Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) Read online

  He went away. Fifteen minutes later, Doc Lee was back. “Specialized help is on the way. In the meantime, let’s see about getting some of the bigger chunks out. I’ll just use my channel-lock pliers and wire cutters until the specialists get here.”

  I’d never heard Doc Lee make dry jokes. Maybe that meant I wasn’t in serious danger. Or maybe it meant I only had moments before I expired.

  He put the magnifying glasses back on and went over my face. I’d been so focused on the glass in my eyes and mouth, that I didn’t realize I also had glass sticking into the rest of my face. Doc Lee found lots of little pieces in my cheeks and plucked them out with some kind of tweezer.

  “You will have glass coming out of your cheeks and eyes and mouth for a long time,” he said. “A good doctor knows his or her limits, I’m going to leave you for a bit. The other doctors will be here soon.”

  I lay there for an hour. Street showed up, raised her hand to her mouth in shock, but tried to be brave as she looked at me. I could see that she was shaken by my appearance. Her eyes teared up, and she bent down to hug me.

  “Sorry, hon,” I said in my garbled voice. “I know I look bad, but Doc Lee makes like it isn’t that bad. Diamond stopped by?” I said. “Brought Spot?”

  Street nodded. “He’s in my VW. Diamond said you found a warning note suck in your door.”

  “Yeah. A strange figure in a star symbol of some kind.” I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to her. “Make any sense to you?”

  “No. But it’s very scary. Something about the drawing being upside down relative to the writing is creepy. Someone is serious about killing you.”

  “Kind of looks like it,” I said.

  “Unless you drop the case,” she said.

  I didn’t respond.

  “Which you won’t do,” she added.

  “I don’t think...” A woman wearing a white coat walked into the room, looked at me, and frowned. Street stepped back, giving her room.

  “I’m Doctor Perez, ophthalmologist,” the woman said. “I understand you had a little accident involving broken glass in your eyes. I’ll take a quick look.” She wore mad scientist glasses with the various lens that could be swiveled back and forth. She also wore a headlamp. She flipped it on and looked at my eyes. Just like Doc Lee, she made a little hmm murmur.

  “Bad?” I said.

  “Not good. But I think your vision will be okay. This is going to take some time. We’ll get the major pieces now and then you can come to my office for a more thorough appointment. Maybe tomorrow morning.”

  Street said, “I’ll leave and get out of the way. Call for a ride when you’re ready?”

  “Will do. Thanks. Don’t worry about me. I’ve survived worse.”

  Street made a little nod, wiped the back of her hand across wet cheeks, and left.

  Dr. Perez went to work with a bunch of different tools. She used a substantial range of her mad scientist lenses. And she made a surprising number of grunts as she dug tiny glass shards out of my eyeballs and the inside of my eyelids.

  Twenty minutes later, she said, “I’ve gotten the major pieces, but there is plenty of small detritus to remove another day.”

  “Boulders out by night, gravel out by day?” I said.

  “Well, yes, I suppose you could put it that way.”

  My eyes still felt like sandpaper.

  The doctor glanced at the clock on the wall, which said 10 p.m. “I have another appointment to get to,” she said as she took off the mad scientist glasses. Maybe she wondered what I’d think of her schedule, but she was smart enough to know that she needn’t answer my unasked questions.

  “I would like you to come to my office tomorrow morning,” she said, “and we’ll have another look. In the meantime, you will be uncomfortable.”

  She left me with some pain meds and some eye drops and some kind of medicinal goo and specific instructions on what to do and what not to do. When she was done, I waited another half hour, and then the Ear, Nose, and Throat guy came, a doctor with an unpronounceable last name that began with the letter T. “You can just call me Doctor T,” he said.

  He wore yet another version of Hollywood torture glasses as he examined my mouth and swabbed with an anesthetic and used long tweezers to mine for glass, finding it in my tongue and gums and at the back of my throat. He wrapped a cloth around my tongue so he could pull my tongue far out of my mouth while he dug around. It was not a joyful experience.

  After another half hour, he said I’d live. “More glass will come out of your tissues here and there. You’ll swallow some of them. But they are all very small. The likelihood is that they’ll all travel through your system without a problem. Drink a lot of water and eat a lot of vegetables and beans, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “But call me immediately if you feel pain anywhere in your digestive system. If you can’t reach me, go to the ER.”

  “Got it.”

  I called Street on her cell, and it turned out she was waiting in her car in the hospital parking lot. She came in and took me home. Spot was in the back seat. He stuck his head forward and sniffed with vigor, no doubt wondering about all the anesthetic smells.

  I called Diamond en route.

  “Any news?” I said when he answered.

  “No. Too dark on the mountainside behind your cabin to see anything. We’ll send two teams up there in the morning. Maybe they can do some ski track forensics. Meantime, even though the shooter is unlikely to try again from the same vantage point, you should try not to present yourself as an easy target.”

  “I was kinda thinking the same thing,” I said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Diamond was outside my cabin when Street dropped me off. He told me that, if I insisted on staying at my cabin, he thought I’d be okay if I had Spot inside with me and I kept the doors and windows locked and blinds closed. But he stressed that it was my decision.

  “You don’t want me to take your advice, then die, then blame you,” I said.

  “Right,” he said with a straight face.

  I looked at Street. “Do you have a preference?”

  “I’d rather you weren’t at the place where you were shot at. But it also makes sense that the shooter would not come back here.”

  “Okay, I’ll go on record as saying that I prefer to stay in my own cabin, and I accept the risks.”

  “Sounds good,” he said.

  I kissed Street, and they both drove away.

  The next morning my eyes, my face, and the inside of my mouth were even more red and swollen than the night before. Every surface, inside and out, felt like 60-grit sandpaper. As I swallowed my morning coffee, it seemed that the liquid was filled with a fine abrasive.

  When I stepped outside with Spot, I was a little wary. It had been less than 12 hours since someone had taken a shot at me. They could be anywhere on the mountain above me, waiting for a second chance. But I saw two Douglas County vehicles up the road and Diamond’s men exploring the mountainside. I relaxed.

  I let Spot into the Jeep and drove myself into town to see the ophthalmologist for my second appointment. Once again, she muttered and murmured and grunted from behind the monster glasses as if I weren’t in the room. I wasn’t a person so much as an interesting specimen.

  “Large pieces of glass show up on radiography or ultrasonography,” she said. “If we can find it, we can extract it. But I think I’ve gotten most of the bigger pieces.”

  “What about all the little shards?”

  “They don’t even show up on imaging. So we don’t worry about them.”

  “You don’t worry, but I do,” I said.

  “Mmm,” she mumbled as she blinded me with her headlamp.

  “What will happen to them?”

  “Some will mostly stay where they are. Some will eventually come out and irritate you as they do so. Others will work themselves in deeper.”

  “Where they will poke me and hurt me inside,�
� I said.

  “Right.”

  “You weren’t supposed to say ‘right.’ You were supposed to protest and convince me that my future was glass-free.”

  The doctor leaned back away from my face, swiveled several lenses away from her eyes and said, “Sorry. I thought you wanted the truth.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “The truth isn’t pretty,” she said. “But it isn’t frightening, either. If you had embedded organic matter, then the likelihood of infection would be high. The problem with glass is simply that it irritates. But it is also inert, so if it doesn’t bother you, it is often better to leave it in place. Removal causes more problems than it solves.”

  “But, is the glass that’s inside going to make me eventually go blind?”

  “No.”

  “Is the glass in my face and mouth going to screw up my health in a major way?”

  “No.”

  “So it’s basically all good news,” I said.

  “If your goal is to have vision and still be able to eat, yes.”

  “But,” I said.

  “But you won’t be pain free. This will bother you for some time.”

  “How long?”

  She thought about it. A month, a year. Maybe several years.”

  “More good news.” I thanked her and left.

  Diamond had given me the addresses of Adam and Felicite’s burnt house as well as where they were staying at Simms’s neighbor, Ronald Baumgarter. I turned off the highway just south of Zephyr Cove, the home base of the M.S. Dixie sternwheeler. I climbed up and around on a twisting street and found the number on a house that perched just back from the street. Behind the house, the land dropped away. Highway 50 was somewhere out of sight down below. On both sides of the house were big Jeffrey pines, straight trunks two feet in diameter and rising up 40 feet before the trunks were interrupted by the lowest branches. Behind the trees was the blue backdrop of Tahoe, not unlike the view from my cabin although from a lower angle.

  To the left of Baumgarter’s house was the carcass of the house that had burned down two nights before. I left Spot in the Jeep and walked around its perimeter. The damage the fire caused was amazing. There was almost nothing recognizable left. I saw some blackened items I recognized, refrigerator, metal bed frame and bed springs, long metal strips that may have once been component layers inside of skis, a metal blade from a snow shovel.

  Only a small portion of the house remained to suggest its former size and shape. The rear wall and one of the side walls were still standing although they were charred black. Part of the front porch remained. Everything else had been destroyed.

  As the roof had burned, it collapsed into the house so that what was once a two-story structure was now a black pile of water-soaked rubble, eight feet high. I could tell that the house had contained a large room by the remnants of heavy timber-frame trusses. One had broken in two, the burnt, broken ends of the wood showing that it had been constructed of four-by-twelve lumber. And below the collapsed roof, the concrete foundation was cracked through, perhaps by the falling structure above and made worse by the temperature stress of cold fire-hose water dousing a searing hot base.

  Tendrils of steam emerged from multiple locations. Outside of the burnt house was a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape secured to trees and several stakes driven down into the snow. I guessed the distance from the burned house to Baumgarter’s as less than thirty feet. Baumgarter was lucky that his house hadn’t caught on fire.

  I pressed Baumgarter’s doorbell. The door opened a short time later.

  “Hello?” The man speaking was skinny, in his sixties, gray and balding, and wearing wire-rims that seemed held in place not by sitting on the slender bridge of his nose but by hanging from his giant, black eyebrows.

  “Hello. My name’s Owen McKenna. I’m an investigator looking into the fire at your neighbors’ house.”

  The man nodded. “I’m Ronald Baumgarter. Terrible thing, a fire is. Terrible.”

  “I understand that Adam Simms is staying with you. May I speak with him, please?”

  The man looked at me as if he were an art forgery expert studying a painting of questionable authenticity. Probably, he was trying to understand the strange, swollen, red glow of someone whose face and eyes had been augmented with glass shards.

  “Yes, Adam Simms is staying here,” he said. “It’s like having royalty in my house. Come with me.”

  He led me through an entry and into a living room with a wall of windows to take in the western view. The windows had a sheer drape to reduce sun glare in the afternoon, but the filtered view of the West Shore mountains was still spectacular. To the side was the smoking wreckage of the burned house.

  “Mr. Simms,” he said, “you have a visitor.” Baumgarter held out his arm like a waiter showing me to a table. “Adam, I have to leave for a couple of hours,” he added. “Will you be okay? Is there anything you need?”

  “No thanks,” Simms said, his voice as deep as that of James Earl Jones.

  “Then I’ll leave you two to talk.” Baumgarter nodded at me, then left.

  Adam Simms was huge. I knew that from seeing him on TV years ago. But in person, he was a black mountain, parked in an over-sized chair in the corner of the room, seemingly unmovable. I tried to visualize him running the 40 in 4.75 seconds as the records claimed. But it wasn’t comprehensible that anyone of such size could get moving so fast.

  He held a small sketchbook in his monstrous lap, a mechanical pencil poised above a page. It looked like a toothpick in a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. Simms’s eyes turned up to me, white flashes in the dark face. In just a glance, he seemed soulful and lonely and confused. He glanced down at his sketchbook, then lay it open-faced over the broad arm of his chair like a saddle on a horse.

  At the man’s feet lay a yellow Lab, small enough and with a soft enough face shape that I thought it was a female. The dog jumped up and trotted over to me, tail wagging vigorously, friendly like all yellow Labs. I bent down and pet the dog while I talked to Adam Simms.

  “My name’s Owen McKenna,” I said. “I’m investigating the fire that burned your house.”

  “Mr. McKenna,” he said more to himself than to me. He added, “It was my sister’s house.”

  He stood up in a single, fluid motion and took three large steps over to me. It wasn’t a fast, spry movement, but he clearly wasn’t suffering the mechanical problems so many of his contemporary football players had. That his knees still worked was a miracle considering his past job and the weight involved.

  Looking at my chest, he reached out his hand to shake. “I’m Adam Simms.”

  We shook. Rarely do I feel small, but next to Adam, I felt delicate. At six-six, I was five inches taller than Adam. But Adam probably carried 360 pounds, which made him 145 more than me on a shorter frame. Imagining him coming toward me at full speed and hitting me with his singular, head-down tackle technique, was like imagining stepping in front of a charging bull. He was short compared to most pro football players, so he went under them, flipping them up and to the side as he desired.

  “Good to meet you,” I said. “I’ve long admired your skills on the field.”

  Adam glanced at my eyes, then went back to his chair, standing in front of it. I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem like my glass-infused eyes and skin put him off. It felt more like he was simply shy.

  “Would it be okay to talk a bit?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  Adam’s dog pushed her head into my hands as I pet her, then walked a circle around me and leaned against my leg. I pet her some more.

  “That’s Blondie,” Adam said. “World’s greatest dog. She was a rescue pup. She took to me like I was her long lost mama.”

  “Seems well adjusted,” I said as I gave Blondie a neck rub.

  “As long as she’s with me,” Adam said. “I’ve heard that she flips out when I’m away.”

  “You go away much?”

  “No. B
ut the problem is that I never know much in advance. She can always tell just before I go, and it makes her stress big-time.”

  Near Adam’s chair was a kind of a sidebar desk opposite the window wall. I walked over to the desk chair, swiveling it to face Adam. As I sat, he lowered himself back down into the big chair.

  Blondie sat down in front of me and lifted her paw as if to shake. I shook it. Then she circled around next to me, sat down again, and lifted her head up so that her jaw rested on my leg. I pet her, and her tail wiped the floor.

  “Sorry, what did you say your name was?”

  “Owen McKenna.”

  Blondie stood and trotted back to Adam. He patted his thigh, and she jumped up on his lap.

  “Would it be okay if I took your photo?” he asked. “I have difficulty with recollection. My doctor says that photos are the best way to jog one’s memory.”

  “Sure.”

  Adam made a little nod. He pulled out his phone, took my picture, then tapped on the phone. “McKenna,” he said as he typed. It was impressive that he could hit the little buttons with his huge fingers. “Good name. McKenna. Sorry, but I’m slowly losing my brain. I forget names and other stuff. Most stuff, actually. They tell me to repeat names to myself. It maybe slows the effects of my growing… Why can’t I say it. D something. Demen… The word that means total confusion.”

  “Dementia?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “So I’m taking photos wherever I go. Then I look at them to see if I can remember taking them. Or remember the people in them. Mostly, I can’t. The last two years, especially. And now it’s getting worse fast.”

  “Is that from football?” I asked.

  He nodded. “They have fancy words for it. TBI. Stands for Traumatic Brain Injury. It comes from banging your head. You bang your head enough times, you lose your brain. I never had a concussion. Not once. I just hit the guys with my head for nine years in the pros and four years of college ball before that. I thought the helmet gave me protection. Twenty-five years later, I’m learning it wasn’t so much protection. Something about tau proteins running amok in my gray matter. I still have some good days. But eventually, it will all be gone.”