Patrick, his insecurity rushing back, immediately craved soft serve ice cream and the comfort only sugar and fat can provide.
Then he realized there was something else nibbling at his fleeting sense of contentment.
There seemed to be a lot of upset people on mobile phones, asking for repetition of information, asking for someone else to be put on the line, demanding their auditors calm down. The reception was terrible up in the mountains, but it was more than that. It vaguely reminded Patrick of the day Princess Diana died, and the shocking news rippled out into the world accompanied by an equal measure of disbelief. It hadn’t been the same with Michael Jackson.
It was probably nothing important, just a coincidence. Patrick was finely tuned to pick up discord in his environment, that was all. Weaver was generally far more impassive, and consequently happier. Patrick wished he was like that himself.
“People acting weird,” Weaver remarked, and Patrick began to perspire.
He lay face-down in the woods, a quarter of a mile downhill from Main Street where the mountain was too steep to build on but ideal for dumping hard-to-discard trash like window glass, bald tires, washing machines, and scrap drywall. There was junk strewn all down the slope, with various articles of rubbish fetched up against the roots of the trees that clung to the stony ground. Danny remembered being cautioned not to play around there when she was a girl, and how, consequently, they played in that area almost exclusively. In childhood, garbage is a kind of treasure, a discovery. The stuff that adults just want to get rid of turns into spacecraft, forts, and the raw materials of a hundred unfinished ideas. What were a few stitches and tetanus shots to the value of such riches?
Danny hadn’t been down this way in years, and whatever magic she’d found there as a child was gone now. But the new generation hadn’t abandoned the place: She saw a large fort made of rusting sheet metal and lumber built up between two trees, and there was some sort of shelter made of tires and plywood as well. A little way below these projects, Danny saw a couple of kids lurking behind a tree, their attention focused downhill. Officer Park was at her side, Mike Bixby (the twin born one minute after his brother Carl) trailing along behind them.
Danny followed the boys’ line of sight and saw something sprawled on a passage of naked rock that jutted out from the steepest part of the slope. She knew immediately that it was a corpse. Any combat veteran can recognize a dead body without hesitation, regardless of its pose or condition. There’s a certain slack gravity to the dead that is absent from anything else, whether it is a realistic shop mannequin, a fallen-over scarecrow, or a sack of leaves.
Two questions immediately sprang to Danny’s mind: First, who was it? And second, how did these kids stumble upon the body? Because Danny had noticed, even with the sour smell of puke, that Mike Bixby stank of gunpowder. If these boys had been fleeing town in a straight line from behind the hardware store—
“That’s a body,” Park said. It wasn’t a question, but Danny heard the uncertainty in his voice. They had called an ambulance from the station before they set out after the Bixby twin, with directions for it to come along the State Forest Trail at the bottom of the mountain—not as direct a route as
Main Street, but with the crowds and unwanted attention, Danny thought it would be easier for the paramedics to hike up from below.
“Keep these kids under control, will you?” Danny said, and made her way past the other boys and down onto the rocky ledge where the corpse was tumbled. Based on Park’s body language, she didn’t think he’d be offended at a great big state policeman being told what to do by a mere local cop. He probably saw his share of road fatalities. The woods were spookier, however, than the 210 Freeway. Or maybe he wasn’t sure how to secure a scene halfway up a cliff.
Danny had to descend toward the remains sideways, as if snowboarding, and several yards to the left so she wouldn’t send cascades of leaves and dirt over the corpse. This was probably a simple case of someone falling in exactly the wrong way while taking a leak, but you never knew.
Danny got parallel to the scene, then worked her way closer over what certainly appeared to be evidence-free rock. It could be a body dump, she realized. Someone could have rolled it down the slope, hoping it would make it another couple of yards to the edge and flop down the steepest part of the mountain, where it would be well out of sight.
She knelt low and examined the body. Male, late twenties, Hispanic. Eyes open, face twisted as if with fright. Probably rigor mortis, not fear: The human face generally goes slack upon death and its expression means as little as the apparent smile of a dog. This wasn’t a body dump. The corpse wasn’t covered in leaves or dirt. Its arms weren’t tangled around the torso, as with a rolling descent, but bent beside the head. The man looked like he’d fallen headlong, right where he lay.
“What’s the story?” Officer Park asked, his voice raised. The three boys were talking among themselves behind the tree, possibly getting their story straight. Danny wished her colleague would keep a closer watch over them, but it was too late now.
“Male, deceased. COD not apparent.” It was nobody she knew. Danny reached out and laid the backs of her fingers against the cheek of the dead man. She felt razor stubble there. The skin was still warm, as if alive. But he was certainly a corpse, his open eyes as lifeless as boiled eggs. “Not dead long,” she added.
“We saw him fall down,” Mike Bixby said, his voice hitching. He was almost done crying—his curiosity had largely overcome the shock.
“How so?” Danny asked. She wanted to sound casual, like they were discussing
a television show. Keep him talking. Cub Maas spoke up next, excited by the chance to be part of a police investigation.
“He was running right at us and yelling,” Cub said. “We thought he was chasing us.”
“Chasing you why?” Danny asked, casually.
“Just because,” Carl Bixby said, evasively, by way of warning to his cousin.
“We were running,” Cub said, and knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.
Danny wanted him to keep talking, however, so she relented: “Okay, he was chasing you along here and what happened? He fell and hit his head?”
“He fell over,” Cub said, at a loss for words.
Carl pitched in now, apparently the ringleader of the boys, looking more confident since the dangerous part of the story had been gotten past. “I saw when he fell, Cub didn’t. Cub was too busy running away like a
girl
. That dude was motoring, and like screaming as well, like this, with his hands on his head. Screaming. I thought he seen a bear or something. Then he like went down, right?”
“He fell right here, he didn’t roll down the hill?” Danny said, indicating the corpse.
“Yeah, I seen him go like—” here, Carl grabbed his own head at the temples, then jerked and pitched forward, catching himself on one leg before he fell all the way, hands still on his head. “Like that, you know?”
“So he tripped on something,” Park said.
“No,” Carl said. “I can’t explain it. He just fell, boom, like he got cold-cocked.”
Danny studied the dead face resting against the rock. Certainly there were no major injuries on the part of the face she could see. He was missing one shoe, though, and his white sock was filthy, tattered, and dappled with blood. So he hadn’t lost the shoe at the moment he fell. He’d been running through the trees like that for some time.
“Did he throw his hands out in front of him?” she asked.
“No. That’s exactly why it looked weird.” Carl was relieved somebody figured it out—he hadn’t articulated it clearly to himself.
“He fell with his hands still on his head,” Danny said. “Huh.”
It didn’t make sense. Maybe he’d been drunk and his reflexes were shut off. Or he could have been on amphetamines or something like that—somebody was dealing in the local area, but Danny hadn’t figured out who—which
would also make his reflexes go haywire, and would explain why he hadn’t stopped to retrieve his shoe. It was probably good old-fashioned death by misadventure. Danny very much doubted the man was chasing these boys, in any case.
Whatever the circumstances that led to this, she was going to have to spend the rest of an already busy day dealing with a dead person, and that meant whatever else went down, her deputies would be dealing with it. The thought made her despair. She wanted a drink now, more than ever.
Her radio clicked and deputy Ted’s voice came over the speaker: “Sheriff, come in? We got a report from down to the Chevron station.”
“Shoot,” Danny said. “Kids present here, FYI,” she added, in case there was anything unsavory to report, like the time a man was gassing up his car and set his pants on fire.
That
made the papers, all the way down in the flatlands.
Ted had to think about it—he wasn’t fluent with the 10-signals, and Danny hadn’t demanded he learn them as they were becoming obsolete. “10–53,” he said at last.
Drunk and disorderly
, Danny thought. It was hardly past noon and the drunks were already on the move.
“You’re going to have to deal with it,” she replied. “I got a 10–105 here. Misadventure.”
Danny was entirely sober for once, so this was her chance to feel superior. Her radio came back to life.
“You still there?” Ted asked, and continued without waiting for a reply. “The thing is, he was running and screaming like crazy, he got away from me, and I don’t think I can get to him in time. He’s headed northwest.”
Same direction as this one
, Danny thought. “Nick, do you copy?” she said.
“Ten-four,” Nick promptly replied, caught up in the radio game himself.
“Intercept this one for me, will you? I can’t leave the body unattended.”
Nick, in the station, was at the correct end of Main Street. But it would leave the station itself unattended.
“Sheriff?” Officer Park came downhill a few feet, and said, confidentially, “I can stay here if you need to get back.” Danny was grateful. She flicked a salute off the edge of her hat and started up the mountainside.
“You gentlemen come with me,” she said to the boys. They fell into line behind her. Halfway back to Main Street, Danny looked over her shoulder and saw Park speaking into his radio mic, probably reporting the situation
to the brass back at his home base. Whatever was going on, it had gotten Danny what amounted to an extra deputy, and that was a big advantage. The way things were going, she thought she would need it.
What worried her most about the 10–53, as described by Ted, was the running and screaming. Second case of running and screaming that day, if the boys were to be believed.
He was inside the Forest Peak patrol car, a Crown Victoria that should have been auctioned off to a taxi company long ago. He had shoulder-length brown hair and no shirt, his skin covered in abrasions and cuts. The backseat of the Vic, like that of the Explorer, was a seamless plastic form, similar to the benches in a fast-food restaurant. It was spattered with blood. The man was completely out of control, shrieking and flailing his limbs—it looked as if he was trying to keep on running, even inside the vehicle. His wrists were cut through the skin from the zip-tie handcuffs that bound them together.
Danny was sweating profusely and so out of breath she could hardly see through the dark purple fireworks behind her eyes. She could smell herself: the sweet, yeasty stink of an alcohol binge.
“…Three times before he stopped swinging long enough to get the cuffs on him,” Nick was saying. He had an ice pack pressed to his cheekbone.
Danny had arrived after a brisk ten-minute slog along the mountainside to the Chevron station, and she was still doubled up with her hands on her knees, trying to get her wind back. The police car was parked around behind the gas station, next to the LP tank for filling barbecue cylinders. The deputies had shown some good sense, getting the perp out of sight of the general public before a crowd gathered. Highway Patrolman Park was posted by the corpse. The Bixby twins and their cousin Cub were in the hands of a neighbor. The situation was stabilized, Danny estimated. Now she had to figure out what to do with this maniac who was beating himself to a pulp in the back of the cruiser.
“You tasered him three times?” Danny said, because she hadn’t been listening.
“I had to,” Nick said, defensive. In fact, Danny didn’t care if he’d beaten the man senseless with a shovel. Not today. But Nick was conditioned to expect disapproval if any situation escalated out of his control, as this one certainly had. “What are we gonna do?” he added, when Danny failed to reprimand him.
“I don’t know,” she said, and this was such a rare admission that both Nick and Ted were startled into looking closely at Danny’s blotchy, sweating face. “Quit staring at me,” she said. “Think of something yourselves.”
All three of them stood there and pretended to think. The manager of the Chevron station, Artie Moys, was leaning against his old Toyota by the trash cans, waiting for them to get the nutcase off his property; until then, it didn’t seem decent somehow to leave the police standing around alone. A couple of tourists were peeking around the hurricane fence, but from their perspective there wasn’t much to see: Through the back window of the cruiser, the perp looked more like laundry bouncing around in a commercial dryer than anything else. But everybody within thirty meters could hear his discordant screams, muffled by the glass but still excruciatingly sharp.
Danny drew a normal breath for the first time since she’d left the corpse on the hill. She could think. She’d have the deputies hogtie this individual in the free cell back at the Sheriff’s Station, then get the paramedics to have a look at him when they were done fucking around with the dead man in the woods. Maybe they could take the wild man away with them alongside the corpse, or Patrolman Park could drive him down the mountain after them in his slick late-model vehicle. Then somebody was going to have to clean the back of the Crown Victoria with bleach and paper towels. She wiped the sweat off her face with her hands and stood upright, ignoring the pain in her side. Time to make a statement to her minions, outlining the plan. She drew another breath to speak.