Savages

11

JAKE RUNYON

He had no good reason to make a two-hundred-mile round-trip drive to the Trinity Alps. No business doing it with a concussion that had already cost him a night in the hospital. If he’d sat down and thought it over carefully, he might have talked himself out of it. But he didn’t. He didn’t feel like going back to the motel in Gray’s Landing, hanging around there sweltering all day; he needed to be on the move. And why drive around aimlessly, going nowhere, when you had a specific place to check out?

Alone at the migrant camp, he got out his California map and pinpointed Lost Bar. It was a flyspeck on Highway 3, southeast of Weaverville, in the mountains some sixty miles east of Redding. Then, without thinking any more about it, he started driving.

Due north on Highway 5, then northwest from Redding on 299 and into the Trinity Alps. Scenic route. Twisty road, thick forest land, views of snow-crested peaks and a big lake from Buckhorn Summit, the winding trail of the Trinity River. Gold Rush country. The fever had struck up here, too, at about the same time as it had down at Sutter’s Mill: hard-rock miners, gold dredgers. Hillsides and backwaters were probably still honeycombed with hundred-and-fifty-year-old diggings. It was cooler at the higher elevations, a relief from the sticky heat of the valley; the air felt good in his lungs, streaming in against his face. The dull headache all but disappeared. More or less back to normal.

At a wide spot called Douglas City, a few miles below Weaverville, Highway 3 branched off to the southeast-a rougher county road that jiggled its way into the lower reaches of the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Lost Bar lay in a small valley below Hayfork Summit, along the bank of Hayford Creek. Hayfork, Hayford-go figure the difference. Another wide spot. Maybe a dozen buildings, two-thirds of them old frame houses and newer mobile homes flanked by meadows and trees. Grocery store, Lost Bar Saloon, Brody’s Garage, and a pair of hollowed-out, collapsing ruins-one of redwood with BLACKSMITH burned into an ancient chain-hung sign, the other a smaller brick-and-mortar structure that bore the barely discernible words ASSAY OFFICE above its gaping entrance.

Runyon turned onto the apron in front of Brody’s Garage, stopped short of the single gas pump. The place was open; inside the big main door, a man in greasy overalls was working on something that looked like a tractor. The mechanic straightened and swung around, wiping his hands on a rag even greasier than his overalls, as Runyon approached. Late forties, early fifties, thin and bald except for a fringe of stringy brown hair above the ears. Eyes that jumped and darted this way and that, as if he were afflicted with some sort of optical anomaly.

“Didn’t expect to find you open on a Sunday,” Runyon said.

“We’re always open. Got to be, up here.”

“Are you Mr. Brody?”

“Sam Brody, that’s right. What’ll it be? Gas, oil?”

“Information.”

“About what?”

“My son. Jerry. He was up this way last Friday, had some trouble with his car, and got it fixed here. Called his mother about it, said he’d be home yesterday. But he didn’t show up.”

The jumpy eyes paused and held for three or four beats. “Is that right?”

“He’s a flaky kid. Disappears every now and then, doing Christ knows what twenty-two-year-old kids do these days. But his mother worries. She sent me out to hunt for him.”

“Last Friday?” Brody said. “What kind of car he drive?”

“ ’Fifty-seven Chevy Impala. Dark blue. Hot stuff.”

“Nope.”

“Nope?”

“I’d remember a car like that. Never saw it, last Friday or any other time.”

“Were you here all day Friday?”

“All day.”

“That’s funny,” Runyon said. “Jerry told his mother he was having the car fixed at the garage in Lost Bar. There another garage around here?”

“Nope. Next closest is in Hayfork. Maybe he meant Hayfork.”

“He usually says what he means.”

“Can’t help you then.”

Runyon said, “I wonder if he saw Gus.”

The eyes stopped darting again. Brody’s face flattened out and went blank, like a shutter snapping into place across a murky window. “Gus who?”

“Local guy Jerry came here to see.”

“Don’t know him.”

“You sure? German, owns property nearby?”

“Sorry,” Brody said. “I got to finish my work.” He started away, paused long enough to glance back and say, “Kids, like you said. Your boy’ll turn up okay,” and then let the garage swallow him again.

Runyon U-turned the Ford across the highway to park in front of the Lost Bar General Store. The interior was gloomy, faintly dank, dominated by the smells of deli meats and the creosote they used on the buckled wooden floor. Close-packed shelves, one checkout stand with a fat woman in her forties behind it, one customer buying a loaf of bread and a six-pack of Coors. Runyon wandered to the cold cases in back, picked out a bottle of Lipton iced tea, brought it back up front. The other customer was gone by then. He paid for the tea before he asked his questions. Different approach this time, a reverse of the one he’d taken with Brody.

“I’m looking for a German fellow named Gus,” he said, “owns property in the area. Can you tell me how to get to his place?”

“How come?”

“How come what?”

“How come you want Gus Mayerhof?”

“Private business matter.”

“On a Sunday?”

“Good as any other day.”

“Not if you’re not expected.”

“I’m not, but I think he’ll want to see me. In fact, I’m sure he will.”

“He’s got a dog, Gus has. Mean bugger of a pit bull, tear your throat out if he gives it the right command. Keeps it because he don’t like strangers coming around unannounced.”

“Let me have his phone number and I’ll call him first.”

“He don’t have a phone.”

“Just directions, then. I’ll take my chances with the pit bull.”

The fat woman eyed his bandage. “What happened to your head?”

“A little accident. Nothing serious.”

“Be real serious if you tangle with that dog.”

He said nothing, watching her, waiting.

“You want a lot for a bottle of iced tea,” she said.

He found a five-dollar bill and laid it on the counter. She looked it for maybe five seconds, looked up at him again with expectant, greedy eyes.

He said, “Five’s all it’s worth,” and started to pick up the bill.

Her sausage fingers stopped him.

“Well, it’s your hide, mister,” she said. “Half a mile west there’s a road cuts off into the wilderness. Peters out into a dirt track after about four miles. Another mile or so, there’s a gate with a No Trespassing sign on it.”

He let her make the five disappear before he said, “Couple more questions before I go. Were you working last Friday?”

“Every damn day except Monday.”

“You happen to see a husky kid in his early twenties, driving a dark blue ‘fifty-seven Impala?”

“I don’t know nothing about cars.”

“You couldn’t miss this one. Might’ve been over at Brody’s part of the day.”

“Didn’t notice if it was.”

“How about yesterday or today? Any young guys come in, strangers?”

“We don’t get too many strangers in here, even in summer. Who’s this kid, anyway?”

Runyon said, “Thanks for your help,” and left her excavating an ear canal with the tip of her little finger.

The Lost Bar Saloon was a squarish log building incongruously topped with a huge satellite dish that loomed up like one of the radar scanners at the SRI complex. The reason for the dish was apparent when Runyon walked in. The bartender and three beer drinkers, two male and one female, were all watching a pro football game on a wide-screen TV, the volume turned up so high you couldn’t hold a conversation without half-shouting. Their interest in him was brief, vanished altogether when he asked his questions. Indifferent responses void of information. None of them had seen a dark blue ’57 Impala in the vicinity recently, or would own up to it if they had.

He closed himself inside the Ford again and rolled out of Lost Bar, following the fat woman’s directions. The wilderness road was a bent and crimped tunnel bored through thick stands of pine, alternately climbing and dropping, bypassing the crumbling hillside remains of a sluice mine. The going got rougher after pitted asphalt gave way to potholed hardpan; he had to drive at a crawl to avoid damage to the tires and undercarriage. The jouncing restarted the ache in his head. He clamped his teeth together and slowed down even more.

After a mile and two-tenths by the odometer, he rounded a curve and there was the gated entrance to Gus Mayerhof’s property. The gate and the barbed-wire fencing strung out on both sides were plastered with No Trespassing signs, all of them handmade. If the gate had been shut and locked, he’d have had to consider whether or not to go in on foot; but it stood open, like an invitation. The access road was a scar on the hillside, heavily furrowed by the erosion of rain and winter snows, climbing up through deep woods. It crested after five hundred yards or so, and the trees thinned; and as he started down on the other side he was looking at a home place like none he’d seen before.

It wasn’t a house or a cabin or a shack; it was a patchwork, spare-parts thing made of wood and brick and tarpaper and sheet metal, sprawling and sagging and jutting at odd angles among tall lodgepole pines. Smoke curled from a stovepipe chimney in one corner of an uneven A-frame roof. A lean-to to one side sheltered a newish Dodge pickup. The front and side yards were littered with the corpses and skeletons of two trucks, a passenger car, a wood stove, an old-fashioned icebox, dozens of less recognizable items.

There was no front porch, just a pair of concrete steps built into a foundation slab below the door. The man standing on the bottom step didn’t move as Runyon drove into the yard. Bearded and shaggy-haired, big-bellied in a khaki shirt and military camouflage pants, he had a shotgun slung over one arm and a chain leash tight-wrapped in the other hand. The pit bull, black and vicious looking, strained at the other end of the chain, barking furiously, foamy drool flying from its jowls. There was no expression on the man’s blocky face. The way he stood, flat-footed, motionless, made him seem even bigger than he was.

He remained motionless until Runyon parked at a slant behind one of the rusted-out wrecks. Then he came forward in a long, stiff-backed stride, like a giant stick man, to within a dozen yards of the Ford. When he stopped again he jerked once on the chain and the pit bull immediately quit barking, sat on its haunches, and stared at Runyon with red-eyed malevolence.

“I don’t know you,” in a big bass rumble. “Stay where you are, you know what’s good for you.”

“Gus Mayerhof?”

“Got eyes, ain’t you? Know how to read signs?”

“Your gate was open.”

“You better have a goddamn good reason for driving through it.”

“I’m looking for a kid named Jerry Belsize. Lives down in the valley-Gray’s Landing. Twenty-two, husky, drives a dark blue ’fifty-seven Impala.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“I was told he came up here to see you last Friday.”

“Then you got told wrong.”

“You haven’t seen him recently?”

“Nobody comes to see me without they’re invited. Nobody.”

“That’s not what I asked you, Gus.”

“Mr. Mayerhof. Nobody calls me Gus unless I say so.”

The new headache had put Runyon in a bleak, dark mood. He didn’t like pit bulls; he didn’t like hard-ass pot growers with shotguns; he didn’t like the situation he’d let himself into. And he didn’t like having to put the kind of tight hold on himself that Mayerhof had on the dog, even if it was the only option given the circumstances. He said, slow and reasonable, “I don’t want much from you, Mr. Mayerhof. Why not just give it to me and I’ll be on my way.”

“Yeah? Why should I?”

“Be in your best interest.”

“Who says so?”

“I say so. My name’s Runyon, Jake Runyon.”

“Fuck Jake Runyon,” Mayerhof said. “You’re a trespasser, not a cop.”

“Close enough to a cop.”

“… What’s that mean?”

“Private investigator. Close ties to the law.”

“Bullshit.”

“I can show you my license.”

“Fuck your license.”

The leash on Runyon’s temper was starting to fray. “Look, Mayerhof, I didn’t come here to make trouble for you. It’s none of my business what you do for a living, but I can make it my business if you push me. I can make it the law’s business.”

“Not if you don’t leave here in one piece,” Mayerhof said. His body turned slightly as he spoke; the shotgun barrel came up on a level with Runyon’s face framed in the open window. His glare was as malevolent as the pit bull’s.

“Cold-blooded murder? I don’t think so. People know I’m here. How do you suppose I got your name, found out where you live?”

“You never heard of self-defense? Man’s got a right to defend his property against trespassers.”

“Not when they’re sitting inside a car.”

“Say you threatened me. Nobody here to call me a liar.”

“There’d still be an investigation. How’re you going to hide what you grow and sell up here?”

“So maybe you just disappear, you and your car both. Happens all the time in country like this.”

“All right then, go ahead and shoot me. But do it quick, Mayerhof. I’ve got a. 357 Magnum in here and the longer you wait, the better my chances of using it. Miss me and I’ll blow your head off before you can lever up another shell. The dog’s head, too, if you try to let it do the job for you.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m a good fast shot, better than you are one-handed with a pump gun, faster than a pit bull can jump through a car window. I was on the Seattle PD for twelve years. Give me the chance and I won’t miss.”

Standoff. But it was the kind that couldn’t last very long. If he’d gauged Mayerhof wrong, he could get himself killed right here and now-put an end to his misery. He cared and he didn’t care at the same time. But he hadn’t misread the man. He’d had confrontations with dozens of Gus Mayerhofs over the years, the petty criminals with hard-as-nails exteriors and guts that melted and ran when push came to shove.

Nothing changed in Mayerhof ’s expression and he didn’t break eye contact, but inside of thirty seconds the shotgun barrel moved slowly off dead aim until it was pointing at the Ford’s sideview mirror. He said, “You got two minutes to ask your questions and haul ass out of here.”

“Jerry Belsize. You know him or don’t you?”

“I got no memory for names.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Only answer you’re gonna get.”

“How often does he come here?”

“Who says he was ever here? Not me.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Shrug. “Real scarce cars, ’fifty-seven Chevys.”

“You better not be jerking me around, Mayerhof.”

“And you better not make trouble for me, man. I ain’t no backwoods hick. I got friends do me any favor I ask.”

“Sure you have.”

Mayerhof relaxed his grip on the chain slightly. The dog tensed and began to growl. “Two minutes about up.”

Runyon let him have another ten seconds of stare before he put the Ford in gear and backed up. In his rearview mirror as he turned around, he saw Mayerhof and the dog still occupying the same piece of ground, neither of them moving, like sculpted juts of granite among the corpses and skeletons. His shoulder muscles didn’t loosen until he was over the rise and through the woods.

Had Mayerhof been lying? Didn’t figure that way. Nothing in it for him if he wanted to avoid trouble. Nothing for Brody or the fat woman in the general store or the saloon bunch in lying, either. So Belsize not only hadn’t come up to the mountains to hide out; he also hadn’t been here last Friday buying pot or having car trouble. Then where was he all that day? Why had he lied to his girlfriend? Why had he left the migrant camp so suddenly and where was he now?

Maybe Rinniak and Sandra Parnell were wrong about the kid. Maybe Jerry Belsize wasn’t so innocent after all.