Authors: Stephen Gallagher
I picked up one of the flat stones that had once been a part of the wall, and hefted it from hand to hand. Michaels shifted his weight from one foot to the other, still listening, still unable to relax.
I said, 'Point number two, he's not very bright. What he can do makes him look awesome, but stop for a minute and look how he uses it. He says he's been around for ever, and where does it lead him? To the Paradise Motel in the Deuce, low-life all the way. He ought to be living like a king, but he can't handle or hang onto money. Even when I thought I'd found his weakness and wiped him out he could have slipped away and broken the trail for good, but instead he comes back screaming and pointing the finger at me like some outraged old prima donna. It occurred to me that he probably isn't the only one of his kind, but the rest of them are smart enough never to be seen. They don't rip up children and they don't make waves — they just keep on surviving and probably do pretty well. So perhaps this one's just the visible rogue of an invisible species, I don't know. What I
do
know is that essentially he's a loser, and he
can
be stopped.'
'So,' Michaels said, 'what's our lever?'
'I've been thinking about the way he works. I mean, the way he's put together. The quickest way to release him is just to kill the body that he's in. I've seen him do it without, but it takes concentration. Give him a bang on the bead or knock him unconscious, and it messes him up enough to keep him in one place for a while; that's how come he couldn't escape a beating when he was Mercado, and how I was able to hold onto him when he was Woods. The point is that he has to have another body to go to, and fast. Without that he'll just piss away into nothing.'
'You sure?'
'I saw the look on his face when he thought it was coming. I'm sure of it, all right. It would have worked, too, if he hadn't got lucky in a hospital Emergency Room just a couple of blocks away. But I'll tell you something else. I don't think he realises it, but deep-down it's what he wants.'
'How do you figure that?'
I turned the stone over in my hand. No Indian writing on it. 'He's old, but he's not wise. He's constantly on the run. He's so jaded that he uses child-murder like other people use hard drugs. And all that he has to look forward to is a life everlasting in the Paradise Motel.'
'You're saying that be actually wants to die?'
'I'm saying that he can't handle the idea, because dying's something that only happens to other people. But he waited for me on the morning after I'd made him, and he opened up when he could have walked away. He says he doesn't know why he let me get so near, but I do. I think he's chosen me. And one way or another, I intend to track him down and deliver.'
'Just about what I was afraid of,' Michaels said. 'Sorry, Alex. You got closer than anybody.' And be drew his revolver and fired at me with a sudden blast that shook the canyon.
He was faster than I'd been expecting, but he obviously wasn't used to the weight of the gun and the shot went wide by a couple of feet. I threw the rock as hard as I could, slamming in just under the breastbone. His reaction was way out of proportion to the severity of the blow, and I knew then that I'd made a right guess; I didn't wait around to watch the after-effects, but rolled back over and into the shelter of the low wall as he folded. I didn't want to stay around and give him a second try at me.
I scrambled, along in the shelter of the wall, getting right out of the pueblo and into the canyon before he could recover. He came out shooting, but I could tell from the sound that he didn't know which way I'd gone. By then I was safely into a crack in the canyon wall, and could even risk a look out through the bushes without being seen; he'd wasted three shots, and was standing by the ruined doorway with his free hand clutching at his stomach as if he was afraid that it might split and let everything come spilling out.
Obviously, his belly was still bruised and sore from the killer-blow that had stopped Michaels' heart; I didn't see how else the body of a child could have accomplished it. He must have been waiting inside the massacre house for the first policeman to come along, ready to cry out and draw him in alone; and then, what better guise than that of total innocence to get close enough to deliver the death-stroke? Michaels hadn't had a chance, he'd walked straight into it. His lack of concentration, his inattention to the job over the last couple of days — they weren't symptoms of an emotional reaction, they were his cover for the fact that he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing for most of the time. And all to one purpose — to find out how vulnerable he really was, to find out how much I knew.
And I'd told him now, hadn't I?
As long as he was in Michaels' body, he should have given himself some practice with Michaels' gun; if he'd been a little more expert, then I'd have been dessert for the pueblo flies. But like I'd said to him, in some ways he obviously wasn't too bright.
Now he was walking away from me, scanning the canyon floor for signs of where I might have gone. He wasn't bothering to keep to cover. I was a better shot than him, and could have put four into his back before he hit the ground... but where would it have got me, in the long run?
And there were some things I wanted to know.
Almost at the turn of the canyon, he seemed to give up and look all around him.
'Alex,' he called out, 'this is stupid. Can't we talk?'
His voice, raised as it was, echoed from the canyon sides and came back at me from three different directions at once. Would the trick work both ways? I decided to give it a try. I could always drop him, if he zeroed in on me. After coming so far, there was no point in worrying about adding to his annoyance. I'd simply increase my own personal body count and the chances of a final reckoning, that was all.
So I called back, 'I thought that was what we were doing.'
It seemed to work. His head swung around, but he hadn't placed me. It was strange to watch. This was the first time I'd seen him as someone that I already knew. It wasn't as if Michaels had died; but it certainly wasn't as if he lived, either.
He said, 'So I flew off the handle. Is that so surprising, after some of the things you said? Come on out.'
'I'm fine here.'
'It's your chance to ask me about your friend's child.'
Ah.
There was his hold over me, and he knew it. I said, 'What about her?'
'She's safe. I haven't done a thing to her. Can you believe that?'
'I can believe anything.' I didn't believe him. 'But what's the catch?'
I saw him grin. He was talking to the wall; I don't know if he was aiming toward some point where he imagined me to be, or what. He said, 'No catch, just a deal. You leave me alone, I'll leave her alone. How does that sound?'
'Sounds as if...' I began, and was immediately drowned out as he brought up the gun and fired three rocketingly loud shots into a bush that was a good fifty feet away from me.
I paused for the echoes to die down, and then went on, 'Sounds as if you don't plan to let her go.'
He was unfazed by his failure. 'Come on,' he said. 'Put yourself in my position. Would you?'
I thought it over. Georgie alive and unhurt was about the only thing in the world that could be guaranteed to keep me at bay. Could I credit him with enough intelligence to have realised the fact all by himself? I supposed that I'd have to. After all, overplaying his lack of mental agility could be even more dangerous than failing to perceive it in the first place.
I said, 'So, where are my guarantees?'
'Oh,' he said, 'don't worry, I don't expect you to trust me. I'll call you at your house tomorrow, before your shift. I'll let you talk to her. You can ask her one question, something that I couldn't know, and that's all you ask her because I'll be listening. No traps or traces, Alex, or she'll suffer. Can we agree on that?'
I took a deep breath before replying. 'Yes,' I said.
'Good.' He sounded as if he was pleased with the conclusion of a neat piece of business. He returned the gun to its holster, dusted off his hands, and straightened his shirt. Then, passing close by my hiding place — I didn't breathe or move — he walked back to the rough scramble-slope by which we'd first entered the canyon.
At the top, he paused and looked back; the sky behind him was almost too bright to look at. A few loose stones were still sliding down as he said, 'By the way. The child stays safe, but the show goes on. Enjoy it, Alex. It's your benefit performance.'
When I got to the canyon rim and cautiously put my head up, I was half-expecting to find him waiting; but he was already most of the way back to his car, a tiny figure on that vast plain. There was something in the way that he was walking that I now recognised, as if he was no longer bothering to disguise it. What I saw was Woods's walk, cocky and self-assured and probably pre-dating Woods by some considerable time.
In his place, I'd have stayed around a while longer and made the most of my advantage. But it occurred to me then, thinking over that parting shot about a 'benefit performance', that I was really the only audience that he had. As long as Georgie lived, my hands would be tied... and I'd be able to do nothing other than watch his parade of terror as he made the most of the spotlight after living in darkness.
And I still knew enough to be a threat to him, in the end. So in his eyes, the show could only have one logical final act. We'd bargained and he'd deferred it for a while, that was all.
It was only when I saw the plume of dust that marked his car's exit from the desert that I emerged all the way out of the canyon.
I had some walking to do.
PART THREE
Life in Darkness
TWENTY
I suppose that I ought to have waited at least until the sun had dropped behind the mountains, but I didn't. I was remembering the way that Woods had struck out from the dirt road on foot with such confidence, his long experience obviously telling him the shortest way back, and I was planning to take the same line. Then, if darkness should fall, I'd at least have the sky-glow of the city to follow. I've never been able to get the hang of this business of navigating by the stars. Every direction always looks the same to me.
I'd done worse. I'd done this kind of thing at double-time and with a full pack; the trick was in taking it steady and staying cool on the inside. Within ten minutes I was back at the grave site, picturing what I'd seen through the scope lens and looking for a piece of horizon that matched the background. At a guess, Woods had been striking out towards the Beeline Highway when my rifle bullet had rearranged his hairstyle.
In less than an hour I came to a small road that saw more regular use, a fact betrayed by the bundles of tumbled rags and mincemeat that were the leftovers of last night's roadrunners. I was doing fine, but dehydration was starting to make me feel light-headed. I followed the road south, and another half-hour brought me the sounds of the distant highway; but before that, only a quarter of a mile ahead, I could see a half-finished white adobe structure with a couple of trucks outside it. A big sign on the front said that the building was going to be an Indian craft center when it opened sometime next year, but I didn't plan to wait. I walked in and said hi, and nearly frightened the crap out of a big long-haired guy up a ladder.
It was unbelievably cool and dark inside those three-foot walls, or at least it seemed that way to me. There were five of them working, all Indians and all curious to know how a scruffy and sweat-stained cop came to be strolling in out of the desert haze. I told them some story about how the electrics on my patrol car had died and taken the radio out, so it had been walk or else just sit around hoping that someone might miss me. They had a standpipe for water but it wasn't fit for drinking, so they gave me some sweet juice from their coolbox and then one of them drove me back to Sky Harbor in the smaller of the two trucks. He dropped me in the yard, and I went into the locker room through the side-door so nobody would see the state I was in; once inside I stripped off and got straight into the shower. About half of it got onto me, the rest I think I drank.
These immediate problems had been keeping my mind off my longer-term troubles, but now these were starting to reassert themselves. It all came down to one simple fact; that if he truly had Georgie and she was still alive, not just another of his inert puppets, then my hands were tied. He had absolute leverage, and I had nothing.
The shift wasn't over, but I knew that my duties had been covered and I didn't feel in much of a fit state to go out again; the same was doubly true of my uniform, and my spare wasn't at the station. Everything considered, I was persuaded that I ought to keep my head down and go home. The skin on my forearms and in the V just under my collarbone was starting to itch and burn, and I wanted to get some Solarcaine onto it.
Having sneaked out of the station, I was then faced with the prospect of sneaking back into my own house because one or both of Loretta's in-laws were moving around in the kitchen of the house next door. I sat out in the car for a while. I handled awkward situations every day in my job, so why was I so reluctant to face up to this one? Because it was so close to home, I supposed.
I got out of the car and climbed the wooden steps to Loretta's door.
It was the man, Heilbron, who answered. 'Yes?' he said, and he somehow seemed eager and distracted at the same time. He was probably somewhere in his sixties, well-worn and friendly-looking and not made for misery. He also looked as if he'd lost weight some time over the last couple of years, and he hadn't yet grown used to it.
I said, 'I'm sorry if I'm disturbing you. I live next door. I was wondering how Loretta was coming along.'
'Would you be Alex?'
'That's me. Is she talking again, now?'
'On and off. Can I ask you to come in for a minute, Alex? There's so much we don't understand, here.'
He stepped aside to allow me in, and I knew that I couldn't refuse. 'I don't know that I can throw much light,' I said, but he gestured towards the inside. It was an invitation, not a demand.
'Please,' he said, so I went on through.
They'd got the place a lot neater than Loretta had ever been able to manage, but it was a dead and unlived-in kind of neatness that wasn't exactly pleasing to see. The only mess was over on the table, where a heap of Georgie's schoolbooks and drawing-pads had been stacked up for careful examination as if by a valuer. Their son's photograph, I noticed, had been brought out of the bedroom and put in a more prominent place over by the stereo.
Heilbron waved me towards a chair, and started opening cupboard doors. I was remembering the lies that I'd told to Loretta in the hospital — white lies, I'd considered them then — and was wondering if they were going to return to accuse me now.
'They say you were actually with her,' he said, rummaging and not finding what he was looking for. I stood by the chair, unable to bring myself to sit. He seemed to be alone in the house.
'Not when it happened,' I said, 'but up to a couple of hours before.'
'So you're as much in the dark as the rest of us?'
'I don't know where Georgie is,' I said. 'If I did, I wouldn't be wasting time around here.'
He muttered something, moved on to the next cupboard. 'I've been waiting here in case the phone should ring,' he said. 'If there's any kind of news, I don't want to miss it. Clara's staying at the hospital for most of the time.'
'What are the doctors saying now?'
'Her neck was broken, but the spinal cord's still in one piece so they don't think she's going to be paralysed. I can't believe how lucky she's been. They say that if somebody untrained had tried to pull her out of the wreck, that would have been the end of it. The main danger now is this haemorrhage business.'
I said, fishing cautiously, 'Have they got any ideas at all about Georgie?'
He gave up on the cupboards, and started on the drawers. 'Not a one,' he said. 'As many theories as you like, but nothing solid. I mean, if somebody's kidnapped her for ransom or something like that, I don't know what I'm going to do... I'm retired, I'm not worth much.' With a sudden, impatient gesture, he slammed shut the drawer that he'd been looking through. 'Damn it, Alex,' he said.
'What's wrong?'
He turned to me, obviously out at the end of his line.
He said, 'Have you
any
idea where Loretta keeps her booze?'
I took him through into the kitchen, and showed him the cardboard box with the bottles in it that she kept behind the spin-dryer. I could see that he desperately wanted to talk to somebody, and I felt guilty because I knew that I couldn't give him the information that would reassure him. He'd want to take it to the police, the police would treat it as a normal kidnap, and Woods, Winter, or whatever he was calling himself now, would simply kill Georgie and change his face and move on.
He rinsed, out a couple of glasses at the sink, and we took a half-full bottle of scotch over to the table where the schoolbooks were. We sat, he poured.
He said, 'I gather the two of you are fairly close.'
'It was moving that way,' I said cautiously, uncomfortably aware of the framed picture behind me.
Heilbron said, 'You're not going to hurt my feelings if you say yes. We're all grown-ups here.'
'I know,' I said.
'We think of her like our own daughter. I only wish we could see her more, but... you can't stifle kids. You can't live on top of them, looking over their shoulder all the time. You understand me?'
'I certainly do.'
'But then, of course, it means we don't see Georgie so often... and kids of that age, you blink and they've got bigger... where
is
she, Alex? Who took her?'
I picked up one of the schoolbooks and turned it over in my hands. 'Hard to say,' I said.
'I drove out to where it happened. Went over every inch and looked in every culvert, just in case she might have been thrown out and could still be lying there. I don't understand it. I don't understand a single thing about it.'
He topped-up our glasses, and I explained the department's missing-persons procedure and the extra measures that we took whenever a child was involved. I was only half-listening to myself, knowing that I was covering up, but Heilbron was taking it all in like a starving dog with its eyes on a handful of biscuits. I could feel the truth like a bubble inside me, trembling and threatening to burst, and I had to leave my glass untouched because already I could feel the booze etching away at the edges of my will. It would be so easy to let go and tell. But they say that it's the same kind of thing with drowning.
Loretta, I learned, now remembered nothing of the accident or of our conversation in the hospital recovery room, probably as a result of the post-operative trauma involved in her second bout of emergency treatment. I also learned a lot about the insurance business, which was the field that Heilbron had worked in before he'd retired.
Finally I said, 'I have to go.'
'I know,' Heilbron said, 'I'm sorry. I've been talking too much.'
'No, it isn't that.'
'I've appreciated you being here. I want you to know something, Alex.'
I pushed away the drawing book that I'd been leafing through, filled with colored-in pictures of animals and birds, and said, 'What?'
'You're not the dull person you seem to think you are. You're reliable, but that's something completely different. I want you to think about that.'
'I will,' I promised.
'You sure you won't have one more drink with me?'
'I'd really like to,' I said, standing and pushing the chair back. 'But I have to take an important call in the morning.'
If only you knew
, I thought as I crossed the narrow patch of ground to my own place.