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                                            CHAPTER FIFTEEN

                                                    Sundown

7:18 p.m.

Lucilva's red cotton blouse turned the color of fire by the orange glow of dusk. It was still warm–over ninety. Reggie grasped the stick on the ultra-light, pulled it back, pictured himself flying this contraption. An exhilarating idea. But the reality was terrifying. Awkwardly, he climbed out of the seat.

One foot on the front wheel, left hand supporting her right arm by the elbow, Lucilva asked: "Where's your girlfriend–how's she doing?"

"She was raped. How do you think she's doing? She's gone."

Lucilva took a drag from her cigarette and swiveled away to courteously exhale in another direction. "Good–that's she gone. She didn't need to be involved with this."

"Didn't need your fat-ass brother either."

"My brother didn't rape her. I asked him. Josh is mean and thick-headed. With about as much sensitivity as that rock. That rock probably cares more about you than he does. But he's not a rapist."

"I saw him. Huffing through the groves, covered in mud–God, just thinking about it–then Jackie, with her clothes ripped off, lying in the muck."

"Did she say Josh raped her?"

Reggie thought a moment. She hadn't said his name. But she'd meant Josh. Who else was there? "She didn't have to say his name. He did it."

"Judge and jury. Well, tell me who called Josh to come up to the ranch? Who called him on his private cellular number, told him to come up to the ranch right away–then just hung up?"

"Who cares? He made it up. If he didn't rape Jackie, who did?"

"Ask her."

"I will."

Her reaction to this was screwy. She didn't like her brother very much, yet she was willing to defend him without considering the obvious facts.

"Josh does what I tell him, without flinching. He knows I got the brains and he got the brawn. I asked him. He says he didn't do it. He'd tell me if he did and let me figure out a way to get him out of it. I believe him."

"I won't work with him."

"If you want to do the deal, you will."

Reggie knew that was a cut of lean truth. He could do nothing about it now. When the deal was done, he promised himself, Josh Paley would get what he had coming to him. And he'd have plenty of time to consider what that would be.

He thought of The Mission and changed the Subject. "Who taught you to fly?"

"My father."

"I didn't know he flew."

"He didn't. He got tired of flying. So he taught me. I flew him back and forth between here and L.A. where for years he had an office. He'd sleep."

"There's no airport in Paley."

"There's an airstrip on the south side of the ranch in a valley. Tough to land there. Then a couple years ago I met a pilot in Moreno Valley who turned me on to ultra-lights. Fell in love with them."

Reggie looked at the ugly bird. "Why?"

"No passengers. Wonderful. You feel the wind, the movement of the aircraft. You like to fly?"

"No," Reggie muttered. "Had a bad experience once."

"What was that?"

"I was born without wings," he replied, forcing a chuckle.

She smiled slightly.

Reggie asked her if Adams flew. She nodded.

"In fact, Ivan wants lessons from him. Only takes a dozen hours."

"What kind of operation you got here?"

"What operation."

"Adam flies, Josh's a drug dealer. There're maps on the wall in there." He left it at that.

She smiled glibly, drug on her cigarette. "What an imagination, Reggie. Come here." She walked the road and led him to the far side of the hangar. There were two long rows of wood-frame rabbit cages running the length of the hangar and Quonset hut. Had to be twenty or thirty of them. When he came around to the front of the cages, he bent down and peeked through the steel mesh. A pair of unblinking eyes rose from the sand in the bottom of the cage, a big white mouth opened and slashed fangs into the mesh. Reggie jumped back and yelped uncontrollably. Lucilva laughed. Rattlesnakes. Two or three to a cage.

"What the hell," Reggie swore.

"Harley Reptiles, Incorporated," Lucilva announced.

"What the hell does he do with them?"

"Sleeps with them." He looked at her. She grinned mischievously. "Sells them."

"To who?"

"Clinics. Faith healers. Gourmet chefs."

"So...what about the maps? All those black lines? Those aren't flight routes?"

"Where he hunts rattlers."

"They don't get out do they?"

"Josh walks them occasionally–but they're on leashes," she quipped, walking back towards the road.

"Funny," Reggie remarked and followed her. "Creepy business fit for a creep."

She walked back to the ultra-light and pulled a camouflage netting over it. "So what about you?"

"What?"

"Why're you here?"

The Mission.

"Make some money," he said.

"You mean, big money, don't you?"

"Yeah. Big money."

"And then what?"

"I don't know."

"No one goes for the big money without knowing what they're going to do with it."

"You wouldn't believe me."

"I have no reason not to."

The Mission. Use a little truth to get the big truth.

"My dad's in a convalescent hospital. Parkinson's and emphysema. He can't afford it. For years he's taken care of my mother. She's up north in a psychiatric hospital. She’s been in there most of my life. I'm an only son. It's up to me to take care of them."

Lucilva's eyes narrowed skeptically. "Commendable. Sorry to hear it. It's tough growing up without a mother."

"Wasn't easy, no. But then you know how it is. You grew up without a mother."

She tapped her cigarette; the ash dropped off. "Yes, I did."

"What happened?"

Lucilva hesitated. "She died when I was two."

The Mission. Reggie nodded sympathetically. "Were you young enough that you didn't miss her."

"That's a stupid question. I knew she was here one day and gone the next. Of course I missed her." She swallowed, fighting back emotion.

"I'm sorry. Didn't mean to–"

"That's okay."

Reggie hesitated. Then he asked the question: "How'd she...how'd she, you know, die?"

Lucilva didn't want to talk about it, he could tell, but she looked down, then up and said: "Killed. Car accident."

Do I press it? Could she be avoiding saying what she really knows? Reggie decided he would ask one more question for now.

"How'd you find out?"

She was incredulous. "Who do you think? My father."

Reggie nodded. "Speaking of your father," he said, moving around to the front of the ultralight, "there's one thing: I thought it was kind of weird when he asked me if I knew anybody who could make synthetic drugs. Wasn't his kind of thing. I told him I might know somebody. Two weeks later I call him to let him know I got a cook. He said Josh had the connection, but I'd be in charge of manufacturing."

"What's your point?"

He took Lucilva's eyes with his own and held them. "Sunday, I called him at home. The maid answered and said he was busy and couldn't come to the phone. She came back with a message from him. She said he wanted me to bring my crew Thursday morning to the east side of The Plunge–discreetly–and wait for Josh."

"This is all one thing?" she interjected.

"Not quite. Thing One is this: Chris died Sunday."

"And what? You think he was already dead when you called."

Reggie shrugged.

"What time did you call?"

"What time did he die?"

"Sunday night."

Someone else could have given the maid the message, Reggie decided. Am I paranoid or what?

Lucilva broke through his thoughts: "What's bothering you?"

"What's bothering me? I'll tell you what's bothering me. This was supposed to be a quick deal, a few pounds–Chris said it was a favor for somebody–but now he's dead, and I knew your father well enough to know he never intended to make this much dope."

Lucilva giggled, catching herself again like the night before when he joined her for dinner. "Is that all that's bothering you?" She flicked the ash from her cigarette. It became apparent that she did this when she needed a moment to think.

Reggie was going to take it a bit further. "I think you gave the message to the maid to pass on to me."

"I wasn't even here."

"Where were you?"

"None of your business."

"Chris wouldn't have sent a message like that through a maid."

"And I would?" she said, folding her arms, nervously twitching her cigarette between her thumb and finger.

"I think so. It bothered me, but it makes sense. If you gave me the message, it meant one of two things. You'd done an end-around on your old man. Unlikely. Or, two: your old man was already dead."

Lucilva's chest heaved as she took in a deep warm breath. Then she smiled frankly. Reggie watched her eyes dart into the darkening sky, as if searching for an answer, or displaying perplexity–he couldn't tell which in this light. She stepped away from him, circling the ultralight, chuckling in her gravelly voice, then giggling girlishly. But when she rounded the tail and came his way, moving out of the shadow of the engine into the dull dusk light, she wasn't smiling. There was a questionable purse of her lips a moment before she said:

"I have always run my father's affairs with a sense of duty that would never allow me to circumvent my father's wishes. If I had given you that message, it would have been what my father wanted. But I didn't give you that message." She started to turn away and added: "And he was still alive when you called."

"So you were there?"

The gleam of a smile rose in her eyes, but it never reached her lips, because she was too busy biting them.

Reggie didn't like her shifty way of not answering. His impulse was to knock her in the head with something that would convince her he knew more than she thought he knew–but he didn't want to give away the whole show. That was the trick. Staying ahead of her by getting into her head. Like wrestling in high school. It was chess played out with the body. A series of complicated maneuvers, planned and executed with the goal of pinning his opponent to the floor. He had to rely on his innovative mind. Problem was, his mind was guided by judgment, and his judgment was, admittedly, weak. Made things tricky.

"Since you were there," Reggie began, folding his own arms across his chest, "you have to know how he died."

She looked away quickly, then back again. "I don't want to talk about it."

The pieces fell together. Most of them. But if he let her have what he suspected, would she tell him the rest? He had to know what he was getting himself into. This was more than just cooking meth–and Otto's mission.

"Your father didn't die the way the death certificate says he died."

Lucilva's eyebrows arched and stayed there while she thought about that statement. "How would you know?"

"I don't. But whatever it says was the cause of death is probably wrong–to some extent."

She cleared her throat and took another cigarette from the pack in her shirt pocket. "Extraordinary. You know something the doctor doesn't?" Her words left an expression that signaled Reggie that she desperately wanted an answer to that question. She lit the cigarette. He had her in a good hold. But it wasn't quite a take-down. She was uncomfortable, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. It was surprising, really. He thought she'd be more sophisticated at hiding her feelings and covering her lies. Her aggressiveness had performed well last night around the candlelight dinner, a roaring fire and with sound effects from Mother Nature in the form of thunder and rain. But in the low-gliding light of dusk that had crept from beneath the horizon and the vast open desert that encircled them, she appeared to lose her strength. Her face shadowed on one side, but her beauty doubled, as if someone had hung the moon and adjusted her spot on the desert just for this one take.

"Are you going to answer me?" she gruffly asked.

"I think the doctor knows what I know," he replied. "Chris died of mysterious causes."

"Mysterious causes," she repeated and blew smoke over his head, making him flinch. "A stroke is hardly mysterious. The fact that he ate like a horse and clogged his arteries doesn't make a stroke mysterious at all, Mr. Thomas."

"Then the doctor lied."

"Why would Doctor Rendquist, who's been one of father's closest friends for years, lie?"

"Maybe because he was a good friend, he lied about the true cause of death. There's a ransom note demanding money for the return of your father's body. You gave it to the police, and that's what got me off the hook." Lucilva took two long drags off the cigarette in quick succession. He hit her again: "The only reason for someone to hold a cadaver–previously six feet in the ground–for ransom, would be because of something on or in the body. What I don't get is why you'd take that to the police–"

Lucilva stepped backwards, waving her cigarette in the air. "Wait a damn minute here." She dropped the butt and didn't bother to smother it. "You...you were there. At the cemetery. And the note–only six people know all the contents."

"Papers know about it," Reggie put in.

"Only about the land lease–not the demand for money." She shook her head in disbelief. "It was you, wasn't it? You robbed my–! I don’t believe–! What a complete idiot I am! You put in the land lease bit to finger somebody local. It really was you! You...you have my father!" She lunged at him, an anger deviling her face. It didn’t seem quite real, though. Too melodramatic for this tightly-wound personality. Reggie defensively put up his hand. He side-stepped her just as her right arm came down from the heavens to strike him.

Reggie caught her by the wrist, held it firmly and growled: "Damn it, I didn't write no ransom note!" He released her. "I don't have him!"

She caressed her wrist. "Then how did you know about the money demand? The police wouldn't tell you; they wouldn't tell anyone."

"Paper said an informant inside the police department–"

"I let them leak about the land leases, for Pete's sake, don't you get it? I want people in this town to know what's at stake if I don't get my father's body back, but I'm not going to pay some asshole for him!"

"You mean, if they know that you have to extend the land leases, they may not help? You want them to think you're willing to do that?"

"Of course."

"And you're going to extend the land leases?"

She laughed scornfully. "If I get his body back I will."

"So you're going to use the ransom demand in reverse on the town?"

"Eureka," she grumbled. "There're folks in this town who'll rip the lungs out of whoever did this. Police don't want a mob out looking for this creep." She moved closer to Reggie. "So how'd you know about the money demand?"

"I know, that's all."

"Whoever took his body is sick if he thinks he can make me pay a quarter million for him. He was my father, but this body doesn't mean a thing to me."

"This body." This. Not "his." "Something about his body meant something to you."

"You listen to me–"

"No, you listen," Reggie barked back, "I don't have your father, but someone does, and that someone knows something about his death, and what they know has something to do with the body."

At that moment, Reggie realized that that meant only one thing: Lucilva had to know the same thing the graverobber knew about Chris's death. For the graverobber to think she'd pay up, he had to think she knew what he knew.

"I want my father's body back. He was my father. I...loved him. He deserves a decent place to rest. But I can’t pay. I’m not paying."

Before he said anything more, she walked passed him, heading for the hangar. Reggie caught up, walking beside her, thinking of something that would pierce her hardened duplicity. He thought of only one thing sharp enough for the task: the truth.

"If you aren't paying the ransom," he said, stepping in front of her, stopping a few feet from the hangar door, "then why did you tell your friend John that you'd get the money?"

She looked at him, into one eye at a time. "You...you listened...."

"You're hiding something."

"You listened on the phone last night. That's how you...." Her expression was a tug-of-war between relief and dread, and Reggie watched the animation in her face as she reviewed her conversation with Quinn, searching, possibly, for any delectable morsels of information that would be harmful...if swallowed.

"Whatever it is," Reggie said calmly, "you're willing to pay to keep it buried. You changed from not paying to finding the money way too easy last night."

A cricket chirped nearby. Something skittered off under a bush behind him. Lucilva didn't appear to hear anything but her own breathing as she stared off into the desert night. Reggie thought of Josh and looked westward for his unexpected arrival.

Then, almost in a whisper, Lucilva spoke: "My father committed suicide." Contemptuously, she pushed him aside and entered the hangar.

It wasn't what he expected. His brain fumbled for something to say. It made sense: the body would show evidence of suicide; Lucilva's reluctance to talk about his death. The body snatcher knew. Who could that be? Someone on the city council? In the police department? The doctor? How could Paley commit suicide? He loved himself too damn much. Talked about himself all the time. How could a man so taken with his own existence kill himself?