China Lake (22 page)

I said, ‘‘You can’t alibi him, or you won’t?’’

The wind lashed up. Though it made me wince, it didn’t so much as cause a quiver on his sleek, pressed facade.

He said, ‘‘I’m telling you this much as his friend. But that is all I can say at this moment. I thought you would be pleased to hear it.’’

‘‘Brian is up the creek without a paddle. It does him no good for you to hand me a bouquet.’’

He said, ‘‘Your brother is straight about this. You should be too.’’

Straight—that meant Brian knew Marc wouldn’t speak up in his defense, and accepted it. All at once I wondered if Marc had in fact been home Friday night—or whether Brian had gone to Marc’s house at all. I wondered if, instead, they’d been on the base.

What if Marc had been on duty, night-flying over the back ranges, performing a classified weapons test? If so, he wouldn’t even have told his wife. And he wasn’t going to tell me or the police. Briefly, for one fissile moment, I hated it all. The navy, my whole family tradition—all it meant was bigger booms, new and improved death, all to protect the edge, to ensure that the U.S. Navy swung a bigger dick than the other guy. The Big Ssssh was part of the strategy, and it was the reason crackpots believed there were aliens running around Area 51, and CIA satellites that watched you take a pee, and that government concentration camps lay beyond the horizon, awaiting prisoners of the beast. And the irony? In the end, the navy’s new toys got written up in
Aviation Week
anyway.

But Marc Dupree was not going to violate regulations even to save Brian from a murder charge. Standing there, beyond the vault of reason, I felt my own head ignite.

‘‘You have a different concept of friendship than I do. I’ll see you, Marc.’’

I went inside and slammed the door behind me.

Dust motes rose and jigged around the hallway when I stepped inside. I was shaking with anger. The air smelled acrid. Fine black fingerprint powder covered numerous surfaces. On the living room floor a deep red stain spread in an irregular circle. A thin trail of blood ran across the carpet to the patio door. Queasiness grabbed at my stomach. Somehow I hadn’t seen it the night of the murder, perhaps distracted by the vandalism—the brighter, bigger, redder things scrawled on the walls. I found myself surprised that the trail wasn’t thicker. And I thought: Why had the killer dragged the body outside?

Conceivably he had set the body ablaze to destroy evidence. Fingerprints, fibers, evidence that he had scuffled with Wyoming, whatever. But if that was the goal, the killer could simply have burned the whole house down. No, a deeper motive underlay the method of destruction.

Stuffed in a trash can. If that wasn’t symbolic, nothing was.

A banshee image hissed in my head: the killer hiding in the house while Brian stumbled on the scene . . . hiding, and waiting, and then arranging the macabre pyrotechnic exhibit for my interactive viewing horror. The hatred, the disdain, and the cool nerve it must have taken—it staggered me.

Outside, the wind licked the walls of the house. I hurried to gather up my things. I wanted someone to come in and rip out the carpet, wash the walls, and paint the whole damn place. But, turning the key in the lock, I doubted whether Brian would ever make this his home; whether he and Luke would ever, in fact, set foot in the house again.

A hot and capricious crosswind chased us all the way to the coast. It was a Santa Ana, a wind that strips the view to a bright and exposed base coat, a wind that opens abrasions. The Pacific glared gold in the sun, with whitecaps shearing off toward the west.

Luke was riding with me, and he was the one who spotted the brown cloud seeping above the mountain-tops. We were only twenty minutes from Jesse’s house. Here, the coastal range butts up against the shoreline. Above the peaks, in the brilliant sky, rose a single cloud.

‘‘That’s smoke,’’ Luke said.

I hunched and peered out at it. ‘‘You think so?’’

‘‘I think there’s a fire.’’

I thought he was right. I turned on the radio. The station was playing its usual anxious-white-boy rock ’n’ roll, so cataclysm hadn’t yet descended. But it was high fire season, that time of year when the world saw news footage of movie stars wielding garden hoses against a mile-wide flame front, trying to douse their Malibu digs. Anything was possible, and could happen in the snap of a finger.

Californians attack fire as mortal enemy, as tragedy, as monster. But fire is integral, in fact vital to this ecosystem. It’s restorative, a form of purification. Some local plants actually need the heat of the flames to germinate. What has gradually become a tragedy is fire suppression, a hundred years of snuffing out blazes in their infancy. The foliage builds up and up, so that when a fire inevitably starts, the resulting blaze is a conflagration, huge and devastating. Still, if it’s your house, your town, you stand and fight.

A minute later we got a better view. In the mountains behind Carpinteria the cloud rose in a fat pillar, spreading high into the sky. At its base, along the chaparral-covered slopes, it was a thick and churning column.

Luke pointed. ‘‘I see the fire!’’

Briefly a flare of red spurted from the brown boil. I blinked, and it was gone.

Traffic began slowing. People were simply rubbernecking, but if the wind blew the fire this way, the CHP could close the freeway, and that would be a mess. The 101 Freeway is the main road into Santa Barbara, which lies like a bracelet between the mountains and the ocean. The city is vulnerable to road closures. Several years back a toxic chemical spill shut down the 101, virtually cutting off traffic to Los Angeles for weeks. I lurched to a stop in a hail of brakelights.

Luke said, ‘‘I bet they’ll send the planes.’’

The U.S. Forest Service has an air-attack base at the Santa Barbara airport, and when a big wildfire hits, the planes soon lumber into the sky. We had seen them that summer, DC-7s and C-130s and P-3s, flying to fires in Montana and Arizona. Heavy at takeoff, they strained off the ground, piston engines roaring, skimming the roads and buildings beyond the runway. Old warriors, they looked heroic.

Luke squirmed for a better view at the smoke. ‘‘Look! It’s number twenty-three!’’

He pointed at a bright streak, white with an orange nose and tail, flying low, almost invisible against the mountains. It angled toward the fire and, just before it disappeared into the cloud, opened its bomb bay doors. Red slurry dumped from its belly, pluming down on the flames. A moment later the plane broke out of the smoke, climbing to escape the turbulent air near the fire. It banked toward the coast, heading straight for us, getting larger, louder, until it grumbled overhead only a few hundred feet off the ground, engines booming loud enough to shake human bone.

Luke said, ‘‘Wow!’’

‘‘Really.’’

It banked right over the ocean, heading for the airport to tank up.

‘‘What happens if they fly through the fire?’’ he said.

‘‘Those planes are tough. They’d be okay.’’

‘‘They could paint the plane with the red stuff, so it wouldn’t burn up.’’ He watched it receding along the coastline. ‘‘Should we say a prayer for them?’’

I looked at him, surprised. ‘‘If you want.’’

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. ‘‘Should we say a prayer for the other fire pilots, too?’’

The sobriety on his face was devastating. I said, ‘‘Do you want to say a prayer for all pilots?’’

He nodded and shut his eyes. I found myself unable to pray along, angry, knowing that the universe was cruel enough to trick a little boy, to let him send out his deepest longings without promise of an answer.

When we finally reached Butterfly Beach, Jesse took Luke bodysurfing. I skipped it, sitting outside on Jesse’s deck with a cold Heineken in hand, watching the two of them make their way into the surf. Salt spray was luminous in the air. Luke was a sprite, wiry arms waving as he met the first breaker and it broke around his legs. He yelled, ‘‘It’s cold!’’

Jesse came behind him, sitting on the sand, sculling backward on his butt, pushing with his better leg, pulling with his arms. When he bought the house, with the sand and the rocks between him and the surf, I thought he was subjecting himself to a nasty joke, a constant, cosmic black eye. Instead he had spent weekends clearing a path to the water. Now, a minute behind Luke, he rolled into the breakers. He embraced a receding wave and became an aquatic creature, graceful and confident, gliding toward Luke, arms arcing in that easy, powerful freestyle he had, water shimmering on his shoulders in the sunlight.

I tilted my head back and drank deeply. An air-attack plane hunkered by, heading back to the airport.

When Luke and Jesse splashed back up onshore, I swaddled Luke in a thick yellow beach towel and ran him a shower in the guest room. The house had three bedrooms veering off the large open space comprising living room, dining area, and kitchen. Just as Jesse came through the patio door, I was looking in his refrigerator. I asked him what he wanted for dinner, onions or baking soda. He coasted toward the far side of the living room, rubbing a towel through his hair, and said, ‘‘I haven’t had time to shop.’’ He put a CD on the stereo. Hendrix,
Electric Ladyland
. Turning up the volume, he went into his room, heading for the shower.

I scrambled eggs, toasted a couple bagels, and called it dinner. Jesse emerged after his shower, barefoot, in a white T-shirt and jeans, and said, ‘‘Smells good.’’ He set the CD to play ‘‘All Along the Watchtower.’’ Hendrix’s guitar hit me like wind shear, like a scythe.

Sundown was coming, and it was Martian red in the smoke from the wildfire. The light angled through the wall of plate-glass windows facing the beach, landing bloody-bright on Jesse’s handsome face, and tinting his white T-shirt crimson. Coming into the kitchen, he uncorked a bottle of pinot noir and poured two glasses. Then he reached for a bottle of prescription pills. Tipping two into his palm, he swallowed them with the wine.

‘‘Pain’s bad?’’ I said.

He shifted himself in his seat. ‘‘I’ve had better weeks.’’ He drank, and changed the subject. ‘‘I didn’t tell you about the whale.’’

‘‘Luke did. Some Jet Skiers got a blubber facial.’’

‘‘City engineers had winched the thing to a fishing trawler and were towing it out to sea. The jokers who hit it were crawling drunk.’’ He spun languidly to face me. ‘‘The next day, when they woke up in the hospital, these bozos called me. They wanted me to sue the city for their injuries. Thanks to
Gaul v. Beowulf’s Books
, I’m suddenly an expert on wild-animal litigation. ’’ Caustic face. ‘‘I declined the case. Told them to call Skip Hinkel.’’

‘‘Speaking of whom . . . ,’’ I said.

He snorted. ‘‘Judge Rodriguez scolded him for slagging me off to the press.’’ Another swallow. ‘‘So Skip told the Department of Fish and Game that I was harboring the ferrets.’’

I was putting plates on the table. I stopped. ‘‘No.’’

‘‘It was an anonymous tip, but nobody else would have done it. A Fish and Game inspector showed up at the office on Friday. It’s hard to get much work done when an officious little man with a cage is scurrying around the firm.’’

‘‘I can’t believe Skip.’’

‘‘Sure you can. He’s a jackass. It’s an FFL.’’

FFL, Fucking Fact of Life. His term for things you couldn’t change.

I said, ‘‘No, it’s not. It’s your reputation.’’

‘‘I’m tough. My rep will be fine.’’

After dinner, darkness came quickly. When I put Luke to bed, I came back to find Jesse on the sofa, watching an
X-Files
rerun. His mouth was pressed tight, his shoulders crooked. The pills weren’t working. I stood behind the sofa and began kneading the base of his neck, feeling resistance, stiff muscles fighting me.

I tapped his shoulder. ‘‘Lie down on the floor.’’

He got on his back on the rug. I knelt down next to him and started stretching his legs, one at a time. I bent his knees, circled his ankles, and rotated his hips, working his hamstrings, calves, quads. I had no training in physical therapy but knew he needed to preserve his range of motion to keep from developing contractures, locked joints that could further disable a paraplegic. He lay there, looking tight. The lights were low, the TV flickering; Mulder confronting the Cigarette-Smoking Man. Mood lighting.

He said, ‘‘Why do you think the killer burned Pastor Pete’s body?’’

At once I found I had a throbbing headache, and the wasp stings were itching like crazy.

I said, ‘‘He could have been a psychopath, or trying to destroy evidence.’’

‘‘He?’’

‘‘Or she, or they.’’

He worked himself up onto his elbows. ‘‘If the killer wanted to get rid of the evidence, why didn’t he dump the body out in the desert? The Mafia does.’’

‘‘Maybe he was worried that the neighbors would see him removing it. I don’t know; maybe he came to the house on foot and had no way to carry it.’’

He said, ‘‘I think it’s something else. The way the killer positioned the body in the trash can, it seems like ritual. Or rage.’’

For a minute we listened to the surf murmuring outside. Then Jesse held his hand out. I pulled him to a sitting position. Tucking his feet in, he sat cross-legged, leaning back against the couch.

He said, ‘‘Do you still think the Remnant has big plans?’’

I rubbed my temples. ‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘Do you think Pastor Pete’s death derailed their scheme?’’

‘‘No. Chenille indicated the opposite, that now they’re more determined than ever to battle the Antichrist. ’’ I paused. ‘‘It brought back something Nikki said to me. That we should be on guard against an event that convinces the Remnant that the end is
now
.’’

‘‘Their leader getting turned into a Roman candle, that would do it.’’