Private Screening (34 page)

At 2:00
P.M.,
Phoenix drove them toward the Parnells'.

His mouth was dry. Seeing their red brick guardhouse, he realized that he had driven the last stretch of country road with both hands tight on the wheel.

Yards from the iron gate, he slipped on his hood and took the Mauser from beneath the seat. When he braked suddenly, tires squealing, a head popped into the guardhouse window. In one continuous motion, Phoenix slid from the van, raising his revolver with both hands. Through the glass, the man gaped in his revolver sight; Phoenix saw his own reflection aiming.

Neither moved. Phoenix fought back panic—he could not shoot him with the gate still locked.

With a deliberate air, he beckoned.

Tentative, the man stepped from the guardhouse, arms raised. When he came through the gate, Phoenix clubbed him on the skull.

In a fireman's carry, Phoenix hauled the guard to some scrub brush, unlooped the rope from his belt, then bound and gagged him; what seemed agonizing slow motion had taken four minutes. He rushed to his van and began driving in the same direction, steadily as before.

A mile past the gatehouse, a firebreak branched left from the road. Phoenix took it. When he stopped again, the van had climbed another half-mile. To the left, through a line of oaks, he gazed down at the tennis court.

It was two hundred feet from the house, a sloping mile from the van. Between them, on the path snaking toward the court, he saw two figures in white. As he raised his field glasses, the woman bent to touch the hem of her tennis dress, sunlight glinting on blonde hair.

His throat constricted.

He lowered the glasses, motionless. Then he slowly got out, walked to the rear of the van, and unlocked it.

The three men blinked at the sunlight, jerkily stretching their joints. Two unloaded rifles, one a camera; sliding from the van, they lifted out the motorcycle, and then Phoenix waved them through the tree line. Sheltered from view, he studied the terrain. Weeks before, he had walked it at night, with the Parnells sleeping inside. As then, underbrush and gullies concealed the route he had taken to the court.

Satisfied, he stationed the cameraman, then synchronized his watch with the two others. The Parnells began playing as they pulled on burlap hoods; at a movement of his hand, the gunmen started down the hill.

He found it hard to turn away.

Driving back down the break, it took him twenty-seven minutes to reach the road again, and turn toward the Parnells'.

At 3:57, he reached the undefended gate.

Opening it, he imagined the two gunmen, huddled in the last gully beneath the court—frightened, doubting him. They could not see the players, only hear their voices and the catgut ping of tennis.

Phoenix slipped on the hood.

As if in a dream, he passed the manmade lake, bordered with cattails, then drove through the symmetric double row of dogwoods Parnell had planted to please his wife. In the afternoon breeze, a pink blossom fell on the windshield; then the dogwoods ended in a circular drive, a tailored green lawn.

As Phoenix veered across it, two masked gunmen burst onto the court.

The players froze; Phoenix felt a savage explosion of joy. And then Parnell turned to the sound of his van, as if hoping to be rescued.

Phoenix leaped from the van, camera resting on his shoulder.

Parnell gaped in disbelief; the shock on Alexis's face seemed to focus on his camera. Then the two gunmen moved to each side of her, one binding her hands, the other with a revolver to her temple.

Phoenix began filming her.

Turning from his wife to the whine of the camera, Parnell blurted, “Take
me
.…”

Tears sprang to her eyes. As Phoenix filmed them pushing her toward the back of the van, staring helplessly at Parnell, she stumbled.

Time stopped.

Even as she gazed up at him, fallen near his van, Phoenix felt the moment as if it were his last: the woman with her hands bound, the slanting clarity of four o'clock light, the green, retreating sweep of hills, the geometry of the white-lined court. Then Parnell moved, a raising of his hand.

Unshouldering the camera, Phoenix drew his Mauser.

“No—” she cried out.

Without turning, Phoenix placed the revolver to her husband's forehead. Parnell's mouth fell open; the hooded men beside him seemed to flinch.

Phoenix swung his arm wide, cracking the revolver against his temple.

There was a dull thud as the shock ran through Phoenix's arm. Parnell slumped heavily, glasses falling beside him in the dirt.

Slowly, deliberately, Phoenix stepped on them, and looked up at Alexis. Her gaze rose in horror from her husband's shattered glasses to the hooded man who had struck him.

Turning from her, he signaled his confederates.

In rapid sequence, the two armed men trussed and blindfolded Parnell, threw him in the van, tied cloth across Alexis's eyes. They stacked the weapons and camera before pulling her inside with them. Running to the driver's side, Phoenix stuck his Mauser beneath the seat and stepped on the accelerator. Dust rose in his rearview as he left the court behind.

Ahead was one straight mile of gravel; then a twelve-hour escape had to be flawlessly timed. He checked his watch, read 4:11, and pushed the pedal to the floor.

The Parnells' iron gate and guardhouse grew larger in his windshield. Suddenly, a motorcyclist appeared outside the gate and opened it. Jamming on his brakes, Phoenix stopped.

The cyclist held up the film he had taken. A second camera was strapped to his motorcycle.

Phoenix left the van.

In silent haste, they opened its rear door; as the two gunmen lifted his motorcycle, the cyclist ran with Phoenix to some scrub brush fifty feet from the drive. The guard lay where Phoenix had left him, bound and unconscious. Lifting him by his hands and feet, they trotted to the van and threw him beside Parnell. Then the motorcyclist sat next to the others against one side of the van, facing their two prone victims. Huddled in a corner, Alexis turned her blindfolded face, as if to hear. Phoenix threw his hood at her feet, and slammed the door.

As he drove away, the gate looked as before.

His heart still raced.

He breathed in, foot easing on the accelerator. For the next eight hours, he must drive steadily, drawing no attention.

The country road they took wound through pastures and hillsides of grapes and crops. Now and then oaks overhung the asphalt, some with Spanish moss; creeks ran beneath them, one so swollen it murmured through his window. Two or three trucks passed in the other direction. Hat shoved over his eyes, Phoenix drove by like a local with his mind on sheep or cattle or planting grapes. He could feel the heat in the back of the van, the fear of those trapped there, and his own.

For another half-hour, he followed his circuitous route, northwest through Sonoma County.

Ahead, sun fell between the first scorched trees. Years ago, a fire had seared miles of hills; above the greenness of recent growth—oaks and brush and younger firs—the blackened pines gave him a kind of chill.

Leaning forward, Phoenix spotted the gnarled oak which marked his path, and turned abruptly from the road.

In the time it took to climb the path, twisting upward between scrub oaks and scabrous pines, it became dusk. Phoenix could scarcely see the ruined farmhouse. It was enough that the surrounding acres had been sold to the next farm, that no one lived here now.

He stopped at the crest of the hill, taking out the Mauser. When he opened the van, the sound carried.

The three men gaped at him. Alexis was hunched in the fetal position, near her husband. As she whimpered, Phoenix threw Parnell's near-dead weight across one shoulder, snatching a duffel bag.

For minutes, he carried Parnell across the ridge line toward a stand of oaks, dark shapes in moonlight. There was no sound but the rise and fall of crickets, a few leaves in the wind, Parnell moaning softly, blindfolded.

At the base of an oak, Phoenix put him down, loosened the gag. Parnell's voice was a croak.

“Why …?”

Phoenix pushed the Mauser down his throat. As the bound man moved his head from side to side, gurgling, he pulled the trigger.

The click of an empty revolver echoed in the trees.

Parnell sobbed when he removed it. Reaching into the bag, Phoenix knelt beside him, looping two videotapes around his neck with twine. Then he forced the audio cassette between the older man's teeth and jammed it tighter with the gag. Parnell choked, gulping, then was silent.

Returning to the van, Phoenix walked softly, to slow the beating of his heart.

It was an hour before Phoenix descended the quarry again. When he stopped, the black van was a swatch of intensified darkness three feet away.

Opening the white van, he heard Alexis's muffled crying.

She was lighter than he had imagined; beneath the tennis dress, her legs felt cold. As he carried her to the black van, her sobs turned to ragged breathing, like a hunted animal afraid of its own sounds.

The three men shuffled in beside her, carrying their equipment, so that only the unconscious guard remained locked inside the white van.

Eyes narrow, Phoenix searched the starlit sky for helicopters or surveillance planes, listened for their sound.

Tomorrow, someone would find an untraceable van, with no fingerprints but the victims', and match its tire prints to the sites of two kidnappings. A perfect circle, leading nowhere, if Phoenix could evade them for eight more hours.

In minutes, the other van had taken the path from the quarry to a county road, veering west toward Highway 101. Phoenix began checking the gas gauge.

It was three-quarters full when he hit the highway, heading north for Humboldt County.

Five hours distant, yet like another country—rugged, isolated, hostile to strangers. Fifteen years ago, it had been a wilderness
, with a few logging towns and Eureka on its northern coast. And then the trickle of burnt-out cases had begun moving from cities where the drugs had gone bad, the rip-offs grown too frequent, the crash pads turned weird or gone condominium. In the mountains, living in tents or lean-tos without electricity, they'd begun to plant their own marijuana, and then to sell it.

Dying towns thrived; realtors sold land no road could reach. Strangers began raiding crops, careless hikers disappeared, Mexicans brought in to harvest vanished before they were paid. Poachers were shot near their trucks. Now people moved there to grow dope, or not at all.

Phoenix checked his gas gauge.

He could not buy gas until he was deep in Humboldt; Alexis might scream, someone could remember the van.

The gauge edged toward half a tank.

For four hours he drove toward Humboldt with agonizing slowness, as the two lanes on each side became one and the look of the country changed as it rose, wide vistas closing in, oaks becoming pine, scattered towns growing smaller, and the road higher and more winding, until he ran along the cliff of the Eel River, a hundred-foot drop to the right. The radio thinned to a crackle; redwoods towered at the edge of the road, blocking the moon. The darkness ahead of him looked like Alaska.

The gauge moved toward empty.

The only safety was hours ahead, the carefully chosen shelter he had bought for cash from a realtor in Garberville, posing as a novice grower with thick glasses, earrings, a southwestern drawl. A hunter's cabin so remote that it had not been used for years.

Twenty miles from Garberville, the gas gauge began merging with the line marked “E.”

Turning the knob, he found the Garberville station.

The twang of country-western music made his nerves raw; the break for news was almost a relief. The newsman's voice became a drone he only noticed when it quickened.

“In a late bulletin, the Napa County Sheriff's Office reports the disappearance of San Francisco publisher Colby Parnell and his wife, Alexis. The Parnells were reported missing by their attorney, John Danziger, whom they had earlier invited to dinner. Authorities theorize that they may have been abducted while playing tennis.…”

Instinctively, Phoenix grasped his Mauser.

He cranked down the window, to clear his head. His T-shirt was soaked; night air chilled his face and chest. Redwoods bounded his right, the steep cliff of the Eel his left. He had nowhere to hide short of where he was going.

At the bottom of the grade, the Eel veered abruptly beneath a bridge marked “Humboldt County.” Looking from the sign to the gas gauge, Phoenix saw that it was empty.

Moments later, he passed the Garberville exit without stopping for gas. To his right now, moonlight on the water shone like obsidian.

Turning from the river, Phoenix took an unmarked path between two redwoods.

As the van disappeared in the grove, his headlights caught the massive dirt-red trunks. Those and the road were all he saw; he drove ten miles an hour. The radio stopped making sound.

Slowly, he climbed through eight more miles of redwoods as the gauge slipped beneath empty. At the crest was a bowl of darkness, a valley without lights. The road turned gently south.

Turning with it, Phoenix took his foot off the accelerator.

For several miles, he idled downward, braking to save gas. Then, abruptly, the road hit bottom, crossing a wooden bridge. Beneath it, the Mattole River ran gently. The sign just beyond it read “Honeydew, population fifty.” One quaintly marked general store, with a gas pump.

Phoenix stopped by the pump, wiping his forehead, then honked.

A light went on; a face peered through the window of the store. Finally a figure emerged, shirtless in overalls, walking to the van. Phoenix imagined the gunmen holding Alexis, hand over her mouth.

“Sorry,” he drawled. “Gas gauge is fucked up.”

The man nodded. “Recognized your truck. Hardly recognize you. You look different.”

Phoenix handed him ten dollars. “I feel different.”

With each click of the gas pump, he waited for a noise from Alexis.