“Where do you suppose he went?”

  She shook her head.

  “To see Annette Byers?”

  “He saw her yesterday. He said we didn’t have to worry, she was leaving right away.”

  “Start at the beginning, Mrs. Johnson. Make it easier on both of us.”

  She drew a breath before she said, “That woman called here last week. Out of the blue ... Grant swore it was the first time he’d heard from her since she gave up custody of Kevin. He wasn’t lying. He was as surprised as I was—I could see it in his eyes.”

  “What day was that?”

  “Saturday. Early Saturday morning.”

  “Where was she calling from?”

  “She wouldn’t say.”

  “Purpose of the call?”

  “She wanted a place to stay for a week or two. She said she was having problems with an abusive boyfriend, had no one else to turn to.”

  “She wanted to stay here, in your house?”

  “Lord, no. She wouldn’t dare have asked that. Grant has a fishing shack on the river that belonged to his father.”

  “Sacramento River?”

  “Yes. Up beyond Knight’s Landing. She knew about it from when they were ... seeing each other, hoped he’d still have it.” Melanie Johnson’s mouth flexed and tightened, as if she were tasting bile. “He used to take her there. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was where Kevin was conceived.”

  “What was your husband’s reaction to her request?”

  “He didn’t want anything to do with her, after all this time. But she begged him ... she was crying; he said she really sounded terrified. Grant has a soft heart ... too soft sometimes. He gave in. I guess I can’t blame him. He said she could stay at the shack as long as she kept away from us, from Kevin. He told her where he hides the key so he wouldn’t have to see her.”

  “Just her staying at the shack, no one else?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Did either of you hear from her again?”

  “No. But then we read in the papers that the police were looking for her, that she was mixed up in that murder case. And yesterday a San Francisco newspaper reporter called Grant and asked about her. It scared us. If the police found her at the shack, we were afraid Grant would be arrested, too ... aiding a fugitive or something.”

  “So what did you decide to do?”

  “Grant said the best thing was to tell her she couldn’t stay any longer, make her leave if he had to. There’s no phone at the shack, so he drove up yesterday afternoon after work.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t give him any trouble, he said. Agreed to leave right away. But he was gone a long time, and he seemed upset when he came home.”

  “Did you ask him about that?”

  “Yes. He said it was painful seeing her again, and he stopped for a couple of beers afterward.” She paused and then said, “Only now you tell me he’s not at work today. If he went back up there ... why would he do that?”

  The question was for herself, not me. I said nothing.

  “I don’t understand it. He’s not a liar, really he’s not. We’ve never had any secrets from each other. He’d never start up with that bitch again, I know he wouldn’t ... But now that I think about it, his breath didn’t smell of beer last night....”

  I was not going there with her. I said, “There’s probably a simple explanation, Mrs. Johnson,” and then I asked, “Where exactly is the fishing shack?”

  She told me; it sounded easy enough to find. Then she said, “You have to tell me something now. How much trouble is my husband in? Can he be arrested for aiding a fugitive?”

  “Not if everything you’ve told me is the truth.” And if he hadn’t been helping her in some other way, last night and/or today.

  “It’s the truth, believe me.” She sighed heavily. “He’ll be mad at me for talking to you like this.”

  “You did the right thing, Mrs. Johnson.”

  She lifted Michael’s thin body, hugged him so tight against her breast he began to squirm. “Yes,” she said a little grimly, “I know I did.”

  I crossed the Sacramento River on Highway 113 out of Woodland. The Sacramento is a big river, 375 miles of loops and bends and white-water rapids from its headwaters near Mount Shasta to San Francisco Bay; an important river in terms of agribusiness, transportation, the endangered Chinook salmon; a controversial river for the ongoing, often bitter struggles over water use, pollution control, and its fragile ecosystem; a badly used river by logging, mining, manufacturing, developmental, and political interests. But you might not guess any of that if you saw it for the first time from the bridge at Knight’s Landing. From there the Sacramento looks small, tame, insignificant—a none too appetizing muddy brown, glinting under the rays of the midday sun.

  Along the rivercourse south of Knight’s Landing is where Sacramento’s gentry live in expensive ranch-style homes and pink-and-white estate villas, their pleasure boats kept in ritzy marinas; north of the village is not much of anything except open grassland and wetland, a fifty-mile stretch up to Colusa that unrestricted logging has all but denuded of the riparian forests that once grew along there. Grant Johnson’s fishing shack was in that stretch, a few miles upriver.

  Highway 113 continues northeast to Yuba City, but at a wide spot called Robbins, Melanie Johnson had told me, a back road branches off to parallel the river. I found it and followed it a couple of miles to where a rutted track angled over to the river hamlet of Kirkville. Look for a dirt lane just outside Kirkville, she’d told me. I looked, spotted it, turned, and jounced along its narrow, snaky length for a tenth of a mile until I could see the river again.

  That was far enough in the car. I left it sitting in the middle of the lane, not because the track was little used, but to block any potential escape. Before I got out, I checked the loads in the .38 and put the weapon in my pocket.

  I walked ahead slowly, keening the way an animal does. Blackbirds chattered in a line of bushes that partially blocked my view of the river; there was no other sound that I could hear. A gusty little wind brought the water smell to me, a good, fresh smell in spite of its muddiness.

  The bushes helped screen my approach. When I reached them, I had a clear look at the river, a few hundred yards wide at this point, and part of the near shoreline. Stunted willows, wild grape, and three tumbledown, board-and-batten shacks squatting at the water’s edge at fifty-yard intervals. Two of the shacks had stubby, rotting piers jutting from their backsides; the one I wanted was the second of the the two, the farthest upriver. From where I stood, I could see only its outer half. I eased ahead a pace at a time until the bushes thinned and the rest of it came into sight.

  The front of the shack had two steps leading up to the door. A man was sitting on the top one, hunched forward, elbows on knees and chin on the backs of his hands. Brown-haired, brown-bearded, and unfamiliar—Grant Johnson, no doubt, because the pickup truck parked nearby had the words RiteClean Plumbing and Heating on the driver’s door.

  But what tightened the muscles in my neck and shoulders, my fingers around the 38’s grip, was neither Johnson nor his truck. It was the other car parked there, drawn up close on the shack’s far side.

  Annette Byers’ MG.

  NINETEEN

  I GOT TO WITHIN THIRTY YARDS OF THE SHACK before the wind lulled and Johnson heard or sensed my presence. His head jerked up; then he was on his feet in one awkward lunge. He was linebacker big, going soft around the middle but with the kind of size and muscle that would make him rough goods in a fight. If he’d made any sort of move in my direction, I would have had to show him the gun. But he was not the aggressive type. He stood swaying slightly, slump-shouldered, gawping at me out of widened eyes, his face twisted with anguish and confusion.

  “Who the hell’re you?” he said in rumbly tones.

  I told him who I was, name and profession both. Recognition brought a grimace and the words, “Oh, God.” Favorite Johnson family phrase in times of stress, as if it were an invocation for first aid.

  “Where’s Annette Byers?”

  I was prepared for lies or evasions; I got neither. He said, “Inside. Asleep, unconscious ... I don’t know.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah. She’s hurt, sick....”

  “Hurt how?”

  “Somebody beat her up. She wouldn’t say who ... the guy she was mixed up with, I guess, the bald guy they wrote about in the papers. I think she’s got internal injuries ... she’s been puking up blood.”

  “How long has she been like that?”

  “Awhile. Before she came here on Saturday.”

  “You were here last night. For Christ’s sake, why didn’t you take her to a hospital?”

  His eyelids slatted. “How’d you know I was here last night? How’d you find out about me, this place?”

  “Never mind that. Answer the question. Why didn’t you take her to a hospital?”

  “I wanted to, but she wouldn’t let me. She said the cops would arrest her for murder, arrest me for harboring a fugitive. She’s so damn scared ... I couldn’t force her to go. I’ve got my family to think of. And Annette, she’s the mother of my oldest son. You understand?”

  I understood, all right. I’d heard it all before, in one form or another, and I didn’t like it any better this time than I had the others.

  “She gave me some money,” Johnson said, “ a lot of money ... she wanted me to buy her drugs. Methamphetamines, cocaine, morphine, whatever I could get. She’s strung out, real bad.”

  “Did you make a buy for her? That why you came back up here today?”

  “No. I couldn’t do it. I know a guy, but ... I hate drugs, I hate what they do to people. I came back to tell her I couldn’t, that the only thing I could do for her was take her to a doctor.” He raked hooked fingers through his beard, making a raspy sound that was audible above the thrum of the wind. “She ... went crazy. Called me all kinds of names, tried to claw my face. Then all of a sudden she passed out.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Twenty minutes, half an hour. I couldn’t wake her up, so I came out here to think. Decide what to do.”

  “Well now you won’t have to do any more thinking. I’ll make the decision for you.”

  “What decision? What’re you gonna do?”

  “Go inside and have a look at her, first. You wait here.”

  He started to argue, changed his mind, and stepped aside to let me pass. Soft-hearted, his wife had called him. Soft-headed, too, for all his bulk: weak, indecisive, ineffectual in a crisis. I pitied his family in any other emergency that might come up in their lives.

  The shack was one room, maybe fifteen feet square, dim because the single window overlooking the river was tightly shuttered. There were shelves and an ancient icebox on one wall, a table and two chairs in the middle of the bare floor, and a double tier of bunk beds against another wall. No cooking facilities, a chemical toilet in a doorless alcove, a space heater near the bunks that was turned on but didn’t throw out much heat. The air in there held a chill, smelled rawly of sickness and human waste.

  Annette Byers was on the lower bunk, a curled mound hidden under a skimpy blanket. I went over and eased the blanket down so I could see her face. An unhealthy white stained with fever blotches and a purple-yellow bruise on the exposed temple; pain lines deeply etched around her mouth, the lips so cracked there were spots of blood where the fissures had opened. She moaned, flopped over on her back, but her eyes stayed shut. I laid the back of my hand on her forehead. Hot. One of her hands was clear of the blanket; I lifted it, held it for a few seconds. Her pulse was weak, fluttery.

  Johnson had said she might have internal injuries, so I drew the blanket down far enough to have a look at her torso. Jesus. She wore a T-shirt and panties, and the shirt had hiked up under her breasts; a solid pattern of bruises covered most of the exposed skin across her belly and abdomen. Heavy blows to that part of a woman’s body could easily rupture the spleen, damage other organs, and cause internal bleeding.

  She moaned again, shivering. I recovered her, and as I did, the lower edge of the blanket came loose from around her feet and I noticed the bulge of something down there, wedged partway between the bunk and the wall. I knew what it was even before I got a grip on it and dragged it out.

  Jay Cohalan’s cowhide briefcase.

  The weight of it said it was full; I unfastened the catches and looked inside just long enough to verify the contents. The money, all right. A few of the packets torn open, the rest intact. Most if not all of the seventy-five thousand. Even as hurt and sick as she was, she’d kept it close the whole time she was here—slept with it, maybe fondled it to help ease her suffering. The damn money to these people was the world, the universe, God and the devil both.

  I looked around for something else to cover her with, keep her warm. Nothing. The space heater was turned up as high as it would go; I moved it a little closer to the bunk. Then I snugged up the case and took it outside with me.

  Johnson was pacing around on the grass in front. He stopped when he saw me. The briefcase didn’t seem to register on him; his gaze held on mine.

  “She awake now?”

  “No.”

  “You think she’ll be all right?”

  “If you’d gotten her medical attention last night, she’d have a hell of a lot better chance than she does now. That truck of yours equipped with a mobile phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go put in an emergency medical call. Tell them where we are and to get an ambulance or a medivac helicopter out here as fast as they can.”

  “Can’t we just take her to a hospital?”

  “It’s too late to risk moving her. Do what I told you, no arguments.”

  He bobbed his head. “Should I tell them her name?”

  “Might as well. They’d find it out pretty soon anyway. But you don’t need to say anything about me, now or later. I won’t be here when the medics and the law arrive. Take all the credit for yourself.”

  “Credit,” he said. “Oh, God, I hope she doesn’t die. I loved her once, she’s Kevin mother. I couldn’t stand that on my conscience....”

  “Goddamn it, make that call.”

  He hurried away to the pickup. I went in the opposite direction at a trot, opened the car’s trunk, traded the briefcase for the blanket I keep in there. I could have left the money in the shack for the authorities to find, maybe should have; but it had been my responsibility, and at least some of this mess would not have happened if I’d been more careful. I was not about to walk away from it now that I had control of it again.

  I drove to the shack, turned the car around there. Johnson was still in his truck. I took the blanket inside, tucked it around Byers’ trembling body. She’d become restless, moving her head from side to side, making noises in her throat. Some of them were words, but I couldn’t make sense of them. Delirious. I’d had the idea of trying to wake her up, see if I could get her to answer some questions, but here with her again it seemed futile and risky.

  Her suede shoulder bag was on the top bunk. I dumped out the contents, pawed through them. The usual stuff, and the only item of interest a dog-eared address book. Dingo was listed in there, under that name alone, with the Duboce Street address and an old phone number scratched out and new ones inked in—Pueblo Street in the city. That must be where he’d been living recently. Would he be holed up there? Possible, but not likely. The other names and addresses told me nothing, but there were a few I didn’t recognize. I pocketed the book, scooped the rest of the stuff back into the bag.

  “No!”

  The sudden cry made me jump a little. When I looked at her, her eyes were wide open and red-flecked drool crawled from the corner of her mouth. But she was not seeing me or anything else in the room. She muttered something that I couldn’t make out, then began babbling in fits and starts. I sank to one knee, leaned my head close enough to her mouth to feel and smell the sour warmth of her breath.

  “Stop it stop it stop it ... crazy bastard what’s the matter with you, leave me alone! Dirty son of a bitch!” Incoherent. “How d’you like it huh? How d’you like getting hit you sick creep ... break your fuckin’ head open....” Incoherent. “Oh shit what am I gonna do now ... kill me if he finds me ...” Incoherent. “Please ... hurts so much ... puking up blood he must’ve broke something inside....” Incoherent. “I’ve got to have it for the pain ... something anything please Grant please....” A series of whimpers, more sentence fragments, as if a nightmare scene kept replaying on a loop in her head.

  I’d heard enough. Had enough in here. I straightened, made sure the blankets covered her completely, and then went back outside and shut the door behind me.

  Johnson was standing there, running his hands up and down his sides as if trying to cleanse them. He said, “They’re on the way.”

  “Make sure you wait for them. And make sure you forget I was here.”

  “I will. What’re you gonna do?”

  “Find the man who hurt her like that.”

  “Then what?”

  “That depends on him. Did she say anything about him? Where he might be?”

  “No.”

  “Mention the name Dingo at any time?”

  “Once. She said if Dingo found her he’d kill her.”

  “She tell you where she was before she came here? Where he beat her up?”

  “No. She wouldn’t talk about any of that.”

  I brushed past him, went to the MG. The driver’s door wasn’t locked. Spots of dried blood on the driver’s bucket; nothing else on any of the seats. And nothing on the floorboards or among the clutter in the glove box. I pulled the trunk release and looked in there. Nothing.

  Johnson was still rooted in the same spot. “All right,” I said to him, “I’m going now. Stay inside with her until somebody comes. Keep her warm, don’t let her kick the blankets off.”

  “I’ll take care of her,” he said.

  Sure you will, I thought. Just like you’ve been taking care of her since last night. You soft-hearted, compassionate tower of strength you.

 

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