by Marc Laidlaw
Give up on it, he told himself at last. You won’t find salvation in logic or arguments or even evidence. And if you have to take the fall for this one—well, hell. What’s a martyr for?
It was then he heard footsteps, and with them, startling him, Maggie’s voice.
The cop who had sympathized with “his” murder of Sal brought her to the cell, winked and walked away.
Hawk went quickly to the bars. He wanted to kiss her, but she wasn’t close enough. She watched him with a wry, amused expression. He decided not to appear overeager.
“How’d you get here?” he asked.
“Dusty and me came over. He had to call a cab, if you can believe that.”
“The final indignity.” Hawk grinned, though it felt out of place. Nothing was certain yet. He shouldn’t be so happy.
“Someone named Randy called him. Dusty said to tell you it was all taken care of.”
“Some of it, maybe.”
“We’re getting your bail together.”
Hawk nodded. His hands were on the bars. She stepped forward and wrapped her fingers around his knuckles.
“Hawk,” she said, “I’m so proud of you.”
He looked around in amazement. Where they in the same room together? “Proud?”
“You kept out of it for once. I know how hard that must have been for you, and I appreciate it.”
“Hard?” he said. “It wasn’t hard or easy. I was locked up!”
“If that’s what it takes.” She grinned. “This could be a turning point for you. For us, I mean.”
He smiled, shrugged. “Well . . . maybe you’re right.”
“I want you to know,” and here she lowered her voice, “I’ve got your alibi all ready.”
“What?”
“That little, you know, fight we had yesterday, on the phone?”
“Yeah?”
“You just tell me when we had that conversation, how long it went on. Jog my memory.”
He started to chastise her for lying, but he realized it was the only way she knew how to help. It was a genuine offer. She wanted to save him, so she would take his blame. She’d share the risk. How could he turn her down?
He said, “We fought all morning, didn’t we?”
“Yeah. It was bad, wasn’t it?”
“Between, say, nine and noon, on and off all day till the cops broke us up.”
“Ever since you got out of bed, and you could hardly sleep all night for thinking of me, you poor thing.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“It was bad, honey, wasn’t it?”
“That it was,” he agreed. “But we were right on the verge of patching it up when the cops broke us off.”
“That’s right, and it’s all fixed up now,” she said. “We’re way past that verge, aren’t we? Everything’s straight between us?”
“If you say so,” he said.
“As long as you don’t keep thinking you’re some kind of Peter Pan, you and your boys.”
Peter Pan? he thought. It was not a suitably serious or Biblical image. It shocked him into wondering how he really appeared to others.
“No,” he said.
“’Cause I’ll tell you something, honey. I ain’t no Wendy. I’m not that fond of boys. And this sure as hell ain’t Never-Never Land.”
‘No,” Hawk agreed. “That it ain’t. Isn’t. I mean, ain’t.”
26
Autumn rode the wind in from the sea. The sky was thick with gray this evening, allowing no rainbow sherbet sunset, no ultraviolet bars of cloud, no color at all, anywhere. The summer was dying without a struggle. The ice cream parlors and souvenir shops, the seascape galleries, toy stores and seashell boutiques looked depressed and withdrawn, reacting badly to the seasonal death of crowds. Many had closed early tonight, and looked as though they were shut down for the year.
Mike walked in the early chill, cocooned in coldness. He felt as if he might never emerge from his thoughts; he had to keep reminding himself of where he was, that everything was fine. The scars on his hands had healed—barbed-wire gouges on the left hand, teethmarks on the right. The blisters raised by the poison oak he’d fallen in after the explosion had long since scabbed over, sloughed away, leaving his skin unblemished. But shallow wounds were always the first to heal.
School started tomorrow, and he almost looked forward to it as a kind of coma into which he could dive and take shelter, barely functioning while the world went on without him. Whatever was going to change inside him, whatever healing lay in wait, it could run its course while he hibernated.
At the end of the boardwalk he came to a small playground, deserted at this hour, on this day. He sat in one of the swings, buried his heels in sand, and stared at the sea. His thoughts joined the last gulls shrieking overhead, circling over the floodlights like vicious moths. He took his sketchpad from his pack and flipped it open.
It was not a new pad, but every page was blank. He forced himself to look at it until he could no longer bear the sight of so much nothing. How long had it been since he’d drawn even a doodle? A month or more? It was torture to keep trying to force himself to draw—but not as torturous as his inability to come up with anything. Yet he had to keep on. He was an artist. It was how he’d defined himself for years. Without that, what did he have?
The problem was, he kept seeing those daunting, perfect, grubby sketches. Created so hastily, then lost forever in the blast. He was the only one alive who’d seen them; they haunted no one else. No one would ever liken them to his pictures—no one but Mike, that is. And his would always suffer in comparison. How could he ever do anything to rival them? How could he forget them and go on with his own work?
He couldn’t even remember what his own work was. Dragons and swordfighters? Did he expect those to sustain him for a lifetime? Yet that was all he’d ever drawn—unreal scenes, fantasies, wet dreams. It was all he was any good at, but it was ruined for him now.
Soft steps padded over the sand of the playground. Someone took the swing beside him, rattling its chains.
“Hi,” she said. “What’re you drawing?”
His heart jolted. That voice . . .
Looking over, he saw blond hair pushed up in a bandana; dark eyes, high cheekbones. She was wrapped in a light, many-colored sweater.
It was her. The girl from the van.
His anima.
So this is a flashback, he thought, experiencing a delirious flood of fright. He tasted a brassy tang in the back of his mouth, an onrush of panic bringing LSD memories and making them inseparable from reality. Dreams had broken out beyond their borderland. Now there was nothing to keep Edgar from reaching up out of the sand to drag him down. If his anima could come to him so easily, then nothing would stop Lupe from walking out of the surf, dripping kelp, with deathless eyes and drawn knife . . .
That particular wave of fear crested and broke, leaving Mike gasping as it subsided and slid silently away.
She remained.
Mike swallowed and closed his tablet. “Nothing,” he finally answered.
“Don’t I know you?” she asked.
“I think so,” he said, not daring to believe it.
“Are you a friend of Kurtis Tyre’s?”
He ducked his head. “Not exactly. A friend of a friend.”
“Oh, now I remember. In the van. Yeah!” She laughed. “I got talked into tagging along that night; my girlfriend knows Kurtis. It was pretty wild.”
“Yeah, it was,” he agreed, his tongue feeling thick for another reason now. Stupid, stupid! What should he say? That he had fallen in love and lost her in the same night? And that Edgar had convinced him she couldn’t possibly exist? Edgar, who was always looking beyond the obvious answers, and Mike, gullible enough to believe him.
“I guess you made out all right,” she said. “You were pretty unhinged there for a while.”
He nodded, avoiding further thought of what had followed that night. Instead he tried to remember her sitting c
lose to him in the van, touching him. She was close enough now that if he leaned over slightly, he could kiss her.
“My name’s Mike,” he said.
“I’m Anaïs.”
“You mean like Anaïs Nin?”
“You know about her?”
He nodded. “My mom’s always reading her diaries.”
“I never met anyone, you know, our age who’s heard of her. I was named after her. My dad’s a professor out at Irvine; he teaches Literature. We just moved here this summer from Torrance.”
“You live in Bohemia?” he said, hardly daring to believe it.
She nodded. “I guess we’ll be in school together, then.”
Something about the way she said “together” electrified him.
“You want to walk?” he asked.
Without answering, she got up from the swing and put out her hand. It was warm. He held it delicately, as if she might break, burst, fade back into his mind. But Edgar had been wrong about her. She was real enough to squeeze his fingers in return.
They walked along the boardwalk toward the Dumas Père restaurant. Remembering the last time he had eaten there, he glanced down.
They were crossing the tunnel where Craig Frost was murdered. Horror surged up in him for perhaps the millionth time. Fear was an aftershock; he was never so afraid in Lupe’s cave as he had been afterward, imagining over and over again how things might have come out. But for the first time, he refused to clutch at the fear. Released, it ebbed away, leaving only a dark stain on his soul like a high-water mark. It would always be there, faintly blood-tinted no matter how faded, until some greater tide surpassed it. But he could not imagine—and prayed he never saw—anything to rival it, no matter how long he lived.
He veered from the boardwalk and tugged Anaïs laughing over the grass, toward the lights of the street and the shut-down stores. He wanted to see her clearly in case she vanished again. He wanted to study the face he had thought was only in his mind, a figment of his desire, but which had turned out to be real after all.
He knew now, suddenly, what he wanted to do. Sketching wasn’t enough anymore; it didn’t encompass half of what he felt. He would take up painting. He would teach himself to capture all her colors, the bright cloth and pale hair, her flushed cheeks and pink lips, against the gray subdued sky of the last twilight of summer.
Table of Contents
PART ONE: THE ONE-WAY GANG
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART TWO: ESP
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
PART THREE: A WALK ON THE MOON WALL
20
21
22
23
24
25
26