Bill Pronzini: Camouflage

Moving again, Chavez letting me have the lead now. The hush seemed deeper here behind the hill; even the birds had quit cawing and chirping. We put a little distance between us as we came into the cluttered yard, walking on either side of the track. The ground was softer here, the ruts deeper and showing the tire indentations we’d seen from the hilltop. Fresh, all right.

The track petered out in gravel and clumps of grass, but the tire marks made a new trail straight to the barn. Check there first. The weather-beaten structure looked as if a stiff wind would knock it down into rubble: listing a little off-center, the roof caving in the middle, the entrance doors hanging crooked. When I got in close enough I saw a rusted hasp on one door half, with a padlock hanging from it by the open staple. There was a narrow gap between the two unlocked halves.

Chavez and I both drew our weapons. Then I wrapped fingers around the edge of one door, dragged it open. Its bottom scraped along the ground, making a sharp noise. I pulled harder, backing to the left, Chavez moving to my right at the same time so that neither of us was standing in front of the open doorway.

Nothing happened.

All I could see in there was gloom broken by skinny shafts of daylight slanting in through gaps in the roof and walls. We eased in, again fanned one to either side. Commingled smells of decaying wood, damp earth, mold, dust, excrement that was probably rodent generated. Something made a faint scurrying sound in the darkness. Yeah-rodents. My nostrils puckered; I started breathing through my mouth.

At first, as my eyes adjusted, I thought the cavernous interior was empty. But after a few steps I could make out irregular piles and stacks along one side, some of which appeared to be covered with the kind of plastic sheets painters use for drop cloths. I went that way, pocketing the Colt so I could fish out my keys and the pencil flash attached to the ring. Chavez came up beside me as I clicked on the light and ran the beam over what was stored there.

Cardboard moving boxes, different sizes, at least a couple of dozen. Chavez lifted one of the sheets to reveal an ornate secretary desk, a slat-backed, hand-carved rocking chair, an antique drop-leaf table, a quartet of Tiffany lamps. Under another tarp was a 48-inch flat-screen television.

“All the stuff they moved out of the house,” Chavez said. “Too much to fit in that one load yesterday-three or four trips.”

“Over the past couple of days, yeah.”

“You think that’s where they went this morning, back for another load?”

“Not after they spotted you on their tail yesterday. Too much risk.”

“Well, they wouldn’t leave all this here indefinitely. Too much chance of it being ruined by rats, mice, the weather.”

“Right. They’re planning to come back.”

“But how soon?”

“When they get themselves a new set of wheels, maybe. Or a better place to hole up.”

I switched off the flash and we went out into daylight. “Might be something inside the farmhouse,” I said then, “if that’s where they spent the night. Better have a quick look.”

“I’ll check around out here.”

I crossed to the house, sidestepping the scattered refuse. The porch roof was held up by sagging supports, one of them cracked and bent near the roofline; the floor had a spongy feel underfoot-termite ridden and riddled with dry rot. There was no lock on the closed door. I pushed it open and went inside, testing the floorboards as I advanced.

The interior wasn’t much more than an empty shell divided into six small rooms, littered here and there with the remnants of long-ago living: a broken-legged table, a cracked lamp thrust on its side into a corner, a freestanding kitchen cabinet with one door missing and the other hanging askew from its hinges. The floors were carpeted with layers of dirt, dust, broken glass fragments, half-petrified rodent droppings, all of it long undisturbed except by small four-legged creatures and now me. Nobody else had been in there in a long time. If McManus and Carson had spent the night on the property, it had been forted up inside the Ford Explorer and the barn.

I didn’t linger; the dust and the mustiness of decay drove me back out into the fresh air. I was coming down off the porch, taking deep breaths to clear my lungs, when I heard Chavez shout my name.

“Bill! Over here-quick!”

He was standing near the well house, almost in the shadow of the skeletal frame of the windmill. I cut over that way, taking a zigzag route because of all the crap in the farmyard. A light, warmish breeze had kicked up, coaxing the remaining sails in the windmill into a slight, creaking turn. It wasn’t until I heard the creaking that I smelled the ugly sour-sweet odor the breeze was carrying-very faint at first, then stronger as I closed in on Chavez. The hackles on the back of my neck lifted. There is no mistaking that smell and what it means.

“Inside the well house,” Chavez said. He crossed himself, not once but twice. “Maybe you don’t want to look.”

I didn’t, but I looked anyway. Had to.

He’d left the door shut. When I dragged it open, the rotting meat stink came pouring out at me. My gorge rose; I kept swallowing to hold it down while I dragged out my handkerchief and slapped it over my mouth and nose, peering ahead into the gloom. The stench was coming from within a six-foot-high circular wooden cistern. I had to force myself to go over there, stretch up, and look down into it.

Sweet Jesus.

The cistern was dry, its floor littered with bundles… what had once been human-sized bundles wrapped mummylike in layers of plastic sheeting and bound with duct tape. The largest and newest of them was still mostly wrapped, but some of the plastic had already been torn away by rats. The rats had been at what was inside, too. One end gaped open and there was just enough left of the head and face revealed there to be recognizable.

Now I knew for sure what had happened to David Virden.

There was not much left of the other bundles. Remnants of sheets long ago torn into shreds and carried away to nests; jumbles of gnawed, fleshless bones, some bleached white and some with fragments of gristle still clinging to them. There was no telling how many bodies there’d been.

McManus and Carson’s victims-the ones they’d murdered since getting their hands on this property more than three years ago.

Dumping ground. Charnel house.

I got the hell out of there, still swallowing, trying not to puke into my handkerchief, and jammed the door shut tight. Chavez had backed off by several yards to escape the worst of the stink. The sick expression he wore probably mirrored mine.

He said, “The client, Virden?”

“Yeah. In there since Tuesday.”

“Must be four or five others.”

Rose O’Day and Gregory Pappas among them. “Yeah.”

“Those women… Ah, Dios.” Chavez shook his head, made the sign of the cross again. “Monstruos.”

Monsters. Tamara’s term for them, too. I was glad she wasn’t here to find out firsthand just how right she’d been.

The wind was still causing the rusty windmill blades to creak; the sound had a chilling quality now, a scrape on my nerves. By tacit consent Chavez and I moved still farther away from the well house, at an angle between the farmhouse and the creek. The stench wasn’t so bad there, upwind. I could breathe without the handkerchief and without wanting to gag.

My cell phone had some sort of glitch in it, didn’t always pick up a signal even in the city. But it worked all right out here. I put in a 911 call to the Marin County sheriff’s department, identified myself, gave the dispatcher a brief account of the situation and the address. Yes, I said, we’d be waiting when officers arrived.