Contract Null & Void

Chapter Seventeen

Sunset was staining the bottoms of the clouds over the sentinel redwoods when O’B came around the rising turn in the narrow road. A small collection of houses was scattered around a clearing in the forest. Five of them. Fallen Tree Road just... stopped at the far edge of the clearing, so O’B knew that he was finally there.

In many ways the drive through the endless miles of silent evergreens stretching toward the unseen Pacific had been breathtaking. Breathtaking beauty of vista; breathtaking piney scents through his open window; breathtaking fear at some of the hairpin turns of the gravel road above awesome bottomless chasms.

In one of these five houses would dwell a certain John Little, who had quit paying for his longbed Dodge Dakota almost four months ago. Which made it a deadline deal for both O’B and for the bank: if Cal-Cit didn’t have it back to the dealership that had sold it before midnight of the last day of the fourth month of delinquency, the bank would have to eat the pickup. Which was a great deal worse than just eating crow, for both the bank and O’B. A man had his pride.

The houses were four-room clapboards with brick chimneys and somehow incongruous front porches. Electric ran in, and phone lines. Heat would be from the fireplace, cooking would be from the propane tanks set on sawhorses behind each house.

All five had phone poles set in the ground beside their front corners. Atop each pole was a TV aerial like a horizontal car grille, all tilted in exactly the same way, bowing to the distant Mecca of Eureka from which all programs flowed.

Smoke wisped from two of the chimneys. Lights were already on in the same two houses, and O’B could smell meat sizzling.

He turned in at the dirt driveway, still muddy and with standing water from last night’s rain, to stop behind an equally muddy longbed Dodge Dakota. Right license plate. O’B turned off his engine, got his repo order out of the folder on the seat beside him. The pickup windows were open. No thieves out here.

Except for O’B, but he wasn’t planning to steal this one; he would have waited until after dark if he had harbored such ideas. The man had stopped paying, and would know he had stopped paying.

There was one irreducible given about repos in distant areas like Fallen Tree Road: if you drove all the way out there and spotted the vehicle it bad to be yours. You could not go away empty-handed, come back tomorrow like you could in the city if the situation looked sticky.

The truck was here. He was here. When he left, the truck would leave with him. Maybe someday he would leave feet-first horizontal and the vehicle would remain behind, but O’B chose not to consider that an acceptable option. Not with the luck of the Irish he believed in so implicitly.

That’s when the guitar began to play. And the sad voice began to sing.

A good bass voice, full and mellow and sorrowful and loaded with whiskey. O’B went around the corner of the house.

On the porch a huge man was sitting in a battered old rocking chair, the ankle of one leg resting on the knee of the other, a guitar resting on the thigh of the crossed leg. The singer had long black shiny hair, a luxuriant black beard, a weather- and whiskey-lined face with full cheeks and heavy brows. His eyes were shut, his head was slightly back, his throat was thick and smooth and worked with his singing.

At the end of the verse, without opening his eyes or shifting his position, he reached a long arm down to grasp the neck of a half-full or half-empty quart whiskey bottle — optimist or pessimist — on the planking of the deck, raise it to his lips, tip back his head, and take a long swig. He said, “Ahh-h-h,” and shuddered slightly as he set it back down again.

At this point O’B, unseen on the bottom step, slipped his fine high tenor in above the huge man’s rumbling bass.

John Little sighed and opened his eyes and looked at O’B. They were the brightest, bluest, saddest eyes O’B had ever seen, deep-set beneath those heavy brows: the kind of eyes that look almost violet and always seem to gleam with unshed tears.

“My wife left me two weeks ago, can’t seem to rev up the damn engine no more.”

O’B sat down on the porch deck near the bottle. John Little grasped it by the neck, raised it slightly toward O’B. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but O’B shook his head no. John Little nodded and took a heavy hit from it.

“Guess you didn’t come way out here to sing sad songs.”

“Wouldn’t mind doing another,” said O’B truthfully.

John Little’s idle strokes of the guitar strings made them moan in the dusk like a woman nearing climax. The light on the bottom of the clouds had faded from salmon to dull silver.

“Can’t blame her none. I ain’t worked in close to seven months. Remember ‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum’?” He suddenly slapped the guitar strings and sang in an angry howl, “How the hell can I work when there’s no work to do?” He laid the guitar across his knees. “A lovely woman, too damn good for the likes of me.”

He stood up smoothly, without effort, threw his arms wide and exclaimed, “ ‘But let us christen him — Little John!’ ”

He was a good seven feet tall, except instead of Lincoln green he wore faded jeans, scuffed leather cowboy boots, and a plaid Pendleton work shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows to show massive forearms. Across the shoulders he was as wide as a loading door.

“After the quarterstaff fight on the stone bridge over the stream,” said O’B, taken back to his own childhood.

John Little nodded. “But I ain’t Little John and you ain’t Will Scarlet.”

“My hair was once,” said O’B.

“And you used to be a drinking man, I miss my guess.”

“Yesterday I was. Today I’m not.”

“Good luck with it. I can’t ever leave it alone when I got troubles. And I got ’em.” He shook his head. “Goddam, I miss that woman.” His face changed, he gestured again. “The truck?”

O’B nodded, almost sadly. He liked this man. “Yeah.”

Fire flashed from the big sad drunken man’s eyes.

“And I suppose you think you’re just gonna goddam waltz in here and goddam drive it away scot-free.”

“I guess that’s what I think,” said O’B, keeping the quaver out of his voice. Seven feet tall, for Godsake!

“Yeah, that’s what I think, too.” He squirmed a hand deep into the tight front pocket of his jeans, came out with two keys on a ring, tossed them to O’B. “Let me get my junk out of it. Then I’ll help you throw your car on the towbar behind her. On these roads in the dark, it’s a lot easier driving the truck and towing the car than the other way around.”

“There’s still some light,” ventured O’B.

“You gotta have some supper first,” said John Little.

Two years ago Larry Ballard had discovered Stoyanoff’s, a really great Greek restaurant right across Ninth Avenue from the karate studio where he trained, and only a couple of blocks from the apartment he was for the moment sharing with Kearny. Since Ballard liked good food but cooked very little of it himself (except coffee), he had mentioned the place to Kearny in passing.

So it was to Stoyanoff’s that Dan Kearny took Giselle and Ken for supper. His two agents would be back on duty at the estate later that night, but since the Mercedes had been blown up the Marin cops were taking the threat on Paul’s life as serious for now. Which temporarily freed up the DKA surveillance troops.

Not a moment too soon for Ken. He was feeling tense and irritable — and put upon.

They all ordered some form of lamb — roast (arni psito), on a spit (arni souvlaki), stuffed chops (arnaki yemisto).

“How come you didn’t want me to tell Captain Rowan about tailing Inga over to Nugent’s place?” demanded Giselle.

“I hadn’t told him about the drugged coffee, why should I tell him about that?”

“Because she’s trying to help Nugent kill her husband.”

Kearny shook his head. “She waits until after he signs the deal on his microchip, he dies, she gets it all. Before he signs, Nugent has at least a shot at getting it all. Of course maybe she’s still in love with Nugent...”

“Except she fingered him as the one trying to kill Paul last night. And after this afternoon on Yew Wood Court—”

“Yeah. So what really happened at Yew Wood Court?”

“You were there, Dan. Nugent rents an apartment, steals Paul’s new car to lure him there so he can—”

“Can what?”

“You’re saying Inga isn’t trying to help kill her husband?”

“I’m saying we don’t know.”

“Of course we know! She left the police station before Paul even got the call about the Mercedes, and made two phone calls just before I followed her right to that apartment. It was just her bad luck you were there to drag Paul away before the car bomb went off.”

“Another lucky bit of timing?”

Giselle was silent. Ken said around the lamb chop he was holding in his hands and inelegantly chewing on, “Hnhmoke.”

“The cigarettes! One of them was still smoldering...”

“Yeah. Does anybody know if Nugent is a smoker?” asked Kearny. “Damn few computer freaks are these days. Especially somebody who works on microchip design.”

“Paul does all the designing,” said Giselle automatically. “Frank Nugent was the outside man.”

Kearny said to Warren, “Ken, ask Bernardine about it tonight. She’ll know how much enamel the guy has on his teeth.”

“Hngo!” exclaimed Ken suddenly, fiercely. He sat back with finality, his arms folded on his chest. “Hngo HmBernhadeen.”

He couldn’t stand any more of Bernardine for a while, so he was not going back to the estate tonight. He had his repo files to work. And he had promised Maybelle he’d take her out for a drink some night after she finished cleaning the DKA offices.

He hadn’t planned to see her tonight, but it felt right as soon as he said it. For Ken, Maybelle was comfortable in a way nobody else was. She always understood what he was saying even if he didn’t say it. Her son Jedediah, dead these many years in the jungles of Vietnam, had always understood him, too. Maybelle would be able to tell him how to handle the Bernardine situation.

“Looks like you’re it for tonight,” Giselle said to Kearny with a heavy-duty smirk.

What the hell, thought Kearny. He couldn’t go home — Jeanne was still hanging up on him when he called. Couldn’t start his line of inquiry about Eddie Graff — who might have been driving the attack car that afternoon — until he could get to Karen Marshall. Couldn’t go to Ballard’s apartment: he’d just get stir-crazy and go to Jacques Daniel’s and drink beer and listen to Beverly whimper about her missing partner. Worse yet, he might start moaning to her about his own troubles.

To Giselle he merely growled, “At least I won’t fall asleep on the goddam job.” For a flier, he said, “Maybe nobody’s trying to kill Paul. Maybe it’s part of some elaborate plan—”

“Somebody fired four shots at us today, tried to ram us...”

“Didn’t hit us. Didn’t ram us.”

“I don’t buy it. That attack was murderous.”

The waitress brought a plate of baklava.

“You’re probably right,” sighed Kearny. He threw up his hands in frustration. “We don’t know enough yet. We don’t know these people yet.” He cast her a dirty look. “This is why I’ve always stuck with the stuff we know — the repos, the skip-tracing, the routine investigations that—”

“You’re the one who sicced us onto the Rochemonts,” snapped Giselle. It was a tender subject with her, because after two days of the Rochemonts she was coming around to Dan’s way of thinking.

“I know, I know, to keep Stan happy.” Kearny sighed. “One thing I do know: Frank Nugent is sure being one resourceful, slippery son of a bitch. Using your own name and still evading an all-points police dragnet seems a little heady for a computer nerd, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe he’s into virtual reality,” said Giselle. “Maybe he disappeared inside one of those gloves they wear.”

“He’s sure as hell playing some kind of game,” grunted Kearny darkly. “Unless...” But then he called for the check, leaving his thought unspoken.