Caruso 01 - Boom Town (21 page)

As the door flung shut behind them, Tony could hear the front door smash in, and knew it would be only seconds before the shooters were right behind them.

They jumped from the wooden deck in the back into a growing snow bank. Tony was disoriented and unsure where to go, but moved through the deep snow with purpose downhill. Frank was right at his side.

The back door swung open and Tony waited for shots. Nothing.

Then he heard a voice yelling, like one giving another orders.

They slipped and slid down the hill, branches from pines whipping them in the face. Frank fell and his body careened down the embankment for ten feet before he caught himself, digging his feet into the thick snow, and then raised himself to his feet again.

Tony thought of pulling his flashlight from his pocket, but realized they’d be perfect targets for the shooters.

Crashing down the hill behind them, Tony could hear at least two men.

Water roared ahead of them. They had to slow down or they’d go flying into the Metolius River.

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The river was getting closer, the noise of frigid water sloshing over rocks just below them. Tony was afraid they’d come to a cliff, which was so common in the area, and crash over the edge to their death.

But his eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, and he could see something shimmering ahead through the falling snow.

Suddenly the hill leveled down and they hit bottom, their legs collapsing beneath them. Frank yelled in pain. Tony rolled as if he had just hit the ground while parachuting.

Tony got to his feet and pulled the flashlight from his pocket, narrowing the beam toward Frank through cupped hands. He was holding his left ankle.

“You all right?” Tony whispered, out of breath.

“I think so.” Peroni was panting as if he’d just run a mile. “Bad sprain.”

Tony listened carefully. The men were still coming, perhaps slower than the two of them had descended the hill, though.

Tony pulled Frank to his feet. “Let’s go.”

He struggled against him. “Where? We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”

“You wanna stay here and get shot?”

Tony flashed the light down the edge of the river toward what looked like a deer trail, trampled down even more by fly fisher-men. Shutting off the light, they ran off down stream.

Leading the way at a jogger’s pace, Tony tried to keep his footing in the deep, heavy snow. It was like tromping through wet oatmeal.

After a short while, Tony could hear one man talking to the other. They had reached the bottom. Tony turned to see that they had a light and could simply follow their tracks. Damn!

As they ran, Tony asked Frank, “How deep is the river?”

“No fuckin’ way,” Frank said. “You’re not gettin’ me in there.

We’d be dead in a minute.”

“How deep is it?”

“I don’t know.”

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They kept going. Maybe they could outrun them. Problem was, Tony wasn’t even sure who they were or why they were after them. Nor did he have much time to speculate on the subject. He was acting on instincts now. And he knew that if they didn’t do something, the shooters could catch them, or at least get close enough to start shooting again.

Without warning, Tony grabbed Frank and shoved him to the right. Then he followed Peroni into the river.

Crashing into the water, the icy waves enveloped Tony, taking his breath away. He recalled going under, hitting something hard on the bottom, and then rising to the surface. But he still had Frank by his collar, who then took in water and started choking.

They rode the rapids for a while, their bodies going numb, and then in a moment the noise from the river seemed to fade in the distance behind them as the river widened.

Tony shoved his leg down and felt rocks, so he planted his hiking boots and hoisted his body upward, bringing Frank Peroni with him. Frank had stopped coughing now, but he was shivering uncontrollably. So was Tony.

“What the hell’d you do that for?” Frank chattered through his teeth.

They waded toward shore. Tony’s face and neck ached as the cold wind hit his exposed skin. He didn’t know how far they had floated. But, just as they got to shore, there was a set of headlights that seemed to float across the river downstream. The bridge. The one he had crossed on the way to the cabin. That meant the road would be up the embankment. They had to get there and backtrack to his truck.

Tony tried to explain to Frank his plan as they ran up the steep hill toward the road, but he wasn’t sure the guy understood everything he said. He wasn’t sure he would have either, considering how the words came chopping from his shivering mouth.

They ran forward as fast as their stiff frames would take them.

Tony’s pants had frozen solid in the frigid air, making it harder to move.

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Shortly they reached the driveway. The truck’s tracks were covered by those with studded radials, and even those were filling in quickly with fresh snowfall.

In a minute the two of them reached a car. A white Pontiac Bonneville with two sets of footprints leading up the driveway.

Damn!

“Just a minute,” Tony said, pulling Frank to a halt. He pulled out his flashlight to check the license plates and then shone the light around to both sides of the car. It might work, he thought.

“You know whose car that is?” Tony asked Frank.

He gave Tony his stupid look again and he knew the answer to that question. Tony pulled out a jackknife and slit a couple of tires, knowing they’d have maybe one spare. It would slow them down.

Without saying anything else, they ran off to Tony’s truck.

Rattling keys to get in, Tony finally got his door open and reached across to open the passenger door for Frank.

Without warning, Panzer growled and lunged toward Frank Peroni as he was getting in.

Jumping backward, Frank yelled, “What the fuck is that?”

“Panzer. Behind the seat.”

The dog turned and jumped behind the front seats.

“Get in! It’s just my dog.”

Reluctantly, Peroni did what Tony said, his head turned to buckle up and his eyes watching the dog.

“Damn thing looks like a bear.”

In the truck now, the engine warming, Tony cranked up the heat. Before getting in, he had seen a place to back around. And since the truck had four-wheel-drive, he had no problem backing into the trees and turning around.

Slowly driving down the lane, Tony came to a stop out front of the Bonneville. Then he turned to the left and plowed through some small pines, angled around, and came back on the road behind the car. A few seconds later they were out on the main road, the heater blowing full blast, and Tony trying to keep the
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vehicle on the slippery road with numb fingers.

It took them more than an hour to get back to the condo, park the truck in the garage, strip down to their shorts, and soak their bodies in the hot tub. Tony had pulled out a couple of beers and they were enjoying those.

“What the hell just happened?” Frank asked.

“That’s a good question. I wish I had a good answer.” He hesitated. “You were going to tell me about the guys in the Bonneville.”

Frank shook his head and took a sip of beer. “What do you want from me?”

“Let’s start with the truth,” Tony said. “Just before we were rudely interrupted, you were going to tell me what happened after you and Barb Humphrey got it on the night she died.”

“Oh, yeah. That. Well, we’re right in the place to tell the story.

I was in the Humphrey hot tub suckin’ down some suds, waiting for Barb to join me, when all hell broke loose.” He thought for a moment, trying to remember the night, or maybe trying to forget.

“Go on.”

“I heard a shot. At first I didn’t know what it was. You don’t think a shot is a shot; not coming from a nice place like that.”

“The Humphrey place.”

He nodded. “Yeah. I had left the back sliding glass door ajar, so the shot seemed to echo back out onto the patio toward me. I was ready to get out, but I froze. I’m not a coward, I’ll tell you that right now. But I don’t like guns. A gun is the great equalizer of all time. You could be some scrawny fuck and take out a huge football player with a single shot. Now that’s power in the wrong hands.”

“Back to the story. What happened next? You froze. Then what?”

“Hey, fuck you!”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Go ahead.”

“I heard a second shot and then someone came running out the
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door. Fairly tall. Fairly gangly. That’s all I could tell in the darkness.”

“You didn’t see who it was?”

“Like I said, it was dark. And I’d had a few beers.”

“But it was a man. You’re sure of that.”

“I think I can tell a man from a woman.” He took a long drink of beer. “This is good shit. You got any more?”

Tony reluctantly got out and went dripping and sloshing to the kitchen for two more beers. When he came back, Frank was leaning back, his arms spread out along the sides, and his eyes closed.

Climbing back into the hot tub, Tony said, “Make yourself at home.”

Frank took a beer from Tony and smiled. “Hey, after getting shot at, racing down a snowy hill like a fuckin’ maniac, and then nearly drowning in the river...not to mention almost freezing to death, this feels pretty damn good.”

Tony had to agree with him. His problem was trying to understand why the two Portland cops would try to shoot them. Frank Peroni wasn’t telling him the whole truth.

“What happened after the guy ran from the house?” Tony asked.

“The scene took a definite turn for the worse. The guy ran off through the woods, so I started to get out of the hot tub. Just then the place blew up. I’d never seen anything like it.”

Frank went on and on explaining how the flames had billowed out of the house. How there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. How he had panicked and run to his car, driving back to his condo naked. How he was lucky he had taken his pants out onto the patio with him, so he’d at least have his keys and wallet.

Tony listened to the guy talk. Watched his facial expressions. And believed what Frank Peroni was saying. One more thing he knew as fact. He had been scared. Scared enough to hole up in the cabin for two weeks. But that still didn’t explain the two cops who were after him. Shabato and Reese. Or why they would try to take him out.

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When Frank was done talking, and done with the second beer, Tony got them both another and then they both toweled off and changed into sweats and T-shirts. They sat in the living room.

“There’s something more than you’re telling me, Frank.”

He responded with a subdued turning down of his head.

“Tell me about your job with Cascade Lock, and those two guys who shot at us tonight.”

“I don’t know who they are,” he said. “You gotta believe me.”

He wasn’t very convincing. “Well, I don’t.”

Frank thought things over for a minute, and finally said, “I think they’re from Portland. After the Humphrey explosion, I took off back to my place. I get home and find this white Bonneville out front, two guys standing at the door talking with my wife.”

“The next day?”

“Yeah. The next morning.”

“They looked like cops, so I took off.”

That was strange. Why would they have been there so soon?

They had told him Frank was under investigation for a number of robberies in the area, but why come to his place then?

Frank continued. “I came back to Central Oregon, remembered my boss’s place along the Metolius, and I’ve been there ever since.”

“Your boss, Burton, brought you there a few times?” Tony asked.

“Yeah. He’d bring a bunch of us reps there in the fall during hunting season. Of course the only thing we’d hunt was pussy.

We’d get trashed for a few days, make the rounds to Bend and Redmond pick-up joints, and then head home. Last time was October.”

That was interesting. Tony wasn’t a hundred percent sure the two cops hadn’t followed him there somehow, his eyes concentrating on the snowy road, but it was more likely they had finally gotten the location from James Burton at Cascade Lock. If he could track down the guy with his limited resources, it wouldn’t
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have been hard for the Portland cops to do the same thing. But the timing was what bothered him. It was too much of a coincidence to have the two cops and him show up at exactly the same time in a blizzard. No, the more and more he thought about it, they had somehow managed to follow him there. And that pissed off Tony.

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Tony had a hard time sleeping that night. Too much had happened and too many questions were still unanswered.

So when he got up just as the sun was doing the same thing, he was alone for a while drinking his coffee. He had almost forgot-ten he was planning on hopping a flight to San Francisco that day to talk with the software company that was making a bid for Deschutes Enterprises. He made a few phone calls. First he caught Captain Al Degaul at home, told him what had happened, and asked him if he could look into Shabato and Reese more thoroughly. Degaul reluctantly agreed, saying he’d get back with him later in the day. Next, he called the local sheriff and told him he had Frank Peroni with him, what had happened the night before, what he had told him about the night Dan and Barb had died, and asked him if the two Portland cops had talked with him yet. They hadn’t. He told Tony to bring Frank by his office for questioning. Tony agreed.

When he got off the phone with Sheriff Green, he went to the sliding glass door overlooking the golf course. The snow that had fallen the night before glistened as the sun shone off it. If he had been smart, which he was beginning to question, he would have said the hell with it and gone up near Mount Bachelor snow shoeing in the back country. There had to be at least three feet of fresh powder up there, since there was a good foot and a half in Bend.