David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

“You’re gonna do what you’re told. Stay put. Make sure he stays in the saddle.”

“Don’t hurt him.”

Dayball smiled and put his fingertip to the bridge of her nose. He tapped gently. “As long as you keep him bright-eyed, as long as he can walk his talk…”

“And after that?” Shel asked.

Dayball removed his hand. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. He rose, returning his chair to where he’d found it. “And the reason I can’t tell you that, is because I don’t know. I’m being straight with you.”

Abatangelo was three weeks into his new daily schedule. He rose at six, showered and ate, then walked across Russian Hill to Lenny Mannion’s photo portrait shop on Union Street. Mornings, he made cold calls to expectant mothers and did the newborn darling layout hustle. Come noon he switched his focus from infants to aspiring talent: homely comedians, models blanching dead smiles, belly dancers hawking cleavage. He stood in the darkroom, inhaling the warm chemical stench as he shepherded black-and-white glossies from developer to stop bath to fixer tray. Come five o’clock he walked back over Telegraph Hill to North Beach, arriving home just as twilight gave way to darkness. Electric buses jostled past, brightly lit and crammed with vacant-eyed office workers. The sidewalks teemed with men and women trudging home. Some of them walked arm in arm, smiling, heads touching.

His apartment remained sparsely furnished in front, but he’d managed to pick up a few items at sidewalk sales. He’d also obtained a metal storage cabinet for the camera equipment he was buying from Mannion, paying it off little by little each week. The camera equipment was part of the plan. He’d gone back out to Oakley two weeks running, sitting atop the hill overlooking Shel’s house and snapping picture after picture of anything and everything that moved in the night. He hadn’t actually seen Shel yet, though he thought he’d caught her silhouette once or twice in a lamplit window, a doorway. He hadn’t mustered the nerve to go down to the door and knock. His reluctance had nothing to do with what the Akers brothers might do to him. It was what they might do to her.

Hanging his coat on the back of a chair, he shuffled to the back room and lay down on the bed, waiting for rush hour to end. He turned on the radio and found himself in the middle of an argument between two female psychologists. The topic, he learned shortly, was impotence. One of the psychologists had a breathy voice, as though letting him in on a withering secret. The other, in contrast, sounded defiantly upbeat. And so it went, like a round of Good Cop/Bad Cop, with the male member under the lights. Withering. Upbeat. Withering. Upbeat.

He turned off the radio.

Books lined the baseboard: Slocum’s Sailing Around the World Alone , Ernest Gann’s Fate Is the Hunter , Ovid’s Metamorphoses . Each volume contained a small white flag where drowsiness or boredom had mastered his curiosity. He picked one up at random and began to read, but soon the words devolved into a blur.

He dozed till seven-thirty, then rose from the bed, put on his shoes and collected his coat. In the front room he gathered together his equipment then went back out into the street, fumbling with his car keys as he hit the pavement.

The car was a twenty-year-old Dodge Dart, an old slant six that Eddie’d bought in near mint condition from an aging customer; all it’d needed were new plugs and seals, a tune-up and a lube. Eddy intended it as a token of gratitude, a way to say thanks for Abatangelo’s hard ten. Under any other circumstances, Abatangelo would have insisted on paying for the car, but his money was tied up in Mannion’s camera equipment. Besides which, without transportation, there’d be no getting out to the Delta.

He traveled the same route he had that first night and for the last two weeks running, across the Bay Bridge, up the Eastshore Freeway, out the Delta Highway then down through the winding county road. He pulled off in a turnout he’d discovered. Putting the car in neutral, he let it glide an additional fifty feet. It came to rest in a cluster of pampas grass beneath a windbreak of eucalyptus trees, invisible unless you already knew it was there.

From the trunk he gathered his tripod and canvas camera bag, filled with the equipment from Mannion: three telephoto lenses, an infrared kit, a Passive Light Intensifier. He donned a pair of rubber boots, scaled a barbed-wire fence, and worked his way uphill in the dark through lowing cattle and wet brush. A filmy scud of cloud obscured the moon, and making way in the windy dark he stumbled into gopher holes, slipped in manure and lost his footing in mudslicks where the cows had tread repeatedly day after day. At the crest of the hill, among a stand of oak and laurel trees, he dropped his equipment and eyed the valley below.

To the right was the gate where the Akers brothers had cut him off. Moving to the left, a gravel lane scaled a low hill, connecting the county road with a house surrounded by elm trees and a white fence. It was Craftsman in design, with gabled dormers, jutting rafter tails and stone cladding along the sides. Furniture veiled with drop cloths cluttered the porch, lending a funereal air. Big, weird and ugly, Abatangelo thought. And better than I could give her.

There were lights on in the house, the kitchen windows were open, and faint music carried on the wind uphill. A porch lamp brightened the dooryard, which was littered with junk.

Beyond the house lay a barn with four silos connected by a catwalk. Three outbuildings stood behind the barn, defiled along a dirt track that continued into pasture and ended beside a rainwater sump rimmed with cattails. A small herd of cows grazed on the salient above the sump amid a clamor of bullfrogs.

Abatangelo’s eye returned to the house and the access road on which it sat. The road continued east for several hundred yards, then gave way to a rutted path sparsed with gravel that followed a shallow ravine. At the far end of that path another group of buildings lay nestled in an orchard. Bunker silos sat in a scrap yard compound, protected by a high wire fence. It was an almost perfect hideaway, the lights only visible from above. Taking out the telephoto lens, Abatangelo checked those distant buildings more closely.

This was where what activity he’d seen the past two weeks had taken place. The vehicles that came and went seldom stopped at the house; most continued on to the compound. Some of the cars whirling in off the road traveled all the way back and never came out again. He assumed they got stripped down and placed into one of the trucks that showed up from time to time.

A truck sat down there now, a ten-speed sixteen-wheeler with a Freuhauf trailer that abutted a loading dock at the warehouse at the back of the compound. Four cars, all top of the line, had sped in during the past hour and not one had been seen since. He was getting an idea of what the Akers family business was.

From behind, Abatangelo heard a pair of cars approaching along the same road he’d taken in. Stepping deeper into the cover of the laurel trees, he turned the camera about on its tripod, squinted into the viewfinder, and watched two large sedans rounding the last turn before the Akers property turnoff. They passed the spot where Abatangelo had hidden his car, not slowing, got to the gate of the Akers property, exchanged signals with the man posted there, and turned in. Like every other vehicle that came to the property, it sped past the ranch house and continued on, back to the fenced-in compound.

Rocking from the motion of the car, Frank stared trance-like through the windshield as the headlights sprayed the gravel road. The car was a Lincoln Mark IV the Akers brothers had stolen earlier that night. A second stolen car drove behind, an old two-tone Le Mans- ironically, exactly the kind of low-slung bucket-seat American coupe with soft shocks and a throbbing V-8 that Mexicans loved. The cars passed through the compound gate and pulled to a stop. At the back of the main warehouse a sixteen-wheeler sat backed up to the bay, receiving the last of this night’s load. Tully, who was driving the Lincoln, honked twice and shortly Snuff appeared, planting his Raiders cap on his head and hurrying to join them.