Wolf in the Shadows Read online

  “Why, I wonder?“

  Hy shrugged.

  “He shot you because he caught you prowling around there?“

  “Caught and recognized me. Brave fellow that I am, I ran like hell again. He fired three times, the second shot winged me.”

  “I’ll bet that was the shooting incident he was acting out tonight for Mourning and Navarro’s benefit.”

  “Probably. Don’t know why he’s so proud of it; he has to realize he didn’t kill me.”

  “I think the purpose of telling about it was to intimidate the women.”

  “He succeed?”

  “Scared Mourning. Navarro just seemed disgusted.”

  “Huh. Well, McCone, that’s my story. Today I just hung around the riverbed, letting Sofia doctor me and … oh, hell, probably feeling sorry for myself. And then I looked down the beach and saw you, sitting there on that ponga, so nonchalant and confident.”

  “I’m not at all sure about the nonchalant and confident part,” I said, “but obviously you were surprised.”

  “You know, I should’ve been, but I really wasn’t. Maybe I knew you’d be along sooner or later.” He placed his hand high up on my thigh, fingers taut, almost hurting me. “Jesus, I’ve missed you.”

  “Missed you, too. When I thought you were dead … I don’t want to remember that.” I turned my head, pressed my lips against his neck, desire flooding my body.

  He said, “D’you understand why I feel like an asshole, McCone?”

  “You shouldn’t. What went wrong wasn’t anything you could control. And any intelligent person would’ve turned tail and run from Salazar.”

  “I don’t know.” He pulled me down until we were lying flat. “I don’t know, McCone,” he repeated, “I’m just not the man I used to be.” Then his head flopped onto my shoulder, his breath deepened and slowed, and he fell asleep.

  I lay holding him, my cheek against his shaggy hair, tamping down desire. His heart beat strong and steady, his breath came regularly, but every now and then he’d moan softly or twitch.

  I tightened my arms around him. Silently told him, You’re twice the man I thought you were. I takes one hell of a man to admit his mistakes, an even better one not to make excuses for them.

  All of which led me to suspect that what had happened in the nine years he refused to share with me was very bad indeed.

  Twenty-Three

  Sunday, June 13

  Hy tossed and mumbled most of the night, but he slept on. My own rest was fitful. A couple of times I got up to use the facilities—as my mother would say, even in a situation like this when the facilities were a clump of Indian tobacco a few yards from the shack. The second time, at around five in the morning, I couldn’t bring myself to go back inside right away and went to sit on the hood of the Tercel, breathing the cold sea air and listening to the silence.

  That was one thing I owed Hy: my newfound ability to listen to the silence. Before our trip to the White Mountains—God, had it been only two weeks ago?—I’d found the echoing quiet of vast open spaces oppressive and lonesome. But in a very few days he’d shown me how to be at peace with it; tonight, with only the faint sound of surf to break the stillness, I felt comforted.

  Not that I felt at peace. Overwhelmed was more like it. Again there had been too many changes with too little time to absorb them. Hy was alive; that was a gift. But he seemed far more damaged by the past week’s events than was justified. And he was as determined as ever to keep his past walled away from me. I wasn’t yet sure how I would deal with either of those things, wasn’t sure how they would affect us in the future. And then there was my own future—the one I needed to re-create. What would that be? And what part would Hy play in it?

  I just didn’t know.

  To keep from brooding, I forced my attention to the situation at Fontes’s villa. Posed some questions, came to a few tentative conclusions. Posed some more questions to ask Hy when he woke. And finally returned to the shack.

  Hy was awake. I saw his eyes glitter in the faint light from my flash, and then his hand snaked under the carryall for his gun.

  “It’s me,” I said quickly.

  He let out a long breath, withdrew his hand. “Jesus, McCone!”

  “Sorry.”

  As I came closer, he reached up and grasped my wrist. Pulled me down, rolled my body against his, hands moving under the back of my shirt. His palms were like fine sandpaper, his fingernails jagged. I winced as one scraped my skin. Our lips touched, cracked and dry; his skin felt parched and fiery. Our bodies didn’t mesh as usual; limbs tangled, joints banged together. We took each other with most of our clothes on.

  I couldn’t stay with it; the discomfort kept getting in the way of pleasure. It was like having sex with a stranger—one whose need was overpowering, one in whom violence was only loosely leashed. As we finished, I felt a step removed. He seemed to experience no pleasure, only release. We rolled away from each other, lay silent in the graying light. It was the first time that sex had created a barrier between us.

  A tap on the wall outside. Hy stirred first, pulled his clothing together, went to see who it was. A voice spoke softly, swiftly, in Spanish. Hy stepped outside, then returned.

  “That was Tomás,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”

  I’d already been dressing. Now I stood. “What’s wrong?”

  “Trouble at Fontes’s villa. Nobody knows what, but it looks bad. Cops all over the place, an ambulance, and now they’re evacuating somebody by helicopter.”

  I listened, heard distant flapping. “A shooting, do you think?”

  “Maybe.” Hy was rolling up the sleeping bag. “Tomás is afraid the cops’ll canvass the area. When there’s a crime, they always come here, use it as an excuse to push people around. It’ll only make it worse for them if the Federales find out they have a couple of gringos staying with them.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “South, to a lookout point Tomás told me about. He’ll come there later, after he finds out what went down.”

  I grabbed my oversized purse. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The lookout was on the tip of a smaller point some ten miles south. Beyond its rock wall, the Pacific lay flat and gray; salt air misted the car’s windshield. The only other vehicle in the graveled parking area was an ancient VW bus with California plates, dented and painted in faded rainbow colors. A bumper sticker commanded us to Question Authority, and a line of empty beer cans and a wine jug sat on the ground below it. I was sure that eventually at least one unreconstructed hippie would emerge from the bus, probably with a bad hangover.

  Hy and I sat in the car, staring moodily at the sea. After a while he touched my hair, pushing a lock of it behind my ear.

  I asked, “So you really think I’ve done something funny to it, huh?”

  “Actually I like it. It’s you. Kind of a shock, though, to see somebody’s gone and changed on you in such a short time.”

  “I could say the same.”

  He sighed. “I know. Let’s you and me just get through this shit, okay? Maybe things still won’t be the same, but who knows? They might even be better.”

  Slowly I nodded.

  “So what d’you think went down at Fontes’s place, McCone?”

  I’d been puzzling about that all the way here. “A medical emergency or a shooting. Knowing who his houseguests were, I’d opt for a shooting.”

  “Which guest was it?”

  “The shooter or the victim?” I shrugged, thinking back to my predawn speculations. “Hy, Salazar waited till Tuesday before he flew down here?”

  “Uh-huh. Tuesday night around eight.”

  “Why wait all that time? Why not bring the L.C. to Fontes as soon as he took it off you? I presume he brought it because it was drawn to a company owned by Fontes’s family.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know what he had at first, or what to do with it. He was one disappointed dude when he saw he’d held Brockowitz
and me up for a piece of paper.”

  “So it took him till Tuesday to figure that out, and then he contacted the wrong Fontes.”

  “Salazar probably knew Emanuel wouldn”t deal with a punk like him. And he”s probably known Gilbert for a long time. I’ve heard that when the Corona Fleet puts into San Diego, there’s more being taken off those seiners than tuna.”

  “Drugs?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what they say.”

  “Okay, Gilbert sent his plane for Salazar. Salazar came down here and did what? Offered to sell the L.C. to Fontes, I’ll bet.”

  “Sounds like the way he’d operate.”

  “But Gilbert couldn’t put the L.C. through; he holds no interest in Colores.”

  “So what would you do in Fontes’s place?”

  I thought. “I’d resell the L.C. to the company whose account it’s drawn on. He contacted Diane Mourning, who by all rights should have gone straight to RKI.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “No, instead she went to Ann Navarro. Why?”

  “You say Navarro buys her merchandise from Colores. That probably means she’s the one with the contact at Colores—somebody who can activate the L.C.”

  “How would Diane know that? How would she know her husband set up his kidnapping in collusion with Navarro and Brockowitz?”

  He frowned; then his eyes grew thoughtful.

  I said, “Last night, just before you came up to me on the beach, I watched Salazar’s bodyguard bring Timothy out onto the terrace. Mourning looked bad, worse than in the photo that was sent to RKI. He was stumbling, obviously disoriented. He saw Diane and started toward her. Natural: his wife, safety. But what did Diane do?”

  Hy raised an eyebrow.

  “She threw up her arms,” I said, “as if to fend him off. As if she was afraid he meant to harm her.”

  “And that means …?”

  “There’s only one thing it could mean: Timothy didn’t arrange for the kidnapping. Diane did. And she was afraid he’d figured that out.”

  Hy considered.

  I went on, “Diane had two reasons for doing so. One Brockowitz told you: Phoenix Labs is about to go into Chapter Eleven. Quite a different picture than their chief financial officer presented to me when I talked with her on Tuesday. The second Gage Renshaw told me: he sensed Timothy was going to move on and not take Diane with him. Pretty soon he wouldn’t be any good to her alive, so why not cash in on his death?”

  “Insurance?”

  I shook my head. “Renshaw says Timothy didn’t believe in it, either keyman or anti-terrorist. A ransom that would bleed away whatever cash was left in Phoenix’s accounts was how Diane chose to go. She probably had to give Brockowitz a hefty cut of the two million for his part in the kidnapping, but what was left would still have been better than nothing.”

  “How did she know Stan would arrange something like that, though? As far as I know, he’s always stuck to white-collar crime.”

  “When this is all over, maybe we’ll know. Tell me about Brockowitz,” I added. “What was he like?”

  “Out to get whatever he could for himself. At first he wanted to be a star in the environmental movement. When that didn’t work out, he got petulant and said fuck the environment. Founded his firm to get back at the people who’d ousted him. Along the way he discovered he liked money. Not what it could buy, from what people tell me, although he lived well. But the real appeal was money for its own sake, piling up numbers. He was one of those guys who would’ve been happy to do anything for money—didn’t matter what, or on whose side.”

  “And Navarro?”

  “She’s a little harder to figure out, Has never been allied with any cause except furthering her own interests. Her people are poor, live somewhere in southern Baja, but they managed to scrape up the money to send her to school in California. She never finished, married a U.S. citizen, got her green card, then divorced him. In the years before she met Brockowitz, she developed three successful retail operations. She and Stan got together, I’m told, when he wandered into her shop in San Juan Capistrano a couple of years ago. They must’ve recognized a mutual acquisitiveness and lack of scruples. One guy I know calls their marriage ‘an unholy little alliance.’”

  “Not too well liked, huh?”

  “Not by environmentalists or anti-environmentalists. So far as I know, neither had a friend in the world except each other.”

  “And now he’s dead, and she’s alone.”

  “Or she may be dead, too, if that’s who was shot at Fontes’s place.”

  We were silent for a moment. The antiquated VW bus began to rock; a big guy with a beard halfway down his chest and practically no hair on his head stumbled out. He wore a rumpled tie-dyed shirt and jeans and a pained scowl. Genus, hippie; species, unreconstructed. He shambled over to the edge of the lookout, unzipped, and urinated. Turned while zipping up and nodded casually to us, then climbed back into the bus.

  Hy and I exchanged wry smiles, I asked, “How does all this sound to you so far?”

  “Pretty solid. The Terramarine thing was just a cover, because Brockowitz knew they were one group that wouldn’t deny it if the press got hold of the kidnapping story. Where d’you suppose they’ve been keeping Tim all this time?”

  “Well, Brockowitz and Navarro have a big isolated house in eastern Orange County.”

  “Why keep him alive at all?”

  “I suppose they thought they needed to be able to produce him for RKI until they collected the ransom. Navarro probably didn’t know what to do with him when Stan didn’t show up again.”

  “She doesn’t know Stan’s dead?”

  “I doubt it. By the time they got an I.D. on the body, Navarro’d already come to Baja. And when I spoke with the detective in charge of the case yesterday afternoon, he said they were withholding Brockowitz’s name from the press pending notification of next of kin.”

  Hy nodded. “Okay, another question: who decided to bring Tim Mourning down here, and why?”

  That was one of the things I’d considered as I sat outside the shack before dawn. “Fontes and Salazar probably figured out where Mourning was—after all, Salazar must’ve taken Brockowitz’s I.D. off his body after he shot him—and sent Jaime to Blossom Hill for him once Navarro was down here. As for why they all came here, I think they gathered at the villa to bargain. Fontes has the L.C. Navarro has the contact who can put it through. Mourning wants her cut. Salazar’s either got a stake in it or is working for Fontes.”

  “You know all that for sure?”

  “I don’t know anything, but it’s the feeling I got from watching them on the terrace last night. It reminded me of a plea-bargaining session. Navarro acted forceful, as if she had all the evidence on her side—the defense attorney. Mourning seemed frightened, but stubborn—the defendant. The men played good prosecutor–bad prosecutor. Salazar’s function was to intimidate, and his tactics weakened Diane, Fontes—he stayed cool, said very little, but exerted a strong presence. And then they dropped their bomb.”

  “Timothy.”

  “Right. When Timothy stumbled out there, Diane panicked. And Navarro was shocked, kind of chagrined. She knew their grabbing him had tipped the scales.”

  “And that brings us to the big question: what happened there this morning?”

  “A question we can’t answer until Tomás shows up.” I looked at my watch. Amazingly, it was only quarter to nine. Had I reset it since I got it going again? Yes, last night while we talked.

  The door to the VW bus opened again and a woman with long, matted hair lurched out, took off at a run toward the edge of the parking area, and knelt, vomiting into the brush. After a while she dragged herself back to the bus, paying us no notice.

  Hy said, “I’m just as glad that decade’s over.”

  “They don’t know it ended.”

  “Now that I think of the seventies and eighties, maybe they’re not so bad off.”

  “What about the n
ineties?” I asked lightly.

  “Too early to tell. You hold any hope for them?”

  Our eyes met; I felt a stirring of our old wordless communication. “Some parts of them I do,” I said, entwining my fingers with his.

  * * *

  Tomás didn’t arrive until after ten. As he got out of an old pickup with a winch for hoisting a boat on its bed, he looked grave. Hy unlocked the back door of the rental car; Tomás got in, cupping his hands and lighting a cigarette in an odd furtive manner. As he spoke with Hy, I was able to follow most of what he said; when I couldn’t, Hy interjected a translation.

  The police had come to the riverbed and questioned everyone about a drifter who had been seen on the beach and in the village—a tall, thin man with a craggy face and a stubbly beard. They were also interested in an American woman who had been sitting on the beach with an expensive camera around sunset the previous evening. The police wanted to talk with them about a shooting that had occurred outside Fontes’s villa at about five that morning.

  Hy asked, “Que?”

  A young blond woman, Tomás told him. She had been shot in the back on the beach and sustained a punctured kidney. The helicopter had taken her to the trauma unit at Ensenada.

  Diane Mourning.

  I told Hy to ask if anyone had gone with her.

  No, Tomás replied. He’d been curious about the situation at Fontes’s house himself, so he’d gone into the village and asked around. The woman had gone alone, and no one else had left there since. The automobile gate was locked, and no one intended to fly anywhere; Fontes’s pilot had been given the day off.

  Hy continued talking with Tomás, but I lost the thread of the conversation, thinking back instead to around five that morning, when I’d been outside the shack. Mourning could not have been shot on the beach; it was a place where sound carried, and I’d heard nothing. Why had the people at the villa lied to the police? To shift attention away from themselves? Perhaps they’d seen it as a convenient opportunity to focus suspicion on Hy and me? But that didn’t feel right. The last thing they would want was for Hy to tell his story to the authorities. And so far as I knew, they weren’t aware I was in El Sueño.