Camouflage (Nameless Detective Mysteries) (23 page)

I crossed to the house, sidestepping the scattered refuse. The porch roof was held up by sagging supports, one of them cracked and bent near the roofline; the floor had a spongy feel underfoot—termite ridden and riddled with dry rot. There was no lock on the closed door. I pushed it open and went inside, testing the floorboards as I advanced.

The interior wasn’t much more than an empty shell divided into six small rooms, littered here and there with the remnants of long-ago living: a broken-legged table, a cracked lamp thrust on its side into a corner, a freestanding kitchen cabinet with one door missing and the other hanging askew from its hinges. The floors were carpeted with layers of dirt, dust, broken glass fragments, half-petrified rodent droppings, all of it long undisturbed except by small four-legged creatures and now me. Nobody else had been in there in a long time. If McManus and Carson had spent the night on the property, it had been forted up inside the Ford Explorer and the barn.

I didn’t linger; the dust and the mustiness of decay drove me back out into the fresh air. I was coming down off the porch, taking deep breaths to clear my lungs, when I heard Chavez shout my name.

“Bill! Over here—quick!”

He was standing near the well house, almost in the shadow of the skeletal frame of the windmill. I cut over that way, taking a zigzag route because of all the crap in the farmyard. A light, warmish breeze had kicked up, coaxing the remaining sails in the windmill into a slight, creaking turn. It wasn’t until I heard the creaking that I smelled the ugly sour-sweet odor the breeze was carrying—very faint at first, then stronger as I closed in on Chavez. The hackles on the back of my neck lifted. There is no mistaking that smell and what it means.

“Inside the well house,” Chavez said. He crossed himself, not once but twice. “Maybe you don’t want to look.”

I didn’t, but I looked anyway. Had to.

He’d left the door shut. When I dragged it open, the rotting meat stink came pouring out at me. My gorge rose; I kept swallowing to hold it down while I dragged out my handkerchief and slapped it over my mouth and nose, peering ahead into the gloom. The stench was coming from within a six-foot-high circular wooden cistern. I had to force myself to go over there, stretch up, and look down into it.

Sweet Jesus.

The cistern was dry, its floor littered with bundles … what had once been human-sized bundles wrapped mummylike in layers of plastic sheeting and bound with duct tape. The largest and newest of them was still mostly wrapped, but some of the plastic had already been torn away by rats. The rats had been at what was inside, too. One end gaped open and there was just enough left of the head and face revealed there to be recognizable.

Now I knew for sure what had happened to David Virden.

There was not much left of the other bundles. Remnants of sheets long ago torn into shreds and carried away to nests; jumbles of gnawed, fleshless bones, some bleached white and some with fragments of gristle still clinging to them. There was no telling how many bodies there’d been.

McManus and Carson’s victims—the ones they’d murdered since getting their hands on this property more than three years ago.

Dumping ground. Charnel house.

I got the hell out of there, still swallowing, trying not to puke into my handkerchief, and jammed the door shut tight. Chavez had backed off by several yards to escape the worst of the stink. The sick expression he wore probably mirrored mine.

He said, “The client, Virden?”

“Yeah. In there since Tuesday.”

“Must be four or five others.”

Rose O’Day and Gregory Pappas among them. “Yeah.”

“Those women … Ah,
Dios
.” Chavez shook his head, made the sign of the cross again.
“Monstruos.”

Monsters. Tamara’s term for them, too. I was glad she wasn’t here to find out firsthand just how right she’d been.

The wind was still causing the rusty windmill blades to creak; the sound had a chilling quality now, a scrape on my nerves. By tacit consent Chavez and I moved still farther away from the well house, at an angle between the farmhouse and the creek. The stench wasn’t so bad there, upwind. I could breathe without the handkerchief and without wanting to gag.

My cell phone had some sort of glitch in it, didn’t always pick up a signal even in the city. But it worked all right out here. I put in a 911 call to the Marin County sheriff’s department, identified myself, gave the dispatcher a brief account of the situation and the address. Yes, I said, we’d be waiting when officers arrived.

But we weren’t going to do our waiting back here with that stink in the air and that damned creaking. Out on the road, by the gate. That was fine with Chavez; he had no more desire to hang around this godforsaken place than I did.

We started back across the littered farmyard. But our timing was off, just a few minutes off.

We hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when I heard the rumbling and rattling on the far side of the hill, low and distant, then rising. Oncoming vehicle jouncing over that uneven track. No, more than one—two distinct engine sounds, one louder than the other, moving in tandem toward the notch between the hillsides. Not county sheriff’s cruisers; there hadn’t been enough time.

Chavez caught hold of my sleeve.

“It’s them,” he said. “Coming back.”

27

You don’t have much time to make a decision in a situation like this. Flash through your options, pick one, take action. Four choices here. Stay where we were in the open, guns drawn—stand and deliver. Run for the house. Run for the barn. Run for the shelter of the trees along the creek behind us. We were about equidistant from each of those last three.

The engine sounds were louder now, faintly hollow—the vehicles grinding into the declivity. Not much more than a minute before the lead driver would have a clear view of the farmyard.

I said, “The barn!” and broke into a run.

Chavez didn’t hesitate; he was right there beside me. There were fewer ground obstructions in that direction, letting us run in more or less a straight line. But clusters of weeds grew along there, one of them a tall thistle plant that I didn’t see in time to avoid because I’d cast a quick sideways glance at the track. I plowed through the thistle, trampling it, and its sharp little spines snagged at my pant leg, pitched me into an off-stride stagger. I might’ve gone down if Chavez hadn’t been close enough to grab hold of my arm, keep me upright and steadied.

Thirty yards to the barn, twenty, ten. He put on a burst, reached the doors a couple of steps ahead, yanked one half-open a foot or so as I pounded up. The nose of some kind of car was just poking into view. He nudged me through the opening, crowded in behind me. When he pulled the door shut behind us, it muted the approaching vehicle sounds to a low rumble.

There were chinks and gaps in the door halves that made for eyeholes. I found one, Chavez another. Both vehicles were in sight now, jouncing along the track. Neither one was the Ford Explorer. The lead car was a gray four-door Nissan compact, dwarfed by the medium-sized U-Haul truck immediately behind. Those women were no dummies. They’d sold or traded or dumped the SUV, bought or rented the compact, and then rented the U-Haul, and they’d no doubt done the buying and renting using one or the other’s real name.

Both of us drew our weapons. I sucked in a couple of deep breaths, trying to slow my pulse rate, as the car and truck rattled into the yard. Sun glare on the Nissan’s windshield prevented me from seeing who was driving until it turned to the right off the track. Carson. With the yellow-eyed Rottweiler, Thor, beside her. The driver’s door stayed shut while the U-Haul rolled past toward the barn.

McManus was as reckless with the cumbersome truck as she’d been with the SUV in rush-hour traffic; twenty yards from the barn she made a sharp, tilting half turn in the opposite direction, braked hard, and then slammed into reverse with a gnashing of gears. The rear tires spun, digging up clods of turf, as she backed and began maneuvering.

They hadn’t spotted us on the run or they’d be reacting differently out there. McManus kept backing until the rear end of the U-Haul was within a dozen feet of the doors. While she was doing that, Carson got out of the compact and the Rottweiler bounded out after her.

Chavez said in an undertone, “Coming in here. Be easier to take them if they walk in together.”

“As long as they leave the dog outside.”

“What if they don’t?”

I waggled the .38. “What do you think?”

The barn had been the right choice. We were in perfect position to surprise McManus and Carson, take out Thor if necessary, and hold the women until the county law arrived. Good plan—except for one thing we hadn’t figured on.

That damn dog and his heightened senses.

Through the eyehole I saw the animal stop moving once he was free of the car, stand with muzzle up and the big body starting to quiver. Then he was barking, loud. And then he lunged into a streak-run straight for the barn doors.

He didn’t slow down when he got there. Left his feet in a sideways jump and rammed his body into one door half hard enough to splinter a couple of the rotting boards. Turned and jumped up again, nose on this time, barking and snarling and scrabbling at the wood with his nails.

“Knows we’re in here,” Chavez said between his teeth.

“But the women don’t. Maybe they’ll think he’s after an animal that got in.”

McManus was out of the U-Haul now, coming around to where Carson stood, both of them watching the dog’s frantic scratchings at the barn door and not trying to call him off. Wary, but not alarmed yet. Neither of them looked to be armed. If they owned guns, and they probably did, the weapons would be stored in here with the other stuff. They’d have had no reason to take the guns along this morning.

I thought we might have a standoff that would last long enough for the law to show—the two women and the Rottweiler out there, us in here, nobody doing anything but standing fast. Wrong on that score, too. Because I didn’t take the yellow-eyed beast’s instincts into account.

He quit scrabbling at the door. Quit barking and snarling, too. I heard him moving and then I didn’t hear him at all. Didn’t see him anymore. I shifted position to another peephole, still didn’t see him.

“Alex. You spot where the dog went?”

“No.”

Not back to McManus and Carson. They were still standing together, talking to each other but looking at the barn.

Seconds ticked away, nobody moving. The silence seemed heavy, strained. Where the hell was the Rottweiler?

Pretty soon we found out.

The warning sounds came from somewhere at the side wall behind Chavez, where the half-collapsed remains of cattle stalls showed as shadow shapes in the murky light. Bumping, scratching, slithering. A deep-throated snarl. Faint blurred movement. The goddamn dog had sniffed around out there and hunted up a gap in the decaying wallboards large enough to squeeze through.

I hissed a warning to Chavez—too late. Thor was already inside and launched in a black blur. Chavez turned, bringing his revolver up, but he had no time to set himself and fire before the hurtling, snarling shape hit him straight on.

The force of impact drove him backward into the door, wrenched a cry of pain out of him, and knocked the gun out of his hand. I heard it clatter off the boards, hit the ground. He got his left arm up in time to keep the bared fangs from tearing into his throat, but the powerful jaws locked around his forearm and the dog began to shake it the way a terrier shakes a rat.

Chavez tried to throw the animal off, but the heaving weight had him pinned. I was there by then and I kicked at Thor’s ribs, his haunches; a third kick caught him square in the ass. But none of the blows did anything except bring out more growls and cause the fangs to sink deeper into Chavez’s arm, shaking it even harder. For me to try wrestling the Rottweiler loose was a fool’s move. I couldn’t take the chance of jamming the muzzle of the .38 in against the squirming body, either, not with the poor light and the way the two of them were locked and thrashing together; if I tried that and didn’t get the angle right, the bullet was liable to go right through the dog and into Chavez.

Only one thing I could do. I spun away to the row of stacked goods, jamming the gun into its holster, and tore off one of the plastic sheets. Bunched it up accordion-fashion with my arms and hands spread wide. Chavez was still struggling to break loose, grunting but not making any other sound. The Rottweiler’s growls had a kind of frenzied canine elation, as if this sort of vicious attack was what he lived for.

I got in close and threw the sheet over him, ensnaring as much of the head and muzzle as I could, then managed to wrap the rest of it around the lower body and tangle up the legs. That got him off Chavez. The jaws released their hold, the muscled body twisting wildly; he let out an enraged yowl. I couldn’t hold him—too much weight, too much fury. Sharp claws and snapping teeth were already tearing tattered holes in the plastic.

All I could do was let go and jump back, set myself, and deliver another kick that caught him somewhere in the hindquarters and sent him tumbling over backward—still entangled in the sheet, but not for long. I went for the .38 again, but the sight had snagged when I jammed the weapon into the holster. I had to muscle it out, and by then the bugger had fought loose of the plastic, those yellow eyes glowing like something out of a nightmare, the big body tensing, then springing. There wasn’t enough time to get off a shot. I made a clumsy, desperate effort to dodge away, knowing I wouldn’t make it, sure for one terrified second that he’d rip my throat out—

Echoing report, muzzle flash.

The dog squealed, twisted, changed direction in mid-air, then dropped straight down, thudding to the ground a few feet to my left, and flopped over onto his side with mouth open and tongue lolling out. Didn’t move or make another sound. Dead before he landed. Chavez had found his revolver, and by luck or skill he’d fired a kill shot and probably saved my life.

I emptied my lungs in a heaving sigh. Chavez was on one knee on the floor; I went to help him to his feet. His left arm where the jacket sleeve had been ripped away shone black with blood.