Twenty minutes later they approached a dirt track off Bogachiel Way, six miles from town. Pine forests soared overhead, and the trunks were so tightly packed that they couldn’t see lights from the house until they were almost upon it.
As Eric had said, James Ronish had never married, and it showed. The one-story house hadn’t seen fresh paint in a decade or more. The roof had been repaired with off-color shingles, and the front lawn looked like a junkyard. There were several skeletonized cars, an askew satellite dish as big as a kiddy wading pool, and various bins of mechanical junk. The doors to the detached garage were open, and inside was just as bad. Workbenches were littered with unidentifiable flotsam, and the only way to reach them was by narrow paths through even more clutter.
“Right out of Better Homes and Scrapyards,” Juan qu
ipped.
“Five will get you ten his curtains are dish towels.”
Cabrillo parked the SUV next to Ronish’s battered pickup. The wind made the trees creak, and their needled tops whisper. The storm couldn’t be more than a few minutes away. Juan grabbed the condom-wrapped papers from the center console. As much as he wanted to read them, he didn’t feel it appropriate. He could only hope that Ronish would share their contents.
A blue flicker showed through a large picture window that was caked with dust. Ronish was watching television, and as they neared the front door they could hear it was a game show.
Juan pulled open a creaky screen door and knocked. After a few seconds of nothing happening, he rapped on the door a little harder. Another twenty seconds went by before a light snapped on over the door and it opened a crack.
“What do you want?” James Ronish asked sourly.
From what Juan could see, he was a big man, heavy in the gut, with thinning gray hair and suspicious eyes. He leaned against an aluminum cane. Below his nose was a clear plastic oxygen canula with tubing that lead to an O2 concentrator the size of a microwave oven.
“Mr. Ronish, my name is Juan Cabrillo. This is Max Hanley.”
“So?”
Friendly sort, Juan thought. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but he supposed Mark was right. Ronish appeared to be an old man marking his calendar until he died.
“I’m not sure how to tell you this, so I’ll just come out and say it.”
Juan didn’t pause but Ronish interrupted anyway. “Don’t care,” he said, and made to close the door.
“Mr. Ronish, we found the Flying Dutchman. Well, the wreckage anyway.”
Color drained from Ronish’s face everywhere but from his gin-blossom nose. “My brothers?” he asked.
“We found a set of remains in the pilot’s seat.”
“That would have been Kevin,” the old man said quietly. Then he seemed to rouse himself, and his guard was up in an instant. “What’s it to you?”
Max and Juan shared a glance, as if to say this wasn’t going as they’d planned.
“Well, sir—”
“If you’re here about Pine Island you can just forget it.”
“You don’t understand. We were just in South America. We work for”—Juan had planned to use the United Nations as a cover, but he suspected that would make a guy like Ronish all the more suspicious—“a mining company doing survey work, and we discovered the crash site. It took a little research to realize what we’d found.”
Just then, the rain started. Icy needles that pounded through the pine canopy and impacted the ground almost like hail. Ronish’s porch didn’t have a roof, so he reluctantly opened the door for the two men to enter his house.
It smelled of old newspapers and food on the verge of spoiling. The appliances in the kitchen next to the entry were at least forty years old, and the floor had the matte finish of ancient linoleum. The living-room furniture was a mousy brown that matched the threadbare carpet. Magazines were stacked atop tables and along the yellowed walls. There were fifteen or twenty portable oxygen bottles stacked near the front door. The exposed fluorescent bulb in the kitchen gave off an electric whine that to Cabrillo was as obnoxious as nails on a chalkboard.
The only other illumination was from a floor lamp next to the chair where Ronish watched television. Juan would have sworn it had a five-watt bulb.
“So you found ’em, eh?” Ronish didn’t sound as though he much cared.
“Yes. They came down in northern Argentina.”
“That’s strange. When they left, they said they were gonna search along the coast.”
“Do you know exactly what they were looking for?” Max spoke for the first time.