Trace Lubbock stood exactly five-five, with two inches added by his cowboy boots. He couldn’t know that if he had gotten his lifelong wish and been taller, by even two more inches, the top of his head, eyebrows included, would be splattered all over the cabin’s front yard.
Before he risked opening his eyes, he indulged in the frivolity of wishing he was still kicking back at the Los Gatos station, swilling down cruddy coffee from Ajax Ballard’s shitty Mr. Coffee machine. Ajax was probably weighing down a counter stool at Paulette Barnum’s diner out on Route 152. He wasn’t due into the Los Gatos station until…late. Trace had warned Ajax about Paulette. She was out to snare herself a Ranger with those fabulous plastic tits of hers. Trace had dented the mattress a few times with her; it was comforting to know she was willing whenever Norma got cranky. Paulette Barnum’s sexual needs were basic and uncomplicated. Trace figured that was why Ajax Ballard was so hot for her—maybe he wasn’t any bull in the sack. Old Ajax, with his Marine Corps haircut and his beer belly… he was doubtless swapping lewd remarks with Paulette and wolfing down his never-changing order of two double cheeseburgers and cottage fries … and he was probably nowhere near the radio in his Jeep… the Los Gatos station had put in an order for those portable FM units that holstered to your belt, but those would not be a reality until after next February, so for now it was the old game of catch and listen.
The radio!
He had to get to the CB in the Jeep. Call. Anybody. Send out a mayday before the pain got so bad he could not move… if he could still move at all.
Trace Lubbock opened his eyes. His panic and alarm held just below the frothy boiling point. Only one of his eyes still worked.
A swimming image of the cabin came into cloudy focus. His yellow rain slicker was sprinkled with gelid slops of blood—whose blood, he could not estimate. Burt Kroeger was on top of him, an unmoving mess, one hand extended toward Trace’s face in a petrified claw, the other twisted beneath his body. He was sprawled face up over Lubbock’s legs. Face up, that was a laugh. Burt Kroeger’s face was gone.
Trace tried to scream, but nothing came out. His vocal works were locked. Rust choked off his gullet, and his tongue sat like a dead blowfish in his mouth, swollen and dry and spiky. He saw his right hand shaking uncontrollably, knuckles knocking on the floorboards. His right leg throbbed with hot cactus prickles of pain, nerve endings shrieking. His left leg was completely numb and dead.
Crippled! Oh, jesus god, crippled, no! Better off dead.
The rain outside sheeted down with Olympian vengeance, scrubbing Trace’s rawed eardrums with demon glee. It was a miracle he could hear anything; the concussion had punched out every window in the cabin. He did not yet realize he was hearing the rain with only one ear. The left one, on the same side as his dead eye, was sealed up with a gooey bloodscab and was as useless as a dustball.
He grabbed with his right arm and pulled. Kroeger’s leg rolled to the floor, the heel of his shoe thunking. The foot toed in and was still again. Kroeger’s other shoe was twelve feet away.
When Trace tried to sit up, the chopping blades of agony in his back cut him down to floor level.
Try that one again.
It took him half an hour.
He reached, this time with both hands, tendons bitching, hooked his fingernails into the grain of the wood on the floor, and pulled. He shifted two or three inches. The lower half of his body was dead freight. But he moved two or three inches. It was only a hundred inches more to the cabin door, maybe two thousand inches more to the Jeep. Piece of cake, if he didn’t die in the next five minutes or pass out from the floodtide of pain eroding his consciousness.
Pull, sonofabitch, pull! Pretend you’re grabbing a bedpost and tucking the tits off Norma or Paulette. PULL!
He bought five more inches, then ten, sliding like a snake with a broken back. Kroeger’s other leg spilled off. Thud. Softer sound—no shoe.
He reached, and pulled, and reached. The reach was restricted each time by the vise-grip of pain in his arms, the stakes penetrating his skull, the horrifying numbness below. At least he could not feel his scrotum sanding against the floor as he dragged himself along, a primal amphibian crawling out of a prehistoric sea for the first time, its undercarriage useless on land.
Breathing quickly became torture. Something was ruptured. Expanding his chest hurt. The air touched off his broken teeth in the way candy foil shocks a filling.
His hand filled with little round white pebbles that ground to powder when he pressed down. They were all over the floor. Pills, miniature pills. His hand closed around half of a smashed, nicotine-colored vial, and Trace read BURTON KR on the ripped label. He’d seen Burt pop one of the high blood pressure pills while in the Jeep. Medicine was a wonderful thing; it was supposed to keep you from dying. Right.
Six, maybe seven more repetitions of the Paraplegic Two-Step would win him the door prize. He reached out. His fingernails were peeling back and bleeding. Something in his chest broke apart and voided hot fluid.
Trace’s good eye rolled up and his forehead hit the floor when he blacked out.
It took a long time for him to come back up.
It would be wasteful for Norma to get insurance money. She’d just buy a bigger TV set and spend the rest of her life in front of it, growing fatter and paler. It was his responsibility to pull them both out, to start over. He wondered if the dying were always so repentant. I’ll fix everything this time around, just give me that second chance…
The pain switched from memory to reality, no less potent. Tears were streaming from his eyes. His eye. But he was awake and alive, and still facing his objective. Outside was the dark, the rain. The storm had not paled at all.
It took centuries to make his slug’s progress. As a reward for curling his fingers around the rough texture of the cabin door, his body kicked in its final shot of epinephrine.
Trace dragged himself out into the rain.
It was totally dark, the all-enveloping, suffocating deep forest dark that only nocturnal hunters could penetrate with their lemur eyes. The moon was just a sliver, and thunderheads blanked out the starscape. The unseen rain sang down like ball bearings on sheet tin, it pattered on Lubbock’s uniform cuff to darken it as he tried to grab his first handful of distance. Clammy moss and mud clogged up his fingers.
Outside, it was quite cold.
The darkness helped him blot out the horrors available to the eye inside the cabin, the cavern of death he was slowly leaving behind. Reach. And. Pull. Now he was squirming in the mud, a dung beetle, lolling and caking himself with swampy cesspool grime. It was better than looking at all the blood in the blurred depth perception of his surviving eye. Dogs rolled in bank mud when they were wounded, didn’t they? Better mud than blood. Crawl, you jarheads! Grovel, worm, locomote with your fucking upper lip, but get closer to that dim curve of Jeep canopy.
Lubbock prayed the Jeep was no illusion.
The storm wanted to press him to the ground, tempting him to stop, relax, and leak his life away into the mud. In the morning, all signs of abnormality would be rinsed clean. He could sink into the earth, return to the loam to nourish the trees. The ecosystem of the forest was slow but inexorable. Relax; become one with nature. If he gave up; if his body gave up for him.
He cursed himself for being lax on the calisthenics, for giving up jogging—too Mann County for his taste, for not giving up Norma’s starchy meals and the fried goodies hashed up by Paulette Barnum. Mud insinuated itself into his pants, filling his holes, making him more ponderous. It topped off his Tony Lama cowboy boots with thick sluice the temperature of morgue-slab marble.
Perhaps the mud might set and solidify, like hot-top on a roadway, a poultice to seal his wounds. He was using this fantasy to occupy another five seconds of pain when his fingers brushed the bas-relief pebbling of the Jeep’s left front tire.
There was no relief, no surprise. This job was still far from coffee break time. The thought of a shot of good
, dark, steaming coffee nearly made him swoon. He fastened on to the hub rim and pulled…grabbed the chassis and pulled…grabbed the running board and pulled…and rose…and reached, and missed, and fell on his ass in the mud.
The second try took longer. He thought he could feel ligaments snapping like rubber bands as he tried to extend his reach. Two fingers hooked on to the icy silver of the driver’s side door handle.
The CB rig was inside, mere feet away now. Inside, there was a padded seat, and dryness, and the miracle of a heater. From his wounded splay in the mucus slime of mud, the interior of the Jeep looked like Valhalla.
Let’s DO IT—
First pins and needles, then scalpels and icepicks invaded his arm from elbow to fingertips. His traitorous limb rattled on the door handle, and Lubbock felt himself plunging again. He ate a double mouthful of mud spiced with the sharp taste of his own fresh blood.
Lubbock screamed.
With a backbone-rending shriek, high and uncharacteristically feminine, he swung at the door handle with his other hand and smashed it down. He strained but could not see if his blind strike, his last chance, had mattered. It was so damned dark, and getting darker.
Hanging drunkenly, he nearly lost it when the door glanced off his temple. He groped out with his nearly useless right hand and felt the vinyl seat cover, which yielded to his weak grip.
The CB unit was mounted above the wide bar of the wraparound rearview mirror. It was far enough away from his reach to be a cruel joke. Its pinhole LEDs blinked importantly, ignoring his emergency. Why hadn’t he mounted it on the dashboard? Why did he have to be so fucking cool all the time? The blinking row of red lights was almost hypnotically seductive.
Red means stop. Stop. Give it a rest. Go to sleep. His eyes began to hinge heavily shut. At last. The LEDs blurred into a thin red line, glowering at him. Redline. DANGER—
He pulled his good leg beneath him and shoved hard. Something else burst apart, and the agony that flamed upward through him made him sure his guts were trailed behind him in gray, slick runners. A new scream died in his throat. His good leg was no longer that.
He went facedown into the driver’s seat. He fancied he could smell his own ancient butt sweat.
Now roll. Roll one more time and grab the mike cable.
His dead legs tried to pull him back toward the ground, a viscera-covered infant sliding forth from a metal womb. He got the edge of the seat in his mouth and bit down hard with his broken teeth. The pain was beyond description.
But he did not slide out of the Jeep.
Unable to look toward the CB, not daring to release the seat, he pawed overhead. There was sudden sharp pain in his fingers.
The black microphone was knocked from its cradle and fell with the coiled cable accordioning out behind it. It struck Lubbock behind the left ear. His consciousness tried swimming for the deep end of the pool one more time.
His remaining front teeth had bitten through the vinyl, and the foam beneath was dark with his blood. He could not hold, so he let go. Gravity hauled him back out the open door of the Jeep. The mike hung, touching the rubber mat by the accelerator, and Trace’s hand slapped at it as he fell out. He caught it and took it with him.
The coiled cable stretched out to full length and twanged tight enough to jerk the plug out of the CB unit. Trace was sure that would happen as he collapsed back into the slime. But when his body went down, his arm was suspended by the still-connected cable.
If he sneezed, the cable might pop out.
He managed to slide around until he was sitting with his back to the Jeep. He could feel the running board digging into his back just below the shoulder blades. And the mike was still in his hand, a marvel to behold. His broken face tried to smile, but there was no victory, not yet. No Pepsi break until he finished his job.
Close the mike in your hand. Don’t let it go. If it’s connected, it’ll spring out of reach. If not, it’ll go into the mud, the dark. Depress the button. Make your face talk. Call in the ATVs, the evacuation crew, the choppers. Talk. Talk now. Do it as though your life—
The cabin had been so nice; it had never been any trouble. Why had all this happened now? There were two dead people in there, one of them a girl with no clothes on. This was not normal. He and Kroeger had walked in and boom—now there were three dead people in there. Three going on four. And nobody knew about it.
Medic! Medic! Corpsman!
Corpse-man, he thought.
Lubbock tried to raise the mike to his face. He tried to depress the talk button. Alone in the dark, dying by the second, he tried.
27
Joshua Knopf was an expert at sitting on his duff and waiting, patiently. He often mentioned this singular talent to people as a means of procuring employment.
Joshua sat, waiting, while the rain eased up and showed some mercy to his Honda Accord. He snapped off his book light to conserve its batteries; the flexible pen lamp was clipped to a paperback copy of James Crumley’s Dancing Bear. Cheeseburger detritus littered the passenger seat, and a huge silver thermos of coffee warmed his thigh. The coffee was thick with Kahlüa, and Joshua was relaxed, glowing warmly. The sound of the rain was soothing. None of this was sufficient to lull him into a doze, however—sleeping was not part of his job. Waiting was.
North Claremont Street in Dos Piedras was badly in need of a bit of slurry sealing. The pavement was ruptured and ancient. The property, however, was upscale. North Claremont allowed access to eight homes on the soft eastern slope of a hill; on the west side of the street the hill flattened into open scrub field. The street was a dead end terminating in a yellow-and-black-striped barricade dotted with orange reflectors. Part of the hillside had been gouged away to accommodate the street. If some drunk lost control and rammed the dead end, Joshua thought, he’d be nosing his car into a berm of dirt ten feet high. It had long since become overgrown with brush as it settled into the local ecology. The field and the open hillside were seeded with paths; past the dead end one trail led down into the little cemetery behind Grace Methodist Church on Weaver Avenue.
Maybe, Joshua reflected, if the drunk hit the berm hard enough, they could just tote him right over the hill and into the graveyard’s next vacancy.
KNOPF FOR HIRE, read the business card clipped to the visor above Joshua’s head. He had a whole glove compartment full of business cards pinpointing expertise in a dozen occupations, from contributing editor to Soldier of Fortune magazine to insurance adjuster to IRS representative to the clergy. None were bonafide. All had served at one time or another to get Joshua Knopf the things he needed in the course of his work. Below his name—it annoyed him that clients rarely got the pun—in maroon ink on the gray card was the line PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS, with his phone number.
The P.I. license had come by mail order seven years earlier. Joshua was retired military (navy, seventeen years starting in 1960). He had also tried, as a tax dodge, a card-carrying ministry in the Universal Life Church. Before opting for the correspondence course, he had decided that a calling as a letter carrier for the post office, a night watchman, a shoe salesman, and night manager of a convenience market was not for him. Thus KNOPF FOR HIRE.
At first he had been astonished at how dull it was. But as he moved away from domestic surveillances and automobile repossessions, he developed a modest measure of pride in his closed-case load. He did all right.
Then people began recommending him to other people. Joshua Knopf was your man for a taste of discreet fact finding. Joshua Knopf got the job done.
One of Joshua’s night-watchman stints had been for the huge Holiday Inn that overlooked the sea on the coast road to Santa Barbara. One memorable weekend, the tenth floor had been invaded by a band called Whip Hand, and Joshua had been the man tapped and tipped for twenty varieties of midnight errands. Gabriel Stannard, leader of the band, had remembered Josh Knopf and ever since 1981 had kept the detective on a yearly stipend, so his services would remain on call. Stannard was always busines
slike—he always discussed his needs with Joshua in person, not through intermediaries like some of these rock and roll guys—and always paid well. The money took the pressure off. Joshua was always happy to work for Gabriel Stannard.
And Stannard had apparently been able to use the file dug up by Joshua on Sara Windsor, psychiatrist at Olive Grove Hospital and resident of 7764 North Claremont Street.
The neighboring dwellings were dark, shut down for the night. The residents here were professional people with things to do in the evenings, or well-to-do older folks who rose with the dawn and were abed by nine o’clock. No one had taken note of Joshua Knopf, private investigator, sitting in his car in the rain, doing what he did best.
Detective fiction tickled the hell out of him. TV programs ditto. Fat chance he should ever wind up rubbing elbows with Cybill Shepherd or waving around firepower like one of Robert Parker’s hapless characters. No—detective work was mostly sitting. And waiting. Occasionally one was mistaken for a burglar or peeping tom.
Another pleasant thing about working for Gabriel Stannard was that the singer never imposed complex instructions. So many clients who resorted to the use of private investigators felt the urge to gussy up their assignments, pump them full of wind and mystery and speed, to make their cases seem more significant, more like the cases they experienced in fiction. Stannard’s instructions regarding Sara Windsor had been specific and succinct.
Joshua sat in his car and watched Sara Windsor’s house. He’d been logging reports ever since Sara had returned home. When Stannard had advised him he would no longer be available at the Beverly Hills number, Joshua had been given an emergency number that he had not yet used.
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