by Alan Drew
“You?”
Then he told her—not everything, but enough; some things were meant to go with you to the grave. For ten minutes or more—he didn’t know how long, really—he watched the surfacing emotions upset her face until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he watched the fog thicken along the ridges, blurring the sloping lines between hills.
“My God, Ben,” she said, water in her eyes. “I can’t believe it.”
“I know.”
“Why now?” she said.
“There’re others,” he said. “It happened to others. If I had said something before, maybe—”
“Other kids?”
“Yes.”
“That man needs to be taken out of that school,” she said, standing up. “Right now.”
“We need a warrant first,” he said. “The statute of limitations is up on me. We need evidence about the others before an arrest.”
“How can there be limitations on such things?” she said, pacing.
“You’d have to ask the lawyers about that,” Ben said.
“We’ve known each other for almost twenty years,” she said after a long silence. “Shared the same bed fifteen of those years. What did you think I’d do if you told me?”
“It’s not what you would have done,” he said, looking at her now. “It’s what you would have seen.”
She shook her head. “What did you think I would see?”
“It was like I won the lottery with you,” he said, trying to explain. “Like I was an idiot, some disgusting fool who got lucky.”
“What did you think I would see, Ben?”
A weak, frightened man. “I don’t know. I would just always wonder, what you saw.”
She gazed out over the fogged-in valley with a look of shock on her face.
“God,” she said. “How many people know? I mean, a case is being built.”
“A couple.”
“Natasha?”
“Yeah. She’s one of them.”
“I wish you’d told me,” she said. “I could’ve helped. I was your wife; it was my job to help. I would have wanted to help.”
“I didn’t know how to.”
“You know what it was like living with you?” Rachel said. “You know what it was like to be ignored? Not to be touched? Then to move here and have it get worse…You sitting out there in the barn, every night. Do you know what that was like?”
How could he tell her, even now, that sometimes when she had rolled over to touch him, Wakeland’s face had flashed across the dark screen of his mind? Moving back here was like having Wakeland move in with them. He hadn’t expected that, didn’t know his mind was still so weak to allow that to happen.
“I thought I’d lose you, if I told you.”
She laughed bitterly at the irony, tears in her eyes. “Ben,” she said, “you don’t understand people at all.”
—
SHE WALKED DOWN the hill in front of him, keeping her distance, the fog socking in and turning everything to cloud.
“I don’t want Emma to see me like this,” Rachel said when they got to the house. “Make an excuse for me. I need a little time.” Then she was in the car, driving down the road.
Inside the house, Emma had the table set with a couple of steaming Hungry-Man Salisbury steaks.
“What’s the breaking news with you guys?” Emma said, cutting into her meat. “Mom didn’t even say goodbye.”
“We had a discussion.”
“An argument.”
“No,” he said.
She squinted her eyes at him, chewing.
“The subject matter?” she said. “Yo?”
“No,” he said. “Not you.” He took a bite of the steak, but it tasted like shit, freezer-burned and syrupy with congealed sauce. “Comida es muy bien!”
“Who’re you kidding?” she said.
—
LATER THAT NIGHT, nearing ten, Rachel called. “I’ve been trying to catch you for an hour,” she said.
“I can’t get your daughter off the phone.”
“Set a time limit, Ben,” she said.
He was watching a cop show, Hill Street Blues. Somehow it got his mind off things, and he enjoyed, to his surprise, making fun of it.
“You called to offer constructive criticism?”
“I’m sorry about taking off like that,” she said. “I just”—a big intake of air—“I needed to think. You caught me off guard.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Couldn’t figure how to set the table for that one.”
“I’m sorry, Ben,” she said. He could hear her tearing up. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know.” Sympathy was fine, but the sound of it was tough on the ears.
“It explains some things for me, though, you know?” she said. “It wasn’t me. What happened to us.”
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t you.”
“I always thought it was me. All that time you spent in the barn. The nights you slept on the couch. I felt so guilty. I always felt guilty.”
“It was never you. Even after the history teacher.”
She let out a long breath.
“I drove by the pool after I left you tonight,” Rachel said, trailing off. “You know, I was jealous of that man when we were in school, all that time you spent with him. I should have known.”
“No,” he said. “You were a kid. Others should have known, but not you.”
Silence on the line.
“You know,” she said, “you’ve got to tell Emma, right?”
He knew, yes, he knew, but…
“Tonight, Ben,” she said. “Before this gets out. I’ll come over if it helps, all right? I’m coming over.”
And she did. She was there in fifteen minutes and they sat around the dinner table together, a situation that would have otherwise caused him joy, and the three of them had a long talk.
—
RACHEL STAYED THAT night, sleeping with Emma in her bed. When he told Emma—God. When he looked in his daughter’s eyes and said, “This is what happened to me,” she took his shaking hands in hers and kissed his knuckles. Emma touched him, without hesitation, without a moment to think about the disgusting things he’d done. Now she and Rachel were asleep in Emma’s room and Ben lay awake, replaying the moment in his mind: the grace of his daughter, the grace of their child. He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, unwilling to go out to the barn tonight. He and Rachel weren’t sharing a bed, and he knew they never would again, but tonight he wanted to be under the same roof with his daughter and the woman that bore her into his life.
INTO THE WILDERNESS
They had followed him into the canyon—the helicopters floating back and forth like metal wasps, the policemen on horses trotting a line down the canyon floor trail. The bandages had bled through, leaving trickles of his blood in the bleached dirt so they could track him. He took off his shirt, ripped it into shreds, and tied it around his arm just above the hole to make it stop. But ten minutes later, the knot came loose and he had to stop to retie it with his good hand and his teeth, his inside-self dripping rust-colored spots onto the dirt until the fabric was cinched tightly enough.
He heard the horses then, close this time, and he had to leave the trail, disappear into the underbrush with the snakes and jackrabbits and mule deer resting in the afternoon shade. The men on the horses stuck to the thin trail—their rifles strapped across their chests, their binoculars glinting in the sunlight—but he slipped along the edges of the canyon, where the cliff walls rose white in the desert sun. For a while, he stalked them stalking him, the need to take one of them blooming in his chest. The men’s bodies floated above the chaparral like brutal ghosts, the air around them tinged with sweat and leather, and he imagined what it would be to clench a fist around one of their necks, imagined the smell of their fear. But they had rifles, they had shotguns, they had clubs and snub-nosed revolvers, and his right hand wouldn’t work anymore, wouldn’t close into a fist without sending dizzying pain up his n
eck to explode in his head. So he snuck away, leaving them to the trail, crawling on his hands and knees through tunnels in the underbrush, dozing for a few moments among boulders when the clomp and scrape of the hooves receded down the canyon, his head whirling with cold sweat.
Two nights ago, he’d spun off the road, the car bottoming out in a rutted drainage. The engine rattled to silence, and he sat there in the dark, blood thrumming in his ears. He unwrapped the wet bandages from his arm and rewrapped it with the last of the fresh bandages and tape, keeping himself inside himself again. He lay down in the front seat then and watched the stars pulse the sky and talked to himself in his eleven-year-old language until his head spun into sleep.
He woke to hot breath outside the window, the stink of mangy hair, something clawing at the metal door. The sky was ribboned red-orange, and when he looked outside, he saw the coyote sniffing at his blood. Dark shapes moved in the brush beyond and then stilled to shadow again. He opened the car door and the coyote leapt backward. He placed one foot and then the other on the dry ground, and the coyote retreated, growling, its teeth bared in fear. He stumbled toward the animal—his head a balloon on a string floating high above his shoulders—and followed it into the brush until he was in the cold breath of the wilderness and the coyote became air. He would become a coyote, he decided then, a hunter disappearing into the night, and he would walk out the other side of the canyon, back into the town, back among them.
Now it was dark, the sky above him bruise blue. He listened for the men, listened for their horses, the rattling of the bits, the pounding of hooves, but he heard nothing, just the thumping sound of a distant helicopter. He slunk along the edge of the canyon wall, his body shadowless in the moonless night. Then the helicopter came thundering down the canyon, its spotlight exploding the brush and trees and rocks with overexposed light. He was caught in the open, between the canyon wall and a row of manzanita, and when he started to run, three mule deer burst out of the underbrush and he ran with them, the helicopter hurling light behind them, the deer darting and kicking in front of him. Up ahead he saw them, the policemen’s flashlights like little lightning strikes against the sagebrush. The deer veering and cutting, careening through chaparral, and then a shot punched the air and one of the deer dropped and he could see the policemen’s flashlights slashing across the shuddering animal.
“Shit,” he heard one of them say.
There was another shot and he heard the policemen arguing, their walkie-talkies sending static into the air. He crouched then in a clump of cactus with the needles poking into his skin, and the helicopter’s light burned across his body until it floated above the men and the dead deer. He crouched there for ten minutes, just outside the circle of light, the cactus thorns puncturing his arms, stabbing into his thighs, until he watched the legs of the horses pass him by on the trail.
“Fucking deer hunter here,” he heard one of them say, a couple others laughing.
“Wonder how that’s going to look in the report.”
“Shut the hell up, Gonzalez. You practically jumped out of the saddle.”
Then they were gone, following the trail north, back up to the entrance to the canyon, back where the stolen car lay broken in a ditch. He crouched there for five more minutes, watching the helicopter splash the canyon with light. The spotlight slashed across the canyon wall once, and he saw the fold in the land, a thin chute of rock rising to the ridge above. He knew then he couldn’t stay on the canyon floor.
18
BEN SPED HIS TRUCK DOWN the washboard ruts of Black Star Canyon Road toward the sunrise over Limestone Canyon.
He’d slept until three in the morning when he startled awake, remembering something from his senior year. He checked in on the sleeping Emma and Rachel, and then went out to the barn and studied the topographic map of the canyon, listening to scanner chatter of the manhunt, watching the helicopter spotlights circling above the distant hills. By dawn, it was clear to Ben they’d lost the serial. The mounted units had ridden up and down the canyon all night, foot patrols were searching under every bush; they’d shot a deer, for God’s sake, startled up by the helicopters. There were a couple rangers from the park service up there, too, but they’d imported them from Alpine, down near San Diego, and they didn’t really know the land. They had the north and south ends of the canyon bottled up, just like Ben had said, but the killer wasn’t down in the canyon. Ben was sure of it.
When he got to the command post—a folding picnic table and a nylon canopy to keep the sun off—Hernandez and the county sheriff were bent over a national forest map.
“Don’t believe you’ve got medical clearance yet,” Hernandez said as a greeting.
“I don’t believe you know where the hell the killer is,” Ben said.
Ben was laying out his topo map over the national forest map, setting a walkie-talkie on each corner to keep the ends down.
“Well,” Hernandez said, glancing at Ben’s truck, “at least you didn’t use city resources to get up here.”
Hernandez explained to the sheriff, Barrow, that Ben used to ride these hills with his father, back when it was a cattle ranch. Barrow, a gaunt older man as tall as a basketball center, blew smoke from his cigarette and eyed Ben.
“You’re the officer that shot him, right?”
“Yeah,” Ben said.
“You’re bleeding, son,” Barrow said, and handed him a handkerchief.
“Thanks.” Ben touched the cloth to his eye. Just a little blood, a stitch shaken loose from the rough ride up, maybe.
The sheriff explained the situation: patrols on the south end of the canyon, cruisers blocking all dirt roads leading out of the hills, Ventura and Riverside mounted units picking the canyon trails.
“Got a couple footprints,” the sheriff said, pointing at the map. “Here and here.”
Ben marked the spots in blue pen.
“Blood on the trail here,” the sheriff pointed, “and a smeared handprint here, on the trunk of an oak tree. But that’s it, as of an hour ago.”
“He knows how to disappear,” Hernandez said.
Ben glanced out along the ridge to where the land fell away in limestone folds.
“We need some foot patrols up on those bluffs,” Ben said. “I think he’s climbing.”
“Up there?” Barrow said. “That’s steep as hell. The guy’s bleeding like a son of a bitch.”
“There’re coyote trails,” Ben said. “Mule deer trails up and down the canyon walls. If he was down on the canyon floor, you’d have found him by now.”
These were city police, used to alleyways and strip malls and neat rows of suburban homes. The sheriff blew smoke and then called to a captain, who sent a half dozen grudging officers hiking up the ridgeline. Ben watched them pick a deer trail through the scrub brush on the lip of the canyon wall.
“I need to get down in there,” Ben said.
“Looks to me,” the sheriff said, “like you should be feet up on a couch.”
“There’re a couple small caves,” Ben said. “Here, and here.” He stabbed his index finger into the map. “Anybody up here know that?”
The sheriff glanced at Hernandez.
“When an injured animal is being hunted,” Ben said, “what does he do?”
“He hides,” Hernandez said.
“Or attacks,” Ben said. “If these guys were anywhere near him, he would’ve attacked already. He’s in one of those fucking caves.”
“Did you read your own medical report?”
“I can’t just sit around on this, Lieutenant,” Ben said, looking Hernandez in the eyes. “You understand?” He thought Hernandez would get it, thought he’d understand all that Ben felt he had to make up for. “Let me do my job. I’m going into the canyon,” Ben said, turning to walk away from Hernandez. “You’d have to arrest me to stop me. You going to do that?”
—
DOWN INTO THE Sinks, like a hole in the earth swallowing the land. The horse was skittish on the way d
own, balking at Ben’s tugs on the bit, dancing around snakes sunning themselves in the sun-bleached dirt. Five minutes earlier, Ben had grabbed his service revolver, handcuffs, and his Viper fins cap out of the truck. He snagged a walkie-talkie from the command post while Barrow’s men set him up with one of the sheriff department’s horses. Hernandez railed about insubordination, threatened him with a desk job. The lieutenant could be a tough bastard, but he was smart, too. Arrest your own officer, the hero, and lose the serial? No.
Ben was supposed to meet up with the MEU riders at the bottom of the canyon, some two hundred feet down a switchback cattle trail that cut through manzanita groves and ears of prickly pear cactus. High above him, a sheriff’s Bell and an Anaheim Police Defender floated circles around each other. It was hot now, the midmorning sun radiating off the exposed earth. The air stank of coyote mint and sagebrush, and even with the hat he had to squint through the brightness, watching the shadows beneath the trees, scanning the needle grass for any movement.
Nothing.
He found the Ventura guys clustered together in the shade of an oak grove, a couple of them smoking cigarettes, all of them looking strung out for lack of sleep. The horses were tied to tree trunks, their heads hung low with exhaustion. The sergeant in charge, Powell, and another MEU were consulting a map spread out across a boulder. When Ben trotted into the grove, Powell turned to watch him come, looking like a man who has just been told he’s doing a shitty job.
“Barrow says you got some theory,” he said.
SOMEONE IS COMING FOR YOU
By the time the sun was up he was high above the policemen, crawling among truck-sized boulders, his left hand smudging rust red prints on the rocks as he climbed. The sun was a hole cut out of the sky, sucking him into its white heat. The land tilted off-balance and was teetering in the sky. The canyon spread below him, the earth’s guts exposed in limestone breaks as though the land were sinking into the ground. The men on the horses with the rifles were getting closer to the steep trail that took him up to the cliffs. He could hear them now, down in the valley, the snorting horses, the electric radio voices echoing off the canyon walls.