Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  “Well, this place isn’t always as nice as it looks,” Ben said.

  Neil nodded. The tide flowed in, the froth snagging the tops of the rocks, the waves crumbling the base of the cliff point at Corona Del Mar.

  “So he found you guys?” Ben asked. “The coach? He walked in on you or something?”

  “Yeah, like nine at night. On Monday. We weren’t doing anything, just sitting on the carpet together, drinking a couple beers left in the fridge, but he knew.” The kid laughed bitterly. “Lucero would have told him anyway. Lucero was too honest. He was scared of the coach.”

  “He had a few things to be scared of, right? He was illegal, didn’t want to be kicked off the team, kicked out of school, didn’t want to be sent back, didn’t want his parents to know he was gay and had a boyfriend.”

  Neil shrugged. “He talked about the coach like, I don’t know, like he was his father. Like it freaked him out to disappoint him. Like it was a really big deal.”

  “This condo,” Ben said. “Where is it?”

  “Over on El Ranchero. Fourteen seventy-six.”

  The surfers were coming in now, the waves crashing high up on the beach, eating away at the cliffs. Soon the beach would be gone, submerged until morning.

  “You ever think about doing it?” Neil said. “Suicide?” He was pressing the point of a barb against the meat of his thumb.

  Ben had once, a long time ago.

  “Why are you so sure it’s suicide?”

  “I’ve thought about it myself,” Neil said, his finger pressing the barb harder.

  “Stop that.”

  The kid ignored him. “I tried with a razor once, but I couldn’t make my hand do it.” He lifted his thumb and looked at it. It was bloodless, though there was a little pink point in the center. “I decided I wasn’t going to let them kill me. That’s what it’s like, you know, like they want to kill you. I’m not letting them have that.” He was quiet a moment, and the sound of the waves rushed up the bluff. “Lucero wasn’t like that, though. He wanted to make everyone happy. I told him it was impossible. Someone has to be the enemy and you have to hate them back.”

  “What happened after you left the apartment?” Ben said. “After the coach caught you?”

  “I ran off,” Neil said. “Through the greenbelt behind the house. I was freaked. My dad would kill me if he knew.”

  “What about Lucero?”

  “Him and the coach were arguing when I left,” he said. “I could hear their voices.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  He hesitated and lit another cigarette.

  “There’s this, like, old building in the hills behind the orange groves near the camp,” he said. “Lucero said it used to be a cowboy camp or something.”

  Loma Canyon. It was another camp, like the one up in Bommer Canyon he and Emma had ridden past the other day. There were a half dozen or more of them dotting the hillsides surrounding town.

  “We used to meet up there,” he said. “I thought he’d come find me afterward.”

  “Did you see him again?”

  Neil put the back of his hand to his eyes, cigarette smoke curling around his face.

  “No,” he said. “After a while, I went over to the camp and waited in the field, thought I’d catch him before he went home, but he never showed.” He took a drag. “I went back up to the cowboy camp and there was some other dude there. I was already late to get home, so I ran back.”

  “There was someone at the camp?”

  “Yeah,” Neil said.

  “What’d he look like?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t go in. I thought it was one of the ranch’s security dudes. You know, one of those guys who patrol with their salt-pellet guns? I didn’t feel like being shot in the ass with one of those, so I got out of there.”

  “If Lucero did kill himself,” Ben said, “you know where he got the gun?”

  “No,” Neil said. “You going to arrest me?”

  Ben looked at him, trying to weigh the advantages of arrest against letting him go.

  Second to the last to see the dead boy alive. Possible motive. Arrest the kid, shit hits the fan. He wanted to keep this quiet for now. Besides, he believed Neil’s story.

  “Not today,” Ben said.

  “I swear I’m telling you the truth.”

  “If I need to talk to you again,” Ben said, “where do I find you?”

  “The lake, sixth period. I’m not into hammering and drilling in shop. I like to hang out with the ducks.”

  Ben nodded. “You got anyone to talk to?”

  “Who am I going to talk to about this?”

  “Your mother,” Ben said, though he already knew the answer. “Your father.”

  The kid laughed. “Jesus,” he said. “I’m going to walk through my front door all smiles and full of bullshit about chemistry class. Then I’m going to lock myself in my room.”

  Ben pulled a card from his wallet and handed it to the kid. “You call me if you need to talk,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid. Call.”

  —

  AFTER HE DROPPED Neil back at the school and made sure the kid walked through the front doors, he called Natasha.

  “Got an ID on the kid,” he said. “Write this down.”

  “Hold on,” Natasha said. There was the muffled sound of the phone being fumbled from hand to hand. “Starting at the clavicle,” she said to someone.

  “Teaching a class?” he said.

  “Lost one to the toilets already,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  “Lucero Vega.”

  “No.” The phone was muffled for a moment. “Right here.” The high-pitched zing of the saw. “Sorry. Vega? Anyone claiming it?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But don’t let it leave the morgue. I don’t want him sent off to the med school.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “But I don’t make the rules around here.”

  On the drive out to Loma Canyon, he put in a call to Daniela Marsh, the reporter at the newspaper.

  “Are you calling,” she said, “so you can have the pleasure of hanging up on me again?”

  “Helen Galloway at the high school is expecting a call from you.” The police generally didn’t release the names of the deceased before next of kin were notified, particularly when the deceased were minors, but Ben wanted this out, wanted to see what it would shake up. “You say you heard it from me, though, and I’ll deny it. And I’ll never tip you again.”

  “Never tipped me before.”

  “First and last time for everything.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “Public service,” he said, and hung up, and, yes, he took a certain pleasure in it.

  He drove Junipero Road, past the strawberry fields and the pickers bent in the sun, past the rows of orange trees blowing in the wind. The pavement ended where the hills began, and he eased the cruiser onto the rutted dirt road, snaking a low hill of needle grass clumped with cactus. The road ended at a chained gate with a NO TRESPASSING sign bolted to the metal. Ben parked the cruiser and scanned for ranch security, men with 12-gauge shotguns loaded with salt pellets who tended to shoot first and ask questions later, especially since the preservationists had gotten worked up over their bulldozing of the land. Ben scaled the fence and hoofed it through fifty yards of orange grove to an open field and the Loma Canyon hut.

  It was nothing, really, a twenty-by-twenty square, the windows broken out, the front door long knocked from its hinges, an old cowboy camp neglected and falling apart, just like the Bommer Canyon place. When Ben was a teenager ditching classes in high school, sometimes he would hike up here and sit alone in the dark, enjoying the silence, soaking up the sweet stink of the leather cots and the dank musk of the adobe walls. The southwest corner roof was sagging now, the foundation badger-holed. He came up on the east side of the hut, the wind blowing swirls of dust into the grove, the early-afternoon sun slanting into his eyes. When he stepped th
rough the door, something jumped in the corner.

  For a moment, everything was confused—his pupils adjusting to the darkness, his sudden flinch and grasping for his revolver. The thing growled, a low guttural sound that blurred Ben with panic. When he got his vision back, the cat’s yellow eyes were zeroed in on him, his ears peeled back, teeth bared. It was a bobcat, manged and wiry, a gutted rabbit caught in the claws of its right paw. It growled at him again and lurched forward. Ben leveled the muzzle of the pistol between its eyes. The animal pressed itself into the corner, its back arched, its ears speared backward, the tang of fear on its skin.

  Ben small-stepped it outside, knelt on the edge of the orange grove, and listened to the low growls from inside the hut. Five minutes, and the bobcat swung its body through the front door, eyeing Ben until it loped into the brush and manzanita of the hillside. Inside, Ben found the rabbit, clumps of sinew and viscera staining the cement foundation. He grabbed the animal by its hind legs, the dead weight of it swinging from his fist, and flung it to the edge of the hillside. The cat was there, he knew it, hunched in the needle grass, waiting for Ben to leave, waiting to claim its kill.

  Back inside, Ben found little to go on—a mash and jumble of shoe prints, an empty Michelob 40-ouncer, Dulces Vero candy wrappers, X-rated graffiti on the walls, an ancient used condom folded and cracked in the corner.

  And when he left the camp, the rabbit carcass was gone, just a few tufts of white fur snagged in the mustard weed.

  —

  IT WAS 3:23 and Ben was back at the high school. He hoofed it past the football team running sprints on the field, the cheerleaders stacking themselves into pyramids on the sidelines. The marching band ran drills on the baseball diamond, dressed like military officers who had never seen the battlefield. The whole thing, this Norman Rockwell crap, was hard to take after the morgue, after Neil. He wanted to tell these Santa Elena kids that safety was only an illusion, but who the hell would listen to him? How could you feel anything but safe with a tuba strapped to your body?

  He stopped at the east fence of the swim complex and watched the lines of swimmers, five or more in each lane, cut through the water. Swimming, in Rancho Santa Elena, was a tradition. The school had produced three Olympians already. Two national-team water-polo players. Regular scholarships to big-name universities. Pictures of the complex were in the glossy brochures the new city had made up to advertise the town as the Shangri-La of Southern California. The pool complex had even hosted the pentathlon for the ’84 Los Angeles Olympics.

  A kid hung his elbows on the edge of the pool, gasping air, and the coach—Lewis Wakeland was his name—got down on his knees in front of him. Ben was too far away to hear what he said to the kid, but he heard the coach’s voice in this head. I know, son. Your lungs are shredding, your arms feel like lead. It’s just your body, not your mind. Your mind is stronger than your body. Get out there and prove it. The kid spit a glob of mucus onto the pool top, slipped into the water, and pushed off.

  The school bell rang and he left the pool to find Emma. No Lance the stoner today, just Emma’s dart eyes, her angry strut to the cruiser.

  “You hid his sweatshirt, didn’t you?” she said, strapping herself into the passenger seat.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “You went to his house, Dad?”

  “Listen, Em,” he said again, putting his hand on her shoulder. “You can scream at me later.”

  She looked at him now—his face must have given it away.

  “What’s wrong? You’re acting weird.”

  He was. The last few days had turned him inside out. He wanted to tell her how dangerous the world was, how dangerous it was to be a teenager. He’d tried to hide the ugliness of the world from her, but it seemed the wrong tactic now, sheltering her like that. How could she keep herself safe if she didn’t know what she needed to be kept safe from?

  “No matter what it is,” he said, “no matter how terrible it is, you can tell me, okay?”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Just listen, please,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. He’d frighten her, though, telling her those things. And he didn’t want her frightened. Life would be full enough of fear; she didn’t need it now. “Anything, anything at all, you can come to me, all right? No sitting in your room alone, depressed. No cutting yourself in the bathroom. No overdosing on drugs. None of it, all right?”

  “All right, Dad, okay. You’re freaking me out.”

  7

  IT WAS CHOCOLATE FRIDAY, AND on Chocolate Friday—the second and last Fridays of the month—they visited Margaret, Ben’s mother, out at Leisure World, armed with a box of See’s Candies, her favorite. This afternoon they were bringing two boxes, the second one compliments of Rachel. Ben knew he’d screwed it up with the sweatshirt stunt, so for atonement he let Emma tune the radio to KROQ, the “Roq of the ’80s,” on the way out from school. When they pulled up to the house, the DJ was playing some obnoxious crap by a pretentiously named British band. Guitar scratches and squeals and something about Bela Lugosi being dead. Jesus.

  “Where have you been?” his mother said when she opened the door. “You said you’d be right back.”

  Emma kissed her grandmother on the cheek, handed her the boxes of candies, and squeezed past her to turn on the television.

  “I said I’d be back next week, Mom,” Ben said. “It’s been a week.”

  “A week?” she said, her face stricken with terror.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I should’ve come right back.”

  “Darn right,” she said, her eyes going dull again. She stabbed the edge of a box with a fingernail, her hands shaking. “You better not have eaten the ones with the cherries in them.”

  He opened the package and pulled one out to show her. She smiled and opened her mouth like a baby bird waiting to be fed. This was a new one. Two weeks ago, she opened the door naked. A few weeks before that, she lay cocooned in bed and made Emma sing her “You Are My Sunshine,” a song Ben used to sing to Emma when she was a child, the same song his father sang to Ben when he was a little boy. After a moment, Ben came to his senses and set the candy on her waiting tongue.

  “Mmm,” she said, eyes closed, savoring it.

  “It’s on, Grandma,” Emma called, and the two of them retired to the couch to watch Magnum, P.I.

  Ben checked the pantry and the refrigerator, scribbled a grocery list while sitting at the kitchen counter. He’d hired an aide for Monday through Thursday and saved a little money by taking care of things himself Friday through Sunday.

  “He reminds me of Warren,” his mother said, when Thomas Magnum stepped out of the Ferrari.

  A gust of wind burst through the window and ruffled the edge of the paper. He stood to close the window, hooking the latch down tight.

  “Mom,” Ben said. “I want you to keep this window closed, all right?”

  His mother stared at the window, as though trying to remember what that rectangular hole in the wall was called, before turning back to Emma, a childlike excitement erasing the dullness in her eyes. “Have I told you about Warren?”

  Emma glanced at Ben and then smiled at her grandmother.

  “No,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Please tell me.”

  “I was pretty then,” his mother began, leaning into Emma, “and Warren had good eyes.”

  Ben retreated to his mother’s bedroom to strip the bed. In the last few months, she had been telling this story every time they visited, a memory loop snatched from her blankening mind. Margaret had been sixteen, on a family outing to Laguna Beach, posed on a cotton blanket, trying to look like Ava Gardner in her pinup red-and-white polka-dot bathing suit, when Warren clomped by on a horse, hoofing up sand.

  “Get that goddamned horse away from my daughter,” Margaret’s father had said.

  Warren stopped the horse directly in front of Margaret, casting a cool shadow across her body. As far as Warren was concerned, these people had no busine
ss burning themselves on the beach, sitting on blankets and eating sun-heated watermelon. This stretch of beach was part of the old ranch, though the company had sold it years before and the town of Laguna had built hotels along the “California Riviera” for the hordes of people who wanted to gaze at the endless blue.

  “Your daughter?” Warren had said, staring at her, not even bothering to hide it from her father, taking in her painted nails and her sand-speckled legs, the polka dots cut in half at the fold of her waist, her green eyes watching him watching her. “Seems she got her looks from her mother.”

  Margaret’s mother, who had been pinching a cherry tomato between forefinger and thumb, blushed bright pink in the sun.

  That did it for Margaret. She never asked for her father’s permission to take the diesel bus from the traffic circle in Orange down the coast highway to sit on a blanket on the beach and wait for the cowboy to return. She never asked his permission to meet Warren in the rock cave where the tide pools were alive with sea anemone and starfish. She never asked his permission to meet Warren’s family and she never asked his permission to marry, which sent her father into such a rage that he broke a wooden chair against the kitchen doorframe, but still he couldn’t stop her.

  “It’s hot in here,” Ben heard his mother say now. Then the scrape of the window sliding open in its frame.

  “It’s a good story, Grandma,” Emma said when Ben came back into the room.

  He closed the window again, this time closing the blinds, too. Out of sight, out of mind.

  “My funny valentine,” Margaret said.

  “Mom, I need you to keep this window shut.”

  She glanced at Ben, her eyes wet and lost-looking, then turned back to Emma. “That’s what he calls me when we’re in bed. My funny valentine.”

  Emma raised her eyebrows at Ben.

  For years his mother rarely mentioned Ben’s father, just brief recollections guiltily offered when Will Voorhees, his stepfather, wasn’t around. Then it had made Ben feel as though he was part of some shameful past, like some bastard son born of a mistaken affair. Now, though, his mother’s voice quickened with excitement, and it was comforting to Ben to know that when all else was erased from the mind, there was still the memory of love.