Cool Heat (12 page)

He used her tennis bag to collect her iPad, notebook computer, handwritten journals, and flash drives. He’d look at it all later and find some answers before turning it over to Thorp.

There were a few pictures of the outdoors, of her and her lesbian girlfriends up in the snow.

Some books. Law stuff. Stuff on the environment. Her furniture was simple and Ikea-cheap. Pictures on the desk of family, he assumed. Fucking cops all over the place. He smiled. That’s where she’d run—Sacramento. Home to the protection of family? Maybe.

But they’d gone first to the bad boy’s uncle. Strange place to run. And her cop relatives might not be all that thrilled she was hanging with a criminal. And then this Marco refused to cough her up, refused to come home. They were up to something. Did they know each other before?

Tracking was all about their past, their habits, comfort zones. Any good hunter knows running off in the woods is a waste of time. You need to understand the quarry. Maybe they’d headed back to Mexico.

Maybe this Corbin, the wannabe, could tell him what the hell was going on. That is, if he was even still around.

Runners are two kinds—those who planned ahead of time, expecting to be on the run, and those it happened to without warning. She was the latter, and they usually left trails, contacting friends or relatives. But, this was a woman from Cop World. Ex-sheriff’s deputy, DA’s investigator. So she didn’t fit into any normal profile.

Corbin, on the other hand, looked like a real fool. He botched the hit and was probably out there looking to fix it. Get it right. If he had half a brain, he’d have gone. Be on his way to South America.

Leon left Sydney Jesup’s place and followed the GPS to the address he’d been given for Corbin.

26

The boy lived back in the hills about two miles or so from the center of South Lake. Hard to find at first, with all the curling roads. No fucking streetlights. Houses hiding back in the trees. But he found it eventually.

Leon parked out of sight of the house, on a feeder road just off Needle Peak Road, and walked. He took the tennis bag with him to add to it if the PI had anything of value.

He slipped up into the woods behind the unlit house and came down toward it slowly, his cougar on the hunt walk, as he liked to think of it. He stared at the little nondescript house. No vehicle out front.

Where are you, boy? You gone? You best be long gone.

It was a dark street with no traffic. The houses in here were a little ragged. Not very active. Not the ski-bum crowd. Poor whites working the casinos, most likely.

Leon, the tennis bag slung over his left shoulder, weapon in his right hand, went into the backyard, past a car up on blocks, and found a side door with not much in the way of a lock. He put the tennis bag down in the kitchen and searched the house. Shaun Corbin proved not to be home, but he hadn’t run off. His bags were out and packed, and it looked like he had plans on taking a long vacation. Even had a map on the table. Florida.

You’re still here, boy. How dumb are you?

Leon brought the tennis bag into the living room.

“You got to come back for your stuff,” Leon said to himself.

And I’ll be here. We’re gonna have a little chit chat about how this mess happened.

He didn’t expect to learn much about the whereabouts of Jesup and her new buddy, but he could learn a little more about the client and the situation.

Why hadn’t Corbin gone? Hanging around to say goodbye to friends? Or was he out on the hunt, hoping to fix things.

Too late for that, boy.

Leon wore a Black Diamond headlamp with two tiny LED bulbs. Gave him a small amount of light, but didn’t create a beam the world could see.

Unlike Jesup, this boy was a pig. His place was a fucking disease incubator, a biohazard zone. Jesup had been minimalist, if a bit messy. This guy was a junk collector. Everything was shoddy. Man never dusted or cleaned. You could smell the mold.

Leon opened windows just a quarter inch—not far enough they would notice, especially at night—to let in some fresh air and allow him to hear anyone approaching.

“Well, let’s see what a PI has in his collection,” Leon said. There was a bunch of stuff out on the coffee table, but first he opened a backpack he’d noticed and pulled out computer disks, dozens of paper files, notebooks. There were dozens of CDs with dates and names. He opened some of the manila envelopes. Man had pictures of young girls doing bad things to older guys. Blackmail kind of stuff.

Busy little PI bugger, aren’t you?

Some of them looked like the same motel rooms. Or cabin rooms. Serious porno stuff going on. Leon chuckled. A couple of young pussy looked like prison bait. Even some gay stuff. Kinky scene, this Tahoe underbelly.

Then he turned to the stuff out on the coffee table. More photos, tape recorder, videos.

“What have we here?”

The photos were all of the same girl with various men. Not your run-of-the-mill hooker. This lady love was in a class by herself. This was serious stuff. Marilyn with an even better body. No surplus on this package. Stop a fucking train. “The best for last, my boy.”

Some girls just had that combination of sweet kid looks and a shape that wouldn’t quit. On the back of one photo, her name: Kora North. The more he stared, the more enraptured he became. There was something about the girl. Perfection, to be sure. But in a unique way.

Figuring it could be a long wait and, being jetlagged, Leon moved to the recliner, but he didn’t like the looks of it. He went into the kitchen and got a towel, wet it, and cleaned off the leather recliner. Before sitting down he tightened the curtain, then began to look over what he had on Jesup.

The more he read from her files and from the PI’s, the more he began to wonder what the hell was going on here in little old Tahoe. What the client was up to his eyeballs in. Who was the PI gathering all this stuff on, and for what, exactly?

He went back to the hot chick, the train-stopper. Some of these dudes in the pics had to be among the rich and powerful set. Lake Tahoe, with its bad-boy history…looked like some of those bad habits were back in vogue. What was the little snoop up to? Must be some blackmail goin’ on. This guy was up to his eyeballs in the muck.

C’mon home, Corbin. Can’t wait to meet you.

He found a file on Jesup. Pictures taken with a telescopic lens. Had a couple partial nude shots in her place. Man had been tracking her. Had all kinds of records on her. Even tapes of phone calls. A big investigation. Newspaper clippings of a girl named Karen Orland who’d drowned in Fallen Leaf Lake.

Corbin had a big profile on the woman. Her past in Sacramento. Her friends and relatives. Habits. Mountain rescue skier in the winter. He knew where she worked out, ate. Had a picture of her coming out of a breakfast place called the Red Hut Waffle Shop.

Leon couldn’t wait to get to the computers. He finally turned off the tiny light. Settled back in the recliner, his weapon on his lap. He was a light sleeper, but right now, he was a little more exhausted than usual. Still, he kept going back to the photo of Kora North. Never had he seen a more beautiful, more perfect woman. He wondered if, in person, she was half as fine.

He drifted off with his usual sleep protocol. He loved to imagine himself hunting down world leaders, killing them, feeding the news cycles, and playing with the government agencies hunting him. Taunting them. It was a kind of masturbation of the mind for Leon.

But on this night, after enjoying his kill in New York and his battle with the old man, he went to Kora North, having various forms of sex with her in his mind until he finally drifted off.

27

Just before sunrise on Tuesday morning, Marco and Sydney slipped out of a still-sleeping Markleeville.

Sydney felt guilty about dragging Marco further into this. She sensed he was already in deep yet was still serious about dumping her and going to his uncle, hat in hand. He was angry about what had happened, but she knew she was growing on him. Now a lot depended on what Gary Gatts could tell them—if it turned out the shooter was some random guy and not coming from Thorp, then she couldn’t expect Marco to join her “crusade.”

The Mountain View Restaurant squatted off the side of the snaking mountain road in the pines about six miles from Markleeville. A sagging dining hall, faded red paint, and a sign over the screened-in porch announced that you could “catch ‘em yourself” along with a colorful drawing of a fish.

“Is that the place?”

“Yes.”

The sun began its rise and would come with a vengeance. Another hot day ahead.

Suddenly, a small horde of leathered, tattooed bikers came roaring around the bend from the opposite direction and pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant. It was awkward for a moment, as Marco slowed as if also going into the restaurant but then continued on, the bikers no doubt assuming their presence was enough to scare off any regular citizenry.

They drove around the curve; Marco found a place just off the highway in the woods, on a feeder road, and parked out of sight of the main road and the restaurant. “We arrived a few minutes earlier, it would have gotten uncomfortable,” he said.

“Timing in love and war is everything,” Sydney said.

Marco secured his piece under his shirt, and then they hiked down through the trees, where they had a view of the restaurant and parking lot but were well hidden. They waited about thirty minutes. Two girls were outside by one of the bikes. They were joined by the rest of the crew: four males, two more females. They stood talking for a moment, then mounted up, kickstands retracted, engines turned on and cranked up.

“Dogs on hogs probably making a delivery, or a pickup,” Sydney said. “The Hell’s Angels used to run the trade until the Mexicans took over. They work for them. Next they’ll all be working for the Chinese. A new world.”

Marco smiled. “You’re cynical.”

“Usually depends on the time of day.”

With the biker bitches clinging onto their road warriors like fierce female bats, they roared off down the winding mountain road toward Markleeville, their shiny black helmets gleaming in the early morning light.

Sydney and Marco walked across the parking lot and went on inside, greeted by a fragrant waft of chilies and old grease. A sign on the wall next to the empty hostess stand explained that you could catch your own fish down in the creek, bring them up to be cleaned, then cook them yourself, or have the cook do it.

Fishing poles and bait on the porch,
the sign read in big red letters across the bottom, with an arrow pointing to the porch.

The man they were looking for wasn’t in the dining room or in the kitchen. A plump, attractive Spanish woman emerged and cast anxious glances at them.

“I guess we don’t look like customers,” Marco said. He nodded to the woman and said,
“Cómo es usted que hace hoy a señora.”

She looked worried. Marco assured her they weren’t ICE. “
No somos gobierno.
”

“I speak English,” she shot back, eyes fiery like he’d insulted her. “Probably better than you do.”

Marco smiled appreciatively at her feistiness. “We’re looking for Mr. Gatts. He around?”

A flicker of anxiety shadowed her eyes. “No.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He comes, he goes. Doesn’t tell me when or where.”

Sydney glanced at the small kitchen table with two coffee mugs and two dirty dishes, then out at the tables. No evidence the bikers had bothered to eat or drink. Looked to her like they’d picked up or delivered and left.

“You just get a delivery?”

“No. Deliveries come on Fridays.”

“I’m not talking about food.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” the woman said, eyes now showing some real apprehension.

“Who’s down at the creek?” Sydney asked. She went over to the stove. “I assume you have the right credentials of citizenship. Or at least a green card.”

Marco said, and without any humor now, “
No
te echarás. Dónde está Gatts?
”

“Yes, that’s him down at the creek. He should be up in a few minutes.”

Marco nodded. “We’ll go on down. He’s an old friend. Be a nice surprise.”

“He has friends?” she asked, with a wry raise of her eyebrows.

Marco and Sydney exchanged looks.

“We were in prison together,” Marco said.

Sydney thought the woman’s suppressed smile would have been laughter had they been sitting at a bar, and if the woman wasn’t frightened for her own safety.

Sydney said, “Sweetheart, you might want to take off, close the place for the rest of the morning. Silence is golden.
And
a way to stay in this country.”

The woman grabbed her purse and a canvas bag from under the counter and beat it out of there, the screen door banging resolutely behind her. Moments later, they heard a car engine cough, then start. They saw from the south end of the building an aging, wounded, blue Ford Focus sputter out across the parking lot and stumble down the road beyond the trees.

Sydney hung the CLOSED sign on the door, locked it, and they both took out weapons, holding them down behind their legs. It was time to shake some information out of Gatts and find out if an old friendship had any weight, and what that might mean.

28

Sydney’s got game,
Marco thought. He liked the way she handled herself. Big city law way out of her true element in a small town like South Lake Tahoe.

As they crossed to the steps, Marco glanced at the fishing poles and rubber boots that cluttered the back porch. A broken refrigerator leaned against the wall, next to it, a sign in large letters: BAIT. A cheap hunting knife was stuck in the wall.

He paused as Sydney got out her phone, he guessed to make a recording of the interaction with Gatts. Then they went down a series of stone steps that led to the stream below. She had to go easy on her wounded leg but seemed to not be in pain.

The creek was narrow but active. Had to be a pool somewhere that Gatts kept stocked. They made their way carefully, the murmuring of the creek over rocks loud enough to mask their approach.