Adrien English Mysteries: A Dangerous Thing & Fatal Shadows (22 page)

“But?”

He said impatiently, “I don’t know! Why don’t we watch a video or something?”

We watched a lot of videos. I was now an expert on the films of Steven Seagal and Vin Diesel, and I’d seen more Super Hero movies in the past month than I’d seen my entire childhood. It wasn’t all cinéma vérité. We even went out for a couple of tense dinners. I guessed that Riordan was wary some of his copper pals might spot him fraternizing with a known homo, although he was too gentlemanly to say so aloud.

Mostly we talked. At my place. Behind closed doors. Not exactly heart to heart, but Jake talked about his work and his family: Mom, Dad, two brothers (one in the Police Academy) all under the delusion that James Patrick Riordan was as straight as the proverbial arrow.

Or mostly Jake talked. My role was usually listener. Occasionally he’d asked me questions which I labeled under the general heading of Gay Lifestyle: How many times a month did I have sex? (Uh ... were we going by Terrestrial Dynamical Time?) When had I come out? (After college -- when it was too late for mother to ground me.) Where did I go to meet guys? (Crime scenes?)

Even though Jake was older and probably more experienced, I sometimes felt like his gay mentor or Fag Big Brother. What I didn’t feel like was his lover.

A month of tentative keeping company and then a month of excuses and canceled engagements.

It was over before it began.

136

Josh Lanyon

“Look,” I told him one night when he arrived four hours late for another dinner under wraps, “You’re just going through the motions. Why bother?”

That tawny gaze lit on mine. Jake said bluntly, “I never meant to get involved with you, Adrien.”

“Rest easy; you’re not.”

“Yeah, I am.” And he put his big paw over mine.

Pathetic, but this is the kind of thing that kept me holding on. I use the term “holding on” loosely, because for the most part life went on exactly as before, with the exception of the funny flutter my heart gave when I’d hear Riordan’s voice on the other end of the phone

-- and for all I knew that was incipient heart failure.

It sure as hell wasn’t love, because I refused to do something so self-destructive as love a man who hated himself for being homosexual -- which, by extension, probably meant he subconsciously hated me too. I reassured myself that although I liked Riordan, I wasn’t closing any doors, wasn’t missing out on any opportunities; I was still open to meeting new people, making new friends and lovers.

So why the frustration and anger, sure, even hurt, when the big guy pulled the plug as he had this evening?

* * * * *

Outside Bakersfield I made a pit stop at a rest area. I walked around and stretched my legs, bought a stale blueberry bagel from a catering truck and rechecked my Thomas Guide in the cab light of the SUV.

The full moon shone brightly, illuminating rolling hills dotted with oaks and occasional farmhouse lights. Miles of nothing but empty highway and starry skies. Miles of nothing but more miles as I headed north with the big rigs. I was doing about eighty-five, kicked back on cruise control with nothing to do but think and remember.

It was twenty-four years since I had last seen Pine Shadow Ranch. That was the summer before my Grandmother Anna died. I was eight years old, and summer vacations with Granna were the happiest times of my life.

Granna was kind of a family legend. One of those Roaring Twenties gals, she’d ditched her society husband and returned to her birthplace to raise horses and hell, as the mood took her. I remembered her as a rail-thin, tall woman with a silver bob and deeply tanned skin.

My granny rolled her own cigarettes, rode like a bronc-buster and cussed in Italian -- which was the language of her childhood nanny. It must have been some childhood judging from the frequency and fluency of her swearing.

There had been no hint that particular summer was to be the last. But two weeks after I returned to my mother’s fretting bosom, my grandmother had been killed in a fall from a horse. To my mother’s chagrin Granna bequeathed her entire estate to me. True, Granna’s A Dangerous Thing

137

estate was nothing to rival the fortune left in trust to Lisa by my dear departed dad, but it was enough to ensure financial necessity would never tie me to Ma’s apron strings.

I inherited half that money when I turned twenty-one, and I had spent it purchasing what was now Cloak and Dagger Books. I would inherit the balance when I turned forty, which around tax time seemed like a lifetime away. As for Pine Shadow Ranch, I’d had some furniture shipped down to me but had never gone back, preferring to remember it as it had been. There was a caretaker who kept an eye on the holdings, but for all I knew the place could have fallen to rack and ruin by the time I decided to take my 400-mile drive down memory lane.

* * * * *

It was nearly eleven when State Highway 49 narrowed to pine trees and mountains. I cracked the window. The night air was startlingly cold and clean with the bite of distant snow.

The next eighty miles of winding road were spent sandwiched between one of those monster trucks (high beams trained on my rearview) and a battered pickup with the license plate URUGLY. At five-mile intervals we would come to another blind curve and the monster truck would swing out in the opposite lane in a playful gambit of vehicular Russian roulette. And thirty seconds later he would drop back into formation just in time to avoid plowing into an oncoming car.

At last he made his big play, risked his all, and roared off around a bend, just missing a head-on with a logging truck. He vanished into the diesel-scented night.

Now it was just me and the 45-mile-an-hour wit in the pickup. Emptying the last of the Popayan coffee into my thermos cup, I fiddled with the radio trying to find a station that varied the thematic content of tears-in-the-beer, crying-on-the-shoulder-of-the-road, and hanging-onto-nothing-but-the-wheel. Despite the caffeine overload I was beat and my eyes felt ready to drop out of my head.

Fast approaching the stage of exhaustion where I wasn’t sure if I was still driving or if I was only dreaming I was still driving, I nearly missed the turn off. The next ten miles were a challenge to the Bronco’s shocks as well as my own, but at last I recognized the landmark of Saddleback Mountain and knew the Pine Shadow Ranch lay right around the next bend.

I downshifted as we began our descent. The Bronco rattled across a cattle guard. Ahead, the ranch lay motionless in the bright moonlight; from a distance it seemed untouched by time. Despite the dark windows and empty corrals I could almost convince myself that I was coming home, that someone waited to welcome me.

Drawing closer, I discerned the sign mounted on wooden posts above the open gate.

Wood-burned letters had once spelled out, Pine Shadow Ranch. I slowed; the Bronco’s high beams picked out a number of forms in the darkness: the ramshackle barn behind the house, 138

Josh Lanyon

a tilting windmill, a fractured swing dangling from one of the trees -- and something on the ground.

I braked. I was so wired I was willing to believe my eyes were playing tricks, but as I waited there, the Bronco’s engine idling, the thing on the ground showed no sign of disappearing.

Too tired to be cautious, I climbed out of the Bronco. It was no trick of light, no play of shadows. A man lay face down in the dirt.

I circled him, my footsteps unnaturally loud in the clear night. From across the yard I could hear a broken shutter banging. Wind rustled the tall winter grass. I knelt beside him.

I could see in the headlights that his face was turned to the side. His eyes were wide open, but he wasn’t alive. His breath didn’t cloud the raw air, his shoulders didn’t rise and fall. There was a neat hole the size of a quarter between his shoulder blades.

I sucked in my breath. This wasn’t my first contact with murder, but I still got that sensation of watching from a separate solar system -- which usually precedes passing out cold. I rubbed my hand across my face. It was like one of those party games where you have thirty seconds to memorize a dozen objects; inevitably you see details instead of the big picture.

The dead man looked to be in his sixties maybe. His hair was thin, plastered to his head.

He was grizzled, his fingernails were dirty. He wore faded jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and cowboy boots. I had never seen him before, or if I had I didn’t recognize him.

Reaching out to touch his wrist, a shock rippled through me like I had not been properly grounded.

He was still warm.

I jerked my head up and stared at the silent house. I looked to the surrounding hills, the sentinel trees.

The wind whispered in the pines. Otherwise nothing moved. All was still. In fact ... too still.

Staring into the windswept darkness I became convinced someone was out there watching me. The hair prickled at the nape of my neck. My heart began to give my ribs the old one-two; a left and a right and then a left left left.

I don’t have time for this, I warned my uncooperative ticker as I slammed back into the Bronco. Reversing in a wide arc, I put pedal to the metal, bumping and banging down the pot hole-riddled road racing back the way I had come.

While I bounced along the road I felt around for my cell phone. Finding it at last, I dialed emergency.

It rang -- and rang -- and rang. Finally I got through to a sleepy someone in the Sheriff’s Department. I opened my mouth and was instantly placed on hold. About one second before I spontaneously combusted, the line was picked up once more, and the voice, still sounding A Dangerous Thing

139

sleepy -- had she dozed off the last time? -- returned asking what the nature of my emergency was. After running through it a couple of times, she eventually seemed to understand what I was squawking about and promised to send help.

True to her word, the dispatcher sent the cavalry. A black and white four wheel drive met me at the mouth of Stagecoach Road twenty minutes later, lights flashing, siren blaring.

“What seems to be the trouble, sir?” The man in uniform was middle-aged, well-fed and a different species from the cops I’d come to know in the past few months.

I explained the trouble.

“Okay dokey,” said Sheriff Billingsly, scratching his skunk-striped beard. “You hop in the truck and we’ll go have a looksee at this alleged dead man.”

I piled into the cab with the sheriff and his waiting deputy -- Dwayne. Dwayne looked like he had just walked off the set of Dukes of Hazzard. He shifted his chaw to his other cheek.

“Howdy.”

“Hi,” I said through teeth starting to chatter with nerves.

Dwayne put the truck into gear and we headed back down the road.

“It was up here,” I said as we clattered over the cattle guard. “Just outside the gate.”

“Right along here?” the deputy asked, slowing as we approached the gate. The headlights fell on empty dirt road.

“Stop,” I ordered. “It was along here that I found him.”

The deputy braked hard and the three of us lurched forward and then back.

“Here?” the sheriff demanded.

The three of us stared at the lone tumbleweed somersaulting across the deserted yard.

“He was right there,” I said.

Silence.

“Well he ain’t there now,” said the sheriff.

140

Josh Lanyon

Chapter Two

I awoke after a long, dreamless sleep. Slowly my vision focused on two beady eyes gazing into my own. A squirrel stood inches from my nose, whiskers twitching in alarm.

The alarm was mutual. I yelped and swung the makeshift pillow of my jacket at my bedmate. The squirrel scampered off in a cloud of newly disturbed dust and disappeared up the chimney of the fireplace at the far end of the room. Coughing, I staggered to my feet and looked about.

Layers of velvety dust covered everything not draped in sheets. Chairs, tables, lamps, most everything was covered in dust sheets. It was like waking up in the middle of a ghosts’

tea party. Cobwebs draped artistically from the blackened ceiling beams.

When I’d finally collapsed on the overstuffed sofa the night before I had been too frazzled and exhausted to notice. In the cold light of day it was clear to me that I’d had some kind of breakdown. Only a lapse of sanity could explain what I was doing shivering in my skivvies in the room that time forgot.

April is plenty bitter in the mountains despite the sunshine and wildflowers. I pulled on Levi’s, shrugged into a flannel shirt. In honor of Jake I fished a beer out of the cooler and swished a mouthful through my teeth as I sat on the ice chest lid considering my surroundings.

The long wide room had a huge stone fireplace at one end. The wooden floors were bare now; I recalled them covered by starkly beautiful Indian rugs. Black gargoyle feet stuck out beneath the dust sheets. If memory served, all those linen peaks and slopes concealed heavy walnut Victorian furniture upholstered in red velvet or smoky-gray tufted satin. Faded drapes framed picture windows and a view that was worth framing. Beyond the trees, in the distance, I could see mountains, still white-tipped with snow. The sky was cerulean -- a word we don’t use much in LA. Not a cloud, not a plane, not a telephone wire to mar that wide blue yonder.

A Dangerous Thing

141

The silence seemed unnatural and would take some getting used to. I heard the sweet trill of a meadow lark, then nothing else. No distant roar of traffic, no voices. Pure silence. I listened to it for some time, waiting for something to break the spell.

Anything.

Then, lubricated by another swig of beer, the wheels began to turn. Already the events of the night before felt like some half-forgotten nightmare -- much the conclusion local law enforcement had come to after they were unable to find any trace of “my” dead body.

“Probably just the way the shadows fall here,” the sheriff had said generously, not giving in to what was clearly his suspicious first thought.

“I’m telling you, it was a body.”

“Coyote maybe,” Deputy Dwayne suggested. “Could have been shot by a rancher and dragged itself off.”