Wild Instinct

26

Black helmets, vests, and leather, their machines slapping wetly at low rpm until Jeffs makes the deputies and guns his machine into a wide U-turn.

Mindy follows him with a smoking roar.

Breaking for their vehicles, Gale and Mendez almost collide, then do a quick shuffle and get into their rides.

Gale is off first, running hard but cold — no lights or sirens on his detective take-home — and he sees Jeffs and Mindy out ahead, Jeffs sweeping south on Main, Mindy north.

In his rearview sees Mendez coming up on him fast, reaches through his open window and points her after the pink Sportster. Low-tech but Mendez gets it.

Signals early, gets a lucky green light, and follows Jeffs onto Main.

He’s on the radio to Dispatch now, an all-units Huntington Beach alert for a black Harley southbound on Main Street from Yorktown Avenue and a pink Harley northbound on Main from the same. Vernon and Mindy Jeffs, white, fifties, presume armed.

Gale’s Explorer is a Sport turbo that eats up Main Street like a shark, closing on Jeffs, who glides between lanes and charges fast ahead.

Gale can’t follow, and the light turns red, so he gooses his SUV onto the shoulder and honks his way past the right-lane traffic, honking and yelling at him, and closes in on Jeffs again, who flips off Gale without looking back and swerves onto Coast Highway.

The southbound traffic is heavy, and Gale knows that they’re miles from the nearest freeway.

Jeffs turns right off PCH and Gale knows it’s a bad call: The farther Vern goes on side streets the better chance the sheriff will stop him.

But Jeffs seems to be thinking the same thing, carving a hard left onto Beach Boulevard, which Gale knows will take him to the San Diego Freeway, California 55, and Interstate 5 — deep into the sprawling suburban thicket of Orange County, and beyond, as far as gas and adrenaline will take him.

Gale catches another lucky break, gunning it through the last of the yellow light and coming up hard on Jeffs and his caterwauling chopper.

He’s close enough to hear the Harley’s engine. And see Jeffs glance at his right-side mirror and clench his fists.

Then his brake lights flare and Gale thinks: Don’t do it.

Jeffs cuts a hard right onto Atlanta hoping Gale will sail past, but his tires slide out from under him and his shining black bike goes down and Jeffs, on his backside, skitters across the asphalt, leathers rasping.

He rolls twice but clambers upright and takes off limping down the sidewalk.

Gale makes the turn, his turbocharger screaming.

Shoots past Jeffs, jumps the curb, and parks, cutting him off.

The big man angles away, stumbling.

Gale calls for backup and an ambulance, then joins the chase, fast catching up with the hobbled goliath.

“Police! Stop and drop! Stop and drop!”

Jeffs stops and turns and Gale launches into him hard, his shoulders weapons, his Capistrano Valley High School football skills on clear display.

The big man goes down and stays down, breathing fast and clutching his left knee through torn bloody leather.

Gale’s got his gun in his right hand and plastic tie in the other.

“Roll over, Vern. Then get your hands behind your back. Don’t even think of getting up.”

Growls and profanities, Jeffs’s voice electric with pain.

“A gun on your ankle and a knife in your boots, Vern?”

“I got a concealed carry permit, man.”

“You’re a felon.”

Jeffs rolls over with a groan, and Gale cinches the tie around his thick wrists.

“I’ll keep it loose until you mess with me,” says Gale. “Next, I’m taking off your boots. You kick at me with those steel toes, you’ll be very sorry.”

“My knee is killing me,” says Jeffs, his voice like wet gravel. “I need an ambulance.”

Gale unzips Vernon’s harness boots and pulls them off. Finds a pearl-grip derringer holstered on the inside of the big man’s right ankle and a folding knife in a neoprene sheath glued inside the left boot.

“You get Mindy?”

“We’ll get Mindy.”

Gale zip-ties Jeffs’s ankles together, the big man groaning again. “Fuck, that knee,” he says.

Gale hears sirens, sees a Huntington Beach police cruiser swinging in next to his Explorer. And another on approach, lights flashing.

“You’re under arrest for the murder of Bennet Tarlow,” he says. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you. You have the right to a lawyer before we ask you any questions. You know the drill, Vern.”

“I didn’t fuckin’ kill him, man. And it’s getting hard to breathe, face down like this. I weigh about half a ton. Keep your knees off my neck.”

“I’ll help you get on your side, it’s going to hurt.”

“Do it, pig.”

With a sharp yelp, Jeffs tries to turn, and Gale pushes him all the way over. The big man is breathing harder. Gale sees the blood oozing through the left knee of his leathers.

“They hired me to kill him, but I changed my mind. I didn’t, I swear.”

Gale feels that sweet swelling of his soul that a confession brings. Even one that’s probably at least half-false. His gut tells him Jeffs put two bullets in Bennet Tarlow’s brain, and he almost certainly was hired: exactly what Gale had thought from the beginning.

Murder for hire.

Beautiful.

But Gale knows the DA can’t charge Vernon Jeffs on the thin evidence he has. Amanda Cho seeing him in Bennet Tarlow’s company the evening of his death is hardly enough. His van in the campground isn’t enough. A cellmate snitch with a long-ago tale isn’t enough, either. No murder weapon. No witnesses.

Vern will be free in forty-eight hours, Gale thinks.

But Jeffs doesn’t know that.

“Who’s they? Who hired you, Vern?”

“I don’t know.”

“Male, female, short, tall? Come on, Vern, you have to talk to me. Your jail cell awaits.”

“Male! I never saw them. First time we talked was in a white Lincoln Navigator with a blackout glass between us in the Bear Cave parking lot. Two of ’em you know, a guy in the passenger seat and a driver. I only made out their shapes through the screen. They kept me in back. Tried to pay me half to kill Tarlow.”

“Which was how much?”

“Thirty thousand.”

“Why Caspers Park?”

“I wasn’t there that night! I didn’t do it! A lie can’t stick to a truth. Here’s the deal, Gale: You take me to a hospital and we’ll trap ’em, those two guys, and they’ll tell you who killed Tarlow. A hospital, man. No jail, no murder charge, no resisting arrest, no bullshit weapons charge, no reckless driving. When I’m a free man with a fixed-up knee, I’ll tell you everything I know. Solid, hundred percent truth! I’ll show you where they picked me up and where we drove to, three times, same white Lincoln Navigator and I know the plates. Weird plates. I’d recognize his voice anywhere. I’ll tell you everything we said. I’ve got a photographic memory.”

Gale follows Jeffs’s pained smile to the paramedics van lumbering to a stop on Atlanta.

“You have a deal, Vern.”