Empty Mile (27 page)

There was nothing about it to indicate that it was laced with gold. But it was there, the bed of an old river, visible, touchable. Real. Until now it had been a blur on a photograph, the dream of a desperate man. But not any longer. I felt something tugging at me, skirting my reasoning mind, going straight for whatever part of me it was that wanted to believe in miracles.

I continued through the trees to the river. Stan and Rosie were sitting on the bank beside a pile of excavated dirt. They were holding hands and their backs were toward me. They seemed to be doing nothing but staring at the bright water that moved in front of them. Stan’s shovel lay on the ground near him, next to the gold pans.

When they heard me approaching they turned and for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Both of them had something smeared on their faces. Against the glare of the water it looked dull and dark and I thought at first that it must be mud. But as I stepped closer I saw it was something else. Stan and Rosie had covered their faces with a slurry of water, crushed moths, and concentrates.

The mixture was almost dry and as their faces moved small pieces of it fell away. One of Stan’s hands lay closed in his lap. He raised it toward me and opened his fingers. A damp mound of concentrates lay creased in the center of his palm.

“Dad was right, Johnny. We only had to do five pans to get this.” He scraped the mix of black sand and gold dust off his hand into one of the pans beside him. “Dad never found so much in just five pans.”

I knelt and examined the concentrates. Without refining them properly it was impossible to tell exactly what proportion of gold they contained, but there was so much color there, so much dull yellow in the black sand, that it looked to me like Stan had panned at least an ounce of gold. It might be that not all of the buried river was so impregnated with wealth, but it showed that at least where Stan had dug it was very rich indeed.

“What do you have on your face?”

“I didn’t want anything to go wrong with getting the gold. I don’t want it to be like Plantasaurus. Rosie was helping me. Has Jeremy Tripp gone?”

“Yes, he’s gone.”

“He knows it was me, doesn’t he?”

“He was just asking questions.”

“Johnny!”

“Yes, okay, he knows, but it’s going to be all right.”

“How can it be all right?”

“I fixed things.”

“How?”

“I just explained how it was all a bad mistake and you didn’t mean to do it. He understood.”

Stan looked at me for a long moment. “You promise, Johnny?”

“I promise.”

He glanced at Rosie and let out a heavy breath.

Gareth and I met at the Black Cat café in Back Town. It was the middle of the afternoon and the place was empty. We took a booth on the other side of the room from the counter. Gareth looked across the table at me measuringly.

“I’d like to think this means we’re going to be friends. You asking me out for coffee and all. But I wonder if there isn’t a little more to it.”

“How are things going with the road to the lake?”

“Oh, I think me first, Johnny. I saw a thing this morning that for some reason made me think immediately of you. Swinging by the Plantagion warehouse on my usual paranoid route to get a glimpse of Viv, I happened to notice there’d been a fire. I bet Jeremy Tripp isn’t too happy with you.”

“What would that have to do with me?”

“Fires don’t start themselves.”

“He’s not very happy with you, either. Marla was at a meeting at the town hall where he and Vivian petitioned the council against building the road. They said they weren’t going to stop until they had enough signatures to shut it down.”

“That cunt. Why doesn’t it surprise me?”

“Do you have any idea who Jeremy Tripp is?”

“A rich asshole who stole my woman and who’s busy fucking up what’s left of my life.”

“He’s Patricia Prentice’s brother.”

Gareth blinked and looked blankly at me as though he hadn’t understood.

“He’s Patricia Prentice’s brother. He’s seen the video and he knows you shot it. He thinks all three of us are responsible for her death and he’s not going to let up on any of us till he gets his revenge. The way he’s going after me is by attacking Plantasaurus. He bought Marla’s house and kicked her out of it. And he’s working against the road to get at you.

And he took Vivian, of course.”

“And there’s the fire, of course.”

“What about the fire?”

“Johnny, if we’re leading up to what I think we’re leading up to, there’s no room for bullshitting each other. You’ve got him on your ass about that fire. It’s too fucking coincidental that we’re here the morning after it happened.”

“Okay, the fire.”

“And he’s right?”

I didn’t want to tell Gareth any more than I had to, but I needed his help to do something I wasn’t capable of doing alone. “Stan made an error of judgment.”

“There you go, wasn’t too hard. Now we can move forward. How do you know he’s her brother?”

“I heard it from one of our clients. And later he told me himself.”

“You talked to him?”

“I was trying to get him to leave us alone.”

“Johnny, it’s just you and Marla on that tape. Why does he think I made it?”

I’d known I was going to have to cover this unfortunate detail and I tried now to make it sound as matter of fact and unavoidable as possible.

“I told him. It was all I had, man. He was destroying our business. I mean, you set up the video, it didn’t have anything to do with us. If anyone should have been taking the heat it was you.”

“Ah …” Gareth smiled tightly to himself. “That explains something. I had Bill on the phone yesterday screaming all kinds of insanity. I do believe he mentioned the video. I denied all knowledge, of course. Not very nice using me like that, Johnboy.”

“Like I said, it was all I had. Anyway, it didn’t work. Tripp just added you to the list and kept right on attacking us. Now, because of the fire, he’s demanding that I give him Empty Mile. If I don’t he’s going to send Stan to prison.”

I watched Gareth carefully as I said this. His face went hard and he shook his head violently. “Your land? No fucking way. That is
not
happening.”

I shook my own head and sighed. “I don’t see much of a way around it.”

“Yes you do, Johnny. That’s why we’re here. You want me to kill him for you.”

“You said before that you wanted to do it.”

“What I said was that
we
should do it. Together.”

“I don’t have it in me.”

“But you think I do.”

I shrugged. Gareth looked at me for a long time without speaking, tapping his forefinger on the table beside his coffee cup.

“Okay, I’ll do it, but you have to help. I’ll take care of the nasty stuff, don’t worry. But you have to be there.”

“Okay.”

“And I want a third of Empty Mile. I told you I was interested in it and it seems like fair payment for what you want done. Especially as Tripp wants all of it.”

The thought of being connected to Gareth through the land made my blood run cold, but we were going to be connected anyway if we killed Jeremy Tripp, so I said yes. I didn’t really have a choice.

“Okay, a third.”

“And we’re talking a full one-third share, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Water rights, a share in the timber if we cut any trees down, mineral rights … that sort of thing.”

“If you want.”

“Cool. We’re going to be partners, Johnny!”

“Tripp is only going to hold off a day or two before he goes to the police on the fire thing.”

“That won’t be a problem. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now.”

“It’ll take me a week or so to get the ownership papers for the land changed.”

“We’ve got a deal, dude. I trust you. Shake my hand and it’s done. Just do the papers when you can.”

He held out his hand and as I shook it I felt like I was being pulled into a long dark tunnel from which there was no exit except some dreadful future where everything was dangerous and irrevocably changed from the way it was now.

“This partnership could really benefit you, Johnny. If we ever need to put any money into the place I could leverage the cabins.”

A little while later Gareth left, saying he’d call me the next day when things were set. I deliberately didn’t ask him how he planned to do it. I didn’t want to know any sooner than I had to.

I sat by myself in the Black Cat for another half hour, thinking about how easy it was for humans to do things that changed them forever. One decision. One action. That was all it took. I was poised between two versions of myself—innocent and killer. In moving from one to the other I knew I would lose part of who I was, and I wondered, that afternoon, if there would be enough of me left to recognize when it was all over.

Back at the cabin, when I told Marla things were in motion, she seemed to accept it until I came to the part about the price Gareth had exacted.

“Are you fucking joking?”

“What was I going to say? I can’t do it by myself. And he
wants
to do it. It’s only a third, we’ll still have the rest.”

“It means he’ll be here all the time. Don’t you understand that? It gives him an excuse. Are you blind? Have you just kind of missed that I can’t stand him anywhere near me? He hates you, Johnny. And he hates me. And he’s not going to waste a fucking minute of this.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

Marla looked at me and shook her head. For a moment her mouth worked, but whatever it was she wanted to say was strangled by her despair and in the end all she could do was lift her eyes to the ceiling and shriek.

CHAPTER 30

T
he morning of the next day started with Gareth calling and asking about the garden at the back of Jeremy Tripp’s house.

“Can other houses see into it?”

“No, it’s cut straight into the forest.”

“Does it have a fence?”

“No.”

Gareth seemed pleased with this and told me to keep my phone on me and to be ready to go sometime in the afternoon. He called again around three and told me to get over to Old Town as fast as I could. I met him on the main street there. He was parked a hundred yards back from Oakridge’s only movie theater. I pulled up behind him and got into his Jeep. As I slid into the seat he reached across and I was forced to clasp hands with him.

“You ready, Johnboy? This is where the tough get going.”

“I guess.”

“I’ve been following him around all day. He’s been in town with Vivian getting more signatures for his fucking petition.” Gareth nodded down the street at the theater. “Now they’re watching a movie. They just went in—that gives us a couple of hours.”

“To do what?”

“They’re using Vivian’s van—she’s been driving, like the good little pig she is. Which means Tripp’s car is back at his place.”

Gareth took his cell phone out and turned it off.

“Yours too, dude. Don’t want to be traced.”

He started the Jeep and made a U-turn and we drove north out of Old Town, out of Oakridge, and into the belt of forest that separated the Slopes from the town. It was BLM land here and there were no houses among the trees. The only traffic that used the road was either tourists or people who lived in, or worked for, the big houses higher up. But it was late in the year now and there were few tourists visiting Oakridge and we didn’t see a single other car.

We didn’t speak until Gareth pulled the Jeep off the road, into a fire trail a half mile short of where the houses of the Slopes began. The land here was steep and as the car made the turn I looked back over my shoulder, down the stretch of road we’d just traveled up, and saw a long narrow straight that made a right-hand turn at the bottom so tight it looked like the road dead-ended in a solid wall of trees. We bounced along the trail for several hundred yards then Gareth stopped the Jeep and got out. He took a backpack from the backseat and slung it over his shoulder.

“End of the line, Johnny. We have to walk from here, I don’t want anyone seeing the car.”

“Through the forest?”

“Yeah. Tripp’s on Eyrie. That’s off the road we just came up, another half mile or so. And his place is about five hundred yards along it. So all we have to do is head uphill from here and we should hit his backyard.”

Gareth took a compass from his pocket, checked the direction, and stepped off the trail into the trees. The forest here felt threatening. It was a place men did not usually come and it seemed to me that our presence violated the way things were supposed to be.

Whatever Gareth had in his backpack made a metallic clinking, and that and the forest and what we were going to do started to work on me. I began to picture one horrific bludgeoning scene after another.

Gareth must have seen the fear on my face.

“Relax, dude, we’re not going to chop him into pieces or anything. All we’re going to do is make a little alteration to that fancy car of his and then he’s going to have an accident.” Gareth held up his hands. “Totally hands-off.”

We continued our way through the forest. The ground was steep and covered with a thick carpet of dry brown pine needles that slipped under our feet. We made slow progress. I kept my eyes on the ground as much as I could and tried to convince myself that killing someone by engineering an accident wasn’t quite as bad as stabbing the life out of them.

It took us half an hour to get level with the properties on the downhill side of Eyrie Street. Gareth’s navigation was slightly off and because we couldn’t see more than twenty yards on either side of us we unknowingly walked through a corridor of forest between two properties and almost blundered out onto the road. From there, though, we got our bearings and it only took us another couple of minutes to backtrack and find the rear border of Jeremy Tripp’s garden.

We stood hidden at the edge of the trees looking out at the bright expanse of lawn. The archery target was there, and on a table on the deck the pages of a magazine lifted lazily as a light breeze caught them. The house was still and quiet.

Gareth nodded toward the carport at the side of the house. The top on Jeremy Tripp’s V12 E-type Jaguar roadster was down and the heavy chrome frame along the upper edge of its windshield caught a stray shaft of sun and made a single bright highlight in the shade.

“That’s going to make things easier, I thought we’d have to break into a garage. We better hurry up, though. If they come back right after the movie we only have an hour or so.”

We stepped out into the light of the garden and although neither it nor the house was overlooked by any of the neighboring properties I felt immediately that we were on show to the world. We walked quickly along the left edge of the garden and into the carport. The open structure was shielded from view on one side by the forest, and on the other by the house. The hedge out front covered us from the road.

Gareth took a flashlight from his backpack, then lay down on the concrete floor so that, by angling his head, he could see behind one of the car’s chrome-wire front wheels. He pulled his head back and sat up.

“Good.”

He took a fine metal file out of the pack and leaned back under the car. For the next couple of minutes he filed gently at something on the other side of the wheel. He stopped regularly and checked his work with the flashlight. When he was satisfied he reached out toward me with one hand.

“There’s a bottle in there. Be careful with it.”

I opened the backpack. Inside was a small collection of loose tools, a pair of industrial rubber gloves, a three-foot length of steel pipe about an inch in diameter, a wad of something that looked like cotton wool, and a small bottle covered with bubble wrap. The bottle had a ground-glass stopper like the sort old-fashioned drugstores display in their windows and it was half full of a colorless liquid. I pulled the bubble wrap off it and handed it to Gareth.

“What is it?”

“Nitric acid. Give me the gloves and that wool stuff.”

I passed over what he wanted and as he pulled on the gloves he outlined what he was going to do.

“The brake lines carry brake fluid from a master cylinder to the brakes on each wheel. When you put your foot on the brake pedal it increases the pressure on the fluid and this transfers to sets of calipers which squeeze the brake pads against the discs and slow the car. Of course, if there’s a hole in the brake lines then brake fluid squirts out when you put the brakes on and your brakes, they don’t work so good no more. We could just cut the brake line, but that would look a tad suspicious. What I want to do is make them just thin enough so that when he brakes hard they rupture. The acid removes the file marks and eats through more of the metal. You do it right, it looks just like a faulty part. It’s pretty hard to judge with this stuff, though, but if I use too much his brakes will still be fucked and we’ll just have to hope he doesn’t notice the leak till it’s too late.”

Gareth pulled a piece of the cotton-like material off the main wad and held it up to me.

“Glass wool. They use it in fish tank filters. It’s the only thing you can use as a sponge with acid.”

He twisted the stopper out of the bottle and carefully wet the glass wool with several drops of acid. Then he lay down and reached behind the wheel again. I lay head-on to the front of the car and watched as he stroked an angled metal pipe about a quarter-inch diameter with the acid. Thin white fumes hazed the outline of the pipe after each pass.

When he’d finished with that wheel, Gareth did the same to the one on the other side. Then he went back and checked the first.

“Okay, I guess. Take a look.”

He moved away and I took his place. The brake line was still intact but it now appeared to be sweating beads of reddish-brown liquid along three or four inches of its length.

Gareth stuffed the used glass wool into the acid bottle, stoppered it again, and returned everything to the backpack.

“It’ll go for sure the first time he hits the brakes.”

“What about the back ones?”

“This car’s got what’s called split diagonals—one circuit feeds the left front and right rear brakes, the other does vice versa. You put a hole anywhere in the circuit and both ends are fucked. And even if he slams the rears on with the emergency it’s only going to help us. The car will either spin or flip.”

“You don’t think anyone will figure it out?”

“Depends how suspicious they are, how deeply they investigate, whether or not the car gets fucked up enough to hide certain things. It’s thirty-five years old. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that something on it could fail. Those brake lines are just going to look like they were corroded. Even if someone does suspect something, why would they connect it to us? We’re just a couple of small-town slobs, and you’re the nice guy looking after his challenged brother. As far as anyone knows we had peripheral contact with Tripp at most.”

Gareth started away from the carport.

“What do we do now?”

“Wait for them to come home.”

We went into the corridor of forest at the side of the garden and cut right toward the road. Staying so close to the scene of our crime seemed to me to be a monumentally stupid thing to do. I tugged at Gareth’s sleeve.

“Wouldn’t it be better to get out of here?”

“We can’t just leave things for whenever that prick feels like going for a drive again. We have to know when he gets home and we have to know when Vivian’s not with him anymore. So, we’re going to stay hidden in these trees and watch the road and Vivian’s house. When she’s safely back at her own place we’ll trigger Jerry-boy into taking the Jag for a latenight spin.”

“How?”

“I’ll make a phone call. Only problem will be if he takes Vivian back to his place for a bit of sausage action.”

We crouched in the trees a few yards back from the edge of the road. We were hidden from view but we could see a stretch of tarmac and the front of Vivian’s house. Jeremy Tripp and Vivian must have stayed in town for dinner after their movie because they didn’t come home for close to three hours. I was cold and I had my eyes closed in an uncomfortable doze when we heard the sound of a car, faint at first, then louder as it moved up the long slope toward the intersection with Eyrie. It had started to get dark by then and when the car made the turn, the road in front of us was suddenly washed in the yellow-white of headlights.

Vivian’s van pulled into her driveway. The security lights at the front of the house popped on. The van idled for a moment, then the engine shut off and the headlights went dark. Jeremy Tripp and Vivian got out and stood talking for a couple of minutes. At the end of this he took her hand and made a show of trying to pull her down the driveway. Vivian laughed and shook her head and waved him off. After a little more talk they embraced and kissed, then Tripp walked diagonally across the road toward his house and out of our line of sight. Vivian went into her own house and Gareth muttered under his breath: “Goodnight, bitch.”

I went to stand up but he held me down and whispered, “I want to make sure he doesn’t come back.”

We waited another five minutes but there was no further movement on the road, so we moved back through the forest and started down toward Gareth’s Jeep. The journey was more difficult in the dark and both of us slipped and fell more than once on the pine needles. We couldn’t risk using the flashlight. Luckily, the fire trail cut right across that part of the mountain and all we had to do was keep stumbling downhill till we hit it. We veered off course quite a way and when we finally came out of the forest we were a couple of hundred yards further along the trail than where we’d left the Jeep.

There was no moon but there were stars and the dry flattened grass of the trail was silver as we walked back along it not talking and rubbing at the scratches the forest had left on our arms.

When we got to the car we climbed inside and closed the doors. I was exhausted and it seemed to me that we had done more than enough for this thing to be over with.

Gareth looked at me as he started the Jeep. “That was the easy part. It’s going to get nastier now, Johnny. You’re not going to fuck up, are you?”

I shook my head, though truthfully I was now so scared I felt outside my body, felt that I observed and acted, but had no ability whatsoever to influence events around me.

“Good.”

We drove slowly back along the fire trail to the road with our lights out. Just before we emerged Gareth stopped and rolled his window down and listened for other cars. When he was satisfied there was no other traffic he pulled out and we rolled down the long straight slope of tarmac with the engine in neutral to make as little noise as possible.

Half a mile on, Gareth slowed to a crawl as we reached the part of the road where it made a sharp bend to the right. I assumed he was just being cautious in case there was oncoming traffic that we couldn’t yet see. But rather than rounding the bend and kicking the car into drive, Gareth stopped completely.

The Jeep was still fully on the tarmac, blocking the right lane, and I glanced nervously back up the road, wondering if this was where fate had decreed we should be caught.

Gareth dropped the backpack in my lap. “This is where you get out.”

“What!”

“Hurry up before someone comes.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

The world slipped sideways and for a moment I felt I had become the night’s victim, that Gareth was now finally taking revenge on me for having stolen Marla from him.

He put his hand on my knee. “Dude, get a grip. We have to get Tripp to drive down the hill. When he tries to take this corner his brakes will fail and he’ll go straight into the trees. Bingo, one dead asshole. But it has to happen tonight. And it has to happen where we want it to happen. It’s no good if he just drives his car to Vivian’s or something, he’ll know the brakes are fucked up and he’ll get them fixed. So I’m going to Back Town to call him from a pay phone, anonymously, and tell him to come meet me. It’s a ten-to fifteen-minute drive. I’ll tell him not to come for forty-five minutes, so I will definitely be back here before he comes down the hill. But just in case, you have to be here to make sure everything works.”