Twice Dying (12 page)

“He’s at the hospital!”

“No, he’s not. I work there. I’d know.”

Tanager broke at that, bolting for the door, running into the night as if fleeing from the sheaf of light that spilled out.

Or from Alison’s words, calling after him:

“Caymas hurt you too,
didn’t
he?”

For half a minute she stood without moving. Monks waited with her, listening, staring into the dark.

Then she said softly, “Come back, Tanager.” She stepped to the desk and scribbled something on a sheet of notebook paper.

Monks went first on the path this time. They were almost past the trailer, the figures still unmoving on the couch, when he heard Alison suck in her breath. He spun around. Something had appeared in a darkened window beside them, a pale oval, a face. Monks’s fingers rugged with idiot clumsiness at the pistol.

Then stopped. The face was ancient, wrinkled, its mouth a toothless black gap which, he realized, was smiling. He glimpsed through the glass a tiny room, lit by a plastic statue of Christ opening His breast to expose a glowing crimson heart. There was a mattress on the floor, along with a tray containing a partial glass of milk and a bowl of what looked like baby food.

He did his best to smile back, and raised a hand in greeting. They moved along the silent path to the Bronco, where the dogs discovered them all over again, but no human presence came forward.

Out on the road, she pulled off the scarf, shook out her hair, then lit up a cigarette.

“I’ve been wanting one of these.” She rolled down her window to exhale. A rush of air blew through the vehicle, touching the sweaty back of his neck. “That too cold?”

“It feels good.” His gaze flicked restlessly to the mirror, watching for headlights. He recalled that locals sometimes knew these roads well enough to cruise without them.

“I’ve got a bottle of Finlandia in my room. Join me?” She was gazing straight ahead.

Monks said, “I could use a drink.”

They did not speak again until they reached the motel.

Monks drank icy vodka, watching her undress. She took her time, making sure he saw. She looked unchanged, breasts heavy and rose-nippled, belly with a slight curve, full hips and strong thighs, a body that embraced with effortless power.

Finished, she sat back against the bedboard, knees drawn up, and reached for her own glass of wine.

“You just going to sit there?”

“For a minute,” Monks said. “You would, too.”

She laughed and stretched luxuriously, like a cat inviting play.

“I miss your cock.”

He stood and came to sit in the curve of her body. Her arms went around him, fingers tugging at his shin buttons. Monks leaned over and inhaled her scent from the soft place where her neck met her shoulder. He scraped her nipples lightly with his teeth, then harder, and moved on down, delicate flesh parting under his tongue with a faint acidic taste until she twisted, gasped, and lay still.

“I missed that, too,” she said. “Come here.”

Together they pulled off the rest of his clothes. She pushed him onto his back and crouched over him. Monks gazed back into her fierce eyes, amazed at the power this mysterious creature held over him.

She started to move, and thought left his mind.

M
onks shifted carefully in the room’s interior twilight. He lay on his back, his left arm around Alison. She had gone quiet, perhaps sleeping.

The worries of the day were rising in his mind again, quickly compounding themselves. But her hair was fragrant, her cheek warm against his skin, and his hand just fit in the curve of her waist. He waited, savoring again the last minutes: her astride him, hands on his chest, eyes closed, teeth biting her lower lip, hips moving slowly.

He rolled his head toward the sliding door onto the balcony, aware of a bit of sensory data out of place, like a subliminal but jarring sound. Light from the parking lot filtered in through the translucent curtain, outlining a squat shadow
shaped like a fire hydrant. Perhaps a chair.

Monks stopped breathing. There were no chairs on the balcony.

He sat up. The shadow rose suddenly, too, expanding upward like a seal thrusting itself from the water.

He heaved himself across Alison, groping for his coat in the gloom, remembering in the same instant that he had locked the pistol in the Bronco—
Christ.
He lunged for the sliding door and threw his weight against it, fingers clawing to make sure it was latched. The shadow moved back.

He jerked the curtain open several inches, and stared at the frightened face of a teenaged boy, crouched with hands on the balcony railing, about to vault back over and once again flee.

Monks exhaled shakily. “It’s Tanager.”

He pulled the door open, wondering how the hell the boy had found them, then remembering her scribbled note. Alison stepped past him, wrapped in the bedspread. She hugged Tanager to her, pulling him inside.

“How’d you get here, Tanager?”

“Motorcycle.”

“Motorcycle?
My God, you must be freezing.”

He had exchanged his shorts for long pants and put on a ski jacket, but they were soaked with rain. His face was milk white. She wrapped the bedspread around him and pressed him into a chair, then walked nude, with no trace of self-consciousness,
to pick up her dress from the floor. Monks hastily pulled on his own clothes.

Tanager sat with hands clasped between his knees, thighs hugging his forearms, face turned aside, as if that way he could not really be seen. Alison knelt beside him, smoothing his hair like a mother or a nurse. In the quiet, Monks heard him swallow.

Alison said, “Why’d you get so scared?”

“She told me she was taking Caymas back to the hospital. Then you said he wasn’t there.”

“Who’s
she?”

“The other lady, who was here before you. Naia.”

Tanager pronounced it to rhyme with
eye-uh.
Monks had never heard the name, or any cognate for the word. He glanced questioningly at Alison. She shook her head.

“Don’t you know her?” Tanager said. “She knows you.”

“Does she have another name?”

“That’s all she told me.”

Naia.
A new player.

“Maybe I do know her,” Alison said. “Maybe that’s a nickname. Tell us what happened.”

Monks listened silently, groping to interpret the boy’s halting words.

Caymas had come home from Clevinger the previous fall. He quickly stopped taking his required medications, and instead was getting into the other kinds of drugs that pervaded the
area. He was irrational, aggressive, dangerous. Far worse, it was clear that Alison had hit a nerve: Tanager had been his brother’s victim in the past, and he was afraid it would start happening again. He spent as much time as he could away from home, especially at a deserted stretch of beach.

One afternoon he met a woman named Naia walking there. She was hard for the boy to describe: older than Alison, heavy makeup, slender, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses. At first, there was no clue that this was anything but accident.

She asked him his age. He was almost sixteen. What would he get for his birthday, if he could have anything? A motorcycle that an older friend wanted to sell.

Monks remembered the crotch-rocket shape, carefully tarped beside the cabin: the bike Tanager had ridden here.

It was not hard to understand how desperate that urge for freedom must have been.

Tanager’s dream was an empty one: there was no way he was going to put his hands on eighteen hundred dollars. But Naia told him that she worked for “the hospital.” They wanted to take Caymas back, but were afraid someone might get hurt, like last time. They would be glad to pay eighteen hundred dollars if Tanager would show them Caymas’s hideout back in the woods. That way, they could wait for Caymas there and take him back safety.

No one else would ever have to know about Tanager’s part in it.

He sniffled in the silence. Alison stood and moved to stand behind him, her hands rubbing his shoulders. “What does everybody else think happened to Caymas?” she said.

“He’s just gone.”

“Maybe they took him to a different hospital,” she said soothingly. “That could be what happened, Tanager.”

“Caymas, he had this belt buckle.” He blurted the words, as if he had been holding them back. “He showed it to me one night. He was laughing, doing crank. He said, ‘You know what this is? Money’ He said, ‘The bitch thought she was getting me to take somebody down. But she liked sucking on me so much, she forgot to be careful. I made her buckle me back up when she was done. Now I got her prints.’”

“Do you think that’s who Caymas meant? Naia?”

“I don’t know!”

“What happened then?” she said.

“Caymas got some money in the mail. I think it was a lot.”

“And then Naia came?”

Nod.

“Do you know where the buckle is?”

“No. Caymas buried things.”

Monks stepped to the sliding door and pushed it open. Cool misty air blew in, heavy with the
smell of the sea. Beyond the rocky headland bluffs, he could see a fishing boat coming into Noyo Harbor, channel lighted by buoys bobbing on the dark Pacific swells.

Caymas buried things.
Like the body of a nine-year-old boy.

“Tanager,” Alison said. “What did Naia say about me?”

“I found a note, day before yesterday. Taped to my handlebars.”

“Do you have it?”

“I threw it away.”

“But you remember what it said?”

“‘Take Alison where you took me. Tell her to look in the stovepipe.’”

“Will you take us there?”

“Am I going to have to talk to the police?”

She looked at Monks again. Her gaze warned him not to contradict her.

“You won’t, Tanager,” she said. “We promise.”

In the parking lot, Monks watched the boy hurry off to his motorcycle.

An unidentified
she
had enlisted Caymas Schulte to “take somebody down,” offering a sexual favor in the bargain. Whoever she was, she did not want her identity known. But Caymas had been cunning enough to get her fingerprints and blackmail her.

Soon after that, Naia showed up.

And Caymas disappeared.

It was hard to escape the conclusion that “she” was Naia, who had come to eliminate the threat of Caymas and the telltale belt buckle. But Tanager had been able to ignore cause and effect, convincing himself that Caymas had been taken away for everyone’s good.

Until tonight. Now, every time he looked at that bike, he was going to think about how he got it.

Caymas Schulte’s hideout was an abandoned logging camp. The long-disused roads that led to it were covered with redwood duff and brush, unrecognizable to anyone who did not know them. Tanager led the way on his motorcycle, Monks following cautiously in four-wheel drive, trying to keep the bike’s taillight in view through the fog. He reckoned they had gone about two miles from the highway when Tanager stopped.

They went the final few hundred yards on foot, Monks lighting the way with a flashlight. Tanager was half-running now, in a hurry to get this over with. The camp was in a clearing on the bank of a stream. There were several ruined old wooden buildings, with one iron-roofed shed still standing.

Alison jerked at Monks’s coat and mouthed the words in his ear: “That photo.”

This was where the picture of Caymas had been snapped.

“In there,” Tanager said, pointing to the shed. His voice was barely above a whisper. “I’m going now, okay?”

Alison turned toward him, but he was already skipping backwards, then gone in the fog.

The shed held a bunk with a tattered mattress and several shelves. A crude table had been built like a workbench under the single window. Monks walked across the wooden floor where a child had given up his life. His steps made a hollow sound.

Whatever stove might have been there was gone, but the pipe was still in the wall, filled with ashes and debris. He reached in, brushing them aside, and touched a smooth cool surface. Plastic.

It was a food container about the size of a shoebox. Monks lifted it out and set it on the table. He opened his pocketknife and gave it to Alison, then held the flashlight while she worked open the lid. The contents were wrapped in several layers of tissue, as the photo had been. Her fingers parted them to reveal a man’s face.

It was chalk white, sculpted out of ceramic or clay, life-sized and extraordinarily lifelike. The nose was thick and the cheeks heavy, suggesting strength. But the impact was in the expression: desperation, pain, rage, forcibly captured. As the box turned in her hands, shadows played across the features, making them seem to move. Monks felt his scalp prickle.

Alison said, “Caymas.”

She lifted the mask out delicately, as if it were a wounded bird. Beneath it in the box lay a second object: a red, much worn, 49ers baseball cap.

Monks glimpsed something quivering on the mask’s back, like moonlit water.

He said, “Hold it up.”

The something was a dark image of his own face, reflected in an oval mirror imbedded in the clay.

He moved beside her, so he was looking over her shoulder.

“Turn it around,” he said.

As her face came full-sized in the mirror, he saw that two red circles had been painted onto its surface, so that her eyes appeared to be ringed in blood.

Monks said, “A death mask?” He steered carefully along the fogbound road, heading back toward the motel.

“They made them in older cultures. Pressed wet clay against the face, then used it as a mold.”

“What’s the message?”

“The mirror. Naia wants to tell me there’s a bond between us.”

“You’re talking about someone who seems to have killed a very dangerous man.”

Alison crossed her arms tightly. The plastic box rested between her feet on the Bronco’s floor.

“This is about trust. Not trying to threaten me.”

“It’s about murder, Alison. We’ll stop at the sheriff’s on our way in.”

“We promised Tanager he wouldn’t have to talk to the police.”

“You
did,” Monks said, and immediately regretted his tone. He recognized the too-familiar strain of adrenaline and fatigue. “Sorry to bark. This is no game.”