Blind Fall

by Christopher Rice

  John said, “Is that really the world you live in?”

  “The thought never crossed your mind last night that I could live in that house too, did it?” Shamed by this fact, John broke eye contact with Alex for the first time since they had started talking to each other across barely three feet of space that felt like a gulf. “Then I’d say it’s the world you live in too, John.”

  When John didn’t make eye contact, Alex said, “I’m going down to San Diego to stay with a friend. All I ask of you is that if you really believe that I’m not strong enough to do what you saw, that you make that very clear to Captain Ray Duncan before he charges me with murder.”

  John was positive Alex was overreacting, misreading the situation. How could Duncan have gone from disbelieving the entire tale the night before to being on the scent of blood after being told about nothing more than a set of missing bedsheets? But Alex’s request seemed shockingly humble given the situation he believed himself to be in, so John nodded, which seemed to take the wind out of Alex’s sails. He looked around the trailer as if he were searching for another conversation topic.

  When a knock cracked against the front door, Alex jumped and backed away from the fridge. John peered around the edge of a window shade. His blood went cold when he saw who was outside. When he turned to Alex and mouthed Duncan’s name, Alex lifted one hand, as if he thought this simple gesture might put everything on pause. Then he looked to his feet in deep concentration. Another knock. Because he could think of no better option, John pointed to the bedroom door, as if Alex were a cheap mistress. Alex took a step, saw the Sig resting on the table, and picked up the weapon by the handle before moving off into the bedroom and shutting the door behind him.

  Duncan was out of uniform, in blue jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, and a blue and red checkered long-sleeved shirt. As he stepped into the space that Alex had occupied just moments earlier, he studied the kitchen with a sad-eyed look, as if everything about it were a great disappointment but he cared about John too deeply to say anything.

  “You want something?” John asked him.

  “Coffee would be nice,” he said.

  Duncan took a seat at the table, kept silent, so silent John wondered if he were waiting to be asked just what the hell he was doing there. John made coffee instead. Duncan locked eyes with him as John delivered the steaming mug and apologized for not having anything to put into it.

  After blowing into the cup for a few seconds, Duncan said, “I think I owe you an apology, John.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I had some conversations earlier this evening. Conversations that have led me to believe you may have walked in on something last night, something you weren’t supposed to see.” John kept his mouth shut because he thought it was the best way to hide the fact that he wasn’t surprised by this information. “I know you went through a lot last night, and I know I might have come across as flip. But I thought it was in your best interests to—”

  “I know what you thought. You thought I was some fucked-up vet having a meltdown.”

  “I thought you were a decent Marine who had just discovered something very…unpleasant about a friend of his. Something his friend had obviously kept a secret from him. And to be frank, I happen to sympathize with you.”

  “How so?”

  Duncan lifted his hands to the sky and looked up as if he were asking for divine guidance for his next words. The gesture allowed John to see the Band-Aid around Duncan’s right thumb: it was flesh colored and easy to miss, but it explained why Duncan had been holding the handle of the coffee cup almost delicately by hooking it with his forefinger and holding the bottom in his left palm.

  Duncan said, “I’m no bigot. But I’m not a fan of the oppressed, the victimized. This is a good country. As long as a man’s sober and in his right mind, you’d be hard pressed to get him to say otherwise. And people need to do certain things to get along and that’s the way it is and most people are fine with it. But when an entire group of people come together and try to make some kind of identity out of their strangeness…well, they usually end up convincing themselves they’re allowed to do any damn thing they want. No matter the consequences.”

  “Alex doesn’t strike me as…an activist.”

  “Alex Martin got kicked out of his parents’ mansion down in Cathedral Beach for being a fruit. His daddy gave him their vacation cabin as a consolation prize, but the whole deal left Alex with a mighty big chip on his shoulder that I’m tired of dealing with. My concern here is that Mike was tired of dealing with it, too.” John was startled by this kind of admission from an officer of the law, but Duncan seemed unfazed by his reaction. “Look, I know it’s a new day and age, but I sure as hell don’t know what put a man like Mike in that house with a man like Alex, and I don’t think it was very strong, whatever the hell it was. I think it came apart.”

  “Are you out of uniform so you’ll feel more comfortable talking to me like this?”

  “I don’t follow,” Duncan said.

  “You’re being very candid with me, Captain Duncan. This might be a murder investigation we’re talking about here.”

  “It might be. But I don’t investigate murders, even when they happen in my jurisdiction. That’s the job of the homicide guys out of Boswell. But it is my job to make sure they are fully apprised of those facts of which I’m aware. And one of those facts is that you walked in on a very bad scene in a manner that is incredibly hard to explain, in a manner that makes you look like a suspect. Now, how that gets presented to them is not just up to me. It’s up to you, too.”

  John took a minute to digest this. Duncan lifted his coffee mug to his mouth and sipped without breaking eye contact. “Well then, there’s something you should know,” John said. Duncan raised his eyebrows. John said, “I killed him.”

  Duncan jerked, and the motion combined with the strange manner in which he held the mug sent hot coffee spilling down the front of his shirt. He guffawed suddenly, held out his soaked hands, and said, “We seem to have gotten ahead of ourselves, and I’ve got myself a little mess here.”

  He made for the bedroom door, and John’s heart leaped. “Bathroom’s right here,” John barked, grabbing Duncan’s right shoulder and steering him toward the opposite end of the trailer. Duncan ducked inside, pulled the door shut behind him.

  John heard a click and turned to see Alex open the bedroom door several inches. Their eyes met, and John saw the fear in Alex’s eyes, the fear of a man who knew he was a prime suspect in a murder. John shook his head silently, raised a hand, trying to find some gesture that would calm Alex. But then Alex’s eyes cut past John, locked on something behind him. The blood drained from Alex’s face. He turned and followed the direction Alex was staring in.

  On the bathroom doorknob was a V-shaped stain exactly like the one John had seen on the door to the bedroom Mike had been murdered in. This time the twin marks were left by coffee and not blood, but it was the same hand that had left them, the hand of someone with an injured thumb who had been forced to grip the knob by hooking his index and middle finger over the top of it. Next came the same feeling that would strike John in the split second before he was fired on by insurgents: a sudden compression of the air around him and what felt like a brief ability to hear the smallest preparatory movements of your potential assailant but without the ability to see exactly where he was hiding.

  The bathroom door opened and Duncan emerged, dabbing wadded-up toilet paper at the long coffee stain down his right thigh. Then John was rocked sideways. Alex shoved past him, the Sig raised in his right hand. Duncan’s face went lax when he saw the gun and who was holding it, but then John reached out with one arm and hooked it around Alex’s chest.

  But Alex kept trying to charge, so John was forced to hurl him backward until his back slammed into the bedroom door with an impact that seemed to rock the entire trailer. To John, the sound that came welling up out of Alex, a growl and a sob in one, was the only
appropriate music one could write for the sudden union of the images that had passed between them that evening—the handprint and the bloody crime scene that had vanished into thin air. He was relieved and surprised when he heard the Sig hit the floor. Alex had flown from the bedroom with such determination and force, John assumed he had the physical strength to give him the confidence to do it. He didn’t. He had pure rage and all the stupidity it brought with it.

  When he looked back at Duncan, he saw the man had weakly raised both hands but was staring down at the coffee-stained doorknob that had given him away. John saw the man’s lips move softly with what appeared to be a stream of curses. By then, John had retrieved the gun from the floor, was rising to a standing position. Duncan saw this and reached in the direction of what John assumed was a side holster.

  John said, “Draw on me in my home and I will kill you where you stand.”

  “Now that’s about where you need to stop talking, my friend,” Duncan said quietly. “Now I’m not sure what the hell’s going on—”

  “The hell you aren’t,” John said. “You know damn well what we just saw.” Duncan nodded slowly, as if indulging a madman, and then opened his mouth to speak. But John cut him off with,

  “I walked in on you, didn’t I? You drugged Alex’s drink so you knew he was passed out downstairs and you were setting the scene. What were you going to do? Frame Alex for Mike’s murder?”

  Duncan said, “This is not something you can see through, John.”

  “Get the phone, Alex. Dial nine-one-one. Tell them we have a murderer here.”

  Duncan let out a throaty laugh and John listened to the shuffling sounds coming from behind him as Alex righted himself, tried to get his composure, and went for the phone. “Turn around,” John told Duncan. “Put your hands on the wall above your head.”

  “That’s not going to work for me,” Duncan said, but now there was a tremor of fury in his voice. So John replied by taking the safety off the Sig.

  The small snapping sound forced Duncan to comply. A silence fell and John was about to ask Alex why he hadn’t called the police, when he felt the entire phone, cradle and receiver as one, slam into the upper portion of his neck. It wasn’t the force of the blow that dropped him to his knees, it was the positioning of it: a near-perfect brachial stun. His vision blurred, then seemed to expand and contract, and when Alex pulled the gun from his hand, it felt like a light tug because his fingers had turned to jelly.

  Outside, John saw Alex’s shadow disappear around the end of the darkened trailer in pursuit of Duncan. He knew how this would end: with Alex shot dead and John’s word against that of an officer of the law. He pursued them, expecting Duncan to turn and fire at any moment, but the man did no such thing. The three of them were moving down a side alleyway that ran along the outer row of trailers and fed into the small parking lot next to the trailer park’s business office. And that’s when it hit John: Duncan was running for his car. Duncan was trying to get the hell out of there without firing a shot. Alex had no such plan. He came to a sudden halt at the entrance to the parking lot, which told John that he had Duncan in his sights.

  Alex raised the gun in both hands. When he was five feet away, John threw himself at Alex, sending them both crashing onto the asphalt as tires squealed and headlights swung over them and past them. For a brief second, John thought Duncan might plow his unmarked Ford Explorer into their tangle of limbs, but instead he raced out of the parking lot. Then he was gone, and John pulled Alex to his feet. But when he saw the anger twisting Alex’s face, his own anger got the best of him and he hurled Alex so that the guy practically had to skip and airplane his arms to keep from falling over.

  “You stupid faggot!” John cursed.

  Alex was walking away from him, hands gripping the back of his head, seemingly drawn to the twin pinpricks of light that were the taillights of Duncan’s Explorer snaking its way down the service road toward I-15. “You would have blown off the side of your own goddamn face!”

  A trailer door popped somewhere in the distance, someone probably drawn by their shouts. Alex heard it, too, and looked over his shoulder at John. There wasn’t a chance in hell John was bringing him back to his trailer, and the shattered look in Alex’s eyes told him he knew.

  Footsteps were approaching, and John could hear mumbled conversation; it sounded like two neighbors had met up and were approaching the parking lot. John said, “Get the hell out of here!”

  John expected Alex to protest, but instead he held the same defeated look, as if everything from the revelation that Duncan was Mike’s killer to John’s current treatment of him were all part of an inevitability he no longer had the energy to fight, or even dread. Then Alex spoke, which surprised John because nothing about the guy’s body had indicated he was preparing to say a word. “Stupid faggot? Is that what you called me? You were chasing me out of my own house while that son of a bitch was getting away with Mike’s body. I may be the faggot, but you’ve got stupid covered all on your own, Sergeant.”

  The words slugged John in the chest. Now he could see clearly how he had managed to avoid saying them to himself over the past day: some part of him had known how much they were going to hurt. Calmly, as if they had just concluded a discussion about which route to take to Grandma’s house, Alex turned and started toward a yellow Nissan Pathfinder parked next to the trailer-park manager’s 4Runner.

  John turned on his heel and started walking back to his trailer. He heard a voice call out, but he didn’t recognize it and assumed it belonged to the neighbors who had spotted Alex. A car engine answered them by starting up. John turned, glimpsed the yellow Pathfinder as it sped out of the gate. John waited, watching to see if Alex headed in the same direction as Duncan. He didn’t. Alex took the service road in the opposite direction, toward the interstate on-ramp that would put him in the southbound lanes. He didn’t have the courage to follow Duncan. Not without a gun. Not without John.

  If any neighbors had come to investigate the shouting in John’s trailer, they were gone by the time he got back. Inside, John went to return the Sig to its holster behind the headboard, but as soon as he did, he envisioned Alex’s headlights cutting lone swaths through the night. It felt like a valve had opened in his chest, emptying something cold and thick down into his stomach.

  John imagined helicopters circling high over the trailer park, saw their searchlights probing the nest of trailers below, looking for Alex. Looking for John.

  John was behind the wheel of his Tacoma and bouncing down the rutted mud road that led out of the trailer park before it occurred to him that he might be away from home long enough to merit bringing a few changes of clothes along. By then he was idling just outside the gates of the park, trying to decide which route to take: the one Duncan had used, or the one Alex had used. He was sweating and having trouble breathing because he knew full well that Alex’s parting words had been God’s truth.

  John had made another seriously bad mistake. He had pursued the wrong man and allowed the real killer to escape with all the evidence of his crime. Then, he sent the man who paid most dearly for his mistake out into the night alone.

  Thoughts of GHB and crimes against nature and sexualities kept secret all seemed to recede from view, like the black space around an aperture, and he saw clearly the one thing the Marine Corps had taught him: wherever he had made wrong, he had to make right.

  So John headed south, the same direction Alex Martin had taken on the 15, with the same clarity of purpose that had driven him to Owensville the night before. As he drove, he kept seeing the expression on Alex’s face before he had left, the defeated look that told John he was just another son of a bitch in a long line of fag haters.

  By the time John reached Temecula, a spread of lights covering the hilly inland of Riverside County, he could see Captain Mike Bowers giving him the same expression with his one good eye.

  6

  John doubted he would find Alex in any of the parts of San Diego he
was familiar with. That meant he had one real lead, and he didn’t like it.

  In Poway, he pulled off the interstate and found a pay phone. Because it was a business, the information operator was happy to give him the street address for The Catch Trap, the notorious gay bar featured in one of the photos hanging on the wall of Mike and Alex’s cabin. Next, he purchased a Thomas Guide from the nearest gas station and used the index to look up the address and plot a good course there from the 15. The neighborhood was called University Heights, and it was almost midnight by the time John was cruising its streets in his truck.

  The Catch Trap was designed to look like a French Quarter brothel, with green shutters framing its blacked-out windows. A short line of pale-skinned boys with gelled hair and high-pitched laughs filled the entrance. John ignored the looks they gave him. Instead he studied the chunky guy with spiky blond hair at the head of the line checking IDs and slapping wristbands on legal drinkers, the same guy who had been standing behind Mike and Alex in the photograph on the wall outside their bedroom. John considered charging the line, but he figured that would draw more attention to him than hovering in the back, his hands shoved in his jeans pockets, the bill of his baseball cap shoved down over his forehead.

  On the wall next to John was a poster advertising some special event that happened at the bar every Thursday night called Booted! The poster featured a muscle-bound model wearing cammie pants and a cover and glistening dog tags that hung between his blown-up pecs. For a full minute, John just stared at it. Maybe he was just fighting fatigue, but it was almost as if the man on the wall was a truer version of Lightning Mike Bowers than John had ever been allowed to know.

  When John reached the head of the line, Spiky said, “May I help you, sir?” The stiffness and defensiveness of this greeting startled John, made him feel as if he had been pegged as an outsider.

  “I’m looking for Alex Martin.”

  “Let me guess. You heard he gives the best head north of the border?”