Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 1 - Combust the Sun (25 page)

"I
guess you were out during that part," Wade said, glancing at Callie.

"Curtis
is dead, Teague," Callie said.

"The
Gigante guy is too," Wade added.

"How
badly did he hurt you, Callie?" I asked.

"Curtis
interrupted Gigante before he could rape me," Callie answered.

"Good.
That saves me digging the sonofabitch up and beating him to death," I said
with bravado for Wade's benefit, but deep down I was just grateful and relieved
Callie had escaped him. "Did we find out who he worked for, or any of the
details?" I asked, and Callie shook her head.

"He
was banging your head into the ground and Callie was on his back, trying to
pull him off you, when we arrived. One of my guys jumped him and went a couple
of rounds before it got ugly and we had to put him away."

My
parents came through the emergency room doors looking frantic. Callie had
called them and assured them I was all right, but after seeing my lumpy face,
they weren't convinced. I told them there was good news/bad news. The good news
was that we were alive. The bad news was their car went up in smoke.

"That's
okay, honey," Mom said sweetly, "we didn't really use it that
much," which made me laugh, which in turn hurt from my waist to my teeth.
While day-to-day events baffled my parents, crisis was their finest hour.

The
ER doctor wanted to keep me overnight for observation, but I insisted on going
home with Callie. I also demanded that Callie rebook our flight for the next
day, which seemed to provide a mild source of amusement for those in charge.
Horizontal people have less clout than vertical ones.

That
night Callie brought me liquids to drink through a straw and kept the ice packs
frozen. My lip was now throbbing and I was feeling pretty cranky. Callie
fluffed my pillows and reminded me that due to the concussion, she had to keep
me awake for a few hours to be certain I wouldn't lapse into a coma, a state I
felt could only be an improvement over my current one. When I finally fell
asleep, I was unconscious until noon, arising to feign total wellness, although
my body parts were so sore I could happily have become a drug addict. It was a
solid week before I began to be able to tell one day from another.

It
was late evening, eight days later, when Wade drove us to the airport at Mach
speed, gesturing with both arms and steering with his knees. It was a perfect
prelude to flight. He recounted how he and his men had located the silver
pickup and Callie, trussed up like a turkey, down below the hill. He'd given
his man Hopper hell when he found out someone had kidnapped us right out from
under him at the cemetery. As it turned out, the young cop had been tricked by
Curtis into forking over our car keys. However, Hopper redeemed himself
slightly when he followed up on a hunch about the reported explosion on 211th.
Wade said when they arrived on the scene, I was unconscious and Callie had bitten
a hole in Curtis's hand the size of a silver dollar.

Callie
interrupted Wade to say she still wanted to know how Caruthers or Isaacs knew
the stone I'd left on Talbot's eye was fake and that the stone Raider swallowed
was fake.

"You
left a stone on a dead guy's eye?" Wade grimaced.

"Long
story," I said. "Bottom line is there's something about those stones
that we don't know yet. The bad guys seem to be able to tell 'em apart like
kids."

At
the airport, we hurried off to the gate. I waved over my shoulder to Wade with
tears in my eyes from sheer gratitude at our being alive, but also from the
pain of lifting my arm up above my waist.

Fifteen
minutes later, we were taxiing down the runway, which always gave me the
shakes. I'd had thrust/drag ratio explained to me, the physics by which objects
the size of buildings are able to float on air. But rationally, it made no
sense, and I was convinced that, at any given moment, the physics and
mathematics behind the whole dubious process would finally be proven false and
I would simply tumble out of the sky. I mentioned this to Callie, who put a
headset on me and cranked the volume up to glass-shattering levels.

I
signaled the flight attendant to bring me a drink. Callie cancelled my order,
reminding me I'd taken pain medication. When we were up in the air, surrounded
by a black void, I began to relax. I could no longer look down and see how far
there was to fall. I was able to think of the darkness as something solid, a
metaphor for life, maybe. Callie leaned up against me reading her book, and for
a moment, everything seemed like it would finally be all right. Callie's safe
return to me was, I had come to realize, the most important thing in my life.

I
watched her put on her reading glasses. She propped them on the end of her
straight, aristocratic nose, and I thought she looked smart and sexy as she
studied her book about interstellar communication with spiritual entities. I
just wanted to be with her like this, our bodies touching, even peripherally,
as we moved through life.

"What?"
she asked sweetly, feeling me staring at her.

"I
like you in glasses. You look—I don't know—sexy."

"It's
the drugs, honey." She patted me and went back to reading.

She's
funny,
I thought.
I've spent so
much time just lusting after her that I never realized she has a very funny
wit.

"Are
you starting to like more than my ass?" she asked, never looking up from
her book. I laughed at being caught thinking just that.

We
drove directly to the police station from the airport. Detective White stood
ready to make notes, having been contacted by Wade. We began with Orca's, moved
on to the murder of Frank Anthony at the Tulsa Health Club and the barter
system at Marathon Studios, the prostitution and drugs that escalated to
heavy-duty pornography and murder. I explained how Isaacs had been turned into
Caruthers's personal puppet and Caruthers was probably behind the murders of
Rita Smith and the attempted murder of Barrett Silvers. When Frank Anthony
threatened to report the studio's nefarious activities, he was shot in the
forehead, compliments of Hank Caruthers, whose initials were on the health club
towel, and it was Hank Caruthers's goons who had just tried to light up our
lives in Tulsa.

Detective
White scratched his head, obviously sorry we'd brought this high-profile
Hollywood mess to his division.

"Where
was the gun you say he always carried in the gym bag?" White asked us.

"We
don't know that," I said.

Detective
White seemed pressured, if one could judge by the sweat rings under his neatly
pressed shirt. "Marathon is a huge studio and it employs thousands of
people. To tarnish a company and its management like this, you need hard
evidence. What you've got would make a good TV show, but it doesn't make an
arrest. Rita Smith's death is on the books as a robbery homicide. Talbot had a
heart attack. Now you're telling me all these people were murdered by a bunch
of studio executives who needed to attract stars at any cost. That's not a
motive. That's the problem half a dozen studios out here have: attracting stars
at any cost. I'm sorry, but it's not enough."

I
told the detective I thought Spider Eye should be questioned about the
possibility of his having been sent to Talbot's house as a hit man and not a
burglar.

"Maybe
even do a little checking on his background in South America to see if hit man
comes up on his resume," I said, only half joking. I could tell from
White's expression that none of what I was suggesting was on his to-do list.

Callie
stood up, letting me know it was time to cut my losses. "I think we should
go to Cedars," Callie whispered, "and talk to Spider Eye
ourselves."

Outside
hospital room 6632, I whispered for Callie to stand guard. "He's staying
in a very nice hospital room. Must have good insurance," I quipped.

"Maybe
the studio takes good care of its own," Callie replied.

I
walked slowly up to the bed where Spider Eye lay recuperating from his gunshot
wound. He looked a lot less terrifying stretched out with a large hole in him.
He'd been hit in the back and was obviously on heavy medication for the pain.
Helpless, Spider Eye looked up and saw me standing in the room. I thought he'd
need a transfusion to bring back his color. He started to yell for someone, but
I put my hand over his mouth. He looked as if he thought I'd come to finish the
job.

"Spi-dah,
Spi-dah, Spi-dah." I said it with the inflection Cary Grant had used when
he spoke Judy Garland's name. "You try to kill me and my friend for no
reason. Now, I can kill you, or you can talk to me. I want to know who hired
you. I will lift my hand off your mouth, and you will say two words. The man's
name. If you say any other words, I will pull my gun out and I will kill you.
Are you ready?"

He
nodded. I removed my hand, and he tried to call for help. I clamped my hand
over his mouth and pulled the gun out of my pocket, tapping him on the forehead
with the barrel in a manner that would not have been very painful to a healthy person
but did nothing to improve Spider Eye's condition. He moaned.

"Now
we're going to try it again, only this time, notice that I have the gun under
your throat. Who hired you?"

"Talbot,"
he muttered.

"Talbot's
dead," I said.

"Talbot."
His eyes pleaded with me to believe him.

Callie
stuck her head in the door and said a doctor was coming.

"Keep
this visit just between us," I said.

Callie
and I beat a hasty retreat down the hallway.

I
told Callie that Spider Eye said Talbot hired him, so maybe Talbot was involved
after all. But Talbot was dead, so why didn't everything come to a halt?

"Let's
go wake Bare up and ask her."

It
was nearly midnight when we knocked on Barrett's front door. She answered after
a few minutes. I was shocked to see the scar across her Greco-Roman features,
as if the Roman statue had fallen over and cracked but the damage had not been
total. She was still handsome. She opened the door slowly, with an arm that was
still bandaged.

"It's
late," she said, "I really don't—" She tried to close the door onus.

I
planted one foot inside her door. "Why in the frog-friggin' hell did you
turn me into a walking decoy by planting that stone on me when your stone is
the one they want? A young blond hood in Tulsa is dead and his Rastafarian
buddy wounded. Curtis, a would-be cop, bit the dust in Okmulgee, but they're
just barnacles on the boat. We're looking for the boat. Now you either help me,
or maybe the police would like to talk to you a little more in depth."

"The
day Frank Anthony bought the stones at Waterston Evers's house, he spent about
an hour there going over Evers's collection. Mathers, Caruthers, and I were
gone for a while looking around the grounds. I think that's when Frank took the
list and put it in the stone. He knew a lot about death stones and—"

"In
the stone?" Callie interrupted.

"Frank
did his homework on death stones. Certain stones, recognized by their
smoothness or eloquent carving, are death stones. Used on wealthy
people—princes, kings. Expertly carved, they contain a passageway inside where
the family could write a special prayer to the gods, stick it in the stone, and
be sure that it would pave the way for their loved one on the other side. Frank
put the list in that stone and gave it to me for safekeeping. He knew they were
trying to kill him, but he was a courageous guy. He said if anything happened
to him, to get the stone to the FBI."

"So
when the death stone was delivered to you at lunch..."

"I
knew Frank was dead and that someone was telling me I was marked."

"Who
was telling you?"

"I
don't know. When I got out of the hospital, I was going to get the stone back
from you, but then I learned they were going to kill Rita. I had to try to stop
it, and they got me. I figured if they knew I had the real stone and I was flat
on my back in the hospital again, they'd come and finish me off. Self-preservation.
I left you to fend them off until I could get out."

"You're
out, but apparently coming forward and talking to the authorities has kind of
slipped your mind," I said sarcastically.

"Did
you take the real stone from my house? Merika says you were here."

"Yes
and yes," I said.

"Good,
because I want nothing more to do with this!" Barrett closed the door, and
I could hear the dead bolt slide shut.

That
night at home, I was working on another script, trying to take my mind off the
Marathon mess that I'd now almost grown accustomed to, like an annoying rash.
Elmo had his huge jowls resting on my bare foot, and his big floppy, soft lips
were comforting.

"I
missed you, Elmo," I told him, and he sighed, letting the full weight of
his head sink onto my foot, confirming he'd missed me too.

Callie
smiled at us and drank her tea. She continued to stare at the photo she'd taken
from Talbot's house and absently twirled the last remaining death stone,
obtained from Barrett's tea canister, around and around on the coffee table.