In the middle of the third and highest row of these bony visages rested a gleaming skull that was markedly different from all the others. It appeared to be human. Small but human. Like the skull of an infant.
“Dear God.”
My voice whispered back to me along the concrete walls.
More than ever, I felt as though I were in a dreamscape, where even such things as concrete and bone were no more solid than smoke. Nevertheless, I did not reach out to touch the small human skull—or any of the others, for that matter. However unreal they might seem, I knew that they would be cold, slick, and too solid to the touch.
Anxious to avoid encountering whoever had acquired this grim collection, I continued downward through the drain.
I expected the cat with the enigmatic eyes to reappear, pale paws meeting concrete with feather-on-feather silence, but either it remained out of sight ahead of me or it had detoured into one of the tributary lines.
Sections of sloped concrete pipe alternated with more spillways, and just as I was beginning to worry that the lighter didn’t contain enough fuel to see me to safety, a circle of dim gray light appeared and gradually brightened ahead. I hurried toward it and found that no grate barred the lower end of the tunnel, which led into an open drainage channel of mortar-set river rock.
I was in familiar territory at last, the northern flats of town. A couple of blocks from the sea. Half a block from the high school.
After the dank culvert, the night air smelled not merely fresh but sweet. The high points of the polished sky glittered diamond-white.
9
According to the digital light board on the Wells Fargo Bank building, the time was 7:56 P.M., which meant that my father had been dead less than three hours, though days seemed to have passed since I’d lost him. The same sign set the temperature at sixty degrees, but the night seemed colder to me.
Around the corner from the bank and down the block, the Tidy Time Laundromat was flooded with fluorescent light. Currently no customers were doing their laundry.
With the dollar bill ready in my hand, with my eyes squinted to slits, I went inside, into the flowery fragrance of soap powders and the chemical keenness of bleach, my head lowered to maximize the protection provided by the bill of my cap. I ran straight to the change machine, fed it, snatched up the four quarters that it spat into the tray, and fled.
Two blocks away, outside the post office, stood a pay phone with winglike sound shields. Above the phone, mounted on the wall of the building, was a security light behind a wire cage.
When I hung my hat on the cage, shadows fell.
I figured that Manuel Ramirez would still be at home. When I phoned him, his mother, Rosalina, said that he had been gone for hours. He was working a double shift because another officer had called in sick. This evening he was on desk duty; later, after midnight, he would be on patrol.
I punched in the main number of the Moonlight Bay Police and asked the operator if I could speak to Officer Ramirez.
Manuel, in my judgment the best cop in town, is three inches shorter than I am, thirty pounds heavier, twelve years older, and a Mexican American. He loves baseball; I never follow sports because I have an acute sense of time slipping away and a reluctance to use my precious hours in too many passive activities. Manuel prefers country music; I like rock. He is a staunch Republican; I have no interest in politics. In movies, his guilty pleasure is Abbott and Costello; mine is the immortal Jackie Chan. We are friends.
“Chris, I heard about your dad,” Manuel said when he came on the line. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Neither do I, really.”
“No, there never is anything to say, is there?”
“Not that matters.”
“You going to be okay?”
To my surprise, I couldn’t speak. My terrible loss seemed suddenly to be a surgeon’s needle that stitched shut my throat and sewed my tongue to the roof of my mouth.
Curiously, immediately after Dad’s death, I’d been able to answer this same question from Dr. Cleveland without hesitation.
I felt closer to Manuel than to the physician. Friendship thaws the nerves, making it possible for pain to be felt.
“You come over some evening when I’m off duty,” Manuel said. “We’ll drink some beer, eat some tamales, watch a couple of Jackie Chan movies.”
In spite of baseball and country music, we have much in common, Manuel Ramirez and I. He works the graveyard shift, from midnight until eight in the morning, sometimes doubling on the swing shift when, as on this March evening, there is a personnel shortage. He likes the night as I do, but he also works it by necessity. Because the graveyard shift is less desirable than daytime duty, the pay is higher. More important, he is able to spend afternoons and evenings with his son, Toby, whom he cherishes. Sixteen years ago, Manuel’s wife, Carmelita, died minutes after bringing Toby into the world. The boy is gentle, charming—and a victim of Down’s syndrome. Manuel’s mother moved into his house immediately after Carmelita’s death and still helps to look after Toby. Manuel Ramirez knows about limitations. He feels the hand of fate every day of his life, in an age when most people no longer believe in purpose or destiny. We have much in common, Manuel Ramirez and I.
“Beer and Jackie Chan sound great,” I agreed. “But who makes the tamales—you or your mother?”
“Oh, not mi madre, I promise.”
Manuel is an exceptional cook, and his mother thinks that she is an exceptional cook. A comparison of their cooking provides a fearsomely illuminating example of the difference between a good deed and a good intention.
A car passed in the street behind me, and when I looked down, I saw my shadow pull at my unmoving feet, stretching from my left side around to my right, growing not merely longer but blacker on the concrete sidewalk, straining to tear loose of me and flee—but then snapping back to the left when the car passed.
“Manuel, there’s something you can do for me, something more than tamales.”
“You name it, Chris.”
After a long hesitation, I said, “It involves my dad…his body.”
Manuel matched my hesitation. His thoughtful silence was the equivalent of a cat’s ears pricking with interest.
He heard more in my words than they appeared to convey. His tone was different when he spoke this time, still the voice of a friend but also the harder voice of a cop. “What’s happened, Chris?”
“It’s pretty weird.”
“Weird?” he said, savoring the word as though it were an unexpected taste.
“I’d really rather not talk about it on the phone. If I come over to the station, can you meet me in the parking lot?”
I couldn’t expect the police to switch off all their office lights and take my statement by the glow of candles.
Manuel said, “We’re talking something criminal?”
“Deeply. And weird.”
“Chief Stevenson’s been working late today. He’s still here but not for much longer. You think maybe I should ask him to wait?”
In my mind rose the eyeless face of the dead hitchhiker.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, Stevenson should hear this.”
“Can you be here in ten minutes?”
“See you then.”
I racked the telephone handset, snatched my cap off the light cage, turned to the street, and shielded my eyes with one hand as two more cars drove past. One was a late-model Saturn. The other was a Chevy pickup.
No white van. No hearse. No black Hummer.
I didn’t actually fear that the search for me was still on. By now the hitchhiker would be charring in the furnace. With the evidence reduced to ashes, no obvious proof existed to support my bizarre story. Sandy Kirk, the orderlies, and all the nameless others would feel safe.
Indeed, any attempt to kill or abduct me would risk witnesses to that crime, who would then have to be dealt with, increasing the likelihood of still more witnesses. These mysterious conspirators were best ser
ved now by discretion rather than aggression—especially when their sole accuser was the town freak, who came out of his heavily curtained house only between dusk and dawn, who feared the sun, who lived by the grace of cloaks and veils and hoods and masks of lotion, who crawled even the night town under a carapace of cloth and chemicals.
Considering the outrageous nature of my accusations, few would find my story credible, but I was sure that Manuel would know I was telling the truth. I hoped the chief would believe me, too.
I stepped away from the telephone outside the post office and headed for the police station. It was only a couple of blocks away.
As I hurried through the night, I rehearsed what I would tell Manuel and his boss, Lewis Stevenson, who was a formidable figure for whom I wanted to be well prepared. Tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, Stevenson had a face noble enough to be stamped in profile on ancient Roman coins. Sometimes he seemed to be but an actor playing the role of dedicated police chief, although if it was a performance, then it was of award caliber. At fifty-two, he gave the impression—without appearing to try—that he was far wiser than his years, easily commanding respect and trust. There was something of the psychologist and something of the priest in him—qualities everyone in his position needed but few possessed. He was that rare person who enjoyed having power but did not abuse it, who exercised authority with good judgment and compassion, and he’d been chief of police for fourteen years without a hint of scandal, ineptitude, or inefficiency in his department.
Thus I came through lampless alleys lit by a moon riding higher in the sky than it had been earlier, came past fences and footpaths, past gardens and garbage cans, came mentally murmuring the words with which I hoped to tell a convincing story, came in two minutes instead of the ten that Manuel had suggested, came to the parking lot behind the municipal building and saw Chief Stevenson in a conspiratorial moment that stripped away all the fine qualities I’d projected onto him. Revealed now was a man who, regardless of his noble face, did not deserve to be honored by coins or by monuments or even by having his photograph hung in the station house next to those of the mayor, the governor, and the President of the United States.
Stevenson stood at the far end of the municipal building, near the back entrance to the police station, in a cascade of bluish light from a hooded security lamp above the door. The man with whom he conferred stood a few feet away, only half revealed in blue shadows.
I crossed the parking lot, heading toward them. They didn’t see me coming because they were deeply engrossed in conversation. Furthermore, I was mostly screened from them as I passed among the street-department trucks and squad cars and water-department trucks and personal vehicles, while also staying as much as possible out of the direct light from the three tall pole lamps.
Just before I would have stepped into the open, Stevenson’s visitor moved closer to the chief, shedding the shadows, and I halted in shock. I saw his shaved head, his hard face. Red-plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, work shoes.
At this distance, I wasn’t able to see his pearl earring.
I was flanked by two large vehicles, and I quickly retreated a few steps to shelter more completely in the oily darkness between them. One of the engines was still hot; it pinged and ticked as it cooled.
Although I could hear the voices of the two men, I could not make out their words. An onshore breeze still romanced the trees and quarreled against all the works of man, and this ceaseless whisper and hiss screened the conversation from me.
I realized that the vehicle to my right, the one with the hot engine, was the white Ford van in which the bald man had driven away from Mercy Hospital earlier in the night. With my father’s mortal remains.
I wondered if the keys might be in the ignition. I pressed my face to the window in the driver’s door, but I couldn’t see much of the interior.
If I could steal the van, I would most likely have possession of crucial proof that my story was true. Even if my father’s body had been taken elsewhere and was no longer in this van, forensic evidence might remain—not least, some of the hitchhiker’s blood.
I had no idea how to hot-wire an engine.
Hell, I didn’t know how to drive.
And even if I discovered that I possessed a natural talent for the operation of motor vehicles that was the equivalent of Mozart’s brilliance at musical composition, I wouldn’t be able to drive twenty miles south along the coast or thirty miles north to another police jurisdiction. Not in the glare of oncoming headlights. Not without my precious sunglasses, which lay broken far away in the hills to the east.
Besides, if I opened the van door, the cab lights would wink on. The two men would notice.
They would come for me.
They would kill me.
The back door of the police station opened. Manuel Ramirez stepped outside.
Lewis Stevenson and his conspirator broke off their urgent conversation at once. From this distance, I wasn’t able to discern whether Manuel knew the bald man, but he appeared to address only the chief.
I couldn’t believe that Manuel—good son of Rosalina, mourning widower of Carmelita, loving father of Toby—would be a part of any business that involved murder and grave-robbing. We can never know many of the people in our lives, not truly know them, regardless of how deeply we believe that we see into them. Most of them are murky ponds, containing infinite layers of suspended particles, stirred by strange currents in their greatest depths. But I was willing to bet my life that Manuel’s clear-water heart concealed no capacity for treachery.
I wasn’t willing to bet his life, however, and if I called out to him to search the back of the white van with me, to impound the vehicle for an exhaustive forensics workup, I might be signing his death warrant as well as mine. In fact, I was sure of it.
Abruptly Stevenson and the bald man turned from Manuel to survey the parking lot. I knew then that he had told them about my telephone call.
I dropped into a crouch and shrank deeper into the gloom between the van and the water-department truck.
At the back of the van, I tried to read the license plate. Although usually I am plagued by too much light, this time I was hampered by too little.
Frantically, I traced the seven numbers and letters with my fingertips. I wasn’t able to memorize them by braille reading, however, at least not quickly enough to avoid discovery.
I knew that the bald man, if not Stevenson, was coming to the van. Was already on the move. The bald man, the butcher, the trader in bodies, the thief of eyes.
Staying low, I retraced the route by which I had come through the ranks of parked trucks and cars, returning to the alley and then scurrying onward, using rows of trash cans as cover, all but crawling to a Dumpster and past it, to a corner and around, into the other alleyway, out of sight of the municipal building, rising to my full height now, running once more, as fleet as the cat, gliding like an owl, a creature of the night, wondering if I would find safe shelter before dawn or would still be afoot in the open to curl and blacken under the hot rising sun.
10
I assumed that I could safely go home but that I might be foolish to linger there too long. I wouldn’t be overdue at the police station for another two minutes, and they would wait for me at least ten minutes past the appointed time before Chief Stevenson realized that I must have seen him with the man who had stolen my father’s body.
Even then, they might not come to the house in search of me. I was still not a serious threat to them—and not likely to become one. I had no proof of anything I’d seen.
Nevertheless, they seemed inclined to take extreme measures to prevent the exposure of their inscrutable conspiracy. They might be loath to leave even the smallest of loose ends—which meant a knot in my neck.
I expected to find Orson in the foyer when I unlocked the front door and stepped inside, but he was not waiting for me. I called his name, but he didn’t appear; and if he had been approaching through the gloom, I would have heard his b
ig paws thumping on the floor.
He was probably in one of his dour moods. For the most part, he is good-humored, playful, and companionable, with enough energy in his tail to sweep all the streets in Moonlight Bay. From time to time, however, the world weighs heavily on him, and then he lies as limp as a rug, sad eyes open but fixed on some doggy memory or on some doggy vision beyond this world, making no sound other than an occasional attenuated sigh.
More rarely, I have found Orson in a state of what seems to be bleakest dejection. This ought to be a condition too profound for any dog to wear, although it fits him well.
He once sat before a mirrored closet door in my bedroom, staring at his reflection for nearly half an hour—an eternity to the dog mind, which generally experiences the world as a series of two-minute wonders and three-minute enthusiasms. I hadn’t been able to tell what fascinated him in his image, although I ruled out both canine vanity and simple puzzlement; he seemed full of sorrow, all drooping ears and slumped shoulders and wagless tail. I swear, at times his eyes brimmed with tears that he was barely able to hold back.
“Orson?” I called.
The switch operating the staircase chandelier was fitted with a rheostat, as were most of the switches throughout the house. I dialed up the minimum light that I needed to climb the stairs.
Orson wasn’t on the landing. He wasn’t waiting in the second-floor hall.
In my room, I dialed a wan glow. Orson wasn’t here, either.
I went directly to the nearest nightstand. From the top drawer I withdrew an envelope in which I kept a supply of knocking-around money. It contained only a hundred and eighty dollars, but this was better than nothing. Though I didn’t know why I might need the cash, I intended to be prepared, so I transferred the entire sum to one of the pockets of my jeans.
As I slid shut the nightstand drawer, I noticed a dark object on the bedspread. When I picked it up, I was surprised that it was actually what it had appeared to be in the shadows: a pistol.