They had come to a small clearing, a canopy of huge pines holding aloft a leaden sky. The opening was surrounded by brush on three sides with, on the fourth, a jumble of stones that looked as if some giant had tossed them in a careless heap centuries ago. Carl paused at the edge of the clearing and pointed at the stones.

  “The cave is over there, beyond that big rock.”

  Once past the largest of the boulders, the entrance to the cave was easy to spot, a wide fissure in the face of a rocky knoll that cut into the forest like the prow of a giant ship.

  “Someone’s been here lately,” Tom said, pointing at a little pile of ashes on the ground just outside the cave. “That’s pretty recent.”

  “What makes you say that?” Carl asked.

  “It rained yesterday. The ashes are dry.”

  Stanley knelt, sifted some of the ashes through his fingers.

  “These were photos,” he said. “Somebody didn’t want their face in circulation.”

  “Or their dick,” Tom said.

  “Good point. Are we going in?”

  Tom looked at the opening to the cave, and at Stanley. “I’ll check it out first.” He pulled his gun from his holster. “Here, you keep this.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Somebody was following us out of town. At least, I thought so.”

  158 Victor Banis

  Which Stanley hadn’t even noticed. “What happened to them?”

  “They disappeared. Either we lost them, or they lost interest.

  Or, maybe I was mistaken.” His tone said he didn’t think so.

  Stanley took the gun reluctantly. “What are you going to carry?”

  “This.” Tom made a fist. “And the Mag.”

  “What if…?” Stanley started to say, but Tom cut him off.

  “Look, we may be dealing with a cold blooded killer here.

  Probably are,” he said. “I can’t leave you out here unarmed.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Carl said quickly.

  “You’ll stay here. You’ll be safe with Stan.”

  “Stanley. You’ll give a yell if—”

  “If there’s anybody in there, you’ll hear yelling,” Tom said.

  He pulled the Mag Lite from his belt, holding it in the usual cop-grip, just above the lens end. The Mag was heavy. In a pinch, it would double nicely as a club. He switched it on and, with a final glance and a nod at Stanley, disappeared inside the cave.

  There was a moment of stillness and then, suddenly, a wisp of smoke appeared at the opening of the cave, quickly grew into a thick black plume that shot upward into the air.

  Not smoke, Stanley realized—a cloud of bats, disturbed by Tom’s entrance. In a moment they had vanished. Stanley shuddered.

  Despite the fact that the road was no more than a mile or so away, the woods were surprisingly quiet. Stanley and Carl waited in silence. Carl’s eyes remained glued to the cave’s entrance, but Stanley looked back and forth, from the cave to the woods surrounding them. Though it was only late morning, it might have been twilight, the sky overhead slate colored and simmering with darker clouds. The indigo rim of one enormous cloud seemed to suck the sun from the sky.

  The silence grew weighty. How long had Tom been gone? It felt like forever.

  A jade green lizard basked on a rock as if waiting for the sunlight’s return, motionless but for the rapid vibrations of its DEADLY WRONG 159

  throat. A coyote appeared in the clearing and loped across it, low to the ground, eyeing them warily over his shoulder. The lizard vanished.

  “Do you think he’s all right?” Carl asked finally.

  “Tom? Yes. He’s pretty handy.”

  “Maybe we should…”

  “Maybe we should do what he told us.”

  “What if there’s somebody in there?”

  “Their tough luck.”

  Stanley wished he felt as confident as he sounded, though.

  He began to wonder too if they should follow Tom. He wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea of Tom alone in that cave, notwithstanding Tom’s competence to take care of himself.

  Even Tom could be ambushed, or outnumbered.

  But, what if there were someone out here, in the woods, maybe even watching them at this very moment? If they all went inside, they could easily be trapped. One man with a gun could keep them inside that cave indefinitely, or pick them off one by one as they tried to come out.

  As if his fears had materialized, there was a sudden thrashing of bushes just behind them. They both turned, alarmed, Stanley automatically raising the gun in both hands the way they’d taught them at the Academy.

  A brownish muzzle appeared through some branches. Large, liquid eyes weighed them and apparently found them unthreatening. A burro pushed his way through the brush to cross the clearing a few feet in front of them. The rest of the pack followed, the Jakes leading, the Jennies forming a protective circle about a trio of colts. They paused in a pack to nibble at some leaves, keeping a watchful eye on the human intruders.

  “Burros?” Stanley asked, astonished. The only time he had ever seen a live burro had been in Tijuana. It had worn a straw hat, and its body was painted in green stripes. Grinning tourists after too many margaritas had their pictures taken standing beside it, or little children sitting astride.

  “They’re wild,” Carl explained. “They live in packs here.”

  160 Victor Banis

  “Not likely to stampede and trample us, I hope?”

  “They’re harmless. Sometimes they’ll even let you get close enough to pet them, but not when they have colts. It’s a good idea to keep a distance then. They can get skittish.”

  “Don’t the coyotes give them trouble? Or dogs?”

  “The dogs mostly have sense enough to stay away from those hooves, and the burros are too big for a coyote to pick off, even a pack of coyotes. But if one of the burros gets hurt, the dogs and the coyotes are quick to pick up on that. Then the pack leader drives the wounded one away for everyone’s safety.”

  “Everyone’s except the wounded fellow, wouldn’t you say?”

  Carl seemed to think about that for a moment. “Nature’s a bitch.”

  “You got that right,” Tom said behind them, making them both jump. “Nobody’s home. Come on in.”

  Stanley handed Tom his gun back and they followed him inside. Stanley thought of the bats and hoped they didn’t decide to come back at just this moment. The cave was not particularly deep or overly large. A narrow opening that necessitated going single file, and low enough that they had to duck their heads; around a bend, and they were in a small room, dusty, higher ceilinged. Tom flashed the light around.

  There was evidence of its occupancy: a sleeping bag, a cardboard box that apparently served as a table, another probably meant for storage, a candle in a wooden holder.

  Things had been tossed every which way, though, the sleeping bag torn and its stuffing scattered, the boxes overturned, the candle broken on the floor as if someone had stepped on it.

  “Donnie didn’t leave it like this,” Carl said.

  “I agree,” Stanley said, thinking of Donnie’s neat little room at home.

  “Someone’s been here, that’s for sure,” Tom said. “Did that guy, Rack, know about this place?”

  DEADLY WRONG 161

  Carl sighed. “He might have. Donnie had some special kind of case on the dude. If he brought anybody here, it was p-probably Rack.”

  “He brought you,” Stanley said.

  “Not for sex.” Carl gave him an offended look. “Anyway, I didn’t do this. You’ve been babysitting me since you got here.”

  Stanley thought, but did not say, there’s no telling when this was done. Anytime, possibly, since Donnie died.

  The dim sunlight outside seemed brighter after the gloom of the cave. Carl, in the lead as they came out, had taken a couple of bottles of water from his backpack by the time Stanley and then Tom emerged.

  “Drink?” he said, offering Tom a bottle with all the rapt solemnity of Paris presenting a prize apple.

  Tom took it with hardly a glance and passed it automatically to Stanley. Less solemnly, Carl handed Tom another. Stanley unscrewed the cap of his bottle and drank. The water was warm, but welcome anyway.

  § § § § §

  They started back to the truck, not talking. Pine boughs trembled in the blustery wind that had come up while they were in the cave. The clouds overhead had grown menacingly darker still, and thunder occasionally grumbled in the distance. A suspicious crow had come back to assure himself they were truly on their way.

  When the first shot came, Stanley mistook it for a crack of thunder, or even a tree branch breaking in a suddenly powerful gust of wind—until Tom shoved him to the ground, falling atop him and covering Stanley’s body with his own.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The second bullet hit the trunk of a tree well over their heads. The crow screamed in alarm and flapped skyward. Carl was still standing where he was, staring dumbly in the direction of the shots. A little slow. Stanley yanked at his pants leg.

  “Get down, for crap’s sake,” he hissed. “Someone’s shooting at us.”

  “Oh.” The truth registered belatedly. Carl dropped to the ground beside Stanley. “Are you sure?” Which Stanley did not dignify with an answer.

  No more shots. Tom, his gun drawn, rose to a crouch. For a moment, there was nothing to be heard, even the birds startled into silence. After a moment the silence was broken by the sound of someone crashing through brush, more concerned, apparently, with getting away than with stealth.

  “Stay here,” Tom said, running in that direction. After a moment, they heard the distant sound of an engine turning over, then a roar and a rattle of stones as a car took off fast.

  Stanley jumped up and ran after Tom. He found him standing on a rocky embankment that looked down at the road where the Ram was parked. They could just hear the car a long way off, trailing dust that dissipated quickly in the wind huffing angrily about them. The clouds above, as if to express their indignation, chose that moment to burst open and began to pelt them with raindrops the size of marbles.

  “Did you see him?” Stanley asked, panting. He had forgotten about the altitude and the thin air.

  “Dark car was all, and just a glimpse of that. Not enough to ID.”

  “Dark gray?”

  “Or blue. You’ve seen it before?”

  “Maybe. I thought someone was tailing me, my first night in town. But I couldn’t say for sure. I couldn’t think of any reason for anyone to be following me then.”

  164 Victor Banis

  “Somebody was following us today. At least I thought so.

  Someone else was in the woods with us, that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe it was a hunter,” Carl said, joining them.

  “Out of season, isn’t it?”

  “Some of these guys, they don’t pay much attention to the rules. These are mountain boys, you know.” He looked in the direction the car had vanished. “Could have been anybody.

  You’re sure they were shooting at us?”

  Tom did one of his shrugs.

  “Your sister has a gun,” Stanley said. “A shot gun.”

  Carl gave him a scornful look. “Everybody up here has a gun. There’s two rifles in Libby’s closet. Anyway, why would my sister want to shoot you? Libby and Hannah, and Mom, are probably the only ones in Bear Mountain who want you here.”

  Which, Stanley had to admit, was pretty much the truth.

  Bear Mountain hadn’t exactly arranged a welcome festival for them.

  “Anyway,” Tom said, “That wasn’t a shotgun.”

  Carl looked back thoughtfully at the woods from which they had just emerged. “There’s lots of pot growing up in these hills.

  The growers guard their little farms very forcefully. We might just have gotten too close to someone’s crop.”

  “Whoever he was, he wasn’t much of a shot,” Tom said.

  “First one missed us by a mile, second one was a good twenty feet high. I hope the poor bastard doesn’t depend on hunting to feed his family.”

  He slipped his Sig back into its holster, hitched up his pants for all the world like John Wayne in one of those old westerns, and said, with an exaggerated drawl, “Let’s go to a funeral.”

  It occurred to Stanley that Tom actually enjoyed this kind of thing. People shooting at us, and he’s having fun? I’m in love with a nutcase?

  § § § § §

  Donnie McIntosh’s funeral was obviously not one of the town’s more celebrated events. Amanda McIntosh sat alone in the first pew of the church, directly in front of the closed DEADLY WRONG 165

  casket. Two middle aged women sat in the row behind her and off to one side. Observing them, Stanley marked them for curiosity seekers, the kind of ghouls who thought they might pick up an amusing bit of chatter to share with their friends over coffee later.

  Stanley, Tom and Carl were the only others at the church, apart from a minister who gave a brisk eulogy in such vague and generalized terms that Stanley suspected he had never met the deceased, and wondered if he even knew of Donnie’s reputation. There were those who preferred to remain ignorant on that score, he thought, remembering Penelope Hunter.

  Halfway through the eulogy, a funeral director came in from an archway to the side, carrying a single arrangement of flowers, a small cluster of pink and lavender gladiolas in a white maché, looking smaller for their lack of company. He placed it by the head of the casket. The minister paused to glance down at the flowers, momentarily distracted.

  Stanley wished now he had thought to order flowers, and wondered who had sent these. Certainly not the two townswomen, whispering together the whole time. The mother?

  She held a single red rose in her hands, but the curious look she gave the late arriving gladiolas inclined him to think she knew nothing about them either. And, lavender? Was that some sort of comment?

  “Yours?” Stanley whispered at Carl, who shook his head.

  The ceremony ended, Amanda McIntosh paused by the casket to look at the card on the gladiolas. When she had gone out, escorted through a side door by the black suited funeral director, Stanley detoured past the casket to look at the flowers.

  The florist’s card attached to them had Donnie’s name and the name of the church written on it, but no mention of a sender.

  § § § § §

  The heavy downpour had settled into a chilly drizzle—

  enough, however, to discourage the curiosity of the two townswomen, who apparently had amassed sufficient gossip, and passed on attending the gravesite ceremony.

  166 Victor Banis

  The same funeral director stood to the left and slightly behind Amanda McIntosh, holding a large black umbrella over her head. She still held her single rose in both hands and stared without word or movement at the waiting casket, appearing altogether unaware of the man with the umbrella.

  Tom led Stanley and Carl up the little knoll to the graveside, taking a position some ten or fifteen feet behind the mother.

  For the moment, except for the funeral director and the same minister from the church, they were the entire assemblage, but they had no more than taken their places there than they heard the muted roar of an approaching motorcycle, and looked back down the hill to see a lone biker pull up. He parked his bike, and dismounted.

  Stanley looked hard at him as he strolled up the hill with the longtime biker’s bow-legged swagger, like a cowboy’s - pleasure bent, Chris would say - but with less roll. He was in black, full leather regalia—boots, gloves, leather pants and vest, with nothing but skin under the vest. He took a position by himself in the shelter of a wide-spreading pine, several yards distant from the rest of them, and took off his cap, cradling it under one arm, and leaned against the trunk of the tree.

  With the hat gone, Stanley recognized him at once from Donnie’s pictures: the bearded, laughing man who had allowed Donnie to photograph his face as well as his body. Stanley nudged Tom and leaned over to whisper to him.

  The service was brief. The same impersonal remarks from the minister, finishing with, as Stanley could have predicted,

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  For a silly moment, Stanley was tempted to sing out a line from a bawdy song he remembered: “Two twin beds and only one of them was mussed.” Anything to bring a less impersonal note to the ceremony. Maybe Donnie would have found it funny.

  Surely someone who, if everyone were to be believed, had provided comfort and pleasure to so many, deserved something more in the way of a send off than this perfunctory exercise.

  At the end of the ceremony, Amanda McIntosh took a faltering step toward the casket, the funeral director shuffling to DEADLY WRONG 167

  keep the umbrella over her head, although it was hardly raining at all by now.

  She laid the red rose atop the casket and stood for an indecisive moment, swaying slightly, until the funeral director stepped to her, taking her elbow to lead her away. It occurred to Stanley that she was drunk, or something close to it.

  Not so drunk, however, that she did not recognize him. She started past him, paused, and squinted, a resentful mask slipping over her face when she finally puzzled out who he was.

  “You didn’t have to leave his room such a damned mess,”

  she said, and went past without waiting for a reply.

  Tom and Stanley exchanged looks. “It was fine when I left,”

  Stanley said. “Neat as a pin.”

  “Wouldn’t she have known if someone else had been there?”

  “She drinks,” Stanley said. “A lot. I suspect the guys from The Handle Bar could do a bike run through her house and it might not register, depending upon how far down she was in the bottle.”

  “Speaking of bikers…”

  The biker in black had stayed where he was leaning against the tree, staring at the casket, not even noticing Amanda McIntosh’s departure, his face revealing nothing. He turned now to amble down the hill toward his bike.