Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (12 page)

    
“They
don’t take her. She’s damaged goods.”

    
“Right,”
said Raszer. “And what possibility does that open up?”

    
“You’re
suggesting that Johnny Horn was trying to protect her?”

    
“I’m not
sure,” said Raszer. “Inoculate her. Lay claim to her. Maybe he sold her out,
then had second thoughts. We have to figure that as badly as these kids
behaved, they were all raised up in the church—and that gangsters, no matter
what period or place, always live in the dark ages. I know it’s a stretch, but
we’re talking alternate history. And what’s Katy thinking? She leaves the dance
hall without a coat . . . ”

    
“Probably
hot and high as a kite. Between the dancing, the dehydration, and the drugs,
some of these ravers run temperatures of 106, 108 . . . ”

    
“You’re
right, Detective,” said Raszer, and pointed to the now neatly stacked manila
folders. “In the version of history that’s in those case files, you’re right.
But, like Richard Feynman said, reality is a sum over all histories, and
A
doesn’t always go to
Z
.”

    
Aquino
smiled, a little impatiently. “Well, I don’t know Richard Feynman, but I do
know perps, and I know that in your alternate history, these guys probably
would have killed Katy Endicott, too.”

    
“What
I’m afraid of, Detective, is that in almost
any
conceivable history, that may have happened. If Katy’s alive, it’s because
they’re making use of her. On that I think we agree. Did you work any other
leads?”

    
“Only
one that matters,” said Aquino. “But I don’t think those crayon pushers in
Homeland Security took it seriously. They were too busy making color charts.”

    
“Terrorism?”

    
“Johnny
bragged about the ‘friends’ he’d made in Iraq. His ‘global network.’”

    
“But
they never found any emails? Cell phone records?”

    
“Not
that they shared with us. Maybe you can get something.”

    
“You’ll
put me in touch with the boys’ families?”

    
“We’ll
do whatever we can, Mr. Raszer,” said Aquino, rising from his chair. He smiled
and pointed to the telephone. “And I’ll be on that grapevine.”

    
Raszer
noticed for the first time that Aquino stood only about five-foot-five.
Somehow, the broad shoulders, mustache, and cop body language had made him seem
taller. Raszer found most L.A. cops to be more style than substance, but he
liked Aquino. He liked that he had kids, and that he saw Katy Endicott as one
of them.

    
Detective
Aquino scrawled a set of directions on a Post-it note and handed them to
Raszer. “You’re a very interesting man, Mr. Raszer. I’m glad to have you on the
case. Just be sure you don’t get in over your head.”

    
They
exchanged tight-lipped smiles. Given even what little he knew of Stephan
Raszer’s history, Aquino could not have expected his advice to be followed.

    
With the
Post-it stuck to his speedometer, Raszer ascended the steep grade into San
Gabriel Canyon via Highway 39. The sky was churning overhead, as if ready to
disgorge the Valkyries. At about 2,800 feet, signs informed Raszer that the
road was open to the Cold Brook Ranger Station but closed to Crystal Lake, due
to snow. That, he figured, ought to be enough pavement to get him to the east
fork and, hopefully, to the 3,600-foot elevation of the old Coronado Lodge. The
snow line was at five thousand feet, but he was bound to encounter hubcap-deep
mud on the fire roads. He glanced down at his feet and cursed. Raszer had
ceased being fussy about his Avanti—so long as its rebuilt V-8 growled—but he
hated getting his good boots muddy.

    
Of the
passable canyons along the Front Range, San Gabriel was the most dramatic in
its sweep. The haunches of the five-thousand-foot peaks that formed its gateway
described an almost perfect Delta of Venus, with the pyramidal mass of Mount
Baden-Powell rising distantly to fill the cleft. The effect, in fair weather or
foul, was to lure a traveler deeper into the breech, and with the mist hanging
like a bridal veil and the lower slopes turned Galway green, the place was fit
for hobbits. As the river that had carved this epic “V” eons ago came fully
into view, surging and slaked by a month of rain, there was also evidence of
giants—or at least of the gigantic ambition tapped by the public-works projects
of the Roosevelt years. At three thousand feet, the broad span of the old
Morris Dam appeared. It wasn’t shiny and Olympian like the Hoover Dam, but it
was big enough, and somehow more epic with its old-school masonry and parchment
patina. It looked like a Cinerama screen erected for the children of Odin.
 

    
Beyond
the dam lay a sprawling reservoir as flat, green, and waveless as an Amazonian
lake, but banked by rugged scree and chaparral, rather than viney jungle. L.A.
was a city of reservoirs standing in for lakes and lagoons, of which there were
no naturally occurring examples. That the city did not die of thirst—that it
survived at all—was owing to the greed of cowboy capitalists and the past
largesse of the federal government. The latter had now mostly left the state to
fend for itself, and the former hadn’t done a thing for the infrastructure in
decades. California was crumbling, but here stood mighty Morris Dam, holding
back the floodwaters of the San Gabriel River in the name of the common good
and the publicly owned Department of Water and Power.

    
Even
after twenty years in California, the term
canyon
felt somehow unsuited to what Raszer saw around him. It evoked images of the
stark, infernal fissures of Arizona and Utah; the British word
glen
seemed more fitting for this wooded
gash cleaved between the shoulders of the fitfully slumbering beasts rising up
on all sides.
Canyon
described a dead
place, but these mountains were alive and still forming, spilling their soft
earth into the chasm with each tectonic lurch left or right, threatening to
close in on the narrow road at each dizzying switchback.

    
In spite
of their immensity, the San Gabriels were fragile and trembling, big mounds of
packed soil held fast by spiky yucca, whitethorn, and creosote at lower
elevations; scrub oak, sycamore and walnut further up the slope; and, at and
above the snow line, stands of Jeffrey, Coulter, and Lodgepole pine. Woven like
pastel threads through the underbrush at all elevations were a hundred
varieties of wildflowers.
 

    
The
mountains extended enormous, furry forepaws of land into the reservoir’s
mirroring emerald expanse, and from a dozen rocky outcroppings above,
waterfalls sprang like ribbons of lace.

    
For a
few minutes, Raszer unhitched both past and future, forgot himself and why he
was there, and returned to a place from his dreams, where sweet woodsmoke rose
from cottages of stone and fathers lulled daughters to sleep with tender half
lies about twilight encounters with the fairy folk. He cleared a mud-slicked
bend at a reckless fifty miles per hour, fishtailed briefly, and spotted up
ahead the low trestle that spanned the San Gabriel’s rapids and led to East
Fork Road. Then he remembered.

    
He
pulled briefly off the road. At the start of each of his earlier assignments
had been a moment like this, a moment when he could have turned back to the
comfort of fantasy; to his books, his music, his women, his Brigit. At this
point, it would not be a difficult retreat. He’d taken no money, nor set
anything of consequence in motion. He could exit now without leaving even a
ripple of his presence, and with his boots clean. He stepped out of the car,
lit a cigarette, and stared across the reservoir at the trestle.

    
In all
likelihood, Katy Endicott was as dead as Johnny Horn. He knew the odds and had
seen the forgone conclusion etched on Aquino’s face. No ransom note, no
cat-and-mouse with the press or the cops, no grainy videotape of the victim
pleading for her life or even boasting—Patty Hearst style—that she’d thrown in
her lot with her captors. And if she were dead, pursuing her ghost would still
be costly. There would be more victims—there always were—and always the chance
that one of them would be him. And for what purpose? The girl’s father was
gone, and Raszer’s prospective employers did not inspire a great deal of
passion for the quest. Moreover, the whole Scotty Darrell debacle had handed
Raszer an escape clause from his otherwise unbreakable contract with fate. He
could still get a real job.

    
And so
he had to ask himself again:
What is it
I’m after
?
Why should I cross that
bridge
? By any standard, it was an ugly case, maybe the ugliest he’d taken
since the turn of the millennium. Given the shakiness of his psyche, did he
really need this?

    
The
answer, which came with his last drag on the cigarette, was as prefigured as
the fractal pattern of the opposing shoreline, and, like most everything about
Raszer, it came in shadow and light.

    
As a dog
senses the presence of bad spirits, Raszer sensed that behind events like Katy
Endicott’s abduction, behind inexplicable acts of abuse great and small, there
was often to be found evidence of grander malfeasance. The highway “detours”
he’d spoken of to Hildegarde did not just spring up spontaneously—they were
erected in the dead of night by an adversary wilier than the Coyote. The odds
against the innocent and guileless in this world weren’t a matter of “natural
selection”—they’d been set by a power whose abiding interest lay in seeing that
the game was fixed.

    
In its
service, this power enlisted sociopaths, tyrants, and all those with great
amounts to lose if the fix were off. Raszer knew this power couldn’t be
vanquished; it was part and parcel of the world. But he hoped that by learning
its name, he might obtain some leverage over it. The trouble was, the name kept
changing
.
No sooner had he held it on
his tongue than it was lost to him, forgotten like a dream that dissipates upon
waking.

    
This was
the genius of all conspiracies and cabals: The links they forged through a
transient common purpose dissolved as soon as the fatal blow was struck. You
could try to pin it on the Bilderbergs or the Trilaterals, you could aim from
right or left, but the true GamesMasters were beyond ideology and evasive as
eels. And yet—Raszer was convinced—some resonance of their original sin must
remain, some trace of the secret name whispered when their knives were first
raised. Where there was design, there had to be evidence of its craft. Common
felony left evidence that police agencies were quite good at following. But
crimes of soul theft and subversion were of a different order, and that, Raszer
knew, was why Silas Endicott had sought him out. Whatever entity plotted such
skulduggery was beyond human justice, but it could be brought to heel by threat
of exposure, and this was often enough to secure release of a captive. Of
necessity, Raszer subscribed to the notion that the world was saved one life at
a time.

    
And
there was this, too, as much a part of Raszer’s raison d’être as his pledge to
gather orphans under his coat—the gold at the end of the rainbow. It was
taunting him right now: An errant ray of western light had struck an
outcropping on the mountainside east of the trestle, illuminating the
possibility that just once, as payment for services rendered, he would pursue a
stray beyond the edge of the familiar and find himself in another country
,
one where there was no market in
souls, where poets stood taller than plunderers, and young girls were left in
peace to blossom like orchids.

    
In that
alterworld would be his house, his daughter, the women and men he loved. It
would not look much different, and humans would still be far from gods. But the
fix would be off, and there would be no profit in dominion. He crushed out the
cigarette, got back into the Avanti, and turned the wheels toward the East Fork
Bridge.

    
Almost as soon as he’d crossed the bridge, color
had drained from the landscape. It wasn’t unusual for California to go
monochrome in the absence of sunlight, especially in the hills. It was all
pastels and earth tones, shades that bled quickly in gloom. But this was stark,
and Raszer had instinctively looked up at the sky to see if some even more
ominous front was coming in. It wasn’t that. It was just the mined-out look of
the San Gabriel’s east fork, the sudden feeling of isolation, and the fact that
the murky part of the job had begun. He wouldn’t see bright colors until he’d
found his first lead.

    
Now, he
stood ankle deep in mud, having hiked the ravine up to the location of Johnny
Horn’s trailer. He’d parked in a gravel lot opposite the access road to the
Burro Canyon Shooting Park, from which, even now, he could hear the reverberant
pings of gunfire, a
whoop
or two, and
the occasional cackle of an automatic weapon. One of the other cars in the lot
had a Phish sticker on its bumper. California: sweet land of libertarianism.
Where the “don’t fuck with me” gun culture meets the hippie ethos.