by Alan Drew
“Imagine how different your life would be if this detective had said something all those years ago.”
But Tucker’s eyes were closed now, his fingers pressed against his temples. “It’s hard enough to deal with my own shit,” he said. “You can’t expect me to be a hero, too.”
—
BEN WAS IDLING in the cruiser down the street from Emma’s boyfriend’s house, watching Lance and two of his friends pulling tricks on the half-pipe in the driveway. When he left Rachel and Emma at the condo, Ben tore off this way, not thinking, just raging to punch the kid in the face. Thank God for suburban stoplights and late rush-hour traffic. By the time he’d turned the corner onto the street, some fifteen minutes later, his head had cooled a bit. Think about us, Rachel’s voice said. Maybe that will help you understand.
The sun was going down, and the kids took turns rolling back and forth on their skateboards, the evening light casting their shadows across the wall of the house. There were no cars parked in the garage—home alone again—and they were blasting punk rock from a boom box. One of the kids, not Lance, dragged on a cigarette, blowing rings into the air as if he was sending up smoke signals. Hey, look at me. See how cool I am? The kid on the pipe wiped out, trying to flip the board around in the air. Lance helped the kid up and then dropped off the lip of the pipe and demonstrated the right technique. He leaned down and flew above the opposite lip, grabbing the edge of the board and spinning in midair, before hitting the landing. It was a nice move, Ben had to admit.
He heard Rachel’s voice again. You and I were stupid kids once.
Their first time wasn’t planned, it just happened, on the floor of her bedroom while Rachel’s parents were entertaining friends in the backyard pool. The two of them taken over with the feeling after hours of swimming together. Neither was prepared for it—no condom, no birth control, nothing. Yeah, stupid kids!
He remembered her sixteen-year-old body lying beneath him, her wet hair spread across the floor. Her skin was dotted with goose pimples, and when he kissed her breast she tasted of chlorine. What a relief, the passion he had for her that afternoon. He was submerged by the feeling with Rachel, and until that day he hadn’t understood what it was to willingly give your body away, to be or not to be consensual. She had led him up to her room. She had closed the door behind them. She had put her hands on his hips. He had been frightened, but he’d wanted it, too. And damn if it didn’t feel right, just like she had been made for him.
But the idea of this punk’s hands on his daughter’s skin! Lance was gliding back and forth on the half-pipe, spinning 360s as if he and the skateboard were one. It was as if the boy snuck into their lives and stole Emma away.
And then Lance wiped out, got only half the rotation and landed head and shoulder first on the driveway.
“Oh, shit,” Ben heard one of the kids say. The friends rushed to Lance, who was lying still on the driveway, not moving at all.
“Ah, Jesus,” Ben said to himself, unbuckling his seatbelt, about to call in an ambulance.
The kid with the cigarette bent down and put his hand on Lance’s chest, and Lance bolted upright, throwing his hands out at his friends, who jumped and then collapsed on the cement, cracking up at the joke, rolling on the ground like giggling children. Children, home alone.
Ben got out of the cruiser and walked the fifty yards to the driveway.
“Oh, man,” Lance said when he saw Ben. He brushed off his shirt.
“Dude, it’s the fuzz,” one of the boys said. The kid with the cigarette flicked it into the bushes.
“Man,” Lance said, “I know you don’t like me, but I think Emma is like totally amazing.”
“You guys go home,” Ben said to the other kids.
Ben took a step toward Lance and the kid backed up, his skateboard held to his chest.
“And you…you get inside and lock everything up.” It was getting dark, the streetlights flickering alive. “Are you stupid or something? Don’t you know there’s a serial killer running around?”
THE LIMBS AND MUSCLES OF FEAR
He had once watched a bobcat kill a jackrabbit. The sun had dropped out of the sky, the canyon slicked with shadow. It happened directly in front of him, as though the animal world didn’t see him at all. He was coming down the deer trail to the cabin when the rabbit zigzagged the open ground, its rear legs frantically kicking out behind it. The bobcat chased, swiping once with a broad paw to send the jackrabbit tumbling. The animal righted itself and then it sat there, frozen in the open country, its ears pinned backward, its stomach heaving. The bobcat didn’t hurry. It slunk across the ground, its body like a shadow inking the earth, and hooked the rabbit into its claws. The rabbit didn’t scream or kick, it simply fell limp into the cat’s talons, as though it had accepted its death. Then the cat sunk its teeth into the neck and the rabbit’s legs went electric with kicking, and then they stopped.
The cat carried the carcass into the cabin and he’d followed, heel to toe, heel to toe, making himself silent. The cat hissed at him—it could smell fear, he knew. But he wasn’t scared. He wasn’t the rabbit. He sat there in the doorway, watching the cat rip the wormlike intestines from the animal until it was too dark to see and there was only the crack and shred of a small body being torn apart.
Last night, when he was crouched in the orange grove, he could smell the fear on the policeman’s skin. They were ten feet from each other, both of them on their haunches in the irrigation trenches. The policeman held the gun, but his skin breathed fear—the sparked burn of it. He sat there in the darkness beneath the orange-tree branches and he felt a tenderness toward the policeman. I can end your fear, he thought. I can release it from you into the air. But he had to run; the policeman would catch him, throw him in jail, and jail was like a basement, and the basement was where he’d been the fearful one.
He’d raced into the city after escaping the policeman, backed his Toyota up against a wooden fence on the edge of an open lot in the old city where truck drivers and RV cruisers slept overnight in their rigs. He half-slept, hemmed in by eighteen-wheelers and Winnebagos, until midmorning when the last of the RVs pulled back onto the highway. He drove exactly twenty-five miles an hour down side streets to the Lucky’s shopping center, where the people walked in and out of the store like ants swarming a nest. Inside the store, he bought a screwdriver and then next door, at a Hallmark store, bought red cellophane and clear tape. Two security guards walked the sidewalk outside and he lingered inside for a few minutes, smelling the cinnamon-scented candles, touching the porcelain figurines with the sad eyes, talking with the pretty woman behind the counter about the crazy man who was climbing through people’s windows at night.
“Terrifying,” he said, agreeing with the woman.
“I moved here,” she said, “because it was safe. Because I didn’t have to lock my doors at night.”
“I know,” he said.
“Nothing like this happens here,” she said.
These people were new to fear. There was a virgin sweetness to the smell of it here. As though they weren’t sure what to do with it yet, like the rabbit in shock, paralyzed by the new feeling. He had discovered that he loved being what they feared. As long as he was Fear, he wasn’t afraid. Fear had form, Fear had substance, it took up space; it had possessed him for so long in the basement—its weight pressing him, crushing his lungs, and stealing his voice. He had tricked Fear, though, slipped his body into Fear’s and learned to occupy it as though it was another skin, until he was the limbs and muscles of it.
In the parking lot, he crouched between cars and unscrewed the license plate from a nearby Firebird. Then he unscrewed the license plate from his black car and swapped them. He unspooled the red cellophane and stretched it across the broken light and taped it in place. Then he drove the speed limit down the wide, clean streets. The midday heat made everything stink—the char of the Carl’s Jr. burgers, the rank of industrial trash bins, the rot of the tomatoes turning black
in the fields. He pushed play on the cassette and listened to the song—the ripping guitars, the singer’s growl. He made a right into a housing complex, the new stucco homes with their red-tile roofs, the palm trees bent in the wind, the blinds swiveled shut on the closed windows, as though if they didn’t see him he couldn’t get them. He loved that, their belief that if they didn’t look at what frightened them it would go away. He knew he should leave. The policemen would have identified him by now, they would know who he was. Or they would know what he looked like and where he came from but not who he was; they couldn’t understand what he was. But he wasn’t scared, and how could he leave now? He’d just gotten here. No, he couldn’t leave this place now.
13
BY DUSK BEN WAS UP in the wilderness, he and Tin Man picking their way through the greasewood and coyote brush. The shadows fell in long angles across Loma Canyon, slicing to the edge of the city, which glowed orange in the last of the sunlight. But up into the finger canyon, where the limestone fell away in collapsed breaks, the land cut open to its guts, it was already dark.
Two hours before, he’d met with the MEU guys at a turnout at the end of Junipero Road. There they parked their vehicles and the horse trailers, and Ben talked them through the topo maps. Ten guys total, two teams of five—a day shift and a night. Five men and their horses for seventy-two square miles of land horseshoed from the coastal hills of Laguna all the way up into the Cleveland National Forest. The Ventura guys had Remington 788s with Leupold scopes. Ben had his father’s old Browning bolt-action with a scratched-up Weaver K-4. The Remingtons, according to a cop named Keating, could pop the back off a skull at four hundred yards. It would have been nice, Ben said, if they’d brought him one of those Remingtons. And they all had a good laugh over that.
Hernandez had called for extra patrols that night; everyone from meter maid to sergeant detective was on coffee patrol, cruising town, looking for black Tercels and a crazy man climbing through windows. Ben and the MEU guys were supposed to ride horseback into the hills to flush out the killer—check abandoned cowboy camps, shine lights in caves—and run the perimeter of the city, where the wilderness met civilization. They split the land into sections, each tracking close to the edge of town. Ben got the east end, from Loma Canyon to the Santa Elena reservoir, from Whiting Ranch to the Sinks. The Ventura guys had brand-new Bearcat handheld radios that they clipped to their belts. They hooked Ben up with one, too, and for the first ten minutes the radio squawked with chatter. But now it was silent, just the sound of the wind in the coyote brush and Tin Man’s hooves cutting semicircles in the sand.
He first checked the cowboy camp where he’d almost caught the killer last night and then picked his way along Trabuco Ridge, the city spread electric orange in the valley, the reflected light casting a rusted hue against the hillsides. In the distance, across town in the coastal hills near his place, an Orange County Sheriff Department’s copter spotted swaths of light across the ridges.
A week after his father’s death, Ben’s mother had called the sheriff’s office to see if they had any leads on the driver of the Chevelle. The sheriff had to look up the incident in the report files to remind himself of the case. He had murders to contend with, rapes, grand thefts; an accident that left a cowboy dead was far down the list of concerns. Ben’s anger erupted after that. Someone out there had killed his father and was going to get away with it. Ben saddled up Comet and rode through the brand-new housing tracts, looking for the Chevelle. He would recognize that car in a second, but there were a hundred garages with a hundred closed doors and not one green Chevelle parked in a driveway or on the street. Soon he was walking the horse through the old town, scoping the gravel parking lots, inspecting the Esso gas station. Nothing. For three days he rode circles in town. The driver might live a half mile away in one of the new homes or he might be a soldier on the Marine base or he might live in Los Angeles; there was no way to know. Ben was an eleven-year-old child and he had no resources, no knowledge of how to hunt down such a person. The car was a ghost, something shot out of another world to forever change his. And he realized then that he was going to have to accept it, that he was going to have to live with the killers that go free. But Ben never really could accept it; for him, there was always a ghost out there, always a man racing down a dark road in a Chevelle that Ben would never catch.
Now he and Tin Man meandered down Trabuco Ridge into the flats of orange and avocado groves, down a firebreak that separated the wilderness from the landscaped green of the El Paraiso housing tract. He hadn’t intended to ride here. Or maybe he had. But here he was, and he and the horse rode the break until he passed the crime scene and found himself parked on the edge of Wakeland’s backyard.
All the windows were shut, light illuminating every pane of glass, two backyard floods spotlighting the patio and the small kidney-shaped pool. Ben sat in the darkness, cut off from the yard by a firebreak and an irrigation ditch, and watched Wakeland, looking small from this distance, sitting on the couch with his son and daughter, watching television. His daughter, who couldn’t have been older than seven, sat between Wakeland’s legs, leaning against his stomach. His son, who was nine or ten, sat Indian style on the couch, a few inches from Wakeland’s knee. Wakeland’s wife sat on a chair opposite, reading a magazine, its pages fluttering in the wind of the fan oscillating in the corner. She was a beautiful woman, long-limbed, her chestnut hair tucked behind her right ear. She had a ballerina neck, and even in the chair she sat gracefully rigid, as though she were about to plié. She was the kind of woman men were jealous to have, and Ben felt that envy like a hot coal pressed to the back of his throat. How did a man like Wakeland stay married, while Ben was out here alone?
Ben pulled his father’s Browning from the saddle holster and put the scope to his eye. Suddenly Wakeland was close enough to touch, his forehead filling the scope sight. Ben watched him for a moment and then estimated the distance: sixty yards, seventy. There were times in life when you realized how truly vulnerable you were. Life into death could be crossed over in a half second. You lived so close to it; it was a like a shadow cast behind you. The walls of a house, the glass in the windows, were nothing. You lived or died because someone chose one way or the other. You considered that too long, you’d lose your mind. You considered that too long, you were paralyzed with fear or you came out on the other side of it—like the killer did—and realized you could be death.
—
NATASHA PULLED UP to Ben’s house around 11:30 the next morning, two foam cups of coffee in her hands.
She had been up most of the night in her kitchen, thinking about Ben and Tucker, thinking about the dead child Lucero. She was hurt for them, of course, but she was angry with them, too—their silence, their sense of helplessness, as though this horrible thing had only happened to them. She was most angry with Ben, though. Women expected to live in a world where they could be overpowered. You didn’t walk down a dark street alone late at night. You didn’t leave the door to your apartment unlocked. You didn’t agree to meet someone at their place on a first date. Just being alone with a man in an elevator could be enough to make you sweat. But Ben was a cop; Ben’s job was to protect people—her, if she should be attacked; his daughter, Emma; and the Wakeland boys—and he had the power to do so, physically and by the authority of the law. How could he not use it? How could he live in this town, knowing what he knew about Wakeland, and do nothing?
By the time she made it to the porch, Ben was standing on his threshold, half hidden behind the cracked-open screen door.
“Can I come in?” Natasha said.
For a moment he didn’t move, but then he pushed open the screen.
It was cool inside—all the windows slid open, the wind billowing the thin curtains across the wooden dining table—but you could feel the heat starting to come off the walls. Outside, framed in the window, the hills rose, browning in the white sun. She set the coffees on the table. He stood a moment longer, dressed in jean
s and a Viper fins T-shirt, his hair ragged and mussed, before taking a seat.
“I hear we have a genuine posse up here in the hills,” Natasha said.
“Something like that,” he said. “Back on it tonight.”
“You get any sleep?”
“A few hours,” he said. “One eye open, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I was drunk the other night,” he said.
“Is that an apology?”
“Yeah, I guess it is.”
They sat together, watching the wind bow the eucalyptus, listening to the helicopters that were circling the wilderness, looking for the killer.
“This business or pleasure?” Ben said.
“Neither,” she said. “I’m here because I want to tell you something.”
And then she told him—about being a stupid nineteen-year-old girl, about the party, about being drunk, about Signal Hill and the submarine races, about the police who did nothing, about the months studying alone until she pulled herself together. She told him and watched a police helicopter outside the window turning elliptical arcs above the hills.
“I’ve never told you because there was never any reason to,” she said. “There is now.”
He studied her, his eyes pooled with some kind of emotion she couldn’t quite read. He was like that—full of emotion you could never nail down. What did she expect? That he’d break down and let her in, that he’d tell her, too? I showed you mine; you show me yours?
“Why are you telling me now?” he said, his voice guarded.
“Because you don’t really know me without knowing that,” she said, hesitating. “And I want you to know me.”