Light Before Day (34 page)

"Bight," I answered. "The mask allowed him to get away with it."

"Did Corey get away with it?"

"Sort of," I answered. "Billy killed him as soon as he got the tape."

"You're sure of this?"

"Billy confessed," I answered. "He said a third party did the job. Not Spinotta. Not the Vanished Three. Someone else."

"A third party," she mused. I listened to the bleating of car horns from the Strip, watched the luxury sedans and SUVs roll past the intersection one block uphill. "Why do you need to get out of LA?" she asked, but it sounded like she knew the answer.

"Billy's dead. So's Martin Cale."

"Jesus! Did you—"

"I didn't kill either of them. Billy ordered that kid who's living with him to kill Martin Cale and me as soon as we watched the tape. Only problem was, the kid realized it wasn't me and decided not to finish the job. Billy blew his brains out rather than give me the identity of Corey's killer."

"Why?" she asked, baffled.

"I don't know," I said. "I guess it was better to kill himself than have Spinotta do it after he found out the deep shit Billy got him into." Or he was trying to force me into a confrontation with his sugar daddy, because he was convinced I would lose. I kept this thought to myself.

"Brenda, please," I said. "I have no physical evidence for anything I saw or heard tonight.

For all I know, Martin Cale's yacht is still heading out to sea with Martin Cale's body in it. If he hasn't been thrown overboard. I could sit in an interrogation room for the rest of my life and I still wouldn't be able to corroborate any of this."

I hoped she was remembering what she had told me the night before— that it was time for Jimmy to get out of my way whether he liked it or not.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"I need a promise, Brenda!"

"Fine. Where are you going to go?"

I didn't answer.

"Dammit," she whispered. "Dwight called here earlier. They caught up with Elena Castillo and Melissa Brady down in San Diego, just like you said. Melissa's not talking, but Elena hasn't shut up. She told them Corey hired Scott Koffler to bring Daniel Brady to LA. Dwight wanted to know why he hadn't heard Corey's name before."

"What did Jimmy say?"

"Nothing," she answered. "But I'm not sure how long that's going to last."

I started walking down a dark side street lined with parked cars, headed away from my building as fast as I could. "Godammit, little man, you better come back with something that makes me feel good about doing this," she said.

She agreed to meet me on an oak-tree-lined street that runs behind the twenty-four-hour Pavilions grocery store on Santa Monica Boulevard. I got there before she did. Across the boulevard, I could see the last drunken revelers dispersing from in front of the gay bars on Robertson.

I heard two cars approach. My Jeep was in the lead, with Brenda behind the wheel. Nate followed in his white Honda Accord. Brenda got out first and started toward me, with the Jeep key in her hand, her mouth opening and preparing to form words. Just then Nate slammed his car door and headed toward us and Brenda said nothing.

"You have my cell phone number?" she asked at last. I shook my head, and she recited the digits, which I programmed into my phone. "You call me every few hours. If you don't, you better switch out the plates on that thing," she said with a nod to my Jeep. "You don't want Joe Ring on your tail."

Nate looked from me to Brenda, desperate for some kind of explanation. "You did a good thing, Nate," I said. "Coming to me about Daniel Brady."

He had done a lot more than that. Nate Bain was the primary reason Billy Hatfill's plan had failed. If I hadn't known about Daniel Brady's trip to West Hollywood, the tape I had watched that night might have affected me the way Billy hoped it would. "Stay with the Wiltons, please,"

I told him.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Stay with the Wiltons and I'll call you."

"If you think Jimmy's so great, why doesn't it make any difference that he thinks you're going to get killed?"

"You got it backward, Nate," Brenda said. Then she grabbed his shoulder and started walking him back toward his car. She steered him into the passenger seat, shut the door, and then gave me a look through the dull glow of leaf-laced streetlights. "I know where you're going," she said at last. "Even if you don't." I figured she was being spiritual again and I didn't have the time for it.

When I drove past my building, the security guard was gone. I went inside and grabbed some changes of clothes, along with the pictures I had of Corey, Spinotta, and the Vanished Three.

Then I walked to a cash machine and withdrew all the cash I had: one hundred and twenty dollars.

I took the 405 Freeway clear across the San Fernando Valley to where it met up with Interstate 5, and then I headed north, past Santa Clarita, where the rides at Magic Mountain Amusement Park looked like isolated oil derricks against the dark mountains, and up into the San Gabriel Mountains. Roadside signs advised me to kill my air conditioning to avoid overheating the engine.

The few eighteen-wheelers sharing the road with me were lumbering in the inside lane so they could make the ascent without stopping traffic.

The interstate began to undulate through the divide between the Angeles and Los Padres National Forests known as the Grapevine. I became so comfortable and familiar with the feeling of traveling high above sea level that I almost forgot my destination: Visalia, the small town in the Central Valley that Corey had run away from at sixteen. Getting there would require a steep descent.

A wildfire blazed on the near horizon, filling the night sky with something that looked like the trail from a rocket launch. I decided James Wilton had started it to prevent me from leaving LA.

I needed sleep.

In the tiny mountain town of Gorman, I pulled into a motel parking lot. When the sodium vapor lights slid across the interior of my car, for the first time I saw the envelope resting on the passenger seat. My first name was written across it in Brenda's sloping cursive.

At first I thought it might be some cash. Then I remembered what she had told me two nights before as we waited for Scott Koffler to meet us outside Plummer Park. She had run Corey's real last name, McCormick, and found something interesting. Jimmy didn't know she had it. I opened the envelope.

It was a printout of an article from the
Bakersfield Californian
dated a little over three weeks earlier. Brenda had retrieved it from the website's archives, so there were no accompanying photographs. The headline read PLEASANT VALLEY MOBILE HOME EXPLOSION KILLS 4. A

powerful explosion had ripped apart a trailer owned by forty-seven-year-old Tonya McCormick, just outside the tiny town of Avenal.

Authorities believed that McCormick, who had served time in state prison for possession of an illegal narcotic, had been operating a methamphetamine lab in her trailer, and that toxic by-products from the manufacturing process had ignited the explosion. The article said Tonya McCormick and Kyle Purcell, her boyfriend of three years, and her thirteen-year-old son Caden were all believed dead in the blast, pending final confirmation from the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, the law enforcement body in charge of investigating all meth lab accidents throughout the state of California.

In the story's most bizarre twist, the explosion had also killed a fifty-two-year-old junior high school English teacher, Janice Hughes. An unnamed source close to the investigation confirmed that Caden McCormick had been a student of Janice Hughes, and that the Kings County Sheriff's Department believed the boy gave his teacher some indication that he was being abused.

Janice Hughes had died of her injuries at the scene. A San Francisco native, she had been a resident of Kings County for less than a year and had repeatedly expressed concern for Caden McCormick to her colleagues at Good Hope Junior High, specifically regarding the boy's lack of grooming and inability to focus during class.

Tonya McCormick, Corey's mother. Caden McCormick, his younger brother. Both had died the same week Corey had discovered his uncle was a customer of Joseph Spinotta's. The following week, Corey had gone to Billy Hatfill asking for Joseph Spinotta's location.

I sat in my parked car, trying to make sense of the article on my lap. But my breaths rasped like a tired dog's and the text on the paper kept smearing into an image of Martin Cale's open throat.

I studied my map and found the tiny town of Avenal. It was due east of Visalia, almost directly across the floor of the Great Central Valley that sat between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges.

Brenda Wilton's parting words took on new meaning. She had known where I was headed, even if I hadn't. I was pretty sure she wouldn't have let me leave LA otherwise.

Central Coast Ranges

West of Coalinga

Morning

Eddie Cairns awoke to dawn seeping through the slats of the vaulted ceiling above him. He jerked and felt nylon rope securing his ankles and wrists to the bed frame, the exposed metal coils digging into his back.

This much clarity usually meant that he had crashed, but something else had softened the blow. He should have felt like the Holy Ghost had carved his insides out with an ice cream spoon, but he didn't. There was something else in his system. He remembered the, golden girl from the night before and her silver needle.

Then she was standing over him. She had lost her luster. Her hair was tangled and her eyes were bagged, and sweat plastered her white tank top to her round breasts. When he tried to form words, her hazel eyes zeroed in on him.

It took him a second to realize the woman had started talking to him. "Eddie, a girl named Lucy Vernon gave me your name. Does the name Vernon ring a bell? Her father was your supervisor back when you worked with that picking crew over in Corcoran. You told him a story, Eddie. Do you remember?"

"What'd you give me?" he asked.

"Something to keep your head clear," she said. "But it's going to wear off soon. Do you remember the story you told Morris Vernon? It was a bad one, Eddie. You scared him shitless."

"My mother sent you, didn't she?"

The girl's face went dead.

"Fuck shit!" Eddie cried. "I fuckin' knew it. You're some kind of crazy herbalist or something."

She cocked one eyebrow. "You think your mother sent an herbalist after you?"

"She was always tryin' to get me to take some herbal shit to get me off the meth. That's what you gave me, right? Where am I? Some goddamn loony bin where they make you pray all day and take out the trash?"

"You're getting distracted, Eddie."

"You tell my mother that I—"

"Your mother's dead, Eddie."

Eddie swallowed. She was wrong. He waited for her to tell him she was wrong, but silence filled the vast space like methane gas. No sound from outside told him where he was. The floor below was, concrete. The shafts of light through the ceiling were gaining luminescence, lancing dust motes. He could smell pine and wood rot.

The girl said, "She died last year while you were living up on that tweaker commune outside of Redding. Too bad the place got raided."

"Lying bitch," he muttered.

Eddie Cairns tried to remember his mother's face and came up with next to nothing. Except for her silvery gray hair. Just like Suzanne's, the boss who had fired him the night before. Maybe it was Suzanne's hair he was remembering.

"Your sister's got her things. They're in a storage locker down in Wasco. The will didn't even mention your name, but your sister says you've got a right to some of them. Sounds fair, doesn't it?"

"Let me go."

"We're not at the negotiation stage yet, Eddie."

"I want to see her," he moaned.

"Your sister?"

"My mother!"

The red-haired woman sat down on the edge of the bed frame and patted his thigh gently.

That's when he realized that whatever she had injected him with had rendered his legs immobile.

She kept patting his thigh, as if to drive this point home. The hard expression on her face, the way her amber eyes bored into his, didn't match her tender gesture.

After a while, the girl said, "You want me to find out where she's buried?"

"Fuck you, cunt!" he roared.

"Stick to bitch, Eddie. Bitch I can handle. Cunt drives me over the edge."

She leaned into his face so close that all he could see were her teeth. "You were half out of your mind when you talked to Morris Vernon. And he'd tracked you down after you missed three days of work, so maybe you were just trying to come up with a good excuse. But your story had a lot of details, Eddie. So many, in fact, that Morris couldn't get the story out of his head."

Tears blurred his vision, and when he blinked, he saw the woman hadn't reacted to them.

Then his sobs broke, echoing up to the high ceiling, trying to move parts of his body that wouldn't budge. The woman got to her feet and brushed off her thighs. "Your resistance is boring me, Eddie. You're acting like you've got some life to defend. You don't."

Eddie heard glass bottles knocking together. Then he saw the girl was squatting on the floor several feet away. He saw her lift a syringe above her head and give it a test squirt.

"I'll scream my fucking head off!" he cried.

"Uh-huh," she said.

He began panting uncontrollably as she closed the distance between them, holding the syringe with the needle aimed at the floor as if it were a gun. She twisted one of his arms, ran three fingers over the track marks there, and shook her head.

"Relax, Eddie," she said as she injected him. "At least it's not another spinal."

C H A P T E R 16

The motel's bleating alarm clock woke me at nine A.M. from a vague dream of wildfires. After a brief shower, I walked to the gas station next door. The roar of eighteen-wheelers bounced off the granite walls of the mountains that rose on either side of the freeway. They looked poised to unleash a rain of boulders on the gas station. Just a short distance away was Tejon Pass, where Interstate 5 made a sudden northward plummet into the Great Central Valley.