“Let ’em know.”
Craig slides his company credit card over the glass.
Perez leaves, but not before helping himself to a candy bar.
In the cramped office behind the Subway, Poulson uploads the file to a ten-inch video monitor.
Craig has regained his composure but Michael thinks there is some part of him that wishes the police had hauled him away for his crimes against the Peppermill, such is the nature of the Christian God.
“Here’s your man,” says Poulson.
The image is bad. The video was digitally recorded so the problem is not there. It’s the camera lens. From the angle and the blurry grease stains Michael fixes the camera above the hot-dog broiler. The wide angle takes in the door, counter and over half the store.
“You have another camera?”
“Busted.”
Michael watches Isaac Lowe come through the door and head out of frame toward the sandwich shop. The frames are jumpy. It is not so much a movie as a slide show of still photos taken in succession.
“Really wish I could see what he ordered,” Michael says.
“What? Why?”
“Hunch. Can you cross check the register receipt with the time stamp?”
“I could but I’m not gunna,” says Poulson. “Ain’t got time for that.”
“It looks like two sandwiches and some chips,” Craig says.
“Okay,” says Michael. “I see what I need.”
“What do you see?” Poulson says.
“Two sandwiches.”
“The man was hungry.”
Michael shrugs. “Let me watch the rest of the tape.”
“I’ll show you where he comes in the next morning.” Poulson reaches for the fast forward key, but Michael stops him.
“No, I’ll watch it from here.”
“That’ll take some time.”
“Do you mind?”
Poulson looks from Michael to Craig and then shrugs. “I ain’t sitting here,” he says and gets up. “Nothing better be missing when you’re done.”
There’s not much space in the little room. Michael has the only chair, Craig leans against a wall.
“You looking for the girl?” he asks.
“Yep.”
The screen might as well be a still life. Only the time stamp changes as the night video creeps on past midnight, one, and two.
“Oswald this is a dead case,” Craig says. “Did Maggie text you? The Idaho thing is blowing up. We should head north tomorrow or Roy’ll be pissed.”
“He already is.”
“Yes. I believe that’s true.”
“There,” Michael says. “There. Look.”
Craig bends over Michael’s shoulder to stare into the machine.
“It’s a girl, but you can’t even see her face.”
“But you know it’s a girl,” Michael says and his mouth goes dry. He tastes ashes. He assumes it’s from his cigarettes. “She’s small. Check her height there against the door meter.” Michael rewinds a few frames to where she entered at 2:35 a.m. According to the stripes on the door jamb, she’s five foot two. Petite.
“So what?” Craig says. “A girl came in to buy a soda that night. I don’t see Lowe.”
“Wait,” he says and rewinds the recorder ten minutes to 2:24.
Two men enter the store and disappear out of frame. Michael lets the video catch up to where the girl enters. She disappears in the same direction.
“Bathrooms,” Craig says.
2:46 a.m. the two men leave. The girl doesn’t appear again until 3:10. Her hair is wet. She’s in different clothes.
Michael fast forwards the recording from there. Poulson is sweeping the floor, stocking the shelves and making coffee. At 6:00 a.m. his relief appears. At 8:00 a.m., Lowe appears and buys a coffee before leaving the frame for half an hour. When he reappears to walk out, he’s showered and carrying food. Michael taps on the screen.
“What?” says Craig.
“Two coffees,” he says. “He still has a passenger.”
“So?”
“The two men met the girl in the middle of the night.”
“Or, two men used the bathroom while some woman showered in another part of the store,” Craig says. “I’ll buy the passenger—maybe, but you’re making a hell of a leap for a conspiracy based on that tape.”
“You don’t think it’s worth pursuing?”
“Who cares? What does it get us? Make up the biggest tall-tale you can, and then tell me where the truck is? I don’t care if Lowe was throwing orgies in his cab and trafficking in stolen Mayan treasure—if it doesn’t lead us to the cargo, it’s useless.” Craig cracks his knuckles and shakes his head in frustration. “I know I’m new at this, but we’ve driven across Nevada twice and I don’t see how we’re any closer. We’re spinning our wheels. The truck went missing in Vegas, not Ely. Remember? If this is how you work, I can see why Roy’s going to fire you.”
“He said that?”
“No,” he stammers. “Well. Kind of. Sure. He said he might. You need to know that. He said he needs to see something out of you. We tried on this laser bounty thing. Now, let’s get to Idaho and make Roy happy. Forget this one.”
“Looking out for me, huh?”
“Actually, Oswald. I am.”
Chapter Ten
“This place smells like feet,” says Craig flopping onto his bed, bouncing on the springs. “Cheap mattress too; and no privacy at all.”
“It’s a bunkhouse, a place to sleep, not a suite to entertain in,” says Michael.
“I can’t believe you like this kind of place.”
The room is neat but has a lingering smell. It’s an honest perfume of working men, honest sweat and road dust. There might be little privacy, but dormitory spaces like these are safer, he thinks. Behind concealing walls, anything can happen. Here, when surrounded by people, the chances of real danger are diminished. There might be a petty theft perhaps, but no murder, not unless everyone else in the room was in on it.
It’s irrelevant though since only he and Craig are there that night.
Michael sat through a movie with him, a computer-generated explosion fest that left him with a headache. Craig tried to talk about the plot holes after the film, but Michael hadn’t noticed a plot. Craig took his inattention as a personal insult and Michael let him, wondering if he had ever cared so much about such trivial things as movie plots and football drafts as Craig does.
The movie did him some good. It was hypnotic, in the frenetic way modern Hollywood films can be—bright colors, orange and blues, rapid cuts and seizure-inducing strobes. His eyes had remained on the screen, but his mind turned in on itself, piecing together fleeting memories and moods, imaginings and clues.
A story forms in his mind. He knows what happened to Isaac Lowe. He isn’t sure how he knows, but he knows. He knows the girl lured him to her accomplices and they killed him. It’s as familiar as a childhood lullaby, a remembered line of poetry from a kindergarten play. He knows it like he read it in a book. He knows it like memory.
Craig stirs in his cot, tossing deliberately and heavily, letting Michael know he does not like the accommodations.
Michael ignores him. This is not about him. He is a passenger, a fly in his car, a buzzing in the back seat darting across his field of vision. Distracting him.
Michael senses something beneath the surface of his life, or perhaps the surface of all reality, and it relates to Isaac Lowe. The patterns are there, the notes, the songs—it’s there if he can only comprehend it all at once. It is not about the bounty. It has never been about the bounty. It has never been about a job, or money, or obligation to Roy and Maggie, Craig in the room, or Carla in Denver. It is him. It is about him. His song, his dance, his relationship to the missing man from Texas.
Craig begins to snore and Michael glances at his watch. For an hour, he’s stared at the shadows looking for edges and patterns, places he can line up and fit together. There is only darkness and
that is what he sees. Darkness is what is there. Darkness.
The black woman comes into his mind.
He sees a night without stars. The stillness of a calm spring. A memory. A yearning. A place.
The woman beckons him.
He knows her. He’s known her for a long time. He feels a door in the back of his mind open, and instead of light, shadows pour out of it.
“Craig,” he says. “Craig, wake up.”
“God, Oswald. I just fell asleep.”
“I’m leaving. I’m taking the car. If I’m not here when you wake up, just wait for me.”
“Where are you going?”
“South. To that rest stop.”
“Which one?”
“The one where Lowe stopped overnight. I’m going there.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
Craig rubs his eyes and blinks. “You think of something?”
Michael doesn’t answer him, but pulls his pants on. He kneels down and digs for his shoes under the bunk.
“Wait, I’ll come with you.”
“No need.”
“That’s half way to Vegas,” Craig says. “I’m coming.”
Robert Poulson is back on duty when they come into the store.
“Can’t sleep, Jim?” he asks rubbing his neck.
“You’re still up, huh? Don’t you sleep?” Michael replies drawing his own hand to his chin.
“Nah,” he says. “You leaving?”
“Places to be.”
“No refunds.”
“Didn’t expect one.”
“That’s right,” he says. “Be seeing you.”
It’s half past midnight when they put Ely behind them and point south into the desert. Craig wedges himself against the door, his coat propped up as a pillow and falls asleep.
Michael spends the time banishing his thoughts and suspicions. It is enough he is going to Crystal Springs, enough that he will soon see what he knows is there. If he knows.
The darkness is beautiful. The sky is clear and the stars bright. There will be a moon later, a waning quarter or less. He senses the glow on the eastern horizon, and on the straightaways, he turns his headlights off and steers by gloom.
There is no light without darkness; no truth without lies. His heart races with these thoughts. He knows he is closing in on something important, something he knows, something he’s forgotten. Something dark and wonderful.
He sees the blackness as a curtain around him, a shroud separating what he knows from what he’s lost, his youth from his adulthood; life from death.
An oncoming car makes him switch his lights back on. He’s rewarded with angry honks and flashing high-beams as if he were trying to kill people. Fool.
The Crystal Springs crossroads rest stop is deserted. There had been hardly any traffic driving down, but of course, Michael took the longer, more dangerous route of Highway 93 which added nearly an hour to an already two-hour drive, a delay most people were unwilling to take and so used 375. But even 375 isn’t busy and when Michael stops the car, he sees nary a headlight for ten minutes. He lets the car settle and his ideas coalesce.
To his left, on the other side of the highway, is a grove of trees outlined in the dim moonlight. Behind them, between the trunks, wisps of steam rise from warm water into cool air. Beyond the springs, on the far side of the grove, it is desert again.
A Mack truck hauling hay bales plows past him and shakes him out of his trance. He gets out of the car.
Craig stirs but settles back again.
Michael Oswald crosses the street and goes into the glade.
It is sandy but verdant. There is grass and low bushes. He recognizes purple tamarisk, but it is all blue-gray in the gloom. The air is cool and moist. The trees are cottonwoods, sparse and narrow, new growth of less than a century. Water softly gurgles over rocks to his left where a river takes the spring away.
He walks to the water. He kneels down on the bank and stares into it as if scrying into a glass. Crystal Springs is not a fiery geyser pool like he knows from Yellowstone. Though the water is warm, it is calm, clear and clean. Michael sees to the bottom. Fish and algae, mosses and snails cluster by the fountainhead where the water is warmest and richest.
He touches the surface like a penitent drawing salvation from a holy font. He touches his wet fingers to his forehead instinctively, either in mimicry or memory. It is the place where the third eye is said to be.
Ripples spread over the dark plane like a promise. When the water is still again, he lowers his face to the pool. He hovers there for a moment, near but not touching, only a breath above the water.
He studies his reflection in the surface. His face is in shade; his features are hidden. He is but a silhouette in the watery mirror; heaven’s light above him seen reflecting from below. But he is shadow.
He feels the heat rise to touch his flesh from below and the cool sky behind him chilling him from above. It is an irony and he smiles. Then he closes his eyes and like a gentle lover, he touches his lips to the water.
It is warm and earthy, hot to drink. He draws in a mouthful and holds it on his tongue. He thinks of tea without leaves poured from a copper kettle. He swallows slowly, tracing the heat from the back of his mouth through his throat, down his neck, and pooling in his stomach until it becomes a part of him.
He stands up and walks through the glade, past the river, beyond the canal cut to take the water to enduring homesteads, green fields stretching south and away. He goes to where the spring no longer nourishes the earth, where the weeds crackle and snap beneath his shoes. He finds the place by rote. It is dry and sandy and he stands there looking at the ground between his feet for a long time. He listens, expecting to hear something, a song or a scream perhaps. He is not sure.
After a time, he hears the sound of heavy plodding footsteps in the undergrowth. He turns and sees the waving flashlight beam and hears also for the first time, the sound of Craig calling him.
In the distance, on the other side of the thicket, a truck passes, and then another. And then a pair of cars speed the other away toward Ely, lines of distant lights, white and red.
“Oswald, what are you doing over there? Didn’t you hear me? Where you been all this time?”
It is as if Michael was dreaming and Craig woke him up. Suddenly he feels cold; his legs cramped, his eyes dry. The glade is not mysterious. It is only a second-rate tourist attraction. The desert where he stands is bare and useless, a bad parking lot at best. He hasn’t slept since Reno, and then not much. He’s sleep deprived and hallucinating.
“I’ve been here,” he says to Craig. “It hasn’t been that long.”
“I’ve been looking for you for over an hour.”
Michael looks at the moon and notes its position. It was behind the car when he parked, now it well past its apex falling to the west.
He looks at the ground, but he is no longer sure.
“Craig. There’s a shovel in the trunk. Go get it, will you?”
Craig shines the light over the ground. “Why? What did you find?”
“Something in my craw,” he says. He scans the ground, notes the brush and grasses, the stones and stillness. “Nevermind. Let’s get out of here,” he says. “You drive.”
Craig kneels down and shines the light low horizontally over the dirt. “I think I know what you’re up to,” he says. “It’s a good idea.”
“No, it’s not. I’m making shit up. I’m sorry. I haven’t been myself lately.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that.”
He wonders if Carla would recognize him now, if she’d sense the change that’s come over him. No. No, she wouldn’t. She’s too busy with her own life to see the fractures in his. She’s told him he isn’t the man she married, but he’d always thought that was just an excuse. Now he wonders if she hadn’t sensed something then that he is only now experiencing.
“It’s a good idea,” Craig says. “It makes sense. In a real creepy way
, it makes sense. It does. Besides from the sound of things, every other avenue has been gone over with a comb by more and better than us.”
Michael lights a cigarette and walks back to the car.
“This looks recent,” Craig says.
Michael stops.
Craig stands over a bush. “See how this shrub is dying? Looks like it was replanted. This ground looks done over.”
Michael’s heart leaps, but he says nothing. He sucks on his cigarette and waits.
“You might have something, Oswald,” Craig says. “Go bring the car around.”
“No. You do it,” Michael says sitting down. “I’m spent.”
Craig takes the offered keys peevishly and trots back the way he came.
Michael kneels on the ground and sweeps away the fallen leaves. He examines the dried root of the sagebrush in the moonlight. He pushes his fingers into the sand and digs out a handful. He lets it pour out between his fingers. He stands up and slaps his palms on his pants.
The spell is broken, but he can still feel its effect like an electric hangover. He paces the ground measuring himself against the mountains and the pool, wondering why it feels so goddamn familiar, why he thinks he’ll find horrors here tonight. Many horrors.
After moving the car, Craig arrives with the shovel. He offers it to Michael, who takes instead the flashlight and shines it on the spot to dig. Craig gives him a dirty look.
“Lucky for you I didn’t get a workout in today,” he says.
“Lucky,” Michael says.
Craig takes off his shirt and spits in his palms for effect. He bends down and starts digging. He works in rhythm—regular stabs, hauls, and tosses with controlled breathing. He’s working his upper body.
“I like to exercise at night,” he pants. “And outside too. This is a great night out here. So clean and clear. You can see so many stars.”
Michael looks up to watch the stars until Craig complains.
“Hey, keep the light. Ah never mind. I can see fine.”
Michael switches off the lamp. He’s glad of it going. The night has its own light, its own atmosphere and purpose.
“Oh God,” cries Craig and falls backward.
What Immortal Hand Page 9