He pointed the weapon at David. “You got five hundred more in your wallet, college boy?”
Having had some experience of a genuine homicidal sociopath during his many conversations with Ronny Jessup in that conference room at Folsom, David did not react as Mathers wanted. “Why? Do you have more story to tell?”
“What’s five hundred to you, anyway? I’m damn sure you don’t live in a shitcan trailer.”
“You’re right about that.”
“We’re in a lonely place, college boy. That Porsche will bring a nice price from a chop shop. And there wouldn’t be no headstone to say Here lies David Thorne.”
“You’d have to dig the grave. Hard work. The lovely Kendra can’t do the job all by herself.”
Most of his life, Richard Mathers had used a low-flashpoint temper to intimidate people, and maybe he hadn’t been accustomed to pushback until he’d taken a beating at the hands of Patrick Corley or Corley’s ghost or whoever/whatever was waiting for him that day in his trailer. If his attitude had once been highly effective, he had lost some of his mojo after being beaten.
“You dissing my lady?” Mathers asked, leaning forward in his chair, resorting again to that Spaghetti Western tough-guy squint.
“No, not her,” David said, and rose to his feet. “After you got the shit kicked out of you, I guess you never went back to the house on Rock Point Lane.”
“Maybe I did. I got a big curiosity.”
Ignoring the revolver, David met Mathers’s stare and finally said, “No, you didn’t. And I don’t pay for bullshit.”
He walked away. He was sure that Mathers had never returned to that house. He was also certain the man had withheld something from him, something related to the spellbound girl in the armchair, but whatever secret he kept, no amount of money would loosen his tongue.
David anticipated the second shot and expected it to be well wide of him. If he ran or ducked or merely flinched, Mathers would feel triumphant, and what critters hadn’t been chased out of the brush by the gunshots would flee the snarky adolescent laughter. The crack of the gun echoed through the low hills, then again.
David suspected that, on some level, his courage might be less admirable, might be a capitulation to fate. If he misjudged Mathers and if the creep shot him in the back, maybe that was the overdue justice he had earned by his behavior ten years earlier, that he had been expecting ever since. He got into his car and pulled the door shut and started the engine and drove away from there.
| 40 |
From the high north, a slow avalanche of clouds slid down the tilted sky, smothering the sun. The Pacific gradually darkened as it rose out of the curve of the earth in menacing ranks and pounded the shore as if to break it.
At 1:04 p.m., on US Highway 101, north of Goleta and south of Gaviota, David parked at the familiar scenic viewpoint. Again, his was the only vehicle in a space that could accommodate four or five.
Across the meadow that sloped and rolled shoreward from the railing, the tall grass trembled as though Nature shared David’s anticipation of some wicked revelation.
Northwest, where the stubby peninsula thrust into the sea, on the headland stood the impressive stone house, which he now knew to be the former home of Patrick Michael Lynam Corley and the current quarters of the Corley Foundation.
Subsequent to Emily Carlino’s disappearance, authorities had interviewed the residents of the houses that were within sight of the viewpoint. Corley’s wife, Nanette, had died of cancer two years prior to that rainy night, and Patrick had lived alone since then. Like others in the area, he’d said that he’d seen nothing of Emily. Evidently because he was a well-known county resident of good reputation, the police had seen no reason to disbelieve him.
Three years later, Patrick had died of a heart attack. And seven years after his death, behind the wheel of a beige Ford van, he had driven Maddison Sutton to the cemetery in Newport Beach, where she had placed a bouquet of calla lilies on a certain grave.
David left the viewpoint and walked north along the graveled shoulder of the highway. Southbound traffic raced past on his right, the vehicle slipstreams tossing his hair and harrying him with waves and whirling funnels of dust. His state of mind was such that, although reputably dressed, he imagined that he resembled a wild-eyed vagrant, an itinerant Bible-thumper on a messianic mission, slouching door-to-door to announce the impending Apocalypse.
Rock Point Lane branched off the coastal highway a hundred yards north of where he’d left his SUV. The one-car width of blacktop led through wild grass and weeds, flanked by eighty-and hundred-foot Monterey pines shaped by the wind into tortured configurations that were nonetheless poetry in wood and foliage.