Killer (15 page)

I take another sip of whiskey, no sting this time, my tongue anesthetized by the first sip—now it is only warmth that spreads down my throat and out from my middle and deeper, further up my spine and into my head and opening doors that haven’t been opened in years, into rooms and hallways and then more comes, a rush of pictures and smells and sounds that gather themselves, once again, into a single memory.

We stand outside McDougal’s and I shield him from the wind as he lights a cigarette.

“Let’s go, I want to show you something, Doc.”

I follow him and we get in his van and drive.

Los Angeles at night, speeding by my window like a movie in fast forward. We float above the low buildings with their bright signs and the mercury vapor street lights that turn the sky a dirty orange. ZZ Top plays on the van’s stereo as we fly above the streets in the neon space between the city and the starless sky. Over the streets we ride, on the freeway, then down the California Incline and up Pacific Coast Highway and past Will Rogers Beach and I have a bottle of Jack in my hand as I ride shotgun.

“Where we goin’?” I ask, turning from the dizzying show outside my window.

“Almost there,” he says, the coast highway unreeling in his glasses as we head north.

I suddenly realize I don’t know who this guy is. I only met him tonight—or last night?

“Hey,” I say. “I’m sorry…I’m not so good at names… An’ I forget things… What’s your name again?”

“That’s alright, I never told you my name.”

“Oh,” I say. “What is it?”

“Dave,” he says.

And then we turn into the gravel parking lot at Temescal Canyon Park.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Hey.”

My face against something cold and hard. Something pushes on my shoulder.

“HEY.”

I look up into the face of a bald giant who is shaking me with a piece of paper in his hand.

“Pay up and get the fuck out. You can’t sleep here,” the Giant says.

I look around. I am in the Midtown bar where Nicki left me and it is dark outside now and the bar is crowded and I am drunk—

“Let’s go, this id’na fuckin’ hotel,” the Bald Giant won’t wait for my shame bath. I lift my face from the cold copper bar and fumble in my back pocket for my wallet, unfamiliar with my new pants—
Don’t thank me,
Nicki had said,
Thank Barney’s for opening at nine-thirty on a weekday.

I pull open my back pocket, popping the button off, and I take out my wallet and hand my Amex to the glaring Bald Giant across the bar.

“Need a driver’s license,” he says.

I give it to him and he scrutinizes it under some kind of magnifying scope
like he’s fucking Louis Pasteur,
then he goes to the cash register. I feel people crowding around me, looking at me with contempt, with impatience, with fear—
there but for the grace of God…

I wipe the saliva from my face and look in the mirror across the bar. I am a fucking slobbering, slit-eyed drunk, and I know it’s no dream this time because I am
still
drunk, despite my little nap. I look at my watch: 5:22 pm.

The Giant comes back and gives me a piece of paper and I squint to focus on my bar tab: $126 dollars.

That’s fucking respectable, even for New York,
I think to myself, with the stupid gallows humor and perverse, self-destructive pride that only other drunks find amusing. I sign the damned thing and slide off the stool and walk out into the cold, which slams me a little more sober.

I nearly walk into two women who are smoking, the smell bringing me back yet again to a memory…

Heading up the trail behind him…behind DAVE…up the railroad tie steps, toward the small plateau in the shallow moonlight…

And then it’s gone.

I move away from the women, who glare at me as I weave down the street. I straighten my stride, the wind sobering me more, feeling the cold and welcoming it now.

Have to think, have to remember…

But I can’t.

I walk until I see the
Mirabelle Hotel
sign down the street, and I head toward it like a lost mariner toward a lighthouse and I reach it and nod at the doorman, who opens the door for me.

I go inside the warm lobby and I am heading to the elevators when a voice calls to me.

“Mr. Rhodes?” she says. I turn and see a stunning young woman at the front desk looking at me.

“You’ve got a lot of people looking for you,” she says, flashing a dazzling smile full of impossibly white teeth. She reaches under the counter and takes out a packet of messages.

I go to her.

“Somebody sure wants to get a hold of you,” she says, with her brilliant, friendly smile.

“Thanks,” I say, and take the pink message slips from her. I look down at them—a dozen phone calls—from Nicki, Joel, Arnie—and from others, whose names I don’t recognize. Some of the phone numbers have 213 area codes. Parker Center.

Fuck.

“D’you have an ATM?” I ask her.

“Yes, right down there, just past the elevators,” she points the way for me. I wish I could stay and chat with her. I wish I could get to know her and find out what time she gets off work and buy her dinner and meet her daddy but I can’t. I will be arrested tomorrow. If I stay.

I go to the ATM and withdraw all the cash I can: $900 bucks in three whacks of $300. The machine won’t let me withdraw any more. I look into the tiny camera lens over the ATM machine’s screen and I know that my face—from this camera—will be scrutinized in a matter of hours by FBI and LAPD and God knows who else.

I turn around and head back out the front doors, where I fumble with my wallet and find my parking slip and a twenty dollar bill and give them to the doorman. He whistles and a kid runs up and he gives him the parking slip and I wait, letting the fresh, cold air sober me further, and soon my truck appears at the curb and the kid gets out and holds my door open and I get in and he slams the door after me and I drive away, flattening my hand against the buttons on the armrest, opening the windows to keep me awake and alert. I drive carefully through the Manhattan streets, looking for a sign for the bridge, the bridge, which bridge?
Where’s the confounded bridge?
Then I find it, and pull carefully into the flow of traffic and look for a sign that will take me west, out of the city. I don’t know how long it will take me to get to West Virginia, but I know where I have to go.

THINGS PAST

When he arrived in Kansas City with the Angel from West Virginia, the fat old trucker who gave him a ride offered him a job. The old guy owned a small company—three rigs, one of which he drove himself on short hauls to Chicago and back to KC.

At first the job entailed the young man doing the heavy lifting that they picked up and delivered at the loading docks—machine parts, mostly. The old trucker suffered from emphysema, which was getting worse as he chain-smoked his Camels day and night. But soon the old man came to trust him enough to let him drive for long stretches at night, while the old guy stretched out, wheezing, in the back of the cab.

The commercial trucking license was easy to procure. The Mexicans in Chicago could get pretty much any document you wanted. But his endless hours of communion with the Angel in almost total darkness had left him extremely near-sighted, so he had to get glasses in order to drive. He chose a rectangular wire-framed pair with lenses so thick that his small eyes could barely be seen behind them.

The old trucker, a devout Baptist, was impressed with his knowledge of the Bible. So when the wheezy old man lit up a Camel after a steak-and-egg breakfast, then turned as red as their Naugahyde booth and dropped dead of a heart attack, his widow sold the rig to the quiet young man with the glasses who knew his Bible so well, and was clearly such a good Christian boy.

So, in his new rig, his phony commercial truck driver’s license in his wallet, he took over the short hauls from Chicago, through Davenport, Peoria, Des Moines, St. Stephen, and back to Kansas City, carrying machine parts to appliance repair shops, car dealerships, and factories.

He lived in the rig, sleeping in the cramped rear of the cab where the old man had installed a mattress and a small TV. He bought window blinds for the truck’s cab, and at night he was with his Angel, when he wasn’t driving. He showered and shaved and ate at the truck stops along the way, and for a year or so he was content.

But the restlessness eventually returned. His embalming work on the West Virginia Angel had held up well, although he occasionally had to work on her with cosmetics. But this time it was his desire to have his story told again that drove him to the irritable, anxious state. He looked at the yellowing West Virginia newspaper articles about the girl Caitlin over and over, and he felt the urgent need to have due attention paid once more.

He had almost told the old trucker about his Angel once, but stopped himself, of course. So he talked about the Bible, in the rare moments when they talked at all. He speculated with the old man about Jesus—what if Jesus hadn’t had Paul to travel the known world and spread His story? Would we ever have known His story, His gospel? But the old trucker was thick and slow, and just shook his head and wheezed, “Lord only knows, son, Lord only knows…”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It is 12:51 a.m. when I cross the border into West Virginia. I’m no longer drunk but I am still driving with the windows open and the heater going full blast to keep the alcohol smell out of the truck, just in case I get pulled over.

I have driven for seven hours and I am on the cusp of a hangover and almost out of gas but I don’t want to stop. I am heading toward a place I made up in my last book, an unincorporated area in Morgan County, in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, where I killed young Katie Stubens in
Killer Unbound.

Once again, I don’t know where I am going and yet I do. I have never been here—
at least I think I haven’t—
but the details of
Killer Unbound
are still clear to me. I finished writing it less than a year ago.

I drive on, through the rolling foothills of the Appalachian mountains, passing a sign which reads “MARTINSBURG GHOST TOURS –
Tour Haunted Graveyards Fridays.”

This is it, I know, and suddenly I can hear the voice of
Dave
once again, from the booth in the back of McDougal’s…

“Tonight we’re gonna talk about a little piece named Caitlin,” he says.

Caitlin. Whom I had named Katie…

“You’ll find her out in Morgan County, West Virginia…just off the interstate, past the billboard for the haunted graveyard there’s a county road…”

…and here it is. I signal and carefully pull off the interstate and onto the county road.

“There are signs leading to the graveyard, you just follow the signs,” he says, cupping his hands around his drink and making that low sound that passes for a laugh.

But what is this? A roadblock. Police lights.

Shit
.

As I come nearer I see a
lot
of flashing lights. Cops everywhere. I see the West Virginia State Police logo on the side of one of the cars, and then a couple of black SUV’s that I know are FBI vehicles. I slow down behind a row of cars waiting to be allowed through the roadblock ahead.

And then I see it—up ahead, along the side of the county road—the banks of brilliant lights that illuminate a crime scene. A backhoe is pulling off of a tractor-trailer, which is backed up to a large group of men and women—most of them in uniform—as they look down at what I know is the grave of a young woman I had named Kate Stubens.

I stop.

The cars ahead of me lurch forward, as each driver is allowed through the roadblock.

I have to get out of here.

But I can’t. Traffic coming the other way is crawling past me as drivers gawk at the display of law enforcement, the multiple flashing lights dazzling them into a collective trance.

The driver behind me honks his horn. I ease forward, toward the state trooper standing with his boots on the double yellow line, checking everyone as they pass.

I am trapped.

A man in a dark blue Gore-Tex jacket is walking along the shoulder of the road, down my row of cars toward me, holding a flashlight. He walks quickly, shining his heavy black Magna-light over each car, into the windows. There is something about him that’s familiar. Then he approaches my truck and I see his face—smooth and hairless, with a preternatural tan and those small gray eyes.

Detective Marsh, LAPD.

As I look at his face he looks at mine and instantly I know he recognizes me. He raises his light and blinds me with it and yells something to a nearby state trooper, who hurries up next to Marsh from the gulley, pulling at his sidearm—

I spin the steering wheel hard to the right and stomp the accelerator to the floor, ripping a u-turn on the shoulder of the county road, slamming into the guard rail and spraying Marsh and the trooper with gravel and grit as I tear back the way I came, along the shoulder, against the traffic that was backed up behind me. I don’t even look in my rearview mirror as I reach the end of the line of cars behind me and then I skid back onto the road, cutting off traffic headed the other direction to a chorus of car horns.

Don’t go back the way you came, they’ll set up roadblocks and radio ahead…they know where you were coming from.

I get back to the interstate and continue west.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I get off the interstate two exits west, then pull over at a truck stop because I am about to run out of gas. I sit for a moment, my brief drunk now OFFICIALLY a hangover, and try to think through the fog.

Have to think.

I turn on my phone and see that I have sixteen messages. I flip through the caller ID list and recognize them as the same numbers from the pink message slips I was given by the beautiful girl at the front desk of the Mirabelle.