Having sneaked out of the station, I was then faced with the prospect of sneaking back into my own house because one or both of Loretta's in-laws were moving around in the kitchen of the house next door. I sat out in the car for a while. I handled awkward situations every day in my job, so why was I so reluctant to face up to this one? Because it was so close to home, I supposed.
I got out of the car and climbed the wooden steps to Loretta's door.
It was the man, Heilbron, who answered. 'Yes?' he said, and he somehow seemed eager and distracted at the same time. He was probably somewhere in his sixties, well-worn and friendly-looking and not made for misery. He also looked as if he'd lost weight some time over the last couple of years, and he hadn't yet grown used to it.
I said, 'I'm sorry if I'm disturbing you. I live next door. I was wondering how Loretta was coming along.'
'Would you be Alex?'
'That's me. Is she talking again, now?'
'On and off. Can I ask you to come in for a minute, Alex? There's so much we don't understand, here.'
He stepped aside to allow me in, and I knew that I couldn't refuse. 'I don't know that I can throw much light,' I said, but he gestured towards the inside. It was an invitation, not a demand.
'Please,' he said, so I went on through.
They'd got the place a lot neater than Loretta had ever been able to manage, but it was a dead and unlived-in kind of neatness that wasn't exactly pleasing to see. The only mess was over on the table, where a heap of Georgie's schoolbooks and drawing-pads had been stacked up for careful examination as if by a valuer. Their son's photograph, I noticed, had been brought out of the bedroom and put in a more prominent place over by the stereo.
Heilbron waved me towards a chair, and started opening cupboard doors. I was remembering the lies that I'd told to Loretta in the hospital – white lies, I'd considered them then – and was wondering if they were going to return to accuse me now.
'They say you were actually with her,' he said, rummaging and not finding what he was looking for. I stood by the chair, unable to bring myself to sit. He seemed to be alone in the house.
'Not when it happened,' I said, 'but up to a couple of hours before.'
'So you're as much in the dark as the rest of us?'
'I don't know where Georgie is,' I said. 'If I did, I wouldn't be wasting time around here.'
He muttered something, moved on to the next cupboard. 'I've been waiting here in case the phone should ring,' he said. 'If there's any kind of news, I don't want to miss it. Clara's staying at the hospital for most of the time.'
'What are the doctors saying now?'
'Her neck was broken, but the spinal cord's still in one piece so they don't think she's going to be paralysed. I can't believe how lucky she's been. They say that if somebody untrained had tried to pull her out of the wreck, that would have been the end of it. The main danger now is this haemorrhage business.'
I said, fishing cautiously, 'Have they got any ideas at all about Georgie?'
He gave up on the cupboards, and started on the drawers. 'Not a one,' he said. 'As many theories as you like, but nothing solid. I mean, if somebody's kidnapped her for ransom or something like that, I don't know what I'm going to do… I'm retired, I'm not worth much.' With a sudden, impatient gesture, he slammed shut the drawer that he'd been looking through. 'Damn it, Alex,' he said.
'What's wrong?'
He turned to me, obviously out at the end of his line.
He said, 'Have you any idea where Loretta keeps her booze?'
I took him through into the kitchen, and showed him the cardboard box with the bottles in it that she kept behind the spin-dryer. I could see that he desperately wanted to talk to somebody, and I felt guilty because I knew that I couldn't give him the information that would reassure him. He'd want to take it to the police, the police would treat it as a normal kidnap, and Woods, Winter, or whatever he was calling himself now, would simply kill Georgie and change his face and move on.
He rinsed, out a couple of glasses at the sink, and we took a half-full bottle of scotch over to the table where the schoolbooks were. We sat, he poured.
He said, 'I gather the two of you are fairly close.'
'It was moving that way,' I said cautiously, uncomfortably aware of the framed picture behind me.
Heilbron said, 'You're not going to hurt my feelings if you say yes. We're all grown-ups here.'
'I know,' I said.
'We think of her like our own daughter. I only wish we could see her more, but… you can't stifle kids. You can't live on top of them, looking over their shoulder all the time. You understand me?'
'I certainly do.'
'But then, of course, it means we don't see Georgie so often… and kids of that age, you blink and they've got bigger… where is she, Alex? Who took her?'
I picked up one of the schoolbooks and turned it over in my hands. 'Hard to say,' I said.
'I drove out to where it happened. Went over every inch and looked in every culvert, just in case she might have been thrown out and could still be lying there. I don't understand it. I don't understand a single thing about it.'
He topped-up our glasses, and I explained the department's missing-persons procedure and the extra measures that we took whenever a child was involved. I was only half-listening to myself, knowing that I was covering up, but Heilbron was taking it all in like a starving dog with its eyes on a handful of biscuits. I could feel the truth like a bubble inside me, trembling and threatening to burst, and I had to leave my glass untouched because already I could feel the booze etching away at the edges of my will. It would be so easy to let go and tell. But they say that it's the same kind of thing with drowning.
Loretta, I learned, now remembered nothing of the accident or of our conversation in the hospital recovery room, probably as a result of the post-operative trauma involved in her second bout of emergency treatment. I also learned a lot about the insurance business, which was the field that Heilbron had worked in before he'd retired.
Finally I said, 'I have to go.'
'I know,' Heilbron said, 'I'm sorry. I've been talking too much.'
'No, it isn't that.'
'I've appreciated you being here. I want you to know something, Alex.'
I pushed away the drawing book that I'd been leafing through, filled with colored-in pictures of animals and birds, and said, 'What?'
'You're not the dull person you seem to think you are. You're reliable, but that's something completely different. I want you to think about that.'
'I will,' I promised.
'You sure you won't have one more drink with me?'
'I'd really like to,' I said, standing and pushing the chair back. 'But I have to take an important call in the morning.'
If only you knew, I thought as I crossed the narrow patch of ground to my own place.
TWENTY-ONE
I was up at dawn the next morning. I didn't dare dress, or go in the shower, or do anything that would prevent me from getting to the phone within the first couple of rings. I walked around in a bathrobe and couldn't even sit for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Today I was on Second Watch, which meant a mid-afternoon start, so I could stick around for as long as I needed to. Somehow it never occurred to me that he wouldn't call.
He did, on the dot of eleven.
All that tension, and now I hesitated before I picked it up. But then I snatched the receiver from the cradle and said, 'Yes?'
'Hello, Alex.'
It was a voice that I'd heard once before, on the line at the motel up in red rock country when I'd been told that I wasn't so hard to find. I said, 'Is that you, Winter?'
'Damned if I can remember,' the voice said pleasantly. 'Is Winter the college kid?'
'Yes.'
'Then that's who I am today. His eyes aren't so good, but he's fitter than most. I've used some real wrecks to get by, in my time.'
'You said I could speak to Georgie.'
He m
ade a sound of disappointment, of disapproval, but I could tell that he was playing with me. 'Little hasty today, aren't we, Alex?' he said.
'Are you going to put her on, or not?'
'She's right here. Remember, Alex, one question and nothing more.'
I could hear fumbling around at the other end of the line, and some whispering. I couldn't make out what was being said, but I thought that I heard my own name in there somewhere. After what seemed like forever, I heard her voice.
'Hello?' she said.
I wasn't going to allow myself to get carried away. Not yet. I said, 'It's me, Georgie. I can't talk for long, but I'm going to ask you something and it's important. It may not seem so but believe me, it is.'
'Okay.'
'You remember your history book from school? No, don't answer that, just think about it. Somebody wrote his name on your history book and you tried to rub it off, but it wouldn't come. If you turn it to the light, you can still read it. Whose name is that, Georgie?'
'On my history book?' She was taking the question seriously, at least, and not messing around and making perplexed noises like an adult might.
'On the back,' I said.
'That was David Haber. He's awful, and he won't leave me alone.'
I sat down heavily, because relief had made my legs go shaky. She was safe, she was whole. There was no way that Winter could have known the answer – I hadn't even known about the book myself, until I'd seen it last night – and so I knew now that he wasn't speaking through her to fool me.
I said, 'That's fine. I can't talk any more right now, Georgie. Put your friend back on, will you?'
'Okay,' she said, and then there was more fumbling around. She'd sounded fine; a little on-guard and apprehensive, perhaps, but not as if she was being kept in fear. I wished that I could see what was happening there at the other end of the line, get some idea of exactly how and where she was being held.
When Winter came hack on, he said in a voice of exasperation, 'Jesus, Alex!'
I said, 'What's the matter?'
'I give you one simple question to ask and you have to make a whole production out of it. Are you satisfied now?'
'Depends what you call satisfied.'
'Oh, don't play games. Do you believe she was speaking for herself?'
'Yes,' I said.
'Good. Now leave me alone, and that's how she stays. She's safe, she's being looked after, she's got everything she needs.'
'And how long are we supposed to he able to go on like this?'
'For however long I say we do,' he shot back, and I could hear the iron of arrogance lying just underneath his words. 'You're not in control here, Alex, I am. Be by that phone every day at this time. I may call, I may not, but when I do, you'd better be there. Anytime you're not, that finishes it.'
'What if there's trouble with the phone?'
'Then it's bad luck for both of you. The child's here with me, so I don't think you'll want me to say what happens then. But you get the picture, don't you, Alex?'
'I get the picture,' I said, and he hung up on me.
I'd dented his good mood, and I wished I hadn't. I didn't want to score points off him, because he could too easily take it out on Georgie. But at least I now knew that she was all right, and I'd spoken to her; she'd sounded calm, too calm if anything. If I'd worried before about her being thrust too fast into a premature kind of adulthood, I had more to be troubled about now. I didn't know what she'd been seeing or what she may have learned, but I knew that it wouldn't be the kind of knowledge that you'd get from Sesame Street.
I sat there by the phone a while longer, looking at my empty hands. What was I going to do?
I was going to do exactly what I'd been told.
When I went out a couple of hours later, I had my spare uniform on a hanger for wearing and the other one in a plastic sack for the laundry. As I was putting them both into the back of my car, Heilbron was getting something out of his. He squinted at me, a non desert-dweller unused to the sunlight, and said, 'Hello again, Alex. The phone didn't ring while I was out, did it?'
'I don't believe so.'
'Only, I had a brainwave. Picked up this.' He brought it over to show me; it turned out to be a telephone answering machine in a box. 'Eighty-five dollars but the man said it works like new. Now if somebody calls and I have to be out, I won't have to worry about whether I missed it.'
'Good idea,' I said.
'I don't suppose you know anything about fixing them up?'
'Not a thing.'
'Well,' he said, turning the box over and looking all around it as if for clues, 'I ought to be able to manage. There's supposed to be a booklet somewhere in here.' And then he turned kind of sheepish and serious. 'Listen, Alex…'
'What?'
'I'm sorry if I rambled last night. I'll bet you thought I was never going to shut up.'
'Didn't even cross my mind,' I said.
'Well… thanks for coming around, anyway. It did me good.'
And me as well, I supposed. I said, 'Any time. Except now. Now I have to work.'
He didn't take offence, as I'd known that he wouldn't. He said, 'Listen, if you should hear anything at all…'
'I'll find you,' I promised.
He walked to the park's entranceway and waved me off down the road. It was years since anybody had done anything remotely like that for me. But then I suppose that I'd lost a father, and he'd lost a son… we were like pieces from two different puzzles, we may not have matched but we more or less fit. I liked him, he was all right.
But now it was hack to business.
Michaels, I learned at the station, had called in sick. This was to everybody's relief and to nobody's surprise except mine; I couldn't understand why he'd bothered to keep up the deception. Within ten minutes of being on the road almost the entire Watch was involved in a major scramble when we had a call from somewhere on North 40th Street for a domestic quarrel with shots heard; the address turned out to be somewhere in a labyrinthine estate whose roads followed no comprehensible system and which had no less than ten units screeching around and almost shunting one another as they crossed at the intersections. The cause of the panic proved in the end to be an over-loud TV set. After that there was a kind of lull in the action, and I took advantage of the quiet period to slip out of the area and drive out toward the quiet street where Michaels had lived.
I'd been there once before, but that had been before his wife had taken a college place somewhere back east to begin belated work on her Master's degree. I didn't know what kind of arrangement they had now. The place seemed dead and silent as I walked up the short path to the door, anyway; I rang the bell, but nobody came.
It was a one-story house, no more than three or four years old, with close neighbors but a well-screened boundary of masonry walls and bushes between each property. It wasn't bad, not bad at all. I knew that Michaels topped up his salary with all kinds of business interests; in fact he'd once told me that he looked upon policework more as a recreation and a labor of love than as a career, to the extent that he'd declined to take the captains' exam because he didn't want to be taken off the streets.
Well, he was off them now.
I went around to the back, through a gate which should have been bolted, but which wasn't, into a yard where a stepped redwood deck overlooked a small swimming pool. There were leaves on the surface of the pool, and the patio door beyond stood open a couple of feet.
I unclipped my holster. Just in case.
The whole house had been pretty thoroughly turned-over. Drawers had been turned out and dumped, clothes pulled out of the closets and strewn, pictures clawed down from the walls in the search for a concealed safe. He'd uncovered one in the study, an iron safe with a combination lock, and although it was scratched and chipped he hadn't been able to get it open. Michaels' certificates of business practice still hung on the wall to either side. The desk beneath had been plundered and things like files and deeds and ranch prospectuses had bee
n thrown around in the hunt for cash and petty valuables to pawn. It was low, it was petty, it made me sick. To be able to live forever, and to choose to live like this.
I noticed one other thing before I left, and that was a letter lying on the mat behind the door. It had yesterday's postmark, and must have been delivered this morning. I didn't have to open it to know what was inside, because I recognised the stationery of Doctor Elaine Mulholland. Poor old Doc, sitting there in an empty office and none of her patients putting in an appearance. I hoped it wouldn't give her a complex, or anything.
Five minutes later I was back in my own area and responding to a call. No-one had even noticed that I'd been gone.
TWENTY-TWO
It was two whole days before he called me again, days that seemed to drag on forever. The city was quiet, although the fear was still everywhere; the sale in guard dogs was so heavy that animals were having to be trucked in from out of state, and gun shops couldn't keep up with the demand. One of the local radio stations took to playing Psycho Killer by Talking Heads until their board of management told them to stop, after which phone-in requests for the track increased tenfold. I read in the Phoenix Gazette that a small-time movie producer had taken a suite in the Hyatt and announced that he was going to step in and bid for the killer's story, as soon as he was caught. According to the paper his last movie had been Revenge of the Zombies and I sat there in the coffee shop, giggling and snorting helplessly and thinking Christ, if only he knew. Out on the streets, we had to cope with local vigilante groups who organised their own patrols and generally got in the way. We even had to break up a fight between two of them.
I was expecting him to hit again, and he probably knew it and was drawing me out as far as he could; but at least that way, nobody was dying.
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