* * *
After negotiating a maze of yards, block walls, wrought iron fences, cul-de-sacs, and service alleys, never sure if he had lost his pursuers or if they were, in fact, at his heels, Spencer found the street on which he had parked the Explorer. He ran to it and jerked on the door.
Locked, of course.
He fumbled in his pockets for the keys. Couldn’t find them. He hoped to God he hadn’t lost them along the way.
Rocky was watching him through the driver’s window. Apparently he found Spencer’s frantic search amusing. He was grinning.
Spencer glanced back along the rain-swept street. Deserted.
One more pocket. Yes. He pressed the deactivating button on the key chain. The security system issued an electronic bleat, the locks popped open, and he clambered into the truck.
As he tried to start the engine, the keys slipped through his wet fingers and fell to the floor.
“Damn!”
Reacting to his master’s fear, no longer amused, Rocky huddled timidly in the corner formed by the passenger seat and the door. He made a thin, interrogatory sound of concern.
Though Spencer’s hands tingled from the rubber pellets that had stung them, they were no longer numb. Yet he fumbled after the keys for what seemed an age.
Maybe it was best to lie on the seats, out of sight, and keep Rocky below window level. Wait for the cops to come…and go. If they arrived just as he was pulling away from the curb, they would suspect he was the one who had been in Valerie’s house, and they would stop him one way or another.
On the other hand, he had stumbled into a major operation with a lot of manpower. They weren’t going to give up easily. While he was hiding in the truck, they might cordon off the area and initiate a house-to-house search. They would also inspect parked cars as best they could, peering in windows; he would be pinned by a flashlight beam, trapped in his own vehicle.
The engine started with a roar.
He popped the hand brake, shifted gears, and pulled away from the curb, switching on windshield wipers and headlights as he went. He had parked near the corner, so he hung a U-turn.
He glanced at the rearview mirror, the side mirror. No armed men in black uniforms.
A couple of cars sped through the intersection, heading south on the other avenue. Plumes of spray fanned behind them.
Without even pausing at the stop sign, Spencer turned right and entered the southbound flow of traffic, away from Valerie’s neighborhood. He resisted the urge to tramp the accelerator into the floorboards. He couldn’t risk being stopped for speeding.
“What the hell?” he asked shakily.
The dog replied with a soft whine.
“What’s she done, why’re they after her?”
Water trickled down his brow into his eyes. He was soaked. He shook his head, and a spray of cold water flew from his hair, spattering the dashboard, the upholstery, and the dog.
Rocky flinched.
Spencer turned up the heater.
He drove five blocks and made two changes of direction before he began to feel safe.
“Who is she? What the hell has she done?”
Rocky had adopted his master’s change of mood. He no longer huddled in the corner. Having resumed his vigilant posture in the center of his seat, he was wary but not fearful. He divided his attention between the storm-drenched city ahead and Spencer, favoring the former with guarded anticipation and the latter with a cocked-head expression of puzzlement.
“Jesus, what was I doing there anyway?” Spencer wondered aloud.
Though bathed in hot air from the dashboard vents, he continued to shiver. Part of his chill had nothing to do with being rain-soaked, and no quantity of heat could dispel it.
“Didn’t belong there, shouldn’t have gone. Do you have a clue what I was doing in that place, pal? Hmmmm? Because I sure as hell don’t. That was stupid.”
He reduced speed to negotiate a flooded intersection, where an armada of trash was adrift on the dirty water.
His face felt hot. He glanced at Rocky.
He had just lied to the dog.
Long ago he had sworn never to lie to himself. He kept that oath only somewhat more faithfully than the average drunkard kept his New Year’s Eve resolution never to allow demon rum to touch his lips again. In fact, he probably indulged in less self-delusion and self-deception than most people did, but he could not claim, with a straight face, that he invariably told himself the truth. Or even that he invariably wanted to hear it. What it came down to was that he tried always to be truthful with himself, but he often accepted a half-truth and a wink instead of the real thing — and he could live comfortably with whatever omission the wink implied.
But he never lied to the dog.
Never.
Theirs was the only entirely honest relationship that Spencer had ever known; therefore, it was special to him. No. More than merely special. Sacred.
Rocky, with his hugely expressive eyes and guileless heart, with his body language and his soul-revealing tail, was incapable of deceit. If he’d been able to talk, he would have been perfectly ingenuous because he was a perfect innocent. Lying to the dog was worse than lying to a small child. Hell, he wouldn’t have felt as bad if he had lied to God, because God unquestionably expected less of him than did poor Rocky.
Never lie to the dog.
“Okay,” he said, braking for a red traffic light, “so I know why I went to her house. I know what I was looking for.”
Rocky regarded him with interest.
“You want me to say it, huh?”
The dog waited.
“That’s important to you, is it — for me to say it?”
The dog chuffed, licked his chops, cocked his head.
“All right. I went to her house because—”
The dog stared.
“—because she’s a very nice-looking woman.”
The rain drummed. The windshield wipers thumped.
“Okay, she’s pretty but she’s not gorgeous. It isn’t her looks. There’s just…something about her. She’s special.”
The idling engine rumbled.
Spencer sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll be straight this time. Right to the heart of it, huh? No more dancing around the edges. I went to her house because—”
Rocky stared.
“—because I wanted to find a life.”
The dog looked away from him, toward the street ahead, evidently satisfied with that final explanation.
Spencer thought about what he had revealed to himself by being honest with Rocky. I wanted to find a life.
He didn’t know whether to laugh at himself or weep. In the end, he did neither. He just moved on, which was what he’d been doing for at least the past sixteen years.
The traffic light turned green.
With Rocky looking ahead, only ahead, Spencer drove home through the streaming night, through the loneliness of the vast city, under a strangely mottled sky that was as yellow as a rancid egg yolk, as gray as crematorium ashes, and fearfully black along one far horizon.
TWO
At nine o’clock, after the fiasco in Santa Monica, eastbound on the freeway, returning to his hotel in Westwood, Roy Miro noticed a Cadillac stopped on the shoulder of the highway. Serpents of red light from its emergency flashers wriggled across his rain-streaked windshield. The rear tire on the driver’s side was flat.
A woman sat behind the steering wheel, evidently waiting for help. She appeared to be the only person in the car.
The thought of a woman alone in such circumstances, in any part of greater Los Angeles, worried Roy. These days, the City of Angels wasn’t the easygoing place it had once been — and the hope of actually finding anyone living even an approximation of an angelic existence was slim indeed. Devils, yes: Those were relatively easy to locate.
He stopped on the shoulder ahead of the Cadillac.
The downpour was heavier than it had been earlier. A wind had sailed in from the ocean. Silv
ery sheets of rain, billowing like the transparent canvases of a ghost ship, flapped through the darkness.
He plucked his floppy-brimmed vinyl hat off the passenger seat and squashed it down on his head. As always in bad weather, he was wearing a raincoat and galoshes. In spite of his precautionary dress, he was going to get soaked, but he couldn’t in good conscience drive on as if he’d never seen the stranded motorist.
As Roy walked back to the Cadillac, the passing traffic cast an all but continuous spray of filthy water across his legs, pasting his pants to his skin. Well, the suit needed to be dry-cleaned anyway.
When he reached the car, the woman did not put down her window. Staring warily at him through the glass, she reflexively checked the door locks to be sure they were engaged.
He wasn’t offended by her suspicion. She was merely wise to the ways of the city and understandably skeptical of his intentions.
He raised his voice to be heard through the closed window: “You need some help?”
She held up a cellular phone. “Called a service station. They said they’ll send somebody.”
Roy glanced toward the oncoming traffic in the eastbound lanes. “How long have they kept you waiting?”
After a hesitation, she said exasperatedly, “Forever.”
“I’ll change the tire. You don’t have to get out or give me your keys. This car — I’ve driven one like it. There’s a trunk-release knob. Just pop it, so I can get the jack and the spare.”
“You could get hurt,” she said.
The narrow shoulder offered little safety margin, and the fast-moving traffic was unnervingly close. “I’ve got flares,” he said.
Turning away before she could object, Roy hurried to his own car and retrieved all six flares from the roadside-emergency kit in the trunk. He strung them out along the freeway for fifty yards behind the Cadillac, closing off most of the nearest traffic lane.
If a drunk driver barreled out of the night, of course, no precautions would be sufficient. And these days it seemed that sober motorists were outnumbered by those who were high on booze or drugs.
It was an age plagued by social irresponsibility — which was why Roy tried to be a good Samaritan whenever an opportunity arose. If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world it would be: He really believed in that.
The woman had released the trunk lock. The lid was ajar.
Roy Miro was happier than he had been all day. Battered by wind and rain, splashed by the passing traffic, he labored with a smile. The more hardship involved, the more rewarding the good deed. As he struggled with a tight lug nut, the wrench slipped and he skinned one knuckle; instead of cursing, he began to whistle while he worked.
When the job was done, the woman lowered the window two inches, so he didn’t have to shout. “You’re all set,” he said.
Sheepishly, she began to apologize for having been so wary of him, but he interrupted to assure her that he understood.
She reminded Roy of his mother, which made him feel even better about helping her. She was attractive, in her early fifties, perhaps twenty years older than Roy, with auburn hair and blue eyes. His mother had been a brunette with hazel eyes, but this woman and his mother had in common an aura of gentleness and refinement.
“This is my husband’s business card,” she said, passing it through the gap in the window. “He’s an accountant. If you need any advice along those lines, no charge.”
“I haven’t done all that much,” Roy said, accepting the card.
“These days, running into someone like you, it’s a miracle. I’d have called Sam instead of that damn service station, but he’s working late at a client’s. Seems we work around the clock these days.”
“This recession,” Roy sympathized.
“Isn’t it ever going to end?” she wondered, rummaging in her purse for something more.
He cupped the business card in his hand to protect it from the rain, turning it so the red glow of the nearest flare illuminated the print. The husband had an office in Century City, where rents were high; no wonder the poor guy was working late to remain afloat.
“And here’s my card,” the woman said, extracting it from her purse and passing it to him.
Penelope Bettonfield. Interior Designer. 213-555-6868.
She said, “I work out of my home. Used to have an office, but this dreadful recession…” She sighed and smiled up at him through the partly open window. “Anyway, if I can ever be of help…”
He fished one of his own cards from his wallet and passed it in to her. She thanked him again, closed her window, and drove away.
Roy walked back along the highway, clearing the flares off the pavement so they would not continue to obstruct traffic.
In his car once more, heading for his hotel in Westwood, he was exhilarated to have lit his one little candle for the day. Sometimes he wondered if there was any hope for modern society, if it was going to spiral down into a hell of hatred and crime and greed — but then he encountered someone like Penelope Bettonfield, with her sweet smile and her aura of gentleness and refinement, and he found it possible to be hopeful again. She was a caring person who would repay his kindness to her by being kind to someone else.
In spite of Mrs. Bettonfield, Roy’s fine mood didn’t last. By the time he left the freeway for Wilshire Boulevard and drove into Westwood, a sadness had crept over him.
He saw signs of social devolution everywhere. Spray-painted graffiti defaced the retaining walls of the freeway exit ramp and obscured the directions on a couple of traffic signs, in an area of the city previously spared such dreary vandalism. A homeless man, pushing a shopping cart full of pathetic possessions, trudged through the rain, his face expressionless, as if he were a zombie shuffling along the aisles of a Kmart in Hell.
At a stoplight, in the lane beside Roy, a car full of fierce-looking young men — skinheads, each with one glittering earring — glared at him malevolently, perhaps trying to decide if he looked like a Jew. They mouthed obscenities with care, to be sure he could read their lips.
He passed a movie theater where the films were all swill of one kind or another. Extravaganzas of violence. Seamy tales of raw sex. Films from big studios, with famous stars, but swill nonetheless.
Gradually, his impression of his encounter with Mrs. Bettonfield changed. He remembered what she’d said about the recession, about the long hours that she and her husband were working, about the poor economy that had forced her to close her design office and run her faltering business from her home. She was such a nice lady. He was saddened to think that she had financial worries. Like all of them, she was a victim of the system, trapped in a society that was awash in drugs and guns but that was bereft of compassion and commitment to high ideals. She deserved better.
By the time he reached his hotel, the Westwood Marquis, Roy was in no mood to go to his room, order a late dinner from room service, and turn in for the night — which was what he’d been planning to do. He drove past the place, kept going to Sunset Boulevard, turned left, and just cruised in circles for a while.
Eventually he parked at the curb two blocks from UCLA, but he didn’t switch off the engine. He clambered across the gearshift into the passenger seat, where the steering wheel would not interfere with his work.
His cellular phone was fully charged. He unplugged it from the cigarette lighter.
From the backseat, he retrieved an attaché case. He opened it on his lap, revealing a compact computer with a built-in modem. He plugged it into the cigarette lighter and switched it on. The display screen lit. The basic menu appeared, from which he made a selection.
He married the cellular phone to the modem, and then called the direct-access number that would link his terminal with the dual Cray supercomputers in the home office. In seconds, the connection was made, and the familiar security litany began with three words that appeared on his screen: WHO GOES THERE?
He typed his name: ROY MIRO.
YOUR IDENTIFICATIO
N NUMBER?
Roy provided it.
YOUR PERSONAL CODE PHRASE?
POOH, he typed, which he had chosen as his code because it was the name of his favorite fictional character of all time, the honey-seeking and unfailingly good-natured bear.
RIGHT THUMBPRINT PLEASE.
A two-inch-square white box appeared in the upper-right quadrant of the blue screen. He pressed his thumb in the indicated space and waited while sensors in the monitor modeled the whorls in his skin by directing microbursts of intense light at them and then contrasting the comparative shadowiness of the troughs to the marginally more reflective ridges. After a minute, a soft beep indicated that the scanning was completed. When he lifted his thumb, a detailed black-line image of his print filled the center of the white box. After an additional thirty seconds, the print vanished from the screen; it had been digitized, transmitted by phone to the home-office computer, electronically compared to his print on file, and approved.
Roy had access to considerably more sophisticated technology than the average hacker with a few thousand dollars and the address of the nearest Computer City store. Neither the electronics in his attaché case nor the software that had been installed in the machine could be purchased by the general public.
A message appeared on the display: ACCESS TO MAMA IS GRANTED.
Mama was the name of the home-office computer. Three thousand miles away on the East Coast, all her programs were now available for Roy’s use, through his cellular phone. A long menu appeared on the screen before him. He scrolled through, found a program titled LOCATE, and selected it.
He typed in a telephone number and requested the street address at which it was located.
While he waited for Mama to access phone company records and trace the listing, Roy studied the storm-lashed street. At that moment, no pedestrians or moving cars were in sight. Some houses were dark, and the lights of the others were dimmed by the seemingly eternal torrents of rain. He could almost believe that a strange, silent apocalypse had transpired, eliminating all human life on earth while leaving the works of civilization untouched.
Dark Rivers of the Heart Page 4