Devil's Keep (5 page)

Favor had an intimidating presence. It was in his growl of a voice, in the intensity of his stare. He usually tried to mute the intimidation. Most times he was exceedingly polite, almost courtly. But he could also use the effect to his advantage. Some women—many women—swooned for that air of menace. And it gave him an edge in business negotiation.

Arielle knew that he was about to turn it on.

He opened his eyes. His expression was blank as
he unlaced his fingers and slowly brought his hands down to the armrests of the chair. He began to lean forward, gradually bringing his gaze down until he was eye to eye with Terry.

Favor squared his shoulders. The impatience drained out of Terry’s face as Favor fixed him with an unblinking look.

Terry blinked and nervously licked his lips.

That’ll cost you,
Arielle thought.

“This is all in the proposal, right?” Favor said. “Anything here that’s not in the package?”

“No,” Terry said. “This is just a more visual presentation.”

“I don’t care about visuals,” Favor said.

“I’m sorry,” Terry said.

“I read the proposal. I liked it.”

“That’s great,” Terry said.

“You did your homework. You have a good idea; I think it’ll fly.”

“We have a deal?” Terry said.

“I want three and a half points at the front end,” Favor said. “Then we have a deal.”

“That’s a lot, three and a half points.”

“I don’t need an answer right away. You take a little time, talk it over. Give me your answer by six o’clock.”

“Three and a half points seems excessive,” Terry said. “Can we meet somewhere in the middle?”

“Three and a half points, nonnegotiable. I know that sounds tough, but I think you’ll see there’s enough left to still make it worth doing.” Favor stood.
“Or not. I really don’t give a shit.”

The three developers were staring at him. Arielle was staring at him.

“Excuse me?” Terry said.

“Do it, don’t do it, it’s really all the same to me.” He looked at Arielle. “I’ll be out the rest of the day.” To the developers he said, “You guys have a good one.”

He turned and walked out of the room.

The developers left grumbling, but less than an hour later they called back to accept the deal. Arielle took the message and phoned Favor with the news.

“You now have three partners in Tulsa,” she said.

“I figured.”

“That was quite a move. ‘I really don’t give a shit’—that’s playing some hardball.”

“It wasn’t a play,” Favor said. “I mean it. I really don’t care if we do it or not.”

“Ray, this is a nice deal. Could be extremely nice.”

“Uh-huh. How nice, you think?”

“You’re asking me?” she said. “I think in a year you make back what you already have in the land. After that, you have a nice, steady revenue stream. I’d say six hundred K per annum as a floor, maybe a million a year in a good year, with no obligation for you except to cash the checks. Not bad for some raggedy-ass trash land that you bought with fifty thousand down.”

“That’s about how I read it,” he said.

“You’re complaining about that?” she said.

“Not complaining. It just doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What does it change?” Favor said. “Does my life get better? Will a million a year let me do anything I couldn’t already do?”

“I guess you already do whatever you want.”

“There you go,” he said. “I mean, it sounds great, six hundred K, a million a year. There was a time when that would have mattered. Not anymore. Not even close. Ergo, it doesn’t matter. Ergo, I really don’t give a shit whether the deal happens or not.”

Arielle didn’t know what to say.

“You want it?” Favor said after a few moments. “Take it, it’s yours.”

“No. It’s not my deal.”

“Up to you. I’ll see you tomorrow, Ari. I’ll be in around noon. We get to do this all over again. The wheels on the bus go round and round.”

He clicked off.

Arielle listened to the silence in her earpiece, then called two numbers in quick succession.

In a workshop surrounded by a redwood forest outside Mendocino, California, Winston Stickney was bent over a bench where two vises gripped a shaft of burnished blue steel. He was peering through a welder’s mask as he used a plasma arc torch to burn a precise curving cut across the shaft. Stickney was now an artist and sculptor, best known for his intricate installations of welded steel. He was nearly finished with his cut when the phone rang on the wall of the workshop. He heard it dimly over the
loud hiss of the torch, but he kept working. When the cut was complete a few seconds later, he put down the torch head, flipped up the mask, and went to pick up the phone.

The second call went to Alex Mendonza at the personal protection company in Los Angeles. Mendonza was in a meeting with the representative of a hip-hop recording artist, working out the security details for the rapper’s visit from New York. Mendonza’s assistant picked up the call but sent it through to Mendonza when she recognized Arielle’s voice.

Arielle linked Stickney and Mendonza in a conference call.

She said, “Something is up with Ray. He’s not being Ray. Maybe it’s nothing, but it bothers me, and having you two around for a couple of days might do him some good.”

“I can be there tonight,” Mendonza said. “Let me find a flight.”

“Five hours’ drive for me,” Stickney said. “I just need to lock up here.”

“Tomorrow is fine,” she said.

“Okay,” Mendonza said. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow it is,” Stickney said.

When he spoke with Arielle, Ray Favor was headed west on Highway 50, into the mountains, behind the wheel of a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. A few miles beyond the summit, he turned off the highway and went down a narrow road. Ahead, a vertical rock
wall rose five hundred feet into a cloudless blue sky.

A mile and a half farther down the road, he reached the small campground at the foot of the wall. Favor was glad to see that the campground was empty so far. The Sierras were his refuge, his getaway, and he got away as often as possible. Lake Tahoe was only a few minutes away from the heart of the range. But the accessibility had a big drawback: it meant that the trails and peaks were easily available to everyone else who lived and worked in the area, and to all of Lake Tahoe’s annual millions of visitors. Highway 50 was a main route across the mountains to the San Francisco Bay Area, and this campground was often full by the mid-afternoon of a summer day.

Favor parked as far as he could get from the campground entrance, got out, and walked to the back of the truck. He unlocked the rear window of the fiberglass shell that covered the bed, and let down the tailgate. The bed was full of camping equipment and outdoor gear. He kept it ready to go.

Favor changed into a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts and slipped on a pair of rock-climbing shoes. They were of heavy nylon fabric, cut to an exaggerated point around the big toe. The soles were a smooth, soft black rubber that wrapped around the heel and up the sides of the foot and toes.

Favor had been a climber since he was a teenager, scaling boulders and short buttes on his grandparents’ ranch in eastern Oregon. Favor rarely visited a gym or weight room. Climbing shaped his body
and his mind. It developed strength and balance and ingenuity. He usually climbed alone, without ropes. When he was clinging to a rock wall without protection, fifty or a hundred feet or more above the ground, he entered a state of calm that he could find no other way.

He had been craving that calm all day.

Favor tied the shoes tight, strapped on a belt that carried a pouch of powdered chalk, and walked to the base of the high wall. Lover’s Leap, it was called, a Tahoe landmark. It was a sheer reef of granite, laced by fractures and ribbed by sills of dark igneous rock. For several minutes he stretched and flexed while he studied the webwork of cracks and protrusions on the face.

Favor walked a couple of paces to one side. An inch-wide sill ran about waist high. He jumped, seeming to throw himself at the rock face. His left foot caught the sill, and the fingertips of his right hand found a narrow seam.

He began to climb.

Favor traversed the face for about an hour, back and forth, up and down, as much as two hundred feet above the ground. He didn’t go higher. That was for the morning. He planned to make a predawn ascent, climbing by the light of a full moon that would still be high in the sky, reaching the top in time to watch the sunrise.

As he worked across the face, a car rolled into the campground below and stopped. Favor was splayed against the wall, legs spread, arms extended in a wide
V above his head. But the handholds were secure, and his feet had found a shelf nearly as wide as his shoes. He paused to rest his aching calves.

Favor glanced down at the car. Two teenage girls and a boy had gotten out and were standing around a picnic table. Giggles and loud chatter filtered up from below.

The noise would have grated on him if he had been down there with them. But from up here they belonged to a separate universe, and they ceased to exist for him the instant he shifted his attention back to his body and the space it occupied. The fires had burned out in his calves, and his breathing was under control.

He began to move again.

Sarah Jean Athold knew it would be trouble: her friend Missy, and Wallace, the semi-geeky senior from biology lab, and the fifth of Captain Morgan that Missy had coaxed Wallace into buying. Trouble—Sarah Jean could see it coming. But she went with them anyway. They bombed out of Carson City in Missy’s Grand Am, heading straight up to the lake after their last class of the day. They brought Wallace because he had the ID and looked twenty-one, kind of. But Sarah Jean knew that Wallace had been invited for another reason too. He was going to be Missy’s admiring audience. Or helpless victim, depending on how you looked at it. Missy was a huge flirt, nonstop and indiscriminate. Sarah Jean sometimes joked that Missy would flirt at a funeral.
With the corpse.

That was just the usual everyday attention-whoring. After a couple of drinks, Missy would turn strip-club raunchy. Always just teasing. Missy never actually went hard-core. They had a word for it. Sarah Jean called her Lut. That was slut without the “s.” One letter short of all the way.

They had headed into the mountains because Wallace said he always had good luck at a liquor store in South Lake Tahoe. The ID worked. Wallace came out with the Captain and a two-liter of Coke and a bottle of butterscotch schnapps. He led them to the campground, where he said they could party without getting hassled.

Wallace passed Sarah Jean a rum and Coke in a plastic cup. Sarah Jean drank it in a hurry, then got a second. While Missy and Wallace laughed and hooted at the picnic table, Sarah Jean took her drink and wandered around the campground, smelling the lodgepole pines that surrounded the campground, feeling small as she craned her neck to look up at the big cliff.

That was when she saw him, the crazy dude way up on the endless slab of rock. Like a bug stuck to a windshield. He was going to fall any second now, Sarah Jean just knew it, and she told herself that when it happened she was going to turn away because she didn’t want to see it happen, and she would cover her ears because she didn’t want to hear him hit.

But he didn’t fall. He was moving. At first it was just one leg sliding a few inches to one side, then an
agonizing reach with an arm, then suddenly a quick burst of scuttling across the rock, arms and legs shooting out at crazy angles.

Sarah Jean was going to point him out to the others, but when she looked over at the picnic table, Wallace was throwing his head back and whooping as Missy humped a butt grind against his crotch. Sarah Jean walked over and poured herself another drink. They weren’t going anywhere for a while.

Soon the lodgepole pines were throwing long shadows across the campground. The climber on the rock came down and walked to his truck, put on a sweater, and cooked a meal over a camp stove. Sarah Jean went to get one last drink and found that the Captain was gone, the schnapps was gone.

Missy was lap-dancing Wallace.

“We should go,” Sarah Jean said.

“No. I’m having fun.”

“Lut! Come on, let’s go home.”

“Not a lut. Tonight I’m a four-letter girl.”

“Sweety, it’s getting late.”

“No!”

“She’s right,” Wallace said. “We can’t drive yet. We’re blasted. We have to sober up some.”

“I don’t want to sober up,” Missy said. “I’m just getting started.”

Now she was rubbing her chest in his face. Wallace pulled back and looked at Sarah Jean.

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “Give me an hour, I’ll be good to go.”

The sun was all the way down now, and Sarah Jean
was getting chilly. She went into the Grand Am and sat there alone. She watched the climber take his sleeping bag into the woods. She watched Missy and Wallace making out at the picnic table.
They’ll get cold soon,
she thought. They would come into the car, they would all sit and wait for a while until one of them was able to drive, and she would soon be home.

No problem,
she thought.

Then the Demons arrived.

Favor was still awake in his sleeping bag, about fifty yards back in the pines. He recognized the sound of Harley engines barking through unmuffled pipes. At least four bikes
,
he thought as he listened to them turn off the access road and roll through the campground. He counted five for sure as they shut down one after the other.

A couple of minutes later the music started, Hank Williams Jr., amp-driven through big speakers, the bass cranked up high.

Shit,
he thought.

He wondered whether he should get up and go home. He didn’t want to lie awake here for hours. But he had been planning the early-morning climb for a long time. A late-rising full moon, perfect weather—he didn’t know when he would get the chance again.

And if tonight was like other recent nights, he would be lying awake at home anyway. At least here he had the sky and the stars.