There was a pay phone in the parking lot of a strip mall off the highway. Patsy’s phone number was still sitting in a drawer in a trailer he had no plans to return to in the immediate future, so he was forced to dial information to get the number.
Without warning, these simple actions blasted him back almost twenty years, to another pay phone, this one a few blocks from the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge, where he had wiped out on his bicycle after riding it far outside the five-block radius around their home his mother had restricted him to. More frightened of his mother’s anger than the warm flow of blood down the front of his face, he had used a quarter to call his sister, a senior in high school then, who, upon hearing the strangled sound of his voice, had rushed to him without any questions.
The top was down on her cherry red Miata when she pulled up. As she stepped onto the sidewalk, John pulled open the phone booth door enough for her to get a good look at him, and he braced himself for her anger. How surprised he had been when she had thrown her arms around him instead of clocking him across the back of the head. How tightly she had held his head against her shirt despite the blood on his face. How quickly and fully the smell of her had cut through the blood in his nose. Sunflowers by Elizabeth Arden. Years later, the sight of that same ovular yellow bottle with its thick white cap on the bathroom counter of a UCSD girl he was about to hook up with had so filled him with thoughts of his sister that he been forced to beg off at the last minute.
“Hello?”
John’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. It didn’t matter. As if she had been able to recognize the sound of his breathing, his sister whispered his first name in a voice that sounded shocked and fatigued.
“I need you to meet me,” John said.
“John.”
“Pick a place. Not in Yucca Valley but close.”
“Where are you?”
“Just pick a place, Patsy.”
The use of her first name seemed to startle her. “You’re in trouble? You can’t talk right now?”
“Yes,” he said, even though he wanted to come up with something more obtuse, more coded than a plea for help.
“I’m looking after one of my girls’ trailers out in Landers. She had to go to Fresno for a custody hearing. How does that sound? I’ll head there right now, then call you.”
“I’m not using cell phones right now.”
“I know. You’re using the pay phone right across the highway from where I live.” A chill went through him, and he fought the urge to hang up and run. Then she said, “Sorry. This guy I dated a few months ago, he kind of stalked me for a bit. Used to call me from there all the time, tell me he could see me going to the bathroom. Stupid shit.”
Against his will, John found his eyes drawn to the shiny new houses dotting the sandy hillside to the west. A far cry from the tract homes and trailers they had been forced to live in while she tried in vain to find a suitable husband. He’d heard through the grapevine that she had come into some money, mainly because she had eventually married her boss, a man John had never met, and inherited his bar. “What happened to your husband?” he asked.
“He’s been dead two years, John.” There was no irritation in her voice, just soft parental condescension, as if John were an infant and she had just asked him not to put Play-Doh in his mouth.
“Should I bring anything?” she said quickly, seemingly unnerved by his silence.
“Just meet me,” he said. “Please.”
She gave him directions, and about fifteen minutes later he and Alex were traveling north on 247, known more affectionately as Old Woman Springs Road. After they passed through his sister’s high-end neighborhood and crested the hill it sat on, the scorched earth beneath them began to rise and fall like petrified ocean waves, and there was a limitless expanse of cactus-studded sand stretching out toward the few barren desert mountains on the far horizons in almost all directions.
Landers wasn’t a town so much as a massive spread of trailers without any real center that had been dubbed “the land of endless vistas.” At some points a space of almost five city blocks lay between each inhabited plot of sand.
“Your sister lives out here?” Alex asked.
“No. Out here I can see everyone who’s coming. There’s nowhere to hide.”
“What does your sister need to hide from?”
“Ray Duncan needs to hide.”
Alex studied him, his blue eyes sleep-glazed, as if he wasn’t sure of John’s sincerity. Maybe the guy took it as an apology for their earlier fight. For all John knew, maybe it was.
John returned his attention to the road; up ahead he saw the trailer Patsy had described. It sat behind a chain-link fence. The trailer had been painted baby blue, and there was a children’s play-set in the front yard, in the shadow of an enormous, multibranched Joshua tree. Ribbons of various colors had been tied along the top of the front fence. There was nothing that spoke more to him of the desert than a run-down trailer whose owner had gone to every pathetic attempt to dress it up that she could afford. In Louisiana, nature itself would bring canopies of greenery to the most impoverished of homes. In the desert, the unforgiving light allowed hardship few disguises.
“Is that her?” Alex asked. But John ignored the sight of the woman sitting on the trailer’s front steps as he pulled around the side of the trailer so he could park the truck where it was hidden from the road. As they walked around toward his sister, John realized he was keeping his eyes on the ground in front of him, even as he heard Patsy’s hiking boots scrape against the concrete steps as she shot to her feet.
At the last possible second, he lifted his eyes to her. By then Alex had stepped forward and offered his hand, and Patsy Houck took it, the gesture tinkling the swarm of silver bracelets on her right wrist. She studied Alex with a furrowed brow and parted, speechless lips. His sister looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her. Her hair was a thick brown mane, with her token white streak dyed in the front. She’d had a boob job, but he was struck by the brightness in her eyes, the clear vision of a woman who had been released from most of her worries.
All this he took in while she gave Alex the once-over, and indicated with a rude silence, which was not her nature, that she wasn’t quite sure what her brother was doing riding around the high desert with a gay guy who wore chest-hugging brand-name polo shirts.
“Can he wait inside?” John asked.
Patsy nodded. “There’s coffee,” she said, and her mouth stayed open, as if she had more to say about what pleasures awaited them inside a strange woman’s trailer, but then her eyes caught John’s, and the sound of the front door shutting behind Alex seemed to lock them in a cell together.
“Whatever happened to Tina Gray?” she asked him in a bright voice, as if they had been standing there chatting for hours. “You guys dated for what—almost a year, right? She lived out here with her mom, right? Did they move away?”
John nodded. Tina Gray had taken his virginity in the backseat of her mother’s El Dorado, forever dashing John’s childish suspicion that women never really enjoyed sex, they just put up with it so men would leave them alone. Tina Gray had convinced him that there was no more beautiful a sight in the world than the creases that appeared in a woman’s thighs when she rocked her legs back to allow you in.
John said, “She ran off with some guy who worked at Denny’s. Told me she didn’t want to be with some jarhead.”
“You weren’t even in the Marines yet.”
“I know. I’d only said something about it once to try to impress her.”
“Bitch,” Patsy whispered, and John almost turned away from her and from this forced gesture of sibling camaraderie. “All I remember about her is that she was short, chubby, and blond, like all your girlfriends. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re probably still going for the baby-faced beauties, right?” He thought of Mandy, who fit this description to a tee, and the idea that his big sister could still read him after te
n years brought blood to his cheeks. “Did you leave the Marines?”
John nodded, studied the road in both directions. The sun had crested the horizon, shortening the shadows of the Joshua trees all around them. The blacktop road was empty. The wind rattled a dozen small things across the vast emptiness surrounding the trailer.
“Why?”
“Because it was time.”
She nodded, eyes to the ground, sucking on her lower lip briefly, her way of saying she knew she was being lied to and she hated it but she didn’t want to drive him away. “I sent you an e-mail a couple of months ago. Did you get it?”
She didn’t add that it was an e-mail containing the location of their brother’s grave. He nodded, and for a few minutes neither one of them spoke. He had visited the grave many times, usually after fortifying himself with a couple of shots of Southern Comfort from a bottle hidden under the front seat of his truck.
“I left a sergeant,” he said. “Three years in Recon. You know, Force Recon—”
“I know what it is,” she said softly. “That’s a big deal, John.” She was doing her best to sound pleased, but he could detect the condescension in her voice; she knew he was trying to impress her, as always, and, as always, she wasn’t quite sure how to react to it. Even though she had never come right out and said it, the Marine Corps had been her last choice for him, and he knew it.
“John…who’s Alex?”
“He’s being framed for murder. And the man who did it got away because of me.”
He saw her shock turn to disbelief, and before she could open her mouth to question him, he began telling her the story, except for the part about Bowers being more than an old friend and comrade, except for the part about how he had been given Danny Oster’s home address the day before.
While he spoke, Patsy sank to a seat on the top step, her clasped hands resting against her lips, her eyes focused on him with increasing desperation as the details of the story he told her seemed to push her further away from the real reunion she had craved for so long. John ran out of things to say, and Patsy finally allowed herself to stare past him. Then, without so much as a word, she got to her feet and started walking toward the spot where her Jeep Grand Cherokee was parked in the Joshua tree’s perforated shade. The car looked new and recently washed, except for the thin coat of sand along the running boards from the ride out there. Patsy opened the passenger-side door and removed something from the glove compartment; then she started for John with an envelope in her hands. For a second he thought of the note Mandy had spied his sister trying to shove under the door of his trailer and figured she was going to force her own kind of reunion after all.
But when she handed him the envelope, he saw the words typed across the front: SERGEANT JOHN HOUCK, USMC. He opened it, pulled out a single sheet of paper, and unfolded it as Patsy moved beside him. It was a hand-drawn map, and it took John a minute to realize that it was the road they had just come out of. To the west of Old Woman Springs Road, a few miles to the south, an X marked a spot.
“When did you get this?”
“My night manager called me around closing time last night, said someone left the envelope on the bar. I asked him to bring it over on his way home. That’s why I wasn’t that surprised when you called this morning. I figured someone knew you were coming my way.”
“Did your manager see who left it?”
She shook her head. It didn’t take John much effort to trace Duncan’s motions. After leaving the trailer park, he had headed for Patsy’s bar. Patsy had held on to her last name, so it hadn’t been that hard to trace the connection. Maybe Duncan had been waiting for him, expecting him to run to her, and when he hadn’t, he dropped the letter. The spot marked with an X was just a short drive north from Patsy’s bar.
“Stay with him,” John said. Patsy started shouting questions at him, but he was already walking toward his truck, and in his mind he was already gunning it down the blacktop.
He was going seventy-five down Old Woman Springs Road, weaving in and out among camper-shell-crowned pickup trucks on their way to work in Morongo Basin, when he saw the green Jeep Grand Cherokee following from about five car lengths away. When he reached the spot marked on the map, his sister was gaining on him, and within less than a minute, the Jeep joined him on an unpaved road that had been ground down by tire tracks, which kept the unobstructed sand-shifting winds from covering it over entirely. They passed a lone trailer, then a second one that looked abandoned, then there was nothing but open sand leading to a wide valley between two mountains, chocolate islands in a sea of chalk dust.
Something blinded him briefly: harsh sunlight reflected off a nearby surface. When he parked the truck, his sister did the same behind him and hopped to the ground.
“I wanted you to stay with him!” he called to her.
“Yeah, and I want a nice, healthy husband and a private plane. What the hell was in that envelope?”
Instead of answering her, he headed toward the spot the reflection had come from, heard her footsteps behind him and then several crunches of sand that indicated they had been joined by a third party. When he turned he saw his sister frozen in her tracks a few paces behind him, her open palms in front of her, as if she were trying to hold the sand in place. A three-foot-long sidewinder curled its way through the sand between them, its rough scales giving it traction. John held his ground as well, waiting for it to depart and waiting for Patsy to run back to her Jeep because she hated snakes more then anyone he had ever met. But she did no such thing. Once their unwelcome visitor had departed, she lifted her eyes to John’s; then her eyes focused on something behind him, and she pointed to it.
A shovel had been driven into the sand several yards away, and a tiny shaving mirror had been duct-taped to the top of the handle. When John pulled the shovel free, an envelope slid across the sand; it had been slightly buried under the tip of the blade. He opened it and removed a single sheet of paper with a single line of text in the center: CUT HIM LOOSE AND WALK AWAY, OR…John started digging. A few minutes later he hit something solid, got down on his hands and knees, and unearthed a metal cash box that could be purchased at any office supply store. A second envelope was taped to the lid.
He opened it and pulled out a note that said…IT ALL GOES TO PIECES.
From behind him, his sister said his first name as if she thought she could imbue its single syllable with all the warning in the world. But before he could entertain the idea that there even was such a thing as fear, John opened the box.
Inside was a severed hand covered in dried blood. On the index finger was a silver ring with a red ruby in the center, the same University of Arizona graduation ring Mike Bowers had worn on a chain around his neck during their deployment. Behind him his sister started cursing into her palms.
John rarely prayed, but he did believe moments of silence could work some effect on the soul. For just a short time they allowed him to imagine he was hollow and that the evils of the world could pass through him like a mist, leaving only a light stain on his insides. But the severed hand in front of him had held him safely against the ground as a storm of shrapnel and white flame had swept over him; there was no breathing that out.
When he turned around, he saw that Patsy was hunched over, as if she were sick to her stomach, her wide-eyed stare fixated on the blackened fingers visible in the open cash box. Her hands were still covering her mouth and she didn’t seem to see her younger brother at all.
“Give me your phone,” John heard himself say.
She stared at him for a few seconds. Then, when she saw his outstretched hand, she seemed to remember his request and handed over her cell phone. Her cell carrier’s information service put him right through to the Owensville Sheriff’s Department at no charge, and when a female deputy answered, John said, “I need to speak to Ray Duncan.”
“Captain Duncan is not in right now,” the deputy responded.
“Is there something I can help you with, sir?”
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“Yeah. Give him a message for me. Tell him when he gets to the middle he’s going to hit steel.”
When they got back, Alex was inside, nursing a cup of coffee at a tiny kitchen table exactly like the one in John’s trailer, his rigid posture suggesting he was afraid of breaking one of the many ceramic animals that lined the shelves above his head.
John set the cash box down on the table in front of Alex and opened the lid with both hands. As soon as he saw what was inside, Alex reared up as if the table had caught on fire, one hand shooting to his mouth, the other holding his gut as if it had been pierced. He made a sound that John didn’t have words for, then shook his head violently as tears sprouted from his eyes. A necessary evil, John told himself. You couldn’t have made this easier for him. He had to see this the same way you saw it.
“This is how Duncan is going to play this. So think hard about how you’re going to play it. Real hard. Because this came with a note: ‘Cut him loose and walk away, or it all goes to pieces.’ Do you understand what that means, Alex?”
Still frozen halfway between sitting and standing, his eyes screwed shut, his hands clasped against lips in tortured prayer, Alex had no response except to shake his head as if he were turning down an invitation to jump into a wood chipper headfirst. John heard his sister say his name softly from across the room, and he held up one hand to silence her.
“Now, I know you don’t think there’s any authority that can help you in this, but you need to think real hard about that, Alex. Real hard. Because this man has Mike’s body, and if we don’t do something about it, he’s going to send it to us in pieces. So you take some time and you think.”
Blind Fall Page 11
