EIGHTEEN

Pete McManus lived in a post-war, ranch-style tract house with peeling gray siding, a front lawn more dirt than grass, and a couple of palm trees out front, slowly dying of thirst. A faded blue and white Air Line Pilots Association decal was stuck to the corner of the front window. I rang the doorbell. It didn’t seem to work. I opened the screen door and rapped loudly.

“Hello?”

No response.

A red Volkswagen Jetta that hadn’t seen a car wash in years, if ever, was parked on the curb in front. Somebody had scrawled, “Wash me,” on the back window. The shiny new BMW convertible McManus was driving when I’d seen him last was nowhere around.

On the side of the house was a chain-link fence. In back was a detached, two-car garage. The dented metal garage door was closed. Inside I could hear a woman sobbing mournfully and trying to sing.

The melody was hard to identify at first, let alone the lyrics. The woman was no crooner. But as I walked through the gate and drew closer, I realized that the tune was Adele’s “Someone Like You” and that there was raw anguish in her effort.

On the north wall of the garage was a weathered, partially open side door. I knocked and stepped inside, startling a very pregnant woman in her early thirties who had been standing at a workbench. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves and a bloodstained shop apron over a Mickey Mouse maternity top. Tears irrigated her cheeks. In her right hand was a meat cleaver.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

She stormed toward me, teeth bared, raising the blade over her head like she meant business. “Get the hell out of here!”

I snared her wrist easily, twisting the cleaver from her grip and kicking it under the bench.

“What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me!”

I held her as she fought to get away, her back to my chest, her arms pinned to her sides. “It’s OK. I’m a pilot, a friend of Pete’s. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Only then did I realize the garage was a butcher shop, but unlike any I’d ever seen. The remains of exotic game animals hung from the rafters on meat hooks—the hind quarter of a zebra with the hide still attached, something shaped like an elephant tusk, some sort of small deer. Piled on the workbench, next to an industrial-sized band saw, were hunks of raw meat that looked like they were being carved into steaks and roasts. Opposite the workbench was a wall-sized cooler with glass doors like the kind you’d find at any convenience store, only this cooler was crammed top to bottom with packaged meat wrapped in clear plastic and neatly labeled: “KUDU”; “LEOPARD”; “LION”; “ORYX,” “RHINO.” Something acrid rose in my throat and stayed there.

“What is this place?”

She struggled to escape my grip. “What do you want?”

The cement floor was sticky with blood. The soles of my shoes stuck to it. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I repeated. “I just want to ask you a few questions, that’s all. You think I could do that?”

Her resistance lessened.

“. . . OK.”

“Great. It’s OK. You can trust me.”

I let her go. She backed away a couple of feet, wiping away tears and staring at the floor, too scared to look at me directly.

“My name’s Logan. I’m a flight instructor. Are you Pete’s wife?”

She nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Peyton.”

“Nice to meet you, Peyton. Again, I’m sorry if I scared you. Is Pete around?”

She peeled off her gloves. “He’s up north somewhere.”

Freckled and of medium height, Peyton McManus was less pretty than she was cute, with a tangled thatch of hair the color of straw and buff-colored eyes rimmed red from crying. She wasn’t wearing a wedding band.

“What is this about?”

“Roy and Toni Hollister,” I said.

Her chin trembled. “Toni Hollister was a two-timing whore.” She pulled off the apron and tossed her rubber gloves angrily on the bench.

“What makes you say that?”

“I’m due in three weeks,” she said. “I gotta eat something.”

I followed her toward the back door. The yard was sun-baked dirt, littered with rusting oil drums, broken chunks of cinder block, and an old motorcycle missing its front wheel. She went inside and didn’t protest when I did likewise.

The kitchen hadn’t been updated in what looked to be about fifty years. Harvest gold appliances. Butcher block countertops. Rolled linoleum floor. Formica dinette set with chrome trim. She washed her hands in the sink and dried them on a dishrag draped over the handle of the oven door.

“Why was Toni a whore, Peyton?”

“What do you care?”

“I’m just asking, that’s all.”

“You said you’re a flight instructor.” She opened the refrigerator. Packages of meat like those in the garage were stacked on the shelves. One of them was labeled, “ELEPHANT.” “Why would a flight instructor care who Toni was banging, unless you were banging her too.”

“I didn’t know Toni. Never met her.”

She opened a can of Sprite and slapped a piece of American cheese between two slices of Wonder Bread. Eating nothing would’ve been more nutritious.

“Answer my question,” Peyton said, easing herself into a chair. “Why do you care?”

I told her how I’d gotten caught up in the Hollister case, how I’d known her husband for a while, and how I respected him as a pilot.

Peyton slowly chewed her sandwich without seeming to taste it. “Toni and my soon-to-be former spouse were sleeping together on a regular basis,” she said contemptuously. “The affair was going on for over a year, right under my nose. I only found out about it a couple days ago. Ran across some e-mails I wasn’t supposed to. Or maybe I was. I don’t care anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Peyton.”

She stared at nothing, lost in her own venomous thoughts. “Toni was always so nice to everybody. All hugs and air kisses. Couldn’t do enough for you. It was all an act. Such a fake bitch. And the thing was, I trusted her, you know?”

I didn’t say anything.

Peyton shook her head, staring into space. “The woman was, like, fifteen years older than him. OK, so she had money but, I mean, what kind of guy goes after some shriveled-up old bitch like that? Like he was looking for his mommy or something. I mean, what’s wrong with me? Am I so disgusting?”

“I asked myself the same thing when my wife left me.”

Peyton looked up at me.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Logan.”

“You want a cheese sandwich, Logan?”

I’m rarely squeamish, but knowing what the cheese was parked beside in her refrigerator made me want to throw up in my mouth. I declined the offer.

She got up and rinsed her plate in the sink.

“What’s with the meat processing operation out back?” I asked her.

“I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“I didn’t come here to get you in trouble.”

Her back was turned to me, her hands braced on the counter. Several seconds passed.

“Screw it,” Peyton said. “It wasn’t my idea, anyway.”

The idea, she explained, was Roy Hollister’s, an offshoot of his struggling safari business. Many hunters were interested only in trophy heads they could hang on their walls. Hollister came up with a system by which game animals would be butchered like cattle and flown illicitly to California in the luggage compartment of his jet before being carved into individual and family-size servings. The meat would then be sold to gourmands with a taste for the exotic and to a handful of upscale restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco that offered special customers special entrees—dishes that never appeared on their regular menus.

“Roy didn’t pay Pete hardly anything when he was flying for him,” Peyton said, washing off her dish in the sink, “and it got to the point that Pete wasn’t doing hardly any flying. Roy was flying himself. So the meat was like a bonus? With me pregnant and working only part-time, we had to find a way to pay the bills, you know?”

I nodded.

“You sure you don’t want a sandwich?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

The image she painted of a young pilot and his wife struggling financially didn’t square with the pricey new sports car I’d seen McManus driving. I asked her about the car.

“That was Pete’s deal,” she said, drying the plate with a dish towel. “He told me Toni loaned him that Beemer until we could get back on our feet. Apparently I must not have understood the terms of the ‘loan.’ Christ, she didn’t loan him that car. She bought it for him. The same way a rich old man buys his girlfriend a diamond bracelet. She bought him a rifle too.”

“What kind of rifle?”

“I don’t know. A hunting rifle. Made out of some fancy wood.”

The kitchen adjoined the living room. Above a red brick veneer fireplace hung the stuffed trophy head of a pronghorn antelope. I could’ve sworn it was looking straight at me.

“Does Pete hunt?”

“Pete?” Peyton snorted. “Are you kidding? Pete loves to hunt. He grew up hunting. Roy took him to Africa a couple years ago with a bunch of his big-deal clients. The highlight of Pete’s life. I think he shot a deer or something. That’s where he is now—after I told him to pack his bags.”

“Pete’s in Africa?”

She looked at me funny, her left hand cradling her baby belly. “Up north, like I said. His dad has a cabin outside Frazier Park, in Pine Mountain Club. They used to go hunting up there all the time before he died.”

“Can you show me where Pete keeps his guns?”

“Why would I want to do that? I don’t even know you.”

“Somebody took a couple of shots at me last night.”

“And you think it was Pete? He may be a cheating piece of scum, but I find that a little hard to believe.”

The Buddha would have us trust everyone. My military mind knew better. A couple had been murdered and I, however willingly, had been sucked into the vortex of their violent deaths. Pete McManus had worked for the Hollisters. He knew I’d been asking questions about them. Did he have something to hide, something to fear that had compelled him to come after me? I didn’t know, but from where I sat, under the gaze of an antelope whose life he had stolen, everyone was suspect, including him.

“You think he shot Toni and Roy.”

I glanced back at Peyton McManus. Her expression was one of stunned disbelief and horror.

“I’m not saying he did or he didn’t. I’d still like to see his guns though.”

She led me down a short hall to their bedroom. The room was maybe ten feet square, if that, with lace curtains, a pressboard Ikea dresser, and matching nightstands. An older TV sat on the dresser. A hand-stitched quilt covered the bed. The closet had two sliding doors.

“I always have to be careful opening these,” Peyton said, clutching one of the doors with both hands. “Stupid things always come off, right on your foot. One more project he said he would get to but never did.”

“Allow me, please.”

She stepped aside as I manhandled the door, sliding it from left to right. As advertised, the stupid thing came off its track and landed on my toes.

“You OK?”

“Fine.” Bruised but otherwise intact, I set the door aside.

Peyton pushed a bunch of long dresses on hangers to the other side of the closet and began extracting firearms. Among the cache were two shotguns—a 12-gauge Remington pump-action, and a Mossberg .410 with a pistol grip—along with three rifles: an old lever-action Winchester .30-30; a Marlin bolt-action .223; and a .22-caliber Henry survival rifle with a collapsible barrel like the one I often packed in my cockpit when I was in the air force.

“Pretty sure that’s all of them,” Peyton said.

“He didn’t take any with him when he left?

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“You mean you can’t tell me, or you won’t?”

“I mean I wasn’t here when he left. I was at my mom’s. Pete’s into guns. I’m not. We used to argue over that. We used to argue over a lot of stuff.”

“Does he own any pistols or revolvers?”

“Not that I ever saw. His dad may have had some up at the house in Pine Mountain Club.”

She wrote down the address of the cabin without me having to pry it out of her.

“That’s the last of it,” she said, “just so you know.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant.

“The meat,” Peyton said. “There’s no more after this batch. I’m not sure where the rent money comes from after that. Gotta pay the hospital to deliver this baby and hire a divorce attorney. Who knows how much those guys charge in fees.”

“A lot,” I said. “I won’t tell anybody about the meat.”

“Some people think it’s gross. I just didn’t know what else to do.”

“It’ll work out.”

She walked me to the front door. “Do me a favor,” she said, “if you do happen to run into him, tell him he’s got a week to get his shit out of here or it’s all going to the dump.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Caliber-wise, none of the rifles Peyton McManus had pulled from the closet matched the one used to kill the Hollisters. The possibility certainly existed that her husband owned others. I presumed I’d find that out after I found him.

I presumed correctly.