“Colorless, excellent clarity, superb cut.” She looked at Jesse. “Mister, you have taste.”
Her feline gaze assessed me. She smiled as though enjoying the answer to a private riddle and brushed the back of her hand across my cheek. I swallowed, dry mouthed.
Tim stubbed out his cigarette. “Here’s the thing. Coyote likes knives and fire. And he’s after you.”
He crossed the concrete, hands loose at his sides. “There’s an adage. First rule of a gunfight? Bring a gun. First rule of a knife fight? Bring a gun.”
My mouth was still dry. “What’s the first rule of a fire-fight?”
“Be someplace else.” He stepped closer. “Get out of Dodge.”
That wasn’t an adage but a directive.
“I’m working with the cops and the FBI,” I said.
“Then do it on the fly. Keep moving and keep your head down. Coyote has no limits. Even if some government agency is sponsoring him, these killings are deeply personal. You can’t stop him; you can only stay ahead of him.”
They turned and headed back to the bike. Overhead, the vulture soared in a figure eight, drawing a sign in the sky. Eternity.
20
I heard the key card flip the lock. I hiked the bath towel around myself just as Jesse pushed open the door. He came into the motel room with Mexican food, and it smelled great.
My hair was wet and the air-conditioning was up high. The South Coast Inn had what we needed for the night: a hot shower, a king bed, high-speed Internet access, and privacy. This was called getting out of Dodge.
I pulled on a white T-shirt and jeans. Jesse set the food on the coffee table.
“Rudy’s taquitos. Babe, this is reason ninety-eight.” I took the fork he offered, grabbed the plate, and started wolfing. “Thank you.”
Green chile salsa, fried tortillas, guacamole, and sour cream: the start to my pregnancy diet. I was eating for two, and right then I didn’t care if the second person was Marlon Brando.
Jesse got his own plate and dug in. He looked at the notes and printouts slung across the coffee table.
“How’s it going?” he said.
“Sally Shimada’s taking the feature idea to her editor.”
Sally was a reporter at the
Santa Barbara News-Press
. She was charming, dogged, and ambitious, so with luck I thought I might get my feature on the reunion killings published within a day or two. After that I could work on spreading it to other papers and online.
“At a minimum she’ll interview me for a piece of her own. And I left a message with Dr. Cantwell’s office in China Lake. Still no answer on Valerie’s number, though. That worries me.”
He eyed me. “You need to set that aside. Eat up, stretch out on the bed, and rest. No worrying tonight.”
“Sure. Flip that switch on my back, would you? I can’t reach it.”
He glanced at my computer. “Making progress on the writing?”
“Excellent progress.”
I took my plate to the desk, sat down, and scrolled through my document. He backpedaled to get a look.
“What is this?” he said.
My smile felt pleasingly evil.
He read the screen. “You’re not serious.”
“You don’t think Taylor deserves it?”
Setting his plate on his lap, he pulled the computer to the edge of the desk. He read aloud.
“ ‘Dear Mrs. Boggs: Thank you for your proposal for
Pants on Fire: Weekend Fireworks for Couples
, which your cousin submitted on your behalf.’ ”
He looked incredulous.
I gestured at the screen. “Didn’t I mock up a first-rate publisher’s letterhead? I’m lethal with fonts.”
“ ‘Your photographs have a gritty,
vérité
quality. And we agree that pants on fire are essential to the nation’s physical and spiritual health. Regretfully, however, your book does not fit with our current list. Photo essays are expensive, and the dimensions . . .’ ”
He blinked.
“Okay, I need a better adjective there.” I deleted
vast
. “Colossal? Thundering?”
“Gargantuan.”
“Now you’re talking.” I typed.
“ ‘. . . the dimensions of your gargantuan ass preclude us from publishing it as a coffee-table book. Even an oversize one. We have forwarded it to our sister publication,
Cattle-men’s Quarterly
, where bovine proportions are de rigueur and . . .’ ”
“Scratch ‘bovine.’ ” I backspaced and retyped.
“ ‘Heiferlicious,’ that’s evocative.” His jaw had gone slack. “How are you going to pull this off? You’ve given the publisher a New York address.”
“Manhattan area code, that’s all she needs to see on the fax header. Think your cousin would send it? The practical joker?”
“I’ll phone him.”
“Excellent.”
He took over the keyboard and added a final line.
“ ‘In closing, may we compliment you on your impeccable proofreading.’ ”
I kissed him on the cheek and stood up. He snagged my hand.
“You never lose your equilibrium. Did you know that?” he said.
I gave him a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”
“You handle everything and you never capsize. Granted, you might handle things aggressively, but you always keep your feet underneath you.”
“I’m told it’s either poise or mulishness.”
“You even cope with a sarcastic hothead proposing marriage to you.”
I smiled. “I think of you more as a spirited wiseass.”
He held on to my hand. “Thank you. For everything.”
The words, his lopsided smile, and the humility in his voice hit me like a skillet in the face.
“Babe.”
I drew him to the bed and he swung over to sit next to me. I put my hand against his cheek.
“I’m the one who needs to thank you, for this tremendous gift,” I said.
“You’re welcome. But I want you to know that I mean it.” He pulled me down and we lay facing each other. “Thank you for taking me as I am. Thank you for taking this ride with me.”
“Taking each other as we are—I think that’s what marriage has to be about.”
He brushed my hair back from my face. “Fearsome idea, isn’t it?”
“Bloodcurdling.”
His lopsided smile remained. He rolled onto his stomach and propped himself up on his elbows.
“Our genes, wrapped up in a new package. Unbelievable.” Giving me the once-over, he said, “I predict freckles.”
I eyed him back. “Blue eyes. Long legs.”
“Your imagination.”
“Your relentlessness.”
“The comical way you cry at the end of movies.”
“That’s not comical; it’s warmhearted. Your misguided clothes sense.”
“
Terminator
turns on your waterworks. It’s comical. What’s wrong with my clothes?”
I pulled up his shirt. His shorts showed above the waistband of his jeans. “Krusty the Clown boxers. You’re right: That’s not misguided. It’s tragic.”
“Your mouth.”
“
Your
mouth.”
We stared at each other. He broke out laughing.
“God, what a nightmare,” I said.
He laid his cheek on my belly and whispered, “Hello, baby. It’s your dad.”
It’s the sweetest of memories.
When the stars came out, Coyote climbed the fire escape to the roof of the whore’s apartment building. It was a cheap California roof, tar paper covered with gravel that scrunched beneath his feet. Squatting down in the dark, he lifted his face to the sky and let the noise of the nearby freeway flow over him. The air carried the metallic taste of auto exhaust. He knew what he had to do.
He had to take the four whose names he had underlined. He would take others as well, but those four were the crux of the project. Taking them would stop the leaks. Taking them would balance the scales. It would cleanse and rectify. And he knew how he had to make his approach.
One name came back to him. She was a pivot point. She was one of the original group, the ones who set his life on the path to disorder. The documents contained more than enough information about her to help him focus his hunt. Valerie Skinner would be beyond valuable.
He put his hands on the gravel roof and scratched his fingernails back, drawing claw marks. The shamans knew, the Shoshone and Paiute of the Neolithic high desert. You draw your hunt, you carve it into the stone as his fingers had carved into Becky O’Keefe’s burned flesh, and you bring good fortune upon yourself.
He looked down. In front of the building a car stopped, a bloodred Camaro, and a man climbed out. He had a rat’s twitchiness. The pimp was here.
Coyote rushed down the fire escape to the apartment and began packing up his work. Footsteps climbed the stairs in the hall and the pimp pounded on the door. He ignored it. When the man left, he would get out. He didn’t need to go far, but he wanted to be away from this site when the stench of Wanda began wafting out. He knew where he would go. He gazed out the window, down toward the crawl of Hollywood. It had been many years, but it was time to go home.
Angie Delaney pulled into the driveway after dark, feeling weary. Work had been a total loss. All she could feel was a grinding worry about her daughter. But she knew that Phil was taking things in hand, and that alone made her feel more secure. Phil was a son of a bitch, but he was her son of a bitch.
She grabbed her purse from the passenger seat and saw the crumpled bits of paper littering the floor. She picked them up and realized they must have fallen out of Evan’s backpack.
She sighed. The visit had been too short. Blow in, blow out, the human hurricane. But that was her girl: Evan was her father’s daughter.
Loneliness swept through her. Damn, she missed her kids sometimes. The fact that they grew up and moved away was not fair, not at all. She uncrumpled the bits of paper, pressed them to her skirt, and smoothed them out.
She smiled to herself, seeing Evan’s handwriting. A grocery list. A legal sheet scribbled with court case citations. The receipt from the pharmacy.
She saw the itemized list of purchases and felt as though she’d been slapped in the head.
Early Pregnancy Test
.
She ran inside to call her ex-husband.
The ocean shines electric blue, lit from below. I swim nowhere. The surf roars and breakers hurl themselves up the sand. Jesse is standing on the beach.
Wind rakes his hair across his eyes. He’s waiting for me. I have to get to shore but I can’t kick.
Behind me comes a ripping sound. I turn. Three gashes are tearing toward me along the surface of the water. Strike-fighter speed. They’re talon tracks, but the creature, whatever huge thing is slicing the ocean, is invisible.
Hey
. My arms won’t swim. I call to Jesse but the surf swallows my voice. The gashes race toward me. Where they rip the water it turns translucent, veined a bloody blue.
Do you have a message?
I’m yelling. And Jesse sees. He runs into the surf, dives through a wave, and comes up sprinting. Head down, thresher kick, barreling toward me. The tracks are bearing down, roaring, and now in their wake the water is black.
Wild laughter
. I stretch my hand toward Jesse. He’s right there, inches away, when the talons slice the water on top of him.
I jerked awake. My hands were clutching the covers and I felt as though a concrete block were laid across my chest. The glow from the television flickered on the ceiling. The dream hung in my mind, sharp as a scream. I rolled over and reached for Jesse.
He wasn’t in bed. I blinked my eyes into focus. A news channel was on TV, showing footage taken from a helicopter: overhead shots of a freeway, a copse of trees, Becky O’Keefe’s Volvo. A photo flashed on-screen, showing Becky holding Ryan on her lap. He was nestled against her chest, wearing a smile that knew neither pain nor fear. I lay still, feeling small.
Jesse was at my computer. I got up.
“Can’t sleep?” I said.
He hit a key. “It’s six a.m. You’ve been out like a light.”
Now that I looked, gray daylight was leaking under the foot of the drapes. I ran my hands around his shoulders. His skin was warm. His hair was going in ten directions. I kissed the top of his head, saw the computer screen, and froze.
“Where did that come from?”
“Your dad.”
“Shit.”
He lifted his hands off the keyboard. “You’d better watch. But brace yourself.”
I sat down. He reset the video to the start of the stream. Giving me a sidelong glance, he pushed
play
.
In jerky, home-movie style, the camera crossed a room. A living room, a starter home, IKEA-blond furnishings blurring past. Light bled in from a window, overwhelming the lens, and the picture whited out. When it came back the cameraman was standing in front of an easy chair, centering on a woman sitting there.
“Dana.” The man’s voice was gentle. “You want to say hello?”
I gripped the edge of the desk. “Jesus Christ.”
Jesse put his hand on my back. “Her husband took the video. He forwarded it to your dad.”
The camera zoomed in, focusing on her face. It was my late classmate, air force nurse Dana West. Or what was left of her.
She was crumpled in the chair. The camera held steady on her shoulders and face, but that couldn’t hide the spasms that pulled at her limbs. She was wasted, her head little more than a skull with skin. She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds. She looked like a malformed toy. She was laughing.
Her lips drew back, her teeth protruded, and her tongue came out like a slug. Her hand writhed past the camera.
“Hey,” she shouted.
Her voice was slurred, pitched like a cat caught in a trap. Her hand came back across the view, fingers twisted. I realized she was waving.
Behind the camera her husband said, “Honey, do you have a message?”
Her gaze roamed over the ceiling. One of her pupils was normal size. The other was dilated wide. It looked wet and black.