Carcass Trade (9 page)

“How about shutting that thing off a minute?”

The canyon got quiet again. The sun seemed to increase its vigor.

“What's your name?”

“I'm Harlan, she's Helen.”

“What's your last name?”

“Smith.”

“You ever been arrested before, Harlan?”

“No, sir.”

“How about you, dear?”

“Two years ago, up in Kern County.”

“What was that for?”

“Doing nitrous.”

“They got nitrous up there in the valley?”

“Major.”

“I thought that was mostly kids.”

She lifted her shoulders, sucked in her cheeks, and looked like a bored thirteen-year-old.

“Are you clean now?”

Harlan said, “Oh man we don't fool with that, none of it.” The woman's eyes fixed on Oskar and his assistant as they were laying out a body bag for the dead man. Harlan saw it then, too, and said, “Shit, what's that?”

“A homicide. You two wouldn't happen to know anything about it?”

“Man, no.”

“Are you sure this is your first time up here?”

Helen said, “First time. Last time, too, by the looks of it. Man, that's heavy.”

“If I ran your plates, would I learn anything about you you'd be sorry you didn't tell me? Would there be any warrants out for you?”

Harlan said, “I got some, but I paid last week. CHP sat on me.”

“I'll bet they got you for no helmet.” The deputy dragged out his ticket pad.

“I hate them brain buckets.”

“Well, I'm going to cite you both for not having them, you understand? Helmets save lives. You may not want to believe that, but they do.”

“There's evidence to the contrary, Officer. I don't want to argue with you, but—”

“No, you don't want to do that. Now, we're going to run your plates, Harlan. And, if I find you're lying to me about having any warrants out, that won't make me happy, you got me?”

“I understand, Officer. You won't find nothing. Look, I'm just up here with my girl, trying to make a little time, you know?” Harlan twisted back to wink at the woman, her neck arching away from him in a deadpan look of boredom. I saw then that she had a tattoo running over the top of one breast in rainbow colors. It said EASY LOVIN'.

The deputy said, “What's your last name, Helen?”

“Baker.”

“What's the name on your driver's license?”

“Helen Baker.”

“What's the name on your birth certificate?”

Glancing at Joe, I saw his expression change, and a faint smile come to his lips as he looked at me. The woman did not answer right away. She dropped her hands to her sides as though the muscles had lost grip on the bones, and rolled her eyes and looked away.

He asked her again, “What's the name on your birth certificate?”

“Henry Babson.”

I opened my eyes wide to Joe, and he was turning now, stifling what promised to be a wide smile, and stepped away and around to me then, coming close and saying softly in my ear, “See the Adam's apple?”

“Do you think it's news to Harlan?”

“Not at all.”

Harlan was in fact looking impatient to move on.

The second deputy came back with results from the plate run off the mobile data terminal in the car, and said, “No warrants on Harlan.”

Harlan looked pleased, and said, “She'll come up clean, too, Officers. I'll vouch for that.”

We were at the only lunch place around for miles, above the hazy flats near the city of Lake Elsinore.

I asked Joe, “The bikers, do you think they were up to anything?”

“You heard them interviewed.”

“I think they were just out riding,” I answered myself.

“Where I would be, if I was twenty years younger.”

He was gazing through a filmy window at the boiling patch of gritty desert country below that drew blue-collar workers, retirees, hot-air balloonists, speedboat enthusiasts, and until recently, a serial killer nabbed only after he'd made a sizable dent in the female prostitute and drug abuser population.

“Didn't you see that one biker the other day with white hair? You're never too old,” I said.

I thought back to the burn scene in Carbon Canyon five days ago, the bikers flying down the highway as we were getting ready to leave, with their hair free in the wind. We were fifty miles from there, as the raven flies.

“My son goes dirt biking somewhere out here,” Joe said. “Lot of decomposed granite. Ruts don't form. The rain just soaks on through.”

“Now you won't want him to go.”

He shook his head. “You get killed quicker in Santa Ana than out here in the mountains.”

Three men, all with beards, came in and pulled out chairs around one of the dark wooden tables. The big man wore a pale yellow knit shirt that form-fit a keg belly so smoothly the navel contours showed. Printed on the shirt was a lobster with an oversized pincer. Crawdaddy's Lobster Shack in Sacramento, the place for tail and ale. As he caught the eye of the woman behind the sandwich bar, he ordered a pitcher of draft, then levered pressure off his flesh with both thumbs under his belt, and sat down.

He said, “Go for that upper gate, man. The eyes are soft as putty.”

“Oh, I don't know,” the man with a tan shirt with his back to me said. “You ever butcher a cow?” On his right arm he had a short flesh-colored cast.

“Not lately,” the big man said, and laughed. He leaned back and humped his shoulders a few times to work out the kinks.

“That cornea is one tough motherfucker.”

I looked at Joe, who flicked the men a glance.

“Greg says to watch the middle gate,” the second man said. “But I'm tellin' ya, man, you got a guy one step, one thrust away, with a knife big as your bone, you're going to be watching the arm. I don't care how much discipline you have. Natural instinct.”

Leaning toward Joe across our table, I said, “Self-defense tactics. Think they're cops?”

“Jerks.” I smiled and watched him sip his coffee I knew was lukewarm, the way he liked it.

Yellow belly stood up in response to the pitcher being placed on the bar. He hooked three mugs and brought it all to the table. “The guy goes for it, whack the ulna,” he said. “That's pain. I guarantee, he's going to drop the weapon.”

“Sure sounds like day-off cops to me,” I said. “Who else says ‘weapon'?”

The short man facing me had a blowsy white beard and hair that curled thickly over his collar. He fixed his bright blue eyes on me until I looked away.

I heard a softer, marbled voice I hadn't heard before and figured it was the white-haired guy. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “You're faced off. Attack first. Don't wait for him to come to you. You need that element of surprise. Render a devastating, neutralizing, lethalizing attack, if that's what you have to do.”

Joe offered me a fry. “They're showboating for you, honey.”

“Think so?”

The waitress brought the check and I asked for a Pepsi to go. The men were quiet for a while, and then, when the woman came back and as we were trying to read the writing on the check, one of the men said something about exotic loads. He was referring to soft-jacketed ammunition also known as manstoppers. I raised my eyebrows to Joe and said, “They like guns too.”

We laid out money for the waitress and walked outside to the hot white brilliance at four thousand feet, my Pepsi in my hand.

In the gravel parking lot was a Jeep with a lift kit and roll bar, and next to it a pickup truck with three dirt bikes in the bed, and I realized what our bearded buddies were up to when they weren't playing Baddest Dude in the Whole Damn Town.

“Dirt bikers,” Joe said. “A little old for that.”

*
   
*
   
*

Joe squinted into the sun as we walked to the cars.

I said, “Joe, do you think I ought to call Miranda Robertson's husband myself?”

“No.” A quick frown arrived then fled across his face. “Homicide will handle that. She's either in Italy or she isn't. In any case, we'll know pretty soon.” He maneuvered me over to my car.

“You're mad. You think I'll meddle.”

“You had enough trouble six months ago.”

“This Pepsi is watery.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“I know you're worried because your brother's involved. But it'll be nothing, you'll see.” By my car door he moved into me, the dank sweet smell of his body comforting.

“I reek of cigar,” I said.

“So do I.” He lifted my chin and kissed me lightly.

When we broke, I said, “I'm going to throw this away,” and looked around for a trash barrel.

“Let's just take the afternoon off,” Joe said.

“Oh yeah, sure.” I knew he didn't mean it. Well, he meant it as far as the urge went, but neither of us would indulge on county time, though we both knew people who did. What's unethical for one is not for another, but stealing paid-for time is stealing just the same, to my mind.

I saw a trash can and went toward it. Joe got out his keys and went around to his car.

Wasps looped over the barrel. A cone of stench emanated from it. I decided to avoid that one, and went a distance away to a can with a paddle-shaped homemade wooden cover on top. When I raised it, I said, “Joe, wait.” He came over.

Two empty cardboard rolls of tape lay in the middle of the trash. One had a fragment of silver duct tape still attached and the other's center held a walnut-sized wad of tape. Coiled over all was a prickly length of shiny single-strand aluminum wire with small triangular nubs on it.

“That looks wicked,” Joe said.

Gingerly, I plucked it out, the tail releasing from the confines of the barrel and whipping into the button panel of Joe's shirt.

“Down, girl,” he said.

“Look at this stuff. What is it?”

“I don't know.”

“Should we take it along, for grins?” I asked.

“We're nine or ten miles from the scene, if that's what you're thinking.”

“That's what I'm thinking. Pretty unlikely, huh?”

I leaned the coiled wire against the trash barrel, remembering a call I went on with my husband in Oakland. We were searching for a weapon all the bystanders said they saw in the hand of the suspect a moment before we arrived. I was sure the suspect passed it off to someone, but Bill said evidence hides in strange places. He went up on the roof of the house next door. The kid had tossed the pistol there.

I said, “Our victim had wire around his neck. It was so embedded. It could have been this. I never pricked myself, though, when I touched it.”

“Take it. It's your call.”

Picking the scary Slinky up again, I said, “You couldn't grab this for a garrote,” I said. “You're right. I'll leave it.”

Joe said, “Take the tape rolls. What the hell, we might get lucky. I'll get a bag.” Prints can be obtained off tape these days, even the sticky side. They can be obtained off the inside of surgical gloves as well, surprise, surprise to the bad guys.

I looked for a twig to move stuff around in the barrel and found a dark stick of manzanita.

“There's a couple other pieces in here.” Using my stick, I lifted out a double-stranded copper wire, spearing through a diamond-shaped separation between the two strands. The diamonds were regular, a part of the design, as though they'd been pried apart by a tiny little Samson standing on the bottom strand. The piece was about a foot long.

Joe shrugged, took the copper piece from me, and dropped it in a bag. He plucked out the cardboard tape rolls and the wads of tape and put them in too.

“Let's tip the barrel,” I said. We shook out a trail of garbage. We were poking around in the papers and chili cups when we heard a window slide open in the café and the waitress say, “Can I help you?”

Joe said to me under his breath, “We need a warrant to do this?”

“No way.”

“My wife thinks she lost her ring in here. That okay?” he said to the woman, now lost in the brown shadow of screen.

“That's why I don't wear mine no more,” she sang back. “Good luck.”

I used my shoe to brush aside a bagful of soiled baby diapers, revealing another strip of wire about fifteen inches long, this one so jagged it looked as if tinsnips had been taken to it to slice its length into even, backward-leaning shark's teeth.

“Woho,” Joe said. “Don't it make your skin tingle?”

“Let's take it.” I pincered it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it into the sack. Hearing the door to the café open, I looked up expecting to see the waitress, but the small man with the white hair who had been with the lobster man stepped off the concrete platform that served as a porch. The wind lifted his beard and blew open his light green shirt, revealing his undershirt and, up by the armpit, a tan holster curved with weight.

“Joe,” I said. “That guy's packing. He's got a shoulder holster.”

Watching him out of the corner of my eye, I saw him go across the lot to the pickup truck with the dirt bikes in it. He opened the door and slid out a pack of cigarettes from the seat. Looking at us, he shook out a cigarette and lit it. Then he came forward.

I stood up and faced him. The small paper sacks we had were lying on their sides, so I didn't suppose he'd think they were anything but trash.

“How y'all doin'?” he said.

I said, “Okay. How you all doin'?”

Joe rose from his crouch. He said, “My wife lost her ring. I swear I can't take her anywhere.”

“I wondered what y'all were digging around in the trash for. I seen hungry and I seen poor, but I hope it don't come down that rough on me,” he said, the cigarette dangling from his mouth. He slipped the lighter into his chest pocket alongside the pack of cigarettes. “You never can tell. I seen guys in suits Dumpster-diving before. Well, take care, now,” he said, and turned and walked toward the Jeep this time.