He couldn’t let her know who he was. He couldn’t even give her any clues, any way to track down his identity. He needed to remain completely anonymous.
Untraceable.
Why?
He refused to think about that.
Steve stood, gathering his phone and laptop, thinking he might drive by Anna’s house and see if she was home. He had often described his job to his friends as a cross between being a journalist and a detective, and he wondered if this wasn’t the right time to start acting on the detective part. He could find her and follow her, learn what he could by—
“Watch it, dillweed.”
A smirking, bearded young man, obviously a student, bumped into him intentionally, almost causing him to drop his laptop. “Poseur,” the student said derisively.
Without thinking, without pause, Steve hit the other man hard in the face, and was gratified to feel the collapse of cartilage beneath his knuckles as he sucker punched the man in the nose. Warm blood spurted over his clenched fist, and the student screamed like a rabbit being disemboweled, a harsh, high shriek that sounded barely human. The student doubled over, covering his nose with his hand, blood seeping from between his fingers and dripping off the bristles of his beard. Everyone in the café had suddenly stopped what they were doing and were staring at him with almost identical expressions of shock and horror on their faces. A few moved toward him threateningly, and someone in back of the counter yelled, “Call the police!”
Steve ran.
Clutching his laptop and shoving his cell phone in his pocket, he took off. He’d parked down the street at a public lot because there’d been no spots available on the street in front of the café, but he was afraid to head directly there in case a police car came speeding down the street and a cop saw him. So he headed in the opposite direction, intending to go around the block until he reached the parking lot. When he got to the corner and saw that no one was chasing after him, he slowed to a normal walk, trying to look inconspicuous.
He was breathing hard. He had never actually been in a fistfight before, and he felt proud of himself for not backing down, for standing up to that asshole. He remembered the one and only time he’d gotten beaten up at school, when he was in fifth grade. Joe LoPrenzi had called him out on the playground, ostensibly for some imagined transgression but really just because he wanted to fight and Steve had been close by. Joe had taunted him, punching his arm, shoving his shoulder, pushing his chest, ordering him to stop acting like a pussy and fight. Steve hadn’t even tried, because he didn’t know how, and he had stood there dumbly, taking the punches and trying not to cry, while the other kids on the playground gathered in a circle around him and laughed. Joe LoPrenzi had eventually given up and walked away in disgust.
When he told his parents about it that evening, his mother had ignored him, leaving the dinner table and going into the kitchen for some unspecified reason, while his father had lectured and berated him for acting like a girl instead of a boy.
If his father could only see him now, bruised knuckles covered with blood, the other man down . . .
Steve reached the back of the parking lot at the end of the block. He’d heard no sirens, seen no patrol cars, and taking a chance, he ran across the lot to his car, fumbling with his keys until he unlocked and opened the door. He and Sherry had to leave; they had to get out of here. He didn’t want to be arrested on an assault charge way out in Utah and end up in jail.
Driving extra carefully, he headed back toward the hotel. His hands on the steering wheel were red, dripping. He couldn’t let Sherry see that, so he stopped on the way and washed off his knuckles in a gas station bathroom, happy to see that they weren’t really bruised, that all of the blood was the other man’s. He splashed water in the porcelain sink until all the red was gone, then looked up at the mirror. He was still breathing heavily, and he remained unmoving, watching his face, which no longer looked to him like his own. Those were his ears, his hair, eyes, his nose, his mouth, his chin, but their sum added up to something different now, and he could not see himself there.
Gradually, he calmed down, his breathing returning to normal, his skin losing its flushed hue, his features coalescing into a more recognizable countenance. The bathroom was out of paper towels, so, rolling a bunch of toilet paper into a ball, he wet it in the sink and used it to wipe blood off the door handle of the car and his steering wheel. He went back in for another roll to dry with.
Steve looked at himself in the mirror one last time. He would leave here, remaining calm, and return to the hotel, where he would tell Sherry that the meeting was over, his work done, and that he wanted to leave Salt Lake City now in order to get a head start on what would be a busy day in Arizona.
Of course, he wouldn’t have to leave at all if that snide jerk hadn’t bumped into him, and though Steve was glad that he’d punched the asshole in the face, he wished he’d done more.
He wished he’d killed him.
They spent the night in Flagstaff, a quick stopover before heading down to Tempe, and Steve told Sherry that he’d lived in Flagstaff for a year when he was six. He was curious to drive by their old house, but he’d been so little at the time that he had no idea where they’d lived, could remember only that there’d been a pine tree in their backyard. He thought of calling his mother and asking her, but she was angry with him already, and if she thought that he was driving around sightseeing instead of working she would probably snap. He had to keep up the “business trip” ruse for Sherry as well, which was why he decided not to tell her that he’d also lived in Salt Lake City, Tempe and Tucson.
He still didn’t think his father had brutally stabbed that coed—the only unsolved murder for the year that they’d lived there—and he’d decided to believe that there’d been no killing in Flagstaff.
He’d hoped to learn more in Tempe, but the city had undergone a complete makeover since the 1980s, including the addition of a huge fake lake, and though he was able to drop Sherry off in Scottsdale for almost an entire day, every lead came up empty.
This trip was turning out to be a complete waste of time and money.
He’d been older when they’d lived in Tucson and remembered a lot more, and many of the locations connected to the killing were familiar to him. Not only did that give him an advantage in his search, but it cemented in his mind the connection between the murder and his father.
The dead man’s name was Salvatore Garza, and he’d been a well-known figure to Tucson’s vice squad in the 1990s. Arrested sixteen times on charges ranging from pandering to possession, he’d been convicted twice and was actually out on bail when he’d been murdered.
For the umpteenth time, Steve read over the account of the pimp’s death, and even without his father here to explain or describe the scene, he knew exactly how it had gone down. He could see it perfectly in his mind.
He walks in, closes the door behind him. A neon sign is blinking outside, its blue-and-red light providing the only illumination, the light coming in at odd angles, leaving swaths of permanent darkness in shadowed segments of the shabby but once-elegant hotel room. From somewhere outside, somewhere close, comes the relentlessly repetitive pounding of conga drums accompanying a shrill flimsy melody that’s been smothered and beaten down by the rhythm.
A half-naked woman on the bed is drugged, unconscious, and it’s clear that she’s been fucked hard and left behind.
There’s a man in the room too, a small, pudgy, oily man with a used-car dealer’s mustache who’s not nervous, not panicking, but calm and smiling, self-satisfied. It’s clear that the pudgy man is the one responsible for this scene.
He steps forward into the room, toward the pudgy man. “Give me the key!” he orders, and the man complies. There’s no fear yet, but the smile beneath the mustache is gone and there’s a wary look in the darting eyes.
The hotel is old, the room doors requiring the use of keys both inside and out, and he uses the key to lock the door before slipping it into his pocket.
The man crawls, cowering in a corner, the infuriating sameness of the Latin drums and the incessant blinking of the neon signs in sharp counterpoint to the man’s frightened movements. Approaching the whimpering man, he grabs a stocking from one of the bars on the brass bed where it had been thrown by the woman or her assailants, and he stretches it taut between his hands, then whips it around the pudgy man’s neck, wrapping it once and pulling tight. The man struggles, his flailing arms in the shadow, in the light, red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, his kicking feet, in some bizarre manner, matching the beat of the endless music, making it look as though he is dancing.
And then the man is still.
He lets go of the stocking, and the dead man flops forward, his blue-red face hanging over the railing of the bed, his bulging eyes staring down at the unmoving form of the still-unconscious woman.
Salvatore Garza had been a monster, and his father had done society a favor in putting an end to his life. His father was a hero, not a villain—he’d done the job the police should have done—and Steve could not find it in his heart to criticize his dad. Even if there’d been no personal connection, no specific reason for him to have killed the pimp, it was a good thing that he had.
How could anybody fault him for that? He had taken it upon himself to solve a problem that until then had been unsolvable, though he had been forced to go outside the law, outside the normal rules and boundaries, and do what had to be done.
Some people needed killing.
That was the punch line to a joke he’d heard some comedian tell, but it was also the truth. Steve was not really a judgmental person—how could he be, after the way he’d always been judged?—but he recognized that certain individuals did not really deserve to live. His father had opened up his eyes to that, and the more Steve learned, the more he saw, the more he experienced, the more he realized that the old man was right.
He remembered watching the movie Shane when he was young. In one scene, Shane had said that a gun was just a tool, with no moral value of its own—it was only as good or bad as the man using it.
Killing was much the same, Steve thought. If someone had killed Mother Teresa before her time, that would have been a horrendously evil act. But killing Hitler or Charles Manson would have been an act of righteousness. Killing a killer was never wrong. His father had realized that, and while such a notion might not sit well with civilized society, it was still true.
Steve thought about Lyman Fischer, about that jerk he’d punched in the café in Salt Lake City.
He too had a chance to make a difference in this world, and it was up to him to make the most of it.
“What are you looking at?” Sherry asked.
She had come up behind him, and Steve quickly closed his laptop. “Nothing.”
“Something.”
He stood, stretched. “Just work.”
“I thought we were going to have more time together here in Tucson.”
“Oh, we are,” he promised.
She suddenly paused, frowned. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I thought I heard a dog barking.” She was still frowning. “Are pets allowed at this hotel?”
He shook his head, smiled. “Not to my knowledge.”
“I hope not,” she said. “I don’t like dogs.”
His smile had grown wider. He didn’t know why, but all of a sudden, he felt incredibly happy. “I had a feeling you didn’t,” he said.
Thirteen
After the Date
She wants me to do her in her bedroom. I say her parents are home, but she says they don’t care; she does this all the time. I don’t like it, though. It doesn’t feel right to me. She’s pretty, has a good body even with just the one tit, and I probably would have done it in the car or in the theater, but I just keep thinking about my own parents, and I know I can’t do it in her apartment. She calls me a pussy and a fag and she grabs my crotch and says I don’t have enough there to do her anyway. Her father opens the window of their apartment and looks out. He’s a big man, brown, and naked except for a dark green jacket. I can see his tattoos even from the sidewalk. “Give it to her!” he bellows. “Give my daughter what she wants!”
“He doesn’t have anything there!” she screams, and there is anger and also hurt in her voice. “He’s not big enough to handle me!”
I get in the car, and I guess I’m angrier than I thought. “Get a tit!” I yell, and I take off, rolling over the bodies of the rats and the cats and the dogs and the discarded gerbils as I speed down the street.
My window is down, and for once I can’t smell the air. I take a deep breath. I can still feel the burning, but there is no smell. No rubber. No sulfur. This is what it’s like in the country, I think. This is what it’s like in the north.
I drive.
The sidewalks are teeming even at this hour, filled with hordes of hairy people pushing, shoving, jostling, maneuvering through the mass in different directions, toward different destinations. It is night, after the Time, and the crowds are silent, the familiar deafening babble of disparate, desperate voices replaced by muffled oceanic swells of sneakered feet on sidewalk. The absence of voices frightens me, and I realize that I can hear the hum of the machinery, the workings of the machines. There are no gunshots.
Clean air and quiet.
I feel chilled, and I look down an alley as I drive by. It is empty save for a short, ugly man in a dark green suit.
He points at me, beckons.
I accelerate, focus my attention on the littered road ahead, quickly turn onto another street. I have seen the man before, although I don’t know where. In a picture? In a movie? In a dream? The memory is vague, thirdhand, more like the echo of a recollection than the remembrance of an actuality, but it is powerful and brings with it fear. The streets suddenly seem darker than they did, and I turn left, then turn right, trying to get away from the areas I recognize, knowing that if I keep heading east I am bound to hit the freeway.
I keep thinking that seeing the man was a warning, that I need to stay off the usual streets and that if I do I will be safe, but I am really scared and I wish my car had a radio. I sing to myself—songs my mom taught me—but it doesn’t help.
On the corner, on a wagon, a still center in the moving crowd, is a Mexican woman with no legs. She is clutching what looks like a baby. It is unmoving. I hope it is a doll.
What went wrong with the date? I wonder. Why didn’t I want to take her down? Last year, last month even, I would have done anything, endured any obstacle, for a chance to get in the pants of any female between fourteen and forty. But something has changed, and the clean air and the silence and the man in the suit are all on my mind and all contribute to the fear I cannot seem to shake.
If I’d just stayed another ten minutes, if I’d just done it the way she wanted, I probably wouldn’t’ve seen the man. Or his suit.
It is the suit that scares me the most.
I pass by the blank gray front of one of the Homes, and I think of my grandpa and his friends in their pink shirts and powder blue pants. I wonder if my grandpa owns or has ever owned a dark green suit. The idea scares me, and I suddenly see the old man in a different light, not as a funny, slightly doddering ex-teacher, but as someone darker, more secretive, more sinister, a man who does not like me but pretends to.
I turn again. The sidewalks are empty, but the street here is filled with boxes and sleeping bodies, debris f
allen off trucks and not picked up. I should slow down, but I don’t. I swerve around the objects as though I am running an obstacle course. I look only at the road. I wish I could close my eyes and not look at anything. I am afraid of what I might see.
Gang members, as always, are crouched by the on-ramp of the freeway, but it is late and even they must be tired, because they don’t come out of their hiding places, and I speed over their deliberate ruts and potholes and onto the freeway itself without being stopped.
I try to remember what Mom told me about my horoscope this morning. I hope I am allowed to go on the freeway.
Traffic is moving, but in the truck lane I see a bundled lump that might be a body and I think of my brother. I look up, but I see no ropes hanging from the overpass.
Now the air is beginning to smell, but the night is still clear and I can see the vague outline of the moon through the smog. I can even make out the diffused lights of office buildings and apartments on the sunken streets to either side of the raised freeway.
I start to feel better. Even though it was my fault the date went as badly as it did, even though I know I won’t see her again, I don’t really care. I think of her father, bellowing down at me to do his daughter; I think of her one tit and her missing finger and the story she told me about the puta, and I know that it wouldn’t’ve worked anyway.
But why didn’t I want to do her?
There are five cars stalled on the side of the freeway next to the skunk factory, smog lights blinking. One of the cars is covered with spit, and from inside peers the frightened face of an albino man. I reach over to the seat next to me and pick up my notebook: 5, I write.
Yesterday it was 10.
Halved.
A bad omen.
Past the cars, walking toward the off-ramp, is a tall man wearing a dark green suit.
I am so scared it’s hard to breathe. I don’t look at the man as I speed by, but I have the feeling that he is watching me, that he knows who I am, and that he is probably smiling.
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