Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “A few months.”

  “I’d flattered myself that it was more recent. I suspected. When I saw the interview I realized she was in love with you. I just knew. So, when were you going to get around to telling me?”

  “I’d been thinking about … how to do it.”

  Her face was flushed now, but Melinda still had the interrogator’s calm that had worn down so many creeps over the years. “Noble of you, not to rush things.”

  “The same way you thought before you left Ish. I hurt you, Melinda. I cheated and I lied. But you’re not righteous either. Nobody is.”

  “I feel very put in my place. I apologize for asking you when you were going to tell me you were cheating on me. I stand corrected.”

  “I was wrong in what I did. I know that. I wasn’t expecting what happened.”

  “And what, exactly, happened?”

  “I just met her and fell. I thought we’d be right together. I fought it. I did what I could because I knew someone was going to get hurt. I did fight …”

  “For whom?”

  “You and me.”

  We were quiet a moment while Melinda stared at me.

  “What about us? Were we right?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. Don’t. Don’t start listing my faults.”

  “Most of them were mine.”

  “I’ve got no interest in them, now.”

  “Do you want me to get up and walk, or sit here and bleed?”

  “Sit and bleed, sonofabitch, because I’m not done with you yet.”

  My turn to offer the olive branch:

  “More coffee, then, hon?”

  “Sure, cakes.”

  When I got back with fresh cups, Melinda had her knees up and her arms wrapped around them and her head sideways on her kneecaps. Her ponytail hung down behind them. I walked into her field of vision to set down the cup, then walked back out of it and sat down again.

  “I knew we weren’t right, too,” she said. “I knew it from the first. But I did it anyway. That sounds like I settled for something less, but really it was just the opposite. I was getting more than I thought I deserved. I thought you’d make me feel young and beautiful and happy again. I thought you’d wrangle me into having another kid, even though I told you I wouldn’t. I felt old, Terry, when we started seeing each other. And I do again, now. I feel old as owl shit. I look in the mirror and I see a face made out of old, dry owl shit. For a couple of months you made me feel like a woman again, then it was just back to being dried-up old me. You’re one of those men that gets older and a little crazier, maybe, but you hold your looks and your body keeps up with your desire, and you do okay for yourself. I knew the drinking would pass. And when it did, I knew your vision of me would pass, too, and you’d see me for what I was. Owl shit. So, no, I’m not arguing with you when I say we weren’t right. We weren’t. Of course, then, nobody is, really, especially at our age.”

  “God, Mel—you talk like you’ve got a foot in the grave.”

  “I feel that way, Terry. Sometimes. I really do. How can’t you, in the kind of work we do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I do.”

  “And maybe you compensate with a twenty-eight-year-old television bombshell from Dixie.”

  “West Virginia stayed Union.”

  “Who gives a shit what West Virginia did?”

  I watched one of our neighbors—former neighbors—driving along the gravel road. She craned her neck, having seen my car out front, trying for a look at a real child molester, the kind of guy they’re going to start chemically castrating in the golden state of California soon. (As head of CAY I was in favor of the old-fashioned, actual castration, but it is considered cruel and unusual. As an accused child molester with a trial date not yet set, I had to admit to some uncertainty on this issue.)

  “Maggie brought me cookies the day she found out you’d been arrested. There was a plate of them for you, too.”

  I said nothing. Melinda unwound from her pensive position and leaned back against the railing of the deck.

  “So, sign the papers, Naughton. I’ll let you say good-bye to Penny sometime, but I don’t want to make too big a thing out of us leaving. I’m putting a happy face on it. And I’m determined to look happy if it kills me, which it might. I’m talking to Wade and the personnel people tomorrow. Thought I’d give you the scoop. Is that what Donna Mason called it, when she sat you down for that interview?”

  She actually waited for an answer. “They call it an ‘exclusive,’ I think.”

  “Well Terry, you’d just had sexual intercourse with her, a few minutes before, so you must have felt pretty exclusive, yourself. It was written all over your pathetic little face.”

  “Mel.”

  “Mel fucking what?”

  “Enough.”

  “Yeah, enough. Take a hike, old friend, but sign the papers first. See you in the next life.”

  I signed the papers.

  On my way back to the apartment all hell suddenly broke loose. Very quietly, but it broke loose just the same.

  First was a call from Loren Runnels:

  “Terry, they’ve got Tim Monaghan from the FBI here to talk about those photographs. Will’s flying in from Boise, should be landing in an hour. I can’t get a read on Zant, but he wants to see us at three, up at County with Wade and the photo boys.”

  “Holy, holy, shit.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  Next was a call from the second-to-last person on earth I expected to hear from:

  “Terry, this is Jim … Jim Wade. I’ve got some people we need to talk to at three today. You’ll be here, won’t you?”

  “You know I will.”

  “How are you?”

  “I was worse the day my son died.”

  “We’ve got some things to talk about. I’ll see you then.”

  My heart was pounding so hard I could feel my chest knocking against the shoulder restraint. The luck was back, man: the stinking Irish luck was coming back to me. I felt it. I knew it. I was it.

  So I called Johnny and got him at the Gayley crime scene.

  “Anything good there?”

  “Skin and blood under her nails, hair all over the place, fingerprints galore—who knows whose. He’s made at this end, Terry. All we need now is a suspect. We could use your eyes, boss. It was bad, what he did to her.”

  “The Bureau’s here to pow-wow with me and Wade. I’m smelling the finish line.”

  “I’ll say a prayer for you.”

  Then I called Vinson Clay at PlaNet and wouldn’t stop talking to his secretary until she put me through.

  “I need Shroud,” I said.

  “Naughton. Look … we’re considering. I took it to committee. It’s the only way to cover our own asses around here.”

  In committee. Lawyers, lawyers, lawyers.

  I went back to the metro apartment to shower and shave before my meeting with the FBI and the sheriff. And there was part three of all hell breaking loose, a user-group posting from I. R. Shroud:

  Mal—Sorry for delay. Been busy as a bee. If you’re going live, call Chet for the feed. He’ll direct. It’ll be worth every penny you donated. Tee-hee-hee.

  And that’s when I realized who the girl in the photographs was.

  Of course.

  I could feel the heat of eyeballs on me as I walked into Sheriff Jim Wade’s office at 2:58 P.M. that day: Ishmael from the hallway; Woolton and Vega from their desks; Burns from his chat with Jim’s secretary; and Frances, who stopped her conversation with a deputy I didn’t recognize to stare at me rather blankly as I made the long march to Wade’s door.

  When that door closed behind me there was Jim and Rick Zant, my lawyer Loren Runnels, Will Fortune and a large, athletic man who could only be Tim Monaghan. Monaghan was with the Special Photographic Unit. I shook his hand and we sat around Wade’s desk.

  “They’re fake,” Monaghan said. “They’re the best I’ve
ever seen, but they’re still fake. They’re digitized mockups, reshot with a film recorder. Several ways we can tell this, but I don’t think I need to go into detail right now. Basically we knocked them on three points—physical anomalies, replicated edge marks and contradictory patterns in the grain matrix. I can testify in court if you want, but one of the reasons I’m here is to keep it from coming down to that. I think we all might have better things to do. We want to talk to the guy who made them. I know you do. We’ll give you our help if you want it. Will, you have anything to add?”

  “Not one word.”

  Talk about a golden silence.

  Two hours later I was sitting in a conference room, uncharged, reinstated, apologized to, put back in control of CAY and gathered with my unit—plus Wade, Woolton and Burns, the six deputies temporarily assigned to us, plus six more brand spanking new ones that Johnny said were a welcome-back present. Monaghan left us with two FBI agents he must have been storing in his briefcase. Our only task was to accelerate our search for The Horridus. We had to light a fire under his ass so hot he’d jump right out of his skillet and into our pot.

  Oh yes, Ishmael was there, too. He was the only deputy on the whole floor who wasn’t lingering around Jim Wade’s office when we came out, the only guy who wasn’t standing there clapping and smiling when Wade said he’d just had the rare experience of being able to help correct one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

  Ish just stood there in the room acting like he had business with a telephone, staring at me with his green cat eyes and a look of spiritless revulsion on his face. Then he turned his back to me and kept on talking.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “I’m looking for a puppy for my daughter,” Hypok said to the animal control officer. “She’s four.”

  The officer—a dour hag of perhaps thirty—told him where the puppy run was, and if he didn’t find one he liked there, he could try the kennels out back for a slightly older dog. Hypok knew the drill here, but he asked all the standard questions anyway. It had been six months or so since he’d hit them up for Moloch chow. The officer on duty today was one he’d never seen before, but it paid to be careful when your face—former face—was on a freeway billboard not two miles away. It was really kind of a thrill to glide through the world with a new look, but you didn’t want to press it.

  Hypok thanked her and walked back to the puppy run. He tilted a little on his way in—all that cactus juice flowing—but it was a good tilt, kind of a personal slant on things. Part of the new look. He was fresh from a shower and change of clothes—khaki pants with pleats, an almost matching cotton long-sleeved shirt with plenty of outdoorsy, all-American looking pockets and epaulets on it, manly gray socks and a pair of work boots. He’d put a pen in the pocket of the shirt. He felt trustworthy and animal friendly, the kind of guy who ate granola and would be happy to let you touch the cute little pup he was walking. But his psoriasis was flaring up—it always did when he got close to a predation—and even the cool, clean cotton was a torment against his skin. He’d gotten a fresh tube of Lidex goop delivered by the pharmacy, though the new delivery bimbo was too dumb to just drop it in his mail slot as usual. But the Lidex helped. And the tequila helped, too.

  The puppy room was small and square. It had cages on three levels, and it echoed with the whines and yelps of puppies and the cacophony of the big dogs outside, and the occasional metallic slamming of doors. It was surprisingly loud. It smelled of dog shit and piss. There were other puppy lookers there with him: a family of five with a chubby but rather sexy daughter who looked to be about three; and an elderly couple made up of a man who probably weighed a hundred and a fat woman who weighed at least twice that.

  Hypok stepped to the cages and stopped eye to eye with a black puppy about the size and shape of a shoe-box. He looked mostly lab, with something smaller and curlier mixed in—cocker spaniel, probably. He had deep brown eyes, the brightest of white teeth and a little pup weenie with a whip of damp hair curving off it. The label said he was an “All American,” one of the shelter’s euphemisms for mutt. He was expected to weigh between thirty and fifty pounds as an adult. He licked Hypok’s finger through the bars. A very cute dog. There were three more just like him in the back of the cage asleep, neat as a row of socks. Next was a beagleish unit yapping quite loudly, paying Hypok no attention at all. Hypok wasn’t a fan of the beagle, though Moloch had eaten one about a year ago, a full-grown dog he’d gotten here for free. It had been a sullen thing, didn’t like Hypok, didn’t like the ride home in the then-red van, didn’t like the guest house or the “last supper” he was offered, didn’t like it at all when Hypok led him to the cage door in the back of Moloch’s world and tried to guide him in. The beagle had wheeled twice and bitten at him but Hypok remained in control. He kept the stubborn little hunter lined up with the open door and kicked it through. The dog had cowed in the corner a minute, then was tentatively exploring the front glass when Moloch hit him like a bolt from Olympus and ten minutes later the ungrateful hound was nothing more than a slow lump. Hypok moved down the row: golden ones, black ones, calico ones; furry coats, short coats, straight coats and curled coats. Even a Dalmatian mix—spots intact—which Hypok knew wouldn’t last long in this market The older, out-of-proportion couple seemed charmed by a Doberman–golden retriever mix with nice eyes and good confirmation. “You can tell he’s intelligent,” the huge woman noted. Her skinny mate muttered, “All dogs are dumb.” Hypok continued.

  Then it was love at first sight. She was a tiny, furry little thing—a failed Lhasa apso, by the look of her—roughly the size and appearance of a fluffy bedroom slipper. He could hardly tell her face from her ass, her eyes just barely visible behind the sprouting brow hair, which was a direct mimic of the tail hair at the other end. A reversible dog, Hypok thought. Her whole tiny body wiggled as she wagged her tail and licked Hypok’s finger. The sign said Yorkie-Lhasa mix, but it could have said anything, because Hypok had made up his mind. He quickly toured the rest of the puppy room, then marched back to the front desk to register his claim.

  The old hag gave him the standard lecture and made him fill out the standard forms. He used his Warren Witt fake California driver’s license with a picture from years ago. It showed him with the short dark hair but no Vandyke or mustaches. The animal control officer seemed to somehow disapprove of it, or him, or something. Maybe it was his breath that she didn’t like, though the tequila and cinnamon drops seemed to be keeping his outlandish inner smells from coming out his mouth. He coughed quietly into his hand and waited for the results: not really that bad at all. The cost for the pup was $47, which included a $25 “altering deposit” that he would get back when he had the thing sterilized. Fat chance of that. He remembered a dog pound back in Missouri—or was it the one in Arkansas?—where they’d give you a puppy and a can of dog food for five bucks. He paid cash, breaking one of the nice hundreds delivered to him by the Friendlies from Naughty Naughton, then dumped the change into a donation bottle.

  He named her Loretta. It was the kind of name he liked—kind of country/traditional—not like the sadly ambitious names that girls have now. She sat on the bucket seat next to his, not really scared, lifting her small buttish face to the air conditioner breeze that parted the long strands of her eyebrows to reveal her BB-sized eyes. Her face was kind of smashed in—from what you could see of it—but her white-and-tan-splotched hair was gay. The grim crone of an animal control officer had offered to tie a bow around the dog’s neck, and Hypok had chosen white with black paw prints. “What’s your daughter’s name?” the officer demanded.

  “Nan,” he’d said with a proud smile.

  Now he was heading back out the 22 toward the 55, giving serious thought to where he should start. He took a generous gulp of tequila and held up the clear plastic bottle: one-third left. It was 5:45 P.M. Friday, with all sorts of good possibilities at the malls because working moms like to pick up their daughters at day care after work and go spend money on Fr
idays. The amusement parks were always good. The supermarkets would be good, too. The beach would be okay but not great because it wasn’t quite warm enough yet. Same for the public swimming facilities, though the one down in Mission Viejo had showers and was active last spring. The parks were always good, especially if you liked Latins, which Hypok neither liked nor disliked more than any other ethnic brand. Obviously, it was too late in the day for schools or bus stops. The trick was to be where the kids were numerous and the parents lax. A lot of it was just luck, too, though. The tequila consolidated him in a wonderful way, compressing him into a single, purposeful unit of acquisition. He was back in the hunt. The first order of business was to stop at a pet store and get a leash and a little collar, and maybe some of those little poopie tissues that come in the round plastic eggs like the rubber snakes in the vending machines used to. He had once purchased a realistic rubber coral snake for a quarter.

  “You girls can get expensive,” he remarked to the dog.

  Loretta yawned, then looked at him and wagged her tail.

  Hypok looked out at the traffic-swelled County of Orange as he crept down the 55. It wasn’t his idea of a good place to live, really, because it was expensive, fast paced and filled with successful, hardworking, narrow-minded people. They wanted it all, and believed they deserved it. Real consumers, reeking of entitlement. One of the upsides was that there was plenty of work if you needed it. The other upside was that these “master-planned communities” were dandy breeding pens for middle-class human beings, who tended to produce attractive, healthy offspring. So, it was a trade-off. But compared to Missouri or Arkansas or Georgia or Florida or Texas, Orange County was pretty good. The parents here were a lot more careless than you might think, which he attributed to a general arrogance in baby boom adults who were themselves just older, privileged children. They thought they owned the whole fucking world. He thought about his next place, wondering if a more rural but growing metropolitan area—like Portland, Oregon, or Denver, Colorado—might give him the sense of nature that he really liked, along with a suitable population base for successful work. He briefly entertained an old fantasy: sell house and most belongings, buy big pickup with camper on it, buy small trailer to tow behind the pickup and go around the states taking choice Items into the camper bed, allowing them to enjoy his company, then letting them have free run of the trailer for as long as they could until they met up with Moloch—the full-time tenant of the trailer. He loved the idea—it was the RV lifestyle they were always talking about on the radio, with a wrinkle. But he knew he’d miss the comforts of a true home. That’s why he’d retracted Collette’s listing, because of the comforts of Wytton Street. But the current fact of the matter was that the heat was on here in OC, and he’d either have to move, quit or get caught. His days of carefree anonymity were over. Another Item or two collected, and that would be about it. There was no reason to press something when the odds were growing against you. But that was easy to say and harder to do, when every cell, nerve and corpuscle in your body was screaming out for the same thing: love, touch, release.