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 anymore, 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 the 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 anymore. 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 towards 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 anymore . . . 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 facedown 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 around 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 which had been in the hands of convicted felons. The biker who went facedown 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.
When he finished up his tale, Ben hit the STOP button on the little cassette recorder we used for interviews. I escorted Mr. Bare Ass back to his cell, then met up with Ben in his office.
“That guy couldn’t shut himself up if you gave him a rubber plug and a roll of duct tape,” Ben said.
“Yeah . . . but when I think about what they did to that girl. Man. Sometimes I just don’t know. Talk about a guy who deserves a beating. Walking him back to his cell, it was all I could do to stop myself from ramming his head into the wall. Take my badge if you want to, but I really wanted to knock the teeth right out of his mouth.”
“Oh, he’ll have his beating coming . . . and worse. You can bank on that. I’m sure he’s got a full-course menu of pain and humiliation ahead of him.”
“Where?”
“In prison.” Ben smiled. “They’ve got plenty of experts in there.”
He grabbed his keys off the table.
“Now let’s go check on that girl.”
And that’s what we did.
Walking into that hospital room with Jane Doe taped on the door, it was almost like seeing her for the first time. The night I’d rescued her was a blur, and there were really only two things I remembered about her—her eyes, which were wide and terrified. And the trail of bloody burns the bikers had left on her body with those road flares, as if they’d wanted to leave her with a set of brands that marked a trail of pain she’d never forget.
Ben had already called an ambulance by the time I got her out of the lake. We carried her up the access road and met the paramedics where we’d blocked the road with the police cruiser. Maybe two minutes later, the ambulance doors closed and she was gone. That was the last we saw of her until the hospital visit.
A couple days rest had done her some good. She actually smiled at us as we came through the door. We talked for a while, just chit-chat. Nice day . . . nice room . . . oh, you’ve got a great view here . . . and look at that little birdbath out on the patio. That’s nice. I was surprised to find how pretty she was. Especially her eyes. They were dark pools, deep brown, and they shone beneath long bangs that were the same color.
Ben asked her some questions. He was patient. He had to be, because she really didn’t have any answers. After a while she said, “I’m sorry I can’t be more help. I’m still kind of tired. The doctors say things might be better after I get some rest.”
“Okay,” Ben said. “You take care of yourself. If there’s anything you think of, just give us a call.” He handed her his card. “Anything you need, too. We’ll be right here if you need us.”
After that, there wasn’t much else for Ben to say.
But she had something to say, and she looked at me when she said it.
“They tell me you saved my life, and I remember that.”
I nodded.
“It’s the one thing I do remember. I didn’t forget you.”
She stared at me.
“I won’t ever forget you.”
She didn’t blink. I was about to say something stupid, like I was just doing my job, but then she said something else.
Something I’ll never forget.
Her eyes were bright pools beneath those dark bangs as she spoke. “I tell myself there are other things I’ll remember,” she said. “Right now I’m waiting for them, like I was waiting for you. Underwater.”
And maybe that’s the way it was. I didn’t know. There was a lot we didn’t know about the young woman in the hospital room with Jane Doe on the door. Some of the hospital staffers thought she knew more than she was saying. Not so much the doctors, but a couple of the nurses definitely felt that way. One of them even said the girl was in on the dope deal, and that she was just putting on an act until she could get free and clear. Ben and I didn’t buy any of that, and for one simple reason—our Jane Doe just didn’t act like any biker chick we’d ever seen.
The doctors weren’t much help. One dealt the amnesia card on the table; another wouldn’t even use the word. He said that diagnosis was out of his league. And, who knew, it could have been that foul-mouthed biker wasn’t far off the mark. Maybe the young woman was some cast-off flower child, left by the side of the road after a literal and figurative bad trip of epic proportions. Or maybe the bikers had snatched her off some college campus, dosed her up and kept her that way until she couldn’t even see straight. We could h
ave speculated until the wheels came off, but no amount of guessing was going to get us to the truth.
Me, I found another answer. It came in a dream . . . or it might have been a nightmare. I wasn’t sure which.
It was 1963 again. That same Halloween night. I was a kid all over again, battling a mummy, trying to save a little girl. She hit the water, and I dove in. Only this time, things ended differently.
This time, underwater, I reached out and found a hand. It seemed small, but not like a child’s hand. I took hold of it and kicked to the surface, and I came up in sunlight.
In that moment, things changed.
We weren’t kids, either of us.
It was a woman I’d saved, and I was a man.
I carried her to shore. We were all alone.
“I didn’t forget you,” she said, looking up at me. “I won’t ever forget you.”
And then our eyes closed, and our lips met, and we were like that, together. The wind rose around us. I could smell the clean, cold scent of the eucalyptus grove, hear the dry leaves rattling in the breeze. And when our lips parted, I felt calm . . . as calm as I’d felt in a long, long time.
Then I looked behind me and saw the dead thing standing at the edge of the eucalyptus grove, watching us. Charlie Steiner smiled, and blood bubbled over his lips. He was still dressed up in his Halloween clothes. Still playing the part of the thing he wanted to be . . . and the thing that would get him what he wanted.
His words were slurred around the bloody remains of his tongue. “It takes a long time for a dead girl to grow into a princess,” Charlie said, “and this one is mine.”
Then he raised his bloody hand.
And he started forward.
My shoulder healed up fast, but that dream stuck with me. Sometimes it made it tough to be in the Steiner house, though I tried to stay busy and wear myself out with work. I tore out drywall, started on the electrical. That kept me going. A lot of nights, exhaustion kept the dreams at bay. Other nights I’d go to bed, and I wouldn’t sleep at all. I’d listen to the wind outside, waiting for a sound that didn’t belong. And when I did sleep (and sleep deeply), it didn’t turn out well, because Charlie Steiner was waiting for me.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 6