Deep into the Dark

by P. J. Tracy

  “I think it might be. We’ll see in the morning.”

  “Thanks for everything, Rolf,” Melody said kindly, her words slurring slightly.

  His face twisted in an impish smile. “Hey, before we all hit it, I want to show you something I’m considering using as a set piece in the film. It will really blow your mind.”

  Sam shook his head, a definitive no. He’d had enough of that action lately.

  “The pool with the waterfall?” Melody asked.

  “No, this is way better. It really gets the creative juices flowing. Come on, let me take you into Pops’s office. It’ll just take a second.”

  They reluctantly followed him down a broad, dim hallway that had a decidedly spooky, haunted mansion feel. He pushed open two double doors and gestured them into a relatively small room—only half the size of a football field—but it was dark and the only thing visible in the ambient light from the hall were book-lined shelves and a massive desk.

  Rolf clicked on a switch and a spotlight illuminated a corner, revealing a grotesque, terrifying specter: a life-sized human body stripped down to bone, muscle, and sinew.

  Melody screamed, and Sam felt a sudden, startling fury consume him. “What the fuck is wrong with you, taking us to see some fucked-up movie prop before we go to bed? You stupid son of a bitch!”

  Rolf’s face fell and he backed up a few steps. “It’s not a prop, it’s a real person. That’s why it’s so cool. That’s why I thought you’d want to see it.”

  “It’s … a real person?” Melody squeaked.

  “Haven’t you heard of Body Worlds? Gunther von Hagens? He’s an anatomist who came up with this technique called ‘plastination’ that preserves bodies. He’s really famous and has exhibitions all over the world.”

  “You think that’s cool?” Sam asked in a shaky voice.

  “It is cool. It’s amazing. Educational. Inspiring. It helped me get off smack, seeing how delicate the body really is.”

  “This can’t be legal.”

  “Sure it is. All the bodies are donated. This stuff is in museums. Pops was able to get one for his private collection because Gunther is a good friend of his.”

  Sam felt Melody’s hand tugging on his arm. “We’re going to go to bed now, Rolf. Good night.”

  He trotted after them. “Hey, look, I’m really sorry if I freaked you out, I just thought … people wait in line for hours and hours to see Body Worlds, and half of them don’t ever get in. You might never get to see it, and I wanted to give you the chance. And I wanted to know your opinion about how it could work for the film.”

  Melody turned around. “If your film is a horror movie, it’s perfect. I accept your apology, Rolf, but you don’t spring things like that on people out of the blue.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I hope there are no hard feelings.”

  “We’ll see you in the morning, Rolf.”

  A small woman in a maid’s uniform came scurrying down the hall. “Señor, is everything okay? I thought I heard a scream.”

  “Everything’s fine, Consuela, we just had a scare. These are my friends who are staying the night, Sam and Melody.”

  She looked at them both, and for a very brief moment an expression of horror or shock or both passed over her face. Then it was gone. “You sure you’re okay, Miss?”

  “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  She bobbed her head, then rushed away.

  Sam knew the look; he’d seen it plenty of times before. Consuela probably felt the same way about seeing his face as he did about seeing a dead body in somebody’s office. If you weren’t prepared for either one, it was a shock.

  “I’m sorry about Consuela, too,” Rolf said, watching her retreat down the hall. “That was so rude, the way she looked at you. Normally she wouldn’t do anything like that, but she hasn’t been herself since she found one of her clients dead.”

  Chapter Sixty-one

  MELODY SAT ON THE EDGE OF Sam’s bed and put her head in her hands.

  “God, that was so freaky.” She looked up at him. Mascara made raccoon rings around her eyes. “I don’t think I want to be here anymore.”

  Sam pulled two bottles of water out of the bar fridge and passed her one. “We can leave right now. I’ll call Nolan. I’m sure she’d be happy to pick us up.”

  “Sam, you’re drunk, too, and you don’t want to tangle with the cops now.”

  “Why not? I wouldn’t be the first person to get drunk after someone they loved was murdered. And it would explain why I dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “You can explain it tomorrow. Sleep it off, it will be better that way.” She stood up and started pacing. “I was actually having fun until that … thing.”

  “Rolf is an idiot and he’s drunk, which compounds the fundamental problem.”

  “I guess.” Melody stepped out onto the balcony and Sam joined her. She pointed to the lights illuminating the windows of a stone cottage below, partially obscured by jacaranda trees. “That must be the guest house.”

  “Rolf’s burning the midnight oil.”

  “Do you think he has talent?”

  “I’m not the best judge, but yeah, I think he does. But he needs to work on his social skills.”

  “Dylan and Bunny.” She shook her head. “We should try to get some sleep.”

  “Yeah.”

  “See you in the morning.”

  “Night, Mel. And if you don’t want to be alone, you can always come in here. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  “Thanks, I’m okay.”

  “Just knock if you change your mind.”

  After she’d left, Sam flopped onto the bed and stared up at the canopy. It made him feel claustrophobic, even in a room this large, and it made his head spin and his stomach roil. God, he’d fucked up, getting drunk. He’d fucked up coming here in the first place, and he had zero confidence in his ability to make rational decisions anymore. It was like that part of his brain had shriveled up and died.

  He closed his eyes, which made the spinning and nausea worse. He thought about taking another pill, then decided against it and instead got another bottle of water from the bar and gulped it down. Hangovers were mainly dehydration; hopefully it would help.

  There was a knock on the door, one he hadn’t been expecting, at least not so soon. “Come in, Mel.”

  But it wasn’t Mel. It was Consuela the maid and she looked upset. Uncertain. Apologetic. But she didn’t seem to be horrified by his face anymore because she was looking straight at him with an unwavering, desperate gaze that made him wonder if she was here against her will and wanted help from a stranger to get her out. “Is something wrong? Do you need help?”

  “No, no, I’m sorry to bother you…”

  “You’re not bothering me, it’s okay.”

  “I … I need to show you something.”

  Great, somebody else in this madhouse wanted to show him something. “What?”

  She looked out into the hall nervously, and Sam gestured her into the room with a reassuring look. “Come in, it’s okay. Close the door and tell me.”

  She did, with obvious relief. “You a friend of Señor Rolf?”

  “We just met. He wants me to be in his film. What do you want to show me?”

  She started tangling her fingers together like she was trying to knit them. “A room downstairs. Señor Rolf uses many times, for many hours, then locks it, but he don’t know I have a key.” She scowled in frustration, trying to find words. “Señor Hans worries when he’s gone. Señor Rolf had drug problem before, so he give me key to every room.”

  “So you can check on him, make sure he’s not doing drugs?”

  She nodded. “It’s not normal, him in that room all the time when he has guest house. Acting very secret. I clean the guest house, I think maybe he uses room for bad things. So I go in one day when he isn’t here. No drugs, but pictures. I think maybe for his film. But when I saw you tonight, I went back to the room after Señor Rolf went to bed…”
Tears started rolling down her cheeks.

  “Pictures of what?”

  “Of you and your friend. There were pictures of Señor Gallagher, too, my client, he just died.”

  Chapter Sixty-two

  WHILE NOLAN WAITED FOR CALTRANS TO get back to her about additional traffic cam footage, she kept rewinding the tape of the woman getting into the Jeep. It was a tiny, poor, low-resolution image. She wouldn’t be able to recognize her if she walked into the office right now.

  “What are you working on?” Crawford asked.

  “I want to ID this woman, but the picture is shit.”

  “How is a better picture going to help with an ID?”

  “It’s LA, she could be famous.”

  “Or she could be one of the thousands of nobodies who drive black Jeeps.”

  “Could be, but I’m not going to sit on my ass, waiting for a miracle.”

  “Miracles happen, Reverend Bandy says so.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “A televangelist Corinne listens to on Sundays. Drives me nuts, but it makes her happy. She told me a cop’s wife can’t afford to be agnostic. Kind of ironic since this job is the fastest way I know to lose your faith.”

  “Nice to have someone praying for you.”

  “Yeah, it kind of is. Call Ike in Tech. Have him plug the footage into his enhancement software and run it through facial recognition. It might be your miracle.”

  Ike was still in his office. He was always in his office. Nolan wondered if he ever went home. She didn’t know much about him, just that he didn’t have a family, he liked to drink, and he kept a bottle of Jack Daniels in his desk. He also didn’t say much, which she thought was an exemplary quality. In general, cops talked too much and criminals talked too much. His youthful face was drawn, and he hadn’t shaved in a while. He looked like a man with demons, but she’d never know what they were. Another mystery that wasn’t hers to solve.

  “The facial recognition will take a while, but if you want to hang around for ten, fifteen minutes, I can work up the enhancement for you.”

  “Thanks, Ike, I appreciate it.”

  He got up from his desk and moved a stack of files to clear a chair for her. “Have a seat. Do you want a drink? A little Old No. 7?”

  “I desperately want a shot of Jack, but I can’t, it would put me under.” She sat down and closed her eyes while she waited, trying to make sense of Easton’s address on a scrap of paper in a shooting gallery where two murders had taken place. An addicted war buddy named Ronald Doerr in town before his final tour, hoping to score some drug money? No, that didn’t make sense, the Army wouldn’t have taken him back if he had a problem. Of course, he could have cleaned up, or maybe the cryptic note meant something else entirely and had nothing to do with Easton.

  To her amazement, she dozed off, jerking awake when Ike waved a printout at her. “This is the best I can do. You should get some rest. You conked out about two seconds after you sat down.”

  “I’m eternally embarrassed.” And she was, but she didn’t think Ike would rat her out.

  “Don’t be, nobody can run on fumes forever, I’ve tried it.”

  She got up and took the paper. Ike hadn’t had much to work with, but the enhancement was good enough that she instantly recognized the woman who’d gotten into the black Jeep. Consuela Ortiz, the housekeeper who’d found Ryan Gallagher dead.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  SAM HAD NEVER FELT COLDER, NOT even when he’d lost half of his blood on a dusty roadside in Afghanistan. The room Consuela showed him was filled with vases of white and red roses and plastered with Poke gig flyers and posters. There were countless other pictures of Melody, too: on stage, in her house, entering his house, behind the bar at Pearl, at a nail shop and a grocery store, in her bed sleeping. In some of the photos, she had short black hair and there was no shamrock tattoo on her bicep. Back before Sam knew her. Jesus Christ, Rolf had been following her for years.

  And there were photos of him: at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on La Cienega, jogging different streets, sitting beneath a coral tree on San Vicente (yesterday morning?), his official Army portrait; some photos of Dr. Frolich; and more of Yuki, with him, and also with Dawson Lightner—kissing in front of a hotel, tangled together in the bedroom of her bungalow. Photos of a dark-haired man with “Ryan Gallagher” scrawled in black marker at the bottom. There were Xs over his eyes. There was also a huge whiteboard with addresses, names, phone numbers, life histories. He stumbled to a corner and vomited in a big ceramic vase.

  Consuela was sobbing. “I didn’t know what to do…”

  Sam wiped his mouth and stood up. “Call the police, Consuela. I’m going to get my friend Melody, and then we’re all going to leave, okay?”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  They both froze at the voice behind them.

  “Nobody’s leaving.”

  Consuela let out a sharp cry and cowered on the floor. Sam spun around and saw Rolf in the hallway, gun raised. But it wasn’t a little pea shooter; it was a big military rifle, an M4, the kind Sam had killed a lot of people with overseas. If he pulled the trigger, they’d both be cut to ribbons.

  Rolf gave him an odd smile. “I got this gun for you, Telegram Sam. You know how to use one so well, I thought it might come in handy for the film. Do you like my research? It’s pretty exhaustive, that’s why the script turned out so well. If you’d read the whole thing, you would have known that.” He looked down at Consuela, who was grasping the cross at her neck, praying in Spanish. “You really shouldn’t have done this, Consuela. This was for my eyes only. It could ruin everything.”

  She shrieked and curled into an even tighter ball in the corner. Rolf trained his gun on her.

  “Put down the gun, Rolf.”

  “No can do, sorry.”

  Sam lurched for it, knocking the barrel away from Consuela, then dove when a jagged orange flower flared in the darkness, accompanied by the deafening sound of battle. That was all it took to bring him back to Afghanistan, and everything went dark. Deep into the dark.

  * * *

  A scream. Gunfire. Melody jerked up in bed, breathless, with ice in her veins. A drunken dream? A horrible dream, the kind Sam had sometimes? She lay perfectly still, listening. The house was silent.

  She slid from beneath the covers, found her phone in her tote bag, and turned it on. She autofilled her password just in case she needed the phone, just in case the scream and the gunfire had been real. Password denied. And denied again and again until she was locked out. Her flesh tingled because this had never happened before. Had there been some operating system breakdown or, more likely, had she been hacked? She thought of the Wi-Fi at Pearl and how willingly and stupidly she’d accessed it and left herself wide open to any number of guests savvy enough to hack her and see what the pretty bartender was doing on her phone.

  The thought made her stomach churn, and it also fueled fear—maybe her stalker knew where she was right now. She rummaged frantically in her rollaboard for her gun, buried beneath layers of clothes. When she retrieved it, it wobbled erratically in her shaking hand. At this point, she’d be lucky to hit a building two feet away; more likely, she’d shoot herself in the foot.

  Gun in hand, she crawled to the door and listened some more. It was still silent. Part of her felt supremely stupid, another part of her felt a panic so deep that she was afraid it would paralyze her if she didn’t move right now. What voice did she listen to this time?

  She stood on weak, trembling legs, entered the hall, and tiptoed down to Sam’s door. It was open slightly, a slice of light issuing through the crack, painting a warm gold line on the rug. She stood there for a moment, listening to her heavy breath echo in her ears. Hadn’t he heard anything? “Sam?” she whispered.

  Melody pushed the door open. The bed was empty.

  Something was wrong.

  That was the voice she was going to listen to, the voice Sam had wanted her to pay attention to. She gathered her
strength and courage and moved very quietly out of the room to the staircase.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  SAM CAME TO SLOWLY, LIGHT AND colors and disjointed images of photos swirling before his eyes, a nauseating psychedelia of malformed input. As far as he could tell, he was still alive and still in Rolf’s sick collage room, but his hands were fastened to the back of the chair he was sitting on, his ankles to the legs of the chair, with no memory of how he’d gotten there—just a memory of a loud and grimly colorful burst of automatic gunfire. He didn’t feel any pain, no wooziness from blood loss, so he hadn’t been hit. But he didn’t know how Consuela had fared. He didn’t even know if any of this was real.

  He tried to yank his hands free, but the bonds held fast. That seemed pretty goddamned real to him, but Rondo had, too, so he still wasn’t positive, and he hated and feared the feeling.

  “Telegram Sam, welcome back.”

  Rolf’s blurry face and his blurry gun moved into his line of sight and he tried to focus. “Are you real?”

  “Flesh and blood real. You really do have some problems. I hope Dr. Frolich and Dr. Guzman can figure them out. I honestly do. You’re a good guy. A great man, too.”

  His vision finally cleared, and so did Rolf, sitting in a sofa across from him, gun resting on his knee. There had been some small consolation in the uncertainty that everything might be a hallucination, a bad dream, like he’d been hoping for when he’d learned about Yuki’s murder, but he knew this was reality now. He could see it sitting in front of him; he could smell it in the cordite of a freshly fired weapon that permeated the room. “Where’s Consuela?”

  “I locked her up in another room.”

  “The police are on their way, Rolf. Melody would have called them when she heard gunfire.”

  He giggled. “She can’t, her phone is locked. I hacked into it a long time ago, just like I hacked into yours. So, what should we do now?”

  The cops aren’t on their way. Bad situation. FUBAR.