Almost Midnight (11 page)

Back in the Dodge, freshly showered, Darrell knew what he had to do. They edged into Kansas, close to the little border town of Galena, and he walked into some woods and buried the last of Lloyd’s bad crank. One problem down, but there was still the matter of cash. After all the wasted motion of the past few days, Darrell had finally decided they should go to California, to a place called Palmdale on the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles where he had a couple of cousins they could hide out with. But they’d need money for gas and food and smokes. They’d already bitten into the biggest part of the fifty dollars they’d started out with.

They drove into Galena and stopped at a hardware store. Darrell
had a nice chain saw he’d taken with them thinking he might be able to sell it somewhere down the road. His aunt Margie had paid $325 for it and given it to him for his birthday. Darrell hadn’t used it enough to hurt it any, so it was practically new. He took it into the store and told the manager he’d take a hundred dollars for it. The manager looked at Darrell and looked at the chain saw and said he wasn’t in the habit of paying that kind of money for used tools, which peeved Darrell. He thought the guy recognized he was in dire straits and was trying to take advantage of him. “Yow, money’s tight all over, ain’t it?” he said, picking the chain saw up from the counter and starting for the door. A middle-aged guy who’d been listening in, a farmer probably, stopped Darrell at the door and peeled off five twenties in exchange for the saw. Down the street they found a pawnshop where they got another twenty-five dollars for a couple of Darrell’s rings. Twenty minutes in town, a hundred and twenty-five bucks. Not a huge haul, but maybe enough to see them through to California.

From Galena they took I-44 and then I-40 straight down through Oklahoma and into Texas. Before they hit Tulsa, Darrell was gone to it all, crashed right out. He hadn’t slept more than a few hours over the past five days, and now he was making up for it. He didn’t wake up until Flagstaff, Arizona, when he felt the car juking and shimmying on the icy winter highway.

K
ARRELL GRAVES WAS
just settling in for the evening when the call came. It was his cousin Darrell, phoning from a gas station outside of town and asking directions to Karrell’s house. Karrell had always liked Darrell but he’d lost touch with him over the years. They’d grown up together in Reeds Spring but then Karrell had gone off to California with his father, Herbert, as a teenager and after getting married had stayed there, first in Lone Pine and then a hundred and fifty miles down the road in Palmdale. Karrell and his wife, Janie, had made a nice life for themselves in Palmdale. The town itself wasn’t much, a suburban smudge north of Los Angeles, dead flat and charmless, but they had their kids and grandkids and a
comfortable ranch house that was always open to visitors from back home.

Karrell told Darrell to stay put. He’d drive out and meet him and then lead him back to the house. When he got to the gas station he saw a brown Dodge Diplomat with red Missouri mud caked on the rear bumper and license plate. He walked over and said hi to Darrell and introduced himself to Mary. He told them he’d take it easy driving back so they wouldn’t lose him.

At the house Mary refused to budge. Karrell invited her inside for a shower and something to eat but she insisted on staying in the car with her dogs. Darrell said that Mary’s nerves were strung pretty tight and they should probably just leave her alone. A bit later, while Darrell was in the shower, Karrell came back out and gave her a sedative with a drink of water. This seemed to do the trick. When Darrell finished cleaning up, Mary was sitting at the kitchen table having a bite and exchanging a few words with Janie.

But this was as far as it went. Mary was uncomfortable with the situation and wouldn’t stay the night. She was worried they might be intruding. Karrell and Janie seemed good and decent people but they were Darrell’s relatives, after all, not hers. Karrell filled up some gallon jugs with water for them, and they drove off and found a place to sleep in the desert that night.

The next day, Darrell convinced Mary they should drop by and see Jack Graves, his other Palmdale cousin. Jack was Lexie’s nephew, her brother Paul’s son. He and Darrell had been good running buddies back in Reeds Spring before Jack moved out west, got married, and eventually settled down in Palmdale. Just about everyone who knew them thought Jack and his wife, Luana, were loads of fun. Jack himself was a real character. Handsome and animated, with a sparkling down-home wit, he was bursting at the seams with bright and funny stories of his childhood in southwest Missouri and his later years out west.

Jack arrived home from work and found Darrell sitting on his porch steps. The Dodge, with Mary and the dogs inside, was parked in front.

“What you doing, buddy? You on vacation?” Jack asked.

“I’m hot, Jack,” Darrell said. “I’m looking for somewhere to hide out for a while.”

Jack and Luana had a broken-down motor home parked beside the house, a big twenty-seven-footer. Jack said that Darrell and Mary could stay there as long as they wanted, which was too good a deal to pass up. The motor home afforded Darrell and Mary some privacy, and Jack and Luana gave them free run of the house for food and showers.

It was a good deal but they didn’t take advantage of it for very long. After about a week camping out at Jack and Luana’s, Darrell experienced what he would later call a “danger urge,” a strong premonition that Lloyd was hot on their trail. They packed up and split in the middle of the night. Darrell left a note in the motor home saying, “I owe you big-time, Jack.”

Years afterward, Jack and Luana were still having trouble making sense of it all. Why would Darrell and Mary run off in the wee hours without even saying goodbye? Darrell had taken Jack aside at one point and told him he’d run afoul of drug dealers back home, but why did he think they’d be able to track him and Mary down in Palmdale? And most perplexing of all, what were Darrell and Mary doing together in the first place?

“It just didn’t click, them being together,” Luana said. “They seemed a real odd couple. Darrell was a good ole country boy. Mary seemed more refined, very prim and pretty. She didn’t seem his type. She was very reserved. She talked a bit but not a whole lot. She told me she loved George Strait. She went up and kissed him at a concert. I got the idea her family was wealthy. She showed me this expensive-looking ring she had, sapphire I think. My impression was she’d had a boring upbringing and was looking for excitement. Darrell was it. Darrell was the excitement.”

“Mary acted well-educated, like she didn’t come from the same class we came from,” Jack said. “At first she wouldn’t even come into the house. I told her, ‘Get your ass in the house.’ But I thought she was also trying to be an outlaw. When I first saw her—I’m stretching the memory a bit here—she was wearing combat boots,
fatigues, and a M*A*S*H T-shirt, and she had a .25 automatic pistol in her pocket and another pistol in her purse. She seemed like she was a nice, good-looking gal trying to be Annie Oakley.”

Darrell’s idea, upon fleeing Palmdale, was to slip up to Lone Pine, a few hours’ drive north. He was familiar with the area from visiting relatives over the years and he figured the remote and rugged countryside would be perfect for hiding out. He’d sold one of his guns to Karrell two or three days earlier, so they weren’t traveling stone-broke.

Halfway up U.S. 395, a couple of hours past midnight, they had a close shave. Darrell saw something out of the corner of his eye just off the road. It was a highway patrol car, poaching for speeders. When he turned his head to check it out, Darrell bobbled the Dodge a little bit. The patrol car ducked in behind them and flashed its lights. Darrell pulled over. He didn’t have a driver’s license, and his .357 Magnum was lying on the front seat where he liked to keep it, near at hand. Just before the cop beamed his flashlight into the driver’s window, Mary took the gun and put it on the floor under the dogs’ water bowl. The cop asked Darrell if he’d been drinking. Darrell said no and explained why the car had bobbled. He asked for Darrell’s driver’s license. Darrell, playing it straight, said he didn’t have one. He’d let his old license expire and they’d left Missouri before he’d had a chance to pick up his new one. The cop then walked around to Mary’s window and asked if she’d put something on the floor. Mary flashed a sweet and innocent smile and pointed to the water bowl. She said she’d put it on the floor so it wouldn’t spill. The cop stood there a minute sizing up the situation, this long-haired bearded dude with a pretty young woman up front and two dogs, one of them a pit bull, in back. He told Darrell and Mary to take it easy and walked back to his car.

They arrived in Lone Pine at daybreak. After a bite of breakfast they stopped by Darrell’s cousin Connie’s house. Darrell didn’t get the impression Connie and her husband were thrilled to see him but he picked up a few more dollars for food and gas by selling them one of his rifles, a Winchester .375 H & H Magnum.

The village of Lone Pine sits in a valley with mountains ranging on either side. Drive fifteen miles west and you reach the beautiful high-meadow country of the Sierra Nevadas, where there’s plenty of game, well-worn trails, and good tree cover. Winters can be severe in the Sierra Nevadas, however, and this winter the switchbacks leading in and out were almost impassible. Darrell figured they’d have better luck heading east toward Death Valley and hiding in the foothills of the Inyo Mountains. The Inyo region is pure desert: rugged range, isolated canyons, sagebrush, scrub piñon, and juniper. Tumbledown cabins are strewn throughout the area, many of them ghostly reminders of silver-, gold-, and lead-mining operations that bit the dust more than half a century ago. Once you hit higher elevations there are mule deer and bighorn sheep, but in the foothills game is sparse due to lack of rain. It’s a harsh environment, but ideal for holing up and avoiding detection.

Darrell and Mary camped in the area for about a week, eventually making their way north to Independence, a little town strung out along Route 395 between Lone Pine and Big Pine. Broke and hungry, they went to a county dump just south of town in hopes of scrounging food or, who knows, maybe some scrap metal or lumber they could sell. They were picking through a mound of garbage when a small elderly gentleman, about five two, with silver hair and big jug ears, eased on over and asked if they’d mind if he foraged in the dump for copper. Darrell said hell no, go ahead, he had as much right foraging as they did.

The man’s name was Truman Buff. He was a Paiute Indian and a fixture in the area. Everybody around Independence knew Truman. He’d worked for years as a water engineer for the town, and since retiring he’d kept the juices flowing playing trombone in a local band. He had a reputation for knowing everything there was to know about the surrounding desert. Darrell said he and Mary were looking for somewhere to stay—someplace cheap and out of the way. Truman suggested they drive into the desert east of Independence and check out the old mining shacks. If cheap and out of the way was what they wanted, the shacks would be tough to beat.

They caught Mazourka Canyon Road on the edge of town and headed back into Inyo country. The pavement soon gave way to dirt and gravel and they wound their way deeper and deeper into the foothills, passing abandoned shafts clinging to jagged rock face and a couple of old shacks that looked undecided about sticking around another year.

Finally they came to a little tar-paper shack that was set back in a clearing behind a stand of runty junipers. It belonged to an old claim-staker named Bill Michaels who had mined silver and gold out in the desert for decades before packing it in and moving to town a few years earlier. Darrell and Mary had no idea who it belonged to. They’d never heard of Bill Michaels. They only knew this was the place for them. Far off the beaten path, eleven miles from town, the views from the clearing were immense and beautiful and barren. The solitude was staggering—no one for miles around, no sound but the desert wind. There was no way Lloyd could sneak up on them out here. If there was anywhere they’d be safe, this was it.

Mary was excited. She thought the old shack was romantic and she talked about fixing it up into a sweet little home for the two of them. She said they should find out who owned it and look into the possibility of buying it. Darrell was moved by this show of enthusiasm. The idea of Mary being so willing to rough it out in the desert for his sake and theirs, it was almost too good to be true. He couldn’t imagine loving anyone more.

They asked around in town for Truman Buff’s address and drove over to see him, thinking he could put them on to whoever owned the shack. Truman had other ideas. He was home when Darrell and Mary pulled up, but when he saw them he broke and ran. Just like that: not a word, nothing. He took off on foot like he’d seen a ghost.

Darrell didn’t like the looks of this. He didn’t know what it meant, but it couldn’t be anything good. Maybe the local police had been quizzing Truman about the newcomers in town with the Missouri plates. Or worse, maybe Lloyd himself had been nosing around. One thing was for sure: they’d have to forget about that little mining shack for now. It was time to move on.

There was a reason why Truman Buff took off when Darrell and Mary pulled up, but it had nothing to do with Lloyd Lawrence or the local police. Since running into them at the county dump, Truman had been thinking. Something about Darrell and Mary had made him uneasy. Here was this rough-looking, long-haired guy living in the desert and hanging out with a shy pretty girl a good fifteen or twenty years younger. Why was this familiar? Then it hit him. It wasn’t so long ago that some other rough-looking, longhaired guy named Charles Manson came out of the same desert with a whole bevy of pretty young girls. Truman knew the story well. Manson had actually done jail time in Independence after being rousted from his lair near Death Valley. For all Truman knew, Darrell was a cat of a completely different color. But he wasn’t taking any chances.