Voodoo Ridge (35 page)

Pacifists question the worth of so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques. They argue that such methods don’t work because people subjected to waterboarding, for example, or made to sit for hours on their knees, will eventually say or do anything to avoid more pain. As such, the critics say, any intelligence derived by using these methods can’t be trusted. They’re right. Because if the person being interrogated knows that his questioners are playing by humanitarian “rules,” then it’s usually nothing more than a big time suck for all parties concerned. The only way it can work is if the guilty detainee fully understands that he may be maimed or even killed if he’s not fully forthcoming.

Now, I’m not saying I ever personally relied on those kinds of tactics, techniques, or procedures. Nor am I saying I saw others use them. I’m not saying that at all. I wouldn’t want to spend the next several years in federal custody. But I’ve heard that much good actionable intelligence can be quickly derived by shooting off a toe, or a finger. You’d be amazed how swiftly that can get somebody’s attention.

Or so I’ve heard.

My phone rang. It was Marlene from the airport.

“Gordon’s here.” Her voice quavered with nerves. “He says he’d like to meet with you.”

“When?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Does he own a gun?”

She lowered her voice. “Not that I know of. Gordon can be a little gruff sometimes, but I don’t think he’s capable of real violence. He’s a real teddy bear inside.”

“I’ll be there in five minutes.”

I called Streeter as I drove to brief him about what I’d learned, but he wasn’t in. His machine picked up. I left a message.

M
ARLENE WAS
standing outside without a coat, eating cookies, one after another. The temperature hovered in the low forties, but the wind chill factor was closer to freezing. Still, I could see sweat rings under the arms of her tan Summit Aviation T-shirt.

“It’s been one heckuva day,” she said. “You want a cookie? I just made some fresh.”

Eating sweets was the last thing on my mind. I strode past her, toward the office door.

“He’s not in there,” Marlene said.

“Where is he?”

“Down the way.” She pointed. “In one of our hangars. We’ve got a big charter coming in. There’ll be a lot of people in the office. He just thought it might be better if the two of you could talk in private.”

I followed her down the flight line. The walk seemed to tire her. She was breathing hard, perspiring even harder.

“Gordon says he’s got nothing to hide,” she said without looking at me.

“We’ll see.”

We passed two rows of prefab metal hangars painted aquamarine. At the third row, Marlene took a right turn. I followed her midway down the line, to the door of a hangar that was partially open. She paused before stepping inside and glanced back at me.

“I just feel so bad,” she said, “what’s happened, all of this.”

Something didn’t feel right. Maybe it was her words, or the way she said them, how the left corner of her mouth turned down, her downcast eyes. In combat, you learn to heed that inner voice that tells you when there’s unseen trouble ahead. But I hadn’t been in combat in a long time. I ignored the voice. The only one I wanted to hear was telling me that Gordon Priest was on the other side of that door, waiting for me to prime him like a pump handle.

I followed Marlene into the hangar.

The first thing I saw in the dim light as I looked past her was a green van, then various office desks and chairs that looked as if they’d been randomly dumped inside the hangar. Leaning perpendicularly against one of the desks was an aluminum sign painted red, white and blue, about three feet long, the kind you hang outside a place of business. It said, “Patriot Flow.”

I sensed movement and turned to glimpse a blur that came up on me fast from behind, partially blocked from my sightline by Marlene’s wide body. I brought my right arm up in a defensive position, but too late. Something hard and heavy came crashing down on the left side of my head.

I could feel myself falling.

I
N
H
OLLYWOOD
, people get knocked unconscious all the time. A karate chop to the neck, a jab to the jaw, and you’re incapacitated for hours. In truth, it usually takes considerable effort to turn off most people’s lights for more than a few seconds, mine included.

The blow that felled me didn’t knock me out completely, but it did leave me stunned and incapacitated long enough that I could feel my arms being yanked behind my back and handcuffs being slapped painfully around my wrists.

There was nothing I could do.

My vision had blurred temporarily from the blow. As my eyes cleared, I fully expected to see Gordon Priest, especially given the handcuffs and what I knew to be his sexual predilections.

Only it wasn’t Priest.

The man with the weather-beaten face standing over me, stuffing a .40-caliber Glock into his belt, which he’d apparently just used to club me silly, wore hiking boots, jeans, and a battered straw cowboy hat.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?”

It took me a second to read the name stitched on his denim work shirt:

Dwayne.

“The Roto-Rooter guy,” I said.

“G’day mate,” he said in a mocking Australian accent. “Glad you could make it to our little party. Might have to throw another shrimp on the barbie, eh?”

He ordered Marlene to go close the door. She was biting her left index finger and fighting back tears.

“I don’t like this.”

“I don’t care what you like or don’t like,” Dwayne said. “I told you to shut the fucking door.”

Cowed, Marlene did as ordered.

Dwayne squatted down beside me.

“You had your chance, dickhead,” he said, the accent gone. “You could’ve left it alone, done what I told you to do, and your lady would be alive today. But you blew it. You blew it bad.”

He stood up and booted me hard in the ribs.

“Dwayne, don’t, please,” Marlene pleaded.

“You shut your mouth.” He glared at her. “You’re the reason we’re in this goddamn mess, Marlene. I can’t believe I’m married to a cow like you.”

“I never wanted this to happen. I just thought we could make some money, that’s all.”

She began to sob.

“You stop that, Marlene, right now. Stop it or so help me God . . .” He cocked his fist like he was about to hit her.

Marlene recoiled, shielding her face, clearly used to it.

“I’m going to thoroughly enjoy killing you,” I said.

Dwayne paused and redirected his focus on me.

“You’re gonna enjoy killing
me
?” He laughed, then bent down beside me, his hands on his knees. “Seems to me, friend, that you don’t fully comprehend what’s happening here.”

“Maybe you can enlighten me.”

“Well, number one, you’re gonna disappear. Forever, OK? And this whole shit storm, which I only got involved in with that punk, Chad, because my sweet ‘little’ wifey here told me how we could turn a quick buck salvaging some airplane? It’s all gonna blow over like a bad dream.”

Dwayne was one of those guys who didn’t know when to shut up, the kind who couldn’t help but remind everyone how brilliant he was, and how he could’ve been wildly successful in life, if only the Vatican and the Jews and the Trilateral Commission hadn’t conspired to screw him over.

He said that after his wife, Marlene, told him about the crashed plane, they decided there might be some money to be made by salvaging a few choice aircraft parts and selling them on eBay. Marlene knew that Chad Lovejoy was familiar with the area, so they got him involved. Dwayne had served in the navy, aboard a nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarine, which often made port of call in Australia. It was his naval training, he boasted, that allowed him to instantly realize the fortune to be made after he and Chad found the Twin Beech and made the unexpected discovery of the crated, weapons-grade uranium that had sat untouched inside the wreckage for decades.

“My mistake,” he said, “was that I told the little punk what we had.”

Chad promptly demanded a higher percentage of the jackpot by virtue of his having led Dwayne to the crash site. Their argument turned violent.

“He picked up a rock.”

“So you capped him three times in the chest.”

“Self-defense.”

Hauling forty pounds of uranium down a snowy mountain single-handedly proved no easy task. Fortunately for Dwayne, he’d been a Boy Scout. He found a couple of stiff pine branches lying on the ground and made a travois like the Plains Indians once used, throwing his coat over the poles to serve as a makeshift cargo platform, then dragging the canister down to his van.

“Piece of cake when you got half a brain,” he said.

“And finding a buyer?”

“Easy as turning on my computer.”

He’d posted anonymous “uranium for sale” notices on a handful of anti-Semitic websites. Within a day, he said, he was in active negotiations with three prospective suitors. One group openly boasted in their e-mails of wanting to build a bomb big enough to wipe out Tel Aviv. They offered $100,000, to be wired directly to the bank account of Patriot Flow Professionals, Dwayne’s fledgling plumbing supply company.

Arrangements were made for the buyers to drive from Los Angeles and to pick up the uranium in Santa Maria. Everything was going smoothly, right on track, Dwayne said, until I balked at completing the delivery.

“Is that when you killed Savannah?”

I couldn’t believe how dispassionately I asked him the question.

“She killed herself,” Dwayne said. “She wouldn’t shut up. She kept trying to get away. I warned her. ‘One more time, and you’re gonna regret it.’ But she wouldn’t listen. That woman, she had a mouth on her, and if there’s one thing I can’t stomach . . .” He turned and looked over at Marlene who was standing near the van, muffling her sobs.

“You were never going to let her go, were you?”

He grinned.

“Remember that morning in Tahoe? When you first came walking up to me in the snow, all freaked out cuz she was gone, and you showed me her picture? Remember that?”

“I remember.”

“She was right there, man, right in the back of my van! I was inside, taping her up just before you showed up. So close and yet so far, right? Is that a fuckin’ hoot?”

Lying there, facedown, handcuffed, listening to him laugh, the killer of Savannah Carlisle and Chad Lovejoy, something cold and primitive came over me, an instinctive, reptilian-like response that prods one to move without thinking. I rolled, shifting my weight, and forcefully kicked the back of his right knee with my left foot.

He buckled and collapsed to the concrete floor.

Again I rolled, this time trying to scissors kick him in the face, but he rolled, too, and I failed to connect.

He got to his knees and drew his pistol.

Then he pulled the trigger.

TWENTY-FIVE

T
he round skipped off the hangar floor, kicking up shards of concrete between my feet, and punctured the van’s left front tire. The hiss of air escaping reminded me of the sound Kiddiot made when he was dissatisfied, which was often.

How Dwayne missed putting a bullet in me from can’t-miss range wasn’t a function of poor marksmanship. It was a function of his beleaguered wife picking up a T-handled airplane tow bar and swinging it at the side of his head like a baseball bat just as he fired.

The pistol skittered under the van as he pitched forward onto the concrete. Blood trickled out of his right ear.

He lay still.

Marlene unclipped a fat key ring dangling from one of her husband’s belt loops and singled out a short, thin handcuff key.

“I’m just so sorry,” she said, struggling to free my wrists. “Dear lord in heaven, please forgive me, I’m so sorry. I never wanted this to happen. I just wanted to make a little money and make him happy so he’d stop beating me for once and blaming me for everything. That’s all, just a little money. I never wanted anybody to get hurt. Please, you have to believe me.”

“It’s all right, Marlene. We’ll sort everything out later.”

She was weeping, having trouble unlocking the handcuffs.