Burning Man (36 page)

I thought he was finished but he wasn’t. My home invasion became surreal when he started singing. What made it even worse was the bastard had a good voice, hitting every note. Maybe it was
his audition tape for
American Idol
. I knew the song: “They Call the Wind Mariah.”

The last line of the lyrics was particularly plaintive, and he put everything into it. It felt as if he was singing it just for me, and that he knew how lost I had been for so long, and how “not even God may find me.”

The song came to a merciful end, but the intimacy of it shook me. It didn’t strike close to home. It was in my home and in my head.

“That’s our song,” Haines whispered. “Have a good night, Detective.”

In the silence I could still hear his voice. It felt as if Haines were stepping on my grave.

The easy chair no longer felt comfortable. For a moment I considered taking a shower to cleanse myself from the toxic ramblings of Haines, but instead I just decided to crawl into bed.

I didn’t replay the message. It could wait until the morning, when I would listen to it in the light of day. And maybe in that light I wouldn’t feel so lost, and maybe God would find me.

Unfortunately, that light never came. An hour later I was once again burning.

The Strangler screamed for help, but his words were swallowed by the fire. I watched his mouth moving and his face contort, but as close as I was to him, I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I had never heard the voice of fire—of inferno—until now. It was a terrible thing—a raging, roaring, deafening howl—and in it there was hunger and madness and worst of all, laughter. It was the sound of a demon unleashed.

The flames were whirling all around us. The wind kept blowing, the bellows kept churning, and we kept running.

The fire made us move to the rhythm of its churning jaws. It came at us from one direction and then another. And then the fire was everywhere, and our dance became wild and out of control.

I’d once seen footage of a male tarantula attempting to mate. As it performed for the female, all eight of its legs were moving. We—the Strangler, and me, and Sirius—were eight legs. My partner was grievously hurt, but sometimes his legs twitched and moved as if I was scratching him in his sweet spot.

In Italy, the tarantula inspired a dance known as the tarantella. Folklore says that when bitten by a tarantula, the only cure is doing the tarantella. It is believed that by frenziedly whirling about, you sweat the poison out.

The flames were making us dance the tarantella. There was madness in our steps; we were out-of-control dervishes. I was the one with the badge and gun. I was supposed to have answers, but I was as lost as lost could be. In the flaming wilderness, I went a little mad.

“We must sweat the poison out!” I shouted.

The Strangler still thought me sane. “What?”

“The poison,” I said.

We continued the dance of the dead.

The shrieking woke me up. It took me a second to realize I was the one doing the shrieking. Sirius was nudging me and whimpering.

“It’s all right,” I said.

But it wasn’t all right. My life was out of control. Every day I was dancing some version of the tarantella.

My racing heart began to slow, and my sweat started to cool. In the blessed relief, my after-fire moment came. It started with music, the strains of
Scheherazade
, and in my mind I saw a montage of familiar entertainers and sports figures.

Then the music stopped and I heard a familiar male voice say, “Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And then murder.”

I knew the voice; I was sure of that. But I couldn’t quite place it. I thought about my vision. The whole thing—from music, to the images, to the voice—had probably taken no more than fifteen seconds.

Normally I sleep after a fire dream, but not this time. I grabbed my laptop and called up a search engine. I typed in “denial” and was partway through typing “anger” when the suggested entry of “Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle Model” came up. I clicked on that and began reading. According to Kübler-Ross, those facing death went through five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In my vision there had been a sixth word: murder. That wasn’t on Kübler-Ross’s list.

It wasn’t as if I had divined the words on her list out of thin air. In college, one of my psych courses had the assigned reading of Kübler-Ross’s
On Death and Dying
. Still, I wasn’t sure where in the course of my investigation her grief cycle model fit in.

I thought about the disparate figures in my vision. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had been shooting a sky hook. Then I’d seen that actress from the
Seinfeld
series. It took me a moment to remember her name: Julia Louis-Dreyfus. My vision had also featured Olivia Newton-John. I think I’d conjured up a memory of her from
Grease
. Daniel Day-Lewis, who had acted in one of my favorite films,
The Last of the Mohicans
, had also been in my lineup.

Everyone I had envisioned, I realized, had a hyphenated name. Even the audio connection of my vision had hyphenated names: Rimsky-Korsakov and Kübler-Ross.

There was something there, something I knew I should be picking up on. There was a current going off in my mind, a humming. Sometimes Seth and his groups chant in his backyard, and the vigor of their sounds and vibrations always amazes me. Their voices combine into this primal force. When their chanting is in full throat, it almost feels as if I can reach out and touch a live wire.

Om...

My neck suddenly prickled. I connected the familiar voice that I’d heard reciting the Kübler-Ross grief cycle with a name.

Double om...

“You want to go for a drive?” I asked Sirius.

It was two thirty a.m., the wind was howling, and we had an hour’s drive ahead of us. My partner thought it was a great idea.

CHAPTER 21:
GONE WITH THE WIND

Two minutes after I confirmed Dave Miller’s address, the power went off. I didn’t know whether only Sherman Oaks was affected, or if most of LA County was also in the dark.

The so-called civilized world gets a lot scarier in the absence of light, especially on a night with the wind unleashed. In the darkness I debated my options. I had planned on calling Gump and Martinez, but with the power off I wasn’t able to call out with either my cell phone or house phone.

I moved toward the front of the house, hoping that if I opened the curtains, the moonlight would help me to see. After all the years I’d lived in my house, you would think I’d know my way around in the dark, but that wasn’t the case. I played blindman’s bluff, tapping my way over to the front window. The curtain pulling didn’t do much good; there was only a sliver moon and it provided minimal illumination. What I could see wasn’t encouraging: trees were being pushed to their limits, and over the wind I listened to their groaning and cracking.

Waiting would be the smart thing to do—for light, for backup, for the proper paperwork—but I have never been good at either waiting or doing the smart thing.

I could still hear Dave Miller’s voice in my head talking about denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and murder. After the fact, everything was beginning to make sense. Miller’s son
had been
on Jason Davis’s bully list, but as Danny Marxmiller and not Danny Miller. What had thrown us off was Danny’s last name, which I was now certain should have been hyphenated as Marx-Miller.

Dave Miller had killed the individual he thought was responsible for his son’s death. He had gotten his eye for an eye. Although Danny Marx-Miller had died from a drug overdose, his father must have learned there was more to that story. That’s why Miller had planted drugs on Klein. His son’s reputation had been sullied, and he wanted the same thing to happen to the young man he believed was his son’s murderer.

There was a lot of supposition and guesswork in my theory, and yet in my gut I knew I was right. My subconscious—my visions—backed me up.

“We can call Gump and Martinez from the road,” I told Sirius. “Between here and Temecula there will be plenty of cell towers still standing.”

Sirius followed me while I stumbled around the house and seemed to think it was a great game. I played too much of that game until I found a flashlight with working batteries. Under its illumination I dressed. Before leaving, I holstered my backup gun.

Almost ten million people live in Los Angeles County. Walking out into the darkness, it felt as if I was in one of those end-of-the-world movies. There was no sign of anyone. I could have been the last person on earth, except for the zombies that had to be lurking out there somewhere.

I was wearing a windbreaker, which only seemed to encourage the wind. The fabric whipped and snapped and made me feel
like the Michelin Man. There was a lot of static electricity in the air; maybe that was why I could feel the hair rising on my arms. Or maybe I was just afraid of the Santa Ana condition. I sniffed the air. Faintly, I could detect the smell of something burning. It wasn’t nearby, but the fire was out there and on the move.

The right thing to do would have been to report to police headquarters. When the lights go out, the LAPD puts out a call for all the bodies it can muster. The brass would be worried about looting, or any appearance of lawlessness. It would want to send out as many squad cars as possible so as to give the appearance of a police presence. Tonight, though, they’d have to do that without me.

In the absence of streetlights, my neighborhood seemed to have mostly disappeared. I backed out of the driveway and began driving. My headlights, even on bright, didn’t make much headway against the darkness. The strong winds were stirring everything around, and the shifting reflections played out on my windshield, making me feel as if I was taking in a black-and-white movie at a drive-in.

I tuned in to KNX and was glad to hear the blackout hadn’t stopped it from broadcasting. A serious-sounding newscaster was talking about all the calamities affecting the Southland that had been caused by the Santa Ana winds.

“It’s a mess out there,” he said. “Power lines are down all over the county and fallen trees are causing numerous road closures. Firefighters are currently battling multiple brushfires that are raging in Whittier, Covina, and Brentwood. If you don’t have to be out on the road, you are advised to stay home.”

It was good advice, but I didn’t heed it.

The freeways were still open. Usually a parade of big rigs travels the Los Angeles arteries at night, but not this night. The trucks were sitting it out. In all my years of LA driving, I’d never seen the highways so deserted. That should have made driving easy, except for the wind. I was driving like a drunk, unable to navigate
a straight line. The wind kept blowing my sedan from one lane to another. The gusting increased as I traveled inland. I found myself leaning forward in my seat while keeping a tight grip on the wheel.

There were patches of darkness and light that showed those areas with power and those without. Whenever I had cell service, I tried calling Gump and Martinez, but the calls didn’t go through, which probably meant the power was out where they lived. I could have gone through the LAPD switchboard to get a message to them, but it wasn’t a good night to ask for messenger service. Judging by what KNX was telling me, all city services were being stretched to the max.

I tried not to think about the last time I’d braved the elements during a bad Santa Ana, but Ellis Haines kept invading my thoughts. Like it or not, our Santa Ana dance with death had intertwined our paths forever. I wanted out of our chain gang, but Haines wasn’t making that easy. The bastard had predicted this Santa Ana; he’d reveled in it. Killer winds, he’d told me. I knew it wasn’t by chance that he’d called me earlier. He had known my three attackers were dead. Later, when I was in the right frame of mind, I’d play back his message. I wasn’t sure whether Haines had called me directly or made a tape and managed to get it smuggled out of prison. If he’d made a tape, that meant in his own way Haines had managed to escape his cell, and that on his orders his confederate or confederates had obtained my unlisted number. It was possible they had my address and were monitoring me. At his trial and afterward, I had seen Haines’s freak show followers. The master was creepy enough; his disciples were almost as scary.

It was more likely, though, that Haines had called me directly. Cell phones are contraband in prisons, but they can be had for a price even if you’re housed in San Quentin’s Adjustment Center. The FBI would be able to tell me if that was the case. Thinking about his call made me remember a line from an old AT&T ad campaign: “Reach out, reach out and touch someone.” That’s what Haines had done. He had reached out with his toxic touch. But
now of all times I couldn’t let Haines get into my head. That was exactly what he wanted, of course, but I couldn’t waste any more psychic energy on a bogeyman.

Aloud, I said, “I thought I saw a puddy cat.”

Sirius’s ears popped up at the c-word.

“But I didn’t, I didn’t,” I added.

Sirius settled down. I tried calling Martinez and then Gump but still had no luck reaching them. I was drawing ever closer to Miller’s home. My cop training told me to not proceed; my cop instinct said to keep going. Since being burned, I had come to rely more and more on that instinct. Something was about to happen, I knew, and I felt this need to get to Miller’s place without any delays. My fire walk had apparently burned away my common sense.

The signs told me I was nearing the city of Temecula. The location of Temecula—roughly equidistant from LA, San Diego, and Orange County—had made it a popular bedroom community for all three when land and gas were cheap. There were still some references in the signage and billboards to the city’s not-too-distant ranching past, but nowadays the cowboys have forsaken the area. Not so the Indians, who according to several billboards were running a large casino in town.