The Blue Hour (27 page)

She did her best to
will them out of her universe, turning to look up at the rusted bar above her
nose, spreading her hands wide for a pec burn on her beginning weight of eighty
pounds, digging the leather palms of her gloves against the worn checkering of
the grip.

"Hi, Merci!"

"Hi, guys!"

"Need a spot.
⁷
"

"Sure don't!"

Then up with it. Ignore
them. She liked the feel of the weights balancing above her. She moved her left
hand over just a hair to get it right. Then the slow, deliberate motion— all
the way down to her chest, then all the way back up again—ten times in all, not
super heavy, really, but you could feel eighty pounds when your body weight was
one forty. Three sets. Every rep was hotter and slower. Grow to burn, burn to
grow.

At one hundred pounds
she had to go a lot slower, but she got the ten. She heard the sweat
tap-tapping to the plastic bench as she sat there breathing hard and deciding
whether to max at one thirty-five or one forty.

She picked the lighter weight to look stronger in
front of the men, a decision that angered her. She was ignoring them but aware
of them in the mirrors, where she saw they were ignoring her but aware of her,
too. They laughed suddenly then and two of them glanced over at her. Mike was
looking down as if regretting something he'd just said. Merci wished she lived
on a different planet. She thought again of Phil Kemp's ugly words and his
touches and felt like all her strength was about to rush away.

Stay focused. Will
away these things.

She heaved up on the bar
and ground out five reps before she realized she wouldn't make ten. Six was a
labor. Seven wasn't even up yet when she knew she'd had enough. The sweat
popped off her lips as she exhaled. Kind of stuck, actually, not enough
gumption to get it back up to safety on the stand, too much pride to set it
down on her heaving chest and rest. Mike McNally now appeared in the north
quadrant of her defocusing vision, looking down at her, a blond-haired
Vikingesque once-upon-a-time boyfriend gritting "One more ... one
more
. .
. one more,
Merci"
at her until she felt the bar rise
magically with his help. Her breathing was fast and short. She felt lungshot.
Then she felt McNally ceding the weight back to her and down she let it come,
all the way to her sternum, pause, then halfway up, then a little more than
halfway, arms and bar wobbling like crazy now and Mike's lift helping her get
it up then suddenly one side shot down and the other shot up and iron crashed
with a clang and the bar smacked into her rib cage as the weights slid off and
chimed to the floor beneath her head.

She was aware of three
more bodies around her, aware of Mike's cursing them away, telling them she was
fine, aware of gripping his hand with hers and rising to a sitting position on
the bench. Little lights circled her vision like the stars around a cartoon
character hit with a hammer.

"You know the circuit
court's going to hear the scent-box case," he was saying.

"That's great,
Mike." Merci wasn't positive what century she was in.

"I know it's going to
be accepted. I know that a hundred years from now they'll be using those boxes
in court all the time. A good scent box and a good dog. That's my answer to
high-tech crime solving. Plus we're going to patent the thing and make a
million. I don't know what I'll name it. Mike's Truth Box or something."

"Hope you're
right. Wow."

"Light in the
head?"

"Um-hm."

"Lay back."

"No way."

"Well, pass out
then."

"I'll lay
back."

"Better?"

"Um."

She lay back down on the
bench and felt her chest rising fast, her back pressing into the pads, the air
rushing in and out. Mike was gone. Just her and the white ceiling and the
mirrors in the periphery of her vision and the ringing in her ears. Lots of
red.

When her heart rate
settled Merci dozed a few minutes. She awoke to the sounds of weights, male
voices, the harsh light of the gym in her eyes. She sat up, looked around and
yawned. Her muscles felt enlarged and stupid. The pile of spilled weights was
still next to her bench.

She
worked herself up and collected the weights, walking them one at a time back to
the rack and sliding them onto the pegs. Then she lumbered on heavy legs over
to the stationary bike and climbed on, setting the resistance lower than the
first time, but still pretty darned high.

For just a moment she
thought about who she was, and about how strong she was. She remembered the
most important thing she had learned in her life thus fan you are powerful
and you can make things bend to your will
as long as you try hard enough.

Your will is the
power to move the world.

So she set the resistance
even higher than the first time. Effort was how things got moved. Effort was
pain. Pain was strength.

She looked at herself in
the mirror as she stood on the pedals to get them going. Pale as a sidewalk,
she thought, and about as good looking.

Merci thought of Hess to
steady herself—how he might do this, his economy and focus. She liked the way
he didn't waste anything. She couldn't forget the look on his face that morning
when he'd seen the hood of Ronnie Stevens's car. It was the saddest, wisest
face she'd ever seen. He looked like Lincoln. But he had been diminished by
what he had seen. The Purse Snatcher had taken something from him, she thought,
and that made her feel angry on Hess's behalf. For him. For someone not
herself. It was nice to admire someone you didn't want to be.

Thirty minutes on this bike should do it, she
thought: burn the foolishness out of my brain and burn the strength into my
muscles.

• • •

She picked up an ankle
holster for her .40 cal derringer, got some takeout food and brought it home.
Home was a rambling house that used to belong to the owner of the large orange
grove that surrounded it. But most of the grove was dozed years ago for housing
tracts, all but a couple of acres, around the house, which was now owned by a
friend of her father and rented cheap. It was old and the faucets groaned and
the fuses blew in heat waves and the garage was full of black widows. It sat
back at the end of a long dirt drive that filled with potholes in winter and
bred dust in summer.

The land was flat and you
wouldn't even know the housing tracts surrounded the grove because the trees
were healthy and high. It was like living inside a wall of green. Merci liked
the cheap rent and the smell of the orange trees and blossoms and the fact that
she had no neighbors to consider. She thought little of strolling around in
nothing but her underwear, behind open windows and screen doors, stereo and
Sheriff's band short wave turned up loud while the orange grove cats lounged in
the sunshine on her porch, licking themselves incessantly, alert to the sound
of the food bag. Once in a while she'd walk out through the rows and look at
things. Not much to see, really, because the big citrus company that worked
these acres did a meticulous job. The workers were quiet Mexicans who hid
their cheerfulness when she was around.

She stared back at one of the cats as she
unlocked the door, then picked up the fast food and holster and went inside.
She loved many things about cats without loving any one cat in the least. The
place got hot during the day so she opened all the windows and doors, then went
to her bedroom and stripped down to undies and her sport shirt with the sleeves
rolled up, working off her bra and tossing it on the floor. She set her holster
and automatic beside the bed, which is where it stayed when it wasn't on her.
She strapped on the new ankle rig and slid in the derringer—lots of play, but
thestrap was good and taut. Skivvies or not, it was good to have a gun on, or
at least one in each room, positioned where she could get it quick if she
needed to. One of her father's habits. She had no fear at home. This was more
or less a game she played to keep her life interesting.

Again she pictured
her partner's face that morning. In the same way that something was taken out
of Hess, something was taken out of her, too, and this reminded her that
nothing they did would make a difference in the long run. The short run was
their stage, collar the creeps and maybe save a life or even two.

But a purse full of
human guts sitting on a Chevy Malibu in the pretty Southern California sunshine
put you in your place. It said: you might find the perpetrator of this, but
there will be other perpetrators of even worse things to follow. More and more
of them, following your own children down the years if you ever have any. Job
security, she thought. It really was a shame. It wasn't a surprise, though. Her
father had taught her early on that being a cop was just plugging the dike for
a while. It didn't make the calling any less genuine, but it suggested something
about what you should risk your life for and what you shouldn't.

Of course, her father
was an ineffectual man who never risked one whisker for anything. A man who
couldn't stand up to a crazy wife was doomed.

She listened to her
messages. One from Joan Cash, just a hi, how are you. One from bumbling,
lovable old Dad— Merci's mother wasn't feeling well and it made her father
frantic with worry. And one from Mike, saying he hoped she was okay, quite a
workout she had in the gym today, coffee sometime? He must have called right
after she left the weight room. That was all. They all seemed to imply so much
obligation and worry. Sometimes Merci really didn't want to know how other
people were feeling. Not that she didn't understand or respect those feelings.
It was just that she
didn't give a shit about them right that minute.

She called Hess.

No answer, so she left a
message—nothing urgent, just wanted to talk, call if you want. She wondered if
he was out getting pounded at the Wedge or maybe having another treatment.
What a strange feeling to be him, she thought, to have almost seven decades of
your life gone and maybe one left if you were completely lucky, but to be
unsure if you'd see another year.

She wondered how come he
had gotten married and divorced so many times. Why he never had children. Why
he came back to work on something like the Purse Snatcher. Hess was interesting
to think about because he was so different from herself. It was funny that
he'd told her she'd have to feel what others felt and think what others thought
in order to get ahead in the department, in life itself. Maybe she could try to
feel like him.

It probably wouldn't be
that hard because Hess was so large and simple. Of course, Mike McNally was
large and simple too, until you got to know him. Then he seemed to grow small
and hectic as a five-year-old at his own birthday party: me, me, me. She
actually missed Mike right now, missed some of the casual hours. A guy who
talked all the time made the hours seem longer. That was good. She missed his
profile and the blue light on his cheeks when he was watching TV. And all the
sweaty athletics in bed, well, she missed them too, although they made her feel
things she wasn't in favor of feeling.

But she wasn't about to
talk to him every single night, be his current steady woman, baby-sit his
resentful kid, get engaged or even
talk
about marriage. So, she broke it
all off rather than just part of it—which part?—and that was enough to loose
the dogs of hell on her. Mike's dogs. Mike's Truth Box. The hardest part of the
whole miserable thing was the way Mike attacked her for being closed and cold
and controlling, and apparently blabbing such things to everyone else, thus
the remark in the cafeteria regarding her sexual preference. Just thinking
about it made her face flush with anger.

The phone rang and it
was Hess.

"I was thinking about
you earlier," she said. "And I wanted to know
if...
well, I wanted to
know
...
how you're doing with this morning."

"I'm hoping for
prints off the interior."

"Well, I am too. What
I meant, though, was if you were doing okay now, after seeing that."

"It got me. I
remembered cleaning deer up in Idaho. The way the guts kind of stick together
and fall out in one big mass. Hardly any blood. And I thought that was one
awful thing to do to that girl."

"Six, Hess.
We're looking at six now."

"I know. I
just...
it really makes you wonder where
these guys come from. It's just pure meanness."

"Where
do
they come from, Hess?"

"I think they're born
evil. That's not a popular notion these days but I believe it."

"They say these
monsters are created, not born."

"I'm just disagreeing
is all. I don't understand a guy who kidnaps and kills a woman, keeps her
carcass but takes the time to do what he did with that purse. Again and again.

What do you call that, besides just plain evil?"

She thought. "It
doesn't matter, really. For us."

"No, it
doesn't."

"It's
interesting to think about, though."