The Totem 1979 (29 page)

But not too much, he kept remembering as he walked toward the living room and sat again in the corner, staring at the night out there. He’d have to do a lot of talking in the morning. Dunlap, Parsons, and the medical examiner. He didn’t know who else, but there’d be many, and he wondered how he’d manage to get through this. All his years of working, and he’d never had this kind of trouble. No, that wasn’t true. There was the grocery store. And on one occasion, he’d shot a man. Three, to be precise, but only one had died, and the inquest had absolved him. He’d been bothered by the killing, but he’d never felt like this, and he was grateful that the bourbon finally was numbing him. Even slumped in a chair, he was slightly off balance, and his lips felt strange. Too long without sleep, without a meal, but he was too disturbed to want either.

He was thinking of the medical examiner, the green walls of the autopsy room, the scalpel cutting. That was something else Slaughter hadn’t done right. Because the father would no doubt press charges, Slaughter never should have let the medical examiner go with the body. Even if the medical examiner were able to determine that the boy was not allergic to the sedative, the father would maintain that the evidence had been distorted. What was more, the sedative had almost surely not reacted well with the virus. It had helped to produce the fatal symptoms of paralysis, so any way the problem was approached, the medical examiner had been at fault. He couldn’t be objective when he examined the body. There’d be accusations from the council. Slaughter wished that he’d forbidden him to do the autopsy.

“But don’t you see I have to know?” the medical examiner had begged him. Slaughter knew how he himself would feel and in the end had let him. After all, what difference did it make? The boy was dead. There wasn’t time to bring in someone else to do the job. They had to know right now how this thing worked. He sipped his drink and wondered if the medical examiner would find out that the boy had died from other causes. That would be the best thing anyone could hope for. If the medical examiner did discover that, however, was it likely that the town council would believe him? Or yourself, he thought. Would you believe him? Do you trust him that much?

Yes, he thought, and when the phone rang and he reached for it, he guessed that this might be the medical examiner calling to report. But it wasn’t, just a dead sound on the telephone.

“Who is it?” Slaughter repeated, but there wasn’t any answer. He wondered if this might be the father. “Is there anybody-?”

But abruptly the dial tone was buzzing, and he stared down at the phone and set it onto its holder. Which he would have done regardless, because from the field down by the barn he heard the horses. They were whinnying and snorting. Through the open window and the screen, he heard their hoofbeats skitter one way, then another. In a rush, he set down his glass and rose from the chair. The bourbon made him dizzy, and he waited until his brain was steady before walking toward the door. He’d turned the porchlight off when he came in, but now he turned it on again and stepped out, pausing as he glanced around, then swung left off the porch to face the barn. There was something different, and he had to think before he noticed that he didn’t hear any insects. They were always rasping in the bushes and the grass. They had been when he drove in, parking, going down to check the horses at the start.

But now the night was silent, heavy, except for the skittish whinny of the horses, and he wished that he had thought to bring a rifle from the house. He had his handgun, though, and in the dark its range was good enough for any target he might see. This likely would be nothing anyhow. The horses sometimes acted like this if they sensed a snake or a coyote down that drywash on the rear side of the barn. Often all he had to do was calm them or else shine a light out into the bushes, and the thing would go away. But with the bourbon working on him, he’d left his flashlight in the house, and he was wondering if he was in control enough for this. Considering the trouble that was going on, this might be something, after all.

So, careful to approach the open barn door from an angle, he quickly reached inside to switch on the floodlights. There were two sets, one in front and back, that blazed out toward the drywash and the field beside the barn and toward the house. His eyes hurt briefly as he stared at where the horses galloped toward the right and whinnied and then swung fast toward the left. Their pattern was a kind of circle as if both felt threatened on each side, and although they were a distance from the fence before him, he could see their wild eyes and their twitching nostrils. “What the hell?”

The words were out before he knew he’d said them, and their sound, mixed with the horses’ panic, startled him. He’d never seen them act like this. When there was something here that bothered them, they always made some slight disturbance and then shifted toward a better section of the field. But both were in a frenzy, snorting, twitching, galloping, and he was just about to climb the fence and go out there to calm then when he realized that they might be infected. Sure, a sudden change in manner. That would be a symptom. He could not afford to go to them.

But what else could he do? Assume that something in the darkness frightened them. He hoped that was the case. He loved these horses, and he’d hate to lose them. Well, get moving then. He realized that his reluctance was an indication of how much he’d been bothered, and he took a breath, pulled out his gun, then forced himself to walk along the fence to reach the drywash.

The floodlights brightened everything for fifty yards behind the barn. He saw the red clay of the gully, saw the bushes on the slope across there and the trees along the far rim. He glanced behind him, fearful that there might be something crouched behind the barn, and then his back protected, he walked slowly toward the gully.

There was nothing at the bottom, just the red clay and the boulders and the branches he had thrown in to stop erosion. All the same, he felt that there was something. In the field, the horses continued skittering and snorting, and he didn’t know exactly how to do this. Under usual circumstances, he would have no second thoughts before he went down into the gully and then up the other side to check the bushes. After all, what normally would be out there that could harm him? But this trouble made him reconsider everything. He had to distrust every living thing and even dead ones. But he couldn’t bear the horses’ panic, couldn’t tolerate their agony. He had to stop what they were doing. So he started down the gully when he heard the branches snapping.

Over to his left, across the gully in the bushes, where the glare from the floodlights blended with the darkness. Stepping back toward the rim, he walked along it, frowning toward the darkness. His handgun cocked and ready, he couldn’t be certain if the branches snapped from something that came close or backed off. Then he heard another group of branches snapping, farther to the left, and he relaxed a little as he judged that it was something moving off. The branches snapped close to the first place he had heard them now, however-farther to the left again as well-and there was more than one thing out here, that was certain. He was rigid, fighting the urge to flee in panic like the horses.

Keep control. It’s just coyotes. Sure, then why the hell have you quit breathing? When he heard the snapping once again and couldn’t pretend anymore that it wasn’t coming closer, he reacted without thinking. His instinct now in charge, he fired in the air and saw the lean four-footed object, furry, scrambling backward through the bushes. Then he saw the other, and another, and he might have shouted as he saw yet another coming nearer. He would never know for sure. He heard a noise down in the gully to his right, another on the far side of the barn, and he was running up along the fence beside the barn to reach the house. The horses galloped in a line with him, and then they bolted toward the middle of the field. He kept running, hearing noises close behind him, not once looking, only gasping, racing, and he reached the house and burst inside, slamming the door, locking it behind him. He dodged through the living room to reach the kitchen and the back door which he locked as well. He closed the windows everywhere. He locked them, pulling down the shades, and he was reaching for the phone, gasping, frantically dialing.

“Hello,” a sleepy voice said. “Who, uh-“

“Rettig, this is Slaughter. Get Hammel and get out here.”

“Chief? Is that you? I uh-“

“Rettig, don’t ask questions. Just get out here.”

“To the station? What time is it?”

“My place. Fast. I need you.”

Slaughter repeated his instructions and set down the phone, hearing how the horses whinnied beyond tolerance. He started toward the windows on that side, reaching for a blind to pull it up and see why they were sounding like that. But the phone rang, and he stood immobile, one hand on the blind while he stared toward the phone. That goddamned Rettig. What’s the matter with him? When Slaughter crossed the room and grabbed the phone, there wasn’t anyone, however, just that same dead silence. “Tell me what you want!” he shouted to the mouthpiece, but the silence continued. Then he heard the dial tone again and scratching on the porch and only one horse out there now was whinnying. He faced the front door, his handgun ready, glancing at the window on the side that faced the horses. But he couldn’t hear even one horse now, and as he scrambled toward the front blind, the scratching stopped. The night became terribly soundless.

Chapter Two.

Dunlap set down the phone. He was in his room, the camera and the tape recorder on the desk where he was sitting, his notes spread out before him. He was almost out of cigarettes. He frowned at the pint of whisky that he’d left here in the morning. Even though his body was in agony, he held firm to his promise to himself not to take a drink. The promise was a recent one, although there’d been others like it many times before, but this time he was absolute in his determination not to break it. He had walked back to his hotel from the park. He’d seen the mother and the father leave, had seen the medical examiner go with the body, and he’d known that Slaughter shortly would be turning on him. After all, he’d seen too much. He’d even taken pictures-of the grieving parents, of the body, of the medical examiner who looked so guilty that an image of him would be damning. Dunlap didn’t know if Slaughter was as good a man as he appeared to be, but he’d seen even good men try a coverup if they were threatened, and the way those parents had reacted, Slaughter would feel threatened all right. Dunlap wasn’t going to take a chance on him. He hadn’t come across a story this strong in too many years, six of them at least, about the time that his drinking had gotten out of hand and the magazine had shifted him to minor stories. Now, though, he’d been lucky. What had seemed little more than a routine story had developed into something that would surely get his reputation back. Indeed if this situation got much worse-and he was positive it would-it might turn out to be among the ten best stories of the year, and he was not about to jeopardize his comeback. Actually he hadn’t walked back to the hotel; he had run. He’d slowed on occasion, fighting for his breath, but mostly he had run the ten blocks to his hotel, knowing from the vantage point that the hill provided which way he had to go to reach the downtown section, and he’d often looked behind him just in case a cruiser might be coming, but there hadn’t been one, and when he at last had reached the hotel and his room, the desk clerk downstairs frowning at him as he hurried up, he’d fumbled to unload his camera, looking for a place to hide the film. His room would be too obvious. He went out in the corridor and braced the cartridge behind a picture on the wall. He hid the tape from his recorder behind another picture. He had all their voices from the moment they had reached the ballroom to the instant when the grieving parents had accused the medical examiner of negligence. Oh, it was all there, every blessed detail, and he meant to keep it. Slaughter might come after it, but Slaughter wasn’t going to get it.

Back inside his room, Dunlap had locked the door, and that was when his glance had settled on the pint of bourbon. He was moving toward it, even twisting at the cap, before he stopped himself. No, that was how he’d ended in this dump. He’d ruined every piece of luck he’d ever had by drinking, had nearly lost his wife and almost screwed up his career. If he got drunk now, he’d do something stupid, maybe talk too much when Slaughter came or even draw attention to those pictures in the corridor. For sure, he’d need his senses to keep up with what was happening. The time lost from a drunken stupor would fit the pattern, though. Like gamblers who kept losing, maybe that was what he wanted. To keep losing. Maybe something in him was determined to seek failure. Well, not this time. This time he was going to be a winner. He had lasted since the morning without booze, the first day he had managed that in years, and if he’d suffered this long, he could suffer just a little longer. Make it through the night. The melody to those words occurred to him, and he was laughing. Face this one hour, then the next. That was how the A. A. people were successful, wasn’t it? Sure, take this one hour at a time.

But although Dunlap had laughed, his hands were shaking. He suspected he would throw up, and he set the bottle by the television, went into the bathroom, and drank some water. Hell, you’re hungry, that’s all. A little sick from all that running. But no matter the reason, he was close to throwing up. He stripped and showered, and that helped, the hot sting of the water flooding all the sweat and dust and tension from him, but he nonetheless was sick and wishing for a drink. The drink might make him even sicker, but he wanted it. Attraction and repulsion. So he put on fresh clothes. Why, he didn’t know. He ought to go to bed, but he was thinking maybe he would take a walk. Instead he sat down at the desk and tried a first draft of some notes, just to flesh out what was on the tape and film. He smoked and scribbled his impressions, in no special order, just to get the words down, staring at the way his hand was shaking, and the sentences were scrawled so poorly that he almost couldn’t read them. Why not just one drink? To brace you, get you through this. No, and glancing from the pint of bourbon, he kept smoking, writing.