When I come to again, a shambling figure looms over me, his face in shadow, his round-shouldered trunk silhouetted against the ash gray sky. I recognize him after a second or two: it’s Chuckles, the drooler whose mannerisms I copied when I was first coming out from under chemical restraint.
“Help me, please?” I plead.
His long arms swing loosely at his sides as he hunkers down beside me. “Heh?”
Fortunately, I am fluent in the thick-tongued dialect of the chemically restrained. “That’s right, help. I need you to help me lift this door off my leg.”
His eyes are deep-set, dark, and puzzled. Then comprehension dawns and they light up with an almost animal intelligence. Squatting low like a weight lifter, he grabs the edge of the door in both hands. Straining upward with his arms extended on either side of his thighs, he manages to raise the bulky slab high enough for me to haul my leg out from under. Quite a feat for a drooler.
After setting the door down again, Chuckles hunkers next to me, slings my left arm over his shoulder, and helps me to my feet. Leaning together with our arms draped across one another’s shoulders, half-blinded by falling ash, the two of us join the procession of scorched and bleeding stragglers staggering away from the doomed building, past the staff parking lot, and into the uncertain shelter of the trees.
Just as we reach the woods there’s a deafening roar behind us, loud as a jetliner. A concussive blast of air smacks into us with the force of a monster wave breaking, and knocks us apart. I hit the ground and lie there stunned for a few seconds. When I look back, the hospital is no longer there. In its place is a roiling pillar of smoke and ash three stories high.
Chuckles is nowhere to be seen. Using a broken tree branch to push myself up, I climb to my feet just in time to see a burning figure emerge from the smoking ruins, lurching drunkenly, arms outstretched, hair and clothes engulfed. Whoever it is gets a lot farther than I’d have predicted he would, making it almost to the tree line before he collapses.
Maybe I’m still in shock, maybe I’m not. All I know is how I feel, and how I feel is sharp and focused, like the calm at the center of the storm. I limp forward, leaning on the forked branch to keep the weight off my injured ankle. I kneel by the side of the fallen man, who’s now a smoldering corpse, and scoop loose dirt on top of him until the little dancing fairy-flames have died down. Then I start going through his pockets, taking care not to scorch my fingers. The lightly charred wallet in the inside jacket pocket belongs to Bernard J. Ruhr; it says “Staff Psychologist” on his hospital ID card. In another pocket is a roll of bills in a gold, paper-clip-shaped money clip, and a set of car keys for a BMW.
I’m starting to hear sirens now. Someone is shouting garbled commands through what sounds like a megaphone. Quickly I pocket the wallet and keys. Limping like Long John Silver on my crooked crutch, under the cover of the hovering cloud of ash and smoke, I head straight for the staff parking lot, where I spy a smoke-and-ash-begrimed dark blue BMW parked in front of a sign reading MD PARKING ONLY!!! ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED!!!
The key fits; the engine turns over smoothly. With the headlights and windshield wipers turned on, I drive slowly through the murky parking lot, feeling a little like a character in one of those postapocalypse science fiction movies.
And what happens next won’t surprise anybody who’s ever seen one of those movies: just as I’m driving out of the parking lot, a shambling figure emerges suddenly from the gloom and steps in front of the car, waving its arms.
I jam on the brakes, and the sloping hood of the Beemer shudders to a stop only inches from my recent savior, Chuckles. His pleading monkey eyes meet mine through the dingy, ash-smeared windshield. Please, they seem to be saying, please take me with you, and for some reason I’ll never understand, I find myself leaning across the front seat and throwing open the passenger door.
“Climb in,” I shout, over the crackling of the flames, the howling of the sirens, and the terrible shrieking of the burned and dying.
2
HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCERRERE VITAE, read the sign above the door to the autopsy room of the Marshall County morgue: Here is where death rejoices to help the living.
Pender, having intentionally skipped breakfast, arrived shortly after 6:00 A.M. and rapped on the frosted glass pane. The diener, a tall black man in surgical greens, hurried over to intercept him—the autopsy was already under way. “It’s a nasty one,” he warned Pender. “You might want to wait outside.”
“Hey, this isn’t my first rodeo,” Pender assured him, buttoning his sport jacket to the neck and turning up his collar against the arctic chill of the Marshall County morgue.
“If you say so. Here, put this under your nose—a little dab’ll do ya.” He unscrewed the top of a jar of Vicks VapoRub. Pender smeared a little across his upper lip. His eyes were watering as he approached the slab upon which the dreadful corpse had been laid out. Its skin was greenish black, but that was a function of decay—it could have been any race or ethnicity. The chest had already been opened with a Y-shaped incision, the heart and lungs removed.
“Dr. Flemm?”
“Yes?” The Marshall County medical examiner was short and round. Above his surgical mask he wore thick-lensed spectacles with heavy black frames. Beneath his green paper cap he was as bald as Pender.
“Special Agent Pender, FBI. I spoke to you this morning about the fingerprints.”
“Ah yes, the fingerprints.” Flemm turned the corpse’s right hand palm up. Pender, who was on the opposite side of the table, started to lean across the corpse, which turned out to be a mistake—not even the pungent odor of the Vicks could mask the stench. He walked around to Flemm’s side of the table. Supporting the corpse’s forearm and elbow, Flemm raised the arm to give Pender a closer look. “What do you think? Not bad after a week or two in damp ground, eh?”
The fingertips were the same greenish black as the rest of the body, but the ridges and whorls were still discernible. “Can they be lifted?” asked Pender.
“If we glove him.” Flemm selected a simple surgical scalpel from the tray of medieval-looking instruments, scissors, needles, chisels, forceps, and saws, on the cloth-draped table next to him. He cut a circular incision around the right wrist, then carefully worked the skin free until it slipped off the hand as neatly as if it had been a glove.
Pender’s stomach lurched as Flemm laid the ghastly “glove” on a drawerlike extension he’d pulled out from the side of the table, and severed each of the fingertips neatly at the first joint. Then he sprayed the fingertips with a drying agent while his diener filled a shallow glass saucer with black ink, viscous from the cold of the autopsy room, and microwaved it for several seconds.
When the fingertip skin was dry enough and the ink fluid enough, Flemm removed his surgical gloves and fit a small latex finger-cot over his forefinger, then slipped the skin fingertips over the latex. Meanwhile the diener had laid out a fingerprint card on the stainless-steel counter. Gingerly, Flemm dipped his forefinger into the saucer, shook off the excess ink, then gently pressed his double-gloved fingertip against the card and rocked it delicately from side to side.
Peering over Flemm’s shoulder, Pender whistled low in appreciation. “Perfect,” he exclaimed. “Absolutely perfect.”
“And only nine more to go,” said Dr. Flemm, beaming.
3
April 18
To tell the truth (and why would I lie to you, my own brand-new, full-sized dear diary), I could have thought this thing out a little better. Or maybe I didn’t really believe I was going to make it. I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t come up lucky on a couple of counts, the first of which was that it had been my left ankle that was injured, so driving a car with an automatic was not a major problem.
The most crucial piece of luck was that Murphy’s barn was still standing. Or at least leaning. Half of it, anyway. A landslide had taken out the rear half of the building, hayloft and all, but the front was still intact, jutting
out from the base of the landslide.
More luck: Rudy’s untouched van was parked right where I’d left it ten years ago, inside the barn, facing the rear, with the front bumper only inches from the edge of the landslide. The money was still there, too, stuffed behind the false walls and floor along with two kilos of vacuum-sealed Humboldt County wacky weed.
Unfortunately, dear diary, you can’t live on money and weed alone. So after I’d cleaned the two of us up as best I could without water, and exchanged our ash-smeared clothes for clean but creased and musty-smelling jeans and shirts from Rudy’s suitcase, we drove back to the giant Wal-Mart outside Marshall City to stock up. I figured it would be safe enough, that no one would be looking for us so soon after the fire, and I was right.
We did get some curious stares, what with me tootling around in the electric scooter (I couldn’t put any weight on my left ankle) and Chuckles lumbering along beside me pushing two shopping carts. But by the time we left, with the trunk and backseat of the Beemer stuffed with food, clothing, medical supplies, including a pair of crutches for yours truly, camping equipment, etc., etc., all paid for in cash, we were provisioned for a good long siege.
It was full dark by the time we got back to Murphy’s farm. Chuckles got out and opened the sliding barn door. I drove the Beemer inside and parked it next to the van, which left us a living space around fifteen feet wide and twenty feet deep. For supper we ate bologna sandwiches by lantern light, then crawled into our new sleeping bags. Chuckles dropped off while I was writing yesterday’s entry, and I followed him into dreamland an hour or so later.
And that, dire deary, was about the extent of my good luck. When I woke up this morning, my left ankle resembled an eggplant in both size and color, and was throbbing painfully. With the aid of my new crutches I went outside to take a leak, and when I got back Chuckles was sitting up in his sleeping bag, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth while muttering unintelligibly under his breath.
That was twelve hours ago, and guess what, he’s still there, rocking and muttering. The only thing that’s changed is that now he seems to be aware of my presence: every once in a while he looks over at me and glowers. So even though I’m pretty sure that he’s only detoxing, I’m glad I’ve got Rudy’s .38 automatic in my sleeping bag with me. My plan, as soon as I finish this entry, is to turn off the flashlight and pretend to close my eyes. If he makes a move toward me, I’ll shoot him dead. If not, I’ll try to get some sleep, and hope my ankle will start to show some improvement in the morning.
Because I didn’t go to all this trouble just to sit around here watching Chuckles drool. I’ve got more important things to do, like driving back down to Santa Cruz to pay a little call on my grandparents. And won’t they be surprised to see me! I can hardly wait to see the expression on their dear old faces.
4
Pender found Skip sitting on the edge of his hospital bed dressed in a paper-thin seersucker robe over an open-arsed hospital gown. “Hey there, Magnum, P.I.! How’s it going?”
“Not bad, G-man, not bad at all. I just talked the doctor into cutting me loose. The problem is, they seem to have burned everything but my wallet and my shoes.”
Pender winked. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
Twenty minutes later, Skip left the hospital wearing a pair of ludicrously oversize blue-and-green plaid golf pants, a loosely draped, periwinkle-colored polo shirt, and a pair of ankle-high pink socks. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” he told Pender as they drove away in Pender’s dusty rental car, “but would you mind stopping off at the first clothing store we come to?”
“Right after I get this to the sheriff’s station,” said Pender, waving the card with the dead man’s fingerprints. “Cal-ID’s promised to give it crash priority.” Cal-ID was the computer network that linked population centers all over the state with the main fingerprint database in Sacramento.
Skip told Pender he’d wait in the car while Pender dropped off the card and conferred briefly with Sheriff Lisle. But when they drove off again, instead of heading back into town to find a clothing or department store, Pender aimed the Toyota in the opposite direction. “They found something out at the site that the crime scene tech thinks might interest us.”
“No way,” Skip protested. “I’m not going anywhere dressed like this.”
“Are you kidding?” said Pender. “You look great in periwinkle. It brings out your eyes.”
5
April 19
Dear Diary: Other than sleeping, smoking weed is the only thing that even comes close to fighting the pain in my leg. The worst part is the throbbing—it feels kind of like there’s a balloon in my ankle that somebody keeps blowing up to just short of bursting, then letting the air out, then blowing it up again.
When I’m stoned, though, it feels more like the pain is coming in waves, long, slow rollers an old Steamer Lane boogie boarder like myself can ride all the way in to shore.
The dope is doing wonders for Chuckles, too. His first few turns I had to hold the joint to his lips, but he got the hang of it pretty quickly, and it must really be helping him with his detox, because oh, man, is he ever grateful. I’ve never owned a dog myself, but when I first moved in with my father he had a chocolate Lab named Toots that absolutely doted on him, and the look Chuckles gives me when I roll a joint for him is the exact same look Toots used to give my dad when Big Luke tossed him a piece of bacon.
The downside is that now Chuckles wants to stay stoned all the time. He keeps waking me up to ask me to roll him another doobie, as he calls them, doobie being one of the few words he can pronounce intelligibly. I finally got smart and prerolled half a dozen fatties for him, which ought to hold him long enough for me to get some uninterrupted shut-eye.
April 20
Well, I slept, dear Di. Not that it did me any good. When I woke up this morning I was so weak I could hardly get up on my crutches, and had to piss into an empty plastic water jug. My leg isn’t hurting quite as much as yesterday, but my left ankle is still swollen double its size, plus my left foot is now the color of a plum, and the toenails are blueish purple, which I’m pretty sure is not a good sign.
My mind is as sharp as ever, though, and focused in like a laser on the problem at hand, which is that while I’m lying in a crumbling barn in Marshall County, rotting from the bottom up, my grandparents are living happily ever after down in Santa Cruz.
THIS CANNOT STAND.
But neither can I.
April 21
At least I think it’s the 21st. It’s easy to lose track when you’re spending most of your time stoned or sleeping.
Whatever day it is, dire deary, my condition continues to deteriorate. The whole foot is now blueish purple, while the toenails are almost black. Chuckles, however, is doing much, much better. The drugs they gave him in the hospital seem to be wearing off. No more drooling, hardly any jerky movements, and as for his mental functioning, when I woke up this morning (I’m pretty sure it was this morning) he was sitting up cross-legged with his nose buried in the BMW owner’s manual, turning the pages rapidly and apparently reading with intense concentration.
“So how’d it come out?” I quipped, when he finally closed the booklet.
To my surprise, he shut his eyes for a few seconds. I saw his eyeballs tracking left to right behind the flickering eyelids, then he opened them again. “Windshield Wipers, 71, 159,” he said, clearly and intelligibly. “Wiper Blade Replacement, 159. Wipers, intermittent, 72.”
Which proved to be the last three entries on the last page of the booklet, word for word. Far fucking out, as Big Luke used to say. A few days ago the guy’s a babbling idiot, now he can recite a 200-page car manual by heart. That’s got to be a jump of at least a hundred IQ points, which means he must have been some kind of major genius before they started drugging him. Either that, or he’s one of those, what do they call them, idiot savants.
Still April 21?
It’s dark out, dear Di, so
unless I just slept something like 36 hours, I’m assuming it’s still the same day. And since I can’t seem to get back to sleep, I might as well get you caught up on recent events.
To begin with, Chuckles, or rather Asmador, as he now prefers to be called, woke me up a little while ago, dragging his Wal-Mart sleeping bag over next to mine and asking me, with a haunted look in his deep-shadowed eyes, to roll him a doobie. By the hissing light of the Coleman I twisted up a bomber, and after we’d each had a couple tokes, I asked him what was bothering him.
I was lying on my side and he was sitting up in his sleeping bag. With the lantern throwing our flickering shadows across the sloping mountain of dirt that formed the back wall of the barn, it felt like we were a couple of old-time western outlaws holed up in a cave. “It’s the Council,” he said cautiously. “The Infernal Council.”
I gave him a knowing nod. “Oh, them.”
“Yes! Them!” He leaned forward earnestly, so relieved and grateful to be taken seriously that I almost felt guilty for putting him on like that.
“What about them?”
With his mind moving faster than his tongue, it took him a few tries to explain it. The gist, I gathered, was that something called the Concilium Infernalis, or Infernal Council, which was basically hell’s board of directors, had some kind of task or mission he was supposed to complete in order to become a Council member, as opposed to (and here he’d shuddered so hard he shook the ash right off the joint), being consigned for all eternity to the ranks of the damned souls in hell. “I know I have to prove myself to them,” he repeated firmly. “But the thing is, they won’t tell me what they want me to do.” He toked up, passed the joint back to me. “They won’t even…(cough, choke)…give me a…(cough, choke)…hint.”
I took a prodigious toke, and suddenly it was like one of those astronomy or astrology deals where all the planets line up in a row. I saw clearly how our lives intersected, how our strengths and weaknesses, our needs and our abilities, meshed, and all at once I understood why fate had brought us together and led us out of Meadows Road, Asmador with his need for a mission, me with my need to have one carried out.
The Boys from Santa Cruz Page 19