DEVIL’S KEEP Read online

  “Ray, this is a nice deal. Could be extremely nice.”

  “Uh-huh. How nice, you think?”

  “You’re asking me?” she said. “I think in a year you make back what you already have in the land. After that, you have a nice, steady revenue stream. I’d say six hundred K per annum as a floor, maybe a million a year in a good year, with no obligation for you except to cash the checks. Not bad for some raggedy-ass trash land that you bought with fifty thousand down.”

  “That’s about how I read it,” he said.

  “You’re complaining about that?” she said.

  “Not complaining. It just doesn’t matter.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What does it change?” Favor said. “Does my life get better? Will a million a year let me do anything I couldn’t already do?”

  “I guess you already do whatever you want.”

  “There you go,” he said. “I mean, it sounds great, six hundred K, a million a year. There was a time when that would have mattered. Not anymore. Not even close. Ergo, it doesn’t matter. Ergo, I really don’t give a shit whether the deal happens or not.”

  Arielle didn’t know what to say.

  “You want it?” Favor said after a few moments. “Take it, it’s yours.”

  “No. It’s not my deal.”

  “Up to you. I’ll see you tomorrow, Ari. I’ll be in around noon. We get to do this all over again. The wheels on the bus go round and round.”

  He clicked off.

  Arielle listened to the silence in her earpiece, then called two numbers in quick succession.

  In a workshop surrounded by a redwood forest outside Mendocino, California, Winston Stickney was bent over a bench where two vises gripped a shaft of burnished blue steel. He was peering through a welder’s mask as he used a plasma arc torch to burn a precise curving cut across the shaft. Stickney was now an artist and sculptor, best known for his intricate installations of welded steel. He was nearly finished with his cut when the phone rang on the wall of the workshop. He heard it dimly over the loud hiss of the torch, but he kept working. When the cut was complete a few seconds later, he put down the torch head, flipped up the mask, and went to pick up the phone.

  The second call went to Alex Mendonza at the personal protection company in Los Angeles. Mendonza was in a meeting with the representative of a hip-hop recording artist, working out the security details for the rapper’s visit from New York. Mendonza’s assistant picked up the call but sent it through to Mendonza when she recognized Arielle’s voice.

  Arielle linked Stickney and Mendonza in a conference call.

  She said, “Something is up with Ray. He’s not being Ray. Maybe it’s nothing, but it bothers me, and having you two around for a couple of days might do him some good.”

  “I can be there tonight,” Mendonza said. “Let me find a flight.”

  “Five hours’ drive for me,” Stickney said. “I just need to lock up here.”

  “Tomorrow is fine,” she said.

  “Okay,” Mendonza said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow it is,” Stickney said.

  When he spoke with Arielle, Ray Favor was headed west on Highway 50, into the mountains, behind the wheel of a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. A few miles beyond the summit, he turned off the highway and went down a narrow road. Ahead, a vertical rock wall rose five hundred feet into a cloudless blue sky.

  A mile and a half farther down the road, he reached the small campground at the foot of the wall. Favor was glad to see that the campground was empty so far. The Sierras were his refuge, his getaway, and he got away as often as possible. Lake Tahoe was only a few minutes away from the heart of the range. But the accessibility had a big drawback: it meant that the trails and peaks were easily available to everyone else who lived and worked in the area, and to all of Lake Tahoe’s annual millions of visitors. Highway 50 was a main route across the mountains to the San Francisco Bay Area, and this campground was often full by the mid-afternoon of a summer day.

  Favor parked as far as he could get from the campground entrance, got out, and walked to the back of the truck. He unlocked the rear window of the fiberglass shell that covered the bed, and let down the tailgate. The bed was full of camping equipment and outdoor gear. He kept it ready to go.

  Favor changed into a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts and slipped on a pair of rock-climbing shoes. They were of heavy nylon fabric, cut to an exaggerated point around the big toe. The soles were a smooth, soft black rubber that wrapped around the heel and up the sides of the foot and toes.

  Favor had been a climber since he was a teenager, scaling boulders and short buttes on his grandparents’ ranch in eastern Oregon. Favor rarely visited a gym or weight room. Climbing shaped his body and his mind. It developed strength and balance and ingenuity. He usually climbed alone, without ropes. When he was clinging to a rock wall without protection, fifty or a hundred feet or more above the ground, he entered a state of calm that he could find no other way.

  He had been craving that calm all day.

  Favor tied the shoes tight, strapped on a belt that carried a pouch of powdered chalk, and walked to the base of the high wall. Lover’s Leap, it was called, a Tahoe landmark. It was a sheer reef of granite, laced by fractures and ribbed by sills of dark igneous rock. For several minutes he stretched and flexed while he studied the webwork of cracks and protrusions on the face.

  Favor walked a couple of paces to one side. An inch-wide sill ran about waist high. He jumped, seeming to throw himself at the rock face. His left foot caught the sill, and the fingertips of his right hand found a narrow seam.

  He began to climb.

  Favor traversed the face for about an hour, back and forth, up and down, as much as two hundred feet above the ground. He didn’t go higher. That was for the morning. He planned to make a predawn ascent, climbing by the light of a full moon that would still be high in the sky, reaching the top in time to watch the sunrise.

  As he worked across the face, a car rolled into the campground below and stopped. Favor was splayed against the wall, legs spread, arms extended in a wide V above his head. But the handholds were secure, and his feet had found a shelf nearly as wide as his shoes. He paused to rest his aching calves.

  Favor glanced down at the car. Two teenage girls and a boy had gotten out and were standing around a picnic table. Giggles and loud chatter filtered up from below.

  The noise would have grated on him if he had been down there with them. But from up here they belonged to a separate universe, and they ceased to exist for him the instant he shifted his attention back to his body and the space it occupied. The fires had burned out in his calves, and his breathing was under control.

  He began to move again.

  Sarah Jean Athold knew it would be trouble: her friend Missy, and Wallace, the semi-geeky senior from biology lab, and the fifth of Captain Morgan that Missy had coaxed Wallace into buying. Trouble—Sarah Jean could see it coming. But she went with them anyway. They bombed out of Carson City in Missy’s Grand Am, heading straight up to the lake after their last class of the day. They brought Wallace because he had the ID and looked twenty-one, kind of. But Sarah Jean knew that Wallace had been invited for another reason too. He was going to be Missy’s admiring audience. Or helpless victim, depending on how you looked at it. Missy was a huge flirt, nonstop and indiscriminate. Sarah Jean sometimes joked that Missy would flirt at a funeral. With the corpse.

  That was just the usual everyday attention-whoring. After a couple of drinks, Missy would turn strip-club raunchy. Always just teasing. Missy never actually went hard-core. They had a word for it. Sarah Jean called her Lut. That was slut without the “s.” One letter short of all the way.

  They had headed into the mountains because Wallace said he always had good luck at a liquor store in South Lake Tahoe. The ID worked. Wallace came out with the Captain and a two-liter of Coke and a bottle of butterscotch schnapps. He led them to the campground, where he s
aid they could party without getting hassled.

  Wallace passed Sarah Jean a rum and Coke in a plastic cup. Sarah Jean drank it in a hurry, then got a second. While Missy and Wallace laughed and hooted at the picnic table, Sarah Jean took her drink and wandered around the campground, smelling the lodgepole pines that surrounded the campground, feeling small as she craned her neck to look up at the big cliff.

  That was when she saw him, the crazy dude way up on the endless slab of rock. Like a bug stuck to a windshield. He was going to fall any second now, Sarah Jean just knew it, and she told herself that when it happened she was going to turn away because she didn’t want to see it happen, and she would cover her ears because she didn’t want to hear him hit.

  But he didn’t fall. He was moving. At first it was just one leg sliding a few inches to one side, then an agonizing reach with an arm, then suddenly a quick burst of scuttling across the rock, arms and legs shooting out at crazy angles.

  Sarah Jean was going to point him out to the others, but when she looked over at the picnic table, Wallace was throwing his head back and whooping as Missy humped a butt grind against his crotch. Sarah Jean walked over and poured herself another drink. They weren’t going anywhere for a while.

  Soon the lodgepole pines were throwing long shadows across the campground. The climber on the rock came down and walked to his truck, put on a sweater, and cooked a meal over a camp stove. Sarah Jean went to get one last drink and found that the Captain was gone, the schnapps was gone.

  Missy was lap-dancing Wallace.

  “We should go,” Sarah Jean said.

  “No. I’m having fun.”

  “Lut! Come on, let’s go home.”

  “Not a lut. Tonight I’m a four-letter girl.”

  “Sweety, it’s getting late.”

  “No!”

  “She’s right,” Wallace said. “We can’t drive yet. We’re blasted. We have to sober up some.”

  “I don’t want to sober up,” Missy said. “I’m just getting started.”

  Now she was rubbing her chest in his face. Wallace pulled back and looked at Sarah Jean.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said. “Give me an hour, I’ll be good to go.”

  The sun was all the way down now, and Sarah Jean was getting chilly. She went into the Grand Am and sat there alone. She watched the climber take his sleeping bag into the woods. She watched Missy and Wallace making out at the picnic table. They’ll get cold soon, she thought. They would come into the car, they would all sit and wait for a while until one of them was able to drive, and she would soon be home.

  No problem, she thought.

  Then the Demons arrived.

  Favor was still awake in his sleeping bag, about fifty yards back in the pines. He recognized the sound of Harley engines barking through unmuffled pipes. At least four bikes, he thought as he listened to them turn off the access road and roll through the campground. He counted five for sure as they shut down one after the other.

  A couple of minutes later the music started, Hank Williams Jr., amp-driven through big speakers, the bass cranked up high.

  Shit, he thought.

  He wondered whether he should get up and go home. He didn’t want to lie awake here for hours. But he had been planning the early-morning climb for a long time. A late-rising full moon, perfect weather—he didn’t know when he would get the chance again.

  And if tonight was like other recent nights, he would be lying awake at home anyway. At least here he had the sky and the stars.

  He rolled over onto one side, turning his back to the bass that was thumping through the trees. With one ear pressed to the ground and the sleeping bag pulled over his head, the noise wasn’t so bad. He willed himself to block out what remained. He promised himself that nothing would disturb him tonight. Not noise, not doubts, not nagging memories. He imagined himself rising in a few hours, refreshed and full of energy, walking to the base of the cliff in the moonlight and beginning his ascent. The image brought him peace. He could feel himself getting drowsy, and he let go and fell away to deep sleep.

  But he woke right away when the girl screamed.

  Sarah Jean saw that there were five men on motorcycles and two women in the van that followed them in. The men wore grubby denims and leather vests with patches on the back that read in Gothic lettering:

  DEMONS M.C.

  Stockton

  The women threw open the rear doors of the van and set out coolers of beer and bottles of liquor. Music began to boom from speakers in the van’s rear doors. The men scattered around the campground, gathering firewood, and in a short time they were standing around a bonfire that blazed flames as high as their heads, lighting up half the campground.

  Sarah Jean watched it all from the car. She saw the Demons riding in, gawking at Missy straddling Wallace as they kissed at the picnic table. The first rider in the pack pulled in just a few camp spots from Missy and Wallace and the Grand Am, and the others followed. Sarah Jean didn’t like having the bikers parked so close to them when nearly the entire campground was empty. It seemed to bother Wallace too. He lifted Missy off his hips and stood, took her by the arm, and tried to lead her to the car.

  Mistake, Sarah Jean thought. Missy did not like to be pushed around. She yanked her arm away. Wallace grabbed her arm again, Missy shook him off harder. He reached a third time. She was ready for it. She swung and hit him, a hard slap that landed square on his cheek, loud enough that a couple of the bikers looked over and grinned.

  Wallace left Missy and got into the car.

  “Well, this sucks majorly,” he said.

  Missy perched at the end of the picnic table, her legs drawn up in front of her, resting her chin on her knees. She looked cold.

  Sarah Jean got out and walked to her.

  “Missy?” said Sarah Jean. “It’s time to go.”

  Missy didn’t answer. She was looking over at the bikers. A couple of them were watching her. They were silhouetted against the campfire. Its flames licked high, throwing up tiny embers that glowed briefly against the sky before they flared out. Sarah Jean had to admit that the fire looked pretty good right now.

  Sarah Jean said, “Missy, I want to go home. Now.”

  Missy turned and flipped the keys at Sarah Jean’s feet.

  “Then go,” she said, and she hopped off the table and started toward the Demons. One of them held out a beer to her, and she took it and joined them around the campfire. She stepped into an open space between two of the men.

  Sarah Jean returned to the car, and when she looked back Missy was dancing at the fire, head thrown back and swaying.

  One of the bikers stepped behind her, moving in close. Missy didn’t seem to notice until he wrapped his thick arms around her. She squealed an uncertain laugh. He squeezed her, she started to fight loose, he picked her up. Now she was yelling, kicking her legs, as he carried her to the open rear of the van, with the second biker following.

  In the car, Sarah Jean turned toward Wallace. He was staring out the window, stunned and transfixed.

  “Do something,” Sarah Jean said. “Wallace, do something.”

  Missy shouted, “Help!” Shrill, sober, scared.

  The bikers threw her into the van and clambered in and pulled a curtain across the back.

  Like that she was gone, swallowed up. The other three Demons, even the two women, acted as if nothing had just happened. As if nothing were happening now behind the curtain.

  Wallace was staring out the window, at the empty space beside the campfire where Missy had been a few moments earlier.

  “Wallace,” Sarah Jean said, trying to stay calm. “We have to get her, Wallace. You hear?”

  Wallace didn’t look at Sarah Jean. His face was zombie blank.

  “Holy shit,” he was murmuring. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”

  “Wallace, I’m going out there.”

  Wallace reached and stopped her as Sarah Jean started to open her door.

  “No,” h
e said. “Stay.”

  He got out and sleepwalked toward the van. The three Demons formed a line in his path, blocking him.

  Wallace stopped in front of them.

  Missy screamed. It was like nothing Sarah Jean had ever heard, a long scream, sheer terror piercing the night.

  One of the three Demons drove a fist into Wallace’s gut. Wallace folded and crumpled.

  Sarah Jean got out and ran. She headed toward the far end of the campground, the dark end. The bikers and the campfire were at her back. She was running toward the last place she had seen the crazy climber guy before he disappeared into the woods with his sleeping bag. She was thinking that she would have to search through the woods, shout for him and stumble around in the darkness.

  But no. He emerged from the pines before she got there.

  He said, “Is she playing?”

  “No way,” Sarah Jean said.

  He ran to his truck, opened the door, took out a metal baseball bat from behind the front seat. Seeing this, something in the way he held the bat, Sarah Jean got a funny feeling. A good feeling. That he was not a ballplayer but that the bat was there just for a time like this, and he had an idea how to use it.

  He took off at a lope toward the campfire. She’s in the van, Sarah Jean wanted to say, but then Missy screamed again, and there was no question about where she was or what was happening to her.

  Sarah Jean ran after him. She saw the three Demons poising for a fight, one of them holding a length of chain that reached from his waist almost to the ground.

  The climber kept moving toward the three bikers, now just a few strides short of where they stood.

  The Demon with the chain stepped forward and whipped it in a vicious chest-high arc. The climber dropped in mid-step, ducked under its sweep, rolled. He popped up in a crouch, suddenly behind them, and swung the bat, one-handed, and caught one of the three behind a knee.

  The biker fell as if shot through the heart.

  The chain swinger turned around, drew his arm back for another swing. From down in his crouch the climber sprung up, the bat in both hands, holding it upright. He drove it straight up, the thick end finding a spot beneath the chain swinger’s jaw as if it belonged there, then continuing upward, jacking the Demon’s head back at an impossible angle.