Nobody Move

by Philip Elliott

  “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” he heard himself repeating uselessly in her ear, somehow on the floor beside her, but he saw that she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t hear anything but her own terrible scream rebounding off the cold marble floor and coming back to her.

  12 | Indio

  They walked hand in hand among the tombstones, Charlie asking what they were for.

  Alison said, “When people die, their bodies are buried under the ground and these tombstones go on top so that people know where to find them.”

  “Why aren’t they pretty colors?” Charlie said.

  She had no answer to that.

  They arrived at the reason for their visit: a cream granite tombstone larger than all the rest with the image of Jennifer O’Malley etched into it. Beneath her smiling face cursive script read “Cherished Daughter.”

  “Who’s that girl?” Charlie said, pointing at her.

  “Her name is Jennifer. Mommy was supposed to help her once, but couldn’t.”

  His little face looking up at her. “Help her with what?”

  “Help her to find somebody.”

  “How come she’s dead?”

  “Sometimes people just die, sweetie. There’s no reason.”

  “How did she die?”

  An image of Jennifer’s severed arm inside a white plastic bag flashed in Alison’s mind and she smelled the putrid rotting flesh and was right there at those garbage bins all over again.

  She rubbed Charlie’s head. How to answer that without lying to him?

  “Somebody hurt her, Charlie. Some people are not nice like Mommy and Sarah and your dad. Some people, not many, but some people want to hurt other people. That’s why you don’t talk to strangers or go anywhere with someone unless Mommy said you can.”

  Too many words; she saw it by his faltering expression.

  “Do you want to put the pretty flowers on Jennifer’s grave?” she said. “They can be a gift from you.”

  Charlie nodded and stretched out his arms. Alison bent down and handed him the bouquet of orange marigolds and guided him as he shuffled to the tombstone.

  “Put them right here,” she said, tapping on the base of the stone.

  Charlie set the flowers down and looked up at her.

  “Good boy. Jennifer will be really pleased with them. I bet she’s watching over us right now and saying thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Jennifer,” Charlie said, and giggled, his little hands up at his chin as if surprised by himself.

  Alison chuckled, and as she watched Charlie giggling back at her, her chuckling became a fit of laughter. They stood giggling at each other for a minute and the day seemed to brighten around them, the gray clouds moving on.

  “Detective Lockley, it’s nice to see you here,” said a woman’s voice.

  Mrs. O’Malley watched them from the path.

  “And who is this handsome young man?” Mrs. O’Malley said.

  “This is my son, Charlie. We came to give Jennifer some flowers, didn’t we, Charlie?”

  Charlie nodded shyly, one hand on Alison’s leg.

  “That’s very kind of you, Charlie. Jennifer loved flowers.” To Alison: “Three years, can you believe it?”

  “Three long, fast years. How have you and Mr. O’Malley been doing?”

  Mrs. O’Malley gazed down at her daughter’s grave. “I’d like to say it gets easier but that simply isn’t the case. You just get more numb. Frank couldn’t even come here today. He comes a couple times per week, usually, but today he got up and went straight to the bar.”

  “I can’t even imagine …”

  “Any new murder cases, Detective?”

  “A young woman was murdered recently. The same age as Jennifer was.”

  Mrs. O’Malley scowled and shook her head. “The poor girl. Find whoever did it, Detective. Find them for Jennifer.”

  “I’ll do my best. We’ll leave you in peace. Say bye bye, Charlie.”

  “Bye bye,” Charlie said, and waved.

  “Goodbye Charlie, it was lovely to meet you. It was nice seeing you again, Detective.”

  “You too, Mrs. O’Malley. Take care.”

  Alison took Charlie’s hand and together they walked around Jennifer’s grave and onto the path.

  “Detective,” Mrs. O’Malley said.

  Alison glanced behind.

  “Jennifer thanks you for everything you did for her. And so do we.”

  Alison smiled and continued through the cemetery with Charlie, the dead watching them from every side.

  Alison dropped Charlie off at his father’s condo so his father could bring him to school later (it didn’t start until 11.00 a.m. today for some reason she hadn’t bothered to discover, glad of the sleep-in), not staying to receive another lecture from her ex-husband on the toll the job must be taking on her (this coming from a man who forclosed on people’s homes for a living and couldn’t give a shit), or, worse, be smugly gawked at by the perky-titted twenty-two-year-old he was fucking.

  She made it to Indio just under two hours later and found the police station—a small, flat building located inconspicuously beside a wide and empty road—almost without realizing it. She parked her car in the near-empty parking lot and stepped out into the sunlight. It seemed brighter this far east of Los Angeles, the temperature a little higher. More than anything it was the silence that struck her. She could hear the softness of the breeze and nothing else. It felt peaceful, allowing her mind to slow down. She remembered something British horror author Susan Hill had said about it being difficult to write a ghost story set in a big city on a sunny day. Susan Hill had obviously never worked homicide in L.A. But out here, far from the city, surrounded by all this space—there were no ghosts out here.

  Inside the station she flashed her badge and asked for Detective Holland.

  A minute later a tall man with a mustache out of Magnum P.I. invited her into his office. It smelled like dust and coffee and appeared left behind by the twenty-first century.

  “Detective Lockley,” he said, looking her up and down, “it’s nice to see you in person. Have a seat.” He flashed her a smile and extended a hand.

  She sat down as Holland perched his ass on the corner of his desk, looking down at her, his crotch level with her head.

  He said, “I must say, you’re even cuter in person than you sounded on the phone.”

  She blinked at him. “What the fuck did you just say?”

  “Hey, I’m just offering a compliment, no need to get hysterical.” Grinning stupidly at her.

  “Offer me one more compliment and I’ll write you up for sexual harassment, how about that? And get your prick out of my face.”

  The grin fell off him. He stood up and got behind the desk, sat down.

  “On the phone you mentioned having some information about the gas station murders,” he said, looking pissed now. Men.

  “I might have. Yesterday a lawyer was murdered in Los Angeles. Nothing new there, except that his wounds matched the wounds of your gas station victims.”

  “So our killer moved on up to the city. I figured as much, given the fact the gas station’s off the interstate. How do you know it’s the same killer?”

  “A three-inch-deep wound in the sternum from an uncommon, extremely sharp double-edged knife, his throat slit, and no witnesses? Come on, don’t insult me.”

  “So, what, the guy’s on a spree?”

  Alison almost rolled her eyes. “Think about it. The lawyer was killed in his private office on his private floor. It’s locked from the outside, so the lawyer would have had to let the killer in. That’s very different than killing a gas station attendant and an ex-con who did three for armed robbery. Was there a gun at the crime scene? It wasn’t in the paper but I figure that’s why he was at that gas station, the ex-con, because he lived nowhere near it.”

  Holland crossed his arms, looking distrustfully at her. “Yeah, there was a gun. We linked it to two murders in the Inland Empire. Also
robberies.”

  “Then the gas station murders were self-defense. Well, not the clerk, obviously; he must have killed the clerk to preserve anonymity. The lawyer was always the only target.”

  “Look at you, Detective, got it all figured out. You drive all the way out here from the big city just to show me how clever you are?”

  “I drove all the way out here so you can show me around your nice little town and help me ask if anyone remembers a man from Texas passing through the day of the murders.”

  Holland screwed up his face. “Listen, lately my wife snores worse than the goddamn bulldog she keeps at the end of the bed. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night and I haven’t had my lunch yet. Stop fucking around and tell me where you’re going with this.”

  Alison crossed her legs and sat back into the chair. “Six days ago a Texan named William Kane was murdered in his condo in downtown L.A. Kane owned the largest trucking company in Texas which doubled as transportation for Mexican cocaine all over the country. Apparently Kane was a D.E.A. informant, so could be that someone found out and had him executed. Maybe he was killed for another reason. Maybe someone intimidated him and, afraid he’d been found out as a rat, he was jumpy, tried to fight back or escape. A young woman was with him that night. She was killed too. She used to work at a strip club in the city.

  “Here’s where it gets interesting. A girl working at that club told me that a few days after those murders, a lawyer shows up asking questions about the murdered girl. A couple days after that a lawyer called Jerry Boylan is murdered in his office. I know what you’re thinking—there’s not necessarily a connection there. I thought so too, so I looked through the lawyer’s files, and what do I find? The contact details of his clients, one in particular jumping out to me. A Mr. William Kane of San Antonio, Texas. So then I’m thinking, what if Boylan sold out his client and leaked that Kane was an informant? Or, maybe whoever had Kane killed had Boylan killed too, cleaning house. That would make sense except for one thing: those gas station murders.”

  Alison uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. “The interstate beside the gas station passes through Texas. Whoever killed Boylan worked for Kane and killed Boylan in retaliation. Our killer came from Texas.”

  Holland whistled and placed his hands behind his head, leaning back into his chair.

  “I’ll give you thirty minutes of my time,” he said. “Then I’m getting surf and turf.”

  Holland took Alison around some businesses in the town. It was a strangely sparse place, Indio, all the buildings spread out across wide roads, distant mountains on every horizon.

  At one point in Holland’s car (some masculine-looking Ford that came as no surpise), Holland said, “Listen, sorry for talking to you that way in the station. You’ve done some good police work here, and, in retrospect, that was a little rude of me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? Is that it?”

  “I don’t forgive you, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “You’re a real hard-ass, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sick to death of my male colleagues, that’s what I am. What do you want, me to be impressed by you? I’ll tell you what, from now on treat your female colleagues exactly like you treat your male colleagues. View them as cops, not female cops. When a detective from another department comes into your office, a detective who happens to be female, say ‘What can I do for you, Detective?’ and sit down behind your desk instead of waving your balls in the detective’s face, and don’t for a second even think of commenting on any aspect of the detective’s appearance or femininity. Do all that and maybe I’ll have some respect for you.”

  Holland stopped trying to make conversation with her after that.

  The workers in the businesses they visited—small restaurants and cafés, mostly, places someone might stop to refresh after a long drive—had no memory of any Southerners on the day in question.

  After several fruitless visits, they pulled up outside a liquor store.

  “This is the last place. Then I’m having lunch,” Holland said.

  They entered the liquor store—a small, dim place with an old man behind the counter squinting at them.

  “How you doing, Marty?” Holland said.

  “I’d feel better if I didn’t have piles in my ass. Doctor says I got to put the cream on three times a day. Rubbing cream on my ass three times a day ain’t my idea of a good time. Other than that, I’m doing all right. You here for a bottle of red for Martha?”

  “No, not today. I’m here on police business. This is Detective Lockley from Los Angeles. She wants to ask you a couple questions.”

  The old man peered at Alison as if trying to see through fog.

  He said, “I don’t know where you got your information but I didn’t do nothing wrong, officers.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Alison said. “Actually, I’m here to ask if you remember serving a customer with a Southern accent on Thursday. This man came from Texas and is wanted for murder, so we’re doing what we can to track him down. Maybe he doesn’t have an accent, but maybe he does. Maybe he mentioned where he was coming from.”

  Marty scratched his chin. “Thursday, eh? No, no, I don’t think so.”

  The man probably couldn’t remember what he ate for breakfast.

  “Nothing at all? You’re sure?”

  Marty nodded slowly, looking very confused about the whole thing.

  “Well, thank you anyway.” Alison began to turn around.

  “Wait now,” Marty said. “Now that you mention it there was a feller came in here and bought a bottle of Jack. A very big man. But he didn’t say a word, not even when I asked him about his car. That’s why I remember him—his car. Nineteen sixty-six Chevrolet Impala. Beautiful. She had a teal paint job with a cream roof and hub caps. I know she were a sixty-six ’cause I had one myself in the early seventies.”

  Marty gazed into the distance. “Those were the days. Cruising along the West Coast with the top down, the wind blowing back my hair. I had long hair back then, believe it or not. Dark and shiny like a horse’s mane. The women loved it. There was this one young lady I met in Eureka and let me tell you, she could do things with her mouth that I’d never experienced—”

  “Did you get a look at the license plate?” Alison said.

  He appeared confused for a moment. “Oh, the license plate. No, no I didn’t.”

  “Why do you think the man might be from Texas?”

  “Texas? What about Texas?”

  Alison sighed. The man hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

  “This was Thursday?” Holland asked him.

  “Yes, Thursday. No, wait now, it could’ve been Wednesday.”

  “All right, thanks Marty, you’ve been a big help,” Holland said.

  “You want a bottle of red for Martha?”

  “Not today, Marty.”

  Outside the store, Holland said, “Well, Detective, that’s all I got for you. Hopefully you get lucky back in the big city.”

  “In my experience luck doesn’t much come into it.”

  He looked beyond her. “Maybe you haven’t gambled enough then. Come on, let’s get you back to your car.”

  It took fifteen minutes for Dakota to calm down. When her screaming finally ceased she got to her feet and paced around the room wailing like a banshee and resting her head against the walls. It was an awful sight to see, and when Dakota finally slumped to the floor in silence, her gaze vacant and far away, Eddie could no longer bear to be in the room with her. He asked Lois if she had a few cigarettes and a lighter, which she did, and said he was going for a walk, keep an eye on Dakota, and keep her away from anything pointy while you’re at it.

  The night air was thick and warm, the moon sharp like a scythe. A gentle breeze raised the hairs on Eddie’s arms. He walked the road down the hill, passing rich people’s homes and looking out at the twinkling city spread out below him. He hadn’t intended to go so far but the further he w
ent from Dakota’s pain and his responsibility for it, the more air he could suck into his lungs. He found some boulders to the side of the road at the edge of the hill and sat on one of them. He lit a cigarette and filled himself with smoke and gazed down at the city of Los Angeles, wondering if he’d ever make it out. The place had a way of keeping hold of you. What was that Dakota had said? You won’t be finished with L.A. till L.A.’s finished with you. Something like that. How’d she know so goddamn much about everything? She could never find out about what he’d done to her sister. He’d carry that one to the grave.

  An owl screeched from somewhere above and Eddie flinched. A few seconds later a car passed, the white headlights dazzling him for a moment. What little calm he’d managed to find was well and truly gone now, but he should head back to the house anyway, tend to Dakota. He finished the cigarette and stamped on it, holding the smoke in his lungs until he craved oxygen, and made his way up the hill.

  He knew something was wrong when he’d pressed the intercom four times and nobody had answered. He eyed the gate and noticed for the first time the points like arrowheads on top. One of those up his ass and he’d be shitting blood the rest of his life.

  He gripped one of the cold iron bars and pulled but it didn’t budge. Wedging his foot above a curve in the design, he pulled himself up, his fingers straining on the lip below the arrowheads. He released his foot, raising his other foot off the ground at the same time, and wrapped his hand around one of the spikes. Pulling hard, he swung his leg over the top, his second hand coming up to support him, and balanced over the top of the gate, his crotch inches above the arrowheads and his forearms trembling, a burning pain shooting through them. With seconds left before they buckled and he lost his balls forever, he drew in a deep breath and swung his other leg over. The momentum threw him over the side as he let go of the gate. He hit the ground with a grunt, scraping his hands on the concrete.