Valley of lights

by Stephen Gallagher

  I thought of him the previous evening when he'd walked out in another form, stopping at an intersection and scenting the night as if he could read all of its patterns in the air. I said, 'When did you make the notes?'

  'Afterwards, while it was all still fresh. Don't worry, Alex, I didn't give myself away. After he'd been standing around for a while he walked east a couple of blocks and bought a newspaper. He took it into a coffee shop and sat reading about himself for twenty minutes. Every now and again he'd take a really good, hard look out of the window. I think he was watching for you.'

  'Did you go into the shop?'

  'I didn't want to get that close. I pretended I was waiting at the bus stop across the street.'

  'Neat.'

  'Yeah, but wait until you hear the next part. I look over and he's coming out of the shop and heading straight towards me. I thought he was going to say something, but he'd seen that the bus was on its way and he was more interested in that.'

  'Did he get on?'

  'He did, but I didn't. I kind of checked my watch and made like I wanted some other destination. I didn't want to be on there with him and then have to get off at some stop miles from anywhere. He'd know I was following him if that happened. So what I did was, I ran back to where I'd left the jeep and then I picked up the bus again about a mile and a half down the road. He stayed on until right out into Tempe. I think he was just staring out of the window until he saw the kind of place he was looking for, because he got off and went straight across into this dingy-looking hotel. I got a note of the name and address, just like you wanted.'

  She slid one of the detached pages across to me. No rings these days, I noticed. The hotel name wasn't one that I recognised; but then, Tempe's outside of my area.

  I said, 'You did well. Pick a prize.'

  'I'm not finished yet,' she said, and out came a second slip. 'Here's his room number.'

  'How did you get that?'

  'I went in and charmed the desk clerk.'

  I felt then like somebody must feel who walks into a strange graveyard and sees his own name on a headstone. This was exactly what I hadn't wanted to happen, and I'd tried to tell Loretta so without actually having to explain to her why I needed to know where Woods was going to base himself next. Apart from the immediate physical danger that I'd barely been able to hint at, there was the chance that he'd take a scare and move on again after only a few hours. The secret of his survival lay in his ability to break a trail with total success; this slim continuity was my only chance of keeping a track of him.

  I said, 'I wish you hadn't done that.'

  'There's no harm, Alex,' Loretta insisted. 'I was careful.'

  How could I tell her that careful wasn't enough? I said, 'He'd already seen you at the bus stop. What if he saw you again?'

  'He didn't.'

  'He might have seen you from the window of his room, and you wouldn't even know it. Or else the clerk could say that someone's been asking after him and the whole thing's blown.'

  'Now, come on, Alex,' she said, closing the notebook with ominous firmness and laying it flat with her hand on top of it, 'you asked me for help, and I did you a damn good job.'

  I had, and she had, and if there was any blame around in this then it was mine and mine alone. 'I know, I'm grateful,' I began, but she was already on her feet.

  'Well,' she said, 'you could try showing it,' and then she stormed out.

  ELEVEN

  Perhaps I should never even have asked her. It was easy to think that way now. Or perhaps I should have told her more – but how could I have told her more without telling it all? The fact was that there had been nobody else that I could have relied on, and so I'd put her into danger – she was the one decent thing that had come into my life of late that hadn't been tied to my work, and I still hadn't been able to keep her out of it. Just sitting and trying to see a way around the problem gave me a dull pain behind the eyes.

  After a while, I heard her go out again. I couldn't deny that she'd gone to a lot of trouble for me. I knew that she'd taken a lot of sanctimonious tut-tutting from her jumped-up junior supervisor to get the couple of hours that I'd asked her for.

  And the information that she'd brought me was gold-dust. I had a line on Woods and – hopefully – Woods wasn't aware of it. And something else I now knew; when he and I had been standing there and talking out on the street he'd still been alone, no refuge set up and nowhere to fly to, and only afterwards had he begun the process of finding a new lair.

  I could have ended it. If only I'd known it then, and had the nerve.

  I didn't go out for the rest of the afternoon, or that evening. I hung around the house watching the rooms go dark and trying to straighten out the details, knowing all the time that somewhere out in Tempe there would be somebody suffering something that would be worse than dying, becoming an empty shell to provide the new face of the beast.

  I slept badly that night, and dreamed the usual dream of Eloise, only this time it was with a new and unpleasant variation. When she looked up at me, the eyes weren't hers; nothing else in the dream changed, and I was walking her out of the hospital trembling with the need to tell somebody, but everyone we passed simply smiled because the two of us always looked so good together.

  The mail came early, when I was showered and dressed and taking the canvas weapon roll out from under my bed. I got one letter, a single sheet of classy headed-notepaper in an off-white envelope, and it was from a Doctor Elaine Mulholland inviting me along to an appointment three days hence at her downtown office. Elaine Mulholland, I gathered, was the department-appointed shrink, although there was nothing on the headed paper to suggest as much. I dropped the letter in the Moynahan File on my way out with the roll under my arm.

  For all the time that I'd lived in the city, I didn't know Tempe too well; I suppose I tended to think of it as the suburb around the State University and little more than that, when I thought of it at all. They had their own police, and although the adjacent forces shared manpower when necessary I'd never done much more than pass through. I drove East out of Phoenix on Washington, crossing a high concrete bridge over a riverbed that was nothing more than dry gravel. This was the Salt River, which gave its name to an Indian reservation beginning just a couple of miles to the north-east. Welcome to Tempe, a sign to my left said as it flashed the time and temperature. Home of the State University and the Fiesta Bowl. It was still early, and it was cool. The sign was backed by the high towers of a flour mill and a rocky hillock on the side of which was a big painted A, facing the sky.

  After a railroad crossing, the speed limit dropped to thirty and the town proper began. I was driving with the air-conditioning switched off and my window rolled down, a service habit born of the need to keep an ear cocked for the sounds of the night. What I saw now in bright daylight was a low-rise town in the slow process of bringing itself up-to-date with the modern campus at its heart, watched over by occasional tall palms that soared upwards out of the grey dust alongside the road. Many of the two-story shopfronts were scaffolded and in the process of getting a new concrete facing, and most of them in that first, tight mile seemed to be given over to bookshops and poster stores and pizza restaurants. The road was mostly following the edge of the campus here, but after a while it swung left and began to open out again.

  The Tropicana Hotel was one of the places that was obviously going to be left behind if it didn't get a change of ownership, a change of purpose, and a lot of money spent on bringing it up to scratch. Whilst it wasn't exactly a flophouse, for many it would be a stage on the way down towards one; pink-stuccoed and peeling, it stood three stories high and held the remnants of its old dignity around it like a falling towel. I cruised past, seeing it as Woods had seen it first from the bus. I had the feeling that I'd have been able to pick it out even if Loretta had lost him somewhere along the way; it was almost as if, after the Paradise and the Sunset Beach, I was getting some kind of feel for his tastes. The hotel faced out acro
ss the street onto a huge parking lot, beyond which were tennis courts and, beyond these, tall campus residential blocks.

  The juxtaposition gave me a little chill. It was like seeing a hawk set up in a tree overlooking a chicken run. Whatever sat inside Woods, it had shown a taste for young life; and here, young life flowed by like a river. I pulled off the road and looked for a space in the lot.

  There was room directly opposite the Tropicana but I didn't want to be so close, not so that I could be seen. When I saw another car leaving and throwing up a high dust, I followed the cloud and took the empty space. The cars around me were Pintos, Volkswagens, some open jeeps like Loretta's; they were mostly compacts or sub-compacts, with the occasional Pontiac or Oldsmobile. One thing that they had in common was that, almost without exception, their paint glazes had been burned matt by the desert sun. Getting out I saw a young blonde girl in yellow shorts and trainers going by, a radio in her shoulder bag tuned low to an FM station, and I wanted to call over to her to go home and lock her door, but I didn't. Instead I went out across the street, and stayed close to the buildings as I walked down towards the Tropicana.

  What came next was ridiculously easy. When I entered the small, dim foyer there was nobody behind the desk and no sign of any building security at all, just a wire basket full of cleaning things on the counter and a door open to where a radio was playing loud two or three rooms away. I was able to reach across and lift Woods' key off its hook, and I was away up the stairs before anybody had appeared.

  His room was on the fire-escape side of the second floor, and the presence of his key in the foyer indicated that he'd be out. There was the usual Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the handle, and I left it in place as I opened up and slipped inside.

  My hand was on the Colt Special, just in case, but as I got in and took a look around the room I let it fall the quarter-inch back into its holster. Woods wasn't here although the room, as I'd expected, wasn't empty. The curtains were drawn, and somebody lay on the cheap iron-framed bed.

  He was a college kid, as I'd feared. He was tanned and healthy-looking, probably an athlete, and I wondered how Woods had managed to get him to come back here; even if the kid was gay he could almost certainly do better than this, but then Woods probably had a number of different techniques of misdirection and entrapment that he'd have developed over the years. With the fire escape handy, it could all have happened somewhere else; Woods looked strong enough to carry a body upstairs, even a body like this.

  I switched on the lights for a closer look.

  He was lying with the pillows propped up behind him, so that he wasn't flat; Woods had loosened the boy's belt and laces and had taken off his wristwatch, leaving a pale tan line where the band had been. The watch itself was on the bedside table. He was lying with his hands down by his sides, the fingers slightly curled and his hands turned slightly outward. He looked like a puppet whose strings had been cut. His breathing was shallow, but even.

  The ceiling creaked almost directly above me. I stopped and listened, but there was nothing more until a door slammed somewhere deep within the building. I realised that I'd been holding my breath.

  I wasn't used to this, creeping around and feeling edgy. I was more used to being the Man with the Badge, the bringer of some kind of order even when that order was sometimes no more than an illusion that disappeared again when the last of the squad cars pulled out. But now my badge was in somebody's desk drawer, and I wasn't even playing on my home turf, and for both I could thank something whose nature and abilities I could barely comprehend.

  There was nothing around the college boy's neck, so I carefully unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it open. I was looking for a bruise or some sign of a blow to the chest. There are supposed to be martial arts moves that can deliver a specific localised shock which can stop the heart without causing much more than superficial physical damage, but I saw no evidence of anything like that here. It was when I lifted his chin for a closer look at his throat that I found what I was looking for; the thin, inflamed garrotte-line was there all right, but it had disappeared into a crease with the tilt of his head. A minute's further searching turned up a loop of twine similar to the one that had been used on me. It was waxed, and near-impossible to break.

  There must have been a certain finesse involved in getting the right tension and holding it for as long as would be needed to starve the brain of blood until the spark of life flickered and died. And then what? Perhaps the new intelligence slipped in for a few moments to restart the heart and the breathing, just check all the dials and the valves and leave everything ticking over on a low-maintenance level to await future occupancy.

  I didn't have to be so delicate. First I tried rolling him over, the simple technique that had stopped the breathing and then finally finished-off one of the three residents of the Paradise, but this boy was strong and healthy and he did little more than rasp and spit into the pillow. As I turned him back, I could hear some of the fluids inside him gurgle.

  This was terrible. I felt lower than I'd ever felt in my life before. I took the noose and slipped it over his head and pulled it tight. I'd seen a pencil lying alongside some cheap hotel stationery by the window, and I took this and slipped it under the loop and used it to wind the noose even tighter so that it as good as disappeared into the flesh around his neck, right along the same line as before. The college boy didn't react, or resist. He simply switched off.

  I felt sick; but not as sick, I noted, as I perhaps should have felt. I was cold and sweating and my heart was thumping. I'd been in the room for a little over fifteen minutes. I planned to go now, leaving the garrotte in place to block any attempt to restart operations.

  But before I left I quickly wiped over anywhere that I might have touched, which was how I came to find that my name and address and even my phone number were written in pencil on the hotel paper by the window.

  Nobody saw me leaving, either, and I practically ran down the street and over to the car. My plan had been to stick around and wait for Woods to return, somehow to play it by ear; I had every gun that I owned in the trunk of the car, including a hunting rifle with a scope sight accurate enough to take him out as he walked from the bus stop to the Tropicana. I knew that there was at least a chance that I'd come under suspicion for the killing because of my prior assault on him, but I also knew that there wasn't time to mess around. It had to be done now, before he could find out that his escape route had been cut off.

  I was here, looking for him; and he was at my place, looking for me. I had to keep the advantage, break the symmetry.

  Barely more than five minutes after leaving the hotel, I was recrossing the Salt River into Phoenix.

  As I drove, some of my doubts from the previous evening began to rise again. Not doubts about what I was doing – that was clear-cut enough for me, based on the certainties of what I'd seen and what had been said – but about my chances of success. Most of what I knew about this thing that I was fighting came from speculation and deduction; it wasn't like in the books, where someone pops up halfway along with all the answers discovered in some ancient manuscript and then it's an all-action race to the finish. If, for example, it turned out that this parasite could simply hang around in the ether if there was no host on offer, cruising the morgues and the intensive care units on the lookout for something suitable, then I'd be, to put it mildly, in deep shit.

  I stopped the car a block south of the residential site and went in over the wall at a point where I knew the Elroys' orange trees would give me cover. I had the Special drawn and in my mind I was nineteen years old again and stalking that weird ghost town with its cardboard pop-up assassins in every doorway and live ammo to off them with. I'd made the third highest score in my unit; even the top-scorer had managed to snuff at least one cardboard civilian, but hey, this was war. I forget the name of the town. It was some mining place, but nobody had lived there in years.

  I was hopping the picket fences from one garden plot to anothe
r, using the houses themselves to screen me as I worked my way around to get an angle on my own place. I had one big advantage in that most of the old people inside the houses were either half-blind or half-deaf or both; the houses were close together and the gardens were dense with green bushes and trelliswork, and the only problem was that whilst I had perfect cover, so did he.

  There was my house; a big through lounge with picture-window, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two years still to pay. It seemed somehow strange from this unusual angle, as if I was looking at an imperfect copy but couldn't place my finger on any difference in detail. Damn it, all the plots were so close together, there were more hiding places than there were in a maze. I crouched low and waited for a minute or so, but nothing seemed to be happening; all that I could hear was the steady swish-swish of a lawn sprinkler, somewhere over on the far side of the administration block. I started to rise; perhaps I could get closer.

  A hand took a firm hold of my arm.

  TWELVE

  I came up a lot faster than I'd intended, and with considerably more noise; and Mrs Moynahan, still holding onto my arm, said, 'Sergeant Volchak, I have to speak to you.'

  She was in her gardening clothes and carrying a watering can in her free hand, and if she'd noticed my gun she showed no sign of it. Perhaps she thought I did this all the time, either as a habit or a recreation. This wasn't her garden plot, but I knew that she did some weeding and watering for some of the tenants who were too infirm to manage their own; cutting was handled by two enterprising kids from off site who brought their own mower and tended the postage-stamp lawns at a dollar a throw.

  I said, 'I'm kind of in a hurry, Mrs Moynahan. Can it wait?'

  'I don't think so. Didn't you get my note?'

  'The IRA terrorists.'