Burning Man

by Alan Russell

  “You are sounding like judge, jury, and executioner.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being all three.”

  “Have you considered there might have been extenuating conditions? What if your mother was mentally ill, like Moses’s mother?”

  “Being sick in the head doesn’t give you a free pass to kill your child. Moses’s mother went off her meds. That was her choice, and her son died because of it.”

  “So you think she should have gone to jail?”

  “Damned right,” I said. Because of her schizophrenia, Moses’s mother had skated on any jail time, and that still rankled.

  “You don’t see any circumstances where you could forgive these mothers?”

  “I’m a cop, Lisbet, and my job is to enforce the laws of our fair city.”

  “Enforcement is one thing but exacting vengeance is another.”

  “And just how am I exacting vengeance?”

  “It sounds as if your own abandonment comes into play.”

  “If that’s part of my motivation, why is it a bad thing? You don’t want to see justice handed out to these women?”

  “I don’t think all these cases are the same, and I don’t think there is any one punishment that fits the crime.”

  “I guess we don’t see eye to eye then.”

  “Or eye for an eye?”

  “There’s that, too.”

  We sipped our wine. With anyone else I probably could have been assured of my self-righteousness, but not with Lisbet. She might not have been abandoned herself, but she dealt with the consequences of abandoned babies, making her more than entitled to her opinion. Besides, she didn’t let me pout for long. My high dander was interrupted by her stretching out her bare foot and tickling me in the ribs.

  I grabbed said foot while taking note of its shapely toes and high arch, and began tickling it in turn. After our squirming and laughing was done we were in each other’s arms again, where the only thing we were tickling was each other’s fancy. Our touching became more urgent until Lisbet gave herself some space from my hands.

  “You and the wine are making me dizzy.”

  “Clear thinking is overrated.”

  “You really should spend the night so I don’t have to worry about you.”

  “I think you’d have more to worry about if I spent the night.”

  “The sofa bed really is comfortable.”

  “If that’s the extent of my options, I should probably hit the road.”

  Lisbet bit her lip and then opened her mouth to say something, but I interrupted her before she could speak. “I have to be leaving anyway. The last twenty-four hours have been a roller coaster, and tomorrow I have a ton of work waiting for me.”

  She nodded, and I was glad to see that Lisbet looked disappointed, or at least that’s how I wanted to interpret it. “Promise me you’ll be careful tonight.”

  “I promise.”

  We sealed the promise with a kiss.

  Lisbet walked me to the door, where we did a little more canoodling, and where I told her, “I could canoodle with you all night.”

  That made her laugh and ask, “Are you sure you have to go?”

  Her eyes made their offer to me, and it was one I wanted to take up, but I said, “I think I better.”

  I took my leave with a last kiss. What Lisbet didn’t know was that what stopped me from staying more than anything else was the prospect of my dreams. It was too late to explain about them and me. I didn’t want to venture into her bed and then wake up screaming and burning. I was more afraid of that than the two of us sharing our bodies for the very first time.

  I should have told her, I thought. It’s not good to start a relationship with a lie, and that’s what it felt like I had done.

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said, the echo reverberating around the parking garage. It seemed an appropriate rhyme, and I remembered the next line: “Hanging from a telephone wire.”

  Ever since the fire I had been hanging. My burning had never stopped, and I hadn’t yet found a way to get beyond that.

  “You got a stupid partner,” I told Sirius.

  He didn’t argue.

  CHAPTER 17:

  THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

  It had been a hell of a day. I was hoping it wouldn’t be a hell of a night. My burning dreams had been working overtime lately. When they occur two or three times a week, I try to tell myself that’s manageable. Of late, though, it had been a nightly event. My cases seemed to be stirring up my subconscious and the end result was me burning.

  The next day was Sunday, I told myself. I could sleep in.

  I remembered when Jen had shared my bed. We always held one another before turning in. If Jenny kissed me on the lips, that meant she wasn’t ready for sleep. A kiss on the nose was another matter. That meant it was time to snooze. That kiss on my nose always brought a smile to my lips, and the next thing I knew it was morning.

  I touched my nose for luck. Within seconds I fell asleep. You’d think I would have been too exhausted to have had one of my dreams. My subconscious begged to differ. As usual, hell broke loose in the middle of the night. Most people drool if they’re sleeping deeply. I am into combustion.

  The fiery blast furnace, pushed by the swirling winds, blew into my face. I recoiled from it, but too late. The fire was being blown every which way and there was no escaping it. We staggered away from the worst of the heat and paused to catch our breath. With so much smoke in the air, there seemed to be a great divide between me and the Strangler, but there was only the length of a dying dog that separated us.

  The light from the burning fires allowed me to see his face. His features were almost totally black from all the smoke and soot. The Strangler’s eyebrows had been singed away along with much of his hair, and I knew the flames had exacted the same toll on me. His eyes were red and enflamed, and they were so deep within his sockets they looked like burning embers. But he could still see well enough to plot.

  I watched him take a quick peek over his head and sensed he was ready to make a run for it. The Strangler knew how hobbled I was, knew that every step hurt like hell.

  “You can’t outrun a bullet,” I croaked. “Before you get two steps away I’ll empty my gun into you.”

  He reconsidered his flight, if not his plight. “The dog’s dead,” he said. “We have to think of ourselves.”

  I forced myself to look at Sirius. If the Strangler was right, I knew what I’d have to do. “Put him down,” I said, “carefully.”

  We lowered Sirius to the ground. As I dropped to one knee I kept my gun pointed at the Strangler.

  “See,” the Strangler said. “He’s not breathing.”

  Earlier Sirius had been panting wildly, but now he was still. My heart started pounding, and the static inside my head made it impossible for me to hear anything other than my surging blood pressure. With my free hand I reached out and touched Sirius’s chest.

  Nothing.

  The Strangler looked hopeful. He wanted Sirius to be dead. He thought that not having to carry a heavy dog around would be a good thing for him. He was wrong. My trigger finger tightened, but at that moment Sirius’s paw moved and then his chest rose.

  “He’s alive,” I said.

  “We can’t...”

  I moved my Glock no more than half an inch; I wasn’t going to miss. The way I was feeling, it didn’t really matter to me whether the Strangler cooperated or not.

  “We’ll lift him on three,” I said.

  “We have a chance to live if we leave him. We’re dead if we don’t.”

  “One.”

  “If we find a way out of here we can send help for him.”

  “Two.”

  The Strangler’s head jerked in my direction. He could hear the intent in my voice and he suddenly realized that there were two counts going on, and that one of those counts was going to end very badly for him. He dropped down and placed his hands underneath Sirius, and it took me a moment to realize what I wa
s feeling: disappointment. Now I would have to keep going.

  “Three,” I whispered, but instead of my shooting the Strangler, we lifted Sirius up and started walking. It was up to me to lead, even though I didn’t know how to lead anymore and hadn’t for some time.

  Fire blew our way again, and the pain made me cry out. It surprised me that I was still alive enough to feel.

  Something dug into my arm, and I felt pressure on my chest. I opened my eyes to see my shepherd hovering over me. One of his front paws was on my arm, and the other was on my chest.

  “I’m all right,” I said, patting him.

  Once again I had done my Lazarus act and returned from the dead, but this time, more than any other of my resurrections, I recognized that being alive was a good thing. It hadn’t always been that way. When you’re severely burned it takes a long time to get better, but that had been the easier recovery for me. After Jen’s death I tried to hide from everyone how bad off I was. Few people had any idea I was a basket case, and my severe burning had helped to mask my other symptoms.

  My dreams were now forcing me to look back. There was no longer any hiding from what I’d been. Part of me had wanted to die in the fire. Jen’s death had left me a hollow man, a shell ripe for going up in flames. Being responsible for my partner was the only reason I hadn’t let myself become a human flare. As bad as reliving the burning was, facing up to the old emotions was worse. It was a hell of a lesson to keep on burning night after night.

  My moment after stripped away my veneer. I had gone out into that fire wanting to die. Ironically, getting burned probably saved my life. I had been contemplating suicide, but I hadn’t wanted it to look like a suicide. That was my own personal insight. I had a feeling my vision somehow applied to the Klein case, but I didn’t know how.

  Inspiration might strike, I told myself, if I got more sleep. Later, I told myself, I would think about it. And then, knowing I wouldn’t burn anymore that night, I fell asleep again and awakened much later than usual.

  Every PTSD burning takes its toll. Satchell Paige once posed the question, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” In the morning following a burning I usually awaken feeling as old as Methuselah. When I got up, I was parched and drained and achy. I downed an Advil with two glasses of water and then started thinking about my moment after.

  My visions—for want of a better word—are not always straightforward, but unlike dreams I always remember every detail of them. I would like to believe that the after-fire message comes from my subconscious, but I don’t know if that’s an adequate explanation. Before my walk through fire I was never prescient, but now some strange door seems to have opened up for me. My oracle demands a high price, though. It needs its pound of burning flesh.

  I made myself a breakfast of Cheerios and coffee. While I sipped my coffee, I thought briefly about my moment after but didn’t stay with it for long. It was too personal. I didn’t like remembering the suicidal thoughts that I’d had and was glad that darkness was no longer with me.

  During my talk with Karen Santos, she had recalled seeing a “feisty” bird on the sweatshirt of the young woman that had bought the baby bootees at the monastery’s gift shop. Her impression was that the bird was gold or brown and belonged to a college. It was time to find that bird. I started entering information into my laptop.

  “Road Runner,” I hummed as I typed, “the coyote’s after you.”

  The search engine told me there were more than twenty four-year colleges in Los Angeles, Orange, and San Fernando Counties. The mascots were varied: there were lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), as well as an anteater, a beaver and, yes, a roadrunner. There were mascot characters such as Prospector Pete, Matty the Matador, and Johnny Poet (which makes sense only if your school is named after the poet John Whittier), and nonanimal mascots in the forms of titans, Trojans, and waves.

  There were also two eagle mascots. One belonged to Biola University, and the other to Cal State, Los Angeles.

  I went to the website for each school. Both of their eagles looked feisty, but the CSULA golden eagle looked more like the bird that Santos had described. It was golden brown and black, and had an attitude. The demographics and location of the school also made it a more likely choice. Biola University was located in La Mirada, about a forty-minute drive from the Monastery of the Angels, whereas Cal State, LA was only about five miles from the monastery, with the same Interstate 10 passing by both of them. The more I read about CSULA, the more it fit the profile of the young woman Karen Santos had seen in the gift shop. Sixty percent of the Cal State, LA undergrads are women, and almost half of those are Hispanic. The vast majority of the university’s twenty-one thousand students lived off campus. Assuming Rose’s mother was a typical commuter student, it wouldn’t have been hard for her to maintain a low profile while attending classes. No one might have even noticed she was pregnant.

  Sorting through my notes, I tried to find Karen Santos’s telephone number. Some of my notes had gotten scattered after the attack on me, and the only home number I could find was that of Dottie Antonelli.

  When I dialed her up I said, “I’d like to return a barely used Saint Jude’s medal.”

  Dottie didn’t sound surprised to be hearing from me. “It’s about time that you called to say thank you.”

  “And what am I thanking you for?”

  “I’m thinking those Saint Jude and Saint Michael medals saved your life.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not crediting the pumpkin bread as well.”

  “Who says I’m not?”

  “Is there a patron saint for pumpkin bread?”

  “There’s a patron saint for farmers: Saint Isidore the Farmer.”

  “Thanks for distinguishing. Like there would be another saint named Isidore.”

  “For your information there’s at least one other saint named Isidore.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I am not.”

  “But there is only one Saint Isidore the Farmer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “With a patron saint named Isidore the Farmer, it’s no wonder that there are so many jokes about farmers’ daughters.”

  “I hope you’re not calling to tell me one of those jokes.”

  “It didn’t start out that way, but maybe you’ll get lucky. I called for Karen Santos’s number.”

  “I’m afraid that puts me in a bit of a dilemma, Detective. We’re not supposed to give out the phone numbers of our volunteers.”

  “She already gave me her number. I misplaced it.”

  Heavy on the mock skepticism, Dottie said, “Is that so?”

  It took me a moment to interpret what was going on. “You’re shaking me down again, aren’t you?”

  “Did you know that Saint Michael is the patron saint of law enforcement? We just got in a shipment with some new Saint Michael medals. I’d be glad to put one aside for you, along with a few other choice items.”

  “How much is all that going to set me back?”

  “Your donation of a hundred dollars will be greatly appreciated.”

  “Who’s the patron saint of extortionists?”

  “I don’t believe there is one.”

  “In that case, you want me to write a recommendation letter for you to the pope?”

  “If you do, don’t forgot to mention our statue fund. You do remember what our beautiful statue of Saint Dominic and Our Lady looked like, don’t you?”

  I remembered only too well. “That concrete foundation saved my life.”

  In a tone suddenly as serious as mine, Dottie said, “God saved your life.”

  Even though we both knew that insurance was going to cover the repair of the statue, I said, “Forget the Benjamin and put me down for two fifty. But that donation comes with strings. Does the gift shop ship items?”

  “That can be arranged.”

  “In that case I want a monthly monastery candy-gram.”

  Soundi
ng all too pleased, Dottie said, “You want a box of our chocolates sent to you every month?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “It worked, didn’t it? Talk about a miracle. You found a woman through that box of chocolates.”

  “It wasn’t the chocolates.”

  She offered up a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort and said, “Yeah, right.”

  “The real miracle will be you giving me Karen Santos’s number.”

  “Temperance is one of the seven heavenly virtues.”

  “Right now it’s feeling a lot more like one of the seven deadly sins.”

  She gave me the number.

  Luck was with me—Karen Santos was home and said she would be glad to help me with my bird hunt. I waited while she turned on her computer and then directed her first to the Biola University site. As she studied their eagle she made a lot of uncertain sounds before finally saying, “It’s possible that’s the bird I saw, but I can’t be sure.”

  From there she went to the Cal State, Los Angeles site, navigating from the athletic department, to a picture of the school’s mascot, to the T-shirt and sweatshirt offerings at the bookstore. With each jump of a webpage she became increasingly more enthusiastic. “The CSULA lettering looks very familiar,” she said, “and I am all but sure that’s the right eagle.”

  I thanked Mrs. Santos. The eagle had landed.

  Assuming Rose’s mother was a student at CSULA, I needed to find the best way to leave her a message. Since CSULA was mostly a commuter school, students would be dependent on getting their news online or from a school newspaper. I did another computer search and found the school had a student newspaper that came out every Friday called the University Times.

  I started writing entries in my notepad. If I could get the student newspaper to run a story, Rose’s mother might take notice. I blocked out the story as I wanted to see it in print, omitting information I didn’t want to disclose, and embellishing on that which I wanted to play up. A cynical reporter might have said I was playing fast and loose with the facts. If I was lucky, the fledgling journalists working at the University Times weren’t old enough to be cynical.