Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [94]
I shrugged.“I’ve had a lot of practice tracing people. Your turn now.”
Tension flooded his long body. He drank wine, poured some more. “Well, what you don’t know starts at that clearing off Highway One-oh-one in San Benito County.”
“What about—”
“It starts there,” he said firmly.
So the past was still to be off limits. In spite of my pointed references to his friendship with Gage Renshaw and Dan Kessell and my stressing how Renshaw had mentioned giving him a “taste of the old action,” he intended to keep the door closed on those subjects. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, how it would affect our future relationship. But I didn’t want to make an issue of it now; there were too many other things I needed to know.
“Go on.”
“Okay, something seemed wrong with the whole setup from the first. Diane Mourning was too unemotional, even for a basically pragmatic and unimaginative person. And Gage had told me the kidnapping might be of the husband’s own manufacture. Terramarine was another thing that didn’t fit: I’d never known them to keep such a low profile. And Colores, the firm the L.C. was drawn to: I know something about Emanuel Fontes, and he’s not the sort to mess around with eco-terrorists, especially the ones who aren’t particularly competent. So I went down there to San Benito expecting a surprise—and I got it.”
“Stan Brockowitz?”
“Uh-huh. I recognized him, even though he had on this really silly disguise. He recognized me, too, started to take off. I gunned my car, thinking I could stop him, and ran into a damn rock.”
“But you didn’t tell Renshaw what had happened.”
“No. I was starting to get a very bad hit off the situation. I doubted the kidnappers would contact RKI again if Brockowitz was sure I’d recognized him. But in case they did, I figured the less Renshaw knew, the more convincing his negotiations with the kidnappers would be. And I suppose that underneath it all I don’t really trust Gage.”
“Why not?”
“History,” he said curtly. “Anyway, I guess Brockowitz wasn’t sure whether I’d made him or not, because the contact woman—Navarro, I found out later—called almost immediately, and I flew to San Diego. You know pretty much what went down there. Funny you getting that lead on me because I mistakenly approached the young woman at the market. I went down there, waited a long time, and was fairly pissed when I saw her crossing the parking lot. I blew it, too, used Brockowitz’s name. Didn’t make that mistake when Navarro finally showed.”
“Hy, why do you suppose Navarro used her own name?”
“Slip of the tongue when she called me at the Bali Kai. I could tell she was rattled, wanted to take it back as soon as she said it. Anyway, when she showed up at the market, she gave me a map, told me to be at that place on Monument Road at eleven. I went down there, checked the area out, but I didn’t go up on the mesa, never even noticed the road.” He shook his head. “Been away from the action too long, I guess.”
I ignored the questions the comment gave rise to; asking them wouldn’t do me any good, anyway, “It was Brockowitz who picked you up in the Jeep?”
“Right.”
“What happened on the mesa?”
He sipped wine, eyes focused at some point in the darkness—both the darkness surrounding us in the shack and, I guessed, a pocket of it within himself. After a moment he said, “Brockowitz told me he had Mourning up on the mesa. He was armed; so was I. We drove up there. It felt wrong, but I wasn’t about to back out; my job was to bring Mourning home. Brockowitz suggested we leave our guns in the Jeep. I agreed; I had a backup piece. So did he, I found out later. Probably planned to kill me after I gave him the L.C. I knew too much. We went into the burned-out adobe.”
I could picture the scene: darkness, except for the distant lights of Tijuana and San Diego, a few fires glowing on the hill where hundreds of Mexicans waited for their chance to make a run for it, icy wind