“What’s bad about that land?”
“What lives there.”
“What does live there?”
He stood. “Nice talking to you.”
The phone was still in his hand, so I knew he wanted something in exchange for the information. “What can I do?” I asked.
“A favor.”
“If I can.”
“Check up on my wife. I think she might be spreading for a guy named Joe David. I don’t expect her to wait forever, and I’m cool with that, but Joe’s supposed to be my bro, and I don’t want him bangin’ my old lady. It ain’t right.”
“Then you’ll tell me about that spot?”
He nodded.
“What’s her name and where can I find her?”
****
Tiffany Wood worked part-time at a Holbrook fish farm and lived in a trailer just outside of town. I’d put more miles on the Pontiac in one day than I had in the past fifteen, and the sun was low behind me when I pulled off I-40.
Sitting on blocks in the middle of a yard that was mostly dirt, the rundown metal rectangle looked more like a meth lab than a home. Tiffany answered the door wearing a Toby Keith t-shirt and what looked like pajama bottoms. Her belly was hanging out, and a cigarette dangled from her lips in that gravity-defying way usually seen only in movies. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Who’re you?”
“I’m looking into a murder. I talked to Cameron, and he sent me your way.”
“You don’t look like a cop.”
“I’m not. Just a concerned citizen.”
“So, this is about his case?”
“Not exactly. But it’s connected. He said he didn’t kill Armstrong.”
She laughed, a harsh rasp that shifted into a cough. “That’s what he told you?”
I nodded.
She leaned in closer. “Bullshit. All bullshit. He did kill that cop. And that cop deserved it. But Cameron was hired to do it. Some guy named…” She frowned, thinking. “Balderama, I think. He wanted the pig taken out. Paid Cam big bucks for it, too.”
I tried not to let the surprise show on my face. “Balderama? Was that…Carlos Balderama?”
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s it. Carlos. Skinny dude. Dressed straight. Looked like an accountant.”
That was him all right.
I was thrown. Why would Carlos put out a hit on Armstrong? To my knowledge, the two had barely had any contact with each other. Had Carlos gotten involved with things he shouldn’t have since I’d left town?
Honesty wasn’t always the best policy, but sometimes it was, and I told her about Carlos getting killed in the same spot as Armstrong, and about what Cameron had said about something else killing the cop, something he was reluctant to talk about.
She snorted. “He doesn’t know shit about any of that. He was just playing you.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, then grew thoughtful. “Although…” She paused for a moment, thinking. “He was worried about driving because of a…situation he had, so I think he actually might’ve gone there with his friend Lewis instead of just by himself. Lewis might’ve actually driven. He’s not a rat, he wouldn’t roll over, so even if Lewis had been there, Cam wouldn’t say nothing about it, but I’m pretty sure he was.
“Lewis is into all that stuff. I’ve never been able to tell if it’s a scam or not, part of some long con, but the past year or so, he’s been calling himself a shaman and getting some extra gigs casting spells or making curses or whatever the fuck. You might want to talk to him about that.” She took another drag on her cigarette. “I don’t believe any of that crap, but sometimes I think Cam does. His whole family’s kind of superstitious. Dumb and superstitious. So, you might talk to Lewis.”
“Where’s this Lewis when he’s at home?”
“Hold on a sec.” She disappeared inside the trailer, then emerged a moment later with an address on a scrap of paper. “Here.”
“You have a pen?” I asked. “So I can copy this?”
“Take it,” she told me. “Cam’s gone, and I sure as shit don’t need that numb nuts’ address.”
“Thanks.” I put the paper in my pocket. “Oh, by the way. Cameron said he wants you to stay away from Joe David. He thinks you two are…” I left the rest unsaid.
“Joe?” She laughed so hard she had a coughing fit. “I wouldn’t touch Joe if he won the lottery.”
“Good to know,” I said. “Tell Cameron that.”
I got back in my car. Lewis lived in Seligman, a couple hundred miles west. There was no way I’d be able to get there before nightfall, so I splurged and got a room at the Route 66 Inn in Flagstaff. Before heading out for my Taco Bell Value Menu dinner, I called Frieda and gave her the scoop on what I’d found. Sort of. I left out the part about her dad ordering the hit. That still made no sense to me, and I hoped that when everything came out in the wash, I’d have a perfectly innocent explanation that both of us could live with.
In the morning, I drove west to Seligman.
Lewis, to my surprise, lived in a neighborhood near the center of town in a tract home surrounded by identical tract homes. To my greater surprise, he was white. He had the scummy appearance of a low-level loser, and with his bandana headband, tribal tattoos and motorcycle boots, he definitely looked like a companion of Wood’s.
“Yeah?” he said, opening the door after I’d knocked.
“Tiffany Wood sent me. I have a few questions about Cameron and why he’s in prison.”
“You the law?” he asked suspiciously.
“No,” I said, holding out a twenty. “Just helping out a friend.”
“What friend?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
He looked at me for a moment, then pocketed the money. “So, what is it you want to know?”
“Armstrong. The cop Balderama paid to be hit. I need to know what happened. Tiffany said Wood did it, but Cameron said there was something else there.”
Lewis nodded. “He’s telling you true. I drove Cameron out to the Beeline on account of he’d lost his license and couldn’t afford to get busted again, at least not on that road. I didn’t know anything about him planning to—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I believe you. You were just an innocent bystander. Get to the point. Wood went out there to do the job and…”
“And we waited. He’d already picked out a spot. We put the hood up, pretended the car had broken down, and waited for the pig to show up. But…there was something there, man. Something in that wash. I didn’t see it, but I felt it, and Cameron did, too. I told him maybe we should move the car somewhere else, and I think he was about to agree, when the cop car pulled up.”
“So, you—I mean, so Wood really did kill him.”
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
“The pig got out, came over, instead of offering to help us said it was illegal to park here and he was going to have to give us a ticket.”
That sounded like Armstrong.
“The plan was to take him off the highway and take him out, away from any cars that might drive by and see. It was actually a pretty crowded day. We didn’t even have to force him off the road or lure him away, because right after he said he was going to give us a ticket, there was a noise down in the wash. A…weird noise. Like a yell, kind of, but…squishy. He took out his gun and told us to wait there, then he walked down to the wash to check it out. Cameron didn’t want to have a shootout with him—cops are trained for that shit—so the plan was to either wait until he holstered the gun again or just shine the whole thing on, but…” Lewis took a deep breath. “He didn’t come back.
“We waited and waited, but when the wait had gone on way too long, we went down to check it out, and he was dead.”
“Shot?”
“Oh, no. That’s what the cops told the news, but that ain’t what happened. He was gutted. Face up over a rock and opened. We saw that and ran like hell. We took off and went back, went our separate ways, and a day later, they picked Ca
m up. Someone must have seen the car and taken down the plates, I guess.” He looked me in the eye. “He kept me out of it.”
“You’re still out of it,” I assured him. “I’m just trying to find out what happened.”
“That’s what happened.”
“So, what was it? What killed Armstrong?”
“I’ve been trying to figure that out.” Lewis drew himself up higher. “I’m a shaman, you know.”
“So I heard.”
He missed the sarcasm. “Whatever it is, it’s not a spirit, it’s a…” He seemed to be at a loss for words. “It’s a thing. I talked to a guy, and he said that when there’s bad land, it’s because a creature’s living there.”
“A creature?”
“Yeah. Like, an actual beast, one that’s left over from the old times. That’s why the land’s bad.”
Bad land again.
“Like I said, we didn’t see it, but we felt it. And we saw what it did.”
“Is there any way to get rid of it?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too. I talked to a guy—not the same guy, a different guy—and he said he saw something himself once, up by Sycamore Creek, which is a bad place, too. He said the thing was small, the size of a ferret or something, more like an animal than anything else. It had just killed a group of campers, gutted ’em and eaten their heads, and it was looking for someone new. Thing is, he said it acted like the campers. I don’t know how that’s possible, it being a rat and all, but somehow it made him think it was one of the campers.”
“What’d he do?”
“Killed it.”
“So, they can be killed.” That was good news.
“Apparently so.”
“Is there some kind of ritual you have to—”
“No, he just shot it.”
“Shot it.”
“Yeah.” Lewis shrugged. “Blew it away with a twenty-two. End of story.”
“That land there,” I asked. “Is it still bad?”
“You got me. But the thing’s dead.”
Lewis had definitely earned his twenty. I took the back way to the Beeline, through Flagstaff, past the two Lake Marys and what was left of Mormon Lake. I had a lot of time to think.
So, the killer of Carlos hadn’t been Armstrong after all. It was…something else, something much older than Armstrong, something that had absorbed the cop’s essence, taken on his personality and his prejudices and used them to satisfy its own bloody needs.
But it was something that could be killed.
I’m not a gun guy. Never have been. But there was a loaded Glock in the glove compartment that I kept on hand just for emergencies. This was an emergency, and when I reached the PBA plaque that marked the spot on the highway where Armstrong had been taken down, I parked and took it out. It felt unfamiliar in my hand, and I hoped I’d be able to hit the creature when I saw it. It had been a long time since I’d practiced shooting.
I got out of the car and walked away from the highway, into the silence.
It felt just like before—wrong. There were no new bodies here, but I sensed that there could be, and I proceeded slowly, glad to have the gun in my hand. Once more, nature was still, as though it had been frozen, but only in the trees. My instinct was to head toward the wash, where the bodies had been found, but it seemed more logical to assume that whatever the monster was, it lived in the trees. I stopped just inside the copse of cottonwoods and sycamores, looking around, absorbing the silence. I glanced up, half-expecting to see something swinging overhead, ready to pounce on me, but the branches above were empty.
All of a sudden, I felt the presence of Armstrong. I didn’t see him, sure as hell didn’t hear him, but somehow I was overtaken by the certainty that he was nearby. I hadn’t seen that fat fuck since I’d left Phoenix, but I hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to be confronted by him, and that’s what I was experiencing now. I swiveled around, half-expecting to find him getting ready to choke me out.
Instead, I saw movement low on the ground next to a giant cottonwood, a ratlike thing made of mud and leaves that was scuttling toward me and that, inexplicably, made me think of Armstrong.
And then…
It was Carlos.
Had it taken over and trapped Carlos’ soul when it killed him? Had it merely made a copy of the man? I had no idea what the thing was or what it did, but I sensed my old friend, felt his presence, and I was glad his daughter wasn’t here right now because I didn’t think she’d allow me to do what I needed to do.
I started shooting.
It didn’t seem right that it should be this simple, but it was. The creature scurried toward me, and I emptied the gun into its body. It might have been short, but it was wide, and it made for a surprisingly easy target. Ten feet away from me, it collapsed and stopped moving, bleeding out into the sand, and it was if my ears had suddenly become unclogged. The trees were alive again, there was noise, and whatever pall had been hanging over this spot had been lifted.
I walked over to the body, looked down at it. What had happened to Armstrong? To Carlos? Were they both gone? Were they both still here? Who the hell knew?
Just to make sure, I picked up a big rock and smashed the creature’s head. I picked up another and another, dropping them onto the body until it was bloody and flattened and buried.
Back up by my car on the edge of the highway, I called Frieda. She answered on the first ring. I didn’t want to go into detail with her, didn’t think the truth would satisfy her anyway, so I told her she was right, it had been Armstrong, but I’d taken care of things.
“Like an exorcism or something?” she asked.
“Or something,” I responded, but I wasn’t in the mood to explain. “It’s over,” I told her.
“Is he in hell?”
I heard something then in her voice, a hardness I wouldn’t have associated with her. It took me aback, and I was reminded of the big bucks Carlos had paid the Papago to take out Armstrong, and the new blue Lexus Frieda drove, and I thought that maybe she wasn’t as sweet and innocent as I’d been thinking she was. Maybe she and her dad had both been involved in something I didn’t want to know about.
“It’s done,” I said tiredly, and clicked off the phone.
I stood there a few minutes, hearing wind rustle the leaves in the trees. I felt good and bad at the same time, satisfied and disappointed, the way I’d always felt after closing a case, the way I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I felt alive.
I got in the car, turned on the ignition, and sat there in the idling Pontiac, thinking.
I thought about turning left, heading north, going back to my cabin and my job at the casino—and I almost did—but instead I decided to turn right, south, toward Phoenix.
I pulled onto the highway. There was a semi on the road ahead, and I gunned the car so I could speed by on the incline before the passenger lane ended. I topped the hill, seeing Weaver’s Needle and the Superstitions across the desert in front of me. Pushing the first preset on my radio, I picked up a station. It played Mexican music now rather than country, but it came in clear and it was from the city. It made me feel good, and I smiled to myself as I saw the Valley ahead, its buildings obscured by a familiar haze.
I pressed down on the gas, gunning it up to eighty.
I was back.
STICKY NOTE
(2016)
He saw it in the gutter while on his morning walk: the familiar square of yellow paper. It sat atop a small heap of brown leaves that had been pushed against the curb by the street sweeper but somehow not picked up. Definitely the worse for wear, the Post-It was dirty, faded, crinkled, smudged and lying face down, and Gary didn’t know why he reached down to grab it, but he did.
From the paper’s soiled appearance, he’d automatically assumed that the adhesive strip at the top had lost its stickiness, but it practically leapt onto his finger, adhering instantly to his skin, and he brought it up to eye-level, turning it over to see if anything ha
d been written on it.
Kill her
The message, scribbled lightly in pencil by a very shaky hand, was shocking in its bluntness, and he pulled the sticky note off his finger and dropped it back in the gutter. It was probably a joke, or part of a game, but the words left him feeling uneasy, and despite his attempt to rationalize the existence of the scrawled command, he could think of no plausible reason why anyone would write it.
Maybe it was part of someone’s to-do list.
That was ridiculous.
Only…what if it wasn’t?
Gary looked around. Despite minor differences in house color and landscaping, each home was typical of the neighborhood, all of them upper middle-class residences similar to his own. Not the sort of place where one would expect to find a person who’d write that type of note.
Kill her
Could it be an order from a gang leader to one of his followers?
No. Gang leaders gave verbal orders. They didn’t put anything in writing. Besides, who would they be targeting in this neighborhood?
A command from a father to his son?
He didn’t want to even think about that. Besides, the idea was completely ridiculous.
Gary continued his walk around the block, heading home, feeling more disturbed than he should have.
He had only a half-hour left to shower, change and make it in to the office. Maggie was already dressed and ready to leave for work, and he caught her in the hall, wanting to tell her what he’d found, but knowing that, in the few moments available to them, he’d be unable to impart to her the feeling he’d gotten from the sticky note, the odd sense of disquiet the simple message had engendered within him.
He’d tell her tonight, he decided, and tried to give her a quick kiss on her way out. She deflected him, as she did too often these days, and they ended up saying curt goodbyes to each other, both put out for no real reason.
At the office, he found himself staring at the small pad of Post-Its on his desk. He seldom used the notes, but everyone else’s desks were awash with the little yellow squares, which were stuck to folders and piles of paperclipped pages, as well as to desk drawers, computer terminals and phones. Nearly all of the notes were reminders from people to themselves, which made him think that the one he’d found in the gutter this morning—
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