Cold Springs (30 page)

She stood as close to the blaze as she could, feeling like something that had been pulled prematurely from the microwave—boiling on one side, frozen on the other.

A dot of ice melted on her cheek. She looked up. Snowflakes were falling, a scatter of oversized dust motes evaporating in the halo of her fire.

Great. Just great.

When her hands felt warm enough to work, she began cleaning out the tree trunk. Grubs and worms and beetles squirmed out of the dark, and these she threw onto the tarp of her jacket by the fire. Just in case, she told herself. Just in case.

By the time dusk was truly setting in, she had made her shelter. The snow had begun to stick to the ground like a crust of salt. Mallory backed into her hollow tree, now lined with moss and grass, and kept the fire blazing. She drank spring water from her canteen, but she avoided the grubs for now.

She couldn't seem to control her shivering. She wondered if hypothermia could set in so quickly.

She imagined she was back on the ropes course above the river, suspended in the dark, her harness tearing. She was ready to make a deal with God, to get her the hell out of here.

Her last visit to her father's, just before she'd run away to the East Bay, she had walked into his bedroom and found him on his knees, his back to her, hunched over his bed in his business suit, praying. She couldn't have been more embarrassed if she'd found him in his underwear. Her dad, who'd never been to church in his life, who'd told her when she was a kid that God was a fairy tale, like Cinderella—her dad was
praying.
He didn't notice her. His fingers were laced, his lips almost kissing them as he spoke.

She'd stayed just long enough to hear him pleading quietly, promising God he would give anything. Please.

Then she'd left, easing the door closed behind her.

She understood finally what he'd been praying for . . . Her.

She'd blown up at him, cursed him, called him a monster because he didn't like Race, because he'd hit her mother once, years ago.

She had hurt him, just like Pérez said, and all he wanted was for her to be safe.

He'd sent Pérez to get her. That was a way of telling her he loved her. A twisted way, maybe. But he had tried.

She started crying—knowing that the tears were some damn chemical imbalance, her period making everything seem worse than it was.

Her dad was gone. She wanted to think she'd feel a hole in her heart if he were dead, but she wasn't sure.

This was her mother's fault—her mother and Chadwick. They had started everything going wrong, just because they wanted to fuck each other. They'd ruined two families. Her father's disappearance was on their heads.

Maybe Chadwick had treated her okay. Maybe he was even serious about helping her. Maybe, for a while, when she was scared in Fredericksburg, she'd even thought about confiding in him. But in the end, Mallory knew the main reason she hadn't told her dream about Katherine to anyone wasn't that she didn't believe the dream. She wanted to see what would happen if her worst suspicions were right. She wanted to see Chadwick punished.

She huddled into her hollow tree, facing the flames, her knife at her side. Her empty stomach seemed to be ripping itself out of her body. And as the night grew dark, her only company was the river and the fire and the sound of the hills moaning as they contracted under a hard freeze.

33

Race was crazy to be at the café. He knew that.

But he needed time to think. He had a decision to make. And he was running out of places to go.

He sat down at the sidewalk table where a month ago Mallory had been taken from him. He stared at a half-empty coffee glass, a chess game the last customers had left unfinished.

He couldn't go back to Nana's apartment. The visit from Chadwick and Jones had unhinged the old lady, made her start drinking and having conversations with Samuel and Talia in the middle of the night, and Race couldn't handle that shit.

His mother's house was sold—some family with a U-Haul already moved in. Race had stood down the block, watching as a boy lugged his wagon of toys up the front steps, a little girl kicked a soccer ball around the stumps of the palm trees like relay race cones.

Last night, he had stayed in the abandoned apartment building behind the café—up at the top of the stairwell where he and Mallory had made love. The BART trains rattled the windows, and a couple of derelicts in the gutted apartment below him had kept him awake, squabbling about laundry money. Race had kept his .22 semiautomatic in his improvised ankle-strap, close enough where he could reach it, just in case they came up the stairs. He didn't sleep until dawn, when the homeless guys wandered out to find their morning booze.

He couldn't handle being in the stairwell another night. Not because of the derelicts, but because the old carpet still smelled of Mallory. Her scent reminded him of their final night together—being pressed against her, how she would pinch his ears, letting him know when he was being too rough. The whole thing had been wrong—as wrong as finding her the heroin she wanted, feeding the death wish that made her want to turn into Katherine. But Race had followed her lead. He always did. And now he was trying hard not to think about her.

During the afternoon, he'd stolen a bike and made the long ride up into the hills—to the condo above the Caldecott Tunnel. He'd been hoping to find some money, but the place had been cleaned out, as if for good. That made Race nervous, made him wonder what was going on. He thought about staying there overnight, but the idea made his throat go dry. The place had worse ghosts than his mother's house; evil breathed into the air like corpse odor from the five or six years it had been occupied—radios and televisions playing in every room, twenty-four hours a day, to drown out the hatred.

Now it was night again, and he was back at his and Mallory's favorite café, where he had failed so miserably to help her.

He shivered, pulled his camouflage coat around himself. It stank. He stank. He had five twenty-dollar bills left—enough to eat for a few days, but this was a miserable time of year to sleep on the street.

He had to make a choice.

Race took out Chadwick's card, fingered the worn edge. He'd looked at this card every day. He'd memorized the damn number. He'd even called it once, but he'd gotten a machine, and hung up.

He could call again. He could even go to the city, to Norma Reyes' house. He would tell her first. Then she would help him. She would make the call for him, protect him from the consequences. He had known for years—ever since the day she defended him against that idiot who called him a monkey in fourth grade—that Miss Reyes was somebody he could trust. It had something to do with the sadness in her eyes, the loneliness that reminded him of his mom, those few times she was between men, when she wasn't high or drunk, and she paid attention to him. He could go to Norma Reyes.

Or he could do what he'd been told. He could wait and be silent.

He thought about Samuel—his dead big brother, whose memory had been resurrected to serve as a monster's skin.

She had promised no one else would die. She had promised to come back for Race and give him a fresh start, a new school, an easy life with plenty of money.

But she had also promised he would graduate from Laurel Heights. She said he could go to college, study history, get a Ph.D. if he wanted to. He could rewrite African-American history and turn the fucking world on its head.

She'd broken her promise.

For a while, his future had been part of her revenge—a thorn in the Zedmans' sides that served her purpose. Now, he was just a loose end.

Race hadn't seen her for days, but he had no illusions. She could find him at a moment's notice. She had almost killed him for saying as much as he had—for leaving the apartment, trying to warn Miss Reyes.

It would be stupid to cross her twice.

He stared at the chipped chess pieces on the table, thought of Mallory teaching him the game, years ago, in third grade. She'd always told him he was smarter than she was, but in chess, like everything else, she always outmaneuvered him.

Inside the café, the evening crowd was settling in with herbal tea and baguette sandwiches. White families, white college students glanced at him apprehensively. When he caught their eye, they stared past him, pretending to be looking somewhere else.

He knew what they were thinking. He was a transient, taking up a table. He would bother them for spare change. Or mug them. Why didn't the café management tell him to move?

Race understood the hate that had driven the knife into his mother thirty-two times. He understood Samuel.

Race's take on it— Being black, you were never far away from a split identity. You always wrestled with a secret desire, a guilty wish that you could be someone else—just slip into a different skin for a while, be invisible, not the object of suspicion and resentment and fear. For him, for a Montrose, it was only a small step from that to schizophrenia, or homicide, or both.

He remembered the first time—when he was a little boy, after he'd told her what he saw, after the body had been found, washed up in a rotting piece of canvas on the shores of Hayward. She had grabbed his arm with such desperation that her fingertips left bruises. “That wasn't him. You understand? Samuel will take care of you. Samuel's your protection.” And the light in her eyes had been just like Nana's—the refracted shimmer of a crystal with a crack in its heart. Whenever Race looked in a mirror, he feared he would start having that same look in his eyes. Since the night of Samuel's murder, Race feared that his whole life had been the product of a fracture—that
she
was his imagination, too.

He couldn't turn himself in. He couldn't betray her. Even now, after all she'd done, she was still his protection. She was still Samuel. He would have to find a sidewalk to curl up on tonight, a church basement to hide in. He would have to argue with the derelicts about laundry money.

He stared at Chadwick's card, pecking at the edge with his greasy fingernail.

A man's voice said, “Hi, Race.”

The fear started in Race's fingers and worked its way up to his neck.

The guy in front of him had close-cropped blond hair, hazel eyes, a face like a baby who'd just gotten through screaming. He wore a black sailor's coat over black denim, a newspaper pinched in his left hand, his right hand in his jacket pocket, closed around something bulky that Race thought was a gun.

“Oh, come on,” the man said. “Not even a hello?”

“Kraft,” he said. “You're that David guy.” Race had never seen the guy without a jacket and tie, never seen him looking so street.

David Kraft smiled. “Funny. Like you didn't know me.”

Race's mind was going fast, running possibilities, angles. He was trying to figure what the hell this guy was doing here, what he wanted.

“I live down the street,” Kraft told him. “I'm a neighbor, practically. You don't remember me from the old days? Didn't know I was an East Bay boy?”

Race could run for it. He knew the alleys. It was dark. But if that was a gun in Kraft's pocket, only three feet from his chest, Race didn't like his chances.

“Empty your pockets,” Kraft said. “Very, very slowly.”

Race pulled out his twenties, half a buck in change, the key to Nana's apartment tangled in pocket thread. Chadwick's card. A paperback copy of
The Bluest Eye
from his jacket. A spent bullet casing he'd picked up from Samuel's bedroom. A number two pencil.

Kraft said, “Unarmed?”

“Yeah.”

Race made a conscious effort not to move his feet, not to tip off the ankle-strap in any way.

David Kraft tossed the newspaper onto the table. “Look.”

It was folded to a story with a photo of the man's face, but it took Race a second to register who he was looking at.

Mallory's dad.

Fear started rolling around his stomach like a marble. He lifted the paper off the table.

He read about it for the first time—John Zedman reported missing three days ago, bloodstains found at his house. His body had been found today in an unoccupied townhouse in the Mission, discovered by one of the property owners, Norma Reyes. Ann Zedman, the deceased's ex-wife, recently suspended from her headmistress job at Laurel Heights on suspicion of embezzlement, was wanted for questioning in the murder, but was believed to have left town.

“Nice job,” Kraft told him. “Hauling the body all that way, just for the effect. I mean, that was overtime pay, right there.”

Race stared at the picture.
She
had done this. She'd promised no one would get hurt. “I didn't know. I didn't—”

“Oh, of course not,” Kraft said. “Never. Right? And the name Katherine Chadwick—that doesn't mean anything to you either.”

With his free hand, Kraft pulled out his keys and threw them on the table. The keys were attached to a metal figurine of Mickey Mouse, about two inches tall. It struck Race as a weird thing for a guy to have on his key chain.

“What you're going to do,” Kraft said, “is drive. You got your learner's permit, Race?”

“No.”

“That's bullshit. I've got access to your student files. I know your age, your mom's and grandma's addresses, your blood type and your fucking birthday. You know how to drive. You're going to drive me to a place where we can talk.”

Race didn't move.

“Or you could scream for help,” David Kraft added. “Call the cops. I guess you could always do that.”

Kraft smiled, waiting.

Race picked up the keys.

“Good boy,” Kraft said. “And Race—yes, it's really a gun in my pocket. In case you were wondering.”

David Kraft's car was a blue SUV, parked at the hydrant half a block up Ocean View. What he must've done—he'd seen Race at the sidewalk. Kraft had circled the block, parked on the side street, walked up behind Race. But the gun—Kraft couldn't carry that all the time. The guy was like a junior business advisor or something. Straight out of college. He must've been watching for Race—watching a long time, waiting.

“No accidents,” Kraft warned. “My dad's insurance won't cover you.”

Kraft brought out his gun, a blue-steel H&K, and pressed it into Race's thigh. Race put the key into the ignition and tried to keep his heart from climbing up his throat. The Mickey Mouse bumped against his knee as he turned the wheel.

Kraft directed him south on Broadway, then into West Oakland on side streets Race had never seen before. Section Eight housing and junkie motels gave way to warehouses, which gave way to miles of razor-wire lots stacked with shipping containers. A few more deserted streets, then the flatlands dissolved into asphalt and sea grass and crumbled right into the Bay.

Kraft directed him up to the shore, where a twenty-foot pier jutted into choppy black water.

To the south, the Port of Oakland's white cranes towered like dinosaur skeletons. To the north, the Bay Bridge glowed and hummed with traffic—thousands of commuters roaring by overhead.

A million people behind them in Oakland, another million across the Bay in San Francisco, and Race and David Kraft were totally alone.

“Get out,” Kraft told him.

“I didn't know about Mallory's dad.”

The gun pressed deeper into his thigh. “Take the keys out of the ignition, and get out of the car. It's a beautiful night.”

Race did what he was told.

He stood on the uneven shore while David Kraft came around the side of the SUV, the sights of the H&K never leaving Race's chest.

Race found himself rubbing the little Mickey Mouse—trying to calm himself with the slick metal under his thumb.

He had to get away.

She had lied to him about not hurting anyone. She had killed Zedman. That meant she would lie about other things, too. Mallory was in trouble.

The .22 was still in his ankle holster, but he'd never get it out in time. Even if he did, Race sucked at shooting. He'd never killed anybody, never even fired the damn thing except in the air on New Year's Eve. He hadn't tried the gun since Chadwick made him drop it five stories off the fire escape. Maybe it didn't even work anymore.

David Kraft prodded him toward the water, then out onto the little pier. “About halfway. That's good. Now face me.”

The wind smelled of car exhaust and rotting fish.

In the dim light from the Bay Bridge, David Kraft's face looked like metal, as if it had been hammered from the hood of his own car.

“Katherine Chadwick,” Kraft told him. “Nine years ago last summer, I took a girl to a party. She was feeling down. I wanted to give her a thrill, show her I could pick up drugs, slum on the bad side of town, you know? So I took her to this house—this little fucking piss-yellow house in West Oakland, and Samuel Montrose stole her from me. Ruined her, got her so hooked on smack that she thought a gangster piece-of-shit like him could actually love somebody. She died, Race. Her parents failed her. The school failed her. I failed her. But most of all, she died because of Samuel. A piece of shit named Samuel Montrose. You look just like him, you know. Just like him.”

Race was imagining that he could levitate straight up from this spot. He could see every important place in his life: his mother's house on Jefferson, Laurel Heights, Nana's apartment, Rockridge, Telegraph Hill. He had never traveled farther than he could see right now, from this spot, and he wondered if this was the geographic center of his life—the point where all the distances averaged out.

He couldn't die. He had to make someone believe him—Norma Reyes. If he could just talk to her again, look straight in her eyes and make her listen.