by Lee Killough
For a moment, the similarity to his own grandmother seemed so strong, panic fluttered in him, wondering if she, too, possibly recognized him for what he was. But her hand never touched the crucifix around her neck or glanced toward the one hanging on the livingroom wall. She cordially invited him to sit down.
At the end of listening to his story, she looked him over with searching eyes. “You think my daughter Mada was friends with the mother of your father? May I see the photograph?”
Garreth handed it over.
After studying it for several minutes, she returned it, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t recognize any of those girls. I don’t know when Mada would have visited your grandmother’s house. She ran away to Europe in 1934.”
He gave her a shrug. “I needed to ask. Did your daughter ever come home again?”
“Not really, but Mada calls every week, no matter where she is.” The old woman beamed. “She’s a singer and travels all over, even to Mexico and Canada and Japan. I’d be satisfied with a letter — calling must be terribly expensive — but she says she enjoys hearing my voice.”
His breath caught. Jackpot! Now if he could learn where she called from most recently. “She calls every week? How lucky you are. Do you have a number for her? I’d like to call and ask her if she knows Mary and where she is or what happened to her.”
“I’m sorry. She never leaves a number…but I can ask her myself the next time she calls.”
The last thing he wanted! He made himself smile. “No, that’s fine. Don’t bother.”
“Then why don’t I give you my number and you call at Thanksgiving and ask her yourself.”
He caught his breath. “She’ll be here at Thanksgiving?”
“Or at Christmas. She always comes home for one of the holidays,” she said with satisfaction.
Garreth mentally pumped a fist. Yes! Lane came home. Lady Luck was a darling. Instead of running around the world looking for her, all he had to do was wait…let the fugitive come to him.
Spider Game
1
Wait for Lane. It sounded ideal but driving back to Hays, the exhilaration of being almost in capture distance faded. Reality set in. How could he wait? He needed to go home and face the review board if he wanted his badge back. Around the end of the week his father and mother would be expecting him home from the fictional hunting trip. He needed to get straight with Harry, too.
Brutal honesty said waiting for Lane was the worst possible course of action…an outsider sitting around in a town of what, two or three thousand for several months, arousing curiosity and maybe suspicion. Anna Bieber was bound to mention it to Lane in one of their phone calls and Lane would see right through the story, then never show up. He ought to just pass on his information to Serruto, even though Serruto would blow his top at what he had been doing, and let Serruto contact the local police, who could be waiting for Lane when she showed up.
There his reasoning stumbled. How could he ask the locals to arrest her. They had no idea what they were dealing with and if he tried to warn them, at best they would lock him in a padded cell.
How, though, could he justify to the department, friends, and family pretty much vanishing for several months. If he let them know where he was, they might interfere. What did he live on, since he could not, in good conscience, keep taking paychecks from the SFPD. Most of all, how could he plant himself here in reasonable inconspicuousness.
With no answers, back at the motel he nevertheless called Homicide. The coast being two hours earlier than here, Serruto should still be there.
He was…and sounded solicitous until Garreth said, “I can’t come back yet, and maybe just ought to resign like I wanted to originally. Because I’m thinking no one will ever trust me to back them up again. I’ll always be the guy who went wacko and got Harry shot.”
More significantly, how could he tolerate working days? The very thought exhausted him.
An exasperated hiss came over the line. “You’re becoming a major hemorrhoid, Mikaelian. Look, if you’re worried about the review board, I don’t see them being too harsh with you. After all, they know you were — ”
“Non compos mentis?”
“Under unusual stress, I was going to say,” Serruto said dryly. “Of course it would be better if you hadn’t strong-armed your way out of the hospital, but I’m thinking you’ll just have to spend a lot of time with the shrink before you come back.”
“I need more than that.”
“Like I said, you’re a major hemorrhoid, but…” He sighed. “…I didn’t wake up on that slab. Don’t resign yet. I’ll see about setting you up a leave of absence.”
“Without pay.” Though his gut knotted at the thought.
Another sigh. “How long do you want?”
“Until the end of the year.” By which time, with any luck, he would have nailed Lane and removed himself from this unwanted life.
2
With inconspicuousness being impossible, he decided to turn conspicuousness into an asset. Let everyone know his business. Once they did and satisfied their curiosity, with luck they would begin overlooking him the same way socks in the bedroom chair became invisible if you left them long enough. So shortly after dawn, he replenished the ice in his ice chest, checked out of his motel, and headed for Baumen.
Yesterday he spotted a hotel as he came into town, the Driscoll…a three-story building on the west side of Kansas Avenue, built of buff colored sandstone, like almost all the buildings downtown here. He had been noticing that stone everywhere: in houses, Baumen’s City Hall, the high school, some barns, even fence posts. It looked nice, he thought, not just the earthy color but the way it gave human habitation an appearance of growing from the prairie around it.
Inside, the Driscoll’s decor looked aged but like a favorite sweatshirt or jeans…oak pillars, a braided rug in the sitting area over a plank floor, leather chairs with the patina of soft old leather jackets, vases of bright fall flowers on side tables and the front desk. He guessed the rooms would be small…but cheap, Garreth hoped. The main reason he had by-passed the modern motel south of town.
At the front desk the clerk greeted him cheerfully…plump, approaching middle age, wearing a name tag engraved Violet Showalter. “Check in time is normally noon, but we have rooms ready for occupancy right now, so go ahead and register. I can even give you a room that opens onto one of the balconies out front.”
Facing the rising sun? He politely declined, then while signing in, told her all about his search for family. The way she hung on every word and prodded him for more information made him confident she would soon have the story spread around town.
His second floor room with its north-facing window — looking at the wall of the movie theater beyond the Chamber of Commerce next door — was cheap as he hoped, and smaller than he anticipated. Barely large enough for the bed, desk and chair, chest of drawers that also held the television, and a small arm chair and reading lamp. It had sacrificed size in some past remodel for the private bath Violet proudly touted for every room. Yet while small, the spotless bathroom and bedroom felt comfortable with themselves, like the lobby downstairs…unpretentious, I-am-what-I-am. More akin to a bed and breakfast than a hotel.
Violet did eye his ice chest warily. At the Holiday Inn he kept the chest in his car, but there the vehicle had been anonymous. Not here, parked on the street with his California plates conspicuous among the Kansas ones.
“What do you have there?”
She sounded suspicious, so he forced himself to open the chest, and even pull out a jug and unscrew the lid while giving her the protein drink story. Trying to keep cooler than he had been with Lien. People are curious about things someone seems reluctant to show or talk about, he reminded himself.
“Would you like to try some? It looks and smells weird but it’s very healthy.” Playing to the perception some people had of California as la-la land, he added, “All organic and natural ingredients. A holistic dietitia
n back home developed the formula.” He held the open top toward her.
She had already pulled back at organic and holistic. Now she put on a polite smile. “It’s kind of you to offer, but no thank you. When you need more ice, the Conoco convenience store has it.”
To avoid housekeeper curiosity, he shoved the chest under the bed with his suitcase and the rolled air mattress pallet in front of it.
The pallet he fingered longingly first. Daylight felt so much heavier today without the leavening of the hunt to make it bearable. How wonderful it would be forget the pretense of hunting ancestors and go comatose until sunset woke him.
After consideration, he wondered why not? As long as he spent the day away, people would assume he was hunting grandma. He just needed somewhere suitable to go to earth, as it were.
“Good luck,” Violet called as he passed the desk on the way out.
When he came back in the evening she greeted him with another smile. “You found your grandmother?”
He had been right about her assumption. Then the content of her question registered. Garreth blinked. “What makes you think that?”
“You look so pleased with yourself.”
Because he felt better than he had in days…even sleeping just three hours in the hideaway he spent most of the day hunting. Nothing like Dracula’s Carfax Abbey but appropriate to this part of the country, he thought, a barn behind the burned ruin of a farm house…roof falling in, leaning enough to keep people out. It seemed stable enough, though, when he pushed on its walls and support posts inside, and it felt and smelled wonderfully of earth. The shadows inside hid the car, and in deeper shadows yet where he spread a blanket from the car, he had stretched out and given himself to that earth.
The Garreth he played, though, would have another reason for his pleasure, which he would readily share. “I didn’t exactly find her, but a Mrs. Reed at the high school in Bellamy thinks she recognizes this girl.” He laid his photograph on the desk and pointed to a girl beside Grandma Doyle. “If she’s right, the name isn’t Mary Pfeifer — what I was afraid of — but Elizabeth something, maybe Pfannenstiel, and she lived in Trubel or on a farm around it.” He fought a temptation to embroider with gossip about a girl running off with an itinerant farm worker. Suspects tripped themselves up that way, talking too much. Did Kansas even have itinerant farm workers? Keep it simple, man, with room to change the story if you have to. “So tomorrow I’m headed for Trubel. Tonight,” he added, “I think I’ll change into a running suit and go jogging.”
“There’s a nice trail in Pioneer Park,” Violet said. “Go north past the stock pens. The park entrance is on the left before you cross the river.”
With his interest being blood, not exercise, he set off with an empty bottle hidden in his jacket and stayed on Kansas Avenue after it narrowed to two lanes on the west side of the railroad tracks, passed the railroad station and the stock pens Violet mentioned, then crossed the Saline River and became Country Road 16. The countryside, which had dropped from the plateau Bellamy sat on into the river valley around Baumen, rose again to rolling hills, pastureland lit by the waxing moon and divided by barb wire fences.
He kept following the highway, jogging leisurely, noting the location of farm houses and sections where cattle grazed…square-built beef, black or red-and-white. The number pleased him…cattle enough to avoid preying on one group too much.
After what he judged to be four or five miles, he stopped to catch his breath, then started back. At a pasture dotted with red-and-white cattle and no farm houses visible, Garreth checked up and down the highway for headlights that might be patrolling sheriff deputies. None showed so he vaulted the metal gate. Keeping the other night’s bull in mind, he approached a trio of animals with caution, though all were smaller than the Charolais. They lifted their heads and regarded him placidly. After a few moments, two returned to grazing. The third ambled toward him.
Garreth grinned. A volunteer. How convenient. “Hi there, fellow.”
Like the bull, the steer obediently lay down for him, and this time he hit the vein first try. After drinking a little to make sure he had a good stick, he sat back holding a finger over one puncture, letting the other continue bleeding, filling his bottle — pre-treated with anti-coagulant.
He watched with satisfaction. Okay, this worked. He had his blood supply secured.
Then one of the other steers snorted. Garreth tensed, ready to jump up and run…but the steer stared at something behind him. He looked around to see a pair of glowing eyes some twenty or so feet away.
The animal looked like a scrawny German Shepherd. A coyote?
The creature eyed him and the supine cow. Did coyotes attack cattle? Garreth waved an arm at it. “Get out of here. Scram!”
The coyote stayed put, eyes gleaming. Garreth stared back, holding the animal’s gaze while he capped the bottle, the puncture quit bleeding, and the steer had safely regained its feet. Only then did he turn away, and after giving the steer a pat of thanks, headed back for town.
With another jolt of alarm he found the coyote following about ten feet off to the side. Son of a bitch. Was there always going to be something threatening him out here? He turned to face the coyote, braced for an attack, but it came no closer…just resumed following when he finally continued on toward town. Garreth broke into a run and so did the coyote. It paced him like a shadow. Not a threat, he decided finally. The cock of its ears looked more like curiosity. Puzzled by Garreth’s not-quite-human scent? He relaxed.
The coyote stayed with him most of the way to town, until Garreth vaulted the fence onto the country road. Then it faded into the darkness of the prairie. Garreth jogged on into town alone.
After he crossed the bridge, a car came out of a road following the river and over the tracks to fall in behind him. Glancing over his shoulder, he identified a light bar and stuck up a hand in greeting.
The engine revved. A tan Crown Vic with POLICE on the door shot past and swung across his path to a tire-screeching halt.
“In a hurry to go somewhere, friend?”
A question without a trace of friendliness in it. Damn! And he carried a bottle of blood. “I’m just jogging.” Garreth knelt unhurriedly, as though to check a shoe, and slid the bottle from under his jacket into brush growing along the railroad right of way.
“In the middle of the night? Sure. Stand up and come over here! Put your hands on the car and spread your feet!”
Arrogant sounding son of a bitch. Angrily, Garreth spread-eagled against the car.
Moving up behind Garreth, the cop began frisking him, a cloying sweetness of aftershave almost masking the blood scent. Garreth also noted biceps straining at the tan shirt, knife creases in dark brown trousers, and a gear belt with a mirror shine.
“You do this like someone with lots of experience at it, friend.”
Which was more than could be said for Barney Fife here…never asking whether he had anything sharp or dangerous in his pockets, no hand on Garreth’s back to keep him against the car or detect the tension of someone about to move. The clown ran hands down both sides of him at once, then leaned down to check his legs with both hands…a perfect target for a kick backward, or a knee in his face if Garreth spun around. Any scumbag back home would have him on the ground in seconds, despite the bulging biceps. The frisk missed half the places a weapon might be hidden, too.
“You don’t carry identification?” Asked as if it were a felony.
Garreth kept his voice polite. “It’s back in my room at the Driscoll, but the name is Garreth Mikaelian.”
“Oh…that kid from California.”
The officer stepped back and let him turn around. The name tag on Barney’s shirt read: Duncan, and Garreth noticed Duncan bore a faint resemblance to Robert Redford. From the way the cop wore his hair, he thought so, too, and wanted to enhance the likeness.
“Sorry about the frisk.” Not sounding at all apologetic. “But you got to understand we can’t be too carefu
l with strangers. There’s a lot of drug traffic through the state.”
Garreth understood Duncan had probably been bored out of his skull and used the first opportunity to create some activity. He resented being used for it.
The car radio sputtered. Duncan climbed in and picked up the mike. “Big number Five here as always, doll. What do you need?” He had the car rolling away even before listening to the response.
Garreth let him pass the railroad station before retrieving the blood. That had been close. He would have to be more careful in the future. Though it gave him a hollow feeling thinking of fellow officers as “them” rather than “us” and made the next two months look miserable. All this could not be over soon enough.
3
Being able to sleep most of the day felt so good that being dragged awake a couple of hours before sunset by the alarm clock he took with him did not feel as annoying as it might have. Six o’clock seemed the reasonable time he would return if he were who he pretended to be. It almost took effort to wear a no-luck-today face back to the hotel.
Behind the desk, Violet sighed. “So that girl wasn’t your Mary?”
She had looked so hopeful as he came in, then crestfallen, that his conscience twitched for lying to her and prompted him to soften her disappointment. “I don’t know if they didn’t recognize her or it’s a case of ‘She dishonored this family so she’s dead to us.’”
Violet sniffed. “Yes, that’s the attitude some family patriarchs around here take. Don’t don’t let them put you off. Keep asking around.”
Garreth had to smile. “Thanks for the encouragement.” He glanced back toward the door. “There’s more traffic tonight than last night.”
She nodded. “It’s Thursday.”
“Thursday is special?”
“Oh, of course you wouldn’t know,” she said. “The stores stay open late, until ten.”
