Never Look Down (20 page)

Chapter Forty-two

Kelly

Rain spattering on Kelly's bedroom window brought her out of a deep, dreamless sleep. It was Sunday, the morning after the attempted rape. She lay there in bed listening to the rain and trying to untie the knot of her hopelessly tangled fears and emotions. She seethed with anger and frustration. Aside from the beating that she and Zook had administered, Sprague and Digger were going scot-free, a thought that enraged her. There were flashbacks of terror, too. What if Zook hadn't been there? What would have happened to her? Worse yet, she felt pangs of guilt for reasons she couldn't fathom, but she forced them down.
You did nothing to deserve that,
she told herself over and over again.

She withered in fear at the thought of Digger telling someone about her backpack. But he had no proof and probably wasn't sure, anyway. And maybe he was just saying that to scare her. He was such a bullshitter.

Then her heart would soar thinking of Zook's sudden appearance, like some knight in shining armor. But she winced each time her mind replayed the crack on the head she'd given Digger. He deserved it, but hitting someone like that still made her feel uneasy. It seemed like everywhere she turned she was confronted with violence, even by her own hand. Her life, it seemed, had taken another dark turn, like when her dad died.

But then she laughed almost uncontrollably when she thought of Sprague on his hands and knees, his nose sideways on his face like a Cubist painting she saw once. Then Zook's parting words on the bus would crash down on her, and she would descend back into darkness.

Kelly might have seesawed like this all day, but then she realized something—she had, in fact, accomplished what she set out to do. Zook was away from Sprague and Digger. They might try to get back at him, but she was sure he could take care of himself. And Digger was probably bluffing about giving her up to whoever was out there asking about her. So, all she had to do now was figure out a way to get Zook back into school and to teach him enough math to pass the GED. The romance thing would have to wait.
Men, they're so frustrating
.

Kelly found Veronica in the kitchen stirring a coffee and smoking a cigarette. She hadn't seen her since her big date with Larry. “How was the dinner party?”

Veronica smiled with more brightness than Kelly was used to seeing her project in the morning. “It was good. He's a nice guy.”

W
ell, at least one of us is having some luck
, she thought. “Does he have a job?”

“Yes,” she answered, sounding more defensive than she probably intended. “He's a tow truck driver. Has been for a long time.” Then she drew up her face in a look of genuine concern. “I saw your blouse in the laundry, Kel. It was ripped and looked like it had some blood spattered on it. What happened?”

Gross,
Kelly thought,
Digger's blood.
She hadn't noticed it. She teetered on the brink of telling Veronica what happened, but thought better of it. She was afraid that if she started running her mouth she would wind up telling her everything
.
“Uh, there was a fight at the school, a couple of girls. I tried to break it up. Sorry.”

Veronica's eyes narrowed. “Kelly, yesterday was Saturday. There was no school.”

“Um, the fight was on the sidewalk outside school. We were just hanging out there.”

Veronica looked unconvinced. “Who's we?”

“My friends and I.”

Veronica sighed. “I wish I could meet some of those friends of yours.”

Kelly eyed her carefully, trying to discern the degree of her seriousness. “I've kept them away like you told me. I tell them very little about my private life. My best friend knows your first name and that's about it. Fortunately, she's not the nosy type.”

Veronica exhaled a plume of bluish smoke and ground out her cigarette. “I know it's hard, Kel, but we've got to be careful.” She locked onto Kelly's eyes. “Look, things are starting to turn around for me. Keep your nose clean, okay?”

Good old Veronica,
Kelly said to herself as she shook out the last flakes of cold cereal into a bowl.
It always winds up being about you.

That afternoon Kelly went back to the library to get some homework done and check her Hide-My-Ass! e-mail account. When she got out on the street, the fear of Digger's threat returned, although not in full force. After all, she told herself, it wasn't the first time he'd threatened her. Nevertheless, she felt jittery, and for the first time in her life the people around her in the street and on the bus seemed vaguely threatening. It was a weird, unwelcome feeling.

The cold, wet weather ensured a crowded library, and Kelly saw several students from the school. She felt a familiar pang of guilt knowing some of those kids would have no place to go that night. At least she had a roof over her head. When she was finally able to log on to her anonymous account, she found a single message from Claxton requesting her to keep in touch with him. She thought back over everything she told the lawyer one more time but couldn't think of anything else to add. She signed off the anonymous account without sending anything.

Kelly left the library feeling better, the specter of a threatening world vanquished, it seemed, by the simple act of doing her homework and the realization that she had done everything she could for Rupert, short of giving herself up. The rest would be up to the lawyer, Claxton, and the cops. She would talk to Kiyana the next day about Zook and how he rescued her, too. Maybe they could devise a plan to lure him back to school. What she wanted most of all was for her life to get back to normal. The thought made her laugh out loud.
Normal?
Normal was something she used to complain about.

The rain let up, and it was getting dark as she walked back to the bus stop. Even if she hadn't let her guard down she probably wouldn't have noticed the man following her.

Chapter Forty-three

Cal

On the Monday following the Portland gun rally the autumn weather took its gloves off and turned wet and miserable. Back at the Aerie, I got up early, fed Arch, let him out, then let him back in. He stood dutifully, if unenthusiastically, lifting one paw at a time for me to clean off the mud with a large towel I kept in a basket next to the kitchen door. I made a double cappuccino and stood watching the storm clouds churn above the valley and worrying about the slant of the incoming rain. The closer it came to horizontal the more likely my bedroom window frame would leak from cracks and fissures I'd been unable to seal despite the expenditure of vast amounts of caulk over the years. The leaks, I was convinced, defied the laws of physics.

Arch and I piled in the car and drove through the vineyards, now shed of their leaves, to my office in Dundee. The grapes were harvested and a fine vintage promised on account of the Indian summer the whole region had enjoyed. I met with three paying clients that morning and was tempted to call Gertie Johnson and tell her that the rumors of my financial demise were greatly exaggerated. At noon, I ate a quick lunch at a Mexican grill at the south end of town, a lime-green building with bright orange trim. It stood like a reminder that, despite all the wine-induced gentrification, Dundee was still a proud blue-collar town with a sizeable Hispanic population.

After lunch, I drove south out of town, took Highway 47 through Carlton, and turned into a narrow dirt lane marked by a single mailbox on a post. The mailbox had a number on it but no name. The lane cut through a thick line of mature sycamores that lay a quarter mile in and then curved to the left toward an immense, white Victorian farmhouse, an even bigger barn, a silo, and two wind turbines. I parked in the circular drive in front of the house, and Archie and I were greeted by two seriously upset pit bulls who stood barking at us below a sign on the porch that told us to beware of them. I knew the drill—don't get out of the car—and called Hunter Barlow on my cell phone. He popped out of the front door, waved at me, then opened a gate to a pen at the side of the porch and pointed inside. The dogs retreated to the pen, and he shut the gate.

Barlow was a tall man, lean with a full beard and a countenance that would lend itself well to high stakes poker. “Hello, Cal, welcome to the farm. It's been a while.”

I rolled the back windows down for Arch and got out, a file folder in my hand. “Yes, it has. Good to see you, Hunter. Obedient dogs. Still leaving them out, I see.” I'd handled an expensive lawsuit for him involving a FedEx driver severely bitten by one of his dogs.

He shrugged and looked a little sheepish. “I have an electronic eye down by the gate. I usually put them up when someone's on the way. Didn't hear you. Sorry about that. They're good boys.”

A curious use of the word “good,” but I let it slide. We chatted a while on the porch, and just as I was going to bring up the purpose of my visit, he told me he had something to show me. I followed him around the house, through an apple orchard, and out into an open field, which sported a bank of solar panels at the far end. He stopped at what looked like a hatch on a submarine, took an electronic key out of his pocket and punched it. I heard a metallic click, and the cover popped up and slowly opened, exposing a vertical, corrugated steel tube with a sturdy ladder attached to the side. He allowed himself a thin smile tinged with pride. “Check this out.”

I stepped up to the tube, looked down, then back at Barlow. I'd heard of doomsday shelters but never expected to see one. “Is this a shelter?”

He nodded. “Yep. Just put it in in August.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Bought it off the ‘net. Outfit in Texas. They brought it on a couple of eighteen wheelers. Come on, I'll show you around.”

What good is a doomsday shelter if you can't show it off?

I followed him down into the shelter, navigating the ladder while carrying the file folder. The entry tube joined a larger, horizontal tube that I learned was twelve feet in diameter, forty feet long, and buried twenty feet under the ground. A subfloor provided a flat walking surface, and storage space beneath the floor held a supply of food and water for Barlow, his wife, and three-year-old son.

“So, is this in case we get the 9.0 subduction earthquake or something more Armageddon-like?” I asked.

Barlow seemed to think about the question for a moment. “Whichever comes first, I guess. I just believe in being prepared, Cal.”

He led me from room to room, showing off running water, air filtration systems, a power grid that could be switched effortlessly from generator, to solar, to wind, even a forty-five-inch flat screen TV. I wondered what kind of movies they would watch after Armageddon but didn't ask.

I knew Barlow would have a well-stocked armory, and he didn't disappoint. At the far end of the tube he showed me various rifles in racks on the wall, an assortment of holstered handguns hanging from pegs, and boxes of ammunition stacked in a corner below his and hers Kevlar bulletproof vests

The pièce de résistance was a large weapon on a tripod sitting in the middle of the floor. I did a double take and said, “Is that a machine gun?”

The thin, prideful smile again. “Fifty caliber. Fully operational. Shoots like the hammers of hell.”

“Is it legal?”

“Completely. I got it through a gun trust. I'm grandfathered in now. The Feds can't touch it, even if they change the regulations.”

“Let me guess—Jack Pfister handled the gun trust for you.”

“As a matter of fact he did. You know Pfister? He's a good man.”

“Yeah, I know Jack.” Then I added, “This is a good place to discuss why I came to see you.” I opened the folder and showed him the drawings I'd photographed from Manny Bonilla's notebook. “What do you make of these?”

He extracted a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, put them on, and leaned in. “Looks like my son drew them.”

I chuckled. “I know. I'm just wondering if these make any sense to you or ring any bells. I think they may have been notes taken by a machinist.”

“Hmm. These are various three-dimensional views of some kind of a trigger assembly. See, that curved arm is the actual trigger, and that oddly shaped element on top's the hammer. That little notch on the block's called the sear. It holds the hammer in place till the trigger's pulled. These sketches are of some kind of drop-in trigger.”

“Drop-in trigger for what?”

Barlow studied the sketches for a long time before speaking. “Hard to say for sure, but judging from the design, it might be for a machine pistol or AR-15 assault rifle, probably the latter.”

“What does a drop-in trigger do?”

“You take the existing trigger out and drop this one in, and it makes the rifle closer to an automatic, like a military M-16. You know, you can empty a big clip much quicker.

“Is that legal?”

He laughed. “Not likely. This looks pretty radical to me, like they're going for fully automatic capability. That would categorize it as a machine gun component, which is outlawed by the National Firearms Act.”

“Would somebody be more likely to sell just the trigger assembly or an AR-15 that's been fully converted?

“Either way, I suppose. If they were converting to sell rifles illegally, they would need straw buyers.” I raised my eyebrows, and he continued, “A straw buyer would buy the gun from a licensed dealer on behalf of the converter for a fee. The converter can then remove the serial number from the gun and drop the new trigger in. The straw buyer simply claims the gun was lost or stolen. Bingo, you have an untraceable, fully automatic AR-15 assault rifle, a real killing machine that's worth a lot on the black market.”

“How much would one fetch?”

Barlow shrugged. “I don't know, maybe north of ten thousand.”

I whistled. “Are the straw buyers required to report a lost or stolen gun?”

He frowned and shook his head. “No. Do you have to report a stolen wallet? But I just heard that the liberals in Portland are trying to change that, at least in the city.”

Of course, I remembered that from the gun rally. I nodded but didn't comment. I didn't want to fan those flames with a true believer. We chatted some more, and as I was leaving I met Barlow's wife. When I told her I was impressed with the new shelter, she smiled weakly, and I saw a flicker of anxiety cross her face. It wasn't the reaction I expected, and judging from the stern look Barlow gave her, it wasn't the reaction he approved of.

Maybe you can be too prepared.

Barlow promised to call me if he thought of anything else, but I felt like he pretty much confirmed my suspicion—Manny Bonilla was probably asked to do few more things for the Jenkins family than drive Roz Jenkins around. I thought about talking to Truax, the ATF guy, but quickly thought better of it. All I had were some crude sketches, and bringing those up would require me to explain how they came into my possession. That was out, because it would put me crosswise with both him and Harmon Scott. And for all I knew they were working together by now.

I was making some headway and had a hunch that K209 knew more about this than she realized. If I could find her maybe I could bust this thing open.