Devil Creek

by Mertz, Stephen

  Ben smiled a small smile that conveyed nothing. “Just my old mind picking up dots and wondering if they connect.”

  Mike grinned. “Is there any hour of the day when you’re not a cop?”

  “Sometimes in my dreams,” said Ben, “I play the violin. Not the fiddle like in country music, but the goll-dang violin. In my dream, I’m playing in packed concert halls and I think it’s in the old days. You know, like Mozart and Beethoven. I don’t know nothing about classical music but there I am in my dream, playing classical music. I don’t know what the hell that damn dream is supposed to mean, but when I’m having that dream, that’s when I’m not a cop. But the rest of the time? Yeah, I’m trying to connect the dots. I like to know what’s going to happen before it happens, if I can.”

  Mike said, “Don’t we all. So how would a dead old Indian named Gray Wolf fit in with Sunrise Ridge?”

  “I was just asking. Nothing but idle late-night talk. I appreciate you having me over and sharing what you’ve got on that tape, in case anything does happen.”

  “It will.”

  “I mean besides you going up to that construction site hot under the collar. Well, goodnight, amigo. You’ve got a good woman and a good kid depending on you. Play a cool hand, son.”

  “I will, Chief. Thanks for coming over.”

  He thought, And it’s past time I got myself home to that good woman.

  Movement across the street caught his eye.

  A silver Altima drew away from the opposite curb, where it had been parked. The engine must have been idling, because he didn’t hear it start. As it first moved away from the curb, past them and down the street, the Altima traveled briefly with headlights off, as if the driver had first hoped not to draw the attention of the men who had emerged onto the porch. Mike got the idea that the driver had The Clarion office under surveillance, or was waiting for someone or something, and was startled by their appearance.

  The Altima was picking up speed when it passed through a pool of illumination cast by a streetlight, and the face of the driver was briefly revealed at a distance of several hundred feet.

  Mike’s throat constricted. His stomach became a cold knot. His heart skipped a beat. The driver was staring directly at him and he glimpsed high cheekbones and blonde hair worn shoulder-length, and he met her steady, penetrating stare across that distance.

  Then the Altima was past the pool of light and the face was lost to darkness. The Altima’s lights came on as she continued gaining speed away from there.

  Ben said, “Nice car, good-looking woman but bad driving. My daughter drives like that. Headlights should be on before you pull away from the curb. Let’s see how she takes the stop sign.”

  The Altima reached the corner, glided to a slow crawl past the stop sign and took the turn without signaling or coming to a complete halt, continuing on the main road and leaving their line of vision.

  Mike thought, That’s the way Carol used to drive.

  He remembered nagging her—sometimes it was good-natured and loving but, he had to admit in fairness, sometimes it was not—about her driving habits, after they were married in Albuquerque.

  This person he loved and adored, the woman who was going to be the mother of his child, was such a conscientious human being in so many ways—recycled aluminum, donated regularly to the breast cancer fund, kept herself in good physical condition—and yet her driving habits were absolutely atrocious. The only thing that had bugged him more than her changing lanes on the freeway without signaling was the way she did those glides around corners without bothering to use her turn signal. What they called a “cop stop” when Mike was a kid, except that Carol had never grown out of it. The funny thing was, she was a safe driver. She’d never been in an accident, not even a fender bender.

  Mike felt a wave of sadness wash through him, and it must have shown on his face.

  Ben said, “What is it, Mike? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  The face of a ghost, thought Mike, glimpsed for the briefest instant, triggering the nightmare image that shone in his mind so clearly because it was an indelible memory, seared into his soul, lying dormant within him, always there to be awakened by unexpected stimuli; the sort of thing that alcohol was made to help with, to numb the pain of memory, to mute the image that made his soul bleed.

  He and Carol had been living in a furnished apartment, close to the campus.

  A police officer had brusquely torn away the sheet from her face without a word of warning to him, that night of the murder, and Mike, already in shock after hearing the news, had looked upon ugly bruises around her throat, her wide open eyes, the purple tongue protruding from her mouth, her dead eyes wide open… .

  Those were the eyes he had looked into during the span of seconds when the Altima had passed through the pool of light. Ben said, “Mike, are you okay? What is it?”

  It wasn’t the first time he’s encountered a woman in passing who had reminded him of Carol. He thought of her with a pang of grief every day, and it was one of the blessings of his life that Robin understood. If he had not personally peered down at Carol’s brutalized body during those first hours when the cops had actually suspected that he had perpetrated the horror, if he had not known firsthand that his first wife was dead and gone, well, he thought he saw her once on a crowded, bustling concourse at LAX when he’d flown to Los Angeles for a regional newspaper conference. And he’d seen her as the passenger of a car passing him through snow flurries on an Albuquerque freeway. Heck, he’d seen her once as an unnamed extra in a popular television cop drama. It wasn’t a fixation, seeing a different woman in passing once every three years or so who reminded you of your deceased wife. But … he had never looked into her eyes before.

  “I’m all right, Chief,” he told Ben Saunders. “Think I’ll lock up and get home to Robin.”

  Chapter Nine

  It had been the most incredible dream—or nightmare?—that Paul had ever had, and it stayed with him well into the next day.

  In the dream, he was an Indian. Today he would have been called a Native American, but this dream did not take place today, but in the wild, violent old West. He was a brave, a warrior, riding his pony bareback at a full gallop with a band of braves, some of whom hefted lances; others were armed with bows and arrows, and a few held repeating rifles.

  They were swooping down on a small cavalry unit seeking cover behind a defensive circle made of the cavalrymen’s dead horses.

  And then, strangely, he became one of the soldiers, hunched there upon the hardrock behind the bulk of his dead mount with the others, watching the war party of about one hundred braves swooping down from three directions from higher ground in three dimensions. There was nothing for the soldiers to do but wait for the Indians to get within range, while knowing they were about to die horrible, painful deaths at the hands of these attacking savages. He wiped the sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of his uniform and sighted along the barrel of his Winchester.

  The midday sun hammered down on the rocky flat as if it wanted to smudge the clustered blue cavalry uniforms into the ground. The man next to Paul was reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Another was taking a last swing of his whiskey bottle and snarling, “Come on, you red sons of bitches.” Another, a freckle-faced kid, was weeping and sniveling. An arrow whistled in and struck him through the throat and the sniveling ended. Then gunfire and war whoops and dust filled the air.

  Then he was the brave again, watching Little Dog getting shot from his mount right next to Paul. Then the attackers overran the soldiers’ position and Paul the warrior brave was leaping from his galloping pony with a war whoop. He sailed into a cavalryman who half-stood to meet the onslaught. Paul and the cavalryman—a foul smelling, bearded brute—toppled to the ground.

  Paul raised his tomahawk high for a blow to the bearded face but the soldier fought savagely with one meaty hand at Paul’s throat, trying to strangle the life from him, while the other locked around the wrist raising the t
omahawk, preventing it from crashing down, and what the bloodthirsty brave thought would be an easy kill suddenly became a fight for his life.

  Warfare swirled around him. Gunfire. Horses’ hooves. Cries of bloodlust and dying.

  And then Paul became the soldier beneath the war-painted brave. With a victorious shout, the brave brushed Paul’s arm aside and the tomahawk came down at his face.

  He awoke with a start.

  He was in a cold sweat, and the dream was so real that he awoke with the reflexive gesture of jerking his arms up before him as he lay there in his bed, the sheets tangled about him, his forearms crossed to shield his face from the descending tomahawk.

  It was dawn beyond the window of his room, gilding his “fortress of solitude” in the soft first light of day. The posters on his walls, the CD player, his bag of soccer gear, these things reassured him that yes, it had been a dream. His heart continued hammering in his chest for several minutes before his breathing returned to normal.

  He didn’t have that many dreams, maybe a couple a month, and they weren’t narrative dreams like this one, with sequential events happening, but random images that were usually gone even before he and Mom left the house for school.

  Mornings were always a disorganized time in their household, and Paul sometimes wondered if there was ever a time when people really did sit down at the table every morning to begin the new day with a meal. He suspected that those days most likely ended about the time they invented the car with the notion that there were places to go, where things had to get done. Mornings generally found Mike making or answering phone calls, jotting down notes, grabbing a bowl of granola and some fruit. Mom fixed oatmeal for herself and Paul, and allowed Paul a Pop Tart if he asked, which was about half the time. Coach Matthews wanted his team to keep their weight at what he called “fighting trim.” If Paul’s day held a quiz in one of his classes, he might review notes at the breakfast table while Mom made sure he ate his breakfast, even if he did wolf it down. Good Morning America was usually on the TV with the volume muted, to be turned up if anything important or interesting appeared on the screen.

  It was rare that the images of a dream would stay with him through that sort of chaos.

  Yet the dream of the skirmish between the war party and the doomed band of soldiers stayed with him. He went about his morning routine—brushing his teeth, taking a shower, throwing on whatever was clean in his dresser drawers—but when he closed his eyes he could experience being an Indian brave riding under the sun at full gallop; he could see his boyhood friend, Little Dog, taking a bullet to the chest, knocked off his pony. And as a cavalryman he still saw the war-painted savage, pinning him to the ground, smashing the tomahawk down at his face.

  As the conversation flowed about him in the kitchen that chaotic morning, Paul could hear echoes of galloping ponies. The war whoops. The crackle of rifle fire. The pain-wracked cries of the dying.

  “Paul, is something wrong?”

  They were halfway on their drive to school.

  Traffic was light. Clouds had moved in during the night, but held back, hovering between the ridges and peaks to the south: billowing, puffy clouds like cotton balls against the blue sky. Mom had her soft rock station playing low on the radio. He couldn’t tell what song they were playing. That stuff all sounded pretty much the same, and not very interesting.

  He realized what a rotten mood he was in. But he didn’t want to start something with Mom.

  “I’m okay.”

  “You hardly touched your breakfast. Did you think I wasn’t paying attention?”

  He sighed dramatically. “I’d never think that.”

  “Paul.”

  “Sorry. Everything’s okay.”

  “All right, then.”

  She seemed to dismiss the subject from her mind. But he was aware that she kept an eye on him from the corner of her eye as she drove and hummed along with the radio.

  The Devil Creek School was a sprawling, modern two-story structure of glass and tan brick that accommodated all twelve grades, located on the outskirts of town on the main highway, abutting a steep, piney slope of foothills.

  His dream retained its hold on him through the first couple of classes. And between classes, he had to deal with Dani Sloman and her friends.

  Dani had a crush on him, and he thought she was okay, too. Dani was a hardbodied little brunette hotty, and she knew how to dress, always in clothes that revealed or emphasized her figure. Dani had decided that he was hot, and so she came on to him whenever he encountered her in the hallways, in the cafeteria or anywhere else. Sometimes he was with his friends, sometimes not, when they encountered each other. But Dani always had her regular clique of friends. Paul could tell that they didn’t approve of her choice of him as date material, but Dani still kept coming on to him, telling him how cool it was that he was going to Europe, and would he e-mail her from France when he was living there? She came to every soccer game, and Paul intended to ask her along next weekend when he and his friends would be getting together at Sasha Conrad’s house to watch DVDs.

  As much as her good looks turned him on, there were some things about Dani that made him wary. For one thing, she never missed an opportunity to be bossy. He’d seen that on several occasions in the way she treated her friends. He didn’t have experience with girls, but he was sure that if he and Dani started seeing each other, she would waste no time in transferring her bossiness in his direction. And her interest in him would soon shift. Dani seemed to have a new boyfriend or two every semester. Her friends showed their disapproval in the way they looked at him. There were people in his class who thought Paul was gone on himself because he had managed to organize a year for himself in Europe. His mom said that was nothing but envy, and he agreed.

  On this day, Dani and her posse cornered him in the hallway after his first class, and he pretended that he was late for his next class and had dodged those girls. With them, he felt like he was running a gauntlet.

  But even with all of that sort of thing going on, the invisible, clutching fingers of his vivid dream—Indians and cavalrymen and death in the sun—would not release him.

  He was trying to pay attention and concentrate, ten minutes into his third-hour French class, when Mr. Tutwiler’s portly figure appeared in the doorway. The school principal cleared his throat, and got Mrs. Gruder’s attention.

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” he said, as if he didn’t really care if she forgave him or not. His attention focused on Paul. Mr. Tutwiler’s jowly features were usually severe, but something resembling a smile now quirked his thin lips. “Paul, I’d like you to step out here, please. There’s someone who wants to see you.”

  The kids around him buzzed curious whispers to one another, and Mrs. Gruder gave a nod.

  He stood from his desk and made his way down the aisle, toward the door. What could this be about? Something to do with his mother? He stepped through the doorway into the hallway.

  Mr. Tutwiler was closing the classroom door behind them. The hallway was quiet and deserted during class.

  A man stood waiting, reminding Paul of a soldier about to face an unpleasant duty. The man’s shoulders were thrown back. His feet were firmly planted. His big hands were clasped before him.

  “Hello, Paul.”

  Paul’s father was a heavyset, burly man in his late forties. His sandy hair was worn in a crewcut. His face was hard, as if chiseled from granite, thought Paul. He wore an expensive gray suit, with a crisp white shirt and red tie. A look you never saw around Devil Creek.

  Paul gulped, and the sound seemed to echo along the empty corridor.

  “Dad—”

  Mr. Tutwiler cleared his throat again. “Well then, I’ll leave the two of you. Paul, I understand that you and your father haven’t seen each other in quite some time, and since he requested this opportunity to see you, I thought it only appropriate. But I ask that you please remember, both of you, that this is a school day.” With a nod to Paul’s fathe
r, he turned and walked off in the direction of the principal’s office.

  Jeff muttered, “Officious prick.”

  Paul gulped again. “Dad … what are you doing here?”

  Except for this eye contact between them, the world seemed to be tilt-a-whirling around his heart. Images flashed through his mind of the last time he’d seen this man, when his father had tried to stop Paul and his mom from leaving, shouting how it would hurt his chances in politics if she left him, and Paul thought his father would have beat his mother then if Paul hadn’t been there.

  He’d vomited after that scene for a half day. He hadn’t seen his father once since that day, almost three years ago … until this moment. His stomach churned. He thought, Oh God, don’t let me hurl!

  His father was saying, “What’s wrong, son? Aren’t you going to give your dad a big hug after all this time?”

  “Mom said you weren’t supposed to come near us anymore.”

  “Hey now, don’t be that way. That was back in Illinois. Don’t you think it’s wrong for the law to keep a father from seeing his own son?”

  “Does Mom know you’re here?”

  Jeff chuckled. “She will as soon as she talks to you, won’t she? You and her always were thick as thieves. So come on, son. Give your dad a hug. Your real dad, that is.”

  Paul didn’t know what to do. He wanted to run. He wanted to hide, the way he had as a child. But there was no place to run. No place to hide.

  His father made a big production of opening his arms, tilting his head to the side with a smile pasted on his hard face that he must have thought would fool Paul, but he was wrong.

  Paul knew he had to do something, and he saw no choice. He didn’t want to make this any worse than it was, and so he stepped up to his father and put his arms as far as he could around the thick, burly torso. His fingertips hardly touched behind his father’s back. It was like hugging a gravestone. His father’s embrace was cold and brief. A formality to be dispensed with. Paul stepped back with relief.