I crossed the parking lot, heading toward them. They didn’t see me coming because they were deeply engrossed in conversation. Furthermore, I was mostly screened from them as I passed among the street-department trucks and squad cars and water-department trucks and personal vehicles, while also staying as much as possible out of the direct light from the three tall pole lamps.
Just before I would have stepped into the open, Stevenson’s visitor moved closer to the chief, shedding the shadows, and I halted in shock. I saw his shaved head, his hard face. Red-plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, work shoes.
At this distance, I wasn’t able to see his pearl earring.
I was flanked by two large vehicles, and I quickly retreated a few steps to shelter more completely in the oily darkness between them. One of the engines was still hot; it pinged and ticked as it cooled.
Although I could hear the voices of the two men, I could not make out their words. An onshore breeze still romanced the trees and quarreled against all the works of man, and this ceaseless whisper and hiss screened the conversation from me.
I realized that the vehicle to my right, the one with the hot engine, was the white Ford van in which the bald man had driven away from Mercy Hospital earlier in the night. With my father’s mortal remains.
I wondered if the keys might be in the ignition. I pressed my face to the window in the driver’s door, but I couldn’t see much of the interior.
If I could steal the van, I would most likely have possession of crucial proof that my story was true. Even if my father’s body had been taken elsewhere and was no longer in this van, forensic evidence might remain—not least, some of the hitchhiker’s blood.
I had no idea how to hot-wire an engine.
Hell, I didn’t know how to drive.
And even if I discovered that I possessed a natural talent for the operation of motor vehicles that was the equivalent of Mozart’s brilliance at musical composition, I wouldn’t be able to drive twenty miles south along the coast or thirty miles north to another police jurisdiction. Not in the glare of oncoming headlights. Not without my precious sunglasses, which lay broken far away in the hills to the east.
Besides, if I opened the van door, the cab lights would wink on. The two men would notice.
They would come for me.
They would kill me.
The back door of the police station opened. Manuel Ramirez stepped outside.
Lewis Stevenson and his conspirator broke off their urgent conversation at once. From this distance, I wasn’t able to discern whether Manuel knew the bald man, but he appeared to address only the chief.
I couldn’t believe that Manuel—good son of Rosalina, mourning widower of Carmelita, loving father of Toby—would be a part of any business that involved murder and grave-robbing. We can never know many of the people in our lives, not truly know them, regardless of how deeply we believe that we see into them. Most of them are murky ponds, containing infinite layers of suspended particles, stirred by strange currents in their greatest depths. But I was willing to bet my life that Manuel’s clear-water heart concealed no capacity for treachery.
I wasn’t willing to bet his life, however, and if I called out to him to search the back of the white van with me, to impound the vehicle for an exhaustive forensics workup, I might be signing his death warrant as well as mine. In fact, I was sure of it.
Abruptly Stevenson and the bald man turned from Manuel to survey the parking lot. I knew then that he had told them about my telephone call.
I dropped into a crouch and shrank deeper into the gloom between the van and the water-department truck.
At the back of the van, I tried to read the license plate. Although usually I am plagued by too much light, this time I was hampered by too little.
Frantically, I traced the seven numbers and letters with my fingertips. I wasn’t able to memorize them by braille reading, however, at least not quickly enough to avoid discovery.
I knew that the bald man, if not Stevenson, was coming to the van. Was already on the move. The bald man, the butcher, the trader in bodies, the thief of eyes.
Staying low, I retraced the route by which I had come through the ranks of parked trucks and cars, returning to the alley and then scurrying onward, using rows of trash cans as cover, all but crawling to a Dumpster and past it, to a corner and around, into the other alleyway, out of sight of the municipal building, rising to my full height now, running once more, as fleet as the cat, gliding like an owl, a creature of the night, wondering if I would find safe shelter before dawn or would still be afoot in the open to curl and blacken under the hot rising sun.
10
I assumed that I could safely go home but that I might be foolish to linger there too long. I wouldn’t be overdue at the police station for another two minutes, and they would wait for me at least ten minutes past the appointed time before Chief Stevenson realized that I must have seen him with the man who had stolen my father’s body.
Even then, they might not come to the house in search of me. I was still not a serious threat to them—and not likely to become one. I had no proof of anything I’d seen.
Nevertheless, they seemed inclined to take extreme measures to prevent the exposure of their inscrutable conspiracy. They might be loath to leave even the smallest of loose ends—which meant a knot in my neck.
I expected to find Orson in the foyer when I unlocked the front door and stepped inside, but he was not waiting for me. I called his name, but he didn’t appear; and if he had been approaching through the gloom, I would have heard his big paws thumping on the floor.
He was probably in one of his dour moods. For the most part, he is good-humored, playful, and companionable, with enough energy in his tail to sweep all the streets in Moonlight Bay. From time to time, however, the world weighs heavily on him, and then he lies as limp as a rug, sad eyes open but fixed on some doggy memory or on some doggy vision beyond this world, making no sound other than an occasional attenuated sigh.
More rarely, I have found Orson in a state of what seems to be bleakest dejection. This ought to be a condition too profound for any dog to wear, although it fits him well.
He once sat before a mirrored closet door in my bedroom, staring at his reflection for nearly half an hour—an eternity to the dog mind, which generally experiences the world as a series of two-minute wonders and three-minute enthusiasms. I hadn’t been able to tell what fascinated him in his image, although I ruled out both canine vanity and simple puzzlement; he seemed full of sorrow, all drooping ears and slumped shoulders and wagless tail. I swear, at times his eyes brimmed with tears that he was barely able to hold back.
“Orson?” I called.
The switch operating the staircase chandelier was fitted with a rheostat, as were most of the switches throughout the house. I dialed up the minimum light that I needed to climb the stairs.
Orson wasn’t on the landing. He wasn’t waiting in the second-floor hall.
In my room, I dialed a wan glow. Orson wasn’t here, either.
I went directly to the nearest nightstand. From the top drawer I withdrew an envelope in which I kept a supply of knocking-around money. It contained only a hundred and eighty dollars, but this was better than nothing. Though I didn’t know why I might need the cash, I intended to be prepared, so I transferred the entire sum to one of the pockets of my jeans.
As I slid shut the nightstand drawer, I noticed a dark object on the bedspread. When I picked it up, I was surprised that it was actually what it had appeared to be in the shadows: a pistol.
I had never seen this weapon before.
My father had never owned a gun.
Acting on instinct, I put down the pistol and used a corner of the bedspread to wipe my prints off it. I suspected that I was being set up to take a fall for something I had not done.
Although any television emits ultraviolet radiation, I’ve seen a lot of movies over the years, because I’m safe if I sit far enough from the screen. I know all the great stories of innocent men—from Cary Grant and James Stewart to Harrison Ford—relentlessly hounded for crimes they never committed and incarcerated on trumped-up evidence.
Stepping quickly into the adjacent bathroom, I switched on the low-watt bulb. No dead blonde in the bathtub.
No Orson, either.
In the bedroom once more, I stood very still and listened to the house. If other people were present, they were only ghosts drifting in ectoplasmic silence.
I returned to the bed, hesitated, picked up the pistol, and fumbled with it until I ejected the magazine. It was fully loaded. I slammed the magazine back into the butt. Being inexperienced with handguns, I found the piece heavier than I had expected: It weighed at least a pound and a half.
Next to where I’d found the gun, a white envelope lay on the cream-colored bedspread. I hadn’t noticed it until now.
I withdrew a penlight from a nightstand drawer and focused the tight beam on the envelope. It was blank except for a professionally printed return address in the upper left corner: Thor’s Gun Shop here in Moonlight Bay. The unsealed envelope, which bore neither a stamp nor a postmark, was slightly crumpled and stippled with curious indentations.
When I picked up the envelope, it was faintly damp in spots. The folded papers inside were dry.
I examined these documents in the beam of the penlight. I recognized my father’s careful printing on the carbon copy of the standard application, on which he had attested to the local police that he had no criminal record or history of mental illness that would be grounds to deny him the right to own this firearm. Also included was a carbon copy of the original invoice for the weapon, indicating that it was a 9-millimeter Glock 17 and that my father had purchased it with a check.
The date on the invoice gave me a chill: January 18, two years ago. My father had bought the Glock just three days after my mother had been killed in the car crash on Highway 1. As though he thought he needed protection.
In the study across the hallway from the bedroom, my compact cellular phone was recharging. I unplugged it and clipped it to my belt, at my hip.
Orson was not in the study.
Earlier, Sasha had stopped by the house to feed him. Maybe she had taken him with her when she’d gone. If Orson had been as somber as he’d been when I’d left for the hospital—and especially if he had settled into an even blacker mood—Sasha might not have been able to leave the poor beast here alone, because as much compassion as blood flows through her veins.
Even if Orson had gone with Sasha, who had transferred the 9-millimeter Glock from my father’s room to my bed? Not Sasha. She wouldn’t have known the gun existed, and she wouldn’t have prowled through my dad’s belongings.
The desk phone was connected to an answering machine. Next to the blinking message light, the counter window showed two calls.
According to the machine’s automatic time-and-date voice, the first call had come in only half an hour ago. It lasted nearly two minutes, although the caller spoke not a word.
Initially, he drew slow deep breaths and let them out almost as slowly, as though he possessed the magical power to inhale the myriad scents of my rooms even across a telephone line, and thereby discover if I was home or out. After a while, he began to hum as though he had forgotten that he was being recorded and was merely humming to himself in the manner of a daydreamer lost in thought, humming a tune that seemed to be improvised, with no coherent melody, spiraling and low, eerie and repetitive, like the song a madman might hear when he believes that angels of destruction, in choirs, are singing to him.
I was sure he was a stranger. I believed that I would have been able to recognize the voice of a friend even from nothing more than the humming. I was also sure that he had not reached a wrong number; somehow he was involved with the events following my father’s death.
By the time the first caller disconnected, I discovered that I had tightened my hands into fists. I was holding useless air in my lungs. I exhaled a hot dry gust, inhaled a cool sweet draft, but could not yet unclench my hands.
The second call, which had come in only minutes before I had returned home, was from Angela Ferryman, the nurse who had been at my father’s bedside. She didn’t identify herself, but I recognized her thin yet musical voice: Through her message, it quickened like an increasingly restless bird hopping from picket point to picket point along a fence.
“Chris, I’d like to talk to you. Have to talk. As soon as it’s convenient. Tonight. If you can, tonight. I’m in the car, on my way home now. You know where I live. Come see me. Don’t call. I don’t trust phones. Don’t even like making this call. But I’ve got to see you. Come to the back door. No matter how late you get this, come anyway. I won’t be asleep. Can’t sleep.”
I put a new message tape on the machine. I hid the original cassette under the crumpled sheets of writing paper at the bottom of the wastebasket beside my desk.
These two brief tape recordings wouldn’t convince a cop or a judge of anything. Nevertheless, they were the only scraps of evidence I possessed to indicate that something extraordinary was happening to me—something even more extraordinary than my birth into this tiny sunless caste. More extraordinary than surviving twenty-eight years unscathed by xeroderma pigmentosum.
I had been home less than ten minutes. Nevertheless, I was lingering too long.
As I searched for Orson, I more than half expected to hear a door being forced or glass breaking on the lower floor and then footsteps on the stairs. The house remained quiet, but this was a tremulous silence like the surface tension on a pond.
The dog wasn’t moping in Dad’s bedroom or bathroom. Not in the walk-in closet, either.
Second by second, I grew more worried about the mutt. Whoever had put the 9-millimeter Glock pistol on my bed might also have taken or harmed Orson.
In my room again, I located a spare pair of sunglasses in a bureau drawer. They were in a soft case with a Velcro seal, and I clipped the case in my shirt pocket.
I glanced at my wristwatch, on which the time was displayed by light-emitting diodes.
Quickly, I returned the invoice and the police questionnaire to the envelope from Thor’s Gun Shop. Whether it was more evidence or merely trash, I hid it between the mattress and box springs of my bed.
The date of purchase seemed significant. Suddenly everything seemed significant.
I kept the pistol. Maybe this was a setup, just like in the movies, but I felt safer with a weapon. I wished that I knew how to use it.
The pockets of my leather jacket were deep enough to conceal the gun. It hung in the right pocket not like a weight of dead steel but like a thing alive, like a torpid but not entirely dormant snake. When I moved, it seemed to writhe slowly: fat and sluggish, an oozing tangle of thick coils.
As I was about to go downstairs to search for Orson, I recalled a July night when I had watched him from my bedroom window as he sat in the backyard, his head tilted to lift his snout to the breeze, transfixed by something in the heavens, deep in one of his most puzzling moods. He had not been howling, and in any event the summer sky had been moonless; the sound he made was neither a whine nor a whimper but a mewling of singular and disturbing character.
