Among the Living

by Dan Vining

  “You should have took the cutoff, the Fourteen,” Angel said. They were in Jimmy’s Cadillac.

  Jimmy didn’t say anything.

  “We should have took my car or something,” Angel said.

  “I wanted to go this way. Same difference. I was thinking of Saugus, the speedway,” Jimmy said. “I’ll cut across there.” The top was down, but it wasn’t too loud to talk. Mary’s tape of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and Buffy Sainte-Marie was in the deck, down low, barely audible. Jimmy had been listening to it so much lately, it was full volume in his head, in his soul. Mary was back at his place. “Maybe I’ll come up here this weekend, get her out of the city.”

  “She like cars?” Angel said.

  “I doubt it. She doesn’t have one.”

  “I didn’t think you liked it, when you and me come up here.”

  “I liked it. What’s not to like? It’s loud and cheap and smoky and they run into each other.”

  “She’s going to be all right,” Angel said, because Mary was what they were really talking about, thinking about.

  They’d already driven past five or six road cuts. Out here, where the highway opened up a little and the subdivisions of blunt, ugly houses only came along every two or three miles, the cuts were immense, great sloped gashes. Geology classes from UCLA took field trips up here. Field geology. Jimmy had seen something on TV about it once. It was a way to see what was under the surface, what primal sedimentary or metamorphic or igneous superstructure was there all along under ten feet of topsoil. Faults and folds. Layers of history. Shifting tectonic plates, north and south coming into collision. Jimmy remembered the professor’s line. A road cut is like an autopsy on the earth.

  “I mean, there was no connection to her, on her own,” Angel said, when Jimmy didn’t say anything. “She was just there. Wrong place, wrong time.”

  These days Mary was in that state of mind that said, Why me? Why did I survive? Jimmy, selfishly, without any evidence to point to, in his own mind had come up with the idea that she was spared because he loved her, because they loved each other. Jimmy and Mary. There was your reason.

  They rolled on north, cut back east at Saugus, by Bouquet Junction into Placerita Canyon to the 14 and north again, past the great shoved-up plates of Vasquez Rocks off to the left, where so many sci-fi movies and Westerns had been filmed. For its other world liness, its sense of the edge, the frontier. A moon a bit past half side-lit the scene. Every time you saw Vasquez Rocks, especially by night, it looked weirder than your memory of it.

  There was the long, easy climb up the grade. The Caddy was purring, running steady. At eighty-five. The forced march up Benedict Canyon the other night must have done it some good, blown out the pipes. Or put the fear of God into it.

  “You should let me fix this up for you,” Angel said.

  “I like it the way it is,” Jimmy said.

  “It runs all right, but it looks sad. Does it even have a top?”

  “It has one. It’s ripped up.”

  Angel put his hand up to surf the wind. With the elevation, the air had gotten a little cooler, but not much.

  “Here we go,” Angel said, as they blew under the green rectangle of a sign. “Nine more miles.”

  “Nothing happens fast out here, does it?” Jimmy said.

  “They get rattlesnakes in their garages,” Angel said. “That can get fast on you.”

  Then they were cruising down one of the wide streets in a subdivision this side of Palmdale. It was three a.m. by then and real dead. The highway was a mile behind them, but if they’d pulled over and killed the engine they could have heard it, even over the sound of all the air conditioners, the steady river-sound of the cars, the interspersed basso profundo of the semis headed the back way toward the Central Valley, Bakersfield, and points beyond.

  It was house after house, shoulder to shoulder, all the same color, at least under the moonlight, big stucco boxes, blank yards. L.A. was forty miles south. Some commute.

  The motion-detector lights over each garage clicked on as they passed.

  “You better have the number right,” Jimmy said. “I mean, it’s not like he can say, ‘I’m in the white house with the little lawn boy out front.’ ”

  “Watch it, Brother.”

  “This is a long way from L.A.,” Jimmy said.

  “Lot of cops live up here.”

  It was something he’d said, the cop at the door at the murder house, a beat after he’d let Jimmy know Mary was alive, that she was all right, that she was in the den. “It passed over her,” he’d said. Angel had made a few calls, confirmed it. The detective was a Sailor. Passed over was their way of saying spared, though it meant something completely different. A good number of Sailors were cops, just like others were EMTs and emergency room doctors, people up all night anyway. They all took care of each other, like they took care of the new ones, stunned on sidewalks or beaches or beside overturned cars, in the first minutes of their new “lives.” A Sailor tended not to say no to another Sailor, unless one or the other was one of the bad ones. (Who took care of each other in their own ways.)

  And this was where he lived, the vet cop who wasn’t as tough as he meant to be, in one of these big, ugly houses, a house he had probably tried to talk his ex-wife into taking.

  “What is it? What’s the number?”

  “One one eight five two. Should be on the left side.”

  Jimmy looked up in the rearview mirror. The cop was standing in his unadorned front yard.

  “Should be three houses back,” Jimmy said.

  The cop’s name was Dill.

  This was Dill’s “day” off. He put a paper plate of Oreos and a gallon jug of whole milk and two glasses on the dining room table. He already had a glass of his own going. Cookies and milk. Sailors tended to eat exactly what they wanted, when they wanted. It could just as easily have been a bowl of raw Vidalia onions. Or ice cubes.

  “They have their rules,” Dill was saying. “They scrub the bodies. They shave the pubic hair. They always position the bodies faceup, head up. They close the eyes.”

  He’d put the Oreos right on top of The Case. He lifted the paper plate to pass it to Angel, and the face of a dead girl looked up at them, a close-up, outdoors. Full sunlight. Very white, white bordering blue. Jimmy and Angel recognized her from the news. She was the first of the dead. The first victim in what came to be called the Road Cut Killings, from two months ago, early in the summer.

  “It’s always high on the cut. Maximum light. Facing east usually.”

  “They,” Jimmy said. “You said they.”

  The cop nodded.

  “So the paper, the TV has it wrong,” Angel said. “Road Cut Killer.”

  “The papers and the TV have their own version of it,” Dill said. “It’s always that way. Personally, I treat reporters like they could just as well be the ones who did it. But that’s just me. Long and short, they know about one-tenth what we know.”

  “How many have there been?” Jimmy said. “How many dead?”

  “These three made thirteen.”

  Angel started to say something.

  “Eleven that were in the papers,” Dill finished.

  “Who were the others?” Jimmy asked.

  “A couple in Encino. They never made it out onto a cut. They were left in their house, in their bed.”

  The dining room table was covered with pictures, offic ial pictures, and official documents and newspaper clippings, but only a few of those. The pics were hard to take. They were full color. It was the nineties. They were in color. With the old black-and-white, you could trick yourself into thinking it was a still from a bad movie. What this looked like was meat on rock. Angel shuddered involuntarily. He grabbed the handle of the jug of milk, poured himself half a glass, like it was whisky in a cowboy bar.

  When Angel lifted the jug, there was Mary’s picture.

  Jimmy saw it.

  Dill saw him looking at it. “No reaso
n for her to be there,” the cop said.

  As it is with cops, the way they talk, there were a couple of ways you could take it.

  “Your girlfriend,” he added.

  Jimmy nodded. He wondered just how early the cop had figured out that Mary wasn’t his sister.

  He picked up the picture of her. It was one the cops had taken that night, before he got there, inside, Mary standing in front of a white paneled wall in the study with her hands down at her side. It made her look so helpless. Small.

  “How many of them are there?” Jimmy said, looking at her.

  “I say two. Some think three. One detective thinks it’s two men and a woman they share. But she’s a woman. The detective.”

  What the cop did next was hard to take, even with the skewed view of the world Jimmy and Angel had, worse in a way than looking at the photographs, because what he did was walk them through every case. Starting at the beginning.

  And it really meant walking, walking in behind the killers, a step behind them, seeing what they saw. It was almost like your feet stuck to the floor, made that bloody kissing noise. He started with victim one, at the beginning of the summer. He would pick up each photo and hold it through the telling. The setup for each story was the entry. The approach to the victim was Act Two. The killing was the climax, the body on the road cut the denouement. He would hold the picture and begin, each time, with a line like, “They parked on a street just below . . .” He might as well have started each line with a personal pronoun. And present tense.

  We come in from the garage . . .

  We walk down the hallway . . .

  Jimmy looked up at the ceiling. There was a galvanized metal plate over an electrical box dead center above their heads. Chandeliers get repossessed? Or divvied up in divorce proceedings? Or maybe the couple had never gotten around to buying one. Angel said Detective Dill had been divorced a year. He’d married a woman with a kid, a boy, a teenager, but it had only lasted two years. There weren’t any other details. There’s hardly ever any story to it when a cop gets divorced, if what a story is, is something with at least a little surprise in it. Dill hadn’t been a Sailor for a long time, four or five years, a lot less than Jimmy, an eternity less than Angel. Maybe what broke up the family was the truth, when he finally got around to telling it. Maybe at this selfsame table. Probably at this hour.

  When Jimmy looked at Dill again, he could see the very faintest edge of blue around his head and shoulders. Very weak. Maybe he was a good man, but he was a weak Sailor, putting in his hours but mostly just waiting for release. Some blue moon to sail away.

  “The French doors across the back of the house were never locked. They were probably open, with the heat. There was a shorted-out circuit breaker in the AC unit on the ground, mid-house. Either it had been out previously or they shorted it. There’s a possibility one or both of them came earlier in the day to prepare the way. No one was home for two hours midafternoon. There were exterior lights, blue, but they weren’t on. The lead put a hand, his right hand, high on the right-hand door of the double doors, and opened it, or opened it further. It opened out . . .”

  Suddenly Jimmy was back in the scene. The episodic tale of the summer of murders had come round to the leased white house at the end of the cul-de-sac. To him. Not that he hadn’t heard every word of the telling of the other killings, every detail, every footstep, every clicking drop of the blood onto every floor.

  “They wore gloves,” Dill said. “There were no prints left anywhere. And rubber-soled shoes. Converse.”

  Jimmy started filling in the details. He thought, Mary stirred on the couch in the study . . .

  “Like the other times, they killed together, two together,” Dill was saying. “The lead put his hand over the girl’s mouth, the girl in bed in the master bedroom, and the second then choked her with both hands. Smoothly, with a strong, steady grip, tighter and tighter, but not enough to break any bones. This was Michelle Gandy. She struggled, broke two toes on her right foot, either on the footboard of the bed or striking one of the two on either side of her.”

  Did Mary hear something? Did her eyes open?

  “They left her, for now,” Dill continued. “The master bedroom opened onto the long hallway. One started through the doorway first. They apparently hadn’t made any noise that had alerted the others in the house. They looked back.” Dill looked over his shoulder. “The French doors were wide open, letting in whatever sounds out in the night there were, possibly masking any of the sounds of violence.”

  Jimmy thought, Mary closed her eyes. It was nothing.

  “The man, David Fifthian, never woke up,” Dill said next. “He was alone in the first small bedroom off the hallway. On his stomach. He was killed the same way, though facedown. Feathers were found all the way into his lungs, from the comforter, from trying to pull in what air he could. Both of them handled his neck.” Dill made his two hands into an open circle. “One pair of hands on top of the other. He wore just a V-neck sweater. He had had sexual relations in the bed in the master bedroom and then left his partner there to come to this room. They wrapped his ankles with a leather belt from a pair of trousers on the floor near the door and used it as a strap to pull him off the bed and out into the hallway, once he was dead.”

  Stay asleep, Jimmy thought, as if he was standing over Mary.

  “The third, April . . .”

  Jimmy wanted to make him stop. What he wanted was to take Mary out of there, lift her off the couch, out of Dill’s narration, before one more thing happened. He wanted to cut her out of the story, let all this happen to strangers, with no connection to him.

  “. . . April Joules. She was awake. Reading. In the second small bedroom. She couldn’t have heard them. She was in a chair, beside a table with a gooseneck lamp, beside an open window.”

  Jimmy remembered something he should have remembered before. He interrupted, “Was his daughter there?”

  It was the only interruption. Dill shook his head. “Vancouver.”

  It made Jimmy realize how little he and Mary had said about the whole thing over the three days, how little he had asked or she had offered.

  “Because April Joules was awake, they stabbed her in the chest,” Dill finished. “There was a different blood pattern.”

  Jimmy looked across at Angel. He had his head bowed. His lips were moving, mumbling a prayer. Or a curse.

  “All of the bodies then were dragged into the living room for the desecration, and the body of at least one, probably the man, was dragged out the front door. The bodies of the women were likely packaged and carried out.”

  Did the wind blow the door shut? Once they’d left? Is that what woke her? Is that what brought Mary out into it, too late, or exactly late enough?

  When it was finished, they talked a little more, about each other. “How are you doing?” was a question Sailors asked each other frequently, and it meant more than to the rest of us. And then, in the empty foyer, behind the closed front door, they formed a circle and held hands, like a prayer circle, only they didn’t bow their heads but rather looked straight at each other, a scene someone from the outside world would never have understood.

  Jimmy dropped Angel off at home in Silver Lake. It was six in the morning by then. Some of Angel’s neighbors were breaking the day, loading tools into their trucks. (They couldn’t leave the trucks loaded on the streets all night.) They’d gotten used to seeing Jimmy in the old Cadillac, Angel’s friend. A couple of them waved. They were even used to them being out all night together. They probably thought they were just partying.

  Mary wasn’t in the house when Jimmy got back.

  The light was full then, bright and hot, coming in through the east-facing windows. He looked for her in every room. He looked in the closets. He looked under the bed, feeling foolish on top of his sense of panic. He tried to tell himself maybe she’d gone for a walk, gone to a friend’s.

  He circled the base of the house, calling her name.

&nbs
p; She was in the storage room beneath the kitchen. She was covered with dirt. There was no floor. She cowered in the corner, in a jail of rakes and hoes and shovels. In as much dark as she could find.

  “They came back after me,” she said before he could say anything.

  He got her out of the corner and held her. He said the words to calm her, to dismiss it, the way men do to women.

  She pulled away from him.

  “They were here,” she said. “They came an hour after you left. There were two of them. They wore black. Black pants and coats and black sneakers . . .”

  FOURTEEN

  It became Jimmy’s first case.

  He got up that morning and moved Mary to another house, a friend of Angel’s down so deep into Latino territory that it’d be next to impossible for anybody who wasn’t Latino to get to her.

  Now it was noon, and he was headed west on Sunset, west all the way out to Temescal Canyon.

  He had “looked into things” for people before, tracked down a lost soul here or there for Angel or for some other Sailor or friend. Or friend of a friend. He had tailed people, to make sure they were all right. To make sure they had made it home, made it back to a safe place. He had tucked in his share of desperate, hurting people, sat up all night with people who needed someone there to keep them from falling apart. Others, he had “looked into” to see just how bad they were. To confirm that here was someone for an innocent, a friend, a Sailor to steer clear of.

  But this was something new. Something closer, with higher stakes.

  The first of the Road Cut Killings had come in a cabin out at the end of a tight, twisting road, a road that all but turned into a footpath as it climbed higher into the hills. The farther you went, the narrower it got, like a capillary. Temescal, Benedict. Maybe there was a canyon connection. It was a one-bedroom cabin. She was young. An actress. Or would-be. Like everybody else, she’d been in a few commercials, was up for a pilot or a continuing role on an episodic. Or at least that’s what she’d probably told the folks back home. Maybe there was a Hollywood connection, but that was too easy. Everyone was connected to Hollywood. Jimmy had spent nearly the entirety of his existence here. From time to time he had to remind himself that dry cleaners and hot dog stands and churches in other parts of the country didn’t brag on the famous people they served. Some places weren’t about the show. Some people just watched movies and television shows.