
BOX SET
J.A. Konrath
Blake Crouch
J. Carson Black
Lee Goldberg
Scott Nicholson
ULTIMATE THRILLER BOX SET Copyright © 2012 by J.A. Konrath, Blake Crouch, J. Carson Black, Lee Goldberg, and Scott Nicholson
ORIGIN Copyright © 2009 by Joe Konrath
DESERT PLACES Copyright © 2004 by Blake Crouch
DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN Copyright © 2005 by Margaret Falk
WATCH ME DIE Copyright © 2005, 2010 by Lee Goldberg
DISINTEGRATION Copyright © 2010 by Scott Nicholson
Cover design by Jeroen ten Berge
By J.A. Konrath
J.A. Konrath's Amazon Author Central page
And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison.
---Revelation 20:7
PANAMA
NOVEMBER 15, 1906
"Where is it?" Theodore Roosevelt asked John Stevens as the two men shook hands. Amador, Shonts, and the rest of the welcoming party had already been greeted and dismissed by the President, left to wonder what had become of Roosevelt's trademark grandiosity.
Fatigue from his journey, they later surmised.
They were wrong.
The twenty-sixth President of the United States was far from tired. Since Stevens's wire a month previous, Roosevelt had been electrified with worry.
The Canal Project had been a tricky one from the onset---the whole Nicaraguan episode, the Panamanian revolution, the constant bickering in Congress---but nothing in his political or personal past had prepared him for this development. After five days of travel aboard the Battleship Louisiana, his wife Edith sick and miserable, Roosevelt's nerves had become so tightly stretched they could be plucked and played like a mandolin.
"You want to see it now?" Stevens asked, wiping the rain from a walrus mustache that rivaled the President's. "Surely you want to rest from your journey."
"Rest is for the weak, John. I have much to accomplish on this visit. But first things first, I must see the discovery."
Roosevelt bid quick apologies to the puzzled group, sending his wife and three secret service agents ahead to the greeting reception at Trivoli Crossing. Before anyone, including Edith, could protest, the President had taken Stevens by the shoulder and was leading him down the pier.
"You are storing it nearby," Roosevelt stated, confirming that his instructions had been explicitly followed.
"In a shack in Cristobal, about a mile from shore. I can arrange for horses."
"We shall walk. Tell me again how it was found."
Stevens chewed his lower lip and lengthened his stride to keep in step with the Commander-in-Chief. The engineer had been in Panama for over a year, at Roosevelt's request, heading the Canal Project.
He wasn't happy.
The heat and constant rain were intolerable. Roosevelt's lackey Shonts was pompous and annoying. Though yellow fever and dysentery were being eradicated through the efforts of Dr. Gorgas and the new sanitation methods, malaria still claimed dozens of lives every month, and labor disputes had become commonplace and increasingly complicated with every new influx of foreign workers.
Now, to top it all off, an excavation team had discovered something so horrible that it made the enormity of the Canal Project look trivial by comparison.
"It was found at the East Culebra Slide in the Cut," Stevens said, referring to the nine mile stretch of land that ran through the mountain range of the Continental Divide. "Spaniard excavation team hit it at about eighty feet down."
"Hard workers, Spaniards," Roosevelt said. He knew the nine thousand workers they had brought over from the Basque Provinces were widely regarded as superior to the Chinese and West Indians because of their tireless efforts. "You were on the site at the time?"
"I was called to it. I arrived the next day. The---capsule, I suppose you could call it, was taken to Pedro Miguel by train."
"Unopened?"
"Yes. After I broke the seal on it and saw the contents..."
"Again, all alone?"
"By myself, yes. After viewing the... well, immediately afterward I wired Secretary Taft..." Stevens trailed off, his breath laboring in effort to keep up with the frantic pace of Roosevelt.
"Dreadful humidity," the President said. He attempted to wipe the hot rain from his forehead with a damp handkerchief. "I had wished to view the working conditions in Panama at their most unfavorable, and I believe I certainly have."
They were quiet the remainder of the walk, Roosevelt taking in the jungle and the many houses and buildings that Stevens had erected during the last year.
Remarkable man, Roosevelt mused, but he'd expected nothing less. Once this matter was decided, he was looking forward to the tour of the canal effort. There was so much that interested him. He was anxious to see one of the famed hundred ton Bucyrus steam shovels that so outperformed the ancient French excavators. He longed to ride in one. Being the first President to ever leave the States, he certainly owed the voters some exciting details of his trip.
"Over there. To the right."
Stevens gestured to a small shack nestled in an outcropping of tropical brush. There was a sturdy padlock hooked to a hasp on the door, and a sign warning in several languages that explosives were contained therein.
"No one else has seen this," Roosevelt confirmed.
"The Spaniard team was deported right after the discovery."
Roosevelt used the sleeve of his elegant white shirt to clean his spectacles while Stevens removed the padlock. They entered the shed and Stevens shut the door behind them.
It was stifling in the small building. The President immediately felt claustrophobic in the dark, hot room, and had to force himself to stand still while Stevens sought the lantern.
Light soon bathed the capsule setting before them.
It was better than twelve feet long, pale gray, with carvings on the outside that resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics to Roosevelt. It rested on the ground, almost chest high, and appeared to be made of stone. But it felt like nothing the President had ever touched.
Running his hand across the top, Roosevelt was surprised by how smooth, almost slippery, the surface was. Like an oily silk, but it left no residue on the fingers.
"How does it open?" he asked.
Stevens handed his lamp to Roosevelt and picked up a pry bar hanging near the door. With a simple twist in a near invisible seam the entire top half of the capsule flipped open on hidden hinges like a coffin.
"My dear God in heaven," the President gasped.
The thing in the capsule was horrible beyond description.
"My sentiments exactly," Stevens whispered.
"And it is... alive?"
"From what I can judge, yes. Dormant, but alive."
Roosevelt's hand ventured to touch it, but the man who charged up San Juan Hill wasn't able to summon the nerve.
"Even being prepared for it, I still cannot believe what I am seeing."
The President fought his repulsion, the cloying heat adding to the surreality of the moment. Roosevelt detected a rank, animal smell, almost like a musk, coming out of the capsule.
The smell of the... thing.
He looked it over, head to foot, unable to turn away. The image seared itself into his mind, to become the source of frequent nightmares for the remainder of his life.
"What is the course of action, Mr. President? Destroy it?"
"How can we? Is it our right? Think what this means."
"But what if it awakens? Could we contain it?"
"Why not? This is the twentieth century. We are making technological advancements on a daily basis."
"Do you believe the public is ready for this?"
"No," Roosevelt said without hesitation. "I do not believe the United States, or the world, even in this enlightened age, would be able to handle a discovery of this magnitude."
Stevens frowned. He didn't believe any good could come of this, but as usual he had trouble going toe to toe with Roosevelt.
"Speak your mind, John. You have been living with this for a month."
"I believe we should burn it, Mr. President. Then sink its ashes in the sea."
"You are afraid."
"Even a man of your standing, sir, must admit to some fear gazing at this thing."
"Yes, I can admit to being afraid. But that is because we fear what we do not understand. Perhaps with understanding..."
Roosevelt made his decision. This would be taken back to the States. He'd lock it away someplace secret and recruit the top minds in the world to study it. He instructed Stevens to have a crate built and for it to be packed and boarded onto the Louisiana--- no, better make it the Tennessee. If Mother found out what was aboard her ship she might die of fright.
"But if the world sees this..."
"The world will not. Pay the workers off, and have them work at night without witnesses. I expect the crate to be locked as this shed was, and the key given to me. Worry no more about this John, it is no longer your concern."
"Yes, Mr. President."
Roosevelt clenched his teeth and forced himself to stick out his hand to touch the thing; a brief touch that he would always recall as the most frightening experience of his life. He covered the fear with a bully Roosevelt harrumph and a false pout of bravado.
"Now let us lock this up and you can show me that canal you are building."
Stevens closed the lid, but the smell remained.
The twenty-sixth President of the United States walked out of the shed and into the rain. His hands were shaking. He made two fists and shoved them into his pockets. The rain speckled his glasses, but he made no effort to clean them off. His whole effort was focused on a silent prayer to God that he'd made the right decision.
CHAPTER ONE
PRESENT DAY
"You have reached Worldwide Translation Services. For English, press one. Por Espaol..."
BEEP.
"Welcome to WTS, the company for your every translation and interpretation need. Our skilled staff of linguists can converse in over two dozen languages, and we specialize in escort, telephone, consecutive, simultaneous, conference, sight, and written translations. For a list of languages we're able to interpret, press one. For Andrew Dennison, press two. For a..."
BEEP.
The business phone rang. Andy glanced at the clock next to the bed. Coming up on 3am Chicago time. But elsewhere in the world they were eating lunch.
If he didn't pick up, it would be forwarded to voice mail.
Unfortunately, voice mail didn't pay his bills.
"WTS, this is Andrew Dennison."
"Mr. Dennison, this is the President of the United States. Your country needs you."
Andy hung up. He remembered being a kid, sleeping over at a friend's house, making prank calls. It seemed so funny back then.
He closed his eyes and tried to return to the dream he'd been having. Something to do with Susan, his ex-girlfriend, begging for him to come back. She'd told him that would only happen in his dreams, and she'd proven herself right.
The phone rang again.
"Look, kid. I've got your number on the caller ID, so I know you're calling from..."
He squinted at the words WHITE HOUSE on the phone display.
"Mr. Dennison, In exactly five seconds two members of the Secret Service will knock on your door."
There was a knock at the door.
Andy jack-knifed to a sitting position.
"Those are agents Smith and Jones. They're to escort you to a limousine waiting downstairs."
Andy took the cordless over to his front door, squinted through the peephole. Standing in the hallway were two men in black suits.
"Look, Mister---uh---President, if this is some kind of tax thing..."
"Your particular skills are required in a matter of national security, Mr. Dennison. I'll brief you in New Mexico."
"This is a translation job?"
"I can't speak any more about it at this time, but you must leave immediately. You'll be paid three times your normal rate, plus expenses. My agents can explain in further detail. We'll talk when you arrive."
The connection ended. Andy peered through his peephole again. The men looked like secret service. They had the blank stare dead-to-rights.
"Do you guys have ID?" he asked through the door.
They held up their ID.
Andy swallowed, and swallowed again. He considered his options, and realized he really didn't have any.
He opened the door.
"As soon as you're dressed, Mr. Dennison, we can take you to the airport."
"How many days should I pack for?"
"No need to pack, sir. Your things will be forwarded to you."
"Do you know what language I'm going to be using? I've got books, computer programs..."
"Your things will be forwarded."
Andy had more questions, but he didn't think asking them would result in answers. He dressed in silence.
The limo, while plush, wasn't accessorized with luxuries. No wet bar. No television. No phone. And the buttons for the windows didn't work.
Andy wore his best suit, Brooks Brothers gray wool, his Harvard tie, and a pair of leather shoes from some Italian designer that cost three hundred dollars and pinched his toes.
"So where in New Mexico am I going?" Andy asked the agents, both of whom rode in the front seat.
They didn't reply.
"Are we going to O'Hare or Midway?"
No answer.
"Can you guys turn on the radio?"
The radio came on. Oldies. Andy slouched back in his seat as Mick Jagger crooned.
Chicago whipped by him on both sides, the streets full of people even at this late hour. Summer in the city was around the clock. The car stopped at a light and three college age girls, drunk and giggling, knocked on his one way window and tried to peer inside. They were at least a decade too young for him.
Their destination turned out to be Midway, the smaller of Chicago's two airports. Rather than enter the terminal, they were cleared through the perimeter fence and pulled directly out onto the runway. They parked in front of a solitary hanger, far from the jumbo jets. Andy was freed from the limo and led silently to a Lear jet. He boarded without enthusiasm. He'd been on many jets, to many places more exotic than New Mexico.
Andy was bursting with curiosity for his current situation, but sleep was invading his head. It would probably turn out to be some silly little international embarrassment, like a Pakistani Ambassador who hit someone while drunk driving. What was the Hindko word for intoxication? He couldn't remember, and since they didn't let him take his books, he had no way to look it up.
At a little past four AM the pilot boarded and introduced himself with a strong handshake, but didn't offer his name. He had no answers for Andy either.
Andy slept poorly, on an off, for the next few hours.
He awoke during the landing, the jolt nudging him alert when the wheels hit the tarmac. After the plane came to a stop, the pilot announced they'd arrived at their destination, Las Cruces International Airport. Andy rubbed some grit from his eyes and stretched in his seat, waiting for the pilot to open the hatch.
The climate was hot and dry, appropriate for the desert. The pilot informed Andy to remain on the runway and then walked off to the terminal.
Andy waited in the powerful sun, the only human being in sight, his rumpled suit soon clinging to him like a close family. A minute passed. Two. A golden eagle rode a thermal in the distance, circling slowly. Andy wondered when his ride would arrive. He wondered why this town was called The Crosses. He wondered what the hell was so important that the leader of the free world woke him up at 3AM and flew him out here.
From the opposite end of the runway an Army Humvee approached. Andy noticed the tags, Fort Bliss. The driver offered him a thermos of coffee and then refused further conversation.
They drove west on Interstate 10 and turned onto highway 549, heading into the desert. Traffic went from infrequent to non-existent, and after they passed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant; a large complex fenced off with barbed wire, they turned off road and followed some dirt trail that Andy could barely make out.
The Florida Mountains loomed in the distance. Sagebrush and tumbleweeds dotted the landscape. Andy even saw the skull of a steer resting on some rocks. This was the authentic West, the West of Geronimo and Billy the Kid. He'd been to several deserts in his travels; the Gobi in China, the Rub al-Khalia in Saudi Arabia, the Kalahari in South Africa... but this was his first visit to the Chihuahuan Desert. It left him as the others had---detached. Travel meant work, and Andy never had a chance to enjoy any of the places he'd visited around the world.
The Humvee stopped abruptly and Andy lurched in his seat.
"We're here," the driver said.
Andy craned his neck and looked around. Three hundred and sixty degrees of desert, not a building nor a soul in sight.
"You're kidding."
"Please get out of the Humvee, sir. I'm supposed to leave you here."
"Leave me here? In the desert?"
"Those are my orders."
Andy squinted. There was nothing but sand and rock for miles and miles.
"This is ridiculous. I'll die out here."
"Sir, please get out of the Humvee."
"You can't leave me in the middle of the desert. It's insane."
The driver drew his pistol.
"Jesus!"
"These are my orders, sir. If you don't get out of the Humvee, I've been instructed to shoot you in the leg and drag you out. One..."
"I don't believe this."
"Two..."
"This is murder. You're murdering me here."
"Three."
The driver cocked the gun and aimed it at Andy's leg. Andy threw up his hands. "Fine! I'm out!"
Andy stepped out of the Humvee. He could feel the heat of the sand through the soles of his shoes.
The driver holstered his weapon, hit the gas, and swung the Humvee around. It sped off in the direction it had come. Andy watched until it shrank down to nothing.
He turned in a complete circle, feeling the knot growing in his belly. The only thing around him was scrub brush and cacti.
"This is not happening."
Andy searched the sky for any helicopters that might be flying in to pick him up. The sky was empty, except for a fat desert sun that hurt his eyes. Andy couldn't be sure, but the air seemed to be getting hotter. By noon it would be scorching.
He looked at his watch and wondered how long he could go without water. The very idea of it made his tongue feel thick. A day, maybe two at most. It would take at least two days to walk back to the airport. He decided to follow the truck tracks.
"Andrew Dennison?"
Andy spun around, startled. Standing twenty yards away was a man. He wore loose fitting jeans and a blue polo shirt, and he approached Andy in an unhurried gait. As the figure came into sharper focus, Andy noticed several things at once. The man was old, maybe seventy, with age spots dotting his bald dome and deep wrinkles set in a square face. But he carried himself like a much younger man, and though his broad shoulders were stooped with age, he projected an apparent strength. Military, Andy guessed, and upper echelon as well.
Andy walked to meet the figure, trying not to appear surprised that he'd just materialized out of nowhere. The thoughts of vultures and thirst were replaced by several dozen questions.
"I'm General Regis Murdoch. Call me Race. Welcome to Project Samhain."
Race offered a thick and hairy hand, which Andy nervously shook. It felt like shaking a two-by-four.
"General Race, I appreciate the welcome, but I think I've been left out of the loop. I don't know..."
"All in good time. The President wants to fill you in, and you're to meet the group."
"Where?" Andy asked, looking around.
The General beamed. "Almost a hundred years old, and still the best hidden secret in the United States. Right this way."
Andy followed Race up to a pile of rocks next to a bush. Close inspection revealed that they'd been glued, or maybe soldered, to a large metal plate which spun on a hinge. The plate swivelled open, revealing a murky stairwell leading into the earth.
"Cutting edge stuff in 1906, now kind of dated." Race smiled. "But sometimes the old tricks are still the best."
Race prompted Andy down the sandy iron staircase and followed after closing the lid above them. The walls were concrete, old and crumbling. Light came from bare bulbs hanging overhead every fifteen steps.
Only a few hours ago I was asleep in my bed, Andy thought.
"Don't worry," Race said. "It gets better."
After almost two hundred steps down they came to a large metal door with a wheel in the center, like a submarine hatch. Race stopped in front of the door and cleared his throat. He leaned closer to Andy, locking eyes with him.
"Three hundred million Americans have lived during the last century, and you are only the forty-third to ever enter this compound. During your time here and for the rest of your life afterwards, you're going to be sworn to absolute secrecy. Failure to keep this secret will lead to your trial and inevitable execution for treason."
"Execution," Andy repeated.
"The Rosenbergs were numbers twenty-two and twenty-three. You didn't buy that crap about selling nuclear secrets, did you?"
Andy blinked. "I'm in an episode of the X-files."
"That old TV show? They wish they had what we do."
Race opened the door and bade Andy to enter. They'd stepped into a modern hospital. Or at least, that's what it looked like. Everything was white, from the tiled floors and painted walls to the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling. A disinfectant smell wafted through the air, cooled by air conditioning. They walked down a hallway, the clicking of Andy's expensive shoes amplified to an almost comic echo. It could have been a hundred other buildings Andy had been in before, except this one was several hundred feet underground and harbored some kind of government secret.
Andy asked, "This was built in 1906?"
"Well, it's been improved upon as the years have gone by. Didn't get fluorescent lights till 1938. In '49 we added the Orange Arm and the Purple Arm. We're always replacing, updating. Just got a Jacuzzi in '99, but it's on the fritz."
"How big is this place?"
"About 75,000 square feet. Took two years to dig it all out. God gets most of the credit, though. Most of this space is a series of natural caves. Not nearly the size of the Carlsbad Caverns two hundred miles to the east, but enough for our purpose."
"Speaking of purpose..."
"We're getting to that."
The hallway curved gradually to the right and Andy noted that the doors were all numbered in yellow paint with the word YELLOW stenciled above them. Andy guessed correctly that they were in the Yellow Arm of the complex, and was happy that at least one thing made sense.
"What's that smell?" Andy asked, noting that the pleasant scent of lemon and pine had been overtaken by a distinct farm-like odor.
"The sheep, over in Orange 12. They just came in last week, and they stink like, well, sheep. We think we can solve the problem with Hepa filters, but it will take some time."
"Sheep," Andy said. He wondered, idly, if he'd been brought here to interpret their bleating.
The hallway they were taking ended at a doorway, and Race ushered Andy through it and into a large round room that had six doors along its walls. Each door was a different color.
"Center of the complex. The head of the Octopus, so to speak. I believe you've got a call waiting for you."
In the middle of the room was a large round table, circled with leather executive-type office chairs. Computer monitors, electronic gizmos, and a mess of cords and papers haphazardly covered the table top as if they'd been dropped there from a great height.
Race sat Andy down in front of a screen and tapped a few commands on a keyboard. The President's head and shoulders appeared on the flat-screen monitor, and he nodded at Andy as if they were in the same room.
"Video phone, got it in '04." Race winked.
"Mr. Dennison, thank you for coming. You've done your country a great service."
The President looked and sounded like he always did, fit, commanding, and sincere. Obviously he'd had a chance to sleep.
"Where do I talk?" Andy asked Race.
"Right at the screen. There's a mike and a camera housed in the monitor."
Andy leaned forward.
"Mr. President, I'd really like to know what's going on and what I'm supposed to be doing here."
"You were chosen, Andy, because you met all of the criteria on a very long list. We need a translator, one with experience in ancient languages. You've always had a gift for language. My sources say you were fluent in Spanish by age three, and by six years old you could also speak French, German, and some Russian. In grade school you were studying the eastern tongues, and you could speak Chinese by junior high."
Only Mandarin, Andy thought. He couldn't speak Cantonese until a few years later.
"You graduated high school in three years and were accepted to Harvard on scholarship. You spent four years at Harvard, and wrote and published your thesis on giving enunciation to cuneiform, at age nineteen.
"When you left school in 1986 you lived on money left to you by your parents, who died in a fire three years before. After the money ran out you got a job at the United Nations in New York. You were there less than a year before being fired. During a Middle East peace talk you insulted the Iraqi ambassador."
"He was a pervert who liked little girls."
"Iraq was our ally at the time."
"What does that have to do with---"
The President held up a hand, as he was so accustomed to doing with reporters.
"I'm not sitting in a seat of judgment, Andy. But you're entitled to know why you were chosen. After the UN fired you, you started your own freelance translation service, WTS. You've been making an average living, one that allows you to be your own boss. But business has been slow lately, I assume because of the Internet."
Andy frowned. In the beginning, the World Wide Web had opened up a wealth of information for a translator, giving him instant access to the greatest libraries in the world. But, of course, it gave everyone else access to those libraries too. Along with computer programs that could translate both the written and the spoken word.
"So you know I'm good at my job, and you know I could use the money."
"More than that, Andy. You're single, and you aren't currently seeing anyone. You don't have any relatives. Business is going poorly and you're behind on your Visa and your Discover Card payments, and you've just gotten your second warning from the electric company. Your unique mind, so active and curious years ago, hasn't had a challenge since college.
"You didn't talk to the media after the incident at the UN, even though reporters offered you money for the story. That's important, because it shows you can keep your mouth shut. In short, by bringing you in on this project, you don't have anything to lose, but everything to gain."
"Why aren't I comforted that the government knows so much about me?"
"Not the government, Andy. Me. No one else in Washington is aware of you, or of Project Samhain. Only the incumbent President knows what goes on there in New Mexico. It was passed on to me by my predecessor, and I'll pass it on to my successor when I leave office. This is the way it's been since President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned construction of this facility in 1906."
Andy didn't like this at all. His curiosity was being overtaken by a creepy feeling.
"This is all very interesting, but I don't think I'm your man."
"I also know about Myra Thackett and Chris Simmons."
Andy's mouth became a thin line. Thackett and Simmons were two fictitious employees that Andy pretended to have under salary at WTS. Having phantom people on the payroll reduced income tax, and was the only way he'd been able to keep his business afloat.
"So this is a tax thing after all."
"Again, only I know about it Andy. Not the IRS. Not the FBI. Just me. And I can promise you that Ms. Thackett and Mr. Simmons will never come back to haunt you if you help us here."
"What exactly," Andy chose his words carefully, "do you want from me?"
"First you must swear, as a citizen of the United States, to never divulge anything you see, hear, or learn at Project Samhain, under penalty of execution. Not to a friend. Not even to a wife. My own wife doesn't even know about this."
Not seeing an alternative, Andy held up his right hand, as if he were testifying in court.
"Fine. I swear."
"General Murdoch will provide the details, he knows them better than I. Suffice to say, this may be the single most important project this country, maybe even the world, has ever been involved with. I wish you luck, and God bless."
The screen went blank.
"It's aliens, isn't it?" Andy turned to Race. "You've got aliens here."
"Well, no. But back in '47 we had a hermit who lived in the mountains, he found our secret entrance and got himself a good look inside. Before we could shut him up he was blabbing to everyone within earshot. So we faked a UFO landing two hundred miles away in Roswell to divert attention."
Andy rubbed his temples.
"You want some aspirin?" Race asked. "Or breakfast, maybe?"
"What I want, after swearing under the penalty of execution, is to know what the hell I'm doing here."
"They say an image is worth a thousand words. Follow me."
Race headed to the Red Door and Andy loped behind. The Red Arm hallway looked exactly like the Yellow Arm; white and sterile with numbered doors, this time with the word RED stenciled on them. But after a few dozen yards Andy noted a big difference. Race had to stop at a barrier that blocked the hallway. It resembled a prison door, with thick vertical steel bars set in a heavy frame.
"Titanium," Race said as he pressed some numbers on a keypad embedded in the wall. "They could stop a charging rhino."
There was a beep and a metallic sound as the door unlocked. The door swung inward, and Race held it open for Andy, then closed it behind him with loud clang. It made Andy feel trapped. They came up on another set of bars fifty yards further up.
"Why two sets?" Andy asked. "You have a rhino problem here?"
"Well, it's got horns, that's for sure."
Race opened the second gate and the Red Arm came to an abrupt end at doors Red 13 and Red 14.
"He was found in Panama in 1906, by a team digging the canal," Race said. "For the past hundred years he's been in some kind of deep sleep, like a coma. Up until last week. Last week he woke up."
"He?"
"We call him Bub. He's trying to communicate, but we don't know what he's saying."
Andy's apprehension increased with every breath. He had an irrational urge to turn around and run. Or maybe it wasn't so irrational.
"Is Bub human?" Andy asked.
"Nope," Race grinned. The General was clearly enjoying himself. Didn't have visitors too often, Andy guessed.
"So what is he?"
"See for yourself."
Race opened door Red 14, and Andy almost gagged on the animal stench. This wasn't a farm smell. This was a musky, sickly, sweet and sour, big carnivore smell.
Forcing himself to move, Andy took two steps into the room. It was large, the size of a gymnasium, the front half filled with medical equipment. The back half had been partitioned off with a massive translucent barrier, glass or plastic. Behind the glass was...
"Jesus Christ," Andy said.
Andy's mind couldn't process what he was seeing. The teeth. The eyes. The claws.
This thing wasn't supposed to exist in real life.
"Biix a beel," Bub said.
Andy flew past Race, heading for the hallway.
"I promise not to tell anyone."
"Mr. Dennison..."
Andy met up with the titanium bars and used some of his favorite curses from several different languages. His palms were soaked with sweat, and he'd begun to hyperventilate.
Race caught up, placing a hand on his shoulder.
"I apologize for not preparing you, but I'm an old man with so little pleasure in my life, and it's such a hoot watching people see Bub for the first time."
Andy braced the older man.
"Bub. Beelzebub. You've got Satan in there."
"Possibly. Father Thrist thinks it's a lower level demon like Moloch or Rahab, but Rabbi Shotzen concedes it may be Mastema."
"I'd like to leave," Andy said, attempting to sound calm. "Right now."
"Don't worry. He's not violent. I've even been in the dwelling with him. He's just scary looking, is all. And that Plexiglas barrier is rated to eight tons. It's as safe as visiting the monkey house at the zoo."
Andy tried to find the words.
"You're a lunatic," he decided.
"Look, Andy, I've been watching after Bub for over forty years. We've had the best of the best in the world here---doctors, scientists, holy men, you name it. We've found out so much, but the rest is just theory. Bub's awake now, and trying to communicate. You're the key to that. Don't you see how important this is?"
"I'm..." Andy began, searching his mind for a way to put it.
Race finished the thought for him. "Afraid. Of course you're afraid. Any damn fool would be, seeing Bub. We've been taught to fear him since we were born. But if I can paraphrase Samuel Butler, we don't know the Devil's side of the story, because God wrote all the books. Just think about what we can learn here."
"You're military," Andy accused. "I'm sure the weapons implications of controlling the Prince of Darkness aren't lost on you."
Race lost his friendly demeanor, his eyes narrowing.
"We have an opportunity here, Mr. Dennison. An opportunity that we haven't had since Christ walked the earth. In that room is a legendary creature, and the things that he could teach us about the world, the universe, and creation itself staggers the imagination. You've been chosen to help us, to work with our team in getting some answers. Many would kill for the chance."
Andy folded his arms. "You expect me to believe not only that the devil is harmless and just wants to have a chat, but that the biggest government conspiracy in the history of the world has only good intentions?"
Race's face remained impassive for a few seconds longer, and then he broke out laughing.
"Damn, that does sound hard to swallow, don't it?"
Andy couldn't help but warm a bit at the man's attitude. "General Murdoch..."
"Race. Call me Race. And I understand. I've been part of the Project so long the whole thing is the norm to me. You need to eat, rest, think about things. We'll grab some food and I'll show you your room."
"And if I want to leave?"
"This isn't a prison, son. I'm sure you weren't the only guy on the President's list. You're free to go whenever you please, so long as you never mention this to anyone."
Andy took a deep, calming breath and the effects of the adrenaline in his system began to wear off. Race opened the gate and they began their trek back down the hallway.
"The world really is going to hell, isn't it?" Andy said.
Race grinned. "Sure is. And we've got a front row seat."
CHAPTER TWO
Breakfast was light but nourishing, consisting of banana muffins, sausage, and coffee. The coffee was the only thing fresh. The food, like all food in the compound, was frozen and then microwaved. Race told Andy that refrigeration had been possible since the compound was created, but the small group of people who lived here didn't warrant the constant trips to refresh supplies. Instead, two huge freezers were stocked several times a year with everything from cheese and bread to Twinkies and Snickers. Milk, an item that didn't freeze well, was available vacuum-packed.
"How many people are here right now?" Andy asked, stirring more sugar into his coffee.
They sat on orange chairs at a Formica table with a sunflower pattern. Green 2---or the Mess Hall as Race called it---doubled as both a dining area and a kitchen. The decor, save for the microwaves, was pure 1950s cafeteria.
"Eight, including you. The holies, the priest and the rabbi, leave for brief periods every so often. Everyone else is here for the long haul. Believe it or not, except for the isolation and the fact that you don't see the great outdoors, this is almost like a resort. We've got a sauna, a four lane swimming pool, a full library, even a racquetball court."
"Who foots the bill for all of this if only the President knows about it?"
"Social Security. Now you know why the benefits are so low."
Andy used his fist to stifle a yawn. The food was settling well and he suddenly realized how tired he was.
"I'll show you to your room," Race said. "If you haven't had a chance yet, take the time to make a list of things you need from your apartment; clothes, books, whatever. I know you've got some things already en route, toiletries and such, but anything else you might need, just holler. That goes for things you might need for research too. We have a blank check here, no questions asked. Back in the sixties, as a joke, two guys asked for a Zamboni. Came the next day. Sure pissed off President Johnson. That man could curse like no one I've ever met."
"I'm still not convinced I'm staying."
"That's fine, but it's a funny thing about Bub. We've had people scream, faint dead away, become downright hysterical the first time they see him. But we've never had one leave without finishing their job. Curiosity is a powerful motivator."
It also killed the cat, Andy thought.
They left the Mess Hall and headed down the Blue Arm via the Octopus. As they walked, the door to Blue 5 opened and a woman came out into the hallway. She was petite, and the lab coat she wore was too big for her even though the sleeves had been rolled up. Her hair was blue-black and cut into a bob, perfectly framing a triangular Asian face.
Andy was immediately entranced. It had been a long time since he'd been in the presence of a beautiful woman. The last was his ex-girlfriend, Susan. Pre-Susan, he'd dated a lot. His looks were okay, but the ability to speak in dozens of languages was something women really liked. Post-Susan, he'd been a desert island. She'd taken more than just his heart. She'd taken his confidence as well.
"Dr. Jones, this is Andy Dennison, the translator. Andy, this is Dr. Sunshine Jones, our resident veterinarian."
"Hi," Andy said, smiling big. "You know, when I was a kid I had a retriever named Sunshine. I loved that dog."
Dr. Jones stared at him, her face made of marble.
"Not that I'm comparing you to a dog," Andy said quickly. "But it's a small world, both you and my dog having the same, uh, name."
She didn't respond. Andy's smile deflated.
Race, who watched the exchange with barely concealed amusement, cut in to give Andy a hand.
"Mr. Dennison was called in at three this morning. He just met Bub an hour ago. You could say he had the typical reaction."
"Hey, I'm from Chicago," Andy said, trying to recover. "I'm not bothered by too much."
"Is that so?" Dr. Jones said. Her voice lacked the faintest trace of good nature. "Bub's next feeding is at noon. Maybe you'd like to lend a hand?"
"Sure."
Dr. Jones nodded, then walked down the Blue Arm to the Octopus.
Andy waited until she'd gone through the door before commenting.
"Very intense lady."
"She's been here a week, since Bub woke up, and I haven't seen her smile once. Does a helluva job though. She's the one who figured out Bub's, uh, nutritional requirements."
"Which are?"
"Remember those sheep you smelled?"
Andy frowned, the banana muffins doing a flip in his stomach.
"Well," Race said. "Here's your room."
Race opened the door to Blue 6. Andy gave it a quick glance over. It was set up like a hotel suite; bed, desk, TV, dresser, washroom. The only thing missing was a view.
"Our water heater is on the fritz, so all we got is lukewarm for the time being. That phone on the nightstand is in-house only. All the rooms in Samhain got 'em. Hit the pound sign and then the number of the Arm followed by the room number. Blue Arm is number one, Yellow Arm number two---there's a list next to the phone. I'm in Blue 1, so just hit #11 to get me. Or hit \*100 and go live over the house speakers."
Andy yawned, knowing he wouldn't remember any of that.
"The only outside line is in the control room," Race continued, "and for obvious reasons that's restricted. If you need to get a message to the rest of the world, you have to go through me."
Andy looked at the bed and felt his will drain away.
"Do I get a wake up call?"
"I believe you've already got one in the form of Dr. Jones. I know a thing or two about being macho, but I'm not sure you should witness a feeding just yet, even to impress the cute doctor."
"It's that bad?"
"I've seen action in two wars, son, and it's that bad."
Andy took Race's outstretched hand and mumbled a thank you, though he wasn't really sure what he was thankful for. He was three items into his list of necessities when he fell asleep.
\*
A buzzing woke him up. Andy wasn't sure where he was, and when he remembered, he couldn't figure out what the noise meant. It turned out to be his phone, humming like an angry bee.
He lifted the receiver.
"Mr. Dennison? This is Dr. Jones."
Andy blinked and said good morning. The clock on the dresser said 12:07, so it was technically afternoon, but that didn't enter into his sleep-addled head.
"Can you meet me at Orange 12, say in fifteen minutes?"
"Sure. Orange 12."
The doctor hung up. Andy rubbed his eyes and extended the motion into scratching his chin. Stubble. He sat up in bed. Thought about the demon. Felt his heart begin to race.
Pretend it's just another translation job, he told himself.
A suitcase that he recognized as his own was sitting next to the bathroom door. When he calmed down, he opened the case to find clothing and sundries, packed neater than he'd ever been able to. His electric razor was in a zippered pocket, and he took that and his toothbrush kit into the bathroom with him.
After a shave and a brush he hopped into and out of a tepid shower, using soap in his hair because he hadn't bothered to look for shampoo. Five minutes later he was dressed in some khakis and a light blue denim shirt. After a brief indecision he left two buttons open at the neck rather than one, and was then out the door and headed for the Orange Arm.
When he reached the center of the compound---the Octopus as Race had called it---he found two men sitting at the center table. Both were at least thirty years his senior. The one on the left wore round Santa Claus glasses on an equally round face. He had a balding head and a gray goatee, and his large green sweater was tight on his rotund body. The other man was his comic opposite; long and gaunt, cheeks sunken rather than cherubic, scowl lines instead of smile lines. He looked uncomfortable in his jeans, whereas his companion looked at home in his.
Andy recalled Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.
They were in an intense conversation when Andy entered, and his arrival didn't warrant an interruption.
"As usual," the chubby one said in a voice deep and full, "you're narrowing your concept of Christian hell to church teachings, with Dante, Milton, and Blake thrown in for good measure. But the concept of an Underworld goes back to Mesopotamia almost four thousand years ago, which predates both Christianity and Judaism."
The thin man sighed as if the world rested on his shoulders. "I'm aware of Mesopotamia, as I am of Egyptian, Zarathrustrian, Grecian and Roman beliefs in Hell." He had a thin, reedy voice that matched his appearance. "I'm also aware of the complexities of explaining the presence of evil in a divinely created universe. But it seems to make more sense to have an embodiment of evil in the form of Satan than a dualistic God who is both forgiving and wrathful."
"Fa!" the fat one said, raising up his hands and rolling his eyes. "Enough with Yeoweh's dark shadow. From the second century BC, my people have believed in a distinct malevolent deity, in this case Mastema, who was created by ha-shem to do His dirty work, namely, punishing sin. It can be read that Mastema, not Adonai, was the one behind the trials of Job. The same Mastema who tempted the prophets Moses and Jesus."
The thin one winced. "I hate it when you call Jesus a prophet."
"You must be the holies," Andy said. It was the first opportunity he'd had to get a word in.
"What makes more sense," the fat man turned to Andy. Andy guessed correctly that he was Rabbi Shotzen. "The devil as a fallen angel, or the devil as a purposeful creation of God to be an alternative to His light?"
"I'm an atheist," Andy said.
There was a moment of silence.
"How can you refuse your own eyes?" asked Father Thrist. "You saw Bub, correct?"
"Yeah."
"Well, he's unmitigated proof that God must exist. For there to be devils, there must be hell, and if there's hell, there's a heaven and a God."
Andy decided he didn't want to get drawn into this conversation.
"I saw a thing, that looked like what we call a devil. I can't draw any more conclusions than that."
"Another Thomas," Thrist said to Shotzen. "Here we have, in captivity, one of Satan's minions, and everyone who sees him doubts. Why not set him free? The world wouldn't tremble with fear, as predicted. Bub would probably go on the talk show circuit and then become a sponsor for soft drinks."
The agitated priest turned to Andy again and pointed a finger, a gesture he seemed comfortable making. "Satan's greatest feat is to convince us he doesn't exist. He doesn't want us to believe in him, and that makes it easier for him to spread his evil. Lucifer is the Master of Lies."
"I disagree, Father," Shotzen cut in. "God wants us to know the devil exists. It's his infernal existence that steers us towards the path of truth and light."
Andy headed for the Orange door, content to leave the philosophical demands of the situation in other hands. The discussion continued without him; in fact, Andy guessed they hadn't even noticed he'd left.
The Orange Arm looked newer than the rest of the facility, with brighter paint and shinier tile, but the smell was barnyard fresh. Andy wrinkled his nose.
Dr. Jones was waiting for him in front of Orange 12, holding a clipboard that commanded her attention. She didn't look up at Andy as he approached.
"I'm ready for lunch," Andy said. He tried on a small grin.
She walked into Orange 12 without replying. Andy followed. The room was large, almost the size of Bub's habitat. Several empty pens were off to the right, and to the left side was a fenced area where almost two dozen sheep milled about. For all his travels, Andy had never seen a sheep before, and was surprised at how big they were. They were waist high and fat, like a bunch of gray marshmallows on toothpick legs.
"Is that actual grass they're on?" Andy asked.
"Astroturf. My idea of turning this part of the complex into a biosphere was rejected as too complicated. The turf wears well and is easy to clean."
"It looks like they're eating parts of it."
"Yeah, I told them that would happen. Come on."
Dr. Jones went to a set of lockers near the pens and removed a leather harness that resembled the reins for a horse. The reins were handed to Andy, and the doctor reached back into the locker and took out a half dozen boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal. She walked up to the fence and rang a large cowbell hanging from a pole. All of the animals turned to look.
"They eat hay, but they love breakfast cereal. To get them to approach I have to bribe them. The problem is they're skittish. Every time they come to get the treat, one of them is taken away."
Dr. Jones began opening boxes and pouring them into the trough inside the fence. The sheep watched for a minute before the first of them approached. He stuck his face in the crunchy treat and began snacking. Dr. Jones patted him on the head.
"You want the harness?" Andy asked.
"No, this is Wooly. He's the Judas sheep. He always comes first, and then the others follow. If we snagged him, they'd all be too afraid to come the next time."
Wooly grunted his agreement, sucking up the cereal like a vacuum. Soon he was joined by two others, muscling their way in. Dr. Jones grabbed one of them by the scruff of the neck, gathering up wool in her fist. It appeared rough, but the animal didn't seem to notice and continued its binge.
When the cereal was gone, Dr. Jones deftly slipped the harness over the sheep's head, tightening the straps with her free hand. She held the reins in her armpit and opened the last box of cereal, luring her captured animal over to the gate. Several of the other sheep followed, and Wooly snorted his disapproval at being left out.
"Shoo the others away while I open the gate," Dr. Jones told Andy.
Andy, feeling quite the dork, flapped his hands around and made hissing noises. The sheep just stared at him, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw the stoic Dr. Jones smirk.
"Go on sheep! Go! Move it! Go on!"
The herd slowly backed off, and Dr. Jones opened the gate and led her captive to one of the pens. Once it was safely locked in she went to fetch her clipboard.
Andy gave the sheep a pat on the head and stared into its alien eyes with their elongated pupils. Bub's eyes. He shuddered, realizing he didn't want to see the demon again so soon.
With a tape measure Dr. Jones checked the sheep's length and its height at the shoulder. She noted the measurements and then pressed some buttons on a digital display next to the pen. It registered the sheep's weight. She jotted this down as well.
"So, do people call you Sunny?"
"Not if they want me to reply."
Ouch, Andy thought. How can someone so cute be so cold?
"I thought all vets were supposed to be cheerful. Something to do with their love of animals."
She gave him a blank stare, and then began to examine the sheep's teeth.
"What do you go by, then?"
"Sun. People call me Sun."
"Sun. It's unique."
"My mother was Vietnamese. She fell in love with an American soldier, who brought her to this country before Saigon fell. Sunshine was one of the first English words she learned. She didn't know any better."
"Oh, I think she did. It matches your cheerful disposition."
Sun was now looking into the sheep's eyes, holding their lids open. The sheep protested the inspection by twisting away.
"Wait a second," Andy said, snapping his fingers. "You're Vietnamese."
"Don't say it," Sun warned.
But Andy, a grin stretched across his face, couldn't resist. "You're a Vietnam vet."
Sun's face became even harder, something Andy hadn't thought possible.
"Never heard that one before. Open the pen there."
Andy lifted the latch on the gate and Sun led the sheep out of the pen and over to the entrance door.
"I've visited Viet Nam twice," Andy said. "Beautiful place. All of those war movies make it look like hell, but it's actually very tranquil, don't you think?"
"I wouldn't know. I've never been there. I'm an American."
Andy decided to shut up.
They led the sheep through the hallway and into the Octopus, where the rabbi and the priest were still arguing.
"Here comes another one, wretched thing," Rabbi Shotzen pointed to the sheep with his chin.
Father Thrist frowned. "I don't understand why you can't kill the sheep humanely first." He crossed his arms, obviously uncomfortable.
"Bub only takes 'em live, guys," Sun answered. "You know that."
The Rabbi said, "What about some kind of painkiller? Morphine, perhaps?"
"We don't know how that would affect Bub's unique anatomy."
"How about a cigarette at least? A last meal?"
"He had Cap'n Crunch," Andy offered.
"You gentlemen are more than welcome to perform the last rites, if you wish," Sun said.
Again, Andy caught the faintest hint of a smirk.
"Sacrilege," the Rabbi said. But he approached the sheep and held its head, speaking a few words of Hebrew.
"Perhaps Bub can be trained in the ways of shohet," Andy said. "Then he can eat according to shehita."
If Shotzen was impressed by Andy's knowledge of his people's tongue, he didn't show it. Instead the chubby holy man shook his head in disagreement. "Bub won't eat kosher meat. He's trefah, a blood drinker."
The rabbi went back to his seat. Sun walked the sheep to the Red door. Father Thrist refused to look.
"Rabbi Shotzen says that prayer every time we feed Bub a sheep," Sun told Andy when they entered the Red Arm.
"It wasn't a prayer. The rabbi simply apologized to the sheep, because it wasn't going to be killed by a proper butcher, according to the Jewish laws of slaughtering animals humanely."
Sun punched in the code for the first gate, and Andy made sure he noted the five digit number. The titanium bars swung open, but the sheep didn't want to budge.
"She smells him," Sun said. She took a black swatch of cloth from her coat pocket and slipped it over the animal's eyes. "They're calmer when they can't see."
With some firm tugging and a sniff of cereal, the sheep moved forward.
"You're a vet, you're supposed to take care of animals. Doesn't this bother you, marching one off to death?"
Sun sighed. "Have you ever eaten a hamburger?"
"Sure, but..."
"Bub's a carnivore, like a lion, like a shark, like you and me. As much as everyone around here is shocked by Bub's eating habits, if they ever visited a slaughterhouse they'd be a thousand times more repulsed."
"But you're a vet."
"I'm a vet who eats hamburgers. I also spent six months in Africa studying lions."
Andy said hello in four African tribal languages.
She wasn't impressed.
They came to the second door, and Andy punched in the numbers on the panel. Nothing happened.
"Two different codes," Sun said. "You can't have a secret government compound without security overkill."
The sheep tried to bolt at the sound of the heavy door clanging open, but Sun had a tight grip on the reins.
Andy stopped at Red 14 and grasped the door handle but he didn't turn it right away. The moment stretched.
"You don't have to go in," Sun said. "I just needed you to help in Orange 12."
She was giving him a graceful way out, but he knew her opinion of him would drop even further if he took it.
Andy turned the knob and entered.
The smell hit him again, heady and musky, almost making Andy gag. This time the room wasn't empty. Standing among the medical equipment was a man in a lab coat. He was tall and intense looking, with a thin line for a mouth and wide expressive eyes. His hair was light gray, short and curly. Andy put him at about forty, but he could have gone eight years either way.
"Oh good, feeding time," the man said.
"Dr. Frank Belgium, this is Andy Dennison," Sun said. "He's the translator."
"Good good good, we're in need of one. Attack the mystery from all angles, the more the better. Yes yes yes."
"Frank's a molecular biologist." Sun said it as if that was explanation for Dr. Belgium's weird speech patterns and birdlike movements. "How's the sequencing going, Frank?"
"Slow slow slow. Our boy---yes, he is a boy, even though there isn't any evidence of external genitalia---his bladder empties through the anus, like a bird. He has 88 pairs of chromosomes. We're looking at over 100,000 different genes, about quadruple what humans have. Billions of codons. Even the Cray is having a hard time isolating sequences. Nothing yet, but a link will show up, I'm sure it will."
"All life on earth, from flatworms to elephants, share some DNA sequences," Sun explained. "Dr. Belgium believes Bub also shares several of these chains."
Dr. Belgium nodded several times. "Bub's got the same four bases as all life, the same 20 amino acids. Even taking into account his... different anatomical layout, I believe he's terrestrial, that is, he has earthly relatives somewhere. We're trying matches with goats, rams, bats, gorillas, humans, crocodiles, pigs, everything that he looks like he may be a part of, to fit him into the animal kingdom... but now it's feeding time, so let's see if we can witness another miracle, shall we?"
Sun led the sheep past Andy and over to Bub's habitat. Andy, who'd been avoiding looking in that direction, forced himself to watch.
At first, Bub wasn't visible. The dwelling was filled with a running stream and trees and bushes and grass, as deep as a basketball court and about thirty feet high. The foliage was so dense in parts that even a creature Bub's size could apparently hide in it.
"All fake," Dr. Belgium said. "Fake brush, fake rocks, fake stream. It's supposed to resemble the area where he was found, in Panama. I don't think he's fooled."
"Where is he?" Andy asked, cautiously approaching the Plexiglas shield. He squinted at the trees, trying to make out anything red.
Bub dropped from directly above, the ground shaking as he landed just three feet in front of Andy.
Andy yelled and jumped backwards, falling onto his ass.
Sun laughed. "Did you forget he could fly?"
Andy didn't notice Sun's amusement. Bub was crouching before him, his black wings billowing out behind him like a rubber parachute.
Andy's mouth went dry. The demon was the most amazing and horrifying thing he'd ever seen.
Hoofs big as washtubs.
Massively muscled black legs, with knees that bent backwards like the hindquarters of a goat.
Claws the size of manhole covers, ending in talons that looked capable of disemboweling an elephant.
Bub approached the Plexiglas and cocked his head to the side, as if contemplating the new arrival. It was a bear's head, with black ram horns, and rows of jagged triangular teeth.
Shark's teeth.
His snout was flat and piggish, and he snorted, fogging up the glass. His elliptical eyes---black bifurcated pupils set into corneas the color of bloody urine---locked on Andy with an intensity that only intelligent beings could manage.
He was so close, Andy could count the coarse red hairs on the demon's broad chest. The animal smell swirled up the linguist's nostrils, mixed with odors of offal and fecal matter.
Bub raised a claw and placed it on the Plexiglas.
"Hach wi' hew," Bub said.
Andy yelled again, crab-walking backwards and bumping into the sheep. The sheep bleated in alarm.
Bub, as if commanded, backed away from the window. His giant, rubbery wings folded over once, twice, and then tucked neatly away behind his massive back. He walked over to a large tree and squatted there, waiting.
Sun led the sheep past the Plexiglas and to a doorway on the other side of the room. They entered, and a minute later a small hatch opened inside the habitat, off to Bub's left.
Andy mentally screamed at Sun, "Don't open that door!" even though the opening was far too narrow for Bub to fit through.
Bub watched as the sheep walked into his domain. The door closed behind it.
The sheep shook off its blindfold and looked around its new environment. Upon seeing Bub it let forth a very human-sounding scream.
In an instant, less than an instant, Bub had sprung from his spot by the tree and sailed through the air almost twenty feet, his wings fully outstretched. He snatched up the sheep in his claws, an obscene imitation of a bat grabbing a moth.
Andy turned away, expecting to hear chomping and bleating. When none came, he ventured another look.
Bub was back by the tree, sitting on his haunches. The sheep was cradled in his enormous hands, as a child might hold a gerbil. But it was unharmed. In fact, Bub was stroking it along its back, and making soft sounds.
Sheep sounds.
"He's talking to the sheep," Dr. Belgium said. "He's going to do it. Here comes the miracle."
Andy watched as the sheep ceased in its struggle. Bub continued to pet the animal, his hideous face taking on a solemn cast. There was silence in the room. Andy realized he'd been holding his breath.
The movement was sudden. One moment Bub was rubbing the sheep's head, the next moment he twisted it backwards like a jar top.
There was a sickening crunch, the sound of wet kindling snapping. The sheep's head lolled off to the side at a crazy angle, rubbery and twitching. Andy felt an adrenaline surge and had to fight not to run away.
"Now here it comes," Dr. Belgium said, his voice a whisper.
Bub held the sheep close to his chest and closed his elliptical eyes. A minute of absolute stillness passed.
Then one of the sheep's legs jerked.
"What is that?" Andy asked. "A reflex?"
"No," Sun answered. "It's not a reflex."
The leg jerked again. And again. Bub set down the sheep, which shook itself and then got to its feet.
"Jesus," Andy gasped.
The sheep took two steps and blinked. What made the whole resurrection even more unsettling was the fact that the sheep's head hung limply between its front legs, turned completely around so it looked at them upside down.
Andy's fear changed to awe. "But it's dead. Isn't it dead?"
"We're not sure," Sun said. "The lungs weren't moving a minute ago, but now they are."
"But he broke its neck. Even if it was alive, could it move with a broken neck?"
The sheep attempted to nibble at some grass with his head backwards.
"I guess it can," Sun said.
"Amazing," Dr. Belgium said. "Amazing amazing amazing."
"Shouldn't you get the sheep?" Andy asked. "Run some tests?"
"Go right ahead," Sun said. "The door's over there."
"Probably not a good idea to go in there before Bub's eaten." Dr. Belgium said.
Andy said. "Can't you tranquilize him or something? Race said he went into the habitat before."
"Twice, against my insistence, but only to get some stool samples and to fix a clog in the artificial stream. Both times Bub ignored him. Even Race isn't insane enough to go in there and take his food away. And I'm not going to tranquilize Bub until we know more about his physiology. We don't know what tranquilizers would do to him."
Bub barked a sound, similar to a cough. The sheep trotted around in a circle, head swinging from side to side, trying to bleat with a broken neck.
Bub coughed again.
Or was it a laugh?
The sheep swung its head around at Bub and screamed. Bub reached out and grabbed the sheep. The grab was rough, all pretense of tenderness gone. Holding a hind leg in each claw, he ripped the sheep in half and began to feast on the innards.
Andy's stomach climbed up his throat and threatened to jump out. He put a hand over his mouth and turned away, the munching and gobbling sounds filling the large room.
"From amazing to horrible," Dr. Belgium said, returning to his computer station.
"He eats everything," Sun said, putting the reins in her coat pocket. "The skull, bones, hide, even intestines. Doesn't waste a crumb. The perfect carnivore."
Andy threw up, seeing the banana muffins for the second time that day. He apologized and fled the room, his brain scrambling to remember the code number for the gate. He managed, but got stuck when he reached the second one.
This was insane. This whole project was insane. Andy felt no curiosity at all---only terror, revulsion, and anger at being suckered into this mess. He gave the bars a shake and a swift kick, swearing in several different languages.
Sun came up behind him and punched in the correct code.
"Thanks," Andy mumbled.
He took off down the hall, barely noticing the deep frown of concern on Sun's face.
CHAPTER THREE
Dr. Sun Jones wasn't pleased with herself. She had to stop alienating every man who showed the slightest bit of interest in her. It wasn't healthy.
But then she hadn't felt healthy in quite some time.
Physically, Sun knew she had more strength and stamina than anyone else in the compound. Even in Africa she'd adhered to her daily exercise regimen of sit-ups and push-ups, receiving more than a few quizzical stares from the indigenous wildlife. Physically, she was a well-tuned machine.
Emotionally, it was a different story.
Sun walked down the arm to Red 3 and let herself in. The lights were already on, bright and harsh and making the large space seem more like an operating theater than a records repository.
Filling the room were dozens of file cabinets, ranging in style from antique oak to modern stainless steel, arranged rank and file like library isles. Off in the corner was a small desk, piled high with the papers she'd been recently reviewing.
Sun sat in a chair twice her age and tried to focus on the massive amount of work ahead of her. She'd discovered the records room on her second day here, and had been spending all of her free time trying to organize the astounding amount of data it contained.
Everything about the project was filed here, from the 1907 payroll ledger of the Spanish team who dug the compound (and was then deported back to Spain), up to the arrival of last month's food shipment. Invoices, reports, inventories, letters, dossiers, Presidential mandates, and even recipes for chicken cacciatore were all haphazardly mixed together with little thought to common sense.
At one time there may have been some order to the room. Helen Murdoch, Race's ill wife, had put an end to that. Sun didn't know the details, but Dr. Belgium had mentioned that years ago Helen had 'torn Red 3 apart', and cleanup had consisted of simply shoving things back into cabinets.
Sun had wanted to ask Helen about that, and even went so far as to visit her in her room, but the woman was too far gone to remember anything.
Sad.
The obvious answer---hire a team to organize everything into a database---had been thought of but deemed unrealistic. Manpower was the only thing the Project lacked. The more people involved, the more likely there would be a security leak, so employment at Samhain was kept bare bones.
Sun had taken it upon herself to make the task hers. She'd been hired to study Bub in his habitat, based on her experience with large predators. It turned out to be amazingly dull, even though Bub was an extraordinary specimen. Watching a pride of roaming lions was a learning experience. Watching a lion at the zoo was sleep-inducing. Bub simply sat around, as if waiting for something. The only time he became lively was at his feedings, and even that had little variation. The records room gave her an opportunity to be useful.
Sun had no office experience to speak of, but she had good organization skills, and after only one week her effort was paying off. She'd been chronologically sorting the mountains of paperwork into two main sections, SAMHAIN and BUB. Each of these main topics had a dozen subsections, which would undoubtedly be broken down even further.
The work was slow going, made even more so by Sun's inquisitive nature; all too often she would find something particularly fascinating and drift off task. Like the Rosenberg file.
It traced the hiring of an independent engineering firm called G & R to improve upon the compound's emergency generator in 1951. The hirees, one Julius Rosenberg and one David Greenglas, snooped where they shouldn't have and actually tried to blackmail President Truman.
Truman didn't go for it, and the two, along with Rosenberg's wife Ethyl, were executed for treason on less than authentic charges.
No one had blabbed since.
Sun thought Race was simply trying to scare her with that story when she'd first arrived. Now she had no illusions that her oath of secrecy was as serious as they come. Strangely, it didn't matter to her one bit.
Sun had no one to tell.
While the political history was interesting, Sun was even more intrigued by the thousands of tests done on Bub since his arrival 100 years ago.
Forty-some people have worked at Samhain, encompassing over a dozen professions, from botanist to phrenologist. More often than not, those who were chosen stayed for the rest of their lives. Samhain had been both their home and their life's work, and as far as she knew Sun was the only person who had ever seen it. It was both inspiring and depressing.
The files Sun had been recently reviewing were from the 1970s, most of them concerning a series of experiments done by two men named Meyer and Storky. The duo performed a staggering number of tests on Bub, up until Meyer's death from Kaposi's Sarcoma in 1979. So dedicated were they to research that Meyer had a linear accelerator sent to Samhain when he was diagnosed, and took his radiation treatments onsite so they could continue their experiments without interruption.
Some of their finds were extraordinary.
Bub was impervious, it seemed, to extreme cold. They'd placed several refrigeration units in Red 13, the room Bub was kept in while he was comatose, and gradually lowered the temperature to four below zero degrees Celsius. Bub's internal body temperature didn't drop a single degree, and his heart rate and breathing remained consistent.
The two then moved in some heaters and cranked it up to over two hundred degrees. An egg fried on the table next to Bub, but he didn't fry. The demon's skin got hot, but his internal temperature didn't fluctuate more than a degree.
Meyer and Storky also discovered that Bub could breathe just about anything. It had been known since the '40s that Bub's complex respiratory system, which included four lungs, two diaphragms, and two organs that resembled air bladders, processed nitrogen and oxygen and excreted a combination of methane and nitrous oxide. Through experimentation they showed that Bub could process pure nitrogen, or pure oxygen, or carbon dioxide, helium, hydrogen, propane, and even chlorine gas, and was able to break it down to nourish his cells.
They stopped short at nerve gas, even though President Nixon gave them the okay.
Sun read all of this with great interest, but the interest was slowly giving way to something else.
Paranoia.
Bub was resistant to all disease, fungal, viral and bacterial. His body attacked any invader, whether it be bubonic plague, herpes zoster, ringworm, or even Dutch elm disease, surrounded it with what were assumed to be antibodies, and expelled the intruder from his anus in a crystalline pellet. Meyer even went so far as to inject him with enough anthrax to wipe out a large city. Bub excreted it within twenty minutes.
He wasn't invulnerable to physical harm, but damn near close. Ever since the first doctor drew some of Bub's blood and watched in amazement as the needle mark repaired itself moments later, it had been known that the demon possessed rapidly accelerated healing ability. Meyer and Storky must have been amazed by this, because they spent no less than three years conducting experiments on the anomaly. They poked, gouged, sliced, burned, scraped, and subjected every part of Bub to chemical attack.
Bub could repair all harm, even plugs taken from flesh and bone, within seconds. It happened so fast that they brought in a 35mm film camera to shoot the miracle in slow motion.
Meyer theorized that Bub's endocrine system was extremely advanced. The endocrine system in humans was capable of instantaneous reaction, such as a burst of adrenaline in a dangerous situation. Bub's had developed to the point where it had taken over the healing functions, knitting wounds instantly. Nixon had given the go-ahead to fully amputate one of Bub's limbs, but Meyer and Storky only went as far as a finger tip.
It grew back, longer and sharper than before.
Sun thought of Hercules and the hydra. Every time he cut off a head, it grew two more.
Meyer and Storky also tried to accurately gauge Bub's age. They took a sample of Bub's horn and tried to carbon date it. All living things take in carbon-14, which is created in the earth's atmosphere when the sun's rays strike nitrogen gas. It combines with oxygen to form CO2. As long as the organism is alive, it has a constant new supply of C-14. But in dead tissue, the C-14 begins to decay into nitrogen-14, with a half life of about 5,730 years. Since Bub's horn---made of keratin like hair and feathers---was dead tissue, it seemed ideal for the task.
Something wasn't right, apparently, because the amount of N-14 found in the sample would have put Bub's age at over 200,000 years. Obviously impossible. Meyer hypothesized that since Bub breathed and was able to process nitrogen, that somehow accounted for the high N-14 count. Sun, who never excelled at chemistry, found that explanation suspicious, but easier to believe than the idea that Bub was older than mankind itself.
Along with a record of Bub's medical history, Sun was also sorting through the hundreds and thousands of pictures taken since the project's beginning. Everything and everyone involved in Samhain over the last century had been photographed, filmed, recorded, and videotaped, and more than half of the file cabinets in Red 3 were filled to the brim with visual media.
Somewhere, buried in all of this mess, was the answer she was looking for.
Sun didn't share Dr. Belgium's belief that Bub was some strange, prehistoric missing link. She also didn't share the view of the holies, who believed Bub was a true demon, a spawn of hell.
Sun had a different theory, one she wasn't willing to share yet. Not without proof. Given that the average tenure here was twenty-two years, Sun figured she'd find it eventually. In twenty-two years a person could find anything.
Maybe even peace.
She finished sorting the files in front of her, and then moved on to the next cabinet. It was crammed full of serum and tissue analyses. Sun picked up a thick folder containing an in-depth report on the physical properties of Bub's early stool samples. It didn't surprise her to find out that they contained ample amounts of radioactivity.
The demon was so damn tough, even his droppings were nuclear.
She gave it a cursory flip through and dropped it in the BUB pile.
"Attention, this is Race."
Sun reflexively looked up at the intercom speaker near the door.
"We have a new arrival, Andrew Dennison, and I think it would be a good time to have a group powwow to get him up to speed on the project. The Mess Hall, in five. Refreshments will be served."
Race chuckled and cut out.
Sun placed her hands on her lower back and stretched, the vertebrae crackling like a bag of chips. She left the lights on in Red 3 and headed for the Octopus. Her thoughts drifted to Andy Dennison, not for the first time.
Sun thought he was cute, in a non-threatening teddy bear kind of way. He was trying hard to be amusing. The complete opposite of Steven, who was so self-assured and serious. She compared all men to Steven, and they all came up lacking. That was one of the reasons she'd been celibate since his death. Everyone else seemed like a step down.
So what was it about this new guy that intrigued her? Must be hormonal, she decided. She had been completely alone in Africa. Andy was the first man her age she'd had a conversation with in close to a year.
Maybe she should let down her guard a notch, stop acting so hard-nosed. Would it kill her to be personable? He obviously found her attractive. She should be flattered rather than irritated.
But then, she should be a lot of things.
Sun walked through the Octopus and went down the Green Arm. Before entering the Mess Hall she absently reached for her purse to check her hair in her make-up compact. The gesture annoyed her; she hadn't carried a purse or a compact in a long time.
She settled for finger-combing her bangs back, and went into the cafeteria. The holies were already there, locked in their usual intense debate. Dr. Belgium was measuring coffee to put into the automatic maker, his actions as meticulous and precise as they were in the lab. Andy was leaning against the water cooler, hands in his pockets. Sun caught his eye and tried to look sympathetic. He gave her a shy smile back and walked over to her.
"Sorry about..."
"No need," Sun interrupted. "We've all been there."
"I haven't thrown up since doing keg stands in college."
"Where did you go to school?"
"Oh. Harvard."
He said it as if it embarrassed him. Sun had met plenty of Harvard men, and they usually wore it like a badge of honor. Interesting.
"How about you?" Andy asked.
"Johns... uh Iowa State."
"Were you going to say Johns Hopkins? I didn't know they offered veterinary medicine."
Sun thought fast. "I lived in Maryland, took some undergrad classes there. Transferred to Iowa."
If he'd caught her lie she couldn't tell.
"Is that what you always wanted to be? A vet?"
"Yeah." Another lie. "Did you always want to be a linguist?"
"I never really thought about it. It's something I've always been good at."
"Do you like it?"
"I don't know. I guess I do, or why would I do it, right? Do you like being a vet?"
"Yes," Sun said, happy to say something honest. "I don't beat myself up if my patients die."
Andy smiled. He had a pleasant smile, she thought. She smiled back, surprised at how good it felt.
"I'm still not sure if I want to stay," Andy said. "This isn't a normal translating job for me. I don't know if I can do it."
"It's okay to be afraid."
"I'd bet you've never been afraid of anything in your entire life."
"Not true. When I was seven, a bat got in my bedroom. Harmless, couldn't have been bigger than a tennis ball. But the way it flew; in a figure eight, unbelievably fast, inches from my face on every pass---it terrified me. Then it landed on my head, got tangled up in my hair. I was so scared I couldn't move. Took about five minutes to get up the guts to scream. Seemed like an eternity."
"What happened?"
"Dad came in, caught it with a blanket, let it outside. He said it must have come in through the window. I didn't open my window again until I was eighteen."
They shared a small laugh, which felt even better than the smile.
"Well, now you're taking care of the biggest bat in the history of the world," Andy said.
"Gotta face your fears sometime. Besides, I think Bub's a wee bit too big to get tangled in my hair."
"You don't find him terrifying?"
"At first I did. Now I'm more intrigued than scared. Aren't you just a little bit curious about him?"
Andy rubbed his upper lip. "It's hard to be curious when breakfast is coming out of your nose."
"Just think about it for a second. Every person on earth, no matter what country or culture, has some kind of idea of the devil. But no one has ever seen him before. Don't you want to know more about him?"
"You think he's really Satan?"
"Actually, I find that pretty hard to believe."
"So what is he? An alien or something?" Andy asked.
"That's hard to believe too. But of the two, I'd buy the alien theory more than the biblical one. His physiology is just too strange."
"An alien, huh? So is he the kind that flies around with Elliot, or the kind that eats Sigorney Weaver?"
"I don't know yet. He seems friendly."
"Maybe that's because he's locked up. I wonder how friendly he'd be on the other side of the Plexiglas."
Race entered the Mess Hall with Dr. Harker. They were in mid-conversation and Sun caught the end of it.
"...for what you've done with her. I still can't accept why you're here, but---"
"No thanks needed, General." A frowning Harker cut him off. "It's my job."
Just visited Helen, Sun guessed. Both looked grim. Harker retained the look; she probably scowled in her sleep as well.
Race, with the poise of any good leader, quickly hid his feelings with a good ole boy smile. "Good, we're all here. Before we get started with the intros I'd like to announce that the Jacuzzi should be operational again by tomorrow. The same rules apply as with the pool, swimming suits are mandatory. You got that, Frank? We have ladies present."
Dr. Belgium gave Race a nod without turning his attention from the brewing coffee.
"Good. Now I think all of you have met Andy Dennison by now, except for Julie. So let's start with you."
Harker had a long, hound-doggish face and a droning voice which left no doubt that she didn't kindly suffer fools. Sun learned after only a few meetings with her that Harker considered everyone a fool.
"I'm Dr. Julie Harker. I came on in 1980 to oversee the medical well-being of the Samhain team, including the dispensing of medication and monthly physicals. I've also been monitoring Bub's vitals since my arrival, and have been attending to the treatment of General Race's wife Helen."
It didn't surprise Sun that it was the exact same speech she'd given to her a week prior, right down to the nasally inflection.
"Thank you, Julie," Race said, and Dr. Harker took a seat and removed a nail clipper from the chest pocket of her lab coat. She began to snip away at a hangnail. "How about you, Frank?"
"Hmm? Oh, sure."
Dr. Frank Belgium touched the fresh cup of coffee to his lips and took a large slurp.
"Frank Belgium, molecular biologist. I'm the gene guy. I've been mapping Bub's genes. Hard, very hard. As you may know, or, well, maybe you don't, it took ten years for the human genome to get sequenced, and we've only got 23 pairs of chromosomes, and less than 25,000 genes. We've isolated 44 pairs of chromosomes in Bub. Hard work. Hard hard hard."
Belgium took another loud slurp of coffee.
"But he's from earth. I'm sure. Bub has the same twenty amino acids as all life on this planet. Why is this important? Well there are about 80 different types of amino acids, and all can create proteins, but nothing on earth uses those extra sixty. All life---plant, animal, bacteria---uses different combinations of those same twenty, and the reason is because we all evolved from one common ancestor. That's why all living organisms share genes. Everyone in this room, on this planet, shares 99.9 percent of the same DNA. We share 98.4 with chimpanzees, 98.3 with gorillas, all the way on down to blue-green algae."
Sun glanced at Andy. He was being drawn in by Frank's words, the same way Sun had been upon first hearing them.
"Now," Belgium continued, "if life started several times, rather than just once, we'd probably find different amino acids in different things on earth. But we don't, we all have the same genetic code, and Bub shares it as well.
"What I'm doing, is mapping sequences in Bub's genome to find out what on earth he shares the most genes with. Very hit or miss when we're not sure where to look. It's kind of like searching for a single sentence in a single book in the Library of Congress."
Frank shrugged and drank more coffee.
"What do you believe Bub is, Doctor?" Race asked, glancing at Andy while he spoke.
"I think, well, I guess I think he's a little bit of everything. A mutation. Maybe he's a member of a prehistoric race that became extinct... since he's intelligent it would reason that we've never found fossils of his kind, perhaps they cremated their dead, or buried them at sea. Or maybe he's a genetic experiment. Maybe our own government created him."
"In 1906?" snorted Harker.
"Dr. Harker, what proof do we have that he's actually been here since 1906? Were you here when he arrived? How do we know that we're not caught up in some crazy conspiracy to help test the latest in biological weapon technology?"
"At least that would stir things up a bit around here." Race gave a wide Southern grin.
"How about an extraterrestrial?" Andy asked. "Isn't there any possibility Bub is from another planet?"
Frank shook his head.
"Even if we discounted the problems associated with space travel from another galaxy, it would be a zillion to one, a gazillion to one, that life formed on another planet with the exact same genetic make-up as life on earth. It would be easier for the same lottery number to come up every single night for a hundred years..."
"Unless it was intentional." Father Thrist cleared his throat and crossed his arms. "Unless God created Bub the same way He created man and all life on earth. That would explain Bub's genetic code without the need for evolution, molecular engineering, or space travel."
Frank raised an eyebrow. "I thought demons and angels had no physical presence. They're ethereal, only existing in heaven and hell."
Thrist laughed. It was the first time Sun had seen mirth from the terminally serious priest.
"All of my life, people have questioned my beliefs because there has been no physical evidence to substantiate them. Now here we have something that is clearly a demon, or even Satan himself. Something we can see and touch. And everyone is looking for a new answer, rather than the answer that Christianity has had for two thousand years."
"Judaism has had it for over three thousand," Rabbi Shotzen said, wagging a finger.
Thrist gave him a sideways glance. "All around is proof of God's creation. Me, you, trees, birds, the earth, the universe---but since the beginning of this century mankind has worshiped the god of science, rather than our Lord Jesus Christ. Now here is something science cannot explain, yet you refuse to believe. Andrew," Thrist gave the linguist his full attention. "What was your reaction when you first saw Bub?"
"Fear," Andy answered.
"But what did Bub represent to you? When you saw him?"
"A devil."
Thrist nodded. "Everyone who sees Bub recognizes a devil. They are concerning themselves with the how and the why, but the 'what' has been answered. Bub is a devil. Where do devils come from, Andrew?"
"This one came from Panama."
Sun and the others laughed. Rabbi Shotzen had to be nudged by Thrist because his laughter went on longer than the others'.
"But before he was found in Panama, where did Bub come from?"
"Devils usually come from hell," Andy said.
"Or heaven," Shotzen added. "Depending on your interpretation of his creation. Lucifer, the Morning Star, had tried to shine brighter than Adonai, was cast out of heaven for his pride."
"Or, according to Enoch," Thrist said, "Devils are angels who chose to fornicate with humans. Wasn't that the explanation Rabbi Elkiezer gave in the 8th century? Something about fornicating with the daughters of Cain?"
Shotzen dismissed him. "Remember, Enoch wrote pseudepigrapha and apocrypha---nothing the scribe did went into the Torah."
"But," Thrist countered, "if we were to base our conceptions solely on the Bible, which encompasses the Torah, we'd have very little to go on."
"Devils and angels were created by ha-shem as separate entities," Shotzen insisted. "Had adonai created angels that became devils, it would contradict His perfection. Instead, ha-shem created devils to punish sin. It can be interpreted that all evil, in fact, is Satanic rather than Divine. The Book of Jubilees agrees."
"Either way," Thrist said, "we have a being here that is obviously supernatural, and obviously created by God. Shouldn't we be focusing our efforts on attempting to figure out why He allowed us to find Bub, and what He expects us to do with this knowledge? Is this the beginning of the apocalypse? The first sign of Armageddon? Or should we take this as a message that God indeed exists, and use it to spread His word? And why, after almost a hundred years at this facility, and who knows how many more years buried in the ground, did Bub finally wake up?"
"That's why Andy is here," Race said. "To ask him. Right Andy?"
Sun glanced at Andy, who squirmed under the spotlight. She raised an eyebrow.
"Uh... are we sure he can't escape?" Andy asked.
Race grinned. "His enclosure is four foot concrete with steel plates sandwiched in between each foot. The Plexiglas is bullet proof, shatter proof, fire proof, and has been tested up to sixteen thousand pounds per square inch. Even if he did escape the habitat, he's two hundred feet underground, and he'd have to go through those two titanium doors. Plus, there are safeguards."
"Such as?"
"In the eighties, the President decided that if Bub were to ever wake up, we'd need to have some control over him. Bub has two explosive charges surgically imbedded inside of him, one in the neck and one in the heart. Either one would render Bub out of commission, even with his rapid healing abilities. He's got enough boom in him to blow up a tank."
Andy's face scrunched up in thought. Sun watched him. She wanted him to stay, she realized, and that surprised as much as scared her.
"I'll need some things; books, programs, access to the Internet. And that capsule that Bub was found in, are there pictures of the writing?"
"Son, we've got the whole damn capsule, you want to see it."
"I want to see it. It's as good a starting place as any. I also need the video recordings of Bub since he's been awake, anything that has him speaking. He's only said a few things to me so far."
"Could you understand him?" Race asked. The excitement was apparent in his voice.
"I'm not sure. But it sounded like an Indio language. I think he said how are things with you and I am very hungry."
"Doesn't sound hostile to me. Dr. Jones, would you mind taking Andy to Red 6 to see the capsule?"
Sun gave Race a look, knowing she was being used, and why. But it didn't bother her as much as she thought it should.
"I have some things to finish up in the records room, but I can free up some time."
"Great," Race said. He was one big smile, ready to shake hands with the world. "Now who wants a microwave chili dog?"
Sun turned to Andy, who was staring at her with a lopsided grin on his face. Part of her wanted to smile back, but she held that part in check.
"Need some help?" Andy asked. "In the records room?"
"You sure you want to help me again?"
Andy smiled. "After watching Bub eat, I think I could handle just about anything."
"How about chili dogs?"
The pain showed in his face. "I don't think I'm quite ready for chili dogs."
"Then let's go."
As they left the Mess Hall, Sun noticed that Race winked at her. She restrained herself and didn't wink back.
CHAPTER FOUR
Andy surprised Sun by being helpful in Red 3. For the first twenty minutes he was chatty and full of questions, but once he settled in with the actual organizing he proved himself a hard worker. They toiled for over two hours in companionable silence, Andy once going for Diet Cokes, and Sun once leaving for the bathroom (and to touch up her make-up, even though she didn't actually touch it up, just check it.)
While rifling through a large stack of invoices, Sun became absorbed in an inventory sheet listing some of the medical supplies and pharmaceuticals on site.
It staggered her. Samhain was better stocked than a hospital pharmacy. Why the staff here would need seven gallons of morphine, or ten thousand tablets of aspirin, was beyond her scope of understanding. Total cost to the taxpayer: seven million dollars in drugs that would never be used. Not for the first time since her arrival, Sun felt underpaid.
"Look at this," Andy said. He handed her a piece of paper written in a language other than English.
"Spanish?" she asked.
"Italian. It's from Pope Pius the tenth."
Sun briefly returned to the long, boring mornings of her youth, trapped in Sunday school memorizing prayers.
"St. Pius," she corrected. "He was canonized in 1954."
"You're Catholic?"
"I was."
"When did you leave the church? Or is that too personal a question?"
"I don't think I really left the church. More like the church left me."
"How so?"
Sun hadn't ever talked about this with anyone. No one had ever asked.
"Five years ago... it was a bad time for me. I had a lot of problems. I met a man, Steven, he was a psychiatrist. I didn't meet him professionally---I met him in a bar, actually."
Sun turned away from Andy and busied herself moving papers around on the desk.
"He was a very sensitive man. Compassionate. We fell in love, got married. We wanted to start a family. I'm sure you know where this is going; woman gets a new shot at happiness, drunk driver kills her husband, woman loses faith in God. Cliché. Soon after that I lost my veterinary clinic."
Sun thought back to the creditors, one even calling her at Steven's wake. Steven had been kept alive for almost six months. Six months of wretched, useless hoping. Six months, at a cost of three thousand dollars a day. Insurance didn't even cover a third of the expense, and of course the asshole who ran head first into Steven was uninsured as well.
"So you blame God for taking him."
"What? No. At first, sure. It made no sense. When Steven died, I lost everything. But then it did make sense. I didn't blame God, because there was no God to blame. Shit just happens."
Sun finished fussing with the papers and turned back to Andy with a question of her own.
"You said to the holies that you were an atheist. Why?"
"It's kind of complicated. I never had any sort of organized religion in my life. God was something that other kids believed in."
"So you never learned about religion?"
"I had a friend, in grade school, his parents tried to take me to church once. I loved it."
"Why'd they only take you once?"
"Oh, I didn't love the Mass. I loved the language. The priest spoke in Latin, asking a question, I think it was something like 'Are you truly thankful?' or something like that. Well, I thought he was asking us, so I answered."
"In Latin."
"Yeah. And it freaked him out. Everyone else too. So he asked me, in Latin, how I knew Latin. So I told him I knew about ten different languages. And he said that it's a miracle, that God has blessed me with the gift of tongues. I told him, in English, God didn't bless me, I studied my ass off!"
Sun laughed.
"Needless to say, the family never took me with them again. When I got into college, I read a lot of religious texts---for the language, not the content. But some of the content leaked through, obviously. And in every case, whether I was translating Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hindi, whatever, I found the same theme within the writing."
"Which was?"
"Scared men, looking for answers. I think that as a species, being self-aware means we have questions. Some of those questions are: What created the universe, where do we go when we die, and why do bad things happen? These questions don't have answers, but need to be answered. That's why men, all men, every people and tribe from Cro-Magnon on up, had to create gods. To answer these questions."
"So here we are, two atheists, trying to find the origin of a demon."
Andy grinned. "Almost seems as if God put us here, to show us the truth, doesn't it?"
Sun could tell Andy was joking, but she got a chill. That was what it seemed like. A second chance at faith.
"So what does St. Pius say in the letter?"
"That the Vatican was sending over a bishop, and if President Roosevelt was wise he would not let Bub's existence be known because the panic could destroy the western world. And that he was praying for everyone involved."
Andy took the paper back and ran his finger over the Vatican seal.
"Funny, yesterday I was wondering how I was going to pay my electric bill, and now here I am holding a letter that is probably worth more than I make in a year. Sotheby's would kill for it."
"Sotheby's? You're thinking historical worth. Try the media. You could make a fortune, up until you were executed for treason."
Andy filed the paper away and Sun suggested they quit and go take a look at the capsule. She felt pretty good for someone who'd just recounted the biggest tragedy of her life. And for once, there was no guilt to accompany feeling good. Was there a statute of limitations on grieving?
Andy held the door for her and they took a short walk from Red 3 to Red 6. The room was small and brightly lit. It reminded Sun of an autopsy room. A small dehumidifier ran nonstop in the corner, humming quietly. In the center, sprawled out like a baby elephant corpse, was the capsule.
It was pale gray, so pale that it seemed to absorb the fluorescent light. Sun was again intrigued by the shape: it was a tube with rounded ends, almost like giant sausage, but the curves were perfect in their simplicity. It had been measured back in the '70s, and the scientist in charge found it was symmetrical to within ten thousandths of an inch.
"It looks like a sarcophagus," Andy ran his hand over the carvings on top. "And it's so smooth! How can it feel so silky when it has all of these glyphs engraved into it? You can barely feel them. What's it made of?"
"A lot," Sun laughed. "Analysis came back with traces of everything: carbon, ferrite, silicon, lead, silver, iridium, petroleum, ivory..."
"Like elephant tusks?"
"Yeah. And here's the kicker. It's something like ten percent nylon."
"Nylon."
"Nylon was invented in 1939. So how did it get in something found in 1906, and buried for who knows how long before that?"
"Weird. So how does it open? I don't see any seams."
"Watch this." Sun ran her hand along the side of the capsule facing them. She found a small notch the size of a pin head and pressed inward. The top came up on hinges, opening like the lid of a casket.
"Secret button. Found by accident around forty years ago, if you hear Race tell it. Before that they were using a crowbar to get it open. See the marks on the edge here?"
Andy didn't look when she pointed out the pry marks. He was totally absorbed in studying the inside of the capsule.
"This is odd." Andy said.
"No kidding."
"No, I mean, see these markings? Demotic Egyptian hieroglyphs. They were using these in 3000 BC. But on the cover, those are Maya glyphs. Used until about 1500 AD. Four and a half thousand years difference."
"So it's old."
"Not just that. How the hell did it cross the Atlantic and get from Egypt to Central America?"
"Maybe the Spanish brought it. Conquistadors."
Andy nodded and ran his hands inside the capsule. "Different texture. Not smooth, but..."
"Soft," Sun said. "I found some old pictures. Bub fit in here perfectly. I mean perfectly. Like it was made from a cast of his body. But it's kind of spongy and springy. Like foam."
"Do you know what it says?"
"I have no idea. Not too much call for translating hieroglyphs in today's market. Hasn't anyone tried before?"
"Race said yes. The inside, not the outside. The work is buried in Red 3 somewhere."
"Might be easier to start from scratch. I could translate the dead sea scrolls quicker than it would take to find anything in that mess."
"What do you think Bub was speaking? Was that Maya?"
"Kind of. There are more than twenty different dialects that descended from the Maya language, I think Bub was speaking one of them. We're allowed to have Internet access, right?"
"Sure. It's monitored somehow, I'm guessing. For security. There are three computers you can use in the Octopus, the Cray in Red 14, and there's a room in the Green Arm, Green 4, with a link if you want privacy."
Andy stared at the capsule, apparently lost in thought.
"Hungry?" Sun asked.
"Hmm? Oh. Yeah, I am actually."
"We all pretty much fend for ourselves around here, except when Race cooks up a batch of chili or stew. Want to grab an early dinner?"
Andy grinned. "Sure. But only if it's not mutton."
Sun led Andy to the Mess Hall and began to school him on the intricacies of microwave defrosting. From the massive walk-in freezer they selected some boneless chicken breast, cauliflower, pea pods, and green peppers. After thawing, Sun showed off her substantial wok skills.
Whenever Sun cooked, she thought of her mother, and how embarrassed of her she was while growing up. Her friends' mothers baked cookies and went to the PTA and had college educations. Sun's mom spoke heavily accented, grammatically incorrect English, and wove baskets. The childhood taunts and teases were unrelenting.
Sun now realized what a graceful, introspective woman her mother had been. Hopefully she'd find that same inner peace some day. But even if she never did, her mother had passed a trickle of her wisdom on to her daughter: Sun could wok like a fiend.
Dinner conversation with Andy was upbeat and impersonal. He knew an alarmingly large number of dumb blonde jokes, and rattled off two or three good ones that almost made Sun choke on her stir fry. Dessert was a large can of fruit cocktail, dumped rather inelegantly into a mixing bowl.
They shared the bowl.
"So, I take it you've decided to stay."
"I don't think I'll be present at any more feedings, but yeah, I'm staying. I'm not captivated by Bub like some of the others are, but I can't pass up the challenge he represents."
Sun offered her hand. "Well then, welcome aboard, Andrew Dennison."
"Glad to be here, Sunshine Jones."
They shook, but Andy didn't drop her hand. The moment stretched. Sun watched Andy's pupils widen, wondered if hers were doing the same thing. They'd gone from zero to intimacy in less than five seconds.
Fast. Too fast.
Sun took her hand back.
"Andy..."
"Sorry..."
"It's just that..."
"I know."
An uncomfortable silence ensued.
"Are my ears red?" he asked.
They were the same shade as a fire hydrant.
"No. They're fine."
"I think I'm gonna call it a night. Low on sleep. Excuse me."
He stood up and walked to the door. Halfway there he touched his ear and stopped.
"They are red, aren't they?" he asked without turning around.
"You could stop traffic," Sun said.
Andy left without another word. There was some fruit cocktail left, but Sun was no longer hungry. She dumped it down the disposal and went back to her room.
Alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sun woke up at half past nine in the morning. She'd always been an early riser, a fact that she recently discovered was dependent on sunlight. With no morning sun to wake her up, she'd been sleeping later than normal. One more thing to dislike about being two hundred feet underground.
After her exercises and a quick shower, she stopped by the Mess Hall, half-hoping Andy was there. He wasn't. She made herself a bowl of shredded wheat with vacuum-packed milk and frozen strawberries, but only picked at it.
Sun wasn't exactly sure what she was feeling. Andy was attractive, and found her attractive, but this wasn't exactly the time or place to start a relationship. She felt flattered, and annoyed, and disappointed all at once.
Romance sucked, she decided. It was much simpler being a hermit.
She forced herself to finish breakfast and then put in some hard work at Red 3 with more enthusiasm than the mundane task warranted. Her current fixation---organizing the thousands of photographs---so absorbed her attention that when she checked the clock it was already a quarter after twelve. Bub's lunchtime.
Sun put some bounce in her step on the way to Orange 12, again hoping to bump into Andy. No such luck.
She was quick and thorough in selecting and examining the sheep, but it didn't hold the charm of the previous time with the linguist.
"I'm acting like a school girl," Sun chided herself. Why didn't she just write him a love note and draw a heart on it and slip it in his locker?
Sun led the hooded animal down the Red Arm. Dr. Belgium, who practically lived in Red 14, wasn't around. She approached the habitat quietly, the only sound being the whirring fans of the Cray computer and the tap-tap of the sheep's footfalls on the tile floor.
Bub was squatting, his eyes closed and his arms on his haunches; a warped parody of the tai chi lotus. This was the position Bub slept in. She'd been recording his sleep patterns, and he took between ten and fifteen naps a day, never longer than twenty minutes each. All totaled, he slept about four hours daily. Far less than any animal she'd ever encountered.
Even squatting, Bub was taller than Sun. She watched his massive chest undulate in waves, his many lungs taking in air at slightly different rates. As usual, seeing Bub filled her with a mixture of awe and fear. Sun clearly recalled their first meeting. She'd walked up to the habitat, so cocksure, and when Bub came out from behind the trees her legs gave out on her and she squealed in fright, much to Race's amusement.
The fact that Bub looked demonic was only part of the shock. What most impressed Sun was the creature's size and obvious strength. It was like seeing a dinosaur up close. More than once Sun had wondered if that Plexiglas wall was truly strong enough to hold him.
Sun leaned closer to the partition, her forehead almost touching it.
"Sun is laaaaaate," Bub said, his voice remarkably clear coming from a mouth packed with so many teeth.
The sheep screamed and bucked, and Sun was so startled she let go of the harness. The sheep ran off towards Dr. Belgium's computers and barreled into a desk, upsetting papers and a coffee mug.
Sun took back control of her faculties and chased after the sheep, one arm locking around its large woolly neck and the other pulling tight on the harness. After a few seconds of struggling and talking, she managed to calm the sheep down enough to tether it to a door handle.
Bub watched the whole episode from his lotus position, his reptilian eyes keenly intelligent.
Sun chose her words carefully.
"I'm sorry. I was busy. Have you always known English?"
"Yooooou are Sun," Bub said. "That is luuunch." His voice was a throaty baritone, but soft and wet like a wheeze.
"Right. My name is Sun Jones."
"Joooooones."
"Yes."
"Yessssss," Bub hissed.
Sun approached the habitat slowly, unconsciously using the stalking approach that she'd used to get close to lions without spooking or threatening them.
Her mind whirred. Even with all the conversations she and her cohorts had had in front of Bub, could he have picked up enough information to understand English?
"Can you understand me, or just repeat what I say?"
His hand raised up and a long claw uncurled from his fist, pointing at her. "Suuuun Jooooones." He turned the talon on himself. "Buuuuub."
Sun pointed at the sheep.
"Luuuuunch," Bub said.
She gestured over her shoulder, to the rear of the room.
"Compuuuuuuter," Bub said. "Craaaaaay. Four teraaaaabytes."
Sun blew out some air. Bub startled her by repeating the gesture.
"Is Bub hungry?" Sun asked.
"Hungry Buuuuub. Eeeeeat." The demon looked beyond Sun. "Fraaaaank."
"Good lord," Dr. Frank Belgium whispered.
Sun hadn't even known he'd entered the room, so intense was her focus.
Bub sprang up on his legs and threw his hands in the air, just as Belgium had. The demon bellowed as loud as a thunder clap, "Goooooood looooord!"
Both Sun and Frank Belgium jumped backwards, and Frank kept backpedaling until he'd bumped into the sheep, which bleated a scream at the intrusion.
"Find Andy," Sun ordered. "And Race."
"Sure thing. Sure thing."
Dr. Belgium hit the door, repeating "sure thing" like a mantra.
"Buuuuub is huuuuungry," the demon said. He lowered his head to her height, pressing his moist pig snout to the Plexiglas. It made a sticky wet spot.
"Lunch, nooooooow."
Sun, who had that jelly feeling back in her legs, fought the fear and stepped up to the glass.
"Where are you from?" Sun asked. "How do you know English? Did you just learn it?"
Bub's lips creased back, revealing a huge valley of yellow, jagged teeth.
He could bite through a redwood with those teeth, Sun thought.
"Lunch noooooow. English laaaaaaater."
Sun, who hadn't taken an order from anyone since she was in grammar school, simply nodded. She went to the sheep, her gaze never leaving Bub. The sheep was rooted, shaking like a jackhammer. It refused to budge.
Sun located the box of Cap'n Crunch, dropped when she'd let go of the harness. There was still cereal left at the bottom, and she lifted the cowl and pushed the box over the sheep's snout like a feed bag. After a moment of struggle the animal began to munch, its muscles relaxing. Sun led it to the oversized door next to the habitat.
Bub watched intently, the terrible smile on his face never slipping. Sun took the sheep through the walkway alongside Bub's pen and stopped at the waist-level entrance hatch. The hatch was set inside a large hinged wall, kind of like a pet door. The wall was concrete, inlaid with the same titanium bars used in the Red Arm. It moved up and down like a garage door---industrial pneumatics---and it was the entrance Bub took when his vital signs indicated he was waking up from his coma.
Sun hadn't been present for that event. She'd arrived shortly afterward. But Race spared no detail, telling her how he'd wheeled Bub into the habitat on a gigantic Gurney, then used a crank to lift up one end until Bub slid off and onto the ground, twitching and blinking the whole time. Race had barely pushed the Gurney back out the entrance and closed the door before Bub was on his feet.
The entrance remained locked, using yet another magnetic bolt operated by a keypad. The hatch in the middle was locked by a simple latch, reinforced with titanium. This was the entrance used for the sheep and the one Race took when he'd been in the habitat on those previous occasions. It was too small for Bub to fit through, but Sun still paused before opening it.
Now that Bub was talking, it made him more menacing to her, rather than less so.
She went a hard round with her fear, then pushed it away and opened the small hatch.
"Fooooooooood," Bub said.
He was squatting directly in front of the opening, and his breath, warm and fetid, blew against Sun like a sewer breeze. She felt an adrenalin jolt, like something had run in front of the car and she had to slam on the breaks. It was accompanied by instant sweating and a small cry that died in her throat.
The sheep tried to buck, but one of Bub's massive talons lashed out and gripped it by the head, dragging it through the hatchway.
Sun watched, transfixed, as Bub twisted the sheep in half only a few feet away from her, a tangle of intestines stretching out between the pieces like hot mozzarella on a pizza. Some blood spattered onto her pants. The sheep's legs were still kicking as Bub jammed them down his throat, not even bothering to chew. Then he uncurled the glistening entrails that hung around his shoulders like Mardi Gras beads and shoved them into his maw, smacking enthusiastically.
"Gooooooooood," Bub said to her.
He licked his talons and belched.
Sun kicked the hatch closed.
For a moment she stood there, her heart playing bongos inside of her ribs, trembling so violently her knees were knocking. She became aware that she was holding her breath, and tried to let it out slowly to regain some control.
He's just an animal, she said in her mind, over and over again.
Her mind wasn't buying it.
Sun forced composure to return, and then left the hallway and reentered the main room, willing herself to look at Bub through the Plexiglas.
The demon was almost done eating, his hairy chest matted dark with sheep's blood. He picked up the severed head and wedged it into the corner of his mouth. It cracked like a walnut. He chewed with a sound similar to a cement mixer, his eyes following Sun as she walked to the center of the room.
The door opened behind her, and Sun turned to see Race, Andy, and Frank rush in.
"He's talking?" Race asked Sun, his attention on the demon.
"Yes. He told me I was late for his lunch."
Andy came up beside Sun but didn't meet her gaze.
"Hello, Bub!" Race said, a wide grin on his face and a hand raised in greeting.
Bub glared at the general, and Sun noted it didn't seem friendly.
"Raaaaaace," Bub said.
Race scratched the back of his head. "I'll be damned. What else did he say?"
"He pointed to things and named them, like me, himself, his lunch."
"Son of a bitch."
Andy leaned closer to the Plexiglas. "Do you speak English?"
Bub closed one eye and the other locked onto Andy, as if scrutinizing him.
"Hal tafham al arabiya?" Andy asked.
"Lam asma had min zaman," Bub answered.
"What?" Race asked. "What did you just say to him?"
"I asked him if he understood Arabic. He said he hasn't heard it in a long time. Qui de Latinam es?" Andy asked.
"Latinam nosco. Multos sermones nosco. Mihi haec lingua patria quam dicis est nova."
"He says he also knows Latin. But you probably figured that out. He also knows many other languages, but English is new to him."
Sun checked the corner of the room where the video camera was, reflexively making sure it was still there. It was, red light blinking. This was all being digitally recorded.
"Okay," Race said, "there are questions. We've got a book in the Octopus for when this would happen, a hundred years of questions to ask. I've got to call the President. And the holies, they'll want to be here."
Race turned to leave, moving double time.
"Ubi sum?" Bub asked. "Quis annus hic est?"
"He wants to know where he is and what the year is," Andy translated.
"It looks like Race isn't the only one with questions," Sun frowned.
Bub glanced at Sun and squinted, his elliptical eyes narrowing in a way that she could only describe as demonic.
CHAPTER SIX
One Star General Regis Murdoch tried to keep his excitement in check as he walked briskly down the Red Arm. This had been an exciting week indeed. He could almost see the light at the end of the tunnel, the conclusion to over three decades of waiting.
Forty goddamn years, and he was almost out of this hole.
He reached the Octopus and sat down at the main terminal. The computer took forever to boot up. Once he was online, he accessed CONTACT, the President's portable internet receiver. The President carried it on him at all times, and almost everyone thought it was a high tech pager. Actually it was a mini computer, capable of receiving and storing more than 40 gigabytes of information: pictures, spoken words, text, computer files and programs, even perfect digital copies of music and video.
Eight orbiting satellites controlled its transmissions, so the President could instantly receive information while anywhere in the world. It was waterproof, shockproof, and bullet proof. The President could even use it to launch a nuclear strike.
Deciding that the current situation didn't warrant an interruption, Race contacted him with one beep. That would tell the President that he was receiving a message, but it wasn't of immediate urgency. The unit would either beep or vibrate once, depending whether or not it was on silent mode. Two beeps and the President would check the message immediately. Three beeps and he'd plug a tiny ear piece into the CONTACT unit and speak into it like a portable phone.
When the connection was made, Race clicked on the microphone to speak. His typing skills were considerably lacking.
"Mr. President, this is Race. Our subject is currently able to communicate. I'm going to begin the interrogation. I'll keep you updated, and remember what was promised to me."
Race hit the Send icon. The spoken word message would be translated into text, encrypted, and sent to the President's CONTACT unit within seconds. Even though the encryption code was the most complicated in the world and deemed unbreakable, Race still was leery of codes and always kept his messages somewhat vague. The Germans never thought ENIGMA would be cracked either.
The Roosevelt Book, as Race's predecessor called it, was in the table drawer next to the main terminal. It was one of Race's responsibilities at Samhain to maintain and update the information it held. Since Theodore Roosevelt began the Project in 1906, a list of questions had been compiled to ask Bub should he ever awake and be judged sentient. There were many, some scientific, some historic, some theological.
Each successive President added his own questions to the book, and questions were dropped when they became outdated---for example, they no longer needed to ask Bub the 1918 question "Is it possible to split the atom?"
The book still had its original leather binding, though it had faded and cracked over the years. The first several dozen questions were typeset, but Roosevelt was wise enough to know that more questions would come up, so bound after the printed pages were two hundred blank ones.
Race had read through the book many times, and had even added several questions of his own. Now, after a century of sowing, it was time to reap.
With the book tucked firmly in his armpit, Race picked up the phone and hit the intercom line.
"Attention, this is Race. Our permanent guest is now talking, so it's show time in Red 14. Will everyone please meet me there."
He hung up and took a micro cassette recorder from a cabinet. Race checked the batteries, and unwrapped a new tape and inserted it into the machine. Then he got up and headed down the Red Arm. His mind was a rubber ball bouncing around inside his skull. It was a familiar feeling; the long stretches of boredom, the careful preparation, and then BOOM!---everything happening at once.
Just like combat, Race thought.
He missed that so badly. Just like he missed everything about the Army.
It was his family.
Race was born to command. First in his class at West Point, back in '50. He entered Korea in '51 as a Butter Bar---second lieutenant--- and rose to the rank of Captain in four years, most of his ascension due to battlefield victories. Korea was where he came to be known as Race, as in Race to the rescue.
When the war ended, Race was a man to watch. He was stationed at Ft. Sam Houston in 1959, headquarters for the Fifth U.S. Army. He paid his dues, did a tour in Vietnam, and generally worked his ass off, and on December 29, 1966, he had made Brigadier General.
Then came the fall.
There was a 2nd Lieutenant under Race's command named Harold Bright. They'd graduated together, gone to Korea together, and were the best of friends. Harold was Race's best man when he married Helen. He was as close as a brother.
Which made the confession even worse.
On a drunken March night, two years after Race's promotion to One Star General, Harold disclosed the affair he'd had with Race's wife.
Race was slack-jawed at the betrayal. Harold went into detail about how lonely Helen was, how Race was never around, how it only happened a few times but now it was over.
The alcohol added to the rage. Race hit him. Harold defended himself. Race broke a bar stool over his best friend's head.
Harold suffered a concussion from the assault, and later died from his injuries.
Helen blamed herself. She begged forgiveness. He forgave, and asked for hers in return. She was strong enough to stand by him during his trial, his discharge from his beloved Army, and his inevitable imprisonment. Race offered no defense for his actions to save her from the scandal.
But somehow President Johnson found out the truth.
He admired Race's stoicism and manliness---LBJ's exact words. He didn't want to see Race go to jail, or get booted from the Army. Not only had Race proven himself an excellent soldier, he'd also proven himself a man who had forsaken his own good to keep a secret. That, Johnson had said, was what patriotism was all about. So he gave Race an opportunity to redeem himself.
Samhain.
Race agreed, and quickly disappeared, along with all charges against him. Johnson also buried the civil case with Harold's family by giving them a modest cash settlement. All Race had to do, to keep up his end of the deal, was run the Samhain project until the time Bub awoke and the questions in the Roosevelt Book were answered. LBJ had given Race the impression that it would happen any day.
And now here it was, forty years later.
Race could have quit at any time. Many times he almost did, twice even going as far as telling the incumbent President he wanted out. But each time he was convinced to stay. Not through any slick blackmailing technique, or bland patriotic speeches about God and country. The carrot on the stick had always been his beloved Army, and the opportunity to some day command again.
So Race stuck it out, through years of boredom, through Helen's illness, through eleven different Presidents. The current Commander-in-Chief even told Race that he had a space waiting for him on the Joint Chiefs of Staff when this was finally over.
It was all only a few hundred questions away.
Race arrived in Red 14 to find Andy sitting in a chair next to the Plexiglas. Bub squatted on his haunches, his head at Andy's level. The image that came to Race's mind was two old women, sharing gossip.
"What have we learned so far?" he asked Andy, slapping a paternal hand on his shoulder.
"Well, not a lot. Bub apparently doesn't remember much about what happened to him before his coma. He doesn't even know how he came to be buried in Panama in the first place."
Race's eyes narrowed. This wouldn't do. Not at all. There were provisions for the possibility that Bub would be uncooperative. The main one involved a very large cattle prod.
But that was to be a last resort.
"Well, let's see what he does know then, shall we?"
Race took a chair from the computer work station and set it next to Andy, taking a seat. Bub glanced at Race and stretched out his mouth. He appeared to be attempting a smile, but Race found himself repulsed. It took him a moment to regain composure.
"This is called the Roosevelt Book; it's a list of questions to ask Bub going back to his discovery. I'll read the question, you interpret it and give me the answer."
Race took the cassette recorder from his pocket and hit the record button. He rested it on his knee.
"What is your name?" Race asked the beast.
"Buuuuuub..." the demon answered, staring into Race's eyes before Andy had a chance to translate. He raised a claw and a talon snaked out, pointing at the General's chest.
"Raaaaace."
Race shivered. Had it gotten colder in the room? Must be the central air unit, blowing down at them overhead. He folded his arms.
"Ask him for his previous name, before we started calling him that."
Andy complied, and Bub whispered a reply.
"He says he's had many names."
"My God in heaven," Father Thrist exclaimed. He'd just entered the room, the thick Rabbi Shotzen in tow. "It speaks."
"Faaaaather," Bub said, his voice a cross between a whisper and a hiss. "Raaaaaabbi."
"Oh my..." Rabbi Shotzen gasped.
"What has he said so far?" Father Thrist demanded. "Anything about God? Anything about Heaven?"
"Heavaaaaaan," Bub said, raising a claw over his head and extending a finger upward. The way he said the word made it sound somehow unclean.
"What do you know about heaven?" Thrist approached the Plexiglas, his nose inches from Bub's. "Are you a fallen angel?"
Bub's mouth stretched open and he belched, a sound like a motorcycle starting. His breath fogged up the glass, and Race caught the stench of blood and wool.
"Father," Race stepped in, holding the aging priest by the shoulders. "All of those questions and more will be answered. They're all in my book. Let's all just sit down, relax, we're gonna be here for a while."
The holies went off in search of chairs, and Rabbi Shotzen dragged over an extra one for Dr. Belgium, who had just arrived.
"Can he talk?" Belgium asked.
"Heeeeee... taaaaaalks..." Bub answered.
Belgium made a sound like a hiccup, and Race watched him turn right around and leave the room.
"He's a quick study," Sun said. "He's already putting together nouns and verbs. I bet he could learn English quickly."
Race furrowed his brow. It would be much easier to interrogate Bub if he knew how to speak American. Save a helluva lot of time.
The disadvantage would be that Bub would understand everything they said, but indications showed that he was understanding a lot already. Besides, better to know what your enemy knows than to not know if he knows anything or not.
"Andy, you've taught several languages. Have you ever taught English?"
"To people."
"Can you do it?"
"I don't think... I mean... he's a..."
"Yes or no, Mr. Dennison?"
"I don't know. I'd need materials."
"Like what?"
"Well, some language programs. A chalk board. Children's books."
"How about one of those phonics programs for kids?" Sun suggested. "We could wheel in a big screen TV and a DVD."
"That might work," Andy nodded.
"So when do you think he could know enough to answer questions in English?" Race asked.
"Well, I couldn't possibly predict when... I mean, there's no precedent for this."
"How long did it take you to learn Japanese?"
"I got a good grasp of the language in about a week, but it took a while before I was fluent."
"You have until tomorrow. Write down all of the supplies you'll need, I'll have them air dropped here within the hour."
"Tomorrow? That's ridiculous. I wouldn't even know how to begin."
"With the ABCs," Race said, heading for the door. "I'll be in the Octopus. Let me know what you need."
This was an interesting turn of events, Race thought. Interesting indeed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Why was she tied to this bed? Where was her husband? She called to him.
"Regis! Regis, help me!"
Then her legs began to tremble violently. She tried but couldn't control the shaking, which became more and more spastic. Her arms followed suit, flapping up and down on the short tethers as if she were being electrocuted.
Without the tethers she might have whacked herself in the face. Perhaps that's what they were for.
The tremors subsided, and a memory flickered in her mind, so quickly that it might have been simply a fleeting thought and not a memory at all. A memory of her mother, tethered to a bed like she was, cursing uncontrollably.
"Mother was sick," she said aloud, alone in her hospital bed.
This was a hospital, wasn't it? The walls were white. The bed had rails. There was medical equipment on a cart next to her. But when she listened, there were no other noises. Weren't hospitals noisy places, full of comings and goings and doctors and nurses and intercoms? If this wasn't a hospital, where was she?
"Regis!" she called out. "Regis, where am I! Help me, Regis!"
The door opened, and an old man walked in. He looked so familiar, but she couldn't place him. He was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. Not a doctor. A visitor?
"I'm here, Helen. It's me."
"Do I know you?"
"It's Regis, Helen. Your husband."
"Bullshit," she spat. "My husband is a young man. You're an old fart!"
Rather than seem shocked, or even bothered by her outburst, the man simply picked up a hand mirror from one of the medical carts. He held it in front of her.
My God! She was old! How did she get so old?
"We're both old, Helen. You don't remember because you have Huntington's Disease. You've had it for many years now."
"Oh my Lord."
The spike of realization pierced her heart. She remembered now---this awful disease that she inherited from her mother. It debilitated the nervous system, causing memory and motor function loss. The tethers were there to hold her arms down when the chorea hit---frenzied palsies that she couldn't control.
"Oh I remember, Regis, oh dear Lord I remember."
He held her close, running his hands over the back of her head.
"It will be okay soon, Helen. I promise. Things are happening. We'll leave here soon, get you better medical treatment. There's hope. They're making new advancements in gene therapy every day."
His words didn't cheer her. While they were admittedly hopeful, her husband's delivery was wrong. He was saying it like it was something he'd memorized and repeated a hundred times before.
And then it occurred to her... what if he had said it a hundred times before?
The chorea hit again, and he held her quivering body until it passed.
"I... love you... Regis."
"I love you too, Helen. Do you want to sleep for a while?"
She nodded. "And I'm thirsty."
He poured some water from a pitcher on a nearby table and held the glass while she drank. He also checked her diaper, which he found to be clean. She began to cry at the indignity of it.
"Oh, Regis..."
"Shh. I've got something that will help." Regis went to the medicine cabinet hanging on the far wall and removed a syringe and a bottle. He extracted some liquid like a pro.
"Regis, dear, where did you learn to do that?"
He put on a weak smile. "Just a little something to help you sleep and help with the seizures."
"Are you sure you can do this?"
He nodded, and placed a hand on her face to stroke her cheek.
The shot didn't hurt at all. As she began to get drowsy, she concentrated on her husband's words.
"He has powers, Helen. Amazing powers. It'll all be okay soon. I promise."
"Who has powers, Regis?" she asked.
"Bub does, Helen. Everything will be okay soon."
She tried to focus on him and smiled. "I know it will, dear. I love you."
"I love you too, Helen. Sweet dreams."
She drifted off to sleep, thinking about her husband, wondering how he got so old.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Faith would be a thing of the past.
Electrified by the idea, Father Michael Thrist stared at Bub. The beast crouched in front of the Plexiglas while Andy, Sun, and Dr. Belgium pointed out the ABCs on a chalkboard. Could this demon be the thing Thrist had been searching for all these years?
Michael entered the priesthood thirty years ago. A double threat---severe acne and a facial tic than caused him to blink and twitch his upper lip at inopportune moments---made college hell, even at a prestigious school like Notre Dame.
Sophomore year he switched his major from biology to theology, partly because he believed he'd never get a date in his life, but mostly because he found science woefully inadequate to explain the many mysteries of the universe.
After completing his pre-theologate, he served as a deacon for two years at a small church in Gary, Indiana. The area was poor, with one of the highest murder rates in the US. When he received the sixth sacrament and entered the priesthood, he requested a transfer from the archdiocese.
Then came his ascension, as he liked to call it. Which lead him to his current position at Samhain, and to watching a linguist and a vet try teach a demon ABC's.
Shotzen leaned over and whispered to Thrist, "Soon they'll be roasting marshmallows and singing campfire songs."
Thrist ignored the comment. Couldn't Shotzen see what was before them? How could he remain skeptical? If anyone should be skeptical, it was Thrist. He'd had the training.
After Indiana, Michael had been assigned to a low income Hispanic neighborhood on Chicago's west side. Though fluent in Spanish---a natural extension of the Latin he learned in school---his new flock never accepted an Anglo as one of their own, especially one whose was always winking and twitching the left side of his face.
He'd been there for a year when the altar boy came to his room, jabbering about a miracle. A local woman had a painting of the Virgin Mary that was crying tears of blood. Thrist had gone to see for himself.
"You're not buying this, are you?" Shotzen whispered, interrupting his reverie.
"What do you mean?" Thrist replied. "And what's with the whispering?"
"Shh! Come here, in private."
The Rabbi ushered the priest out of his chair and over to the corner of the room, between the data banks of the Cray computer.
"Don't you see what I see?" Shotzen urged, his cherubic eyes looking very serious.
"What do you see, Rabbi?"
"Bub, the demon. I think he already knows English. This is all deception."
"Ridiculous."
"If it were an angel in there, instead of a devil, wouldn't you think it already knew English? If this thing is from the pits of hell, surely they know English in hell? If hell exists, the English have been going there for a thousand years."
"But if he did know English already, why pretend otherwise?"
"Baalzebub is the master of lies, Father. It is his nature to deceive. You said so yourself. Perhaps he's buying some time."
"Buying time until what?"
The chubby holy man shrugged.
Thrist stopped short of rolling his eyes. "Look, Rabbi, the creature has only been awake for a week. He was discovered in Panama, which, the last time I checked, is not an English-speaking country. He'd been buried since the time of the Mayans. It's hardly likely he knows English."
Shotzen folded his arms. "I'm convinced he's deceiving us."
"Do you at least agree he's a demon?"
"I'm undecided. You're the debunking expert, yet you seem to be eating this up."
"If Bub's a fake, I can't spot it." Thrist said. "And I'm good at spotting deception."
The bleeding painting had been unremarkable in its execution, a typical pieta scene. But streaking down the Virgin's face were trails of blood, and a puddle the size of a throw rug was pooling on the floor.
Thrist's first reaction to it was disbelief, but upon examination he couldn't find any holes or tubes behind the canvas, and the blood smelled, felt, and even tasted real. Could this truly be a miracle?
The gathering crowd seemed to think so. The old mestizo woman who owned the painting was charging people five dollars a head to come in and genuflect after dipping their fingers in the puddle of blood.
This incensed the priest. His parishioners were worshiping a false idol, rather than God. But he couldn't figure out the trick.
His epiphany would come the following day at lunch, when he was making himself a grilled cheese sandwich in the toaster oven. He'd left it in too long and the toast burned, all of the cheese melting and leaking out from between the bread.
That, of course, was the answer.
He had returned to the apartment, his Roman collar allowing him to bypass a line that stretched around the block, and again asked to examine the painting. The several burly men standing over the growing pile of money almost refused, but the old woman relented. In one quick move Thrist seized the painting and dashed it to the floor.
There were several cries of horror. The cries turned to outrage when he held up the broken frame and showed the crowd the hollow middle where the blood had been stored. Then he tore the false canvas off the back of the painting, exposing the thin plastic tube that fed the blood from the reservoir in the frame to the Virgin's eyes. They had sandwiched the tube between two canvases, attempting to make them appear as one. Thrist guessed that there was a hole somewhere in the frame that they could use to refill it with chicken blood, or whatever blood they'd been using.
"Still searching for the fakery?" Shotzen mused. "It's there. You just aren't looking close enough."
"I've been looking for it for over thirty years," Thrist replied.
Shotzen sighed. "Michael, you've said it yourself. Adonai works in subtle ways. You've spoken to me about your acne and your facial tic, and how they went away during your early years as a priest. That's how ha-shem works. He isn't a show off like this."
Shortly after he'd proven the painting a fake, Thrist's childhood afflictions had gone away. But whether that had been a sign from God or simply a physical manifestation of his own growing self-confidence, Thrist had never decided.
"Rabbi, what other explanation is there? We've been discussing this since your arrival more than twenty years ago. We've done the research. We've posed the theories. Fallen angel, genetic experiment, biological weapon, man in a rubber suit---neither of us can find any evidence of fraud."
"So just because we can't see it, it isn't there? During your tour as Vatican Examiner, did you ever authenticate a miracle?"
Thrist frowned. "No."
It had been a wonderful time for Thrist, serving the Lord with a renewed vigor. His Eminence the Cardinal removed him from the Chicago parish and Thrist traveled throughout the Americas, investigating miraculous phenomena. Sometimes the occurrence was amusing, such as the case in Texas where Christ's face had appeared simultaneously on several dozen cow patties---they turned out to be hoof marks. Sometimes it was appalling, such as the baby who was supposedly exhibiting signs of the stigmata, when actually it was his disturbed mother inflicting the wounds with a razor blade.
But for all his travels, he never authenticated a miracle.
"Look at the mounting evidence," Thrist insisted. "Bub has mentioned both heaven and Jesus Christ. He can resurrect sheep. He speaks in ancient tongues..."
"What language is he speaking now?"
"I'm not sure. Sounds like Egyptian."
"I tell you, the beast is a liar. He can speak all languages, I'm convinced. Watch this."
Shotzen marched over the Plexiglas and gave it a tap, drawing Bub's attention.
"Anachnu holchim leshamen otcha ve'lehchol otcha," he said to Bub.
Bub cocked his head to the side, doing a damn good imitation of confusion.
"What did he say?" Sun asked.
"He told Bub we're going to fatten him up and eat him," Andy turned to Shotzen. "Isn't the food here good enough for you, Rabbi?"
"Fah!" Shotzen said, pointing at the demon. "You understand me. I know you do. Admit it!"
Bub looked hard at Shotzen, and the holy man took a step back, dropping his arm.
"He understands me." Shotzen whispered. "Every word."
"Perhaps Yiddish?" Thrist offered a tight smile. Mirth was an emotion he rarely showed, but the whole idea of a demon speaking Hebrew amused him. Everyone knew demons spoke Latin.
Epiphany.
"Latin," Thrist said aloud.
He rushed the glass, pressing his palms against it.
"Potesne dicere Latinam?" he asked Bub.
Can you speak Latin?
The demon turned his attention to the priest. "Ita, Latinam dico."
Yes, I speak Latin.
"Ubi Latinam didicisti?" Thrist asked.
Where did you learn Latin?
"Me abimperatore in loco appellato Roma ea docta est."
It was taught to me by an emperor in a place called Rome.
"Quis rex erat? Quando regnabat?"
Who was this king? When did he rule?
"Aliquem hac aetate eum noscere dubito. Misere cecidit. Membra senatus sui eum insidiis interfecerunt."
I doubt anyone remembers him in this era. He died poorly. Members of his senate assassinated him.
"Caesar!" Thrist cried, his voice cracking in an octave that was normally too high for him. "Julius Caesar!"
"Illud erat nomen," Bub said. His voice was oddly sensual, almost a verbal caress. "Quis nunc imperator tuus est?"
That was his name. Who is your emperor in this age?"
"What just happened?" Sun asked.
"Apparently Julius Caesar taught Bub Latin," Andy replied.
Thrist's heart was threatening to burst from his rib cage. He was talking with a being who lived in the era of Christ. In the same part of the world. This was even more incredible than he'd imagined.
A demon by itself was ample evidence for the existence of God. But could this creature also prove without doubt that Jesus was God's son on earth?
This was the dawn of a new era. Religious differences, agnosticism, atheism, war, inhumanity; they'd all be things of the past. The world would embrace Bub's message and a collective effort would be made to worship the one true God. The Christian God.
Thrist's God.
"Habesne cognitionem viri religiosi ex Galileo, qui in Bethlehem natus est? Iudaes qui multos disipulos habebat?"
Did you know of a religious man from Galleli, born in Bethlehem? A Jew with a large following?
"Jeeeesus Christ," Bub said the name in English. "I haaaaave seeeeen Jeeeeesus."
The breath caught in Thrist's throat and his lower jaw began to tremble. All the Bible study, all the research, all the prayers, none of it had brought Thrist as close to God as he was feeling right now.
"Narro de eo, sis."
Please, tell me of him.
"Father," Rabbi Shotzen cut in. "We have time for this later."
"Narro de eo," Thrist implored.
"Father," Shotzen sighed, "please let them get on with their work. This can wait."
"Bullshit!" the priest spat at Shotzen. The rabbi recoiled in surprise. "You don't want to hear of it because you don't want to hear the truth! For two thousand years you've been waiting for a Messiah that already came! You missed Him! Now's your chance to atone for your mistake!"
Thrist turned to Bub and begged, "Tell me of Jesus! Tell me what you know!"
The demon stretched his mouth wide in a grin.
"Serius, Pater. Tempus sine arbitrus mox habebimus."
Later, Father. We'll have time alone soon.
Bub was using the same soothing voice that he'd used with the sheep.
"Sciendus sum! Eratne Deus? Estne natus ex virgine? Cognitionem eius habebas... erasne qui in desertis eum temptabas? Heu, sciendus sum!"
I must know! Was he God? Was he born of a virgin? You knew him... were you the one that tempted him in the desert? I must know dammit!
"Soooooon," soothed the demon. He gave his attention back to Andy and Sun.
Thrist banged on the glass, but Bub paid him no mind.
Thrist stepped back and looked at the others. Andy looked embarassed. Sun was frowning. He turned to Rabbi Shotzen, and was stunned to see the sadness on his friend's chubby face.
"I... I'm..."
Shotzen gave him his back.
"For a man of faith you're showing surprisingly little," the Rabbi said.
Thrist opened his mouth, closed it again. His face became very hot. He didn't trust his voice. He reached for the crucifix hanging from his neck.
Christ felt cold in his hand.
Thrist hurried out the door, hurried down the Red Arm, fumbling the code for the first gate several times, fumbling several more times at the second, racing to his room and falling on his knees next to his bed, his hands clasped in prayer but his mind unable to dismiss Shotzen's words and the possibility that they might be true.
CHAPTER NINE
Frank Belgium watched from the sanctuary of his computer terminal. He'd returned to Red 14 after spending half an hour in the bathroom, feeling the urge to vomit but unable to.
Belgium knew it was a physical response to fear. When the demon awoke last week, that was frightening enough. But his voice---soft, low, almost seductive---was the voice of a thousand nightmares.
Though he sat far enough away from the speech lesson to be unable to hear Bub, watching proved disconcerting all by itself. There was something upsetting and grotesque about a demon watching a children's television show. Bub's blank stare made Belgium wonder if he was indeed learning how to conjugate verbs, or if he was wondering how the child actors tasted.
The doctor shivered, nibbling on his lower lip.
Get a grip, he told himself. The demon seemed to be cooperating so far. Maybe it wasn't his fault he was so frightening.
Andy stood, stretched, and said something to Sun. She stood as well, answered him and nodded, and they walked out of the room.
Bub watched them leave. His stare lingered on the door for almost ten seconds, then his eyes locked on Belgium.
Belgium tried to swallow, but couldn't.
"Fraaaaaank," Bub said, loud enough to be heard from across the room. "Fraaaaaank Beeeeeelgium..."
Belgium turned away, wondering if the demon would leave him alone if he pretended to be working.
"Fraaaaaank..."
"I'm busy," he said, trying to make his voice sound unafraid.
"Fraaaaaank...... what does Craaaaay computer dooooo?"
That seemed like an innocent enough question.
"Umm, The Cray? It stores and processes information."
"In Englisssssssh?"
"In computer language."
"Dooooooes it... taaaaaaalk?"
"Talk? No no no. Computers don't talk. But we can use them to talk to others who have computers with an Internet connection."
"Internet coooooonnection?"
"The World Wide Web lets people with computers access all the information available in the world."
"Would the Woooorld Wide Web help me learn Engliiiiiiish?"
Belgium hunched down lower and ruffled some papers on his desk.
"Sure. The Internet has everything on it."
"I waaaaant Internet coooooonnection," Bub said.
Dr. Belgium turned around and ratcheted up his spine. He didn't quite stare at Bub so much as stare in his general direction.
"You're too too too big. Sorry. You couldn't use the keyboard."
Bub didn't answer, and Belgium hoped the conversation had ended. Being alone in the room with the creature was freaking him out. He got up to leave.
"Come heeeeere," Bub said.
Belgium stopped, mid-stride, his mouth going dry.
"Coooooome heeeeeere, Fraaaaaank."
Relax, Belgium though. He's behind the Plexiglas. He can't hurt me.
He changed direction and approached Bub.
"Yes? What is it?"
Bub extended a claw and touched it to the Plexiglas. Then there was a shrill screeching sound and his finger became a blur, moving faster than any human being possibly could.
It was over in an instant, and Dr. Belgium was amazed to see that Bub had etched the entire English alphabet, both upper case and lower case letters, onto the glass in a space less than the size of a credit card. So impressed was the doctor, that it didn't occur to him that Bub had written it as a mirror image, which allowed Frank to see it the normal way.
"Well, I guess typing wouldn't be too difficult for you then. Remarkable small muscle control. Yes yes yes."
"I waaaaant Internet cooooonnection," Bub said.
"I I I don't see how. We'd have to rig something up. Maybe we could use, um, a wireless router."
Bub moved closer to the Plexiglas, the corners of his mouth turning up into a smile. He moved quite well for such a large creature, thought Belgium. Like a dancer, smooth and quick.
Or like a cobra.
"Let meeee ooooout," Bub said, "I caaaan use your compuuuuuuter."
Dr. Belgium blinked. "Uh, no Bub. It's safer for you in there."
"Yoooou aaaare afraaaaaid."
"No no no. Not at all. I'm a scientist, Bub. I study things."
"You study meeeeee."
"Yes."
"With the Craaaaay compuuuuuuter."
"Yes. That's part of it."
"Hoooooow?"
"Well, Bub, I'm trying to sequence your DNA. Your karyotype shows you have 88 chromosomes. This is over 300,000 genes, about six billion base pairs. I want to figure out what your genes are, so I can see what you're related to. All life on earth is related to something, some things more than others."
Bub stared, saying nothing. Belgium continued, fear making him ramble.
"What I'm doing is using the Sanger procedure, along with whole genome shotgun sequencing. First, I take some of your DNA---a blood sample---and make a template by subcloning into a YAC. I'm using restriction enzymes in gel electrophoresis to get a 1000 sequence base read that the computer can interpret as a chromatogram. It's all very simple, really. Simple simple simple."
"Hoooow much of my DNA haaaaave you seeeequenced?"
"Only about forty percent. The problem comes from not knowing enough about DNA. Only ten percent of an organism's chromosomes contain exon genes---those are the ones that protein code, which account for an organism's physiology. Intron genes are responsible for growing, aging, things we don't know yet... so sequencing is only half the battle. The Cray is also trying to sort out what is exon and what is intron, and trying to find matches with other life forms."
Bub blinked. Belgium had never noticed him blink before. His eyelids closed sideways, like elevator doors. It was disconcerting.
"You analyze my bloooooood," Bub said. His voice had dropped an octave. "What else do you anaaaaaaalyze?"
"We have tissue samples going back 100 years."
Bub appeared to think about this.
"Why do yooooou study meeee, Fraaaaaaank?"
"Hmm? Oh. To figure out what you are, my friend. Physiologically, you're more advanced than anything on earth. Mentally too. You've been learning English for less than six hours and already you're conversant. You're an amazing specimen."
"Amaaaaaazing."
"Very. For example, you clearly have the X and Y chromosomes, making you a male, but you have no genitalia... at least not that we've been able to find. Nor do you have a belly button. How were you born? How does your kind reproduce? Or is there only one of you? Questions questions questions."
"Why are you heeeeere, Fraaaank?"
"To study you, Bub. The opportunity you represent is limitless, I've been doing research for..."
Bub cut him off. "You have to beeee heeeeeere."
Frank's words died in his mouth, leaving a foul taste. "What?" he managed.
"Did you do something wrong, Fraaaaank?"
Dr. Belgium swallowed. His mind involuntarily returned to his prior life, graduating top of his class at Berkeley, already thrice published, a Nobel Prize almost a foregone conclusion...
He'd first taken speed in graduate school. The courses were highly demanding, and he had to postpone sleep in order to learn everything that needed to be learned. Simple caffeine pills at first. Then ephedrine, available over the counter in health stores as ma haung extract. These worked for a time, limiting his sleep to five hours a night, but when five hours became too long, he switched to harder stuff.
A friend was able to hook him up with a Benzedrine supply. Bennies got him through school, got him his job at BioloGen, the largest genetics lab in the world, got him his Porsche, his house, his trophy wife.
But the work was even more demanding than school had been. He switched from Benzedrine pills to injecting Methedrine. To come down after a Methedrine buzz he started taking Librium and later Nembutal. He was stoned on Nembutal when he blew up Labs 4, 5, and 6 at BioloGen.
The police report called it criminal negligence. He'd left the gas line live on a Bunsen burner after the flame had gone out. Not even a kid in high school would have made such a careless mistake. The irony was that the burner wasn't even being used in an experiment. Frank had been using it to heat his coffee.
The explosion caused almost two million dollars worth of damage and lost research. Three people were killed. Frank had been in the bathroom, and walked away without a mark.
He hid nothing. After admitting to the drugs, he demanded to be arrested.
A lawsuit was filed. So were manslaughter charges. Frank lost it all; career, money, wife, and he went to jail. That's where President Reagan found him.
Prison gave him a chance to kick the drugs, and it also gave him penance for his wrongs. Frank didn't want to leave. Reagan arranged for a trip to Samhain, to give Frank an idea of what his country needed him for.
Frank never left. He traded prison of one type for prison of another. This new one was quieter, more demanding, and gave him a chance to help the world while being punished at the same time. Frank hadn't seen a sunset in twenty years. He missed it every day, and that's why he stayed.
Even when the incumbent President pronounced his sentence over, Frank stayed. He would finish the job he started; sequencing Bub's DNA. Only then would his penance be complete.
"That was a long time ago," Frank whispered.
"I can help yoooou."
"How?"
"I knoooow of genetics. I can give you my whole seeeequence. But I need a compuuuuuter."
Frank thought it over. Twenty years without seeing the light of day. Was that long enough? Had he paid for his mistakes?
"I can get you a computer," Dr. Frank Belgium said.
The demon made a sound that Belgium swore was laughter.
CHAPTER TEN
"I like snow, but not a lot of it," Andy mumbled, taking a bite of his turkey sandwich.
"Yeah, not a lot," Sun agreed. "Too much snow and I hate it."
"Exactly. Too much snow isn't good."
Andy groaned inwardly. What the hell were they talking about? And why was Sun even bothering?
He stared at her across the cafeteria table and decided she must be patronizing him, hoping for an opportunity to escape. He couldn't really blame her. The only thing worse than their lame conversation was the food.
Andy looked down at his half-eaten sandwich. It needed fresh lettuce and tomato, neither of which were available. Canned tomatoes were a poor substitute. Even worse, the turkey was processed, and tasted it. Andy wondered how much was actually turkey, and what other chemicals, fillers, and by-products it contained.
"Good sandwich," Andy said.
Sun nodded and looked at her watch. Andy decided not to talk anymore. He'd die if his ears turned red like that again. Last night he had to soak his head in the sink to get them to stop burning.
"You're an attractive guy," Sun said, taking a bite of her sandwich.
Andy waited for the rest, the part where she told him that even though he was attractive, she wasn't interested and hoped they could just be friends.
That part never came.
Was she playing with him? What was he supposed to say back?
Andy opened his mouth to return the compliment, but closed it again when he considered his ears.
Their eyes locked. He realized he was going to say it anyway, but the phone saved him. He got up and answered.
"Who is this, Andy or Sun?"
"This is Andy, Dr. Belgium."
"Andy? This is Dr. Belgium."
"I know."
"I'm in Red 14 with Bub."
"I know. Sun and I are almost done. We'll be right by."
"No no no. Not necessary. Bub said, he said... all of this studying, he needed to rest for a bit. He took---he's taking---a nap. Rest rest rest, must have rest."
"Bub's sleeping," Andy repeated, for Sun's benefit.
"He doesn't sleep long," Sun said. "Maybe fifteen minutes at a time."
"Sun said he doesn't sleep long," Andy said into the receiver.
"I know, but Bub was clear that he wanted to take a break. Rest rest rest."
"Bub needs to rest rest rest," Andy told Sun. "How about an hour?"
"An hour. An hour an hour... make it two hours. I'll be here, when Bub is ready to resume I'll let you know."
"No problem." Andy hung up. "Frank said Bub needs two hours of rest."
"Interesting. Perhaps mental activities leave him more exhausted than physical ones."
"I've always heard sleep is for the mind, not the body."
"I've heard that too." You're so damn beautiful, Andy wanted to say.
Sun said, "So... have you had enough of this clever banter?"
"God yes."
"Do you play racquetball?"
"I'm a racquetball king." Andy tried on a small smile, happy to have the conversation change. "If it ever becomes an Olympic event, I'm sure I'll be picked to represent my country."
"We have some time. Up for a game?"
"Yeah, okay."
"Are you sure? Most men have ego issues when it comes to losing, especially to a woman."
"Not a problem. I'm good at being a loser."
Sun smiled, and the realization of what he just said hit him. Open mouth, insert foot...
"I'll meet you in Purple 5. Say, twenty minutes?"
"Twenty minutes. Fine."
Sun finished her sandwich and stood up.
"It's a date." She spun on her toes and trotted off.
What did she mean by that? Did she mean date as in a man and a woman having fun with a later possibility of sex? Or date as in a scheduled event on a calender?
Fifteen minutes later he was dressed in some blue shorts and a sweatshirt, walking down the Purple Arm. The Secret Service had forwarded his gym shoes, but no gym socks, so he was forced to wear none. None were preferable to argyle, especially around pretty women.
Sun was waiting for him, squatting on the floor with her right leg extended in a stretch. She wore bike pants and a sports bra top, both black.
Did she have any idea of how good she looked? She must have.
So this was a real date.
Right?
On the floor next to her were two racquets. They resembled their tennis counterparts, except their handles were less than half the length. A blue rubber racquetball was in her hand, the manufacturer's label stamped on it in gold.
Mixed signals and potential embarrassment be damned, Andy willed himself to relax and have fun.
"I see you mean to distract me by playing on my weakness."
"What's that?"
"Spandex."
"Nice socks," Sun said. "You'll get blisters."
"I don't plan on doing much running."
"Maybe, since we both seem to be confident in our abilities, we should make a little bet on this game."
"Fine." Andy took a deep breath. "If I win, I get to kiss you."
Sun's cheeks colored.
"I don't think so."
What little ego Andy had left shriveled up. But confidence isn't about how you feel. It's about what you project.
"Why not? Afraid you'll lose on purpose?"
Sun smiled, projecting quite a bit of confidence.
"I'm not going to lose."
"So you have nothing to worry about then."
"Fine. So what do I get when I win?
"You get to kiss me."
"How about a thousand bucks?"
"A thousand bucks? Can we afford it?"
"We're government employees," Sun bounced to her feet and handed him a racquet. "Of course we can afford it."
She gave him a heart-melting grin and trotted into Purple 5.
"You're not really serious, are you?" Andy called after her. "A thousand bucks?"
He walked into the room. It was a standard racquetball court, forty feet long by twenty feet wide. The walls were matte white, marred by several dozen chips and marks. Six florescent lights were set into the twenty foot high ceiling, making it as bright as an operating theater. The floor was wood, with red painted markings for the service area and the fault line.
Andy closed the heavy door behind him. The door had no knob on the inside; there were no protrusions anywhere in the room. The handle was shaped like a half moon and attached to a hinge, and when it wasn't in use it recessed into a depression. Andy likened the court to being inside of a large white box.
"Game is fifteen points, turn over the serve at fourteen, have to win by two. Do you want to stretch?"
"I'll be fine."
Andy grinned but Sun was all business.
"Zero serving zero, for one thousand dollars. Ready?"
Andy bent his knees and held his racquet up. The pose was familiar to him. He'd played racquetball a hundred times, and though the last time he'd played was several years ago, he'd been pretty good.
Sun was better.
Within two minutes she was four points up. Racquetball didn't have bizarre scoring like tennis. It was actually more like Ping-Pong. The goal was to return the ball to your opponent by bouncing it off of the front wall, and you had to do this before it bounced on the floor twice.
By the time Sun was up six to zero, Andy realized she wasn't intending to lose on purpose. So much for wanting to be kissed.
But even though he was behind, he'd gotten a good feel for her game. She was faster than he was, and her ball control was better. On easy volleys she was able to hit the front wall only inches above the floor, making it impossible for him to return.
Andy, however, had the strength advantage, and could hit the ball harder than she could. It wasn't unusual for a racquetball to exceed speeds of ninety miles per hour, and when it was bouncing off four walls that didn't make for an easy return. Andy was also several inches taller than Sun, so he hit the ball high whenever he had a chance, and often the bounce would sail over her head out of reach.
After twenty minutes Andy was able to cut Sun's lead down to one point. His sweatshirt was soaked enough to wring-out, and it was becoming harder to catch his breath between volleys.
Sun didn't appear to be sweating at all.
"You can take a break if you need one," she told him. Her smirk was barely concealed.
He pursed his lips and didn't answer. She served and scored.
"Twelve to ten, are you sure you don't want to get some water?"
Water did sound good.
"After the game. Serve."
It only took four more serves for Sun to win.
She shook his hand with vigor, her smile wide and genuine. Andy handled the loss easily. He just wanted something to drink.
A few minutes later they were in the Mess Hall, each with a large glass of water. Andy was on his third.
"You're better than I thought," Sun said. "You actually gave me a little trouble."
"You could play professionally."
"Well, I did, kind of. American Racquetball Association. Won a few tournaments. No big deal, really. Racquetball stars don't get too many product endorsements."
"You might have shared that info with me before we bet a thousand bucks."
"We've still got an hour before Bub is ready for his next lesson. Want to play again? Double or nothing?"
Andy could feel his muscles starting to cramp up. He knew he wouldn't get through another game. But she was so earnest, so cute. Her eyes were wide and bright and her cheeks had a lovely flush to them. Such a change from the dour, strict women he'd met yesterday.
"Race said something about a pool table. Do you play?"
"I haven't for a while."
"How about a game of nine ball, double or nothing?"
Sun grinned. "You're on. I need to shower and change first. See you in Purple 5 in twenty minutes?"
"It's a date," Andy said.
And as she trotted off, he sincerely hoped it was.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rabbi Menachem Shotzen ended his nightly kaddish by asking G-d to help his friend, Father Thrist, with his crisis of faith.
He took off his braided kippah---a skull cap he received at bar mitzvah, and put it in his tallis bag on top of his tzitzit and his tefillin, both of which were worn only for morning prayer.
The Rabbi glanced at his nightstand. He knew what it contained. And he knew that only minutes prior, he had pleaded with G-d to give him the strength to avoid it.
Shotzen turned away from the temptation and instead seated himself at a small desk to proofread the latest pages of his memoirs.
He hefted the manuscript, now over fifteen hundred hand written pages, and its weight pleased him. Not too bad, especially considering one day and two nights of the week, Shabbes, he was forbidden by Jewish law to write. The first line still made him proud, and he said it softly to himself.
"Blessings and curses, I have had many of both."
He glanced at the nightstand again. One of the curses, for sure. Bub may indeed be demonic, though Shotzen doubted it, but in that drawer was something even worse. Yetzir ha-ra. A denial of G-d.
He approached it just the same.
The liquor was where he had left it, awaiting his return. Shotzen picked up the bottle---half-full of overproof peppermint schnapps---then put it back down. It was a familiar ritual, with a familiar ending. Once the nightstand was opened, the bottle won.
This time the internal struggle lasted barely a minute. Shotzen poured himself a generous glass, cursing his weakness. On his second glass, his curse became a resignation. On his third, it became a toast.
He wasn't sure if he imagined the knock at the door or not. He stopped in mid-gulp and held his breath, listening. The second knock gave him a start.
"Yes?" he answered, almost choking on his schnapps. The bottle was on the desk, empty now, but Shotzen placed it back into the nightstand.
"Menachem? It's Michael."
Shotzen pursed his lips---this was his disapproving look---and he opened the door. Thrist was dressed for Mass, roman collar pristine and starched and green cassock meticulously ironed.
"May I come in?" he asked.
His tone didn't match his dress; it was dull and lacking conviction.
"Of course."
Shotzen stepped aside and allowed him entrance. He closed the door quietly and found Thrist staring at his glass of schnapps. It still held a finger or so.
"Not on account of my reprehensible behavior, I hope," Thrist said.
"My disease needs no provocation," Shotzen answered. He and Thrist had talked many times about alcoholism. In fact, Thrist was the only one that Shotzen discussed it with.
"I am sorry, Menachem."
"Passion is a refreshing emotion to see in you," Shotzen replied. "In our many dialogs throughout the years I don't recall you ever yelling like that before."
"It was inexcusable, both the tone and the content."
"Nothing is inexcusable, as long as there is remorse. Apology accepted, Father."
Shotzen offered his hand, which the priest clasped in both of his.
"You are a dear friend."
"As are you."
Thrist sat on the bed and nodded at the manuscript.
"Working on the memoirs?"
"Pathetic, no? There sits my life, never to be read by anyone under penalty of government execution."
"Time passes, Rabbi, whether we want it to or not. At least you have something to show for it."
"True. My legacy. How preferable it is to a wife and child."
Thrist's long face became longer. "Have you ever heard from Reba?"
"Not once since I granted her the get, the divorce. And why should I? Ha-shem told the Jews to be fruitful and multiply, and I... I have no lead in my pencil. Between the sterility and the alcohol, it is no wonder she grew to hate me."
"You could have adopted."
Shotzen smiled. "I could have stopped drinking as well. I'd still have it all; her, my synagogue, my congregation---perhaps even my father would still be alive. He died of shame, you know, when I showed up at Temple and read from the Torah drunk as drunk can be."
"We all have our crosses to bear."
"I so dislike that expression," Shotzen frowned. "But what of you, Father? No desire for children? Women? Adonai made you a man, He cannot then deny you a man's needs."
"God can bless the beasts and the children, because I never cared much for either," Thrist said with the barest of smiles. "And sex?" "I was created to serve God. Perhaps that is why he denied me any charisma whatsoever."
Shotzen laughed, "I'm happy that you're able to find your sense of humor, after this afternoon. If I were the devil, I would have done the same thing to test your faith."
Thrist nodded. "So you agree it is a possibility that Bub is the devil?"
"No. No more than I agree that Jesus was the moshiach. But when something has the appearance of Satan it would make sense for it to also imitate the demeanor."
Thrist absorbed this. "And if Bub indeed knew Christ?"
"The beauty of faith, Michael, is that there is no need for proof. Belief in a feeling is more powerful than belief in a fact. Ha-shem could surely appear to the world at any time and squelch all doubts. But Adonai prefers faith."
"But what if Bub is a sign from God? Think of it, Rabbi. Nothing happens by accident. The Lord preordains all. Bub was sent here, by God, as proof of His existence. I agree with the power of faith, but Christ also taught us the power of proof."
"Familiar argument. Christ was not the son of Adonai. Ha-shem can not be man. None of the prophesies were fulfilled."
"They were all fulfilled."
Shotzen reached for his glass and finished the schnapps. He was halfway to the nightstand when he remembered the bottle was empty.
"Let's stick with the current argument," Shotzen said. He sat on his bed, facing Father Thrist. "What do we know of ha-satan?"
"The Adversary. First mentioned in Job 1:6. Taken to mean the opponent of God."
Shotzen nodded, his double chin jiggling. "But before that was Ma'lak, the shadow side of Ha-Shem, turned to humanity because Adonai was too bright to be seen by mortals. Later, In Jubilees, it had become a separate entity. Mastema, the Accusing angel."
"Dualism," Thrist added, "probably taken from Zoroaster. Ahriman the Lord of Darkness. Zarathrustra's concept of good and evil as opposing forces."
"Zoroaster's era is highly debated; he could have lived anywhere from the 18th century B.C. up until the 7th... five hundred years after Moses. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he may have taken his ideas of deities from the Egyptians, Set and Ra, and prior to them, the Mesopotamians with Ereshkigal. The Queen of the Underworld. The first recorded mention of hell."
Thrist nodded. "Mmm-hmm. Predating Judaism. But none of these would be an accurate description of our Bub, so let's move ahead."
"Agreed. In Enoch, Lucifer, the Bearer of Light, was cast out of heaven because of lust. Or pride, in Enoch's second chronicle, or free will according to Origen of Alexandria, or disobedience, or a war in heaven..."
"He has many names and many incarnations. Satan-el. Abbaddon. Astarot. Rahab. Rofacale. Moloch. Leviathan. Baal-beryth. Metatron..."
"Metatron is an archangel."
"He is referred to in Exodus, interpreted as the lessor Yahweh, ordering atrocities upon his chosen people. He could indeed be the first devil, the shadow side of God."
"You are misguided, as usual, but let's go on. There's Beliel, the prince of Sheol. Also Baalzebub. Azazel. Mastema. Mammon. Belphegor. Kakabel. Lahash. Sammael..."
"Tartaruchus," Thrist continued. "Zophiel. Xaphan. Baresches. Biqa. Salmael..."
"I said Salmael."
"You said Sammael, not Salmael."
"They aren't the same?"
"Sammael is the Angel of Poison, Sumerian in origin. Salmael is a Duke of Hell, who each year calls for the annihilation of the chosen tribes of Israel."
"Ah! How could I have forgotten that one? So which of these nasty beings do you believe Bub to be?"
Thrist touched his chin. "I'm not sure. He may not be any of them. He may be all of them. Our current conceptions of Satan and hell began after Rome fell. The hysterical visions of Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England in the year 731. The Vision of Tundal in 1149 offers a detailed look at the tortures of Hell."
Shotzen was familiar with them all. "Much more influential was Dante," the Rabbi added. "He gave us the description of the circles of hell and its demons in 1306. William Blake, Bosch, Breughel, Giotto, Memlinc---all famous religious painters who gave modern man images of a bat-winged, cloven-hooved, horned angel from hell."
"Martin Luther, John Calvin, Milton's Paradise Lost... they also helped hone the modern image. And Marlowe and Goethe's versions of Faust."
"Yes," Shotzen nodded, his chins bouncing. "The devil as an intellectual. Gentleman Jack. Old Nick. Old Scratch. Mephistopheles. Old Horny. Black Bogey. And now, he's an icon of pop culture." Shotzen shrugged. "He's in cartoons, movies, television shows, commercials..."
"Worshiped by thousands of school children in the form of rock music. Did I ever tell you about the time the arch diocese sent me to a Black Sabbath concert in the early 1970's?"
Shotzen sighed. "Yes. You've shown me your souvenir T-shirt. I doubt there is anything about you I don't know."
"Which brings us back to topic. What do we have here?"
The Rabbi felt good. His mind was clear; clearer than it had been without the liquor. Shotzen once read that booze was proof that G-d loves us and wants us to be happy. The Talmud also stated that we would be held accountable in the world to come for every permitted food and drink we have had the opportunity to eat yet not eaten. Why should being drunk be considered a sin?
"Both of our religions believe in angels, correct?" Thrist asked.
"Yes."
"And angels can fall from grace, just as man can."
"Natch. But Jews don't believe in a fiery hell where souls are tortured for eternity by red devils with pitchforks. Sheol, the pit, is nothing more than the absence of God. And most believe it doesn't last any longer than eleven hours."
Thrist held up his hands as if stopping an oncoming car. "Let's hold off on hell for a second. Is it possible for a fallen angel to visit earth?"
"Perhaps. But demons aren't prevalent in Jewish midrash. They're usually allegorical. For example Kesef, the demon who attacked Moses at Horeb, is the Hebrew word for silver."
Thrist sighed. "Menachem, open your mind for a moment. When President Carter recruited you for Samhain, you were publishing that underground newsletter---"
"The Wandering Jew," Shotzen said with pride.
"You were America's foremost expert in Judaic mysticism."
Shotzen thought back to those years, living like a hermit in a one bedroom apartment, studying and interpreting ancient texts. The Kabbalah and Zohar, a little known Jewish tome which revealed how to obtain peace on earth. The 4th century Haggadah, a collection of Jewish legends and exegetical treaties. The apocrypha, the hidden scriptures of the Torah compiled during the period of exile in Babylonia.
"Michael, you've read the same texts. Seven heavens and seven earths, with twenty one layers of reality hooked together by wires. Gehenna, a continent on Arqa which encompasses the seven layers of hell---this is all allegory."
"Take a good look at Bub, Rabbi, and tell me he is allegory. You agree fallen angels could visit the earth?"
"Perhaps."
"Then perhaps this fallen angel, this devil, would take on a familiar appearance, even if it is the appearance that mankind gave him."
"Go on."
"If Bub was truly alive at the time of Christ..."
"Again with Christ?"
"Christ as Messiah isn't the point. Can you believe that there was once a living breathing person named Jesus Christ?"
"There is mention of him in Josephus, so yes. But every knee has not bowed, there is no universal peace, the lion has not lain down with the lamb, nor does every tongue swear loyalty to the one true God."
Thrist frowned. "You're missing the point. You have conceded that devils exist, and that Jesus existed. Now the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all make the claim that Beelzebub tempted Jesus while he fasted in the desert. Luke 4:5 Then the Devil took him up..."
"Please," Shotzen grimaced. "We don't want to play the scripture quoting game again."
"Fine. The point is, if Julius Caesar indeed taught Bub how to speak Latin, and Caesar died in 44 BC, isn't it conceivable that it was Bub who tempted Christ in the desert?"
"That was eighty years later."
"Demons don't age. He's been here for 100 years and looks exactly the same. Can't you at least admit it could be possible?"
"Possible, yes. Probable, no. Whether Bub is a demon or something pretending to be a demon, it makes sense for him to act like a demon. Lies, deceptions, flattery, bribery, bargaining, tempting, wheeling and dealing; these are Satan's tricks. I contend he heard the name Christ and played on your reaction to it."
Thrist's wrinkles deepened and he pursed his lips. "So he also heard the name Julius Caesar?" he countered.
"He was found in 1906. Say he was buried in the 1800's, or even the 1700's or 1600's. He could have known the names of both Christ and Caesar. He spoke Maya when he woke up, and the Mayans were conquered by the Spanish, who were Christians, if I remember my history. That was one of the ways they justified the genocide of the indigenous South American people. They claimed it was Adonai's will to slaughter the heathens."
"Bah!" Thrist threw his hands in the air and stood up. "The problem with you, Rabbi, is your insistence on the past to explain the present. Until you find some kind of precedent for Bub in one of your ancient mystic texts, you'll continue to deny what you see with your own eyes."
"What is more important Father---what I see with my eyes or what I feel with my heart?"
"You were born and raised a Jew, and that's why you are a Jew. It was what you were taught. I'm Catholic because that's what I was taught. But faith is not a substitute for proof, no matter how much you insist. Anyone with a high school education can argue that the world is more than 6000 years old. Yet that is what our religions teach. Atheists have attacked the Bible from all angles, finding one discrepancy after another. How does the Church refute these claims of no God? Faith! But that doesn't matter anymore!"
Thrist was shouting now, his finger pointing at Shotzen.
"I could show the entire world the Bible, and only some will believe. But if I showed the entire world our friend Bub, ALL WOULD BELIEVE!"
Thrist sprung to his feet, his face bright red, breathing as if he'd just run a marathon.
Shotzen chose his words carefully. "Bub is not a sign from ha-shem, Father."
"Yes, he is."
"Perhaps you need some time off, to rest. Can't you confer with the arch diocese?"
Thrist stormed over to the door and opened it. He turned before leaving. "I need time off," Thrist said, "like you need another drink."
Thrist left, closing the door behind him.
Shotzen mulled it over.
"I cannot argue with logic like that," he said.
Then he left his room to get another bottle of schnapps.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dr. Julie Harker walked by Rabbi Shotzen in the Purple Arm, avoiding eye contact.
"Good evening, Dr. Harker," Shotzen said as he passed.
Harker didn't bother replying.
She was on her way to Purple 8 to find a movie to watch. Something to kill the evening. Shotzen, the doctor surmised, was coming back from Purple 6. That's where the liquor was kept. The Rabbi had been holding something at his side, trying to conceal it. Trying to hide his secret.
Harker knew about having secrets.
She entered Purple 8 and hit the light. The room was arranged like a library, which made sense because it was essentially just that. But unlike Red 3, which held documents about Project Samhain, this was put here for the entertainment needs of the staff. Harker walked past the shelving units filled with fiction, past the several large magazine racks (the compound had subscriptions to 58 different magazines, and issues were dropped off every few months with supplies), and past the archaic film collection (actual 16mm films in cans on reels.)
The video collection was one aisle over from film. It included the obsolete reel-to-reel format, which replaced kinescope for recording television from the 60s, and the racks of ¾" tapes which became standard in the 70s. None of these interested Harker. She continued down the isle until she reached the first commercially produced tapes for home use. Betamax.
Samhain's Beta selection was among the largest in the world. It may have also been the only remaining one in the world as well, since the Sony format had become obsolete years prior to VHS. There were over 20,000 titles, arranged alphabetically and according to genre.
Harker didn't give the Action/Adventure section a glance. She also passed up Drama, Westerns, and the Adult aisle. Samhain had an ample pornography section, both magazine and video, much of it vintage and also worth a lot of money. The armed forces have known for many years that a man's sex drive can put him off task, so the easiest thing to do was cater to it. Harker had no interest in that.
She came to a stop at Comedy and found the films she was looking for immediately. Poor Little Rich Girl. Curly Top. Baby Take a Bow. Her eyes began to mist. These were three of her all time favorites.
Harker loved Shirley Temple. Loved her so much that she named her daughter Shirley. It had been the realization of a life long dream.
Dr. Julie Harker was born to be a mother. In her earliest memories, she'd always had a doll. Something to feed, and change, and talk to. Something that loved her as much as she loved it. In Julie's childhood her dolls were real babies, and she was the perfect Mama.
She knew the psychology behind it. She knew the reasons she had such a strong maternal urge. Both of Julie's parents had been unfit. Alcoholics. Abusers. They never should have had children. Kids were supposed to be a joy. But in Harker's house, she had been a burden.
"You're so fat and ugly," she could remember her father saying over and over. "We'll never be able to marry you off. We'll be stuck with you forever."
Not if Julie could help it. She knew she wasn't attractive, even if her parents hadn't reminded her of the fact constantly. Besides her weight problem and somewhat masculine features, Julie was painfully shy. She went through four years of high school without a friend or a date. But there was more to life than looks.
Julie Harker graduated at the top of her class, and had her pick of colleges. Medical school was tough, and her poor people skills were an obstacle, but Julie's saving grace was her way with children. She joined a pediatric practice after her internship, but that was only half of the equation. She still needed to have a child of her own.
With the tapes nestled safely under her arm, Harker left Purple 8 and returned to her room. She put Curly Top in the VCR and hit REWIND. Then she turned off the lights and undressed.
Samhain wasn't so bad, she decided. Compared to that month of sheer hell she spent in prison, this place was almost pleasant. True, it would never be like it was, raising Shirley and Shirley.
Harker frowned as the memory returned. The first Shirley had been hers. Julie had planned it carefully. She'd considered artificial insemination, but was leery about the honesty of the donors. Several times she went to bars, hoping to get picked up, but the men who hit on her didn't have the kind of genes she wanted passed on to her child.
She finally settled on her neighbor's son. He was seventeen, gawky and inexperienced, but from good stock. Her first attempts at seduction were laughable, but she lucked out one night when his parents weren't home, and after sharing a bottle of wine they did the deed.
Nine months later, Shirley was born. There were complications; profuse bleeding that resulted in a full hysterectomy, but Shirley was perfect. Her daughter was beautiful, actually physically beautiful, and Julie Harker was happy beyond all expectations.
For seven wonderful months, Harker raised Shirley. It was the greatest time in her life. Shirley healed every scar Harker had retained from her upbringing. She was a dream come true.
The autopsy report called it SIDS. Sudden infant death syndrome. Sometime during the night, Shirley had stopped breathing. When Harker found her in the morning, she was blue.
Dr. Julie Harker thought she handled the situation very well. Being a pediatrician, she easily gained admission to the hospital's nursery. She'd just lost a child, and could never give birth to another, so why shouldn't she have a replacement? Julie was born to be a mother. It wasn't fair that she was denied her birthright.
The second Shirley was actually named Jennifer. She was four days old when Harker smuggled her out of the hospital. That same day she fled the country, finding work as a nurse in Canada. She'd had this Shirley for almost a year, raising her and loving her as much as she had the first Shirley, before the authorities found her.
They came for her while she was nursing. She saw the police car outside. She knew they'd try to take Shirley away from her.
Harker couldn't allow that.
She ran out the back door, Shirley wrapped in a blanket, ran into the woods with the police right behind her. She was hysterical, frantic, and never saw the branch she tripped over.
When Harker fell, she landed on top of Shirley.
After being extradited to the United States, she was tried and convicted of kidnaping and second-degree murder.
Prison almost destroyed Julie. She'd lost two kids in a ten month period, and the grief consumed her. Prison was worse than school, with the teasing and harassment. Julie was attacked many times, and her mental state flip-flopped between constant grief and terror.
President Reagan's call was a blessing.
Harker had been in the prison infirmary, recovering from a botched suicide attempt. Reagan had made it very clear that he didn't like Harker, or the things she'd done, and didn't care one way or the other what happened to her. But he offered Harker a choice. She could either carry out her life sentence in prison, or at a fully equipped secret facility in New Mexico, looking after the daily health of a research team.
Harker made the obvious decision. The VCR stopped and Harker pressed PLAY, then she curled up in bed to watch the video.
Yes, Samhain was a prison of sorts, and yes, she would probably die here, but life could be worse. And maybe, now that Bub was talking, the project would end. Maybe, after over twenty years of service, Harker would get a reprieve. There was always hope.
"Hello, Shirley," Harker said as the movie began, the tears starting to flow. "Sing a song for Mama."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After her shower, Sun put on a pair of blue jeans and a snug black top with a V-neck. She spent ten minutes on her hair and make-up, and another two minutes searching for perfume before she remembered she didn't own any.
"It's just a game of pool," she said to her reflection.
Then she brushed her teeth.
Purple 5 had more to offer than just pool. It was a fully equipped game room, complete with darts, foosball, ping pong, and an old Asteroids arcade game. Andy was at the table, rolling a cue across the slate to make sure it wasn't warped. He wore tan Dockers and a striped shirt, untucked with the sleeves rolled up. His hair was still wet from the shower.
Looking at him, Sun felt her stomach do little flip-flops. She silently cursed her hormones. This wasn't the time, or the place, to start a relationship.
It doesn't have to be a relationship, the little voice in her head told her. It can just be sex.
She told the little voice to shut up.
"What's your game," Andy asked. "Eight ball or nine ball?"
"I prefer nine. Lag for the break?"
"Sure. Double or nothing, right?
"Right. Two thousand dollars."
"Or two kisses."
Andy winked at her.
After selecting a stick from the rack and chalking the tip, Sun stood next to Andy and they both placed a cue ball on the table. Lagging was an art form. The trick was to bounce the cue ball off the far rail and have it return back. The one who got it closest to the near rail without touching won the break. Sun's parents had a pool table, and she grew up with the game. She hadn't played in a few years, but once she slid the stick onto the bridge of her fingers it all came back to her.
"Ready?"
Andy nodded.
Sun won the lag.
"You're a few inches short," she teased.
"I'm not sure how I should reply to that."
Sun used the triangle to rack the balls, leaving a perfect nine ball diamond pattern on the table. She put her whole body into the break, getting good separation and sinking the 4.
"Nice," Andy said. "Where did you learn to break like that?"
"I played the pro circuit for a while."
Sun lined up the one ball and flashed Andy a grin.
Andy said, "You're kidding, right?"
She banked the one into a corner pocket, leaving herself position on the two.
"Most people think pool is a man's game. It's not. Football---running, throwing, hitting each other. That's a man's game."
Sun put away the two ball, setting up an easy shot on the 3. She leaned over a bit farther than necessary, enjoying his eyes on her body.
"Pool," Sun continued, "pool is all about angles and finesse and thinking ahead. Carefully plotting actions and executing them with precision."
The three went in with a whisper, and the five was all lined up.
"Visualizing what you want, and getting it."
She pocketed the five and also put down the seven, crippled along the side pocket.
"It's like seduction," Sun said. "Something that a woman can do much better than a man."
"Is this a date?" Andy asked. "This is a date, right? I mean, not a going out kind of date, because we're not out, but we've got this man-woman thing going on here, right?"
Sun smiled at him. "Why put labels on it? We're just two consenting adults, enjoying a two thousand dollar game of pool."
"We should really play foosball. Now that's my game. I did that as a living, for a while. Hustling foosball."
"Good money?" Sun asked, eyeing the 6.
"Yeah. I used to bring in four, five bucks a night."
"Sounds like a fun way to spend your childhood."
"Childhood? I did it until I turned thirty."
Sun laughed, missing her shot.
"Okay, stand back," Andy said. "Now you'll see why they call me Fast Andy."
Andy took careful aim at the 6 ball, and with an easy, steady stroke, missed it completely and scratched the cue into the corner pocket.
"Because you lose so fast?" Sun asked.
Andy's eyes twinkled with challenge. "I'd be winning if you weren't wearing that tight blouse."
"So if I took the blouse off, you'd be more focused?"
I'm actually flirting, Sun thought. It felt nice. Really nice.
She eyed the table. Andy was leaning against the rail, in the way of her shot.
"You wanna move, so I can win my two thousand dollars?"
"Not really, no."
Sun walked over to him and put her arms around his waist, still holding her cue.
"I knew this was a date," Andy said. "Right? Am I right?"
Sun placed the cue ball on the table and drew her stick back, shooting behind him. In one fluid movement she banked off the six and sunk the nine, winning the game.
"Nice shot," Andy looked down at her, putting his hands on her shoulders.
"Thanks." She let go of the cue, but her arms remained around his waist. Their eyes locked. "I take cash and personal checks."
"I want to be honest with you. I only have four dollars to my name."
Andy's lips parted slightly. She could feel his heart through his ribs, and it seemed to beat a little louder. Though he had the barest hint of stubble on his face, Sun could smell aftershave. She moved her hand up his sides, feeling the muscles in his back, thinking that she hadn't touched a man like that in so long.
Sun stared at him, wondering if her pupils were as wide as his. She waited for him to move in for the kiss, unsure what she would do if he tried.
Neither of them moved.
The moment lingered, then passed. Sun dropped her hands and turned away.
"So foosball is your game?" she said, trying to sound upbeat.
"I'm supernatural at foosball. I'm ranked third in the world."
"Double or nothing?"
"You're on."
Sun beat him in four minutes.
"There's got to be something you can win at," she said after the final goal.
"Football," Andy said. "That was my game. All the running and the hitting. It's not a real sport unless you wear mouth protection. Would you like to see where I got kicked in the head with cleats?"
"How about Asteroids," Sun said. "I stink at Asteroids."
Andy stunk worse. Sun played her last ship with her eyes closed, and still annihilated his score.
"What are we up to?" Andy asked. "Eight grand?"
"There's got to be something you can win at." Sun looked around the rec room, trying to find something she wasn't good at.
"How about arm wrestling?"
Sun declined. Andy looked strong, but if she beat him at arm wrestling she didn't think his ego would ever recover.
"How about Scrabble in Portuguese?" Andy suggested.
"Board games are in Purple 10."
As they walked out of the rec room, Sun noticed Andy's limp.
"Did you pull a muscle?"
"Blister." Andy made a face. "From not wearing socks."
"Let me see it."
"It's ugly."
"I'm a big girl."
Andy kicked off his shoe and peeled down his sock. It was ugly, covering much of his heel, red and inflamed.
"We need to dress that. Come on."
Sun took Andy's hand and led him into Yellow 6, the medical supply room. She sat him on the padded examination table and removed his shoe and sock.
"Don't you need to muzzle me first?" Andy asked.
Sun grinned. "Have you had your shots?"
"I'm not sure. Let me check my tags."
Sun opened the closet and found some gauze, tape, hydrogen peroxide, and burn ointment on the well-stocked shelves.
"Are you sure you're qualified to do this?" Andy asked.
"I think I can manage."
"Remember, this is a blister. Not a neutering."
"I'll try to keep that in mind."
She dabbed peroxide on some gauze and cleaned the inflamed skin.
"So why did you become a vet?" Andy asked. "No desire to practice on people at all?"
Sun tried to think of something flippant, but nothing came to mind.
"Not that I'm knocking vets," Andy said quickly. "But it seems like you'd make a great MD."
She squirted on some ointment, but her good mood deflated like a leaky tire. The memories came back. Memories she'd been trying for years to suppress.
"Sun? You okay?"
Could she tell him? Would that scare him away?
"Sun?"
"I... I used to be a doctor," she said. "A human doctor."
Sun taped on the bandage and waited for a response. None came. The silence stretched.
"If you want to talk about it," Andy said finally, "I want to know."
He reached down and took her hand. She gripped it, tight, and sat on the table next to him. The words, unspoken for so long, began to tumble out of her.
"I did my internship at Johns Hopkins, began my residency there. I was on the tail end of a twenty hour shift; there was an apartment fire and we'd been working without break for eight hours. A women came in with abdominal pain to the right iliac fossa. Her tongue was coated, she had foetor oris, high temp, vomiting; text book appendicitis. Hers was ready to rupture. We prepped her for a laparotomy, emptied her stomach with a naso-gastric, and I scrubbed for surgery."
Sun could remember how tired she was, and how determined that she wouldn't let fatigue get in the way of her job. The woman was Caucasian and overweight, but in a way she reminded Sun of her own mother. Even though her pain was severe she'd been stoic.
"I'd done a dozen appendectomies. It was a simple operation. I made a gridiron incision through McBurney's point, divided the mesoappendix, used a pursestring suture in the caecum. Then I closed her up and she was discharged a few days later."
Sun swallowed, held Andy's hand even tighter.
"She bounced back the next week. Temperature of 105. Peritonitis. Her peritoneal cavity was filled with pus and fecal matter." Sun took a deep breath. "My pursestring suture had opened. I hadn't tied it off. Her lower intestine emptied out into her abdominal cavity."
Sun turned away from Andy, stared at a spot on the wall.
"She didn't make it," she said softly.
Sun had been the one who opened her up the second time. The woman had come in and asked for Sun by name. Had trusted her to help.
"You lost your job," Andy said.
"The review committee was unanimous. Any first year intern could have done that suture. I screwed up. The Maryland Medical Board revoked my license. The Board had been taking some bad hits in the media, and they made an example out of me. I had over a hundred thousand dollars in student loans, and loss of my license meant I'd never pay them back. So I filed bankruptcy.
"I became a vet by studying at home. Not too big a leap, really. Animals and humans share a lot of the same medical problems. Then I met Steven, we got married, and he died, leaving me with another load of bills. I couldn't file bankruptcy again; you had to wait seven years. So I applied for a grant under a false name to study lions in Africa. Mainly to hide from my creditors."
Andy said, "Why did you leave Africa?"
"They found out I wasn't who I said I was and pulled my funding. I applied for citizenship in South Africa but was denied. When I was deported back to the US I had about ten different groups trying to sue me. That's when the President stepped in. I think he found me through the US Embassy in South Africa. I made the headlines a few times while I was there, fighting for citizenship. He offered me a deal; Samhain for ten years or until the project ended, whichever came first. All of my debts would disappear if I agreed. Of course, I took it."
"And here you are."
"And here I am."
Andy put his hand on her cheek.
"I'm glad you're here," he said.
She looked up at him, saw the warmth, and hugged him.
"Thanks for fixing up my foot."
Sun snorted. "Good thing you didn't need stitches."
"We all make mistakes, Sun. The hard part is forgiving ourselves."
Sun pursed her lips. "Her name was Madeline. She had a husband. A son. She was only 60. I went to the funeral."
"That took guts."
"Her son spat in my face. It made me feel a little better."
Andy said, "I could spit on you now, if you want."
"Maybe later. Let's go feed the demon."
They left Sun's room and headed for the Octopus. Race was there, hunched over a computer. He looked up when he noticed Sun and Andy.
"How is the speech lesson coming?"
"Great," Andy answered. "Like teaching kindergarten, except snack time is messier."
"So he'll be ready to talk tomorrow morning?"
"I don't see why not."
Race beamed. "Excellent," he said.
The General turned back to his monitor. Race always wore his good ole boy attitude like cowboys wore hats, but Sun hadn't seen him so genuinely pleased before. The man looked ten years younger.
Sun and Andy took the Orange Arm to Orange 12. Andy was more help in procuring a sheep this time. He held the cereal, assisted in putting on the harness, and Sun taught him that the most effective way to startle sheep wasn't yelling "Boo!" It was clapping your hands.
"I can't get enough of this earthy smell," Andy said. "We should bottle it and sell it to urbanites."
"Where there's a wool, there's a way."
Andy made a show of rolling his eyes.
"You never told me," Sun said, "about that problem you were having with the hieroglyphics on the capsule."
"I'm still stuck on it. You ready for a mini lecture?"
Sun nodded. She was happy to be talking about something other than her broken past.
"Okay. You see, it's known that glyphs are based on spoken language, but for a long time Hieroglyphic Maya was thought to be logographic. Each picture was a word. But the current view is that it was a phonetic system; glyphs stand for sounds, like our own alphabet. So scholars have had to reevaluate everything. To make it even harder, current Maya language is filled with bits of Spanish, so to understand the ancient language, the language of the glyphs, you can't really use modern Maya."
"So how do you decipher it?" Sun asked.
"Lots of ways. I have a few computer programs, I check the work of other scholars, I find similar references in previously translated passages. A lot of it is basic logic. Once you understand the sentence structure of a language, it's like a cryptogram in a crossword puzzle book. You just look for the context clues."
Sun led the sheep over to the scale pen. "So what has the great translator perplexed?"
"There are several references to a tuunich k'iinal. The hot rock. I don't know what that means."
"Volcano?"
Andy shook his head. "That's a different word."
"Coals? For cooking?"
"No. A cooking pit is a piib. Different glyphs. There's also reference to Kukulcán. He's a flying warrior god who came from 'over the water'. Sort of the Mayan version of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl."
"Could that be Bub?"
"That's what I'm thinking. Quetzalcoatl means feathered serpent. Bub doesn't have feathers, but he does fly, and he could qualify as a serpent. The thought that ancient people were offering our Bub human sacrifices is a little unnerving. More than 100,000 were killed to satisfy Kukulcán's lust for blood."
"I should have paid more attention in history class," Sun said.
Sun finished jotting down the sheep's specs on the chart and they led it out of Orange 12 and down the hallway. Race was no longer in the Octopus.
"What's your impression of our General Race?" Andy asked, holding open the Red Arm door.
"He's good at manipulating people. I wonder why he's here, though. The Army only has so many Generals, why stick one underground for forty years?"
"Something to do with his wife?" Andy suggested. "Dr. Belgium told me about her disease."
"I don't think so. She didn't become symptomatic until a few years ago."
"Maybe we should ask him. He seems honest. Well, as honest as the military can get. What's Dr. Harker's problem?"
"You noticed it too?"
"Yeah. The lady seems to have a large assortment of bugs up her ass."
Sun punched in the code for the first gate. "She has problems relating to people, I think."
"And Dr. Belgium... don't get me wrong. I like the guy. But he seems to be one slice short of a sandwich himself."
"Yeah," Sun agreed. "And the holies. Odd ducks, both of them. Father Thrist's little outburst didn't wear well with the Roman collar."
Andy said, "Maybe we're not all here because we're perfect for the job."
"Okay. Then why?"
"Well, you didn't have a choice. I really didn't either. The President saw fit to mention a little problem that I would have with the IRS if I didn't cooperate. Maybe everyone here is stuck as well. Think about it. Not just everyone would give up their life, families, friends, possessions, to live down here, even though Bub is an interesting subject. Only those people with nothing to lose."
Sun punched in the code for the second gate and thought it over.
"It's so American," she said.
"How so?"
"Here is the most top secret, and possibly the most important, project the world has ever known. And who's running it? Screw-ups and criminals."
Andy smiled, closing the gate behind them. "Well, it's been a hundred years, and no problems yet."
"Does that mean we should be encouraged?" Sun asked, "Or be worried that the problems are overdue?"
"What's the worst that can happen?"
"Bub kills us all, escapes, and destroys the world."
"That takes some of the pressure off," Andy said.
He opened the door to Red 14. Dr. Belgium was fiddling with the DVD, trying to shove a disc in.
"It helps if you turn it on," Sun suggested.
"Suuuuun," Bub said. "Aaaaaandy."
Sun almost backed up. It still freaked her out a little that something so big and ugly could talk.
Andy said, "Hello, Bub. How was your nap?"
"Huuuuungry. Need sheeeeep."
"Are sheep what you'd normally eat?" Sun asked. "Before you were able to talk, I could only guess."
"Sheeeeeep are goooood."
Sun had opened the small door and pushed the sheep through. Bub snatched it up in his claw and quickly snapped its neck.
"Bub, sometimes when you eat the sheep, you kill it and bring it back to life," Sun said. "How do you do this?"
Bub continued to twist the sheep's head until it came off like a bottle cap. He sucked on the neck stump, tilting the body up as if it were a giant beer.
"Seeeeeeeecret," Bub said, gurgling from the liquid in his mouth. Some of the blood ran out of the corner and matted his chest hair.
"Can you do it now?" Sun asked.
"Yesssss."
Bub held the sheep's headless carcass tightly to his chest. A minute passed, and then the animal's legs began to twitch and buck. Bub dropped it to the ground, and the sheep took off in a sprint and rammed full speed into the Plexiglas barrier. It hit with a large crash, smearing the glass with blood.
The sheep righted itself, shook, then ran again, this time barreling into one of the artificial trees.
Bub croaked with baritone laughter. The sheep's head, still in his claw, opened and closed its mouth in silent protest, its eyes darting back and forth.
"Baa-aaa," Bub said, imitating the sheep's sound. He held the head in front of him like a hand puppet. "Baa-aaa."
Sun had to steel herself and hoped she hadn't lost composure. A glance at Dr. Belgium found him ashen, and Andy had a look on his face that predicted vomiting.
"Thank you, Bub," Sun said in metered tones. "That's enough."
Bub tossed the sheep's head into his mouth like a piece of popcorn. It continued to squirm while being munched on. His other claw shot out and grazed the runaway sheep body. It's belly unzipped, intestines winding out like a firehouse. The demon grabbed a handful and shoveled them in.
"Goooood," Bub said.
"I've got to stop coming here during mealtime," Andy said, clutching his stomach.
The demon cocked his head to the side, appearing confused.
"Are you sick, Aaaaaandy?"
"No, Bub. It's just that your eating habits are a little... distressing."
"You wanted to seeeeee."
Andy was looking greener and greener, so Sun answered. "We want to learn from you, Bub, but we have a culture gap. Some things that you do aren't done in our culture, so we don't know how to react to them."
Bub jumped up to the Plexiglas, holding the sheep. Sun hadn't seen him jump before. The leap was over fifteen feet, and Bub landed hard enough to make the ground rumble. He yanked off one of the sheep's hind legs and held it to his chest. It began to twitch and then bend at the knee back and forth.
"Eeeeeach part is aliiiiive," Bub said.
"The little parts are called cells."
"Cells," Bub repeated. "When the body dieeeeees, the cells still live for some tiiiiiime. I can maaaaake them think the body is still aliiiiiiive."
"How?" Sun asked.
Bub held the twitching leg up for Sun to see. It was no longer bleeding---in fact, it looked as if it had healed.
"God," Bub said. "I have pooooowers from God."
Sun asked, "Can we have that leg so we can study it?"
Bub cocked his head to the side and appeared to think it over.
"Yessssssss." Bub walked over to the sheep door and squatted, waiting. Sun took a breath and forced herself to move. She unlatched the door and Bub thrust the leg through it, stump first. Sun held it with both hands. It was heavy, and she felt the muscle fibers in the thigh contract and expand, exactly as if the sheep were alive.
"Ressurrrrrrrrrrection," Bub said.
After he said it, the sheep's leg contracted and the hoof missed her head by inches. On reflex she dropped it, and it flopped around on the floor like a landed fish.
Bub laughed.
Sun fought the surrealism of the scene and bent over, this time grabbing the leg by the hoof. She walked it over to Dr. Belgium, who was watching the whole episode slack-jawed.
"Can you take some blood samples? Tissue and marrow too?"
Belgium seemed reluctant to touch the leg, but consented and held it by the hoof as Sun had. The leg jerked wildly, and Belgium dropped it. He and Sun bent down for it, and Belgium got a firmer, two handed grip.
"I'll be in Red 5," Belgium said, indicating the lab. He walked off, holding the leg at arm's length of his body.
"Do you want moooore? I could maaake the organs moooove."
Andy's hand clamped over his face and he went from green to white.
"Thank you, Bub," Sun said. "There's no need for any more right now."
Bub nodded, then went back to eating. "You okay?" Sun asked, rubbing Andy's back.
"I'm becoming a vegetarian," he replied.
Bub's munching sounds in the background made Andy gag again.
"Do we have any children's videos on table manners?" Sun asked.
Andy gave her a weak grin.
Behind the Plexiglas barrier, Bub grinned as well.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"I need more Internet tiiiiiiiiiime," Bub told Dr. Belgium when he returned from Red 5. Sun and Andy had left.
"I don't think that's a good idea," Belgium answered. His Adam's apple wobbled up and down in his throat.
"I muuuuuust learn moooore."
Belgium laughed, high pitched and near hysterical. "You're joking! You went through the entire website of the Encyclopedia Britannica in an hour and a half. You can process information faster than it loads."
"Open the dooooor," Bub said. "Let meeeee oooooout."
"I don't think..."
"I'll tell Raaaaace," Bub interrupted.
"What? Are you blackmailing me?"
"Fraaaaaank," Bub said softly, the trace of a purr in his voice. "I need more tiiiiiime to seeeeequence my geeeeenome."
Belgium said nothing.
"Don't you want to leeeeave heeeere, Fraaaaank?"
Belgium pictured himself, in a boat on a lake, a rod in his hand, the sun in his eyes. He hadn't fished since he was in grade school, but right now it seemed like the most appealing thing in the world.
He hit the code to Bub's door. It rose pneumatically and the demon folded his wings and left his habitat for the second time that day. He squatted next to Dr. Belgium and gave him a pat on the head, which Frank recoiled from.
"Gooooood, Fraaaaaank."
Frank ducked down, away from the hand. The claws grazed his scalp. It was like a hairbrush made of needles.
"You maaaay goooooo," Bub said, lumbering over to the Cray computer.
Belgium squatted and stayed put, watching as Bub hunched over his workstation. The keyboard was like a pocket calculator to Bub, the monitor must have been like looking at a digital watch. Belgium laughed. It reminded him of an old cartoon, where an elephant moved into a mouse's house, dwarfing everything to comic proportions.
Using the tip of his pinky claw, Bub accessed the ISP and began to surf the World Wide Web. Samhain's Internet connection was fiber-optic. The load times were instantaneous. Bub's hand became a blur, as did the monitor. It seemed impossible that Bub could be absorbing all of that information that fast, but Belgium knew that he was.
He tried to think of all the reasons this was bad. Why shouldn't Bub be allowed to learn about the world he was in? Think of the things he could teach us, the bridges he could gap, the mysteries he could solve. Bub could be the key to solving all of the world's problems; disease, hunger, war, death. Bub could create a utopia.
Or he could destroy everything.
But what would be the point in that? Bub had shown himself to be cooperative, and interested in humans. There would be no point in his using the world's knowledge for bad things.
Belgium laughed again, at the memory of the cartoon elephant drinking out of the mouse's tiny tea cup.
"This is all insane," he said to himself.
Then he closed his eyes and imagined sitting on that boat, the sun warm on his face.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The alarm went off at 7:00 AM, but Race was already up. He hadn't slept much; it seemed that every time he got comfortable his mind woke him up, offering images of combat and war games.
Soon. Very soon.
He hopped out of bed and did a quick round of calisthenics, working his muscles, feeling the sweat and increased respiration, enjoying it more than usual. Healthy body, healthy mind. He finished and hit the shower.
He was tempted to wake everyone up, get this show on the road, but restraint was as important a leadership quality as action. Race dressed in some chinos and a green crew neck and left his room for the Mess Hall. He made a large bowl of pancake batter and added two cans of blueberries to it while a pat of butter melted on the skillet. Helen had taught him how to make pancakes, years ago. He'd always hoped one day she would teach him other dishes. That was becoming more of a possibility with every passing day.
He made six cakes for himself and ate them with honey. Then he made twenty more with the rest of the batter for whoever wanted them. The thought amused him; a Brigadier General making blueberry pancakes for his troops. Even more amusing; the Secretary of Defense making blueberry pancakes.
Race chuckled to himself. He put two more pancakes on his plate and put the rest in the refrigerator. He then poured a glass of milk, and took that and the plate out of the Mess Hall, through the Octopus, and into Yellow 1.
"Who are you?" his wife asked. "What am I doing here? Why am I tied to this bed? Are you a doctor?"
"I'm your husband, dear."
He set the plate and glass on the nightstand and changed her diaper while fielding her usual questions. She had some diaper rash, and he applied ointment as she protested between sobs. Then he untethered her hands and helped her sit up.
"Oh Race, how did we get so old?" she cried.
He checked her for bed sores and found none; Harker was good at her job in that respect.
"Can you get up, sit at the table for breakfast?"
She sniffled and nodded. Race put his arm around her waist and walked with her to the small breakfast bar on the other side of the room. Her legs were wobbly things, incapable of supporting her fragile body without his help.
"Remember how we used to cut the rug?" Race said, grinning.
Her teary eyes shone for a moment.
"You were quite the dancer," Helen said.
"You too. I was the envy of every CO on the base with a pretty thing like you at my side."
He sat her in a chair and fetched the pancakes and milk.
"Blueberry pancakes," Helen said. "Just like I make."
He helped her cut them up and she tried to feed herself until the chorea hit, her arm knocking the plate across the table. Race held her until it passed, then gave her some milk.
"Dr. Harker mentioned that Bub was speaking," Helen said.
This startled Race. Helen usually couldn't remember anything that happened within the last forty years.
"He is. I'm going to run the Roosevelt Book by him today."
"Then we can go home," Helen said.
Race's eyes welled up. He'd put up so many emotional defenses over the years it was rare when something slipped through.
"Yes, my love. Then we can go home."
Helen gave him a small kiss on the lips.
"Walk me back to bed, dear. I think I'll watch some television."
Race carried her back to bed and retied her arms. The television remote control was bolted to the frame under her right hand. He pressed the power button for her. Helen flipped channels until she found a game show, and Race kissed her forehead and left with the plate and glass. He found Father Thrist in the Octopus, typing away on a computer.
"Good morning, Father."
"Good morning, General. Today is the big day."
"It is. Hopefully I'll get all of it done. It depends how talkative he is."
"Yes. I would also like some time with Bub. When you've finished, of course. The President has granted me that."
"Of course, Father. You can sit in on my interrogation as well."
Thrist nodded and turned back to his terminal. Race returned to his room, Blue 1, and picked up his phone. He hit the intercom code and spoke into the receiver.
"Good morning, there are blueberry pancakes in the fridge in limited supply, first come first serve. I would like everyone to meet in the Mess Hall by o-nine hundred hours. Today is the big day."
He hung up the phone and forced himself to concentrate. His focus should have been on the game, but his mind was already on the victory party. First would be a briefing with the President, of course. Before he accepted any appointments, Race wanted to take a vacation. See how much his country had changed over the last four decades. If things went according to his plan, Helen could accompany him. She always wanted to go to Hollywood. How could he say no?
The President would undoubtedly also want his input on the future of Samhain. Depending on the answers Race got from Bub, there were three possible venues to take. Keep Bub a secret and let the project continue, end the project and go public, or end the project and terminate Bub. Samhain was home to Race, but it was a foster home, and he wouldn't miss it in the least. Race would help train his replacement, or he would talk with reporters, or he would push the buttons in Yellow 4 that would detonate Bub's implanted explosives. Whatever the President wanted, Race didn't care. It wasn't a soldier's job to care. But a forty-year tour was long enough. Race wanted out.
He picked up the Roosevelt Book from the dresser and tucked it in his armpit. When he arrived at the Mess Hall Andy and Sun were already there, digging into his pancakes.
"Good morning," Race beamed. "How's the grub?"
"Good, thanks," Andy said.
Sun nodded her approval; she was chewing. Race noted their close proximity to each other, one that implied intimacy, and thought of how times had changed. Race had dated Helen for six weeks before even getting a kiss. These two had known each other for two days and it was apparent they had something going on.
"How's our permanent resident?" Race asked. "Is he ready to be questioned?"
"He had breakfast earlier," Sun said. "He's talking up a storm."
Andy agreed. "His grasp of language is remarkable. It's as if he's been speaking it his whole life. By the time we were done with him last night, his English was better than mine."
"Great. We'll begin after everyone has breakfast. Good morning, Frank."
Dr. Belgium entered Green 2 wearing the rumpled lab coat he'd had on the night before. His face was stubbly and the bags under his eyes were large enough to pack.
"Morning," he mumbled.
"You look like hell, Doctor. Do you feel okay?"
"Headache. Didn't sleep well."
"Let Dr. Harker take a look at you later," Race said. "Good morning, Rabbi."
"Shalom," Rabbi Shotzen said. He sat down at the table. "So the demon is speaking English, yes?"
"Like a native," Andy said.
"And everyone thinks he learned an entire language overnight? No one is suspicious that he may have known English all along and has been feigning ignorance?"
"Have some pancakes, Rabbi," Race gave the holy man a pat on the back.
"Thank you, General, I will. You used the kashered cast iron skillet, yes? Good. Remember; we must take everything the demon says with two grains of salt. Bub may not be a fallen angel, but he's imitating one, and all of hell's angels lie. Now if someone could pass me a plate maybe?"
Father Thrist came in next, and Race noted that he and Shotzen avoided one another. Thrist waved off on the pancakes and opted for black coffee instead. Dr. Harker was the last to arrive. Race wished her a good morning, and suggested she examine Dr. Belgium after breakfast. Harker grunted acknowledgment, and instead of pancakes she made herself some buttered toast.
Quite a dysfunctional little family, Race thought. It had always been like that, in its many incarnations dating back to 1968. Not like the Army. On the battlefield, men were close-knit with strong bonds. It came from functioning as a unit, rather than as individuals. The dozens of specialists that have lived at Samhain since its inception had never been like that. This motley bunch would last two minutes in combat. Good thing it would never have to be proven.
"If everyone is ready, I'd like to lay down some ground rules," Race said.
All eyes were on him. He stood up to project better.
"I'm sure we all have things to ask Bub, and everyone will get private time with him, I promise. But the first order of business is to get all of the questions in this book answered. If we go off on tangents, it'll take forever. We need to stay focused. I'm not going to ask you all to zip your lips, but I am asking for the extraneous questions to be kept to the barest minimum. I also ask that we remain united in our opinion. I've done interrogations before, and group numbers give us the psychological advantage. But if there's dissension, Bub could possibly play on that."
"What is our opinion, General?" Father Thrist asked.
"We haven't formed one yet. But we can't have any in-group bickering in front of Bub. Dr. Belgium, is the video operational?"
"Hmm? Oh, yes yes yes. I just put in a new DVD-R a little bit ago. It's good for six hours."
"Good. Remember people, we're going into this treating Bub as a source of information. He's like a gold vein that we are trying to dig up. Personal opinions, preconceptions, whether you think he's the Antichrist or just a nice guy... file it all away. Our object is to get these questions answered."
"What if we figure out the demon is lying?" Rabbi Shotzen said.
"If Bub appears to be lying, or intentionally evasive, we'll have to regroup and approach the situation differently. But please let me be the judge of that. Any other questions?"
There were none. Race made eye contact with each member of the group, to make sure he was understood on all counts.
"Okay," he said, grinning broadly. "Let's go rattle the gates of hell."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"The gang's all heeeeeeere." Bub grinned his horrible grin.
No one laughed. Andy couldn't speak for the rest of the group, but he was very much awed by Bub. Not only by the demon's physical presence---which was substantial---or his apparent powers over the dead, but how quickly he learned. Bub mastered English in just a day, to the point where he was comfortable making jokes. That kind of genius, and all it implied, almost made the linguist speechless.
"We have questions, Bub," Race said. "Questions we've been waiting a very long time to have answered."
"You may aaaaaask," Bub said.
He squatted on his haunches in front of the Plexiglas, to the right of the large blood stain the headless sheep had made the previous day. It had turned brown and begun to flake. Andy tried not to look at it.
Race sat in a chair facing Bub. The rest of the group formed a semicircle behind him. Andy sat next to Sun, the holies were on opposite ends, Dr. Harker sat way in the back, and Dr. Belgium stood, pacing back and forth like he was the one in the cage.
"Let's begin with your background," Race said. He opened up the old book in his lap but didn't look at it. "You were found buried eighty feet in the ground in the Culebra Cut in Panama, one hundred years ago. How did you get there?"
Bub titled his head slightly and appeared to think about it, his elliptical eyes flicking left, then right.
"I was in a comaaaaaaa. My people thought I was deaaaaaad."
"Who were your people?"
"The Kanjobalán Mayaaaaaaa. We lived in a city called Coooooopán."
"Copán is in Honduras," Andy said, surprising himself by talking---he'd wanted to remain neutral and simply observe. "That's eight hundred miles away from Panama. Why were you buried eight hundred miles from Mayan boundaries?"
"I do not knooooow."
"How long were you with the Maya?" Race asked.
"Threeeeeee hundred years.
"And before that, you lived where?"
"Many plaaaaaces. Across the waaaaaater."
"How did you travel from place to place?" Race said.
Bub's wings unfurled behind him as if they were spring-loaded. They opened with the sound of a belt being snapped.
"I caaaaaan fly."
"Over the oceans?" Sun asked. "Carrying your capsule?"
"I'm strooooong." Bub's pectoral muscles twitched and bounced. It reminded Andy of a body builder showing off.
"If you were in all of these places," Race asked, "why isn't there any record of you?"
Bub grinned his crooked grin and folded his wings behind his back.
"There isssss," Bub said. "Look at hisssstory. Many deeeeemons."
"There are more of you?" Race asked.
"Yesssssss."
"What happened to them?"
"I don't knoooooow."
"Where did you come from," Race said, "originally?"
Bub's eyes took on a far away cast.
"From liiiiiiiight," Bub said. "From light, to darknessssssss."
"What light?"
"Heavaaaaaaaaan. I was caaaaast out."
"Cast into hell?" Father Thrist asked, his voice quavering. "Incredible."
"Yeah, incredible," Sun repeated. But she didn't sound convinced. Andy wasn't sure if he was convinced either, but he forced himself to keep an open mind.
"Explain how the world began," Race said.
"God created everything. He created angels to be messengers between Hiiiiim and maaaaankiiiind."
"Why were you cast out?" Thrist asked.
"There was a... disagreeeeeeement."
Rabbi Shotzen made a snorting sound. Andy guessed him to be skeptical as well.
"What about evolution?" Race asked.
"Evolution is like planting seeeeeeeeds. When there was enough growth, God added maaaaaan."
"Like the garden of Eden," Thrist said, looking up from his notes.
"What is your name?" Race asked, leaning closer to the Plexiglas. "Your true name?"
Bub seemed to grow. He stood up to his full height, stretched out his talons, swelled up his chest. When he spoke, it was deep and loud.
"I am the Prince of the Poooooower of Air. The Draaaagon of Dawn. Son of the Mooooorning and Bearer of Liiiiight. The naaame most know me by is Luuuuuuuucifer."
He settled back down on his haunches. Andy realized he was clenching his fist so tightly his hand had fallen asleep. He shook it, wincing at the tingles of pain as the blood came back in.
"Were you the one who tempted Christ in the desert?" Thrist asked.
"I met him in the desert, Faaaaaather. But not to tempt. Only to warn him of his faaaaaate."
Thrist's voice became a whisper. "Was Christ the son of God?"
"Yesssssss. God had sent him down on earth to dieeeeeee."
"Fa!" Rabbi Shotzen threw up his hands in disgust. "I've had enough of this nonsense."
Bub titled his head at Shotzen. "Bad hangover, Raaaaaaabbi?"
The Rabbi stood up and pointed at the demon. "I don't know what you are, but Satan you are not."
"Don't you beleeeeeeeive me?"
"Do not allow yourself to be misled," the Rabbi told the group. "He shows only what he wants you to see. You are being manipulated."
"Foooooool," Bub said. "Jews are not the chosen peeeeeeeople."
Shotzen's face lost all color. He turned and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
"You warned Christ?" Thrist asked, apparently unaffected by Shotzen's outburst.
"Wanted to saaaaave him." Bub leaned back, assuming his lotus position. "God wanted him deaaaaaaad."
Thrist shook his head. "Christ died for our sins. He wasn't being punished by God. He died so God would forgive us."
"God was jealoussssss," Bub said. "So he killed Hisssss son."
Thrist shook his head. "It was for our sins. God forgave us."
"God doesn't caaaaare about yooooou."
"What of the resurrection?" Thrist asked. "Christ rising from the dead?"
"Lieeeess."
"It had to happen," Thrist declared.
"His followers stole hissssss body from the tooooooomb."
The priest shook his head. "No."
"I saaaaaw them."
"That simply isn't true."
"It's truuuuuuuuuue."
Thrist deflated in his chair. There was a silence that stretched on for over a minute. Andy wasn't sure if any of this were true, but he noticed that Father Thrist looked like he'd been beaten up.
"What of prayer?" Race asked finally. "Does God hear prayers?"
"God doesn't caaaare."
"I... I don't feel well," Thrist said quietly.
"When we die, do we go to heaven?" Race asked.
Bub brought a talon up to his beard and scratched it.
"I don't knoooooow."
Race furrowed his brow. "You don't know? Or you're not telling?"
The demon's face got so ugly Andy had to turn away.
"I. Doooooooooon't. Knooooooooooooooow."
"How about hell?" Sun asked.
Bub focused on Sun. The anger on his face vanished, replaced with a sly smile.
"Yooooooooou'll seeeeeeeee."
Andy looked at the others, wondering if they were as creeped out as he was. They were, except for Race, who appeared more impatient than scared.
"Did God give you the ability to bring back the dead?" Race asked.
"Yessssssss."
"How about heal? Can you heal the sick?"
"Yesssssss. I can cuuuuuuuuure your wiiiiiiife."
Race stood up suddenly, pressing his palms to the glass. "Helen?"
"Yessssssss." Bub touched the Plexiglas, placing his palm against Race's.
"Bring her to meeeeeeee"
Race paused for a nanosecond, then headed for the door.
"General," Sun warned. "That isn't a wise idea."
"We'll be right back."
Race practically yanked Dr. Harker out of her chair and they exited as fast as he could pull her. Andy saw Father Thrist take Race's place at the glass, both hands pressed against Bub's.
"Is there no way to win heaven?" Thrist asked. There were tears in his eyes.
"Such sadnessssss," Bub said. "God doesn't want you to be saaaaaaad. Maybe there is a waaaaaaaay."
Thrist nodded several times. "Yes. Of course there's a way. You just aren't aware of it. You've never read the bible, have you?"
"Noooooooo."
"I'll bring you mine. You shall have mine. I'll be right back."
Thrist also hurried out of the room.
Andy looked around. "The ranks are thinning."
"I have a few questions," Sun moved to Race's seat. "You said you were in a coma. How did that happen?"
"I don't knoooooow."
"Did you get sick? Injured somehow?"
"I don't knoooooow."
"I have studied your physiology. You are immune to all disease. We've tried practically every bug known to man, nothing makes you sick."
Bub stared impassively at Sun. His black tongue snaked out of his mouth and licked the mucus from his right nostril.
Andy flinched. Sun asked, "Ever hear the name Kukulcán?"
The demon's mouth twitched.
"Noooooo."
"You're lying," Sun said. "How about that hot rock thing. What's it called?"
"Tuunich k'iinal," Andy said.
"I don't knoooooow."
"But it's engraved in your capsule," Sun said.
"I don't knoooooow."
Sun folded her arms. "And taken 800 miles away from your city, buried seventy feet deep with hand tools. It sounds like they feared you. Feared you even when you were dead."
"Do you fear meeeeee? There's nothing to feaaaaaar, but feaaaaaar itself."
That and talking demons, Andy thought.
But Sun stood her ground.
Why did you wake up now?" She asked. Her voice was getting louder. "What's special about now? Why not ninety years ago? What took so goddamn long?"
"I was waaaaaaaaiting."
"For what?"
"The riiiiiiight time."
"Where did you really come from, Bub? Tell me the truth. None of this bible thumping bullshit."
The demon looked beyond them.
"Raaaaaace. Heeeeeeeeeelen."
Race pushed Helen forward in her wheelchair, stopping to give Sun a stern look.
"Don't let Helen go in there," Sun said. "You can't trust him."
"What happened to remaining united in our opinion?" Race asked brusquely.
"Bub has been lying. I bet everything he's said so far has been a lie."
Race looked at Andy, a question in his eyes.
"She's over-reacting," Andy said, shrugging.
Sun clenched her fist and Andy thought for a moment that she was going to deck him. Instead she spun on her heels and stormed out.
"Sun doesn't like meeeeeeeeee."
"I like you," Race said. "And I'll like you even more if you cure my wife."
Andy tapped Race on the shoulder and whispered.
"Do you think making a deal with the devil is wise, General?"
Race offered a clipped grin. "I asked the other guy, and he wasn't listening. This is the only hope left."
"But don't you think..."
"There isn't a single thing you could say or do to stop me, son. "
Andy watched Race and Harker wheel Helen over to the feeding door. As far as instincts went, Andy's weren't very good. Time and again he'd made the wrong decision, the bad call. But he couldn't help feeling that everything was about to go horribly, irrevocably wrong.
He got up and went after Sun.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sun was punching in the code for the first gate when Andy caught up to her.
"Don't even," she warned. The affection she felt for the linguist was gone, replaced by a sense of betrayal.
"Shh," Andy put a finger in front of his lips. "Maybe he can still hear us."
Sun swung the gate open, aiming for Andy's shoulder. She missed.
"Hey, hold on."
Sun lengthened her stride.
"I agree with you," he said, catching her arm.
"You what?"
He moved in front of Sun and faced her. "I agree with you!" Andy whispered. "Bub's lying."
"Well, why did..."
"Shh! Keep it down. Do you remember when Bub said the only thing to fear is fear itself?"
"Yeah. So?"
"So that's FDR. How has he heard that quote? I don't think it was on any of the phonics videos."
Some of Sun's anger evaporated. She pushed a strand of hair out of her face.
"Okay, we both know he's lying. So why didn't you back me up? Race is going to put his wife in there with him."
"Race is going to do that no matter what we say. I think he made this decision a while ago. Calling Bub a liar isn't going to help the situation. We need to figure out why Bub is lying, and how can he know that quote."
Sun nodded. Her affection for Andy returned. He'd played it smart, and she'd reacted without thinking things through.
"Has he been awake since he was brought here and faking it?" Sun said, thinking out loud. "Maybe he's been biding his time, listening to everything going on around him, taking it all in. Even if he didn't know English, if he has an eidetic memory, he could remember everything that had been said since his arrival and then translate it after he learned English. Maybe that's how he knows so much. Or maybe, like Shotzen said, he's always known English."
"Possible, but I think that's reaching."
"What's another explanation?"
"Someone's been coaching him," Andy said.
"Who?"
"I don't know. But his habitat is always being video recorded, right?"
"Yeah. So we just need to watch the recordings and see who's been paying him visits."
"Right. And in the meantime, let's just play along with him. We know he's lying, but we don't know why. Better to let him believe we're on his side."
It made sense to Sun.
"Okay. But I still think letting Bub near Helen is a bad idea."
"I'm beginning to think," Andy said, "that a lot about Samhain is a bad idea."
Andy punched in the code for the gate and they returned to Red 14. Race had wheeled Helen over to the pneumatic door on the side of Bub's habitat. The sheep's hatch was open, and he was talking to the demon through it. Sun and Andy got close enough to hear the exchange.
"I do have the authority, and the ability, to terminate you if I consider you a threat," Race said. "There are several safeguards, installed before we knew if you were hostile or not. I'm sure you understand."
"I want to heeeeeeelp yooooooou."
Race hesitated. Sun noticed that he had a large white object in his hand, the size of a baseball bat.
"It will be fine, Regis," Helen said.
Race touched his wife's neck. "Lower your head, dear."
Helen hunched down, and Race pushed her chair into the dwelling.
Bub waited, squatting down. Race moved slowly, the white object resting on the wheelchair's handles.
"Don't beeeee afraaaaaaid."
"This is called a cattle prod," Race said, holding out the white stick. "It's been modified, and has enough electricity to stop your heart."
Bub took a step towards them and reached for Helen, his movements slow and steady.
Helen sat stock-still, even when Bub touched her face.
"Relaaaaaaaaaax."
Bub picked Helen up, slowly and carefully, while Race stood by holding the prod like a broadsword.
Helen began to shake.
This was bad, Sun knew. Very bad. She took a step toward the habitat door, but Andy held her back.
"It's out of our control," Andy whispered.
Sun watched, helpless, as Helen's tremors became worse.
"It's the chorea," Race said.
"Waaaaaaaaaaaait," Bub told him. The demon cradled Helen in his giant arms; close to his chest, like a child would hold a teddy bear. Her trembling gradually subsided.
Sun became aware she was biting her lower lip.
"I brought the bible," Thrist said, bursting into the room. He stopped in mid-step when he looked in the habitat. "Sweet Jesus," Thrist whispered.
Helen's head disappeared in Bub's massive claw as he appeared to anoint her. She yelped like a scared puppy. Race moved in with the cattle prod, but Bub set Helen down and quickly backed away.
"It's dooooooone."
Race looked at Bub, then at his wife, who was lying curled up on the ground.
"Helen?"
She held up her head. "Race?
And then she stood up.
"Helen... you're standing!"
Race dropped the cattle prod and ran to embrace her.
"My dear, how do you feel? Are you okay?"
"I feel wonderful, Regis. Just wonderful."
Race began to sob, and then Helen sobbed as well.
"We've witnessed a miracle," Father Thrist said.
He genuflected, kneeling down and making the sign of the cross. Sun sidled up to Dr. Belgium. She remained unimpressed.
"Did you run serum tests on that sheep leg yet?" Sun asked from the corner of her mouth.
"A few. It was still wiggling this morning when I checked. Some apoptosis---cell death, but it's still moving. Since there's no respiration or circulation, I think the leg is reabsorbing its own dead tissue for energy."
"Anything conclusive?"
"I'm running an amino acid detection to ID proteins and enzymes."
"Where are the recent video recordings of Bub's habitat?" Sun asked. "For the last week?"
"Uh... Red 4. I've been putting them there."
"Look Regis! I can walk!"
Helen was strolling around the habitat, tentatively at first, and then prancing like a gazelle.
"Wonderful, Helen! It's wonderful!"
"We'll also need blood work on Helen," Sun said. "I don't trust Harker. Can you do it?"
Belgium nodded, several more times than necessary.
"What should we do now?" Andy asked Sun.
"First the recordings. I'd like a chance to examine Helen myself. I'd also like to spend some time in Red 3 and see what else I can find out about Bub's physiology. Frank, are you sequencing Bub's mitochondrial DNA?"
"Hmm? No. Nuclear."
"Mitochondrial?" Andy asked.
"The genome of an organism is found in the nucleus of a cell," Sun explained. "Mitochondria are organelles that produce energy for a cell. They also contain DNA, but fewer genes than nuclear DNA."
"I'lI test for short tandem repeats," Belgium nodded. "I'm convinced Bub has a lot of the same genes that we do, and that other animals do, but so far I can't classify them. Maybe an STR of his mitochondria will turn up something."
"I'd like to get back to the capsule," Andy said. "See if I can make sense of that hot rock."
Race and Helen were slow dancing, wet cheek to wet cheek.
Father Thrist was on his knees, hands clasped in prayer.
Dr. Harker had her nail clippers out.
Bub was staring at Sun through the Plexiglas, the expression on his face unpleasant.
Sun shivered. "I liked him better before he could talk," she said. "Let's get started."
She left Red 14, feeling the demon's eyes on her the entire time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Pathetic, Dr. Julie Harker thought.
Race had kissed so much demon ass his face was turning brown. The All Important Roosevelt Book had been left on his chair, forgotten. Race and Helen had danced out of Red 14 an hour ago, giggling like teenagers. Probably going to have sex, Harker guessed. The thought sickened her.
Just as sickening was Father Thrist, sucking up to Bub with sycophantic relish. He'd given Bub his precious bible, preaching endlessly about the wonders of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Harker had been a Christian, once. Her parish priest offered no explanation for her daughter's death, other than the lame "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
A child's death wasn't mysterious. It was reprehensible. Harker wanted no part of any religion that allowed such a thing to happen.
Harker sat patiently outside of the habitat, waiting. She had a question to ask Bub, but she wanted to be alone when she did. It was admittedly a long shot, but it kept Harker rooted to her chair, watching Father Thrist grovel and gesture. Harker passed the time by picking at her cuticles, a habit from her youth. A day didn't go by where she didn't draw some blood from one or two fingers, cutting down too deep.
After an interminable wait, the priest left. Running off to call the Pope, Harker guessed. The only two remaining in Red 14 were herself and that flake Dr. Belgium. Belgium was busy at the computer, engrossed in some gene program. Harker decided to chance being overheard, and she approached the habitat slowly.
"Dr. Haaaaarker. Are you maaaaaaaad?"
"Mad? Why?"
"I heeeeeeealed Helen. You could noooooot."
"I haven't examined her yet, so I can't be sure the Huntington's is actually gone."
"You have dooooooubt."
"No. I just prefer facts to faith."
The demon nodded. Harker eyed him, hoof to horn. He was certainly formidable. But supernatural? Harker decided she didn't care, one way or the other.
"So you can raise the dead?" she asked.
"Yesssssssss."
"How long can they be dead before you can raise them? Minutes, hours... years?"
"Houuuuuurs."
Harker frowned. She'd been harboring a minor fantasy of digging up her beloved Shirley and bringing her to Bub. It was ridiculous, she knew. But better to ask than always wonder.
"Who diiiiiied?"
"Excuse me?"
"You want me to bring someone baaaaaaaack."
Harker's eyes began to glaze and her lower lip quivered. She couldn't help it. The pain never went away.
"I lost a child," Harker said.
Bub grinned. His grin was like opening a drawer full of steak knives.
"I can maaaaaaake a child."
Harker blinked. "What?"
"A chiiiiild. I can maaaaaaaake one."
"A newborn?"
"Any aaaaaaaaage."
That would be perfect! All these years, without hope of ever holding a baby again...
"How?" Harker asked.
"A sheeeeeeeeeep."
Harker frowned.
"You can make a baby out of a sheep?"
"I can change the geeeeeeeeenes. Make it huuuuuman."
"I'd like to see," Harker said.
"I neeeeed your help."
"How?"
The demon leaned closer to the Plexiglas and lowered his voice.
"We shouldn't beeeeeeee here," Bub said.
Harker furrowed her brow. "What do you mean?"
"In Samhaaaaaaain. You and I are trapped heeeeeere."
No kidding, Harker thought.
"So what do you want?"
"To get oooooooout."
Harker shook her head. "Impossible. I couldn't help you. The President would have me killed, plain and simple. He'd send me back to prison for even thinking about it. No way."
"Booooooy or giiiiiiirl?"
"There's too much security."
"Booooooy or giiiiiiirl?"
Harker could picture Shirley's face.
"A girl. A little girl."
"I can maaaaake a beautiful giiiiiirl."
"I can't. There's the door here, plus the two coded gates in the Red Arm. There's also a camera right over my shoulder."
"Give meeee the cooooooodes."
Harker thought it over. That couldn't be traced back to her. And if Bub got out, so what? The demon had a right to be free. He didn't deserve to be locked up here any more than Harker did. In fact, if Bub escaped, Harker might even be allowed to leave. No more Bub, no more Project Samhain.
But even more important than that was the thought of having a child. If just for a few stolen hours. It had been so long. The feedings, the diapers, those little fingers and toes...
"I give you the door code, you make me a child," Harker confirmed.
Bub nodded.
"The child first," Harker said.
"I neeeeeeeed proof."
"How?"
"You'll think of soooooomething."
Harker would think of something. Suddenly nothing else mattered to her. During her trial she'd been evaluated by a court-appointed shrink who did a thoroughly incompetent job, but who had managed to say something interesting. Harker had shown no remorse. And why should she have? She loved Shirley more than her birth parents ever could have. But because Harker never felt bad for her actions, the judge decided she could never be rehabilitated.
And never was a very long time.
"Everything you told the priest," Harker said, "that was all bullshit, wasn't it?"
"Whyyyyyyyyyy?"
"I need to know if I can trust you. Maybe if I let you escape you'll try to murder us all."
Bub laughed, a giant frog croaking.
"Truuuuuust meeeeee."
Harker decided that she didn't care what Bub's plans were. She was going to help him no matter what.
"Okay. I'll need some time to think of something. We'll also need some way to turn off the video camera. I don't want to get caught."
"I'll take caaaaare of that. Tell Sun I want two sheeeeeeeeep."
"Fine."
Harker checked her watch. She had about an hour. How could she somehow prove to Bub that she was giving him the real code, other than taking him out of his habitat and showing him?
Showing him.
"I'll see you at lunch time," Harker said. She left Red 14, hoping she'd be able to make her plan work.
\*
Dr. Frank Belgium was oblivious to the exchange. He was busy multi-tasking on the Cray. Switching focus from nuclear to mitochondrial DNA, Belgium used restriction enzymes to cut some specific sequences, then used a PCR---polymerase chain reaction---machine to amplify the sample for an STR test. The DNA molecules actually went through channels in a microchip and then passed through a laser beam, getting 'fingerprinted' in the process. This would give him a tagged sequence that could be checked against samples from other life forms in the database.
At the same time, he was using some proteomic tools to identify the amino acids in the serum sample he took from the re-animated sheep's leg. Genes were sort of like factories that could build themselves. DNA coded for protein. Some of the protein was used to make things like cells and antibodies, but some of it was used to make enzymes and hormones. These were chemicals that caused biochemical reactions within the body.
For instance, insulin was a hormone that lowered blood sugar, and a lack of it resulted in diabetes. HGH was responsible for human growth, and lack of it caused dwarfism, or too much of it caused NBA players. Enzymes speeded biochemical reactions---saliva contained enzymes that helped break down starches, aiding in digestion, and the restriction enzymes used so often in molecular science were chemicals that functioned like tiny pairs of scissors, cutting DNA molecules at specific sequences. These were essential to genetic research, because a single strand of DNA could have billions of base pairs, making it unwieldy indeed.
Belgium was convinced that Bub's power of resurrection was either hormonal or enzymic, and in order to prove it he had to identify the proteins. Since proteins were made of amino acids, that was what he searched for. Some of the tools he used were AACompIdent, PeptIdent, SWISS-PROT, and TrEMBLE; all extremely sophisticated amino acid identifiers.
"Let meeee oooooout," Bub said, startling Belgium to the point that he almost fell out of his chair.
"What?"
"I want the inteeeernet."
Belgium had already made the decision that he wouldn't let Bub out again. He knew Bub had lied during the interrogation. Bub had claimed to have never read the bible, but Frank had checked the cookies in the Temp file, and several of the websites Bub had been extensively surfing were biblical. That made everything the demon had said suspect.
Belgium wasn't sure why Bub would lie---he'd cured Race's wife and been friendly to everyone---but he decided he wasn't going to give Bub access to any more information.
The last 24 hours had been gut-wrenching for Belgium. He destroyed the video recordings of Bub leaving his habitat, but he was still worried the infraction would be discovered. He was even more worried once he realized Bub was lying. If Bub had done anything harmful, Belgium would consider himself to blame. After his screw-up at BioloGen, Frank didn't want to be responsible for anyone getting hurt ever again. He would sequence Bub's genome without the demon's help, no matter how long it took.
"I'm sorry, Bub. The server is down. It happens all the time."
Bub didn't answer right away.
"Are you lyyyyyyyying?" he finally asked. The tone in his voice seemed to bore into Frank's bones.
"Hmm? No no no, of course not, Bub. Our server is under construction. Maybe they're doing an upgrade."
"Use another server."
"We don't have a contract with another server. Besides, we couldn't access another server without using our current server."
"I wish to see."
"There's nothing to see, simple as that."
Belgium buried his face in his notes, pretending to be in deep concentration.
"I'll telllllllll them," Bub said,
"Tell them what, Bub?"
"Telllllllllll them that you let me oooooooout."
Belgium turned away from the monitor and faced Bub. He couldn't believe how scared he felt.
Don't show fear, he said to himself.
"I made a mistake letting you out. Twice. I won't do it again. If you want Internet time, you'll have to talk with Race. I'm sure he'll give you the world, after what you did with Helen."
Bub laughed. This confused Belgium, who wasn't aware he'd said anything funny.
He decided to finish up in Green 4. There was a computer there, and he could access the Cray without having to deal with Bub.
"Enjoy the time you haaaaaaaaaave," Bub said as Frank left.
Belgium didn't know what that meant, but he didn't like the sound of it. Not one bit.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"That was the last one," Sun said. "For a scientist, his organizational skills suck."
She and Andy had been in Red 4, fast forwarding through the surveillance DVDs of Bub since he'd been put into the habitat.
They'd just zipped through Bub's first feeding, which was gory even at 32X speed. After the horrifying meal, Bub appeared to say something. Andy shuttled back and let it play at normal.
"Messy eater," Race said on the monitor.
"Ba'ax u k'aat u ya'al le t'aano?" Bub replied.
Andy translated the Mayan dialect in his head. "Bub was asking Race What does that expression mean?"
"So he didn't know English yet?"
"Apparently not."
They fast-forwarded through the two times Race went into the dwelling, changed discs, and sped through more eating and sleeping.
The discs were not labeled and they weren't in sequential order. This was annoying, because Sun and Andy had to go through each disc to find the current one, and it turned out that one was missing.
An hour wasted. Andy picked up the phone and dialed Red 14.
"No answer," he said.
He tried Dr. Belgium's room, Blue 10. The doctor wasn't there, either.
"Maybe he's the one that took the disc," Sun said. "He's in charge of them."
"Could be. But it could have been anyone. At least now we can be fairly certain that the disc is intentionally missing. Someone is trying to cover something up."
"So what does it prove?"
"More proof that Bub was lying, I guess. I don't know, I'm an interpreter, not a detective."
"Why would someone be helping Bub lie?"
Andy leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. "Isn't it obvious? People make deals with the devil all the time."
Sun could see his point. She'd only been here a week, but she'd seen enough to accurately describe the Samhain staff as dysfunctional. She stood up and stretched.
"I'm going to Red 3, put some time in. I recall reading something in there that didn't make sense. I can't remember what the hell it was."
Andy said, "I'll be in Red 6 with the capsule. I want to check the Maya glyphs against the Egyptian ones, see if they say the same thing."
"I've got to feed Bub soon. Wanna meet me in Orange 12 in say, forty minutes?"
"Sure. I'm hungry myself. We can grab a bite."
Andy held open the door for Sun, something that Steven used to do for her all the time. She smiled. The memory no longer hurt.
"Hi, Dr. Harker," Andy said. The physician was standing in the hall, outside the door.
Eavesdropping? Sun wondered.
"Did you examine Helen yet?" Andy asked.
Dr. Harker looked briefly at Andy, surprise on her face. Then she looked at the floor.
"Not yet," Harker said.
"What's with the video camera?" Sun pointed at Harker's hand.
Harker was holding a palm-sized camcorder, one of the ultra-small models with the flip out screen. She was trying unsuccessfully to put it into her lab coat pocket.
"I borrowed it from the AV room. I was going to take some footage of Bub and analyze it."
"Analyze it," Sun intoned. She made no attempt to keep the incredulity out of her voice.
Harker nodded.
"That blinking green light." Andy pointed to the camera. "That means it's taping."
Harker brought the camera up to eye level and stared at it as if it were an alien. Andy pressed the red button on the grip and the green light stopped blinking.
"Thanks," Harker mumbled. "When does Bub eat?"
"We're going to feed him at noon," Sun answered.
"Bub said... he told me... that he was very hungry and he wanted two sheep for lunch."
Harker wasn't speaking to Sun. She was speaking to a point over her right shoulder. How could anyone become a doctor with people skills that were this bad?
"Okay," Sun said. "We'll bring him two."
Andy briefly touched Sun's arm, and then walked across the hall and disappeared into Red 6. Harker avoided looking at Sun and made her way to the gate, fumbling with the code.
Sun watched her go. She disliked Harker, but now dislike had turned to outright suspicion. Harker did the barest minimum to get by at Samhain. She'd also taken a less than active interest in Bub, when everyone else had been buzzing like bees since the demon awoke. Why, all of the sudden, did she want to videotape him? Could this have something to do with the missing surveillance disc?
After almost a minute of fumbling, Harker made it through the gate. Perhaps I should tell Race about Dr. Harker's new video fetish, Sun thought. Whether Race would care or not was anyone's guess, but it was his show and he should be kept informed on what everyone was doing.
Unless Race was the one helping the demon out. After all, Bub just cured his wife. Or at least, he seemed to.
Sun tried to clear her mind and concentrate on the latest problem at hand; Red 3. Somewhere, in all of that paperwork, she'd seen something that was important. It tugged at her subconscious---perhaps one of the tests run on Bub. There was something that she'd missed and she was determined to find it.
Sun passed Dr. Harker again, heading into the Octopus, and subconsciously noted that once again the green light was flashing on Harker's camcorder.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bub had to die.
Rabbi Shotzen pondered and prayed and pondered and prayed, and that was the conclusion he came to. That was G-d's will. It was also a matter of survival.
Whether Bub was a demon or not didn't matter. If he were Lucifer, as he claimed, then Shotzen would be doing the world a favor by destroying him. If he were something else, at the very least Shotzen would be saving Judaism. Father Thrist was proof.
Thrist was the most skeptical man Shotzen had ever met. If Bub had won him over that easily, he would have little difficulty convincing the rest of the world. All Bub had to do is go on television and talk about Jesus being the messiah. The Jews, the chosen people of God, would again be persecuted in the name of Christ, this time to extinction.
The Rabbi knew what would happen. There were two billion Christians in the world, three hundred million in North America alone. Muslims numbered over one billion. Jews? Fourteen million worldwide. The opposition outnumbered them two hundred to one. If Bub were to go public, spouting off about Jesus Christ, the repercussions would be enormous. The US might cease support of Israel, which could very well mean its destruction. In America, the vandalism of synagogues and the harassment of Jews would escalate and violence would no doubt erupt.
Shotzen couldn't let that happen. Christ was not moschiac. It was impossible. The messiah was to be of Davidic lineage. If Christ were the son of G-d, how could he be descended from David? G-d was one being, not a trinity as the Catholics said. That was sacrilege.
So he only had one course of action. Bub had to be destroyed. Just as David had slain Goliath, Shotzen had to destroy a giant of his own. It was treason, he knew. The United States might very well execute him. But if he got out word to Jews worldwide, he believed the support would be total. He would truly be the savior of his people. They might even embrace him as a hero. And his memoirs, so long thought to be a pipe dream, might some day be studied at yeshivot around the globe, alongside with the work Rabbi Moses ben Maimon and Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph.
Normally, he would consult a bais din, a house of justice consisting of three Rabbis, to discuss the legal points of killing Bub. The Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin discussed setting up a court to try crimes, but this only applied to humans, of which Bub was not. Jewish law did allow for killing the pursuer without a bais din. In fact, if there is an obvious threat, G-d commands Jews to respond with mortal judgment.
Bub was an obvious threat to 14 million Jews, so Shotzen considered himself justified in destroying him.
Bub might kill him, of course. But he was willing to take the risk to save his people.
Shotzen outlined the plan in his memoirs; should he not survive there would at least be a record of his bravery and sacrifice. His first idea was to detonate the bombs that had been surgically implanted in Bub's head and chest. But the trigger for them was in Yellow 4, and it had a locked door with a keypad entrance. Only Race could get in there.
Shotzen decided the next best way to destroy Bub was with fire. The flames could possibly even set off the bombs. He could sneak into the habitat while Bub slept. But what to use?
The rabbi harkened back to his youth and remembered a hate crime; a synagogue that had burned to the ground. Vandals had thrown a bottle filled with kerosene at the front door. That kind of incendiary weapon had a name, Shotzen recalled. A Molotov cocktail.
Samhain had a back-up generator that ran on gasoline. Shotzen could fill an empty schnapps bottle with gas, stuff a sock down the bottle neck as a wick, and he'd have a fire bomb. One should be enough; after all, one destroyed an entire two story synagogue. Shotzen decided to make two, just in case.
He had half a bottle of schnapps plus the empty from the night before. Shotzen indulged in a quick slug to calm his nerves, and then dumped the rest of the liquor down the sink. He placed both bottles in his pillowcase and left his room.
He walked quickly and with purpose. The Octopus was empty. Shotzen took the Yellow Arm to room 8, the generator room. He turned on the lights.
The generator sat silently in the corner, a large green appliance the size of several refrigerators. Off to the right was a gasoline pump, an older version of the modern day gas station model. Shotzen set down the pillowcase and removed the bottles. The gasoline shot out of the nozzle like a garden hose, and the rabbi spilled as much as he bottled. Gas evaporated quickly, so Shotzen didn't worry himself over it.
He capped the bottles, put them back in the pillowcase, and headed for the Red Arm. He would check on Bub. If the demon was asleep, he would proceed. If not, he'd stick around until he had the chance.
Shotzen had trouble with the gates; his hands were shaking. When he approached Red 14, he opened the door just an inch and peeked inside. Dr. Harker was standing in front of the habitat, talking with the demon.
Rabbi Shotzen closed the door silently and contemplated his next move. He went through the first gate and decided to hold fort in Red 7. It was a small storage room. There were various cleaning supplies scattered around. Shotzen set the bottles down next to a collection of mop heads, then sat down and removed his socks. He unscrewed the bottle tops and stuffed one sock into each bottle neck. Then he tilted the bottles upside down, saturating the makeshift wicks with gas.
He had a several disposable lighters in his pocket. In his room was a collection of over thirty. His wife Reba had smoked, and Shotzen's method of discouraging her was to constantly take her lighters. She never did quit, but for some reason he'd never gotten rid of them. Strangely, they were all he had left to remind him of Reba. The get granted her possession of everything, down to the last photograph.
Shotzen said a quick blessing, wishing her the best wherever she was. He bore her no ill will. His sterility and his alcoholism were more than any woman should have had to bear.
He took out a lighter and flicked it once. Twice. No flame.
He tried a second one and it worked instantly. Shotzen adjusted the flame to its greatest height, almost two inches. Then he shook it to make sure there was plenty of fluid left.
There was.
He heard voices in the hallway. Sun and Andy. He could also make out the footfalls of sheep. They were bringing Bub his lunch. Good. Bub usually took a nap after eating. That would be the time to strike.
Shotzen checked his compass, something he'd gotten from Race and always carried around, and faced east. He took his siddur---his prayer book---from his pocket and read the afternoon service. Then, while still standing, he began to pray the Amidah. He prayed aloud and with kavanah---intent---but he kept his voice a whisper.
When the prayer ended he began to shuckle, rocking back and forth, davening to Adonai for judgement, purpose, and strength.
He was going to need it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dr. Julie Harker sat in the back of the room and watched impatiently as Sun led the two sheep into Bub's habitat. Andy Dennison, the interpreter, was helping her.
She's screwing him, Harker decided. Didn't waste much time either; the guy had only been here a few days. It reminded Harker of her mother. She used to sleep around too. Harker couldn't count all the times she was taken to different men's houses and left in front of the television while her mom hurried to the bedroom. One more horrible memory from a horrible childhood.
Harker turned on the camera and videotaped the hideous spectacle, giving further credence to her earlier lie. Bub got down to business quickly. As soon as the sheep entered his domain Bub had grabbed each by the head. With a quick twist of his giant talons he broke their necks in unison, and then began to feast.
As Bub gorged himself, Sun engaged him in some brief conversation, asking why his hunger had increased. Bub explained that a creature of his high metabolism needed a lot of calories to maintain itself. Bub had only learned English yesterday, Harker noted, and was already lying like a pro.
The demon ate quickly, stuffing the final bit of the first sheep into his gaping maw only minutes after beginning. Through the zoom of the camcorder lens Harker could see that Bub was able to unhinge his lower jaw like a snake to get the big pieces down.
He began to chow down on the second sheep, causing Harker to stop taping and shoot him a look. The extra sheep was to become Harker's little girl. Had she been tricked?
Sun and Andy neglected to stay for the second course, and when they left Bub stopped eating.
"That's supposed to be my child," Harker snapped as she approached the habitat. "You're eating my baby."
"Don't woooooooorry," Bub cooed.
"I don't want a daughter with bite marks out of her."
"She'll be fiiiiiiiiiine."
"I want her perfect."
"She'll be fiiiiiiiiiine. Give me the cooooooodes"
Harker held the camcorder up to the Plexiglas. She pressed the stop button and rewound the tape.
"I recorded myself punching in the code, so you know it works. See for yourself."
She faced the viewing screen at Bub and let the tape play. Bub kept perfectly still while he watched, like a cobra before it strikes.
"The second gaaaaaaate."
"The same code," Harker stated matter-of-factly. "I would have kept taping, but I was almost caught."
Bub eyed her closely. Julie wasn't quite sure why she lied. Perhaps it was because having a nine foot demon running around loose wasn't the smartest thing to allow. Perhaps it was because she didn't entirely trust Bub to make her a little girl. If all worked out, Harker might give Bub the second code later on. Maybe in another deal. Harker would enjoy having a little boy for her daughter to play with.
"We have a deal, right?" Harker narrowed her eyes. There was no way Bub could tell she was lying. Harker was too good at deception. She'd cared for one for nearly a year.
"What color eeeeeeeeeyes?"
Harker blinked. She'd never considered it.
"Blue eyes. And blonde hair. Curly blonde hair."
Just like Shirley, Harker thought.
"Watch the doooooooor," Bub instructed.
He dragged the carcass of the sheep further back into his habitat, coming to rest behind some bushes. Harker stood in the doorway to Red 14, alternating her attention between the hall and the habitat.
"How about the surveillance camera?" she called to Bub.
He didn't answer. Minutes passed. Harker could see the legs of the sheep poking out from behind the brush. At first they twitched, then the twitching became bucking. When the blood started to spray, Harker left the door to take a closer look.
Bub rested his palm on the prone sheep's chest. The sheep was jerking wildly under his hold, almost as if an electric current was being passed through it. Slowly, it began to expand. The wool, matted black with blood, peeled away like strips of wet carpet. Then the skin detached itself from the skeleton and puffed out until the sheep was double its original size. It began to bleat, high-pitched and frantic.
It's screaming, Harker realized.
There was a large wet POP as the skin burst. A fine mist of blood sprayed Bub, covering him with droplets. With his free claw, Bub tore away the remaining skin. The muscles underneath were dark red and stringy and...
Changing.
All four legs shortened, seeming to shrink into themselves. As if its bones were made of rubber, bending and twisting until it no longer resembled a sheep, just a squirming mass of connective tissue.
The bleating became the choke of someone drowning.
Then the head imploded and promptly expanded into a human skull shape.
"Watch the dooooooooooor," Bub commanded.
But Harker was rooted. The body convulsed, sending blood and stringy sinew in all directions like thrown spaghetti. It curled up into a position that was obviously fetal. Bub continued to keep his claw on its chest, in contact with the heart.
The musculature became a lighter and lighter red until it was pink. Harker realized it wasn't changing color; skin was forming. It kicked its legs, now ending in recognizable feet rather than hooves. Harker watched as its hands, shaped like two mittens, began to divide and splay until they each had five fingers.
Bub's concentration was intense. He appeared almost in a trance.
The bleating was high-pitched now, almost the wail of a siren. It slowly died down, becoming rhythmic, more recognizable.
The cries of a child.
Harker tried to swallow, but the lump in her throat was too big.
The changes became more gradual. Harker came up to the habitat and pressed her forehead against the Plexiglas. She could make out fine hair, springing from the scalp wet with blood. As the girl cried, Harker could catch glimpses of the gums forming and the tongue taking shape.
"Incredible," Harker whispered.
The child blinked, revealing startling blue eyes. The details on her small body became sharper: nipples formed, fingernails grew, a belly button. Genitals, small and delicate. The many bends of the ear. Eyebrows and lashes. It was as if Harker was looking at her from far away through binoculars, slowly fine-tuning the focus.
"All dooooooooone."
The girl had stopped crying. She lay on her back, arms and legs twitching.
"She's done?" Harker asked.
"Yessssssssss."
"Can she eat?"
"Sucking reeeeeeeflex."
"Bring her," Harker said.
Bub gently picked up the child with one claw and took her to the side door. Harker hurried over to it.
"My daughter." Harker's voice broke.
She took the child in both arms, holding her close. It felt so natural. So good.
"Mama needs to clean you up, Shirley. You're all covered in blood."
The child gripped her blouse and Harker almost swooned from joy. She had to get her back to her room in the Blue Arm without being seen. How?
"Watch her for a moment," Harker said, handing the child back to Bub.
The girl closed her eyes and sucked her thumb.
Harker flew out of the room, through the gates, through the Octopus, into the Green Arm. Green 8 housed the two large food freezers. Harker went into the first, finding a large box filled with frozen loaves of bread. She emptied the bread onto the floor. The box seemed big enough.
She hurried back to Red 14 unseen. Shirley was sleeping in the palm of Bub's claw, curled up in a little ball. Perfect. Harker put the child into the box gently, so as not to wake her.
"Haaaaaaaave fun," Bub said, grinning.
Harker was too nervous, too excited to answer. The box was cumbersome, but she welcomed the burden. She held it tight to her chest, careful not to jostle and redistribute the precious weight inside. More valuable than gold. More valuable than even freedom.
A box full of love, Harker thought.
The tears came freely now. Joy so sharp it was painful. Once again, after years of fruitless fantasies and desperate dreams, Julie Harker was finally complete once again.
She was a mom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Father Thrist had never felt so close to Jesus Christ. He felt Him in his heart. He felt Him running though his veins. He felt Him with every breath, every step, every pore.
He hurried down the Red Arm, anxious to perform his first baptism in over twenty years. Bub, having read the bible Thrist had lent him, had decided to become Catholic.
Besides receiving the First Sacrament, Bub was anxious for others as well; the Second Sacrament, Penance, and the Third Sacrament, the Eucharist, receiving the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion.
The world was soon going to change, Thrist knew for sure now. Bub would usher in a new era of religious awakening. His message of Christ's Divinity would resonate to all corners of the earth. There would be no more doubters. Even the most stubborn contrary faiths would have to recant. Rabbi Shotzen's conviction that Jesus never met the criteria of the Messiah would soon be overturned. Every knee would bow. Every tongue would swear loyalty to the one true God. And when that happened, the lion would lay down with the lamb and there would be universal peace, praise be to Christ.
Thrist had dressed for the occasion. Over his green cassock and Roman collar, Thrist wore a white alb and amice, a stole, and a white floor-length chasuble. Pride was a sin, of course, but Thrist loved wearing full Christian liturgical garb. It made him feel holy.
He entered Red 14 with an uncharacteristic smile.
"Good afternoon, Bub."
"Faaaaaaaaaather."
The demon sat in the center of the habitat, his legs in an odd lotus position---odd because his knees bent forward rather than backward.
He looked peaceful, Thrist thought.
"Have you decided on a Christian name?" Thrist asked.
"Luuuuucifer Michaeeeeeeeeeel," Bub answered.
Father Thrist's chest swelled.
"I am honored. Lucifer Michael it is. I was named after the arch angel Michael. Did you know him?"
"Nooooooooo."
"Tell me about God again," Thrist said.
He felt like a child who never tired of his favorite bedtime story.
"God is pure blissssssss. He's watching us right noooooow. He loves yoooooooou."
Thrist closed his eyes, trying to imagine being in the presence of God. Thrist had never known bliss. It sounded too wonderful to bear.
"Let us save your soul then," the priest said, "so you may once again be with God in heaven."
Father Thrist nodded and patted the satchel he carried. In it were two copies of the Missale Romanum---the Latin Mass. Bub would serve as the choir and read the responses. The bag also contained a vial of holy water, a goblet, an unleavened circle of bread with a cross imprinted upon it, and a small bottle of red wine.
"We shall celebrate Mass," Thrist said. "You shall be baptized, get Penance, and finally receive the Body and Blood of Christ."
"Through the glasssssssss?" Bub asked.
The priest shook his head. "I shall be in the habitat with you."
The creature uncrossed his legs and stood. He approached the Plexiglas slowly.
Bub whispered, "Aren't you afraaaaaaaaid?"
"Of course not, Bub. I have no reason to be."
Father Thrist marched over to the side hatch without fear. He opened the small door with the assurance of his faith.
Big mistake.
Bub was waiting for him when he entered. He grabbed the priest in his claw and held him up against the inner wall of the dwelling, five feet off the ground.
"What are you doing?" the priest asked, more surprised than afraid.
Bub grinned, a mouth of daggers.
"Open the dooooooooor," the demon said.
"This is not the way to be saved," Thrist said. "That door isn't the door you need to worry about. The door to heaven is..."
"Shhhhhhhhhhh," Bub held a talon over Thrist's mouth. "Enough talk of heaven and God and Jesussssss. I met Jesus, priest, but not in the desssssssert. I met him in a whore hooooouse. He was fat and uuuuuugly."
"Lies," Thrist's voice was barely a whisper. He couldn't get his mind around what was happening. "Blasphemy."
"The whoooooooores didn't want to touch him. He had to pay extraaaaaa. But at least he didn't die a virrrrrgin... like yooooooou."
The reality of the deceit now weighed fully on Thrist. His friend, Rabbi Shotzen, had been right all along. In his eagerness for proof, he had eschewed faith.
This time, the epiphany had come too late. He was a fool to think he could change the devil.
But he wasn't fool enough to listen to his lies.
"I... renounce you, Satan."
"Open the doooooor."
Bub traced an upside down cross on Thrist's left cheek, drawing blood. Thrist was terrified, but the holy man refused to flinch.
"Let meeeee give you Holy Communion, Faaaaaaather." Bub barked a laugh. "Hoc est enim corpus meum!"
Take and eat this, for this is my body.
Bub pinched himself in the pectoral muscle and removed several ounces of his own flesh. The wound knitted itself instantly.
Thrist tried to turn his head away, but Bub forced the raw meat into his mouth. It was warm and smelled of decay, and it seemed to wiggle and squirm as if still alive.
The priest vomited, staining his vestments.
It would be the first of many stains.
"Open the doooooor."
"Never," Thrist spat. "I will not do the work of the devil."
"Christ died in paaaaaaaain." Bub said. "Your death can be woooooooorse."
Bub moved his face closer to the priest's. Thrist could smell his fetid breath and see ragged bits of sheep still clinging to his teeth.
"The Lord is my shepherd," Thrist said, "I shall not want."
"Heeeeere comes the paaaaaaaain."
Thrist felt Bub's claw sliding down his left leg. The demon grabbed it tight and slowly began to twist. There were cracking sounds, and then a loud pop when the knee gave out.
Thrist screamed, the first time he'd ever screamed in his life.
"Now waaaaatch."
The priest felt a pressure in his chest, akin to suffocation. Then his body was enveloped in a fold of warmth, a warmth so complete that Thrist thought the Holy Spirit had rescued him.
He was mistaken.
"I just healed yoooooour leg"
Thrist was astonished to find the agony completely gone. He moved his leg and it felt normal.
"Here is cooooomes."
Bub twisted the leg again, faster than before.
Again Thrist cried out, but this time Bub opened his toothy maw and a black tongue snaked out, slithering into Thrist's mouth and silencing the cry.
Tears streaked down the priest's face as Bub wiggled the broken leg this way and that way, his vile tongue raping Thrist's throat.
Father Thrist prayed for death.
It didn't come.
Just as he was close to passing out, Bub removed his tongue and allowed him to breathe again.
"Do you want me to heeeeeeeeeeal you?" Bub whispered.
Thrist's face began to spasm, his left eye blinking uncontrollably. His facial tic had returned.
"Open the doooooor."
The priest said nothing. The pain in his leg was overwhelming, but even worse was the left side of his face. Every twitch of his upper lip pierced his soul.
"What's wrong with your faaaaaaaaaace?"
Thrist's entire world was reduced to despair. The facial tic was proof. His God had forsaken him.
"I can make it wooooooorse," Bub said.
He gave the leg a twist and Thrist blacked out.
\*
When the holy man awoke, there was no pain.
"We can do this all daaaaaay," Bub said.
He grabbed the same leg. Father Thrist gagged at the thought of the oncoming agony. He knew he couldn't handle it again. The very idea made his gorge rise.
"...please..."
"Where is your God nooooooow?"
Thrist's eyelid was blinking like crazy. "...no more..."
"Pray to me, Faaaaaather. Pray to me to not to hurt yoooooooou."
"I... I..."
"Kneeeeeeeel, priest."
Thrist knew he was a dead man. The moment he'd stepped into the habitat, his fate had been sealed. But that was the fate of his body. The fate of his eternal soul remained unresolved.
Until now.
Father Michael Thrist silently asked God for the forgiveness of his sins, and thanked the Almighty for the privilege of his life and the opportunity presented to him. Thrist had come there today expecting a baptism, but it turned out he was the one about to be baptized.
The Church called it the Baptism of Blood. Dying a violent death in the name of the Lord.
Thrist embraced martyrdom like a gift.
"No."
"Nooooooooooo?"
Thrist faced the demon. His facial tic had disappeared, and he stood proudly, without fear. Jesus died for mankind's sins, and Thrist was honored to die in His name.
"I shall not kneel."
Bub lifted the priest up and twisted each of his feet backwards. Thrist began to cry, and Bub held him on the ground in a kneeling position.
"Worship meeeeeeeee."
"No," the priest said through clenched teeth.
The demon took one of Thrist's arms and bent it back at the elbow. It snapped with the sound of a gun shot. Thrist screamed again.
"Proclaim your loyalty to meeeeeeee."
There could be no worse death, Thrist thought. Or no greater death.
"I proclaim... my loyalty..."
"Yesssssssssssss."
He looked up, past Bub, past the ceiling, past the two hundred feet of earth above them.
Thrist said it clear and strong, "To my Lord, Jesus Christ."
Bub went to work on the other arm, but Thrist had gone to another place in his mind. He knew Bub was twisting and breaking his body, but he no longer felt any pain. He could picture heaven, as Bub had described it. Eternal bliss. His faith had been restored, and Thrist had no fear of death.
Not even when Bub pulled off his leg.
"Fooooooool," Bub hissed at him. "Open the fucking dooooooooor."
The priest looked up at Bub and smiled beatifically through his veil of tears and blood.
"I forgive you," Thrist whispered.
He didn't feel it when Bub bit off his head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rabbi Shotzen thought he heard a scream. He stopped his prayer and listened.
Silence.
He began again in earnest, intoning under his breath, "Kadosh kadosh kadosh..."
Another scream. This time he was sure he heard it. Moving cautiously, he approached the door and opened it a crack.
The Red Arm was empty.
He craned an ear to listen.
Nothing. Not a sound.
Perhaps it wasn't a scream. But he should check. He'd heard the gate open a few minutes ago. It had been Father Thrist, visiting Bub in full church regalia. But that couldn't have been Thrist who screamed. Even he wasn't foolish enough to go into the habitat.
Then again...
Rabbi Shotzen was overcome by a sudden burst of urgency. He grabbed his bag of Molotov cocktails and held onto the lighter, and then he rushed out into the hall and saw...
Bub was crawling out of Red 14.
"Jesus Christ," Shotzen said.
The demon pulled himself through the tight fit of the door and cocked his head at Rabbi Shotzen.
"Shalom, Raaaaaaaabbi," Bub said.
Shotzen set down the bag and with shaking hands and took out the first bottle.
Bub couldn't stand erect because the ceiling was too low. He crawled up to the first gate, and to Shotzen's amazement, punched in the code.
The bars swung open.
Shotzen flicked the lighter. Once. Twice. Three times. No flame. He looked at it and saw he had the wrong one.
"Your friend Faaaather Thrist," Bub said, crawling forward, "has something to saaaaaay."
The demon opened his mouth and coughed. A red ball flew out of his throat and bounced before him, sticky with goo.
Shotzen took a closer look and saw it wasn't a ball.
Bub picked it up and held it out to Shotzen.
Father Thrist's head, slicked in gore.
It blinked.
Then it blinked again, and opened its mouth as if to say something.
"What's thaaaaaat?" Bub asked, holding his other claw to his ear. "You'll have to speeeeeeak up."
Shotzen gagged.
"He wants to talk to yoooooou."
The creature chucked Thrist's head at the Rabbi. On reflex, Shotzen dropped the bottle and the lighter and caught it with both hands like a basketball. The firebomb fell to the ground and shattered.
Shotzen stared at the head in his hands.
"Kill me," the priest's lips clearly said.
Shotzen yelled out in shock.
Bub laughed so hard he vomited out Father Thrist's leg. It flopped onto the floor and wiggled like a fish.
Shotzen threw the head into the wall as hard as he could, hoping to end the priest's misery. He reached for the second Molotov cocktail and took another lighter from his pocket.
"Back to the pit with you," Shotzen declared, shaking with rage. He flicked the lighter and the two inch flame jumped up to ignite the gasoline soaked rag. The Rabbi threw the bottle at the ground before the beast. It shattered, showering Bub with a wall of flames.
The demon screamed. The stench of burned hair and cooked meat invaded Shotzen's nostrils. Bub batted at the flames with its claws and rolled in the cramped hallway, trying to staunch the flames.
"What the hell?" Andy said. He'd come out into the hallway fifty yards further down, on the other side of the second gate. Sun appeared a moment later.
"Stay back," Shotzen warned them.
Bub burned for almost a minute before the sprinklers came on.
The flames died down, and then smoldered out. Smoke began to clear. Shotzen stared in amazement as Bub's burned flesh seemed to wash away under the water stream. He shook like a wet dog and shed the scorched flesh. Underneath his skin was new and unharmed.
"Now it's my turn," Bub said.
"Rabbi!" Andy yelled. "Come on!"
"Run!" Shotzen yelled back. "He knows the codes!"
Bub was on Shotzen in a single lunge, scooping up the holy man in a claw.
"Codes?" he asked. "There is mooooooore than one?"
He dragged Shotzen to the second gate and punched in a code.
Nothing happened.
The demon roared. It was the most horrible sound Shotzen had ever heard. Like the thunderclap of a terrible storm.
"What is the code for this dooooooooor?" Bub demanded.
The talons were digging deeply into Shotzen's body. If he'd been skinnier, it might have killed him. As it stood, they were only imbedded in fat, causing excruciating pain.
"Race!" Shotzen called to Andy. "The bombs!"
Andy nodded, grabbing Sun by the hand and disappearing into Red 3.
"The coooooooode," Bub said. He tightened his grip.
It was like being prodded with hot pokers, the Rabbi thought. The pain was worse than anything he'd ever known.
"Shema Yisraeil, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad," Shotzen gasped.
"Ah, the Shemaaaaaa," Bub said. "Deuteronomy six four. Rabbi Akika, riiiight?"
Shotzen thought of Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, the man who compiled the Mishna in the first century. He suffered a horrible death, tortured by the Romans, but still proclaimed his love for God as he died. His last words were the Shema.
"How did Rabbi Akiba die?" Bub asked. "Remembeeeeer?"
Shotzen remembered. The thought of it had given him nightmares as a youth.
Bub said, "I want the doooooooor code."
Shotzen shut his eyes and prayed. "Barukh Shem k'vod malkhuto l'olam va-ed."
Blessed be the name of his glorious kingdom for ever and ever.
"Rabbi Akiba was skinned aliiiiiiiive."
Shotzen quaked with fear. Bub pinned the rabbi to the ground and ripped away his clothing.
"Paaaaaaainful," the demon said. He sunk two claws into Shotzen's shoulder and began to pull.
"And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might!" Shotzen screamed.
He'd said the words a thousand times. Ten thousand. They were the words in his mezuzah on his doorway, the words in the tefillin he strapped to his arm and forehead for morning aleinu.
"The cooooooode," Bub ordered.
Shotzen thought of his life. Of his parents. Of Reba. Of the congregation that didn't want him and the children he never had.
"Give me the code and I'll make yoooooooou better."
Bub had healed Race's wife. He had seen them together, in the Octopus, laughing like children. Shotzen had no doubt that Bub could heal him now. Perhaps even fix his sterility. Shotzen could live through this, maybe even start a family. He knew that if he gave Bub the code, he didn't have to die.
Bub began on his leg, pulling and ripping. Shotzen fought against the agony and continued to pray.
"And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart!"
Perhaps fifty thousand times he'd said the Shema in his life. He'd meant it every time. But he'd never truly understood what love was until that moment. Loving G-d with more than heart and soul and might. Loving Adonai with your life.
Shotzen's eyes were somehow forced open.
"Seeeeeee this?" Bub held up what looked like a bloody rag. "This is your faaaaaaaaaace."
Shotzen could no longer form words without lips, and an animal cry came from his throat. But his thoughts were focused.
And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up.
"Foooooools," Bub spat. "Stupid religious foooooools."
The light was dimming, things became blurry. Shotzen was in incredible pain. Yet he was happy. He knew even though he hadn't killed Bub, his life was not in vain. Bub wouldn't get out. Race would set off the explosives implanted in Bub's body. Shotzen hoped to live long enough to hear the boom.
"You won't die until I get the coooooode. I'll keep resurrecting you, ooooover and ooooooover."
You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be frontlets between your eyes.
Shotzen could no longer see. His own blood had pooled into his eye sockets.
Angry at the lack of response, Bub began to rip the rabbi in half.
You shall write them on your doorposts of your house and on your gates...
Shotzen finished the prayer. His very last thought was his love for his Lord.
Bub cast aside the body of the holy man. Then he shook the titanium gate and howled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
"Where the hell is he?" Andy swore. He had the phone in his hand and had tried Race's room, the Octopus, the Mess Hall, the rec room, Helen's room, the library, and even the pool, all the while trying to remain in control while Shotzen screamed in the hallway.
"Use the intercom," Sun told him.
"How? What goddamn button? Was it star something?"
"I forgot too, dammit!"
The floor shook and there was a tremendous clang. Sun and Andy exchanged glances and peeked out of Red 3 into the hall.
CLANG!
Bub had charged the gate and rammed it with his shoulder. His chest was soaked in blood, making the fine red hairs appear black. Behind him, Shotzen was lying on the floor in two large pieces, neither of which had any skin.
When Bub noticed Andy he smiled at him, stringy things sticking to his steak knife teeth.
"Aaaaaaaandy!"
"We are so out of here." Andy grabbed Sun's arm and they ran down the Red Arm, away from the demon.
"Let me ooooout!" Bub shouted after them.
They rushed into the Octopus. No Race.
"Okay, what were Race and Helen doing?" Andy said, thinking out loud.
"Dancing. They were dancing."
"Does this place have a disco?"
"No. But... the lounge! There's a stereo in the lounge."
"What room?"
"Purple something." Sun rubbed her forehead. "Um, the pool is 2, the bar is 6, library is 8. Dammit, I don't know the lounge."
"We'll try them all."
Andy picked up the nearest phone and dialed Purple 1. No answer. Then he tried Purple 4.
"Howdy, you're interrupting a rumba lesson."
Thank God.
"Jesus! General, Bub is out. He's killed Rabbi Shotzen and gotten through the first gate."
"I'll be right there."
"He's coming," Andy told Sun, hanging up the phone.
"What did he do to the Rabbi?" Sun asked. "The screams..."
Andy put his arms around her. He tried to shake the image of Rabbi Shotzen being peeled by Bub, but it refused to go away.
The Purple Door flew open, and Andy and Sun each jumped back.
"How did he get out?" Race demanded.
The General was in full dress uniform. Helen was in a sequined evening gown. She looked worried.
"Shotzen said Bub knew the code."
"Sunshine, if you could wait with my wife. Andy..."
Race motioned for Andy to follow. Andy didn't want to. But Sun's eyes on him forced him to move. He trailed Race back into the Red Arm.
CLANG!
The gate was still holding. Bub rubbed his shoulder and squinted at the new arrival.
"Raaaaace. Let me oooooooout."
Race approached slowly. Andy was even slower. He watched the General peer past Bub and down the hallway, which was charred black and drenched in gore.
It looked like a corridor of hell.
"Why did you kill Rabbi Shotzen?" Race asked.
"It was fuuuuuuun."
"Blow this bastard up," Andy told Race.
Bub leveled his eyes at Andy. "Open the doooooor, Andy. You want to fuck Suuuuuun? I'll make her your whore if you let meeeeee ooooout."
Andy had to clench hard to avoid wetting his pants.
"Here's the deal, Bub," Race said. "You go back into your habitat, lock yourself in, and I won't destroy you."
"Do you want power, Raaaaaace?" Bub hissed. "You can be a general in my army. I'll make immoooooooortal."
Race took another step forward, still beyond grabbing range. He took his eyes off of Bub to examine the gate.
"Hooooooow is Helen?" the demon cooed.
"She's fine." Race looked hard at the demon. "Why?"
Bub grinned slyly.
Race's voice was almost as scary as Bub's. "What did you do to her?"
"Let me ooooooooout. There's still time to fiiiiiiiix it."
"So help me, if anything happens to that woman..."
"She haaaaaaates you. She haaaaaaates you for bringing her heeeeeere. But I can fiiiiiiix that. Maaaaaaake her loooooove you again."
"You're bluffing. You're trapped, and you're bluffing."
Bub barked, his laughter echoing down the hall.
"We'll seeeeeeeee."
Race turned around and walked briskly back down the Red Arm, Andy in tow.
"Let me oooooooout!" Bub screeched.
CLANG! The ground shook as the demon rammed the gate again.
"What's going on, Race?" Andy asked. "Just detonate the bombs."
"I need to talk to the President."
"Then get his ass on the phone!"
They entered the Octopus, Race going to his wife. He held her face in his hands.
"Do you feel okay, dear? Anything wrong?"
"I feel fine, Regis."
"Sun, can you check her out?"
Sun nodded, and sat Helen down at one of the far tables.
Andy got up close to Race and thrust out his chest. "Why don't we kill him?" he demanded.
"He can't get through that gate. It's holding."
"What if---"
"I can only destroy Bub if he's a risk to any of the occupants of Samhain."
"Bullshit," Andy said. "We're expendable. The people involved in a top secret project are always expendable."
Race jammed his finger into Andy's shoulder. "We are not expendable, understand? But I can't kill Bub unless he's a threat. Right now he's trapped. He cannot get out. And even if he does, we have backups."
Andy said, "The bombs implanted in his body."
"Yes. Plus we have something called Lockdown. See, above all the doors?"
Race pointed to every door in the Octopus. Above each of the frames was a large overhang with a slit in the bottom.
"More titanium gates, they completely seal off each arm and the Octopus. I just need to type in the code on the security screen, right here."
"What's the code?" Andy asked.
"Lockdown. One word, all caps."
"So what are you waiting for?"
"It can't be reset. Once we're in Lockdown, gates drop on all the arm entrances and in front of the exit at the end of the Yellow Arm. Plus three more titanium gates drop on the staircase leading to the outside. We'd be stuck here until someone cut us out, bar by bar, with a blowtorch. So that isn't necessary right now. You don't have to worry. We're safe."
Andy shook his head. "I've had it," he said. "I'm not a soldier. It's not my job to fight the devil. I know exactly what will happen. I saw Jurassic Park. Everything will go wrong. The systems will fail, Bub will get out, we'll all be dead by morning."
"Calm down, son."
"Bullshit! I want out. Me, Sun, the rest. Get us the hell out of here, Race."
Andy met Race's gaze, trying to be just as impassive.
Race said, "Okay."
Andy stared at him, amazed. "Okay? That's it? We can go?"
"Of course you can go. I'll call the President right now, arrange for transport. We can have a chopper here within an hour."
Andy wasn't sure if he could believe him or not, but Race sat down at a terminal and accessed a program called CONTACT. He clicked the options bar on EMERGENCY.
"Direct link to the Prez," Race explained. "Unless he's having a press conference, he should be on line in a minute or so."
Within seconds another window appeared on screen. The message bar read AUDIO CONNECT.
"General?" came the President's voice from the monitor speaker.
"Mr. President, the occupant has breached the first two phases of security. He is extremely hostile, and we have civilian casualties. Request immediate evac."
"Is the occupant currently contained?"
"Yes. I'm going to stay with him. But I want the rest of the team picked up ASAP."
"Of course. I'll contact Fort Bliss."
"I'm going to need help to neutralize the subject. Maybe one of those big game hunters who captures elephants for zoos. With a tranquilizer gun and plenty of ammo."
"I'll find someone as soon as possible. A helicopter will be sent immediately to evacuate the team. I'll debrief them at Fort Bliss. How did this happen, General?"
"I'm not sure, Sir. He got the codes for the gates somehow."
"I'll contact you soon. God be with you and your team, General."
The computer blinked MESSAGE ENDED.
"Well," Andy said, relief making him feel twenty pounds lighter, "he's an okay guy after all."
Race picked up the phone and hit \*100. His voice boomed over the in house speakers. Dammit, Andy thought. That was the intercom code.
"Attention, this is Race. Everyone meet in the Octopus for immediate evacuation. Repeat, everyone meet in the Octopus, we're all getting out of here. Move your asses, people."
"RAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!" Bub bellowed, his voice heard from all the way down the Red Arm.
"I guess he doesn't like the news," Andy said.
"Screw the son of a bitch. What the hell happened in there, Andy?"
"I don't know. I was in Red 6 translating the glyphs and I heard screams. It was Rabbi Shotzen, getting ripped apart."
"Shotzen let him out?"
"I don't think so. Bub... he skinned Shotzen to get the code for the second gate. The Rabbi didn't give it up."
"Brave man. So how did Bub get the codes?"
"What's happening?" Dr. Belgium entered the Octopus through the Green Door.
"Bub's out," Andy explained. "We're leaving."
"I'll get my things," Belgium turned for the Blue Door.
"Pack light," Race said. "Have you seen Father Thrist or Dr. Harker?"
"Not lately. Do you think..."
"Race!" Sun said. "Your wife!"
The three of them hurried over to Helen, who was lying on the floor with Sun crouched over her.
"She was fine just a second ago," Sun said.
"Is it the Huntington's chorea?" Race asked. "Is it back?"
"No," Sun said, panic in her eyes. "This is something else."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Helen struggled in the throes of some kind of seizure. Her limbs flapped uncontrollably, and her back arched and twisted, but it didn't look like any convulsions Race had ever seen.
Helen's legs and arms were bending backwards.
"Helen! Oh, Lord!"
"Regis," she cried.
Race's eyes clouded over. He knelt next to his wife, holding her in an attempt to stop her body from snapping apart.
"Her feet." Dr. Belgium pointed.
Race stared as one of Helen's high heels split open. The shoe fell away, revealing toes that swelled and melded into a giant black mass that resembled...
"A hoof," Andy said.
Race could feel his wife expand in his arms, bulging and stretching. Changing.
Helen howled, revealing several rows of long, sharp teeth.
"Oh my my my..." Dr. Belgium said.
"Race," Andy put a hand on the General's shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Helen. I'm so sorry."
"Race, we've got to take her out of here."
"Take her where?" Race accused. "This is my wife, dammit!"
"Race, your wife is growing hoofs and fangs. We've got to separate her from the group."
"I'm not leaving her!"
A deep growl came from Helen.
Andy put his arm around Race's neck and yanked him backwards.
"Move her!" he yelled at Frank and Sun. They wasted no time, each grabbing a foot and dragging Helen out the nearest door, into the Yellow Arm.
"Helen!" Race choked. He held Andy's arm and twisted, flipping the younger man off of him. Then he made a run for the Yellow door.
"Don't!" Sun stood in his way. "It's not Helen anymore! Stop and listen!"
Behind the Yellow door came a cacaphony of screeches and yowls, sounds no human being could produce.
Race shoved Sun away and grabbed the door knob. He paused, grief racking his face.
"Barricade it," he said through his teeth.
The next thirty seconds were a frenzy of chair throwing and table stacking, everyone waiting for the inevitable moment when the Helen-thing came crashing through the door.
The moment stretched, but never came.
"Maybe she left," Belgium said.
"The exit to the outside is down that hallway," Andy said. "Do you think she's trying to get out?"
"Do you want to open it and look?" Sun asked.
"Well if she's in there, how are we supposed to get out ourselves? The helicopter should be here within the hour. Race---"
One Star General Race Murdoch marched into the Red Arm, his heart a stone. He had never felt pain like this before. Helen's illness had been torture for Race, killing him a bit at a time in the same way it was killing her. But seeing Helen whole again, dancing with her after all of these years, and then watching helpless as she turned into that...
Bub was sitting behind the gate, a lopsided grin on his face.
"Hoooooooow's Helen?"
Race turned to the keypad on the wall and punched in the first two numbers of the code to open the gate.
"Goooooooood boooooooooy."
"You see that?" Race said, facing the demon. "You're four numbers away from being free---"
Bub's grin stretched.
"---and that's as close as you're ever going to get. It's over, Bub. It's not a question of you getting out. It's a question of you still being alive five minutes from now. You're about to go off like a fourth of July firework."
Bub darkened.
"Are you threatening meeeeeeee?"
"No, Bub. I'm killing you."
Race turned and headed back to the Octopus, getting intercepted halfway there by Sun, Andy, and Frank.
"I'm doing what I should have done forty years ago," Race told them.
He led the trio and into the Octopus and began to take down the makeshift barricade in front of the Yellow Arm.
"General," Dr. Belgium said, "maybe you should think this over. Helen---she might not be pleased to see you."
Race smiled sadly.
"Hell, Frank, if a soldier can't handle the little woman, what good is he?"
The last table was pushed away and Race took a deep breath.
"After I go in, put this back up, and don't open the door again until I give the all-clear."
"I'm going with you," Andy said.
"They teach you hand-to-hand combat at Harvard, son?"
"Two have a better chance than one."
Race clasped his shoulder. "I respect your bravery, but this is my job, not yours. You stay here and keep an eye on your lady, let me tend to mine."
Andy stared hard into Race's eyes and offered his hand. "Good luck, General."
Race shook it and grinned. "I'll take training over luck any day."
He winked and went through the Yellow door.
The hallway was empty. Race moved slowly at first, then broke into a jog. The years of daily exercise had paid off. He tried to push the emotional baggage aside and visualize his goal. Yellow 4.
That's where the bomb switch was.
He got within ten yards, and then Helen burst out of Yellow 3.
But it was no longer Helen.
She'd changed into a five foot version of Bub. Her chest was greenish, rather than red, and her wings didn't look large enough for flight. The legs had bent backwards, like a goat, ending in large cloven hoofs. Her arms ended in razor claws that resembled eagle talons. Hundreds of long, pointy teeth, thin as icicles, jutted from her mouth, so large that her lips were shredded and bleeding.
Race stared hard into her elliptical eyes, eyes the color of a furnace. He found no trace of his wife in their depths. A lump the size of a plum formed in his throat.
"Hello, dear," Race said.
It took two steps towards him, its piggish nostrils sniffing the air.
"Can you understand me, Helen?"
The creature growled, raising its talons. They ground together with the sound of knives being sharpened.
Race clenched his teeth and said, "I'm sorry."
Then he took a running start and dove at the thing that was once his wife.
It was like fighting a tiger, all claws and teeth and muscle. Race had the weight advantage, but the sheer ferocity of the demon's attack put him on the defensive. He was being torn apart in ten places at once.
She forced him to the ground and continued her assault, ripping at his clothes, snapping at his neck. The pain was electric. He felt as if he'd fallen into a meat grinder, and part of him wanted to just give up and die.
But Race was a soldier. A soldier with a debt to settle. For his country, that he loved so dearly. For his friend Harold, whose senseless death weighed upon Race every hour of every day. But most of all, for Helen.
Bub had to die. And so did this abomination that was once his wife.
Race went for the eyes, making his fingers stiff and jamming them in hard. The demon squealed, releasing its grip long enough for Race to crawl past and reach Yellow 4.
It was a keypad entrance. Race lifted his arm to punch in the code, but his arm wasn't working right. He took note of the puddle of blood forming around his feet.
He was hurt bad.
Race used his other hand, unable to stop it from shaking.
His first attempt at the code failed.
The thing that used to be Helen advanced on all fours, like a wolf.
The General ignored the threat, and once more punched in the code. A talon wrapped around his leg and tugged, just as the door unlocked.
Race grabbed the doorframe and pulled himself into Yellow 4, breaking the beast's grip. He slammed the door shut with his feet, hoping it would hold.
\*
"How do we know for sure the bombs will kill Bub?" Sun asked. "He heals so fast."
Andy was sitting with his arm around her, and he couldn't be sure if she was trembling, or he was.
"This could be interesting." Dr. Belgium got up and headed for the Red Door. "I think I'll watch."
Andy said, "Be careful. Race said those charges were large enough to..."
Oh no.
"Large enough to what?" Belgium asked.
"We have to stop him." Andy got to his feet. "Call Race, we have to stop him from setting off those bombs."
"Why why why would we do that?" Belgium asked.
"Do it!"
Andy knocked away a chair from the Yellow door barricade but Sun held him back.
"You can't go in there. That thing will tear you apart."
"Call Race!" Andy said. "He can't set off those bombs!"
Andy broke away from Sun, but rather than the Yellow Door he went for the Red Door. He half stumbled, half ran down the Red Arm.
Bub wasn't near the gate. And Andy saw why.
\*
Race took a deep breath and choked on the blood. There wasn't an inch of him that didn't hurt. But that didn't matter. All that mattered was the detonation switch. Race was going to send Bub back to hell, where he belonged.
The phone rang. Race ignored it. He crawled to the side panel along the wall. There were several buttons and switches. Race turned on the power for the remote, then activated the radio transmitter and disengaged the safety.
"This is for you, Helen."
He hit the detonation switch.
\*
Andy could see the gate, twenty yards ahead. Resting on the bars, near the lock, were two stainless steel pellets each about the size of a baseball. Even from that distance, Andy could see they were slick with blood.
Andy knew why the demon had taunted Race earlier.
Bub had dug the bombs out of his body and set them on the gate.
The linguist turned tail and ran back to the Octopus.
"Get down!" he said, slamming the Red Door and pulling Sun to the floor.
The explosion rocked the complex, blowing the Red Door off of its hinges. Andy felt the floor vibrate like a mini earthquake, shaking so hard he bit his tongue. The BOOM was painful to his ears, and immediately followed by a wave of heat and smoke, which drifted through the Red Arm and into the Octopus.
Andy looked down the hallway, straining to see through the haze.
The titanium gate swung open.
"Reaaaaaaady or not," Bub said. "Heeeeeeeeere I coooooooooome."
The demon crawled forward.
"What happened?" Sun said.
Andy ignored her and rushed to the computer terminal, grateful that it wasn't damaged. He booted up the main screen and searched for the SECURITY window. There were a dozen headings; COMMUNICATION, INVENTORY, HELP, PERSONAL, SECURITY...
"Aaaaaaaaaaaandy!" Bub bellowed.
Sun said, "Jesus! He sounds close. Did he get through the gate?"
Andy glanced down the Red Arm and saw Bub making his way down the hall. He was about forty yards away, moving in a crouch.
"This is not good," Belgium whispered.
"Andy, what are you doing?" Sun shook him. "Can you stop him?"
Andy clicked on SECURITY and the password window came up. He typed in lockdown.
PASSWORD INCORRECT.
Andy retyped it, making sure he spelled it right.
PASSWORD INCORRECT.
"Godammit, Race!" Andy smacked the desk with his fist. Race said lockdown, one word no breaks. Andy tried lock down.
PASSWORD INCORRECT.
"Andy, whatever you're doing, do it fast."
Andy chanced a look over his shoulder. Bub was twenty yards away and closing.
"I'm not worried." Dr. Belgium put his hand to his chest. "I'll have a heart attack before he finally gets here."
Andy typed lockdown with a hyphen.
PASSWORD INCORRECT.
Andy hit the HELP button. It read PASSWORDS ARE CASE SENSITIVE.
"Caps. It's all caps."
"We've got to run," Sun said. "He's almost at the door."
Andy typed in LOCKDOWB.
"Stand clear!" he yelled.
He hit ENTER.
PASSWORD INCORRECT.
"Oops. Typo."
"He's here!" Belgium screamed, high-pitched and frantic.
Andy pressed BACKSPACE, erasing the B. Then he hit N and ENTER.
LOCKDOWN ACTIVATED.
Six titanium gates dropped from the overhangs above all the doors in the Octopus, simultaneously sealing it off with a ground shaking CLANG!
Bub barely pulled his arm back in time, or he would have lost it. The demon stared at the new set of bars and scowled. He grabbed one and gave it a violent tug. It held.
The demon screamed, an unearthly wail that sounding like hundreds of souls being tortured.
Andy let out a deep breath. The adrenaline was wearing off and his whole body was shaking badly.
The phone rang, prompting Dr. Belgium to scream again.
Andy grabbed it.
"Did I get him?" Race asked on the other end. His voice was wet and sickly.
"No, General. He used the bombs to blow up the gate. I had to go into Lockdown."
"Dammit." Race's voice held none of the authority Andy had become used to. "I did just what the enemy wanted. Some soldier I am."
"He fooled us all, Race. Can we make it to the exit through, uh, Helen?"
"No," Race coughed and spat. "She turned into a demon like Bub, smaller but deadly. I'm bleeding to death. There's no way to get through. It doesn't matter anyway. When you activated Lockdown, a gate dropped over the only way to the surface, plus four more on the exit stairs."
Despair hit Andy like a punch.
"When we aren't there to be picked up, won't the Army come in?"
"This is a top secret base, son. They don't even know it exists."
"Can't the President---"
"The President's two top priorities are to keep Samhain secret, and to keep Bub contained. The safety of the staff is a long third."
Andy wanted to throw the phone across the room. He settled for swearing.
"Do we have any weapons? Guns? Explosives?"
"Nothing," Race's voice was solemn. "I don't even have my sidearm down here. No one ever thought we'd need anything."
"So what next?"
Race sighed, a bubbling sound. "I don't know. We wait for the President to call. Have you heard from Father Thrist or Dr. Harker?"
"We haven't seen Thrist or Harker."
Bub laughed, deep and cruel. His rage had vanished, and he sat in front of the gate, lotus style.
"Here's some of Faaaaaather Thrist." Bub spit a glob of something out between his teeth.
"So all we can do is wait," Andy said.
"I'm sorry, son. I am. I won't be able to make it back there, so let me know when the President calls. We'll think of something."
"Try to hold on," Andy told him.
"You too." Andy hung up.
Sun went to Andy and cradled his head in her arms. Andy put his hand on her cheek and closed his eyes.
"What now?" Sun asked.
"We have to wait for the President. There's no other way out of here."
"What about food?" Sun asked. "Or water? We can't get to the Mess Hall."
Belgium squinted. "Hey, where did Bub go?"
The demon was no longer by the titanium gate.
Sun stood up and walked over to the Red Arm. Andy didn't want to go with her---anywhere Bub went was better than him here, taunting them. But he went anyway. He wasn't sure the exact moment it happened, but he'd become extremely protective of the veterinarian.
"See him?" Sun asked.
Andy gripped her hand and tried to peer down the hallway. There was still some residual smoke, and some of the overhead lights had blown out when the bomb went off.
"Looking for meeeeeee?" Bub said in the distance. His vision was apparently better than Andy's.
Bub came into view, dragging something behind him.
"Oh, Jesus," Sun said, backing away.
"You all remember Raaaaaaaabbi Shotzen." Bub pulled the two halves up to the gate.
Andy didn't want to look at the ruined mess, but he couldn't help it. The body no longer looked human. It was just blood, guts, and bones.
"I'm ressurecting hiiiim. Would you like to seeeeeeee?"
Sun turned away. Andy glanced at Dr. Belgium, and saw him taking his own pulse. He faced Bub.
"We're not afraid of you," Andy said.
Dr. Belgium cleared his throat. "Actually, um, I am."
"Shall I bring the rabbi back to life, Fraaaaaank?"
"No no no, I wouldn't like that at all, Bub."
Bub stroked his chin with his talons, as if in thought.
"How about this insteaaaaaaaad."
The demon touched his claw to one of the larger parts, and a moment later, it began to shake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The corpse's arms and legs rolled and squirmed as if they were boneless, like the tentacles of a squid. Organs inflated and split. The rabbi's skull expanded like a water balloon, undulating and jiggling.
Sun had witnessed death, up close. She remembered being a med student, visiting the morgue for the first time, and how creepy it felt even though she'd been prepared for it. Sun had encountered burn victims, and fatal car accidents, and once even operated on a man who'd gotten his hand caught in a meat grinder.
This was most horrible thing she'd ever seen.
And then it got worse.
The flesh began to blister and bubble, and when the bubbles reached the size of baseballs they separated from the body and shot into the air with a loud PHLOP sound. A few at first, and then all at once, like microwave popcorn.
Several of the chunks flew through the bars, landing at Sun's feet with wet thuds. She watched, holding her breath.
With frightening speed, the flesh took shape. Curled up at first, like an embryo, maturing in fast motion. The head formed, arms, legs, a tail. It stood up, about the size of a large vampire bat, with matching bat wings. Black and red, sporting tiny horns, and claws that looked like fish hooks. The thing opened its mouth, revealing rows of needle sharp teeth.
"A little Bub," Belgium gasped.
Sun watched it waddle over to her and leap onto her shoe. Fear had paralyzed her, memories of her childhood and that horrible bat in her bedroom assaulting her mind.
The thing chirped like a bird and stretched open its jaws, ready to bite her leg.
Andy kicked it across the room.
More fist-sized chunks sailed through the bars. Dozens. A few took to the air and began to fly around the room in quick figure eights.
Sun still couldn't move. A demon landed on her shoulder, screeching like nails on a chalkboard. It was going to bite her, and she couldn't get her muscles to work.
"Ow!" Dr. Belgium yelped. He had a nasty gash across his cheek. "They're like flying razor blades!"
"Move it!" Andy smacked the demon off Sun's shoulder and yanked her away from the gate. The Octopus was full of them now, flapping and squealing, diving at the group with claws out and mouths wide. Fifty or more.
Andy pushed Sun under a desk and pulled another desk over, trying to seal her between them. The things, the batlings, circled around and around, diving in and taking bites out of Andy's hands and head. Sun could glimpse the blood through the swirling tornado of monsters.
Belgium picked up a chair and swatted at them, knocking several out of the air. When they fell he picked up his knees and stomped marching band-style, crushing them with his heels.
One managed to escape the stomping, and hopped over to Sun's hiding place.
Damn it, Sun, move! her mind screamed.
But her body didn't listen.
The batling jumped up onto her shoulder. It's maw stretched open, bloody drool leaking down its chin.
MOVE!
But she didn't.
The demon bit into Sun's shoulder, hitting a nerve, doubling her over.
The pain galvanized her. Sun clenched the batling in her fist, feeling the pointy little bones snap under the pressure. She threw it aside and scrambled out from under the desk.
Fear be damned, she was ready to fight.
The demons saw a new victim and swarmed.
Sun grabbed a computer keyboard, yanked it free, and began to whack batlings left and right. But for each one she hit, ten hit her. The pain came from everywhere at once, pain like gigantic bee stings, sharp and burning. Nipping at her arms and back. Going for her eyes.
They're eating me alive, Sun thought
Something bit into her ear and she smashed it against the side of her face. Another became tangled in her hair, clawing and gnawing at her head. She pulled it off, taking some hair with it.
Bub's giggling filled the room---a disturbing sound like a small child being tickled.
Sun could no longer see. Her torn scalp bled down into her eyes, burning like salt water. She wiped a sleeve across her face and saw a figure fall to his knees, covered with batlings.
Andy.
In four steps she was at his side, rearing back the keyboard, smashing it against his chest. Eight batlings dropped off. She repeated the move with his back, putting all of her strength into the blow.
It probably hurt, but not as much as being eaten alive.
The demons she killed were quickly replaced by others, covering Andy like a fur coat.
This is futile, Sun realized. We're all going to die.
Which really pissed Sun off. She tried to block out some of the panic and think. They couldn't hide, or get away. Killing them one at a time was too slow. What did she know about bats? They were nocturnal, they used radar to navigate, they were eaten by hawks, they hibernate when it gets cold...
"Cold," Sun said aloud.
At the far end of the Octopus was a fire extinguisher. Sun beelined for it, tossing the keyboard aside. The extinguisher was a big one, at least sixty pounds, and the fire engine red color meant it was filled with carbon dioxide. She yanked it from the wall housing and pulled the pin.
In one hand, she grabbed the funnel cone and aimed at the cloud of batlings. With the other, she pulled the trigger.
A spray of sub-zero CO2 burst from the nozzle with an explosive SHHUSSH sound, freezing batlings as they flew. They dropped from the air, covered in frost. When they hit the ground they twitched and flopped around in a stupor.
"Cover your eyes!" she yelled at Andy before giving him a healthy spritz of healing cold. She then zapped Dr. Belgium, who had curled up into a fetal position near the Purple door.
"Help me! Kill the ones on the floor!"
Frank and Andy began to step on the fallen batlings, while Sun tracked down the remaining few still circling the Octopus. She ran out of CO2 with only one demon remaining, and she managed to swat that out of the sky with a clipboard.
When the last batling had been crushed underfoot, the childhood giggling began again.
Bub.
The demon clapped his hands in glee, his lips peeling back and his tongue obscenely bathing his own face.
Sun ignored the demon and went to Andy, who looked like he'd dipped his head in a bucket of red paint.
"You're hurt," she said.
"So are you." He touched her cheek.
"Let me help you first."
She sat Andy down and saw most of the blood was coming from two major wounds; one on his nose, and one on his scalp. She found a box of tissue in a desk drawer and gave him a handful to press against his face.
The head wound was worse---a four inch gash that went down deep.
"You need stitches."
"Got a sewing kit handy?"
"No. But do you trust me?"
Andy offered a lame smile through the wad of bloody Kleenex. "Of course."
Sun took a stapler off the desk.
"You're kidding," Andy said.
"Watch carefully. You'll have to do me next."
She opened up the stapler and pinched the edges of Andy's wound closed. Then she lined it up and pushed down, hard.
CHHHH-CHHHHK.
"Ow!"
"Only three or four more."
Dr. Belgium wandered over. He'd wrapped his lab coat around his head, like a giant red and white turban.
"Me next," he said.
Sun had to put six more staples into Andy's head, and then three into Frank's.
"Thank you for stapling my head," Frank said.
"You're welcome."
When she finished, she handed the bloody stapler to Andy.
"Press down firm, to anchor them into bone."
"You and your sweet talk."
Sun sat and closed her eyes while Andy patched up the wound on her head. She reached up a hand and gingerly felt his work.
"Not bad," she told him.
Andy looked like he'd been in a hockey fight, but he smiled shyly. Sun had a sudden urge to hug him, but didn't want to hurt him any more than he already was.
"The doors are all closed," Belgium said, looking around the room.
"What did you say, Frank?"
"All the doors in the Octopus. That means those bat things were contained. We wouldn't want any getting out and hurting anyone else."
"That wouldn't be good," Sun agreed.
"And speaking of anyone else---where where where is Dr. Harker?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Dr. Julie Harker had been bathing her new daughter in the sink when she heard the voice over the intercom.
"Attention, this is Race. Everyone meet in the Octopus for immediate evacuation. Repeat, everyone meet in the Octopus, we're all getting out of here. Move your asses, people."
Harker frowned at the news. Evacuation. Bub must have gotten out.
"No need to rush." Harker squeezed the sponge over Shirley's head, rinsing the shampoo from her hair. The water was pink with the blood from Shirley's creation.
Birth, Harker corrected herself. Shirley had been born today.
"Happy birthday to you," Harker sang.
She wrapped Shirley in a bath towel and carried her to the bed.
"Mama needs to find a diaper for her Shirley, yes she does. Maybe an old sheet? What do you think, Shirley?"
Harker located a pillow case, and wrapped it expertly around Shirley's bottom, securing it with three paper clips.
"There you are. Your first diaper."
Harker smiled. There would be many more firsts. The first pee-pee and poo-poo. The first nap. The first steps. The first words. A whole lifetime of firsts to share together.
"How's my little girl?"
Shirley gurgled, and Harker's heart melted. She was so beautiful. So perfect. Harker wanted to savor this moment, to make it last, but she knew she had to hurry. Shirley was just small enough that she could fit in Harker's suitcase. There was a good chance Harker could get her out of here without anyone knowing.
Julie set the baby down and searched the closet for her old luggage, coming out with a carry-on bag. Punch in a few airholes, and it should work fine.
"Perfect," she smiled. "Now let's dry you off."
Harker put the towel over Shirley's head and rubbed.
Shirley snarled, low and hoarse, making Harker jump back.
Her daughter stared at her, deep blue eyes burning with hate.
Harker yelped.
Shirley no longer had a face. Harker looked at the towel in her hand and saw her daughter's scalp.
She'd torn it off.
"No. No no no. Oh my, oh my..."
Shirley hissed at her, a glistening red skull. She stretched her mouth wide to cry and Harker noticed she was growing teeth. They breached her gums with alarming speed, long and narrow and impossibly sharp.
"Oh my Shirley..."
Shirley hissed at her. Her tiny body began to swell, tripling in size. Greasy fur sprouted all over her skin. Her shoulder blades jutted out in points, and her head inflated like a balloon, crackling as the skull bones separated, her eyes bulging out and changing from blue to milky white.
Harker felt faint. She turned to run for the door, but something wrapped around her ankle. Something sharp, that dug deep into the bone.
"MaaaaaaMaaaaaa," Shirley said.
The pain was unreal. Harker screamed. She continued to scream as Shirley pulled herself toward her mother, her giant mouth snapping like a bear trap, getting closer and closer until---
SNAP!
The teeth closed on Harker's foot.
A symphony of agony thundered through Harker's nervous system.
Harker kicked with all of her might. She punched like a crazy woman. But Shirley hung on, continuing to chew.
Before Harker passed out, an ironic thought passed through her mind.
This is Shirley's first meal.
\*
She woke up sometime later. There was no more pain in her foot. Harker quickly realized that was because most of her leg was gone.
Her daughter was perched on the bed, eyes closed. She no longer resembled anything human. Shirley had six legs. She was pale white, with clawed feet and a body like a fat lizard. Her oversized head was crammed full of teeth, and they jutted from her closed mouth like fondue forks.
On the end of one, Harker spotted her skewered big toe.
Harker bit her lower lip to keep from screaming again. Shirley appeared to be asleep. Maybe she still had a chance to make it out of there alive.
She looked around the room. The phone was on the nearby dresser, but talking might wake the creature. Instead, she twisted toward the door, only a few feet away.
Harker pulled herself along the soggy carpet, using her arms and her remaining leg. She felt no fear. She was remote, detached from the situation. And cold. So cold.
I'm going into shock, she thought, shivering. The edges of her world began to blur and slip away. She bit the inside of her cheek to stay awake.
Almost there. Just a little more.
She made it!
Julie reached up at the door knob, turning... turning...
"MaaaaaMaaaaaa."
Harker screamed as Shirley sprung from the bed, scurrying over to her on many legs.
The demon climbed atop Harker and hissed.
"All I wanted was to love you," Harker moaned.
Shirley began to eat again. Harker closed her eyes, unable to put up a fight. She gave in to shock, grateful that the cold was overtaking her.
At least she wouldn't feel any pain anymore.
As it turned out, Harker was able to feel more pain. For quite some time, in fact.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Andy leaned back in a chair, doing his best to fight exhaustion and one whopper of a headache. A search of the desk drawers had uncovered a bottle of Tylenol. They all took several. They hadn't found any water, and Andy felt like the tablets were still caught in his throat.
"How long can Bub go without food?" he asked Sun.
"I don't know."
"I'm immoooooortal," Bub answered through the bars of the titanium gate. The demon giggled again, making all the hair on Andy's body stand on end.
"In his claws!" Dr. Belgium shouted, springing to his feet. He'd been scrutinizing one of the squashed little demons. "Yes yes yes. The sheep's leg had a puncture wound. I didn't know where it came from. But now I know."
"Know what, Frank?"
Andy and Sun came over and looked. Belgium spread the claw open, and a tiny needle came out the center of the palm. When he released the pressure, the needle retracted.
"How Bub reproduces. No sex organs. When he fixed Helen and brought the sheep back to life, he touched them with his talons."
Sun said, "Go on."
"Bub uses the syringe in his palm to inject organic matter with some kind of serum, something probably containing hormones and enzymes. This serum can restructure DNA; restriction enzymes cut the DNA up, then it's put back into any order Bub wants it to be in. Maybe he uses a virus, or a retro virus, to take over the cells operating machinery---that's how we splice genes---and then during mitosis the cells change into whatever Bub preprograms."
"That's how Helen changed into that monster." Sun said, nodding. "And how Rabbi Shotzen became those batlings."
"Right right right. Remember, humans are 90 percent intron genes---genes that don't code for protein. But they could be cut up with enzymes and patched back together so they can code for protein. There's a wealth of raw material in DNA, if it could only be activated by enzymes or hormones."
"That could also explain Bub's rapid healing abilities, and why he doesn't age," Sun agreed.
"He can program his own DNA to heal itself."
"So why are the batlings so easy to kill?" Andy asked. "Why can't they heal themselves?"
Belgium shrugged. "Not mature enough yet. Their systems haven't fully developed. They're a generation removed from the host. I'm not sure. But there's a scientific explanation."
Andy stared at Bub and scowled. "Not a miracle at all."
Bub growled, his eyes becoming malevolent yellow slits.
"Did you get a work-up of the proteins involved?" Sun asked Belgium.
"Not yet. Didn't have time."
"How about the mitochondrial DNA?"
"Hmm? Oh, that. Yes yes yes. The Short Tandem Repeat got a hit on that."
"And...?" Sun asked.
"His mitochondria encompassed 70 percent of the genome for Methanococcus jannaschii. An archaean."
Andy blinked. "I speak thirty languages, and I don't know what the hell you just said."
"It's a microscopic life form," Sun answered. "It isn't quite a bacteria, isn't quite a plant or animal, and probably predates both, making it one of the oldest and maybe the first life forms on earth."
"Archaea is an extremophile," Dr. Belgium added. "It's found in some of the harshest areas on the planet. It thrives in boiling water, in geysers, near black smokers at the bottom of the ocean, in extremely salty brines. We've also discovered archaea that live in rock, more than a mile deep in the earth's crust. Think of it, bacteria living in solid stone."
The scientist began to pace around the room.
"Archaea can also withstand below freezing temperatures. It doesn't need oxygen. Many archeaens are autotrophic; they get their energy from inorganic sources; iron, sulfur, hydrogen. It's suspected that there may be archaea on Mars, or on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter. Because it can survive in extreme environments, scientists expect archeae to be the first alien life form found in the universe."
Belgium stopped pacing, and his eyes got very big.
"What is it, Frank?" Sun asked.
"Panspermia!" the biologist exclaimed. "Francis Crick!"
Belgium began to pace, eyes wide with excitement. "Crick won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. He had an idea called directed panspermia. What if an alien race shielded a microbe in some kind of spaceship and sent it to all corners of the galaxy, where it was likely to grow? Crick postulated it could be how life on earth began. It was planted here."
Sun said, "If archaea was the first life form on earth, and it didn't need oxygen---"
"Which is exactly what earth's early environment was like, no oxygen," Belgium interrupted.
"---it could have hitched a ride here in a meteorite made of iron, which would not only be a food source but also protect if from radiation. It could survive the deep cold of space---"
"Archaea has been found in five million year old Siberian permafrost," Belgium exclaimed.
"---and it could also survive the tremendous heat when it entered the earth's atmosphere. So if Bub has archaea in his genes..."
They all looked at the demon. Bub grinned wide and giggled.
"I created yoooooooou," the demon cooed. "I'm yoooooour god."
Andy was slack-jawed. He noticed similar expressions on his companions.
"This isn't happening." Andy shook his head. "Life on earth isn't some garden planted by this bastard."
"It's truuuuuuuuue."
Sun said, "So where's your spaceship?"
"Einstein proved interstellar travel was impossible," Dr. Belgium concurred. "The nearest star is more than twenty four trillion miles away. That's over four years travel if you were moving at light speed, 186,000 miles a second, and light speed is impossible to attain. The faster an object moves, the heavier it becomes."
Bub didn't answer.
"His capsule," Sun said, snapping her fingers. "It had iridium in it."
Belgium gasped. "Oh my goodness."
Andy asked, "Iridium? What's that?"
"It's not commonly found on earth. But it's abundant in meteorites, or other objects that come from space."
"That gray thing is a spaceship?" Andy said, incredulous.
Sun put a hand on his arm. "Did you figure out the Egyptian glyphs?"
Andy's shoulders slumped. He rubbed his eyes.
"Yeah. They told the story of a god who fell from the sky and helped them build the pyramids." The linguist shook his head. "I don't believe this."
"So all that talk of God," Sun said to Bub, "of heaven and Jesus and fallen angels. That was all bullshit?"
"Fraaaaaank gave me Inteeeeernet access."
Andy shot Belgium a look. The scientist seemed to shrink.
"Not my smartest move, in hindsight," Belgium said.
The computer beeped several times and the message bar read INCOMING MESSAGE. Andy clicked on the video icon and the President's face came of the monitor.
"Mr. Dennison? I was just informed that none of you made it to the evacuation helicopter."
"We had to go into Lockdown, Mr. President. We're trapped in here."
"Is General Murdoch with you?" the President asked.
"He's stuck in another part of the compound. Hurt bad. His wife turned into a demon. Bub changed her somehow."
The Commander-in-Chief raised an eyebrow. "He can change people into demons?"
"You need to find a way to get us out of here, Mr. President. Can you get us any sort of weapons? Gas? Explosives? Something to cut through the bars?"
"Is it possible that I could speak to General Murdoch?"
"Just a second, I'll see if he's still alive."
Andy picked up the phone and dialed Yellow 4.
"Race, how are you doing?"
Race coughed. "Not dead yet." Though he didn't sound far from it.
"I've got the President on the monitor."
"Ask him," Race said, "if we can go ahead with Protocol 9."
"What's that?"
"Just ask him, Andy."
"Mr. President, Race wants to go ahead with Protocol 9. Is that an escape plan?"
"I grant acceptance for Protocol 9. Authorization code..." the President looked at some papers on his desk. "7-6-5-8-9-9-0."
"He says to do it, Race, code number 7-6-5-8-9-9-0. What's Protocol 9?"
"God be with you folks," the President said.
The monitor went blank.
Andy's stomach did a slow roll. "What the hell just happened?" he demanded.
Sun reached out and gripped his arm. "I don't like this. Ask Race what's going on."
"It's the last safety measure," Race said, "in case all others fail. In 1967 I authorized a one kiloton nuclear device to be buried under Samhain."
"What? A nuke?"
Sun closed her eyes. "A nuke."
"Race," Andy gripped the receiver, knuckles white, fighting to remain calm. "You can't blow us up."
"I'm sorry, son. If Bub gets out, he could destroy the world. I don't have a choice here."
"What about our choice?" Andy pleaded.
"It's in God's hands now."
"God?" Andy laughed. "Didn't you hear? Bub is God. He came from outer space and created all life on earth."
Sun wrestled the phone from Andy.
"General, you have to give us a chance. Is the Yellow Arm the only way out?"
There was a pause. Andy put his ear next to the receiver and heard Race say, "Yes."
"You paused. Why did you pause? Is there another way out?"
"I'm sorry, Sunshine. It has to be this way."
"Don't do this, Race. Please."
"I'm setting the timer for an hour," Race said. "Give you time to make your peace, have one last fling, whatever you want to do."
"Race..."
"We're saving the world, Sun. Take some solace in that."
The General hung up.
Andy stared at Sun, then at Dr. Belgium. They both looked devastated.
"We have to turn off that nuke," he said.
Sun met his eyes. "We don't even know if it can be turned off."
"We have to try."
Sun shook her head. "How do we get through the bars? And even if we manage that, how do we get past Helen?"
"We'll find a way. Race said we have an hour."
"An hour? We couldn't even do it with power tools."
"There's the central air vent." Dr. Belgium pointed above to the left of the Blue Door near the ceiling. "It's big enough to crawl in. Race had to go in there once, around ten years ago, to fix a weld."
Andy's heart leapt. "Where does it go?"
"The ducts go through the ceilings all over the compound."
"We still can't go into the Yellow Arm," Sun said. "Not without some kind of weapon."
"Race had that cattle prod. I'm betting it's in his room."
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!
They all turned to look at Bub, who'd gripped the titanium bars and shook them with ferocious power.
"Free meeeeeeee!" Bub hissed. "I'll help you turn off the bomb if you free meeeeeee. Fraaaaank..."
The demon focused his attention on the biologist.
"I know things about science that yooooooou couldn't even comprehend. I could teeeeeach you. You'd surpass Crick. Surpass Einsteeeein."
Frank looked away.
"Suuuuuuun," Bub implored. "I can take away your paaain, heal the wounds of the paaaaaaaast."
Sun gave Bub her back and folded her arms.
"Andy..."
Andy gave Bub the finger.
"Fooooools. Then diiiiiiiiie!"
Bub roared, an unholy screech that made Andy's ears ring, then disappeared down the Red Arm.
"We have to defend ourselves somehow. Bub might making more of those things out of Father Thrist."
"How many can he make?" Andy asked.
Sun did a quick count. "There are about eighty dead ones here. So we should expect another eighty."
"Can we barricade the gate?" Belgium asked.
"He can fit his hands through the bars. He'll just push the barricade down."
"How about a net?"
"Made of what?"
Belgium scanned a desktop, then held up a pack of yellow Post-It notes.
"I don't think that will hold, Frank. But it can't hurt to start piling stuff up against the gate."
Andy set the timer on his watch for fifty-five minutes.
"Let's move like our lives depend on it." he said.
Belgium began to stack chairs against the Red Arm. Andy and Sun pushed a desk over to the air vent. Andy climbed on top. The grating was at waist level, held into place with four screws. Flat heads.
"See if you can find some kind of flat tool. A nail file. A rulers. Something to use as a screwdriver."
Sun rifled through the drawers, then handed him a staple remover. The metal edge fit into the groove on the screw head. Andy twisted.
The screw didn't budge.
"Not enough leverage. Try to find something else."
Sun left to search for a better tool, while Andy struggled with the staple remover. He tried another screw, pushing down on it hard, his fingers turning white from the pressure.
It moved.
Andy leaned into it, his head pounding, the sweat starting to come.
An agonizing two minutes later, and the screw was out. A long son of a bitch too.
One down, three to go.
"Try this," Sun said. She handed him a piece of metal---one of the drawer tracks from a desk. Andy tried it in the screw.
"Too soft. It just bends."
"I'll keep looking."
Andy went back to work with the staple remover. His fingers were cramped and screaming, and the sweaty tool kept slipping off the screw, making him scrape his knuckles. But he managed to get another one out.
Checking his watch, he saw they'd lost eight minutes.
"They're coming," Dr. Belgium said.
Andy looked over his shoulder. Belgium had piled a ceiling-high stack of chairs and desks against the Red Arm gate.
Sun ran up to him.
"Andy! You gotta hurry!"
Andy pried up an edge of the vent, stuck his fingers under it, and yanked. He was able to pull the vent to the side, revealing a very narrow opening.
"It's dark," he said, peering in. "And dusty. Does anyone have matches or a lighter?"
"Just get your ass in there." Sun said. "We should be able to see light through the vents when we're over them."
"Bats bats bats!" Belgium said, running up. "I hear them coming down the hall!"
Andy took off his shirt and wound it around his face to keep out the thick dust. Sun and Belgium did the same. Then Andy went in.
There wasn't much space, and Andy couldn't get on all fours to crawl. He moved forward by pulling himself with his fingers in a chin-up motion, using his tip toes to assist. It was slow going, exhausting, claustrophobic, and it didn't help that Andy had wounds all over his body.
Before long his breathing was choked and labored, and his fingers and calves were cramping.
"Keep going," he heard Sun say behind him.
She touched his foot. It gave him a smidgeon of hope.
Then he heard the squeal of the batlings echo through the vent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sun didn't like enclosed spaces. With Andy in front of her, and Dr. Belgium at her heels, she felt like a sardine. The dust coated the inside of her mouth and nose, and made her eyes water.
Belgium tapped her ankle. "They're right behind me."
"Faster, Andy!"
"There's a light ahead. Just a few feet."
Sun scurried forward, trying to push Andy's feet to move him quicker.
"There's a vent. I'm over a hallway."
A clanging sound; Andy banging on the vent, trying to force it open.
Behind Sun, Dr. Belgium screamed.
"Biting me! They're biting!"
Two more clangs, and then Andy disappeared.
Sun saw the light ahead. Andy had knocked out the grating, and gone face-first through the opening on the bottom of the vent.
"Keep moving, Frank!" she yelled. "Just a few more feet!"
Sun got her head over the opening and blanched at the ten foot drop. Andy knelt on the floor, moaning softly. His staples had come loose, and his head gushed blood.
"Andy!"
He glanced up at Sun, his face bathed in confusion. He must have hit the floor hard.
Sun couldn't wait for him to get his bearings.
"Andy! Catch me!"
She wiggled through the opening and fell into his arms. He caught her and hugged her tight to his chest, and they tumbled over onto their sides.
Andy blinked, then grinned at her.
"We've got to stop meeting like this," he said. "People will talk."
"Coming down!"
Dr. Belgium dropped through the grate like a stone, landing on top of the couple. He hit Sun with such force that she saw stars and had the air knocked out of her chest.
Belgium was followed by a dark wave of batlings, which quickly filled the hall with swirling fury.
Sun sucked in a breath and looked around. They were in the Blue Arm, only a few yards away from her room. She had a can of mace in there. Along with something that might be even more helpful.
Sun managed to get to her feet and scrambled for her door, batlings swooping on her at all angles. She tugged the knob, dove onto the bed, and wrapped her fists around the two racquetball racquets she'd left there since her earlier game with Andy.
Sun rushed back into the fray in time to see Dr. Belgium run screaming down the hall.
"Andy!" she yelled, tossing him a racquet.
The batlings went straight for blood, biting at Suns wounds. She pulled off the ones that had begun to chew, and adopted her game stance.
The demons flew fast, but not as fast as a racquetball bounced. On Sun's first swing she smacked one down the hall, splattering it against a door.
It felt good.
Another dove straight at her face, screeching , and she backhanded it to the left.
WHACK!
She forearmed another into the ceiling.
WHACK!
Two flew at her head-on, and with an overhand smash she catapulted both into the floor. Sun hit another so hard its claws got stuck in her racquet string. She yanked it out and tossed it aside.
The former American Racquetball Association Women's Champion swung again and again, her racquet slicing through the air in all directions, knocking away batlings as fast as they could fly at her.
She chanced a look at Andy, who was displacing so many demons he seemed to be waving around a large net.
The batlings smartened up. They stayed out of Sun's swinging range, and tried to attack her from the side and from behind. Sun dodged left, jumped, and hammered two more.
Less than twenty remained, and Sun kicked it into overdrive, bringing the fight to her attackers. She set her jaw and sprang into the thick of them, staying on the balls of her feet, moving the racquet as fast as she could. Blood hung in the air like a mist, coating her face, making the racquet handle slippery. The constant flapping and screeching became intermittent, and then almost non-existent.
Just a handful remained, and the veterinarian hunted them down, one at a time.
A final demon, screaming like a smoke alarm, beelined for Sun's face in a suicidal attempt to get at her throat.
Sun whacked it so hard it bounced off two walls.
The veterinarian turned completely around, searching for another flying attacker.
There were none. The floor was littered with the dead and dying; almost a hundred of them. Several were still twitching or trying to flap their broken wings. The once pristine hallway now resembled a slaughterhouse.
Something touched her shoulder, and Sun whirled around, ready to swing.
Andy.
"I'm checking Race's room for the cattle prod."
She touched his head. He flinched.
"I've got some super glue in my room."
"For what?" Andy's eyes looked up, as if he could see his own scalp. "You're kidding, right?"
"It's better than staples. Surgeons use it. What time do you have?"
Andy checked his watch. "Thirty-six minutes until we're fried."
"I'll meet you back out here in two minutes."
Sun turned to go, but Andy caught her arm.
"Wait a sec."
She turned. "What is it?"
Sun searched his face, saw tenderness.
"Watching you, since all of this began, you're so brave."
"We're both brave."
"No. I'm just trying to stay alive. You told me about your fear of bats, how they freaked you out. You faced that fear, and won. I want to be like that."
Injured as he was, she never had a man look at her with so much longing.
"It's easy to be brave," she breathed. "Don't think about it. Just do it."
Andy put his arm around the small of her back, pulled her close, and kissed her.
Sun hurt in a hundred places. Andy tasted like blood and sweat and dust, and he smelled even worse, and his hand was pressed right up against an open batling bite on her side, and this was the worst possible timing in the history of male/female relations.
It was also the best kiss of Sun's life.
She kissed him back, enjoying the spark of electricity that ran helter-skelter over her nerve endings. She may have even moaned a little.
When they finally broke the kiss, Andy said, "Wow."
No one had ever given Sun a "Wow" before.
"Meet me back here in two minutes," she said. "And be careful. We don't know what else is running around here."
Sun hurried to her room, and only after closing the door did she wonder what happened to Dr. Belgium.
CHAPTER THIRTY
When the hallway filled with batlings, Dr. Belgium looked to Sun and Andy to tell him what to do. He watched Sun tear down the hall and run into her room.
Good idea, Belgium thought.
He took off after Sun, a swarm of demons striking him from all directions. He almost panicked. The batlings instilled the same primordial fear as a swarm of bees or a nest of vipers. Even worse, they were intelligent, aiming for Belgium's eyes, biting at his legs and back and other places he couldn't swat with his hands.
The high-pitched squealing sound they made, the electric pain appearing all over his body like bullet hits, the blood blinding his eyes---part of him wanted to just give up and die.
He quickly realized he wasn't going to reach his room alive. The creatures were in his face, and he couldn't see. Every time he knocked one off, another took its place.
So Belgium did what he was taught in grammar school.
Stop, drop, and roll.
The batlings that clung to him were crushed under his weight. The others couldn't land on him. Dizziness be damned, this was the perfect protection.
Until he hit the wall.
Disoriented, he reached up, his fingers finding purchase on a doorknob. He got to his knees and entered the room, slamming it closed behind him.
He checked his clothes, to see if any batlings still clung to him. One was gnawing on his left calf, and he tore it off and tossed it at the bed.
It was then that he noticed what was left of Dr. Harker.
"...oh dear oh dear oh dear."
Something had gotten to her. Something big and hungry. Her dead eyes were wide open, and her mouth frozen in a scream of raw agony. Glancing at her lower body, Belgium could guess she'd been alive for much of the meal.
The batling on the bed squeaked, shook itself off, and took flight. It came straight at Belgium, and he moved up his forearm to shield his face from the attack.
But before the demon reached him, a long pink whip snatched it out of the air with a THWACK! The batling, and the tongue that held it, vanished behind the bed.
Then came munching sounds.
Belgium held his breath, reaching his hand behind him, seeking the doorknob.
In the hallway he could hear the squealing of the brood. Going back out there wasn't a viable option.
Maybe if he kept very still, the thing behind the bed wouldn't come out.
As soon as the thought left his head, the thing behind the bed came out.
It looked like an albino alligator, with a grossly inflated and misshapen human head. Bulging, cloudy white eyes without pupils darted left, then right, eventually resting on Belgium. The creature blinked and stretched open its mouth.
It had more teeth than Bub did.
"Oh shit shit shit."
Its six legs bent, and it hopped onto the bed. Belgium watched its nostrils flare as it sniffed the air.
The hallway was looking better and better.
"Um, hello there," Belgium said, his mouth so dry he felt as if he'd gargled with sand.
The creature cocked its head to the side. The milky eyes regarded him.
"Hello," it said. Its voice was that of a child's.
Frank came very close to wetting his pants.
"I'm, um, Dr. Belgium. What's your name?"
It moved closer.
"Do you have a name?" Belgium asked again.
"Shirley," said the monster.
Belgium glanced to the left. The bathroom. If he could get in there and lock the door...
Shirley's tongue fired from its mouth as if spring loaded, wrapping around Belgium's ankle.
He screamed, then threw his whole body toward the bathroom, barely getting out of the way as Shirley leapt at him.
Frank moved faster than he'd ever moved in his life, diving for the tile floor, kicking the bathroom door shut---
It wouldn't close.
Shirley's tongue was still around his leg.
Belgium placed both feet on the door and pushed until the veins stood out on his forehead.
Shirley let out a heart-wrenching cry, and then the tongue severed, becoming slack.
Belgium pressed the lock button on the door knob, kicked away the slimy tongue, and almost wept with relief.
The relief was interrupted by an odd sound---a mixture of scratching and gurgling---coming from the door.
Belgium crab-walked away from the sound, and watched in horrific fascination as a small hole appeared.
Shirley, like an organic chainsaw, was chewing her way through the wood at an alarming rate.
Frank looked around for a weapon. He picked up a toothbrush from the sink, then put it back down. In the medicine cabinet were various pill bottles, some tweezers, and a comb.
He checked the door again, and Shirley had widened the hole to a ten inch circumference. She'd be crawling through any second.
Belgium reached up for the shower curtain rod, but it was bolted to the walls. The curtain itself was thin, useless. He spun and faced the toilet. Maybe the toilet seat? No time to unscrew it. But atop the tank was a heavy, porcelain cover. Belgium hefted it, whirling around just as Shirley stuck her head through the hole in door.
He gave the swing everything he had, cracking her skull so hard that the lid split in two. The creature was knocked backward, out of the hole.
Belgium craned an ear, listening. He could only hear his own beating heart.
Did he kill it? Was the thing dead?
He slowly reached for the door knob, but then thought better of it. Instead he took a step away from the door, then cautiously bent over to look through the hole.
Almost there... can almost see...
The tongue slapped against his face like a garden hose and wrapped around his neck, pulling Belgium to his knees. He gasped in horror as Shirley stuck her head through the opening, mouth open wide.
She began to reel her tongue in.
At first, Belgium's mind couldn't grasp the situation. Inch by inch, he was being drawn into her gaping jaws.
Then reality hit, and once again he screamed.
Unwilling to submit to the impending facectomy, Belgium planted both feet against the door and pulled hard.
Shirley answered by pulling even harder, tightening the tongue noose around his neck.
Belgium's oxygen got cut off, and he began to lose the tug of war. Though he loathed to touch the beast, he made a V with his fingers and poked them right into Shirley's bulging white eyes.
She cried out, the tongue loosening its hold. Belgium yanked on it with both hands, stretched it upward, and tied it in a quick granny knot around the door knob.
Then he shoved the door open and crawled past the thrashing, screaming Shirley.
Batlings be damned, he had to get the hell out of there.
Belgium threw open the door and rushed out into the Blue Arm, slamming it behind him.
There were no batlings left.
He just about wept with relief.
Then he heard the familiar scratching/gurgling sound.
Shirley was free, and biting through the door. Soon she'd be in the hallway.
Andy stuck his head out of Blue 1 and Belgium ran in and slammed the door behind him.
"Frank? Are you okay?"
"We need need need to get out of here."
"What's going on?"
Belgium's eyes scanned the room, frantic.
"Weapon. We need a weapon."
Something hit the door with a tremendous thump.
"What the hell is that?" Andy said.
"That's Shirley." Belgium said, gasping. "She ate Harker, and she's still hungry."
Andy picked up the phone and dialed a number.
"Sun, there's something in the hallway. Don't leave your room."
The biting sound came from behind the door. Belgium watched the sawdust begin to fly, and the blur of gnashing teeth.
"Did you find the cattle prod?" Belgium asked.
"Not yet. Maybe it's not even here."
"He's military, he'd keep his only weapon nearby."
Belgium looked under the bed and came up with a white stick. "It doesn't look big enough," Belgium said.
"Figure out how it works."
Andy went into the General's closet and began taking clothes off hangers.
"What are you going to do, dress it?" Belgium said.
Andy knocked away hangers and pulled out the closet rod. It was four feet long and two and a half inches wide, solid wood.
"Can you use that prod?" Andy asked.
"I think so."
Andy raised the rod above the hole.
But, as quickly as it had begun, the chewing stopped.
Andy bent down to look through the hole. Belgium stopped him.
"Don't. It knows that trick."
They waited for almost a full minute.
"It's going after Sun," Andy said. "We have to go get her."
Frank couldn't think of anything he wanted to do less, but the thought of that nice veterinarian alone with that horrible thing forced him to move.
Andy motioned with his chin for Belgium to open the door.
Dr. Belgium fought every ounce of common sense he had and reached for the knob, slowly turning it.
Andy gave him a nod.
Here goes nothing.
Belgium flung the door open and Andy gripped the rod and brought it back like a baseball bat.
The demon wasn't there.
Belgium crept into the hallway, looking right, looking left.
"Where the hell did it go?" Andy asked.
"Maybe it went back to Harker's room. Or maybe..."
Belgium looked at the floor, making out the faint bloody footprints the thing had left while chasing him. The prints stopped at Race's room, then went over to the opposite wall, and...
"Up the wall," Belgium said.
Andy and Frank raised their heads, slowly, to the ceiling. The demon was hanging upside down like a giant gecko, staring at them with its milky eyes.
It pounced. Andy swung, but it landed inside the arc of the rod and hit him squarely in the chest, knocking him back into Race's room.
Belgium watched as the creature dug in its claws and snapped at Andy's neck. Andy shoved the closet rod into the hinge of its jaws, forcing its head back.
Frank rushed to help the linguist.
"Take that that that!" Dr. Belgium yelled.
Frank hit the thing in the side with the cattle prod.
Nothing happened.
Belgium looked at the prod, and flipped the switch in the other direction and tried again.
Nothing.
"Dammit, Frank!" Andy yelped, struggling with the beast. "You're a goddamn molecular biologist! Figure the damn thing out!"
Belgium flipped the switch twice more, then noticed the handle could turn. He twisted it, heard a click, and touched the prod to the hellspawn.
There was a loud crack and a spark at the contact point. The thing squealed and rolled off of Andy. Belgium thrust the prod at the creature again and nothing happened.
"Reset it!" Andy yelled, getting to his feet.
The demon lunged at Belgium, toppling him over and sending the cattle prod skittering across the floor.
Snap snap snap went the beast's jaws. Belgium gripped its neck and tried to force it away, a battle he was quickly losing as the teeth inched closer. It's breath was hot and sour, and the injured tongue shot out and once more got Frank in a stranglehold.
As his vision blurred, Frank saw Andy step behind the demon and swing the rod like a home run champion. The contact was solid, and Belgium could feel the shock of the blow vibrating through the monster's tongue.
The thing rolled from Dr. Belgium's chest, and Andy followed up with another viscous swing to its head. The wet WHAP was accompanied by a cracking sound, and Shirley slumped over.
Belgium reached for the dropped cattle prod. He turned the handle and shoved it at the demon's body, causing a burn where it made contact.
Belgium did it again, and then once more.
Shirley didn't move.
"I think we got it," Andy said.
Belgium zapped it twice more.
Sun appeared, clutching a towel and a tiny cylinder of pepper spray.
"What was it?" she asked.
"One more reason to avoid working for the government," Andy said. "We need to find the vent that'll lead to the Yellow Arm. Frank!"
Belgium was still zapping the dead creature.
"Frank! It's dead! Save the battery!"
"Better safe than sorry."
"The Yellow Arm is to the right of the Blue Arm," Sun said. "Down the hall here there's another ceiling vent. I bet it goes both ways, left to the Purple arm and right to the Yellow."
"We'll drag a dresser out here to stand on. Frank! Enough with the cattle prod!"
Belgium zapped the demon once more, for good measure, and then joined them.
With little difficulty, they pushed a dresser out into the hall under the ceiling grill, up onto its end. Andy took out the drawers, which allowed him to climb the piece of furniture like a ladder. He pulled off the vent and peered inside.
"The duct ends in a T, going off in both left and right directions."
"How much time left?" Sun asked.
Andy checked his watch.
"Twenty-six minutes."
"Hold still."
Sun used the towel to wipe away the blood on Andy's scalp, and then went to work on his wound with a tube of super glue.
"Is this going to... ow! Jesus!"
"Hold still. I'll be done in a second."
Belgium took a deep, calming breath, which was no help at all. Everything hurt. He felt miserable. Not just for himself, but for this cute young couple, who'd done nothing to bring this shit storm down on themselves.
"Sun, Andy," he said. "I'm really sorry. This is all my fault."
"Were you the one who gave him the code for the gate?" Sun asked.
"What? No no no. Of course not. I let him use the Internet because I thought it would help teach him to read. Now I see---"
"Don't worry about it." Sun pocketed the super glue and patted his shoulder.
"But---"
"No buts. Bub has been planning this all along. He got to all of us, in one way or another. Don't beat yourself up over it. This isn't your fault."
Belgium felt a lump grow in his throat. Sun had no way on knowing it, but she'd given him the nicest gift he'd ever received.
"Thank you, Sun."
"Now let's go stop a nuclear explosion."
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Since Bub first walked the earth there have been over five hundred attempts on his life. Sometimes it was just a single assassin armed with an ineffectual club or a useless dagger. Other times it was a conspiracy of many, or a carefully prepared trap.
He'd eluded death in all situations. Besides the fact that he was extremely hard to kill, Bub had developed a knack for thinking like humans. They rarely surprised him. The closest he'd ever been to actual death was at the hands of the Maya, and only then because they'd been extremely lucky.
But this time, Bub was worried. A one kiloton weapon, the equivalent of two million pounds of TNT, was more than enough to blow him into oblivion. And even if the nuke didn't explode, it still posed a threat.
Something had to be done. Something quick.
The demon went to the end of the hallway and stared at the air conditioning vent. He put his ear to it, listening to the faint sounds of the humans inching their way through. Bub was much too big to fit inside the small duct, but that could be fixed.
With one talon he yanked off the grating.
The demon closed his eyes and focused on his own DNA structure. He hadn't lied to Belgium about that. Bub knew his genome like a man knows his name. He'd memorized every base pair, every gene, every chromosome, and knew what every one of them did.
He did some quick equations in his head, decided what needed to be done, and placed his right claw on his chest, injecting himself with his own essence.
Genetic manipulation had limits. Bub couldn't make the drastic changes to himself as he did with other life forms. If he altered his own genome too much, he'd become something entirely different and wouldn't be able to change back.
He also had a set mass to work with, and it was impossible to make himself larger or smaller. Bub could not have turned into a rat in order to fit through the bars of the gate. But he could change his genome enough to fit into the air condition duct. He'd done it earlier today, when he escaped his habitat through the sheep's door, after that zealot Father Thrist refused to help.
All it took was a little time and effort.
Without pain, his shoulders dislocated and moved up alongside his neck. His skull elongated and his mouth shrank, his ram's horns flattening against his face and curving inward. With a crackling sound, Bub's ribs stretched out and compacted, making his torso longer and thinner. Both hips popped audibly from their sockets and slid closer together. His organs shifted around in his body cavity, adjusting to their new spaces.
Bub was now twice as long and half as thick. He resembled a funhouse mirror reflection of himself.
He stuck his head into the vent and glared in the direction of the humans. They could wait. For the moment, they were allies, no more wanting to explode in a nuclear fireball than he did.
Bub looked to the left, sniffing the air. That was were the sheep were.
The demon wormed his way into the vent and slithered snakelike to the Orange Arm. He knocked out the ceiling grate with a flick of his wrist and poured himself out of the duct and into the Orange Arm hallway.
His nose took him to Orange 12, and he went in. Inside were over a dozen sheep. But Bub wasn't hungry.
In order to escape Samhain, Bub had to be able to bypass these titanium gates. They'd been built to withstand a creature of his size and strength. But how would they hold up to a much larger creature?
Bub looked at the thousands of pounds of raw material around him and got started.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Andy looked down into the Yellow Arm from the ceiling vent.
No Helen.
He carefully bent the grating down and eased himself over the opening, going through legs-first rather than face-first like he had in the Blue Arm.
His landing was louder than he would have liked. His eyes nervously scanned both directions to see if the creature was coming.
So far, so good.
Sun handed him the clothes rod, and he helped her exit the duct. They both assisted Dr. Belgium.
"Where do you think she is?" Frank whispered.
They moved down the hall slowly, Andy paying special attention to the ceiling---he wasn't going to let anything drop on him again.
"Do you hear that?" Sun said.
Andy held his breath and listened.
"It sounds like laughter."
"A laugh track," Sun said. "It's a television."
"She's watching TV?"
"Not beyond the scope of possibility," Belgium said. "Helen watched a lot of TV. Maybe when Bub changed her genome, some of her memory remained intact."
There was faint applause, then a recognizable soda jingle. Dr. Belgium hummed along with it.
Down the hall, at Helen's old room, the door opened.
"Uh-oh," Frank said.
The Helen demon stepped out into the hallway, hoofs clicking on the tile floor. Andy noted that it was three times as big as that alligator monster they'd just killed. The curtain rod suddenly felt ineffectual.
"We should go back up the vent," Andy said softly.
"Come on," Sun tugged him. "In here."
They slipped silently into Yellow 9, an empty closet.
"It's too big" Andy whispered. "We won't be able to kill it."
"Maybe we can sneak past it."
The three of them cautiously peeked out the doorway. The demon had moved down the hall and stopped in front of Yellow 4. It sniffed at the keypad, then squatted down next to the door.
"That's where Race is," Dr. Belgium said. "The bomb room."
They waited. Minutes passed. The demon stayed put.
Andy checked his watch. They had thirteen minutes left.
"We're running out of time," Dr. Belgium said. "We have to distract it, yes yes yes."
"Sure. I'll throw a stick, see if it'll fetch."
"We should attack," Sun said.
Andy stared at her, incredulous. "It practically killed Race, and he's a lot tougher than we are."
"Hold on." Belgium rubbed his chin. "If it watches TV, maybe part of Helen is still in there somewhere. Let me try to talk to her."
The demon yawned, showing more teeth than a dog kennel.
"Maybe that's not too smart of an idea," Sun said.
"I have to try. Helen?" Belgium stepped out of the closet, his hands raised in supplication. "It's me, Frank. Remember?"
The demon leapt to its feet and turned to face Belgium, red eyes narrowing.
Belgium took a slow step towards it.
"Hello, Helen. Remember how I used to come to your room and we'd play checkers?"
A guttural sound came from the Helen-thing's mouth.
"See see see?" Frank said. "She remembers."
He took another step forward.
"This is going to end badly," Andy whispered to Sun. "We should do something."
"Frank..." Sun warned.
"It's okay." Belgium shooed them back. "Helen, we could play checkers again someday. Would you like that?"
The demon's wings suddenly opened, and it stretched out its arms the width of the hallway, scraping at the plaster with its talons.
"Frank," Andy said slowly, "I don't think the hellspawn wants to play checkers with you."
"I know part of you is still human," Belgium went on. "Maybe we could somehow change you back. If not, well... I understand there are some very nice zoos."
The creature howled and launched itself down the hall.
"Run, Frank!"
Belgium backpedaled, then turned around and passed up Andy and Sun.
The demon sprang, knocking Sun aside and latching its claws onto Andy's shoulder. Its grip was agonizing. Andy swung at its face and the beast snapped down on his hand, razor teeth slicing into his wrist. Andy screamed and tried frantically to yank it free.
Sun maced the creature in the face. The creature didn't seem to be bothered much, but when the pepper spray hit Andy's chewed hand, he reached a whole new level of pain.
From the corner of his eye, he watched the demon swat Sun away.
"Andy!" Dr. Belgium yelled.
He rushed up to Helen and rammed the cattle prod into the demon's mouth, past the sharp teeth, and bent upward.
Andy pulled out his hand, giving Belgium more room to jam the prod in further, down the thing's throat.
The effect was immediate. The demon dropped Andy and grabbed the biologist, drawing him close in a bear hug. It shook its head back and forth, trying to dislodge the obstruction.
Frank kept his grip on the prod and shoved once more, grunting with effort. It went down the demon's throat almost to the hilt. Then he turned the handle and gave the beast some juice.
Helen's whole body went rigid, smoke curling out the corners of her mouth. She released Frank and collapsed onto the floor, her red eyes rolling up in her head.
Sun jumped on her with the curtain rod, swinging it over and over, until the demon's head cracked open like a dropped watermelon.
Helen twitched twice, then ceased all movement.
"Well," Belgium said. "That was horrible." He nudged the creature with his foot. "Dead dead dead."
Andy clutched his wrist. Blood spurted through his fingers with his heartbeat, a good amount of it pooling on the floor.
He dropped to his knees.
\*
An artery, Sun thought, looking at Andy.
She knelt next to him. He was pale, his face clammy and cold, his breathing shallow. A quick inspection of the wound found it to be ugly; the creature had bit him almost to the bone. She took Andy's pulse. Weak. She unbuckled his belt and pulled it off his waist, cinching it tight about the wound.
"Hold here," she told Belgium, taking his hand and putting it on Andy's wrist below the tourniquet. "Don't let him close his eyes."
Sun ran down the hall into the Med Supply room, Yellow 6. She grabbed everything in a whirlwind; a hundred cc bag of saline solution with an IV drip, a surgical needle, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a pack of cotton swabs, a scalpel, a gallon jug of sterile water. She searched quickly for clamps, but couldn't find any.
The hell with it; there was no time. If she didn't stop the bleeding now, Sun knew Andy was going to die.
"Pour this on your hands," she said to Belgium, tossing him the alcohol. When he finished, she repeated the procedure with her own hands and then poured the remaining alcohol onto Andy's wound.
He moaned weakly.
"Open the scalpel package," Sun told Belgium. "Pour some water on him, clear away the blood."
Keeping pressure on his wrist, Sun spread open the gash with her fingers to peer inside. The blood flow had stopped, so she loosened the belt to see its source.
When the blood came, it came fast.
"Now."
Belgium poured, washing blood away. The ulnar artery was completely severed, as was the medial antebrachial vein. The radial artery had a gash in it. Sun cinched the belt tight.
"Scalpel," Sun ordered, "and open the needle pack."
Belgium complied. Sun cut into Andy's flesh, lengthening the width of the wound so she could fit her fingers in. Andy yelped and tried to pull away.
"Hold his arm steady. You can't let him squirm."
"Okay okay okay."
"You see, here? I need you to put your fingers on that artery and squeeze."
Belgium kept one hand on Andy's forearm and stuck the other into the gash, doing what he was told.
Sun poured more water on the wound, then took hold of the pre-threaded half-moon needle.
"Don't worry," she told Andy. "I'm gonna do this right. Just hold real still."
Sun tied off the artery, greatly reducing the blood flow. She didn't have a clamp to hold the needle, so she did it freehand, her fingers slick with blood. Belgium had to let go of Andy's twitching forearm to dump more water on the wound.
Quickly, expertly, Sun sutured the ulnar artery back together. Her next job was the gash in the radial. It was on the underside and tough to see. "Hold him," Sun said. She tied the artery off and then tugged on it lightly to get a better look.
"Jesus!" Andy cried.
"You're not getting religious on me, are you?" Sun said.
Sun sewed up the radial artery, then got to work on the severed antebrachial vein. Her concentration was pinpoint. She was tired, hurt all over, and emotionally frazzled, but she wouldn't allow it to get in the way of her job.
Not this time.
She finished, and then cut the thread she'd used to tie off the arteries. They filled with pumping blood. Sun poured on more water and looked for leaks.
None.
She smiled to herself.
"Get something to put under his feet," Sun told Belgium.
Andy's blood pressure was still weak. She ripped open the IV pack and dug the needle into a vein on his good hand. Belgium came back with a chair and raised Andy's feet up onto the seat.
"I have to close him up, what's our time?"
Belgium glanced at Andy's watch.
"Four minutes."
"Find Race, shut off the bomb."
Belgium nodded, hurrying off.
Sun hung the saline bag on the end of the chair and began to stitch Andy's wrist closed.
"You'll make it," she told him. "But I don't know if we will."
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Race was dying.
It suited him just fine. Losing Helen was devastating. He'd spent years trying to become emotionally detached, and then for one brief, magic moment, she was his again, body and soul.
He realized, after more than four decades of marriage, that he'd made the wrong choice. Helen was more important than Samhain, more important than even his beloved Army. Race should have cherished his years with her, rather than wasted them here.
And now she was gone.
Bub's words had hit home. Helen surely must have hated him for keeping her here all that time. When she developed Huntington's, Race considered her his burden. But all along, he was her burden.
Race welcomed death. The thought of it warmed him. Never a religious man, the one in a million chance that there was an afterlife, and that Helen might be there waiting for him, far outweighed his desire for this world.
"Race?" A knock. "It's Frank Belgium. The door is locked. Are you in there?"
"Yeah, I'm here."
The words took great effort. Race figured he'd lost more than two pints of blood.
"Can you let me in?"
"Code is 1-7-1-9-5-9."
His wedding anniversary.
The lock disengaged and Dr. Belgium came into the room. He was just as bloody as Race, his lab coat more red than white.
"How did you get through Lockdown?"
"Air ducts."
"Helen?" Race asked.
"She's at peace now. I'm sorry. Dr. Harker is dead too. Andy's badly hurt."
"Bub?"
"Still locked in the Red Arm."
Race sighed painfully. "For a hundred years of planning and safeguards, it all went to hell pretty fast."
"The best laid plans often go astray," the biologist said. "It's not your fault."
"Of course it's my fault. Armies don't lose wars. Leaders lose wars."
"Race..." Belgium put a hand on his shoulder. "We want you to shut off the nuke."
The General said nothing.
"We've known each other what, twenty years? You know why I came to Samhain, right?"
Race nodded.
"General, I let Bub out of the habitat. He went on the Internet. All of those questions he answered... it was all garbage garbage garbage. Stuff he picked up off the web."
"Stupid thing to do."
"I know. You think I would have learned after twenty years."
Belgium eased himself into a sitting position, next to Race.
"Did you know I was married?"
Race gave his head a slight shake.
"I thought I loved her, but in reality I suppose didn't. All I ever loved was my work. Such a beautiful thing, genetics. So beautiful and perfect. Perfect perfect perfect."
Belgium stared deeply into Race's eyes. "That's what life is all about, General. Loving something. Maybe a person, or a thing, but something. Like you loved Helen."
The General's eyes became glassy.
"You've seen Andy and Sun together... Race, we're older, you and I. We've lived our lives. And we've had to live with our mistakes. Please. I can't let them die. Not because of me."
"Doesn't matter," Race said. "I switch off the nuke, the President will still destroy Samhain. It's a hardened target, two hundred feet underground, but he could get it done within two hours."
"At least that gives us two more hours. You, above all people, should know how precious a few hours can be."
Race knew.
"How about that?" Helen had said, zipping up her evening gown only hours before. "Still fits."
"You know you're even more beautiful than the day I met you," Race told her.
She smiled. It lit up the room. Race would have given her the world, right then, if she'd only asked.
"Oh, Regis. This is so perfect, being with you right now. I love you, my dear."
"I love you too, Helen. Now let's cut up that rug, shall we?"
He could still smell her perfume on him, beneath all the blood.
"The panel," Race told Belgium. "Turn the switch to the left, then punch in these numbers. Six, three, six, zero, niner."
Belgium stood up and punched in the code. There was a beep, and the timer stopped with two minutes to spare.
"Is there another way out of Samhain?" Belgium asked.
Race coughed. A thin line of blood dripped down his chin.
"Maybe. Most of Samhain is made of natural caverns---this area is full of them. When they were building this compound, they came in through the underground from a few miles away. Then they sealed off the connecting tunnel when they were done."
"Where is it?"
"Somewhere in the Green Arm. You need to bust through a wall, I don't know which one. You'll have to find the old blueprints. They should be in Red 3."
"How about tools? Shovels, picks, axes?"
"In one of the Green rooms there's a bunch of old excavating equipment. And I mean old. Left here from when they built the compound. Maybe you can dig your way into the original access tunnel, if you can find it, and escape through the caverns before the President nukes the whole area."
"Can you come with us?"
Race shook his head.
Dr. Belgium took Race's hand and grasped it firmly.
"Thank you, General. It was an honor serving under you."
"Promise me something." Race stared hard at Frank.
"Yes?"
"Whatever happens, see to it Bub doesn't live for another day."
Dr. Belgium smiled warmly. "Consider it done done done."
The General watched the biologist leave. He'd always liked Dr. Belgium. He liked Sun and Andy too, even though he barely knew them.
It was too bad. Even if they did break through to the caverns, it wasn't likely they could get far enough away in time. When the Samhain nuke didn't go off, the President wouldn't take any chances. He'd drop something substantially bigger than a single kiloton to guarantee zero chance of survival. There were strategic bomber bases in both Roswell and Amarillo. Race guessed he'd send an F-111E equipped with a B 83 bomb, capped by a nuclear warhead of at least twenty kilotons.
Slightly larger than the payload of Little Boy in the Hiroshima blast.
A surface impact would disintegrate Samhain, and pretty much everything else for a mile in all directions. Even if they managed to navigate the caves and get two miles away, they'd still have to deal with second to third degree burns, hundred mile per hour winds from the overpressure, and the radiation exposure, depending on the fissile material used.
A shame, the General thought.
But better to go down swinging than lie there like a lump, as he was doing.
One Star General Regis Murdoch sighed. Then he closed his eyes and waited quietly for death.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Andy opened his eyes to the concerned face of Dr. Sunshine Jones. She had blood and dust smeared over both cheeks, and her hair was matted and tangled.
"You're beautiful," Andy said.
"You're delirious. How do you feel?"
He lifted his hand and wiggled the fingers. The wrist was expertly taped up.
"It's numb."
"Lidocaine. You won't be able to use it for a while." Sun ran her fingers over Andy's forehead.
Andy said, "Thanks. You know, for saving my life."
"That's what we doctors do."
"How about the bomb?"
"Race switched it off. But there's still a problem. He said the President would nuke Samhain anyway."
"Our tax dollars at work."
"Can you move?"
Andy sat up. His vision began to swirl and he instantly felt sick.
"Dizzy," he said. "How long do we have?"
"An hour, maybe two. Dr. Belgium went to the Octopus to contact the President. But if that doesn't work, we may still have a chance."
Sun outlined the plan as Belgium had relayed it to her.
"The blueprints are in Red 3?" Andy asked.
"Yes. I remember filing them."
"Bub's in the Red Arm."
"I know."
"Are we supposed to tip toe in while he's sleeping?"
"Maybe we won't have to," Sun said. "In the Med Supply room there are over a thousand different pharmaceuticals. How about I make Bub a little cocktail?"
Andy smiled. "Make it a big one."
\*
Sun left Andy in the hall and went into Yellow 6. She found a reusable enema on a shelf; a large rubber squeeze bulb with a thin plastic nozzle. To the end of the nozzle she attached a short length of plastic tubing and an IV needle. She now had a very big syringe.
Recalling Bub's medical test history, Sun couldn't remember which drugs had been tested on him. He'd been given many diseases, all of which caused no effect. So what would be good to try?
She began by looking at some sedatives.
\*
Frank Belgium crawled through the air conditioning duct and into the Octopus, heaving with effort. His muscles were screaming at him. Even during the years at school and at BioloGen, he'd never been so exhausted. He sat down in the nearest chair and rubbed his neck and shoulders. After a few seconds he became aware of something wrong.
Bub was gone.
Belgium walked to the Red Arm and pulled down the stacked chairs, searching for the demon.
There was nothing, as far back as he could see.
Perhaps Bub had given up and locked himself back in the habitat. A pleasant thought, but Belgium didn't think that was the case.
Moving quickly, Belgium reached through the bars in the gates and opened up the doors for all the arms, searching for the demon.
He didn't find a trace of him.
"Andy! Sun!" Belgium called down the Yellow Arm.
"Yeah?" Andy yelled back. He was sitting next to the doorway to Yellow 6.
"Bub's gone!" Belgium said. "He's not in the Red Arm. I checked the others and he's not there either."
"Keep your eyes open," Andy replied. "I don't see how he could have gotten through that gate, but he's a sneaky bastard."
He sure is, the biologist thought, paranoia creeping up. He could feel the demon's eyes on the back of his neck.
Belgium walked around the Octopus again, to make sure Bub wasn't in the room with him. Satisfied he was alone, he sat down at the computer terminal and accessed CONTACT, clicking on EMERGENCY.
Then he waited nervously for the President to answer.
\*
Andy wiggled his fingers and tried to make a fist. He could only close his hand halfway. That wouldn't be good enough; if they were to dig their way out of there he had to be able to hold a pick.
He tried again, straining with effort, and managed a little better. So intent was Andy on his injury that he didn't noticed the movement to his right until it was within ten yards.
When he turned to look, his breath caught in his throat.
Bub was snaking silently out of the ceiling vent twenty yards to his right. The demon had somehow stretched its body to over eighteen feet in length. He moved like an inchworm, his middle section rising up in a hump as his rear section met his front claws.
"Aaaaaaaandy."
Bub's elastic face split into a toothy grin. Andy opened his mouth to scream, but Bub was on him before he had the chance.
\*
Dr. Belgium tapped his fingers on the desk, waiting for the President to get on the damn video phone. He heard movement far behind him and felt the hair on the back of his neck spring to attention.
Belgium swivelled around and stared down the Yellow Arm.
Bub had Andy.
\*
Andy had never felt so helpless. Bub had him clutched tightly in one claw. The other was pressed over his mouth, the talons tickling the back of his head.
The demon looked surprisingly different; like a sea serpent or a long, thin Chinese dragon. His face was elongated, reminding Andy of the times as a child he'd pressed silly putty onto a comic book and then stretched and distorted the figures. But the bloodshot eyes and the evil grin were pure Bub.
"Has the bomb been deeeeeeeactivated?" Bub whispered, bathing Andy's face with decay.
He removed his claw so Andy could answer.
"No," Andy stammered.
"Liaaaaaaaaaaar."
Andy felt the talons dig into his sides. He was being crushed and couldn't draw a breath. Tears were squeezed from his eyes.
"It was shut off," Andy whimpered.
Bub released his grip slightly and Andy gulped in some air.
"How do I get out of heeeeeere?"
Andy thought about the Green Arm, digging into the original tunnel. If Bub found out about it, it could very well mean the end of the human race.
"The Yellow Arm," Andy said with as much emotion as he could muster. "There are four gates blocking the exit."
"That's the only waaaaaaaay?"
"Yes."
"Liaaaaaaaaaaar."
Bub moved his claw down Andy's body.
"Here comes the paaaaaaaaain."
\*
The phone rang in Yellow 6, giving Sun a major startle. She picked it up with more than a little trepidation.
"Bub's in the Yellow Arm," Belgium's voice said in a whisper. "He's got Andy."
Sun thought fast. Already in the enema was enough liquid sodium secobarbital to kill an elephant. She filled the remaining space with the potassium cyanide she'd been looking at and snapped on the nozzle.
Before opening the door she put her ear to it.
Andy was right outside, whimpering.
Sun took a lungful of air and swung open the door.
\*
Bub had heard the phone ring and was ready for Sun. When the door flung open he had a long spindly claw outstretched to wrap around her.
What he hadn't anticipated was her weapon.
As the giant talons encircled Sun's body, she jabbed him in the wrist with some kind of small spear.
This amused Bub, but his demeanor quickly changed to shock when he felt the foreign liquid pulsing into his body, burning as it went.
What had she done?
He shoved Sun away, pushing her back into the Med Supply room, and then tossed Andy aside to yank the weapon out of his palm.
Bub stared at his hand, watching as the hole healed, but his expression was pure bewilderment. The nictating membranes over his eyes fluttered once, twice. His head swayed back and forth, and then his chin hit the ground with a SLAP.
\*
"Run!" Dr. Belgium yelled at them from the Octopus, looking at them through the gate. But they didn't need to.
Bub was sprawled out on his face.
Sun limped out of Yellow 6, staring at the demon.
"Is he dead?" yelled Dr. Belgium.
"I'm not sure."
She moved closer, reaching out her hand to take Bub's pulse.
"Bad idea," Andy grabbed her shoulder.
"We have to make sure he's dead. If not, I can get more drugs and..."
Bub's eyelids flicked open and his claw shot out at Sun.
Andy yanked her out of the way and they stumbled down the hall to the air conditioning vent. Sun went first, up the book case Belgium had pushed into the hallway for his ascension. Andy followed quickly.
Bub flopped over onto his belly and moaned, but he didn't chase them.
Maybe the bastard was going to die after all, Belgium hoped.
The computer monitor beeped. Dr. Belgium dragged his attention away from the Yellow Arm and went to the desk. The message bar read VIDEO INTERFACE ACTIVE and the President came on the screen. He looked as he always did; rosy cheeked and rested.
"I see Protocol 9 has failed," he said.
Belgium frowned.
"We turned off the nuclear device. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we're all still alive."
"I didn't like the decision, Dr. Belgium, but I don't regret it. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. You can understand that."
"Yes I can, Mr. President. I can also understand what it's like to live with innocent blood on my hands. It isn't pleasant. Though perhaps your political bearing makes you more tolerant of it than I."
"You do realize the area still has to be neutralized."
"Neutralized. That's a nice way to put it. Like spraying a smoky room with disinfectant. Five people have already been neutralized by this ill-conceived little project. I don't want the rest of us to follow suit."
"I'm sorry, Dr. Belgium. My hands are tied."
"Look, we've managed to knock out Bub. He may even be dead. And we got rid of the thing Helen turned into."
"This is the way it has to be, Frank. We cannot allow for the slightest possibility that the occupant may escape. You knew this when you signed on at Samhain. You voluntarily accepted the risks."
"Yes yes yes. But if there's a chance of saving us and still destroying Bub, shouldn't it be considered?"
"I am sorry, Frank. I truly am."
He didn't look sorry. Not a bit. He might have been talking about the economy or the budget.
"How long do we have?"
"Operation Slim Bob has already begun. It will reach completion in eighty-seven minutes."
"Can we have more time?"
"That's impossible."
"No chance of a rescue?"
"Your country recognizes the sacrifice you're making, Frank. May God be with you."
Belgium rubbed his eyes and let out a deep breath.
"There is another favor, a personal one, that I would like to ask."
"If it is within my power, consider it done."
"It is within your power, Mr. President. And you could even do it right now."
"Yes, Frank?"
"Go fuck fuck fuck yourself."
Belgium hit the disconnect button.
"Eighty-seven minutes," he said softly. "That isn't enough---"
CLANG!
Belgium jumped six inches out of his chair and spun in the direction of the noise.
Crouching in the Orange Arm was another creature. Bigger than a hippopotamus, covered head to toe with coal-black scales. The thing cocked its head and stared at Frank with a bloodshot eye the size of a dinner plate.
It was on all fours, and its back nearly touched the hallway ceiling.
The animal moved backward, much quicker than Belgium would have anticipated for something so large, and then reared on its hind legs and charged the gate again.
CLANG!
The ground shook and Belgium watched in amazement as the titanium gate bent slightly inward.
"What the hell is that sound?" Andy asked.
The biologist turned and saw Andy and Sun were now in the Red Arm. The Orange Arm was to their right, so they hadn't noticed the latest complication.
CLANG!
"It's, um, proof that things can always get worse. We'd better hurry."
"Get out of there, Frank," Sun said. "Meet us in the Green Arm. What's Bub doing?"
Belgium tore his eyes away from the ramming demon and looked down the Yellow Arm.
"He's still there. But he's... changing."
"How?"
"I think he's turning back to his regular size."
"Good, then he can't get through the vents."
CLANG!
"I talked to the President. We only have about eighty-five minutes," Belgium said.
"Find the digging equipment. We need to get the blueprints."
Belgium nodded. He stole a glance at the Orange Arm gate.
CLANG!
The lower half was bending away from the doorway.
Belgium hurried into the duct, not daring to look back again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
"Check that cabinet," Sun told Andy. "They're in a brown folder, legal sized, about an inch thick."
Sun was pretty sure she'd filed them away rather than left them in one of her growing piles, but she wanted to double-check. She quickly sorted through the large Samhain pile on the desk, then for caution's sake went through the Bub pile.
Something caught her eye.
Not the blueprints, but an old report on Bub's stool samples. She picked it up, trying to figure out what her subconscious was trying to tell her.
Since Bub had been brought here, he'd had several bowel movements while in the coma. Back in 1921 the stool had been analyzed with a newly acquired mass spectrometer, which found it contained an ample amount of uranium.
It hit Sun like a slap. Now it finally made sense. What she'd been searching for in Red 3. How Bub had been buried in Panama. Why it took him so long to wake up. His spaceship, the hieroglyphs...
"The hot rock," Sun said.
Andy looked up at her from the file cabinet.
"It's uranium. Bub's got such a highly advanced genetic structure, he's very sensitive to radiation. Radiation destroys DNA, it kills cells. The ancient Mayans probably covered him in uranium ore when he was sleeping. That's the hot rock they were referring to."
"It put him in a coma, and they buried him," Andy said. "It fits with the glyphs."
"But there's more. The capsule, his spaceship, had lead in it. To protect him from the iridium in deep space. That's why he's been in a coma so long---it took him that long to get all of the uranium out of his system. The radioactivity slowed his metabolism down to a crawl. And being here made it even worse."
"How?"
"Look around," Sun said, picking up a handful of files. "X-rays. Thousands of X-rays. The X-ray machine was invented before the turn of the last century. They bombarded Bub with radiation on a continuous basis up until the 1970s. I'm surprised he didn't glow in the dark."
"Why'd they stop in the 70s?"
"Two guys took over, Meyer and Storky. They did other tests on Bub. But not anything involving radiation. I wonder why..."
But Sun realized she already knew.
Dr. Meyer had died of cancer. Kaposi's sarcoma. A malignancy of the skin. He continued to work at Samhain through his illness, getting radiation therapy at the compound. Radiation in cancer treatment had to be carefully monitored. Meyer couldn't have worked on Bub if there was radiation involved. The human body could only handle so big a dose without getting sick, or dropping dead.
"Is the X-ray machine still here?" Andy said. "Maybe we could use it as a weapon."
Sun shook her head. "We've got something even better than that. Let's find those blueprints."
"It was a green folder?"
"Brown."
"Like this?"
Andy held up the folder full of blueprints. Sun hurried over and spread the folded document out over the floor.
"There," Andy said, pointing at some faint gray lines. "In Green 11. See the wall there? The lines continue beyond that. I'll bet that's the tunnel."
"How thick is that wall?"
"Got me. Probably eight inch cinder block. Could be even thicker."
"Let's go," Sun said, folding up the blueprints.
They left Red 3 and hurried down the hallway. Sun tried not to look at the blood stained walls and tried not to breathe the smell of violent death. Poor Rabbi Shotzen. There were bits of him everywhere.
Andy bent down and picked something up. A disposable lighter. He flicked it once, and the flame shot up two inches.
"Want to break for a smoke?" Sun asked.
Andy put it in his pocket. "Might come in handy."
In Red 14 they cleared off a desk and pushed it out under the ceiling air vent in the hall.
Sun went first, hiking her shirt up over her face to make breathing in the dusty duct bearable. It was slow going, and to get to the Green Arm they had to pass over the Orange Arm, the ominous CLANG from below becoming louder and more frightening.
When Sun crawled over the grating she looked down, nervous to see what was making so much noise. It made her catch her breath.
The creature was simply massive. Those titanium gates wouldn't be able to hold up to a monster like this. This demon looked like it could eat a tank. How many of these things would Bub be capable of making if he escaped Samhain?
"What is it?" Andy whispered behind her, touching her leg.
"Shh!"
The awesome beast stopped in mid-charge and lifted an ear to the ceiling. Sun held both her breath and her bladder as it stared up at the vent she was perched over. One of its enormous eyes inched closer, squinting into the darkness of the duct. It got so close Sun could count the dark blood vessels that squiggled around its black cornea, each the width of a pencil. The demon blinked, then turned away and resumed its attack on the gate.
"Are you okay?" Andy nudged her.
Sun exhaled. "Yeah. Don't look through the grill."
Sun continued forward, making the decision that if she did have to die, she wasn't letting Bub or this giant loose upon the world.
"Holy shit."
Andy had apparently looked through the grill.
"Keep moving."
"We're in hell, aren't we? We're actually trapped in hell."
"Let's just hope Frank found those shovels."
\*
Dr. Frank Belgium opened the door to Green 5. He knew Green 6 and 7 contained medical equipment, Green 8 was the freezers, and Green 9 was the dry goods storage. This was the only room left to check.
Luckily, he hit the jackpot.
It was a large closet, and the overhead light didn't work. But stacked in the corner, gathering dust, was the excavation equipment. Picks, shovels, axes, hoes, and even a sledgehammer.
"Frank?"
Belgium spun around, looking for the voice.
"Up here."
Sun was poking her head down through the ceiling vent. He helped her climb through, and then they both assisted Andy.
"I found the equipment," Belgium told them. "Where's the cavern?"
"Green 11," Andy said. "Let's move."
"I want to check on Bub," Sun said.
Andy checked his watch. "We've only got sixty-two minutes to dig out of here and get a safe distance away."
"We need to see what he's doing."
Belgium watched Sun and Andy exchange a meaningful glance. He wished he had someone who looked at him like that.
Maybe, if he lived through this, he'd join a dating service.
If he lived through this.
\*
Sun walked down the Green Arm toward the Octopus. She stopped at the titanium bars and pressed her cheek to them, looking left.
CLANG!
The ramming beast was almost through the Orange Arm gate.
She switched cheeks and stared at the Yellow Arm. Bub had his hands on the bars. His yellow eyes locked on hers.
"No meeeeercy for yoooooou."
CLANG!
The giant demon burst through the Orange gate and went barreling into the Octopus, knocking over tables, chairs, and millions of dollars in computer equipment. Then it sat in the center of the Octopus and stared at its master, awaiting direction.
"You're neeeeeeeeext."
Sun tried to focus. They needed time to break through the wall and escape, and couldn't do that if Bub was on their tail.
When in doubt, tell the truth.
"There are four other titanium gates blocking the exit to the outside. You don't have time to come for us."
"I have tiiiiiiime," Bub hissed.
"No, you don't. Since the nuke didn't go off, they're going to drop one on us. A big one."
Bub sneered, his horrifying features becoming even more revolting.
"Liaaaaaaaaar," he spat. "You will beg for deaaaaaath."
The ramming beast pawed at the floor, then launched itself at the Green Arm gate. The shockwave jolted Sun backward.
That didn't work out as I'd hoped, she thought.
Sun flew into Green 11. Andy was attacking the concrete wall with a sledgehammer, awkwardly holding it with his left hand, and Belgium was having a time trying to figure out the proper swing of a mining pick. They were both sweating, and for their labors they'd only made a few cracks in the cinder block.
"I need help. Fast."
"What's wrong?"
"Defense," Sun said, thinking about the demon breaking into the Green Arm. "We're about to have company."
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Bub believed Sun. Her government would have a back-up plan. He stared at the four sets of bars preventing his escape and felt anger welling inside him. Anger, and an emotion he hadn't known in millennia of existence.
Fear.
Strong as the beast was, it wouldn't be able to get through all of these gates in time. Which meant is was within the realm of possibility that Bub might actually die.
The thought was horrifying. At the epicenter of a nuclear explosion the temperature was hotter than the sun. There was no way he could protect himself from that.
Humans. How had these miserable hunks of carbon gotten so smart so fast? Sun had hurt him with her poison. Hurt him almost as much as those filthy Mayans did with their uranium ore. Bub could no longer alter himself to fit into the air duct---his body was busy trying to heal. Now, to add to his injury, he might actually have to comprehend his own death.
He concentrated. Was the Yellow Arm really the only way out?
Andy had been close to spilling his guts, but then Sun attacked him with the poison needle. That opportunity was lost, but perhaps there was another...
The demon walked down the hallway to Yellow 4. The door was locked, and there was a keypad on the wall next to it.
Bub didn't bother with the keypad. Regular doors he could handle. He turned around and gave it a quick kick with his massive hoof. The door burst inward.
General Race Murdoch was a hunk of dead meat, cooling in a pool of his own bodily fluids.
Bub had just enough of his essence left to suit the purpose.
\*
Race had been dead. He was sure he'd been dead. He could even remember the moment his heart stopped pumping. His point of vision had become smaller and smaller, darkness enveloping him, until there was nothing.
So how could he be thinking? Race opened his eyes, amazed that his wounds were healed and his pain was gone. He soon realized why.
"Raaaaace. How was deaaaaath?"
"Quiet," Race answered the demon. The words felt sour in his mouth, like he'd just eaten some bad ham. "What the hell do you want?"
"Why is everyone in the greeeeen arm?"
"They're having a tea party. You weren't invited."
Bub gave Race's arm a swift tug, dislocating the shoulder.
"Tell meeeeeee."
The General winced. "I can see where this is going. You torture me until I talk. If I die, you bring me back."
"Yessssssss."
Race hurt, but his level of annoyance was even greater. He'd been looking forward to death, had actually achieved it, and this smug son of a bitch had taken that from him. First Helen, now this.
Race wasn't going to tell him a damn thing.
"Well, I'll let you in on a little secret," the General said. "Any minute now we're going to be radioactive. I'd be tickled pink if you stayed here with me, so I could watch you bake like a cow pie on Georgia asphalt."
Bub tugged Race's dislocated arm and broke it at the elbow. Race cried out.
"Is there another way ooooooooout?" Bub asked.
"Please..." the General winced.
"Another waaaaaaaaay?"
"Please..."
"Pleeeeease what?"
Race grinned, "Please kiss my lily white Southern ass."
\*
Then the man actually began to laugh. His pain must have been excruciating, but he was laughing right in Bub's face.
And Bub was afraid.
He picked the General up and threw him against the wall as hard as he could. Race left a bloody spot there, then slumped to the floor, broken and unmoving.
Bub hurried out of the room and went to the Octopus. With a shrill shriek, he commanded the beast to begin breaking down the gate to the Yellow Arm. There had to be another exit in the Green Arm. There had to be.
Bub would be damned if he lost his life because of some poorly trained pets on a fourth rate planet.
CLANG!
He would see for himself what they were doing. And then he'd slaughter them all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
"What the hell is it?" Andy asked.
"It's a linac. A medical linear accelerator. A very unique one. Get behind it, let's push it into the hall."
Andy stared at the piece of medical equipment. It was white, about five feet high and four feet wide, and sort of resembled a large kitchen faucet. Attached to a rectangular base was a curved arm that could rotate. On the end of the arm was a lens kind of thing. The lens pointed down at a fancy table.
Sun explained, "A cancer patient lies down on the table, and then their tumors can be bombarded with either electrons or photons from the collimator here."
She tapped the spout of the faucet.
Andy nodded, getting it.
"Radioactivity."
"Right. It kills cancer cells. Actually, it kills all cells, but it's made to target cancer cells."
Andy got his shoulder behind the base and shoved. It barely moved.
"It's heavy as hell," he grunted.
"It's actually about half the size of a normal model. They must have custom made it to fit inside the compound's entrance."
Andy and Sun both put their weight into it, getting the machine to slide a foot.
"This is what Dr. Meyer used to fight his sarcoma," Sun groaned, pushing as hard as she could. "Skin cancer can cover a large surface area of the body, so this particular model is modified for TSEI---total skin electron irradiation. Instead of a thin beam, it showers the entire body with electrons."
"More powerful than an X-ray?" Andy asked.
Sun stopped pushing and sat down, breathing heavily. "An X-ray machine gives off 200,000 electron volts. This little baby can do about 25 million."
"But if it's used to cure cancer, how can it hurt Bub?"
"Are you ready for a mini lecture?"
Andy nodded. Sun brushed the hair out of her face.
"Radiation is measured on the gray scale. Let's say Meyer's cancer required a dosage of 36 gray to complete treatment. Even though it's an electron shower---electrons don't penetrate deeply like photons, 36 Gray would make him sick or even kill him. So it's broken up into ten weeks of treatments, a single 36 centigray dose a week."
"But if we give Bub a big dose at once..."
"It will destroy massive amounts of tissue. But it gets better. This machine can produce electrons and photons. Photons penetrate much deeper than electrons. So if we do a wide photon penumbra---a large beam width for a full body target---at 25 million electron volts, it could really cause some grievous damage."
Andy said, "Nice. Let's do it."
They got up and finished pushing the linac out of Green 6 and into the hallway, cables trailing behind it. Sun directed Andy to help turn the machine so it faced the Octopus.
"Anything else?"
"It'll take a moment to set up. Go help Frank with the wall."
He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and ran down the hall.
Sun detached the treatment table and pushed it aside, and then used the control box to rotate the collimator on the gantry---the big counter weighted arm. She stopped it when the lower defining head was pointing straight down the hallway, aiming at the door to the Octopus.
That was the easy part. The hard part would be figuring out the settings. Sun took a solitary class in radiotherapy over ten years ago. She didn't remember much.
There was a computer control console in Green 6 near the far wall. She went to it and turned it on, hoping it would all come back to her.
\*
One of the reasons Dr. Belgium had chosen science as a career was his distaste for manual labor.
"So much for that," he muttered, swinging the pick at the concrete. For all the oomph he put into it, the potato chip sized piece that flaked off the wall was hardly satisfying.
"How's it going?" Andy asked, walking into Green 11.
"How much time do we have left?"
"About fifty minutes."
"In that case, not good. At this rate we won't break through until next Tuesday."
CLANG!
The noise reverberated down the Green Arm.
"Uh-oh," Belgium said. "It looks like that ramming beast has found a new target."
Andy picked up the twenty pound sledge and hefted it to his shoulder. The bandage around his wrist had become dark red.
He gripped the hammer and let the wall have it.
\*
The computer program that ran the linac had presets, calibrated to Dr. Meyer's dosage. Sun found a way to manually change them, but couldn't remember any dosage calculations. She had to deal with beam energy, field size, distance, filtration, quality, and a dozen other parameters. She decided the smartest thing to do was just shoot for the maximum on everything.
Dr. Meyer's beam energy was set at 6 MeV---six million electron volts. She changed it to 25, and went from there.
\*
Andy and Frank developed a chain gang rhythm with their swings, one alternating with another. Slowly, gradually, they cracked through a single 8" x 16" cinder block, and were able to knock it into the wall.
Andy bent down and used his lighter to peer through the opening. He couldn't see a damn thing, but the flame on the lighter bent and blew inward.
"We found it," Andy said.
\*
CURRENT SETTINGS WILL EXPOSE PATIENT TO LETHAL DOSES OF RADIATION the screen blinked at Sun.
"Good," she said.
Sun saved the settings in memory and started the program to charge the beam. She hurried out of the room to see how the guys were doing.
Not too well, it turned out. Both Frank and Andy were drenched with sweat, and they'd only knocked a single cinder block through. Blood was dripping down Andy's right hand. He'd popped several stitches.
"Give me a try," Sun said.
Andy handed over the sledgehammer, which was too heavy for her to properly wield. She tried Belgium's miner's pick. It weighed about ten pounds, and Sun found it much easier to handle. After a five minutes of swinging, she managed to put the eight inch pointed head through a second cinder block. Andy and Frank helped her pry the rock away.
"One more, and we may be able to squeeze through," Belgium said.
There was a sudden CRASH! and the ground shook.
The trio ran into the hallway, and watched as the giant ramming creature burst into the Green Arm.
It slowly backed out, and in crawled Bub, triumphant, his eyes burning with malevolent glee.
"Stay here," Sun told the others, and headed for the linac by Green 6. She immediately knew she wasn't going to make it in time. Bub was going to reach the machine before she had a chance to turn on the photon beam.
So she changed tactics and forced herself to stay calm.
"Well," she said. "It looks like you've won."
Bub grinned.
"I alwaaaaaaaays win."
Sun considered her slim options. If she couldn't find a way to switch on the beam she was dead, Andy was dead, and possibly the entire human race was dead.
"I have one question to ask before you kill me," she said, getting closer. The linac was ten steps away.
"Yessssssssss."
Six steps. Five. Four.
"Do you know what a hertz donut is?" Sun asked.
The demon cocked its head to the side. "A heeeertz doooooonut?"
Sun walked calmly up to the linac and put her hand on the control box.
"Watch," Sun said.
She hit the activate button.
The linac hummed like a stock car and Bub immediately thrust his hands out in front of his eyes. He fell backward, his exposed skin mottling and turning brown.
"Hurts, don't it?" Sun said.
The demon opened his wings and attempted to shield himself, but only something with the density of lead could shield 25 million volts of X-rays. Every inch of his body seemed to bruise and mush like overripe fruit, weeping clear fluid.
He rolled backwards, but his retreat did little good. There was no beam stopper, and photons traveled in a straight line at the speed of light. They tore millions of sub atomic holes in his body, ripping through membranes, ionizing atoms and bursting cell walls, breaking down his DNA into base pairs.
As Bub rolled away, large sections of dead tissue were sloughing off his body in strips. Sun watched as he spewed blood along the walls and ceiling. He was screaming, a sound not dissimilar to the cries of the many sheep he'd gutted and eaten.
"Beg for death, my ass," Sun said.
Momentum took Bub through the Green door and into the Octopus, but from what Sun could tell he was no longer moving. The hallway was empty. The giant demon cowered off to the side, out of the beam's invisible perimeter.
Belgium came up and said, "Good good good. Leave it on and we'll get back to work."
"Won't that beam run out of power?" Andy asked.
"It doesn't use any radioactive isotopes," Belgium explained. "A linac uses high frequency electromagnetic waves to accelerate charged particles, such as photons, to high energies through a linear tube."
Sun said, "I thought you were a biologist."
"Minor in nuclear physics. Fun fun fun stuff."
"How much time do we have?" Sun asked.
Andy looked at his watch. "Forty-four minutes."
"Okay, Mr. Physics, assuming we can break down that wall, how far away do we have to be from here when the nuke is dropped?"
Belgium rubbed his chin. "I'd assume they'd use a simple fission mechanism in the lower kiloton range, maybe 10-30 kTs. A Uranium-235 or a Plutonium-239 bomb would vaporize metals for a kilometer in all directions. We'd need to be 2 to 4 miles away to escape the thermal effects. The blast effects would send hundred mile an hour winds up to the two mile mark."
"How about radiation?" Andy asked.
"If we're two miles away, we'd only absorb a minimal dose, maybe 12 centigray, but if they used a fusion weapon rather than a fission one, say a lithium deuteride core with an Uranium jacket, then it would be a thermonuclear neutron bomb with the same explosive power, but 30 times the radiation. I'd guess that---"
The lights went out, plunging the entire complex into total darkness.
"This isn't a good development," Dr. Belgium said.
"The bastard cut the breaker."
"The linac is off!" Sun yelled. "Bub can get in!"
Andy's lighter cut through the darkness, and the trio shuffled back to Green 11. Sun knocked over a metal shelving unit, and she and Belgium pushed it in front of the door.
"SUUUUUUUUUUUUN!"
Bub's voice was hoarse and sickly, but it still carried with tremendous force down the hallway and caused Sun's knees to knock with fear.
"Look what you did to meeeeee!" he roared. "To MEEEEEEEEEE!"
"Give me your shirt," Andy said to Sun. "Mine's too wet."
She complied, stripping to her sports bra. Andy wound the shirt around an ax handle and lit it like a torch.
"Frank, where's the pick?"
"I think I dropped it in the hall. Want me to get it?"
"Here I coooooooome!"
"Perhaps not," Belgium said.
The doorknob turned. Sun held tight to the metal frame of the shelves and braced herself.
"Help me!" she said. Frank and Andy put their weight on it. The door exploded inward, sending the shelf skittering across the room.
Bub filled the doorway. His skin was blistered and peeling, brown and black rather than the normal red. A horn had fallen out, exposing a raw sore. His teeth had shredded his lips, and when he breathed bits of flesh fluttered out like streamers. He was missing his left eye; in its place was a gooey, dripping blob. His animal smell was now a roadkill smell, a stench of decay and death.
Before, Bub had been taunting and clever. His evil was sadistic and calculating.
Now he was simply a mad dog.
This scared Sun even more.
"Hey, Bub."
The voice came from behind the demon, in the hallway.
Bub spun around. "Yooooooooooooou," he hissed.
Andy held up the torch and they watched as the vent grating fell from the ceiling and a figure crawled through.
"Race," Sun whispered.
\*
General Race Murdoch landed hard, but without pain. Before crawling up into the air conditioning vent he'd stopped at the Med Supply room. Besides shooting himself up with various painkillers and stimulants, Race had also made a weapon. He taped the largest scalpel he could find to a broomstick, and then wrapped the tape in a quick-setting fiberglass cast.
He stood up and gripped the makeshift spear in his good hand, pointing it at Bub's head. Race felt like he'd lost a fist fight with a lawn mower. But Bub looked even worse.
"Block off the door," Race told the trio. "Escape."
"What about you?" Sun asked.
"A little while ago I died with my tail between my legs. Bub injected me with that same stuff he used on Helen. God only knows what I'll turn into. I'm not going quietly this time. This time I'm going down swinging."
"Good luck, Race," Andy said.
Race winked. "I'll take training over luck any day. Now get going."
Sun nodded her goodbye and slammed the door to Green 11.
The hallway was enveloped in absolute darkness, save for a single thing.
Bub's glowing red eye.
"I can seeeeee you in the daaaaaark," Bub whispered.
"Not for long," Race said.
He put everything into the lunge; his rage over Helen, his frustration at wasting forty years being Bub's caretaker, his pure hatred for being forced back to life. The spear went into Bub's eye, through his brain, and stuck in the back of his unholy skull.
The demon fell, screeching.
Race sensed movement behind him. He turned, and saw the huge glowing eyes of the giant gate-breaking demon draw nearer.
"Well, ain't you a big sonuvabitch," Race said.
He felt along the floor and found his spear, yanking it out of Bub.
"You hungry, big boy? I got something for you to chew on."
Race smiled, and when the monster opened its mouth and bit down on him, Race jammed in the spear as far as it could go, his very last thought of dancing cheek to cheek with his beloved Helen.
\*
Andy and Sun threw everything they could find in front of the door while Belgium banged away at the wall.
Strangely, nothing tried to get in.
"Maybe he's finally dead," Andy said. He yelled, "Race!"
No answer.
Sun rushed to Dr. Belgium and began to strip off his lab coat.
"The torch is dying."
He shrugged out of it and Sun ripped the garment in half, winding one part around the dimming flame.
Andy took the sledgehammer from Belgium and pounded away at the blocks until he could no longer lift his arms. Then Frank took over, breathing like an asthmatic. Sun had the next crack at it, struggling with the heavy weight but able to swing it underhanded.
The cinder block broke in half, leaving an L-shaped opening in the wall.
"It's not big enough," Belgium said.
"Yes, it is." Sun tossed the torch through the hole and then squeezed herself into it. The cinder block scraped her bare shoulders and back, but she made it through intact.
"Go on, Frank," Andy prompted.
The biologist had to tilt his shoulders, but he managed to fit his upper body in the opening. Sun helped pull him the rest of the way through.
"C'mon Andy, let's go!" Andy looked at the opening and knew it was too small. Belgium was a thin man, one hundred and fifty pounds max. Andy was one eighty, with a broader chest and shoulders.
"I won't make it."
"Try," Sun pleaded.
He stuck his head and one arm through the opening, but he couldn't get the other arm in.
"Go on," he said. "Go ahead without me."
"No. Just get your other hand through. Then you can make it."
Andy was wedged so tightly in the space that there was no way he could get his other hand through. The corner of the L was digging into his breast bone.
"I can't. I'm going to try to widen the hole."
"There's no time!" Sun screamed at him.
Dr. Belgium said, "Exhale."
"What?"
"You're lungs are full of air. Breathe all of your air out and your chest will contract."
Andy blew out air, blew until his lungs were empty, blew until he was seeing spots. It freed up just enough space to force his other wrist through. Sun and Belgium grabbed it and pulled like crazy. The skin on Andy's arm scraped against the cinder block, and his chest felt as if he was pinned under a dump truck, but it was coming... coming...
He was through.
They yanked him the rest of the way and Sun held him, even tighter than it had been squeezing through the hole.
"I can't breathe," Andy croaked.
She released her grip.
"The cave leads off this way," Belgium picked up the torch. "What's our time?"
Andy looked at his watch.
"Twenty-eight minutes."
They ran.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
This was the scariest part of all for Andy. Everything that happened prior had been beyond his control, but this last attempt at survival was completely up to him. If he ran fast enough, he'd live. If he didn't, he'd die.
The natural limestone caverns they ran through were completely dark. Sun led the way, carrying the torch, keeping it low to illuminate their footing. The ground was sometimes hard jagged rock, and other times loose gravel that sucked at their shoes like hungry fish. They ran past natural stone columns and underground pools, razor sharp walls and stalagmites, alongside steep drop offs that fell into oblivion.
Sometimes the cavern widened to the size of an auditorium, other times it was as thin as a hallway. They were following the original trail the excavation crew had made one hundred years prior, when Samhain was born. It surprised Andy to occasionally see a bootprint in the ground, the mark of someone who helped build the compound, someone long dead.
They ran as fast as safety allowed. When there was an open area ahead, Sun picked up the pace, and they sprinted until their lungs were bursting and their stomachs clenched.
There was a bad moment, at the fifteen minute mark, when the trail couldn't be found and they hit a dead end. All of them began to panic, Sun almost to the point of tears, when Dr. Belgium found a fork in the cave a hundred yards prior. They backtracked and took the fork, but precious minutes had been lost.
Andy fought the fatigue. He fought the many pains he'd incurred. But he couldn't fight his own mind, which kept telling him that this was the end, it was all over, his existence was about to be snuffed out forever.
"Please," he begged the universe, "don't let this happen. Don't let my life stop here. There's so much I haven't done, haven't seen."
The universe didn't answer. But surprisingly, his mind focused on something he'd long ago memorized, when he was just a boy.
Pater noster, qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Our Father, Who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name.
The Lord's Prayer.
He ran on, repeating it over and over in his head.
\*
Sun was in better physical shape than her male companions, and she knew it. But she couldn't slow her pace, even when they began to fall behind. She had to be the goal for them, the one in the lead who forced them to catch up.
Belgium surprised Sun. He was thin and long limbed, and on the sprints he lacked breath control, but for the most part he kept up.
Andy was the problem. He was in fair shape, but he'd suffered so many injuries. The batling attack, his wrist, all the blood he lost---it was surprising he could even stand up. Still, Sun couldn't slow down for him. If she did, they all might as well give up.
Sun only stopped once, when the torch was dying and she had to wrap the other half of Belgium's lab coat around it. The rest of the time she ran as fast as her little legs could move.
The cavern was cool, and the air was good, two things that surprised her. Her conception of caves had always been of the mining type, cramped and choked with coal dust. These caves were pleasant, even tranquil. She could see how she might enjoy exploring them one day, possibly with Andy.
It was the first time she'd considered her future since Steven died, and it opened up a floodgate of emotion. Suddenly there was so much she wanted out of life. She wanted to be married, have kids, get her medical license back, buy a little house someplace---things she'd given up on ever doing. She thought about how many times she'd worried about money, and of how little importance it actually was.
If they lived through this, she promised to herself she'd be different. More open. Less worried. More fun. Less angry. More loving.
If they lived.
\*
Dr. Belgium was playing tricks with himself so as to not give in to exhaustion. He recited the Periodic Table of the Elements, then he gave himself quadratic equations to solve.
But the cave kept interfering with his ploy.
It was the most eerily quiet place Belgium had even been in. Their heavy breathing seemed to echo and amplify in the silence, sometimes chasing them through the dark.
Several times Belgium lost his train of thought, trying to gauge if the cavern was actually heading upward like it felt. Or calculating twists and turns and puzzling over whether they had gone 180 degrees and were actually running back to Samhain.
Once, he lost aural contact with Andy running behind him, and stopped to find the man on his hands and knees, vomiting. Belgium didn't bother with inspirational speeches or voiced concerns. He yanked Andy up by his shirt and pulled him back into formation.
Frank didn't think they seriously had a shot at surviving. The odds against them having made it this far were astronomical. But he still ran, and this was curious to him. Only a short time ago, he would have been content to sit at his desk and wait for the bomb to drop. Perhaps he had finally learned to accept himself. To forgive himself.
Maybe someday he might even like himself.
If he lived to see someday.
\*
With five minutes to go on Andy's watch they ran out of cave.
They'd come to an open area, large enough to drive around in. Sun checked all of the walls and couldn't find any other tunnels. There was no place left to go.
"How far away are we?" Sun heaved.
"A mile and a half," Belgium said, hands on his knees. "Maybe two. We have to get out of the cave."
Andy leaned against a limestone wall. "Wouldn't it be safer down here?"
"Samhain is an underground target. The nuke they use will go down deep. A lot of the blast effects will happen underground and could travel through these caves. The surface would be better."
"I can't find the damn exit," Sun's voice was beginning to crack.
Then the bats swooped down.
Sun lost it. She swung the torch like a club, screaming at the bats, determined to burn them all to cinders.
Belgium held her back.
"They're bats," he said. "Plain old bats. If there are bats, there's an exit nearby."
He took the torch and held it up, illuminating the high ceiling, following the path of the flying rodents until they disappeared into a crack in the wall.
"There's the exit," Belgium pointed to a tiny sliver of light, twenty feet or so above them. The wall was so simple to climb it was almost anticlimactic. Even Andy, with his injured wrist, had no trouble with the large hand and footholds. At fifteen feet up, the tiny splinter of light had opened up into a large crevice amid an outcropping of rocks.
Sun climbed onto the floor of the desert and hugged it like a lover.
Andy dropped to his knees and said, "Thank God."
Dr. Belgium looked around and tears streamed down his cheeks.
"This is the first sky I've seen in twenty years. I've forgotten how beautiful the world is."
"Look!" Andy said, pointing up.
Sun noticed the telltale trail of jet exhaust and followed it back to the area they'd just fled from.
"Get down, behind these rocks," Belgium said. "Put your fingers in your ears and close your eyes as tight as you can."
"Are we far enough away?" Andy asked.
"We'll know in just a moment."
They huddled down together and waited.
BEEP BEEP.
Andy's watch had counted down to zero.
Sun held her breath. She could feel the cool desert air on her face, and wondered if it would be the last thing she ever felt.
The moment stretched.
Andy said, "Maybe they---"
The light hit them first. Intense, super-bright light, blinding their eyes even though their lids were closed.
Then the sound overtook them, the slap of an angry God, louder than the loudest thunder, and at the same time they were bowled over by a hot wind, spitting dust and debris into their faces, knocking them off their feet.
The wind died suddenly, bringing absolute stillness.
Andy opened his eyes. A breeze hit them from the opposite direction, lasting a few seconds, but not nearly the strength of the blast wave.
"Negative phase," Belgium yelled. "The blast happened so fast it created a partial vacuum, this wind is the result of suction."
Andy wasn't listening. He was staring at the fireball. It was bright, almost too bright to look at, mostly red and violet with portions of pure white.
The giant fire column plumed at the top, becoming the recognizable mushroom cloud, gray and purple smoke billowing out in an expanding ball.
"Spectacular," Belgium said.
Sun was also taken in by its destructive beauty. The apex of mankind's scientific endeavors. The secret of the atom, on display in all of its kiloton glory.
"We weren't burned," Sun said. "How do we know about our radiation exposure?"
"It doesn't look like too big of a nuke, so it probably isn't a fusion bomb," Belgium said. "We won't know until later, but I think we're far enough away. Our radiation exposure should be minimal."
The mushroom cloud continued to expand, spreading open like a flower.
"Nothing could live through that, right?" Andy said. "Bub couldn't..."
"Nothing can survive a nuclear blast at ground zero."
Andy frowned. "But what if all of that outer space crap was just that---crap? Isn't the devil supposed to be a liar? What was it that Father Thrist said? Satan's greatest feat is to convince us he doesn't exist. Lucifer is the Master of Lies."
"Trust me, Andy," Belgium patted his shoulder. "Even if Bub really was Lucifer, he doesn't exist any longer."
Andy thought about it. "So we did it," he said. "We actually beat the devil."
The voice came from behind them, low and hoarse.
"I'm not beaten yet."
They spun around and watched in horror as Bub crawled out of the crevice. He looked even worse than before. One wing was missing, and the other dragged behind him, broken and bloody. Several holes in his flesh were so big that the bones showed through. Both eye sockets were empty, but he'd grown a tiny third eye in the middle of his forehead.
The demon glanced away from the trio and looked at the fireball, the plume still rising. He dropped to his haunches and vomited blood onto the desert sand.
"I am immortal... I was heeeeere before your species began... and I'll be heeeeeeere to lead you to extinctioooooooon!"
Bub stretched out his claws and raised them to the heavens.
"YOU CAN'T KILL ME!" he screamed, his voice spreading out over the expanse of the desert.
He pointed a misshapen claw at them, accusing.
"All you diiiiiiiiiid," Bub snarled, "is make meeeee angry."
Sun looked around for any kind of weapon---a rock, a branch, anything at all. She saw Belgium pick up a handful of sand, and Andy ball up his fists.
Then Bub did something that none of them could have possibly expected.
He exploded.
The demon burst into dozens of pieces with a splatting sound, like a giant water balloon had popped. Andy, Sun, and Frank dove to the ground and hid their faces from the blast.
But nothing touched them.
The trio looked, and saw that each of Bub's parts had sprouted wings and remained airborn. He had become a swarm of demons, each no larger than a tennis ball.
Perfect replicas of Bub.
They circled, briefly flapping around the trio in quick figure eights. Then they all flew off in different directions, scattering into the distance, as if each had a specific destination in mind.
Eventually they faded out of sight.
Andy reached for Sun's hand and held it. She squeezed it tight. They looked at each other, and then at Dr. Belgium.
The biologist made a long face and verbalized what each of them was thinking.
"Uh-oh."
THE END
Desert Places
By Blake Crouch
Blake Crouch's Amazon Author Central page
for my parents, Clay and Susan Crouch
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars --- on stars where no human race is
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
--- ROBERT FROST, "DESERT PLACES"
Excerpts from "Desert Places" and "The Road Not Taken" from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1916, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, 1936, 1944 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
I.
1
ON a lovely May evening, I sat on my deck, watching the sun descend upon Lake Norman. So far, it had been a perfect day. I'd risen at 5:00 A.M. as I always do, put on a pot of French roast, and prepared my usual breakfast of scrambled eggs and a bowl of fresh pineapple. By six o'clock, I was writing, and I didn't stop until noon. I fried two white crappies I'd caught the night before, and the moment I sat down for lunch, my agent called. Cynthia fields my messages when I'm close to finishing a book, and she had several for me, the only one of real importance being that the movie deal for my latest novel, Blue Murder, had closed. It was good news of course, but two other movies had been made from my books, so I was used to it by now.
I worked in my study for the remainder of the afternoon and quit at 6:30. My final edits of the new as yet untitled manuscript would be finished tomorrow. I was tired, but my new thriller, The Scorcher, would be on bookshelves within the week. I savored the exhaustion that followed a full day of work. My hands sore from typing, eyes dry and strained, I shut down the computer and rolled back from the desk in my swivel chair.
I went outside and walked up the long gravel drive toward the mailbox. It was the first time I'd been out all day, and the sharp sunlight burned my eyes as it squeezed through the tall rows of loblollies that bordered both sides of the drive. It was so quiet here. Fifteen miles south, Charlotte was still gridlocked in rush-hour traffic, and I was grateful not to be a part of that madness. As the tiny rocks crunched beneath my feet, I pictured my best friend, Walter Lancing, fuming in his Cadillac. He'd be cursing the drone of horns and the profusion of taillights as he inched away from his suite in uptown Charlotte, leaving the quarterly nature magazine Hiker to return home to his wife and children. Not me, I thought, the solitary one.
For once, my mailbox wasn't overflowing. Two envelopes lay inside, one a bill, the other blank except for my address typed on the outside. Fan mail.
Back inside, I mixed myself a Jack Daniel's and Sun-Drop and took my mail and a book on criminal pathology out onto the deck. Settling into a rocking chair, I set everything but my drink on a small glass table and gazed down to the water. My backyard is narrow, and the woods flourish a quarter mile on either side, keeping my home of ten years in isolation from my closest neighbors. Spring had not come this year until mid-April, so the last of the pink and white dogwood blossoms still specked the variably green interior of the surrounding forest. Bright grass ran down to a weathered gray pier at the water's edge, where an ancient weeping willow sagged over the bank, the tips of its branches dabbling in the surface of the water.
The lake is more than a mile wide where it touches my property, making houses on the opposite shore visible only in winter, when the blanket of leaves has been stripped from the trees. So now, in the thick of spring, branches thriving with baby greens and yellows, the lake was mine alone, and I felt like the only living soul for miles around.
I put my glass down half-empty and opened the first envelope. As expected, I found a bill from the phone company, and I scrutinized the lengthy list of calls. When I'd finished, I set it down and lifted the lighter envelope. There was no stamp, which I thought strange, and upon slicing it open, I extracted a single piece of white paper and unfolded it. In the center of the page, one paragraph had been typed in black ink:
Greetings. There is a body buried on your property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady's name is Rita Jones. You've seen this missing school-teacher's face on the news, I'm sure. In her jeans pocket you'll find a slip of paper with a phone number on it. You have one day to call that number. If I have not heard from you by 8:00 P.M. tomorrow (5/17), the Charlotte Police Department will receive an anonymous phone call. I'll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on Andrew Thomas's lakefront property, how he killed her, and where the murder weapon can be found in his house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing from your kitchen.) I hope for your sake I don't have to make that call. I've placed a property marker on the grave site. Just walk along the shoreline toward the southern boundary of your property and you'll find it. I strongly advise against going to the police, as I am always watching you.
A smile edged across my lips. I even chuckled to myself. Because my novels treat crime and violence, my fans often have a demented sense of humor. I've received death threats, graphic artwork, even notes from people claiming to have murdered in the same fashion as the serial killers in my books. But I'll save this, I thought. I couldn't remember one so original.
I read it again, but a premonitory twinge struck me the second time, particularly because the author had some knowledge regarding the layout of my property. And a paring knife was, in fact, missing from my cutlery block. Carefully refolding the letter, I slipped it into the pocket of my khakis and walked down the steps toward the lake.
As the sun cascaded through the hazy sky, beams of light drained like spilled paint across the western horizon. Looking at the lacquered lake suffused with deep orange, garnet, and magenta, I stood by the shore for several moments, watching two sunsets collide.
Against my better judgment, I followed the shoreline south and was soon tramping through a noisy bed of leaves. I'd gone an eighth of a mile when I stopped. At my feet, amid a coppice of pink flowering mountain laurel, I saw a miniature red flag attached to a strip of rusted metal thrust into the ground. The flag fluttered in a breeze that curled off the water. This has to be a joke, I thought, and if so, it's a damn good one.
As I brushed away the dead leaves that surrounded the marker, my heart began to pound. The dirt beneath the flag was packed, not crumbly like undisturbed soil. I even saw half a footprint when I'd swept all the leaves away.
I ran back to the house and returned with a shovel. Because the soil had previously been unearthed, I dug easily through the first foot and a half, directly below where the marker had been placed. At two feet, the head of the shovel stabbed into something soft. My heart stopped. Throwing the shovel aside, I dropped to my hands and knees and clawed through the dirt. A rotten stench enveloped me, and as the hole deepened, the smell grew more pungent.
My fingers touched flesh. I drew my hand back in horror and scrambled away from the hole. Rising to my feet, I stared down at a coffee brown ankle, barely showing through the dirt. The odor of rot overwhelmed me, so I breathed only through my mouth as I took up the shovel again.
When the corpse was completely exposed, and I saw what a month of putrefaction could do to a human face, I vomited into the leaves. I kept thinking that I should have the stomach for this because I write about it. Researching the grisly handiwork of serial killers, I'd studied countless mutilated cadavers. But I had never smelled a human being decomposing in the ground, or seen how insects teem in the moist cavities.
I composed myself, held my hand over my mouth and nose, and peered again into the hole. The face was unrecognizable, but the body was undoubtedly that of a short black female, thick in the legs, plump through the torso. She wore a formerly white shirt, now marred with blood and dirt, the fabric rent over much of the chest, primarily in the vicinity of her heart. Jean shorts covered her legs down to the knees. I got back down on all fours, held my breath, and reached for one of her pockets. Her legs were mushy and turgid, and I had great difficulty forcing my hand into the tight jeans. Finding nothing in the first pocket, I stepped across the hole and tried the other. Sticking my hand inside it, I withdrew a slip of paper from a fortune cookie and fell back into the leaves, gasping for clean lungfuls of air. On one side, I saw the phone number; on the other: "YOU ARE THE ONLY FLOWER OF MEDITATION IN THE WILDERNESS."
In five minutes, I'd reburied the body and the marker. I took a small chunk of granite from the shore and placed it on the thicketed grave site. Then I returned to the house. It was quarter to eight, and there was hardly any light left in the sky.
Two hours later, sitting on the sofa in my living room, I dialed the number on the slip of paper. Every door to the house was locked, most of the lights turned on, and in my lap, a cold satin stainless .357 revolver.
I had not called the police for a very good reason. The claim that it was my blood on the woman was probably a lie, but the paring knife had been missing from my kitchen for weeks. Also, with the Charlotte Police Department's search for Rita Jones dominating local news headlines, her body on my property, murdered with my knife, possibly with my fingerprints on it, would be more than sufficient evidence to indict me. I'd researched enough murder trials to know that.
As the phone rang, I stared up at the vaulted ceiling of my living room, glanced at the black baby grand piano I'd never learned to play, the marble fireplace, the odd artwork that adorned the walls. A woman named Karen, whom I'd dated for nearly two years, had convinced me to buy half a dozen pieces of art from a recently deceased minimalist from New York, a man who signed his work "Loman." I hadn't initially taken to Loman, but Karen had promised me I'd eventually "get" him. Now, $27,000 and one fiancée lighter, I stared at the ten-by-twelve-foot abomination that hung above the mantel: shit brown on canvas, with a basketball-size yellow sphere in the upper right-hand corner. Aside from Brown No. 2, four similar marvels of artistic genius pockmarked other walls of my home, but these I could suffer. Mounted on the wall at the foot of the staircase, it was Playtime, the twelve-thousand-dollar glass-encased heap of stuffed animals, sewn together in an orgiastic conglomeration, which reddened my face even now. But I smiled, and the knot that had been absent since late winter shot a needle of pain through my gut. My Karen ulcer. You're still there. Still hurting me. At least it's you.
The second ring.
I peered up the staircase that ascended to the exposed second-floor hallway, and closing my eyes, I recalled the party I'd thrown just a week ago --- guests laughing, talking politics and books, filling up my silence. I saw a man and a woman upstairs, elbows resting against the oak banister, overlooking the living room, the wet bar, and the kitchen. Holding their wineglasses, they waved down to me, smiling at their host.
The third ring.
My eyes fell on a photograph of my mother --- a five-by-seven in a stained-glass frame, sitting atop the obsidian piano. She was the only family member with whom I maintained regular contact. Though I had relatives in the Pacific Northwest, Florida, and a handful in the Carolinas, I saw them rarely --- at reunions, weddings, or funerals that my mother shamed me into attending with her. But with my father having passed away and a brother I hadn't seen in thirteen years, family meant little to me. My friends sustained me, and contrary to popular belief, I didn't have the true reclusive spirit imputed to me. I did need them.
In the photograph, my mother is squatting down at my father's grave, pruning a tuft of carmine canna lilies in the shadow of the headstone. But you can only see her strong, kind face among the blossoms, intent on tidying up her husband's plot of earth under that magnolia he'd taught me to climb, the blur of its waxy green leaves behind her.
The fourth ring.
"Did you see the body?"
It sounded as if the man were speaking through a towel. There was no emotion or hesitation in his staccato voice.
"Yes."
"I gutted her with your paring knife and hid the knife in your house. It has your fingerprints all over it." He cleared his throat. "Four months ago, you had blood work done by Dr. Xu. They misplaced a vial. You remember having to go back and give more?"
"Yes."
"I stole that vial. Some is on Rita Jones's white T-shirt. The rest is on the others."
"What others?"
"I make a phone call, and you spend the rest of your life in prison, possibly death row...."
"I just want you ---"
"Shut your mouth. You'll receive a plane ticket in the mail. Take the flight. Pack clothes, toiletries, nothing else. You spent last summer in Aruba. Tell your friends you're going again."
"How did you know that?"
"I know many things, Andrew."
"I have a book coming out," I pleaded. "I've got readings scheduled. My agent ---"
"Lie to her."
"She won't understand me just leaving like this."
"Fuck Cynthia Mathis. You lie to her for your safety, because if I even suspect you've brought someone along or that someone knows, you'll go to jail or you'll die. One or the other, guaranteed. And I hope you aren't stupid enough to trace this number. I promise you it's stolen."
"How do I know I won't be hurt?"
"You don't. But if I get off the phone with you and I'm not convinced you'll be on that flight, I'll call the police tonight. Or I may visit you while you're sleeping. You've got to put that Smith and Wesson away sometime."
I stood up and spun around, the gun clenched in my sweaty hands. The house was silent, though chimes on the deck were clanging in a zephyr. I looked through the large living room windows at the black lake, its wind-rippled surface reflecting the pier lights. The blue light at the end of Walter's pier shone out across the water from a distant inlet. His "Gatsby light," we called it. My eyes scanned the grass and the edge of the trees, but it was far too dark to see anything in the woods.
"I'm not in the house," he said. "Sit down."
I felt something well up inside of me --- anger at the fear, rage at this injustice.
"Change of plan," I said. "I'm going to hang up, dial nine one one, and take my chances. You can go ---"
"If you aren't motivated by self-preservation, there's an old woman named Jeanette I could ---"
"I'll kill you."
"Sixty-five, lives alone, I think she'd love the company. What do you think? Do I have to visit your mother to show you I'm serious? What is there to consider? Tell me you'll be on that plane, Andrew. Tell me so I don't have to visit your mother tonight."
"I'll be on that plane."
The phone clicked, and he was gone.
2
ON the muggy morning of May 21, as raindrops splattered onto the sidewalk, I locked the door to my lake house and carried an enormous black duffel bag toward a white Cadillac DeVille. Walter Lancing opened the trunk from the driver's seat, and I tossed the bag inside.
"Where the hell are you going?" he asked cheerfully as we rolled slowly down my drive. I'd called him three hours ago, told him I needed a ride to the airport, and to pick me up by 10:30, hanging up before he could question me.
"Going away for a while," I said.
"Where? That's a big piece of luggage you got back there." He was smiling. I could hear it in his voice as I watched my house dwindle away in the side mirror.
"Just away," I said.
"Are you being intentionally vague?" Beads of sweat had formed on his unshaven face, and he ran his fingers through his short gray hair. He glanced at me, awaiting my reply as rain fell in sheets from the charcoal sky, followed by a growl of thunder. "Andy, what's wrong?"
"Nothing. I finished my book. I'm tired. I need a break --- you know how it goes." Walter sighed, and I stared out the window as trees rushed by, listening to rain patter on the windshield. Walter's wife, Beth, had ridden in this car recently. I could smell her body wash --- sweet, icy juniper. Her pink emery board lay on the floor mat at my feet.
"You going back to Aruba?" he asked.
"No." I wasn't going to lie outright to him.
"So I guess you aren't telling Cynthia, either." I shook my head. "With The Scorcher coming out, she's gonna go apeshit."
"That's why I didn't tell her. She's a drill sergeant. Call her tonight at home for me, would you? Tell her I said I'm tired of writing, I need a vacation, and not to worry."
"And when she asks me where you went?"
"Tell her all you know is it's some tiny island in the South Pacific."
"She'll think I'm lying."
"That's her problem. She's not your agent."
"Please tell me what's going ---"
"Don't ask, Walter."
The rain was still pouring when we turned southbound onto I-77. I closed my eyes and took a careful breath, my heart dancing like I'd thrown down two shots of espresso. I wanted to turn back. The book tour, and relaxing in the comfort of my home while summer burgeoned around the lake, was how I'd envisioned spending the coming months.
"Call me," Walter said. "Or write. Just let me know you're okay."
"If it's possible, I will."
"Need me to get your mail and take care of your bills?"
"Yeah. I meant to ask you before."
"You're scaring me, Andy," he said.
The scurry of windshield wipers swinging back and forth and the groan of the engine became deafening. I fiddled with the automatic window, flicking the tiny button with my middle finger, though nothing happened. The child-safety lock was on.
The minuscule skyline of Charlotte rose out of the green piedmont distance, the buildings decapitated, their pinnacles cloaked in the low ceiling of storm clouds. Walter looked over at me, attempting a smile. "I'm sure you'll be fine."
"I really don't know. That's the thing."
At eleven o'clock, we arrived at the main entrance of Douglas International Airport. We got out of the car, and I lifted my bag from the trunk and hoisted it up onto my shoulder.
"I'll come in with you if you want," Walter said.
"You can't." I glanced around at the crowd of travelers moving through the automatic doors. No one seemed to be paying us any attention, so I pulled out a manila envelope from a pocket on my bag and discreetly tossed it into the trunk.
"If I'm not back by the first of September, you can open it."
"September?"
"Walter. Listen to me. Don't show it to anyone. If the time comes and I'm not back, you'll know what to do with what's inside. I wrote instructions." He slammed the trunk shut.
Our eyes locked. His searched mine, confused, apprehensive. I took him in whole so I could carry his image with me --- him standing there in that granite gray suit, no tie, a white oxford shirt with the top two buttons undone. My best friend. Walter. Will I look back on this moment and regret not letting you help me? My God.
"See you around," I said. Then I slapped him on the shoulder and walked into the airport.
I peered out the circular window and guessed that the jet was cruising somewhere over the plains. Even at six miles above the earth, I could only see a tawny ocean extending from horizon to horizon. In first class, I reclined, unbuckled, in a plush seat. Through the curtain that separated me from coach, I registered the discontented murmur of a hundred miserable passengers. I couldn't remember the last time I'd flown coach, and amid the fear that accompanied me to Denver, I found this smallest degree of luxury a comfort.
I stepped into the terminal. As I stared down the long corridor bustling with impatient travelers, I saw an old white man in a black chauffeur's suit staring at me. He held a piece of cardboard displaying my last name printed in tall, thin letters. I approached him.
"I'm Andrew Thomas," I said. The brim of the man's hat came only to my shoulders. He looked me up and down with wide, uneven eyes.
"Welcome to Denver. Name's Hiram," he rasped, and a smile spread suddenly across his gaunt, sinking face. "I have a limousine waiting for you outside. Shall we get your luggage?"
I followed him through the concourse, and for an old man, his stride was fast and steady. In no time, we reached the baggage claim.
As we waited for my duffel bag, I asked him, "So you know where to take me?"
"Yes sir," he said.
"Where?"
He frowned reproachfully. "Now, I was told to keep that a surprise, Mr. Thomas. I got a pretty penny for keeping this a secret, so I can't go spoiling it for you."
"You won't spoil it for me," I said, forcing myself to laugh good-naturedly, attempting to put him at ease. "Really. I'll double what he's paying you." Hiram laughed and shook his head.
"He said you'd probably try something like this. Told me to tell him if you did and he'd pay me twice what you offered."
"Fine," I said. "Forget it. Let it be a secret, then. Don't tell him I asked."
I saw my bag gliding toward us, but when I reached for it, Hiram grabbed my arm.
"Now, that's my job, Mr. Thomas."
"No, really, it's okay. That's a heavy bag."
"I get paid well for what I do, Mr. Thomas. Let me do my job." He stepped in front of me and heaved my bag awkwardly off the conveyor belt.
"I have breakable items in there," I said. "I'd prefer to carry it."
"No," he said flatly, and began walking away.
"Stop!" I yelled, drawing glances from the other passengers waiting for their luggage. He stopped, and I ran up to him and jerked the bag off his shoulder. "I'd prefer to carry it," I said. Hiram's sagging eyes narrowed. "I have to use the bathroom," I said. "I'll be back."
I found a rest room and squeezed into the last stall. Sitting down on the toilet, I opened the bag and could immediately tell it had been sifted, for my clothes were in shambles. Reaching down, I retrieved the black gun case I'd declared at the ticket counter.
I unlocked and opened the case, took out the .357, and set it on top of the clothes. I found the box of rounds buried under my socks, and I tore it open and loaded five semijacketed hollow-points into the cylinder. Then, with the .357 stuffed into the waistband of my khakis, and my oversized green polo shirt pulled down over my waist, I put the empty gun case and the box of rounds back into the duffel bag, zipped it up, and exited the stall.
Three men stood at the urinals, and I strode nervously past them. If you get caught, this is prison, I thought, moving through the swarm of people back toward Hiram. The gun felt so heavy, like it might fall out of my pants onto the floor.
We reached the entrance of the airport, and Hiram led me outside to a black limousine. I let him load my bag into the trunk, and then he opened the door for me and I climbed inside, half-expecting to find someone waiting for me. But there was no one --- just the immaculate gray interior of the limousine.
When Hiram had settled into the driver's seat and started the car, he looked back and said, "There's a minibar and a TV if you're interested. Just let me know if you need anything else, Mr. Thomas."
Hiram pulled out of the parking space and drove away from the airport. Staring out the deeply tinted windows, beyond the glare of the tarmac, I saw a brown throng of mountains in the western distance. I wanted to lose myself in them and escape whatever hell awaited me.
3
AN hour later, I stood watching Hiram's black limousine roll down the exit ramp and speed away on the interstate, heading back toward Denver. Lifting my bag, I carried it into the shade of an aspen near the Motel 6 office. In the heat of the sun, it seemed impossible that snow glistened on the mountaintops. Across the interstate, thirty miles west, the front range of the Rocky Mountains swept up out of the plain without the warning of foothills, and though the sky shone blue directly above, thunderclouds clustered around the highest peaks. Lightning flickered farther back in the mountains, but I never heard the thunder that followed.
Sitting in the cool grass, I opened the envelope Hiram had left with me. The note inside, identical in form to its predecessor, put knots in my craw as I read the black type:
You should be reading this around two in the afternoon at the Motel 6 on 1-25 north of Denver. Get a room and pay cash for it so you can check in under the name Randy Snider. Be packed and ready to go at 6:00 A.M. tomorrow.
Room 112 was on the ground level. My nerves were frayed, so I checked the closet, the shower, even under the bed --- anyplace large enough for a man to hide. When I felt confident I was alone, I closed the blinds and locked the door. Then I lay down on the bed with the gun and a book and read all afternoon.
Sometime after nine o'clock, the sky slipped from navy into black. Unable to keep my eyes open, I noticed the words on the page beginning to blur. Fatigue wore me down, though I fought to stay awake. A line of storms was rolling in from Rocky Mountain National Park, and every few seconds, thunder cracked and lightning flashed through the blinds.
Starving, I ran outside to the vending machines and bought a pack of crackers and two cans of soda. By the time I returned to my door, a drenching rain was falling from the sky, and the wind gusted, flinging dust in my eyes. As I opened the door and stepped across the threshold, I glanced back at the parking lot. There were only three cars, briefly visible when lightning stoked the sky with a yellowish blue explosion of electricity.
I shut the door and locked it. Storm warnings scrolled across the bottom of the television screen in alarming red. Within minutes, I finished the sodas and devoured the crackers, and, having satisfied my appetite, my exhaustion became complete. I cut out the lights, slipped out of my tennis shoes, and climbed into bed. Nothing could stop my eyes from closing, not even the knowledge that he was coming.
I felt constrained beneath the covers, so I lay on top of them and placed the .357 on the bedside table. I'll only sleep for an hour, I promised myself. One hour, no longer.
A deafening blast of thunder shattered the sky --- so loud, it seemed the storm was in the room. My eyes opened, and I saw the door swinging back and forth and lightning striking a mountain peak. I glanced at the alarm clock: 3:15.
The door is open, I thought, and I reached for the gun on the bedside table but only palmed the smooth surface of the wood. A stabbing pain shot through my left arm, and I jerked up in bed. When I looked down at the floor, I shrieked. A dark figure crouched on all fours.
My mouth turned cottony, and I could think of nothing but running before it stabbed me again. I tried to lunge off the other side of the bed and move toward the door, but nothing happened. It felt as if boulders had been strapped to my arms and legs. Even my fingers were incapacitated, and I fell back, my head sinking into the soft pillow. My eyes began to close as the dark figure stood and moved to the foot of the bed. It spoke to me, but the words melted.
Lightning, black...
Pain and darkness. The throbbing of an interstate beneath me. Muffled jazz music...
I opened my eyes to pure darkness. My hands were cuffed behind my back, feet bound with thick rope, and an aching thirst wrenched my gut. Through chapped, splitting lips, I gave voice to a broken scream. An antique moon appeared, huge and yellow. The shadowy figure of a man reached toward me, and I felt the prick of a needle. When I groaned, he said, "This will all be over soon." Darkness again...
Sunlight flooded across my eyelids. On my back, sweating, I perceived the softness of a mattress beneath me and a pillow supporting my head. My hands and feet were no longer tied, so I pulled a blanket over my eyes to block the sun.
Be packed and ready to go at 6:00 A.M. tomorrow.
Sitting up, I looked for the alarm clock. I wasn't in the Motel 6.
In the small square room, my bed rested flush against the back wall, one window at the level of the bed showering brilliant sunlight into the room. Black iron bars stretched across the window, and I knew they were for me. The rough, unembellished walls were built of mud red logs, each a foot in diameter, and the floor was stone. The only other furniture consisted of a bedside table, a chair, and a tottering desk pushed against the opposite wall, beside a closed door. I moved to the window and gazed through the bars.
A vast expanse of semiarid desert stretched out before me, the land flat and ridden with low homogenous vegetation. No power lines, no pavement, no signs of civilization outside this tiny room. I felt utterly alone. The sky was turquoise, and though warm in my room, I judged from the intensity of the sun that it was torrid outside.
Turning from the window, I noticed a piece of paper on the desk across the room. I stepped onto the stone floor, cold as steel despite the intolerable heat, then crossed the room and lifted the sheet of paper off the desk.
Before we meet, let me emphasize the futility of escape, deception, or destroying me. If you'll open the middle drawer of the desk, you'll find an envelope. Take a moment to look inside.
When I opened the envelope, I gasped: photos of me reaching down into Rita Jones's grave, a crudely sketched map of my lake property, disclosing the location of four bodies, and three typed pages giving details of the killings and revealing in which closet of my house the paring knife could be found. There was also a newspaper clipping regarding the sentencing of a man whose name (along with all other pertinent information) had been blacked out. Across the headline, he'd scribbled "INNOCENCE TAKES THE PUNISHMENT FOR MY CRIME." I returned to the letter.
Prayers for my health and safety are in order, because there is another envelope with a map, showing where the bodies really are and telling where the knife really is. In two months, someone will deliver that envelope to the Charlotte Police Department. If I'm not there to stop them in person, you, Andrew Thomas, will go to prison. People have been convicted with less evidence than I have against you, and I've already put two individuals on death row for my crimes. (Like the newspaper clipping?)
Last thing. Know that your mother's safety hinges on your conduct here. Now, you've had quite a journey. Rest as much as you like, and when you're ready to learn why I've brought you here, knock on the door.
I returned to the bed and, leaning against the barred window, looked out again upon the desert. My eyes filled with tears as I beheld the wilderness. Aside from the windblown motion of the tumbleweeds dispersing their seed, there was no movement. It was a wasteland, a deadened landscape, which at another time might have been serene. But in my present condition, it only enhanced the foreboding. Wiping my eyes, I rose from the bed, and my heart galloped as I approached the door.
4
A slot six inches high and a foot wide had been cut into the center of the sturdy wooden door. I knelt down and pushed on the metal sheet, but it wouldn't budge. Standing again, I drew a deep breath. Weak and hungry, it was impossible to know how long I'd lain unconscious in this room. My arms were sore and speckled with needle pricks.
Timidly, I knocked on the door and then retreated to the bed. Footsteps soon approached, clicking softly against the stone outside. The metal panel slid up, and I glimpsed another room: bookshelves, a stack of records, a white kerosene heater, a breakfast table....
In place of the panel, a flap of bubble wrap descended. Someone stood before the opening, though only a form without detail, blurred behind the sheet of quarter-size plastic bubbles.
"Come here," he said. I inched toward the door. When I was a few feet away, he said, "Stop. Turn around."
I turned and waited. The bubble wrap crinkled, and I assumed he'd lifted the plastic and was now appraising my condition. After a moment, he said, "Come to the door." The slot had been cut at waist level, and when I reached the door and knelt down to peer out, he said, "No, no, don't look at me. Sit with your back to the door."
I obeyed. Though it terrified me to be in proximity to him, I emphatically reassured myself that he hadn't brought me into a desert just to kill me in my first moments of consciousness.
"How do you feel?" he asked, and in his voice I sensed true concern. He sounded nothing like the man on the phone. His voice had a slight buzzing quality, as if he spoke with the aid of a speech enhancement device. Though his voice was familiar, I couldn't place him, and I distrusted my perception after spending an indeterminate number of hours unconscious under a slew of narcotics.
"I feel groggy," I said, my tone as demure as possible. I didn't want to excite him.
"That'll wear off."
"You wrote those letters? Killed that teacher?"
"Yes and yes."
"Where am I?"
"Suffice it to say that you're in the middle of a desert, and were you to escape, you'd die of thirst and heat exhaustion before you reached the outskirts of civilization."
"How long will I ---"
"No more questions regarding your quasi-captivity. I won't tell you when or where you are."
"What will you tell me?"
"You're here to get an education." He paused. "If you only knew. The substance of your learning will become manifest, so be patient."
"Can I please have my things?"
He sighed, the first sign of frustration boiling under his breath. "We'll talk about that later." Then his voice softened, shedding its edge. "Pretend you're an infant, Andrew. A tiny, helpless infant. Right now, in your room, you're in the womb. You don't understand how to use your senses, how to think, how to reason. Rely on me for everything. I'm going to teach you how to see the world again. I'll feed your mind first. Fatten it up on the most brilliant thinkers in human history." A white hand pushed through the bubble wrap and dropped a book onto the floor.
"Your first meal," he said as I lifted a hardback of The Prince. "Machiavelli. The man's a genius. Undisputedly. Are you familiar with Hannibal, the general from Carthage who ransacked Rome? Marched his men across the Alps with an army of war elephants."
"I know who he was."
"Well, he marched his army all over the Mediterranean coast and Eastern Europe, but what made Hannibal's army singular was that there was no dissension among his soldiers. Different nationalities, beliefs, languages, and no dissension in the ranks. You know what made that peace possible?" he asked. "In the words of Machiavelli, Hannibal's 'inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valor, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.' " He was silent for a moment, and I could hear only the dry, scorching wind pushing against the glass panes and my captor's escalated breathing. " 'Inhuman cruelty,' " he repeated. "That gives me chills." His voice had turned passionate, as though he were speaking to his lover. "So," he said, "start reading that tonight, and we'll talk about it tomorrow. Are you hungry?"
"Yes, I'm starving."
"Good. I'm gonna make dinner now, so why don't you start on that book. I hope broiled shrimp on angel-hair pasta sounds good to you." He ripped the bubble wrap away and shoved the metal panel back over the opening. My head dropped in relief that he was gone, and I sat motionless in my white bathrobe, staring vacantly into the floor.
A small lamp, screwed into the wall, exuded dim, barely sufficient light onto the pages. Because he'd yet to give me the duffel bag, I didn't have the aid of my glasses, so my eyes were failing me.
I dropped The Prince onto the floor, having finished half of it. I hoped that would be enough for him. When I reached up and turned off the lamp, the placid light of a full moon flooded in between the bars, soft and soothing. I would've dreaded to spend my first conscious night in the perfect darkness of a new moon.
The room had grown unbearable from a day's accumulation of sunlight, and though the heat had dissipated from the desert with the onslaught of night, it had lingered in my room. So I'd opened the window when the sun set, and now the dry chill of the desert night infiltrated the room, forcing me to burrow under the fleece blankets.
Closing my eyes, I listened. Through the open window, owls screeched and coyotes or wild dogs yapped at the moon, though they seemed a great distance away. Since dinner, I hadn't heard a peep from him. No footsteps, no breathing, nothing.
For the last hour, jazz music had filled the cabin. It came quietly at first, stealing in like a whisper, so that I heard only the guttural rumblings of a bass. The volume rose, and the ride cymbal pattern and the offbeat swish of a closing hi-hat pulsed into the room. When the piano and trumpet and saxes climaxed through the wall, I suddenly recognized the song, and it took me back twenty years, to a different time, a different life. It was Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing "All Blues," a moody, blues form piece in 6/8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.
An acute scream soared above the music. I sat up and listened. Another scream ruptured the night. Clutching the iron bars, I turned my eyes on the desert, but saw nothing save miles of moonlit sagebrush. Again, a scream --- a woman's, closer than before.
Fifty feet away, a figure stumbled through the desert, choking for breath. When it was halfway past the window frame, a second, larger figure entered on the left side. It lunged upon the smaller figure and drove it into the ground at the foot of a greasewood shrub.
I heard a female voice, crying, shriller screams, pleadings, but the words were indecipherable when they reached my ears. The larger figure kicked at the ground. Then it knelt down, thrusting.
More screams, the loudest, most piercing yet. Silence.
Now only the large figure stood, staring at the ground. In a measured pace, it walked back in the direction from which it had come, pulling by long black hair what it had chased through the desert. I heard the footsteps and what it dragged sliding through the dirt, the woman's legs still twitching.
Suddenly, it turned and looked in my direction. Moonlight, bluish and surreal, streamed across the stranger's face.
I froze. My brother, Orson, stood smiling on the desert.
5
A stiff purple dawn unfolded on the desert, ending a terrible, sleepless night. I realized from here on out, whenever I closed my eyes, I would always see a man on a moonlit desert, dragging a woman through the dirt by her hair.
At the approach of footsteps, I sat up in bed. A dead bolt turned and the door swung open, revealing a man of my proportions: same thin, muscular build, same stark blue eyes. Similar but not identical, his face looked like the ideal of mine, more handsome in its superior proportionality. He stood grinning in the doorway, and in contrast to my unkempt graying hair, his crew cut shone a perfect brown. In addition to black snakeskin boots and faded blue jeans, he wore a bloody white T-shirt with sweat marks extending down from the armpits. I wondered fleetingly why he perspired so profusely before the sun had even risen. His arms were stronger than mine, and as he leaned against the door frame, he took an aggressive bite out of a large burgundy apple.
I couldn't speak. It was like seeing not the ghost of a loved one, but the demon. Tears burned in my eyes. This is not real. This cannot be my brother, this terrible man.
"I have missed you so much," Orson said, still hovering in the doorway. I could only stare back into his blue eyes.
Orson had disappeared from Appalachian State University our junior year, my last image that of him standing in the doorway of our dorm room.
"You won't see me for a while," he had said. And I hadn't, from that day to this. The police had given up. He'd just vanished. My mother and I had hired detectives: nothing. We feared he was dead.
Now he apologized. "I wouldn't have had you see that last night. The consequence of using old rope, I guess." I noticed fresh scratch marks on his neck and face. Specks of glitter glinted on his cheeks, and I wondered if they'd come off the woman's fingernails when she struggled. "You want breakfast?" he asked. "Coffee's brewing."
I shuddered, repulsed. "Are you kidding me?"
"I wanted to keep you in here for several days before bringing you out and revealing myself, but after last night...well, there's really no use is there?"
Sweat slid down my sides.
As he bit again into the apple, Orson began to walk up a short hallway. "Come on," he said.
I climbed down off the bed and followed him out of my room, heading toward the front of the cabin. My legs felt unstable, like they might sink right down into a puddle on the floor.
"Have a seat," he said, pointing to a black leather sofa pushed against the left-hand wall. As I walked into the living room, I glanced behind me. At the terminus of a narrow hallway, two rooms, side by side, constructed the backbone of the cabin, mine on the left, a door without a dead bolt or a centered metal panel on the right. A small Monet of a skiff gliding under a stone bridge hung from a log between the two doors.
The walls of the living room were covered, floor to ceiling, with books. They stood on rustic shelves that protruded from the logs, and I was amazed at the diversity of the titles. I recognized, on the end of one shelf, the colorful jackets of the five books I'd written.
My brother walked to the other side of the room, which became a tiny kitchen. A record player sat on a stool by the front door, a three-foot stack of records beside it. Orson looked at me and, smiling, set the needle on a record. "Freddie Freeloader" sprang out from two large speakers, and I eased down on the sofa.
As the song progressed, Orson took a seat on the other end of the couch. The way he stared unnerved me. I wanted my glasses.
"Do you think I could have my things now?"
"Oh, you mean this?" Nonchalantly, he pulled my .357 out of his jeans pocket. "I did tell you to bring the Smith and Wesson, didn't I?" His voice filled with angry sarcasm as his cold eyes dilated and burned through me.
"I'm sorry," I said, shifting uncomfortably on the couch, mouth running dry. "Wouldn't you have done the same? I mean, I didn't know ---"
"Trying to put me in your shoes won't work." He walked to the record player and lifted the needle. The cabin now in absolute silence, he moved to the center of the living room.
"You fucked up, Andy. I told you just bring clothes and toiletries, and you brought a gun and a box of bullets." He spoke casually, as though we lounged on a back porch, smoking cigars.
"When you don't follow my instructions, that hurts both of us, and the only thing I can think of to do is show you that not following them isn't in your best interest." He opened the cylinder of the .357 and showed me five empty chambers. "You fucked up once, so we'll load one bullet." He took a round from his pocket and slipped it into a chamber.
I grew sick with fear. "Orson, you can't."
"Andy-Andy-Andy. You never tell a man with a loaded weapon what to do." He spun the cylinder, flipped it back into the gun, and cocked the hammer. "Let me explain how this punishes me also, because I don't want you to think I'm doing this just for kicks.
"I've gone to a great deal of trouble to bring you out here, and if your luck suddenly runs out and the twenty percent chance of this bullet being in the hot chamber bites your ass, I've done a lot of work for nothing. But I'm willing to take that chance to teach you a lesson about following my instructions."
When he pointed the gun at my chest, I uselessly held out my hands. He squeezed the trigger --- click --- and took a bite of his apple. I could hardly breathe, and as I buried my face in my hands, Orson put the record back on. The music started again, and he snapped his fingers to the offbeat, smiling warmly at me as he returned to the couch. When he'd removed the round from the chamber, he set the gun on the floor and plopped back down beside me. A wave of nausea watered my mouth, and I thought I might be sick.
Holy fucking shit, he's out of his goddamned mind. I'm going to die. I'm alone in a desert with a psychopath who is my brother. My fucking brother.
"Andy, you're free to roam the house now, and the desert. The shed outside is off-limits, and I'm gonna lock your door every night when you go to bed. You can quit pissing in the bowl. Shower at the well by the outhouse. It's cold, but you'll get used to it. The electricity comes from a new generator out back, but I've been too busy to put in plumbing."
"May I use the outhouse now?" I asked, scarcely able to muster my voice.
"Sure. Always let me know when you leave. I don't ever want to have to come find you."
Still shaking, I crossed the room and opened the door to sunlight ripening upon the russet wilderness. I shivered, girding the white bathrobe I'd worn for the last two days more snugly around my waist. When I reached back to shut the door, Orson stood in the threshold.
"I have missed you," he said.
I looked at him, and for a second he was vulnerable, like the brother I'd loved when we were young. His eyes pleaded for something, but I was in no condition to consider what they wanted.
"Who was she?" I asked.
He knew damn well who I meant, but he said nothing. We just stared at each other, a connection kindling that had lain dormant almost to its death. There remained combustible matter between us. I wasn't going to wait for him to close the door, so I turned away to walk down into the chilled dirt.
"Andy," he said, and I stopped on the steps, but I didn't look back. "Just a waitress."
6
I stood on the rickety front porch, in the shadow of a tin roof supported by rotten four-by-fours. A strong, steady breeze blew in from the desert, carrying the sweet, piquant smell of sagebrush, scorched earth, and flowers unknown to me.
Four wobbly rocking chairs, two on either side of the door, swayed imperceptibly, but I sat down on the steps and shoved my bare feet into shaded dirt, still cool where it escaped the sun. My eyes wandered along the northern horizon, a mass of foothills and mountains. At least thirty miles away, there was no texture to their slopes. Only hunter green at the lower elevations, denoting evergreen forests, then shattered gray rock, then cloudlike glacier fields that would never melt.
Sixty yards off the left side of the porch stood a large shed. It looked hastily built and new, its tin roof and smooth boards of yellow pine glowing in the sinking sun. A chain was wrapped snakelike around the latch that connected the double doors. Tire tracks led straight to the shed.
A mile or so beyond, the desert rose several hundred feet to a ridge of rusty bluffs that extended south, sloping gently back to the desert floor. Scraggy junipers lined the top, their jagged silhouettes blackening against the sky.
Since dawn, I'd been trying to read Machiavelli in my room. Hot and unable to concentrate on anything except how I might escape, I'd come outside looking for relief in a breeze. But even in the wind, sweat stung my eyes, moistening my skin and hair. Inside, I heard another jazz record --- such an eerie sound track to this empty desert, the music so full, effecting thoughts of crowded New York City clubs and people crammed into compact spaces. Normally, I despise crowds and proximity, but now the claustrophobic confines of a raucous nightclub seemed comforting.
I sat on the steps for the better part of an hour, watching the desert turn scarlet beneath the sun. My mind blanked, and I became so engrossed in the perpetuation of mindlessness that I started when the front door squeaked open behind me. Orson's boots clunked hollowly against the wood.
"Will you be hungry soon?" he asked. The rumble of his scratchy voice caused my stomach to flutter. I couldn't accept that we were together again. His presence still horrified me.
"Yes."
"I thought I'd grill a couple of steaks," he said, and I could tell he was smiling, hoping I'd be impressed. I wondered if he were trying to make up for nearly killing me. As children, whenever we fought, he'd always try to win me back with gifts, flattery, or, as in this case, food. "You want a drink?"
God yes.
I turned around and looked up at him. "If you've got it, Jack Daniel's would be nice."
He walked back inside and returned with an unopened fifth of that blessed Tennessee whiskey. It was the best moment of my day, like a small piece of home, and my heart leapt. Cracking the black seal, I took a long swill, closing my eyes as the oaken fire burned down my throat. In that second, as the whiskey singed my empty stomach, I could've been on my deck, alone, getting shit-faced in the glory of a Carolina evening.
I offered the bottle to Orson, but he declined. He walked around the corner of the cabin and dragged a grill back with him. After lighting the charcoal, he walked inside and returned carrying a plate with two ridiculously thick red filets mignons, salted and peppered. As he stepped past me, he held the plate down and said, "Pour a little of that whiskey on the meat."
I drenched them in sour mash, and Orson tossed the tenderloin rounds on the grill, where they flamed for a couple of seconds. He came and sat beside me, and as the fuzziness of the whiskey set in, we listened to the steaks sizzle and watched the sunset redden, like old friends.
When the steaks were cooked, we took our plates onto the front porch, where a flimsy table stood on one side. Orson lit two candles with a silver Zippo, and we consumed our dinner in silence. I couldn't help thinking as I sat across from him, You aren't that monster I saw on the desert last night. That is how I sit here without trembling or weeping, because somehow I know that cannot be you. You are just Orson. My brother. My blue-eyed twin. I see you as a boy, a sweet, innocuous boy. Not that thing on the desert. Not that demon.
As the last shallow sunbeams retreated below the purple horizon, an ominous feeling took hold of me. The presence of light had afforded me a sense of control, but now, in darkness, I felt defenseless again. For this reason, I hadn't touched the whiskey after my initial buzz, fearing inebriation could be dangerous here. The silence at the table unnerved me, too. We'd been sitting for twenty minutes without a word, but I wasn't going to speak. What would I say to him?
Orson had been staring into his plate, but now his eyes fixed on me. He cleared his throat.
"Andy," he said. "You remember Mr. Hamby?"
I couldn't suppress it. A smile found my lips for the first time in days.
"Want me to tell it like you never heard it before?" Orson asked.
When I nodded, he leaned forward in his chair, blithe, wide-eyed, a born storyteller.
"When we were kids, we'd go several times a year up into the countryside north of Winston-Salem to stay with Grandmom. Granddad was dead, and she liked the company. So how old were we when this happened? Nine maybe? We'll say nine so..."
You feel like Orson, and I know, I hope it won't last, but Christ, you feel like my brother in this moment.
"And Grandmom's house was next to this apple orchard. Joe Hamby's orchard. He was a widower, so he lived by himself. It was early autumn, and schools and church groups would come for the day to Hamby's orchard to pick apples and pumpkins, and buy cider and take hayrides.
"Well, since this orchard backed right up against Grandmom's property, we couldn't resist sneaking over there. We'd steal apples, climb on his tractors, play in the mountains of hay he stored in his barns. But Hamby was a real bastard about trespassers, so we'd have to go at night. We'd wait till Grandmom went to sleep, and we'd sneak out of that creaky farmhouse.
"All right, so this one particular October night, we slip outside about nine o'clock and hop the fence into the orchard. I remember the moon's very full, and it's not cold yet, but the crickets and tree frogs are gone, so the night is very still and very quiet. It's near the peak of harvest. Some of the apples have soured, but most are perfect, and we stroll through the orchard, eating these ripened sun-warmed beauties, just having a helluva time.
"Now Hamby owned a couple hundred acres, and on the farthest corner of his land, there was this pumpkin patch we'd heard about but never had the balls to go there. Well, this night was one of those nights when we felt invincible. So we reach the end of the orchard and see these big orange pumpkins in the moonlight. Remember, Hamby had won some blue ribbons for his pumpkins at the state fair. He grew these monstrous hundred-pound freaks of nature.
"We can see his house a ways up the tractor path, and all the lights are off, so we race each other into the pumpkin patch, our eyes peeled for one of those hundred-pounders. Finally, we collapse in the middle of the patch, laughing, out of breath."
Orson smiled. I did, too. We knew what was coming. "Suddenly, just a few yards away, we hear this loud groan: 'I LOVE my orange pussy!' "
I guffawed, felt the whiskey burn my sinuses.
"Scared us shitless," he said. "We turn and see Mr. Hamby draped over this huge pumpkin the size of one of those Galápagos Island sea turtles. He's got his overalls down around his ankles, and boy he's humping this thing in the moonlight. Just talking up a storm, smacking it like he's smacking a bare ass, and stopping every now and then to take a swig from his jar of peach brandy.
"Of course we're mortified, and don't realize he's obliviously drunk. We think he'll see us and chase us if we try to run home, so we lay down in the dirt and wait for him to finish up and go home. Well, eventually he finishes...with that pumpkin, pulls up his overalls, and goes looking for another. The next one's smaller, and after he's bored a hole in it with his auger, he drops to his knees and starts riding this one. We watch him fuck five pumpkins before he passes out dead drunk. Then we run back through the orchard toward Grandmom's, sick on apples and..."
I see us on that brisk autumn night, as vividly as I see us sitting here now, climbing back over that wooden fence, both wearing overalls and matching long-sleeved turtlenecks. We wanted to be identical then. Told everyone we were, and we looked it, too. Does that bond still have a pulse?
I had tears in my eyes when he finished. The sound of our laughter moved me, and I allowed myself to look freely into his face, surveying the space behind his eyes. But the fingernail marks across his cheek started that woman's godawful screaming inside my head again, and I lost the comfort of the moment, and the ease with which I'd remained in his presence for the last half hour. Orson discerned the change, and his gaze left me for the black empty desert all around us.
A gust extinguished the candles, leaving us in darkness. Now the last intimation of purple was exposed against the western horizon, but it blackened the moment I saw it. The sky filled with stars --- millions more than in the polluted eastern skies. Even on the clearest nights above Lake Norman, the stars appear fuzzy, as if dimmed behind diaphanous chiffon. Here they shone upon the desert like tiny moons, and many streaked across the sky.
"I'm cold," I said, rubbing my arms, now textured with goose-flesh. I could barely see Orson, only his shape visible across the table.
He stood. "If you have to use the outhouse, do it now. In fifteen minutes, I'm locking you in your room."
"Why?"
Orson made no reply. He took the plates and glasses inside, and I sat for a moment after he was gone, searching the sky for meteors. Rubbing my eyes, I came to my feet. I would be relieved to be alone in my room, with nothing to do but read and sleep. The sound of dishes in the sink made me start, and I ran across the warm dirt in bare feet to the outhouse.
7
DAYS passed languidly on the desert. The sun wasted no time setting the land on fire, so after ten o'clock each morning, it became dangerous to venture outside. The heat was dry and stifling, so I remained in the shaded, cooler confines of my room or the rest of the cabin when I wasn't locked away.
There was no paucity of food. In fact, I'd never eaten better. Orson kept his freezer filled with prime cuts of meat, and he prepared three exquisite meals each day. We ate steak, salmon, veal, even lobster on one occasion, and drank bottles of wine with every supper. I asked him once why he dined like royalty, and he told me, "Because I'm entitled to it, Andy. We both are."
As I finished one book, Orson would have another for me. After Machiavelli, it was Seneca, and then Democratis on the expunction of melancholy. Though I read a book each day, Orson kept constant pressure on me to read faster. What he wanted me to glean from these classic texts, I could not imagine, and he had yet to reveal.
I obsessed about potential modes of escape. Though I had the opportunity, simply walking away was out. I had neither the strength nor the resources to hike out of this desert, without even knowing a direction in which to head. But I surmised Orson's means of transportation was locked in the shed. So I'd bide my time, construct a plan, and amass the nerve and will to overcome my brother. I would not be impetuous. Only smart decisions and flawless execution would preserve my life.
Keeping a journal calmed me. Several hours after dusk, when I'd finished reading and Orson had locked me in for the night, I would sit in bed and jot down the day's events. I'd write for an hour, often longer, sometimes disgressing into thoughts of home and the lake. I'd compose elaborate descriptions of my property, summoning the smells and sounds of the lake in summer to this lonely desert. Without question, it became my favorite time of day, and I considered it a temporary oasis. It was all I could think about during the day --- what I lived for. And often, by the time I'd put my pen and paper in the drawer and cut out the light, I could hear the lake lapping at the shore, its breeze stirring the trees.
With respect to time, I knew only that it was late May. Since I'd been drugged during my abduction, I couldn't be sure which day I'd come to consciousness in the desert. Several days might have passed between that stormy night at the motel and my waking in the cabin. So I labeled my journal entries "Day 1," "Day 2," "Day 3," et cetera, beginning with my first day of consciousness. I couldn't understand what drove Orson to keep the date hidden from me. It seemed like an irrelevant, useless fact in my present situation, yet it bothered me not to know.
As for the location of the cabin, I didn't have the first clue. It could've been anywhere west of the plains. I pencil-sketched views from the front porch and my barred bedroom window, including the mountain range to the north and east and the ridge of red bluffs in the west. I also sketched the local plant life: sagebrush, tumbleweed, greasewood, lupine, and several other desert flowers that I happened upon during early-evening walks.
Some nights after sunset, when just a blush of red lingered in the sky, I'd see herds of antelope and mule deer moving through the desert. Their silhouettes against the horizon pained me, for as they trudged slowly out of sight, I envied their freedom. I recorded these observations in the journal, too, along with sightings of jackrabbits and long-tailed kangaroo mice. Though I never saw one, barn owls screeched constantly through the night and turkey vultures frequented the sky in the heat of day. I hoped that through the observations I recorded, I could one day locate this desert again. But in truth, I had no way of knowing if I would ever be allowed to leave.
I lay awake in bed. Having finished my journal, it was late, and Orson had disabled the generator for the night, so the cabin was silent. Outside in the dark, only the wind disrupted the oblique stillness. I could feel it pushing through cracks between the logs. Always blowing.
A memory had been haunting me for the last hour.
Orson and I are eight years old, playing in the woods near our neighborhood in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, under a bleached August sky. Like many young boys, we're fascinated with wildlife, and Orson catches a gray lizard scampering across a rotten log.
Thrilled with the find, I tell him to hold the lizard down, and with a devious smile, he does. I extract a magnifying glass from my pocket. The sun is bright, and in no time a blinding dot appears on the lizard's scaly skin. The sunlight burns through, and Orson and I look at each other and laugh with delight, enthralled as the smoking lizard squirms to escape.
"It's my turn!" he says finally. "You hold him."
We spend the entire afternoon torturing the creature. When we're finished, I throw it into the grass, but Orson insists on taking it with him.
"I own it now," he says. "It's mine."
8
Day 6 (after midnight?)
Took another shower today. The thermometer read 95°F when I scrambled naked across the blistering ground to the well. I loathe that icy water. Feels just a few degrees above freezing, and it takes my breath as it spills over me. I washed as fast as I could, but by the time I'd rinsed all the soap from my body, I was shivering.
At sunset, I wanted to go for a walk on the desert, but Orson locked me in my room. From my bedroom window, I saw a brown Buick heading east on a slim dirt road that runs perfectly straight into the horizon. He's been gone several hours now. It feels safer here without him.
The Scorcher is probably hitting the bookstores now, and I'm sure Cynthia has about nine ulcers. I don't blame her. I'm supposed to start a twelve-city book tour any day now. Signings, radio programs, and television appearances will be canceled. This is going to dampen sales; this is breaking contract with my publisher.... But I can't dwell on these things now. It's out of my control and only makes me crazy.
I'm still reading like a madman. Poe, Plato, and McCarthy in the last two days. I still don't understand what Orson wants so desperately for me to see. Hell, I'm not sure he even knows. He spends his days reading, too, and I wonder what he's searching for in the thousands of pages, if he thinks there's some character, some story or philosophy he's yet to uncover that might explain or justify what he sees in the mirror. But I imagine he only finds morsels of comfort, like that cruelty bit from The Prince or the psychopathic Judge Holden in Blood Meridian.
I hear a car approaching in the distance. This is the first time he's left me alone, and that worries me. Perhaps he just went for groceries. Good night.
I walked from the bed to the dresser and placed the pen and paper inside the middle drawer. It would be useless to try to hide my journal from Orson. Besides, he did display a sense of decorum when it came to my writing. At least I didn't think he'd read my journal yet. He respected what he called intrinsic urges, which was writing in my case.
I crawled back into bed, reached over to the beside table, and smothered the kerosene lantern, which I'd been using the last few nights instead of the lamp. The slam of a car door echoed through the open window. I didn't want to be awake when he came inside.
His voice whispered my name: "Andy. Andy. Andrew Thomas." My eyes opened, but I saw nothing. The sotto voce whisper continued. "Hey there, buddy. Got a surprise for you. Well, for us actually." The blinding beam of a flashlight illuminated Orson's face --- a smile between blood-besmirched cheeks. He turned on the lamp above the bed. My eyes ached.
"Let's go. You're burning moonlight." He set the flashlight on the dresser and yanked the covers off me. Glancing out the window, I saw the moon high in the sky. Still exhausted, I didn't feel like I'd been asleep long.
Orson tossed me a pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt from my duffel bag, which lay open in a corner. Impatient, almost manic, he resembled a child in an amusement park as he paced around the room in his navy one-piece mechanic's suit and steel-tipped boots.
The waning moon spread a blue glow, bright as day, upon everything --- the sagebrush, the bluffs, even Orson. My breath steamed in the cold night air. We walked toward the shed, and as we approached, I noticed the Buick parked outside, its back end facing us, the front pointed into the double doors. The license plate had been removed.
Something banged into those doors inside the shed, followed by a brief lamentation: "HELP ME!" When I stopped walking, Orson spun around.
"Tell me what we're doing," I said.
"You're coming with me into that shed."
"Who's in there?"
"Andy..."
"No. Who's in ---" I stared down the two-and-one-eighth-inch stainless steel barrel of my .357 revolver.
"Lead the way," he said.
At gunpoint, I walked along the side of the building. The shed was bigger than I'd originally thought, the sides forty feet long, the tin roof steeply slanted, presumably to protect it from caving under the crippling winter snows, if we were, in fact, that far north. We reached the back side of the shed, and Orson stopped me at the door. He withdrew a key from his pocket, and as he inserted it into the lock, glanced back at me and grinned.
"You like buttermilk, don't you?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, though I couldn't fathom the possible relevance.
"Did you always like it?"
"No."
"That's right. You drank it 'cause Dad did, but you came to love it. Well, I think it tastes like shit, but you have an acquired taste for buttermilk. That's sort of what's gonna happen here. You're gonna hate it at first. You're gonna hate me more than you do now. But it'll grow on you. You'll acquire a taste for this, too, I promise." He unlocked the door and put the key back into his pocket. "Not one word unless I tell you." Smiling, he motioned for me to enter first. " 'Inhuman cruelty,' " he whispered as I opened the door and he followed me into the shed.
A woman lay blindfolded and handcuffed in the middle of the floor, a brown leather collar around her neck, a five-foot chain running from the collar to a metal pole. The pole rose from the concrete floor to the ceiling, where it was welded to a rafter. When Orson slammed the door, the woman clambered to her feet, wobbling awkwardly around the pole, attempting to gauge our location.
She must've been about forty-five, her blond hair losing a perm. Slightly overweight, she wore a red-and-gray bowling shirt, navy pants, and one white shoe. Her perfume filled the room, and blood ran down the side of her nose from a cut beneath the blindfold.
"Where are you? Why are you doing this?"
This isn't happening. This is pretend. We're playing a game. That is not a human being.
"Go sit, Andy," Orson said, pointing to the front of the shed. I walked past tool-laden metal shelves and took a seat in a green lawn chair near the double doors. A white shoe rested against the doors, and I wondered why the woman had kicked it off. She looked in my direction, tears rambling down her cheeks. Orson came and stood beside me. He knelt down, inspecting the shiny tips of his boots. Suddenly, something clenched around my ankle.
"Sorry," he said, "but I just don't trust you yet." He'd cuffed my ankle with a leg iron, bolted to the floor beneath the lawn chair.
As Orson walked toward the woman, he shoved my gun into a deep pocket in his mechanic's suit.
"Why are you doing this to me?" she asked again. Orson reached out and wiped the tears from her face, moving with her as she backed away, winding the chain slowly around the pole.
"What's your name?" he asked gently.
"Sh-Shirley," she said.
"Shirley what?"
"Tanner." Orson crossed the room and picked up two stools that had been set upside down on the floor. He arranged them beside each other, within range of the woman's chain.
"Please," he said, taking hold of her arm above the elbow, "have a seat." When they were seated, facing each other, Orson stroked her face. Her entire body quaked, as though suffering from hypothermia. "Shirley, please calm down. I know you're scared, but you have to stop crying."
"I wanna go home," she said, her voice shaky and childlike. "I want ---"
"You can go home, Shirley," Orson said. "I just want to talk to you. That's all. Let me preface what we're going to do by asking you a few questions. Do you know what preface means, Shirley?"
"Yes."
"This is just a hunch, but when I look at you, I don't see someone who spends much time in the books. Am I right?" She shrugged. "What's the last thing you read?"
"Um...Heaven's Kiss."
"Is that a romance?" he asked, and she nodded. "Oh, I'm sorry, that doesn't count. You see, romance novels are shit. You could probably write one. Go to college by chance?"
"No."
"Finish high school?"
"Yes."
"Whew. Scared me there for a minute, Shirley."
"Take me back," she begged. "I want my husband."
"Stop whining," he said, and tears trickled down her face again, but Orson let them go. "My brother's here tonight," he said, "and that's a lucky coincidence for you. He's gonna ask you five questions on anything --- philosophy, history, literature, geography, whatever. You have to answer at least three correctly. Do that and I'll take you back to the bowling alley. That's why you're blindfolded. Can't see my face if I'm gonna let you go, now can you?" Timidly, she shook her head. Orson's voice dropped to a whisper, and leaning in, he spoke into her ear just loudly enough for me to hear also: "But if you answer less than three questions correctly, I'm gonna cut your heart out."
Shirley moaned. Clumsily dismounting the stool, she tried to run, but the chain jerked her to the floor.
"Get up!" Orson screamed, stepping down from his stool. "If you aren't sitting on that stool in five seconds, I'll consider it a forfeiture of the test." Shirley stood up immediately, and Orson helped her back onto the stool. "Calm down, sweetheart," he said, his voice recovering its sweetness. "Take a breath, answer the questions, and you'll be back with your husband and --- do you have kids?"
"Three," she said, weeping.
"With your husband and your three beautiful children before morning."
"I can't do it," she whined.
"Then you'll experience an agonizing death. It's all up to you, Shirley."
The single bare lightbulb that illuminated the room flickered, throwing the shed into bursts of darkness. Orson sighed and stood up on his stool. He tightened the bulb, climbed down, and walked to my chair. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, "Fire away, Andy."
"But..." I swallowed. "Please, Orson. Don't do ---"
Leaning down, he whispered into my ear so the woman couldn't hear: "Ask the questions or I'll do her in front of you. It won't be pleasant. You might close your eyes, but you'll hear her. The whole desert'll hear her. But if she gets them right, I will let her go. I won't rescind that promise. It's all in her hands. That's what makes this so much fun."
I looked at the woman, still quivering on the stool, felt my brother's hand gripping my shoulder. Orson was in control, so I asked the first question.
"Name three plays by William Shakespeare," I said woodenly.
"That's good," Orson said. "That's a fair question. Shirley?"
"Romeo and Juliet," she blurted. "Um...Hamlet."
"Excellent," Orson mocked. "One more, please."
She was silent for a moment and then exclaimed, "Othello! Othello!"
"Yes!" Orson clapped his hands. "One for one. Next question."
"Who's the president of the United States?"
Orson slapped the back of my head. "Too easy, so now I'm gonna ask one. Shirley, which philosopher's theory is encapsulated in this quote: 'Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law'?"
"I don't know! How the hell should I know that?"
"If you knew anything about philosophy, you'd know it was Kant. One for two. Andy?" Hesitating, I glanced up at Orson. "Ask the question, Andy!"
I deliberated. "On what hill was Jesus Christ crucified?" I looked up at Orson, and he nodded approvingly.
"Golgotha," she said weakly.
"Two for three," Orson said, but he didn't sound as happy this time.
"Fourth question. When ---"
"I've got one," said Orson, interrupting. "You can ask the last one, Andy. Shirley, on what continent is the country of Gabon?"
She answered quickly, as if she knew. "Europe."
"Oh, no, I'm sorry. Africa. Western coast."
"Don't do this anymore," she begged. "I'll give you money. I have credit cards. I have ---"
"Shut up," Orson said. "Play fair. I am." His face reddening, he gritted his teeth. When it passed, he said, "It all comes down to this. Andy, hope you've got a good one, 'cause if it isn't, I have a perfect question in mind."
"The subject is history," I said. "In what year did we sign the Declaration of Independence?" Closing my eyes, I prayed Orson would let the question fly.
"Shirley?" he said after ten seconds. "I'm gonna have to ask for your answer."
When I opened my eyes, my stomach turned. Tears had begun to glide down her cheeks. "1896?" she asked. "Oh God, 1896?"
"EEEEEHHHHH! I'm sorry, that is incorrect. The year was 1776." She collapsed onto the concrete. "Two for five doesn't cut it," he said, walking across the floor to Shirley. He bent down and untied the blindfold. Wadding it up, he threw it at me. Shirley refused to look up.
"That's a shame, Shirley," he said, circling her as she remained balled up on the floor. "That last one was a gimme. I didn't want my brother to have to see what I'm gonna do to you."
"I'm sorry," she cried, trying to catch her breath as she lifted her bruised face from the floor. Her eyes met Orson's for the first time, and it struck me that they were exceptionally kind. "Don't hurt me, sir."
"You are sorry," he said. He walked to a row of three long metal shelves stacked piggyback against the wall beside the back door. From the middle shelf he took a leather sheath and a gray sharpening stone. Then he strolled back across the room and pulled his stool against the wall, out of my reach and Shirley's. Sitting down, he unsheathed the knife and winked at me. "Shirley," he coaxed. "Look here, honey. I want to ask you something." Again, she lifted her head to Orson, taking long, asthmatic breaths.
"Do you appreciate fine craftsmanship?" he asked. "Let me tell you about this knife."
She disintegrated into hysteria, but Orson paid her sobs and pleadings no attention. For the moment, he'd forgotten me, alone with his victim.
"I acquired this tool from a custom knife maker in Montana. His work is incredible." Orson slid the blade methodically up and down the sharpening stone. "It's a five-and-a-half-inch blade, carbon steel, three millimeters thick. Had a helluva time trying to explain to this knife maker the uses to which I'd be putting this thing. 'Cause, you know, you've got to tell them exactly what you need it for, so they'll fashion the appropriate blade. Finally, I ended up saying to the guy, 'Look, I'll be cleaning a lot of big game.' And I think that's accurate. I mean, I'm gonna clean you, Shirley. Wouldn't you consider yourself big game?"
Shirley hunched over on her knees, her face pressed into the floor, praying to God. I prayed with her, and I don't even believe.
Orson went on, "Well, I've got to say, I've been thrilled with its performance. As you can see, the blade is slightly serrated, so it can slice through that tough pectoral muscle, but it's thick enough to hack through the rib cage, too. Now that's a rare combination in a blade. It's why I paid three hundred and seventy-five dollars for it. See the hilt? Black-market ivory." He shook his head. "An utterly exquisite tool.
"Hey, I want your opinion on something, Shirley. Look up here." She obeyed him. "See the discoloration on the blade? That comes from the acids in the meat when I'm carving, and I was wondering if it's scarier for you, knowing I'm getting ready to butcher you, to see those stains on the blade and realize that your meat will soon be staining this blade, too? Or, would it be more frightening if this blade was as bright and shiny as the day I first got it? 'Cause if that's the case, I'll get a crocus cloth and polish it up right now for you."
"You don't have to do this," Shirley said, sitting up suddenly. She gazed into Orson's eyes, trying to be brave. "I'll give you whatever you want. Anything. Name it."
Orson chuckled. "Shirley," he said, perfectly serious, "I'll say it like this. I want your heart. Now if you get up and walk out that door after I've cut it out, I won't stop you." He stood up. "I've gotta piss, Andy. Keep her company." Orson walked to the door, unlocked it, and stepped outside. I could hear him spraying the side of the shed.
"Ma'am," I whispered, breathless. "I don't know what to do. I am so sorry. I want ---"
"I don't want to die," she said, begging me with her stormy eyes. "Don't let him hurt me."
"I'm chained to the floor. I want to help you. Just tell me ---"
"Please don't kill me!" she screamed, oblivious now to my voice. She rocked back and forth on her knees like an autistic child. "I don't want to die!"
The door opened, and Orson cruised back in. "Well, you're in the wrong place," he said, " 'cause it's that time." He held the knife by his side and moved deliberately toward her. She crawled away from him, using only her knees because her hands were still cuffed behind her back. The chain always stopped her. Orson giggled.
"No!" she screamed. "You can't do this!"
"Watch me," he said, bending down toward her, the knife cocked back.
"Stop it, Orson!" I yelled, my heart beating in my throat. With the woman cowering at his feet, a puddle spreading beneath her, Orson looked back at me.
Think, think, think, think. "You just...you can't kill her."
"Would you rather do it? We can't let her go. She knows our names. Seen our faces."
"Don't cut her," I said. The lumpiness of tears ached in my throat.
"I do it to all of them, and I don't make exceptions."
"While they're alive?"
"That's the fun of it."
"You're out of your mind!" Shirley screamed at Orson, but he ignored her.
"Not this time, Orson," I implored, rising to my feet. "Please."
Shirley screamed, "Let me go!"
"Bitch!" Orson screamed back, and he kicked her in the side of the head with the steel tip of his boot. She slumped down on the floor. "Open your mouth again, goodbye tongue."
He looked back at me, eyes blazing. "It's perfect with you here," he said. "I want to share this with you."
"No," I begged. "Don't touch her."
Orson glanced down at his victim and then back at me.
"I'll give you a choice," he said. Walking to the stool, he set down the knife and pulled out my .357. "You can shoot her right now. Save her the pain." He approached and handed me the gun. "Here. Seeing you kill her painlessly would be as good to me as killing her the way I like to." When he looked at Shirley, I glanced at the back of the cylinder. The gun was loaded.
"Shirley, get up. I told you it was a lucky coincidence for you that my brother was here."
She didn't move.
"Shirley," he said again, walking toward her, "get up." He nudged her with his boot, and when she didn't move, Orson rolled her onto her back. Her temple smashed in, blood drained out of one ear. Orson dug two fingers into the side of her neck and waited. "She's dead," he said, looking incredulously at me. "No, wait, it's there. It's weak, but it's there. I just knocked her out. Andy, now's your chance," he urged, taking several steps back from the woman. "Squeeze off a few rounds before she comes to. Aim at the head."
I pointed the gun at Orson. "Slide me the keys," I said, but he didn't move. He just stared at me, sadly shaking his head.
"This is gonna set us way back in the trust department."
I pulled the trigger, and the gun fired. I squeezed it again and again, the plangent crack of gunshots filling up the shed, the gray smoke of gunpowder ascending into the rafters, until only the clicking of the hammer remained, thumping the empty shells.
Orson hadn't flinched.
I looked down at the gun, eyes bulging.
"Blanks, Andy," he said. "I thought you might just threaten me, but you pulled that trigger without hesitation. Wow." He took the knife from the stool and walked toward me. I threw the gun at him, but it missed his head and struck the back door.
"She's dead, Andy," he said. "I wasn't going to make you watch her suffer. Not the first time. And this is how you repay me? He was close now, gripping the knife. "Part of me wants to shove this into your stomach," Orson said. "It's almost irresistible." He pushed me back down into the lawn chair. "But I'm not gonna do that," he said. "I won't do that." He went to the stool, set down the knife, and walked to the .357, which was lying against the back door. Picking it up, he took two bullets from his pocket. "I'd say your little stunt constitutes fuckup number two." He loaded the bullets and spun the cylinder. When it stopped, he aimed the gun at my chest. "These aren't blanks," he said.
Click.
I saw the relief on Orson's face. "Don't make me do this again," he said. "It'd be a real shame if I had to kill you." He returned the gun to his pocket, pulled out the key for the leg iron, and slid it across the floor to me. "You can use my knife," he said. "I'll be back for the heart. Don't botch it up. Put her on one of those plastic sheets in the corner over there. Otherwise, you'll be scrubbing this floor till Christmas."
I'd regained my voice, and I said, "Orson, I can't ---"
"You have four hours. If the job isn't done when I return, we'll play our little game again with three bullets."
He opened the back door, and I saw the sky coming into purple. It didn't seem like dawn should be here yet. It didn't seem like it should ever come.
Orson closed the door and locked it. I felt the key in my hand, but I wanted to remain in chains. How could I touch Shirley? She stared at me, those kind eyes open but empty as she lay on the cold, hard floor. I was glad she was gone. Glad for her.
9
THAT is a human being. She was bowling with her family a few hours ago. I leaned down and kissed her forehead. "I am so sorry," I whispered. "You did not..." Don't lose it. This won't help you now. There's nothing you could've done to save her; there's nothing you can do to bring her back. I'd witnessed unadulterated evil --- the mental torture of a woman, and I wept savagely. When my tear ducts were dry, I steeled myself, wiped my eyes, and got to the task at hand.
Years ago, when I had time to hunt in the North Carolina mountains, I'd gut the deer I shot in the woods near my hillside cabin. This is no different. No different from an animal now. She feels nothing. Dead is dead, regardless of where it resides.
The work was difficult. But if you've taken an organ from one large animal, you can take one from another. What made this so difficult was her face. I couldn't look at it, so I pulled her bowling shirt over her head.
The ascension of the sun quickly warmed the shed, and soon it became so unbearably hot that I could think of nothing but a cold drink from the well. My thirst hastened my work, and when I heard the door unlocking, long before the four hours had expired, I'd nearly finished my chore. Orson walked in, still sporting the mechanic's suit. Through the open door, I saw the morning sun, already blinding. It would be another glorious blue day. A breeze slipped in before Orson shut the door, and it felt spectacular.
"Smile, Andy." He snapped a Polaroid. It was strange to think that the worst moment of my life had just been captured in a photograph.
My brother looked tired --- a melancholic darkness in his eyes. I stopped working and put the knife down. Because I'd done most of the work on my knees, they were terribly sore, so I sat on the red plastic. Orson circled the body, inspecting my work.
"I thought you might be getting thirsty," he said, his voice now frail, depleted. "I'll finish this up, unless you want to."
I shook my head as he peered down into the evisceration. "That's not a bad job," he said. He picked the knife up and wiped it off on his pants. "Go get cleaned up." I stood, but he stopped me from walking off the plastic. "Take your shoes off," he said. I was standing in a pool of blood. "We're gonna burn these clothes anyway, so just strip here. I'll take care of it."
I removed my clothes and left them in a pile on the plastic. Even my boxers and socks were stained. When I was naked, my arms were red up to my elbows and a smattering of blood dotted my face, though it was nothing a cold shower wouldn't rinse away.
I walked to the door and opened it. The sunlight caused me to squint while I gazed across the desert. As I stepped onto the baking dirt, Orson called my name, and I looked back.
"I don't want you to hate me," he said.
"What do you expect? After forcing me to watch this and making me...cut her."
"I need you to understand what I do," he said. "Can you try?" I looked at Shirley, motionless on the plastic, the bowling shirt still hiding her face. What utter degradation. I felt tears coming to shatter the numbness that had sustained me these last few hours. Without reply, I closed the door, and after several steps, the soles of my feet burned, so I hustled to the well. A showerhead was mounted to the side of the outhouse. I filled the bucket overhead and opened the spigot. When the ice water hit the ground, I dug my feet into the mud. The hair on my arms was matted with dried blood. For ten minutes, I scrubbed my skin raw as the silver showerhead, an oddity in this vast desert, sluiced freezing water upon my head.
I cut the water off and walked to the cabin, standing for some time on the front porch, naked, letting the parched wind evaporate the water from my skin. Guilt, massive and lethal, loitered on the outskirts of my conscience. Still so dirty.
I saw a jet cutting a white contrail miles above the desert. Do you see me? I thought, squinting to see the glint of the sun on the distant metallic tube. Is someone looking down at me from their tiny window as I look up at them? Can you see me and what I've done? As the jet cruised out of sight, I felt like a child --- already in bed at 8:30 on a summer evening, not yet dark, other children playing freeze tag in the street, their laughter reaching me while I cry myself to sleep.
Orson emerged from the shed, bearing the woman wrapped in plastic. He walked fifty yards into the desert and threw her into a hole. It took him several minutes to bury her. Then he came toward the cabin, and as he approached, I noticed he carried a small Styrofoam cooler.
"Is it in there?" I asked when he stepped onto the porch. He nodded and walked inside. I followed him in, and he stopped at the door to his room and unlocked it.
"You can't come in here," he said. He wouldn't open the door.
"I wanna see what you do with it."
"I'm gonna put it in a freezer."
"Let me see your room," I said. "I'm curious. You want me to understand?"
"Get some clothes on first." I ran to my room and put on a clean pair of jeans and a black tank top. When I returned, Orson's door was open, and he stood inside before his freezer chest.
"May I come in now?" I asked from the doorway.
"Yeah." Orson's bedroom was larger than mine. To my immediate right, a single bed sat low to the floor, neatly made with a red fleece blanket pulled taut from end to end. Next to the bed, against the wall, Orson had constructed another bookshelf, much smaller, but crammed with books nonetheless. Against the far wall, beneath an unbarred window, stood the freezer chest. Orson was reaching down into it as I walked up behind him.
"What's in there?" I asked.
"Hearts," he said, closing the freezer.
"How many?"
"Not nearly enough."
"That a trophy?" I pointed to a newspaper clipping tacked to the wall near the freezer. Skimming the article, I found that the names, dates, and locations had been blacked out with Magic Marker. " 'Mutilated Body Found at Construction Site,' " I read aloud. "Mom would be proud."
"When you do a good job, do you like to be acknowledged?"
Orson locked the freezer and walked across the room. Prostrating himself on the bed, he stretched his arms into the air and yawned. Then he lay back on top of the red fleece blanket and stared into the wall.
"I get like this after they're gone," he said. "An empty place inside of me. Right here." He pointed at his heart. "You couldn't imagine it. Famous writer. I mean absolutely nothing. I'm a man in a cabin in the middle of a desert, and that's it. The extent of my existence." He kicked off his boots, and grains of sand spilled onto the stone. "But I'm more than what's in that freezer," he said. "I own what's in that freezer. They're my children now. I remember every birth." I sat down and leaned back against the splintery logs. "After a couple days, this depression will subside, and I'll feel normal again, like anyone else. But that'll pass, and I'll get a burning where the void is now. A burning to do it again. And I do. And the cycle repeats." He looked at me with dying eyes, and I tried not to pity him, but he was my brother.
"Do you hear yourself? You're sick."
"I used to think so too. A tenet of stoicism advises to live according to your nature. If you try to be something you aren't, you'll self-destruct. When I accepted my nature, violent as it is, I made peace with myself. Stopped hating myself and what I do. After a kill, I used to get much worse than this. I'd contemplate suicide. But now I anticipate the depression, and that allows me to take the despair and sense of loss in stride." His spirits improved as he analyzed himself. "I actually feel better having you here, Andy. It's quite surprising."
"Maybe your depression stems from guilt, which should be expected after murdering an innocent woman."
"Andy," he said, his voice brightening, a sign that he'd changed the subject. "I wanna tell you something that struck me when I read your first novel, which was good, by the way. They don't deserve the criticism they get. They're much deeper than slasher stories. Anyway, when I finished The Killer and His Weapon, I realized that we do the same thing."
"No. I write; you kill."
"We both murder people, Andy. Because you do it with words on a page, that doesn't exonerate what's in your heart."
"People happen to like the way I tell crime stories," I said. "If I had the chops to write literary fiction, I'd do that."
"No, there's something about murder, about rage, that intrigues you. You embrace that obsession through writing. I embrace it through the act itself. Which of us is living according to his true nature?"
"There's a world of difference between how our obsessions manifest themselves," I said.
"So you admit you're obsessed with murder?"
"For the sake of argument. But my books don't hurt anyone."
"I wouldn't go that far."
"How do my books kill?"
"When I read The Killer and His Weapon, I didn't feel alone anymore. Andy, you know how killers think. Why they kill. When it came out ten years ago, I was confused and terrified of what was happening in my mind. I was homeless then, spending my days at a library. I hadn't acted on anything, but the burning had begun."
"Where were you?"
He shook his head. "City X. I'll tell you nothing about my past. But every word in that book validated the urges I was having. Especially my anger. I mean, to write that protagonist, you had to have an intimate knowledge of the rage I lived with. And of course you did ---" he smiled --- "my twin. Unfortunately, I didn't have the tool of writing to channel that rage, so people had to die. But your book...it was inspiring. It's kind of funny when you think about it. We both have the same disease, only yours makes you rich and famous, and mine makes me a serial murderer."
"Tell me something," I said, and he sat up on one arm. "When did this start?"
He hesitated, rolling the idea around in his head. "Eight years ago. Winter of nineteen-eighty-eight. We were twenty-six, and it was the last year I was homeless. I usually slept outside, because I didn't leave the library until nine, when it closed, and by then the shelters were full.
"If you wanted to survive a cold night on the street, you had to go where the fires were --- the industrial district, near these railroad tracks. It was an unloading zone, so there was plenty of scrap wood lying around. The homeless would pile the wood in oil drums and feed the fires until morning, when libraries and doughnut shops reopened.
"On this particular night, the shelters were full, so when the library closed, I headed for the tracks. It was a long walk, two miles, maybe more. Whole way there, I just degenerated. Became furious. I'd been getting this way a lot lately. Especially at night. I'd wake myself cursing and screaming. I was preoccupied with pain and torture. I'd run these little scenarios over and over in my mind. It was impossible to concentrate. Didn't know what was happening to me.
"Well, I got down to the tracks, and there were fires everywhere, people huddled in tight circles around them. I couldn't find a place near a fire, so I sat down on the outskirts of one, people sleeping all around me, under cardboard boxes, filthy blankets.
"I was getting worse inside. Got so angry, I couldn't sit still, so I got up and walked away from the fire. Came to the edge of the crowd, where the people were more spread out. It was late, near midnight. Most everyone was sleeping. The only conscious ones were by the fires, and they were too drunk and tired to care about anything. They just wanted to keep warm.
"There were these train cars close by that hadn't been used in years. I was standing near one when I saw a man passed out in the gravel. Didn't have anything to keep warm. I stared at him. He was a black man. Squalid, old, and small. It's funny. I remember exactly what he looked like, right down to his red toboggan hat and ripped leather jacket. Just like you vividly remember the first girl you're with. He smelled like a bottle of Night Train. It's how they made it through the night.
"Nobody was paying attention to anything but the fire, and since he was drunk, I grabbed his feet and dragged him behind the train car. He didn't even wake up. Just kept snoring. Adrenaline filled me. I'd never felt anything like it. I searched for a sharp piece of scrap wood, but I thought if I stabbed him, he'd have a noisy death.
"When I saw the rock, I smiled. So fitting. It was about the size of two fists. I turned the man gently over onto his stomach. Then I pulled off his hat and dashed the back of his head out. He never made a sound. I had an orgasm. Was born again. I left the body under the train car and tossed the rock into a river. Who'd give a shit about a dead homeless man? I walked the streets all night, bursting with limitless energy. Never slept a wink, and that was the beginning.
"The one thing I didn't expect was for the burning to return so soon. Two days later, it was back, stronger than it had ever been, demanding another fix."
Orson rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. I felt nauseated.
"I'm gonna lock you in your room now, Andy, so I can get some sleep."
"My God. Don't you have any remorse?" I asked.
Orson turned over and looked at me. "I refuse to apologize for what I am. I learned a long time ago that guilt will never stop me. Not that I wasn't plagued by it. I mean, I had...I still do have a conscience. I just realize it's futile to let it torment me. The essential thing you have to understand about a true killer is that killing is their nature, and you can't change something's nature. It's what they are. Their function. I didn't ask to be me. Certain chemicals, certain events compose me. It's out of my control, Andy, so I choose not to fight it."
"No. Something is screaming inside you that this is wrong."
He shook his head sadly and muttered Shakespeare: " 'I am in blood/Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er.' "
Then he looked at me strangely, as if something had just occurred to him. There was honesty in his voice, which unnerved me more than anything he'd said all morning: "I know that you've forgotten. But one day, I'll tell you something, and this will all make perfect sense."
"What?"
"Today is not that day. You aren't ready for it. Not ready to use what I tell you."
"Orson..."
He climbed off the bed and motioned for me to rise. "Let's get some sleep, brother."
10
Day 10
I feel free again. Orson gave me the afternoon, so I'm sitting on top of that bluff I always write about, looking out over a thirsty wasteland. I'm a good four hundred feet above the desert floor, sitting on a flat rock, and I can see panoramically for seventy miles.
A golden eagle has been circling high above. I wonder if it nests in one of the scrawny ridgeline junipers.
If I look behind me, five miles east beyond the cabin, I see what appears to be a road. I've seen three silver specks speeding across the thin gray strip, and I assume they're cars. But that does me no good. It wouldn't matter if a Highway Patrol station were situated beside the cabin. Orson owns me. He took pictures of me cutting that woman. Left them on my desk this morning.
Dreamed about Shirley again last night. Carried her through the desert, through the night, and delivered her into the arms of her family. Left her smiling with her husband and three children, in her red-and-gray bowling shirt.
I've seen a significant change in Orson's mood over the last day. He's no longer morose. Like he said, this is his normal time. But the burning will return, and that's what I fear more than anything.
I'm considering just killing him. He's beginning to trust me now. What I'd do is take one of those heavy bookends and brain him like he did that poor homeless man. But where would that leave me? I have complete faith that Orson has enough incriminating evidence to send me straight to death row, even if I killed him. Besides, something occurred to me last night that horrifies me: In one of his letters, Orson threatened that someone would deliver a package of evidence to the Charlotte Police Department, unless he stopped them in person --- who's helping Orson?
I tossed the clipboard onto the ground, hopped off the rock, and looked intently down the slope. At the foot of the bluff, on the hillside hidden from the cabin, a man on horseback stared up at me. Though nothing more than a brown speck on the desert floor, I could see him waving to me. Afraid he would shout, I waved back, put the clipboard into a small backpack, and scrambled down the bluff as quickly as I could.
It took me several minutes to negotiate the declivitous hillside, avoiding places where the slope descended too steeply. My ears popped on the way down, and I arrived spent at the foot of the bluff, out of breath, my legs burning. I leaned against a dusty boulder, panting heavily.
The horse stood ten feet away. It looked at me, whinnied, then dropped an enormous pile of shit. Dust stung my eyes, and I rubbed them until tears rinsed away the particles of windblown dirt. I looked up at the man on the horse.
He wore a cowboy hat the color of dark chocolate, an earth-tone plaid button-up jacket, and tan riding pants. His face, worn and wrinkled, held a vital quality, which suggested he wasn't as old as he seemed, that years of hard labor and riding in the wind and sun had aged him prematurely.
I thought he was going to speak, but instead, he took a long drag from a joint. Holding the smoke in his lungs, he offered the marijuana cigarette to me, but I shook my head. A moment passed, and he expelled a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, which the wind ripped away and diffused into the sweltering air. His brown eyes disappeared when he squinted at me.
"I thought you was Dave Parker," he said, his accent thick and remote. "I'll be damned if you don't look kinda like him."
"You mean the man who owns the cabin on the other side of that hill?"
"That's him." He took another draw.
"I'm his brother," I said. "How do you know him?"
"How do I know him?" he asked in disbelief, still holding the smoke in his lungs and speaking directly from his raspy throat. "That used to be my cabin." He let the smoke out with his words. "You didn't know that?"
"Dave didn't tell me who he bought it from, and I've only been out here a few days. We haven't seen each other in awhile."
"Well hell, all this, far as you can see, is mine. I own a ranch ten miles that a way." He pointed north toward the mountains. "Got four hundred head of cattle that graze this land."
"This desert?"
"It's been dry lately, but it greens up with Indian rice grass after a good rain. Besides, we run 'em up into the Winds, too. Yeah, I'd never have sold that cabin, except your brother offered me a small fortune for it. Sits dead in the middle of my land. So I sold him the cabin and ten acres. Hell, I don't know why anybody'd wanna own a cabin out here. Ain't much to look at, and there's no use coming here in the winter. But hell, his money."
"When did he buy it from you?"
"Oh shit. The years all run together now. I guess Dr. Parker bought it back in '91."
"Dr. Parker?"
"He is a doctor of something, ain't he? Oh hell, history maybe? Ain't he a doctor of history? I haven't spoken to the man in two years, so I may be wrong about ---"
"He made you call him Dr.?" I interrupted, forcing myself to laugh and diverting the man's attention from my barrage of questions. "That bastard thinks he's something else."
"Don't he though," the cowboy said, laughing, too. I smiled, relieved I'd put him at ease, though I'm sure it wasn't all my doing.
"He still teaching at that college up north?" the man asked. "My memory ain't worth two shits anymore. Vermont maybe. Said he taught fall and spring and liked to spend summers out here. Least he did two years ago."
"Oh. Yeah, he is. Sure is." I tried to temper the shock in my voice. Not in a thousand years had I expected to come into contact with another person in this desert. It was exhilarating, and I prayed Orson wouldn't see this cowboy riding so close to his cabin.
"Well, I best be heading on," he said. "Got a lot more ground to cover before this day's through. You tell Dr. Parker I said hello. And what was your name?"
"Mike. Mike Parker."
"Percy Madding."
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Percy," I said, stepping forward and shaking his gloved hand.
"Good to know you, Mike. And maybe I'll drop in on you boys sometime with a bottle of tequila and a few of these." He wiggled the joint in his hand; it had burned out for the moment.
"Actually, we're leaving in several days. Heading back east."
"Oh. That's a shame. Well, you boys have a safe trip."
"Thank you," I said, "and oh, one more thing. What's that mountain range in the north and east?"
"The Wind Rivers," he said. "Loveliest mountains in the state. They don't get all the goddamned tourists like the Tetons and Yellowstone."
Percy pulled a silver lighter from his pocket, relit the joint, and spurred his horse softly in the side. "Hit the road, Zachary," he said, then clicked his tongue, and trotted away.
11
MID-AFTERNOON, I walked in the front door of the cabin, dripping with sweat. Orson lay on the living room floor, his bare back against the cold stone, a book in his hands. I stepped carefully over him and collapsed onto the sofa.
"What are you reading?" I asked, staring at the perfect definition of his abdominal and pectoral muscles. They shuddered when he breathed.
"A poem, which you just ruined." He threw the book across the floor, and his eyes met mine. "I have to read a poem from beginning to end, without interruption. That's how poetry blossoms. You consume it as a whole, not in fractured pieces."
"Which poem?"
" 'The Hollow Men,' " he said impatiently, gazing up into the open ceiling, where supportive beams upheld the roof. He sprang up suddenly from the floor, using the sheer power of his legs. Sitting down beside me on the sofa, he tapped his fingers on his knees, watching me with skittish eyes. I wondered if he'd seen the cowboy.
"Go get cleaned up," he said abruptly.
"Why?" His eyes narrowed. He didn't have to ask me a second time.
Looking in the side mirror, I watched the shrinking cabin. The sun, just moments below the horizon, still bled mauve light upon the western edge of sky. The desert floor held a Martian red hue in the wake of the passing sun, and I watched the land turn black and lifeless again. Heading east, I looked straight ahead. Night engulfed the Wind River Range.
We sped along a primitive dirt road, a ribbon of dust trailing behind us like the contrail of a jet. Orson hadn't spoken since we'd left the cabin. I rolled my window down, and the evening air cooled my sun-scorched face.
Orson jammed his foot into the brake pedal, and the car slid to a stop. There was an empty highway several hundred feet ahead, the same I'd seen from the bluffs. He reached down to the floorboard at his feet, grabbed a pair of handcuffs, and dropped them in my lap.
"Put one cuff on your right wrist and attach the other cuff to the door."
I put the handcuffs on as instructed. "What are we doing here?" I asked.
He leaned over and tested the security of the handcuffs, and turned off the engine. It became instantly silent, for the wind had died at dusk. I watched Orson as he stared ahead. He wore another blue mechanic's suit and those snakeskin boots. I wore a brown one, identical to his. One of the four closets in the hallway that connected the bedrooms and the living room was filled with them.
Orson's beard had begun to fill in, painting a shadow across his face in the same pattern it spread across mine. Such subtleties create the strongest bond between twins, and as I watched Orson, I felt a glimmer of intimacy in a vessel that had long since died to that sort of love. But this was not the man I had known. You are a monster. Losing my brother had been like losing an appendage, but as I looked at him now, I felt like an amputee having a nightmare that the limb had grown back --- demonic, independent of my will.
"You see Mom much?" Orson asked, his eyes fixed on the highway.
"I drive up to Winston twice a month. We go to lunch and visit Dad's grave."
"What does she wear?" he asked, still watching the road, his eyes never diverting to mine.
"I don't under ---"
"Her clothes. What clothes does she wear?"
"Dresses, mostly. Like she used to."
"She ever wear that blue one with the sunflowers on it?"
"I don't know."
"When I dream about her, that's what she wears. I went to see her once," he said. "Drove up and down Race Street, watching the house, seeing if I could catch a glimpse of her in the front yard or through the windows. Never saw her, though."
"Why didn't you go through with it?"
"What would I say to her?" He paused, swallowing. "She ever ask about me?"
I considered lying but could find no reason to spare his feelings. "No."
"You ever talk to her about me?"
"If I do, it's just about when we were kids. But I don't think she even likes those stories anymore." Down the highway, northbound headlights appeared, so far off, I couldn't distinguish the separate bulbs.
"That car won't pass this spot for ten minutes," he said. "It's still miles away. These roads are so long and straight, the distance is deceiving."
My right hand throbbed in the grip of the metal cuff. Blood wasn't reaching my fingers, but I didn't complain. I massaged them until the tingling went away.
"What do you really want with me?" I asked, but Orson just eyed those approaching headlights like I hadn't said a word. "Orson," I said. "What do you ---"
"I told you the first day. I'm giving you an education."
"You think reading boring fucking books all day constitutes an education?"
He looked me dead in the eyes. "The books have nothing to do with it. Surely you realized that by now."
He cranked the engine and we rolled toward the highway. Dark now, the sky completely drained of light, we crossed the pavement and pulled onto the shoulder. I watched the headlights through the windshield, and for the first time, they seemed closer. Confused, I looked at Orson.
"Sit tight," he said. Turning off the car, he opened his door and stepped out. He withdrew a white handkerchief from his pocket and tied it to the antenna. Then he shut the door and stuck his head through the open window. "Andy," he warned, "not a word."
He sat with his arms crossed on the edge of the hood. Rolling my window up, I tried to assuage my apprehension, but I just stared ahead, praying the car would pass. After awhile, I heard its engine. Then the headlights closed in, seconds away.
A minivan rushed by. I watched its brake lights flush in the rearview mirror. The van turned around, glided slowly back toward us, and stopped on the opposite shoulder. The driver's door opened and the interior lights came on. Children in the backseat. A man our age climbed out, said something to his wife, and walked confidently toward Orson. His kids watched through the tinted glass.
The man wore khaki shorts, loafers, and a red short-sleeved polo shirt. He looked like a lawyer taking his family on a cross-country vacation.
"Car trouble?" he asked, crossing the dotted yellow line and stopping at the shoulder's edge.
My brother smiled. "Yeah, she's thirsty for oil."
Through the windshield, I noticed another set of northbound headlights.
"Can I give you a lift or let you use my cell phone?" the man offered.
"Actually, we've got someone on the way," Orson said. "Wouldn't want to trouble you."
Thank you, God.
"Well, just wanted to make the offer. Bad spot to break down."
"Sure is." Orson extended his hand. "But thank you anyway."
The man smiled and took my brother's hand. "I guess we'll be heading on, then. Hoping to make Yellowstone before midnight. The kids are just wild about that damn geyser."
"Have a safe trip," Orson said. The man crossed the road and climbed back into his van. My brother waved to the kids in the backseat, and they giggled and waved back, delighted. As the van drove away, I watched its taillights begin to fade in the rearview mirror.
The next car was close now. It slowed down before it passed us, then pulled over onto the shoulder on our side of the road, stopping just ten feet from the front bumper of Orson's Buick. From a black Ford pickup truck, one of the enormous new models with a rack of blinding KC lights mounted above the cab, a large man with a substantial beer gut hopped down from behind the wheel. He left the truck running, and the headlights fried my eyes. A country ballad blared from the speakers, and as the driver walked unsteadily toward Orson, I could tell he was drunk. Two other men climbed down out of the passenger side and approached my brother, too.
"Hello, gentlemen," Orson said as they surrounded him. Each man nursed a pinch of dip crammed between his teeth and bottom lip. The two passengers wore cowboy hats, and the driver held a ragged Redskins cap, his long hair, tangled and greasy, hanging in his face.
"Something wrong with your car?" the driver asked. He spat into the road, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and wiped his hand across his black tank top, which had a blue-and-silver Ford emblem across the front. He hadn't shaved recently.
"Don't know," Orson said. "I was hoping someone would stop who had a little mechanical expertise." The two passengers dissolved into a drunken giggle, and the driver glanced over at them and smiled. Their teeth were gray and orange from excessive dipping, but regardless of the men's deficient hygiene, not a one looked older than thirty.
"Where you from, boy?" one of the passengers asked.
Orson assessed the tall, skinny man on the far left and smiled. "Missouri."
"You a long way from home, ain't ye?" he said, then took a sip from his beer can.
"Yes, I am," Orson said, "and I'd appreciate your help."
"It might cost you something," the driver said. "It might cost you a whole lot." He looked at his buddies again, and they all laughed.
"I don't want any trouble, now."
"How much money you got?" asked the heavyset man standing in the middle. With dark, bushy sideburns and a hairy belly poking out between his black jeans and white grease-stained T-shirt, he looked so hideously disheveled, I imagined I could smell him through the windshield.
"I don't know," Orson said. "I'll have to go get my wallet and see."
Orson stepped cautiously by the driver and headed for the trunk, smiling and winking at me as he passed my window. I heard the trunk open, followed by the sound of rustling plastic.
The driver caught me looking at him through the windshield.
"What in the goddamn hell you looking at, boy?" he said. Orson walked by my door again and stopped on the right side of the hood. The three men stared at him suspiciously, though too drunk to notice that he now wore black gloves.
"Your friend's gonna get his ass whupped if he keeps staring at me."
"He's harmless," Orson said. "Look, I could give you twenty dollars. Would that be sufficient?"
The driver glared at him, dumbfounded. "Let me see your wallet," he said finally.
"Why?"
"Motherfucker, I said give me your wallet." Orson hesitated. "You stupid, boy? Wanna get your ass kicked?"
"Look, guys, I said I don't want any trouble." Orson let the fear ooze from his voice.
"Then cough up your wallet, you dumb shit," said the obese middle passenger. "We need more beer."
"Will you fix my car?" The men broke into laughter. "I have more than twenty dollars," Orson pleaded. "At least look under the hood and see if you can tell what's wrong."
Orson moved to the front of the Buick. Reaching through the grille, he pulled a lever and lifted the massive hood. Then he returned to where he'd been standing, on the right side of the car, near me. I could see nothing now but my brother, still talking to the men.
"Just take a look," Orson prodded. "Now if you guys don't know anything about cars..."
"I know cars," a voice said. "Stupid city fuck. Don't know shit about shit, do you?"
The Buick squeaked and sank as if someone had knelt against the bumper.
"Check the radiator," Orson said. "Something's causing the engine to overheat."
The car shifted again. "No, on the inside," Orson said. "I think something melted. You have to get closer to see. Move, guys. You're in his light."
A muffled voice said, "I don't know what in the fuck ---"
Orson slammed the hood. The two passengers shrieked and jumped back in horror. Blood speckled the windshield. Orson lifted the hood once more and slammed it home. The driver sprawled momentarily against the hood, squirting the windshield as he sank down into the dirt.
"Get the shotgun!" the fat one yelled, but no one moved.
"Don't worry about it, boys," Orson said in that same timorous voice. "I have a gun." He pointed my .357 at the two men. "I hope you aren't too fucked up to know what this is. You," he told the slender man, "pick up your buddy's head." The man dropped his beer can. "Go on, he won't bite you." The man lifted it off the ground by its long, grimy hair. "Right this way, boys," Orson said. "Walk around the side of the car. That's it." The men walked by the driver's door, and Orson walked by mine. I turned to look through the back window, but the trunk was open. He'd never shut it.
"I'm sorry about the wallet...."
"In you go," Orson said. The car didn't move. "Do I have to shoot you both in the kneecaps and drag you in there myself? I'd rather you not bleed all over my car if it can be helped." When the hammer cocked, the car suddenly shook as the men climbed clumsily into the trunk.
"Stupid, stupid boys," Orson said. "It'd have been better for you if you'd all three looked under that hood." He closed the trunk.
As Orson walked back toward the truck, I heard the boys begin to sob. Then they screamed, pounding and kicking the inside of the trunk. As Orson climbed into the truck and turned off the headlights and KC lights, I noticed the laboriously slow ballad still pouring from the black Ford, the steel guitar solo twanging into the desert. As my eyes readjusted to the darkness, the music stopped. The driver's door of the Buick opened, and Orson reached into the backseat and picked up a two-by-four and a length of rope.
He shut the door and said, "If they keep carrying on, tell them you're gonna kill them."
"Look." I pointed down the road at a pair of headlights just coming into view.
Orson untied the handkerchief from the antenna and ran back to the truck. He climbed into the cab again, put the truck in gear, and let it roll forward several feet until it pointed east into the desert. For several minutes, Orson worked on something inside the cab. The men continued to moan, their intoxication intensifying their fear, making their pleadings more desperate. I didn't say a word to them, and still the headlights approached.
The Ford sped off into the desert. I watched it through the windshield and then through the windows on the driver's side. In ten seconds, it had disappeared into the night. Orson came running up to the car, breathless. He gave me a thumbs-up and dragged the driver to the back of the car. Then he was at my window.
"I need your help," he said, opening the door. He unlocked the handcuffs and handed me the car keys. As we walked to the back of the Buick, I could hear the approaching car in the distance and see the taillights of the minivan, which had yet to fully disappear --- a glowing red eye dwindling into darkness. I clung to that happy family. We let them go. We let them go. I looked down, but there was still no license plate on the Buick.
Orson pointed at the driver on the ground and said, "When I tell you, unlock the trunk and throw him in there. Can you do it?" I nodded.
"Gentlemen!" Orson yelled: "The trunk is being opened, and I'll be pointing a three-fifty-seven at you. Breathe and I start squeezing."
Orson looked at me and nodded. I opened the trunk without looking inside at the men or the body I had to lift. Heaving the driver from the ground, I shoved his limp, heavy frame on top of the two men. Then I slammed the trunk, and we got back into the car.
Orson started the Buick after the oncoming car passed us. The interior lights came on, and I gasped when I looked down at my brown suit, doused in blood, which had pooled and run down the coarse cloth into my boots. I screamed at Orson to stop the car. Stumbling outside, I fell to my knees and rolled around, scrubbing my hands with dirt until the blood turned granular.
From inside the car, Orson's voice reached me. He was slapping the steering wheel, his great bellows of laughter erupting into the night air.
12
HEADING back to the cabin, the men continued to pound against the inside of the trunk. Orson relished their noisy fear. Whenever they screamed, he mocked and mimicked their voices, often surpassing their pleas.
Watching the dirt road illuminated by the headlights, I asked Orson what he'd done to the truck. He grinned. "I secured the steering wheel with that rope so the truck would stay straight, and I shoved that two-by-four between the front seat and the gas pedal." Orson glanced at his luminescent watch. "For the next half hour, it'll roll through twenty-five miles of empty desert. Then it'll run into the mountains, and that's where it'll stop, unless it hits a mule deer along the way. But it'd have to be a big buck to stop that monster truck.
"Eventually, someone will find it. Maybe in a few days, maybe in several weeks. But by then it won't matter, 'cause these boys'll be pushing up sagebrush. Local law enforcement will probably find out where they were coming from and where they were headed. They'll realize something happened on that road back there, but so what? It's gonna rain tomorrow for the first time in weeks and rinse all the blood from the ground. Only two cars saw us, and they both had out-of-state tags, so they were just passing through. This'll be an unsolved disappearance, and judging from the rude dispositions of these young men, I have a hard time believing anyone will give much of a shit."
Upon reaching the cabin, Orson pulled up to the shed. When we got out, he called to me from the front of the Buick, popped the hood, and motioned for me to look inside. Floodlights mounted to the shed illuminated the metallic cavity as I peered in.
"What?" I asked, staring at the corroded engine.
"You'd have fallen for it, too. Look." A few inches in, a piece of metal three feet long had been welded to the underside of the hood. "It's an old lawn mower blade," Orson said. "Razor-sharp. Especially in the middle. If his head had been a little farther to the right, it would've come clean off the first slam." Gingerly, I touched the blade with my index finger. It was scratchy sharp, and there was blood on it, sprayed all over the engine, too.
"Have you done this hood trick before?" I asked.
"On occasion."
One of the men yelled from inside the trunk, "Let me out, motherfucker!"
Orson laughed. "Since he asked politely. Come open it up." He tossed me the keys. "You hear that, boys?" he yelled, moving toward the trunk. "I'm opening it up. No movement."
I raised the trunk while Orson stood with the gun pointed at the men. As I backed away, he whispered, "Go get the handcuffs."
I glanced into the plastic-lined trunk, a gruesome spectacle. The driver had been shoved to the back of the roomy compartment, but not before his blood had soaked his friends. They looked at me as I walked by, their eyes pleading for mercy that wasn't mine to give. I grabbed the handcuffs from the floorboard on the passenger's side and returned to Orson.
"Throw them the handcuffs," he said. "Boys, lock yourselves together."
"Go fuck yourself," said the heavy man. Orson cocked the hammer and shot a hole in his leg. As the man howled and screamed obscenities, Orson turned the gun on the other man.
"Your name, please," he said.
"Jeff." The man trembled, his hands in front of his face, as if they could stop bullets. His friend grunted and squealed through his teeth as he grasped his thigh.
"Jeff," Orson said. "I suggest you take the initiative and handcuff yourself to your pal."
"Yes sir," Jeff said, and as he cuffed his own hand, Orson spoke to the wounded man, who was now grinding his teeth together, trying not to scream.
"What's your name?" Orson said.
Through clenched teeth, the man responded, "Wilbur."
"Wilbur, I know you're in agonizing pain, and I wish I could tell you it's all gonna be over soon. But it's not." Orson patted him tenderly on the shoulder. "I just wanted to assure you that this night has only begun, and the more you buck me, the worse it's gonna be for you."
When Jeff and Wilbur were cuffed together, Orson ordered them to get out. Wilbur had difficulty moving his leg, so Orson directed me to drag him out of the trunk. As he screamed, I pulled him onto the ground, and Jeff fell on him, crushing the injured thigh.
Leaving their cowboy hats in the trunk, the two men came slowly to their feet, and Orson led them toward the back of the shed. As he unlocked the door, he told me to go wrap the driver up in the plastic lining and remove him from the trunk.
"I can't lift him by myself," I said. "The blood'll spill everywhere."
"Just go shut it, then. But we gotta get him out before he starts stinking."
I returned to the car and closed the trunk. Walking back toward the shed, I felt the keys jingle in my pocket. Staring at the brown car, dull beneath the floodlights, I thought, I could go. Right now. Get in the car, turn the ignition, and drive back to the highway. There's probably a town, maybe thirty or forty miles away. You find a police station, you bring someone here. Maybe you save them. Sliding my hand into my pocket, I poked a finger through the key ring. Orson's voice passed through the pine structure, taunting the groaning man inside.
Go. I started for the driver's seat. Shit. The hood was still raised, and I quietly lowered it so that it closed with a soft metallic click, which Orson could not have heard from inside the shed. With the key held firmly between my thumb and forefinger, I opened the car door, my hands shaking now, and sat down in the driver's seat. Key into the ignition. Check the parking brake. Don't shut the door until you're moving. Turn the key. Turn the key.
Something tapped on the window, and, flinching, I looked over at Orson, who was standing by the passenger door, pointing the revolver at my head through the glass.
"What in the world are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm coming," I said. "I was coming." I pulled the keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car. "Here." I tossed him the keys and walked toward the shed. Don't shoot me. Please. Pretend this didn't happen. At the back door he stopped me.
"I'm considering killing you," he said. "But you've got an opportunity in here to dissuade me. After you."
He followed me into the shed and locked the door behind us, having already collared the men individually and chained them to the pole. You've seen this before. It won't be as bad as Shirley. Can't be. We let the family go. We let the family go. Those kids will see Old Faithful tomorrow. Hold on to that.
Orson retrieved his handcrafted knife and inserted a tape into a video camera that sat on a black tripod in the corner. I didn't recall seeing a video camera on Shirley's night.
When he noticed me looking at the camera, he said, "Hey, I gotta have something to tide me over." Orson walked to the center of the room with his knife as Wilbur moaned on the floor.
"Jeff," Orson said, "you're smarter than your recalcitrant friend here. I've known you only forty minutes, and it's an obvious fact." Orson looked at me and said, "Drag the plastic over here, Andy." I walked to the corner, where at least two dozen neatly folded sheets were stacked. On a nearby shelf, I noticed a cardboard box filled with votive candles, and I wondered to what use Orson put them.
"Look," Jeff said, "please just listen ---"
"Zip it, Jeff. It's futile. Normally, I'd have given you two a test, but your roadside manner automatically flunks you both. So with that matter settled, get up, gentlemen."
Jeff stood, but Wilbur struggled. He'd already bled a little pool onto the floor. I spread the sheet near the pole, and the men sat back down, Jeff looking with confusion at the plastic beneath him.
"Jeff," Orson continued, "how long you known Wilbur?"
"All my life."
"Then this might be a difficult decision for you." I was leaning against the double doors, and Orson looked back at me. "Have a seat, Andy. You're making me nervous."
As I sat down in the lawn chair, Orson turned back to Jeff and held up the knife and the revolver. "Jeff, the bad news is you're both going to die tonight. The slightly better news is that you get to decide who gets the easy way and who gets the fun way. Option A. My brother executes you with this three fifty-seven. If you choose the gun, you have to go first. Option B. I take this gorgeous knife and cut your heart out while you watch." Orson smiled. "Take a moment to think it over."
My brother walked to me as the men stared at each other on the plastic --- Jeff crying, Wilbur on the verge of losing consciousness. Orson leaned down and whispered into my ear: "Whoever you shoot, you're doing them an act of kindness. They'll feel nothing. I'm not even gonna make you watch what I do with this knife tonight. You can go back to the house and go to bed."
Orson returned to the center of the room and looked down at the men. "Jeff, I'm gonna have to ask ---"
Jeff sobbed. "Why are you ---"
"If the next words from your mouth aren't 'Shoot me' or 'Shoot him,' I'll take both your hearts out. Decide."
"Shoot me," Jeff cried, his lips pulling back, exposing rotten teeth. Wilbur, still holding his leg, glared at Orson.
My brother walked to the back door and said, "Andy, I thought about it, and I'm only leaving you one bullet in the gun. Wouldn't want you to do them both a favor." Orson emptied the cylinder and reloaded one round.
"Behind the ear, Andy. Anywhere else and you might not kill him. He'd just lay around suffering." Orson set the gun on the floor. "I'd love to stay and watch, but after that incident with Miss Tanner, well...I'll come back when I hear the gunshot. Don't do anything heroic like not shoot him or destroy the gun. I have others, and we'd have to play our little game again. I think the stakes are up to sixty percent now against you, and I'm sure you don't want those odds. And if that doesn't encourage you, let me say this. Anything goes wrong, I'll punish our mother. So...I'll leave you to your work. Jeff" --- Orson flippantly saluted him --- "it's my brother's first time, so take it like a man. Don't beg and plead with him not to shoot you, because you might convince him, and then you'd have to die my way. And I promise you," he said, smiling at Wilbur, "my way's a shitty way to die." Orson stepped out, shut the door, and turned the dead bolt. I was alone with my victim.
Rising, I crossed the floor to the gun, picked it up, and carried it back to the chair. The way Jeff watched me felt unnatural. No one had ever feared me like this.
I sat down to think, my hands sweating onto the metal. Jeff stared at me, and I stared back. Our eyes met, eyes that in another time or place might have been cordial or apathetic, now gravely opposed. This is preventing his torture.
When I stood, my legs jellied, like those nightmares when you have to run, but your legs refuse to work. I walked toward Jeff. It's for his own good. Be professional, calm, and swift. Even through his pain, Wilbur cursed me under his malodorous breath. Are you actually going to do this?
"A joke?" Jeff laughed strangely. "This is a funny joke. Isn't this a funny joke, Wilbur? Let's go now. We have to be at Charlie's before twelve."
Lifting the gun in my right hand, I pointed it at Jeff and tried to aim, but my hands shook. I stepped forward so that, despite my trembling, Jeff's head remained in the sight.
"Don't shoot my face," he begged as tears welled up again in his eyes. Jeff knelt down and leaned forward like a Muslim facing Mecca, his dirty blond hair in his eyes, his right arm stretched out, still connected to Wilbur. He touched the skin behind his ear. "Right here," he said, his voice quaking. "Get close if you have to."
You aren't going to do this.
I took a step closer. His face now inches from my boots, he made fists and grunted, preparing to die. With both hands, I steadied the gun, and my finger found the trigger.
I squeezed, but the hammer only clicked.
Jeff gasped.
"I'm sorry," I said, and as his back heaved up and down from hyperventilation, I stepped back. The cylinder of a Smith & Wesson rotates counterclockwise. Orson had loaded the eleven o'clock chamber instead of the two. You did that on purpose, you bastard. I dropped the round into the hot chamber, put the barrel behind Jeff's ear, and thumbed back the hammer.
He went limp and rolled onto his left side. I hadn't heard the gunshot or felt my finger move, but a stream of dark blood flowed fast onto the plastic. In five seconds, it had surrounded Jeff above the shoulders, a crimson halo that reflected the lightbulb redly. I could see into his right eye, open but blank, without soul or will. As the pool expanded across the plastic, Wilbur jerked back, dragging Jeff's body with him, and shrieking his name. Do not analyze this moment. You couldn't bear it.
The back door opened, and Orson entered, an expression of awe upon his face as he stared at the plastic. He pulled the Polaroid camera from his pocket, and captured me looking down at Jeff.
"This moment..." he began, but did not finish the thought. His eyes glistened, joyful. "My God, Andy." He came and took the gun from my hands. Embracing me with tears in his eyes, he rubbed my back. "This is love, Wilbur," he said. "Real as it gets." Orson let go and wiped his eyes. "You can go now if you want, Andy," he said. "You're welcome to stay, but I know you probably don't wanna see this. I won't force you."
As Orson looked at Wilbur, I could see his mind drift from what I'd done. His preoccupation with his next victim took precedence, and his eyes glazed over with predatory concentration. He walked across the room and returned with the sharpening stone. Then he sat down on the concrete and began sliding the knife blade against the stone, returning it to the razor edge it had held before Shirley Tanner. You killed a human being. No, stop that. Stop thinking.
"Staying or going?" he asked, looking up at me.
"I'm going," I said, watching Wilbur watch the knife as it scraped across the stone for him. I wondered if Orson would make the knife speech after I left. Orson set the knife on the floor and walked me to the door. When he opened it, I gladly stepped outside. Wilbur strained his neck to see the desert, and Orson noticed.
"You interested in something out here, Wilbur?" he asked, turning around as I stood in the threshold. "Well, take a look," he said. "Take a long, long look at that night sky, and the stars, and the moon, 'cause you'll never see them again. Not ever."
Orson's icy stare returned to me. "I'll see you in the morning, brother."
He slammed the door in my face and locked it. I trudged toward the cabin, the sound of the knife blade on the sharpening stone reaching faintly through the walls.
Ahead the black mass of the cabin pressed against the navy sky. The desert had turned blue again in the moonlight. I thought of my quiet room inside. I would sleep tonight. This staggering numbness was my lifeboat.
As I stepped onto the front porch and reached for the door, the first scream rushed out of the shed and splintered the gentle night. I could not fathom the pain that had inspired it, and as I walked inside and closed the door behind me, I prayed the cabin walls would impede the sound of Orson's handiwork from reaching my ears.
13
ON the eleventh day, I didn't leave my room. Orson slipped in during the afternoon. I wasn't sleeping, though. Since first light, I'd been awake. He brought me a ham sandwich and a glass of port and set them on the bedside table. I lay on my side, facing him, staring into nothing. The despondence that always struck him afterward was evident in his cumbrous eyes and hushed voice.
"Andy," he said, but I didn't acknowledge him. "This is part of it. The depression. But you're prepared for it." He squatted down and looked into my eyes. "I can help you through it."
Raindrops ticked on the tin roof. I had yet to get out of bed to look outside, but the light that struggled shyly between the window bars was far from the brilliance of a desert afternoon. Soft and gray, it sulked in the corners. The turpentine fragrance of wet sagebrush perfumed the desert and my room.
"I'm through with you now," he said. "You can go home."
A current of hope flowed through me, and I found his eyes.
"When?"
"Pack today, leave tomorrow." I sat up in bed and set the plate on my lap. "Feel better?" I took a bite of the cold smoked-ham sandwich and nodded. "I thought you would," he said, moving to the door. As he opened it, a cool draft swirled into my room. "I'm locking the door. I'll bring you dinner later this evening. The only thing I ask is that you're packed before you fall asleep tonight."
When he was gone, I closed my eyes and saw Lake Norman --- mosquitoes humming on the surface, a baby blue sky reflected in the mild water. I could smell the pines again, the rich, living soil. The plagiary of mockingbirds and children's laughter echoing across the lake filled the dead air of the cabin. I could turn this all into a dream. I'm not home yet. My eyes opened again to somber reality --- the sound of Orson moving about the cabin, and rain flooding a desert.
Day 11
I'd estimate the hour to be approaching midnight. It's raining, as it has been all day, and storm clouds have shrouded the moon, so the desert is invisible except when lightning jolts the sky. But it comes without thunder. The heart of the storm is miles away.
My duffel bag is packed. I think Orson's waiting for me to fall asleep. I've heard his footsteps approach my door and stop several times in the last hour, as if he's listening for the sound of my movement. This makes me a tad nervous, particularly since he's been so kind today. But strangely enough, I trust him. I can't explain it, but I don't think he'll hurt me, especially after last night. That really touched him.
Hopefully, this is the last entry I'll ever make in this cabin. Through writing these pages, I saved some degree of sanity and autonomy, but I haven't written down everything that occurred here. The reason for this is that I intend to forget. Some people find the cravenness to lose entire years of their childhood. They tuck things into their subconscious so that it only eats them away a little at a time, in small, painless bites.
This idea of repression is my model. My goal is to forget the unspeakable events of these past eleven days. I'll gladly pay the price in episodes of depression, rage, and denial that are destined to plague my coming years. Nothing can be as devastating as the actual memories of what I've seen and done.
I signed my name at the bottom of the entry and folded the sheet of notebook paper into thirds. Then I walked to the duffel bag and stuffed it down between the dirty clothes with the other entries I'd saved. Turning out the lantern on the bedside table, I slid under the blanket. Rain on the tin roof was more effective than a bottle of sleeping pills at lulling me to sleep.
Lightning broke the darkness, and I saw the whites of Orson's eyes. He stood in my room, dripping onto the floor. When the sky went black again, my pulse raced, and I sat up in bed.
"Orson, you're scaring me." My voice rose above the tinkling roof.
"Don't be afraid," he said. "I came to give you an injection."
"Of what?"
"Something to help you sleep. Like what you had at the motel."
"How long have you been standing there?"
"Awhile. I've been watching you sleep, Andy."
"Will you turn the light on, please?"
"I shut the generator off."
My heart wouldn't decelerate, so I grabbed a book of matches from the bedside table and lighted the kerosene lantern. As I turned up the flame, the walls warmed, and the terror faded from my heart. He wore jeans and a green poncho, soaking wet.
"I need to give this to you," he said, showing me the syringe. "It's time to leave."
"Is it really necessary?" I asked.
"Extremely." He took a step closer. "Lift your sleeve."
Pushing the T-shirt sleeve above my shoulder, I turned my head away as Orson jabbed the needle into my arm. The pain was sharp but brief, and I didn't feel the needle pull out. When I looked back at Orson, the room had already grown fuzzy, and my head fell involuntarily back onto the pillow.
"You don't have much time now," Orson said as my eyelids lowered, his voice as distant as the storm's thunder. "When you wake, you'll be in a motel room in Denver, a plane ticket on the dresser, the three-fifty-seven locked up in your duffel bag. At that point, you can know that Mom is safe, and the evidence I have against you is in a secure place, in my possession. You've upheld your end of the agreement. I'll uphold mine.
"I think we've passed this stage in our relationship, but I'll say it once more. Tell no one what you've done, where you think you've been. Say nothing about me, or Shirley Tanner, or Wilbur and the boys. You were in Aruba the whole time, relaxing. And don't waste your energy coming back out here to look for me. You may have deduced the location of this cabin, but I assure you I'll be leaving this desert with you.
"In the coming months, things may happen that you won't understand, that you may never have dreamed of. But Andy, never forget this: Everything that happens, happens for a reason, and I'll be in control of that reason. Never doubt that.
"You'll see me again, though it won't be for some time. Carry on with your life as before. Guilt will come for you, but you have to beat it back. Write your books, embrace your success, just keep me in the back of your mind."
His face was blurry, but I thought I saw him smile. The sound of the rain had hushed, and even Orson's voice, an eloquent, soft-spoken whisper, I could scarcely understand.
"You're almost gone," he said. "I see it in your slit eyes. I wanna leave you with something as we say goodbye and you fall into that blissful unconsciousness.
"I know you like poetry. You studied Frost our freshman year of college. I hated him then; I love him now. Especially one poem in particular. The thing about this poem is, everyone thinks it applies to them. It's recited at graduations and printed in annuals, so as everyone takes the same path, they can claim uniqueness because they love this poem. I'll shut up now and let Bob put you to sleep."
My eyes closed, and I couldn't have opened them had I wanted to. Orson's voice found my ears, and though I never heard the last line, I couldn't help thinking as I surrendered to the power of the drug that "The Road Not Taken" was undisputedly his.
"'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth;
'Then took...as just as fair and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted...the passing there had worn them really about the same,
'And both...in leaves no step had trodden black....'"
II.
14
WITH the floor space of a coffeehouse, it surprised me that such a crowd had squeezed into 9th Street Books. One of a dying breed of individually owned bookstores, it felt like the library of a mansion. Though two stories high, the second floor existed only as shelf space, and a walkway, ten feet above the floor, circumnavigated the store, lending access to shelf after shelf of elevated books.
Removing my gold-rimmed glasses, I chewed on the rubbery end of an earpiece, leaned forward with my elbows against the wooden lectern, and read the closing sentence from The Scorcher: " 'Sizzle died and went happily to hell.' Thank you."
When I closed the book, the crowd applauded. Adrienne Phelps, the proprietor of 9th Street Books, rose from her seat in the front row. "It's nine o'clock," she mouthed, tapping her watch. I stepped back from the lectern as the small, thin-lipped woman with short jet black hair and a sweetly menacing face pulled the microphone down to her mouth.
"Unfortunately, we're out of time," she told the crowd. "There's a display up front with Mr. Thomas's books, and he's been kind enough to autograph fifty copies of The Scorcher, so those are on sale, too. Let's give him a big hand." Turning to me and smiling, she began to clap. The crowd joined in, and for ten seconds the staccato applause filled the old store, the last stop on my twelve-city book tour of the States.
As the crowd dispersed from the store and out onto the street, my literary agent, Cynthia Mathis, left her chair and came across the worn hardwood floor toward me. I dodged an autograph-hungry fan and reached her.
"You outdid yourself tonight, Andy," she said as we embraced. Wearing a perfume that suggested lilac, Cynthia embodied every quality an elegant, successful New York woman might be thought to possess. At fifty, she hardly looked forty. Her hair, frosting into a misty gray, was long, but she wore it wrapped tightly against the nape of her neck in a chignon. A hint of blush glowed beneath her smooth cheeks, in striking contrast to her black suit.
"It's so good to see you," I said as we pulled away. I hadn't seen Cynthia since before I'd started The Scorcher, and it felt strange to speak to her in person again.
"I got us reservations at Il Piazza," she said.
"Thank God, I'm starving." But at least fifty people surrounded us, waiting for a personalized autograph and a few seconds of chitchat. The doors of the bookstore, which led to my supper, seemed miles away, but I reminded myself that this was what I loved, what I'd worked so hard for. So I taped a courteous smile to my face, took a breath, and walked into the waiting crowd, hoping their interest would be short-lived.
The tall Italian sommelier handed me a ruby-stained cork, and I felt for dampness on the end as he poured a little wine into my glass. I swirled it around, took a sip, and when I nodded again, he filled both glasses with a dark amber Latour that had waited fourteen years for this moment.
When the wine steward left, our waiter came and described several dishes in intricate detail. Then he left us with two burgundy menus. Stumbling through the Italian, I sipped the velvety wine and thought of purple grapes ripening in the French countryside, and then subterranean cellars.
Lights from downtown created the calm, glittering ambience of Il Piazza. On the thirty-fifth floor of the Parker-Lewis Building, the restaurant occupied a corner of the skyscraper, so the best tables were positioned along the two walls of windows that peered out upon the city. We sat at one of these candlelit tables, and I stared down at the waters of the East River far below, gliding beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. My eyes followed the lights of a barge drifting upriver against the black current.
"You look tired," Cynthia said.
I looked up. "I used to love the readings, but they wear on me now. I wanna be home."
"Andy," she said, and I could predict by the gravity in her voice what was coming. I knew Cynthia well, and my disappearance in May had shaken her faith in me. "Look, I've tried to talk with you about what happened, but you always blow it off as ---"
"Cynthia ---"
"Andy, if you'll let me get this off my chest, we can put it aside." When I didn't speak, she continued. "You understand what bothered me about you just taking off for the South Pacific?"
"Yes," I said, stroking the glass stem with my thumb and forefinger.
"If you just up and leave without telling me in the midst of writing a book, I don't care. I'm not your mother. But you were gone when your book came out. I don't have to tell you how important it is for you to be around that first week. You're a visible writer, Andy. It's the interviews and readings you do then that help create buzz. Initial sales were down from what Blue Murder sold. For a while, it looked like it might flop."
"Cynthia, I ---"
"All I'm saying is, don't pull that shit again. Aside from the bookstore appearances your publisher canceled, I had to call a lot of media people and tell them why you weren't coming. I didn't have a clue. Don't put me in that position again." The waiter was walking toward us, but Cynthia waved him off. "God, Andy, you didn't even call to tell me you were leaving," she whispered fiercely, her brow furrowed, arms thrown forward in agitation. "How hard is it to pick up a goddamn phone?"
I leaned forward and said calmly, "I was burned-out. I needed a break, and I didn't feel like calling to ask permission. Now, that was my reasoning then, it was wrong, and I'm sorry. It won't ever happen again." She took a long sip of wine. I finished my glass and felt the glow of warmth in my cheeks. Reaching out, I touched her hand. Her eyes gasped.
"Cynthia. I'm sorry, okay? Will you forgive me?"
"You better smooth things with your editor, too."
"Will you forgive me?"
A faint smile overspread her lips. "Yes, Andy."
"Good. Let's order."
Cynthia had ordered the braised lamb shank with red-pepper sauce, and as the waiter set her plate down, her glassy eyes lit up. Then I watched with pleasure as my main course --- mostaccioli, sundried tomatoes, capers, and seared bay scallops --- was placed before me. Beneath the bed of pasta shimmered a vodka pink sauce. Before leaving, our waiter uncorked a second bottle of Bordeaux and refilled our wineglasses.
The scallops had taken on the flavor of the sweet tomatoes, and as one melted across my tongue, a grain of sand crunched between my molars. I sipped the wine --- glimmers of plum, meat, and tobacco. It went down like silk. Experiencing the perfect balance of hunger and its satisfaction, I wanted to linger there as long as possible.
As the night wore on, I became preoccupied with the city. Drinking exceptional wine in one of New York's finer restaurants, and watching a multitude of lights shining from the skyscrapers and boroughs, is one hell of a way to spend an evening. In the center of the constant twinkling, I knew that millions of people surrounded me, and in this way, the city became inhospitable to the lonely fear that threatened me.
"Andrew?" Cynthia giggled with a feigned English accent. "Too much wine for you."
Turning slowly from the window to Cynthia, the restaurant swayed with my eyes. I was getting drunk. "That's a beautiful city," I said warmly.
"You ought to get a place here."
"Hell no."
"Are you implying there's a problem with my city?"
"I don't have to imply. I'll just tell you. You Yankees are in too much of a damn hurry."
"And that's an inferior state of existence in comparison to the comatose South?"
"We southerners know the value of an easy day's work. Don't fault us for that. I think it's just a little Yankee jealousy ---"
"I find the word Yankee to be an offensive term."
"That's 'cause you've got a muddled definition in your head."
"Clarify, please."
"All right. Yankee: a noun defining anyone who lives north of Virginia, especially rude, anal northerners who talk too damn fast, don't understand the concept of sweet tea and barbecue, and move to Florida in their golden years." Cynthia laughed, her brown eyes glistening. I looked into them.
They hemorrhaged, and I turned toward the window, my heart throbbing beneath my oxford shirt and saffron tie.
"Andy?"
"I'm fine," I said, trying to catch my breath.
"What is it?"
"Nothing." Staring out the window into Queens, I grasped for composure, telling myself the lie again.
"You seem so different lately," she said, bringing the wineglass to her lips.
"How so?"
"I don't know. Since this is the first time we've been together in almost a year, it may be an unfair assessment on my part."
"Please," I said, stabbing a scallop with my fork, "assess away."
"Since your vacation, I've noticed a change in you. Nothing drastic. But I think I've known you long enough to tell when something's wrong."
"What do you think is wrong, Cynthia?"
"Difficult to put into words," she said. "Just a gut feeling. When you called me after you returned this summer, something was different. I assumed you were just dreading the book tour. But I feel the same detached vibe coming from you even now." I finished another glass of wine. "Talk to me, Andy," she said. "You still burned-out?"
"No. I know that really worries you."
"If it's a woman, tell me and I'll drop it. I don't want to pry into your personal ---"
"It's not a woman," I said. "Look, I'm fine. There's nothing you can do."
She lifted her wineglass and looked out the window.
Our waiter came for our plates. He described a diabolical raspberry-chocolate soufflé, but it was late, and I had an 8:30 flight out of La Guardia in the morning. So Cynthia paid the bill, and we rode the elevator down to the street. Nearly midnight. I couldn't imagine waking in the morning. I'd drunk far too much.
I hailed a cab for Cynthia and kissed her on the cheek before she climbed in. She told me to call her the following week, and I promised I would. As her cab drove away, she stared through the back window, her earnest eyes penetrating me, gnawing at the root of my restlessness.
You have no idea.
When her cab was gone, I started down the sidewalk, and for several blocks, I didn't pass a soul. Though hidden now from view, the filthy East River flowed into the Atlantic. I could smell the stale, polluted water. Four ambulances rushed by, their sirens shrieking between the buildings. With my hotel only ten blocks north, I hoped a stroll in the cool September night would sober me up.
I dreaded going home. Since mid-June, I'd traveled the country, filling my days with appearances and readings that kept me grounded in the present. I never wanted a moment alone. My thoughts horrified me. Now, as I returned to North Carolina, to a slower way of life, I knew the torture would begin. I had no book to write. There was nothing for me to do but inhabit my lake house. To exist. And it was there, I feared, that the two weeks whose existence I'd denied all summer would come for me.
When my mind drifted back to the desert, I'd force-feed myself the jade green sea, ivory sand, sweaty sunlight. Distinctly, I could picture the stuccoed beach house and veranda where I'd watch bloody sunsets fall into the sea. I was aware of the self-deception, but man will do anything to live with himself.
15
I filled the beginning of October with crisp, clear days on Lake Norman and unbearable nights in my bed. I fished off my pier for an hour each morning and evening. And in the early afternoons, I'd swim, diving beneath the murky blue water, now holding a cool bite with the approach of winter. Sometimes, I'd swim naked just for the freedom of it, like a child in a cold womb, unborn, unknowing. Nearing the surface after a deep dive, I'd pretend that hideous knowledge buried in the recesses of my mind would vanish when I broke into the golden air. It's only real underwater, I'd think, rising from the lake bottom. The air will cleanse me.
Dawdling on the end of my pier late one afternoon, nursing a Jack and Sun-Drop, I watched a bobber swaying on the surface of the lake. Early Octobers in North Carolina are perfection, and the sky turned azure as the sun edged toward the horizon. I'd been holding a fishing rod, waiting for the red-and-white bobber to duck beneath the water, when I heard footsteps swishing through the grass.
Setting the rod down, I looked back toward the shore and saw Walter step onto the pier. He wore sunglasses and a wheat-colored suit, his jacket thrown over his left shoulder, tie loosened.
For two weeks, I'd been home. Though he called often, I'd spoken to Walter only twice, and the conversations had been vapid on my part. Each time I'd hung up as soon as possible, revealing nothing of my May disappearance and shying away from his questions. Solitude and self-oblivion had been my sole desire, and as I watched my best friend stroll down the pier, his face sullen, I knew I'd hurt him.
Several feet away, he stopped and tossed a manila envelope onto the sun-bleached wood. Walter looked down at me, and I could see myself in his sunglasses. He sat down beside me on the edge of the pier, and our legs dangled out over the water.
"Your novel's selling well," he said. "I'm happy for you."
"It's a relief."
As I fumbled with the envelope, Walter said, "I never opened it."
"You don't have to tell me that."
"Something's on your line." I grabbed my rod and yanked it back, but the bobber resurfaced without tension in the line. When I reeled it back in, the bobber didn't move.
"Shit, he was big. That was a large-mouth." I tossed the rod onto the pier and picked up my drink. "Come on," I said, standing up. Though the air was mild, the long day of direct sunlight had turned the surface of the pier as hot as summer concrete. It toasted the soles of my feet. "Let's go inside. I'll get you a beer."
In swimming trunks, I ran up the pier toward the shore, leapt into the grass, and waited. Walter came along sluggishly, his usual pace. We walked together up through the yard, a narrow green slope rising from the shore to the house. I hadn't mown the grass in two weeks, so it rose several inches above my ankles, a soft, dense carpet.
As we climbed the steps to the deck, I glanced into the woods on my right. I thought of the corpse buried out there, the one that had flung my life into this disarray. For a moment, I relived finding her --- the smell, the fear, the rush of discovery.
Inside, I got Walter a bottle of beer out of the fridge and led him into the living room. Not quite as soused as I wanted to be, I mixed another Jack and Sun-Drop as he lay down on the sofa.
"I'm sorry I haven't been over," I said from the wet bar.
"Book tour wore you out, huh?"
"Just wasn't in the mood to be in front of people constantly. To be on all the time." After dropping several shards of ice into the glass and filling it half with citrus soda, half with bourbon, I stirred my drink, walked into the living room, and sat down in the tan leather chair across from Walter.
His eyes caught on Brown No. 2, looking down on us from above the fireplace in all its pretentious glory. He smirked, but the tension between us made him withhold comment.
"I know," I said, "A real piece of shit. Loman. I'd like to kick that fucker's ass. Don't know why I leave it up there. It's not like it's growing on me. Fact, I hate it more every day."
"Deep down, he must've known he was a hack. Had to. Should've listened to me, man."
"I know, I know." I yawned. I'd be passing out when Walter left. "How's the fam?"
"Ah. The obligatory inquiry. They're fine. I've been trying to spend more time with them lately. Less at the magazine. I've actually gotta be at a school play in two hours. Thirty six-year-olds on a stage. Can you imagine?"
"What are they doing?"
"Mamet." We laughed. We always laughed when we were together. "Poor thing --- Jenna's so nervous about it. She got into bed with Beth and me last night, crying. We fell asleep comforting her. Woke up in a puddle."
"Ooh," I shuddered. "The thrill of parenthood. I'd miss it for the world."
"You serious?" Walter asked, kicking off his wing tips and balancing the bottle on his chest.
"Hell yeah. Everybody feels sorry for me when I tell them I don't wanna get married or have kids. But it's not like pathetic resignation. I just happen to know for a fact that there isn't a single person out there I'd wanna wake up beside day in and day out. Except you, of course. I'd marry you, Walter. Seriously."
He laughed kindly. "Karen did a number on you, but you won't always feel bitter."
"How the hell do you know how I'm always gonna feel?"
" 'Cause it's impossible for someone to go through life without repeatedly falling in love."
How sad. He really thinks I want his life. He thinks I'm Gatsby to his Daisy. Maybe I am.
"I was in love with Karen," I said, and a lump swelled in my throat, but I stifled it. "Where did that get me? So I loved her and thought I wanted to spend my life with her. For two years, I felt this way, and suddenly, she didn't, and wanted nothing to do with me. Not even friendship. Said I was a phase. A fucking phase. That's two years of my life wasted. I think about what I could've written during that time --- fucking irks me." I shook my head and sipped the soured citrus soda. "I'll tell you --- it'll be a genuine miracle if I ever do get married, 'cause I'm not looking for it. I just don't think it'll happen, and after two years of Karen --- hell, I'm fine with that. I make a great mate."
"You bit into a bad apple, and now you think all apples taste that way, but they don't," he said with the swagger of someone who knows they're right.
"Maybe some people just like the taste of rotten apples." His face dropped. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm being an asshole. I'm just a little shit-faced right now."
"Hey, people go through phases. Be glad you aren't a full-time asshole like Bill York."
"That prick's still your copyeditor?"
"Yep. He's such a dick. He was giving me shit today for leaving early."
"You run the magazine. Fire him."
"If he wasn't such a good editor, I'd have canned his ass a long time ago. But I don't pay him to be a decent human being. Long as he keeps the text grammatically perfect, he can be the Prince of Darkness."
"God, I admire your principle." We laughed again. There was a brief period of silence, but because it followed laughter, it elapsed unstrained. Walter looked up at me from his beer.
"Andy," he said, "wanna tell me what's going on?"
I looked into Walter's eyes, and I wanted to spill everything. The urge to tell another human being where I'd been and what I'd done was overwhelming.
"I just don't know."
"It has to do with that trip you took last May?"
I held my breath, thinking. "I guess you could say that."
"Is it taxes?" he asked. "You in trouble with the IRS? That's no shit."
"Of course not." I laughed.
"What can't you trust me with?" His eyes narrowed, and I shrugged. "So talk to me."
"You willing to chance prison, or your personal safety, to know what happened to me?"
He sat up and set his half-empty bottle on the floor. "I know you'd do it for me."
My stomach contracted at the thought of the desert. I finished my drink and looked into his hazel eyes. His gray hair had grown out considerably since May. "You know I have a twin?"
"You've mentioned it. He disappeared, right?"
"We were twenty. Just walked out of our dorm room one night. Said, 'You won't see me for a while.' "
"Bet that was hard."
"Yeah, it was hard. He contacted me last May. Walter, you can't tell anyone. Not Beth, not ---"
"Who am I going to tell?"
"You remember that black teacher who went missing last spring?"
"Rita Jones?"
I swallowed. You say it now, he's involved. Think about it. You're too hammered to make this decision.
"She's buried in my woods." Walter's face blanched. "My brother, Orson, put her there. He blackmailed me. Told me my blood was all over her and that the knife he killed her with was hidden in my house. Swore he'd call the police if I didn't come see him. Threatened my mother."
"You're drunk."
"Wanna see the body?"
Walter stared at me, eyes laced with doubt. "He killed her?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"He's a psychopath," I said, steadying my hands.
"What'd he want with you?" Tears welled up in my eyes, and I couldn't stop them. They spilled down my cheeks, and as I wiped them away and looked up at Walter, my eyes filled again.
"Horrible," I said, my lips quivering as tears ran over them and down my chin.
"Where'd you go?"
"The Wyoming desert."
"Why?" I didn't answer him, and Walter allowed me a moment to regain my composure. He didn't ask why again. "Where is he now?"
"I don't know. Could be anywhere in the country."
"You never went to the police?"
"He threatened my mother!" My voice rose into the second floor. "Besides, what would I say? 'My twin brother killed Rita Jones and buried her in my backyard. Oh, by the way, my blood's all over her, she was murdered with my paring knife, and my brother's disappeared, but I swear I didn't do it!' "
"What other choice do you have?" he asked. I shrugged. "Well, if what you're saying is true, people will continue to die until he's caught. It could be Beth or John David next. That doesn't concern you?"
"What concerns me," I said, "is that even if I could find Orson, haul him into a precinct, and tell the detectives what he'd done, Orson would walk out the free man. I have no proof, Walter. It means shit in a court of law that I know Orson is a psychopath, that I've seen him torture and murder. What matters is that Rita Jones is covered in my blood."
"You've seen him murder?" Walter asked. "Actually watched him kill?" Tears came to my eyes again. "Who did he ---"
"I don't wanna talk about it anymore."
"But you're telling me you ---"
"I won't talk about it!" Leaving the chair, I walked to the window, which looked across the lawn and, farther down, the lake. On the forest's edge, yellow poplars had begun to turn gold, and scarlet oaks and red maples would soon set the woods ablaze with their dying leaves. My forehead against the window, my tears streaked down the glass, leaving blurry trails in their wake.
"What can I do?" Walter asked, his voice gentle again.
I shook my head. I murdered, too. Cut out a woman's heart and shot a man in the head, because Orson told me to. The words ricocheted inside my head, but I couldn't tell Walter what I'd done. Somehow, I thought it'd be enough that he knew about Orson and where I'd been.
"I have nightmares every night. I can't write. The things I saw..."
"You have to talk to someone. Something like this could fuck you over for ---"
"I'm talking to you," I said, watching a boat drag an inner tube across the lake and wondering what really was coursing through Walter's mind.
He came to the window, and we both leaned against the glass.
"She's right out there," I said, pointing toward the woods. "In a shallow grave."
We stood for ages by the window. I thought he might push for more details, but he kept the silence, and I was grateful.
It was soon time for him to leave. He had his daughter's play to attend. I pictured Jenna onstage, Walter and Beth in the audience, beaming. I swear it only lasted a second, but I was gorged with envy.
16
JEANETTE Thomas lived alone in a dying neighborhood in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the same ranch-style house where her sons had grown up and her husband had died. It had been a thriving middle-class neighborhood when I was a child, but now as I drove my red CJ-7 slowly along Race Street, I marveled at how the area had changed. Rusted chain-link fences enclosed the yards, and some of the homes were derelict. It seemed as if an elderly person sat in a rocking chair on every front porch, waving at the infrequent cars that passed through. This neighborhood served as the final zone of independence for many of its residents, most only several years from a nursing home existence.
Approaching my mother's house, I couldn't help but ruminate on what this place had once been. In my childhood, kids had filled the streets, and I saw them now, riding bicycles and scrap-wood contraptions, laughing, fighting, chasing the ice-cream truck as it made the rounds on a sweltering summer afternoon. A wonderland, shrouded in shady green trees and electric with youthful energy, it had been mine and Orson's world. We'd climbed its trees, navigated the cool darkness of the drainage ditches, and explored the forbidden woods that bordered the north side of the neighborhood. We'd formed secret clubs, constructed rickety tree houses, and smoked our first cigarette here on a deserted baseball diamond one winter night. Because it was the only home of my childhood, the memories were thick and staggering. They overcame me every time I returned, and now that this neighborhood had become a ghost town, my childhood felt far more spectacular. The present listless decay made my memories rich and resplendent.
My mother always parked her car at the bottom of the driveway so she wouldn't back over the mailbox. When I saw her car edged slightly into the street, I smiled and parked near the curb in front of her house. I cut off the Jeep and opened the door to the grating whine of a leaf blower. Stepping outside, I slammed the door.
Across the street, an old man sat in a chair on his front porch, smoking a pipe and watching a crew of teenagers blow the leaves on his lawn into a brown pile. He waved to me, and I waved back. Mr. Harrison. We were twelve when we learned about your subscription to Playboy. Stole the magazine for three consecutive months. Checked your mailbox every day for its delivery when we got home from school. You caught us the fourth month. Peeped from behind your curtain for a whole week, waiting to identify the thieves. Came tearing out of the house, fully intent on dragging us to our mother, until you realized she'd know you were a dirty old man. "Well, you got three of 'em already!" you shouted, then whispered, "I'll leave 'em on my back porch when I'm through. How about that? At least let me get my money's worth." That was fine by us.
"Hey!" a man shouted from a gray Honda that had stopped in the middle of the street. I stepped back down off the curb and walked toward the car.
"Can I help you with something?" I asked. I placed him at twenty-six or twenty-seven. His hair was very black, and his razor-thin face was baby ass--smooth and white. The interior of his car reeked of Windex. I didn't like his eyes.
"Are you Andrew Thomas?" he asked.
Here we go.
Since the publication of my first novel, I'd kept a running count --- excluding conferences, literary festivals, and other publicized appearances, this was the thirty-third time I'd been recognized.
I nodded. "No way! I'm reading your book right now. Um, The Incinerator --- no, ah, I know what it's called...."
"The Scorcher."
"That's it. I love it. In fact, I've got it with me. Do you think that, um, that..."
"Would you like for me to sign it?"
"Would you?"
"Be happy to." He reached onto the floorboard in the back, grabbed my newest hardcover, and handed it to me. I guess I just look like I have a pen on me. Sometimes it was disappointing meeting the fans. "You got a pen?" I asked.
"Shit, I don't --- oh, wait." He opened the glove compartment and retrieved a short, dull pencil. He'd played miniature golf recently. As I took the pencil, I glanced at the jacket of The Scorcher --- an evil smiling face, consumed in flames. I hadn't been particularly pleased with this jacket design, but no one cares what the author thinks.
"You want me just to sign it?" I asked.
"Could you do it to...sign it to my girlfriend?"
"Sure." Are you gonna tell me her name, or do I have to ask?...I have to ask. "What's her name?"
"Jenna."
"J-E-N-N-A?"
"Yep." I set my book on the roof of his car and scribbled her name and one of the three dedications I always use: "To Jenna --- may your hands tremble and your heart pound. Andrew Z. Thomas." I closed the book and returned it. "She's gonna love this," he said, shifting the car back into drive. "Thank you so much." I shook his cold, thin hand and stepped back over the curb.
As he drove away, I walked through my mother's uncut grass toward the front door. A gusty wind passed through the trees and tickled my spine. The morning sky was overcast, filled with bumpy mattresslike clouds, which in the coming months might be filled with snow. In the center of her lawn, against the ashen late-October sky, a silver maple exploded in burnt orange.
As I continued through the grass, the appearance of her house grew dismal. Beginning to pull away from the roof, the gutters overflowed with leaves, and the siding had peeled and buckled. Even the yard had turned into a jungle, and I didn't doubt Mom had fired the lawn service I'd hired for her. She'd been infuriatingly stubborn in her refusal to accept any degree of financial assistance. I'd tried to buy her a new house after The Killer and His Weapon was sold to Hollywood, but she refused. She wouldn't let me pay her bills, buy her a car, or even send her on a cruise. Whether it was her pride or just ignorance concerning how much money I made, I wasn't sure, but it irritated me to no end. She insisted on scraping by with Social Security, her teacher's pension, and the tiny chunk of Dad's life insurance, now almost gone.
I stepped up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. Bob Barker's voice from The Price Is Right escaped through a cracked window. I heard my mother dragging a stool across the floor so she could reach the peephole.
"It's me, Mom," I said through the door.
"Andrew, is that you?"
"Yes, ma'am." Three dead bolts turned, and it opened.
"Darling!" Her face brightened --- a cloud unveiling the sun. "Come in," she said, smiling. "Give your mom a hug." I stepped inside and we embraced. At sixty-five, she seemed to grow smaller every time I visited. Her hair was turning white, but she wore it long, as she always had, pulled back in a ponytail. Though too big for her now, a green dress dotted with white flowers hung upon her feeble frame like outdated wallpaper.
"You look good," she said, inspecting my waist. "I see you lost that spare tire." Smiling, she pinched my stomach. She had a paralyzing fear I'd suddenly gain six hundred pounds and become trapped in my house. It was hell being around her if I was the slightest bit overweight. "I told you it wouldn't take much to lose those love handles. They're really not attractive, you know. That's what happens when you spend all your time inside, writing."
"The yard doesn't look good, Mom," I said, walking into the living room and sitting down on the sofa. She walked to the television and turned the volume all the way down. "Is that lawn service not coming anymore?"
"I fired them," she said, blocking the screen, hands on her hips. "They charged too much."
"You weren't paying for it."
"I don't need your help," she said. "And I'm not gonna argue with you about it. I wrote a check to you for the money you gave me. Remind me to give it to you before you leave."
"I won't take it."
"Then the money will go to waste."
"But the yard looks terrible. It needs to be ---"
"That grass is gonna turn brown and die anyway. No need to make a fuss about it now."
I sighed and leaned back against the dusty, sunken sofa as my mother disappeared into the kitchen. The house smelled of must, aged wood, and tarnished silverware. Above the brick fireplace hung a family portrait that had been taken the summer after Orson and I graduated from high school. The picture was sixteen years old, and it showed. The background had reddened, and our faces looked more pink than flesh-colored.
I remembered the day distinctly. Orson and I had fought about who would wear Dad's brown suit. We'd both become fixated on it, so Mom had flipped a dime, and I won. Furious, Orson had refused to have his picture taken, so Mom and I went alone to the photographer's studio. I wore my father's brown suit, and she wore a purple dress, black now in the discolored photograph. It was eerie to look at my mother and myself standing there alone, with the plain red background behind us, half a family. Sixteen years later, nothing has changed.
She came back into the living room from the kitchen, carrying a glass of sweet tea.
"Here you are, darling," she said, handing me the cold, sweaty glass. I took a sip, savoring her ability to brew the best tea I'd ever tasted. It held the perfect sweetness --- not bitter, not weak, and the color was transparent mahogany. She sat down in her rocking chair and pulled a quilt over her skinny legs, the wormy veins hidden by fleshy panty hose.
"Why haven't you come in four months?" she asked.
"I've been busy, Mom," I said, setting the tea down on a glass coffee table in front of the couch. "I had the book tour and other stuff, so I haven't been back in North Carolina that long."
"Well, it hurts my feelings that my son won't take time out of his high-and-mighty schedule to come visit his mother."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I really feel bad."
"You should be more considerate."
"I will. I'm sorry."
"Stop saying that," she snapped. "I forgive you." Then turning back to the television, she said, "I bought your book."
"You didn't have to buy it, Mom. I have thirty copies at home. I could've brought one."
"I didn't know that."
"You read it?"
She frowned, and I knew the answer. "I don't want to hurt your feelings," she said, "but it's just like your other ones. I didn't even reach the end of the first chapter before I put it down. You know I can't stand profanity. And that Sizzle was just horrible. I'm not gonna read about a man going around setting people on fire. I don't know how you write it. People probably think I abused you."
"Mom, I ---"
"I know you write what sells, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm gonna like it. I just wish you'd write something nice for a change."
"Like what? What would you like for me to write?"
"A love story, Andrew. Something with a happy ending. People read love stories, too, you know."
I laughed out loud and lifted up the glass. "So you think I should switch to romance? My fans would love that, let me tell you."
"Now you're just being ugly," she said as I sipped the tea. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Mocking your own mother."
"I'm not mocking you, Mom. I think you're hilarious."
She frowned again and looked back at the television. Though strong-willed and feisty, my mother was excruciatingly sensitive beneath her fussy exterior.
"Have you been to Dad's grave yet?" she asked after a moment.
"No. I wanted to go with you."
"There were flowers by the headstone this morning. A beautiful arrangement. It looked fresh. You sure you didn't ---"
"Mom, I think I'd know if I laid flowers on Dad's grave this morning."
Her short-term memory was wilting. She'd probably taken the flowers there yesterday.
"Well, I was there this morning," she said. "Before it clouded up. Sat there for about an hour, talking to him. He's got a nice spot under that magnolia."
"Yes, he does."
Staring into the olive shag carpet beneath my feet, at the sloped dining room table next to the kitchen, and that first door in the hallway leading down into the basement, I sensed the four of us moving through this dead space, this antiquated haunt --- felt my father and Orson as strongly as I did my mother, sitting in the flesh before me. Strangely enough, it was the smell of burned toast that moved me. My mother loved scorched bread, and though the scent of her singed breakfast was now a few hours old, it made this deteriorating house my home, and me her little boy again, for three inexorable seconds.
"Mom," I began, and I almost said his name. Orson was on the tip of my tongue. I wanted her to remind me that we'd been carefree children once, kids who'd played.
She looked up from the muted television.
But I didn't ask. She'd driven him from her mind. When I'd made the mistake of talking about him before, she had instantly shut down. It crushed her that he'd left, that thirteen years ago Orson had severed all ties from our family. Initially, she dealt with that pain by denying he'd ever been her son. Now, years later, that he'd ever been born.
"Never mind," I said, and she turned back to the game show. So I found a memory for myself. Orson and I are eleven, alone in the woods. It's summertime, the trees laden with leaves. We find a tattered canvas tent, damp and mildewed, but we love it. Brushing out the leaves from inside, we transform it into our secret fort, playing there every day, even in the rain. Since we never tell any of the neighborhood kids, it's ours alone, and we sneak out of the house at night on several occasions and camp there with our flashlights and sleeping bags, hunting fireflies until dawn. Then, running home, we climb into bed before Mom or Dad wakes up. They never catch us, and by summer's end, we have a jelly jar full of prisoners --- a luciferin nightlight on the toy chest between our beds.
Mom and I sat watching the greedy contestants until noon. I kept the memory to myself.
"Andrew," she said when the show had ended, "is it still cold outside?"
"It's cool," I said, "and a little breezy."
"Would you take a walk with me? The leaves are just beautiful."
"I'd love to."
While she went to her bedroom for an overcoat, I stood and walked through the dining room to the back door. I opened it and stepped onto the back porch, its green paint flaking off everywhere, the boards slick with paint chips.
My eyes wandered through the overgrown yard, alighting on the fallen swing we'd helped my father build. He would not be proud of how I'd cared for his wife. But she's stubborn as hell, and you knew it. You knew it better than anyone. Leaning against the railing, I looked thirty yards beyond, staring into the woods, which started abruptly where the grass ended.
Something inside of me twitched. It was as though I were seeing the world as a negative of a photograph --- in black and gray, two boys rambling through the trees toward something I could not see. A fleeting image struck me --- a cigarette ember glowing in a tunnel. There was a presence in the forest, in my head, and it bowled me over.
I could not escape the idea that I'd forgotten something.
17
I left my mother's house before dusk, and for the forty miles of back roads between Winston-Salem and my lake house near Davidson, I thought of Karen. Normally, I'd banish her from my thoughts at the first flicker of a memory, but tonight I allowed her to remain, and watching the familiar roads wind between stands of forest and breaks of pasture, I imagined she sat beside me in the Jeep.
We ride home in one of those comfortable stretches of silence, and within an hour, we're walking together through the front door of my house. You throw your coat on the piano bench, and as I head for the kitchen for a bottle of wine, I catch your eyes, and see that you could care less about wine tonight. So without music, or candles, or freshening up, we walk upstairs to my bedroom and make love and fall asleep and wake up and go again and fall back asleep. I wake up once more in the night, feel you breathing beside me, and smile at the thought of making us breakfast. You're excellent company in the morning, over coffee, in our robes, the lake shimmering in early sun....
I was speaking aloud to an empty seat, with Davidson still fifteen miles away.
Last I heard, Karen was reading manuscripts for a small house in Boston and living with a patent attorney. They were going to be married in Bermuda over Christmas. Try this, Andy: Around 8:30, you'll unlock the front door, walk into your house, and go straight upstairs to bed. Alone. You won't even feel like a drink.
I awoke to the earsplitting scream of the stereo system in my living room downstairs, the speakers pumping Miles Davis through the house at full volume. It was two o'clock in the morning. I remained motionless under the covers, in utter darkness, thinking, Someone is in the house. If you turn on the light, you'll see him standing at the end of your bed, and if you move, he'll know you're awake and kill you. Please God, let this be a power surge, or something fucked up in the circuitry. But I don't own a Miles Davis record.
As the music rattled the windows, I reached my left hand to the bedside table and opened the drawer, expecting at any moment for lights to blind me, followed by the immediate onset of unthinkable pain. My hand touched my new pistol, a subcompact .40-caliber Glock. I couldn't remember if I'd chambered the first round, so I brought the handgun under the sheet and, pulling back on the slide, felt the semijacketed hollow-point poke out of the ejection port, ready to fire.
For two minutes, I lay in bed, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Then, squinting so he wouldn't see the whites of my eyes, I scoped out my room: At a glance, I seemed to be the only occupant. Unless he's in the closet. Rolling to the other side of the bed, I lifted the phone to dial 911. Miles blared through the receiver. Oh Jesus.
I planted my feet on the carpet and crept toward the door, thinking, Don't go down there. Orson could be anywhere in this house. I know it's him. Please be dreaming.
The exposed second-floor hallway ran the length of the living room, with my bedroom at the end. At my door, I stopped and peered down the empty hallway. Too dark to see anything in the living room below. I did, however, notice the red and green stereo lights glowing by the staircase. Through the tall living room windows, I could see the woods, the lake, and that remote blue light at the end of Walter's pier. I might die tonight.
Finger on the light switch, I couldn't decide whether or not to turn on the track lighting in the hallway. Maybe he doesn't know I'm up yet. I won't alert him to the fact.
There were three open doors leading into black rooms along the right side of the hall, the oak banister on the left. My heart clanged like a blacksmith's hammer. Get to the staircase. I sprinted down the hall as "So What" masked my footsteps. Crouching at the top of the staircase, freezing sweat burning in my eyes, I stared through the banister at the expansive living room --- the couch, the baby grand, the wet bar, the hearth --- ambiguous oblique forms in the shadows below. Then there were the places I could not see --- the kitchen, the foyer, my study. He could be anywhere. Resisting waves of hysterical trembling, so intense that I kept my finger off the trigger, I thought, He's doing this for the fear. That's what gets him off.
Anger displaced my terror. I stood up, charged down the staircase, and ran into the living room.
"Orson!" I screamed above the music. "Do I look scared? COME ON!"
I moved to the stereo and cut it off. The gaping silence engulfed me, so I turned on a lamp beside the stereo, and the soft, warm light it produced eased my heart. I listened, looked, heard and saw nothing, took five deep breaths, and leaned against the wall to tame my renascent fear. Go out through the kitchen and onto the deck. Get away from here. Maybe he's just fucking with you. Maybe he's already gone.
As I started for the back door, something in the bay-windowed alcove between the kitchen and the living room arrested my exit. An unmarked videotape stood atop the glass breakfast table. Picking it up, I again glanced over my shoulder at the hallway above and then into the foyer. Still nothing moved. I wanted to search my study and the three guest rooms on the second floor, but I didn't have the equanimity to roam my house, knowing he skulked in some corner or nook, waiting for me to stumble blindly past.
Returning to the stereo and the entertainment center, I inserted the videotape into my VCR, turned on the television, and sat down on the sofa so I could watch the screen and still see most of the living room.
The screen is blue, then black. The date and time emerge in the bottom right-hand corner: 10/30/96, 11:08 A.M. That's today. No, yesterday now.
I hear a voice, then two voices, so low and muffled that I turn up the volume.
"Would you like for me to sign it?"..."Would you?"..."Be happy to."..."You got a pen?"..."Shit, I don't --- oh, wait"..."You want me just to sign it?"..."Could you do it to...sign it to my girlfriend?"..."Sure."..."What's her name?"..."Jenna."..."J-E-N-N-A?"..."Yep."..."She's gonna love this. Thank you so much."
The screen still dark, the sound of a car engine vibrates the television set, and then the first shot appears --- through the back window of a moving car and from a few hundred feet away --- me walking up the steps to my mother's house. The screen goes black and silent.
Still 10/30/96, now 11:55 A.M. The picture fades in, and the camera slowly pans a dark room. Oh God. Concrete walls and floor. The objects in the room are the giveaway: two red bicycles, a dilapidated exercise trampoline, a fake white Christmas tree, mountains of cardboard boxes, and several stacks of records --- the small windowless basement of my mother's house.
The cameraman holds on a shot of the fourteen steps that lead upstairs, and then the picture jerks nauseatingly as he ascends. The first hallway door creaks open, and the camera zooms in on my face as I sit quietly on my mother's couch, watching the muted television. "Such a good son to visit her," he whispers. Then the cameraman closes the door and tiptoes back down the steps.
After placing the camera atop a stack of our father's records, Orson squats down in front of it, the staircase behind him now, and the screen blackens.
The picture returns from the same position in the basement --- 10/30/96, 7:25 P.M. Orson leans into the lens and whispers, "You just left, Andy." He smiles. He wears a mechanic's suit, though I can't tell its color in the poor basement light. "I don't want you to worry, Andy," he whispers. "This following you around thing is quite temporary. In fact, as you watch this now in your living room around two in the morning, I'll be hundreds of miles away, driving into the capital of this great nation. And when I finish there, I'll be blending back into the faceless masses for a good long while." Orson sneezes twice.
"Because you can't keep your mouth shut, I'm considering having a friend of mine visit Walter and his beautiful family. Would that upset you? I think you've met Luther." He smiles. "He's a fan." Orson pulls a length of wire from his pocket. "In one minute, it'll occur to you that you have this all on tape. Well, you had it all on tape. Remember that. Shall we?" Orson lifts the camera and continues to whisper as he climbs the staircase. "The rage you're about to feel will liberate you, Andy. Think of it that way. Oh, one last thing --- watch the news tomorrow morning."
He opens the door to the hallway. Somewhere in the house, my mother is singing. Orson slams the door, opens it, and slams it again before rushing back down the steps. Setting the camera back on the stack of records, he moves offscreen, somewhere in the semidarkness, amid the innumerable boxes. I have only a view of the staircase now and a section of the bare concrete wall.
Silence. At the top of the steps, the door opens.
"Andrew, did you come back in?" My mother's voice fills the basement, and I begin to tremble, my head shaking involuntarily back and forth. Descending five steps, she stops, and I can see her legs now. I'm muttering, "No" continuously, as if it will drive her back up those steps.
"Andrew?" she calls out. No answer. After three more steps, she leans down so that she can see into the basement. She inspects the rows of clutter for several seconds, then straightens up and clumps back up the staircase. But her footsteps stop before she reaches the door, and she goes back down again to where she was and looks directly into the camera. I see the confusion on her face, but it's not yet accompanied by fear.
My mother walks carefully to the bottom of the staircase and stops before the camera. She's still wearing that green dress, but her white hair is down now. She stares curiously into the lens, that sharp crease wrinkling up between her eyebrows.
"HI, MOM!" Orson screams. She looks behind the camera. The fear in her face destroys me, and as she shrieks and runs for the staircase, the camera crashes to the concrete floor.
After the screen turned blue again, I sat for five seconds in unholy shock. He did not kill our mother. He did...I smelled Windex. A hard metallic object thumped the back of my skull.
Lying on my back beside the couch and staring up through the windows, I saw that morning was now just a few hours away --- that purple-navy tinge of dawn leeching the darkness from the sky. As I struggled to my feet, the tender knot on the back of my head throbbed on mercilessly.
The television was still on. Kneeling down, I pressed the eject button on the VCR, but the tape had already been removed.
After hanging up the phone in the kitchen, I trudged up the steps to my bedroom. I returned the Glock to the drawer and lay down on top of the covers, bracing myself for the tsunami of despair to consume me. I closed my eyes and tried to cry, but the pain was too intense, too surreal. Could this have been a new nightmare? Maybe I walked down there in my sleep and banged my head. Dreamed a fucked-up dream. That is a possibility. Hold on to that. She's sleeping. I could call her now and wake her up. She'll answer the phone, peeved at my rudeness. But she'll answer the phone, and that's all that matters.
In darkness, I reached for the phone and dialed my mother's number.
It rang and rang.
III.
18
ON a cold, clear Halloween morning, the world watched Washington, D.C., as city police, FBI, Secret Service, and a myriad of media swarmed the White House. It had begun before dawn.
At 4:30 A.M., a jogger running down East Street noticed a pile of cardboard boxes stacked in the frosty grass of the Ellipse, close to the site of the national Christmas tree. Upon returning home, she called 911.
By the time the police arrived, the Secret Service was already on the scene, and suspicion immediately arose that the boxes might contain explosives. So the president was flown to a safe location, the White House staff evacuated, and the quarter-mile stretch of East Street behind the White House occluded.
In Washington, bad news travels fast. By eight o'clock, local and network news crews were camped along the perimeter that the police had established two hundred yards from the boxes. The story broke on every news channel in the country, so by nine o'clock, as a bomb-squad robot rolled toward the portentous heap of cardboard boxes, the world was watching.
For two hours, cameras zoomed in on technicians in bomb-resistant suits as they utilized the robot and X-ray unit to investigate each cardboard box. When a box had been cleared, it was set inside an armored truck. Each was opened, but the cameras were too far away to determine what, if anything, was inside. There were at least a dozen boxes, and the bomb squad treated each one as if it contained a nuclear bomb. Their precision made the task tedious, and eleven o'clock had passed before the last box was cleared and the armored truck drove away.
Speculation began. What was inside the boxes if not a bomb? A hoax? An assassination attempt on the president? Rumors and unconfirmed reports swirled through the coverage until a statement was issued by the FBI at 1:30 as East Street reopened.
Special Agent Harold Trent addressed the nation of reporters, speaking into a cluster of microphones, the back side of the White House visible behind him beneath the late October sky. Twelve boxes, most between one and three cubic feet in volume, had been taken into possession by the FBI. No explosive devices had been found. Inside each box was what appeared to be a human heart and a corresponding name.
The reporters fired questions: Were the names those of real people? Would the names be released? Were there any suspects? Why were the boxes left near the White House? Agent Trent refused to theorize. The investigation had only begun, and a special FBI task force would be assembled to work with state and local police until the person or persons responsible had been taken into custody.
Agent Trent took a deep breath, his exhaustion already evident on the screen that transported his image into my living room. He looked into the cameras and spoke words that would be repeatedly broadcast as sound bites in the coming days.
"There's a long road ahead of us," he said. "It'll take some time to verify if these are actually the hearts of missing persons or known murder victims. I pray it's not the case, but this appears to be the work of a serial murderer. And if it is, he'll continue to kill until he's caught." The sturdy black agent walked away from the microphones as reporters shouted questions that he ignored.
The nation was captivated, and the media fueled its obsession. Rampant speculation ignited as the country fell in love with its own fear. Even before the FBI confirmed that the hearts represented actual murders, the media had conceived and birthed a monster.
To the dismay of doctors, they would call him "the Heart Surgeon," the professional title marred from that day forward. No one could say the words without provoking images of FBI agents and the Washington, D.C., bomb squad loading cardboard boxes, the work of a madman, into an armored truck.
How strange it felt to be the only one who knew.
19
MIST whipped my face as my boat crawled toward the middle of the lake. I could hear nothing over the gurgling clatter of the outboard motor mounted to the stern of my leaky rowboat. The evening sky threatened rain as I glided across the leaden chop, scanning the empty lake for Walter's boat.
A half mile out from my pier, I cut the motor. The cold, darkening silence closed in on me, and I wondered if I'd make it home before the rain set in. Though I despised coming out on the lake, I couldn't speak to Walter in my house anymore without fear that Orson was eavesdropping.
I heard the groan of Walter's boat before I saw it. My nerves took over, and I regretted not having knocked back several stiff drinks to facilitate what I had to tell him. Walter pulled his equally powerless rowboat beside mine, tossed over a rope, and I tied us together.
"What's up?" he asked when he'd killed the motor.
"You see the news?"
"Yeah."
He pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from his brown raincoat and slid a cigarette into his mouth. From a pocket on my blue raincoat, I tossed him a butane cigar lighter. "Thanks," he said, blowing a puff of smoke out of the corner of his mouth and throwing the lighter back to me. "The media's tickled pink," he said. "You can see it in their ambitious little faces. I'll bet they blew their load when they got the tip."
"Think they were tipped, huh?"
"Oh, whoever planted those boxes knew exactly what they were doing. Probably called a dozen newspapers and TV stations after the drop. I'll bet he told them there was a bomb behind the White House. Then that jogger called nine-one-one, confirming the story, and boom...media frenzy." Walter took a long drag from his cigarette and spoke as the smoke curled from his mouth. "Yeah, the only person happier about those hearts than the press is the sick fuck who left them there. He's probably sitting in front of a TV right now, jacking off, watching the nation drool over his ---"
"It's Orson," I said. Walter took in a mouthful of smoke, attempting to look unfazed.
"How do you know?" he asked, coughing a little as he exhaled.
"He keeps the hearts. In his cabin in Wyoming, there was a freezer full of them. They're his trophies, his little keepsakes."
"Andy..."
"Just listen for a minute, Walter."
A gust banged our boats together, and a raindrop hit my face.
How do you tell a man you've endangered his wife and children?
"The thing in Washington," I said, "is small potatoes. My mother's dead. Orson strangled her last night. He videotaped it.... It's..." I stopped to steady myself. "I'm sorry. But I think I've put you in danger." His head tilted questioningly. "I don't know how, but Orson knows or suspects that I told you about the desert."
"Oh Christ." Walter flicked his cigarette into the water, and it hissed as he put his face into his hands.
"I should never have told you anything about ---"
"You're goddamn right you shouldn't have."
"Look ---"
"What did he say?"
"Walter ---"
"What the fuck did he say?" His voice rang out across the lake. A fish splashed in the water nearby.
"The exact words aren't ---"
"Fuck you." He wiped the tears from his face. "What did he say?" I shook my head. "Did he mention my family?" Tears, the first of the day, streamed from my eyes as I nodded. "He mentioned my family?" Walter hyperventilated.
"I am so ---"
"How could you let this happen, Andy?"
"I didn't mean ---"
"What did your brother say? I want to know each word, each syllable, verbatim, and I dare you to say exact words aren't important. Tell me!"
"He said because I can't keep my mouth shut..." I closed my eyes. I want to die.
"Finish it!"
"He was considering having a friend of his come visit you. And your 'beautiful family.' "
Walter looked back toward his pier and his house, concealed behind the orange leaves. It was drizzling now, so I pulled up the hood of my rain jacket. An inch of water had collected in my boat.
"Who's his friend?" he asked.
"I have no idea."
"Is this ---" He started to hyperventilate again.
"Walter, I'm gonna take care of this."
"How?"
"I'm gonna kill Orson."
"So you do know where he is?"
"I have an idea."
"Tip the FBI."
"No. Orson can still send me to prison. I'm not going to prison."
Our boats rocked on the rough water. I felt queasy.
"If I find Orson," I said, "will you come with me?"
"To help you kill him?"
"Yes."
He guffawed sardonically. "Is this real? I mean, are you off your rocker?"
"Feels that way."
The drizzle had become rain. I shivered.
"I have to get home," he said. "I've gotta take John David and Jenna trick-or-treating."
"Will you come with me?" I asked again.
"Take a wild guess."
"I understand."
"No. No, you don't. You don't understand anything." He started to cry again, but he managed to hold himself together for another moment. "Let's get something straight, all right? Don't call me. Don't come to my house. Don't e-mail me. Don't think about me. Don't do one goddamn thing that would make this monster think we're friends. We clear?"
"Yes, Walter. I want you to ---"
"Don't you say another word to me. Give me the rope."
I untied our rowboats and cast the end of the rope to him. He cranked the outboard motor and chugged away, making a wide circle back toward his pier.
It was nearly dark, and the rain fell steadily and hard into the lake. I started the motor and pressed on toward my pier. Were the safety of Walter and his family not in question, I would have been heading home to kill myself.
20
THE walls of my office consist almost entirely of windows, and because the room juts out from the rest of my house into the trees, I feel as though I spend my hours writing in a piedmont forest. My desk is pushed against the largest wall of glass, facing the forest, so that nothing but an occasional doe or gray fox distracts me from my work. I can't even see the lake from my desk, and this is by design, because the water mesmerizes me and would only steal my time.
Books abound, stacked on disorganized shelves and lying in piles on the floor. In one corner, there's an intimidating stack of manuscripts from fans and blurb-seekers. A mammoth dictionary lounges across a lectern, perennially open. There's even a display case, which holds first editions and translations of my novels, standing on one side of the door; a small gold frame enclosing a mounted photocopy of my first, meager royalty check hangs on the other.
Staring into the black forest as streams of rain meandered down the glass, I sat at my desk, waiting for the Web page to load. This would be the fifth college Web site I'd checked. I was focusing my search on the history departments of schools in New Hampshire and Vermont, but as the doors closed one after another, I'd begun to wonder if that cowboy's memory wasn't askew. Franklin Pierce, Keene State, the University of New Hampshire, and Plymouth had given me nothing. Maybe Dave Parker was Orson bullshit.
When the home page for Woodside College had loaded, I clicked on "Departments," then "History," and finally "Faculty of the History Department (alphabetical listing)."
Waiting on the server, I glanced at the clock on my desk: 7:55 P.M. She's been dead twenty-four hours. Did you just leave her in that filthy basement? With his gig in Washington, I couldn't imagine that Orson had gone to the trouble to take our mother with him. Depositing her body outside of the house would have been time-consuming and risky. Besides, my mother was a loner, and she'd sometimes go days without contacting a soul. My God, she could lie in that basement a week before someone finds her.
The police would have to notify me. I hadn't even given consideration to reporting her murder, because for all I knew, Orson had framed me again. Matricide. It seems unnatural even among the animals. I couldn't begin to wonder why. I was operating on numbness again.
At the top of the Web page listing faculty was a short paragraph that bragged about the sheer brilliance and abundant qualifications of the fourteen professors who constituted the history department. I scanned that, then scrolled down the list.
Son of a bitch.
"Dr. David L. Parker," the entry read.
Though his name was hyperlinked, his page wouldn't load when I clicked on it. Is that you? Did I just find you because of one short exchange with a stoned Wyoming cowboy?
The doorbell startled me. I was not expecting company. Picking up my pistol from the desk (I carried it with me everywhere now), I walked through the long hallway that separated my office from the kitchen and the rest of the house. Passing through the living room, I turned right into the foyer, chambered the first round, and stopped at an opaque oval window beside the door.
The doorbell rang again.
"Who is it?" I said.
"Trick-or-treat!" Children's voices. Lowering the gun, I shoved it into the waistband at the back of my damp jeans. Because my house stood alone on ten acres of forest, at the end of a long driveway, trick-or-treaters rarely ventured to my door. I hadn't even bought candy for them this year.
I opened the door. A little masked boy dressed up as Zorro pointed a gun at me. His sister was an angel --- a small white bathrobe, cardboard wings, and a halo of silver tinsel. A calamitous-faced man in a brown raincoat stood behind them, holding an umbrella --- Walter. Why are you ---
"Give me candy or I'll shootcha," John David said. The four-year-old's blond hair poked out from under the black bandanna. His mask was crooked, so that he could see through only one of the eye-holes, but he maintained the disguise. "I'll shootcha," he warned again, and before I could speak, he pulled the trigger. As the plastic hammer clicked again and again, I cringed with the impact of each bullet. Stumbling back into the foyer, I dropped to my knees.
"Why, John David, why?" I gasped, holding my belly as I crumpled down onto the floor, careful that my Glock didn't fall out. John David giggled.
"Look, Dad, I got him. I'm a go see if he's dead."
"No, J.D.," Walter said as I resurrected. "Don't go in the house."
I walked back to the door, caught Walter's eyes, and looked down at the seven-year-old angel.
"You look beautiful, Jenna," I said. "Did you make your costume?"
"At school today I did," she said. "You like my wand?" She held up a long pixie stick with a glittery cardboard star glued to the end.
"Take a walk with us," Walter said. "I left the car by the mailbox."
"Let me see if I can find some candy for ---"
He rustled the trash bag in his right hand. "They've got plenty of candy. Come on." I put on a pair of boots, grabbed a jacket and an umbrella from the coat closet, and locked the door behind me as I stepped outside.
The four of us walked down the sidewalk, and when we reached the driveway, Walter handed his umbrella to Jenna. "Sweetie, I want you and J.D. to walk a little ahead of us, okay?"
"Why, Daddy?"
"I have to talk to Uncle Andy."
She took the umbrella. "You have to come with me, J.D.," she said, bossing her brother.
"Nooooo!"
"Go with her, son. We'll be right behind you." Jenna rushed on ahead, and John David ran after her and ducked under the umbrella. They laughed, their small buoyant voices filling the woods. His toy gun fired three times.
Walter stepped under my umbrella, and we started up the drive, the tall loblollies on either side of us. I waited for him to speak as the rain drummed on the canopy. The night smelled of wet pine.
"Beth's packing," he whispered. "She's taking the kids away."
"Where?"
"I told her not to tell me."
"She knows about ---"
"No. She knows the children are in danger. That's all she needs to know."
"Stoppit!" John David yelled at his sister.
"Kids!" Walter shouted gruffly. "Behave."
"Dad, Jenna ---"
"I don't wanna hear it, son."
I wondered where Walter's anger toward me had gone.
"Do you really know where he is, Andy?" he whispered.
"I've got a possible alias in New England. Now, I can't be sure until I get there, but I think it's him."
"So you're definitely going?"
"Yeah."
He stopped and faced me. "You're going there to kill him? To put him in a hole somewhere, where no one's ever gonna find him?"
"That's the plan."
"And you have no compunctions about killing your own brother?"
"None."
We started walking again. I had an awful premonition.
"You've called the police, haven't you?" I said.
"What?"
"You told them about Orson."
"No, Andy."
"But you're going to."
He shook his head.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Come here, Jenna!" Walter hollered. His children turned around and ran back to us, their umbrella so low, I couldn't see them. Walter took his umbrella from Jenna and lifted it up.
"Jenna, show Uncle Andy the tattoo you got at school."
"Oh yeah!" she said, remembering. "Look, Andy, isn't it cool?"
Jenna raised the sleeve of her robe and held up the delicate underside of her right forearm. My knees weakened. In pink Magic Marker, scribbled from her elbow to her tiny wrist:
W -- Shhhhh. O
I looked up at Walter. His eyes flooded.
"All right, kids." He smiled through it. "Here. Go on ahead now. Let us talk." Jenna took the umbrella and she and John David ran ahead as we continued on, the mailbox not far ahead.
"She had it when she came home from school," Walter said. "Beth noticed it when they were putting on her costume. Fuckin' teacher didn't know anything about it. Jenna said a nice man was drawing tattoos on all the kids at their Halloween carnival. She hadn't seen him before."
"Jesus, Walter. I am ---"
"I don't want your apologies or your pity," he whispered. "I'm going with you. That's what I came to tell you. We're gonna bury Orson together."
The kids had reached the white Cadillac. We stopped ten feet from the end of the driveway and Walter turned to me. "So when are you leaving?" he asked.
"A day or two. I've gotta go before my mother's discovered."
His eyes softened. "Andy, I want you to know that I am s ---"
"And I don't need your pity," I said. "It won't help either of us do what we have to do."
He nodded and looked over his shoulder at Jenna and John David. The umbrella cast aside, they were throwing gravel from the driveway at my mailbox, and coming nowhere close to hitting it.
21
THE eve of my departure for Vermont was our thirty-fifth birthday, and Orson mailed me a handmade card. On the front, he'd designed a collage out of photographs, all taken in the sickly orange light of his shed. There was a head shot of Shirley Tanner's boot-bruised face; a full body shot of Jeff in a hole in the desert; Wilbur on red plastic from the waist up --- inside out.
Below the colorful collage, scrawled in Orson's unmistakable hand: "What do you get for the guy who has it all?" On the inside he'd written, "Not a goddamn thing. A big happy birthday from Shirley and the Gang."
Woodside is a foothill community in midwestern Vermont, isolated from the major cities of the North by the Green Mountains in the east and New York's Adirondacks in the west. On an autumn day, it's quintessential American countryside, breathtaking in its open vistas of rolling hills, endless mountain chains, and a quaint college town tucked into a vale.
According to the gas station attendant, we were three weeks late. Then the forests had been burning with the brightest color in thirty years. Now, the leaves brown and dead, few remained on the trees, and the blue sky gleamed awkwardly against the winter bleakness of the countryside. Vermont in November smacked of the same stiff beauty as dolling up a corpse for its wake.
Beyond the outskirts of Woodside, on the fringe of the Green Mountains, Walter and I approached the inn. Heading up a long, curving driveway, I saw a large white house perched halfway up the mountain. There was movement on its wraparound porch --- empty rocking chairs swaying in a raw breeze.
Walter pulled his Cadillac into the gravel parking lot adjacent to the sallow lawn behind the house. There were only seven other cars, and I felt relieved to be outside of Orson's town. We'd almost stayed at a motel in downtown Woodside because of its proximity to the college campus, but the risk of running into Orson was too great.
Hauling our suitcases up the front porch steps, we collapsed into a pair of rockers. The mountainside fell away from where we sat for a thousand feet, and the late-afternoon sun shone on the forest of bare trees in the valley below. Naked branches moved with the breeze, and I imagined that three weeks ago the sound of chattering leaves had filled the air. Across the valley, which extended twenty miles west, I could see into New York State, and the grander mountains of the Adirondacks that stood there.
Wood smoke scented the forest, and sitting in the cold, listening and watching, I sensed Walter's restiveness.
After a moment, he said, "It's too cold to sit out here. I'll check us in." He stood up and lifted his suitcase off the porch. "You just gonna sit there?" he asked, walking toward the door.
"Yep."
Our room was at the end of a creaky hallway on the second floor. There were two double beds, placed on opposite sides of the room, a dormer window between them, from which you could view the mountains. The ceiling slanted up on both sides and met in a straight line, which bisected the room. Two paisley love seats faced each other in the center of the hardwood floor, a squat square coffee table between them. For seventy-five dollars a night, it was a lovely room. There were even fresh irises in glass vases on each bedside table. They made the room smell like an arbor.
Walter sat on his bed, unpacking his clothes, and I lay on mine, my suitcase still unopened on the floor. Voices moved through the walls, and I heard the hollow clack of footsteps ascending the staircase. Someone knocked.
Crossing the room, I stopped at the door. There was no peephole, so I asked, "Who is it?"
"Melody Terrence." I opened the door to a striking longhaired brunette, far too young and pretty to be an innkeeper.
"Hi there," I said.
"You guys settling in all right?" she asked.
"We sure are."
"Well, I just came to let you know that we're serving dinner in thirty minutes, if you're interested. Danny forgot to put the sign up again."
"Thanks for the invitation."
"Will you be joining us? There's a cozy dining room downstairs, and Danny's been smoking a bird all day. We'll have fresh vegetables, homemade biscuits ---"
"It sounds wonderful," I said. "We'll see you there."
"Excellent." She smiled and walked down the hall to the next room. I closed the door.
Walter had placed a stack of shirts into a drawer, and, slamming it, he looked up at me, smoldering. "You call yourself a crime writer? Think we should go down and meet all the guests? What if someone recognizes you, Andy? If it ever got out that Orson, the Heart Surgeon" --- he whispered the infamous title --- "was your brother, and lived in Woodside, someone could put two and two together. They might remember that you were here in Vermont around the same time David Parker disappeared. And, you know, that's all it'd take to put the FBI on our ass." Walter moved into the dormer. His back turned, he looked into the woods, dark now that the sun had set. If the moon was up, it had yet to rise above the mountains and spread its meek light.
I moved across the room to my friend.
"Walter," I said, but he didn't turn around. "What? You scared?"
"We can't fuck anything up," he said. "Not one thing."
Staring out into the Vermont night, the foreign darkness lodged a splinter of homesickness in my heart. A child again, I acknowledged the nostalgic pain, and then it passed.
"Thank you for coming," I said, my hand on his shoulder. "You didn't have to do this, Walter. I'm never gonna forget it."
He turned back and faced me. "It has nothing to do with you," he said. "Nothing."
On a cold, cloudy Thursday, at eleven o'clock in the morning, I parked Walter's Cadillac in downtown Woodside and set out at a keen pace for the campus. Two-and three-story buildings lined both sides of the street, which was quite busy for a small town. People filled the sidewalks, sitting on benches, gliding along on Roller-blades, on gazing into storefront windows. Most were students, and they vivified the town, easily identifiable by their backpacks and the unbridled, merry apathy in their faces.
I passed a drugstore, the Woodside General Store, the Valley Café, several apparel stores, and a coffee shop called Beans n' Bagels, in front of which, canopied tables cluttered the sidewalk. It was the liveliest store by far, brimming with caffeine junkies and quirky music. The rich smell of roasted coffee beans mingled with the air outside the open vestibule. I would've bought myself a cup had I not downed two at the Woodside Inn, where Walter still slept in our room, drained from the previous day of driving.
The buildings ended, but the sidewalk continued from the downtown toward the wooded campus. I could now see the mountains that surrounded the town, the highest slopes already white with early snow. I wondered how many students had skipped classes for a day of skiing. A steely wind made my eyes water and I zipped my leather jacket all the way up to my chin and dug my hands into the warm pockets.
A brick walkway veered off from the main sidewalk toward a group of brick buildings. Heading up the walkway, I reached a hexagonal white gazebo within several minutes. It appeared to stand in the exact center of campus, as most of the buildings, each not more than forty yards away, surrounded it. Plaques had been nailed to each side of the gazebo, engraved with WOODSIDE COLLEGE, EST. 1800."
I passed beneath the portico of a stone-columned building, the largest of the ten or so in the vicinity, and walked up the steps. A great clock surmounted the roof, surrounded by scaffolding, its black hands stuck suspiciously on 4:20.
Inside, the building was dim and stale. The floor was constructed of burnished marble, and the walls of the foyer, wooden and intricately carved, were adorned with large portraits of former deans, founders, and dead professors. A life-size statue stood in the center of the circular room, staring vacuously at me. I didn't stop to see who he was.
Glass double doors led into the office of the university registrar. I caught my reflection as I pushed them open --- my hair and recent beard now brown, a pair of wire-framed spectacles on the bridge of my nose. In jeans and wearing a faded denim shirt under my jacket, I looked nothing like myself.
In the bright windowless room, there were several open cubicles, each holding a desk and portioned off from the cubicle next to it. I walked to the closest one, where a woman typed fervidly on a computer. She looked up from the screen and smiled as I approached.
"May I help you?" she asked. I sat down in the chair before her desk. The constant pecking of fingers on keyboards would've driven me insane.
"I need a campus map, a class directory for this semester, and a campus phone book."
She opened a filing cabinet and withdrew a booklet and a blue pamphlet.
"Here's a map and here's the phone book," she said, setting the items on her tidy desk. "I'll have to get a class directory from the closet." She walked across the room, mumbling something to another secretary as she passed. I opened the phone book. It was only fifty pages thick, with the faculty listings in the first ten pages and those of the two thousand students in the remaining forty. I thumbed through it to the P's.
I skipped over the entries for Page and Paine, then spotted "Parker, David L." The information given beneath the name was sparse --- only an office number --- Gerard 209 --- and a corresponding phone number.
The woman returned and handed me a directory of classes. "Here you are, sir."
"Thanks. Are the students in class today?" I asked, rising.
She shook her head doubtfully. "They're supposed to be," she said, "but this is the first cold snap of the season, so a fair number probably played hooky to go skiing."
I thanked her again, then walked out of the office and into the foyer, where I passed three college girls standing in a circle beside the statue, whispering to each other. Exiting the building, I walked through snow flurries to the gazebo and sat down on the bench that circumnavigated the interior of the structure. First, I unfolded the map and located Gerard Hall. I could see it from where I sat, a two-story building that displayed the same charmingly decrepit brick as the others.
With hot breath, I warmed my hands, then opened the directory of classes, a thick booklet, its first ten pages crammed with mountains of information regarding registering for classes and buying books. I found an alphabetical listing of the classes and their schedules, and flipping through anthropology, biology, communications, English, and French, stopped finally at the roster of history classes for fall '96. There was a full page of history courses, and I skimmed down the list until I saw his name:
Hist 089 History of Rome LEC 3.0 35
26229 001 TR 11:00AM-12:15PM HD 107 Parker, D.L.
It appeared to be the only course he taught, and, glancing at my watch, I realized that it was currently in session.
According to the building abbreviation key, HD stood for Howard Hall. I found it on the blue map. Just twenty yards away, it was one of the closest buildings to the gazebo. An apprehensive knocking started in my chest as I looked down the walkway leading to its entrance.
Before I could dissuade myself, I was walking down the steps, away from the gazebo, heading toward Howard Hall. To the left of the registrar's building, it made up the eastern wall of the quasi courtyard surrounding the gazebo. Two students smoked on the steps, and I passed them and touched the door, thinking, What if this isn't him? Then I'll go to prison, and Walter and his family will die.
As the door closed behind me, I heard his voice. It haunted the first floor of Howard Hall, its soft-spoken intensity reeling me back to the Wyoming desert. I walked slowly on, leaving the foyer, where political notices, ads for roommates, and a host of other flyers papered the walls. In the darker hall, light spilled from one door. I heard a collection of voices, then an outburst of laughter. Orson's voice rose above the rumblings of his students, and I turned right and walked down the hallway, taking care my steps didn't echo off the floor.
His voice grew louder, and I could soon understand every word. Stopping several feet from the doorway, I leaned against the wall. From the volume of laughter, I approximated the class size at thirty or forty students. Orson spoke again, his voice directly across from me on the other side of the wall. Though I wanted to run, to hide in a closet or a bathroom stall far from that voice, I remained to listen, trusting he'd have no reason to step into the hall.
"I want you to put your pens and pencils down," he said, and the sound of writing implements falling onto wood engulfed the room. "To understand history, you have to see it. It's more than words on a page. It happened. You can't ever forget that. Put your head on your desk," he said. "Everybody. Go on. Now close your eyes." His footsteps approached the door. He flipped a switch, the room went black, and the footsteps trailed away.
"Megalomania," he said. "Somebody tell me what it means."
A male voice sounded in the dark. "Delusions of omnipotence."
"Good," Orson said. "It's a mental disorder, so keep that in mind, too."
The professor kept silent for half a minute, and the room was still. When he spoke again, his voice had a controlled, musical resonance.
"The year is A.D. thirty-nine," he began. "You're a Roman senator, and you and your wife have been invited to watch the gladiatorial games with the young emperor, Gaius Caligula.
"During the lunch interlude, as humiliores are executed ad bestias before a rejoicing crowd, Caligula stands up, takes your wife by the hand, and leaves with her, escorted by his guards.
"You know exactly what's happening, and it's apparent to the other senators, because the same thing has happened to their wives. But you do nothing. You just sit on the stone steps, under the blue, spring sky, watching the lions chase their prey.
"An hour later, Gaius returns with your wife. When she sits down beside you, you notice a purple bruise on her face. She's rattled, her clothes are torn, and she refuses to look at you. There are six other senators who've been invited along with you, and suddenly you hear Caligula speak to them.
" 'Her breasts are quite small,' he says, loudly enough for everyone around to hear. 'She's a sexual bore. I'd rather watch the lions feed than fuck her...again.'
"He laughs and pats you on the back, and everyone laughs with him. No one contradicts Gaius. No one challenges the emperor. It's pure sycophancy, and you sit there, boiling, wishing you'd never come. But to speak one word against Caligula would be your family's certain death. It's best just to keep silent and pray you never receive another invitation."
Orson's footsteps approached the doorway. I stepped back, but he'd only come for the lights. The room filled with the sound of students shifting in their seats and reopening notebooks.
"Next Tuesday," he said, "we'll talk about Caligula. I notice some of your classmates aren't with us today, and that may or may not have something to do with the snowstorm in the mountains last night." The class laughed. It was obvious by now that his students adored him.
"There will be a quiz on Caligula next Tuesday. Know the basics. When was he born? When did he become emperor? When and how did he die? Read chapter twenty-one in your text, and you shouldn't have a problem. I think you'll find him to be one of the most complex, intriguing, yet misunderstood rulers in Roman history." He paused. "Have a nice weekend."
I heard notebooks closing and backpacks zipping. Then the class seemed to rise all at once and dash for the door. Orson would be coming, too.
Across the hall, a door was ajar. I pushed my way through the students and slipped unseen into a dark, empty classroom. Then, peering through the cracked door, I waited for him to emerge.
22
ORSON descended the steps and started down the walkway. I waited inside the foyer of Howard Hall, watching him through the window beside the door. Dressed in a beige wool suit, a red bow tie, and green suspenders, he carried a tan briefcase and wore gold wire-framed glasses. When he was beyond the gazebo, I opened the door and followed him as he strode quickly across campus and disappeared into Gerard Hall.
As I approached his building, the light snow continued. The temperature had dropped as the day progressed, and the sky, only partly overcast this morning, was now completely masked by low gray clouds, which grazed the mountain peaks.
Gerard Hall was one of the smaller buildings on campus --- two stories and narrow. Its name was incised into the stone pediment above the door. I felt exposed standing out in front of Orson's building in the cold. His office was on the second floor, but he could be anywhere inside, and while from a distance I felt safe, I knew that in proximity, my brother would instantly know my eyes.
I sat on the steps for five minutes, until I'd worked up the nerve to go inside. But as I stood to reach for the door handle footsteps pounded on a hardwood floor, and looking through the window, I saw a figure appear from the hallway. I turned away and leaned against the black railing just as the door opened.
I smelled her perfume before I saw her. An older woman, still beautiful, cascaded down the steps in high heels and a black overcoat. Her blond hair, streaked with silver, jounced as she walked away on a path leading to the town. I peeked again through the tall, slim window by the door, then, seeing only the empty foyer, pulled the handle and stepped inside.
Without voices, or fingers on keyboards, the fluorescent lights hummed deafeningly overhead as they shone hard light upon the dusty floor. According to a glass-encased magnetic message board, this was the office building of the history department, and the last names of professors and their respective office numbers were displayed in white lettering behind the glass. Looking down the hallway, I saw there were stairwells at both ends. Arbitrarily, I turned left and started walking to the stairs, passing four unmarked doors and a janitor's closet.
Jazz music poured softly from the second floor. I stopped at the top of the stairwell and looked into the hallway. All the fluorescent lights were out save one, which flickered sporadically at the other end. The only constant light emanated from two open and opposing doorways, where voices rose in conversation above a moaning trumpet.
In the shadows, I walked toward the first office along the corridor. It was closed, and a brass nameplate affixed to the door read STCHYKENSKI 206. Across the hall, someone typed inside of 207, where light and classical music escaped in slivers beneath the door.
On the right side, fifteen feet down the hall, Orson's door stood wide open, the wonder of Miles Davis's "Blue in Green" lingering in the doorway. I inched forward until I could see into Orson's empty office, and hear the conversation in the room across from his.
"I'm not sure yet," Orson was saying.
"David, there's no rush. We just need to make the decision before Christmas. I think the deadline's the twenty-first of December."
"That's plenty of time," Orson said. "I just want to finish a thorough reading of his publications. I like what I've seen so far, but I want to be sure, Jack."
"We all do," Jack said, "and right now what I'm hearing from the others is that Dr. Harris would fit in nicely. Those of us who've read his work think he's more than qualified."
Footsteps reverberated in the opposite stairwell, and I backed away.
"Damn," Orson said. "I've got to meet with a student. How about lunch tomorrow?"
"Splendid."
A chair squeaked, and I ran down the hall. There was a men's bathroom on my right that I'd unwittingly passed before, and I slipped inside as Orson stepped from Jack's office into the hall. In the dark bathroom, a faucet dripped into the sink. Cracking the door, I glanced back into the hallway. Orson now stood in the threshold of his office, leaning against the door frame and speaking to a pudgy girl with walnut hair and a pale white face. She wore a backpack on the outside of her yellow rain jacket, and she smiled as Orson invited her into his office and shut the door.
I let the bathroom door close, immersing myself in darkness. Closing my eyes, I took steady breaths until the banging in my chest subsided.
Suddenly, I remembered --- walking up the steps, I'd seen a red box with the word Fire on it.
I opened the door. Orson's was still closed, so I ran from the hallway into the stairwell. The fire alarm was mounted on the wall, and I stopped and looked back down the hallway. Now the only light came from Jack's office.
I pulled the white handle and the alarm screamed.
Back inside the bathroom, the darkness now riddled with blinking lights, I found my way into a stall and sat down on the toilet. The door opened, someone shouted, and then it closed again, the darkness assuring whoever had entered that the men's room was vacant. After thirty seconds, I walked to the door.
The floor vacated, most of the doors were open now, brightening the hallway considerably. I ran toward 209 as the alarm rang. Empty. Rushing inside, I shut the door behind me and moved to the window. Outside, a crowd was gathering at the building's entrance, people staring up in wonder, looking for the smoke. It was snowing hard now, sticking to the grass, melting on the brick. I wondered how long it'd take the fire department to arrive.
There were no filing cabinets. I opened the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk and found it stuffed with graded papers and tests. The drawer above it overflowed with supplies --- pens, pencils, several legal pads. Two roll books and two packs of note cards filled the drawer in the center, and the left-hand drawers were both empty. No trophies. No photographs. But this did not surprise me. He was too careful to keep them here. I'd known it, but I had to check.
A monitor, processor, and keyboard stood separately on the floor --- an old Tandy 1000 with the letters and numbers worn completely off the keys. There was a bookshelf on either side of the window. I glanced at the titles but found nothing peculiar. They were history texts, most on ancient Rome and Greece. A poster of Athens and a framed photograph of Orson standing in the Coliseum hung on the wall in front of his desk.
A stack of unopened envelopes lay on top of his desk, and I picked them up. Of the four, three had been addressed to his school office, the other to 617 Jennings Road, Woodside, Vermont. Yes. Grabbing a pen and a sheet of paper from the supply drawer, I copied down the address. Then I looked through the drawers once more to make sure I hadn't disturbed anything. Orson would know.
The fire alarm stopped ringing. Stuffing his address in my pocket, I opened the door. Though still quiet in this hall, there were firemen on the floor below --- I could hear their shouting and heavy footsteps. Rushing to the stairwell on the right, I looked down, then, seeing nothing, descended the steps. At the bottom, I saw two firemen in the first-floor hallway disappear into different rooms. There was an exit at the side of the building, and I bolted for the door and sprinted down stone steps into snowy grass. After fifty yards, I slowed to a walk, and glancing over my shoulder, saw the people still waiting in front of the building, Orson among them.
The snow had let up and was now falling in big downy flakes. Exhilarated, I walked through frosted grass back toward the town. Walter and I still had to dig Orson's hole before dark.
23
WE waited until 6:30, when the cloudy sky darkened into slate. I drove the Cadillac onto 116, a lonely stretch of highway that shot through the wilderness between Woodside and Bristol. Little snow remained in the valley now. The temperature had hovered in the upper thirties throughout the evening, melting the half inch of wet snow that had fallen in the early afternoon.
Pines blitzed by on both sides of the road. I could smell them even from inside the car --- a clean, bitter scent. We passed several picnic areas and a campground, all part of the Green Mountain National Forest. But I wanted land where people never walked. The campgrounds were empty now, and their trails offered easy access to the woods. But if the weather turned warm again, which undoubtedly it would do before the ground froze for the winter, people would flock to these trails, some with dogs. I didn't have the time or energy to dig that deep a hole.
I'd been driving for ten minutes when the shoulder widened to two car lengths. Slowing down, I swerved off the road, and the tires slid to a stop in the muddy grass. I turned off the engine and the headlights and looked through the windshield and the rearview mirror. The highway stretched on, dark and empty.
"You think this spot is safe?" Walter asked.
"Safe as any," I said, pulling the keys from the ignition.
I opened the door and stepped down into the cold, wet grass. The sound of our doors slamming resounded through the woods. Opening the trunk, we each took a shovel and a pair of leather gloves to keep our hands from going numb.
I led us back into the trees. We didn't go far, because it'd be difficult to find this place on a moonless night. We'd be carrying Orson, and stumbling through the woods with him would be hard enough. The white pines dripped snowmelt, and within moments, I was shivering and miserable, thinking of the fireplace at the Woodside Inn.
Forty yards in, I stopped. The trees grew so close to one another that the highway was now invisible. I drew an arrow in the pine needles, pointing toward the road. If we somehow became disoriented in the forest, we could wander out here all night looking for the highway.
"Let's dig," I said, motioning to a level space between the trees.
I stabbed my shovel through the pine needles, and it cut into the moist earth below. The work was initially difficult because we were cold, but the exertion soon drew sweat. In no time, I could feel only the biting chill in my ruddy cheeks.
We traced the outline first. Then we began to dig, and with the two of us working, we'd soon gone two feet down. When I thought it was sufficiently deep, I lay in the hole and Walter measured how far an animal would have to dig to reach me: There'd be a foot of earth between Orson and the forest floor.
I climbed out and brushed the dirt from my jeans, now damp and mud-streaked. Walter leaned against the trunk of a red spruce and lit a cigarette. In the blue dusk, there was no detail in his face, but I could tell that he stared at me strangely, the tobacco cinder glowing and fading.
"What?" I asked, but he shook his head. "No, what is it?" I'd begun to shiver again.
"We're actually going to kill a man."
"Not a man, Walter. The man who's threatened to sic a psychopath on your family."
"You might not be scared, Andy, but I'm shitting my pants. I hardly slept last night. I can't stop thinking that a million things could go wrong tomorrow. He could escape. Kill us. He might even know we're here. You considered that? He's a psychopath, and we're fucking with him."
A twig snapped in the distance.
"Aren't you doing this for your family?" I asked. "Think about them when you're scared. What it'll feel like to see the animal who threatened Jenna bleeding in that hole."
The woods had become unnervingly dark.
"It may get rough tomorrow," I said. "We may have to...do things to him if he won't tell us what we need to know. You up for that?"
"I will be."
Walter started in the direction of the highway. I picked up my shovel and followed him, counting the steps from Orson's grave to the edge of the forest. When we emerged from the trees, the highway was silent, and a cold fog was descended from the high country. I could only see a hundred yards down the road now --- beyond, an impenetrable black mist.
I left my shovel leaning against the largest pine tree I could find. We would need some marker to find this place at night. As we climbed back into the car and the interior lights came on and the seat belt warning beeped, something sank inside of me. Walter was wrong. Perhaps the foggy dusk intensified it, but I was afraid. Driving back toward the inn, my hands trembled as they gripped the steering wheel. I wondered in the back of my mind if I could do it. In spite of everything he'd done, Orson was my brother. My twin. There was a bond.
Walter and I didn't speak. I imagined our silence might be analogous to that which develops between soldiers who have a bloody task ahead of them. No place for superficial chatter. Only an intense focus on the coming hours, and mental preparation to do a horrible thing.
24
FRIDAY, early afternoon, as the sun reached its apogee and crossed into the western sky, my bed resembled a small arsenal: my subcompact .40 Glock; Walter's full-size .45; two boxes of Remington .40-caliber 180-grain semijacketed hollow-points; two boxes of Remington .45-caliber 185-grain semijacketed hollow-points; two extra magazines for each handgun; a pair of Amherst RS446 walkie-talkies; eighteen vials of benzodiazepines; one vial of antidote; three hypodermic needles; latex gloves; leather gloves; a penlight; handcuffs; and two mechanic's suits I'd purchased from an Army-Navy surplus store in Davidson.
The benzodiazepines had been tricky to come by. Walter's motherin-law suffered from a panic disorder, and among the sundry medications she stockpiled was a medium-acting sedative called Ativan. He'd helped himself to thirteen 1-mL vials. According to our on-line research, this would be sufficient to keep Orson sedated for a couple of days if need be. The downside, however, was that the onset of Ativan took upward of twenty minutes, and I needed something that could knock Orson down in less than two.
So I'd done a very bad thing.
Horror writers get away with murder in the pursuit of realism, and over the years, I'd befriended attorneys, detectives, and professionals in various fields, all of whom had graciously consulted with me on the accuracy of my novels. The investigative and courtroom procedures in my stories are religiously unerring. I always get the gun right. A coroner friend of mine even let me sit in on an autopsy, just so I could nail the olfactory experience in the opening chapter of my latest book.
There's a vignette in Blue Murder where the protagonist steals drugs from a hospital. So in the course of my research for the book, I'd asked my doctor, "If you wanted to steal narcotics from a hospital, how would you do it?" Writers can ask these questions, and no one suspects their motives because "it's for the book," and they show up in the acknowledgments.
He told me exactly what to do, and goddamn if he wasn't right. His advice: "Raid the recovery room. It doesn't matter if the narcotics are locked up, as long as the keys are left in drawers that aren't. Pray for incompetent nurses. Know where the cameras are. Acquire a janitor's uniform, and stay busy long enough to see where the keys to the narcotics cabinet are kept."
Thanks to careless, unobservant nurses in the recovery room, two days before we left for Woodside, I walked out of Mercy Hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina, with five 1-mL vials of the short-acting benzodiazepine, Versed. Used for sedation in surgical procedures, when administered intravenously, it can render someone unconscious inside of ninety seconds. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to induce respiratory depression, so I'd stolen a vial of its antidote, flumazenil, as well.
In addition to my larceny, I'd extensively researched intravenous and intramuscular injection. I knew the dosages and monographs for Ativan and Versed. I'd done my homework, had reliable firearms, and a well-devised plan. As Walter and I sat on opposite love seats, pushing the brass-shelled hollow-points into the magazines, a calmness settled upon me. We're actually doing it, I thought. Who does this kind of thing? Pretty fucking gutsy. It'd make one hell of a book.
While Walter took a catnap, I went downstairs. Dirty dishes and empty wine bottles cluttered the dining room table --- casualties of lunch. I walked back into the kitchen and asked the chef if he would make me a turkey sandwich. He didn't want to. Lunch had already been served. But reluctantly, he agreed and said I could wait by the fire.
I sat down in a rocking chair. In the brick hearth, a fire was in the process of burning out. I imagined it had been blazing in the early-morning hours, before the dusting of snow had melted, as other guests planned their day. It still warmed the snug sitting area, though now halfheartedly. As I waited, I stared at the only remaining log. It glowed underneath, the embers slowly eating it away, turning the wood to ash and smoke.
In the nearby lounge, a TV blared. I heard the voice of Agent Trent, discussing recent developments in the search for the Heart Surgeon.
A couple walking by on their way to the front door glanced curiously at my outfit. A gray one-piece mechanic's suit was anomalous attire for this upscale inn.
Jennings Road branched left off of Main Street, a mile beyond the college. Leafless sugar maples and birches shielded the road from the sky as it climbed a hillside. There were mounds of leaves along the sides of the road. I pictured them in full, fiery color, littered across the street and through the lawns, turning this small New England neighborhood into a mystical universe all its own.
Near the top of the hill, on a black mailbox in slanted white numbers, I saw 617. Walter slowed the car, but I told him to drive casually by and park a ways up the street. As we continued on, I gazed at Orson's home, disbelieving I'd actually found it. From the outside, it was modestly elegant. A white two-story house, with dormer windows protruding from the second floor, larger bay windows from the first. A split-rail fence enclosed the front lawn, and flowers grew along a brick walkway that curved from the driveway to the front porch. There was no garage, and there were presently no cars in the driveway.
We crested the hill and Walter parked near the curb, scattering a pile of leaves. He turned off the engine and looked warily at me as I reached under my seat and grabbed the walkie-talkies.
"Channel eight, subchannel seventeen," I said, handing one to Walter. We adjusted our frequencies accordingly. "We passed a diner before we turned onto Jennings. Wait there. This car looks conspicuous sitting up here, especially with an out-of-state tag. You'll get the first communication at the diner. I'll say, 'Go, Papa.' That'll mean he's home, so get your ass up here and start circling the neighborhood. The second communication will be 'Bring it home,' and that means come to six seventeen and back into the driveway. I'll want you to open the trunk for me and get back in the car. When you're inside and the trunk's open, I'll bring him out. He'll be unconscious. I'll put him in the trunk, and you'll drive us to his hole on One sixteen. Any questions?"
"No."
"Don't break radio silence unless it's an emergency. If you have to, call me Wilma. I'll call you Fred. You never know who might be listening. Also, don't forget the channels. Eight and seventeen. Write it on your hand." I clipped on my walkie-talkie and lifted the cumbersome fanny pack from the floorboard. Then I strapped it around my waist, opened the door, and stepped out into the cool afternoon.
"It's only four-thirty," I said, "so it may be several hours before you hear from me." I shut the door, and he drove on down the mountain, disappearing around a bend in the road.
I walked back up the hill, and as I passed over the crest, the town of Woodside appeared before me. I wondered if in spring or summer, when leaves fattened the trees, it would be difficult to see the town, hundreds of feet below. But the naked trees revealed the foothill community --- Main Street, the college, even glimpses of the downtown a mile and a half north. A lovely neighborhood. There might be hundreds like it in the New England countryside, thousands across the country itself. Who'd ever suspect the Heart Surgeon lived here, among these pastoral dwellings in Woodside suburbia?
I walked up Orson's driveway to a chest-high white fence that picketed the backyard. As I scaled and then straddled it, I wondered if he owned a dog. When my feet hit the grass on the other side, I stayed on all fours, scanning the lawn for a doghouse, listening for the jingle of a chain. Nothing moved in the beautiful grass. A northern white cedar overshadowed the backyard, but there was no dog.
I walked around the corner. A stone patio with white plastic lawn chairs extended from the back of the house. I moved across the grass onto the patio, where French doors led into a solarium. Creeping up to the doors, I peeked through the glass. No lights were on, but peering through the shadows, I could see beyond the sunroom into the kitchen. The house seemed empty. I tried the door, but it was locked. There was no dead bolt, though, and I was relieved I would have to break only a single pane of glass.
I withdrew a pair of leather gloves from the fanny pack and grabbed a baseball-size rock lying in a flaccid garden adjacent to the patio. When the gloves were on, I shoved the rock through the pane nearest the doorknob. There was a concussive crack, and splinters of glass spilled across the floor inside. Still holding the rock, I listened for the sound of an alarm, but the house remained silent. I dropped the rock and turned the lock.
The warm breath of central heating caressed my face as the doors swung open. I stepped inside, removed the leather gloves, and put them back in the fanny pack. After wiping my fingerprints off the outside doorknob, I squeezed my hands into a pair of latex gloves and pulled the doors closed behind me.
I distrusted the silence. Standing in a sunroom, I noticed the fading light filtering in through long, curved panels of glass. Wicker chairs had been placed somewhat erratically across the brick-patterned linoleum floor, and potted plants lent the room the earthy bouquet of a greenhouse. I moved cautiously across the floor, my footfalls crunching bits of glass. Taking my Glock from the fanny pack, I chambered the first bullet, praying I wouldn't have to fire the unsilenced weapon in this tranquil neighborhood. Walter and I had been unable to locate black-market silencers.
From the solarium, I proceeded into the kitchen, which was decked out with white appliances on miles of counter space. I examined pictures on the refrigerator of a white-water rafting trip, and of Orson and a woman I'd never seen before, standing arm in arm on the barren summit of a mountain.
To the right, a doorway led into a dining room, complete with china hutch, chandelier, and a mahogany table set with crystal, silver, and china on a white tablecloth.
But I went through the doorway to the left, leaving the kitchen and entering the living room. Orson had impeccable taste. Over the mantel there hung a print of Odilon Redon's monochromatic Anthony: What Is the Object of All This? The Devil: There is No Object. Incidentally, the subject of the black lithograph looked jarringly similar to the man who'd stopped me for an autograph on my mother's street. Luther. In the far left corner stood an old Steinway upright piano, and before the gas-log fireplace, a Persian rug spread across the floor, framed by a futon and two burgundy leather chairs. A staircase ascended to my immediate right, and just ahead, at the foot of its steps, loomed the front door.
I walked through the living room, my steps resonating on the hardwood floor. A doorway on the left wall, near the Steinway, opened into a library, and I crossed the threshold into the room of books.
It smelled good in his study, like aged paper and cigars. A lavish desk dominated the center of the room, identical to the one in my office. Even his swivel chair was the same. Sifting through the drawers, I found nothing. Every letter was addressed to Dr. David Parker, and most of the files consisted of research materials on ancient Rome. There weren't even pictures on the desk --- just a computer, a cedar humidor filled with Macanudo Robusto cigars, and a decanter of cognac.
The walls were covered by bookcases. The titles indicated the same specific, academic sort of subject matter as the books I'd seen in his office: Agrarian Society in Rome in the Third Century B.C. Tribunal Policy and Imperial Power Before Caesar. Foreign Relations: Rome, Carthage, and the Punic Wars.
The low shudder of a car engine pulled me to the window. I split the blinds with two fingers and watched a white Lexus sedan turn into Orson's driveway. I waited, my stomach twisting into knots. If Orson came in through the back door, he'd see the broken glass.
He appeared suddenly, walking swiftly up the sidewalk in an olive suit, briefcase in hand. I stepped back from the blinds, dropped to my knees, and crawled under his desk.
A key slid into the dead bolt, and the front door opened. Orson whistled as he strode inside, and I drew back as far as I could into the darkness under the desk. His footsteps moved through the living room, then into the study. A deafening clump shook the desk and set my heart palpitating. He'd dropped his briefcase on the desktop. As he came around the desk toward the chair, I readied the gun.
A phone rang somewhere in the house. He stopped. I could see his legs now, his pointed black wing tips. I smelled him --- clean, cologne-sweet, familiar. The scent of our sweat after a long day was identical. The phone rang again, and he rushed out of the study, mumbling something indecipherable under his breath.
He answered from the kitchen after the third ring. "Hello?...Hi, Arlene.... Yes, of course.... Well, why don't you, then? We'll put something on.... No, don't do that. And just come on in.... All right. Sounds good. See you then."
He hung up the phone and went back into the living room. For a moment, I thought he was returning to the study, and I raised the gun. But his footsteps died away as he ran up the staircase.
Shaking, I climbed out from under the desk. As the shower cut on upstairs, I squatted down, took the walkie-talkie from the fanny pack, and pressed the talk button.
"Wilma," I whispered. "Wilma? Over?"
"Over." Walter's voice crackled back through the speaker. I lowered the volume. "You're Wilma. I'm Fred," he said.
"He's here," I whispered. "Upstairs, taking a shower."
"Did you find ---"
"Can't talk now. Go, Papa."
"What?"
"Get up here and wait for the next signal."
I turned off the walkie-talkie and walked into the living room. The staircase was carpeted, so my footsteps fell silently as I ascended to the second floor. Emerging in the center of a dim hallway, I saw there was a bedroom at each end, and a closed door directly ahead, which, because it glowed underneath, I presumed to be the bathroom. Orson's shoes, his navy-speckled brown socks, black belt, and olive suit trailed right up to the door.
He sang the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" in the shower.
I stepped toward the bathroom. Open the door, slip inside, and then stick him with the needle through the shower curtain....
The doorbell rang, and I froze in the hallway, wondering if he'd heard it, too. After five seconds, the shower cut off, and I heard the plop of wet feet on tile and cloth rubbing frantically over skin. I ran down the hallway, then into the bedroom on the right. Because there were clothes strewn all over the floor, I assumed this was his room. To my right, a dormer window overlooked Jennings Road and, beyond it, the snowy Adirondacks. Pillows filled the alcove, and I couldn't help thinking that Orson must spend a great deal of time reading in that dormer nook.
A roomy walk-in closet opened to my left, and I darted inside as the bathroom door opened. The doorbell rang again, and Orson shouted, "I told you to just come in!" as he rushed down the staircase.
I did not hear him answer the door. Jostling my way between hangers of mothball-stinking suits and stiff sweaters, I finally ducked down in the farthest corner of the dark closet.
After a moment, Orson came back up the stairs and entered his room. I saw him briefly through the hangers --- naked, stepping into a pair of boxer shorts and blue jeans, still conjoined on the floor, just as he'd left them. He stood shirtless in front of a full-length mirror, combing his wet hair, grown out now from the crew cut he'd sported in the desert. Grinning at himself, he bared his teeth, mouthing words into the mirror, none of which I could understand. It was the first good look I'd had of my brother, and I drank it in.
Still in marvelous physical condition, his appearance was more civilized and handsome than in the desert. He radiated charisma, and his eyes sparkled.
"Pour yourself a glass of wine!" he yelled. "There's a pinot noir in the wine rack!"
Orson opened a dresser drawer and perused it for a moment, finally lifting out a gray box cutter. He exposed the razor, a small blade that obtruded no more than an inch from its metal sheath. Fingering the edge with his thumb, he smiled at himself again in the mirror.
"You behave." He giggled. "You behave tonight."
"Dave?"
Orson spun around. "Arlene. You scared me."
Her voice came from the top of the stairs. "Where's the wine rack?"
"Kitchen counter." He held the box cutter behind his back. From my angle, I could see it in the mirror as he fidgeted with it, pushing the blade in and out. "Oh, Arlene. Put on some music, will you? Miles Davis, if you don't mind."
Retracting the blade, he slipped the box cutter into his back pocket, and continued to primp.
Through the dormer window, the last strands of sunlight receded behind the Adirondacks. It was tempting to hide in that closet for the entire night, cloistered safely behind hangers, between smelly old garments. But I steeled myself, pushed my way through the clothes, and stumbled at last out of his closet.
Their voices rose to the second floor. I heard my brother laugh, and the tinkle of silverware on china. It'd taken me an hour to summon the nerve to walk out of the closet. Thank God they're still eating. It suddenly occurred to me: The broken glass. Please don't go into the sunroom.
Since I had his room temporarily to myself, I took the opportunity to check the dresser, the bookshelves, and the closet for the pictures and videos of the desert. I found nothing, however, to substantiate his hobby, not even a journal. In fact, the only item in his bedroom that reflected in a small way Orson's taste for violence was an enormous William Blake print hanging on the wall across from his bed --- The Simoniac Pope, a pen and watercolor hellscape of Pope Nicholas III in a vat of flames, the soles of his feet on fire. I knew this work. It was an illustration of Hell, Canto 19 from Dante's Divine Comedy. Those who didn't know him might be perplexed at Orson's morbid choice of wall decor.
I walked down the hallway and entered the guest room. It was impersonal, filled with ill-matched, eclectic furniture. The closet was empty, as were the two drawers of the bedside table. I doubted if anyone had ever slept in the single bed.
Slinking back into the hallway, I turned and went down several steps. Orson spoke softly in the dining room. Chairs moved, and I heard footsteps heading toward the foyer. I retraced my steps, and when their footsteps continued in my direction, I clawed my way up the staircase, raced back down the hallway, and hid again in his closet.
They entered the room and fell together onto his bed. I heard Orson say, "I like you a lot."
"I like you, too."
"Yeah?"
"I wouldn't be here if I didn't." Arlene sounded as if she was about thirty, and though her voice was throaty, it retained a sliver of girlish innocence. I knew why Orson liked her. The lamp on his bedside table cut off. They kissed for a while in the darkness, and the intimate slurping reminded me of Friday nights, in high school.
"What would you think about me doing this?" he asked.
"Ooooh."
"Yeah?"
"Uh-huh." The room fell silent for a moment, excepting the moist sucking murmurs.
"Can you guess what I have in my back pocket?" Orson said finally.
"Mmm. What?"
"You have to guess, silly."
"Is it round and crinkly?"
"Actually, it's hard."
"Mmm." She shuddered in a good way. I could hear the alcohol thickening up her voice.
"And very sharp."
"Huh?"
"You told any of your friends about me?"
"What do you mean?"
"Does anyone know we've been seeing each other?"
"Why does it matter?"
"Just tell me." I caught a grain of anger in his voice, which I'm sure she didn't register.
"Only the girls at work."
Orson sighed.
"I asked you not to tell anyone. You tell them my name?"
"Why?"
"Arlene, did you tell them my name?"
"I don't remember." Her voice mellowed. "What do you think about this, sweetie?" A zipper started to descend.
There was sudden movement in the dark. "Don't you touch me," he hissed.
The bed squeaked, and I wondered if she'd sat up.
"Turn on the light," she said. "Turn it on!" The light did not come on.
"Did you tell your girlfriends my name?"
"Why are you acting so weird?"
"Tell me, so I can show you what's in my pocket."
"Yes, I told them your ---"
"Goddamnit."
"What?"
"You can go now."
"Why?"
"Leave."
"What is wrong with you? I thought --- I mean...I like you, and I thought ---"
"I had something extraordinarily special planned for us tonight. And you just ruined it. I was going to open you up, Arlene."
"To what?"
"Get out of my house."
The bed moved again, the floor creaked, and it sounded as though clothes were being smoothed.
"I can't believe I --- you need help, David."
"Perhaps."
"You can go to ---"
"I'd advise you to leave while you're still able."
She stormed from his bedroom into the hallway, screamed "Fucking freak!" and was sobbing by the time she reached the front door.
25
ORSON sat for a while in the dark after Arlene left. For some reason, I expected him to cry, to come apart in pathetic flinders when no one was around. But this didn't happen. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I began to make out the shapes in his room --- the painting on the wall, the bookshelves, his legs stretched out on the bed. I could see barbs of light through the dormer window, on the black slopes across the valley.
After thirty minutes, I thought he'd fallen asleep, and I began to psych myself up to crawl out of the closet and do what I'd come here to do. But when I started to move, he sat up abruptly. Stiffening, I watched his arms reach down under the bed and lift what appeared to be a shoe box up onto the mattress. Orson slipped out of his loafers and kicked them in opposite directions across the room. One hurtled into the closet and nearly struck me in the head.
I heard a mechanical clicking. He settled back onto the mattress and began speaking in a low, monotonous voice: "It is...seven forty-three P.M. on Friday, November eighth. Arlene came over this evening. I told you about her. That legal assistant from Bristol. It was going to happen tonight. I thought about it all day. All week. But she'd mentioned me --- my name, I mean --- to some of her coworkers, so that's the end of that. It was an exercise in self-control. I'd never used a box cutter before, so I'm more than a little disappointed that tonight didn't work out. If I go much longer without any play, I may resort to doing something careless, like that time in Burlington. But you made the rule never to do that in this town, and it's an intelligent rule, so don't fuck things up." He stopped the Dictaphone, but then pushed the record button again.
"Last thing. I was on-line today, and I saw that James Keiller's second appeal was denied. Guess that means they'll be setting an execution date in the near term. That's a beautiful thing, what I did there. It really is. I may have to make the trip out to Nebraska when they juice him. And I do believe they juice 'em in the Cornhusker State."
He returned the Dictaphone to the shoe box and took out something else. Climbing out of bed, he walked toward his dresser, upon which sat a TV/VCR combo. He inserted a videotape and turned on the TV. As it started to play, he lay down on his stomach, his head at the edge of the mattress, propped up on his elbows, chin cupped in his hands.
It was in color. Oh God. The shed. I resisted a surge of nausea.
"This is Cindy, and she just failed the test. Say hi, Cindy."
The woman was tied to the pole, with that leather collar around her neck. Orson turned the camera on himself, sweaty-faced, eyes twinkling, beaming, bridelike.
"Cindy has chosen the six-inch boning knife."
"Stop it!" she shrieked.
I plugged my ears and shut my eyes. The fear in her voice sickened me. Even with the volume muffled, I could still hear the most piercing of screams. On the bed, Orson was making noise, too. I squinted and saw that he'd turned over on his back and was watching the screen upside down, jerking off.
The footage of Orson killing her wasn't terribly long, so he watched it over and over. If I hyperfocused on my heartbeat, I found that I could block out the television and Orson's groans almost completely. Counting the beats, I worked my way up to 704.
When my eyes opened, the room was silent. I'd nodded off, and it horrified me to think I might've been snoring or lost precious hours asleep in his closet. Checking my watch, I saw that 9:30 had just passed, and I felt relief knowing that Walter and I still had the majority of the night to kill my brother.
From the bed --- deep breathing. I recognized the pattern of Orson's long exhalations. Almost certain he was asleep, I withdrew a syringe and a vial of Versed. Flicking off the plastic cap, I stuck the hollow needle through the rubber seal and pulled the plunger back until the bottle was empty. I then aspirated the contents of two more vials. With fifteen milligrams of Versed in the syringe, I secured the caps and placed the three empty vials back into my fanny pack, closing the zipper so slowly, I couldn't even hear the minute teeth biting back together. The needle in my left hand, the Glock in my right, I poked my head through the hangers and proceeded to inch my way out.
As I came to my feet on the hardwood floor of the walk-in closet, it occurred to me that he might not be asleep. Perhaps he was merely resting, breathing patiently in a yogic trance. After three steps, I stood at the threshold of the closet, staring down at Orson on the bed.
His chest rose and fell in an unhurried rhythm indicative of sleep. I went down on my knees, held the plastic syringe with my teeth, and crawled across the dusty floor. At the edge of his bed, I stopped and spurned another wave of nausea and hyperventilation. Sweat trickled down my forehead and smarted in my eyes. Under the latex skin, my hands were wet.
Squatting down on the floor, I took the syringe from my mouth, then, holding it up before my face, squirted a brief stream through the shaft of the needle to remove air bubbles. Orson shifted on the bed. His back had been to me, but he turned over, so that we faced each other. All he has to do is open his eyes.
His left arm was beautifully exposed. Withdrawing a penlight and holding it between my teeth, I spotlighted his forearm and could see numerous periwinkle veins under the surface of his skin. With great patience and concentration, I lowered the eye of the needle until it hovered just an inch above his skin. There was a chance this would kill him. Because I was attempting to inject intravenously, the substantial dose of Versed would be tearing through his bloodstream, and when it slammed into his central nervous system, he might stop breathing. Steady hands.
As I slipped the needle into the antecubital vein opposite the elbow, his eyes opened. I injected the drug. Please have hit the vein. Orson shot up and gasped. I let go of the syringe and jumped back, the needle still dangling in his arm. He pulled it out and held it up before his face, flabbergasted.
"Andy?" he whispered, cotton-mouthed. "Andy? How did you..." He swallowed several times, as though something was blocking his windpipe. Standing, I pointed the gun at him.
"Lie back, Orson."
"What did you give me?"
"Lie back!"
He leaned back into the pillows. "God," he said. "That's strong."
He sounded medicated already, and I thought his eyes had closed. I turned on the bedside lamp so I could be sure. They were slits.
"What are you doing, Andy?" he asked. "How did you..." His words trailed off.
"You killed my mother," I said to him.
"I don't think you..." His eyes closed.
"Orson?" I could see the red dot on his arm where the needle had penetrated the skin. "Orson!" He still didn't move, so I reached forward and slapped his face. He groaned, but it was an incoherent response, which only assured me that the drug had taken control of him.
Backpedaling toward the closet, I took the walkie-talkie from my fanny pack.
"Walter?" I said, breathless. "Walt...Fred?"
"Over."
"You close?"
"A hundred yards."
"Get up here and come inside."
I leaned against the wall and wiped the sweat from my eyelids.
Orson lunged from the bed and drilled his head into my stomach before I could even think about my gun. As I lost my breath, he drove his knee between my legs and grabbed the back of my neck with both hands. He butted his forehead into my nose, and I felt the cartilage crunch and then the subsequent burn. Cool blood flowed over my lips.
"What are you thinking, Andy? You can just do this to me?"
I'd just managed to fill my lungs with air, when he shovel-punched me in the gut, right below my navel. As I hunched over, he kneed my face, and I dropped to the floor.
Instantly, he was on me, his fingers digging under my stomach, where my hands retained an iron grip on the Glock. A sharp, brutal pinch speared through my shirt into my back, and I moaned.
"Yeah, you like that, don't you? I'm gonna do it again and again." He'd stuck me with the needle. I felt it wiggling in me. "You're gonna give it up," he said, "and I'm gonna spend the weekend killing you. What were you thinking, Andy? What?"
I kept thinking that I should at least try to fight him, but if I moved, he might wrangle the gun from my hands.
A hard bone pummeled the back of my head, and it hurt like hell. I felt the needle pull out and enter again.
"Ah shit," he muttered. He struck the back of my head again, but it wasn't nearly as powerful a blow. "Ah, fuck you, Andy." He slumped onto the floor, crouching on his hands and knees, trying to preserve his consciousness. "Stay with it," he mumbled. "No. No."
Yanking the needle out of my back, I stood up and moved to the open doorway of his bedroom. My face felt swollen, and I could not see as clearly through my left eye. But the adrenaline masked the pain, even the deep microscopic holes in my back. Beneath the mechanic's suit, lines of blood streamed down my legs. Orson fell over onto his side on the floor.
"No." He sighed sleepily, his speech beginning to slur. "Andy. Don't do things..." He shut his eyes and was still.
There was a knock on the front door. I held the gun by the muzzle and hammered Orson across the forehead until I saw blood. Then I ran into the hallway and rushed down the staircase.
"Walter?" I yelled through the door.
"It's me," he said, and I let him inside. The coldness of the night radiated off his clothes. "Where's your broth --- Oh God, your face..."
"I'm fine. Come on," I said, starting back up the steps. "Put on your latex gloves. He's upstairs."
26
WHILE Walter dragged Orson down the steps in his boxer shorts and rolled him up in the florid Persian rug, I again searched every crevice of my brother's bedroom. Searching under the bed, I located the shoe box of microcassettes and two more videotapes, but this was the extent of my discovery. Another thorough inspection of the closet produced nothing out of the ordinary. In the guest room, I found nothing, and by the time I'd begun a second perusal of the study, I waxed furious.
"You see this?" I said, exiting the hallway on the first floor and lifting the shoe box above my head. "It's all he keeps in his entire house that would clue anyone in to what he is."
In a mechanic's suit like mine, Walter sat on top of Orson, who was now cocooned inside the rug.
"There are more pictures than this," I said. "Pictures of me doing horrible things to people. In a self-storage unit or a safety-deposit box. You know what happens when this son of a bitch can't pay the bill 'cause he's dead? They clear out his space and find pictures of me digging a heart out of a woman's chest." Now you know.
Walter looked at me, but he didn't ask for elaboration. Standing up, he walked across the hardwood floor into Orson's study. He lifted the decanter of cognac and poured himself an immoderately full snifter.
"You want one?" he asked, warming the brandy with a delicate swirling motion of the glass.
"Please." He poured me one, too, and brought it into the living room. We sat down on Orson's futon before the hearth, swirling and sipping our brandies in silence, each waiting for that euphoric calm, though it never fully came.
"Will he tell us?" Walter asked finally.
"Tell us what?"
"About the pictures of you, and the man who wrote on Jenna's arm."
I turned my head and found Walter's eyes, my cheeks candescent with the liquor.
"Absofuckinlutely."
We carried him out the front door and down the steps. The moon shone bone white through the leafless, calligraphic trees. The alcohol numbed my face, diminishing the sting of the cold.
The rug wouldn't fit into the trunk, so we unrolled it and let Orson slide into the dark, empty cavity. I checked his breathing, and though it was steady, they were damn shallow breaths. A light cut on in the house across the street. The figure of a man came to a bay window.
"Come on, Walter," I said. "This is just about the worst place we could be right now."
We headed back down the mountain the way we'd come and turned right onto Main Street. I stared out my window as we passed the campus, its brick walkways lighted but empty. Farther on, I caught a glimpse of the white gazebo, where I'd stood in the snow just yesterday, in search of the man who now lay unconscious in the trunk.
"We got him, didn't we?" I said, and the brandy drew a smirk across my face.
"I'll celebrate when he's got a hundred pounds of cold dirt on top of his face, and we know where the man is who threatened my daughter."
Downtown Woodside was hopping for 10:30 at night. In spite of the cold, students filled the sidewalks. I could see a hundred miniature clouds of breath vapor, and hear their hollering through the glass. Dueling bars on opposite sides of the street had students milling outside the doors in long, anxious lines, waiting to reach the mirthful warmth inside. It made perfect sense to me. It was too cold in this town to do anything but drink.
Seven point eight miles from Beans n' Bagels, Walter eased off the pavement, pulling onto the soft, wide shoulder of 116. He drove through the grass for a hundred yards and stopped in the shadow of two oaks.
"Your shovel's back there," he said. "I saw it against that tree." He leaned back in his seat and killed the engine. I turned around and looked through the back windshield. Up and down the highway, bathed now in blue frozen moonlight, nothing moved.
"How's your face?" he asked.
"My nose feels broken, but it's not." It was hot to the touch, the skin across the bridge having tightened from swelling. My left eye had nearly closed, but, surprisingly, it didn't hurt.
"You wanna help me get him out?" I asked.
Two door slams echoed through the pine forest and up the slopes. An owl hooted somewhere above us, and I pictured it sitting on the flaking branch of a gnarled pine, wide-eyed, listening. I was tipsy from the brandy, and I staggered a little en route to the rear of the Cadillac.
Walter inserted a key and popped open the trunk. Orson lay on his stomach, his arms splayed out above his head. I reached in without hesitation and, grabbing his arms just above the elbows, dragged him out of the trunk and let him fall into the grass. Though he was shirtless, the cold didn't rouse him. Walter opened the back door and then lifted my brother's feet. We crammed him into the backseat, and Walter climbed on top of him and handcuffed his wrists behind his back. Turning Orson over, he slapped him hard across the face five times. I didn't say anything.
Hurrying back to the door, I hopped inside. "Turn the heat on," I said. "It's cold as shit."
Walter cranked the engine, and it idled noiselessly. I bent down and held my face before the vents, letting the engine-heated air thaw my cheeks.
"Orson," I said, getting up on my knees in the seat and facing the back. He lay unmoving on his stomach, stretched out from door to door. I could see his face --- his eyes were closed. Reaching into the backseat, I grabbed his arms and shook him violently, but he made no sound.
I climbed into the backseat and knelt down on the floorboard so we were face-to-face. "Orson," I said, so near to his lips, I could've kissed him. "Wake. Up." I slapped him. It felt good. "Wake. Up!" I shouted, but he didn't flinch. "Fuck it." I crawled back into the front seat. "Guess we'll just wait."
"How much did you give him?" Walter asked.
"Fifteen milligrams."
"Look, I don't want to sit out here all night. Just give him the antidote."
"It might kill him. It's a hell of a shock. We should let him come to on his own if he can."
I stared down the highway and watched a set of headlights suddenly appear and vanish.
"Out in Wyoming," I said, "you can see headlights when they're still twenty or thirty miles away." I angled the seat back and turned onto my right side, facing the door. "Walter?"
"Yeah?"
"I killed a man in Wyoming."
He didn't say anything, and we were quiet for some time.
"You remember that party I threw last May?" I asked finally.
"Yeah."
"I keep thinking about that night. We were sitting out on my pier ---"
"Pretty drunk, if I recall."
"Yep. I distinctly remember thinking: You lucky, lucky man. Thirty-four, successful, respected. You have a quality of life most people can't even fathom.... One week later, to the day, I received that envelope from Orson.... How do we go home after this? I can't imagine ever wanting to write again. Or feeling normal. Like anything's good. Like people are capable of goodness." I motioned to Orson. "When we were in the desert, he told me I had murder in my heart."
"I think it's safe to say he was projecting."
I glanced down at the gun in my lap.
"I think he was right, Walter."
"You are not an evil person."
"No, but I could be. I see that now. We're a lot closer to it than you think." I dropped my Glock into the fanny pack. "Will you stay awake and watch Orson?"
"Yeah."
"Wake me up in an hour, and I'll let you sleep."
"There's no way I'm going to sleep."
"Then wake me when he wakes." I curled up in the seat. To fall asleep, I imagined I was lounging in a beach chair in Aruba. The vents were my tropical breeze, and I could even hear the ocean in the vibration of the idling engine.
Hands shook me, and I sat up. My head ached as if a fault had rifted around the perimeter of my skull. Walter stared at me, the .45 in his lap.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"One. He's stirred, but I don't think he's waking up anytime soon. Not coherently at least."
"All right. I'll give him the antidote."
I searched through the fanny pack until I found the 10-mL vial of the benzodiazepine antidote, flumazenil. Aspirating the entire vial, I climbed into the backseat and took hold of Orson's left arm. Locating the same vein I'd hit before, I penetrated the skin, depressed the plunger with my thumb, and injected one milligram of flumazenil. When the syringe was empty, I slid it out and climbed back into the front seat.
"You ready?" I asked. "He's gonna come out of this fast. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."
A minute elapsed. Then Orson moved, rubbing his face into the seat and trying to sit up. There was a nasty gash on his forehead where I'd coldcocked him with the butt of the Glock. A trail of dried blood traversed a path from his left eye to the corner of his mouth, like runaway mascara. He mumbled.
"Sit him up," I said, coming to my knees again and facing the backseat.
Walter grabbed him by his hair and jerked him ruthlessly up into the center seat. Orson steadied himself and opened his eyes. When he saw me, he produced an enervate smile.
"Andy," he said clearly, "what in the world ---"
"Where are those videotapes you made of the killings? And the pictures you took, like that card you sent me?"
"I had a dream we fought," he said. "I kicked the shit out of you, as I recall." The reversal of the sedation was miraculous. Orson was lucid, pupils dilated, heart racing.
"Hit the cigarette lighter, Walter," I said, and he punched it in.
"Walt?" Orson said. "What are you doing here?"
"Don't talk to him," I said to Walter.
"He can talk to me if he wants to. How's the fam, Walt?"
"Orson," Walter growled. "I'm gonna ---" I grabbed Walter's arm and, catching his eyes, shook my head. Flushed, he nodded.
"No, let him talk," Orson said. "He's probably a little pissed at me and wants to get it off his chest."
"No, Orson. Tonight's about you."
Orson smiled, finding Walter's eyes in the rearview mirror. "How's little Jenna?" Hands on the steering wheel, Walter looked down into his lap at the .45. "I hear she's precious. I'll bet you're proud as ---"
"Walter isn't moved by your taunts," I said. "You aren't in any position to ---"
"If he isn't moved, why'd he just look down at his gun?" Orson smiled at Walter. "Thinking of doing something rash?"
"Orson," I said, "this is between ---"
"I think he's upset because one of my other protégés has his eye on the Lancing clan."
Walter's fingers constricted around the Glock. Coming to his knees, he faced my brother.
"His name's Luther," Orson continued. "Would you like to know more about him, Walter? He may become a big part of your life. In fact, he may already be a big part of your life. You see, when I took him out to the desert three years ago, he took an avid interest in ---"
"Walter, just ignore ---"
"Let him finish."
"Not that it's my inclination," Orson said, "but among his many interests, Luther likes little things. Well, more specifically, he likes to hurt little things, and me not being one to pass judgment, I told him, 'I know two little things named Jenna and John David Lancing who could use a little hurting.' "
"I don't believe you."
"You don't have to believe me, Walter. Luther believes me, and that's all that matters. His visit to Jenna's school was just an introduction. He's met Beth, too, though she didn't realize it. At my urging, he's added your address to his Rolodex, and if he hasn't already, I'm sure he'll come calling at Fifteen eighteen Shortleaf Drive any day now. Oh, that's right, Beth took the kids away. Well, Luther will find them, if he hasn't already. He's very motivated --- what the FBI profilers would call a 'hedonic thrill killer,' which means he receives sexual gratification from the agony of others. Believe me when I tell you, he's one macabre motherfucker. He even scares me."
Walter pressed his gun against Orson's chest.
"No," I said calmly. "Just sit back."
"When I pull this trigger," Walter said to Orson, "the force of the bullet impacting your chest will be so intense, your heart might stop. How does it feel, Orson?"
"I imagine I feel like your wife and children are going to feel. And trust me on this, Walter. You could flay me, and I wouldn't call off Luther."
"Put that fucking gun down," I said. "This is not the way to do this."
"He's talking about my family."
"He's lying. He will tell us."
"I'm not lying, Walter. Shall I tell you how Luther's planning to do your family, or do you want it to be a surprise?"
Walter ground his teeth together, trembling with explosive rage.
"I'm not telling you again," I said. "Put it down."
"Fuck off, Andy."
I took my Glock from the fanny pack and pointed it at my best friend. "I won't let you shoot him. Not yet. Think about it. If you kill him, we aren't gonna find out where Luther is. You're risking your family now."
"If he's dead, maybe Luther will leave us alone. Orson's just doing this because I know about him." He chambered the first round.
"Walter, you're a little crazy now, so just ---" I leaned forward to take the gun from him, but he jerked back and turned his .45 on me.
"You put the gun down."
My finger moved onto the trigger.
"You gonna shoot me?"
"You aren't a parent," he said, incensed. "You don't know." He trained the gun back on my brother. "Count to three, you piece of shit."
"Okay. One."
"Walter!"
"Two."
"You kill him, you kill your family!"
Before Walter reached three, Orson drew his knees into his chest and kicked the back of my seat. Jerking forward into the dashboard, I felt my finger slip, and though I didn't hear the gunshot, my Glock recoiled.
Walter fell back onto the steering wheel, and it bleated through the countryside. I lifted him off the horn and he sagged into my lap, spilling all over me.
I wept; Orson laughed.
27
I finished burying Walter a few minutes before five o'clock. Through the ceiling of pines, light was coming, and the white Cadillac would be plainly visible from the highway, if it was not already. The sky kindled with each passing second, and I felt the self-possession I'd known just hours ago disintegrating. Walking back through the trees, the mechanic's suit rigid now with Walter's frozen blood, I thought, I could crumble so easily.
When I broke out of the trees, I saw three cars speed by, heading into Bristol. It was light enough that I could see the textureless black mountains clearly against the sky, and anyone passing, if they happened to look, would see me stumbling along the shoulder toward the car. On the eastern horizon a trace of day warmed above the Atlantic. The sun was coming. The moon had disappeared hours ago.
I reached the Cadillac. Orson was unconscious in the trunk, an entire 4-mg vial of Ativan coursing through his bloodstream.
The front seat was a mess --- pools of blood on both floorboards, the driver's side window smeared red. I managed to scrape enough blood and brain matter off the glass to drive. Exhausted, I started the car and pulled onto the highway, heading south, back into Woodside.
I kept wondering what I'd do if a cop pulled me over. He'd see the bloodstained interior and the purple mass that was my left eye. I'd have to run. There'd be no other choice besides killing him.
Returning to Orson's house, I backed the Cadillac into his driveway and parked beside the white Lexus. I agonized over leaving the car out here when the town would be waking within the hour. But there was no alternative. I needed to get Orson inside, clean myself up, and figure out what the hell I was going to do.
Reclining on a floral-print couch in Orson's den, I dialed Cynthia's home number. It was a sunny Saturday morning, eleven o'clock, and the sunbeams angled brilliantly through the blinds into the den, a scantly furnished room with a large television in a pine cabinet and a tower of CDs standing in the corner. Orson lay across from me on a matching couch, his hands still cuffed behind his back, feet bound with a bicycle lock I'd found in his study.
She answered on the third ring. "Hello?"
"Hi, Cynthia."
"Andy." I detected undeniable shock in her voice, and it concerned me. "Where are you?" she asked. "Everyone's looking for you."
"Who's everyone?"
"The Winston-Salem Police Department called my office twice yesterday."
"Why are they looking for me?"
"You know about your mother?"
She was going to regret asking that.
"What about her?"
"Oh, Andy. I'm sorry."
"What?"
"A neighbor found her dead in her house three days ago. On Wednesday, I think. Andy..."
"What happened?" I let my voice quake. How could an innocent man explain not crying when he learns his mother has been murdered? Even the guilty manage tears.
"They think she was murdered."
I dropped the phone and produced a few sobs. After a moment, I brought the receiver to my ear again. "I'm here," I said, sniffling.
"Are you all right?"
"I don't know."
"Andy, the police want to speak with you."
"Why?"
"I um...I think..." She sighed. "This is tough, Andy. There's a warrant for your arrest."
"What in the world for?"
"Your mother's murder."
"Oh no, no, no, no ---"
"And I know you didn't do it. I believe you. But the best thing to do is just talk to the police and clear this mess up. Where are you? Let me have someone come get you."
"Thank you for everything, Cynthia." I hung up the phone, thinking, They had to find her eventually. Orson, you fucked me again. I stared at my brother on the sofa. He'd be waking soon. Until you fix this, you don't have a home. In fact, you might never go home again.
Orson awoke in the early afternoon, strapped naked to a wooden chair in his den, handcuffs securing his arms behind the chair back, and a length of rope binding his legs to the chair legs. I'd shut the door, closed the blinds, and turned the television up so loud, the set buzzed.
Sitting on the couch, I waited until he'd regained sufficient clarity of mind.
"You with me?" I shouted. He said something, but I couldn't hear over the television. "Speak up!" I could tell he was still disoriented.
"Yes. What's..." I saw it all come back to him --- the fight, the trunk, Walter. He smiled, and I knew he was with me. Taking the remote control from the couch, I muted the television.
"Orson," I said. "This is how this works. I ask the questions. You answer them. Quickly, concisely ---"
"Where's Walt? No. Let me guess. Is he in my hole?"
I cloaked my fury --- I had a hunch the torture would be more effective if I remained placid. Composing myself, I asked him, "Do you still have the videotapes and pictures of you and me in the desert?"
"Of course."
"Where are they?" He smiled and shook his head.
I pressed the mute button and the television roared. It was the episode of The Andy Griffith Show that chronicles Barney Fife's attempt to join a church choir, despite his glaring inability to sing. We watched this with our father.
Coming to my feet, I walked around to the back of the chair. From my pocket, I took a silver Zippo I'd found in Orson's dresser and struck a flame. Regardless of the hell he'd put me through, I found it exceedingly difficult to burn him. But I did.
Orson grunted wrenchingly, and after six seconds, I withdrew the flame and returned to the couch. Sweat had broken out across his forehead, and his face had crimsoned. I silenced the television.
"Whew!" He smiled through the pain. "Man, that's unpleasant! But you know, the back isn't the most sensitive part of the body. You should burn my face. The lips, the eyes. Make 'em boil."
"Orson, are the videotapes and pictures in this house?"
"No."
"Are they in Woodside?"
"Flame on!"
The cacophony of the television again filled the room. Leaning forward, I positioned the lighter against Orson's inner thigh as he watched with rabid interest. This time, I felt less squeamish about applying the pain.
He hollered over the dissonant voice of Barney Fife as the tonguelike flame licked his skin. When the patch of hairy white flesh began to bubble, I extinguished the flame and hit the mute button. He was still yelping, eyes closed, teeth clicking, breathless.
"I think you missed your calling," he said, wincing and sucking through his teeth, stifling the squeals. Glancing down at his thigh, I noticed the afflicted skin had blossomed into a bright blister. I could smell the sweet charred flesh, a pleasantly devious odor, like gasoline.
"All right, Orson," I said. "Take three."
"Maybe it's in a storage unit in some town you'll never find. Maybe ---" The television blared, and standing up, I held the lighter beneath Orson's right eye. When the flame leapt out, he shrieked, "In the desert! In the desert!"
Stepping back, I cut the volume. "I think you're lying."
"Andy," he gasped, "my videos, my photographs, everything I used to blackmail you --- it's all out there."
"Where out there? In the cabin?"
"Take me to Wyoming, and I'll show you."
"I guess you like being burned."
"No. Don't. Just listen. If I told you, Andy, even after you'd tortured me, you'd have no way of knowing if it was the truth till you got out there. And trust me, it wouldn't be. Now think about that."
"You think I'm gonna haul you to Wyoming?"
"How are you gonna find the cabin? My dirt road's in the middle of nowhere. You have to watch the mileage from a certain point even to have a chance at finding it, and I'm not telling you where that is. Not here. No fucking way. You need me; I need you. Let's take a trip."
"I can find it on my own."
"How?"
"I found you."
He snorted. "That fucking cowboy."
I considered holding the flame to Orson's eye until he screamed exactly where in the cabin or shed I could find the paraphernalia of his obsession. But he was right: I wouldn't know if he'd told the truth until I got out there.
I wanted to ask him about my mother and how he'd framed me, but I was afraid the rage would undermine me like it had Walter, and there were things I still had to know.
"Where's Luther?" I asked.
"I don't know. Luther drifts." Discomfort strained his voice.
"How do you communicate?"
"E-mail."
"What's your password?" Part of me wanted him to resist. I flipped open the Zippo.
"W-B-A-S-S."
"Pray he hasn't touched them." I got up and opened the door.
"Andy," he said. "Can I please have whatever you've been giving me? This hurts like hell."
"It's supposed to hurt."
I walked through the living room into Orson's study and booted up the computer. His password gave me access to his E-mail account. Six new messages: five spam, one from LK72:
>From: <LK72@aol.com>
>Date: Fr, 8 Nov 1996 20:54:33 -0500 (EST)
>To: David Parker <dparker@email.woodside.edu>
>Subject:
>
>O ---
>
>Getting antsy. Need to head north soon. Ask me about that strpt at stlns. Funny stuff! AT is still gone. As is WL. Still? as to the L. whereabouts. I'll wait if you want. Otherwise, there's someone I need to go visit asap up in Sas. Still all over the tube. Wow! Looking forward to OB.
>
>L
I searched Orson's deleted, sent, and received message folders, but he kept nothing saved or archived. When I'd printed out the E-mail, I took it with me into the den.
"Decipher this," I said, setting the cryptic E-mail in Orson's lap. "It is from Luther, right?"
"Yeah, that's from him."
"So read it back to me like it makes some fucking sense."
He looked down at the page and read aloud in a weary, crestfallen voice: "Orson, getting antsy. Need to head north soon. Ask me about that stripper at Stallion's. Funny stuff. Andrew Thomas is still gone. As is Walter Lancing. Still no idea as to the Lancing whereabouts. I'll wait if you want. Otherwise, there's someone I need to go visit asap up in Saskatchewan. Still all over the tube. Wow. Looking forward to the Outer Banks. Luther." He looked up at me. "That's it."
"So he's still in North Carolina, waiting for you to tell him what to do about the Lancings?"
"Yes."
Returning to the desk in his study, I sat for a moment, staring out the window at a woman raking her lawn across the street. As I drafted the message in my head, it occurred to me all at once what I would do --- about Luther, the photographs, even Orson. It was a revelation not unlike the epiphanies I'd experienced upon finding my way out of the woods in the plotting of a novel.
As I typed, I worried that my E-mail response to Luther would deviate too conspicuously from Orson's format and style, but I risked it:
>From: <dparker@email.woodside.edu>
>Date: Sat, 9 Nov 1996 13:56:26 -0500 (EST)
>To: <LK72@aol.com>
>Subject:
>
>L,
>
>Head on to Sas. I may take care of the L's later if need be. I'm heading cross-country, too, to you know where. Want to meet somewhere en route late tomorrow or Monday, and tell me about that strpr in person?
>
>O
I walked back into the den and filled a syringe with two vials of Ativan. Then I jabbed the needle deep into the muscle of Orson's bare ass. On my way out the door, he called my name, but I didn't stop. I ascended the staircase and headed for the guest room, unwilling to sleep in his bed. The mattress was cramped and lumpy, but I'd been up for thirty hours and could've slept on broken glass. Through the window, I heard the college bell tower striking two, birds bickering, wind in the trees, and cars in the valley below --- the sounds of a New England town on a Saturday afternoon. I am so, so far from that.
My thoughts were with Beth Lancing and her children as I floated into sleep. I'm trying to save your lives, but I robbed you of a husband and a father. Robbed myself of my best friend. I wondered if she already sensed that he was gone.
28
I came down the staircase at 1:30 in the morning, having slept straight for eleven and a half hours. The house was so still. I could hear only the minute mechanical breathing of the kitchen appliances as they cut on and off in the predawn silence.
After starting a pot of coffee, I poked my head into the den. Orson's chair had fallen over. He was unconscious, naked, still awkwardly attached to the toppled chair. He looked feeble, helpless, and for a moment I let myself pity him.
Barefoot, I walked into his study and sat down at the desk. As the monitor revived, crackling with static electricity, I saw that he had one message waiting. Typing in the password, I opened the new E-mail:
>From: <LK72@aol.com>
>Date: Sun, 10 Nov 1996 01:02:09 -0500 (EST)
>To: David Parker <dparker@email.woodside.edu>
>Subject:
>
>O ---
>
>Might be in SB Monday evng. Call when you hit Nbrsk and we'll see about a rendezvous.
>
>L
Shutting down the computer, I walked back into the den and gave Orson another injection. Then I went upstairs to take a shower.
The hot water felt immaculate. After I'd tidied up the cuts on my face with a razor blade, I lingered in the stream, leaning against the wet tile, head down, the water cooling, watching the blood swirl under my feet into the drain.
It took a while for the steam to settle in the bathroom, and I sat on the toilet while it did, thumbing through Orson's wallet, yet another possession of his, identical to mine. Removing his driver's license, I set it on the sink. I looked nothing like the picture. His hair was short and brown, his face clean-shaven. Rising, I wiped the condensation off the mirror.
My beard had grown out considerably, gray and bristly. My hair was in shambles, the dye stripped from this last marathon shower. I shaved first, even my sideburns, and it was an improvement. There was an attachment on the electric razor for tonsure, so I climbed back into the shower and sheared my head.
When I finished, I glanced again into the mirror --- much, much better.
"Hi, Orson," I said, smiling.
IV.
29
SUNDAY, before dawn, I loaded Orson into the trunk of his Lexus and pulled out of the driveway of his house in Woodside. I carried his wallet, filled with his cash and credit cards, and I felt reasonably sure that, should the necessity arise, I could pass for my brother. It was comforting to know that because Orson existed, Andrew Thomas could disappear.
I drove to the Woodside Inn and slipped furtively up the noisy staircase into what had been Walter's and my room. Our clothes were still scattered across the beds, and I stuffed everything from the drawers and the floor into our suitcases and lugged them down to the car.
Heading out on Highway 116, I prided myself on my thoroughness. I'd remembered to check out of the inn. I'd removed all traces of my presence in Orson's home (my blood in his room, my hair in his sink and bathtub), along with all signs of his abduction. I'd even taken care of Walter's Cadillac, driving it down the hill to the Champlain Diner at 3:15 in the morning and leaving it parked beside an overflowing Dumpster. The jog back up into Orson's neighborhood had been a bitch, but it was worth it. Nothing could link me to this town now, and though Walter's gory car would more than likely be discovered within the week, I'd be long, long gone by then.
Prior to leaving Orson's house, I'd downed an entire pot of coffee and swallowed a double dose of a sinus medication that always keyed me up. Caffeine raged through me, and with unfettered energy, I drove southwest out of Woodside into New York State. If nothing went awry, Luther would be dead, and I'd be in Wyoming in less than forty-eight hours.
I sped westbound on I-80 through eastern Nebraska. It was 11:45 P.M., and the luster of driving without sleep from Vermont to Wyoming had waned. Orson was awake. He'd been kicking the inside of the trunk for the last fifty miles and cursing at me to pull over.
Traffic was light, and because there was nothing but hewn corn-fields and distant farmhouse lights as far as I could see, I obliged him. Pulling into the emergency lane somewhere between Lincoln and York, I hopped out into the chilly Nebraska night and popped the trunk. Lying on his back, in his bathrobe, handcuffed, he lifted his head.
"I'm thirsty, you bastard," he croaked. "I've been dying back here."
"Well, there's some ice-cold water up front with your name on it. But you gotta earn it." Taking Luther's E-mail from my pocket and unfolding it, I asked him, "Is SB Scottsbluff, Nebraska?"
"Why?"
I went back to the front seat and grabbed the full squeeze bottle from the passenger side. Returning to Orson, I stood in front of him and squirted a stream into my mouth.
"Wow, that's refreshing!" I could see the pining thirst in his eyes. "This is all the water that's left," I said, "and when it's gone, it may be hundreds and hundreds of miles before I stop again. Now, I'm not very thirsty, but I'll stand here and guzzle it just the same if you aren't a model of cooperation. Is SB Scottsbluff?"
"Yes."
"What's the significance?"
"Of what?" I squirted another long stream into my mouth. "There's this girl there who Luther stays with sometimes. He's always on the road."
"What's her name?"
"Mandy something."
"You don't know her last name?"
"No."
"What's Luther's last name?"
"Kite."
"Like fly a kite?" He nodded. "Open up." I shot him a mouthful of water. "I saw Luther on the phone list in your wallet. Is that number the best way to reach him?"
"It's his cell. What are you trying to do, Andy?"
"You ever met Luther in Scottsbluff?"
"Once."
"Where?"
"Ricki's. Can I ---"
"Who's Ricki?"
"It's a bar on Highway Ninety-two. Please, Andy..."
I touched the open nozzle to his lips and squeezed cold water down his throat. He sucked frantically, and I pulled it back after three seconds as a transfer truck roared by. I took Orson's cell phone from my pocket. Dialing Luther's number, I held up the half-empty squeeze bottle.
"The rest of it's yours," I said. "Find out if Luther can meet at Ricki's tomorrow night. And be peppy. Don't sound like you've been drugged up in a trunk for twenty hours. Fuck anything up and you'll die slowly of thirst. I mean it. I'll keep you on the brink of madness for days." He nodded. "Brevity," I said. Then I pushed the talk button and held the phone to his ear.
On the first ring, a man answered. I could clearly hear his voice.
"Hello?"
"Luth?"
"Hey." I dribbled water onto Orson's face.
"Where are you?" Orson asked.
"Gateway to the west. Just crossing the Mississippi. I can see the arch right now. Where are you?"
I mouthed, "Eastern Nebraska."
"Eastern Nebraska," Orson said. "You staying with Mandy tomorrow night?"
"Yeah, you wanna hook up at Ricki's?"
"What time?"
"How's nine? I'm staying tonight in St. Louis, so I won't be in Scottsbluff till late tomorrow."
"All right." I moved my finger across my throat. "Hey, Luth, you're breaking up."
I pressed the button to end the call and returned the phone to my pocket. Then I gave Orson the rest of the bottle and watched the desperation finally retreat from his eyes.
"You need something to eat?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I've gotta piss, Andy."
"Can't help you there."
"What do you want me to do, piss in the trunk?"
"It's your car."
I opened the back door and fished out a syringe and a vial of Ativan from the fanny pack. Another car passed us, heading toward Lincoln, and I suddenly felt anxious to get on the road again.
"Turn over, Orson." I stuck him with the needle.
"Andy," he said as I put my hands on the trunk to close it, "you're very good at this."
The coffee and sinus medication had worn off hours ago, and on the tediously straight roads of western Nebraska, I now operated solely on the determination not to fall asleep.
I'd been driving for twenty-three hours and thirty-five minutes, and I existed in a limbo between sleep and consciousness. Occasionally, my forehead would touch the steering wheel, and I'd jerk back up and cherish a five-minute oasis of petrified alertness. Then my mind would drift back, and I'd lose consciousness for that split second and scare myself to death all over again.
Heading up Highway 26, fifty miles northwest of Ogallala, the prairie awoke. A peach sunrise was lifting out of the eastern horizon, and as the light strengthened, the land spread and spread and spread, farther than it seemed possible. It had changed overnight, and because I had not witnessed the gradual topographic expansion, this sudden revelation was staggering. For an easterner driving west, the stark vastness of the land and sky is always inconceivable, and I imagined a symphonic aubade to accompany the majesty of the morning.
At 6:30 A.M., I crossed the tree-lined North Platte River into the town of Bridgeport. In the southern distance, the tips of numerous sandstone buttes were catching coral sunbeams. Though several miles away, it looked like I could reach out and touch them.
Highway 26 cut through the sleeping town. On the western fringe, there was a motel called Courthouse View (named after a prominent butte five miles south), and I got a room there. Since I'd given Orson enough Ativan to maintain sedation for the better part of the day, I left him in the trunk, walked inside, and crashed.
I'd be meeting Luther in fourteen hours.
I checked out of Courthouse View in the late afternoon, and heading northwest toward Scottsbluff on Highway 92, I started mulling over what I'd gotten myself into with Luther. In all honesty, I'd done a stupid thing. It was already 5:07, and that left me a little under four hours to determine how I would kill him, dispose of him, and leave town unnoticed. Finally, I concluded that I was being hasty and reckless. Besides, I couldn't get past the idea that I was going to get myself killed fucking with this guy. So fifteen miles outside of Scottsbluff, I decided not to go through with it. I'd been methodical up to this point, and while it was tempting to orchestrate a quick, clever way to do in Luther Kite, four hours wasn't an adequate length of time in which to do it.
Ricki's was a true shithole. On the southern outskirts of Scottsbluff, in the shadow of the eight-hundred-foot bluff from which the town assumed its name, I pulled into its dirt parking lot and turned off the car. Stepping outside into the dry, tingling cold, night was imminent, though the sun still illumined the prairie and the spire of Chimney Rock, tiny but distinct in the distance. The tourist brochure in the motel claimed that the five-hundred-foot inselberg had been a landmark for pioneers on the Oregon Trail --- the first indication of the Rocky Mountains, which lay ahead. Walking toward the trunk with two squeeze bottles of water and three bags of potato chips, I stared at the golden sandstone buttes of the Wildcat Hills, thinking, I'd like to pick one of those hills and lie down on top and never leave. I'd just sit out there and erode, alone.
I'd bought the food at Courthouse View, but the motel parking lot had been too crowded to risk opening the trunk. Ricki's parking lot was empty except for Orson's Lexus and a pickup truck.
Orson was awake. Even the sallow evening light burned his eyes, so he closed them. He'd pulled his cuffed hands under his feet, so they were now in front of him.
"Here," I said, placing a squeeze bottle in his hands. As he drank it like a baby, I dropped the bags of chips and the other bottle inside. "It won't be much longer," I said. "We're just thirty-five miles from the Wyoming border."
I had a syringe prepared and I shot another 4-mg vial of Ativan into his ass.
I located a pen in the glove compartment and tore off a piece of the Vermont state map. I'd considered just calling Luther and having Orson cancel our meeting, but I had misgivings about my brother's current ability to mask the atrophy in his voice. So stuffing the pen, paper, and Glock into my jeans pocket and pulling on a gray wool sweater, I locked the car and walked across the dirt parking lot toward the bar.
Above the door, a neon sign displayed RICKI'S in blue cursive. I walked under the humming sign and entered the deserted bar, which was smaller than my living room. Its ceiling was obtrusively low, booths lined the walls, and with only two windows, one on either side of the door, I felt as though I were stepping into a smoky closet.
The sole patron, I sat down at a bar stool on the corner. The bar was constructed of unsanded railroad ties that still smelled of tar. Names, oaths, and declarations of love and enmity had been carved into the black wood.
As I pulled out the pen and scrap of paper, a woman emerged from the kitchen.
"We ain't serving yet," she said. She wore tight jeans shorts and a black turtleneck with BEARCATS: '94 STATE CHAMPS across the chest. Her black hair was wiry and stiff, and she'd have benefited from orthodontic care.
"Your door was open," I said.
"Well shit. What do you want?"
"Whatever you have on tap is fine."
While she grabbed a glass out of the freezer and commenced filling it with bronze ale, I started what would be Orson's note to Luther.
L - I made a
She set the glass down on the railroad tie. "Dollar fifty."
I handed her two of Orson's dollar bills and told her to keep the change. Foam spilled down the sides of the glass. I took a sip, tasted flecks of ice in the draft, and continued scrawling on the scrap:
friend this morning--you know how that goes. In fact, she composed this letter before I... Anyhow, I though it prudent to leave town asap. Sorry we couldn't meet tonight. Have fun in Sas. O.
I folded the torn map into a neat little square, wrote "Luther" across the town of Burlington, and set it on the bar. Then I sat there, drinking my beer, thinking, So people actually leave notes with bartenders. How many times have I written this scene? It doesn't feel real.
Sipping the beer, I surveyed the empty bar --- unadorned concrete walls, no jukebox or neon beer signs. There weren't even cute cowboy slogans to fake the prairie culture for transient easterners like me. Just a drab, hopeless place for hopeless westerners to get drunk.
I finished the beer, and as though her ears were attuned to the sound of empty glasses clinking the wood, she came back through the door from the kitchen and stood in front of me.
"You want another one?" she asked.
"No thanks. Where is everyone?"
She looked at her watch. "It's only six," she said. "They don't start getting here till seven."
A car pulled up outside. I heard its tires lock up in the dirt.
"Where's Ricki?" I asked.
"That son of a bitch is dead."
She took my empty glass and set it in a brown plastic container.
"Would you do something for me?" I asked.
"What?" she said joylessly. She was possibly the most indifferent person I'd ever met. I wondered why she didn't just go slice her wrists. I pushed the square of paper across the ties.
"I'm supposed to meet a friend here at nine, but I can't. Will you give this to him?"
She looked suspiciously at the square of paper, then picked it up and jammed it in her back pocket.
A car door slammed outside.
"What's he look like?" she asked.
"Shoulder-length black, black hair. Even darker than yours. Very white. Late twenties. Fairly tall. Dark eyes."
At the same instant I heard footsteps approaching the door, she said, "Well hell, ain't that him?"
I glanced over my shoulder and watched Luther Kite walk through the door. Sliding off the stool, I slipped my hand into my pocket and withdrew the Glock. By the time I'd chambered a bullet, he was standing in my face, looking down on me.
I took it in piecemeal. The reek of Windex. His blue windbreaker. Ebony hair against a smooth cheek. My finger moving once. Luther falling into me, clutching. Screaming behind the railroad ties. Gasping. Blood on nylon. My right hand warm and wet. Running through the dirt to the car. Cold. The spire of Chimney Rock now dark. The rushing prairie and the maroon hills as I sped toward Wyoming.
30
I pulled over after midnight onto the shoulder of I-80, halfway through Wyoming, outside the town of Wamsutter. There was no moon, so I had no sense of the land, except that it was even more expansive and forsaken than Nebraska. Pushing the suitcases onto the floor and curling up in the backseat, I closed my eyes. When cars passed on the interstate, the Lexus shuddered. I fell asleep wondering if Ricki's had really happened.
I awoke at 3:30 A.M. to the sound of Orson moaning. When I climbed out and opened the trunk, he was flailing around inside, though his eyes were closed. I stirred him from the nightmare, and as he opened his eyes and regained cognizance of his surroundings, he sat up.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"Middle of Wyoming."
"I'm so thirsty."
"You'll have to wait till tomorrow." He stretched out his arms and yawned.
"I heard a gunshot," he said.
"Orson, how do I find the cabin?"
He lay back down. "Will you give me another shot?"
I sat on the bumper. "Of course."
"This is I-Eighty, right?"
"Yeah."
"Stay on Eighty till you hit Rock Springs. It's in the southwest corner of the state. From Rock Springs, take One ninety-one north and start watching the odometer. When you've gone seventy miles, you're gonna have to pull over and bring me up. I'll take you the rest of the way."
"All right."
"Are we heading for it tonight?"
"Nah, I'm wiped. I'm gonna sleep till morning."
"Andy, did you kill Luther?"
"I chickened out," I said, standing up. "So you left him a note."
"I know I ---"
"You're fucked up. I'll go get your shot."
Over the course of two thousand miles, it was bound to happen.
Tuesday morning, I'd passed the exits for Red Desert, Table Rock, Bitter Creek, and Point of Rocks, when thirty miles east of Rock Springs, I heard the whine of a siren --- a Highway Patrol SUV crowded my bumper. With my Glock wedged into the pouch behind the passenger seat, I pulled over into the emergency lane, reassuring myself, Why would he want to search the car? Orson's unconscious. I've got the proper license and registration. Ricki's may not have even happened. I'm golden.
The officer tapped on my window. I lowered it.
"License and registration," he said in that austere, authoritative tone, and removing the papers from the glove compartment, I smiled and handed them through the window.
He walked bowlegged back to his hunter green Bronco and climbed inside.
The clock in the dashboard read 10:15, but it felt later. The prairie had turned arid. Across the northwestern horizon, a chain of tan hills rose out of the flatland. Gray clouds massed beyond.
I noticed the sweater and jeans I'd worn into Ricki's lying on the floorboard on the passenger side. It happened. They were stained with Luther's blood, and I regretted not having thrown them out last night at the gas station in Cheyenne. I started to scoop them up, but the gravelly crunch of the officer's footsteps stopped me.
I righted myself and looked back through the open window into his face. The officer was my age. He reminded me of a lawman in a movie, though I couldn't recall which one.
"Know why I stopped you, Mr. Parker?" he asked, handing back Orson's license and registration. I placed them on the passenger seat.
"No sir, officer."
He removed his reflective sunglasses and stared down at me through hard, pale eyes.
"You were swerving all over the goddamn road."
"I was?"
"Are you drunk?" A gust of wind lifted his hat, which he caught and shelved under his arm. He had unruly blond hair, the variety that, if allowed to grow out, might bush into an Afro. The image of the officer with a blond Afro lightened my heart, and I chortled.
"What's funny?"
"Nothing, sir. I'm not drunk. I'm tired. I've been driving for the past two days."
"From Vermont?"
"Yes, sir."
He glanced at the suitcases in the backseat. "Traveling alone?"
"Yes, sir."
"Which one of them suitcases is yours?"
How sly.
"Both of them."
He nodded. "And you only been on the road since Sunday?"
"Yes, sir."
"Must be in some kind of hurry."
"No, not really. I just wanted to see how fast I could cross the country."
I thought he might grin at my ambition, but he remained as stolid as ever.
"Where you headed?" he asked.
"California."
"Whereabouts in California?"
"L.A."
"Eighty don't go to L.A. Eighty goes to San Francisco."
"I know, but I wanted to drive through Wyoming, seeing as how I've never seen this part of the country. It's beautiful."
"It's fuckin' shitland." I gazed into the gold badge above his green breast pocket, filled with the presentiment that he was on the verge of ordering me out of the vehicle.
"Well, you ought to know that you're heading into one hell of a storm," he said.
"Snowstorm?"
"Yep. Forecast says it's supposed to get real bad."
"Thanks for the warning. I hadn't heard."
"Might want to find a motel to hole up in. Maybe in Rock Springs, or Salt Lake, if you make it that far."
"I'll consider that."
He looked askance at my face; he'd noticed my fading bruises. "Someone hit you?"
"Yes, sir."
"When did that happen?"
"At a bar this past weekend."
"Must've been one hell of a fight."
Everything was one hell of a something with this guy. I was definitely putting him in a book.
"Looks like you took a few knocks there," he said.
"Yeah, but you should see the other guy." That threadbare cliché got him. He cracked a smile and, looking off across the wasteland, reckoned that he'd better get going. Peering into the rearview mirror, I watched him saunter back to the Bronco.
Cool fucking cucumber. And I meant me.
Rock Springs was an ugly brown town, dedicated to the extraction of coal, oil, and a mineral called trona from deep beneath the surrounding hills. It was larger and more industrial than I'd anticipated, and I wondered what twenty thousand people did for fun in this northeast boundary of the Great Basin Desert.
I pulled into the congested parking lot of a supermarket. It had been raining and snowing for the last half hour, the flakes sticking to the desert but melting on the sun-warmed pavement. Jogging through the windblown snow toward the entrance, I feared that at any moment the roads would accept the ice, and then we'd never reach the cabin.
The supermarket was an entropic battlefield --- frenzied shoppers compulsively stripping the shelves of bread, milk, and eggs. Because I didn't know what Orson had stocked at the cabin, I grabbed a bit of everything --- canned food, fruit, cereal, loaves of white bread, even several bottles of the best wines they had (though they were quite unexceptional). The checkout lines stretched halfway down the aisles, and I'd started to roll my shopping cart to the back of one, when I realized I'd have to wait for an hour just to pay. Fuck this. You've done a hell of a lot worse than steal.
So I pushed the cart right on through the automatic doors, back out into the storm. The parking lot was frosted now, blanching as the snow swept down in torrents. Behind the strip mall, red cliffs stood out sharply against the white, and it occurred to me that I'd never seen a desert snowfall.
Upon reaching the Lexus, I opened the back door and began shoveling groceries on top of my suitcase and Walter's. Orson was making a racket. I told him to shut up, said we were almost home. The parking space beside mine was empty, so I left the cart there and opened the driver's door.
"Excuse me, sir?" An obese woman bundled up in a puffy pink parka, which did not flatter her proportions, stared at me quizzically from the trunk of the Lexus.
"What?"
"What's that sound?" She tapped on the trunk.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"I think there's someone in your trunk."
I heard it, too, Orson shouting again, his voice muffled but audible. He was saying something about killing me if I didn't give him a drink of water.
"There's nothing in there," I said. "Excuse me."
"Is it a dog?"
I sighed. "No. Actually, I'm a hit man. There's someone in my trunk, and I'm taking them out into the desert to shoot them in the head and bury them. Wanna come along?"
She laughed, her face rumpling. "Oh my, that's rich! Very rich!" she said, chuckling maniacally.
She walked away, and I climbed into the Lexus and backed out of the parking space. The pavement was becoming icy, so I drove tentatively out of the parking lot and back onto Highway 191, as nervous as a southerner on wheels in a snowstorm.
31
WIND blasted the car. The road had disappeared.
I'd been following a single set of tire tracks for the last forty miles. Leaving Rock Springs, almost four hours ago, they'd cut down to the pavement. But as I plowed north up the mind-numbingly straight trajectory of Highway 191, the contrast between the blacktop and the snow had dissipated. Now, looking through the furious windshield wipers, I strained to see the faintest indentation in the snow. It would soon be too deep to negotiate. Even now, I felt the tires slide at the slightest pressure on the accelerator or the brake. Aside from a hurricane that came inland into the Piedmont of North Carolina seven years ago, this was the worst weather I'd ever seen.
Precisely seventy miles north of Rock Springs, I stopped the car in the middle of the abandoned highway. Sitting for a moment in the warm leather seat, I stared through the glass at snow that fell as hard and fast as rain. Beyond one hundred feet, the white was inscrutable, and still the visibility continued to diminish. A violent downdraft joggled the car and whisked the fallen snow off the road. With the pavement revealed, I saw that the tires straddled the dotted line.
I turned off the engine and, grasping the keys, opened the door and stepped into the storm. Driving snow filled my eyes, and, shielding my face against the side of my arm, I struggled toward the trunk. Three inches had already accumulated on the road, more upon the desert. Once the snow depth exceeded all shrubbery except the tallest sagebrush and greasewood, we would have no point of reference by which to follow the road. But we have time, I thought, unlocking the trunk and bracing against another icy gust. This storm is just beginning.
Orson was conscious, and his dark, swollen eyes widened when he saw the snow. It collected in his hair. There were red lines across his face from hours of sleeping on the carpet, and his lips were parched and split.
"We might be in trouble," I said. "I want you to put your hands behind your back, 'cause I'm gonna undo your feet. Put 'em up here." He hung his legs out of the trunk, and I removed the bicycle lock from his ankles. Tossing it back into a corner of the trunk, I helped my brother climb out and told him to go around to the passenger door. By the time I'd returned to my seat and adjusted the vents to their maximum output, my clothes were soaked from the snow. I opened the passenger door and Orson got in. Leaving his hands cuffed behind his back, I reached across his lap and shut the door.
We sat there for a moment without speaking. I turned off the windshield wipers. The snow fell and melted on the heated glass. The grayness darkened.
"We're exactly seventy miles north of Rock Springs," I said. Orson stared out the windshield. "We near the dirt road?"
"Probably within a half mile. But when it's like this, it might as well be a hundred."
"The cabin's on that side, right?" I pointed out my window.
"Yeah. Somewhere out there."
"What do you mean? You can't find it?"
"Not in this." Concern had tensed his jaw and reduced the gleam in his blue eyes.
"Let's try," I said. "It's better than ---"
"Look. About five miles that way into the desert" --- he nodded at the swirling grayness out my window --- "there's a ridge. You probably remember it."
"Yeah. So?"
"If I can't see that ridge, I have no way of knowing where we are in relation to the cabin. Hell, we could drive that way, but it'd be a shot in the dark, and we'd probably get stuck."
"Shit." I turned off the engine. "I should've stopped in Rock Springs for the night."
"Probably so. But you didn't know it'd be like this."
"No, I didn't." I wiped the snowmelt from my sleek bald head.
"You look like me," Orson said. "What's that about?"
"You thirsty?"
"Yeah."
I fed him a full bottle of tepid water.
"Orson," I said. "You try anything. One thing. I'll kill you."
"I believe it."
The dashboard clock read 4:07. I watched it turn to 4:08, then 4:09.
"It'll be dark out there soon," I said. Sweat trilled down my chest and my legs. Orson leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He smelled of urine. His robe was soiled, and I felt ashamed I hadn't let him use the bathroom properly since Vermont.
The seconds ticked on: 4:10. 4:11. 4:12.
"I can't stand this," I said, and I started the car.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm gonna find that dirt road."
"Andy. Andy!" I'd shifted the car into drive, and with my foot on the accelerator, I looked over at Orson. "Quit being stupid," he said calmly. "You aren't gonna find the road. You aren't gonna find the cabin. This is a full-fledged blizzard, and if you get us stuck off this highway, we are fucked. Now, we aren't leaving this car anytime soon. That's a given. So let's wait it out here, in the middle of a highway, where we at least know where we are. If you try to find that dirt road, you're gonna put us in the middle of a desert in a whiteout."
"All we have to do is go straight. The cabin's that way. We'll go straight for ---"
"Which way's straight? That way? That way? That way? It all looks straight to me!"
I punched the gas, and the tail end of the Lexus fishtailed. Letting off, I pressed more gently, and the tires found the pavement and gave us solid forward momentum. At forty miles an hour, I turned into the desert. The tires sank into the powder, and our speed slowed to thirty. The snow was twice as deep as on the road, and though I felt we might lose traction at any second, I maintained control. Steering between sagebrush, I squinted through the windshield, looking for that long, straight swath of white that would be unmarred by vegetation. It would extend westward, a thin white ribbon in the snow, and we'd follow it and find the cabin.
Orson gaped at me.
"You see anything?" I asked. "You looking?" The engine labored to keep the wheels turning, and the speedometer needle jigged between twenty and twenty-five. I watched it uneasily.
"Circle back," he said. "Do it now and we might reach the highway. But if you let this car stop out here, we don't have a prayer."
"Look for the dirt road," I said.
"Andy ---"
"Look for the fucking road!"
Four minutes passed before I realized he was right. I couldn't see farther than fifty feet beyond the hood of the car, and with the needle hovering at ten, I doubted if we had had the velocity to return to the highway.
"We'll go back," I said, easing the steering wheel to the right.
The back end jinked left and the tires instantly lost traction. Panicking, I stomped the gas, and the car spun 360 degrees. By the time I'd backed off the accelerator, our speed had dropped under five miles an hour, and there was nothing I could do to regain it. The Lexus came to rest against a shrub of sagebrush.
"It's fine," I said. "Don't say anything."
Touching the gas gingerly, the tires spun, but they didn't achieve traction. I clenched the steering wheel and pushed the pedal into the floor. The engine roared and the tires spewed up a load of snow, and, for a second, dirt. The Lexus surged forward into fresh snow, and I shoved my foot harder into the pedal until the rpm indicator red-lined, and I could smell the engine cooking. But the tires never met the ground again, and after I'd overheated the engine, I turned off the car and jerked the keys from the ignition.
I opened my door and ran out into the storm. At fifty miles an hour, snowflakes become cold needles, and they relentlessly pricked my face. I bent down and scraped through six inches of powder, thinking, Maybe I'm standing on the dirt road. My hands ached as I clawed through the snow, and I reached the dirt finally, but it was too loose to be a road.
Staring up into the raging white fog, I screamed until my throat burned. My face stung from the cold, and the snow seeped through my sneakers. This isn't happening, I thought, the dread of being stranded out here with him beginning to suffocate me. This cannot be real.
32
I climbed back into the Lexus and shed my wet clothes. Throwing them onto the floorboard of the backseat, I opened my suitcase and put on a clean pair of underwear, a sweatsuit I'd packed to sleep in, and two pairs of socks.
"Should I turn the car on?" I asked. "Will that run down the battery?"
"It shouldn't. But leave it off for now, at least till it's pitch-black out there. We'll need it to run all night for the heat." He leaned against the window, still haggard and sluggish from the drug. "How are we on gas?"
"Half a tank."
Orson brought his legs up into the seat and turned over on his side, his back to me.
"You cold?" I asked.
"A little."
From Walter's suitcase, I grabbed a pair of sweatpants, wool socks, and a gray sweatshirt featuring the UNC insignia in Carolina blue. Placing them across Orson's lap, I picked up the Glock, which had been at my feet, and took the handcuff key from my pocket.
"I'm gonna uncuff you so you can get out of that nasty robe," I said. "Then they're going right back on." I unlocked the handcuffs and removed them from his wrists. Disrobing, he dropped the bathrobe at his feet and bundled up in Walter's clothes. I moved to put the cuffs back on him, but he said, "Hold on a second," and lowered his sweatpants so he could inspect the burn on his inner thigh. "It itches," he said, and after he'd scratched around the perimeter of the peppermint patty--size blister, he pulled his sweatpants back up, placed his hands behind his back, and allowed me to cuff him.
I tilted my seat back and listened to the wind ravish the car. Lightning blinked against the snowy dusk; thunder promptly followed.
"Orson," I said, "I want you to tell me why you killed our mother."
"You know."
He was right.
"I want you to say it. I'd have come after you for Walter's family. Maybe just for me."
"I'm sure you would have."
"You're an abomination. I've got another theory. Want to hear it?"
"Sure," he said, staring into the storm.
"Because she brought you into this world."
He looked at me like I'd caught him sniffing panties.
The temperature inside the car had already begun to plummet when I selected a box of Ritz crackers, a cylinder of provolone cheese, and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon from the stash of groceries.
"We aren't gonna be able to drink this," I said. "No corkscrew."
"There's a pocketknife with one on it in the glove compartment," Orson said.
Finding the Swiss army knife under a stack of road maps, I uncorked the bottle and swilled the spicy wine. Then I tore open the box of crackers and lined them up on my legs.
"You hungry?" I asked, slicing into the smoked cheese with the dull blade. "Here." Sandwiching a disk of provolone between two crackers, I placed it in his mouth. Then I lay back in my seat and watched the night come.
Once the windshield froze, the snow stuck to the glass. The wind blew so savagely that the flakes clung to every window, and within fifteen minutes, we could see nothing of the blizzard all around us. Only the constant shrieking and the cold, voracious energy confirmed its presence.
Orson noticed the bloody clothes beneath his feet.
"Andy," he said, "is that Luther's blood?" I nodded. "Wow. Where'd you do it? Ricki's?"
"We were supposed to meet at nine. I went at six to leave a note with the barkeep that you couldn't make it. Luther walked in as I was getting ready to leave. If he hadn't come early ---"
"He came early because he knew something wasn't right."
"How do you know?"
"He's smart. But you were, too. You had your gun. Otherwise, you'd be dying right now."
"Are you sad he's gone?"
"No. And that's nothing against him. We did a lot together."
"Well, I'm delighted he's dead."
Orson smiled. "He's wasn't all that different from you, Andy."
"Sure."
"I happened to him like I happened to you. He just took to it a little faster."
I stared at Orson, astounded.
"You know, you've done worse than kill me," I said. "You've wrecked me. You've taken my mother, my best friend. I can't go home. I can't return from this."
"No, I saved you, Andy. Your home was a sham. You no longer flit around like everyone else, blind to that black hole you call a heart. Be grateful. You now know what you're capable of. Most people never do. But we live honestly, you and I. Truth, Andy. What did Keats say? It's beauty. Not just pretty truth. We have black hearts, but they're beautiful."
We devoured the entire box of crackers and most of the cheese. The wine was diluting my chary vigilance, so I slowed my consumption.
When we'd finished eating, I unzipped my fanny pack. There were two vials of Ativan remaining and two vials of Versed, but because it was the safer drug, I took the last of the Ativan.
"Andy," he said as I poked the needle into the first vial and began drawing the solution up through its hollow shaft.
"What?"
"You remember the summer they found that man under the interstate behind our house?"
"Yeah, I remember that."
Orson sat up straight and stared at me, his head cocked to one side, as though he were buried in thought. I drained the second vial and thumped the syringe. It was steadily darkening in the car --- beyond twilight now.
"What do you remember?" he asked.
"Come on, man, I'm tired."
"Just tell me what you remember."
"We were twelve. It was June."
"July."
"Okay. July. Oh, yeah. Around the Fourth. In fact, it was on the Fourth when they found him. I remember that night, sitting in the backyard, holding a sparkler and seeing three police cars pull up on the curb. The officers came running through our backyard with two German shepherds. Dad was grilling hamburgers, and we watched the men disappear into the woods. A few minutes later, the dogs started going crazy and Dad said, 'Sounds like they found whatever it is they're looking for.' "
Orson smiled. "Willard Bass."
"Huh?"
"That's who they found in the tunnel."
"I can't believe you remember his name."
"I can't believe you don't."
"Why would I?"
Orson swallowed, eyes asquint. "He raped me, Andy."
Thunder vibrated the glass. I stared into the half-empty bottle of wine between my legs. My fingers wrapped around the cool neck. I lifted the cabernet to my lips and let it run down my throat.
"That didn't happen," I said. "I can look at you and ---"
"And I can look at your face right now and see that you know it did."
"You're lying."
"Then why do you have a funny feeling in your guts? Like something you haven't touched in years is waking up in the lining of your stomach."
I took another jammy sip and set the bottle between my feet.
"Let me tell you a story," he said. "See if ---"
"No. I'm giving you this so I can sleep. I'm not gonna sit here and listen to ---"
"Do you have a cigarette burn on the end of your dick?"
It felt as though ants were traversing the back of my neck.
"Me, too," he said.
"That didn't happen. I remember now. It was a story you made up after those kids found him."
"Andy."
I didn't want to know, but I did. I sensed it had always been there, tucked away in an alley of my memory, where I could walk by and know that something awful lurked there, without ever wandering down the corridor to behold it with clarity.
"It happened late one afternoon during a thunderstorm," he said. "In a drainage tunnel that ran beneath the interstate. The water was only a couple inches deep and the tunnel was high enough for a man to walk upright in. We played there all the time.
"We'd been exploring the woods since lunch, when a line of storms blew in. To escape the squall, we ran down to the creek and followed it up to the tunnel. Thought we'd be safe from lightning under the concrete, but we were standing in running water."
I see you in the dank tunnel darkness.
"I was telling you," he continued, "that Mom was gonna whip our asses for staying out in the storm."
I turned away from Orson and set the syringe on the floorboard. Night was full-blown, and darkness pervaded the car, so Orson was imperceptible beside me. I only saw his words, scarcely audible over the moan of the storm, as they dragged me into that alley.
Our laughter reverberates through the tunnel. Orson splashes me with water, and I splash it back onto his skinny prepubescent legs. We stand at the mouth of the tunnel, where the runoff drops two feet into a waist-deep muddy pool that we think is filled with snakes.
Two hundred feet away, at the opposite end of the tunnel, we hear the noise of careless footsteps in shallow water. Orson and I turn and see that the dot of light at the other end is blocked now by a moving figure.
"Who is it?" Orson whispers.
"I don't know."
Through the darkness, I detect the microscopic glow of a cigarette.
"Come on," he whines. "Let's go. We're gonna get in trouble."
Thunder shakes the concrete, and I step across the dirty current and stand by my brother.
He tells me he's afraid. I am, too. It begins to hail, chunks of ice the size of Ping-Pong balls pelting the forest floor and flopping fatly into the orange pool. More scared of the storm than the approaching footsteps, we wait, apprehensive. The tobacco cherry waxes, and we soon catch the first waft of smoke.
The man who emerges from the shadow is stocky and bald, older than our father, with an undomesticated gray beard and forearms thick as four-by-fours. He wears filthy army fatigues, and though hardly taller, he outweighs us by a hundred pounds. Staggering right up between us, he looks us up and down in a utilitarian fashion, which does not unnerve me like it should. I still don't know about some things.
"I been watching you all afternoon," he says. "Never had twins." I'm not sure what he means. He has a northern accent, and a deep voice that rumbles when he speaks, like a growling animal. His breath is rancid, smoky, and sated with alcohol. "Eenie, meanie, minie, moe. Catch a tiger by her toe. If she hollers, let her go. Eenie, meanie, minie, moe." He points a thick grease-stained index finger into Orson's chest. I'm getting ready to ask what he's doing, when a fist I never see coming catches me clean across the jaw.
I come to consciousness with the side of my face in the water, my vision blurred, and Orson moaning.
"Keep crying like that, boy," the man says, winded. "That's nice. Real nice."
My sight clears, but I don't understand why Orson is on his knees in the water, with the man draped over him, his enormous villous legs pressed up against the back of Orson's hairless thighs. His olive pants and underwear pulled down around his black boots, the man hugs him tightly as they rock back and forth.
"Hot damn," the man whispers. "Oh, good God." Orson screeches. He sounds like our cocker spaniel puppy, and still I don't understand.
The man and Orson look at me at the same instant and see that I'm conscious and curious. Orson shakes his head and sobs harder. I cry, too.
"Boy," the man says to me, his face slick with sweat. "Don't you move. I'll twist your brother's little neck off and roll it like a bowling ball."
So I lie there with my face in the water, watching the man moan. He closes his eyes and starts hugging Orson faster and faster. As he comes, he bites Orson's shoulder through a blue T-shirt, and my brother howls.
The man looks so happy. "Ah! Ahh! Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhhhhh!"
Willard pulls out and Orson collapses into the water. There's blood all over my brother's ass. It runs down the backs of his legs. He lies in the water, half-naked, too stunned to cry or even pull up his pants. Willard takes a cigarette from his breast pocket and lights it.
"You're a sweet piece," he says, reaching down toward my brother, who's still curled up in the water. Orson screams.
I sit up against the concrete wall. It's no longer hailing, and Willard stumbles through the water toward me, his pants still down around his ankles. I've never seen a man's erection before, and though beginning to fade, it's ungodly huge. He stops in front of me.
"I can't love you like I did him," he says, dragging on the cigarette. "Ever sucked on a dick?" I shake my head, and he steps into me. My jaw is swollen, but I forget the pain when I smell him. He holds himself in his hand and brushes it against my cheek.
"You put that in your mouth, boy, or I'll twist your head off."
Tears slide down my cheeks. "I can't. I can't do it."
"Boy, you take that now. And you do me good. Like you mean it. And mind those braces."
The moist bulbous head of his cock touches my lips, and I take it for a full minute.
A grapefruit-size rock drops beside me into the water, and Willard staggers back into the opposite wall and sinks down into a sitting position in the water. He's dazed, and I don't understand what's happened until I see Orson's hand lift the rock back out of the water.
Because Willard is holding his left temple, he never sees Orson wind up again. The rock strikes him dead in the face this time, and I hear the fracture of bone. The man's face is purple now, rearranged. On his hands and knees, he struggles toward the mouth of the tunnel. Taking the rock again, Orson mounts him, like we used to ride on our father's back, and brings the granite down into the man's skull. Willard sustains four blows before his arms give out.
With both hands, Orson lifts the rock up high and dashes the man's head out like a piece of soft fruit. When he's finished, he turns to me, still astride Willard, his face speckled with blood and pulp.
"Wanna hit him some?" he asks, though there isn't much left to hit.
"No."
He lobs the rock into the pool and comes over and sits down beside me. I lean over and vomit. When I sit back up, I ask him, "What'd he do to you?"
"Put his thing in my butt."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Look at what else." Orson shows me his tiny penis. There's a blister on the end, and it makes me cry to see it.
I walk over to Willard and roll him over. He doesn't have a face. His skull reminds me of a cracked watermelon shell. I find the soggy pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. The lighter's inside the pack, so I take it, along with one cigarette, and sit back down beside my brother. Lighting the cigarette, I pull down my pants and brand myself.
"We're still the same," I say, whimpering as the pain comes on.
Willard Bass was a fly buffet when the dogs found him. Though our parents forbade us from playing in the woods for the remainder of the summer, they never seemed to notice that their sons had been hollowed.
It's funny. I don't remember forgetting.
Silence reigned for a long time after Orson finished. The darkness inside the car became complete, and the storm raged on.
"Guess you think that explains a lot," I said.
"No. You want to know what I think? I think if you and I had never gone into that tunnel, we'd still be in this desert. I am not who I am because I was raped when I was twelve. Willard Bass was just gas on my fire. When will you see it?"
"What?"
"What's really in you."
"I do see it, Orson."
"And?"
"And I hate it. I fear it. I respect it. And if I thought for a moment it could ever control me, I'd put a gun in my mouth. Time for your injection."
33
WHEN I woke up, I didn't hear the wind. The clock read 10:00 A.M. Orson was breathing heavily, and though I shook him, he wouldn't stir.
It had grown uncomfortably hot inside the car, so I shut the vents. I turned the windshield wipers on, and they knocked off a wedge of snow. The sun shone into the front seat with eye-splitting brilliance.
The snow depth had risen above the hood, and as I stared out across the white desert, I saw only an occasional tangle of mature sagebrush poking up through the snow. The sky was orchid blue.
I saw a white ridge several miles ahead, and I wondered if it was the same one that rose behind the cabin and the shed.
Watching my brother sleep in the passenger seat, I felt a knot swell in my stomach. Bastard. I'd dreamed about Willard Bass making me take it. The rage lingered, festering in my gut, and the more I shunned it, the more it swelled. He should not have done that to me.
"Orson, wake up!" I slapped his face, and his eyes opened.
"Oh my," he mumbled, sitting up. "There's three feet on the ground." Orson cracked his neck. "Roll down my window." A clump of snow fell onto Orson's lap as the glass lowered into the door. "I see the cabin," he said.
"Where?"
"Two black specks on the horizon."
I squinted through the passenger window. "Are you sure that's it?"
"There isn't another structure within fifteen miles."
"How far is it?"
"A mile or two."
I reached into the backseat, grabbed an armful of clothes from the suitcases, and dropped them on the console between Orson and me. "I'm gonna let you out of the cuffs till we reach the cabin."
"We're going now?" he asked, incredulous. "There's no way we'll make it."
"Orson, we can see it. We got less than a quarter of a tank of gas left. That's not enough for another night of heat, and what if there's another storm coming? We're going."
"Any of these clothes waterproof?"
"No."
"Then forget it. That ice will saturate cotton, and it'll take us several hours at least to reach the cabin in snow this deep. Ever heard of frostbite?"
"I'll risk it. I'm not staying in this car another night with you."
I dug the handcuff key out of my pocket.
"I'm sorry I told you about Willard," he said. "Andy?"
"What?"
"You gonna forget again?"
"Don't say another fucking word to me."
The snow came up just shy of my waist. I'd never walked in snow so deep that each step required you to expend the energy of a toddler climbing a staircase. I made Orson walk several yards ahead of me, and, just as he'd predicted, we hadn't taken fifty awkward steps before the ice began to soak through the layers of my khakis and sweatpants. We'd gone a quarter of a mile when the initial icy burn set in above my knees, like a swarm of needles poking in and out of my raw red skin. It hurt to walk. It hurt to stand still, and by the time we'd hiked a mile through the snow, even my eyes burned from the sunny crystal glare. I wondered how I could possibly reach that minuscule black dot, which still seemed a fixture on the horizon.
Orson trudged on at his tireless gait, showing no sign of pain or fatigue. The burning in my legs had grown so unendurable that my forehead broke out into a cold sweat.
"Hold up!" I shouted, and Orson stopped. He was twenty feet ahead, bundled up in two Tshirts, a sweater, a sweatshirt, and a black leather jacket. His legs appeared bulky beneath the long johns, sweatpants, and jeans I'd given him from Walter's suitcase.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I just need a breather."
After a moment, I lifted my grocery-filled suitcase up over my head, and we continued on. My legs and feet turned numb shortly thereafter, so I battled only the stinging in my eyes. The sole relief came from closing my eyes, but I couldn't shut them long enough to quell the pain while Orson walked uncuffed ahead of me.
With the cabin three football fields away, my legs were spectacularly numb. I kept thinking of that medical definition I'd found for snow blindness while doing research for Blue Murder --- a sunburn directly on the cornea. It watered my eyes just to think of it, and I fixated on locking Orson into that spare bedroom and falling asleep under his fleece blanket in the soothing darkness of the cabin.
Orson glanced back at me, and I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed it before. He wore my sunglasses. Did you swipe them from the top of the dashboard while we dressed for this snow trek? I was going to scream at him to stop, but I thought, Fuck it, we're almost there.
Even when squinting, I couldn't adequately shield my eyes from the glare, so I let them close entirely, and it felt wonderful. I'm just going to shut them for a moment, I thought, moving clumsily and blindly now through the snow.
After six gargantuan steps, I opened my eyes to check on Orson.
He was gone.
Dropping the suitcase, I took the Glock out of my waistband and looked in every direction --- nothing but smooth unending snow, which drifted randomly in gentle mounds.
"Orson!" I screamed. My voice cracked and echoed across the blinding white expanse. "Orson!" No sound, not even wind. Trying to follow his tracks through the snow, my eyes watered, and the salt in the tears exacerbated the sting.
I sensed suddenly that someone was running up behind me, and I spun around and pointed the gun back in the direction of the car. The snow sparkled, pristine and empty. Fear tickled my loins. The white Lexus, half-buried and camouflaged in snow, existed now only as a silver glimmer in the distance. Sunlight struck the speck of its windshield like a flake of mica.
He's out there, I thought, turning back toward the cabin. He's lying in the snow, and all I have to do is follow his footprints. I saw where they ended less than fifty feet ahead.
"Stand up!" I shouted. "I won't shoot you, Orson! Come on! Don't do this!"
Nothing moved. I grabbed up the suitcase, and I had taken three steps, when something occurred to me. Kneeling down in the snow, I hollowed out a sufficient space to sit. With my leather-gloved hands, I attempted to tunnel into the thirty-six-inch wall of snow, and, to my horror, succeeded. During the storm, the wind had compressed the snowpack, so now I could shovel out a passageway, which barely exceeded one foot in height and two feet in width, while keeping the surface above intact. In essence, a man could tunnel unseen under the snow.
I stood up, becoming colder now through my torso. The footprints ahead of me meant nothing. Even as I reached the end of Orson's tracks and saw the suitcase he'd left behind, I knew that he could be anywhere in the immediate vicinity, hiding, waiting just two feet below the surface.
Dropping the suitcase again, I sprinted off into the snow, running in slowly expanding circles and screaming at my brother to show himself. I ran myself dizzy and finally collapsed on top of our suitcases, back again where Orson's tracks had terminated.
On the cusp of blindness, I feared that the numbness in my legs masked tremendous pain, which warmth would soon unthaw. The Glock in my hands was useless, and conceding that for the moment he held the advantage, I came to my feet and bounded on through virgin powder toward the cabin.
34
REACHING into the side pocket of my frozen khakis, I took the key that Orson had promised me would unlock the front door. Punching it through the icebound keyhole, I turned the key. The door opened; hauling the suitcases behind me, I entered the cabin.
I wagered that no one had been here in months. There was an unpalatable scent in the air, as if I'd climbed into an attic or a crawl space. My effete vision made the interior of the cabin dusky. I staggered across the stone floor so I could look out the window that faced south, the direction from which we'd come. Though late in the afternoon, the sun blazed as it descended over the bluff. Nothing moved in the sprawl of dazzling white, and I took comfort in knowing that were he to approach the cabin now, I would undoubtedly see him.
My attention turned from my brother to the morbid condition of my legs. I could feel nothing below the knees, and I imagined this was the sensation an amputee might endure when first walking on a prosthetic appendage. I need heat, I thought, limping toward the kitchen.
My snow blindness caused me to see everything in crimson. Nothing had changed. Orson's cornucopia of books still lined the walls, and on the northern edge of the living room, the perfectly organized kitchen stood against the wall, minus a functional sink. The doors to the back bedrooms were closed, and when I saw them, and that small Monet between the doors, my stomach dropped.
I noticed Orson's record player on the stool by the front door, along with the stack of jazz records he'd left behind. I would've put on a record, but there was no power, and it dawned on me that I should find the fuel supply and crank the generator before nightfall.
Beside the stove, I found what I was looking for --- the white kerosene heater. I couldn't find a corresponding can of kerosene, but when I lifted the heater, I heard a plentiful sloshing of fuel inside its tank. After dragging it into the living room and setting it before the black leather couch, I pressed the electric starter, and, to my surprise, the heater ignited on the first attempt. Warmth flooded the subfreezing cabin, and as the drafts of heat splashed at my face, I began removing the sweaters and sweatshirts that had kept me alive on that hike from the car to this cabin.
Leaving the pile of clothes on the floor, I sank down into the couch, unlaced my boots, and pulled the ice-encrusted shoes off my feet. I stripped the stiff socks, the khakis, sweats, and finally the wet long underwear that stuck to my legs. Below my knees, my skin had turned waxy white. I touched my pallid calves, and though they felt cold and hard like a corpse's, the tissue underneath was still malleable. My feet looked much worse. The ends of my toes were tinged with blue, and when I pinched the soles of my feet, there was no sensation of pain or pressure.
I glanced out the window and then, still seeing nothing on the desert, walked into the kitchen. There was a large silver basin on the counter, its interior frosted with the remnants of unbleached flour. I took it out onto the front porch and filled it with snow. The top of the kerosene heater was a level metal plate, exposed directly to the glowing orange coils underneath. I set the bowl of snow on the plate and lay back on the couch to watch it melt.
As the pile of snow disappeared into the basin, I couldn't shake the pavid feeling that being in this cabin fomented inside of me. I felt as if I'd come to my own wake and was standing before the casket, looking down into my lifeless face, unnatural beneath the false warm color of my skin. No sound, no wind, no movement in the back bedrooms --- my hands trembled.
I should not be here. This is very wrong.
The snow had been melted for some time when steam began to roll off the surface of the water. Reaching forward, I dipped my finger into the bowl. The water was warm, so I used my socks to lift the hot bowl and set it on the floor. Then I slid my blue feet into the basin, unable to feel the temperature or even the wetness of the water. Lying back on the couch, I closed my eyes as my legs came back to life, their resurrection announced by the tingling between my ankles and knees.
After five minutes, I still couldn't feel my toes. Reaching down, I plunged my hand into the water and found that my feet had cooled it more effectively than two blocks of ice. I set the bowl back on top of the kerosene heater, let the water reheat, and once again submersed my feet.
It took two more rounds of cooling and reheating the snowmelt before I felt something awaken in the bones of my toes --- the beginning of a deep, freezing burn. I tried to relax, visualizing my lake house in spring and imagining myself sitting out on my back porch beneath the pines, in the presence of the virid forest and the lake-chilled wind.
The lukewarm water bit like acid, and I grunted, sweat running into my tender eyes, my feet burning, as though I held them over an open flame. The pain reduced me to whimpering, and though the impulse to withdraw them from the water was enticing, I knew it wouldn't obviate the burn. I was paying for the cold now, for walking four hours through the snow in leaky boots. I could do nothing but sit on the couch and endure what was perhaps the most virulent pain I'd ever known.
By 6:00 P.M. the pain was sufferable, though I still saw the world in red. It was futile staring out the window for Orson. The sun had set, and the desert was blacker than the space between stars.
Retracting my feet from the cold water, I stood up, wobbly, but relieved to have the feeling returned to my ankles. The ends of my toes were blackening, but there was nothing more I could do. At the very least, I might have saved my feet. Who the hell needs pinkie toes?
Rummaging through the kitchen drawers, I located a candle and a book of matches. With the flame throwing soft yellow light against the log walls, I checked the dead bolt for the third time and secured the four living room windows. Then, clutching the tarnished brass candlestick, I walked through the narrow hallway into the back of the cabin.
The key to the dead bolt also unlocked the room that had been my prison. It appeared just as I had left it, meager and confining. Though the window in the back wall was still barred, I reached through and tested the latch. Then I opened the dresser drawers, which were empty, and peeked under the bed. There was nothing significant in this room, a holding cell, nothing more.
I walked back into the hallway and stopped at Orson's door. Touching the doorknob, I hesitated. You're alone. Fuck the fear. I stepped inside.
The freezer chest stood unlocked beneath the window. I opened it. Empty. I locked the window. Now he'd have to break glass to get inside.
Setting the candle atop Orson's pine dresser, I started opening drawers. The top three were empty, but when I tried the last, it was stuck. Yanking on it again, it still wouldn't open, so I kicked it. The wood squeaked, and jerking back once more on the handles, I pulled the drawer entirely out of the dresser and onto the floor.
Thank you, God.
I inventoried five videotapes, a stack of manila folders, a box of microcassettes, and three Mead notebooks. Bringing the candle down onto the floor, I held it over the drawer and removed a videotape. I read the label on the tape, written in his straight, microscopic penmanship: "Jessica Horowitz: 5-29-92; Jim Yountz: 6-20-92; Trevor Kistling: 6-25-92; Mandy Sommers: 7-06-92" --- all on one label, and there were five tapes here, not counting the three I'd destroyed in Woodside. I noticed that each tape, without exception, had been recorded during the months of May, June, July, and August: his hunting season.
The microcassettes were labeled only by date, and I assumed they contained the same self-absorbed drivel I'd heard Orson dictating in his bed in Vermont. Lifting a green wire-bound notebook from the drawer, I lay on my stomach and thumbed through the pages by candlelight. This one was full of poetry, every page, front and back. I read a short untitled poem aloud to explore the rhythm of his verse, his direct, protean voice flowing through mine:
You are always with me
When I lie in bed in the dark
When I walk a crowded street
When I watch the night sky
When I shit
When I laugh
When I possess them, as you possess me
You are omnipotent, but you aren't my god
You raised me but did not make me
You are gas but not the fire
I am deeper
I am incalculable
I am
The two other notebooks contained short stories, brainstorms, and the fragmented thoughts of someone aspiring to write. Orson wouldn't make it as a writer. He could turn a nifty phrase, but there was a general ungainliness and ambiguity in his verse and prose, which would've doomed him to fail had he ever tried to publish. I wanted to tell him this, and that his poetry was prosaic. I wanted him to watch me burn the notebooks and the tapes.
There were three manila folders. The first, titled "In the News," was filled with newspaper clippings regarding the discovery or lack thereof of Orson's victims. The second folder, "Memory Lane," bulged with photographs, and I studied all of them. I saw myself in half a dozen pictures, but they didn't unglue me like I'd feared, even the one of me staring down at Jeff seconds after his execution.
A handful of photographs featured Luther doing grisly things to people. In one photo, he stared truculently into the camera with dead, soulless eyes, fingernail marks running down each cheek.
In the third folder, "The Minutes," Orson had chronicled six summers of killing on unlined loose-leaf paper. Flipping to the end, I skimmed the synopsis of our time together, until I reached the final paragraph:
Wyoming: June 2, 1996
He hasn't been as easy or productive as Luther, but I see in him potential that transcends my other pupil. So I'm letting him go. Another week here and he'd lose his mind, when what I want is for his rage to ferment so he becomes drunk on the hate. He is my brother. He is me in so many ways. I love him, and the least I can do is introduce him to himself. Though I anticipate bringing him out here again, let me make a prediction: I won't have to. He'll come for me, and there won't be anything I can do to prevent it. Andy's smart and remarkably cruel when he needs to be. If he does come for me, I'll give him the gift, because he'll be ready. It's funny --- the selflessness he inspires in me.
35
THE moon came up over the Winds, lighting the snowpack like a field of blue diamonds. I simmered a can of pork and beans on top of the kerosene heater, and as they filled the cabin with their sweet, smoky aroma, I surveyed the desert for Orson.
We'd left the car at noon, and it was nearly 8:30. He couldn't have stayed alive on the desert this long. The temperature hadn't surpassed ten degrees all day, and tramping through the snow in deficient clothing would've resulted in his freezing to death by now. So he was either dead out there or he'd found refuge, the only viable shelters being the Lexus, the shed, or this cabin. I knew he wasn't in the cabin. I'd checked the four closets, under the two beds, and I knew with certainty that I was the sole occupant. The shed glowed in the moonlight. I could see it through the window beside the front door. If I'd mustered the nerve, I might've walked outside and searched for tracks leading to the shed. But I didn't have the temerity to go back out into the cold to look for him, especially since my legs were beginning to blister. Where are you? I thought. And what are you going to do?
When I finished my supper, I sat on the floor beside the heater and pulled a shoe box down from the couch. I'd found it under the defunct kitchen sink, and it contained all sorts of goodies, including Indiana, Oregon, California, and Louisiana state driver's licenses. In addition to Orson Thomas and David Parker, he was also Roger Garrison, Brad Harping, Patrick Mulligan, and Vincent Carmichael. He had passports for every name except Roger Garrison, and flipping through them, I saw that he'd traveled extensively in Europe and South America.
The find that pleased me most, however, was the rubber-banded stack of hundred-dollar bills. I counted $52,800 --- plenty to disappear.
Closing the shoe box, I tossed it into the drawer of videotapes and folders that I'd carried into the living room. Having scoured the cabin, every incriminating piece of evidence was contained in that single drawer, and it gave me great comfort to have it in my possession now. I stood up and walked to the window beside the door. The bluffs soared above the desert a mile behind the shed, like colossal dunes of white sand. Orson, I thought. Just you now. The only thing left to destroy.
If he came for me, it would be at night, but exhaustion wasted my mind and body. I'll sleep until midnight, I thought. I'm worthless now anyway. For all I knew, he might never come. He could be lying out there right now, statuesque under the snow.
I extinguished the heater and went into his bedroom. Wrapped in the fleece blanket, I curled up with the gun beside my pillow, and the handcuffs in my pocket. In the absence of wind and the humming generator, my breathing and my heartbeat produced the only perceptible sound.
I dreamed a memory: Orson and I are ten years old. The church service has just concluded at Third Creek Baptist Church, a chapel in the countryside north of Winston-Salem where Grandmom attends. Because it's the last Sunday of the month, the congregation surges through the front doors outside for a covered-dish picnic. Beside the small brick building, the epitome of homely Baptist churches, a half a dozen picnic tables exhibit a smorgasbord of country cooking. Three grills have been going since midmorning, and the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers and a whole smoked pig floods the August afternoon.
When we finish eating, Orson and I sit under a walnut tree and watch a regiment of ants feast on a discarded watermelon rind. It's clear and hot, and we sweat copiously under our matching baby blue suits with yellow bow ties.
I see her walking toward us, stepping daintily between families, who are gorged and lounging on blankets in the grass. New to the congregation, her knee-length sleeveless dress is the same premature yellow as the sun-scorched poplar leaves. She stops and stands by the watermelon rind. I watch an ant crawl across her unpainted big toe.
When she speaks, she makes the most peculiar sound, something akin to a knife blade sliding across a sharpening stone: "Schick. Aren't you two just the most precious little things I ever saw!"
Orson and I look up from the ground into her heavily powdered face. Her curly platinum hair is rigid, and she smells like a concoction of cheap perfumes.
"Darlings!" she exclaims, grinning, and we see her false teeth, where broccoli florets still cling. Here it comes --- that question everyone feels compelled to ask, though Orson and I are mirror images of each other. "Are y'all twins?"
God, we hate that. I open my mouth to explain how we're just fraternal twins, but Orson stops me with a look. He peers up into her eyes and makes his bottom lip quiver.
"We are now," he says.
"What do you mean, young man?"
"Our triplet brother Timmy --- he got burned up in the fire three days ago."
Through the powder, her face colors, and she covers her mouth with her hand. "Schick. Oh, I am so sorry. I didn't mean to..." She squats down, and I'm pinching the back sides of my calves, trying not to laugh. "Well, he's with Jesus now," she says softly, "so ---"
"No, he wasn't saved," Orson says. "He was gonna do it this Sunday. You think he's in hell with Satan? I mean, if you aren't saved, that's where you go, right? That's what Preacher Rob said."
She stands back up. "You'd better talk with your parents about that. Schick." Her feigned giddiness vaporized, she looks off into the bordering wood. With all her makeup, she reminds me of a sad clown. "Schick. Well, I'm terribly sorry," she says, and we watch her walk back into the crowd. Then we run behind the walnut tree and laugh until tears glisten on our cheeks.
I woke and found myself sitting up in Orson's bed, pressing the Glock against my temple. Nothing surprised me anymore. Sliding out from under the fleece blanket, I walked into the living room, the gun at my side. Without the warmth of the kerosene heater, the cabin had cooled again, and I bent down to punch the electric starter, when something curdled my blood: I recalled the dream and the woman's queer nervous tic: schick, schick, schick. Instead of lighting the heater as I'd intended, I unlocked the dead bolt and cracked the front door. Subzero night air deluged the cabin.
I hadn't ventured outside again since arriving at the cabin in the late afternoon, and my tracks ran south toward the car. A surge of adrenaline straightened each hair on my neck --- another set of tracks, which I had not made, came directly from the shed, up the steps, to the front door, where I now stood. He's in the cabin. Closing the door, I turned around and chambered a bullet, regretting I'd not left the votive candles burning in every room. I stepped forward into the red darkness, squinting at the corners in the kitchen and the living room, straining to detect the slightest pin drop of sound --- a noisy breath or a clamorous heart that pounded like mine.
Are you watching me now? I thought, creeping from the living room back through the hallway. The door to the spare bedroom was cracked, and I couldn't remember leaving it that way. Approaching the door, I kicked it open and rushed inside, spinning around in the darkness, my finger on the trigger, waiting for him to spring at me. But the room was empty, just as I'd left it.
I returned to the hallway. Your room. You were watching me sleep. Disregarding my fear, I stepped over the threshold. The only place in the room obstructed from view was the other side of his dresser. The Glock raised, ready to fire, I lunged across the room, beginning to squeeze the trigger as the blind spot between the dresser and the freezer came into view. He wasn't there.
The four closets were the only places I'd yet to comb, but I couldn't imagine he'd squeezed himself into one. They were filled with supplies --- one a pantry, another a storage space for gas, bottled water, and a substantial coil of rope. Besides, I'd have heard him banging around in the dark.
I walked out of his bedroom. There were two closets on each side of the twelve-foot hallway connecting the bedrooms to the living room. You're waiting for me to walk by again, so you can swing a door into my face. I bolted through the hall back into the living room.
Standing by the cold heater, I'd begun to devise a plan to flush him out, when a bead of water slapped the crown of my bald head. Snowmelt. Wood creaked above me, and I looked up into the rafters. A shadow swung down from a beam, and something blunt and hard smote the back of my head.
I came to on the floor, and the Glock was gone. I struggled to my feet. The red darkness twirled, pierced by bursts of light. Am I dreaming?
The point of a knife slipped between my right arm and my torso and touched my solar plexus. I saw the ivory handle, and when I felt his breath against the back of my ear, piss flowed down the side of my leg and pooled under my bare feet. When I tried to pull away, the blade pressed against my throat.
"This knife'll cut through your windpipe like it was Jell-O."
"Don't kill me."
"What's that jangle?" Reaching down, he felt the pockets of my sweatpants. "Oh goodie." He removed the handcuffs, with the key still in the lock, and cuffed my left hand. "Give me the other one." I put my right hand behind my back, and he cuffed that one, too. "Now lead the way," he whispered, the blade still at my throat. "There's a surprise for you in the shed."
36
THOUGH barefoot, I couldn't feel the ice between my toes. I imagined that the sliver of moon lit our faces blue and baleful. The night was surreal, and I thought, I am not here. I am not walking with him to that shed. Orson kept close, grunting with each breath, as though it were a struggle for him to stay with me. Withdrawal or frostbite, or both. I reached the back door of the shed, stopped, and turned. He shuffled toward me, pointing the Glock waveringly at my head. In the moonlight, I saw his face --- the tips of his ears blackened, his cheeks, lips, and forehead corpse-white from the cold.
"You've been guzzling your buttermilk," he said, grinning. "Go on in. It's unlocked."
I pushed my shoulder into the door and it opened. Terror weakened me when I saw what he'd done. The interior of the shed was filled with candles --- dozens of them placed on the floor and the shelves. Innumerable shadows jitterbugged along the concrete, up the walls, into the rafters. I saw the pole, the leather collar, the sheet of plastic spread out on the floor to catch my blood.
"All for you," he whispered. "A candlelight death."
"Orson, please...." The tip of the knife pricked my back, urging me through the doorway. As I walked across the concrete, I stared at the hole in the far corner of the wall, presuming he'd crawled in out of the snow sometime after dark. The missing panel of pine lay on the floor.
"On the plastic," he said. When I hesitated, he took three steps in my direction and pointed the Glock at my left knee. Immediately, I moved to the plastic and knelt down. "On your stomach," he said, and I prostrated myself as instructed. I smelled the leather collar as he slipped it over my head and cinched it around my neck --- the scent of misfortunate strangers' sweat and blood and tears and spit. I felt a terrible, intimate kinship with those doomed souls who'd worn this putrid collar before me. We were blood now --- Orson's hideous children. Papa dragged the stool out from the corner and perched on it, just out of reach.
Shoving the Glock into the waistband of Walter's jeans, he took the sharpening stone from his pocket and began drawing the blade across it: schick, schick, schick. Watching him work in the dim, jaundiced light, candles surrounding the plastic, I grew sensitive to the cuffs that dug into my wrists.
They were mine. I'd owned them since a Halloween party in 1987, when a friend presented them as a gag gift to me and this woman I was seeing, Sophie. It embarrassed us at first, but I cuffed her to my bedpost that night. I'd tied up other women with these cuffs and allowed them to shackle me. I'd bound Orson. Now he bound me. Fucking durable metal.
I sat up, facing him. Desperately and discreetly, I tried to pull the cuffs apart, and when my hands turned numb, I strained even harder. A man-burner named Sizzle in The Scorcher breaks the chain between a pair of cuffs while sitting in the back of a police car, and goes on to slay the arresting officer. Still pulling my hands apart, I recalled that deft little sentence: "The chain popped, O'Malley's neck popped, and Sizzle climbed behind the wheel and shoved the officer into the wet street." It's that easy. So break.
"You're wasting precious energy," Orson said offhandedly as he studied a ding in the blade. "I couldn't break them when you held the flame under my eyeball." He resumed stroking the blade, and his eyes fixed now on me. "A guy does favor after favor for you, and this is how you repay him. This betrayal."
My mouth ran dry; I had no spit.
"I don't know what your definition of favor en ---"
"It was all for you," he said. "Washington. Mom. We could've been amazing, brother. I could've freed you. Like Luther. I held the mirror up for him, too, you see. Showed him the demon. He didn't spit in my face." Orson began pinching his cheeks and scraping the skin off his face with the knife, as if amused with the lack of feeling in his brittle epidermis. He bled in several places. "You came in my house," he continued. "While I slept in my bed. Tortured me." He stared into my eyes. "You scare me, Andy. And that should not happen."
"I swear ---"
"I know --- you'll never come after me again. Andy, when a person knows their death is imminent, they'll say anything. I was carving this guy up once, and he told me his grandfather had molested him. Just blurted it out between screams, like it might change something." He laughed sadly. "You gonna talk to me while I open you? Nah, I'll bet you're just a screamer."
Orson stepped down off the stool. The largest candle in the shed was a red cinnamon-scented cylinder of wax with the girth of a soup can. It sat on the shelf beside the back door, and he laid the knife blade over its flame and pulled the Glock from his waistband.
"Pick a knee," he said.
"Why?"
"Disablement. Torture. Death. In that order. It begins now. Pick a knee."
An extraordinary calm enveloped me. You will not hurt me. I came to my feet and found his eyes, invoking that irrevocable love that was our entitlement.
"Orson. Let's talk ---"
The hollow-point bored into the meat of my left shoulder. On my knees, I watched blood drizzle across the plastic. I smelled gunpowder. I smelled blood. I blacked out.
I stared up into the rafters, flat on my back on the plastic, hands still cuffed behind my back. I attempted to move my feet, but they were tied crudely with thick, coarse rope. One hundred and eighty-five pounds crushed into my ribs, and I moaned.
Straddling me, Orson took the knife off the red candle, which now oozed wax onto the plastic. The carbon blade glowed lava orange, and the metal secreted smoke.
I wore a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a shabby burgundy sweater. Starting at my waist, the blade cleaved easily through the layers of scorching fabric, all the way up to the collars at my throat. Then splitting the garments, he exposed my bare torso, the chest hair swaying in the tiny drafts effected by candles in this icy shed. Above the thudding of my heart, I thought I heard something on the desert, a distant whine, like mosquitoes behind my ear.
"Wow. Look how fast your heart's palpitating," he said, placing his hand on my shuddering chest. He tapped my breastbone. "I'm gonna saw through that now. Anxious?"
When the knife point met my left nipple, I chomped my teeth and flexed every muscle, as though the tension might thwart the penetration of the fiery blade.
"Easy," he said. "I want you to relax. It'll hurt more." Orson moved the knife two inches to the left of my nipple and inserted the blade an eighth of an inch. The metal was brutally cold, and I shivered as I watched him slit a sloppy circle, four inches in diameter. Blood pooled in my navel, and Orson spoke to me while he carved, his voice flowing psychotic peace.
"Two-thirds of your heart lies to the left of your sternum. So I'm giving myself an outline to work with." He sighed. "I'd have taught you this, you know. On someone else. Look at that." He held the tip of the knife under my eye so I could see my blood sizzling on the amber blade. "I know you don't feel anything yet," he said. "That's the power of adrenaline. Your pain receptors are blocked." He smiled. "But that won't last much longer. They can only mask so much pain."
"Orson," I pleaded, on the brink of tears now. "What about the gift?"
He looked down at me, puzzled; then, remembering, he said, "Ah, the gift. You nosy bastard." He put his lips to my ear. "Willard was the gift."
He braced his left hand against my forehead and gripped the knife in his other. "Sometimes I wonder, Andy, what if he'd picked you?"
Someone knocked on the back door. Orson stiffened. "I want you to say something," he whispered as he stood up. "Swear to God, I'll keep you alive for days." Setting the knife on the stool, he walked to the door and drew the Glock.
Percy Madding's voice came through the door: "Dave, you in there? You all right?"
I strained to sit up on the plastic.
Orson fired eight shots through the wood at waist level. Looking back at me, he smiled. "That, Andy, is what you call ---"
A shotgun report blasted through the door, and Orson's chest caught the full load of double-aught buckshot. It knocked him off his feet and slammed him on his back as if a man had thrown him. Orson struggled to his hands and knees, stunned, staring at me as sanguine globs dropped out of his chest onto the concrete. Percy burst through the door and kicked the gun out of his hands. My brother crawled toward me, then eased back down onto the concrete, hissing shoal, sputtering breaths.
Leaning his double-barreled shotgun beside the door, Percy approached the plastic and squatted beside me. From the shallowness of his breathing, I could tell he'd been hit. He looked strangely at the pole, the leash, the sheet of plastic, the ragged bloody circle in my chest.
"He got the key to these cuffs on him?" he asked gruffly, twisting his snowy mustache. His voice was strong, but his hands shook. When I nodded, he walked over to Orson and dug through his pockets until he found the key. He told me to roll over, and then, after unlocking the handcuffs, he unsheathed a bowie knife from his belt and cut the rope that bound my feet.
"You hit?" I asked. He touched his side. Down mushroomed out of a hole in his camouflage vest.
"Just a graze, though," he said as I unbuckled the collar. "I see you took one in the shoulder. Them hollow-points, ain't they?"
"Yes sir."
"Then it's still in there." Percy walked over to Orson and pressed two fingers into the side of his neck. "This your brother?" he asked, waiting on a pulse. I nodded. "What in holy hell was he doing to you?" I didn't answer. "Reckon we better get us to a doctor."
I came to my feet and, starting for the back door, said, "I have to get some things from the cabin first. Would you mind helping me?"
"You bet."
Leaving Orson's vacant eyes open, Percy took his shotgun as he followed me through the obliterated door, back out into the snow. He yelled something about my friend, but my panting drowned his voice, and I didn't stop to ask what he'd said. My shoulder burned now.
A snowmobile idled in front of the cabin. When I reached the front porch, I glanced back and saw that Percy lagged fifteen feet behind, holding his side with his left hand, the shotgun in his right.
Upon entering the cabin, I closed the door behind me. In the perfect gloom, I could see nothing. Neither will Percy. I peered out the window, watched Percy wading through the snow, his body illuminated by the snowmobile's single headlight. Receding into the shadows so he wouldn't see me, I thought, I'll just knock him unconscious. There's food here, and he isn't badly injured. Someone will come for him. There's no other way. His boots thumped up the steps.
I inched back toward the hinges of the door so I'd be behind him when he entered.
"Dave!" he yelled as the front door swung open. "What was you saying about ---"
Ammonia.
Warm breath misted the nape of my neck.
I turned and faced Luther, smiling in the darkness.
EPILOGUE
LUTHER greets the morning with a smile. Climbing out of bed, he dons jeans and two sweaters and walks into the living room, smiling at Percy's frozen burgundy puddle on the stone.
While the coffee brews, he steps out onto the front porch. Large snowflakes drift lackadaisically down from the overcast sky.
"Howdy, boys."
Orson and Percy don't answer. They sit in their rocking chairs on opposite sides of the door, still as sculptures, their open, unblinking eyes staring into the desert, into nothing. They're upset with him because he made them stay out all night in the cold.
Sitting down on the steps, he listens but doesn't hear it yet. That's all right, though. It's only 10:45. He is not anxious. Beyond the shed, a brown speck darts through the snow --- a coyote, foraging. It woke him last night, crooning to the moon.
He hears an infinitesimal drone. Standing up leisurely, he stretches his arms above his head and fetches Percy's twelve-gauge from the breakfast table. Setting it beside him on the front porch, he sits back down on the steps to wait.
The snowmobile streaks across the desert, a black dot skimming the snow.
Percy's wife pulls up on her SnowKat and parks beside her late husband's snowmobile. In her umber bib and black parka, she removes her helmet and dismounts, the snow rising above her waist. Her face is robust and wizened like Percy's, and her hair sweeps long and gray behind her shoulders. She smiles at Luther and leans against the SnowKat to catch her breath. He can see two cabins in her sunglasses.
"Hi, there," he says, chipper. "Pam, is it?"
"Yep."
"It was kind of Percy to bring me over here last night. I was very worried about my friends getting stranded in the storm."
"Well, I appreciate you boys keeping him company last night. I brought your toolbox, Percy, so maybe we can fix your Kat good enough to get home. I always told him I'd kick the shit out of him if he left without a cell. What do you say there, Perce?" She glances at her husband, on Luther's left.
"You report him missing to anyone?" Luther asks, staving off another wave of lightheadedness. Pam steps forward, her head curiously tilted at her husband. Luther takes two shells of double-aught buckshot from his pocket.
"Not since I got you on the horn," she says, but she's not looking at him. "Hey, Percy!" She removes her sunglasses, squints at her husband, then at Luther, befuddled. Blood runs over the tip of Luther's left boot into the snow. "The hell's wrong with him?"
"Oh, he's dead."
She smiles, as though Luther'd made a joke, and comes a step closer. When she sees Percy's throat, she looks at Luther, then at Orson, and screams. A raven launches out of the snow beside the shed, croaking bitterly. Pam turns and bounds back toward the SnowKat.
Luther breaks the breech of the shotgun and slides the shells home.
Three hours later, he unwinds on the front porch, sipping from a mug of black coffee. He is not void of kindness. He has allowed Pam and Percy to sit side by side, and even arranged Pam's hand to rest in her husband's lap. They will freeze together. That is not altogether unromantic.
"I'm going to bring you guys a new friend," he says. "How would you like that?" He looks over at Orson and slaps him on the back, an arctic slab of stone. "Don't talk much, do you?" Luther guffaws.
He believes now that he is the perfection of Orson, and he burns with ecstasy.
A new thread of warm blood runs down his inner thigh....
Luther revives on his back, staring up into the ceiling of the covered porch, the spilt coffee already iced into the wool of his sweater. He sits up. The clouds are gone, the sun low in the sky, half-obscured behind that distant white bluff. Tingling specks of black have infiltrated his vision --- particles of dying that will soon overtake him. A small blood puddle has frozen on the wood beneath his feet, rosy in the petering sun. He is blisteringly cold. The pain is back, but he does not respond to discomfort in the whimpering, human fashion. He is indomitable, though he should depart soon if he intends to survive the bullet Andrew Thomas put inside him.
He stands, takes up the shotgun, and staggers back into the cabin. At the end of the hallway, he unlocks the door of the guest room and kicks it open.
Andrew Thomas lies motionless on the bed.
"Get up," Luther says. He hasn't entered the room since the previous night, when he dragged Andrew inside. With a pained exhalation, Andrew struggles to sit up against the logs. The quilt still wrapped around his shoulders, he shivers, his breath steaming.
"Come with me," Luther says.
Andrew looks up at him, vanquished. "I heard the shotgun. Are they all dead?"
"Come with me."
Orson's brother looks down at the floor, tears filling his eyes. "Just kill me."
Luther falters. Lurching into the wall, blood dripping from the hem of his blue jeans, he tries to take aim. But the shotgun slips from his hands and he slumps down upon the stone.
\*
I lift the shotgun from the floor and touch my finger to one of the triggers. When I place the barrel against Luther's chest, I can taste the madness, and my God it's sweet. I want to squeeze the trigger, feel the shotgun buck against my shoulder, and watch him bleed out on the stone. In short, I ache to kill him, which is precisely why I don't.
I drag Luther, alive but fading, onto the porch and bind him with seventy feet of rope to the last available rocking chair. Then I lift the red fleece blanket I took from Orson's bed and wrap it around Percy Madding and the woman beside him, who I assume was his wife. I want to bury them, but the ground is frozen beneath the snowpack. This is all I can do for the man who saved my life.
When I've managed to close Percy's frosted eyelids, I wade out into the snow and turn and behold the dying and the dead.
The parting rays of a cold sun gild the spectacle of the front porch, a sight I will never be rid of: Percy Madding, his wife, Orson, and Luther Kite, each in a rocking chair, three dead, one not far behind.
It startles me when Luther speaks. He shivers now, his teeth clicking uncontrollably. I cannot imagine him surviving the night. I wonder whether he'll bleed to death, or if the cold will claim him first.
"You stand there appalled," he says. "At what, Andrew?"
"At all this blood, Luther."
"We all want blood. We are war. That's the code. War and regression and more and more blood. Tell me it doesn't speak to you." Luther's black hair whips across a pale, bloodless face. He awaits my reply, but I have none.
At last, I approach my brother. Our faces are inches apart. Orson's eyes remain open, his mouth frozen into the slightest grin. The abject violation of the Maddings and every other human being he butchered consumes me, and I scream at him, raging, my voice filling the desert: "Is this beauty, Orson? Is this truth?"
Then, like a fever breaking, finally I start to cry.
Eastward, I glide across the snow toward 191 under the purple immensity of the Wyoming sky, and the madness diminishes as the cabin falls farther behind. I wonder if Luther is dead yet. I wonder many things.
The skis scrape across the pavement, and I bring the snowmobile to a halt on the other side of the road. Alighting, I unfasten the two suitcases filled with clothes and the contents of Orson's drawer. I sit down on the shoulder. The highway has been plowed --- the only snow on the road is windblown powder. All is still. My left arm throbs, but luckily, Percy was wrong. The bullet tore through --- I extracted the mushroom of lead from the back of my shoulder this morning.
The sun is gone. Ancient images of stars and planets commence filling the night sky.
The moon crawls above the Winds at my back, and I cast a lunar shadow across the road. The empty, pruinose highway stretches on, north and south, as far as I can see.
I'm so cold. I stand and stamp my feet on the road. Instead of sitting back down on the shoulder, I walk out into a thigh-deep drift and make a snow angel. Lying flat on my back, a wall of white enclosing me, all I can see now is the cosmos, and all I can feel is the steady infusion of cold.
My thoughts become electric.
I think of Orson's poem. Defiant. Courageous perhaps.
If we'd never stepped into your tunnel, we'd still be in this desert.
Mom...
Walter...
I will not be returning to North Carolina.
As the cold strengthens, the madness seems to ebb, and my mind clears.
Peace overruns me.
I'm nearly asleep when the distant mumble of a car engine reaches me. For a moment, I consider whether I should lie here and die. I've stopped shivering, and false warmth flows through me.
I struggle to sit up. Headlights appear, heading northbound out of Rock Springs. I rise, brush the snow from my clothes, and trudge stiffly into the road. A transfer truck, I predict, and standing on the dotted line, I wave my arms when the beam strikes me.
Much to my surprise, the bumper of a long white suburban stops ten feet from my waist.
The driver's window lowers at my approach, and a man several years my junior smiles until he sees the bruises that blacken my face. Elbows on the console, his pretty wife looks warily at me, the side of her face lit blue by the lucent dashboard clock. Three children sleep in the backseat, spread across one another in a tangle of small sibling appendages.
"Are you all right?" the husband asks.
"I don't know. I just...I need a ride to the next town. Wherever you're going. Please." The man glances at his wife. Her lips purse.
"Where's your car?"
"I don't have one."
"Well, how'd you get here?"
"Will you please take me to the next town? You're the only car that's passed all night."
The man turns once more to his wife, their eyes consulting.
"Look, we're going to visit family in Montana," he says. "But Pinedale is about fifty miles up the road. We'll take you that far. You can hop in through the back."
"Thank you. I'll grab my things."
"Richard," his wife mutters.
I lift my suitcases from the snow and walk to the back of the suburban. Opening the cargo doors, I stow my luggage on the floor and climb inside.
"Please keep it down back there," the wife whispers. "We want them to sleep through the night." She motions to her children as though she were displaying jewels.
The rear bench seat has been removed, so I find a place on the floor amid the family's luggage: a red cooler, canvas bags, suitcases, a laundry basket filled with toys. With my suitcases at my feet, I curl up against the cooler and draw my knees into my chest. We begin to move, and I stare out the back window, watching the linear moonlit strip of highway spooling out beneath the tires with increasing speed.
We climb subtly for a half hour. Then we're cruising along a plateau, and I'm looking back across the desolate flatland, scanning for two black specks in the sea of snow.
In the front seat, the woman whispers to her husband, "You're a sweet man, Rich." She strokes the back of his neck.
The vents channel warmth into my face, and the speakers emit a solacing oceanic ambience: sparse piano, waves and seagulls, the calming voice of a man reading Scripture.
And as Orson, Luther, and the Maddings harden on the cabin porch, in the massive desertic silence, I bask in the breathing of the children.
THE END
DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN
By J. CARSON BLACK
J. Carson Black's Amazon Author Central page
To the memory of my father:
A stray breeze on a hot day
The sun gentle on my face
1
VAIL, ARIZONA
Francis X. Entwistle showed up in Laura Cardinal's bedroom at three in the morning, looking world-weary.
"Don't get up, Lorie. Just wanted to give you a heads-up. A bad one's coming."
Frank's complexion was pale and there were shadows under his eyes. In life, his face had been dull red from the high blood pressure that had killed him. A bottle of Tanqueray gin sat on the window table and the tumbler in Frank's hand was about a quarter full. Laura didn't own any tumblers and she didn't drink gin.
Laura wasn't entirely surprised that her old mentor was sitting in the straight-backed Mexican chair in her bedroom four months after his wife had buried him. Maybe because she knew she was dreaming. Or maybe because he was her last link to her parents, and she didn't want him to be gone for good. Frank Entwistle leaned forward, the nightlight from the bathroom illuminating the scroll of white hair above his side part. "You're gonna have to pay attention and keep on paying attention."
He stopped to scratch the tip of his nose. Laura Cardinal realized the absurdity of the situation: Sitting in her bed at three in the morning, watching a dead homicide cop scratching his nose.
"I'm talking about the kind of thing, you aren't careful, could come back around and bite you in the ass. The key word here is vigilance."
She wanted him to clarify what he meant by that, but he was starting to fade.
He held his glass up in a salute. "Watch your back, kiddo."
When she caught the case the next day, there was no doubt in Laura's mind that it was the one Frank Entwistle had alluded to.
It was the weekend, and she was at her little house on the guest ranch where she lived rent-free. The owner, a friend from high school, liked the idea of having a criminal investigator from the Arizona Department of Public Safety living on his property.
The dream about Frank Entwistle remained with her, vivid and unsettling. It didn't feel like a dream. When she got up this morning, she sleepwalked into the bathroom. In the dim glow of the nightlight, she saw a ring on the table left by a sweating glass. Instantly she was wide awake, her heart rate going through the roof, until she realized the real culprit was Tom Lightfoot. Tom never remembered to use a coaster.
It was Tom who had been on her mind all morning, Tom who had preoccupied her since he left two days ago on a packing trip to New Mexico.
This was because of the note stuck to the refrigerator: "Maybe we should live together - T"
Not "Love, T," she noticed. The word "love" scared her anyway, so she wouldn't hold that against him. What she did hold against him was the fact that he had blindsided her, leaving that note on her refrigerator and then creeping out of town. She couldn't reach him in the back country. She couldn't say they'd only been together two and a half months, that his house was just over the hill, that just because he spent every night with her anyway, he shouldn't think he could move in. Living together was a whole different proposition from sleeping together. The last man she had lived with had been her husband, and that had not turned out well.
What bothered Laura most, though, was the part of her that leaped at the thought.
Restless, she went outside to water, the day already hot enough she had to run the hose awhile to avoid scalding the plants. Her mobile rang and she retreated into the shade with the phone.
It was Jerry Grimes, her sergeant. "You busy?"
"What's up?" Knowing that whatever plans she had for a quiet weekend were about to be blown out of the water.
"Bisbee PD has asked for an assist on a homicide."
As she listened, Laura forgot about Tom's note. Frank Entwistle had warned her it would be bad, and it was. A fourteen-year-old girl had been found dead in a small town south of here.
"Mike's talked to the chief down there, and we all agree," Jerry said. "You're the lead investigator on this. So don't take any shit."
He always said that, although Laura had never taken any shit yet. She knew the pep talk was just his way of showing support for her, a woman doing a man's job. But being called in to assist on investigations in other jurisdictions---mostly small towns---Laura knew that petty politics were far more obstructive to an investigation than any effect her gender might have.
"Victor will meet you there as soon as he can. You know where the ADOT yard is this side of the tunnel?" Jerry said. "They'll have someone from Bisbee PD there to escort you in."
Fifteen minutes later, Laura turned her 4Runner onto Interstate 10 going east, dread pressing into her throat.
Fourteen years old.
2
Once on the road, Laura punched in the Jerry Grime's number to get some background. Now she'd have time to absorb what he had to say.
"A girl named Jessica Parris was abducted yesterday from the street near her house. They think that's where it happened; there weren't any witnesses."
"What time yesterday?"
"After school. She didn't come home for dinner. Place is kind of out in the sticks. According to Bisbee PD, she lives---lived---at the end of West Boulevard." Jerry paused. He reminded her of an old-time union boss, tough and gruff. This case, though, would get to him; he had three daughters of his own.
Jerry said, "A girl fitting the Parris girl's description was found this morning in City Park. You know where that is?"
"On Brewery Gulch."
"That's right. Tourists went to see the bandshell and got a big surprise."
She thought of how the tourists must have felt, that sudden drop in the pit of the stomach. "She was in the bandshell?"
"Propped up against the back wall. Kind of like a doll on a bed, the woman said. The witness's name is Slaughter." He paused to let the irony sink in. "Doris Ann Slaughter. Said the girl was dressed up in some way, I don't know, like a doll dress." He paused again---this was hard for him. "Victor's coming from Marana. Should be a half hour behind you."
Laura signed off and pushed the 4runner up to eighty, mesmerized by her own thoughts as the freeway unraveled before her. She hoped the storm would hold off until she got a look at the crime scene. The day was sunny, but the sky to the south and east was an ominous leaden blue.
The monsoon season had started July 4. They'd had a thunderstorm every day this week---uprooted trees, downed power lines, roofs torn off, the north-south streets of Tucson turned into flooded canals. A whole city held hostage by rain-swollen streets, many of them uncrossable. Ask a man who has been plucked by a helicopter from the roof of his pickup in a Tucson intersection just how quickly nature can trump progress.
This morning, the heat hadn't yet built up sufficiently to produce the cumulonimbus clouds necessary for a thunderstorm, but Laura could feel the electricity in the air. She stopped at a fast food place in Benson for a breakfast sandwich---fuel---then drove south into the gathering gloom that seemed to press down on the mountains like a weight.
She felt both dread and anticipation. Needing to get there, see it for herself, but knowing that when she did, the image would haunt her for the rest of her life. The sight of the dead girl would be imprinted on her eyeball as if it were caught in the flash from a camera.
It would have plenty of company.
Laura reached the ADOT yard, where the Arizona Department of Transportation kept road machinery, at a little after ten a.m. A Bisbee PD Crown Vic was parked just outside the Mule Pass Tunnel. The officer, female and twenty-something, leaned against the Crown Vic's door. When she saw Laura's unmarked 4runner pull in behind her, she walked up to the window. "I have to advise you that you are not allowed to park here." Her face was peeling from a severe sunburn.
Laura showed her badge and told the officer---her nameplate said Duffy---that she would follow her. They drove through the tunnel and down into town and parked in a lot populated by law enforcement vehicles from four different agencies. Everybody and his brother was here.
Officer Duffy was out of her car in an instant. She strode across the lot without looking back, headed toward the staging area set up outside the mining museum across the street. Laura was used to this kind of rudeness. A state agency, the Arizona Department of Public Safety could only assist small town police departments if the chief requested it. The chief usually asked for help either because his force was too small or they weren't equipped to do the job. Laura encountered resentment every time she set foot in one of these small towns.
Sometimes she thought her job description should read Professional Pariah.
She opened up the back of her vehicle and took out her camera bag, wishing she hadn't worn dark clothes that absorbed the heat. The sky above was an unrelenting blue; no sign of the storm clouds she's seen on the way down. The mountains above the town were so high, they probably hid them from view. Laura entered the park and introduced herself to the cluster of men in the roped-off area.
Rusty Ducotte, who served twenty-five years with the DPS before his current stint as Bisbee Police chief, spoke in the subtle Arizona drawl that Laura had grown up with. He was long-faced with receding hair and red-rimmed eyes that reminded her of a rabbit's.
Ducotte made it clear that she was the lead, that it was now her scene. "I'd like Detective Holland to walk the scene with you, though, if that's okay."
Although the chief put it in the form of a request, Laura could sense steel behind it. He wanted his detective to work the case with her. Laura didn't see why not, as long as he didn't get in the way. She couldn't depend on Victor; his wife had just had a baby, and he'd already told everyone who would listen that he wanted to stay close to home.
As she listened to the first officer at the scene describe how he had secured the area, Laura assessed Buddy Holland. He had the cop look: hair clipped short, razored whitewalls, mustache. He also had a grim jaw and watchful eyes. Wary.
He didn't say much. Just kind of sat back and waited. Figuring out with those small narrow eyes which way to jump?
Officer Billings, the responding officer, paused in his dissertation. Looking at her for approval.
"You've made my job a lot easier," she told him. He deserved praise. By her standards, a lot of street cops weren't careful enough at crime scenes, mostly because they weren't trained well. Officer Billings had probably trained himself.
"I plan to be a homicide detective someday. That's my goal."
Buddy Holland smirked.
Twenty minutes later, Victor breezed in, trailing expensive cologne behind him. "I guess you're wondering why I called you all here today," he said, crisp white shirtsleeves already rolled up. He walked up to Detective Holland and held out his hand. "Victor Celaya."
The Bisbee PD detective straightened up from the tree trunk on which he had been leaning, his face instantly animated. "Buddy Holland."
They shook hands like long-lost brothers. Victor had an unerring sense for which person in a crowd needed to be won over. Now he paused and shot a glance at Laura, just to be sure she was still charmed by him. Impossible not to be.
It was decided that Laura, Detective Holland, and Officer Billings would walk the crime scene, and Victor would interview the two female witnesses detained in a conference room at the Copper Queen Hotel. Victor usually did the interviews. He was the best interviewer/interrogator in the unit.
Laura glanced up the street lined by two-story brick buildings: Brewery Gulch. From their vantage point on OK Street, news photographers aimed their telephotos down the hill at the park. OK Street marked the eastern boundary of Bisbee; after that, there was no place to go but straight up. This odd topography had the effect of making the corner of Brewery Gulch and Main Street both the city center and the edge of town.
They walked up the Gulch, Officer Duffy leading the way. The narrow canyon seemed to telescope until Laura's gaze was trained solely on the blue uniform of Duffy ahead of her, twenty pounds of duty belt, service weapon, flashlight, and handcuffs shifting from side to side on her compact girl-body. Duffy seemed sure of herself, as if she knew exactly where she was going. Laura got the impression it wasn't just Bisbee the officer was sure of, but her future as well. Laura envied the girl's certainty. Her own future seemed to disappear somewhere up ahead in the mist; she'd suffered too many body blows to take anything for granted in her personal life. Or maybe her personal life and her professional life were one and the same. The only thing she seemed to be good at was this job.
Ahead, yellow crime scene tape blocked the road, leaving space for people to turn their cars around. Their little group passed the open door to a bar. The beer smell billowed out, enveloping Laura in a dank, underworldly current.
The closer she got, the greater the dread she felt. The game of push-and-pull went on full force inside her: the urgency to see the scene, the equally strong desire to turn away. Whatever Jessica Parris had been thinking, feeling, or doing---stuff as simple as hanging out with a friend or planning what to do for the weekend---all of it had been cut short like a snipped thread.
At least nothing could hurt the girl anymore. Her family was another matter. In the aftermath of the tornado that took their daughter's life, their entire world would be blown apart, shattered into tiny pieces. Laura knew from experience that you could pick up the pieces, but you could never put them back together. She was here to get Jessica's family the only thing left that had any meaning: justice.
A knot of people had gathered at the edge of the tape. A uniform held them back, unassailable as a block of granite. She saw he had been assigned to keep the crime log.
Laura took photographs of the people crowded near the tape, making sure to get every face. You never knew who would be there, thinking they were invisible.
A hot wind spiraled up the canyon, bringing with it the smell of impending rain.
She let the camera hang down from the ribbon around her neck.
Her stomach tightened.
Time to begin.
3
When she was in grade school, Laura's parents took her to the Tucson Metro Ice Rink for ice-skating lessons. She remembered walking gingerly on her blades across the black rubber apron to the edge of the rink. The delineation between rubber and ice was inviolate, a law of nature. First you were clumping, and then you were gliding.
Like an ice rink, a crime scene was something apart. City Park had been transformed forever from what it had once been. The evil that had visited here would linger in the hearts and the minds of the people who frequented it, long after the body was carted away and the crime scene tape taken down. Legends would grow up around it. The crime scene was hallowed ground.
Laura was about to step across the threshold into a new world with new rules, and she saw what she did there as a sacred duty. Mistakes could never be recalled, so she had to take her time and do it right. She ducked under the tape, followed by Holland and Billings. Officer Duffy followed suit.
"Officer Duffy," Laura said firmly, "it will be just the three of us."
Duffy blushed furiously and stepped back. Laura didn't bother to explain something the officer should already know: The fewer people inside a crime scene, the better. Cops were the worst offenders when it came to trampling evidence, drinking from water fountains, or flushing toilets at a crime scene.
Now they were standing at the entrance to City Park, which was actually one story above them and accessed by a flight of dingy brown steps climbing up to the street above. Bisbee was built on hills, and concrete stairs like these were everywhere, connecting to the winding roads above and below like a game of Chutes and Ladders.
According to Officer Billings, there was an entrance into the park halfway up. The witness had led Billings up this way. The place made Laura think of the inner city, Chicago or New York---a park made of concrete, suspended above the street on the backs of three locked-tight shops, their windows blank.
She looked up and saw the finials of a wrought iron fence and some treetops. Wondered how trees could grow there. She glanced at Officer Billings. "That street, where does it go?" Laura pointed to a street that curved up the hill around the edge of the park.
"Opera Drive? It makes a half-circle around City Park, doubles back up there." He motioned to the road above, high on the mountain. Houses were strewn down the hill like items in a jumble sale.
"Let's start here and walk the perimeter," Laura said. Behind her, Buddy Holland snapped on latex gloves and young Billings followed suit. Buddy looked over at Laura, then pointedly back at his hands. Laura crossed her arms, tucking her hands under her armpits. She didn't wear gloves until it was time to collect the evidence; wearing them tended to make her complacent.
They walked north on Brewery Gulch and followed the curving street up the hill, Billings filling them in on the witnesses' discovery of the body and his subsequent trip back with them to the bands hell---any and all observations, large and small. Halfway up the curve, they came to an entrance into the park. From here Laura could see a long concrete oval with a basketball court, a playground, cement bleachers cutting into the hill on the right, and the band shell.
Billings's voice trailed off into silence.
Inside the band shell, propped up against the back wall, was a tiny, forlorn figure. At first glance, it looked like a doll. From where she was, Laura couldn't see features or details, but she could see the figure's static nature, its lack of life. She felt the shocked presence of the men with her. The whole canyon seemed quiet, insulated from the world like a soundproof room.
She wiped sweat out of her eyes. Suddenly she wished the storm would come, bringing with it cool rain.
After a moment that seemed like a prayer, they continued up the hill. Sunlight glared off silver-painted roofs down below on the Gulch. Laura realized how thirsty she was. When they got back down, she'd ask for someone to send up some bottled water. They followed the wrought iron fence, looking at everything, paying particular attention to the ground. She could hear her own ragged breathing; they were up at five-thousand feet. They could see into the band shell, the horror closer now. It was unsettling how much the girl looked like a doll. Still too far away to be sure if she was real.
At the top of the road, they reached the flight of stairs that descended the hill along the south side of the park. If they walked down these stairs they would have gone full circle. In the corner, next to the steps, the tarpaper roof of the band shell gleamed in the sun, a shallow puddle from a recent thunderstorm in the center. Beneath, unseen, was the girl. The stench of death condensed in the humid air, cloying and undeniable.
The three of them stood at the top of the concrete steps, looking down at Brewery Gulch below.
A breeze touched Laura's face and she smelled wild fennel. Behind her Buddy said, "I don't think he came from up here. He'd block the road. It would be hard to get in and out. He'd have more of a chance of being seen."
Laura thought he was probably right.
A cicada buzzed, hard and violent.
She was aware of the two of them looking at her. "Let's go down the stairs."
As they entered the park, Officer Billings headed for the band shell steps.
"Officer," Laura said, "stay with us."
He blushed at his lapse of judgment. "Sorry," he said, quickly rejoining them at the entrance.
Laura stood still, facing out into the park. The body of the little girl would wait. Wordlessly, the two men stayed with her. She could see Detective Holland out of the corner of her eye. She hated dividing her attention between two people she didn't know and the crime scene. If she had it her way, she'd be here alone.
Looking at the park with her back to the band shell, she measured with her eye the distance to the other end---approximately two hundred feet, maybe a little more. Inside the long oval of the park, the basketball court formed a smaller, concentric one. Near the wrought iron fences, there were cookie-cutter scraps of dirt, where the trees grew. She realized that she was in a natural amphitheater, houses all around, many of them looking down from the tall hills---a ready-made audience.
Laura closed her eyes, trying to summon the thoughts of a killer. Sometimes, if she narrowed her field of vision enough, she could see things from his perspective.
Laura knew he craved an audience, knew it from the evidence he'd left behind. Even as she tried to draw him in, think like him, her analytical mind ticked away underneath, logically picking up and discarding theories---the easiest way for him to enter the park, if the girl was dead or alive when he brought her here, and what he did last, just before he left.
The reason he had to dress her up like a doll.
A scrape of shoe on cement---Holland or Billings. Whoever it was, her concentration broke. The killer had something to say to her, but she couldn't hear him. Maybe it was Detective Holland, his disapproval of her jamming the frequencies.
She would come back later, alone.
She turned and faced the band shell.
The 1916-era band shell was small and shabby with stuccoed-over cement. The stage apron stood a little over waist-high. Under the arch, the shallow interior had been painted pale blue---to represent the sky?---but was now overpowered by graffiti.
The body of the girl had been placed in the center, propped against the wall, legs out. Flies zoomed around her.
Finally, Laura looked directly into the girl's face. Shocked, she thought, I know her.
4
The barriers of time and place dissolved, and she saw the grainy newspaper photo of the two-tone sedan and the headline above it: CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND.
It wasn't Julie, though. Of course not; it couldn't be. And now that she really looked, she saw that the girl was not an exact match.
Laura owed it to this girl not to get sidetracked. Her resemblance to Julie Marr was just a coincidence. Looking for a distraction, she glanced at Buddy Holland.
His face had turned deep crimson. He stared at the child, eyes fixed, a vein pulsing in his jaw. For a moment, she wondered if he was having a heart attack. She opened her mouth to ask him if he was all right.
He turned his head to look at her. For a moment, the bleakness in his eyes reminded her of Frank Entwistle staring across the hospital bed at his own death---what one guy in her squad referred to as the thousand-yard stare. Then his eyes turned stony, unreadable.
Laura looked at the girl. She was barefoot and dressed in an old-fashioned white dress. A little girl's dress, babyish. Something a seven-year-old would wear to First Communion. If this girl really was Jessica Parris, she was fourteen years old---far too old to wear a dress like this.
"I wonder where he got the dress," Laura said. "Who would sell dresses like that for a girl that age?"
"It looks small on her," Buddy Holland said. His voice was thick with emotion. She liked him better.
Laura took inventory. The girl's hands had been placed neatly in her lap. Her fingers were clasped together. Her hair had been brushed. Her legs had been slightly but not overtly spread. This last could indicate sexual motivation. Dressing her up was also most likely sexually motivated.
She had been arranged in a tableau.
Buddy's voice echoed her own thoughts. "He staged this---put her on display. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts he's done this before."
"Probably." Either the bad guy had killed before, or he had worked his way up to this, probably with rape.
God, she wished she had some water. She led the way to the band shell steps on the other side farthest from the street, the ones she believed the killer did not take.
She was pretty sure the guy had come up from below. That would have been easiest. He would have come up the steps from the Gulch, entered the park, and headed right up the steps to the band shell.
Up on the concrete stage, Laura scanned the inside walls. There was a door opposite, probably a storage area, padlocked closed. On the padlock someone had written FTW---Fuck the World. Bad guys, but likely not the ones she was looking for.
The floor was so clean it might have been swept. Clearly, he was an organized offender. He made very few mistakes. The guy she was looking for had probably read the same books she had, books on criminal investigation and forensic science. Laura stared across at the entrance to the park, just down the steps from the band shell, already picturing him coming up from the street. It would take him ten minutes, tops, and that included clasping the hands.
In, out.
Arms still folded, she hunkered down next to the girl in a catcher's stance.
The girl looked nothing like Julie from this angle. Her eyes were too close together. Her hair was a lighter blond. It looked dyed. There were holes in her earlobes, but no earrings. Did he take them? There was a tiny butterfly tattoo on the fleshy part of the right hand, just below the thumb. At odds with the dress. The dress itself was white but appeared shop-soiled, as if it had been packed away for a while. She could see the creases. She leaned to look at where the girl's back departed from the wall. The dress had been zipped up only halfway. No tag.
Laura took a deep breath and looked into the girl's eyes.
She had seen many people who had died violently. It seemed to her that the eyes of a large percentage of these victims had been stamped with fathomless terror, as if they had seen their deaths coming for them.
But in this girl's eyes Laura saw no emotion, just broken blood vessels in the whites---petechiae---which hinted at death by strangulation. Brown and brittle as acorn hulls, the girl's eyes showed nothing at all.
Laura hoped it meant she hadn't suffered, but the petechiae told her otherwise. Either way, she would never know the truth for sure.
She stood up and walked around to the other side, looking at the girl from that angle.
Laura always felt the victim could tell her something. There was usually some evidence that the dead kept to themselves, a secret they had taken with them, a secret the killer forgot. In every homicide case she'd investigated, there had been something that the dead had held back. She just had to find it. To recognize it when it looked her in the face.
"I figure the lividity points to the fact that she was moved," Officer Billings said behind her. "Down by her ears, the bottom of her neck, see?"
She tried to block him out, concentrate on the girl.
"Looks to me like she was prostate when she was killed."
"Prostrate," Laura said.
"Prostrate, sorry." He laughed nervously. "That's funny, prostate. Anyway, I knew it the minute I saw her."
"Would you shut the fuck up?" Buddy Holland snapped.
Hurt, Billings said, "Hey, I was just---"
"I don't fucking want to hear it."
Laura was aware of Buddy's legs, spread in a fighter's stance. She thought he was very close to the edge. When the chief introduced them, he'd mentioned that Buddy Holland had been with the Tucson PD a long time before coming to Bisbee. Why did this death affect him so much? He must have seen his share of corpses---even young girls.
He squatted down beside her. She could feel his breath as she studied the girl's hair near her ear.
That was when she saw it.
You slick son of a bitch, she thought.
You missed something.
5
After Musicman logged on at the Earthling Café, the first thing he did was check his mail.
There were two messages from CRZYGRL12@ synerG.net.
Fingers tapping rapidly on the table, he tried to think it through. Hard, because his mind was rushing a mile a minute. Although his rage had not abated one bit, he felt the overwhelming need to know what happened.
Out front, another police car went by, this one from the sheriff's department.
He tapped his fingers some more and then brought her picture up on the screen. Maybe he could find a clue in her eyes.
The waitress, a scarf-haired girl wearing heavy white linen tied around her waist, set his iced tea down. She glanced at the picture. "That your daughter?"
He lowered the laptop lid so she couldn't see. "Uh-huh."
"Pretty girl."
He nodded, acknowledging but not friendly. She took the hint and threaded her way back through the cramped cafe to the stand-up counter. Only then did he push the laptop's lid back up.
She smiled out at him---his girl.
Like a tidal wave, the desire---the need---came rumbling up from deep inside him. He could feel it in the trembling of his hands, the prickling saliva in the corners of his mouth. The adrenaline rush, the beating of his heart, the answering chime in his groin.
If she was his girl.
He had to know. No way could he leave it like this---not when he was this close.
He opened the first message.
Where wer u? I waited 1 hr. I thought for sure this was the day and I walked 3 Miles. Did I get the wrong day? Let me know. Luv, Your Muse. PS I looked it up, it's really cool to be your muse.
He closed the first email without replying and opened the second one.
Y haven't I heard from u? Write me!
The same. She was the same. Or at least she seemed the same.
Another cop car went by, lights on but silent. That was seven, total, since he'd been here. He poured two packets of sugar into his glass and stirred, having to use a regular teaspoon because they didn't have the long ones.
Suddenly, he wanted to throw the goddamn spoon across the room.
His girl. Who was he fooling?
He wasn't stupid---far from it. He knew he couldn't dismiss what he'd seen. There came a time when you had to trust your instincts. He had always been fully aware of the dangers, and that was why he was so careful. He'd always had a sixth sense for trouble.
Until now.
6
Dusk had fallen by the time one of the lab techs, Danny Urquides, motioned to Laura from the band shell stage. "The ME's gonna take her now."
For the last half hour, Laura had been waiting for the crime scene techs to finish their work. Now she realized how dry her lips were---a chronic problem. She fumbled in the pocket of her slacks, momentarily afraid she'd left her lip balm in the car, relieved and grateful when her hand closed around the small tin. When she worked a crime scene her field of vision narrowed so much she forgot about things like thirst, hunger, and dry lips.
It had been a very long day. There had been so much to do, and she trusted no one else to do it---even the stuff some might label scutwork---because this was her case and she had to build it painstakingly. In her mind she thought of it as a Popsicle-stick house, placing one piece of evidence atop another until she had a case so tight no defense attorney could knock it down.
One thing Frank Entwistle had drummed into her: Think about the end game. In police work, the end game was a conviction. Whatever she uncovered would have to stand up in court.
Since this morning, she had walked the crime scene twice. She had marked and collected evidence, measured and drawn the crime scene to scale, and shot seventeen rolls of film from the ground and an additional two from the DPS helicopter. Laura hated flying in general, and flying in helicopters---where the world tilted crazily---in particular. But it was part of her job and she white-knuckled it.
Laura dropped the lip balm into her slacks pocket and went up to supervise the removal of the body.
A tech from the medical examiner's office was in the process of gently moving the girl away from the wall. Laura photographed the part of her that had been concealed until now, from head to heels. Other than residue from the dirty wall, there was nothing new. The one thing the killer had missed---a mesquite leaf Laura had found on the girl's neck---had already been photographed, bagged, and removed.
By this time, they had made a positive identification: The girl was indeed Jessica Parris. Victor Celaya had made the notification earlier in the afternoon.
A familiar twinge started in the small of her back. At five feet nine, she was on the tall side and had a long waist. A car accident during her time at the Highway Patrol had weakened her back despite the doctors' assurances to the contrary, and she felt it every time the job required long hours and standing around. She couldn't even lean against a wall until they were done with the crime scene.
It had rained scantily off and on for about an hour---not much of a storm. The air smelled of wet earth and wet cement, nothing like the seductive perfume of the creosote desert where she lived. But it had cooled her down, blown some fresh air into her.
As they lifted the girl, Laura looked at her face. Despite the deterioration already beginning to erode the hopeful image of youth, the face that once belonged to Jessica Parris seemed unconcerned with the indignities of death---as if she were already an angel.
Laura thought of the parents, glad they could not see her now. How did you deal with the death of your own child?
Anguish stormed up into her chest, the wanton destruction getting to her. Why? Why take this girl's life? She knew the conventional wisdom, the explanations given by psychologists and FBI profilers, the charts and statistics and probabilities, but at this moment they rang hollow.
The firestorm of emotion took her unawares, blowing up through her soul like a crown fire. Just as quickly, it burned out, leaving only cold, bitter anger.
You think you can get away with it, she said to him. But you won't.
I will find you. I swear to God I will.
I will make you pay.
Going back down Brewery Gulch, she passed the bar she'd gone by this morning, what seemed like a hundred years ago. Heavy metal music spilled out along with the beer smell. Several Harleys were parked out in front of the bar. Bikers, tourists, and stray dogs populated the shadowy street, flickering in and out of lights from open doorways. They were joined by hippie types who seemed at the same time flamboyant and insubstantial, slipping through the night like ghosts of a long-gone era.
Laura was tired, dirty, drained, and hungry. Earlier today she'd seen the sign in the Copper Queen Hotel lobby for prime rib. She hoped the restaurant would still be open after the briefing at the Bisbee Police Department. Maybe grab a bite with Victor. She hadn't seen him since this morning. He'd spent most of his time canvassing the streets around the park or up at the Copper Queen Hotel conference room, doing what he did best: talk. Interviewing witnesses, being interviewed himself by the news crews from the Tucson and Phoenix network affiliates. He could have them.
Laura was almost past a red brick building when she saw something in the store window, partly shielded by an old-fashioned canvas awning, its candy-stripes faded to pink. A doll, propped up against a metal trunk, legs splayed, hands together on her lap. She wore a Victorian-style little girl's dress. The dress looked like it had once been white, but had been faded by the sun.
The sign above the door said: COOGER & DARK'S PANDEMONIUM SHADOW SHOW AND EMPORIUM. The antique shop sold twentieth-century kitsch. Melmac, Buck Rogers space ships. A dim light came from the back of the store.
Taped to the door's window was a faded poster depicting whirling leaves on a dark sidewalk. Laura remembered it from her childhood, the cover of Ray Bradbury's book, Something Wicked this Way Comes.
Evil had visited Bisbee in the middle of the night, like the locomotive in Bradbury's book, bringing the dark carnival to the edge of town.
She knocked on the door and it rattled in the frame. No one answered.
The shop next door was open, though---a tattoo parlor. Laura asked the proprietor about Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show and Emporium.
The heavyset woman looked up from tattooing the Virgin of Guadalupe on her customer's forearm. "Oh, that place. Guy doesn't show up much, kind of like a lot of shop owners around here. No set hours, just every once in a while the door's open. Name's Ted." She shrugged. "That's all I know."
Laura could find out who owned the shop tomorrow. All it would take was a look at the city records. She was about to walk out when another thought occurred to her. "Did you do the tattoo for Jessica Parris?"
"Hold her steady, Ramon." The woman put down a tool that looked like a dentist's drill and bustled over to a filing cabinet behind the counter, handed Laura the file. "She wanted the butterfly---very popular with young girls. Turned out real nice."
"Don't you have to get parental permission to tattoo a minor?"
She gave Laura a look. "In this case, her mama brought her in. Her mama and her boyfriend."
Jessica had a boyfriend? "You know his name?"
"Cary Statler. He lives with them. They took him in when his own mom left town."
"So what do we know about this guy?" Chief Ducotte said.
Laura, Victor Celaya, and the eight members of the Bisbee PD were crammed around a table in the Bisbee Police Department conference room, an airless cubicle smelling of microwaved pizza.
"The creep likes to play dress-up," muttered Sergeant Nesmith.
Nervous laughter.
"I bet he's done it before," said someone behind Laura. Sandwiched as she was between a young police officer named Noone and Detective Holland, she'd have to turn herself inside out to see who had spoken. Holland had thrown his weight around, literally, making the most of his space and practically pushing Laura into Noone's lap. The molded plastic chair didn't help her back much either.
She didn't mind the chair so much as the feeling that this briefing was an exercise in futility. Chief Ducotte had asked that the briefing include all of the Bisbee Police Department. Laura remembered his exact words: He wanted "to foster an inclusive atmosphere" and make sure that everybody "was on the same page."
Bottom line: He didn't want his people to feel left out. Even though they would be.
Laura was well aware of the pressures the chief faced. The safety of a city dependent on tourism had suddenly been breached, and logical or not, the chief would be blamed. His job was to keep the town running smoothly, bring in revenue in the form of traffic tickets and fines, and maintain a comforting presence in the community. These were his priorities, and he needed to get the town back up on the rails as quickly as possible. That meant he had to get his cops back out on the street.
But he also had to think about morale.
In Laura's opinion, this briefing was unwise; it would raise expectations in the rank-and-file that they would be integral to the case, and other than helping in minor ways, that just wasn't true.
Officer Billings, one of the few here who had seen Jessica Parris's body, was enjoying his three minutes of fame. "You know what she looked like?" He paused dramatically. "Judy Garland in the The Wizard of Oz. The girl was too old for a baby-doll dress like that ... damn, it was spooky."
Sergeant Nesmith leaned back and folded his arms over his considerable bulk. "Haven't heard of nobody dressing 'em up like that. Sounds like something you'd see on Most Wanted."
What no one said but everyone thought: This guy might be a serial killer. Either there had been other murders before this, or Jessica Parris was the first. Everyone here had some knowledge of FBI profile techniques. They knew as well as she did that when a person employed ritual in his killing, he would do it again.
Victor said, "The dress was too small. He must have had the dress first. Why'd he have the dress first?"
"Maybe that's all he could find," said a scrawny cop with a rust-colored, handlebar mustache like Wyatt Earp's. His nameplate said Danehill.
Laura said, "We need to check the resale and antique shops in the area."
"He could have gotten the dress anywhere," said Victor. "Also, there was no tag on the collar."
"Maybe he tore it off."
"Or it could be homemade."
"What, you mean like sewed? From a pattern or something?"
"My wife sews," Sergeant Nesmith said. "If I could get a look at the dress, I could probably tell. I could get on the Internet, check out dresses like that, see if there are any patterns."
Laura shifted in her seat to relieve the pain in her back, caught Officer Heather Duffy's eye. Duffy was glaring at her.
Victor crossed his leg at the knee, played with the tassel on his Italian loafers. "We'll get photos of the dress and pass them around to everyone. I wonder what he did with her clothes?"
"Took 'em for a souvenir?" suggested Officer Billings. "A trophy?"
"Or threw them away."
Chief Ducotte said, "You have someone on that? Checking all the garbage cans around here?"
"We're on it," said Nesmith.
They discussed the mesquite leaf found on Jessica Parris's neck, stuck like a piece of confetti behind her ear---something the killer had missed. This pointed to the possibility that the girl had been killed outside of Bisbee, since mesquite trees were rarely found above five-thousand feet. Unfortunately, the surrounding valleys---some of them only a mile or two away---were thick with them.
Then they came to the doll at Cooger & Darks. "I'm going by there tomorrow and talk to the owner," Laura told them. "Maybe he saw somebody, someone too interested in the display."
Chief Ducotte nodded, blinking his rabbity eyes.
Victor said, "Another thing, we're all agreed he took her up there after she was dead. That means we have three crime scenes. The one where she was abducted, the one where he killed her, and the band shell. Any ideas on that?"
"His house?"
"A motel, if he isn't from around here."
Laura glanced in Duffy's direction and noticed she was looking at Noone with an odd expression. She tried to pigeonhole it: Longing? Anger? Something in between? Duffy's short, compact body looked like it was about to explode.
Something between Duffy and Noone.
Buddy Holland, who'd seemed preoccupied throughout the proceedings, followed Laura's gaze. One corner of his mouth came up. Whatever was going on with Duffy and Noone, he knew about it.
Victor was saying, "Motels, bed and breakfasts, apartments, what else?"
"If it's his crib it'd be pretty much impossible to find," said Danehill.
"I got some photographs of the crowd by the crime scene tape this morning," Laura said. "Our guy might not have been able to stay away. As soon as we have them, I want to canvass the neighborhood again. Maybe somebody noticed something unusual, maybe someone they knew did something outside their routine. That is, if he's local. But I have my doubts about that."
Detective Holland picked at some invisible lint on his sleeve, stretched his long blue jean-clad legs out and stared at his feet. "I think he is local."
"You do?" asked Noone. "From here in Bisbee?"
Holland shrugged. His watchful eyes scanned the room, landed on Laura. "Why would he come here? We're a little off the beaten path. It just doesn't compute."
Officer Duffy spoke up. "I think Buddy's right."
Chief Ducotte looked at Holland. "Go on," he said.
Buddy Holland paused, waiting until he had their undivided attention: When E.F. Holland talks, people listen.
"This is a local guy, been working up to this a long time, peeping in windows, maybe caught masturbating outside some little girl's house. I see it as opportunistic---nobody was around, he saw her, he grabbed her. Maybe it got out of hand. He's fantasized about this for a long time." He pushed his chair back, almost pinning Laura's arm between them. "I think what Ms. Cardinal here said was telling. The doll shop. He could have got the idea from the doll. A local would know the park really well, know how easy it'd be to get up and down with a DB without being seen."
"How many people from out of town know where West End Boulevard is?" demanded Heather Duffy. "Nobody."
"He could've grown up here and come back," said Danehill.
"It's one theory," the chief said. "But I've been thinking there might be an Internet connection. It could be what drew the guy here, like maybe he met her on the Internet. Buddy's been raising concerns about this---his daughter---" He looked at Holland. "You're the logical choice, why don't you look into it?"
"Okay," Holland said. "We have to cover all the angles."
Laura knew she should say something before the chief took the briefing over and started making assignments. "Looks like we've got a plan." She looked at the chief. "I know you're short-handed, but if you could spare an officer to help canvass the houses facing the park once I get the photos from the scene, that would be helpful."
Chief Ducotte stood up. "No problem. My people are your people. You want Detective Holland to coordinate that?"
Code for: He wanted Detective Holland to work closely with her.
"No," she said. "He'll have more important things to do."
If she'd expected Holland to be grateful, she would have been disappointed.
As the briefing broke up, all of them crowding around to squeeze through the door of the conference room, Heather handed Laura a tampon still in its package. "You drop this?" she asked.
Her voice had the exaggerated sweetness of a bully.
Laura became aware of men shuffling, coughing, some of them amused, no one looking at her. Mention a tampon and you're back in second grade, never mind most of these guys were married and had umpty-ump kids.
Laura took the tampon, thought briefly about stabbing Duffy in the eye with it. "Thanks, Duffy. I never turn down anything that's free."
It took the drive back to the Copper Queen Hotel to get her heart rate back down. Hard to not show how humiliated she was. It took her right back to grade school.
It had been her experience that there were certain women who knew just where the soft underbelly was---an instinct they were born with. A toxic form of cunning. She supposed there were men like that, too, but she hadn't met any.
Victor didn't help---reliving the scene more than a few times. "Jesus, I bet you haven't been razzed like that since you were a rock at the Academy."
"Fuck you, Victor."
They ate in the dining room at the Copper Queen just before the kitchen closed, then headed for the bar. She wanted to talk about this guy, bounce some things off Victor. This was a bad bad guy. He was on a roll, and she knew he wouldn't stop with Jessica Parris.
A man was playing the upright piano in the bar, "Rhapsody in Blue". On the table next to him was a jar for tips. Laura loved Rhapsody in Blue, so she put some cash in the jar. He nodded to her as she and Victor went out onto the terrace.
The moment they sat down, Victor produced the photographs. Laura had been expecting them. Victor's daughter Angela had been born a week ago, his fifth child.
Laura oohed and ahhed over the baby, who looked like a red thumb wrapped in a bandage. The baby did look cute in her little green blanket with the yellow ducks.
The rest of the roll was from the "get-acquainted barbecue" at Lieutenant Galaz's a couple of months ago. There was Let's Go People! himself, holding a meat fork and wearing an apron emblazoned with the words GOT CARCINOGENS?. Detectives and their wives playing volleyball, chowing down on burgers and dogs, holding plastic cups of beer and smiling hazily at the camera. A couple of group photos, Laura conspicuous by her absence, Richie Lockhart's fingers forming bunny ears behind Let's Go People!'s head.
"A great time had by all," Laura commented.
"You should have been there," Victor said. "It was fun."
"I was busy, remember?"
She had been working the most disturbing case of her career. A Safford man had shot his wife, his mother, and four children. At first they thought he had taken the youngest---a little girl---with him. But it turned out she had crawled under the house and died of her wounds. The little girl had been alive for at least a day.
"How did the notification go?" she asked Victor, not wanting to think about that case.
"You know it's never good. On a scale from one to ten, maybe a seven. No hysterics." He took a drink of his Chivas Regal. "The mother was pretty weird. Too busy kowtowing to her husband, making sure his dinner was still hot---can you believe it? When I did get her attention she seemed embarrassed. Like the kid made her look bad. Could be just shock. She kept saying stuff like, 'I told her something like this would happen,' and 'that's what happens when you don't listen,' as if the kid skipped school or something. Almost like she expected her daughter to turn up dead."
"They've been living with it since yesterday afternoon," Laura said. "If they've been watching cable at all they know the drill." Hungry for filler, the cable news channels had blown stranger abductions up into epidemic proportions, the experts drilling it into the American psyche that children abducted by strangers were killed within three to five hours after being taken.
One cable TV network had labeled this "The Summer of Fear." The spotlight had moved on in recent months to three separate grizzly bear attacks, and a reasonable person might assume that the child abductions had ceased altogether.
"Did you meet the boyfriend?" she asked.
"Boyfriend?"
"According to the tattoo artist next door to the doll place, Jessica's boyfriend lived with her family. His name is Cary Statler."
"Nobody mentioned him, and I didn't see anyone matching a boy her age." He took out his notebook and wrote the name down. "He lives with them?"
"Uh-huh."
"Cozy---just another modern American family." Victor sipped his Chivas. "There's someone else we should look at, just in case Sherlock Holmes in there is right and it was a local. A neighbor---a friend of the family. Chuck Lehman. Guy was over there in the role of concerned friend, but there was something ... I dunno, avid, about the way he was tuning in. So I checked him out. Two DUIs in the past three and a half years---one in Colorado and one here. Also, he broke into his ex-wife's house, tore up some of her dainties. Felony trespass and criminal damage, both DVs. They pled the felony down."
"How old is he?"
"Early forties. I know, I know. He skews old for this." He lit a cigarette, even though he knew Laura didn't like it.
Victor turned his head and blew out the smoke, and also held his hand away---his try at meeting her halfway. "It's a lead. Don't worry, we'll get a match on this creep somewhere, you'll see. Jesus. Dressing her up like it's her first fucking Communion."
The pianist had finished Rhapsody in Blue. Even though they were outside, Laura applauded with the rest of the bar patrons, Victor following suit. The door was open and it was possible the pianist might hear.
"With Lehman, there are some serious stressors," Victor said. "Guy's divorce was finalized a month or so ago, just around the time he got laid off from work." He saw the question in her eyes. "He worked at the mine---well, what's left of the mining operation out here."
"Where'd you hear this?"
"I asked around. Danehill was the one popped him for the DUI and the DV. I've got the number for his probation officer if you want it."
"Sure. We have to look at everything." The story depressed Laura. "How's Elena doing?"
"Fine now. At least she's not cursing my name anymore. There was about eight hours there where she seemed a little pissed off at me."
"No kidding."
"Come on, it's not all my fault." Victor showed her his most irresistible grin, no doubt the one that had snagged Elena into motherhood five times. "She was the one who wanted another one." He took a sip of Chivas. "Some women actually want kids. It's the maternal instinct, something you'd appreciate if you ever grew up, found a nice man, got married---"
"Hey, I put in my time."
He laughed. "Seven months? That's a slap on the wrist."
"I got time off for good behavior." Laura realized that she'd never told Victor the whole story about her marriage. Maybe because, logic to the contrary, she still felt embarrassed.
"One of these days you'll find the right guy and you'll know what I'm talking about. I got the impression you didn't agree with Buddy back there, about the guy being a local."
Laura sighed. It didn't feel local to her, but her gut could be wrong. "Who knows? Maybe there's an Internet connection, like the chief said. In that case, it could be someone from anywhere. Buddy Holland says the guy wouldn't know Bisbee, but it's not that big. It wouldn't take much to figure this place out."
"But why here?"
Laura shook her head.
Why anywhere?
Victor left for Tucson soon afterward, wanting to get home to his new baby. Laura would stay here and go directly to the autopsy in Sierra Vista tomorrow afternoon. The Copper Queen Hotel was full up, but after calling around, she found a place on the main drag through town.
The storm that had been threatening all day finally unleashed its fury during the short drive to the motel. Rain hit the windshield like a fire hose, but she managed to spot the neon letters spelling out THE JONQUIL MOTEL. She got out and ran through the downpour to the office.
The Jonquil Motel was a white-stuccoed motor court, circa 1930, situated on what was once the main highway through town. For Laura, it was love at first sight. In her job as a criminal investigator, she'd spent many nights on the road, and the motels often stuck out in her memory. After a long day she'd close the door to her room and give herself time to unwind. Many times she'd find the answers that had eluded her when she was on the job---something would just click. She remembered asking a maid for towels at a Holiday Inn in Flagstaff and abruptly remembering a piece of evidence essential to the case.
The motels also reflected the peripatetic quality to her job---always starting over, working with someone new. She was invariably seen as an outsider, but Laura didn't mind that. She liked working her way into the warp and woof of a town, picking up its easy rhythm, slowing down for the odd yellow dog crossing the street.
Every small town had its own personality.
She got into bed without bothering to change out of her clothes and lay there thinking about Jessica's killer. When she wasn't thinking about the killer, she thought about Tom and the idea of living together, her mind going around like a carousel.
TRAFFIC STOP ON 92
Rain tapped on the roof of Officer Duffy's patrol car as she sat in the Safeway parking lot, keeping her eye on the blue BMW Z4 through the streaming windshield. She'd already run the plate; it came back to a Darrell Lee James, 2452 E. Silver Strand Drive, Gulfport, Mississippi. No wants, no warrants.
Great car.
Duffy glanced down at the laser-printed photograph on the seat beside her. In the orange light from the sodium arcs, raindrop reflections from the windshield crawled across the picture like ants. The photo showed a good-looking man leaning against a blue BMW Z4. Hard to believe he could be a child-raper, a great-looking guy like that. Still, when she'd spotted the Z4 on her way out to Tacho's Tacos for a late dinner, she'd had no choice but to check it out. If it was him, and she was the one who caught him---oh, man. That would show them all up.
Her thoughts turned to that stuck-up detective the chief had saddled them with. Imagine being kept out of the crime scene, like she was a first-year rookie. She smiled at the picture on the seat and said, "You stupid bitch. You don't know everything."
If this was the guy, she'd be a hero. She pictured how impressed Randall would be if she and Buddy ended up on Today.
This daydream kept her occupied until she spotted a man carrying a grocery bag in each hand splashing through the parking lot toward the Z4. She couldn't see much of him; he wore a hooded raincoat. When he drove out of the parking lot, she pulled out right behind him.
He made it easy for her by speeding. Couldn't blame someone with a car like that for putting on the afterburners. She stopped him on 92 just south of Tintown.
The rain was coming down hard now. Mud sucked at Duffy's shoes as she walked up to the driver's side, careful to approach him from an angle. Safety first. Darrell Lee James buzzed his window down.
She flashed her light on his face. It wasn't him. This guy was fifty if he was a day.
Duffy kept her face impassive, but her disappointment was deep. She knew she should feel more than disappointed. There was a monster on the loose. The problem was she didn't feel things deeply the way other people did, with one exception. Love was the most important emotion on earth, and that she felt in spades. Everything else paled in comparison to what was going on between her and Randall---even catching a killer. Love could be sweet torture, or a burning agony, and she couldn't live without it.
"Sir, put both hands on the wheel where I can see them."
"Officer, I know I was speeding---"
"Reach down with one hand and remove your wallet. No quick moves."
Carefully, Darrell Lee James reached into his coat and produced his wallet, holding it high and away from his body. The move was automatic; he'd been caught speeding before.
"Slide the license out of your wallet, sir."
He did so, and handed it to her, then put both his hands back on the wheel.
"Do not remove your hands from the wheel, sir. I'll be watching."
She took her time walking back to her unit. Since she had already run his license, she sat there for a couple minutes, looking at the photo on the seat.
Now that was a good-looking man. A total fucking creep, but good-looking.
When she felt she'd waited long enough, she got out and trudged through the mud, handed him back his license, and opened her ticket book. "I'm going to give you a warning this time. But keep to the speed limit from now on, okay?"
"Thank you, ma'am." Eyes like a Pekingese, shiny and moist in his fat pink face.
Duffy watched him pull back onto the road, driving like a little old lady.
A shame to see a Z4 being driven like that.
7
At two a.m., the clock radio came on. Laura got out of bed, pulled together what she needed, and walked through the rain-slick streets to City Park.
Ducking under the crime scene tape, she stopped on the sidewalk below the park and looked around.
The light from a sodium arc lamp tinted the street and buildings apricot. This had a flattening effect, making it harder to see. Most of Bisbee was sleeping, but she saw a few rectangles of light in the old buildings up and down the hills.
She looked up the tall flight of steps to the street above.
Laura had always thought it was most likely the bad guy had parked down here on the street and carried the girl up the stairs. She pictured him driving up around the park once to make sure no one was around. On the second pass, he parked right in front of the steps, the passenger door only a few inches from the curb and five feet from the bottom of the steps.
Were his lights on? Would he leave the engine running?
Yes to the lights, no to leaving the engine running. The best way to hide what you were doing was to act normally. Drive down the street with your lights on, park, turn off the lights along with the engine. If anyone happened to be awake and looking out the window, they would see nothing suspicious in someone parking a car. People worked night shifts.
It was doubtful that he had been seen at all. At the briefing, it came out that there were very few houses from which you could actually see the band shell. This had surprised her. There were a couple of houses right on the road facing the park, maybe one or two across the way up high on OK Street, although the trees blocked the band shell from view.
Laura stood in the street where the driver's door would be, pantomimed walking around to the passenger side, leaning down and picking up the girl. He could be up the steps in less than five seconds.
One step into the park. Three more steps to the band shell stairs. Four steps up. Set her against the wall, clasp her hands together, stand back to look at what you've done. Admire your still life.
Water from rain earlier tonight dripped from the band shell arch.
Just the act of carrying Jessica up here and placing her against the wall would cause him to shed fibers, hair, skin, and some of that would stick. How would he deal with that?
Would he sweep up?
Or could he have used one of those sticky rollers, the one people used to pick up pet hair? Lab techs now preferred the sticky rollers to vacuum cleaners when they looked for trace evidence.
Water dripping from the band shell roof: tap tap tap.
Where are you tonight? Holed up in a motel or have you moved on already?
The wind rose, whipping the treetops. Their restive shadows danced on the band shell wall beside her. Rain started up, speckling the concrete.
Where are you tonight?
As if in answer, notes from an alto sax trickled down from a window somewhere up the street. Pure and sweet; a soulful, lonely sound.
All the buildings in that direction were dark. The music stopped almost as soon as it had started.
The rain came down harder, a curtain of clear beads in a doorway. Laura stood under the arch, feeling the chill draft as rain blew inward. With the rain came the stench of death.
Suddenly, she could feel him, his essence leaking out of the wet cement, the air around her. Controlled rage. A predator. For a moment, she knew what it was like to be a rabbit in the shadow of the hawk.
Was he watching her now? She looked around, but saw nothing. Imagined she heard footsteps, but it was only the rain.
The wind blew harder. The tree shadows lashed back and forth on the wall of the band shell in tortured shapes, as if they were being strangled.
She stared out at the park.
Something caught her eye in the gleam of the streetlight, wet and shiny at the edge of the stage. A matchbook.
Laura had been over every inch of this stage earlier today, and she knew the matchbook had not been there when they removed the body. The crime scene had been clean. The matchbook could belong to anyone; kids, tourists, curiosity seekers. The morbid.
Donning latex gloves, she hunkered down beside the matchbook. The words "The Copper Queen Hotel" were stamped on the front. Holding the edges with her fingertips to avoid smearing any prints, she pried it open.
On the inside cover, someone had written a message in block letters with a roller ball pen. The cardboard was so soggy it threatened to come apart in her hands, the letters starting to blur where the raindrops hit them.
Laura scooted back under the overhang. Holding the matchbook open against the concrete, she aimed her flashlight at the block letters.
CRZYGRL12.
The rain hissed, chortled, murmured.
CRZYGRL. Short for crazy girl? The twelfth in a line of crazy girls?
She caught a movement in the corner of her eye. Suddenly, a bright light shone in her face and a voice demanded, "What are you doing?"
8
Laura squinted into the glare of a MagLite.
"What are you doing?" Detective Holland repeated. The MagLite steady on her face.
She wondered if he was keeping it on her purposely. Letting her know she was the trespasser here rather than the lead on this case? It made her angry, but it also goosed her heart up a notch. What did he think---she was planting evidence?
"What's that?" he said, motioning at her hand with the light.
She stood up and brushed off her slacks. "What are you doing here?"
"Checking on the crime scene, same as you."
"Earlier today, did you see anything like this?" She held the copper-colored matchbook up to the light.
"Nope."
"Take a look."
"I don't have gloves."
"I'll hold it for you." She opened the matchbook as carefully as she could. "CRZYGRL12. What do you think that means?"
He stared at the letters on the matchbook, his gaze stony. But she could tell that something was going on behind his eyes, the cogs turning.
Laura said "I need a paper bag for this."
He just watched her.
"I have plastic evidence bags but no paper. This thing's falling apart and it's wet. If we're going to put this into evidence, I've got to have a paper bag. I've got some in the 4Runner. Would you mind running down and getting me one?"
She tossed him the keys and he caught them. But he made no move to go.
"I'm parked outside the Jonquil."
"Is that an order?"
"It's a request." She added, "Don't you want to catch this guy?"
He stood there for a moment. Drawing it out---that she needed a favor from him. Then he shambled down the steps, in no hurry.
Way down the block she heard the big engine of his Chevy Caprice start up.
Laura wondered how long Buddy Holland had been up here. She would have heard him if he'd just driven up. If she could have planted the matchbook, so could he.
The rain kept coming down. After a while, her back started to hurt, and she needed to sit down. She sat against the bandshell wall as far away as she could get from where Jessica Parris was. She tried not to look at the spot. Breathed through her mouth and let her mind wander.
She remembered someone telling her that before the citizens of Bisbee built City Park, this place had been a cemetery. Where did she hear that? On a trip down here a few years ago? Probably. She used to come down overnight with her boyfriend, a member of the Pima County Sheriff's SWAT team. Mostly they came down to cool off from the Tucson summers and make love. It didn't work out because he had an ex-wife who kept tabs on him even though they'd split up years ago.
Counting Tom Lightfoot, that made six serious or semi-serious relationships since college, if she included her ex-husband Billy, who was before, during and after.
Suddenly she flashed on the night two months ago at the Vail Steak House, going off to the bathroom with Karen, who did the books for the Bosque Escondido. They'd run into each other in the bar on Laura's first foray out into the world with Tom. Tipsy, blundering into the vinyl-walled cubicle, verging on conspiratorial giggles, Laura asking: What do you think? Like asking someone off the street to tell her if she ought to buy a certain car. On cue Karen said what Laura wanted to hear. He's so good-looking, and he can't keep his eyes off you. You guys make a really cute couple.
It doesn't bother you that he doesn't have a real job? Laura asking this as if Karen's opinion was more important than her own.
Who cares? You earn enough for both of you.
A car cruised up the street and the engine died. Buddy appeared at the steps to the band shell a minute later. He pulled a folded evidence envelope from his pocket and handed it to her.
"Sorry it took so long." He didn't tell her why.
She placed the matchbook in the envelope and marked it with a pen. "To preserve the chain of custody, I'll keep it with me tonight and take it to the crime lab when I get back to Tucson." Looking for a reaction. He didn't give her one. "Do you have any ideas who CRZYGRL12 is? Is she a local?"
"Not that I know of."
"Anything come to mind at all?"
At first she thought he wasn't going to answer. Then he said, "It could be something to do with the Internet."
"What, like an e-mail address?"
He rubbed his nose. "Or a nick."
Looking at her for some sort of reaction. All she could offer was confusion. "Nick?"
"Nickname. In a chat room." He stared out at the park. "Are we about through?"
"Why did you come up here tonight?"
"Same as you. I wanted to see the place how he saw it."
She didn't get back to the Jonquil Motel until a quarter of four. The rain stopped on the walk back.
A fluorescent bulb sizzled above the yellow and green door to her room. The glare of the light was so harsh she had to blink. When she stuck her key in the lock, it didn't turn.
She jiggled the key in the lock, cursing under her breath. Stared down at the stubborn lock. Funny: Her hand didn't look like her hand. It looked strange, but she couldn't figure out why.
Brain fart. She'd gone without sleep for long periods before---the job required it. Forty, sometimes sixty hours straight. She was young, she was healthy, but tonight she felt every one of her thirty-one years bearing down on her like a weight.
Abruptly, the lock turned. She got the door open, stripped off her clothes and crawled under the covers. But even when she closed her eyes the light from above the door seemed to sizzle behind her eyelids, little fireworks popping in the dark.
9
THE BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION
Musicman bought a cupcake and a box of birthday candles, even though the box of candles was a waste of money because he used only one. He chose a blue candle because blue was her favorite color. He set it down next to the present, even though the present was not for her. He'd wrapped it with care, beautiful eye-catching paper with a bright golden bow.
While waiting at the checkout counter, he'd picked up a paper. Jessica Parris's death made the front page. Lots of strokes and attaboys. He was disappointed, though, that cable hadn't picked it up.
Back inside with the shades drawn, he lit the candle and sang Happy Birthday, surprised when it made him cry. She would have been thirty years old today. He remembered the last time he saw her in 1998, two years before her boyfriend beat her to death during a drunken binge. Musicman liked to think she had provoked the cretin into killing her because she could not live with herself.
It still troubled him, her ending up like that. He hated thinking about what had happened in Alert Bay, but sometimes it just reached up and grabbed him, pulling him down into that bad time.
He had been surprised how warm the village on the west Canadian coast was in midsummer. While browsing through the drugstore on the main drag, he'd even had to take off his jacket and wrap it around his waist.
Alert Bay was about as far away as you could get from where he lived---so far away it was even in another country. It was almost as if she had drawn a line on a map. He didn't blame her, after what she'd been through.
There were plenty of knickknacks on the half-empty shelves. Most of them had a native or marine theme, which was fine except Misty had lived here awhile and none of it would be new to her.
Who are you trying to impress? It didn't matter what he bought. He knew that. She would know what was in his mind, and that was what counted.
He glanced at his watch. If he was going to surprise her, he'd better get a move-on. She got off work at two. Hurriedly, he picked out a ceramic orca and a card, one of those soft-filtered ones showing two cute little kids together. He also grabbed a roll of breath mints.
He walked fast, worried he might miss her. As he rounded the bend, he saw the yellow clapboard building housing the Midnight Sun Hotel and Restaurant. He'd just started up the steps when a woman pushed the door out, struggling with a kid in a stroller. The woman looked used-up, your basic white trash---stringy hair, tattoos on her bare arms.
He waited for her to get through the door. She made a big show of wrangling with the stroller, but he refused to help. She gave him a dirty look and he returned her gaze serenely, not letting her know what he was thinking. What he was thinking: She looks like a hype.
"Thanks for your help," she said.
He ignored her and went inside. The place was empty except for a woman he presumed worked there sitting at a table by the window. He asked her pleasantly if Misty Patin was there.
"She just left."
"Could I get an address?"
The woman parted the curtain and then looked at him. "She's still there. Didn't you see her when you came in?"
He felt his heart drop, the funny feeling you get when an elevator goes way up. "I didn't see anybody."
The woman looked at him as if he were crazy. She shoved back the curtain again and pointed. "She's right out there."
He leaned down and peered out. He saw the hype and her kid across the street. A brand-new navy pickup pulled up. The driver looked like an Eskimo, although that wasn't what they were called around here. He wore a tank top, shorts and flip flops. A little girl, maybe ten years old, hopped out right behind him. She was blond and didn't look anything like the man or the kid in the stroller. The girl ran down to the rocky beach and threw rocks into the water.
Looking at her, he knew it was true.
She looked just like Misty.
He felt a wall in his gut give way, the dam he had carefully built up over the years. He could feel something dark and toxic seep out, the resentment and anger that had always been there, but that he had managed to control up until now.
The woman said, "You better hurry if you want to catch her."
"Shut up."
"No one talks to me like that. You'd better go, mister---"
"Shut the fuck up or I'll make you shut up, you dried-up old hag!"
For a second, there was quiet. Then the woman catapulted to her feet, her chair screeching across the floor and ricocheting against the wall as she made a beeline for the kitchen. "I'm calling the police. Nobody talks to me like that."
He ignored her, pulling the curtain back and staring out the window. He watched the little girl, the delight she took in picking out stones and hurling them into the bay. She was fruit of the poisoned tree, but still innocent, like an angel. The way Misty used to be.
He let the curtain drop. Looking down, he realized he had crumpled the paper bag holding his recent purchases. Also, he'd forgotten to take a breath mint.
It didn't matter now.
10
When Laura arrived at the Bisbee Police Department the next morning, she looked for Buddy Holland, but he wasn't at his desk. She'd planned to divide up the phone work, but that didn't look like it would happen now.
Chief Ducotte had scrounged up a phone and phone jack for her computer and given her the table by the window where they kept the coffee urn. Fortunately, the coffee urn had been moved so she'd have some privacy. She sat down in the folding metal chair, thinking that if she sat here very long, her back would be in agony. She scanned the list of contacts at other law enforcement agencies in the state. Might as well get started.
In the next hour, she reached close to a dozen of her counterparts in other jurisdictions, but none of them had encountered a similar crime.
She knew this wasn't this guy's first kill. Dressing the victim up was the killer's signature---something he'd do every time. It would have taken him time and practice to perfect a ritual like this one. Unfortunately, looking for one piece of information in the staggering wave of data from VICAP was a daunting task. VICAP---the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program---was only as good as the agencies entering the data. The FBI database cross-referenced violent crimes nationwide, but participation was voluntary and many smaller jurisdictions didn't use the system.
Somebody standing at her elbow--- Officer Noone. "Ma'am?"
She straightened up, felt a twinge in her back. Smiled at him.
"I heard you were looking for a saxophone player? My sister dated a guy who played the sax. I heard he lived on the Gulch, so I asked around and I found him. Name's Jeeter."
"Jeeter who?"
"Just Jeeter."
Through the window Laura saw Buddy Holland and Officer Duffy approaching from the parking lot. Duffy looked pissed. Laura got the impression that was a permanent condition.
As Buddy approached the window, he ducked his head to look in at her. No, not at her. He was looking at himself.
"Jeeter doesn't have a last name?" Laura asked Noone.
"Apparently not, ma'am." He looked chastened, as if Jeeter's not having a last name was a reflection on him.
"What's Jeeter's story?" she asked.
"Guess you could say he's a night owl. Itinerant musician, takes up the slack with odd jobs."
Laura glanced at Buddy Holland's desk, at a faded but eye-catching photo of Buddy, a woman, and a little girl posing in front of Old Faithful at Yellowstone. "Did Jeeter happen to look out his window?" Laura asked Noone.
"As a matter of fact he did. He likes to sit next to an open window when he plays. Feel the night air."
"Great for his neighbors. Did he see anything?"
His broad handsome face lit up---what he had been building up to. "He saw a motor home." He consulted his memo pad. "He noticed it for a couple of reasons. Almost nobody drives down the Gulch in the wee hours of the morning. And this motor home went up and back on the Gulch twice."
"What time was that?"
"Between two and three."
"Did he notice anything else?"
"Just that it went slow. He wasn't thinking make, size, anything---just noticed it driving down the street a couple of times. Here's his number." He handed her a While You Were Out slip, the name Jeeter, his phone number and address neatly printed on it.
He lingered.
"Yes?" Wishing he would go so she could think.
"If there's anything else I can do---"
She glanced at her watch, thinking she should get out to see the Parris family soon or she'd have to wait until early afternoon---and that would be cutting it close. She was meeting the owner of the Cooger & Dark shop at eleven and the autopsy in Sierra Vista was at four. She looked at Noone. "As a matter of fact there is something you can do. I want you to look up motor homes---you can do it on the Internet. Go back at least fifteen years and get a representative sample. Go show them to Jeeter and see if anything jogs his memory."
"Yes, ma'am. I'll do that right now."
"When does your shift end?"
"Three o'clock, but---"
"You'd better ask your sergeant if he can spare you; otherwise, it will have to wait."
After he was gone, she thought about the motor home. Saw it in her mind's eye, cruising down the Gulch in the early hours of the morning.
It made sense. A motor home was an ideal vehicle for a sexual predator. Portable, self-contained, window shades so no one could see in.
She glanced at Buddy Holland's desk. He must have come in and gone again while she was talking to Noone. She powered down her computer and went looking for him, catching Officer Danehill at the coffee urn, which had been set up outside the bathroom. "Have you seen Buddy?"
"Buddy? He just left."
Laura decided that could be a good thing. She doubted Buddy would be a help and might be a hindrance. She headed up canyon to see Jessica's parents.
David and Linda Parris lived on West Boulevard, the last house before vacant land. Three hundred yards up, West Boulevard bottomed out in a hairpin turn before slanting up the mountain. According to Laura's map, this road, old Route 80, switchbacked up to the top and then down again to connect up with the main highway on the other side of Mule Pass.
On the left side of the road just before the hairpin turn were a couple of houses. It might be worth talking to the owners of those houses, to find out if they saw anything. She'd do that after her interview with the family.
It was going on nine in the morning. She'd debated calling first, but decided it was better to just show up. In her job, Laura always looked for the upper hand with everyone---victim or perpetrator---so she could get a better read on the personalities involved.
The Parris house, a craftsman bungalow, had a three-foot-high base of dark volcanic rock with red brick above that. The porch, windows, and doors were painted white. A picket fence flickered in and out of the shadow of a massive sycamore tree, and an American flag hung dispiritedly from the porch roof. Blinds in the front windows were shut tight.
The day was steamy after the rain and the sun blindingly bright. Laura was grateful for the shade of the porch. She used the deer-head knocker, preparing herself.
No answer. A breeze shuttled a few oak leaves across the floorboards. She knocked again, scanning the street while she waited, then tried the doorbell.
"They're out."
Laura looked up and saw a bare-chested man watering his plants next door. Was this the neighbor Victor had told her about?
"You with the police department?" he asked.
"Laura Cardinal, Department of Public Safety." She held her wallet badge up for him to see and approached the fence.
She studied him as he looked at her badge: Five-feet-nine, average build, tattoos on his arms, head like a bullet. Intense eyes.
He shook her hand over the fence. A grip like a mountain climber. "Chuck Lehman."
"Do you know where they went?"
"Dave mentioned making funeral arrangements yesterday, so I'm guessing they're at the funeral home. You just missed them."
Laura tried not to show her disappointment. "Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?"
He picked up the hose and started watering again. "Sure, go ahead."
"Did you notice Jessica coming home from school day before yesterday?"
"Nope. I was in the back room on the computer. Stock trading."
"You didn't hear anything, see anything? Maybe earlier? A car you didn't recognize, maybe going slow? Someone hanging around?"
She was plowing old ground; Victor had already asked him questions like this, but she wanted to hear his answers for herself.
Chuck Lehman was willing. He gave her a thumbnail sketch of the family (father, authoritarian; mother, a pretty doormat; boyfriend, probably will end up being gay; Jessica, a "cute kid"; younger brother, a little shit). He pondered at length how her agency could use its resources to better advantage, they needed to get the media involved "on a national level", put up roadblocks. "You don't even have the Amber Alert."
"You sound like you're in law enforcement."
"Me? No. I'm a carpenter." He touched his forehead. "But I have good powers of observation."
She noticed the tautness in his face, the slight trembling in his body---he seemed to be on an adrenaline high. Was he excited about being included, or covering up something?
"Did you talk to Jessica much?"
"Me? No." He waved at the air vaguely. "Hardly ever saw her." Mister Amiable, suddenly closing up.
"You know of any of her friends I could talk to?"
"How would I know that? If you haven't noticed, I'm a big kid." Confident smile.
"All the days she's walked home from school, nobody, nothing stuck out in your mind?"
"I don't notice who comes and goes. They're just kids."
He seemed increasingly uncomfortable. It occurred to her that he could be hiding an interest in young girls.
Something not right about him. She remembered what Buddy Holland had said, that CRZYGRL12 could be an e-mail address or a chat room name. She lowered her voice, her inflection friendly: You and me in his together. "You said you have a computer. Do you know anyone with the e-mail address CRZYGRL12?"
He blinked. "What?"
"CRZYGRL12? Maybe Jessica's e-mail? You wouldn't know if she had a computer, would you?"
"Why would I know that?"
Angry. Offense was the best defense.
Without conscious thought, Laura shifted her weight to her back leg. Aware of the gun under her jacket. She made her voice even quieter, non-threatening. "Sir, could you tell me about your conviction?"
His eyes turned hard. "You can call my probation officer."
She waited.
"Criminal damage," he said, his voice as hard as his eyes. "I broke into my ex-wife's house and tore up her clothes."
"Her underpants," Laura said, sounding as if it was something that happened every day.
"Right. Her underpants. Satisfied?" Anger radiated from him, making him seem bigger.
She stepped back, hand near her hip. "Sir---"
Suddenly he crossed the space between them, so quick she had to back up another couple of steps. His chin thrust out like a drill sergeant. "I said, are you satisfied?"
"Yes," she said. Keeping the calm in her voice, though she was anything but.
He glared at her, his eyes like twin blue flames.
"Good." With a jerk of the head for emphasis, he walked into his house and slammed the door.
Laura stood there for almost a minute, shame and anger riding a river of adrenaline. She had reacted in an acceptable way---stepping back to allow space between them so that she had room to draw her weapon---but couldn't help feeling she'd looked weak. Would Victor have retreated like that?
Lehman got a big charge out of intimidating her---in his mind, he had won. She looked back at the Lehman house. One of the blinds moved in the front window. He was watching her. She straightened her back, trying to ignore him. She'd planned to do something. What was it?
The houses at the hairpin. That was it. Someone there might have seen something.
She started up the road, careful to stay to the asphalt, scanning the ground on either side. She doubted she'd find anything; the general consensus was that Jessica had been picked up coming home from school, which would mean she didn't get this far. But Laura looked at the ground anyway, trying to concentrate. Trying not to think of Lehman staring at her back. A hundred yards up, she noted a clearing on the left side of the road, and another turnout on the corresponding side. Several cars had turned around there.
A dog barked at her from behind the redwood fence of the first house. She knocked and got no answer, stuck her card in the door with a request that the homeowner contact her when they got home.
The second house was set back from the road, a faded green cinder block. The drapes were closed. A swamp box cooler rattled like a cement mixer. She thought she heard a TV set going, but no one answered her knock. Many people these days didn't answer their doors---a safety issue. She left another card.
On the way back to the car, Laura stopped at the turnout and examined the tire tracks. Many of them overlapped. One set of tread marks in particular caught her attention. A heavy vehicle, judging from the way the tracks sank into the ground. She could see corresponding tread marks on the other side of the road; he'd had to back and fill.
The mud had dried, hardening into bas-relief. They'd make excellent plaster casts.
She squatted down and stared at them. Double wheels. From looking at both turnouts, she thought the vehicle had a big wheelbase.
Like a motor home.
The sun bore down on her neck like an iron and flies buzzed around, lighting on her face and arms, tickling her. No telling if the tracks here belonged to a motor home at all, let alone the one Jeeter had seen on the Gulch. She knew what Frank Entwistle would say. When in doubt, be thorough.
She walked back to the 4Runner and got a spool of yellow crime scene tape and blocked off the area around both turnouts. She called the station and asked to be patched through to Officer Noone.
"What are you doing?" she asked him when he answered.
"Looking up motor homes." He added hastily, "The chief said I could."
Laura glanced at her watch. She had to be at Cooger & Dark's in ten minutes. "I've taped off some tire tracks up at the end of West Boulevard," she said. "I want you to come up here and keep an eye on them until I get back. Can you do that?"
"Yes ma'am. I'm on my way."
Ted Olsen, the owner of Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show and Emporium, looked nothing like his Viking name. He was a short, balding man with a ZZ Top beard that had been buttoned into the neck of his short-sleeved shirt, as if he wanted to keep it out of the way.
Cooger & Dark's shelves were cluttered with fringed lamp shades, art deco radios, and old lunch boxes. A gas pump from the early part of the century stood in the corner. But Laura's attention was on the dolls suspended from the ceiling. They made her think of trapeze artists caught in mid-swoop.
They reminded her of the Cabbage Patch craze years ago, only bigger. Much bigger, their long flour-white limbs like sausages. They were dressed in gingham pinafores, dotted Swiss baby-doll dresses, gunny-sack dresses. White, pink, yellow.
"You've got a lot of dolls," she said as Olsen went through the shop turning on lights.
"You like them?"
"Very nice." Actually, they creeped her out.
She wondered: Could this be the guy? She didn't get anything from him except matter-of-factness, but she wasn't psychic.
"Where did you get them?" she asked.
"My girls? I make them."
"You do?" Her next question would naturally be Why? Instead she asked him if anyone had shown interest in the doll in the window.
"She's not one of mine. She's plastic. I use only natural materials."
"But has anyone asked about it? Or any of your dolls?"
"Tourists."
"Any men?"
"Men?" He stroked his beard. "Usually the men are interested in stuff like that gas pump. I can't recall anyone ..." He coughed up something into a handkerchief that he kept in his gray pants, pants that reminded Laura of the custodian at her high school years ago. "There was a guy interested in a dress. Wanted to buy it."
"Why?"
"People never cease to amaze me. Been in this business for twenty years, and you never can figure out what they're gonna ask for. He wanted to take that dress up there right off Daisy, but I told him no."
Laura's gaze followed his long crooked finger.
The doll wore a pale pink tulle dress with baby-doll sleeves.
"If I sold him the dress, Daisy would have been left in her birthday suit," Olsen explained. 'I couldn't do that. When I explained it to him, he got mad."
"Mad?"
"He didn't make a scene, but you could tell he was steaming. Like he was counting to ten."
"Can I see the doll?"
"Sure." He grabbed a long pole with a hook on the end of it and pulled at a rope hanging down behind him. Laura realized that it was a pulley system, kind of like at a dry cleaner's, from which the dolls were suspended. He pulled the doll around, then expertly hooked her off by the neck and set her down on the counter. She noticed he had a US Marines tattoo on one arm.
Laura eyeballed Daisy, thinking she was approximately the same size as Jessica Parris---one big damn doll. "What size dress is that?"
"Size 3, junior."
"What age would that fit?"
"Thirteen, fourteen years old."
"Tell me about the guy."
According to Ted Olsen, the man was white, average-looking except for a black mustache, and he had blue eyes. Olsen remembered the eyes because the guy was so mad. Asked to describe his clothing, Olsen thought he might have been wearing a ball cap and "probably jeans."
"Nothing seemed unusual about him?"
"When he first came in, he didn't seem like somebody who would get so mad."
"So how did he strike you? When he first came in?"
"Well, see, I didn't really notice him until he found me. He was the kind who blends in---just a regular guy."
"When did he come in?"
"Day before yesterday. I was open that night, which I do sometimes when I'm working on a doll in back. Stayed open until nine o'clock."
Nine o'clock: three to four hours after Jessica Parris was last seen.
Laura told him she'd be back with a photograph of the dress Jessica Parris had worn, in case he recognized the style. "In the meantime, if you remember anything else about this guy, please call me." She handed him her card.
As she crossed the street to her car, she finally got hold of Buddy Holland.
"Where are you? I've been looking for you."
"Running down some things on my own."
And avoiding her, she thought. "We need to compare notes. I'm headed up to take some plaster casts on West Boulevard right now, but---"
"I'll meet you there. I'm going up there anyway."
"You are?"
"I just talked to Dave Parris. Thought it would be a good idea if we took a look at the girl's room. Unless you're too busy."
11
The window to Jessica Parris's room was open, sunlight pouring in along with the warm summer air. It was clear from the posters on the wall that Jessica favored Josh Hartnett, Shakira, and Nelly. Laura had done stupid things in her teenage years, but worshipping a guy who wore a Band-Aid on his cheek wasn't one of them.
Someone had written all over Jessica's sheets with permanent markers: "Stay cool!" "You're my best friend ever." "You and Cary are the coolest people I know."
"Her friends wrote those things," Mrs. Parris said from the doorway. "We had a slumber party and they helped her decorate her room." She hugged herself as if by doing so she might hold herself together, her nervous gaze straying to Buddy Holland, who was poking around the room as if it were a garbage dump. "Do you need anything else?"
Laura said, "I notice she doesn't have a computer. Do you or your husband?"
"No. We're not computer literate around here. Excuse me. I have to check the cookies."
A dresser drawer screeched as Buddy opened it with latexed hands.
Laura looked up sharply. Holland returned her look, eyes devoid of all expression. She'd seen that look before, had used it herself. Cops who detested each other still had to work together, so they did it with as few words possible, just enough to get the job done. No one did cold as well as a cop.
Laura said, "No computer in the house, but she probably has access to one at school. You really think CRZYGRL12 has something to do with the Internet?"
"Could be." Then he did something she didn't expect: volunteered. "Let me check it out. I know my way around the Net pretty well. If she's there, I can probably track her down."
It was the longest speech she'd ever heard from him. "What would you do?"
"Check out Internet Relay Chats, see if I can find her there."
Laura seized on the one word of the three she understood. "You mean chat rooms?"
"Uh-huh." He didn't elaborate. "You want me to or not?"
She nodded. "I think you should."
A photograph on the dresser top caught her eye---Jessica and a young man she assumed was Cary Statler. Jessica was pretty in a short denim skirt and halter top. Statler was a skinny, sleepy-looking kid in a black t-shirt and dirty-looking jeans. His hair looked like a pineapple top.
Buddy had gone back to searching, rummaging through a make-up caddy, then moving on to a velvet-lined box holding her earrings, bracelets, and anklets. A tinny sound as an anklet hit the floor. Doing it to annoy her.
"Buddy."
"What?"
"Why don't you interview Mr. Parris?"
Shrug. "Fine with me."
He snapped off his gloves and left the room.
The stillness contrasted with all his banging. Now maybe she could get a feel for the girl.
Jessica had a thing for girly stuff: Flavored lip gloss; smiley-faced colognes with names like Cool Diva and Cha Cha Chica; and at least a dozen tubes of Sungirl---sun care products with glitter.
Laura looked at the photo again, wondering what about it nagged her.
It would come.
She looked through the dresser drawers and closet: Blue jeans, peasant blouses, halters, clogs. Jessica's underwear was neatly folded in her dresser drawers. Bikini underwear in pastel colors, a couple of bras---Victoria's Secret type stuff. They looked sophisticated for a fourteen-year-old girl, at least the fourteen-year-old girl Laura had been. A different era. She found a few homework assignments jammed into a bookshelf, most of the answer spaces blank. Round handwriting with hearts to dot the 'i's. No diary, unless Jessica kept it in a secret place. No books other than schoolbooks and the Harry Potter series, which was lined up in the bookcase like those leather-bound classics people displayed for show. Laura couldn't say for sure, but she doubted that Jessica had cracked one of them.
Lots of stuff. Laura had read somewhere that tweens---eight to fourteen-year-olds---had so much discretionary income and expensive tastes that they drove the whole economy. Not just the US economy, but the world's.
She noticed a newspaper clipping from a modeling agency tucked into the frame of the dresser mirror. Mrs. Parris had told her Jessica had wanted to be a model or a rock star.
Now she would be neither.
Laura walked into the kitchen, where the smell of baking cookies was overwhelming. Mrs. Parris fluttered back and forth through the sunny kitchen like a bird trapped indoors, her movements increasingly frantic.
"How are you doing?" Laura asked.
Mrs. Parris checked the heat on the oven. "We're okay. I mean. It's horrible, but ..." She wiped a strand of red hair from her eyes.
"I'm sorry, but I have some more questions." Laura set her mini-cassette recorder on the kitchen counter.
"I know you have to ask your questions. We want to find the guy who did this." She said this last brightly.
"Mrs. Parris, do you know if she used a computer at school?"
Her brow wrinkled. "I think so."
"She never talked about it? You know, texting her friends?"
"I wouldn't know email from a hole in the wall. I'm not the least bit technical." She stared at the oven. "Jessica loved to bake cookies. That's why I'm doing it today. Kind of in her memory."
"Where's Cary?"
"Cary?" Linda Parris looked stunned.
"Her boyfriend. Doesn't he live here?"
"Oh." She floundered for a moment, as if she'd dropped a thought and had to consciously pick it up again. "We're kind of like his foster parents, even though there's nothing official. You must think that odd, but it really isn't. He needs us. We love him as if he's our own son."
"He and Jessica were boyfriend and girlfriend, though?"
"I know what you're thinking. We had very strict rules, her father did. Cary lives in our travel trailer out back. Not in the house. But he's a nice boy."
"Were they sexually active?"
Defiance. "Yes. I found out about that a couple of months ago. And you know what I did? I marched her down to Planned Parenthood and got her birth control pills. You might think I'm a bad mother, but I did what I had to do, and I didn't want our child having a child."
"I'm not judging you, Mrs. Parris."
"Please don't say anything to her father. He'd have a fit if he knew."
Laura thought that he probably did know. "I see no reason to tell him. So you don't know where Cary is?"
Mrs. Parris frowned. "Come to think of it, I haven't seen him for a while."
"Since Jessica was missing?"
"I'm not ..." She didn't finish her thought.
"You don't know when he was here last?"
"He comes and goes. He has an uncle in Tucson---sometimes he stays there weeks at a time, especially after---" she stopped. Her eyes widened slightly.
"After what?"
"After a fight." Linda Parris looked past Laura, out the window.
Laura took note of the present tense and decided to stick with it. "With Jessica? Do they fight a lot?"
"No, no, nothing like what you're thinking. Just arguments. Jessica can be---she could get dramatic. Cary just stayed out of her way, let her cool down. That's all it was."
"When was their last fight?"
"I know they weren't talking earlier in the week."
"And you haven't seen him since?"
"It's not like that. David and I would never bring someone into our home that we thought would be dangerous to our daughter."
"Mrs. Parris, I have to know. When was the last time you saw him?"
"I think it was ... two, three days ago. But it's not what you think. He keeps to himself a lot, likes to go for long walks. Sometimes he stays with friends. That's what Jessica loves most about him, even though it drove her crazy sometimes. She said he was a free spirit. I know what you're hinting at and you're wrong. We would never put our own daughter in danger."
"I understand that, but it's important I talk to him. It's very likely he doesn't know Jessica is gone. Don't you agree he should know?"
She nodded reluctantly. Laura asked for the uncle's address and phone number, and Linda Parris found it in her address book and copied it on paper from the memo pad stuck to the refrigerator, a flag at the top above the phrase "United We Stand".
Linda moved back to the sink and carefully washed the mixing bowl and set it in the dishwasher. She stared out the window again. "We had so many good times. Last Saturday we spent the morning weeding. Jessie and her dad went to the Arctic Circle for hamburgers. She got mine with mustard, but not ketchup---she knew I didn't like ketchup. That was a great day."
She continued to stare out the window.
Something brushed Laura's ankles. She looked down. A Siamese cat rubbed against her trouser legs.
Laura was attracted to animals the way some people were attracted to babies. She hunkered down and stroked the cat.
"That's Princess, Jessie's cat," Linda Parris's voice broke. "Jessie found her in a dumpster at the school. Half-starved, sick. Her father told her Princess was her responsibility---she couldn't keep her unless she did everything. Feed her, clean the cat box, use her allowance to get her spayed ..." She was rambling.
The cat climbed up into Laura's arms and onto her shoulder. It felt natural to Laura; the small vibrating body, the warmth. Comforting.
Holding the cat, she thought of Jessica. Jessica, who liked Josh Hartnett and Nelly. Jessica, who took such good care of her cat. Something crumbled in her chest, and tears pricked the corner of her eyes.
She turned away so the mother couldn't see and set the cat down.
As Laura left through the front door, she glanced up the street at the roped-off area where the turnouts were. Officer Noone stood in the road, hands on his waist above his heavy duty belt, the yellow crime scene tape quivering behind him. When he saw her he waved. If he was bored by his new duty--- waiting for the tire cast to dry---he didn't show it.
Buddy appeared from around the corner of the house, where David Parris, Jessica's father, was hammering away at something.
Buddy nodded toward Noone. "You about done up there?"
"Might be another half hour. How's Mr. Parris?"
"Wouldn't talk to me. We put up three sections of rain gutter, though."
"Wouldn't talk at all?"
"The only thing he said was, if Cary Statler ever showed his face around here again, he'd kill him."
As Laura reached the turnout, Noone said, "They're almost dry."
Beside the metal-framed cast lay a couple of sticks, all that was left of a sampling of twigs, grass, and debris Laura had instructed Noone to collect from around the site. These Laura had used to reinforce the plaster. Not only would it make the cast stronger, but it would also supply a soil and debris sample for the crime lab. Laura picked up a stout twig and wrote her initials onto the cast, along with the case number.
"I never saw anyone take a tire cast before. It's pretty interesting," Noone offered. "Too bad there weren't any footprints."
It was clear Officer Noone had made the leap from the motor home sighting on Brewery Gulch to the abduction of Jessica Parris on West Boulevard, concluding that the killer had used a motor home.
"These tracks could belong to anyone. I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you."
"But it could be his."
"Could be." Emphasis on the could.
12
To business.
Musicman wrote: "D---Your shipment has come in."
Immediately, a reply popped up.
DARK MOONDANCER: Hello, friend.
Musicman's fingers flew over the keys.
MUSICMAN: I have that special order you requested.
DARK MOONDANCER: Same price?
MUSICMAN: Two thousand more.
DARK MOONDANCER: Verification?
MUSICMAN: Turn on the local news.
DARK MOONDANCER: That one? You're in my jurisdiction! Let's meet.
MUSICMAN: I never meet my clientele. It's not good to mix business with pleasure.
DARK MOONDANCER: You do it all the time, mix business with pleasure. LOL. But seriously, we are an exclusive club, you and I. Please come visit. Bring a friend.
MUSICMAN: My plans are fluid at the moment.
DARK MOONDANCER: Fluid? There's a pun. So you are still here. I would have thought you'd be a thousand miles away by now.
MUSICMAN: Parting is such sweet sorrow.
DARK MOONDANCER: Don't be cryptic. I'd love to know what's going on in your mind.
MUSICMAN: Shall I make the shipment or not?
DARK MOONDANCER: By all means. As before, payment is forthcoming. But if you're planning an extended stay, do give serious thought to my invitation. You might not come this way again.
Musicman thought: We have less in common than you think.
Dark Moondancer's desires were base, his enthusiasm clumsy. He didn't get the subtle distinctions; he was just another cretin saturated with blood lust, looking for a vicarious thrill. The guy reminded him of a comic book character---way over the top.
Still, he paid the bills.
Musicman pulled up the photograph he intended to use: baby ducks following their mother across a lawn. Beautiful, the play of sunlight and shadow on their soft yellow down. So innocent. And yet beneath the surface resided a dark secret.
A secret that, truth to tell, shamed him.
He wouldn't do it if he didn't need the money. So far he'd ignored Dark Moondancer's hints about escalating the violence---it just wasn't his way. Even with this one---who'd made him so fucking angry!---he'd stopped short of fulfilling Dark Moondancer's requests. Partly because he didn't like the sight of blood (although he'd proven that he could deal with it if he had to), and partly because he didn't like Dark Moondancer or anybody else calling the shots.
This was his show.
Musicman knew, though, that Dark Moondancer was getting impatient. The gravy train wouldn't last forever.
Utilizing a user-friendly software program he had downloaded from the Internet, Musicman embedded the first photo into the picture of the baby ducks. He pulled up another scenic from his photo library---boats in a marina.
He would send four pics in all. Each pic would be encrypted and require a password to open. Dark Moondancer would have the baby ducks, but he would not have the real picture underneath until Musicman got his payment. Only then would he send back the encrypted password.
He pictured Dark Moondancer looking at the little duckies, wishing he could see what was underneath.
"Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink," Musicman intoned. He hit the SEND button, consigning the ducklings and their invisible cargo into the ether.
13
"Her hyoid was broken," Cochise County ME Carmen Sotomayor said as she snapped off her gloves and dropped them into a BIOHAZARD container.
The smell of sawed bone clung to Laura's nostrils, almost as bad as the odor of death. The last thing Carmen Sotomayor had done before sewing Jessica Parris back up was to use an electric saw to open up her cranium to examine her brain.
Laura thought the killer had been crafty, but now she knew to what extremes he had gone to avoid detection. He'd bathed the girl's body and washed her hair, clipped her fingernails, even given her a douche.
The douche was necessary. He had sexually assaulted his victim after death, not before. Postmortem sex was another indication that the killer didn't want to risk abrasions to Jessica and to himself. Whoever he was, he knew something about the collection of evidence.
She looked at Jessica Parris, small and forlorn on the stainless steel autopsy table. Gutters running around the edge of the table gleamed in the light, still holding the residue of blood from the autopsy. The girl who had reminded her yesterday of a Victorian doll now looked more like Raggedy Ann, big ugly stitches forming a Y down the length of her body.
"When you measured her---you said she was small for her age?" Laura asked.
"And underdeveloped."
"You mean more like a little girl than a teenager, anatomically?"
"There's a phenomenon we're just beginning to see in the physical development in girls. They're maturing at a faster rate than, say, when you and I were their age. But this girl is on the immature side, although it appears she had enough pubic hair for him to shave."
"He shaved her so he could think of her as younger," Laura said.
"And to destroy evidence---her pubic hair and his." Carmen Sotomayor stared at the girl, her eyes sad. Laura noticed she had bitten her lip, a little gash, dark lipstick edging her teeth.
Carmen added, "If he did it to make her seem younger, it wasn't too much of a leap---she's pretty flat up top. She wasn't wearing a bra. You'd think a fourteen-year-old girl would wear a bra, whether she needed to or not."
Laura thought of the bras in the top drawer of Jessica's dresser. "He took it."
"But he left the bikini underwear."
Laura said, "I wonder if he had a replacement pair and they didn't fit."
"What would he replace them with?"
"Maybe something more modest."
Two vertical lines appeared between Carmen's dark brows. "You think so?"
"Who knows? It was just something that occurred to me." Laura divested herself of the paper booties, gown, the gloves.
She knew not to jump to any conclusions. Her method had always been to disprove a theory, rather than prove it. That way, she avoided making leaps in logic just to bolster a theory that might not pan out. She liked to look at evidence as if it were a disassembled car spread out on a tarp, making damn sure that whatever parts connected weren't forced into place.
Something didn't fit here. Maybe it was the girl herself. She seemed out of place, although Laura couldn't figure out why. Maybe it was her age; maybe it was more than that.
"That dress is homemade," Carmen Sotomayor said. "No tag anywhere, and those darts looked like they were from a pretty simple pattern. So that ought to narrow it down."
By the time Laura left the ME's office in the Sierra Vista Community Hospital, it was going on six o'clock and looked like it would storm. She rolled down the window, inhaling the scent of the impending rain on the dense air. The area had greened up a lot since she'd been down here a couple of weeks ago---johnsongrass lined both sides of the road, lush and green, soaking up the runoff. Ocotillo on the hills looked like dark green pipe cleaners.
The evidence for the DPS Crime Lab resided in the back of the 4runner, each piece packaged separately and bearing her initials: head and pubic hair samples from Jessica, fingernail clippings, scrapings from under her fingernails, swabs from her body, and her clothing. And of course the tire tread moulage and the matchbook in its paper evidence envelope.
He had been pretty sure of himself to go back and leave the matchbook---another taunt. He was playing with them. In a way, that was good. Laura knew that when you got cocky you made mistakes, and she intended to be there when he did.
The dress intrigued her, the idea of it having been run up on a sewing machine from a pattern. Did that mean he could sew, like Ted Olsen? Did he have someone in his life who sewed for him---a girlfriend, wife or mother? He'd tried to buy a dress that would fit a fourteen-year-old girl because his own dress didn't fit.
It would be time-consuming to locate the company that produced the pattern and backtrack from there to the outlets. Laura was even less optimistic about tracing the material, the zipper, the thread, the lace, and the ribbon.
If he didn't purchase those in the area, you could forget about that.
The storm hit just as she reached Tucson. She took the Valencia Road exit and drove west to the Department of Public Safety on Tucson Boulevard down the street from the Tucson International Airport.
Lightning sizzled across the sky as she turned into the parking lot. Built in the sixties, the DPS building reminded her of a grain elevator. In the blowing rain, the concrete building darkened to the same slate color as the sky. US and Arizona flags whipped in a wind-driven frenzy, their chains rattling. Laura waited for the automatic gate to roll back and drove in, taking note of the cars in the inside lot. Victor's truck wasn't there. She doubted she'd see anyone at this hour.
She booked the tire moulage, the matchbook, Jessica's clothes, and other items from the autopsy into evidence, filled out the paperwork, and requested the types of tests she wanted from the crime lab. On her way to the squad bay, she passed Mike Galaz's office and noticed something new---two rows of photos on the wall by his door. Mostly of the Tucson social scene, Let's Go People! and his wife standing in groups of three or four at various fundraising events. Expensive coifs, more expensive smiles.
Laura had never been part of that social circle, and knew by now she never would be. Fortunately, she didn't need an expensive evening gown to send her check to the Hermitage No-kill Cat Shelter.
Everybody had gone home except for Todd Rees, the youngest and newest member of the squad. His desk was catty-corner to hers, facing the other direction. She liked that, because it kept their interaction to a minimum. He looked up and then back at his computer.
Her plant was looking a little dry. She prodded it, filled a coffee cup with water from the bathroom sink, and gave it a drink before checking her messages and her voice mail.
One message had been placed on the center of her desk in Rich Lockhart's handwriting: "Call Myra Maynes at the medical examiner's office."
"My remains. Very funny," she muttered, tossing the note into the wastebasket.
A California detective named Barry Endicott of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department had left a message on her voicemail, "regarding your child homicide in Bisbee."
She didn't recognize the name. One of her contacts at another agency must have made some calls. As she picked up the phone, Todd Rees slipped on his suit jacket, picked up his briefcase, and ambled past her. He always dressed in a suit and tie.
Tall and thin, he reminded her of a praying mantis. Now he craned his neck over her shoulder, looking at her notes.
She put her hand over the mouthpiece. "Watcha need?"
"Nothing." He slouched past her, but she could feel him lurking in the doorway. Todd had a reputation for keeping his mind on other people's business, always looking for a way to ingratiate himself with the brass. "You have a good time in Bisbee?"
The phone started ringing on the other end and she broke the connection. "'Good' is not the way I'd describe it."
"The lieut kind of wondered why you didn't come back with the techs."
So that was it. What, he thought she turned it into a vacation?
One of the new rules Galaz had instituted was financial: He wanted to see a justification of every expense over a hundred dollars. This affected overnight stays. If at all possible, he wanted his detectives to drive back rather than stay the night.
"I used my own money," Laura said, mad at herself for letting Todd put her on the defensive.
"Did you use your own time?"
It was a parting shot; he was already out the door and halfway down the stairs. Todd had a habit of sniping at people and then running for cover. Still, she knew she'd have to smooth it over with Jerry Grimes, and he in turn would smooth it over with Galaz.
She wasn't going to worry about it. Jerry knew she got results. Maybe her methods were a little unorthodox, but that had always been the way she worked.
Lieutenant Mike Galaz had been here for five months. Other than his watchful eye over the budget, he was an unknown factor, generally considered to be a good (if political) administrator who left the sergeants to run their own squads.
His first official act was to institute weekly briefings where everyone in the criminal investigation division got together and discussed their cases. Galaz himself didn't take part, but stood at the front of the room listening intently. At the end of each meeting, he'd give a short speech about the importance of their mission, ending with a phrase he must have picked up from a TV show: "Let's go, people!"
Laura punched in Detective Endicott's number, but got his voice mail---gone for the day. She looked at the clock: seven-thirty. Next she called Cary Statler's uncle. No answer, no machine.
Where was Cary Statler?
It nagged at her, even though Laura's instincts told her he wasn't Jessica Parris's killer. Strangling a person face-to-face showed rage, which would fit a domestic abusive relationship. But Laura worked under the assumption that the killer was older. Dressing her like that didn't fit with a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. And the way he'd cleaned her up; so careful not to leave evidence. It was possible Cary could have done all that, but unlikely.
Still, she wished she knew where he was.
When she looked at the clock again it was eleven thirty. By this time there were stacks of papers all over her desk, some on chairs, some on the floor. Transcripts of interviews, autopsy results, her own notes torn from a yellow legal pad. A sea of information, including a printout of City Park drawn to scale. She had looked it over three times now, worrying that she was missing something. Now she was staring at it without really seeing it.
Time to go home, and sleep---if she could.
14
The 4Runner's tires rumbled over the cattle guard marking the entrance to the Bosque Escondido Guest Ranch. The storm had gone, leaving a few luminous clouds and a full moon that turned the dirt road white, a chalk line through the desert.
The moment she drove onto the Bosque Escondido, Laura felt something give in her chest. She loved her job, but it wasn't natural to have to look at so much ugliness day after day. The evils people visited on one another, the unspeakable cruelties she saw almost daily, had the cumulative effect of a house of cards---one insult building up on top of another until over time the whole thing threatened to come crashing down. She was almost to that point now. She could feel it, tiny cracks running through the wall she'd put up.
Structural damage.
Tonight she had nothing to go home to except the flat-roofed Mexican adobe in the middle of the desert.
Normally she liked being way out at the edge of Tucson, in a shallow indentation in the desert where she could not even see the city lights, but tonight she didn't want to walk into an empty house. Putting it off, she drove past the main ranch house, the guest bungalows, the cantina, then turned onto the short loop road that took her by Tom's place---a tin-roofed adobe with a screened-in porch. The place was dark---no welcoming light. She wondered if he was thinking about her.
Right now---at this moment---she wanted him to move in and never leave. It was almost physical, this need she had. She wondered how she had managed to go so long without someone. When you had someone, everything was better. You had a mate in a world where most people had mates. You went more places, and there was an aura to being in love, like you had God's blessing. People saw you differently.
She thought of all the places she wanted to go with him. Just overnight stays because she worked so much. But good times. Good times piling up one on top of the other, photos in an album.
She wished he was here right now. She wanted him to hold her, she wanted him to make love to her, see if that could wipe out the image of Jessica Parris, dehumanized and left like a piece of meat on display in a shabby band shell in a concrete park. Obliterate it from her mind. Tape over it with something good.
She didn't want to be logical and look at the long run. She wanted them to live together. Hell, if he asked, she'd go to Las Vegas with him right now. Why not just abdicate responsibility, do something for the pure thrill of it? Like getting married to a man you've only known for a few months.
The two of them against the world.
"Good thing you're in New Mexico," she said to the dark house.
She followed the road back into the desert, the road dipping down into the Agua Verde wash and out again. A quarter-mile to her place. Just where the dirt lane right-angled, there it was, Mi Nidito. It looked like a hacienda in Mexico, whitewashed by the moonlight, almost hidden by mature mesquite trees.
Mi Nidito. My little nest. Laura didn't know who'd named it, spelling it out in Mexican tile by the door. Someone else who had lived here for a while? She saw it as her house, but she knew it wasn't, that someday she'd have to move on.
Stepping out of the car, she was careful to avoid the cow pies; the ranch cows went where they pleased. She did step on plenty of mesquite bean pods, though, soft, yielding crescents on this hot humid night. The old metal gate creaked as she went through.
Laura was serenaded by cow-like crying---spadefoot toads. She smiled, remembering how her mother had told her that the noise, which always came after a summer storm, came from rabbits who'd lost their homes. Now she knew better, but she loved the sentimentality---the Irishness---of her mother's story better.
She walked up onto the deep porch and stopped to listen, hoping the bobcat kittens who lived on her roof were back. They hadn't been around for at least a week.
The place was quiet.
She had it all to herself.
Looking at the cemetery and sky was like peering through a sheet of bright yellow cellophane. Laura knew where she was: the Mexican cemetery on Fort Lowell Road down the street from her parents' house. The cemetery belonged to los fuertenos, the community of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans which grew up around the abandoned fort on the rich bottomland of the Rillito River. Laura used to walk by here every day on the way to school.
The graveyard was both stark and beautiful, an anthill riddled with plaster and iron crosses, statues, and heaps of flowers both plastic and real. Graves alternated with cactus and creosote bushes.
Julie Marr was standing outside the wire fence by the curve in the road, looking at Laura. From where she was, Laura could see the old car coming. The picture in the paper was black and white, but in this bright yellow world she knew the car was orange over ivory. She knew the make, too, thanks to her experience with the Highway Patrol: a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air sedan. Primer on the rocker panels, a crucifix hanging from the rearview.
Laura sat up in bed, her pulse hammering in her ears. Her dreams had always been vivid and easily recalled. In recent years, she'd had one recurring dream---going home to show off her DPS Crown Vic to her parents, just a few weeks out of the Academy. It always relieved her to see that they'd come through the months of intensive care, physical therapy, and countless operations with flying colors. Dad didn't walk so well, and Mom was forgetful. But they'd made it through.
Except it wasn't true.
Laura's mind veered back to the dream. She remembered how her parents had freaked out when they heard about Julie Marr on the news. "But for the grace of God, it could have been her" she'd overheard her father say about his only child. Julie's kidnapping had affected Laura's mother strangely, leading to an obsession with true crime---the grislier the better. It sent her to a journal-writing group, which she attended faithfully, and a year or so later she started receiving letters with New York postmarks. Laura's mom never told her what was in them, but she guessed they were rejection letters. Maybe writing about crime was Alice Cardinal's way of facing her fears.
The car---the 1955 Bel Air---had been stolen specifically for the purpose of abducting Julie Marr on that terrible spring day in 1987. Julie had never been found, but there had been blood evidence in the car.
Lots of it. That didn't show up in black and white either.
She got on the road early the next morning. The faded moon hung in a clear indigo sky as she drove off the ranch and through the little town of Vail, over the railroad tracks and onto the freeway going east toward Bisbee. Ahead, there was a blush over the far mountains. Julie Marr's death faded from her mind like an old photograph in a scrapbook.
15
OFFICER NOONE INVESTIGATES
Randall Noone---he hated the name "Randy"; people might as well just go ahead and call him "Horny"---parked a little way down and walked up to the turnout on West Boulevard. He'd just started his shift and wanted to check on the tire tracks and see if the same vehicle had come back. He was sure those tire tracks had something to do with Jessica Parris's death. Otherwise, why would Laura Cardinal bother to take casts of them?
At seven in the morning, this part of the canyon was still deep in shadow. There was a hushed feeling to the air, which was actually cool for once, thanks to the overnight rain.
His favorite time of day.
Even though he'd enjoyed the thrill of working nights, he never could adjust completely to the night. Working the day shift in Bisbee wasn't big on excitement, but he enjoyed talking to folks---the place was like Mayberry. He was good at giving speeding tickets, too; he made people feel so good about getting a ticket that they were practically thanking him before he was done. Randall thought that if he'd really wanted excitement, he could have joined up with the sheriff's department, which had become a war zone in the last few years. With the Feds clamping down on the border crossings in California and Texas, Arizona was a hotbed for illegal aliens. One of his friends in the sheriff's department had personally discovered three decomposing bodies in the desert just this year, and had nearly been run down during a routine traffic stop when a vanload of illegals jumped out after putting the van into reverse, right at him.
Nope, he liked Mayberry just fine. Especially with the baby on the way. He and Marcie had picked out the name already: Justin. A good strong name.
The only bad thing about days---Heather Duffy was on days, too.
The Duffy trouble began when his wife had a cold and couldn't make it to the year-end party. After downing five Tabasco shooters, he'd ended up making out with Duffy, and she'd never let him forget it. She sank her teeth into him like a gila monster. When one of them clamped onto your fingers, you might as well get used to having a new clothing accessory.
He reached the yellow tape and looked at the area. He'd made a mental note of exactly how it had looked the night before and was happy to see that the area had not been disturbed.
Glancing back at the Parris house, he said a brief prayer. Man, that was tough---imagine losing your kid like that. The chief had mentioned a possible Internet connection. That was bad stuff, the way some freak with a computer could reach right into your house and lure your kid right out the front door. When Justin grew up, he'd have to watch him like a hawk. He'd get AOL. They had safeguards for stuff just like that.
He walked across the road to look at the other turnout. A raven flew over, making a nut-cracking noise deep in its throat.
As he reached the road's shoulder, the smell hit him.
He realized that off and on yesterday afternoon he had smelled it, too, had thought it was coming from the dumpster. But it wasn't really a garbage smell.
It was a death smell.
He looked up and down the road, but saw nothing. Probably some poor animal had been hit by a car and crawled into the underbrush.
A thick screen of trees ran along the east side of the road. His Uncle Nate called them cancer trees because they spread like a fast-moving tumor. He stepped to the side of the road and peered between the trunks. No animal that he could see, but there was something---a solid patch of gray through the trees. Couldn't be more than ten feet from where he stood.
An abandoned shed? No, it had a pitched roof. It looked like a little cabin. Suddenly he remembered something else Uncle Nate told him, that there were some old tourist cabins around here from the twenties, back when this road was the highway through town.
As he recalled, it had an Indian name. Cochise? No. Geronimo. The Geronimo Tourist Camp.
Randall Noone squinted at the shack, holding the tree limbs away from his face. The trees made him feel claustrophobic. They gave off a cloying odor, like peanut butter, that mixed with the death smell and made his stomach queasy. Breathing through his mouth, he made his way through the underbrush, the limbs springing back like boomerangs when he let go of them, until he was standing outside the shack.
The doors and windows to the cabin were gone, leaving it open to the elements---just a shell with a rusted stove pipe lying in the corner across floorboards pretty much rotted through. Place couldn't be much bigger than a roomy bathroom.
He noticed another ghostly square to his left, maybe fifteen feet away, and went to investigate.
This cabin looked like a kids' hangout---there was a candle, an old rug, throw pillows, rolling papers, and a boom box. A faint odor of pot.
This was interesting.
He spotted another cabin, this one farthest away from the road and backed up against the hill. He picked his way along a faint trail littered with junk---a roll of hog wire, broken glass, a sink with a hole in it.
Darker here, shadowed by the ridge and oak trees. Damp. The raven flew to an oak and chortled at him as he approached the open doorway.
The stench hit him with almost physical force.
He stepped back, his mind reeling. Something dead here. Steeling himself, he breathed through his mouth before peering in.
At first he thought it was just a pile of black rags. No, it was jeans and a T-shirt. Naturally, his gaze wandered up the t-shirt toward the face.
His disbelieving eyes registered the green fright mask for just an instant before he reeled backwards out the door, gulping for air.
Officer Randall Noone found himself on all fours, the scrambled eggs Marcie cooked for his breakfast ending up in a steaming pile on the grass.
16
"What do you think?" Laura asked Victor. Early afternoon now, and the crime lab techs had finished collecting evidence and the ME's people were on their way to remove the body of Cary Statler.
Victor sighed. "Whoever killed Jessica probably killed him."
Laura knew what he was thinking: more trouble. Just seven hours ago he'd been making arrangements for a studio portrait of his family, including his new daughter, and now he'd been dragged back here in this heat to look at the corpse of Cary Statler, which in his view only complicated the case.
Laura agreed with Victor that there was a high probability that Jessica and Cary had been attacked at the same time. With a body this far gone, it would be impossible to fix a definitive time of death, but Laura didn't believe in coincidences. The fact that Cary Statler and Jessica Parris had both been victims of homicide was just too big a coincidence to ignore.
Detective Holland said, "He wanted the girl and this poor sad bastard was in the way. So he bashed him in the head and took the girl where he could have his fun without being rushed."
Laura kept her gaze on Statler, although it was hard to do. He was riddled with maggots. One eye had been pecked out, and several fingers had been torn from one hand, probably dragged off by animals. It was fortunate he had ID on him, because skin slippage and a hardening and darkening of his complexion made his features unrecognizable---his face was marbled lime-green and black.
But Laura knew who it was the moment she saw the Megadeth tee and the yellow pineapple hair.
She straightened up, feeling the twinge in her back. The shade, which had stayed with them most of the day, had given way to full sunlight coming in through the southern window. The air was stifling; the stench almost unbearable. Victor and Buddy had shared dabs of Victor's jar of mentholatum to block out the smell, but Laura had made it a policy not to use the stuff, since she knew from experience that the stink would linger in the mentholatum long after she had left the scene. She breathed through her mouth, but could still feel death lying on the membranes on her tongue, in her nostrils, on her skin.
Victor cocked his head. "Man, that was some hit he took." The force of the blow had broken Cary Statler's neck, even though the wound itself had been higher up to the side of the head. One blow. It had come close to separating his head from his body.
"Had to be someone who knew about this place," Buddy was saying. "You can't even see these cabins from the road."
"Could be." Laura kept her voice neutral.
Buddy had the ball and he ran with it. "I think he knew them. He wanted Jessica, she fit his fantasy. My guess is he followed them, or knew about their little hangout---"
"If it was their hangout." Laura could feel sweat trickling under her hair. She wanted out of this cabin now. She desperately wanted to go back to the car and get to her purse, scrub her face and hands with hand sanitizer, and salve her dry lips.
"If it was Cary's hangout, this guy would know they hung out there. He'd be able to keep tabs on them, look for his opportunity. I think he planned it," Buddy said.
"What I still can't figure out though---why the dress?" Victor asked. "Why did he do all that? He leaves the kid here, like so much garbage dumped out by the side of the road, but he's careful about the evidence with her."
Buddy said, "He didn't think anyone would find the kid. That's why he brought him to this cabin, farthest from the road. Nobody comes out here. That's also why I think he's local. He knows this place. He had to act fast and move this kid, and he knew exactly where to put him."
"And then what?" asked Laura.
Buddy looked at her and his eyes narrowed. "He takes her to his place."
"So he's parked up on the road?"
"I guess he would be."
"Wouldn't he be afraid that someone would see his car? Or see him come up to the road with the girl?"
"He's pretty bold---you said so yourself, dressing her up like that and putting her in City Park. If you don't like him taking him somewhere, he could have killed and raped her up here, came back later that night, cleaned her up and planted her in City Park."
"Why?"
"To taunt the police. To show us up."
Buddy's theory was logical. Still, something about it bothered her. She had spent a large part of yesterday talking to various law enforcement agencies in Arizona. No one she'd talked to could even remember a case like this one, but there was the phone call from that detective---Endicott---in Indio, California. She'd tried him twice today, would have to keep trying.
If he was a local, she guessed that he had not lived here long. A year or two at the most. She knew he had done this before. He had built up to this.
The mesquite leaf, too, bothered her. She didn't recall seeing a mesquite tree anywhere up here; it was too high up.
And there was the matchbook she'd found at the bandshell, CRZYGRL12 written in block letters on the inside cover. "Why would he leave the matchbook behind?"
Buddy stared at her. "We don't know for sure it was his."
Gauging her reaction.
"No, we don't know he was the one who put it there. We have to consider it, though. We have to consider everything. This might have something to do with the Internet."
"That's how he could have met her."
"But you think he knew her from here."
"He knew her from here and he knew her on the Internet. They were probably e-mail buddies."
She could tell he was getting steamed. She saw Victor grin---the first time today. Victor understood Buddy's frustration, maybe even sympathized. He'd often said she was too even-handed.
"Besides," Buddy said, "I talked to her teachers. She was carefully supervised and never left alone on the computers. No way someone could have reached her---they'd know. I think CRZYGIRL12 doesn't have anything to do with it."
Laura didn't bother to reply. Instead, she stepped outside the cabin. She couldn't stand the stench in there, and she couldn't stand Buddy Holland's attitude. His barely-veiled belligerence. His hints that she'd planted the matchbook.
Concentrate.
She walked out beyond the crime scene tape. From here, she could see the dumpster near the road. The lab techs had removed the dumpster's contents and already taken it to the crime lab in Tucson, even though they had found nothing overtly related to Cary's murder.
What Laura hoped for was a bloodstained towel or T-shirt. There had been evidence that Cary's head had been wrapped in something to keep his blood from getting all over. This dovetailed with her theory that Cary was moved to the cabin from the spot where he'd been killed.
The killer had probably taken the shirt or towel with him. Maybe he knew that it was possible to get latents from cloth. Or maybe it was his natural neatness.
He was still being careful.
She did agree with Buddy on one thing: Cary had been in the way, and the killer had not foreseen this. He had taken some pains to hide Cary's body, but had been too much in a hurry to clean up.
He had made a big mistake.
She caught a movement down below: Chuck Lehman walking in the direction of the crime scene tape stretching across the road. An unleashed Rottweiler accompanied him.
Officer Noone walked down to meet him. Reporters zeroed in on him like ducks after bread. Voices drifted up, but she couldn't hear them. She didn't need to---Officer Noone was telling Lehman he couldn't go past the tape.
Lehman whistled to his dog and turned on his heel. He walked back in the direction of his house, but didn't go far. Arms folded over his chest, he watched the ME's van pull up behind the other vehicles. Laura couldn't see his expression, but she could sense his excitement even from here. It was evident in the tense way he held his body, pitched slightly forward, as if he were absorbing everything about the scene with all his senses.
She thought about the word Victor had used to describe him.
Avid.
After the body was removed, Laura,Victor, and Buddy headed down to the road. As they reached the crime scene tape, a female reporter thrust a microphone in Laura's face.
"Is it true the body you found belongs to Cary Statler, Jessica Parris's boyfriend?"
"We don't have a positive ID yet," Laura said.
"But you're pretty sure it's Cary Statler?"
"We won't know that until we get a positive ID."
"If it was Cary Statler, can you comment on what they were doing in here?"
Someone else shouted, "Did he die trying to save Jessica's life?"
"We don't know what happened. We're just beginning this investigation."
"But Jessica Parris was here?"
"It's too early to tell that."
She finally got past them and walked to her car.
It was going on three o'clock when the news vans pulled out, following the ME's van down the road. Laura scrubbed her hands and face with hand sanitizer and applied lip balm to her lips. Then she reached into the back seat and tore open the plastic covering on the case of water bottles she carried there, grabbed a new bottle, and drank. Water never tasted so sweet. Ducking into the back of the 4Runner, she stripped off her shirt and replaced it with the blouse she kept on a hanger for emergencies. She ran a brush through her hair, hoping she was respectable enough to meet people.
Victor took the houses on the east side of the street, and Buddy took the houses on the west. Laura headed up to the two houses at the bend in the road.
Again, she got no answer at the first house. But a man answered the door to the green house. Frail and thin, he was bent over a walker. It was clear he was not going to invite her in. The house smelled of boiled cabbage and unclean cat boxes. A TV set blared in the background. She asked him if he had seen or heard anything unusual the last few nights.
He looked at her blankly. "I've been in bed all week with a septic throat."
He hadn't heard anything and didn't know Cary Statler or the Parris family. Laura asked him her whole list of questions, but it was clear he didn't know anything and didn't want to know anything.
"Does anyone else live here?"
"Nope. Have a girl comes in three times a week."
Laura finally nailed it down: The "girl" worked on the day Jessica had been kidnapped. When Laura asked for her name and phone number, the man sighed and clacked his way into the darkness, returning with a slip of paper that had been torn off the edge of a TV Guide, one inch by one-half inch.
"Is that it?" he demanded. "I'm not supposed to be out of bed."
"Have you noticed any unusual vehicles drive this road in the last few days?"
"I keep my drapes drawn. Don't want to fade the furniture." The door closed in her face.
From her vantage point in the 4Runner, Laura watched Victor get in his vehicle and drive off, and then Buddy. Neither one approached her, even though she was in plain sight. She assumed Victor was going back to the Copper Queen Hotel for a swim and to call his wife. They would meet later at the hotel restaurant and compare notes.
Buddy---who knew what he was going to do?
Laura took out her camera and stepped onto the road. She wanted to be in this canyon at the time of day that Cary died and Jessica was taken.
She guessed that Cary had been killed somewhere between five and seven o'clock in the evening on the day Jessica disappeared. This would fit the timeline for Jessica's abduction.
The shadows stretched down from Mule Pass, coming from the opposite direction they had been this morning. The trees on the left side of the road were all in shadow now.
Laura stepped into the wood and worked her way over to the cabin that had contained the drug paraphernalia.
She pictured herself sneaking up on them. Tried to move quietly, but it was impossible given the leaf litter underfoot and the whiplashing limbs.
They would hear an intruder, but would they care? They might not be afraid of strangers. Mellow on pot, Cary and Jessica might not see the danger until it was too late. Would he lure them up to the other cabin farther away from the road?
Or did he arrange to meet them here?
She leaned in through the cabin door and inhaled the smell of pot, which to her smelled like a cross between a burnt-out campfire and old grass and gym socks in a school locker.
The lab techs had removed the pillow, the boom box, the rolling papers, the rug, soil, and debris samples---everything---as possible evidence. They'd also vacuumed the cabin for fibers and hairs, to see if they could place Cary or Jessica or both of them here.
If he did encounter them here, how did he overpower them? Two young, strong kids---that would be hard to do.
She retraced her steps back to the road, looking for any sign where the killer might have come in, and nearly walked right over a couple of divots in the sand north of where she thought he would have gone in.
She squatted on her heels and examined the shallow impressions. They could be drag marks---the divots could be a sign of heels digging in. She followed the trajectory of the marks down into the trees, feeling more excited the more she saw. The leaves on the ground were scuffed, a broken line running in roughly an east-west direction. Not, she noticed, in the direction of the hangout. Plenty of broken limbs and branches---the kid had been dragged by a whirlwind. And swipes and spatters and smears of blood.
Eventually the scuffmarks led to where she thought they would: the cabin on the hill.
She was now sure he did not meet Cary and Jessica at the first cabin.
Laura absorbed the warm stillness of the canyon, thinking. Cary had been dragged down from the road. That meant he had met the killer up there, or at least gone to his car. But where was Jessica during all this?
A raven flew over and settled in a tree farther up the hill, chortling at her.
She returned to the 4Runner for latex gloves and evidence envelopes and retraced the killer's steps up the hill. She was nearly to the cabin on the hill when she spotted something red on the ground---a rectangular plastic tab. She recognized it as one of those savings cards people used at grocery stores---a Safeway Club Card. It fit on a key ring; the hole punch looked as if it had given out from use.
These cards had a bar code and a number, one reason Laura had never signed up for one despite the savings. She didn't like the idea that her purchases could be tracked by someone she didn't know.
She bagged the card. At the edge of the road where Cary had been dragged into the woods, she took several soil samples and marked them as evidence.
Some of the soil looked dark, almost black. It could have been oil spots from a car.
Or it could have been blood.
Back at the Bisbee Police Department, Laura photocopied both sides of the Safeway Club Card, then looked up Safeway in the phone book. There was one in Bisbee. She took the photocopy and drove out to the strip mall where the Safeway was located.
She asked to speak to the manager. A sallow young man with a few thin hairs on his upper lip came to meet her and they walked back to a dingy, fluorescent-lit office at the back of the store. She guessed he was a manager, not the manager.
"Is it possible to get a name and address from this card?" she asked, handing him the photocopy.
The young man, whose nametag said "Gerald," looked dubious. "I don't know ... that information is confidential."
Sure it was. Laura knew these cards were used to track shoppers' purchases, and that they shared this information with other companies.
Laura had to be careful here. She wanted Gerald to give her the cardholder's name without tipping him off that it involved a homicide. She didn't want it getting out what kind of evidence had been left at the scene---information like that would make a defense attorney's day. She cleared her throat.
"I could really use your help. The person who dropped this is an important witness to a serious crime---"
The boy leaned forward. "What kind of crime?"
"A missing person's case." Technically, that was true.
"Do you think it's connected with those murders?"
"This concerns someone we just need to talk to. You'd really be helping me out."
She could see the wheels going around in his head. "I think it's against regulations, you know, unless you had a search warrant or something like that." He drummed a pencil on the desk blotter and looked tortured. "Are you sure it doesn't have anything to do with that girl getting killed?"
"We haven't ruled that out---tangentially."
"I thought so." Pleased with himself. "So you really need to talk to whoever owns this card because he might have witnessed the killing?"
"Gerald, I can't really say."
"Damn, that's scary. Two people getting killed like that. I saw it on the news." His eyes turned regretful. "I wish I could help ..."
Laura glanced at her watch. "Damn."
"Ma'am?"
"I'm just thinking, I've never run into this kind of situation before. I can get a warrant, no problem---I just hope nobody gets hurt because we took the extra time to hammer this out." She shook her head. "I just can't believe this is happening." She stood up. "I hope I can find a judge at this time of day. If this turns bad, I sure don't want this on my conscience."
Gerald squirmed in his chair. "Maybe I should look it up, just in case. I can't remember if there's a hard and fast rule."
"That would be a big help."
Five minutes later, she emerged from the Safeway into the parking lot with the name and address. She didn't need the address, though. She already knew where Charles Edward Lehman lived.
17
Victor Celaya showed up at the Jonquil hours after their dinner at the Copper Queen Hotel. He leaned against the doorjamb, gamma-rayed by the fluorescent light above the door to her room, waggling a sixpack of Bohemia.
Well, almost a sixpack. One was missing.
"Can I come in?"
"Sure. Just let me wake up."
"You were in bed already? I'm sorry." He walked past her and put the sixpack on the table.
"Want one?"
She glanced dubiously at the sixpack.
"They're cold. Just got it from Circle K. I'm sorry I woke you up, but I had to tell you my idea."
Laura sat on the bed, trying to focus. She'd just made it into deep sleep when he pulled her out of it. "What idea is that?"
"Kind of stuffy in here. You want to go outside?"
"Sure." Why not? She wasn't going to go back to sleep now.
Laura went into the bathroom and changed out of the long shirt she wore to bed. Back into today's clothes, wrinkled as they were. She could hear Victor whistling a familiar-sounding corrida, pure and sweet. Wondered what his idea was and why it couldn't wait until tomorrow.
Whatever he'd come up with, he was excited about it.
They crossed a bridge over the narrow channel that ran through Tombstone Canyon and sat down at one of the outdoor tables. Laura was almost glad he'd awakened her; it was a beautiful night. Cool compared to Tucson. The sky full of stars. Runoff from the rains tumbled through the canal, catching the glow of the streetlights.
He quickly spoiled the mood. "I thought of a way to get in Lehman's house. We go through his probation officer."
"We could do that," she said slowly. As a probationer, Chuck Lehman did not have the rights regular citizens had. Probation was a substitute for prison, and there were a number of restrictions on him---what he could do and not do, who he could associate with. If his probation officer suspected he was violating his probation, his house could be searched. Usually it required concurrence by the chief of probation, but essentially, Lehman's house could be searched without a warrant.
Laura didn't like this for a couple of reasons. One, Chuck Lehman's link to the crime scene was tenuous. He lived right near the vacant land. He had a dog and probably walked around in there often. The key tab could have come off any time. She'd bagged it because she was thorough, because if their investigation pointed to Lehman, she'd have other evidence to back it up.
And two, going through the probation officer could cause problems down the line. She could just hear the defense attorney: overeager cops, abusing the privilege---using a probation officer to gain access to a house when they couldn't get a search warrant through regular channels.
That could cause problems if this ever went to trial.
Frank Entwistle had always taught her to think of police work as a pool game, always setting up the next shot and the shot after that. Thinking about the end game---the trial. The ultimate shot should land the bad guy in prison.
This strategy made her a lousy pool player, but a good investigator.
Victor was talking, excited about the case for the first time. She knew he had a pool game of his own in mind: Getting home to his wife and family.
This was not the first time Victor had cut corners. He saw everything in terms of exit strategy---close the case, boost the solve rate.
Laura said, "We can't do that, Victor. We don't have enough evidence."
"That's the beauty of it. We'll get the evidence, once we're inside."
"You really think he's the one?"
"Don't you?" Suddenly his mouth flatlined. "Shit! You don't. You don't think it's him, do you? You're still fooling around with that motor home idea. Nothing can be easy for you, can it?" He stood up and walked around in a circle. "I knew you were gonna do this."
"Victor---"
"What, afraid you'll lose your membership in the ACLU?"
She tried not to lose her cool. "It just won't work."
"Of course it'll work. You just don't want it to."
Suddenly, it dawned on her. "Did Buddy Holland have anything to do with this?"
"Oh, that's great. You never give me any credit, do you? What, I can't think for myself?" He set the bottle down on the table so hard that beer sloshed up---a sharp yeasty smell.
"Victor, I don't want to say this, but---"
"Then don't."
"It's my case. Like it or not, I'm the lead. I say we're not going to do this."
He smiled at her sadly. "Too late."
"What do you mean?"
"It's a done deal. We're meeting Sylvia Clegg over at Lehman's tomorrow."
It shocked her so much, for a minute she couldn't speak.
He stood up. "Sorry you're not happy about this. I came here as a courtesy. We're meeting the probation officer over at Lehman's at eight a.m. See you then---if you want to be there."
18
Driving up West Boulevard the next morning, Laura resolved to do the best she could to hold her case together.
She knew when she was beat. The probation office had agreed to this search, and if she objected now, it would only send a signal that the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. That in turn would be communicated to other jurisdictions on many levels and would affect her ability to get things done.
Perception was reality.
Victor and Buddy had made an end-run around her. She had to salvage what was left of her case and go on.
When she reached Lehman's house, the first thing she saw was a new black Suburban parked two houses down. The vanity plate said RICOPRZ. She knew it: The Suburban had been seized from a Mexican-American drug lord under the RICO laws. It was driven by Lieutenant Mike Galaz.
What was he doing here?
Laura remembered a difference of opinion she'd had with Victor about the new lieutenant. Victor insisted that Galaz was a control freak. But as far as she could tell, Galaz seemed detached from the job, letting the sergeants run the day-to-day---which suited her fine.
She suspected that Victor resented Galaz for other reasons, more ephemeral stuff, like his expensive home in the foothills; his constant talk about his golf game; his breedy-looking second wife, a high-powered Anglo lawyer.
Laura glanced at Galaz. The fact that he was here really didn't surprise her. An important case like this, it wasn't unprecedented that the lieutenant would want a piece of the pie---especially since this one was already unofficially running for mayor of Tucson.
The Suburban, a Bisbee PD patrol car, and Buddy Holland's Caprice were all parked on the street half a block from Lehman's house. A small group had collected near Victor Celaya's shiny black truck. Laura recognized everyone except a skinny bleached-blonde in Guess Jeans that molded tightly to her ass, and an older Hispanic male: Sylvia Clegg and the chief of probation, Ernie Lopez.
Victor leaned against the front fender of his new GMC, the window open so he could get his last few minutes of Rush Limbaugh. A Mexican ditto-head---who'd've thunk.
Galaz nodded to her, his brown eyes assessing. She wondered why he was so interested, put it down to the fact that he hardly knew her. He explained that later today he was speaking at a law enforcement seminar in Sierra Vista, and he decided to come by and see how "his people" were doing.
Those inscrutable eyes, weighing her. Laura turned to Ernie Lopez.
"Is he home?"
"His car's there."
They headed up the street, the Bisbee PD officer, Chambers, leading the way. Galaz hung back---not sure of his role? He'd come up through the administration side of DPS, with a long stint in Internal Affairs. Not a cop's cop.
Laura glanced back, uncomfortable that her lieutenant was walking behind her. When he saw her looking back he transferred his gaze from Clegg to her and flashed a smile. Galaz was one of those people dirt didn't stick to. Manicured nails, expensive suit, immaculate white cuffs crisped to a razor edge, micromanaged haircut. With his patrician good looks and Spanish elegance, even at eight a.m. he looked ready for a thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraiser---a world Laura knew existed, but would never in her life see firsthand.
She could smell the products that went into him: shampoo, cologne, mouthwash, body wash, hair spray. His expensive shoes clicked on the sidewalk behind her like a metronome.
Officer Chambers rapped on the door.
Laura was aware that Lieutenant Galaz remained near the curb. Was he worried there might be shooting? Laura's own hand hovered near her weapon---automatic.
Lehman came to the screen. Shirtless again.
He took one look at them and said, "Oh shit."
Sylvia Clegg said, "Chuck, I'm informing you that I am here to do a search."
Lehman glared past her at Laura. "This is your doing. You trying to get back at me?"
Unperturbed, Sylvia said, "Chuck, you know that under the terms of your probation, you have to allow me in to search."
For a moment it looked like there would be a stand-off. Chambers shifted his weight slightly, his hand near his gun.
Lehman stood in the doorway, arms folded, looking like an angry Mr. Clean.
"What did I do?" he demanded. It took Laura back to the other day when he'd yelled at her like a drill sergeant. "What did I do?"
A powerful engine started up on the street. Laura looked back to see Mike Galaz pull out and drive away. Why had he bothered to come at all?
Clegg said quietly, "Chuck. May I proceed with the search?"
"And if I don't, you'll arrest me."
"Come on, Chuck, this isn't such a big deal," Clegg said. "Take a deep breath and---"
"You're gonna arrest me, am I right?"
"No one's going to arrest you. If you just let me take a look around, we'll be in and out in no time. You know I wouldn't---"
He shoved the screen door open so hard it slammed against the wall of the house. "Go ahead. I have nothing to hide."
"First you need to secure your dog," Clegg said.
"Oh for Christ's sake!" He whistled for the dog and took him outside, returning a few moments later. "I put him in his run, that good enough?"
Clegg smiled like she'd won the lottery. "That's great, Chuck."
They traipsed in: Laura, Victor, Buddy Holland, and Sylvia Clegg. The rest remained out on the street.
Buddy Holland cruised the room, eagle eyes taking in everything. Laura was worried that he was going to piss Sylvia Clegg off, but it appeared they were friends. Buddy must not have seen anything incriminating, because he joined them and stood there with a bored look on his face.
Chuck Lehman lived well. Blond hardwood floors, oriental carpet, Danish furniture. Doggie bed in the corner, near a river stone fireplace. Colorful kites hanging from the walls.
Sylvia Clegg, gloved in latex, started a low-key but thorough search. Her movements were deliberate and efficient. Laura noticed she had a calming effect about her, which was well-appreciated.
Victor said to Lehman, "Mr. Lehman, we'd like to ask you a few questions." He glanced in the direction of the sunny kitchen. "Why don't we go in and sit down, while your probation officer looks around."
"Am I under arrest?"
"No sir."
"Then I'm not answering any questions."
Victor smiled. "We'd appreciate it if you would. We just want to clear up a couple things."
"I can't believe this! I'm calling my lawyer."
"You're not under arrest. We're only asking for a little cooperation."
"You can fuck that." Lehman picked up his cell phone from the kitchen table and turned away from them.
It was a short conversation. When he was through, he closed the phone with a snap and slapped it on the table. "Lawyer's on his way."
"Can we at least sit down?" Victor asked him.
"I can't stop you, can I?"
They sat in the breakfast nook. Lehman leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded.
Victor set his mini-recorder on the table. He spoke into it, giving the time and date and Lehman's name.
Lehman ignored him, staring straight ahead, his eyes like two holes in his face. She could feel his rage under the surface---he hummed like a powerline.
"Did you know Cary Statler?" Victor asked Lehman.
Lehman didn't answer. He was in his own zone, his breathing short and rapid. Staring so hard at a spot on the wall, she thought he'd go cross-eyed.
The way he'd tried to bully her ...
"When was the last time you saw Statler?" Victor asked.
Lehman transferred his gaze to the ceiling.
"Do you remember where you were the evening Jessica was kidnapped?"
It went on like that for a minute or so before Victor gave up.
Usually he could charm people with his easygoing nature, his sympathetic ear. But Lehman was immune.
Laura looked around the kitchen. Everything was spotless, gleaming. The stove, refrigerator and cooking island were all stainless steel and modern. There was not the usual clutter you'd see on shelves or near the sink; in her house the dishwashing liquid sat next to the sink, but here, the kitchen counter was cleared of everything except a bowl of fruit.
Not much in plain sight.
Buddy leaned in the doorway, looking at her. A self-satisfied smirk on his face. Laura ignored him and concentrated on the kitchen.
Place reminded her of a model home. She thought of the way the bad guy had washed the girl, washed her hair, clipped her nails. This guy was that neat. Would there be trace evidence in the shower? She knew that the probation officer's search wouldn't extend there, but if she found something else incriminating, they could get a search warrant.
What would that be? Dress patterns for little girls?
Sylvia poked her head in the doorway. "Can I get in here?"
Lehman shot her a virulent look and launched himself away from the refrigerator like a missile. He went out the kitchen door into his yard, letting the screen door slam behind him. Laura, Victor, and Buddy followed.
Out into the steaming summer heat. Brick patio. Immaculate propane grill. Lehman turned on the hose and began watering the potted plants. The smell of the water mingled with the scent of wet earth.
Laura knew that Clegg could not do a comprehensive search. She'd noticed how Victor had worked certain words into his conversation with Clegg as they'd walked over here. He asked her if she knew how to sew. Mentioned his own mother's sewing machine. Asked her about actors, too, what she knew about makeup, wigs, dress-up. How as a kid one Halloween he'd gone as Snidely Whiplash, twiddling his big black mustache.
Broad hints. Clegg had gotten it.
Now Clegg spoke through the screen door. "All I have left is the bedroom."
Laura glanced at her watch. Victor would have to leave soon; he had Cary Statler's autopsy in Sierra Vista. She wanted to get out of here, too. She needed to go to Tucson to notify Cary's uncle about the death in person. The man might know already, although the police had not yet given Cary's name to the press.
She glanced at Lehman.
His intensity scared her. All this time and his anger had not abated. A hard smell to him---could you smell testosterone?---mingling with the smell of water and earth.
This was Victor's show. Victor's and Buddy's.
"I've got to go," she said to no one in particular.
Neither Buddy nor Victor said anything.
Laura let herself out the gate just as a Lexus pulled up to the curb. An ugly little man in an expensive suit emerged, holding a calfskin briefcase.
Lehman's lawyer.
19
Tucson-Saguaro Auto & Body, near the corner of Palo Verde and 29th Street, was a cinder block building with three roll-up work bays, a parking lot surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain link fence, and a corrugated iron shed that served as the office. The traffic here was a six-lane river of cars and SUVs flowing past a median on which a person dressed like a chicken waved a sign for a fast food place called El Pollo Grande. Every car window was up, the air conditioning going, people with cell phones attached to their ears. All of them isolated from one another in their speeding steel-and-glass capsules.
The chicken looked jaunty, even though he must be smothering from the heat---a real trouper. Laura wondered how much he was paid.
As she stepped onto the curb, she felt that familiar tightening in her stomach whenever she notified people that their loved ones were dead.
She knew what it felt like. The memory was always close at hand, a penance of sorts. A counselor at the University had explained to her the concept of survivor's guilt. It ran through her head like film: drifting off to sleep, her thoughts on Billy and the fun they'd had in Nogales, turtle soup at La Rocca's, coming home late and not feeling like going to her parents' house for dinner. Making love, Billy having to leave because he had to be at work early tomorrow. The stutter of the sprinklers outside the open dorm window. The bedclothes smelling of sex. That Last Happy Day.
Someone knocking on her door. She opens it to two men in suits, who look as if they've been lurking in the hallway trying to get their stories straight.
Knowing right then something is wrong.
The older one with the florid complexion clearing his throat---
She walked along the weedy curb to the shed. The heat was like a convection oven. The door to the shed was open and a table fan blew sporadically in her direction. It took her a moment to adjust her eyes to the darkness of the shed after the blinding desert sun.
"Help you?"
The man sat at a metal desk facing the door. Graying ponytail, a red T-shirt washed so many times it had faded to pink. Behind him, a Tecate poster of a sweaty girl with a bare midriff and cutoffs was tacked to the faded wall.
The minute he saw her, his smile faded. She realized that he had been expecting this visit.
"Are you Beau Taylor?"
There was still a hopeful quality to his expression, as if there was a chance that there had been some kind of mistake. Laura remembered going through the same thinking process when detectives Jeff Smith and Frank Entwistle came to her door. It went like this: As long as nothing was said, you were all right. But the moment the words spilled into the air, there was no way to call them back. So the thing was to try and stop those words.
"If it's about the Coupe de Ville---"
"No sir." Best to tell him flat out, no ambiguity. "There's no easy way to tell you this, sir, but your nephew Cary Statler was found in Bisbee yesterday morning, dead."
His face crumpled. "I thought it was him. The news said they found a body, but they didn't identify him."
"Why did you think it was him, sir?"
"Jessica was killed and he disappeared. If he was missing, he was either hitchhiking his way here or someone got him, too. He didn't show up, then they find a body right near her house. You might as well tell me what happened."
She did.
"Do you think he suffered?"
She went for the white lie; for all she knew, it was true. "I don't think so. It was a massive head injury."
"Poor, sweet kid. He wanted to be a vet. His grades were piss-poor, he dropped out of school, but he was always talking about getting his GED and then trying to get into vet school." He snorted. "Like he could get through a science degree in college. Didn't talk about it so much lately, though. I grew up in a time when drugs were cool, but I tell you, I've seen more kids lose their ambition smoking pot ..." He trailed off, looked down at his club-like fingers. "Probably never would have gotten anywhere."
"Did you ever hear him talk about a neighbor, a man named Chuck Lehman?"
"Sure. He and Cary made kites. Kind of strange, a forty-year-old man and an eighteen-year-old kid."
And a fourteen-year-old girl, Laura thought.
"Cary was a funny mixture of a kid. Never could stick with anything, had that attention-span problem, what do you call it? ADD? Plus, he got put off easy."
The shack rattled---the thundering whistle of two A-10s from Davis Monthan on final approach. Laura glanced out the doorway and saw one of them over the strip mall across the way, a giant mosquito looking for a place to alight.
She wondered how Cary's uncle could stand it, here in the flight path of the A-10s and C-130s---and worse, the F16s---just an iron shed between himself and the stifling heat that killed one or two illegal aliens a day a few miles south of here. He noticed her discomfort and aimed the fan in her direction. Must have been a floor model; it still had the streamers.
"You said he was put off easily?" she asked him.
"Say if somebody hurt his feelings, he'd withdraw. I think it was because he was shy. Somebody said one wrong thing to him, he'd just clam up. Just up and leave. That's why he was always bouncing around between Bisbee and here. He didn't like being criticized, took it to heart."
"He ever get in fights?"
"Nope. When something bothered him, he'd pack up his stuff and take off." Beau Taylor stared at the shimmering white heat beyond the open doorway.
"You're sure he was friends with Chuck Lehman."
"Oh yeah. It was always Chuck this and Chuck that. Guy knew everything. Nobody else knew shit. But that all changed a couple of weeks ago."
"They had a falling out?"
"Kid wouldn't talk about it, but you should've seen the look on his face when I asked about him."
"This was a couple of weeks ago?"
"Last time he came down here."
"Could you pinpoint the date?"
"I think it was a Sunday. We're closed Sundays, plus we go to church." He rolled his chair over to the counter under the window and consulted a greasy-looking desk calendar. "Sunday. End of June."
"Did he fight with his girlfriend much?"
"They had their set-to's. But he was in love with her and in love with her family---couldn't say what he loved more. His mother wasn't worth much, and he always wanted a family."
"Cary was eighteen. An adult. How come he wasn't out on his own?"
"He attached himself to people. He was needy and a loner at the same time."
"Was Jessica a friend of Lehman's, too?"
"I'm pretty sure she was. Cary mentioned a couple of times they did things together."
"Didn't it seem strange to you? A man that much older hanging out with kids?"
"I didn't have a say in it. As you said, he was an adult."
Laura opened her mouth to say that Jessica wasn't an adult---and that was when her cell phone chirped.
Sylvia Clegg, standing on a chair in the closet, felt hard plastic behind the piles of folded blankets stored for the summer.
She pulled down a videotape just as she heard the toilet flush.
The tape was called Pubic Enemy No. 1. The heart-warming story of a gangster who finds love in a hot sheet motel with two vertically-challenged girls.
"What's that?" said Detective Buddy Holland from the doorway.
"Buddy, you didn't use the bathroom, did you?"
He held up his hands, gloved in latex. "You gotta go, you gotta go. What's that? Porno?"
"You're in here now, you might as well come and look at this."
She held the tape out to him. He didn't touch; just looked. "What do you think?"
"Girls could be twenty, or they could be sixteen. Hard to tell these days."
"Definitely not little girls, though." She stepped back up and reached into the closet, pulled out more of tapes.
Buddy remained in the room, hands on his hips, watching her.
"Where's Chuck?" she asked him.
"He's still out back, stewing." He added, "The DPS guy left, has to witness the autopsy."
"You really aren't supposed to be in here."
"I know." He made a slow circuit of the room, peering at things without touching. "Anything besides the porno?"
"Not that I can see."
"Too bad." Buddy shone his MagLite at the back of Chuck Lehman's dresser.
"Buddy, what are you doing?"
"There's a gap between the dresser and the wall."
"So?"
He looked at her. "Did you look to see if anything fell back there?"
Sylvia felt a twinge of embarrassment. "I'm not done yet."
Buddy continued to stand over the dresser. He was looking at something.
Sylvia got down off the chair and set the videotapes down on the floor. "What is it?"
Buddy pointed his flashlight behind the dresser. She came to stand next to him and peered down. Something there. A cylinder.
She went and got a videotape, which was just narrow enough to fit behind the dresser. She caught the thing with the corner, scooting it toward her.
"Bingo," Buddy said as a lipstick tube rolled across the floor.
20
They served the search warrant for Chuck Lehman's house at six o'clock the next morning, pulling Lehman out of bed. He slept in something that looked like a karate gi, and for a minute Laura wondered if he was going to launch an assault at them. He looked mad enough to bust a brick with his hand.
Anger boiled out of him, his eyes burning pure hatred, like twin gas flames.
Nudging the red line.
A lot had happened since Buddy Holland found the lipstick. Most notably, a partial print on the lipstick matched Jessica Parris's index finger from the print cards taken by the Sierra Vista Medical Examiner---an eight-point match. Laura, Buddy and Victor had spent most of the night hashing out what they wanted on the search warrant, which Laura and Buddy would get from a judge in Bisbee. It was important they didn't leave anything out---any area not spelled out by a warrant would be inaccessible to them. And so it became a name game: books, diaries, computer disks, the computer itself. Anything in the sewing line. Makeup, hairpieces, spirit gum and false mustaches. Kites. Indoor and outdoor trash. All cleaning products. Personal grooming products and grooming products for the dog: shampoos, soap, nail scissors, pet-grooming equipment. Financial records, receipts, check books, credit card information. Tools. His car, his yard, his garden shed.
Victor remained in Tucson, catching up on the paperwork they'd accumulated so far.
Buddy took the bedroom. Laura started in the living room and moved on to the kitchen.
The stainless steel appliances would show fingerprints, smudges, if they had not been wiped clean with glass cleaner. She didn't know if he had cleaned everything recently to cover up Jessica's presence in his house, or if this was just the way he was. The place had been neat when they'd come here yesterday. Maybe he was just a neat kind of guy.
She got on her hands and knees, looking for hairs or other evidence. Found several graying hairs and some dog hairs but nothing long or blond. She took them as evidence.
Now for the refrigerator.
Lehman favored health foods, green leafy vegetables, white wine. A healthy guy. A neat guy and a healthy guy.
Expecting to move on pretty quickly, she slid out the crisper.
A chill crept up her back. The only occupant of the crisper was a screenplay. CANDY RIDE.
She hunkered down on her heels and aimed the MagLite at the script. After fixing its position in the crisper, she reached a gloved hand in and lifted it out.
She felt breathing on her neck. Buddy.
"Why would he keep a screenplay in the crisper?" Laura muttered.
Buddy shrugged. "To hide it, I guess. I wonder what's so bad about it he has to hide it."
Carefully, Laura pushed back the cardboard cover and read the first page.
Buddy, leaning over her, whistled, low.
The scene started with the abduction of a teenaged girl.
Buddy said, "Sick fuck."
"You could look at it another way."
"How?"
"I don't know."
"He hid it in the crisper."
Laura stared at the first page, thinking that it could go either way. People wrote what came from their imaginations; it didn't mean that they did what they wrote about. "Maybe he's serious. Maybe he's trying to sell a screenplay."
Buddy just stared at her.
"Are you done with the bedroom?" she asked.
"I wanted to tell you. Couldn't find anything in the bedclothes. He changed the sheets."
"You sure?"
"They were black yesterday and they're blue plaid now."
She absorbed this. "He was afraid we'd come back."
Buddy looked grim, which prompted her to ask, "What else?"
"What do you mean, what else?"
"There's something else. What is it?"
"I think he vacuumed the bedroom. Place is so clean it's sterile."
Laura thought about the appliance surfaces. "He could just be a neat kind of guy."
"Yes, except I checked his vacuum cleaner. And his hand vac. New bags."
"So what he did, the minute we left, he vacuumed." She thought of something. "Why'd he leave the screenplay in the crisper?"
"He didn't think we'd look there."
"If it was me, I'd get rid of any evidence of it. He'd have to know we'd look in the refrigerator. He'd have to know we'd be thorough this time around."
"How else do you explain it, then?"
"I don't know. Did you find any floppy disks?"
"I found a box of them. Didn't look at them, though. Some of these guys have a program where they can destroy everything on the hard disk if someone unauthorized logs on. No way I'd turn that puppy on."
Laura concealed her disappointment. "He could hide e-mails on those disks, right?"
"Oh, sure he could." He straightened up and she heard his knees crack.
Forensics on a computer would take weeks, sometimes months, depending how careful he was in getting rid of any incriminating evidence. Just deleting files wouldn't protect him for very long. Most of what was on his hard drive would be retrievable through various means, but it would take a long time.
She wondered if they'd finally find CRZYGRL12.
Ted Olsen stroked the beard lying on his chest as if it were a pet ferret. "I don't know," he said at last. "The mustache made a big difference."
The owner of Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Show and Emporium squinted again at the row of six photographs on the table in the conference room at the Bisbee Police Department. He wore a polyester short-sleeved shirt, so thin Laura could see the individual hairs on his back. She noticed his odor, a peculiar combination of chicken soup and pencil shavings.
Buddy Holland alternated between leaning over him and pacing the small cubicle. "You sure?" he asked now. "Do you know any of these men?"
"That's Chuck Lehman."
"Think about what he'd look like if he had a mustache."
Trying to influence the witness.
But Ted Olsen wouldn't be influenced. His shifted onto one buttock and removed a snot-caked handkerchief from his back pocket, blew his nose. Leaned back and looked. Leaned forward so his eye was close to the photo. Leaned back again and scratched an armpit.
Milking it for all it was worth.
Finally he shook his head. "It could be Chuck. But I can't tell without the mustache. He has blue eyes," he added helpfully.
"What about his voice. Did his voice sound like Chuck's?" Buddy asked.
Laura shot him a warning look, but he ignored her.
Olsen considered this, but finally shook his head. "I'm not sure, and I can't put a man in jeopardy if I'm not sure."
"I think we're done here," Laura said wearily.
She was surprised at the virulence in the gaze Buddy shot her. He reached down and swept up the photos.
"Thank you for your help, sir," Laura said.
He looked up at her. "Sorry I couldn't help."
"You did the right thing. If you could give me your opinion on these." She showed him photographs of the dress Jessica Parris had worn in death. "What about this dress? Do you recognize the pattern?"
He stroked his beard, then clasped his hands over his stomach. "Looks familiar ... I never made that one."
"Why not?" asked Buddy.
"Because I don't like the sleeves. Too puffy."
"But you've seen something like this before?"
"It could be in the catalog. Online."
"And that would be?"
He marked them off on his fingers. "Inspirational Woman, Satin and Lace, Lynette's Originals, Darcy's Dress Shoppe ..."
Laura wrote them down. "Must be a popular style."
"It's kind of alternative clothing, you know? The stuff girls wear today---kids in thongs, those midriff blouses."
"You don't like that kind of thing?" asked Laura.
"Nope. I should have been born in a different era. When women didn't show everything they had."
As Laura headed back to Tucson later in the day, she replayed her interview with Ted Olsen. After agreeing with him on the sad state of teenagers today and their lack of modesty, she'd eased into specific questions about his actions on the evening Jessica Parris disappeared. If he recognized that the thrust of the interview had changed, Laura didn't see any evidence of it. He answered her questions innocently and with painstaking thoroughness, supplying the name of at least one person, a local woman, who had been to his shop that night. Her followup call to the customer corroborated his story.
Even though he made dresses and his shop was close to City Park, Laura found it hard to imagine this man killing Cary Statler and overpowering Jessica Parris. His shop was cluttered and dusty; his personal hygiene abominable. She couldn't picture him scrupulously cleaning up Jessica with an almost scary attention to detail.
This driving back and forth between Bisbee and Tucson was getting old. Laura got some cheese crackers from the vending machine and headed to the squad bay. On the way, she ducked into the bathroom and gave herself a strip wash, using liquid soap from the dispenser and a half dozen small sheets of brown paper towels. It didn't do much good. Her blouse was wrinkled and she still felt stale. She salved her lips, combed the sweat more evenly through her hair, and decided that was as good as it would get today.
Victor wasn't at his desk, but he'd left her a copy of his autopsy notes.
It occurred to her that Victor wasn't around much at all these days.
He seemed to be disconnecting from the case. She knew he was preoccupied with his wife and new daughter, not to mention his four other kids and the mistress everyone knew about but didn't acknowledge. But it was more than that. He was acting as if the case were already solved and he had moved on.
Victor had always been a lazy investigator, but his charm made up for it. He was a brilliant interviewer and interrogator---had gotten some astounding confessions over the years. On the cases they'd worked together, his laxness in certain aspects of an investigation had never bothered her. She'd picked up the slack without complaint, not because she was a saint---she sure as hell wasn't---but because she liked to keep her finger on the pulse of every case. She wanted to possess a case, know it up and down and inside out, the car parts on the tarp, so she could pounce down on any piece at any time. For this reason, she liked being teamed with Victor. He never got in her way.
But that had all changed when he went behind her back and set up the search with Sylvia Clegg.
She'd just started reading Victor's autopsy notes when the phone rang---Doris Bonney returning her call. It took a moment for Laura to place her, the "girl" who worked for the old man on West Boulevard. Doris Bonney sounded much older, sixty at least.
Accustomed to doing two things at once, Laura skimmed the report as she asked Doris Bonney about the previous Friday. "Do you remember what time you left there?"
"Had to be six fifteen, six twenty at the latest."
"Are you sure?"
"Mr. Toomey eats at five thirty every evening. I have to be across town for a class I'm taking by six thirty."
"Did you notice anything unusual when you left?"
"I can't think of anything."
Laura's eyes ran down the report. Cause of death: A blow to the head. Well duh.
"Think hard," she said to Mrs. Bonney. "People walking their dogs, kids, someone driving by?"
Silence. Laura pictured her thinking. Most good citizens tried hard to please. Talking to cops brought out the bright student in them.
"Sorry." Bonney sounded sincerely disappointed. "It was just like any other night."
Once more with feeling. "You're sure? It could be anything out of the ordinary, no matter how insignificant it seems to you."
Laura said this as she turned to the next page of the report, noting that the object used to kill Cary Statler was described as heavy and flat. There was a portion of Cary's scalp where the edge of the weapon had made its mark---a curved indentation. In addition, there was trace evidence of fish, oil, salt, and flakes of metal in Cary's wound. The report concluded that the weapon could have been a frying pan or skillet.
"Well, there was a motor home."
Laura straightened in her chair, all her attention now on Bonney. "Motor home?"
"I thought I was going to be late for class. This big motor home was taking its time trying to turn around. I'm sure it isn't important, but honestly, that's the only thing ..."
"Are you sure it was that Friday?"
"That's the night of my pottery class."
"Can you remember what it looked like?"
"Big. Had to be a mile long. It took him some maneuvering to turn that thing around, let me tell you. There were three other cars waiting. You'd think he'd be more considerate."
"Do you remember which way he was going?"
"When he finally got turned around? Up to the pass."
"Out of town?"
"That's right."
"Can you remember the color?"
"It was light brown---tan, I'd guess is the better word. I had to sit there staring at it for the longest time. Definitely tan."
"Did you get a look at the driver?"
"Nope. It was hard to see in---it's dark up there by six thirty."
After she hung up, Laura pulled out a pad and wrote.
Motor home sightings:
West Boulevard, approx. 6:15 p.m. July 8
Brewery Gulch, approx. 2 a.m. July 8
After this, she wrote:
Frying pan?
She tried to picture Chuck Lehman walking up the road looking for Jessica and Cary, holding a frying pan.
The phone interrupted her thoughts.
"Laura, could you come by my office for a minute?" Lieutenant Galaz asked when she answered. "Any time in the next ten minutes."
Laura realized this was the first time she'd seen the inside of Lieutenant Galaz's office since he'd been here.
A big man sat in the leather chair closest to Galaz's desk. He gave the impression of toughness; blond butch cut, muscles encased in fat under a Big and Tall navy sports coat. The ubiquitous cop mustache, ginger-gray. Square, gold-rimmed glasses tinted rose that went with his square face. One black-loafered ankle rested on his knee. He did not get up when she entered the room.
Galaz, seated at his massive cherrywood desk, did rise. His smile inclusive, as if he shared a joke with her.
"Laura, glad you could make it. This is Mickey Harmon, with Dynever Security. He's a twenty-year veteran with TPD. We go way back---grew up together."
Laura nodded to Harmon.
"Sit down, sit down." Galaz motioned Laura to the other burgundy leather chair. Watching her with interest. As she did so, she thought how different this office looked from that of the previous owner, Larry Tuttle, who had occupied this office for eleven years. The bank of fluorescent lights had morphed into softer, more flattering light. The secondhand furniture, a lot of it cheap office stuff, had been replaced by a thick oriental carpet, cherrywood, and leather. A bookshelf full of books on DPS rules and procedures, one whole shelf devoted to criminal profiling and forensic procedures---not so different from her own library. But the biggest change was on the walls---three nature photos, blown-up big. One of them was a close-up of a hummingbird in mid-flight. The other two were spiders blown up into monsters: A black widow in a glistening web, its eyes magnified to the size of peas; a giant, hairy wolf spider against a shimmering backdrop of green.
Galaz followed her gaze. "Ah, you noticed my photos. It's a hobby of mine. Well, more of a passion." He pushed an Arizona Highways magazine across his desk. "Finally made the big time. Page fifteen."
Laura dutifully turned to the photo spread: More spiders and a scorpion or two.
"Very impressive, sir."
His smile was quick, as if he were expecting the compliment.
"I called you in here to see how the case was going. Is it true we're close to an arrest?"
"We're in the process of collecting evidence now. We're hoping the forensics on the computer will pan out."
"But the lipstick with the prints on it? That's pretty solid?"
"The lipstick had her prints on it. It was found in his bedroom."
Galaz frowned. "I'm glad you're taking your time and not rushing to judgment. You remember Walter Bush."
Walter Bush was a local businessman who had been arrested for a series of burglaries based on one witness's identification. He was eventually cleared, but not before he attempted suicide in his jail cell. A lawsuit was pending.
Galaz leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. "Laura here is one of the best investigators we've got. You remember the Judd murders---guy murdered his whole family? Laura was the one who cracked it. She's like a pit bull. Grabs on and won't let go."
Laura mentally squirmed.
"We've been having a little disagreement on what kind of killer this is," Galaz said. "Mickey's convinced he's white, but I'd like him to think outside the box a little bit." He smiled and spread his hands. "You know---embrace diversity."
Laura said, "The majority of these offenders are white---"
"What did I tell you?" Mickey said, winking at her.
Laura added, "But it's a mistake to rule out any one race. Even though there are very few black or Hispanic offenders, I think there will be more as---"
Galaz turned to Mickey, his grin triumphant. "You see, Mickey? She agrees with me. Even though minorities are under-represented, culturally we're catching up. More of us are joining the ranks of the middle class, are better-educated, we're succumbing to the same pressures that the average white guy has. We're developing a taste for it."
Laura said nothing. It was tantamount to saying how great it was that women were catching up and passing men in lung cancer statistics.
"All I'm saying, Mickey, is it could be anybody," Galaz said. "We don't want to limit our options."
"I agree," Laura said. "But likely he is Caucasian." Hoping the lieutenant wouldn't be insulted in some weird way.
"Oh, I'm sure he is. We were talking theoretically." Galaz rolled a Mont Blanc pen in his long, tapered fingers. "I understand there's an Internet connection to this? You think the perp got to this girl on the Internet?"
She wondered if he got the term "perp" from television. Nobody in her squad or any squad she knew had ever used the word. "We think there could be an Internet connection, but so far we haven't been able to find it."
"Why is that?"
"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. I've got someone on it, but with the Cary Statler homicide---we don't have the resources."
His eyes were sympathetic. "I was talking about this with Mickey. This CRZYGRL thing. You really think that's important to the case?"
"It could be."
"I told you that Mickey here works for Dynever Security. It's one of the top Internet security companies in the United States. Heck, probably the world." He glanced at Harmon. "You work with the government on all levels, don't you, Mickey? State, federal, you name it. Really impressive."
"We've consulted on a number of high-profile cases for them," Harmon said.
"I forget what all you do," Galaz said, fiddling with his pen.
"Mostly we're Internet security. Countersurveillance. One division creates websites and develops networks, another is strictly data management. We also offer Internet security services to small businesses."
It sounded like a sales pitch.
"The point is," said Galaz, "You know as well as I do we're not equipped to handle something like this. If this guy really did lure her on the Internet. You know what our budget's like." He turned to Harmon. "Desert Lakes, this little podunk town in the middle of the state? They have three times the budget per capita we do. They get the shiny new cars, the cyber-cops, all the perks. Here we are, the state agency, we're supposed to be elite, and we're lagging behind everybody else."
Laura smiled. There was a joke around the investigative division that "DPS" stood for "Don't Pay Shit".
"So we have to improvise." Galaz leveled his gaze on her. "How sure are you that this is the guy?"
"Lehman?" She paused. Not knowing what to say.
"Go on. We're nonjudgmental here."
Laura didn't like the way this was going. She didn't like the "we"---this friend of Galaz's sitting there as if he were DPS. But she had to be honest. "Even though we're moving ahead with Lehman, we're looking at other leads."
"Would it help if we could find this CRZYGRL connection?"
"I suppose so, sir."
"What if we outsourced this job to Dynever Security?"
So that was what this was about. She opened her mouth to reply, then stopped. Harmon was sitting right here. She realized belatedly she'd walked into an ambush. She couldn't tell him her real thoughts with Harmon here.
"My guess is, this is going to take some getting used to." Galaz swiveled in his chair, back and forth, smiling at her. "Tell you what. I'm having a little get-together tonight, just a few people. I'd like you to come by, meet the folks you didn't get a chance to last time."
"That would be great, sir."
"So I can count on you?"
"Yes sir."
"I particularly want you to meet the head of Dynever Security. Great guy. He's like a brother to me."
She nodded, not knowing what else to say.
He glanced at his watch. "I can tell we're going to get out of here late. Nine o'clock for drinks? You can find my house okay, can't you? I don't think you've ever been there."
Laying it on a little thick. Victor was right; she should have gone to the barbecue. She nodded. "I'll be there."
"See you then."
Something in his smile told her that the audience was over.
When the door shut behind her, she felt as if she had been processed through the county jail---her wallet, shoelaces, and belt gone. Folded, stapled, and mutilated.
She found herself staring at the wall of photos again. Noticed that most of them included Nick Fialla, the University of Arizona football coach who had led the Wildcats to a Rose Bowl win two years ago. It amazed her how the prominent people of Tucson, the movers and shakers, flocked to get their picture taken with Nick Fialla.
He should rent himself out, she thought sourly. Like the burros in Nogales that the tourists pose with to prove they'd been to Mexico.
21
The sun had just gone down behind the Tucson Mountains when Laura reached the Vail exit. The lights of oncoming cars were already snapping on, strung out across the pink-purple hills east of Tucson like a necklace of diamonds.
As she drove across the overpass, she spotted a scrawny woman sitting in the open hatchback of a Chevy Vega parked near the off ramp, holding up a cardboard sign that said BLOWJOBS $2.00.
Everyone had their price.
Laura's price was giving in to Let's Go People! Galaz. No way she could get out of going to this party; she'd already missed the barbecue---apparently the only person in the whole department who did.
As she pulled up in front of her house, she spotted something pale in the darkness of her porch. It materialized into a white long-sleeved shirt as she approached.
"Tom?" Her heart quickening.
"Hi, Bird."
"When did you get back?"
"This morning." He stood up from the steel glider near the door. It creaked loudly---sixty-year-old springs.
He was close enough that she caught the scent of his shirt, a combination of starch and the fresh smell of line-drying. Tom didn't own a dryer. He didn't own much of anything.
"I heard about the girl who got killed---thought you might need me."
"Who'd you hear that from?"
"Mina."
"Mina called you?"
"I called her. I was checking on Ali."
Referring to a famous bareback bronc named Old Yeller. Ten years ago, before Old Yeller took the inevitable downward spiral to the dog food factory, Tom bought him, changed his name to Ali ("because he was The Greatest") and towed him around from job to job. Ali was twenty-three years old, sway-backed, and deeply suspicious of Laura.
She inhaled the night air, soggy and laden with the odors of creosote and manure. She was glad Tom was here---really glad. "How long have you been waiting?"
"I wasn't waiting. I was sitting."
Zen and the Mystic Itinerant Wrangler. He reached out and touched her lightly on her cheek, which sent her thoughts whirling like sparks from a kicked-up fire, her mind buzzing on and off like an old neon sign. He was aware of his effect on her, but had the good sense not to say anything. "I thought we could go by the cantina and get a drink. Mina's beginning to wonder if you're avoiding her."
Mina, the proprietor of the Spanish Moon Cantina on the Bosque Escondido, liked to micromanage the lives of the people who lived and worked here. Laura wondered if she'd weighed in on the living-together issue yet.
"I'd better not drink anything. I have to be somewhere later."
"Oh?"
"A party at my lieutenant's house---it's mandatory."
"Mandatory?"
"For me anyway. I didn't go to the last one, so I've got to go this time."
"What'll he do if you don't?"
She shrugged. "Probably nothing. It's politics."
"Sounds to me like he set you up."
Great insight from a man whose only possessions were a truck, a saddle, a horse trailer, and one decrepit horse.
Here she'd found a man who was perfect for her in every way except one. In the currency she valued most, the currency that defined her life---career---he didn't even have pocket change. He had no ambition. Thirty-five years old and he wrangled horses on a guest ranch.
He said, "Did you get my note?"
"Of course I got your note. I have to eat, don't I? Lucky for you, you didn't leave it in the cleaning closet."
He had both hands on her shoulders now. "Have you thought about it?"
"I haven't had time."
If she thought he'd be heartbroken, she was wrong.
"Okay, I can wait. If you can't drink, can we at least eat?"
"I was going to have mac and cheese."
He smiled. "Not much food in those little boxes."
"I've got two of them."
Laura drifted in and out of sleep, her body one long smile. Naked in the cool swirl of sheets, the boat-oar ripple of the ceiling fan playing over her body, legs entangled with Tom's long, lean ones, the feel of his skin against hers ... times like these, she felt young again. Young in that innocent romantic way before life started cutting away at her. Before Billy Linton blew her romantic ideals out of the water. Before she learned that no matter how strong a bond you had with your family, it could be ripped away from you at any time.
Lying here, she felt like the college kid she once was, infatuated with life, absolutely certain about her future. All she had to do was succumb to her feelings, and she could hold it again, that hope. Allow herself to be swept away by this incredible lover whose touch shot through her like electricity.
Still drowsy, she found herself looking at the length of his body in the light from the bathroom. It was impossible to keep herself from touching him. She reached out and laid a finger on his skin. Felt a shiver, although it was warm. Traced a line down his muscled forearm, down along his rib cage, the bump where one rib had broken during a bull ride, then down into the hollow between his hipbones.
Another shiver.
Why shouldn't we live together?
Because it could go wrong. That was the lesson she had learned from her marriage.
Marriage?, the hard-ass in her said. Whatever it was she and Billy had, you couldn't really call it a marriage.
The fact was, love could go wrong. All those good times, feeling you were joined at the hip, that you knew the other person so well, as well as you knew yourself, and then something bad happens and all of a sudden you become enemies. You don't even know how it happens, but one day you meet in the hallway and you skirt around each other, looking away, trying not to touch. Because all of a sudden touching is impossible, you can't stand to feel him on your skin. How does that happen? Just bad luck? Did it happen to everyone who went through a tragedy? She didn't know.
Tom stirred and his arm fell across her.
She couldn't deny how good it felt to be with him. Logically, she knew she couldn't judge Tom by the Lintons. Besides, Tom didn't have a rich family.
She pressed her lips to his, and he stirred again.
The sudden thrill of absolute wanting always caught her by surprise. Undeniably needy ... and he always responded.
Now he rose up on one arm above her, settled his lips onto hers.
She cupped the back of his head, and they kissed long and slow.
Exquisite.
But something not so good insinuating itself into her mind---
"Shit!" She sat up, grabbed the bedside clock and turned it so she could see.
Tom, his dark eyes cloudy with sleep and desire and questions, "What's wrong?"
Eleven ten.
"Dammit!"
"What's wrong?" Concern etched into two grooves between his eyes. Realization. "You missed the party."
She hopped out of bed, stumbling in the sheet and having to grab the bedpost to stay afloat. In the bathroom, turning the shower on full spray. Fumbling for her toothbrush. Before or after her shower? What would she wear? What kind of shoes?
Feeling impotent. Unable to make decisions. Duck into the shower, make it fast.
As she scrubbed, she tried to remember. How did she let this happen? The two of them sitting on the porch eating macaroni and cheese. Watching TV, starting on the couch and transferring to the bedroom, hurried and wanting.
Immersed in their lovemaking. Mindless pleasure. Spending themselves, energy dwindling down to a tiny speck, like the dot on her grandmother's old television set just before it went dark. She remembered thinking as she drifted off, I've got time. Just a few minutes and then I'll get up ...
As the hard needles of spray drilled into her skin, Laura thought of something Frank Entwistle used to say.
There are no accidents.
She took Old Spanish Trail, flooring it along the edge of the Rincon Mountains, knowing it was too late. Doglegged over to the Catalina Highway, turning right onto a single lane of blacktop that climbed along the base of the mountains to where Galaz's house overlooked the city. No cars parked outside the closed decorative iron gate, the house dark.
Driving back, Laura was surprised how bad she felt. She sensed that this time, she'd done the unforgiveable. Victor always warned her that she needed to pay attention to what was going on with the brass. He'd told her on more than one occasion that she was impolitic. She'd always brushed it off, because in her opinion sucking up wasn't important to the job she did every day.
The moon peeked over the shoulder of the Rincons, a laughing clown.
When she got home, Tom was gone. She was surprised, although she couldn't expect him to stay. If they lived together it would be different. He'd be there all the time.
Too tired to think now anyway.
She got into bed, was asleep within minutes. Awakened not long after by a loud thump. Hallelujah---the bobcat kittens were back.
Laura sat up in bed, listening to them play on the roof, watching the moonlight and mesquite shadows tremble across the floor. Most ranch houses in the southwest had concrete floors. This one had been deep red for the majority of its eighty years, scuffed and chipped by generations of cowboy boots, spurs, dragged saddles and bridles. Laura had painted it hazelnut brown, a glossy finish. In the moonlight, though, it was hard to tell what color it was.
She wished Tom had waited. The lack of his presence prickled her, like the ghost pain from a severed limb.
She had not had this feeling since Billy---that heart-thumping, nerve-shattering, high-voltage infatuation. Like two electrical wires touching, igniting feelings both visceral and surprising.
Laura had spent some time thinking about it. She'd known sexier men, better-looking men, more powerful men. Maybe it was the forbidden nature of their relationship. The desire for the forbidden had probably been pummeled into her during catechism---kids being prone to absorb the opposite message as they were. By the time she was a teenager, forbidden pleasure as a concept was in full force. It fueled her poor choices in middle school, high school, and college. Beautiful boys who knew they were beautiful and had nothing else to occupy their minds except contempt for those who worship them.
Her mother wasn't here to disapprove now. But Laura knew she'd adopted her prejudices. An itinerant former bull rider was not the right man for her. The end result was a relationship that tasted and felt illicit---and therefore delicious.
A train horn blared. The railroad tracks ran along the freeway, some five or six miles away as the crow flew. On sleepless nights, which lately had been all too many, she heard every big truck out on the highway and the mournful horn of the trains. Those sounds had been woven into the tapestry of her life, the lonely sounds of people going elsewhere, passing in the night.
If you lived together you'd---
Stop it.
The bobcats, snarling, scuffling, galloping back and forth across the roof. God bless them.
No more sleep tonight. She turned on the light. The chartreuse green walls of her bedroom looked like they had peeled and faded in the sun---she'd taken a course on distressing walls to look old. That and the mesquite mission bed---hecho en Mexico---made her room beautiful, to her eyes anyway.
Her gaze strayed to the photos on the wall opposite the bed, the focal point of the room. Most of them were of good times with her parents and her friends, eight-by-tens of her on her mare Calliope, showing off her ribbons from the Alamo Farm annual horse show. Two Ross Santee pen-and-ink drawings that she had found at a yard sale. A wedding picture of Frank Entwistle and his second wife, Pat.
No wedding pictures of her own, though. There hadn't been any.
She liked looking at the wall of photos from a distance, the cumulative effect of them arrayed tastefully, the mellow finish of the gold frames catching the light, but the truth was she rarely got up close and looked right at them. She didn't like how they made her feel.
That was then; this is now.
Those days were as old and faded as the photographs, a half-remembered dream. Someone else's life. She was not the pretty, shy girl perched on the fifty-thousand-dollar Thoroughbred hunter, the teenager giggling with friends at places as diverse as Dairy Queens and rock concerts.
The girl looking out of those photographs seemed confident of her future happiness.
Laura, looking at it from the perspective of distance, thought that was sad.
22
She was getting ready for work the next morning when she heard the gate creak out front. She looked out the window and saw Mike Galaz standing just inside the hog wire fence, almost concealed by the large mesquites. He seemed to be looking at her roof.
She came out on the porch. His gaze still fixed on the clay barrel tiles, he said, "Is that a prickly pear growing out of your roof, or are you just happy to see me?"
He didn't sound mad. In fact, he sounded friendlier than she'd ever heard him. "Like it?" she said. "It's the latest in home design." And immediately wondered---was she being too flip? "About last night---"
"Don't worry about it."
A compulsion to explain. "I guess I was more tired then I thought. I fell asleep."
"No problema. You missed a good time, but it's no big deal." He removed his coat jacket and folded it neatly over his arm. "You have air conditioning in that shack? I feel like I'm going to melt."
"Maybe you should trade that black SUV for a white one."
"Why is that?" He stepped up onto the worn brick paving of the portal and wiped his brow with the back of his hand.
"Black attracts heat."
He shrugged. "I've got good air conditioning. It's just walking from the car to the house that kills me."
He didn't seem to know the basics about living in the desert. Like driving a white car or getting most of your outdoor work done before eight in the morning. She'd seen Galaz go out for a jog during his lunch hour in the middle of the summer.
The Galaz family had been around Tucson since the eighteen hundreds, but the lieutenant didn't act like an native Tucsonan, except in one way. Tucson had a proud tradition of Hispanic politicos and wheeler-dealers.
She offered him coffee and he accepted while she went through the house closing windows and turning on the cooler.
He held his hand up toward the air vent, grimacing at the fishy smell. "You sure it works?"
"Swampbox," she said. "It'll take awhile." She had no doubt that Mike Galaz had real air conditioning in his expensive home in the foothills.
A hundred years ago, he would probably have lived in a ranch house just like this one. He looked like he belonged here with his elegant Spanish features and aristocratic bearing. A man who would look good by candlelight.
He cradled the coffee mug in both hands. "I hope you don't mind me dropping by like this."
"No, of course not." But she started to feel nervous again.
Galaz sipped his coffee. "A shame you couldn't meet Jay."
"Jay?"
"Head of Dynever Security. The main reason I had the party, for you and him to meet."
He was mad after all. What she was about to say would make him a lot madder. "About that." She took a deep breath. "I don't know if it's a good idea to get them involved."
"Because of the chain of custody? Is that what's bothering you?"
"You know what a defense attorney might do with that."
He stared at her, his dark eyes inscrutable. "You're a good detective, Laura. You always think ahead. I like that." He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. "But you've got to give me some credit. There's no way I'd jeopardize this investigation. If you're worried about the forensics on the computer, of course our crime lab does that. No way I'd farm that out. I'm just talking about the cyber stuff. As far as I'm concerned, that's just air."
Air that can kill, Laura thought.
Galaz leaned back, and the Mexican chair creaked. "I thought you had your doubts about it being Lehman."
"I have questions."
"I saw the autopsy report. That part about the frying pan. I find it hard to believe Lehman would walk up the road looking for those two kids."
"I can't speak for Victor, but I bet he'd say that Lehman killed Cary in his house and dragged him up to the cabin at night."
At the mention of Victor, Galaz's eyes turned stony. Something between them. She remembered what Victor had called him---a control freak.
He crossed one knee over the other and said, "What do you think?"
"I didn't see any blood evidence of that, and there would have been a lot of blood. Even when you clean a place really well, there's always some residual blood. Nothing came up when we used Luminol."
"CRZYGRL12. That bothers me, too. You said yourself Detective Holland hasn't done much."
"To be fair, we've been kept pretty busy."
"But bottom line, you've got your doubts."
She nodded.
He set his coffee mug down. "I think we should try this. Before he gets another girl. Victor and Buddy can work the Lehman angle." He saw her expression and added, "I promise you, there won't be any repercussions."
"You can't promise that."
"Yes, I can. I'll take the blame if it goes wrong, but it won't go wrong. This guy is good. You'll like him."
She noticed his word tenses. Past the negotiation phase. As far as he was concerned, it was a done deal. It would have been a done deal last night, but she'd messed that up by not showing.
She realized that if she had gone last night, this conversation wouldn't be taking place. He would have asked her in front of this man Jay, and she would have had to agree. In the DPS---as in any law enforcement agency--- you never made your boss look weak. Never.
Maybe Victor was right about the lieutenant's need for control. He certainly had it now. Might as well get it over with. She could make a token effort, talk to the guy, then tell Galaz it didn't work out. "Okay, I'll talk to him."
"Good." Galaz reached into his wallet and removed a card, set it on the table.
The card said Dynever Security --- Michael J. Ramsey II, CEO.
She stared down at the pale gray velum, the embossed letters. Heat suffused her face and her heart started to pound.
"Jay Ramsey?" she said. Her tongue felt stiff.
"You know him," Galaz said. Not a question.
"No, not really. I only met him once."
"Met" wasn't strictly accurate. She'd noticed him plenty.
Watching him whack tennis balls at the Ramseys' tennis court down the road from the stables. Watching him go from the house to his Range Rover, hanging with his friends, driving by in a cloud of dust.
"He asked about you," Galaz said. "He thinks of you often."
Occasionally, he'd look her way and nod.
"But of course that goes without saying," Galaz added.
23
Galaz left soon after. Feeling as if she'd been whacked by a two-by-four, Laura walked out onto the porch, wondering what this all meant.
She had no particular objection to seeing Jay Ramsey. She didn't know the man. But it had been eleven years since she had been in that part of town. There were so many memories ...
Mrs. Ramsey, handing her the papers: We wanted you to have her. As a thank you.
A fifty-thousand-dollar thank you.
The phone rang and she jumped.
It was Barry Endicott, the sheriff's detective from Indio. "Sorry I haven't gotten back to you," he said. "I've been working a case that's taken all my time."
"That's okay." Aware of her own breathing.
"I heard you had a girl," he said. "Dressed up and posed, am I right?"
"Yes."
"So did we, five months ago. Girl named Alison Burns."
"What was she wearing?"
"She was dressed up like a flower girl and posed on a bed at a motel slated for demolition. It was pure luck we found her at all. It was kind of opportunistic---guy that found her was taking pictures of abandoned buildings. He said he had his eye on the place and as soon as they cleared out, he went in before it could be boarded up. He was our main suspect for a while, but turns out he was in Monterey around the time the girl was killed---at a photographer's workshop."
"How old was she?"
"Twelve. How old was yours?"
"Fourteen."
He didn't say anything for a moment, probably pondering the disparity in their ages. Laura pressed him for details.
"She was left there after they officially closed the place, but before they removed the beds. The fact the guy found her that early gave us a better fix on time of death."
According to Endicott, Alison Burns had been smothered. She had traces of Rohypnol, the date rape drug, in her system.
"We figured the guy gave her the Rohypnol, then soft-smothered her, but that's only a theory. We think from the stomach contents that he held a little party for her."
Laura said, "What?"
"We think he took her to McDonalds. Happy Meal, soft drink, Baskin Robbins after that. There were balloons in the room and a new teddy bear."
Stranger and stranger. "Like a birthday celebration?"
"Like one. Her birthday wasn't anywhere around that time. We think he made her last day a good one."
Laura was aware how tightly she gripped the phone.
"That's conjecture on our part, though."
"He soft-smothered her?"
"We think he wanted to quote unquote 'ease her into sleep.'"
"Was she molested?"
"Oh yeah. For days."
"Days? He didn't kill her right away?"
"We think he had her four days, maybe five."
Jessica's killer had kept her only a few hours tops, and raped her postmortem. Maybe this wasn't the same guy. "Could I see the evidence list?"
"We'll need a written request."
"I'll fax you one, but is there any way we can expedite this?"
"I'll see what I can do. Go ahead and send your request. Make sure you ask for a detailed list. You'll want to ask for photos of the dress, the digital camera---"
"What camera?"
"The one he sent her."
"He sent her a camera?"
"Among other things." He paused. "We think he got to her over the Internet."
Twenty minutes later, Laura got the first fax: A photograph of Alison Burns's dress.
According to the accompanying report, the dress pattern came from an Internet company called Inspirational Woman, which sold clothing designed for the "modest woman and girl." Laura recognized it from Ted Olsen's list. She looked it up online. The dress, called "Winsome," was a lot like the one that had been used for Jessica Parris, but there were a few differences. Alison's dress was plainer, but it had an apron that looked as if it were part of the dress itself.
She scrolled down through the patterns and found Jessica's dress at the bottom: It was called "Charity."
This was good. This was really good.
It got better. The faxes came through at a maddeningly slow pace: A photograph of the camera Alison had received in the mail, two photos of jewelry that seemed sophisticated for a twelve-year-old. But the last picture was the best find of all.
Scribbled on top was a notation by Endicott, saying that the original photo had been printed up on an inkjet and taped to Alison's mirror. This was a black-and-white photocopy, a poor one---but enough to give her a thrill.
The man was in his early twenties. Dark, handsome, wearing casual but expensive clothing. He stood before a clapboard house on stilts. Scribbled across the bottom, barely legible in the photocopy, was a note.
"Forever True, James."
This was the guy the Riverside Sheriff's Department believed had corresponded with Alison Burns via the Internet. Unfortunately, they had no more information since Alison Burns didn't have a computer. Endicott believed she had been contacted by this man during her time on the computer at the public library.
Laura stared at the man, putting herself in Alison Burns' shoes. He did not look like a child molester. He looked like a gorgeous, rich, young guy who could fit the bill in the Prince Charming department.
The kind of guy who could lure a precocious twelve-year-old.
Laura looked at the house. The fact that it was on stilts indicated ocean-front property---a beach house? The house was clapboard, a light color, and a saw palmetto grew near the steps. The Gulf Coast? And the man's tanned beauty, the professional quality of the photograph---this could be a photo from a model's portfolio.
She grabbed her notebook and jotted these new developments down.
Alison Burns - similars
Dress patterns -- Inspirational Woman
Motor home seen at Brewery Gulch
Motor home seen near primary crime scene
Digital camera, jewelry sent to Alison/Internet connection (?)
CRZYGRL12
The man in the photo---beach house?
Serial killer, organized type
Differences between Jessica and Alison: period of time kept, age, manner of death
Postmortem vs. antemortem
There were serious differences. The age difference, the method used to kill the victims, the fact that Alison was kept and raped for days and Jessica was alive only a few hours and raped postmortem.
Jessica Parris's pubic area had been shaved. The dress the killer brought was too small---the ME saying that Jessica was an immature fourteen-year-old. Laura wondered---could he have realized his mistake after he picked her up? And would the fact that she was older than he expected ruin it for him?
If it did, he might take it out on her. He might strangle her instead of "ease her into sleep," as Endicott had described it.
Laura was even more impressed by the similarities. She had always felt that the answer to this problem was on the Internet.
If the guy who killed Jessica also killed Alison, it would be easy enough to eliminate Chuck Lehman. All they had to do was verify where he was at the time of Alison's death.
If it was the same killer.
Despite her doubts about Lehman, Laura added him to her list.
Lehman's friendship with Cary and Jessica
Lip Bullets lipstick found in bedroom
Vacuumed, change sheets?
Safeway card found nearby
Screenplay about kidnap and murder of young girl
Porn
Lehman lied about relationship with Cary.
It was like looking at two different pictures. A strong case could be made either way.
Frustrated, she closed the notebook and stared out at the desert beyond her window. The answer, she knew, was in the cyber world.
She picked up Jay Ramsey's card and made the call.
24
Wrought iron gates set into a seven-foot-high stone wall marked the entrance to the Alamo Farm on Fort Lowell Road. The last time she'd been here, the stone wall was waist-high and there were no gates. The trees beyond the wall were the same, though mature mesquite and Arizona walnut. As lush and healthy as she remembered.
As she approached the speaker set into the pole underneath the security camera, Laura buzzed her window down, looking at the wall. She couldn't tell where the old section left off and the new one began. She did notice the embedded glass across the top.
The speaker crackled. "May I see some ID?" a voice asked.
Laura held up her badge toward the camera. She heard a whirr inside the camera, didn't know what that was about. She waited for what seemed like eons before the gates rolled back and she could drive through.
The moment the wheels of her 4Runner touched onto the property, Laura's stomach clenched. She should have known all those memories would come back. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, waiting, the cold seeping up through the seat of her jeans, her eyelids getting heavy.
Starting to fall asleep and not wanting to, because she'd been here three nights in a row and just knew the mare would foal tonight.
The lane headed south toward the river between the over-arching trees. Laura realized the wall and the gate were window-dressing---the property had deteriorated. It looked downright shabby.
The sound of a car engine jarring her from sleep. It scared her. She was safe on the Ramsey property, at least she thought she was, but her parents didn't know she was here and Julie Marr had been kidnapped not far from here.
Laura noticed that some of the trees on Alamo Farm suffered the same fate as others along the Rillito River; a lowering water table as the city grew put them in deep distress. Bare limbs stuck up through the green summer growth, and the mesquites were snarled with mistletoe. The irrigation ditch alongside the road, once brimming with water, was dry. She'd heard on the news that Betsy Ramsey was killed in a car accident a couple of years ago. Clearly, no one had used the hunt course since then. It had dried up and blown away---the jump rails lying on the ground, their colors faded to the brown of the earth. A dusty halo of grass and high weeds poked up through the threadbare dirt.
The droning of the engine, coming closer.
Laura drove into an S turn bottoming out in a dark copse of mesquites and walnut trees. Now the lane ran parallel to Fort Lowell Road, going west. On one side was a windbreak of Aleppo pines, and on the other, a dry field. The white board fences remained, but the pastures where Thoroughbreds had once grazed were overgrown with more weeds.
Looking toward the end of the lane, she got a shock.
The stables were gone.
The big cottonwood tree---which gave the farm its name---remained, but the stables with their spacious box stalls and paddocks had been ripped out. Knocked down, bulldozed, scrap lumber stacked in a haphazard pile. Weeds growing up around a mountain of torn green asphalt shingles, splintered white wood, pipe fencing.
Gone.
1987
Headlights appeared at the far end of the lane and barreled up the road, cones of light illuminating the farm trees.
Wide awake now. And scared. Something about the violence of the way the visitors came, flooring the car up the dirt road. Heart thumping, Laura stood up and melted into the shadow of the cottonwood tree beside the mare's stall, uncertain what to do.
The headlights turned in at the house. Car doors slammed.
Laura listened to the rustling of the night creatures, a cricket chirping. Voices drifted out of the house---angry and male. She couldn't hear what they were saying.
Two loud cracks came close together---like an ax splitting firewood. Her disbelieving ears told her it was something else. The door banged open and she heard running footsteps. Car doors slammed. An engine roared to life.
The car slewed around in a fountain of dust, headlights pinning the mare in her stall before it rocketed back down the tunnel of trees.
Laura waited a few minutes, but they didn't come back.
She crept up to the hedge dividing the barns from the side yard of the house, followed the path to the open gate and went through, heading for the back door. Partly open, the door was almost obscured by a cloud of bougainvillea until she was right on top of it. Remembering what she'd seen on TV, she pushed the door wider with her forearm, not her hands. So she wouldn't leave fingerprints.
She thought about what the foreman, Rafael, had told her. Both Ramseys were out of town for the summer and their son was house-sitting during their absence.
The kitchen light was on. She tiptoed through the house. "Mr. Ramsey? Are you all right? It's Laura Cardinal. Are you there?"
The carpet in the hallway was surprisingly old, plush and white, and still had vacuum marks. Footprints made deep impressions. She walked around them. The footprints led toward the last door at the end of the hall. Light spilled out from the open door.
Inside the room was a king-sized bed, the rich teal-green and white bedclothes piled up. Two mean-looking black iron dogs glowered at the foot of the bed.
It smelled funny in here. A burning smell.
It felt funny, too. Like the air had been sucked from the room. What she had thought were bedclothes now materialized into a pale torso and arm, hanging down off the bed, mostly covered by a pillow. On the carpet beneath was an irregular blotch, as if someone had stomped a raspberry Popsicle into the carpet:
Blood.
25
Not as much blood as you would think.
Laura remembered fumbling for the phone (even now she lamented the fingerprints she had probably covered up) and punching 911.
She didn't touch him. Not because she had knowledge that moving him could make him worse, but because she didn't want to touch him. As if death and dying would rub off on her.
All these crime scenes later, the best thing she had ever done in her life was not to do something.
Now Laura let the car idle and stared at the remains of Mrs. Ramsey's stables.
She remembered the way it was: Everything in its place. The raked breezeway, the whitewashed tack room, the stable colors. Everything was in green or in a combination of yellow and green: the horse blankets, coolers, saddle blankets, buckets, leg wraps, even the rub rags. Everything. Yellow and green.
Now it looked as if the stables had been torn limb from limb like an animal. Ripped apart by a hungry beast and left to rot in the baking sun.
Sadness seeped down into a place she had thought was sealed up tight.
She was sorry she'd come.
She drove on, turning in at the house. The one-story California mission style home built in the twenties looked the same, except there were bars on the doors and ramps and railings for a wheelchair. The grounds were neatly trimmed, the lawn as green and groomed as a billiard table. Bougainvillea, hibiscus, bird of paradise, royal palm, and agave grew in profusion. Mission cactus forming a tall border around the lawn.
Beautiful.
The cars out front were different. Instead of Mercedes, BMWs, and Jay's Range Rover, there was a large half-van half-SUV that Laura assumed Jay drove and an ancient Honda Civic.
This time she went to the front door.
She wondered what Ramsey looked like now. Seventeen years was a long time, and she knew just from what she'd read on the Internet last night that quadriplegics suffered from many side effects, many of them life-threatening. She had thought that being paralyzed meant you couldn't walk, couldn't move certain parts of the body. Thought of it as dead wood, but reading the articles made her realize that the body was still living tissue, and because it could not do what it was meant to do, there were grave repercussions.
What was he like now? She remembered him whacking a tennis ball, the sun shining on his blond hair, his lean, muscular body darkly tanned against his white shorts. The few times he looked at her, she thought she saw a spark of interest. Flattering herself that a college boy might be attracted to her.
Laura assumed that after all this time the quadriplegia would have taken its toll. Jay Ramsey was in his late thirties now. Galaz had told her he was a C6-7 quadriplegic, having suffered a break between the C6 vertebra and the C7. According to Galaz, Ramsey had pretty good control of most over his upper body, including use of his hands. His life expectancy wasn't much shorter than the life expectancy for anyone.
She knew, though, that there were many dangers: dysreflexia, which could lead to stroke, respiratory problems, kidney and bladder problems, muscle spasms, skin breakdown, pneumonia. According to Galaz, Jay Ramsey's disabilities had not stopped him from starting and building one of the top Internet security businesses in the country.
"He started out as a hacker," Galaz told her. "Got himself into trouble with the wrong people. After the shooting, he straightened himself out and never looked back. Even if his family didn't own J.J. Brown, he would have made it big-time. Unbelievable intellect."
J.J. Brown was a discount department store with high-end products, much like the outlets today, started in the 1920s. The Ramseys had been the beneficiaries of that wealth ever since.
She rang the bell, thinking how much she didn't want to be here. I'll make an idiot of myself. I won't know how to talk to him, I'll stare ...
She heard a stirring inside. The door opened and Laura was hit by a blast of refrigerated air. The man in the doorway wore a white knit shirt, chinos, and bedroom slippers. He reminded her of a plump, soft dove.
"Detective Cardinal?" he asked. He looked vaguely disappointed. What was a lifesaver supposed to look like? Superwoman? He pushed open the door and held it as she walked in. "Jay has been waiting---he's quite excited. He's in his study."
Laura followed him into the hallway that led off the kitchen.
She prepared herself. With all the dangers, all the bad things that could happen---muscle spasms, cord pain, bedsores, bladder problems---she expected he would already be a ruin of a man.
Freddy opened the door to the room.
The sun spilled in shuttered stripes across the Berber carpet. Laura could barely see through the dust motes. A massive cherrywood desk, a large computer monitor, a horse statue from the Tang dynasty. And the shape in the wheelchair.
Hitting the ball backhand, flaxen hair catching the sun---
Her eyes adjusted to the light.
He looked exactly the same.
In a strange moment of déjà vu, she was a kid again with a crush on the privileged, older son of a wealthy family. Suddenly she was that tongue-tied girl, mouth dry and heart beating fast.
Jesus. You're a grown woman. You have a boyfriend and everything. Grow up.
His hair was the same vibrant pale gold. His face would be angelic if it weren't for the amusement in his eyes.
The same look he gave me when I was fourteen.
He had the same lean, handsome face, elegant nose, and penetrating blue-green eyes. He wore very expensive, but casual clothing, and it fit his lithe body well. Pushing forty, but he didn't look it. It was as if he'd been frozen in amber.
Aware she was staring.
"Laura," he said warmly. "It's good to see you again." Not the voice of a sick man.
She wondered if she could unstick her throat enough to talk; tried it. "Hello." What a scintillating wit.
A click and a buzz, as the motorized wheelchair came toward her.
"Freddy, you finally get to meet my guardian angel. The girl---the woman, who saved my life." He came closer. "I told you she was pretty, didn't I? But pretty doesn't do you justice now."
Up close, Laura saw that his youth was an illusion. There was a little dip of flesh beneath the chin. His complexion was uneven, the elasticity lost, and there was something brittle around the eyelids. His eyes were bright, but hard too---the driest part of him.
"You know, Laura, I don't think I ever thanked you."
Your mother did.
He was studying her---amused? Interested? Could he really be interested? Did quadriplegics have a sex drive? She had no idea.
"You're staring."
She stepped back. "I'm sorry."
"That's okay. I'm used to that. There's always that awkward few minutes. Don't be embarrassed."
But his eyes pinned her like a butterfly to a board. "Mike said you need help tracking down a predator."
Laura was relieved to talk about the case. "We think we have an Internet predator." She started to fill him in on the Jessica Parris case, but he held up a hand.
"I watch the news. You're very telegenic, by the way." He smiled. Angelic. "Mike told me all about it. I don't know what I can do to help. You have anything on this guy?"
From her briefcase, Laura removed the photocopies of the young man, the digital camera and jewelry, and the matchbook cover the killer had left at the band shell. She started to hand them to Jay, hesitated, and was relieved when he took them from her.
"Freddy?" Jay Ramsey said without looking in the attendant's direction.
The soft-looking man bustled over, took the photocopy, and looked at it.
Jay asked, "This is the man?"
"He could be. It's possible he killed a girl in California."
Freddy said, "Definitely the southeast. Probably the Gulf Coast."
"Freddy was born in Pensacola," Ramsey explained. "What else?"
Freddy handed Laura the photocopy back. "Guy is almost too good-looking. That looks like a publicity photo."
Laura said, "I'm thinking that if we could find the general area, we could link him through a talent or model agency."
Jay Ramsey looked up at her. "Could happen."
She found herself feeling unusually pleased.
Jay shifted in his chair, winced. "He sent her the camera and the jewelry."
"The detective in Indio thinks he wanted her to take pictures of herself for him."
He turned his attention to the photocopy of the matchbook. "CRZYGRL12. That's interesting." His chair buzzed around to the computer on the cherrywood desk.
"What's interesting?" Laura asked.
"How old was that girl---Jessica?"
"Fourteen."
Jay stared at the computer screen. To Laura's limited knowledge, it appeared to be state-of-the-art. Ramsey spoke, but did not look at her. "The number 12 after her screen name---that usually means her age. And since it's human nature for teenagers to want to appear older, I sincerely doubt this girl would lower her age by two years."
"What are you saying?"
He looked straight ahead at the computer. "Jessica Parris isn't CRZYGRL12."
"You think he contacted another girl?"
"That's the most likely scenario."
"He came to Bisbee looking for another girl." Her mind was moving now, all self-consciousness forgotten. "But what happened to her?"
Ramsey's body flinched, and he rolled his head on the backrest of his chair. "A few things, I imagine. He kidnapped her and killed her. He took her and kept her with him. Or he never got to her."
"There are no missing children that I'm aware of."
"Then he probably never met up with her."
Why? she wondered. What stopped him?
Jay Ramsey said, "I have a question for you."
"Okay."
"What was it like when you found me?"
She stared at him. "I'm sorry?"
"What happened before and after you found me?"
Laura didn't like the question. It took her right back to that time, and she didn't like to think about the past. She shrugged. "It happened so fast."
"What did I look like?"
"You were unconscious."
"But what did I look like?"
She wanted to tell him this was a pointless conversation, but already felt she owed him. He had given her real insights into the Internet connection. She had to find Jessica's killer, and he might be the one to help her do it. Keep your eye on the ball.
You were ..." She wondered if he really wanted to hear this. "You were lying in the bedclothes, part of your upper body off the bed. I didn't see blood on you, but I saw it on the carpet. I think you were naked."
"Naked."
"I think so. You were partially under the covers."
"You didn't touch me. What made you not touch me?"
"I wanted to---" She stopped. Not touching him had saved his life. The doctors said that moving him might have increased the swelling in the area where the spine had been nicked. She started again. "I was afraid to," she said.
He smiled. "An honest answer. I appreciate that, Laura."
"I don't know why you asked."
"It was the seminal moment in my life. I wanted to see what it looked like from the outside. I was out of it. I don't even remember them coming to shoot me."
Laura knew that kind of amnesia was common.
"You know what happened, don't you?" Jay said. "I wasn't a bad kid, but I was heavily into cocaine. Kind of guys I was dealing with, you don't want to fool around. I thought I knew what I was doing." He sighed. "When I screwed up, they decided to make an example of me---if it could happen to a rich kid, it could happen to anyone."
He paused. Waiting for her to comment?
"You want to talk about your case, though." He returned his focus to the computer screen and said briskly, "This is all we have to start with? CRZYGRL12?"
"Yes. Is it impossible?"
He smiled. "Nothing is impossible. It will take a little time, though. Tell you what. I'm meeting with some people this afternoon and I want to have a rest. Why don't you come back this evening? In the meantime, I'll see what I can do with CRZYGRL12."
Laura felt a strange letdown. "All right." She was aware of Freddy standing at her elbow. He escorted her out---wham bam thank you ma'am.
At the door, Freddy said, "He's very excited to be working with you on this. But he had a long night. Give me your phone number and I'll call you and let you know if it will work out tonight."
Then she found herself outside, feeling, illogically, that Jay Ramsey had taken something from her. Which was ridiculous. She understood why he'd want to know what happened. It was probably the thing that made him agree to see her at all.
If it would help catch Jessica Parris's killer, she'd be happy to tell him anything he wanted to hear.
Laura stopped the car on the lane near the ruined stables, letting the engine idle.
She'd campaigned Calliope for three years, winning several working hunter classes in Tucson and Phoenix, placing first in a couple of the big shows. All that time, she thought she owned Calliope. Betsy had "given" her the horse, even providing her with the mare's Jockey Club papers.
One day Betsy Ramsey told her she wanted Calliope back.
Laura's parents explained to her that they could hire a lawyer, but ultimately they would lose. The Ramsey family was wealthy, the Cardinal family---a school principal and a fifth-grade teacher---were not. And Betsy Ramsey had donated money to build a new wing on the elementary school where Alice Cardinal taught.
It was Laura's first lesson in pragmaticism.
Laura remembered how it felt, taking the Jockey Club papers back to Mrs. Ramsey. She'd loved that mare. Calliope had been her best friend. She'd spent hours with her, riding her, grooming her, grazing her along irrigation ditches that were now as dry and dusty as her memories.
Mrs. Ramsey rode Calliope to Reserve Champion in working hunter in the Desert Classic in California that year.
The day Laura left Alamo Farm, she never went back, not until today. She couldn't even bring herself to say goodbye to her mare. Somewhere along the line she had gotten the notion that clean breaks were best. Laura didn't remember getting this idea from her parents or peers. But she knew instinctively that prolonging the association, that holding out hope, would only hurt her more in the end.
Maybe there had been a ticking clock inside that warned her she'd need that coping mechanism later on. Something primitive, hinting she'd have to face finality early in life? So when her parents died, she'd know how to accept it.
The moment the gate rolled back, Laura felt a deep sense of relief.
She put on her left turn signal and waited for the traffic on Fort Lowell to clear.
"You should have looked at the fine print."
The voice came from inside the car. Frank Entwistle's bulk filled the passenger seat, dressed in a cheap polyester suit jacket and slacks, a brown shirt, and an unfashionably wide tie. He held a breakfast sandwich in one hand. The smell of grease permeated the car.
"You're not real."
"So you say." He leaned over and hit the turn signal lever, switching it from left to right.
"What'd you do that for?" she asked, although she knew.
"Aren't you going go by your old house?"
"No."
"Why not? You're right here in the neighborhood." He glanced over at her, shrugged. "Suit yourself."
"Thanks." Laura switched on her left turn signal and pulled out, going east on Ft. Lowell Road, watching her old mentor out of the corner of her eye. He'd never learned to chew with his mouth closed and apparently being dead didn't change anything. "I didn't know ghosts could eat."
"I'm not a ghost."
"What are you? A figment of my imagination?"
"That's as good an explanation as any." He reached over and aimed the air conditioning vent toward his face. "Hot in here. Slow down, will you?"
Laura had to slow down anyway. They were approaching the tight curve that bordered the Mexican cemetery.
Frank draped his arm across the seat back. "You ever go in there?"
"No. Why would I?"
"You were a kid back then. You know how kids are, always pushing the envelope, trying to figure it out---about death, you know? When your schoolmate got taken, it would be natural to go there. I know I won't ever forget the first kid in my class to die."
"Who's to say Julie died in the cemetery?"
"Not died. Taken. Why don't you pull over?"
Although her first impulse was to resist, Laura turned onto the verge at the last minute, tires bumping on the hard dirt, white dust billowing up behind them. "There was nothing in the paper about exactly where she was taken."
Frank Entwistle crumpled up the grease-spotted paper from the sandwich and shot it at the dashboard. "Then how come you dream about it?"
Laura looked past him at the graveyard. The greasewood and mesquite trees, greener and fuller after the summer rains, mingled with plaster angels, crosses, and graves of heaped dirt and piled rocks. A profusion of flowers---both real and fake---rested on the graves, garish in the unrelenting sun. Laura was parked under a mesquite tree, facing the wrong way to traffic. In the spot where, in her dreams, the orange and white car cruised to a stop, the mesquite tree's sketchy shade scrolling over the blocky white hood. The girl, hands clasped around the straps of her backpack, leaning down to talk to the man inside.
In her dreams, Laura always heard the car's rough idling, smelled burning oil, and felt the heat from the Chevy's engine---details her imagination had conjured from the nightly news and one newspaper photo long ago.
Entwistle said, "No matter how old you get, you always remember."
"Remember what?"
"The first kid in your class to die."
Julie Marr was a transfer student from North Carolina. She had a strange accent, stranger hair, and even stranger clothes.
Laura had known what it was like to be bullied, picked on. But she'd made it to the other side; she had friends. She'd felt for Julie, but face it: She wasn't about to put her own reputation in jeopardy.
Julie Marr lived in the same subdivision as Laura. Laura hated to admit this, but if she saw Julie walking up ahead of her, she would cross to the other side of the street so they wouldn't end up walking together. It was her damn stride. Her natural stride was long; she covered the ground quickly. So she'd walk on the other side, her eyes straight ahead.
Like Jessica Parris, Julie Marr had disappeared between school and her house. Laura had Press Club two days a week after school. Otherwise, the orange and white car might have stopped for her.
The stiff old latches sprang back like little mouse-traps. Laura sat cross-legged on the floor of the guest bedroom, the late afternoon sun filtering in through Venetian blinds that came with the house, contemplating the old-fashioned suitcase and trying not to sneeze from the dust.
Inside were stacks of files held together by shoelaces. Most of them were marked in ballpoint ink discolored with age, usually beginning with the word "Laura." Laura--School; Laura--Artwork; Laura--Swimming Lessons; and so on.
But some manila folders her mother had saved for herself.
There it was, toward the bottom. The word "Crime" in her mother's spidery writing.
Laura knew exactly where to look, even though she had not seen this file in eleven years. She remembered seeing articles on Tucson murders that her mother had clipped, some of them as early as the forties, including the grisly saga of Charles Schmid, who killed three young girls in the 1960s and landed Tucson in Life magazine as the town with the "Ugliest Street in America". A killer who wore face makeup and put crumpled-up beer cans into his boots to make him look taller.
Laura had forgotten how serious her mother had been about writing. There were three spiral notebooks full of notes, scrawled slips of paper, photos, phone numbers of detectives and police officers, lawyers and prosecutors, and six chapters of a book titled Death in the Desert: A Comprehensive Account of Tucson's Most Infamous Murders, by Alice Cardinal.
She didn't remember this. She had been a teenager when her mom started writing classes, involved with her own life. She hadn't taken her mother's interests seriously. "Author" didn't fit with her image of her mom. Her mom was a school librarian who spent most of her time and energy trying to shape Laura's life, not her own.
Laura looked at the first page.
Chapter One
Tucson Arizona had seen its share of murders, but none was as mysterious as the disappearance of San Pedro Middle School student Julie Marr.
On a warm day in late September, Julie Marr was walking home from school as usual when she vanished without a trace. Two days later a man named Jerry Lee, out hiking in the Redington Pass area east of town, noticed an old car that seemed to have rolled down the embankment off the road and had come to a stop in some brush and cactus. A curious sort, he bushwhacked down to the car, and was shocked by what he found. The back seat of the old car was soaked with blood.
Six chapters on Julie Marr's disappearance, then nothing. Laura didn't know if her mom had quit at Chapter Seven or if she'd died in the midst of writing the book, a homicide victim herself.
Laura decided she didn't want to look at her mother's book right now. She put the unfinished book to the side and looked through the clippings of the Julie Marr abduction. Two articles. The first declared,
"CITY-WIDE SEARCH FOR MISSING SAN PEDRO MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT"
and was accompanied by a school picture of Julie Marr. Two days later, the front page headline said "CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND." A black-and-white photo of the 1955 Chevy Bel Air, all four doors open, a detective squatting near the driver's side.
She skimmed the article, jotting down the facts of the case on the inside cover of the manila folder.
The car had been stolen from A&B Auto Wrecking on South Park Avenue. The Bel Air had been in an accident, but was still driveable.
Blood-typing indicated that the blood in the backseat belonged to Julie Marr. From the amount of blood, the detectives were sure she was either gravely injured or dead. The lead detective on the case was Barry Fruchtendler of TPD.
Corroborating her mother's account, the article detailed the discovery of the car off Redington Pass Road in the Tanque Verde Mountains east of town. It had been pushed off the road at a curve. The way the road was banked made it impossible for it to be seen from a vehicle driving up or down the mountain.
The search had been concentrated there, but no body, no grave, had been found.
Because Julie Marr's body could be anywhere in rugged, almost inaccessible country, the search was called off the next day.
Julie Marr's parents, George and Natalie Marr, were quoted as saying that if the police had taken her disappearance more seriously, Julie might be alive today.
Laura put the suitcase away, but took the file, including her mother's chapters, with her. She dropped it on the kitchen table. An interesting trip down memory lane, but she didn't see any relevance to Jessica's case.
It was possible the killer could have lived here in Tucson all those years ago and killed both Julie Marr and Jessica Parris. But that seemed unlikely, given the number of years that had gone by and the fact that Jessica was strangled, while Julie Marr had been killed even more violently. It pointed to a different kind of killer; one organized, the other out of control.
Laura called the Tucson Police Department and asked to speak with Detective Barry Fruchtendler. No one there by that name.
Probably retired.
She looked for his name in the phone book and was stymied again. That didn't mean much; cops usually had unlisted numbers. She'd call one of her friends at TPD tomorrow and see if he was still around.
But not now.
She put on a fresh blouse, locked up, and took the path over the hill to Tom's house.
26
Jay Ramsey had almost managed to pull his plate onto his lap when it slipped out of his hands and crashed to the flagstones.
"You see?" Freddy said primly as he picked up the pieces of bone china. "You've been out here too long."
"Don't worry about me."
"This was your mother's favorite pattern. You know when you start dropping things---"
"Freddy, enough."
"Fine, if that's what you want." Freddy whisked around them, clearing plates and brushing away crumbs from the tablecloth.
Jay had invited Laura to breakfast. She was happy to get out here early, anxious as she was to get Jay on the Internet and see him work the magic Galaz had promised her, but here they sat. She kept thinking about Alison Burns lying on the bed in the abandoned motel room. And Jessica Parris, posed like a doll in the City Park band shell.
She had to admit, it was pleasant here---lush plants and deep shade. Misters on the porch roof cooled the terrace. Across the lane stood the high hedge lining the tennis court where Jay Ramsey used to play. Laura, a kid, a horse groom, walking by, hoping she'd catch his eye.
Now she had his full attention. Strange how wants and hopes changed over the years.
Freddy was back from the kitchen. He nodded at the thermometer tacked to the pepper tree near the pool. "It's eighty-seven degrees. You've been out here well over an hour."
"I'm fine."
"You won't be so cocky if your bladder lets go in front of company."
Jay saw Laura's discomfort and grinned. "Freddy's afraid I'll get overheated. That can lead to dysreflexia, which---"
"Could send his blood pressure sky-high," Freddy said.
Jay leaned toward Laura, his voice conspiratorial.
"You know what you have to do if you start to get overheated? Piss your pants." He laughed. "When quads get overheated, sometimes their bladders can back up. You don't want that to happen, so you have a little accident. Relieves the pressure. You have to train yourself to do it---it's amazing how stubborn the mind can be, all that potty training you have to overcome."
Freddy took his stack of still-intact dishes and retreated into the house with a martyr's sigh.
Jay said, "The minute I saw you on the news, I knew I had to meet you. Maybe because we never did." Saw her confusion and added, "Never met."
The Ramseys had been clear from the beginning: They didn't want any visitors. "I understood that. Your parents were looking out for---"
"She was never going to let that happen," Jay said. "Even though you saved my life, she didn't want a relationship." He sipped his mimosa. "That's why she paid you off."
Told to her this way, it made her angry all over again.
"You should see your face. I don't blame you for being mad. I would be livid. Especially when she took the horse back. A couple of years down the line, when she saw just how much my condition changed my life---her life---she wasn't so thankful anymore."
He shifted in his chair, yawned. Laura wondered if the yawning helped him in some way. "If you want to put it in a charitable light, she was impulsive. Giving you the horse on an impulse and taking it back the same way. Your good deed had outlived its usefulness." No self-pity, just a statement of fact. "But I've never forgotten, and now I'm in a position to help you. I know how important this is to you. It would be important to anyone, but considering what you've been through in your own life ..." He let it hover, the vague reference to the home invasion.
Laura didn't like this. He knew too much about her life.
"I want to apologize for my mother. It's too bad Calliope is gone---I'd give her back to you if I could. Mother sold her foals. For all I know, one of them might be in town."
"It doesn't matter now."
He changed the subject. "Did Mikey tell you about my background?"
"Mikey?"
"Lieutenant Galaz."
"He told me Dynever is an Internet security company."
"We've worked with the FBI on cases just like this. One in New York, a pedophile ring. One of my people pretended he was a fourteen-year-old girl."
He wiped his forehead. His complexion looked blotchy, and he was sweating. Laura looked around, but Freddy was still inside the house.
"These guys---they build their wholes lives around getting little girls. They marry women so they can get to their children. Go into occupations where they can be around them. It's the fantasy. They can't resist it---they don't want to."
"It's sick," she said. She knew that technically the guy she was after wasn't sick. He was a sociopath---perfectly sane. But calling him "sick" relieved the pressure in her head, made her feel better.
"You'd be surprised at how many people---doctors, lawyers, beggermen, chiefs---think that doing a twelve-year-old girl is acceptable. The evidence is there, staring you in the face. On the 'net." He set his glass down on the table, spilling orange juice and champagne over his long, elegant fingers. He didn't seem to notice. "The web has changed everything. People used to hide the way they felt, but now there are so many of them and they're all connected, they have strength in numbers. Now they're legitimate. They can rationalize it.
"So my question to you, Laura, is this: If more and more people believe something, might there not be some value to it?"
Before Laura could answer Jay called out, "You win, Freddy. I'm coming in." He backed his motorized wheelchair and deftly sped up the ramp and through the French doors into the house, leaving her to follow.
Freddy insisted that Laura wait in the living room while they "took care of some essentials."
She waited, feeling uncomfortable. Wondering if he was being cleaned up because he had overheated, wondering if he had, indeed, pissed his pants. Wondering, too, if he thought that just because a majority of people thought something was right, there was an excuse for cruelty. Did he really think that, or was he just playing devil's advocate?
Forty minutes later, Jay Ramsey reappeared, his hair combed nicely and his color better. "Let's get down to it, babe," he said.
Jay situated himself in front of the computer and connected to the Internet. Laura noticed that even with his limited hand motions, he was fast with his two index fingers; they seemed to fly over the keyboard like ten digits.
Laura watched as he pulled up a no-frills site, devoid of graphics.
Ramsey said, "Welcome to WiNX. This is the quintessential Internet relay chat program."
Laura tried to remember what Buddy Holland had told her. "Does it have something to do with Instant Messaging?"
"That's the currency. People talking to each other in real time. You've probably done something like it on Facebook or Yahoo."
"Uh no."
He twisted in his chair a little, smiled. "The principle is really simple. You put yourself out there and pretty soon someone wants to talk to you."
He hit a couple of keys and brought up a screen that reminded Laura of her first experience with a computer, back in the covered wagon days. "That looks like DOS."
"See? You know more than you think. WiNX is a DOS-based system. See these?" He keyed down through several lines of old-fashioned courier print and pointed with a thumb. "These are channels---rooms where people with like tastes can meet. There're probably 20,000 channels on WiNX right now." He flinched again, moved in his seat. Looked at her. "Am I confusing you?"
She remembered how Buddy had thrown technical terms at her without telling her what they meant. Enjoying her discomfort. She hesitated to make a fool of herself, but couldn't help asking, "Are they kind of like TV channels?"
He grinned lopsidedly. "That's as good a description as any. Imagine a station with unlimited channels on everything you can imagine." He clicked on another page. "WiNX has been around forever. The thing you've got to know is that this is the real underground. There are no controls. Nobody's watching you to see that you don't go over the line. There's nothing to stop you from doing anything you want to do. It's a no-man's land."
Laura felt a kinetic snap in her spine. A no-man's land. She got the feeling that she was on the brink of knowing something she'd rather not.
He scrolled down what seemed like miles of print. "Ah, here we are." He clicked on something called Warezoutpost, and a list of titles came up, all after the word "warez".
"Warez is 'wares'," Jay explained. "As in 'let me show you my wares.' See? Software for games. Movies, music. This is where the kids are at because they can download stuff for free."
He showed her how to locate what he wanted, a movie called Ghost Recon. "This is what draws the kids. Free music, movies. I'm next in line if I want it."
With a few clicks to the keyboard, he moved on.
"The kids are always the first to know. You can get anything you want off these boards. They cater to every taste. This one is general, but there are channels where kids talk to each other." He pulled up another window. "Let's see what we've got in the Girls' Room."
"The Girls' Room?"
"I call it that. It's used by lots preteen girls."
He pointed out the list of names on the sidebar to the right. "Those are the people in the room now. What I'm going to do is ..." He hit a key and then typed in a name, erased it, and typed in another. "Gotta have a nick." He added helpfully, "Nickname." He typed in "nick1amber/." This was accepted, and then he typed: "hi."
It showed up like this:
Amber: hi
Laura heard a chime and a message box popped up. Jay pointed to the status bar and Laura saw the name Gitmo.
Gitmo: how old r u?
Amber: 2
Gitmo: pic?
"He wants a picture."
Amber: ok were you fro?????????
Amber: from
Gitmo: CA u?
Laura heard a chime. Another person wanting to talk to Amber. Jay hit a key and another instant message box popped up.
Podunk89: a/s
"He's asking her age and sex."
Amber: alost 13
Jay nodded to the status bar at the top of the screen. Podunk's name changed from red to black. He was gone. "Wrong age," Jay said, going back to Gitmo.
Gitmo: where you been?
Amber: My mom calledm e
Gitmo: send me a pic
A flurry of chimes. Four new names lit up the board.
Amber: well see how old r you?
Gitmo: you ever had sex?
Amber: I had a bf last year
"Bf?" asked Laura.
"Boyfriend."
Gitmo: Did bf getta bj?
Amber: You sonud mean!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gitmo: can't handle a joke LOL
More chimes, the board lighting up with suitors. Jay opened another instant message box.
Smooth Talk: Amber u a little girl?
Amber: im thrteen how old r u???????????????
Smooth Talk: let me see a pic
Amber: I have 1 at shchol school -- not here
Smooth Talk: where d you live
Amber: I live in az
Smooth Talk dropped out. Back to Gitmo:
Gitmo: I want a pic
Amber: not fair if u don send me pic toO
Gitmo: you playing games little girl
Amber: fairs fair my pic for yours
Gitmo: if you don't want to fuck your wasting m time
Gitmo's name went from red to black.
Jay sat up straighter, twisted, adjusted himself against the back of the chair. "That's what you're dealing with. These creeps are on these boards all day, trolling for kids."
Laura was about to say that she didn't think any child would fall for that, and then shut her mouth.
Children would fall for it. Teenagers would fall for it. Because they had not yet developed that distrust life ground into you over the years, like grime into clothing.
"We did a survey," Jay said. "Among parents. They think of computers as just another appliance, like a TV set. They don't realize it's like leaving the back door to your house open. Anybody can come in, and some of these guys are really smart. They know how to push the buttons."
"How do you find someone like this? Can you find his ISP?"
"Doubtful. Guy like that, he'd use one of the big servers, like earthlink, hotmail---it's easy to be anonymous. There are search engines that you can look on, but I'm pretty sure this guy wouldn't have a local ISP."
"Oh."
"But there's an easier way. That's what's so interesting about technology. Sometimes the best things are simple. You know the photo you have of him? We can probably trace him through that." He hit a couple of keys and a beach scene came up on the screen.
"This is why you need me." Sounding cocky. "Not many people can get their hands on this kind of software."
He explained that there was something called image recognition software, which could break up every photograph into its elements, then run each element against all kinds of databases, looking for a match. He zoomed in on a man on the beach. "See this guy's T-shirt? With the software I'm going to use, I can run a search for exact matches. It's like a search engine, instead of searching for like words, it searches for images. I'm going to need the original photo, though."
"From what Endicott said, it was a digital photo, and the only thing we have is an inkjet picture." She nodded to the black-and-white photocopy. "It's not all that much better than that."
Jay looked troubled. "It might be harder, but we can still do it. Where is the original?"
"Endicott's FedExing it---I should get it today."
"What we'll do," Jay said, "is re-scan the picture using high resolution. Then I'll compare it to the databases. It might take a few days, though."
"You sure you can't find him with the ISP?"
"I'll try that, too. I'm warning you, though, this guy isn't your average Internet user. I think you know that."
"But this image recognition software, it'll take a few days? That's a long time."
"How many days has it been so far?"
Too many, she thought.
27
"This is what CloneImage came up with," Jay Ramsey said, rolling his chair to the computer monitor.
It turned out that Jay Ramsey's image recognition program had been quicker than expected; Laura had gotten the call this morning, not twenty-four hours after she last saw him. Jay had already found two matches to the man in the picture.
Ramsey pulled up a site called TalentFish.com. "For a small fee, actors and models can put their pictures online. Kind of like a rogues' gallery. Lucky for us that young Petey is up on the latest technology."
"Petey?"
"Peter Dorrance. Actor, model, pretty boy around town. This was a virtual cakewalk." He laughed at his own joke---virtual.
The TalentFish home page opened up. There were several headings at the top of the page: Actors, Portraits, Head Shots, Actor and Model Composites. Jay pulled up Peter Dorrance's page under "Actor and Model Composites".
"CloneImage got this hit pretty quick, since one of these is the same picture he sent that little girl."
And there it was. The photo of the young man, the house behind him. This was a three-quarters shot, showing his excellent physique, but there were others, including two headshots.
Laura looked at the other photographs, the ones she'd never seen before. Dorrance had three photos taken in front of the house. Two in black and white and one in color. In the color photo, he leaned against a blue sportscar, arms folded over his chest. He wore a cable-knit sweater and looked like a print ad from Land's End. The house behind him was yellow with white trim.
"Nice wheels," Laura said.
"Hard to get into," Jay said, "Unless you're his age. I also found the house, if you're interested."
"In a minute."
She looked at his resume. Age twenty-two. Six foot three and a half. 40-Regular. Several acting roles in plays Laura did not recognize (she wasn't a big patron of the theater). Print ads: Hair and Now; Leslie's Department Store; Eat at Joes. Television ads: Ralph's Car Sales and Gulf Chiropractic. Not a lot there, but he had gotten a crack at the big time, a cameo as a corpse on CSI: Miami.
"Eat at Joes is in Panama City," Freddy said.
"Take a bow, Freddy," Jay said. "The Florida panhandle---just like you said it would be. Prince Charming here lives on the Forgotten Coast, the Redneck Riviera, or---if you're thinking red and blue states---Bush country."
Freddy pointed to the bottom of the page. "There's the address of the Talent Agency." The Strand Talent Agency, Panama City Beach, Florida.
"So there's good reason to believe he lives in Panama City," Laura said.
"Thereabouts. I got another match, though." Jay clicked through to another site, the Franklin County Home Buyers Guide.
Laura found herself staring at the house. "St. George Island?"
"Down the coast, east of Panama City," Freddy explained.
"An old listing," Jay said. "This site hasn't been updated since 2002." He zoomed in on a pale plaque near the top of the steps. It was blurry and hard to read, but Laura was able to make an educated guess: "Gull Cottage?"
"Shouldn't be hard to find. St. George Island isn't all that big." He clicked on MapQuest. The barrier island looked like a narrow boomerang, bisected by one main road paralleled by a few ancillary streets. "Twenty-nine miles in length and no more than a mile across at any one place."
He clicked onto some photographs of St. George Island.
"It doesn't look like a place Peter Dorrance could afford," Laura said. "Unless he's independently wealthy." Considering the sports car he leaned so casually against, that was a possibility.
"I did a few searches on him. The only times he comes up is in regards to acting jobs---and not very many of them. But at least you've got a place to start."
Laura stared at Dorrance's headshot. Was this her killer? If she went strictly by the FBI profile, he skewed young for this kind of crime. Usually, it took time to build up to precise ritual-like dressing up of the girl and posing her that way. It took time to develop that kind of self-confidence, time to become a full-fledged sexual predator.
"Something you might want to think about," Ramsey said, as if he'd read her mind. "You saw how easily I found this site. Could be your killer looked for the best-looking hunk he could find and sent it to the girl to impress her. Easy enough with gullible little girls."
Laura thought he had a point. But it had always been her experience that most people stayed within their comfort zones---including sexual predators. Even if the man in the photo wasn't her killer, she was willing to bet they had crossed paths sometime or other.
A call into the Panama City Police Department revealed there was no one by the name of Peter Dorrance in either Panama City or Bay County, Florida. While she had the detective on the phone, Laura described her own case and asked if he had anything similar.
"Nothing that comes to mind, and that one would. But I'll check around, see if anything like that's turned up in the other counties up here."
Next she called Detective Endicott in Indio, the detective who had investigated Alison Burns' murder. She laid out what she had and asked him if he wanted to accompany her to Florida. He declined, but asked her to keep him updated.
The rest of the afternoon she put her case together, wondering if she should go to Jerry Grimes or directly to Galaz. She didn't like the idea of going over Jerry Grimes's head, but she also knew that Mike Galaz would be more enthusiastic. After debating back and forth, she finally went to see Jerry. She couldn't leave him out of the loop.
He was gone for the day. She tried his cell, got a message and left one of her own. Looked at her watch. She needed to make reservations if she was going to fly out there tomorrow. She went looking for Mike Galaz.
He was practicing his putting. "How'd it go with Ramsey?" he asked her.
"That's what I'm here to talk to you about."
She ran it down for him.
Galaz didn't take his eye from the ball. "Jay has a point, don't you think? It could be the guy, or it could be someone else who got his picture off the 'Net."
"Either way, I think he's from around there. Other than Lehman, it's the only real lead we've got, and I think I should go and check it out. This guy isn't going to stop with Jessica Parris."
Galaz tapped the ball, which rolled up to the lip of the cup and hung there. He frowned.
Laura waited as he adjusted his stance and nudged the ball in.
Without looking at her, he started over. She knew better than to say anything. Lucky for her, the ball made it in right away this time.
He looked up at her and smiled. "Ah, much better." Then he retrieved the ball and set it up again.
Laura contemplated grabbing the putter and whacking him on the shin with it.
She wondered if he was getting a perverse pleasure out of making her wait. He sure was milking it---the stance, the grip, the way he rocked back and forth before squatting down and stretching the putter out toward the cup before doing it all again. At last she couldn't take it anymore. "Sir? I've got to get moving if I'm going to go."
He held up one hand: Just a minute.
So she waited, the tasteful cherry and brass mantel clock on the shelf behind the desk ticking out her presence. After another successful putt, he palmed the ball and studied her. "Is this coming from logic or from your gut?"
"Both."
"But if you had to choose. You think this is woman's intuition?"
Woman's intuition? Jesus. She tried to figure out what he wanted, but couldn't read him so she picked one. "I have a real gut feeling about this, sir. I think Jay does, too."
He didn't answer right away, but seemed to be weighing her answer---an answer she had tossed on a fifty-fifty throw. At last he said, " Go ahead."
He was setting up the next putt when she left.
Next she called Victor, who had been in Bisbee all day, working the case from there.
"Don't you think you're jumping the gun?" he asked.
"I think it's the guy. Or he can lead me to the guy."
"Are you sure these killings are connected?"
"The similarities are pretty striking." Feeling defensive.
"There's a lot that doesn't add up." He enumerated the same dissimilarities that had bothered her. "Shit, a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. That's a big difference on the Tanner chart. You know how choosy these guys can be."
Thought about telling him her theory, but realizing that arguing would get her nowhere.
"There's something I'd like you to do personally. Check with Jessica's friends again. I never did get a straight answer from Buddy about whether or not she used the computer at school. If she didn't use it at school, find out if she used one at the public library."
"Anything else?" His voice was cool.
"That should do it."
After he hung up, she stared off into space. She realized she was skating on a very thin edge. Going over Jerry Grimes's head, working with Jay Ramsey, her less than enthusiastic investigation of Lehman. Working just as hard, putting in the hours, but more and more certain that with Lehman, they were heading down the wrong road.
28
Laura rented a car in Panama City and drove in the direction of the Strand Model and Talent Agency in Panama City Beach.
Panama City gave Laura the impression of a beach town being swallowed whole by Wal-Mart and shopping malls---a battle of old versus new. Fast food chains vying with mom-and-pop burger stands, bait shops and boat rentals in the shadow of superstores. Colored pennants and tacky signs marked mobile home sales and car dealerships adjacent to tracts of land marked for sale as "unimproved" property.
As if you could improve on quiet two-lane roads disappearing into live oak and stands of southern pine.
The Strand Model and Talent Agency was located three blocks from the beach. Blue with gray trim, the modest saltbox was bordered by a row of immature banana trees and sat in one corner of a parking lot roped off by a giant, sand-encrusted hawser stretching from piling to piling. The plastic sign out front had stick-on letters, like many a drive-by church she'd seen on the way out here.
She was impressed by the pelican statue on one of the pilings---until it flew off.
The Strand Talent Agency must have been a doctor's office at one time. A partition divided the front office from the receptionist's window, and next to the window was the door to inner offices. Posters of sullen-faced models lined the gray fabric walls. A blond, equally sullen-faced receptionist sat behind the window, concentrating on her nails. She would be pretty if not for her spoiled expression. Laura asked to see the owner of the agency.
"You'll have to wait your turn," the girl said, and went back to filing her nails. Ludicrous. Laura was the only one here. She wondered how talent agencies made a living on the Florida panhandle. She glanced at the stack of brochures sitting in the receptionist's window and saw the rates for runway modeling and deportment classes. Now she understood.
A young man carrying a portfolio emerged from the door to the inner offices, and Laura took the opportunity to duck past him. If she expected a protest from the blonde, it wasn't forthcoming. She found herself in a hallway, poked her head into the first room. A heavyset woman with jet-black hair and white sideburns was making photocopies. She wore an outfit that could have looked great on the streets of New York.
"I'm looking for the owner of the agency."
"I'm the owner. Who are you?"
Laura introduced herself. "I need to get in touch with one of your actors." She handed Myrna Gorman the composite of Peter Dorrance. She could have found his address in Public Records in Apalachicola, but had another reason for talking to Myrna Gorman.
Gorman led Laura into another room lined with file cabinets. For a big woman, her movements were swift and economical. "Peter. A great look, but we haven't been able to do much with him. He's one of those people who can't act." She opened a file cabinet and ran Turandot nails over the files, scooped one out. "Here it is. We sent him out on two modeling jobs this year. He lives far enough away that we don't send him too many places."
"But he did make it to CSI: Miami."
"They wanted the most beautiful male corpse they could find. Last I looked, corpses don't have to act."
"These headshots ... Did he use your photographer?"
"We don't have a photographer on staff. There are two or three we use. I have their names and phone numbers if you want them."
Laura did.
"What do you know about Peter Dorrance? Other than he can't act?"
Mrs. Gorman returned to her office chair and drummed her fingernails on the desk blotter. "He's one of those with stars in their eyes. I know he's planning to move to LA."
"When was the last time you saw him?"
"Months." She looked inward. "April? I had an audition for him in Tallahassee---a national commercial. He didn't get it. What brings you here, all the way from Arizona? Did he do something illegal?"
"I can't discuss that."
"Well, I think you should tell me what he did. I have a reputation in this town, and I don't want to be associated with something like that."
"You sound like you think he's capable of bad things."
Myrna Gorman's stare hardened. "I know he knocked up one of my models. But I guess that isn't a crime."
"How old was your model?"
"Alissa? Twenty-two."
"Are they an item?"
She shrugged. "Who knows? It isn't very often we get a production company coming through here to film. I landed that girl a good role. The day before filming was due to start, she had a miscarriage and ended up in the hospital. They had to recast, and City Confidential got the commission. You could say that Peter Dorrance has cost me more than he ever made me."
Laura took Highway 98 going east past Tyndall Air Force Base, past miles of slash pines, then into a pretty town called Mexico Beach. Late in the afternoon, the sky, though clear, had a metallic quality---grayish green down at the horizon. The beach was on the right side of the road. An incoming wave caught the sun, the shape and color of a 7-Up bottle lying on its side, and crashed down into foam. Laura wished she could pull over, buy a bathing suit somewhere, and go for a swim.
She drove through Apalachicola just after six p.m. According to her map, Apalachicola was once a major port city in the south. The place struck her as gracious--neatly gridded streets, live oaks draped with Spanish moss, a fisherman walking down a street spattered by shadow. Following her map, she drove over the Gorrie St. Bridge and across Apalachicola Bay to Eastpoint.
Peter Dorrance lived at the Palmetto Cove apartment complex in Eastpoint, the jump-off point for St. George Island. Two stories, Palmetto Cove Apartments reminded Laura of a Travelodge. She followed the stairs up to a sway-backed concrete walkway and found his room overlooking the parking lot. When she knocked, the orange door rattled in the frame. Cheap. He was probably at work.
On to Bennies at the Beach, where Dorrance worked as a waiter. Laura backtracked to the St. George Island Causeway and drove across to the island. The bay shimmered in the lowering sun, brimming with oyster boats and sparklets of late light. The first thing she saw on the island was a water tower. It looked like a plastic golf tee.
Bennie's at the Beach was just down E. Gulf Beach going east. Easy to spot: Three stories of weathered wood topped by a thatched roof, colorful surfboards lining the walls. She counted at least thirty cars parked along the road.
Laura was almost to the restaurant when she spotted a house on the right that looked familiar. She pulled over to the side of the road and looked across a vacant lot of sand and sea oats to the pastel-colored houses facing out onto the Gulf.
They appeared to be relatively new. From what she'd seen in the renters and buyers guide she'd picked up at the airport, prices for homes on the Florida panhandle were going up exponentially. Beachfront property was at a premium. Laura guessed these were vacation rentals. The house nearest to her looked like the Gull Cottage from the photograph.
She got out of the car and walked up the road for a closer look. Pale yellow siding, white trim, a red metal roof, widow's walk. She recognized the steps to one side, the palmetto, and the garage under the house.
What clinched it was the sports car: a blue BMW Z4.
The neighbor must be some nice guy to let an out-of-work actor pose with his car.
Or maybe Peter had waited for the owner to leave, and then had his photo session. Laura glanced at Bennies at the Beach, approximately fifty yards up the road. Every day Peter Dorrance came to work, he would have driven by this house.
She revised her notion that the house was a vacation rental; the publicity photos were at least five months old, yet the Z4 was still here. She debated talking to the owner, but decided that she would talk to Dorrance first.
The sky was turning sherbet colors---flamingo pink, orange, lemon---as she drove the rest of the way to Bennies.
Bennies was a Parrothead paradise. Fish nets hanging from plank walls, sawdust on the floor, middle-aged men in loud Hawaiian shirts. The noisy babble rose to the rafters. A sign above the bar: Oysters - Half Dozen for a Dollar. Exotic-sounding drink specials with names like "Banshee Breeze" written in colored chalk on a blackboard.
A waitress in a white dress shirt and black trousers whipped by, holding a huge tray overflowing with colorful food, making Laura hungry. She pressed her way through the crowd to the bar and yelled over the music until the bartender understood. He pointed to a tall young man with shoulder-length black hair.
Laura waited for Dorrance to finish taking his order and stood in his path. He smiled absently at her.
"Mr. Dorrance?" she asked.
"Yes. Hi. I'll be right with you." He expertly side-stepped her and headed for the kitchen. Laura couldn't follow him---the way he threaded through the crowd could have made him a star on the football field.
She waited at the kitchen entrance. "Mr. Dorrance. I need to talk to you." She held up her shield.
"Department of Public Safety? What's that?"
She found herself shouting. "An Arizona law enforcement agency." She watched him carefully, but saw only confusion. "Is there a place we can talk?"
He looked around doubtfully. Handsome, almost pretty. His hair was thick and slightly frizzy from the humidity. Startled blue eyes, heavy brows, cleft chin, full lips. "A twelve-top just sat down. Can you wait until I get a moment?"
She waited by the bar, watching him in action, tried to picture him picking up a young girl, keeping her with him, dressing her up.
Peter Dorrance was a waiter who lived in a crappy apartment because he couldn't afford to live on the island where he worked. Even used motor homes cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, especially the long one Mrs. Bonney had described. Peter Dorrance didn't seem like the kind of guy who could afford that.
Laura stepped up to the bar and caught the bartender's eye. He made it over eventually and slapped a cocktail napkin down on the bar. "What'll it be?"
"I'd like to speak to the manager." She showed him her shield.
A few minutes later, a middle-aged man in a knit shirt and khakis appeared at her elbow. He was solid looking, with dark hair and a face hewn by the wind and sun. "I'm Buddy Gill," he said. "You were asking for me?"
"Could we go to your office?"
He assessed her, then turned on his heel. "Come on," he said over his shoulder. He led her to a small room dominated by a Maritime clock of polished brass and teak, a swordfish mounted on the wall, and photos of a woman and four blond boys. He sat down behind his desk in the only chair. He swiveled back and forth, staring at her.
"Eric said you're a cop?"
"I'm a detective with DPS, the Arizona state agency. I need to know if Peter Dorrance worked here last week."
He considered her for a moment, then reached into a side drawer of his desk and dropped a schedule on the table for her to see.
"According to this, he was scheduled for four days?"
"That's right. Tuesday through Friday."
"What about the week before?"
He produced that schedule, too. Laura saw immediately that Dorrance had worked both Friday and Saturday nights. Friday was the day Jessica was kidnapped and killed.
"This is penciled in. He actually worked these days?"
"I remember him being here."
She stifled her disappointment. Someone must have used Dorrance's picture. All this way, and anyone could have picked his picture up off the Internet.
"What's this about?"
"He's an investigative lead---a possible witness to a crime committed in Arizona."
"How could he witness a crime there if he was here?"
"He couldn't," she said. She pushed open the door and walked back out into the crowd.
Back in the bar, Laura saw Peter Dorrance was coming her way, a big friendly grin on his face. When he got close he dipped his head near her ear, so close she took a step back and jogged someone's drink.
"I'm on break," he said. "Let's go outside so we don't have to yell."
He nudged her through the crowd.
Outside, they stood on the deck overlooking the ocean. The sun had turned into a blood orange, sinking into a lavender sea. A hot wind tugged at Dorrance's pirate hair, and for a moment Laura felt she was in the middle of a Hallmark card. Especially the way he was looking at her, a cross between "aren't I irresistible?" and "you're not bad yourself."
"I wanted to talk to you about your composite." Laura showed him the one she'd printed up from the TalentFish site. "Do you remember when you had these taken?"
He leaned close. She could smell his aftershave and a dash of garlic, probably from the plates he handled. Giving her his best smoldering look. "Last year some time. I had some old shots that didn't really represent what I look like now, so I needed to update them."
"You worked with a photographer affiliated with the agency? One of these?" She handed him the slip marked "From the Desk of Myrna Gorman".
He tapped the third name on the list. "Jimmy. Yeah. He gave me a good price. What's this about?"
He seemed truthful. Impinging on her space, though, trying to make a conquest. Too concerned with his own image to think about anybody else.
She told him how she came across his picture.
He stared at her, his seduction forgotten. "You mean someone used my photograph on the Internet? Pretended they were me?"
"That's what it looks like."
"Oh man! If they found out at TalentFish, I could be blacklisted!"
"That's one of the ramifications, yes," Laura said dryly. "Besides two dead girls."
He stared at his feet. "I can't believe this."
"This Jimmy. What do you know about him?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. He was just some guy Strand recommended."
"Do you remember what he looked like?"
"Average. Kind of ... insignificant."
"He gave you that impression? That he was insignificant? Why was that?"
"I don't know. He was kind of short. Not good-looking."
Not good-looking. In Peter Dorrance's world, that probably had greater significance than the Mason-Dixon line.
"What about his coloring?"
"God, I can't remember." He wanted to be helpful, though, so he added, "I think his card said he lived in Apalach."
"Where'd you take the photos?"
He pointed across the vacant lot. "That yellow house. Belongs to the owner." He nodded at Bennies. "Good guy, always looking out for his employees. He even drove the car out so I could pose with it." He shook his head. "Nice wheels. I didn't even want to lean against it, afraid I'd hurt the paint job."
"Was that his idea or yours?"
"Steve's? Oh, you mean the photog. It was his idea. He must have took ten, fifteen rolls."
"Is that unusual---that many?"
"I thought I was getting a really great deal. He said it was a special because he wanted to make his name as a fashion photog."
In Panama City? Laura thought.
"I only paid him two hundred dollars. Not that that's chump change, but for everything he did, it was a great deal. We must have been out there three or four hours. I went through a whole bunch of clothes."
"This exchange---" Laura showed him the phone number. "That's in Apalachicola?"
"I think so."
"Anything else you can remember about him? What did he drive?"
"I can't remember ... wait a minute. It was an old beat-up truck. I remember because he parked it way down the road so it wouldn't get in the shots. So this is identity theft, right?"
"I'd say so." She circled her cell phone number and handed him her card. "If you can think of anything else about that day, or what he said or did, anything at all, please call me."
She started down the steps.
He called out after her. "You think I have enough for a lawsuit?"
"You're going to have to stand in line," she said.
29
The moon was up when Laura drove into Apalachicola. As she came off the curve of the Gorrie Street Bridge into town, she spotted the massive hotel she'd noticed on the way out. The Gibson Inn, blue clapboard with white trim, had wraparound galleries populated with Adirondack chairs. The inn looked like a riverboat all lit up and ready to steam away.
She parked out front and went in. Cigarette smoke lingered with the potted palms and plush Victorian furnishings of the lobby. A tabby cat lounged on the desk, partially covering the bell with her paunch. Laura stroked the cat and asked for a nonsmoking room. She paid with her own money. The woman at the desk led her upstairs to a nautical-themed room with wooden shutters and a king-sized bed.
For a moment she thought about Tom Lightfoot. Felt this overwhelming desire to have him here with her, a pair of lovers on vacation, having fun.
But this wasn't a vacation. If the photographer, Jimmy, didn't pan out, she'd go home empty-handed.
Unpacking didn't take long---putting away her other suit, two sets of casual clothes, a small makeup case, toothbrush, pajamas. Her gun, her protective Kevlar vest, Jessica Parris's murder book she had compiled so far.
Then she called Jimmy de Seroux. The phone rang ten times, no answering machine.
She had to make another phone call, which couldn't be put off. She reached the dispatcher at Apalachicola PD and left a short message, asking for an appointment with the chief.
"Just come by tomorrow anytime," said the dispatcher. She promised to pass on Laura's message.
Laura did this as a courtesy, although she had mixed feelings about contacting them. Jimmy de Seroux could be a dead end. Still, she didn't want word to get back that she had been asking questions around town.
Which it surely would. Laura had lots of experience with small towns.
After dinner in town, Laura took a glass of red wine from the bar out onto the porch. The air, which had been so heavy and hot during the day, was leavened by a breeze from Apalachicola Bay. She could smell the fecund richness of the bay, the sea life.
The waitress came out and asked her if she needed anything.
"Have you lived here long?"
"Grew up in Port St. Joe."
"Do you know a man named Jimmy de Seroux?"
"Dot would know." She nodded to the bar. "She's the bartender."
There were only a few people inside. The middle-aged woman wiping down the bar looked up and smiled.
"Jimmy? Of course I know him. What's he up to? Haven't seen him in a coon's age."
"I heard he's a photographer and he lives somewhere around here."
"I didn't know that. Photographer, huh? Must be one of those multi-talented people." She sighed. "Some people get all the talent. The rest of us have to work for a living." She flicked a dishrag over the polished bar top.
Laura said, "He does something besides photography?"
Dot pointed at a autographed photo above the bar. "Jimmy used to play the piano here. Pretty good, too."
Laura peered at the photograph. Hard to see in the dim light. She asked Dot if she would take it down, and Dot obliged, handing it to her.
Laura stared at the picture. She felt the skin of her scalp tighten.
She'd seen many photographs like it, mostly in bars: A black-and-white photo in a black frame, typical publicity shot. But this wasn't any photo.
Looking into that face, Laura had a bad feeling---a visceral reaction rather than anything based on logic.
If she'd glanced at the photo on the wall in a dark bar, she wouldn't have looked twice. The guy wasn't attractive. He wasn't even interesting. Just an average guy, mid-thirties, pale face and narrow mouth. The distance between nose and mouth was long and simian, like Homer Simpson. Wispy hair on the longish side, combed across a domed forehead. A white short-sleeved shirt that would have gone well with a pocket protector. He looked soft, almost effeminate---harmless.
He looked like a lot of people. The kind of person you've seen before, but couldn't place.
But his eyes were dead.
Dot ducked back behind the bar and snapped down a business card on the bar. "I knew I had it somewhere," she said triumphantly. "People are always leaving their cards with us."
The card said "JIMMY DE SEROUX Photographer Musician Piano Lessons Piano Tuning." An address, a phone number, and an e-mail address.
"He gives piano lessons to kids?"
"Oh yeah. My neighbor's daughter studied with him for a while. I went to her recital. They had it at the Elks Hall."
A pedophile who had access to children through his job. A man who could play a wedding or photograph one. A mild, unassuming little guy.
She looked at the eyes again. Dull. As if she were looking at them instead of into them, not even a pinpoint of light to show the way to his soul.
She had seen him somewhere. Maybe in one of the photographs she'd taken on Brewery Gulch near the crime scene.
"Is this address close to here?"
"Just go west on C, that's the street right out front, and you'll run right into 15th Street."
Laura glanced around. The other two patrons were gone, and she and Dot were alone. "How long since he last played here?"
"A few months ago, at least."
"Can you remember when the recital was?"
"What is this?"
Laura produced her badge and ID.
"I don't have to talk to you."
"I know, but I wish you would."
"What did he do?"
"Nothing, that I know of. He's one of many people we're looking at who might know something about a crime in Arizona."
"What kind of crime?"
"Do you mind if I ask the questions at the moment? I promise I'll tell you what I know if you'll just humor me."
Dot's eyes darkened. Definitely hostile.
Laura asked, "At the recital. Did he spend a lot of time with the girls?"
"What do you mean?"
"Did he enjoy their company more than that of adults? Did you notice anything like that?"
Dot's mouth flatlined. "You've got it all wrong. That doesn't sound like Jimmy at all."
"You may be right. But why don't you think it sounds like Jimmy?"
"He's ... it's hard to explain. You don't know what he looks like in person. He's kind of small. You ever read that story about Walter Mitty? He's like that. And respectful of women."
"How do you mean?"
"He was raised up right. You can tell. He's almost old-fashioned---giving up his seat at the bar when the place is full or opening the door, just a bunch of ways."
"Do you know his family?"
"No." She took a deep breath. "All I know is he minds his own business, and I can't see him wanting to hurt little girls. It just doesn't fit the kind of person he is."
Laura thought Jimmy de Seroux was precisely the type of man who would go after little girls.
Inadequate.
30
The windows of the twin-gabled Victorian cottage on Fifteenth Street were dark. The yard was overgrown and leaves from the enormous live oak out front littered the roof. Wild vines snarled and matted the screened-in porch, as dark and secretive as the night surrounding it.
Hand near her weapon, Laura stepped into the porch and knocked on the door. She expected and got no answer. Although the place was neat and had been kept up, it had an abandoned feel to it, as if its owner had been gone for a while.
A breeze blew, heavily laden with the smell of the gulf, and a few acorns pelted the walk. Grass grew between the cracks.
He wasn't here. The feeling Laura had about Jimmy de Seroux solidified. He hadn't been here in a long time. Months maybe.
She glanced around. The house next door was boarded up. The rest of the street was quiet, a mixture of large houses and small. A few porch lights were on. But nobody looking out their windows, nobody on their front porches, no one driving by. It was too hot, even at this time of night.
Laura walked along the side of the house, peering at the windows. Most of them were draped, but she could see through the back door into the kitchen. She flashed her light, holding her hand over the top to keep the glare down.
Yellow linoleum. Honey-maple cabinets. Very neat. A Felix the Cat clock on the wall.
She closed her eyes. Smelled the fecund earth, growing things. The slight mildew smell of the concrete. She tried to absorb the vibrations of the place, put herself into his place.
She knew he was gone. Traveling.
A breeze shifted the massive oak branches, their shadows playing over the crushed gypsum drive to the right of the lawn, bone-white against lush darkness. There was a cleared space beside the drive, scars on the grass where someone had parked.
An old truck sat inside a carport fashioned from banged-together wood and corrugated plastic sheeting. Parked behind the truck, was a smallish boat covered by a blue tarp. The truck fit Peter Dorrance's description--- a 1967 Chevrolet pickup. Blue, dented, and splotched with rust around the wheel wells.
She walked around and peered through the side window, which had been cracked a couple of inches. Old, but clean. None of the usual detritus you'd find in a car someone used a lot. Rain had gotten in; the seat covers were water-stained and wet leaves had drifted in through the crack in the window, sticking to the floorboards like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.
Laura walked to the front and then the back of the truck. No license plate. She pulled on the latex gloves she always carried with her, reached through the passenger side window, and pulled up on the door handle. The door squeaked open. She paused, looked around, thinking how loud it sounded. Opened the glove compartment and shined her light in. A tire gauge, a few maps, registration two years old. The maps were for Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Buried among the change and paper clips was one of those cards where if you get it stamped ten times you get a free meal. A Port St. Joe address. This card was for the Zebra Island Trading Post and Raw Bar in Port St. Joe. It had been stamped eight times.
He was a regular there.
Jimmy de Seroux was a pianist, which could mean he played piano at the Zebra Island Trading Post and Raw Bar. Someone to talk to.
She started back down the driveway and stopped at the place on the grass next to the driveway where someone had parked. Tire tracks that had sunk deep into the ground and dried that way.
They belonged to a heavy vehicle. They looked familiar.
Laura memorized the tread style and walked back to the pickup and looked at its tires.
The treads on the truck were different. Something else had been parked here on the berm. Something bigger, like the tracks on West Boulevard.
Back in her room, she couldn't sleep. She was worried that Jerry Grimes or Mike Galaz would call her back any time. She had nothing to show for this expensive trip except a gut feeling and a digital photo that could be downloaded by anyone.
Laura turned on the light. The only thing she'd brought to read was her mother's files on the Tucson murders and the six chapters of Death in the Desert. Laura removed the files from her suitcase and slid out Alice Cardinal's unfinished manuscript, held together by an industrial-size paper clip. She realized that she never did follow up with the detective on the Julie Marr case. There had been too much going on.
Laura skimmed through the chapter on Julie Marr, still feeling it was strange---almost creepy---that her mother could write about a girl Laura used to see daily at school.
Alice Cardinal's book echoed much of what Laura had already read in the clippings. The car used in Julie's abduction had come from A&B Auto Wrecking. Laura's mother had interviewed the owner, Jack Landis.
Landis told detectives that the car in question, a 1955 Chevrolet sedan, had been one of the few vehicles at the junkyard that was driveable.
Probably he took it because it was parked outside the fence, Landis said, pointing at the tall chain link fence bordering the yard full of twisted, rusty car hulks. Landis explained that he also did muffler repair and that he used the orange and white car as a loaner car to people who needed transportation while they waited.
I guess he didn't want to face Luke and Laura, he said, nodding to the two Dobermans inside the yard.
Had the killer stolen a car just to use in commission of this vicious and brutal crime? It seems likely that he did. The Tucson Police detective on the case certainly thought so.
Laura found herself drifting off to sleep. Whatever lessons she could learn from the murder of Julie Marr would have to wait.
"I want you to run somebody on NCIC for me," Laura said when she reached Victor the next morning.
"Can't you do it yourself? We're a little busy here."
"What's up?"
"Lehman's about to give it up."
"What makes you think that?"
"His lawyer wants a meeting. This whole thing could unravel in the next couple of days. You really ought to be here."
"I'll try to hurry it up," she said. "Do you have the lab report on the tire treads taken up on West Boulevard?"
"Hold on, let me look." She heard him shuffle papers. "Got a whole shitload of stuff from the lab yesterday. A lot to plow through."
Hinting that without her there, it was twice as much work.
She waited as the paper shuffled for an inordinate amount of time, thinking that if she was wrong about Jimmy de Seroux and had wasted the DPS's limited budget on a whim, Galaz wouldn't back her up. She'd be on her own.
"Here it is," Victor said at last. "They're Michelins. XRVs."
"What kind of tires are those?"
"Big ones. The kind you get on trucks, motor homes."
"Anything else? Was he able to get the wheelbase?"
"I'm looking," he said impatiently. She could tell he resented having to do it. "Here it is. Looks like it was a motor home. That narrows it down. There are only thousands of them all over Arizona."
"I'm sending you photos of some treads I found out here. I'm also faxing you the photo of a possible suspect, his name is---"
"Suspect? Didn't you hear a word I just said?"
She ignored that. "I'll FedEx a copy of the original as soon as I can get it done. The guy's name is Jimmy de Seroux." She spelled it for him and gave him the registration number of his truck. "Be sure to run him on NCIC."
"Can't you do it?"
"I don't have access to NCIC right at this moment."
Silence. Then, "I've got to get going. Lehman's lawyer's gonna be here any minute."
31
The Apalachicola Police Department offices took up the second story of City Hall near the Apalachicola River. From its proximity to the water, the building could have been a cotton warehouse when the town was a bustling port.
A giant standing fan dominated Chief Redbone's office, blowing like a blizzard across the cluttered space.
A large man with thinning blond hair and a strawberry complexion, Clyde Redbone heaved himself out of his chair and held out a hand. In his late forties, more muscle than fat, he looked like a former linebacker.
"I'm Laura---"
"Cardinal. I know. Couldn't forget a pretty name like that. My secretary told me you'd be coming by." He directed her to a leather couch against the wall that had seen better days. "Sit down, take a load off."
He skimmed his bulk expertly from behind his desk and aimed the standing fan at her. "How's that?"
Gale force, but in this heat and humidity, necessary. "Thanks."
"Something to drink? Coffee? Co'Cola?"
She asked for water and he filled a mug with water from the cooler. He sat down and folded his hands on the green felt blotter. He wore a short-sleeved shirt that exposed massive arms mottled with freckles run together under a nest of blond hair. "What can I help you with?"
"I'm interested in a man named Jimmy de Seroux. Do you know him?"
He leaned back and regarded her through watery blue eyes. Something going on behind them, but she couldn't tell what it was. "I know Jimmy, but not well. Good piano player."
"I'm trying to locate him."
"Think he lives over on Fifteenth Street." He reached for the phone book.
"I know where he lives. I thought you could give me assistance."
He stood up and reached for his hat, hooked on an old-fashioned hat stand beside the desk. "Why not?" He checked his watch. "Tell you what. It's lunch time. I was just going to go down to the park and have my sandwich. We could talk there. I try never to miss my half hour outdoors."
Girls' voices from the stairwell, giggling and strident.
"Hi, Daddy!"
"Hi, Daddy!"
A couple of teenage girls---twins---clattered into the office on tall sandals. One blonde, one redhead. The blonde wore her hair long and straight, parted in the middle. She wore a short, flouncy skirt. The redhead wore short shorts, much more makeup, and enough chains to pass for Marley's Ghost. Identical twins, but each of them had developed her own look. Laura guessed it was a way to maintain their individuality.
Redbone looked stricken. "Holy moly, you walked down the street like that?"
From the looks the girls gave him, Laura had the feeling he'd said words to that effect before.
"Can we take the car?" asked the blond one. "Graham wants us to help him look at boats."
"You think that kid can afford a boat?"
Gum snapped. "Dad. We're just looking."
"Graham should be studying for the SATs, and so should you. By the way, this is Laura Cardinal from Arizona. That one who thinks she's in the navel academy is Amanda, and this is Georgette."
Georgette lifted her hand in a tiny, lacquered wave, Amanda rolled her eyes.
"Please? Can we have the car or not?" asked Amanda, for all her makeup and chains sounding like a southern belle in training.
"Yes, you can have the car. But you gotta be back by five. Your mother's cooking roast chicken. Got that?"
They were already out the door, their thank you's banging off the walls behind them.
Redbone shook his head. "Don't ever have girls," he said. "They'll give you an ulcer, then break your bankbook."
"There was a girl," Chief Redbone said, in response to Laura's question. He had to talk loud over the riding mower negotiating the lawn at the far end of Battery Park. They sat at a picnic table under a canopy of oaks, eating sandwiches bought from a deli on Market Street. Laura had asked the guy at the deli for a hoagie, and he'd looked at her as if she'd come from another planet. Chief Redbone interceded and got them over the language barrier. Next time she'd ask for a sub.
Laura looked out the little marina at the edge of Battery Park, enjoying the sight of the sailboats drowsing in the paint-peeling Gulf sun. Watching them rocking gently in the hot light had a soporific affect.
"Linnet Sobek," Clyde Redbone said. "Thought she was a runaway." He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. "She ran off twice before. Got herself in all kinds of trouble. You know. Boys, drugs, getting drunk, fighting." He shook his head, his eyes sad. "Only thirteen years old."
Thinking about his daughters?
"Couldn't really blame her. She had a rotten home life. Mother was a meth head. Lots to run away from."
The aroma of cooking meat drifted across the park in a smoke haze. Laura glanced over at a large family group taking up two tables across the park. Kids, dogs, overweight adults in shorts and tent-like tees. She remembered Victor's pictures from Lieutenant Galaz's cookout. "When did she disappear?"
"2002. Early summer---June, I think. I've got the file back at the office. She was last seen hitchhiking on C30-A near the turnoff to Indian Pass. Telephone repairman up on a pole saw her go by."
"You questioned him?"
"What do you think I do here? Trot myself out for the Fourth of July parade every year?"
"I'm sorry."
"No offense taken. Man's got to stand up for himself, especially when the big guns from Arizona come callin'." He grinned, his expression saying no offense. "Humility is a southern trait, since we have so much to be humble about. You're gonna choke, you scarf down that sandwich so fast."
"It's good." She wiped her mouth with a wispy napkin from the deli. "Those times she ran away. Did she come back voluntarily?"
"Nope. Her brother found her both times."
He nodded to the cold thermos at his elbow. "Sure you don't want to try a little of the local brew?"
Sweet tea. "No thanks. What did she look like?"
"That's the funny thing." He balled up the butcher paper his sandwich came in and threw it into the garbage can nearby: three points. "Those photos you showed me of your victims? She looked a lot like both those girls. Pretty and blond."
After lunch they took a tree-lined rural road, C-30A, out to Zebra Island Trading Post and Raw Bar at Indian Pass.
Laura glanced at Redbone. He drove in a desultory fashion, the seat back all the way and one freckled hand steering from the bottom of the wheel.
"Zebra Island Trading Post?" she asked.
"This is the turnoff for St. Vincent Island. St. Vincent was owned by a rich man who thought it would look good with a bunch of zebras on it."
Before they left the park, the chief suggested that he take the lead, since he knew the owners and probably knew the clientele as well. Laura agreed; she was a fish out of water here.
Redbone swung the wheel and the patrol car slewed into a sandy parking lot, nose in to an old-fashioned country store. Under the pitched roof were a collection of weathered murals depicting an Indian chief's head---complete with warbonnet---a pastoral scene of zebras grazing, and a giant oyster. A GONE FISHIN' sign hung in the window.
"Well, that's strange. I didn't know Gary was going fishing," Redbone said. "Guess we should've called first."
They were still thinking what to do when a dull red Blazer of indeterminate age pulled into the lot. KC lights up top, jacked-up wheels. A sinewy man in a black T-shirt and camo pants emerged from the Blazer and went to the newspaper vending machines out front.
The chief buzzed down his window and cocked his elbow on the door. "Ronnie! How you doing?"
"Hey." Ronnie came over and bent his head inside the driver's door. "How're you?"
Chief Redbone nodded Laura's way. "This pretty lady here is Criminal Investigator Laura Cardinal from Arizona. You know Jimmy de Seroux, don't you?"
"Jimmy? He photographed my sister's wedding."
Redbone turned to Laura. "Ron's cousin owns this place. Where is Gary, anyway?"
"Went down to St. George for a couple of days of R and R. I'm keeping an eye on the place."
"Was Jimmy a regular?"
"Sure was. Came in at least once a week."
"He tell you he was going anywhere?"
Ron rubbed the bristles on his chin. "As a matter of fact, he did. Said he was taking a trip to see the country."
"When was this?"
"Long time ago. It was still cold---I remember talkin' to him outside, and as I recall, there was a hard frost from the night before."
"He say anything else?"
Ron thought about it. "I don't think so."
"You know Jimmy very well?"
"Just, he likes his burgers. Every time he come in here he ordered a burger medium rare. Ron don't cook medium rare anymore. They'd go round and round on that."
"Jimmy have a girlfriend?"
"Never saw him with anybody. I don't remember him socializing with anybody, male or female. Real quiet guy, kind of kept to himself."
"How come he told you he was going on a trip?"
"I don't remember how that came up. Is it important?" He peered in through the window again. "Did he do something in Arizona?"
"That's what we're trying to figure out," Redbone said. "Somebody still breaking into those vending machines?"
"Nope. But it don't hurt to check."
Laura asked, "Do you know if he had an RV? Camper, motor home?"
Ron shook his head. "Heck, I was surprised when he told me he was going on a trip. Must have been feeling talkative that day."
Back at Apalachicola PD, Redbone showed Laura the file on Linnet Sobek. It was a thin file because she was considered a missing person. The photograph attached was eerily similar in appearance to that of Alison Burns. Same heart-shaped face, big blue eyes, child's small nose. Blond hair.
They could have been twins.
Scanning the file, Laura saw nothing that Redbone hadn't already told her, but she asked for a copy of the file anyway.
"I'll just run him on NCIC and see what comes up," Redbone said.
There were no wants or warrants on a Jimmy de Seroux. No previous convictions. If he was who Laura thought he was, he had been very successful as a criminal, sailing under the radar all his adult life.
Next, Redbone checked the Motor Vehicle Division records. Jimmy de Seroux owned only one vehicle, the blue 1967 Chevrolet pickup.
"So much for the motor home theory," the chief said. "You ask me, it's pretty thin."
"What's pretty thin?"
An Apalachicola PD officer appeared in the doorway and the room decreased in size by twenty-five percent.
"Just helpin' out a fellow peace officer run down a suspect." Chief Redbone introduced Laura to the officer, Jerry Oliver.
Oliver took off his hat and Laura saw the sweat line in his hair above his moon face. She also noticed that his brass was unpolished, his nameplate so filmy,she couldn't read his name.
"So who's the guy?" Oliver said. "Maybe I know him."
"It's none of---"
"Jimmy de Seroux," Laura said.
"Jimmy?" Oliver snorted. "No way. No way he'd do anything violent, considering what---"
"Jerry, did you go by Mrs. Darling's?" Chief Redbone said. "She's mighty agitated about that Buckner kid and his loud music."
"I've talked to her three times. The kid doesn't play that loud."
"Well, go talk to her anyway. See if you can work it out. Use your negotiating skills."
Oliver's face turned stubborn, and he rested his hand on his nightstick. "Let me at least get a drink of water. It's hot as Hades out there." He crossed over to the water cooler. "Arizona, huh? How'd you get a line on Jimmy?" he asked Laura, pouring water on his hands and rubbing his face.
"Jerry, I want you to get your butt out there now." Redbone's voice boomed. Laura looked at him. She saw a hard light in his eyes.
"I'm goin', I'm goin.'"
Chief Redbone watched him leave.
"That boy is the laziest sonofagun I ever saw." Back to his easygoing, affable self. Smiling, expansive. "Can't do a thing about it, though. His daddy's on the city council."
When Laura got back to the Gibson Inn, she checked at the front desk for messages. Victor still hadn't called back. She called him and got his voice mail. Left her own and paged him, too.
She wondered if Lehman had confessed. There might already be a deal in the works. And here she was in Florida with nothing.
Tilting at windmills.
She looked at her list again.
Alison Burns - similar
Dress patterns -- Inspirational Woman
Motor home seen at Brewery Gulch
Motor home seen near primary crime scene
Digital camera, jewelry sent to Alison/Internet connection (?)
CRZYGRL12
The man in the photo---beach house?
Peter Dorrance
Serial killer, organized type?
Differences between Jessica and Alison: period of time kept, age, manner of death
Postmortem vs. antemortem
She had added five items to the list:
Dorrance -- J. de Seroux photog
Tire treads at J's
Linnet Sobek -- last seen near oyster bar
J.S. regular at oyster bar
Linnet Sobek looks like Alison and Jessica
Chief Redbone was right: Pretty thin.
De Seroux had no criminal record. He didn't own a motor home. And as Victor had pointed out, anyone could have downloaded Dorrance's picture from the Internet.
Laura stared at the picture of de Seroux she had photocopied. The deadness in his eyes didn't translate to the dark photocopy, or it could be that she had attached too much significance to it. A lot of people looked dull. Her conviction that he was Jessica's killer was starting to evaporate.
To cheer herself up, she went out and treated herself on her own money to a good dinner. Oysters, crab cakes, and Merlot at the Owl Café. The place was small and intimate. The rest of the diners were all couples.
Usually, she wasn't bothered about dining out alone. But tonight she felt self-conscious, as if people were looking at her. That wasn't true---one glance at the other diners told her that. They were too concerned with each other.
Maybe that was it. She pictured Tom opposite her, their heads bent together over wine glasses. Pictured them walking out on the marina dock set in a plain of marsh and sawgrass, holding hands and watching the sun set on the water. Or on the porch at the Gibson Inn, listening to the night sounds, making out if no one else was around.
In the king-sized bed.
His presence, the way he looked at her, the quiet way he talked. Never, ever in a hurry. His life just the way he wanted it. Something to be said for that.
Except his life wasn't exactly the way he wanted or else he wouldn't want her.
As a cop, she always worked with a partner. Someone to watch her back, an ally. Not being alone ...
It always came as a surprise to her that she didn't have any family. There were relatives back east, people she hardly knew. She doubted they would welcome her intrusion and she didn't want anything from them. She was used to being alone; only children were, as a rule, self-reliant.
Still, she'd always thought she would find someone. She had thought that Billy Linton would solve all her problems, that he could wipe out the idea of her parents dying by gunshot at close-range. Of course that had not worked. She and Billy didn't have the stuff to sustain even a normal relationship, let alone one that was that had been banged up from the beginning. Ever since, all she had to show for a personal life was a string of failed relationships.
Now Tom was asking her to give it a try one more time. Living together wasn't marriage, but it was a commitment. She couldn't even think about getting married again, but she could think about sharing her house.
She paid her check and walked back to the Inn, decided to prolong the night by having another drink out on the gallery. She walked into the bar, glancing up at Jimmy de Seroux's publicity photo.
She'd seen him before ... well, of course she had. She'd studied that photograph more than a few times in the last two days. But there was something else.
Then it came to her.
Where she had seen him.
32
"What a day," Victor said when he finally got back to Laura that night. "We really thought he was going to take a plea, but he backed out at the last minute."
"Lehman? What did he say?"
"Nothing. He demanded to talk to his lawyer in private and that was it, man. Never came back. Is Cruller pissed!"
Roger Cruller was the county attorney.
"I knew---knew---he was going to confess. Why else did Glass call this whole fucking dog-and-pony show? And then, nada."
Laura wondered about Lehman's attorney, Barry Glass, who had a reputation for winning big cases. Why had he called the meeting if he didn't want to work out a deal? Only if Lehman himself got cold feet.
"And the bad thing? We don't have enough to arrest him at this point. The forensics on the computer could take months. You should hear the lame shit his attorney tried to feed me---like the screenplay? He said it was in the refrigerator because, get this, he wanted to protect it in case there was a fire."
She let him rant for a while before changing the subject. "Did you run my guy's name through NCIC?" she asked.
"I've been so busy, I must've forgot. You still want me to do it? I'll get to it first---"
"That's okay, we ran him at the PD here. He doesn't have a criminal record."
"Well, I guess that's it."
"Maybe not."
He ignored that. "I have some news you might be interested in. Timmy Judd's in intensive care. He tried to kill himself today. Drank some drain cleaner. They don't know how he got it. But you know he's gotta be suffering."
Laura thought about Shannon Judd, only seven years old, having the presence of mind to make her way into the crawl space underneath her house---the house she had lived in all her short life---to hide from her own father. The pain and fear she must have experienced as her life drained away along with the blood from two gunshot wounds.
"Hope it destroys his throat, his esophagus, his digestive tract---I hope he gets cancer."
"He's feeling it, that's for sure."
They were both silent for a moment.
Laura sensed that whatever rift had been between them was healing. She might as well make him even happier. "I'm thinking about coming back soon."
"Oh?"
"I want to get into his house, but I don't have enough to get a warrant."
"Come on, do you really think he's the one? I'm telling you, Lehman was this close to telling it all."
Laura mentally shrugged. "I would like you to do one thing for me. The photographs I took at the crime scene that first morning---of all the people hanging out there? Could you FedEX them to me?"
"I came straight home from Bisbee. I'd have to go back to the squad bay to pick them up, then Fed Ex---"
"I know he was there, in Bisbee. I saw him. You did, too."
"Where?"
"He was the pianist at the Copper Queen Hotel."
33
MUSICMAN. HOT WHEELS. WARLOCK. SMOOTH TALK. TRAVELER.
It was like having a wardrobe full of costumes. You could change your clothes whenever you felt like it. You just decided what person you wanted to be that day---whatever fit your mood---and donned the name like a favorite shirt or jacket.
His favorite right now was "Traveler," for a couple of reasons. One, he had always loved the open road, loved to drive. Just pick a route---back road or freeway, it didn't matter---and follow it. Go where he pleased, always looking for what was beyond the next bend in the road. But the most pertinent connotation of the word "traveler" came from the books the profilers used, those books about people like him. Men who killed---serial killers---had a tendency to go from place to place so they wouldn't get caught. They were called "travelers," and he thought this the height of irony to use that for one of his e-mail names. It was a hint, even though no one had ever picked up on it. A clever nod to fair play.
He had not done much traveling lately, although he had moved ninety miles to the north. Tucson was an easy town to disappear in. He had melted right into the Tucson melting pot. He was careful, though, staying close to the freeway in a Motel 6, only venturing out of the neighborhood to a UPS Store to pick up the money Dark Moondancer had sent him.
He was in the Motel 6 now, doing what he loved best---trolling the net. But even that paled in comparison to what was on his mind: the e-mail from LVRGRL@livewire.com.
Intrigued, he'd opened it---and knew right away it was her.
She told him what happened---how her parents had discovered the camera and jewelry he'd sent her and demanded to know where she got them. She'd refused to tell, and her father, the son-of-a-bitch, took away her computer privileges.
But his girl had spunk. It took her awhile, but she managed to talk her mother into letting her use her computer for school, and immediately she set up a new e-mail account.
Kids these days.
I was scared but now I know how much I really luv U and I know its right. They cant keep us apart
Reading that, Musicman couldn't help experiencing a tiny kernel of hope.
He had to be sure, though.
He went through all his CRZYGRL12 messages, starting with the most recent and going backward. He read the messages which had lured him to Bisbee, messages he now knew were false:
I have to go visit my dad in the poduk town. Boriiiing. Theirs nothig to do there.
A lie.
I've been thinking. Your right. Its time we got together.
Lie, lie, lie.
I know a park were we coud meet
I want to do it now
I luv U
Musicman went back through each e-mail, scrupulously, trying to figure out when the imposter had taken over. Looking for changes in syntax and content. He couldn't see anything different. She used "lay" instead of "lie", a common grammatical mistake. Lots of smiley faces and sad faces, depending on her mood. The same misspellings: "their" for "there"; "coud" for "could".
He printed everything up; sometimes you could spot stuff on hard copy that you missed on the screen. Went through the e-mails again, starting with the most recent, going backward in time.
And then he saw it.
Theirs nothig to do there.
He rummaged through the twenty-seven pages of correspondence he had saved to disk, scanning rapidly, pulse thumping in his ears. Did she use "their" and "there" indiscriminately?
No. Thirteen times she'd written "their". Never "there".
Whoever intercepted their e-mails---and pretended to be CRZYGRL12---had slipped up. A common mistake; it's hard to misspell on purpose. Spelling was a habit like anything else. Like if you tried to change your handwriting. As careful as you were, you had a tendency to revert to what you were.
How had he missed it?
Now he had to figure out if this latest e-mail came from the girl or the imposter.
34
Back in Chief Redbone's mildew-smelling office, Laura removed the top two photographs from the envelope Victor had FedExed her and spread them out on his desk beside the photograph of Jimmy de Seroux.
"Kind of looks like him," Redbone said. "If you take away the mustache." He was in the process of eating a slice of apple pie from a styrofoam box.
"I saw him myself. Playing piano at a bar in Bisbee."
He sat back and folded his hands over his stomach. "That may be, but you're not what Judge Lanier would call an impartial witness, and he's who we gotta get around if we want a warrant." He sighed and pushed the photo back across the table. "Sounds pretty circumstantial to me. Judge Lanier doesn't like circumstantial evidence. Honestly, I don't think he's gonna bite."
"The tire tracks outside his house are the same make and type as the ones found near the primary crime scene---Michelin XRVs." She pushed the lab report that Victor had faxed along with the photos across the desk.
Redbone picked it up, holding it out in order to read it. "Says here it's the same kind, but there must be millions of these things all over the country. There's no anomaly to show these are the exact same tires." He put his hands behind his head. "Lanier's not going to like that."
Laura had experience with recalcitrant judges. She always sought out the toughest judges because if they okayed a search warrant, the defense attorney would be left with one less piece of ammunition. "I'll take my chances."
The chief shook his head. "I can tell you right now he'll dearly love tearing this apart. Lookie here, the dress---the link to that Alison Burns killing. How many people use those patterns? They're on the Internet. And how many people could've downloaded this boy's picture? He's got it out there for everybody to see."
He scooped up some melted ice cream, licked the plastic spoon.
"Nope," he added morosely, "I don't see Judge Lanier liking this at all."
Judge Lanier had them in and out in ten minutes.
"He's got a golf game at ten," Chief Redbone explained as they were ushered out by the judge's white-haired bailiff. "He sure as heck shot us down. I'm sorry about that."
"Whatever happened to Southern hospitality?"
Redbone held the door open for her. "He's a transplant from Rhode Island."
Laura tried to think if she could have done anything different, but it had all happened so fast. Judge Lanier had said few words to them inside his stuffy, smoke-filled chamber, but the ones he did use were scathing. "A waste of the court's time." "A snipe hunt." And: "I don't know how you do it out in the southwest, Miss Criminal Investigator of the DP of S, but here we have laws and we have precedence. You will not turn this court into a Star Chamber. The de Serouxs have been through enough, and I will not permit this witch hunt."
"What was that about the de Serouxs?" Laura asked Redbone as they walked down the steps of the courthouse.
Redbone said, "The Judge doesn't like extra work, and this qualifies. He doesn't want to come under any scrutiny. He just keeps a low profile so he's retained every few years. Well," he patted her arm, "I've got to be going. Gotta keep the streets safe for posterity."
He got into his unit and drove sedately down Market Street. She saw him turn in the direction of the police department.
Laura realized he never answered her question.
Hungry, she walked up Market to the Cloud Nine Coffee Shop. Taking a red vinyl booth by the window, she pulled the photos of Jessica Parris, Alison Burns, and Linnet Sobek out of her briefcase and spread them out on the formica surface.
There had to be a way to get into that house. Her conviction was growing---this was the guy. She just had to look harder, find something she'd missed.
She stared at the photographs. All three girls looked alike. The same type. Similar hair length, if not style, same pert nose. A dusting of freckles. Innocent, wide blue eyes.
Jessica was the anomaly. Brown eyes. Light-boned, small for her age. Jessica was the mistake. The abduction of Jessica Parris was an act of impulse after de Seroux failed to get the girl he wanted.
The waitress appeared and upended a brown ceramic mug. "Coffee?" she asked.
Laura nodded. The blond waitress looked to be in her sixties. Laura was mesmerized by the woman's upper eyelids, the color of purple grapes and almost as puffy, ending in eyelashes heavily lined in black. Her nameplate said "Marlee".
She glanced at the photograph of Linnet Sobek. "I sure hope she landed someplace good." She gave Laura a searching look. "You a reporter?"
"No."
Laura just wanted to be left alone, but the waitress was friendly. "You don't sound like you're from around here," the waitress added.
"I'm from Arizona."
"Well, isn't that a small world? I lived with my daughter and her husband in Phoenix up until a year or two ago. Where you say you were from?"
"Tucson." She wished the woman would leave her alone to think.
"I grew up here, never wanted to leave, but my daughter wanted me to come live with her and I wanted to be near my grandchildren ... now the kids are grown, and I just couldn't stop being homesick for this little town. So I finally made a break and came on back. One thing I've got is really good feet, that plus stamina, so I figure I can work until I'm seventy at least. Plus, I like the work, being around people."
Laura could appreciate that, but she just wanted to be left alone with her blue funk.
"What'll it be? The biscuits and gravy are good."
She remembered how when she was a kid she always ordered a BLT on white toast with a side of pickles. She hadn't eaten white bread for years, but suddenly craved it. Must be the influence of the south.
The waitress pushed back a strand of brittle hair and said, "Sure thing, honey." She whisked away with the menu and headed for the kitchen.
There was some kind of heating vent near the back wall and Laura could feel it on the back of her neck, steaming her clothes. The place looked none too clean either---a greasy spoon. Her dad loved greasy spoons. She'd forgotten about that.
Laura replaced the photographs of the girls with the picture of Jimmy de Seroux. Maybe she was wrong---what if it was Lehman?
She reached into the wooden bowl of dried olives in front of the table jukebox, suddenly starving, took one and bit. It wasn't an olive---the thing was salty and kind of mushy. She had no idea what it was.
"Never had a boiled peanut before?" asked Marlee coming by with a fresh pot.
"Who'd want to boil peanuts?"
"You just keep on eating them, and sooner or later you're gonna be addicted." She set the plate with the BLT down on the table with a plastic click and glanced at the photograph of de Seroux. "You know Dale?"
"Dale?" Laura was confused.
"Dale Lundy. That's got to be Bill Lundy's son. What's that say?" she added, craning her neck to see the writing on the bottom. "Best Wishes ... Jimmy."
Laura said, "Jimmy de Seroux."
She frowned, as if she were trying to access something on her hard drive. "No. That just can't be."
"This is Jimmy de Seroux. He plays piano at the Gibson Inn."
"No, that's got to be Dale Lundy. He looks just like his daddy."
Laura felt as if she'd just slipped down the rabbit hole. This woman obviously didn't know what she was talking about. Everyone she'd talked to had assured her that this guy was Jimmy de Seroux. He'd signed his name Jimmy. It was Jimmy de Seroux. Laura reiterated that.
"Nope, that's Dale Lundy. He looks so much like his daddy." The woman's conviction was unshakable. "Maybe you're getting them confused because they were neighbors."
There was something about the way she said it. As if she were holding back an unsavory detail. Laura remembered something Judge Lanier had said: The de Serouxs have been through enough.
"The de Serouxs and the Lundys were neighbors?"
"Next door neighbors."
"You knew the de Seroux family?"
"I surely did. They used to come in every Saturday. Henry always ordered biscuits and gravy. Never ate anything different. That could have been a warning sign in itself."
"Henry?"
"Henry de Seroux. More coffee?"
Laura put her hand over the mug, natural curiosity getting the better of her. "What did you mean by 'warning sign?'"
Suddenly, Marlee looked uncomfortable. "It was a long time ago. You don't want to hear about that."
Something bad---Laura could feel it. The judge's statement, Chief Redbone's evasions. He hadn't told her anything about the de Serouxs. "What did he do?"
"I guess it's no secret. He killed his own family."
35
Laura stared at Marlee's mouth, the net of wrinkles moving. Now that Laura had finally pried it out of her, Marlee was happy to share the gory details. "Slaughtered his wife and two little girls one afternoon, then turned the gun on himself. Shotgun---heard he had to use his big toe."
"What about his son?"
"His son? Oh, the little boy. He died when he was younger---had leukemia. Can't remember his name."
"Then who's Jimmy de Seroux?"
"Well, he could be a cousin. But that's no de Seroux." She tapped one long, lacquered nail on the photocopy. "That there is Dale Lundy. I know that because his daddy died must be eight, nine years ago, and he's the spitting image of his father."
Laura was having trouble absorbing this. "Dale lives here?"
"He might've come back, I don't know. When his father died, an aunt took him in. She lived in Alabama."
"You knew the father well?"
"Just to say 'hi' to. Not that he was what you'd call friendly. Bill was an oysterman."
"And this Dale---did you know him?"
"Not hardly. I don't think anybody saw much of that kid."
Laura couldn't make sense of what she was hearing, but she asked anyway. "Why was that?"
"His mother home-schooled him. Nothing wrong with that, plenty do, but there was more there than met the eye." Marlee refilled Laura's cup. "That's a story in itself. She ran off and left the boy and his father to their own devices."
Laura was still trying to reconcile the one man and two names.
Marlene continued, "Alene Lundy belonged to some religious group. These days you'd call it a cult. Everybody knew she was a little strange and she seemed to get worse, keeping to herself, keeping that son of hers away from other kids, and you know that's not natural. If any family was going to end in tragedy, I'd a bet it would have been them, not the de Serouxs." She nodded to the photo. "I don't know who's been pulling your leg, but that's Dale Lundy."
Laura caught Redbone as he was coming down the stairs of the police department. "Why didn't you tell me about the de Seroux family?"
He paused in the stairwell, a Co' Cola in his hand, the heat making his proximity stiflingly close. Laura saw little lumps of ice on the bottle. A Co' Cola would really hit the spot right now, but for once he didn't offer her one.
"Can't talk now. I'm on my way to a meeting," Redbone said, continuing down the stairs. Laura followed him out into the heat haze.
"I want to know why you didn't tell me about the de Seroux murders."
"Holy Jesus Lord, it's hot today." He pressed the Coke bottle to his sweating cheek. Perspiration like giant inkblots soaked his shirt. Looked at her. Good ol' boy with eyes of steel. "That de Seroux story was a long time ago. That's why."
"Maybe so, but it could have affected my case."
"And how would that be?"
"Whether it did or not, you should have let me know. At least then I'd have some idea what I was dealing with."
"He's a cousin from the outside," he said, stressing the word "outside." "He had nothing to do with any of that."
"You had to know I'd find out. A mass murder in a small town isn't---"
"That's all water under the bridge. Folks here don't like to talk about it. We don't like to even think about it."
"So the piano player is Jimmy de Seroux."
"He is to the best of my knowledge."
"What does that mean?"
He shrugged. "I know the family had cousins somewhere. He showed up and said he was a cousin. He owned the house. That was good enough for me. People here mind their own business."
"But didn't you wonder about his resemblance to Lundy?"
"I thought that wasn't any of my business either."
"What? Oh." She got the inflection. "You think Bill Lundy might have---"
"I think we've aired enough dirty laundry for one day." He unlocked his car.
She persisted. "How would that happen?"
He took off his straw hat and placed the Coke against his forehead, smearing his dripping coils of hair. "The way it always happens, I guess."
"You're saying Bill Lundy and Mrs. De Seroux had an affair?"
"Look, missy, I don't know. Could be a lot of things happened. Henry had a sister, a real spinster type, if you'll excuse the saying. She lived there for a while. Don't ask when because I don't remember. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm late."
"I want you to run Dale Lundy for me."
"When I get back I'll do it first thing," he said, hefting his bulk into his unit.
The doors to the Apalachicola Times were locked---closed, even though it was the middle of the day. So Laura went looking for the library.
The library was located on a quiet Apalachicola street; a red brick, one-story building with white trim. Laura asked the librarian if she had newspapers or microfiche dating back to the time of the de Seroux murders.
The librarian looked at her, a vague uneasiness creeping into her deep violet eyes. She was a pretty woman, powdered and small, somewhere in her thirties. "The de Seroux murders?"
"That's what I heard. Someone named Henry de Seroux killed his wife and daughters here in Apalachicola."
The librarian looked shocked. "When was this?"
"A long time ago. It's not something that people would forget, though."
Definitely flustered. "Excuse me, let me take a look, see what I have on the database."
She went into the back room. Laura waited.
At last she returned. "I couldn't find any references on the computer, but that doesn't mean anything. We have back issues of the Times going back to the mid-seventies."
"So you never heard that story? Have you lived here long?"
"Twelve years."
"I guess it would be before that then." A mass murder would appear on the front page, so all she'd have to do was look for the headlines. She'd start with 1990 and work her way back from there.
The librarian took her to the little alcove where the microfiche machine was. She showed Laura how to wind the tape on the spool, and Laura let her, although she'd done this many times before.
There was no reference to a mass murder in 1990. Or 1989, 1988, 1987.
By the time she got to 1983, her neck was beginning to ache.
And then she saw it: Page One, June 12, 1983.
"LOCAL MAN KILLS FAMILY, SELF"
She read quickly, getting more excited as she read.
Henry de Seroux, a respected dentist and family man, had cancelled the newspaper subscription, the water, the electricity, and the gas; gave his golf clubs to his surprised receptionist; and went home to kill his family and himself.
No mention of a young man who could be a cousin. No mention of any other family at all.
There was a picture of the family, though. A studio portrait with a gauzy, blue background. The two girls were pretty and blond. One of them, sitting on her mother's lap, was five or six. Her name was Carrie. The other, standing, was older---eleven? Twelve?
Marisa.
She looked familiar, and Laura suddenly realized why. Marisa de Seroux looked a lot like Linnet Sobek.
And Alison Burns.
And Jessica Parris.
Laura hit the button to photocopy the page.
Back in her room, Laura started a fresh page of her legal pad. Looking for links.
1) The XRV tire treads in de Seroux's driveway were the same make and type as the ones found up on West Boulevard.
2) The resemblance among Alison Burns, Jessica Parris, Linnet Sobek, and Marisa de Seroux was uncanny.
3) Jimmy de Seroux might or might not be a man named Dale Lundy, the son of the next door neighbor.
4) Dale Lundy/Jimmy de Seroux---whoever he really was---had access to the original proofs of Pete Dorrance's publicity photos.
5) Laura herself had seen him at the Copper Queen Hotel.
She stared at the list. A couple of things occurred to her immediately.
Punching in 1411, Laura requested the number for the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, Arizona, then called the hotel. The front desk answered.
"I wonder if you could help me," Laura said. "I was in the bar last weekend when you had the pianist there. I liked him so much I asked if he could play for my wedding. We exchanged cards, but I can't find his anywhere, and the wedding is in three weeks. Could you help me out? I think his name was ..." She looked at her notes. Jimmy or Dale: Pick one. "Dale."
"Let me take a look," the woman replied. "Hold on." The phone clattered.
A minute passed before the woman picked up again. "Dale Lundy, right? He's playing this weekend, too. All I have is a cell phone number." She recited it.
"Thanks so much! This will make all the difference."
"Just make sure you have a good photographer. I stinted, and it was the worst mistake we ever made. Good luck!"
Laura loved small towns. People still saw strangers as human beings.
Next, Laura opened her laptop and connected to the Internet. She'd already bookmarked TalentFish.com. She opened it up now and compared the Talentfish photos of Peter Dorrance to the one Detective Endicott sent her.
One of the Talentfish photos, the three-quarters shot in front of the house, was almost identical to the photo from Alison Burn's computer. Laura held the five-by-seven digital printout up near the computer, eyeballing one and then the other.
In the Talentfish photo, Laura could see half the saw palmetto fronds behind Dorrance, but in the Burns photograph, she could see only one-third. Dorrance's smile was different, too. Just a millimeter this way or that.
Laura had been to photo sessions before. A photographer took many shots of one pose. The Talentfish photo and the Burns photo were in the same sequence, but slightly different.
She reached Myrna Gorman at the Strand Talent Agency on the first try. "How many different photos do you have of Peter Dorrance?" she asked.
"I'll have to look to be sure, but usually we get a headshot and a composite."
"How many in the composite?"
"Three or four."
"Did he send his photos to Talentfish.com or did you?"
"We did. We have an agreement with them. You want to hold? I'll get his file."
When she came back she said, "It's what I thought. We sent the composite. Four pictures."
"Can you describe them for me?"
They corresponded with what she saw on the screen. Laura found Chief Redbone's card and asked her to fax them to the Apalachicola Police Department.
She didn't need any more convincing, though.
The digital photo that had been sent to Alison Burns did not correspond to any of the photographs up on Talentfish.com. That meant that no one could have downloaded the photo and sent it on to Alison Burns. Either Peter Dorrance had placed publicity shots on another site, or the person who sent the photo had access to all the rolls of film they shot that day.
That meant either Peter Dorrance or Dale Lundy sent the photo to Alison Burns.
And Peter Dorrance wasn't playing at the Copper Queen Hotel next weekend.
"He's not gonna like seeing us again so quick," Chief Redbone said as he turned onto Avenue B. "If we get the warrant, let's do it tomorrow. That old house hasn't been lived in for a long time. It can wait till morning."
Thaddeus Lanier lived in a large, Federalist, red brick building with a gracious white portico and two tall live oaks dressed in widow's weeds.
Laura was feeling good---especially after they ran Lundy on NCIC. Unlike Jimmy de Seroux, Lundy had two arrests for sexual offenses: peeping and masturbating outside a grade school, both in Dothan, Alabama. One when he was twenty years old, another when he'd just turned twenty-one.
Nothing since then, but if he was the man she thought he was, Lundy had learned to fly under the radar, graduating from peeping and masturbating to taking young girls. His crimes fit into a predictable time line, a clear trajectory. He had been given time to develop predilections and rituals---like dressing girls up in his doll dresses.
He'd learned his craft.
Laura had no doubt he kept a rape kit in his motor home with all the tools he needed to capture, subdue, and kill his victim.
She had been right about the motor home. Dale Lundy owned a 1987 Fleetwood Pace Arrow. He also owned the house next door to the de Seroux house---the one she'd noticed because it was boarded up.
Vindication.
The Lundy house had been empty and boarded up since Bill Lundy died all those years ago, but had never been put up for sale. Dale Lundy had used the address when he bought the motor home, and it was the address listed on his credit cards.
They crossed the neat lawn and knocked on the front door.
Lanier appeared in khakis and a knit shirt---relaxing after a hard day of torpedoing search warrants. A dour, long-faced man with wire glasses perched on his nose, he looked down that nose now. Two grouchy-looking King Charles spaniels barked and yapped at his feet. "What do you want now?" he asked.
Redbone scratched his ear. "Well, Thad, more evidence just turned itself up. Looks pretty convincing to me."
"Very well." Lanier opened the door and stood back.
The front room was palatial. High ceilings, plaster rosettes in the corners. A gleaming hardwood floor. A grand piano with a mirror finish. Striped silk Queen Anne chairs.
Lanier led the way to his study, followed by the two muttering King Charles spaniels. He sat down at his massive mahogany desk and directed them to sit, too.
His sigh was long-suffering. "Let's see what you've got."
He perched the glasses farther down on his nose and started reading.
Twenty minutes later, they had their search warrant.
36
"Here's what I want to do," Laura said to Chief Redbone outside the police station early the next morning. "I want one officer on the back door, and the rest of us will go in the front."
"I don't know we need to do that," Redbone said. "The place is boarded up and you said yourself this guy is in Arizona. We don't have to go running in there like we're looking for terrorists or something."
He had a point, but it was not one Laura would concede. She didn't care if the place was boarded up, she wanted a safe entry. She outlined it for him: she, Redbone, and one officer would take the front, and the third officer would take the back. She would position herself to the left of the front door, and Redbone and his officer would take the right.
She said to Redbone, "I'll go low and you go high. Your officer will go low. That way I'll cover the right side of the house, and you'll take care of the left."
He shrugged. "You're calling the shots."
Jerry Oliver drove up and got out of his car.
Redbone called out, "Jerry, you ever check that steak knife of Ginny Peacock's into evidence?"
"Don't worry, it's safe in the trunk."
"Why don't you do it now?"
"Can't it wait until after we do the entry?"
"No, it can't wait." Redbone looked at Laura. "Tell you what. You go with Officer Descartes, and Oliver and I'll be right behind you."
Warning her, perhaps, what caliber of officer Jerry Oliver was. She hoped Descartes was better.
Officer Descartes, it turned out, was much better.
"How's that strep throat, Andy?" Redbone asked as a young man in an Apalachicola PD uniform emerged from the City Hall building. Redbone turned to Laura. "Got him out of bed for this thing."
"I'm fine now, sir," Descartes said. "The antibiotics pretty much knocked it out."
Redbone introduced them. "I hope that pretty wife of yours is taking care of you." Redbone winked at Laura. "Newlyweds."
Laura noticed the unmistakable outline of a protective vest under Descartes's uniform. That made two of them. She'd asked Redbone earlier if he had Kevlar vests, and he'd said that the city council was still considering if it was a necessary expense. Evidently Officer Andrew Descartes had ordered the vest on his own. And unlike Jerry Oliver, Descartes's uniform was pressed and his brass polished.
The trip to Lundy's house covered only a few blocks, allowing Laura to get a feel for the third member of the Apalachicola PD. She ran down her plan.
"Are we clear on that?"
"Yes ma'am."
"You might think because the place is boarded up that this should be a cakewalk."
Before she could continue he said, "I don't think that, ma'am."
"Why not?"
"I was taught at the Academy you always need a plan. I mean, think about it, the bad guy might---have a plan. And if he does and you don't, you could get yourself and others killed." He came to a stop at an intersection, scanning the street with sharp eyes. "Besides, you know what you're going to do, you practice it, then if things go bad on you, you'll probl'y come out all right because you fell back on your training."
"You sure you feel up to this?" she asked. "Strep throat is nothing to fool around with."
"I'm fine. Those antibiotics kick major---they really do the job."
On Fifteenth Street now, he made a pass by the Lundy house. He didn't slow down, didn't give any hint that this was the house he was interested in, although his eyes missed nothing. He reached the end of the block, turned, and parked out of sight of the house. He turned off the engine, tapped the wheel with his fingers. Geared up.
"Have you ever done this before?" she asked him.
"No ma'am."
"I'm not worried," she said. "Just trust your instincts."
Right now, her instincts told her that at least one member of the three-man Apalachicola Police Department wasn't up for this. Even sick, Descartes looked like the better bet.
She stepped out into the warm morning. The grass and hedges were still soggy with dew and the street was quiet---no one around. Good. A tickle of excitement in her own gut. Nervousness. Not unusual, but something to acknowledge. Mentally she took inventory: the Sig Sauer forty caliber under her blazer, the S&W nine millimeter in her boot, handcuffs tucked into the back pocket of her slacks. Flashlight. Pepper spray. Gloves.
They walked up to the corner. An Apalachicola PD patrol car came up the street. To Laura's dismay, it stopped right in front of Lundy's house. Might as well be a flashing sign. Laura wasn't surprised to see Jerry Oliver emerge from the driver's side.
She regretted not pushing Chief Redbone to request a SWAT response from the sheriff's office. She knew the chief was smart, and there was no question he knew his town. But he might be out of his depth here. If it weren't for the fact that the house was boarded up, she would call this off now.
She let Redbone outline the problem, only interjecting to say that she wanted Descartes to take the back and Oliver to remain in front with them. She wanted Jerry Oliver where she could keep an eye on him.
As Redbone parroted her earlier instructions, Laura looked the house over. Like its neighbor, it was clapboard---modest compared to some of the houses on this street. The original color was Wedgewood blue trimmed with white, but the wood had weathered to gray. Plywood had been hammered across the windows, the front door barred by several planks. As they crossed the leaf-littered yard, an enormous magnolia tree swallowed them in dark shade. Some kind of hedge Laura didn't recognize grew around the house, something with thorns. It had gone wild, obscuring several of the windows. The porch was festooned with Virginia creeper that in some places had died but remained, snarled and gray like a spider web.
Gun ready, Laura crept up to the house at an angle, even though no one could see out the windows. She stood to the left of the door, which would open inward. But first, it would have to be stripped of the planks that had been hammered across it.
Redbone nodded to Oliver, who pried up the boards with the sharp end of a crowbar. When he was done, Oliver threw the crowbar on the grass with a hollow bang.
Laura crouched down, looking over to see that both Redbone and Oliver were in position. She caught Oliver's eye and nodded toward the gun on his hip. He sighed heavily and drew his weapon. Redbone checked the radio to make sure Descartes was stationed at the back door.
The radio crackled. He was in position.
Redbone tested the knob on the door. Locked. He nodded to Oliver, who re-holstered his weapon, retrieved the crowbar, and bashed the lock with repeated blows. The door creaked open a couple of inches.
This time when Oliver threw the crowbar, it nearly took out Laura's foot. He caught her look and had the grace to look sheepish. He again withdrew his weapon, but held it loosely at his side, pointed down and dangling a little behind his leg.
She thought: I hope his complacency doesn't catch up with him someday.
She dropped into a crouch. Looked at Oliver again. He assumed a crouching position and raised his gun. Redbone remained standing, aiming his weapon toward the left. Laura shouted, "Police! Search Warrant!" and shoved the door the rest of the way open, swinging back and forth into the dark, her weapon leveled on empty air.
37
The word that came to her was "surreal". As if she were in the middle of a snow globe, but the snow was the dust motes that floated in the golden light from the open doorway. Glittering snowflakes falling across the jumping beam of her MagLite.
It floated out of the darkness at her, this strange, cluttered room. Too much to assimilate right now. She didn't have time.
"Clear!" she called as she ducked into the doorway to her left. Another light---Redbone's---jumped into the darkness, a weak ray. She was in the kitchen. Counter, sink, refrigerator---
"Kitchen is clear!"
Her flashlight swung in the other direction as Laura heard Oliver scrambling toward the doorway on the other side.
"Bedroom is clear!" Oliver shouted.
They went through the house, systematically clearing every room. Laura saw things that she did not expect to see, but it was so dark she would reserve judgment until they could get light on the situation. They returned to the first room, the living room.
Despite her wariness, respiration was beginning to return to normal. They'd checked every closet, every alcove. No one home.
The place smelled stale.
Oliver holstered his weapon and stretched his neck as Andrew Descartes entered through the front door. Jerry Oliver would not be punished for his inattention today.
"Let's get some light in here," Laura said. "Get the rest of that plywood off."
38
Once the plywood was off, there was enough light to search some of the rooms, but not all. Redbone got on the horn and made arrangements for a gas-powered generator and a pair of 500-watt quartz lamps from the Franklin County Sheriff's Department.
There was enough light, though, for Laura to think she had stepped inside an old photograph of a Victorian house---something you'd see in a history book.
The front room---the parlor---seemed to press in on her. A stamped tin ceiling, an old-fashioned chandelier, dark furniture, burgundy velvet drapes swagged to reveal immaculate white lace. Everything fringed, shirred, swagged, or flocked. The wallpaper was dark, the floor dominated by a large oriental carpet. Oval portraits on the walls in old, convex glass. Bric-a-brac everywhere: china cabinet, ottoman, settee, footstools---
So much of it.
Ottoman, settee ... Words people didn't use anymore: A room out of the nineteenth century. The operative word here was fussy.
"Good Lord Jesus," muttered Redbone. "It looks like a museum."
Laura's attention was caught by a sewing machine, modern vintage, on a table. Another sewing machine that looked exactly like the first one except smaller---a child's machine?---sat on a shorter table.
Laura's throat felt dry as her latexed hand pulled open the many drawers and searched alcoves neatly stacked with patterns, thread spools, bobbins, measuring tapes.
Him and his mom, sewing together in the good old days?
But it still confused her.
This room confused her.
A Bible stand in the corner of the room, old and well-used. On the inside it said, "This Bible belongs to Alene Davis."
His mother's maiden name.
This room had a surreal quality, as if all she had to do was close her eyes and when she opened them again she'd see an abandoned house with plywood windows and cracking plaster.
She ran an index finger across an oval rosewood table. Dust. Several layers. But other than that, the place was clean. The dust was the only sign that Lundy had not been here for a long time. Everything was neatly displayed, a tableau.
A shrine?
She bent to look at the underside of the rosewood table: Ethan Allen---the store.
Not an antique then. An approximation of an antique.
She flashed her light on the ceiling. It might have been stamped tin, or plastic made to look like stamped tin.
Watching where she walked, Laura went down the hall.
She looked in on a bedroom. It, too, looked frozen in time. A single bed with lace and eyelet Victorian linens, a down comforter, heaps of satin pillows. A wooden rocking horse. Enormous dry flower arrangements in tall vases. Dolls on a window seat.
A little girl's room, but Dale Lundy was an only child.
Onward, farther down the hall.
A boy's room. This one had Darth Vader sheets and posters from the seventies. A hooked rug on polished floorboards. Cowboy-and-Indian wallpaper, cornflower blue.
Dark in here. On an impulse, Laura walked to the window. Carefully, she moved aside the cowboy-and-Indian-patterned drapes with her latexed hands. She was right. Black-out curtains.
He'd used plywood to cover up the windows, but he'd added black-out curtains as well. Why? It was as if this house had to remain a secret. As if it embarrassed him in some way. Maybe the kids at school had called him a mama's boy.
But he had been home-schooled---isolated from other kids.
Lonely?
At the end of the hall was what Laura assumed was the master bedroom.
She opened the door.
From every wall, Marisa de Seroux stared down at her.
Eight-by-tens, four-by-fives. Posters, blown up and fuzzy. Photo after photo after photo, a collage from floor to ceiling. Mostly black and white. All of the same girl. Most of them candid shots, where the girl wasn't posing or even looking at the camera. Many of them had been blown up to catch her face. But the majority of them were good, professional quality. Taken with a telephoto lens, pictures of the girl, unaware, going about her life in the small town of Apalachicola. As if she were being followed around by paparazzi.
The photos were cracked in places, as if they had curled up at one point and then been flattened again and again, glued in place.
She called Chief Redbone in.
"What does this look like to you?"
"I'll be damned. He sure had a thing for her, didn't he?"
"So this is definitely Marisa de Seroux?"
"Oh, I'd say so. That's Misty."
"Misty?"
"That's what everyone knew her by."
Laura walked to the first wall. "She didn't know he was taking them."
"This makes no sense."
"Maybe it does. It looks to me like he was obsessed with her." Enough to come back to town and pretend he was a member of her family? She had seen stranger things in her career.
She inhaled. It was musty in here; the place had been closed up for a long time.
"Hey, look at that." Chief Redbone motioned to a shelf crammed with books. "That one on the end. Looks like a scrapbook."
She walked over to the shelf and gently lifted out the scrapbook. More dust, like a blanket. The scrapbook was a cheap one he must have gotten from a drug store. It had a bright yellow sunflower on the front.
She opened it up, careful not to smudge anything. The first thing she realized: it was less than a quarter full.
The first few pages were some of the best photos of Marisa de Seroux. Pale skin, blond, with serious eyes and a heart-shaped face. An angel.
Then she came to a yellowed newspaper clipping. Laura recognized it: The New Times article about the de Seroux murder-suicide. She turned the page and saw the photo from Page 2, a white coffin under a mass of lilies being hefted up the steps into a church.
In the margin someone---Lundy, she assumed---had written in faded ink, "Liars!"
She made a note to save it for handwriting analysis.
Chief Redbone bent to see over her shoulder. "What does he mean by that?"
Laura knew. She felt it, that tangible truth that occasionally revealed itself at a certain point in a case. "He didn't believe she was dead."
"What? Why would he think that?"
"It was a closed-casket funeral, right? He could have gotten the idea she somehow escaped."
"Escaped?"
"Uh-huh." Laura remembered the news reports on TV after the Judd murder case in Safford. The hope everyone had that one of the children had escaped when all that time she lay underneath the house, dying.
"He must have been delusional," Redbone said.
"They say love is blind."
"What? Are you saying he was in love with a twelve-year-old girl?"
"Is it really that much of a stretch? How old do you think he was?"
Redbone frowned. "I don't know. A teenager, I guess."
"Probably not that much older than Marisa---Misty."
"She didn't escape, though. Everybody knew that. No way anyone could escape something like that---Henry shot up the house."
"The paper didn't publish any crime scene photos."
"No, of course not."
"There was no trial?"
"Nobody to prosecute. Everybody was dead."
"I'm guessing Lundy didn't want to believe it, so he didn't. What do they say? Perception is reality. Misty escaping---that was his reality."
"We can't know that for sure."
"No." Laura turned the page. It felt fragile in her hand, crackly. Another shorter article describing the murders-suicide. Laura read through it quickly---nothing new.
But on the opposite page was something that made no sense at all.
It was a small news item in a Vancouver newspaper.
"WOMAN IN ALERT BAY SUCCUMBS TO INJURIES. Live-in Boyfriend Charged with Capital Murder."
"Misty Patin of Alert Bay, British Columbia, who has been in a coma for half a year, died today, paving the way for Robert Lewis to be charged with murder..."
Laura read quickly. Misty Patin, age twenty-eight, had been beaten so badly she had been on life support for six months before succumbing to her injuries. She left behind a girl, thirteen, and a boy, five. This had been one of two traumatic events in Misty Patin's young life. Her daughter, Kim, had been kidnapped from a Wal-Mart in Vancouver during a family shopping trip two years before. Tragedy was averted, though, when she was found shortly afterwards in the custody of a cabbie several miles away. According to the cabbie, he had picked up a nervous man and young girl in the Gas Town district. The girl started crying and told the cabbie that the man was not her daddy. The man then jumped out of the cab and disappeared into the crowd.
The Pakistani cabbie described the man as "not a tough guy, you know? He was more like a gay."
Gay, Laura thought. Or just effeminate? The kind of guy who grew up sewing alongside his mother. She said aloud, "How would he get the idea this woman was his Misty?"
"Lundy?" The chief stared at her. "What, you think he followed her there? Because of her name?"
Laura was thinking on her feet now. "My guess it was Lundy who kidnapped the girl."
"I thought he was in love with Misty."
"I know." It didn't make sense. Something was missing. Maybe it wasn't him. Maybe he didn't follow her there. But she wondered how a man in Apalachicola, Florida, would get his hands on a newspaper from Alert Bay, Canada. She wondered how many people in Apalachicola, Florida, knew of the existence of Alert Bay, Canada---or vice versa. She herself had never heard of Alert Bay until now.
Laura said, "There must be some link."
"You think he tracked down every Misty he could find?"
"Somehow he got on to this one."
"That's crazy. How would he get the idea that was Misty de Seroux?"
"I don't know." She was stuck on the kidnapping. If it was him---and she felt sure it was---why did he kidnap the girl when it was Misty he was after?
He was attracted to young girls. That had to be the reason. Maybe he went looking for Misty. And then he saw her daughter.
He'd gone looking for Misty. It was the only thing that made any sense. "If you thought you'd been lied to, that the girl you were in love with got away, how would you track her down?" Laura asked the chief.
"It's too unbelievable."
"I know. But remember that story about Anastasia, one of the Czar's daughters? A lot of people believed she escaped. They made a movie about it. If you thought Misty had somehow gotten away, what would you do?"
"I guess I'd get in touch with her people---if she had any left."
"Do you know where her family were from?"
"I have no idea. I know they moved here from somewhere else. But they weren't from too far away. Their accents."
"Why'd it take him so long?" Laura said.
"What?"
"Why did he go after her in 1998?"
She looked down at the scrapbook. That was the last page. It was as if he'd abandoned it. Or started a new one.
She stared at the sunflower. It sat in a turquoise water can. Behind it, through a window, a man stooped behind a plough. She thought that Jay Ramsey could have used his image recognition software to pinpoint the water can, the man, the mule, the plough.
"The Internet," she said.
"What?"
"He found Misty on the Internet."
"How would he do that?"
"He did a search on Google or another search engine. Probably found himself a bunch of Mistys, then whittled them down."
"How would he do that?"
She shrugged. "Age, coloring, height---maybe he knew how to get information from driver's licenses. Maybe he hired a private investigator. For whatever reason, he zeroed in on this Misty. Maybe because of the name. Patin."
"Makes sense. Patin's French. De Seroux's French."
"Maybe he found a Misty Patin, found out she once lived here in this part of the country."
"That's crazy."
"He was there in 1998. He took her daughter."
"You don't know that for sure."
"No, I don't."
Redbone scratched his head. "You think he was the one who killed her?"
"It says in the article her boyfriend killed her. I think that's probably true. Lundy wouldn't hang around. He wouldn't kill her two years later. He would have moved on by then."
To preteen girls.
"Found something here!" yelled Officer Oliver from somewhere else in the house. He sounded excited.
Laura didn't like being dragged away from her thoughts. Hard enough to keep track of them---they kept doubling back on themselves, trying to make sense of Dale Lundy's actions.
"In here!" Oliver called again.
She left the scrapbook and made her way to the kitchen.
The kitchen was utilitarian, with a round-shouldered refrigerator and sunny yellow, chintz drapes and matching covers for the kitchen chairs. The large hooked rug in the center had been pushed aside to reveal a trapdoor in the old floorboards.
"Want me to open it?"
"No," Laura said.
He gave her a hostile look. "What do you want me to do?"
"Nothing for now. We'll get to it later."
He scratched his head. "I don't see why ..."
"Because she told you, is why," Redbone said behind her. "Leave it be."
Oliver shot him a look of undisguised contempt. He was the son of a city council member, probably felt he was entitled.
"What do you want to do?" Redbone asked Laura quietly.
"I want to make sure we don't have any surprises." So far, Lundy had been full of surprises. "I want us to make sure we have cover and do this right. We might need assistance from Hazardous Devices."
"Good enough for me." Redbone looked at Oliver and nodded to the door. "You mark the evidence I pointed out in the living room yet?"
Oliver stared at him, fuming, before brushing past them without a word. Redbone followed him out, ostensibly to make sure he did what he was told.
Laura looked at Descartes, who had witnessed the exchange from the hallway. "Andrew, wait a minute."
"Yes ma'am."
"Keep an eye on Oliver for me, would you? Under no circumstances is he to open that trapdoor. It's a safety issue."
"I'll make sure, you better believe it, ma'am."
Laura got Victor on the phone and gave him a rundown of what they had found. She read off Lundy's credit card numbers and gave him a detailed description of the motor home he was driving, the 1987 Fleetwood Pace Arrow.
Victor broke in. "Chuck Lehman confessed---"
"What?"
"But not to killing Parris. He was sleeping with her."
The moment Victor said it, all Lehman's actions, his evasions, made sense. Hanging out with Cary and Cary's girlfriend, the falling-out between them.
"It would explain a lot. The lipstick, for one. He's gonna plead to the probation violation and to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. That'll put him away for a while."
"So you believe him?" Laura asked.
Victor sighed. "I believe it. Especially after I looked at the time line and it didn't fit with the Burns killing. Do me a favor and don't say you told me so."
They talked about Lehman, but Laura's mind was still on Dale Lundy and his cross-country adventure. The idea that he was looking for someone like Misty de Seroux was, in a way, a hopeful sign. He was looking for an emotional connection. That might mean the difference between life and death for the next girl he took.
He'd kept Alison Burns for five days. Most sexual predators who murdered their victims killed them within the first few hours.
"... with this?" Victor was asking.
"What?"
"You want us to go to the media?"
"No. I think we should keep it within law enforcement agencies for now. Put out an Attempt to Locate, make sure everybody gets pictures of him, the motor home, the credit card numbers. We don't want to scare him out of the area. This weekend, he's supposed to play at the Copper Queen Hotel."
"We might get lucky if he used his credit cards, too. Find a paper trail."
"I'm hoping."
After he hung up she said into the phone: "I told you so."
She started photographing the bedroom, paying particular attention to the evidence she had marked: the scrapbook, the wall of photos, the contents of the closet. Chief Redbone had gone back to the evidence room at the PD to pick up more evidence bags---they'd need them.
She had just walked into the master bathroom when the roar of a shotgun blast reverberated through the cheap wallboard, stunning the air into silence.
39
In the first few moments after the blast, Laura heard nothing. She ran to the kitchen like she was running through a dream. Like those movies where the woman runs from her pursuer, the soundtrack screeching and thrumming along with her thoughts, tracking her with a shaking handheld camera as she blunders through tilting corridors and jack-in-the-box shadows before stumbling onto a scene of unrelenting horror.
She knew it would be bad.
Two men down. One breathing, one not. Laura radioed Apalachicola PD, got no one. No one minding the store---the chief en route? Shit shit shit! She called 911. The phone still cradled between her shoulder and her ear as she dropped to her knees beside Andrew Descartes, compressing the carotid, her mind ticking between clinical observation and a panicked string of thoughts, just a kitchen towel and the gloves between her and his blood---unlikely he had AIDS, but you never knew---his life leaking out, the phone slipping out from under her chin and dropping to the floor. The air was bright, every airborne fiber, every dust mote, every speck of blood delineated, every sound magnified. Knowing it was hopeless, but unable to stop trying.
Descartes. Jesus.
Oliver moaning, then screaming, like a stuck pig.
Looking at Descartes, knowing he was finished. One shot to the carotid. Gone.
Let him go.
Move on to Oliver---more wounds. Find the worst one and compress that.
Later.
More sounds. Radio static, a paramedic talking into his shoulder. Ripping sensors, snatching bandages, and sucking oxygen. The pneumatic wheeze of the gurney bearing Jerry Oliver down the steps to the waiting ambulance, a few blocks to Weems Memorial Hospital, and from there a Medevac to Tallahassee Memorial---if he didn't die before he got to Weems.
Jerry Oliver had been shot in the cheek, eye, left shoulder, and upper right chest. Oliver, whom Laura was sure had been the one to open the trapdoor, was going to Weems and, if he was lucky, on to Tallahassee. Andrew Descartes, who had tried to stop him, was going nowhere---not for another couple of hours at least. First he would lie in his own blood while he was photographed from every angle. Then he would be transported to the morgue, evidence tweezered from his wound, his statistics read into a recorder, his organs weighed and measured, his skull sawed in half.
Andrew Descartes was now evidence in a crime.
The responding officer---a sheriff's deputy---looked sheepish after yorking his guts out on the linoleum floor. Uniforms coming, but where the hell were they?
Where were the techs from the Hazardous Devices unit?
They would be the ones to handle the 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun still resting in its brackets on the underside of the trapdoor, everything but the muzzle concealed by a homemade plywood box. This she saw with brilliant clarity; her clinical mind divided right down the middle from her more emotional side, the emotional side lagging behind, still in shock. A simple principle. When the trapdoor opens, the shotgun fires: Chief Redbone's police force wiped out in an instant.
Laura stood in the torn, blood-spattered kitchen, hands tucked up under her arms from long practice.
She would not touch anything.
A paramedic entered the room, pulling another gurney bearing a body bag.
"You can't do that," Laura said.
"Who are you?"
I'm the person who caused all this. She held up her shield and gave him her name and rank. "He's not going anywhere."
"The chief---"
"This is a crime scene. He's staying here."
The sheriff deputy stepped up. "She's right, man, we have charge of this scene now."
Only then did the paramedic leave.
The room narrowed down to just Laura and the body of Andrew Descartes. She made herself look at him. She was used to looking at the dead, but this was different. She knew him. She'd shared a joke with him not an hour ago. She saw his promise---a good cop who might have grown into an exceptional cop.
I wonder who will tell his wife.
She should be the one to do it because she felt responsible. If she hadn't come here, none of this would have happened. He'd still be at home, getting over strep throat, his new wife babying him with chicken soup...
The thought suddenly occurred to her: Where was Chief Redbone? She didn't remember him being around here. Had he already gone to tell Descartes's wife?
She wondered how it felt to have your whole police force devastated in the course of a split second. She thought of how his life had been laid out just the way he liked it---his teenage daughters, his sleepy town, dispensing his good ol' boy wisdom.
In twenty-three years, I never had to draw my gun in anger.
That record was shot to shit.
Laura kept her eye on Andrew Descartes, feeling dizzy. Look at him until you detach. Step back, detach, do your job.
Never before had her job felt moot. Never until now did she realize what a small dent seeking justice made into grief. Yes, she helped pick up the pieces, but they were still pieces. The aftermath of a tornado. In the face of that destruction, you were helpless. Now it had struck home, and she wondered if her job was worth anything at all.
She continued to stare at him, like serving some godawful penance. Filling her eye, her soul with him. Her mind straying away, and she patiently bringing it back around and around again to the fact: You did this. You're responsible.
But now she had to do the right thing. Look around, figure it out. Do your job.
Buckshot. She guessed .00 buckshot from the look of the wound. A single pellet, slicing through his carotid like a tiny razor.
Tears formed at the edge of her eyes, threatening to brim over, a still pool. That, she could not allow to happen. So she blinked. She blinked so hard and so fast she could feel it in the back of her skull, a corresponding ache to the one inside her gut.
Where was Chief Redbone? The deputy was the only other member of law enforcement here, but when she looked for him he was gone.
Out to meet the reinforcements, she hoped.
She heard the toilet flush somewhere in the house. The kid had used the bathroom at a crime scene.
She'd ream him out when he came back.
And then she realized it: You have no standing here. She would not be the investigator of this crime. That would fall to the state police, her counterpart in Florida.
But Laura couldn't leave. She couldn't leave Andy Descartes here alone.
Late in the afternoon, Laura and Chief Redbone drove up to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement regional office in Tallahassee to give their statements after handing the crime scene over to two FDLE agents. Both of them were preoccupied with their own thoughts and did not speak. Laura found refuge in the scenery as they drove in and out of the lengthening shadows. The grass along the roadside was a dazzling kelly green from the rain earlier today. The sun's horizontal rays ignited the trees and shimmered on the blacktop like gold. Laura found herself looking back at the sunset behind them, the leftover clouds turning from tangerine to cherry-red to dark plum.
Andy Descartes would never see another sunset.
At FDLE, Laura gave her statement, as clear and detailed as she could remember. When she was through, Special Agent Jack McClellan shut off the tape recorder and smiled. Laura noticed he smiled a lot, but she wasn't sure why.
"That should do it. You're free to go."
Free to go where? Laura thought. She pictured herself getting a ride to the Tallahassee airport, changing her ticket, boarding the plane. Maybe sip a cocktail as they passed over the Mississippi and she put the south behind her. Just a quick trip in and out of Florida, leaving an obliterated Apalachicola PD and broken lives in her wake.
But that wasn't who she was. "There's the disposition of the evidence. We need to work that out."
"I wouldn't worry," said Jeremy Poitras, McCellan's co-agent. He was a massive black man with an exquisitely-shaped shaved head. He wore an expensive suit. "I'm sure we can come to some accommodation."
A fancy-ass word for a fancy-ass man. Laura said, "We'll need to do forensics on the computer, if you find one."
"We can work that out," Poitras said." We have very good people here---we can do the specific computer forensics."
"I want the computer to go to the DPS lab in Phoenix."
McClellan broke in smoothly, "First of all, we don't know he even has a computer. But if your agency can make their case to us, there's a good chance we'll release to you all the evidence that doesn't pertain to our investigation."
"I want to go into the de Seroux house. You understand I have a vested interest in this. Your guys are going to be looking for other things."
"That's fine by me," Poitras said. "You can certainly tag along, but ..." He consulted his watch. "You'd better get down there soon. I have a feeling they've already gone in."
Laura felt her hostility rise to the surface. "I hope nobody opened any trapdoors," she said.
The de Seroux house itself seemed normal compared to Lundy's secret place. Cheap generic furniture. Plenty of fingerprints, but little else. There was a desk for a computer, a cheap printer, split phone lines, a surge protector, and APS, but the computer (or computers) were gone.
Again, Laura had the feeling that Lundy wasn't coming back. He had left the furniture, but taken all his paper trail with him: checkbooks, statements, records. There was a square of less-worn linoleum in the room where the computer had been---she guessed it was where he kept his file cabinet.
The place felt like an abandoned ship.
The first to enter the de Seroux house was the FDLE Hazardous Devices Unit, entering through the tunnel from Lundy's side, past the deployed weapon, looking for traps along the way. They found nothing on the other end except a corresponding trapdoor in the floor of de Seroux's tool shed.
Laura wondered if Lundy expected his house to be searched and planned for that eventuality.
She had never been so tired. Perhaps it was because she felt like a guest at her own scene. She was allowed to gather evidence, but always under the watchful eyes of the FDLE special agents. She chafed; she never did well where she didn't have some control.
They finished processing the house early in the evening of the next day. Laura realized she was starving. She went by the deli on Market and got herself a submarine sandwich and a bottle of water, took them down to Battery Park. It was the first food she'd had all day.
After finishing her sandwich, she walked out onto the long dock. There was a slight squall out in the bay tonight, the scent of rain hanging in the air, and the sky alternated between bruised blue and copper when the sun came through. Fishing boats---she guessed a lot of them were charters---were coming in at sunset.
Why did he booby trap the tunnel? That bothered her. If he was protecting the de Seroux house, did he really think the booby trap would stop the police? Or maybe was it just to kill whoever got that far---because he could.
Maybe he did it because he was embarrassed by the house itself, what it said about him---his obsession with Misty, his shrine to his mother's memory, the Victorian parlor. Mother and son sewing together. Maybe he wanted to hurt whoever became privy to his secret life.
Impossible to know what was in his mind.
Tomorrow morning they would search the tunnel again. Maybe she'd find her answer then. But she was beginning to believe it was just what her mother used to call pure bloody-mindedness.
She'd have to ask him when she met him face to face.
A pristine white sportsfisher was coming in, dropping down into idle just inside the no-wake zone. Freedom's Daughter was written in blue cursive on the bow. Laura felt her spirit lift just looking at it.
"I've always wanted a boat like that," Chief Redbone said behind her.
For a big man, he was light on his feet.
"Lot of work though," he added, leaning on the dock railing. "Time and money both."
The light had turned red now.
"That's a beautiful name for a boat," Laura said.
"I sure do second that."
Laura felt uncomfortable around him. The only time they had spent together since the tragedy was on the drive to FDLE in Tallahassee. She had not seen him since.
"How's it going over there?" he asked now.
She shrugged. "We haven't found much."
He sighed. "Glad I'm out of it."
He didn't sound devastated. He sounded like his old self. Laura wondered if that was a front.
"How's Mrs. Descartes doing?"
He leaned his back against the railing. His eyes looked like dark pebbles in his face, which seemed unusually slack. "About as well as you'd expect, which is not good at all."
"I should have gone with you. I feel responsible."
"It wasn't your fault." He said it, but she could tell he didn't believe it.
"Will she be all right? Financially?"
"She and Andy belong to the Church of Christ. Don't have to worry about making ends meet, not in this town. We take care of our own."
Laura opened her mouth to tell him she wished she could help, but said nothing. She could tell from the tone of his voice that she in fact wouldn't be asked to help. She was the stranger here.
And so she watched Freedom's Daughter glide under the bridge and into the Apalachicola River. Such a beautiful town. Easy and slow. She'd brought her big city troubles here, destroyed lives.
Chief Redbone stared straight ahead. "Thought you'd want to know Jerry Oliver's been upgraded to guarded. They think he'll be all right, although he lost the eye."
She nodded. "There are a few things we need to discuss. Will you be in the office tomorrow?" she asked him.
"Nope. I'm pretty much done here."
"What do you mean?"
He leveled his gaze on her. "I'm through with this. It wasn't what I signed up for."
"You mean you're quitting?"
"Been there, done that, as they say."
"What will happen now?"
"They're plenty of folks wanting this job. They're welcome to it."
"What are you going to do?"
"Me?" He thought about it. "First thing I'm gonna do is go fishing."
She thought he was done, but he stared back out at the bay and continued, "Hasn't been one bad thing that a few days of fishing didn't cure, at least for me. Even my divorce. Thing is, though," he massaged his forehead over one eye, "I don't think I can ever get that picture of Andy out of my mind."
40
Chief Redbone left not long after that. Laura remained until it was dark, staring out at the bay and the ocean beyond. It was a short walk to the Gibson Inn, but as Laura started back she became aware of someone in the corner of her eye angling toward her at a rapid pace.
She was reaching for the Sig Sauer on her hip when she smelled the aftershave.
Old Spice. A familiar shape.
She left the gun where it was as Frank Entwistle materialized beside her. She heard the tiny wheezes through his nostrils he always made whenever he tried to keep up with her.
"What are you doing here?"
"Thought you could use some backup. Emotionally speaking."
"Emotionally speaking."
"Yeah, you know. Be your sounding board." He waved his cigarette and the cherry danced around them like a flying saucer.
Laura was weary of this.
"If you're so tuned in to me and my problems, why didn't you give me a heads-up on the booby trap?" Why didn't you save Andy Descartes?
In the dark, his face was the color of ash and about as amorphous. "Could you slow down a little? You know I have a bum knee."
He stopped, so she stopped too. "To answer your question, I'm not a mind-reader. I don't have a crystal ball either."
"Then what the hell are you?"
He shrugged his shoulders in his ill-fitting coat and loosened his tie.
"I been tryin' to figure it out. You're not the only one who's affected by this situation." He swiped at his forehead with the back of his hand. "Damn, it's humid here. This is only a hunch, kiddo, but it could be I'm part of your subconscious."
Laura watched as a stream of cars came down the Gorrie St. Bridge, headlights flaring behind the dead homicide dick and turning him into a silhouette.
"Why are you here?"
He shrugged. "Beats me."
"Then why do you keep showing up?"
"Look, you're the one who's pulling all the strings. It's pretty clear you need me."
"Need you?"
Her phone chirped. She recognized the number that flashed on the screen---Victor's home phone.
Frank was saying, "If I were you I'd---"
"Just a second," she said to Entwistle, holding up a hand. She wanted to catch Victor before it went to voice mail. Maybe he'd had some luck tracing Lundy.
Entwistle said: "You sure you want to answer that?" just as Victor said something in her ear.
Laura stared from the phone in her hand to Entwistle. "Why wouldn't I want to an---"
"Why wouldn't you what?" asked Victor.
Laura looked at the spot where Entwistle had been. Gone.
Gradually it came through, what Victor was saying.
Frank Entwistle was right; Laura wished she could somehow deflect the words coming from Victor's mouth.
41
SUMMER
Summer didn't like lying to her mom, but she knew she'd never get to meet James if she didn't. There was no way she was going to miss out on the most important day of her life.
"You sure Chrissy's mom'll bring you home?" her mom said as they pulled up in front of McDonalds.
"Uh-huh."
"I don't want to impose."
"She doesn't mind. She likes driving."
"You have to be home by nine o'clock. No later."
"Sure, Mom."
She got out of the car, holding her new shoulder-strap purse that went with her sandals, leaning in and giving her mom a kiss on the cheek. And then she was free.
Her mom pulled out and nearly got wiped out by a bigger SUV. She never did pay attention to her driving. She was just totally unawares, driving away but looking back, waving. As if she'd never see her again.
She always did that.
Her mom treated her like a kid in so many ways, but she also treated her as if she was already an adult. She really liked to "talk things out." Communication was a big thing in their house. Her mom---who had just recently asked Summer to call her Beth---always said, "There's no problem too big to tackle if we just communicate."
Summer glanced at her watch. Seven o'clock. She was glad about the timing. Butthead Bryan was coming over tonight, and when that happened, her mom, who was usually pretty level-headed, kind of lost it. She would do anything for him. She acted like a servant, waiting on him hand and foot. Bryan would be thrilled that she, Summer, was out of the way, over at a friend's house. That way they could do the nasty.
She knew that James wouldn't pat her butt the way Bryan patted her mom's, right in front of her. James had respect for women. When she and James made love, it would be beautiful. It would be right.
She found a table by the window inside so she could see the parking lot. It wasn't dark yet, but it was getting harder to see, especially because headlights were just coming on and they glared in the plate glass windows. Still, she'd know a Z4 anywhere.
She waited, and she waited.
It was getting darker by the minute. Every time a car pulled into the parking lot, she felt this incredible thrill. But none of them was a Z4. She glanced at her watch again. Had it really been ten minutes?
That was when the first doubt crept in. Maybe he was going to stand her up. She pictured having to walk to Chrissy's in the dark and facing her friends, telling them he didn't show up.
No. He wouldn't do that. She and Jamie had some very open and honest conversations in the two and a half months since they'd met on WiNX, had talked for hours online and on the phone. She had fallen in love with him even before she knew what a hunk he was.
She knew he loved her. He sent her the MP3. He wouldn't have done that if he wasn't planning to meet her.
Of course her dad found out and took the MP3 player. He even read their e-mails!
Her face flamed as she thought of that.
"Summer?"
She looked in the direction of the voice. A middle-aged guy was making his way through the restaurant toward her.
"Are you Summer?" he asked.
"Uh-huh." She waited for him to come up to her. He was breathing through his mouth and sweating from the heat. He wasn't much taller than she was and looked a little like Mr. Murray, who taught fifth-period math.
"I'm a friend of James. He got tied up and couldn't make it, so he asked me to pick you up." The man added, "I bet you're thinking you shouldn't go with me, but really, it's all right. James is staying with me while he's here."
"You're Dale?"
He looked surprised. "He mentioned me? Well, that's cool. All he's been talking about is Summer Summer Summer. I didn't think he'd even mention me." He smiled. His smile was so homely, it made her feel good. "Let's go rustle up old Jamie."
She followed him through the parking lot to a white GEO Prizm---not exactly what she'd been dreaming of.
He held the car door open for her, and for a moment she almost balked. Technically, he was a stranger. But if she didn't go with him, it would all be for nothing. She wouldn't get to go on her date.
Plus, James had mentioned Dale.
Dale was looking at her, frowning a little. As if he thought she didn't trust him, and this disappointed him.
She got in.
They pulled out of the parking lot and drove south on Swan. She was aware that he kept sneaking peeks at her. She knew she looked good in her denim skirt and her pink peasant top; getting looked at was nothing unusual. "Why couldn't James come?" she asked him.
"He's working on his folks' motor home. The air conditioner is on the fritz."
"His parents are here too?"
"Yeah. They're good friends of mine. That's how I got to know Jamie. He was the one who got me into dirt bikes."
James had told her that he raced dirt bikes. He also loved to hike and camp. They had that in common; when her parents were still together, they had a camper and would go all over the place.
But now she had another worry. James's parents. What if they thought she was too young? What if they called her mom? Worse, her dad? She thought about this as they drove. Pretty soon she noticed they were driving through an ugly area, past a big electric plant. Dale glanced at her. "Almost there."
He turned onto the Old Benson Highway. This was a scrubby part of town---desert, old motels, and mobile home sales. She wondered why James would stay way out here.
They drove past motels with western names, crummy old places with peeling walls and rusty signs. Past a vacant lot that seemed to go on forever. The headlights picked out the desert broom that grew alongside the road. Her mom had a constant battle with the stuff in their little yard of the new townhouse.
"Here we are," Dale said.
A weathered sign under a light on a tall pole said, EL RANCHO TRAILER COURT. Dale turned onto a narrow lane between two rows of trailers jam-packed together.
"He's staying here?"
"It's close to the airport."
Gravel popped off the GEO's tires as they drove slowly up the lane. The trailers looked dented and ancient---one of them had painted-over windows and was the color of dried blood.
That carnival ride thrill again, only this time it didn't feel so good.
She glanced at Dale. He was humming a tune under his breath, like he was the happiest man in the world.
The window shades of the trailers they passed were all pulled down, dim light seeping out from underneath, flickering blue. She pictured hillbillies in their underwear watching TV and drinking beer in front of an electric fan. They drove by a dead palm that looked like a witch's broomstick, and stopped behind a motor home parked at the end of the lane.
"Here we are," Dale said.
Suddenly she felt queasy. James was going to college in the fall. He owned an expensive sports car. His father was a surgeon. What were James's parents doing in a place like this, when they could have stayed at one of the inns by the airport?
"Come on," Dale said, getting out. He came around to her side and opened the door.
At least the motor home looked good. Clean-looking. New tires. That dispelled some of her worries. The other thing that made her feel better was, for some reason, THE ROPERS wheel cover under the back window. It had to be James's last name. She tried it on for size. James Roper. Mrs. James Roper.
And she liked the curtains in the window. Not blinds, but lace curtains. Something a mom might make. James's mom?
Still, she balked. "Where's James?" she asked.
"He's inside."
"I thought he was working on the air conditioner."
"He's probably finished by now. Come on, let me introduce you to his parents."
That made her hang back even more. She didn't doubt they would call her mom the minute they saw her.
Dale gave her a little nudge. "Come on, don't be shy." He unlocked the door to the motor home and stood there, waiting for her to step up inside.
The confined space was stuffy like it had been shut up. It didn't seem to her that the air conditioning had been on recently. And wouldn't you have it on in order to make sure it worked?
"Jamie!" Dale called into the interior. "Come on out here! Milady awaits!"
That convinced her. She stepped up into the tiny living room.
"Oh," Dale said, as he closed the door behind them. "You know something? I just remembered, Jamie went to the store."
"What about his parents?"
Dale was looking at her, his face sad.
Alarm bells were ringing in her head now. Her stomach tightened, and her heart started pounding in her chest, her throat, her ears. She suddenly felt an overwhelming premonition that she had just stepped off the face of the earth.
42
Beth Holland had been watching TV, one eye on the window. Any moment she expected to see the sweep of headlights announcing Marie Lansing's car.
She had gotten Bryan out of the house by quarter of nine. It was for Summer's sake, because the two didn't get along, and things were tough enough on children of divorce. Even though Summer knew they were involved, she didn't want her to have to face the evidence firsthand. And so she had hustled to make her own bed and even wash the wine glasses and throw the wine bottle into the recycle bin.
Everything had been straightened up by nine o'clock. But nine became nine fifteen, then nine thirty. And now she was starting to worry.
She'd put off calling because she didn't want Summer to think she didn't trust her. But this was ridiculous. Steeling herself, she went to her address book and found the number.
Marie Lansing answered the phone.
"This is Summer's mother. May I speak to her?" She didn't want to embarrass Summer by telling Chrissy's mother what it was about. They would have their talk and that would be it.
Confusion in Mrs. Lansing's voice. "Summer? She's not here."
The girls couldn't still be at McDonalds at this time of night. "She told me she was going to meet Chrissy and Jenny at McDonalds, and then go to your house."
Marie Lansing said, "Chrissy's here. Let me put her on the phone."
As she waited, Beth started to feel more than worry. She told herself not to be silly. It was probably a misunderstanding.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Chrissy? Do you know where Summer is?"
"Huh-uh."
Fear sharpened to a point. Take a deep breath. "I thought she was meeting you and Jenny at McDonalds."
"No," Chrissy said carefully. "I think she said she was busy tonight."
"Busy?" She could hear her own voice, up an octave.
"I don't know what she---I mean, I don't think we had any plans," Chrissy said quickly. "You could call Jenny. Maybe she knows."
She gave Beth the number.
Dreading what she would hear, Beth called Jenny Conley's house and started praying as she waited for Mrs. Conley to go get her daughter. Went through the same questions, the same elusive replies.
Whatever Summer had going, it didn't include Jenny or Chrissy. Summer had lied to her.
Shaken, Beth put the phone down.
She stared at it for a moment. Then she picked it up again and called Buddy.
Buddy Holland was in the process of opening the door to his house in Bisbee when the phone rang. He locked the door behind him and carried the pizza from the Greek place and the beer from the Safeway over to the kitchen counter.
Then he stood over the phone, waiting for the message. He never answered the phone because of telemarketers. He hated them with a passion, but there was nothing he could do to them, so he didn't waste his energy. Two things you had to just let slide in this world---spam and canned phone calls.
After the beep, Beth's voice--- strained and anxious---came on. "I don't know where Summer is---"
He grabbed up the phone.
"Ohmygod, Buddy, she lied to me! I can't believe it ..."
The moment he heard her voice, he knew what had happened.
She was babbling. "I dropped her off at McDonalds and that was the last---"
"Beth, stop it. You need to calm down. Tell me exactly what happened. Don't leave anything out."
She told him. About the friends at McDonalds. About Summer's promise that Mrs. Lansing would drive her home at nine. He glanced at the clock. It was a little after ten now.
Summer had been gone three hours.
When she was through talking, he said, "Listen carefully. I want you to call TPD right now. Have them send someone out to the house. Ask for either White or Cheek. I'm on my way."
"She could just be meeting a boy. Don't you think we should look---"
"Call them. Do it now. I'll see you in an hour and a half."
"You don't think---"
"We don't have time to think. Call them."
When he hung up the phone, he sat down and closed his eyes.
This would be the end of his career. He had to face that. But his career was, at this moment, as unmourned as the uneaten pizza in the cardboard box. It meant nothing.
One thing for sure: He wouldn't want to live if he never saw his little girl again.
He swallowed his pride and made the two calls: one to the Tucson Police Department, the other to the Department of Public Safety. He managed to convince the people who mattered that they needed to recall Laura Cardinal from Florida---now.
By the time she arrived, he would have psyched himself up sufficiently to tell her the truth.
43
She was a wily one---a cop's daughter---but just like the others, she'd ended up doing what he wanted. That was the secret about girls. They aimed to please. Girls could be easily pressured, talked into things---they didn't trust their own instincts. They shut that part of themselves down because they didn't want to appear to be uncool, or rejecting, or out of the loop. So they were malleable.
Even now, he could tell she didn't believe it. She was still trying to apply the ways of the world she knew to this new circumstance. She'd been raised to be polite. She'd been raised to be a good girl. His heart ached for her. Politeness could be a dangerous thing in this day and age.
And yet it was what had attracted him to her. That aura of innocence. Oh, she pretended to be wise in the ways of the world, but she wasn't. She was like a kitten with its hair standing up, making itself seem bigger than it was.
That quality---that politeness, that kindness---that was what he had loved in Misty. Sadly, Misty had grown out of it. She'd had disappointments, she'd fallen into bad ways, she did drugs, but he preferred to remember her the way she was when they were in love.
He watched Summer's face. She was staring around, her bewilderment turning to panic.
"What's going on?" she asked.
He kept his voice steady and low. As you would talking to a frightened animal---and really, that was what she had been reduced to. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"I think I'd better go home."
"In a minute. Just let me explain to you---"
"Where's James?"
This was always the part he didn't like. He hated that moment when he had to tell them the truth. Still, he had learned that it was better to get it over with rather than to scare the girl even more. "James is not coming."
"Where is he?" She had that look in her eye now, a dawning. He reached behind him, made sure the plastic handcuffs were there, stuck down the back of his jeans. He didn't want to use them, but he would if she didn't see reason.
"I want to explain this to you so you understand that I have only your best interests at heart. I'm James. I'm the person you wrote to, I'm the person you fell in love with."
Her mouth dropped open. She started for the door. "Let me out of here!"
He moved quickly and barred the doorway. She couldn't stop herself and stumbled into him, her face almost even with his, her tiny breasts in that peasant top brushing against his chest.
That did it. He wanted her now. Right now. Wanted her badly.
He closed his eyes, sidling away from the proximity of her breasts. He couldn't let her touch him again. If she did, that would be it. That would be it because he had such a tenuous grip now on himself now---
He slid away further. Aware that he was hard as a rock.
No, he told himself. He knew it wouldn't work that way. It just wouldn't. He'd learned from experience. Girls needed to be wooed. His mother had told him that.
He closed his eyes and started to pray. As he prayed, he pictured what it would be like, the two of them, driving all over the country, going wherever they pleased...
"You don't know how great it will be," he said to her. "We can go all over---the Grand Canyon, Disneyland. Have you ever been to Six Flags Over Texas?"
"I don't want to go anywhere. I want to go home. You take me home right now."
"I can't do that."
"Why not?"
"I just can't." He held his hands up, open. "It's for your own good."
But he was looking at those small breasts. Like tiny buds, just barely stretching the peasant top. And her skin. Golden, like honey. There were white stripes, tan lines where she'd worn a swimsuit or sundress that had tied at a knot at the back of her neck. He could see it because of the blouse's scoop neck. And the skirt. So short, so tiny, the narrow little girl hips. The smooth long legs. Like satin.
Misty had dressed like that. His mother used to talk about how slutty she looked. How if Misty were her child she'd dress her in nice dresses. He agreed with that. They hid a girl's wares. Even pure girls had wares. It was just the way God made them.
"Take me home or I'll scream."
"Go ahead. I've heard two screaming fights since I've been here." He tweaked open the shade, the lace curtains. "See---nobody around now. They're all at work or inside their trailers."
"Why are you doing this to me?"
"You'll understand. I know it's going to take awhile to get used to this, but we've got a lot of good times ahead. Just the two of us---"
If only she could understand. He felt the same way when he watched the vet shows on the Animal Planet. When he saw the frightened animals struggling against the people who would help them. They just didn't understand that they were only making things worse by fighting.
He made himself turn away from Summer, the thin top, the smooth denim skirt.
He walked over to the closet and pulled out a dress. Girl's size 12. He had made it last year.
He held it out to her. "Would you do me a favor?" he asked. "Would you go into the bedroom and put that on?"
He saw she was about to argue. And then he saw the intelligence, the cunning, come back over her face.
Nothing like Misty.
Had he made another mistake?
She took the dress, turned on her heel, and walked into the bedroom at the end of the short hall, closed and locked the door.
In the bedroom, Summer stood back from the door, her heart pounding.
This wasn't happening. Where was James? What happened to James?
I'm James
She couldn't think. Her mind was racing, but she couldn't think. She was stuck on the man who said he was James when he wasn't. She was stuck on what he said---God it was so creepy---"Have you ever been to Six Flags over Texas?" Like he thought if he offered that to her everything would be all right, like she was some little kid, and the idea of going anywhere with that ugly, balding, little worm---
Creepy, the way he looked at her.
He was probably her parents' age.
This couldn't be happening. This couldn't be.
She became aware of the dress in her hands. It was like a little girl's dress. She was way too old for it---why'd he want her to wear that? But when he handed it to her, she just took it.
Why didn't I fight? Why didn't I scream? Why didn't I try to escape?
Instead, she just accepted the dress---maybe she even said "thanks." What was wrong with her? How could she have gotten herself into this mess?
Because she knew this was something very bad. She knew enough about sex---three of her friends weren't virgins anymore, and they had told her everything---she knew what this guy wanted.
He was old. He was ugly. The thought of doing it with him made her sick to her stomach. But here she was, in this smothering little room all alone. Her mom didn't know where she was. Her dad ...
He was a cop, but he lived in Bisbee. Of course they'd start looking for her, but how would they find her here? She had a pager in her purse, but what good would that do? He'd just turn it off. She wished her mom had gotten her a cell phone. She said to wait until her birthday. Now I probably won't have a thirteenth birthday.
She had seen enough on TV to know that she was in deep trouble. He would probably rape her. And kill her.
Adrenaline poured through her, a muscular current of fear. Her hands and legs shook.
Get hold of yourself. You're not dead yet.
Maybe, maybe if she cooperated, put on the dress, tried to talk with him. Get him to see her as a human being. Make friends with him. Maybe she could get to his phone, or his computer, or something.
She needed to be smart. Observant, like her dad was. He didn't miss a thing. She remembered when they went to restaurants, he always sat with his back to the wall, scanning the room constantly, always aware. She needed to be like that. Careful and smart.
She'd put the dress on. She'd try to get Dale to talk to her, to make friends with her.
Suddenly, she had something to do. She imagined herself as her dad. He was always in control. He'd be looking for her. He was a cop---he'd know how to find her. But in the meantime, she would picture herself as him. She would act like him, and think like him.
Musicman waited for her to come out. He'd seen this before, the girl going into his bedroom and locking the door, as if she could really escape that way, when in reality she was only putting off the inevitable. One of them---the girl in Colorado---had stayed in the room a day and a half. But she had been so hungry and thirsty, she finally opened the door.
The bedroom door lock that came with the Pace Arrow didn't really work, but he knew it gave them a sense of security. They felt they could get away from him, and that put them at ease. What she probably didn't notice was the hasp on the outside of the door. He could padlock it, but he didn't. Let her think she had the upper hand.
The bedroom was soundproofed. The lace curtains in the bedroom windows looked nice from the outside but they hid the fact that they weren't real windows---not anymore. He had boarded them up. She had locked herself in there, in that soundproofed room, and she could just think about it.
44
Laura massaged her back and stretched her legs. The cabin was dim; hardly anyone else on the plane. Nothing between her and her guilt over the killing in, an itch she could not scratch. Your fault. You didn't trust your instincts. You knew there was a problem with Oliver, but you ignored it.
A police officer dead, lives that would never be the same.
Apalachicola
She kept seeing Chief Redbone's face. The sense of failure she saw in his eyes.
Frank Entwistle used to call her---jokingly---the gunslinger. As in:The gunslinger come to town to help the townspeople chase out the bad elements. Like Wyatt Earp. But this time, she'd brought only devastation and death before slinking off into the night like a coward. She was going home to her little house in Vail---but what would Linda Descartes do tonight?
"This is getting you nowhere," she muttered.
She needed to concentrate on what was happening now---Summer Holland's abduction.
Her conversation with Victor had been brief. Summer Holland disappeared from a McDonalds in Tucson. She'd lied about who she was meeting. And Buddy had been insistent. He needed to meet with Laura face-to-face.
He knew something.
Laura saw Dale Lundy in her mind. His pale, almost feminine face. The soft, wet eyes that had no soul behind them. The Victorian-style room where he sewed with his mother. The photos of Misty de Seroux.
The 12-gauge shotgun nestled in a homemade plywood box on the underside of the trapdoor.
She closed her eyes, trying to think. Could it be Lundy? How many kidnappers could there be, operating in that relatively small part of the world?
Suddenly, lights started dancing in the corner of her eye. She opened both eyes and stared at the seat back in front of her, expecting them to go away. But the lights kept on blinking.
Pulsing on and off at the corner of her right eye.
A thin edge of panic poked its way under her heart. She remembered the same thing happening at the Jonquil Motel the night she found the matchbook.
Her hand on the doorknob, the strangeness she felt.
Laura looked down at her hand. Again it looked funny, but she couldn't figure out why. The one side of her eye---it was like her vision was bleary from being underwater.
She got up and walked to the back of the plane, heading for the restroom, pushing down the beginnings of panic. Halfway down the aisle, the flashing lights went away.
She blinked. Nothing there---she could see fine.
Walking back to her seat, she thought: It's got to be stress. After what happened in Apalachicola, she had a right to be stressed out.
Musicman had just dozed off when he heard the door to the bedroom creak. He sat up on the couch and glanced at his watch: almost two in the morning. He'd taken care of his needs twice since she had disappeared into his bedroom, but it hadn't taken the edge off. He felt like one long nerve.
In the light seeping in from under the shades from the sodium arc light above the trailer court, he saw her edge into the hallway.
She wore the dress---he almost lost it right there.
He made sure to hide the sock he'd used as he fantasized about her, then turned on the light.
She looked like a burglar, caught red-handed.
Talk to her gently. "I'm glad to see you," he said.
She looked at him, and he rang like a tuning fork.
He was not expecting his reaction. Usually, seeing the girls in the dresses acted as an inhibitor, cooling his jets, so to speak.
But she was even more alluring, more exciting, in the dress. It was the juxtaposition of her innate beauty that had a definite sexual quality to it and the way the dress tried to hide it. It did hide those tanned legs, the breasts, the curve of her ass, but it had just the opposite effect than he'd expected.
It titillated him.
She stood in the doorway, looking him right in the face. Calm, cool, alert. Just standing there, so serious. So dignified. And underneath---
No, he wouldn't think about it.
"Couldn't you sleep?" he asked.
"No." Her voice quiet.
"You sure look pretty in that dress."
"Do I?" Interested. Friendly, even. Like she was someone else, someone older. Like she was the one who was in control.
Those cool eyes on him.
There was a speck of brown in her blue-green iris.
That hit him square in the heart. Misty had that same imperfection. That was what they called it, but he always thought of it as a beauty mark.
"You have a brown spot in your eye," he said.
"I know. My mom calls it my beauty mark."
This had to be a sign from God---she was the one. He felt the rush of joy.
Not that he believed she was Misty come back to life. That would be ridiculous. He wasn't crazy, just nostalgic. Still, the resemblance was heartening.
His mind was babbling now. She was so like Misty. The spot in the eye, the words she used. Beauty mark. The way she tilted her chin---he hadn't noticed it before. The cool way she looked at him.
This time, it was going to work. He could feel it. Sure, he'd have to gain her confidence, her trust. He'd have to go slow. But this time would be different from the others.
"Would you like something to eat?" he asked. "I can cook anything you want. I'll make you something special."
45
Laura got in at two thirty in the morning. Victor Celaya and Buddy Holland were waiting for her, Holland humming like a power line. He had his keys in his hand as they walked down the steps toward the exit, his stride lengthening so he was way ahead of them, looking back periodically, impatient for them to catch up.
"He must be going out of his mind," Laura said.
"Jesus, can you imagine what he's thinking? What if it's Lundy."
Laura said nothing, because she thought it was Lundy.
She remembered what Jay Ramsey had said before she left for Florida---there had been another girl. "How old is Summer?"
"Twelve."
"She lives with her mother? In Tucson?"
"Uh-huh."
The heat hit the moment they were through the automatic doors, a hot, dry wind seizing the breath from her lips and nostrils. She'd gone from sauna to oven. It seemed to her it got hotter every year, the monsoon seasons of her memory dwindling down to a few thunderstorms, terminal humidity, and a plague of mosquitos. Maybe it was all due to global warming.
They drove the one long block to DPS headquarters. Laura had come back empty-handed. Nothing to check into evidence---that was still being decided in Tallahassee. Who got what, when. They headed upstairs to the squad bay, took chairs in the conference room. Buddy sat opposite Laura, and Victor sat between them at the head of the table.
Victor nodded to Buddy. "Okay. She's here. What was it you wanted to talk about?"
Buddy stretched his long legs out in front of him and stared at his feet. Laura thought he had aged ten years.
Victor said to Laura, "He won't tell me what's going on. He said he wanted to wait for you. So give it up, Buddy, what is it?"
Buddy's face was pale, his eyes like dark stones. He opened his mouth to speak, then abruptly launched himself out of his chair and started pacing.
"Come on, Buddy. What's so important we have to beg for it?"
He stopped and took a breath.
"I think I brought him here."
Laura wondered if she heard right.
"What do you mean, you brought him here?" demanded Victor.
Buddy started pacing again, head scrupulously turned away from them. He said, "I brought him here. It was me."
"How'd you do that?" Victor's voice loud in the small room.
"I found out my daughter was talking to this guy on the Internet. He sent her stuff---an MP3 player, earrings---"
Laura thought about Endicott's evidence list. She had been right. It was Lundy. She looked at Buddy, who was still talking. It took her a moment to catch up with his words.
"... decided to intercept his messages. I knew he was a bad guy, a sexual predator. I'd been on the chief to let us start our own Internet sexual predator task force, but he wouldn't go for it. This guy was out there, and I couldn't just let him get away. So we set him up."
"Set him up how?" Victor asked.
"I took over for my daughter. Pretended I was her."
Victor whistled.
Laura said, "We? You said we set him up."
"Me and Duffy."
Duffy? Jesus.
Buddy slung himself into a chair. Now that he was talking, it all came out. How he and Heather Duffy had planned a sting, setting up a meeting with Lundy in City Park. "But he never showed. I think he saw something that tipped him off."
Laura thought: Duffy would look like a cop even in a negligee.
"He made you," Victor said. "He made you and he bolted, and on his way out of town, he saw Jessica Parris. And you kept this secret all this time? What about Lehman?"
"I thought it could be him."
"That's a huge coincidence, man."
"Hey, his prints were on her lipstick." For a moment, the arrogant Buddy was back. "It could have been an unrelated crime."
"Come on! You expect us to believe that?"
"Where's Lehman now?" Laura asked.
"First place I called. He's at his house. He would have had time to get her to Bisbee. He had three hours."
"But he didn't," said Laura.
Buddy looked at her defiantly.
"You didn't go to his place, because you knew it wasn't him."
Buddy didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Laura asked, "Did he send her a picture?"
He nodded. Didn't look at her.
"What were you trying to do? Throw us off the track?" Victor again.
Buddy stood up and the plastic chair clattered, hit the wall. His fists clenched, he stepped toward Victor.
"Wait a minute!" Laura said, getting up to stand between them. "This isn't doing us any good. We've got to find this guy."
Buddy sat back down, passed a hand over his face. "Shit."
Laura cleared her throat. "We've got to compare notes. We know a lot more than we think." She looked at Buddy. "I know stuff about this guy now. The good news is, Jessica Parris was an anomaly. He keeps his victims for a while."
Buddy Holland shot her a look of gratitude.
She ran down what she'd learned, her belief that he was reliving some kind of relationship with Misty de Seroux. "That could work for us."
"Are you telling me he's looking for girls that looked like this Misty?" Victor asked.
"I know---weird, but you've seen weirder." She looked at Buddy. "I don't think he's going to kill her---not yet. I think we have some time."
Buddy's gaze locked with hers. "Then what are we doing hanging out here? We've got to get moving."
"Where would we go? It's better if we figure out a few things first."
"He rapes and kills," Buddy said bitterly. "We already know that. He's probably already ... oh shit."
"If we recover her," Laura said to Buddy, "we can work with that. Get her counseling."
She reached into her briefcase and removed photographs of Alison Burns, Jessica Parris, and Linnet Sobek. And then she added a couple of candid photos Lundy had taken of Misty de Seroux.
She watched Buddy's face. He drew in a quick breath.
"Look at them, how much they look alike," Laura said quietly. "He wants a relationship. He wants someone like Misty."
46
"You just sit down and take a load off," Musicman said to Summer, bustling around the galley. "How do grilled cheese sandwiches and a Coke sound?"
Summer didn't like grilled cheese sandwiches, but she thought she'd better say she did.
He was trying to be nice to her. He brought the grilled cheese sandwiches to the table on paper plates, the kind you got from Paper Warehouse. These plates had purple, blue and yellow fireworks and said HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Beside her plate was a present.
"Go ahead, open it."
She tore off the wrapping, feeling queasy. When did he get her a present?
"Could you be a little more careful?" Dale said. "We can use that paper again."
She did as she was told, gently parting the wrapping where the Scotch tape was until it revealed her gift: A Lucite photo cube.
"Well? Do you like it?"
"It's great," she said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
"That's for our trip. Here, let me put it away so we don't get food on it." He cleared the paper and put the cube away up in a top cupboard. He removed the bow from the wrapping paper and smoothed the paper out, folded it neatly, and put both the paper and the bow in a kitchen drawer. Then he sat down at the dinette table to watch her eat.
The idea of eating anything made her want to gag, but she smiled and bit into the sandwich. It tasted like cardboard. She chewed and chewed, trying to make the food small enough to swallow, and kept smiling. That seemed to please him. He acted like he had a crush on her---like he was shy or something. He reminded her of Justin Teeters in fifth period, who, whenever he saw her, got this look on his face that was really comic. She'd say "hi" and he couldn't even answer back.
In that way, Dale was just like Justin. She knew he wanted to do it with her, but she also knew that he was holding back. Because he was shy?
Was he just like Justin, only older? She closed her eyes, imagined that her power was bigger than herself. That she was bigger and bigger, and Dale was smaller and smaller.
When she opened her eyes, he was looking at her. Staring. "How is it?" he asked.
"Mmmm. Really good."
"I bought ice cream for dessert. I know it's almost breakfast time, but hey, we can do anything we want."
Like a little kid. Jeez.
"Would you like some?"
She swallowed more of the cardboard. "Sure."
"I got Neopolitan," he said shyly. "That way you can choose what you want---chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry."
"Cool."
"You look so much better in that dress."
That reminded her. "What did you do with my clothes?"
"They're gone. Never you worry about that. You won't have to see them again."
She almost said she liked them, but bit her tongue. Humor him. Humor him until you can find a way to get out of here.
She set the sandwich down, sipped some Coke. Looked at him, memorizing his face. That way, her dad would be able to track him down after she escaped.
How she was going to escape, she didn't know. But the more time she spent with him, the better she felt about her chances. He was kind of pathetic. She almost felt sorry for him. Sorry and grateful that he wasn't the kind of kidnapper she'd seen on the Discovery channel, the ones who murdered their victims. She couldn't see him murdering anybody.
"You like the sandwich?" he asked again.
"Oh yeah. I just don't eat a lot. I'm on a diet."
He frowned. "You don't need to diet. Why do girls do that? You should be healthy, enjoy your life, not diet. I told Misty that."
"Who's Misty?" Get him talking.
"She was my first girlfriend."
"I bet she was pretty."
"Oh, she was."
"How come you aren't still with her?"
"We grew apart."
"I'm sorry ... I don't know why she'd want to leave someone as nice as you. I mean, you're really pretty cool."
He stood up abruptly. "If you're not going to finish that, I'll throw it away."
She'd made him mad.
He shoved the picnic plates into the garbage. He wouldn't look at her, but she could tell he was angry by the way his shoulders hunched, the way he slammed around.
Finally he turned to face her. "Why do you have to be so sly?"
His face was dark red, his eyes like marbles. Suddenly he looked dangerous.
Her heart sped up. What was he mad about?
"Flattery will get you nowhere," he said.
"I just meant---"
"I know what you meant. You think you can wrap me around your little finger? Well, that's not going to happen." He stepped forward, his hands clenching and unclenching. "That makes me so mad."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. Honest."
"I think you'd better go to your room, young lady."
"Okay." She slipped out from behind the dinette table, had to pass right by him to get to the bedroom. She tried not to touch him at all, but her dress brushed against his thigh.
His hands came out and he whipped her around to face him. Bands of steel around her upper arms, nails digging in. His hands were trembling. His head was trembling.
His face was so close. It blotted out everything. His mouth was working, and his eyes---
His eyes were dark, like holes. Like there wasn't anything there behind them. Just black space. She opened her mouth to say she was sorry, but nothing came out.
He shook her, once, hard, and slammed her against the stove. The edge of the stove whacked into her elbow, the shock running up her arm to her chin. She groaned.
He continued to stare at her. Eyes like holes. She was distracted by the pain in her elbow. Her funny bone.
Then she saw something else way down deep in his eyes. Pain? It was shiny, slick, desperate. He turned around and walked away from her. "Best get to your room," he said without looking at her.
She bolted for the room and locked the door.
A few minutes later she heard something bang against the doorjamb, then the sound of a padlock clicking shut.
47
Victor, Laura, Buddy, and Jerry Grimes set up a task force, calling their contacts at other law enforcement agencies---the FBI; US Customs; her own DPS Highway Patrol; US Border Patrol; and the sheriffs in all Arizona counties, the Tucson, South Tucson, Marana, Oro Valley, and Green Valley police departments. Laura contacted the detectives she knew with these agencies. Every agency was faxed a picture of a 1987 Fleetwood Pace Arrow, the headshot of Lundy, both names, and his license plate number. They also contacted law enforcement in New Mexico, California, and Mexico.
Anybody and everybody to help them out.
Buddy asked, "What about media?"
Laura was torn about that. "We have no idea if he's still in Tucson, but if he is, we don't want him to run."
"I think we should keep it to law enforcement," Victor said.
Laura agreed.
Buddy wanted the Amber Alert.
"It's too fucking late for that," Victor snapped.
Charlie Specter, a DPS intelligence analyst, started entering what data they had on Lundy in the Rapid Start system. Rapid Start was a computer program developed by the FBI for just this kind of situation. He would enter the data as information came in from various law enforcement entities---one man in charge of everything.
"Too bad we don't have his computer," Charlie said to Laura. "I guess he's had it with him all this time."
"Is there any way to track his movements on the Internet?" she asked. Just then her mobile rang. She excused herself, walking away so she could hear.
The caller was Barry Fruchtendler. She rummaged through her overloaded circuits and pulled up the name---the cop who worked the Julie Marr case---and told him she'd have to get back to him later. He gave her his number in Montana and she wrote it down. As she flipped the phone closed, she tried to recapture her line of thought. "What if we had his e-mail address?" she asked Charlie.
"That depends. If he's gone wireless ..." He shrugged. "Worth a shot, though."
"How would that work?"
"If he's on the road, he'll need one of the big servers he can access by an 800 number. All he needs is a phone jack, and he can keep up on his correspondence, no matter where he is."
Laura was puzzled. "The motor home wouldn't have a phone jack, would it?"
"Nope, but there are plenty of places he can go. Cyber cafés, any place he could get his hands on a phone line. Which would give us a great way to find out where he is. Once you have his e-mail account, you could subpoena his Internet server and have them intercept his e-mails. Trick is to let the e-mails go through so he doesn't notice anything unusual, but a copy comes here to us." He saw Laura's puzzled expression. "When an e-mail goes out, it has to go some place to wait before it's sent on---kind of a like a clearinghouse. When you log on, you ask for your e-mail and that's when the server sends it."
"And that could pinpoint where he was?"
"The general area where he's calling from. It goes by area code. We'd know if he was in Tucson or Green Valley or in New Mexico---wherever. We could even track him if he's moving, as long as he checks his e-mail."
Laura looked at Buddy. "It would be on your wife's computer, wouldn't it?"
"Better than that," Buddy said. "I've got his e-mails."
Musicman knocked on the bedroom door late in the morning. "Summer? You okay?"
No reply. He didn't blame her, the way he'd acted. What had possessed him?
"You're going to have to stay in the bedroom while I'm gone. Screaming won't help. A lot of people scream at each other around here, and everybody minds their own business. I just have a couple of errands, and then I'll be back. Is there anything you want me to pick up? Ice cream? Soda?"
Still no answer.
"Once we get to know each other, I won't have to take this kind of precaution."
The hot air hit him as he walked outside. The El Rancho Trailer Court was bad enough at night, but in the summer sun it looked as if it had been left out to rot. It was an ideal place to go to ground, though, for several reasons. The people here minded their own business. They remained inside, trying to stay cool. No doubt most of them were drugged to their eyeballs. An added bonus: The El Rancho Trailer Court was a short shot to the freeway and the airport if he had to get away in a hurry.
One of the best things about El Rancho was its proximity to the Motel 6.
He pulled into the Motel 6 parking lot and took his laptop into room 17. Inside, he set it on the round table near the door and closed the drapes against the summer heat. He turned the television to CNN and the air conditioner on high. Then he logged on.
When he wasn't on the road, he had to check it several times a day. He usually tried to find a cheap motel room---it didn't matter what color the drapes were, as long as it had a phone jack.
Every time he logged on, he felt an incredible rush of anticipation. His heart beat faster, his fingers practically itched. Maybe it was because his mother had so looked forward to getting the mail every day, as if she thought there might be a grand prize or a love letter from an old lover---something special. It got to be kind of a game. They would walk out to the mailbox together, and she'd say, "I wonder what I'll get today?"
Even if it was just a bill, she liked getting mail. It was always an adventure.
He was like just like her. Even though he got a lot of spam, it was still mail.
He'd been hoping to hear from his friend Marshall, who lived in Chicago and had sounded interested in the pics of Jessica Parris. But all that came up were more messages from Dark Moondancer.
He had mostly ignored Moondancer. He'd sold him the pics, and as far as he was concerned, that was the end of it. But Dark Moondancer was nothing if not persistent. He must have sent thirty e-mails in the last week. All of them telling him to come and bring his latest sweetheart. Cryptic, subtle. Stuff like "I'd love to meet your new girlfriend." And "I have such a cozy, out-of-the-way place, far from the rat race."
He opened the latest message. "I wish you'd think about coming for a visit. I could give you the run of the place. Please think about it. Yours, Dark Moondancer. PS, am enjoying my trips down memory lane."
Memory Lane was the title of one of the photos he'd sent to Dark Moondancer. A forest glade. But underneath it was a dark secret---Jessica Parris in the band shell.
The idea of that cretin coming near Summer sickened him. The man was untrustworthy and dangerous. It wouldn't be wise to put Summer into that kind of situation.
When he was through, he locked the door behind him and took his laptop back to the GEO. The room was so much cooler than the motor home, he'd debated bringing Summer here. Ultimately he'd decided against it. There was too much room for error. The motor home was a controlled area. He'd used it for all his girls, and had everything down to a science. You never wanted to do anything that could throw you off your game.
The GEO felt like an oven. The sour smell of cheap vinyl rose up around him. He started the car, yelped as his fingers touched the burning metal. He grabbed a gas receipt on the floor and used it to steer, narrowly missed running into a white panel van entering the parking lot. Feeling churlish, he flipped the driver the bird.
Hot air coming through the vents---the air conditioning sucked on this thing. But it was his getaway car. If it got too hot, he could always leave the motor home and take off in the GEO.
Laura had Buddy print up three copies of all the e-mails and started going through them.
"So Summer was CRZYGRL12." She stared at Buddy. "Must have been a shock for you when that matchbook turned up."
He looked at her stonily.
She decided to move on. "Let's see what they've been saying to each other."
Laura had to admit that Buddy had a good ear. He had imitated his daughter perfectly, and Lundy had not suspected a thing. The only problem: He'd come early to their meeting and something had spooked him.
Laura read samples of Musicman's pitch:
"I can't believe how sweet you are. You're not like other girls not in any way. Your different and I can't believe how lucky I am."
"I want to be the one to make love to you for the first time. The first time should be perfect. I picture giving you a bubble bath, get you nice and relaxed, candlelight, maybe a little something to drink. And when you're all warm inside and out ..."
She wanted to throw up---such a rasher of shit.
"When can we meet in person? Your picture is not enough anymore. I think about you all the time."
He told her he was seventeen and would be a freshman in college this fall, premed. His parents had money, but he "wanted to earn his way through college," so he worked two jobs. He described how beautiful Colorado was and how much fun it would be, just the two of them, camping out under the pines and falling in love.
"We need to get hold of Colorado law enforcement," Laura said. "It sounds like he knows these places. He might have had another girl there."
Victor leaned over her. "Durango, Mesa Verde, Ouray, Grand Junction, Glenwood Springs---I have a cousin who lives in Colorado. Most of those towns are on the same highway."
"He must have passed through." But when? She knew he had been in Indio five months ago.
"He really did take his show on the road," Victor said.
Buddy opened up the jpeg photo of "James" standing in front of the blue Z4, arms crossed.
"Only you and Duffy knew about this?"
"Yes."
"If you had this picture, why did you concentrate on Lehman?"
"You were the one who bird-dogged him, remember?"
"Yes. But I didn't have this." She motioned to the computer screen.
He shrugged. "I told you. I thought they were two different cases---"
"Bullshit." Victor.
Buddy shot Victor a venomous look. "I did look for him. So did Duffy. We must have stopped a dozen of those blue Z4s."
"We could have all been looking for him," Laura said.
Buddy Holland had gotten back his equilibrium, and blame bounced off him. "But that wouldn't have done us much good, would it?" He tapped the screen, the photograph of Peter Dorrance. "Because it wasn't him."
48
As Musicman drove the last block toward the El Rancho, his mind turned to the problem of Summer. He was angry with himself for treating her the way he did. Now he'd need to woo her all over again.
A street vendor had set up shop in an empty lot on the corner of the Benson Highway and Palo Verde. On an impulse, Musicman pulled into the lot. Under a parachute-type awning, an old man in a guayaberra shirt sat behind a glass case of cheap-looking jewelry on velvet.
All his girls had loved trinkets. Of course, that was before they saw him. That was always a shock. They were always willing to accept gifts from a good-looking guy like Dorrance, but they turned their nose up at him.
He bought a pretty choker, the thin strand of silver almost liquid in the glaring sunlight. Little beads of turquoise were threaded on at intervals. He drove the rest of the way with a smile on his face.
As he switched on his blinker to make the turn into the El Rancho Trailer Court, he felt a sudden premonition. He'd learned to trust his instincts, so he flicked off the blinker and continued driving on to the next block. He turned there and turned left again, coming up behind the trailer court.
He'd been right.
From this angle he could see the revolving lights of a cop car.
Feast or famine, DPS intelligence analyst Charlie Specter thought as he got himself a cup of coffee and sat back down at the computer. Tips from law enforcement entities throughout the state had come in rapidly at first, then slowed to a trickle, followed by another onslaught. Like turning a faucet on and off. Right now was a down-time.
He checked his watch. Another thirty minutes or so had gone by since the last time he checked his e-mail.
Laura Cardinal had made sure that Charlie was specifically named in the subpoena to Lundy's Internet server. The messages that Lundy sent and received would be trapped at the server and then sent on to Lundy. After it had been sent to Lundy, an "admin copy" would be sent on directly to Charlie. Along with the text of the e-mail would be a header showing the date and time of the e-mail, as well as the area code and phone number.
He took a sip of coffee and logged on.
Bingo! There was the e-mail address from Lundy's ISP log: musicman2@msn.com The e-mail was from darkmoondancer@livewire.net.
Time sent: 1:57 a.m. Time received: 10:43 a.m.
Lundy's ISP had a Tucson area code. He was still in Tucson---a 628 exchange.
Specter called the 628 number. Familiar music came on---Tom Bodette inviting the caller to stay at Motel 6.
He looked up Motel 6 and found several. One of them had the 628 exchange.
He turned the corner and walked to Laura's desk. "How's this?" he said. "I know where your bad guy was, up to an hour ago."
Get a grip, Musicman told himself. There's no way she could have gotten out of that motor home. No way anyone could have heard her.
He parked the car by the side of the road, got out, and trotted across the patch of desert toward the chain link fence that bordered the park. The fence was woven with dried-out yellow plastic, so it was hard to see, but he could hear the yelling. It sounded like a drunk male, very angry.
He snuck up to the fence and peered through a hole in the plastic.
A shirtless, longhaired man was bent over the hood of a Tucson police car as two cops struggled to handcuff him. His jeans were so low on his skinny waist they showed his butt crack and a bad tattoo.
"What'd I do? What'd I do?" the man kept screaming.
Even though the guy was obviously suffering from malnutrition, he gave the cops quite a fight.
The cop cars were parked four trailers down from Musicman's motor home. The motor home was quiet, but Summer could be hitting her fists against the windows and screaming---no way to tell.
He watched the cops. They were so busy with the screaming man that they were oblivious to anything else. A few neighbors had come out, hanging back mostly, on their front stoops. A ragtag bunch.
Finally the cops wrestled the screaming man into the back of one of the patrol cars. Both cops had to pause for breath, and as they did, they looked at the crowd, which seemed to melt back into the rusting metal of their homes.
He didn't like it.
The first car, the one holding the prisoner, drove away. The second cop walked to his car. Was it his imagination or did the cop give the Pace Arrow more than a passing glance? He even took a step to the side, so he could see more of it.
Then the cop's radio squawked. Whatever it was, he got in and drove off in a cloud of dust.
Musicman waited for several minutes, then got back into the car and drove around to the entrance.
Right before the entrance, the GEO stalled and he cursed. Still, he was glad he'd bought the car.
He needed to get out of here.
Officer Ray Garcia wiped the sweat from his face. Even in the squad car, Timmy Swanson was still kicking and screaming. Let him kick. He wasn't about to break through that steel mesh.
"D&D. Possession of crack. Resisting arrest. I guess that'll about do it," said Sam Chilcott.
"Ought to. See you in a few." Ray knocked on the roof of Sam's squad car and then walked back to his own.
He always told his kids he had eyes in the back of his head, which wasn't far from the truth. He'd been trained to look at everything as a potential threat and had developed that eye for detail. So as he walked to his car, he scanned the trailer park. Maybe someone would resent the arrest of poor ol' Timmy, maybe they would rush him or take a potshot at him. Some people would say he was paranoid, but it was a paranoia he wasn't ashamed of.
A vehicle up ahead stood out from the rest. Every other trailer looked as if it had been moored there and the vegetation---and junk---had grown up around it. But the motor home at the end looked out of place. The trailers here had been scoured by the sun and the dust, burnished to oxidation. But the motor home looked as if it had been washed recently. It also didn't look permanent.
He stepped out of the lane so he could see the back end. Lace curtains in the back window, just like on the sides.
He'd heard something about a motor home recently, but couldn't remember what kind or where.
His handheld crackled---a knife fight two blocks south of here. He got into his unit and floored it on out of there.
Musicman unlocked the door to the motor home and called out, "Oh, June, I'm home!"
It was a lame joke, but it had become kind of a ritual. He loved the old TV shows on TV Land. At his age, he'd missed the best ones: The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Lucy.
"There's been a change of plans. We're going on our trip sooner than I thought."
No reply.
"I'm sorry about what I did. I just kind of lost it. I won't act like that again."
Nothing. She was being stubborn.
He was surprised to realize that it excited him. He remembered one porno tape he played over and over where the man did a young girl and she fought and snarled and he kept saying, "You little wildcat!"
He couldn't think about that now. Sometimes he felt he lived inside a flame that wanted to consume him, burn him to nothing. This was one of those times. He swallowed. "We don't have any time to waste. We've got to go."
He unlocked the padlock. "Let's go!"
Still no reply.
Maybe he should just hitch the GEO up to the Pace Arrow and get out of here. That way he could leave her in her room. Deal with her later. She needed finesse, not force, and he didn't have time to play games.
"Okay, you want to play it that way, fine."
He walked outside and got into the GEO, drove it up to the hitch.
As he got out, he saw two cop cars zoom by on Benson Highway. Going fast and silent, but with their lights on, headed in the direction of the Motel 6.
Don't be paranoid
Maybe they were going to the Motel 6, maybe not. But what if they were?
What if it had something to do with him?
Shit! He didn't have time. He clambered back into the motor home and pulled the seat cushions off the dinette seat, flung it open, and rummaged inside. He needed his duffle and his computer bag. He grabbed the duffle and started throwing things in. The main thing was the laptop, the power cord, the disks, his Jazz drive.
His notebooks. His photo albums. His cameras, of course. His cash. And Summer.
It took him three trips to get everything into the GEO. There was a lot he was leaving behind, but he couldn't help that. Although no one had put his picture up on television, he could feel them breathing down his neck. He knew he was one step ahead of their snapping jaws---he could feel it. He always trusted his instincts.
They knew who he was. Maybe it was the way the cop had looked at the motor home. He should have jumped on that earlier. At least they didn't know about the GEO.
After he'd stuffed everything into the back seat, he stood by the car, the sun beating down on him, hyperventilating.
Where would they go?
Mexico?
He'd have to put her in the trunk. But what if the Mexican customs asked to see inside?
He'd cross that bridge when he came to it.
Or he could head east or west on the interstate. Or take the back roads, lay low.
Later. He'd figure it out later.
He went back inside, feeling strangely jazzed. She was going to give him a battle. He knew it. The wildcat.
And so he prepared everything ahead of time. The chloroform, the rag, his handcuffs, duct tape. It was all in the same place he'd stashed them after he'd used them on Jessica---
The boyfriend, standing there in the doorway of the Pace Arrow. What's going on?"
The image so strong it seemed like real time. Stupid kid, surprising him like that. The girl, who'd just stopped struggling, a dead weight. He had no choice but to act---and act fast.
Still amazed no one saw him drag the kid down into the woods.
He had the rag, the bottle at the ready. Knocked on the door.
No answer.
He felt the beginning of impatience.
"Summer, we can do this easy or we can do this hard. I guarantee you won't like it hard." He tried not to laugh at the pun.
Nothing.
Bitch
To think he'd bought a present for her. He reached into his shirt pocket and extracted the key to the padlock, unlocked the door, and pulled it open.
Something jumped out at him like a jack-in-the-box.
"What---?"
He saw the stick clenched in her hands, and his mind had only a split second to wonder what it was when it hit him right in the midsection, punching into his side.
Pain, tingly and bright and blood-colored. He thought he screamed.
He grabbed at her as her impulsion carried her past him, his fingers snagging her dress---
She jerked away, and through a fine haze of pain, he saw her bolt through the hallway and out the door, the door banging wham wham wham---
And he was aware that he was holding his side and it was kind of like hot pudding, slick as snot as his father used to say, and he staggered back, spun around, and that was when he saw the object on the floor. Wood tapering down to a band of brass glimmering at the bottom.
It was a leg off the swing-out table.
She'd sawed it off. Somehow.
Smart girl.
He grabbed a towel from the bathroom and pressed it to the wound. Compress. It hurt like a sonofabitch, but it had missed everything vital. There were splinters, though, big ones.
Time slowed. His nerve endings screaming. The towel turning red. Still, he'd better go get her and think about cleaning this mess up later.
49
As Laura walked across the parking lot to the Motel 6 entrance, the overheated asphalt yielded under her shoe like brownie dough. Traffic hummed and sighed on the street behind her, a constant pedal point. She shielded her eyes against the glare and glanced back at the van parked unobtrusively near the edge of the property---a unit from the Pima County Sheriff's SWAT team inside.
The young woman at the desk looked like a college student. She wore a nice blazer with the name tag "Marci".
Laura asked Marci if she had either a Dale Lundy or Jimmy de Seroux registered.
Marci looked through the book. "No one by that name."
"Anything close? Maybe a combination of the two? Dale de Seroux? Jimmy Lundy?"
Uncertain, the girl pored over the names again.
Laura looked at the names upside down. "That's it. James E. Lund. Could you pull the card please?"
"I don't know---"
"We have a warrant."
"Oh. Okay." Marci found the registration card and pushed it diffidently across the desk.
The date of checkin was July 15. James E. Lund, Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Drove a 1994 white GEO Prizm with a Colorado plate. He was in Room 17.
A white GEO?
Laura wondered if he'd ditched the motor home or if he'd just added the car. Sometimes the simplest things could slip under the radar. All the agencies were on the alert for a motor home. But they might not even see a motor home towing a car.
She asked Marci for the key to Room 17. Marci handed it over without asking to see the warrant, which was good because Laura didn't have one. Victor Celaya was on his way with it.
"How did he pay for the room?" she asked. "Cash, check, or credit card?"
Marci looked up the receipt. "He paid cash in advance." She anticipated Laura's next question. "For a week." Laura counted up in her head. He had three days left.
She walked back out into the gun-metal haze.
At this time of day, between checkout and checkin, there were few cars in the parking lot and no white GEO Prizm with Colorado plates.
She walked back to the 4Runner, got in, and turned the air conditioner on full blast. Immediately her cell started bleeping. It was Charlie Specter. "A TPD officer spotted a motor home in a trailer court on Benson Highway that looked suspicious. He says it fits the description and the photo---the Pace Arrow. From the looks of the street numbers, it's less than two miles from where you are now.
"I got hold of the owner of the trailer court, asked him if he had anyone there by the name of Lundy or de Seroux. He said the guy with the motor home gave his name as John de Seroux."
Summer ran through the trailer park pounding on doors, screaming for help.
But the trailers just dozed in the summer sun. Nobody was going to open their door to her. She didn't know why, but she knew it was true.
She started running up the lane toward the street.
Behind her the motor home door banged open and she heard running feet.
She knew it was him, but looked back anyway. Dale got into his car, backed it up and swerved around, heading toward her in a funnel of dust.
Summer knew she wouldn't make it to the road. She scanned the trailer court and saw a break in the fence near the last trailer she'd been to. She had to go back in the direction of the GEO, but the good news was he'd have to turn around.
He saw what she was doing and hit the brakes, but by the time he had stopped the car, she was past him and was already cutting across the concrete pad next to the trailer. Behind her, she heard the tiny engine roar as he put it in reverse. She darted toward the break in the fence, trying to figure out how to get through the clumps of prickly pear guarding it.
Behind her she heard the car slam into park and the door jerk open.
She had to get down on her stomach, which took time, and shimmy through, careful to avoid the cactus. chain link snagged her dress and she had to yank at it, legs flailing. Then she was free, out into the desert and running.
"Summer, get back here!" Dale yelled.
Then: "Dammit!" And the slam of the car door, the squeal of the engine again as he charged up the drive, spraying gravel.
Summer's mind raced. What would he do? Could he drive into the desert? He'd have to get out onto Benson Highway and get past the other businesses before he could get to the empty lot. It would be fastest and easiest for him to make a right onto the highway and another right, so he would probably be up ahead. She switched directions, following a path through the scrub, her sandals scarfing up dirt like an open mouth and stickers pricking her feet and legs. She stepped on the point of a doghead that went through the bottom of her sandal and yelped. Pulled it out and kept on going.
She hoped she'd guessed right. As she ran she could see rooftops rising above the screen of creosote and mesquite---the next street, parallel to Benson Highway. A neighborhood. She ran for it.
50
Where did all this traffic come from? Musicman slammed the steering wheel with his fist. Summer was loose and here he was, just sitting here, waiting as a whole procession of cars drove by.
His mind raced. Where would she go? Would she stick to the desert or would she make her way back to the highway? Or would she head for another road?
Dammit! His side hurt. Raw, throbbing. Blood starting to show through the towel. If a cop stopped him now ...
How could this happen?
Now he wished he'd chased her on foot. But even that would have been problematic; he doubted he could have gotten through the break in the fence.
One more car and he could turn right. But as he watched, the white van slowed down.
Come on, dammit!
The turn signal came on.
"Come on, come on," he muttered. "Shit or get off the pot."
But the van didn't turn in. It kept going, turn signal still on. He tried to catch a glimpse of what kind of asshole would play a game like that, but couldn't; the windows were too dark.
Suddenly he remembered the white van at the Motel 6, the one he'd flipped the bird at. He thought they were similar: a white Ford utility van with dark windows.
The van continued past, and he pulled onto the street behind it. Suddenly, it U-turned four lanes and headed in the other direction. Cretin.
Down the road from the El Rancho was the next business, the Desert Rose Motel. The Desert Rose was a horseshoe of peeling, white brick buildings around asphalt, a drained pool in the center. This was the kind of place that rented by the week. Place looked deserted, but he knew people lived here---if you could call this living. Could she have come here for help?
He swerved in off the road. He scanned the highway, the few buildings, tried to see between them at the desert. Finally he turned in and drove around the horseshoe. He didn't see anyone---it was too hot to be outside. Still, he looked, paying particular attention to the four cars parked nose-in to the cabins. Looking for movement, looking for feet underneath.
He came back around to the road. He didn't know what to do. She could be anywhere.
At the next street, he turned right. He cruised along slowly, watching the desert, but he was thinking about the van. There was something about it that bothered him.
It was the stripped-down version. Blackwall tires. Nothing fancy. But clean. Government? He wished he'd gotten a gander at the plates.
Were they that close? He knew the FBI was involved---had seen it on CNN---but they'd been pretty close-mouthed. Not even a press conference. If they knew what he looked like, they weren't letting the public in on it.
Why was that?
And then it occurred to him.
His ISP.
They'd used his ISP to track him to the Motel 6.
Nobody home in the Fleetwood Pace Arrow parked at the El Rancho Trailer Court. The door was ajar, the screen door dented as if someone had bulled through it. No car, but Laura noticed a tow rack on the back.
The plates had been switched, but VIN numbers don't lie. The motor home belonged to Lundy.
After making sure the motor home was clear, Laura and Victor took a quick look inside as they waited for the tow truck.
Laura spotted some drops of blood on the floor near the bedroom, as well as a few smears where it had been hastily wiped up with a towel. "Don't come back here," she said to Victor. "We've got some blood evidence."
She retrieved a can of fluorescent paint from the car and spray-painted a circle around each drop of blood.
Victor said, "Not a whole lot of it."
"Unless he got a lot up with the towel."
"Look at this," Victor said, showing her the padlock and the way the door was configured. "Doesn't look anything like the floor plan we have back at the squad. The bedroom and bath have been modified. He remodeled the bedroom door into a swing-out door that locks from the outside."
He also noted the boarded windows. "His own personal dungeon."
Lace curtains squeezed between the window and the plywood. They looked like the ones at his mother's house.
Laura spotted a broken table leg on the floor. She squatted on her heels and studied it. "Blood on the end of this," she said, pointing it out to Victor.
"You think he stabbed her with it?"
"Or the other way around."
She took photographs of the table leg while Victor went back into the living room.
"What do we have here?" he said a few minutes later. She glanced back; he was holding two round, pleated stretches of vinyl. "Wheel covers. For the spare wheel on the back."
One of them depicted a quail under the legend THE ANDERSONS. The other, in cursive writing said: "Happy Trails! Jeff and Pat Lieber."
He laughed. "Pretty cute. We're looking for a motor home with THE ANDERSONS on the back, and he morphs into Jeff Lieber and his lovely wife Pat."
"Too cute," Laura said. "He's a little too elaborate for his own good."
Victor shrugged. "Seems to have worked so far."
Laura heard gravel popping outside and ducked her head out the door. It was Buddy Holland in his plain-wrapped.
She understood why he was here, but couldn't let him in. He wouldn't do himself any good, and he sure wouldn't help Summer.
"Buddy," she said. "Two people in here is enough."
"What did you find?" Fear and hope warring on his face.
"She's not here."
His relief gave way to by worry. He rubbed his hand over his eyes and then squinted into the sun. "Was she here? Did you find anything?"
"Nothing definitive," Laura lied. "We'll have to get prints---you know the drill."
"Where are we going to tow it?" Victor asked Laura from inside the RV.
Laura excused herself and went back inside.
Buddy peering in at her.
"We've got a problem. We need to use Luminol---" Victor said. He saw her look and lowered his voice. "The DPS lab's too small."
In order to use Luminol to look for more blood, the motor home would have to be in complete darkness. The DPS lab would not be able to enclose a super-sized vehicle like this.
"The sheriff's has a big room," Victor said.
"Door's too small. We'll have to wait until tonight, I guess, unless we can find an airport hanger nobody's using."
She punched in the number for Charlie Specter. "We need to put an APB out for a 1994 white GEO Prizm with either a white male or a white male and a 12-year-old girl. Get a picture of the make and model and Lundy's picture and get them to the media."
She closed the phone. She would always wonder if she'd made the wrong call not going to the media. One consolation, though, was that up until an hour ago, they didn't even know about the white GEO.
"I wonder if he bought that car here," she said.
"The GEO? It's got Colorado plates."
Laura just looked at him.
"Oh."
"Whether or not he changed the plates, we need to know the history of this car. He might have had it all along, or he might have bought it from around here."
"If he bought it from a private party, it would be hard to find."
"Buddy." Laura hopped down from the motor home. "Can you get me the Sunday Star from last week? And the Citizen." She described the car they were looking for. "Also the Sierra Vista and Bisbee papers, also last week. Oh. And a Dandy Dime."
He gave her a dirty look, but got back into his car and took off.
It kept him away from the motor home, and the blood. For now anyway.
51
Breathing hard now, Summer ran into the subdivision. The houses looked new, a cheaper version of her mom's townhouse in the foothills. The problem was they didn't look moved-in yet. She heard power saws and hammering, though. Up the street, she saw construction workers up on a roof.
"Hey!" she called out, slowing to a walk. Almost safe.
One guy, up high stapling something to the wood frame of a house, looked in her direction and shouted something. She wasn't close enough to hear, but at least he knew she was there.
She'd escaped. Hard to believe that she'd done it, but she had. Her heart started to slow. Her legs felt like lead now that she didn't need them for running.
Tires squealed. She looked back and saw Dale's car coming around the corner.
Desperately, she looked at the man on the roof, thinking she could climb the ladder up to him---but the house was too far away. She did the only thing that made sense---she darted between houses onto the next street.
The car kept going to the next corner. She knew he'd try to head her off.
This street was empty---she was all alone. The houses were unfinished, sitting on a pavement of dried mud. Feeling scared again, she took a deep breath and almost choked on the smell of sawdust.
He'd be driving up this street any minute. She had to figure out what to do. Hide? There were plenty of houses around here to hide in, but she discarded the idea---she'd be trapped. No, the best thing was to let him start up this street, then run back through to the street she was just on.
Heart thudding in her chest, she squinted up the block, first one direction, then another.
Suddenly, she heard a car coming behind her. It sounded different from Dale's. It was a white van. It must be a construction van because the back part didn't have windows. She stepped out onto the new asphalt of the street and waved her arms.
The van slowed. He was going to stop for her!
Suddenly, Dale's car came around the corner at the other end of the street and accelerated. He lurched to a stop, got out, and ran toward her.
She had to turn her back on him to run to the van, but she had a good head start. Dale knew it was over, didn't he? Still, as she ran she imagined she could feel his breath on her neck, the smell of hot oil from the stupid car, his feet pounding on the pavement. Could picture him grabbing her at the last minute---
But it didn't happen.
A hand propped the passenger door open.
She started to say "thanks," but the words froze in her throat. Something leaped out at her from the darkness.
Talons grabbed her, hard, pulled her around, a crushing grip around her throat as the thick arm levered her almost off the ground, elbow catching her chin and neck in a vise. She was dragged off her feet, her hip bumping hard against the side of the van. One of her sandals fell to the ground, and with cold clarity, she realized that she would never need it again. Then she was pulled in, backwards, across the seat. Struggling as the driver put the van in gear.
"No!" Dale screamed.
Just before the door slammed shut, she saw Dale Lundy's eyes, a mirror of her own bottomless terror.
52
Laura left the motor home to Victor and drove the few blocks to DPS. Hard to believe that Lundy had been under their noses all this time. Hidden in plain sight.
Although they had cops crawling all over the Benson Highway area, FBI agents at the airport, Highway Patrol and sheriffs in four counties looking for a white GEO with a Colorado license plate, Lundy had slipped through the net.
He could be anywhere.
She went to see Charlie Specter.
He looked up from his computer. "I was just going to call you. I think Lundy's got a soulmate."
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
He handed her a log of incoming e-mails to Lundy's account that his server had faxed over:
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
mortgagemike@mortgagemike.com
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
newsletter@studiomusician.com
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
Charlie leaned back in his chair, watching her face. "How about that? In my professional opinion, this guy is obsessive."
"Is there a way to find him?" Laura asked.
Charlie sighed. "Livewire's a big server with a one eight-hundred number. Which is fine---I was able to trace it to Coffee Anon, place on the west side---but these are old."
"How old?"
"They're from four days ago."
" Nothing since?"
"Unfortunately, no. Maybe they finally got together."
"Either they connected or Dark Moondancer gave up. I want somebody to go out and talk to the people at the coffee place. Call TPD and see if they can send Barry White."
She rapped her fingers on the desk. Where to go from here? If Lundy was panicked, he might kill Summer any time and ditch her somewhere.
She stared at the screen. Dark Moondancer. The name struck her as pretentious---extravagant. Like something from a movie. A fantasy.
She had seen or heard those words somewhere before. Recently. There had been something...
The word "fantasy" struck a chord. Lords. Lords and ladies. Role-playing.
Role-playing. She remembered now.
53
Because Laura had come directly to DPS from the airport, her mother's file and book chapters were still in her suitcase. She got them out and spread them on her desk. There it was---a notation on a scrap of notepaper: "Dk Moondancer?"
She called Barry Fruchtendler and got his machine. She pictured him out there in Montana, a beautiful sunny day, the retired cop out on a stream somewhere, casting flies.
"What's up?" asked Charlie at her elbow. "You heard of this guy before?"
"I know what Dark Moondancer is---was."
Charlie waited.
"A role-playing game, like Dungeons and Dragons. Knights, fairies, stuff like that. I don't know much about it. A few kids at our school played it, but it was really more of a high school and college kid's game."
Mostly males. She couldn't remember if the game was confined to Tucson or if it was popular throughout the country.
"A game?" Specter said. "You sure?"
Laura was thinking out loud. "Mark might know." Mark Hewitt, her landlord, had gone to school with her. She grabbed the phone book and looked him up. He was home, and he did remember the game.
"The object was to become Dark Moondancer," he said. "There were groups all over town. I think there was a point system, but it was pretty loose. Game had a bunch of different levels that you had to negotiate to get to the top, the top being the wizard, the powerful one. Only the people who made the top circle had a chance to become Moondancer. They were voted in by their peers."
"Sounds like Survivor."
"Long before its time. I think ... I think there was a certain time span---a month? Maybe it went by moon phases. Then they'd start over."
"How did someone get into the top circle?"
"I heard they did outrageous things."
"Like what?"
"Whatever was outrageous when you were a kid---there were tests. Stealing something, bashing mailboxes, waiting outside a store and getting an adult to buy beer. Running naked down Speedway. Getting a popular girl to give it up."
From buying beer to getting someone to have sex so you could get a few extra points in a game---a lot of leeway. "Did you know anyone who played?"
He rattled off a few names. Most of them were a year or two ahead and already in high school. She wrote them down.
"I'm leaving some of these guys out, I know it. I'll call you back if I remember." He paused. "While I've got you on the phone, we're having a wedding in the butterfly garden next weekend. A big one."
One of the conditions of living on the ranch rent-free was providing security for events whenever she could.
"I'll look at my schedule and let you know," she said.
Charlie looked at the list. "These the Dark Moondancer boys? You know any of them?"
"No."
"I guess it's something."
Not much, though. Who knew how long that game went on? Years probably.
Laura spent an hour tracking down the names Mark had given her. Not much luck---she mostly got answering machines.
She wondered if she was wasting her time. Would Dark Moondancer even know where Lundy was? Probably not. All those messages he'd sent---it was clear to her that in their strange cyber-relationship, Dark Moondancer was the beta dog to Musicman's alpha. But it was possible that Charlie was right, and the messages had stopped because they had made physical contact.
Victor called in to tell her they had found an auto body shop which could be closed up and made dark so they could use Luminol.
"How's Buddy doing?"
"Fine. There wasn't that much blood, so he knows he didn't kill her in there." He added, "You won't believe what that girl did."
"Summer?"
"She covered that bedroom with fingerprints---light fixtures, walls, chrome, you name it. We just filled up seven cards and all of them except one were the same. Plastered all over the place."
"How do you know they were hers?"
"Buddy picked up some prints from his wife's house---good enough to eyeball. Plus, the few places she didn't get to were wiped clean. Probably from the last one."
Laura wondered if "the last one" was Alison.
"Not only that, she pulled out her hair, by the roots. Left some hair in the sink, but some she hid. Like stringing one over the curtain rod, putting one under the lamp. Blond, so they were easy to see. And a barrette Buddy remembers because he bought it for her. You should see Buddy. He's glowing more than the Luminol. Twelve years old and she does that. She's a cop's daughter, all right."
"See that the lab gets started on the blood right away. We don't want Buddy wondering any longer than he has to---with DNA it's going to be long enough as it is."
"You coming down?"
Laura saw Lieutenant Galaz in her peripheral vision, holding a file folder, waiting for her to finish.
"Soon. Wait---you grew up in Tucson. Did you ever hear of a role-playing game called Dark Moondancer?"
"Dark Moondancer? That's a silly name."
Laura told him about the game and the Dark Moondancer who sent the e-mails to Lundy.
"Sounds pretty tenuous to me," Victor said.
"There's your big word for the day."
As soon as she finished talking to Victor, Galaz said, "Why don't you take a look at this evidence list before I call Tallahassee. I want to get this thing straightened out."
He dropped the file on her desk and walked across the squad bay to talk to Richie Lockhart. She guessed that meant he wanted her to do it now. She'd just started scanning the list when the phone rang: Barry Fruchtendler calling back.
"When I was looking at my mother's book, I saw a notation about Dark Moondancer with a question mark," she told him. "Did that have anything to do with your case?"
Fruchtendler said, "It had a lot of bearing on the case. We found some loose paper from Julie Marr's notebook in the cemetery---must have blown over the fence. School stuff mostly. She wrote down that there was a party---I think it was the weekend after she was killed. A Dark Moondancer party. We didn't release that to the press, but your mother knew about it."
"You followed that lead, Dark Moondancer?" she asked. "Did you look at anyone in particular because of that?"
"Sure did. Talked to prob'ly seven or eight young men. It's all in the murder book at TPD. I could make some calls, get them to fax it to you."
More delay. "That would be great. I'll try to expedite it on my end."
She was about to hang up when he said, "There's one name I won't forget. I always thought that kid had something to do with it, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't connect the dots. Not having a body, that was tough."
He paused to cough. His cough lasted a long time and did not sound good.
"He attended high school in the same district as Julie Marr," he said when he was finally able to talk. "His uncle owned A&B Auto Towing. That was where the car was taken from. Michael Harmon."
"Mickey Harmon?" Her voice loud in the squad room.
From his place near Richie Lockhart's desk, Galaz looked up disapprovingly.
"You know about him? That was his nickname, Mickey. Thought from the very beginning he was lying to me."
WATCH AND WAIT
Musicman glanced at his fuel gauge---almost empty. He had been parked among the big trucks outside the Crown Paper Company for an hour, keeping an eye on the warehouse at the corner of 17th and Fremont, running the engine to keep cool. He'd have to do something soon, though. Waiting on 100-degree heat, no shade in sight, wasn't an option. He supposed he could go get more gas. But what if they left while he was gone?
To Musicman's surprise, the white van hadn't gone far. The guy driving didn't care that Musicman was on his tail. He drove sedately down the old Benson Highway, took Park Avenue north, and turned into the manufacturing district near the railroad tracks. Musicman watched as the man unlocked the gate to a tall, chain link fence topped by razor wire. A derelict brick warehouse, the Chiricahua Paint Company, rotted in the sun beyond the fence. Once in the parking lot, the man drove around the back and out of view. Since the road Musicman was on dead-ended, he had to turn before he reached the entrance. And so he drove around the block, trying to think what to do. By the time he came around again, he saw them at the side of the building, a big man holding Summer's arm, the man opening the door and ushering her inside.
Dark Moondancer.
The GEO was shaking from the air conditioner. He needed to do something, but what?
He did have options. He could make an anonymous call to the police and let them rescue her.
But he didn't want to give Summer up. She had the potential to be The One, and he could not let her go without a fight. The best thing to do was retreat and think about this. Wait until dark, when at least he'd have a chance to sneak up on them.
He only hoped she'd be alive by then.
54
Laura jotted down the words Julie Marr, A&B towing, Dark Moondancer, and Mickey Harmon.
Mickey Harmon worked for Dynever Security, Jay Ramsey's Internet security company. Jay had mentioned they'd grown up together. Jay might know something, either about Dark Moondancer or about Barry Fruchtendler's suspicions.
She called the Ramsey house and got Freddy, who gave her his number at Dynever Security.
"I heard about that girl," Jay said when he answered. "If I can help in any way ..."
"Maybe you can," she said. "You know Mickey Harmon pretty well?"
"We've been friends since we were in fifth grade."
"Did you ever play a game called Dark Moondancer?"
"Dark Moondancer?"
"It was a role-playing game."
"I know what Dark Moondancer is." It was not her imagination; his voice sounded strained. "What's this about Mickey?"
"Were you aware that the police considered him a suspect in the Julie Marr abduction?"
"Oh that." He sounded relieved. "For a while there, they really went after him. But Mickey wouldn't---"
She waited.
"Wouldn't what?"
"Do you mind if I call you back? I've got someone in my office."
"Sure," she said, but he'd already hung up.
Thinking he sounded spooked and wondering why.
Galaz caught her eye. She waved at him and held up the evidence list, pantomiming that she'd get to it now.
When she took the list over to Galaz, he and Richie Lockhart were laughing about something.
"What's so funny?"
Galaz said, "You missed all the excitement around here."
"Excitement?"
"While you were in Florida. Victor got a message from his mistress. Her plumbing went crazy and she was knee-deep in water, panicked that the water was almost up to her mattress."
"You remember the mattress he bought?" Richie said. "Top of the line, twenty-five hundred dollars?"
Galaz said, "He took out of here like a bat out of hell."
"When was this?"
"Couple days ago. Richie swears he took the message down right."
Richie looked at her, wide eyes innocent. "My español isn't that good, but I thought that was what she said."
Galaz said, "You should've seen Victor when he got back. He was running around the squad bay screaming for Richie's blood."
Laura's cell phone vibrated. She sneaked a look at the number flashing on the screen: Jay Ramsey.
"Jay?" she said, turning her back so she could hear.
"We need to talk," Ramsey said. He sounded as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well. "I'll be done here in an hour and a half. Why don't I meet you at the farm in two hours. Say, six thirty? I'll leave the gate open."
"Six thirty, I'll be there."
He hung up.
That strange quality to his voice.
"What was that?" Galaz asked, his voice hopeful. "A break?"
"Nope," Laura said. "No break."
She stopped by the auto body shop to see how the lab techs were doing with the motor home. They were in the process of carrying out bags of evidence. There would be a lot to comb through.
Victor had gone to track down two private parties who sold white GEOs in the last week, and Buddy was about to leave. He pulled out behind her, but she lost sight of him when she headed in the direction of midtown. She decided to stop by Mickey Harmon's house and see if she could catch him off-guard.
Harmon lived on a quiet street in the Sam Hughes neighborhood. His house was a Spanish eclectic mansion---arched colonnades, red-tiled roof, stately palms and a lush desert garden which she could see through the gates set into the high stucco wall.
The security business must be booming. She rang the buzzer at the gate, but nothing happened.
She debated whether to go back to DPS or straight to Jay Ramsey's house. She had a little over an hour before they were due to meet---too short a window to get anything done at DPS and get back out to midtown. So she drove the few miles to Alamo Farm.
Unlike Harmon's place, Ramsey's gate was open. Maybe Jay had made it home early.
As she drove onto the property, the slanting sun poked holes through the windbreak of walnut and mesquite trees, throwing shadows on the lane like a bar code. She turned left on the lane leading to the house, driving into the sun. Dust from her car tires seemed to buzz in the air as sun and shade flickered across her eyeballs. The windshield gleamed gold and brown, like tortoiseshell.
A black SUV turned onto the lane from between the two eucalyptus trees marking the entrance to the Ramsey house. Funny. It looked like Mike Galaz's take-home vehicle.
He stopped and she stopped, window to window. "If you're looking for Jay," Galaz said, "He's not home."
"I'm meeting him here at six thirty."
"Have you talked to Mickey yet?"
"No."
"Two minds with a single thought," Galaz said. "Jay knows Mickey a lot better than I do---it occurred to me he could give us some insight."
"Same here." Laura stifled her resentment. She hated the idea of him micromanaging her case.
"You want me to come back with you and wait?"
"That's not---"
"Let me turn around, okay?"
She put the 4Runner in gear and drove on without waiting for him to catch up. Why was Galaz so interested? Was it because he was so close to Jay Ramsey and Mickey Harmon? She knew Ramsey was influential in raising money for Galaz's campaign for mayor. Maybe he was here for damage control.
She turned off at Ramsey's house, Galaz on her tail. Trees cast long shadows across the dirt clearing, the hard-packed ground reddish gold in the dying light. No cars. Laura knocked on the door anyway, wasn't surprised when she got no answer. Cold air leaked through the screen door as she peered in. Nobody home?
Galaz wasn't good at waiting. He paced back and forth on the flagstone paving in front of the house, finally went around to the back. Returned and checked his watch over and over, whistling. Annoying the hell out of her.
A sprinkler stuttered noisily across the lawn, raining on a pair of shrieking grackles. Laura, grateful for the cooling mist as the water spattered near her feet.
"I don't think he's coming," Galaz said after his second circuit around the house.
Laura was inclined to agree with him.
"That's it for me." Galaz got into his Suburban. "See you back at the ranch."
He started his engine to cool off the Suburban, but didn't pull out right away. She could see him talking on the phone as she walked back to her own vehicle.
Something about this scene bothered her. Where was Freddy? She got out her phone and checked her messages. There was a message from Charlie Specter regarding the owner of the GEO . The man was being interviewed by Victor Celaya now. But neither Freddy nor Jay had called to cancel the meeting.
The door to the house was open; only the screen door stood between her and the inside of the house. A guy who ran an Internet security company wouldn't leave his house wide open like that.
I'll leave the gate open for you.
Why? Why bother leaving the gate open when it was just as easy to do what he always did?
Abruptly, she had a bad feeling. It took her a moment to pinpoint it, although it had been in the back of her mind all afternoon.
She had interviewed and interrogated perhaps a hundred suspects and witnesses in her three years as a investigator, and in the cases where she got a confession, there was always that moment when the decision was made to capitulate. With some of them, it showed in their eyes; others, in their voices.
She had heard that kind of resignation in Jay's voice, realized that the sound of his voice was the main reason she had come out here. The link between Dark Moondancer and Musicman was tenuous and might come to nothing. Mickey Harmon may or may have not killed Julie Marr all those years ago. What compelled her to come here was Jay Ramsey's state of mind.
She walked back to the house, glancing at Galaz in his vehicle, still engrossed in his phone call. She thought about asking him to go with her, but discarded that notion. She didn't know if he would be a help or a hindrance. Better to do this on her own.
"Jay?" she called. "Freddy?"
She pulled at the screen door and was surprised that it was unlocked.
Suddenly she remembered the last time she had walked into this house uninvited, the night Jay Ramsey was shot. For a moment the two incidents, decades apart, seemed to meld together into this one surreal moment. She withdrew her weapon. Heart slamming against her ribs, she cleared each room she came to. Heading down the hallway to the master bedroom, unable to shake the bad feeling growing just beneath her solar plexus. The air coming from the vents was frigid, a vapor that seemed to seep like melting ice into her bowels.
Something wrong.
The white carpet with the vacuum marks had long ago been replaced by Saltillo tile. The tiles reflected the white of the hallway walls and ceiling, gleaming yet cold; inviting yet ominous. Ahead in the half-light, Laura spotted a sheet of paper lying in the hallway. She picked it up. The freezing air coming from the vents made the paper flutter in her fingers.
"Dark Moondancer is a secret no longer worth keeping. I thought my penance was living the rest of my life as a quadriplegic, but it has become clear that I cannot live ..."
The letter took up most of the page, twelve-point print. Laura returned the note to the floor where she found it. There would be plenty of time to look at it later; right now, she needed to find out if Jay was alive or dead.
She approached the open doorway to the master bedroom. The black iron dogs guarding the foot of the bed were gone, but she saw them as clearly as if they were here in real time, along with the indelible image of Jay Ramsey tangled in the sheets, bleeding onto the white carpet.
Superimposed by reality.
Now Jay Ramsey sat in his wheelchair. A bottle of whiskey and an empty pill vial lay in his lap. A plastic bag had been pulled over his head.
55
Laura holstered her weapon and was at Jay Ramsey's side in three strides. The bag had already been torn by his desperate fingers, leaving a hole, probably the last thing he did before he lost consciousness---suicides often had second thoughts.
A possibility then that he was still alive---she felt for a pulse. Weak, but there.
She removed the plastic bag and checked his airway---unobstructed. Breathing through his mouth. Good, she didn't have to give him CPR. She couldn't risk moving a quadriplegic from his wheelchair and laying him out on the floor.
Laura fumbled for her cell phone and pressed the TALK button.
"What's going on?" Mike Galaz called from the hallway.
"In here," she called. "Ramsey tried to kill himself, but he's still alive."
Galaz appeared in the doorway, his gun out and held at his side. "Is someone on the way?"
Face pale, eyes dark in his head. Agitated. "Did you call dispatch? 911?"
"I was just going to call it i---"
He put his gun away and crossed the space between them. "Let me do it."
Before she could object Galaz seized the phone from her hand. He looked at the screen for a moment, raised his arm, and threw the phone savagely across the room. It hit the wall and exploded into plastic shards.
Laura stared at the wall and back to Galaz.
"Houston, we've got a problem!" Galaz shouted. "Do you hear me, Mickey?"
Laura heard a noise from the master bathroom and pivoted, but it was too late; her fingers had just brushed the grip of her Sig when two huge hands closed down on her wrists like a vise, wrenching her arms up against her spine. Her shoulders and neck protested as Harmon shoved his knee square in the small of her back. He pushed her hard against the bedside table with crushing force, knocking the breath right out of her. Cuffs ratcheted around her wrists.
She didn't feel the gun being taken from the holster, but knew he had it. Smelled his sour breath: Pickles. Harmon yanked her upright, and as he did so, Galaz darted in like a bantam-weight prize fighter, jabbed her in the hip with a hypodermic needle.
He jumped back as Laura howled.
Galaz started pacing. "Dammit!"
"Don't worry, boss. We can contain it."
"You don't understand! She's not some dime-a-dozen street hustler off Miracle Mile. She's DPS. This is not going to go away!" He crossed over to Jay and fiddled with the plastic bag. "There's a hole in this thing!" He tore the bag apart, crumpled it up and shoved it into the pocket of his slacks. Breathed deeply. "The whiskey and the pills'll finish him off. All we needed was a little time."
He sat down on a chair by the window. "There's a way to do this, I just have to figure it out. I know what to do, I just need a little space. It'll come." He checked his watch, then looked at Ramsey. "He can't last much longer. While we're here, we might as well stay around and make sure."
Mickey kicked Laura's feet out from under her, and she sat down hard on her tailbone, legs jarring as they hit the floor.
Shit-scared. What had he given her?
Galaz crossed one elegantly-trousered knee over the other and stared down his elegant nose at her. "Under the weather, Laura? You should start to feel it any time."
"What? What did you give me?"
"Do you feel hot?"
"Hot?"
"Not hot as in Girls Gone Wild'---I mean hot as in burning up."
She did feel hot. She tried to bring her legs under her to stand up and found she couldn't. Her legs weren't responding. They felt like wood. Rigid.
Her tailbone throbbed from the fall, and her hip hurt where the needle went in. The ache seemed to be spreading up into the small of her back. "What did you give me?"
"Steatoda juliei."
"What?" Her body was clenching. Sweat popped out on her forehead, her upper lip, her arms, trickled down her sides.
"Steatoda juliei," Galaz said. "It's a neurotoxin that comes from the false black widow."
It felt like she was cramping up---everywhere at once.
Galaz continued, "The term 'false' is misleading, since there are few differences between Steatoda and Latrodectus. The black widow is glossy black, as opposed to a matte finish---that's steatoda---and the steatoda doesn't have the hourglass on its belly, but otherwise, they're almost identical. Especially where their neurotoxins are concerned."
Locked in pain, Laura followed his words, but there was a lag. She could feel a buzzing in her brain and knew it was pure fear. This wasn't just pain, it was agony, her body slippery with sweat---soaking every inch of her skin, in her eyes, blotting her blouse with it. And clenching, God, her toes were clenching and the pain just wouldn't stop ...
Galaz said, "There are variations in neurotoxins from species to species. Some are far more extreme than others. This particular neurotoxin is pretty severe, but fortunately for you, not long-lasting. One, two hours at the most, and then the effects wear off. Another choice of spider, and you could be in incredible pain for two or three days. But I chose Steatoda juliei because we don't need that long."
She looked at his crossed legs, the top leg moving back and forth. Using his knee as a fulcrum. He was smiling. "I gave this Steatoda its name. Since I spent months studying the effects of its venom on everything from bunny rabbits to horses, I can safely say this was an unnamed species, until now. That's Phylum: Arthropoda; Subphylum: Celicerata; Class: Arachnida; Order: Aranae; Genus: Steatoda; Species: juliei."
Suddenly, her lower back bloomed like a bright red flower, pain so crushing and absolute that for a moment she couldn't breathe.
She closed her eyes and moaned. Her instinct told her to curl up in a fetal position on the floor, but her abdominal muscles were as stiff as a washboard. She gulped air, tried to roll with the cramping pain, but couldn't: It was the bright screaming center of her brain.
Galaz was talking at her but she didn't understand much of what he said.
"When you find a new species you can name it after anything you want---other than yourself. That would be in bad taste. You just add an 'i' to the end. So I named it Steatoda juliei. Do you know why I chose juliei?" He leaned his upper body as far forward as it would go so he was looking into her eyes.
Julie Marr. She didn't know if she spoke it out loud or if she just thought it.
"I meant this dose for Buddy Holland's daughter. I wanted to see how she reacted, but---" He shrugged--- "The best-laid plans ... you know the saying." He turned to Harmon. How is our other patient?"
"He's dead."
"You sure this time?"
"Uh-huh."
Galaz stood. "We'd better go then. You'll have to carry her. Give me her gun." Galaz removed his own gun from the paddle holster on his hip and traded it for Laura's Sig Sauer. Harmon tucked Galaz's gun into his ankle holster.
"That reminds me. Better check her boots, too. She should have another weapon."
Harmon's manhandling was excruciating. He found her second gun, her mace, her knife.
Galaz put his index finger to his lip. "What we'll do is, you make sure this place looks right. Doesn't matter about hair and fibers, lots of people come here. What about Freddy?"
"I saw him race out of here. He won't be back for a while."
Galaz said to Laura, "Freddy thinks someone stomped his boyfriend. He's probably just now figuring out his inamorata isn't at St. Mary's Hospital. Pretty ingenious, don't you think? If only you hadn't come early and spoiled the party." He sighed. "I should have known---you never know when to stop."
Laura barely heard him. Her arms felt as if they were being pulled out of their sockets, handcuffed as they were behind her back. Every muscle, long and short, big and small---writhing, turning inside-out, flopping like an oxygen-starved fish, wringing itself limp, squirting pain and adrenaline into her system.
"Aren't you even curious where we're going?"
Laura tried to say something, but couldn't.
"You mean to tell me you haven't figured it out?"
He stood over her, the toe of his alligator-skin loafer inches from her face.
"We're going to see Summer," he said.
Buddy Holland trailed Laura Cardinal to a house in midtown, then to Fort Lowell Road. He knew from the way she was acting that Cardinal was on to something and he wanted to know what it was.
It was easy to get locked out in an investigation like this---he was just some cop from Bisbee with no power here. He also knew that Cardinal didn't trust him because Summer was his daughter. He understood how she could think that. But he didn't care how she felt; he wanted to find his daughter, and no one was going to stop him.
He watched her drive through the gates to what looked like an estate. He got out and walked up the utility road along the east side of the property, lined with a new ten-foot-high, chain link fence topped with barbed wire, every panel marked NO TRESPASSING in big red letters. When he came to a place where the lane curved, he spotted a mirror by the side of the road to show the blind corner. The last time he'd seen something like that was in Germany, where he'd been stationed during his stint in the Army. Fingers locked into the chain link, Buddy peered through the kaleidoscope of foliage at the narrow road and saw Laura Cardinal's car stopped on the lane as she talked to someone in a black SUV.
The SUV turned around and followed her up the lane. They turned in at some tall trees---where he assumed the house was. Buddy wondered if the black Suburban belonged to the DPS lieutenant, Galaz. Whatever they were doing, he and Victor had been kept in the dark. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with Summer's kidnapping. Maybe their meeting was of a personal nature.
Still, he decided to stay around awhile and see what happened.
He backed his Caprice under a tamarisk tree a little ways back from the road, where he could keep an eye on the entrance. The sun was low in the sky and the shade of the tamarisk, dense and inky, concealed the car well.
A little over an hour later, he heard cars coming up the lane. Galaz's black Suburban drove slowly out the gate and turned right onto Fort Lowell, followed by Laura Cardinal's 4Runner.
The glass was dark on the SUV, but he thought he saw a person in the passenger seat. A man drove Laura Cardinal's 4Runner. He was by himself.
Why wasn't Cardinal driving her own car? Was she riding with Galaz?
There was something secretive about this that seemed off.
Buddy realized he had a choice. He could go onto the property, or he could follow Galaz and the 4Runner.
He compromised by calling Victor Celaya. Victor said he would send someone to check out the property. That worked out, Buddy put his brown Caprice into gear and slipped into the traffic stream like an alligator into a river.
56
Ghostly letters spelled out the words CHIRICAHUA PAINT CO. in canary yellow on the dark red brick just under the roof line of the warehouse. Below that were two rows of multi-paned factory windows, all of them either blacked-out or broken. The property was wrapped in chain link. Behind the warehouse, an east-bound train rattled past. Laura wished she could scream to them. But even if she were able, they were too far away.
Mickey Harmon un-padlocked the gate and swung it open, waiting for Galaz to drive through. They jounced across the potholed parking lot around to the back and parked in the shadow of the building. Mickey got out of the 4Runner and into the backseat. Galaz left the engine running so he could run the air conditioner.
"Where's Musicman?" Galaz asked Harmon.
"Parked down the road between a couple of trucks. Must think he's invisible."
Galaz laughed. "I'll bet he's waiting for it to get dark. You should leave the gate open, make it easy for him."
"He might call the police," Harmon said.
"He won't. He wants her for himself. There's no way he'd give her up---not voluntarily." A smile flickered on his face, not reaching his eyes. "What do you think, Laura? You've been hot on Dale Lundy's trail for some time. You think he's going to give up now?"
"No."
"See, Mickey? Cardinal knows her quarry."
She stared at him, feeling the ache in her eyeballs. Tried out her voice again. "You used me to find him."
He laughed. "It pays to have a crack investigator on the home team. At a certain point I didn't need you anymore, though---Jay tracked down his ISP before Charlie did." He turned to Harmon. "Just remember, Mickey, I want Lundy alive. I want the last thing he sees to be me doing Summer. I want him to know he's been dominated. He's got to learn that he can't defy me."
He tapped the steering wheel, the only sign that he was nervous. "I've got to figure out what to do with Laura here. Any ideas?"
Harmon grunted.
"I didn't think so. That's why you never got higher than the third level."
The third level? He must be referring to the game Dark Moondancer. Pushing forty, and he was preoccupied with a kid's game. It was the first thing about this whole situation that made her want to laugh out loud. The feeling didn't last long.
Galaz's fingers drummed on the steering wheel: Tap, tap, tap. "Jay was easy, but if one of our criminal investigators disappears, that's going to look bad. I really wanted to have some time with Summer, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen now."
"I dunno. You could maybe take her someplace else---"
"No. There's the time element. I'll be lucky if I have a half hour. Laura here is the head of a task force, people will be calling, they'll come looking for her. This whole thing could blow up in our faces. Better just go ahead and cut my losses."
Laura asked, "Why Dark Moondancer?"
"Why? Because it's more than a game, that's why. Dark Moondancer transcends fantasy. To get to the highest level and become Dark Moondancer, you have to make it real. Things you would never dream of doing in your regular life---you'll do if you want to win. This game isn't for the faint of heart.
"The problem with Mickey here, and Jay---they always pulled their punches. They had no commitment. No vision."
Across the empty lot east of the warehouse, Laura saw cars crawling along a road that paralleled the railroad tracks, the last rays of the sun flaring off their back windows. Too far away to signal. She traced their movement with her eyes, though, watching them turn and go out of view, becoming swallowed by the rise of land and the creosote. One of them was a brown Caprice, the kind Buddy Holland drove. Now she wished she'd brought Buddy with her.
She said to Jay, "After all these years, you're still playing this game?"
"It's not just a game. It's a way of life. There are smart people and dumb people, powerful people and losers. Dark Moondancer is a metaphor for power."
"Do you still play it, Mickey?" she asked.
Mickey grunted something intelligible. Scared to say anything in front of Mike Galaz?
"Did Jay?"
Galaz said, "Jay was nothing but a rich crip who outlived his usefulness. Although he did buy me this warehouse for my extracurricular activities."
"Did he have anything to do with Julie's murder?"
"You saw the note."
"The one you wrote and planted?"
He smiled. "You think the three of us did it? That's what you think? Jay, Mickey and me?"
Even through her pain, Laura was amazed at her own curiosity. She wanted to know how long Galaz had been killing. She wanted to know if Jay had helped him kill Julie Marr.
She had to know.
Galaz sensed that need and abruptly changed the subject. "You're not so different, you and the pedophile. There are a lot of things I can take, Laura, but being patronized is not one of them. I don't take that from anyone."
What was he talking about? "Patronize you?"
"Come on, Laura. Don't play that game."
"Honestly, I don't know what you think I did." In her mind she reviewed her actions of the last few months. She had always been polite, always did as she was told, was very careful in fact because she didn't know him well. She'd gone out of her way to stay under the radar, to do what he wanted, even going outside the department and working with Jay Ramsey because he asked her to. She had done everything---except show up at his party.
He couldn't be that petty, could he? Why would the fact that she didn't show up to his parties make a difference to him either way?
Galaz glanced at his watch. "Times a wasting. Mickey, you're going to have to do the honors."
Mickey Harmon got out and opened the passenger door.
"Better take the cuffs off. That would look bad if anyone driving by looked too hard. Laura, can you walk under your own steam?"
"I don't know."
"Get her on her feet and see."
At 22nd and Park, Buddy Holland got caught at the light. By the time he made the turn onto Park, both the Suburban and the 4Runner were gone.
He put on the afterburners, gunning it up to eighty to catch the cars ahead, but none of them were the vehicles he was looking for. Galaz must have turned off somewhere in between. He backtracked and found himself cruising through the warehouse district, his instincts telling him they were here somewhere. But where?
The sun was going down and it was getting harder to see. He scanned the roads, empty except for big trucks and semis parked for the night, the blank-windowed factories and warehouses. Then he saw something out of place---a small white car tucked in between two trucks.
A white GEO Prizm crammed to the ceiling with junk.
He drove down the road and pulled in behind an empty office building to think.
Buddy didn't know what kind of connection there could be between Dale Lundy and the meeting between Laura Cardinal and Lieutenant Galaz. Something was wrong, but he didn't know what. And now, here was this amazing coincidence. A '94 GEO Prizm parked between two trucks.
He got out of the car and slipped behind the empty building. He walked to the next block, cutting back between two warehouses, following an internal alley. He emerged fifty feet or so from the car.
Getting darker by the minute.
He drew his weapon, using the back end of a big tractor trailer for cover. He went from one truck to another until he was behind the truck parked to the left of the GEO. This gave him a good back view of the GEO, including the driver's side.
No signs of life. No movement inside that he could see, but with stuff piled that high, it was impossible to see past the back seat. Buddy squinted at the license plate. He didn't need to call in to get Dale Lundy's plate number; he knew it by heart.
He was right. It was Lundy's car.
He thought about going back to the Caprice and calling it in, but just then he heard footfalls down the road, the crunch of shoes on dirt. A hundred yards up the road he saw a figure almost obscured by darkness---just the white of his shirt. Walking north.
Headlights appeared at the other end of the road, lighting up the weeds along the side of the road. Buddy watched as the man ducked behind a palo verde tree until the car had passed. Then he was walking again, heading up to the street Buddy knew from his previous pass was a dead end.
He flashed his MagLite on the back of the GEO, approached it at a slant, gun trained on the driver's window. Adrenaline pumping, knowing he should identify himself, but aware that the man walking up the road might hear. With every step, he saw more of the interior of the car.
Empty.
Relief like a douse of ice-cold water. Summer wasn't there. But where was she?
Buddy looked up the road. The man was almost to the cross street. Buddy watched as he crossed the street and walked along the chain link fence on the other side, then stopped. Too dark to tell, but Buddy assumed there was a gate. The man just stood there, peering in. Even from here Buddy could tell he was scared. It was in the way he hung back, the nervous movement of his head as he looked around.
What do I bet it's you, asshole?
Laura was able to hobble from the car to the warehouse door, every muscle screaming. Her toes clenched, her teeth aching, her nerve endings shrieking like the high strings on a violin. Every shuffling step was an agony. She wanted to lie down. She wanted to curl into a ball. But Mickey had taken off the handcuffs so she needed to test her limits in case she had a chance to get her weapon back. Otherwise, she knew the end of her pain would also be the end of her life.
Once inside, her freedom ended.
"Carry her, Mick," Galaz said, his voice impatient. "Otherwise it'll take all day."
Mickey slung her over his shoulder.
The warehouse was empty except for broken glass. In the huge, cavernous space, their footsteps crunched on glass and concrete, echoing in the rafters high above. The last light of the day poked through the jagged holes in the many windowpanes. The intact windows had been painted over dark green, giving the place a murky, aqueous cast.
They didn't have far to go. Half of one side of the warehouse was a suite of offices---cheap wallboard painted mint green, doors removed. Their destination was the corner office, closest to the back door.
"Who's there?"
The voice belonged to a girl. It sounded creaky, as if she wasn't used to speaking. Just inside the door, Harmon set Laura down.
She was facing into the room, but her mind balked. She stared at her feet, at the floor, a kind of disconnect. She didn't want to see what had been done to Summer. Her job was finding the bad guy. Her job was to pick up the pieces. Her job was to comfort the families. There was nothing she had ever done that had prepared her for this.
She couldn't do anything for Summer. She was helpless.
Galaz said, "What's the matter, Laura? You've been looking for her all day---aren't you the least bit curious?" At the same moment, Mickey Harmon poked her in the back.
She couldn't see this. It would do her in. She couldn't help Summer, she couldn't help herself. For the first time in her life, Laura wanted to give up. Give it up, let it go. Like slipping into a warm bath. A certain comfort when you knew it was hopeless, and you were just waiting for death.
One more push from Harmon and she was in the room.
She smelled the stale air, fear riding on it. Fear and sweat and tears. And the coppery smell of old blood.
She squeezed her eyes shut, the way she did sometimes when the alarm went off and she insisted on sleeping a little longer, knowing that once she opened her eyes it was all over, she'd have to get up.
"Please ..." the girl said, her voice drifting off. So pathetic that Laura felt a warm surge of emotion, tears climbing up into her throat.
When she heard Summer's voice, her resolve came back.
She willed her eyes open.
When Buddy was a kid, he was obsessed with American Indians. He read books about them, watched movies, pestered his parents to take him to Indian ceremonies---especially the Apaches, who were the toughest people on earth. During the Indian wars, an Apache could cover seventy miles a day on foot. The Apaches trained their infants not to make noise because they might alert the enemy. They lived on stealth because otherwise they would be eradicated. Now his days of stalking the low-rent neighborhood in south Phoenix where he grew up came back to him.
He was quiet. Like air, threading through the cracks of the world.
Silently he tracked Lundy through the dark parking lot of the Chiricahua Paint Company. Adhering to his training: Always find cover. Cover was something a bullet couldn't go through, like the engine block of a car. That was something that had been hammered into his head over and over. Find cover. If you can't find cover, find concealment. And if you can't find concealment, look for an escape route.
Lundy was a lightweight: A guy who picked on little girls. Watching him creep along the warehouse wall, flinching at every noise---it could have made Buddy complacent, but it didn't. The minute you let your guard down, that was when fate got you. He'd seen it many times in his twenty-three years in law enforcement. Just a little bit of inattention, and you were dead.
So he did not underestimate this man. Hated him, yes, but even the hate he had to push down deep inside. He had to clear the fear for his daughter out of his mind if he wanted to help her.
Not much cover around here, so he went for concealment.
The little man had his back to the warehouse wall, inching around like he was on a ledge twenty floors up. Clear he didn't know what he was doing.
Time to take him out.
Buddy was behind him in an instant, one arm around his neck and his other hand over his mouth. He was tempted to administer a choke hold, tempted to take the choke hold too far.
He said quietly in Dale Lundy's ear, "Make a sound and I will kill you. Do you understand?"
A quick nod, his eyes bugging out.
He dragged Lundy backwards, off his feet---the guy was as light as a feather. Dragged him under a tamarisk tree. The salt cedar's boughs trailed almost to the ground, affording him all the privacy he needed.
He had Lundy cuffed and on his stomach, one knee pressed into his back. Thinking about how much he'd like to pound his head into the pavement, crack it like an egg.
"Where is she?" he demanded.
"I don't know---"
"Don't fuck with me. Where is she?" Pressing his knee harder.
"She's in there."
"Why?"
"It wasn't my fault. I tried to save her, but he got her anyway, I tried, I tried ..." Blubbering. New blue Keds skating in the dirt.
Buddy fighting panic now---who got her? "Is she hurt?"
"I don't know---I don't think so. She looked okay when he took her in there."
"How long ago was that?"
"Two, three hours ago? I can't remember---it could be longer than that."
"Who is he?"
"Dark Moondancer."
He shook Lundy until he rattled. "Are you playing games with me? Because if you are---"
"No no no! Dark Moondancer. That's his name. It's the truth, I swear to God, it's his nick. He took her away from me, all I ever wanted was for her and me to---"
"Shut up!" He heard the savagery in his own voice. Out of control. Gritted his teeth, tamped down his revulsion. His voice quiet. "If you don't shut the fuck up about that I'll kill you." He took a deep breath. "Tell me about Dark Moondancer."
"I don't know him really, except from the Internet. He ... he and I have had transactions over the years. He knew I was in town and he wanted to ... to meet Summer."
Buddy gave him a hard slap to the head. "Go on."
"He's evil. He likes torture. That's why I refused to let him meet Summer. I wanted to protect her."
"What are you saying? He's torturing my daughter in there?"
Lundy gasped. "Your daughter?"
"Answer the question."
"Oh God. Ohmygod, I'm dead. Oh God, please don't hurt me!"
His voice hopeless.
Buddy felt something crack in his heart.
Laura stared, taking in everything at once, but unable to completely assimilate it. Breaking it down object by object, things she could name. A gas can on the floor. A trouble light. Extension cords. A video camera. A work table. Tools arrayed neatly on the table's pristine surface---pliers, a vise, an electric drill, a staple gun. The tool cabinet was like the one her father owned, candy-apple red. The kind you got at Sears.
Shackles bolted to the walls. Meat hooks dangling from the ceiling. A machine that looked custom-made, padded, something you'd see in a gym, but with shackles, chains, and pulleys at each end. A modern-day rack? Photos tacked to the wall, eight-by-tens of the hell he had committed on young women and girls---she counted three different women, photographed from all angles. Tied up, eyes bulging with fear. Before and After shots.
Digital photos of Jessica Parris after death.
A place for Let's Go People! to unwind.
Laura took it in, trying to stay clinical. She almost lost it as she stared at the mattress on the floor, though, soaked through with old bloodstains. So many reds, browns and blacks they formed a hard, shiny slick.
Mickey prodded her deeper into the room.
"You two girls know each other?" asked Galaz.
When Laura finally looked at Summer, she felt both relief and revulsion.
The girl was bolted to one wall, huddled down as far as she could get, but her arms were held high above her head. Wearing a little girl's dress.
Unhurt, physically. But how did you face something like this without losing a grip on your soul?
Twelve years old
She looked at Galaz, the supercilious smile on his face. Seeing living, breathing women as something to torture for his pleasure, because he was so empty he couldn't get a high any other way.
If there's a way for me to kill you, she thought, I will.
Buddy secured Lundy to the tree with the cuffs after tearing strips of the man's shirt for a gag. Arms behind him, cuffs looped around a sturdy bough. Lundy on his knees.
That would hurt before too long. His back would be in agony. Good.
Buddy started for the back of the warehouse.
The cars were there, Laura Cardinal's and Galaz's. He made a circuit of the building, which was uniformly dark except for the one area near the corner, where a dim light leaked out through the holes in the painted-over windows.
That's where they were.
Buddy leaned his back against the brick, which still retained heat from the day. He needed to call it in. The cell phone would have to do. But before that, he took the knife he always carried and stabbed the tires on the two vehicles.
He called 911, explained who he was, that he was a cop. Gave the exact location. The South Tucson police were on their way. He got through to DPS, to Jerry Grimes.
He'd give them five minutes.
Laura was aware of Galaz standing near her. He was smug, pleased with himself. But there was something else.
Something going on with him.
Working out a problem.
"Why don't you check her shackles?" Galaz said to Harmon.
"They're fine."
"Humor me, Mick."
Ponderously, Harmon walked over to Summer and bent down to check. He straightened, said, "I told you they were fi---"
The bullet took him in the chest, throwing him against the wall.
Galaz was holding Laura's weapon, looking down at Harmon.
"Sorry, Mickey, there's been a change of plans," he said.
Mickey started crawling along the floor.
Galaz crossed over to Mickey, his latex-gloved hand swooping in to take the gun from Harmon's shoulder holster. Harmon gasping, still crawling.
Galaz staring down at him. "You look like a snail, Mickey."
He followed as Mickey Harmon crawled, his fancy shoes inches from his face. Laura saw the narrow planes of Galaz's face---rapt attention.
She looked from him to the work table. Less than two feet away, but her muscles had gotten cold again from not moving, and when she tried to move in that direction, her body resisted like wood.
Had to do it.
Couldn't.
She looked at Summer. The look on her face. Jesus.
Throat constricted, aching, clenching---she inched her way, one eye on Galaz, the pleasure he got from watching Mickey crawl.
"Almost to the door, Mickey," Galaz said. "If you make it before dying, I'll let you go." Pocketing her gun. Holding Mickey's.
Laura was almost to the table.
Mickey, two feet from the doorway.
Galaz, in a world of his own. The look on his face orgasmic.
The knife was closest. She didn't know if she could even wrap her crippled fingers around it. Even the idea was agony.
She heard a train horn.
Galaz still had his back to her, but he seemed to have lost interest in Mickey, who had fallen short of his mark and lay either dead or unconscious short of the doorway. Galaz oddly still. Thinking?
Laura's fingertips touched the knife. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, tried to grasp it. How she'd be able to do anything when she couldn't even wrap her fingers around the knife, she didn't know.
Suddenly, Galaz turned.
Laura started and the knife scuttled out of her fingers.
Galaz looked from the knife to Laura. "Can't do it, can you, Detective Cardinal? It must be frustrating, not being about to tell your body what to do when you've done it all your life."
Unconcerned, he crossed to the place Laura had been. Like a choreographer, he eyed the distance between that spot and where Mickey Harmon was shot. "This can work," he said, and nodded. "You shoot at Mickey and Mickey shoots at you. The problem is---maybe you can help me figure this out---what about all my hairs, fibers, fingerprints? Semen? What would you do?"
Laura needed to get the knife. But she'd pushed it even farther away, and her hands were cramping up even worse.
Galaz spun around and scanned the room. Frowning. "Have to burn the place down. That's the only solution, don't you think?" Talking more quickly now. "He shoots you, but you shoot him; he's wounded. He's got to cover this up though. So he pours the gas and lights a match and then tries to get out. Does that sound plausible?"
Not expecting her to answer.
"Or he's about to pour the gas and lights it just as you shoot him---I don't think it really matters. The important thing is the Point of Origin. It's got to be right ... here."
He strode over to where Mickey was when he was shot. Only a couple of feet from Summer. He had been checking her shackles just before Galaz shot him.
Outside in the night, she heard a train coming, horn blaring to warn people away from the tracks. Laura looked at Summer. Fear shiny in her eyes. Watching Galaz, understanding what he was saying, that the Point of Origin would be at her feet.
Galaz looked at Summer.
"Something I've always wanted to do---the Joan of Arc thing. Too bad I won't be here to see it all." He winked at Summer and walked to the gas can, hefted it up. Held it near her, watching her face. Completely absorbed in her fear.
He looked bemused. Oblivious to Laura.
Laura said, "What about Musicman?"
Startling him out of his reverie. "Musicman?"
The train was coming.
"Weren't you going to bring him here? To see Summer?"
"What? No." He shrugged. "You can't do everything."
"But he defied you."
Wheels ticking on the tracks, louder and louder.
"Can't do everything," Galaz repeated, uncertain.
The train upon them now, the rumbling shaking the room. A sweeping wall of sound, so big that for a moment it obliterated all thought. They were in the maw of sound.
Concentrate! She had to try one more time for the knife. She straightened out her fingers as far as they could go and pressed down on the handle, edging it to her by pushing the handle down against the wood.
The thundering in her ears. Fear pushing its way up into her throat. "Musicman wins, then" she said.
"He won't win. He won't get Summer now." Galaz unscrewed the cap and sloshed some of the liquid on the floor. The smell hit Laura, the rank high smell of pure gasoline.
The thing she feared most was dying in a fire.
Summer, whimpering with fear.
Get your fingers around---
Galaz produced a silver lighter from his pocket. Paused. Laura could see he was still working it out in his mind, seeing the evidence the way the fire marshal would see it, the detectives, the ME.
Get your fingers around the knife---
The sound of the train abating now, the wheels the noisiest part.
Laura curled her fingers. It hurt like hell, but fire would hurt worse. She closed her eyes and with an act of will, squeezed. The knife was in her hand. She'd have to rush him, but she could barely move.
She'd just have to aim herself at him, keeping the point of the knife to the front.
Five feet away.
She clenched her muscles even more, the pain excruciating.
Galaz's back toward her. Splashing more gasoline on the walls, the windows.
Harnessing her adrenaline. Clamping down on muscles already stressed beyond the breaking point. Take a deep breath.
Now.
When Buddy heard the shot, he reacted immediately. Drawing his weapon, he tried the metal door, but it was locked. He stared at the windows, looking for the weakest point. The panes were fashioned of glass and wood, and in some places the wood strips were broken.
There would be no element of surprise. They'd see him coming.
Then he heard the train. He realized the tracks went right behind the warehouse. All he had to do was time it right. He doubted anyone would hear the breaking glass.
He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his gun. Picked the place where the wood had splintered, where there were stress fractures.
Waited.
The train coming, coming, the rumbling getting louder and louder until it enveloped him in an ungodly roar---
Now.
Laura pushed off from her feet and launched herself toward Galaz, flat end of the knife handle jammed into her side to keep it steady, using her body as a projectile. Trying not to think that it could poke her own guts out.
Landing far short, crashing on her hands, her knees, her chin, her hand cut, the knife skittering harmlessly across the concrete.
Galaz spinning around, his face a mask of surprise.
The stink of gasoline everywhere.
"You actually think---"
Shock in his eyes as a gunshot exploded through the small space, the momentum spinning him around and flipping him backwards into the wall.
Head cracking---an awful sound. Holding his side, his mouth open and working.
In his hands, the lighter.
Manicured fingers flicking.
A rough male voice yelling, "Drop it! Do it now!"
Laura recognizing the voice, but not sure---
An incandescent moment when metal struck flint, ignition. Spark---a runnel of flame swirling up Galaz's arm to his waxy face and up the walls.
The delight on his face turning to terror.
A blur beside her: Buddy Holland going to his daughter.
Laura thinking: Shackles.
Buddy from cop to father, his face twisted in terror as he ran to his daughter, pulled at her shackles, saying, "Keys keys keys!"
Frank Entwistle, peering down at her. "You okay?"
What do you think? But she didn't say it.
"What about Mickey?" Entwistle asked.
"Mickey?" What about him?
Entwistle nodded toward the man lying in the doorway. "He had the key to your handcuffs, didn't he?"
Then she remembered: Mickey bending down to check Summer's shackles.
Suddenly, a loud whoosh! Galaz lit up like a burning straw man, sheets of flame spreading to the roof, the whole place getting darker, almost black. Boiling black smoke on a river of flame---
Concentrate! He had the key to your handcuffs, didn't he?
"Mickey!" Laura shouted.
Buddy looking up, perspiration running down his face, glowing in the flickering light; his eyes like a wild horse's.
Summer screaming.
Laura nodding at the man lying in the doorway.
Buddy, an acknowledging nod, then on the man like a jackal, coming up with a key ring, including three small ones---cuff keys. Buddy fumbling, Laura unable to move, Summer screaming screaming screaming---
Get out now, her brain told her,but she had no answer for that. The air buzzing at her mouth and nostrils like a swarm of bees, sparks lighting on her, in her hair, panic scrabbling like rats in the walls, the fear pure and hard and all-consuming.
I don't want to die like this.
Even with the incredible noise of the flames, she heard the click of the lock to Summer's shackles. Buddy cursing, praying, his breath hitching. Summer whimpering.
Laura, trying to remember where the doorway was because the air was now black except for the oily flames. Crawling, pushing her body to move.
Buddy running past her. She didn't see him, but heard his boots on the glass, felt the wind of his passing, something soft passing across her face---the dress?
Fire feeding on oxygen. Blowing toward her---she could feel it on her feet, her back. Going toward the air? Or was that wrong? She couldn't think. Maybe she was going in the wrong direction. Where was the doorway? I should have reached Mickey by now. Her throat clogging up, her chest seizing with the need to breathe---
Banging, loud voices.
"Police!"
People in the room. Noise, men, legs, guns, SWAT.
Eyes stinging. Harder to breathe. Gasping for air. She could be dead any moment. Grateful that she lay on her face away from the smoke, that they were here. They were here, they would get her out now.
Legs milling, but no one coming to her.
What about me?
Entwistle looking down at her, his expression sorrowful.
Someone else---SWAT?---crouching down. Then she was borne up and carried like a bird in the grip of a hawk, up and out into the air, rushing headlong through the hurtling dark, the clean bright stars overhead.
57
Five days, twelve interviews, three interrogations, and reams of paperwork later, Laura decided she'd had enough. She had to go home and not just for a few hours of sleep. They were at the point in the investigation where it was all mopping up and putting it in one place for the County attorney. Down the line, she would have to make another trip back to Florida to testify in a related case, the death of Andrew Descartes, but not now.
That was good. Laura could barely wrap her mind around Andy Descartes's death. She had erred seriously in not asking assistance from SWAT. She could rationalize all she wanted about giving the Apalachicola PD the benefit of the doubt, and that was true to a certain extent. But the real reason she had gone in that day with Chief Redbone and his two officers was hubris; she did not want to give up control of her case.
All the pieces of her case were falling into place. Mickey Harmon had survived the shooting, and he was talking---about his friendship with Galaz and Ramsey that had spanned twenty years, his lucrative position as Galaz's bodyguard, their blackmailing scheme. He catalogued a string of killings going back eighteen years, giving Victor the address of a warehouse in Phoenix where Galaz had plied his brand of sexual sadism while he worked his way up through DPS and planned a political career.
Dale Lundy---Musicman---confessed to killing four girls. He came off as beleaguered and confused. Laura thought his lawyer would argue for not guilty by mental defect, but after seeing what he'd done, she doubted any jury would go for it.
Victor was the lead on both the Harmon and Lundy interrogations. Laura sat in the room, watching Musicman, trying to figure the man out, but she couldn't. He gave them nothing---nothing except his "poor me" act. Unfailingly polite, small, insignificant, hands folded prissily on the table, he reminded her of a decent, church-going lady mortified at being placed in such an untenable situation.
Laura asked him why he booby-trapped the tunnel.
He turned moist, frightened eyes on her. "Can I have a glass of water?"
After he had his water, she asked him again: "Why did you booby-trap the tunnel in your kitchen, but not the other house? What made you do that?"
He looked at her, uncomprehending.
She asked it another way. "You didn't booby trap the front door, the back door, anything in the other house, so what was your reasoning? Why was that entrance so important to you when the others weren't?"
He gave a small shrug.
"I just felt like it."
I just felt like it. Laura had tried staring into his eyes, but there were no answers there. If she'd hoped for an explanation for Andrew Descartes's death, something real she could hold on to that gave this tragedy some kind of design, she wouldn't get it from Dale Lundy.
Buddy Holland was placed on administrative leave by the Bisbee Police Department. An Officer Involved Shooting investigation was the least of his troubles. Luring Dale Lundy to Bisbee would likely cost him his job. Fortunately, he had his pension from TPD. He was a young enough man he could find a good job somewhere in law enforcement.
"I hear Dynever Security is hiring," he'd joked.
He told Laura he was moving back to Tucson so he could be close to his daughter.
Laura had seen a lot of him lately. Summer had to give her statement, and Buddy was there with her. They went back and forth to DPS, to the courthouse---Buddy, Summer, and Beth.
Laura found herself envying Buddy Holland his family. Watching the bond between them. She remembered what it was like to have that kind of love, the love of her parents.
It wasn't over yet for them, though. Summer would need a lot of help to overcome what she had seen, what she had experienced, first at the hands of Musicman, and then Galaz. Unharmed physically, but emotionally devastated. Left alone in that room with the photos of the tortured women---knowing she would be next. Laura thought with time Summer would heal. She would need counseling and her family every step of the way, but she could heal.
Laura went to Jay Ramsey's funeral. It was sparsely attended. She recognized the younger brother, whom she had met only once close to twenty years ago. She noticed no one was with him---not a wife, not a child. He looked lost. Laura felt an odd kinship with him. He had no family left. She could tell from the shock on his face that he had never expected to be alone in this way.
He gave her a Post-it note that Jay had apparently intended for her. It had been pasted to his computer, Laura's name scribbled at the top. Below that it said: "Barbara Stanley" followed by a phone number. And the words: "Calliope's Music, 9 yr. old TB mare".
Laura thanked him and took the note, putting it in a special compartment in her wallet. She didn't know what to do with the information right now, so she would leave it there until she did.
After attending the funeral that morning, the fifth day after the Chiricahua Paint Company fire, Laura gathered up some of the paperwork that had yet to be done and told Victor she was going home.
"See you tomorrow?"
"I don't think so."
She headed home to the Bosque Escondido, after stopping at a little store squeezed into the middle of a strip mall on the south side.
58
"Where should I put the dishes?" asked Tom, carrying the box up onto the front porch.
Laura knew which dishes he meant. Cheap china, a brown and yellow design of bees and flowers. Tom had gotten them from a grocery store giveaway---buy so many groceries and pay a dollar for each dish. They went well with his two jelly glasses. "Couldn't we store those?"
"Sure. I'll put it with my sheets, my rug, my couch---"
"This is my nidito. You're just---"
"What? What am I?"
He stood there, looking at her, still holding the box. The man she had invited to live with her.
She thought of her nice FiestaWare. Thought of them nested one into the other, their fine sold colors, dark blue, green, tangerine, dark red. Okay, so there would be bees and flowers, too. She sighed. "Okay. Put them in the cupboard near the fridge."
Still holding the box, he bent awkwardly and kissed her on the forehead. "You're doing pretty well."
"You think so?"
"You've lived alone for a long time."
"So have you."
"But I'm not territorial like you are."
It was true. As he let the screen door close behind him, Laura realized this would not be easy. When she'd agreed to try it, in the middle of the night three days ago, it had seemed absolutely right. Love was love. It was supposed to conquer all.
But she'd seen him leave towels on the floor of his bathroom.
The morning after Tom Lightfoot moved in, Laura awakened to rain tapping on the roof just before dawn. It seemed to her that the temperature had dropped ten degrees. She crept out of bed, careful not to wake him. Looking down at him and thinking that this was how it would be from now on. She found herself thinking of Buddy and Beth. Were they healing the rift between them? Or would Buddy get a place nearby and hover around his daughter like a guardian angel?
She brewed some coffee and went outside, sitting down on the old steel glider, swinging back and forth. She'd found the Art Deco glider at a yard sale, complete with the original striped canvas cushion. Here on the porch of a house built in the twenties, the scent of the desert around her, she could pretend this was the early part of the twentieth century.
There were serial killers then---though not as many---and plenty of pedophiles, but people didn't know about it. How nice for them.
The rain was soft and steady---what the Navajos called a female rain. Water dripped off the eaves and splashed on the brick pavement in the few places the porch roof leaked. The smell of wet creosote wafting in, the trunks of the big old mesquites gleaming black as seal skin. The coolness good on her face, a balm to her singed eyebrows and the burn on her cheek.
Now was as good a time as any. She went inside, got her mother's old electric typewriter and set it on the wood, drop-leaf table on the other end of the porch. She needed an extension cord to plug it in.
It took her a moment or two to figure out how to install the ribbon she'd bought from Hart Brothers Business Machines. The guy had one ribbon left, taking up dust in a back aisle, saying it was fortunate for her this was a common typewriter in its day.
As she lifted the paper bale and rolled the first sheet of paper through, she smiled, thinking how Tom had liked the idea.
Zen and the art of unfinished business. She liked it that her crazy idea had Tom's approval. But that was predictable; he admired simplicity in all its ways.
She stared at the clean sheet of paper, then typed "Chapter Seven". The action was strange, percussive. Both stiff and too fast for fingers used to a computer.
She was still staring at the words "Chapter Seven" forty minutes later when Tom came out and joined her. He'd brought her more coffee. He had put the right amount of half and half in it---a quick learner. She told him that.
"I read somewhere there's a big shot designer in Hollywood who made up a swatch to show his maid what color his coffee should be. You're not that bad."
Glad she hadn't said she appreciated him using her FiestaWare instead of his supermarket china.
He bent to kiss her. Soon the coffee and Chapter Seven were forgotten.
After they made love and were lying tangled together, listening to their heartbeats slowing back to normal, Laura felt a sudden strange bursting in her heart, as profound a moment as she had ever had. Tears unshed for eleven years suddenly came to the surface.
She lay in bed with Tom stroking her hair, her tears soaking the sheets and filling up her nose and throat. Enveloped in his comforting presence.
Feeling that, finally, she belonged.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mickey Harmon couldn't sleep. He kept dreaming that Julie Marr was alive. He had to see her again to make sure. He didn't know what he'd do if she really was alive---take her to a hospital? Maybe she'd be so grateful, she wouldn't rat him out.
He didn't know why he stopped by Mike Galaz's house. Maybe it was because he'd always gone to Mike for advice. In recent months, he and Jay had gotten tired of Mike Galaz always calling the shots, always being crowned Dark Moondancer. So they'd shut him out. But this was different.
He went looking for Mike Galaz by instinct.
Taking some chick's virginity would have been worth big points, but that didn't matter now. Mickey Harmon was scared. He couldn't face this alone, and he was afraid of how Jay, who had always been a mamma's boy, might react. And so Mickey woke Mike up, and they drove out to the place where he and Jay had dumped Julie Marr.
Mickey told Galaz the story on the way, how they had meant to seduce her---his euphemism for date rape---but she'd freaked, fought them, and in slamming around the car, she'd sliced her head open. So much blood. Mickey and Jay panicked, dragging her out of the car to a mesquite tree, covering her with dirt and trash.
But now he wasn't so sure she was dead.
It turned out that Mickey was right. Julie Marr was alive. They found her wandering dazedly in the desert, blood all over her face.
What are we going to do? asked Mickey, getting that panicky feeling.
Galaz didn't look at him; he just walked out to meet Julie Marr. When she saw him, her face lit up with relief. Mickey could swear he saw that. She thought Mike was here to rescue her.
He wasn't prepared for what Galaz did next.
Mickey watched in horror as Galaz raped and strangled Julie Marr. When she wouldn't die, he stabbed her repeatedly with a knife he produced from his windbreaker.
He should have said something, but his voice was weightless, silent.
This time, they buried Julie Marr under the mesquite tree, digging a shallow grave in the caliche and rocky ground, piling up rocks to keep the animals away.
Mickey was scared.
Mike always knew what to do, though, and he already had a plan. Jay Ramsey, Mike told him, should never know that they'd found Julie Marr alive. Jay came from money and Mike Galaz saw an opportunity for blackmail, a way to control Jay Ramsey and his money.
Don't even think about going to the police, Galaz told him. You're as guilty as I am. We're bound together forever the three of us. You, me, and Jay.
It was the first of many times Mickey would keep his mouth shut.
The pact Mike Galaz and Mickey Harmon made that night lasted until the summer of this year, ending with Mike Galaz's death in a warehouse fire.
In the aftermath of the fire, Mickey Harmon, cuffed and shackled, led the Tucson Police Department to Julie Marr's remains. Retired detective Barry Fruchtendler was there to watch as the girl's bones were unearthed from their shallow grave.
After eighteen years, Julie Marr was finally going home.
THE END
Watch Me Die
By Lee Goldberg
Lee Goldberg's Amazon Author Central page
Chapter One
I don't know if you've ever read John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books before. McGee is sort of a private eye who lives in Florida on a houseboat he won in a poker game. While solving mysteries, he helps a lot of ladies in distress. The way he helps them is by fucking their brains out and letting them cook his meals, do his laundry, and scrub the deck of his boat for a few weeks. These women, McGee calls them "wounded birds," are always very grateful that he does this for them.
To me, that's a perfect world.
I wanted his life.
This is the story of what I did to get it.
My name is Harvey Mapes. I'm twenty-nine years old, six feet tall, and I'm in fair shape. I suppose I'd be better-looking if I exercised and stopped eating fast-food three times a day, but I won't, so I won't.
I'm a security guard. My job is to sit in a little, Mediterranean-style stucco shack from midnight until eight a.m. six days a week, outside the fountains and gates of Bel Vista Estates, a private community of million-dollar-plus homes in the Spanish Hills area of Camarillo, California.
The homes at Bel Vista Estates are built on a hillside above the farms of Pleasant Valley, the Ventura Freeway, and a really great outlet mall, about a quarter of the way between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I say that so you can appreciate the kind of drive to work I have to make each night from my one-bedroom apartment in Northridge.
There are worse jobs.
Most of the time, I just sit there looking at my black and white monitor, which is split into quarters and shows me three different views of the gate and a wide angle of an intersection up the hill inside the community. I'm supposed to watch the intersection to see if people run the stop sign, and if they do, I'm supposed to write them a "courtesy ticket" when they come through the gate.
I'd like to meet the asshole who came up with that.
It's no courtesy to give one, and the folks who live here certainly don't think it's a courtesy to take one. Most of the time, they don't even stop to get it from me; they just laugh or flip me off or ignore me altogether.
And why shouldn't they? It's not like I'm going to chase them down to the freeway or put a lien on their homes.
Enforcement really isn't my job anyway. I'm there to give the illusion of security. I don't have a gun, a badge, or even a working stapler. If there's any real trouble, which there never is, I'm supposed to call my supervisor and he'll send a car out.
The guys in the car, guys so inept and violent the police department wouldn't hire them, are the "armed response team" the company advertises. If I were a resident, I'd feel safer taking my chances with the robber, rapist, or ax murderer.
I'm just the guy in the shack. The one who either waves you through and opens the gate, or stops you to see if you've got a pass. If you do, or if I get the homeowner on the phone and he says you're okay, then I jot your name and license number in my ledger, open the gate, and return to my reading.
I do a lot of reading, which is the one big perk of the job and, truthfully, the reason I took it in the first place, back when I was going to community college. Mostly I read paperback mysteries now, cheap stuff I get at used bookstores, and it's probably why I was so susceptible to his offer when it came.
I guess on some level I wanted to be like the tough, self-assured, no-problem-getting-laid guys I read about. I conveniently forgot that in a typical book, those guys usually sustain at least one concussion, get shot at several times, and see a lot of people die.
It was after midnight, but still early enough that I hadn't settled into a book yet, when Cyril Parkus drove up in his white Jaguar XJ8, the one with a forest of wood and a herd's worth of leather inside, and instead of going through the resident lane to wait for me to open the gate, he drove right up to my window.
We're supposed to stand up when they do that, almost at attention, like we're soldiers or something, so I did. The people who live at Bel Vista Estates are quick to report you for the slightest infraction, especially one that might imply you aren't acknowledging their greatness, wealth, and power.
Even just sitting in that car, Parkus exuded the kind of laid-back, relaxed charm that says to me: look how easygoing I am, it's because I'm rich and damn happy about it. He was in his mid-thirties, the kind of tanned, well-built, tennis-playing guy who subscribes to Esquire because he sees himself in every advertisement and it makes him feel good.
In other words, he was the complete opposite of me.
I'd see him leave for work every morning around six thirty or seven a.m., and it wasn't unusual for me to see him coming home so late. But he rarely stopped to talk to me, unless it was to leave a pass or get a package from me that his wife hadn't picked up during the previous shift. I'd only seen his wife, Lauren Parkus, once or twice, and when I did, it was late and she was in the passenger seat of his car, her face hidden in the shadows as he sped by.
"Good evening, Mr. Parkus," I said, adopting the cheerful, respectful, and totally false tone of voice I used with all the residents.
"How are you, Harvey?"
I caught him glancing at my nameplate as he spoke. Each guard slides his nameplate into a slot on the door at the start of his shift for exactly this reason. You can't expect the residents to remember, or care about, the name of the guy in the shack.
"Fine, sir," I replied. "What can I do for you?"
He smiled warmly at me, a smile as false as my cheerful respect and admiration.
"Could I ask you a couple of questions about your work, Harvey?"
"Of course, sir."
I figured there must be a complaint coming, and this was just his wind-up. In the back of my mind, I tried to guess what I could have done to piss him or his wife off, but I knew there wasn't anything.
"What are your hours?" Parkus asked.
I told him. He nodded.
"And then what do you do?" he asked.
That question had nothing to do with work, and I was tempted to tell him it was none of his fucking business, but I wanted to keep my job, and it wasn't like there was anything in my life worth keeping private. Besides, I was curious where all this was going and how I was going to get screwed in the end. At that moment, I had no way of knowing just how bad it would be or how many people would get killed along the way.
"I usually grab something to eat at Denny's, since they serve a decent dinner any time and have good prices, and then I go home."
"You go right to sleep?"
"No, sir, I like to sit by the pool if it's sunny, swim a couple of laps, maybe go to a movie or something. Then I go to bed around three in the afternoon, wake up around nine or ten, have some breakfast, and come back here for another day of work."
"So, you only work this one job and don't go to school or anything."
"That's right, sir."
Parkus nodded, satisfied. Apparently, I told him what he wanted to hear. I confirmed that I was a complete loser and that yes, his life was a lot better than mine.
"Could I meet you at Denny's in the morning and buy you dinner?" he asked. "I'd like to talk over a business proposition with you."
"Sure," I said, too stunned to say anything more.
He drove up to the gate and waited for me to open it. I hit the button, the gate rolled open, and I watched him drive up the hill, wondering what he could possibly want from me.
I kept watching him on the monitor. I couldn't do that with most residents, but Parkus happened to live on one of the corners of the intersection that I'm supposed to watch for those "courtesy tickets," so technically, I wasn't spying, I was just doing my job.
Cyril Parkus lived in a huge, Spanish-style house that had two detached garages out front and a couple of stone lions on either side of the driveway, each with one stone paw resting on a stone ball. I've never understood the point of those lion statues, or why rich people think it's classy to have them. I've thought about buying one and sticking it in front of my apartment door, just to see how my life changes, but I don't know what they're called or where you find them and I probably couldn't afford one anyway.
Once he went inside his house, the excitement was over and I was in for a long, restless night, waiting for daybreak, unaware that with the sunrise, my life would change completely.
Chapter Two
At eight o'clock sharp, Victor Banos showed up for his shift. Excuse me, Sergeant Victor Banos. That Sergeant thing is real important to him, though the only real difference between him and me are two military-type stripes sewn on the shoulders of his uniform, which he earned by being the nephew of the area supervisor for the security company.
The stripes indicate that Victor gets slightly higher pay than me because he also serves as a training officer, which means he sometimes shares the shack with new recruits, showing them the complexities of writing license plates down in the log and watching the gate when you're in back on the toilet.
What Victor doesn't tell the newbies is how he takes kickbacks from painters, gardeners, plumbers, handymen, electricians, and other workers that he recommends to the residents, or that as the day-shift guy he always gets the best Christmas presents, because he's the one guard the people who live there actually know.
I really wanted Cyril Parkus to drive up in his Jag, or maybe his Mercedes or Range Rover, and pick me up for that business meeting, just to see the look of jealousy on Sergeant Victor's face, but I knew it wasn't going to happen.
"Anything happen last night?" asked Victor.
He asked me that every morning, and every morning I told him nothing had, even though it wasn't always true.
A year ago, in the street in front of the guard shack, I saw a coyote with a French poodle in its mouth. We stared at each other for a minute or two, then he ran off. Now the coyote shows up every few weeks to stare at me some more. I stare back. That night, just before dawn, he came back. It felt like he stared at me a lot longer this time, before loping off into the darkness.
I'm not sure if a coyote looking at me would qualify as something "happening" to Victor, who claims he once got a blowjob in broad daylight from a teenage girl who lives in the community. While she was giving it to him, her mother happened to drive up to the gate. Victor says he just smiled and waved her through, and neither mother nor daughter was ever the wiser.
I don't know if the story is true, but all of us guards wanted to believe it anyway. It gave us one more thing to fantasize about during those long shifts in that tiny shack.
So, like always, I told Victor nothing happened, and trudged down the street to where my '95 Nissan Sentra was parked, a discreet distance from the million-dollar front gate so as not to bring down the property values. They don't want my car leaking oil on the pressed-concrete cobblestones in front of the gate, but they don't mind the resident who's kept a dead DeLorean rotting in his driveway for years, the tires flat, the car caked in layers of calcified bird crap. If it was a Tercel, or a Sonata, or a Maxima, or any other car with a sticker price under fifty thousand dollars, there'd be an angry mob on his front lawn lobbing rocks, torches, and lawyers at the house.
When I got to my car, I took off my uniform shirt, stuck it on a hanger, and hung it from the plastic hook in the backseat. That saved me having to wash or iron it for a couple days. I kept on the white t-shirt I wore underneath and drove down to the Ventura Freeway, took the overpass to the other side, and parked in front of the Denny's that was beside the off-ramp.
I'd been going to the Denny's since I started working at Bel Vista Estates, except for a month or two while they were remodeling the restaurant to look like a '50s diner instead of the '70s coffee shop it was before. It didn't make a lot of sense to me, since the '70s were hot again and the '50s craze was long dead, but that's Denny's for you. They'd just discovered stir-fry, too. Pretty soon they'd stumble on croissants.
I picked a booth by the window so Parkus wouldn't have any trouble spotting me. I ordered a Coke and decided to give him ten minutes before ordering, because the smell of sizzling bacon was making me drool.
I was halfway through my Coke and ten seconds away from flagging a waitress when Parkus showed up, looking like a kid sneaking into a topless bar. Not that I know much about topless bars. Well, not lately, anyway.
He smiled nervously and slid into the booth, smoothing his silk tie as if the simple act of sitting down would've wrinkled it all up. I smoothed my t-shirt, just in case sitting down had ruffled me up, too.
"Thanks for meeting me, Harvey," Parkus smiled. "I appreciate it."
I shrugged. His suit, even if he bought it at the outlet mall, was worth more than my car.
The waitress came to the table and, while I ordered a T-bone steak, fries, and another Coke, he picked up the laminated menu and made a show of looking through it. I don't think he was used to a menu with pictures on it. His discomfort already made the meeting worthwhile for me. He ended up ordering a bagel and some coffee.
As soon as the waitress was gone, he smoothed his tie again and smiled at me. I smiled back and fought the urge to smooth my t-shirt. I had no idea sitting was so hard on clothes.
"Harvey, I've got a problem and, since you're experienced in the security field, I think you're the man to help me," he said. "I need someone followed."
"Who?"
"My wife."
I knew he'd say that.
I sipped my Coke and hoped he couldn't hear my heart beating. In that instant, I'd become the hero of one of those old Gold Medal paperbacks, the ones with the lurid cover drawing of a busty girl in a bikini wrapping herself around a grimacing, rugged guy holding a gun or a martini glass.
I was now that guy.
It could happen that fast.
Then I realized that no, it couldn't. I wasn't that guy. I would never be that guy. There had to be a catch to this.
"Why me, Mr. Parkus? You could probably afford to hire a big PI firm that's got a bunch of operatives and all the high-tech stuff."
"You're right, Harvey, I could. But that would make it official, so to speak, and I want to keep this low-key."
Meaning he wanted to go cheap and pay cash out of his pocket, rather than leave a paper trail. At least that was my uneducated guess.
"Do you really want the guard out front knowing all your secrets?" I asked.
"You wouldn't know all my secrets." Parkus smiled, trying to be jovial, lighten things up. "The truth is, Harvey, I want someone I know, someone I can talk to without creating attention. You can give me your reports as I come through the gate. No phone calls, no memos, nothing anyone can ask questions about. It's certainly not going to look strange if your car is parked outside the gate. And the great thing is, you can watch her day and night without raising any suspicion. Hell, half the time you'll just be doing your job, right out front where everybody can see you."
He'd obviously given this a lot of thought, but it still didn't make sense to me.
"Aren't you afraid she'll recognize me?"
"She's only seen you a couple of times, late at night, in the dark. I doubt she'd recognize you in the daylight, especially out of context. Besides, you're not going to get that close to her, you're too good at what you do."
Either Parkus was trying to flatter me, or he was an idiot. He had to know the extent of my surveillance experience was sitting in a chair, watching the gate open and close.
The waitress arrived with our food, which gave me a few minutes to get my thoughts together. I bought another minute or two pouring A-1 sauce on my steak and chewing on a few bites of meat. I'm glad I did, because tasting that steak cleared my head. Why was I trying to talk this guy out of hiring me? If he thought I was qualified for the job, what did I care? He was offering me the chance to play detective, which by itself was exciting, and we hadn't even started talking about the money yet.
"You think she's having an affair?" I asked.
He carefully spread some cream cheese on his bagel while he considered his answer.
"I don't think so, but something is going on. She's been acting strange, aloof, very secretive. She's evasive and can't account for her time during the day."
"I see," I said, even though I didn't. I knew more about molecular biology than I did about women, and I don't even know what molecular biology is.
It occurred to me that I didn't really know anything about this guy and that my steak was getting cold, so I said: "I'm going to need some background. What can you tell me about you and your wife?"
So, while I ate my steak and fries, Parkus told me that he worked in international distribution of movies, selling them to TV networks overseas. His office was in Studio City, a straight shot east on the Ventura Freeway. He said it took him about forty minutes in good traffic to get to work, which is where he met his wife Lauren ten years ago. She was temping as a receptionist. One day he just stepped out of the elevator and there she was. Bluebirds sang. The clouds parted. Their souls kissed. It was as if he'd known her his entire life.
He made it sound a lot more romantic and personal than that, but I was too jealous to pay attention to the exact words. You get the gist of it. They were married six months later up in Seattle, where she was from.
Lauren Parkus didn't work, and they didn't have any kids, so she spent her time on what he called the "charity and arts circuit," working on fundraisers to stop diseases, feed Ethiopians, buy Picassos for the museum, that kind of thing. And when she wasn't raising money and organizing parties, she was in charge of decorating and maintaining their home, which he told me was practically a full-time job in itself. I thought about asking him to hire me for that job when this was over, but that would have been getting ahead of myself.
Nothing, Cyril Parkus said, was more important to him than his wife and her happiness.
"Even if she's cheating on you?" I asked, and from the tight look on his face, I'd gone too far. Before he could say anything I'd regret, I kept talking. More like babbling. "I guess that's a question you won't be able to ask yourself until I find out what, if anything, is going on."
That lightened him up a little. "So you'll take the job?" Parkus asked.
"For one hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses."
Jim Rockford used to ask for one hundred and twenty-five dollars a day, so I adjusted up for inflation. I probably hadn't adjusted up enough, but anybody could see I wasn't James Garner, or even Buddy Ebsen, and besides, it was more than double what I got paid to guard the gate.
"What expenses?" Parkus looked amused. I tried not to look embarrassed.
"You never know, sir."
"No, I guess you don't."
Parkus reached into his pocket, pulled out a thick money clip, and peeled off five one-hundred-dollar bills onto the table.
"This should cover the first few days," he said.
It was Tuesday, so the retainer would carry me through until the weekend when, I figured, we'd review the situation and make new arrangements.
"When will you get started?" Parkus asked.
"Tomorrow, after my shift. I need to get some things sorted out today, before I jump into this."
"Of course," he replied. "Do you have a camera?"
That was one of the things I had to get sorted, but instead of admitting that, I just nodded.
"Then I guess that's it, Harvey." Parkus peeled off a twenty to cover our dinner, slid out of the booth, and stood for a moment at the edge of the table, looking down at me. "I really hope this turns out to be nothing."
I really hoped it would take a week or so to find out.
"Me, too," I said as if I cared, which, at the time, I didn't.
He walked away and I ordered a slice of Chocolate Chunks and Chips, the most expensive pie Denny's had. I could afford it now.
Chapter Three
I live in the Caribbean.
I love saying that, and I knew that I would, which is the only reason why I chose to live in that stucco box instead of the Manor, the Palms, or the Meadows. All the buildings in that area charged the same rent for a one-bedroom with a "kitchenette," which is French for a crappy Formica counter and a strip of linoleum on the floor.
The Caribbean is built around a concrete courtyard that's got a kidney-shaped pool, a sickly palm tree, a couple plastic chaise lounges repaired with duct tape, and a pretty decent Coke machine that keeps the drinks nearly frozen, just the way I like them. The whole courtyard smells of chlorine because the manager dumps the stuff into the pool by the bucket-load. Stepping into the water is like taking an acid bath.
The tenants are evenly split between retirees, Hispanic families, Cal State Northridge students, which I was when I first moved in, and young professionals, which is what I am now. It's what losers like me like to call ourselves, so we don't feel like losers.
Carol was already at the pool when I came into the courtyard around ten. She was a young professional like me. She was my age, worked at a mortgage company, and was probably a little too chunky in the middle to be wearing a two-piece bathing suit, but I certainly wasn't going to say anything. She'd lived in the Caribbean about as long as I had and, when she was really lonely and desperate, we'd fuck sometimes. She wasn't lonely and desperate nearly as often as I'd like. It wasn't love, but we'd loaned each other money, taken care of each other when we were sick, and, like I said, fucked a few times, so you could say we were good friends.
You're probably wondering how this squares with my earlier comment that I don't know anything about women. I didn't really consider Carol a woman, for one thing. I mean, she was definitely female and she was straight, but to me a woman was more beautiful, more mysterious, more aloof than Carol. A woman was unattainable, and Carol was eager to be attained, only by a better guy than me, which I didn't blame her for. That isn't to say I understood her. I've known Carol six or seven years and she still doesn't make sense to me.
So, like I said, Carol was by the pool when I came in. I was carrying a Sav-On bag, because on the way home I'd stopped to buy myself three disposable cameras, some candy bars, two sixpacks of Coke, a spiral notebook, and a couple pens. I even treated myself to the latest Spenser novel at full cover price. That's how good I felt.
I sat down on the chaise lounge next to her and set my bag on the ground between us.
"You know what's in this bag?" I asked her.
"This is not like the time you bought me some magazines with the idea I'd look in the bag and also see the big box of Trojans and think you were some kind of stud and be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable urge to hump you."
"That was years ago. When are you gonna forget about that?"
"Never," she replied. "Aren't you going to ask me why I'm sunbathing on a weekday, instead of going to work?"
"No, I want you to ask me what's in this bag."
She sighed. "Okay, what's in the bag?"
"My private eye kit." I leaned back and smiled. "Everything I need for long-term surveillance."
She leaned over and peeked in the bag. I couldn't help stealing a look at her cleavage.
"Snickers bars and a paperback." Carol leaned back on the chaise again, giving me a look. She knew where my eyes had been. "Isn't this the same as your security guard kit?"
"It's a little different," I said. "For one thing, this job pays one hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses."
It was an awkward segue, but I was eager to get to the big news. I took out the hundreds and waved them in front of her face. That made her sit up again.
"Where did you get that?"
"It's my retainer."
"The only retainer you know anything about is the one you wore in high school, so you can drop the bullshit. Are you doing something illegal?"
I didn't think so. And after I told Carol all the details, neither did she. But she did have questions.
"What do you know about detective work?" she asked.
"What's there to know? All I have to do is follow her," I replied. Besides, I intended to brush up on my skills that night. There was a "Mannix" marathon on TVLand I was going to watch, and I'd have the new Spenser book to refer to during the lulls in my surveillance.
"So you're going to keep working your midnight-to-eight shift and follow her during the day."
"That's right."
"If you're supposed to watch her all day, when are you going to sleep?"
"At one hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses, who needs sleep?"
"This should be interesting."
"Which is why I'm doing it. When was the last time my life was interesting?"
Carol smiled. "You have a point."
\*\*\*
She wasn't lonely or desperate or in the mood to help me celebrate in the lusty way I thought we should, so I went to my apartment to prepare for my new job.
My apartment is a second-floor unit with a "lanai," which is Hawaiian for a tiny little deck you can barely fit a lawn chair on, and has a spectacular view of our dumpster, which is usually left wide open. So I use the "lanai" to store stuff, like a bike I haven't used in four years, a Hibachi grill, and that lawn chair I mentioned.
My place is decorated in a casual style I like to call Thrift Shop Chic. Most of my furniture comes from garage sales and hand-me-down stores, with the exception of my bed, which is just a mattress and box spring on a wrought-iron frame. I practically live on this big, black, leather couch I bought at the Salvation Army for a hundred bucks that'd been softened up and creased all over by years of pounding by heavy butts long before I got it.
I've also got a bunch of those white particle-board bookcases, the kind you put together with those little, L-shaped, screwin-tool thingies that come in the box. Most of the shelves are sagging under the weight of books, videos, and stereo components, but it doesn't bother me as long as the bookcases don't collapse.
I took a frosty can of Coke from the fridge, a bag of chips from the cupboard, and settled on my couch, put my feet up on the coffee table, and turned on the TV set.
For the next six hours, I watched "Mannix" reruns on TVLand and here's what I learned.
Getting shot in the arm, which happened to Joe at least three times that afternoon, is really no more painful or debilitating than pulling a muscle. A few days with your arm in a sling and you're fine. You can also relieve the pain of a concussion by just rubbing the back of your neck and shaking your head. However, you can probably avoid a concussion altogether, if before you walk through a door you peek around the corner first; that way, no one can surprise you with a karate-chop to the back of your neck.
Picking a mobster's henchmen out of a crowd isn't really too hard. They are usually the grimacing, muscle-bound guys who look very uncomfortable in their turtleneck sweaters and blazers. They will also be staring at you menacingly, which is a good tip-off about their intent.
I also learned some important pointers about following people. If you're a private eye, to follow someone driving, you just have to stay one car behind your target; and to tail him walking on the street, stroll casually ten yards back and pretend to window-shop and you'll never be noticed. However, if you're a private eye and someone is following one car behind you, you will spot him immediately; and if anyone is shadowing you while you're walking on the street, you can usually see him by checking out your reflection in a store window.
It's a good idea for a private eye to drive a sports car of some kind, especially if you want to get away from someone by driving around corners real fast, your tires screeching. Intelligent, well-educated criminals drive Cadillacs or Lincolns, psycho killers and thugs drive Chevys or pickup trucks, while just about every law enforcement officer thinks he will be inconspicuous in a stripped-down, American-made sedan with a huge radio antenna on the trunk.
If you have a female client, no matter what she says, deep down she wants to fuck you. The same goes for any other woman you meet, especially waitresses, secretaries, nurses, and strippers. Apparently, nothing is sexier to a woman than a private eye doing his job. That bit of information was especially nice to know.
Hey, I'm not some kind of cartoon character. I knew "Mannix" wasn't the real world, that if, say, someone shot me in the arm, I'd probably piss myself and start weeping in agony, then spend the next few weeks zoned out on painkillers I couldn't afford. But I figured any knowledge was better than nothing at all, and that I couldn't help but pick up a few useful pointers from watching a private eye, even a fictional one, at work.
Maybe they used real private eyes as technical advisors on the show. Who knows?
By three p.m. I thought I was ready for bed, but it turned out I was too keyed up to sleep, even though all I'd done was watch TV and eat Cheetos all day. So I put my favorite whack-off tape, The Wild Side, into the VCR and went back to the couch.
The tape was already cued up to the scene where Anne Heche and Joan Chen have simulated, lesbo sex, but in light of Anne's later frolicking with Ellen DeGeneres, I like to think her lust was real. Though you got to wonder if Anne had made it with Joan Chen, why she would want to rub herself against Ellen DeGeneres. Put Joan and Ellen side-by-side naked and, whether you're a man or a woman, the choice is obvious.
Anyway, I watched the tape, jerked off, and thirty seconds later, I was ready for bed again. This time, I had no trouble falling asleep.
I dreamed I was Joe Mannix, wearing the checked blazer and all, tooling around in a Dodge Charger convertible with Joan Chen in the backseat, her shirt open to her crotch.
Even asleep, I knew it was just a dream, but I also thought that it could actually happen.
Chapter Four
The drive from Northridge to Camarillo takes you out the northwestern end of the San Fernando Valley, past the wealthy, four-car garage suburbs of Calabasas, Agoura, Thousand Oaks, and Westlake Village, and down the Conejo Pass into Pleasant Valley.
Around Camarillo, the number of Mercedes, Volvos, BMWs, and Range Rovers thins out and you see a lot of farm workers crammed into shitcans like mine. The area between Camarillo and Santa Barbara is filled with farms, and it takes a lot of low-paid, mostly Hispanic workers to do all the planting and picking.
The area is considered far enough from real places like LA and Santa Barbara that there are two big outlet malls for travelers who find themselves caught in middle of the two-hour journey between the two cities with no place to shop.
Above all of this, looking down on everything like the imperious Greek gods in those old Hercules movies, are the people who live in the gated communities on the graded peaks of Spanish Hills.
On the off-chance that those farm workers ever rise up in violent revolt and storm the hills, they've got to get past the guard in the shack first.
I like to think that the terrifying prospect of rousing me from reading a paperback is what keeps them in line.
The night before my first day as a detective went fast. The only memorable moment was the flash of breast I saw while staring at the scrambled picture of the cable porn channel on TV. That was another perk of the job I forgot to mention.
I practically ran out of the shack when Victor showed up in the morning. I didn't want to get caught by surprise, just in case Lauren Parkus decided to meet her lover promptly at eight a.m.
I hustled down the street to my car, which was parked beside the grassy embankment, and changed into a polo shirt and sunglasses as a disguise. As soon as I was in the car, I stripped off my uniform pants and put on jeans. Actually, that was a lot harder than it sounds, and I was really afraid Lauren Parkus would pick that moment, while my feet were up against the dashboard and I was struggling with my pants, to leave for her erotic romp.
But she didn't.
In fact, she was taking so long to get going that I was getting mightily pissed. I was eager to begin detecting, and she was sapping my enthusiasm by not doing her part.
I sat there for two hours, my hands on the steering wheel, staring at the gate, playing out various surveillance scenarios in my mind, and I got so into it that when she finally drove out in her Range Rover, I thought it was an illusion.
I resisted the temptation to stomp on the gas pedal and instead showed my calm professionalism by easing into traffic, not that there was any. I was the only other car on the road, so I stayed way back behind her until we got down into the sprawl of shopping centers and gas stations.
The traffic was pretty heavy down there, so I hesitantly let two cars slip between us. It was a good thing she was driving such a high car, or I would have had a hard time following her.
She turned into the Encino Grande Shopping Center and parked right in front of a place called The Seattle Coffee Bean. I parked in one of the aisles so I could watch her inconspicuously. Lauren went inside and ordered something. I deduced it was coffee.
My hand was shaking as I made a notation in a notepad of her activities. All she did was buy a cup of coffee and my heart already was pounding with excitement. If this kept up, I figured I'd have a stroke when her stud finally appeared.
She sat down at a table outside and took her time sipping her coffee. It gave me a chance to really look at her for the first time.
Lauren Parkus was in her early thirties, with long, black hair and the same lean physique and tennis tan as her husband, which made sense to me. They probably worked on it together, unless she was bonking her tennis pro. I figured I'd soon find out which it was.
Her face had a sculpted beauty, as if God was concentrating very hard while he was working on her slender nose, her sharp cheekbones, the gentle curve of her chin, and her long, graceful neck.
She was clearly deep in thought over something, giving her a pensive expression that did nothing to dull the startling intensity of her eyes, which I could feel from twenty yards away.
She wore a large, loose-fitting blouse that was casually unbuttoned down to the swell of her perfect breasts. And I mean perfect, the kind of breasts you only see on women on movie posters, book covers, and comic books.
I picked up one of the disposable cameras and snapped a picture. It wasn't for Cyril Parkus. It was for me.
Lauren was beautiful.
It took her a half an hour to finish her coffee; then she drove off across the parking lot. I was right behind her, I mean literally, as she stopped for traffic at the exit. She glanced into the rearview mirror and I ducked down, as if searching for a station on the radio.
When I looked back up, praying that she hadn't seen my face, Lauren had already shot into traffic on Las Posas. I tried to follow, but nobody would let me in. It was bumper-to-bumper and the space between the cars and the sidewalk was too narrow for me to fit into. I watched in desperation as she sped through the intersection and on towards the freeway onramp.
If I didn't get through the intersection before it turned red, she'd hit the freeway and I'd never catch up to her.
I swore, turned the wheel, and hit the gas, speeding with half my car on the road, the other half on the sidewalk, the underbelly of my Sentra scraping the curb and spraying sparks as I went. But Lauren didn't see any of that; her Range Rover had already disappeared down the embankment to the freeway.
I made it through the intersection as the light turned yellow, and raced onto the freeway in time to see Lauren's Range Rover about five cars ahead of me.
I weaved through cars until I'd cut the number of cars between us down to two, then I relaxed, settling back into my vinyl seat, noticing for the first time that my entire body was drenched with sweat.
I'd almost lost her and yet, the truth is, I loved every desperate moment.
\*\*\*
I spent the next forty-five minutes on the freeway into Santa Barbara torturing myself, wondering if I'd screwed up and she'd done all that on purpose to lose me.
But if Lauren had, she wasn't making it too hard for me to keep up with her.
Then a Highway Patrol car roared up behind me, tailgating me for a while and giving me something new to worry about. I convinced myself he could tell I was stalking this beautiful woman and he was just waiting for back-up before arresting me. But after a mile or two, he got off the freeway and let me go back to torturing myself over previous events.
The further north we got, the foggier and cooler it got. It's what my mother used to call "beach weather." She liked it misty and gray like that. I don't know why. I suppose it's one of the things I might have asked her, if she hadn't walked out the door one morning when I was fourteen and decided not to come back.
That's around the time I started reading mysteries. I began with Encyclopedia Brown, which I liked for the tough puzzles and the simmering erotic tension. I kept waiting for him to cop a feel from Sally, the prettiest girl in the fifth grade and the only kid in school who could kick the shit out of that bully Bugs Meany, but if it ever happened, I missed it.
I went from Encyclopedia to the Hardy Boys, and then at a garage sale I stumbled onto a pile of ratty, old paperbacks by Richard Prather. He wrote about Shell Scott, a detective who, like me, had a twenty-four-hour-a-day hard-on and looked like a freak. Shell was six feet tall with white hair and white eyebrows. I was gawky and covered with zits. He got laid all the time by women he called tomatoes. I masturbated a lot.
When I wasn't reading or jerking off, I watched PI shows on TV. We had a great UHF station that showed all the old stuff, everything from "77 Sunset Strip" to "Cannon." The PIs on The Strip, they were cool cats, even though one of the detectives was played by an actor named Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. If a guy with a name like Efrem could fool people into thinking he was cool, maybe Harvey Mapes wasn't such a geek name after all. Private Eye Frank Cannon was an ugly fat-ass, but I admired how he got the job done anyway. I thought it'd be great if in one episode he overpowered a hitman by sitting on him, but I don't think he ever did.
Lauren took the first off-ramp into Santa Barbara, where Kinsey Milhone lives, though she calls it Santa Teresa, which doesn't fool anybody. I followed Lauren as she drove along the broad beach and I wondered which of the hotels she'd end up at. She had her choice of meticulously maintained, retro-style motels or one of the lush, expansive resorts. They were all pricey and only a few stories tall to maintain Santa Barbara's friendly village ambience and ensure unobscured views of the offshore oil rigs.
I figured she'd choose a motel, because even at three hundred fifty bucks a night, there was still a certain dirty charm to a room you could drive up to.
But she surprised me by driving past the pier, and the turn into the downtown shopping district, and heading into the beach parking lot instead. She paid her two bucks and found a spot. I did the same, noting the expense, the time, and the location in my notebook and admiring my own professionalism.
Lauren got out of her car, took off her shoes, and walked out on to the sand. I stayed where I was and just watched her.
She walked down to the shore and strolled with her bare feet in the surf. I waited expectantly for the illicit rendezvous and two hours later, my bladder bursting, it still hadn't happened.
Lauren just sat on the sand, staring at the waves. For me, looking at all that churning surf only made my predicament worse.
I kept glancing at the restrooms, trying to gauge how long it would take me to run inside, piss, and come back out, and if she could disappear in that time. I was never good at math or geometry.
I decided to take a chance.
I bolted out of the car and ran into the restroom, which was thick with flies and the fetid stench of urine. I hurried up to a urinal and pissed. It seemed to take forever. And while I was doing it, I became aware of a homeless man sitting on the floor in a corner, staring at me furiously, like I'd broken into his house and started pissing on his rug.
As I zipped up my fly, I smiled at him and actually said I was sorry. I ran out, took a deep breath of fresh air, and looked at the beach.
She was gone.
I couldn't believe it. I'd only been away a few seconds and she'd disappeared. I looked for her car. It was still there, so she couldn't have gone far.
Unless she got into her lover's car.
I told myself there wasn't time for that to happen. She'd been down by the water, she couldn't have gotten back to the parking lot that quickly.
I ran out towards the water, looking everywhere for her as I went.
And that's when I almost stepped on her.
She was right where she was supposed to be, only now she was lying down, which is how I'd missed her. I quickly spun around, turning my back to her, and hoped for the second time that day that she hadn't noticed me.
I walked quickly back to my car, got inside, and gave some thought to how to avoid pissing on duty in the future.
\*\*\*
I passed the time reading the Spenser book and noticed he never had bladder issues on the job, which I now knew from experience wasn't very realistic. I was thinking about writing a letter on the subject to the author when Lauren got up off the sand and trudged back towards her car.
I made a notation of the time and started my car up in anticipation.
As Lauren got closer, I could see the sadness on her face. Perhaps it was longing for the lover who never showed up. I briefly considered volunteering to take his place, but ethically, it just wasn't the right thing to do. I also lacked the courage, the looks, and the charm to pull it off. But there was a light, cool breeze buffeting her blouse, making her nipples big and hard, so I couldn't help at least fantasizing about the possibility.
I took another picture. This one was also for me.
She got in her car, backed out slowly, and drove off. I took it easy and let a couple cars pass before leaving the parking lot and following her down the street the way we came.
It was going just fine until we were nearly at the freeway. She went through the intersection and the light turned yellow on the car that was between us.
There was only one way to stay with her.
I ran the red light.
The only thing I really remember about the accident was the sound of the impact when the van clipped me.
I don't know what it felt like when the car rolled over all those times, or what I was thinking when I unbuckled my seat belt, crawled out of my upside-down Sentra, and vomited on the pavement.
What is real clear to me was the terror on the face of the van's Mexican driver as he slowed to look at me, and then the sound of his tires squealing as he sped off, dragging his front grill along the pavement.
Chapter Five
In a strange way, it was my lucky day.
The driver of the van that hit me must have been an illegal alien or a wanted criminal or something, because he didn't stick around to accuse me of running the red light and causing the accident.
That wasn't the only break I got.
The witnesses were totally unreliable. Because the driver of the van fled, in their minds that made him the bad guy, even though they must have seen me run the red light. They resolved the conflict between what they saw and what really happened by simply changing what they saw.
I helped things along by looking as pitiful and pained as I possibly could, hoping to appeal to their compassion and gullibility.
It worked.
To the police, I was the poor victim of a hit-and-run driver and he became the asshole who hit me. Obviously, I didn't say anything that would change their minds, but now I know what eyewitness testimony is really worth.
I also made sure to describe the Hispanic driver as black, and say, with absolute certainty, that his Chevy van was a Ford. The last thing I wanted the police to do was find the guy, and the witnesses helped me again. One witness described the driver as Asian, another saw a white woman, and no one knew what kind of van it was.
The paramedics insisted that I go to the hospital, but I didn't want to make a bad day worse by adding a medical deductible to my problems. Besides, all I had were a few cuts and bruises, which they'd already doctored up just fine. So I swallowed four Advils, thanked them, and walked away to inspect what was left of my Sentra.
There was no question that my car was totaled. I was insured, but I had a thousand-dollar deductible to keep my rates down. I doubted my car was worth much more than two grand, and with only seven hundred eighty-eight dollars in the bank, I saw financial disaster in my future.
I borrowed a cop's cell phone and called my insurance agent, and discovered my luck was still holding. The deductible didn't apply in this situation. The insurance company had a deal with a body shop in Santa Barbara; all I'd have to do is have my car towed there and they'd take care of everything, even give me a free rental until they could cut me a check for the negligible market value of my heap.
I figured if I kept working for the next week or so at both jobs, I could still come out of this ahead financially and with a car no worse than what I had before.
So, while I waited for the tow truck, I salvaged my uniform, cameras, and notebook from the car and tried to figure out how I was going to hide this huge fuck-up from Cyril Parkus.
I glanced at my watch. It was five twenty-five.
Lauren Parkus could be anywhere. Fucking her lover or robbing banks or hopping a jet to Rio, for all I knew.
Cyril Parkus was going to want a complete account of his wife's activities, and if I made something up, I stood a good chance of being caught.
What would happen, for example, if I reported that she went to the movies at three, but when Cyril Parkus got home he discovered his wife had bought a couple stone lions for their back door? Her shopping trip wouldn't be in my report and I'd be outed as a moron.
The last time I'd seen Lauren was two hours ago, getting onto the southbound Ventura Freeway. If I was very, very, very lucky, she went straight home, but I didn't hold out much hope.
\*\*\*
It was after eight by the time I got out of Santa Barbara in my rented Kia Sephia, Korea's idea of an automotive practical joke. I was certain if I hit a speed bump too fast, I would be killed instantly.
Even so, I drove the car as fast as it would go, managing to nudge the speedometer all the way up to fifty-six miles per hour without the engine bursting into flames and covering the freeway with bits of charred hamster.
All in all, my first day doing detective work wasn't quite what I'd hoped it would be. There was no glamour. There was no action. And the only nipples I saw were from a distance. It was a complete disaster. Even so, I was exhilarated in way I hadn't been since, well, since ever.
I knew I wasn't going to have time to go home before starting my shift, so I stopped at Target and reluctantly parted with fifty bucks. I bought a fresh shirt and pants, a battery-operated alarm clock, a bunch of snack food, and some personal hygiene stuff.
I stopped at a Chevron station and cleaned myself in the restroom. I shaved, brushed my teeth, and washed my hair in the corroded sink. I slathered Arid Extra Dry Ultra Fresh Gel under my arms, shook the broken glass off my uniform, and put it on, hoping no one would notice in the dark just how wrinkled and dirty it was.
Exuding ultra-freshness, I got back in my car and drove to Spanish Hills, parking down the block from Bel Vista Estates. I set the alarm clock for eleven fifty, put it on the dash, and closed my eyes.
\*\*\*
The alarm rang on time. I swiped it off the dash and stuck it in the glove box, which I discovered was roomier than the trunk. I made a mental note to myself to scratch the Kia Sephia off my list of possible new cars.
Every part of my body ached from the accident and within seconds of waking up, my stomach started cramping with anxiety. I still had no idea what I was going to tell Cyril Parkus. I didn't want him to find out I was incompetent, at least not until I got more of his money, which I needed more now than ever.
I got out of the car, told myself I was as ultra-fresh as I smelled, and walked up to the shack to relieve Clay Denbo, sort of a younger version of me, only black and two hundred pounds heavier. I weight one ninety, so you get the picture.
Clay worked part-time while going to community college in Moorpark, the way I did, only I went to Cal State Northridge, which is a better school.
He was thinking of either becoming a radio psychologist or a parking concepts engineer. Redesigning the layout of parking lots to add more spaces was kind of his hobby. He had a whole sketchpad of ideas he carried around with him and was always asking me to keep my eyes open for problem parking areas he could visit.
Clay was packing up his textbooks and sketchpad as I walked up. One of the books was called The History of Vehicle Parking in the Urban Landscape, a real grabber. He took one look at me and his mouth kind of hung open.
"Jesus Christ, Harvey, what happened to you?" he asked.
"A woman," I replied. It wasn't exactly a lie, but the implication was certainly dishonest.
Clay broke out in a big grin, and I realized he'd make a terrific black Santa Claus and, with the political correctness and diversity thing being trendy at the time, I thought it might even be a money-making idea for him. But I kept the idea to myself, not sure if it'd be taken as some kind of racist jab. You can't be too sure these days.
"Hot damn," Clay said. "Looks like she crawled all over you."
"She really likes a man in uniform." I smiled.
"Think she'd go for a lot more man in a lot more uniform?"
"I hope not."
Clay gave me a jolly slap on the back as he stepped out of the shack. "See you tomorrow, stud."
As soon as he was gone, the first thing I did was rewind the tapes from the gate's surveillance cameras until I came across Lauren Parkus returning home.
I froze the tape on her Range Rover going through the gate. According to the time code, she drove in at four seventeen, not even an hour after I last saw her.
That meant she drove straight home. She couldn't have stopped anywhere between Santa Barbara and the gate in that amount of time.
I fell into the chair and nearly cried with relief.
I had a second chance.
\*\*\*
Cyril Parkus drove out of the community and up to the shack around seven thirty in the morning.
"So?" he asked.
I gave him my handwritten report. "She had coffee, took a walk on the beach, and came home."
Parkus didn't look up from the piece of notebook paper, as if staring at it real hard would reveal new details even I had missed.
"She didn't see anybody all day?" he asked.
"Not unless you count the guy who served her coffee."
"I see you noted the seven dollars you paid for parking," he said. "That would be one of the expenses you were talking about."
"Yes, sir."
"The one hundred and fifty dollars a day doesn't cover parking?"
I couldn't tell if he was playing with me, or just being cheap. He didn't wait for me to answer, he just handed the paper back to me.
"Thanks, Harvey," he said. "Keep up the good work."
And with that, Cyril Parkus drove off, the smell of leather upholstery lingering in his wake.
He didn't even say anything about how lousy I looked. Maybe I really was ultra-fresh. Or maybe he just didn't give a damn.
Sergeant Victor Banos showed up a few minutes later, and he made up for Parkus' oversight regarding my appearance. I won't share all the snide remarks he made, they really aren't pertinent to the story. Needless to say, I got out of there as fast as I could, returned to my Sephia, and changed into my new clothes.
I'd just got my pants on when Lauren Parkus drove out of the gate. She was getting a very early start. I turned the key in the ignition, hit the gas pedal in my stocking feet, and followed after her.
Lauren didn't make it difficult for me this time. She went right down to the freeway and headed south. We hit the tail end of rush hour traffic, so keeping up with her was easy, though my Sephia struggled mightily going up the Conejo Pass between Camarillo and Newbury Park. The car was such a little shitcan, I was afraid if a bug slammed into the windshield the car would be totaled.
She took me across the San Fernando Valley to Studio City, where she got off at Coldwater Canyon and headed south towards the Hollywood Hills.
I stayed one car behind her on Coldwater and tailgated the guy in front of me. I was afraid of another intersection mishap like the day before. If this guy raced into the intersection on a yellow, I was going too, hanging right onto his bumper. We crossed Ventura Boulevard without incident, but the guy in front of me got spooked and made a sharp, last-minute right turn onto a side street.
I bet the idiot thought I was following him.
She led me up Coldwater and I relaxed a bit because I had a general idea where we were headed. Coldwater weaves through the Hollywood Hills and is basically used as a shortcut between the Valley and Beverly Hills.
So I settled back and enjoyed the drive. We passed one big mansion after another. They aren't so much homes as they are billboards. The only reason anybody that wealthy would want to live on a busy, narrow street like that is to show everybody how much money he has.
So for the opportunity to brag, these rich-ass people get to breathe exhaust fumes and listen to traffic going by all day.
In other words, they're paying millions to experience what it's like living in a cardboard box beside a freeway.
Just because the rich have money, it doesn't mean they've got brains.
I followed Lauren Parkus across Sunset, where Coldwater becomes Beverly Boulevard and widens quite a bit. The houses are every bit as expensive and just as showy. You'll also find a lot more of those mysterious stone lions.
She crossed Santa Monica Boulevard and entered the fancy shopping district known in all the tourist guides as the Golden Triangle, which sounds like a sleazy euphemism for a woman's crotch. Based on the name, you'd expect to find topless bars and nudie shows instead of Ralph Lauren, Gucci, and Tiffany's. Then again, the most famous street in the area is Rodeo Drive, but you won't find anything that even remotely has to do with rodeos, cattle, or cowboys. So right away you know nothing in Beverly Hills is what it says it is, or appears to be.
Lauren drove into one of the city-owned, valet parking lots. I pulled in a couple of cars behind her, then ducked down to put on my shoes as she walked past me. When I gave my keys to the valet, he looked like I dropped a turd in his hand.
I walked about a half-block behind Lauren and carried my Kodak disposable camera out in the open, figuring that way I'd look like a tourist and wouldn't raise any suspicions if people saw me taking pictures. Not that anyone was going to notice me with so many boob jobs walking by.
These tomatoes were mostly plastic fruit. The women here seemed to be walking around for the sole purpose of modeling their new hooters. I wondered how many of them would sleep with me if I had white hair and white eyebrows. They'd probably just run screaming. I gladly took in the show, but was careful not to let my attention stray too long.
Besides, it wasn't like watching Lauren was painful on the eyes. She was wearing trim, black linen pants and a sleeveless, white top, and I found the aggressive, don't-give-me-shit way she was walking down the street incredibly sexy. Gone was any of the pensiveness she seemed to have yesterday. Today she seemed pissed off and in a hurry.
I liked it.
Remember how earlier I was talking about what a woman was? Lauren Parkus was a woman. No doubt about it.
She marched up to the door of Beverly Hills Collateral Lenders and hesitated. Just for a moment. Like she'd changed her mind. She made a quarter-turn in my direction, and that's when I snapped a picture.
I only saw her face for an instant, but I thought I saw fear, anger, and sadness all mixed together. I felt the surprising urge to hold her. Not for sex, either, which was the most surprising part about it. In the time it took for the shutter to click, whatever doubts Lauren had disappeared and she went inside.
I stood where I was and took a good look at Beverly Hills Collateral Lenders. There were no windows, just a sign in elegant script and a door squeezed between a clothing store and an overpriced muffin place. Although I couldn't see inside, I could guess what she was doing and it made me angry.
I bought a five-dollar cranberry muffin and a two-dollar cup of coffee, sat down at a table out front, and waited to see what happened next.
Chapter Six
"Collateral Lender" is just a fancy way of saying "Pawn Shop."
I know a few things about pawn shops. I've never been inside one myself, but my father was a regular customer and that's how I acquired my knowledge and a healthy hatred of the places.
My father, Kingston "King" Mapes, was a gambler. I tell that to most people, and they imagine some suave guy in a tuxedo, striding into a ritzy casino. Or they think of that Kenny Rogers song.
He was nothing like either one, and I suspect that's true of most people who play cards and call themselves gamblers like it's something to be proud of.
I suppose I should have been angry about paying seven dollars for a muffin and a cup of coffee, instead of things that happened in the past. I was stuck with the past, I couldn't do anything about that, but I certainly wasn't going to patronize that muffin place again. You could get two big breakfasts at Denny's for the same price.
Like I said, rich people sometimes aren't very bright when it comes to spending what they've earned. It's a good thing I was on an expense account.
I glared some more at the Beverly Hills Collateral Lenders sign and wondered what Lauren's problem was. Maybe her lover needed some quick cash. Maybe it wasn't a lover, maybe it was drugs. Or maybe she was a gambler like my dad. If she was, pretty soon Cyril's house would be stripped clean of anything of value. When I was a kid, my dad once stole my watch and clock radio while I was sleeping. I woke up one morning and they were gone. That's why, to this day, I sleep with my watch on.
After staring at the building for a while, it occurred to me I hadn't seen her go in carrying anything but her purse. Maybe she wasn't there to hock stuff, maybe she was there to buy things. Could be I'd totally misjudged her. Could be she was actually being a crafty shopper. The goods here had to be better than the stuff at your average pawn shop.
That thought made me feel a lot better, until she walked out ten minutes later, empty-handed. Lauren stood outside the door for a minute, looking kind of dazed. I took a couple pictures. I didn't want to hug her any more. I wanted to slap her. But I didn't have to call Dr. Laura to know I really wanted to slap my father.
I could slap him any time I wanted. He's in his sixties now, living in Palm Springs, near the Indian casinos. I actually visit him sometimes, in his crummy little bachelor unit at the Tropic Palms apartments. He likes to call me Prince.
I've never slapped him, but my sister Becky once slapped me when she found out I went down there. I don't think she was slapping me, really, but maybe I'm over-analyzing things. People who know my father and me, and there aren't many, say I look just like him.
But none of this has anything to do with Lauren Parkus, or the terrible things that happened later, and that's what I'm supposed to be talking about.
Lauren walked slowly back to her car. Whatever was pushing her along before was gone. I think she didn't want to go back. I took more pictures. It was really just an excuse to look at her some more, like I'd be able to understand her better through the lens than with the naked eye. Which was stupid. It was a disposable camera, not a fucking microscope.
She paid the valet, got in her car, and drove off. I did the same.
\*\*\*
Lauren Parkus got back to Bel Vista Estates before lunchtime. I parked in my usual spot alongside the embankment, where I was out of sight of the guard shack but could still see if anyone left or entered the community.
After about two hours, I slid over to the passenger seat, opened the door a crack, and pissed onto the street from a sitting position. I didn't want some homeowner driving by and seeing me taking a leak; that would get me fired for sure. So there I was, in my Sephia, sitting there pissing out the door, which isn't as easy as you might think if you don't want to wet yourself or the car.
Being in that vulnerable position, I was certain that's when Lauren would decide to leave again, but she didn't. I didn't know it then, but I was in for a long, boring afternoon.
I listened to Dr. Laura, reread my two-line report a few times, ate a box of Ritz Crackers, a bag of beef jerky, and a package of Ding Dongs, and tried hard not to fall asleep.
I'd been up over twelve hours already and hadn't had much sleep the day before, which was when I really could have used it, after that accident and all.
At five o'clock, I decided to leave.
Now that might not sound very professional to you, but here was my thinking: Her husband usually came home between six and eight, and occasionally later, so she wasn't likely to run off during that period. The only risk was that she would sneak out in the hour between five and six.
But I needed to get my film developed, and most of those one-hour photo places closed by six or seven. I also needed to get my uniform cleaned and pressed and go home for a nap, a shower, and fresh clothes.
And I was exhausted and felt like shit.
All things considered, I was willing to take the risk.
Maybe Spenser wouldn't do it, but he has Hawk to help him out. It's easy to be a complete professional when you've got some big, black muscle to back you up with the unpleasant and tedious aspects of the job.
\*\*\*
I dropped off my film at the Thrifty near my house, and my uniform at the dry cleaner next door, then went into Ralph's and browsed through the magazines while I waited for both items to be ready.
The photos were done first, so I took them with me over to Fat Burger for a quick dinner. I was careful not to dribble anything on the pictures as I looked through them.
The first thing that struck we was how her eyes blazed, even in a photograph. The moment was frozen but her eyes were alive.
I felt the irrational fear that she might actually be able to see me and then I found, weirdly, that I wished she could.
I attributed the feelings to hunger and lack of sleep, because otherwise they didn't make any sense.
I studied the pictures, first because I thought she was beautiful, and I was surprised that a cheapo camera like the Kodak disposable managed to capture the darkness of her hard nipples under her blouse. But then I studied the pictures for another reason. Something had changed about her over the two days, and I couldn't figure out what it was.
Her clothes were different, of course, and the expressions on her face covered a lot of emotional range, but otherwise I couldn't tell what had changed. But I knew something had. I could feel it.
I finished my burger, and went back to Thrifty and bought a magnifying glass before picking up my uniform next door.
When I got back to my car, I hung my uniform up in the backseat, got inside, and looked at the pictures again, this time with the magnifying glass. I had no idea what I was looking for, but it seemed like the professional thing to do. I figured there must be a reason why the magnifying glass is the universal logo for private eyes.
I looked her over real good. She may have been the most beautiful woman with the most perfect body I'd ever seen. And then there were those eyes, like the tractor beams Captain Kirk was always using to capture objects in space. Once you were locked in a tractor beam, good luck escaping without a fight.
I moved the magnifying glass slowly down her slender neck, almost like a caress, to professionally scrutinize the rest of her perfect body.
And then I noticed it, and I went back quickly over all the pictures to make sure.
I sat back and smiled at myself in the rearview mirror. I had just accomplished my first piece of true detecting based on instinct, investigation, and deduction.
In my mind, at that moment, I became a detective.
\*\*\*
I was drying off from my shower and getting ready for bed around seven p.m. when there was a knock at my door. I could tell from the knock it was Carol, so I just yelled for her to come in.
It's not that we had a secret knock or anything like that, she just knocks a certain way. Maybe there's a rhythm to it or something.
I put on my terrycloth robe and walked into the living room, which means I also walked into the kitchen, den, and library at the same time.
"How's it going, Magnum?" Carol smiled. She was still in her Anne Klein suit, the one she bought on sale and was so proud of, so I knew she'd just come from work without even stopping by her apartment first.
Actually, I didn't know she did that. I deduced it. I wondered if maybe I'd been a detective longer than I'd thought.
"You weren't home last night," she said. "Did you get lucky?"
"I was on the case."
"Uh-huh," She went to the fridge and helped herself to a Coke. "What happened to your car?"
"What do you mean?" I asked quickly. For a minute, I was afraid that somehow she'd found out about the accident.
"There's a new car parked in your spot." She sat down on the couch and put her feet up on the coffee table.
"It's just something I rented so I wouldn't be noticed," I said, trying to sound casual. "But I am thinking, when this is over, of getting rid of my junker."
I added that last part to cover the inevitable purchase of a new ride.
"What happened to your forehead?" she asked.
I reached up and felt a little lump on my brow, probably a bruise from the accident.
"Nothing. It's just what happens when I think too hard," I said. I really was in a hurry to get to the parts of my story that would impress her, not the stuff that made me look like an oaf. "So, do you want to hear about the case or not?"
"If it wouldn't be breaching any rules about client confidentiality."
She was teasing me, but I didn't mind. I was eager to have someone to share my brilliance with. I wanted her to know I'd become a detective, to be my corroborating witness. I grabbed the packet of photos off the kitchen counter, plopped myself down on the couch next to her, and spread the pictures out on the table.
"I've laid these out in chronological order," I said. "Take a look and tell me what you see."
She took her feet off the table and leaned forward. "Is there something to see?"
"If you know where to look."
She examined the pictures, then gave me a disapproving look. "You're not talking about her nipples, are you?"
"I'm only interested in what's pertinent to the case," I said, trying to sound offended and superior at the same time. "Try and focus."
"You're serious about this."
I handed her the magnifying glass. "Why wouldn't I be?"
Carol took the magnifying glass and leaned over the photos again. "Because you've never been serious about anything else before."
I didn't think that was true, and I wasn't quite sure how to take the comment.
"She's obviously got money," Carol said, still scrutinizing the pictures. "Aside from the car, the clothes, and the jewelry, she's had a lot of work done."
"What work?" I asked like I already knew.
"Her nose, her eyes, her chin," Carol replied.
No wonder Lauren looked sculpted to me. I'd have to learn to listen to myself. I was more observant than I thought.
"Maybe even her breasts, too," she added, "mainly because I hate to think anyone was born that way."
"That's the obvious stuff," I said. "The real story is more subtle."
I was enjoying the hell out of this and feeling very smart. Because if Carol hadn't spotted it yet, and I considered her a lot more intelligent than me, then my deduction must really have been clever.
She smiled at me.
I'd never seen a smile like that on Carol before. It was as if she was intrigued and amused and surprised all at once.
"You're sure pleased with yourself. That's a first, too," she said. "Why don't you just tell me, and save me the hard work and suspense."
So I did. I showed her that Lauren wore a gold necklace, tiny earrings, and her wedding ring during her day at the beach. She was also wearing them when she went to Beverly Hills Collateral Lenders---but she was only wearing her wedding ring when she came out.
"Lauren hocked her jewelry," I concluded. "The question now is why? Debts? Drugs? Blackmail?"
"Collagen? Botox? Lipo?"
Carol smiled. I gave her a chastising look, or at least my best shot at one.
"You're not helping," I said. "I'm trying to work here."
She looked at me, as if she'd just noticed a giant mole on my cheek or something. "You are, aren't you? I mean, you really do want to find out what is going on."
"Of course I do. It's my job."
"You know something, Harvey? You may have stumbled into your true calling."
"You think so?" I wanted to believe she was right.
Instead of answering me, she did something totally unexpected.
She kissed me hard on the lips and thrust her hand inside my bathrobe. I forgot all about my calling and answered a new one.
Chapter Seven
I guess something I learned from "Mannix" was true. Being a private eye really is an aphrodisiac to women. Carol had never attacked me like that before.
I'm afraid the surprise and excitement were too much, because I came in about three minutes. But I don't think Carol minded; it calmed me down and allowed me to concentrate real hard on getting her off. And believe me, it took my complete attention. Pleasing a woman, especially Carol, isn't easy and with me, at least, there's a lot of potential for embarrassment and humiliation.
She rewarded me for all my hard work with a nice, squealing, writhing orgasm that nearly broke my nose on her pubic bone, but I didn't mind. I even jumped in, literally, to enjoy the last few squeals of it with her.
It was so dark, and things happened so fast, she never saw my cuts and bruises, so she mistook my occasional groans of pain for pleasure.
Carol fell right to sleep afterwards.
Between the sex, the pain, and the things on my mind, I didn't get as much sleep as I would have liked. But I get laid so rarely, I'm willing to sacrifice just about anything for it, especially sleep, when I usually dream about having sex anyway.
Around eleven, I slipped out of bed, took four Advils, smeared a lot of Arrid Extra Dry under my arms to hide the smell of sex on me, and got into my clean uniform. I grabbed some fresh clothes, gathered up the photos, and left as quickly as I could.
To be honest, I was eager to get out of there. I was confused and more than a little bit ashamed and thought that leaving the apartment would change things.
It didn't.
I just couldn't understand why it had happened. Not the sex with Carol, that was great. It was what happened during the sex, and it was all I could think about afterward.
What was troubling me was this: when I was making love to Carol, it was Lauren that I saw.
\*\*\*
The first thing I did when I got in the shack was check the surveillance tapes to reassure myself that Lauren Parkus didn't leave between the time I abandoned my post and her husband came home.
She hadn't.
The rest of the night I just watched TV, stared into the darkness, and guzzled Cokes to stay awake. I tried not to think about Lauren Parkus, or why I saw her while making love to Carol, or why I felt so guilty about it. So, naturally, that was all I thought about.
I figured there weren't many men who could look at Lauren Parkus and not fantasize a little bit about her, especially while having sex. But that didn't make me feel any better.
In fact, by seven forty-five a.m. when Cyril Parkus came down, I was so wired on caffeine and so afraid he'd guess I was horny for his wife that my hands were shaking.
He rolled down the window of his Jag and looked up at me. "Anything new, Harvey?"
"I'm afraid there is, Mr. Parkus," I handed him the packet of photos, my handwritten report, and receipts for the film developing, parking, and overpriced muffin. I'd left out certain photos, I'm pretty sure you can guess which ones.
"Your wife hocked her jewelry in Beverly Hills," I said as he flipped through the photos.
Parkus stopped at the picture of her going into the Collateral Lender and shook his head in disagreement. "She'll go anywhere for a bargain. How do you know she didn't just go in there to shop?"
I was hoping he'd ask, so I could show off. "You'll notice she's wearing her jewelry when she goes in and not when she comes out. Ergo, she hocked it."
He looked at those two pictures again, then back at me. His eyes were cold.
"Ergo, Harvey?"
I met his gaze, just to prove I had some balls, and wouldn't always take his shit.
"Ergo, Mr. Parkus."
He must have seen something in my eyes besides my lack of sleep, and if he did see something, I wished he'd held up a mirror so I could've seen it, too.
Parkus blinked and turned back to the pictures. "Lauren doesn't need to hock anything, Harvey. She has plenty of money."
"Maybe she doesn't want you to know what she's spending it on." I pressed my advantage. "How much was the jewelry worth?"
"About thirty thousand, give or take." He stuffed the pictures back into their envelope.
"Any idea what she'd need that kind of money for?"
"If I did, I wouldn't need you, would I?" He tossed the envelope back to me and drove off without waiting for my reply.
It's nice to be needed, especially at one hundred fifty dollars a day plus expenses.
\*\*\*
I almost slept through the most important day in the investigation.
If Lauren Parkus hadn't been in such a hurry coming out of the gate at ten a.m., and if she hadn't cut off a Lincoln, and if the old geezer driving it hadn't honked at her long and loud to show how angry he was, I wouldn't have woken up. I'd have still been sitting there waiting for her to come out when she came home later that afternoon.
But the guy did honk, I woke up, and I was able to follow her. We headed south again on the Ventura Freeway, getting off in Calabasas and taking Malibu Canyon towards the sea.
It's a real nice drive through the Santa Monica Mountains, with lots of charred trees and blackened earth from the annual wildfires to look at. You also pass some dramatic gouges and gashes in the hillside from the seasonal mudslides. It's not the place I'd pick to build my secluded mansion, but I'm not a rich movie star or studio executive.
When we hit the Pacific Coast Highway, she turned left towards Santa Monica, traveling south along the beaches.
It's amazing how beautiful the ocean is, especially when you consider it's just a giant toilet that's been used by millions of people and never been flushed. There's only a few months out of the year when stepping in it is actually hazardous to your health. The rest of the time, you'll just get a rash that we let the tourists think is sunburn. But despite its variable toxicity, the sea along the Southern California coastline is always nice to look at and that's got to count for something.
Lauren took the off-ramp up to Ocean Avenue, but instead of going into Santa Monica, she surprised me by making a hard left onto the Pier.
I was surprised for a lot of reasons, but mainly because it was such a cliché. Once again, "Mannix" got it right, or maybe we just can't help but imitate it. Maybe the clichés and conventions are so ingrained, they've become instinctive behavior.
In old TV cop shows, people are always having their clandestine meetings in decrepit warehouses and abandoned amusement parks. I guess since most of the decrepit warehouses in LA were converted to soundstages, and the last abandoned amusement park was paved over decades ago, the Santa Monica Pier was the perfect compromise.
Beyond the landmark carousel, the Pier has all the allure of one of those traveling carnivals that set up for a weekend or two in a vacant field or shopping center parking lot. The big attractions are a Ferris wheel, a rinky-dink roller coaster, and a noisy pinball arcade where old Pac Man machines go to die.
I didn't know much about Lauren Parkus, but I was willing to bet she hadn't picked this spot, which already told me a lot about the person she was going to meet. Whoever he was, he wasn't in her class.
He was in mine.
Lauren paid the ten bucks and parked behind the arcade and near the ticket booth for the rides. I parked two rows over, across from her, so I could see her face. She sat in her car for a moment, looking at the line of weary Hispanic nannies waiting for tickets, pushing elaborate strollers full of plump, white kids dribbling drool and snot onto their Izod polo shirts and Guess overalls.
I wondered what she was thinking and snapped a few pictures on the chance I might see the answer on her face later, under a magnifying glass.
After a few moments, Lauren put on a pair of sunglasses and got out, carrying a large purse. She'd dressed down for this, wearing jeans and a big, untucked blouse loosely buttoned over a blue t-shirt.
She walked slowly and deliberately towards the rides and I followed a few yards behind, trying to look inconspicuous, which wasn't easy without a kid, a stroller, or a date. I pretended to take pictures, like I was a tourist who loved seedy amusement parks.
I was pretty excited, and nervous, too, because I could feel that I was coming up on the big moment I'd been waiting for, the key revelation in the case. But I was hoping it wouldn't be the end, but rather send things in a new direction. I was enjoying this job too much for it to finish so soon.
As I moved through the crowd, I kept my eye open for thugs from the Syndicate, European hitmen, and Ninja assassins, because that's what Joe Mannix would do. I wasn't sure what I'd do if I spotted any of them, though, since, unlike Mannix, I don't carry a gun and hadn't been in a fistfight since the fourth grade. Luckily for me, they seemed to be busy elsewhere that day.
She took a seat at a table in front of a hot dog place. A moment later, a guy sat down across from her and she seemed to recoil. I couldn't blame her.
He looked like the kind of character Martin Sheen used to play on "Cannon" and "Barnaby Jones" before he became the President of the United States on TV. The guy had a thick, bushy mustache on his thin face that hung over his leering grin and must've got stuck in everything he ate. His deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks made him look older than he probably was, which I pegged at around thirty-four. He let the stringy, black hair on the back of his head grow over his shoulders in a botched attempt to make you forget his receding hairline.
She wasn't fucking this guy, I was certain of that. Her whole body screamed out her repulsion. He had this relaxed, cocky air about him. I wanted to beat the shit out of the guy and I didn't even know him.
I snapped a bunch of pictures and, since I couldn't hear what they were saying, I tried to read their expressions and body language instead. It was like watching one of those soap operas on the Spanish channel.
I could tell she was angry, but pleading at the same time. He was enjoying himself way too much. He liked looking at her, but he liked torturing her even more, which is why I knew even before she gave him the bulging envelope from her purse that this was about blackmail.
The package was a half-filled manila envelope folded over itself and taped together that I guessed held about thirty thousand dollars.
He stuck the money inside his shirt, said something, and grinned.
"You promised!" she yelled in fury, startling me.
But he didn't even flinch. He kissed the air between them, stood up, and strode off, relaxed and happy with himself.
Lauren Parkus stayed there, staring at the space where he'd been, tears streaming from beneath her dark, impenetrable glasses.
Chapter Eight
I was right about food getting stuck in his mustache. From where I sat, a couple tables away from him in the food court of the Santa Monica Place mall, I could see the grains of fried rice getting trapped in the tangle above his lip as he stuffed himself with Chinese food.
Back on the pier, I had five seconds to choose between staying with Lauren or following her blackmailer. I figured since her business was done, I wouldn't miss anything if I left her.
Lauren's blackmailer strode up the pier to the mall, patting his stomach every so often to feel the thirty grand underneath his shirt. I'd probably have done the same thing, if I was him. As soon as he was in the mall, he went straight to the food court and got himself the three ninety-nine combo plate at the Wok Inn.
As long as I was there, I bought myself a slice of pizza and a Coke, got a table where I could see him, and thought about things. I wondered what he had on Lauren, and if there were pictures or recordings somewhere that Cyril Parkus might pay me to get back. And if I did get hired to do it, I wondered how the hell I'd pull it off.
Things were getting complicated and scary and exciting, words I never could have used before to describe my life. I liked it.
He finished his lunch and got up without bussing his table. I thought about snagging his fork for fingerprints, but I realized I didn't have an irascible friend on The Force to run them for me. I made a mental note to myself: if I stayed in this business, I'd have to cultivate a love-hate relationship with a police officer right away.
The blackmailer crossed Broadway, then walked down to the corner of Second Street and disappeared. I waited a minute, shoved the camera in my pants pocket, then ran across the street. I hurried up to the corner and peered around the edge of the building, just in time to see him enter the municipal parking structure, where you get the first three hours free. This guy and I had at least one thing in common. If I had the choice, I would have saved the ten bucks and parked there, too, even if I knew I'd be coming back to the car with thirty thousand dollars.
I jogged up to the parking structure, and when I got there, he was just stepping into the elevator, leaving me with a split-second choice to make. I could either go in the elevator with him, or run up the stairs and somehow try to meet him at whatever floor he stopped at. It wasn't that hard a choice to make.
I rushed into the elevator.
He grabbed me as I came in, threw me back against the wall, and slammed his fist into my stomach. I keeled over, grasping at his shirt as I went down, pulling it out of his pants. The packet of money hit the floor just before I did.
I ended up face-down on the floor, mouth open wide, unable to breathe, clutching my stomach, my body on top of his money. I was panicked. It wasn't the pain as much as it was the shock and the inability to breathe.
That's when he started kicking me in the ribs, again and again, screaming, "Get up! Get up you motherfucker!"
I wanted to say, "If you'll stop kicking me, I will," but I couldn't breathe, much less form words. With each kick, I imagined bones shattering and internal organs bursting like water balloons. That's what it felt like. He was killing me.
His foot must have finally got sore, or he got bored, because he stopped kicking me, grabbed me by my shirt, and rolled me over.
He hesitated for a moment, then picked up his money, scowling with disgust, holding it by its edges. The envelope was soiled with big, wet stains.
"Shit, you pissed all over my money!"
I wasn't surprised. Somewhere between the punch and the third kick, I'd lost all control of my body. I was just a lump of pain and misery and I wanted to die.
"What the fuck's the matter with you?" He kicked me sharply in the balls. I didn't think I could hurt any more than I already did. I was wrong. It was a tsunami of pain that swamped my entire body, from my groin to the tips of the individual hairs on my head. "What am I supposed to do with money that smells like piss?"
I gagged and began to choke on my undigested pizza. I imagine Spenser would have had a wittier answer. He probably wouldn't have started crying.
I did.
He glared at me with utter fury, breathing hard, his chin trembling. It's hard work kicking a guy when he's down.
"You can tell her this is what I'll do to her face, if I ever see you or anybody else on my ass again."
He lifted his foot back to give me a good kick in the face, one that would flatten my nose against the inside of my skull, and I closed my eyes, like that would actually give me any protection.
I heard a ding and felt nothing. I opened my eyes to blurrily see him shoving his way past a shocked family of six standing outside the elevator doors.
"The queer grabbed my balls," he said by way of explanation.
"We'll take the stairs, Martha," the father told his family, hustling them away from me. I would have thanked them for their help if I'd been able to speak. Just by being there, they saved my face.
With the beating finished, I managed to suck in some air and cough out some puke. It cleared my vision enough for me to clearly see the number eight on a pillar outside, and to realize I was on the eighth floor. It would take the blackmailer some time to drive down to the street.
Now, this is when a very weird thing happened. My prehistoric monkey brain, the part of our minds that's unchanged from the caveman days, must have been hardwired for detective work. I should have been curled up in a fetal position in my puddle of piss, puke, and tears, whimpering for help. Instead, I reached up and hit the button for the first floor, pain ricocheting around inside of me. The doors closed and my arm dropped. I felt the elevator descending. I willed myself to pull out my camera from my pocket and slid myself around to face the door.
When the doors opened, I dragged myself out on my stomach, propped the camera in front of me on the pavement, aimed the lens at the aisle, and waited for the blackmailer to drive down. I prayed the camera hadn't been broken by one of his kicks.
A moment or two later, he came screeching by in a new Ford Focus. I don't think he saw me. I managed to snap one or two pictures before he sped past on his way to the cashier. I hoped I got his license plate, though I had no idea what I would do with the information.
\*\*\*
I was still there, soaked in my own urine and bile, when the family of six came out of the stairwell. They pretended not to see me. So did the lovely young couple that walked up five minutes later. They just stepped over me and got in the elevator, then immediately got out and stepped over me again to take the stairs instead.
It took me a good ten minutes before I'd gathered enough oxygen, and enough courage, to try sitting up. The pain was like a fresh kick, but at least I could breathe. Sort of. Each breath was like being stuck with knives. I'd broken a few ribs playing touch football in high school, and it felt just like this.
I propped myself up against the wall and sat there, clutching my sides, gathering strength, waiting for my pants to dry, and hoping the pain would wane.
More people passed me on their way to the elevator and tried not to look at me. I think if I hadn't wet myself, I would have gotten more sympathy. As it was, I was written off as another one of Santa Monica's ubiquitous homeless people.
Next time I took a beating, I would work harder at controlling my bladder. Next time, I wouldn't cry, either.
Yes, I was thinking about the next time.
Because as miserable as I felt, as humiliated as I was, as much pain as I was in, I was elated.
I had just gotten my first professional beating.
Someone had just pounded the piss out of me because my investigation had gotten me too close. It didn't matter that my bungled surveillance was what got me in that elevator and got me thrashed. Nor did it matter that I didn't even get in a punch of my own. With each kick, he acknowledged that I was on a case and I was a threat to him.
It was no different from Syndicate thugs trying to run over Jim Rockford. Or a hired sniper taking a shot at Dan Tana. Or someone waiting in Travis McGee's houseboat to ambush him.
I was one of them now. I wasn't simply a detective. I was Harvey Mapes, private eye.
\*\*\*
I may have considered myself a private dick, but as I sat in my car stripping off my piss-soaked pants and underwear, I certainly didn't feel like a sex machine to all the chicks.
I left my soiled clothes on the pier, rolled down the window, and drove back to the Valley naked from the waist down, hoping to air myself out a little. I figured if anyone could see I was half-naked, they were too damn close to my car anyway.
I decided against going to the ER. I knew I had a few broken ribs, but a doctor wouldn't do anything for me I couldn't do myself, besides prescribe some strong painkillers. I would have to make do with handfuls of Advils, which I could buy in bulk from Costco for what a pharmacist charged for two pills of something fancier.
After I dropped off my film for developing, I'd buy some Ace bandages and a big jug of Pepto Bismol, since eating Advils like M&Ms ravages your stomach. The only thing more humiliating than a detective who pisses his pants is one who can't be more than five feet away from a toilet for fear he'll shit himself.
I got off the freeway at the Ventura Boulevard exit and parked behind the first gas station I saw. I put on my uniform, got out of the car, and limped into the men's room. Those simple actions hurt more than I can describe. Suffice it to say that every move I made was painful, so I won't belabor the point from now on. Take it as a given.
I shoved my blood-and-puke-stained shirt in the trash, washed my face in the sink, and took a pee to see if there was any blood in my urine. There wasn't, which I took to mean there wasn't any internal bleeding, not that I had the slightest bit of medical knowledge.
Still, I was relieved.
I got back in the car and drove to the Thrifty on the way to my place, dropping the film off at their one-hour photo counter. I bought my medical supplies and went to my apartment.
As soon as I got home, I stripped and showered. After that, I wrapped the Ace bandages tightly around my waist, washed down six Advils with a couple gulps of Pepto Bismol, and lay down on my bed to rest for a few minutes.
\*\*\*
I awoke to pounding in my head from inside and out.
The apartment was dark. Pain pulsed in my head, keeping time with the sound of a fist banging on my front door.
I sat up slowly, pleased that the tight bandages were providing some support and a slight easing of my pain.
I put on my bathrobe and dragged myself to the front door. I could have stayed where I was and yelled to Carol to stop her damn knocking, but I was afraid it would hurt me more than walking across the apartment.
I unlocked the door and swung it open.
"Oh my God, what happened to you?" Carol said as she came in, closing the door behind her.
"Nothing," I said. "I'd love to talk, but I got some errands to run before I go to work."
"Harvey, it's after midnight." She turned on the light. "I just got back from the movies."
"Shit!" I yelled, and confirmed my earlier fears. Yelling did hurt more than walking across the room. I clutched myself and wanted to cry. I'd slept over ten hours.
I wasn't so concerned about being late to work; Clay would cover for me. But Thrifty was closed now, which meant I wouldn't be able to pick up the pictures until after my shift Saturday morning. I'd have nothing to show Cyril Parkus. I put both hands on the kitchen counter and groaned. Now I felt like a failure. This hurt worse than the beating.
Carol turned the light off again.
"Why did you do that?" I asked.
"Because right now you look a lot better in the dark," She came up behind me and tenderly caressed my back. She'd never touched me like that before. "Are you going to tell me what happened?"
"Maybe tomorrow," I said. "I have to go to work."
"You're in no condition to work."
"You could be in a coma and do my job," I said and shuffled off to the bedroom.
"Then you're certainly qualified," she replied.
I was changing carefully into my uniform when Carol came into the bedroom and, without saying a word, helped me put on my pants and button my shirt. It was the most intimate moment of my adult life. For some reason I couldn't figure out, I wanted to cry, but I brought all my manly resources to bear and controlled myself. When she was done, she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.
In the glow of my clock radio, I could see the concern on her face when she spoke.
"I'll be waiting for you tomorrow."
And I knew, no matter what, she would be.
Chapter Nine
It was after one a.m. by the time I got to Bel Vista Estates with some burgers from McDonalds for Clay and me. Clay took one look at me and offered to work the next shift in my place, but I told him I needed the money.
I also told him I'd been mugged, which is why I looked like shit.
He asked me where it happened, and when I told him it was in a parking structure, he demanded to know which one, so he could scope it out for a redesign to enhance safety.
After Clay left, I checked the surveillance tapes. Lauren came home around two Friday afternoon and didn't come out again. I wasn't surprised.
I spent the rest of the night swallowing Advils, guzzling Pepto Bismol, and going over the events of the previous day in my mind.
I wondered how he discovered that I was following him. As much as I tried, I couldn't isolate the fuck-up, maybe because it wasn't just one thing, but my entire performance. Maybe I was the fuck-up.
I wondered why he was driving a brand new Ford Focus, which didn't strike me as his kind of car, not that I knew him that well. I knew his foot pretty good, though, and it seemed like it belonged in a pickup truck or a used Firebird.
I wondered how he knew Lauren Parkus and what he could know about her that she was afraid of.
And I wondered how I would find him so I could do to him what he did to me.
By sunrise, I didn't have any better understanding than I did before, but I promised myself that by the end of the day, I would.
It would require a radical change in approach. So far, all I'd been doing was following people. So I decided that today, on my day off, I would blaze a trail of my own.
\*\*\*
"Jesus Christ, Harvey, you're a security officer," Sergeant Victor Banos said after I told him what I told Clay. "You should have been able to take the guy."
"He caught me by surprise."
"You still should have taken him," Victor said. "I would have taken him. I know how to handle myself."
"I bet you do," I said. "Probably half a dozen times a day, too."
"You're a worthless piece of shit, Mapes. You don't deserve to wear the badge."
"It's not a badge," I said, "It's a patch."
"What's the fucking difference?"
I walked out before he could humiliate me any further. I was almost at my car when Cyril Parkus drove out of the gate and came up beside me in his wife's Range Rover.
"What happened to you, Harvey?" Parkus asked.
That question was becoming my theme song. It was a shame Sammy Davis, Jr. wasn't around any more to do the vocals.
"I took the elevator when I should have taken the stairs," I replied. "Look, Mr. Parkus, I don't have anything to tell you right now."
"What do you mean?" he snapped. "She did something yesterday, and I want to know what it was. That's what I paid you for."
"Your wife is being blackmailed," I replied. "If you give me a few hours, I can tell you who's doing it and maybe even why. Just stay close to her today; don't let her leave the house alone. Then come up with an excuse to meet me at Denny's around six."
He studied me for a long moment. "I hope you know what the fuck you're doing, Harvey."
So did I. Because at that precise moment, watching him make a U-turn and drive back up to the house, I didn't have the slightest idea how I was going to pull off what I'd just promised.
\*\*\*
I rushed back to Thrifty in Northridge and went through the photos right there at the counter.
Even with Lauren's eyes hidden by her sunglasses, her anger and her fear still came through, maybe even stronger than it did when I saw her on the Pier. Pictures are funny that way.
I pulled out my magnifying glass and studied the guy who kicked my ass, hoping to spot a tattoo or fraternal ring or something else I might use to find out who he was. No such luck.
I'd have to rely on the license plate and come up with some scam to get the DMV to spit out his name and address for me.
In theory, anyway, that was a good idea. What I really needed was a plugged-in techno-buddy who could hack into anything anywhere. Just about every private eye, secret agent, and suave adventurer has a buddy like that these days.
My buddy could have a name like Joe "Hard Drive" Hardigan.
But I didn't have a buddy like that yet.
I also didn't have a picture of the license plate. I had a picture of the back tires and a chunk of the car's bumper.
There was something on the bumper, though, that caught my eye. I looked at it under the magnifying glass. It was a tiny green sticker, a stylish rendering of the letter "S" and a code number underneath: "UC2376."
It looked familiar to me, but I couldn't place where I'd seen it before. I figured it was a parking permit of some kind, but from where? The UC could stand for the University of California, and could come from any of their campuses statewide, though the guy who beat me up didn't look like a student to me.
The sticker could also be a parking permit for a factory, an office building, a government office, or even a gated community like the one I guarded. The possibilities were endless.
As I walked outside to my car, it occurred to me again how unusual I thought it was for the blackmailer to be driving a new Ford Focus, a practical economy car. It's the last car a guy like that would buy.
So I decided to assume that the car wasn't his.
Which meant it could be stolen, though if you're gonna steal a car, it would be something nicer than Ford Focus, even if all you were gonna to do with it was take a joyride. There's no joy in riding in a Ford Focus, believe me.
If I assumed it wasn't stolen, that he'd borrowed it, then maybe it belonged to his employer. Perhaps the sticker meant it was a fleet car of some kind.
And then it hit me, just as I reached my little Kia Sephia.
It was a rental car.
Right away, I knew my deduction was right. I knew it because it matched the evidence, it was logical, and it fit my astute observations of his character.
And I knew it because the tiny green sticker on his bumper was the same as the one on my car.
\*\*\*
The lady behind the counter at the Swift Rent-A-Car office on Ventura Boulevard looked like she'd been manufactured at the same plant where they make stewardesses, bank tellers, telephone operators, and Barbie dolls.
She was blond, blue-eyed, and her body had all the right measurements so she could fit into her pre-tailored, green rent-a-car gal uniform. I was hoping she'd be just as robotic and predictable as her appearance promised.
"May I help you?" she chirped.
I strode up in a new polo shirt and khakis I bought at K-Mart.
"My name is John D. MacDonald, and I'm a bestselling author of mystery novels. I'm doing some research for my next book, and I was hoping you could help me with a technical question about the rental car industry."
I said it all quickly, in a nervous blurt, just the way I'd memorized it. I also whipped out a new paperback reprint of Nightmare in Pink and held it in front of me like an ID.
"What does the D stand for?" she asked.
"Excuse me?"
I wasn't prepared for improvisation. I'd come up with a very detailed script, and already she was deviating from her part.
"The D," she repeated. "People don't usually mention their middle initial unless they are very proud of it."
"What about Captain James T. Kirk? He tells everybody about his middle initial, even aliens who don't understand English and certainly don't give a damn."
"Tiberius."
"Excuse me?"
"That's what his T stands for," she explained. "Would you like to know what Doctor McCoy's middle name was?"
"Actually, what I'd like to know is what this means." I handed her the photo of the blackmailer's bumper.
"What for?" she asked.
"My hero, Travis McGee, is tossed out of a car. And just before he passes out on the road, he sees that sticker with the logo and number. I was wondering what he could deduce from that clue."
"He didn't know the people in the car?"
"No," I replied testily, "they were thugs."
"What about the license plate?" she said. "Wouldn't he look at that, instead of a tiny bumper sticker?"
"There are no plates."
"Weren't the thugs worried that by driving around without plates, a cop might pull them over while they're holding McGee hostage?"
"They are on a rural country road where there are no cops."
"They didn't have to drive on other roads first to get to the rural road?"
"No."
She shrugged. "I'd rethink the whole situation, if I were you. It doesn't sound too plausible to me."
"Could you please just tell me what the numbers on the sticker mean?"
"The first three characters identify the rental location," she said. "The remaining numbers identify the vehicle."
"So what, for instance, could you tell me about this car?"
"Whose car is it?"
"I don't know, that's why I'm asking you," I replied angrily without thinking. An instant later, I realized my mistake and hurried to repair it. "I took this picture of a stranger's car as research. I'm trying to go through the same steps my hero would."
"You going to jump out of a car, too?"
"I already have." I lifted my shirt to show her the bruises and bandaging. "As you can see, I take my research very seriously. I'd really appreciate your help."
She smiled now, the first genuine smile since I walked in the door.
"The car came from our rental desk at the Universal Sheraton," she replied. "The UC stands for Universal City."
There's no real city there, just the Universal Studios Tour. The blackmailer must have decided to do a little sightseeing while he was here. Since LA has no real sights, you have to go someplace where they manufacture them.
"What can you tell me about who rented the car?"
"Nothing," she said.
"Because you don't have the information, or because you just don't want to tell me?"
"Because it's confidential."
"So, you have the information."
"Yes," she replied.
"So, it would be possible for my hero to get it."
"I don't see how," she said.
"What if, for instance, he seduced the woman behind the counter?"
"You gonna try that as research, too?" she asked.
"Would it work?" I replied.
"No chance in hell, John D.," she replied.
I smiled. "What if I told you what the D stood for?"
I also wasn't beyond begging.
"Dann," she said. "That's with two Ns."
"Excuse me?"
"That's what the D is for," she said. "He wrote twenty-one Travis McGee novels before his death in 1986. My dad was a big fan, though I never understood that 'wounded bird' crap."
I felt like I'd just been kicked in the ribs again.
"If you knew I wasn't John D. MacDonald, why did you help me?"
"I wasn't going to, until you lifted your shirt."
"Thanks," I tossed her the book and walked out. I was almost out the door, when I paused for effect, then turned around.
"Horatio," I said.
"Excuse me?"
"That's Doctor McCoy's middle name."
And with that I smiled and walked out, feeling pretty cool.
I knew watching all that TV would pay off someday. My good mood lasted all the way, until I got to my car.
I still didn't know who the blackmailer was. All I knew was that he rented his car at the Universal Sheraton. So, I figured, odds were that was where the guy was staying.
But what the hell was I going to do now?
I thought about it a minute. Spenser would walk the parking structure until he found the car, then he'd find a place to hide out and wait. When the blackmailer came for his car, Spenser would beat him up and make him talk.
I was in no condition to do that now.
I was no condition to do that before my beating.
So, I asked myself what Jim Rockford would do.
\*\*\*
I stopped by Target before going to the Universal Sheraton and bought a hammer, a gym bag, and a red sweat suit.
I visited a gas station, went into the restroom, and changed into my uniform again; then I put the red sweat suit on over it.
I went back to the car and drove to Universal Studios, not the part in the Valley where they make movies, but the amusement park, hotels, and shopping center above it, on the hills along the Cahuenga Pass.
I was lucky the blackmailer wasn't staying at Disneyland, or the task ahead of me would have been a lot harder. They've got more hotels there, thousands of guests, and tighter security.
I paid seven dollars and fifty cents to park in the tour lot, then walked down the hill and across the street to the Sheraton's parking structure.
It took me two hours of wandering through the five-story parking structure before I finally found it. The Ford Focus was parked near the stairwell on the third floor. The bumper sticker matched the one in my photo.
I double-checked it against the photo a couple times to make absolutely sure, then I looked around. I didn't see anyone or any security cameras and I was fairly certain there wasn't going to be a car alarm in a rented Ford Focus. So I grabbed the hammer from the gym bag on my shoulder, took one more look, and then smashed the passenger's side window of the car.
I was right, the Ford Focus didn't have a car alarm. But every other car within twenty yards did, and they were wailing. The alarms echoed off the concrete walls, amplifying the sound a hundred-fold and turning the entire parking structure into a loudspeaker.
After the events of the last two days, I was developing a serious hatred of parking structures.
I quickly reached into the Ford, opened the glove compartment, and grabbed the rental agreement, which was nicely folded inside a pamphlet-sized, Swift Rent-A-Car folder. I shoved the folder and the hammer in my bag and ran for the stairwell.
Running is something you generally want to avoid when you've got an unknown number of broken ribs. It is extraordinarily painful. But the alarms panicked me. So did the sight of two security guards in a golf cart speeding down the ramp from the upper floor.
I say they were speeding, because for the last few days I'd been driving a Kia Sephia, and compared to it, a golf cart is a formula one racer.
I'm not much of a runner even without broken ribs, so I knew I couldn't outrun them. As soon as I got in the stairwell, I peeled off my sweat suit and shoved it in the trash, which left me in my security guard uniform. I stuck the picture and the folder in my shirt and ditched the gym bag, too. Then I ran the rest of the way down the stairs.
The instant I hit the street, I fell to the ground, clutching my sides. It was part of my plan to do that, but my performance was helped greatly by the fact I was in tremendous pain and too dizzy to stand. Not having to actually act when you're supposed to be acting makes you a lot more convincing.
A few moments later one security guard burst out of the stairwell, and another sped out of the exit ramp in the golf cart. The one from the stairs rushed up to me.
"You looking for a guy in a red sweat suit?" I rasped.
"Yeah, you see him?" the guard asked.
What a stupid question, I thought. That guard would be a sergeant in no time.
"He tackled me like a linebacker and ran into the structure across the street."
"You gonna be okay?"
I nodded. "Just get the son-of-a-bitch."
The guard mumbled something into a walkie-talkie, jumped into his buddy's golf cart, and scooted across the street in hot pursuit.
When I drove down the hill fifteen minutes later, now dressed in my polo shirt and wearing sunglasses, the entrances and exits to the structure across from the hotel were blocked by private security patrol cars.
I smiled to myself and wiped tears from my eyes. The smile was from pride, the tears were from the pain. But it was worth it.
Now I knew who the blackmailer was.
Chapter Ten
I arrived at Denny's early to prepare my report, calculate my bill, and rehearse my presentation. I was impressed with myself and was pretty sure Mr. Parkus would share my opinion, once he learned the results of my work.
Sure, I'd made a few mistakes along the way, but there's a learning curve to any new job. The fact was, despite a car accident and a serious beating, I'd still managed to pull off what he'd hired me to do, and then some. And now I felt I was ready to take on the next phase of the operation: uncovering Lauren's secret and retrieving whatever evidence the blackmailer had.
I told the waitress to start defrosting the steaks. There was going to be some big dining tonight.
Cyril Parkus showed up right on time, wearing jeans and a Ralph Lauren sweatshirt, which I guessed he picked up at the outlet mall for fifty dollars. I thought about telling him he could buy five sweatshirts just like it, only without the horse on the chest, for the same price at the J.C. Penney outlet in Woodland Hills. Then again, I figured the horse was probably worth forty bucks to him, so I kept quiet.
"We've got to make this fast, Harvey," he said as he slid into the booth. "I told Lauren I was going to make a quick run down to the grocery store for a bottle of wine."
"This won't take long," I replied, and laid out in front of him my handwritten report with receipts stapled to it. "Here's my report, my bill, and my expenses. Don't bother reading it now, I'll give you the headlines. Your wife went down to the Santa Monica Pier yesterday morning and paid thirty thousand dollars to this man."
I dealt the pictures to him like playing cards.
He picked up the best shot of the blackmailer and jerked as if he'd been hit with defibrillator paddles. The blood drained from his face. His eyes widened and he swallowed hard. Parkus did everything except spontaneously combust.
So, I asked, "Do you know the guy?"
"Nope," he lied.
I decided right then that I had to play poker with this guy some day.
"Maybe this will help," I said. "His name is Arlo Pelz. Does that mean anything to you?"
"No," he lied again, staring at the picture.
"He's staying at the Universal Sheraton, but I don't know for how long."
Parkus just nodded and took a drink of my water. "You got anything more?"
Unfortunately, the only information in the rental agreement was the guy's name, his credit card receipt, and how much he was paying per day for the car. Arlo didn't pay the extra few bucks for insurance. That was a mistake.
"That's it for now," I replied. "But I'm just getting started."
"That won't be necessary." Parkus shook his head and gathered up the photos. "You've done a really great job."
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Parkus wanted me to stop. He wanted me to leave the mystery unsolved and go back to being a security guard.
"But there's still a lot we don't know," I whined. I didn't mean for it to come out that way, but it did. "I mean, this could be the first payment or the fifth. Who knows how long this has been going on?"
"I'll take it from here, Harvey," he interrupted.
Parkus reached into his pocket, pulled out his money clip, and peeled out ten one-hundred-dollar bills. "This should cover what I owe and a little bit more as a bonus."
"But I still have to find out who Pelz is, where he came from, and get whatever he has on Lauren."
He looked at me at the mention of her name, a strange expression on his face.
"Your wife," I corrected, but the damage was done.
"I appreciate everything you've done, Harvey." Parkus slid out of his seat, taking the pictures with him. "But I have the answers I wanted. I'm counting on you to keep our arrangement, and what you've found out, completely confidential."
"Don't worry," I said, unable to hide the disappointment from my voice. "I'm a professional."
He nodded and hurried out.
I watched him drive off in his Jag and then I looked down at the crisp one-hundred-dollar bills on the table.
I still didn't know who Arlo Pelz was, or why he was blackmailing Lauren, or what her secret was, or why it scared her. But there in front of me was a thousand bucks from a satisfied client.
If he didn't care, why should I?
I was officially a private detective now. There was the money to prove it. That should be enough for me.
I shoved the cash in my pocket and left. I could afford to eat at a nicer place.
\*\*\*
I knocked on Carol's door around seven p.m. and asked her if she'd eaten yet. She said she hadn't.
"Then I want you to get dressed in something nice, pick a very fancy place to eat, make a reservation, and meet me here in thirty minutes."
"I can't afford it," she said.
"Did I ask you to pay?"
"You asked me to do everything else."
"I'm taking you out tonight."
She narrowed her eyes. "But I'm making all the arrangements."
"Right," I said. "Remember to pick someplace expensive."
I hurried off before she could ask me any more questions. I went back to my apartment to class myself up. I slathered some Arrid Extra Dry Ultra Fresh Gel under my arms, ran some water through my hair, and brushed my teeth. I washed down a couple Advils with a gulp of Pepto Bismol, then realized I should have done that before I brushed my teeth. The Pepto leaves a chalky residue on your tongue, but it has a nice, minty scent, so I decided not to brush again.
I changed into the only suit I had. It was black; I bought it for my mother's funeral two years ago. That was the last time I wore it, but it still fit, and black is always cool.
Carol was waiting outside when I opened my door. She was wearing a low-cut dress, a fake-pearl necklace, and high-heeled shoes. She was also wearing make-up and had done something different to her hair that made her face seem bolder and sharper. Her eyes sparkled and her lips seemed fuller and redder than ever before.
She was beautiful.
Better than that, she'd become a woman.
Carol must have been thinking the same about me, opposite sex-wise, because she gave me the once-over two or three times and then flashed me this big smile.
"We've never gone out before," she said.
"We've gone out hundreds of times."
"Not like this."
I took her hand. "Then we should have."
\*\*\*
The Bistro Garden in Studio City was big, open, and airy. The place was alive with the tinkle of silverware, soft music, and the occasional trill of a cell phone. It was fancy without being snobby.
Well, that's not entirely true. When I drove up in my Kia Sephia, the valet hesitated before opening Carol's door, like a compact car with a sticker price under twenty thousand dollars carries some kind of infectious disease. But she gave him a look through the window that promised immediate emasculation unless he jumped to attention, so he did. That was the only bump in an otherwise perfect evening.
While we waited for our steaks and lobsters, and ogled the movie stars and agents at the other tables, she took my hand from across the table.
"You're forgetting something," she said.
"Would you like some wine?" I replied. "Order whatever you like."
"Thank you, but that's not it. Last night, you promised me an explanation," she said. "I want to know what happened to you yesterday and what tonight is all about."
I thought about it for a minute. I thought about what I should leave out, what I should exaggerate, and what I should invent. In the end, I decided to tell her the truth and only leave out the part about wetting myself and everything related to that.
Even without that part, as I told the story I kept waiting to see the disappointment, disgust, and pity on her face, or for her to just start laughing at me. But instead she did something strange. She kept her hand on mine and, every so often, gave it a little squeeze.
Our dinner arrived, and while we ate, I told her the rest, about breaking into Pelz's car and presenting my case to Parkus and getting paid the bonus.
"I was right, Harvey," she said when I'd finished. "You're good at this."
"Even though I let Arlo Pelz beat me up?"
"The thing is you didn't give up; you stuck to it and succeeded in what you were hired to do."
I shrugged. "I suppose you're right."
"But more importantly, you proved something to yourself."
"I did?"
"It's changed everything about you. You're proud of yourself, maybe for the first time," she said. "Isn't that what we're here celebrating?"
I didn't really know what we were doing. I just knew I didn't want to eat dinner at Denny's and that I didn't want to be alone that night and there was only one person I really wanted to be with.
So, that's what I tried to tell her.
"I don't know what we're doing," I said. "I'm just glad we're doing it together."
Something seemed to melt in her. Me, too, if you want to know the truth.
Carol put her hand on mine. "Let's go home, Harvey."
\*\*\*
It was the best sex of my life. It was like that moment when she buttoned up my shirt, only with intercourse thrown in.
I don't know if it was because we had to go real slow because of my broken ribs, or because we'd dressed up nice and had a fancy dinner first, or because I'd finished a job and had some real money in my pocket.
All I know is that it lasted a long time, it felt real good, and afterwards I didn't want to be anywhere else but in her bed and in her arms.
So, why the hell couldn't I get Lauren Parkus out of my head?
I slipped out of bed, closed the door, and went into the kitchen. I picked up the phone, called the Universal Sheraton, and asked for Arlo Pelz's room.
It was after midnight, and I had no idea what I was going to say to him, so it was probably a good thing that he'd already checked out.
I hung up the phone and stood there for a moment in the dark before I realized Carol was standing in the bedroom doorway in her bathrobe, looking at me. A tomato would have been wearing my shirt and nothing else.
"What are you doing, Harvey?" she asked.
I'd actually been asking myself the same question.
"Nothing." I suddenly realized that I was naked and I wished I wasn't.
"You've been paid," Carol said. "The case is closed."
"I don't really feel like it is," I replied. "I don't know the answers to a lot of questions."
"The answers are none of your business."
"I know that, but I still want to know," I said. Now I saw the look of disappointment on her face that I'd been expecting before. "I'm just doing my job."
"No one is paying you anymore," she said.
No one ever paid Spenser, either---the Robert Urich TV Spenser, I mean. All that mattered was justice, honor, and duty. That duty was to solve the mystery. Hell, even Encyclopedia Brown always did that, regardless of whether or not somebody plunked a quarter down on his table.
"But I only did half the work," I said, trying to make her understand. "I didn't solve the mystery. I don't know who Arlo Pelz is or what Lauren Parkus is getting blackmailed about."
"You were hired to follow her and find out why she was acting strange. You did that. The client is happy and you got paid."
"Why do you think Cyril Parkus paid me so much? To buy me off. To get me to stop investigating. He knows who Pelz is."
"Then there's nothing left for you to investigate, is there? If he knows Pelz, then Parkus probably already knows what his wife's secret is, or if he doesn't, you gave him the leverage to get her to tell him."
She stood there, looking at me. I really wished I had some clothes on.
"This isn't about doing the job," Carol said. "It's about your curiosity."
"That's not true," I argued, feeling very exposed. I stepped behind the kitchen counter for some cover. "Maybe I can help her."
I was more exposed than I thought. I quickly corrected myself. "Maybe I can help both of them."
If she caught my slip, she didn't mention it.
"Harvey, you've done a good job. It could be the start of something. Of a lot of things. Don't screw it up now."
Carol turned around and went back to bed. I stood there for a moment, thinking about our conversation, weighing what she'd said. I also thought about what Spenser, Elvis Cole, Travis McGee, and Joe Mannix might say.
I knew what I had to do. I really didn't have any other choice.
\*\*\*
I was parked down the street from the Bel Vista Estates gate by seven thirty the next morning.
I couldn't park in my usual spot, because Sergeant Victor Banos was sure to notice my car when he arrived to take over from Stanley Gertz, the old guy who handles my shift on my night off.
Even so, I could see who came and went from where I was, and had plenty of time to duck down under my dash when Cyril Parkus left at eight twenty and drove right past me.
I knew that Carol was right, but she just didn't get it. She wasn't immersed in the case the way I was. I couldn't go back to sitting in my shack, watching Cyril and Lauren Parkus come and go, without knowing the truth.
I didn't care whether it was my business or not.
And I was certain that most private eyes, at least most fictional ones, would agree with me on this, with the possible exception of Jim Rockford, who never did anything unless he was paid to or was forced into it at gunpoint.
So I sat there, waiting for something to happen.
As the hours passed, I found myself enjoying the wait, just sitting there watching the gate. There was something about being a private eye that gave even the simplest things in life more intensity. Even doing nothing suddenly had a thrilling edge to it.
It was certainly different from the experience of sitting in the shack and doing nothing.
I thought about going back to Swift Rent-A-Car and trying to talk the lady behind the counter into giving me more on Arlo Pelz. I felt I handled myself well last time, and that maybe we connected in some way towards the end.
Then again, there might be something in the computer about what happened to Arlo's car, and if I walked in asking more questions, she might just call the cops on me.
I really had to find myself a big, brutal sidekick who wouldn't care about ethics, morality, or the law, and would be glad to do all the dangerous or tricky stuff that I didn't want to. I could send him to talk to her. He'd just walk in, stick his gun in the woman's face, and leave with a complete printout of the information I wanted.
I imagined him. A huge, bald, Asian guy with a dragon tattoo on his face. His name would be Drago. We'd engage in lots of witty, tough-guy repartee. We'd share a manly code of honor. He'd pick up my uniform at the dry cleaners'.
Around eleven, Lauren sped through the gate in her Range Rover. I started the car and really had to floor it to keep up with her, inadvertently letting a couple cars slip in between us. She was in a hurry to go somewhere, and I had a feeling it wasn't to get a cup of coffee.
I was excited. I had a hunch that my extra, added surveillance was going to have an immediate payoff. And then I was excited simply because I'd had a hunch. Before I became a private eye, I never had hunches.
Lauren raced down the hill towards the freeway. I wondered whether we'd be heading down to LA or up to Santa Barbara. I wondered if we'd be seeing Arlo Pelz again and if I'd have an opportunity to ambush him. When she passed the onramp, I knew we were going south.
But she suddenly came to a screeching stop in the middle of the freeway overpass, causing a domino-like chain reaction in the lane behind her. Everyone slammed on his brakes to avoid rear-ending the car in front of him. I was so busy trying not to become a Kia stain on the truck in front of me, I didn't even see Lauren get out of her car.
When I saw her again, she was already standing on the rail above the freeway.
She turned her head and looked right at me, her eyes blazing with the intensity of spotlights, exposing me and everything I ever thought or felt.
And then, before I could even blink, Lauren faced straight ahead and dove gracefully into the traffic below.
Chapter Eleven
I never saw what happened next. But I heard it. The scraping and sliding and tearing and mashing of metal, glass, and flesh, and the moment afterward of unnatural stillness, when even time seemed shocked into immobility and silence, a stillness shattered by screams everywhere and the blur of people abandoning their cars, running down to the freeway to help the injured and the dead and to see the mess that one human being can make.
I backed up, made a screeching U-turn, and drove away. I didn't want to be any part of it.
But I already was.
Lauren told me as much with that look. She said: I know you're there. I know what you've seen. Now watch this, asshole.
Or maybe that wasn't what she said. Maybe she was asking me a question: Why did you do this to me?
I didn't know where to go or what to do. I just drove aimlessly. I wasn't aware of the traffic, of the stoplights, or even the car itself. I was fleeing.
All I saw was that horrible moment again and again, on an endless-replay loop in my mind. And the more I thought about it, the more frightened I became, the more my stomach churned and ached and seized up.
I finally stopped the car and puked in the street, my broken ribs raging with pain with each deep, choking heave. When I was done, I leaned back against my car, clutching my sides, my whole body shaking, tears streaming down my checks.
And once again, I saw her head turning around slowly, her eyes intense, her lips curled in a tiny grimace.
She was looking for me. She wanted to be sure I was watching, that I would never forget.
And then Lauren was gone. Off the edge, taking me with her.
\*\*\*
It was on the radio within the hour. I was somewhere out near Fillmore, driving aimlessly through the endless farmland, when I heard it.
They said a woman leaped to her death from a freeway overpass in Camarillo, causing a seventeen-car pile-up and injuring half a dozen people, two of them seriously.
Police had found her abandoned Range Rover and were withholding her identity until notification of next-of-kin.
Authorities said a full autopsy would be conducted to see if drugs or alcohol played a role in the horrific tragedy, but based on numerous witness accounts, they believed no foul play was involved.
They were calling it a suicide.
There was no mention of her looking at anybody first, or of the guy in the Kia Sephia who sped away from the scene.
No one was chasing me except my conscience, and that's how it would stay.
I knew that Cyril Parkus wouldn't tell them about her strange behavior, or that he'd hired a security guard to follow her around, or that somebody named Arlo Pelz was blackmailing her. I knew that despite the shock, the sorrow, and the disbelief, he would protect himself and her secret.
I had nothing to fear. And yet, I was terrified. Of what, I'm not sure. Maybe it was simply the knowledge that my presence alone could kill, that without even meeting someone, just by watching her, I could provoke death and injury.
That may have been why I was afraid, but it wasn't why I felt guilty.
I didn't really have a reason to be. I knew it wasn't my idea to follow her. I knew I wasn't the one blackmailing her and that I didn't push her off that overpass. I knew I had nothing to do with the secret that haunted her.
But I still felt guilty.
Because I was there.
Because she wanted me to.
\*\*\*
Fillmore was a Hollywood-perfect recreation of a small town from the '30s, only with cars from the '90s filling the diagonal parking spaces.
Actually, the town had always looked like this, until it was decimated by the 1994 earthquake. They quickly rebuilt the Main Street, faithfully restoring everything to the way it had been.
But it wasn't really Fillmore any more, no matter how much they thought it was.
They had to know it, too; otherwise, why put historical placards on every building, detailing its history and rebirth?
It made the whole town feel like a museum exhibit. Because it was. An authentic recreation of a genuine California farming town.
Even so, walking down Main Street past the hardware store and pool hall and ice cream parlor was like stepping into an idealized, make-believe world, one more innocent and safe than the one we live in.
I don't know how I ended up there, but it was the perfect place for me to be. It didn't matter if Fillmore was real any more or not. In fact, it was probably better that it wasn't.
For the rest of the day, and into the night, I walked up and down the three blocks of Main Street, stopping to admire each and every window display. I sat in the park and fed the birds. I walked along the train tracks and had a slice of homemade pie at the diner.
I found a way to escape. I went to a place that didn't really exist. Where even the kids playing in the park looked like recreations. I was half-tempted to see if they had historical placards around their necks.
I didn't think about Lauren Parkus.
I didn't think about myself.
I just went numb.
And then, when the clock tower above City Hall chimed at eleven p.m., I snapped out of it. It was time to return to the real world.
But I was going back a different man.
I became a recreation of myself. I looked like Harvey Mapes once looked, but like Fillmore, something had been lost.
I got in my car and drove back through the orchards and up through the hills and down into Camarillo again.
\*\*\*
I went to work.
I didn't know what else to do or where else to go. I just sat there and stared out into the night.
Around two a.m. the coyote showed up, stepping cautiously into the circle of light cast by the streetlamp. We looked at each other for a long moment, and then the telephone rang, startling us both.
The coyote ran away. I answered the phone.
"Front gate," I replied.
"I saw you this morning."
It was Cyril Parkus' voice.
It sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a deep, dark pit.
"You were parked on the side of the road," he said. "You tried to hide from me, but I knew you were there. Your windows were fogged up."
Maybe he should have been a detective. He could have saved me a lot of pain.
"If you knew," I asked, "why didn't you do something about it?"
There was a long silence. I didn't say anything, I just held the phone, listening to him breathe. His voice, when he finally spoke again, was almost a whisper.
"What did you see?"
"I saw her standing on the rail," I replied. "Lauren looked at me, and then she dove off as casually as if she were taking a swim."
"What did she want from you?"
"She wanted to make sure I was looking."
I was surprised by my own answer. It was simpler than the other explanations I'd run through my head. I wondered when I'd settled on this one.
"No, Harvey, she wanted to be sure that I was."
And then he hung up. I kept the phone to my ear.
I said, "Good night, Mr. Parkus." And then I hung up, too.
\*\*\*
It took me fifteen minutes to walk up the steep hill to Cyril Parkus' house. I suppose a man in better shape would have made it in five, but I had to stop and rest a few times and clutch my sides in pain. I wasn't being a very good patient. I wasn't being much of a security guard, either.
I'd left the guard shack empty and the gate closed, but I knew from experience there was rarely anybody coming or going at two fifteen a.m. on a weeknight. I wasn't too worried.
We're also not supposed to enter the community, even though we guard it. Don't ask me why. So, to get in without ending up on the surveillance tape, I climbed over the gate at a spot where I know the camera's view is obstructed by an overgrown tree.
As I trudged up the steep hill, which would have been a chore for me even without the broken ribs, I tried to distract myself from the pain by looking at all the big houses I was theoretically protecting, with their detached garages and red-tile roofs and dramatic, outdoor lighting. It was as if the exterior of each house was decoratively pre-lit in case the cover photographer from Architectural Digest just happened to drive by, or maybe a busload of tourists, neither of which was likely to happen with the gate out front and my constant vigilance.
Well, almost constant.
All the lights were on inside and out at the Parkus house, and I heard the burbling of at least three different fountains as I walked across the cobblestones of the motor court.
The front door was almost entirely glass, so I could see straight through the circular, marble entry area into the huge, two-story living room, its floor-to-ceiling windows affording a commanding view of the entire valley.
But the view was lost on Cyril Parkus, who was sitting on the floor, staring blankly into the whiskey bottle between his legs. He was still dressed in his business suit, leaning against a wrought-iron and glass coffee table.
I knocked on the door. He looked over and didn't seem too surprised to see me.
He motioned me inside. I opened the door and went in. The house smelled like a rose garden, but there wasn't a single flower in sight.
"Come to check up on me?" Parkus asked.
"You didn't sound too good."
"Afraid I was gonna stick a gun in my mouth?"
I shrugged. There was alot of antique furniture and maritime oil paintings, but the room was dominated by an old, rotting, wooden sign above the fireplace. The faded, peeling paint read: Big Rock Lake Resort. It couldn't have been worth much, and didn't fit in with the rest of the décor, so I figured its value was sentimental.
"I could never do it, even though it's the Parkus family tradition." He shook his head and took a big swig from his bottle. "First my mom, then my sister, now my wife. All killed themselves. I must be a real horrible person to live with."
"You're not the reason she jumped."
Parkus cocked his head. "Really? And how the fuck would you know that? You've never even talked to her."
"I saw her face when she met Arlo Pelz," I said. "I bet if he'd never shown up, she'd still be alive."
"We'll never know, will we?"
"We could try."
"Un-fucking-believable." He glared at me, set his bottle down on the floor, and struggled to his feet. "Is that what you came here for, Harvey, to shake me down for a few more bucks?"
Parkus reached into his pocket, pulled out his money-clip, and threw the cash at me.
"Go ahead," he yelled, "take it!"
"I want to earn it, Mr. Parkus. I want to bring Arlo Pelz to justice."
"Jesus Christ," he snorted in disbelief. "I hired you do to something anybody with a driver's license and a two-digit IQ could pull off, and now you think you're fucking Batman."
"Arlo Pelz might as well have pushed your wife off that overpass," I said. "And you're going to let him just walk away. Well, maybe you can, but I can't."
It was true. At that moment, I felt like I was channeling Joe Mannix, Frank Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Thomas Magnum, and all the great private eyes who came before me. Even Parkus seemed to sense that.
"Who the fuck are you?" Parkus yelled, his voice echoing off the walls of his big, wide living room. "You're not a police officer, you're not even a security guard. You're barely even a man. You're just a clown with an iron-on badge."
He looked so disgusted at the sight of me, I thought he might vomit right there. But I felt stronger and more sure of myself than I ever had in my life.
Parkus marched over to the front door and held it open.
"Get out of my house, Harvey. Go back down to your little shack and pick your nose for a few more hours. And if you ever butt into my life again, if you so much as wave to me as I drive by, I'll have you fired. Do we understand each other?"
I understood, all right.
The only reason he wasn't going to have me fired the next day was because he was still afraid of what I knew, or might know, or could figure out. He couldn't take the risk that I might go to the police with my story.
I walked out.
"I'm sorry for your loss," I said as I left.
He slammed the door behind me.
I was glad I came up. I'd learned a lot and, without even realizing it, made some decisions.
In a way, Arlo Pelz and I now had something in common. We both had something on Cyril Parkus. Arlo had Lauren's secret, whatever it was, and I knew that she was being blackmailed, and that her husband knew the guy who was doing it.
It didn't seem like I had all that much, but it was enough to make Cyril Parkus very nervous. Enough to try buying me off and, when that failed, using intimidation to get his way.
Neither worked. If anything, he'd encouraged me.
I was going to find Arlo Pelz and whatever it was that Lauren killed herself to escape.
The only trouble was, I had no idea how I was going to do it.
Chapter Twelve
Carol was waiting for me at the Caribbean, sitting on a chaise lounge facing the entrance. She was in her business clothes, and she had the morning paper on the chaise lounge next to her.
"Shouldn't you be on your way to work?" I asked.
"I thought you'd want to talk."
"About what?"
She held up the Valley section of the Los Angeles Times. On the front page was a picture of Lauren, which I guessed was taken at a party, a picture of the wrecked cars on the freeway, and an article about the suicide.
I took the paper and quickly scanned the article. It was mostly about the traffic accident she caused, and the people in the hospital, who were in satisfactory condition with all kinds of broken bones. There was a little bit about Lauren and how shocked the community was by her suicide. The article said she was an active fundraiser for local charities and was survived by her husband in Camarillo and a mother in Seattle.
I handed the paper back to Carol. "I told you she needed help."
Carol nodded. "I'm sorry, Harvey."
"It's not your fault." I was saying that a lot lately.
"It's not yours, either."
I nodded, but really only to be polite. I wasn't sure she was right. I told her that I saw the suicide, and that I'd talked to Cyril Parkus, and that even though he threatened me, I was going to continue my investigation.
Carol smiled, which I thought was kind of odd.
"I knew you would," she said, like she was glad, or proud of me, when just the other night she was scowling with disapproval over the idea that I hadn't walked away from it. I'll never understand women.
"I think I can help you," she said. "Do you still have that car rental agreement?"
"Yeah, why?"
"I'd like to take it to work with me; maybe I can use Arlo's VISA number to run a credit check on him and get you an address."
That was a great idea.
Who'd have thought having a friend at a mortgage company would come in handy on an investigation?
I was learning that there were other ways for a private eye to get information without having a love-hate relationship with a cop.
"You're my Peggy and my Susan Silverman," I said.
"Who are they?" she asked.
"Peggy was the secretary for private eye Joe Mannix. She did all the important research for him while he ran around beating people up. Susan Silverman is a shrink who sleeps with Spenser, another private eye. She gives him philosophical insight into how noble and good he is and they are, and how it's okay he's killed a dozen people because he's so noble and good, and then she fucks his brains out."
"Is this your way of saying you expect me to go to bed with you now?"
That hadn't occurred to me, but since she'd mentioned it, I didn't want to entirely dismiss the idea.
"No, but if that's what you want . . ." I let my voice trail off suggestively.
"Get me the rental agreement, Harvey."
She said it in a way that not only made it clear my suggestion was rejected, but that she was disappointed with me again. Somehow, that made me feel a lot more at ease with her.
I got up. "Can I use your computer while you're at work?"
She tossed me the keys to her place. "Make yourself at home."
I started for my apartment, then turned back to look at her and caught her looking at me. The expression on her face wasn't the lingering traces of disappointment I'd expected. I saw warmth and concern and even some sadness.
"Why do you want to help me?" I asked.
"I've never seen you care about something before," she said. The answer came so easily for her, I wondered if she'd been waiting for the question.
"I care about you," I replied.
"It's different now," she said.
I supposed it was, but I didn't want to get into it then. I didn't know if I ever wanted to. I nodded in what I hoped was a deep, introspective way, and went to get her the rental agreement. I felt her eyes on me the whole way, but this time I didn't look back.
\*\*\*
Carol's apartment had the same floor plan as mine, but that's where the similarities ended. It was decorated like some kind of frilly country cottage, with yellow walls, white trim, and everything she could afford from the Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn catalogs.
She'd replaced all the door knobs and drawer handles and faucet fixtures with replicas of old-fashioned stuff, and every surface in her place had some kind of cutesy accessory, whether it was the colorful oven-mitts on the kitchen counter, the napkins in their special holder on the table, or the seat covers on all the chairs.
There were also plug-in air fresheners in every electrical outlet, which made the whole apartment smell so strongly of pine sap, I felt like I was visiting an upscale tree house.
Ordinarily, I felt uncomfortable in her apartment and fled as soon as possible. But this time, I was concentrating so much on her computer screen, I was oblivious to my environment.
First, I used a search engine to see what I could find on the Internet about Lauren Parkus. I found lots of articles, mostly local society columns, about parties and fundraisers she either organized or had attended. The events were always very pricey affairs for good causes at five-star hotels, and the guest lists usually included some movie stars, major sports figures, and big corporate leaders.
There were also a few pictures of her. Each time one came up on screen, it startled me. Her eyes always looked so alive. Of course, nothing about her was alive any more.
Cyril Parkus was often in the photographs with his wife, a big, proud smile on his face. He seemed so glad to be there, as if he was having such a good time battling cancer, illiteracy, lupus, sudden infant death syndrome, teenage drug addiction, and pollution of our groundwater. They were just parties to him---I think they were more to Lauren, or at least I wanted to believe they were. He also held her in a possessive kind of way that declared, I get to take her home and fuck her and you don't.
I looked up Cyril Parkus. There were even more articles about him than his wife, mostly business pieces about the financial side of the movies. Apparently he was a major player in the international sale and distribution of movies. Anytime there was an article about the field, he was the expert they quoted. I guess he qualified as an "industry leader." I figured it was his stature in the business that got so many people to contribute and participate in the charities Lauren was involved in.
Just for the hell of it, I tried looking up Arlo Pelz in a few of those Internet phone book and "find your lost friend, lover, or relative" websites, but came up empty. I also ran my name on those same sites, and wasn't surprised that nothing turned up for me, either. We were both as irrelevant in cyberspace as we were in the real world.
But I was going to find him, somehow, and I was going to make him pay for blackmailing Lauren Parkus and driving her to commit suicide. I also intended to get him back for kicking the piss out of me.
Intention and ability are two very different things.
I wasn't martial artist or a boxer. I had no self-defense skills at all, unless you include running and hiding. The last actual fistfight I'd been in was in the fourth grade and it went a lot like that fight in the elevator, with the other guy doing all the hitting and kicking and me doing all the crying.
I didn't have time to find a master of the ancient art of Sinanju and learn how to turn a napkin into a lethal weapon.
If I wanted to take Arlo, it couldn't be a fair fight. I needed an edge.
With that in mind, the next thing I did was go back to the search engine and type in the phrases: "'Realistic toy gun' AND 'police shooting.'" The search engine coughed up a couple hundred articles about police officers shooting kids and morons who pointed fake guns at them. I scanned the articles and narrowed my search until I found the brand name and model of toy gun that did the best job of fooling the police and getting kids and morons killed.
It was an exact, plastic replica of a Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol that fired BBs. I found the manufacturer's website and learned they also made detailed replicas of just about every other pistol, machine gun, and rifle you could imagine.
The air-fired BB guns were intended mostly for target shooting, but were also used a lot in movie and TV production as standins for the real thing. By law, the replica guns came with a bright orange tip on the barrel so they couldn't be mistaken for genuine firearms. But it wasn't hard to break the tip off, or paint it, and trick someone holding a real weapon into shooting you five or six times.
The fake Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol sold for about forty bucks, a fraction of the cost of a real one, and required no license or waiting period. All you had to be was over twenty-one years old and gun crazy.
That's when Carol called, excitement in her voice. She'd discovered that the credit card Arlo Pelz used was shared with his wife, Jolene, that the card was officially in her name, and that the bills were sent to her in Snohomish, Washington, which was just outside Seattle.
I got a chill up my back, just like the one I got when Bruce Willis saw the wedding ring drop out of his wife's hand in The Sixth Sense.
I checked the article about Lauren Parkus' suicide again, to be sure the chill I felt wasn't lightheadedness from inhaling all that pine air freshener. It wasn't. The article said Lauren's mother lived in Seattle.
I got the chill again and told Carol why. I think I heard her swallow a squeal. It was kind of like we were having phone sex, saying the things we knew would get the other person off.
"If anybody finds out what I was doing, I could get fired for this, but I don't care," Carol admitted, her hushed voice tittering with excitement. "It was fun."
She'd discovered my awful secret. Snooping was a thrill, so much so that she'd easily forgotten the dark side, the whole reason she was looking into Arlo Pelz for me: somebody died. I didn't have the heart to remind her. Carol did me a favor; she deserved to enjoy it.
"You have something else I can do?" she whispered conspiratorially.
I told her there wasn't and thanked her for what she'd found out. I also told her I wouldn't be around when she got back and that I'd leave her keys in my mailbox.
Then I called my supervisor at the security company, told him I had a horrible stomach flu, and that I'd probably be out for a couple days.
And then I printed out the specs on the Desert Eagle and a list of the manufacturer's retailers in Seattle.
\*\*\*
When I got to LAX, I discovered that the airline had overbooked my flight. They were offering four hundred dollars in free travel vouchers to any volunteers who were willing to give up their seats and wait for the next flight to Seattle in three hours.
I wasn't in a hurry. Lauren Parkus was already dead. Three hours wouldn't change much. I volunteered my narrow coach seat and five inches of legroom.
I got my free travel voucher and, feeling flush, went to the restaurant and treated myself to one of their eight-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent cheeseburgers and two-fifty Cokes.
It was only while I was sitting there, eating my insanely expensive fast food, that I started thinking about things. First, I wondered how the public allowed airports and movie theatres to charge so goddamn much for food. Then I thought about what I'd do when I got to Seattle.
I hadn't made any concrete, or even sketchy, plans yet. I'd been so caught up in the excitement of my discoveries, I'd just let the momentum carry me along.
The only thing I knew for sure was that I was going to the Snohomish address where the credit card bills were sent, but I didn't know what I was going to do when I got there, how I'd capture Arlo, and what I'd do with him once I did.
I wondered what the Seattle connection was, and if maybe Arlo or his wife Jolene were relatives of Lauren's. I also wondered what kind of woman would marry Arlo Pelz and if she was involved with the blackmail scheme, too. And if she was, what was I going to do about her? What if neither one of them was there? What would I do then?
I could go and talk to Lauren's mother, for one thing. Maybe she could tell me something about Arlo or Jolene or Lauren that would help me figure everything out.
And that's when I realized there was something else I didn't know: Lauren's maiden name.
How was I supposed to find her mother without knowing at least that?
It was a good thing I volunteered to sit the flight out, because I wouldn't have discovered until much later how ill-prepared I was for the journey.
So I sat there in the criminally overpriced airport restaurant, nursing my Coke and thinking hard, hoping the slow trickle of sugar and caffeine into my system would jump-start my brain.
I started by asking myself who would know the name of Lauren's mother. Cyril Parkus certainly would, but I couldn't ask him. The police probably knew, but I wasn't brave enough to call them. I was fucked.
If only the LA Times reporter had asked for Lauren's maiden name when he was writing his story, he could have saved me a lot of trouble.
Thinking about the LA Times made me think about what I read on the can in the guard shack. I mean, what I read besides the paperbacks and the two-year-old copy of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
I found a pay phone, called the Camarillo Star-News, and asked for the city desk. I told the editor I was from The AIDS Crack Baby Rescue Alliance, and that we wanted to send a wreath to Lauren Parkus' mother, in honor of all the money her daughter had raised to help crack babies with AIDS, and asked if he had a name or address for her. I even started sobbing to drive home my sorrow and genuine desperation.
He gave me the name, Mona Harper, and told me that she lived in Seattle, and that was all he knew. He did ask me why it sounded like I was calling from an airport. I sobbed some more and told him I was on my way to South America, to help all the malnourished, crack babies with AIDS down there. He was so touched, he wanted to make a donation to the A.C.B.R.A. in Lauren's name. I made up a post office box address and tearfully hung up.
There's a good reason why an editor ends up at the Camarillo Star-News instead of the LA Times, and that's why I called him.
I wiped my eyes and went to the newsstand, where I bought a couple Sue Grafton and Robert Crais mysteries. I found a seat and started reading right away. I couldn't help feeling like I was cramming before my final exams.
Chapter Thirteen
By the time the plane landed at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport early that evening, I'd finished the Grafton book and was almost finished with the Crais. I can't say I consciously learned anything from the exploits of Kinsey Milhone and Elvis Cole, but I hoped something had sunk in by osmosis.
On my way through the terminal, I stopped at a gift shop and bought some Pepto Bismol and Advils which, in my haste to get going, I'd forgotten to pack. Between the uncomfortable coach seat and my anxiety, my accumulated injuries were flaring up badly.
I washed down five or six Advils with a mouthful of Pepto Bismol, then hobbled over to the Swift Rent-A-Car counter, which was located in the parking structure outside, across from the terminal.
I'd never been to Seattle before, and I didn't know what kind of trouble I might get into or how far I might have to travel in the course of my investigation. So, I decided to step up from my Kia into something a bit more aggressive. The best they had to offer was a Buick LeSabre Custom. I took it and was careful to choose every insurance option they offered.
The LeSabre was the size of my apartment. The simulated wood-grain interior trim and the decoratively patterned cloth seats gave me a flashback to my mom's Oldsmobile Cutlass station wagon and the fights my sister and I used to have over who got to sit "in the way-back." When my mother abandoned us, she gladly left the Cutlass station wagon behind. My father lost it a few months later to pay gambling debts, but we really didn't miss it.
Anyway, the LeSabre, with its big bench seats, would be comfortable to sleep in if I had to. The engine had some guts, and the power steering was so loose, if I broke every finger except one, I'd still be able to turn the wheel.
That was good to know.
I didn't have to drive far from Sea-Tac before I came upon a Borders bookstore off the freeway. I didn't realize then that the only thing that outnumbered bookstores in Seattle were coffee houses or I might have kept on driving. Instead, I stopped there and bought an illustrated city guide and a detailed map book of Seattle-area streets.
I went back to my LeSabre, took out my list of retailers selling those replica Desert Eagle guns, and looked for the nearest store. I got lucky; there was one a few blocks away. It was called The Northwest Sportsman.
The sportsman at the counter was shaped like a Hershey's Kiss and had one more chin than was absolutely necessary. He wanted to impress me with his encyclopedic knowledge of BB guns, which I was sure was only rivaled by his knowledge of comic books.
The sportsman held the plastic gun loosely in his hand and grinned at it in admiration as he spoke.
"This here is a spring-loaded, single-shot, low-volume air pistol. The real Desert Eagle is manufactured in Israel, but this baby comes to us straight from Tokyo. The styling is nearly indistinguishable from the genuine article," he said, drawling out the pronunciation of those last two words so they came out as genu-wine art-eekle.
"The body is ABS plastic, the internal parts are metal," he went on. "It's got a 113-millimeter barrel and a muzzle velocity of two hundred thirty-five feet per second, firing .2-gram plastic BBs. But the beauty of this piece is the subtle tonal differences in the molding and coloring that?"
I interrupted him.
"I just want to shoot some bottles and look cool doing it," I said. "I don't need to know all the details."
For a minute, I thought he was so offended that he wouldn't sell it to me, but his commercial instincts easily overcame his personal pride and he finally forked the weapon over. He didn't say a single word after that.
I bought a belt-clip holster to go with the gun and some BBs, so I'd appear to be a genu-wine enthusiast. The bill came to nearly a hundred bucks. I saved the receipt for my taxes.
On the way out, I spotted a hardware store across the street. I stowed my gun in the trunk, went to the store, and bought a roll of duct tape, a sledgehammer, and a can of black spray paint. I saved that receipt, too.
I was ready for action.
\*\*\*
Once inside my two-star hotel room a few blocks away, I laid out some newspaper in the bathtub and spray-painted over the bright orange tip of the gun, adding my own subtle, tonal differences to the molding and coloring. I left the gun in the tub to dry.
I could hear the planes rumbling overhead, but it didn't bother me much. It reminded me how much I was saving on accommodations and made me feel responsible. There's no reason to spend more than thirty bucks a night for a mattress, a toilet, and a sink, especially for a hardened, professional private eye on assignment.
I sat down at the table, spread the map out in front of me, and located the address near Snohomish where Arlo Pelz lived. I put an X on the spot; then I took out a pen and traced the best route there. It was a small town on the Snohomish River in Snohomish County, about forty miles northeast of Seattle.
I also looked up Mona Harper's address in the phone book, found it on the map, and put an X there, too. She lived in a Seattle neighborhood called Madison Park, on the shore of Lake Washington, near one of the city's floating bridges. It sounded like a term a spokesman for the bridge might use to spin things after a disaster. "The bridge hasn't really collapsed," he'd say, "it's just floating."
I always thought bridges were supposed to go over the water, but what did I know? Up here, they probably called those flying bridges or something.
Now that I'd mastered the terrain, and had a vague idea of what I intended to do, I called Carol and told her my plan. I told her if she didn't hear from me at the same time tomorrow, to call the Seattle police.
"And tell them what, exactly?" she asked.
"Tell them I'm dead," I replied.
"That's not going to do you much good."
"Okay, so tell them I'm probably dead," I said, "or I will be if they don't rescue me."
"You think the police will care?"
I was in uncharted territory here, since most private eyes I knew about never told anyone where they were going or what they were doing. But they were braver than me, and certainly never pissed themselves in a fistfight.
"If I had a friend on the force, they would," I said. "Getting myself one is at the top of my list of things to do, if I don't get killed and decide to continue in this field."
"Don't do anything stupid, Harvey."
It was probably way too late for that advice. "I never intend to," I said.
There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone.
"Come back soon," she said.
"I'll call you tomorrow."
I hung up and thought about all the implications of her last words. Then I wondered if it would be against the private eye code of conduct to watch a double feature of The Horny Contortionist and Where The Boys Aren't on pay-per-view.
I decided it wouldn't be and reached for the remote.
\*\*\*
I didn't sleep much. Part of the problem with working nights is that your biological clock, or whatever the hell they call it, gets all out of whack. Having a couple broken ribs didn't help. So I only got a couple hours' worth of sleep, mostly catnaps during the slow parts of the porn movies. I also slept a little bit sitting on the toilet, where I discovered the consequences of amateur pharmacology.
I was ready to check out and get going as soon as the sun came up, what little of it I could see through the gray, cloudy skies. I put on a jacket and tie and by seven a.m. I was on Interstate 5, heading towards downtown Seattle.
I was struck by a couple things right away. The crisp, clean air to start with. My sinuses weren't used to that, so I kept sneezing and my nose was running. If you can't taste the air when you breathe it, it's too clean.
Next thing I noticed was the drizzle. I seemed to be the only guy on the road with his windshield wipers on, so I guessed it was like this all the time and that people there were so used to it, they'd learned to see through the layer of water on the glass.
Finally, there was the green. There was so much vegetation everywhere, even along the freeway, it made LA seemed like nothing but concrete and asphalt, which I suppose it was.
As the freeway cut through downtown, I craned my neck like a tourist to get a few good looks at the Space Needle. It was actually the least impressive of the tall buildings that made up the skyline, but at least I was certain I was in Seattle.
The farther out of the city I got, the greener the landscape became. Just before reaching Everett, I took the turnoff for Highway 96. Things became what I'd call rural after that, the narrow highway passing through hilly forests, and lots of mailboxes on posts in front of dirt roads that led who-knows-where. Around the intersection with Highway 9, just outside Snohomish, there were a couple motels facing each other on either side of the road. I made a mental note of them and continued on towards town.
Snohomish wasn't really a town anymore, it was more of a theme for a shopping center. The quaint, nineteenth-century buildings at the heart of the old logging town were almost all occupied by antique stores and indoor swap-meets. That's what they do with dead towns now, they turn them into antique malls.
I drove through town and into the country again, past lots of rusted-out cars, rundown farms, and old, rotting houses until I came to a batch of mailboxes at a turnoff for a long, dirt road.
I drove up the muddy road, lined on both sides with tall weeds, and took a fork that was marked by a weather-beaten wood sign that'd been spray-painted with Pelz's address.
I thought about stopping, and walking the rest of the way in, to be more stealthy, but figured I'd get bogged down in the mud. Besides, if things went bad, I didn't want to be too far from my car and a quick escape. I decided to take my chances with a direct approach and I drove on.
The road curved and suddenly spilled out into a clearing. There was a faded mobile home, a ten-year-old, corroded Chevy Lumina parked beside it. A clothesline was loosely strung between two trees. There was a barbecue, a picnic table, a couple of lawn chairs in search of a lawn, and an old couch sinking in the mud. The stripped, sheet-metal carcasses of a few decaying cars were scattered amidst the weeds on the edges of the clearing. It all fit with my initial impression of Arlo Pelz.
I parked beside the Lumina and sat a minute, my heart racing. I don't know which I felt more, terror or excitement, but I knew I couldn't just sit there. I blew my nose into a napkin and tossed it on the floor. I took my toy gun out of the glove box, leaned forward, and slipped it into the holster that was clipped to my belt behind my back, underneath my jacket. That was the way Mannix used to do it.
I eased out of the car and approached the door, one hand behind my back, ready to whip out my gun if Arlo gave me trouble. I'd lead him to my car, tie his wrists up with duct tape, and then make him think I was going to execute him unless he talked. Once he told me everything, and wet his pants, I'd take him in. The wetting-his-pants part was real important to me.
The key to my plan was the assumption that Arlo would be unarmed. That didn't seem like a big assumption until I approached the mobile home.
What if he burst out right now with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands? Did I really believe I could hold him off with my state-of-the-art BB gun?
I was about to go back to my car and drive away until I could come up with a better plan, when the door opened and Jolene Pelz stepped out in a pink bathrobe, wrapped tight around what I presumed was her naked body, looking tired and pissed-off.
"Who the hell are you and what are you doing here so Goddamn early in the morning?" she said.
Jolene Pelz had the basic framework for beauty, a nice body and attractive face, but her attributes were eroded by a lifetime of bitter disappointment, which she wore on her skin, carried on her back, and expressed with a weariness that marbled her voice. No amount of make-up, perfume, jewelry, or designer clothing would ever hide it, not that she was even trying.
"I'm looking for Arlo Pelz," I said.
"He isn't here. In fact, he doesn't live here anymore."
"That's not what it says on his credit card bills, Mrs. Pelz."
"What kind of cop are you?"
I was so flattered that I almost smiled. I actually radiated copliness now. Wow. That had to say something fundamental about how much I'd changed, about the self-confidence I now radiated, even if I didn't feel it.
"Credit card," I said. "My name is Frank Furillo. I'm a fraud investigator for VISA."
She leaned against her door. "The cop on 'Hill Street Blues' was named Furillo."
If I was going to continue in this business, I had to stop assuming I was the only guy who watched TV and read books.
"I know," I said wearily. "But it's not so bad. I grew up with a kid named James Bond. He got his ass kicked every day of the week."
"Probably by a guy like Arlo," she said. "You want some coffee?"
"That would be nice."
"All I got is instant," she said and went back inside.
I took my hand off my toy gun and followed her in.
Chapter Fourteen
The place was laid out a lot like Jim Rockford's mobile home, only where his desk would be there was a tan, pseudo-suede couch, the kind that had bulging cushions when you bought it but that flattened to the width of typing paper within a month after you got it home. The cushions were still plump.
That caught my eye, and so did the big-screen TV that dominated the boxy living room.
Jolene asked me to sit down on the couch while she made the coffee, but I couldn't. I was afraid my clip-on holster would come off and that, with my broken ribs, I'd have a hard time getting up again after I sunk into the cushions.
So I stood at the low, chipped Formica counter that separated the kitchen area from the living room and watched her set the water to boil. There were bills, magazines, and a high school yearbook cluttering the countertop. I resisted the urge to rummage through them.
Jolene washed out two coffee mugs and dried them off.
"What's this about?" she asked.
This was my first time questioning somebody, and my second attempt at subterfuge, and I didn't want to blow it. I reminded myself that when she first saw me, she thought I was a cop. Everything I said and did now had to reinforce that first impression. I couldn't show any doubt or hesitation. I couldn't let my nose run and I couldn't sniffle.
"We noticed an unusual flurry of activity on your account in a very short period of time," I said. "Were you aware that your husband stayed at the Universal Sheraton in Los Angeles last week and ran up a bill of twelve hundred and fifteen dollars?"
"No," she cinched the robe even tighter around herself. I looked past her to the open door of the bedroom. I could see one corner of an unmade bed and a pair of tennis shoes on the floor. I'd seen them before, coming at my face.
"Did you know he rented a Ford Focus from Swift Rent-A-Car, which he returned after a week with two thousand three hundred and eighty-seven dollars in uninsured body damage?"
"I don't know anything about that."
"His name is on the account, which makes you responsible for his charges and the damage to the vehicle."
I glanced at the yearbook on the counter. On the cover it read: Marcus Whitman High School, 1986.
"It's a mistake," Jolene said, cinching her robe again, even though it hadn't loosened up any in the last twenty seconds. "I put his name on the account when we got married and I forgot it was there, or I would have taken it off when he went to prison. I certainly would have taken it off after the divorce."
This was getting interesting. I decided to give her a little something to hang some hope on as a reward. "It's true that we haven't seen his signature on a credit slip in quite some time."
"Four years."
"That was one of the things that seemed suspicious to us," I said. "Still, the fact remains he is an authorized user. Technically, the charges are valid."
I didn't want to give her too much hope. I wanted her to have a reason to answer my questions, to try to convince me to write off the mythical thirty five hundred dollars.
"You have to believe me, I didn't remember he was on the card," she whined. "We're divorced; why the hell would I pay his bills anymore?"
"When did you divorce him?"
"Right after he went to prison," she said.
"What did he go to prison for?"
"He was a drug dealer," she said. "Not a very good one. He used too much of what he sold. So did I."
It was a nice try, that little bit of self-recrimination, but she wasn't getting any sympathy from me. "When was he released?"
"About six months ago."
The teapot whistled. She poured the water into the mugs.
"You're not gonna make me pay for all that stuff, are you?" she asked. "I mean, doesn't the fact that we're legally divorced make what he did fraud? I mean, doesn't that make you and me the victims?"
"How did he get the card?" I asked.
Jolene dropped a couple spoonfuls of coffee crystals into the cups and stirred them while she thought about her answer.
"All his mail was forwarded to him in prison," she said tentatively. "I guess that included credit cards."
That didn't make much sense to me. I couldn't see prison officials letting inmates receive credit cards in the mail. Couldn't the cards be sharpened into shivs or something? But I had to give her points for thinking fast on her feet. I decided to make my next move while she was still off-balance. I headed for the bedroom like I paid the mortgage.
"What are you doing?" she asked, dropping the spoon with a clank into the sink.
I strode directly into the bedroom before I replied. "Looking for the bathroom."
The closet doors were open, so Arlo wasn't hiding in there. Her panties and bra were on the floor. She'd taken them off in a hurry. The bed didn't have a mattress frame; the box spring was right on the floor. There was no way he could be hiding under the bed.
"The bathroom is over here," she said from behind me.
I turned around and she knocked on the door that was between the kitchen and the bedroom.
"Thanks," I said.
She opened it. The bathroom was empty. I went inside and closed the door behind me. It reminded me of an airplane lavatory, only not as roomy. I looked at myself in the mirror and pondered my next move.
The first thing I did was take some toilet paper and blow my nose, which hurt my ribs, and I was reminded again of how they were broken.
Those were definitely Arlo's tennis shoes in the bedroom. He'd been here, maybe only moments ago. They'd probably heard my car coming up the road long before I got there.
If Arlo was still around, he was outside hiding somewhere, shivering in the wet weeds. Maybe he was waiting to ambush me, but I doubted it.
I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and came out again. My coffee was waiting for me on the counter, an issue of Cosmo serving as a coaster.
Jolene sipped her coffee and looked at me over the rim of the mug.
"When was the last time you saw your ex-husband?" I asked.
"March twenty-seventh," she blurted out.
That was roughly three weeks ago, about the time Lauren started acting funny. "How can you be so sure of the date?"
"It was the day after my high school reunion," she held up her yearbook. "I was a cheerleader."
"Really?"
Jolene opened the book and proudly showed me the picture. It was taken of her in mid-leap, pom-poms in the air, a big smile on her face. She was pure beauty then, unblemished by the disappointments that burdened her now. She stared at the photo as if it were a diamond.
"You were very pretty," I said.
"Yes, I was." She abruptly closed the book.
"What was Arlo doing here?" I asked.
"He wanted to borrow some money. I told him to get fucked," she replied, studying me now. "You ask an awful lot of personal questions for a guy checking on some credit card purchases."
"It's my job to determine whether we swallow the charges or you do, and I have to support my decision with the circumstances surrounding the transactions," I said, realizing I'd let her put me momentarily on the defensive. That had to be corrected. I looked over at the big-screen TV and the puffy couch. "I don't recall seeing those on your statement."
"They were a gift," she said quickly. "From my aunt."
"Lucky you," I said dryly. I pulled a photo of Lauren Parkus from my jacket pocket. It was one of the special ones I'd taken for myself. "Do you know this woman?"
She gave the picture a quick glance. "Was she using my credit card, too?"
I just looked at her. She sighed and looked at the picture again. I studied her face to see if I could detect a reaction. What I saw was a woman afraid of being stuck with a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bill. I didn't see anything else.
"Who is she?" Jolene asked.
"Her name is Lauren Parkus," I said, looking again for a reaction and not getting one. "We suspect your ex-husband was seeing her in LA, that she might be involved."
When I said that, Jolene sighed with relief. "So, you're not going to make me pay. You believe me."
I pocketed the photo. "I've still got to verify what you've told me. But if it checks out, we'll pursue Mr. Pelz for the money. If we decide to press charges, you may be hearing from the FBI."
"The FBI?"
"He crossed state lines in the commission of a felony," I said. "That makes it a Federal offense."
I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I was making it up as I went along. But I wanted to scare her. Then I remembered something I read in a detective novel once, I couldn't remember which one, but it confirmed my faith in learning-by-osmosis.
"I'll be staying at the Sno-Inn for the night," I said, referring to one of the two motels I saw on opposite sides of the highway as I drove in. "If you think of anything that might help me locate Arlo, give me a call."
I headed for the door, opening it slowly, my hand behind my back near my gun, in case Arlo was waiting on the other side to clobber me.
He wasn't.
I relaxed and walked out. She stood in the doorway and watched me go to my car.
"The Sno-Inn Motel is a dump," she said.
I smiled at her. "I'm frugal."
I got in the car, made a wide U-turn, and drove off. I checked my rearview mirror for a glimpse of Arlo as I left the clearing, but if he was there, he didn't come out of hiding.
Overall, I was pleased with my performance. I learned a lot of useful information. In my estimation, I was getting pretty slick.
I would have liked to stake the place out, but I didn't see a way to pull it off. I wasn't about to park the car and creep back up there. If he was there, he'd be expecting that, so that would be stupid. And if he decided to flee in the Lumina, I'd be stuck up there on foot. And if he wasn't around now, there was no place to stash the car and still keep my eye on the dirt road without him spotting me when he came back. I just didn't see a way to go after him for the moment that didn't put me at a big disadvantage.
But I wasn't concerned. I had a feeling I wouldn't have to go after him. I had a feeling he'd come after me.
Chapter Fifteen
On my way back to Seattle to see Mona Harper, Lauren's mother, I took an hour out to do a little sightseeing. I did it to reward myself and work up the courage to talk with her.
I stopped in Pioneer Square because that's what my guidebook recommended. It also recommended I take the tour of underground Seattle, but I figured if they decided to bury it, nobody thought it was much to look at to begin with.
So I parked on a side street near the cobblestone plaza and walked around the neighborhood, seeking shelter from the drizzle under a Victorian-looking, iron-and-glass pergola.
I studied the passers-by and thought about what I'd learned from my visit with Jolene. I learned that cheerleaders may have it great in high school, but that things evened out later. And I learned that Arlo Pelz used to be a drug dealer and served time in prison, so blackmail wasn't a big moral dilemma for him.
He'd definitely seen his ex-wife since he'd returned from Los Angeles. I knew that from the tennis shoes by the bed. And I was pretty certain the new TV and couch were bought with the piss-soaked blackmail money. What I didn't know was whether Jolene knew that's where his money came from. I was sure she gave Arlo the credit card, but she might not have known about the trip to LA or anything about Lauren Parkus.
But now they both knew I was on the case and, judging by Arlo's reaction to me in Santa Monica, I knew he wouldn't be too happy about the news, especially if he caught a peek at me and recognized me from the elevator. I figured he might do something rash and save me the trouble of cooking up some way to sneak up on him.
I'd be able to get more out of Arlo if I could make him think I knew more than I actually did. Private eyes pulled that trick all the time.
I didn't come to any new conclusions about the case while I was standing there, but I discovered I could tell the tourists from the locals pretty easily. The tourists were the ones hiding from the drizzle under umbrellas. The locals were the ones who only needed a lid for their espressos.
Just about everybody, except the obvious tourists, seemed to have a cup of coffee in one hand and a novel in the other. Apparently, there was a city ordinance that required everybody to join Oprah's book club and declare a favorite coffee blend. Even the bums were sipping Starbucks and reading Barbara Kingsolver.
So, before going back to the car, I stopped at the Elliot Bay Bookstore, bought an Anita Shreve novel, and snagged an empty Starbucks cup from the trash can outside, in case I ever needed to blend in with the crowd.
I drove east on Madison Street until it ended at the lake and a little shopping village that seemed to cater to well-heeled retirees and rich, young couples.
There was a small park and beach, but otherwise the shore was lined with apartment buildings that jutted out on pilings into the cold, emerald water. I wondered what would happen to the buildings in an earthquake. Californians can't help but wonder about that.
Mrs. Harper's apartment building was the tallest, at about ten stories, and the apartments on the end had big decks that commanded unobstructed views of the floating bridge and snow-capped Mount Rainier in the distance.
I parked the car in front of her building, walked up to the lobby, and found her name on the directory by the locked front door. I punched in the number of her unit on the security keypad and rang her up.
"Yes?" her voice crackled with static. There were Jack-in-the-Box drive-thrus with better speaker systems.
"Mrs. Harper?" I replied.
"Yes?"
"My name is Harvey Mapes, I'm a detective with Westland Security. Your son-in-law, Cyril Parkus, hired me to investigate your daughter's death."
I waited for her to say something, but the speaker just hissed.
"I'd like to come up and ask you a few questions."
"Cyril didn't say anything to me about this," she said.
"I was afraid of that," I said. "I'm sorry. I guess he didn't know how to tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"Is this really a conversation you want to have over a loudspeaker? There are other people waiting to come in out here."
She buzzed me inside. I took the elevator to the seventh floor and walked down the long, wide corridor to the very end. It smelled like disinfectant and fried food and shag carpet. It smelled like retirement.
I knocked on her door but she didn't open it right away.
"Do you have some ID?" she asked, her voice muffled behind the door.
I was glad I'd decided to stay as close to the truth as I could with my story. I wasn't exactly lying, but I was certainly implying a lot more than was true.
I held my Westland employee ID up to the peephole. The ID didn't say anything about me being a security guard, it just had my name, my picture, a barcode, and their badge-and-eagle logo. It must have impressed her, because she slid off the chain, turned the deadbolt, and opened the door.
I expected to see Lauren, the way she'd look if she were an actress playing her older self, after the make-up guy glued on latex wrinkles and rubber jowls and added a few age spots and a stringy, gray wig to obscure her youthful, sculpted beauty. But underneath all that applied age, I knew her intense eyes would shine through, revealing the woman underneath it all, the one that time, real or imagined, couldn't hide.
So, I was startled by the matronly old woman who faced me, her gray hair tied up in a bun, wringing her hands under her grandmotherly bosom. I looked for Lauren's intensity in her eyes, but if it had been there, I wouldn't have had to look for it.
She had the flat gaze of a trout.
If there was an actress underneath that aged skin, she had long ego become the woman she was playing. It was hard to imagine that Lauren had sprung from her loins, or that she'd ever had loins at all.
"I tried calling Cyril while you were on your way up," Mrs. Harper said, "but there was no answer."
"I wish you'd been able to reach him," I lied. "He could probably explain himself better than I can. But I'll try. May I come in?"
She stepped aside and let me walk in past her. Oprah was muted on the TV, the kind that was designed to look like a piece of carved-wood furniture, with built-in drawers and molding. There were framed, family photos on top of the TV and on most of the walls.
"Did you leave him a message?" I asked.
"Yes," Mrs. Harper took a seat on the couch.
"Good," I sat down in a chair facing her. Now Cyril Parkus would know I was in Seattle and what I was doing. The best I could hope for was to get as much information as possible from her before he called back. I wouldn't get a second chance. "I'm assuming you're familiar with the circumstances regarding your daughter's death."
"It wasn't a death," she replied. "It was a suicide. I don't see what there is to investigate."
"For starters, why did she do it?"
"Only she knows."
"Can you live with that? Mr. Parkus can't. He needs to understand. She didn't leave a note and, as far as he knew, your daughter was very happy."
"Lauren wasn't my daughter," she said, looking away from me, "though I certainly loved her as if she was. Even so, I think Cyril has engaged you in a hopeless pursuit that will only prolong his pain. And mine."
Mrs. Harper wasn't her mother. That explained why I couldn't see a trace of Lauren in her face. I marveled at my rapidly-developing detective instincts. I would have to learn to pay more attention to my first impressions.
"What was your relationship with her?" I asked.
Mrs. Harper looked at me suspiciously. "Didn't Cyril tell you?"
"I'd rather hear it from you," I stalled, scrambling to come up with a bullshit explanation. "When I get the story secondhand, all I'm told are the broad strokes and none of the important details."
"It's irrelevant," Mrs. Harper said. "Whatever tormented her was part of her life in Los Angeles."
I could see that she still needed more convincing and time was ticking away. I took a deep breath and leaned towards her, resting my elbows on my knees. I had to show her how serious and competent I was.
"Suicide investigation is my specialty, Mrs. Harper. It's been my experience that it isn't any one thing that makes someone take her own life, but rather an accumulation of events over a long period of time. They eventually build into one, overwhelming presence that permeates every moment of their lives until there seems to be only one escape. Death."
That last word hit her like a slap, which is what I intended. I gave it my best James Earl Jones delivery, as heavy and throaty as I could, then I let the word hang in the air between us, to reinforce the gravity of the situation.
"My job is to track down those scattered events and try to determine how they became something the person could no longer live with."
It sounded like the intro to a TV series: "The Suicide Sleuth." It might be hard to squeeze in enough sex and action to distract people from the morbid subject matter, but the exciting main titles were already playing in my head.
I looked her in the eye.
"I think we both know that whatever haunted Lauren didn't start in Los Angeles," I added. "It started a long time ago."
Mrs. Harper nodded, tears rolling down her cheeks. I'd gotten to her.
"I thought we'd saved her, that she'd put those horrible years behind her," she said. "But I see now that I was fooling myself. I see that no matter how much joy or love comes into your life, you can never erase the past."
I tried to hide my excitement. I tried to look caring, concerned, and patient. I tried to look like a guy who wasn't afraid that Cyril Parkus might call at any moment and ruin everything.
"Tell me all about it," I said.
And so she did.
Chapter Sixteen
It took her about twenty minutes to lay out the whole story, fighting tears as she remembered it all again, the hope and the happiness and then the pain.
And while she spoke, I wanted to pull out one of the pictures I had of Lauren, to see if the expression on her face, the look in her eye, would slowly reveal their meanings to me as I learned more about her.
The story began about twenty years ago.
Mona and Brock Harper lived in a big house in Bellevue, across the lake from Seattle. He was a lawyer in the shipping industry and frequently entertained clients in his home, from private dinners with a few individuals to large banquets and garden parties.
The Harpers were always looking for dependable domestic help, but they went through maids almost as fast as they went through cocktail napkins. One day, a young woman answered their advertisement for a cleaning lady. She was conscientious, worked fast and efficiently, and clearly had experience. Her name was Lauren, and although she said she was eighteen, Mrs. Harper wasn't fooled.
Still, good cleaning women were hard to find, and not only that, but Lauren was polite, well-mannered, and a perfect hostess when called upon to serve guests at the Harpers' many social gatherings.
Lauren was also bright and inquisitive. More than once Mr. Harper found her in the library, after her work was done, reading from his leather-bound collection of classic literature, something he'd never done. The books were bought by their decorator, strictly for show. But it pleased Mrs. Harper that Lauren was finding the décor useful. It revealed the maid had intelligence and a desire to better herself.
Mrs. Harper decided to save her.
One night, on his wife's orders, Mr. Harper followed Lauren after she finished work and discovered that Lauren was an orphan, living in a squalid Seattle tenement with a bunch of "runaways, junkies, whores, and radicals." As far as I know, he didn't become a private eye after that. I guess he didn't get the same thrill out of surveillance that I did.
They immediately brought Lauren back to their home, offering her a job as a live-in housekeeper. Lauren settled into the maid's quarters off the laundry room and continued her exemplary work. Meanwhile, Mr. Harper tried to try and find out something about their secretive, but dependable, housekeeper, but to no avail. After a month or two, the Harpers sat Lauren down and told her if she was going to live in their home, she would have to trust them as they had trusted her. She had to tell them the truth about herself.
So, she did.
Lauren admitted that she was only fifteen, and that she was a runaway, but that no one was, or ever would be, looking for her. She said her mother was a junkie who "sold her body," as Mrs. Harper put it, for drugs and money. Lauren didn't know who her father was. The man her mother lived with for years was a drug dealer who sexually molested Lauren whenever her mother wasn't available for him, and sometimes even when she was. Her mother knew about it and didn't care.
Lauren figured her only way out was to either kill them, or run away. She chose to run, because she wasn't about to throw away her life for those two shitheads.
I had a hard time believing the entire hard luck story. To me, the only part that rang true was the drug stuff, because it connected her to Arlo Pelz, whom I'd just learned from Jolene was a seller and a user.
I was very pleased with myself. Through shrewd and dogged detective work, I'd just landed a big clue about where Lauren and Arlo's lives intersected. What I didn't know yet was exactly how. The story Mrs. Harper was telling me certainly wasn't blackmail material, at least not that version. Lauren had risen from a tragic childhood and bettered herself.
Hell, if that story had come out, it would probably have raised Lauren's stature among her fundraising-for-charity social set.
No, the truth had to be something much worse. Maybe Lauren wasn't as clean and wholesome as she'd portrayed herself to the Harpers. What if she'd been an addict and a whore, and Arlo knew it? Worse, what if Arlo could prove it? That might have been something so shameful that Lauren couldn't live with it.
That theory worked, except for one thing. It didn't explain how Cyril Parkus knew who Arlo was, or if he didn't exactly know Arlo, how he recognized his face.
While I was mulling the possibilities, Mrs. Harper went on with her story. I have to confess I was only half-listening at that point, and probably missed some important details.
The upshot was that the Harpers virtually adopted Lauren. They hired a new maid and Lauren was promoted to surrogate daughter. Somehow, Mr. Harper pulled off some legal magic and enrolled her in the local high school under their name. They told their friends she was a "tragically orphaned" niece they'd adopted. I don't know what lie they told their family, but whatever it was, it worked. No one questioned anything then and hadn't since.
"She blossomed in school," Mrs. Harper said. "She made us so proud. Straight As."
"That's wonderful," I said, eager to go now that I'd found what I needed. There was just one, last thing. "Did she ever mention Arlo Pelz?"
"No," she replied.
I showed her a picture of Arlo, a close-up I took that day on the pier.
"Ever seen him before?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Who is he?"
"A drug dealer."
"Haven't you been listening?" Mrs. Harper stood up, clearly angry. "Lauren escaped from that world. From the day she stepped into our home, that life ended and her new one began."
"Apparently not," I replied.
Mrs. Harper marched over to the wall of family photos and pointed at one of them. "Here she is getting the honor roll. Here she is on the swim team. The debate team. The school newspaper."
She pointed at photo after photo to prove her point. "Does this look like a woman who has anything to do with drugs?"
I looked at the picture. Six teenage girls standing around a printing press, their aprons covered with ink. Not one of them was Lauren.
In fact, Lauren wasn't in a single one of the photos on that wall. I turned to Mrs. Harper and studied her. This crazy woman had created an entirely false, perfect world and inserted her vision of Lauren into it. She'd even gone so far as to put up fake childhood photos on the wall. I could only imagine what Lauren's teenage years had really been like.
"Mrs. Harper, I don't know who that girl is, but she isn't Lauren," I said. "Why don't we start over, with the real story?"
Mrs. Harper looked at the photo, then back at me, then started to speak again, stammering, talking so fast, the words tripped over themselves. "Oh, no! You've got it wrong. You didn't know. This is her. This is Lauren. It's her before."
"Before?"
She grabbed my arm and dragged me over to another photo, of herself, a man I presumed was Mr. Harper, and a teenage girl, taken in front of an old Ford Mustang. I looked into the girl's eyes and I shivered.
"This is a picture of us, a few weeks after Lauren graduated from high school," she said. "Brock bought that car for her as a graduation gift, but it was really more for himself. He'd always wanted a sports car."
She sat down on the couch again. I stayed where I was, looking at the photo again. The same girl was in all of them. I'd never see her before. But I knew her.
"Brock used any excuse to drive that damn car. He was always going on a quick trip to the grocery store for things we didn't really need and asking Lauren if he could borrow her car. Lauren always went with him," Mrs. Harper wiped away fresh tears and struggled to continue. "The police say he was driving fifteen miles over the speed limit when a station wagon pulled out in front of him. He swerved, lost control of the car. It rolled over a dozen times. Brock was killed. Lauren was thrown clear, but she broke her arm, her ribs, and smashed up her face pretty bad."
I stared at the family portrait. Lauren's eyes stared back at me from another person's face, the girl in all those photos.
I took out my picture of Lauren and held it beside the framed photo. It was the same person, only one of them was wearing a mask. I looked Lauren's picture, her face finally revealing its meaning to me.
No wonder I thought Lauren's beauty looked sculpted. No wonder Carol looked at the pictures and saw a woman who'd had a lot of work done.
We both saw through one of Lauren's secrets and blew it off. How many other secrets had been revealed to me that I'd ignored?
Suddenly, a strange thought occurred to me.
My hand started to shake. To hide it, I put my picture of Lauren back in my pocket and left my hand there.
"Mrs. Harper," I asked, hearing a tremble in my voice, "You wouldn't happen to remember which high school Lauren went to?"
"Of course I do," she said. "Marcus Whitman."
The same school Jolene went to. The school that had a reunion the day Arlo suddenly disappeared.
People, places, and events were colliding in ways I could never have imagined and had an even harder time trying to understand. But all I could do was my part, to connect the obvious dots as they appeared, even if I couldn't see the shape I was creating.
"Do you know if Lauren ever went to one of their reunions?" I asked.
"She got an invitation, but wasn't able to make it," Mrs. Harper said. "Since she wasn't going to attend, the reunion people asked me for a recent picture of Lauren and some news about her life to put in a newsletter they were going to give out at the party."
"Did you give them a picture?"
"No, that wouldn't have been right. I just told them how well she'd done, and how she'd raised so much money for charity in Los Angeles," she replied. "What does this have to do with Lauren's suicide?"
Everything---I just didn't know how yet. A few more questions might have helped me, but I didn't get a chance to ask.
The phone rang.
I immediately headed for the door. "I better be going now, Mrs. Harper; you've been a tremendous help."
"Wait, that could be Cyril," she said, rising from the couch.
"Tell him I'm on the case."
I was out the door and running down the hall by the time she answered the phone.
Chapter Seventeen
I went to dinner at a Home Town Buffet off the freeway between Seattle and Snohomish. I piled my plate high with fried chicken, macaroni, chow mein, tater tots, and corn on the cob and took it back to my booth.
While I ate, I looked at the people around me. They all looked suspicious. They all looked like people with secrets.
And when they looked at me, they probably thought I was one of them. Just another average person trying to eat as much as he could for six dollars and ninety-nine cents.
They didn't know that I was a private detective. They didn't know it was my job to see through them, to find out what they didn't want anyone else to discover.
I wondered what they would do if they knew.
I felt like the hero of one of those old World War II movies where a rugged soldier, like Jose Ferrer or Alan Ladd, parachutes into occupied France to carry out a deadly mission. I wasn't sitting in Home Town Buffet, I was in a small café in Bordeaux, and all the other tables were filled with German soldiers. When I talked to the waitress, would subtle mistakes in my French reveal me? Would I die at the table, doomed by a flawed past participle, before I even began my mission?
"Are you done with your plate?" the waitress asked. Her name was Dede. A sticker on her shirt told me to ask about the senior citizen specials.
I saw the Nazis at the next table eyeing me over their Teriyaki chicken wings and tacos. I tried to remain casual.
"Are you serving the mini-corn dogs tonight?" I asked Dede.
"Only on Tuesdays," she replied. "May I take your plate?"
I nodded. The people at the next table looked away, uninterested.
I would live, at least for the moment. They thought I was one of them. Only I knew that I wasn't any more and I was damn happy about it.
I grabbed a fresh plate and got myself some cinnamon buns while they were still hot.
\*\*\*
I called Carol as soon as I got to the motel room. It was a good thing I did, because she was about to call the police.
I told her what I'd learned, hoping that since Carol was smarter than me, she might see stuff that I'd missed. I left out the part in my story about telling Jolene which motel I was staying at, and the idea I stole from a book I'd read. I figured there was no sense getting Carol worried. She didn't know yet how cool and professional I'd become, though I hoped telling her about my day at least gave her a hint.
I told her my theory, that Arlo and Lauren were both involved with drugs, and that he knew her before she ran away from home, disappeared, and got a new face. Arlo probably forgot all about her, until the fateful day his ex-wife Jolene got invited to her high school reunion and showed him her yearbook. He must have seen a photo of Lauren and shit himself. Then he read the "Where Are They Now?" newsletter, saw how she'd married a wealthy man and become an active fundraiser for charity, and saw a way to make himself some quick cash.
"Here's a guy, a loser fresh out of prison, who lucks into a woman's deep, dark secret," I said. "If it wasn't obvious that Lauren was rich, Arlo might have just laughed it all off. Instead, he took a plane to LA to soak her for as much as he could. Only he pushed her too hard and she dived off an overpass."
"But you still don't know what the deep, dark secret is," Carol said, "except that it has to do with drugs."
"Arlo was a drug dealer; Lauren's mother and her boyfriend were addicts. At least that's the self-serving story Lauren told the Harpers," I replied. "Now that I've had some experience as a liar, I've discovered the most convincing lies are based on truth. So, I'm assuming there's some truth to the story, only I don't think Lauren was the wholesome, innocent victim or Arlo wouldn't have anything on her."
"Maybe Lauren's mother wasn't the addict," Carol said. "Maybe it was Lauren. And maybe her mother's boyfriend didn't seduce Lauren, maybe it was the other way around, so she could get her hands on his drugs."
"Where does Arlo fit into that?"
"Maybe Arlo was her boyfriend," she said. "Maybe he didn't like her fucking her mother's boyfriend to get drugs."
"Or maybe Arlo was the one who put her up to it, to get drugs for both of them," I added. "Only Arlo began to think Lauren was enjoying doing Mommy's boyfriend too much and maybe wasn't sharing all the dope she got. So, Arlo gets pissed, and tells Lauren's mother what's going on."
"Or arranges for her mother to catch them in the act."
And then it hit me. It was so obvious.
"No, he did better than that." I said. "He took pictures."
"Yeah," Carol said softly.
That was it. We both knew. It all fit.
"So, Lauren has to run, because her mother, or the boyfriend, or both of them want to wring her neck," Carol said. "She ends up in a dive in Seattle, lucks into a job with the Harpers, and reinvents herself. She even gets a new face. After a while, it's almost like none of it ever happened, or if it did, it was to a totally different person."
"Until one day," I said, "Arlo Pelz shows up at her door with the pictures and it all comes back to haunt her."
"It makes sense," Carol said.
"That doesn't mean that's what happened."
"It's probably close enough," she said.
We tried knocking around a few other scenarios, but none of them worked as good as that one. It was fun talking about them anyway. We were really enjoying the call.
Two weeks ago, all she had to tell me was office gossip about people I didn't know or care about. Even so, that was more than I usually could contribute to a conversation. Not much happened on the night shift in a guard shack. Now we were discussing blackmail and ex-convicts and drug dealers and secret lives.
Then Carol told me what she'd been doing at work, only for the first time I was interested. She'd been so revved up by the credit stuff she'd found on Arlo that she had to do something more. So, she sat down at her computer and found a couple dozen websites that searched public records and other databases for personal information about people. She didn't find out anything more about Lauren, but she thought that now, based on what I'd told her, she might be able to dig up more on Arlo Pelz. She'd start with the Washington State Department of Corrections and work backward from there.
"You don't have to do that," I said.
"I want to," she said. "I'm enjoying this. Besides, it's the first thing we've really done together."
"No, it's not," I said slyly.
"It's the first thing that doesn't involve a TV, a pizza, or a bed."
Hearing her talk that way, I began to think seriously about starting a detective agency of my own. I'd do the exciting legwork, including the car chases and shoot-outs, while she did all the dull research, cleaned up the office, and fucked my brains out.
It sounded like a dream, only it wasn't anymore. I was most of the way there. All that was left for me to do was win a houseboat in a poker game and I'd have the Travis McGee lifestyle I dreamed of, with some minor alterations. I wasn't interested in rescuing those "wounded birds." For some reason, I didn't have any desire to do that part any more. Carol was enough for me and certainly more than I deserved.
"I love you, Carol."
The words were out of my mouth before I knew I said them. And then, realizing what I'd done, I quickly added a friendly chuckle, so the remark would be taken casually, lightly, maybe even forgotten, shrugged off as just a tongue-in-cheek compliment to a chum. But like I said, Carol was smarter than me.
"I know you do, Harvey," she said, surprising me with the matter-of-fact tone of her voice. "I've known for a while. I was beginning to wonder, though, when it would occur to you."
I swallowed. I fidgeted. I shifted the receiver to my other ear.
"How long have you loved me?" I asked.
"You're the detective now," she replied. "You figure it out."
There was a long moment of silence. I found myself imagining what she was wearing, where she was sitting, the expression on her face. For that moment, I didn't give a shit about Lauren Parkus or her secret or why she killed herself. I wanted to go home and investigate this new mystery.
"Goodnight, Harvey," she said softly. "I'd better hear from you tomorrow or I'm calling the police."
It might have been the nicest thing anybody ever said to me.
I hung up the phone, closed the drapes, and turned off all the lights. I pulled a chair over to the window so I could peek between the drapes and not be seen. Then I sat down in the chair, took out my gun, and set it on the table next to my can of Diet Coke.
I sat there like James Bond in that scene from Dr. No and the one thirty-five years later in Tomorrow Never Dies. Just a man in a chair with his drink and his gun, waiting for danger to arrive.
It was a longer wait than I expected.
I was driving a '50s T-bird convertible down the Las Vegas Strip. I made a left turn at the Desert Inn, and drove around back to my place.
I drove into the garage, which was also my living room and my office. You'd think a private eye living and working out of his garage would be pathetic, but it was actually very cool.
One of things that made it cool was my assistant Carol, who had breasts the size of watermelons, really big watermelons, and was waiting for me with a tropical drink.
I climbed over the door of my car instead of opening it. It was a lot more trouble, but it was one of the carefree, cool things I did that made me irresistible to women.
"The casino called for you, Dan. They've got trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
She showed me a picture of Lauren.
"They say she's gonna jump, unless you can help her," Carol said.
I took the drink and downed it in one gulp and suddenly I was on the roof of the Desert Inn, standing a few feet behind Lauren, who stood on the edge, her back to me, the wind whipping her dress.
I approached her slowly. "You don't have to do this."
"Arlo is back. He going to tell them everything."
"I'll find him," I said. "I'll stop him."
"That's not going to change anything."
"Your secret will be safe," I said. "No one will know anything."
She turned her head and looked right at me. Her gaze was blinding.
"I will," she said. "I can never forget it now."
And then she jumped.
Chapter Eighteen
I'm not sure exactly which sound woke me up. It was either Lauren's body hitting the pavement or the explosion from the motel across the highway.
I whipped open my blinds and saw flames engulfing the room I'd rented at the Sno-Inn Motel and licking the hood of my rented LeSabre, which I'd parked right out front.
It was a huge fire, so hot I could feel it from fifty yards away, behind a pane of glass. And I could hear it, howling in the night, embers snapping in the cold air like cicadas on PCP.
Even so, I still had a hard time believing it. This didn't happen in real life. This didn't happen to me. But that was my room and my car on fire. And once the reality sunk it, I was angry at myself, because I'd slept through it.
I'd missed my chance to catch Arlo by surprise when he came to hurt me. I'd missed the moment of glorious satisfaction when Arlo realized how I'd tricked him, and how much smarter I was than he'd ever be.
I'd missed my sweet victory.
I should have been looking out the window when Arlo sped by and lobbed his Molotov cocktail through the window of my empty motel room.
I should have been out there in the street firing my gun at his Lumina as he sped off. I should have shot out his tires and sent his car careening out of control. I should have dragged him from the wreckage, made a citizen's arrest, and been a hero.
But that wasn't what happened, because I was asleep, dreaming I was Dan Tana in Vega$. Dan wouldn't have let this happen.
I looked out the window at the frightened people running out of their motel rooms in their underwear, and the flames igniting the Sno-Inn's wood-shake roof, and I realized something else.
The flames were meant for me.
Jolene told Arlo where I was staying and he went there to kill me. No one had ever wanted to do that before.
I'd assumed that Arlo would try to scare me off with a good beating. My plan was to catch him when he snuck into my room across the street. When he came out, I was going to smack him on the head with my gun, then kick him once or twice after he hit the ground, just so he'd know what it felt like.
I didn't expect Arlo to toss a bomb into my room.
And if I'd been awake when it happened, I know I would have run out in the street without thinking and started shooting BBs at his car. And he probably would have made a U-turn, mowed me down with his Lumina, and laughed about it all the way back to his mobile home.
So, maybe it was a good thing I slept through it.
I took a sip of my flat Diet Coke and watched the motel burn and my rental car get scorched and listened to the sirens in the distance.
Actually, it was kind of cool.
This was the kind of thing that happened to Matt Houston and Jim Rockford and Dan Tana all the time. And now it was happening to me.
The only thing left was to be knocked unconscious and get shot in the arm, and then I'd really be one of the guys; though, to be honest, I wasn't looking forward to either experience.
All in all, this turn of events wasn't so bad. In fact, I decided I should be pleased with myself and my cleverness. The trick I played by renting two motel rooms, and sticking my car in front of the vacant one, had actually worked. I wasn't in the room that was on fire. I was alive and unscathed. I'd outwitted my adversary.
I also knew for certain that I was really onto something, that Arlo Pelz was afraid of what I might know, what I'd detected.
Then I realized the most important thing of all.
Now Arlo Pelz thought I was dead.
\*\*\*
I took my ice bucket and went outside to join the frightened Sno-Inn guests as they watched their rooms and their belongings burn.
No one noticed me blending in to the crowd; they were all busy watching the flames devour the motel. I moved among them, eavesdropping as they shared their stories with one another about what they heard and what they saw.
A couple people heard a car peeling out just before the fire. One guy actually saw what he thought was a Pontiac or a Chevy speeding away, but no one got a license number. No one saw anything that would lead the police to Arlo Pelz.
The gnomish manager of the Sno-Inn was the biggest help of all in distracting people from the real perpetrator. He was marching in front of the inferno in his underwear, screaming that the asshole motel-owner across the highway was responsible for the blaze. In fact, the enraged gnome had to be restrained by two men from beating up his competitor, a spindly old man who made the mistake of coming over to offer his condolences.
By the time the fire engines showed up, the motel had all but burned to the ground and the fire had spread to the trees, transforming them into enormous torches. While the firefighters battled to keep the fire from spreading into the surrounding forest, and sheriff's deputies moved through the crowd taking statements, I worked on my story.
The ice bucket I'd grabbed on impulse turned out to be an inspiration. Just by carrying it around with me, I looked like a guy in shock. And it made a nice prop for my story, which was that I left my room to get some ice, heard a screech of tires, and then saw my room ablaze.
The deputy asked what I was doing in Snohomish, and if there was any reason someone might want to do me harm. I told him I was here on vacation and that I was a night-shift security guard in a gated community in Southern California. Why would anyone give a damn about me?
I didn't have to sell him too hard on that one.
I could have told him I was investigating the blackmail and subsequent suicide of Lauren Parkus, and that I suspected ex-convict Arlo Pelz, a dark memory from her druggie past, was responsible for this. But like any half-decent private eye, I didn't do that. I wanted Arlo Pelz for myself.
So, for the second time that week, I lied to the law and was surprised how easy it was for me.
I told the deputy I wouldn't be in the Snohomish area very long and gave him my number in LA. He asked if there was anything he could do to help me. I said I still had my wallet in my pocket when I went to get the ice, so I was in decent shape. In fact, I explained, I'd already reserved a room across the street for the night, so they wouldn't have to worry about me. Which was fine by him. He had plenty of other guests a lot worse off than me to deal with.
I managed to get an incident report number from him and the name of the officer who'd be in charge of the investigation to pass along to Swift Rent-A-Car. I had a feeling they'd want more than my word to explain how their LeSabre had become a giant ashtray.
I hung around for another hour or two, looking suitably spooked, watching them douse what was left of the fire, and then slipped back to my room.
I called Swift Rent-A-Car and gave them the bad news. Because I'd taken all the insurance they'd offered, I was off the hook as far as damages went. They asked, hesitantly, if I wanted another car and I passed. I didn't want to press my luck with the company, especially since I couldn't be sure my next car wouldn't meet a dire fate, too. So I rang up one of their competitors, EconoCar, who agreed to send out their courtesy shuttle to pick me up in an hour.
I didn't have much to pack in the meantime. I'd sacrificed a suitcase, my clothes, my shaving kit, and my copy of Anita Shreve's book to the flames, all things that could be easily replaced or forgotten about. All I had left were the clothes on my back, my wallet, a return ticket to LA, a few pictures of Lauren, and my gun.
I had everything I needed.
So, I went and stood outside in the drizzle to wait for courtesy shuttle. As dawn broke over the top of the smoldering trees, I watched the firemen pick through the smoking rubble where the motel once stood.
The Sno-Inn was gone and all because Harvey Mapes came to town and asked a few questions. I can't really explain why, and I know it's sick, but it made me incredibly happy.
\*\*\*
I picked out a blue Crown Victoria from EconoCar that looked just like an unmarked cop car, drove to a hardware store, and bought a sledgehammer and roll of duct tape to replace the ones I lost.
I drove out of town to the muddy road that led to Jolene's mobile home and pulled off into the weeds. I took out the duct tape, dropped the roll around the handle of the sledgehammer, and went the rest of the way on foot.
I took my time, stopping every few moments to listen and look around. When I got to the clearing, I slipped behind a tree, pulled out my replica Desert Eagle handgun, and peered around the edge of the trunk.
Everything was exactly like it was the day before. Even the Lumina was parked in the same spot. The only sound I heard was the half-open front door of the mobile home creaking in the breeze.
My guess was that they were still asleep, and that Arlo accidentally left the door open when he crept back in after firebombing the Sno-Inn.
And now he was sleeping soundly, convinced his troubles were over. He was about to find out how wrong he was. Harvey Mapes was ready for payback.
I was lightheaded with excitement, my heart pounding. This was the most exciting thing I'd ever done. And the most dangerous. But I had surprise on my side.
The front door was open, so I wouldn't need the sledgehammer. I left it by the tree, took the duct tape, and made a break for one of the stripped cars. I waited a moment, then went forward a few yards to the discarded couch.
And so I went, from tree to junked car to picnic table, slowly working my way closer, copying moves I saw Don Johnson use a thousand times on "Miami Vice." I dashed and I spun and I crouched my way to the mobile home and up the steps to the door. I flattened myself against the wall and tried to catch my breath.
This was the big moment. Time to burst in and take Arlo Pelz down. I'd force Jolene at gunpoint to bind Arlo's wrists with the duct tape and then I'd lead him away. I'd do that bit I'd planned earlier, where I'd threaten to execute him unless he talked, and then once he told me everything he knew about Lauren, about the drugs and whatever else, I'd deliver him to the police, where he'd be charged with attempted murder, blackmail, and extortion. Lauren would be avenged and I'd be well on my way to a successful career as a private detective.
All I had to do was step through that door, where Arlo could be waiting with a sawed-off shotgun to blow me in half.
That wasn't going to happen, I assured myself. Arlo thought I was dead. He wasn't expecting any more trouble.
Unless he heard me drive up. Unless he saw my ridiculous Don Johnson dance across the clearing. Unless he knew I was standing right outside his door.
My mouth was dry, my body was covered with sweat, and, much to my surprise, I was hard. I looked down and I could see my erection, poking against my pants.
It had to be the adrenaline, because I certainly wasn't horny, so thinking about grilled cheese sandwiches and dog shit and Roseanne wouldn't make this untimely tumescence go away. I didn't want to stand there and wait for the adrenaline rush to go, because I needed it to overcome my fear and insecurity. I had to go in, hard-on or not.
But did I really want to confront Arlo with a big boner? How could he take me seriously with that poking out?
Because, I told myself, you'll be holding a big, fucking gun.
A toy gun, I countered.
Yes, I agreed, but he doesn't know that.
I decided I had a good point. Fuck the boner. It's not like I'd wet myself. The hard-on simply meant I was surging with manhood. Dangerous manhood.
Maybe it would scare him. Maybe it would make him think I got off on the violence. And if it didn't, I could always pistol-whip the son-of-a-bitch. God knows he deserved it.
I took a deep breath.
I eased open the door with the toe of my muddy shoe and spun into the room in a firing stance, my toy gun and my stiff penis aimed directly at Jolene's corpse.
Chapter Nineteen
Somebody had shoved Jolene's head through the big-screen TV, slashing her neck open on the jagged, broken glass. There was blood everywhere, only now it was no longer red, but black and flaky.
She was still wearing her bathrobe, which was now drenched in the shit and piss she expelled when she died, which also accounted for the horrible smell that suddenly hit me and the fat horseflies that buzzed around the room.
I started to gag and, without even bothering to check if I was alone, I ran into the bathroom and vomited in the toilet. I kept gagging until there was absolutely nothing left inside me and I was hugging myself in agony, my cheek resting against the rim of the toilet.
My ribs felt as if they'd splintered apart, sending shards of bone ricocheting into my internal organs. The pain was so bad I thought I was going to faint, my face in the toilet.
But in a few minutes, the worst of the pain ebbed, and I reached out to the sink for support and staggered to my feet. I ran some cold water and splashed my face to revive myself. At least my hard-on was gone, and I feared it might never return.
I stood very still.
I could hear the flies buzzing around and the front door creaking.
I was alone. Except that outside the bathroom, and three steps down the hall, there was a corpse in the living room. A woman I knew, who was alive and talking and drinking coffee just twenty-four hours ago, was dead because of me.
No, murdered, because of me.
If she hadn't met Harvey Mapes, she'd be alive. She wouldn't be sticking out of a TV set, her body rotting in her own blood, shit, and piss.
The thought made me gag again, and I hunched over the sink, my mouth wide open, but there was nothing left to heave, except maybe what was left of my rib cage.
This was a nightmare. I'd been hired to follow a cheating wife. That's it. Now I was in a mobile home in Snohomish, Washington, with a corpse. This was the life of adventure I'd always wanted but I never thought it would feel, look, or smell like this.
I straightened up, looked at my reflection in the mirror, and ordered myself to leave the bathroom. I couldn't stay here, as much as I wanted to. I couldn't hide from what was in the living room. It had happened. Now I had to deal with it. Coolly. Calmly. Professionally.
The first thing I had to do was make sure I was really alone.
I picked up my gun off the floor and, breathing through my nose to avoid the stench, stepped out into the hall. I didn't look in the living room. I put it off by checking out the bedroom first. The only thing that'd changed since I'd last seen it was that Arlo's tennis shoes were gone. I checked the closet and behind the bureau. There was no place for Arlo to hide in here, and I was reasonably certain he wasn't outside.
Now there was only one more place I could go.
I put my gun in my holster and, breathing through my mouth, staggered back into the living room. Again, I tried not to look at the body. I studied the room.
My coffee cup was where I'd left it and so was hers. It didn't take a forensic expert to see that she'd died only a few minutes after I was gone.
Arlo must have been hiding outside when I showed up that day and he recognized me. After I left, he must have come in, found out what she'd told me, and got so mad that he smashed Jolene's face into the big-screen TV.
I wondered if he really meant to kill her or if he'd even stuck around long enough afterwards to know that he had. Not that it mattered. Jolene was dead. And Arlo killed her, just as surely as he killed Lauren Parkus.
And I was his unwitting accomplice both times.
I thought about what I should do next.
The right thing to do, ethically and morally, was to call the police, report the murder, and tell them everything I knew.
If I did that, I would probably be charged with something for misleading them about the fire last night and maybe, if they were really sharp, about the accident in Santa Barbara. Everything I did would get back to Westland Security, and they'd fire me. And then there would be the reports in the press, and the embarrassment that came with it, which would be hard to live down and make it difficult for me to get future employment as a security guard, much less as a private eye.
The only good that would come out of calling the police was that it might get Arlo arrested faster for Jolene's murder. But I didn't see the hurry, not if it meant my life would get totally destroyed.
So, I didn't call.
I decided to stick to my mission and bring in Arlo Pelz myself for what he'd done to Lauren. At that point, I could suggest to the authorities that he was responsible for the fire at the Sno-Inn. As for Jolene's murder, by then they'd have discovered her body and, if they hadn't, I could always point them in the right direction without admitting ever having been here myself.
To pull that off, I had to clean things up, so there was nothing that linked me to the crime scene.
I thought back to my conversation with Jolene and tried to remember everything I did and what I'd touched. I'd seen CSI, I'd read those Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reich novels, I knew how they could nail me on microscopic evidence I didn't even know I'd left. Carpet fibers, lint, hairs, dirt particles, footprints, it was almost too much to comprehend. I'd have to just wash down everything.
Which meant that not only would I be removing any trace of myself, but probably important evidence about Arlo being there, too.
There was no way around that. I was sorry Jolene was dead, but I had to look out for myself.
I found a pair of rubber dish gloves draped over the edge of the kitchen sink. They were too small for my hands, but they covered my fingertips, which was all that mattered. I opened a few drawers and cupboards, found plenty of cleanser and Hefty trash bags, and got to work.
I scrubbed down every surface I touched or might have touched. I vacuumed the couch and the carpets. I removed the vacuum bag and I shoved it into the trash, along with my coffee cup. I mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors, then took the sponge off the end of the mop and put it in the trash, too.
When I was done, I was drenched with sweat and my ribs were a row of jagged knives that stabbed me with each breath.
I felt I deserved it.
I gave the mobile home a quick once-over. I'd covered everything I could. The only thing left inside that I might have touched was the high school yearbook, but I was taking that with me. I shoved it in the trash bag for now. Then I remembered my roll of duct tape. I found it on the bathroom floor and stuck it in the bag, too.
The only trace of me that remained now were my footprints and tire tracks outside, and any fingerprints I might have left where I took cover. I grabbed some Lysol spray and a rag and stuck them in the bag, too.
Careful not to look at Jolene again, I carried the trash bag outside and closed the door behind me. I sprayed Lysol on the screen door, the wall, and the handrail along the steps to remove any fingerprints I might have left. I spotted a hose, which I used to wash muddy footprints and any microscopic stuff I might have left on the steps.
I shut off the hose and surveyed the area. I saw footprints and tire tracks in the mud. I didn't know which tire tracks were mine from yesterday, but I could see where I'd crept from the weeds to the front steps. I could also make out a single, unique tire track that began behind the mobile home and went on down the road.
I followed the tire track behind the motor home. It ended beside a discarded gas can and a bunch of empty bottles and beer cans. Arlo might have used Jolene's car last night, but he'd fled on a motorcycle. I walked to the front again and surveyed the clearing.
Although I couldn't remove my footprints from the clearing without creating new ones at the same time, I could make my movements less obvious. I walked all around the clearing again and behind the trees, so by the time I was done, it was impossible to distinguish my footprints, or any particular path I'd taken, from among all the others in the mud. Besides, I planned on ditching my shoes, along with everything else.
Satisfied that I'd done all that I could, I grabbed the bulging trash bag, retrieved my sledgehammer, and crept back to my car, which I'd hoped no one had noticed parked in the weeds. I put my dish gloves in the bag, put the bag in the trunk, and drove off.
Since I had no more leads and no clue where Arlo was, I made a U-turn and headed for Seattle, simply because it was someplace to go. Along the way, I stopped at a drugstore, and washed down a handful of Advils with a half-bottle of Pepto Bismol; then I went to a Footlocker outlet and bought a new pair of sneakers. I stuck my old shoes in the trash bag and removed the yearbook, which I slid under the driver's seat. I wasn't ready to look at it yet.
Instead, I found a pay phone and called Carol. I didn't tell her about the fire or about Jolene's murder. I also didn't tell her I was lost, driving around with a trash bag full of incriminating evidence, with no idea where to go or what to do next.
I pretended like I was confident, totally in charge, and just checking in to see if she'd come up with anything.
"I stayed up all night, searching Internet databases for stuff on Arlo Pelz," Carol said, weary but excited. "I think I got some good information for you."
She'd found out which prison Arlo had done his time at, the date of his trial, and the names of his public defender, his prosecutor, and the investigating officers. None of that struck me as particularly useful at the moment, but I thanked her anyway. Then she told me she'd discovered one other piece of information. Arlo was born and raised in Deerlick, Washington, just thirty miles north of Spokane, which was where he'd been arrested for his drug activities.
Now I had someplace to go. There was no guarantee that Arlo would go running back home after killing his ex-wife, but it was a place to start. If he wasn't there, hiding among family and friends, I might at least come up with something that would help me find him.
I thanked her again and told her I'd call when I got settled.
"What is it you're not telling me?" she asked.
I thought about it, and then said: "I love you."
It came out stilted, awkward, and forced, but it was such a struggle to say it this time, I didn't have the energy to dress it up.
"I appreciate the effort that went into saying that," she said. "But that isn't what I meant."
I knew what she meant. She meant the fire. She meant Jolene. I hated her for knowing me so well and, at the same time, if I'd told her I loved her right then, it wouldn't have come out stilted at all.
\*\*\*
Deerlick was so small, it barely merited a dot on the roadmap, and even then, it was the smallest dot you could register with the naked eye. According to the map, the town was clear across the state, almost a straight shot on I-90 and a solid six-hour drive away from Seattle.
But it took me a lot longer. There were a lot of reasons for that. For one thing, I drove slowly because I'd never traveled that stretch of highway before, or any road in central Washington State, and I didn't want inadvertently to take the wrong fork in the darkness and end up in Peshastin, Wenatchee, Ephrata, Moxee City, or some other strange-sounding place. I also didn't want any highway patrolmen to notice me.
The other thing that slowed me down was that I got off the Interstate at just about every exit that promised gas, food, or lodging. I got off to find out-of-the-way garbage cans to dump a few items from my Hefty bag of incriminating evidence. Dish gloves in Hyak, a coffee mug in Kachess Lake, a mop-head in Cle Elum, a vacuum bag in Thorp, my old sneakers in Kittitas. I spread bits of Jolene's trailer across the state as if they were her ashes.
Before I was even halfway to Deerlick, somewhere around midnight, I'd disposed of everything except the memory of Jolene's corpse and the yearbook that was stashed under the driver's seat, both of which I'd managed put out of my mind for a few hours. I'd been so intent on running and covering up, that I'd avoided thinking about the case entirely.
Not about the case. About the suicide. About the murder. About two dead women. About my responsibility for it all.
But alone on that dark road, with no more tasks to complete and several long hours ahead of me before I arrived at the unknown, there was nothing else to think about.
I'd gone my whole life without affecting anyone else's. I never mattered enough. During the day, I slept in my apartment. During the night, I sat in a guard shack. I didn't see many people and I know they didn't see me.
It was fine.
And then I changed that and within days a friend became a lover, a stranger beat me up, a woman killed herself, a building burned down, and a woman got murdered.
Would any of that have happened if I'd just stayed in my shack?
No, probably not.
And then I realized something that should have made me feel sick, that should have made me pull over suddenly to the side of the road, throw open the door of my car, and cough up a layer of stomach lining. But it didn't, which only proved my realization was the inescapable truth.
I wasn't sorry.
I'd puked my guts out back in Jolene's mobile home out of terror and revulsion, not guilt. Maybe I knew it even then and just didn't want to believe it.
Yes, two women were dead. But I was alive.
Alive in a way I'd never been before.
If I'd stayed in my shack, yeah, Lauren and Jolene might have lived. And the Sno-Inn Motel might still be open for business. And I might not have a bunch of broken ribs and a stomach eaten away by painkillers.
But I would still be dead.
I learned then that living doesn't come without painful sacrifices, and that they aren't always your own.
\*\*\*
When I got too tired to drive any longer, and I felt the car starting to weave, I pulled over at a rest stop somewhere between Moses Lake and Ritzville.
I didn't go to sleep right away. I pulled out the yearbook from underneath my seat, turned on my map light, and flipped through the pages.
The first thing that tumbled out was the "Where Are They Now?" newsletter. There was a nice write-up on Lauren that made her sound happy, successful, and very rich. It was an enticing advertisement for easy money to Arlo Pelz.
I flipped through the stiff, glossy pages of the yearbook and found Lauren's class picture. She had a bright smile, full of hope and enthusiasm, that was in sharp contrast to her eyes, intense even then, hinting at a darkness I didn't see in any of the other teenagers' faces. It was a darkness that was still in Lauren's eyes when she looked at me on the overpass, right before she took a flying leap.
There was nothing in Jolene's picture that hinted at the disappointments and violence in her future. Her face, like most of the others, radiated nothing but boundless expectation and desire. When she leaped into the air in her cheerleading photos---her arms and legs spread, her face arched up into the sky---the borders of the page could barely contain her from soaring free.
A few pages later, alongside another photo of Jolene in liberating flight, was a picture of Lauren, looking slyly at the camera as she emerged, slick and wet, from the swimming pool. It was the women's sports page, the page a hundred horny high school boys undoubtedly jerked off to. I would have. It was a page for dreaming, for looking at a picture of a cheerleader or swimmer or runner and thinking as you came in your fist . . .
She could be mine.
Years later, Arlo Pelz looked at that page and had the same dream.
The next few pages were torn out. I flipped to the index to see what was missing---it was the crew picture of the women's swim team.
I closed the yearbook, slid it back under my seat, and turned off the map light. I spread out across the big, bench seat, shut my eyes, and worked on some dreams of my own.
Chapter Twenty
I woke up because I had to piss.
It was still dark outside. The clock on the dash said it was a little after four a.m. I sat up slowly, my back stiff, my ribs aching, opened the door, and staggered across the empty parking lot to the restrooms.
The bathroom reeked of stale piss. It probably hadn't been cleaned in months. I relieved myself at the urinal and trudged back to my car, thinking I might get another hour or two of sleep before hitting the road again.
That wasn't going to happen.
The driver's side door of my car was open, and so was my trunk.
"Hey," I said.
The trunk slammed shut and revealed a man, about six feet tall, wearing a puffy down jacket, flannel shirt, jeans, and a pair of muddy Doc Martens. Seeing the guy scared the shit out of me.
"No fucking suitcases?" he said angrily, looking right at me.
I suddenly realized just how alone I was. I glanced around and noticed a pickup truck at the far corner of the lot, hidden in the shadows. It must have been his. The infrequent traffic on the Interstate seemed a long way off.
And then I remembered who I was, and where I was going, and why I was in that parking lot. I wasn't afraid anymore. I was excited.
"Get the hell away from my car," I said.
"Or what?" He whipped out a switchblade from somewhere inside his jacket and marched toward me, a lopsided grin on his face. "Give me your wallet and your fucking car keys and maybe I'll let you keep your shriveled little balls."
I made like I was reaching into my back pocket for my wallet and pulled out my gun. He froze, his eyes wide with shock, and then he forced a smile.
"Well, fuck me," he said. "I guess this makes us even."
"Not unless you've got a semi-automatic handgun hidden up your ass," I said. "Then again, you'd have to get to it first."
Now that I had my gun out, I wasn't quite sure what to do next. A hundred tough-guy scenes from a thousand TV shows and movies seemed to run through my head at once. And they all made me realize just how important this moment was for me.
"Drop the knife," I said.
"This is my special knife. I got it in 'Nam." He just stood there, smiling, as if I wouldn't notice he was twenty years too young to have been in Vietnam. "What if I put it in my pocket and I just walk away, no harm done?"
"You could," I said.
He retracted the blade and his hand started towards his pocket.
"But you'd better ask yourself a question first," I said. "Do you feel lucky today?"
His smile began to waver and his hand, the one with the knife, stopped before reaching his pocket.
"Well, do you, punk?" I grinned.
I probably sounded more like Bart Simpson than Clint Eastwood, but the props and the atmosphere more than compensated for it. From the way he looked at me, I could tell he'd decided I was crazy. He dropped the knife.
"This was a setup," he said. "You're one of those psycho-assholes who goes looking for trouble."
"What if I am?" I asked, motioning him towards me with my free hand. "Walk this way until I tell you to stop."
As he came towards me, I moved off to one side, and we made a little circle, until I was near my car and he ended up where I'd been standing before.
"Stop right there and empty all your pockets," I said, "then pull them out so I can see them."
"Fuck you."
"You want to make this hard?" I shrugged and aimed my gun at his groin. "Go ahead, make my day."
He must have seen something in my eyes, because he quickly held up his hands in submission. "Okay, okay, I'll empty them."
He hesitated for a moment, then slowly reached into his jacket. First one wallet, and then another, and then another, hit the ground. Then watches, necklaces, and some car keys. Then he got to his pants; out came some condoms, some loose change, and another wallet, which I figured was his.
I shook my head at him. "You've been a bad boy."
"No worse than you, motherfucker."
I grinned again. I liked that he thought I was tough. But the truth was, if I didn't have my fake gun, by now I probably would have given him my car keys, my wallet, and been sobbing for mercy while he butt-fucked me into the pavement.
As much as I was enjoying the moment, I didn't want to press my luck. If I stayed much longer, I was afraid the guy would see my gun in the right light and realize it was a fake and kill me with his bare hands. Or somebody would drive in, see me with the gun, and think I was the criminal. And if I was really unlucky, that somebody would be a highway patrolman.
"I want you to crawl into the bathroom, then lie face down on the floor with your feet sticking out the door so I can see them."
"No fucking way I'll crawl for you or anybody else," he said. "You're gonna have to shoot me, asshole."
I sighed. "Works for me."
I aimed at his head.
He immediately dropped to his knees and glared at me. I grinned at him.
"A man's got to know his limitations," I said. "You can thank me for showing you yours. Start crawling."
He turned around and began to crawl towards the bathrooms, his butt facing me. "You better hope I never see you again, motherfucker."
I ran up and kicked him in the stomach, and when he hit the ground on his side, I kicked him twice in the head. He went limp and lolled on his back. I wasn't sure if he was faking it until I heard his bladder empty against the inside of his pants. I was certain he was unconscious then. No one goes that far to be convincing.
I pushed him onto his stomach, rushed to my car, and got out the roll of duct tape. I hog-tied him with the tape, checked his pulse to make sure I hadn't killed him (though I don't know what I would have done if I had), and left him there with his stolen goods. If he didn't get arrested, and somehow managed to get away, he would certainly think twice about robbing someone else at a deserted rest stop.
"You'll rue the night you met Dirty Harvey," I hissed at him. It was the first time I'd ever said rue to anybody, whether they were conscious to hear it or not.
I picked up his car keys and his knife and drove off in a hurry.
A half-mile away, I tossed his things out the window and smiled to myself, a smile that lasted for the next two hours.
I considered the experience at the rest stop good practice for the day I'd meet Arlo Pelz again, a day I hoped would come very soon.
\*\*\*
I arrived in Spokane at daybreak. It didn't impress me much as a city. If it was worth visiting, somebody would have set a TV series there by now.
It struck me as the kind of place where everybody drove a pickup with a camper shell and owned at least one pair of overalls. There were plenty of old buildings downtown, but I was never interested much in architecture.
I followed I-90 through the city and then drove up Division Street, a row of fast-food franchises that would become the northbound 395 and take me to Deerlick.
As I drove past Riverfront Park, I could see the skeletal remains of the big tent that was the centerpiece of the 1974 World's Fair. It was certainly no Space Needle. That should tell you something about the city's character.
I guess they built a big tent as their enduring landmark, instead of a huge camper shell, because they didn't have the money to erect the giant Ford pickup to go with it.
I only had one set of clothes left after the fire, and I'd just spent the night in them. So I stopped at a Wal-Mart and bought a few shirts, some underwear and socks, and two pairs of pants. I also bought a denim, letterman-style jacket to hide my gun and holster, some toiletries, a nylon gym bag, and a fresh Ace bandage for my ribs.
After making my purchases, I stopped at a Shell station and used the restroom to clean up, put on my new bandages, and change my clothes. I dumped my old clothes and bandages in the trash bin and hit the road.
I felt like a new man.
In fact, I know that I was.
It didn't take long to put Spokane behind me and find myself winding through big stretches of farmland under bright, morning sun. As I passed places like Denison and Clayton and Jump Off Joe, I discovered it didn't require much in Washington State to declare a patch of dirt a town, just a couple gas pumps and a burger place.
By the time I got to Deerlick, I wasn't expecting much and I wasn't disappointed. The turnoff took me down a narrow road past a trailer park, a small cemetery, and an old brick schoolhouse.
The center of the town was dominated by a '60s-era supermarket that might once have been the wreckage of a flying saucer before somebody got the bright idea of building a parking lot around it and selling groceries. The original bright colors of the supermarket had long since faded into shades of gray, the big windows fogged by countless layers of transparent tape used to hang posters for the last forty years.
The supermarket was bordered by Main Street, A Street, and Broadway, which were lined with old storefronts, most of them empty. There was a diner, a beauty salon, a barber shop, a drugstore, a tackle shop, and a post office.
I kept driving down the street, past the town center. There were a few car and boat repair shops, a gas station, and a bar; then the road took you behind the trailer park and around to the highway again.
I made a U-turn and headed back into town, took a right on A Street, and found myself in the residential section. The houses were fifty or sixty years old, the kind with porches and basements and detached garages. Almost all of them had some kind of beaten-up boat on a trailer in the driveway. There were bicycles and kids' toys on the lawns and GM cars parked on the street. I wondered what kind of people lived there and what they did for a living and what would happen to the first person on the block who bought a Japanese car.
I turned around, parked in front of the supermarket, and got out of the car. I was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of sizzling bacon. A hunger I didn't know I had suddenly asserted itself big time.
Like a drooling dog, I followed the scent of bacon to the diner across the street.
\*\*\*
The Chuck Wagon was the kind of '50s diner that people in LA buy to renovate into authentic '50s diners.
You lose the real place, with history you can read in the sedimentary layers of grease on the walls, and end up with Johnny Rockets or the Denny's in Camarillo, full of sparkling chrome and shiny, colored tile and a jukebox playing Chuck Berry songs. You end up with a diner the way people think they should have looked, not the way they actually did.
There was nothing shiny about the Chuck Wagon and there was no jukebox. The red-vinyl upholstery in the booths was torn. The linoleum counters and floors were scuffed and chipped. The wood-paneled walls were yellowed by sunlight and steam. There were store-bought bottles of catsup and jars of mustard at every table. The windows had ratty drapes and the ceiling fan twirled lazily.
It was my kind of place.
The Chuck Wagon was about half-full, and just about all the customers were deeply-tanned men wearing faded jeans, faded shirts, and sweat-stained baseball caps that advertised outboard motors or farm equipment. The Evinrudes and Chris Crafts and John Deeres looked at me in my new shirt, new jacket, and new slacks as if I were some kind of alien being the likes of which they hadn't seen since the supermarket landed from outer space in 1962.
I smiled feebly and took a seat at the counter. I snatched the one-page, laminated menu from the napkin holder and gave it a quick look.
There were less than a dozen items on the menu: combinations of eggs, pancakes, hamburgers, and steaks. On the back there was a list of four homemade pies (apple, pecan, chocolate, and banana cream) and two kinds of ice cream, chocolate or vanilla, to choose from. The prices were covered with white tape and written over by hand in ballpoint pen. There wasn't anything over six bucks. I wanted to try everything.
"What'll it be, sir?" the waitress asked wearily.
I looked up and saw a tired woman in her forties, stuffed into a too-tight, stained white uniform, her hair pinned into a bun. She wore a bra that made her breasts look like airplane engines, her name stitched in script across one of them.
I ordered the Rancher's Breakfast of eggs, steak, bacon, pancakes, and hash browns, and asked Georgette for an extra-thick chocolate shake to wash it down with.
While I waited for my meal, I watched the short-order cook move piles of hash browns and stacks of bacon strips around the grill, making room for the eggs and pancakes and steaks he was preparing. In between all that, he ladled oil onto the grill and used an ice cream scooper to dig butter out of a bucket, dropping the gobs into his frying pans. It was excruciating, gastronomical foreplay.
By the time Georgette set my plate down in front of me, I was so hungry I was nearly slobbering. I wolfed the hot meal down in about ten minutes and immediately ordered another shake.
It may have been the best breakfast I ever had in my life.
When she brought me the shake, with a dollop of whipped cream sprayed on top, I was sated and finally ready to get to work.
"Excuse me," I said, stifling a burp. "Have you seen Arlo around?"
She looked like I'd slapped her, but she recovered quickly. I guess she was used to being slapped.
"Who?" she asked unconvincingly.
"Arlo Pelz," I replied, and took a big slurp of the shake to drown out another burp. "You know Arlo, don't you Georgette?"
I was aware that everybody in the restaurant had stopped talking. They were all listening, which was fine with me. The more people who heard, the better. I wasn't all that great at detecting, so I figured it would be a lot easier to let him find me.
"I haven't seen him," she said. "You a friend of his?"
"You could say that." I smiled and leaned over, plucked a pen from her apron pocket, and started scrawling a note on my napkin. "If he stops by, maybe you could give him this for me."
I wrote: Jolene is really into her TV. She asked me to thank you. Your pal from the Sno-Inn.
I read it out-loud in case she lost it, and so everybody else got my message. I wrapped the napkin around a ten-dollar bill and put it, and the pen, back in her apron pocket.
"I appreciate it," I said, flashing her another insincere smile.
She dropped my breakfast check on the counter and walked away without bothering to ask me first if maybe I wanted a slice of pie or something.
I took the hint, though I would have liked to try a slice. I gulped down the last of my shake, dropped another ten on the counter, and walked out.
I visited the barbershop, the beauty salon, and the drugstore, and left pretty much the same message at each place. In the post office, I asked the aged clerk behind the counter if he knew where the Pelz family lived.
"There isn't any family left here except for little Billy," the clerk said. "Still lives at their place on A street. Sixteen A Street."
"What about Arlo," I asked. "Seen him around?"
The old man narrowed his eyes at me. "Once, right after he got out of prison. You a friend of his?"
"Not really," I said. "How about you?"
The clerk just turned and walked away, disappearing into the back of the post office.
I walked out and went next door to the tackle shop. They sold fishing poles, reels, lures, hooks, and all kinds of worms, crickets, and maggots. A man sat at the counter stringing a fly. As I got closer, I realized if you drew a line connecting the five moles on his cheek, you could make a lopsided star. I wondered if he knew that.
He looked up at me as I approached the counter. "Can I help you?"
"I'm up here doing some fishing," I said.
"Whatcha interested in catching?" he asked. "Salmon, trout, perch, bass, mackinaw?"
"Arlo Pelz."
I felt really cool saying that. I don't think Mannix could have delivered it any better.
"I understand he's a bottom-feeder native to these parts," I said.
He stopped working on his lure, stood up, and gave me a hard look. "Are you a cop of some kind?"
I smiled thinly. "Of some kind."
"I haven't seen him."
"Where do you suppose he'd be likely to go, if he came back for a visit?"
He thought for a minute. He wasn't searching for the answer, he was trying to decide if the answer might get him hurt.
"You could check out his place on A Street," the man replied. "Of course, you'd have to get past Little Billy first."
I shrugged as if getting past anyone was easy for me. "Anyplace else?"
"Maybe the woods around the lake," he said. "He used to hang out there a lot when he was a kid."
"Why was that?"
"Same reason kids still do," he replied. "To drink and fuck. He also liked to hide there."
"What was he hiding from?"
"Everybody," he replied. "He used to work in the marina, fixing outboards, before he gave that up to break into homes on the lake. Vacation places, empty most of the time. It'd be months before anyone realized they'd been robbed."
"Where can I find the lake?" I asked.
"It's about ten miles farther up the highway," the man said. "Can't miss it. Big Rock Lake."
I got that chill of creepy realization up my back, only I was missing out on the realization part. I didn't know why the name of the lake sounded strangely familiar to me.
"They got some place to stay the night up there besides the woods?" I asked.
"You can rent a cabin at the Big Rock Lake Resort."
I got that chill again and it bugged me. I thanked the man for his help and left, thinking maybe the fresh air would clear my head.
It wasn't until I'd crossed the street and was halfway to my car that I remembered where I'd heard the name of the lake before.
Actually, I didn't remembering hearing it, I remembered seeing it. On the peeling, faded sign that hung above Cyril Parkus' fireplace. The sign that said Big Rock Lake Resort.
I was so busy thinking, I didn't see the guy sitting on the hood of my car until I was nearly standing in front of him.
And that's when the guy, three hundred pounds of bad karma in a Grateful Dead tank-top and shorts, slid his huge ass off my car and stood up in front of me, resting a baseball bat on his shoulder.
Chapter Twenty-One
All the books and TV shows are very clear about what I was required to do in that situation: show no fear and come up with lots of smart ass remarks. I realized right away that acting on my instinct, which was to either run away or beg for mercy, wasn't appropriate.
I tried to exude tough-guy calm which, at that moment, mainly consisted of suppressing my urge to whimper.
"I hear you're looking for my brother," the Neanderthal said, his voice full of menace.
"I was hoping word would get around," I said, letting one hand slip behind my back. "You must be Little Billy."
"You know why they call me Little Billy?"
"Because it's supposed to be humorously ironic, given how big, fat, and stupid you are?"
Little Billy took a step toward me, but I held my ground, not so much because I'd mastered the tough-guy thing, but because I was petrified with fear.
"I got the name because a cop once snapped a billy club in half on my head and still couldn't take me down."
"It's a shame about the brain damage, but at least you got a cute nickname," I said, surprising myself. "Where's Arlo?"
"I don't know." Little Billy grinned. "Then again, maybe I do."
I grinned back. "Tell him I know how he found her and what he had on her. Tell him I want sixty percent of the action or I give everything I know to the cops."
I didn't know where the words and the grin were coming from. Maybe it was that big breakfast that did something to me. Or maybe it was my rest stop performance as Dirty Harvey. Whatever the reason, I was running on pure impulse. I hadn't even stopped to think yet about how everything fit together, how Big Rock Lake connected to drugs, Lauren, Arlo, Cyril, and Seattle.
"What's to stop me from shutting you up with this bat instead?" Little Billy asked.
"Why don't you try and see for yourself?"
I said it with surprising self-confidence, which I really shouldn't have had. In the bright light of day, I couldn't be sure he'd be fooled by my BB gun or that I'd even be able to whip it out before he took off my head with his bat.
But like I said, I wasn't thinking.
I walked past him, expecting to get whacked with that bat at any moment, but to my astonishment, he let me go unharmed. As I walked around to the driver's side door of my car, I noticed the dent his ass had left on my hood and congratulated myself again for taking all the insurance that EconoCar had to offer.
I opened the door and glanced at Little Billy, who stood on the curb, tapping the end of his bat into his palm, staring at me with the flat, dead eyes of a shark.
"I'll be in touch," I said.
I got in and drove off before Little Billy could change his mind about taking that swing at me. My work in Deerlick was done. If Arlo was there, he knew by now that I was, too.
\*\*\*
The Big Rock Lake Resort billboard, which stood along the highway a quarter mile ahead of the turnoff, promised "exciting water sports, great fishing, rustic cabins, and delicious home cooking" over a cartoon of a surprised fisherman getting yanked out of his boat by the gleeful trout on his hook.
I took the turnoff, a gravel road that ended at the Big Rock Lake Resort Store and Restaurant, a large, white, clapboard building that was mostly porch, and built onto its namesake, allowing it to loom a bit over the lake, the dock, and the beach below. On either side of the store, set back from the shore by a dry lawn, were ten identical white cabins, with small porches facing the water.
I parked my car behind a row of railroad ties and got out. The hot, heavy air smelled of outboard motors, lighter fluid, fish guts, and suntan lotion. Most of the cabins looked empty; a few had families camped out front, the kids running around, the sagging mothers basting on chaise lounges, while the pot-bellied fathers knocked back beers and looked for teenage girls to ogle. There were a few water skiers and fishing boats on the small lake, but there didn't seem to be a lot of action. It was the kind of lake where people parked Winnebagos instead of building vacation homes, though there were a few of those, most not much more elaborate than the Big Rock cabins.
I strode up to the Big Rock Lake Resort Store and Restaurant, admiring the sign on the roof. Although it was weathered and peeling, I knew it was newer than the one in Cyril Parkus' living room.
The porch was lined with wooden benches and surrounded the open counter that passed for the store. All the merchandise was on shelves behind the counter, which itself was a glass display case full of melting candy and fishing lures. The restaurant was a screened-in section of the porch that faced the lake, with a hand-painted menu above the counter and an electric fly trap in the corner that snapped every few seconds.
I took a stool at the restaurant counter beside a couple old men smoking cigarettes and nursing mugs of coffee. They looked liked they'd been installed with the stools fifty years ago. A couple kids sat on the bench, staring at the fly trap, letting their Popsicles melt all over their bathing suits as they waited in suspense for another insect to get zapped.
"What'll it be?" asked the man behind the counter, who wore a big apron that had the same cartoon as the highway billboard. He was as jolly as a department store Santa, with a body to match.
I looked at the menu above the counter. The prices had been painted over and changed many times, but the menu remained the same. Burgers, hot dogs, bacon, and eggs, and a combination of them all called the Big Rock Burger.
I'd had a big breakfast, but acting tough gave me an appetite.
"Gimme a Big Rock Burger, please," I said. "It'll bring back memories."
The man immediately repeated the order to someone in the kitchen, which was hidden somewhere in back.
"So you've been here before," the man ventured jovially, as I'd hoped he would.
I nodded with a smile. "When I was a kid." I offered him my hand across the counter. "The name's Harvey Mapes."
He shook my hand enthusiastically. "Tom Wade, pleasure to have you back."
"The place hasn't changed much," I said.
"Just fresh coats of paint," he replied. "Any of the pictures on that wall could've been taken yesterday."
Wade motioned to a wall covered with about a hundred faded snapshots and Polaroids, some framed, some stuck to the paneling with thumbtacks or yellowed tape.
"The fish were a lot bigger then," grumbled one of the old men.
"You can say that again," another old timer agreed. "Coffee tasted better, too."
Wade laughed and freshened up the old timer's cup. "Maybe if I warm it up, you won't notice."
"The sign out front looks different," I said, as if making a fresh observation.
"You've got a good memory and a sharp eye," Wade said. "The only thing the family that sold me the place kept for themselves was the sign. Sentimental value, I suppose. Couldn't really begrudge them that. I tried to copy the original sign as best I could, but I couldn't get it quite right."
A woman built just like Wade came out and set the Big Rock Burger down in front of me, then stood there expectantly to see if I was satisfied. I took a big bite out of it. It was wonderful.
"You certainly got the Big Rock down right," I said through my mouthful of hamburger, hot dog, bacon, eggs, and cheese. "It's perfection, even better than I remembered."
Wade's wife beamed with pride. "Thank you kindly," she said, then disappeared into the back again.
"That's my wife, Betty Lou," Wade said, smiling after her. "The only thing she loves more than cooking is watching people eat what she makes."
"Where can I find a wife like that?" I asked.
"You can look anyplace but right here!" Wade chuckled good-naturedly and so did I.
I took a few more bites of my Big Rock Burger, then said: "I vaguely remember the people who used to run the place. Their name was Parkus, wasn't it?"
"Josiah Parkus," Wade nodded. "This place was in their family since the early 1900s."
"Then why did they sell it?"
"Too much tragedy, I suppose." Wade took a cloth from his apron and started to absently wipe the countertop. "Josiah's wife Esme killed herself in '74. He woke up one morning and Esme was gone. A few hours later, he found one of their boats floating in middle of the lake. The anchor was missing."
"Fisherman out trolling for macks snagged Esme's dress in '75," the old man with the coffee said. "Maybe it was '76."
"Their daughter Kelly never really got over it, drowned herself the same way a few years later," Wade said. "That just left Josiah and his son."
"Cyril, wasn't it?" I asked.
Wade nodded. "Neither one of 'em was much interested in running the resort after that, though Josiah stuck it out on his own after Cyril went off to California. When Josiah died, Cyril sold the place to me. We used to run an RV park up at Spirit Lake, but we always envied this outfit."
I finished up my burger and tried to figure out how all of this tied together with what I already knew. After thinking about it for a few minutes, the pieces fit pretty good.
Cyril knew Arlo Pelz because they grew up together, with Arlo probably resenting the hell out of Cyril the whole time. Arlo worked for Cyril's father at the resort marina, fixing outboard motors, and it wouldn't surprise me if Cyril treated Arlo as his employee, too.
After Kelly Parkus killed herself, Cyril went off to California, and Arlo got into drugs, eventually ending up in Seattle, where he met Lauren, who was either a drug addict, a drug dealer, or a whore. Or maybe all three.
Somehow they split up, how or why I don't know. A few years went by. Arlo married Jolene, went to prison for dealing drugs, and when he got out, he stumbled into the discovery that Cyril, wealthy and powerful, was married to a woman with a dark, shameful past her husband probably didn't know about. Arlo guessed Lauren would pay dearly to keep it that way.
Instead, something went wrong.
That something was me, Harvey Mapes.
I uncovered the blackmail scheme and told Cyril about it. Cyril confronted his wife with what I'd found out and then she, unable to deal with the exposure of her ugly past, killed herself.
Now poor Cyril was left to mourn the suicide of yet another woman in his life.
It all made sense. All that was missing were the sordid little details, which I expected to wring out of Arlo once I captured him.
"How about a slice of pie to go with that?" Betty Lou Wade asked, sliding a huge hunk of apple pie in front of me before I could answer.
I smiled back at her. "I don't see how any sane man could refuse."
She beamed again. I dug into the pie. Marie Callender and Sarah Lee had nothing on Betty Lou Wade. I picked up my plate and fork and worked on my pie as I wandered over to the wall of photos.
The snapshots captured nearly identical moments in time, spread out over decades, of people standing in front of the store, posing with their fish, smiling into the lens. Occasionally, a portion of a parked car or a particular style of clothing would give away when the picture was taken, but otherwise they could have all been shot today.
I saw what probably amounted to tons of dead fish.
I saw the Parkus family, I saw Arlo, and I saw most of the citizens of Deerlick that I'd met, even Little Billy when he actually was little.
And as I stared back through decades, the pie plate slipping from my hands and shattering on the floor, I saw what I got right and what I got wrong, and just how cruel and inescapable fate could be.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I rented the cabin closest to the woods for the night, parked my car right behind it, then called Carol from the pay phone outside the store.
I didn't tell her anything that happened to me or what I'd found out. All I said was that I was in Deerlick, asking around for Arlo, and that I'd be staying at Big Rock Lake overnight. I told her I thought Arlo might be in town, but I didn't know for sure.
That last part was the biggest lie of all.
I knew he was there. I felt it as clearly as my own heartbeat.
I gave Carol the number at the Big Rock Lake Resort Store, since the cabins didn't have phones. She didn't ask me why I gave it to her, and I was glad, because she probably would have seen through whatever lie I came up with. The truth was, if she didn't hear from me in a day or two, I wanted her to know who to call first to go look for my body.
I wasn't being morbid or fatalistic, just practical. I had every intention of capturing Arlo and bringing him in to pay for his crimes, but I also knew how badly things could go wrong. Recent experience certainly proved that.
I told Carol I loved her and this time it wasn't hard to say. It sounded to me like saying it came pretty easy for her, too.
\*\*\*
I spent the afternoon sitting on a chaise lounge on the lawn in front of my cabin, right where everybody could see me, drinking Cokes and looking at the lake.
I was surprisingly relaxed, considering what I still had left to do. I guess I was either confident in my abilities or too stupid to realize just how much danger I was in.
Sitting there like I was made me think of an episode of "Maverick," which starred James Garner as gambler and conman Bret Maverick.
My dad loved that show. There was this one episode where Maverick wins a poker game, then convinces a banker to let him make an after-hours deposit to keep his money safe. The next day, Maverick goes in to get his money and the banker says slyly, "What money?"
See, nobody witnessed the transaction. It's Maverick's word against the banker's, and who is going to take the word of a conman?
So Maverick tells everybody he's gonna get his money back . . . and what he does is, he sits in a rocking chair across the street from the bank and just starts whittling. People walk by every day and ask him, "How's it goin', Maverick? You gettin' your money back?" And every day he says, "I'm workin' on it."
The thing was, while he spent the whole episode sitting in that rocking chair, unnerving everybody by happily doing absolutely nothing, a gang of his conman friends were swindling the banker out of exactly what he owed Maverick.
My dad was a gambler, but mostly he was a loser. Whatever he won at the poker table, when he rarely won, was lost the next day. He never got ahead. I think my dad wanted to be James Garner as Maverick the way I wanted to be James Garner as Rockford.
What did that make me?
I didn't have a gang of conman friends, or anybody else, to help me do what I was going to do that night. So it didn't make a whole lot of sense for me to be sitting there, sunning myself like I didn't have a care in the world. I should have been laying down some clever plan.
I had a plan. It wasn't clever. It wasn't likely to work any better than my dad's bluffs at the poker table.
It didn't matter anyway. I was powerless to control what was going to happen next and I pretty much knew it. What I'd learned over the last few days convinced me that the outcome was inevitable and that I was just doing my predestined part.
When the sun set, it started to get chilly. The resort guests slowly drifted back to their cabins. I stayed where I was for a while, listening to the water lapping against the boats tied to the dock and watching the bats skim the surface of the dark lake.
I imagined Esme Parkus on the muddy bottom, her dress swirling around her skeleton, dozens of sparkling fishing lures caught in the tattered fabric.
And I thought about Kelly Parkus, rowing her boat into the middle of the lake late one night, contemplating the same fate for herself.
I got up, strolled over to the Big Rock Lake Resort Store, and walked around the porch into the restaurant.
The day's heat was trapped inside. The electric bug trap snapped and crackled, sending off tiny sparks as one insect after another got zapped. It was almost festive.
I took another look at the photos on the wall. One day, Esme and Kelly Parkus were there, grinning in front of the store, and then they weren't. Time at Big Rock Lake just kept marching on, measured only by all the big fish that didn't get away.
I took a seat at the counter and ordered another Big Rock Burger from Tom Wade.
"Sorry again about breaking the plate," I said.
"Don't worry about it," he said, absently wiping the counter in front of me with a rag.
"Why do you suppose Esme drowned herself?" I asked.
He smiled at me. "Can't get it out of your mind, can you?"
I didn't answer.
"Once you've heard the story, it's hard not to think about it," Wade said. "It's the kind of tragedy that becomes legend. What is it about the lake that draws beautiful young women into its cold depths?"
"But it wasn't the lake, was it?"
"Not entirely."
Wade went back into the kitchen and came back with my burger, setting it in front of me. "Josiah Parkus and his father cut down the trees, cleared the land, and built this store, the docks, and the cabins themselves. They didn't build this place, they birthed it. It wasn't a business to them, it was a life. Everything else came second. You follow what I'm saying?"
"The resort was his priority; his wife and kids came later," I said between bites, just to prove I was paying attention.
"And that was the crux of their problem. Esme fell in love with Josiah, not with the lake. But, see, it was a package deal. He'd never leave, so neither could she," Wade said. "Josiah didn't make it easy on her. He expected Esme and his kids to be as devoted to the lake as he was. Wasn't gonna happen. Esme hated the lake but she loved him. Something had to give, and it sure as hell wasn't gonna be Josiah Parkus."
Wade shrugged.
"So she sacrificed herself to the thing he loved most," I said.
Wade nodded.
I'm not usually so poetic, but something about the stillness of the night, the dark romance of the story, and the crackle of electrified insects brought it out in me.
"I didn't know Esme," Wade said, "but I've heard enough about it from folks who did to believe that's the way it happened. But I knew the kids, I saw the way Josiah worked them, the way he tried to force them to love this place the way he did. He was especially hard on Kelly, maybe because of what happened to Esme. After she died, all those two kids really had was each other. They knew there was no way off this lake for them."
"Kelly found one," I said.
"She didn't really leave, though, did she?" Wade said, inadvertently glancing at the lake below, then catching himself at it. "But she broke the hold Josiah had on Cyril. The boy left, didn't even come back for his father's funeral."
I finished up my burger and pushed the plate towards Wade. "So, are you as hung up on this place as Josiah Parkus was?"
Wade picked up the plate and wiped away the crumbs I'd left on the counter.
"I didn't build it with my bare hands," he said. "I just bought it."
I had another slice of pie, thought about what Wade had told me, then went back to my cabin for the night to wait for Arlo Pelz.
\*\*\*
The cabin was laid out a lot like my apartment, a combination kitchen and living room in front, and the bedroom and small bath in back.
The walls were covered with sheets of wood paneling, the floors were linoleum. It was furnished with a vinyl couch and a Formica-topped table with some plastic chairs around it. There was a bad painting of a duck on the wall.
Just what you'd expect for forty-five dollars a night.
Considering how Arlo botched things at the Sno-Inn, I was reasonably certain he wouldn't go the firebomb route again. This time he'd want to be sure that he'd gotten the job done, and there was only one way to do that.
I messed up the bed and used the pillows to create the vague outline of a person under the blankets. It's an old trick that's been used a thousand times on television, so I figured it must work.
I turned off all the lights, dragged one of the kitchen chairs into the bedroom closet, and sat down, the roll of duct tape on the floor and my gun on my lap. I drew the closet curtain closed in front of me and waited.
I wasn't worried about falling asleep this time. One of the reasons I drank so many Cokes during the afternoon was to tank myself up on caffeine. But when I did start to feel a bit drowsy, I just reminded myself what Jolene looked like the last time I saw her. That sharpened me up real quick.
As I sat there in the closet of that cabin, feeling the night chill seeping through the old boards, smelling the pine of the surrounding forest, I thought about my guard shack. It wasn't a whole lot bigger than that closet, but it seemed a world, and a lifetime, away.
It had been a little over a week since I'd been hired to follow Lauren Parkus. Before that, I'd never been the victim or inflictor of violence. I'd never seen a person die. And I'd never been in love.
But it seemed to me that all those years, all those nights, of sitting alone in that guard shack was training for this moment. I had no problem sitting in a closet like a suit of clothes waiting to be worn or a box waiting to be opened. I'd learned to sit in a cramped space and wait for something to happen, even if most of the time nothing ever did. I'd become an expert at passivity, at waiting for life to happen rather than going after it myself.
Not anymore.
I thought about Esme, Kelly, and Cyril Parkus, about how it was them against their father and the lake, and what life must have been like for them after Esme died.
It made me think about my mother, my sister Becky, and me, and about my father, who loved to gamble and sacrificed everything for it. I remembered how things changed after my mother ran off, how Becky stepped up and ragged on my dad the same way mom used to, and just as ineffectively.
When I was a kid, I thought we had a uniquely fucked-up family, that nobody else could possibly understand what it was like being abandoned by your mother and left with a father who lived for something he thought was more important than you.
Well, it turned out I was wrong. We weren't uniquely fucked-up, we were just as fucked-up as lots of other families. Cyril Parkus may have been a rich guy in a big house with the stone lions, and I was just the loser in the stucco shack on the other side of the gate, but we were more alike than either of us would have thought.
I wasn't quite sure how to feel about that.
Sitting in that closet, alone with my memories, I was surprised how fast the hours slipped past. It seemed like only a few minutes had gone by when, at two a.m., I heard the soft footfalls in the living room.
Arlo slunk into the room and up to the bed, holding one of those big, serrated Rambo knives in his fist. Knives seemed to be the weapon of choice with criminals in Washington State. He raised the knife over his head, then brought it down with a vengeance, plunging it deep into the covered pillows.
While he was bent over like that, slightly off-balance, I leaped out of the closet behind him, slammed his head into the wall, then smashed his face down on the night stand for good measure, his nose bursting like a water balloon. I let him drop to the floor.
"You aren't much of a criminal mastermind, are you?" I said.
I stomped on Arlo's back, keeping him down while I looked for the Rambo knife. It was still sticking out of the bed. He'd been fooled by the pillow trick. Who says you can't learn anything watching cop shows?
I went to the closet, snatched up my gun and the roll of duct tape, and turned around to see Arlo trying to get up. I noticed he was wearing the same tennis shoes he used on me in Santa Monica. That pissed me off all over again.
I stomped him down, then gave him a swift kick in the side.
"That's for what you did to me in Santa Monica," I said. I gave him another kick and thought I felt something give against my shoe. "That's for Lauren."
Then I grabbed him by the hair, lifting his blood-splattered face off the floor so he could see me. I looked right into his dazed, watery eyes.
"And this is for Jolene," I hissed into his ear, right before I slammed his face into the floor a couple of times. "The rest of your punishment I'll leave up to the law."
I straddled his back, pulled his arms behind him, and bound his wrists with duct tape. Then I taped up his ankles together, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him into the living room. I propped him up against the couch, set my gun on the table, then pulled out a chair and sat down so I could take a good look at him.
I was momentarily repulsed, not so much by the man in front of me, but by what I'd done to him. Before that guy tried to rob me on the Interstate, I'd never beat up anybody before. I didn't think I could do it. I certainly never thought I'd enjoy it. But I'd never imagined I'd be in a place like Deerlick, stuck in a cabin alone with a murderer.
It wasn't even a fair fight. If it had been, I had no doubt I'd have been the loser. I prevailed because I ambushed Arlo, then kicked the shit out of him when he was down and couldn't defend himself.
It didn't say much about me as a man.
Travis McGee and Spenser would be ashamed of me. More importantly, I suspected Carol would be, too.
Not that it mattered, but Arlo wasn't going to give me a chance to defend myself either, stabbing me to death as I slept. And what I did to Arlo was far less brutal than what he'd done to Jolene or Lauren. Violence was an inherent part of his character; it wasn't in mine.
Maybe it would be now.
Arlo's head lolled on his chest and he drooled blood and mucus onto himself. After a few minutes, he began to groan. He lifted his head up slowly, spat out a big glob of blood and teeth, then tried to focus his eyes on me.
When he spoke, it wasn't easy to understand him, what with his smashed nose and mouthful of teeth.
"You're the guy who pissed on my money," he slobbered.
I'd hunted him down, uncovered his scheme, foiled his attempts to kill me, and ultimately captured him, and that was all he had to say. He'd murdered his wife and drove Lauren to suicide and this was how it was going to end.
So much for my evil adversary. My Moriarty.
I looked at him and found it hard to believe that someone so stupid and pathetic could cause so much misery and death. It didn't say much for me, if this guy had met his match.
I thought about terrorizing some answers out of him, like I'd originally planned, but the idea had lost all of its allure. I'd captured him and given him a beating. That was enough. Suddenly, I was tired of the whole damn thing and just wanted to go home.
"I'm going to go and call the police now," I said. "But first I want to know if Little Billy is out there waiting for you."
Arlo didn't say anything.
"You better tell me if he is," I said. "Because if I see him, I'll shoot him dead and say it was self-defense."
I picked up my gun and aimed it at him, so he'd get the point.
"With a BB gun?" Arlo slobbered.
I could have hit him again and felt good about it.
Instead, I taped his mouth shut, tipped him over on his stomach, and hog-tied his arms and legs together. I didn't want him slithering back to his Rambo knife or finding some other way to cut his bonds while I went up to the phone booth.
I looked at my handiwork. It was a good thing I'd had that highway robber to practice on. The police might not be so impressed, but I couldn't see how they could call me anything but a hero.
I wished I'd felt more excited about capturing Arlo, but I figured that would come later, once I'd put some time between me and everything that had happened, once it didn't seem so ugly and it became just a story I told.
I eased open the front door and peered out into the darkness. If Little Billy was out there, he was doing a good job of blending into the surroundings.
My gun held at my side, I closed the door behind me and cautiously stepped off the porch, careful to peer around the edge of the cabin first.
Then something grabbed me by the ankles and the ground came rushing up to my face. I instinctively reached out my hands to break my fall and my gun flew out of my grasp.
I slapped against the ground hard, my arms taking most of the impact. I was about to scramble for my gun when my head exploded and I died.
Chapter Twenty-Three
You don't dream when you're unconscious. It's not like sleep. And when you wake up, you wish you hadn't.
It was still dark.
At first that was all I was aware of, beyond the pulsating pain in my head. Then I was aware of being alive, which confused me and gave me an incentive to get past the agony and focus my eyes.
After a minute or two, I was able to sharpen the blur enough to tell I was lying on my back on the cabin floor. I was afraid to lift my head up, because it felt like the floor was the only thing holding my brain inside my skull.
I turned my head a tiny bit and saw my gun on the table, beside the roll of duct tape. Neither Arlo nor Little Billy seemed to be around.
So I lay there, waiting for some sensation besides pain to return, pondering my predicament.
The last thing I remembered was going outside to call the police. Someone was hiding under the porch, knocked me down, and hit me on the head with something.
My guess was a large baseball bat.
What I couldn't figure out was why I was still alive. Arlo came to kill me, and I'd given him a beating and trussed him up with duct tape. If anything, he had more reason to kill me now than he had before.
So why didn't he finish the job?
Maybe he was getting ready to. Maybe this was the only chance I'd have to escape.
I lifted my head up. My brains didn't spill out, but the pain made my eyes blur again, almost into unconsciousness. Using my feet and my elbows, I slid across the floor and propped myself up against the couch, roughly in the same spot Arlo had been in before. I know that because I was sitting on the glob of blood he'd coughed up.
Supposedly, if my TV education in private detecting was to be believed, all I had to do was rub my neck a few times and I'd be revived enough to ambush Little Billy and Arlo when they came through the door. The problem was, I couldn't lift my arm and didn't have the strength to do any rubbing.
So I resigned myself to the reality of the situation. I rested my head against the couch cushion, in case I'd jarred a chunk of my skull loose, and waited for the Pelz brothers to come back and finish what they'd started.
If, by some miracle, I survived, I was going to write a very nasty letter to the executives at TVLand about the inaccuracies in their detective programming. I was glad I'd learned this lesson from a concussion rather than a gunshot wound in the shoulder, not that it was going to make much of a difference now.
A moment or two later, I heard footsteps on the porch and turned my head to face my executioners. Only one man came in, and it wasn't who I expected.
Cyril Parkus was wearing one of those Body Glove wet suits that surfers use, and was carrying a pair of flippers and goggles. His hair was soaked and beads of water were dripping from his suit.
He'd been swimming.
"Still with us, Harvey?" he said as he padded past me in his bare, sandy feet and dropped his stuff on the table.
"Where's Arlo?" I asked, my voice raspy and weak.
"At the bottom of the lake." Cyril replied and walked into the bedroom.
I knew now that it was Cyril who'd been hiding under the porch, and that I'd made things a lot easier for him by pummeling Arlo and taping him up the way I had. The fact that Cyril was wearing a wet suit meant he'd come here planning to do exactly what he did.
When Cyril came out of the bedroom again, he was toweling his hair dry with one hand, and holding the big, serrated knife with the other.
I said, "In the morning, I suppose they'll find a boat floating in the middle of the lake without an anchor."
Cyril sat down in the chair I'd pulled out earlier and looked at me, much the same way I'd looked at Arlo.
"Can you blame me?" he asked.
I don't think he cared about my opinion, and I didn't offer it.
I thought of Arlo, his mouth taped shut, his arms and legs pinned behind him, knowing exactly what was going to happen to him as Cyril rowed the boat out into the middle of the lake. And then Cyril stopped, tied the anchor rope tightly around Arlo's ankles, and pushed him into the water. I could see Arlo wriggling helplessly as the anchor pulled him down into the murky, cold depths.
I shivered for him and for myself.
I suppose you could say Arlo deserved what he got for what he did to Jolene, but I was pretty sure Cyril didn't know about that and if he had, it wouldn't have mattered. There was only one thing that did, and that's what I asked him about.
"When did you find out that Lauren was your sister?"
Cyril stared at me. I wondered if he was going to answer me, or gut me with the Rambo knife. I think he was wondering the same thing.
"I felt it almost immediately. Every time I looked at Lauren, I saw Kelly. She was in her voice, her laugh, her eyes. It haunted me," Cyril said softly, wiping the knife blade with his towel. "I tried to tell myself I was seeing things that weren't there, but the more time I spent with her, the more certain I became. If Lauren wasn't Kelly, then she carried her spirit. I knew I was deluding myself, but I didn't care. Lauren loved me, and I loved her; it didn't matter if I imagined she was Kelly or not. Then one night after we made love, she just looked in my eyes and whispered, 'Yes, it's me.' She told me everything. And when she was done, I asked her to marry me."
I could barely lift my head, what with the pounding pain, the double vision, and waves of nausea, but I did. I stared at him, trying to bring the blur into focus.
The guy finds out that the sister he thought was dead is alive, and that he's been fucking her for weeks, and what's his first reaction?
He asks her to marry him!
It didn't make sense to me.
I mean, I could think of a lot of reactions to news like that, but a marriage proposal wasn't one of them.
"I wish I could say we lived happily ever after, but she was tormented by guilt," Cyril said. "I told her if there was a price to pay, she'd paid it long ago. She'd earned her happiness. She didn't believe it, so she threw herself into to charity work, thinking that would make the guilt go away. It almost did."
How could he not understand her guilt? Didn't he think there was anything wrong, anything unusual, about marrying his own sister?
Apparently, he didn't feel the least bit uncomfortable with the arrangement.
The only thing I could figure was that the shock of finding out who she was must have turned his brain to Cheese Whiz.
What other explanation could there be for his bizarre reaction?
And then I realized there was another one, and that it explained everything.
My vision was still a blur, but for the first time since I got involved in this case, I saw everything clearly.
"You were sleeping with your sister before," I said. "Here, at the lake, when you were teenagers."
Cyril nodded without a trace of shame. "Arlo saw us in the woods. He was going to tell, unless Kelly slept with him, too. That's why she killed herself. Only she didn't, did she? Not then, anyway."
The rest of the story I already knew or could guess. After staging her suicide, she somehow made her way to Seattle and started another life. After the car accident gave her a new face, there was nothing stopping her anymore from searching out her brother and reuniting with him as lovers once more. No one would ever know the truth about who she was.
But once again, Arlo Pelz discovered her secret.
That's what I meant about fate being cruel and inescapable. Twice Kelly Parkus had killed herself to protect her brother, only this time, she wouldn't be coming back.
I almost felt sorry for Cyril.
Then I remembered what he did to Arlo and what was probably in store for me, and he lost my sympathy.
That's when I should probably have instigated my cunning escape plan, only I didn't have one. But at that point, I couldn't even stand up on my own, much less wrestle the Rambo knife away from Cyril. There was nothing stopping him from dragging me to a boat and tossing me overboard the same way he did with Arlo.
"I guess you underestimated me, huh?" I said.
He looked up at me as if he'd forgotten I was there. "What do you mean?"
"I wasn't just the jerk in the guard shack, the clown with the iron-on badge, was I? You paid me to do a job and I did it, and then some. You sure as hell didn't expect that, not from a guy you thought couldn't pick his nose without illustrated instructions. But I found Arlo Pelz and I figured out who your wife really was, didn't I?"
I was reciting my own epitaph and I knew it.
I wanted him to know how wrong he'd been about me, how smart and capable I'd been. I wanted him to acknowledge it, if only with a nod of his head.
"You're right, Harvey, I made a big mistake hiring you." Cyril said. "I was afraid a professional detective might find out who Lauren really was. I never thought you would. Then again, a real detective would have stopped working when I fired him and wouldn't be sitting here right now."
"So what happens now, Cyril? Are they going to find two boats tomorrow morning drifting without anchors?"
Cyril rose to his feet, clutching the knife and the towel, and looked down at me. "I'm not a murderer, Harvey."
"Let's ask Arlo about that."
"That was justice. He killed my sister and I made him pay for it," Cyril said. "I've got no reason to hurt you."
"Except to stop me from going to the police and telling them what you've done."
It was only after I said it that I realized how I stupid I was to say anything.
What the hell was I thinking?
Did I want him to kill me?
"I haven't done anything," Cyril said. "At least nothing that can be proved. The only person you'd be causing trouble for is yourself."
"I didn't push Arlo out of a boat with an anchor tied to his feet."
I don't know what was making me say those things, except maybe some deep-rooted death wish I didn't realize I had. Was I trying to talk him out of sparing my life?
No, I was only saying what Mannix, or Spenser, or even Rockford would in the same situation. They never let the bad guy get away with anything, even if their own lives were at stake. The bad guy had to know that the detective knew what was really going on. Now, more than ever, I felt the need to fulfill the duties of my role.
"Think a moment, Harvey. No one knows I'm here, no one has seen me. And I'll let you in on a secret: there are no plane tickets, rental car agreements, or gas station receipts proving I was here. I drove up here in my own car, paid cash for gas, and didn't stop until I got to these woods, where I waited and watched, never encountering a soul," Cyril said. "You, on the other hand, have left big tracks."
I didn't see what he was getting at; then again, I'd just suffered a concussion. I could be forgiven for being a little slow on the uptake.
"I haven't done anything illegal," I lied.
"That's not how it will look, if you are stupid enough to bring the police into this," Cyril said. "You flew up to Seattle and, masquerading as a detective, interrogated Mona Harper. You rented a car and drove to Deerlick, where you made a spectacle of yourself, going all over town asking questions about Arlo."
"So what?" I said. "I didn't kill him."
"Really? Let's look at the evidence. You beat up Arlo, his blood is all over your clothes and this cabin. You bound and gagged Arlo, your fingerprints are on the duct tape. As far as the motive, well, I'll tell them how I hired you to follow my wife and you became obsessed with her. They won't have to take my word for that; it's clear from those pictures you took of her and kept for yourself, the ones in your pocket right now. You obviously blamed Arlo for her suicide and tracked him down. To anyone objectively looking at the evidence, you killed Arlo Pelz."
His scenario was pretty damning, I had to give him that. And he didn't even know about the Sno-Inn fire, or about Jolene's murder and how I'd altered the crime scene, or about the highway robber I beat up the same way I did Arlo. If all those events were uncovered, and were looked at in the wrong way, they would only support Cyril's take on things. Even if I revealed that Lauren was Cyril's sister, it wouldn't change things for me. He'd be embarrassed and humiliated, but he wouldn't be on death row. I would be.
Yeah, he had it all worked out. I should have been happy about it, too, because it meant he didn't have to kill me. But I wasn't happy. I felt thoroughly screwed. I wasn't going to bring anyone to justice, unless I wanted to turn myself in, and I was too selfish to do that.
"That's all hypothetical, though," Cyril said. "Because no one besides us knows what happened to Arlo Pelz and nobody cares. No one is ever going to be looking for him anyway."
Except maybe the Snohomish police, to question him about Jolene's murder. They'd assume his disappearance was a flight from justice. They'd never suspect he was at the bottom of Big Rock Lake, being nibbled by fishes. And, after a while, they'd just stop looking.
Cyril wiped his prints off the knife with the towel, then tossed the weapon on the table. He gathered up his flippers and goggles and started towards the door. He must have thought we were finished. We weren't.
"That's all fine and dandy, Cyril, but don't walk out that door thinking you've fooled me or yourself," I said. "You'd have killed me if you thought you could get away with it. The only reason I'm still alive is the same reason Arlo is dead. You can't risk the truth about you and your sister coming out."
He turned around slowly.
I pulled myself up into a standing position, using all the willpower I had not to fall. I staggered, and I swayed, and had to brace myself against the couch, but at least I was facing him. I didn't want him looking down on me one second longer.
"You didn't kill Arlo for justice, you killed him to save yourself," I said. "If I turned Arlo over to the police, there would have been a trial and the truth about Lauren would have come out. You couldn't allow that. The only thing stopping you from killing me are those big tracks I left. You can't risk what an investigation into my disappearance would reveal about you and Lauren. In the end, that's all that matters to you."
Cyril shook his head sadly. "You really don't understand, do you? I don't care if anyone finds out about Kelly and me. I don't care about anything now that she's gone."
He turned and walked out.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I was getting pretty good at cleaning up crime scenes.
I changed out of my bloody clothes and, once I felt clear-headed enough to drive, I went up the highway to the next town and stopped at a 7-11. I bought some cleaning supplies and a baseball cap to hide the ugly lump on my head.
I got back to my cabin around dawn and wiped up the blood and anyplace I thought Arlo might have left his prints. At the same time, I was also unwillingly removing any trace of Cyril, too. That made me an accomplice-after-the-fact to two murders.
I wasn't proud of it.
There wasn't anything I could do about the slashed blanket on my bed. I figured if I took it, that would call more attention than the tear would. Besides, I had to believe those ratty blankets tore pretty easily, so I turned the tear into a rip and left it.
I put all the dirty paper towels, my bloody clothes, the stabbed pillow, the roll of duct tape, and the Rambo knife into a trash bag and put it the trunk of my rental car, alongside the sledgehammer and the spare tire.
I gave the apartment another quick once-over. Any other trace evidence I left behind I figured would be vacuumed up and washed away by the maid when she cleaned up the cabin for the next guest.
I was about to go, when I remembered one more thing. I went back into the bedroom, took the kitchen chair out of the closet, and returned it to its place at the table.
When I walked up to the store, Tom Wade was standing on the porch, looking out at the lake through a pair of binoculars. Betty Lou was wiping the counter with a rag and didn't see me.
"Is that one of our rowboats out there?" Wade asked.
"I don't know, Tom," his wife replied. "Why don't you go down to the beach and see if any of our boats is missing."
"I think I'll do that." He lowered his binoculars, turned around, and smiled when he saw me. "Well, good morning, Harvey. How about some breakfast?"
"I'm making pancakes," Betty Lou said.
"It will have to be next time," I said, setting my key on the counter. "I'm afraid I have an early plane to catch in Spokane."
"Let me get you a slice of pie for the road," Betty Lou said, hobbling off into the kitchen. "It will only take a minute . . ."
"Did you enjoy your stay?" Wade asked me.
"I'll never forget it," I replied.
Before I left, I borrowed Wade's binoculars, stood on the porch, and took a look at the lake. I stared at the little boat floating out on the water and wondered about all those missing anchors.
I wondered if Esme Parkus was really down at the bottom, or if she'd staged her suicide too, so she could try a new life somewhere else. And if she had, I wondered if I could find her and what I'd learn about fate if I did.
\*\*\*
I dumped the contents of the trash bag in dumpsters around Spokane and tossed the Rambo knife, my BB gun, and the sledgehammer I never used into the river.
I kept the yearbook, though.
I dropped the Crown Victoria off at the EconoCar outlet at the Spokane airport; then I called Carol and told her I'd be home that afternoon.
She had a lot of questions, and I promised I'd answer them all when I got home. I was still trying to decide if I really would. I wasn't sure which would make her fall out of love with me faster, the truth about what I'd done to solve the mystery or the lies I'd have to tell to convince her I'd failed.
While I was waiting for my flight, I went to the gift shop and browsed through the selection of paperbacks for something to read on the plane. They had a lot of mysteries there, but none of them interested me. I'd lost my taste for detective stories.
Instead, I spent the three-hour flight to LA flipping back and forth through the yearbook, looking into the eyes of two young women, searching for clues to what happened to them and what might become of me.
\*\*\*
I ransomed my car from airport parking and drove home. After driving those big cars up in Washington, my Kia Sephia felt unbearably small and cramped. But I'm not sure the tiny car was entirely to blame for my sudden claustrophobia. I was boxed-in by the stop-and-go, rush hour traffic on the San Diego Freeway and by the inevitability of the questions Carol was going to ask.
Even my own skin felt too tight. Between my cracked head and cracked ribs, it hurt to think and it hurt to breathe.
I tried to do as little of both as I could.
I could have flown halfway back to Seattle in the time it took me to drive from the airport to the Caribbean, but once I got there, I wished the journey had taken a little longer.
Carol's Toyota Camry was parked in her spot a few spaces down from mine. She'd come home early.
Stalling, I stopped at the mailbox inside the lobby and got my mail. There were a couple bills and a letter from my insurance company. It looked like a check. That was good news.
I stepped into the courtyard and the cloud of chlorine gas emanating from the pool. It was the sweet, toxic smell of home. It felt like I'd been away for years instead of days.
I went up the stairs to my apartment. I opened the door, tossed my gym bag and my mail on the couch, and stood there for a minute, just breathing the stale air and looking at the place. I used to be able to look at the beaten-up couch and the sagging bookcases and think the place felt lived-in. But I didn't see much of a life there anymore.
I closed the door and walked down to Carol's apartment. She must have heard me coming, because her door was open and she was standing there, waiting for me.
And suddenly, I realized I couldn't remember the last time anyone had waited for me, the last time anyone wanted to share what I'd felt or experienced.
Seeing her at that moment, I never wanted a woman so much in my life. I took her in my arms and kissed her hungrily. She kissed me back with just as much appetite. She pulled me into her apartment and I kicked the door shut with my foot.
\*\*\*
We did it with a ferocity and urgency that approached the kind of thing you see in movies, only we didn't rip our clothes into shreds, and our lovemaking was frequently interrupted by cries of pain, mostly from me. Maybe it wouldn't have hurt so much if we'd made it to the bed instead of doing it on the floor, and if I was on top instead of her, but we weren't thinking of comfort, only of slaking our need. And when it was over, about five minutes later, we lay beside each other on the floor, breathing hard, our bodies sticky with sweat and saliva and other stuff.
We lay quietly like that for a while, then she rolled on her side to face me, rested her head on her arm, and said: "Tell me everything."
So I did, without even thinking about it. I didn't leave anything out, or dress anything up so she'd still have some respect for me.
I told her about Jolene's murder, and how I'd cleaned up the crime scene to save myself. I told her how I took pleasure in the beating of the highway robber, and how later I used what I learned on Arlo Pelz. I told her how that helped Cyril drown Arlo and why Cyril did it. And I told her how I cleaned up the cabin and threw away the evidence to save Cyril and myself.
I told her the whole story while looking up at the ceiling and feeling her gaze against the side of my head like a heat lamp. It was hard enough revealing my shortcomings while I was naked; I didn't want to see the anger, the disappointment, and the disgust on her face while I did it. When I was done, I sat up with a grunt of pain and started to gather up my clothes.
"What are you doing?" Carol asked.
"Going home," I said, peering under the coffee table for my underwear. "Isn't that what you want?"
I found a sock, but no underwear.
She sat up and touched my shoulder. "You are home."
I clutched the sock, and my shirt, to my chest. "What about the things I did?"
"You did some stupid things," she said. "I'm not happy you did them. So what? You aren't a perfect person. Neither am I."
"You've never covered up a murder or beat the shit out of somebody when they were defenseless," I said. "You've got to be an idiot, a coward, and an asshole to do that."
"Yeah, that's true. But the fact you know you fucked-up, and you recognize you can be an idiot, a coward, and an asshole, goes a long way towards making up for the things you did, at least with me," she said. "Eventually, I'm going to fuck-up, and you'll see all of my failings, and you'll have to decide whether you can live with them, too."
I turned around and looked at her. I tried to keep my eyes on her face and not her breasts, because it was an important moment in our relationship, but I couldn't.
"I was planning on lying to you," I said. "I'm not sure why I didn't."
"I think I know," she said. "And that's another reason I don't want you to go. You care about me so much that it's important to you that I know you as you really are. That kind of honesty isn't easy. It was a very brave thing you did for me."
Her words had a big impact on me, and I didn't want to let her down. I wanted to continue to earn her respect, so I made another admission.
"I'm having a hard time not looking at your breasts."
"So, look at them."
"But we're having an important conversation," I said. "Doesn't it piss you off that I can't stop looking at them?"
"I'm naked; of course you're looking at them," she said. "I'm looking at your penis."
I immediately got up and went into the kitchen for a drink of water. I wasn't really thirsty, I just needed to hide behind the counter if we were going to continue talking. I'm funny about nudity and certain kinds of conversations. I used to hate it if my shirt happened to be off, or if I was in my underwear, when my parents scolded me about something or when I had an argument with a girlfriend. It embarrassed me. It made me feel more naked than actually being naked, if you can understand that.
Carol apparently had no such hang-ups. She sat there on the floor, showing me her breasts and her crotch as comfortably as if she were wearing clothes. I was envious of her casual indifference to her own nudity.
"You haven't said anything yet about how I fucked-up the case," I said.
"Because you didn't," she replied.
"Three people are dead and I didn't bring anyone to justice for it."
She laughed. "Who do you think you are? Batman?"
It was the second time someone had said that to me since this all started, but it was the first time it made me feel foolish. Of course, when Cyril Parkus said it to me, I wasn't naked.
"I didn't accomplish anything," I said.
"You wanted to find out why Lauren killed herself and make the guy responsible pay for it. You did both."
"And I let Cyril Parkus get away with murder."
"So what? Arlo deserved it. To me, that's justice."
"Maybe there's still a way to catch Cyril without getting myself thrown in jail with him."
"Why would you even want to try?"
"Because Cyril Parkus murdered Arlo Pelz," I said. "I can't just let him walk."
"Why not?"
Because Travis McGee wouldn't.
Neither would Joe Mannix, Lew Archer, Kinsey Milhone, Dan Tana, or Spenser.
But that's not what I said.
"Because it's wrong," I replied.
"That's not why," she said. "Don't start lying to me now, Harvey."
At that moment, I hated her for knowing me so well. I don't know how she did, since I never really talked to her before. Maybe I said more over the years than I thought I did. Maybe I'm just transparent.
"Because a private eye is supposed to solve the crime and catch the bad guys," I said. "I only did half the job. The bad guy is still out there."
The truth was, I felt cheated. I solved the mystery but I didn't get to be a hero. The only people alive who knew what I'd done were Cyril and Carol.
I was hoping for wider acclaim than that.
I was hoping to get a friend on the force.
"The bad guy was Arlo, and he's dead," Carol said. "Cyril did a bad thing, but that doesn't make him the bad guy. He lost his wife once and his sister twice and his life is shit. I have a lot of sympathy for him."
"This just doesn't feel right to me," I said. "It feels unsettled."
"Welcome to real life," she said. "You don't get tidy resolutions. People fuck-up and do terrible things, and if we're lucky, like we are now, things sort of work out. Not everyone has to feel good about it. In fact, maybe it's better for everyone if they don't."
She was right. I was looking for the TV ending, where the whole case is wrapped up nice and neat, the bad guys are all behind bars, and the PI gets laid.
Well, at least one thing worked out the way it was supposed to.
I came around the counter and let her see me naked again, though I think I will always be naked in front of her.
"So, where do we go from here?" I asked her.
"Wherever you want."
"You're looking at my penis."
"Uh-huh," she said. "And I think I have a pretty good idea where you'd like to go."
It was a start.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I quit my job at Westland Security the next morning. I couldn't go back to sitting in that guard shack, or any guard shack, again. I had a feeling if I did, it would always remind me of a cabin closet on Big Rock Lake.
I didn't need the job anyway. If I added up my auto insurance settlement with what I had left from the Parkus job, I had about five thousand dollars. That would hold me for a few months, especially since I didn't have to buy myself a car right away. Carol was letting me drive her Camry as long as I dropped her off at work promptly at nine a.m. and picked her up at six. I think she had an ulterior motive, since the arrangement almost guaranteed I'd be spending my nights with her.
She didn't need to come up with the car arrangement for that, but I guess she was covering her bases.
The first few days I was back, I mostly lay around my apartment or hers, recuperating from my injuries, and getting used to the idea of being with Carol. I was the wounded bird in this story, though I didn't have to scrub Carol's floor or do her laundry.
I tried not to think about all the dead people. Lauren, Jolene, Arlo, even Esme. But they haunted me anyway. In my mind, they were all floating in the murky lake, all of them giving me the look that Lauren gave me before she jumped.
I can't recall Spenser being haunted by anything except his own splendid competence.
I didn't have the competence, I knew that. Still, I accomplished something, something more than writing courtesy tickets at Bel Vista Estates, even if I couldn't point to exactly what it was. And I took some big risks to do it, too.
It pissed me off that I didn't feel the euphoria and pride I felt I deserved for solving my first case and surviving.
The only thing I felt was different.
I know that's not very specific, just saying different. But I knew I was not the same guy I was a couple weeks ago and that I never would be again.
So, who was I now? What was I going to do?
Those were questions I'd managed to avoid my entire life and I had a feeling that keeping Carol around, and continuing to enjoy all this sex I was getting, had a lot to do with not avoiding them now.
Although my experience as a detective wasn't as much fun as I'd dreamed it would be, and I couldn't exactly use Cyril Parkus as a reference for future work, I still thought I had a certain affinity for the job. It might even live up to my expectations next time, assuming I could snag another gig. So, I started looking into what it would take to go legit, to become a licensed private detective.
What I found out wasn't encouraging.
In the state of California, you've got to take an extensive training course, log six thousand hours of investigative experience, and pass a two-hour written exam covering laws and regulations before you get a license. By my calculations, it would be about three years before I could set up shop as a private detective.
Legally, that is.
But there wasn't any law saying I couldn't go into business as an "investigative advisor" or "professional problem solver." I knew it could be done. Travis McGee didn't have a license, he just called himself a "salvage expert" and asked for half the value of whatever he recovered. I decided that could work for me, too, though I wasn't sure how I'd figure out the salvage price for, as an example, following someone's wife. I decided my task for the month would be to reread the books and make a detailed report of exactly how McGee computed his commissions.
So that's what I was doing on that sunny Wednesday afternoon, about a week after I got back. I was on my way out to the pool in a t-shirt and shorts with one of the McGee books when I saw him, sitting on a chaise lounge, waiting for me.
Little Billy held the baseball bat across his lap, tapping it gently on the open palm of his hand, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses that were squeezed into place between his bulbous nose and his Neanderthal brow.
I was stunned and terrified and feeling incredibly vulnerable with only a used paperback and a yellow highlighter for protection. I didn't think I could muster the same tough guy swagger that enabled me to survive our last encounter.
I suppose the sensible thing to do would have been to run back into my apartment, lock the door, and hope my call to 911 would go through before Little Billy broke inside and killed me.
But curiosity and a suicidal sense of dignity got the better of me. I surrendered to the inevitability of my violent demise, smiled, and walked right over to him.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
"Arlo said he had a deal going in LA." Little Billy shrugged. "You gave your name to the Wades. I looked it up in the LA phone book. There was only one Harvey Mapes."
He had a bright future as a private eye, certainly a lot brighter than mine seemed at that moment. Then again, it occurred to me that he hadn't mentioned Cyril Parkus or Lauren Parkus. He'd only come looking for me. Which, I deduced, meant he didn't know what Arlo's deal was in LA. That gave me a slight advantage.
I motioned to the baseball bat with a nod of my head. "You brought that all the way from Deerlick?"
"I never go anywhere without it."
I guess you could call the bat his pacifier. Perhaps he just used it to pacify others. "So, when do you intend to start hitting me with it?"
"I don't know yet."
That offered me some hope. Even so, my mouth was suddenly so dry, I could hardly swallow without gagging.
"Mind if I have a Coke while you decide?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"You want anything?" I asked.
"Dr Pepper," he replied.
I went to the machine, and as I fed coins into the slot, I was struck by the absurdity of offering refreshments to my executioner. I never had experiences like this before I became a private eye and, despite the jeopardy, I wasn't sorry. I might be later, though, after a few whacks of that bat against my skull.
I brought back the drinks, reclined on the chaise lounge next to him, and took a big sip of Diet Coke.
He downed his Dr Pepper in one long gulp.
I waited for him to smash the empty can against his forehead, or crush it in his fist, or just take a bite out of it, but he didn't. He set the empty can on the ground beside him and burped.
"I want to know what happened to Arlo," Little Billy said. "He went out to the lake to kill you and didn't come back."
"Are you here to finish the job?" I asked, hoping my voice wouldn't crack and reveal my terror.
"Depends," Little Billy replied. "Did you kill my brother?"
"No."
"Then how come you're still alive?"
"Lucky, I guess."
"Why were you looking for him?"
"I can't tell you that," I replied, though if he hit me a couple times with that bat, I probably would have changed my mind. I think he knew it, too.
"I could make you," he said confidently.
"I wish you wouldn't." I tried to say that without sounding like I was pleading.
"Do you know where I can find Arlo?"
I shook my head because I didn't think I could say no with conviction.
"The police came around a few days ago. They're looking for him, too. They say he killed Jolene. Is it true?"
I nodded. "He slammed her head into a big-screen TV and left her there to die. Lovable guy, your brother."
Little Billy was silent for a moment. I was expecting the bat to come swinging my way at any second. When he finally moved, I cringed, but he was only getting comfortable on the chaise lounge. If he noticed my cowardice, he didn't show it.
"Arlo wasn't always the fuck-up," Little Billy said. "That was supposed to be my profession. But he had the hots for this girl at the lake who then went and drowned herself. After that, he didn't give a shit about anything."
Little Billy picked up the Dr Pepper can, got up, and dropped it in the trash can, then turned around and stood over me.
He was in the perfect position to swat my head right off my shoulders.
"I'm not saying what he's done is right or wrong, that don't matter to me," Little Billy said. "He's my brother, and I'm supposed to look out for him. If someone hurt him, I'm going to have to hurt them worse."
I couldn't see his eyes behind those sunglasses, but I was pretty sure he was staring at me, trying to decide if now was the time to carry out his responsibility. After a moment, he rested the baseball bat on his shoulder like a caveman's club and walked out.
I stayed on the chaise lounge for another twenty minutes or so, thinking about my encounter with Little Billy.
It occurred to me that he'd make the perfect psychopathic sidekick for my new business venture---as long as he never found out that I'd helped murder his brother.
\*\*\*
I started staking out the gate in front of Bel Vista Estates the same afternoon I had my visit from Little Billy. I told myself I was doing it to protect Cyril Parkus in case Little Billy came after him, but the truth is, I didn't really think he was in any danger.
I told myself I'd watch him for a week, and if nothing happened, I'd leave him alone, but that wasn't true, either.
I still felt different from everybody else, like they all had secrets and it was my job to find them out. I felt such a strong compulsion now to play detective that, if I didn't have Cyril Parkus to follow, I probably would have picked somebody at random instead.
I didn't tell Carol what I was doing, though I suppose I would have told her if she'd asked. She was smart enough not to.
I'd arrive around ten a.m. after dropping Carol off at work, and would stay until about five. Cyril wasn't going to the office anymore; I'd made a call there before I started and discovered he was "on sabbatical" indefinitely. And he hardly ever came out of his house, and when he did, it was just to go down to the grocery store or drive through one of the fast-food places.
Cyril didn't look the same to me. It's not that he let himself go or anything, it was the way he walked, like he'd suddenly gained a hundred and fifty pounds, and the vacant expression on his face, like he was sleepwalking. More than once I saw him bump into a person, or collide with the edge of a grocery cart, or stumble off a curb, and not even realize it.
He was in mourning for his lost wife, his lost sister, his lost love.
I wondered if in his grief, he ever thought about what he did to Arlo, and if it mattered to him at all.
I hadn't killed anyone yet, but I thought a lot about the beatings I gave Arlo and the highway robber. I thought about how both of them were helpless at the time, and how I enjoyed that almost as much as delivering the kicks and blows. I thought about what that said about me and if I'd been changed by it.
I also thought about Carol, and I wondered if maybe, out of all the things I'd seen and done over the last few weeks, if she was what had changed me most of all.
I'd been parked outside Bel Vista Estates for five days, and was nearly finished with my list of Travis McGee's fees, on the afternoon that Cyril Parkus drove out of the gate in Lauren's Range Rover. I liked it best when he chose that car; it was much easier to see in traffic than his sleek Jag.
I was hoping he was making another trip through Taco Bell, since my stomach was growling and I was in the mood for Mexican food, but instead he headed down towards the freeway.
I thought that maybe he'd finally decided to rejoin the world again.
Traffic was light, so I stayed about four cars behind him. I wasn't worried about losing him, I could see the top of his enormous Range Rover from a block away.
He drove down to the freeway overpass that led to Old Town Camarillo, so I figured we were making a visit to the outlet mall, probably to Ralph Lauren, judging by what I'd seen of Cyril's wardrobe. It was a good sign. If he was ready to shop, he was ready to forget.
But then I saw the cars in front of me suddenly brake, and was overcome with a horrible sense of déjà vu. I stopped the car, jumped out, and ran towards the overpass, knowing what I'd see before I saw it.
Cyril Parkus stood on the guardrail over the freeway, his head turned towards the street, waiting for me to show up.
He knew I'd be there, just like Lauren knew.
And when he saw me, he smiled and looked down at the traffic as if contemplating a jump into a tranquil pool.
I yelled his name, and it was still echoing in the air when Cyril simply stepped off the rail, his arms at his sides, his body perfectly straight.
I reached the rail in time to see the massive pile-up below, cars careening across the roadway like pinballs, smashing into one another, dragging pieces of Cyril's body across the asphalt until he was lost amidst the carnage.
He'd told me in the cabin that he was going to do this, but I was so busy living out my private eye fantasy, so busy trying to plug him into the role of the big, rich, bad ugly, I didn't hear what he said.
"I don't care about anything now that she's gone . . ."
The tragedy was complete now, sparing no one. Lauren, Cyril, and Arlo were all dead. There was no wrong that had been righted. There was no bad guy on his way to life in the big house. There was no happy client to thank me for what I'd done.
In over two hundred episodes, nothing like this had ever happened to Joe Mannix.
No one was following the rules.
I turned and walked back towards my car against the frantic tide of people rushing off the street and out of their cars to see what happened. When I was passed them, I saw one person standing on the sidewalk in front of my car, a baseball bat resting on his shoulder.
"Did Parkus kill my brother?" Little Billy asked.
I nodded. Some private eye I was. He must have been following me all week, and I never once saw him. Then again, I never thought to look.
"He tied Arlo to a boat anchor and dropped him in the middle of the lake," I said, suddenly in the mood for honesty.
Little Billy took the news emotionlessly, as if I'd just told him about the weather.
"Could you have stopped him?" he asked.
"No more than I could have stopped this," I replied.
Little Billy seemed to accept that and let me pass. I was about to get in the car, but then I looked back at him standing there, and felt the pain that he wasn't showing.
The first instant I saw him, back in Deerlick, I assigned him his clichéd role in my detective story, just as I did with everybody else. He was the mindless, violent thug. The bone-breaker. One of the bad guys. Now I saw a guy whose only fault was that he cared about his brother and I didn't.
"If you want to meet me back at my place, I'll buy you another Dr Pepper and tell you everything I know," I said.
Little Billy nodded.
We both became aware of the sirens approaching, and neither one of us wanted to be here when the police showed up. I tossed him the keys to my apartment.
"I have to stop on the way and pick up my girlfriend at work," I added. "Make yourself at home."
I got into my car and watched him go in my rearview mirror.
He walked over to a rusted-out pickup truck a couple cars behind me. He'd driven all the way down here in that junker to find out the truth.
His search had ended the way mine began.
I realized then that maybe we had more in common with each other than either of us knew. Maybe we'd get the chance to find out how much. Or maybe he'd just beat me to death with his bat. I didn't know, and I didn't particularly care. I was going with my gut.
As I drove back towards LA, I threw my Travis McGee books out the window. The guy didn't know shit about being a private eye.
THE END
About Lee Goldberg
DISINTEGRATION
By Scott Nicholson
Scott Nicholson's Amazon Author Central page
CHAPTER ONE
Jacob Wells smelled smoke seventeen seconds before hell opened its door.
The Appalachian night was just cool enough to require a quilt on top of the bedspread, and he'd sought Renee's body heat beneath the sheet. One of his wife's legs was tangled in his, the nail of her big toe digging into his ankle. The weight of her head pressed into that familiar space above his armpit and her hair spilled across his shoulder. Drowsy, he tried to remember where he was, then saw the red glaring numbers. 1:14.
The alarm was set for six a.m., an ugly hour that always came too soon. Jacob rarely slept before reaching the long side of midnight. Every night his sleep shrank, his dreams crammed into tighter and darker crevices, his thoughts spiraling like dirty water down a drain. He had failed, and the knowledge had dull teeth that ground him from the guts up.
Tonight, the dream had been of a mirror that he had somehow fallen into, as if it were a silvery, sunlight sea. He tried to drag himself out, because he couldn't breathe. When he reached out of the mirror, though, his reflection was on the other side, pushing him back down. Desperate, he grabbed his reflection and pulled it into the mirror with him, and they wrestled in that bottomless, soundless void, joining into one writhing mass that sank and sank ever further from the light.
His eyes snapped open to the black sheet of the ceiling. The pillow was damp at his neck. A breeze blew from somewhere, a crack in the door or window, carrying the March odors of mud and daffodils. Renee stirred beside him, nudging him with a sleepy elbow. Her snores were soft and feminine.
Her scent flooded his nostrils, meadow shampoo and the lingering tang of their lovemaking. She had always been clean, a chronic neat freak, almost to the point of obsession. She loathed perfume, though, and was comfortable with her own natural odors. That was one of Jacob's favorite things about her. He took another sniff, as if he could carry its memory back into his dreams to give him comfort.
The sniff brought unease instead of comfort. Something was out of place in the too-thick air. Jacob pulled himself from drowsiness. No mistake.
Smoke.
They'd had candles on the nightstand, a ritual dating back to their initial shy fumbling in college when soft light hid minor flaws and made pupils attractively large. But the candles were long cold, and this aroma wasn't thick and waxy.
It had a chemical sting, and beneath that, the brusque body of burning wood.
Jacob swam the rest of the way up from the waters of half-sleep and pushed Renee's leg away. Maybe one of the neighbors was burning brush. It was the time of year for yard work, when leaves and ice-damaged branches were raked into large piles in that first spring bloom of homeowner energy. But who would start a brush fire an hour after midnight?
Renee mumbled into the pillows where her face had fallen. Jacob swung his legs over the side of the bed, squeaking the springs. He switched on the bedside lamp. On the nightstand, shielded by a slight sheen of dust, was a framed photograph of Mattie. Except for the crooked primary teeth in her grin, she looked like a miniature of Renee---sea-green eyes, reddish-blond hair, a faint splash of freckles on the swells of her cheeks. Jacob looked at the trusting face.
Another photograph was behind it, lost in shadows.
He sniffed again. Smoke, for sure.
He stood, wide awake, the air thicker now and tingling his sinuses. He grabbed his polar fleece robe, still damp from the shower, and hurried to the door.
"Jakie?" Renee mumbled, disoriented amid the piled covers and squinting against the intrusion of light. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know," he said. They'd locked the door, a habit since Mattie had walked in on them one night two years ago, after which they'd spent fifteen minutes of improvisational theater explaining why grown-ups were silly enough to exercise in bed. Now the lock seemed to work the opposite way, keeping Jacob imprisoned instead of the rest of the world out.
As Jacob fumbled with the lock, a whisper of warm air crawled across his toes.
"What's that smell?" Renee asked. She was fully awake now, too.
Jacob swung the door open, and that was when hell came calling, rolling forward in a whoosh of yellow and red, fingers and tongues of flame stabbing and licking, Satan's gate thrown wide in welcome.
The heat singed his eyebrows, the smoke slapped him like an open palm. He raised his arms against the rush of heat.
"Jake!" Renee screamed from the bed.
"Call 9-1-1."
"Oh, God. Mattie."
"I'll get her. You get out."
He slammed the door closed behind him, hoping it would buy Renee an extra minute. He ducked and scrambled on all fours, keeping his head low where the oxygen was less polluted. The flames crackled like bunched cellophane and he could smell the steam off his bathrobe.
Mattie's room was three doors down, three easy doors, past the laundry room and the vacant nursery and around the corner, where she shared the largest upstairs room with a dozen stuffed animals, two hundred books, and a wooden locomotive large enough to ride.
Jacob crawled forward, the carpet scuffing his bare knees. The floor was warm, and he wondered how far the fire had spread, if it had already sucked the downstairs into its hungry, blue-white heart. The alarm hadn't gone off. The smoke detector clung to the ceiling as a mute witness to disaster.
"Mattie." He licked his lips, throat dry as a crack pipe. He called her name again, and the word sounded like the desperate bleat of a dying sheep.
He passed the laundry room, its door ajar, flames barely making entry there. Before bedtime, Renee had put her work clothes in the dryer, a nylon navy pants suit with a blouse that would look good with a briefcase. If the dryer had ignited, then the room would be gutted. So the fire's origins were elsewhere.
Not that it mattered where the fire started. All that mattered was where it ended.
Jacob forced himself past the nursery, not daring to slow, because slowing would make him think of the empty crib inside, and he had no time.
The best antidote for failure was pain, and the heat shined his skin, pinked the back of his hands, stretched his forehead taut, and invaded his lungs. Still he crawled.
"Mattie!" he yelled, but the name may as well have been shouted against the swirling walls of a typhoon.
He reached the bend in the hall. The current of air was stronger now as the draft poured up the staircase. The flames leaped with new anger at the influx of oxygen. Jacob was dizzy from smoke inhalation and asphyxia, but he wouldn't let himself drop to the floor. He couldn't fail again.
All he had to do was reach Mattie's room, break the window, and collect her in his arms, then jump two floors into the rhododendron hedge below.
He could do it, though the hairs on his arms were electrified wires and his eyeballs felt like boiled grapes.
Mattie's door was just ahead, closed against the storm of fire. The great yellow-and-red beast chewed the ceiling, licked paint from the walls, clawed at the stair railing. A light fixture fell, shattering three feet to Jacob's left. He crawled onward, ignoring the shards of glass gouging his hands and knees.
He would not fail.
The door beckoned, its rectangular shape lost in the shimmering haze. Jacob blinked moisture into his eyes and focused on the doorknob. Its brass reflected the conflagration, a kaleidoscope sunburst, acid lemon, nuclear tangerine.
Ten more feet.
He shoved himself forward, commanded his worthless limbs to work, embraced the pain. His lungs were two bricks of ash, his sinuses raw. In the crackling laughter of the surrounding blaze, Jacob heard soft whispers: Sleep, surrender, lie down and lose.
His eyes begged to be closed. The smoke churned and twisted in dark hurricanes. The golden maelstrom swelled with new passion as it reached the framing lumber behind the walls, tasted pine and found it sweet. The house shook in its first death throes. The smoke detector finally reached critical mass and emitted a piercing staccato of beeps.
The doorknob became Jacob's grail. Failure's gravity pressed upon him from all directions, as heavy as molten lead. He squirmed forward like some pathetic primitive creature crawling up from steamy slime. Sense of purpose had almost abandoned him, and his muscles screamed in rebellion as he kept moving.
The door.
Open it.
Because behind it lay everything.
Mattie.
Her birthday was February 3rd. Six weeks ago. He'd given her a 35mm camera and a bird book, Renee had given her a bicycle. The cake was chocolate, the nine candles arranged to form an M. The neighborhood kids sat around the table squealing while Mattie smiled amid the splendor of bright ribbons and wrapping paper. Princess for a day.
Princess for every day, in Jacob's heart.
He couldn't surrender.
The flames seemed to whisper his father's voice: A Wells never fails.
He rose, his body wracked with fever, the flames whining and screaming, pieces of construction falling downstairs, large timbers and shelves and furniture. He could only imagine the chaos below them, heat like liquid, and wondered if the floor would collapse before he made it through Mattie's door. Steam rose from the carpet, its threads curling and shriveling.
"Mommy . . ."
At first Jacob thought Mattie had called out, but the voice was muted, metallic.
The voice came again: "Wish me."
Jacob had given Mattie a Rock Star Barbie for Christmas that recorded short sound bites. While the quality and tone were the same as pull-string dolls, the newer technology allowed the owner to record bits of song for playback. Mattie and Jacob had a blast playing silly messages back and forth, but she couldn't know about "Wish me." The recording erupted into giggles, a perverted mirth that blended into the chaotic and crackling symphony of holocaust.
Broken toys. Nothing but broken toys.
He reached for the doorknob, patted it with his fingers. He knew that if he opened the door, the oxygen would create a backdraft. He wasn't sure if the draft would blow inward or outward, or how much he'd endanger Mattie with the act.
"Mattie!" he shouted again, his voice lost in fire, becoming the fire, all one now, an angry, all-consuming, sky-eating roar. The detector was an electric hawk, shrieking overhead.
"Daddy?"
No recording. She was there, alive.
He cupped his blistered hands and yelled. "Move away from the door, honey."
"Daddy?" Sobs surrounded the word, joined by tears that would evaporate before reaching the floor.
"Move back." A sock lay by the door, somehow missed by Renee's latest compulsive clean sweep. He rolled it over his fingers and grasped the knob. It was like sticking his hand in a forge, as if he were trying to meld his fingers into some sort of cold weapon.
The fire crowded behind him like a spectator, swelled, held its breath in waiting.
Jacob twisted the knob and pulled back, the gap in the door showed dark, then yellow and red and blue and white leaped through the opening like twisted and howling sheets of wet metal.
The flames lapped at Jacob, raced over his body, singed the hair on his arms and chest and groin. He fell backward against the hot gale while the fire kicked the door wide. The oxygen lifeblood of the fire pulsed forward in both directions and funneled toward the fuel of the hall. Jacob rolled over, heart heavy as a hearthstone as he crawled once more toward Mattie's room.
She squatted at the foot of her bed in Winnie the Pooh pajamas, stuffed animals huddled around her for protection. Flames crept from the edges of the ceiling. The wallpaper border featuring Sesame Street characters fell away, showing the darkened faces of Big Bird, Elmo, and the Cookie Monster.
"Stay down, honey," Jacob yelled, his breath a swarm of razors as it slashed his windpipe.
"Daddy," she said, pleading, as if she were like the smoke detector and had been programmed for one terrible sound.
He forced himself to rise into a crouch and moved through the orange rectangle of the burning doorway. He could see her eyes now, so wide, so scared, eyes like Renee's, and then fear for Renee gripped him, sluiced through his bloodstream like menthol, and he wondered why he had left his wife alone.
Because you're not like him. Because you can't fail.
He couldn't fail. Not Jacob Daniel Wells, the man who had it all. Not bulletproof Jake, who could buy his luck and whose ladders led only upwards. Not the man with the Midas touch, who had gold at his fingertips and gold for guilt and gold now eating his house and flesh and family, taking back everything it had ever given.
No. It wasn't taking Mattie. He wouldn't let it.
He clawed toward her, blew the smoke aside, huffed and puffed like the wolf in Mattie's bedtime story. Fire hissed at him, outraged by his defiance. Its insistent voice tickled the dry paper of his eardrums and filled his head: Surrender.
Only one of us can have everything, and it's not you.
"No," he shouted, reaching for Mattie. Because he saw her, all of her, the smoke parting as if the fire's master wanted to play one final, cruel joke of revelation.
Her pajamas had melted to her skin. Her body quivered, cold and hot, her flesh shrink-wrapped to her bones. Her stuffed alligator had dissolved into a goo of synthetic fibers around her hand. She couldn't speak, couldn't scream. Except with her eyes.
And her eyes screamed plenty.
"Wish me," they said.
He touched her, afraid to touch her, not knowing where she was least damaged. He was oblivious to the fire now, as if it were a Red Sea that had parted, a miracle that allowed him not escape but a single path for his eternal soul.
Then he lifted her, the window exploded from the heat and the stress of collapsed wood, the detector gave a last long wail of agony, the ceiling folded in, the fire stoked itself, the embers made their bed upon his back, the night pressed its black boot upon them both, and his last thought was that he'd forgotten to give Mattie a goodnight kiss when he'd tucked her in.
And he couldn't now, because she had no lips.
CHAPTER TWO
This dream was one of darkness, set in a cool, timeless place, like the underwater bottom of a grotto.
Jacob found he didn't need to breathe this time. Breathing had been a bother all along, an endless exercise in futility, air in and out toward no purpose. Suffocating was so much easier. Breathlessness almost seemed a natural state.
Far above, like a distant moon over a thick sky, was a soft circle of light. Its gravity disturbed his peace, a slight but insistent pull that mirrored the moon's effect on ocean tides. He tried to fight, but his muscles urged him to surrender, to drift upward. His arms and legs floated effortlessly in the cold waters of the grotto, his lungs took their fill, his eyes stared at the hazy circle of light that grew ever larger.
As he ascended, the layers of dreams separated like a series of skins, peeled away until he was pink and naked and raw. And now the moon was brighter, the water warmer, the sky pressing closer. His lungs ached, the soothing liquid rushing out only to be replaced by jagged stones. The tug of gravity intensified, pulling him faster toward a surface of confusion.
Jacob wanted to scream, but the grotto ate his words. The swelling brightness of the moon corresponded to bright feelings in his fingers, sparks of ice, arctic static.
The moon grew whiter, took over the world, and he recognized the energy that now flowed through his body.
Pain.
He awoke to razors and needles and shards of glass and the dull crush of tons. For a panicked moment, he thought he was being cremated alive, that he'd been brought back to consciousness for one final torment before the deliverance of eternal slumber.
Then the pain lost its thousand sharp edges and became a giant cresting wave of agony, one whose amplitude rose ever higher. The wave turned into a scream that crashed with the echo of his daughter's name.
Matilda Suzanne Aldridge Wells.
Matilda after Renee's mother, a woman who had hated her own name. Suzanne because that was Jacob's first choice, and they'd haggled about hyphenating Mattie's last name. Aldridge-Wells. But Renee pointed out that she herself had taken the Wells name and the hyphen wouldn't make sense unless she changed back to her maiden name. Or else Jake would have to take Renee's name. In either case, the paperwork was too daunting: social security forms, credit cards, insurance policies, Jake's business records, trappings of a modern American society where every person had a number and too many parents were making up confusing names for their children.
And Matilda became Mattie, though Jacob called her "Matilda" in the soft twilight of her room, in the space between bedtime stories and night-night kisses, or on those rare occasions when Mattie's misbehavior ranked as a full-name offense. She was Matilda at both extremes of emotion, in deep anger and gentle, aching appreciation. And that was the name that crossed his lips now, as he plunged up through the surface and the moon exploded around him.
"What's that?" came a foreign voice, probably the voice of that strange moon pushed by a dry wind.
"Matilda." His own ears couldn't recognize the sound that passed his lips.
"Don't speak, Mr. Wells."
Jacob tried to speak anyway, but felt the tube that lay on his tongue and snaked down his throat. He blinked into the bright lunar face but its haziness remained. Gauze lay across his eyes. He shivered in the white light, afraid of everything, wishing the grotto would suck him back down into its placid waters.
A gentle hand touched his arm and he yelped at the contact. A machine hissed in a rhythm that both mimicked and mocked life. It was breathing for him, sending oxygen into the tube, through his lungs and heart and bloodstream. Jacob tried to lift his head, but it felt impossibly heavy, a chunk of charred granite.
"Relax, Mr. Wells."
The voice was soothing, distant. Jacob licked his lips around the tube. Through the gauze, he could make out the brown face, the white coat, the spotlight he'd mistaken for the moon.
"Thirsty," Jacob said, having trouble with the sibilant due to the dryness of his mouth.
"You've got an IV," the distant voice said. The voice was richly accented, West African or something equally exotic. "It may be a day or two before you can drink again."
Jacob blinked against the gauze, his eyes stinging. After a moment of looking at the vague shapes of machinery and the tubes dangling around him, he closed his eyes. "Where am I?"
"Littlejohn Memorial."
Hospital.
Kingsboro, North Carolina.
Where he'd once lived and probably still did.
So this wasn't heaven, or even an antechamber to the land of the dead. Or perhaps it was. Maybe this was his punishment, a purgatory of pain and equipment, a life sentence for his failures.
"How long . . .?" Jacob wasn't sure what he wanted to ask. How long he'd been dead? How long before he wasn't dead anymore?
"You've been here thirty-six hours. You're a very lucky man. Upper airway edema, second-degree burns over fifty percent of your body, a dislocated hip." A hand touched Jacob's arm again. "I'm Dr. Masutu."
Jacob shivered, his flesh cold but his skin like that of a baked potato, rough and hot and dry. He flexed his fingers and they felt like water balloons. The doctor must have noticed the movement.
"You're a little swollen at the moment. It's typical for burn victims to gain twenty or thirty pounds due to fluid buildup. Your metabolism is in hyperactive mode right now, trying to heal your injuries."
A memory sparked in Jacob's head, but it was swept away by a yellow wave of pain. The wave rushed up the beaches of his soul, the foam tickled him, and then the pain receded. The pain reminded him of something, as if it were part of him and he should not be spared. His tongue was thick against the tube and he couldn't feel his teeth.
"I've adjusted your morphine drip," Dr. Masutu said. "Now that you're awake, you'll probably feel a little discomfort. Unfortunately, we have to go easy on the suppressants because your respiratory system is overtaxed."
Doctors always used the word "discomfort" in place of "pain."
"And extra antibiotics," the doctor continued. "The burns will heal, but it's a dangerous time for your body. Because your system is fighting so hard to grow new skin and replace your fluids, you're vulnerable to infections. But we're going to be just fine."
Jacob felt himself sliding back into the languor of the grotto. Something the doctor had said, one word among that stream of syllables, caused him to open his eyes just before he succumbed to darkness.
Burns.
Burns meant heat.
Heat meant fire.
Fire meant that the other dream was not a dream, and the memory of flames eating the walls returned. The past built itself on blackened timbers, stacked like logs, nailed itself together into a wobbly house.
Fire. House.
And a name.
Then words meant nothing, because he was in the grotto again, its water soft against his skin. Cool darkness reclaimed him, and he welcomed it.
A familiar voice accompanied him on his next journey to the surface.
"Honey? Can you hear me?"
Jacob could hear Renee, but couldn't respond. His tongue was like a sock, his mouth a leather shoe. He forced his eyes open and the spotlight stung them. The gauze had been removed. The corners of the room swam on the edges of his vision.
"Doctor, he opened his eyes."
He sensed movement, and shadows fell across his face. His hands and feet were numb. His chest was cold, and for a moment he thought he was naked. Jacob rolled his eyes down far enough to see that a loose sheet covered his body. Or maybe it was a shroud.
"Welcome back, Mr. Wells," came a voice that he dimly recognized. "It's Dr. Masutu."
Jacob's lips parted, and he pushed his tongue out enough to feel the chapped skin around his mouth. His cheeks were coated with a cold gel. He tried to raise his arm and wipe it away, but the doctor caught his hand.
"Easy does it. You still have a drip in that arm."
Jacob looked into the dark, featureless face of the man above him. Then he saw the person to the right of the doctor. The shape of the hair was familiar, the way it curled out at shoulder length. He tried to focus on her but his head throbbed, shattering his vision into tiny shards of meaningless images. He closed his eyes again.
"Relax, honey. Take it slow," Renee said.
Take it slow. She'd whispered that the first time they'd made love, when Jacob and Renee were fellow sophomores at North Carolina State. Before Mattie and the other one. Before Joshua came back.
Jacob had taken it slow many times, but never as slow as he did now. Because gravity still pressed upon him, each machine-assisted breath brought embers of agony, and his limbs felt like alien parasites leeched to his torso. He tried to collect the pieces of himself, to reacquaint flesh with bone, to integrate his organs into a functioning cooperative. He gave up. The only connection between his many parts was a network of pain.
"Renee," he said in a wheeze.
"Don't talk."
He wasn't talking. He was gasping, choking, mouthing nonsense air. He opened his eyes again.
Renee bent over him, and her face filled the hazy circle where the spotlight had been. She was nothing but eyes and a slash of teeth. The eyes were like lost binary stars against the endless depth of space.
Those eyes looked familiar.
Whose eyes? Green like that---
And it all came back in a scream, the fire, the collapsing roof, Mattie amid her scorched stuffed animals. He fought to sit upright but was far too weak. The movement sent a rocket flare of agony up his left hip.
"Where's Mattie?" he said, this time summoning enough air to fill the room with his words. They echoed off the room's sterile surfaces of tile, chrome, and glass.
He couldn't see Renee well enough to be sure, but her face seemed to collapse in upon itself, like a flower gone putrid in steam.
"Shhh, honey," she whispered. "We can talk about that later."
Later? How could she possibly think he would make it to later unless he knew? Giant claws scratched at his intestines, a monster inside him wanting to tear itself free. He fought it down as if it were a rush of nausea. "Where is she?"
Renee turned her head toward the doctor, and they must have shared a look. Dr. Masutu gave a stiff nod. Renee's hand took his, and her small fingers were slick in the ointment that coated his skin. He squeezed weakly, begging with all the meager strength he could summon.
"Where?" he whispered, already knowing, never wanting to know.
"The fire---when the second floor collapsed and threw you out of the fire, she was still there and---she got burned bad---"
Her voice cracked in synch with the breaking of Jacob's heart.
Not Mattie.
Not. Not. Not.
She was the Happy Sunshine Girl, who played doctor to make her dolls better and held tea parties for her stuffed animals. She was the favorite in her class among all the teachers at Middlewood Elementary. She loved soccer and jump rope and Sunday morning cartoons, the ones that came on just before the scary preacher shows. She was beautiful, the thing that spiritually bound him to Renee, the creature that connected him to the future rather than a past he loathed.
A strange sound poured out of his lungs, the internal monster turning into a vomit of voice. If not for the raw pain of its passing through his throat, he wouldn't have recognized the voice as his own.
Renee squeezed more tightly, two hands now, as he twisted in the sheets. Dr. Masutu moved around the bed, trying to calm him with incomprehensible medical terminology. Jacob thrashed his head from side to side, the ceiling a blur of silver and white streaks.
"It's all going to be okay," Renee said, choking, her face close to his, her breath cool on his cheek.
The monster ripped his insides, claw and tooth and sharp bone. The monster laughed, rattling the truth against his rib cage like a scythe strumming a xylophone. The monster chewed his aortic chambers, spitting pieces of flesh in its triumph. The pain inside met the pain outside and rose into an unbearable crescendo.
Jacob wailed, a plea to God, a damning of God.
He sobbed and coughed, pushed at the tube in his mouth with his tongue.
He had promised himself that he would be stronger this time, that he'd protect her from Joshua. He would protect all of them. But he had failed again. And that knowledge slashed him with its acid talons.
Renee dabbed a tissue against his eyes. Her whisper was as soft as the steady wheezing of the respirator: "Jake."
"Where is she?" he repeated, his teeth clenched around the tube. He looked in the mirror above the sink as if Mattie were in the room.
Dr. Masutu moved closer, a model of crisp efficiency. "You'd best leave, Mrs. Wells. We can't risk an additional sedative with his respiratory system so stressed."
Jacob clutched her hand, muscles tight with desperation. Sweat broke loose on his face. "Where is she?"
Renee stepped away and the ointment caused Jacob to lose his grip. He stared at the back of his hand, at the white blisters, at the pink skin peeling away. His wedding ring was gone. Everything was gone. Joshua had taken it.
"She's here," Renee said.
He sat up and dizziness swarmed in. The room tilted, Dr. Masutu's face grew alternately larger and smaller, Renee bobbed like a ship moving away toward the horizon.
Jacob tried to move his legs, but they were mutinous. He lunged for the edge of the bed and collapsed on the railing. His IV bag fell over and spattered open against the cold tiles. Dr. Masutu gripped him by the shoulders and tried to ease him back onto the bed.
"Easy, Mr. Wells," the doctor said. His breath smelled of disinfectant, the first odor Jacob had noticed since awakening.
"I want to see her. Where is she?" he screamed at Renee. He didn't care if she lied. He just needed an answer, any answer, or the hard concrete in his chest would let no more air pass.
Renee stopped at the door, hunched and shivering. She cupped her hands and leaned against the wall, slowly sliding down its surface like the victim of a firing squad.
"Mr. Wells," the doctor said, pulling him against the pillow. "Don't make me have to call for assistance."
"Fuck you," Jacob said, yanking free and pulling himself onto the rail. He caught a fleeting glimpse of himself in the mirror, a wild-eyed lab animal breaking free of a cruel experiment, its flesh mottled red. Then he went over. The respirator tube must have become disconnected, because oxygen escaped with a snakelike hiss. The loose tube protruded from Jacob's mouth as his torso struck the floor, one leg tangled in the bed rails, the other twisted in the sheets. He kicked free, ignoring the pain that chopped him with its hundred dull axes.
He scrabbled across the floor like a paraplegic crab, Dr. Masutu in a hurry somewhere across the room, Renee shaking. The tiles were cool against his skin, and the thin hospital gown had come undone. The strings dangled down the backs of his legs, lit firecracker fuses. His whole body was heating up, swollen dynamite, a bilious volcano about to erupt.
He reached Renee and pulled her hands from her face. Her green eyes were drowned with red, her face twenty years older than he remembered it. She was a stranger, he was a stranger, and neither belonged to this world. Not where things like this happened.
Jacob grabbed the respirator tube with one hand and pulled it from his throat. A piece of skin broke free from his lip and clung to the clear plastic. If only he could tear himself away a piece at a time, like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse, and undo his own existence. But even if he vanished, Joshua would still be there, and then Joshua would have everything.
"Tell . . . me . . .," he said. "Where?"
She turned away and sobbed some words against the white surface of the wall.
He touched her hair, fought an urge to clamp his fingers around the strands and slam the truth out of her.
Her words were invisible bullets: "You said it wouldn't happen again."
Dr. Masutu moved somewhere above them, and someone else had entered the room. They may as well have been shadows on the wall, for all Jacob noticed or cared. Dr. Masutu shouted some sort of command, but Jacob obeyed only one master now and that was his naked need to know.
"Where is she?" He grabbed Renee's chin, forced her to face him. Hands grabbed at him, plowing new furrows of agony on his shoulders.
"Where do you think?" Renee's lips trembled, bitten through in spots, cheeks shiny with tears. She appeared to have escaped the fire without injury. At least any visible, physical hurt.
"She's in the hospital, isn't she?"
"You said nothing would ever happen to her."
"Please, Mr. Wells," came Dr. Masutu's voice as if from another land, one where reason prevailed and patients were expected to will themselves back to health.
Jacob elbowed the doctor away and climbed onto Renee, his left leg skewed limp and useless. Half of him wanted to crawl inside her and hide, to seek those soft places that had always offered him sanctuary. The other half wanted her to bleed, to suffer, to choke on her words. And that half was taking over.
He drew back his hand to slap her. Dr. Masutu tried to grab his wrist, but he squirmed free, losing another piece of skin in the process. He swept his hand toward her face and her eyes locked on his, not blinking against the blow. Inviting him. Daring him.
And he stopped.
She couldn't win. Not like this.
He collapsed into a fetal position, the ointment sticky against the tiles. The floor smelled of pine cleanser and bleach. Dr. Masutu gave directions to the nurse, and someone was mopping up fluid. Dr. Masutu knelt and took Jacob's arm. This time, Jacob didn't resist as the needle entered the inner crook of his elbow.
"Mattie is in the hospital, Jakie," Renee said.
Numbness crept up his arm, rushed into his head, and the drug massaged his brain with its icy fingers.
"On the bottom floor," Renee said, as Jacob slipped back into the grotto, surrendered once more to the black soothing liquid of unconsciousness.
He drowned at Renee's last words: "In the morgue."
CHAPTER THREE
Renee didn't know what was more terrible, burying an older child or burying an infant.
Mothers should not outlast their children. Mothers should go first, by any rule of the universe, under any decree of a caring God.
She wiped her eyes and the dishwater stung. She only had three plates, and they were all clean, but she washed them again anyway. Same with the coffee cup. She had scrubbed it until no hint of brown remained. If she rubbed the cup any harder, she would wear through its ceramic skin.
The apartment was devoid of any personality. Beige couch, matching armchair, solid oak table in the kitchenette with matching benches. Bare walls of antique white, a drab sea of gray carpet. Perfectly lifeless.
She was afraid she would never feel alive again. Sure, her lungs inflated and her heart pumped blood, her fingers and toes moved, her eyes blinked. But life was more than the sum of working parts.
Once, while making love to Jacob in their first year of marriage, she had the sensation of floating outside her body. She saw the two of them below, Jacob on his back, her with blonde hair dangling as they moved in a smooth and careless rhythm of hips.
"How happy and alive they look," the disembodied part of herself had thought. Even without her glasses, she could see with great clarity from her ethereal vantage point. A voyeuristic guilt tugged her back into her flesh and the sensation had passed, but not the notion that she was totally and absurdly right where God had wanted her to be.
She experienced that same discorporate sensation last year when the tractor was lowering Christine's coffin into the rectangular, red hollow of the Earth. There had been no pleasure in the sensation that time, only an aloof split, and then she rose like a polluted balloon. She swept over the scene on a September wind, cold, brittle, bound for the dead of winter. The cemetery stones jutted like broken icebergs, the greater part of their mystery unseen beneath the surface. The ancient maple by the steel gate had already lost its leaves and stood as helpless as the priest while the tractor's engine whined. Jacob stood in a dark wool coat, holding Mattie against him. Mattie wore black mittens, and their ends were damp because she had wiped her nose with them.
The tractor stripped a gear in its winch box and the coffin jerked, the chain from which it was suspended digging into the well-shined surface. Lawrence McMasters, the funeral director, kept his lips pursed in practiced, stoic sorrow as he tried to usher the grieving family away.
The Renee she'd left behind on the ground couldn't take her eyes from the coffin, which began to spin awkwardly two feet deep into its final resting place, knocking against the earthen sides of the grave and raining dirt. The tractor operator cursed and Father Rose crossed himself. Jacob called Renee's name and then Christine's, and Renee was grateful that the main service had been at St. Mary's and that the graveside service was restricted to immediate family.
A family whose membership was now reduced.
She witnessed the debacle from the distant safety of the sky, and remembered looking down at herself with pity, though part of her was glad to be momentarily free of the pain.
She had no delusions of being an angel. In that bleak stretch of impossible perspective, she saw herself as she really was: scared, fragile, clinging to the threads of a reality whose fabric threatened to unravel.
It wasn't at all how she viewed herself in the mirror, when vanity battled insecurity and the face was always familiar, plain, and far too old. That woman standing beside the oblong hole was an utter stranger, alone and futureless, unconnected to the flesh she had created and nurtured.
The escape was all too brief, and the wind pulled her spirit back into her body, or the illusion dissolved, or the dissociative episode of grief ended. And all that was left was the coffin swinging from the end of the chain like the tool of a brutal hypnotist.
Dishes. She plunged her hands back into the soapy water. The plates needed to sparkle like those in detergent commercials. Out, out, damned spots.
There was a knock on the door. She hadn't had a visitor in several days, when the last of her friends had paid their obligatory sympathies. Her best girlfriend Kim, who knew secrets about her that even Jacob hadn't plumbed, had resigned herself to the fact that Renee wanted to get through it on her own. A stubborn blonde, that's what Kim had called her, and if she ever needed a shoulder to cry on, give a call. Otherwise, here's a casserole and don't hurry about returning the dish.
Renee dried her hands on a towel that was wrapped around the refrigerator handle. She didn't want company right now. The house was a mess. No, "house" wasn't the right word, house had connotations of home, and what had once been her home was now a heap of dark, dead ashes. This apartment wasn't home, it was a temporary sleep chamber of the soul.
The knock came again, more insistent, authoritative. Be polite, she told herself. A good hostess. Mrs. Jacob Wells. She opened the door.
It was Kingsboro's fire chief, stocky, dressed in an informal uniform of dark trousers and blue shirt. Her red hair was tied back but the sun caught some stray strands that glowed like firecracker fuses. Renee wondered if her hair color had led the woman to her career choice, the result of some homeopathic psychological pull. Or maybe she'd suffered some long-ago disaster of her own that had compelled her into public service.
"Hello?"
Renee had forgotten the woman's name, since their first meeting had been in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. The Tragedy, with a capital T. That was how she referred to the night, both in forced conversation and in the hidden depths of her private thoughts. But now she saw the name above the badge, Davidson, and remembered they had spoken at some length, but couldn't recall a word either of them had said.
"Davidson, Kingsboro Fire Department. Sorry to bother you again."
"That's okay," Renee said, struggling to drive images of The Tragedy from her mind: the confusion as she rolled from the blankets, the stench of chemical smoke, the winking numerals of the alarm clock, Jacob's shouting, her attempt to follow him before the flames cut her off, the flight down the stairs, the descent into hell, the escape into night air, and then the continuing descent into a deeper hell.
"I'd like to ask you a few more questions. May I come in?"
Renee stood aside, and the sliding of the invisible mask over her face was an almost physical sensation. "Please excuse the mess. And wipe your feet."
Davidson looked down at her boots, which she had wiped on the outdoor welcome mat. She wiped again, then once more on the carpeted rug inside. Renee led Davidson to the couch and sat across from her in the armchair. The apartment seemed too small.
"First of all," Davidson said, "I'm sorry for your loss. If we'd had any chance for a rescue---"
"I know. I'm sure you guys did everything you could. Nobody's blaming you." Because Renee bore all the blame, except for that one dark sliver she allowed Jacob.
"I understand how difficult this is, but we need some more information to help us determine the cause."
"You already have my statement."
"Yes, ma'am. But that was made in what we like to call 'the heat of the moment.'" She smiled, but the expression on Renee's face made it fade fast. Davidson's voice shifted into an official monotone. "People sometimes remember things later, after they've settled their minds a little bit. Could you please go over the sequence of events one more time?"
Renee closed her eyes and tried to separate the actual events from her nightmares of the past two weeks. The reality and the nightmare had fused into one giant hell storm, a series of flickering images that seared her psyche and hot-wired her nerves. "I woke up," she said finally. "And Jake was sitting on the edge of the bed."
"Are you sure? You didn't wake up first and then wake him up?"
"No. I'm a heavy sleeper---" Renee rubbed at her swollen eyelids. "I mean, I used to be a heavy sleeper. Jake always had to poke me in the ribs to get me to stop snoring. Or so he says. I'm still not convinced that I snore, and I challenged him to make a tape recording to prove it. Seems unladylike somehow, breathing through your nose like a lumberjack in a cartoon."
Davidson nodded, and Renee knew she was babbling, but the act of recollection had pushed her to the dangerous cliff edge, the wind was blowing, the abyss was black and deep, and her balance wasn't what it should be. Renee rushed on, afraid that if she paused, she would go back to that scary place inside that had beckoned her with the promise of isolation and safety.
"I woke up and I looked at the clock because I thought it was morning and time to get Mattie ready for school. I feel it's a wife's duty to have breakfast on the table, get the family off to a good start. That's our deal, Jake works and I take care of the house. I mean, nothing personal, you being a woman in a man's job, that must be hard, especially here in the mountains where everybody's so conservative."
That almost made Davidson flinch, but her firewall face kept its grim countenance. "It's tough enough being a woman no matter what," she said.
"When Jake woke me up, I smelled smoke, and of course I thought of Mattie first thing. I yelled at Jake, but he told me to stay, he'd take care of her. We practiced, of course. We had fire drills and we put those little child ID stickers on the window and we had one of those rope ladders under the bed. Everything you're supposed to do. But the real thing is never like a drill, and I don't think you could ever practice the way it really happens. But I guess you know that better than anybody.
"I followed Jake to the door, even though he told me to stay, because I usually obey him, but I was half-asleep and confused and then the smoke made me dizzy. I was about to go into the hallway when Jacob screamed at me and slammed the door, and I trusted him to save Mattie---"
Renee's throat caught for the first time, breaking the unthinking stream of words. The fire chief waited, making no gesture of sympathy. Chapped, coarse hands, ones comfortable around an axe handle. And a wet blade of grass clung to the toe of her boot. Lying was easier now. Renee sniffed and continued.
"I waited for maybe a minute, then put my hand on the door. It was hot, and I remembered what they say about fire needing air to breathe. The alarm was going crazy---"
"Excuse me. Did your husband wake you up, or did the alarm?"
Renee shook her head. In the nightmare, the alarm was blasting like a freighter's fog horn and Jacob had the blanket over her head, pulling it tight, cutting off her air and muffling her screams. "I think the alarm was already going. But it had gone off before, like when Jacob stayed up late and burned some toast or something, and the sound didn't wake me up right away. It sort of turned into whatever I was dreaming and became a part of it. I told you I was a heavy sleeper. Jacob says I ought to get tested for sleep apnea, because that can kill you."
"Okay. You're standing at the door waiting for your husband to tell you when to come out?"
"Yeah. I think he told me to jump out the window, but we had the fire ladder under Mattie's bed. When we practiced, we all met in Mattie's room and then climbed out her window, so I thought maybe the fire wasn't too bad yet, he was going to get everything ready, then take Mattie down and come back for me. I couldn't see any fire, just the smoke, so I didn't know what it was like out there."
"Did you see flames before your husband closed the door? Out in the hall, I mean?"
"I saw a reflection of light in the dresser mirror, right before I stood up. I was still in bed and barely awake. I couldn't tell if the reflection was the fire or if Jacob had turned on the hall light or something. He yelled at me to call 9-1-1 and I tried to find my glasses and couldn't, so I punched in the numbers from memory. I must have got it wrong the first time because I had to try again."
"But you looked at the clock?"
"Yeah. It was one something, but I didn't have my glasses on, so I thought the first two numerals were a 'seven,' which is why I thought it might be morning. That's another thing that makes it confusing when I wake up, because my eyesight is really bad without my glasses. I can barely even recognize myself in the mirror without them."
"How long did you wait at the bedroom door?"
"Maybe two more minutes, then I heard something crackling and I guess something downstairs fell over, because there was a loud bang and that's when I first started getting really worried. I was wide awake by then."
"We believe the fire started downstairs," Davidson said. "The sliding glass door was open, and a couple of the kitchen windows. The fire was able to get a good rolling start with a cross-draft like that. It probably had eaten up half the downstairs before the smoke got thick enough to set off the fire detectors upstairs. Tell me, was it usual for you folks to leave the sliding glass door open?"
"That's Jacob again. He's restless, he sometimes gets up in the middle of the night and works downstairs. He makes a snack and gets on the computer and sometimes he might be gone half the night. I hardly notice, because I'm a heavy sleeper. But he likes fresh air, and this is a safe neighborhood."
Renee paused, reminded by Davidson's stare that she and Jacob and Mattie no longer lived in the house on Elk Avenue. She looked around at the pale walls of her new lifeless life.
"Are you sure Jacob woke you up? Was he in the bed when you first heard the alarm?"
"Yeah. That's what he told me. And I can see it plain as day, him sitting up with his back to me, the streetlight coming through the curtains just a little, and then he ran and threw on his robe and went out the door, and I was just starting to get out of bed. And I could hear the alarm, I remember that, and then I reached on the bedside table for my glasses but they must have fallen to the floor."
"So you found them, because I remember you had them on when we arrived."
"No, that was my extra pair. People with normal vision don't know what it's like, but I could hardly find my way out the door. Then when I finally heard Jacob yell at me, and yell Mattie's name, I opened the door and all I could see was a blur of yellow and red flames and black smoke and the house looked like it was caving in and Jacob told me to run, he'd get Mattie and meet me outside. All I could think of was to get down the stairs, fast, but I should have jumped out the window because the downstairs was one big fire and the smoke was hurting me and I was dizzy, but I was lucky I went when I did because I just made it out the sliding glass door when it sounded like the floor collapsed."
"Was the sliding glass door open when you went downstairs, or did you have to open it?"
Renee appraised the squat, redheaded woman. What right did she have to act suspicious, play macho, barge in and dance on Mattie's grave? Davidson had probably watched too many forensic crime shows on television, and now an accident could never be just an accident. Somebody always had to have something to hide.
"It was open," Renee said. "You already said that."
Davidson nodded again, the stub of head dipping, the facial features as inflexible as a rubber fright mask. "That's right. I forgot. I'd better write all this down."
The fire chief leaned forward and pulled a small composition pad from her back pocket. A tiny scrap of paper fell from the wire rings of the pad. Renee stared at the scrap, which fluttered to a rest beside Davidson's left foot. She almost leaned over and picked it up, but didn't want to come near the fire chief's leg.
"So you're down the stairs and outside," Davidson said, marking in the pad. "Then what?"
"I ran into the yard and looked up at Mattie's window. I couldn't see anything, and by then the fire was too hot for me to go back inside. I ran to the car---"
"There were two cars in the driveway. Was yours the SUV or the Subaru sedan?"
"Subaru. I grabbed my purse---"
"Your purse. You leave your purse in an unlocked car?"
"It's a safe neighborhood, like I told you. And I hardly ever carry much money. But I figured I needed my glasses or I'd be useless, I wouldn't be able to help Jacob and Mattie when they came out through the window. I carry an extra pair in my purse."
"Did you see anything unusual?"
"Besides the house on fire?"
Davidson's lips pressed together like those of a meditating toad. "Please, Mrs. Wells. I know this is difficult, but I'm only doing my job. Did you see anyone around?"
"No. Some of the lights came on in the houses down the street and I believe some dogs were barking. But all I can remember is the sound of the fire, the wood snapping and the walls creaking and the glass breaking. Then I started screaming and the scream turned into a siren and you guys showed up and I was scared because Jacob should have been out by then. The roof caved in a little and the firemen were beating on the front door with axes and I think I went crazy because all I could do was scream and Jacob and Mattie still didn't come out and they still didn't come out and they're still in there."
Renee realized she'd forgotten Davidson and found herself staring at the wall as if a film of the event had been projected there.
Davidson stood up, folded her pad and tucked it away. "I'm sorry, ma'am. This is the hardest part of the job, believe me. I'll let you know if we need anything else."
Renee glanced at the scrap of paper and followed the fire chief to the door. Davidson stood on the porch a moment, looking out over the mountain ridges. "She's home with the Lord, Mrs. Wells. It was a hard way to get there, but the getting there is the main thing."
Renee nodded, eyes bleary, wanting the awkward moment to end. Catholicism had failed her when she needed faith the most. She'd viewed Mattie's death through the lenses of a dozen philosophies and religions, yet all of them blurred into the same dead end. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, go toward the light, ride the karmic wheel, take the stairway to heaven. None of them made sense. And none of them lessened the pain.
She closed the door and went to retrieve the tiny scrap of paper from the floor, putting what she had of a home into perfect order.
CHAPTER FOUR
Littlejohn Hospital lay on the edge of town, the shining bridge between Kingsboro's urban future and its rural past. A shopping center and cluster of medical complexes were islands in the sea of asphalt leading up to the front entrance, while a cow pasture sprawled to the rear, waiting for the right developer to come along. In the street three stories below Jacob's room, Memorial Day traffic hissed in pointless conflict. Someone in the hall spat a tubercular laugh full of fatalistic cheer.
Jacob sat up and stared at the black screen of the television. The tubes were gone now and the burns had mostly healed, though portions of his body still received twice-daily applications of silvadene ointment. He was taking multiple courses of antibiotics, and the worst was over, according to Dr. Masutu. But the doctor was an optimist. The worst had only just begun.
Jacob looked at the tray on the table beside him. A fly landed on the scrambled eggs and tracked across the rubbery yellow surface. As a toddler, Mattie had called them "home flies," a cute corruption of the phrase "house flies." He watched the fly reach the tar pit of pancake syrup. It struggled, broke free, cut a lazy circle in the air, then lit again in the same sticky spot.
Renee entered the room. "Knock, knock."
Jacob closed his eyes and sank against the pillows. The darkness behind his eyelids was far too inviting.
"I hear you'll be going home in a few days," she said.
"Home," he said.
"You know what I mean."
"The wonderful Dr. Masutu explained the formula to me. One week of hospitalization for every ten percent of body burn."
"Then you should have been released last week."
"The burns feel better," he lied. "They're trying to fix the stuff that's broken on the inside."
"I took an apartment. The insurance company gave me some money until they sort things out. Donald set me up with one. I tried to pay but he said M & W would absorb it, since you own half of it."
"Which apartments?"
"Ivy Terrace."
"Nice. We only opened them last year."
"I didn't know you built them."
"Didn't build them, really. I got a commission on the land sale, subdivided a few lots, went in as a silent partner. M & W just collects the rent."
"I got a two-bedroom unit," she said, as relieved as he to avoid conversation. She opened a National Geographic.
Jacob let his gaze crawl back to the window. He'd trusted his partner, Donald Meekins, to take care of her until he got out. Donald had phoned his hospital room but Jacob had refused to talk to him. He was afraid of what he might say. The cash flow would be tight for a couple of months, but at least they had insurance.
He counted the houses on the hillside opposite the hospital. There were at least two good-sized tracts that were prime spots for development. With Kingsboro Hospital opening a new cancer wing and cardiac care facility, more wealthy seniors would be moving from Florida and New York to the North Carolina mountains. Those seniors needed homes, preferably close to health care services. M & W had built a country club outside of town, complete with an eighteen-hole golf course, but those homes had all been sold. New homes were needed for all the future cancer victims. Abnormal growth was a growth industry.
"It's too quiet in here," Renee said.
He heard a click and the television came on. One of those stupid morning shows, Early NBC or ABC Sunrise or whatever. He opened his eyes. At least he could focus on the screen instead of Renee. A man in a blue suit was interviewing a woman who kept pulling at the hem of her short skirt, wanting to show off her legs while still projecting wholesomeness and modesty. Cut.
"I really like this commercial," he said. On the screen, a lizard spoke in an Australian accent, trying to entice the viewer into buying a particular brand of car insurance.
"About the insurance," she said, as if the commercial had triggered an opportunity to bring up the subject. "I didn't want to do too much without you. But I needed a roof over my head."
"She was worth a lot, wasn't she?"
"You bastard. Don't start that again. We're going to have to deal with some things, and we may as well be civil about it."
"The money, you mean."
"Shut up. All I'm asking is that you sign the papers and let's get on with our lives. Whatever we can salvage, that is."
"We probably saved a ton on the cremation, since the job was half-done when you turned the body over to the aftercare vultures."
"I had to make arrangements. I couldn't wait---"
"---for me to attend my own daughter's funeral?"
Renee jabbed at the television remote and muted the sound. Jacob watched the silent interview guest fighting her hem line. The woman's knees were a little too knobby for his taste. Back when he had taste, that was. He turned his attention to the fly in the syrup.
Wasn't there a saying about the fly in the ointment? Dr. Masutu's tranquilizer worked miracles, freed his mind to explore the foolish. Jacob had stopped fighting, and the injections had been replaced with twice-daily pills. Diazepam. The quicker-picker-upper.
Or the easier-to-forgetter.
Or the don't-give-a-damner.
"Jake, we're going to have to talk about it."
"There's nothing left to talk about."
"There's plenty."
"There's nothing. It's all gone."
"No. There's still us."
"There's no more 'us.' There's just you and me. Or maybe just you."
"Don't talk like that. You've always despised failure. That's not the Wells way."
"I've had a lot of time to think. Hospitals are good for that, maybe even better than prisons." Jacob pulled the straw from his milk carton and poked it into the syrup near the fly. The fly's wings beat frantically.
"I know this is terrible. But maybe we can get through it together. Start over."
"The way we did after Christine? You saw how that one turned out."
Renee finally sat, in the oak and mauve vinyl chair near the window. The sun had grown a shade more yellow outside, rising above the fog that hazed the horizon. In the old world, the happy distant past, Jacob would be at his desk at the M & W office, talking on the phone, cutting deals, lining up subcontractors. Or else out on the job site, looking at blueprints as a bulldozer ripped brown gashes in the mountainside.
Developing.
That was an interesting word, with several connotations. Developers made things happen. But development was also the term for a baby's trek through the cycle, from microscopic fertilized egg to alien peanut creature to bawling, squealing reality.
"Funny, isn't it?" he said. "The kids were born in this hospital."
"That's not so funny."
"Think about it. They took their first breaths from this very same air. The same sick air." He waved the hand that held the straw and the fly finally broke free and arced across the room like a crippled bomber returning from a death run.
The door swung open. A nurse came in, a male with a sour expression and two days of stubble. He stared at Renee as if she were the patient, then wiped his palms against his hospital blues and slipped on rubber gloves. He squeezed ointment from a tube and rubbed it softly into the skin of Jacob's arms.
"You're looking good, my man," the nurse said. His ID nameplate read "Steve Poccora" and his picture beneath it was clean-shaven and smiling. The smile looked as if it had been computer-generated in a photo manipulation program.
"The doctor says I'm getting better every minute," Jacob said.
"Aren't we all?" Poccora said. Then, to Renee, "We'll have him home to you in no time."
"No hurry," Renee said.
Poccora started to grin at the joke, sensed the coldness in the room for the first time, then rubbed the ointment faster. Jacob barely felt the contact. The skin had roughened and much of the damaged layer had sloughed off. He was new in a way, pink as a baby, slick as a snake after molting.
If only he could shed his soul as easily. He'd read that the body completely remade itself every seven years as cells died and were replaced. That meant he'd been a different man when Mattie was born. A better man.
Less like Joshua.
"How's the appetite?" the nurse asked.
"Crazy," Jacob said. "Renee smuggled me in two buckets of the Colonel's finest."
"That's why you didn't like the cafeteria grub." Steve Poccora moved the rolling table with the food tray to the corner of the room. "You didn't touch it. Figured you'd be used to it by now."
"Mez compliments au chef," Jacob said in mutilated French.
The nurse took his blood pressure and pulse, wrote numbers on a chart. "Your diastolic's a little high, but nothing to be worried about."
"Do I look like I'm worried?" Jacob asked.
"He's not the worrying type," Renee said. "I do that for both of us."
Poccora looked from one to the other, as if deciding not to be the birdie in their badminton game. "Yell if you need anything."
"'Scream' is more likely." On the television, the talk show host had a parrot perched on his shoulder. The bird's trainer stood nearby, holding up a snack food. The host looked nervous, as if he feared an embarrassing episode involving droppings. The bird gave a soundless squawk, warming up for a ribald wisecrack.
Poccora picked up the food tray. "I hate parrots," he said, looking at the television. "They always get to cut you down, but you can't make a snappy comeback. They're too dumb to get it. Like talking to a ventriloquist's dummy."
"The worst ones are the dummies who look just like the ventriloquist," Jacob said. "They let their evil side out."
"Hey, you try being nice when some guy has his hand shoved up your rectum," Poccora said.
"They call that a 'prostate exam.'"
The nurse started to laugh, then gave up. He walked between them with the food tray, paused at the door. "You sure you don't want any of these pancakes?"
Jacob looked around the room for the fly. "No, Steve. They're all yours."
Steve dipped a finger into the syrup and pretended to lick it. "Hate to see good food go to waste. But this is no good. I know the infections that go through this place."
He left, and the forced humor shifted back to unbearable tension.
"Where do we start?" Renee asked after twenty seconds of silence.
"Please. You're starting to sound like my old shrinks." He fumbled for the remote, wanting to punch up the volume.
"Let's start at the beginning, then."
"The beginning. My first big mistake."
"Jake, don't do this."
"You're the one who wants it to be over. Isn't that what you've wanted all along? It's just pathetic that you needed this kind of excuse to get your nerve up." The tears were hot in his eyes, burning with the memory of the fire and all the rest of it.
His thumb pressed the volume button. Renee moved forward with angry speed and slapped the remote from his hand. He stared at the silent television as its colors blurred in his watery vision.
"Talk to me, you bastard," she said.
His throat was tight, rasped raw from the ventilator tube that had been stuffed into his lungs. He tried to convince himself that the fire had damaged him, taken the soft words from his tongue, leaving a handful of ash in the cavity where his heart used to beat. Part of him wished he had died in the fire. Part of him had died in the fire. But not the right part, the half that needed killing.
Renee's breath was on his cheek, but he was miles away, in the dark, searching for that cool grotto that the drugs carved in the stony recesses of his skull.
"You can't keep your eyes closed forever."
"Long enough."
"That won't make it go away. We've got to deal with it. You can't crawl into your shell and pretend it never happened."
"Take the money. It doesn't matter."
"Donald called me. He wanted to know when you'll be ready to go back to work.""I'm through." And he was. M & W Ventures, Inc., had built ten apartment complexes, a half-dozen subdivisions, three shopping centers, the country club, and a pair of chain motels. That qualified as a life's work, didn't it? Even for the son of Warren Wells. Maybe Donald Meekins could take the oversize prop scissors they used for ceremonial ribbon cuttings and snip the W off the corporation's name.
Jacob had made his mark on the world. A reputation you could take to the bank. Something you could use for collateral.
He could lose everything, his kids, his wife, his soul, but still those buildings would stand, a testament to willpower and vision. Asphalt to pave his way to a better future. Steel bones, concrete flesh, and a blueprint for his soul. Material evidence for Judgment Day, a devil's bargain.
"You're not through," Renee said. "I won't let you be through."
He wondered how much of it had been for her. Where did spousal support cross the line into need, what separated encouragement from the shrewish demand for perfection and achievement? Was it his own insecurity that drove him, or was her relentless desire for his success the whip that kept him in a lather? Was she the ventriloquist whose hand had guided him through his lockstep sleepwalk of greed?
No. She didn't deserve that much credit. Where he'd been, where he was going, were decisions shaped in the forge of his guts. He could blame other people, and that was fast becoming his latest survival tactic, but the justifications always rang hollow.
In the end, it comes down to you and the stranger in the mirror.
"Leave me," he said.
"It's not going away, even if I do."
Jacob smiled. The movement was painful to his chapped lips. "It's already gone." He felt the thump on his chest from the weight of the remote control she had tossed there.
"You and your fucking martyr act," she said. "As if you're the only one who has to suffer."
"I'll give you the damned divorce. Anything you want. The money, the cars, the house . . ."
The house. Which was nothing but a heap of charcoal in one of Kingsboro's squarest subdivisions.
"And the kids," he said, his voice taking on a shrill giddiness. "You can have the kids. No arguments from me. I don't even want visitation rights."
"Jakie."
He clenched the sheet with both hands, tried to squeeze juice from it, pressed his teeth together until his temples ached.
"Calm down. You're scaring me." She moved to the head of the bed, reaching for the button that would signal the nurse's desk.
"You should be scared."
"Do you think this is any easier for me?"
Jacob looked at her, the green eyes made large by her lenses. He was supposed to love this woman. He knew it, something strong tugged the inside of his chest, a deep memory turned over in the grave of his sleeping heart. How could something so sure and real have turned into this? How could an eternal bond dissolve like mist exposed to the bright glare of morning?
"I'm sorry," he said. That stupid, useless word crawled out of his dry mouth. He couldn't stop it. The response was automatic. He'd said that word so often in the past ten months.
"This is impossible," she said. She pulled her purse to her lap, opened it, took out a pair of clip-on sunglasses, and flipped the dark lenses over her eyes. Jacob was glad her eyes were gone. Now he could look at her fully.
"There's something else," she said. She brought a crumpled envelope from the purse. "I guess you wanted to get in one last little twist of the knife."
"What are you talking about?"
Renee fished a note from the envelope and read it. "'Hope you liked the housewarming present. Yours always, J.'"
Jacob's stomach became a great claw clutching at his other abdominal organs. "Where did you get that?"
"I found it in my car. I guess you figured it wouldn't burn since I was parked on the street that night."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"It's your handwriting, Jake. Don't play any more games. Please." A solitary tear slid from beneath the black curve of one plastic lens.
"I still don't know what you're talking about."
"The fire, Jake. The investigators think it might have been arson."
"I know. They talked to me about it last week. I told them I don't know why anybody would want to set fire to our house. There's nothing special about it. It's not even the best one on the block."
"But this note---" Her voice broke and all she could do was hold the beige paper in the air before her face.
"---is nothing," Jake said, his pulse like a frantic clock ticking against his eardrums, a timer for an explosion. "Throw it away."
"It's your handwriting. And the insurance---"
"Don't talk crazy, honey."
"I'm just confused. None of it makes sense. And Mattie . . . Oh, Jake." She squeezed the paper into a ball, stood so fast that her purse fell and scattered its contents across the antiseptic floor. She leaned over him and put her head gently on his chest.
He reached out a wounded hand and stroked her hair. "Shh. It's going to be okay. I promise."
"Please don't let it end like this," she said, her sobs making the narrow hospital bed shake.
"Everything's going to be good as new," he said, his heart jumping so much he was sure she could feel it through the thin cotton of his hospital gown. "Trust me. I'm not going to let anyone take you away from me."
Especially Joshua. No, he wouldn't let Joshua win this time. Not again. Not like always.
As he spoke soothing words and petted her with one hand, his other hand eased across her body to the paper in her fist. He tugged gently and she let go. He glanced at it, saw the cursive letters leaning to the left. Familiar handwriting. He tucked the paper underneath his sheet, secretly, and let her finish crying.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jacob Wells was released from the hospital on May twenty-ninth.
Steve Poccora wheeled him from his room to the elevator on the day of his release. Jacob insisted he was fine, but Poccora said it was hospital policy to treat everybody like infirms until they reached the door.
"After that, it's your business," Poccora said. "Trip and break your leg, for all I care. But we can't have you suing us for something that happens on the inside."
Jacob couldn't tell if the nurse was joking. So he sat in the wheelchair and watched the elevator lights blink as they passed each floor down to ground level. The elevator opened and a man Jacob recognized from the Chamber of Commerce stepped on with a bouquet of pink roses, tulips, and Queen Anne's lace. Jacob couldn't recall the man's name, though he had the thick neck and jowly, red complexion of a former football player. Probably someone in masonry supplies.
"Jacob," the man said, flashing his money smile. "How's it going? You doing okay?"
"Never been better."
The smile faded. "Listen, sorry to hear about . . . you know."
"Don't mention it."
"I've been praying for you."
"That helps. Thanks."
The man pointed to the flowers. "For my wife. She's in maternity. We just had our third."
Jacob nodded, staring past him at the hospital lobby, the wax sheen of the industrial tiles, the patient information desk staffed by an old lady with pince-nez glasses. Poccora wheeled him out of the elevator and the doors closed with a soft hiss, cutting off the smell of the flowers.
"Dawson," Jacob said.
"Huh?" Poccora said.
"The man's name was Dawson. You ever do that, draw a blank when you're talking to somebody, then it pops right into your head later?"
"No, man. I think you've been in here too long."
They reached the glass entrance and Poccora stopped the wheelchair. Jacob sat looking at the world outside, a changed world, a lesser world.
"End of the ride," Poccora said.
"Yeah," Jacob said.
"Your wife picking you up?"
"Yeah. She's right outside. I phoned her from the room."
"Good. You two ought to work things out. Take care of each other. Maybe you can have another kid someday."
Jacob stood. Though he had been walking the halls for the last few days, his legs were cotton candy. He waved to Poccora and went through the exit, wondering how much of himself he'd left in the hospital. The outdoors was welcome after the stale, recycled indoor air, but it somehow left an aftertaste of smoke on his tongue.
The mountains were thick and bright green with new growth and a late spring rain had washed the dust from the streets. Kingsboro had only two cab companies, each of those operated by solitary drivers who kept their own hours. Jacob could have called Donald, or any one of half a dozen friends and business associates, but the walk seemed a worthwhile challenge after the weeks spent in the hospital bed. Besides, a borrowed ride might corner him into conversation.
The talk would go to banal matters such as whether the Atlanta Braves would finally do it this year or how the late snows had affected the golf course at the country club. Anything except what Renee had called "the eighty-ton elephant in the living room." Jacob's loss. Or plural losses, depending on how deep into personal history the friend was willing to go. He never wanted to hear the words "I'm sorry" again.
The burns had healed better than he deserved. The skin was still a little shiny and tight, but with no permanent scarring. Dr. Masutu said he was lucky. If the house hadn't collapsed and spat him out when it did, the carbon monoxide might have finished him off. The doctor had tried to convince him that his daughter had been doomed no matter what Jacob had done, but Jacob didn't believe it.
He'd originally considered going by the office, sitting behind his desk and seeing if M & W Ventures still held any appeal at all. But there were too many reminders, too many photographs. His desk was just another piece of a broken past. He headed down the sidewalk, away from downtown. He had no more destinations, only a long journey away from places he had known.
On the eastern side of town, Kingsboro was a schizophrenic mix of land uses. Medical offices were clustered around the hospital like brick vultures around carrion, while some old farmhouses sat back from the road behind them, their gardens showing the first green shoots of corn and potatoes. A nearby gas station had pumps that didn't accept credit cards and its lot was a black crumble of concrete, yet a glossy sign heralded the modern British energy conglomerate that had taken over. A row of faded apartments slewed up a slight rise of earth beyond the hospital, some of the windows held together with masking tape. Soaring above those flat rooftops was a glistening, seven-story Holiday Inn.
His father had built the Holiday Inn. It was Warren Wells' last attempt at an Appalachian Tower of Babel before his death. Jacob averted his eyes from the inn, the tallest building on the landscape. But his father touched something on every horizon, from the community arts center along the highway to the recreation fields in the plains along the river that bore the Wells name. Warren Wells had built too much of this town, his civic stench lingering in a hundred corridors. Jacob had succumbed to the allure of following in those loud footsteps.
Being born here was enough of a mistake, and being born who he was made it even worse. But he'd compounded it by returning. He had once thought his escape was complete. Then along came Renee with her drive for him to succeed, and she pushed him to the only territory where victories mattered, where his accomplishments had a measuring stick. Victory from the ground up.
Now Kingsboro was where he buried his dead.
After a mile, the sidewalk ended and he walked along the clumped grass that edged the road. His breath was hard and cold and his heart beat too rapidly, but he forced his feet forward. Cars roared past, pickup trucks loaded with lumber and sewer pipes, soccer dads in SUV's, little old ladies on their way to the hairdresser, cable television techs in their long vans. Something purred in Jacob's jacket pocket. He stuck his hand in the pocket, pulled out the cell phone, and stared at it as if it were an alien artifact. Renee must have brought the jacket to the hospital, the phone planted as a ploy to bring him back around to his old self.
Jacob the developer, the builder, the one who carried the bloodline. Jacob the upstanding citizen and loving husband. Jacob, father of two---
He turned and hurled the phone as far as he could, wrenching his shoulder with the effort. The small, silver rectangle spun end over end, disappearing into a tall thicket of briars and scrub hemlock. A warped wall made of wooden slats marked the edge of a mobile home park behind the weeds. A hand-painted sign in English and Spanish offered weekly rentals, cash only. Crumpled beer cans and cellophane food wrappers clung to the weeds. This place was in dire need of a bulldozer, a cosmic clean sweep.
He walked on, the traffic thinning, his head throbbing under the midmorning sun. The birds had started their journey north, and species the likes of which he'd rarely seen passed overhead or twittered from pine branches. The land gave way to clusters of small houses, old but neatly kept, owned by people whose ancestors had bartered away the property that had made outsiders wealthy. Jacob was tired and his legs weak from lack of use, but he kept moving in a pitiful yearning for escape.
But he knew that, no matter how fast or how far he fled, he couldn't outrun himself.
A car came growling up behind him, slowed, passed. He glanced at its dented green flanks and immediately assigned its driver to the lower class. It was a 1970s family car, a gas-swigging chunk of Chevrolet steel that only a rural American could drive without shame. The windows were tinted so he couldn't match a face to such a metal monstrosity.
The car slowed again, its brake lights blinking twenty feet ahead of Jacob. The car idled in a throaty rasp of rusted muffler. Jacob kept walking. He moved past the car, looking up the road, wondering where all the traffic had gone. Even along this residential stretch beyond the town limits, there were too few roads to avoid a steady stream of vehicles.
The Chevy's engine accelerated and its exhaust hung on the damp air. The car eased up alongside Jacob again, and sweat crept beneath his eyes and scalp line. He glanced toward the car, not turning his head, and saw only his own reflection in the tinted passenger window. The car kept pace with Jacob, and he fought the urge to break into a run.
Maybe this was a robbery set-up. The crime rate was low in Kingsboro, but people were people everywhere and occasionally someone grew desperate. Jacob was dressed in a tailor-cut suit, not the kind of person usually seen on the side of a road. He was out of his element, in a place he didn't belong, pale and trembling due to his long recovery. The predators of every species had a knack for culling the weak, picking out the perfect victims.
He walked faster, eyes shifting over to the Chevy. Its engine was the only sound in that tight stretch of valley. Even the birds had vanished. The road curved out of sight in both directions, behind hills turning green with spring. The trailer park was around the bend in its own clutter. One lone farmhouse was visible in a carved pocket of the woods, but it appeared uninhabited, shutters drawn and driveway empty, the doors of its adjacent barn bolted and locked. A hand-painted "For Sale" sign was staked in the scraggly yard.
The car scooted ahead, then paused and idled until he caught up to it.
If only he had the cell phone. Even if he called for help, though, what would he tell the police? He was being stalked by a car? They couldn't arrive in time to help him anyway. He could leave the side of the road, cut over the ditch, and head between the trees. But the car had issued no overt threat, the driver holding a steady course, not veering from between the lines. The only menace was in its slow crawl, though its motor grumbled in an imagined hunger.
A robber, that's all. Nothing worse.
Jacob increased his pace to just short of a jog. Still the car remained alongside him. He didn't have a watch, but the car must have followed him for at least thirty seconds. Surely another car would have come by during that time. It was as if the road had been blocked off at each end of the mountain valley so this showdown could be staged in private.
His lungs were taut and aching, his legs about to collapse and fold. He was too out of shape. Even if he ran, the driver would have no trouble chasing him down. Fighting was out of the question. How do you fight four tons of blind steel?
You know it's him.
Maybe someone was only trying to scare him. Some of his business competitors accused him of dirty tricks, such as planting money among members of the county planning board whenever he had a variance request coming up. He'd had disputes with a few contractors, and a couple of times he had refused to pay when work wasn't done to specifications. He had an inside track on property that had been foreclosed through mortgage defaults or tax liens, and his deals had put more than one family out on the street, though they always had it coming. Was it his fault that some people didn't pay their bills on time?
Just being a Wells was plenty enough reason to be a target. These mountain people had long memories, and Warren Wells had shafted a dozen men. In some cases, he'd also shafted their wives, in a crueler but less economically damaging way. Jacob had inherited miles of built-up resentment along with the numerous tracts of commercial property.
The driver of the green car could be anybody. Someone he knew in high school? Or someone who knew Joshua? Some people still confused him with his brother, and Joshua had made plenty of enemies. Joshua, though, had been smart enough to leave town and never look back.
It's anybody. Not him.
Jacob's legs refused his command for them to move faster, and he could hardly muster the energy for another step. So he stopped, bent over slightly to catch his breath, and turned to the passenger side of the car. He reached out as if to open the door.
The Chevrolet groaned, its engine racing, and the rear wheels spun on the asphalt. The warm smell of rubber and burnt oil assaulted Jacob's nose. The car rocketed away, its tires screaming and the rear end fishtailing. The back windshield was tinted, a small Rebel flag decal on its lower left corner. One brake light was broken and dangled by wires above the peeling chrome bumper. The car accelerated around the curve before he could read the muddied tag number, but its orange, green, and white color scheme indicated Tennessee plates.
The car careened up the valley, pistons whining in rage, moving much too fast for the winding road. The backfire echoed off the hills, fading as the car negotiated deeper into the country until it disappeared from hearing. In the sudden silence, Jacob felt the pounding of his pulse against his eardrums. Other sounds filled the void---birds in the forest, a small airplane lost against the sky, a distant dog barking in territorial defense.
Jacob crouched, limp from terror. A chill enveloped him. He pulled his jacket more tightly around him and stared at the road ahead, then back. He didn't know where he was. How had he gotten out here on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere?
Not again.
He hadn't experienced a fugue state since his teens, when Joshua was playing his cruel tricks. The fugues were a protective mechanism, one of the shrinks had assured him. Nothing serious, certainly nothing that would put him in a rubber room. It was a reaction to extreme stress, that was all. Besides, that was long ago, and he didn't black out anymore.
Except, if you were suffering periods of forgetfulness, you wouldn't remember, would you?
Anything could have happened and you wouldn't know it.
A sound arose from the back side of the hill, the whisper of wheels on asphalt.
Jacob expected the green Chevy to come screaming around the curve, headlights glittering like a murderer's eyes, bumper bright in the sun. He had no strength to flee. He would only be able to stand and watch as its front grill loomed closer and then chewed him into its chrome jaws.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to pray. But prayer was a ritual, a practiced art, not an escape hatch for the lapsed and faithless. The whisper grew louder, but without the accompanying growl of an overdriven engine. It wasn't the Chevy.
He blinked as the pickup drove past. The vehicle slowed then backed up until it idled in the lane across from him. The driver's-side window descended, but even before Jacob recognized the dark, tousled head topped with its ever-present gray wool toboggan, he read the logo on the door: Smalley Construction.
Chick Smalley blew a frayed rope of cigarette smoke into the air, then said, "Mr. Wells, what you doing out in these parts? You break down or something?"
Smalley had done some subcontracting work for M & W Ventures. He had plumbing and electrical licenses and could also do drywall or roofing when sober. He never missed a deadline but neither did he miss a chance to fly fish when the mood struck him. He never lied about his preferences. If the fish were biting, he'd call the boss and tell him to go to hell for the morning. He'd work three times as hard in the afternoon to make it up, and that reputation kept him busy enough to make all the living he seemed to desire.
"Hi, Chick," Jacob said. He put his hands in his pockets so that Smalley wouldn't see them trembling. "Did you pass a car a minute ago, a junker Chevy with tinted windows?"
"Nope," Smalley said, looking in the ditch ahead as if expecting to see Jacob's wrecked vehicle. "You get runned off the road? Flat tire?"
"I was just---" Just what the hell was he doing out here? He couldn't explain the encounter with the Chevy and was afraid he'd sound like a lunatic if he tried. Already he doubted if the incident had even happened. But there were the skid marks, twin black snakes crawling away from him on the surface of the road.
"You're looking rough, Mr. Wells. You need a ride back to town?"
A car came around the curve, another behind it. Traffic had returned to normal. Whatever strange spell had descended upon the valley had lifted. Jacob felt foolish standing on the side of the road and he'd lost his appetite for directionless wandering. He hurried across the lane and climbed into the passenger side of the pickup.
Smalley put the truck in gear. "Just dump that stuff in the floor," he said, grinding out his cigarette and accelerating. Jacob pushed rags, a tape measure, a vial of plumber's putty, a caulking gun, and some ragged outdoors magazines aside to make room, then clutched the dashboard in a spasm of dizziness. It must have been the tobacco smoke, a reminder of his recent tragedy. Smoke would forever bring a longing ache, and fire would always take him back to that hellish night.
"Shit, Mr. Wells, you look white as a Confederate ghost. Want me to take you to the hospital?"
"No," Jacob yelled, more forcefully than he'd intended. "Take me ho---"
He had no home. The knowledge hit him like God's fist. He looked out the window at the trees blurring past, the varying shades of green as the vegetation juiced itself in preparation for summer. This was a hostile planet, a land of pain and strangeness. You could buy pieces of it, hold up deeds and titles, but in the end all you had was the dirt above you, the dirt that busted through your coffin and filled your mouth and lungs. In the end, you didn't own the land, it owned you, it sucked you under and crushed you and hugged you and smothered you with affection, its worms kissing you into slumber, its weight greater than the tonnage of guilt and fear and rage that you carried in your living flesh.
"Do you know where Ivy Terrace is?" he finally asked.
"Them apartments you built up on the west side?" Smalley peered at him as if deciding whether to go to the hospital after all.
"Yeah. Can you take me there?" He reached for his back pocket. "I'll pay you, of course."
"Oh, no, you don't. Work is work and favors is favors. Remember that next time somebody else needs a hand."
Jacob glanced in the side mirror, and for a moment thought he saw the green Chevy roaring up from behind. He wiped at his eyes.
"I heard about what happened," Smalley said, keeping his eyes on the road as the clusters of neighboring houses grew denser. Jacob hadn't realized how far he had walked. The sun had already started its downward slide toward afternoon.
"Hard to figure the ways of the Lord sometimes," Smalley said. He reached to a stained and frayed work coat beside him and pushed it across the seat toward Jacob. "The way I figure, He did plenty of suffering up on the cross, so we all get to do a little in our turn."
Jacob looked out the window, thinking of Mattie, remembering the way she had sat on his foot as a toddler and urged him to make it "giddy-up." What did Smalley know about suffering? He didn't have a family, or any responsibility. He had a fly rod in his shotgun rack and a truck bed full of scrap lumber and rusty tools. He had a nicotine habit and dirty nails.
Smalley fumbled in the folds of the coat, opening it so that Jacob could see the bottle. The amber liquid lay greasy and thick within the confines of the glass, rolling back and forth in waves with the motion of the truck. "But the Lord gave us means to ease our suffering. That's a real blessing, you ask me."
Jacob looked at the bottle, the slick brass cap, the brown label that suggested an easy afternoon on the plantation. He pictured himself showing up on Renee's doorstep half-drunk, an excuse to launch into an abusive rage.
No, not half. Jacob hadn't been half-drunk in over a decade.
"No, thanks," he said, more to himself than Smalley.
"Suit yourself. Say, you got any work coming up?"
Jacob didn't want to tell the man that M & W Ventures was done. Renee should be the first to know, followed by his partner. Maybe Donald would buy him out and keep the earth machines well fed, continue stacking bricks and laying pavement and raising monuments to progress and ego. Taking up the Wells mantle without benefit of the bloodline. "I've been out of touch," he said.
"Yeah. I reckon so."
They circled the back end of town, past the gray warehouses and boarded-up shops that lined the abandoned railroad. Jacob used to think of this section as a slum, acres and acres in need of a wrecking ball, an urban renewal project he had once calculated as a long-term investment. Turn the old textile mill into a mini-mall, charge outrageous rent for small shops whose proprietors could peddle "handcrafted" Appalachian baskets and quilts that were actually mass-produced by exploited labor in Taiwan. The consumer was only buying an emotion, after all. A mountain town back-street offered plenty of nostalgia for those who longed for better days that had never really existed.
For the first time, Jacob saw the beauty of the broken glass that sparkled in the dying sun. The ragweed that grew in clumps along the leaning chain-link fence had outlasted the concrete. The stinking brown creek, marred by oil runoff, carried away the dregs of growth. Here and there between the buildings, a honey locust made a reach for the sky, bristling with thorns and defiance.
Smalley shifted gears and turned up the hill onto a private drive. A wooden sign with a fieldstone base heralded "Ivy Terrace." The sign was landscaped, ringed with pine straw and non-native pansies. Nestled among the hardwood trees on the ridge were the apartments that Jacob had helped develop. More of his false ego, a mock testament to the ephemeral nature of ambition.
And behind one of those doors was Renee. Another mock testament.
"Stop," Jacob said.
Smalley glanced at him and eased in the clutch. When the truck slowed, Jacob pushed open the passenger door and eased to the ground. He reached in and pulled the bottle of liquor from its hiding place.
"A small blessing," Jacob said.
"Don't blame you none. Give me a holler if you got any work for me."
"I'll do that, Chick."
"I'll be praying for you."
"It can't hurt none."
Nothing could hurt, not anymore. Smalley turned the truck around and headed back toward town. Jacob tucked the bottle inside his coat and headed for the shrubs that had been part of a landscaping scheme he had once designed, never realizing until now the type of concealment it provided. He found a gap in the rhododendrons and crawled among the twisted branches. The space had been used before. Empty beer bottles, a condom wrapper, a mottled, crushed French fries container, and a sprinkling of cigarette butts marked it as the territory of the transient. Jacob instantly felt at home.
He twisted the metal cap from the liquor bottle and toasted the distant sky, which was barely visible through the thick, waxy leaves. "To our mutual suffering," he said.
The first taste was harsh and welcoming. The second was merely welcoming.
CHAPTER SIX
Renee cradled the phone against her ear. She'd chipped her fingernail polish opening a can of Tab. Sitting in an apartment she wasn't paying for, talking of money, made her lightheaded. Despite the wealth Jacob had accumulated early in their marriage, this money seemed unreal, almost sickening. "It's two million dollars, Kim."
"Holy crud," came her best friend's voice from the speaker. Kim worked as a technician at the hospital, testing blood samples. The sound of hospital business occasionally came through in the background, doctors being paged, carts rattling by, the ringing of nurses' bells.
"That doesn't make up for it. Not a bit."
"I know, honey. We've been through that. You don't have any more tears left to cry."
"I was the beneficiary. Jacob set it up that way. After Christine died, he insured the three of us for a million dollars each. Said that's how his father always did it."
"And you let him?"
"Well, it's the kind of thing you don't think about much. You can't let it weigh on you, that tragedy might strike again. I figured we'd used up more than our share with Christine."
"I know you guys are movers and shakers, but a million is a million, even with inflation. What are you guys going to do with the money?"
"That's just it. He's hiding from all this."
"Forget about him for a minute. What do you want?"
Renee looked at the urn on the mantel. She didn't want the ashes around as a constant reminder of The Tragedy. She carried around enough reminders inside her.
She'd hoped Jacob would pull himself together and get through his grieving process, decide with her what they should do with the ashes. It had been over two months and he still refused to have any contact with her. "I want Jake to be happy. That's all that's left for me, Kim."
"Your parents gone?"
"Yeah, they left last week. Dad's not doing too well. Said now he didn't have any grandchildren to spoil. Mom helped, but I can't talk to her about the heavy stuff."
"Well, I'm here whenever you need me."
Renee's throat caught and the tears welled up without warning. She stuck a finger behind her glasses and brushed at her eyelashes. "I can't do this much longer. I want Jake."
"Didn't he get weird after Christine?"
Renee's chest clenched around her heart. "Yeah. He went AWOL, but I was so focused on Mattie that I hardly noticed."
"He'll work it out in time. He'll see how much he needs you. You know what I've always said about men."
Renee barked a half-sob, half-laugh. "'They can't see the light because their heads are up their butts.'"
"In the meantime, you need to invest that money. What's done is done but you still have to live."
"I guess so."
"It's what Mattie would want."
"Sure."
"And, if worse comes to worse, you can always ditch Jacob and move in with me."
"You're not my type. You're too emotionally stable and your place is too messy."
"Yeah, that's always been my problem."
A shadow broke the sunlight that slanted through the curtains. Someone was outside her door. Her apartment, like all the others at Ivy Terrace, had a private entrance. The top stories were accessed by a shared set of stairs, but each had its own deck. She waited for a knock but none came. It must have been an errant courier.
"I'd better be getting back to work," Kim said, tugging Renee back to the phone.
"Things crazy at the lab?"
"You know how blood is. People just can't seem to live without it."
"Okay, thanks for letting me whine."
"Renee?"
"Yeah?"
"I hate to say this, but you made a million the hard way."
"I'd pay a hundred times that to have Mattie back."
"I know. It just seems a little strange, that's all. Like a silver lining in a black-as-hell cloud."
"Yeah." She didn't want to start crying again. "Oh, there was one thing I wanted to ask you, since you've been here awhile. Do you know anything about Joshua Wells?"
"Jacob's brother? I've only been here a few years longer than you. I heard some stories, but apparently he left town years ago."
"What kind of stories?"
"The usual, troubled-rich-kid stuff. Vandalism, shoplifting, drugs, soliciting hookers. What, Jacob never told you?"
"I guess he was ashamed. He's always going on about living up to the Wells name."
"Get that man some help. Get both of you some help. Now I've really got to run. I have some Type O that's just crying out to be HIV-negative."
"Bye, Kim." She hung up and looked at the window again.
The shadow was back. The deck planking squeaked with footsteps. She wondered if Davidson was snooping around. She was about to go to the door when the phone rang.
She looked from the door to the phone. Ivy Terrace was upscale, safe. And she had locked the door. She always locked the door. It was Jake who was careless about such things, like leaving the sliding glass door open on the night of the fire---
She picked up the phone. "Hello?"
The line hissed with empty electronics. Four seconds passed.
"Kim?" she said.
"It's me."
"Jake! I've been worried sick. Where are you?"
"The place I said I'd never go."
"What? You sound terrible. Do you have a cold?"
"I got another present for you."
"I don't want a present. I want you to talk to me."
Jacob's voice grew fainter. "Special delivery."
He added something she couldn't hear because a car with a busted muffler roared through the parking lot outside.
"Jake, we need some counseling. We need to work things out. About the money and about us."
"Mattie," he said.
"Yes, that, too. We need to return her to the dirt. It's something we should do together, no matter how you feel about me."
"My daughter."
"Mine, too."
"I didn't know."
"Jake, are you okay? Please don't tell me you're still drinking. You know what stress does to you."
"The door," he said, and the line went dead.
Was he the one who'd been outside her door? The phone signal had been clear and steady, not fluctuating the way most wireless signals did in the mountains. There was a pay phone in the apartment's laundry room, but whoever was at the door wouldn't have reached it in the interim between her seeing the shadow and answering the phone.
Renee brushed her hair and grabbed her purse. After what Kim had said about Joshua Wells, she planned to go to the Kingsboro police department and check on his criminal record. She'd heard long-time residents mention him once in a while, but she knew little about him other than that he'd moved out of town shortly after his mother's death. Joshua hadn't even shown up at the reading of Warren Wells' will. Of course, Jacob had already been guaranteed the money, so she couldn't blame him.
She opened the door and was reaching for her sunglasses when the package flopped at her feet. It must have been leaning against the door. It was in plain cardboard about the size of a saltines box. She went to the edge of the deck and peered over the side, expecting to see a UPS or FedEx van. The parking lot was nearly empty, the tenants off to day jobs and errands.
She picked up the package. It bore no label. The box was light, and might even have been empty. She carried it inside to the narrow table in the kitchenette, got a butcher knife, and slit the tape between the top two folds of cardboard.
As she peeled the flaps back, the odor of stale charcoal assailed her. Inside was a stained bundle of white cloth. She touched it, and then recognized the lace brocade around the small collar. It was the dress Mattie had worn at her First Communion.
She pulled the dress out, knocking the box to the floor with the motion. The dress was silk, and the bottom half of it had burned away. One sleeve had been torn off, and a black rip ran the length of the abbreviated back. Despite the ruin of the dress, it evoked an image of a beatific Mattie bowing before Father Rose, accepting the round wafer from the priest and putting it between her lips.
"Matilda Suzanne," Renee whispered, pressing the garment to her cheek. "Oh, my baby."
They had picked out the dress together, Mattie insisting on a "grown-up girl's dress," not one of the plain ones with a bow tied in the rear. She'd worn white socks and black shoes with single straps and the slightest rise in the heels. Her hair had been pinned back with lacquered white barrettes in the shape of doves. Though this was her big sister's day, Christine had also worn a tiny white dress, adorned with some milk spit-up on the front.
The memory so overwhelmed Renee that she wasn't aware how long she stood there, rocking back and forth, the cloying stench of scorched fabric in her nostrils. After a time, the dress grew heavy in her hands, a relic that was both treasured and despised. It should have burned up in the fire. She had prayed for understanding, she had accepted the loss as one of God's mysterious workings, and she had wiped clean the slate of her soul. Yet here came this piece of a miserable past back into her life.
No, God hadn't delivered this. Jacob had.
The phone call, his cryptic phrases, the mocking voice, almost as if he were blaming her. Taunting her. Torturing her.
He wasn't himself. The realization broke her heart all over again. She had promised to be strong for him, to bring him back from whatever abyss failure had pushed him into. But how could she rescue him when she didn't know who he was? How could she save him when it took all her energy to save herself?
Jacob must have visited the charred wreckage of the house. Maybe Mattie's dress had been caught in some strange backdraft and wafted away from the flames into the surrounding woods. With all the commotion and activity, no one would have noticed, nor recognized its significance. But Jacob knew. He'd attended the communion, one of his rare visits to St. Mary's.
The dress had leaked bits of charred cloth onto the floor. Renee spread the garment across the table, then knelt and collected the pieces. As she touched the black scraps, they broke into smaller pieces. They were disintegrating even as she tried to collect them, and her desperation to save the scraps only made them crumble faster.
She gave up and washed her hands in the kitchen sink. The black specks swirled down the drain, lost to her forever, gone to some lightless place of decomposition and decay.
Maybe Jacob was breaking down in the same way. She couldn't let that happen. She dried her hands, grabbed her purse, and went outside into the sunlight. The wind off the white pines swept away the charred smell, and her head was clear by the time she reached her car.
The police department lay behind the Fuller County courthouse in Kingsboro, in the old part of downtown that had thrived before chain restaurants and big-box retailers pulled most shoppers to the main thoroughfares. The records office was headed by a stern woman with glasses as thick as Renee's whose steel-gray hair suggested she had been employed there long before the advent of computers. Renee tapped at the bulletproof window until the woman looked up from her desk, lips pursed as if she had just eaten the lemon wedge from the iced tea in front of her. The woman pushed back her chair with a complaint of springs and sauntered over to the service window.
Renee pushed a button and spoke into a microphone mounted on the window ledge. "Yes, ma'am, I'm looking for any records you have on Joshua Wells."
"Joshua Wells?" The woman tilted her head back and peered at Renee as if studying an insect. The speaker made her sound as if she were asking for an order at a drive-through window.
"Yes, ma'am."
Renee thought the woman was going to ask her why she wanted the records, but she said, "Do you have a middle name?"
For an instant, Renee thought she meant her own name, then realized that even a town as small as Kingsboro might have had several Joshua Wellses. "No, sorry. Can I just have them all?"
The woman made a chewing motion, then said, "It's public record. All you have to do is pay the fees."
The woman pointed to a sign on the wall that was lost amid the clutter of "Most Wanted" posters, meeting reminders, and communication codes. Searches were five dollars and copies were fifty cents each.
"That's fine," Renee said.
"It'll be a minute. That's Wells, W-E-L-L-S, right?"
"Yes. Like Warren Wells."
"Oh, yeah. 'Joshua' was his kid's name, wasn't it? One of them, anyway."
Renee nodded. The woman went to a computer and typed in the name without sitting down. She frowned at the screen, and soon came back to the window. "There's not any."
"That has to be a mistake. I understand he had been charged with several crimes."
"Could be a couple of things," the woman said. "Maybe the records were ordered expunged by a judge, or they could have been sealed if he was a juvenile at the time of the offense."
"What's the age for being tried as an adult?"
"Depends. For most crimes, it's sixteen."
"Okay, sorry to trouble you."
So either Kim had been wrong, or Joshua's crimes had occurred during his early teens. Renee paid with a twenty and declined a receipt. While the woman made change, Renee pressed the button and asked, "Did you know Joshua Wells personally?"
The woman shook her head, experienced at deflecting any probe for off-limits information. "No. He made the papers once in a while, for sports and things. He was an all-star pitcher before he dropped out of high school. I heard he moved after that."
Newspaper. She decided her next stop was the library, where she could go through the microfiche files of the Kingsboro Times-Herald. At least she'd be able to put a face with a name and start filling in the puzzle. She'd seen his picture in the Wells house when she'd had dinner there before her marriage, but both the boys had been adolescents then. Identical twins often developed different facial features over time.
She was nearly to the door when another thought occurred to her. She knew little about Jacob's past. Her probing had met a sullen wall that had no chinks. Sure, she knew Warren Wells had made millions in real estate, that his mother had died in a tragic fall, and that Jacob had disliked his parents. But he hadn't opened up about his past and had left no paper trail. He didn't even own a high school yearbook.
She returned to the service window. The records officer was just settling back into her desk. Instead of waiting for the woman to return to the window, Renee pressed the button and asked for a search on Jacob Wells.
The clerk's eyes narrowed. "You with the newspaper?"
"No, just a citizen."
"He's done a lot for this town. Just remember that."
How could Renee forget?
The woman sipped her tea as she operated the keyboard. She squinted at her computer screen and the printer on a filing cabinet beside her desk began scrolling out papers. She brought the stack of papers back to the window and slid them through the slot. "That will be eight more dollars."
Renee paid and flipped through the papers, her heart pounding. The names in the "suspect" line of the reports read "Jacob Warren Wells." Her Jacob.
Vandalism in the high school parking lot, suspect allegedly gouged the paint on a number of vehicles with a set of keys. Arson, suspect allegedly set some boxes on fire inside a hotel during a Christmas tree growers' convention. Misdemeanor shoplifting and underage possession of alcohol, suspect allegedly stole two bottles of wine from a convenience store. Misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance, suspect allegedly caught smoking marijuana under the high school stadium bleachers. Obstructing and delaying a police officer, suspect allegedly gave his brother's driver license during a traffic stop in an attempt at deception.
Arson again, this time at the construction site of a building under development by Warren Wells. Charges were later dropped when the fire was attributed to "accidental causes."
The last arrest report was the most incredible, the most difficult to imagine. Cruelty to animals, suspect allegedly suffocated a cat by sealing it inside a plastic bag.
"Is that the one you were looking for?" the woman said, watching her.
Renee shook her head. This must be another Jacob Warren Wells. But the address listed on the reports was 121 White River Road, the same one Jacob had used the few times he'd mailed postcards home during college.
"That was the other Wells twin, wasn't it?" the records officer said. "The one who lost the child in the fire?"
"It must be a mistake." She didn't push the microphone button, but the woman was close enough to hear her through the slot.
The woman drew back from the glass as if offended. "We're not perfect around here, but we can't be wrong that many times."
"Jacob and Joshua," Renee said, the papers like toxic freight in her hands.
"You know what they say about twins," the woman said, speaking off the record for the first time, eyes like wet beetles behind her glasses. "One of them always turns out bad."
Renee took her change and went outside, into a world whose sun was too brilliant to allow dark things to hide.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"I sympathize with you, Jacob. Really, I do. If I could bend on this, you know I'd do it for you in a heartbeat."
The words were spoken with a practiced precision. Rayburn Jones tented his fingers and leaned back in his leather chair, his eyes like oil drops, bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lamps. The computer monitor to Jones's left had an aquarium screen saver across which sedate and colorful fish drifted without fear of predators. The maple top of the desk was like the surface of a still, dark lake. The office could have served as a museum set for the subspecies known as "insurance adjuster."
"I don't understand." Jacob wiped at the stubble on his chin. He could smell the stink of his own sweat.
"I'm afraid we can't pay out any more money until the case is settled. You know how it is. These things go back to the underwriters, they smell something funny, and they clamp down on the money flow."
"That damned fire chief---"
"I'm sure you're aware anytime there's even the smallest doubt, we have to be a little more careful." Jones leaned forward. "Please don't take it personally, Jacob. Nobody's saying the fire was deliberately set. But the paperwork has to go through clean."
Jacob's breath was rapid, the air in the room suddenly too thin. Blood rushed to his face. His side ached. He spoke through clenched teeth. "My daughter died in that fire."
Jones glanced at a framed family portrait that showed his own three daughters wearing curls, ribbons, and smiles. "I appreciate the depth of your tragedy, Jacob. My Anne was on Mattie's soccer team, remember? I can't even begin to imagine what you're going through."
Jones's steady tone was infuriating. Jacob slipped a trembling hand into his pocket, touched the cool metal flask. If only he could take a drink, he'd be able to handle this. "I've talked with the fire chief. She said there were some loose ends but nothing that would lead her to call in the State Bureau of Investigation."
"She still hasn't filed a final report and it's been nearly three months. I'm afraid I can't make any more disbursements until the official determination is made. Your wife received the short-term settlement to cover temporary living expenses, but that's all we can do right now. Believe me, as soon as I get the nod from corporate, I'll deliver the check to you personally."
Jacob didn't tell Jones he'd only seen Renee once since his release from the hospital. That encounter had been an accident. He was at the bank withdrawing a hundred dollars from their joint savings account when the teller signaled the manager. Renee was in an upstairs office that overlooked the bank's lobby, talking to someone whose suit looked as crisp as new bills. She saw Jacob through the glass walls and mouthed his name, then ran for the office door and downstairs.
He ducked outside before she could catch him. The hedges and shrubs had become his ally, his natural environment, and he'd moved among them until he was several businesses away from the bank. She finally gave up the search. He waited until she finished her dealings and watched her drive away. Jacob had put that day's expenses, for liquor and a motel room, on his credit card instead of paying cash. Prior success had given him one clear benefit in his new life: he had a $50,000 limit on his platinum VISA.
"The house was valued at three quarters of a million," Jacob said. "A lot of custom woodwork. And contents were insured for another quarter million."
"Please, Jacob. We go way back. Don't make this more difficult than it already is."
"It's not difficult at all. You bury your kids and that's that. No more crying over spilled milk. Fold the tent and move on."
"Jacob."
Jacob pressed the bottoms of his fists against the top of Jones's polished desk. "You shook my hand at those Chamber dinners, pushed through the paperwork so my developments were covered, cashed my premiums like clockwork. Now when I need you, you've turned into a goddamned machine."
"Check your policy. No one's accusing you of negligence, but the fire could have had any number of causes, some that might not be covered. And, if you don't mind a little advice from a friend, clean up the drinking. That's not helping. If corporate sends in some investigators, that's the first thing they'll jump on."
Jacob stood and reached for the ornately carved business card dispenser that had two brass pens protruding from it. He yanked one of the pens from its sheath and pointed it at Jones. "See if I ever write you another goddamned check."
Jones stood, too, six feet three and outweighing Jacob by fifty pounds. "I knew your daddy, Jacob. A fine man. I see some of him in you. I watched you come along and get your foot in the door, and you were ready to really make something of yourself. You don't know how proud he was when he learned you wanted to take up the business. But it's getting lost in this mess you're making."
Daddy. That was the last person Jacob wanted to think about. Daddy had been cut from solid Republican cloth, as sentimental as a brick. Jacob always wanted to be better than him in some way, whether it was spiritual or psychological, but instead had ended up competing with the old man's memory on the playing field of commerce, where the game always favored the unimaginative and the sociopathic. Whenever Jacob looked in the mirror, he saw some of the old bastard looking back at him.
And Joshua. Except Joshua was always smirking.
But he could muster no more rage, not at Daddy, not at Joshua, and not at Rayburn Jones. His heart, the last little bit that wasn't completely dead, was still full of Mattie. He cherished the pain and let it nourish him in the dark hollow of his soul. The pain was a furnace that consumed the alcohol and ambition and even the anger. The pain was his comfort, the suffering a twisted blessing that dragged him through the days, his closest companion.
He felt a hundred years old. He'd lost everything and only money could make it better. Only money could make the problem go away. "Sorry, Ray. I just can't think straight anymore."
Jones moved around the desk and put a hand on Jacob's shoulder. It was a condescending gesture, but was also Jacob's first human contact since leaving the hospital, not counting the bartender's touching his palm while returning change.
"Do yourself a favor, Jacob. Get some help. See somebody." Jones looked through the office door to make sure none of the other agents were eavesdropping. "It's hard as hell when you're a man. Nobody will let you cry, and you can't let yourself do it even when you're alone."
"She was all I had left, Ray." Jacob choked down a sob, knew he would sound like a blubbering drunk if he let himself slip and break.
Rayburn Jones patted him on the back, cool and manly. "No. You've got Renee, and you've got the rest of your life. What would Mattie think if she saw you like this?"
Jacob rolled his eyes heavenward. In the blur of tears, the ceiling tiles could have been the thick, white cotton of holy clouds. But he couldn't see Mattie's face. If she were up there, she was just as far from him as ever.
She couldn't forgive him because she wasn't here anymore.
Anger drove the moistness from his eyes. "Sorry I lost my temper, Ray. I know it's not your fault. You've got procedures to follow."
Jones gave a grim smile. "Hang in there. You've got some savings, don't you?"
"Yeah. Thanks, Ray. I'll check back soon." Jacob wasn't going to tell him about the million-dollar policy on Mattie, eight hundred thousand of that for accidental death. The policy was made under Renee's name through another insurance agent. He didn't know if she'd filed the claim yet. The Wells financial philosophy had been to have all developments and properties appraised for as large an amount as possible, borrow as much against them as the banks allowed, and over-insure everything.
As Rayburn Jones had once told Jacob, you didn't buy insurance because you expected to collect. You certainly didn't bet the life of your loved ones. But in the final amortization of things, tragedy was just another wise investment. The safe play.
Insurance agents and undertakers took their pounds of flesh. The cops and firefighters and ambulance drivers cashed their paychecks whether you lived or died. Hospitals stayed open by overcharging those with major medical coverage, even the patients on deathbeds, so the poor could die alongside the rich. Churches collected the wages of sin, at least from those whose guilt compelled them to tithe. The system worked.
Jacob turned to leave, bracing himself for the exposed walk back through the main office. Before the fire, he had moved between those desks with his head high and shoulders square, a smile for the ladies and a handshake for the men. He had been a Wells, a Somebody, a pillar of the community. Now he was just another object of pity. They avoided each other's eyes.
And they didn't even know the worst of it. They hadn't seen him huddled in the Ivy Terrace laurel thicket, a sheet of construction plastic tied overhead for a roof, a bundle of blankets for a bed. He took his liquor a bottle at a time, so the litter hadn't piled up, but the Beanie Weenies, sardines, and Pop-Tarts had left their silver bones around him and wrecked his digestion. His view of the world was not from a panoramic ivory-tower turret, but rather a narrow gap in the waxy leaves that allowed him to watch his wife's apartment door.
It was not just a matter of perspective. It was point of view. He was at the wrong point.
Back under the sunshine of the parking lot, Jacob looked out at the vast green ridges that surrounded Kingsboro. The tops of houses were scattered among the slopes, and a few oversize displays of success rose above the tree line. He'd never blamed anyone for building up high, and the views allowed Realtors to demand outrageous lot prices. Jacob himself had put together a few cabin subdivisions, some of which had led to the slaughter of hundreds of old-growth hardwoods. Money didn't grow on trees, but paper came from trees and money was printed on paper. The progression had once seemed logical.
Instead of running through the forest and screaming at the top of his lungs, he had to walk with feigned dignity a couple of blocks to the counselor's office. He knew he should change his jacket, at least. He'd slept in the shirt for three nights running and the white collar had turned a dingy shade of ivory. His shoes were scuffed and muddy. The uniform was all wrong for the business at hand. But he couldn't muster the energy for a shower and shave, and most of his clothes had burned up in the fire. The real estate mogul's stage costume he once wore was now smoke, mingled with the melted electrical wiring and the ash of rayon carpet, entwined with the soul of his dead daughter.
If only he hadn't stopped by the M & W office in the middle of the night, drunk and looking for money. He'd cleaned out the petty cash drawer, flipped through his mail, and found her note:
"Meet me at Total Wellness at 3 p.m. Wednesday. Please. I love you. Renee."
It was a waste of time, and he didn't want to expose their pain to a stranger. He'd had enough of counselors when he was a teenager. But he owed her something. He wasn't sure what, but if he gave her an hour, maybe she would shut up and leave him alone. She'd brought out the heavy artillery, the bravest lie or the most pathetic truth: "I love you."
Total Wellness was a two-story building set off the highway in a business park. It combined a daycare, substance abuse center, and counseling services and was subsidized by various government funds. The behavioral health care industry was booming in these days of escalating stress, all bright brick and painted columns, the sun and clouds reflecting off the windows. Jacob cut through the lawn, no longer a man for sidewalks and other ordinary routes.
Shouts arose from the daycare's playground. Jacob couldn't imagine a worse sound. The high-pitched laughter was broken glass in his ears. How dare those children be happy and healthy when all those tomorrows ahead were denied to Mattie and Christine? Through the whitewashed fence, he could see the swing sets, tangled hair, and pale, dirty faces.
He stopped, his lungs like stone.
Mattie stood behind the fence, her arm thrust between the tall pickets. Her upturned hand was curled into a small fist.
Her fingers slowly uncurled, and gray ash poured from her palm.
Jacob reeled, the sky spun, and he found himself on his hands and knees, his face pressed against the grass. Vomit sluiced up from his gut, razing a raw path through his throat and stinging his nasal cavity. Tears filled his eyes as he coughed and spat the dregs of undigested liquor and bile. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and looked back at the fence.
Mattie was gone. A dark red ball floated over the playground fence, hung a moment at the apex of its arc then fell as if gravity held a grudge. The giggles continued, an adult supervisor shouted, and one of the kids began bawling. Someone was watching Jacob from a window, and he forced himself to stand and head for the counseling center.
They would think he was just another drunk putting in a court-ordered visit. The disguise fit too readily. He swallowed and the acid burned its way back to his stomach. A drink would help, but he was dehydrated and knew the liquor wouldn't stay down. Jacob staggered through the double doors.
A woman with a pinched face slid open a glass window at the counter and sniffed like a rodent. "May I help you, sir?"
Help. That was a good one. "I have an appointment."
"With whom?" She flipped through a notebook. "Or are you looking for the AA meeting? That's in Room 117, down the hall to your left."
"I'm in no shape for quitting," he said. "I'm with Rheinsfeldt."
"Oh." The clerk checked the book. "Excuse me, Mr. Wells. I didn't recognize you."
Jacob was sure he'd never met the woman. But his photo was on file at the local newspaper, and between the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis Club, he appeared in its pages at least twice a year. His development projects often came before various planning boards, sometimes bringing opposition from the neighborhoods where M & W's bulldozers disturbed morning sleep and residential character. And, of, course, the fire had been front-page news.
He licked his chapped lips. "Has Mrs. Wells arrived?"
"No, sir, but if you'll have a seat, I'll let Dr. Rheinsfeldt know you're here."
"That's okay, I'll do it myself." Jacob pushed open the door that led to the private offices, feeling the clerk's stare on his back. He wanted to show up for the appointment early and chat with the doctor for a couple of minutes, so that Renee would walk through the door already on the defensive. Jacob had learned from past experience that psychologists naturally gravitated to whichever side seemed most in need of "curing."
Jacob read the names on the doors as he went down the hall. A cadre of wise and caring souls sat behind those doors, with leather chairs and computers and rows of books on the shelves. Their heads were filled with questions and they deluded themselves into thinking they served a noble purpose. Their meat was anger and pain, their drink was pity disguised as sympathy. They had all the crude hunger of vampires and slightly less moral conscience.
The patients were perhaps even more complicit in the cycle of mutual dependency. They sat, wept, shared personal troubles that would be worthy of canned laughter if displayed in a television sitcom. The best part was they only had to open their souls for a single hour, and then they could stumble into the sunshine believing they had shed themselves of a bothersome skin. They could pretend they were a step closer to wholeness, but Jacob knew the whole was always less than the sum of its parts.
Because, where he went, so did Joshua.
He took a drink from a water fountain in the hall, then slipped into the rest room and swallowed as much of the whiskey as he could stomach. He rinsed his mouth and splashed water onto his face. A pale, pinched face stared back at him from the mirror. With his bloodshot eyes and swollen eyelids, he could easily pass for a crier. If you wanted to win a joint counseling session, imagined tears scored more points than honest and soul-deep revelations. He should know. He'd won all of his counseling sessions as a child.
Dr. Rheinsfeldt's office was the last on the left wing. The door was open. Rheinsfeldt was a shriveled, shrunken troll doll of a woman, her hair as wild and wispy as Einstein's. She pretended not to see him, as if giving him an opportunity to case the room. Let the rat sniff the cheese before you send it on a run through the maze, Jacob thought.
Magazines were spread haphazardly across the coffee table in the center of the room, smart stuff: Science News, Consumer Reports, Smithsonian. A spotless glass ashtray lay on top of them, one virgin cigarette resting in a notch on the rim. A single shelf on the wall bowed under the weight of thick hardcovers. The dusty books looked as if they had been undisturbed since the days of Jung.
Rheinsfeldt closed the magazine she had been reading, unfolded her rubbery legs from beneath her torso, and reached for the cigarette. She put it in her mouth and spoke around its stem. "You must be Jacob Wells."
Jacob looked into the hall behind him. "Oh, you're talking to me."
"A sense of the absurd. I like that. Please come in and have a seat."
The room had two chairs and a small couch, arranged in a triangle. This was the first and most obvious test. Rheinsfeldt would slide his peg into a certain shape of hole depending upon where he sat. If he chose the chair beside hers, it would reflect urgency and desperation, a desire for an ally. On the other hand, if he sat on the couch, then Renee might be expected to sit beside him in a show of matrimonial support. He decided on the third alternative, the middle of the couch, which left no room for Renee on either side of him. When he sat, Rheinsfeldt's dark eyes glimmered with satisfaction, as if she had suspected such a move from the start.
"Most couples arrive for counseling sessions together," Rheinsfeldt said, removing the unlit cigarette from her mouth and placing it in her small purse.
"Renee believes in being punctual. I believe in being early."
"Ah. All relationships are built on conflict. Why should marriage be any different?"
"Have you ever been married?"
"What, are you crazy?"
"Then why should we listen to anything you have to say?"
"Because, Jacob, I can't tell you anything. All I can do is help you hear yourself."
Jacob looked at the walls. Rheinsfeldt's gaze was like a hundred needles trying to pin him to a cork board. He looked out the window, but it was small and revealed only a square of boring blue. The room's walls and ceiling came at him as if he was in a trash compactor, and he closed his eyes.
Renee's entrance was heralded by her hair conditioner, a minty brand that used to arouse instant erotic feelings in Jacob. Now it was the stench of failure, as sickening as wood smoke. He forced himself to look at her, knowing those green eyes would remind him of Mattie.
He realized with horror that he couldn't quite recall the rest of Mattie's face.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Renee looked around the room at the incomprehensible art, anywhere but at Jacob's face. She couldn't decide if Dr. Rheinsfeldt's tastes in interior decoration were personal or clinical. The woman herself was squat and toadish, eyes dark with looming advice. She gave the impression of someone whose interpersonal relationships had been dramatic and brief.
"Where to begin?" Rheinsfeldt said.
"You're supposed to ask, 'What brings you both here today?'" Jacob said. He stank of liquor and a sour rot. "Didn't they teach you that in shrink school?"
"Don't mind him," Renee said. She could barely stand to look at him. If those police reports were true, she didn't know the man she'd shared the last ten years of her life with.
"There you go again," he said.
"He's been drinking," she said to Rheinsfeldt.
"Have you been drinking, Jacob?"
"Maybe." He crossed his arms and slumped down in the couch.
"Okay. This isn't a treatment program," Rheinsfeldt said. "You can do that later if you need to and want to. Right now, let's get a dialogue going about this other thing."
"The thing," Renee said. Reduced to a single vague noun, The Tragedy seemed to have lost its power. She tried to see the two of them through Rheinsfeldt's eyes: a wild-eyed, frantic woman and a drunken, unshaven man in filthy clothes. Renee's right hand went to her wedding band and she twisted it until her knuckle was red.
"I read the papers," Rheinsfeldt said. "Everybody's heard of the Wells family and the fire. I think that's where we need to start. That's where the pain is. The death of a child---I can only imagine."
"No," Renee said. "The pain started before that."
"Tell me."
"Don't you dare," Jacob said.
Renee forced herself to look at him. His jaw trembled, cheeks still pink where the new skin had formed. He looked like an alien, a Hollywood stunt double with a lump of putty piled on his shoulders, broken marbles stuck in for eyes. He ran the back of his hand over his lips and jerked forward, as if wanting to beat her to the punch line of some pointless joke.
"She's always been like this," he blurted.
"Always?" Rheinsfeldt said. "When was that?"
"When we first got together," Renee said. "He pretended to open up, but there was always something hidden away. He didn't even tell me his family was rich until we had dated for half a year.""She was always after the money," Jacob said.
"See what I mean?" Renee said to Rheinsfeldt. "How can he even talk about money when our children are dead?"
"Jacob? That sounds like a pretty damning observation."
"I take half the blame for Christine."
"Christine," Rheinsfeldt said. "That was last year?"
Renee opened her purse and brought out tissues, ignoring the box of Kleenex on the edge of the table. The box was too perfectly positioned, its calculated alignment not matching the chaos of the room. She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. "Christine was a SIDS baby."
"I'm terribly sorry. How was the marriage going before then?"
"It wasn't heaven but we were working on it, for the sake of the children."
"I hate to say it, but that's not the only reason for making a marriage work. You're not just a mother, you're also a human being, with wants and needs of your own."
"I'm not a mother anymore." Renee felt the familiar pressure in her chest, swallowed hard, and squeezed the damp tissue.
"And she wants way more than she needs," Jacob said.
"I understand your anger," Rheinsfeldt said. "You have a right to be angry for such a loss."
"Jacob hasn't been himself lately," Renee cut in, hating herself for defending him. "He was under a lot of pressure in his business. Jacob never talked much about it, but his partner told me the company was burned by a couple of contractors and---"
"You don't know anything about land development," Jacob said. "All you know is a big house and nice appliances, LL Bean and Nieman Marcus catalogs."
"Let's get back to Christine," Rheinsfeldt said. "I know you'd rather not talk about it, but---"
"It was a Tuesday," Renee said, and her hands grew cold even though the room was as stifling as a coffin in hell. Jacob had never let her talk about Christine, and though Renee and Kim had cried together a dozen times afterwards, she still ached to spill it all again, as if the act of psychological spewing would purge the poison from her system. "I'd just got off the phone with my mother. Christine was down for her afternoon nap, she was as steady as a clock, naps at ten and three. I had soup on. I was trying to save money then, figuring with two children we had a lot of college to pay for one day. The soup was boiling over---"
"She called me at work that morning to gripe," Jacob said. "Said she was tired of cutting her fingers to get rid of leftover vegetable scraps and why couldn't she just put some groceries on the credit card---"
"Let her finish, Jacob."
Renee felt a sick but grateful smile slide across her face. Rheinsfeldt was as tough as any prison warden, and she seemed to be on Renee's side. "I burned my fingers," Renee said. "That's what the medics said when they arrived. I don't remember much after that, but I took the pot off and then went to check on Christine because it was nearly four and about time for Mattie to get home from school."
"That's when she found her," Jacob said.
"What did you see?" Rheinsfeldt asked Renee.
"You have to keep it a secret, don't you? I mean, patient-doctor privilege or whatever?"
"Yes. Everything you say in this room stays in this room. Except the parts you take with you."
Renee looked at Jacob, expecting to see hatred in those stranger's eyes, but he only nodded in resignation. She would tell it the way he wanted. She'd once promised in front of God to honor and obey him.
"I went in, and Mattie was standing over the crib. I didn't hear her, but she must have come through the sliding glass doors in back and up the stairs. She was pale and her lips moved but she wasn't making a sound. And neither was Christine. You have any children? No? Then you probably don't know babies are never absolutely quiet, no matter what. Even when they're asleep, they twitch or sigh or wheeze or kick the blankies."
"Christine was way too quiet," Jacob said. "Blue."
"It was the blankies," Renee said, and the words came easy, just as they had when she talked to the rescue squad and then the doctors and then the police. She's said them so often that the words were a recitation. "There's this new thing where you're not supposed to let babies sleep on their stomachs, so I had blankies in there to prop her up on her back. But somehow she turned and got under them. She---"
"Mattie knew something was wrong right away," Jacob said. "It was Mattie who called 9-1-1 while Renee tried to revive Christine."
"How terrible," Rheinsfeldt said, and the wrinkled troll-doll face looked almost sad. "Where were you?" she asked Jacob.
"On a job site. We were clearing for a subdivision. If it wasn't for the cell phone---"
"You mean Mattie didn't call you first?"
"I told Mattie to call 9-1-1," Renee said. "What the hell is this? We had enough of that stuff from the police. We're the victims, remember?"
"I'm just trying to understand," Rheinsfeldt said, her eyes seeming to grow a shade darker and more obscure.
"It wouldn't have mattered anyway," Jacob said. "The ME fixed the time of death at around 3:15. Christine must have smothered shortly after Renee put her down."
"You know the only thing that's kept me from losing my mind?" Renee saw that Jacob was paying attention now. If only he'd paid that much attention in the immediate aftermath, when depression crushed her like God snuffing a cigarette.
"What?" Rheinsfeldt asked. The woman didn't take any kind of notes. Maybe she was arrogant enough to count on memory, but Renee knew that memory could lie. Memory told you all the lies you wanted to hear. You could count on it to deceive you.
"Because it seems like it happened to somebody else. I mean, I know I was there, I know I had the baby, but she was gone so fast, I can tell myself she was never born. And don't preach to me about denial, or the value of acceptance. This is how I grieve---by not letting it have happened, at least not to me."
Jacob put his head in his hands and spoke to the floor. "I tried not to blame her."
"How did you deal with it as a couple?" the doctor asked. "Focus on each other? On Mattie?"
Renee pondered the different responses. The truth was not an option. "Jacob threw himself into his work. He pulled away from me, but we each drew closer to Mattie. I took her to visit my parents for a week, and then we took a cruise to the Cayman Islands. The water's so blue there."
"Jacob wasn't with you?"
"No. That subdivision deal---"
"The Realtor balked," Jacob said. He sounded sober now, as if the hard hammers of business considerations had knocked him awake. "We had a nice row of tract houses, half of them pre-sold. The realty company said we were charging too much, that we were cutting our own throats because we were trying to turn over some upscale houses on the other side of town. The company undercut us and siphoned off some of our buyers, and we took a bath on the mortgages. Never build on spec in this town unless you own the bank."
"But what about Mattie?" Rheinsfeldt said, nonplussed by Jacob's passionate diversion. "How did you relate to her after Christine's death?"
"I don't know," Jacob said. "I just felt so helpless. My old man would have told me to pull my balls out of the sand and keep them swinging. When you get a raw deal, you turn it around. So we---me and my partner---decided it was a good time to buy if it looked like prices were dropping. So we went in on a few lots around town, high-end commercial space."
"He gave me money instead of himself," Renee said.
"I figured the best way to focus on Mattie was to spoil her like crazy," Jacob said. "And it took money. The cruise, riding lessons, Disney World, shopping trips to Charlotte."
Renee didn't like Rheinsfeldt's reaction. The counselor's lips curled as if valuing money was somehow distasteful. She had no comprehension of what it meant to be a Wells.
"It isn't unusual to throw yourself into practical pursuits when faced with an emotional tragedy," Rheinsfeldt said. "But how did you feel on the inside?"
"Inside?" One of Jacob's eyelids twitched. "I don't have any inside anymore."
"Please, Jake," Renee said. "Don't change into...you know."
He stood, paced, stopped at the window. For a moment, it looked as if he were going to snatch up the potted geraniums and hurl them against the wall. He turned, fists clenched. "You could never understand, not in a million goddamned years."
Renee wasn't sure whether Jacob was addressing her or Rheinsfeldt, because his eyes kept swiveling in their sockets. She figured the words were meant for her. She'd heard them plenty enough.
Rheinsfeldt didn't flinch, just sat in her chair with professional poise. "How did you feel on the inside?" she repeated.
"Like my guts were on fire. All the time. I had stomach trouble, diarrhea, pain so intense that Tylenol couldn't touch it."
"Guilt, perhaps?" Rheinsfeldt's tone was that of a game show host whose contestant was coming up short in the final round.
"No, the guilt was all mine," Renee said. The tears were hot in her eyes. She didn't try to hold them back. Damn, she was getting good at this. "I'm the one who put Christine down for the nap, I'm the one who arranged the blankets. I'm the one who brought her into this awful world."
"Do you really believe it's awful? If so, you wouldn't have had any children in the first place."
"Mattie was an accident," Renee said, and Jacob stopped pacing by the window.
"An accident?" Rheinsfeldt sniffed blood in the psychological pool. "So perhaps that contributed to Jacob's desire to spoil her. Maybe he didn't think---"
"He didn't think. That's the point. We had it all planned, get the business going and get settled, accumulate some wealth, and then talk about having a family."
"How old were you then?"
"Twenty-two," Jacob said.
"Twenty-one," Renee said. "We know which night we got pregnant." She looked at Jacob and the pain in his face was worth millions. "Tell her, Jakie."
He turned to the window again. The sky was dull and blue, limitless, like her love.
"We always used condoms, even after we were married," she told Rheinsfeldt, though she was really talking to Jacob, delivering the words as if they were nails in flesh. "The pill gave me migraines, and the diaphragm and foam were so messy. One night in August, Jacob had gone out for drinks with one of his old college classmates---yes, he'd started drinking again around that time. I think it was the fear of success, but that's a whole other story. Anyway, I don't even know who these classmates were, but it must have been some party, because Jake came in at about four in the morning. It was dark and I was half asleep, but he crawled on me like an animal. I tried to push him away. I'm no prude but I like a little foreplay, plus he didn't put on a condom. He forced himself in."
"Jacob?" Rheinsfeldt interrupted, as if fearing that Renee was gaining control of the session.
"She liked it," Jacob said to the window. "It was probably the best night of her life."
Renee squirmed. Jacob had been more passionate that night than any other, almost as if he knew he was planting a baby inside her. Almost as if he wanted a child. And some small part of her had accepted it, had pulled him more deeply into her.
The sex hadn't been as intense even when they were deliberately trying for the one that would be Christine. Stinking of whiskey and sweat, tongue like an attacking viper, and body like a weapon, his excitement had swept her up and over the edge of the universe. And she hated his causing her loss of control.
And here he was, about to do it again: make her lose control. She forced herself to think of Christine, small and blue-skinned against the blanket. And Mattie, lost amid the big fire that had burned away the last bridge that connected her to their happy past.
"Three times," Renee said. "You wanted to make sure, didn't you, Jake?"
"You didn't fight it," he said.
"I'm not supposed to fight it," she said. "You married me, remember?"
"Everybody makes mistakes."
"We made them together."
"A Wells never fails."
Renee swallowed hard, trying to push the anger down her throat. It lodged there, making each breath an effort. The sudden silence in the room was thick and oppressive. Rheinsfeldt edged forward with serpentine ease.
"Obviously, you loved each other enough to carry the baby to term," the doctor said. "And Jacob is a successful businessman. It sounds like you two were getting everything you wanted. What part of your common dream didn't work out?"
"After that encounter, Jacob wouldn't touch me for weeks," Renee said. "Like I was the dirty one, or maybe he was embarrassed by his passion. He was gone when I woke up and didn't come home until the afternoon. We fought a few times, threw things, nothing too physical, mostly yelling, then him storming out."
The doctor nodded as if such behavior were perfectly normal. "Why did you behave that way, Jacob?"
"I was afraid she was pregnant."
"Why was that so frightening? Was it the responsibility?"
"No. The bloodline. I was afraid I would be a lousy father, just like I was taught."
"Taught?"
"By my own lousy father."
"Jacob, this sounds like an issue we'll need to work on privately. But for today, let's see if we can understand this one little piece of the puzzle."
"He sobered up when I missed my period and we got the test results," Renee said. "He was the perfect husband, worked hard all day, phoned me before and after lunch, showered me with attention when he got home. It was like being newlyweds again."
"And the honeymoon ended?"
"Mattie was a quick delivery. She looked so much like Jacob. Not in the features, maybe, since she got my eyes, but in the way she smiled and laughed. The way her eyebrows scrunched when she was upset."
"She was beautiful," Jacob said, heading toward the door. "Better than we deserved. I'm done."
"I hate you," Renee said.
Jacob kept walking.
"We need something for you guys to work on," Rheinsfeldt said to Jacob's back. "Something to build on for the next session."
Jacob went around the corner and was gone.
"See?" Renee said. "It's impossible."
Rheinsfeldt pulled a tissue from the box on the table and held it out to her. Renee took it but didn't wipe the tears away, didn't stanch the thin streams of mucus running down her nostrils. She knew she looked a wreck, cheeks blotched, eyelids swollen.
Rheinsfeldt put a reassuring hand on her knee. "Considering Jacob's history, you might be forced to commit him involuntarily."
"History?"
Rheinsfeldt's compassionate expression melded into an impenetrable mask. "You didn't know."
CHAPTER NINE
Jacob left the building and hurried past the playground, afraid he would see the vision of Mattie again. If the hallucinations started, the carefully constructed wall inside his head might crumble, brick by brick. Already, darkness broke through the chinks. And the things inside the darkness might slither out if the gap widened.
The session was a mistake. Nothing had changed since his teens. You couldn't trust them. You couldn't trust her.
He turned the corner and headed down Buffalo Trace Lane. The county historical society said the street had once been a path where buffalo traveled to the high grazing lands in the summer. The Cherokee and Catawba hunted there, put up temporary meat camps, and moved into the valleys when the frost came. Now all the buffalo were gone, slaughtered in order to build the roads that bore their name.Jacob's throat was raw from the bout of vomiting. The air of the town tasted like old coins. A bank's neon clock said 4:37. Back in his old life, Jacob would probably have an appointment somewhere, with a developer or tenant or maybe a loan officer. In his old life, he would be running late.
Back in Rheinsfeldt's office, Renee was probably crying. Rheinsfeldt would swallow it all in her eagerness to help, and Jacob would be "the problem child" again. Now that he was gone, they could conspire against him. Just like always.
Renee loved that story about the night Mattie was conceived. He'd been drunk. He wouldn't have remembered it at all without her help. But once she'd reminded him, it had been burned into his mind forever. And Mattie was the result, and she was also burned.
Forever.
He needed some cash. The credit card was nearly topped out. He didn't have a postal address so he couldn't apply for another. The way all the financial and credit institutions were tied together, you couldn't slip through the net if you were carrying heavy debt.
He moved like muddy water down the sidewalk as Kingsboro dragged him toward its heart. The town his father had helped nurture now bristled with concrete menace, the old three-story buildings blocking the surrounding mountains. The hardware store where his grandfather bought cut nails and hand tools now sold polyvinyl bird baths and plastic signs that said things like "Forget the dog . . . beware of the OWNER." A girl sat on a bench by the door, Kingsboro's version of a Goth, tiny swells of adolescence on her chest and black lipstick smeared by the cell phone she was holding. She rolled her eyes at Jacob as if he were of a different, dangerous species.
He was.
Three men stood outside the drugstore, one of them smoking. They laughed at the idle afternoon, fingering their pockets in the shade. Jacob recognized the middle one as a roofer who had held some M & W contracts. The man's left arm was in a sling, and Jacob wondered if the injury was accompanied by a workman's compensation claim against one of his fellow developers.
"Howdy, Jacob," the roofer said. Jacob ran through a mental list of names, trying to match one with the face. His father had taught him that showing interest in workers as human beings made them more productive. That meant better profit margins. Warren Wells' philosophy was built on the idea that every person had a role in his empire.
"Hi, fellows," Jacob said, deciding to include them all. He used their native tongue, that of the Southern mountain boy. He'd perfected it as a youngster, though it never came as naturally to him as it did to Joshua. "Nice afternoon, ain't it?"
"Yep," the man in the sling said. "We been missing you at church."
The roofer was a member of the choir. Jacob had to mentally remove the stubble, comb his hair, and press him into a suit and tie, but he could picture the roofer praising the Lord, singing about trading this house for a mansion in the sky, a mighty fortress is our God, worthy is the lamb, grace that is greater than all our sin, it is well with my soul, I surrender all. And the blood. Lots of hymns about the revelations of cities charred with fire, oceans boiling with blood, a coming judgment spelled out against the dark, gathering clouds.
"I know," Jacob said. "I've been missing it myself."Father Rose had stopped by several times while Jacob was in the hospital. Jacob had at first refused to talk to him, then asked the preacher the question that had no answer. Why did God let the innocent suffer? When the standard answer came, of the Lord knowing best and that all was in His blessed hands, Jacob had become so angry that he wanted to strangle the old man. He'd shouted and cursed at the priest until the nurse came and gave Jacob a shot. The priest was gone when Jacob came back from the dark grotto. No doubt Father Rose hadn't mentioned the incident to the congregation, merely asked the church members to pray for Jacob's and Renee's acceptance of their loss.
"The Lord's always there to help you heal," the roofer said.
The Lord had too many agents of healing, that was the problem. From Dr. Masutu to Rheinsfeldt to Father Rose, Jacob was bound for glory no matter what. God probably needed a developer to help house all those angels. Real estate followed the universal law of supply and demand. When the value went up, only the richest could buy.
"I'm getting better," Jacob said to the roofer. His chest hurt and he was thirsty.
"Terrible thing, to lose a daughter like that."
"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Jacob wondered if those words were actually in the Bible, or if they were like most religious uttering and simply repeated until they became meaningless, a hollow mantra, an oral admission of helplessness and resignation.
"That He does," the man with the cigarette said. The wind rose and the American flag on the pole in front of town hall snapped to brisk attention. A woman came out of the drugstore carrying an orange-and-white-striped prescription bag. Jacob recognized her as also being a choir member. Her face was twisted as if it had been kicked by a horse. She nodded to Jacob and went to stand beside the man in the sling.
"We're praying for you, Mr. Wells," she said. "You and the missus."
"It can't hurt none," Jacob said.
Nothing could hurt, not anymore. Not when his skin was new and his heart was encased in emotional scar tissue. Prayers and arrows could not penetrate. He looked at his bare wrist as if he had an appointment, then said goodbye and hurried away. He went past town hall, a brick building that bore a portrait of his father in the lobby. Next to town hall was the downtown fire station. He glanced at his reflection in the glass door and saw a hunched, sickly man.
Then the door swung open and the fire chief, Davidson, came out. Her belt was too tight and her stomach strained against the waistband of her pants. Her thick biceps were tight against her short shirt sleeves. Sweat darkened the blue shirt beneath her armpits.
"Mr. Wells, I've been trying to get hold of you," she said.
"I've been trying to get hold of me myself."
"The report came back from the SBI. I did the initial scene, and I didn't see anything that set off alarms. But when there's a fatality, we have to give it a closer look. The spalling and the depth of the charred remains suggested that it started near the sliding glass door by your computer."
"My wife already told you that."
"There was some question about why it spread so fast. The state lab did a gas analysis and didn't find any trace of an accelerant. When a house gets eaten up in less than twenty minutes, you would expect to find some lighter fluid, gasoline, or something as simple as the impression of a matchstick."
"You're talking arson."
Davidson gave a dutiful nod of the head. "That's why we asked about any enemies, problems at work, that kind of thing. And of course there was the autopsy..."
Jacob turned away and looked at the skyline, the tarred tops of buildings, a transmission tower glinting silver on a distant hill. He couldn't think of Mattie lying cold on a stainless steel table, black skin peeling and flaking like that of an overly toasted marshmallow, the sharp blades of strangers probing into her scalded organs. Easier to see her as four pounds of ash, dust, and bone bits resting in a ceramic urn in Renee's apartment. She was part of the sky now, he tried to tell himself, up there in a Catholic heaven singing about mighty fortresses and worthy lambs.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Wells. But we had to look at the lungs for signs of smoke inhalation."
"I told you she was still alive when I reached her. And I couldn't goddamned save her."
"Not that we have any reason to suspect foul play, but the smoke damage confirmed she was still breathing when the fire started. Arson is sometimes used to hide a murder, but it doesn't work very well. Murderers have this idea that their sin will be purified by fire or something."
Jacob wanted to grab the stocky woman by her shoulders and shove her against the brick wall. His left eyelid twitched and his lips were tight against his teeth. He forced himself to breathe through his mouth, swallow deeply as directed by those television self-help gurus. The air was thick as smoke, the air was a hot snake sliding down his throat, the air was broken glass in his lungs.
Child murder was a different, poisonous atmosphere.
Davidson examined him with cool amphibian eyes. "My report's going to say an accident caused by the wiring. Something shorted out in the wall socket, probably an electrical surge caused by the computer, and a fluke spark touched some papers near the desk. The papers apparently smoldered for several minutes before catching on. With the bookcase right there, and so much wood used in the construction, that would account for the rapid spread."
"What about the smoke detectors?"
"Weak back-up batteries. The same surge that started the fire must have shut down their main power. I'd guess the batteries came with the original installation. Most people never think to check their detectors because they get so used to seeing the little red test lights always on."
"So this means you finally believe us?"
"It's not a case of believing or not believing," Davidson said. "It's about removing any shadow of a doubt. For all of us."
"You think I was afraid somebody burned my house down? That maybe they were trying to kill me and got Mattie instead?"
"It's a brutal planet, Mr. Wells. And there's the inescapable coincidence that your house was insured for a million dollars. Your wife and child were insured for a million each in the event of accidental death. And you were insured for five million. It could have been an eight-million-dollar fire."
Jacob peered into the bottomless grottoes of Davidson's eyes. "But then nobody would have been around to collect."
"Somebody would come out pretty flush no matter which way it turned out, don't you think?"
"And it just happened to be us." Jacob wiped the dry corners of his mouth. One of the large bay doors of the fire station groaned and revealed a gap of darkness at its bottom. The aluminum panels of the door lurched and lifted with a grating sound. The broadband radio on Davidson's hip hissed static.
"My wife couldn't have started the fire," Jacob said. "She was in bed with me."
"She was standing outside the house when the first responders arrived."
"You don't know Renee." Neither did Jacob.
"I'm trained to look at the evidence, Mr. Wells. Nothing personal. But people do strange things for money. Anyway, it looks like she's come out of this better than you have."
Jacob looked down at his soiled shirt. One of the sleeve buttons was missing. The knees of his pants were scuffed and the toe boxes of his shoes were caked with dried mud. He wore no socks. He'd dressed better than this in his most decadent student days, when he would sometimes wake up on a strange couch with a throbbing head and memories as elusive as an opium dream.
"She didn't do it," he said.
"Take it easy. I'm trying to tell you what the lab results were. But from what I've seen and heard, her story just doesn't hold together."
"You're going to have the police charge her with something?"
"I don't have any evidence. But I'm not finished yet."
The bay door was fully open now. The silver grill of the fire truck caught the late afternoon sunlight. Inside the station, a man in yellow rubber pants began unraveling a canvas-covered hose. The traffic on the street grew thicker as everyone cheated five o'clock in order to beat the evening rush. A car horn sounded, but Jacob kept his gaze on Davidson.
"She lost her child, and all you can think about is walking her through hell again," Jacob said. "What kind of monster are you?"
"The hungry kind, Mr. Wells. Because I don't go away 'til I'm satisfied."
"We'll not speak to you anymore without a lawyer."
"That only applies to police interrogation. I have a public duty to determine the cause of the fire. That goes beyond victims and insurance policies and hardship. It's all about the cold, gray facts."
"I hope you choke on them."
"Of course, the police are the first to get a copy of my report."
Jacob turned his back and stomped down the sidewalk. His skin was clammy and he was far too sober. Kingsboro's windows leered at him, alternately flashing his reflection and allowing him to see into the faces of the storefronts. He passed a pawn shop featuring carpenter's tools and old Nintendo cartridges, a music store with a garish neon sign in the shape of a guitar, a home decorating store that stank of new carpet. Strangers swept past him, heading for sit-down restaurants and television news. Most of these people were not from old local blood. The locals kept away from downtown during rush hour. They rose early and worked late, immune to the cancer of the clock.
Jacob turned the corner and was relieved to no longer feel Davidson's eyes on his back. Renee would never do anything like that. She couldn't. She had been in bed, he'd been the first to awaken, the first to smell smoke, the first to try to reach Mattie. Even if Renee wanted him dead, she would never put Mattie at risk. Davidson didn't know a damned thing. Just another dyke wishing she had a pecker, a gun to notch when she brought down one of Kingsboro's big boys.
The town thinned, the buildings now broken by vacant lots and blank alleys. A closed furniture factory, one of the casualties of free-trade agreements, slouched behind its chain-link fence like a defeated beast. Behind the factory stretched a parcel of chalky brown dirt that was ribbed with erosion, a real estate deal gone south. Jacob walked faster, the breeze drying his sweat.
He was approaching a vacant Methodist church when he heard the familiar rusty death rattle. The green Chevy with the tinted windows roared into the parking lot behind him. Jacob panicked and looked for an escape route. He could turn and run into the closest store, a jeweler's specializing in engraved gold, but somehow the rules of this strange psychological showdown required that no outsiders be involved. He ran toward the adjoining lot and hurtled a sagging chain-link fence. The property was the site of a bank under construction, another temple of Kingsboro's new economy.
The Chevy accelerated and closed the sixty feet in seconds. The brakes squealed and the tires grabbed pavement as the driver realized that Jacob was beyond the bite of his bumper. Jacob ducked between a ditch-digging machine and a stack of cool cinder blocks. The Chevy eased out of the parking lot and turned onto the construction property. A crew of Hispanic workers were pouring a concrete floor at the far end of the building, but they were too busy with wet cement to notice Jacob or the car. Jacob pressed deep into the shadows and waited for the Chevy's next move. The car crept forward like a cat that had cornered a mouse, patient and confident and playful.
Jacob eyed the distance between his hiding place and the steel-girded shell of the building. He would never make it before the Chevy delivered its killing blow. He couldn't run back to the parking lot without being cut off. His best chance was to slip down the rear of the property, where a creek bordered a stand of jack pines. The car couldn't reach him there unless it was the sort of mythical beast that could sprout wings and fly.
He fumbled for the flask and pulled it from his pocket. Evan Williams, eighty-six proof. His blood had chilled at the first sound of the car, and his numb fingers fought with the lid. He closed his eyes and let the liquor settle into a hot ball in his stomach.
The car idled, purring like a giant asthmatic dragon. Jacob knew it would never give up on its prey. Even if he beat it to the creek and made for the safety of the undergrowth, the Chevy would find him again. Jacob took another harsh swallow, the heat inside expanding into frustration and anger. What behavior would the dragon least expect from its chosen victim?
He stood, shouted, and charged the car. He raised the liquor bottle as if it were a battle mace. The sight of Jacob approaching like a suicide bomber must have unnerved the driver, because the car's engine didn't rev in anticipation of combat. The car neither attacked nor retreated.
Jacob reached the driver's-side, his fingers tight around the neck of the bottle, its contents dribbling out and running down his sleeve. He pulled the bottle back to smash the window when he saw his reflection in the tinted glass. He hardly recognized himself, so great was his dissipation over the recent weeks. Fear and rage had contorted his face. A crazed stranger looked back at him, a string of drool dangling from bared teeth, hair tangled, dark wedges of flesh ringing his bloodshot eyes. His arm froze in shock and revulsion.
The driver's side window descended slowly and once again Jacob was face to face with himself.
CHAPTER TEN
"You ain't changed a bit, brother."
Jacob looked into the grinning mirror image and his muscles tensed to bring the bottle down in a smashing arc. But, as always, his self-hatred faltered when it counted most. The bottle slipped from his fingers and bounced off the packed dirt.
"Why?" Jacob said through clenched teeth.
His twin brother looked down at the liquor bottle. "Since when did upstanding citizens start drinking five-dollar bourbon straight from the bottle? I thought that junk was for white trash like me."
"What are you doing here?" Jacob repeated.
"This is the 'Town That Wells Built,' ain't it? If a man can't return to his ancestral home, where else can he go?" Joshua gunned the engine. "What do you think of my new ride?"
"What's the idea of stalking me?"
"Hey, lighten up, Jake. Still got that little problem with paranoia? I thought you saw somebody about that."
"Fuck you, Josh."
"You're as pissed off as a snake in duct tape. But get over it, because we got business. Family business."
Jacob wanted to tear himself away, to run for the safety of the woods, because this threat was bigger and sharper and more dangerous than a homicidal car. But those intense hazel eyes mesmerized him and melted the years away. His lungs hurt, and he realized he'd been holding his breath. "I've got nothing to say to you. Go away."
"This ain't like blowing out the candles on our birthday cake together. Just because you make a wish don't mean it comes true."
Wish me. The night of the fire. "You don't belong here anymore."
"We came up from the same dark hole, Jakie Boy." Joshua's breath was fetid and thick, mingling with the car exhaust. "And I been in the hole a long, long time. Gets lonely down there. But I guess you're figuring that out for yourself."
"I don't owe you anything."
"No, because all of it's already mine. You was just holding it for me."
Now that the initial shock had passed, Jacob could see the small differences between him and Joshua that only a few people would notice, the subtle marks of time and gravity. Joshua had a nearly invisible scar above his right eyebrow. Joshua had never tried to control his alcoholism, so the broken blood vessels beneath the skin of his face were more apparent. His teeth were also more yellow and uneven than Jacob's, the result of different eating habits and lack of dental care. But the rest of the features would fool anyone short of a well-trained detective. Joshua even had the same hair length and density of stubble, as if he'd been observing Jacob's slide into self-destruction and had made an intentional effort to copy it.
Not that Joshua had ever needed a role model for this particular type of decline. He'd always been inspired on his own. He'd stripped himself of the Wells taint and moved into a rat-infested mobile home just across the border in east Tennessee. While Jacob had been staging his decadent poet's act in college, Joshua was piloting charter bass boats on Watauga Lake for thirty bucks a day, a cooler of beer at his feet.
"You got your share," Jacob said. "Now go away."
"I had a piece," Joshua responded with a smirk. "That pie tastes so good, I want the whole thing now."
With an effort of will, Jacob broke Joshua's stare and looked past him to the gloomy interior of the Chevy. The upholstery was torn and the passenger seat was patched with silver tape. The car smelled of cigarette butts and fast food grease. Two rubber shrunken heads hung from the rearview mirror, their duplicate stretched lips and wizened eye sockets a nightmarish replica of Joshua's grinning face.
"Got company," Joshua said, nodding past him toward the construction crew. One of the workers, a white man in an orange hard hat and blue jumpsuit, was approaching. "I reckon the sign at the entrance that said 'Private Property, Keep Out,' wasn't just a suggestion. People take everything so serious these days. Property rights, deeds, ownership. 'What's mine is mine' and all that happy shit. It's a selfish world, ain't it, Jakie Boy?"
Jacob said nothing, watching the man in the hard hat approach. "I'll have them call the cops."
"Oh, you just go ahead and do that. I'm sure they'd be all ears when I started telling them the truth."
"You don't know the truth."
"The truth is what you make it. There's what really happened, and there's the way you set it in your mind so you can live with yourself."
"You weren't supposed to come back." He'd figured his twin brother was gone for good, the seed split for a final time. But the bond was stronger than flesh and ran deeper than blood.
Or maybe only exactly as deep as blood.
"Get in," Joshua said. Not a command, not an invitation. Just words.
Jacob hesitated as the man in the hard hat took off his gloves and punched at the numbers on a cell phone. The tiny electronic box looked out of place in those thick, scarred hands, as if a Neanderthal had come upon the controls of a time machine. But this machine would summon the police, and Jacob didn't want to be thrust under their gaze any more than he already was. He might be guilty of crimes he couldn't remember.
Jacob crossed to the passenger side of the decrepit automobile. The handle didn't work, so he waited for Joshua to open the door. Foam chunks dribbled from a split in the vinyl as he settled into the seat. The man in the hard hat held the phone to his ear. Joshua backed up in an arc so that the man could get a good look at the license plate, then punched the accelerator and threw up a cloud of dust and gravel. The Chevy had a four-on-the-floor gear shift, and as they exited the construction site and hit the street, Joshua grabbed second and tore a long shriek from the rear tires.
"You haven't changed a bit, either," Jacob said.
"I'm as ugly as I ever was."
Lunch hour had just ended, so the traffic wasn't heavy. But Joshua's driving tactics made the street seem crowded and narrow. The speedometer needle bounced at fifty-five as the car wove through the thirty-five-mile per hour zone. They passed an old man in a Mercedes SUV who mouthed a curse at them, but Joshua had already cut the SUV off before the driver reached the horn.
"Where are we going?" Jacob asked.
"Where else? There's only one place good enough for the two of us. That place we said we'd never go."
Jacob had the sensation that the car itself was stationary, that instead the world was whirring by in an insane and jumbled blur of color. The business district was brick red and concrete gray, glass green and power-pole brown. The road was a hard river that flowed backward to a black underground source. This moment had always existed, this now was forever, this vehicle was an embryo in which the two of them were bound. He would never escape the creature that had stolen half of his genetic material.
Joshua slid a cassette into the tape deck. Vintage Johnny Cash, falling into a ring of fire. Joshua joined in the chorus: "Burns, burns, burns."
"You're a sorry son of a bitch," Jacob said.
"I wish I could have been there when it happened. Remember in the old days, when we used to share everything? I'm jealous, Jake."
"No, you're not. And my life is mine. Even when it turns to hell."
"A million dollars. Plus the house, what's that, another three-quarters? You make the old man look like a piker. At least when he played the system, he tried to slip under the radar. You laugh in its fucking face and dare God to catch you."
"You don't know anything about it."
"They got newspapers, even where I been living. I've always managed to scrape up enough to subscribe to the old Times-Herald. A man's got to stay up on things if he wants to better himself. But all I read about was how Jacob Wells did this, Jacob Wells did that."
Here Joshua shifted out of his rural accent so easily that he might have been a drama professor. "'Upholding the heritage of community service started by one of Kingsboro's early patriarchs.' I started to wonder if they was really talking about my older brother, or if some imposter had done took his place."
"I'm only older than you by seventeen minutes."
"Still, that was good enough for the old man to make you the Number One Son."
"Lucky fucking me."
They reached the outskirts, heading west toward soft, rolling farmland. In the pastures, cattle bent their brown necks for the new growth. Barns stood peeling red paint against the breeze. Here and there a tractor bit steel teeth into the earth, demanding a future harvest of the dark soil. Along the highway, shadows filled the inside of an abandoned produce stand, a forlorn stack of wooden board bones and chicken wire skin that had been around since the days of sharecropping.
The Johnny Cash song ended, gave way to "Walls of a Prison."
"You're a clever bastard, Jake. First, you pulled the wool over the old man's eyes, fed him that line about how you wanted to carry on his life's work. Stepped into M & W like it was a pair of broken-in shoes. Played that 'settling down' role so good you could have put Tom Hanks to shame."
"It wasn't a game, Josh. I was . . . confused, that's all. I tried to get away, pretend I was somebody I could never be. But you can't escape who you are, can you? When I came back here, I was facing up to it."
"Confused, huh? Is that what Daddy paid all those doctors for? To get you unconfused, fill you full of his brainless bullshit?"
"You'd just as soon piss on his grave as cut the grass. But you bailed out. You never got to know him."
"I took my hand out of his pocket. No matter how many millions, it wasn't worth the price. Even the devil offers a better deal than that. The pointy-tailed son of a bitch with the pitchfork only asks for one soul. Warren Wells wanted two."
"You haven't answered me yet. Why did you come back?"
Joshua took his eyes from the highway and tapped the shrunken heads that hung from the mirror. The taut-skinned plastic skulls seemed to sway and dance in delight, clacking against one another in a noise that resembled chuckling. "Haven't you heard the old saying? Two heads are better than one, Jakie Boy?"
Now Johnny Cash was singing "I Don't Like It, But I Guess Things Happen That Way."
"How's Carlita?" Jacob asked, his gut in knots.
"Fine as ever."
"Where is she?"
"You want to see her?"
"Yeah."
Joshua reached up and squeezed one of the rubber mirror ornaments, making its face distort into a leer. "Wish me."
"We don't play that game anymore."
"Wish me."
Jacob felt the years fall away. "Wish me a kingdom and make me a king."
Joshua's crazed cackle drowned out the rumbling muffler.
They reached White River Road and drove parallel to the water for several miles, then crossed an old wooden bridge. Jacob looked at the cold currents passing below them. The water was up, fed by the melting snows that had seeped from the granite slopes weeks before. The banks were lush and verdant, the saplings arching toward the sun, fighting toward the canopy of the established oak, wild cherry, honey locust, and sugar maple. The land across the river was changed in a subtle way, as if its skin were somehow more vibrant, its dirt thicker, its trees more commanding and stark. The hills hinted at old secrets, a land thrust up by the pressure of hell's forge and then worn down over the eons by heaven's rain.
This was home.
Jacob hadn't been here in years, not since the afternoon call that informed him of their father's death and then during the burial that followed. The man-made aspects of the landscape were unchanged: the long barn with its tin roof catching the sunlight, the split-rail fence running along the sweeping curve of the drive, the two-story white Colonial that perched on the hill like a military command post. It was the property itself that was different, possessed of some unseen aura of menace. Or maybe Jacob himself had changed, and the memory of his past came rushing at him like a ghost wind.
"What do you think, Jake? Daddy would be proud, wouldn't he?"
Jacob glared up at the window on the second floor, the room that he had once shared with his twin brother.
"Hey, now, don't go frowny-face on me," Joshua said. "Daddy gave me the keys to the kingdom. Since I can't sell it, it's a hundred-and-forty-acre pain in the ass. A patch of hell with back taxes."
"You've painted it the way it was when we were children."
"Bugs the hell out of you, don't it? You'd think the old man would want us to profit from his death, judging from the way he sold out his own family. But lifelong philosophies have a way of changing when you're on your deathbed."
"There's no 'deathbed' when you suffer a sudden heart attack."
"There you go again, getting all mixed up. That was a long time ago and none of it matters now. All that matters is making up for lost time. Setting things right."
As they approached the house, the years fell away, and Jacob could see himself in shorts and sneakers, riding the tire swing beneath the apple tree in the side yard. His childhood seemed part dream, part nightmare, viewed through the gauze of old wounds. He could almost hear his father shouting from the den, demanding that someone bring his pipe and newspaper. He could almost hear the crash of glass, the dull thump of bone-filled meat tumbling down the stairs---
He closed his eyes as the Chevy came to a stop beside the front porch. The abrasive engine was an affront to the stillness of the estate. The place deserved to be allowed to rest in peace. The house was as much of a coffin as the shiniest metal-encased box down at McMasters Funeral Home, this one holding the corpse of an entire family instead of one person's moldering mound of flesh and bone.
Joshua killed the engine and Johnny Cash's train-wreck voice cut off in mid-verse. "I was tempted to move back in, you know. Figured I'd play royalty, see what being a Wells was like. But it takes money, scratch, boatloads of Franklins, and I wasn't in the mood to join the working class just to stay in Kingsboro. A million ain't what it used to be. And it ain't nearly enough."
"I'll get you the rest, but you promised to stay away."
"You worry too much about things that ain't none of your business. Just like always. Seems like you'd be better off taking care of your own business instead of worrying about mine."
"Go to hell."
"Short trip." Joshua opened his door and got out, took an exaggerated gasp of fresh air. "Ah, the sweet smell of Wells country. Or is that chicken shit?"
Jacob stared at the twin shrunken heads. For the first time, he noticed that one of them had tiny cuts on its face, as if someone had slashed the rubber with a sharp knife. One ear was melted and charred, the nylon hair above it singed. Psycho voodoo, another of Joshua's mind games.
Joshua leaned forward and pressed his face against the tinted windshield, making a distorted dark mash of his nose. "Ain't you coming in? You're gonna hurt my feelings."
From the porch, Jacob couldn't resist taking in the panoramic view.
"Prime territory, half of it good bottom land," Joshua said, as if he'd sold real estate all his life. "Convenient to town yet with all the peace and quiet you can stand without going crazy. Do you know how much this would bring if you parceled it out right? Especially the way the second-home market is booming here in the mountains."
"Not interested."
"Come on, Jake. You've got money now. It don't matter where it came from, neither. I'd be the last one to ever pass judgment on a thing like that."
"I don't have the money. Renee got it."
Joshua's grin froze, a speck of saliva on his lower lip glistening in the sun as he stood by the car. "What are you talking about?"
"We separated. She blames me because of the fire. And Mattie." Jacob faced the breeze so his tears would dry. He wouldn't give Joshua the pleasure of his pain.
Joshua pounded the bottom of his fist on the Chevy's hood, denting the sheet metal. "Damn. I should have known she'd try some stunt like that. Leave it to a dumb bitch to take ever goddamned thing you got and still cry for more, more, more---"
"It's not her fault. I just---"
"And after you stood by her when Christine died."
Jacob turned, his fists clenched. "You don't know anything about that. Shut the hell up."
"She was family to me, too. I meant to send a card, but how do you say you're sorry when something like that happens?"
Jacob had been asking himself that same question for nearly a year. Christine's death had been different, tragic in a quieter way. Christine meant "follower of Christ," Renee's choice. Coming from Joshua's lips, the name now sounded like a grim cosmic joke.
"So when my other child dies, you pop up out of nowhere," Jacob said.
"Misery loves company," Joshua said. "Just like the good old days."
He reached up and rattled the brass pipes of a wind chime that hung from the porch's support beam. A die-stamped metal sparrow perched atop the chime, its crevices gritty with age. The chime had been there as far back as Jacob could remember. Their mother had tapped it with her cane to summon them to dinner or bedtime, and the soft notes were a reminder of long summer nights in the forest or games in the barn.
Joshua mimicked their mother's high voice as he climbed the porch steps. "Time to come in, boys." His voice rose to a piercing shrillness. "Jake! Josh!"
Joshua took a key from his pocket and unlocked the door, then stood aside. The damp, woody odor of the trapped air enveloped Jacob. Joshua gave him a gentle nudge in the back.
Jacob took a tentative step forward, on the threshold of a life he'd spent a decade burying. A long Oriental carpet led into the foyer where the dining room, sitting room, stairs, and hall intersected. The framed photographs of dead Wells ancestors hung on the walls, dim with dust. A rustic butcher-block table stood on uneven legs against the far wall, topped by a gray doily and an empty crystal vase. A wrought iron coatrack skulked in the corner like a sharp-edged stalker. A path was worn in the center of the oak stair treads. The bottom baluster was still splintered from their mother's fall. Except for the smell and cobwebs, everything was as it had been on Jacob's last visit. The day they'd buried Warren Wells. This house was a museum of pain, a mausoleum of bad memories.
Jacob waded forward, as if the past were a wet stack of calendars. Even Joshua's voice, coming from behind him, sounded years younger. "I haven't had the power turned on. No phone, neither. Didn't want anybody to know I was around."
Jacob finally mustered enough oxygen to speak. "How long are you staying?"
"That's up to you." Joshua lit a cigarette and the acrid smoke helped drive the stench of failure from the foyer.
Jacob reached the entrance to the sitting room. Books lined the shelves around the central fireplace, the burnt umber of the leather a complement to the bricks. Spread across the mantel was a collection of knickknacks, clay cats, glass figurines, hand-carved exotica from across the world. Their mother had been a collector and had wiped down the objects weekly, spacing them in such a precise manner that she could tell if a piece had been shifted even so much as a centimeter. She would have slammed her cane against the floor in anguish to see the figures now, clouded by accumulated dust.
Joshua crossed the sitting room, his boots shedding dried mud. He flicked his cigarette ash into the fireplace, picked up a crystal poodle, and held it to the muted light that leaked through the drapes. He rubbed a finger across the animal's head then raised his arm as if to fling the object against the grate. Instead, he tossed his cigarette onto the brick apron of the hearth, mashed it out with his foot, and returned the poodle to its proper place in the menagerie.
"It's a little chilly in here," Joshua said. He pulled a couple of thin books from the nearest shelf. "Hemingway. Dad's favorite writer. I think we ought to build a fire."
Jacob sat in a Queen Anne chair, a piece of furniture not designed for comfort. If the foyer was a hallway into the past of the entire Wells family, this room was solely his mother's, stiff and formal and brutal, as severe as a prison cell. Jacob had rarely spent time here during his childhood, and he perched on the edge of the chair as if expecting his dead mother to clatter around the corner, cane-first, and shout at him not to disturb anything. He breathed shallowly, afraid even to stir the air too much.
Joshua stooped and opened one of the volumes to the front pages. "First edition, what do you know?"
He tossed the books onto the log irons, where they lay like clumsy giant moths with paper wings. He pulled out his lighter. "Welcome home, Jake."
He flicked the flint wheel and stared into the dancing flame. The flame touched the brown pages and burst into brighter life, sending shadows crawling along the curtains. Joshua grinned, his eyes sparkling with the reflected fire. He echoed familiar words, written words:
"Hope you like the housewarming present."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Donald Meekins was definitely avoiding her.
Renee looked at her watch. She'd been waiting for twenty minutes in the little room with Jeffrey Snow, who sat at his desk and occasionally looked at her over his computer. Jeffrey was fresh out of college and had been hired by M & W Ventures after the previous office manager had been caught kneeling under Donald's desk by none other than Mrs. Meekins. Jeffrey was as far from blonde and bouncy as they came, with a weak chin and faded gray eyes, and his name wasn't Staci and he didn't sign his name with a little heart over the letter I. He had just the proper amount of stern bookishness to cow tenants who were behind on the rent and enough equanimity to divert those who clamored for repairs or a new paint job.
"Can I knock?" she asked Jeffrey.
"He's on an important phone call. Long distance."
"I see. Has Jacob been by?"
"Mr. Wells?" Jeffrey looked around the office as if expecting to see him in one of the chairs by the rubber tree. "I haven't seen him, ma'am."
"This week?"
"Not since the accid---" Jeffrey pulled at his tie as if it were cutting off the oxygen to his brain. "Not since March."
"He got my message, so he must have come by at least once."
"He still has a key."
"I guess things are a mess around here. I know Jacob and Donald were in the middle of a big land deal west of town. The way the economy's going, you can't afford to sit on anything."
Jeffrey tapped at the keyboard as if randomly plugging in numbers to escape her. "I wouldn't know about that, ma'am. I only keep track of the leases."
"I like Ivy Terrace. Easy to keep clean."
"Yes, ma'am. And Donald paid you up three months ahead. That qualifies you for a five percent discount if you renew."
"We'll be building another house soon," she lied. "When we get things straightened out."
Renee stood and arched her back, stiff from the long wait. She looked at the telephone on Jeffrey's desk. There were three lines in the system, each with a red indicator light. One line each for Donald and Jacob, and one line for Jeffrey. None of them were lit.
Renee picked up her purse from the floor beside her chair. Jeffrey did a bad job of hiding his relief at her leaving. "Tell Donald I'll give him a call later," she said.
"Certainly, Mrs. Wells."
Renee waited for Jeffrey's attention to return to the computer screen, and then she marched past him, twisted the knob to Donald's office, and flung the door open. Donald was behind the saltwater aquarium looking at the miniature undersea world, his face distorted by water and glass. The fish moved in darting patterns of color, nervous in their narrow world.
"Bring any bait?" Donald asked.
"No. Just some dynamite."
The light in the room was soft, the furnishings heavy and dark against walls of paneled walnut. Donald had built his environment to match his personality. Aside from the fish, the only bold color in the office was the plaid upholstery in the wooden case that held a clutch of dusty golf trophies. Along the rear wall was a bookshelf that was bare except for some piles of loose papers. A filing cabinet beside the desk looked as if it had been placed there for effect instead of utility. Donald came around the aquarium and approached Renee with the slow steps of a condemned man climbing the scaffold.
Renee searched his eyes for any sign of emotion. She hadn't seen him since the funeral. She wondered if he knew about Jacob's history of mental illness or if Warren Wells had cleaned up that mess along with all the others.
Donald smiled, his face tanned to health club perfection, the several rows of deep wrinkles on his forehead giving him the appearance of concern. His hair was shoe-polish black and he resembled an overgrown ventriloquist's dummy. "How's it going?"
"Oh, you know." She didn't want to cry here. She wouldn't think of Mattie or Christine. Not this time. Not now. Not unless she had to.
"Jacob loved her so much. This must be killing him."
"You've talked to him, then?"
"No. I've been trying to reach him. He won't return my calls. I can't reach him on the cell and he didn't give me the number of your new place."
"You haven't seen him?" She watched his face. He was a businessman, a speculator, an adulterer. A proven liar, and good at it.
"Of course, I expect him to take some time to recover, get through this at his own speed. But we need a plan to tide things over until then. We've got some big deals hanging in the balance."
She couldn't reconcile her image of Donald with the man who'd nearly wrecked his own marriage through a foolish affair. He seemed as cold and passionless as his fish. Jacob said Donald was an asset to the company, though, a partner who knew which palms had to be greased to push a deal through. This metaphorical grease seemed to cling to his skin, and probably left him slick under the folds of his expensive but drab suit.
"Jacob told me to touch base for him. I thought he'd been in a couple of times." The walls seemed to close in on Renee. She had left the office door open and thought about making an escape. But this job wouldn't be finished until the final nail was driven in the coffin.
Donald glanced at the door and lowered his voice. "Do you trust your husband?"
"He's my husband."
"I don't know how much he tells you---"
"We're partners, Donald. I make deposits for him."
"Okay, then," Donald said, slipping into his smarmy business manner. "You know we'll lose our purchase option if we don't make the second payment on the Martin property. And we've got a couple of contractors breathing down our necks for some major past dues. I know this has been devastating, but I'd hate to see Jacob lose everything his father worked for."
Renee stared at Donald, whose eyes were watery and narrow. "He'll come through. He's a Wells."
"I know, 'A Wells never fails,' but---"
He glanced at the door again, went silently past Renee and closed it. Then he faced her, wearing what she imagined was the same grave expression he used when pleading for a zoning variance before a municipal planning board. "I've been worried about him. Ever since Christine died, maybe even before that, he was taking too many chances, overreaching and gambling. The real estate market's way too soft for the moves he was making, especially in commercial development. I don't know how much he told you, but when he went into his funk after Christine died, the company nearly collapsed."
All she had done, all the sacrifices she'd made, were for Jacob Wells and their future together. This wasn't the plan. She'd been bailing a leaky boat and hadn't known it. As with the Titanic, there hadn't been enough life preservers to go around.
"It's not that bad," she said. "We were doing fine. There was plenty of money."
"Borrowed money. He was getting big loans to buy up land and inflating the values on all the appraisals. It's fairly common practice, but it's like juggling live hand grenades. One or two you can handle, but five or six and one's bound to go off sooner or later."
"How much does he owe?"
"A million three."
She looked at the aquarium. A large fish with an extravagant top fin darted toward the ceramic sunken ship, chasing away a school of blue and silver fish. The soft bubbling of the aerator and the hum of the fluorescent lights were the only sounds in the room.
"You didn't know," Donald said.
She fought an urge to go to the shelves and arrange the loose papers into neat stacks. Donald put a hand out as if he were going to touch her shoulder then changed his mind.
"I'm sorry," he said. "About Mattie. About your house. Nobody deserves such bad luck."
She wished she had a better confessor. A Catholic priest hidden away in a dark booth, or a shrink whose breath smelled of exotic beer and goat cheese. But she was going to shatter right there in front of Mr. Smooth himself, an acquaintance, someone who knew only the wrong half of the story.
"He put too much pressure on himself," Renee said. "Jacob always wanted to make his father proud. Part of him wants to outdo Warren Wells, but in this town he never had a chance."
She'd brought him here. She'd seen through his street-poet act at college and she'd known all about his wealth before the second date, though she pretended otherwise. The Wells family turmoil aroused little interest, and she was happy to let him enjoy his secrecy. She cared about the future, not the past. But she'd assumed the past involved silly prom dates and inattentive parents, not intensive therapy for a dissociative disorder.
"You want to sit down?" Donald waved toward the brown sofa.
Renee couldn't bear the thought of sitting where Donald and Staci might have wallowed in vapid passion. "What about last year? How bad was it?"
He held his finger and thumb about an inch apart. "I was this close to looking for some more investors to save our asses. But Jacob wouldn't hear of it. Said we'd get a break, something would come through soon."
"And it did."
"Like I said, the insurance from the fire---hey, I'm sorry, I'm an insensitive bastard. I didn't mean it that way."
"I'm getting over it," she said. Donald had never lost a child. He wouldn't know that you never got over it.
"The million can get us through the short run, but he's taken too many chances. God, I can't believe he didn't tell you all this."
"That Wells pride. He wouldn't borrow a water hose if his pants were on fire."
"Personally, I was ready to declare bankruptcy, start over in something with a future, like maybe pharmaceutical sales. But Jake just kept telling me the market would turn and we'd be okay, we just needed to hold out until we got a break."
"And he got a big insurance payoff just in the nick of time."
"That's why I asked if you'd made the deposit. I figured you'd at least have the check for the house. And, knowing Jake's business habits, I'll bet he had the family insured to the eyeballs."
"Mattie's only been dead three months." The fish turned into bright blurred streaks in her vision.
"The Christine money?"
None of his business. "That was my baby girl, Donald."
"Sure, but the living have got to keep living, right? That's what Old Man Wells said and Jacob's got so much of that blood in him, I forget he's human sometimes. I figured he'd be throwing himself into his work, getting the ball rolling again. Dealing with it his way."
"His way. What the hell do you know about 'his way'?"
"Don't shoot the messenger, Renee. You can't bring Mattie and Christine back no matter how much you hate me. Right now you ought to be worried about bringing Jake back."
She wanted to slap Donald, take out her anger and frustration. But Donald was right. Jacob was the real target, as elusive as any prey, his survival instinct intact. Her bait of the marriage counselor hadn't worked.
The electronic rattle of the phone interrupted them. Jeffrey's voice came over the intercom: "Mr. Meekins, line three. It sounds like Mr. Wells. He asked for Mrs. Wells."
How had he known she was there? Was he watching her?
"Hello?" Donald cradled the phone between his head and shoulder and nodded to Renee. "Listen, Jake, where are you? Things are going to hell in a handbasket here---"
He held up his hand as if warding off a tirade from the other end of the line. "Okay, here she is. But I need to talk to you after you're done with her."
Renee took the phone from Donald and squeezed it against her ear as if by force of pressure she could bring Jacob to her. "Jake?"
"Yeah."
"Where are you?"
"The place I said I'd never go."
"Come see me."
"I already did."
"What's wrong?"
Jacob's phrasing was strange, slightly slurred, his voice made thin by the compression of the phone line. Just like the phone call about the package. "Well, let me add it up," he said. "You cremated my daughter while I was drugged to hell in a hospital bed. You moved out and set up your own little nest before I had a chance to make things right. And now you're conspiring with my business partner while I'm here trying to pull everything together."
Her rib cage muscles clamped tight around her heart. "Jake?"
"I saw the way he looked at you. Like a wolf at a pork chop. And you---well, we know how you are."
Donald hovered close, wiggling his finger as if he wanted to listen. Renee raised her elbow to keep him away.
"We need to talk." Her throat was tight, as if someone had shoved a large, dry stone down her windpipe.
"There ain't nothing left to talk about."
"We've got to fix this. I know you're hurting over Mattie, but so am I. We need each other. That's the only way we can make it. And I know about---"
"All you need is Donnie Boy."
The tears broke forth, hot as blood on her cheeks. "Jake, you're talking crazy."
She immediately regretted using that word. Dr. Rheinsfeldt had explained that dissociative conditions came in several forms, and Jacob had exhibited some of the milder symptoms. Fugue states and amnesia didn't sound so mild to Renee, but at least he hadn't lost his identity or descended into any of the other horrible conditions Rheinsfeldt had described.
Donald retreated to the aquarium, his expression revealing his distaste for Renee's emotional outburst. If he only knew what his partner was saying about him, the tanning-bed brown of his skin might have flushed to red.
"Listen," came the voice from the end of the line. "Don't waste your breath lying. I don't care what you do no more. But I need you to do something."
"Please, Jake. You need help."
"Oh, yeah. Right. A round of skull sessions. Fixed me up good the last time, didn't they?"
"It's not just for you, honey. For us."
"There ain't no 'us.' There's just you and me and him."
"You're drifting like you did after Christine died."
"Except there's one major difference . . . Mattie's dead, too."
"The doctor said drinking is risky in your condition."
"I'm sober as a fuckin' Republican judge."
"Tell me where you are," she said. "I'll be right there."
"I'll bet you would. Because you're probably playing Donald, too. I reckon he got a million or two laying around."
"Jacob, seriously." She didn't know how she was still breathing. Some animal part of her brain had taken over her functioning. All she felt was the numb weight of the phone and the grief grinding her soul into ethereal sausage. Sometime during the last blurred minute, Donald had slipped out of the room.
Even though she could have screamed, she whispered instead. "Listen. You know you're not yourself. When Christine died---"
"When Christine fucking died. Stop pretending."
"It was a hard time for us, Jake. Mattie, too."
"The problem with Mattie was she was too much like you."
"You---" She pulled the phone away from her head, clamped it in her fist and looked for a corner in which to hurl this insanity from her life.
But she was compelled to listen again. The line carried only shallow static for fifteen seconds.
"You want to know the deal?" he said.
"Yeah," she whispered. At least Donald had the decency to close the door behind him. Now she could slip to her knees on the floor, let the tears crawl down without restraint. It took all her willpower to remind herself Jacob was ill. She would have to endure, that's all.
"Okay. Here's what I want you to do. You got the money?"
She nodded to no one. "I've got the money."
"Good. I want you to bring it to the cemetery."
There was only one cemetery in their lives. Heavenly Meadows, where Christine was buried. "Why there?"
"Family reunion, honeybunches."
Honeybunches. Jacob had only called her that once before. Years ago, during that hot August night Mattie was conceived in violent passion. He was cracking and she wasn't sure she had enough band-aids this time around. She summoned enough air to respond. "When?"
"Thursday morning. And no doctors or police."
"Please, Jake---"
"And tell Donnie Boy to go fuck himself. Unless you want to help him with that."
"Can't you see what's happening to you?"
"Sure, honeybunches. Like you said, I'm not myself. See you Thursday."
Before she could warn him to stay away from the Wells farm, the soft click came that cut her off from the man she loved.
Renee was finished crying by the time Donald returned. She promised to be strong, for Jacob and the memories of her children, and for the God who had promised blessings for those who kept the faith. But some rewards were only paid upon pain of death.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Sure, honeybunches. Like you said, I'm not myself. See you Thursday." Joshua hung up the phone and turned to face Jacob. "Damn. It was real hard to keep the Tennessee out of my voice. How did you get such a sissy accent?"
"I like what you've done to the place," Jacob said.
"Mom always did have great taste in ugly. She and old Queen Victoria had a lot in common. In fact, if it wasn't for us being born, I'd have sworn she never got laid in her life. Can I ask you something, brother to brother?"
Jacob rubbed the itching skin of his cheek, still raw from healing. "I could never keep a secret from you."
"How do you get through it?"
"Get through what?"
"Your damned kids. How do you deal with it when they die? I mean, ain't it supposed to ruin your life, make you blame God and all that shit?"
"You get by." Jacob squirmed in the uncomfortable chair.
"No, really." Joshua lit another cigarette, crossed the floor and loomed over Jacob. "How does it feel? You got to be honest with me. We always shared everything. Or at least we did, until dear old Daddy came between us. But he's out of the way now, so it can be just like old times."
"You wouldn't understand. You have to love somebody before you know what it's like to lose them." Jacob's gaze crawled past his twin brother to the fireplace, where he saw Mattie's peeling face in the curls of flame. He was relieved that he could remember his daughter, but frightened that she would always carry that association.
"Hey, I know what love's all about. It's about getting what you need. Ain't that right?"
"Shut up."
"You loved Mom. She's dead. You loved Dad. He's dead. I guess you loved your kids. They're both dead. And Renee---"
Jacob clenched his fists, leapt up, and shoved Joshua, who dropped his cigarette and staggered back against the bookcase. He fell with exaggerated awkwardness, knocking over the fire poker and ash shovel. A few books tumbled to the floor.
Joshua wiped at his mouth where a thin line of blood had collected in one corner. "They lose and you win, huh? A Wells never fails."
"I never asked for any of it."
"But you got it all, don't you? And every time somebody dies, you get a little more."
"I'll wring your goddamned neck if you don't shut up."
"Jake, Jake, Jake." Joshua wheezed a laugh. "You looked in a mirror lately? We're not kids anymore."
"I don't have to put up with your shit. I put up with plenty of it when we were kids, but you're right. Those days are over. And you can add one more person to my list of dead people." Jacob started for the door, then whirled and jabbed out with his finger. "You."
Joshua rose, the poker in his hand. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"
Jacob kept walking, entered the foyer with its high ceiling and haunted walls. The front door was locked. The shiny, key-operated deadbolt was new, its bright glint out of place in that dim room.
"You're home, Jacob," Joshua said, tapping the poker on the floor as if it were a cane. "Get used to it."
Jacob yanked on the door. One of his parents' favorite punishments was to lock naughty children in their rooms, and many of the doors in the house could be locked from either side. "I'll bust a window if I have to. Or your head."
"Such anger. I thought the doctors taught you to deal with it. But it's handy to claim you don't remember what happened."
"What do you want?"
"What have I always wanted? To be you, hotshot. I had the bad luck of sliding into the world after you did. And you beat me to everything else, too."
"Look, I didn't want Dad's blessing, I didn't want the inheritance, and I sure as hell didn't want any Wells birthright. I fought against that with every breath, same as you."
"Until just before he died. Funny how that happened. How you got in good when it counted."
Jacob pressed his hands over his ears. If only he could shut off that taunting, accusing voice. Or maybe squeeze hard enough for the memories to squirt from his brain like pus from a festering boil. He hadn't gone to Warren Wells' deathbed and begged for forgiveness, had he? But he couldn't shake the image of that pale wrinkled hand reaching to pat his head, and those watery blue eyes staring in pride and victory.
Joshua approached, the poker raised before him like a fencer's foil, his lips curled in triumph. Jacob had nowhere to run. Even if the door were open, there was no place in the world to escape the past. He stared into the face that looked like a savage mirror, a reminder of all those dark secrets and sick, hidden things.
Joshua stood close enough for Jacob to smell the stale cigarette tar on his lips. "Take it easy, brother. You're acting like you're here against your will. As if you haven't thought of this house every single day of your adult life."
Joshua put a hand on Jacob's shoulder. The hand was as cold as a lizard tucked under a creek rock. "Come on. Let me show you to your room."
Jacob let himself be led across the foyer to the polished stairs with their worn runners. They paused as if both were admiring the splintered baluster, an awesome relic that had resisted repair. Then Joshua nudged him up the stairs. Each riser took Jacob closer to the past, though memory seemed to elude him. Instead of clear and prolonged reels, he saw the events of their childhood in flashes of blurred and fractured images.
Step. On the floor, the sun shining through the window, making a yellow river between them, Joshua bringing a wooden train caboose down hard on Jacob's knee.Step. Jacob's fingers caught in the corner of the crib, his screams filling the world, Joshua grinning while yanking the covers away.
Step. In the dark behind the curtain, holding his breath, something terrible scratching at the door.
Step. Mother entering their room, smiling, bearing a silver tray with China teapot and mugs.
Step. Father smirking around his pipe, holding out a dollar bill and seeing which of his sons could leap the highest and be the first to snatch it.
Step. The window broken, the jagged glass smeared with the dark blood of the bird that had flown into its own reflection.
Step. In the night, Joshua giggling from his bed across the room. A separate giggle echoing from the closet. Jacob with his head under the suffocating safety of the pillow.
Step. Mother at the head of the stairs, her legs trembling, eyes gone wild toward the ceiling.
Step. Jacob's comic book collection scattered across the floor, the crotches of the cartoon women neatly clipped out.
Step. An arm reaching up from beneath the bed, fingers pale in the moonlight.
Step. Father locking the closet door, threatening to leave the boys in there until they turned to skeletons if they didn't learn to behave.
Step. A fleeting stench of sulfur, then a small flame crawling up the sheets.
Step. Joshua making him promise to never tell, cross his heart and hope to die.
Step. The doctor bending over, smelling of sweet decay, his round face bright with kindness.
Step. Mother with the silver tray, this time bearing pills and a glass of water.
Step. A scattering of coins on the walnut dresser. Joshua with three whole dollars because he was Father's favorite.
Step. Rummaging through Joshua's laundry, trying on his brother's favorite red shirt. It fit perfectly, better than any of Jacob's own clothes.
Step. Jacob with his head under the pillow. The closet door creaking open.
Step. The doctor telling him it was just a dream, and dreams could be scary, couldn't they? But, see, there's nothing here now.
Step. Mother at the head of the stairs.
Step. Father at the head of the stairs.
Step. A crashing sound, bone softer than wood, meat with little give.
Step. Promise not to tell ever.
Step. Jacob at the head of the stairs.
He blinked and looked around. The dust was like a fine silver-gray carpet, the threads shimmering and almost ethereal in the dying daylight. The hall was paneled with cherry. The closed doors stood like solid slabs of unforgiving darkness. Cracks as crooked as the legs of spiders stretched across the ceiling.
The last door on the right led to the room he and Joshua had shared as young children. Despite the expansiveness of the house, Mother had insisted the boys be together as much as possible. Their parents' bedroom was two doors down, the neighboring room serving first as a nursery, then as a guest room after the boys had been weaned from the crib. It wasn't until Jacob and Joshua were twelve that they each were allowed their own rooms. But when Jacob thought of the house, he didn't think of "his" room. He thought of "their" room. To him, the room on the corner with the view of the barn and the field beside the river was where he had grown up.
That's where his feet carried him now. The floorboards creaked with damp age, though he still unconsciously avoided the weak spot that had first alerted his parents to his sleepwalking. How many times had he walked this strip of faded carpet? Probably more times than he remembered.
"Attaboy," Joshua said. "Don't fight it no more."
Jacob must have entered a brief fugue state, because the next thing he knew, he was standing between the twin bunks that stood against opposite walls. Jacob's childhood bed now seemed too impossibly small to have held all those terrors and shivers. The closet door at the foot of the bed was ajar and he studied the harsh angle of blackness for any signs of movement.
Joshua sat on his own bed and made an awkward attempt to stretch out. "Brings back a lot of memories, don't it?"
"Not really," he lied. "My childhood is just sort of one long blur. Why would I want to remember it?"
Joshua sat up with a hard groan of bedsprings. "Because I want you to, dear brother. Those were best days of my life, and I'd like to have them back."
Jacob shook off the malaise that had engulfed him. "Is that why you hate me? Because I finally had some happiness? Because I succeeded while you ended up in a slave-wage job in Tennessee? Because I had a loving wife and kids while you were shacking up with some trailer-trash slut? Because I left all this behind and you had to live in it day after day because it's all you ever had? Is that why you hate me?"
Joshua smiled, his lips like those of the zombie-doll heads hanging from his car mirror. "I don't hate you. I love you. Why else would I go to all this trouble?"
"It's not trouble. It's luck. You happen to show up here just when I hit bottom."
"You got a nice, soft pile of green to catch your fall."
Jacob stared into Joshua's eyes, those deep, soulless, hazel-ringed holes that swallowed any light that struck them. He wondered how closely his own eyes matched Joshua's. In the mirror, he never saw himself as merciless. But he wondered how others saw him. Could anyone really escape the corrupt taint of their genes?
"I'm not like you, Joshua. I don't feed on the pain of others."
"Like hell. You turned into the old man. A chip off the fucking block. As much as we used to despise him, looks like he had the last laugh after all."
"You didn't even know him. At least he had enough of a soul left at the end that he could face his sins and apologize. But you don't even think about making amends. You just keep on digging a deeper hole, getting closer to hell with every shovelful."
"Mighty fancy words for a make-believe poet. But at least I'm not burying my kids."
Joshua reached to the shelf above his bed. The shelf was built into the wall and held the artifacts of a lost childhood. A ragged teddy bear flopped against a baseball glove, and an amputee G.I. Joe doll stood sentry over a stack of baseball cards crimped by a rubber band. Without looking, Joshua ran his hand over a Rubik's cube and a dented Tonka dump truck. He pushed the toys aside and pulled a dusty book from the recesses of the shelf.
Jacob recognized it instantly, though he hadn't seen it in more than a decade. "My diary. How did you get that?"
"It's my story, too, Jakie. Hell, I coulda wrote it for you if I wasn't so lazy."
Jacob stood. The past was sealed in its vault, yesterdays were the stuff that filled coffins, memories were for those who lacked the strength to bury them. Skeletons weren't meant for closets, they were to be hammered into a thousand bone fragments and scattered to the far corners of the world. Driven to dust. No evidence must ever remain.
No evidence. . .
"Give me that." Jacob's blood was frigid lava.
Joshua leaned back against a faded pillow, cracked the book to somewhere in the middle, and began reading, all trace of his rural accent gone.
"'January 17: Cold and gray. Looks like snow. Joshua got me in trouble in school today. He marked over part of my homework and drew pictures of naked girls. He made an A and I got sent to the principal's office.'"
Joshua looked past the diary, his grin that of a devilish boy's. "Hey, I'd forgotten all about that. Good thing you wrote it down, or it might never have happened. What else did you say about me?"
"That's none of your business. Give me that."
Joshua flipped through a couple of pages, the paper rustling like the lungs of a dying man. "Oooh, here's a good one. 'February 3: Cynthia Chaney sat with me at lunch today. I had peanut butter and jelly. She gets free lunch because her family is so poor. Cynthia said she's scared of Joshua because he spies on girls going into the restroom.' Hell, brother, you ought to give up real estate and go to Hollywood. With some of this stuff you make up, you're bound to be a hit."
"That really happened. It's all true."
"Bullshit. I was the one who ate lunch with Cynthia Chaney. Walked her home. Screwed her in the bushes behind the trailer park. She had this crazy idea that I was gonna marry her and rescue her from her pathetic excuse for a life. Dumb bitch."
"Cynthia was a nice girl. She couldn't help it that you ruined her."
"Cry me a goddamned river. Any girl that spreads her legs when you whisper the word 'love' deserves everything she gets."
"She had to move to Florida after the abortion."
"If you believe all the other stupid sluts. I'd bet money she was looking for an excuse to drop out of school and came up with that one because nobody would blame her. People are real good at arranging the truth to fit their needs. And I wasn't the only one to ride that little pony, anyway."
"The next day . . ." Jacob looked out the window, the anger seeping out of him along with his strength. "Cynthia thought I was you. She came up to me behind the gym and kissed me on the mouth, said meet her at lunch and make plans for running away together."
Joshua laughed. "Told you she was a dumb bitch. You probably felt sorry for her. Shows how messed up you were back then. Hell, I knew it two years before the doctors did. Didn't take a college degree to hear those loose screws rattling around inside your skull."
"Give me the diary."
"Wait. We're about to get to the good part. 'March 3: I wonder what it's like to be Joshua. They say twins often share a psychic bond that goes beyond anything that DNA can explain. This book I read said that's why twins separated at birth will often lead lives that seem amazingly parallel.' Hey, that's a good one. 'Psychic bond.' Do you really believe that crap, or is it some screwy shit the doctors told you?"
"We're alike in a lot of ways. In ways that make me ashamed. But Dad thought I was the troubled one. I guess you're right about people seeing what they want to see."
The sun was slanting through the window at a low angle, illuminating the dusty clutter under Joshua's bed. That thing about monsters under the bed, the hand rising up to snatch children away to that dark land beneath, had been nothing but a story. Yet as the shadows of the room grew deeper, Jacob sat on his childhood bed and had to fight an urge to pull his feet up from the floor and tuck them under his knees. The monsters were long gone, their power to scare sealed away in the dead hollows of closets and empty toy boxes.
Joshua turned a few more pages and a piece of crinkled celluloid fell out of the diary. Joshua picked it up, glanced at it then spun it over to Jacob as if it were a square Frisbee. Jacob caught it. The Polaroid portrayed him and Joshua in matching blue sailor suits, aged about seven. It must have been early summer, because neither wore shoes. It took Jacob a moment to recognize himself as the one on the right, the one who held a small sailboat. Jacob had loved that sailboat and had slept with it on the windowsill at the head of his bed.
Then one day Joshua had torn it from his hands and set it loose in the river, where it plunged over the tumbling, rocky currents and headed for a plunging froth of falls. Jacob had raced after the boat, almost jumping in the river to save it, but he couldn't swim and the water was fat and brown from recent rains. He ran along the riverbank as the briars and scrub locusts ripped jagged red lines across his arms and legs. He finally watched, helplessly tangled, as the sailboat careened against a protruding monolith of granite and shattered into bright scraps of painted wood and cloth.
"'April 11,'" Joshua read. "'Mother is sick again. She stayed in bed all day and I had to bring her soup. She wouldn't eat any solid food. Medicine and wine. Her face is pale and her hair somehow turned gray over these past few weeks. Father stays downstairs in his study. Joshua hides when it's time to take food to Mother. We should get a nurse for her.'"
Joshua slammed the diary closed. "Mommy's little pet, weren't you?"
"It was an accident," Jacob said, looking out the window, seeing the broken sailboat in his mind, splinters in the foam.
"Nothing's an accident. We get everything we deserve."
"No." The river rose up, dark waters rimmed with white teeth.
"You pushed her, Jacob."
"No." The river opened like a large mouth, the cold current inviting him inside.
"You killed your own fucking mother."
Jacob rubbed the bottoms of his fists against his eyes, trying to wipe the sight of that broken sailboat out of his mind. Somewhere, far from here, its wreckage must have reached the bottom of a calm sea.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Renee drove by the remains of their house Wednesday just as the sun hit the far tops of the Blue Ridge. She had meant to keep going, but found herself turning into the driveway as if she were back from a run to the grocery store. The block footprint of the building lay like a lidless coffin. Yellow plastic tape still stretched around the charred wreckage, though it was ripped in places, the pieces fluttering like the tails of tangled kites.
At the rear of the backyard, a small storage shed had been blackened but otherwise undamaged. The branches of the oaks and maples nearest the house were stunted and bare, crippled fingers among the vibrant spring foliage. A split-rail fence along the western side of the property had been knocked down, probably by one of the tanker trucks. The front yard was crisscrossed with ruts, the sidewalk cracked, mailbox leaning like a penitent drunken priest.
A few blackened timbers poked up from the sunken pit of debris. Twisted metal and smoky stones were scattered in the dead embers. The refrigerator had once held pictures of Mattie in her soccer uniform, foolproof recipes, wrinkled tests with red letter A's circled at the top, all stuck to the door with colorful magnets. Now the rusty appliance lay on its side, adorned with nothing but shards of gray glass.
She shouldn't have come. The fire chief, Davidson, had told her the scene investigation was complete, though some evidence was being tested in the state lab. She and Jacob were welcome to salvage anything they wanted. Davidson said they could even come in with a front end loader and dump truck and clear the remains, get a fresh start on the existing foundation.
Remains.
Easy for Davidson to say, a woman who was married to her work and whose only responsibility was to duty. Maybe Davidson, in the privacy of her lonely bed, could cry over firefighters killed in televised tragedies or mourn victims of distant wars. But Davidson didn't have some of the flesh of her own flesh seared into these ruins. Renee did. She wore the smoke like a burial shroud, and the loss was a hot bed of eternal coals in her chest.
She sat in her car for a moment, looking up the street at the perfect houses with bright lights, television, and laughter behind the drawn curtains. She hated those people. They had no right to fortune and happiness. Renee had built her life from the ground up, driven each nail carefully, caulked every opening to prevent hard winds from penetrating. Yet she had failed somewhere. You could worry all you wanted about locks and safety lights, take every precaution, but tragedy still kicked in the front door, walked up the stairs, and whispered, "Nice to see you again."
Or maybe it slipped in a back door that someone else left open...
A BMW drove by, one of the flattened and ugly newer models, probably driven by a perfect mother from the far side of the subdivision. One whose children were brushing their teeth and getting ready for a night of sweet dreams. A woman whose children were full of blood and breath and chicken soup. A woman with copper-bottomed skillets hanging in sequential order, arranged by descending size. A woman who watched Dr. Phil with a knowing, sympathetic smile, secure that her marriage had no hidden cracks or stress fractures.
Renee got out of the car. The air was damp with summer dew and thick with the stench of burnt wood. She was amazed that so little of the house remained. Curls of wire, warped pipe, some dark, wet mounds of gypsum, and a few clumps of charred clothes were scattered among the black embers. Something caught and reflected the dying sunlight, a bright beacon in the blackness.
It was the hand mirror her mother had given her, a family heirloom. Renee had passed it down to Mattie. The ornate silver framing had melted into shapeless slag, dark ashes stuck to the metal, but the glass was intact.
Renee edged the line of cinder blocks that had served as the basement wall. She was wearing slacks, and her shoes would be ruined, but she worked her way down into the hole that had once been her house. A jagged strip of sheet metal cut into her ankle. She hissed the beginning of a cuss word then stopped herself, as if she were committing sacrilege on hallowed ground. The burnt wood crumbled under her feet, black dust rising and clogging her throat and nostrils.
She reached the spot fifteen feet from the wall where the hand mirror's surface gleamed between the twisted hulks of two rafters. She pushed a path to the mirror and picked it up, then knelt in the rubble and placed it against her heart.
When she had given the mirror to Mattie, she had told her the story of Snow White, and how the wicked stepmother had asked the mirror about beautiful women.
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" Renee had said, in her most gravelly, cruel voice.
"Who, Mommy, who?" Mattie replied, bouncing her bottom on the bed, eyes wide enough to reveal white sclera all around the pupils.
Renee turned the mirror around so that Mattie could see herself, rosy lips and crooked baby teeth, softly curving nose and pink cheeks, hair as golden as her mother's, but much finer. "Why, you are, silly," Renee had said.
She looked up at the darkening sky. That magical moment had taken place twenty feet above her, on the second floor in a land of happily ever after. And the mirror had absorbed that moment into its family legend, so that Mattie could never look into the mirror without wrinkling her nose and saying, "Why, you are, silly," sometimes changing the emphasis of the words to say, "Why, you are silly." Renee couldn't believe the daughter who had owned the mirror was now less substantial than the twilight haze that hung in the trees.
Renee jerked the mirror up and peered into its blurred surface with the childish hope that she might catch Mattie's reflection. But the silver-backed face had slipped off with the spirit of the girl who had died in the fire.
When you die, you take all your reflections with you.
How much different Mattie's ceremony had been than the disaster with Christine's. It was more than just Jacob's absence. A coffin, even as small as the one that held Christine, carried the suggestion of a human form. Planting a loved one at least gave the illusion of renewal. Sliding a pot into the square concrete sleeve of a mausoleum wall brought no sense of completion, even after the greasy-haired man in coveralls had screwed the wrought-iron cover into place.
She tilted the mirror so she could see her own face in the dim light. She had aged, and her skin was tired and drawn. Her eyes were streaked with lightning bolts of red, her jaws clenched with tension. But she wasn't looking for physical signs of reassurance. She was searching herself to see if her face still held any hope.
"A Wells never fails," she whispered. "But I'm not a Wells."
A noise came from the rear of the property, where a line of azalea and forsythia gave way to an untamed tangle of forest. Probably some dog was sniffing around, drawn by the strange smells. Maybe to its hypersensitive nose, the aroma of roasted meat still wafted---
Renee stomped back to the block wall, the mirror under her arm. She carefully perched the mirror on the grass outside the rubble, then lifted herself up. She'd scuffed the knees of her slacks, and her hands were black. She wiped her hands but the stains remained. The noise came again from the forest edge, where streetlighted gray met night black.
"Who's there?" she said. She wasn't scared. Someone who had just lost a child, had lost two children, had already faced the worst. Ordinary fear no longer had any power over her.
A stifled giggle came from the shadows. Probably one of the neighborhood kids, responding to a dare.
Betcha won't go over there, Scaredy Fraidy Baby. Betcha won't touch the house where Mattie died. Especially in the dark.
Kids had their own way of dealing with tragedy. They poked dead things with sticks, resorted to morbid humor. They scared themselves silly on purpose. They went looking for ghosts.
Isn't that what you're doing?
No. Her ghosts had dissolved, slipped through her fingers as she watched, and all she had was a bottomless mirror.
Mattie had been so brave about Christine's death. Part of it had been Mattie's ignorance of death's permanence. Christine was still so new to the world. Mattie hadn't gotten the opportunity to form a sisterly bond. The closest she had come was taking her turn holding Christine, rocking her when she suffered colic, and singing "Hush Little Baby."
And Mattie had, even more than Jacob, brought Renee through the foggy months of anguish. Mattie needed her. Not just for the everyday things like clean clothes and rides home from school, but for advice on what to do when Tommy Winegarden tried to kiss her on the playground. Or an explanation of how tadpoles could turn into frogs when they didn't even have any legs. Or why Jesus loved the little children but let them smother in their blankies.
The giggle came again. It hadn't been her imagination.
"Hello?" Renee called to the trees, wondering which of Mattie's friends was hiding there. Sydney, Brett, or Noelle.
The only response was a snapping of twigs and the hushed rustle of branches.
She walked toward the noise, the marred mirror held before her like a talisman.
"Don't be afraid. I just want to talk to you."
Sydney Minter, two houses down, had come over one afternoon to play Barbies with Mattie. They both pretended dolls were really lame. Then Renee showed them how they could make a house of wooden blocks and have Barbie crash G.I. Joe's jeep into it and, afterward, Mattie's room grew loud with happy shouts and fantasized combat. Renee hadn't seen the Minters at Mattie's service.
She reached the cold fringe of the woods and tried once more. "Come out where I can see you. I miss her, too."
The giggle came again, and this time it carried no wariness, no hesitancy. It was followed by a low, rasping reply from a counterfeit voice: "Wish me."
The voice sounded electronic, as if coming from a toy. Mattie had owned a Barbie doll that allowed the owner to record bits of song so the doll could sing "like a real rock star." This sentence carried that same compressed, static-filled quality, as if someone had whispered into the device at close range and then played it back on an amplified setting.
Who would play such a cruel joke? No child would be so vicious to a grieving mother. Nor as creative in cunning. Renee lifted the mirror as if to hurl it in the direction of the voice or deflect the unreal mirth. "What do you want?"
The reply came ten seconds later, from a different dark space behind the wall of trees. Again with the electronic stage voice of someone imitating a B-movie demon: "I saw what happened."
"What happened where?"
A pause, time for record and playback. "The night of the fire."
Renee fought her way among the sharp, grasping limbs of the landscaped bushes, ignoring the scratches to her skin. "Stay where you are," she said, her breath and heartbeat filling her ears.
She plunged into the woods, a pine branch slapping her face and making her eyes water. The canopy of leaves overhead merged into a ceiling of utter blackness, and only a few jagged strips of distant light leaked between the tree trunks. She spun, confused, trying to orient herself toward the direction of the voice.
This time, it came from behind her, deeper in the forest. "He went through the door."
"What door?"
Another five seconds for record and playback. "The door that swings both ways." The source of the voice was retreating even as it spoke. Renee couldn't tell if it was child or adult, male or female. She held her breath, crouching with her mouth open, gauging the location of the footfalls. As she listened, her mind raced in wild synchronicity with her pulse.
Door that swings both ways.
Was it a riddle of some kind? Or was it all some elaborate prank played by the Minter kids or the Bennington boy or some faceless brat from one of the anonymous, perfect homes?
Or had someone seen something on the night of the fire and was afraid to tell?
She ran in the direction of the noise. The black trunks of trees seemed to rise up on all sides, as if they had been placed in a perfect disarray to confuse her. Low limbs slapped at her legs, ripping her slacks. The forest was like a live creature, drawing her into its wild heart. Renee clawed brittle twigs away from her face as her hair tangled in the arching branches. She tore free and lurched past a massive oak then found herself in a clearing.
In the starlight, she could make out a worn path. It led to a creek. The path disappeared into a thicket of briars, locust, and crabapple on the other side, a dense and bristling wall through which no human could pass.
Renee bent to the creek and splashed water on her cut face. She heard no footsteps, no false recorded voices, only the soft laughing of the water. She held up the mirror and saw herself, a wicked witch with bruised eyes, a viper's nest of hair, blood trickling from the bridge of her nose.
She looked down at the water's edge. Lying on a cold gray boulder was a tiny plastic object of faded yellow.
She stooped and picked it up, and it made a clacking sound.
A rattle.
It had belonged to Christine.
Beyond it, in the hollow between two water-worn stones, lay a bundle of fabric. Renee retrieved it, looked into the frozen smile of Rock Star Barbie. The doll should have burned along with the house. It was clean, its hair untangled, the glittering clothes laundry fresh.
She turned the doll over and felt for the button that would trigger the audio clip. She found it.
"Housewarming present."
Renee sat by the creek for long minutes, listening to the wind in the trees, the bright music of the currents, the sharp chirrup of insects. As the last daylight faded and the sounds of the night merged into a single symphony, she stood, brushed the dirt from her clothes, and tucked the rattle and doll into her pocket.
Someone knew.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jacob awoke with his mouth dry, heart pounding in his ears, wrists aching. He thought he smelled smoke and realized he'd been dreaming of the house burning down. His back was stiff. He rolled over and looked across the room. Joshua's bed was empty.
The windowsill was gray with approaching dawn. He sat up and rolled his shoulders and neck, loosening the sore muscles. The smoke he'd smelled was from a cigarette. Joshua stood by the door, smiling, scratching in the stained armpit of his T-shirt.
"Morning, brother. How did you sleep?"
"Worse than ever."
"You got no peace of mind. Them shrinks didn't do you a bit of good."
"How long do I have to stay here?"
Joshua flicked his cigarette, sending ashes onto the rug. "You act like I'm holding you here against your will." He laughed, the barking of a thirsty dog. "I ain't my brother's keeper. Pretty funny, huh?"
"Can I go, then?"
"It's a long walk back to town."
"I'll call a cab."
"Sorry. I can't let you use the phone. You might say something we'll both regret."
"Okay, then. I'll walk."
"So you don't want to wait for your dear, sweet honeybunches of a wife."
"Leave her out of this."
"That ain't the deal."
Jacob looked at the closet. The door was closed. He wondered what was hidden behind it. "You have the house. And what I already paid you. Isn't that enough?"
"What the hell good is this old place since I can't sell it? Nothing but a snake den of memories that sneak out and bite you. You owe me plenty more, Jake. You've owed me for a long time. Now it's time to pay up."
"Whatever you want. Just leave us alone."
"'Us'? I thought you'd decided your wife was a cheating bitch who deserved to die."
Jacob rubbed his eyes with the tops of his fists. "No. I didn't say that. You said it, didn't you?"
"Jake, how many times do I got to tell you? I'm only doing what's best for you. I'm only doing what you would do, if you had the cojones."
Jacob leaned forward, straining, and looked under the bed. Nothing. "You never took care of me."
"Better than the old man ever did, that's for sure."
"Because he loved you the best."
"Love? The old man? Them words don't go together."
"He did all of this for us, Josh. He wanted both of us to carry on for him."
"Except I never wanted it. Not the fucking legacy, not the place in the community, not the life given in tireless service to others. I just wanted the money. But Dad fucked me over by leaving me the house instead. Laughed all the way to the goddamned grave, with you sitting there holding his bedpan and a fresh copy of the will."
Jacob's head throbbed and his tongue rasped against the roof of his mouth, the result of too much whiskey. He looked around the room. The only time he had ever desired ownership of this house was when the lawyer cracked open the will and announced that it belonged to Joshua. Maybe he should have bought it then. Surely the lawyer could have found a way around the covenant that prevented its sale.
The room seemed smaller and less forbidding than it had in their youth. Two baseball gloves hung on a row of pegs above the dresser. One was right-handed, one left-handed. Jacob had learned about transverse twins, and how the embryo split and the two halves developed as mirror opposites, facing each other, confronting each other. Jacob clenched his right hand. Joshua, as a lefty, had always been the better baseball player, especially as a pitcher.
That was one of the few ways their grade school teachers could ever tell them apart: by the hand with which they wrote. Occasionally Joshua would force Jacob to cover for him while he was off skipping school or smoking marijuana under the football stadium bleachers. Jacob had practiced writing with his left hand until the print was legible. He didn't want to disappoint Joshua, and of course Joshua wielded the ultimate weapon against him.
Jacob had often imagined the two of them facing each other in the womb, fighting for Mom's physical resources and sapping her strength. Then, at the moment of release, struggling toward the bright opening above in a desperate, winner-take-all race. As if they each knew the prizes that awaited and the stakes of life and death.
"Renee doesn't know about you," Jacob said.
"She knows enough." Joshua went to the window.
Outside, the sun had risen but was veiled in ragged clouds. A spring breeze whistled through the shutters and a loose slat knocked against the exterior wall. Tap tap tap.
Mother had made that same sound walking down the hall after her stroke, tapping with her cane. Jacob could picture her hunched inside a peach flannel nightgown and wearing frayed slippers, ankles streaked with thick blue veins. Her body trembled as she slid a foot forward, balanced herself, swung the cane and planted its tip against the floor, adjusted her weight on the handle, and slid the second foot beside the first. Repeated over and over, slowly, until she reached the stairs. Then the tap of the cane would be broken by the clatter of her spidery hand against the railing.
"We had some good times in the old barn, didn't we?" Joshua said, without turning.
"The chickens didn't."
"Heh. So you remember that, huh?"
Jacob grew faint and wanted to lean back on the bed but was afraid Joshua would take it as a sign of weakness. His lightheadedness was partially due to the hangover, but Joshua's torture of the animals still had the power to shock him. The things Joshua did with a lit cigarette and that place where the guinea hens' eggs came out . . .
He swallowed a hard knot of liquor nausea. "Daddy never did figure out why the hens quit laying."
"The Gentleman Farmer. What a joke. He just wanted a big driveway so he could see his enemies coming from a long way off. That Wells paranoia runs deep, don't it, brother?"
"You could have sent me a letter. I would have paid you and you wouldn't have had to come back."
"It's more fun this way." Joshua went to the closet, grinned, and opened the door. Jacob closed his eyes. The creak of the hinges hadn't changed in two decades. The sound was still a dry scream combined with a perverted snicker.
"Wish me, Jake," Joshua said, and they may as well have been eleven years old again. Wish Me started out as a game where one of them would guess which toy the other boy was holding in his bed across the dark room. Then Wish Me evolved into an elaborate fantasy in which they pretended to be someone else.
From Captain Kangaroo to Pete Rose to Batman to Shaggy on the "Scooby Doo" cartoon, they would run through the heroes of the day. Then Joshua started on monster movies, Dracula and the Mummy, using sinister voices that were as creepy as those of swarthy Hollywood actors. Instead of staying on his own bed, Joshua would sneak across the dark floor and slide under Jacob's.
"Wish me a monster with fangs and red eyes," Joshua would whisper in the darkness.
Jacob would barely be able to breathe and his vocal chords grew as tight as banjo strings. "I'm not afraid of you."
"It's not me you're afraid of. It's the Sock Monster." And the sock would climb over the edge of the mattress, Joshua's hand inside, scratching softly against the blankets. And no matter how many times Jacob told himself it was only a hand, the menace in Joshua's voice made the Sock Monster a real and terrible threat. And Jacob would squirm away and bunch up near the headboard, only to find the Sock Monster crawling through the bed's gap to snap and claw at his flesh.
All the while, as he pinched and poked, Joshua laughed and made cruel comments in his creepy fake voice. He would keep up the Sock Monster game until he was bored or tired, then he would say, "Do you give, you big sissy?"
By that time, Jacob would be curled into a shuddering and whimpering ball.
"Suck that snot back up your nose and tell me you give."
"I give," he said when he could part his clenched teeth.
Each morning, Jacob never failed to find a sock under the bed, pocked with small round spots of dried blood. His blood. As if the Sock Monster had really dug teeth into him, pulled his hair out by the roots, gnawed his fingers and toes.
Eventually, Joshua stopped sliding under the bed and began hiding in the closet instead. That's when things really started getting nasty. And Jacob was eleven again.
"Wish me, Jake," Joshua repeated, and Jacob opened his eyes to find himself in the present, in the room he never thought he'd see again except in occasional nightmares.
"I don't want to play."
"You better. Or I'll tell."
"I'm not twelve anymore."
"No, but the statute of limitations don't run out on murder."
"It wasn't murder."
"Well, I guess in a court of law they'd call it manslaughter or reckless endangerment or something to make sure you got off with a slap on the wrist. Since you're so upstanding and all. But we both know it's a killing no matter what name you give it."
Jacob felt as if his ribs were splintered and digging deep into the meat of his lungs and heart. "I was just a kid."
"That cane was her life, Jakie Boy. She hardly ever took a step without it. Even when she sat and read the newspaper, or dusted her little knickknacks, that cane was right there with her. She probably could have beat off a rabid mountain lion with that thing. She sure enough knew how to whoop us with it."
"She shouldn't have hit me. Not right there on the elbow, where it made my arm go numb."
"You always was the type to carry a grudge. Look what you done to me. Let me live like scum while you rode that golden ticket to the top. And I reckon you figured Momma was in the way, too."
"She shouldn't have hit me."
"The stroke crippled her up a little, but it didn't hurt her mind a bit. Helped her focus. Just made her hate us that much more. You remember why she hit you?"
"Because I was in striking distance."
"No. That was the other times. This time, it was because you broke her little ceramic rooster."
"I didn't break her ceramic rooster."
Joshua laughed, lit another cigarette, sucked in the burning tobacco as if it were a hit of eternal life. "Hey, I tried to tell her, but she didn't believe me. So I reckon it was either you or somebody who looked a lot like you."
"You bastard."
"When the eagle head of that cane knocked against your bone, I heard it clear across the house. Figured it served you right. Still, that wasn't no excuse to mess with her cane like that."
"You're the one who snuck into their room and stole it."
"As a favor. You're my brother."
Jacob had a little pocket knife, a Case with two blades that their father had given him for a Christmas present. When Joshua brought him the cane that night, Jacob slid it under his blankets and kept it there until he heard Joshua snoring across the room. Jacob had intended to mar the cane in some way, maybe carve his initials or try to raise a few splinters to catch his mother's skin. But he'd found a soft vein in the wood near the bottom and he worked the knife deep into it, gouging until the cane had a little flexibility. Jacob thought maybe the cane would crack as Momma swung it at him and missed. He never dreamed it would give way while she was descending from the top of the stairs.
An accident, they had said. Warren Wells was the one who found her, sprawled and twisted at the bottom of the stairs, one shattered leg poking through a broken baluster. Dad didn't scream or moan or even shed a tear. He didn't bother calling 9-1-1. With the calmness of an undertaker, he had called the sheriff's department and then the ambulance service, telling them not to hurry. He seemed more upset over the broken baluster than over his wife's death.
She was insured for two million, after all.
"I didn't mean for her to get hurt," Jacob said.
"That's a good one. Ever notice how everybody close to you ends up getting hurt sooner or later? And never on purpose?"
"Except you. I could never hurt you enough, and you're the only one I ever wanted to kill."
Jacob looked out the window at the top of the barn. The morning sun caught the hills beyond the house, capped them with the golden anger of dawn. The light glinted off the barn's tin roof and the drops of dew that lay across the surrounding meadows sparkled like leaky diamonds. As a child, Jacob had often awakened before anyone else in the house, even his insomniac mother, and he would go out into the fields alone to breathe the air of an unspoiled day.
"When's the last time you visited her grave?" Joshua said.
Jacob realized Joshua was staring at the family cemetery on the top of the ridge, where a few stone markers were fenced off from the cattle. Cemeteries required permanent easements. The land could never be used unless the bodies were disinterred and moved to other resting places. When Jacob had learned of that legal detail, he had forever become a believer in cremation. There were no laws governing the disposal of ashes, and such a send-off didn't damage real estate values.
"Why would I visit Mom's grave?"
"Ain't her I was talking about."
"Mattie doesn't have a grave."
"The other one. Christine."
"That burial was for Renee. She was still Catholic then."
"So you think the dead sleep better in tiny pieces, scattered on the wind?"
"Except for those like you who go to hell."
"Mattie could have been buried here," Joshua said, nodding toward the family plot that held three generations of the Wells dead. "You know kin is always welcome under home ground."
Something thumped outside the room, a sound eerily similar to the one Mother had made while tumbling to her death down the stairs. Jacob tried to stand, then gave up.
"We have a guest," Joshua said, showing teeth that were brown from tobacco.
"Renee?"
"No, she's Thursday, remember."
"Not..."
"Heh. I'm sure you two will have a lot to talk about. It ain't been that long, has it?" Joshua called out of the room. "Honey, we're in here."
Jacob lay back on the bed again, his head swimming, his pulse sluicing through the veins of his temples like liquid barbed wire. He wondered how quickly a physical addiction to alcohol could cause a case of delirium tremens. Footsteps came down the hall and stopped at the doorway. He closed his eyes against the dawn.
"Hello, stranger," she said.
He didn't have to look to picture her. Her face was dark, the tan color of a worn football, eyes as black as midnight crows. She was several inches shorter than Joshua but she'd be standing straight, her breasts small and firm beneath the men's shirt she always wore. Her hands would have their first wrinkles now, the fingernails chipped. Her hair was thick and dark and flowed down her back to her waist. Drinking would have been hard on the skin around her eyes, and he wondered if she had let her hygiene deteriorate to match the environment in which she lived. But she had made her bed, tangled its blankets, stained its sheets, and now she could lie in it and rot for all Jacob cared.
"He's in a mood," Joshua said.
"Poor chiquito," she said. "He always was the sensitive type."
Her voice hadn't changed over the years. It was still that same husky silk that even a telephone line couldn't diminish, the clipped accent not much influenced by her exposure to eastern Tennessee. He could even smell her now, a woodsy, animal odor, a wisp of sweat, a perfume that blended patchouli and cinnamon. Beneath that lay the faintest scent of her vagina, as if she and Jacob had made love in the bed across the room from him as he slept.
Or maybe that was just his imagination. She would never do such a thing. Nothing to tease him or hurt him. Or remind him that he would never be Joshua, no matter how much he tried.
"Come on, look at me," she said, and all that old bravado was back, her cruel and tantalizing indifference. He wished he could run to her, throw his arms around her, clamp his hands around her throat, kiss her and slap her and bite her lip.
But in the end, all he could do was obey her. Just like always.
"Carlita," he said.
Her eyes were hard and flat, dry obsidian marbles. That was all he allowed himself to absorb at first glance. It was drink to a drunk, heroin to a junkie, d-Con to a starving rat.
"Your face is red," she said. "Are you blushing?"
"Jake got a little too close to the campfire while he was roasting his weenie," Joshua said.
"Oh, that thing. I didn't know you still had one," she said to Jacob.
Life had marked her, the plows of time and hardship dragging furrows into her face. But her lips were as robust as October persimmons, though the corner of her mouth twisted in disdain. She had probably been born with that mannerism, hatched in the dirty hut of an illegal immigrant's shack in Piney Flats, where the Christmas tree farms leached their insecticides into the slow-moving creeks. On land that Warren Wells had owned and lorded over.
He couldn't look away from her eyes. They were as deep and dark as that grotto into which he had descended while hospitalized. They held the promise of cool suffocation, a slow and pitiless drowning. Though her skin had changed, losing some of that caramel luster, her eyes were untouched by the years that had passed since he had last seen her. Those eyes were as ancient as Mayan idols.
"How is the wife and kids?" she asked.
Jacob looked at Joshua, who smiled as if he had swallowed a greasy lizard. "You told her, didn't you?" Jacob managed.
Joshua shrugged and snuffed his cigarette against the wall. "Family secrets."
Jacob's head throbbed, the sun now high and bright and piercing him as if its needles were sewing his skin to his flesh. "I need a drink."
"Drinking is a want, not a need," Joshua said.
Carlita lifted her bottle of beer and drank. The bottle was beaded with moist drops of water, further arousing Jacob's thirst. She twisted her mouth again and pressed the Corona Light to her forehead, the motion causing her unbridled breasts to sway beneath her checked flannel shirt. Her denim jeans were tight around the curves of her thighs. She hadn't borne any children. She had moved too fast to be pinned down, had evaded all sperm that swam upstream against her unwelcoming currents.
Jacob closed his eyes again and turned his face against the pillow. His back was sore.
"Sorry to hear about your kids," she said. "That's mal mucho."
"Joshua," Jacob said, eyes clenched shut. He actually whimpered. "Make her stop."
Carlita came closer. Her beer breath wafted on his face. She whispered, "Told you it would never work. You cannot run away from who you are."
"Joshua," Jacob repeated, his voice cracking like a teenager's. "I'll give you anything. Just let me go."
Carlita's lips brushed against his cheek. He fought a slithering snake of vomit that wended up his esophagus. Despite his revulsion, a rush of warm blood surged through his groin.
"You didn't need them, Cacatua," she whispered. "Just me. Just me."
Jacob screamed, or maybe something inside him tore open and the sound that filled his ears was the wrenching of flesh from bone.
When he opened his eyes, he couldn't tell if seconds or minutes had passed. Drops of cool sweat clung to him like tiny leeches. Carlita and Joshua were sitting on the bed across the room, holding hands. They shared a kiss, no tongue, like kids with braces who were trying something new.
"I'll give you anything," Jacob said. "Just make it go away."
"Anything?" Joshua said.
"Yes."
"Sounds like what we wanted, don't it, babe?" Joshua said to Carlita.
"He filthy rich, a gringo pig," Carlita said. "Right now he just plain filthy."
"She's right, brother, you're really starting to stink up the joint. If dear old Momma was here, she'd rap a cane across your knuckles and give you a bath."
"Renee will bring the money," Jacob said.
"I know."
"Can I go now?"
"Sure, big brother. You're a guest here. You're free to leave any time you want."
Jacob lifted his hands and rubbed his wrists together where the ropes had chafed and cut through his skin. "Untie me, then."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Renee knelt on the cool grass. The morning clouds overhead were irregular, a jagged wash of gray rubbing against the lard-like lumps of white cumulus. She couldn't arrange the clouds, nor tidy the twisted trees that lined the edge of Heavenly Meadows. The shrubs along the low stone fence hadn't been trimmed since autumn and bristled with ungainly new growth. A chipped mausoleum stood at the top of the rise, its columns and facade done in a Roman style as if polytheism were acceptable as long as the tenants paid their rent. The world was irregular and obscene, the cracks in the mausoleum much too large for her to repair. Even the grave markers were arrayed in uneven rows, the older ones on the top of the hill worn and leaning, some bearing small, tattered American flags. She picked the stray bits of uneven grass from Christine's grave.
"She loves me, she loves me not," Renee heard herself saying, and the smell of plucked grass sent her to a fantasy playground where Mattie and Christine ran together, hand in hand. But the image made no sense, even for a daydream, because Christine had never even crawled, let alone walked.
"She loves me," Renee said, then changed to "Hail Mary, full of grace." Instead of rosary beads, she clutched the dirty pink rattle she'd found in the forest behind their burned-down house. Several priests had warned her in sermons that all the great and wondrous gifts of God could be stripped away in the blink of an eye, but that even the deepest sorrow could be tempered through abiding faith. She'd always thought those sermons had been addressed to other people, those whose sinful and cluttered lives invited disaster. Bad things didn't happen to good people in a just world guided by a merciful God.
She was praying over Christine's body because Mattie had no fixed location, no single point at which to hurl grief. Jacob's belief in a unifying, universal energy seemed terribly large and empty to her. Such an afterlife was the spiritual equivalent of ashes tossed onto the cosmic winds. She didn't want Mattie spending eternity in such a place. That's why she'd pressed Jacob to allow the children to be christened and baptized as Catholics. For all the good it did.
Renee finished her run through the cycle of sorrowful mysteries and stood. The grass had stained the knees of her pants. She would have to throw them away. Her apartment didn't have a washer and dryer, and she hated the dank, dim laundry room beside the property management office. She wasn't sure when she'd be returning to the apartment, anyway.
The money was in her jacket pocket in a crumpled paper sack, like something out of a crime movie. Twenty-seven one hundred dollar bills. All that was left. The profit of Christine's death.
A million in insurance coverage had been nothing. That barely replenished what Jacob had swiped from the M & W accounts, the bad real estate deals, foolish donations to charity that had become an obligation because of his name. Now they had another million coming, and all it cost was Mattie.
She wiped her eyes and turned. Someone stood at the far edge of the cemetery, cloaked in the morning shadows. She thought at first it was a caretaker, one of those hunched and reclusive figures prone to working in memorial parks. Then she remembered the whispered taunts from the woods the night before.
Renee put her hand in her pocket, searching for her key. Her car was by the gate fifty yards away. But she didn't need to run. She was in no danger. If her stalker had wanted to harm her, last night provided the perfect opportunity.
She headed toward the trees that clustered in the older part of the graveyard. The figure slipped back into the laurel undergrowth. The park had only one entrance, so the person would have to climb over the wall to avoid being seen. Renee fought the urge to hurry. She veered toward the wall, which bordered the rear of a strip mall. The buildings were brick, masonry oozing from the cracks as if a messy kindergartner had been in charge of construction. Jack vines, kudzu, and poison sumac climbed the wall and thorny locusts grew on the slope of the drop-off leading to the strip mall. No one in his right mind would scale the wall and scramble down that hazardous and itchy embankment.
She was nearly to the undergrowth when she heard the voice. Small and childlike, but not the same recorded voice from the night before.
"Wish me," the voice said.
The words came like one-two punches, one deep in the hollow of her stomach and the other flush against her forehead.
Jacob had taught Mattie the game. Wish Me usually came into play on long car trips, when fast-food stops and the occasional bathroom break weren't enough to drive away a child's boredom. Wish Me was usually a giggle game, descending into silliness such as "Wish me a zebra and paint the stripes like a rainbow." Or, "Wish me a million dollars and let's go to the candy store."
"Come out, Jacob," Renee said, surprised she could still issue breaths from behind her clenched rib cage.
The voice came again. "Wish me."
"I don't want to wish," she said, recalling Rheinsfeldt's summary of dissociative behavior. It was possible Jacob didn't realize he was stalking her. "I want to know why you're hiding."
"Follow me," the voice said. A branch snapped.
"We already played that game."
"Wish me your deepest wish."
"I don't have any wishes left."
"Except to know."
The laurel was tangled and dense, and the disarray of the branches filled Renee with a deep dread. She required order, and this organic chaos was beyond her control. This patch of forest lived for itself, grasping for the sky and rain, pushing up out of the earth like a corpse seeking a refund. Last night, the darkness had allowed her to block out the discordant surroundings as she gave chase to the person who had eluded her. But here in the warm glare of a perfect spring day, she couldn't deceive herself.
Disorder. All was disorder.
She glanced back at her car parked by the gate, at the highway below the cemetery where trucks hauled frozen turkeys and Coca-Cola, venting black diesel exhaust into the air. All she had to do was get in her car and drive away, leave all this madness behind.
"I can't follow you, Jacob," she said.
"Wish me." A monotone, as if from a talking doll whose microchips stole souls, a Rock Star Barbie whose plastic had become flesh and who now went by the name of Wells.
She took a tentative step into the laurel thicket. The branches crisscrossed like the arms of stunted witches, a coven of crazed and grasping creatures. "Where are we going?"
"To the door that swings both ways."
The same riddle as the night before. It must have been Jacob that had lured her away from the charred remains of their house.
"What do you want?" Renee asked again, expecting another riddle or taunt.
"Mattie sent me."
Renee's fear downshifted into helpless anger. "She's dead, Jacob."
Three ravens swooped across the cemetery, their wings steady. Almost simultaneously, they lit on separate gravestones. One landed on Christine's marker, a blue-gray slab of marble that had been shaped and etched by a professional sculptor rather than a monument company. She fought an urge to rush toward the bird, waving her arms and shouting, before its droppings could spoil the luster of the marble. Jacob had commissioned the monument complete with a lamb on top, and though he'd never mentioned a price, she suspected it was at least $10,000.
"Do you have the mirror?"
"I told you last night, I don't know what you're talking about."
"Who's the fairest of them all?"
"Mattie."
"Mattie. Not Christine."
The silver-plated mirror was heavy in her jacket pocket, covered by the brown bag.
She looked back at Christine's grave. The ravens were hopping along the ground, searching the grass for insects and worms. Nasty birds. But at least they were moving away from her baby.
A truck pulling a small flat-bed trailer stopped at the gate. On the trailer sat a stand-behind lawn mower and several gas-powered Weed Eaters. A man got out of the truck and pushed the gate wide. He waved to Renee.
"He sees you," Renee said.
"He thinks you're talking to yourself."
"Wish me, then," came the voice. "Wish me the money."
"Why can't you face me?" She glanced back at the groundskeeper, who was ignoring her, busy checking the fuel levels in his machines.
A shuffle of leaves came from within the thick stand of vegetation, the sound moving away from Renee and closer to the vine-clotted wall. Renee stooped and surveyed the ground beneath the lower branches. A worn path appeared to run just inside the perimeter of the wall. Cigarette butts and two crushed and dirty beer cans lay in the weeds. She took a deep breath, wondering if she could force herself to crawl through the narrow opening, where bugs and spider webs and dirt and thorns awaited.
The groundskeeper started his lawnmower and the gargle of the four-stroke engine drowned out whatever words the hidden stranger might have said. The three ravens lifted into the air, and with a crisp flapping of wings they soared over the thicket and settled on the roof of the strip mall. A stagnant puddle of water stretched across the wrinkled tar roof. On the water's surface, the sky was reflected, the thin silver clouds floating, the sun suspended, two seemingly endless worlds meeting in the face of a mirror.
She pulled the mirror out of her pocket, looked into it, and saw Mattie. Her racing heart fluttered, skipped a beat then thundered on toward its eventual finish line.
"Who's the fairest of them all?" Jacob shouted.
Her hand clenched around the mirror handle. She forced herself to look at the reflection again. Nothing but her wild, glittering eyes, hair as crazy as that of a rubber Halloween mask's, mouth creased with anxiety. She touched her hair, tried to smooth it straight, then gave up and slipped the mirror back into her pocket.
"Wish me," she yelled into the thicket. The lawnmower was coming close on its first lap around the cemetery, the blade trimming to putting-green closeness. The mower would soon be rolling over Christine, disturbing her sleep. She would awaken crying. She would need a blankie and a snuggle, "Hush Little Baby," her mother's breast.
Renee stepped back a few yards and the man on the lawnmower rode past her, lifting one gloved hand and nodding, the machine throwing clippings into the thicket. He was wearing headphones, his boots and jean cuffs stained green. The smell of cut grass filled Renee's nostrils, irking her allergies. The mower roared onward and soon the man disappeared behind the mausoleum and the far side of the hill. In the relative quiet, Renee called into the thicket again. "Wish me, Jacob."
"Wish me the fire didn't happen."
At her feet, a greasy earthworm stretched itself toward the shade, carrying off bits of the buried dead. Renee shut her eyes and pulled the brown paper bag from her pocket. "I brought the money."
The lawn mower buzzed over the hill, following the inside curve of the far wall. The groundskeeper was hunched over the handles, oblivious to everything but whatever amplified audio source was bombarding his ears.
"Throw it to me," Jacob said.
Renee peered into the tangled growth, trying to spot movement. She twisted the bag into a denser package and hurled it with all her strength. It landed against a hemlock, caught in the branches for a second, then vanished into the shadows. Renee knew this was her best chance, but her knees were weak, and she felt like a skeleton shivering on an October wire.
She was afraid to see her husband, afraid of what he'd become.
"Is this all?" he said.
"All that's left."
"I need more."
"Jacob, you don't have to---"
"I'm not fucking Jacob, all right?"
"Please, honey."
"Wish me."
"Let me get you some help. This has been hard on both of us. Dr. Rheinsfeldt---"
"Wish me, goddamn it."
Tears stung Renee's eyes. Grief caused one kind of crying, anger brought on another. Hopelessness brought a third kind, a clear, sulfuric emission that was more akin to bleeding than weeping.
"Wish you what?" she whispered over the distant hum of the mower.
"Wish me a million dollars so we can live happily ever after."
"Jacob, please."
She brought the mirror from her pocket, afraid to look into its surface. The mirror lied. Mattie and Christine had both been the fairest. Tied for first, the most beautiful princesses in all the kingdom. They should both be reflected in that mirror, and they deserved to have lived happily ever after.
"Jacob," she called. "Come by the apartment. I'll give you the rest."
The lawn mower had completed its circuit and was making a return path toward Renee. She could think of no reason to continue standing there. Jacob wouldn't come out. He was hiding because he was ashamed. He had lost face in more ways than one.
The fire, the new pink skin of his cheeks and forehead, his raw nose, the eyelashes that were singed short and stunted. Jacob had died in that fire as surely as Mattie had. She needed to bring his new incarnation back from the ashes, a reluctant phoenix. That was her only remaining purpose, her last chance at redemption.
In the end, it always came down to the selfish need to mortgage your own sorry soul.
"Wish me, Jacob," she shouted, voice cracking.
The lawn mower came closer, roaring like a swarm of man-eating bees, its exhaust hanging blue and pungent in the air. The groundskeeper eyed her, slowed the mower as it approached, shouted "Are you okay?"
She nodded. Grief. Playing a role to fit the surroundings.
We all wear masks, all the time, happily every after. Wish me not to be in my daughter's graveyard.
The man adjusted his headphones, hit the throttle, and accelerated across the grass. Exhaust rose, bitter and gray. The mower lurched toward the mausoleum, weaving between the oldest rows of markers. The smoke settled, thick as a battlefield's.
The smoke. Gray now. Surrounding her. Gushing from the thicket.
The woods were on fire.
"Jacob!"
The first bright flames leapt from the evergreen branches, leaf litter crackling, the wind lifting the smoke and pushing it across the earthen beds of the dead. Renee thought she heard a final "Wish me," or it may have been the roaring echo of an earlier fire, one whose embers glowed deep and red and ceaseless inside her heart.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Carlita had taken Joshua's virginity at the age of fourteen, the same age at which Jacob had discovered the brutal numbness of alcohol.
On the backside of a hill on the southern corner of the Warren Wells property, a row of cramped mobile homes housed the Mexicans who worked the Christmas tree farms, spraying pesticides and planting seedlings to replace the spruces and Fraser firs that had been harvested in previous years. Many of the workers had temporary agricultural visas, enduring thirty-hour bus rides each season to earn American dollars. Illegal aliens were cheaper and never complained about working conditions, so the papers were often passed to different hands if a worker said "No mas" and caught an early bus back to Guadalajara.
"Who the hell can tell a Jose from a Joaquin?" Warren Wells used to say in his unassailable logic. "They're all brown beaners to me."
The twins were fascinated with the small tribe of strangers that were their closest neighbors. Jacob wasn't allowed to go near the tree fields because of the pesticides, whose stench cloyed the air for weeks after a spraying. Mom had warned of the drunken fighting that went on in the Piney Flats camp, and she implored her husband to hire "honest white men" who attended Baptist church and kept their drinking and violence behind closed doors where it belonged. It was at the family dinner table that Jacob's imagination had fired, and the dark-skinned men he had seen moving like silent ghosts between the Fraser firs took on a mythic quality. After Mom died, the twins found more and more freedom as Warren Wells grew preoccupied with his ever-expanding empire.
He and Joshua had talked about them one night in July, weeks before the sailboat incident. Dad was on the porch smoking and looking out over the mountains, plotting ways to buy and build on more of them. Joshua had played a game of "Wish Me," and Jacob had answered, "Wish me a peek into the Mexican camp."
"You're too chickenshit for that, brother."
"No, I'm not."
"You wouldn't last five minutes. They fight cocks and spit blood."
Unformed sexual imagery flashed in Jacob's mind. "How do you know?"
"Don't you know nothing? What do you think I'm doing after school while you're up here doing your stupid homework?"
"Liar."
"I'll wish you, then. Put on your pants and shoes and let's go." Joshua sat up in bed, the crescent summer moon bathing his shoulders, his eyes glinting like wet beetles.
"No way. Mom will kill us."
"She'll have to catch us first." Joshua slipped on his shirt, leaving it unbuttoned as he put on his jeans. His legs and arms were more muscular than Jacob's, and the hair that rose from his groin to his belly button was thicker than his twin brother's. Joshua always said that though he had been born second, he had become a man first.
Jacob trembled with a mixture of dread and excitement as he hurriedly dressed. They climbed out the window onto the sloping roof, edged to the back of the house then worked their way down by leveraging against a long metal pipe that contained the utility lines.
The dew was cool and crickets fidgeted their legs. Fireflies blinked against the black curtain of forest and a sullen moon hid behind clouds of warship gray. Jacob's heart jumped like a trapped rat in his chest as he followed Joshua past the barn and across the hay fields. From the top of the rise, he looked back and saw the Wells house with its small yellow squares of light. The structure appeared to be a stage set, a lifeless thing that was waiting for something to happen.
They slipped into the trees and down a worn path the Mexican workers used when they carried hand tools from the barn. A creek ran below the trail, and its silver music played against the night sounds of the woods. The canopy overhead blocked most of the moonlight, but Joshua appeared to carry a map and compass in his head, leading Jacob through the stands of oak, buckeye, and maple without pausing to get his bearings. Soon they emerged into the regimented rows of Fraser fir, the trees a little taller than the boys and soon to feel the chain saws of autumnal harvest. At the bottom of the slope, the trees gave way to seedlings and a clearing where the box-like trailers lined an uneven dirt road. Music and laughter spilled from the open door of one of the trailers then someone shouted what sounded like a curse in Spanish.
"They're playing cards," Joshua said. "They do that on weeknights. They only fight cocks on Saturday night."
As if to punctuate Joshua's words, a rooster let out a cackle, seven hours too early. Joshua could make out the gray walls of a pen behind the trailers, chicken wire wound between crooked posts and plywood nailed across the openings.
"How many times have you been here?" Jacob asked.
"Not enough. Not yet."
They hunched and crept through the dwindling firs, then crouched just beyond a power pole whose lamp cast a cone of pale bluish light. Inside the noisy trailer, men sat around a table, shirts off, skin moist in the heat. Cigarette smoke wended out the door and rose toward the moon. The clink of glass was sharp and dangerous, as if bottles would soon be broken and used as weapons. The men were talking rapidly in Spanish, flipping cards, stacking American bills.
"They're gambling," Jacob said.
"Big deal."
A short, barrel-chested man exited the trailer and stood in the soft rectangle of light that spilled from the door. He wore a ragged bandanna on his head and smoked a turd-colored cigarillo. He hawked loudly, spat toward the darkness, then fished at the front of his pants and sent a stream of piss arcing into the dusty yard.
"Over here," Joshua whispered, shifting between the brittle bones of dead ornamental shrubs. "This is where the action is."
They worked their way to a tumbled outbuilding near the chicken shack. The shed was constructed of warped planks, tarpaper, and bulging plywood. Joshua opened the door with a shriek of rusty hinges, and Jacob glanced back at the urinating Mexican. The man swatted at a mosquito, sending his stream oscillating out in front of him. The boys entered the shed, the only light a dim, lesser gray that knifed between the wall's cracks.
Jacob bumped his head on something dangling from the ceiling, and a rain of grit went down the back of his shirt. He put his hand up and felt the leathery object. It was a salted rack of ribs, smoked and cured and hung where the rats and dogs couldn't get it. The room smelled of wet hay and used motor oil, and the air was stale. Joshua moved to the wall, motioning Jacob forward, his arm like a strobe against the lighted cracks.
There was a knothole in the wall the size of a silver dollar. "Cheap peep show," Joshua said.
Jacob squinted through the hole and couldn't see anything at first. Then he realized he was looking at one of the rear mobile homes. He rolled the gaze of his right eye downward and saw a window, its dirty curtain like a soft gauze veiling the scene beyond the glass. On the bed was a girl with black hair and eyes, reading a book by candlelight. She wore a bathrobe whose whiteness was in sharp contrast to her tan skin. She appeared to be slightly younger than Jacob and Joshua, though the swells on her chest beneath the robe suggested an early push toward maturity.
"What do you think?" Joshua said, as if he were showing off a star baseball card fresh out of the pack.
Jacob's heart turned a sick flip but he couldn't tear his face from the knothole. The girl stretched her legs and the robe parted below her waist, revealing pink panties. She must have just finished a shower, because wet hair was plastered to her cheeks. She worked her lips as if trying to pronounce the words in the book, and the sight of her moist tongue brought an electric tingle to Jacob's groin.
"Hot tamale, huh?" Joshua said. "How would you like to roll up in a burrito with that?"
Jacob finally forced himself away from the wall. "How long have you been spying on her?"
"Long enough. I figure she's the daughter of one of the workers, and they smuggled her up here. Because there ain't no damn way the government's going to give a work visa to an underage girl."
"An illegal immigrant? Like down in Texas and California?"
"Like all the way to North Carolina. Right here in Wells Country."
Jacob ached to take another look, though his stomach clenched with guilt. This was sneaky and wrong. This was something that perverts did, like Melvin Ricks, the janitor, who had been fired by the high school for drilling a hole in the wall to the girl's locker room.
There was only one door to the shed. "What if they catch you?"
"I only come at night, when they're already drunk," Joshua said. "Besides, what are they going to do? Tell Dad and get fired? Report me to the cops? They'd check everybody in the place for green cards and half these beaners would be on the next bus to Brownsville."
Jacob swallowed what felt like a sharp stone lodged in his throat. "Have you seen her naked?"
Joshua's grin flashed in the dimness. "Better than that."
"Bullshit."
Joshua clapped him on the shoulder. "Ten bucks and your run of Hulk comics says so."
"I don't gamble."
"Hang around here awhile and you'll get over it."
An unintelligible shout came from the trailer that hosted the card game, followed by laughter. "Sounds like somebody hit a full house," Joshua said. "Some idiot probably just lost two weeks' worth of trimming branches. Dumb fucks."
Jacob scarcely heard, because his cheek was pressed against the wall again, his one-eyed gaze crawling between the curtain and up the curving insides of the girl's thighs. He felt a small stir of air. Joshua had opened the shed door. The door closed with a rattle of metal, followed by the sound of a latch slamming home.
"Joshua," Jacob said with a whispered hiss. "Let me out of here."
"Keep watching, bro', and I'll show you what it means to be a Wells."
Jacob scrambled over the scrap metal, bundled straw, and tree baling equipment until he reached the door. He tried his weight against it then nudged it with his shoulder. He was afraid to make too much noise and risk drawing the attention of the card players. Despite Joshua's assessment, he could think of a number of ways the Mexicans could vent their anger at a gringo pervert.
He heard a tinny knock then Joshua called out, "Carlita, it's me."
Jacob listened for a moment and scrambled back to the knothole. He got there in time to see the trailer door close. Joshua was nowhere to be seen. Until he stepped into the girl's bedroom, moved to the window, and opened the curtains. He winked, then the room went dark as Carlita leaned over, her robe parted and rumpled, and blew out the candle.
Jacob wasn't sure how long he sat in the shed, huddled in a ball. The card game went on and on, the laughter sharpening while the Spanish banter grew more gruff and slurred. After perhaps an hour, Jacob looked through the knothole to find the girl's window was still dark. He tried to picture Joshua, the girl lying beneath him with the robe parted, their limbs entwined.
Two men left the card game and stood outside the shed, passing a bottle, talking quietly in words that Jacob couldn't understand. One of them went into the girl's trailer, and Jacob expected shouts as the couple was caught in the act. Instead, a light came on in the room, an overhead bulb this time instead of the candle. Joshua lay on the bed, the blankets pulled up to his bare chest. The girl was nowhere in sight. Joshua lifted his head and flashed Jacob two fingers in a sign of peace or victory. Or maybe that he'd done it two times.
Someone fumbled with the latch to the shed door.
Jacob looked around. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and he could make out some agricultural equipment in the back of the room, fertilizer spreaders and watering tanks. He pushed away from the wall and clambered under the machines just as the door opened. Someone entered the room, clinking glass against the wooden door frame.
The man slumped into the loose stack of hay, hummed a drunken ballad that contained references to senoritas and corazon, then the toneless notes drifted into snores. When the snores became gravelly and steady, Jacob slipped from his hiding place and knelt by the door again. The half-light lay on the bottle by the man's side, causing the liquid within to glow. Jacob took the bottle and returned to his vigil by the knothole.
He twisted off the lid and smelled the contents. He knew it was liquor, because his father had a cabinet of the stuff kept under lock and key that was occasionally broken out for dinner guests. Medicine to dull pain, Warren Wells had said.
Joshua was still on the bed, and the girl was with him now, her bare back to the window as she slid astride him. She threw her head back and Joshua's fingers gripped her waist. She moved back and forth, her firm buttocks flexing with the gentle motion. Jacob sipped the liquor, barely aware of the burning on his tongue and in his throat. He took another swallow as the girl writhed faster, rocking as if on a hobby horse. The trot turned to a gallop and Jacob wasn't sure how much of the liquor he'd drunk but his head swam and his hand ached to reach for the heat inside his pants. The girl began crying out, and Joshua was yelling and groaning, the girl's skin red around the imprint of his fingers. Her flailing black hair fell across her shoulders as she ground her hips against Joshua, and with one great shudder and shriek, she went rigid.
Jacob drained the last of the bottle's contents as the couple slowed their movements and the girl collapsed on top of his twin brother. Jacob's head was thick; he was angry and aroused and nauseated. The card game must have ended, because silence filled the camp. He leaned his face against the wall and closed his eyes.
The next thing he knew, Joshua was shoving him awake. "Come on, goober, we better get home."
Jacob felt as if a plow had speared his skull. He blinked, looked past the door at the graying of dawn, the Mexican asleep in the hay, the empty bottle at his feet.
Joshua picked up the bottle and laughed. "Jose Cuervo, huh? Cheap crap. I'll bet you feel like Pancho Villa's army camped out in your mouth."
Thirst scorched Jacob's throat. He tried to clear it but he couldn't swallow. A knot of dry vomit worked its way up past his lungs. "That girl---"
"Carlita," Joshua said. His hair was mussed, his eyes bright. "Mmm, mmm, moy bien chiquita."
"Why didn't you tell me?" Jacob wasn't sure if he was jealous or simply angry because Joshua had kept a secret. His thoughts were foggy and his eyes were dry as stones.
"Because you wouldn't have believed me."
"Then why did you bring me out here?"
"Because I hate you." A rooster crowed, then another. Joshua nodded to the sleeping man. "They'll be going to work soon. Dear old Daddy can't make a profit off them if they sleep all day. Let's get out of here."
They headed back across the Christmas tree field, Jacob staggering and holding his stomach. The revelry that had colored the camp the night before had died with darkness, and now the trailers looked rumpled and sad. A Dodge van was parked out front, its side door gone, the rear window broken. Jacob knelt in the grass and tried to vomit, but all that came up was a caked, greenish-yellow substance. He crawled several yards with the stuff trailing from his lips until Joshua yanked him to his feet.
"Shape up, Jake. You don't want nobody to suspect nothing back at the house."
Jacob took one last look at the girl's window, thought of that miraculous skin against the soft terry cloth of the robe, the black hair, the curves and muscles of her legs. He spat his mouth clear. "Did you...um...?"
Joshua patted him on the back. "A Wells never fails."
They made it back to the house, and Jacob was able to shower and have breakfast before Old Man Wells made it to the table. Dad drank his coffee and checked the stocks in the newspaper. Joshua sat in silence, wearing a faint smile of amusement. The greasy bacon and eggs sat in Jacob's stomach like steel shavings and rubber, but the nausea passed and his hands no longer trembled. It was Friday, so he and Joshua would have to walk the half mile to catch the school bus down by the bridge.
"What are you boys doing after school?" Dad asked.
"I thought we'd go down to the workers' camp," Joshua said, catching Jacob's gaze and holding it. "I'm thinking of taking Spanish next semester and figured I could get a few free lessons."
"You stay away from there. Those beaners are rough. They're hard workers, but if they didn't work so cheap, I wouldn't bother with them. When they're drunk, they get mean. They'd cut each other's throat for a nickel."
"I don't think our workers drink, Dad," Joshua said.
Dad actually looked over the newspaper at that. "They all drink. So don't be hanging around there. If you want to learn Spanish, we can hire a tutor."
"But I want to learn about the tree industry," Joshua said, and Jacob was stunned by the glib cunning of his brother. Joshua knew how to trick Jacob, all right, but his recent conquest must have fueled his arrogance, because there he was bullshitting Dad, the king of the bullshitters.
"I can teach you about the trees when the time comes," Dad said, turning his attention back to the Dow Jones average.
"What if something happened to you? One of us would have to know what to do."
"Nothing's going to happen to me."
"It happened to Mom, didn't it?"
Dad folded the paper, crossed the kitchen, poured his coffee down the sink, and rinsed his glass. He left the room, and a minute later the front door closed, followed by the sound of his truck engine.
Joshua leaned back in his chair and grinned like a dyspeptic weasel. "What's really cool is one day one of us is going to have to carry on."
Jacob put his head on the table, head in his hands. He wondered if he could skip school without Dad finding out. "Are you in love with her?"
"What's that, pukeface?"
"Is she your girlfriend?"
"Love. You really believe that shit, don't you?"
Jacob wanted to ask what it was like, her hot, slick skin on his, her lips brushing his face, the secret folds opened. He wanted to know how Joshua could enjoy all those wonders and then remain so callous towards them.
He'd always been afraid that the twins were too much alike, that his and Joshua's shadow would always be merged and neither would escape the other. That morning, he saw for the first time how little alike they actually were, as if they didn't even belong to the same species.
"Wish me," Jacob said.
"I can't wish you sober, Jake. Only time can do that."
"No, wish me to be you one time."
"You like Carlita, huh? Want a taste of taco sauce?"
"Wish me."
"Well, you're already going to be me this afternoon, remember? My algebra test. The one I missed and you're going to make up for. Mrs. Runyon will never know the difference. And don't forget to write with your left hand."
"How come you can't take it?"
"You're smarter. Besides, me and Carlita are going to hang out under the bridge. Do a little fishing." He smiled. "One day I might teach you how to use a pole, when you're big enough."
"What if I don't want to take your damned test?"
"Come on, now. The cane, remember?"
Jacob burped and the acid sluiced up his throat. He swore to himself he would never try liquor again. And he was going to quit letting Joshua threaten him, because Joshua was as much to blame for Mother's death as he was. He was done letting Joshua push him around. But, first, he was going to find a way to finish that test early so he could find himself a good hiding place in the weeds beside the bridge.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dust.
Which of the tiny specks were Mattie, and which were bits of dead skin, moth wings, dandelion fluff, or lost sea sand?
Jacob looked down into his palm, then at the urn on the faux mantel of Renee's living room. The urn was cold in its solitude, cast in black porcelain with dark gold piping around the rim. Overwrought solemnity, the best money could buy.
Jacob let the dust sift through his palm to the floor, knowing Renee would twitch with the urge to get out the vacuum cleaner. "I need the rest of it."
"I gave it to you already."
"I can make him go away."
"By buying your father's place? I thought you hated that house. You always said it brought back bad memories."
"I'm not buying the place. I'm giving it to my brother."
"Joshua? The man whose name you could barely stand to say? The one you kept secret from me because you were so ashamed?"
"I owe him. I took everything my father left. I tricked Joshua out of his birthright because I thought I could put it to better use."
"You said he refused to take any inheritance. 'I don't want nothing the old man ever touched.'"
"I got the money and the real estate, Joshua got the home place. But he can't sell or rent it because of the covenants Dad put on it. Since he doesn't want to live there, he basically got nothing. While I got to finish building the Wells empire."
"Since when did you start feeling guilty about that? If you're going to feel guilty for something, maybe you should show some emotion over the death of your daughter."
Renee stood with the sleeves of her tan sweater tucked into her fists. Her eyes held enough fire and light to drive the chill out of Jacob's heart, but the combustible places inside him had long since been walled off. He felt like a trespasser in her apartment, in this new life she was trying to make. One where the kids were nothing but photographs on the wall, pieces of slick paper in polished picture frames. A life where Jacob was nothing more than temporary clutter.
"I've dealt with Mattie's death in my own way," he said.
"Great. Thanks a lot for leaving me behind while you did it."
Jacob looked at her, wondering if he'd ever really known her. Or maybe he had never known himself. "You've been talking to that damned Rheinsfeldt again, ain't you?"
"Yes, and I'm starting to figure out some things. She said you had some traumatic experience---or probably several---that caused your adolescent disorder."
"'Disorder.' As if everything has to be in order."
"And now this brother thing. Like maybe if you make amends with Joshua, pay him off, you can buy his love and maybe get your father back that way. But maybe you can't fit all the pieces together again."
"Money makes a good glue."
"They won't release the settlement, Jacob. Not until the investigation's complete. You know that."
"I didn't start the fire. Even if you hate me now, you know I'd never do anything that stupid."
"I'm not so sure anymore. I don't know which Jacob you are."
That's what they always say.
Jacob fought the urge to rush across the room and slap her. He forced his fist open and stretched his fingers. Some of the dust from the urn still clung to his moist palm.
Jacob took his gaze from Renee's tear-streaked face and looked at the urn. How could such a small jar hold those millions of memories, the hopscotch chalk on the sidewalk, Big Bird's Firehouse, the sticky trip to Disneyland, the juice boxes of midget league soccer? How could his precious little girl be reduced to such a finite space when she had once contained multitudes of possibilities?
"Fine, then."
"What the hell do you expect?" Renee said. "You've gone off the deep end again and you won't let me help. You run away from the hospital, hide from Donald and me, start drinking, then you stand in the woods and try to freak me out, pretending you're somebody else. What the hell am I supposed to do? Lock you in the nuthouse again?"
"That was a long time ago and I'm much better now. I'm a grown-up. I know how to deal with my problems."
"You didn't handle your mother's death very well. You go crazy when you lose a child. And we're both twice as crazy now. Don't you see that helping each other is the only hope?"
"Rheinsfeldt and her touchy-feely 'dialoging to wellness.' That doesn't sound like much hope to me. Because when it was over, if it was ever over, then all we'd have would be each other."
"Maybe that's enough." Renee said.
"Two million would be enough."
"I told you. The twenty-seven hundred was the last of it."
"Give it here."
Renee's jaw was twisted and tight. "I already gave it to you. At the cemetery."
"Quit bullshitting me, Renee. If you want to trick me into thinking I'm cracking up, you got to do better than that."
She shook her head, the tears no longer flowing but lying on her cheeks in thin, bright tracks. Jacob almost felt sorry for her, this woman he had loved for nearly a decade. She had lost as much as he had. Perhaps her suffering was even worse, because she believed in a merciful God, and God had proven the worthlessness of her faith.
"I don't have it," she said. "Talk to Donald. He'll tell you. You're ruined, Jacob. There's no money left, the banks are foreclosing on your property, and even if you get your insurance money, it's going to be too late to bail you out this time."
"No. I'm a Wells, damn it. This is my town. They can't take it away from me."
"Sorry, Jake. You shouldn't have dropped out of your own life."
"Give me your keys," he said.
"No. It's my car."
"Our car. Don't forget whose name's on the title. Wells."
"Just like the house, huh? And there's nothing left of it but ashes. Everything we owned together is ashes now. Everything a Wells ever touched."
They both looked at the urn. It had the power of a sacred relic, an icon that marked not the abiding mystery of faith and life but the absolute consuming nadir of despair and failure.
"I'll drive you back to the Wells farm," she said.
"I can't stay there."
"You can't sleep in the bushes."
Jacob looked at the couch, then down the hall at the starched covers of her bed. When you turn your back on your life, you leave everything behind, even those things that once seemed valuable. "Take me by the ruins, then. Show me where the person called to you from the woods."
"That was you, Jake."
"It wasn't. I swear."
But he couldn't be sure. Maybe visiting the scene of the nightmare would rob it of its power. He had nothing left to lose. Except two million dollars, his wife, and the Wells homestead.
They drove to Buffalo Trace Lane in silence, Renee keeping her purse in her lap, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. The town seemed like a movie set to Jacob, a false-front stage for the Wells illusion. He hadn't owned Kingsboro. All he had was a name heavier than blocks, girders, and bricks.
As they pulled into the driveway, Jacob was struck by the harsh emptiness of the lot, as if the blank space in the sky required the satisfying geometry of walls and roof in order to be complete. The rectangular bed of ashes lay like a black, sunken grave. The yellow crime scene tape had drooped, and in places it was broken and fluttering in the breeze like the tails of crippled kites. The trees around the ruin were scorched, the branches stunted and bare. New blackberry vines had thrust from the dead embers scattered beyond the block foundation, as if sharp and painful edges were the next natural evolutionary step here.
Renee stopped the engine and sat with her hands in her lap. "We're home."
Jacob looked up to where the second floor would have been, to the haunted air of Mattie's vanished window. "I tried to save her. You believe that, don't you?"
"I was there, Jake. I remember."
"But you couldn't see. All that smoke."
"Like I told the fire chief."
"We were cut off from each other. You had to go downstairs. It was the only way out."
"I thought you and Mattie were already safe, or I never would have left." Renee adjusted her glasses on her nose, as if using a memory trick to recall her half of the story. "But I had to get my glasses out of the car."
"And the back door was open."
"The door that swings both ways."
"Huh?" Jacob imagined flames licking at the afternoon sky, a daytime Armageddon, a cleansing wave pushed up from the bowels of hell.
"The door that swings both ways. Like you told me the night you were hiding in the woods."
"I wasn't hiding in the woods."
"Something about the door, Jake. And when you smelled the smoke, you told me to wait in the bedroom. Like you were afraid of what I might see."
"I didn't want you to see Mattie. I wanted to protect you. Both of you. Like I couldn't protect Christine."
That sounded good. He swallowed.
The charred flecks of Christine's crib lay somewhere in the burned-out basement, along with a menagerie of stuffed animals, hair brushes, Barbie dolls, and an Easy-bake oven. The Weebles and Lego and Strawberry Shortcake and Pooh pajamas. Tweety Bird sleepers and Dr. Seuss videos. Purple plastic bracelets and silver wigs, sneakers that lit up with red LED's when a girl danced. The solid things were the only believable reminders of Mattie, because memory clung not to her smile in the sunshine but to her face in the fire.
"Jake, I can't talk to Chief Davidson anymore. She suspects something."
"It won't be much longer. The SBI has run about every test they have. They'll have to close the case soon, and we'll get our money."
"It's not ours, though. You want to give it to Joshua."
A car came up the road behind them, slowing as it passed the driveway. Jacob glanced in the rearview mirror. The Nelsons from 217, who lived around the corner. Their house had a thousand square feet less of floor space than the one he'd built here. With the insurance money, he could build an even larger one, an envy-inspiring Wells monument that would be three stories and---
He wouldn't rebuild here. This wasn't his home anymore. He belonged in Joshua's house. And Joshua would get the two million, money from the fire and Mattie. Fair was fair. Jacob opened the door and got out of the car.
The air carried a faint charred aroma in its heavy dampness. If he'd believed in spirits, he could imagine Mattie hovering over the bed of dead embers, picking among the ruins for the ghosts of toys. He touched his face, recalled the searing heat that must have been ten times as intense to her. The fire had robbed her of oxygen, suffocating her in its selfish consumption. The greedy fingers of flames had stroked and groped and seized, had pulled all that lay before it into its arms.
The fire had risen from a muted spark and swelled to a stubborn, hungry thing. The fire refused to recognize its limits. Therefore, it was the fire's fault, not his.
Never his.
Because a Wells never fails.
Renee came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. He shivered. She had always been colder than Carlita. "Jacob, what are we going to do?"
"Wait."
"But what happens after that? M & W is wiped out."
"The partnership can declare bankruptcy. The claimants can't touch the insurance money. That's mine."
"Ours. A joint asset."
"Ours." The word had lost most of its meaning. Still, if she wanted to believe in a fantasy future, it would make things that much simpler. Betrayal worked best when it came as a surprise. Enemies were the only people you could trust, because they were predictable. The only trouble was figuring out which ones were enemies.
"Why did your brother come back?"
"He's a Wells. He's part of me." In a way that Renee would never be. Her blood, no matter how hot it ran or how much of it spilled for him, would never have the purity of Joshua's. Even Mattie and Christine were diluted, only half Wells.
"Somebody knows, Jake."
"Nobody knows."
She pulled the Rock Star Barbie out of her purse. "Remember this?"
The fire, laying on the floor, screaming "Wish me" against the crackling chorus of flames. "Mattie's doll."
Renee triggered its audio chip and it bleated "Housewarming present."
"Some kid playing a joke, maybe. Some drunk. Or crazy bum." Not like him. Not him.
"I found it in the woods."
"Forget it. Nobody saw nothing."
"Let me show you something," she said.
Jacob looked up the road, half expecting to see Davidson round the corner in her fat-wheeled SUV, all chrome and insignia and fog lights. If she smelled arson, she would hang the crime on somebody. And an arson that caused a child's death would be a second degree murder charge at a minimum.
Renee tugged his sleeve, dragged him toward the woods. As they passed the wreckage, he wondered what the clutter meant to her, how the skeletal block wall and blackened wood and scorched appliances played against her obsessive-compulsive disorder. She'd wanted to clear the forest, level the oak and maple and birch and install landscaping, to regiment the wilderness and line the shrubs in a God-pleasing order. Jacob had convinced her that they wouldn't be in the house long enough for the plants to reach maturity, and she had settled for flower beds along the front walk.
He fumbled at his shirt pocket and touched the pack of cigarettes. Marlboro Lights, the same brand as Joshua's.
"I found this, too." She pulled the plastic rattle out of her pocket and shook it, though the sound elicited sharp pricks of regret.
"That was in the nursery," Jacob said.
"Should have been."
Jacob took the rattle in his left hand and shook it. It bore the face of a generic bear, its painted eyes long since flaked off. The handle was worn, but it felt familiar inside Jacob's grip. He had rattled the bear himself, as a tiny child whose twin lay in the crib beside him, whose mother leaned over in severe judgment, whose father stayed well away. Years that Jacob had rarely mentioned, no matter how deeply Renee had dug.
It was one of the few relics Jacob had kept when he left home. It had been in his college apartment, and Renee had found it in one of her frantic bouts of cleaning. He'd shrugged it off, but Renee found it sweet and enduring that a rebellious, scatter-brained poet hung on to a childhood toy.
And, by rights, the rattle should have been a melted lump of slag deep in the black bowels of the house.
"Somebody was in the house, Jake."
"He couldn't have known."
"Who are you talking about?"
"Who do think?" Jacob gripped the rattle hard enough that the plastic cracked.
"Is that why you're giving him the money? Is he blackmailing you?"
Jacob stared back at the house, at the black bed of charred ruins that may as well have been a mirror of their souls. He pulled out the pack of cigarettes and tapped one free, shaking the rattle in the process.
"When did you take up smoking?" she asked.
"I've always smoked."
He flicked the lighter and touched it to the cigarette tip, fighting the impulse to also apply the flame to the rattle.
Better late than never.
"Do you trust me?" she asked.
"I love you." As if that were an answer.
She took the cigarette from his fingers. "Then let's do this together."
She tossed the cigarette to the ground and crushed it with her foot. "A Wells never fails, and two Wells are better than one," she said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As Renee drove Jacob to Dr. Rheinsfeldt's office, she looked over at the passenger seat and admired her handiwork. He'd moved into her apartment, cleaned up, and bought a couple of new suits. It was off-the-rack, Belk's stuff, but it would have to do until the money began rolling again. And it would. A shave and a splash of cologne, three weeks of sobriety to get the bugs off his skin, and he was ready to climb back onto the throne. Kingsboro was waiting for him to stand up and be a Wells, to take the town's future in his hands and push it into a prosperous new era.
Attitude was the important thing. They had mourned enough. The SBI had turned in the final incident report, and the fire had been ruled "Cause undetermined." Not quite as good as a ruling of "accidental," which would mean that a definitive source of the fire had been found. As it was, the open-ended ruling left a cloud of suspicion lingering, but the insurance company was now compelled to pay. Two million dollars, minus the $20,000 that Renee had received for emergency housing and living expenses.
Now they were bound together, joined for the future, and Jacob wouldn't be able to shake her. He had accepted the new arrangement with sullen resentment, but she had explained that no other options remained. A husband and wife didn't keep secrets from each other, and now they had to close ranks. They could deal with the rest of it after they squared the books of M & W Ventures and shut up Donald Meekins. They'd already signed the necessary forms, and Rayburn Jones had treated them like old friends, pleased to see Jacob back in Rotarian form. Jacob seemed to sit a little straighter, his eyes brighter and wider, confidence returning.
They'd not talked about Joshua. Renee hoped he'd given up and left town.
"This is important," Renee said, pulling into the parking lot of Total Wellness. "I know we each have to deal with grief in our own way, but the community will forgive you faster if you seek help. And don't forget to act humble."
"Humble," Jacob said. "I can manage that."
"We don't even have to talk about the girls if you don't want to."
"Whatever the doctor thinks is best."
Summer was giving way to autumn, the grass taking on a blue-green shade and the oaks on the lawn in full red canopy. The sky was blue and the clouds high and white, and the sadness had faded enough that Renee could once again believe that God watched over them all.
She saw Rheinsfeldt at the second-floor window, looking down on them as they came up the sidewalk. Renee started to wave then wondered if that was a breach of etiquette. Maybe therapists didn't acknowledge their clients outside the confines of the confessional chamber. Jacob didn't notice the doctor, his gaze fixed on a hill in the distance where grading machines were at work notching a red gash in the slope.
"That's Wade Thompson's crew," Jacob said. "We had an option on that land before all this recent trouble. I think he's aiming for student apartments. I would have gone for condominiums myself. Fewer headaches and a quicker return."
He was sounding like the Jake of old, the one with plans and ambition. The man she had helped build, and the only version of him she was able to love. She had no use for the broken Jake who drank cheap liquor in the bushes and cowered at the mention of his brother. This reborn Jake had a bounce in his step and his complexion had gone to a healthy blush, the mottled and burned skin almost completely healed.
"Be patient, honey," she said. "We're going to get it all back. A Wells never fails."
"And two Wells are better than one."
The receptionist recognized Jacob. "Good morning, Mr. Wells," the receptionist said, smiling in a way that would have made Renee jealous had she not been so pleased that another woman found her husband worthy of charm. "Please sign here."
As he signed them in, Renee interrupted him. "Jake?"
"Yes?" He looked down and saw he'd been writing with his left hand. "Oh."
He switched to his right and finished his signature. They barely had time to pick up magazines, Home Design for him and Entertainment Weekly for her, before they were summoned down the hall to Dr. Rheinsfeldt's office.
"So," the doctor said, taking the couch this time. The room smelled of potpourri and long-burnt incense. The furniture had been rearranged, and Renee wondered if a chair had been taken out especially for their visit. With only one chair in the room, besides the small chair at the computer desk, one of them would be forced to sit beside the doctor. Divide and conquer, maybe that was the doctor's strategy.
That was fine with Renee. This outcome was already determined, so Dr. Rheinsfeldt could use whatever technique she desired. "We've decided to start over," she said.
"That's good," the doctor said, pursing her Prussian mouth in a manner that suggested she was displeased. "Willingness is half the battle."
Jacob sat beside the doctor. "I realized I was blaming myself for what happened," he said. "And then I blamed my wife."
"You realize there's no blame here," Rheinsfeldt said. "Just a tragic accident."
Renee and Jacob exchanged looks. The doctor went on, oblivious of their feelings. "When we suffer a loss, we each must design our own grieving process. Some people cry their eyes out all the way up to the funeral, then calm down and never seem to be bothered again. Others show no emotion and go around cold and dead on the inside for months or even years. It's not uncommon to slip into clinical depression"---she looked at Jacob over the top of her glasses frame---"especially if substance abuse is involved. And with your history, Jacob---"
"I'm done with all that." Jacob tugged at his tie, centering the knot under his throat. "I owe it to Mattie and Christine to keep living."
"The other thing," Renee said, "is he's coming to grips with his past."
Rheinsfeldt ignored her, focusing on Jacob. "From your records, that seems to be the origin of your trauma."
"I think Jacob and his twin brother were competing for their father's affection, and Jacob always felt he never shined as brightly as his brother," Renee said. "At least in his father's eyes."
"I'm aware of Warren Wells," Rheinsfeldt said. "He was a consummate overachiever, apparently. And your twin brother?"
"It doesn't matter now," Jacob said.
"I sense anger," Rheinsfeldt said.
"I have a right to be angry. Joshua played mean tricks on me all during our childhood. Even though we were physically identical, he was somehow stronger and more willful than I was. He always had the best-looking girlfriends, the star positions on the sports teams, the best grades. Even when I did his homework for him."
"So you felt inferior to him?"
"At first. Then, when I decided that I was going away as soon as I was old enough to live on my own, it didn't bother me anymore. Mom died and everything changed."
"You felt abandoned?"
"No. I felt relieved. Dad was just distant and reproachful. Mom actively despised us."
"Were you . . . physically abused?"
"No." Jacob's eyes fixed on the floor. "That would be too simple."
"Jacob's never been violent with me," Renee said. "He wouldn't spank Mattie. I always had to be the disciplinarian."
"Does that cause you resentment?" Dr. Rheinsfeldt asked her.
"Maybe, but let's focus on Jacob," Renee said. "I think he needs it more than I do right now."
"Tell me more about Joshua," the doctor asked Jacob.
"I went away to college, determined that I was never coming back here. I even toyed with the idea of changing my name. I just wanted to forget that I was a Wells, especially after Dad put all this pressure on us to follow in his footsteps."
"How did he do that? You said he was aloof."
"He had his ways. He was a slave master, a plantation owner born in the wrong time. He was a conqueror, not a father. With him, it was all about winning."
"And Joshua pleased him more than you did? Or, you at least perceived it that way?"
"Joshua had a way of . . . I don't know, dodging responsibility, shifting blame. If a lamp was broken, it was always my fault. If the newspaper was rumpled, I'd be the one who had no respect for the property of others. A bad report card, and I'd be the one not performing up to my abilities, even if my grades were better than Joshua's."
Renee leaned forward and touched Jacob's knee, encouraging him to continue. He was exposing his inner workings, the ones he'd always hidden from her. He was serious about wanting to start over. And getting the story straight was important.
"I started getting headaches, mostly when I was around Joshua," he said. "We'd always shared the same room, though we lived in a big house. I think it made Mom happy. She liked the idea that her sons were close. Gave her a feeling that she had done a good job of raising us."
"Did she?"
Jacob looked at the window, not seeing the curtains or the sliver of outside world between them. "Who knows? I suppose you judge your parents by how your own life turns out."
"Do you blame your mother for leaving you?"
"I'm not angry with my mother," Jacob said. "I guess I was angry at Dad. That's why I tried so hard to get away. If it wasn't for Renee---"
The sorrow slipped out of his eyes, replaced by a glint of determination. He would do it for her and their future together. Maybe one day they could start a new family. She loved him.
"She's the one who turned me around, cleaned me up, made me take some pride in myself," Jacob said. "It sounds strange, but she made me understand what it means to be a Wells."
"Do you think you turned Renee into a mother figure?"
"I don't think so," Jacob said. "Renee is different from my mother in most ways."
"Except the cleanliness," Renee cut in again. "You always said we were both neat freaks."
"But that wasn't what attracted me to you," Jacob said, talking to her now as if the doctor wasn't in the room. "It was your atmosphere, the way you carried yourself. Like you knew what you were about."
"And, being a bit scattered yourself, you saw a chance to impose some order on your life," the doctor said.
"Maybe," Jacob said. "That, and the conversation."
"Sex," Renee said. The sex hadn't been great at first. Jacob had been tentative, restrained, as if carrying a burden of guilt. It had taken months before he really opened up and became considerate and expressive. It had started with the night he'd come home drunk and taken her forcefully, with an animal passion that receded into such deep tenderness that she had wept during her final round of orgasms. The night that Mattie had been conceived.
"I was trying to come off as a gentleman."
"Remember that we only have one rule in this room," the doctor said. "Absolute honesty at all times."
Renee nodded at him. Jacob had never been a good liar. Despite his success at business, despite the long Wells tradition of deception, despite his hatred of his parents and twin brother, Jacob's blood had never turned cold enough to qualify him as a sociopath. She knew him better than he knew himself. She gave him a smile of support.
"Let's go back to your adolescent fugue states," Rheinsfeldt said. "What happened during them?"
"I would experience periods of forgetfulness. Most of the time they would only last a minute or two. Like I'd be in school, listening to the teacher start a math problem, then all of a sudden I'd hear the bell ring and all the kids would be getting out of their seats to change classes. The chalkboard would be full and I'd look down at my paper and see all these notes to myself. Notes that had nothing to do with the class work."
"Notes?"
"To my brother, mostly. We used to play a game called 'Wish Me.' Just a silly game where you wish something impossible. Except Joshua always made it scary."
"Scary?"
"In our room at night. He'd hide under my bed and be the Sock Monster. Put a sock over his hand and sneak up and pinch me. I'd say, 'Wish me away from the Sock Monster.' But he'd say, 'Wishes don't come true for rotten little boys.' And he'd twist my ears or snatch my toes or claw my face."
"No wonder you harbor anger toward him," Rheinsfeldt said, tapping the unlit cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. Renee was sure the doctor would be delighted to have the twins in the same room. Though she'd never met Joshua, Renee couldn't help loathing him after all the pain he'd caused her husband. And, of course, he might be dangerous in other ways. He was a rival.
"I covered up for him," Jacob said. "He was the black sheep, always getting in trouble, messing around with girls, disobeying Dad."
"And you were the responsible one?"
"Not always. But"---he looked at Renee, eyes unreadable---"he made me pretend to be him sometimes."
The doctor straightened. "During your dissociative disorder?"
"Nothing serious," Jacob said. "He'd skip a class and make me cover for him. So I would be the one who was marked absent. He had a Saturday job as a carpenter's helper, and if he had a date with a girl, I'd have to fill in. And the carpenters would get mad at me because I didn't know how to do the work. We were so identical that no one ever caught on. Except Josh is left-handed, so I had to learn to be ambidextrous."
"Did you ever pretend to be Joshua at home? Did you try to fool your parents?"
"Dad could always tell us apart. Like I said, Joshua always was his favorite, the one he finally decided would carry on the family tradition. I was the afterthought, even though I was born first. Mom seemed to ignore both of us equally. I don't think she cared enough to learn our individual mannerisms."
"After you left home, how did you feel?"
"Liberated. Like I could finally breathe for the first time in my life."
"And your fugue states?"
"I didn't have any after that. But there was one I still worry about."
"Really. Please tell us."
The room's cloying sweetness gave Renee a headache. Jacob had kept so much from her. She glanced at him, at his eyes that would always remind her of Mattie's. She studied his features more closely but saw nothing of Christine there. Christine had been hers, if only for two months.
"Joshua used to torture the guinea hens," Jacob said. "Dad kept them around so he could pretend to be the gentleman farmer, but we never collected their eggs. They mostly just ran wild around the woods. Joshua would corner them in the barn and shove things inside them---cigarette butts, pieces of corn, pencil erasers. He always made me watch."
"How could he force you? What sort of power did he hold over you?"
Jacob shrugged. "He was a Wells."
"Did your brother ever have counseling?"
"No, but I did. Because of the blanking out. They even ran brain scans. Dad thought it was for something else. Adjustment problems, or whatever the guidance counselor at school called it. Like he'd ever notice a difference."
"Ah," Rheinsfeldt said, with a knowing smile, confident her profession had successfully addressed Jacob's earlier problems. "So which fugue bothered you?"
"The one where I came awake in the barn. Joshua was standing there holding a bloody hatchet. There were six hens scattered around the floor of the barn. Joshua said I'd gone crazy and chopped their heads off. My hands were coated with blood. One of the hens wasn't dead yet, and it scratched its way across the dirty hay, one wing drooping to the ground. Its head lay at my feet, the eyes blinking at me as I watched the light fade out of them. And I can't understand why I'd ever do such a thing." Jacob looked at his hands as if the chicken blood was still slick on his fingers.
"Repressed memory," the doctor said. "People often block out traumatic events. It's the brain's way of protecting itself. Protecting us from ourselves, one might say."
"Anyway, once I got away from Dad and Joshua, everything was wonderful. I met Renee and she allowed me to be myself. I know it sounds corny, but once I got some distance, I began to miss Kingsboro."
"Did your father approve of Renee?"
"Once he figured out she would set me on the path to success. His idea of success. Real estate development, civic pride, big shot dreams, and money. Lots of money."
"Yet you don't resent your wife? After all, it sounds like she had the same kind of power over you that Joshua had, and your father had, only she used it in a more constructive manner."
Renee didn't like the doctor's shrewd lick of the lips. Her power over Jacob was unreliable. Love could only work so much magic. After that, all she had was words.
And the threat of secrets.
But Jacob didn't follow the doctor down that path of reasoning. "I would be nothing without Renee. After Christine---after that first tragedy---we really pulled together. We decided to dedicate the rest of our lives to making Mattie happy. Like maybe if we loved her twice as much, somehow Christine's short life wouldn't have been completely wasted."
Renee pulled a tissue from the box on the table. She was glad it was unscented, though some of the room's smell had settled into the fibers. She wiped her eyes and nose, determined not to break down. This was for Jake. She didn't need to add drama.
"And after Mattie died?" the doctor said, visibly taking measure of the dampness in Jacob's eyes. "After our session?"
"I lost it," Jacob said. "The drinking, avoiding Renee, shirking my business responsibilities. Pretty much everything I worked for and believed in was gone."
"And you were angry?"
"Damned right."
"And you needed someone to blame?"
"Sure."
"He blamed me," Renee said. "And it was partly my fault. If I had gone to Mattie's room with him, maybe together we could have saved her."
"No," Jacob said. "We have to move past that. It was just an awful, terrible accident. I'm sorry."
She wanted to trust him, wanted to believe he was back to his regular self. The Jacob he'd promised to be, the one who would remake Kingsboro in his image. But she had to know where his loyalty really lay, and who had the most power over him.
"Joshua's back in town," she said to Rheinsfeldt. "And I'm afraid Jacob's fugue states are coming back, too."
Rheinsfeldt's mouth opened in either surprise or pleasure. She stood on her thick legs and crossed to the telephone, pressed a button and spoke toward it. "Judy, cancel my next appointment. Thank you."
Then the doctor returned to the couch, plucked the unlit cigarette, and puffed on it as if frustrated by the lack of smoke. She faced Renee. "Tell us all about it."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jacob chose the Dodge Ram pickup truck over the Mercedes. The truck projected a blue-collar, hands-on attitude. He'd tried to talk Renee into getting a new car, but she said they should be frugal for a while. Otherwise, people might talk.
He'd had some money left over even after replacing what he'd embezzled from the M & W accounts. He'd had to concoct a few receipts by creating dummy subcontracting firms, landscapers and plumbers and excavators, the same companies he'd used to drain off most of Donald Meekins' money in the first place. And then there was the payoff to Joshua...
But now he was out of the red and ready to unleash the bulldozers on a sleepy Kingsboro.
It was September, a prime month for groundbreaking in the mountains. He leaned against his truck, which had a fine sprinkling of red dust on its black hood. This side of the hill overlooking the old part of town would yield maybe a dozen houses, and the view would add tens of thousands of dollars to the asking prices. One of the homes was already under construction, log cabin kits with lots of glass to catch the southern exposure. The subdivision road was cut and graveled, and chain saws ripped the air as workers cleared the adjoining lots. The well hadn't been drilled yet, so no water lines were connected. Two fifty-five gallon drums of water stood by the housing site for use by the block masons. The work crew was Mexican, dark-faced and solemn, shouting to one another over the noise of their machines. Jacob appreciated the Wells tradition he'd carried on, employing immigrant workers who were there on temporary visas. He didn't care if their papers were in order. They worked under the table, for cash, with none of the onerous paperwork.
He looked over the sprawling valley below. Kingsboro's western end consisted of flat and low buildings. The hospital rose above the urban skyline to the east, along with the Holiday Inn that Jacob thought of as his own creation. A new strip mall was being built along the main thoroughfare, the work of some outfit from Texas. Jacob wasn't threatened by it, though. Four thousand square feet of floor space, four storefronts, nothing major. Probably end up as a craft shop, a Christian bookstore, a laundromat, and an investment agency. Besides, they were building out, not up, and Jacob knew his real mark would be made by adjusting the skyline. Right now, the First Baptist Church was the highest structure in Kingsboro, eighty feet if you counted the steeple. Warren Wells had won the contract by becoming a member of the congregation the instant he'd heard the church was collecting tithes for a building fund.
"What do you think, Jacob?" Donald asked. Donald rarely visited the field sites, preferring the controlled environment of his office. He'd been pleased to have his partner back, because they both knew that Donald would never survive if he had to deal with real people, those who had to work with their hands and lived from paycheck to paycheck. He enjoyed the suit crowd, the financiers and bankers and attorneys. But lately he'd taken a much greater interest in the company's enterprises on the ground level.
"We should get this subdivision wrapped up by October," Jacob said.
"I've already got some people lined up to buy."
"Good, because we can use that capital to get some other things rolling. I feel a hot streak coming on."
"Hope it lasts the winter, but I'm ready to get back to the air-conditioned office." Donald wiped at his brow. The sun was glaring, though the seasonal humidity had yet to settle in the Southern Appalachians. Donald's jacket and tie were out of place on the scarred stretch of earth.
"There," Jacob said, pointing to a mixed stand of evergreens and hardwoods across the valley. A two-lane ribbon of asphalt wound up the slope and few roofs were visible through the canopy, but most of the mountain was undeveloped.
Donald put his hand to his forehead to shade his eyes. "Yeah? What about it?"
"Another subdivision. And in a couple of years, Kingsboro will be ready for a business park."
"I don't know, Jake. We've done pretty well with this safe residential stuff. We tend to lose our asses when we gamble on commercial projects."
Jacob's lips tightened. The Comfort Suites deal had lost a quarter million due to rain. The bad weather had delayed the pouring of the foundation and slab, and that set all the other contractors back. Some of those who had committed went on to other jobs and Jacob had to use all his muscle to get them lined up again. Meanwhile, the interest on the borrowed money had compounded and Donald had to get rid of a few rental properties to cover the difference. But Donald didn't seem to appreciate the accomplishment of a shiny new lodging establishment, of what it meant to the community and other businesses. All Donald could see was the bottom line.
"We'll be okay," Jacob said. He reached out and swatted Donald on the shoulder. The collective sounds of hammers, drills and chain saws blended into a symphony of progress. It was the music of money, yes, but it was also the song of a better town.
"I don't know. Jeffrey's been looking over the receipts and believes he's spotted some holes. Probably some math mistakes, but it seems like enough that we might want to have our annual audit a little early this year."
"How early?"
"November, maybe. I'm sure it's nothing, but mistakes can eat away our asset base if we don't catch them fast. And if we've overpaid some people, we need to recoup before the money's all spent."
"Well, I wouldn't put too much faith in Jeffrey. He's a receptionist, not an accountant."
"He's good on the phone," Donald said. "And he annoys the tenants if they call up and make maintenance requests."
"He's too expensive, though. And I think he's bad for business."
"What do you mean?"
"What you said. Sure, he rubs tenants the wrong way, and that's fine when it's just apartments, but if we move into office and professional rentals---"
"Wait a second, Jake. Don't be rushing into anything. I know you've got a hole in your life, but some wild plans aren't going to fill it."
"I think we should get rid of Jeffrey and hire Renee. We'd save on insurance because she's already covered under my policy. She'd work for a lower salary, too." Jacob looked past Donald to a man who was installing and squaring a door on one of the houses. "She needs something to keep her busy. I don't want her dwelling on the past."
Donald straightened his tie and grimaced. After a moment, he said, "Well, as long as my wife understands this was your idea and not mine. Any female in the office can spell trouble for me."
"Only if you can't keep it in your pants, Donald."
"Jake, I swear I've never even looked at your wife---"
Jacob grinned. "Just kidding. Damn, you're really jumpy."
"Yeah. This accounting thing scares me, I guess. I'm at the age where I want to play it safe."
"Play it safe when you're dead." Jacob spread his arms toward Kingsboro. "We've got the whole world to conquer."
Donald pursed his lips then nodded. "Okay. We'll give Jeffrey two weeks' notice and two weeks' severance pay."
"Renee will be good for business. She has an eye for detail."
"Fine." Donald waved his hand. "I'll go tell Jeffrey the news. I'll tell him we had too many tenants complaining about him and we both need to move in a new direction. The usual."
Donald climbed into his Lexus and eased down the gravel road toward Kingsboro. Jacob went to his truck to get his bagged lunch out of the cab. Renee had been feeding him lots of carrots and celery, along with high-protein foods like peanut butter sandwiches and those granola energy bars. He'd regained most of the weight he'd lost while in the hospital, and working outdoors had driven the pallor from his skin. Jacob settled behind the seat, turned on the radio to hear the weather forecast, and opened the bag.
Inside was a bundle of wax paper. He lifted it out and unwrapped the package, wondering what surprise Renee had left for him this time. The chicken head rolled out, bounced off his knee, and settled onto the floor board with a meaty plop. The wax paper was smeared with dried blood. Written on one corner in black marker were the words, "Don't chicken out."
Beneath that, the initial "J." Leaning to the left.
Jacob knelt and examined the chicken head. It was a guinea, the same breed that used to run wild on the Wells farm. A ring of congealed blood circled the hatchet wound. The dull onyx of one eye showed through the crescent slit of the eyelids. The beak was parted as if in a gasp or scream.
The cell phone on the seat beside him emitted its electronic bleat. Renee had given him a new one when he'd purchased the truck, a tacit acknowledgment that Jacob was back to normal. The children's spirits had been laid to rest in their hearts and they would move on. Happily ever after wasn't an option anymore, but neither was mutual suicide.
Jacob flipped open the phone, looking through the windshield at the house under construction. "Hello?"
"How was your lunch?"
"I told you not to call me anymore. You're out of my life now. You and Carlita can head back to your Tennessee trailer park, or hang around Daddy's house until your damned skeletons collect cobwebs. But we're through."
"Dear brother," Joshua said. "We're not even halfway through. Because you still owe me a million. And brothers always keep their promises, don't they?"
"I'm not scared anymore. Nobody would believe you if you went to the police."
"I don't have to go to the police. I just need to talk to your wife."
The cords in Jacob's neck grew taut and heat rushed to his face. "Damn it. You leave her out of this."
"No way, bro'. We're all in it together. Like one big, happy family. Ain't that right, Carlita?"
Jacob heard a whisper of air on the phone's speaker as Carlita took the phone. "My buena, Jake," she said in her sultry, smoke-scarred voice. "Like the good old days, si?"
Jacob hated the automatic response she aroused in him, that same blend of guilt and dread and excitement. Like something forbidden, overripe fruit that smelled sweet but was utterly corrupt inside. "I'm not playing your games anymore," he said, his chest aching.
"Oh, but you invented this game, silly chiquito. Wish me, remember?"
"But it's over. You've got your million."
"And you have your life back, yes? Just the way it was."
"It will never be like it was." Jacob wiped the sweat from his face. Even with the cab door open, the late-summer heat stifled him.
"Well, you can't blame a girl for wishing," she said. She lowered her voice to a whisper that curled into his soul like fingers beneath his waistband. "And two Wells give twice as much water. Gets me twice as wet."
Jacob couldn't think of a reply. That had been one of Carlita's favorite lines when they were sixteen. Joshua had probably come up with it. Carlita's creativity was never revealed in language. Hers was the cunning of the viper, one that sought out warm, camouflaged crevices and patiently waited to dispense venom.
Joshua came back on the phone. "I never was no good at math, but the way I figure it, we always shared everything fifty-fifty, all the way back to Daddy's sick little sperm. And now you got everything back and I still got nothing. Another million ain't so much to ask, when you look at it that way."
"No. You've got your million. I'll be lucky if I get away with it this time. My partner's already sniffing around like he smells shit on his shoes."
"Hey, Jake, I thought you was big time now. Tall in the saddle and all that. I mean, you got this new housing development going up. Got to be some bucks coming in."
Up at the construction site, two Mexicans were dropping shingle scraps over the side of the roof, hollering out warnings in Spanish in case any workers were on the ground below. It was the kind of careless action that made Jacob glad the safety inspectors only came around at the first of each month. He'd have to talk to the contractor. Even though he wasn't responsible for any worker's compensation claims, a few accidents would push up his liability insurance rates. "How did you know I was working again?"
"I got wheels, remember? And I got eyes."
"Where are you?" Jacob had assumed Joshua was staying out at the estate, waking up at noon and working up to a good drunk by four o'clock. Half the day spent in bed with Carlita, with the occasional time off for runs to the convenience store for Budweiser and Marlboro Lights. A million dollars was plenty of money for that kind of life. Even working in tandem, Joshua and Carlita would never be able to spend it all before either their livers or their lungs gave out.
"Been keeping an eye on my investment," Joshua said.
Jacob's stomach clenched. He rose in his seat and scooted out of the cab, kicking the chicken's head to the dirt. What if Joshua were outside Renee's apartment right now, or watching her in the laundry? Maybe they had followed her to the grocery store or post office, and were lying in wait to pop up and introduce themselves.
"Where, damn it?" Jacob said.
"See, there's this funny thing about twins. No matter how far apart they are, or what gets in between them, they somehow get tugged together. Like God meant it to be."
"Don't you dare talk about God. If God were real, my daughters would be alive and we never would have been born."
"That don't make no sense."
"You're watching me, aren't you?" Jacob paced around the truck, scanning the woods behind the construction site. The property above M & W's planned subdivision belonged to a Texas corporation. A few logging roads crisscrossed the mountaintop, but their entrances were gated. Joshua's behemoth Chevy would never manage those rutted roads.
"It was Carlita's idea. She's got a thing for you, you know."
"No. That was a long time ago. A different lifetime."
"That same life where you killed your mom?"
Jacob had to restrain himself from hurling the cell phone across the field. "Where are you?"
"You'll see us when the time is right. Now, about that money you owe me."
"Why can't you be happy with what you have? You got the property and the house, and whatever you left across the state line. That's more than you ever deserved."
"Except Dad left you about eight million, if I remember right. Daddy didn't believe in share and share alike, and I reckon you didn't, neither."
"Go away. Please. I've paid you back enough."
"Damn it, Jake. You still ain't figured it out. It ain't about the money. It's about the fun."
"Screw you."
Carlita was back on the phone. "Hey, what's this about fun? It's been a long time, hasn't it, gringo? Is your wife taking caring of you?"
"You don't have any business here, Carlita." Jacob was helpless against her. He felt as if he was over a bottomless pit, clinging to a thin rope with slick hands. Unbidden, that feeling from the hospital swept over him, the one of being submerged in dark, suffocating water. Down in the silent cold where they couldn't get him.
"But we have so much more to share," Carlita said, taunting him. "I mean, the boy of fourteen didn't know what he was doing. I'll bet your wife has taught you a few tricks since then."
Jacob heard her cigarette lighter click before she inhaled. The sound triggered flames in his head. Joshua must have whispered something to her because he heard the muted buzzing.
"Josh said to say, 'Where there's smoke,'" she said. "I don't know what it means. You are both muy loco. Made for each other."
"Let me talk to him." A sick feeling wended through Jacob's stomach, a fiery snake of unease.
"Remember under the bridge?" Carlita said. "I know you do. A boy never forgets something like that."
Jacob stabbed the 'End' button and folded the phone. He sat on the truck's bumper, not trusting his legs. The grinding of the chain saws merged with the buzzing in his ears, and every hammer blow from the roof drove nails into his skull. The phone rang again. And again.
Six times.
They were watching.
He activated the signal and pressed the phone to the side of his head.
It was Joshua. "Ain't that just like a woman? They won't let bygones be bygones."
Then his tone changed, the clumsy rural grammar vanished. "But the past does have a price, brother. Remember that."
The signal died.
Jacob loosened the top buttons on his flannel shirt and then breathed into his hands, hoping his hyperventilation would fade before he passed out. He worked his way back to the cab, supporting himself using the truck's frame. He had just settled into the driver's seat and closed his eyes when shouts arose from the house. The words were in Spanish, and Jacob didn't immediately grasp their meaning. Then the word "fuego" stood out.
Fire.
Billows of black smoke erupted from the open squares of window frames. The roofers scrambled down the ladder, their tools forgotten, the paper from the bags of shingles fluttering in the breeze. The crew leader, a muscular white man in a gray, mottled tank top, ran out of the structure's interior. The other carpenters raced to the water drums, filling five-gallon buckets and hurrying back to the house. The crew leader grabbed one of the buckets and started to enter the building, but the heat forced him back. Flames were already visible, licking around the front door that had just been installed.
Jacob tried to move, but it was as if cement had been poured into his veins and solidified there, creating a dense and immovable weight. He finally was able to move his lips, completing the phrase Carlita had suggested.
Where there's smoke, there's fire.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Renee ran the vacuum cleaner over the rug, lost in the hum of tidiness. The windows were open and the breeze caused the curtains to lift and swell. Renee preferred the fresh air and the scent of the pines that grew along the creek outside. The sunlight gave the room a soft, feathery aspect that she found pleasing.
They wouldn't be in the apartment much longer. She had enjoyed their time together here. It had reminded her of the days in Jacob's college apartment, cluttered and crowded and close. Back before Mattie and Christine and---
She would not think of those things. The future mattered, not the past. They were already planning on building a new home. Jacob wanted a larger house than the one that had burned, but Renee wasn't sure she wanted something so big and empty. However, the nest wouldn't be empty forever. After all the pain and sacrifice in their lives, they were due some happiness.
She flipped the vacuum cleaner switch then stooped to check the floor. When Jacob came home after visiting a job site, he often tracked mud across the carpet. She had asked him to take off his boots at the door, but the apartment had no foyer and she was just as bothered by the dirty boots sitting out in the open as she was by the footprints. She tucked the vacuum cleaner in the closet. In the new house, she promised herself, the closets would be deep enough to keep everything out of sight.
She checked her watch. Twenty minutes to get to the office by the end of lunch break. She'd been unsure about working for M & W, but Jacob's enthusiasm had won her over. Now she was glad she'd taken the job, because she saw her husband several times during the day and they often ate lunch together. Twice they'd even sneaked away to the apartment and had daytime sex just like in the early years of their relationship. A suffused glow had been born inside her, a feeling that she was rebuilding him. She now had a noble purpose, one that would help heal the wounds caused by the loss of her children. The saving of one man might make up for her failure to save two children. Maybe that counted in God's eyes.
As the last act of her daily ritual, she placed a fresh flower on the mantel by Mattie's urn. A laurel, because the species had just broken into seasonal bloom and grew from black mountain soil. Rich and full of life, the opposite of the gray ashes inside the ceramic shell.
"Wish me, Mattie," she whispered. "Wish me that you're in a better place."
She bowed her head slightly and crossed herself, then went out into the Thursday sunshine. As she unlocked her car, she noticed an out-of-date, rusty Chevrolet beside hers, one of the wide gas guzzlers popular when her parents were young. It was an ugly green, with faded gray primer on one fender and bald tires. The windows were tinted to a shade much darker than was allowed by law. She'd never seen the car in the parking lot before, and new tenants were required to register their vehicles with the M & W office. Perhaps the car belonged to a visitor.
She was backing out of her space when the green car's engine rumbled to life, accompanied by a belch of black smoke from its rear. She waited, giving the car room to exit in front of her, but the car didn't move.
So much for random acts of kindness. She waved to indicate that she was going ahead then eased forward. The Chevy lurched, cutting her off. Renee slammed the brakes, her restraint harness digging into her shoulder, stopping her car inches from the Chevy. She frowned toward the tinted windshield, uneasy because she couldn't see the driver's face.
Irritated, she motioned the Chevy forward again. The Chevy idled unevenly.
Renee rolled down her window and leaned her head out. "Please," she shouted. "I'm in a hurry."
She looked around the apartment complex and considered hitting her horn. That would disturb the tenants' peace, though. Rudeness was out of place at Ivy Terrace. Instead of waiting, she backed up and steered around the Chevy.
It shot a few feet forward, the engine rasping with mechanical emphysema. Renee accelerated past, veering in a wider circuit toward the parking lot entrance. Once she was clear, she slowed then looked in her rearview mirror to see the Chevy rumbling up behind her. She cut onto the highway without stopping and the Chevy followed suit, its tires squealing from the inertia of the heavy steel chassis. Renee gripped the steering wheel with all her strength and glanced down at the speedometer. She was already ten miles over the speed limit in the residential zone, but the Chevy was weaving close behind her, its approach steady.
Renee wasn't an aggressive driver, but fear caused her foot to nudge down on the gas pedal. Houses blurred by on each side of her, the tall oaks along the street forming a tunnel, and cars in the oncoming lane gave her a wide berth. She checked the mirror again. The Chevy was within twenty feet, its dented grill like the grin of a chrome cannibal. A signal light was just ahead, changing to yellow. Renee measured the distance, held her breath, and floored it, shooting through the intersection under the red.
The Chevy ignored the stop signal, bouncing as it came after her. A car horn blared, and a man emptying cans into a garbage truck jumped back onto the curb. An Amoco gas station was just ahead on the right. Renee slowed as if to pull in. The Chevy crossed the double yellow stripes into the oncoming lane and edged alongside her flank.
Renee's window was still down, and her hair whipped about her face, briefly blinding her. Over the busted muffler of the Chevy, she heard music, and it was like a scene out of those old Smokey and the Bandit movies with Burt Reynolds as the lead-footed moonshine runner. The bass line thumped and the guitars jangled, and a half-familiar male voice wailed something about blisters, great big blisters on his heart.
Renee figured the Chevy would pull in beside the gas pumps and trap her there, or maybe run her down if she dashed for the inside of the convenience store. But that notion was just as crazy as the idea that she was in a car chase. She eased off the pedal and took the right turn just before the gas station. The Chevy braked, its wheels smoking, and cut around a pickup and a caved-in telephone booth in the gas station parking lot. Her pursuer made up the lost ground in less than thirty seconds. Renee was afraid to push the Subaru past 70 on the narrow two-lane, though she was now in a rural area and therefore less likely to be blindsided from a driveway. But a remote stretch of road also offered fewer witnesses if the Chevy's driver forced her off the pavement.
She glanced in the mirror again, desperate to see the face of her tormentor. The black glaze of windshield gave away nothing. But if the Chevy were chasing her, what would it do if it caught her?
She might finally see Joshua's face.
And she might get some answers.
The best way to conquer fear was to face it, even if it killed you in the process.
The terrain swept steeply upward to her right, the slope covered with second-growth forest. To her left was a spread of pasture, the grass almost blue with summer ripeness. A herd of Black Angus steers dotted the field, heads all pointed toward the shade of the trees. Renee saw a place to pull over, a dirt driveway that led to a wobbly-looking feed shed. She slowed and made the turn, checking the Chevy in the mirror, bracing in case Joshua decided to ram her from behind. She killed the engine and waited, her window open. A farmhouse sat in the notch of a valley, and the roofs of a few houses were visible in the hills across the road.
The Chevy slowed and pulled alongside her, and again she heard the country-tinged beat and the sweet whiskey smoke of the vocals. The lyrics soared into a chorus about a ring of fire, and then Renee identified the singer. Johnny Cash. She hadn't known much about him, but had seen a television special on his career shortly after his death. "The Man in Black," the narrator had called him.
Renee didn't wait for the Chevy's engine to die. She got out and rounded the front of the car, knowing she was vulnerable, almost daring the car to leap forward. She glared straight at where the driver would be sitting. She would get her answers now, with no more secrets or games. She was about to pound on the tinted driver's-side window when the door opened.
A plume of gray smoke issued from the vehicle's interior, accompanied by Johnny Cash's repetitive ring of fire fade-out. Then the Chevy's engine gave a couple of thunderous, dying coughs and fell silent. Renee heard the wind in the trees and a metallic squeak from the driver's seat. Her muscles tensed, half of her coiling to pounce while the other half wanted to flee across the field.
Come on, Joshua. You can't be any worse than I've imagined.
A woman stepped out of the car, tall and dark-skinned, pretty, but hard around the eyes. She looked Hispanic, with thick, black eyelashes and flat raven hair. Her yellow cotton blouse was tied in a knot beneath her breasts, her brown stomach flat with a tiny dark cave at her navel. She wore cut-off blue jean shorts and a cheap pair of pink flip-flops. She tapped her cigarette and smirked.
"You're not him," Renee said.
"Neither are you," the woman said, her accent a blend of tobacco-road Southern and back-alley Spanish, a little rolling of the r with the vowels drawn out.
"Why were you chasing me?"
"We need to talk." The woman leaned against the Chevy.
"Why couldn't you use the phone like anybody else?"
"Because I had to be sure," she said. "And I didn't want Jacob to know."
"Who are you?"
"Carlita. A friend of your husband."
"Jacob never mentioned you."
Carlita laughed then coughed. She tossed her cigarette into the ditch. "No wonder."
"What about my husband?" Renee wished she had her cell phone. A car whizzed down the road and past before she could make up her mind to flag it down.
"Jacob's been a very bad boy. He gets a little loco." Carlita cocked her hip and tilted her head, letting her black hair spill across her shoulders. Her mouth twisted into a wry curve. "It's not my fault. But you know how he is, si?"
"Hold on," Renee said. "First you're trying to run me off the road, and now you're talking like we're old friends."
"We're nearly sisters," Carlita said. "And Joshua's told me so much about you."
"But I've never met Joshua. Jacob won't talk about him. They had a falling out years ago, before I even met Jacob."
"Jacob's got his---how you say?---his delusion. He thinks Joshua tricked their father to get the house and land. He thinks Joshua's after his money now. But Joshua just wants to make up, to bring the family together."
Renee shook her head. "Jacob hates that house. He said it's full of bad memories."
"Do you trust your husband?"
"Of course I do. I mean, we've had some tough times lately---"
"The children. A terrible thing."
Renee's heart stuttered then lurched inside her chest. She could scarcely recognize her own voice when she spoke. "How did you know?"
"Like sisters, remember? Sisters keep secrets from the rest of the world, not each other."
"I'm not your sister, and if you don't start making sense, I'll---" She looked at the ground for something to throw. A pile of oak stakes, used for curing tobacco, lay beside the gate. The tips were sharp enough to skewer a vampire. Her hands trembled and her vision blurred from anger and tears.
"Don't go like that," Carlita said, her voice flat, as if she had been threatened so often it now aroused only weariness. "I'm trying to help."
"By chasing me down and then dumping all this on my head?"
"I'm doing it for Joshua, because I love him, and I want him to be happy."
"So you make him happy by making me miserable?"
"I'm worried what Jacob might do to him."
"Jacob wouldn't hurt a fly. He's the kindest man I've ever known."
"But you see what he's like when someone stands in his way. Big trouble."
"Not my Jacob."
"You don't know him."
"I know him plenty."
"Then you know he's in love with me."
The woman's accent made the word even more foreign. "Love?"
"We've been lovers for many years."
Renee had always wondered about the expression "seeing red." She thought it was figurative, based on an emotional connotation. Now she knew it was real, because the red madness squeezed from the backs of her eyelids and the hidden crevices inside her skull. A sick and strange energy flowed through her, cruel electricity sparked by demonic lightning.
"Bitch." Renee launched herself at the woman, knowing she was out of shape and undersized, no match for her sinewy opponent.
But the red tidal wave of rage flooded her, used her body like a puppet, flung her flesh against Carlita. Her hands curled into fists and raised to smash that dark, somber face, to punch out those bottomless brown eyes, to tear away the lips that had uttered such an obscene claim.
The momentum of Renee's assault carried them both across the Chevy's warm hood. The sheet metal dented as Renee rolled atop Carlita, one hand gripping the woman's hair. Carlita grunted, breath tinged with tobacco and beer. Renee slapped her and scrambled astride her waist as Carlita twisted and tried to kick off her attacker. One foot bounced off Renee's shin but she barely felt it. Carlita's forearm shoved into Renee's stomach, taking her breath as the pain rippled out from the point of contact.
Renee bent her head forward and realized with horror that she was about to sink her teeth into the woman's cheek. She froze, then went limp and slid down Carlita's body, aware of the woman's unrestrained breasts beneath the thin shirt. Aware of the woman's heat, her soft but powerful thighs, her robust Hispanic lips, everything that was feminine and dangerous and attractive to men.
Any man. Even a man like a Jacob.
She pushed away and slid down the bumper to the ground, her legs weak. She couldn't wrap her mind around the idea. Jacob didn't even glance at sunbathing college girls and he didn't ogle stars on television shows.
She trusted him.
Didn't she?
Despite his fugues and his forgetful lapses and his occasional, inexplicable anger.
Carlita sat on the hood, her legs crossed under her as if she were folding into a yoga position. She fished a cellophane-wrapped pack from her pocket, tapped it, and offered the brown tip of a cigarette to Renee. "Give it time," she said.
Renee shook her head, refusing both the cigarette and the advice.
Carlita lit one and rubbed her cheek. "You fight like you mean it."
"What about you and Jacob?"
"I didn't want to tell it this way. A man should be honest about his heart. But men, they never are."
A pickup drove down the road toward them, slowing, the driver waving before speeding up again. A country boy checking to make sure everything was all right. As if anything would ever be all right again. Renee thought about flagging him down and sending for the police, but she didn't want any more attention drawn to the Wells family.
Now that the anger had faded, Renee felt deflated. She could barely muster a whisper. "Tell me. Please."
"I lived on the Wells farm when I was young. My father and brother worked the Christmas trees, and I helped in the vegetable garden, picking tomatoes and green beans. Migrant workers, up on temporary permits. Mi padre said it was the only way out of Mexico. That's when I met Joshua."
"You mean Warren Wells let his son date a Mexican? From what Jacob's told me, your people---I mean, the workers---were not people he respected."
Carlita smoked around a smile. "We didn't date. He came by the camp when the men were out in the fields. I was in the shed, shelling beans. He walked in like he owned the place and sat down beside me. I was just a scared girl, but I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. My English was okay even back then. I'd been coming to North Carolina with my family for years, mostly when padre worked soybeans and tobacco down by the coast, sometimes peaches. One thing led to another, and Joshua took the basket of beans from me and set it to the side, then laid me down on the hay."
"God. He raped you?"
Carlita gave a coarse laugh. "Oh, no. I wanted to see what a gringo was like. I only had a few of the camp boys before then, and mi padre would have killed me if he caught me. It was a danger and that makes it fun when you're a teenage girl. Comprende?"
"Not really. I kept my virginity until I met Jacob," she lied. "And I only gave it up then because I knew we were going to be married."
"Maybe I was thinking some of that. We were to stay nine months on our visas, go back to Guadalajara in December after all the trees were cut. I thought if Joshua got me pregnant, I'd get my ring and a green card."
Renee was shocked at the confession. "What does this have to do with Jacob?"
"After that first time, Joshua and me were doing it every minute we could sneak away. He liked it and I thought the more we did it, the faster I get a gringo baby in my belly." She slapped her bare abdomen and added with bitterness, "Turned out I'm no good in there. Seed won't take root."
Renee wondered if never having a baby was worse than losing two children. She decided nothing could be worse than that. "So you had to go back to Mexico?"
"No. His father fixed it up so we didn't have to go back right away. Joshua said it was because we were cheap. Said, 'Daddy don't have to pay no white-man wages.' Jacob used to follow Joshua sometimes when he came to the camp. I think he was jealous."
"I'm sorry. You don't know Jacob."
"Maybe you don't, hey, senora? He used to watch us while we did it. One day, under the bridge, I saw him hiding in the bushes. He came out and said he was going to tell their father if I didn't let him do it, too."
Renee's intestines clenched as if they harbored a nest of snakes. "Did you let him?"
"Joshua went loco, beat him up. Said he was the oldest so he always got to go first. Said to come back when he had something to offer in return."
"And?"
"Jacob finally did come back. Eight years ago. Right after he married you."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The house stood like a watchtower on the hill overlooking the river. Jacob gunned the pickup across the bridge and up the driveway then slewed to a stop, knocking over a handrail that led up the steps. He ran into the shade of the porch and beat on the door with both fists. "Josh. Open this damned door."
The knob turned and the door parted. Joshua held a Mason jar full of iced tea, a ragged wedge of lemon sticking to the rim. "Howdy, brother. Nice of you to drop by. We're getting to be just like family again."
"You set the fire at the construction site."
"Jake, don't be like that. Come on in and have a drink."
Jacob didn't move, his fists still clenched. "They're watching me. They'll be suspicious."
"Look, don't tell me the thing wasn't insured. I know you. You're a chip off the old block. Even when you lose, you make money, just like Warren Wells." Joshua looked up at the family cemetery, a twisted grin on his stubbly face.
"Arson is a serious crime."
"The fire chief showed up, didn't she?"
"They investigate every structure fire. You know that."
"But she didn't find nothing. Had to be an accident. A worker dropped a cigarette by the kerosene can, right?"
Jacob frowned, loathing himself for letting his twin dominate his life for so long, even in absence. "She said they'd do more tests, but that was her preliminary ruling."
"They'll sniff around and try to scare you, but in the end they'll pay. And then you can pay me."
"I'll pay. Just leave my wife out of it."
"Oh, Jakie Boy. The game don't play that way. She's in way too deep to be left out. She's family."
"Damn it, we're trying to make it work. I don't want to lose her."
"You mean you can't afford to lose her yet."
Jacob looked off the porch to the rise of hills, the meadow sloping away to the river, the long sandy drive, the distant bridge. "I've kept my part of the bargain," Jacob said. "Now get your ass back to Tennessee."
"I kinda like it here now."
"I should have killed you when I had the chance."
"Seeing Carlita got you fired up."
"You told her, didn't you? About Mom?"
"Family secrets stay in the family," Joshua said. "Ain't that what you always said?"
"Does she know you poisoned your own dad?"
"Why don't you come on in, have a cold one? I'm drinking Corona today. A little taste of Mexico while Carlita's away."
"Is she back in Tennessee?"
"Hell if I know. She took the keys and left before I got up. You know how women are. You know how she is."
"You should keep her out of it."
"Oh, but she's right smack between us, ain't she?" Joshua jerked his head toward the inside of the house. "She ought to be in them family portraits, arms around you and me, Mom and Dad in the back row grinning like a couple of skulls."
"Shut up."
"Like a couple of skulls."
"I didn't kill them."
"No. Dad was all me."
"You didn't have to. The cancer had already reached his liver. He wouldn't have lived more than six months."
"I wasn't going to let the bastard cheat me out of the fun."
"I didn't know he'd changed the will."
"Sure." Joshua pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, stabbed it between his chapped lips, and mopped the sweat from his greasy forehead with the back of his hand. "We thought it was fifty-fifty. But he played us to the end, just like he did our whole lives."
"Once in a while I'd catch him looking at that broken cane, at the splinters in the wood. Like he knew."
"No damned wonder," Joshua said around the cigarette. "The only reason he didn't kill her is you beat him to it."
"I didn't---"
"Cut the shit, Jake. It's in your blood. It's what we do." He fired the cigarette, holding the Bic aloft, the flame's reflection bobbing in each of his dark pupils. He rattled the shrinking ice cubes in his jar of tea, the noise like bones shaken in a glass coffin. The lighter disappeared into his pocket, easy to retrieve in case arson was required.
And it often was, Jacob knew. "Nobody would believe you if you told them."
"Does it matter? A small town like this, the newspaper would be on it like green flies on sugar shit. They'd drag you through the mud until you were so dirty it wouldn't matter what the truth was. It's not every day that a boy kills his Momma. Then they'd start connecting the dots on the other stuff."
"You'd go to jail, too."
Joshua inhaled the tobacco as if it were his last gasp of oxygen, then pushed it out of his lungs. "I got nothing to lose. Ain't no prison worse than waking up pissed off and poor every day. Besides, I didn't leave no evidence. Dad was eating those pills anyway. A little digitalis and cyanide wasn't nothing."
Warren Wells' friends had heaped sympathy on the twins. People like Rayburn Jones and the family attorney, Herbert Isaacs, talked about how the sons had been so noble, coming back to the farm to help their ailing father get out a final tree crop. The funeral was held at Three Springs Baptist Church, where Warren Wells had served as a deacon in his middle age, before his fervor shifted toward hoarding treasures of the Earth rather than of the spirit. During the memorial service, Joshua had disguised his giggles as sobs. Jacob felt no emotion at all.
The day after the burial in the family cemetery, Herbert Isaacs gathered the family in the study of the Wells house and read them the will. That's when Joshua learned he'd received the property instead of the running money he'd yearned for. Jacob received a lion's share of the eight million dollars in other assets, some real estate holdings, and various stocks and bonds, while five more distant relatives had each received title to business properties in downtown Kingsboro. Warren Wells' final laugh had been to place a covenant on Joshua's bequest that prevented him from selling it, and the taxes on the hundred-and-forty-acre estate all but assured that Joshua would have to keep a job to pay them. Otherwise, the county could put a lien on the property and leave Joshua with nothing but an unprofitable patricide.
In that one desperate act, Joshua had failed to live up to a family legacy that required all dark deeds to pay dividends.
"Can't sell it, and you can't make a nickel on farming. Even the Christmas trees have gone to hell, nobody set out seedlings and the rest got too big and scruffy for market."
"A million can last a long time in Tennessee, though."
Joshua grinned, showing his uneven, opossum's teeth. "Like I said, Kingsboro ain't so bad if you got money."
"Get out of my town."
"Now, now, Jacob. We're just now getting used to each other. Kind of brings back the early days, when we were two of a kind."
"We were opposites."
Transverse twins, their doctor had called them. Developing in the womb face-to-face, mirror images of each other. Joshua born left-handed, with his heart shifted to the right side of his chest, and in the mysterious properties of the brain's hemispheres, more prone to mechanical and mathematical skills yet lacking a deep emotional pool. Jacob had been the left-brained one, the sensitive and reclusive child, easily dominated. Desperate for his parents' love but always failing to win it, while Joshua had extracted it from them like a butcher taking hearts in a slaughterhouse.
"We're alike," Joshua said, then added with an ugly wink, "We want the same things."
"You're wrong. I've changed."
"I saw how you looked at Carlita. She's put in a few hard years, but she's still a saucy little taco, ain't she?"
"I'm done. Like I said, I'm going to work it out with Renee. After all the hard times, I owe it to her."
"Sure." Joshua flipped his spent cigarette into the grass at the fringe of the porch, and a thin thread of its smoke curled to the sky. "Come on in, sit a spell. Act like folks."
Jacob stared at the dying, orange end of the cigarette. If Jacob burned down the house that Wells built, then Joshua would have to go home. Not this home, but to his real home, a dirty trailer across the state line, where Confederate flags flew from ATV's and waffle houses and pawn shops filled what passed for a business district.
"You deserve this place," Jacob heard himself saying, though in his mind, yellow fingers of flames groped their way up the wooden walls, clutched at the eaves and fascia, scratched the shingles.
Joshua grunted. "I'll bet you got to shitbag shyster Isaacs when you found out Dad had cancer, played him like a fiddle. Got him to change the will while I was poisoning the old rat. I wonder how much he bagged out of the deal."
"You were Dad's favorite, remember?"
"Only when he couldn't tell us apart."
Jacob took another look at the barn, remembering the bloody carnage of Joshua's chicken-slaughtering spree. Forensic psychologists said many serial killers served their internship by practicing on animals. According to the profile, many were also late bed wetters. But Jacob, not Joshua, was the one who had awakened to damp sheets at the age of seven, who sneaked out of bed and bundled up the offending linen before his twin brother woke across the room. He was never clever enough, because Mother wouldn't let anyone else do laundry. And she always took glee in hanging his yellowed sheets out on the line, knowing the farmhands and their father would see them.
Jacob pushed past Joshua into the house. The house that should have been his.
He headed up the darkened stairs, each thump and clatter of his mother's falling body echoing in his head. There among the shadows, in the alcove just at the end of hall, he saw a pale face. A child's face, floating, ethereal, shaped by the distant mist of a memory. He brushed the memory away, because memories couldn't be trusted, especially those born in this house.
Joshua shouted from below, but Jacob couldn't make out the words. Their childhood room was just ahead. He flung the door open and burst inside. The sun poured through the open window, the curtains golden and soft. His bed was still rumpled and the ropes that Joshua had used weeks before to tie him down were still attached to the bedstead. Joshua's bed looked as if it had been unused, and he wondered if Joshua and Carlita had taken over the master bedroom.
Jacob opened the closet. No Sock Monster, no bloodied chicken heads, no broken toys. The closet was empty, except for the upper shelf above the rod. He pulled out the broken cane with its yellowed ivory handle that was carved in the shape of an eagle head. He ran his hand over the splintered edges, feeling the grain where he had worked the knife fifteen years before. He hadn't known it would break. He hadn't wanted to kill his mother, no matter how much she hated him.
"Two million is a suitable bargain," Joshua said from the doorway, all trace of his rural Southern accent gone. Joshua the actor, the pleaser, the manipulator. The one who had fooled their parents with a pretense of devotion.
"I have to know it's going to end."
"Guilt is a currency one borrows from the soul," Joshua said. "And only one person can meet that debt."
"I think Dad might have suspected something. Maybe that's why he left me the money. As a kind of payoff."
"He knew about Carlita, that's why." Joshua's redneck accent returned, as if he were speaking in tongues. "He didn't want no son of his shacking up with a Mexican."
"He didn't like Renee, either."
"You know the Old Man. He figured out her value. Simple as that."
"I love her."
"Sure you do. A Wells always loves his woman until she stands in the way of what you really want."
"I don't want this."
"You shoulda thought of that back when you were spying on me and Carlita."
"I never saw nothing like that before."
"Your accent, Jake. It's coming back."
"I can't help it." And he couldn't. This room, the ghosts in the walls, the pasts both real and imagined, all shifted in and out of substance. The floor seemed to move beneath his feet, and he reached for the closet door to steady himself.
"Why do you think I married her, Jake?"
"So she could get her green card."
"That didn't matter back then. That was before they got so crazy about terrorists. Illegals could hang around a few years and sneak into the system sideways. There's only one reason I married her."
Jacob held onto the closet door, the one on which his childhood nightmares had been projected. His stomach fluttered, his heart pumped ground glass through his vascular system. This room, the bed that had soaked up his wet dreams and urine, the space beneath the bed where Joshua had staged his best games, the window through which the world had grown smaller and uglier. The walls closed in and he could barely breathe.
"I married her because you wanted her," Joshua said. "It was the only thing I could take from you."
"No," he said, but the lie tasted like closet dust.
"And you only wanted her because she was mine."
He shook his head and sweat and misery fell from his scalp.
"Because you saw what it was like to be close to someone," Joshua said. "It wasn't just the screwing, though that sure enough drove you crazy. You think I didn't know you were watching? Why do you reckon I took you to the work camp that night? I wanted you to see what you were missing. I wanted you to see that you'd never be me, no matter how goddamned hard you tried."
"I never wanted to be you."
"That ain't what those shrinks said. And Dad was sure pissed off, having one of his sons turn out to be a skullfuck."
"Those were . . . emotional difficulties . . . adjustment disorders."
"Twenty-dollar words for 'skullfucked.'"
Jacob felt as if the closet door were squeezing closed with half of him caught in the middle. He blinked and the room stopped moving. "One of the doctors said it might be genetic."
"Still passing the blame, huh? Why can't you just accept that you were fucked from your first breath. That you should have died inside Mom's nasty belly and left everything to me like it was supposed to be."
Jacob slipped to his knees, and he felt weak, eleven years old again, then nine, then seven. Joshua reached out his left hand and there was the Sock Monster, bloody and pointy and gray. Joshua worked the filthy sock like a puppet, using his "Wish Me" voice.
"Wish me to make you go away," said the sock, and Joshua's stage voice echoed through the tunnel of years, chasing him, grabbing at him, scratching him.
He kicked out and crawled backwards into the safety of the closet. The door slammed and the dark dropped over him, but in his mind the Sock Monster still reached, reached, reached.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The fire chief, Davidson, was waiting in the M & W office when Renee arrived twenty minutes late. The door to Donald Meekins' office was closed. He must have been in a meeting or he would have locked the outer office door.
Davidson stood as rigid as a soldier. "Where is your husband?"
"That's what I want to know." Renee's eyes were puffy and dewy. Having a cheating husband tended to do that to a woman. But she was well aware of his ability to keep secrets. Their deepest bond was their mutual dishonesty.
"I'm sorry to do this here, but I need to talk to both of you. Together."
"There's not a 'together' anymore."
"Sorry, Mrs. Wells. I don't mean to pry in personal business. But after the fire at your husband's construction site, I had to go back and look at the evidence collected when your house burned down."
"You said the SBI ruled it accidental."
"Not exactly. What they ruled was 'undetermined cause.'"
Renee wiped her nose with a ragged Kleenex she pulled from her pocket. She hated to be seen like this. Her hair was tangled and sweaty, her cheeks bright with shock and sorrow. She wouldn't have come to the office after her encounter with Carlita, but she was hoping to confront Jacob.
And to get a look at the fine print on the company life-insurance policy.
"We've had a couple of recent arson cases, so I had to go back and look at all of this year's suspicious fires. There was one out at the cemetery, and the groundskeeper said he saw a woman near the woods where it started. An attorney's office caught six weeks ago, took out the back of the building before we got it under control. Started inside, with what looked like a short where a computer was plugged in. The office belonged to Herbert Isaacs. Is that name familiar?"
"No, unless he rented from M & W. Then I might have seen his name on a statement or something." Renee couldn't think straight. She had to get rid of Davidson until she could sort things out with Jacob. She shouldn't be talking before she knew which story they were going to use.
"Herbert Isaacs was the attorney for Jacob's father, who was the developer of the office building. So I figured maybe there was an extra key around here and somebody had access without breaking and entering."
"That's quite a leap."
"Usually, arsonists have a modus operandi, a way of working that's as distinctive as fingerprints, and that gives them away. But this time, four different fires, four different causes."
"Sounds like random accidents to me. That would account for the difference."
"Three of them have the Wells name in common. Four, if you count the fact that a Wells is buried in the cemetery."
Renee tossed the moist tissue in the garbage can and tried to smile. Something had broken inside her, and her gut ached from the forearm blow that Carlita had given her. She rubbed her stomach. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Mrs. Wells, I'm starting to believe you were the woman the groundskeeper saw."
"Is it a crime for a woman to visit her daughter's grave?" Renee channeled the anger she felt toward Carlita and Jacob and focused it on Davidson. "If I'm under suspicion, perhaps I should talk to a lawyer before I answer any more questions. But since I don't see the police with you, then I'm starting to believe you're blowing smoke."
Davidson pursed her thin lips, her eyes narrowed to slits. She pulled a plastic baggie from the back of her trousers. In it lay a rumpled piece of paper. "I found this at the scene when I went back for another look at your house. It was in the basement, laying there in the chunks of charcoal. Somebody must have left it there to be found, otherwise it would have burned. And it's fairly recent or the weather would have made the ink fade."
Renee couldn't help reaching for the baggie, but Davidson pulled it away. "Let me read it to you," the fire chief said. "'Hope you like the housewarming present. J.'"
Davidson observed Renee as if she were a germ on a microscope slide, but Renee's face had turned to stone.
"Pretty strange, huh? Fingerprints match Jacob's. He had a record as a teen, some minor vandalism at school, and he set fire to a bridge though no charges were filed. He was also arrested for assault, but the victim was a Mexican and didn't want to press charges. Your fingerprints aren't on file, but you've touched this before, haven't you?"
Renee let her face bend enough for a smile. "If you think Jacob burned down his own house, he'd be pretty stupid to leave something like that at the scene."
"I don't think your husband is stupid. But I can count two million reasons for him to cover it up."
"The house was only insured for a million."
Davidson's eyes grew grim, her short-cropped hair making her look like a severe monk who frowned on joy in others. "Your daughter was worth another million."
"That wasn't supposed to happen," Renee said, eyes roaming to the framed Rembrandt print on the wall, a Flemish village locked in time, a place where no children burned. She wouldn't face it. It was inside, hidden away, entombed. Nothing but ash. "That was an accident."
"You didn't know, did you? About the insurance on your daughter?"
"Of course I did," she said. A million per child. She accepted it because she had remade that person she used to be, shaped her past until she could live with the consequences. She had simply changed what she believed. That wasn't wrong, was it? Not with her soul and sanity at stake.
"Here's what I think happened," Davidson said. "Your husband had some money troubles. We don't know how deep he was under, but the detectives will have plenty of time to sort that out once we get this arson charge to stick. So he needed money fast, and here was this nice, new house worth maybe $300,000 but insured with contents for a million. All it takes is one electrical short and your husband turns a huge overnight profit. If not for one little mistake, he probably would have got away clean."
One little mistake.
The fire chief had reduced Mattie's life to three words. Davidson would never know how Mattie's little foot had kicked in the womb, high up under the rib, so powerfully that she and Jacob had joked about their future soccer star. Davidson hadn't sat Mattie in her lap and read "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," hadn't watched Strawberry Shortcake videos and made Rice Krispies treats, hadn't seen Mattie in ballerina's tights skipping across a gym floor, hadn't brushed Mattie's luxuriant hair and shared purple fingernail polish and silly necklaces. Davidson didn't know about their daughter's sixteen million heartbeats, each one a blessing beyond measure, or the remaining millions of which God had cheated them.
"Jacob didn't do it," Renee blurted out, wanting to convince herself. "I think it was Joshua who started the fire."
"Joshua?"
"His twin brother. He's always been jealous because Jacob is successful. He wants to destroy Jacob, bring him down to his level, drag him down to hell."
Davidson tapped the baggie against her thick thigh. "Joshua Wells, huh? He hasn't been around here in years."
"You know him?"
"Knew of him. I went to the high school at the other end of the county, but everybody knew about the Wells boys, their dad being rich and all. Funny, but Jacob was always the troublemaker, the boy with his name in the newspaper, not the other one."
"You've got it wrong." Renee remembered what Carlita had told her about Jacob's mysterious twin. Desperation gripped her guts. "Joshua---he did all those bad things and blamed them on Jacob. I know Jacob. He's honest and kind."
"The evil twin did it, huh?" Davidson didn't appear as if she relished her sardonic joke. "Are you trying to sell your story to the 'Lifetime Channel' or something?"
"Jacob didn't start the fire at our house. I was there, remember?"
"Nothing personal, Mrs. Wells, but I don't believe you. Either of you. And when I take another look at these four fires, I'm going to find something. Then it will be the police knocking on your door, not me."
A well of spite rose in Renee. "Fine. At least I won't have to smell your sweat anymore."
At the end of the hall, the door to Donald Meekins' office opened. A redheaded woman with freckles came out, straightening her natural-fiber blouse. Renee recognized her as one of the company's tenants, a massage therapist who rented an office downtown. Donald followed her, his laughter ceasing when he saw Renee with a woman in a uniform.
The redhead raised her eyebrows, but Donald said, "Come back next week and we'll work out that lease extension, Miss Adamson. Just call Renee to set up the appointment."
"Thank you, sir," Miss Adamson said, fortunate to have made her living in alternative health rather than acting. "I look forward to doing business with you."
Donald reached up to adjust his tie then must have realized how that would look. "Yes. Thank you. Well, see you next week."
Miss Adamson smiled on her way past Renee to the exit, wobbling like a foal on her four-inch heels. After she was gone, Donald asked Davidson, "Can I help you?"
"I just needed to fill out some forms to do fire inspections at some of your apartments. Mrs. Wells here helped me out."
Donald squinted at her brass nameplate and nodded in his haste to duck back inside his office. "Well, after all the fires we've been having, I guess that's a good thing."
"Stop, drop, and roll and all that," Davidson said. "I'd better get back to my truck. Somebody might be trying to steal a fire hydrant."
"Okay, thank you," he said, overusing the phrase, grateful for everything today. Miss Adamson had a rare talent for emotional healing, it seemed. Donald went into his office and closed the door.
"He thinks Jacob has had a run of bad luck," Renee said.
"Sometimes people make their luck," Davidson said. She slipped the baggie with the note into her pocket.
"You should check that for Joshua's fingerprints," Renee said. "Or do identical twins have the same fingerprints?"
"No, their fingerprints are different. It's the DNA that's the same."
"It wasn't Jacob."
"You seem like a nice woman. You just married the wrong man, that's all. I wish I didn't have to nail you."
Davidson left without a backward glance. Renee sat at her desk and picked up the phone and tried Jacob's cell number. The signal was too weak.
She remembered showing Jacob the note while he was in the hospital, but she thought it was still in her purse. Maybe she'd dropped it when she went back to the ruins, the night she'd found the mirror. The night she'd followed the stranger into the woods. She should have burned it.
At least now she knew who the stranger was. The arsonist.
Joshua.
A man she'd never met, but one who must harbor as much hatred for her as he did his twin brother. Enough hatred to want to kill them both. But only Mattie had paid.
But why? If he wanted revenge, why had he waited so many years? What did he have against Jacob? There was a German word "Doppelganger," which meant a spiritual double. If Jacob's dissociative disorder was genetic, then maybe Joshua suffered delusions, too.
Unless Carlita was telling the truth, and Jacob was really in love with her. That would make Joshua jealous, wouldn't it? The brothers had been competitive, and Joshua had always come up short.
She couldn't make that final leap. She knew Jacob. They were closer than twins could ever be. They had survived two major tragedies together, they had pulled each other back from the mortgage of despair. They were developing themselves, building a new and brighter future on the ashes of the past. Two Wells were better than one.
Renee sat at her desk and tried to concentrate on her work, running a database of water bills. The numbers on the computer screen fuzzed before her eyes. The clock moved in a slow crawl, but Jacob didn't walk through the door. She tried the phone again.
He answered on the second ring. "Hello?"
"Jake! Where are you?"
"Where the door swings both ways."
"No, Jake, don't play games. We need to---"
"Finish it. Goodbye."
She pushed herself away from the desk and went out, not bothering to tell Donald she was leaving. She would find Jacob and confront him about Carlita. Jacob might be an arsonist and an insurance fraud but he wasn't a cheater. But if he'd gone home again, the place he despised, then Joshua's blackmail must have taken a darker turn.
Though she hadn't traveled that end of the county much, she was familiar with the two-lane highway that ran west along the river. Beyond the valley of Kingsboro, the road was twisty and the houses more sparse across the slopes. The forests were lush with pine, oak, and hickory. Much of the bottomland along the river held rows of yellowing tobacco or corn, and cattle grazed while serving out their sentences in idyllic, barbed-wire death camps.
The bridge came into view, and she recognized its wooden rails that peeled gray paint. Beneath that bridge, according to Carlita, Jacob had spied on his brother making love. Except Carlita didn't regard Joshua's affections as love. She spoke of it as a mutual addiction, a degrading need, a bond of desperation. Apparently only Jacob was capable of loving Carlita, in whatever form the woman imagined it. An image flashed through her mind of Jacob on top of Carlita, his pale sweating skin against her muscular dark body, her thighs straddling his hips, their limbs tangled in profane passion.
The Wells house stood on the hill, as stark as she remembered it, and through the trees she saw Jacob's new pickup. But the rusty green Chevrolet wasn't there. Jacob was alone in the house.
She slowed as she crossed the bridge, her hands so tight on the steering wheel that her knuckles were white. She looked over the rail at the water racing below, the currents sweeping around boulders and spilling over little falls, fueled by a hundred springs that welled from the mountains beyond. Jacob had told her a story once about a sailboat he'd had as a child, and how it had been smashed in the river. She wondered if Joshua had received a sailboat just like it, since twins often got the same presents.
The house was quiet as she parked. No one came out on the porch. Up close, the house had a shabby look, as if it hadn't been tended, with dusty windows and a few siding boards buckled out. The old barn stood on a nearby rise of meadow, and blue-gray hens worried the grass in the structure's shade. Jacob had tried to take her inside the barn during their engagement visit, but the thought of dust, manure, and vermin had repelled her. She shivered as she recalled Jacob's story of the animal torture.
Renee knocked. "Jacob?"
Maybe Joshua had never been here, and the blackmail had been a ruse. Perhaps Jacob had come here to wait for Carlita. A perfect little love nest. Maybe he was waiting in bed right now, with some candles and mineral oil and imported beer. She tried the knob. Locked.
She walked around the house, pulling herself up by the ledge of the big mullioned windows on the first floor, digging the toes of her pumps into the siding. The dining room was empty except for an oval wooden table coated with dust. On that long-ago night, Warren Wells had sat there at the head, with Renee seated between him and Jacob. Beyond the table was a fireplace, with small figurines lined along the mantel, their order apparently unchanged since her first visit. She dropped back to the ground and continued around the house. The back door was open.
"Jacob?"
The doorway led into the kitchen, which was spacious but dark despite the sunny day. She tried the light switch. Nothing. As her eyes adjusted, she made out a metal card table near the refrigerator that was covered in pizza boxes, empty beer bottles, and opened tin cans of food. Under the table sat a white Styrofoam cooler. Someone had been staying here.
She tried to count all those times Jacob had been out late, running errands or visiting a job site after hours. After he left the hospital, he'd disappeared for a few weeks. He'd claimed he'd been sleeping in the woods, but his memory had been damaged by the drinking. Maybe his fugue states were the ultimate cover story. After all, you couldn't be caught in a lie if you didn't remember where you had been. Or whom you were with.
Maybe Jacob had taken up smoking again.
She went through the hall to the stairs. The daylight was weaker here, the surrounding rooms walled off from the sun by thick drapes. The house smelled of must, stale smoke, and old cooking grease. Cigarette ash dotted some of the tin cans and butts lay scattered on the tiled floor. She paused and listened, wondering if Jacob had heard her arrival and was now hiding.
Renee started up the steps. She watched where she placed her foot, careful not to make the wood creak. If Jacob were up to something, better to catch him in the act. She took two steps, and then grabbed the railing to distribute her weight more easily. Her hand touched something slick and moist.
She pulled her hand back and put it near her face. Even in the bad light, there was no mistake.
Blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dark.
Where the Sock Monster lived.
And all the other beasts, the hundreds of creatures that had once crawled from beneath the bed and clutched at him, digging into his flesh, pulling him to pieces.
That's what Jacob had told the first doctor, shortly after his mother died.
No, not "died," came the Sock Monster's voice from an unseen corner of the closet. She was killed.
The original diagnosis had been an identity disorder, attendant paranoia with an underlying persecution complex. But the doctor consulted with Warren Wells and agreed to change the diagnosis to "adjustment disorder," a temporary failure in the coping mechanism. That way, Jacob could recover and go about his business of becoming a Wells.
Two years later, on the lost Saturday, Warren Wells had found his son unconscious in the barn, surrounded by the headless corpses of two dozen guinea hens, a bloody hatchet by his side. That time, the doctor had suggested a borderline personality disorder with sociopathic tendencies. Warren Wells had trumped it with his own diagnosis: "Boys will be boys."
And that was the last doctor, until Rheinsfeldt.
A couple of the trailers in the migrant camp had burned down the next year, but that was in the late winter, when most of the Mexicans had gone to the coast to work soybeans and cotton. The only family living in the camp had been Carlita's, but she and Joshua had recently married and moved to Tennessee. Jacob slipped out of the big, frigid house that night, tired of the brooding air that surrounded his father after his "only son" had married outside his own ethnic group. Jacob had spent the evening with a stolen bottle of tequila, sipping in the shed and staring at the blank, black window of one of the trailers.
The fire wasn't his fault. It was like anger, or seeing red, something that burned so hot inside that it caught fire to things on the outside, too. A match that lit itself.
Then off to college, where excessive drinking brought endless rounds of fugue states. Except those were easily explainable, and as far as Jacob knew, he never committed any violent acts during them. Sure, sometimes he'd wake up with blood in his mouth, or bits of broken glass in the creases of his clothes, but he'd never been arrested. Then he'd met Renee and the rage dissolved.
But she didn't know Joshua.
The half of him that could be neither restored nor excised.
In the dark, Joshua was always with him, whispering, taunting, tempting.
Jacob had never been able to explain it to the doctors. Even shrinks like Rheinsfeldt were too smart for their own good, thumbing through their thick manuals looking for Latin words to describe him. If they had only listened, they would have known it wasn't his words he spoke. He only said what Joshua would say.
Carlita understood that part. Carlita was primal, carnal, an animal spirit. She saw that Jacob and Joshua were the same, and could love them both. Not even their mother and father could do that. Where everyone else tried to pull them apart, make them separate beings, Carlita accepted them the way they were.
She was the only person Jacob could ever trust, the only person who seduced him into letting down his guard.
And, like all mistakes of love, this one carried a deep price.
Now, curled in the darkness, his nose in the dust and mildew, he knew he was foolish to ever think he could escape Joshua. Even if he killed his brother, the voice wouldn't go away. Even if he paid him millions of dollars, and Joshua moved to Mexico, Jacob would still be wed to his twin. Joshua was part of him. Sometimes he even thought he was more Joshua than he was himself, because only Joshua would be afraid of the dark like this.
Not Jacob.
Because Jacob was brave, wasn't he? Jacob took care of business. Jacob did the dirty work for both of them.
Had he really hit Joshua, just before the closet door had slammed shut? He spread his fingers and moved them slowly across the floor. He touched the heavy eagle head of the cane. The hooked beak was slick and wet. He lifted the cane and smiled.
You didn't have to be afraid just because you were in the dark.
When there were two of you, you were never alone.
Right, Joshua?
Footsteps.
Coming up the stairs.
Mother. You've had a terrible fall. Why don't you lie down and rest?
He giggled in the dark, the sound swallowed by the dead air of the closet. Your imagination could get the better of you if you weren't careful. As Dad always said, "Dreams are for dreamers, but the rest of us have to live in the real world."
The footsteps came closer.
It must be Joshua, that other one that lived outside his head, coming to taunt him some more. Or demand more money.
But Jacob would be ready this time.
He gripped the cane.
Kill him then burn the house down.
Closer footsteps.
Then her voice. "Jacob?"
His stomach clenched.
Her. Did she know?
He'd kept Joshua a secret because she wouldn't understand. They never did.
And he had sacrificed everything for her, hadn't he? Moved back to Kingsboro, took over the Wells holdings, tried to build up some momentum in a tough market. All so she could say she had made him successful. Gave her children so she would find the ultimate female fulfillment, the most obvious and unbreakable sign of commitment.
But even those commitments could be broken.
He loved her, and when you loved somebody, you owed them everything.
Carlita understood that, but Renee never would.
"Jacob?" She was across the room now, probably near the window. Or the bed.
He raised himself onto his hands and knees. He heard the swick of fabric as she parted the curtains, and a sword of light appeared at the base of the closet door. How long had he been here? Days?
No. The blood would have dried. He hadn't forgotten anything. This wasn't a fugue state.
He was . . . confused, that was all.
That silly Joshua stuff was the kind of thing a scared kid would dream up. He was a grown man, his own man. He called softly through the door. "Carlita?"
The sword of light was broken by her shadow. "Jacob? Are you in there? Are you okay?"
"Yes. Joshua locked me in here. Let me out."
"There's blood everywhere."
How many times had he hit Joshua? He couldn't remember. Obviously not enough, or Joshua's body would be lying in the room.
The door handle turned then the door rattled in its frame. "It's locked."
Jacob stood the cane in the corner. No need for her to see it, or the blood that spattered the eagle head of the handle. She wouldn't understand. They never did.
He raised himself on his knees and fumbled for the eye-hook he'd installed as a teenager, so he'd have a place to hide from his family when the barn was too cold. Nobody ever expected a closet to be locked from the inside. Joshua had found out, though, and had installed a latch on the outside, too.
"The door swings both ways," Joshua had said. "You can lock me out, but I can also lock you in."
Jacob pushed the metal latch up and it fell against wood. As the door opened and the sudden daylight blinded him, he stared up at the figure before him. Blinking, he said, "I did it for you."
"What, Jake? What did you do?"
Not her. It was the other one.
Renee.
Blood dotted the floor like the footprints of a rabid animal. The sunlight made crazy rainbow diamonds on the window glass. The sky was a mirror, the sky was a mirror, the sky was a mirror.
"I did it for us," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
"What's going on, Jake?" Renee asked, patting Jacob's shoulder. Her husband was wild-eyed and pale, on his knees, clothes wrinkled. Why had he locked himself in the closet?
"It's Joshua," Jacob said. "He's the one who burned the house down. He's the one who killed Mattie."
She tried to comprehend the words but couldn't. Mattie died in an accident. Even Davidson had said so. If you repeated the story often enough, it became true.
She looked around the room, saw the twin beds, their blankets tangled. One of the sheets was stained with rust-brown circles.
She drew back, but he reached and grabbed her hands and looked up at her, a bizarre mockery of the moment when he'd asked for her hand in marriage. "He took the insurance money," Jacob said. "He said Dad cheated him out of his inheritance."
"Jacob, we'd better get you to a doctor."
"We have to find him, or he'll tell."
The trail of blood spots that led out of the room and downstairs. Jacob didn't appear to be wounded. "No. We can call the police on your cell phone. If your brother's hurt, we can get help for him."
Lord, Jakie, what did you do to him? Are you so obsessed with Carlita that you'll assault your own brother?
She needed time to figure things out. If Jacob was in trouble, they'd get through it together, just like they always had. She pulled Jacob to his feet.
"Come on," she said. "Are you hurt?"
"No." He looked past her through the window, and she turned to see the afternoon sun bathing the family cemetery and the barn beyond that. "The camp. That's where he went."
"Did you hurt him?"
"We should call the police."
"No police. We'll take care of it ourselves, the way we always have." She took his hand and led him into the hallway, listening for footsteps. If Joshua was in the house, he would have heard her calling. Unless he was unconscious. Or dead.
Her hand went cold at the thought that she might be touching a murderer.
No. This was no murderer. This was her husband.
Wasn't it? Because this was the real world and Jacob loved only her. Sure, they'd had their tragedies, but everyone did. It came with the territory of breathing. Things would make sense once they got away from this place. She wondered if Joshua had insured the Wells home and how briskly it might burn with all that woodwork.
As they descended the stairs, Jacob said, "He would have killed her."
"Killed who?"
"Mother. That's just the way he is."
"She died in an accident, Jacob," she said, then realized this was where it happened. She had slipped on the stairs and tumbled down, her brittle bones clattering against the railing. A broken neck. Nobody's fault.
"Yeah," Jacob said, though his eyes gazed down the flight of stairs as if the body were still sprawled there. "That's just what Joshua said. An accident."
When they reached the landing, she told Jacob to wait for her in the truck.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to look for Joshua."
"I told you, he's gone to the camp."
"I know, honey. But you're confused right now."
It's for his own good. He's safer that way. And it's my job to protect him. For the family.
She waited for Jacob to pass through the kitchen and into the sunshine. After he was around the corner, she closed and latched the door, then entered the living room. Books were askew on the shelves, some of them lying open and face down on the floor. Figurines, many of them now reduced to shards of plaster and ceramic, were scattered across the stone hearth. A beer bottle lay on its side by one of the chairs, a pool of dried amber surrounding it. The fireplace contained layers of fine black ash, as if someone had burned stacks of paper. Jacob's cell phone was a melted pile of slag in the center.
She glanced between the curtains and saw Jacob in his truck.
Renee checked the dining room. She could almost see the ghost of Warren Wells sitting at the table, lording over his family, demanding clean fingernails and perfect place settings and food of the proper temperature. She could understand his desire for perfection. She shared it. Perhaps that was what Jacob had seen in her, what he had fallen in love with. It was something Carlita or no other woman could give him.
A drive to be absolute.
She had dared him to be a Wells, and he became one. She was the success story as much as her husband was. Others might measure success by acres developed, income realized, charities supported, or community awards received. But her success was internal, eternal, spiritual. She had saved him from himself.
But at such a great cost. Still, sacrifices were necessary.
And she couldn't lose now. Not when the payoff was so close.
A Wells never fails.
She entered a room that appeared to have been Warren Wells' study. It was dark, with heavy curtains blocking the one slim window. A desk sat in the middle of the floor, a lone piece of paper on it.
She picked it up, carried it to the window and read it through the slit of leaking light: "IOU eight million dollars for pain and suffering." The "eight" had been crossed out, and beneath it "two" had been scrawled in pencil.
It was signed "J." Just like note she'd shown Jacob in the hospital, the same one Davidson found at the scene of their burned-down house. The letters slanted to the left.
Eight million. That was roughly the value of Jacob's inheritance, including the Wells share of M & W Ventures.
"I don't reckon we've met. At least not formal-like."
She spun, crinkling the paper. He stood in the doorway, in silhouette, with the living room window at his back. She recognized the voice. The one from the woods behind her destroyed home, from the thicket in the cemetery, the one she'd heard on the phone. Even though it had been disguised before, the timbre of the words were plain, close enough to Jacob's to be startling, yet in a flatter, lazier accent.
"Joshua?"
He stepped into the room, and it had to be Joshua, because he resembled Jacob so much that she had to look twice to note the differences. The main one was the gash above his right eye, raw and wet, needing stitches. His grin was harder, more cynical, and his teeth were chipped and stained yellow. His hair was oily, slicked back and uneven. This was her brother-in-law, the man who bore the same blood and had sprung from the same seed as her husband.
This was family.
Joshua wiped at his eyebrow then cleaned his hand on his trousers. "Your husband got a mean streak in him," he said, in an exaggerated drawl. "I don't know where in the world he got it from."
"I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but we're calling the police."
"That'd be just fine with me, ma'am. Then I can tell them all about what Jacob done."
"He hasn't done anything."
Joshua limped forward. "He done plenty."
Now the light caught his face, and his eyes were moss brown and somber like Jacob's, his chin and cheeks in the same geometric proportions, his build of the same angular strength. Except for the cruelty in his eyes, he was as handsome as her husband.
"Stay away from me, or I'll yell for Jacob."
"I wouldn't do that if I were you. 'Cause you might need me to save you from him."
"You're crazy. Jacob told me about you."
"Not nearly enough, I'll bet. Did he tell you about when we were kids? About how he managed to blame everything on me, how he'd steal all my toys? How he turned Dad against me until they drove me out of the family?"
Renee maneuvered so the desk was between her and Joshua. She didn't like the crease of his smile, the mad sparks in his pupils. Jacob must still be sitting in the truck, waiting for her.
"What about the eight million dollars?" she said.
"Fair's fair," he said. "That's what Jake stole from me, and that's what he's going to give me back."
"He didn't steal anything. I saw your father's will. Jake got the money and you got the house and land."
"It shoulda been mine. Jacob got it all turned around."
"We can't give you any more money."
"That ain't the way this works. Two million more or I tell all of it."
"You're the one who started the fires. They're talking a murder charge now."
He moved forward, winced, and supported himself by leaning against the desk. His breath reeked of stale beer and smoke, and the odor of perspiration rose from his clothes. He was feral, desperate, beyond law and order.
Boom-boom-boom. The hollow echo of fists pounding on the back door. Jacob's unintelligible, muffled voice came from outside.
"Two million," Joshua said to her. "Ain't you got any more people to kill? Ask him about his mother."
He turned and limped out of the study, pausing once, stained teeth gritted. The wound over his eye had broken open again and a large red tear rolled down his cheek. "And ask him about my kid."
Then Joshua was gone, leaving Renee looking from the paper in her hand to the Wells family portrait on the wall. After a moment, she slipped the paper in the pocket of her pants suit and ran through the house, her heels clattering on the hardwood floor. The front door slammed, and the deadbolt was locked by the time she reached it. Through a glass pane in the door she could see Jacob's truck and her car, both with their hoods up.
She ran through the living room and kitchen and fumbled with the old-fashioned lock on the back door, throwing the door open. Jacob stood on the back step, his arms apart. From each of his hands, a nest of wires dangled like dead snakes.
"He cut our ignition wires," Jacob said. "This is just like him."
"I saw him, Jake."
Jacob's eyes narrowed and shifted back and forth in their sockets. "Where?"
"Inside. He wants more money. I thought we were done with him."
"I told you he was crazy. Gets it from his daddy."
"He said to ask you about your mother. And his kid."
Jacob flung the wires to the ground and pushed past her into the house. His feet rumbled up the stairs, then he shouted Joshua's name. She followed him, afraid that Joshua would jump out of the shadows and hold a knife to her throat. She should have known they couldn't buy their way back to a perfect world, especially after what had happened to Mattie and Christine.
Renee had entered the Wells world, had been seduced by the promise of power. But she thought she could change him, salvage him. Even after the accidents.
Love could work miracles. Love could heal all wounds. Love could patch the broken places inside Jacob. But, first, she had to get him far away from Joshua, at whatever price.
She had reached the foot of the stairs when Jacob appeared on the top landing, his face nearly unrecognizable in the darkness. His hands twitched at his sides. "He's not here," he said.
"I told you, he ran out the front. He was bleeding, Jake. Did you beat him up?"
"How could I ever hurt my dear brother?" Jacob descended, taking one slow step after another. "My own flesh and blood. I'd just as soon kill myself."
"Jake?"
He continued his descent, steady, sure, retracing the path down which his mother had fallen to her death. Fallen, or pushed? What if Joshua were telling the truth? How much could she trust Jacob?
A test. Love passed all its tests in a perfect world.
"I know about Carlita."
Jacob stopped and hovered above her, close enough that she could see the corners of his lips curl upward. "You wouldn't understand. They never do."
"Jake?"
He continued down the stairs, a funeral march, eyes vacant. "He's at the camp. With her."
Renee grabbed his sleeve as he passed. "Let's just go. We can walk if we have to. It's only a mile to the highway."
His words shifted into an accent she'd never heard him use before. "What's owed got to be paid. It's the Wells way."
"He told me to ask you about his kid. But Carlita told me she couldn't have kids."
"She don't know nothing. A dumbfuck beaner who spreads her legs for any gringo with a grin and a dollar."
"Do you love her?" She tugged at his arm, but his gaze was fixed out the door, beyond the world outside, staring into a land that no one else was allowed to visit.
"Joshua don't," Jacob said. "He loves himself. That's just the way he is."
"I don't give a damn about Joshua. All I care about is us."
"There ain't no 'us,' honey. There's only you and me and him and her."
He shoved away from her grasp and headed out of the dank house into the sunshine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The cemetery on the ridge was thick with weeds and briars, the graves untended, the markers askew. It was fenced with locust posts, and guinea hens had scratched in the dirt around the stones. A few sprigs of honey locust rose along the fence line, old field succession that would one day reclaim this neglected ground. Jacob's grandmother and grandfather had been buried there, along with his father's only brother. The Wells family hadn't owned this land long enough to lay out a decent array of corpses. The ones under this soil were linked only by DNA, with dust and decay their common denominator.
Jacob stopped by the fence to catch his breath. He read the names of the two largest stones, which stood side by side in the center of the plot. Warren Harding Wells and Nancy Elizabeth Wells. He had rarely thought of his mother as someone with a name. Having a name might have made her more human and real to him. Maybe Joshua wouldn't have killed her if she had been "Nancy Wells" instead of "Mother."
He was glad that Christine and Mattie weren't buried here. Bad enough to be polluted by Wells blood without having to spend eternity among them. The cemetery had enough room for a dozen more, and no doubt Warren Wells had harbored dreams of his sons one day resting together at his feet. The deviant division of Nancy's egg would have come full circle and made its final reunion.
Jacob looked back at the house. Renee was trying to start her car, the engine turning over with dry disinterest. She'd probably look for the cell phone, too. They never understood, and they never took your word for it, either.
He looked at the barn, where Joshua might be laying in ambush. The barn door hung askew, one of the rollers broken, and the hayloft opening was as black as winter sin. Joshua might be able to secure a weapon, a hatchet or scythe, some rusted remnant of the Christmas tree enterprise. Joshua might get weak and kill him, just when Jacob was about to give him back his birthright.
No, Joshua was as desperate for resolution as Jacob was, and the deal could only go down in one place---the shabby camp where it had begun.
The guinea hens emerged from the trees at the edge of the pasture, expecting to be fed. They were striped like granite, with rippling bands of dark blue and light gray. Some ancestral memory kept them lingering around the barn, raising their broods, fleeing the occasional fox or red-tailed hawk. They had staked out their territory, and not even the scent of the man who had once slaughtered their kind would roust them.
Guineas were stupid, and Jacob hated all stupid creatures. He knew he should get to the camp, because Carlita would be waiting.
Renee was now hurrying toward him, coming up the rise, her dress shoes slowing her down. He waited until she was close enough so that he could hear her shouts, then he turned from the cemetery. She had never been to this part of the farm, and he didn't want to lose her. Joshua would never forgive him if Renee missed all the fun.
The slope grew uneven beneath his feet, the trail eroded since the days when cattle had made their way to the barn from far pastures. The sun was heading down toward the tops of the mountains, over where Tennessee and North Carolina collided in monstrous, rocky waves and the autumn trees screamed red and yellow as if on fire. Jacob could smell his own sweat, the crisp acid of dying oak leaves, and rabbit tobacco. Joshua didn't deserve this place.
He turned once to see Renee cresting the hill behind him, now rid of her shoes. Her hair trailed behind her, golden in the late-afternoon sun. No wonder Joshua loved her so. She was an ideal, a floating dream image of womanhood, someone who was loyal and stable and strong. A woman who could build a better man. She understood what it meant to be a Wells.
Well, most of it.
He reached the first of the Fraser firs, Christmas trees that were too deformed for market and had been left to grow wild. They threw long shadows as he ran between the rows, stumps of harvested trees dotting the hillside. Briars tore at his pants legs, and he knew Renee would have trouble following with her bare feet. He considered stopping, letting her catch up, but the roofs of the migrant camp were below him now, the tottering shed from where he'd first watched Carlita and Joshua, the land giving way to a sheer drop behind the mobile homes, falling away to the river. The blackened ruins of two fire-gutted trailers stood near the ledge, shards of ragged alloy spiking toward the sky.
The road to the camp ran parallel to the river, twin tracks of brown dirt bounded by oaks and white pines. A narrow, wobbly bridge spanned the river, leading to the tree fields and upper pastures. Jacob had driven the road many times, and had walked it many more, the long way home. All those nights spent following Joshua, watching as Carlita surrendered herself, wrapped her brown limbs around him and shouted his name.
Joshua.
That had been the problem. She'd always called out "Joshua."
He picked up the pace, excited now. Soon she wouldn't call him "Joshua" any more.
The rusty, green Chevy was parked in front of the last mobile home. No doubt, Carlita was cleaning the cut on Joshua's face, kissing his brow and telling him it would soon be over. His loco brother would bother him no more. They would be away from this place, wealthy, and then they could live as they were meant.
The grin felt like it was splitting his face. It wasn't easy being a Wells, becoming a Wells. But the end was near. He would get all the good things he deserved.
Jacob gained speed as he ran down the slope, his legs rejuvenated. Time seemed to fall away, and he was sixteen again, the hills lush with trees, a thread of campfire smoke rising from the migrant camp, bacon in the wind. It was the day after their birthday, and both of the boys had taken their driver's tests and gotten their licenses. Joshua said they should celebrate, said he had a special present for his favorite brother. He told Jacob to come by the camp that afternoon. There was a green bow on the shed door, and when he opened the door, heart like a jackhammer in his chest, he heard the grunting in the shadows, the frantic whisper of his brother's name, then laughter. Joshua lay on top of Carlita, his skin pale against her brownness, the hay strewn around them as they wallowed, the air thick with dust. Joshua groaned and pushed himself to his knees, looked at his brother in the doorway.
"Happy birthday to us," he said.
And sixteen-year-old Jacob took a step inside, fumbling for the buttons on his shirt. Carlita didn't rise, just lay on her back and smiled, her breasts lifting with her breath, the dark patch between her spread legs glistening in the half-light. Jacob's trembling fingers finally managed to free the shirt, and he shucked his shoes, and he was approaching her, unbuckling his belt, wondering if he could do it with his little brother watching, when the back of his head erupted in a thunderclap of red agony.
The thirty-three-year-old Jacob rubbed his head now, remembering the dull throb, the rising from the gray mist to find himself on his stomach on the dirt floor of the shed. An ax handle lay beside him. His clothes were scattered, his pants around his knees, his wallet gone. Joshua had stolen his driver's license, and Jacob had never gotten it back.
He now reached the camp and moved past the Chevy, peering through the tinted window to make sure the key was in the ignition. Carlita would want to make a fast getaway. That's the way women were, especially when they wanted to rip out a man's heart and show it to him while it was still beating, laughing all the while.
They would be in the last mobile home, the one with the faded silver stripe down the side and translucent polyvinyl taped over the windows.
The door was unlocked. He looked back up the hill and saw Renee's silhouette against the sundown. If she didn't fall, she'd be right on time. He yanked open the door. "Joshua!"
Joshua and Carlita sat on a couch in the dark living room. The couch looked to have been inhabited by rats, with cotton dribbling from its stitches. A brick propped up one corner. Carlita was leaning into Joshua, and he had his arm around her.
"Let's go, Carlita," Jacob said. "He's got his."
"Not so fast," Joshua said. "Two more million."
"You can get it from Renee."
"You ain't much of a horse trader, are you?"
"I just want it over with."
Carlita looked at him with those maddening brown eyes. "Why do you bring that crazy woman into this, Joshua?"
"Nothing for you to worry about. We're just giving you what you wanted all these years."
"I want to go back to Tennessee."
"Get in the car, then," Jacob said.
Carlita looked at Joshua, who squeezed her shoulder and lifted his arm from her body. He gave her a little shove. "You heard your husband. You promised to honor and obey, till death do us part."
Carlita stood, her breasts swaying beneath her shirt, her ripeness in defiance of time and truth. Jacob licked his lips. He wondered how much she had changed, if she was still as moist and frantic as she had been that long-ago night of the trade. She'd lived hard in the meantime, and Jacob planned to let her live harder. Much harder.
"How you going to do her?" Joshua asked him.
"By accident, the way we always do it. I figure the river. It was dark, she slipped, hit her head on the rocks."
"Too bad you can't burn her up, huh?" Joshua's stained grin was like that of an opossum's in a chicken house.
"Don't want to push my luck," Jacob said.
"You'll get all kinds of sympathy for your loss. If you get away with it."
"I don't like this," Carlita said to Josh. "I thought we take the money and go home."
"Jake and me, we made a new deal." Joshua took a long swallow from the bottle in his lap. "I get the house and money, the fancy stuff. I get his good life, and he gets mine. I finally get to be a Wells, and he gets... well, he gets what he wants."
"He gets your life?" Carlita shook her head. "You have no life."
Jacob was aroused by the memory of her writhing under him, panting and urgent then pushing him over to climb on top, then accepting him from behind, from the side, demanding, hungry, a wild thing that Renee could never be. Opening up parts of himself that he didn't know existed. She had made him feel alive. She had made him want to kill.
Jacob smiled and took her by the wrist. "Get in the car."
"The gas mileage sucks," Joshua said. "And don't drive drunk because the tag's expired. You ain't got enough money to bail yourself out of jail."
"We'll manage," Jacob said. "We'll get by on love, right, Carlita?"
"You're both loco," she said.
He pulled her to the doorway. Carlita slapped at his arm, eyes imploring Joshua to help her. She spat at Jacob, a wad of her saliva sticking to his pink cheek before beginning a slow crawl down his face. "Let me go, pig."
"Just head on along," Joshua said. "After a month or two, you won't even know the difference. Jacob will never do it as good as me, but hey, you never noticed before."
"Before?"
Jacob grinned. "Didn't you wonder about that night?"
"Which night?"
Joshua hoisted his tall boy of Budweiser and showed the bobbing knot of his neck as he swallowed. "Ten years ago. When we first made the trade."
Jacob dragged Carlita to the door, but her legs collapsed and she became dead weight. The mobile home shook with their struggle, teetering on its cinder block pillars. Renee's voice came from outside, calling Jacob.
"Now for my part of the deal," Joshua said. He rose from the couch, staggering, eyes bright and red. He tossed his Budweiser can into the corner of the living room, stirring a cockroach. His belch tainted the air as he pushed past Jacob and Carlita. "Here I am, honey," he called.
Jacob wrapped his arms around Carlita and hauled her outside. She grabbed the door jamb, kicking her feet, but Jacob could hardly feel the blows against his shin. Her fingernails skreeched against the metalworks of the door, then he yanked her free.
Renee had reached the Chevy and leaned against it, catching her breath. Her hair was tangled, the knees of her pants torn and the bare skin stitched with blood and briars.
"Come on inside, honey," Joshua said to her. "We got a lot to talk about."
"Jacob?" She twisted her head in confusion.
"What?" Joshua said.
Jacob still loved her, in a strange way, and he almost regretted what he'd have to do. But she'd wanted to be a Wells, she'd signed up for the company plan, and she was worth two million dollars dead.
Sometimes that's just the way it went. Sometimes you were worth more dead than alive.
Just ask Mattie.
Jacob dragged Carlita to the Chevy. She elbowed him in the side, and he fought an urge to slap her. That's what Joshua would do, slap her silly and throw her down on the ground. He wasn't Joshua. Not yet.
Renee grabbed him, trying to pull him away from Carlita. "Leave her alone."
Jacob shrugged away from her grip and flung the driver's-side door open. Held by only one arm, Carlita squirmed free and spun, spittle flying from her mouth, fists raised in front of her. Jacob closed on her, cornered her between the mobile home and the toolshed. He backed her toward the shed. She dodged to the left, but he tackled her and they wrestled on the ground.
"You stinking bastard," Carlita said, her blows raining on his back with the sound like that of a dull drum.
"Jacob!" Renee called, but Joshua held her now. She writhed against him, much like she probably had when Joshua was planting the seed that became Mattie.
Enraged by the memory, Jacob picked up Carlita and shoved her into the toolshed, then slammed the door and snapped the hasp.
"Jake!" Renee screamed. "Help me."
"Right here, babe," Joshua said, laughing as he pinned her against the Chevy, obviously enjoying the contact as she squirmed beneath him.
"You're crazy," she said to him. "What have you done to Jacob?"
"I let him be himself," Joshua said. "That's something you never did."
"How the hell do you know what I did or didn't do?"
Joshua reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handheld tape recorder. He pressed a button and thumbed up the volume. The hiss of the tape drowned out the roar of the river below then came Jacob's voice, compressed and flattened, but recognizable, eerily similar to the voice of the Rock Star Barbie.
"It's the only way, honey," Jacob said on the tape. "The fire will start downstairs. When the alarm goes off, I'll get Mattie and we'll meet you outside. That way no one will suspect anything."
Jacob approached the Chevy and smiled as Renee's voice came on the tape: "I'm worried, Jake."
He mouthed the words that he'd said next, in sync with the tape. "A million dollars, honey."
Joshua clicked the tape recorder off as Renee slumped in surrender. Carlita must have found something blunt and wooden, because she was hammering on the shed door, causing slivers of wood to fall from the planks. The wind had risen, and the air had gone cool with the dying of the day. The sun now touched the ridge, an obscene orange ball whose light smeared the clouds into stained rags and sent fingers of hellish flame across the homestead.
"You taped it," Renee said to Jacob.
"You know how I feel about insurance."
"Goddamn you, you taped it."
"If we got caught, I wasn't going to go down alone."
Joshua slid the tape recorder into his shirt pocket. Though Renee had stopped struggling, he kept her pinned against the car's fender. Or maybe he just enjoyed the heat of her body. "A Wells never fails."
"And two Wells are better than one," Jacob said.
"You're insane," Renee said between sobs. "Both of you."
"Shit," Joshua said. "I ain't the one that killed my own kid for money."
"Yes, you are," Jacob said. "I never would have done that. But you would."
"Hell, I started the fire, but you're the one that fucked up. You were supposed to get her out of there."
Jacob grinned, and the expression felt like a live snake across his face. "I tried. But maybe I didn't try as hard as I could."
Renee stared at him, then past him, eyes wide and blank. "Jakie. Oh, Jakie."
"I couldn't let her live," Jacob said to Renee. "You can see that, can't you?"
"Oh, Jesus, Jacob."
Joshua spat. "What the hell, it was another million, right?"
"It's all Christine's fault. She died natural and it paid good. Mattie was just too healthy."
Renee sagged and Joshua released her. She fell to her knees, sobs wracking her shoulders. She tried to speak, but the words became gasps. The sunset threw the migrant camp into a golden light, the color of Jacob's memories. Of watching Carlita and Joshua through the window, of fantasizing that he was his younger brother, that he could trade his life for Joshua's.
Only he couldn't trade fifty-fifty. He was too deeply in debt.
"Two million for two kids," Joshua said to Renee. "And two million for you. But I'm taking a down payment first. I got a feeling you ain't had a real man in years."
"What about the autopsy?" Jacob said.
"Shit. Semen got DNA, don't it?"
"Well, we got the same DNA, so go for it."
Renee looked at Jacob, wondering about the next breath and how it could possibly force itself from the sky and into her constricted, brick-hard lungs. She'd pushed him to this. She was the one that put value in material things. She wanted the Wells world, the power, the land, the respect. She'd wanted to be a Wells more than Jacob ever had.
Mattie, that was an accident. But Christine. . .
As if he could read her thoughts, Jacob said, "I didn't kill Mattie for the money."
He sat on the Chevy's hood and lit a cigarette, then blew smoke into Joshua's face. "I killed her because she was yours."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Renee's muscles were damp rags. Her tongue was swollen in her mouth, her throat tight. The ringing in her ears was so intense she might have misheard Jacob.
Mattie was Joshua's?
The revelation made the horizon blur on the edge of her vision and the sky was an obscene and smothering ocean above her. Her head throbbed, her eyeballs ached, her jaws clenched. Her intestines felt as if they had been yanked from her gut and knotted around her larynx. But beneath the sick pressure in her rib cage was a small and sick glow of joy---she bore no blame for Mattie's death.
It was all Jacob's fault.
But what was Joshua saying about Christine?
She couldn't understand, didn't want to. The pounding on the shed door was like the beat of a bruised wooden heart, and Carlita's Spanish curses and screams came in muffled arrhythmia behind it. The sun cast doomsday lava over the land. Renee closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears, but it was too late. The knowledge had entered and could never be purged.
Jacob had killed their children.
"Get up," Joshua shouted at her in his rough, smoky voice. She opened her eyes to the scarred tips of his boots. She lifted her head, though gravity was an unforgiving enemy.
"Hear what he just said?" Joshua said.
She couldn't speak. Words had become gravel in her lungs.
"He torched our kid," Joshua said. "Ain't that just like a Wells?"
She shook her head and an impossible smile came to her lips. The sunset was warm on her face, the air pine-sweet, the river churning and cold below. This was the far end of the world, this land that had created the Wells twins. The gates of hell must surely be somewhere nearby, waiting for them all to enter.
"Our kid." Joshua snorted with derision. "Reckon my seed took where his wouldn't."
She tried to arrange his words into a sensible structure. Language had become an elusive snake burrowing into a moist hole in the riverbank. All she knew was the song of the river, its sibilant rush, its bright splashing against stones, slithering toward a place far away.
That August night when Jacob had taken her by force, had spent his passion into her again and again, when she'd fully opened herself to him and let him reach and join in that most sacred sanctuary. It hadn't been Jacob after all. It had been Joshua.
Even in that drunken darkness, she should have known. Maybe she had known but deceived herself. Maybe she'd craved that side of Jacob he would never let slip from his control. And the wanting had brought Joshua to her.
Wish me, cooed the mad voice in her head. Wish me that two Wells are better than one.
"Come on," Joshua said, reaching down and grabbing her arm. He pulled Renee to her feet and put an arm around her. His sweat drowned out the wet smell of the river. She leaned against him, a rag doll with a hot wire girding its spine.
"Well, Jake, let's get 'er done," Joshua said. "Sounds like Carlita's getting a mite restless."
"Wait a second," Jacob said. "Don't you get it? I killed your goddamned kid."
"Big whoop-dee-shit."
"I won, see? I fucked you over harder than you ever fucked me. I'm more of a Wells than you are."
"Oh, I get it now. That blame thing. It's all my fault you killed Momma, right?" Joshua slipped a cigarette between his lips and lit it. When he exhaled, the smoke strangled Renee. "You won nothing," he said to Jacob.
"Carlita," Jacob replied.
"You could have had her for a few thousand, dumbass. My first time, it only cost twenty bucks. But four million ain't bad."
Jacob nodded at Renee. "Paid in full, brother."
Renee's legs trembled. Her mind was crushed by the wild clouds above, the fog of God's breath, the rising twilight that darkened the eastern horizon. Joshua eased her toward the Chevy.
Two million.
Her line on Jacob's M & W insurance policy.
Jacob was getting rid of her, too. Cashing her in, just as he had done their children.
Means to an end.
And Jacob's end was to become his brother.
"I figure the bridge," Joshua said.
"Not bad," Jacob said. "She lost her footing in the dark, fell into the river, and smashed her head on the rocks. Blacked out and drowned. Another tragedy."
"Them Wells sure do got bad luck."
"The grieving husband and father. No one will blame me for marrying Carlita so soon after my loss."
"And the money suits me. Carlita's kind is a dime a dozen. I don't know what it is about her that drove you so donkeyshit."
"She was yours."
Joshua opened the car door on the rear driver's side. Renee tried to pull away, but he shoved her into the stinking seat amid the fast-food wrappers and empty beer cans. Jacob climbed in behind her and slammed the door while Joshua got behind the wheel. Renee sat up but Jacob put his weight on top of her.
His mouth pressed against her ear. "Sorry about the kids. But this is the only way."
"You're crazy," she managed to say.
"No, Joshua's crazy. Because this is the kind of thing I would never do unless I was him."
Joshua started the car with a rumble of pipes. Music blasted from the speakers, Johnny Cash singing about the green, green grass of home. She crawled across the seat and lunged for the door, but the handle was missing. She tried to climb over the seat but Jacob grabbed her hair and yanked. The engine gunned and the car lurched forward, bouncing on sprung shocks as it crawled along the narrow dirt road.
Renee slumped against the rear of the seat, her head turned toward the dark window. Only the outlines of the trees were visible and the ridges were black humps against a violet sky. Johnny Cash hit the last verse of the ballad, awakening from a dream to find himself in prison facing a death sentence.
"Why, Jakie?" she said to the window. In the dashboard's dim glow, she could see his reflection in the window. His twisted face, narrowed eyes, and bright scarred skin made him look like a demon.
"Because you wanted me to," he said.
Joshua reached down to the floorboard and pulled out a can of beer. He steered with his elbow while he popped the tab. Foam sprayed across the windshield, lathering the twin troll heads that hung from the mirror. "No, she wanted me to," Joshua said. "Ain't that right, honey?"
"Shut up," she said. "You made Jake do this."
"It was his idea. All I did was nudge him along. See, I always wanted what was best for him. Not like you."
"I gave him everything." She turned to Jacob. "I gave you everything."
The tears came and it was as if she was looking through greased glass. Jacob sneered at her and said, "You gave Joshua everything. You had Mattie for him."
Her voice cracked like her mind was cracking. "I didn't know."
"I thought Christine would make up for it. But she wasn't as perfect as Mattie. She wasn't a Wells."
"How could you?"
"Christine was easy. No whimpers with a plastic bag, no blood, no questions asked."
Renee said nothing. She was next to die, but she didn't care anymore. Perhaps in heaven she would have her children back. She could spend an eternity begging their forgiveness, and maybe one day on the far side of forever, they would love her again.
Johnny Cash went into a song about a highwayman, dying and coming back again and again. The vocal part was taken over by Willie Nelson, then by someone she couldn't recognize. She lost herself in the slick guitars, a "Wish me" game of dissociation and despair.
Joshua finished his beer and tossed the can behind him. The car hit a rut and he bounced high enough that his head hit the roof. He cursed and slowed down a little. The night had become liquid and the Chevy moved through it like a bottom feeder.
"I mean, you're sweet and all," Joshua said to her. "But you ain't as sweet as money."
"You know what's funny?" Jacob said to his brother.
"What?"
"You're going to be richer than the old man."
"Shit fire. That's great. Maybe I'll dig the old bastard up and prop his skeleton at the dinner table. Piss in his coffee cup."
"He always did love you best."
"Naw. That was Momma."
"You would have killed her if I hadn't gotten to it first."
"Well, you beat me at one thing, I reckon."
The Johnny Cash was winding down in a repetitive guitar riff. Joshua stopped the car and killed the engine. "Here we are."
He opened his door and the dome light blinked on. Renee could hear the river churning below. She recalled her drive over the bridge and pictured the water thirty feet below. It wasn't a far enough fall to kill her unless her head hit a rock. But bad luck followed the Wells family.
And, sometimes, you had to make your luck.
Joshua left the door open after he exited, and the dome light cast a dirty yellow glow. Jacob grabbed Renee's wrist, his face a mask of wicked joy. She didn't struggle. These two men had already torn her to shreds. There was nothing left worth fighting over.
Joshua opened the back door. "Bring her on."
Jacob's Southern accent returned, a bizarre replica of his brother's. "Reckon we ought to bash her head in first, or just chuck her over the side?"
"You want to make sure. It ain't the kind of thing you leave up to chance. What if she turns up alive six miles downstream?"
"That would be sand in the craw, all right."
"You do it. You'll enjoy it more than I will."
"Why, thanks, Josh. I appreciate it."
"I'm Jacob, remember? Don't go getting all confused on me, or we'll never get the story straight."
"Right, Jake. You're the Wells now. I'm just pig shit, rolling around with a Mexican whore in a Tennessee trailer park."
"And you're going to love every minute of it. I know I did, but now it's time for the big switcheroo."
Jacob's hand tightened around Renee's wrist, sending sparks of pain up her arm. Joshua handed his brother something, and Renee saw its rusty bulk in the dome light.
A pipe wrench.
She could almost see the police report: Blunt head trauma, followed by asphyxiation due to drowning.
Jacob's latest accidental victim.
And who would be next? Joshua? Carlita? Or would he plant more seed, each sprout insured for a million dollars?
"Hold her for a sec." Joshua got out of the driver's side and went to the back door. He yanked it open and leaned in, his breath sour with beer and cigarettes and the lingering tang of salsa. "Come here, sweetie."
Renee backed away, kicking, until she was across the seat. Joshua climbed in, and now she recognized that perverse grin, one glimpsed in the dim light of a night nearly a decade ago. The night of Mattie's conception.
She shoved her foot toward his face. He caught it and his eyes twinkled in the greasy dome light, the cut on his forehead oozing blood again. "Hmm. She still got a little fight in her. Tempting me to go one more round. What say, brother, wanna watch just for old times' sake?"
Jacob yanked her wrist. "I can fantasize about it later. Right now, we better get her in the river."
Joshua's face sagged, his smoker's wrinkles deepening. "Reckon so. Give the water more time to wash away evidence."
"Besides, we'll still have Carlita."
Renee wondered if they would play this sick game the rest of their lives. Swapping partners, playing with money and murder, tricking each other. But that was the future. She had none.
Joshua dragged her by the ankle. She grabbed for the armrest but it came off in her hand. Her fingernails broke as she clawed at the nylon seat covering. No saving grip there.
Jacob released her and got out of the car to join his brother. She knew this was her final chance. The passenger door was open, though it seemed miles away.
She twisted upward, reaching for the front seat, but Jacob had her other leg now and she was being worried between them like a butcher-shop bone in the mouths of two dogs.
"Treat her like a wishbone, brother," Jacob said.
"I'm wishing for two million goddamned dollars. On three. One . . . "
She wriggled, nothing.
"Two . . . "
"Jacob," she said. "Honey?"
But the word was a lie. Even his name was a lie. He had always been Joshua.
"Three."
She was jerked into the moist night.
"Do her," Joshua said.
He had Renee pinned to the rail, shoulders leaning toward the river, facing the whispering, frothing water below. Jacob tested the heft of the pipe wrench. How would she hit if she had actually fallen?
No, not "if." When.
Think it out, Jakie, just like always. Momma's cane . . . an accident. Could have happened to anybody. Anybody with a murderous son, that is.
Christine. That one had been the saddest. But she was barely formed, not even talking. All I did was save her from the life of a Wells. So that was a mercy killing.
Mattie. Too bad about her. But she was Joshua's fault all the way, from sperm to burn victim.
The moon was out, the clouds like violet sheep counting down to a restless sleep. He wondered if blood would spatter onto the bridge railing. He'd have to strike her at an angle, so the pattern would fly out and into the water.
"Smash her up," Joshua urged. "Just like you did the chickens."
The wrench grew heavy in Jacob's hand. "I didn't do the chickens."
Joshua, holding Renee's arms behind her back, his crotch pressed against her rear, gave a thrust of his hips, causing the wooden railing to squeak with their combined weight. "Hell, yeah. You went donkeyshit, brother. Chopping their heads off, licking blood from the hatchet---"
"Stop it."
Red. The night had gone from purple to red.
"You're one sick fuck, all right."
"Shut up. That wasn't me. It was never me."
"Tell it to the judge. I got a date with two million bucks."
"I was only doing what you'd do, if you had the brains." Jacob gripped the wrench so tight his hand hurt. The metal was slick with his sweat. He thought of the fingerprints he would leave behind. And the DNA, which he shared with Joshua. The DNA one of them had passed to Mattie.
And maybe Christine. He didn't know how often Joshua had slipped into his bed over the years.
The blood in the Chevy would be Joshua's. The cops would figure it out. Even though Jacob had the same blood.
"Do it, Jakie," Renee wheezed from constricted lungs. "Just like we talked about."
Joshua turned toward him, his face as twisted as the rubberized troll heads hanging from the rearview mirror. Confusion. The dumb bastard had been late out of the womb, and had always been two steps behind his entire life.
Jacob swung the wrench.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
"Blood everywhere," Jacob said, mopping at the stains on the railing.
"No murder is perfect," Renee said. She wanted to vomit, but her gut was like a clenched fist. "You taught me that, if nothing else."
"I can't help it if you're lousy at choosing."
"I guess you should go get Carlita. Think you guys will be happy together?"
"What do you care? You're getting what you want."
"You don't know what I want."
Jacob leaned over the railing. "He'll be downriver soon. As drunk as he was, nobody will question a fall."
Renee glanced at her husband's exposed neck, alabaster in the moon's warm glow. The wrench lay on the seat of the Chevy. She could have it out and bring it down in a matter of seconds.
She loved him.
When you loved somebody, you owed him.
"Mattie," she said, her voice breaking a little. The rush of the kill had faded, leaving her feeling washed out and limp. Her heart was a husk rattling against her dry ribs.
Maybe all the tears were gone forever.
Jacob came to her, took her hands. He almost kissed her. Then he glanced up at the hill, where the Wells house stood dark and brooding, as if remembering some memory tucked in a far, dusty closet. The first flickers teased the windows, and smoke drifted on the air. Davidson and her crew would be on the way soon, late as always, left to sift through the ashes of the Wells family secrets.
He reached into the car, grabbed the wrinkled pack of cigarettes, and stuffed one in his mouth. He lit it, then reached under the seat and pulled out a beer. Warm, it sprayed foam all over his pants when he pulled the tab. He reached up and tapped the twin rubber heads, sending them swinging.
Just like Joshua. He looks just like his brother.
And on the heels of that thought came another, rising bright and strong from the murk of her confusion.
What if we killed the wrong one?
But maybe there was no right one.
Renee looked over the rail. In the gloom, she could barely make out the broken form on the rocks below.
"Oh, God, Jake, he's moving. He's still alive!"
Jacob ran to the railing, cigarette smoke pluming from his mouth along with his whispered "Shit."
He leaned over, straining against the darkness. "I don't see nothing."
"I do," she said. "I see it all now."
The wrench was heavy. But she managed. Oh, yes, she managed.
The crunch was subdued, like hitting a bag of ice wrapped in a towel. Jacob gave a small bleat of surprise and collapsed onto the rail, head and arms trailing over the far side.
She didn't check his pulse. She didn't want to touch him. If he took a long time to die, he deserved it.
She patted her belly.
She'd never mentioned it to Jacob. Three months along.
Whether it was Jacob's or Joshua's, she would never know.
But it didn't matter. One Wells was as good as another.
And a Wells never fails.
As she headed up the dirt road to free Carlita, she glanced at the house, the orange flames now rising to heaven in a wavering thread.
I love you, Mattie. I love you, Christine.
She was relieved to see the burning house blur in her vision.
She was still human, if only barely.
As long as she could cry, there was hope for her yet.
Renee staggered across a land long polluted and ruined, tears streaming down her cheeks. The tears wouldn't wash away the past, but they might clear her vision for the future.
She had a child to raise.
One last chance.
THE END
ABOUT J.A. KONRATH
J.A. Konrath is the author of seven novels in the Jack Daniels series, along with dozens of short stories. The eighth, STIRRED, will be available in 2011.
Under the name Jack Kilborn, he wrote the horror novels AFRAID, ENDURANCE, TRAPPED, SERIAL UNCUT (written with Blake Crouch) and DRACULAS (written with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson.)
Under the name Joe Kimball, he wrote two novels in the TIMECASTER sci-fi series which feature Jack Daniels's grandson as the hero, and Harry McGlade III. Visit Joe at http://www.JAKonrath.com.
Jack Daniels thrillers
Killers Uncut with Blake Crouch
Serial Killers Uncut with Blake Crouch
Birds of Prey with Blake Crouch
Jack Daniels Stories (collected stories)
Serial Uncut with Blake Crouch
Killers with Blake Crouch
Suckers with Jeff Strand
Planter's Punch with Tom Schreck
Floaters with Henry Perez
Burners with Henry Perez
Symbios (writing as Joe Kimball)
Flee (with Ann Voss Peterson)
Exposed (with Ann Voss Peterson)
Babe on Board (with Ann Voss Peterson)
Wild Night is Calling (with Ann Voss Peterson)
Other works
Draculas with J.A. Konrath, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson
65 Proof (short story omnibus)
Crime Stories (collected stories)
Horror Stories (collected stories)
A Newbie's Guide to Publishing
ABOUT BLAKE CROUCH
Blake Crouch was born near the piedmont town of Statesville, North Carolina in 1978. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated in 2000 with degrees in English and Creative Writing. Blake lives with his family in southwest Colorado, where he is at work on a new book. His website is http://www.blakecrouch.com.
Blake Crouch's Works Available on Kindle
Andrew Z. Thomas thrillers
Other works
Draculas with J.A. Konrath, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson
Perfect Little Town (horror novella)
Serial with Jack Kilborn
Serial Uncut with J.A. Konrath and Jack Kilborn
Killers with Jack Kilborn
Killers Uncut with Jack Kilborn and J.A. Konrath
Serial Killers Uncut with Jack Kilborn and J.A. Konrath
Birds of Prey with Jack Kilborn and J.A. Konrath
\*69 (short story)
On the Good, Red Road (short story)
Remaking (short story)
The Meteorologist (short story)
Unconditional (short story)
Four Live Rounds (collected stories)
Six in the Cylinder (collected stories)
Fully Loaded (complete collected stories)
J. Carson Black is the bestselling and critically-acclaimed author of eight books, including the Laura Cardinal crime fiction series. Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Black has found inspiration for her writing in everything from real life horrors to the headlines screaming today's news. Her thrillers THE SHOP and ICON will be published by Thomas & Mercer in 2012.
Novels and Short Stories
The BlueLight Special (two short stories)
ABOUT LEE GOLDBERG
Lee Goldberg is a two-time Edgar Award nominee and one-time Shamus Award nominee whose many TV writing and/or producing credits include "Martial Law," "Diagnosis Murder," "The Cosby Mysteries," "Hunter," "Spenser: For Hire," "Nero Wolfe," "Missing," and "Monk." He's also the author of My Gun Has Bullets, Beyond the Beyond, Successful Television Writing, The Walk, and the Diagnosis Murder and Monk series of original mysteries.
Also by Lee Goldberg
The Jury Series
Non-fiction
Unsold TV Pilots: The Greatest Shows You Never Saw
Tied In: The Business, History and Craft of Media Tie-in Writing
ABOUT SCOTT NICHOLSON
Scott Nicholson is the international bestselling author of more than 30 books, including The Red Church, Liquid Fear, Chronic Fear, The Harvest, and Speed Dating with the Dead. He collaborated with bestselling author J.R. Rain on Cursed, The Vampire Club, Bad Blood, and Ghost College. Nicholson has also written the children's books If I Were Your Monster, Too Many Witches, Ida Claire, and Duncan the Punkin, and created the graphic novels Dirt and Grave Conditions, in addition to writing six screenplays and 80 short stories. Connect with him on Facebook, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Twitter, his blog, or his website, or visit his Author Central page to learn more about his Kindle books.
Novels
Cursed (with J.R. Rain)
Bad Blood (with J.R. Rain & H.T. Night)
Ghost College (with J.R. Rain)
The Vampire Club (with J.R. Rain)
Troubled (UK only)
Solom (UK only)
The Gorge (UK only)
Story Collections
Children's Books
If I Were Your Monster (with Lee Davis)
Too Many Witches (with Lee Davis)
Ida Claire (with Lee Davis)
Duncan the Punkin (with Sergio Castro)
Screenplays
The Skull Ring: The Screenplay
Creative Spirit: The Screenplay
Writing
The Indie Journey: Secrets to Writing Success
BOX SETS
Horror Movies: Three Screenplays
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Novels
Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 1
Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 2
Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 3
Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4
Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 5 (UK only)
Mad Stacks: Short Stories Box Set
Bad Stacks: Short Stories Box Set
Odd Stacks: Short Stories Box Set
ORIGIN by J.A. Konrath
DESERT PLACES by Blake Crouch
DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN by J. Carson Black
WATCH ME DIE by Lee Goldberg
DISINTEGRATION by Scott Nicholson
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the authors.

