Dig Your Grave

by Steven Cooper

  The navigator tells him to exit here. Take a left.

  14

  Gus wishes he had a camera. He gets out of his car and steps into a portrait that would put most photographers out of business. How could they ever match the beauty? The cemetery absolutely glows under the dusky sky. Against the retina of the valley, the colors shift in silence, mostly unnoticed, from waning yellow to illustrious pink and to transcendent blue. He now, in this moment, understands that this is what people mean when they say “rest in peace.” This is the “peace.” Peace is an eternal dusk, a pastel state of bliss.

  “It’s like bedtime for dead people,” he tells Detective Powell.

  “What?”

  She’s sitting in Alex’s car, working on her laptop. She looks up for only a second.

  “Just the sky,” he says to her. “The mood it brings.”

  “Right,” she says back. “Mills is out there looking at the hole.”

  Gus nods. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” she says, her disinterest in him obvious.

  Gus follows the sound of voices coming from a far corner of the graveyard and sees in the distance the silhouette of a crime scene—against the horizon, a small team hovers. As Gus gets closer, he spots Alex leaning against a boulder that is the only thing separating the detective from a drastic drop off a cliff. Not far from Alex, a photographer is kneeling and taking shots of the hole. “Hey, Alex,” Gus calls. “Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. I worked a full shift.”

  “Wow. A full shift,” Alex says, extending a hand. “You deserve a vacation.”

  Gus points to the cliff’s edge and says, “Interesting place.”

  “No shit. If we ever get enough rain for a landslide, there’s gonna be a lot of bones and bodies in the neighborhood below.”

  “I don’t see that happening,” Gus tells him.

  The detective points to a cardboard sign staked into the ground. “You see that?”

  Gus squints. “I can’t read it from here.”

  Alex guides him closer until they’re standing about ten feet behind the kneeling photographer. Here every letter of the sign comes into focus:

  DIG YOUR GRAVE

  “Again, we doubt a copycat, Gus,” Alex says. “We haven’t released details of the crime scenes to the public. We’ve shared information with surrounding departments, just in case something like this turns up elsewhere. But it’s unlikely another jurisdiction would leak this.”

  “I’m going with the assumption that this is the work of the same person,” Gus says. “I don’t suppose I can touch the sign or hold it.”

  “Correct supposition.”

  “Honestly, the best thing for me would be to lie in the hole.”

  Laughter bursts from Alex’s face. The photographer looks up similarly amused.

  “I realize I can’t do that,” Gus says. “I’m just saying that the closer I can get to the suspect, the better. You know how this works.”

  Still laughing, Mills says, “Of course I do. I realize you’re handicapped. But do the best you can.”

  “How close can I get?”

  “You are as close as you can get.”

  Gus nods. He kneels, takes a good whiff of the crispy air, and feels the replenishment expand in his lungs. More quickly than usual, the stirrings of separation begin. His body stays behind while his mind explores with a greedy curiosity. It’s the ultimate meditation, albeit at warp speed. Vast possibilities flash by in microseconds, not really visions of anything, more like random photos shaken loose from their albums; this is what the universe has to sort out, somehow, for every life, for every story. Until then, the photos are no more than abstracts and notions. So, Gus surfs onward. From the crest of a cosmic wave appears a dome. A white, official dome. Not an abstract, not a notion, this is a tangible place, and Gus can hear the shuffling of feet on marble. There’s a vast, empty room, floor-to-ceiling books. In the distance, a man stands at a podium, reading from a stack of papers. He waves the documents in the air angrily, then slams them against the podium’s surface. With that he vanishes. The room vanishes. Gus is outside. The street is leafy. It’s springtime, and it’s a city of wide avenues that run for miles. Gus arrives at a box of a building, a mansion, perhaps, or a museum. He’s not sure. This is where his vision stops, right here—number twenty-five. An address?

  He repeats the information to Alex.

  “You do that with your eyes wide open?” the eavesdropping photographer asks him.

  “Do what?”

  “Your psychic thing,” she says.

  “Sometimes,” he replies.

  “I thought your eyes had to be closed so you could see stuff,” she says.

  “Sometimes they do.”

  Alex gives Gus’s elbow a tug. “If you will excuse us, Donna. Gus is running short on time.”

  “Sure, sure. Didn’t mean to pry.”

  Gus and Alex drift away. “She did mean to pry,” Alex tells him. “Sorry.”

  Gus laughs. “No problem. I’m used to it.”

  “So, what do you think any of it means, if it means anything at all?” Alex asks.

  Gus, leaning now against the massive boulder, searches the darkening horizon and says, “I can’t tell you what it means for your investigation, but I interpret the setting as someplace official. I think that’s obvious. I don’t know about the man, but he seemed like a lawyer or maybe a government official.”

  “Government official?”

  “Secretary of the treasury, maybe . . . or attorney general, that sort of thing.”

  “So, you just paid a visit to Washington, DC. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m just guessing, but that could be it,” Gus says. “Maybe those documents in his hand were actually ballots. Do you think we can tie the victims to election fraud?”

  Alex utters a one-syllable laugh and says, “I don’t see the connection, sorry.”

  “Or maybe we’re dealing with a deadly whistleblower,” Gus muses. “Maybe the CEO was up to some kind of financial fraud, and maybe the doctor was defrauding Medicare, I don’t know, and there’s a government whistleblower who actually kills instead of whistles.”

  A big smile from Alex Mills. “I mean no disrespect here, Gus, but the scenario seems farfetched. Very creative, but unlikely.”

  “Don’t dismiss it.”

  “Oh, I don’t dismiss anything entirely.”

  A slight breeze stirs. The neon of the valley comes alive, as if somebody flipped a switch, creating an incandescent grid under the darkening sky. “I should probably be going,” Gus tells Alex. “I have to pick up Billie at the airport. She’s flying in tonight.”

  “No limo?”

  “We don’t limo around Phoenix,” Gus says, turning to leave.

  “What about the address?” Alex asks.

  Gus stops. “What address?”

  “The one in your vision. Number twenty-five.”

  “Maybe it’s the killer’s address. Maybe it’s the next victim’s address. I don’t even know if it is an address, but it’s a significant number. I’ll work on it.”

  He passes Detective Powell on the way back to his car. She’s on a mission; he can see it in her face, in her determined gait. She’s clutching her laptop.

  “Good night, Detective,” he says, but she either doesn’t hear him or pretends she doesn’t hear him, because she doesn’t say a word.

  “I saw your Detective Psycho leaving just now,” Powell says. “Did he see anything?” Her eyes bulge mockingly.

  Mills writes off the mockery to human nature; people often dismiss what they don’t understand. She’s dismissive, she’s a skeptic, and she’s a hard-ass. Powell is so by the book she’ll get hired to write the second edition, and that’s what makes her a brilliant scene investigator and thorough researcher.

  “He saw some interesting images,” Mills tells her. “Nothing conclusive yet. But stuff to think about.”

  “Well, I found some interesting images o
f my own,” Powell says. “And I’m feeling fairly conclusive about them.”

  They step over to one of the monuments, and Powell sets her laptop on a flat surface (David Ludwig 1925–2005). In the absence of other options, Mills doesn’t stop her. Her screen sheds a small field of light.

  “Who are they?” Mills asks, pointing to the faces on the screen.

  “You don’t recognize them?”

  “Could be our victims, I guess. Minus a few years, maybe.”

  “I’ve found one common tie between the doctor and the CEO,” she tells him.

  He lunges his face closer to the screen. “What? What kind of tie?”

  She leans in to him. “After I talked to the caretaker, I sat in the car and pulled up Klink’s bio from the Illumilife website and compared it to Schultz’s bio from his practice’s website,” she explains. “Obviously they’re in very different fields. But they have one thing in common. They graduated from the same college, University of Arizona.”

  He tilts his head back and forth. “U of A’s a big school. Doesn’t mean they knew each other.”

  “But they did,” she replies. “I did a Google search for images with their names and ‘U of A’ in the search window, and sure enough, I found pictures of them drinking together at a class reunion.”

  “Is that what I’m looking at?”

  “You are,” she replies. “I’ll email the pics to you. This one here is from their tenth reunion.” She points to the picture on the left. “That one’s from their fifteenth.” She points to the one on the right.

  “But there are a bunch of others in the shot, Jan,” Mills says. “We can’t tell how well they knew each other, or if they just happened to be in the same shot with friends of friends.”

  “All true,” she concedes. “But at the very least, they’re familiar with each other.”

  Mills examines the photo from the tenth reunion. The men are toasting, champagne glasses raised, it seems, to their own self-importance. “Wow,” he says. “They are. And that’s certainly more than we knew yesterday. Good work. If you’re through here, so am I.”

  On the drive out of Moon Valley, Mills asks his colleague about the caretaker.

  “He said they’ve been vandalized before, mostly by kids,” she tells him. “But the empty grave was a first.”

  “Did he say why he didn’t find the grave until the middle of the afternoon?”

  “Said there were no funerals today, and since the hole was dug at the very back of the cemetery he didn’t see it until he was finishing routine maintenance.”

  Mills nods, content with that explanation. “Assuming all that’s true, then it’s very possible our suspect was here overnight, and the thing went unnoticed for most of the day.”

  “Agreed,” Powell says.

  His phone rings. It’s Kelly.

  “Hey, babe,” he says. “I’m with another woman.”

  “Good. Have her cook you dinner.”

  Mills laughs. “We’re on the way back from Moon Valley. I’ll drop Powell and see you at home in about thirty.”

  “I was thinking Mexican,” she says. “Trevor aced his Spanish project.”

  “No fucking way! That’s the best news all day. I’m in.”

  When he hangs up, he tells Powell about Trevor’s project. “He’s doing something about comparing Spanish dialects in Central American countries, like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica . . .”

  “I know where Central America is,” Powell says. “But that’s great.”

  “We’ve been through some rough times with that kid.”

  “But look at you now,” she says with a smile, “proud daddy!”

  They’re quiet as they enter the highway and the twinkling valley pours out in front of them. As usual, the mountains to the south are blacker than the night, their massive antennas blinking red like the pulsing eyes of aliens communicating in code. It’s a dependable sight.

  “So, I’m wondering,” Powell says. “Why haven’t you gone for a promotion? You’ve been doing this for years.”

  He shrugs. “Not interested.”

  “Mind if I ask why? You could do Jake’s job in a second.”

  “I’m a guy for the streets, not for the office,” he says. “I push around enough paperwork as it is. I don’t want to do it twenty-four seven.”

  “So, no ambitions toward management.”

  He looks at her sharply. “No. Do you know who my father was?”

  “Of course. The famous county attorney, Lyle Mills,” she says with steroidal reverence.

  “Exactly. The guy was so ambitious he worked himself to death at age fifty-eight,” he tells her. “He was brilliant, but he was also stupid. He died too early. Heart attack. No thank you.”

  Mills craves the white noise of the highway right about now, the absence of both memory and anticipation, but Powell persists. “Did he push you to be more ambitious?”

  “Yep. But I tuned him out. To a fault.”

  “He was your hero,” she says.

  “I don’t believe in heroes. But yeah.”

  The small charter carrying Billie Welch lands at Sky Harbor. She steps off the plane, a small bag over one shoulder. Something about the orange light on the tarmac, the way it seeps inward to the vestibule where Gus waits alone, suggests a clandestine meeting or a forbidden love story or a midnight Hollywood rendezvous; it prickles him nicely and eerily at once. The experience at Desert Rose Memorial Park has given him one of his classic psychic hangovers; like a run-on sentence that won’t quit, his imagination has run amok, and his brain buzzes with a landslide of words and images that connect and disconnect at the same time. This doesn’t happen after every psychic vision. Only the ones that prove to be the most portentous, if history is any evidence.

  She gives him a huge hug. Her lipstick is plum-colored, her face powder white. Her eyes, outlined in black, transmit a signal so instantly and fiercely loving that it almost throws Gus off-balance. Her face affects the seamless luxury of a Hollywood starlet rushing to a respite from stardom. Warmth overcomes him now.

  “I am so glad to be back in Phoenix,” she gushes.

  Phoenix is the respite.

  “You’ve only been here for five minutes,” he says, deflated.

  “You know what I mean.”

  He doesn’t know anything.

  For the entire drive to Paradise Valley, Billie assumes the role of run-on sentence, which is agreeable to him since it relieves him of his hangover. She serenades him with plans for a greatest hits album, a tour, maybe a live in concert DVD. This is all the result of meeting with “her people” in LA, where everybody has “people” and nobody, Gus has learned, has a soul to speak of. Which is why Billie’s commute to and from the coast is so important. She does business there; she does life here. He gets it.

  “My sister is helping me sequence the album. I’m going to record a few new songs for it,” she says. “I’m also thinking it’s time for me to write a book. I was supposed to write a book a couple of years ago with someone from Rolling Stone, but that sort of went off the rails. A memoir has never been a high priority, you know, because I’ve lived my life, and I’m not sure I want to relive all of the boring details. That would drive me crazy, so I’m not sure.”

  “The details are more fascinating than boring, Billie,” he tells her. “You have a great life story to tell. I’d read it.”

  She grabs his arm and squeezes it, rests her head on his shoulder, and keeps it there until they swing into the security entrance to her community. Gus is about to glide through the residents’ lane when the guard pops out of the booth and flags him down. Gus lowers his window. “What is it, Donald?”

  Donald, the happy seventy-something bespectacled guard, hands him an envelope. “Someone dropped this off for you earlier today, Mr. Parker,” he says.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Donald peers in the window. “I don’t think I’ve seen either of you for a few days. Welcome back.”

&n
bsp; “Thanks, Donald,” Billie says. “You doing okay?”

  “I’m magnificent.”

  Billie giggles. “We know you are,” she says.

  He’s driving through her property gate when Billie asks, “Who’s the envelope from?”

  “I have no idea.”

  And she doesn’t mention it again, and he doesn’t either as he follows her into the house. He resets the alarm. She announces she’d like a bath. He says he’ll make it for her. But she says she’ll make it and that all he needs to do is join her. That makes him smile and almost instantly erect with expectation. He laughs at himself, at his dick. A bath for two means a trip to Billie’s home spa, a room at the back of the estate that might as well be in another house on the other side of the world. Inspired by a spa she visited in Indonesia, Billie designed the room and the hallway that leads there by summoning the bamboos and mists of a lush, jungle hideaway. You turn on a switch and the room is filled with exotic birdsong. You flip another and an entire wall becomes a waterfall, sheets of water cascading. Bamboo planks lead you to the sunken tub. “Hurry,” Billie calls to him. “And bring a bottle of wine.”

  He goes to fetch the wine from the kitchen and is about to drop the envelope on a counter when he figures he should open it now before he forgets. The spa and anything that might, hopefully, happen in there could easily make him forget. He pulls a single sheet of paper from the envelope. He assumes it’s a bill because that’s all that seems to arrive these days. He tries to remember if he paid the alarm guys in person. He remembers signing forms, but that’s about it. Gus unfolds the sheet, and his hand trembles.

  What he’s looking at is not a bill.

  What he sees are four words, black on white, stoic block letters. Instinctively, he blinks his eyes to confirm the words are not a psychic vision. They’re not.

  STAY AWAY FROM HER

  15

  So much for that promising erection.