Desert Remains

by Steven Cooper

  “They do sometimes,” Gus admits.

  Their voices are graveyard quiet in here, reverent. Gus looks back at the aperture of the cave; from here it’s a small hole with a celestial beam of light. But, save for the flashlight, they’re soaked in blackness. There’s a damp, coppery smell in here. They step slowly, Alex pivoting the flashlight so it offers a small valley, a half circle, of illumination. They walk a few feet at a time. The smell is stronger, more forbidding, unfamiliar, then putrid.

  Something falls.

  Both men stop short.

  They wait.

  Just a rock outside the cave, Gus imagines. And then he touches the wall. “Right here. Shine the light right here.”

  Alex complies, and the light reveals nothing in the spot that Gus had touched. Gus reaches for the flashlight, and Alex surrenders it. Immediately Gus lifts it to the ceiling of the cave, and up there is a large petroglyph, an ancient depiction of one animal chasing another; Symbols of fire, or what seems like bursts of flames, are etched into the rock above and below the larger portrait. Gus says, “We’re here. We’re close. That is not a new carving. That’s the real thing.”

  He shines the light at the detective who nods. Alex looks tired. Gus is just waking up. Alex reaches for the flashlight, and Gus places it in his hand. They’re about forty feet in. Alex pivots and starts inching deeper when suddenly the flashlight, like a live missile, flies from his hand and hits the wall. Gus hears the detective stumble to the rocky floor.

  “Alex?”

  “Dude, I tripped on it.”

  “What?”

  “I fell on the body.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. The body broke my fall,” Alex says. “Don’t come near me.”

  “What?”

  “I said don’t come near me,” the detective repeats. “I can get myself up. But I’m a mess. I’ve got body parts all over me.”

  The words alone bring a heave to Gus’s throat. He doesn’t puke, but knows it won’t be long. He scrambles for the flashlight, which has rolled backward a few feet. He kneels on the ground, grabs it, and illuminates Detective Alex Mills, who is rising from a puddle of slime and human tissue, indeed, clinging to his arms and legs. Gus lowers the flashlight and sees a carcass and bones that have been pulled apart but left in a pile.

  Alex is speaking into his radio. “I need recovery. We have a body here. Send the ME. Send the techs. Maybe get me HazMat.”

  There’s no reply.

  “Damn it. I probably can’t get a fucking frequency in here.”

  The detective repeats his request. Still nothing. He tries again.

  Finally the radio static yields a voice. “We’ll pull that together, Mills,” he’s told.

  “We might need a chopper.”

  “You got it.”

  “And get Chase out here to take over the scene. My clothes are evidence, so I’ll be here when he arrives.”

  “Ten-four, Mills. As good as done.”

  Gus aims the flashlight at the detective’s face.

  “Dude,” is all Alex can say.

  “I know. This is sick.”

  “Never,” Alex says and then stops.

  “I heard you call for HazMat.”

  “Well, yeah. I’m contaminated.”

  “Contaminated?”

  “This is not the murder you saw yesterday, Gus,” Mills says firmly. “This body’s badly decomposed. It’s been ripped apart by critters, maybe vultures. It’s been here for a while.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me on this, Parker. I’ve seen enough decomposed bodies to know one when I actually trip over one.”

  Gus aims the flashlight to the body again and sees a hand and an arm, not much of a shoulder. The face lays there crumpled, a shiny parchment of flesh still intact, the jaw, ear, and forehead insanely reminiscent of a Picasso. He moves the light above and around the body, and there, on the walls of the cave, is the killer’s rendition of the murder. It’s not unlike the carving at South Mountain. A man kneels over a woman and plunges a knife into her body. A wound in the throat. A wound in the chest.

  12

  The men step out onto the ledge. It’s like an escape without an escape. Mills sees revulsion on Gus’s face.

  “What?” the detective asks.

  Gus points, slowly at first, then more urgent, and says, “Those are maggots on your collar, I think.”

  Mills examines himself and finds the wobbling beans not only on his collar but in his socks, as well. “Shit. Shit. Fuck,” he curses. He starts to strip out of his clothes as Gus retches over the side of the ledge into the canyon below.

  “I hope no one’s down there,” the psychic says.

  Mills ignores him and brushes madly through his hair to loosen any maggots or bugs that may have landed on his scalp. “I can’t fucking believe this,” he says. Mills can fucking believe the maggots; what he can’t fucking believe is that he’s stuck out here in this ugly fucking canyon scraping up the decrepit remains of life, really wading through the sewer of humanity, when he should be at home straightening out his family. He should be talking to his son. He should be saying, “Trevor, you are my priority.” You can’t imply something like that. Not to a teenager. But, Jesus Christ, this is his job. This. This contaminated mess is his job, and it comes as no surprise that this is where he finds himself, covered by maggots, on an otherwise beautiful weekend morning when most men are at home fixing things or frying up bacon or getting the kids ready for a hike. There are probably families hiking all around him now, linen fresh and rosy cheeked.

  “Maggots are more likely on a fresh corpse, but I think flies can return and lay more eggs,” he says clinically. “Actually, I don’t give a shit. Look at me. I’ll leave it to the experts.”

  Gus retches again.

  “You okay?” Mills asks.

  Gus looks at him confused, as if wondering how you define okay out here. “I guess,” he says. “But I’m sorry about my screwup. I must have gotten my wires crossed. I know someone was murdered yesterday. But my visions led me here.”

  Gus sits. Mills examines for maggots one more time, then does likewise. “Don’t apologize, my friend. We needed to find this body.”

  “You’ve got a very ambitious killer on your hands, Alex. I mean who would go to all this trouble to murder someone?”

  “Something ceremonial, I think,” Mills replies. “But what the fuck do I know? I know nothing about these symbols and shit. I really don’t get the connection.”

  “I know one thing,” Gus says. “This is a man capable of many murders. You’ve got a guy on a killing spree.”

  “Two murders do not make a serial killer.”

  “Three,” Gus corrects him. “The third body will turn up today.”

  “Hey what if you actually cross your eyes right now?” Mills asks with a smirk. “Wouldn’t that actually uncross your visions?”

  “I don’t think it works that way,” Gus tells him. “So, what’s next?”

  “You stay as far away from me as possible.”

  The psychic surveys the ledge, acknowledging how little room he has to maneuver.

  “How will the ME get down here?”

  Mills shrugs. “Not my problem right now,” he says. “Maybe they’ll bring the body to him. I have no clue.”

  They wait for help, in whatever form.

  Gus, it seems, is fidgety with the wait and can’t stand the silence. “Ever uncover anything like this?” he asks Mills.

  “Not exactly,” the detective tells him. “I’ve seen a lot of grisly things. I’ve found body parts in the most unlikely places.”

  “Like where?”

  “Aw, I don’t know. The fryolator at Pico Elementary.”

  “Get out.”

  “It was during summer break. No kids around.”

  Gus gestures to the cave. “Well, this is certainly a great story to tell your—”

  “Son?”

  “Sorry. I�
��m sure you two have more important things to talk about.”

  “Do we ever.”

  Suddenly the rapture of choppers arrives. A war of whirs and the men look to the sky. Mills starts flailing his arms furiously as if waving off the helicopters. “Fuck,” he screams. “Fuck the fucking fuckers.”

  Gus rises, too. “What’s wrong?”

  “Those aren’t my choppers,” he says. “Those are news choppers.”

  “Oh, Jesus. How did they know we were out here?”

  “They picked up scanner traffic. Probably been following it since the search started this morning.”

  The metal vultures are getting closer, lower, their domes almost close enough to see the pilots and reporters inside. The noise is descending, cascading, like a waterfall of scrap metal.

  “Stand in front of me,” Mills yells.

  “Huh?”

  “Stand in front of me,” Mills repeats. “I’m not going to end up on the news in my underwear.”

  Gus dashes to Mills’s side of the ledge. “I guess that means I’m going to HazMat with you,” Gus screams into Mills’s ear.

  “No, no. You just cover me until I back up into the cave. It’ll just take a second. Let’s move backward now. Stay a foot or so in front of me.”

  The men begin the slow retreat.

  Mills shrinks behind Gus as the two of them march.

  Once in the cave, Mills ducks across the perimeter of darkness. “Shit,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I need my radio.”

  Gus immediately turns to the entrance of the cave, leans out, and grabs the radio. He puts it on the ground beside Mills. Mills lunges for it. “Get those choppers out of here,” Mills shouts into the device. “Tell them they’re impeding an investigation.”

  “They say they have a right to be out here,” the voice replies.

  “No!” Mills hollers. “Not at all. In fact, we have a right to close off airspace in order to get our own equipment in here. Tell them that.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “Close the airspace,” Mills repeats.

  “Ten-four, Detective.”

  Then Mills looks at the psychic. “Do you believe this shit?”

  Gus just looks at him and shrugs. “As soon as the news choppers leave, I think I’m going to start my climb back up.”

  “Huh? You think you’re going to climb back up?”

  “Yeah. How else am I going to get out of here?”

  Mills spits. There’s an awful taste in his mouth, worse than death, as if he’s gotten human organs on his lips. “Dude, I can put you in one of our choppers,” he tells Gus. “You know, an airlift.”

  “I’d rather just climb back up, if that’s not a problem.”

  “It’s not a problem for me,” the detective tells him. “But based on your skills coming down, it may be a problem for you.”

  Gus rolls his eyes and then leans forward. “I’m not a big fan of helicopters,” he says.

  “Scared.”

  “Yep. Totally scared.”

  “I appreciate your candor, Mr. Parker. When we get the media out of here, you’re free to climb.”

  The climb up is a whole lot easier than the hike down. Perhaps it’s because Gus is fleeing the scene. That’s what he thinks as he muscles up the mountain. He’s escaping a monstrous scene, a hideous corpse, a vortex of evil. And he attacks that mountain, grinding away with his hands, with his feet, and it all reminds him of the rope climb in high school gym. He was always the first to the top. Never liked the way down. Now atop the ridge he catches his breath, walks in circles with his hands above his head, at once reaching for the sky, for purifying air, for salvation. And then he wipes the sweat from his face and shrugs off the idea of salvation. “You ready to head back down the trail?” someone asks him.

  Gus hadn’t noticed the patrolman coming toward him. He recognizes the kid with the wide and eager face. The name is Hall. The badge confirms it. “Yeah,” he tells the kid. “Let’s go.”

  They descend the trail in silence for about ten minutes before Hall turns to him and asks, “What was down there?”

  “A corpse.”

  “Well, I know they found a dead body, Mr. Parker, but was there, like, anything unusual?”

  Gus stifles a laugh. “A dead body down there would be considered unusual,” he tells the rookie.

  “I hear Mills tripped over the body.”

  “It was very dark in there. We’re lucky we found the remains.”

  The kid has a swagger, but it’s refined and not discourteous. “Yeah, well, that makes three bodies and three caves.”

  That kind of math would account for Gus’s visions, but he doesn’t share his psychic arithmetic with the officer. “Two bodies so far,” Gus says instead. “Unless you’ve been reading my mind.”

  “No. It’s three bodies, three caves,” the officer repeats with intrigue in his eyes. “I sense a pattern here.”

  Gus dispatches a clear signal of confusion from his face.

  Hall moves closer. “Oh. You probably didn’t hear.”

  “Hear what?”

  “While you were climbing up from the cave, a call came in from Camelback. Somebody found another body up there.”

  Gus feels his eyes rip open. “Where? When?”

  “About half an hour ago, maybe. On the south side of Camelback.”

  They’re walking swiftly now. “Really? I didn’t think the south side was all that popular with hikers,” Gus says.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has anyone told Alex?”

  “He’ll be told as soon as someone from his squad gets here,” the officer replies.

  They descend the rest of the trail in silence, but Gus is full of commotion in the regions of his mind where he goes to clarify visions. The Camelback body is the murder he saw yesterday. Has to be. On his Camelback. You live in its shadows long enough and you begin to think of it as your shelter, as your hunkering guardian. There is something about that big, red mountain that Gus trusts instinctively even if the huge beast occasionally strands a hiker, injures a cocky climber, and requires rescue choppers to dip between its humps.

  Down at the trailhead Beatrice is gone.

  No sign of the Karmann Ghia. He pulls out his cell and dials.

  “I had a client,” she explains. “You were gone forever. But I left with every intention to come back and get you,” she coos. “Don’t feel abandoned.”

  He tells her about the grisly remains in the cave and the body at Camelback.

  “Oh, my dear God,” she says, and Gus imagines her holding a fluttering hand to her heart. “Let me see if I can work on this for a few minutes.”

  “Beatrice, you don’t do murder,” Gus reminds her. “Besides, I know the body at Camelback is the death I saw yesterday. Because the victim here is obviously not fresh.” And then he walks toward Hall’s cruiser, the cell phone still in his hand. “Beatrice, hold on,” he says. He sticks his head into the officer’s car.

  “Hall, can you give me a ride to Camelback? I’m stranded out here.”

  “Those are my instructions,” Hall says.

  “From who?”

  “Mills. Just heard from him. Apparently he got the news.”

  Gus flies to the passenger side and hops in. “Beatrice. I’ll call you later.”

  This place is so familiar. It’s Gus’s backyard, this street that starts out flat in Arcadia and starts its climb up to the base of the mountain. It curves and bends, and Camelback towers overhead; he has studied this big rock for years, and he is still so awestruck. The closer he gets, the bigger it grows until he is just a tiny factor of dust.

  “You know this area?” Hall asks.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “This isn’t exactly a hiking spot.”

  “I know.”

  “But there’s a ledge up around here where people climb to take pictures. Nice views.”

  “Yeah, and it’s all being sold off to developers. It’s
immoral.”

  They make a sharp turn, and the road heads steeply downward before twisting, again, up and around another bend. That’s where they find about six cruisers parked end to end. A crime scene van is blocking the road. They get out and walk to the van where they’re greeted by Detective Morton Myers.

  “Looks like you don’t need me here,” Hall says.

  Gus senses the void in Hall, the enough-for-one-day disintegration of the soul. Hall is so young and already jaded enough to retreat from the big case of the day. Doesn’t need to be here. Perfectly happy to go home and eat pasta and walk the dog.

  Myers nods. “Go back to the Peak,” he tells Hall. “They need your help working the perimeter and closing the trails.”

  Gus is not looking at either of them. Instead he is studying the ledge above the road and watching the scramble of feet up there. He closes his eyes. This is where the body lies, the one he saw slain yesterday. The vibe rattles deep within him, a kettledrum of affirmation. He opens his eyes, shielding them with one hand from the sun. “There’s a cave up there?” he asks Myers.

  Myers flashes a bubba grin and says, “Oh damn right there is. Party cave. All the kids come up here to drink and smoke. Neighbors are always complaining.”

  “And nobody saw anything last night?”

  “Not that we know of,” Myers says.

  “A hiker found the body, right?”

  Again that grin of the Wild West, where body counts make a cop like Morton Myers salivate, as though without the bodies, without menace of criminals, how would he justify the uniform? “Hysterical neighbor is more like it,” Myers says. “This ain’t no hiking trail.”

  “I’m out of here,” Hall says. He extends a hand, and he and Gus shake.

  Gus turns back to Myers. “Show me the way up.”

  Myers looks to the ledge, then back to Gus. “Uh, not so fast, buddy. I don’t have the authority to let you up there.”

  “Where’s Mills?”

  Myers twists his mouth as if he’s savoring his favorite pastry. “He’s probably at headquarters taking the hottest shower of his life. That’s if they let him leave the scene; I hear his clothes are evidence. Heh-heh.”