She helped me into the living room, to a chair in there. I was able to lean on her a little, another measure of her strength. In the lamplight I could see the blood on my hands and the front of my coat; more wetness trickled down into the collar of my shirt. My jaw ached in two or three places and my ear had a cauliflowered feel. I explored gingerly with the tips of two fingers. Half a dozen cuts and abrasions, all more or less superficial.
When I glanced up, Emily was gone. I called her name; she answered from a distance. Then she was back with a dripping dishtowel from the kitchen. She swabbed gently at my face and neck, turning the towel red. Her face was pale, strained, the big luminous eyes wide and moist.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Are you sure? You don’t look very good.”
“I don’t feel so good, either.”
“A doctor? ...”
“I don’t need one. I’ll be all right.”
“But your head ... you might need stitches....”
“Emily, did you see the man who ran out of here?”
She bit her lip before she said, “Yes.”
“Did he see you?”
“No. He wasn’t looking at the car and I stayed inside until he was gone.
“Where’d he go?”
“Down the street. A car parked there.”
“Could you tell what kind or color?”
“No, it was too dark.”
“Can you describe what he looked like?”
She shook her head. “Who was he?”
“I don’t know.” I heard those clicks in my head again, the revolver’s hammer cocking and then falling. I could be dead right now. My stomach twisted; I said between my teeth, “But I’m going to find out.”
I got slowly to my feet, took a couple of tentative steps. Still shaky, but I could function. Full reaction hadn’t set in yet; when it did, I was not going to be worth much for a while. Do what needed to be done now, as fast as possible.
“Emily, I want you to go out and get in the car, lock the doors, and wait for me. Don’t open the door for anyone else, no matter who it is. If anybody comes, blow the horn and keep blowing it.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Make a couple of calls. I won’t be long.”
I went with her to the front door, out onto the porch. The street and sidewalks were empty, no one visible anywhere. It seemed that the bald son of a bitch and I had made enough noise to wake up half of Daly City, but sounds become magnified during a skirmish like that. If they’d carried to the nearby houses, the neighbors had chosen to ignore them: the Great Unwritten Code of Noninvolvement. I watched until Emily had locked herself inside the car, her face a white blur pressed close to the window glass. Then I drew back inside and shut and locked the door.
Except for the uneven rhythm of my breathing, the house was still. Too still. The air felt charged. There was nothing to see in the living room; and nothing in the kitchen or Emily would have reacted. One of the bedrooms, then. Or the back porch. Or the garage. I took a tight hold on myself and went looking.
It didn’t take long. Second of two bedrooms—the master bedroom, though it was no larger than the other. The bed was a big double, one of those modern four-posters, and Carolyn Dain was lying facedown in the middle of it. I did not have to go any closer than the doorway to know she was dead. Bloody, powder-scorched hole behind her right ear, blood in her pale yellow hair, blood splattered on the sheet under her head. He’d used a pillow to muffle the shot; it lay beside her, black-burned and leaking kapok or whatever they use to stuff cheap pillows nowadays.
Execution. Pushed facedown, knee in the back, gun muzzle pressed tight to the bone above the ear, bang you’re dead.
The way I would have died if the revolver hadn’t misfired. The way I’d look right now, lying on the hallway floor. My blood. My stillness, that terrible final stillness like no other.
My gorge had risen; I had to swallow half a dozen times to keep the sickness down. The rage had gone cold in me, like a deep-driven wedge of ice. I kept standing there, staring over at the bed. I could not seem to make myself move.
Carolyn Dain. Teacher, music lover, music historian. Average woman with average needs and average feelings, living an average life in an average neighborhood of an average city. Human being. Victim. Dead before her fortieth birthday on account of a philandering, corrupt husband and a cold-blooded, merciless thief. And sure to be too little mourned, too soon forgotten.
Seventy-five thousand dollars. She’d been killed for nothing more than that; I had almost died for nothing more than that. Two human beings—sacrifices on a subhuman’s altar of greed.
I have hated, truly, primitively hated, only a handful of men in my life. The bald man, whoever he was, had joined that select few. I no longer believe in capital punishment, but standing there then, looking at what was left of Carolyn Dain, hearing those hammer clicks again and again in my mind, I yearned to see him as dead as she was, as he’d tried to make me. I ached to dance on his grave.
It might have been a long time, or only a minute or two, before I grew aware of the bedroom itself. It had been thoroughly searched. Drawers pulled out, articles of clothing and other items strewn over the shag carpet, clothing and boxes spilling out of a small walk-in closet. Carolyn Dain’s purse was there, too, riffled and emptied. Predator’s hunt for more money, jewelry, anything else of value. Before or after he killed her? Depended on whether he’d come here with her or gotten into the house some other way and been waiting when she arrived. Depended on who he was and how he’d found out about the money.
The friend she’d spent the night with? Not likely. Somebody connected to Cohalan or Annette Byers or both of them? Good bet. It seemed out of character for Cohalan to arrange or collude in his wife’s murder; but I could see him setting up a robbery to get his hooks on the cash, and not knowing or wanting to know how blood-sick his accomplice was. Byers ... same thing. Or one or the other of them might have inadvertently tipped Baldy off. Or Carolyn Dain might have in some way, if she’d known him.
Possibilities. I told myself it was up to the cops to explore them, not me. I told myself I was going to be out of it soon enough, and a good thing, too. I told myself I was a lucky survivor, and I’d damn well better let it go at that. And all the while I kept hearing those clicks, the hammer being drawn back to cock, the hammer falling as he squeezed the trigger.
I’d had enough of this room, of the death it contained. I made myself turn away, took a quick look through the rest of the house and then returned to the living room. A desk with a computer on it stood in one corner; I hadn’t noticed it before. A couple of the drawers were pulled partway out, and papers littered the surface. He’d been in there, too, hunting for valuables. I started over that way, drawn by the swarm of papers.
The telephone rang.
It brought me up short, the noise scraping at my nerves like the blade of a rasp. I located the thing on a stand beside the desk, listened to it ring twice more. Then there was the sound an answering machine makes when it kicks in, and Jay Cohalan’s recorded voice said, “Hello. I am Jay and Carolyn’s machine. I am the only one here right now. At the beep tell me who, what, where, when, and why, and I will pass it on as soon as I can. Have a nice day.” Just like him, that message. Smart-ass and verbose.
“Carolyn? It’s Mel. If you’re there, pick up.” Male voice, youngish, deep-pitched, with a note of urgency in it. There was a pause, and then: “You were supposed to call me, remember? Give me a buzz as soon as you get this message and let me know if everything’s all right. You know how worried I am after last night.”
Mel. “How worried I am after last night.” Was he the friend she’d gone to spend the night with? Sauce for the goose?
I went ahead to the desk. The one thing you never do, if you’re a private investigator who wants to keep his license, is disturb anything at a crime scene. Special circumstances here, though, oh yeah. I pawed through the papers and drawers, doing
it carefully, using my handkerchief whenever I touched a surface that would take fingerprints. Bills and receipts, mostly. No personal correspondence. No Rolodex or address book. Nothing with the name Mel on it.
Back to the master bedroom. I kept my eyes off the bed as I picked my way in and squatted where the contents of her purse had been dumped. It took a few seconds to find a thin red leatherette address book under a fold of the bedspread. Fewer than twenty entries in a small, neat hand—pathetically few for a woman in her late thirties. Most seemed to have some connection to White Rock School: teachers, a principal, a vice principal. No relatives, or at least no one named Dain or Cohalan. Initials and surnames only, three of the initials M. I thought about copying those three names and addresses into my notebook, but I was beginning to feel shaky, a little disoriented. Reaction setting in; I’d experienced that sort of thing too often not to recognize the symptoms.
When I straightened, using a bureau corner for support, a wave of vertigo came over me and the rubbery feeling returned to my legs. I leaned against the bureau until the dizziness passed, then groped my way to the living room and collapsed into the desk chair.
Bad now, worse than I could remember. Tingling weakness in my limbs and fingers. Nausea. Pounding in both temples, intensifying the hurt in my ear and jawline. My hearing had gone out of whack—external sounds tuned out, the hammer clicks so clear and loud they might have been happening here and now. I could feel the hard muzzle of the revolver as if it were again ... still ... jabbing the bone above my right ear.
Sweat oozed out of me. Blood, too, trickling again from one of the wounds, like a worm crawling on my neck. I still had the wet dishtowel; at some point Emily or I had draped it over my shoulder. My hand trembled as I mopped my face and neck. Panic climbed in me. I fought it down, willing myself calm so I could call the police, call Kerry and have her come and take charge of Emily.
And kept on sitting there, fighting and willing and sweating and shaking, listening to the clicks.
SEVEN
THE REST OF THAT NIGHT IS RECORDED IN MY memory as a series of blurred images, disconnected and time warped, like fragments of a film edited and projected by a madman.
Cops in uniforms asking questions that I answered, questions that I couldn’t answer.
Kerry, anxious, hovering close by.
Latino police lieutenant named Fuentes, mole on one cheek, humorless half-smile frozen on his mouth. Wanting to know about the money, Carolyn Dain, Cohalan, Annette Byers. Taking the answering machine tape and putting it into a plastic bag. Saying more than once, as if he were making an accusation, “You sure you don’t have any idea who the bald man is?”
Paramedics, two of them, male and female, probing my wounds and talking at me and around me. One of them saying, “Head wounds can be tricky, you’d better let us take you to the ER for an X-ray.”
Emily, arms tight around my waist, small face upturned, luminous eyes full of wet.
Riding in the ambulance, lights beyond the windows making crazy-quilt patterns on a black backdrop.
Hospital smells, doctors and nurses hurrying, scurrying. Somebody with blood all over him, somebody else moaning and saying over and over, “Está muerto, Dios Mío, Está muerto.” Machines humming and the touch of cold metal.
Kerry again, telling me in relieved tones that the X-rays were negative, she could take me home now.
Lying next to her in bed, wide awake waiting for some kind of medication to take effect, watching the dark.
And through it all, in every fragment, behind every voice and every sound, I heard the clicks, listened to the clicks—an endless hollow rhythm that matched the beating of my heart.
I was better in the morning. My head ached, there was an odd sort of thrumming in my body like you sometimes have the day after a long plane flight, but otherwise I felt well enough physically. The clicks were muted now, like the faintest of background noises. I told myself I was okay. No head trauma, none of the wounds serious. I was going to be fine. Still alive, still kicking.
I should have been dead.
The click of the hammer cocking should have been the last sound I heard on this earth.
Jammed cartridge, faulty firing pin—pure blind luck. One-in-a-million chance. The gun hadn’t misfired for Carolyn Dain, and she was lying dead in the cold room at the morgue. The gun had misfired for me, and here I was moving, thinking, breathing. Alive.
Dead man walking.
I could not drive that thought out of my head. I tried to tell myself that last night’s experience was no worse than others I’d lived through. The ordeal in the mountain cabin ... three months shackled to a wall, three months alone facing my own mortality every minute of every day. The arson fire in the China Basin warehouse, the rigged shotgun at Deep Mountain Lake, too many other close calls. Death was no stranger to me; I’d lived with it in one form or another most of my adult life. And I’d survived. That was what really counted, wasn’t it? Survival?
Yes. Right. But this was different somehow.
This was different.
The bore of the revolver tight against the bone above my ear, the click of the hammer cocking, the sudden realization that I was about to take my last breath, live the last second of my life. The helplessness, the fury. And the terror. All of that concentrated into a single instant, intensified a hundredfold. You do not survive a moment like that unchanged in some profound way. Do not simply walk away from it telling yourself you’re lucky and then get on with your spared life as if nothing much had happened.
But how had it changed me? In what way was I different this morning than yesterday? I had no answer yet to that question. I felt oddly detached, the way you do in certain dreams, as if part of me was standing off at a distance watching the other part perform the usual daily rituals of showering, shaving, combing hair, getting dressed. I felt calm enough, except for a persistent restlessness. The anger was still there, but it was a faint glow without heat. There was the hate when I thought about the bald man and a desire to see him punished for what he’d done to me and to Carolyn Dain; but they were nothing at all like the consuming hatred and hunger for revenge I’d felt last night or nurtured for so long against the man who had chained me to the cabin wall. No urge to go hunting. No bloodlust. No strong emotion of any kind. Yet it was not as if I were dead inside. Feelings were there but weighted down, smothered. All except one—more of a sensation, really, that had been there when I woke up and that had stayed with me unabated.
I felt as though I were bleeding.
As though the piece that had been torn loose after the gun misfired had left an open wound, and the wound was leaking in a slow, steady seepage that would neither cease nor clot. As though a pool of blood were being created deep within, and the weight of that pool was what was smothering my emotions. Irrational notion, but I couldn’t shake it. I could not stop the bleeding.
Kerry was Kerry, as always: wife, lover, best friend, buffer zone, and rock in a crisis. She asked if I wanted to talk about what had happened, and I said no, not yet. I didn’t want to relive last night even for her, and I had no words to express how I felt. Space was what I needed, separation from everyone for the time being. She’d been through this kind of thing with me before; she understood. She not only left me alone, she got rid of somebody from the media who rang the doorbell and deflected half a dozen callers, including Tamara, my old reporter buddy Joe DeFalco, and Fuentes, the Daly City cop, who wanted my complete file on the Dain-Cohalan case as soon as I could get it to him.
She must have had a talk with Emily, too, because other than a kiss and a hug, I got the same hands-off treatment from her. Only her eyes betrayed her feelings: she was still very frightened and upset. Looking into them, I remembered our little talk yesterday at the zoo, her words You might not always be here, you might go away, and my glib philosophical reassurances. And I remembered the way she’d looked when she came running into the Daly City house, and how she’d called me Daddy. I felt badly for h
er, and angry at myself for not being able to protect her from last night’s brand of evil, for putting her in a position where she might also have been a victim. Poor Emily, poor hurt lonely little girl. My little girl now. Yet all the feelings—the empathy, the anger, the sadness, the love—were dulled and superficial at this moment. I was not capable of any strong emotion today, not for anyone including myself.
Daddy, you’re bleeding....
The three of us sat quiet at the breakfast table. I drank coffee and made an effort to eat a little of what Kerry put in front of me and couldn’t do it. Finally I pushed the plate away. Tried to smile and couldn’t manage that, either, as I said, “I don’t think I’m up to the Delta trip today.”
They both made of-course-not-we-don’t-care-about-that sounds. Kerry said, “Why don’t you just rest? I’ll call Tamara and ask her to take the file to Lieutenant Fuentes. There’s no need for you to go out....”
“Yes there is. My car.”
“It can stay where it is until tomorrow.”
“I’d rather go get it now.”
“You mean right now?”
“Yes.”
“ ... All right, if that’s what you want.”
Emily asked to go along. Kerry put up a mild objection, but this was not a good time for the kid to be alone. We piled into Kerry’s car, and she drove us out to Daly City. I thought I might have some kind of flashback reaction when I got to the house again; I felt nothing at all. It was just another tract home wrapped in morning fog, nondescript even with the yellow crime-scene tape strung across the front entrance and a couple of sensation-seekers gawking on the sidewalk nearby.
Kerry pulled up behind my car, and when I opened the passenger door she said, “What now?”
“Go fetch the file for Fuentes, I guess.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel.”
She gnawed at her lower lip. “You won’t? ...”
“Won’t what?”
“Nothing. I love you.”
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