In the Night of the Heat (26 page)

But I had the advantage, and Carlyle knew it. His only sane option was to hit his brakes and trust me to evade him. If he didn't, the slightest mistake would flip him over, or he might flip over whether or not he made a mistake. That's the thing: SUVs flip over.

Just like all those studies have warned.

Carlyle waited until I was within fifteen yards before he braked, and by then he'd waited so long that he couldn't help trying to steer clear of me. I'd panicked him so much that he steered too hard, too fast.

A nightmare scenario unfolded in my windshield like a horror movie: Carlyle's frenzied steering had sent him out of control—his Jeep skittered, then skidded, fishtailing toward us.

Right, steer left. Left, steer right.

I was close enough to see the dealership's logo glittering from the side of Carlyle's rear flank by the time I decided to steer left, toward the drop-off. My brakes squealed from a love tap, and I felt my back tires trying to break free of my control.

The rest was what Dad would call giving it up to God. You do everything you know how to do, but eventually death catches up to you. I thought of Chela, and felt sad for her. Dad reached out instinctively, his arm planted across my chest, trying to hold me in my seat the way he had when I was a child.

The roar of Carlyle's brakes sounded like an approaching hurricane.

One…two…three…
We were still on the road. As my life's purpose narrowed to controlling my car, images came to me in flashes, obstacles to avoid: The guardrail alarmingly close on the driver's side. A cloud of smoke from Carlyle's brakes. The underbelly of Carlyle's Jeep as he capsized on the road, spinning toward the rocks.

In my rearview mirror, I saw Carlyle's overturned Jeep spinning, but I had to look back at the road. A
crash
behind us told me how hard the impact was. The Jeep seemed to bounce, and more skidding told me that Carlyle's ride wasn't over. This time, he was headed toward the cliff.

As I tried to fight myself out of a skid, an oncoming Winnebago appeared suddenly from around the corner, in my path. The appearance of another car had always been inevitable, but that might have been the worst time, and the worst kind. I forgot Carlyle's troubles while I tried to resolve my own.

The Winnebago's driver gave it up to God, too. He braked, bringing a much-more-unwieldy vehicle to a controlled stop. She must have figured it was my job to evade her, or we were both fucked. The strategy paid off: I steered well clear of the Winnebago and stopped as close to the rocks as I could, pulled halfway out of the traffic lane.

If Dad hadn't been with me, I might have parked across the lanes to stop the traffic flow—but my first priority was to make sure that he wasn't having a heart attack. Dad was breathing in slightly hitching gasps. I don't know how long he had been breathing like that, but it was the first time I could afford to notice.

“Dad?” I said.

He waved me away. “I'm…all right.” He breathed again, wincing.

“No chest pain?”

“No. Just…startled.”

I wasn't sure I could believe him, but I didn't have a choice. I
glanced around the bend, and I saw Carlyle's SUV rocking on the cliff behind us. The barrier had already been torn, but either Carlyle's willpower or pure fortune had kept him from plummeting down.

But gravity was doing its best.

Shit.
The Jeep was going to fall. I had just started running toward the Jeep when I heard something metallic groan, and the Jeep tumbled down with a horrific bounce.

No way they'll survive that
, I thought.
No way.

Carlyle had whiplashed my emotions again: A moment before, I'd been wishing him dead; now I was praying for his survival.

The height was dizzying when I reached the edge of the cliff—I have a touch of vertigo, which kicks in at inconvenient times. I came close to swaying. I saw the Jeep right away, to my left: It had landed on a wide ledge twenty feet down rather than plummeting down another thirty.

The nose of the Jeep was upturned, facing me, one broken headlight still bright, one out. The glass in the windshield had broken out entirely. Both airbags had deployed, so I couldn't see Carlyle or his passenger behind the massive balloons.

And it was scalable. Steep at one point, but I could get down there without a rope.

Was the Jeep going to burn? The hood was steaming, but I didn't smell gasoline, and I didn't see smoke. Carlyle was luckier than he deserved.

I turned and ran back toward the parked Winnebago, waving my arms. The driver had climbed out, a portly woman wearing a fishing cap in hunter's camo.

“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “I just saw them go over—”

“Do you have flares?” I said.

“Of course I do.” She sounded almost offended by the question.

“Put them out—we need to make sure nobody else goes over,” I
said, then I pointed out my Beemer, which was unrecognizable from twenty yards. “Make sure nobody hits that car. My dad's in there. He can't walk.”

“Oh, my goodness!” she said again, in shock. Her cheeks flushed bright red.

I turned to run back toward Carlyle's Jeep.

“Could he still be alive?” the woman called after me.

“Flares!” I said. I wanted her to keep her mind on my car and my father.

I half slid, half climbed down a few choice rocks to make it to the ledge that had prevented Carlyle Simms from exploding at the bottom of the ravine. Now that I was closer to the car, I thought I might smell smoke. I should have brought the fire extinguisher out of my trunk, I realized.
Except that Carlyle smashed your trunk into an accordion, so I guess that's on him.

The Jeep had reached a secure berth, I realized, its rear nestled firmly between boulders that weren't going anywhere. It didn't look like I was in danger of tumbling down with him.

I reached the driver's side first, and my illusions were lost.

Carlyle's empty eyes stared from a bloody mess of crushed flesh and bone. His head lolled at an angle damned near perpendicular to his spine. The driver's-side front window was spiderwebbed, cratered, and splattered red. Someone hadn't been wearing his seatbelt. So much for his interview.

I heard a groan. Another glance at Carlyle's face reminded me that the groan wasn't from him. I squeezed between the hood of the car and the rocks to make it to the passenger side.

Lee Quarry was groggy but alive. Not surprisingly, his seat belt was buckled. His face didn't have a scratch, but when he saw mine, his eyes went wide. I tried to forget how he had put his hands on
Chela, but suddenly I was pissed about my car again. And my father's breathing.

Lee's head was already lolling, but his eyes widened with panic as they focused on me.

“Naw, man, wait—” He tried to wriggle away, but he was trapped behind his airbag and too disoriented to free himself from his seat belt.

“Let me see your hands,” I said.

“Shit, man—my arm's broken!”

“Carlyle's neck is broken. Something really bad could happen to you before the ambulance gets here. Why'd you try to kill me?”

Lee raised his arms over the airbag, within my sight. His left arm was misshapen, dangling lower, but he kept it raised with gritted teeth. They weren't called Heat for nothing.

“Man, that was Carlyle,” he said, fighting a sob. “Is his neck really broke?”

“Let's just say you'll save a stamp this Christmas,” I told him. “Answer my question.”

Lee fought to compose himself, blinking several times as he stared into my eyes. He knew his life was in my hands; if he'd been in my place, he would have killed me already.

“OK, man, look…” Lee said. “Carlyle said he was gonna follow you, that's all. I never thought that crazy motherfucker would try to crash into you. Shit—he almost got me killed!”

Funny how the survivor is always the innocent one.

“Why's Carlyle following me?” I said.

“He said you were trying to trash T.D.,” he said. “Trying to get all that shit with Chantelle stirred up again.”

“Did Carlyle help T.D. kill Chantelle?”

A light flared way back in Lee's eyes. “Man, I don't know,” Lee said. “I wasn't there.”

“But you know they did it. As close as you guys were? You're full of shit. Even if they didn't say a word, you knew as soon as you saw them. You could see it.”

Lee stayed firm, his features hardening. “Like I said, I do not know. I was not there. Can you let me out of this damn car before we blow up?”

“Did Carlyle kill T.D.?”

“Fuck you, man. Carlyle loved T.D.”

“Then who killed him?”

“Shit, if I knew that, he'd be on the news. Let me the fuck out of here, man.”

“What do you know about Wallace Rubens?”

“Who?”

No light in Lee's eyes that time; the name didn't mean anything to him. But Wallace Rubens had meant something to Carlyle—his face had told me that when he came to my house.

Dammit. Carlyle might have been my best chance to find out who killed T.D., and the son of a bitch had just made me kill him. That might not be exactly what happened, but that was the way it felt. The smell of Carlyle's blood made me feel sick to my stomach.

I opened Lee's door and helped him out of the Jeep.

Above us, the police were waiting.

 

I was relieved when Melanie picked up her phone. “You got something?” she said, anxious. Melanie sounded desperate for me to finish it, somehow. Make the pain stop.

The rain was back to a drizzle. A trickle of traffic passed as a Ventura County sheriff's deputy officiated from the center lane. By then, the Winnebago was long gone. I watched as my father's gurney was
lifted into the back of the Lifeline ambulance that was parked as close to the shoulder as it could get. Dad lay staring straight up at the sky, full of resignation. He looked smaller than he had seemed in my car. We hadn't expected to have to talk to doctors today.

“Bad news,” I told Melanie. “I'd tell you in person, but I don't want you to hear it on TV.”

Melanie's line filled with silent dread. Her silence was a torrent of questions.

I told her Carlyle was dead, and how he'd attacked me and my father on the road.

“No!” she said. “Ten,
no.
” A plea to confess I was only joking.

“It doesn't mean he killed your cousin, but it sure doesn't look good,” I said. “We knew this might be coming, Mel.”

The wheels to my father's gurney rattled across the ambulance floor. The white-shirted attendant waved at me to climb in behind him. The only thing worse than taking Dad to a doctor was riding with him in an ambulance. I climbed in, swinging myself inside with the handrail with one hand, on my phone with the other. I knew the drill by then.

Chest pains don't mean it's a heart attack
, I wanted to say as I stared down at Dad's face, chiseled tight as he tried not to sink into fear. If I fussed over Dad, it only scared him. I thought it might be better for Dad if I stayed on the phone. Casual. Just a routine trip to the hospital.

“Maybe you should call his girlfriend,” I told Melanie. I remembered how protective Alma had been of her home; the honor-roll bumper sticker on her car. “In case Lee doesn't.”

“Oh, God,” she said, her realization deepening. “Alma and the boys! And these kids. He's Uncle Carlyle to them. They just saw him at their father's funeral yesterday.”

“We'll talk more about this soon. I'm on my way to the hospital.”

“I'm sorry—are you all right?” Melanie sounded deeply concerned. “Your dad?”

“We're lucky to be alive, so we're fine. I'll call you later. I'm really sorry, Mel.”

“God, I'm sorry, too,” she said, soothing me. Somehow, Melanie and I couldn't keep from crashing into each other. It was starting to bruise.

In the Ojai Valley Community Hospital emergency room, the doctor sounded certain that the chest pains were only Dad's recurring angina, not a heart attack. Sure enough, after my father got a dose of nitro, the pain went away. Still, it reminded me too much of waking in the middle of an old, ugly dream.

Marcela arrived with Chela by five o'clock. Marcela conferred by phone with my cousin Reggie and agreed that Dad should stay overnight for observation. It pays to have medical experts close to the family.

Since Dad wanted to go home, he wasn't speaking to us before long. In some ways, the episode on the road with Carlyle Simms was buried by its aftermath at the hospital. Marcela sat beside Dad's bed, holding his hand openly, maybe for the first time, but he was so angry that he barely looked at her. Dad's face was drawn and weary. He hated hospitals. To me, he looked like a scared old man again. Even Marcela's chiding and Chela's cooing couldn't loosen up Dad's face.

For once, the television was turned off. The news isn't as entertaining when the top story is about you. For dinner, Chela, Marcela, and I ate burgers from the cafeteria—hospital cafeterias generally have fast food to give patients and staff alike comfort from stress. We stayed in Dad's room until nine, when he head nurse insisted that regulations required us to leave.

“I'll be back in the morning, Dad,” I told him, standing over his bed.

“Foolishness,” Dad said, just to make sure his point had been made. He wanted to sleep in his own bed. He didn't want to be alone. The way Dad refused to look me in the eye cut more than it usually did, but I understood. My ear buzzed, at the same instant I remembered the sight of the ravine spinning past my windshield.

“I'm sorry about all of this. Truly. I love you, man.” As if I said it every day.

Dad looked straight past me, so I gave up and headed for his door. Finally, Dad called after me. “LAPD will…call. Nelson. Be…careful.”