The Orange Curtain (26 page)

In his mother’s huge oversoft bed, he slept fitfully, but without his usual dreams, all those repeating motifs that he knew so well—the tidal flood rising slowly across some familiar town, the misplaced implement that he needed desperately, the circle of faces glaring at some mistake he couldn’t have anticipated. Instead of these, he was being surrounded, approached by a simple cloud of pure darkness. His usual nightmares had always filled him with dread, but their extinction now seemed like an even more dire punishment. The darkness billowed closer, a palpable thing, squid ink on the air. And there was something inside that velvety murk, stirring, just waiting to spring at him.

He must have slept, because he woke with a jolt. It was still night and Billy Gudger stood in front of him, shaking his head darkly.

“It makes me too nervous,” he explained. He held the pistol a-dangle from his hand, half forgotten.

Jack Liffey wasn’t quite sure what the young man meant, but he had a bad feeling.

“It’s too dangerous here.”

He noticed that his foot was free of the sofa, though it was still cuffed to Tien, and he was barefoot now. He was astonished that Billy Gudger had got his shoes and socks off without waking him.

“Get her up now.” He backed a few feet away while Jack Liffey nudged Tien Joubert awake. Her eyes came open with a start, and there was no recognition there for a moment, just a wild animal at bay, and then he could sense her awareness slowly filling up behind the blank black eyes like a warm liquid, and she made soft noises that could have meant anything.

“Help each other stand up.”

Someone on the TV was giving advice on how to screw in a wall bracket to hold a curtain valance. The rain seemed to have stopped, because all he could hear from outside was the slow metallic drip in the downspout. By leaning forward they both managed to stand up, and Jack Liffey got a glance at an old Rainier Beer clock that said it was 3:45. He noticed that she was barefoot, too. For some reason he wasn’t quite as frightened as he had been, though he had no illusions about what was happening. Jack Liffey was quite focused: their lives were in his hands now and he had to stay absolutely alert for the chance. There might never be an opening, but if there was, it would come and go quickly, and he had to take it without hesitation.

The same thought must have gone through Billy Gudger’s mind for he kept his distance, and he’d taken to clutching the pistol against his chest, like a precious toy that might be snatched away by a bully.

“This way.”

He took them through the kitchen, past the baleful freezer chest, and out onto the stoop. The wood was splintery and cold underfoot. The VW had been moved to the driveway, parked at the path that led from the door, and Jack Liffey could hear wind swishing in some huge dangly eucalyptus trees, an old farm windbreak at the side of the lot. The sky was dark and lumpy from horizon to horizon and there was enough moisture in the air for him to feel scattered pricklings, even drops. There was more rain coming. He was alert moment to moment, but there was no opportunity to do anything. Billy Gudger lowered the rear seat and hooked it flat and then forced them to get in and lie down on their faces in an unnatural tangle of limbs.

He heard the door slam and cranked his neck around to see the back of Billy’s head, but they were cramped by the car’s geometry and Tien was between him and the front seat so he could find nothing whatever that he could do with his right leg still fixed to her left and their arms manacled behind their backs. There was a screech like a finger on a blackboard, and another, and he craned up to see that the passenger-side wiper was missing and the metal arm was carving an arc into the windshield glass. 

Jack Liffey held his head up as long as he could, watching as the car came out of the drive and turned left, then he let it droop and rest. Tien Joubert was trying to offer him some short message over and over near his ear, four or five words, but he couldn’t make it out no matter how he tried to fit logical words to it.
Dum-ditty-dum, ditty-ditty-dum, dum-dum
. At the same time there was the screech-screech of the wiper scoring the glass, and then he could hear the rain picking up again on the roof. The young man drove badly, clutching and jamming the shift lever at the wrong shift points and sending the car into little lunges and jolts as it did its best to adjust to his shifts.

Dum-ditty-dum, ditty-ditty-dum, dum-dum.

Billy Gudger turned on the radio, an all-news station offering a cute story about an unauthorized delivery of 45 pizzas to the Orange County central jail, and Tien Joubert gave up on her message. Soon the radio snapped off again. The car rocked to the side in what was probably a gust of wind.

“Local news is so bad,” Billy Gudger offered over his shoulder, as if trying hard to entertain a date. “They should be ashamed.”

He certainly seemed to have compartmented off what he was doing. Jack Liffey wished he could talk to him to try working him around, but there was nothing much he could do with grunts and moans. He scraped his mouth again and again against the rough carpet under him but the tape wouldn’t budge. When he raised his head again, he thought they were heading along Chapman toward the hills and that made him a little sick to his stomach. The very hills where all the bodies had been found, including Phuong’s. He had seen no traffic at all on the shiny streets, and reminded himself it was after 4 A.M. now. A corner with two well-lighted but deserted gas stations and then a few dark businesses petering out to the beginning of the foothills and soon the only light was their own headlights, even that hardly showing up on the wet streets that were reflecting almost all of the light forward. The wiper still screeched on and on in its insane rhythm.

“Did you know that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo?” Billy Gudger informed them. “No one knows why. It’s strange.”

Yes, it was strange, Jack Liffey thought, but he had no free mental capacity for thinking about a duck’s quack. In a few minutes, he craned his neck up again and saw a lighted compound in the distance behind a chain link fence with a lot of earth movers and graders. They were passing over the torn up landscape where the new toll road was coming through, and he realized that they were following exactly the route he had taken to talk to Philip Marlowe. He supposed there was something ironic in that, but thinking about irony wasn’t very fruitful.

The off-side tires hit gravel and Billy Gudger yanked on the wheel to correct. “Oops,” he announced after the car had settled back onto the pavement. “I’m not a very great driver, I guess.”

The engine gave a little hitch now and then, but that had been a characteristic of the carburetion on his own old VW, too, and a breakdown out here was too much to hope for. Tien Joubert rested against his arm passively, seemingly given up to her fate. In a few minutes there was a real jolt and then the car carried on hammering on its springs and they’d obviously come off onto a dirt road. When Jack Liffey looked he could see nothing at all to the side of the car, so he craned his neck to the front and saw headlights picking out a curving fire trail. The hillsides off the trail were a little less dark than the sky and, for just an instant, he saw the witchy gnarled shape of a live oak.

“I’m sure glad they graded this road recently.”

For quite some time, Jack Liffey could feel the car climbing and descending and winding along the rough road in noisy second gear, and he didn’t let himself think about death. He knew, with their high clearance and so much weight over the drive wheels, VWs were pretty good at bad roads, and he couldn’t count on getting bogged down. All he could do was stay alert to every fact he could gather in, approximately where he was, the sounds, the time—at least 4:15 now—the weather, and the psychological tenor of Billy Gudger. He kept himself hanging on the knife-edge, lit by the searchlight of his intense concentration, waiting for the most minute fault line in their fate.

“Hey, this looks pretty good.”

The car came to a stop with a little gravelly skid, and Billy got out and yanked the seat forward. He backed away, holding the gun on the two of them, the whole strange tableau visible in the dome light.

“Come on out. It’s only drizzling.”

Jack Liffey wondered what on earth they were supposed to think this was all about—a little excursion to study plant life in the hills? But Billy Gudger probably wasn’t thinking rationally just then, and it may have taken his full attention to cordon off whatever was going on in his consciousness. Jack Liffey remembered that passive tense—“something had happened” to Billy Gudger’s mother. Something was almost certainly about to happen to them, too.

He delayed as long as he could, readjusting his leg to make it difficult for Tien to unfold herself, considering what he could do out there in the cold, damp, dangerous world. The headlights were still on, though the engine had stopped, and a gusty breeze was tearing past the car, driving shimmery curtains of drizzle before it. They were parked on a turnout off the dirt road, scarred by many tires and broken up by shallow pools of rainwater. It stopped abruptly at a low line-up of weed that seemed to indicate a dropoff into a canyon. It was hard to orient in the darkness.

Then they were both standing beside the car, his feet hurting on the sharp chilly ground, and Billy Gudger, who stood near the edge of the canyon, was watching them like a hawk 20 feet away. If there was going to be a crease in possibility, Jack Liffey knew with an abrupt chill of dread unlike anything he had ever known before, it had to be right about
now
, and he didn’t see one. Lightning flashed and gave him an instantaneous vision of the surroundings. There was indeed a canyon, and a hillside on the far side of the canyon maybe a hundred yards away, but it was impossible to know how deep the canyon was, or how steep the dropoff was past the weeds, but the rolling hills weren’t rocky and the far side didn’t seem all that steep.

“I want you to see something,” Billy Gudger said and beckoned.

Jack Liffey guided their steps away from the car, closer to the young man than Tien seemed to want, but not close enough to alarm him. He kept between them, and trended slightly toward the young man but turned his eyes to the ground as if all he was interested in was keeping his footing and avoiding sharp stones. A little turn, a misstep, as if avoiding a sharp rock. If only he could yell to her, he thought, but this inability to communicate was just another handicap they were forced to carry.

Surprise was the only thing he had. And if he didn’t get a sliver of opportunity, he would have to make one. At his closest approach to the young man, Jack Liffey hesitated, timing himself, waiting until both he and Tien had their weight just coming off the feet that were bound together, then he let all his fear and rage go and hurled himself all at once at Billy Gudger to butt him sprawling back. Then he turned and threw his body at Tien Joubert so together they fell into the weeds at the edge of the little plateau and he wrenched around and kicked out so they went over the raw edge. He tried to cry out at the freefall into the dark, but he couldn’t, and then they hit the slope and his shoulder and arm were scraped by a giant cheese grater. A gunshot flashed above them and another, echoing and rumbling in the hills like more thunder. They came to rest where the slope leveled off and she was up again even faster than he was and they highstepped further downhill the best they could in utter darkness with their feet lashed together. Their salvation would be if Billy Gudger lacked a flashlight. He’d never get the headlights pointed downhill.

Two more shots were squeezed off, but there was little danger from that now. He could spray the darkness all night and have little chance of hitting them. Jack Liffey tripped on a shrub and they fell again, and he tore a lot of skin off his right knee as the tumble turned into a bewildering muddle of limbs. He felt a sudden yank on his leg and then they seemed to hit bottom. A few inches of fizzy ice-cold water ran around and over them.

He lay still and caught his breath. Over the gurgling of the rain-creek he heard a plaintive wail, “Come back! I’m not going to hurt you!”

There was a delight at the absurdity of Billy Gudger’s wail, but even more at the sudden prospect of continued life, and Jack Liffey tried to laugh, which the gag turned into a choke and swallow. Tien Joubert lay stock still beside him, and he hoped she hadn’t been badly hurt. As he lay, he felt the rain grow heavier and he offered his thanks to the rain gods because the sound would cover any noises they made and probably drive the young man back into his car. Slowly he became aware of his body. Something had cut one of his bare feet and it hurt a lot. His knee was cut, too, and his right arm was on fire. He waited for his eyes to adjust but there was almost no improvement in the moonless overcast, many miles from city lights. All he could eventually make out was a patch of brighter cloud to what was probably the west, the underside lit a dull orange by city lights, and against that he could see the pure black of hills, and then he turned and gradually he made out a smaller pool of light above him, the headlights of the Volkswagen reflecting off a shrub. It was a lot closer than he wanted it to be.

“Nobody comes here!” he heard. Billy Gudger’s voice was shrill and desperate. “I’ll get you the minute it’s light!” Something hit the ground and skittered down the slope. Soon there were other impacts around him, in the dirt and the stream, and he realized the young man was hurling rocks down the ravine, some quite heavy judging from the thuds.

He nudged Tien and pressed his cheek against her face until he could feel her breathing. His clothes were torn and sopping wet now and one sleeve hung off his fiery arm like a rag, and now he started shuddering with the chill. There wasn’t enough light for him to see if Tien’s clothes were torn up, too, or if she was injured anywhere.

He sat up to try to get what bearings he could, then realized that a strange exercise in the geometry of the human body might just be possible, the geometry of two bodies actually, the Houdini maneuver of getting his cuffed hands around to his front. He stretched his arms to their full extent behind him and wriggled and got them at last under his buttocks, wincing with pain, and then it was a snap to worm backwards enough to get his linked hands up behind his knees. He thought it would be easy from there, but it wasn’t, and after a long fight with his bare feet he was almost resigned to spending the rest of a short life as a human cannonball. Pressing against Tien for leverage, he finally got the heel of the free foot bent back enough to catch onto the links between the handcuffs. He probably wouldn’t have made it with the shoe on, he knew he wasn’t all that limber, but he got the first foot over the barrier and then straightened his leg with a sigh. Now he only had to deal with the leg that was cuffed to Tien.