11
GHOST STORY
When the right front tire blew, Benny hardly slowed. He wrestled with the wheel and drove another half block. The Mercedes thumped and shuddered and rocked along, crippled but cooperative.
No headlights appeared behind them. The pursuing Cadillac had not yet turned the corner two blocks back. But it would. Soon.
Benny kept looking desperately left and right.
Rachael wondered what sort of bolthole he was searching for.
Then he found it: a one-story stucco house with a for SALE sign in the front yard, set on a big half-acre lot, grass unmown, separated from its neighbors by an eight-foot-high concrete-block wall that was also finished in stucco and that afforded some privacy. There were lots of trees on the property as well, and overgrown shrubbery in need of a gardener's attention.
“Eureka,” Benny said.
He swung into the driveway, then pulled across one corner of the lawn and around the side of the house. In back, he parked on a concrete deck, under a redwood patio cover. He switched off the headlights, the engine.
Darkness fell over them.
The car's hot metal made soft pinging sounds as it cooled.
The house was unoccupied, so no one came out to see what was happening. And because the place was screened from the neighbors on both sides by the wall and trees, no alarm was raised from those sources, either.
Benny said, “Give me your gun.”
From her perch behind the seats, Rachael handed over the pistol.
Sarah Kiel was watching them, still trembling, still afraid, but no longer in a trance of terror. The violence of the chase seemed to have jolted her out of her preoccupation with her memories of other, earlier violence.
Benny opened his door and started to get out.
Rachael said, “Where are you going?”
“I want to make sure they go past and don't double back. Then I've got to find another car.”
“We can change the tire—”
“No. This heap's too easy to spot. We need something ordinary.”
“But where will you get another car?”
“Steal it,” he said. “You just sit tight, and I'll be back as soon as I can.”
He closed his door softly, sprinted back the way they had come, slipped around the corner of the house, and was gone.
* * *
Scuttling in a half crouch along the side of the house, Ben heard a chorus of distant sirens. Police cars and ambulances were probably still converging on Palm Canyon Drive, a mile or two away, where the bullet-riddled cops had ridden their cruiser through the windows of a boutique.
Ben reached the front of the house and saw the Cadillac coming along the street. He dove into a lush planting bed at the corner and cautiously peered between branches of the overgrown oleander bushes, which were heavily laden with pink flowers and poisonous berries.
The Caddy cruised slowly by, giving him a chance to ascertain that there were three men inside. He could see only one clearly — the guy in the front passenger's seat, who had a receding hairline, a mustache, blunt features, and a mean slash of a mouth.
They were looking for the red Mercedes, of course, and they were smart enough to know that Ben might have tried to slip into a shadowy niche and wait until they had gone past. He hoped to God that he had not left obvious tire tracks across the short stretch of unmown lawn that he'd traversed between the driveway and the side of the house. It was dense Bermuda grass, highly resilient, and it hadn't been watered as regularly as it should have been, so it was badly blotched with brown patches, which provided a natural camouflage to further conceal the marks of the Mercedes's passage. But the men in the Caddy might be trained hunters who could spot the most subtle signs of their quarry's trail.
Hunkering in the bushy oleander, still wearing his thoroughly inappropriate suit trousers, vest, white shirt, and tie with the knot askew, Ben felt ridiculous. Worse, he felt hopelessly inadequate to meet the challenge confronting him. He'd been a real-estate salesman too long. He was not up to this sort of thing anymore, not for an extended length of time. He was thirty-seven, and he'd last been a man of action when he'd been twenty-one, which seemed a date lost in the mists of the Paleolithic era. Although he had kept in shape over the years, he was rusty. To Rachael, he had looked formidable when he'd gone after the man named Vincent Baresco in Eric Leben's Newport Beach office, and his handling of the car had no doubt impressed her, but he knew his reflexes weren't what they had once been. And he knew these people, his nameless enemies, were deadly serious.
He was scared.
They had blown away those two cops as if swatting a couple of annoying flies. Jesus.
What secret did they share with Rachael? What could be so damn important that they would kill anyone, even cops, to keep a lid on it?
If he lived through the next hour, he would get the truth out of her one way or another. Damned if he would let her keep stalling.
The Caddy's engine sort of purred and sort of rumbled, and the car moved past at a crawl, and the guy with the mustache looked right at Ben for a moment, or seemed to, stared right between the oleander branches that Ben was holding slightly apart. Ben wanted to let the branches close up, but he was afraid the movement would be seen, slight as it was, so he just looked back into the other man's eyes, expecting the Caddy to stop and the doors to fly open, expecting a submachine gun to start crackling, shredding the oleander leaves with a thousand bullets. But the car kept moving past the house and on down the street. Watching its taillights dwindle, Ben let out his breath with a shudder.
He crept free of the shrubbery, went out to the street, and stood in the shadows by a tall jacaranda growing near the curb. He stared after the Cadillac until it had traveled three blocks, climbed a small hill, and disappeared over the crest.
In the distance, there were still sirens, though fewer. They had sounded angry before. Now they sounded mournful.
Holding the thirty-two pistol at his side, he hurried off into the night-cloaked neighborhood in search of a car to steal.
* * *
In the 560 SL, Rachael had moved up front to the driver's seat. It was more comfortable than the cramped storage space, and it was a better position from which to talk with Sarah Kiel. She switched on the little overhead light provided for map reading, confident it would not be seen past the property's thick screen of trees. The moon-pale glow illuminated a portion of the dashboard, the console, Rachael's face, and Sarah's stricken countenance.
The battered girl, having been shaken from her catatonic state, was at last capable of responding to questions. She was holding her curled right hand protectively against her breast, which somehow gave her the look of a small, injured bird. Her torn fingernails had stopped bleeding, but her broken finger was grotesquely swollen. With her left hand, she tenderly explored her blackened eye, bruised cheek, and split lip, frequently wincing and making small, thin sounds of pain. She said nothing, but when her frightened eyes met Rachael's, awareness glimmered in them.
Rachael said, “Honey, we'll get you to a hospital in just a few minutes. Okay?”
The girl nodded.
“Sarah, do you have any idea who I am?”
The girl shook her head.
“I'm Rachael Leben, Eric's wife.”
Fear seemed to darken the blue of Sarah's eyes.
“No, honey, it's all right. I'm on your side. Really. I was in the process of divorcing him. I knew about his young girls, but that has nothing to do with why I left him. The man was sick, honey. Twisted and arrogant and sick. I learned to despise and fear him. So you can speak freely with me. You've got a friend in me. You understand?”
Sarah nodded.
Pausing to look around at the darkness beyond the car, at the blank black windows and patio doors of the house on one side and the untended shrubbery and trees on the other, Rachael locked both doors with the master latch. It was getting warm inside the car. She knew she should open the windows, but she fe
lt safer with them closed.
Returning her attention to the teenager, Rachael said, “Tell me what happened to you, honey. Tell me everything.”
The girl tried to speak, but her voice broke. Violent shivers coursed through her.
“Take it easy,” Rachael said. “You're safe now.” She hoped that was true. “You're safe. Who did this to you?”
In the frosty glow of the map light, Sarah's skin looked as pallid as carved bone. She cleared her throat and whispered, “Eric. Eric b-beat me.”
Rachael had known this would be the answer, yet it chilled her to the marrow and, for a moment, left her speechless. At last she said, “When? When did he do this to you?”
“He came… at half past midnight.”
“Dear God, not even an hour before we got there! He must've left just before we arrived.”
From the time she'd left the city morgue earlier this evening, she had hoped to catch up with Eric, and she should have been pleased to learn they were so close behind him. Instead, her heart broke into hard drumlike pounding and her chest tightened as she realized how closely they had passed by him in the warm desert night.
“He rang the bell, and I answered the door, and he just… he just… hit me.” Sarah carefully touched her blackened eye, which was now almost swollen shut. “Hit me and knocked me down and kicked me twice, kicked my legs…”
Rachael remembered the ugly bruises on Sarah's thighs.
“… grabbed me by the hair…”
Rachael took the girl's left hand, held it.
“… dragged me into the bedroom…”
“Go on,” Rachael said.
“… just tore my pajamas off, you know, and… and kept yanking on my hair and hitting me, hitting, punching me…”
“Has he ever beaten you before?”
“N-no. A few slaps. You know… a little roughhouse. That's all. But tonight… tonight he was wild… so full of hatred.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Not much. Called me names. Awful names, you know. And his speech — it was funny, slurred.”
“How did he look?” Rachael asked.
“Oh God…”
“Tell me.”
“A couple teeth busted out. Bruised up. He looked bad.”
“How bad?”
“Gray.”
“What about his head, Sarah?”
The girl gripped Rachael's hand very tightly. “His face… all gray… like, you know, like ashes.”
“What about his head?” Rachael repeated.
“He… he was wearing a knitted cap when he came in. He had it pulled way down, you know what I mean, like a toboggan cap. But when he was beating me… when I tried to fight back… the cap came off.”
Rachael waited.
The air in the car was stuffy and tainted by the acid stink of the girl's sweat.
“His head was… it was all banged up,” Sarah said, her voice thickening with terror, horror, and disgust.
“The side of his skull?” Rachael asked. “You saw that?”
“All broken, punched in… terrible, terrible.”
“His eyes. What about his eyes?”
Sarah tried to speak, choked. She lowered her head and closed her eyes for a moment, struggling to regain control of herself.
Seized by the irrational but quite understandable feeling that someone — or something—was stealthily creeping up on the Mercedes, Rachael surveyed the night again. It seemed to pulse against the car, seeking entrance at the windows.
When the brutalized girl raised her head again, Rachael said, “Please, honey, tell me about his eyes.”
“Strange. Hyper. Spaced out, you know? And… clouded…”
“Sort of muddy-looking?”
“Yeah.”
“His movements. Was there anything odd about the way he moved?”
“Sometimes… he seemed jerky… you know, a little spastic. But most of the time he was quick, too quick for me.”
“And you said his speech was slurred.”
“Yeah. Sometimes it didn't make any sense at all. And a couple times he stopped hitting me and just stood there, swaying back and forth, and he seemed… confused, you know, as if he couldn't figure where he was or who he was, as if he'd forgotten all about me.”
Rachael found that she was trembling as badly as Sarah — and that she was drawing as much strength from the contact with the girl's hand as the girl was drawing from her.
“His touch,” Rachael said. “His skin. What did he feel like?”
“You don't even have to ask, do you? 'Cause you already know what he felt like. Huh?” the girl said. “Don't you? Somehow… you already know.”
“But tell me anyway.”
“Cold. He felt too cold.”
“And moist?” Rachael asked.
“Yeah… but… not like sweat.”
“Greasy,” Rachael said.
The memory was so vivid that the girl gagged on it and nodded.
Ever so slightly greasy flesh, like the first stage — the very earliest stage — of putrefaction, Rachael thought, but she was too sick to her stomach and too sick at heart to speak that thought aloud.
Sarah said, “Tonight I watched the eleven o'clock news, and that's when I first heard he'd been killed, hit by a truck earlier in the day, yesterday morning, and I'm wondering how long I can stay in the house before someone comes to put me out, and I'm trying to figure what to do, where to go from here. But then little more than an hour after I see the story about him on the news, he shows up at the door, and at first I think the story must've been all wrong, but then…oh, Christ… then I knew it wasn't wrong. He… he really was killed. He was.”
“Yes.”
The girl tenderly licked her split lip. “But somehow…”
“Yes.”
“… he came back.”
“Yes,” Rachael said. “He came back. In fact, he's still coming back. He's not made it all the way back yet and probably won't ever make it.”
“But how—”
“Never mind how. You don't want to know.”
“And who—”
“You don't want to know who! Believe me, you don't want to know, can't afford to know. Honey, you've got to listen closely now, and I want you to take to heart what I'm saying to you. You can't tell anyone what you've seen. Not anyone. Understand? If you do… you'll be in terrible danger. There're people who'd kill you in a minute to keep you from talking about Eric's resurrection. There's more involved here than you can ever know, and they'll kill as many people as necessary to keep their secrets.”
A dark, ironic, and not entirely sane laugh escaped the girl. “Who could I tell that would believe me, anyway?”
“Exactly,” Rachael said.
“They'd think I was crazy. It's nuts, the whole thing, just plain impossible.”
Sarah's voice had a bleak edge, a haunted note, and it was clear that what she had seen tonight had changed her forever, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse. She would never be the same again. And for a long time, perhaps for the rest of her life, sleep would not be easily attained, for she would always fear what dreams might come.
Rachael said, “All right. Now, when we get you to a hospital, I'll pay all your bills. And I'm going to give you a check for ten thousand dollars as well, which I hope to God you won't throw away on drugs. And if you want me to, I'll call your parents out there in Kansas and ask them to come for you.”
“I… I think I'd like that.”
“Good. I think that's very good, honey. I'm sure they've been worried about you.”
“You know… Eric would've killed me. I'm sure that's what he wanted. To kill me. Maybe not me in particular. Just someone. He just felt like he had to kill someone, like it was a need in him, in his blood. And I was there. You know? Convenient.”
“How did you get away from him?”
“He… he sort of phased out for a couple of minutes. Like I told you, he seemed confused at times. And then
at one point his eyes just sort of clouded up even worse, and he started making this funny little wheezing noise. He turned away from me and looked around, as if he was really mixed up… you know, bewildered. He seemed to get weak, too, because he leaned against the wall there by the bathroom door and hung his head down.”
Rachael remembered the bloody palmprint on the bedroom wall, beside the bathroom door.
“And when he was like that,” Sarah said, “when he was distracted, I was flat on the bathroom floor, hurt real bad, hardly able to move, and so the best I could do was crawl into the shower stall, and I was sure he'd come in after me when he got his senses back, you know, but he didn't. Like he forgot me. Came to his senses and either didn't remember I'd been there or couldn't figure out where I'd gone to. And then, after a while, I heard him farther back in the house, pounding things, breaking things.”
“He pretty much wrecked the kitchen,” Rachael said, and in a dark corner of her memory was the image of the knives driven deep into the kitchen wall.
Tears slid first from Sarah's good eye, then from the blackened and swollen one, and she said, “I can't figure…”
“What?” Rachael asked.
“Why he'd come after me.”
“He probably didn't come after you specifically,” Rachael said. “If there was a wall safe in the house, he would've wanted the money from it. But basically, I think he's just… looking for a place to go to ground for a while, until the process… runs its course. Then, when he blanked out for a moment and you hid from him, and when he came around again and didn't see you, he probably figured you'd gone for help, so he had to get out of there fast, go somewhere else.”
“The cabin, I'll bet.”
“What cabin?”
“You don't know about his cabin up at Lake Arrowhead?”
“No,” Rachael said.
“It's not on the lake, really. Farther up there on the mountain. He took me up to it once. He owns a couple of acres of woods and this neat cabin—”
Someone tapped on the window.
Rachael and Sarah cried out in surprise.
It was only Benny. He pulled open Rachael's door and said, “Come on. I've got us a new set of wheels. It's a gray Subaru — one hell of a lot less conspicuous than this buggy.”
Shadowfires Page 13
