at the firing range. In the center of the room, there was a beaten-up desk and chair, and behind that a couple of green metal lockers he’d salvaged from a gym being demolished up the street. That was where he kept his field gear.
Should he just suit up, he thought, and get it over with? He knew this would happen—that if he got anywhere near his stuff again, he would want to get started.
But he also knew what Burt had told them all, a dozen times: “If it goes off too soon, it’ll go nowhere.” The whole idea was to carefully plant the incendiary devices in all the places marked on the map, and time them to go off so the resulting blaze would be unstoppable. As soon as the fire department moved its resources to stop one, another one would start up, just beyond where a firebreak might have been formed. Burt knew all about this stuff—he’d been a volunteer firefighter in the Northwest, and he’d made a thorough study of the L.A. geography and terrain. If everybody in the inner circle did exactly as he was supposed to do, then the whole west side of Los Angeles, from Westwood to the Pacific Palisades, would go up in the biggest fucking conflagration the country had ever seen. And the Sons of Liberty would have done in one night what the Minutemen hadn’t been able to do in years: put the illegal aliens—and the terrorist threat from our unguarded borders to the south—in the dead center of the national radar screen.
Burt had all the rest figured out, too—how it’d look like some wetbacks or foreign agents had done it (this was part of the plan that Burt had kind of kept under wraps), and the war to reclaim America’s borders, and its proud white heritage, would be well under way.
Sadowski couldn’t resist popping open the lockers and looking over his equipment one more time. Army fatigues (he considered this work to be a continuing part of his national service), flashlight, canteen (filled with Gatorade to keep his electrolytes high), a forty-caliber Browning Hi-Power pistol (its grip made from the wood of the last surviving Liberty Tree), and most important of all, his fireproof asbestos sheath; this was what the smoke jumpers up north used, just in case they found themselves caught in the middle of a fire. Burt had shown them what to do. As fast as you could, you made a depression in the ground, then lay down in it with the sheath zipped up (from the inside) from your feet to your head. If the fire lingered, you’d probably cook to death—“like an ear of corn in aluminum foil,” Burt had joked—but if you were lucky and it swept on past quickly enough, you’d make it out alive.
In a rucksack, under a wadded-up mosquito net, there were a half dozen incendiary bombs on timers, all of them housed in empty Kleenex boxes—the boutique style. It was amazing how cheaply Burt had been able to make them; all he’d needed was some battery-operated alarm clocks, a bag or two of fertilizer, some of those Fire Starter sticks for home barbecues. Sadowski wondered why there weren’t more arsonists; you could create some major havoc for not much money, and with very little chance of ever getting caught. Most of the evidence against you went up in the blaze. (Burt had bragged that he’d been arrested several times, but never convicted, for fire-related crimes.)
There was a portable TV in the corner, perched on top of a mini fridge, and Sadowski turned it on.
Cold Case
had been replaced by another of his favorite shows,
American Justice
. The host, Bill Kurtis, was someone Sadowski thought he could really get along with; he seemed like a regular guy. Sadowski took a cold beer out of the fridge and plopped himself down on the rickety desk chair. It was a rerun—about some woman in Texas who’d run over her cheating husband in a parking lot—but it was still good. And it took his mind off what he had to do—at precisely 1700 the next afternoon—in the swanky hills of Bel-Air.
Cold Case
had been replaced by another of his favorite shows,
American Justice
. The host, Bill Kurtis, was someone Sadowski thought he could really get along with; he seemed like a regular guy. Sadowski took a cold beer out of the fridge and plopped himself down on the rickety desk chair. It was a rerun—about some woman in Texas who’d run over her cheating husband in a parking lot—but it was still good. And it took his mind off what he had to do—at precisely 1700 the next afternoon—in the swanky hills of Bel-Air.
And wasn’t his old army buddy—Captain Derek Greer—going to get a good swift kick in the ass out of that? Sadowski hoped—though it wasn’t likely on the Fourth of July—that he’d get to see him up there, at the Arab’s place. It would be so much sweeter if Greer actually knew who had fucked him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
EVEN THOUGH IT was the Fourth of July, it was business as usual around the Cox household, Beth reflected. Carter had run off to the Page Museum to catch up on some urgent paperwork—or so he claimed—and Beth had managed to prevail upon Robin to come to the house for just a few hours to watch Joey, so she, too, could go to work. With the museum closed for the day, and the staff all off at backyard barbecues and pool parties, Beth thought she’d never find a better time to run in, enter the last few paragraphs of the scribe’s secret letter into the computer database, get the translation . . . and find out, at last, how the drama had come to an end.
Traffic was heavy—it was another hot, dry day, and everybody in L.A. seemed to be heading for the beach—but fortunately Summit View wasn’t far from the Getty. And of course there were no cars, other than those belonging to a few of the usual security personnel, in the garage. Beth had an assigned spot, but it wasn’t as close to the elevators as some of the others, so she took one of those. The parking garage was at the foot of the hill, and the tram, which took visitors all the way up to the museum complex, had no one else on board. As the sleek, air-conditioned car made its way up the curving track, Beth looked out over the 405 freeway—the cars inching along, bumper to bumper—and toward the neighboring hills of Bel-Air. Way up at the top, though well hidden from view, was the al-Kalli estate . . . and on that estate was the book Beth considered one of the most remarkable in the world. A book that might now remain unknown, and unseen, forever.
The very thought still pained her.
Stepping out into the wide, travertine plaza, she saw only one other person, a security guard whom she knew. She waved to him and he waved back. Her own staff card allowed her to enter the building where her office was located. The carpeted halls, never noisy, were now completely silent; no phones were ringing, no copying machines were humming. It was all that she could have wished for.
Until she approached her own office. Lights were on, and spilling into the hall. And she could hear the clatter of computer keys, at a dizzying rate of speed. A rate that she knew only one person in the world would be capable of—her assistant.
When she stopped and looked inside, Elvis, his back to her, was staring at his computer monitor while his fingers flew across the keyboard and his head bopped to the jangling tune accompanying the program on his screen.
“Elvis,” she said, “what are you doing here?”
From the way he whirled around, it was clear that he was more than startled; he looked guilty. Beth’s eyes strayed to the computer—was he downloading porn?—but what she saw there looked a lot more like some super-high-tech version of “Dungeons and Dragons.” A wizard with a white beard was traveling up a winding road, toward a castle with several gates, while numbers flashed in the lower left corner of the screen and words scrolled across the top.
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