David Putnam - The Replacements

From the beginning, I had tried to forget about Micah, his family, and their house. All those years ago. Now, when his name had come up again, the time frame wasn’t clear in my head. I’d gotten a postcard in the mail maybe two years after the event. The standard plain white card came to the Sheriff’s main headquarters, and interoffice forwarded it onto Violent Crimes Division. In crooked little letters from a shaky hand, the card read:

I never had a chance to properly thank you. Please come and see me. Soon. It’s real important .

Micah Mabry

The return address: 12635 Old Woman Springs Road, Landers, California.

All those years ago, I fought for weeks whether to go or not to go. The card remained on my clipboard in plain view, where I couldn’t help but see it all day at work. At night, the card brought back nightmares of dead children in an ugly house that bled.

Without trying, I became obsessed. I didn’t want to go. I wouldn’t go under any circumstance. One night after the Violent Crimes Team took down a bank robbery in progress, we conducted our usual victory dance with lots of beer in the closest store parking lot. I drank more than normal and shouldn’t have been driving. I drove in a trance, but snapped out of it as I transitioned from the 10 Freeway onto Highway 62, subconsciously making the drive to the desert. I checked the map book and found Landers, a little no-account town outside a larger one called Yucca Valley. I drove out Old Woman Springs Road as the sun peeked over the horizon to paint the desert hot in yellows and oranges. For as far as the eye could see, Landers and Johnson Valley rolled in empty desert, spotted with sage and Joshua trees and salt cedar and small, one-room shacks. I stopped a quarter mile down the dirt road and watched with binoculars.

Parked out in front of Micah Mabry’s shack was a broken-down GMC pickup, the black and gray paint splotched and ruined from the unrelenting desert sun. I didn’t put my Toyota Camry in park and kept my foot on the brake, ready to flee at any moment. I watched a long time until the muscles in my foot cramped, the car interior turned claustrophobic, and the sides and roof closed in. Still, I waited. Off in the corner of my mind, I realized I had a subpoena for court and was already late. Robby would be looking for me, calling, sending a cop car by my house to wake me up. When that didn’t work, Robby would check the jails for a drunk driver. Then the hospitals.

And, still, I waited.

Sweat rolled down into my eyes, burning. I changed feet on the brake over and over. I tried to analyze why I didn’t want to see him and came up with the only logical reason: I didn’t want a reminder of what he and I had gone through. I didn’t want images so difficult to suppress, again laid bare to raw, emotional wounds.

Three hours into my vigil, a decrepit old man, slump-shouldered, gray hair, eased out the door of the shack. A man without motivation, without spirit, nothing more than an empty husk. I recognized him and received a jolt of an image: this same man on his knees in bloody water holding a dead child as he keened in grief. He’d aged so much in such a short period of time. He’d given up on life and life had not hesitated to run him over.

My breath came quick. My stomach heaved. I let my foot off the brake and drove away.

My mind kicked back into reality and my attention returned to the car with Mack. Mack kept his foot on the accelerator, passing all the other cars. They’d found Micah dead in a car about eighteen years after I’d seen him out in front of that shack in the desert. Eighteen years without a spirit was a long time to spend in hell.

“You read this entire file? The car they found Micah in two years ago, was it a black and gray GMC?” My voice came out in a croak.

“Don’t remember.”

I went back into the file and found it. A rental. A cherry-red Rent-a-Wreck Toyota Corolla.

“He died two years ago of natural causes,” Mack said, “cardiac infarction according to the medical examiner. Positive ID with fingerprints.”

The man died of a broken heart .

“Don’t you find it odd that the car was found in a grocery store parking lot in Montclair? The same city Sandy Williams was taken from?”

Mack took his eyes from the freeway and glanced at me. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Nobody thought to look into that. It was a natural death, for crying out loud.” He took his foot off the accelerator, looking to change lanes, get off, and turn around to go back to Montclair.

“No,” I said, “Keep going. We’ve come this far, let’s check it out.” He looked at me again, this time not questioning my judgment, and put his foot back on the gas pedal.

I took the cell out and dialed Barbara Wicks.

“What are you doing?” asked Mack.

“I’m going to get someone working on Micah’s rental car.”

“We can do that as soon as we finish this fool’s errand out in the desert.”

Mack still lived by the old team’s doctrine created by Robby, who stole it from the FBI: Don’t show anyone your cards. Don’t give anyone any information or intelligence that will assist them in catching your crook. The Violent Crimes Team cracking the case first had forever remained the number one goal.

“Good morning, Leon,” Barbara said, with a smile in her voice.

So, the ‘Leon’ moniker was prearranged .

“I’m just getting into this case, but I need to have someone track down-”

“Hold on, let me get a pen,” she said. “Okay, go.”

“Micah died of natural causes-”

She cut me off. “We already checked and rechecked that. Autopsy confirmed natural causes and positive ID with fingerprints-two years ago-it has nothing to do with our current situation.”

The heavy fatigue gnawed down my patience to a ragged nub. I waited.

“Leon?” she said.

“Micah died in a car.”

“And?”

“In a parking lot in Montclair.”

“Shit.”

“Have someone check out the rental car. Go back and see who rented it and get an address.”

“Right. Son of a bitch. How did we miss that? I’m on it.”

“It was two years ago, and sometimes the obvious hides in plain sight.”

She lowered her tone. “Thanks, Bruno. Where are you guys?”

“It’s probably a dead end, but we’re almost there, so we’re going to check on something. I’ll keep you updated.”

“And I’ll let you know what this lead turns up.”

Twenty minutes later, we rode the rolling Old Woman Springs Road with her gentle rise and fall. Mack let me have quiet time as I read some of the thick file. Outside, the passing terrain looked familiar and, at the same time, it didn’t. The last time out here, I’d been too unfocused to take in any permanent landmarks. Until we came to the shack. “Right there, pull in right there.”

“How do you know? There aren’t any numbers I can see.”

“That’s Micah’s truck parked out front.” The truck didn’t look as if it had moved in all those years, but it had. Mack zipped in. The undercarriage bounced and squeaked from the uneven dirt. He stopped behind the truck. A cloud of dust caught up and overtook us, turned the light dim for a second. Mack leaned over, opened the glove box, and took out a gun. He tried to give me the blue automatic, a Glock 9mm.

“No, I’m not going to shoot anyone here.”

“How do you know?”

“How can I, if I don’t have a gun?”

I got out as Mack shoved the extra gun under the seat and followed.

The stucco on the shack’s exterior walls wore puke beige paint with little cracks turning to fissures that let the wind and cold and heat inside. The desiccated wood door hung on rusted hinges. The one window, thick with dust and grime, didn’t allow visibility in either direction. The door opened before I knocked. An old crone of indeterminate age stood in a faded floral dress, ragged at the hem from dragging the ground. Her hair, wiry gray, stood out at all angles. Her tired eyes didn’t care who visited. She said, “He’s not here. He left a long time ago.”