The Last Thing I Saw (25 page)

A male voice outside shouted, “Throw out your weapons.”

I said to the frightened Mexicans, “Toss out one of the automatics. They don’t know how many we have. They know we have one.”

The guy threw his gun out the door, then ducked back out of the way.

“Hal, why don’t you go out first?” I said. “Just put your hands in the air like on one of your Hey Look private-eye shows. You must know how it’s done.”

“
What
?”

“You’re the boss. These people won’t want to talk to the paid help.”

Skutnik had begun to tremble. “What if they
shoot
me?”

“They might not. I’d put the chances at fifty-fifty. And if we stay in here and make the Figueros madder and madder, that’ll be even worse once they get their hands on us. Which sooner or later they will do.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Skutnik said. “I think we’d better call the police. How long will it take them to get up here?”

Another shout came from outside. “Hey, you get your asses out here right now or we are gonna throw a firebomb in the door. Do you understand what I am saying? You have ten seconds.”

Martine said, “Oh shit, come on, let’s go.”

Danielle shrugged, and so did Ort, and then the three of them strode out the door, Martine first, their hands high in the air, stepping over the battered corpses of Blanco and Pablo.

“They’re not shooting. Let’s go,” I said to the others.

Hively climbed out from under the table and said something like, “Oh, Lisbeth, Lisbeth, help us, help us!”

The rest of us were not foxhole converts to Stieg Larsson and instead just hoped for the best.

The trembling Mexicans and I placed our firearms in the pantry on a shelf next to the SPAM, and as our group all moved toward the open door, Skutnik said, “I
knew
I should have brought along somebody from legal.”

“Yeah, Hal,” Wenske said. “These guys are going to be tougher to deal with than Marva Beers. Good luck.”

We climbed over the corpses and filed out into the twilight and faced a crew of about twenty armed men, most but not all of them Hispanic. They wore jeans and flak jackets and had what looked like Uzis aimed at us, courtesy, I guessed, of an NRA-approved legal gun show somewhere in the Mount Shasta area.

The gang’s boss, a squat man with a nicely trimmed thick black mustache, stepped forward and directed two of his men to check the building to see if anyone was left inside.

“Eduardo,” Martine said to the boss, “we just now heard about your brother Francisco. Danielle, Ort and I are sorry for your loss.”

“You’re sorry? Oh. That’s nice.” Both his voice and his look were cold and hard.

“Now, you know us, and I think you know we didn’t have anything to do with any shit that went down. We’ve all gotten along real nice for too many years for this to get some freakin’ war started that’s not gonna do anybody any good. The DEA would just love it if we all were tearin’ each other’s guts out—save them a lot of trouble and expense. So I just want to say that we know who did this stupid-ass thing, and Danielle and Ort and I are gonna deal with those dudes in an appropriate manner and make everything right again.”

Rover and Hiveley went bug-eyed when they heard this, and Hal gawked around in confusion.

“Martine, what’s that supposed to mean?” Rover said. “What the fuck?”

Martine said to Eduardo, “If one of you gents will give me the loan of your firearm that has at least three rounds in it, I’ll settle the matter right now. And then we can all go back to leading the law-abiding good lives we had until Hal and his phony-ass L.A. ilk came up here to Happy Valley and started fucking everything up for the rest of us. Will that work for you, Eduardo? Do we have a deal?”

Hal and Rover both began to sputter, and Hively swayed and looked as if he might faint.

Delaney looked both horrified and maybe a bit relieved. But Wenske, who knew the drug gangs and their ways, just looked mournful. He knew what was coming.

“I am so sorry,” Eduardo the boss said to Martine. “But it is too late for deals.”

“I see.”

“My brother is dead.”

“I understand that.”

“So what I must now do represents both a punishment that will serve as a deterrent to others and also compensation.”

“Compensation. You mean our weed business.”

“Yes. Just the weed. The logging business your heirs can keep.”

Now Hively was crying and Skutnik was whimpering, “Oh please, oh please.” Rover was paralyzed again and made no sound except heavy breathing.

“Please kneel in a row,” Eduardo said.

“Who?” Skutnik said.

“All of you.”

“Oh!”

“There can be no mercy and there can be no witnesses.”

Skutnik said, “Have you ever…have you ever considered being part of a television reality show?”

Eduardo ignored this. He gave some kind of signal, and his men began leading us into a line side by side, the three Mexican van goons included.

“I know people at Telemundo,” Skutnik croaked out. “I’m a player! I’ve got juice!”

I looked at Wenske again, and he shrugged. I thought,
Timothy, you are going to be so pissed off at me
. Delaney still looked fascinated, as if, wow, what a great story he’ll never be able to write or edit.

Then the helicopter sounds that had been at the edge of our peripheral hearing grew louder, and then suddenly they were very loud, and the choppers appeared over the trees just as the convoy of sheriff’s cars came roaring up the driveway.

Eduardo yelled something to his gang, and they broke and ran. They ran past their own caravan of SUVs and headed for the woods on the hillside behind the lodge. A large van rolled into view, and men wearing vests that said FBI poured out of the van and ran in the direction of the hillside. Almost immediately sporadic gunshots could be heard.

One of the sheriff’s cars pulled up next to us, and among the four men who climbed out of it were Ricky Esteban and Marsden Davis.

I said to Davis, “Did you take a wrong turn at Copley Square? I thought you knew your way around Boston.”

“When you didn’t pick up on Saturday when I called back with the name of a helpful cop in Mount Shasta, that got me worried. I was even worrieder when we got the security camera tag ID of the black van in the Bryan Kim killing. The van was registered to a hoodlum in Mount Shasta with a rap sheet as long as your nose, Strachey. When I couldn’t get hold of you, I had a good idea you were in deep shit of a type that would be of genuine interest to the Boston Police Department. So I did some re-budgeting, and here I am. I ran into your friend here, Mr. Esteban, and at first I wondered if he was part of the problem for you. But he convinced me pretty fast that he was part of the solution to tracking down your whereabouts.”

“I was at your motel,” Ricky said, “and this Boston cop dude starts hassling me, and why am I carrying a firearm, and shit like that. So I told him I was carrying because you told me to and how come. The two of us, we put six and six together and came up with the assholes who run HLM and Mr. Skutnik’s house in the mountains where they made that
Dark Smooches
piece of crap.”

Skutnik had been listening to this gape-jawed, and he said, “Piece of crap? Who the fuck are you to criticize America’s premier gay television network.”

Rover said tightly, “He used to work for us.”

“Oh,” Skutnik said. “Then you know whereof you speak.”

“All you have to do is tune in,” Esteban said. “Anybody knows that.”

I said, “Lieutenant Davis, I want you to meet someone. Eddie Wenske.”

“Holy Moses! No shit?”

“That’s me.”

“So the druggies didn’t get you after all.”

“No, but what passes for gay media in the cheap, sad-ass straight and gay culture we all live in nearly did.”

“I take exception to that,” Skutnik said.

“Noted,” Wenske said. “I’ll quote you in the book.”

There was still sporadic gunfire up on the hillside, though I realized that Martine, Danielle, and Ort were no longer standing among us in the gathering dusk. I looked around and noticed Ort’s truck with the three of them in the cab creep down the hill toward the highway and the way back to town. I guessed they probably had growers to deal with, shipments to get out.

EPILOGUE

Mason Hively, Rover Fye and Ogden Winkleman were ratted out by the employee in the Hey Look New York City office who was in charge of recording staffers’ phone calls. He turned over to prosecutors taped conversations showing that the three men conspired to “eliminate” Wenske, Kim, and Boo Miller to keep HLM’s criminal activities from being exposed in Wenske’s gay media book. Wenske had survived temporarily only because Hively needed him to transform his award-winning book into an award-winning television movie for Hal Skutnik and his mom. Each of the three conspirators went to prison for eighty years. As did the three Mexican killers, who admitted that they had talked their way into Bryan Kim’s apartment claiming that they had a message for Kim from Eddie Wenske. They told prosecutors they had been paid two-hundred-fifty dollars each for the killings.

Skutnik was not implicated in the murders, but as the revelations of his business practices rolled out, Skutnik’s company unraveled. At first, he tried to sell off parts of the conglomerate. But without the support of the Siskiyou marijuana trade, none of HLM’s components was making money and no buyers were forthcoming, so HLM basically disintegrated. Over 400 additional lawsuits were filed against the remains of the company. Skutnik ended up as a commentator on the Fox News Channel as one of its token “liberals.” We heard that he told people that his mother was tremendously proud.

Martine and Danielle copped a plea, helping prosecute Hively and Fye, as well as the Figuero gang, in return for a lighter sentence for themselves. During their six-month jail term, Ort kept the weed business going, including the Figuero territory the sisters had divided up with a Juarez operation from their jail cell.

With the research assistance of Paul Delaney and Jane Ware, Eddie Wenske completed his book critical of the present-day gay U.S. news and entertainment media, and Marva Beers was able to obtain a contract with the University of Saskatoon Press with an advance of five-hundred dollars. The book sold 1,426 copies.

Wenske enjoyed a tearful reunion with his mother and sister, both of whom were grateful for the job I had done. We all had a happy get-together back in Albany, where Timmy met the Wenskes and was gratified to see how much they appreciated me.

After our celebratory dinner, Timmy said to me on the way home, “What a great job you did. You saved Eddie Wenske, you collected your fat fee, and all it cost you was a near-death experience.”

“Hey, I’ve had close calls before.”

“But not quite like this one.”

“Nope. You’re right.”

“What were you thinking at the critical moment? What went through your mind when the drug gang boss told you to kneel on the ground and lean forward?”

“Timothy, what kind of question is that? What are you, Barbara Walters? Is this television?”

“I mean, did your life flash before you? What was the last thing you saw?”

“The funny thing was, it wasn’t my life that flashed before me. It was Ann Marie Stoneseifer’s life that flashed before me.”

“What? Good grief.”

“When I was in high school, Ann Marie Stoneseifer, who was a classmate, was in a car driven by a friend that went out of control. The car almost ended up in Bald Eagle Creek. It turned out that everyone was okay, but Ann Marie told me the next day that at the moment of the crash into some creek-side brush she thought she was going to die, and her life actually did flash before her. I’ve never forgotten that—it made such an impression on me—and ever since then I’ve been convinced that when my time came I would remember that incident and Ann Marie Stoneseifer’s life would flash before me. And up at Hal Skutnik’s lodge, that’s exactly what happened.”

He laughed. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”

“You’re partly right to be skeptical. I’ve always believed that that’s the way it would happen. But it didn’t.”

“Oh good.”

“As I began to kneel, I saw your face,” I said.

“Did you really? Oh Don.”

This wasn’t exactly true. I had seen nothing. Just trees and sky and the people around me and maybe some blood rushing from the back of my brain and into my eyeballs. But I wished afterwards that I had seen Timmy’s face, and that was plenty true enough.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Stevenson
is the pseudonym of Richard Lipez, author of fourteen books, including the Don Strachey private eye series. He also co-wrote Grand Scam with Peter Stein, and contributed to Crimes of the Scene: A Mystery Novel Guide for the International Traveler. He is a mystery reviewer for The Washington Post and a former editorial writer at The Berkshire Eagle. Lipez’s reporting, reviews and fiction have appeared in Newsday, The Boston Globe, The Progressive, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and many other publications. Four of the Strachey books have been filmed by Here!TV. Red White Black and Blue, the twelfth Strachey book, won the Lambda Literary Award for the best gay mystery of 2011. Lipez grew up in Pennsylvania, went to college there, and served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia from 1962-64. He is married to sculptor and video artist Joe Wheaton and lives in Becket, Massachusetts.

TRADEMARKS ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

Albany Times Union: Hearst Communications Inc.

AMTRAK: National Railroad Passenger Corporation

Arby’s: Arby’s IP Holder Trust Corporation

ART (Harvard): President and Fellows of Harvard College

Beemer: BMW of North America LLC

Beverly Hilton: Hilton Hotels & Resorts

BlackBerry: Research in Motion Limited

Boston Globe: The New York Times Company

Brooks Brothers: Retail Brand Alliance

Calistoga: Calistoga Beverage Company