Winter Tides (37 page)

S
OUTH OF
S
AN
D
IEGO THE FOG AND OVERCAST HAD
started to thin, and the sun shone through the murk so that the misty, late-morning sky was a milky white. There was quite a bit of border traffic for a weekday morning, and in the time that Mifflin sat in his car, moving forward toward the crossing, the fog burned away entirely, and it grew abruptly hotter. He took off his coat, rolled the windows down, and lit a cigarette. There was something almost poetic about the weather clearing up like this, and he was tempted to whistle or sing. But he couldn’t sing or whistle worth a damn anyway, so he watched the border approaching, closer and closer, utterly aware that he wasn’t merely coming down here on vacation this time; he was coming for good. Crazy Edmund Dalton had actually done him a favor by closing the door on business as usual in Orange County.
Adios
Huntington Beach;
hola
, Punta Rioja.

He was through the border in under fifteen minutes, and then slanting past Tijuana, skirting the border town for points south. His Mexican residency was enough to make him a solid citizen. The guard hadn’t asked to look in his bags, which in fact held over a hundred thousand dollars in cash and traveler’s checks along with gold jewelry and all the clothes that seemed worth taking. His .38 was loaded and available, hidden under the seat in a natural cubbyhole where the upholstery wrapped around the wire seat support.

He’d had the gun in his pocket when he picked up the briefcase full of money two and a half hours ago at the Embassy Suites. Actually carrying a loaded gun made him feel like some kind of cowboy, but if Edmund Dalton had decided to get nasty, then that meant that the English
language had failed him, and in that case there was nothing that spoke more clearly than a gun. He hadn’t needed it, though. He had cruised the parking lot looking for Dalton’s car, and then had been in and out of the hotel in under five minutes, not looking into the briefcase until he was back in the car and heading south down the freeway. He had pulled over at a McDonald’s in Encinitas for a late breakfast, where he had counted the money twice. Edmund had paid him every penny. The thought had occurred to him, and not for the first time, that he could have snaked even more money out of the man. Clearly he was anxious to close this whole thing down, no matter how smartass he had acted on the phone. But to hell with that. Blackmail wasn’t in Mifflin’s line of work.

Beyond Tijuana the countryside was open and green, and the third-world poverty was staggering—half-built shacks covered in old tar paper, women dipping water out of rusty, open-air oil drums. It was dead true that he had made a certain amount of money in the past facilitating illegal immigration. But for God’s sake, if he lived here under these conditions, he’d get the hell out, too, any way he could. And the same goddamn U.S. citizens who were hot under the collar about it were happy enough to pay immigrants four dollars an hour to paint their houses and pour concrete. They said they wanted to deport people wholesale, but every last one of them wanted to wait until after the work got done. No, he had no regrets at all about that end of his business, and there was no reason that he couldn’t go right on making a dollar or two along the same lines.

He passed the lobster restaurants at Puerto Nuevo and nearly pulled off the road for lunch, but he decided against it. It was better to get home and get the car unpacked and everything squared away. The house would be empty, and he would have to fend for himself tonight. On the way in, though, he’d stop in town and find a maid. She could start tomorrow morning.

The countryside flew past now, much of it empty, looking like southern California must have looked a hundred years ago. The road finally wound around the upper edge of a hillside shaded by a half-dozen big oak trees. When
he was a child, and the drive down here seemed endlessly long, these old oaks were this same size, and over the years they had become his own personal landmark rooted in the Mexican earth. They seemed to have a home-at-last quality about them today, and he was surprised at his sentimentality. He watched almost anxiously for the coastline to open up, and soon the land fell away on the right, the rocky hillside flattening into grassy scrub that ran down to the edge of the cliffs. A sliver of blue-green ocean appeared over the cliff tops, broadened into a bay with an island in the dim distance, and he could see a scattering of houses spread out along the bluffs, maybe a quarter mile apart. There were two that he didn’t recognize, which didn’t make him happy: when it came to Mexico, he was a no-growth kind of guy. But like everywhere else, Punta Rioja was destined to go the way of the world. Right now it still looked pretty much like home to him.

He turned off the highway onto a dirt road that dipped through a streambed. Dragonflies rose out of the vegetation along the stream, and one bumped against the window, rose into the air, and disappeared. Through the open car window the air smelled hot, as if it were already summer in Mexico. The road angled upward, then found level ground, and there was the house, sitting there as always, the shutters drawn, the yard empty of cars. He shut off the motor and coasted to a stop, savoring the silence—nothing but the sound of locusts or cicadas or whatever the hell they were scraping away out in the brush. He climbed stiffly out of the Pontiac, retrieved his gun from under the seat, and then pulled one of the cash-filled suitcases from the back trunk, opened it up, and put the gun inside. He found the house key hanging under the garden bench just like always, and he let himself into the house, squinting into the darkness, navigating mostly by memory. He set the suitcase on the floor and stood for a moment letting his eyes adjust.

The place was cool and dusty, the furniture covered with white sheets. He slapped the back of the couch, and a cloud of dust rose above it, hanging in the still air. Immediately he sneezed twice, then blessed himself out loud. He heard at that same moment what sounded like movement, a muted
shuffling from somewhere back in the house. He stood still, listening hard, but there was only silence now, the absolute silence of the deserted bluffs. It would take him a few days to get used to the silence, to the absence of traffic noise, to the sound of the ocean at night, of coyotes and seabirds. He saw that there were dust-covered cobwebs everywhere—hanging from the plaster in the corners of the room, draped from the wrought iron chandelier and the wooden shutters. The whole place needed to be vacuumed out, the furniture polished. Right now it was about as homey as a crypt.

He moved on across the living room and into the back of the house. The air was heavy with the faint odor of decay in the rear hallway. Something had probably gotten under the sleeping porch and died—most likely a possum. It wouldn’t be the first time. The bluffs were full of coyotes and rabbits and wood rats and possums, and dead animals were common. There were turkey vultures circling in the sky virtually every afternoon.

The big bedroom that stood at the back of the house had been his parents’ bedroom years ago. The door to the room was shut now, and he waved his hand and arm in front of his face in the gloomy hallway, clearing away cobwebs. He had put off the job of clearing his parents’ stuff out of the room, partly out of sentimentality, partly out of laziness. The last time he was here he had nearly finished the job, but sorting and packing had taken more time than he had thought it would, and when he pushed open the door and walked in now, he saw the half-dozen boxes he had left behind sitting around an immense old steamer trunk that would probably be worth a couple hundred bucks in an antiques store in southern California. He would give the whole works to the maid when she showed up in the morning. That would buy her.

The odor was worse in the bedroom, fetid and almost sweet, and he wondered if there was something in the toiletries shoved into one of the boxes, some kind of organic soap, maybe, that had gone bad. He opened the shutters to let in sunlight, then searched behind the boxes for a dead rat. The boxes themselves were tied with twine, and clearly hadn’t been chewed open. He sat down on the four-poster
bed, shoving the bed drape all the way up to the head end. He couldn’t sleep in here along with the smell. He had to find it.

He saw then that the trunk lid was not closed all the way, so that a half inch of interior darkness was visible beneath the boxy edge of the lid, and the thought occurred to him that rats had gotten into the trunk, although the odor didn’t really have the musky urine smell of a rat’s nest. He must have shut the trunk when he’d packed it two years ago. It had four spring latches, all of which were open. Hell, had the house been broken into? Curious now, his senses suddenly alert, he stood up from the bed, and the movement of the mattress caused one of the pillows to shift oddly, as if something heavy had been balanced under the bedcovers.

He grasped the bedspread and pulled it back, and there, nestled between two down pillows, lay a severed human head, staring up at the ceiling through sunken milky eyes.

Mifflin reeled backward, stumbling against the edge of the steamer trunk, grabbing the corner post of the bed to keep himself from falling, There was the creaking sound of disused hinges, of the trunk lid opening. He turned, throwing his hands in front of him defensively. Edmund Dalton stood up from inside the trunk, a wide grin on his face, his head nodding rapidly as if he had some kind of palsy. “Boo!” he said, and then started to laugh.

Mifflin rolled backward across the bed, landing heavily on the floor and scrambling at once to his feet. Without a backward glance he sprinted for the door, and Dalton followed him, taking his time, aiming his pistol. When Mifflin was halfway down the hall, with no place to run but straight ahead, Dalton shot him.

R
ED
M
AYHEW’S HEAD SAT IN A SHALLOW BAKING PAN ON
the living room coffee table. The head wouldn’t stand up on its own, so Edmund had propped it up with rocks out of the yard out front. Mifflin didn’t seem to want to look at it. He didn’t want to look at the can of lamp oil on the table, either. He was in a terrible state—frayed nerves, tied hand and foot to the couch, shot full of holes. “Ray Mifflin is alive, but not kicking,” Edmund announced, deepening his voice like a sportscaster and then laughing out loud. He panned the room with the video camera, closing in on Mifflin, wide-eyed and sweating, then swung in for a close-up of Mayhew’s rotten face. He shut the camera off, screwed it onto its tripod, turned it back on, and got down to business.

Next to the head in the pan he set a fist-sized candle fashioned like a multicolored Thanksgiving turkey. He had bought it on impulse at one of the so-called 99 cent stores that were spreading like a disease through southern California. Next to the turkey he laid five twenty-dollar bills that he had retrieved from Mifflin’s luggage, fanning the bills out like a hand of cards. And behind those three elements of the piece, he set a heavy old windup alarm clock that had been in the steamer trunk in the bedroom. It ticked loudly now, filling the room with the sound of time flying by. He stepped back a couple of feet to admire the arrangement. It was good, very good. There was humor in it, what with the turkey sitting in a baking dish and all, ready to offer itself up to potential lamp oil flames. There was a message in the money aspect of the piece, too, a symbolic treatise on the dangers of greed. He angled the turkey a
little bit more, so that it seemed to be looking at both Mifflin and Mayhew, two men who, depending upon chance and inspiration, might well end up companions in death.

“Bring me the head of Red Mayhew,” he said in the announcer’s voice, then laughed again.

Mifflin was apparently in no mood to join in the laughter. In the hallway, Edmund had shot him through the right shoulder. The slug had a full metal jacket to minimize damage, something which Mifflin probably didn’t appreciate as much as he should. Mifflin had passed out there in the hall, which had made it all that much easier to tie him to the couch. He wasn’t in much danger of dying—not from the bullet wound, anyway. There wasn’t enough blood leaking out of him to do anything more than stain the couch cover. And he was very much awake now. His eyes were glazed with pain and fear. There was no need to gag him, since it was unlikely that a neighbor would come calling.

“This turkey candle is a cheapie, Ray. It’s meant as decoration, not as illumination. The lamp oil will provide the illumination. To an artist, there’s a
big
difference between illumination and decoration. Now, the thing about this sort of candle is that it sputters and flares—burns down
really
fast—so fast that I might easily see hacienda smoke in my rearview mirror before I’m a half mile down the road. Frankly, I’d rather not. I’d rather be a bit closer to the border when this place goes up. That’s the chance
I’m
willing to take, Ray. Of course, maybe the wick won’t burn down far enough to light the oil at all, in which case the candle will fizzle out like bad fireworks. Or—here’s another one—it could be that the house fills up with vapor from the lamp oil and simply explodes. Any authority on the subject will tell you that a vapor is
much
more explosive than a liquid. What I’m saying is that I can’t be expected to know exactly what fate lies in store for Ray Mifflin. That’s the entire point. I
love
that element of chance, Ray. Chance and intuition point the artist’s way to inspiration.”

Mifflin gaped at him. Terror apparently made him a good audience. He listened with perfect patience now as Edmund told him the story of the last couple of days—how he had come up out of nowhere with the idea of renting the car
using the stolen credit card, how that had led him to the idea of killing Mayhew, and how he had borrowed a false mustache and makeup from the costume room at the Earl’s, so as to pass himself off as one Ray Mifflin, businessman.

“The stolen driver’s license is an unbelievably workable scam,” he said. “I found that out weeks ago when I brought Mayhew in to impersonate my father. The truth is, Ray, there’s a vast power in the world, a life force, waiting to be tapped. It’s like solar power. It’s free. It’s unlimited. But the tiling is, without inspiration, you can’t see it and you can’t access it. You don’t have the right credit card. You look up in the sky, and there’s the sun, way out there in space, ninety-three million miles away. A science book will tell you that what almost nobody realized until recently was that the sun’s light was all around them—it was a force, like I said, an invisible force. Those rays could burn us up, Ray, or they could light our mind. The energy of artistic inspiration is the same damned thing. Artistic inspiration gives a man the kind of vision it takes to see the energy around him, and to know how to access it. Do you follow me?”