The Founding Fathers were no dummies when they drew the line right here. Everything south of the border was rotten from the ground up.
Gray came around the hood of the huge SUV at a casual stroll, but the highway patrolman didn’t even look at him. He just kept chewing Jake’s ear off in that sorry-as-hell, hangdog tone. They would have to come back to Mexicali, no matter how much mordida they gave him. He was terribly sorry. He knew the legal system in Mexico was corrupt, but somebody had to pick up the pieces, and they’d been caught red-handed making a mess, and most of the victims were their fellow Americans, and didn’t they feel bad, coming down here, and behaving in such a way as to give Americans a bad name?
Gray came within arm’s reach of the old patrulero before he even took any notice, but Gray stopped dead when the highway cop looked at him.
Those eyes. So sad and tired and red rimmed, caked with dust…
They knew what he was going to do. They didn’t care. They’d seen this stupid fucking movie so many times that they didn’t even blame him for what was about to happen. They almost wanted it…
Gray unstuck himself from the tar pit in those eyes and wound up with the empty tequila bottle, cracking it across the beaner’s sunburned forehead so hard the bottom flew off across the road. The old man dropped like he’d been waiting for the cue, curled up on his left side on the cracked blacktop.
Jake clapped and hooted, fired up the H2, but Gray couldn’t just walk away.
That motherfucker looked at him like he was a germ, a mindless thing destined to offer him a communion he’d come to pray for. It was funny, for a second. Losers commit suicide by cop. Cops commit suicide by Gray.
But the geek didn’t just want to get killed. He just knew how it would all play out—maybe because some higher power would reward his meek acceptance of death in the middle of the road he wasted his life guarding, or maybe because it would just be as neat an end to his meaningless life as any.
Whatever the philosophy behind it, Gray wasn’t any-body’s puppet. If the guy wanted to die, Gray would let him do it himself…after he saw himself in the mirror.
Gray finally jumped in the Hummer and tossed the bottleneck out into the desert. The patrulero was still breathing when they left. Gray only cut off his ears and most of his nose, and stuffed them in his mouth.
Five minutes later, at the border, they’d been having problems with the phones all morning, and only a skeleton staff out on the road to take Jake’s cash with their eyes closed.
They were as good as their word on one thing. They never went back to Mexicali. Jake went down a couple times by himself, and nothing happened, but Gray couldn’t go anywhere, from Tijuana to Matamoros, without seeing the patrulero.
Not that the geek was out there, of course. Even if he survived long enough to be found and was stitched back together by the Aztec witch doctors, he doubted the fucker was still out on patrol.
But whenever he got drunk enough, or tweaked for more than a couple days, things started to get blurry. What used to be a pleasant masking of the unbearable seediness of reality now became an unsettling game. Faces ran together when they kissed or danced, soul-shadows licking out at each other, feeding on vital essences, while he sat alone. They blurred and melted, and usually, they just turned into pigs, what fun to watch, but now, their noses and ears disappeared, and they all seemed to look at him like they knew what he’d done, and what he was going to do, and none of it was worth resisting.
Like they—all of them, everyone but Gray—knew how it would all end.
He got in trouble, bad trouble, whenever he tried to party in Mexico. He saw things, and tried to stab or shoot them. Jake thought it was hilarious at first, but finally stopped taking him when he went down.
He would give anything to go back and kill that fucking patrulero, to erase that mocking uncertainty that he was still out there, or what ever demon looked out of his mangled face, which was unkillable, though he would gladly try.
Now, he saw it looking at him out of Eddie’s eyes, and he found himself painting the rest of the picture: a bushy Pancho Villa mustache, instead of Eddie’s pencil-thin shit stain; the gray-whiskered jowls, the melanoma-spotted, deep brown complexion; the wheezing, dripping hole below and between his droopy, apologetic eyes. The restlessly chewing mouth, occasionally opening wide enough for the cartilage-wad of an ear to peek out.
Gray wanted to see it and lose himself in those eyes and everything behind it, right here and now, fuck Jake, fuck this whole charade…
Because it was so much easier to contemplate killing Eddie than to deal with the ghost that laughed at him, whenever he went outside.
Part VII
God’s Law
Chapter Thirty-five
Eddie heard the cop car—saw the telltale spray of tricolor light painting the gloom of the front yard in patriotic red, white, and blue—but he kept sporting his best poker face. He’d passed up a dozen even chances to plant the claw of his hammer in Gray’s forehead or chest, as he seemed to lapse into a daydream whenever Eddie stood still to finish the door.
He would do nothing to excite this psycho fuckhead, until he was sure he could live through it.
“Oh, boy…” Gray sprang into ten-cups-of-coffee alertness, ducking in the doorway. “Don’t do anything stupid. I can turn this place into Baghdad in five seconds flat.”
Eddie figured this for a conservative estimate. He hammered the pin through the middle hinge, affixing the door.
“Just wave and smile,” Gray growled. “Shut the door. And come with me.”
Eddie tugged the heavy oak door into the jamb. He had to force it into place; the top hinge was sagging out of the frame. Oh well, you get what you pay for…
Dropping the hammer into the toolbox, Eddie hustled ahead of Gray down the hallway to the studio.
Eddie threw open the door, Gray right behind him.
Jake hovered over Emmy. Both whipped around at the sound. Mathias dangled from the cross behind them.
Eddie averted his eyes, but could not unsee it.
“We got cops,” Gray said.
Jake looked groggy, as if Emmy had hypnotized him. Under the hot studio lights, his face appeared to be melting. “How many?”
“Just one car. But…”
“Okay, okay, lemme think for a second…”
Eddie couldn’t stop staring at the crucified Mathias. He started shaking, bushwacked by the horror. Emmy looked like she was ready to bolt. And she couldn’t stop crying.
“You stay right here!” Jake hissed at her. “You hear me? You move so much as a muscle, you make so much as a squeak, and you don’t wanna know what’s gonna happen.”
He got up in her face. She cringed away from the heat of his stare. “You believe that, don’tcha?”
Emmy nodded. Musical pattering of fluid on concrete, as she lost control of her bladder.
Jake stood upright, spine popping like dud firecrackers. “I’ll get Esther. Don’t fuck this up.” His mind still seemed miles away, Eddie noticed, but maybe it was miles ahead.
Gray herded Eddie back to the living room. Jake went out the sliding glass door and stomped across the lawn to the holding cell.
Leaving Emmy alone in the studio (not alone, no—) too terrified to move.
Chapter Thirty-six
Out in the big dirt parking lot, Sheriff LeGrange nosed the cruiser in behind a huge classic Cadillac, parked, tamped a plug of Red Man into his cheek, got out and looked around as if the cameras were still rolling.
Deputy Peet ran a quick radio check, grateful for somebody to talk to. The old man had run himself ragged when Pastor Jake’s hunky corpse turned up naked in the desert: taking his meals at his desk and sleeping—or trying to—on a cot.
His dumpy, spinster daughter finally came in to the station to take him home this morning, but he returned before dinner, croaking for a dragnet when he heard the first calls about the funeral home massacre on his bedside scanner.
Nothin
g had come of their search of Apple Valley; but within hours of the case going out on the database, San Bernardino PD tipped them that the good minister’s car had been found this morning, parked in a visitors’ lot in a condo complex. SBPD forced entry into an empty unit after a nosy neighbor ID’d Connaway from a photo, and reported sounds of fighting, three nights before.
Some personal effects and evidence of the deceased minister, including several pints of his blood, turned up in the condo, which belonged to a Sugar Sutherland, a.k.a. Joelle Stainback, twenty-three, waitress, dancer, and sometime Internet porn talent, originally of Riverside.
Riverside Sheriff’s chipped in the news that the trailer of Margaret Stainback, fifty-four (unemployed), burned down night before last; the two bodies inside had been tagged as Sugar and her mother.
Of Sugar’s live-in boyfriend, Frankie Petrasino, twenty-six (surprise! Unemployed), no sign so far, leading the hunt to focus on him.
Peet wasn’t the only one who connected the dots and figured Frankie stabbed the minister for jocking his girlfriend, torched his special lady at Mom’s place, then lit out south. But all of that was just news headlines, no more savage or inhuman than the typing, or the sober serif font that related them.
She saw the funeral home carnage with her own eyes.
She hardly knew Lew Oliff, the Unitarian minister whose face got ripped off, but she got sick in the women’s room (“No girl deputy of mine ralphs in front of the boys,” he’d warned) until she’d rediscovered yesterday’s breakfast.
She was only a deputy, and young, and a girl to boot, but she knew no angry boyfriend would carry a grudge this far.
Sheriff LeGrange was still hopped-up on the adrenaline rush of playing the grizzled bulldog of the law on the news. Peet would have kidded him about it, but he hadn’t said ten words since they left the chapel.
The wind whipped all around them as they convened.
LeGrange screwed his Stetson down on his head. “Lord, it’s an ugly night.”
They checked out the parking lot, noted the sacrilegious bumper stickers on Jasper’s TRUCK: FOCUS ON YOUR OWN DAMN FAMILY and IN CASE OF RAPTURE…TAKE YOUR SHITTY CAR WITH YOU!
“Does that look right to you?” he asked.
Peet shook her head. “Want me to call those plates in, quick?”
“I’ll tell ya right now, that one’s Jasper Ellis. And what he’s doin’ here, I don’t know. But check out the others. See what we got, before we go in.”
“What about that thing?” she said, nodding at the massive white Cadillac half hidden behind the house.
“If I’m not mistaken,” said LeGrange, “that belonged to the deceased.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Jake opened the holding cell and thrust a big paw inside. “Esther. I need you, baby. Quick.”
Esther stumbled back, but Jake had her by the arm and snatched her out of the cell, marching her briskly toward the back door.
“Okay, honey, you know the drill. Just put on your game face, and send ’em off smiling.”
Her heart thudded triple-time against her chest. “I can’t…”
“Look, we don’t have time to argue…”
“Jake, I…”
“Please don’t make me have to kill them. Cuz if I do, I just might not able to stop…oh, holy Christ, what happened to your face?”
In the light from the back door, the ripening shiner had already begun to disfigure her cheek. Esther threw a glance back at the holding cell.
“That’s great. That’s just great…” Then he chuckled abruptly, and stroked her hair. “Well, at least they won’t blame this one on me…”
In the studio, Emmy knelt before the cross and wept.
Mathias’s feet dangled free. One of his brown Bass work shoes had fallen off, and lay on its side like a capsized boat in a red pond. Jake’s huge footprints splashed droplets of blood up the walls, and tracked gore to and from the cameras, then out the door.
It’s okay, then, see? she tried to tell herself. It’s part of the show—
When Emmy’s mother left the Baptist church where she married Emmy’s father, she called them all fools. They suffered her outburst; everyone knew she was not well. “God knows all! Sees all! Who’s saved, who’s damned, it’s all in his book!” Their struggle against the Adversary was futile, because God knew the future, and none of them would pass muster.
Emmy stayed with her, cared for her, until the end. When she went out looking for a cause, she wanted to give herself to God in a way that would speak for those left out of everyone’s book.
Jake had seemed to tap into the innate Christ in all people, even the lost. When she heard fallen women talk about him, about how his words “put them up on the cross with Jesus,” they spoke in awed whispers, sharing a secret as breathlessly mysterious as sex.
Emmy knew about sex, of course, but she was still a virgin. Mama was wrong or lying, what she said about Daddy, and Mathias had never pressured her.
In her heart, there was an empty cross; and in those dreams—the hot, troublesome dreams that made her sick with guilt—she saw Jake on the cross. He was naked, and uninjured. Perfect.
In the dreams, he reached out to her, and he flew away with her on glorious white wings.
A stupid dream, even before…this.
Mathias had painted the base of the cross with bloody skid marks as he kicked with his stocking foot. Slowly, head swimming, she pulled herself upright.
Tears streaming down her face, sobbing softly as she took stock of his wounds, she kissed her palm and tried to touch every one. She couldn’t take them back—but oh, how she would—so she tried to take their pain into herself.
Out front, the sheriff couldn’t say just why, but he approached the door warily, with his head on a swivel.
Behind him, Peet probed the yard and the dark windows with her flashlight, feeling a little chill as the beam picked out the creaky swings clanking in the gusty wind.
Growing up in town, the kids told stories about the Weirdo School; but aside from giving out blue popcorn balls for Halloween, they never lived up to the legend.
Tonight, though, there was no denying that the place felt far weirder than all of those stories combined.
LeGrange spat tobacco juice in the shrubbery and knocked. The heavy door rocked against the jamb, hanging lopsided and loose. Peet noticed it, too, threw him a questioning glance, her hand automatically hovering over the grip of her revolver.
He flashed her a look that said hold tight, but it was clear he was ready to go in, too.
Then a woman’s voice from inside chirped, “I’m coming!” and both of them eased up one smidgen. But only one.
Even without Jasper’s body, the living room was a nightmare tableau: blood and shattered glass everywhere, furniture in disarray, and monsters on every side.
Esther’s eyes nearly swooned at Eddie as she crossed the living room. She felt giddy with relief that he was okay, but now her hands started shaking badly. She could do this, she could get through this, but she needed a drink first. Like that scotch on the counter.
Jake handed her the bottle with an eye-rolling sigh, the long-suffering husband of the functioning alcoholic, then stepped to one side of the door and blew her a kiss.
The stench of him queasily recalled the pickled cow’s eye she had to dissect in junior high biology. She had never forgiven her father for that.
Esther took a good swig, went to set the bottle on the table, then remembered that it was on its back not four feet from the door. Disorientation had her so fucked up that she almost dropped the bottle before stopping herself, taking one more swig, and setting it down on the bloody carpet, where it promptly fell over and spilled.
Three pairs of eyes were staring at her—Jake, Gray, and Eddie—only one of them sympathetic. But all of them were saying, for Christ sake, quit fucking around!
So she forced herself forward, wrenched herself upright and poised. She had done this so many times before tha
t pretending everything was all right was more than second nature. It had become a way of life.
Eddie and Gray stepped back from the door like a precision drill team, giving her access. Eddie’s expression was flat and tense, but his eyes were full of love and fear.
Then she opened the door and stepped out on the porch, smoothly pulling it shut it behind her: smile practiced and genuine, hands clasped together tight.
“Sheriff? Deputy?” she said. “How may I help you?”
At her back, the door settled in its frame. Jake, Gray, and Eddie were totally silent, but she could feel them listening hard. She also smelled weed-killer.
“Just checking in, Mrs. Connaway,” Sheriff LeGrange said. “We know this is a terrible time…”
“Well, thank you, Sheriff. I appreciate your diligence, but…”
“I see you’ve got company.”
“Oh, yes.” Nodding, whipping up a wistful smile. “I have some friends over. We were out back, watching the storm.” She gave them each a meaningful glance. “I think you can understand that I don’t want to be alone.”
“But there’s no problem.”
“Oh, no!” Brightly. “Everything’s…”
“Ma’am,” the woman deputy interjected. “How did you receive that bruise on your face?”
“Oh!” Esther gave a little laugh, though her stomach was starting to plummet. “I—it’s been a rough week. I’ve had a little too much to drink, if you couldn’t tell already, and, well, I slipped and fell into the counter, just fifteen minutes ago.”
It seemed like a reasonable enough explanation. Certainly, it had flown before.
So why were they looking at her like that?
“I really should put some concealer on it, don’t you think?” she continued, just a bit giddily. “Or an ice pack, if I were smarter. And I will, when we’re done talking. It’s just been a terrible…what?”
LeGrange could have been a cigar store Indian. Peet wrinkled her nose and looked around for the source of the stench.
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