HOWLERS (5 page)

He’d learned all about computers, their use important to the fortress’s running—that had been ten years ago. Now it was all done and ready for the battle to come. When Armageddon arrived, he would be prepared.

He walked through the snow toward the cabin’s wooden porch. Most of all he wanted to share his achievements with friends, people he liked. Many times he’d stopped his truck in front of Quentin Collier’s ranch and thought about showing Quentin everything he’d done inside the cabin.

He liked Quentin. Quentin was one of a group of friends in Timberline who never looked at him like he was just an old crazy Vietnam vet. Chuck smiled. Every year he’d been invited for Thanksgiving at the Colliers’. Every year he’d gone. Thanksgiving at the Colliers’ was his one social event of the year, and he always looked forward to it.

He’d stop his truck, turning off the engine, and fantasize about telling Quentin and Marie what he’d accomplished at the cabin, how thorough he’d been, the tunnels, the stores of food and ammo, the hidden diesel generator buried ten feet underground, equipped with its own exhaust and thousand-gallon fuel supply. But he couldn’t actually go through with it. Quentin, after all, was the town sheriff, and maybe he would have to tell someone about what he’d done—especially about his collection of fully auto assault rifles (more than fifty). No doubt he’d broken laws in collecting so many weapons of every description, and there were the highly-illegal plastic explosives, the homemade flame thrower, and the black-market hand grenades. Not to mention his newest addition: an M32 multi-barrel grenade launcher given to him by a close friend and fellow Vietnam vet who was developing the weapon for the Marine Corps, and making a fortune in the process.

But even then he’d almost gone on down the gravel road into the Collier ranch and told Quentin because he wanted to tell his friend that his family would be safe—safe when Armageddon came. He wanted Quentin and Marie to know they would be welcomed at his redoubt. He wanted them to know that they could all hold out in the cabin together, that everything for them would be all right. He would share with the Colliers.

When Quentin’s wife, Marie, had gotten breast cancer and passed two years ago, it had hit him very hard. He had cried in the cabin by himself. Marie Collier had been so sweet to him. Marie Collier was a good woman. Even now, two years later, he didn’t like thinking about her passing.

It wasn’t fair
, he thought,
always the good people die and the evil people live to get old: the Clintons, both Bushes, Dick Cheney, big-time banksters
. They all, no doubt, would live forever.

“They all think I don’t like people,” Chuck said out loud.
It isn’t that at all. It was just that I had something I had to do. I had to do this for my . . .  friends, the people I will invite
. He would invite them. He began to tick off the names: Willis Good and his family; the Colliers; T.C. McCauley; the librarians in town, who never charged him for late fees. Farren Webb, the cook at the Copper Penny who always added extra French fries to his order; his uncle Sam, who was in the old-folks home in Reno and had lost an arm at the Battle Of The Bulge. People he cared about. Was it crazy?

Only if I told stupid people
.

   “No, I like people,” Chuck said, talking to himself, climbing the steep wooden stairs to the top of the porch. He stopped at the front door and wiped his feet. He’d put up a Christmas wreath. He loved Christmas and hated to see it go. He held the wreath in his hand. He’d decorated it himself with bits of colored foil and wooden ornaments, and bits of his first Apple computer. He loved computers, and country music, and Christmas, and he loved people. It was just that people didn’t love him back, since that time in the airport on his way back from Vietnam when a girl had called him a baby killer and spit on him. He’d never forgotten that. What her face looked like. She’d meant it.

I liked people
, he thought, looking at the wreath. And if truth be told, he had done things over there that were wrong.  He made a mental note: Next year’s wreath would be bigger. If Armageddon didn’t come, it would be bigger and he would buy one of those big plastic red bows he’d seen in a Seagram’s ad in the back of a
Time
magazine. No, he wasn’t a sad ol’ Vietnam-veteran “Prepper” like he’d seen on TV. He was different. He loved people. He wanted to save his friends from the war he knew was coming.

He pushed the door open, taking the wreath off its nail. He didn’t have the heart to take the decorations off the wreath. He put the wreath on the rough wooden table in the kitchen. The kitchen was clean, its waxed hardwood floor spotless. He’d salvaged the flooring from an old abandoned farmhouse in the valley. The cabin’s living room had an almost feminine sensibility, everything well-scrubbed and orderly. He was a neat freak. The fire in the potbelly wood burner made the living room feel cozy. The big Christmas tree by the small bulletproof windows made it homey, too. He made a mental note to take the Christmas tree down when he got back from his hunting trip.

He walked to the back of the cabin; a small hallway separated the living room from the one bedroom. In the hallway to the bedroom was a long row of gun cases. He walked to the first, unlocked it and took out his .30-30. “The gun that won the West,” his father had told him when he was a kid. He threw the lever back. The magazine was clear and smelled of Hoppe’s oil, a smell he loved. He walked back to the table, laid the rifle down, went back to the hallway.

He crouched in the hall, pulled open the trap door and looked down into the bunker he’d hand-dug—some areas having to be dynamited to clear rocks. It had taken him six years to dig and blast out the space for the bunker, which was twice the size of the cabin. He’d spent whole days with nothing but a miner’s style hat with its puny light showing the black earth as he hand-dug the bunker’s two escape tunnels that ran for over a hundred yards, and ended at the county road.

He hit the light switch on the wall and saw the crude hand-hewn stairs leading down to the lit-up bunker. The bunker held seven bedrooms, two fully-functioning bathrooms, and more rooms that held the bulk of the armory, with tens of thousands of rounds of ammo and more weapons. The redoubt was equipped with a state-of-the-art “control room” as well as a kitchen, larder and dining room. He’d installed a fully-ventilated power plant with a thousand-gallon reserve of diesel fuel. At the very back were the two escape-tunnel entrances, the tunnels laid with tracks for caisson-like carts that could be ridden or filled with equipment and pushed should the bunker need to be abandoned during an attack. The bunker even had its own gravity-fed water system that came straight off the Sierra behind the cabin. Every time he opened the hatch cover, he felt proud of what he’d accomplished.

He took the steps down into the brightly lit bunker designed to comfortably hold a dozen of his close friends.

I’m sure now, sure that it’s coming. I know it, you feel things like that. Feel them in your heart, not your head. We’re there.

He came back up the stairs with two boxes of .30-30 ammunition and closed the trap door. He went to the cabin’s kitchen table and picked up his rifle. Of all the rifles he owned—and he had scores just in the cabin’s top-floor gun lockers—this was his favorite. He’d gotten it as a gift from his father when he turned thirteen. Still the best kind of brush gun there was, and perfect for deer hunting in the Sierras.

He slung it over his shoulder and looked at the Christmas tree. He’d kept the lights on, but now it was time to turn them off. He hated that. It would be the last time he would turn off this year’s Christmas tree. It was beautiful. He’d taken a picture with his new iPhone and put it in his computer scrapbook. He had twenty trees in his scrapbook, with comments, things he wanted to add, new lighting schemes.

He stood for a moment and took it in, found his favorite ornaments. A Santa Claus his mother had made, a gold ball with glitter he’d made in the fourth grade that said 57 on it. There was a crystal reindeer he’d ordered from Germany. Ornaments his sister—who’d married well— had sent him from a fancy store in San Francisco. The glass reindeer caught the electric light and projected a beautiful rainbow.

Christmas this year had been good. He’d spent hours and hours reloading, adding to his ammo stash sitting across from the tree. He had more than ten thousand rounds of ammo for the FAL NATO-issue machine gun alone.

He crossed the room and remembered Thanksgiving morning, going out to the field with the snowmobile and racing along. He’d spotted the tree he’d cut months before. He went that morning before going to the Colliers’ for dinner and chopped it down and brought it back to the cabin. He’d even worn the Santa cap he’d bought at the CVS pharmacy in Nevada City.

Phelps reached down and pulled the plug. The Christmas tree’s lights went dark. It was always painful, he thought, but he reminded himself that it was February. Time to move on.

Outside, riding his snowmobile, rushing into the wilderness, his .30-30 strapped to his back, Chuck thought how sad it was that people didn’t love winter. He thought they should.
We should love all the seasons because the seasons are God. Not their god, the bible thumper’s God. But the God I know is out here. Maybe God would forgive me for what I did over there. I was good at killing people. Maybe too good. Some things you get real good at,
he thought.
Things you shouldn’t get good at
.

It started to snow hard as he entered the Emigrant Gap wilderness area.

C
HAPTER 4

Quentin realized that it had stopped snowing. He reached for the switch and turned off his windshield wipers. The white snow-covered world outside his patrol car seemed distant. He’d ridden back from breakfast in a kind of daydream, and it was Patty Tyson’s fault. Seeing her had set something loose in him. Their breakfast date had upset his emotional gyroscope; he’d left the Denny’s excited, but wobbly. It had upset his routine, his balance. Stopped snowing and he hadn’t even noticed … Would they have an affair? He wondered how he’d be at affairs now.

Not a kid anymore. Still, I’m not dead. She is attractive.

He felt the smooth-warm steering wheel, and without meaning to, felt the warm plastic bumps. He let his fingertips travel over several of them and wondered what it would be like to make love to Patty Tyson. Pretty damn good, probably. 

The dirty snow-splattered green and white patrol car pulled off the two-lane county road, rocking a little as it left the asphalt and pulled onto the rough gravel road that led, a half-mile down, to his family’s ranch.

The patrol car passed along the pine trees his great-great-grandfather had planted at the turn of the century. They were massive now, sixty feet, their trunks part of the fence that ran up to the two-story Victorian ranch house, and a barn, both painted white. The five hundred-acre ranch had been in Quentin’s family since the 1890s. Snow flocked the trees and made the empty snow-carpeted paddocks on either side of the lane look like a picture postcard of a high-Sierra ranch.

“Hey Sheriff, I’m twenty-four fifty here at Blue Canyon.”

Quentin slowed his patrol car to a crawl and took the radio call. “Calvin. What’s up, over?”

“It’s about Chuck Phelps, Sheriff, over.”

“Let’s leave Chuck the hell alone. This thing with the B and B will blow over, over,” Quentin said. He was tired of hearing about Chuck Phelps and his quarrelsome neighbor.

“No, Sheriff, this isn’t about the bed and breakfast hassle, over.”

“Well, then? Over.”

“Mordecai stopped me this morning at the Copper Penny and said that Chuck’s mail box is full. He thinks maybe something’s happened to him. I’m on my way over the hill to Reno to testify in the Paulson trial. Can you go by and check it out? I know it’s just down the road from your place, over,” the deputy said.

“Sure, I’ll go by,” Quentin said. “Over.”

“Thanks, Quentin. Did you see that light the other night?”

“Yeah, I saw it.”

“My brother over in Indian Valley said he heard an explosion too,” the deputy said.

“Yeah, I think everyone in the county saw it,” Quentin said. “I think it was another meth lab. Someone will find what’s left of the building before too long.”

“Well, they wanted to get high, and I guess they did. Ten-four.”

Quentin sped up, deciding to check in on his daughter before he drove over to the Phelps place. No doubt it was nothing; Chuck had probably just gone to San Francisco to visit his sister. Still, he could be hurt . . .  better check. That light was strange. Strange, too, that they hadn’t had any report of a blown house or outbuilding yet.

Halfway up the road, he realized the pain had gone. The deep one, the one that had been screwed into his chest the day he walked back from the hospital cafeteria and saw his daughters running toward him. Marie had been on the phone the day before with her parents and seemed to be stronger, not weaker; and, then, when he’d gone to have breakfast, she’d died. Gone.

He stopped the car. He’d had the incredible pain for two years, gotten used to moving through his life with it. The pine trees overhead had grown together reaching over the road, forming a canopy.  Motes of snow drifted down through the canopy of pines.

It’s gone.

Quentin looked out on the west paddock that ran all the way down to the county road. It was empty, forlorn-looking in winter. He saw a small snow dust devil kick up and dance across the paddock. 

Marie, no matter what happens with this girl, it won’t be the same. I swear it
.

“Daddy. What’s wrong?”

Quentin had walked up to the barn after checking the house for his younger daughter, but she’d already left for school. Lacy, his older daughter, was leading her black Arabian stallion out from the barn. Red-faced from mucking out cold stalls, the twenty-three year old looked radiant. Her long blond hair was done up with a big tortoise shell clip in the back. She looked exactly like her mother had when Quentin first met her while away at college. He couldn’t speak. It was as if his dead wife were standing there looking at him, back from the dead.

“What’s wrong, Daddy? You okay?”

He pushed his cowboy hat back on his head. She’d never seen him look like that before, like a lost little boy.

“Hi, sweetheart.” He was going to say something about her looking so much like her mother, but he stopped himself.

“Daddy, I think Salvation has picked up something.”  The stallion was puffing, steam coming from his muzzle because of the cold. Lacy turned the horse around and walked him back toward the barn so that her father could watch the horse’s gate.

Marie, God
…
look at what we made together
. He walked out to where his daughter had stopped in front of the barn. He put his arm around her and pulled her to him.

“God, I love you two so much. Do you know that?” he said out loud, hugging her.

“Daddy, you’re acting weird. What do you think, is it bad?”

“You bet I’m weird.” He took the black nylon hackamore from her and walked the animal toward the barn door, watching it over his shoulder. He could see that the horse was limping. He stopped and turned the animal around. At the same time he moved down along the horse’s flank, dropping the hackamore’s single bridle onto the snow.

“Is it bad, Dad?”

Quentin moved to the rear and reached down to pick up the game hoof. He tucked it between his legs. The horse stiffened when he lifted it, then tried to pull the hoof out of Quentin’s hand, almost hitting him in the face.

“Whoa.” He used his car keys to push muck out from the hoof’s center. “He’s picked up a thorn. That’s all.” He let the hoof drop and wiped his shit-and-mud covered hand and keys on his clean jeans.

“Should we call Robin?” Robin was the new vet in Timberline, and he knew his daughter had a crush on him. She was finding any reason she could to have him up to the ranch. He was about to tell her that no, they couldn’t afford to have the vet in, but didn’t, despite the fact that Colliers had been doctoring horses since they’d come to the Sierras. He could have pulled the thorn out himself.

“Yeah, go ahead and call him. Sharon left already, I guess. I wanted to take her to school this morning,” he said. Quentin turned and walked the horse back to his daughter and handed her the bridle.

“I heard a motorcycle early,” Lacy said.

They both looked at each other. The motorcycle meant that the biker Sharon had been dating had come to the ranch. Quentin hated bikers. The foothills were full of them, having come with the meth labs. The idea that his daughter, a high school student, was seeing one appalled them both.

“She’s mad at me,” he said. “I told her she was wasting her time with those kinds of people. I think she’s doing it just to get me mad at her.”

“Probably,” Lacy said.

“I think you better go back to school,” he said. He tucked his shirt in nervously. “I think whatever reason you have for taking the semester off isn’t good enough. You worked too hard to get into medical school to leave like that. Your mother would have wanted you to go back. That’s all she talked about, you know, before.”

“Let’s talk about it later. How’d it go this morning, Romeo?” Lacy said.

“Good.”

“Did she call you tall, dark, and handsome?”

“You’ll like her,” Quentin said.

“I’m sure I will. We’re about the same age!”

“No, you aren’t,” he said. “She’s coming over tomorrow night for dinner. What should I make?”

“Oh my God!” His daughter laughed. “We said date, not bring her home. And if you marry her, I’m not going to call her mother. She’s—how old? Thirty something. It’s weird!”

“Very funny. I wanted you guys to meet her. I thought I’d cook my best dish.”

“Daddy, do me one favor, please. Do not make that woman sit through your venison stew. It’s awful. Really awful!”

It was snowing again. Little bits of snow were clinging to his daughter’s black Patagonia jacket that he’d bought her for that Christmas. Her blond hair covered the collar.

“I think Sharon needed your mom more than you did. Maybe because you were older,” Quentin said.

Lacy picked up the bridle. The horse lowered his head and munched a bit of snow. “I try to be like Mom was. I mean for Sharon. But I don’t think it’s working. She just pushes me away,” Lacy said. “She’s going out with a real low-life, I saw him this morning.  He’s so ... creepy looking.”

“Like a bucket of—” Quentin stopped himself from swearing in front of his daughter. “Why?” he asked.

“I think she’s doing it to get your attention, that’s all.”

“Well, she’s got it. Keep trying to break through, okay?” He smiled at her. “I have to go to work.”

“I’m glad you’re dating,” his daughter said unexpectedly. Lacy turned the horse around and started up the road toward the barn in the snow. She seemed completely un-crackable, completely beautiful. She had her mother’s power and confidence, he thought, watching her.

“Let’s get Sharon a new saddle for her birthday,” Quentin shouted.

His daughter turned around. She was smiling. “Good idea!” She waved. “Hey, did you see that big flash of light last night?”

He nodded.

“What was it?”

“A meth lab blew somewhere, probably.”

Lacy looked at her father as if she were going to tell him something, but decided not to. She turned around instead and led the horse back into the barn.

“You might as well stay until Founder’s Day,” he yelled. Quentin thought she’d heard him, but she hadn’t.

The Phelps ranch was an original homestead. Like the Colliers, the original Phelps had given up panning for gold and become a cattleman during the Gold Rush. Quentin closed the door to the patrol car and looked down the empty, snow-covered single-lane county road. He walked down the icy verge and stood in front of a dirt road that led into the Phelps’s property. Fifty feet down, a series of fallen trees blocked the road and made it completely impassable by car.

Quentin shook his head and smiled. He walked to the mailbox nailed to the once-white fence. It was overflowing with mail. He pulled off his gloves and emptied the box, putting the envelopes and junk mail between his gun belt and his jeans.

He heard a car horn. A new black Range Rover pulled out from the bed-and-breakfast’s private road a half-mile down. It turned toward Quentin. A hand shot out from the driver’s side of the Rover and waved as it approached. The sheriff waved back. He watched the fancy highly-polished jeep come toward him. Quentin unzipped his jacket and stuffed a parcel that had been sitting on top of Chuck’s mailbox under his jacket, then walked over to the Rover that had stopped in the middle of the road, white steam coming from its exhaust.

Quentin knew the man behind the wheel, Todd Cooley. The man was wearing one of those expensive full-length leather coats city people could afford. Cooley’s sunglasses were hanging off his neck. His black hair was greased straight back; he looked like he’d just climbed out of a barber chair. He had on a cowboy shirt from the Sun Dance catalog made for “real cowboys” that cost a hundred dollars and no real cowboy could afford.

Cooley was an accountant in San Francisco and looked it, but dressed like a cowboy when he came up to the mountains. Cooley and some wealthy partners had bought a hundred acres and built the “Country Bride Inn and Spa,” a luxury bed-and-breakfast next door to the Phelps ranch. Since the accountant had bought the property from Chuck there’d been nothing but problems between Phelps and his new neighbors.

“Sheriff, good morning. I’m glad to see you,” Cooley said.

“Good morning, Mr. Cooley.”

“I had to call A.T.F, Sheriff. I just wanted you to know. In case, well, in case there’s a problem when they come out to talk to Phelps. Maybe you should be here, too.”

Quentin heard the words A.T.F. and froze. He didn’t like Cooley, and he didn’t like federal agents much—especially the DEA, staffed by paramilitary gunslinger types, who were always heavy-handed and patronizing when it came to dealing with the locals. (He’d heard a rumor that some of the DEA in Sacramento had partnered up with the bad guys, too.) And he certainly didn’t like the idea of some Federal agents from Sacramento picking on Chuck Phelps, who was a close family friend.

Great, that’s all we need
, Quentin thought.

“Why, for God’s sake?” Quentin said, unable to keep the pique out of his voice. He’d had enough of the roly-poly accountant and his pushy big-city ways. Quentin practiced controlling himself.
Have to get along with the city people
, he reminded himself. It was something he’d promised Marie. He counted to ten as he listened to the over-dressed businessman. More and more of them were coming up to the Sierras, and Marie had been afraid they could, one day, organize and vote him out of office.

“He won’t stop with that shooting. I called ATF and told them he has automatic weapons. I’m sure of it. Probably machine guns. He’s some kind of gun nut. People don’t appreciate the sound of gunfire when we’re serving dinner at the Inn. That’s not what they come up here for. We have a glass-enclosed massage area—cost a fortune—faces that nut’s place. We’re trying to run a business here,” Cooley said. The accountant looked up the road toward Phelps’s cabin. “Besides, we’re afraid of him. He’s crazy and no doubt violent.”

Quentin finished buttoning up his jean jacket. His anger had passed as quickly as it had come. He held the package up against his chest. “I wish you hadn’t done that, Mr. Cooley. That’s going to make for trouble. People around here like to take care of their own problems. I told you I would talk to Chuck about his gun range. He’s reasonable. I can work this out, if you just give me a chance. The gun range is legal. I’ve told you. But maybe we could get him to use it just in the morning or something?”

“Sheriff, I like you. You have tried. I know you have, but Jesus Christ, the man’s a nut. They said they’d come out here and investigate. Sorry. But I think you local people are a little slow. I know he’s a local and all. I’m just trying to get along here.” Cooley nodded, put the Range Rover in gear and drove off. He turned around in Chuck Phelps’s driveway and raced down the road toward town.

You aren’t trying very hard
, Quentin thought. All the rich city people that were moving in were the same, they all said they wanted to fit in, until it came time to fit in. Then it was always their way or the highway.

Quentin stood on top of a fallen pine tree and surveyed the road into the Phelps’s ranch. He saw no footprints or fresh snowmobile tracks. He looked down at the cabin, a good hundred yards down the snow-bound road. No smoke from the chimney. The cabin was small, hand-built by Chuck. He’d started it the summer he got back from the Marine Corps. His parents had lived in the original ranch house until they died a few years ago.

The sheriff looked to his left. He saw the original Phelps place two hundred yards to his right. A fancy Los Angeles plastic surgeon had bought it as a summer place. The original turn-of the-century two-story ranch house had been completely remodeled. It had a home theater and an indoor swimming pool, people said, a third story had been added, too. The doctor was rumored to have spent five million dollars on the renovations. A chimney was throwing off smoke from a small caretaker’s cabin in back of the doctor’s place.