LIGHT, PALE AND frosted.
It went away.
It returned.
Good deal. I expected light. The Pearly Gates would have light, a sign on an alabaster post, maybe a set of rules, and maybe a password or a secret handshake to get in.
I didn’t know the password. Well, shit. Who was in charge of handing out the damn passwords?
The light dimmed, faded to black.
Voices.
“What’s the password?”
Hell, I don’t know, I thought. No one told me. I wasn’t in the loop. Which figured.
“You got a warrant?”
I laughed, maybe. Not out loud. You need a warrant to get past the Pearly Gates? Since when?
“I need a warrant? I’ll get one if I have to, but do you really want to play it that way?”
Silence. Then, “It’s C-L-i-n-v-#-2-1-3-5-@-L.”
Hell. I’m supposed to remember all that? Although it did sound vaguely familiar. Maybe I would get in after all.
“That did it. Let’s see what we got here.”
I sank back into the depths.
I opened my eyes. Headache, and the lights were too bright, acoustic tile overhead. An IV bottle was hanging on a stainless-steel stand to my right. Drops of clear liquid fell into a see-through plastic tube. The sight of them made me thirsty.
“You’re awake,” Lucy said. “Oh, thank God.”
So I didn’t get in after all.
That probably meant I wasn’t dead yet. A moment of disorientation dissipated slowly, then I croaked, “Water,” or tried to. It didn’t sound right, even to me.
“What, Mort?” Lucy’s face floated above mine.
“Wa-a-r-r-t-r.”
She held a cup to my lips. I drank a sip, saw a white bandage on her forearm. I lifted a hand, which weighed six hundred pounds, and touched it. “Wazit?”
“That rotten fucker Kyle shot me with his head.”
I smiled.
So I wasn’t awake yet. I still had a chance at the Pearly Gates, if only I could remember the password. I wished I’d written it down.
I slept.
Yum. Green Jell-O with shredded carrots in it. Not as good as the steak I’d had at the Golden View.
“When was that?” I asked.
Lucy frowned. “When was what, Mort?”
“When all of us were up in the Golden View eating real food.”
“That was four days ago.”
She was feeding me. Ma and Harper looked on. “That was a pretty good steak,” I said. “I could use another one right about now.”
“I’m sure it was. And no.”
“In fact, it was steak and lobster, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was. Have another bite of Jell-O, dear heart.”
“A bite, Luce? It doesn’t warrant chewing.”
“Uh-huh. Eat.”
“Yum, Luce. Green slime. Mmmm-mm.”
“He’s better,” Ma said.
“Eat,” Lucy commanded, trying to shovel another bite into me. “Open up. It works better than stuffing it up your nose.”
So I opened up and ate. Yum.
“Why has it been four days, Luce? That’s a long damn time.”
“You’ve been in a medically induced coma.”
I stared at her. “My first coma and I missed it?”
“Maybe not,” Ma said. “Sometimes we can’t tell.”
Harper laughed. I had the feeling that the air of black humor in the room was a form of relief.
“Eat,” Lucy said.
I pinched my lips together like I did when I was four. “Not until you tell me what you meant when you said Kyle shot you with his head.”
She smiled. “You must’ve hallucinated that.”
“Sort of.”
“What does that mean? And what’s this?” I touched the bandage on her right forearm. It was smaller than the one I’d seen earlier, but something had happened to her. Being her purported husband, I felt I had a right to know.
She sighed. “When that psycho shot you, I already had my gun out of my purse—that little .22 my dad gave me last year. I wasn’t fast enough to stop him from shooting you, but I shot him three times in the chest before he could get off another round at you.”
“You shot your dad?”
She bent down and kissed me. “Doofus. He went down but he wasn’t dead and he needed to be dead, so I put the gun close to his left eye, pulled the trigger, and the bullet went into his brain, skipped around inside his skull, then came out his right eye and went half an inch into my arm.”
“Bet that hurt.”
“It did. Fuckin’ Kyle.”
“I hope you got rabies shots for that.”
“Antibiotics, which I’m still on. But they checked for rabies.”
Ma smiled. “He’s makin’ jokes. He’s back. He’s okay. We oughta sneak a steak in here. And a beer.”
My kind of woman.
I wasn’t dead after all, but according to more than one doc, it had been close. If the bullet had hit a quarter inch lower, I would’ve been pushing daisies by now. Kyle’s bullet had split my scalp and grooved my skull, half an inch off dead center. For two days the docs had been monitoring my intracranial pressure. I was told I had been put on a ventilator and they’d hyperventilated me for eight hours, something I’d never done before. Lots of cool things had been going on while I was somewhere else.
But all good things must come to an end. By the fifth day, at 11:00 a.m., my intracranial pressure was chugging along nicely at thirteen millimeters, which probably meant something to someone, so my primary doctor permitted the FBI to interview me. As I discovered, when a person is the alleged front-runner to be the running mate of the front-running presidential hopeful for their political party, the FBI wants to be the front-runner when it comes to interviewing the guy who had apparently sunk deepest into the morass of kidnapping and murder bankrolled by that alleged front-runner—kidnapping being the FBI’s forte and bailiwick because they’re so good at it.
To grab all the credit, they wanted answers.
Their problem, however, was that I had been through several investigative wringers in the past two years: FBI, RPD, county sheriffs, district attorneys. I was tired, so I fell back on something I hadn’t done before—I ran them off with the four magic words, “I want a lawyer,” which is like yelling “bingo” or turning over a “get out of jail free” card—not that I thought I needed one. But I had blown off a guy’s hand and left him miles from the nearest road instead of bringing him out, so I thought it best to hire a shyster to explain it in the kind of convoluted, polysyllabic language the feds would understand and appreciate.
I got them out of there, told them to come back some other time, maybe tomorrow morning, “don’t call me, I’ll call you.” In the meantime, I told them, there was a movie showing at Century 21, something about a couple of rogue FBI agents that they oughta take in, pick up a few pointers. They left grumbling, as they do.
Before involving a lawyer, I wanted to know what the police had found while I’d been in a coma. Ma called Russ who showed up at 1:15 that afternoon, and in a closed-door session with me, Ma, and Lucy—Harper was in Carson City at her mother’s funeral at the time—a session that included a chocolate milkshake for the patient, Russell told us everything the police had discovered before the feds waded in to take the credit. That turned out to be pretty much everything of importance since the facts were easy to find and the pieces of the puzzle slid into place as if greased.
We put it together like this:
Kyle Anza made it down to road number 265 alive, flagged down Arnold Becker’s pickup and Arnold drove him to the town of Silver Peak. In Becker’s house, Kyle stabbed him in the throat with an eight-inch kitchen knife. He then searched Becker’s house and came up with a .38 special, not the most powerful handgun, thank God, since that’s what he shot me with. The gun was registered to Becker. Early the next morning he drove off in Becker’s old orange pickup. In Hawthorne, Nevada, he bought a burner phone at a gas station, filled the tank, and got to Carson City sometime around 10:45 that morning. The phone was found at the scene in the parking garage where Kyle was killed, as was Becker’s antiquated orange truck.
Phone records showed that he’d called Sylvia Haas at her government office in Carson City at 10:52. Indications were that he’d followed her the twenty-some miles to her southwest Reno home and they arrived within minutes of each other. More phone records showed that Sylvia called her husband, Carl, at his medical office at 11:38. Witnesses at Carl’s office said he left between 11:40 and 11:50.
Then things got sketchy, but clearly Carl went home where he took a 9mm bullet in the forehead in his living room from a CZ SP-01 automatic, a gun registered to him. The gun was found on the floor of Sylvia’s office. She had been shot with it in the right temple—a contact wound, hence the early determination of murder-suicide, which was later upgraded to double murder.
The two deaths had taken place so close together in time that it couldn’t be determined who died first, not that it mattered since it was likely Kyle killed them both in an effort to clean things up, or in an act of revenge. Or both, since he might’ve held them responsible, at least in part, for his missing hand, his brain-dead brother, and his lack of prospects for gainful employment in the future.
Kyle had put a GPS tracker on Lucy’s Mustang when he kidnapped her and Harper in Goldfield. He’d installed a tracker app on Arnold Becker’s cell phone with a code that worked with the tracker on Lucy’s car, which is how he’d found us in the parking garage.
Kyle shot me with the gun he’d taken from Becker’s place in Silver Peak. He left Carl’s automatic in Sylvia’s office with her prints on it to make it appear that she had killed Carl and then herself. A neighbor lady remembered seeing an ugly orange pickup truck in their driveway, very much out of place, so that put Kyle at the Haases’ house—no surprise there, but it was good to get that nailed down.
At the Haases’ residence, the video of Carl with the two girls was found on a computer in Sylvia’s office. The so-called missing video that Annette Leeman gave to a family member that had caused all the trouble was still out there, if it existed. So far there was no sign of it. It might have been a lie to put pressure on Sylvia, Annette’s last-ditch effort to save herself. If so, it hadn’t worked. The video had cost the two teenage girls their lives, and the lives of Chase Eystad, Sylvia and Carl Haas, and the three Anza lads. Roll a boulder downhill and you never know how much damage it’ll do before it comes to rest.
Phone records indicated that Kyle and Sylvia had been seeing each other for two years, probably as lovers, long enough for them to have developed a certain level of trust, which might have included a certain level of mistrust and mutually assured destruction, a kind of Mexican standoff that works something like relationship glue.
Russ didn’t stay long. It took less than half an hour to give us what he knew that we hadn’t heard before and to make sense of it. He took off, our secret agent on the force, sort of like Deep Throat back in the day.
Ma got on the horn and spoke to a criminal defense attorney, Ulysses Morgan Taber. With a name like Ulysses, how can you go wrong?
Taber showed up within the hour. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said in the first two minutes. “It’s only half a joke that a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich—not something I’ve ever seen, but I won’t be surprised when it happens. Not if,” he said, “but when.”
I liked him right away. He was in his fifties, stooped and slightly gaunt, with sharp blue eyes under bushy gray eyebrows, as if he were constantly on the hunt. When you hire a lawyer, you want a killer, so to speak.
“Who’s my client?” he asked. “Best if it’s just one of you, at least for now.”
I raised my hand. “That would be me.”
“Thought it might.”
Taber laid it out: “I get four hundred bucks an hour out of court, twelve hundred an hour in a courtroom, if it comes to that—but from what I’ve heard so far on the news, I think a grand jury would be a laughingstock if they indicted you. And if the district attorney put your case before a grand jury, he’d be hard pressed in the next election since you’re something of a folk hero. If we go to trial, I’d have the prosecutor’s liver for lunch. That’s all first-impression stuff. But let’s hear your story and I’ll tell you what I think then.”
He thought it best if he and I were alone as I told him what had happened, but I told him they already knew everything I was going to tell him so even though attorney-client privilege didn’t extend to them if I were the client, it didn’t matter. He thought about that then shrugged, said something like, “Your funeral,” which I think was lawyer humor, and we were off and running.
It took three hours, so telling the story cost us twelve hundred bucks and was worth every nickel.
I told him most of what happened in the basement at the Monroe Street house. I left Russ, Ma, and Officer Day out of it, didn’t tell Taber how Jake ended up like he did or that he’d been shuffled around. Maybe it was the bullet he took in the neck, or Lucy’s last blow with the hammer. Let the docs figure it out. It wasn’t our problem.
“The nutshell version,” Taber said, “is that the three of you were taken to that house against your will, threatened, barely escaped with your lives, Joe Anza was killed in the ensuing battle, and Jake Anza got what he deserved.”
“That’s about it, omitting a few ugly details. Like when Jake waterboarded Lucy.”
Taber smiled. “Granted. I would like to see how Lucy got that noose from around her neck.” He looked at her.
She stood up, kicked off her shoes, and lifted a foot up to her right ear, then used her toes to rub the back of her head. “Something like that,” she said, sitting down again.
Taber’s eyes were still wide. “Now that would impress a jury. Not that it’ll come to that, but good Lord!”
I told him it was my decision not to tell the police after we escaped. We didn’t know who the woman was who had hired Jake and Kyle. According to Jake, Kyle was on his way there, but if the police stopped him and held him for questioning, I didn’t see anything that pointed enough of a finger at him to hold him—Jake yes, Kyle no. He would be released, he’d be on the loose and dangerous, and we still wouldn’t know who the mystery woman was.
“He was out there anyway,” Taber said, playing devil’s advocate, as lawyers do.
“But he didn’t know exactly what had happened in the basement. We knew he’d show up so we could follow him, hoping he’d lead us to the mystery woman.” I told him I’d called Maude Clary after we escaped, that she had put the tracker on Kyle’s car and we’d followed him to the Grand Sierra Resort. We left Russell and Day out of it. No need to get into any of that, especially Jake’s little side trip to Ma’s garage. Kyle wasn’t in any position to tell anyone Jake was not in the basement when he’d gone in that morning.
Taber thought about what I’d told him. “You didn’t notify the police after you escaped because it might have alerted the person you’re calling the mystery woman. Which turned out to be Sylvia Haas.”
“That’s it, because of the timing. If she had a mole in the police department she might’ve taken off before Kyle had a chance to meet up with her, if that’s what they were going to do. If he had taken off, disappeared, we wouldn’t have known who she was and she would still be a threat.”
He smiled at the word mole. “You didn’t trust that the police or the FBI could—or would—tail Kyle Anza and keep it quiet if they held him for questioning.”
“Would you?”
“No. The FBI is a ‘bird in the hand’ organization. Not a lot of self-control. Also, they could get a FISA warrant to surveil a ham sandwich, but that’s an entirely different issue.”
I really liked this guy.
“It’s a bit convoluted,” he said. “But considering your state of mind, collectively that is, it makes sense. I’ll give it some more thought but I think you’re okay.”
He turned to Lucy. “Tell me how Kyle Anza kidnapped you and Harper, where he took you and how he held you.”
So Lucy put in another two hundred dollars’ worth, ending with her and Harper tied and handcuffed on a bed in the back room of the cabin, waiting for me to show up. She told him she heard Kyle call to me after I arrived, then more words and a loud bang, which she thought meant he’d killed me. She had cried. But then there was more talking that she couldn’t make out so she thought I was still alive. I showed up soon after that, entirely naked, which, she told Taber, was why I’d had to blow off Kyle’s hand the way I did since I couldn’t hide a weapon. I let her tell all of that from her point of view.
“Naked,” Taber said with a wry smile. “Talk about jury sympathy—not that this is headed that way.” He looked at me. “Okay, I get the shaped charge, but where did you get the remote to set it off?”
“Jake had it on his belt. He took it off and put it on a work table in the basement. I took it when we left because I’d left the shaped charge where I could find it again.”
“And you thought you might want it? The charge?”
“You never know when you’ll want one of those. What if I had a window that got painted shut, wouldn’t open?”
He gave me a long look, then tilted his head. “This’ll never go to trial, but if it did there’s no way I’d put you on the stand without a lot of coaching.”
He turned to Lucy. “One question: Did Kyle Anza lift his gun at either you or Mort after you’d shot him in the chest with your .22 in the parking garage? He wasn’t dead yet. Were you defending yourself or your husband when you just happened to shoot him in the eye?”
Just happened. I liked that.
“Yes, he lifted his gun at Mort again. I thought he was about to shoot. I was terrified.”
Taber gave us each a look. “That’s called leading the witness. In a trial, I couldn’t do that. Remember what you said, Lucy. Especially about being terrified, which goes to your state of mind.”
Taber turned to me again. “After Kyle Anza called you at the Goldfield Inn, you didn’t tell the FBI that Lucy and Harper had been kidnapped. Explain why not.”
“After everything Kyle told me, I didn’t trust the FBI to save them before Kyle could kill them.”
Taber smiled. “They’ll believe that. A jury would too. Next question: You had your suspicions, but the first time you actually heard the name Sylvia Haas in connection with the two teenage girls or Jake or Kyle Anza was when you got the, shall we say, ‘upper hand’ on Kyle at the cabin, is that right?”
The upper hand. Cool guy, this Taber. I wondered if he would say that during a trial.
“That’s right,” I said.
“So your decision not to call the police after the events at the Monroe house worked, in a roundabout way.”
I nodded. “Well put.”
He smiled, then looked into a corner of the room for a few minutes, thinking. Then he stood up. “I’ll give all of this more thought, if that’s all right, see if I can punch a big enough hole in it to be a problem.” He gave me a look. “For four hundred an hour, you understand.”
“Cost doesn’t matter,” Lucy said.
Taber didn’t respond to that, other than the corners of his mouth turning up in a little smile. I didn’t know if he’d already checked us out and knew Lucy’s net worth was in the neighborhood of fourteen million dollars. The interest on that alone could keep him thinking full-time for a year without touching the principal.
He shook my hand, then Lucy’s and Ma’s, said, “I’ll be here tomorrow early, before the FBI rolls in.”
Then he left.
The FBI showed up at 9:05 the next morning. Two agents, sporting short haircuts, cheap suits, darkish circles under their eyes, a professional lack of humor. Lucy, Ma, and Taber were present. Taber kept the FBI at arm’s length and frequently interrupted the flow of their questions. His favorite disrupter was, “Already asked and answered, let’s move on.”
At 10:15 a.m. they threw in the towel.
“Je-sus Christ,” said the shorter and squatter of the two—which might have been his way of saying In God We Trust since he actually said it twice. He glared at me. “You didn’t say one thing we didn’t already know.”
“Shows how smart you guys are,” I said. “Good job.”
They left.
“Nice,” Lucy said. “Nice boys. Their mothers must be so proud.”
I left the hospital the next day. The FBI returned for rounds two and three, both of which took place in Taber’s office. They didn’t learn anything to excite them, so they wrote up their conclusions and that was the last we heard of them. The day they told us they probably wouldn’t be back, Lucy, Ma, and I gathered in the Green Room to drink to the boys in the cheap suits. By then, school was back in session and Harper was back in Vegas, teaching English.
I never did catch up to Elrood Wintergarden. I mean, me, personally. I’d had more important things to do, Ma, too, so she told the will’s executor, Stanley Brady, PLLC, that Elrood was still in the wind and that he should find another investigator to continue the hunt.
At Ma’s suggestion, Stan hired Yancy Hubbard, who fumbled the ball, not that Elrood had made it easy, and not that Yancy wouldn’t have fumbled it in any case. The four-week deadline passed and the money rolled over to those no-kill animal shelters. Yancy kept at it past the deadline, probably because he was being paid two hundred bucks a day, and Stanley Brady also fumbled the ball, failing to take Yancy off the case. As a result, Elrood learned, five weeks after the death of Mildred Castle, that he had lost out on six hundred eighty thousand bucks.
A month after that, I heard that he’d been arrested for fraud, pled guilty for a reduced sentence, and was given free room and board at the county jail for six months.
C’est la vie.