by Dean Ing
He drove into the part of the garage reserved for his Pinto and lowered the overhead door, brushing past the milky film of plastic that defined the space he called his scenery shop. Andy's own woodworking space, with the drill press and radial-arm saw for cabinetry, and an old Frigidaire for storage of solvents, paints, cans of soda, and usually a carton of milk, occupied half of the big garage. The ceiling-high partition of polyethylene kept the noise level down while it prevented wood dust from migrating away, and no one but Andy lived above. And he knew the importance of remaining on good terms with his neighbors.
A stair tread protested with a creak that might have been heard a hundred feet away as he trotted up to the landing. He would run a few drywall screws in from its underside one day soon and silence that telltale sound. No sense in alerting some neighbor as to the time of the night he came and went.
He could see his digital clock through the window. After that glance, he unlocked the door, pushed it open. Still in darkness, he inserted his right hand past the door facing to the wallboard; placed his palm flat against the wall. Behind that featureless wallboard lay a capacitance switch that sensed his mass and, with no audible click, disabled the circuit to a second capacitance switch set into his bookcase. Anyone who passed the bookcase while that circuit was live would trigger a relay set into the wooden base of his digital clock. Among amateur theatrical groups in the Fresno area, Andy was known for some very clever stagecraft.
He shut the door, strode past the bookcase, glanced again at the numerals of the clock which faced away from the door. It read 1:18, close enough. The relay advanced the hour readout. Had someone entered and left again, it would read 3:18. If someone had entered without leaving, it would read 2:18. If ever that clock was an hour or so off, Andrew Soriano would be forewarned.
He found the bedroom light switch by rote, sat down on his bed, toggled his answering machine for a replay. It was a source of quiet pride to him that Mom wasn't the only person who thought he had his uses.
A familiar contralto, mature and well modulated, made him smile. "Andy, it's Aletha from the playhouse, now Friday evening, ah, about seven-thirty. If you're there, how about a pickup?" His smile grew. Aletha McCarran was every inch a lady of status, but it had become her habit to toss Andy a private innuendo now and then. Did she really mean anything by it? Hard to say, dangerous to pursue, with a woman of such worldly ways and family money.
Andy sighed. His virginity did not leave him unaware of sexual wordplay. Quite the opposite. The contralto went on: "We're pushing the schedule on Barefoot rehearsals so I'm wondering how soon we can get together on the flats for the apartment scenes. I don't want to block it without your input. If you have any time this weekend, give me some of your input, pretty-please? Ciao."
He sat perfectly still, thinking that pussy could always use some input, thinking that he would give Aletha a call in the morning and that it was scenery flats - not the other thing - they would focus on. Then, finding no other calls, he ran the tape back; played it again, running his thumb very slowly along his crotch, and still again.
Aletha had the voice of a gifted actress; as the star performer of the Valley Players, as well as its chief supporter, she could play the lusty young bride of Barefoot in the Park or the shrewish Martha of Who's Afraid. . . with equal ease. Onstage, as Martha, she had reminded him of Mom. She had soft curves where Mom had sinew, but they both knew how to play roles. Sisters under the skin, he thought, still drawing his thumbnail back and forth, prompting a rise that no longer needed prompting. Soon, now, but not too soon, he would obtain relief from his frustrations. His gaze drifted toward the hamster cages ranged below his bedroom window.
He rose very slowly, his mouth dry, and squatted to survey his darlings, furry sleeping balls of life, in their tiny worldlets. Kong, stirring in the light; Gaia, an indiscriminate lump tucked among her babies; Freya, blinking alone, rousing herself, now climbing onto a treadmill as if performing for him. He liked it when they performed for him, pussy acts, acts of total submission.
He chose the silvery gray Queenie, a long-haired angora with a moody disposition. You never knew whether Queenie would curl up in your hand or bite you without provocation. For some reason, he respected Queenie more than the others. Queenie wanted to dominate you.
He reached down and stroked the somnolent female, who let him take her up without struggle. He replaced the lid and moved about the room, spreading a large double-thick white terry-cloth towel on the side of the bed, then opening a drawer, looking over the instruments he had collected during his undergrad courses in veterinary science.
Scalpels come in different shapes. The one he chose had a straight blade with an upward frontal curve, not so good for removing splinters or lancing abscesses, but ideal for deep incisions. His clasp knife's special blade would have worked as well, but was large for this work. He took Queenie by her loose neck scruff, filled his shirt pocket with her, constantly aware of the hard fullness in his briefs. He removed his shoes, socks, trousers, briefs, now moving faster. She was never satisfied, always dominating him, ever alert for some tiny deviation from her precious standards. He forced his memory to dwell on recent moments of Mom's behavior; snarling when he took the commission bag for immediate inspection, unappreciative when he played the fool for her, scornful at his suggestion for using defaced bills.
He sat down on the rough pleasurable terry cloth, touched himself, at first only with fingernails but then more roughly, teasing his maleness, his heart a triphammer that made his shirt pulse and began a faint roaring in his ears. Then he imagined Mom tied down as she had tied him down in earlier days, nude and vulnerable to the belt, a helpless pussy facing merciless power, and the focus of agony was not the physical pain, that was almost beside the point, but the recognition of your own insignificance, your impotence, but look who's helpless now, he thought, pulling Queenie from his shirt so quickly that she bit him.
He ignored the bite, now holding her expertly, Mom by the scruff as it were, and did what had to be done with a vagrant wish that Queenie might know why; and then he laid the scalpel aside and did more things, both hands sticky and crimson, and thrust himself into the still-warm furry hollow and thought that this, for Mom, would be the ultimate indignity. And thoughts of Aletha McCarran were suddenly mixed in now, though she had never done anything to make him want to get even, but there she was, with her flirtatious smiles and winks for him, slipping from the open part of his mind into that dark catacomb where his frustrations and desires fought, writhed together like pythons in a crimson lake, and then he burst like a ripe melon falling and falling onto concrete, collapsing back on the bed.
He rolled the towel and its contents into a loose ball, washed his hands, found when he washed his penis that it was bleeding a bit - nothing serious, perhaps scratched by a tiny rib. He tossed the towel into his bathtub. A small eviscerated animal, he had found, would always keep until morning. He could sleep for a week, it seemed. If he fell asleep soon enough, the self-reproachment for his dark compulsion would not begin until tomorrow.
9
MAY 1994
The night passed for him as a series of momentary agonies, each brief wakefulness bringing a flood of pain so fierce that at first he could not localize it. But by dawn, the receptacle of suffering that was his body had told him several things. His lower legs were numb because they lay in several inches of water that stretched away into a deeper dark, as if he had been abandoned at limbo's black shoreline. No wonder his head throbbed, with a swelling the size of an egg near the back of his skull and every time he shouted, he regretted it because the echo was tomblike, oppressive. He rolled slightly to relieve the pressure of a large rounded stone beneath his right side and grunted with fresh pain. He thought the left forearm must be fractured because he could not use it without a spasm. At some point, scrabbling with his good hand above the waterline, he grasped a familiar cold comfort that felt like his weapon, thrust it into his belt because it was too big f
or his front pockets. When at last he could see faint outlines around him and realized that the diffuse light came from far above behind his head, Gary Landis resolved to stand or die.
That issue lay in doubt for long minutes as he fought to get to his knees in soft earth, pulling his feet from muck, using his good right arm for purchase on anything he could grasp, snapping old sticks that lay beneath his lower back, buttocks, and thighs, rolling in the debris as he held onto a wooden pole that stretched, staunch as a root, down the sloping rock. Even when he began to feel cold tingles in his feet, he was not at first capable of climbing, though he knew now that the wooden pole was part of a rough-finished ladder, spiked into the rocky slope, with rungs of hardwood spanning two poles.
When he placed his foot in the center of the lowest rung, it cracked loudly enough to produce an echo of its own, and it was an echo from hell. He leaned forward against the poles, right shoulder nudging the side of the shaft, trembling with a cold that pierced to his marrow, skull pounding so that he feared fainting again. But if he fell backward, he knew, he would drown. Some shred of logic told him then that he must crowd the wooden side poles with each foot as he climbed, avoiding the center of the rungs, and in this fashion he began a one-armed climb that he could not have managed on a vertical ladder.
Once he vomited from the pain, swaying dangerously, and farther up he stopped again, fearful that vertigo would send him tumbling back down into that dark nest of dead sticks. But now, too, the light was much improved - not entirely a bonus because double vision made his dizziness worse. By shutting one eye, he handled that minor problem - the least of his troubles - and stopped looking up because it not only gave him vertigo but virtually blinded him.
By the time he neared the mouth of the shaft he was alert enough to realize that it was full daylight up there, and whoever had put him in that hole might still be nearby. Nearby what? He had no idea where he was, knew only that a small tree loomed above the shaft and beyond it, others formed a shifting canopy against sundazzle. But he was approaching the tag ends of his strength now, his left arm throbbing as though competing with his head. He came out of the shaft on hands and knees, drawing his weapon, threatening the area with an arm sweep like a man snaring spiderwebs as he fell - and then, for a time, he burrowed into a cocoon of oblivion.
The sun woke him, finding a midmorning hole in the leafy canopy to bathe his hands and neck. He jerked, moaned as his forearm did its painful duty to remind him that it was, by God, hurt and it wasn't going to get any better with abuse. And the handgun lying near his outstretched right hand was his Beretta, all right, muddy but a friend for all that - maybe the only friend he had.
He sat up despite the persistent double vision, checking himself over. His lower trouser legs and shoes were sodden, the shoes containing wet, sandy silt. But he would not remove his shoes because he wasn't sure he could get them back on, and obviously he was in the boondocks, so he would need to stay well shod. He still had his knife, coins, and a small roll of bills in his pocket that he didn't recall putting there. But that wallet - that goddamn old wallet - he liked so much and had stuffed with the talismans of Chuck Lane was gone.
And he didn't have that little bag with his change of clothes and Jesus Christ, six thousand in cash, he remembered, but if he'd had the Beretta down in the shaft, who could say, his bag could be down there, too. But he didn't think so, and he did not want to go near that hole again; if he saw the bag and went down there after it, well, he was nuts, that's all. But he made himself go back and kneel at the lip and look hard.
He could see nothing down there in the gloom but the ladder disappearing into indistinctness and maybe a jumble of stuff at the bottom, and a glimmer that could be reflection from water. And then he patted the right-hand pocket of his jacket, wondering if he had a handkerchief or even a Kleenex in there. He didn't, but what he pulled out of that pocket stunned him, made him drop it like a tarantula.
He stared at it, closing one eye and then the other, and then - he would never be able to explain this act even to himself - put his hand to his mouth to be certain his chin was still in place. Because the thing that lay on the carpet of leaves was a human mandible - the lower jaw - with a few bits of mummified tissue clinging to it.
And when Gary put his hand to his temple in wonderment, he realized why his head had seemed so cool and sensitive to the breeze. He was virtually bald, with tufts remaining as though some drunken drill instructor had given him a recruit's burr cut.
"Well, Jeezus Christ," he croaked, running his hand over the wreckage atop his scalp, wondering how many more revelations he would find in a mirror, finding small rips in his trousers that matched abrasions he could feel, dislodging the small stick caught in his trouser cuff. Only it wasn't exactly a stick, it was a piece of bone the size of a slightly bowed finger. A rib. And now he remembered that rounded stone against his side down in the hole - and realized that it was not a stone, but a skull. "So I'm not the first," he muttered aloud, pocketing the jawbone and the rib.
Suddenly he wanted very much to get the hell and gone from this place, and his legs were willing enough for a short distance, far enough to reveal a decayed shack that he detoured around, the Beretta in hand. But nausea swept over him, and he found a spot in sunlight where he could lie full-length.
He may have fainted or simply fallen asleep. When he awoke again, he was in cool shadow with scents of pine and eucalyptus on the breeze, and the sun's position indicated roughly noon. I'm not spending the night here, he promised himself. A lot of things were coming back to him, once the pounding had subsided to a nasty little pulse in his cranium.
His lower trousers and shoes were still damp, but it was not so noticeable when he had brushed them with his one good hand. The double vision seemed to be lessening a little, too. He followed fresh treadmarks near the cabin, taking care not to mar the track with his footprints because this was evidence. Yeah? And who'll be doing the forensics? he thought, sticking the Beretta behind his belt and under his jacket as he saw ancient strands of barbed wire and, beyond that, a ribbon of blacktop.
He climbed between the strands and learned not to dip his head too quickly if he didn't want it to roll off; turned right, stumbling along beside the road merely because it had a downhill slope and he didn't feel like trudging up any more inclines than necessary. A hundred yards farther, he memorized a landmark; a black rusted-out car fender deposited ten feet off the road by God knew what, God knew when.
What next? Hitch a ride if possible. The terrain suggested that he might be in the Sierra foothills east of Merced, around Mariposa, maybe. He wasn't about to go back to the apartment, nor call DEA; not when he'd been warned by somebody who was definitely an insider - or a psychic. For that matter, he wasn't even sure that spray of bullets through his window had been from La Familia. I can't believe Paul would be a part of this, he told himself. But I can't be sure he isn’t either. Whoever it was, she sure played for keeps. She! Two of them, in fact. His short-term memory was full of gaps, but much of it had come back now, enough to make him wonder if they had really been women. He'd been hit by a hypo - he was certain of it. Not your standard drug-runner MO. Let's see, there's something you're supposed do after taking a syringe load. Well, it can wait, he thought.
That left forearm was swollen so much it nearly filled the sleeve of his jacket, the discoloration reaching to his wrist, and though he could move his fingers it was only an exercise in self-torture. He found the arm hurt less if he held it across his belly, but could not close the jacket zipper one-handed, so he gave up on using the jacket's closure as a sling.
One car went by, a woman with two kids in a Chevy sedan, properly ignoring the wave of a man who looked as if he spent his nights wallowing in ditches. Then two youths in an Isuzu coupe, blasting along the blacktop with the total confidence of kids who hadn't died yet, therefore could not die. Could not be delayed by hitchhikers, either.
The little old guy who stopped for Gary sat in an I
nternational pickup that Noah might have found after the Flood. "Hop in back," he called, nodding at the cab's other occupant. "He's not as friendly as I am." The big mixed-breed had its ears back, sitting up front where Gary wanted to sit, watching him through the closed window as if just hoping for a chance.
Gary tried to smile, nodded, managed to climb in over the tailgate one-handed. Then they were off with a gear crunch, and Gary found himself in a welter of ranch junk: chain saw, old rope, oak limbs cut to the length of firewood, gasoline can, big yellow-tinted chunks from a salt lick in heavy sealable plastic bags.
And when he heard fuel sloshing in that can and saw the urine-yellow color of those slabs of salt, he remembered two things.
He had to take a leak in the worst way. And he remembered what you did after being forced to take unknown drugs: you saved urine for analysis.
Gary emptied the smallest of the bags, hoping the old guy in the cab wasn't watching, then spent five minutes of sway and jounce before he got his fly unzipped with the bag positioned. Then it was blessed relief; not such a blessing afterward, when he had to press the bag's seal with one hand while holding the plastic with his teeth, a quart of urine weighing the bag down. He couldn't get it into his left jacket pocket at all, and only after releasing half of it where it trickled away through rust holes did he manage to get it into the pocket with the bones. Man, talk about compromising your evidence, he told himself, but he felt a surge of hope. He was coping, coming back from the dead with thirty bucks, a Beretta, and a pocketful of piss.