by Paula Guran
To tell the truth, at first I was tempted to talk to Ben about knocking the pyramid down. After all, that had really been Charlie’s place. But if part of this deal was about confronting Charlie Steiner, then I knew I couldn’t do that. So I decided to work on it first.
I replaced a few broken windows, then gave the place a coat of paint inside and out. The further I got with work on the A-frame, the less I thought about Charlie and the past. Instead, maybe for the first time ever, I started to think about myself and what lay ahead of me. I didn’t know what that was going to be. Sometimes it was scary to think about it and sometimes it was exciting, but in the end it didn’t matter.
In the end, I didn’t think about myself for very long at all.
I was working with Ben Cross the night the call came in. Since starting at the cop shop I’d been on day shift with the sheriff, and by this time he was breaking me in to work swings. That way, I’d have my mornings free and could work on the house before clocking in at three, and Ben could come by and do some work of his own after he clocked out without having to worry about crowding my space. That way we could double-shift projects during the week. The plan was to work together on weekends on stuff that took two pairs of hands, and we’d get the place in shape faster. It made sense, and I knew going in that I’d take swing shift over graveyards any day. I’d pulled those shifts a few times and they made for a long night of patrolling empty streets, rattling doorknobs, and (mostly) trying to stay awake until the sun came up.
It was July. Not too hot for that time of year, with the possibility of a summer storm blowing in. It was around 10 p.m. and neither one of us had had any dinner. We were talking about where to catch a bite when the main line rang. Ben wasn’t on the phone more than a minute. And he didn’t say much besides “yeah” or “uh-huh” before he finished with the important one: “I’ll check it out.”
He cradled the receiver and shot me a look. “What’s the deal?” I asked.
“You know that guy who owns the dairy farm out by the county two-lane?”
“You mean Vince Kaehler?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. His ranch backs up against Butcher’s Lake on the north side. He found a stretch of downed barbed wire this afternoon. Turned out some of his stock got loose. A couple cows wandered up the dirt road that skirts the lake, and Vince spent the evening rounding them up. He just got back to the house after fixing his fence. Says he saw a campfire down there by the water, heard some loud rock ’n’ roll and some screaming, like a party was going on.”
“Loud rock ’n’ roll? He actually said that?”
“Well, what he really said was goddamn loud hippie music, but that’s close enough.”
“Yeah. Well . . . Vince is a Merle Haggard kind of guy.”
“Uh-huh.” Cross smiled. “And he didn’t say party. He said orgy.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No . . . not even a little bit.”
Quiet hung there between us, but just for a second. “So you want to roll with me on this one?”
“Sure, boss,” I said, and we strapped on the hardware.
Of course, at that point it hardly seemed worth it. I mean, strapping on our guns or rolling on the call at all. I figured I was in for an instant replay of crash-pad night at Charlie Steiner’s. Maybe I’d even find those same two stoner girls who’d been asleep on the mattress in front of Charlie’s fireplace that night, only tonight they’d be snoozing on a couple of air mattresses out in the middle of Butcher’s Lake.
Man, was I ever wrong.
Dead wrong.
I killed the lights before I pulled up to the rusty guard rail by the eucalyptus grove. The night really wasn’t that much different than that Halloween back in ’63 when I’d met up with Charlie Steiner. But I wasn’t really thinking about Charlie on this night.
Part of that had to do with living in his house. It seemed the creep factor around the place had reached the point of diminishing returns, as if the work I’d done there had exorcised his spirit. The other part was easier to explain, because it didn’t have anything to do with a ghost of the past—it was all sensory input and gut reaction as Ben Cross rolled down his window and a couple specific varieties of noise spilled up that black little path that led to Butcher’s Lake.
Laughter. Lots of it. And all of it male.
And music. A transistor cranked up to ten, playing Iron Butterfly. “Goddamn,” Ben said. “It is hippie music.”
I couldn’t argue. I couldn’t return the joke, either.
Because I wasn’t listening to the music. The sound of that laughter reached down and grabbed me by the balls. It was over the edge and more than a little mad, reminding me of party sounds I’d once heard in the jungles of Vietnam. We’d run across a village another platoon had raided looking for Cong. We’d come upon them at dusk, tipping back bottles of Cutty Sark, partying with VC soldiers who were dead and others who wished they were.
Those weren’t good memories. And the laughter I heard that night at Butcher’s Lake brought them back.
Of course, I didn’t mention any of that to Ben Cross.
There was only time to size up the situation and move forward. That’s what we did. We didn’t take the trail through the eucalyptus grove. We figured we’d cut around to the dirt access road that led to the lake and block it with the cruiser, just in case the laughing crew had wheels. That way we’d pen them in, because there was only one way out of there.
I backed up, then started down the dirt road. I thumbed the lights, pushing in the knobbed rod until the headlights died. That left the parking lights, which were just bright enough to get me down the road. I knew where I was going: this was the same road I took to the Steiner house. When I hit the forked cutoff down to the lake itself I knew I’d gone far enough, because there was a solid-panel Dodge van parked about halfway down the fork, alongside a couple of choppers.
“Bikers,” Ben said. “Shit.”
We ran the plates. The Dodge had been reported stolen three days before, more than two hundred miles away. The choppers were registered to a couple of bikers with gang affiliations and rap sheets a mile long. With my Spidey senses already tingling, this didn’t surprise me. I don’t know if Ben had a clue before the hard news came over the squawk-box, but he didn’t look happy. Any way you sliced it, the idea we were in for an easy time of it rousting a bunch of partying teenagers had definitely gone south in a big way.
We got out of the car.
That laughter was still there, hanging on the wind like a coming storm.
Ben said, “Watch yourself.”
I said, “You do the same, boss.”
That about covered it. Cross unlocked the shotgun from the rack.
He jacked a shell into the chamber. My left hand slid toward my holster, and I unsnapped the leather strap that ran over my .38.
Then we walked around the Dodge van and moved into the darkness.
The young woman screamed just about the time we spotted the campfire.
She was down by the water. Naked, wearing nothing but mud. The bikers stood between her and the fire, backlit by the flames. And since one of them wasn’t wearing his pants, it wasn’t hard to figure out what had been going on.
Mr Bare Ass brayed like a billy goat. Then he said: “You don’t want to play any more, babe, then we ain’t got no further use for you.”
His hand came up, rising like a fistful of molten lava. It jerked out, shot back. Then repeated the action.
The woman screamed again. The bikers laughed, and her hand shot out, slapping Bare Ass across the face.
“Whoa. She’s a live one!”
“Not for long,” Bare Ass said. “This bitch is just another rack of ribs ready for the grill.”
“Burn, baby, burn!” one of the bikers yelled.
Those words sent a chill up my spine. Just that fast another biker raised his fist. More molten fire, this handful so bright it made me squint.
That’s when I realized what th
e bikers had in their hands. They’d sparked a bunch of road flares.
They were using them to herd the young woman into the water. The flare jabbed against her arm, and she screamed like she’d swallowed a bucket of brimstone. Ben was way ahead of me, advancing toward the fire with the shotgun shouldered and the barrel trained on the bikers.
“County Sheriff!” he shouted. “Freeze. Now!”
I knew they wouldn’t. Ben probably knew it too. And to tell the truth in that moment we had as much going against us as we had going for us. The pack started to turn, and I had the feeling at least one of them was going to end up with something more than molten fire in his hand. At the same time, I doubted Ben was going to let loose with the street howitzer unless he absolutely had to—after all, the woman was right in the middle of the pack, and the scattergun would sure enough do a job on her, too.
The best thing going in that moment was that none of the bikers had thought to grab the woman and use her for a shield. Apart from the gap between two of them, she was almost standing behind them. Two of them were holding burning flares, and one of them let his loose, throwing it in Ben’s direction. In the time it took Ben to sidestep the flare, I drew my .38. The fire was between us and the mob; the flares were blazing; there was light. But there were shadows too, and night pouring thick around the edges of every damn one of them, and there was no way to judge everything without making a dozen guesses that could be dead wrong.
One sound took all that second-guessing away.
I heard a .45 chambering a round, and I let loose.
The .38 bucked in my hand. Once. Twice. One of the bikers fell like a slaughterhouse steer. Another stumbled a few steps and dropped on his knees in the campfire before pitching face-first across the flames. That cleared enough ground to see that the young woman wasn’t in the picture any more. Just about the time I thought we were about to tighten the cinches on the deal, another shot rang out.
It wasn’t mine.
It was the .45. I hadn’t dropped the man who held it after all.
The biker fired again. This time, the sound hit me just as someone laid a red-hot poker across my shoulder. At least, that was the way it felt.
The .38 dropped out of my hand. By then, it didn’t matter.
Because Ben Cross let loose with the shotgun.
A couple ticks of the second hand, and the whole thing was as over as over can be.
At least, we thought it was.
Four of the bikers lay on the ground. Still. One of them face down in the fire. Smoke billowed up around him, and he was finished. I didn’t give him a second glance, because I was only thinking of one thing.
The woman.
Had to be she’d gone into the water to escape the gunfight. It had been the only way out.
I dropped my gun belt and kicked off my shoes. I didn’t say a word to Ben. Didn’t have to. The sheriff was standing next to Mr Bare Ass, who was the last biker standing. Only now he was down on his knees, with his hands behind his head. Ben had the shotgun near the biker’s head, and I know he wanted to pull the trigger. After what the bastard had done, he sure enough deserved it. But all Ben did was touch that shotgun barrel against the biker’s cheek, and he let out a howl as the hot metal scorched him. Then Ben put a knee to his spine, and he was flat on the ground as the sheriff snatched the cuffs from his gun-belt and proceeded to truss up the turkey.
I was headed for the water by that point. The smoke from the dead-man fire drifted between me and the lake, giving the heavy moon above a black cataract. But I was through it in a second, and the cataract was gone, and a familiar white glow pooled on the still water before me.
Black water.
And beyond the expanse of darkness, out there where the moon’s reflection floated, a glimmer of movement.
I heard a splash, and spotted the woman.
I dove into the darkness.
I swam toward the light.
It had to be her. That’s what I told myself as my hands cut furrows in that cold water and I stroked toward the moon’s reflection.
By that time, you’d think I would have been flashbacking like a son of a bitch. Seeing visions of a little girl taped up in a plastic Halloween mask. Seeing her disappear underwater all over again. Only difference from that Halloween night back in ’63 was that I wasn’t a kid any more . . . but the girl in the water wasn’t a kid, either.
Other than that, my heart was pounding exactly as it had ten years before—same lake, same hope, same fear, same desperation. That’s how far I’d put Charlie Steiner’s memory behind me . . . or maybe it was just how deep Charlie was buried.
At least that’s what I thought. That’s what I told myself.
Whatever the case, I wouldn’t give the past a window. I felt no pain; didn’t even feel the bullet wound trenched in my shoulder. Everything that was with me was in my head. The things that had just happened most of all—each one of them was a flashbulb pop that waited for me every time I closed my eyes and dipped my head into that water.
Ben walking with the shotgun.
The naked woman getting prodded with the flares.
The gunfight.
The corpses on the beach.
The man face down in the fire, and the stink of burning flesh.
And then I’d gulp a clean breath, open my eyes, catch my bearings, and see that spot of moon on the water, and the streak of light that stretched across the lake between it and me—
—and the woman. There she was. Paddling away from me, arms splashing the water in hard slaps, a black wake left behind by her kicking feet.
She had to be terrified. That was it. Had to be she didn’t even know what had happened back at the beach. If that were true, she was still trying to get away. Hell, she might think I was one of the bikers, and—
She coughed. Hard. Like she’d swallowed water. Again, as if she was spitting up a bellyful.
“Hey!” I yelled. “It’s over! It’s okay. I’m with the sheriff. Tread water. Stay in one spot. We’ll take care of you!”
Another cough. A few frantic splashes in a streak of moonlight.
She was going under.
My head was above water as I stroked forward. Watching, keeping my eye on the woman so I’d know exactly where to dive if it came to that.
A gasp for breath, and then her head went under.
And her arms followed. And her fingers.
That’s when the past slammed me hard, right between the eyes. And it wasn’t the woman disappearing beneath the surface of the lake. It was a sound, from behind me.
I knew it was only the campfire, stirring in a gust of wind.
Or the rising wind carving a path through those old stands of eucalyptus.
I knew it was. It had to be.
Because it wasn’t a mummy, swinging his wrecking-ball fist, roaring in the darkness.
It wasn’t a mummy, cursing loneliness, and dreams, and wishes, and magic . . . and fate.
So I ignored it, and I swam fast, and then I started diving. Underwater, there was silence. My heart pounded with desperation, but there was nothing else to do. I dove once, twice. And the second time down I thought my fingers were passing through a tangle of weeds. At first I did. But it had to be the woman’s hair. Because as I pulled my hand free, the strands were pulled in the other direction, and a torrent of bubbles came up at me from below, brushing my face as they rose to the surface.
I wished I could gulp one down. My chest was burning, but I pushed further, deeper. She had to be close. But there was nothing but black. Nothing to see at all. My hands pulled at the water, as if straining to part a pair of locked doors. And this time I touched flesh, and my fingers passed over lips and an open mouth.
And next I found a hand.
It seemed small. Not like a child’s hand. But frail, like something you’d brush against in an old woman’s coffin.
For a moment I thought it was something long dead.
But I grabbed it, and five fingers closed a
round my own. And we rose to the surface together.
The whole department ran on adrenaline for the next few days as we put the investigation together. Everyone pretty much had to double-shift it, questioning the perps and doing the crime scene and handling anything else that came our way.
The crime scene itself wasn’t much to sweat over. We were prepared to bring in a drug-sniffing dog from upstate if we had to, but the bikers weren’t that clever. Once we got a look, we knew we’d have an open-and-shut case. There were several baggies of cocaine inside the van’s spare tire, more in the gas tank of one of the choppers. A couple of sawed-off shotguns rolled up in a rug in the back of the van. Besides that, it turned out that there were two .45s down by the campsite, both of which had been in the hands of convicted felons. The biker who went face down in the fire had a .357 Magnum tucked into his pants, and Ben and I both knew we were lucky he hadn’t managed to pull that cannon. So even without rape charges, and the double-shot possibles of kidnapping and attempted murder, we had those boys cold.
At least, we had the one who was still alive.
For his part, Mr Bare Ass lied up one side and down the other. About everything. Swore he didn’t know anything about the drugs, or the guns. Swore he was just along for the ride with some friends of his who maybe once in a while got a little bit out of hand. All he wanted to do was party. That was his sole mission in life.
The only thing he’d admit straight up was that, sure, he liked to smoke grass. Who the hell didn’t? And the girl? Hell, she was down by the lake. That’s where they found her. She was nineteen, maybe twenty . . . just another stray. She wandered up to their campfire, shivering, covered in mud and naked as a little spring daisy. Connect the dots, and she was just some misplaced flower child who got herself dosed up on acid and was left behind on life’s long and lonesome highway. Wasn’t that a pity. And what the hell were they supposed to do, with some naked chick showing up like that? They weren’t Boy Scouts, and this wasn’t the annual jamboree. So they gave her a blanket and a couple pulls on a bottle of screw-top red, and then she took herself a few hits of herb. What was supposed to happen next? Didn’t the same thing happen, everywhere? Nature took its course.