Why do you live like this, she’d asked, and I’d said, as though it were a joke, that it kept me young. But it wasn’t a joke, or at least not completely. I lived like this because I enjoyed it. I liked to flip coins, I liked not knowing whether I’d win or lose, and I liked it when the stakes were high. I liked breaking into houses, I liked stepping into the maze of a puzzle, more complicated than the floor plan of DiGaudio’s house, not knowing whether there was a Minotaur inside.
It made me feel alive.
But so did Rina. In a completely different way. What would I be giving up if she lived with me? What would I be giving up if she didn’t?
Long ago, Kathy had told me I was two different people, and I’d said it was okay as long as I could hold it to two.
Wrong again. I was wrong so often, you’d think I’d be used to it. It seemed like all I did was make mistakes and drive. What I needed was an inflatable therapist, a fatherly vinyl figure in a tweed jacket I could blow up and put in the passenger seat. I could work through my issues as I drove.
The highway rose, here and there slicing between steep walls cut through stone, but more often just rolling across trackless sand. Occasionally a narrow road, usually unpaved, bisected it at a perpendicular and dwindled to a point in the distance. Here and there, I caught the glitter of one of the desert’s mysteries: a shiny, metallic ribbon of cassette tape, unspooled and fluttering across the road’s surface, knotted into a bush or snagged on one of the reflectors that have thoughtfully been posted every few hundred yards to provide some sort of margin that might prevent the half-hypnotized driver from drifting off the road and onto the deceptive smoothness of the desert. I found myself wondering, as I always did when I made this drive, who the hell listens to cassette tapes any more? Long-haul truckers? High-desert Luddites unwilling to be dragged into the age of the mp3 file? Aging hippies wedded to their 40-year-old mix tapes?
Once in a very great while, a yellow rectangle of light defined a distant window. Somebody’s life, out there in the silence.
Almost 11:30. Any minute now.
I’d already passed through Joshua Tree, basically a big sign announcing a small town. I’d reached the outskirts of Twentynine Palms, long a rest station on the Utah Trail, now a military town that serves a Marine base.
The terrain rose to the left of the road and rolled downhill to the right, south toward the untouched and protected desert of the Joshua Tree Monument. Most of the development, such as it was—the new dirt roads, the occasional block of stucco houses—were up to the left, rising toward the foothills of some modest, prickly-looking mountains, nameless to me. Street signs began to appear, some of them reflective and official, others hopeful, just names printed in black on white fiber board, marking the way to some developer’s optimistic grid scratched into the sand, or perhaps the refuge of some desert rat, solitary as a trapdoor spider.
From the description on the deed to Pivensey’s parcel, the cabin he’d bought as Doris’s last address had been one of those, a spider’s lair. The only structure in a square of sixteen acres, probably surrounded by square miles of nothing, somewhere up there on the slope.
The terrain was populated now by Joshua trees, the kings of the high desert, essentially variants on the yucca that mimic trees with their branches upraised to heaven, the prayerful silhouette that led the Mormons on the Utah Trail to give them their name. The sandy stretches between the Joshuas were broken by patches of scrub: ocotillo, mesquite, cholla cactus bristling with barbed spines that bite into the skin and break off when you try to pull them out. And here and there rose the massive boulders, glacier-dragged and then slowly broken into geometric piles by million years of heat and erosion. The moon, now about a third of the way up, caught the southeastern surfaces of the giant rocks, coating them in white chalk and creating enormous shadows, holes in the moonlight, on the opposite side.
Even though I was driving slowly, the little sign that said FELDSPAR LANE bloomed in my headlights almost too late for me to make the left, and the rear of the car swung wide as I cut the wheel. According to Rand McNally, I’d follow Feldspar for a little more than a mile and then make another left onto Sunrise Drive. After another two-fifths of a mile, Sunrise Drive led to the access road to Pivensey’s dream cottage.
And it was uphill all the way, with nothing between me and it except a few piles of rock and some Joshua trees. There was more moonlight than I wanted, but at least it meant I could turn off my headlights. I got far enough off the highway that I felt reasonably secure I wouldn’t draw the attention of the Highway Patrol and doused the lights.
Feldspar Lane, two compact vehicles wide, was slightly banked on either side, just ridges of the sand that had been bulldozed aside to create a smoother surface, and the ridges caught the moonlight and turned the lane into a sharp-edged crayon line scrawled over the desert. Easy for me to follow, easy for someone else to see from above, even with no headlights.
I slowed without tapping the brakes—not eager for the blink of red lights—and leaned over to grab the briefcase from the floor. With one hand on the wheel, I popped the two snaps that kept the case closed and felt around until my hand hit the reassuringly cold and solid surface of the Glock. I put it in my lap and then located the Sig Sauer and put it on the seat beside the briefcase. Finally, I pulled out the two full clips and dropped them into my shirt pocket. They were amazingly heavy. Then I pushed the briefcase back onto the floor and located the Sig by touch once again. Put my hand back on the wheel and found the Sig once more. Then I did it again and again, until I could hit it first time every time, with my hand right on the grip.
I passed a little turn-off, no sign, just a track across the sand that led toward one of the rock monoliths.
I used the flashlight to check the odometer. Eight-tenths of a mile since I turned off the highway. About three-tenths left, and then the left onto Sunrise. And I was seeing nothing on either side or ahead of me that looked like a plausible alternative destination: no houses, no bar, no rundown motel. Anyone sitting on the front porch of Pivensey’s house would have to figure I was on my way to drop in.
And there was no way the house didn’t face south. South was where the view was.
Sound carries in the desert. He could hear me, too.
I said, “Hell,” and pulled the car over. I got the right front tire up and over the little ridge of sand at the edge and cut the wheel left as hard as I could. No way to do this without the brake lights coming on, but what was the alternative? Feldspar was so narrow that it took me several back-and-forths, with a lot of blinking red lights, before I’d managed a three-point turn to point myself back down the road. I let the car coast until I came to the track I’d just passed, and then I turned onto it and followed it to the rocks. As I’d hoped, it swung around them, and I stayed on the track until my car was out of sight from the slopes to the north. Then I stopped and turned the engine off. And sat there.
I decided to give it an hour. After an hour, whoever saw the brake lights would be bored enough to do something else.
Maybe.
Once you get outside Palm Springs, desert land values have remained low, and I had a lot of opportunity to appreciate the reasons for that as I hiked toward Pivensey’s property. The desert is dull and featureless for long stretches, and when it suddenly isn’t, it’s because you’ve just walked into a bunch of things that can kill you. Even the plants bite. By the time I’d gone halfway, I’d been spiked several times, I’d heard a couple of probably poisonous life forms slither away from me, and I’d turned my ankle on a rock that nature had abandoned to sulk all by itself in the middle of nowhere.
The moon was almost halfway across the sky when I encountered yet another reason to hate the evening. Although it hadn’t been visible from the highway or from Feldspar Lane, the area around chez Pivensey was comparatively hilly. Erosion had cut gullies through it, and mounds of sand, topped with thorny stuff, rose up all over the place. While the rolling terrain might help me s
tay out of sight, it would also complicate the search that was my first order of business.
I was keeping Sunrise Drive to my left as I walked. I figured I had to be getting close, so I slogged up to the highest of the rises and found myself looking across three or four other small hills to the straight white line of a roof, the white probably chosen to reflect the sun and cool the house, to whatever extent that was possible. The burglar’s Eternal Question came to me, somewhat belatedly: are there dogs? Not much I could do about it at this point if there were. I took the Glock out of my belt, put my finger on the trigger guard, and moved quietly in the direction of the house.
I topped the hill closest to it and took a longer look. It was at least fifty years old, a basic clapboard rectangle of three or four rooms, maybe 1,200 square feet. A narrow, south-looking porch ran along the side of the house I was facing, and a chimney sprouted from the near left corner of the roof, announcing the location of the living room. Looking down at the roof, I visualized a plausible floor plan. The front door, which I could see, opened from the porch directly into the living room. The kitchen would be straight back, and the bedroom and bathroom would be off to the right, linked by a short hall, with perhaps another, smaller bedroom or storage room behind the front bedroom. Rudimentary but big enough for two people.
Or, of course, for one.
There were no lights in the windows.
Sixteen acres isn’t all that big. From where I stood I could see the driveway to the house, just an economical, straight sand track that went past the structure and disappeared from sight. I figured I could use the driveway and the house as reference points to let me walk a grid of parallel lines across the property, so I hiked on down the hill, heading toward the point at which the driveway intersected Sunrise Drive. It took me about five minutes, with only one serious slip, when my feet went out from under me and nearly dropped me into a patch of cholla, but I got there.
It seemed unlikely that anyone would dig a grave any closer to the property line than thirty yards, so I measured off thirty long paces from the beginning of the driveway and then turned left. I blundered up and down the little rises for ten minutes or so, walking as straight a line as possible and taking a sighting of the house’s roof whenever it was visible, to keep me on track. When I figured I was close to the edge of the property—assuming that the driveway and the house were roughly centered on it—I made a right that took me about ten yards closer to the house and then turned again in the direction I’d come, and hiked back to the driveway, keeping my eyes on the ground as much as possible, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Then I went ten yards back up the driveway until I was exactly opposite the point at which I’d gone left, and this time I went the other way. After nine or ten minutes, I did the ten-yard zigzag that took me closer to the house and hiked back to the driveway. I continued with that pattern: go as straight as possible from one probable property line to the other, then get ten yards closer to the house, and go back again, scanning the ground as I went.
One of the very few good things about the desert, at least for my purposes that evening, is that it’s relatively smooth. It’s where God put all the sand left over from the beach, and there’s a lot of moving air. The air makes the sand flow like a very slow liquid, smoothing it, even creating ripples like the ones you’d see in a photograph of moving water. Among all that smoothness, irregularity stands out: rocks, brush, the decaying skeletons of Joshua trees and cholla plants, the littered scree of small stones in the bottoms of temporary stream beds. Here and there I saw a hole surrounded by a fan of loose sand where a coyote had gone subterranean, digging after some burrowing prey.
I’d crossed the plot of land four times now, and still hadn’t alerted a dog, so there probably wasn’t one. The house was getting pretty close. I changed my pattern and started moving in a squared-off U pattern, beginning about forty feet from the house. I went around the sides and the back of it, always maintaining my distance, then moved another ten yards away and repeated the U in the other direction.
By now, I had theories. If I were going to bury someone in the desert, I’d avoid the flash-flood gullies for the obvious reason that the water would bring whoever it was to the surface sooner or later, possibly scattering bones for a conspicuous mile or five across the desert as storm followed storm. Steep slopes were out because of wind erosion and the possibility of sand slides opening the grave. No, if I wanted to bury someone, I’d either look for a relatively flat patch of high ground, or I’d dig on the downwind slope of a gentle hill.
My eyes began to go automatically to those areas, and on the fourth U, maybe fifty yards behind the house, I saw it. A level area, a sort of plateau. Its surface was broken and irregular. A hole had been dug and something had been put into it, something with significant volume, because there was a lot of sand left over. Three piles of it, not yet smoothed, streamlined by the wind.
I dropped to my knees and, with profound misgivings, began to dig with my bare hands.
The hole was recent. The sand hadn’t settled. It was still loose and easy to scoop out of the way. It was easier than I wanted it to be. I wanted resistance, I wanted difficulty, I wanted anything that would delay the moment when my fingers found the hand.
I stopped, popping goose bumps so pronounced I felt like a cactus. I didn’t want to look at it, but I dug further down, eyes raised to the moon, until I could grip the entire hand. It was a small hand and a cold one. And now I could smell it.
I stood up so quickly I got dizzy. Without even knowing I was doing it, I took three or four steps back, away from the grave. Then, not wanting to, I looked down.
Five fingers protruded from the hole I’d dug. They were spread wide and slightly curled toward the palm. It looked like the hand of someone who’d tried to claw back to the surface, back to the air and the moonlight and the spangle of stars. I knew I was imagining that, knew he wouldn’t bury anyone who wasn’t dead, because—well, because sand is soft. I was sure his imagination was sufficiently vivid to allow him the vision of someone digging free, staggering up out of the hole. Coming for him.
But that’s what the hand looked like. Someone trying to dig out. Someone small.
I was glad that Marge wasn’t alone.
And it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to kill Pivensey.
I’d seen the car parked beside the house, so he was there. With the moon at its high point in the sky, there were no obscuring shadows now, but it didn’t worry me. There had been no lights on in the house the first time I saw it, forty or fifty minutes ago, and there still weren’t.
Odds were that he’d be in the front bedroom. The door at the rear of the house led into the kitchen if my mental floor plan was accurate. The back door was farther from the bedroom than the front door, so the back door it was. It had a lock I could have opened with a toothpick. In about ten seconds, I took the step up into the kitchen, which was right where I thought it would be.
Even though a skilled burglar gets in and out as quickly as possible, it’s always a good idea to spend the first minute or two in a house just standing still and listening. I was breathing through my mouth with my tip of my tongue against the roof of the mouth, which is the quietest way to breathe. The moonlight through the windows spread itself over a spotless kitchen. A day’s worth of dishes for a single person—three plates, a cup, a couple of glasses, and some silverware—gleamed in a drying rack next to the sink. A dishtowel had been folded into smooth quarters and placed beside the rack. A painted wooden shelf a couple of feet above the counter held big sealed mayonnaise jars full of what looked like sugar and tea and coffee beans and flour, plus smaller containers of herbs and spices. A boxy white refrigerator from the 1950s, barely shoulder high, hummed against the wall next to the door that led to the living room. On top of the refrigerator was an old wooden breadbox.
It was all pretty homey.
The kitchen floor was wood, with too much space between the uprights to which the floorbo
ards were nailed, and it creaked. I slid my feet over the surface, moving slowly and transferring my weight as smoothly as possible, the Glock loose and comfortable in my right hand. I crossed the kitchen with a minimum of noise and paused at the door to the living room. The fireplace, made of river stone, took up much of the wall to the right. Facing it was an old couch, covered in corduroy or some other napped fabric that ate light without giving any back. A pale pine coffee table, rough-hewn and a couple of inches thick, sat in front of the couch. Magazines were fanned out over its surface, tidy as the selection in a dentist’s office at the beginning of the day. Smug, glossy women looked up from the covers: Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour. Doris’s leftovers, dreams between covers.
The only other furniture in the living room was an armchair covered in scarred leather, one of those ones with the brass nailheads on the front of the arms to make it clear that it’s one hundred percent guy furniture. Beyond the armchair was a dark rectangle, the opening into the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
After the kitchen, the living room was a breeze because a rug covered almost the entire floor. It was a cheap oriental nine-by-twelve in a dark pattern that might have been mainly red in daylight, and it was thin, but it was a lot quieter than bare wood. The front wall of the living room was mostly a big window that let in plenty of moonlight, but the hallway was much darker. As I stood beside the entrance to the hall, I could see a soft rectangle of cold white moonlight falling through an open door on the right, the door to the front bedroom. Other than that, the hall was dark enough to make me nervous.
For all I knew Lorne Henry Pivensey was standing somewhere in there right now, breathing as quietly as I was, gun in hand. Maybe the open door was an invitation. Maybe he was behind the mostly-closed door on the opposite side of the hall, waiting for me to edge my way to that open door and stand in it, my back to him, silhouetted in moonlight, presenting my spinal column for a nice, clean shot.
Little Elvises Page 27