He took another swig, for luck, then worked on a pair of latex gloves and started up the van.
Thirty seconds later he was sitting outside Item #4’s house, engine off, neighborhood still, moon low over the uniform roofs of uniform houses, his heart slamming inside his chest like a dragster with a blown rod. He put some cinnamon drops on his tongue. He pulled off three eight-inch lengths of duct tape and stuck them inside his jacket. The glass cutter and toilet plunger, the rim of which was smeared with petroleum jelly for a sure fit on the window glass, sat in his lap. He put the Hiker’s Headlight on and arranged the lamp up on his forehead, equidistant from each eye, a snug, cyclopean organ just waiting to illuminate prey. He knew the Item’s room was in the back and he knew they didn’t have a dog. It was just a matter of getting over the gate without waking up the world, then he’d be home free. He got out and quietly pressed the door shut, nudging it into its latch with his hips.
Fifteen steps to the gate, arms at his sides and plunger tucked up under his armpit. Calm strides, but assured ones, the stride of a man on familiar ground. Then the gate getting closer, closer now, closer still, Hypok running the last five steps, long eager steps like the high jumpers take in the Olympics—one, two, three, four, five—then the swing of his right leg and the heave of his left, plunger held before him for balance, and he was atop the rickety grapestake fence, pausing for just one moment like a sentence delayed by a comma, then he shifted his weight and drew himself together to spring off with hardly a sound, just the brief swoosh of a body falling through space then the muffled air-cushion tap of athletic shoes on concrete as Hypok landed apelike and crouched on the side walkway by the trash cans, his eyes adjusting to a new gradient of darkness, moonlight only, his ears tuned to every sound in the night, his heart pounding hard and a voice inside snickering, clean.
Eight steps, right turn: window. Plunger on. Cutter scratches a loose circle around the suction cup, pane rasps quietly as it breaks away. The hole is clean. Michael Hypok: craftsman. His latexed hand reaches inside for the slider latch. There. Up unlocks, so he eases up. The window slides in the channel with hardly a sound if he does it slowly, and he does it very slowly so the Item can remain in dreamland, and when the window is finally open and a brief pause tells him that no one is stirring not even a mouse, he hoists himself into the opening and in the faint white moonlight his supple body pours to the bedroom floor like cream dispensed from a pitcher.
He turned on the Hiker’s Headlight and found the bed. Item #4 was sleeping deeply, lost in a comforter, just its little head with all that blond hair showing. He looked down and admired it for a long minute: all the innocence, all the joy, all the magnificence it would inspire. But, work to do.
Then he heard something in the darkness to his right.
The light blazed on and he stood there looking at this thing, Margo Gayley, Christian single mother, in the doorway wearing a pink robe and a terrified expression, holding something small in her hand.
She pointed it at his face. He had already begun to crouch and coil when he heard an aerosol hiss and saw the red mist jet overhead. He leapt just as she lowered the can, but he was already up, midair, and he took a load of the stuff on his neck.
His eyes burst into flames just as his hands closed around Margo’s throat. He drove forward. He couldn’t open his eyes because of the heat. She made an awful gagging sound. He felt both their bodies slam back into a flimsy panel that gave way and let him fall down on top of her, hands powerfully locked on this thin throat, and he felt a bunch of what had to be clothes falling on his back as he forced her head down as far as it would go. He focused every cell of his burning, outraged strength to drive his thumbs all the way back to his fingers. He put his weight into it, his neck and back, his hips and legs, everything dedicated to the meeting of thumb pads and fingertips. They were already close to touching. He’d never heard a sound like she was making, part whimper and part screech but mostly this dry clicking sound like muscles flapping against each other. He released his thumbs for just a second to move them higher up, where the bones and glands were, then smashed down again with ferocious force. He felt her fingers on his wrists, but they had no power. She was kicking up violently with her knees but he’d landed between them and all he had to do was keep his groin jammed up tight against hers and her knees couldn’t even touch him. He could hear Item #4 screaming and feel it thrashing his back with something, but neither mattered a bit right now, only the rrr … rrr … rrrrrrrrrrrrr coming from his own throat. Then a sudden muted crunch and his thumbs almost met his fingers and the woman relaxed so Hypok throttled her still harder until there was no resistance left, just accepting flesh and this screaming thing behind him lashing his back with what felt like a belt.
He whirled. The Item shot out the door and into the house. Hypok rose with shaky legs and followed it. It ran down the hallway and around a corner. Hypok made the corner in three long strides, just as it flew out the front door. Hypok followed it into the little front yard, into the misty morning air, but he stopped short and thought about the van. How far away from it could he get—his life force, his escape, his freedom? Fuck it, get the Item! It was hauling down the sidewalk, loose T-shirt rippling and tiny feet a blur beneath it, like how the chickens used to run when his mother chased one down for dinner. It wasn’t screaming, it was just moving and moving fast. Get the van, then get the Item!
Ten steps and he was there, flinging himself through the door, turning the key in the ignition where he had left it, throwing the tranny into first and gunning the gas all at once. The van jumped forward. He hunched over the wheel and flipped on the brights. There it was, flailing straight down the sidewalk, growing larger in the bright beams, shirt waving like a flag at a ballpark, hair flying out everywhere.
The van ate up the distance. The Item looked back, eyes dark and shining. It looked like an animal just before you run over it. Hypok lurched past it, then threw the van into park and slammed through the door. But it cut across the lawn on a diagonal, away from him. He heard its scream pierce the heavy air. It screamed again. A light went on in the house it had passed, the house on the lawn of which Hypok now stood, eyes burning and heart pounding, watching his future scooting away from him like a rabbit. Like a bad dream. Then another light, one house back of him. Then another, from the house it was running to. Like every damned household in suburbia knew he was here. Up the walkway to the porch it scurried, while Hypok could only watch in mute, furious heartache as the door opened and Item #4 vanished from the moist darkness into the warm welcoming light of a cozy Orange County home. After the Item was inside, two heads appeared in the doorway, looking at him. Then the man stepped onto the porch and crossed his arms. Ward Fucking Cleaver in boxers. The woman was probably already on the phone.
Hypok walked back to the van and drove away, unconcerned that Ward would remember his plates, stolen months ago from an out-of-commission Audi near the Bright Tomorrows building in Irvine.
He was a mess. His eyes burned, his lips and nostrils burned, his neck burned, his right thumb was sprained and he had absolutely nothing to show for himself. He held up his right hand and looked at the latex glove, fingers torn and peeled back, a yawning hole over his palm. Same with the left, but no palm hole. He noted that his lucky snake bracelet was gone, fuck, probably ripped off in the disagreement with the mom. God knew how many fingerprints he’d left behind, but he was clean, they couldn’t match prints with nothing, the pinheads. Margo Whatsername wasn’t going to be fingering anybody for a while, either.
Driving slowly, he signaled his occasional lane changes, trying to get his nerves to settle a little. He drank more tequila, but that did the opposite of settling nerves, it just taunted him with its warmth and courage and it made him feel again that consolidation down there in the naughty zone, morning wood, which he’d been hoping to deal with in some depth before the sun came up. It made him want sex; it made him want … well, everything.
He headed east o
n the 91, out of Orange County, where he figured some kind of APB would be on the cop waves. Not enough traffic on the roads to feel safe, yet. Just before the county line he saw another billboard of himself. It really wasn’t a bad rendition of his old look. He thought it might actually be a help to him now, transformed as he was into dark-haired, hip and poetic sideburn and earring man. It was a decoy. He watched himself watch himself until the sign turned to reveal the insipid stop smoking announcement on the other side. He wondered what the names of the bones were he’d crushed in the mom’s throat. Whatever. That thumb was sore.
Getting off on Maple Street in Corona, he then went north to the park. Hypok had scouted the place as a possible Item release site, but it was too crowded, too many people, no privacy. Of course it was closed now, but he parked anyway and wandered across the damp grass toward the drinking fountains and rest rooms. Stooped over the fountain he let the water loop up into his eyes and blinked them a lot until the burning eased up. Then lips and nose. He pulled off the gloves and rinsed them, then poured some of the wet gravel from the fountain bed into them and tossed them on top of the outhouse. Then he giggled.
He sat on a picnic bench for a while and listened to the park birds. He yawned. Then he climbed up onto the table and stretched out on his back, with his elbows on either side of his head and his fingers laced beneath it to form a pillow. Let the traffic get going before you head back home, he thought. Another hour or two.
Then his little cowboy pj’s were down around his knees and Collette and Valeen half hidden under the sheet were giggling and oohing, inspecting, probing, playing. All he wanted to do was relish their touch and his feeling, lie there and pretend he was sleeping though they all knew he wasn’t. Yes, that would be enough, to just stay there forever, enfolded within the smells of his sisters and the sheets and the bewildering wonders of being four years old and loved so much and feeling so sweetly, deliciously, mysteriously good, peeking out the window where the Missouri sky held a full orange moon and, one night, a pretty little rat snake on the sill illuminated by the porch light looked through the screen at him.
Hypok woke up, startled and aroused. He watched the traffic heading out Maple to the freeway. The headlights were still on but the first light of morning had turned the world gray. This wasn’t Missouri. He looked down at his pants and rolled over, trying to hide what could not be hidden forever, imagining a way to express what had to be expressed. Fully expressed. Soon. He was sad, frustrated and furious.
A few minutes later he was back in his van, heading for home. The traffic was heavy from Riverside into Orange County and there wasn’t a way on earth they would spot him.
About halfway there, he got an idea.
No time for a long predation. No time for the port-in-a-storm stuff. It took weeks to get those right.
But he wanted action and he wanted it now and he was going to get it. God, he needed it. He was aching: heart, head, balls, thumb. When they’ve put your face all over the freeways, you know your time in that place is short. You’ve got to act. Hypok decided to just go get some live bait and go hunting. Like back in Wichita, but simpler, something irresistible. He’d had the idea before.
He brought out the tequila and took a long, warm gulp. Most good. Then he turned the jazz back on low. He imagined the big County of Orange Animal Shelter, right off I-5. He’d shopped there occasionally for free dogs and cats for Moloch, but he hadn’t been there in months.
How much is that doggie in the window?
TWENTY-EIGHT
Johnny Escobedo called me at six the next morning to tell me that The Horridus had just moved again. APB on a white van, stolen plates, description of UN-SUB male pending. One terrified girl, okay—she got away. But her mother was strangled while she escaped and The Horridus had slithered back into the dark. Johnny said it looked like the mother had heard something and surprised him. I wasn’t at the crime scene, but I could have told you that.
For the next seven hours I’d sat by the phone, waiting for his updates, feeling more foolish, helpless and impotent than I had ever felt in my life. It just frosted me, because I knew he’d be out that night and I’d missed him. Finally I blew up. I threw a full beer bottle through the TV screen—though it wasn’t even turned on. Then I smashed my fist into a kitchen cabinet that splintered like the cheap wood it was. So much for my deposit. Neither helped. There were white splinters in my knuckles.
In the early afternoon I took a break to meet Melinda at her house. She’d taken the day off work to have an escrow officer put a rush on the papers that would allow us to sell the place and split the money. Neither one of us had expected a sale so quickly. She had some documents for me to sign. She was wearing an old yellow sweatsuit she used to work out in, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and a brooding look on her face. She looked underslept, pale.
I was in a foul mood when I got there, and a fouler one still when Melinda held up the papers, said “sign these” and with a sigh held them out to me. Moe looked at me and slunk away.
“Thought I might get consulted before we decided to sell,” I said.
Her look was sharp as a paring blade. “Don’t.”
“Sorry. But I’m having trouble figuring out why I’m doing real estate deals while The Horridus is out there killing people and chasing little girls.”
“It’ll take two minutes. Then you’ll be back on the case.”
Pure sarcasm.
“Just sign and get out?”
She smiled wanly and shook her head. Then, our standard peace offering: “Coffee?”
“Hell. Why not?”
In the bright Laguna kitchen we watched the coffee drip into the carafe. When it was ready we took our cups to the sundeck outside and sat in the shade of a silver-dollar eucalyptus. The day was warm and it was breezy there in the canyon, as it often is, and I felt again the loss of it all. My home, though it wasn’t really mine. My woman, though she wasn’t really mine. My daughter, though she wasn’t really mine. I guess I had borrowed a family after losing my real one and now it was time to return it. My frustration and fury melted away when I felt that loss. It just blew away in the breeze and it left me with a heightened sense of what was here for me now: nothing. She set the papers on the patio table and put a rock on them so they wouldn’t blow away.
“I wanted to get a few things straight with you,” she said. “One is, I don’t think you did what those pictures showed, but I also know you don’t remember a lot of what you did, back when we were drinking so much. I don’t either. But that doesn’t really matter. You’ve made Penny’s life extremely difficult. She refuses to believe anything that’s on the TV or in the papers, but that isn’t enough to save her. She’s taunted at school, she’s ridiculed by friends, she’s been disincluded by loving parents who think their own children might be … contaminated by her contact with you.”
“It doesn’t make sense to shun her for something I didn’t do.”
“Men believed the world was flat for centuries. That didn’t make sense either.”
“Well, now that’s really—”
“—But more to the point, Terry, you’ve humiliated me. You can’t even imagine the looks I get, the things people say—some of them trying to help, I know—just the way people are. You might be the alleged monster, but I’m the bride of Frankenstein. Well, I’m sick of it. That’s why I’m leaving. For Penny, and for me.
I didn’t speak. I could see by the flush on Melinda’s broad, pale cheeks that she was angry and hurting.
“I’ve already made an offer on a place up in the Portland area. Good schools. Nobody knows us. So I’d appreciate your cooperation on the sale. According to the joint ownership either one of us can impede a sale, and I’m asking you not to.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m settling for a little less than I asked. It’s still a buyers’ market and I want out. So, thank you.”
“What are you going to do for work?”
She looked at me
and smiled just a little. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
“You’re going to use that old credential and teach school.”
She nodded. “I just can’t do it anymore, Terry. The filth we shovel. The people we deal with. We’re just garbage collectors—human garbage. I’m sorry, but I’m bitter and I’m burned out and I’m finished. They’ll get The Horridus and another one will crop up to take his place. Anyway, there’s openings in some of the Portland districts. I’ll get something.”
“How’s Penny taking it?”
Melinda’s eyes bore into me. “She wants to stay.”
There was a long silence then and I listened to the cars hissing past on Laguna Canyon Road.
“You know, Terry, you did something more than humiliate me to the world. You humiliated me to me.”
“You know I’m innocent.”
“Of the children, I believe so. But how innocent are you of Donna Mason?”
I watched her sip her coffee. There are times when a man wants to crawl down a hole, and times when he is the hole. This was one of those.
She chuckled. “You can tell me I’m wrong and I won’t bring it up again. I’m not after confirmation. I’m past that, to be honest.”
“Well, yes. There is that.”
“How long?”
Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) Page 35
