Reilly 09 - Presumption of Death (50 page)

He felt like a ghost, cold, lifeless.

He went over to the pitiful fire and began tossing wood on it, all the rest of the wood he had taken from his mother, and made his own personal bonfire. After he got it burning big enough, and had drunk his fill of it with his eyes, he found the tape recorder. He pulled out a cell phone and dialed up Jolene and George.

George answered.

“I got someone here wants to talk to her grandma,” Danny said, enjoying the cry he heard on the other end. The phone clattered, and Jolene spoke next. “Danny? Where is she, Danny?”

He played the tape. Jolene started crying right after hearing the word
grandma,
so it didn’t matter that Callie didn’t talk much.

“Now put George back on the phone,” he said. Damn the woman. She couldn’t hear him through the wailing. He repeated himself, louder this time, and she let go of the phone.

“It’s me,” George said.

Danny put his face closer to the fire. “I got such a big fire going, George. Wish you could be here to experience it with me. But you don’t like hanging with losers, do you?”

“I’m sorry I said that, son. Now you-”

“Callie’s okay. She wants to go home, but that’s up to you.”

“Don’t hurt her,” George said. “We’ve talked. We’ll pay you the full amount. Twenty thousand. Just bring the kids back safe. Or leave them somewhere so we can come get them.”

“I’m going to need more money.”

Silence from George.

“I asked for the twenty. But you all thought, he set the fire, how’s he gonna collect? You forced me into all this mess.”

“It was just-you kept on setting fires-”

“So?”

“I-I won’t argue with you. I’m just waiting to hear how much.”

“An extra fifty grand.”

A pause, then George said, “Okay. On top of the twenty.”

“Get it,” Danny said. “Cash, unmarked, nothing over a fifty. I’ll call you in the morning about where all to leave the money and where to find the kids. This whole thing could be over by one o’clock tomorrow. It’s up to you.”

“Son, tell us where you are.”

“I’m not your son.” Danny punched End and looked around, paranoid again. The wind was rising, so the licks of fire flared out and blew sideways.

“It’s just possible,” Paul said, pushing a branch back for Nina, “that he’s dumb enough to build a fire.” They stumbled through brush that in the daytime would have been daunting, but at night was nearly impossible. Wind had blown in intermittent bursts for the past hour, so the pines shook and whipped above them, and dry leaves rained down. They reached the top of a rise, but had to march around for quite a while before they could see any distance through the thick black forest.

“No fires,” Paul said, disappointed.

“Keep looking,” Nina said. She did not let herself think about what the children might be feeling in the darkness of this night, because she knew knowledge of their fear would paralyze her.

She took Paul’s arm and pointed upward. She reckoned they had climbed to over nine thousand feet and still hadn’t hit treeline. “There!” she whispered.

He peered. “I can make out rocks… white…”

“Smoke,” Nina said. “It’s a pretty big fire. And the wind is coming up again.”

He watched for a long minute. “Controlled, Nina. At the moment. Let’s go.”

They began traversing along a steep slope to the left, toward a wooded gully where two hills came together, keeping well below the white plume. They were bushwhacking and it was hard to be quiet as they made their way across the talus slope. When they finally edged into the gully they found a swift meltwater stream and a gentle slope leading up.

They were on a huge ridge of mountains that flanked Lake Tahoe, looking down at the flat forests of Incline along the shore and out upon endless, distant, shining water. They moved even more cautiously now, until they judged they were within earshot. Then they slowed to a crawl.

“What do we do if it’s them?” she whispered in Paul’s ear.

“The minute we see them,” Paul said, “we get the cops up here. We are not going to mess with this guy, Nina.” She nodded.

The gully flattened into a saddle cleft by the spring. They slowed even more as they approached what appeared to be a campsite, bordered at the back by huge boulders of fallen rock. They heard a voice-Danny Cervantes.

“I never liked you either, Darryl,” Danny was saying into a mobile phone. He looked like John Walker Lindh fresh out of Afghanistan, hair out of its customary ponytail, clothes dirty and disheveled, lit by flames that played over his skin like dancing demons. They had to move in close to hear him say, “Oh, they’re sleeping good tonight, Darryl. I drugged them. You know I’m no doctor, though, I had to guess how much would keep them out of my hair for the rest of the night.” He then spent a few minutes assuring an apparently frantic Darryl that he was “ninety-nine percent sure” they were still alive before shutting the phone.

To their surprise, after hanging up, Danny left the campsite, heading directly around a nearby bend.

“Where’d he go?” Nina whispered.

“My guess is, he wants a bigger fire.”

Nina ran over to the campsite and tried to open the tent flaps, but they were tied shut. “Callie!” she hissed. “Mikey, are you there?”

Paul was by her side. He helped her fumble with the tent ties, and they both called to the kids.

“Rip them off!” Nina said, tearing at them. She was trying to locate her penknife, when they heard a sound in the woods.

Within two seconds, Paul had hold of her, had run her out of the camp area and back into the dark forest.

He looked back toward the clearing. They could hear Danny now, but they couldn’t see him. Taking her by the arm, Paul walked her quietly farther from the campsite, although they could still see it, and could hear Danny, who was apparently gathering more dead wood, judging by the sticks and branches that flew roughly toward the fire.

Paul called Crockett. He ran down the situation and their location as well as he could, then shut his phone. “He patched me through to the local police. It will take them a while, Nina. It’s a good thirty minutes up from Incline Village if they go slow along the back road, and there’s no other easy way in. They don’t want to scare him off, or scare him into doing anything to the kids. They’ll have to go slow, like we did.”

Nina made a call to the poison center and was told exactly what she thought they would tell her about the Ambien-get the kids to throw up and get them to a hospital. Now.

“I’m going back there.”

A log as thick as a lamppost flew into the camp.

“Nina.” Paul took her in his arms. “Listen to me. You’ll put everyone in danger.”

“They may be dying! I’m not afraid of him.”

“Be patient, Nina. We’ll watch over them until the police arrive.”

“You don’t understand!” she said. “You…”

“Don’t have kids?”

She could feel his eyes on her, beams from his soul shooting through the dark.

“You think I’m making the wrong decision because I can’t appreciate how serious the situation is? You think I don’t care because I don’t have kids of my own?” His voice had leveled to flatness.

Heart pounding, breath coming in bursts, Nina shook her head. “No, of course not. Paul, I’m sorry…”

They waited for some time. Nina leaned against Paul and took comfort from him. She checked her watch frequently.

No sound came from the campsite.

Then they heard a crash as Danny broke through some bushes by the tent, bottle of whiskey in one hand, and a can of kerosene in the other. He had obviously already made headway on the bottle, because he was humming.

Nina and Paul crouched down. Paul had his gun out, Nina noted, and felt relieved at the sight. At least no more overt harm could come to the kids while they were watching.

“This is good,” Paul said in her ear. “Maybe he’ll pass out.”

But as the minutes ticked by, Danny got drunker, and seemed not at all inclined to doze off. At one point he stumbled directly toward them, stopping at the first line of bushes, and let loose a gurgling flow of vomit. After that, he seemed livelier than ever, collecting more wood to keep the bonfire going, keeping it big, and keeping it under control. Nina thought a forest fire was not in his plan for the evening, and was thankful.

The sheriff’s officers did not come, and did not come.

Danny’s happy song turned into muttered cursing. His face, scratched and lined by firelight, drooped as his mood shifted. He peed into bushes. He drank some more.

He picked up the can of kerosene. At first, he contented himself with splashing a few drops toward the fire. It blazed up. Once he made a small fire next to it, and stomped it out.

“He could kill himself doing that,” Paul whispered, his face grim. “That can could explode in his hand. Damn, he’s so close to the tent.”

She heard indecision in his voice. She, too, couldn’t decide whether to rush him now-the dangerous can of fuel he was wandering around with could burn the tent-but a moment later, Danny, apparently overcome by his foul mood, made a move they could not ignore. He had been gesturing wildly, and now slopped the kerosene in a long stream that stretched all the way to the tent.

And it caught. A spark, something, set the whole stream of fuel alight.

Paul ran out into the clearing, gun in hand. Danny screamed as the fire hit his hand and dropped the can, saw Paul, and grabbed a burning limb. He brandished it at Paul, who moved around him in a circle pattern, looking for a way in.

The tent was in flames. Running past the fire, Nina grabbed a burning torch and ran behind Danny and then lunged at his back and bedeviled him with the flame.

Danny screamed again and turned to face her. She threw the fiery limb at him. Paul tackled him from behind, but he kicked out and had a second to stand up. He should have run into the forest where he might have escaped.

But he ran toward the tent and disappeared inside.

And Nina knew then that he had come to the end of his line and decided to burn with the children. Paul was up but he couldn’t get inside the low doorway, it was a sheet of flames. She was pulling at the lines, trying to pull the tent anchors away. The anchors popped up and she could pick up the whole side of the tent-

Danny pushed her hard from inside the tent. It felt as though the tent fought her. She fell and her shirt caught fire. Tearing it off, she ran back to the canvas-covered form in the tent and picked up her leg in the hiking boot and gave Danny the hardest kick she could.

The whole tent fell down. Now it was only burning sheets of canvas with two children and a murderer lying trapped inside.

For a moment she and Paul just stood there and looked at each other, horror in their eyes.

Then Danny began crawling out of the collapsed tent, dazed and burning, and Paul tackled him.

The forest around them came alive. Police in uniform, firefighters burst into the campsite. Three cops rushed Paul and Danny, and at almost the same moment a crew of firefighters came running in and used handheld extinguishers to spread foam on the fire.

And Nina ran through the burning half-circle of fire to the one side of the tent that wasn’t already engulfed, ripped through the fabric with her knife, and found the children.

EPILOGUE

One Month Later

A BIG BANNER, HUNG ACROSS THE entrance to Jolene’s new business, said WELCOME TO THE CAT LADY CAFÉ! BEST LATTES IN THE UNIVERSE! Through the front window, Nina saw a big crowd of adults and children talking and laughing.

“Go ahead, Wish,” she said. Wish had twenty thousand dollars thanks to his cut of the reward, which had been shared with Connie Cervantes, Sandy, Nina, and Paul, and he looked self-confident and happy again. As he dipped his head and disappeared inside, she held Paul’s hand and stopped him.

“You okay?” he said.

“It’s the first time back in this town since-”

“It’s just good old Carmel Valley Village again, and the party goes on,” Paul said. “I think the Cat Lady would approve of this tribute. She was a tough character and so is Jolene. Look in there. See Jolene behind the counter?”

“I like the cat ears.”

“I’ve been hearing at the Carmel post office that this is the best lunch place on the central coast. The place is jammed. She’s a hit.”

“Thank goodness. I had heard she found a start-up stake somewhere. She moved fast. There’s Debbie and Nate. He looks happy. Isn’t Debbie a remarkable woman? She had to work hard to get the foster-care certificate.”

“She wanted another child,” Paul said. “She’s going to take good care of Nate, and then she’ll find other foster children when Nate goes back to the Washoe tribe. I wonder how her husband took it.”

“Like a man, I hope,” Nina said. “Tory told me that Nate and Mikey are getting to be friends. Oh, there he is, behind the counter.”

“Ah, I see the ex-cons drinking coffee at the table in the corner. How many hours of community service did they get?”

“Six hundred hours apiece. They’ll have to testify against Danny in a few months too. And they all have records. And then there’s the payback to Green River.”

“You did a great job keeping them out of jail. They know how lucky they are.”

“Keeps them busy,” Nina said, smiling. “I hope they’re only talking about golf. I wonder if they miss David and Britta.”

“I doubt David and Britta miss them. Britta’s going to be happier in New York. She made an amazing recovery, didn’t she?”

Nina nodded. “And Tory’s looking very pregnant. I’m glad she didn’t throw Darryl out. Check out Elizabeth and Ben by the cash register. He has an arm around her waist. Very interesting. Jolene did mention something about that when she called to invite us. Ben decided he didn’t want to live on the same street as the men who toasted his nephew’s death and Elizabeth had extra room.”

“Are you ready? They’re not going to bite you, Nina.”

“One more minute. It’s going to be intense,” Nina said.

“Here comes Megan. I noticed the bikes in the rack.” Megan came outside and said, “Hi! Why don’t you come in? I saw you out here.”