Black Water (43 page)

No movement, no sound. The head moved again, but away her this time.

Then a sigh and a soft whisper.
"Wildcraft. "

"Did he do this to you?"

"Yes."

"What did he want?"

"Facts."

"Of?"

"Murder."

"Of Gwen, his wife."

"Yes."

Rayborn thought she knew why Archie had done this, but wanted to hear it from Cherbrenko. "He said he'd let you go if you told him who did it and how it happened."

A nod.

"You told him."

Another.

"And the truth is, you didn't do it."

"No, I did not."

Merci tried to square her knowledge of Archie Wildcraft against the hideous thing he had done to the man below her. She understood murder but not mutilation. It took her a moment to find the logic. "Deputy Wildcraft didn't kill you. You told him you didn't shoot her, and he believed you, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"Because it was Vorapin who shot her. And Archie."

No reply. Her mind raced ahead through the possibilities, tasting and rejecting, moving on.

"You told him it was Vorapin."

"No. We did nothing."

"But Archie did this to you anyway?"

Just a whisper:
"He told me I would never drive a car again

He was right about that, Merci thought. And she realized why Wildcraft had done what he had done. There was only one more thing he could have wanted. "He let you live because he wanted something from you. And you gave it to him."

A nod.

"And you understand, don't you, Mr. Cherbrenko, that if you tell me what you told him, there's a good chance we can get to Zlatan before Wildcraft does."

"Yes."

"Where is he? Where's Vorapin?"

It was a long time before Cherbrenko answered. The fingers on both his hands slowly opened and closed, then clenched into fists.

"His private house."

"The Fullerton house, with Irene?"

"No. His other."

"What's the address, Mr. Cherbrenko? Help me save your friend something worse than what happened to you."

Another pause. Cherbrenko lay still as a dead man, his fingers again open and relaxed on his tethered hands.

"We did nothing."

"I believe you. Now give me the address."

"Two-two-seven Palacio. Newport Beach."

Zamorra broke for the door but Merci waited. Another light went on: friends don't let friends die. "The nurse dialed his number for you."

Another nod.

"Was he home?"

"No."

"You left him a message."

"Yes. I told him to call the police and let them handle this mistake."

"I'll bet you did."

"This is true."

"And what else?"

"To pull out his eyes and step on them. "

"You're a sweetheart, Sonny. You two killed her because you thought she was going to blow the whistle on you about the MiraVen."

"We did nothing."

Rayborn and Zamorra made the Newport Beach address in half an hour. Palacio was up in the hills off of Coast Highway, servicing Villagio, one of the new Italianate developments. The homes were built in clusters of three, which allowed them to face away from each and into the tan canyons.

Vorapin's address had a courtyard and garage behind a gate. The gate was closed but the garage was open. She could see the back end of a clean black car and that was it.

They walked to the gate and looked through the wrought-iron rail. Merci noted the chrome-heavy back end of the Lincoln Town Car and the livery plates, the Air Glide plate frame.

"He's home," she said.

"You want to camp or knock?"

"I'll knock."

She popped the snap on her hip leather and drew the Heckler & Koch, holding it down against her leg as she walked around the courtyard wall and into the narrow cones of shade cast by three cypresses. The front door was recessed and rounded at the top, with iron bands bolted to the timbers top and bottom. The knock black iron, heavy and warm against her fingers.

One rap, two, nothing.

Three, four, nothing.

She tried the doorbell next but it chimed back with distance and emptiness.

Then again.

Then back to Zamorra, shaking her head, her nerves buzzing, the nine tapping against her thigh.

Zamorra jumped the gate with the bored grace of a cat and hit the manual opener. It slid open and Rayborn angled in, taking the left of the walkway while her partner took the right.

.Into the dappled shade of the courtyard and the spicy aroma cypresses. The walkway made an elegant curve toward the house and that was where they found Vorapin, facedown and motionless in of blood, holes gaping from the back of his head, the upper middle of his suit coat and the center of his buttocks.

Merci stared at him, figuring the high hump of his back would come about to her knees. Why would God make a man that big?

Vorapin groaned and Merci felt her heart leap into the sky. He coughed a mouthful of black blood onto the pavers.

"Oh, Damn," she said, staring down the sights of the automatic, which had reflexively jumped into her sightline.

Vorapin's fingers tightened and slid. His cratered, misshapen head rose and wobbled, like he was a baby trying to crawl. He turned a little, just enough to curse Rayborn with one magnificent, furious eye.

Then he blew another storm of blood, gave an enormous animal shudder and his head landed with a heavy wet crunch.

For just a moment Merci couldn't hold thoughts. They swam at her dreamily, only to vanish like spooked tarpon in a bright silver sea. Then her attention refocused with blazing clarity on the soles of Zlatan Vorapin's gigantic shoes.

"I'll call paramedics," said Zamorra.

"Versa-Terra."

"What?"

"Used by Foot Rite."

She lowered her gun and looked at Zamorra blankly.

"Take five, Merci. He isn't going anywhere."

"In their popular Comfort Strider."

She half listened as Zamorra made the call. She couldn't take her eyes off of Vorapin. His bulk was obscene, absolutely. But he was majestic, too, like Ahab's whale or a Tsavo man-eater.

Her own phone rang three times before she flipped open the mouthpiece and spoke from her heart:
"Who are you and what do you want? "

"Hi. It's Archie."

A sudden reentry for Merci, swift and complete, all of her attention now focused on the voice in her ear. "Where are you?"

"I'll be at the top of Santiago Peak in about ten minutes. I'm going to get Gwen. Meet me and we can clear some things up."

"You blinded Sonny and murdered Vorapin."

"Hurry up, Sergeant. I'm kind of eager to get going."

H
e got the wings out of the back of the Durango and carried them to the edge. There was a natural platform of sandstone to on, warning signs all over the place, and above him a fenced bristling with radio and communications antennae and more was windy and hot, and when he looked out he could see County spread out in front of him, the blue houses creeping purple hillside below like soldiers storming a fort. According to the map the peak was 5,687 feet above sea level, the highest point county.

"It's beautiful," he said.

"It really is."

At the sound of her voice he swung around, but she wasn't there.

"Sweetie, I'm sorry you had to see all that. But they made me do it. They started all of this."

"I know," she said quietly. "They deserved it."

"I didn't feel anything while I was doing it."

"It's the bullet."

"What a thing to happen."

He sat at the edge of the sandstone, legs dangling in air. He watched the wind work the manzanita, shifting the branches in terse unison. He looked down at the beautiful yellow tarp of his wings. Checked the fittings and the fasteners into which the Canadian crutches were locked."

What I'm going to do is head off toward the ocean, then turn south. The wind coming up the peak is strong, and I'll ride it up and back toward you. Then, well, it's just us. Hold on to my shoulders. It'll be nothing but blue skies."

"I'm ready, Arch. I'll be here. You look terrific."

Archie had used the hotel iron and board to press his uniform, getting the seams crisp and the difficult pleats of his shirt pockets flat before reattaching his badge and nameplate. Concerned about weight, he stripped his duty belt down to the essentials: holster, handgun and plastic wrist restraints; no extra clips of ammunition, no flashlight or radio, no spray and no stick. He'd polished his boots with a miniature shoeshine kit from a drugstore. Shaved his face, of course, and affixed a fresh bandage over his wound, which, in the stress of Sonny and the giant, began emitting a steady flow of pink fluid. Since the giant, it had been getting worse.

"I called Rayborn, Gwen."

She didn't answer right away. "Why?"

"I want to see something."

"Her?"

"Not her, Gwen. Me. I want to see something about me."

"Be careful."

"I think I got into a fight because of her. I can't quite remember."

He felt the warm trickle down his neck and knew the bandage pad was full again. He fished a fresh square out of his shirt pocket and peeled away the old one, which he flicked sideways off the cliff. It spun out and caught the updraft, then downward out of sight.

"Better," he said.

He gathered up the wings and lay them across his lap. He could feel the sun on the back of his uniform and the sharp breeze drying his sweat. Below him, the colors of the county had changed: now the foliage was red and the houses were a pale turquoise that reminded him of a Baja village he'd visited with Gwen once, years ago, driving the old pickup truck slowly over the pitted asphalt and looking for a lobster restaurant to eat in.

Archie sighed and looked out at the sky in which he would soon be reconnected to his wife. In the awful confusion after his shooting he had clung to two hopes: that he would see Gwen soon, and that he would kill the men brutalized her. To him these seemed to be reasonable and just desires. True, he'd spared Sonny, because it had been the right thing to do. Sonny had driven, not shot. Sonny would never drive again, though, how unsatisfying it all had been. Archie remembered saying to the giant
this is for Gwen,
though it caused none of the exhilaration he was expecting. All he really felt as he did these things he'd done his job fairly well, taking a rational satisfaction in details: apprehending Mr. Charles without struggle; jumping the giant's gate in the early-morning darkness and landing without a sound; performance of the noise suppression device. This crude silencer, which he had painstakingly created from two PVC pipes of differing diameters, steel wool and duct tape—all fixed to the barrel of his forty-five with a powerful epoxy cement billed as Squeeze-a-Bolt--- had turned out almost comically large. But it had worked well. After five shots, only a small part of the end had melted. So that Sonny and the Giant were accounted for. But his liberation from numbness had failed.

And now, with half of his desires fulfilled, Archie felt pinioned and exhausted and alone and he missed his wife even more terribly than before. He thought about his faraway life because he could still feel the moments, though just barely: walking Julia to school with that lump in his heart, and the Little League years when he first understood that he had a gift for the game, and high school ball when he set all the county records; then Gwen and college ball and later the months she put him through the academy and the skinny first years when he worked the jail at odd hours and she built her schedule around his and they lived only to love each other. Then later the friends on the department and the regular shifts and the feeling that he was getting good at his job; even the dizzying spiral into wealth, all the worry and scrounging of money to invest, not knowing if it was going to pay off or no house and the new cars and he and Gwen still in love and it seemed like life couldn't get better. These were true memories, not the neutered snapshots that the Russians had left him with. But the emotions accompanying even these were harder and harder to recall. He remembered now, slowly and with a grim resolve, how it felt the first time he saw Gwen Kuerner in the multiplex out in Riverside.

Suddenly the tears were rushing out of him as a great spasm of loss cracked through him like a whip. It felt like his soul was caving in upon itself. He could hear his scream, feeble in the wind, but inside him it was deafening as the roar he'd heard standing by the tracks near Willits, when he was a boy with Kevin and they'd seen how close they could get to the train as it howled clattering past, inhaling their thin boys' bodies toward the fatal rails.

"We shouldn't have messed with the snake stuff," he sobbed.

"It was a terrible mistake, Arch. But I was trying to make things go our way. Really go our way."

The tears kept pouring down his face and he stared through them at the sky and wondered why his life had come down to empty air.

"It's okay, Archie," she whispered. "Come on, now. Come get me."