“Oh, baby… no, no, it’s okay…
By the time he stopped shaking she was drowsing, slipping into that never-never land that beckons you after really good sex, the soft, warm cloud that lets you come down slow. When he freed himself from her, her hands would not let him go. He stood before the dying fire, the air movement making his damp crotch and legs chill. The fire needed stirring up and refueling.
She had rolled onto her stomach then, her round butt poking up saucily, flowing into her legs, which tapered into the magnificent calves he had admired. She had crooked herself onto her elbows and swept the hair from her eyes.
Her eyes are glittering. It’s encore time.
“Lucas?”
She had been saying his name when he crushed her skull with the stubby split of firewood. He’d hit her twice, and she had not moved or drawn breath since then. She was curled up next to the fireplace, very still, where she had died.
Kristen was dead. Cass was dead. So now they really were the same.
They’d gone off to join Cory. He stood before the renewed fire, into which he had tossed the chunk of split birch. Cass’ blood sizzled as it evaporated. Heat sheeted the front of his body. He knew about that nightmare glitter in Kristen’s eyes. He had learned to recognize it. Even though he had not been at the Whip Hand concert, he knew the glitter. It was the same queer golden light he’d seen in her eyes as she watched him hold the knifepoint to Cory’s temple and feed her the red pills, one at a time, with a swallow of water every tenth pill.
Sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy…
Kristen had gotten that glitter from her mother. She would have matured into the same kind of creature. If Cass was anything like Kristen, the same chain of events would be set in motion once again, and it would lead to his destruction. Lucas understood why he had a naked female corpse in front of his cabin fireplace.
Reality was slipping in and out of his grasp. The dream and the here and now; the past and the present; the old Kristen who was the new Cory; the new Kristen who was the old Kristen, it would hit critical mass and blow his circuits soon if he didn’t get help.
Sara had helped him the first time.
He had to find her. Pretend he was being chased by a demon. Sara had made everything stabilize for him; Sara could explain what was taking place inside of him. Without Sara, he never would have gotten his little girl back. For that he was grateful… and now he did not want to be afraid.
He dressed hurriedly, yanking on his pants, groping around in the darkness for his boots. His frightened mind could find comfort in order, in the dissolution of problems, and now his mind considered the problems at hand.
The body of Cass’ monster boyfriend, Reese, was still outside in the rain. Bodies had to be dealt with. All the Whip Hand incriminata needed to go up in smoke or into the sea, and soon. The remaining ordnance waited to be piled into the Bronco. He turned his back on the corpse in the living room and concentrated on cleaning up. His fingers were steady as they broke the boxes of 5.56 ammo and loaded the clips for the M-16. He mixed in fifty Teflon-tipped rounds. Developed for police use, then officially rejected as too dangerous, Teflon loads could punch through a stack of four Kevlar vests as easily as ripping through a cotton shirt, and the SWAT squads of Los Angeles disliked such abrupt vulnerability. The range and penetration the Teflon coating gave the comparatively small-caliber bullets were awesome. Lucas tucked the loaded clips into their canvas pouches on a garrison belt. Good to be armed, just in case.
The shearing wind made the rain outside needle-like, and it stung his face. Cass’ body was shrouded by his sleeping bag, and he was stopped by the sight of it on his way out to load the Bronco.
He thought he had helped her, too, in return. Now she would never have to worry about the White Picket Fence screwing up her life.
24
The ranger’s name was, Trace W. Lubbock.
He barely scraped five-five in his Smokey Bear cap and shitkicker heels. Thanks to his mom’s mom, he was one-quarter Paiute Indian, but that blood did nothing to push along his suntan. It was still too chilly to go shirtless along the Diablo and Santa Lucia ranges, so Lubbock had resorted to a sunlamp to get his coveted ruddy-outdoorsman’s cast, with mediocre results. Now he looked like any other displaced Staten Island Jew with a sunburn. This abraded both his purely western sensibilities and his ranger persona.
Trace Lubbock wore tailored, starched, dun-colored uniform blouses with a tight fit and knife-sharp collar blades. He squinted on purpose to make his face craggy and weathered. To assure tenderfeet that he was indeed a seasoned mountain badass, he spoke in a low, dry growl through clenched teeth. If it worked for Clint Eastwood, it’d work for Ranger Lubbock. Usually, though, grinding his jaws gave him muscle-spasm headaches. The pain settled in between his shoulder blades and defoliated his cool in a mohawk-straight furrow up and over the crown of his head, with a silver dollar of pain dead bang between his eyes.
The seed of another such headache was sprouting right now, and he resisted the urge to knock it down with a slug of coffee. Norma had warned him off caffeine. Everything Norma warned him off had been regurgitations of the TV commercials that divided up her daily soap opera intake. He felt manfully entitled to his four morning cups of joe even when headaches were the price. From what he’d experienced, caffeine withdrawal was worse. When he was late getting to the ranger station below Los Gatos, he lacked time to brew at home and had to drink the turbid crud shat by the station’s wheezing Mr. Coffee. It hadn’t been cleaned since its purchase in 1970, and the stuff it produced reminded Lubbock of the silt that had caked his feet when he had made the mistake of wading into the Salton Sea, farther south. That one-time goof had come before Norma and before rangerhood. He had reached a detente between the coffee, the headaches, and the four pint bottles of Pepsi-Cola he put down every day (number one came at lunchtime). Hell—tomorrow would bring the first paycheck to reflect his recent salary hike, and Norma’s VCR would be paid off, and didn’t that translate as progress in the long run? Life wasn’t so bad. Just dull.
Lubbock was also a harmlessly superstitious man. He knew that if he took the trouble to get more coffee, make sure it was the right temperature, measure in his cream and sugar powders with assayer pickiness, by the time that precisely prepared mugful was ready to drink that fella from Los Angeles was going to stroll through the door and make him strand that coffee on the radio desk, to grow cold. Besides, he did not wish to give the impression that all he did at the station was dump coffee down his chute. The only call that had been logged this morning had come in from this Kroeger fella.
Trace Lubbock, Super-Ranger, sat without his coffee, looking tough and professional. Waiting.
The radio in front of him spat ranger drivel and fuzzy crosstalk. The bad weather and overcast conditions were juggling the airwaves. When he clumped to the station’s freezing bathroom to relieve himself, he dared the phone to try ringing. Norma had told him that the caffeine in all his coffee and Pepsis was a diuretic. Whatever a diuretic was. It sounded like just another cute name for the Inca Squat Dance—ain’t that the shits? Lubbock firmly believed that a man pissed out what a man poured in; you drank a pint, and a pint of a different color emerged, and that was all. Norma was so foggy sometimes.
Superstitions always had some basis in fact, he thought, and sure enough, as soon as he was laid bare with his cannon in his hand, he heard the front door rattle as it was slammed shut. He took his time buttoning up, having learned at age thirteen not to try pissing through a zipper because you can shake, wiggle, squirm, and dance—but the last three drops always hit your pants! He checked the mirror and made sure his Ranger Face was on before saying how to the L.A. fella. Kroeger —same name as the supermarket to which Trace once hauled wagonloads of deposit bottles during his boyhood in Roswell, New Mexico. Kroeger and his weird phone call about a matter of life and death and all that TV stuff. This was going to be weird.
Kroeger had needed Trace to pinpoint
the location of a cabin owned by Lucas Ellington. When Trace considered the map reference, he whistled through his teeth. The location was prime—a couple of acres that cost more than five of the ticky-tacky double wide he kept Norma in. The mobile home was cheap, and Trace was still feeling each payment hard. Norma had selected a trailer corral where every other double-wide tin firetrap enclosed a story like their own. Christ—you could always hear your neighbors humping in the next trailer. It wasn’t like a home at all. Checking out the sort of retreat Lucas Ellington’s money had bought reminded Trace that not everybody relaxed by watching the tube inside an anonymous foil box. One day, he’d win his own modest Xanadu like the buddy of the fella Kroeger had.
Rich folks, Trace thought. Not like me. But Kroeger had done his matter-of-life-and-death dance. Seemed like drastic stuff always befell people who had a lot of money. If he ever got rich, he would never make a rich person’s mistakes.
The fella waiting for him in the outer office looked well-to-do, too. But he also looked dog-tired, and the first thing he said was, “You wouldn’t happen to have any coffee running loose around here, would you?”
Trace liked this city guy better already.
It was so easy to abstract into the rain. Burt rubbed his face and deeply inhaled cold, damp air. The Jeep Ranger roared through the storm, water mist sluicing to either side, wipers squeegeeing miniature waves cleanly to the left. The chuck-knobbed tires cut glistening lines across the rainswept pavement, lines that held their pattern for one fragile second before dissolving into the flat, wet sheen of the road.
Abstracted, Burt thought that the foundation of this whole mission was mistrust of a friend. Once again he had become the manipulator of events. Sara’s workload demanded her return to Olive Grove, and he had dispatched her back to Dos Piedras in his car after mouthing a lot of promises. He had talked her into tipping off the Los Angeles police. Her call imposed a deadline on their activities—Lucas had to turn up soon, or it would all be in the hands of the authorities. Burt had pledged himself to take one more shot at the cabin, taking a Ranger along, thinking perhaps the presence of a uniform might help to loosen the tongue of the girl who was fortressed in up there.
All bases covered? It was the best he could do. A gnawing sense of his own impotence demanded that Burt do something. And here he was.
He still felt that if he could see Lucas, meet his eyes, the whole potpourri of events would assume a sensible configuration. If not, and if Sara was right about Lucas the ugly alternatives scraped away at Burt’s composure like a planer defeating a sticky door one peel of wood at a time.
The Jeep’s CB chattered sporadically, its tiny bank of red LEDs freezing whenever they caught a stream of good, pungent nonsense: Big Fat Firestone, you’ve snared the Hub snatchin’ two flatcases smokin’ it signwise hip deep and fast asleep; lay it down for me if ya dupe, rebound!
“Goddamn truckers,” muttered Lubbock.
“Sounds like a Russian code or something,” Burt said.
Lubbock sighed. “The Hub is setting up a deal. He’s in a citizen car, pacing a truck, on the lookout for highway patrol speed traps so the truck can cut ninety miles-plus without a bust. It’s still cheaper for the truckers to pay off pace cars than to bribe the hypos.”
Burt nodded. The stuff coming out of Lubbock’s mouth wasn’t much clearer. A sign flashed past on the right: POINT PITT: 10 mi/6.2 km. Two miles past that was a scenic lookout.
Burt was trying to figure out how he was going to suggest to Lubbock that they just might be dealing with a killer today. Lubbock shoved a cassette into a dark slot on the dashboard, and the cab filled up with an old J. J. Cale song, “They Call Me the Breeze.” The Ranger’s hands tapped the wheel in time, and the speedometer oozed past seventy-five. The coiled cord for the CB mike swung between them from the top of the cab. Competition with the music kept Burt quiet for a few more miles until Lubbock just spat it right out: “Why is it we need to visit this fella, Mr. Kroeger?”
They passed the place where Burt remembered parking the day before.
Burt hoped his nonchalance quotient was up. “Mostly to make sure he’s okay, if he’s still up here at all.” He said “atall,” unconsciously lapsing into Lubbock’s good-ole-boy speech pattern. “I scatter-assed up this anthill once, after I got lost twice before that. Figured I needed some local help. A guide; one with a four-wheel drive to get me up the hill in the rain, and get my friend out if he’s hurt.”
“I can do basic rescue,” Lubbock said as he twisted the stereo’s volume knob down a notch. “Used to work as a paramedic for an ambulance service.” That brief gig had come during a hellish eighteen months Lubbock and Norma had spent in a jerkwater piece of nowhere called Bisbee, Arizona—another misstep in the long haul from Roswell, New Mexico, to Los Gatos and the trailer court.
“Well, we might have to restrain him,” Burt said. “Or pull him out of the cabin bodily. You see…er, he was recently released from a…” Mental hospital, his brain screamed at him. There was no nice way to pussyfoot around it. Acid boiled sourly in his stomach. “Uh, institution.”
“Oh—this guy Ellington is a Mental?” Lubbock’s tongue was digging furiously inside his right cheek, trying to dislodge some ancient morsel of breakfast. “I’ve handled Mentals before. No sweat. Hadda restrain this fella we hauled out of a bar brawl once. Kept hitting us while we were trying to hold his guts and brains in. He didn’t feel no pain; he was lubed to the crow’s nest. Thought we was trying to boost his wallet, which had nine hundred and eighty bucks in cash falling out of it.
We finally put him down with an injection. Technically we can’t give ’em a needle, that was a job for a doctor. But we did—I did. We were trying to keep him alive, and he wanted to kill us on behalf of his billfold, so we compromised and spiked him to settle him down. I don’t drink, myself, not after seeing that.” Lubbock’s lush caffeine habit did not count as drug use. Burt noted with perverse amusement that the Ranger omitted mentioning the fate of the fella’s wallet. “Yeah, I’ve done Mentals. Single guy, you ‘n’ me, shouldn’t be no problem. No sweat, like I said. Why you checking up on this guy? ’Cos he’s a Mental?”
Lubbock’s cruelty was astonishing, but Burt could not allow himself the luxury of protest. It would be dangerous to argue the point before they knew whether Lucas was in the cabin or not. “His doctor is worried.”
Lubbock let it ride. He was more interested in conversation than in motives and investigative logic. He’d checked Lucas’ cabin for signs of vandalism many times over the years and never noticed anything provocative. Teeth clenched, he bucked the Jeep up the rain-washed hillside and over the slippery obstacle course of limestone shards.
Burt grabbed the chicken bar bolted over the glovebox, and a few stomach-lurching moments later they were looking at the front door of Lucas’ cabin. Lubbock killed the Jeep’s motor, and the sound of the downpour became unnaturally loud. Droplets speckled the windshield and obscured their view. No lights were on inside.
Lubbock pawed around behind his seat and located a holstered .357 revolver stopped up with six Light Special police loads. He strapped it on beneath his rain slicker. The look of alarm on Burt’s face was almost comical, and Lubbock overrode the protest he saw coming out of his passenger’s mouth. “Mr. Kroeger, you say this guy’s a Mental, then I’m walking up to that front door with my goodbuddy here. Don’t worry. I ain’t never had to draw this thing seriously.”
“My friend gets nervous around guns,” Burt blurted out. “Better not flash that firepower.” He had a nightmare preview of Lucas and Lubbock swapping lead; of Pretty Boy Floyd getting a high-caliber calling card from the Feds. What if Lucas got his head ventilated by this cowboy?
“He won’t even see it.” Lubbock patted the slicker. It was fairly clear he could not be argued out of packing his gun. His sunburn was even starker against the danger-yellow of the rain slicker.
Burt didn’t like the light in Lubbock’s eyes.
&n
bsp; He thought of the murderous calm that would enshroud the dog soldiers in his unit whenever they got tapped to flush Vietcong snipers out of the trees on night patrol. At first the newcomers gobbled up battle duty, but after about a week of nightfighting with no sleep they became glutted with death, and their eyes would gleam in the same wet, fixated way that Lubbock’s were right now. Burt’s stint in Southeast Asia was the history of two decades past, but memories of it were keyed too damned easily. The steel slivers he felt in his stomach were battle jitters. He and Lubbock were poised to jump into the unknown and find stuff out… for good, bad, or worse.
“Let’s do it,” Lubbock said, and dismounted.
Burt began to sense that the young Ranger might be a more dangerous piece of machinery than Lucas at any depth of madness. Lubbock was dangerous because he was bored. He thought he craved action. Let’s do it—that was what Gary Gilmore had quipped on his way to the frying chair. Burt climbed down from the cab of the Jeep, and his city topcoat speckled with dark raindrops.
As they approached the front door, he felt absurdly like a gunfighter stepping his way to the final showdown.
Nothing happened.
Burt wet his lips. “Lucas?”
Rain pattered the forest, hissing on the trees and rocks. He felt totally removed from civilization. Maybe Lubbock’s hogleg was a good idea after all. Emboldened by the lack of response from inside, he called again, louder, thumping a fist against the door.
The door creaked open three inches.
There was a huge eye-level gouge in the blank wooden face of the door. The axe was missing from the chopping stump out front; Burt had noticed it there yesterday. But only a boob would leave a good axe out in the rain. Right?
“Hey, Lucas. You home?” He spread his fingers against the door planks and pushed gently. Peripherally, he saw Lubbock’s hand travel beneath the slicker to unlimber the pistol. His head was tilted forward, and a tiny stream of water spouted down from his Saran-Wrapped hatbrim.
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