Stagger Bay Page 18
“I still miss Wayne,” Natalie said. “I miss him in the morning, and in the evenings too. All I had to do was touch his cheek, you know?” she said, brushing the side of my face with the back of her fingers.
“I think my headache is gone now,” I managed to choke out, hoping I wouldn’t have to stand up any time soon.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her chin raised slightly as she leaned around to look me in the face sideways. Her breasts rested easy on my shoulder. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”
The living room felt several dozen degrees warmer, probably from the incandescent lamp my face felt to be. And then Natalie said the words that made me smile as she breathed them in my ear; the sweetest words I’d heard coming from a woman’s mouth in a long time:
“You know you can get all those books on tape, right?”
Chapter 50
A nap of exhaustion and I wake from a dream, get up to go to the bathroom. The dream had been an unrealistic one, wherein she welcomes all my attentions and desires.
But now, awake, I hear her sobbing on the other side of her closed bathroom door. I stand there unconscionably rapt at her almost erotic cries, as if they’re the distant call of a siren or undine luring some poor pitiful sailor to his doom.
The door opens and there she stands weeping – strange that her tears lend her a carnal seductiveness her quiet demeanor has never fully expressed to me yet. She’s angry to see me there.
“You…” she says in an accusing tone, before closing her mouth tight and biting her lower lip. I back off and step out on the porch; after a few minutes she joins me and apologizes, but for what I don’t know.
I am awed by her tears. Who are they for, exactly? I am still aroused but now is not the time.
Chapter 51
Later that night, I prowled Natalie’s darkened front room. She’d offered to stay up with me, make coffee and keep me company – but I was pretty gruff and she finally took the hint.
This was the place I was never good at: the waiting. I grew more and more restless, like an over-wound top waiting to whirl into action Tasmanian-Devil-style. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling; as usual it was like a bellyful of bad drugs spinning away in my gut. I kept yawning from tension too, and my jaw was sore from nervously gulping air so often.
I’d had Natalie and Randy lay their bedding on the bedroom floor in case of gunplay. I checked on them from time to time through the open door as I paced the front room: two blanket covered oblong hummocks, one large, one small, looking like graves in the dimness. I couldn’t tell if they were asleep or just pretending to be, but their figures were motionless beneath their bedding and I did my best not to disturb them.
There was a quiet knock on the door and I almost jumped before I got a grip. When I peeked out the spy hole, a tall wide silhouette stood blocking the street light’s glare.
“Everyone in the Gardens is in place,” Big Moe said through the hole. “We’re all up for it, and if he comes we’re ready for him. We got cars if he gets away from us.”
I opened the door and shook my head. “He’ll see a car easy, and he can outrun anything you’ve got if he knows you’re behind him. Minivans and that cute little Taurus of yours got no replacement for his displacement. And if you lynch-mob after him up Moose Creek Road, you know the cops will be waiting. That’ll be suicide for you all.”
I shook my head again. “No, son. I have my plan – sometimes one guy on foot can do things a group could never get away with.”
Big Moe left and stood for a moment at the corner of Natalie’s stoop, clearly visible in the light of the full moon before wandering off on his rounds, the war chief checking his troops. Down the block I saw a cigarette coal flare, illuminating the face of a male Hmong who stood in darkness next to a bungalow. Around the area, several other still figures stood guard in whatever pools of shadow could conceal them from the streaming moonlight.
How had Sam and Elaine made out? Were they still alive, or had the Driver come calling and caught Sam napping? I restrained the impulse to call – I would have wound up wearing out the phone like any worried parent.
Sam could handle his end. And if he couldn’t, if the bastards took out my son, the only family I had left in the world? Then God help Stagger Bay, because I wouldn’t have any pity or self-preservation left in me.
Chapter 52
Time passed and I spun myself up more and more. I couldn't stop myself from shuffling and reshuffling the cards in my head, dealing hand after mental hand of solitaire in my mind’s eye.
The Driver was the only thing I needed to pay attention to right now. Ding an Sich, baby: What was that thing in itself?
How did the he think? What drove his twisted plans? I kept trying to put myself in his shoes but they sure weren’t a comfortable fit. He was arrogant and impulsive, utterly dangerous and seemingly close to some kind of final frenzy – but he could be manipulated and somewhat predicted.
Out of the people I knew, which one was he? Hell, did I even know him? Changing his voice might’ve just been him having fun, deliberately feeding me a red herring.
No, that was bullshit. Ockham’s Razor had to be kept in play. Keep it simple, Markus – you knew the Driver, all right.
What was Rick Hoffman’s place in all this? Was he the Driver? What was going on behind that blank Noh-mask face of his right now?
Or was it Killer Reese? And just how did that rogue cop’s actions fit into the larger campaign? Kendra had loved him, but so what? Either she’d understand what I was doing or forget her.
Someone with influence was protecting the Driver, that was for sure. What would make law enforcement shield a serial killer, make them willing to frame me and let him keep on doing his thing? Was the whole department in on it, or just enough to muster a hillbilly death squad with the other Stagger Bay police unable to break the rogue cops open? They had that 911 dispatcher at least.
And how did Stagger Bay herself feel about so many law-abiding white citizens disappearing? Exactly how many were part of it? Was it pretty much the whole town – or just enough to make it fly, with all the rest too scared to do anything about it, or paying with their lives if they were reckless enough to stand up? A lot of these good people here were making healthy construction-job wages off all the new development coming in. They had enough at stake it’d be easy for them to put the blinders on and live tunnel-vision lives.
This was when it really came home that my big brother was gone forever. Karl would be calming me right now, watching my back while I prepped my head for the upcoming fracas, maybe cracking one of his many dorky jokes to break the tension.
Despite his twitchiness and his many flaws, he’d always tried to be the careful one; the complement to my wrecking-ball nature. Me, I’d always been more hey-diddle diddle, right up the middle, come right at you and say hi as it were.
Karl had always forced himself to sniff at our scores like a leopard examining possibly poisoned bait. Still, it had been easy enough for them to make him die alone with no one to notice or care except Sam and I.
As for me? I figured I was a little too high profile right at the moment for them to feel comfortable about taking me out quite yet, unless I really pushed them. Heck, I’d given them every reason to feel safe; they had to be thinking I was no threat at all.
I was a buffoon; a cage-rattling blowhard that woofed on TV, made a few soapbox speeches to curry favor with Stagger Bay’s underbelly, and talked some inconsequential smack to their faces. After it blew up on me with little Mai, I know they had to have been laughing their asses off – hell, I would have mocked me if I was them.
When I made my move, its speed and suddenness after my previous inactivity would be doubly appalling to them. Underestimate me some more, fools – it felt good they did so.
‘Unrealistic expectations,’ Sam had said. But wasn’t that what life was all about? Stumbling along, doing our best to hypnotize ourselves into believing we could make some kind of difference?
/> Chapter 53
Down the block a man shouted something incoherent, his leonine roar piercing the night for a moment before being cut off abruptly. A woman howled, and I picked up the phone and dialed Elaine’s cell. Her voice was wide awake when she answered; she hadn’t been sleeping either.
Sam mumbled something behind her and she made unhappy noises aimed away from the mouth piece; there were fumbling sounds as Sam grabbed the phone from her and came on line: “Yeah?”
“Get your butt over here right now, boy. It’s going down.”
Then I was out the door, locking it behind me and checking the knob before heading on. The gun was in my hand pointing at the ground as I rolled up on the bungalow the howling had come from.
It was easy enough to spot: the front door was wide open, all the lights were on, and what looked like every adult male in the Gardens was milling around it. I went inside: a tiny black woman in a nightgown knelt on the floor cradling Big Moe’s bloody head.
“My baby,” she sobbed, staring out the open back door.
I ran out that way and joined the flood of men running toward the brush-line. “He went in there,” somebody yelled, and I followed the herd into the chaotic dark of the undergrowth, people cursing and stumbling, my face getting whipped and stung by branches springing back from the progress of all those ahead. Somebody started shooting, the muzzle flash from one round after another lighting up the shrubbery in front of me and to my left.
“Stop that, idiot,” Mackie shouted somewhere behind me in the dark. “Either you’ll hit the kid or one of us.”
That’s when the Cougar’s engine kicked over somewhere in front of me: He must have come in from above and coasted his car down one of the fire lanes cut through the underbrush surrounding the Gardens, maybe one we hadn’t even known was there. Then he’d ninja-ed his way into the Gardens and taken his prey in a smash-and-grab.
I heard road gravel kicking up as the Driver peeled out, and there were cries of dismay from that direction – his closest pursuers must have gotten pelted in the face by the Cougar’s rooster-tail.
I turned and clawed my way back through the undergrowth. As I was right by the entrance there was still a chance.
I charged full bore across the avenue and down one of the phantom courts, hopping the curb to keep running on the flattened earth of the prepped lot beyond. As I wove my way between surveyor’s stakes, the Cougar’s roar grew clearer and louder behind me as it emerged from the narrow over-grown entrance to the fire lane and gunned out onto the avenue.
The Cougar’s tires screeched as it took the first corner but I just kept running. He rounded the second corner as I neared the Caterpillar, gloating that I’d be in place to take my shot.
That’s when I tripped and fell flat on my face, the pistol spinning from my hand to disappear somewhere in the weeds. I leapt up and took a despairing glance around for the pistol, but it was nowhere in sight.
So much for your grand plan, the unforgiving part of my mind sneered. I ran around the contractor’s hut, to do what I don’t know: throw myself on the hood and scrabble my way inside with my bare hands maybe.
I rounded the hut just in time to see taillights as the Cougar ramped up the access road, turned left onto Moose Creek Road, and headed home to party. I ran up the access road even though my legs were already trembling underneath me, and turned left into the piney woods like I stood a chance in hell of catching up on foot. Even though I doubted I’d do any better this time than at the Arcade with Mai, I still had to try.
Chapter 54
When I was a kid I loved Creepy Magazine, a horror comic that featured terrifying covers by Frank Frazetta. His paintings always had gorgeous full moons, demons, big-titted vampire women and all kinds of other morbid, beautifully rendered monstrosities.
That’s what the night I ran through looked like: a Frazetta cover. The two-lane blacktop extended ahead of me into dim infinities of towering pines and redwoods, their branches leaning in as they clutched at the air. Overhead a bloated full moon shone down with a light that seemed to say anything could happen beneath its rays.
Ahead the Cougar’s taillights glared like a retreating werewolf as it cruised away, not going fast here in the Driver’s home territory. He had his cruising tunes blasting: the Beach Boys’ ‘In My Room.’ He was enjoying the drive enough to make it last.
My heart pounded fit to burst out of my rib cage, and my breath came in pulses of white-hot agony – the Cougar pulled further and further ahead with mocking ease. I ran slower and slower as my old legs turned to wood beneath my traitor of a body and I finally came to a shuddering halt with my hands on my thighs, rhythmic sobs of pain and anger coming from me unwillingly as I watched the Cougar take a curve and disappear into the wooded night. The music spilled back for a few moments before fading, and I was alone in silence.
I’d failed again, and another child would die a hideous lingering death because of it. I dropped to my knees on the asphalt.
A car was coming up fast from the direction of the Gardens, but I was too beat to get out the way. As it came up its headlights backlit me; my shadow spilled to darken the road ahead in a thin goblin caricature of my silhouette.
I waited, almost hoping whoever it was would just plow over me and put me out of my misery, or that it would be a Stagger Bay cop come to eliminate me for overstepping my bounds. But the car stopped a few feet behind where I kneeled.
“Old fool,” Sam said from inside his Lincoln. “You trying to kill yourself?”
I tottered up, turned, and grabbed the door handle. “Step on it, Sam,” I managed to gasp, before I saw Elaine riding shotgun, right where I’d intended to sit.
“What the hell is she doing here?” I asked.
“You’re wasting time, Markus,” Elaine said.
“You said to bird-dog her,” Sam said as he floored the gas before I’d even closed the back seat door all the way. He turned off the Connie’s headlights but the full moon’s light was more than bright enough for him to drive by.
“I didn’t mean to bring her along on this.”
Luxurious manors lay to either side as we raced up Moose Creek Road, some lit up like Christmas trees, some dark as the tomb. We swooped round the first curve and hit a long uphill straightaway. My teeth ground together and I had to repress a snarl of unbelieving joy as I saw the Cougar’s taillights just disappearing around the next curve.
“You think I was going to leave her alone at the motel?” Sam said, his voice raised. I opened my mouth to bark something back.
“What’s your plan, Markus?” Elaine said, cutting me off before I could speak. She was half turned to me, her profile lit up by the dash indicator lights.
I took a deep breath to calm myself, putting aside any worries about letting her be an eye-witness to what was about to happen. “We keep sharking forward until we can’t any more.”
“Doesn’t sound like much,” Sam said, but he kept the car surging ahead, and the darkling redwoods raced past us in a blur as we rounded the next curve to see the Cougar’s taillights much closer now.
“Yes,” Sam hissed, and all three of us leaned eagerly forward as he ground his foot onto the gas pedal, as if he thought he could squeeze any more speed from the maxed-out old war horse. Catch up!
“Let me know when you come up with a better scheme, boy,” I said, but most of my attention was on those fleeing taillights.
We passed Mr. Tubbs’ house as Sam flew toward where the Cougar had disappeared around another curve. All the lights were on and there seemed to be frenetic activity happening in Tubbs’ junk-crowded yard, but we didn’t stop to pay our respects.
We rounded the next curve. Several hundred yards ahead the Cougar’s taillights turned left and abruptly disappeared.
“He’s pulled off of the main road,” Elaine said. “He’s home now.”
I stuck my upper body out the window and squinted my eye against the wind of our onrushing progress as we neared where the Cougar
had disappeared. I couldn’t hear the big block engine, couldn’t hear those surf tunes anymore. We were approaching the most rarefied stretch of Moose Creek Road, meteoring our way up that hill to the very top, to the extreme end of the line.
Sam stepped on the brakes as we pulled up to a gravel access road. The moonlight made the access road stand out like a white tongue against the darker surrounding undergrowth.
The gash of a driveway led toward a Craftsman-style house on a knoll, hulking dark behind a ragged screen of interposing trees. We stared hard at that house, as though we could will the Cougar to be down this particular road.
In the gravel of the driveway entrance lay two wide tire tracks. As we watched, a trickle of pea-sized stones rattled down to make a little heap in one of the troughs: Someone had taken this access road at speed and recently.
“If either of you thinks this ain’t the place, now just might be the time to say,” I pointed out. As neither of them seemed inclined to disagree, I got out the car. “Wait here a skosh. I’m going to scout it out.”
I crept down the driveway, the house looming larger and clearer with every furtive step I took. As I got closer, I heard an electric motor humming around the corner of the attached garage.
I angled to the side for a better look. The Cougar’s rear end was visible as the garage’s motorized rolling door descended, rattling and clashing as it lowered to hide the car the rest of the way from my sight.
I needed to move quick but I crept just as careful on the way back to the Lincoln. Like the wise man said: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
“This is the house,” I told Sam, my voice gone tight and brassy. “I’m going in, and you’re gonna stay outside.”
“The fuck you say,” Sam said. “You think I’m letting you do it alone, you got another think coming.”
He looked like he wanted to stomp up to the house and kick it in like a puffball, like he thought fury and a just cause would carry him through whatever awaited within. I shook my head at his foolishness, doing my best to appear dismissive and authoritative – the forms had to be observed here, my son was stubborn enough to need the full pantomime.