Stateline (36 page)

S
hortly after Conrad Pace’s assassination, a leading men’s magazine published an account of his criminality and his demise. Cody brought the article to my attention, and although some of it is fictionalized, it struck me as authentic, and I feel it bears repeating. The following is the section of the text I remember most vividly:

Conrad Pace smiled to himself as he drove his new Cadillac across the low bridge over the swamplands. On the other side of the water was New Orleans, and he was deciding what to have for dinner. Maybe seafood gumbo. Or hell, why not the best steak money could buy? And then how about going down to the French Quarter and picking up a black whore for dessert? He laughed out loud. His old friend Louis was probably facing serious time, but so were the rest of those dago gumballs back in Nevada. Meanwhile, he had a new name and Social Security number and a briefcase with $3 million cash in his trunk. It was the way of the world—the simple-minded would always be sacrificed for the elite.

His mind wandered to the home the realtor had just shown him—a large, white-columned, antebellum spread with a front lawn half the size of a football field. Maybe he’d sign the papers tomorrow and then hire an interior decorator. The mess in Tahoe already seemed a million miles away, and he had no doubt his future promised a continuance of the wealth and luxury he had earned.

After dinner, he checked out a couple of strip joints in the Quarter, places he’d been to years before. They hadn’t changed much, and half an hour later he followed a woman up a flight of stairs to her apartment. She was just what he had in mind: tall and sultry, with one of those swinging asses that just wouldn’t quit, the kind only nigger bitches have. He’d crack her like a shotgun and ram her with his horse cock first thing, he decided. Give that ass a good working over. He followed her inside, his eyes glazed in anticipation, and then out of nowhere a fist slammed into his face.

Pace reeled across the room and grabbed a heavy ceramic lamp. He swung it with all his strength at the shadowy figure coming at him and felt a satisfying crack as the lamp shattered against bone. But a second man seized him from behind and put him in a chokehold, and the man’s arms felt like iron girders. Pace couldn’t break free from the grip, and his lungs roared in pain. The last thing he saw before he passed out was the hooker’s red fingernails clawing at his face.

When Pace opened his eyes, he heard water lapping at the side of the boat, and he could feel the dampness in the air. It must be dawn, it occurred to him, as his eyes stained to see through the thick fog. He lay on the bottom of a pirogue, and it reeked of rotting fish. Two men paddled the boat, their faces obscured behind rain hoods. Pace struggled upright, his head aching violently. His hands were tied behind him, and he felt like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” Pace said.

The men were silent, hunched forward and paddling.

“I’m talking to you. Whoever’s paying you, I’ll double it.”

No response.

“Listen to me, goddammit! I can make you both rich.”

The man on the right turned his head slowly, and through the gloom Pace could make out his heavy mustache and thick jowls.

“Salvador Tuma has a message for you. He wants you to know his son’s in prison, and you stole three million from him.”

“Fuck Tuma! He went off the radar and left me and his son to clean up!”

The men kept paddling silently. The fog was dense, and Pace knew he was out on the bayou, but he had no idea where. He peered out into the mist, seeing nothing, and felt an overwhelming sense that he and these two men were the last people on earth.

“Name your price,” Pace said.

They stopped rowing, and one man stood and tossed a rope around a wood piling that rose from the gray water.

“The money you stole is already on the way back to Mr. Tuma,” the man said.

“Yeah,” said the other one, speaking for the first time, in a heavy Cajun accent. “But I get to keep your car, me.”

Pace’s mouth moved silently as the men lifted him by the arms. He nearly collapsed from dizziness, then vomited what was left of his supper into the murky water. Pace watched the contents of his stomach rolling with the weak current. He looked around desperately, trying not to panic, his hands straining behind his back against the tightly wound rope. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a revolver in one of the men’s hands. In a detached place in his mind, Pace mused that he’d just heaved up the last dinner he’d ever have, and it was floating away in the bayou, his life floating away, his body reduced to a slick of rancid and steaming human waste.

• • •

Beverly Howitt’s mother passed away in late April. I flew to Salt Lake City and drove down to Salina to attend the service. Glenda Howitt was laid to rest on a perfect spring day, a day all wrong for a funeral. The sky was a deep cloudless blue, the air smelled clean and pure, and the colors of the trees and flowers were so bright that no painting or photograph would do them justice.

When I got on the plane back to San Jose, Beverly was with me. She hadn’t said anything about it; there was no discussion—she just had her suitcase packed and came with me to the airport. Funny the way things work out sometimes. When we walked into my apartment, she looked around, clicked her teeth, and went to work, cleaning, rearranging the cupboards, buying flowers and plants, lending the proverbial woman’s touch. She tried to throw out one of my favorite old sweatshirts and actually bought a can of silver spray paint and painted the rusty iron weight set I’d left outdoors for years in the rain and sun.

The stock market had taken a dramatic dive earlier in April and continued to erode as investors started bailing out. Horror stories of day traders and margin investors losing their life savings dominated the local and then the national news. Dotcom companies in the Silicon Valley began going belly up, and hordes of common folk saw their stock portfolios shed value like a dog shaking water out of its fur. Wenger grew increasingly depressed and bitter until he confessed to me that he was many thousands in the red and was closing up his business. In May he moved from San Jose because he felt living here was a daily reminder of how much money he’d lost.

My bank account was still flush with the checks from Bascom Lumber. Beverly and I decided to drive up to Tahoe to see the lake in the springtime, while the peaks were still covered with snow, looking down like content parents at the green meadows and blossoming flowers of the valley. While Beverly packed our clothes, I cleared some miscellaneous junk from the cab of my new Nissan four-by-four truck. I opened the glove box, and there sat Osterlund’s camera, like a diary that possessed a morbid secret. I hefted the camera in my palm, feeling its weight, knowing my fingers were obscuring the prints of Osterlund and Mandy. But it didn’t matter anymore. Osterlund was dead, and so were Michael Dean Stiles, Julo Nafui, and Conrad Pace. For some reason fate dictated I be the instrument of their downfall. Maybe it was my destiny, or maybe I just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. Regardless, it didn’t matter; it was a chapter in my life I was ready to put behind me. I ejected the tape and stuck it in my pocket.

Beverly had finished packing our bags, and when I walked in, she showed me the picnic lunch she had made.

“I even packed a couple beers for you,” she said. “I was thinking we could stop somewhere pretty on the way up to Tahoe.”

I kissed her cheek and walked out to the back patio, to my barbecue. I doused some half-burned coals in lighter fluid, then crumpled up the sports section from the morning newspaper and threw it on top.

“Is everything okay?” Beverly called, coming out to join me.

“It will be,” I said, tossing a match on the paper. Beverly put her hand on mine, which held the Sony video camera. She looked up at me, sudden realization flashing in her eyes. I pulled the tape out of my pocket and dropped it into the flames, but the fire burned out too quickly. “Wait a sec,” I said, and got my bottle of 151-proof rum down from above the refrigerator. I came back and doused the tape with enough booze to keep a man drunk for two days. When I flipped another match into the barbecue, it went up like a Roman candle. Beverly stood in front of me, her head under my chin, her body warm against mine, her face glowing in the heat of the flames. She held my arms tightly around her waist as we watched the tape burn into an unrecognizable scrap of melted plastic.

“It’s over?” she asked, leaning into my chest, her hair against my neck.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s over.”

B
orn in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, Dave Stanton moved to Northern California in 1961. He attended San Jose State University and received a BA in journalism in 1983. Over the years, he worked as a bartender, newspaper advertising salesman, furniture mover, pizza cook, debt collector, and technology salesman. He has two children, Austin and Haley. He and his wife, Heidi, live in San Jose, California.

Stanton is the author of five novels, all featuring private investigator Dan Reno and his ex-cop buddy, Cody Gibbons.

To learn more, visit the author’s website at
DanRenoNovels.com
.

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Stateline
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More Dan Reno Novels:

Dying for the Highlife

Jimmy Homestead’s glory days as a high school stud were a distant memory. His adulthood had amounted to little more than temporary jobs, cheap boarding houses, and discount whiskey. But he always felt he was special, and winning a $43 million lottery proved it.

With all that money, everything is great for Jimmy—until people from his past start coming out of the woodwork. First, his sexy stepmother, who seduced him as a teenager. Then his uncle, just released from Folsom after a five-year jolt for securities fraud, a crime that bankrupted Jimmy’s father. Mix in a broke ex-stripper and a down-on-his luck drug dealer, both seeking payback over transgressions Jimmy thought were long forgotten.

Caught in the middle are investigator Dan Reno and his good buddy Cody Gibbons, two guys just trying to make an honest paycheck. Reno, straining to keep his home out of foreclosure, thinks that’s his biggest problem. But his priorities change when Gibbons and Jimmy are kidnapped by a gang of cartel thugs out for a big score. Fighting to save his friend’s life, Reno is drawn into a mess that leaves dead bodies scattered all over northern Nevada.

Speed Metal Blues

Bounty hunter Dan Reno never thought he’d be the prey.

It’s a two-for-one deal when a pair of accused rapists from a New Jersey-based gang surface in South Lake Tahoe. The first is easy to catch, but the second, a Satanist suspected of a string of murders, is an adversary unlike any Reno has faced. After escaping Reno’s clutches in the desert outside of Carson City, the target vanishes. That is, until he makes it clear he intends to settle the score.

To make matters worse, the criminal takes an interest in a teenage boy and his talented sister, both friends of Reno’s. Wading through a drug-dealing turf war and a deadly feud between mobsters running a local casino, Reno can’t figure out how his target fits in with the new outlaws in town. He only knows he’s hunting for a ghost-like adversary calling all the shots.

The more Reno learns more about his target, the more he’s convinced that mayhem is inevitable unless he can capture him quickly. He’d prefer to do it clean, without further bloodshed. But sometimes that ain’t in the cards, especially when Reno’s partner Cody Gibbons decides it’s time for payback.

Coming in 2015:

DARK ICE

HARD PREJUDICE