She folded the page into quarters, then eighths. She didn’t look up for a long, long time. Then she walked to her father and tucked her face into his neck while she cried her heart out.
Within ten minutes of their arrival at a motel off Highway 69, Eli and Emma were ratted on by the manager. Cal Bentley pulled into the parking lot and spotted the Corvette immediately, but he didn’t get out. That boy had no luck; he never had and probably never would.
Cal lit one of his contraband cigarettes and sucked in even harder when he thought of the tirade he’d get from Lois. She never made her usual Saturday night pot roast when she caught him smoking. Instead, she tried to balance the damage done by cooking tofu and falafel, two things no amount of mustard and Worcestershire sauce could turn edible.
He kept an eye on the dingy outer hallway. He’d just gotten off the cell phone with Savannah. If she wanted to let her fifteen-year-old daughter loose with a boy like Eli, that was her problem. His problem was making sure a boy on the run didn’t do something stupid. His problem was harder.
Mistake number one: The kids hadn’t gone more than fifty miles before stopping. Mistake number two: They’d pulled into a motel right by the side of the highway, where anyone could make out the black glow of Eli’s Corvette. Mistake number three: They’d paid the motel manager by cash, which was always suspicious, and signed in under John and Jane Doe, which was just plain ridiculous. The manager had waited no more than five minutes before phoning Cal.
Cal had one hell of a headache. He’d had it since yesterday, when Dan Merrill had called to give him a list of houseboaters who’d lived on Wawani Lake at the same time as the Pillandros. Dan himself had located a man who, years ago, found Jake’s wallet, along with a yellowed tooth, washed up on shore. Dan had wanted to bring Jake in for questioning.
“You’ve got nothing,” Cal had told him.
“What about the hole in the dead guy’s skull?” Dan had asked. “What about the fact that this skeleton was Jake’s stepfather, and one son of a bitch to boot?”
“I’m telling you, get your facts in order first. You’ve got nothing here. You hear me?”
But Cal knew exactly what they had. The day before Roy Pillandro had disappeared, his wife, Cheryl, had been treated at Phoenix Memorial for broken bones, and then seen by a neighbor at her old house in Phoenix, where Jake was still living. And yesterday, Cal had checked on some of those names Dan had given him and spoken to Mrs. Alice Lane.
“Roy was a brute,” Mrs. Lane had said. “An all-out animal. Cheryl never said a word, but I mean, how do you hide bruises all over your face? We weren’t deaf, you know. We heard the screaming.”
“Do you recall what happened when Roy disappeared?”
“Recall it? I was there that night. I was watching television, then all of a sudden there was shouting, then a loud bang. I ran outside, but when I called over, a man’s voice said Roy had just gotten crazy with a firecracker. Ha! That was no firecracker. That was a gun going off. I caught a glimpse of the man who shot it, too. Tall, dark-haired, but just a kid. Twenty or so.”
“Could you identify him now?”
“Oh, I doubt it. It was fifteen years ago. And he jumped back into the shadows so fast, it was hard to notice anything other than his dark hair. But when you find him, you tell him I’m glad he did it. That night was the first good night’s sleep I’d gotten in years.”
They had motive, mounting circumstantial evidence, and a probable witness, but Cal was obviously losing his mind because even if Jake had killed Roy Pillandro, he didn’t particularly care. On top of that, he was sitting here in front of a motel, letting a couple of runaways think they’d gotten off. His heart just wasn’t in it anymore. He’d gotten so old and soft, when Eli and Emma finally skulked out of their room, he decided then and there to let them go. When Eli took off his jacket and wrapped it around Emma’s shoulders, Cal smoked his cigarette down to the stub. When they got into the Corvette and huddled together before peeling out, Cal turned on his radio to the oldies station and sang “Blueberry Hill” at the top of his lungs. When the song was over and the kids were long gone, he got on his cell phone and called Lois.
“Honey,” he said, “slip into something pretty. I’m taking you out to lunch.”
Eli was breathing hard as he skidded out of the motel parking lot. Cal Bentley was sitting in his squad car not fifty feet from them. Eli’s hands slipped off the wheel as he turned the corner and drove toward the signal at the highway on-ramp. The light was red, and his lungs were on fire. Emma was pale as fresh paper, looking into the rearview mirror.
“See him yet?” Eli said.
“No.”
“Fuck. He’s playing us.” He gunned the engine. The light was going to stay red forever. Finally, he just blew through it. He headed up the on-ramp and waited for the lights and sirens, but they never came.
He was doing sixty in seconds, then seventy, seventy-five. He swerved into the fast line, cutting off a Suburban loaded down with a family of blonds. He couldn’t have slowed if he tried. Finally, Emma got up on her knees and turned around in her seat.
“He’s not coming,” she said.
“Yeah. Right.”
Eli floored it. He was doing eighty-five and not about to stop. He had pawned a couple of stereos just to stay the night at that lame hotel, and now the cops were on to them. Fearlessness had kept his bones strong all these years, and now he could feel them splintering. He wished he had a home to go to. For the first time in years, he wished someone else was in charge.
“Really,” she said, turning around. “He let us go.”
Eli let up on the accelerator. He started shaking and couldn’t stop. He didn’t like this one bit. He fully expected himself to act crazy, but when cops started doing it, the whole system went to hell. Next thing you knew, Cal would be taking bribes, Eli’s dad would be getting sober, and he’d be crying in Emma’s lap. Everything they’d pretended to be would blow up in their faces.
“We’ll go to Flagstaff tonight.” He despised the tremor in his voice and sucked on another cigarette to stop it. “I’ve got a friend there who can put us up for a few days. Then we’ll meet Rick. He thinks we can score at least a grand, maybe more, from the liquor store. That’ll get Rick his powder and us out of this fucking state.”
“Why do we have to rob that liquor store? Let’s go somewhere out of town.”
“Rick knows the combination to the safe. That’s where the real stash is. His brother was a cashier there. We’ll be in and out, Emma. No one’s gonna catch us.”
Emma nodded, but she kept looking over her shoulder, and he didn’t blame her. The cop wasn’t there, but that didn’t mean something wasn’t closing in on them fast. That didn’t mean they weren’t headed for disaster anyway.
FIFTEEN
THE FIVE OF SWORDS, REVERSED MISFORTUNE OF A FRIEND
The only evidence Doug had been in the garden was two shoe prints in the soil. When Jake called his name, Doug disappeared so fast into a thicket of pines, not even a hound could have tracked him. He pressed his back against the bristly trunk of a ponderosa and by the time Jake went back inside and slammed the door, he was covered in sap, and laughing out loud.
He had never thought he would be good at espionage, but maybe every man had a bit of James Bond in him, especially when it mattered this much. Jake wanted the last two designs for the bench, and no doubt he wanted his privacy back too. But Doug had already decided he was never leaving the cabin. He feigned sleep whenever Jake peeked into the loft, and escaped for walks when Jake came outside. He wasn’t going anywhere, not when the air up here was pure oxygen, his blood running clean as Jake’s well water, and on good days he could walk nearly a mile.
In fact, he had decided on the next symbol for the bench, and he would tell Jake in another week or two, to keep the man happy. He wanted the sun carved in, deep and dazzling. The blazing sun that had given life to his garden, then threatened to take his own. The sun he still couldn�
�t get enough of, despite what it had done to him.
He turned his face to it now and wasn’t blinded. He could stay out in the sun all day and not get burnt. The one benefit of dying was that nothing else could hurt him now. They ought to send him into battle; he could detonate bombs at close range and stop bullets with his teeth. Better than that, he would move the enemy to tears; one whiff of his spoiled breath and young, hearty men would start packing for home.
He was giddy, too. This morning, when Savannah had laid out her cards for him, he’d put his hand over hers. “Now,” he’d said, “go get the other ones.”
She had looked up quickly, then simply went to her bag and pulled out another third of the deck. She mixed them in with the others, then he reshuffled. She laid them out stiffly, but then she smiled.
“Oh, Dad. Do you see this? It’s the Ace of Cups. That means fulfillment. A favorable outlook. It means you’re going to be all right.”
“I never doubted it.”
And he hadn’t. He was going to be all right, one way or the other. He hadn’t gotten worked up over the cancer, and he wasn’t getting worked up over this apparent remission. Sixty years in this world had taught him things were never as bad or as good as they appeared, and either way, life worked out as it should.
He walked to the meadow. He was not leaving, not when the sun was this warm and the grass waist-high and soft, and the old dog needed him. Sasha was right on his heels. When he lay down in the grass, in the blunt shadow of Kemper Peak, she lay down too, her gray muzzle on his chest.
They breathed in sync, in shallow, jerky breaths. When Doug fell asleep, he dreamed animal dreams. He had paws instead of feet and ran faster than he’d ever imagined, through forests so heavily timbered, his fur was scraped off by pine bark. He had amazing spring to his legs, he could leap over granite boulders twice his height.
He spotted his prey just a few yards ahead, a white rabbit, gone still with fear. He growled from deep in his throat, but when he went to charge it, he couldn’t move. His chest was on fire; his paws twitched, then slipped out from under him. He fell to the ground, pine needles piercing his belly. His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth. He looked up to find a frail, white-haired man bending over him.
When Doug opened his eyes, Sasha was curled into him. His own chest rose and fell evenly, but hers labored, and her tongue hung out of her mouth. Doug reached over and scratched behind the ears.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “Just a bit of dying, old girl.”
She pressed her head against his hand, then dropped her chin to the ground. She shuddered, but when he put his ear to her chest, he could still hear the shaky beat of her heart.
He got to his feet, then reached for a tree to hold on to. He could walk a mile now, but the corners of his vision were going black. The tips of his fingers were numb. As he headed back to the cabin for Jake, he had to feel his way through, tree to tree.
Sasha saw colors now. Before, the world had been black and white, but now the good man’s face was lavender and chartreuse and mustard and a marvelous lime green. He came in and out of focus, but when he got close enough, Sasha managed to lift up her head and lick his bearded chin.
She could hear the good man crying, saying her name, but she was floating now, dancing on air. Her bones no longer ached; in fact, she couldn’t find her paws, or any fur to lick. She’d been snatched by the wind and carried up over treetops. She growled at a robin flying by, then looked down and saw her old body, which the good man was hugging fiercely.
She swooped down and looked up through her body’s eyes at this man she loved. She was afraid to leave him, afraid he might not know how to love anything but dogs, but the air smelled of a hundred irresistible scents, all the colors were Day-Glo, and devotion didn’t stop here, no matter what the man might think.
Her legs jerked in release, the man cried out, and she wished she spoke his language so she could tell him it didn’t hurt at all.
The man’s tears fell on her snout and slipped into her mouth. She drank them down, but her throat was still parched. The man clutched at her, but she was already floating again. Gabe and Rufus were circling her now, howling. They would mourn her for a day, then get on with things, the way dogs did. Life for a dog was too short to do otherwise.
Sasha sailed up past the detestable chipmunks, up over the hundred-year-old ponderosa that had withstood a dozen lightning strikes. When she looked down again, past the splintered crest, she saw the good man’s bent head. She tried to swoop back to take him with her, but the air was too light and the colors too mesmerizing, and soon she was sucked up into the sky.
* * *
Jake crouched over his dog, his chin pressed into her fur. Savannah had come to the meadow with him and now she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He must have let something awful out of his throat, because she squeezed harder, and Rufus and Gabe howled.
“This is your good world,” he said. “You love one thing and then it dies.”
Savannah squeezed him tighter. She was crying, too. He could feel her tears sinking through his shirt, but he made no move to comfort her. She was just going to leave him anyway.
She rocked him back and forth. She pried his hands out of Sasha’s fur and looped her fingers through his.
“I loved her,” he said.
“Well, thank God. You just stand here and thank God for that.”
She was stronger than he’d thought; she yanked him right to his feet. She wore a red gauze dress and straw hat and, even through his grief, Jake knew she had him, like a pebble in her hand she could play with or toss away.
“We’ll bury her on your mountain,” she said. “That’ll give Roy some unexpected company. Dogs are the best ghosts, you know. They come on full moons and bark like crazy. They don’t take any crap.”
He had the strangest thought: He needed her to make him real. He’d been only a shadow on his mountain and hadn’t materialized into substance until she looked at him head-on.
“You never lose them, that’s what I’m saying,” she said. “You never lose what you love best. That’s why I haven’t lost Emma, no matter what she might think.”
He was never going to get an invitation, he saw that now. She wouldn’t be able to stand the silence here much longer; she certainly wasn’t going to stick around to watch her father die. She would return to sea level, where people didn’t hallucinate about ghosts and love, where the air was so dense, no one could take a deep breath of anything. She would never ask Jake to come with her. There was no reason she should, no reason to think he could ever give up his little, damaged life. But if he just stood here, the ground might open up beneath him. The only way to keep from falling in was to hold on to her.
He leaned down and stroked Sasha’s fur once more, then stood up as straight as he could. “When you leave, I’m coming with you.”
She leaned back to look at him. If she didn’t take him now, he would go into the woods and not stop walking. He would be one of those men backpackers found beside streams in the spring, the meat stripped from his bones long after he’d died of some mysterious hunger.
He wanted to state his case, to plead, but all he did was stand there. When she just went on staring at him, he looked into the sun. “Please. Say something.”
She put her hands on each side of his face and pulled him down to kiss him.
Bronco Liquor was just outside of Prescott, off Highway 69. The owner was a sixty-year-old named Bob Simon, who had made the mistake, a few years back, of hiring Rick Laufer’s older brother Phil, despite his felony record. Phil had worked at the liquor store for two years, with full access to the safe. He had repaid Bob Simon’s trust by selling cocaine from the storeroom and, right before he was arrested for dealing, slipping the combination of the safe to his younger brother.
Late Thursday night, Rick sat beside Pippen in the front seat of his Mustang, waiting for the one car in the parking lot to pull out. Emma was in the back with Eli and Jac
k; she’d been smoking Marlboro reds nonstop for an hour. Her throat was raw, and that was just as well, because if she said anything it would probably be about right and wrong.
They all had purple auras, Rick and Eli and Jack and Pippen. Even worse, when they rolled down their windows, most of those auras blew away. Whatever those boys were, or wanted to be, was so weak the slightest breeze could change it. When their auras grew back again, they were just outlines and even darker, almost black.
The car finally pulled out, and Rick parked down the street. “Okay,” he said. “You know what to do, Emma?”
She nodded. She had thought being bad might excite her, but it only made her sick to her stomach, and a little bit green. Eli grabbed her hand and brought it to his lips. Even though the guys would ride him later, he just looked right at her.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
That’s when she knew she did. She had something to prove, and it wasn’t that she was daring enough to rob a liquor store. It was that she was brave enough to love a lost cause. She was willing to give up everything.
She got out of the car and walked to the door of the liquor store. She turned around and gave the sign.
Then she took a deep breath and walked inside. She went to the back, searched for a six-pack of Michelob, and brought it to the counter. Just as they had known he would, Bob Simon took a good look at her and shook his head.
“Yeah, right. Not even a fake ID is gonna work, little lady.”
She was able to smile right over the flip of her stomach. “Come on. It’s just a six-pack. I’m not driving, I swear it.”
He took the six-pack off the counter and walked back to the refrigerator. “No way. You know what the fine is now? I can’t even sell you cigarettes.”
“Look, I won’t tell.”
The man laughed. He looked a lot like her grandfather might have, if he hadn’t gotten sick. Bob Simon was reaching out to give her a sympathetic squeeze on the arm when the guys, all covered in ski masks and carrying sawed-off shotguns, burst in.
The Wishing Garden Page 24