by Mark Reps
Zeb felt a rush of relief when he eyed Jake’s beat-up pickup parked with the keys in the ignition. But his spirits dampened when Jake didn’t answer his knock.
“Jake? You in there?”
Through the mesh screen, Zeb’s flashlight scattered beams into the living room. Nothing looked out of place but he found the circumstances odd enough to warrant letting himself in.
“Jake? It’s Zeb Hanks. You asleep in there? Don’t mean to scare you if you are.”
Zeb made a quick scan of the room. No Jake Dablo to be seen. Nothing out of the ordinary, save the fact that maybe the trailer looked like it had recently been straightened up. Zeb found that unusual, but hardly a felony. Jake Dablo was fifty-five years old. He didn’t need a baby sitter or a mother. Zeb continued his examination of the trailer.
On the wall over a small desk were letters of commendation and awards Jake had received over the years. Zeb eyed the coveted Arizona County Sheriff of the Year plaque and remembered how moved Jake was to be honored by his fellow lawmen. Next to the awards was a series of photos from happier times, pictures of Jake, his ex-wife, his daughter and his granddaughter. Days gone by, thought Zeb, days when people wore smiles more easily than they do today. On the desk was a photo that made Zeb’s head spin in a double take. He looked closely at a series of pictures from his and Jenny’s senior year, most of them from the senior prom. The largest photo was of one of three steadfast friends, Jenny, Maya and Zeb. Zeb shook his head. He looked ridiculously silly in long, curly hair and a skinny little mustache. Jenny and Maya both radiated the innocence and beauty that rides high on the faces of carefree youth. If he could only go back to that day knowing what he knew now. Though impossible, it didn’t stop him from wishing it so.
Zeb exited the trailer and headed home. His fatigue was rapidly turning to exhaustion. He allowed himself to believe that Jake was fine to overrule a nagging fear that he might not be.
Plopping his head on his pillow, he considered the chance that the events surrounding October eighteenth were making him a bit paranoid. Giving himself a goodnight lecture on the absolute need for logic in a lawman’s mind, he drifted off into a well-deserved and desperately needed sleep. But his slumber was short-lived when an all too real nightmare shocked him from his sleep.
Gasping and swallowing air under laborious breath, Zeb bolted upright in bed. A thick layer of sweat covered his head, dripping into his eyes. The dampness made his head feel clammy even though his face burned like fire. His pajamas were drenched and clung to his heaving chest. As Zeb struggled to catch his breath, his nightmare vividly replayed itself. Recounting the ghoulish nightmare, the sheriff wiped his forehead with a dampened bed sheet.
The macabre vision had a most peculiar setting, his imagined future wedding night. Zeb’s bride, a stunningly beautiful Doreen Nightingale, her back turned to him, laughed as she began to remove her wedding dress for a night of impending nuptial bliss. The chemical reaction in his dream body as he watched Doreen undress bordered on a previously unrealized euphoria.
“Shave those rough whiskers for me, would you, pumpkin?” she asked as Zeb floated into the dream bathroom.
“I’ll be right back, honey. My face will be as smooth as a baby’s bottom.”
Lathering his face with a cool, minty, shaving gel, his body shivered with anticipation. His warm hand, soft from lather, rubbed against a face that, in the mirror, beheld the happiest man wandering through dreamland. Each stroke of the straight razor gently removed nubbins of whiskers. His dream face was silky. Suddenly, his state of ecstasy was shattered by a blood-curdling scream. The razor slipped in his hand, slicing his face near the corner of his eye. Large drops of bright, red blood drained down his cheek into the sink where it speckled the white shaving gel. But the only pain he felt was the intense fear stinging every fiber of his being as Doreen cried out. His body tensed with every ounce of its strength as he attempted to move. But his effort was worse than futile. He was frozen, unable to act. Not a single muscle in his body responded to his brain’s command to move. Her terrified screaming, ringing off the tiled bathroom walls, ceased as it melded into a guttural, muffled utterance.
He ordered his feet to march, but they reacted as though some unyielding magnetic force had immobilized them. His mind screamed her name, but no sound fell upon his ears. Gasping for air, he finally broke free from the gripping paralysis. He charged the bathroom door with the power of a hundred men, only to be soundly repelled. He heaved his shoulder against it a dozen times. Finally, with Herculean effort, he broke the door loose from its hinges. Once again, he found himself unable to move. This time he was frozen by the sight of Doreen’s body. Lying on their wedding bed, naked, Doreen was freshly gutted from her navel to her neck. His eyes took in a dizzying display of exposed internal body organs covered with warm, sticky blood. But it was the sight of Doreen’s still beating heart, lying on her breast, that buckled his knees out from beneath him. Kneeling over the body, his dreaming became suddenly lucid as his mind flashed between Doreen and the image of Amanda Song Bird’s sacrificial altar in Antelope Flats.
Zeb shuddered as he pushed the nightmare from his head. Drenched in sweat and trembling with anxiety, he stumbled out of bed, groping his way to the bathroom sink. Splashing cold water on his hot face did little to calm him. He ran his fingers through his sweat-dampened hair, exhaled heavily and gave himself a long, hard stare in the mirror. Cautiously touching his face to assure himself of his own existence, he switched on the small light attached to the side of the mirror but quickly turned it off, not wanting to see too deeply into his own reflection.
Alert and alive but caught in a netherworld state of mind, he found his way back into his bedroom. Pulling open the top bureau drawer, he rifled through his socks and underwear in a vain search for cigarettes. His mind argued strongly that he had hidden some there months earlier when he was in the midst of cheating on the quitting process. As he became calmer, he remembered that he actually discarded the old coffin nails.
Still restless from his dream, Zeb walked barefoot through the darkened house to the living room. His little toe brushing hard against the leg of a chair returned his senses to near normal. In the silent darkness, he replayed the evil and frightening nightmare over and over. Detail after detail streamed through his consciousness, imprinting their latent images into his memory. Doreen’s dress, pure white, her shoes, satin purple, the blood on his face in the mirror, orange and red, her heart, paling as it lay on her dying body, its beat rhythmically synchronous to his own inhalations.
His mesmerized state of mind was abruptly shifted by the raspy growl of a car’s worn muffler. Zeb instinctively looked through the street-facing window. A light fog rested close to the street, a sign of rare, low-hanging moisture in the late desert evening. Edging back the curtains, he squinted out at the street, eyeing an old car limping down the road. One of the tail lights, which identified the car as a Ford, was broken. From the way the rear end hugged closer to the curb than the front, Zeb assumed it had a bent frame. He looked closer at the unfamiliar red car as it turned a corner under a streetlight. He tried to read the license plate, but the car was too far away. His mind, still awash with the lingering effects of the dream, flashed to something Jake told him on his first day of work many years earlier.
“Once you put on this badge, you’ve got yourself a twenty-four hour a day job. A policeman may sleep, but his mind never rests. Because of your dedication to the job of citizen safety, there will be times when you are the only hope for justice.”
The racing rhythm that had overtaken Zeb’s heart slowed to a more normal pace as he continued staring out the living room window. He blinked a few times and shook his head, hoping to shake the bad dream loose and push it a little further away. Closing the curtain to ensure total darkness, Zeb headed to the refrigerator and poured himself a tall glass of ice-cold chocolate milk. He pulled a chair to the kitchen table and recounted the gory details of his dream one more time like
it was some sort of crime he should solve, not merely a series of fleeting images he had no control over.
Wandering back to his bed, Zeb lay down on his back. He stared mindlessly at an intricately woven spider web in a corner where the wall met the ceiling. Slowly, the angst associated with the images of his nightmare oozed further into the recesses of his memory.
At six a.m. when the clock radio on the stand beside his bed began to sing, Zeb’s eyes opened to see the spider’s web had nabbed an unwary night critter. The local country and western station greeted him with a familiar refrain by Buck Owens, one of Zeb’s favorites.
“I’ve got a tiger by the tail it’s plain to see,
I won’t be much when you get through with me.
I’m a losin’ weight and a turnin’ mighty pale
and it looks like I’ve got a tiger by the tail.”
9
With one hand gripped tightly on the steering wheel, the killer took the corner a little too fast. The Coleman cooler slid across the leather seat, stopping when it jammed against the gearshift. The top popped open and dense dry ice fumes drifted upward. He inhaled deeply, carrying the aroma through his sinuses and deeply into his lungs. Wind sucking through the open window blew the thick air aside, revealing two small freezer bags. Each was filled with a single brownish, fist-sized object. He reached into the cooler and smiled as he fondled the frozen packages.
Driving down the dimly lit street, the killer eyed the big Dodge truck parked in front of the sheriff’s house. He tapped his brakes lightly and slowed to a crawl as he checked to see if the lawman was awake. He knew that the sheriff’s routine would be his undoing. It rarely varied. The lawman was always up early and at the office no later than seven-thirty. He knew the sheriff did some business and then took a break to visit that dolled up whore who ran the Town Talk. He made city rounds, visited the bitch again at the Town Talk and spent the afternoon back at the office or out making rounds. Most days he worked a little late. The sheriff was so mundane that it required little or no thought to outline his every move. The killer laughed at the one-dimensional nature of the sheriff. Such a simpleton would never catch him. This little cat and mouse game was like a duel, one that would ultimately leave the sheriff dead on the field of honor.
Tonight the killer was calm, collected and cocky. He considered upping the ante. Maybe it was the right time to stick another bee under the sheriff’s big ten-gallon bonnet. Maybe tonight he would add to his collection.
He turned again and headed toward the county jail. A couple of young girls drove by and waved, laughing. Were they laughing at him? Angry, he turned around and followed them as they headed north on the highway toward his turf, the lonesome and empty desert. He followed their taillights until they pulled into a ranch house. The loud music told him a party was going on. He pulled off the road, turned off his lights and sat, listening and watching. It was easy. Oh, so easy. His body tingled with excitement as he fantasized new victims. No one would ever catch him. His father’s lessons had been too well learned to fall prey to mere mortals.
10
Pounding jets of scalding water beat down on Zeb’s neck and back. He focused on the day that lay ahead as the lingering odor from the night’s sweat-filled dream disappeared down the drain.
Stepping out of the shower and into a robe, he rubbed his head vigorously with a towel and checked on the time. It was six-thirteen, too early to call Jake. He wiped the fog from the bathroom mirror and began to lather his face. The sound of the furnace kicking on grabbed his ear. The cool morning temperatures of mid-fall signaled the possibility of an early arriving winter. The forced warm air escaping the bathroom duct struck the cool gel on his face, creating small air bubbles in the lather.
Lifting the razor to his face stirred the fading ghost of the previous night’s dream. Zeb looked into the sink basin at the fallen drips of white lather, half expecting to see blood. With a second glance into the mirror he gave himself a scolding pep talk.
“Shake it off. It doesn’t mean a thing. It was just a dream. Get a grip, bud. It’s going to be a busy day. You’re going to have to be sharp.”
Most of the situations he would be dealing with today would be completely out of his control. For starters, he would be working on the enigmatic concept of Apache time. He found himself annoyed by the very notion of it. His father had mentioned more than once that many Indians seemingly glommed onto this unmeasured reference to reality as a convenient excuse to be lazy and shiftless. Maybe his old man was right about that. Zeb was worldly enough to know that disliking an individual Indian was a completely different story than painting the entire Apache Nation with the same brush.
Wiping the last dabs of shaving cream from his face, he considered what customs and rituals regarding the young girl’s body would have to be followed in accordance with Apache tradition. Song Bird had probably contacted Geronimo Star in the Night to handle the spiritual and religious matters. Zeb reminded himself of the immense importance in showing respect to those beliefs. Under the circumstances, Song Bird may or may not appreciate Zeb’s presence. At this point, there was no telling how that would play itself out. In light of losing his granddaughter, the wise Medicine Man’s view of appropriate justice could be highly skewed. Being a man of much worldly experience, Song Bird probably had a passionate sense of justice. But being an Apache, he might see the necessity for stronger and swifter retribution. Such beliefs might preclude involving the Graham County Sheriff’s Department.
Zeb’s heart ached the hardest when he thought of Maya. After so many years, to finally have contact with her at such a terrible time in her life and under these conditions felt so wrong. Her heart would be broken. Zeb would undoubtedly provoke old memories. He should try and be there for her, but it was unlikely he would be much comfort at a time like this. Even less likely she would be looking for it from him.
Zeb tucked his shirt into his jeans. Slipping into his boots, the sheriff glanced up at the clock on the dresser. Six twenty-six. He grabbed his hat and placed it on his head and checked himself in the mirror. Before walking out the door, he instinctively grabbed the phone. What the hell, why not call? Why should he care if Jake was hung over or not? Jake was the one who had called him, not the other way around. Besides, Jake would understand a call from the sheriff doesn’t necessarily come at a convenient time. It was better to find out right now what was on Jake’s mind than to spend the day wondering.
When Jake answered on the first ring, he sounded alert, chipper, nothing like a man nursing a hangover. Zeb was almost lost for words.
“Hello,” answered Jake, “and top of the morning.’”
“Jake, Zeb here. Best of the day back atcha’. You’re up and at ‘em mighty early.”
“I was sneaking a peek at the pre-dawn stars and, let me tell you, they looked beautiful. Zeb, have you ever watched the gentle way that night sneaks away from the oncoming day? It’s a real work of art. God bless the Creator and his wonderful ways.”
“Uh, no. I can’t say that it’s something I’ve noticed. I’m sure it’s beautiful.”
“Well, have a gander sometime and let me know what you think. I’d be interested in your opinion.”
“The next time I rise and shine an hour or so before daybreak, I’ll sneak a peek.”
“I can guaran-damn-tee you that you won’t be any worse for the wear.”
Jake’s newfound attitude was as refreshing as it was unexpected. It was also quite inappropriate under the circumstances.
“Zeb, a couple of nights ago when I was staring up at the stars, a thought about you passed through my mind. Remember the night we were staking out those cattle rustlers just beyond the western base of Mount Graham, down there along the Snake River?”
“Sure thing. It was the first week I was back in town as your deputy. We nailed the bastards.”
“We sure did. I was yammering on about the star formations and the stories they told. You were telling me about some bizarre murder
case over in Tucson.”
“I remember,” said Zeb. “The Flickstein case.”
“Do you remember anything I taught you that night about the stars? I bet you don’t. But that doesn’t matter because last night I remembered something about your murderer over in Tucson. You said what made him hard to find was that he hid in plain sight, right under everyone’s nose. He was so blatantly obvious that you looked right past him as a suspect. Right?”
“That’s right,” said Zeb. “The killer was even a close friend of the family. They’d known him for years. Even after he confessed and gave up the location of the body, they couldn’t believe it was him.”
“But when they did finally believe it, didn’t they exact revenge by burning his house down?”
“Nothing was ever proven.”
“How much of an effort did you put into finding out if they had?” asked Jake.
“Not much of one,” replied Zeb. “I was working homicide, not arson.”
“When I was thinking about that case, it got me to wondering. Did you ever think the killer of Amanda Song Bird might be right here, in our own backyard? Sort of rubbing our noses in it?”
Zeb paused. In the background at Jake’s house, strains of classical music, not the usual twang of country and western, drifted in the air.
“It’s just a theory,” said Jake. “Just a thought that came to mind. But think about it. By the way, thanks for getting back to me so quickly, I appreciate it.”
“It’s all right, Jake. I didn’t get your message until last night. I tried getting a hold of you but you must have been out. During the day I was out of town.”
“I figured you were up in Antelope Flats.”