Kill Devil Falls Page 2

  “I’m real sorry about that, hon,” the waitress said when he was gone. “Food’s on the house.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. I can handle myself.”

  “Well, I guess you can.”

  The waitress refilled Helen’s coffee mug. The remaining trucker whistled and went back to his sports page.

  After finishing her meal, Helen checked her phone and located Choder’s directions in her email inbox. It looked like a circuitous but straightforward route: Highway 80 to Route 89 to Route 49, and finally onto a smaller, unnamed access road. She punched “Kill Devil Falls” into Google. It showed her Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina, but no California town by that name. Not a good sign. She located Route 49 and traced it on the display until it linked to the access road. After that, the access road quickly dead-ended into a splotch of green empty space. What the hell? Even Google didn’t think the place was worth the effort of mapping.

  The estimated drive time from her present location to the access road was one hour and ten minutes. It was unlikely she’d reach Kill Devil Falls, collect Crawford, and get back down to the valley before nightfall. She was anxious at the prospect of navigating steep, treacherous, and unfamiliar mountain roads in the dark.

  Helen paid her bill over the protests of the waitress, used the restroom, and stepped out into the chilly parking lot. She glanced at her cell phone. Already past three. And dusk fell early this time of year.

  Her Dodge and a brown Honda occupied neighboring spots in the parking lot. As she was reaching for the Charger’s door handle, a blur of movement flashed kitty-corner though the rear window.

  She walked around to the back of the car. A man squatted between the Charger and the Honda. She recognized him from the diner. Tall, lanky, combat fatigues. She glanced at the insignia on his jacket, saw that he was a sergeant.

  “Hi,” Helen said.

  “Hi,” Lee said.

  She waited. Lee was holding a small tool with a black plastic handle and long sharp metal shaft. His hands were black with oily dirt. He looked down at the tool, back up at her.

  “This looks kinda weird, don’t it?”

  “Kinda. What are you doing?”

  “I got a hole in my tire. I’m plugging it. Till I can get to a garage.”

  “Ah. You need a hand?”

  “No, ma’am. I got it under control.” Lee held up a small brown tube which resembled a Slim Jim. “I just gotta jam this sucker in the hole and I’m good to go.”

  “Okay.”

  Helen took a step forward, leaned down to look at the tire.

  “Ingenious,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The plug thing. Very clever.”

  “Yeah.”

  She wasn’t really interested in his tire. She just wanted to examine her own without being obvious. She gave it a quick once-over as she straightened up and backed away. It seemed fine. But what did she know?

  “Can’t be too careful on these mountain roads,” Lee said. “A blowout can send you right over the side of a cliff.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You headed up or down?” he asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “You headed up or down the mountain?”

  “Up,” Helen said. “You?”

  “Same. On leave. Visiting family in Reno.”

  “You have a long drive.”

  “Sure do. That’s why I got to get this tire sorted out. Where you headed?”

  “Up,” Helen repeated. “You have a good day.”

  She walked back to the front of the Charger, climbed inside, started the engine. She checked her side-view mirror. The guy stood up, flattened himself against the side panel of the Honda, waved her on. Helen backed slowly out of the parking lot. As she passed by, he flashed a thumbs-up sign.

  2

  HELEN NAVIGATED THE SERPENTINE curves of Route 89, ascending steadily, the Charger chugging along like the Little Engine that Could. She switched on the CD player. A forceful female voice flowed crisply from the car speakers:

  “Let’s face it, ladies. It’s still a man’s-man’s-man’s world.”

  Helen was an avid, but exceedingly secretive, consumer of self-help titles. Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The Secret, The Road Less Traveled, Awaken the Giant Within—she’d read them all. This one was called The Superior Sex.

  “Let’s review a few statistics,” the narrator continued. “By the time a college-educated woman turns fifty-nine, she will have earned eight hundred thousand dollars less than her male counterparts due to the gender wage gap. Women make up almost half the workforce, but only account for 4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. As recently as 2013, Congress proposed seven hundred bills designed to regulate women’s health and reproductive rights. In fact, it’s now easier for your average woman to get her hands on a gun than it is for her to obtain an abortion.”

  Helen estimated another twenty or thirty minutes to Route 49, and perhaps fifteen or twenty more to reach the access road. Beyond that, she had no idea how long till Kill Devil Falls. Could be ten minutes on the access road, could be half an hour.

  “The fact remains, we live in a patriarchal society,” the narrator declared. “Power is still concentrated in the hands of men, whether they be senators, bosses, fathers, or husbands.”

  “Eh.” Helen shrugged, not entirely convinced. She decelerated into a curve, eyes flickering to the edge of the road where a flimsy metal barrier was all that separated her from a deadly plunge straight down a cliffside. The mountain scenery was truly breathtaking—snow-frosted peaks, a thick carpet of fir trees, sheer granite rock faces, and deeply cut valleys—but a second’s carelessness and the Charger would become a twisted, buckled, deformed metal coffin.

  On the far side of the curve, the road inclined sharply. The Charger’s V6 whined in protest as Helen pressed on the gas pedal.

  “In the corporate world, when a woman does not conform to the male beauty standards, she is less likely to receive promotions and leadership roles. If she does conform to these standards, she is assumed to be pretty, but stupid. If she dresses conservatively, she is called a frump. If she dresses in a manner that plays up her sexuality, she is considered a slut. An aggressive male CEO is tough, while an aggressive female CEO is a bitch.”

  Helen nodded to herself, thinking of how Choder enjoyed tossing out the occasional comment on her appearance, suggesting she dress in a more feminine manner or let her hair down. “Just because you carry a gun doesn’t mean you have to wear men’s pants,” he’d say.

  “So what is a woman to do? The simple answer is this: A woman has to work twice as hard, and be twice as good, as her male colleagues. When the deck is stacked against you, you have to bring your own aces to the table. You have to prove you are the superior sex.”

  Helen eased up on the gas and navigated a tight turn, skirting very close to the safety barrier. The road started to level out. The Charger’s engine settled into a comfortable purr.

  Although she didn’t label herself a hardcore feminist, Helen was no stranger to the challenges of being female in a predominantly male environment. For one thing, she’d been raised by a single father, an ex-Navy officer with little patience for emotional outbursts and menstrual cycles. For another, she’d chosen a profession dominated by men with a high tolerance for personal risk and violence, where sexual innuendo and crude jokes were the norm. For the most part, she ignored the wisecracks and pick-up lines or just laughed them off. After all, there weren’t enough hours in the day to call her coworkers on all their bullshit, and besides, she didn’t want to earn a reputation for being hard to work with.

  But she had her limit, and when a colleague crossed it, she let him know. Just like with the trucker in the diner. She found a dose of humor usually helped the pill go down, but if that didn’t do the trick, she was willing to draw a line in the sand and then throw a punch when some meathead stepped over it.

 
“I developed the following questionnaire to help you evaluate your strengths and vulnerabilities, so you can determine how to reach your full potential as the superior sex,” the narrator said. “Check the statements below which apply to you.”

  “Go for it,” Helen said.

  “I have a good relationship with my father.”

  “A beeline straight to Freud, huh?” Helen said.

  “I have a good relationship with my mother.”

  Helen tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, frowned at the CD Player console. Her mother had died when she was ten. Car accident.

  “I go the extra mile to please my partner.”

  Helen laughed. “What partner?”

  “I like to call the shots in bed.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “I’d rather shoot pool with the boys than go shoe shopping.”

  “That’s an affirmative.”

  The next question was cut short by the sound of an explosion. The steering wheel leaped from Helen’s grasp. The Charger swerved left, straight for the rocky mountainside, then shot right, toward the safety barrier overlooking the cliff.

  Helen clamped her hands on the wheel and slammed on the brakes. The Charger’s right fender scraped along the safety barrier, spewing sparks like a black market Roman candle. Helen maintained a grip on the wheel with her left hand, reached down and yanked on the emergency brake with her right. The car fishtailed. The view through the windshield careened wildly, like a ship tossed on the ocean by gale-force winds.

  Helen lifted her foot from the brake, gave the car some leeway. When the Charger’s direction stabilized, she went back to the brakes, adjusted the wheel. Slowly, grudgingly, the Charger responded. Another fifty feet, and she brought it to a sliding halt on a narrow dirt shoulder.

  She put the car in park and shut off the engine. Her heart was hammering so violently against her sternum, it threatened to crack a rib. She inhaled deeply, started mentally counting backward from one hundred, gradually brought her pulse rate under control.

  “Fuck your fucking FUCK!” she screamed at the windshield. The struggle to curtail her habitual cursing continued, but in some situations, frick, eff, and dang weren’t sufficiently cathartic.

  Helen waited out a bout of the shakes. Then she opened the car door and walked around to the rear of the Charger. The smell of hot rubber and burning motor oil hung in the air.

  The right rear tire was flat. Not just flat. Deflated, shredded, a hollow skin of tattered black sludge.

  She shuffled a few feet over to the side of the road, peered down into the valley below. Just beyond the safety barrier was a nearly vertical drop of at least one hundred feet. Nothing clung to the cliffside apart from a scatter of scree and a few stunted trees, which grew at awkward angles in a desperate bid for sunlight.

  Helen attempted to open the trunk with her key, but her hand trembled too much to fit it into the slot. She returned to the driver’s side door and popped the trunk using the release under the dashboard.

  She removed a jack, lug wrench, and spare tire, dumped them on the graveled shoulder. She fit the wrench over the first of the wheel’s lug nuts, twisted. It was stuck fast. She leaned all of her weight on the wrench, grunted with effort, felt it give. By the time she had three of the nuts removed, her arms were as limp as boiled macaroni.

  As she was jacking up the car, she heard the putter of an engine approaching. Seconds later, a dirty white sedan whipped around the corner, recklessly fast. Helen froze, hand on the jack lever, certain the sedan would sideswipe the Charger, propelling it and her over the side of the cliff.

  The sedan missed by a narrow margin, raced past, engine mewling piteously, and disappeared around the curve up ahead.

  “Asshole!” she shouted.

  She wiped sweat from her hairline. Could this day get any shittier?

  Helen wrestled the shredded tire off the axle, dropped it onto the ground. As she rolled the spare over, she flashed back to the guy in the diner parking lot.

  He’d been squatting right there, at the back of the Charger. Wielding a sharp tool. Could he have tampered with her tire, rigged it to hold twenty or thirty miles and then basically disintegrate?

  Possible. But what reason would a random stranger have for sabotaging her ride?

  Helen propped the spare tire against the exposed axle, pulled out her cell phone. Reception was weak but serviceable. She googled “California’s Most Wanted,” waited several minutes for the mug shots to load. She couldn’t remember the name of Crawford’s partner off the top of her head, so she scrolled down, searched the photos. Here he was: Lee Larimer.

  Long dark hair, unshaven, pale as a vampire. Handsome in a grungy, struggling-musician-with-a-drug-habit kind of way. Not her type, but she knew lots of women who’d take him in, give him a hot bath, make him a grilled cheese sandwich, and then moon over him for six months after he absconded with all their cash, credit cards, and jewelry.

  Larimer didn’t look anything like Sgt. Fix-it. Still, it didn’t sit right, the blow-out right on the heels of the parking lot incident.

  Helen put her phone back in her pocket. She lifted the spare onto the axle, threaded the lug nuts, lowered the jack, tightened the nuts with the wrench. She tossed the wrench and jack into the trunk. She picked up the shredded tire and tossed that into the trunk, as well. When she got back to Sac, she’d ask the boys in motor pool to examine it. See if she was just being paranoid or if maybe, possibly, some punk-ass associate of Crawford’s had attempted to send her over a cliff.

  The antique chair groaned in protest as Teddy Scroggins leaned his considerable bulk to one side and spat a stream of tobacco juice into an empty coffee can sitting on the floor. He wiped a stray dribble off his beard with the heel of his hand.

  He’d found the coffee can in the guard room, on a shelf displaying a dozen or so artifacts dating to the late 1800s—an ivory-handled straight razor and a shaving brush, a tortoise-shell comb, a pocket watch, a deck of cards, a collection of yellowed Penny Dreadfuls, rusted food tins, a dented sheriff’s badge.

  He wasn’t supposed to be using it, certainly not as a tobacco juice receptacle, but they weren’t supposed to be using the Old Log Jail to hold a fugitive, either. Of the two, Teddy figured borrowing an old coffee can was the lessor offense.

  The Old Log Jail was, as its name indicated, an A-frame structure built of pine logs. Attached to the front of the building was a wooden porch, leading to a thick door reinforced with iron bands. To the right of the door was a window, likewise secured with metal bars.

  Inside was a sizable room. On the left, facing out from the wall, sat a massive mahogany desk. This is where the sheriff had conducted his business back when the jail was in active use, and where Teddy sat now. Recessed into the rear wall were two jail cells with doors constructed of crisscrossed flat metal strips. To the right side of the jail cells was a short hallway leading to a separate guard room at the back of the building. The guard room was furnished with a wooden bed frame and mattress, the aforementioned display shelf of artifacts, a round table with two pewter place settings, a pair of chairs, and an old cast-iron wood-burning stove.

  The jail dated back to 1876, when it served as the county lock-up. In its heyday, it hosted a rogue’s gallery of petty thieves, claim jumpers, drunks, gamblers, debtors, and even a murderer or two. Originally located in Marleesville, it was decommissioned in the 1930s and sat empty and neglected until the 1960s, when it was dismantled and reassembled on the outskirts of town to serve as a Gold Rush-era museum.

  In retrospect, no one could remember who had made the decision to move the jail to Kill Devil Falls, and it proved a strange one, as the only tourists who ever visited the museum were those hopelessly off course on their way to a camping or hiking destination.

  The county’s current jail was located in Donnersville, in the same building as the courthouse and sheriff’s department. That was thirty miles as the crow flies, but a good fifty minutes to an
hour by car across a twisted, undulating landscape. And in the wake of a biker-rally-turned-violent-street-brawl, it was presently filled to capacity.

  Even so, when Big Ed and Teddy rode up from Donnersville, the intention was to take Rita Crawford into custody, bring her back down, and then sit on her until the US Marshals arrived. But shortly after they’d reached Kill Devil Falls, a call came over the radio regarding a shooting in Sardine Valley. It was decided that Big Ed would take the patrol vehicle, a white Ford Explorer with County Sheriff printed on the side, and Teddy would wait with Rita.

  At the moment, Rita was locked up in the leftmost five-by-six-foot cell and Teddy was chewing tobacco and biding his time.

  “Edward,” Rita said. Her fingers poked through the slats of the cell door, her nails ragged, dark with dirt.

  Teddy pretended not to hear. He folded his hands across his wide belly and closed his eyes.

  “Deputy,” Rita growled, annoyed.

  “Deputy Sheriff,” Teddy said.

  “Jesus Christ. Deputy Sheriff. May I please have a cigarette? They’re in my jacket.” Rita pointed at a leather motorcycle jacket resting atop the desk.

  “No, you may not,” Teddy said. “This is a public building. No smoking allowed.”

  “Come on. I could really use one. Please?”

  “Shouldn’ta let yourself get hooked on such a nasty habit.”

  “I see. And you’re fucking perfect, aren’t you?”

  Teddy abruptly stood up and strode over to the cell, drawing a baton from his gun belt as he did so. Rita withdrew her fingers from the cell door.

  “I don’t take lip from criminals,” Teddy said. He rapped the baton on the door. “Mind your manners.”

  “If anyone should be locked up, it’s you, Deputy.” She spat the word out like a mouthful of maggoty cheese.

  Teddy’s face flushed a deep shade of crimson. He clenched the baton hard enough to turn his knuckles white. He reached toward the wall behind the desk, where a rusty metal ring holding a large key hung on a hook.