Phantoms

Chapter 31

Destiny In Santa Mira, Fletcher Kale spent the greatest part of Monday afternoon tearing apart Jake Johnson's house, room by room.

He thoroughly enjoyed himself.

In the walk-in pantry, off the kitchen, he at last located Johnson's cache. It wasn't on the shelves, which were crammed full of at least a year's supply of canned and bottled food, or on the floor with stacks of other supplies. No, the real treasure was under the pantry floor: under the loose linoleum, under the subflooring, in a secret compartment.

A small, carefully selected, formidable collection of guns was hidden there; each of the weapons was individually wrapped in watertight plastic. Feeling as if it were Christmas morning, Kale unwrapped all of them. There were a pair of Smith & Wesson Combat Magnums, perhaps the best and most powerful handgun in the world. Loaded with.357s, it was the deadliest piece a man could carry, with enough punch to stop a grizzly bear; and with light-loaded.38s, it was an equally useful and extremely accurate gun for small game. One shotgun: a Remington 870 Brushmaster 12-puge with adjustable rifle sights, a folding stock, a pistol grip, magazine extension, and sling.

Two rifles. An M-I semiautomatic. But far better than that, there was a Heckler & Koch HK91, a superb assault rifle, complete with eight thirty-round magazines, already loaded, and a couple of thousand rounds of additional ammunition.

For almost an hour, Kale sat examining and playing with the rifles.

Fondling them. If the cops happened to spot him on Is way to the mountains, they would wish they had looked the other way.

The hole beneath the pantry also contained money. A lot of it. The bills were tightly rolled wads, encircled by rubber bands, and then stuffed into five large, well-sealed mason jars; there were anywhere from three to five rolls in each container.

He took the jars out to the kitchen and stood them on the table. He looked in the refrigerator for a beer, had to settle for a can of Pepsi, sat down at the table, and began to count his treasure.

$63,440.

One of the most enduring modern legends of Santa Mira County was the one that concerned Big Ralph Johnson's secret fortune, amassed (so it was rumored) through graft and bribe-taking. Obviously, this was what remained of Big Ralph's ill-gotten stash. Just the kind of grubstake Kale needed to start on a new life.

The ironic thing about finding the stash was that he wouldn't have had to kill Joanna and Danny if only he'd had this money in his hands last week. This was more than he had needed to bail himself out of his difficulties with High Country Investments.

A year and a half ago, when he had become a partner in High Country, he couldn't have foreseen that it would lead to disaster. Back then, it had seemed like the golden opportunity that he knew was destined to come his way sooner or later.

Each of the partners in High Country Investments had put up one-seventh of the necessary funds to acquire, subdivide, and develop a thirty-acre parcel over at the eastern edge of Santa Mira, on top of Highline Ridge.

To get in on the ground floor, Kale had been forced to commit every available dollar he could lay his hands on, but the potential return had seemed well worth the risk.

However, the Highline Ridge project turned out to be a money-eating monster with a voracious appetite.

The way the deal was set up, each partner was liable for additional assessments if the initial pool of capital proved inadequate to the task. If Kale (or any other partner) failed to meet an assessment, he was out of High Country Investments, immediately, without any compensation for what he had already paid in, thank you very much and goodbye. Then the remaining partners became liable for equal portions of his assessment-and acquired equal fractions of his share of the project. It was the sort of arrangement that facilitated the financing of the project by enticing (usually) only those investors who had a lot of liquidity-but it also required an iron stomach and steel nerves.

Kale hadn't thought there would be any assessments. The original capital pool had looked more than adequate to him.

But he was wrong.

When the first of the special assessments was levied for thirty-five thousand dollars, he had been shocked but not defeated. He figured they could borrow ten thousand from Joanna's parents, and there was sufficient equity in their house to arrange refinancing to free another twenty. The last five thousand could be pieced together.

The only problem was Joanna.

Right from the start, she hadn't wanted him to become involved in High Country Investments. She had said the deal was too rich for him, that he should stop trying to play the big-shot wheeler-dealer.

He had gone ahead anyway, and then the assessment had come, and she reveled in his desperation. Not openly, of course.

She was too clever for that. She knew she could play the martyr more effectively than she could play the harpy. She never said I-told-you-so, not directly, but that smug accusation was in her eyes, humiliatingly evident in the way she treated him.

Finally he talked her into refinancing the house and taking a loan from her parents. It had not been easy.

He had smiled and nodded and taken all their smarmy advice and snide criticism, but he had promised himself he would eventually rub their faces in all the crap they'd thrown at him.

When he hit it big with High Country, he'd make them crawl, Joanna most of all.

Then, to his consternation, the second special assessment had been levied on the seven partners. It was forty thousand dollars.

He could have met that obligation, too, if Joanna had sincerely wanted him to succeed. She could have tapped the trust fund for it. When Joanna's grandmother had died, five months after Danny was born, the old hag had left almost half her estate-fifty thousand dollars-in trust for her only great grandson. Joanna was appointed the chief administrator of the fund. So when the second assessment came from High Country, she could have taken forty thousand of the trust fund money and paid the bill. But Joanna had refused. She had said, "What if there's another assessment? You lose everything, Fletch, everything, and Danny loses most of his trust fund, too." He had tried to make her see that there wouldn't be a third assessment. But, of course, she would not listen to him because she didn't really want him to succeed, because she wanted to see him lose everything and be humiliated, because she wanted to ruin him, break him.

He'd had no choice but to kill her and Danny. The way the trust was set up, if Danny were to die before his twenty-first birthday, the fund would be dissolved. The money, after taxes, would become Joanna's property. And if Joanna died, all of her estate went to her husband; that's what her will said. So if he got rid of both of them, the proceeds of the trust fund plus a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus in the form of Joanna's life insurance policy-wound up in his hands.

The bitch had left him no choice.

It wasn't his fault she was dead.

She had done it to herself, really. She had arranged things so that there wasn't any other way out for him.

He smiled, remembering her expression when she had seen the boy's body-and when she'd seen him point the gun at her.

Now, sitting at Jake Johnson's kitchen table, Kale looked at all the money, and his smile grew even broader.

$63,440.

A few hours ago, he had been in jail, virtually penniless, facing a trial that could result in a death penalty. Most men would have been immobilized by despair. But Fletcher Kale had not been beaten. He knew he was destined for great things.

And here was proof. In an incredibly short time, he had gone from jail to freedom, from penury to $63,440. He now had money, guns, transportation, and a safe hideout in the nearby mountains.

It had begun at last.

His special destiny had begun to unfold.