Sleeper
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It is a well-known fact that people disappear in Oregon. It happens in a variety of ways. Some folks don’t want anyone to find them and take off into the wild for personal reasons. Others vanish by romantic mistake. The wilderness is like a huge magnet, calling out for exploration just as it did to the early settlers a hundred and fifty years ago. Wild places, however, still pose risks, and no amount of knowledge and expert gear can prevent them from dispatching the unwary, one way or another. Tourists, hikers, even workers on the way home make wrong turns and end up in places where search parties have no clue where to look to find them.
They might hike up a mountain on a sunny morning and meet snow or fog too dense to fight through by afternoon. Gone. They go hunting with provisions for a day or two; and instead of finding deer, they find killer weather. Cars pull off onto deserted logging roads for a better view of Mount Hood, or the volcanoes, and tumble down ravines, crashing out of sight in lava fields where no one ever goes. There are thousands of places where a person could get hurt and never be found. But there are also hazardous places to stumble into right in the middle of farmland. Criminally inclined groups with ideas of their own stake out territories right in the middle of civilization, grow weed, train to fight the establishment, or some personal enemy, smuggle guns and moonshine. In some ways it’s still the Wild West and there’s no way to know where it’s safe to wander, and where a fling in the wild can go bad in a heartbeat.
When Matt Brand and Cheli Abrio left Fiesta Vineyard near Dundee at four p.m. on May 23rd, they had no idea a wrong turn was about to kill them. On the contrary, they were happy, giggly, and high. Matt wasn’t quite ready for the hour and a half ride back to Portland on his new Honda Shadow, so he didn’t
take the paved road down the hill to Route 99. Instead, he turned right onto a dirt path that led to more remote vineyards above, even though it was a bumpy ride. Winter rains had turned the gravel and dirt bed into a washboard that was not an ideal surface for the classic cruiser designed for the open road. A series of hairpin switchbacks further challenged the bike.
For Matt, the bumps and skids only added to the fun. Cheli was a brand new love, a skinny girl with a trusting face, long dark hair and a tattoo of a cat on her left wrist. She was hugging him hard, and hanging on, as the Honda slid through tight turns, barely holding the path. Matt was showing off, taking some ofthe curves too fast, almost spinning out. He didn’t care. He was euphoric with this new girl who was so different from others he’d known. She was game for anything, and he was thinking about that as he pushed the groaning bike higher.
Fields with greening hazelnut trees were on the right side of the worsening track. Vineyards just coming to life dotted the hills to the left. Best of all, there were no fancy buildings to attract tourists as he headed for the crest of the hill. What Matt had in mind was seclusion. He wanted to commemorate the perfect weekend on the first really warm day of spring, and so he was looking for a sheltered bit of hidden field to make love to the hottest girl he knew.
Matt and Cheli were graduate students from Eugene on break, staying in an apartment owned by a friend who was in Italy for a month. One Sunday morning, at a popular Portland coffee bar, they happened to pick up an insert from the Oregonian that somebody had left behind on the next table. It featured the wine country just south of the city where two hundred of Oregon’s three hundred and fifty vineyards were located around a few farm towns in Yamhill County. A map detailed the area, pinpointed a cluster of vineyards, and highlighted some worthy local restaurants. Matt’s plan for his last adventure started over a latte.
The two lovers made it to Dundee by lunch time. They ate sandwiches in a little place that offered over a hundred varieties of wine. Afterward, they hit the road again and visited five wineries, where they sipped flights that were mostly pinots, the best-known grapes in northern Oregon. There were a few sauvignon blancs, a chardonnay here and there, but Matt and Cheli didn’t know the difference. The flights came in red, white, and pink. They were nothing more than dashes of bright liquid in huge crystal glasses. Four or five of them at each stop was hardly enough to get their tongues around, much less intoxicate them. But this was their first time, and they were high from the ambiance of wine country alone. They got the lingo down. The vineyards were where the grapes were grown. The wineries were where the wine was made. They stood at the windows on the floor above “the caves” and stared at the huge stainless steel vats where fermenting occurred.
Each winery had its own special allure, its own history and flavor. Together they held out the promise of more pleasure than just the array of lavish Tuscan-style buildings with stone terraces, tasteful gardens, and chilly, high-ceilinged tasting rooms. The visits promoted wine clubs in which members received monthly offerings of expensive bottles and invitations for special tastings of even more expensive bottles and gourmet pairings with expensive food. Matt and Cheli had no money for $75 bottles of wine, but they stood on the terraces and imagined a future in which they would. He was an engineer and had already received job offers.
The road made a sharp turn just below the summit. The land fell away to a vast field filled with little green bushes of some kind. Matt was disappointed but kept going. He was more interested in the vineyard on the steep hill to his left and was hopeful that the road would switch back somewhere up ahead. He didn’t see the eye of a camera in the tree in front of him as the road dipped. As he sped along, he almost didn’t see the chain across the driveway ahead, either. It was hanging low, almost touching the ground, but not low enough for him to go over without crashing the bike. He thought he was extremely lucky when he stopped in time. He could have been a lot luckier.
In the trailer at the end of the driveway, George Hamid was not watching the monitors next to his TV. There were four of them. Two showed the road, one showed the front of the cabin where the former owners had lived and Ali did his magic with the meth. The fourth was trained on the side of the barn where the nurse tank of anhydrous ammonia was anchored and, at the moment, a feed hose led into the cabin. George didn’t see the bike pass the first camera. He was busy taming his daymare with his favorite porn video. George was not in survival mode. Instead, he was engrossed in the story about a guy who’d never had pussy. Like, never.
He loved the story because he knew a lot of guys back home who were just like this. When he’d known them, they’d been boys in school. Now they were faceless soldiers who fought and died virgins. There were probably millions of them who never saw a girl naked, much less kissed one. Their not knowing was a sad deprivation he thought about. It could have been him.
George concentrated on watching each scene of the seduction over and over. He kept flipping back a dozen, two dozen times, until every frame was fixed just right in his mind. The guy works in a warehouse where a pretty girl comes on to him. She takes off her blouse and lets him look at her. That was a frame. She puts his hands on her breasts. That was a frame. She kisses him. That was another frame. Unzips his jeans and takes out his dick, bigger than any George had seen in real life. Frame. Frame. Frame.
He watched it over and over. He watched the girl’s mouth, watched the guy’s face. Sometimes he watched just this much for two or three hours. Other times he focused on the part when the girl asks for money after the blow job. Or when she screws him and asks for money. He likes how the poor slob doesn’t know she’s a whore. Even after he’s lost his job, all his money is gone, and he’s homeless, the asshole never gets it. Addicted to a whore. George smoked a joint to take the edge off and thought the video was hilarious.
The last thing he was prepared for was tourists this early in the season. He’d had a lot of privacy up there all winter when the vineyard and the farm were dormant. No one had lived at the end of this road since the sale over a year ago, and he considered the place his now. The vineyard had once been a hazelnut farm, but the trees had been ripped out to make way for grapes a number of years ago, and the potential for development was what attracted his uncle. A producer bought the grapes for a blend he claimed had hazelnut in the nose. George’s uncle had liked that and talked about building a winery, a resort with time shares, and maybe condos, too.
But it was the farm that brought George up here week after week. The nurse tank beside the barn was a bonus that had changed his life. He hadn’t been into methamphetamine production before then. There were too many federal bans on purchasing the ingredients. Meth could be made with battery acid, paint thinner, drain cleaner, antifreeze, all kinds of nasty stuff that was cooked up with cold and cough medicine. Quality ingredients like ammonia were almost impossible to get.
Federal bans had opened the way for Mexican cartels to take over production in labs in northern California and Mexico, and they distributed up I5 all the way to Canada. Mexican meth was brown and pebbly, but meth made the Nazi way, with ammonia, looked like sugar, clean and healthy as could be. It could be used a lot of different ways, and on the street it got top dollar. George was making the very best meth with the legal fertilizer ammonia on his uncle’s farm.
He didn’t see the motorcycle stop just short of the chain, or the girl dismount and remove her helmet. He didn’t see her shake out her long dark hair and signal to the driver. The real movie started playing next to the fake one, and he missed it. The lovers dumped their helmets and embraced in a swath of sunlight. Then they linked arms and walked toward the chain. The moment they stepped between the poles the buzzer went off in the cabin. George didn’t see any of this, but he heard Ali’s scream. It was the piercing sound he’d never wanted to hear, and it made his heart stop. Fear of an accident or a spill, or an explosion, were his constant daymares. He didn’t have to be asleep to have them. The hose from the tank to the cabin couldn’t be more dangerous in so many ways. If it leaked, just breathing the fumes for a second or two would burn a person’s lungs out.
Whatever it touched, it froze. The pain and damage to skin and flesh was worse than hydrochloric acid. Then, if it expanded too fast inside the tank or hose, or got too hot when cooking, it exploded. A really big bang with a lot of fire. Whenever a lab went up, the toxic chemicals condemned all the buildings in the area.
If this happened on his uncle’s property, George would have a lot more to fear than the Mexican cartel or prison time. He handled his anxiety about the production end of the business by staying out of the cabin and parking his SUV far away so he could escape quickly if he had to. He’d failed chemistry a bunch of times when he first got to the U.S., and didn’t have a lot of faith in Ali’s safeguards. Shit, he was so frightened by that scream he could not catch his breath. It seemed to take an hour before his next heartbeat came. Finally, it kicked in with a thud, and he gasped for air. Whew, at least he was still alive. Then he checked the monitors and saw the problem. Two kids were walking down the driveway, paying a little visit. And Ali had come out to meet them with his goggles and mask still on and the hose in his gloved hands. He looked like something out of a horror movie. George wanted to rip the asshole’s head off for screaming and scaring the shit out of him like that. He burst out of the trailer, swearing. Now he was in survival mode. Christ! Two stupid kids, looked like tweakers. What was wrong with him?
“Hey, what’s going on?”
The biker boy looked from Ali to him. Thin kid, curly hair. Something made George think he might be a Jew. That caused his gut to tighten. The fact that he didn’t seem afraid of Ali in the goggles and knitted hat pissed him off even more. The kid didn’t know enough to be scared.
“What can we do for you, sonny?” Sonny was what George’s uncle called him, and he hated the name more than anything. It was the worst kind of put down as far as he was concerned.
“Nothing at all. Sorry to bother you.” The kid shrugged and took one step backward, signaling that he was on his way out. But before the kid moved any further, George could see his eyes take a quick tour of the yard. He followed what he now was sure were Jew eyes as the kid registered the cabin with blacked out windows, the rusted trailer with blacked out windows, the garbage bags everywhere. A meth lab was a dirty place, pretty much unmistakable if you knew what you were looking at. There was also the odor. Despite the fresh spring air and new growth in the field, the cooking chemicals smelled pretty bad. Vomit. Cat piss. Body odor of the worst kind. Yeah, the kid knew where he was. That was not good.
“I think you’re looking for something,” George said. He prided himself on being cool, being able to talk to people. Right then he wanted to get to the bottom of this. “Somebody tell you to come here?”
“Nope. Followed the road to the end, that’s all. We’re going.”
“Not so fast. Maybe we can help you out.”
The girl tossed her hair back. Suddenly he was sure that she was a tweaker. “Who sent you here? What did he say? I won’t be mad,” George added. He had a bit of an accent, but he didn’t think it was coming out now.
“Chill, man. Nobody sent us. Forget it, we’re leaving.” The kid grabbed the girl’s hand and they started walking away. Fast. George wasn’t sure what to do. Let them go, or punch them out? He didn’t like the fact that they had come and now they were leaving, both without his permission. Who did they think they were? He felt a rush of paranoia, and didn’t want to let them get away. Much as he admired the jihad fighters he supported, he was not much of a fighter himself. He saw this as one his major problems in life. He needed a strong man around him whenever there was trouble. Without one to do it for him, he could not punch anyone out. He had a gun in the trailer, but he didn’t think about it soon enough.
And then they were walking away. If they had just stepped over the chain and kept going, it would have been over. But Matt Brand didn’t step over the chain. Something made him sidestep it, maybe to get farther away. He led the girl around the pole on the vineyard side of the driveway. It turned out to be a lethal decision. George had rigged the sides of the driveway with trip wires, and he’d been thinking of getting a bad-tempered dog. The dog would come too late for this pair.
They hit the first trip wire together and both went down hard. Before they knew what happened Ali had that hose as far as it would go from the tank, which was far enough. He didn’t say a word. He just started spraying them with the liquid ammonia as if it were a can of Raid on two cockroaches.
George couldn’t believe it. That was going too far. It was insane. He leaped up and down, screaming, “Are you fuckin’ crazy? Are you crazy?”
Ali didn’t stop, and there was nothing George could do. He couldn’t even get close to them, couldn’t do anything but watch as Ali’s victims writhed on the ground, screaming in agony until the ammonia both burned and froze them to death.
This was not the first time George had seen people die. He’d seen his own father shot down in front of him, and car bomb attacks that blew body parts in all directions. But this was the first time he was witness to a kill and felt good about it. Something about the torment the girl suffered before she died turned him on.
