Voodoo Ridge (18 page)

“OK.”

“Have fun out there. Ski safe now.”

She gathered up her gear and smiled at me on the way out. McMahon strode from behind the cash register and watched her go, focused on her butt. A fat shark’s tooth hung from a gold chain around his neck.

“God help me, I do love the sheilas,” he said. “Now, mate, how can I help you?”

“I’m Cordell Logan.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Cordell Logan.” He had a firm grip and friendly blue eyes. “Liam McMahon’s the name. Don’t wear it out.”

Had McMahon known my name and been genuinely surprised by my presence, his face would have registered telling involuntary muscle movements that scientists call “micro expressions”—an eyebrow lifted almost imperceptibly, the subtle opening of an eye or parting of lips that can speak the truth far more accurately than words alone. But I perceived nothing in McMahon’s facial movements, involuntary or otherwise, to suggest that he regarded me as anything other than a paying customer.

“Australian?”

“Born and bred. Ever been?”

“Several times. Good people. How’d you end up in Tahoe?”

“What else? Chasing a sheila. We fell out of love and I fell in love with where she lived.”

“A lot of other Australians around here?”

“None at all, hardly. Ten, twelve, maybe. I probably know ’em all. Half are retired buggers. Lack the strength to even stand up. The other half are too drunk or doped up to get out of bed most days. What about you? You’re not from around here.”

“Rancho Bonita.”

“Well, you couldn’t have timed it any better, mate, what with all this fresh powder. I can put you on a set of Rossi parabolics that’ll blow your mind.”

“I’m not here to ski. I’m trying to locate somebody.”

I showed him Savannah’s picture and explained the circumstances of her disappearance.

“Gorgeous lady,” McMahon said. “I’d be bent out of shape, too, if somebody like that had vanished from my life. Tell you what, let me Xerox a copy of that. I’ll put it in my window and ask everybody who comes in if they’ve seen her around.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“You’d do the same for me, mate.”

He took the photo into a back office where his copying machine was.

McMahon, I realized, wasn’t Crocodile Dundee. If what he said was true, that there were no more than a dozen native Australians residing in the greater Lake Tahoe area, then whoever had taken Savannah had to be among the dumbest Aussies who ever lived to front himself the way he did, and Dundee sounded anything but dumb over the phone. The more I pondered it, the more I became convinced that the accent was fake.

I drove over and cruised the strip mall that was home to Los Mexicanos. The restaurant had mirrored front windows and a pretend brick facade painted bright orange. Every employee I approached leaned away from me when I showed them Savannah’s picture, fear in their eyes, like they were about to be deported. Nobody remembered seeing Savannah or a green van parked outside that day. The other mall shops were closed for the evening. There was nobody else to ask questions of. I ordered a chile verde burrito to go and ate it sitting in my car.

A few customers drove in, skiers and snowboarders. It seemed pointless to ask them. Shortly after seven thirty, a black, dinged-up Dodge pickup with tinted glass, chrome mag wheels, and a plow blade pulled in and began scraping snow off the lot, piling it along the edges. I got out and walked over, holding up my hand in the truck’s headlights. The driver braked and his window came down, giving way to the pungent odor of marijuana, and a glassy-eyed young man of about twenty-two with an Oakland Raider’s baseball cap. His earlobes were stretched out like an African tribesman and there was a hole in each the size of a quarter.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” He waved away tendrils of pot smoke, snubbing out his blunt on the top of a Budweiser can. “What’s up?”

I showed him Savannah’s picture, explaining what had purportedly happened in the parking lot earlier in the day. He shook his head apologetically.

“I’ve been sleeping all day, dude. I was supposed to be over here this afternoon, plowing this shit, but I dunno, man. Fell asleep. Next thing I know, it’s like, ‘Where am I? What planet is this? What time is it?’ You know what I’m saying?”

“We all have our off days.”

I asked him if he knew anybody in town who drove a green van.

“A green van . . . a green van . . .” He closed his eyes, trying to focus, working the question like a contestant on final Jeopardy. “No, dude,” he said after several seconds, “can’t say that I do. My buddy, Twitch, he’s got this totally tricked-out blue van with a Porta-Potty in it and everything, but it’s, like—”

“Blue.”

“Exactly.”

“Look, if you do happen to spot any green vans, or the woman from that picture,” I said, handing him my card, “I’d appreciate a call.”

“No worries.” He grabbed his own business card from above the sun visor and handed it to me. “You need any snow plowed, firewood, run some errands, there’s my number, right there. Ask anybody, OK? I’m, like, totally reliable.”

“I’ll, like, keep you in mind.”

Back inside the Yukon, I glanced at his card in the glow of the dashboard instruments. His corporate DBA was, “The Plowman Cometh.”

Clever. I wondered if I’d ever smile again.

T
HE RED
message light was blinking on my beige-colored room phone when I got back to the Econo Lodge. It was Streeter. He’d called about an hour earlier to apprise me that the fingerprint dusting of the room where Savannah and I stayed had proven inconclusive. The only prints the sheriff’s technician had been able to find and identify were left by Johnny and Gwen Kavitch, which didn’t set off any bells considering the couple ran the B&B and handled room cleaning themselves. Streeter noted that he’d received my message about the green van and had passed it on to his department’s patrol units as well as surrounding law enforcement agencies.

“Don’t think we’re giving up, we haven’t even started,” he said on the machine. “I’m still confident we’ll find her. I also have an update on the Lovejoy homicide I thought you’d find interesting. Call me when you get a chance.”

Streeter had been unable to reach me on my cell phone. The thought occurred to me: what if Crocodile Dundee had the same problem—tried to call me with instructions and couldn’t get through because I had yet to figure out all of my phone’s mind-numbing, over-engineered features. What if he’d taken his frustration out on Savannah? My face felt flush and my mouth went dry.

Walking quickly into the bathroom, I filled a plastic cup with water and gulped it down, refilled the cup, and drank that, too. Suddenly, I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart began pounding crazily, like it was skipping beats, and for a moment, I thought I was dying. Not even in a firefight, or diving in on a heavily defended target, had I ever felt anything remotely close to panic. But that’s what it was. A panic attack. Complete, unbridled terror.

I went and sat down on the corner of the bed, closed my eyes, and concentrated, trying to will my heart to normalcy. When that didn’t work, I rolled onto the floor and did stomach crunches to the point of exhaustion. That seemed to do the trick; the skipping beats stopped. I lay back on the carpet, my right triceps in spasm, too tired to move.

The Buddha believed that fear is the result of attachment—to ourselves, our possessions, the people we love. Everything in life is transient, including life. Embrace that transience, recognize that all those attachments are fleeting, Buddhists reason, and you’ll ultimately shed your fear. Could be all of that is true. I don’t really know. But if the Buddha had sat in the same room with Savannah for even five minutes, he might’ve better understood the erratic beating of my heart and my sense of near-paralytic dread at the prospect of never seeing her again.

My cell phone was on the nightstand above me. I pushed myself off the floor and grabbed it, peering closely at the screen, trying to figure out if I’d missed Dundee’s call or text message. Whether he’d tried to reach me or not, I couldn’t tell; advancements in digital communications are an anathema to the analog me. I lay down on the bed, not bothering to undress or pull down the bedspread, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the sun was coming up and my phone was chiming with an incoming text message:

Behind Applebee’s. Suitcase. You got 10 minutes. Will call to confirm you have it. No cops or she dies. You’re late, she dies.

The room clock read 7:35
A
.
M
. The text had come in two minutes earlier. I grabbed my duffel bag and bolted, throwing open the motel’s office door on my way to my car.

“Where’s the Applebee’s?”

The college kid manning the front desk pushed her stringy brown hair behind one multipierced ear and looked up at me from a copy of the
Hunger Games
.

“Excuse me?”

“Applebee’s. Where is it?”

She pointed. “Take a right on Lake Tahoe Boulevard. It’s about three and a half miles. But I’m pretty sure they don’t open ’til—”

I reached the Yukon, tossed my duffel into the passenger seat, hopped in, fired up the engine, and roared out, onto the boulevard.

The road was still snow packed and icy in spots, but traffic fortunately was sparse. I fishtailed around a garbage truck and a snail-like Mercedes 450 whose driver, a wizened old man, looked to be steering with one hand and conducting Beethoven’s Fifth with the other. As I glanced back to pass him, a deer and her spotted fawn bounded out of nowhere, directly into my path. I cut the wheel hard left and slid along the shoulder, fighting to keep 5,200 pounds of SUV from going off the road. How I avoided hitting Bambi and his mother, I’ll never know.

The Yukon’s odometer told me I had another two miles to go. That was assuming the desk clerk was correct in her distance estimate. Assuming the clock on the dashboard was set correctly, I had six minutes to get there, find a suitcase, and send a text message acknowledging that whatever was in that suitcase was in my possession, or Savannah would die.

The traffic light ahead was red. Vehicles were beginning to back up in either direction. I cut right, laying on the horn and blew through the T-intersection.

Four minutes.

I gunned the accelerator on the straightaways, the speedometer creeping past eighty, and eased up on the curves. Every fiber in me screamed go faster. I probably could’ve, too, but not without upping the risk past what Indy race car drivers like to call “being stupid.” We’d learned all about high-speed and evasive-driving techniques at Alpha from an instructor who’d spent more than thirty years running guns in Latin America for everyone from the Sandinistas to the Medellin Cartel. Jose Camacho was a slight little man with rotted teeth who’d dropped out of school in third grade, but who fathomed inherently and intimately the physics of wheeled vehicles. He didn’t drive them so much as strapped them on. “A car is like a woman,” he’d tell us, “each different, yet each the same. Learn to touch her in the way she
desires
to be touched. Never push her beyond what
she
desires, and she will fill your heart forever.”

Ever so subtly, I could feel the Yukon swaying left and right as the front tires danced on patches of black ice.

I heeded the words of Jose Camacho and slowed down.

Three minutes.

The landscape passed by as a blur. Towering pine forests and minimalls punctuated by stand-alone ski shops, banks, burger joints, cafés, and budget motels. Ordinarily, I would’ve mentally catalogued them all, consciously and automatically mapping my exfiltration route—the byproduct of escape and evasion training. But I was so laser-focused on making it to Applebee’s in time, I barely noticed any of it.

Two minutes.

The road faded left and suddenly I was tapping like crazy on the brakes, hook-sliding on the ice to a stop. An eighteen-wheeler had jackknifed 200 meters ahead of me. The road in either direction was blocked with traffic.

I pulled out of line, bouncing over the sidewalk in front of the Highland Inn, jumped out of the Yukon, and sprinted.

Where the hell was Applebee’s? How much farther up the road? I ran like I did back in the day, with lightning bolts on my football helmet. I was never the fastest receiver, but I had good hands and a nose for the end zone. I used that nose now, racing toward my objective as fast as my calcified knees would carry me.

I’d run about 200 meters when Applebee’s came into view on my left with its green shingled roof and stone façade. The expansive, snow-covered parking lot in back was empty save for a weathered, silver Honda Civic with Nevada tags. The car was unoccupied.

I looked around frantically. Not a suitcase in sight.

There was, however, a battered gray Dumpster adjacent to the restaurant’s rear door.

One minute.

I threw open the Dumpster’s hinged steel top. It crashed against the back with a loud clang. Inside, piled high, were plastic trash bags stuffed with fetid table scraps, used paper napkins and the other disposable detritus of dining out. I began heaving bags onto the snow like a homeless man possessed, one after the other.