by Alan Drew
The boulders were like things dropped from the sky, shaken loose from the stars—bulbous and sharp, specks in the rock sparkling in the sun. The string holding his head above his shoulders had spun out into the white air, and he could see a cave above him, a dark mouth between rocks. He wedged his toes into the canyon wall, pulled himself up by the fingertips of his good arm, and crawled inside the mouth of the cave, dust on his tongue, an animal piss sour that tasted yellow in his mind. He curled into the corner of the cave where it was cold and lay in the dust and breathed the earth inside of himself, and for some reason he remembered the boy.
He had been hidden in the camp late at night, half asleep on the old mattress, when the boy came through the door. It was one of the boys from the pickers’ camp, Mexican or Honduran, his dark skin and brown eyes. He’d watched this boy with another one in the orange groves. He’d been sleeping there once, hidden behind a picker’s cart when he heard them, and he watched them kiss in the circle of shade beneath a tree. He liked to watch them, liked the way they touched each other. It reminded him of someone, the person who had said she was his mother; the one with the little holes in her arm who sometimes came into the basement and stroked the back of his head; the one who pressed her lips to his forehead; the one who stopped coming.
When the boy saw him in the camp the other night, he’d stumbled back toward the door.
“I thought you were someone else,” the boy said.
“I know,” he said. No one ever expected him.
The boy stared at him, trying to piece his face together. He knew he was strange-looking to them, knew his face was something that frightened people.
“Did someone else come here,” the boy said, “looking for me?”
He noticed the gun then, hanging from the boy’s right hand.
“No.”
“No one?” the boy said, starting to shake. He was tall, his shoulders broad and straining his shirt with muscle. If he’d wanted to choke the boy, he wouldn’t have been strong enough. “He said he’d be here.”
“No,” he said. “No one came. No one comes when you need them.”
The wind shook the cabin, dust skittering across the floor.
“I need to talk to him,” the boy said. He was crying now, running his fingers through his hair.
He had stood up and stepped toward the boy, felt something strange for him, something soft. He wanted to touch the boy, to feel the heat of his skin. He knew what it was to be left alone. Then the boy pointed the gun at him. The gun was shaking in the boy’s hand, but the boy wasn’t going to shoot him. The muzzle jumped around in the air and the boy was crying. When he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder the boy shoved him against the wall. Then the boy stumbled out the door of the cabin into the roaring wind. He followed the boy through the orange grove shadows and down the moonlit white path, angry now that he’d been shoved, wanting to choke him.
He tracked the boy to the edge of the strawberry field and then crouched down in the needle grass near the irrigation ditch. The boy stumbled into the field, a tall shadow cut against the electric light of the city. In the middle of the field, among the dead strawberries, he sat down. He could see the boy, a blotch of black upsetting the rows of fruit, rocking back and forth, hugging his knees. Then the boy stood suddenly and paced up and down the row, the gun swinging from his hand. Twice he raised the gun to his head, before dropping it to his side. He paced in the row like an animal stuck in a cage, shifting the gun to his left hand, back into his right, and then into his left, and then suddenly, mid-step, he jerked the gun to his head and a pop of spark exploded, the sound carried away on the wind.
He sat there on the edge of the field, the wind blowing the needle grass against his arms, the city lights shimmering in the hot night, the clump of dark where the boy had fallen between the strawberry rows. Most people wanted to live; they fought him, dug their nails into his arms, kicked at his back, their whole body writhing to take another breath. He didn’t know how to think about this boy, didn’t know what it meant that he’d killed himself, and he sat there until morning thinking—the boy alone in the field for hours, the yellow light bleeding into the sky, the silent pickers going down the rows until one of them screamed.
Now they were coming for him, the men with their guns. They hadn’t come for his eleven-year-old self, but now he’d done things that made him worthy of being found. They had sounded closer, but now, from inside the cave, their voices began to grow faint. He smiled to himself; they hadn’t found him. But his head hurt and his vision was tunneled and he was in a hole in the ground again, deep in the cold mouth of the earth, and he could still just barely hear them—their radios, the horse snorts, a chain rattling from a saddle, all of it going the other way, fading down the length of the canyon floor. They were coming for him finally, but he crouched in the dark, sure they would not know where to look.
19
POWELL SHOWED HIM THE HANDPRINT pressed into the trunk of one of the oak trees. Then they all were up in the saddle, single-filing it down the old cattle trail. It was hot as hell now, even in the mottled shade of trees, and the dust kicked up by hooves tasted like singed chalk. In the bright midday light, the vision in Ben’s dilated eye was overexposed and washed out. Still his good eye kept the world in focus, and he found himself closing his injured eye to ease the ache in his head. A second handprint smeared against a boulder was fifty yards down the trail. From there, they followed a smattering of blood, like paint dripped from a brush, until they came to a small puddle, still wet in the dirt. Ben hopped off the horse and knelt on the trail, squinting through the manzanita. There were no other signs, nothing—no blood on the leaves, no broken branches, no footprints in the underbrush to indicate where he’d gone.
“Nothing for another five to six hundred yards,” Powell said. “And then it starts up again. Like he lifted off the ground and flew there.”
Ben glanced up at the cliffs, rising white in the sun. He hadn’t been in this canyon for years, but he didn’t think they were near the first cave yet. That’s what had startled him awake this morning: the caves. His senior year when everything in his life was blowing up and he didn’t want to be found—by Wakeland, by his mother, even by Rachel—he hiked up here alone. They’d find him at the beach, if they bothered to look, but not up here. A couple days after blowing states, when he thought he was going to lose his mind if he set foot on school property again, he hiked up here and climbed a coyote path up the steep cliffs. It was dangerous and he might have fallen, but that just made it better. He found one of the caves that afternoon and sat in the shade of it, trying to figure out what he was going to do next.
“Think he’s got some kind of tourniquet working,” Ben said now. “Probably had to retie it here.”
“You must’ve tore a pretty big hole into him.”
“Not big enough,” Ben said. “You say six hundred yards up?”
“About,” Powell said. “Same thing. Trickle of blood, but more up there. Like the spigot opened up and then closed. Tourniquet makes sense.”
They passed the dead deer on the edge of the trail, a few jokes thrown around. In ten minutes they came upon another puddle of the serial’s blood, congealed now, with flies swarming the edges. Ben scanned the cliffs. Two of the MEU guys did, too, using their rifle scopes. This was it, Ben was sure of it. He remembered the steep cliffs, the way the limestone breaks folded together like pleats.
“You can’t see it from here,” Ben said, “but there’s a cave up there.”
“Up there?” Powell said.
“Nothing real big,” Ben said. “Bobcat den, shade for coyote in the afternoon.”
“You think he climbed up there, with one good arm?”
“I think he’d use his teeth if he had to, with us on his heels.”
—
BLOOD SMEARED AGAINST an ironwood tree. Snapped manzanita branch. A couple of faint footprints: Vans, eight and a half. They had him.
They were on foot now,
four of them—Powell and two MEUs, one named Davis and the other Rutter—hacking through brush and cactus clumps, ironwood branches and tangles of sagebrush. Their guns drawn, safeties off. The trail was faint, but it was there—a deer trail leading to the base of the cliffs.
When they reached the cliff, a thin white line threaded up the wall of the canyon. A bobcat trail, coyote maybe. There they found a third handprint, like a petroglyph against the rock.
“Jesus,” Rutter said. “Who is this guy?”
The limestone was soft. You could dig your fingers into it, carve the edge of your boot into the rock. But it could crumble underfoot, give way with the grip of your hand. Ben remembered this climb as he wedged his toe into a foothold, fifty feet above the canyon floor now, the way little landslides gave way underfoot, the way dust and rock fell from handholds and scoured your eyes. Davis was fifteen feet below him and Rutter ten below Davis, both of them staggered along the cliffside to keep out of the slush of sand and rock falling with each push up the wall.
The trail was steep, rock climbing the first seventy-five feet, but after that it leveled until it was like hiking a steep staircase. Still, when he looked back to see where Davis and Rutter were, the effect was dizzying—the land below felt tilted off-balance, the horizon out on the edge of the blue sky seemed to slide toward the ocean. Ben’s head pounded now, his heart thumped his injured eye. But his body felt strong. His lungs were conditioned from holding his breath. His arms and shoulders, muscled from body surfing, lifted him upward, even as Davis and Rutter fell behind.
The sheriff’s Bell came shuddering up the canyon, hovering below the lip of the ridge. An officer leaned out the open side door, one booted foot on the landing skid, his sniper rifle strapped across his chest. They were following them up the cliffside, ready to shoot the killer if Ben flushed him out.
Two hundred feet up, it walled out again, and Ben had to carve out toeholds, scratch away little crescents for finger pulls. If he lost a foothold here, it was a long, body-beating slide to the bottom. He was close, though; he could see the dark smudge in the limestone where the cave was carved into the rock. He found a lip to rest on, and watched the cave entrance, hoping light penetrated deeply enough to see inside. But the sun was already pushing west, and shadows fell across the opening. Blind. He’d have to go in blind.
The helicopter spun a circle above the canyon, its rotor wash spraying dust across the cliff wall.
“Get the chopper out of here,” Ben called into his walkie-talkie.
In the noise of the rotors, Ben could just make out Powell’s voice. Then the copter tilted its nose and spun high above the canyon, ready to dive down if necessary.
Ben edged along the wall toward the cave entrance.
“Wait for backup.” Powell’s voice scratched through the walkie-talkie.
He snapped the walkie-talkie off, not wanting the killer to hear it, and glanced down to see Davis and Rutter pulling themselves up the cliffside, still sixty feet or more below. Then he was on the threshold of the opening just to the left. His revolver drawn, he watched for movement. Nothing, an unnerving stillness—no birds, no buzzing insects. Nausea roiled his stomach, but he swallowed it down. He slid his back up against the wall and hoisted himself into the darkness of the cave.
Something lunged at him—a flash of movement, a slap of hands against his chest, a clenched wet grip on his neck. Ben stumbled backward, digging his heels into the dirt to keep from pitching over the edge of the cliffside. He ripped a hand from his throat and flung the thing off him—pointing the muzzle of his gun blindly into the darkness until his eyes adjusted and he saw him, the killer, cornered at the back wall of the cave, balancing on his haunches.
He was a shocking sight—shirtless and covered in his own blood, as small as a child but malformed. Crouched as it was, his body—all ribs and wiry muscles—looked like a coiled spring. The killer watched him, but his eyes seemed unfocused, as though he were staring out blindly. He spoke a gibberish, a ramble of inarticulate vowels and consonants.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Ben said, the gun shaking in his hand.
The killer’s eyes seemed to adjust then, locking on Ben. “You knew where to look.” His voice sounded almost pleased, an air of relief in it, Ben thought.
“Come with me, no bullshit,” Ben said, “and we’ll get you to a hospital.”
Maybe it was Ben’s beat-up head or the adrenaline still pumping from the attack, but the gun wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Then you’ll lock me up.”
“Yes,” Ben said.
The killer spoke gibberish again, turning his face away from Ben. There was something almost intimate about the voice, as though he were talking to another person inside of himself. “Throw away the key,” he said suddenly in English.
“I know what happened to you,” Ben said. “I saw the basement.”
“Everyone knows what happened to me,” he said, a sharpness in the voice now.
“Those people,” Ben said. “The ones you killed were innocent.”
The killer smiled disdainfully. “Innocent,” he said. “Innocent, innocent…” spinning his good hand in the air now, “innocent, innocent, innocent…” until the word broke down into meaningless sounds.
“They weren’t the ones that knew what was happening to you. They didn’t do anything to you.”
“Innocent, innocent, innocent…No one’s innocent.” He ran a bloodied hand through his hair. “I wanted the woman next door,” he said. He was panting with exhaustion now. “She saw me when he brought me home from the doctor.” He paused, his breath growing shallower. “But I couldn’t go back to that place.”
Ben remembered the elderly woman watering the fuchsias next door to the Norwalk house. “Those people never bothered us,” he remembered her saying.
“To punish her?” Ben said. Killing her would have made sense: a clear motive, revenge for letting it happen to him. But not the others. “The last girl was twenty. She didn’t do anything to deserve your punishment.”
“I needed them,” he said. He let out a long breath. “You know what it feels like? To take them?”
A rush of feeling overcame Ben; he remembered his fingers around Wakeland’s windpipe, the incredible adrenaline high he felt knowing he could kill the man.
“No,” Ben said.
In the days since, when he remembered the terror in Wakeland’s eyes, Ben had buzzed with the feeling, like the aftereffects of a powerful drug.
“You do,” the killer said. “You know what it is to take someone. To make them nothing.”
He shuffled forward.
“Stay where you are,” Ben said, the gun pointed straight at the killer’s chest, his finger hooked on the trigger. Ben was terrified of the feeling, terrified that some part of him understood this killer.
“You’re the one who shot me,” the killer said.
“Yes,” Ben said, “and I’ll do it again if you move another inch.”
“Wade,” a voice called just below the cave. “You up there?”
“You’re me then,” the killer said, sitting down in the dust.
He’d come up to finish the job—to arrest the killer, to find him dead, maybe. But what he really wanted was the satisfaction of blasting a final hole into him, that was true; that was why he’d driven up here this morning, that was why he’d climbed up this canyon wall. And he had maybe a few seconds to do it, to pull that trigger, before Davis was witness to it. He had been attacked; no one would question him.
“You’re my me,” the killer said. Then he leaned back against the cave wall and spoke to himself with the incoherent syllables, as though trying to calm himself.
No. Ben wasn’t this malformed thing, this murderer. He wasn’t.
“Wade?” The voice closer this time.
The killer looked toward the sound, watched the entrance, his eyes blinking slowly.
“You can walk out of here with me,” Ben said. “Or we can put another bullet into
you right now.”
“See,” the killer said, “you do know what it feels like, to take someone.” He let out a long breath, as though clearing the air from his body. “I can see it in your eyes.”
Then the killer bit into the bloodied shirt wrapped around his arm, unraveling the knot with his teeth and good hand. When he did, the blood pumped out of the hole, slicking his arm. Ben should have held him down, cuffed him, and retied the tourniquet.
“There was a boy,” the killer said, his voice growing quiet. “In the field.”
“What?”
A shuffle of feet kicked up dust at the entrance to the cave. “Wade,” Davis said, out of breath. “Got anything?”
“Stay there,” Ben said to Davis. “A boy?” he stepped toward the serial. “Did you kill him?”
The killer smiled and shook his head slowly, watching his blood run down his arm, puddling useless around his hip.
“Fight or flight,” he said.
“Did you kill him?” Ben said, kneeling in front of him now. He should have retied the tourniquet, but it was too late now. The killer’s breath was strained and smelled like congealed syrup—the sweet stink of coming death.
“Jesus,” Davis said, kneeling now at the opening of the cave, his gun drawn. “That’s him? That’s the guy?”
“Did you kill him?”
“There was a boy…” the killer said, his body slumped in the dirt, his voice fading now. He gazed up at Ben, but his eyes were unfocused and lost, veiled by what was closing between them. Ben leaned in to hear, trying to make out the words, but he heard only a withering of confused syllables that revealed nothing.
20
THREE DAYS AFTER THEY’D HELICOPTERED the serial’s body out of the Sinks, bled out from Ben’s gunshot wound, Hernandez called and asked if Ben wanted to ride along. They’d gotten the warrant, they’d searched Wakeland’s apartment, they’d found the box in the back of the closet, even in the chaos of press conferences following the capture of the killer. Ben was surprised. He thought he had more time—thought it would sit on the back burner with so many resources on the serial. He had spent the better part of the past two days speaking to the media, fielding questions about how he got the shot off that would eventually kill the serial. It’d only been in the dark hours of the morning he’d been able to think about Wakeland, about Lucero and Phillip.