Dynamite Road Page 2

  He veered off the freeway at the end of the long valley. Exit: Driscoll, California, population sixty-seven thousand, the last great outpost before the mountains and the woods.

  The Harley grumbled as Bishop forced it down beneath its touring speed. He rolled at forty-five along a bland four-lane, hemmed in every which way by a steady stream of cars. Gas stations lined the road and sand-colored malls and more gas stations and motel after motel and then fast-food outposts, Taco Bell, Burger King, McDonald’s, and more gas stations and more malls with their stores in sand-colored boxes and the big screaming letters to tell which store was which. The Harley went down one road, turned onto another and then turned onto another and the scenery stayed the same. Gas stations, hotels, restaurants and malls. From behind his aviator shades, Bishop’s pale eyes searched for the city center. Then he realized: This was it, this was all there was. Driscoll was just a starburst scar of concrete and stucco at the base of the big mountains. A tourist stop on the way into the wilderness.

  He chugged over a white bridge, still hemmed in by traffic. Beneath him, the Sacramento River glinted painfully in the sun. On the far side of the water, around a bend, the cars began to fall away a little. Bishop opened the throttle some, split the lane and wove between a couple of cage-drivers. He wound round the corner onto Main Street—or what was called Main Street. Main Street was pretty much dead. The malls and their chain stores had sucked the life out of it. Now there was a gutted theater here and a desperate bar called the Clover Leaf and a hotel that might have been open or closed, he couldn’t tell which. A one-armed man in an army cap was staggering drunk on the sidewalk. A fat man with a bushy beard was planted at the corner, brandishing a cardboard sign that said: Homeless Veteran. Give what you can. Bishop and his big motorcycle cruised on by.

  He headed into the neighborhoods. On branching roads, slanting houses of wood or aluminum huddled on scraps of lawn. Fat women in sleeveless blouses hosed down patches of desert garden. Their grubby children danced laughing through the water.

  The laughter fell away. The city fell away. A few last gasping shacks and then an empty field, burnt dry by the heat, ran shimmering into the foothills. Far away, as in a dreamland far away, the whitewashed walls of holiday mansions gleamed down at Driscoll from those hills on high. Bishop had reached the edge of town, the border of the northern forests.

  He rounded his bike onto a gritty little lane and rode the last half mile to the airfield.

  There were two men in the hangar, both in overalls. One was an older statesman, bald, craggy. The other was a young fellow with a face lit by brainless contentment. They were chatting over the low wing of a Piper Tomahawk. Chatting, chuckling. It was the older man, wiping his hands on a rag, who first looked through the hangar door and saw Bishop heading in.

  Bishop had left his helmet hanging from the Harley’s handlebars. Stripped off his leather jacket and slung it over his shoulder. He was strolling across the parking lot slowly, slowly surveying the airfield with the pale eyes behind the aviator shades. Bishop was around thirty then, I guess. Not a big man, five-eight or -nine maybe but broad across the shoulders and muscular, pecs and biceps stretching the sweat-dark tee. He had a way of moving, easy and tense, so you sensed his speed and his compact power. He had a round face with chiseled features under sandy hair. And though he looked as if he had his tongue in his cheek, as if he was laughing silently at a joke you were too thick to understand, the older man had been around some and had seen guys like this before. His stomach sank and he swallowed dry as he watched Bishop come on.

  Bishop stepped out of the hot sunlight into the hangar’s cooler shadows. Stopped at the Tomahawk’s rudder.

  “Either of you Ray?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said the older man. “I’m Ray. Ray Grambling.”

  “I’m Frank Kennedy,” said Jim Bishop quietly. “I’m your new pilot.”

  Two

  If Ray Grambling was tense when he saw Bishop coming, he was really nervous now. He laughed too much—ha-ha: like that—and he spoke too loudly like a bad actor just learning his lines.

  “We’re a small operation—ha-ha. I can’t offer you full-time work. But summer’s the busy season, that’s for sure, spring and summer. Ha-ha.”

  He walked Bishop through the doorway in the hangar wall, into an air-conditioned hallway. Bishop followed him along the hall, giving a hard stare to the back of his head, willing him to just calm the fuck down.

  Ray babbled on over his shoulder. “We got the usual lawyers flying back and forth to Arcata—that’s the county seat—for their trials and whatnot, ha-ha. Then in the hot weather we got the forestry department doing smoke watches, running equipment up into the woods. We get some cargo runs, store inventory, canceled checks down from Weaverville and the like. You wear your beeper and make sure you get your flight and duty breaks, ha-ha, we’ll have you up in the air every day through September most likely. Here’s Kathleen.”

  They had come the back way into the front office, a broad space divided in half by a counter. On the far side of the counter, a storefront window looked out at the small planes lined up on the airport’s apron. There were chairs by the window and a table covered with magazines, a waiting place for the paying customers, when there were any, which there weren’t. On this side of the counter, the working side, there were desks, computers, filing cabinets and a mess of paper. Kathleen was at one of the filing cabinets, slotting a manila folder into a drawer.

  As the two men came in, Ray’s voice got even louder, his laugh more frantic. “Kathleen Wannamaker, this is Ji…No, Frank it was, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it Frank? Ha-ha. You get old, you can’t remember a thing anymore. Ha-ha. Frank Kennedy, that’s it, our new pilot. Kathleen here’s our director of operations and sometimes our dispatcher when we need her to fill in. You gotta be nice to her if you want to get those hours, ha-ha. Right, Kathleen?”

  She looked up without smiling. A glamourless woman and hardboiled but not unattractive. In her thirties, small, trim at the waist, heavy at the breasts and hips. She wore a tan skirt and light white blouse. Had long, limp, mouse brown hair parted in the middle. When she saw Bishop, she unconsciously lifted her hand to brush some strands behind her ear.

  “Meetcha,” she said. Her eyes went up and down him. Her face was smooth and regular and would’ve been kind of sweet except somehow it wasn’t.

  Bishop took his sunglasses off, met her gaze for gaze.

  Ray kept babbling. “Frank’s the one I told you about, needs a place to stay? Kathleen here has a house she rents, so there it is, ha-ha. Right, Kathleen, that’s good for you, right? You said the house is open and all. Kennedy’s gonna be here through the summer, at least. So it works out perfect, ha-ha.”

  For a moment, Kathleen didn’t answer. She was still looking at Bishop, looking at Bishop looking back at her. You might as well know this right away, there’s no point being coy about it: Women fell in love with Bishop. It happened again and again. They fell in love, dropped, plummeted into love with him like stones out of the clouds, like stones falling out of the clouds into the depths of some murky pond. Part of it, sure, was the looks, the muscles, all the cool stuff, the bikes and the planes and whatnot. But there had to be more to it than that. Maybe it was simply the fact that he was a genuine bona fide coldhearted bastard. He was a bastard and he just didn’t care. Men were glad he didn’t care. They just wanted him to pass on through without wrecking anything. But women? They seemed to want to make him care. Each one of them seemed to want to be the first to make him care.

  So anyway, Kathleen did that thing where she hesitated before she answered Ray, she hesitated and went on looking at Bishop. And Bishop went on looking at her, indifferent and easy within himself, smiling slightly and sizing her up for the doing.

  Then finally Kathleen took a breath, blinked as if she were waking up. “It’s four fifty,” she said. “The rent. Four hundred and fifty a month. Ready to move in, if you want it.”

  “S
ounds good,” said Bishop.

  “Well, there you go,” Ray practically shouted. “That was easy! Ha-ha. That’s all settled. So—uh—uh…”

  “Kennedy,” said Bishop.

  “Kennedy! Frank, right! I swear, ha-ha, my memory for names…Frank. So we’ll get you started on your training, check you out in all the planes, you’ll be good to go.”

  Bishop said nothing. He looked at Kathleen. She looked at him back and her chest rose and fell.

  “Oh, hey, Kathleen,” Ray broke in. “Here comes your husband.”

  Bishop glanced up, out through the storefront window. A twin engine Cessna 340 was gliding in through the wavering heat, settling onto the runway with a slow flare. The pulse of the props made the big pane rattle.

  Kathleen didn’t turn to watch at first. She let her eyes play over Bishop another second or two. Then she forced herself to look over her shoulder.

  The plane taxied onto the apron. The engines shut down, the props stopped turning. The three in the office watched as the pilot unfolded himself from the cockpit, as he walked from wing to wing to tie the aircraft down.

  “That’s Kathleen’s husband Chris,” Ray told Bishop. “He’s my chief pilot. He’s a check airman too, so he’s the one’ll be checking you out in all the planes.”

  Chris Wannamaker came swaggering toward them now, his flight bag dangling from one fist. A big son of a bitch, Bishop observed calmly. And mighty mean-looking too.

  Yeah, he thought, and I’ll just bet he’s not gonna like it much when I start in fucking his wife.

  Three

  Kathleen’s house—the house she rented out—was not far from the airfield. A shabby two-story clapboard slumping on a patch of heat-brown grass. There was a living room and a kitchen downstairs, a bedroom upstairs under the low eaves. What furniture there was was musty and faded.

  It was evening when she brought him here. From the houses clustered all around came the sound of laughing children and whizzing sprinklers and barking dogs and mothers shouting “Dinnertime!” through one screen door and then another. The light in the sky lingered—it was still only June—but the first cooler breeze of the day came in through the living room windows, stirring the thin curtains.

  Upstairs, though, it was stifling. When they stood together in the cramped bedroom, crowded under the slant of the roof, Bishop could smell Kathleen’s sweat laced with her perfume. He liked the smell. He liked the sensation it gave him.

  “You’re gonna need the air conditioner up here most times,” Kathleen told him. “It rattles a little but it works okay.”

  Bishop looked out the window. He nodded slightly to himself. From here—and from the southern window downstairs too—he could see right into the living room of the house next door. That was the house Kathleen lived in with her husband. This was going to work out well.

  He turned to her. He moved close.

  “Any furniture of your own you want to bring in, go ahead,” she went on, lifting her face to his. “I can always store this stuff at my uncle’s place. I just keep it here in case the tenants want to use it. You can set the place up any way…” Her voice trailed off as Bishop studied her, studied the fall of her hair down her cheek, the contours of her full mouth. “Any way you want,” she finished finally.

  Bishop let his gaze trail lazily up from her lips to her eyes, to her hairline, down to her eyes again.

  “It’s just fine the way it is,” he told her.

  Four

  That very first night, the man with the gray moustache came. Bishop sat in a wooden chair in the living room, sat in the dark. He smoked a cigarette, cupping it in his hand so that the glow wasn’t visible from the house next door. He watched Kathleen’s living room through the stirring curtains.

  The man with the gray moustache sat with Kathleen’s husband Chris. Chris sat hunch-shouldered on the sofa, his features twisted in a surly and submissive smile. He drank beer. Beer after beer. Bishop could hear him when he shouted to Kathleen to bring him another bottle.

  The man with the gray moustache sat in a stuffed armchair. There was a glass of whiskey on the coffee table in front of him but he only sipped it once the whole time Bishop watched.

  About an hour and a half went by. The man with the gray moustache rose and left. Bishop could see him come out the front door and move to the silver Mercedes parked behind the Dodge pickup in the carport. Bishop could also see Chris sitting where he was, meanwhile, sucking the last out of his beer bottle. Then, when Chris was done, Bishop saw him lumber to his feet and stagger drunkenly out of the living room. After that, Bishop couldn’t see him anymore.

  But he went on sitting at the window, watching. And in a little while he heard the sound of Chris’s voice from the back of the house. It spiraled from a snarl to an angry bark. Kathleen answered him loudly. She must’ve been near the screen door to the kitchen because her words were clear:

  “It’s my house. I don’t have to ask your goddamned permission, y’know!”

  Chris cursed and Kathleen cried out and Bishop knew that he had struck her. He heard her sobbing raggedly as they struggled. He heard her sobbing cry as Chris struck her again. Chris cursed again and Bishop heard his stumbling footsteps. For a few minutes, Kathleen went on weeping miserably by the kitchen door.

  “You bastard,” he heard her say.

  After that, the house was quiet. Bishop lifted his cupped cigarette to his lips. He took a long drag. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple. The quiet went on. Finally, Bishop crushed the cigarette out in an ashtray. He got to his feet. He climbed the stairs to the bedroom.

  He was glad to get into the air-conditioning. He knelt beside the black travel bag he’d set on the floor by the bed. He dug through his clothes. He dug out his handheld computer. Brought it to the table against the wall, set it into a portable keyboard, switched it on.

  The computer was one of those palmtop things that can send e-mail. Bishop preferred e-mail. It was harder to snoop on. No one could simply overhear it or pick up another line and listen in. The portable keyboard was small but Bishop was used to it. He typed quickly, using his index fingers.

  Weiss, he began. I’m here.…

  Five

  “Someone is going to kill me,” the Mousey Guy said.

  The formidable body of Scott Weiss swelled and subsided like the sea. “I’m a private investigator, Mr. Spender,” he said. “If someone is trying to kill you, that’s a matter for the police.”

  “I can’t go to the police. I can’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The Mousey Guy leaned forward urgently. “Because this person—this man who’s going to kill me: The reason he’s going to kill me is because I raped his sister.”

  Weiss’s deadpan was as good as laughter. He didn’t believe this shit for a minute.

  They were in his office on Market Street, on the eighth floor of a concrete tower with a red mansard roof. A bank took up the tower’s ground floor and the next six floors of offices above it. Then there was us, the Agency, on eight, and then a law firm on the two stories up under the mansard. The law firm, Jaffe and Jaffe, gave the Agency a lot of its business, and they rented us the space below them for their own convenience.

  But it was a break for us, too. The downtown location was valuable and the eighth floor was the nicest in the whole building. Most of its charm came from its big arched windows. On a clear summer day like this we got the morning sun slanting in. We got a hearty chunk of the famous skyline: a foreground of ornate stone office buildings with a heartbeat chart of modern towers rising behind. We got to watch the city’s walls flare red and yellow with the morning light and start to sparkle when their own lights came on in the gloaming.

  In Weiss’s office—his spacious office with its massive desk and its massive client armchairs and his massive self tilted slightly backward in a massive swivel chair of his own—the backdrop of the radiant city in its vaulting window frame served to emphasize the sweep and size of the scene.


  It was a scene that dwarfed our client this morning. Wally Spender. A little man and thin with jug ears and frightened eyes and a long, slender nose: A mouse enchanted into human form.

  “It happened in Spain,” he went on in his high voice. “The—the incident with the sister, I mean. I—I don’t know what came over me. Uncontrollable passion, I guess.” He wrung his small hands, fretting on the edge of his seat like a schoolboy in a jam.

  Weiss maintained his deadpan.

  “I just saw her…down by the water. In Malaga. This is about a year ago. I was sitting in a cafe there, enjoying a coffee, and she just went walking past. Just a poor, local girl but…very beautiful. Very—I don’t know—beautiful, like I said. I just saw her, Mr. Weiss and—and I just got up. I just got right up from my table right then and there. And I—I followed her. Right then and there. I followed her right down the street, right along the water. I remember she stopped along the way. To do some errands, you know. To buy some—some fruit or…Yes, fruit, that’s what it was. And I just stood there, Mr. Weiss. I just stood there and—and watched her. There was something about her. I don’t know. And I kept following her. I followed her all the way back to her humble dwelling on the edge of town.”

  “Her humble dwelling.” Weiss drew the words out slowly.

  But Mousey Guy completely missed the irony. He kept right on. “Yes. Yes. It was down these streets. I followed her down these streets in the old quarter. Lonely, empty, cobblestone streets between crumbling old Spanish buildings. And it was like…The thought came into my head that in a place like this, it was, like, anything could happen. I mean, we were all alone on these empty streets. And there’s lots of crime there. No one would think anything of it. And I was following her, you know, down these streets, and these thoughts just started coming into my head. I couldn’t help it.” He licked his thin lips, stared into the middle distance. He was getting excited. His story excited him.