Dying for the Highlife (30 page)

John stared at Mort, his lips struggling to form words. “You lousy…,” he said finally, pulling the automatic from his coat pocket.

Mort lunged at John again with the knife. John dodged back, pointed the gun, and pulled the trigger. The bullet popped a small round hole in the plastic of the phony protruding gut that served as Mort’s disguise. Mort froze, his eyes raging with shock and desperation, then he tried once more to stab John. The blade nicked John’s shoulder as he fired a second time, hitting Mort in the upper chest. Mort’s hands dropped, and John grappled with him and shoved him out the door.

The two men hit the railing to the staircase, the wood splintering under their weight. They fell hard onto the wooden stairs, and John rode Mort’s body to the tile below. John pushed himself upright, dripping in blood. He clenched his arm tightly to his body, trying to stem the flow from the gash in his armpit. Mort lay on the floor, wheezing in pain, his fake glasses gone, the diagonal scar across his cheek glowing like an unhealed wound. Stumbling up, John searched his pockets for his cell phone, but it was gone. He limped out the front door, his car keys in his hand.

He fell into his Cadillac, his shirt sticking to his body like wet paint. Pools of blood began forming in the stitching of the leather seat. John knew he would bleed to death if he didn’t get to a hospital. No cell phone. He needed a doctor. An ambulance. Someone who could help him.

He fumbled the key into the ignition and lurched down the driveway in reverse. He collided with something and heard a thump and the screech of metal twisting, and then a great, thunderous blast, the whoosh of air rocking the sedan on its shocks. When he looked in his rearview mirror, he saw a fuzzy tangle of color. His eyes fell shut, and his consciousness faded as the car bounced over a curb and rolled slowly away.

• • •

His body convulsing in pain, Mort knew he didn’t have long. Images from his past flickered in his mind like a surreal slide show. The tenement apartment where he spent his years as a child. The failure of his company and the cell at Folsom. His father turning purple, his eyes pleading for mercy, before he jerked one final time and lay still. Mort summoned the last of his energy and rolled onto his side. He felt the button of the remote activator in his hip pocket compress, and a second later, the explosion blew out his eardrums. Burning debris from above rained down on him, but he felt nothing. You done good, boy, a strange voice said. For a brief moment he was happy, then he felt a strong, persistent sensation of downward momentum, as if gravity was pulling him into the floor. He opened his mouth in protest, but no words came.

T
he nurse at the hospital told me Cody was getting some tests done and wouldn’t be checking out until later in the day. I drove back to the freeway, and after a few minutes took the exit to Route 431. The summit field of Mount Rose loomed ten miles ahead, covered in snow. I thought idly about the upcoming ski season, then considered my truck was totaled and my next mortgage payment would exhaust my bank account, unless Jimmy was actually willing to pay me as we’d discussed. I considered that far from a given.

When I came around the bend and over the small rise toward Jimmy’s rental pad, I saw a motorcycle coming toward me. It was moving slowly, as if the rider was searching for an address. The bike had long forks, and the man on it wore a black leather jacket. It was Garrett Rancour.

I shook my head and sighed. Of all the screwy things. I assumed he was here to collect the money he claimed Jimmy owed him. But then he stopped next to a silver Toyota parked down the street. He seemed inordinately interested in the car, removing his helmet and staring as if perplexed. I pulled over and parked about fifty feet from Jimmy’s curved, steep driveway. Over a short row of bushes, I could see the orange Lamborghini, and next to it a large, red sedan. My intention was to walk up the driveway while Rancour was distracted. I saw no benefit in conversing with the dude. But he spotted me, and pulled his helmet back on.

From the front of the house, I heard a car door close. Rancour fixed his eyes on me, juiced his throttle, and turned up the driveway while I was still on the street. What happened next transpired so quickly all I could do was watch in disbelief. The red sedan jetted down the driveway in reverse. Rancour had no time to avoid it. The rear bumper of the car hit him head on, snapping his forks and flipping him and his Honda over the trunk lid. The motorcycle smashed into the rear window, and Rancour bounced off the car’s roof and was flung like a rag doll. His body slammed face down on the pavement.

The sedan continued in reverse, as if the driver was unaware he’d hit anything. I ran toward where Rancour lay. His head was cocked at an odd angle, his arm twisted behind his back. Just as I reached him, a huge blast from the house blew a chunk of the second-story roof into the sky. The concussion knocked me to the ground.

I pushed myself to my feet and saw the red car roll over the curb on the opposite side of the street. It went down a short hillside and stopped when it crashed into a backyard fence. I started toward the car, then stopped and went back to Rancour. No pulse. His neck was broken.

I looked up at the house. Smoke was billowing from the hole in the roof, and tongues of flame were lapping at the shingles. The front door was wide open. I ran inside and nearly tripped over a dead body at the base of the stairs. It stopped me in my tracks. The agony etched across the corpse’s face was beyond anything I’d witnessed. The dead man’s lips were twisted in a snarl, exposing yellowish teeth spotted with blood. An ear was burned to a stub, and while one eye was squeezed shut, the other was bulbous and staring, the eyelid and surrounding skin burnt away to reveal the entirety of the eyeball. A charred black stain outlined the body, as if he’d burned to death, but most of his flesh was intact.

I swallowed hard and went up the stairs to the smoke-filled room at the end of the hall. The walls were scorched and smoldering, and the king-size bed had been upended, the mattress leaning against a wall and feeding the flames. Scraps of kindling littered the floor, probably the remains of a large dresser or desk.

In the far corner of the room, propped upright on a collapsed chair, sat a figure unrecognizable save for the long blond hair falling almost daintily around what was left of his face. The smoke was thick and obscured the extent of his injuries, but when I stepped into the room my foot hit something. It was a severed leg.

A nightstand had somehow survived the explosion mostly intact. Its doors were open, and a black leather bag lay partially inside. Embers had burned a small hole at the end of the bag, revealing what looked like a stack of papers. Covering my mouth with my shirt, my eyes tearing and burning, I grabbed the bag, thinking to save whatever documents it contained from the fire.

Outside, I locked the satchel in the covered bed of Cody’s truck and called 911. A crowd was gathering to watch the fire. It took the fire trucks only a couple of minutes to arrive, but by that time the upstairs was fully ablaze. Thick smoke poured from the roof and the windows, the wood crackling and popping, ash floating into the sky. A section of gutter broke free from the roofline and tumbled down, coming to rest across the hood of the Lamborghini.

The medics started for the front door. “Two bodies, one upstairs, one down. Both dead,” I told them. They paused, then went in and pulled out the first man. The onlookers gasped, and the medics quickly covered the body. Soon enough the fire was under control, the house dripping with water, the downstairs flooded. A large portion of the second story had collapsed, leaving a gaping void in the structure. The room where the party ended for Jimmy Homestead no longer existed.

The driver of the red Cadillac was removed from his car and loaded into an ambulance. I went to get a look at him but was grabbed from behind.

“I can’t wait to hear your story this time,” Lieutenant Gordon DeHart said.

“I’m just an innocent bystander, Lieutenant. A good Samaritan.”

“Is that the best you can come up with? You disappoint me.”

“Life’s full of disappointments.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said, then cuffed my wrists and took me away.

T
his time DeHart kept me locked up at Reno Central for two days. When I asked what the charges were, he didn’t answer directly, but muttered something about class-A felonies. Each morning he broke the monotony by bringing me to an interview room for questioning. He kept trying to figure out the relationships and connections between all the involved parties, be they living or dead. I wasn’t much help to him. The only thing he accomplished was to reveal more to me than I otherwise would have known.

“John Homestead regained consciousness, and it looks like he’s going to make it,” DeHart said.

“What’s he have to say?”

“Well, the body the paramedics pulled from the house was John’s estranged brother, Mort. Supposedly he was trying to coerce Jimmy into paying him off. We assume he was the source of the plastic explosives.”

“I doubt he knew what he was doing. He probably didn’t mean to blow the house apart,” I said.

“Who knows?” DeHart said, shrugging. “From all accounts, the guy was a whackjob.”

“I assume John Homestead is first in line to inherit Jimmy’s fortune,” I said.

“Probably.”

“What’s Sanzini got to say?”

“Not much. When I told him Garrett Rancour died, he asked if he was wearing a black jacket. Said it belonged to him.”

“It does. You should return it to him.”

“Sure thing. I’ll put that right at the top of my priority list.”

“You know, Lieutenant, I get the feeling you don’t intend to charge me with anything.”

“I still consider you a person of interest, Reno. Don’t make yourself scarce. I hope you enjoyed the free room and board?”

“Yes, it was splendid,” I said, but instead of smiling, DeHart looked at me like he’d seen too much too recently, and was sick of it all.

• • •

A freezing rain was coming down when DeHart dropped me off at the impound yard where they stored Cody’s truck while I was a guest of the city. Cody had stayed at my house since his release from the hospital, and he was there holding down the fort when I called.

“It’s snowing here, Dirt. Take it easy coming over the pass.”

“Did you drink all my booze yet?”

“Of course not! There’s a shot or two left in your whiskey bottle.”

“Well, I’m broke and I want to get drunk. How about my six-pack of beer?”

“I seem to have a vague recollection of seeing a six-pack. Budweisers, weren’t they?”

“That’s right.”

“Yes, now I remember. They went down quite smoothly with the pizza in your freezer. I hope you weren’t saving that for a special occasion?”

It was slow going over Spooner Summit. The late October storm shrouded the pass in a ghostly mist, obscuring the road and at times creating a near whiteout. I drove on slowly, alone in the elements. I’d had plenty of time for reflection during the empty hours in the Reno jail, but I’d drawn few hard conclusions. Regarding Jimmy Homestead and his demise, I didn’t know whose side to take, or even if there was a side to take. I didn’t fault Sanzini for his motivations, although by involving the Mexican gang, he unwittingly perpetuated their deaths and his own demise. He would pay the price for his stupidity in the Nevada prison system. As for Garrett Rancour, I thought of him as a petty crook looking for a big score. Although he put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, he probably didn’t deserve to die. He just had bad luck.

I felt more sympathy for Heather Sanderson, though my thoughts were no doubt skewed by images of her naked body. Lustful issues aside, I believed Heather was an example of a decent person dragged down to the level of her bad husband. If in some way her actions predicated his death, it was probably justified in the cosmic scheme of things. Actually, she may have been one of the few to benefit from the events surrounding Jimmy’s downfall. With her husband gone, she could begin life anew.

Whatever angles John Homestead and his brother Mort were playing, it was clear their end games were the same—to take Jimmy’s money. The plight of the two desperate brothers seemed sad and pathetic. From what DeHart told me of Mort Homestead, he would not be missed. On the other hand, John Homestead, after nearly bleeding to death, would probably soon have new friends coming out of the woodwork, since he was first in line to inherit Jimmy’s fortune. I had no idea if he was deserving or not, and frankly, I didn’t care. I had my own problems to deal with.

The snowplows hadn’t yet cleared the main drag in South Lake Tahoe. I drove past the casinos slowly, the bright lights flickering and promising good times and easy money. A group of tourists walked the boulevard in shirtsleeves, seemingly oblivious to the weather. As I crossed the state line into California, the sun peeked out from a break in the clouds and quickly retreated. It started snowing harder.

My truck was parked in front of my home. A tire was flat, and snow had fallen through the caved-in windshield, coating the interior. When I walked inside, Cody hauled himself off my couch and gave me a once-over.

“You look like you lost a few pounds,” he said.

“I didn’t find the baloney sandwiches and mashed potatoes all that appetizing.”

“Here,” he said, pitching me a can of beer. “Welcome back to the land of the free.”

I drank the beer while showering the jailhouse funk off my body, then threw on clean clothes and went to my fridge to grab another.

“I got to head back to San Jose tomorrow, Dirt.”

“I may be joining you,” I said. “I think I’ll put the place up for sale next month.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah.” I sat on the kitchen counter and finished my beer, then reached over and grabbed the fifth of bourbon next to the oven. Contrary to Cody’s claim, it was empty.

“Hey,” he said. “Let’s head over to Whiskey Dick’s. I’m buying.”

“All right,” I said, and hopped off the counter. “Give me a minute, though.” I went out front, unlocked Cody’s bed cover, and reached in and pulled out the leather bag I’d rescued from the fire in Jimmy’s room.