Before the chief’s clammy gray hand could reach out to clutch at me, I plucked the keys from the ignition, backed out of the car, and finally exhaled explosively.
In the trunk I found the large first-aid kit that I expected. From it, I extracted only a thick roll of gauze bandage and a pair of scissors.
While Orson patrolled the entire perimeter of the squad car, diligently sniffing the air, I unrolled the gauze, doubling it again and again into a collection of five-foot loops before snipping it with the scissors. I twisted the strands tightly together, then tied a knot at the upper end, another in the middle, and a third at the lower end. After repeating this exercise, I joined the two multiple-strand lengths together with a final knot—and had a fuse approximately ten feet long.
Tick, tick, tick.
I coiled the fuse on the sidewalk, opened the fuel port on the side of the car, and removed the tank cap. Gasoline fumes wafted out of the neck of the tank.
At the trunk again, I replaced the scissors and what remained of the roll of gauze in the first-aid kit. I closed the kit and then the trunk.
The parking lot remained deserted. The only sounds were the drops of condensation plopping from the Indian laurel onto the squad car and the soft ceaseless padding of my worried dog’s paws.
Although it meant another visit with Lewis Stevenson’s corpse, I returned the keys to the ignition. I’d seen a few episodes from the most popular crime series on television, and I knew how easily even fiendishly clever criminals could be tripped up by an ingenious homicide detective. Or by a best-selling female mystery novelist who solves real murders as a hobby. Or a retired spinster schoolteacher. All this between the opening credits and the final commercial for a vaginal deodorant. I intended to give them—both the professionals and the meddlesome hobbyists—damned little with which to work.
The dead man croaked at me as a bubble of gas broke deep in his esophagus.
“Rolaids,” I advised him, trying unsuccessfully to cheer myself.
I didn’t see any of the four expended brass cartridges on the front seat. In spite of the platoons of amateur sleuths waiting to pounce, and regardless of whether having the brass might help them identify the murder weapon, I didn’t have the nerve to search the floor, especially under Stevenson’s legs.
Anyway, even if I found all the cartridges, there was still a bullet buried in his chest. If it wasn’t too grossly distorted, this wad of lead would feature score marks that could be matched to the singularities of the bore of my pistol, but even the prospect of prison wasn’t sufficient to make me take out my penknife and perform exploratory surgery to retrieve the incriminating slug.
If I’d been a different man than I am, with the stomach for such an impromptu autopsy, I wouldn’t have risked it, anyway. Assuming that Stevenson’s radical personality change—his newfound thirst for violence—was but one symptom of the weird disease he carried, and assuming that this illness could be spread by contact with infected tissues and bodily fluids, this type of grisly wet work was out of the question, which is also why I had been careful not to get any of his blood on me.
When the chief had been telling me about his dreams of rape and mutilation, I’d been sickened by the thought that I was breathing the same air that he’d used and exhaled. I doubted, however, that the microbe he carried was airborne. If it were
that
highly contagious, Moonlight Bay wouldn’t be on a roller-coaster ride to Hell, as he had claimed the town was: It would long ago have arrived in the sulfurous Pit.
Tick, tick, tick.
According to the gauge on the instrument panel, the fuel tank was nearly full. Good. Perfect. Earlier in the night, at Angela’s, the troop had taught me how to destroy evidence and possibly conceal a murder.
The fire should be so intense that the four brass cartridges, the sheet-metal body of the car, and even portions of the heavier frame would melt. Of the late Lewis Stevenson, little more than charred bones would remain, and the soft lead slug would effectively vanish. Certainly, none of my fingerprints, hairs, or clothes fibers would survive.
Another slug had passed through the chief’s neck, pulverizing the window in the driver’s door. It was now lying somewhere out in the parking lot or, with luck, was at rest deep in the ivy-covered slope that rose from the far end of the lot to the higher-situated Embarcadero Way, where it would be all but impossible to find.
Incriminating powder burns marred my jacket. I should have destroyed it. I couldn’t. I loved that jacket. It was cool. The bullet hole in the pocket made it even cooler.
“Gotta give the spinster schoolteachers
some
chance,” I muttered as I closed the front and back doors of the car.
The brief laugh that escaped me was so humorless and bleak that it scared me almost as much as the possibility of imprisonment.
I ejected the magazine from the Glock, took one cartridge from it, which left six, and then slapped it back into the pistol.
Orson whined impatiently and picked up one end of the gauze fuse in his mouth.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said—and then gave him the double take that he deserved.
The mutt might have picked it up solely because he was curious about it, as dogs tend to be curious about everything.
Funny white coil. Like a snake, snake, snake…but not a snake. Interesting. Interesting. Master Snow’s scent on it. Might be good to eat. Almost anything might be good to eat.
Just because Orson picked up the fuse and whined impatiently didn’t necessarily mean that he understood the purpose of it or the nature of the entire scheme I’d concocted. His interest—and uncanny timing—might be purely coincidental.
Yeah. Sure. Like the purely coincidental eruption of fireworks every Independence Day.
Heart pounding, expecting to be discovered at any moment, I took the twisted gauze fuse from Orson and carefully knotted the cartridge to one end of it.
He watched intently.
“Do you approve of the knot,” I asked, “or would you like to tie one of your own?”
At the open fuel port, I lowered the cartridge into the tank. The weight of it pulled the fuse all the way down into the reservoir. Like a wick, the highly absorbent gauze would immediately begin to soak up the gasoline.
Orson ran nervously in a circle:
Hurry, hurry. Hurry quick. Quick, quick, quick, Master Snow.
I left almost five feet of fuse out of the tank. It hung along the side of the patrol car and trailed onto the sidewalk.
After fetching my bicycle from where I’d leaned it against the trunk of the laurel, I stooped and ignited the end of the fuse with my butane lighter. Although the exposed length of gauze was not gasoline-soaked, it burned faster than I expected. Too fast.
I climbed onto my bike and pedaled as if all of Hell’s lawyers and a few demons of this earth were baying at my heels, which they probably were. With Orson sprinting at my side, I shot across the parking lot to the ramped exit drive, onto Embarcadero Way, which was deserted, and then south past the shuttered restaurants and shops that lined the bay front.
The explosion came too soon, a solid
whump
that wasn’t half as loud as I’d anticipated. Around and even ahead of me, orange light bloomed; the initial flare of the blast was refracted a considerable distance by the fog.
Recklessly, I squeezed the hand brake, slid through a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, came to a halt with one foot on the blacktop, and looked back.
Little could be seen, no details: a core of hard yellow-white light surrounded by orange plumes, all softened by the deep, eddying mist.
The worst thing I saw wasn’t in the night but inside my head: Lewis Stevenson’s face bubbling, smoking, streaming hot clear grease like bacon in a frying pan.
“Dear God,” I said in a voice that was so raspy and tremulous that I didn’t recognize it.
Nevertheless, I could have done nothing else but light that fuse. Although the cops would know Stevenson had been killed, evidence of how it was done—and by whom—would now be obliterated.
I made the drive chain sing, leading my accomplice dog away from the harbor, through a spiraling maze of streets and alleyways, deeper into the murky, nautilus heart of Moonlight Bay. Even with the heavy Glock in one pocket, my unzipped leather jacket flapped as though it were a cape, and I fled unseen, avoiding light for more than one reason now, a shadow flowing liquidly through shadows, as though I were the fabled Phantom, escaped from the labyrinth underneath the opera house, now on wheels and hell-bent on terrorizing the world above ground.
Being able to entertain such a flamboyantly romantic image of myself in the immediate aftermath of murder doesn’t speak well of me. In my defense, I can only say that by recasting these events as a grand adventure, with me in a dashing role, I was desperately trying to quell my fear and, more desperately still, struggling to suppress the memories of the shooting. I also needed to suppress the ghastly images of the burning body that my active imagination generated like an endless series of pop-up spooks leaping from the black walls of a funhouse.
Anyway, this shaky effort to romanticize the event lasted only until I reached the alleyway behind the Grand Theater, half a block south of Ocean Avenue, where a grime-encrusted security lamp made the fog appear to be brown and polluted. There, I swung off my bike, let it clatter to the pavement, leaned into a Dumpster, and brought up what little I had not digested of my midnight dinner with Bobby Halloway.
I had murdered a man.
Unquestionably, the victim had deserved to die. And sooner or later, relying on one excuse or another, Lewis Stevenson would have killed me, regardless of his coconspirators’ inclination to grant special dispensation to me; arguably, I acted in self-defense. And to save Orson’s life.
Nevertheless, I’d killed a human being; even these qualifying circumstances didn’t alter the moral essence of the act. His vacant eyes, black with death, haunted me. His mouth, open in a silent scream, his bloodied teeth. Sights are readily recalled from memory; recollections of sounds and tastes and tactile sensations are far less easily evoked; and it is virtually impossible to experience a scent merely by willing it to rise from memory. Yet earlier I’d recalled the fragrance of my mother’s shampoo, and now the metallic odor of Stevenson’s fresh blood lingered so pungently that it kept me hanging on to the Dumpster as if I were at the railing of a yawing ship.
In fact, I was shaken not solely by having killed him but by having destroyed the corpse and all evidence with brisk efficiency and self-possession. Apparently I had a talent for the criminal life. I felt as though some of the darkness in which I’d lived for twenty-eight years had seeped into me and had coalesced in a previously unknown chamber of my heart.
Purged but feeling no better for it, I boarded the bicycle again and led Orson through a series of byways to Caldecott’s Shell at the corner of San Rafael Avenue and Palm Street. The service station was closed. The only light inside came from a blue-neon wall clock in the sales office, and the only light outside was at the soft-drink vending machine.
I bought a can of Pepsi to cleanse the sour taste from my mouth. At the pump island, I opened the water faucet partway and waited while Orson drank his fill.
“What an awesomely lucky dog you are to have such a thoughtful master,” I said. “Always tending to your thirst, your hunger, your grooming. Always ready to kill anyone who lifts a finger against you.”
The searching look that he turned on me was disconcerting even in the gloom. Then he licked my hand.
“Gratitude acknowledged,” I said.
He lapped at the running water again, finished, and shook his dripping snout.
Shutting off the faucet, I said, “Where
did
Mom get you?”
He met my eyes again.
“What secret was my mother keeping?”
His gaze was unwavering. He knew the answers to my questions. He just wasn’t talking.
27
I suppose God really might be loafing around in St. Bernadette’s Church, playing air guitar with a companion band of angels, or games of mental chess. He might be there in a dimension that we can’t quite see, drawing blueprints for new universes in which such problems as hatred and ignorance and cancer and athlete’s-foot fungus will have been eliminated in the planning stage. He might be drifting high above the polished-oak pews, as if in a swimming pool filled with clouds of spicy incense and humble prayer instead of water, silently bumping into the columns and the corners of the cathedral ceiling as He dreamily meditates, waiting for parishioners in need to come to Him with problems to be solved.
This night, however, I felt sure God was keeping His distance from the rectory adjoining the church, which gave me the creeps when I cycled past it. The architecture of the two-story stone house—like that of the church itself—was modified Norman, with enough of the French edge abraded to make it fit more comfortably in the softer climate of California. The overlapping black-slate tiles of the steep roof, wet with fog, were as armor-thick as the scales on the beetled brow of a dragon, and beyond the blank black eyes of window glass—including an oculus on each side of the front door—lay a soulless realm. The rectory had never appeared forbidding to me before, and I knew that I now viewed it with uneasiness only because of the scene I had witnessed between Jesse Pinn and Father Tom in the church basement.
I pedaled past both the rectory and the church, into the cemetery, under the oaks, and among the graves. Noah Joseph James, who’d had ninety-six years from birthday to deathbed, was just as silent as ever when I greeted him and parked my bike against his headstone.
I unclipped the cell phone from my belt and keyed in the number for the unlisted back line that went directly to the broadcasting booth at KBAY. I heard four rings before Sasha picked up, although no tone would have sounded in the booth; she would have been alerted to the incoming call solely by a flashing blue light on the wall that she faced when at her microphone. She answered it by pushing a hold button, and while I waited, I could hear her program over the phone line.