Bad Desire (23 page)

“What do you mean? He's just a friend, just a longtime family friend. I think he seems nice … sincere.”

“How old is he?”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “How should I know?”

“Jesus Christ! Don't you think it's weird, Sheila? Why's he always hanging around? What is it with you two, anyway? I come in and here you are—standing around in your kitchen with this big, rich, powerful,
married
guy!—with one goddamned light on!—in the whole damned house! Don't you think that seems kind of odd?”

All at once, Sheila leaned forward and gave him a kiss. “Oh, shut up, Denny,” she whispered. “You know there's no one but you.”

14

The Pacific lapped at the old waterfront of Rio Del Palmos, the ripples all but motionless, the water black, reflecting every star. It was as if there were no sky, no ocean, only a vast twinkling void. A woman, bending down to kiss her children goodnight, whispered, “Don't the stars seem close tonight? Don't they look like little pieces of heaven?” Life was peaceful in Rio Del Palmos, lying beside the glittering night.

The light gleamed from the houses, tarnishing the grass in long copper shafts. In the rooms, seen through windows, the lamps glowed prettily in their shades—sometimes a breeze played at the curtains only to disappear like breath taken away. At eleven-thirty, after
The Tonight Show
, the last lights began to go down. Here and there. An upstairs light continued to burn all night at the Schullenburgs'; they had a new baby girl, four days old. The other houses were dark, all was silent, all secure.

No one heard the muffled engine prowling up and down the streets. In the sleeping houses, no one had any reason to notice that a nondescript Jeep was weaving through the city, crisscrossing back and forth, stopping at the old boatworks—where a figure left the Jeep and placed two ten-inch packages low beneath the derelict hydrangea bushes, one at each side of the large frame structure—then looping around, doubling back and going on. Twice that night, patroling police cars appeared on the street in front of him and Slater veered off into the surrounding neighborhoods, hid the Jeep among other shadowy parked cars, killed the lights and engine, and waited. But he wasn't being followed.

On Klamath Drive, the black and white police cruiser sat at the end of Reeves's drive. No one living nearby would remember the sound of the engine that softly died or the metal door closing. In his gloved hands, Slater carried electrician's tape and a thin coil of soft wire; his dark windbreaker concealed a parcel already wrapped in tape. In the neighbors' slumber, the whisper of his footsteps crept over starlit lawns and vanished through a hole in their dreams.

Faith had been sound asleep at two-thirty when Slater left the house; at four-fifteen, when he got back into bed beside her, he could see that she had hardly moved.

In the hour before dawn, the milk trucks turned slowly into their fog-bound routes, yellow beams smoking before them. Half an hour later, the whir of bicycle tires spun down the dream-thick streets; newspapers hit bushes, sidewalks, porches. Slowly, in the foothills and across the basin of the city, sixty thousand lights were coming on in bedrooms.

In the East, the first clear rays of dawn streaked over the Sierra Madres. Layer by slow layer, the fog dispersed and sunlight dappled the sidewalks like white drifts of pollen. It was morning in Rio Del Palmos, June 8; peaceful and serene.

A breath of wind stirred the palms at 6:55 when Slater crossed the plaza to City Hall. He stopped momentarily outside the revolving glass doors to let it bathe his face. The day's perfect, he thought. A smile touched the corners of his mouth. In the lobby, the large granite reception desk was unoccupied as he went past. Stepping into the elevator, he pushed the button for the sixth floor.

The cubicles were deserted when he walked down the narrow aisle and unlocked his office. He checked his watch. 7:06. He left the door conspicuously ajar. Abigail would not arrive for another half hour, the rest of the staff closer to eight.

Without haste, he took up his briefcase, went into the private bathroom and pushed the lock in the knob. He turned on the cold water tap to mask any incidental noise and, also, to alert anyone that he was there and not to be disturbed. Sliding the thumb latches, Slater opened the briefcase and took out the small set of binoculars and a transmitter roughly the size and shape of a garage door opener.

With a twist of the handle, the opaque window swung open. He drew back and glanced at the locked door, listened, then he looked at his watch. 7:14. Opening the window to its full pivot and taking up the binoculars, he looked two blocks north, drawing into sharp focus the Rialto River Bridge, which rose above the surrounding trees. The morning rush hour wasn't fully underway. The seconds ticked within him. He watched and waited until he saw the roof of Reeves's black and white cruiser rise over the hump of the bridge, its number—5022—painted in block letters on the curved brow above the windshield. Okay, he thought. Come on.

Slater checked his watch. 7:16. Right on time. The tremendous panic he had experienced a few days ago with Reeves was gone now, completely. Again he calculated the distance and it was right. The time couldn't be better. In another twenty minutes, the traffic coursing the bridge would be dense, headed toward the interstate. Slater took up the transmitter and threw the switch to turn it on, activating its batteries.

Reeves's cruiser came off the end of the bridge, turned right and swung into the lot. Come on, Burris! What're you doing! Slater's nerves were taut as wires. The car door swung open and the police chief got out, ambled across the street and entered the donut shop.

The binoculars swerved from the glass door to the parking lot. Another car arrived—there were eight now altogether counting the cruiser—and Slater waited for the driver and his companion to go inside. Quickly he examined the lot. No one else had driven in.

Do it, he thought. His thumb pressed the black button.

There was a thudding blast, a flash of light. The floor of the building shuddered under Slater's feet. He was certain he saw the cruiser bounce into the air, but a huge cloud of smoke and dirt billowed over the wreckage that was taking place before his eyes. As the dust drifted away, he saw the crazy angles of the badly battered cars. The cruiser had actually rocked backward a few feet, its hood torn off, its entire front end blackened. The cars parked on either side of it were wrecked.

In those first few seconds as he surveyed the damage, there came a second blast—the cruiser's gas tank exploded and then the rear of the car next to it heaved up. Its tank exploded. Flames leapt into the sky. It was happening so fast that Slater couldn't take it all in. “Goddamn,” he whispered to himself. “God—damn!”

He waited until he saw the men run out of the donut shop and into the street, where they stopped and stared, Burris Reeves among them. Okay, Reeves, he thought, now what are you going to do?

Slater stepped back, cranked the window shut, returned the transmitter and the binoculars to his briefcase and snapped it shut. The other bombs were rigged with timing devices—there was nothing he could do about them now. It was out of his hands—irreversible. He had chosen the places and times as carefully as he could. A vision came to him then, just as if he stood on the sidewalk in the crowd: the riot of blue police lights, red ambulance flashers, sirens, fire equipment, TV crews—all gathered at the carcass of the black and white cruiser.

Now you see the diamond, now you don't.

The art of distraction.

Slater had planned four bombings in all, three the first day, two within the first hour, in rapid succession.

The second explosion came at 8:19—flames shot fifty feet into the air. The unoccupied new addition of the St. Pius Grade School, which Slater had dedicated only a couple of weeks earlier, collapsed in fiery ruin.

Through the heavy plate-glass windows of his office, he watched the fireball lick the air but he could hardly hear it. Bulletins were coming from the radio behind his desk: “We interrupt this broadcast … an explosion has occured at Three Points Avenue near the entrance to the Rialto River Bridge. Police are asking that commuters please avoid the area. We repeat—”

No mention was made of the convicts. It's too soon, he thought, too much confusion. He kept changing the stations. “KRIO has just been informed that the city of Rio Del Palmos has been shattered this morning by two explosions. We will be keeping you up-to-date with those locations as soon as they are verified. Police officials are advising that residents stay inside their homes unless it's absolutely necessary to go out—”

Slater paced beside his office windows, watching the devastation and waiting. Running through his fingers and in his mind was Sheila's gold necklace, a single gold thread, pliant as her hair. I'm closing this city down, he thought. It'll all grind to a halt, all for you. It occurred to him that this was one of the few times in his life when he knew exactly what had to be done. Never had he been so careful; he had to think of everything.

Two gray pillars of smoke curled into the early morning light. It was awesome to watch the world blow apart with forces only he controlled. Never in his life had Slater felt more in command, more omniscient. He heard the dim wail of sirens but the noise rose to him as if from the depths of the ocean. Only the two columns of smoke made it real. And the ringing telephone. He put the necklace into his pocket, reached across and picked up the receiver. “This is Henry Slater.”

But it wasn't Reeves.

Frightened herself, Abigail came in and tried to elaborate on what the bulletins were saying on the radio. Faith called, obviously upset, wanting to know if he was all right and Slater assured her that he was. She wanted to come down, to be with him, but he told her not to—to stay home.

The intercom beeped on his desk as Abigail screened and announced his incoming calls. It was ten o'clock, it was eleven. With the receiver tucked between his cheek and shoulder, he shuffled through the blue slips she periodically brought in. Still nothing from Reeves.

When Slater wasn't on the telephone, he paced in front of the windows, his hands in his pockets, his right-hand fingers wrapped in gold. Then Abigail said Burris Reeves was on line three. This is it, he thought.
Finally
. But Reeves was only giving him an early assessment of damages, reporting that he had requested additional manpower from neighboring communities. “You do that, Burris,” he said. “I want some answers.”

“I'll get back to you,” Reeves told him.

Slater hung up. I'm still waiting, Burris.

The morning was spent on the telephone, the afternoon in emergency meetings. Rumors flew; men raced in and out of his office; implausible theories took on the ring of truth. At one o'clock, Slater stepped before the microphones and cameras and expressed his shock and outrage, calling the bombings “fiendish” and “insane,” and assuring the public at large that immediate action was being taken.

Through it all, he waited for Reeves to call him back. And again, the only call that mattered didn't come. The afternoon and evening newspapers began to arrive. The local
Gazette
carried a small header above the double banner headline.

Police stymied, no leads, no critical injuries

2 EXPLOSIONS SHOCK RIO DEL PALMOS

BOMB DESTROYS POLICE CHIEF'S CAR

The
Santa Barbara News Press
devoted the entire front page to the bombings and the
L.A. Times
carried the story below the fold:

TERROR ERUPTS IN RIO DEL PALMOS
,

FEAR STALKS THE STREETS

Two bombs in less than an hour sent waves of panic through affluent Rio Del Palmos at dawn this morning. The powerful explosions jarred homes as far as a mile away, although miraculously no one was injured.

He saw his own words—
fiendish
and
insane
—quoted in headlines. The police chief was quoted again and again, but nowhere were the convicts mentioned.

Slater shoved his hands into his pockets. Again, he paced. The intercom beeped but he ignored it. A minute elapsed, then two more—minutes when he imagined Reeves thinking that the worst was over. At 4:26, there came a noise like an immense thunderclap. His pictures shook against the office walls. In an instant, the old abandoned boat-works collapsed in a heap of dust and rubble. That's three, he thought. Talk to me, Reeves, or I'll bring you to your goddamned knees.

Abigail stood at the doorway. “Oh, Mr. Slater!” she exclaimed. “My God, did you hear that?”

Her face was more frightened than his own. It fed him with strength.

Night fell. Barricades and emergency torches sealed off entire neighborhoods. Slater took a roundabout way home, talking with the patrolmen stationed at intersections, passing through the roadblocks surrounding the city.

And again the next morning, a bomb blew at 6:48 while Slater looked at his watch and got into the shower. He walked through police headquarters on his way to the office, but Reeves wasn't there.

Noon came and still no call, no word. Slater was hanging up the telephone when he realized that the door to his office was open and that Reeves was looking at him. In the way the police chief stood, Slater could see the man's exhaustion.

“Well, Henry,” Reeves said. “I guess everyone's entitled to a mistake once in a while. I was wrong. It's been those goddamned convicts all along—Christ, have we ever got a situation on our hands.”

Okay, Slater thought, now it can stop. It's over. It worked.

“Close the door, Burris,” he said, measuring his tone, getting up and going around the desk to meet him.

It worked. It worked.

And yet there was still that lingering doubt.