The Boys from Santa Cruz (24 page)

Next thing I know, I’m lying on my back, looking up into a heat-wavy blue sky streaked with oily brown smoke. Scorched flakes spin dizzily through the superheated air, and ashes pile in scalloped mounds atop the fence posts and the bushes and the domed roofs of the cars in the parking lot, transforming the landscape into a mute, gray statuary garden.

It’s not so bad at first, this snowstorm from hell. A peaceful silence reigns momentarily. Then suddenly, as on that long-ago summer morning, my hearing returns. Crackling flames, clanging bells, ululating car alarms, anguished screams. It occurs to me that I’d better get the hell out of there before the whole fucking building comes crashing down on top of me. But when I try to crawl away, I realize my left ankle is firmly pinned beneath the heavy, steel-plated Alarm Will Sound fire door, which had been blown clear off its hinges.

“Help! Somebody help me! Somebody get this thing offa me!” Another voice joins the trapped and panicked chorus: mine. I’ve never been so scared or screamed so loud in my entire life, and yet I can barely hear myself. Sitting up, I see that I’m lying only a few feet from the burning building. A brick wall rises straight over me, blocking out half the sky. The ashes are falling thick and fast. I can feel the heat coming through the bricks. I grab my trapped leg in both hands and try to yank it out from under the un-budgeable weight. The pain is so intense that I lose consciousness momentarily.

When I come to again, a shambling figure looms over me, his face in shadow, his round-shouldered trunk silhouetted against the ash gray sky. I recognize him after a second or two: it’s Chuckles, the drooler whose mannerisms I copied when I was first coming out from under chemical restraint.

“Help me, please?” I plead.

His long arms swing loosely at his sides as he hunkers down beside me. “Heh?”

Fortunately, I am fluent in the thick-tongued dialect of the chemically restrained. “That’s right, help. I need you to help me lift this door off my leg.”

His eyes are deep-set, dark, and puzzled. Then comprehension dawns and they light up with an almost animal intelligence. Squatting low like a weight lifter, he grabs the edge of the door in both hands. Straining upward with his arms extended on either side of his thighs, he manages to raise the bulky slab high enough for me to haul my leg out from under. Quite a feat for a drooler.

After setting the door down again, Chuckles hunkers next to me, slings my left arm over his shoulder, and helps me to my feet. Leaning together with our arms draped across one another’s shoulders, half-blinded by falling ash, the two of us join the procession of scorched and bleeding stragglers staggering away from the doomed building, past the staff parking lot, and into the uncertain shelter of the trees.

Just as we reach the woods there’s a deafening roar behind us, loud as a jetliner. A concussive blast of air smacks into us with the force of a monster wave breaking, and knocks us apart. I hit the ground and lie there stunned for a few seconds. When I look back, the hospital is no longer there. In its place is a roiling pillar of smoke and ash three stories high.

Chuckles is nowhere to be seen. Using a broken tree branch to push myself up, I climb to my feet just in time to see a burning figure emerge from the smoking ruins, lurching drunkenly, arms outstretched, hair and clothes engulfed. Whoever it is gets a lot farther than I’d have predicted he would, making it almost to the tree line before he collapses.

Maybe I’m still in shock, maybe I’m not. All I know is how I feel, and how I feel is sharp and focused, like the calm at the center of the storm. I limp forward, leaning on the forked branch to keep the weight off my injured ankle. I kneel by the side of the fallen man, who’s now a smoldering corpse, and scoop loose dirt on top of him until the little dancing fairy-flames have died down. Then I start going through his pockets, taking care not to scorch my fingers. The lightly charred wallet in the inside jacket pocket belongs to Bernard J. Ruhr; it says “Staff Psychologist” on his hospital ID card. In another pocket is a roll of bills in a gold, paper-clip-shaped money clip, and a set of car keys for a BMW.

I’m starting to hear sirens now. Someone is shouting garbled commands through what sounds like a megaphone. Quickly I pocket the wallet and
keys. Limping like Long John Silver on my crooked crutch, under the cover of the hovering cloud of ash and smoke, I head straight for the staff parking lot, where I spy a smoke-and-ash-begrimed dark blue BMW parked in front of a sign reading
MD PARKING ONLY
!!!
ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED
!!!

The key fits; the engine turns over smoothly. With the headlights and windshield wipers turned on, I drive slowly through the murky parking lot, feeling a little like a character in one of those postapocalypse science fiction movies.

And what happens next won’t surprise anybody who’s ever seen one of those movies: just as I’m driving out of the parking lot, a shambling figure emerges suddenly from the gloom and steps in front of the car, waving its arms.

I jam on the brakes, and the sloping hood of the Beemer shudders to a stop only inches from my recent savior, Chuckles. His pleading monkey eyes meet mine through the dingy, ash-smeared windshield.
Please,
they seem to be saying,
please take me with you,
and for some reason I’ll never understand, I find myself leaning across the front seat and throwing open the passenger door.

“Climb in,” I shout, over the crackling of the flames, the howling of the sirens, and the terrible shrieking of the burned and dying.

HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCERRERE VITAE
, read the sign above the door to the autopsy room of the Marshall County morgue: Here is where death rejoices to help the living.

Pender, having intentionally skipped breakfast, arrived shortly after 6:00
A.M
. and rapped on the frosted glass pane. The diener, a tall black man in surgical greens, hurried over to intercept him—the autopsy was already under way. “It’s a nasty one,” he warned Pender. “You might want to wait outside.”

“Hey, this isn’t my first rodeo,” Pender assured him, buttoning his sport jacket to the neck and turning up his collar against the arctic chill of the Marshall County morgue.

“If you say so. Here, put this under your nose—a little dab’ll do ya.” He unscrewed the top of a jar of Vicks VapoRub. Pender smeared a little across his upper lip. His eyes were watering as he approached the slab upon which the dreadful corpse had been laid out. Its skin was greenish black, but that was a function of decay—it could have been any race or ethnicity. The chest had already been opened with a Y-shaped incision, the heart and lungs removed.

“Dr. Flemm?”

“Yes?” The Marshall County medical examiner was short and round. Above his surgical mask he wore thick-lensed spectacles with heavy black frames. Beneath his green paper cap he was as bald as Pender.

“Special Agent Pender, FBI. I spoke to you this morning about the fingerprints.”

“Ah yes, the fingerprints.” Flemm turned the corpse’s right hand palm up. Pender, who was on the opposite side of the table, started to lean across the corpse, which turned out to be a mistake—not even the pungent odor of the Vicks could mask the stench. He walked around to Flemm’s side of the table. Supporting the corpse’s forearm and elbow, Flemm raised the arm to give Pender a closer look. “What do you think? Not bad after a week or two in damp ground, eh?”

The fingertips were the same greenish black as the rest of the body, but the ridges and whorls were still discernible. “Can they be lifted?” asked Pender.

“If we glove him.” Flemm selected a simple surgical scalpel from the tray of medieval-looking instruments, scissors, needles, chisels, forceps, and saws, on the cloth-draped table next to him. He cut a circular incision around the right wrist, then carefully worked the skin free until it slipped off the hand as neatly as if it had been a glove.

Pender’s stomach lurched as Flemm laid the ghastly “glove” on a drawerlike extension he’d pulled out from the side of the table, and severed each of the fingertips neatly at the first joint. Then he sprayed the fingertips with a drying agent while his diener filled a shallow glass saucer with black ink, viscous from the cold of the autopsy room, and microwaved it for several seconds.

When the fingertip skin was dry enough and the ink fluid enough, Flemm removed his surgical gloves and fit a small latex finger-cot over his forefinger, then slipped the skin fingertips over the latex. Meanwhile the diener had laid out a fingerprint card on the stainless-steel counter. Gingerly, Flemm dipped his forefinger into the saucer, shook off the excess ink, then gently pressed his double-gloved fingertip against the card and rocked it delicately from side to side.

Peering over Flemm’s shoulder, Pender whistled low in appreciation. “Perfect,” he exclaimed. “Absolutely perfect.”

“And only nine more to go,” said Dr. Flemm, beaming.

April 18

To tell the truth (and why would I lie to you, my own brand-new, full-sized dear diary), I could have thought this thing out a little better. Or maybe I didn’t really believe I was going to make it. I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t come up lucky on a couple of counts, the first of which was that it had been my left ankle that was injured, so driving a car with an automatic was not a major problem.

The most crucial piece of luck was that Murphy’s barn was still standing. Or at least leaning. Half of it, anyway. A landslide had taken out the rear half of the building, hayloft and all, but the front was still intact, jutting out from the base of the landslide.

More luck: Rudy’s untouched van was parked right where I’d left it ten years ago, inside the barn, facing the rear, with the front bumper only inches from the edge of the landslide. The money was still there, too, stuffed behind the false walls and floor along with two kilos of vacuum-sealed Humboldt County wacky weed.

Unfortunately, dear diary, you can’t live on money and weed alone. So after I’d cleaned the two of us up as best I could without water, and exchanged our ash-smeared clothes for clean but creased and musty-smelling jeans and shirts from Rudy’s suitcase, we drove back to the giant Wal-Mart outside Marshall City to stock up. I figured it would be safe enough, that no one would be looking for us so soon after the fire, and I was right.

We did get some curious stares, what with me tootling around in the electric scooter (I couldn’t put any weight on my left ankle) and Chuckles lumbering along beside me pushing two shopping carts. But by the time we left, with the trunk and backseat of the Beemer stuffed with food, clothing, medical supplies, including a pair of crutches for yours truly, camping equipment, etc., etc., all paid for in cash, we were provisioned for a good long siege.

It was full dark by the time we got back to Murphy’s farm. Chuckles got out and opened the sliding barn door. I drove the Beemer inside and parked it next to the van, which left us a living space around fifteen feet wide and twenty feet deep. For supper we ate bologna sandwiches by lantern light, then crawled into our new sleeping bags. Chuckles dropped off while I was writing yesterday’s entry, and I followed him into dreamland an hour or so later.

And that, dire deary, was about the extent of my good luck. When I woke up this morning, my left ankle resembled an eggplant in both size and color, and was throbbing painfully. With the aid of my new crutches I went outside to take a leak, and when I got back Chuckles was sitting up in his sleeping bag, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth while muttering unintelligibly under his breath.

That was twelve hours ago, and guess what, he’s still there, rocking and muttering. The only thing that’s changed is that now he seems to be aware of my presence: every once in a while he looks over at me and glowers. So
even though I’m pretty sure that he’s only detoxing, I’m glad I’ve got Rudy’s .38 automatic in my sleeping bag with me. My plan, as soon as I finish this entry, is to turn off the flashlight and pretend to close my eyes. If he makes a move toward me, I’ll shoot him dead. If not, I’ll try to get some sleep, and hope my ankle will start to show some improvement in the morning.

Because I didn’t go to all this trouble just to sit around here watching Chuckles drool. I’ve got more important things to do, like driving back down to Santa Cruz to pay a little call on my grandparents. And won’t they be surprised to see me! I can hardly wait to see the expression on their dear old faces.

Pender found Skip sitting on the edge of his hospital bed dressed in a paper-thin seersucker robe over an open-arsed hospital gown. “Hey there, Magnum, P.I.! How’s it going?”

“Not bad, G-man, not bad at all. I just talked the doctor into cutting me loose. The problem is, they seem to have burned everything but my wallet and my shoes.”

Pender winked. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

Twenty minutes later, Skip left the hospital wearing a pair of ludicrously oversize blue-and-green plaid golf pants, a loosely draped, periwinkle-colored polo shirt, and a pair of ankle-high pink socks. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” he told Pender as they drove away in Pender’s dusty rental car, “but would you mind stopping off at the first clothing store we come to?”

“Right after I get this to the sheriff’s station,” said Pender, waving the card with the dead man’s fingerprints. “Cal-ID’s promised to give it crash priority.” Cal-ID was the computer network that linked population centers all over the state with the main fingerprint database in Sacramento.

Skip told Pender he’d wait in the car while Pender dropped off the card and conferred briefly with Sheriff Lisle. But when they drove off again, instead of heading back into town to find a clothing or department store, Pender aimed the Toyota in the opposite direction. “They found something out at the site that the crime scene tech thinks might interest us.”