I had just unlocked my car when the mobile phone went off. Tamara. Fast service — and the news was good. Very good.
“East Central Valley High’s a small school on the outskirts of Hollister,” she said.
“Hollister. Didn’t you tell me one of the other Manganarises lived there?”
“Near there, right. Mr. Adam Manganaris.”
“Address for him yet?”
She had one. Not much else on the man, but now that she knew about the school connection, she’d be able to ferret out any relationship between Harold Manganaris and his Hollister namesake.
Son and father.
It took Tamara just half an hour to turn up that information, and I was already on the road by then, heading south down 101. My gut feeling had been son and father; it felt right, and it was right. And where does a man like Dingo go, a man with no friends and no job and little or no cash left to feed his drug habit and no idea where to find Byers or the seventy-five thousand blood money and nowhere else to turn... where is he likely to go, at least for a short while, to regroup and refinance?
He goes home.
To his father’s place, the Outback Oasis, on Highway 152 east of Hollister.
21
It was one of those little crossroads spots you still find occasionally in the California backcountry, several miles east of Hollister on the way to the Pinnacles National Monument. Relics of another era; old dying things with precious little time left before they crumble or are bulldozed to make room for something new and not half as appealing. Weathered wooden store building, gas pumps, a detached service garage, some warped little tourist cabins clustered close behind; a couple of junk-car husks and a stand of shade trees. Its name, Outback Oasis, was spelled out on a pocked metal sign on the store roof. There were four cabins, and the shade trees were cottonwoods.
I expected it to be closed by the time I got there at 7:15, but that wasn’t the case. Lights showed inside the store, and a big Open sign was displayed in the front window. Sodium vapor lights and the powdery white shine from a nearly full moon sharpened details and created pockets of deep shadow. The cabins were dark except for night lights over the entrances.
No cars were visible back there, and the parking apron was deserted. I pulled up on the near side of the pumps, outside the pooled glare of the sodium vapor arcs, and sat there for a time, flexing cramped muscles and rubbing away eye grit. I was dead tired and drum tight from all the long-haul driving, the buildup of tension. Close to the end of it now. You get so you can feel it, more a kind of bone-deep ache than conscious intuition. Maybe not here, maybe not tonight or tomorrow, but soon. Soon.
I’d put the Colt back in its dash clip, as I always do when driving; I removed it yet again, held it balanced in the palm of my hand. God, I was sick of that gun, its cold, slick surfaces and its deadly contents. The more I carried it with me into uncertain circumstances, the greater the odds that I’d be forced to use it. I did not want to shoot Harold Manganaris; it would rip me up, keep me bleeding, if he died by my hand and my gun. Yet the driving need to find and confront him was as powerful as ever.
This time I tucked the .38 into my belt at the small of my back. I preferred not to carry a weapon that way, but the front sight had a tendency to hang up in my pocket; and unless I kept my fingers around it, it made conspicuous bulge besides. Hold a gun in your hand long enough, and it can turn you paranoid, increase your inclination to use it.
A warm, dry breeze, heavy with the scents of earth and dry grass, greeted me when I stepped out. In the distance, moonlight made black cutout shapes of the hills of the Diablo Range. It was flat here, and dust-blown, and quiet. The feeling I had was one of isolation, emptiness, displacement in time. Normally I would not have minded that; I like touching the past, the sense of history that seems to elude most people these days. But tonight it served only to whet the edges in me.
It was too warm inside the store. Wood fire crackling inside an ancient pot-bellied stove, despite the fact that the night held no hint of chill. The air had a stale, hanging quality that was heavy in the lungs. The old man behind the counter at the rear had the same leaden aspect. He was slumped on a stool, studying a book of some kind that was open on the countertop. A bell had tinkled to announce my arrival, but at first he didn’t look up. As I crossed the room, he turned a page; it made a dry rustling sound. The page was black, with what appeared to be photographs and paper items affixed to it. A scrapbook.
When I reached him, he shut the book. It had a brown, simulated leather cover, the word Memories embossed on it in gilt. The gilt had flaked and faded, the ersatz leather was cracked: the scrapbook was almost as old as he was. Over seventy, I judged. Thin, stoop-shouldered, white hair as fine as rabbit fur. Deeply seamed face. Bent left arm that was also knobbed and crooked at the wrist, as if it had been badly broken once and hadn’t healed properly. When he finally raised his head, his rheumy gray eyes held weariness and something else that I could not define.
“Evening,” he said. Torpid voice, too. “Help you?”
“Are you Adam Manganaris?”
“I am.” His accent was discernible but faint, blurred by his years on U.S. soil; if I hadn’t known he was Australian, I might not have been able to identify it.
I told him who I was. Nothing changed in his face or eyes, yet I had the sense that he recognized my name. I tried to give him one of my business cards; he wouldn’t take it. So I laid it on the counter, face up, and pushed it toward him. He pretended it wasn’t there.
“I’m looking for your son, Mr. Manganaris.”
No response. His gaze held steady on mine.
“Is he here?”
No response.
“Been here recently?”
No response.
“How long since you’ve seen or heard from him?”
He said slowly, “I have no son.”
“Harold. Also known as Dingo.”
No response.
“He’s in trouble. The worst kind of trouble.”
Face like a chunk of eroded limestone, eyes like cloudy imbedded agates. “I have no son,” he said again.
Enough pussyfooting around. I did not want to hurt the old man, but I’d been hurt too much myself to pull any punches. If the brutal approach was the only way to rouse answers out of him, then that was the one I’d use and the hell with it.
“Do you read the San Francisco papers, Mr. Manganaris?”
“No.”
“Sure you do. You also watch TV, I’ll bet. You know there’s an ongoing police investigation involving two murders and the theft of seventy-five thousand dollars in cash entrusted to my care. You also know that I came close to being a third murder victim myself.”
Silence.
“The man who pulled the trigger on me and on Carolyn Dain and Jay Cohalan is your son. Like it or not, that’s God’s honest truth.”
Not a flicker of reaction.
“Harold and a woman named Annette Byers planned the whole thing. They had the cash for a while, but neither of them has it any more. She’s already in custody. It’s only a matter of time until he’s caught, but I want to see it happen before anyone else dies or gets hurt.”
Silence.
“I think there’s a good chance he came here,” I said. “You’re his father and the only person who can give him what he needs — money, shelter, a place to hide out.”
Adam Manganaris pushed off his stool in slow, arthritic movements, picked up the scrapbook and laid it on a shelf behind him. Several regular hardback books lined the rest of the shelf, all of them old and well read.