Valley of lights

by Stephen Gallagher

  'They sent a man around. I think they've found out you're with the police.'

  Why me? Why now? I felt almost as if a big target had been painted on my back ready for the start of the Volchak season. Still scanning what I could see of the avenue – wooden cladding, white picket, the nose of a car sticking out here and there like that of a sleeping dog – I said, 'They won't be a problem any more, Mrs Moynahan. I've had all your information put into the computer, they're moving on it right now…'

  'Please, sergeant.' Her hand was on my arm again, and I had to look at her. It occurred to me that I'd always avoided meeting her eyes before, but now I could see that they were steady and clear. She said, 'Please, don't humor me. I know you do, most of the time. But I'm serious.'

  I could feel myself starting to blush. I suddenly felt as if my house was of glass, and that she knew all about the Moynahan file with its collection of screwed-up notes and tipoffs; there had been times when I'd dug out the latest and smoothed it out to show to some visitor. But now I could sense that there was something very sane shining through the delusion, and I said, 'What did he look like?'

  'Short and dark, about thirty-five. Strong-looking, like someone who works in the open. He was wearing a flowered shirt and light slacks, not too clean. He tried your door, but he couldn't get in. He was watching around as he did it. He knew he was doing wrong.'

  'What did he do then?'

  'He went to the next house. The young woman's place, I don't know her name. I tried to see what he was doing there, but I couldn't. You didn't believe my note, did you?'

  'I believe you now,' I said.

  Loretta's door was unlocked, but Woods wasn't there. It was worse than that, much worse. When I'd double-checked all the rooms I returned to the lounge, where the TV was playing to nobody and a half-finished TV dinner lay cold on the table.

  How long? Half an hour, more? Georgie had been given all of the warnings about strange men and strange cars and strange propositions, but here was somebody whose plausibility had been polished by lifetimes of practice. I didn't doubt that he could conjure up charm when he needed to, although I'd seen nothing of this quality in him so far.

  I ran out of the main gates and down to my car.

  As long as he was still on foot, I had a chance. The site was in a relatively undeveloped part of the city, in a grid of open desert roads with no more than two or three houses on some blocks and none at all on others; even where the development became heavier along the canal, the area still kept the feel of some dry and dusty suburb of little traffic and a lot of space. I couldn't guess which direction he might have chosen; north towards Indian School Road, perhaps, drawn through the morning's haze by the distant red mountains, or south to the heavy build-up and intermittent sleaze of Van Buren?

  I quickly circled the immediate few blocks. I'd lived here for some time, but I knew nobody outside of the trailer park itself. There were no shops and nowhere to socialise, so how could I? As I realised with some alarm after my second wrong turn, I didn't even know the layout of the streets too well. Put me in the Deuce, and I could almost drive around blindfold. Here, I was making big arcs in the dust and heading back the way I'd come within the first couple of minutes.

  There were people around, but not many. Two dried-out looking old women sat on folding chairs that they'd taken from their station wagon and set on the white concrete levee overlooking the canal, facing the sun and baking in the glare as if they hoped it might preserve them for a while longer; and when I called to them and they turned to me, I saw that they were both wearing little black round-lensed sunglasses like radiation goggles. They hadn't seen anyone. They hadn't seen anything. They didn't want to know.

  I covered more ground, getting nowhere. The farther out that I drove, the thinner my chances of success became. At one junction I was checking around so desperately that I almost tailgated a pickup truck that had stopped in front of me, but I scorched to a halt with maybe an inch to spare. The owner was getting out and wanted to fight; I showed him the Special and he turned around and slowly walked back to his vehicle and climbed in, moving as if the ground was almost too hot to bear. He followed me at a distance for a block or so, but I managed to lose him.

  I asked everybody I saw, which was maybe three people, 'Did a man and a girl go by here? A little girl, about so big?' And I raised my hand to approximate Georgie's height. They all shook their heads, none of them spoke out loud.

  None except the telephone linesman.

  He was sitting in his truck and eating a sandwich as he ran a ballpoint down some list on a clipboard. I had to get out of my car to go and talk to him, but I left the engine running.

  Yeah, he'd seen a man and a girl not ten minutes ago. The little girl was holding onto the man's hand and they were walking north on forty-seventh, one block west of the canal.

  I thanked him, and almost flew back across the road. Holding his hand? I'd cut his damned hands off, both of them, for even touching her. I gripped the wheel hard and tried to control myself; drive slowly and give no warning, I told myself, as my anger and fear boiled inside like something sour.

  Wrong man. Wrong girl.

  He was in his sixties and must have weighed about three hundred pounds, whilst the child – probably his grand-daughter – couldn't have been much more than five years old. He was wearing a red sweater, and the two of them walking along and talking about this and that bore an uncanny resemblance to Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet. They both looked up as I hit the accelerator and took the bend just ahead of them, and the child pointed and said something.

  I was so frantic now that I wasn't thinking straight; because although they weren't the people that I was looking for, it still made sense to ask them what they'd seen.

  So when I reached the canal, I began to turn so that I could circle back and speak to them; which was how I hit the jackpot.

  Woods and Georgie were about a hundred yards further down, walking with their backs to me. They were over on the other side of the canal, partly screened by the red-earth levee that had replaced the concrete for this section. Woods was talking, but he wasn't touching her. Neither looked, back as I completed the turn as quietly as I could; then, as soon as they were out of sight, I put my foot down and raced up the parallel street to get ahead of them. Pooh and Piglet watched me pass for a second time, no less demented now than before.

  I left the car on Osborne, and ran the last half-block. The canal made a short dogleg here so that it crossed underneath the street; they'd have to pass over the bridge, and this would be where I'd wait. The canal was unfenced, a short scramble down the levee to where the water ran black and slow, and I could get down and hug the hard-baked earth and let them come by within a few feet of me, I drew the Special, safety off, and laid it flat on the ground alongside my face. If I had to use it now, I'd plant it on him afterwards; with a clear case of kidnap here, I'd probably get away with it.

  They were coming. I heard Georgie saying, 'Are you kidding me? I've been up here before. It doesn't go anywhere.'

  'All I know is what Alex told me,' Woods said. He didn't even sound plausible to me, he just sounded greasy and dangerous. 'You don't trust Alex?'

  'I don't even think you're a cop.'

  'Sure I am.'

  'Where's your badge?'

  (Twenty feet)

  'I'm in plain clothes. Look, you want to see these new police dogs, or what?'

  'How old are they?'

  (Passing me now)

  'Fifteen weeks. They're just puppies, they still haven't had all their shots. That's why we have to keep them so far out.'

  I came up silently, the baked earth a perfect footing. I was so close that I almost betrayed myself with my shadow instead. Georgie was too much in the way for me to fire, but I took one long step and swung the butt of the revolver in an arc over her head. Woods saw it coming and began to turn – his reactions were fast, all right – but I caught him on the temple and spun him around. Georgie shrieked in surpri
se as he fell, but I had to leave her as I tossed the gun behind me where he wouldn't be able to reach it and then got a grip on his collar. He was making strange grabbing motions at the air with his hands, as if he wanted to hold his head but had lost the co-ordination to find it, and I was easily able to pull him up and get my arm around his throat to shut off his air and everything else with a choke-hold. After only seconds he stopped grasping, and then he slid from my grip and hit the ground like a sack.

  I looked at Georgie. She was watching the whole thing in disbelief, her mouth open and her eyes wide.

  Then she said, 'I knew he wasn't a cop.'

  'So why'd you go with him?'

  'I was going to run. We're right near Jilly Henderson's. I was going to knock on their door.'

  It wasn't my job to get angry with her. I said, 'You know the number of your place where your mom works?'

  She nodded. I knew that Loretta had made her repeat it over and over, in case of an emergency. I thought that this probably qualified as one.

  I said, 'Okay. I want you to go on to the Hendersons' and use their phone to call your mother. Ask her to get here as fast as she can. Walk out on the job if she has to, it's that important. And then when you've made the call, stay with the Hendersons until she comes to pick you up. You won't have to wait very long.'

  I got her to repeat the street names and the message, and then I sent her on her way at the usual earth-shaking run. Even before she was out of sight I'd retrieved and re-holstered the Special and begun to roll Woods over the lip of the levee to where he could lie without being seen from the road.

  I was watching him carefully. The butt of the revolver had bruised his temple without breaking the skin, and the choke-hold had left no mark at all. He was twitching and his eyes were moving under their lids, both good signs; they meant that he was genuinely unconscious and hadn't been able to desert the body. When he seemed on the point of coming around, I choked him again. You can do a person serious damage that way, but this was the least of my worries. I had to do it twice more before Loretta got there.

  She was in the jeep, as I'd been hoping. I stood up and waved her in as soon as I saw her, and she pulled over to park on the shoulder of the road just below me. Standing up to get out, she said, 'Alex? What is all this?'

  'I need your help again,' I said. I was aware that we hadn't spoken since our stormy scene of yesterday; and so, obviously, was she.

  'This had better be good, Alex,' she said as she stepped up the embankment towards me. 'I don't even know that I've got a job to go back to.' She wasn't able to see the body at my feet until she was almost at the crest; and then, when she could, she did a perfect double-take. She said, 'Is that Woods?'

  'He came looking for me,' I said. 'He took Georgie instead. He's the Encanto Park killer. He thinks he can never be caught.'

  I'd never actually seen the colour drain from anybody's face in an instant before, but Loretta was suddenly so pale with shock that it was almost as if someone had shone a light through her.

  'He took her?' she managed to say.

  'Fed her some story. It wasn't her fault.'

  She looked down at Woods again. He wasn't exactly a sympathy-inspiring sight at the best of times, and now as far as Loretta was concerned he was less so than ever.

  'Kill him, Alex,' she said. 'Don't take him in. Kill him. Do it now.'

  'Lend me your jeep,' I said.

  'Are you going to do it? Because if you won't, I will.'

  'I'm going to stop him for good. He doesn't think I can, but he's wrong. Can I have the jeep for a couple of hours?'

  She nodded, her mind only half-on my request. She was probably remembering the reports on the Encanto Park child murder; details were still coming out, and the TV stations had each come up with a special graphic symbol to flash up behind their anchor people whenever the story featured in a bulletin.

  I said, 'My car's just around the corner. There are some things I need in the trunk. Can you bring it?'

  By the time that she got back with my car, I'd dragged Woods down from the levee and hoisted him up into the jeep's passenger seat. He slumped there, still out of it. Loretta stood well back and watched as I opened up the trunk of my car and transferred the canvas roll across to the open rear of the Renegade; she wasn't quite so pale now, and that sudden certainty had gone.

  I said, 'Georgie's up at the Henderson house.'

  'I know.'

  'Use my car again and take her home. I'll join you sometime later.'

  She saw me handcuff Woods securely to the overhead roll-bar, both hands. He groaned a little. I wanted to get him away from there, before he came around and said something that might make the next stage more difficult.

  Loretta said, 'What are you going to do?'

  'You don't want to know.'

  'Alex, are you absolutely sure about this?'

  'Trust me. He boasted about it to me, that's how safe he thinks he is. And he took Georgie, remember.'

  That swayed it for her, but I could still see a reluctance in the way that she left. First came the thirst for blood, but afterwards came the doubts. Something that I couldn't afford.

  I got behind the wheel of the jeep, and started the engine. Woods looked like an odd kind of passenger in the cuffs, but they kept him upright and made it look as if he was holding onto the roll bar for safety. At the first major street I turned east, heading for the edge of the city and the desert reservation beyond.

  There was a sound from the seat beside me.

  THIRTEEN

  We were coming up to a simple turnoff, marked by nothing more elaborate than a broken stake with an old car wheel as its base; the sign that it had carried had long gone, and as we turned onto the nameless track I glanced at Woods. He was blinking, and literally didn't know what had hit him. This was as I'd hoped.

  I said, helpfully, 'It's called a headache.'

  He turned to look at me, his head moving like something on a stiff bearing. I could almost see the intelligence reassembling itself there, the scattered pieces rapidly coming together in a seamless fit.

  'Clever, Alex,' he said, and his voice was dry and scratchy. 'Very clever. But as a technique, it's annoyance-value only,'

  'Better than nothing at all,' I said.

  The road went on into the roughest, poorest country. It was an unmade track, a bare strip of the wide desert plain running all the way out to where the mountains were like heaped stones on the horizon. To either side were cacti, prickly pear, salt bushes; we passed a desert fox which lay bundled at the roadside like an old shirt, days dead.

  It wasn't a road that got heavy use, because it led almost nowhere. This was what made it ideal.

  Woods said, 'Whatever you've got in mind, you're wasting your time.'

  I glanced at him again. He was looking straight ahead, but that confident and irritatingly superior smile was back. He'd settled into the seat as far as the cuffs would allow, and in spite of his dusty clothes and his bruises and his messed-up hair he had the look of someone who was waiting to be entertained.

  I said, 'You think so?'

  And he said, 'Yeah, but don't stop. I can always use a good joke.'

  'I bet you don't get many, in a life like yours.'

  I seemed to have hit a nerve with that one, because he didn't reply. He made as if something had caught his interest over to the side, and turned away; I got a brief flash of the dropping of the mask, but I didn't see what was revealed underneath.

  'Exactly what are you?' I said. 'Really?'

  'I'm older than the desert,' be said tonelessly. 'I don't have a name.' When he turned to face front again the facade was back up, but now he was looking more serious. He said, 'Don't hate me for what I have to do, Alex.'

  'What do you expect me to do? Like you for it?'

  He shook his head slowly, looking out through the windshield but not focussing on the road ahead. 'I don't know why I let you get so close,' he said. 'No-one else ever has.'

  Hearing h
im use my name like he had, it was like having somebody stroke my back with a dead snake; but I wanted to keep him talking and so I said to him, 'Answer me one thing. Tell me why you killed the child, And then tell me how many others you've done.'

  'That's two things.'

  'Come on, just between us. I know it isn't for food, because you threw up what you ate. Do you get something else out of it? Or is it just some kink?'

  He turned to look at me then. He wasn't smiling, his eyes were dead; for one brief moment I was afraid that he'd pulled out and left me with a lifeless shell as a hostage, but then he spoke.

  'He was young life,' he said.

  His voice was remote, like something echoing up from a crack in the earth. Even in the desert heat, I felt the chill wind of the dead blow through me.

  'So it's a kink,' I said.

  His dead eyes seemed infinitely weary. 'What do you know about anything?' he said.

  'I'm learning all the time.'

  'Better start counting the time you have left. Because I've got to tell you, Alex, when your little game's finished then so are you. Nothing personal, it's just the cycle. The cycle's all that matters. Predator and prey. It's like a heartbeat, only your kind never hear it. That's the difference between us. That's why I'll always win, and you'll always lose.'

  'But you can die,' I persisted.

  'Anything can die. But I never will.'

  There was silence for a while. Our dust trail now went back five miles or more, but the mountains still seemed an infinite distance ahead. We'd seen no life at all, apart from a couple of roadrunners that had dashed across the track in front of the jeep towards the beginning. The sky overhead was the deep, pitiless blue of noon.

  Young life. Jesus. Ancient and sour as he was, he must have despised it. He'd worked his way through every pleasure on offer through the ages, and now the only one left to him was to see young life suffer. Revenge on those who had something he'd lost and could never have again.

  I slowed the jeep to a halt, but kept the engine running. It was the only sound, out there in the vast bowl of the desert.