by Alan Drew
“About a quarter mile away.”
Hernandez nodded and sipped his beer.
The morning after the accident, Natasha called Ben to let him know that Wakeland wasn’t strangled dead in the apartment. She called him that afternoon, too, to tell him she’d checked in with dispatch at the department and no assault claims had been filed, at least not yet.
“You were on that scene pretty fast.”
“It was near Rachel’s place,” he said. “Freaked me out.”
“Want another?” Hernandez said.
“No,” Ben said. “I’m good.”
Hernandez looked hard at him.
“You hungry?” Ben said. “I’ve got some tacos left over. My daughter makes some mean pico de gallo.”
“No thanks,” Hernandez said, slapping his knees and standing up. “Just wanted to check in on you, see how you’re doing.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Get that head of yours healed up,” Hernandez said. “Then let’s talk when you sign off on that suicide.”
THE FEAR BASIN
When it was done, when he had become not fear but death, he looked up and saw that the television was on. He hadn’t noticed the flashing screen when he had followed her into the room; when he grabbed her, the pain in his arm had exploded and the inside of his mind had gone white. His head had felt distant from his body, a mile away from his hands, which clamped down until she stopped struggling and death had taken over fear.
He heard them call his name, Night Prowler, and when his vision puzzled back together, he was staring at his own face on the screen. It was him, but it was another him, the him when he’d first been arrested long ago and he’d only begun to understand what he had become. The face of the almost-him filled up the screen, and even he was moved by it—the dark, hollow eyes, the mangled teeth, the worm-brown skin. His face on the screen made him look bigger than real life, as though he were six feet tall, a fully formed monster. His face was being transmitted into every living room in Southern California. They saw him. They would see him now.
He covered her with a quilt he found on the couch—his blood had marred her face and made her ugly—and turned up the volume on the television. He found a bathroom at the end of a hallway, opened the medicine cabinet, and knocked aside lipstick and medicine vials until he found the gauze and the metal clips. The television said the police were looking for him, said people were terrified. It said all of the L.A. basin was on alert, a basin full of fear. A fear basin, he thought. He liked the sound of that, said it out loud to himself just to hear it. He rolled out the gauze and ripped a section off with his teeth. The television talked about the policeman who shot him and the woman the policeman had stopped him from killing. He unwrapped the old gauze, wet and pulpy with his insides. He wrapped the new gauze around his arm, the blood still leaking down his elbow and dripping onto the floor. The television read the names of the people he’d killed, and he smiled; they were a part of him now, and he a part of them, too. Other people wouldn’t remember their lives; they’d remember their deaths; they’d remember the one who killed them. Even when he was gone, his name would send a shudder down their bodies. They saw him now and they’d remember him. Basin of fear.
When the gauze was wrapped, he pressed the metal clip into the fabric to hold it in place. But the blood kept coming, in little pumps, as though the policeman’s bullet had tapped the muscle of his heart. In the garage, he found duct tape and he wrapped the gauze until the blood stopped running down his elbow. He found a crowbar and sledgehammer hanging from hooks on the wall, and he threw those on the passenger seat of the car. On a pegboard, he found the keys to the car—a Rabbit, the car was called a Rabbit—climbed into the driver’s seat, and fired up the engine. Music blared from the radio, Wake me up before you go go!, and he slammed the dial off with the heel of his hand.
It was nearly dark now, a ribbon of pink in the western sky. Across the freeway, he could see the police helicopter spotlighting the rooftops dotting the hills. He drove down the road, out of the hills to the main street that led to the freeway. The police were still there in the on-ramp circles. He could see their lights spinning blues and reds. The traffic slowed and he watched two policemen walking between cars, showing the drivers pieces of paper. His picture was on those papers, he knew it. He edged the car to the left, into a turn lane that led to the twenty-four-hour grocery store. There he drove slowly across the parking lot and back out the other side, where he climbed the road back into the neighborhood and followed it as it curved up into the hills, past the neat little homes, past the backyard pools and parks with the tire swings, past the greenbelts and their electric lights coming to life. He drove until he came to the top of the hill where the pavement turned to rutted dirt, and he drove that road until it dead-ended at a metal gate. He had found the gate the second night he was here, but it was chained and locked and his crowbar was still in the trunk of his Toyota. Beyond the gate, the dirt road climbed a ridge into the hills and disappeared in darkness. One of the helicopters floated across the freeway now, its spotlight exploding across the rooftops below, the rotors chopping the air. Grabbing the crowbar, he wedged the metal between the gate and lock. It took three times, the helicopter floating closer, his head spinning with pain, but it finally snapped, and he drove the Rabbit through the gate and into the deep darkness of the hills.
17
THE CALL CAME IN OVER the scanner at 9:37 P.M.
Ben had been in the barn since Hernandez left, sitting in the dark to save his eye, putting away the rest of the Coors, trying to figure out how much Hernandez knew—and what to do about it. The lieutenant had made some connections, sure, but had he added them up? Whom had he spoken to? Had Natasha given him away? Regardless, Hernandez was putting him on alert; that was for sure. “Let’s talk when you sign off on that suicide.”
The call was out of Anaheim, East Station. “Possible 187. 14667 Sky Line Drive.”
Ben flipped on the desk lamp to check the address, his vision blurring with the light. He turned it to spotlight the topographic map he’d tacked to the wall. He ran his finger down the map, following the 55 Freeway out to the 91, the exact route the serial had taken the night Ben had shot him.
The scanner squawked again. They’d found a black BMW parked across the street from the victim’s house. Plates didn’t match, but the steering wheel was covered in blood.
The night the serial escaped, the CHP had shut down the 91 Freeway for three hours, checking each car before letting them drive on: nothing. Just disappeared. Ben found the spot on the map where they had set up the roadblock. Just two exit ramps between the 55 junction and the CHP roadblock: Imperial Highway and Weir Canyon. Just two ways in and two ways out.
Scanner: The Anaheim police were shutting down the on-ramps to the freeway.
Ben found the victim’s house and pinned it. It was in the hills, hemmed in between the freeway on one side and the open land of the Santa Ana Mountains on the other. Unless he slipped through before they closed the on-ramps, the serial was cornered.
No, that was too easy. He’d have a way out, if he was going to kill again. Ben ran his finger over the serpentine roads as they climbed through the residential streets. The roads curved back onto one another, a labyrinth of expensive homes pushing the edge of the wilderness.
There, he found it, the route that could get him out: Black Star Canyon Road. Ben knew the road, a graded dirt path that snaked the backbone ridge of the mountains down into Limestone Canyon and beyond. Ben followed the road with his fingers, tracing the ridgeline—three miles, four back into the wilderness, five miles, six, and the serial could go out the other side, right back into Rancho Santa Elena.
He called Hernandez at home.
“This better be good.”
“We gotta get Anaheim on the horn,” Ben said. “I think I know where he is.”
—
NATASHA DROVE UP to the house midmorning and found Ben in the barn. She hadn’t told
him about the photos yet. She had covered them in tissue paper and placed them in a file folder and let them sit on her kitchen table, vibrating something ugly. She had decided to give him a few days to heal. This wasn’t the kind of thing you hit a man with when his guard was down.
“You been out here all night?” she said when she saw him, sitting, elbows up on the makeshift desk.
He gave her a guilty glance. His left eye socket was still mean-looking, purple with yellow splotches on the edges, a little dried blood around the stitches of a zigzagging laceration.
“You on scene last night?”
“No,” she said. “Mendenhall took this one.”
“Thought he didn’t like the field.”
“He doesn’t. But there’s a lot of press on it now. He sees it as good exposure.”
“Bastard,” Ben said, half-joking.
“Political animal,” she said. “I needed a break anyway.”
A helicopter flew low over the barn. Outside the window, they both watched it head east toward the Santa Ana Mountains.
“I almost had him,” Ben said. “If I had gotten him, that girl would be alive.” She had been a college student, the one killed last night, a twenty-year-old back at her parents’ place for a visit. “Now all I can do is sit on my ass doing nothing.”
She looked at him, wondering if he heard his own words.
“Take a ride with me,” she said.
—
THEY GOT IN her Z and rode across town in silence. Cruisers were out everywhere, the city like a police state. Cops in grocery store parking lots. Cops guarding the dirt roads that led out of the hills. The yellow tape was still up at Puente Madera, and police cruisers were there, too, blocking the entrance to the complex. Everything else was back in order, though—the stoplight replaced, the skid marks and oil slick cleaned up.
“Hernandez paid me a visit,” Ben said. “He seemed to know a lot about my recent activities.”
She glanced at him, hearing the implication in his voice.
“I haven’t said a word to him,” she said. A light turned red; she hit the brakes and glared at him. “You know me better than that.”
He stared at her for a moment, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, and then nodded and turned away. It took five minutes and two cigarettes to reach the high school, all three hundred seconds ticking off in silence.
“You know this is the last place I want to be,” he said, when he saw where they were headed.
“Yeah,” she said, pulling into the parking lot. “I know.”
She passed two more police cruisers at the entrance to the high school, parked her car in the lot in front of the swim complex, and cut the engine. They could see the lines of boys through the fence, freestyling down the pool lanes, Wakeland pacing the edge of the water with them, stopwatch in hand. She watched Ben as he stared through the fence, his jaw hard, his eyes narrowed.
“I want you to think about something,” she said. “What if Emma were a boy? Would you be sending her here next year?”
He looked at her, his face darkening.
“Would you?”
“What’s your point?”
“You know my point.”
She reached into the backseat, grabbed the file folder, and tossed it on his lap.
“You need to see something,” she said.
He opened it, glanced at the first shot, and his face collapsed. It was painful to see, painful to be the cause of it. He turned his face away and stared out the passenger-side window, hiding himself for a few seconds, and then looked back down at the Polaroids in his hands.
“There’re more,” she said. “Back at the apartment. In the master bedroom closet.”
“I knew there was something there,” Ben said. “I just couldn’t—”
“Some things can’t be done alone.”
He turned the photos facedown in his lap, the black square of film paper betraying nothing of the ugliness on the other side.
“Any of me?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Only Lucero.”
Wakeland blew the whistle. They both looked up, watched the boys climb out of the water and strut across the pool deck to grab their towels.
“You know why I let go of him the other night?” he said.
“You’re not a killer, that’s why.”
“No,” he said. “I could have killed him.” He turned his face away from her. “Somehow I still cared for the man. I don’t know how, but the feeling was still there.”
She let that sink in for a second, trying to find a place in her mind where it could be understood.
“Four or five years ago,” she said, “this seventeen-year-old girl was rolled into the examination room. She had been kicked to death by her boyfriend—broken ribs, fractured skull, internal bleeding.”
He wasn’t looking at her, his face turned away still, staring into some middle distance of his mind.
“One of the detectives on the case kept coming back, two or three times. First he made a pretense of gathering evidence, but later he just seemed to come by to look at her. It was a pretty straightforward case—I’d already sent my report over to the department—so I asked him about it. He said she had been put in the hospital five times by this man, a dealer in his late twenties. He’d tried to get her to press charges, but she wouldn’t. She fell down the stairs, she’d say, or she got hit in the eye with a ball, stuff like that. She wouldn’t leave him. And then she ended up on an examination table in my office.”
“I’m supposed to be the seventeen-year-old girl?”
“The point is,” she said, “there comes a time when the reasons don’t matter anymore. I can’t explain it and neither can you. It just needs to stop.”
She handed him a photocopy of Phillip’s picture, the one she got from Helen.
“Phillip Lambert,” she said. “Fourteen years old. Wakeland had him alone in the pool the other day.”
Ben stared at the picture, his hands shaking a little.
“Any pictures of him in that box?”
“Not yet,” Natasha said.
The boy had big hazel eyes, a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
“What happened to you, Ben, isn’t about your body. It wouldn’t show up in an autopsy; there’d be no evidence. What happened to you is in your head. He’s in your head—that’s it. He can’t hurt you anymore.” She nodded to the school picture of Phillip. “That was you,” she said. “That’s how young you were.”
She took the photos from Ben’s hands, slid all of them into the file folder, and handed it back to him. The boys were streaming into the locker room now, a couple stragglers pulling on T-shirts, but Wakeland had stopped Phillip on the pool deck.
“That’s him,” she said, nodding toward the pool.
Ben looked up and stared hard at the pool.
Wakeland was pressing down on the boy’s shoulders, saying something to him that they were too far away to hear. Ben shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat.
“I can’t do nothing, knowing what I know,” she said, looking at Ben now. “The man you need to catch is right there.” She pointed toward the pool. “So is the boy you need to save. People knew what was happening to you, Ben. Right?”
Water threatened his eyes, and she could see him grind his teeth to hold it back.
“They never said anything,” she said. “Are you going to be one of those people?”
Nothing.
She glanced back at the pool. Phillip was walking toward the locker room, and Wakeland had turned, looking out at the parking lot toward Natasha’s car. He recognized it from the other day, she was sure of it. Yes, she thought. We’re watching you.
“No one’s looking for Wakeland,” Natasha said. “No one’s hunting him down. I’ll give you a couple days, but after that I am going to go talk to Hernandez.”
He looked at her then, his face misshapen with swelling.
“I’ve covered for you,” she said very quietly,
“but I can’t do it again.” She took his hand then and he let her, and neither could look at the other. They just watched their fingers intertwined. “I don’t know what we are, Ben. But if you make me do this, I don’t think I can be anything to you anymore. It’s yours to do.”
—
AFTER NATASHA DROPPED him off at the house, Ben sat at the kitchen counter next to the phone, holding the number in his hands. Wakeland’s hands had been on Phillip’s shoulders. “Are you going to be one of those people?” He heard Natasha’s voice ring in his head. Then Wakeland had touched Phillip’s chest, just once, but Ben felt his body leap with panic. He was teaching the boy to breathe. That’s how it started, that was the beginning. Even after all that had happened, even after Ben’s attack, the man was laying the foundation for another boy.
It took Ben the better part of an hour—thinking about the evidence he already had against Wakeland, thinking about all the evidence he didn’t have—before he finally dialed the number.
“Tucker Preston?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Ben Wade,” he said. “I swam for Coach Wakeland.”
The line hissed with silence.
“Can I buy you a beer?” Ben said.
“No,” he said. “You can’t.” Silence. “Meet me at Cordova Park.”
—
THE KID WAS sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, when Ben found him, his feet rolling his skateboard deck back and forth.
“I told the medical examiner I wasn’t going to say anything,” Tucker said.
Ben sat on the farthest edge of the bench, a square of orange trees before them, surrounded by a wooden fence. PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE read a brass plaque.
“But you gave her your number.”
“Yeah,” he said, turning to look at Ben. “I did. Wanted to see what you looked like, I guess.” Tucker’s gaze unnerved him. “You’re the cop that shot the Night Prowler, right?”
“I am.”
“But he got away.”
“For now.”
“Shit, man,” Tucker said, shaking his head. “Wakeland loved you. Talked about you all the time, about how special you were, about how you understood things. When I pissed him off, he always compared me to you. I was so jealous.” Tucker laughed ironically. “I could never live up.”