by Lee Goldberg, Scott Nicholson, J A Konrath, J Carson Black,
Laura asked him why he booby-trapped the tunnel.
He turned moist, frightened eyes on her. “Can I have a glass of water?”
After he had his water, she asked him again: “Why did you booby-trap the tunnel in your kitchen, but not the other house? What made you do that?”
He looked at her, uncomprehending.
She asked it another way. “You didn’t booby trap the front door, the back door, anything in the other house, so what was your reasoning? Why was that entrance so important to you when the others weren’t?”
He gave a small shrug.
“I just felt like it.”
I just felt like it. Laura had tried staring into his eyes, but there were no answers there. If she’d hoped for an explanation for Andrew Descartes’s death, something real she could hold on to that gave this tragedy some kind of design, she wouldn’t get it from Dale Lundy.
Buddy Holland was placed on administrative leave by the Bisbee Police Department. An Officer Involved Shooting investigation was the least of his troubles. Luring Dale Lundy to Bisbee would likely cost him his job. Fortunately, he had his pension from TPD. He was a young enough man he could find a good job somewhere in law enforcement.
“I hear Dynever Security is hiring,” he’d joked.
He told Laura he was moving back to Tucson so he could be close to his daughter.
Laura had seen a lot of him lately. Summer had to give her statement, and Buddy was there with her. They went back and forth to DPS, to the courthouse—Buddy, Summer, and Beth.
Laura found herself envying Buddy Holland his family. Watching the bond between them. She remembered what it was like to have that kind of love, the love of her parents.
It wasn’t over yet for them, though. Summer would need a lot of help to overcome what she had seen, what she had experienced, first at the hands of Musicman, and then Galaz. Unharmed physically, but emotionally devastated. Left alone in that room with the photos of the tortured women—knowing she would be next. Laura thought with time Summer would heal. She would need counseling and her family every step of the way, but she could heal.
Laura went to Jay Ramsey’s funeral. It was sparsely attended. She recognized the younger brother, whom she had met only once close to twenty years ago. She noticed no one was with him—not a wife, not a child. He looked lost. Laura felt an odd kinship with him. He had no family left. She could tell from the shock on his face that he had never expected to be alone in this way.
He gave her a Post-it note that Jay had apparently intended for her. It had been pasted to his computer, Laura’s name scribbled at the top. Below that it said: “Barbara Stanley” followed by a phone number. And the words: “Calliope’s Music, 9 yr. old TB mare”.
Laura thanked him and took the note, putting it in a special compartment in her wallet. She didn’t know what to do with the information right now, so she would leave it there until she did.
After attending the funeral that morning, the fifth day after the Chiricahua Paint Company fire, Laura gathered up some of the paperwork that had yet to be done and told Victor she was going home.
“See you tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so.”
She headed home to the Bosque Escondido, after stopping at a little store squeezed into the middle of a strip mall on the south side.
58
“Where should I put the dishes?” asked Tom, carrying the box up onto the front porch.
Laura knew which dishes he meant. Cheap china, a brown and yellow design of bees and flowers. Tom had gotten them from a grocery store give-away—buy so many groceries and pay a dollar for each dish. They went well with his two jelly glasses. “Couldn’t we store those?”
“Sure. I’ll put it with my sheets, my rug, my couch—“
“This is my nidito. You’re just—“
“What? What am I?”
He stood there, looking at her, still holding the box. The man she had invited to live with her.
She thought of her nice FiestaWare. Thought of them nested one into the other, their fine sold colors, dark blue, green, tangerine, dark red. Okay, so there would be bees and flowers, too. She sighed. “Okay. Put them in the cupboard near the fridge.”
Still holding the box, he bent awkwardly and kissed her on the forehead. “You’re doing pretty well.”
“You think so?”
“You’ve lived alone for a long time.”
“So have you.”
“But I’m not territorial like you are.”
It was true. As he let the screen door close behind him, Laura realized this would not be easy. When she’d agreed to try it, in the middle of the night three days ago, it had seemed absolutely right. Love was love. It was supposed to conquer all.
But she’d seen him leave towels on the floor of his bathroom.
The morning after Tom Lightfoot moved in, Laura awakened to rain tapping on the roof just before dawn. It seemed to her that the temperature had dropped ten degrees. She crept out of bed, careful not to wake him. Looking down at him and thinking that this was how it would be from now on. She found herself thinking of Buddy and Beth. Were they healing the rift between them? Or would Buddy get a place nearby and hover around his daughter like a guardian angel?
She brewed some coffee and went outside, sitting down on the old steel glider, swinging back and forth. She’d found the Art Deco glider at a yard sale, complete with the original striped canvas cushion. Here on the porch of a house built in the twenties, the scent of the desert around her, she could pretend this was the early part of the twentieth century.
There were serial killers then—though not as many—and plenty of pedophiles, but people didn’t know about it. How nice for them.
The rain was soft and steady—what the Navajos called a female rain. Water dripped off the eaves and splashed on the brick pavement in the few places the porch roof leaked. The smell of wet creosote wafting in, the trunks of the big old mesquites gleaming black as seal skin. The coolness good on her face, a balm to her singed eyebrows and the burn on her cheek.
Now was as good a time as any. She went inside, got her mother’s old electric typewriter and set it on the wood, drop-leaf table on the other end of the porch. She needed an extension cord to plug it in.
It took her a moment or two to figure out how to install the ribbon she’d bought from Hart Brothers Business Machines. The guy had one ribbon left, taking up dust in a back aisle, saying it was fortunate for her this was a common typewriter in its day.
As she lifted the paper bale and rolled the first sheet of paper through, she smiled, thinking how Tom had liked the idea.
Zen and the art of unfinished business. She liked it that her crazy idea had Tom’s approval. But that was predictable; he admired simplicity in all its ways.
She stared at the clean sheet of paper, then typed “Chapter Seven”. The action was strange, percussive. Both stiff and too fast for fingers used to a computer.
She was still staring at the words “Chapter Seven” forty minutes later when Tom came out and joined her. He’d brought her more coffee. He had put the right amount of half and half in it—a quick learner. She told him that.
“I read somewhere there’s a big shot designer in Hollywood who made up a swatch to show his maid what color his coffee should be. You’re not that bad.”
Glad she hadn’t said she appreciated him using her FiestaWare instead of his supermarket china.
He bent to kiss her. Soon the coffee and Chapter Seven were forgotten.
After they made love and were lying tangled together, listening to their heartbeats slowing back to normal, Laura felt a sudden strange bursting in her heart, as profound a moment as she had ever had. Tears unshed for eleven years suddenly came to the surface.
She lay in bed with Tom stroking her hair, her tears soaking the sheets and filling up her nose and throat. Enveloped in his comforting presence.
Feeling that, finally, she belonged.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mickey Harmon couldn’t sleep. He kept dreaming that Julie Marr was alive. He had to see her again to make sure. He didn’t know what he’d do if she really was alive—take her to a hospital? Maybe she’d be so grateful, she wouldn’t rat him out.
He didn’t know why he stopped by Mike Galaz’s house. Maybe it was because he’d always gone to Mike for advice. In recent months, he and Jay had gotten tired of Mike Galaz always calling the shots, always being crowned Dark Moondancer. So they’d shut him out. But this was different.
He went looking for Mike Galaz by instinct.
Taking some chick’s virginity would have been worth big points, but that didn’t matter now. Mickey Harmon was scared. He couldn’t face this alone, and he was afraid of how Jay, who had always been a mamma’s boy, might react. And so Mickey woke Mike up, and they drove out to the place where he and Jay had dumped Julie Marr.
Mickey told Galaz the story on the way, how they had meant to seduce her—his euphemism for date rape—but she’d freaked, fought them, and in slamming around the car, she’d sliced her head open. So much blood. Mickey and Jay panicked, dragging her out of the car to a mesquite tree, covering her with dirt and trash.
But now he wasn’t so sure she was dead.
It turned out that Mickey was right. Julie Marr was alive. They found her wandering dazedly in the desert, blood all over her face.
What are we going to do? asked Mickey, getting that panicky feeling.
Galaz didn’t look at him; he just walked out to meet Julie Marr. When she saw him, her face lit up with relief. Mickey could swear he saw that. She thought Mike was here to rescue her.
He wasn’t prepared for what Galaz did next.
Mickey watched in horror as Galaz raped and strangled Julie Marr. When she wouldn’t die, he stabbed her repeatedly with a knife he produced from his windbreaker.
He should have said something, but his voice was weightless, silent.
This time, they buried Julie Marr under the mesquite tree, digging a shallow grave in the caliche and rocky ground, piling up rocks to keep the animals away.
Mickey was scared.
Mike always knew what to do, though, and he already had a plan. Jay Ramsey, Mike told him, should never know that they’d found Julie Marr alive. Jay came from money and Mike Galaz saw an opportunity for blackmail, a way to control Jay Ramsey and his money.
Don’t even think about going to the police, Galaz told him. You’re as guilty as I am. We’re bound together forever the three of us. You, me, and Jay.
It was the first of many times Mickey would keep his mouth shut.
The pact Mike Galaz and Mickey Harmon made that night lasted until the summer of this year, ending with Mike Galaz’s death in a warehouse fire.
In the aftermath of the fire, Mickey Harmon, cuffed and shackled, led the Tucson Police Department to Julie Marr’s remains. Retired detective Barry Fruchtendler was there to watch as the girl’s bones were unearthed from their shallow grave.
After eighteen years, Julie Marr was finally going home.
THE END
About J.Carson Black
Table of Contents
Watch Me Die
By Lee Goldberg
Lee Goldberg’s Amazon Author Central page
About the Author
Table of Contents
Chapter One
I don’t know if you’ve ever read John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books before. McGee is sort of a private eye who lives in Florida on a houseboat he won in a poker game. While solving mysteries, he helps a lot of ladies in distress. The way he helps them is by fucking their brains out and letting them cook his meals, do his laundry, and scrub the deck of his boat for a few weeks. These women, McGee calls them “wounded birds,” are always very grateful that he does this for them.
To me, that’s a perfect world.
I wanted his life.
This is the story of what I did to get it.
My name is Harvey Mapes. I’m twenty-nine years old, six feet tall, and I’m in fair shape. I suppose I’d be better-looking if I exercised and stopped eating fast-food three times a day, but I won’t, so I won’t.
I’m a security guard. My job is to sit in a little, Mediterranean-style stucco shack from midnight until eight a.m. six days a week, outside the fountains and gates of Bel Vista Estates, a private community of million-dollar-plus homes in the Spanish Hills area of Camarillo, California.
The homes at Bel Vista Estates are built on a hillside above the farms of Pleasant Valley, the Ventura Freeway, and a really great outlet mall, about a quarter of the way between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I say that so you can appreciate the kind of drive to work I have to make each night from my one-bedroom apartment in Northridge.
There are worse jobs.
Most of the time, I just sit there looking at my black and white monitor, which is split into quarters and shows me three different views of the gate and a wide angle of an intersection up the hill inside the community. I’m supposed to watch the intersection to see if people run the stop sign, and if they do, I’m supposed to write them a “courtesy ticket” when they come through the gate.
I’d like to meet the asshole who came up with that.
It’s no courtesy to give one, and the folks who live here certainly don’t think it’s a courtesy to take one. Most of the time, they don’t even stop to get it from me; they just laugh or flip me off or ignore me altogether.
And why shouldn’t they? It’s not like I’m going to chase them down to the freeway or put a lien on their homes.
Enforcement really isn’t my job anyway. I’m there to give the illusion of security. I don’t have a gun, a badge, or even a working stapler. If there’s any real trouble, which there never is, I’m supposed to call my supervisor and he’ll send a car out.
The guys in the car, guys so inept and violent the police department wouldn’t hire them, are the “armed response team” the company advertises. If I were a resident, I’d feel safer taking my chances with the robber, rapist, or ax murderer.
I’m just the guy in the shack. The one who either waves you through and opens the gate, or stops you to see if you’ve got a pass. If you do, or if I get the homeowner on the phone and he says you’re okay, then I jot your name and license number in my ledger, open the gate, and return to my reading.
I do a lot of reading, which is the one big perk of the job and, truthfully, the reason I took it in the first place, back when I was going to community college. Mostly I read paperback mysteries now, cheap stuff I get at used bookstores, and it’s probably why I was so susceptible to his offer when it came.
I guess on some level I wanted to be like the tough, self-assured, no-problem-getting-laid guys I read about. I conveniently forgot that in a typical book, those guys usually sustain at least one concussion, get shot at several times, and see a lot of people die.
It was after midnight, but still early enough that I hadn’t settled into a book yet, when Cyril Parkus drove up in his white Jaguar XJ8, the one with a forest of wood and a herd’s worth of leather inside, and instead of going through the resident lane to wait for me to open the gate, he drove right up to my window.
We’re supposed to stand up when they do that, almost at attention, like we’re soldiers or something, so I did. The people who live at Bel Vista Estates are quick to report you for the slightest infraction, especially one that might imply you aren’t acknowledging their greatness, wealth, and power.
Even just sitting in that car, Parkus exuded the kind of laid-back, relaxed charm that says to me: look how easy-going I am, it’s because I’m rich and damn happy about it. He was in his mid-thirties, the kind of tanned, well-built, tennis-playing guy who subscribes to Esquire because he sees himself in every advertisement and it makes him feel good.
In other words, he was the complete opposite of me.
I’d see him leave for work every morning around six thirty or seven a.m., and it wasn’t unusual for me to see him
coming home so late. But he rarely stopped to talk to me, unless it was to leave a pass or get a package from me that his wife hadn’t picked up during the previous shift. I’d only seen his wife, Lauren Parkus, once or twice, and when I did, it was late and she was in the passenger seat of his car, her face hidden in the shadows as he sped by.
“Good evening, Mr. Parkus,” I said, adopting the cheerful, respectful, and totally false tone of voice I used with all the residents.
“How are you, Harvey?”
I caught him glancing at my nameplate as he spoke. Each guard slides his nameplate into a slot on the door at the start of his shift for exactly this reason. You can’t expect the residents to remember, or care about, the name of the guy in the shack.
“Fine, sir,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”
He smiled warmly at me, a smile as false as my cheerful respect and admiration.
“Could I ask you a couple of questions about your work, Harvey?”
“Of course, sir.”
I figured there must be a complaint coming, and this was just his wind-up. In the back of my mind, I tried to guess what I could have done to piss him or his wife off, but I knew there wasn’t anything.
“What are your hours?” Parkus asked.
I told him. He nodded.
“And then what do you do?” he asked.
That question had nothing to do with work, and I was tempted to tell him it was none of his fucking business, but I wanted to keep my job, and it wasn’t like there was anything in my life worth keeping private. Besides, I was curious where all this was going and how I was going to get screwed in the end. At that moment, I had no way of knowing just how bad it would be or how many people would get killed along the way.
“I usually grab something to eat at Denny’s, since they serve a decent dinner any time and have good prices, and then I go home.”
