A Killing in the Valley Read Free Page A

Anglo college boy. No way the cops would believe what had happened wasn’t consensual.
    “I don’t need the police to help me.” She resumed dialing again.
    “Then who are you calling?” he asked suspiciously. “And don’t give me that bullshit about your mother.”
    She paused in mid-dial. “You really want to know? You really want to fucking know?” she screamed at him. “I’ll tell you, asshole. I’m calling my uncle. He runs with the gangs in Ventura and Oxnard, from way back. He’s going to come get me, then he’s gonna fuck you up so bad you’ll wish I had called the police.”
    Involuntarily, he began to shake, his body trembling as if he was standing on an electric grid. His mind’s eye flooded with television and magazine images of tattooed prison inmates from gangs like Bloods, Crips, Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood. If she really had an uncle who was connected to any one of those gangs, he was in serious trouble.
    He lunged for her, grasping for the phone. Surprisingly nimble for someone who had been drunk, stoned, thrown up, raped, and assaulted, she pivoted away from him, running across the room, continuing to punch in numbers.
    The gun, an old revolver, was lying on a small table near the fireplace. In the darkness, neither had seen it. She grabbed it off the table and pointed it at him.
    He froze. Very deliberately, as if trying to calm a wounded, frightened animal, he asked, “Are you going to shoot me?” Even more deliberately: “You’re not actually going to pull the trigger on that thing.”
    She backed away, her head shaking back and forth. Her gun-hand was shaking so violently she could barely keep it pointing at him. “Not unless you force me to,” she told him. “I want to get out of here, that’s all. You let me walk out of here, and I won’t do nothing to you.”
    Except call the cops, or your uncle, or someone else equally disastrous, he thought fearfully.
    He took a step toward her. Pointing to the gun in her quivering hand, he said, “That piece of shit won’t shoot anybody. It’s as old as this house. It probably hasn’t been fired in a hundred years. The only thing that will happen if you pull that trigger is that it’ll blow up in your hand and take your arm off.” He reached his hand out. “Come on. Give it to me. I’ll make this up to you, I promise.”
    As she backed away from him she stole a quick glance at the weapon. She didn’t know anything about guns, but it was obviously ancient, as he had said. And he was also probably right about how it would perform.
    “It’ll shoot fine,” she said with false bravado. “You don’t want to test whether it will or not.”
    “Neither do you.” He took another step toward her. “Put the phone and the gun down, and we’ll talk this out.” He paused. “I can pay you good money. Neither of us wants the world to know about this.”
    He was closer to her now. Deliberately and cautiously, he held his hand out. For a moment they were frozen in place, trying to stare the other down. Then with a sudden, violent move, he grabbed for the gun.
    The explosion was deafening.

2
FOURTEEN HOURS EARLIER
    J UANITA MCCOY WAS A daughter and a wife of ranchers, and a rancher herself. She was a direct, tenth-generation descendant of one of the original land-grant families in central California, their holdings conferred upon them by the king of Spain, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Two hundred years of marriage outside the original Spanish community had bred out most of the Mediterranean-looking characteristics in her lineage. She was fair-skinned and blue-eyed, and before her hair turned its present silver it had been blonde. But the old Spanish connection was still the essential part of her heritage, rather than that of the English-Scottish-German sea captains, prospectors, cattle ranchers, and get-rich-schemers who migrated to California generations later and intermarried with the original Spanish families,