Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Then I understood that I wanted to drive out to Tustin again, to see who might be stirring at Collette Loach’s home on Wytton Street. The feeling I’d gotten in Hopkin was upon me again, the feeling I’d gotten at Caspers Park, the feeling I’d gotten—however slightly—at the Loach residence in Tustin. The long shot. The hunch. The maybe.

  Donna wanted to come. She microwaved some popcorn, which took a couple of minutes, then we hit the road. I slipped a flat little five-shot Colt .38 into my jacket when she wasn’t looking. You’d be surprised what space just one less cylinder saves. It was 2:07 A.M. when we got there, though my watch runs two minutes fast. When I rolled down the window I smelled exhaust but it wasn’t mine. You get used to the aromas of a familiar car. It really stood out against the smell of the popcorn, hanging there in the moist night air. I parked across the street from Collette’s place, two houses down.

  We sat in the darkness with a thermos full of tequila and ice, sharing from the little plastic cup. We ate the popcorn from a paper shopping bag. I looked at the formidable wall of the Loach house, the big black sycamores guarding above, the neat little bungalow next door, where the rose fancier lived out the last days of his life. A faint yellow light issued from behind the wall—an outdoor bug light was my guess.

  We made small talk while we watched the wall, covering the events of the day, as anyone who spends time with Donna Mason must be prepared to do. She is interested in everything and everyone. Perhaps too much interested in some things, but who am I to judge?

  We sat in silence after that. I felt like I should talk to her.

  “When I get like this, Donna, I just want to explode. I’ve been run all over the state by this guy. I’m out ten grand as part of a practical joke. He’s done things to girls that go against everything I am and everything I believe in. He’s got the key that can clear my name. I’m all ready and there’s nothing to do.”

  “Well, you’re doing something now.”

  I watched the house. I felt the tequila pulling me downward and together, toward some yearned for but often evasive center.

  “I feel that this guy, no matter where he lives, is going out tonight.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “Used to be nights like this, I’d go to the cave. The Horridus feels the same way. Like I do. He wants to bust out of his skin. He watches his snakes do it and it makes him want to do it, too. He wants to emerge fresh. He wants to start over. The reason he wants those girls isn’t only for sex. The sex is the drivetrain for what he does. It’s the fuel and the engine. But what he’s doing, in a bigger sense—is getting back at everybody who ever wronged him. First, he punishes the girls for what they make him feel. What he feels is wrong, and he knows it, though he can’t help it I’ve got to change. And he punishes them for what he thinks the world has done to him—they’re sacrificial. That’s what the mesh robes say to me, anyway: you are now an angel, so that I can change, because I’ve got to change. He was probably abused as a boy. Physically, sexually maybe, psychologically. That builds a lot of anger, and a lot of self-disgust. I’ve got to change. The closer he gets to taking one of these girls and doing what he did to Mary Lou Kidder, the worse he feels about himself, but he thinks that’s the thing that will transform him. He stopped for a year and a half. He gave it a try. But once you go off peaks like that, you don’t go back easily. He’s not going to settle for the bunny slope.”

  Donna said nothing for a long moment. “Does he deserve to die?”

  “He’ll die.”

  “Early, in a gas chamber or an electric chair?”

  “That’s God’s decision, not mine.”

  “And if you were God?”

  “I’d roast him on a spit.”

  I took a nice long drink of the Herradura and ice, then ate another handful of popcorn. The minutes ticked by.

  “I know I drink too much. I’ll stop when I’m ready to. But right now it fuels me and it contains the flame, at the same time. You drink some and it’s like adrenaline going down. Then you drink more and the adrenaline turns into something strong and inward. Then you drink more and the something strong and inward melts into your muscles, and for a while you’re one, whole, integrated unit. Then you drink more and your body gets heavy and your mind stays light. Then you drink more and you’re asleep.”

  “It doesn’t sound all that exciting.”

  “I’m just rambling.”

  “You’re packing, too.”

  “You weren’t supposed to notice.”

  “I notice every single thing about you. And I like it when you let your guard down and ramble.”

  “The alcohol, though. It’s not about excitement. It’s about… well, I’m not sure what it’s about, really.”

  “Maybe what it’s about is about wanting to feel different than you feel. Getting around what’s happened to you. Getting around yourself, seeing around the corner of you. When I was a kid, my Uncle Pollard out in War, he’d drink in the tool shed because my aunt wouldn’t let the liquor in the house. When he’d gotten enough, he started calling himself Jonah. That’s who he was when he was liquored up—Jonah. Even walked and talked different. Wasn’t crazy or mean or sloppy or anything—just… a different guy”

  “Sounds great. But, what’s War?”

  “Ah, just another little town in another little holler. West Virginia’s full of them. War, Left Hand, Big Isaac, Tad, Pinch, Ida May. They all got reasons behind the names. Like, Left Hand is on the left side of Left Hand Creek. Stuff like that. Anyway, real drinkers, be they in War or Orange County, are trying to drink themselves into being somebody different. Some of you get good results. I think Pollard did.”

  I thought about that.

  “You think I do?”

  “No. I don’t think you’re much different when you drink. You just talk more and hurt less, I guess. Maybe you’re not drinking enough.”

  We laughed at that.

  I continued to stare out at the house. Nothing moved in the breezeless night. I waited for the feeling from Hopkin to come to me, but it didn’t. I realized there were still more houses listed for sale by women that I hadn’t even looked into yet. It’s a terrible feeling to realize you’ve been wrong.

  “Can I ask you something?” she asked. “How come you never told me much about your boy?”

  Oh, no, I thought. But I’d had enough tequila to feel honest.

  “I didn’t want you to be a part of him.”

  “I understand mat, but why?”

  “Sometimes separation is good.”

  “Understand that, too. But do you think that I’m somehow not good enough to be connected up with him?”

  I felt a little lump way down below my Adam’s apple. Donna Mason’s deep and genuine humility never failed to surprise me. “No, it’s because I didn’t want you to be … ah .. . part of what happened to him. He ended in death and I want you to … not be affected by that.”

  “Protecting me? Or just protecting your vision of me?”

  “My vision of you.”

  She was quiet for a long while.

  “How come you ordered me not to look into his death when I was putting together our interview?”

  “I didn’t order you not to look into it. I asked you not to pry into the particulars of his dying, is all. In front of thousands of viewers. Can you blame me for that?”

  It was a very slick and very cool evasion of the truth. A lie of omission. But Donna caught it.

  “I don’t think it had to do with viewers at all. I think it had to do with me.”

  “No.”

  She looked at me in the darkness for a beat. “I wouldn’t have done that anyway.”

  I almost believed her, which meant I doubted her. I felt bad for not trusting her, but my sins against men, women and children have been far greater than that. “I know,” I lied. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Lies are walls; you hit them and hit them and nothing breaks but you.
r />   “Maybe now you can explain that court date to me.

  I didn’t lie about that. I just told her about the photogrammetry and what it might prove, if Donna was willing to tell the world what she was doing that January afternoon in the Marriott. She listened intently, and was quiet for a long time.

  “Want to just quit?” I asked her. “You can walk, Donna, and you won’t have to explain a thing to me—or to any court in the land. There are decent odds that you’d be better off.”

  More silence.

  “Terry, why do I have to fight so hard to tell what’s generous in you from what’s insulting?”

  “I don’t mean to insult you.”

  “I love you.”

  “I want you to. I’m just trying to find a way to make you.”

  “That isn’t up to you. That’s the whole point. Don’t you understand? Just the basic things about me?”

  She shook her head and sighed. “Well, then you let me know when you find that way. Meantime, I’ll consider myself on the edge of something about to crumble.”

  “I don’t crumble.”

  “Maybe you just should. Terry, love isn’t something you have to force. It isn’t that hard. It’s not. .. something you strain to keep up, like a dumbbell with a ton of weight on it.”

  I thought about that one.

  “How come you put up with me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I just can’t seem to scrape you off my shoe.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Terry, I don’t feel like I’ve got much choice in it.”

  “Let’s drink to that.”

  We did.

  I watched an owl float through the yellow light and land in a sycamore. Moths buzzed the streetlamp, the light a busy halo in the thick, damp air.

  “I thought he’d be moving tonight. Hunting.”

  “Maybe this isn’t his house.”

  “He’s out there tonight, Donna—I’m sure of it.”

  “Then he left earlier. Or he hasn’t left yet.”

  “I smelled exhaust when we first drove up. Hang in here with me for another hour, will you?”

  “You know I will.”

  “I’m glad you made this popcorn. I’d forgotten, but I always used to get hungry on stakeouts. Starved.”

  Donna looked out the window to the house. “Strange, isn’t it? Pictures of what isn’t true, but they look true. Pictures of you taken by your ex-wife, gone missing. Pictures of The Horridus, hanging over the freeways. Moving pictures of you in my interview. Pictures the press snaps. Then, there’s all the other kind of picturing going on—you’ve got a present-day picture of me you don’t want altered by your son’s past. A man out there is hunting children because he’s pictured himself with them. A man with a gun right beside me, hunting him, because he’s pictured this as the only thing that can save his sweet, tormented soul. This is one crazy world we’re in here, Terry.”

  I watched her as she stared out the window at the walled house. I wanted to put her body inside my heart. “Donna, this is as corny as it gets, but I’m glad you’re in it with me and I love you more than anything on earth.”

  She smiled. “I love corn. Pass it, will you?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Hypok climbed into his van and leaned over to check himself in the rearview mirror. Even in the pale interior light he was pleased by the transformation: jet black hair brushed down over his head (boyish and dramatic), black mustaches and Vandyke tapering to a neat point (hip and musketeerish), the earring hoop in his left lobe and the long, bottom-flaring black sideburns (piratical and Presleyan). What more could you want? He’d started the shed three days ago, just after the Item #3 flop. It had taken that long for the whiskers to grow out enough to dye the same midnight black as his hair.

  He took a giant swig off the generic tequila and set the bottle back in the center console. He checked his directions on the street map again, like a vacationer making sure he didn’t get lost: Leeward Place in Yorba Linda, a bit of a jaunt out the 91 freeway, birthplace of Richard Nixon and home to Item #4.

  He hit the garage door control, waited the usual eternity for the thing to rise, then backed out carefully so as not to scrape the Saturn. Easy. Then into the driveway and a quick push on the shut button. He made a nifty little highway patrol–style turn, where you back up, crank hard, then crank the other way to reverse direction without a time-and-space-consuming three-point maneuver. He used another control to open the front gate and rolled confidently onto Wytton Street in the heart of old-town Tustin as the gate slid shut behind him.

  It was 2:03 A.M. by Hypok’s watch, which, he knew, was two minutes slow. He started the turn off Wytton and his rearview caught the faint headlights coming up his street from way back in the night.

  Wytton to B to First. The school, the church, the ball field. Darkness, streetlights and the private hiss of cars. Haif a moon. Then the 55 freeway heading north and east to get him to the 91.

  Hypok felt strong right now, immensely strong, with the tequila pulling down all his nerves into one big muscle and the one big muscle under the control of his will. Strong fingers on window handle, strong arm as he cranked it down for the cool spring suburban air. Jazz on the radio, syncopated, mindless and happy. That’s what he liked about jazz when he was on a predation, the way it never got to the point, never hit the tonic note, just kept mincing along and got you more and more … agitated. He let the notes go into his ears and bounce off the knotted muscle of his nerves and imagined what happens when a bird lands on the snout-ball of an alligator submerged in water. Wham!

  Up the 55, merging with the 91, low-lying fog in the basin of the river, tracts to the left and hillsides to the right, truck scales closed, the toll lanes offered for 25 cents but empty anyway, fast-food America anchoring the suburbs: McDonald’s, In-and-Out, Carl’s, Taco Bell. He gazed at his own gigantic face on a billboard and felt proud. Have You Seen This Man? Call 1-800-647-SAVE. He wondered for the thousandth time exactly when Item #3, the little toad, had peeked at him. Must be a problem with the hood. The next one could stare at him all it wanted, he thought. The big illuminated rectangle of his face stood out wonderfully against the dark hillsides, and it was the only one for miles, the reigning deity in this little corner of the American night. It didn’t look anything like him anymore, he thought, but that was good, like an advertisement for someone else.

  Hypok veered gently to his left, flattening a dozen orange dividers that wobbled back upright in the wake of his van, then he sailed along in the toll lane for a few hundred yards just to see what it was like—he’d never used it and this was his chance—but at this hour with so few cars what was the benefit except the satisfaction of feeling those rubber stanchions bending under you like helpless pygmies and the comfort of knowing you were breaking the law and getting away with it? He trampled another ten pylons and settled back into the no-pay fast lane, jazz low on the radio, fog triangulated in his headlamp beams, generic tequila harnessing the tracers of his imagination and tamping them down in his brain like gunpowder.

  He thought of the Item and its mother waiting for him on Leeward: ditzy blondes, both of them, the mom maybe thirty and the Item maybe seven or eight, with long spindly legs and lots of hair. Met them at church months ago, talked to the woman at the Single Parents meeting afterward a few times, Chloe the Item and Margo the mom, very trusting as you would expect people at church to be. He’d regaled Margo with tales of his beloved “Mike,” age five, living with his mother back in Texas. Even showed her a picture of him, courtesy of some Bright Tomorrows moron who’d foisted it off on him in a burst of motherly pride. My son, Alexander. He’d filed Chloe and Margo under the port-in-a-storm category, because they weren’t easy to research, like the Bright Tomorrows Items, and it took him two prowls into the assistant pastor’s office to view the Rolodex long enough to get the address and phone number, because Margo wasn’t listed in the phone directory. He kept maybe a dozen port-in-
a-storms catalogued in his head, reserved for a situation just like this one: billboards of his face on all major county freeways, a composite drawing (not bad) distributed to post offices, neighborhood markets, health clubs, police stations, school offices and thousands of homes throughout Christendom; cops getting closer to him, pressure, pressure, pressure. The pigs called it proaction—that warthog Ishmael spelled it out, right on TV—and proaction was exactly what he was going to give them, courtesy of Margo, Item #4, Neighborhood Congregational Church—Praise the Lord!—and the port-in-a-storm file.

  It was hard to keep his excitement contained. Hypok thought about the ten grand, delivered to him that night by one of the Friendlies. What a sweet, secret delight it was to know that he had been instrumental, first in ruining the reputation of Crimes Against Youth sergeant Terry Naughton, and now in fleecing him out of ten thousand more bucks! And that on top of the $30,000 Naughton—Mal—had coughed for his original customs. Talk about a smiley face. That money would go a long way now, especially with his snakes no longer eating up a hundred dollars’ worth of vermin a week along with the occasional boxes of kittens or puppies he’d get free in the classifieds, so long as he promised a good home for them. After quitting Bright Tomorrows, he’d live on Mal’s money. A cop’s money. Tax free. He was commissioned. He was golden. He was changing. He was there.

  He really was there. He pulled onto Leeward and proceeded west to the correct number. It was easy to find because they were right out there on the curbs, in reflecting black and silver paint: 239. He drove past, made three right turns and pulled alongside a little park to settle himself. He cut the engine and got out the bottle. He liked the way the liquor warmed up in the center console, down there where the engine heat seeped through the plastic. He thought about Mal again. What would the inmates do with him if he went to prison? It was hard to imagine the wrath. He took another drink. Idea: would law enforcement pay for information on the continuing exploits of T.N.? What if he contacted this Ishmael fool, for instance, the one on the TV press conference, the proactive prick, and told him he had additional information on the accused? Interesting. But would the cops pay up enough to make it worth his while? Idea: take it one step further. What would Mal do if he threatened to expose his latest request to the Sheriffs? Maybe that’s how to get the last few drops of blood out of Naughton. Wait until he finds out who his dream girl is. Make him sweat awhile. Daydreams can be so exciting, he thought, especially at 2:38 A.M. on a damp May morning.