Valley of Lights (8 page)

I got behind the wheel of the jeep, and started the engine. Woods looked like an odd kind of passenger in the cuffs, but they kept him upright and made it look as if he was holding onto the roll bar for safety. At the first major street I turned east, heading for the edge of the city and the desert reservation beyond.

There was a sound from the seat beside me.

THIRTEEN

We were coming up to a simple turnoff, marked by nothing more elaborate than a broken stake with an old car wheel as its base; the sign that it had carried had long gone, and as we turned onto the nameless track I glanced at Woods. He was blinking, and literally didn't know what had hit him. This was as I'd hoped.

I said, helpfully, 'It's called a headache.'

He turned to look at me, his head moving like something on a stiff bearing. I could almost see the intelligence reassembling itself there, the scattered pieces rapidly coming together in a seamless fit.

'Clever, Alex,' he said, and his voice was dry and scratchy. 'Very clever. But as a technique, it's annoyance-value only,'

'Better than nothing at all,' I said.

The road went on into the roughest, poorest country. It was an unmade track, a bare strip of the wide desert plain running all the way out to where the mountains were like heaped stones on the horizon. To either side were cacti, prickly pear, salt bushes; we passed a desert fox which lay bundled at the roadside like an old shirt, days dead.

It wasn't a road that got heavy use, because it led almost nowhere. This was what made it ideal.

Woods said, 'Whatever you've got in mind, you're wasting your time.'

I glanced at him again. He was looking straight ahead, but that confident and irritatingly superior smile was back. He'd settled into the seat as far as the cuffs would allow, and in spite of his dusty clothes and his bruises and his messed-up hair he had the look of someone who was waiting to be entertained.

I said, 'You think so?'

And he said, 'Yeah, but don't stop. I can always use a good joke.'

'I bet you don't get many, in a life like yours.'

I seemed to have hit a nerve with that one, because he didn't reply. He made as if something had caught his interest over to the side, and turned away; I got a brief flash of the dropping of the mask, but I didn't see what was revealed underneath.

'Exactly what are you?' I said. 'Really?'

'I'm older than the desert,' be said tonelessly. 'I don't have a name.' When he turned to face front again the facade was back up, but now he was looking more serious. He said, 'Don't hate me for what I have to do, Alex.'

'What do you expect me to do? Like you for it?'

He shook his head slowly, looking out through the windshield but not focussing on the road ahead. 'I don't know why I let you get so close,' he said. 'No-one else ever has.'

Hearing him use my name like he had, it was like having somebody stroke my back with a dead snake; but I wanted to keep him talking and so I said to him, 'Answer me one thing. Tell me why you killed the child, And then tell me how many others you've done.'

'That's two things.'

'Come on, just between us. I know it isn't for food, because you threw up what you ate. Do you get something else out of it? Or is it just some kink?'

He turned to look at me then. He wasn't smiling, his eyes were dead; for one brief moment I was afraid that he'd pulled out and left me with a lifeless shell as a hostage, but then he spoke.

'He was young life,' he said.

His voice was remote, like something echoing up from a crack in the earth. Even in the desert heat, I felt the chill wind of the dead blow through me.

'So it's a kink,' I said.

His dead eyes seemed infinitely weary. 'What do you know about anything?' he said.

'I'm learning all the time.'

'Better start counting the time you have left. Because I've got to tell you, Alex, when your little game's finished then so are you. Nothing personal, it's just the cycle. The cycle's all that matters. Predator and prey. It's like a heartbeat, only your kind never hear it. That's the difference between us. That's why I'll always win, and you'll always lose.'

'But you
can
die,' I persisted.

'Anything can die. But I never will.'

There was silence for a while. Our dust trail now went back five miles or more, but the mountains still seemed an infinite distance ahead. We'd seen no life at all, apart from a couple of roadrunners that had dashed across the track in front of the jeep towards the beginning. The sky overhead was the deep, pitiless blue of noon.

Young life. Jesus. Ancient and sour as he was, he must have despised it. He'd worked his way through every pleasure on offer through the ages, and now the only one left to him was to see young life suffer. Revenge on those who had something he'd lost and could never have again.

I slowed the jeep to a halt, but kept the engine running. It was the only sound, out there in the vast bowl of the desert.

'Okay,' I said, and I reached up to the roll bar and unlocked the handcuffs. I was wary of him grabbing for me, but he didn't try. He sat rubbing some life back into his wrists, and flexing his fingers.

He said. 'What now?'

'You've convinced me. Get out of the car.'

'What?'

'Get out of the car. I'm damned if I'm going to drive you back into town.'

He was suspicious. Nothing too great, just a tiny grain of disquiet, but I could see that it was nibbling away at the edge of his confidence.

'What are you planning?' he said.

'What does it matter? You're supposed to be untouchable. Now move away from the car.'

He got out, stiffly. He stood by the jeep and put his hands into the small of his back and stretched until I could almost hear his joints pop.

I reached over into the back, and came up with the hunting rifle.

'Move,' I said, and he started to walk. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back; I could see that he still wasn't entirely certain about this. It wasn't because of the rifle, because that didn't seem to be bothering him at all.

I said, 'Something else?'

'The woman and child,' he said. 'I'll remember them.'

But not for long, I thought, and without taking any particular aim I raised the rifle one-handed and fired into the scrub just a yard or so to the side of him. The sound was instantly lost out here in the open, but the rock-dust flew and spattered his legs.

I said, 'Keep walking.' He was still too close. I didn't want to risk getting anything of him on me, or on the jeep.

He was shaking his head. 'Oh, Alex,' he said, and I recognised the tone of it; I heard actual affection there, the condescension of a higher species for a lower, an immune observer touched by the frantic but futile efforts of some small beast to do him harm. With a sorrowful smile, he turned and started to walk. He didn't follow the road, but struck out at an angle; as if he'd been here before, and knew where he was, and knew exactly which direction would be the shortest way back.

Perhaps he had. The Salt River Valley had at least a two thousand year history of settlement, but it was a history without details; the Hohokam Indians had faded out and left no writings and very little for the mound-diggers to argue over. They also used to cremate their dead; and I wondered now if I was looking at the reason why.

'Okay,' I said, 'That's about far enough,' and he stopped and turned to face me again.

'You're disappointing me, Alex,' he said.

'Answer me one more thing,' I said. 'Say somebody made it so that you had no more bodies to jump to, and then something happened to you. Say I'd found your boy in the Tropicana and switched off his lights for good. What then?'

He didn't have to reply.

His face had already told me everything that I needed to know.

He turned and he started to run, and I hoisted the rifle up and put my eye to the scope sight. I was standing in the jeep and resting the gun on the roll bar, so my aim was steady. That awful flowered shirt was already beginning to lose its colors with the distance; beyond him, the rising haze from the desert shimmered like meltwater. The crosshairs were almost squarely on the back of his head. He had a balding spot, and I was targeting just below it.

Now look at me, I thought.

It might have been coincidence or it might have been something else, but at exactly that moment I saw him turn to look back over his shoulder and I corrected slightly to re-site the crosshairs. I had the feeling that be was looking straight into my eyes as I squeezed the trigger. I lost the image of him for a moment with the bucking recoil of the gun, but then I found him again and he was still looking back as be ran, only now his head from the eyebrows up was empty space. He took three more staggering steps, like a drunk. Then he folded for good.

I waited, wondering if I was going to hear or feel anything as the bird made one last flight to find its refuge gone. I was tensed-up, but I heard nothing. A faint echo of my shot came back from the mountains, but that was all.

I wondered if he'd seen it coming.

I hoped that he had.

PART TWO

False Dawn

FOURTEEN

Two days later, we loaded up the Renegade and drove north. In three hours we climbed from the desert plain through the hills and into red rock country, burning in the rays of the mid-morning sun. Georgie was still out of school, Loretta was out of a job, and I still didn't know what was to happen to me as a result of the Woods business; but I'd set up this trip and talked Loretta into it because I needed some time to work on her. I could see what was going through her mind as clearly as if she'd been made of fine glass; she was scared to ask me about what had taken place after I'd driven away and left her by the canal, but she was also troubled by not knowing. It was tearing her up, and she was saying nothing. We must have made a strange pair — Loretta being down and trying not to show it, whilst I was bursting like a jumping bean with a story that I couldn't tell. What Georgie must have made of us both, I don't know.

The gas jockey at the Mobil station told us that we were lucky, because it was warm for October; Oak Ridge had usually had its first snows by now. I turned to Georgie in the back and said that she'd probably make it to Slide Rock, a kind of natural Wet'n'Wild ride along a smoothed-out streambed, after all if the weather held. Georgie looked thunderstruck and said that she hadn't packed any swimming stuff, and I said that was okay, in that case she'd have to go all the way along Slide Rock
naked
. And then Georgie fumbled around in the back, and came up with the paper bag that had contained most of our breakfast, and promptly put it over her head.

Loretta smiled a tight little smile, and then told her to take it off.

We drove into Sedona and parked on the wide main street, just across from where the pink-painted tour jeeps were lining up ready for the first excursion of the afternoon. Sedona was still a small resort town, spoiled only by the hustling of the realtors to turn it into a big and sprawling one; on my last visit, I'd overheard a waitress saying that the area was expected to become like another Palm Springs. I'd been split between mourning the passing of an old friend, and wondering if I'd be able to get the stake together to pick up a piece of land somewhere on the outskirts so that I could then sit back and watch its value climb. I counted up, and between my salary and my savings and my monthly outgoings the most that I could have afforded would have been a box number in the local Post Office.

We went for lunch in a place that I knew where we could sit out the back on a board terrace. Beyond the rail we could look out across Oak Creek, its valley sides lined with cypress and pine and rising to the rust-colored mesas that gave the area its name. Loretta didn't order much and said that she wasn't too hungry, but I could see that she was making an effort. Afterwards the two of them went out to see if they could pick up some swimwear in one of the main street shops, and I stayed behind at the table for a while.

Not for the first time, I wondered exactly what I was going to say to her.

I knew what I wanted to tell her, and that was the whole truth, from start to finish; but I was too aware of how it would sound, of how it was an open invitation to disbelief. I'd been out there and I'd looked Woods in the eyes and we'd known each other as enemies, but this wasn't the kind of knowledge that I could pass on in words; the only way that I can describe it is to say that it was more part of the fabric, like when my old man died and changed my understanding of death from something that existed in the same layer of reality as taxes and airline schedules to something deeper and more permanent. Perhaps I could make up something that had a part of the truth in it but which sounded more plausible, but I wasn't sure that I could do the job. I'm not exactly what you'd call imaginative.

I was confident that this thing was going to work itself out, and that this was the best way to go about it; staying at home would probably have meant a slide into a fearful silence that would eventually become impossible to break. And the one big bonus for me, the knowledge that made every other problem seem small and manageable, was that I'd found a cancer in the city and I'd cut it out. Maybe I'd always have to stay an unsung hero, but at least I knew what I'd done.

Or rather, I
thought
I knew.

I was soon to find out that I'd been wrong.

The place where I'd reserved our rooms was about six miles further on out of the town, and we headed there after lunch to drop off our luggage. It was a small and inexpensive motel called the Red Ridge Terrace, and there didn't seem to be anybody around as we parked the jeep on its stonechip forecourt and rang the bell outside the office for attention. A friendly guy in his sixties appeared, apparently from raking leaves around the back, and called for Jolene; and moments later Jolene appeared from one of the units, walking down towards us and shaking the office key out of a bunch that hung beside her apron. Georgie went exploring as we signed for our two adjacent rooms, and then Loretta had to go and find her when we'd moved the bags out of the jeep. Georgie came trailing back behind her, insisting that she could hardly believe it but she'd seen a squirrel go by not six feet away. I told her that in Central Park, the squirrels formed gangs and mugged the kids for money to buy peanuts.

After that we got back onto the road and went even further into the valley, climbing and winding steeply through the forest with little room for passing. The roadside fruit stalls were all shuttered, and we passed a number of campground access roads with barriers across them stencilled
Closed until April
. It suited me fine, I hate crowds. I hate being one of them.

We left the car on a red-dirt strip by the road and spent a couple of hours at Slide Rock, after which the three of us went for a walk up the bed of a dry gully. There had been a lot of older kids splashing around at the Rock, but here we saw nobody. The gully had been sculpted and smoothed into all kinds of weird shapes and steps, and we went as high as we could until a fallen tree blocked our way. Then it was everybody race back to the jeep, and back into town in search of the perfect deep-pan pizza.

Loretta was unwinding, one notch at a time; I could almost hear the clicks. Perhaps tonight, when Georgie was asleep, she'd be able to let her worries out for some exercise.

There was a message waiting for me at the Red Ridge; someone had been phoning during the afternoon, asking for me but leaving no name.

Loretta said, 'Who knows we're here, Alex?'

'I left a number at the station desk in case they wanted to reach me,' I explained. 'I'm still on suspension, remember.'

'Could it be trouble?'

'There's only one way to find out.'

The pay phone was outside, under a shingled awning that ran the length of the units and provided a covered walkway down to a roofed lean-to area at the end of the building. It was now the last quarter of the sunset hour, where the greens go to black and the blues and reds turn vivid and metallic before dying away altogether. I shivered a little in the evening chill, wishing that I'd picked up a sweatshirt before I'd come out.

'This is Sergeant Volchak, District Five,' I said when I finally got through on the office extension. 'Has somebody been trying to get hold of me today?'

'Alex?' a voice said, and I recognised Blowjob Horowitz. 'That you?'

'Yeah,' I said, relaxing a little. 'Who's been calling?'

'I don't know anything about that, but they sent somebody around to your house this afternoon with a letter. Woods has dropped out of sight and there's no complaint against you. Your suspension ends Monday.'

'That's good news. Thanks.'

'Wait until you see what you'll be walking into. It's been chaos here, all day.'

'Why, what's happened?'

'You haven't heard? Go turn on the TV, it'll tell you more than I can. All I know is, this new boy makes the Encanto Park killer look like Mister Rogers.'

When I got back to the rooms, Loretta was inside with Georgie and presumably helping her to get into her night things. She put her head out of the door as I went by, and said, 'They tell you anything good?'

'I don't think so,' I said, and went into the next unit.

There was a large black and white TV in the corner of my room, its aerial lead trailing up to a hole in the ceiling; I plugged it in and switched it on, and as it slowly warmed into life I found that the sound wasn't working. The volume switch turned too easily, not meeting the resistance that it should. The TV next door was working fine, because I could hear it through the wall, but I didn't want to walk in and explain to Georgie why I wanted her to change channels from
The 'A' Team
or whatever it was that she was being allowed to watch in the last half-hour or so before she'd be packed off to sleep. With a certain and formless apprehension, I watched as the monochrome image resolved itself into the main news story of the evening.

A plain house, with stuccoed walls painted in some medium tone — probably the dusty kind of blue that looked good on many of the houses on the south side of the city. There were portable barriers in the near foreground which I knew would have
Police Barrier — Do Not Cross
stencilled on them in much the same style as the campground, notices that we'd passed earlier in the day, and beyond the barriers were enough official vehicles to spell
major disaster
clearly in my mind, sound or no sound. The coverage then cut to an unsteady hand-held shot on a long lens. It showed stretchers with blankets draped full-length over the bodies that they carried, five of them emerging from the house in a sombre procession as the news people fought and jostled all around the camera to peek through the cars at the one narrow angle that would show them anything. Then, as there was a jump cut to a lot of our people getting into vehicles, I heard the door to the next unit open and close and then Loretta slipped in to join me. She was about to speak, but didn't; there's something in the coverage of a tragic aftermath that makes it instantly identifiable, so instead she came over and sat on the bed. I'd been sitting in near-darkness, and when she reached over to switch on the reading lamp the TV picture jumped and threatened to get smaller.

I could hear another station's commercials running on the set next door, and they made a weird counterpoint to the sight of Lieutenant Michaels walking by and shaking his head as a sudden forest of microphones and mini-recorders were thrust in from every side of the frame towards him. They supered his name at the bottom of the screen, and I wondered what they were saying about him. Then, another unsteady image, this time a sneak-shot around the back of the house; keeping newspeople back at a scene like this is always like trying to dam up a creek with sawdust, you stop them in one place and they just come through at another. The camera zoomed in on a ground-floor window, and then immediately they froze the frame to show that there was writing of some kind on the glass, and then they did some kind of electronic trick and flipped it around so that it read the way that it would when seen from inside the room.

It read

YOUNG LIFE

OLD SCORES

and whatever it had been written in, it had run.

After a few moments on the anchorman, they went into some archive footage. Loretta frowned at the old film and said, 'Isn't that Manson?' and I made a noise of agreement as I stood up. Suddenly I had to go outside for a while.

The roofed lean-to at the back of the motel overlooked a terrace with two blackened barbecues and a couple of tables. It was now lit from above by a single naked bulb, around which moths were circling. I sat on one of the benches with my own weak shadow falling across the table in front of me. Somewhere in the RV park in the valley down below the terrace, a door slammed. After a couple of minutes, another shadow joined mine.

Loretta said, 'You didn't kill him after all, did you?'

She sounded relieved. I said, 'I took him out into the desert and shot him, but I didn't stop him. We just saw him make another entry in his résumé.'

'You can't be sure of that.'

'Yes, I can. He's showing off, now. He's wiped out an entire family just to prove that he's still in business. Those words on the glass, they were a message to me. He's dancing out of reach.'

'So, how come no-one else is in on this? Why should you carry it alone?'

I looked at her now. The pale light showed up her lines, but it also stripped away the years. I said, 'Do you like horror stories, Loretta?'

She became a little suspicious, reluctant. 'Depends how close to home they are,' she said.

'Well,' I said, 'then you're not going to like this one.'

What I did then was to tell her the whole story from day one, step by step but with no conclusions or commentary; the idea was that I'd let her supply the connections for herself, go through it and see light in the same places that I'd seen it. Once you accepted the basic truth of the sequence, everything else had to fall into place.

Or so I hoped.

I didn't get to finish, because when I reached the part where I arrived home and found Georgie gone, the phone under the overhang started to ring. I tried to ignore it, thinking that someone else might come out and pick it up, but it carried on and I began to lose the competition with the distraction. I had to break off and go around the corner to answer it.

'This is the Red Ridge Motel's phone,' I said. 'Who's that?'

'Alex Volchak?' said a voice that I didn't know.

'Yes?'

'
Sergeant
Alex Volchak?' Whoever he was, he sounded young.

'Who is this?' I said.

'You weren't so hard to find,' he said, and rang off.