by Chuck Logan
Ruby sipped her coffee and went on. “It’s something to do with their ears. There’s a mineral in a cat’s ear-magnetite? You ever hear of that?”
“Ah, no.” He opened Ida’s e-mail box.
“According to this theory, when the tectonic plates down in the earth grind together, the pressure on all that rock acts like a transmitter…”
Danny started to scroll down the menu of Ida Rain’s messages. Memory Lane. Going-away party for Howie Norell.
Bye, Howie. Internal memo about company cell phones.
United Way Appeal.
“…and the magnetite acts like a receiver for these low signals-like a dog whistle. It vibrates the magnetite in the cat’s ears, and they take off because they know…”
Danny’s eyes scanned past and then whipsawed back on the message tag; BruceNote, the metro editor; Good old Bruce, the prick. He clicked on it. It opened. Began to read: Ida,
We’re holding the Wanger’s story idea on Tom James you proposed. Wanger contacted Angland in jail, and Angland denied that James ever told him anything
about the money. So we have questions whether this Broker, who is just a temporary deputy up there, is pressing a legitimate investigation. I put the story back in your basket. Let’s talk-B
“…an event is coming.”
“Motherfucker!” he screamed. He shot to his feet, his chair and coffee cup flew in different directions.
Ruby went rigid, terrified, speechless. Coffee slicked her bare thighs and shorts. Her empty cup spun in hollow circles on the tile floor.
“Fucking no good bitch…” Danny seized the upturned chair and slammed it down. When it fell over again he hurled it through the screens, it smashed into a collection of brittle, empty terra-cotta planters on the deck.
Ruby was on her feet, backing away with her hands extended, palms out, but turned sideways, not defensive, more like pleading. “Pleeaase,” she whispered. And the nightmarish expression on her face bespoke a fault line all her own, a terror of men rammed deep within her. Seeing it brought Danny to his senses.
His smile came too suddenly, still quivering with anger, and that also terrified her, as if she’d seen it before.
“No, no,” he said in an embarrassed voice. “It’s…”
But she was going through the screen door. Her pretty face froze in profile. One flat wild eye splashed on features jagged as a piece of broken glass. Her bare feet made fast slapping sounds on the paving stones as she fled the property.
God. He touched his forehead, which felt like hot paper ready to combust. His eyes locked back on the monitor. But the screen saver had kicked on. Black panel. White dots zipping like blizzard snow pelting a windshield.
Like a bad night in Minnesota.
God. He felt like he was going to puke. Unsteady, he walked toward the bathroom. He even managed a sickly smile. His rubber knees duplicated the shock of a quake.
God. I could lose it all. That thought went down like a plunger, and he felt a wave of stomach acid froth in his throat.
He barely made the bathroom, knelt before the stool and projectile vomited. Immediately he felt relief. He rose to his feet, wiping away hot strings of spittle.
The shower curtain moved.
Someone in the shower.
A fast low shape shot past the cheap plastic curtain. Gray.
Sleek. Oriental black boots on the gray paws. Ruby’s cat.
Her missing fucking precursor cat.
Rage networked a million miles of nerves and assembled, red hot, in his hands. He ripped the toilet seat from the stool and in one powerful, flawless spin, turned and smashed the wooden oval down on the animal’s head.
He dropped the seat and kicked it and kicked it and…it died a kind of floppy miniature animal death somewhere between a small dog and an insect.
Squashed. Blood on its tiny white needle teeth.
Calmer now, with matted blood and fur on his bare feet, he walked back through the house to the kitchen, got a fresh cup and poured coffee.
Think. Clean up the bathroom. Hard to think. Fucking Broker again. Got to Ida somehow. And I would have bought her a new chin. He grimaced at his gory feet as he walked back into the bathroom. Bloody footprints on the tile.
Splashes on the wall. Jesus Christ, he giggled. Looks like a goddamn slaughterhouse in here.
Then-holy shit!
Almost as an afterthought, he saw his whole new life crumble. The folly. So obvious. She knew his name. Had THE BIG LAW/341
whispered it in the dark for months. Those pages in her desk…
He stooped, picked up the dripping cat-thing and said to the smashed head, “We’ll have to do something about that!”
Then, practical: Wash the floor, Danny; get rid of the damn cat. With a pail, some Comet and a rag he sopped up the tracks and the mess in the bathroom. He placed the toilet seat tentatively back on the stool.
Stupid damn thing to do. Got to be careful now. This is when you make mistakes.
He wrapped the dead cat in the ragged cleaning towel and carried it to his truck. A light rain hissed from the warm tangerine sky, strange low clouds, air thick as jam.
He consulted his county map, drove through the flooded strawberry fields and orchards until he found the road to the nearest beach. Good. The parking lot was deserted. With the leaky cat wrapped under his arm, he went up the plank walkway through the dunes and crossed the beach toward the Pacific Ocean. Rain threaded down. He could barely make out the silhouette of the power plant to the south in Monterey.
Slow gray rollers flopped over and foamed lacy surf across the beach. Coils of fluted gray kelp protruded from hum-mocks of damp sand. Looked like dead worms from Mars.
Fucking Jeremiah Johnson running through the trees, tomahawk out.
He’d zeroed in on Ida.
She knew his name. But she didn’t know she knew it.
The fear washed through him faster than his eyes could process or conscious thought could catch. And there, like his fear manifest-thirty feet away, where the waves tumbled in the first breaker line-a long supple shadow broke the surface, glided. Fins.
Had to be twelve, thirteen feet, the distance between the dorsal and the tail. Just-right there. Then silently gone into the wide endless Pacific.
He lobbed the cat overhand, a lazy layup. It splashed just past the first breakers. He waited to see if the shark would strike. If it did, it happened below the surface where he couldn’t see.
Like he would. Silent.
Some fishermen in hip waders with very long poles were walking up the beach. Short men with black hair. The tonal mystery of an Asian language cartwheeled in the sound of the waves. He watched them take huge lures with ferocious curved hooks from their tackle box and string them to their leader. Calmer, composed, Danny walked back to his car.
These events disrupted his timetable. He’d have to take risks. It infuriated him that Ida Rain had repaid his compassion with betrayal. The bitch could have had it all.
The best goddamn face money could buy.
Then he looked at his watch. Shit. He was supposed to meet the retired cop at that bar in Santa Cruz this afternoon.
59
The sky over Monterey Bay sagged in rainy streaks of aqua, orange and lime like a bleeding South American flag. He parked, got out and walked, nibbled the sweet California air. Passed a girl in cutoff jeans with beach bunny legs and safety pins in her face.
She looked at him funny. He glanced down, saw he had a wad of gooey cat-hair-stickum on his arm. Rubbed it off with spit.
The bar was wedged between an insurance office and a small strip mall. Across Ocean Street, the county building looked faintly colonial behind a screen of tall palms and pine trees. Sunday. Except for cop cars, the parking lot was almost empty.
In testimony to the new antismoking ordinance, four patrons stood outside the bar, furtively smoking like high school kids behind the field house. Inside, the Jury Box was black as a cave. A partition faced the door lik
e a blast shield to defeat the light of day. The interior was cramped and made smaller by dark paneling. A pool table was covered with garish red felt.
Custom street signs adorned the header over the bar. One said BULLSHIT PLACE the other spelled out ASSHOLE ALLEY.
In the corner a video game had a large green Creature from the Black Lagoon swimming on its side. The creature appeared very much at home in the darkness.
Danny ordered a Sharps nonalcoholic beer and sat at one of the small tables next to the pool table. He checked his watch. Early, 1:45; 3:45 in St. Paul. He eyed the pay phone on the wall. The urge was palpable, treading in the dark.
Like the creature in the corner, silently swimming to and fro.
He tried to imagine Kemper filling the space of this room.
A really big man, six nine. Kemper, according to the literat-ure, hated his mother and finally killed her. Danny did not hate his mother. He was glad she was gone because she was a bother. He’d always dreaded the long haul across the rickety ministrations of some nursing home. But he never hated her. Sometimes he wished she had been someone else.
Someone with better genes. Better looks. More goddamn money.
Danny eyed the phone again. Imagined hearing Ida’s unsuspecting voice and jacking off.
He had to get rid of her, of course. Not effortlessly, like Caren. This time it had to be done with authority. Some fear and pain to mark the arrival of Danny Storey. Trauma. Not unlike birth.
The sunlight oscillated on the other side of the partition, and a square medium-size man in his late fifties shouldered into the gloom. Danny squinted and held up his loose leaf binder. He rose and extended his hand.
“Harold?”
The man nodded curtly. Came forward. His handshake was forceful, casual retro macho. Danny winced a little and did not try to compete.
“Dan Storey?” he asked.
“That’s right,” said Danny. They walked to the bar. Wicks ordered a Scotch and water and asked for an extra glass of water. Danny dropped a five to cover it. When Wicks had his drink, they went back to the table.
“So Arnie says you’re interested in old Santa Cruz, back during the serial killer epidemic,” said Harold.
“I was curious if you had a theory why it happened here.”
Harold shrugged his shoulders. “Why not here? Those guys were like bad weather. You know it exists, but you don’t think it’ll come ashore where you’re having your picnic. But there it is.” He was philosophical. A Big Thing, but at the same time, in the long view, no big thing.
He took a sip of his drink and studied Danny. “It’s not like there are rules that govern these things.”
Danny cleared his throat. “Well, the FBI studies them, the killers.”
“Common sense,” said Harold.
“How’s that?” asked Danny, polite.
Harold gestured offhand. “Most of Kemper’s victims were coeds. He picked them up hitchhiking. Who keeps hitchhiking in Santa Cruz when somebody’s killing female hitch-hikers?”
“I hear you,” agreed Danny. He probed his cheek with his tongue. “The thing that got to me was, he used to sit in here with you guys.”
Harold nodded. “I remember one night he was at the bar with a bunch of deputies.” Shook his head, grinned. “They were trying to recruit him for their basketball team. He was this big guy. Meanwhile pieces of missing people were showing up in the ravines. Had a foot wash in on a wave with a surfer up toward Monterey.” Wicks sighed. “I went out and picked that one up.”
Danny leaned forward and studied the lines in Harold’s face. “What I mean is, you were sitting this close to him and you didn’t know.”
“Hell,” chuckled Harold. “I was just a copper, a patrol grunt.” He shifted forward, and his face creased with a rueful smile and his blue eyes twinkled with elfin mischief. “You know about what he did to his grandparents?”
Danny nodded.
“Naturally, the state of California in its infinite wisdom let him out of the nuthouse. He had to go in for regular sessions with a shrink. You know, a college-educated liberal fruit the state of California employs to look after its wayward children.
Well, Kemper goes in for his therapy and convinces the shrink that he’s a well-adjusted example of rehabilitation.
And you know what?”
Danny cocked forward. An eager audience.
Harold continued. “During this interview, Kemper’s got a victim’s severed head in the trunk of his car out in the parking lot.”
“Why?” asked Danny. Fascinated.
Harold shrugged. “He was taunting us. Part of the thrill, I guess.”
Danny laughed in Harold Wicks’s face.
They studied each other philosophically. Finally Harold pronounced, “You never fuckin’ know.”
“Ah,” Danny glanced at his wristwatch. “Could you excuse me, I gotta make a quick call.” He rose and picked up his empty beer bottle and eyed Harold’s almost dry glass. “You want another one?”
“If you are,” said Harold.
Danny took Harold’s glass and his bottle to the bar, ordered another round and got change. Then he walked to the side of the room, picked up the pay phone receiver and dropped in quarters, got long distance and asked for Ida’s number in Minnesota.
He watched smoke shift through the rays of balmy light splayed to the side of the partition while the phone rang on Sergeant Street in St. Paul.
“Hello?”
He gripped the receiver and experienced a pleasurable squirm of muscles low in his abdomen.
“Hello?” her voice was husky, busy, practical. Not concerned. Just inconvenienced.
Danny waited another beat and then hung the phone up. He went back to the bar, paid for the round of drinks and returned to the table.
“Do you think he wanted to be caught?” asked Danny.
Harold sipped his drink. “Guess so. Called up the city cops and confessed. At first the dispatcher didn’t take it seriously.
Their old drinking buddy Ed.”
“So he had a shred of conscience?”
Wicks shook his head dubiously. “Him? Nah, I think he was expecting to be famous or something.”
Danny felt no such urge. He just wanted to be left alone.
Right under their noses. He was cruising right under their fucking noses and they couldn’t see. Smooth as that shark off the beach.
Old Harold Wicks was on the job, just inches away, and he didn’t see anything. None of them did. Except Broker.
Still hanging on. Some hick resort owner playing cop.
Danny tore the wrapper from a Power Bar and wolfed it down. It started to rain again. He slowed down, hit his indicator and turned off on the Freedom Road exit. Waited at the light. Turned and picked up speed.
He had not planned on going back for a while. He tossed the wrapper out the window in an explosion of nerves, steadied, passed a slow station wagon in the right-hand lane.
There was the question of how to get it back here. He couldn’t just fly in a commercial jet with a big suitcase.
Money would show up as a suspicious blob on the X rays.
The kind they were trained to look for. Transporting the money was a problem. If he took a jet back to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International, he could rent a car. Drop in on Ida, zip up north, pick up the money and drive the rental back to San Jose and pick up his truck in the airport lot. Have to show ID to rent a car. Not good.
Be nice to visit Broker. Just up the road from where the 348 / CHUCK LOGAN
stuff was buried, but that would be too many coincidences.
He had to silence Ida Rain. Had to. Had to-
Had to be careful. She had that damn little gun in the dresser drawer right next to her bed, or in her purse. Knew how to shoot it.
A loopy shriek interrupted his thoughts. Behind him, the red flasher flooded across the wet pavement like a liquid sound wave. One turn of the siren. He checked the rearview.
Aw shit. The co
p car was right on his bumper. Danny pulled over. He pulled out his license certificate and watched the side view mirror. The county deputy came forward from his green and white cruiser. Cautious, hand on his pistol, approaching from the blind side.
“What’s the problem, officer?”
The cop accepted the license form and placed it on the clipboard he held on one arm. Pen in the other.
“When you turned off the highway onto Freedom you sailed a candy wrapper out the window.”
“Aw Christ,” Danny sagged. It was an expression of guilt.
But also relief.
The cop went back to his cruiser to write the ticket. About five minutes later he returned. “You can mail it in or stop by the courthouse and pay it. Otherwise you’ve got a court date if you want to go that route.” He handed the license back.
Danny studied the ticket as the cop got back into his car and pulled into traffic.
Give me a fucking break. He groaned-$240 for littering?
60
Like a joke, the next morning, his new California driver’s license came in the mail.
Danny sat at his kitchen table studying a AAA Road Atlas of the United States. Rain sluiced down the windows.
The most secure way to sneak back into the “danger zone,”
without leaving a trail, was drive the truck; burn cross-country, sleep in the cab, no motels, nothing on record.
There and back. He turned to the map.
The United States was shaped like a clumsy dinosaur with a pea head in Maine and Texas and Florida for feet. Road net for arteries. Big cities the vital organs. And it looked like Interstate 80, depending on the weather, was his best route, through Salt Lake, Cheyenne, Omaha, and into Des Moines, then shoot up into Minnesota.
Okay. He got up, meaning to flip on his new TV and check the Weather Channel when he saw his front gate shimmer in the rain. Swing open. Joe Travis wore sunglasses even in the gloom and rain, also a long brown oilcloth raincoat. He climbed back in the black Ford and pulled it closer to the house.