Blind Fall (7 page)

John took a minute to digest this. Duncan lifted his coffee mug to his mouth and sipped without breaking eye contact. “Well then, there’s something you should know,” John said. Duncan raised his eyebrows. John said, “I killed him.”

Duncan jerked, and the motion combined with the strange manner in which he held the mug sent hot coffee spilling down the front of his shirt. He guffawed suddenly, held out his soaked hands, and said, “We seem to have gotten ahead of ourselves, and I’ve got myself a little mess here.”

He made for the bedroom door, and John’s heart leaped. “Bathroom’s right here,” John barked, grabbing Duncan’s right shoulder and steering him toward the opposite end of the trailer. Duncan ducked inside, pulled the door shut behind him.

John heard a click and turned to see Alex open the bedroom door several inches. Their eyes met, and John saw the fear in Alex’s eyes, the fear of a man who knew he was a prime suspect in a murder. John shook his head silently, raised a hand, trying to find some gesture that would calm Alex. But then Alex’s eyes cut past John, locked on something behind him. The blood drained from Alex’s face. He turned and followed the direction Alex was staring in.

On the bathroom doorknob was a V-shaped stain exactly like the one John had seen on the door to the bedroom Mike had been murdered in. This time the twin marks were left by coffee and not blood, but it was the same hand that had left them, the hand of someone with an injured thumb who had been forced to grip the knob by hooking his index and middle finger over the top of it. Next came the same feeling that would strike John in the split second before he was fired on by insurgents: a sudden compression of the air around him and what felt like a brief ability to hear the smallest preparatory movements of your potential assailant but without the ability to see exactly where he was hiding.

The bathroom door opened and Duncan emerged, dabbing wadded-up toilet paper at the long coffee stain down his right thigh. Then John was rocked sideways. Alex shoved past him, the Sig raised in his right hand. Duncan’s face went lax when he saw the gun and who was holding it, but then John reached out with one arm and hooked it around Alex’s chest.

But Alex kept trying to charge, so John was forced to hurl him backward until his back slammed into the bedroom door with an impact that seemed to rock the entire trailer. To John, the sound that came welling up out of Alex, a growl and a sob in one, was the only appropriate music one could write for the sudden union of the images that had passed between them that evening—the handprint and the bloody crime scene that had vanished into thin air. He was relieved and surprised when he heard the Sig hit the floor. Alex had flown from the bedroom with such determination and force, John assumed he had the physical strength to give him the confidence to do it. He didn’t. He had pure rage and all the stupidity it brought with it.

When he looked back at Duncan, he saw the man had weakly raised both hands but was staring down at the coffee-stained doorknob that had given him away. John saw the man’s lips move softly with what appeared to be a stream of curses. By then, John had retrieved the gun from the floor, was rising to a standing position. Duncan saw this and reached in the direction of what John assumed was a side holster.

John said, “Draw on me in my home and I will kill you where you stand.”

“Now that’s about where you need to stop talking, my friend,” Duncan said quietly. “Now I’m not sure what the hell’s going on—”

“The hell you aren’t,” John said. “You know damn well what we just saw.” Duncan nodded slowly, as if indulging a madman, and then opened his mouth to speak. But John cut him off with,

“I walked in on
you,
didn’t I? You drugged Alex’s drink so you knew he was passed out downstairs and you were setting the scene. What were you going to do? Frame Alex for Mike’s murder?”

Duncan said, “This is not something you can see through, John.”

“Get the phone, Alex. Dial nine-one-one. Tell them we have a murderer here.”

Duncan let out a throaty laugh and John listened to the shuffling sounds coming from behind him as Alex righted himself, tried to get his composure, and went for the phone. “Turn around,” John told Duncan. “Put your hands on the wall above your head.”

“That’s not going to work for me,” Duncan said, but now there was a tremor of fury in his voice. So John replied by taking the safety off the Sig.

The small snapping sound forced Duncan to comply. A silence fell and John was about to ask Alex why he hadn’t called the police, when he felt the entire phone, cradle and receiver as one, slam into the upper portion of his neck. It wasn’t the force of the blow that dropped him to his knees, it was the positioning of it: a near-perfect brachial stun. His vision blurred, then seemed to expand and contract, and when Alex pulled the gun from his hand, it felt like a light tug because his fingers had turned to jelly.

Outside, John saw Alex’s shadow disappear around the end of the darkened trailer in pursuit of Duncan. He knew how this would end: with Alex shot dead and John’s word against that of an officer of the law. He pursued them, expecting Duncan to turn and fire at any moment, but the man did no such thing. The three of them were moving down a side alleyway that ran along the outer row of trailers and fed into the small parking lot next to the trailer park’s business office. And that’s when it hit John: Duncan was running for his car. Duncan was trying to get the hell out of there without firing a shot. Alex had no such plan. He came to a sudden halt at the entrance to the parking lot, which told John that he had Duncan in his sights.

Alex raised the gun in both hands. When he was five feet away, John threw himself at Alex, sending them both crashing onto the asphalt as tires squealed and headlights swung over them and past them. For a brief second, John thought Duncan might plow his unmarked Ford Explorer into their tangle of limbs, but instead he raced out of the parking lot. Then he was gone, and John pulled Alex to his feet. But when he saw the anger twisting Alex’s face, his own anger got the best of him and he hurled Alex so that the guy practically had to skip and airplane his arms to keep from falling over.

“You stupid
faggot
!” John cursed.

Alex was walking away from him, hands gripping the back of his head, seemingly drawn to the twin pinpricks of light that were the taillights of Duncan’s Explorer snaking its way down the service road toward I-15. “You would have blown off the side of your own goddamn face!”

A trailer door popped somewhere in the distance, someone probably drawn by their shouts. Alex heard it, too, and looked over his shoulder at John. There wasn’t a chance in hell John was bringing him back to his trailer, and the shattered look in Alex’s eyes told him he knew.

Footsteps were approaching, and John could hear mumbled conversation; it sounded like two neighbors had met up and were approaching the parking lot. John said, “Get the hell out of here!”

John expected Alex to protest, but instead he held the same defeated look, as if everything from the revelation that Duncan was Mike’s killer to John’s current treatment of him were all part of an inevitability he no longer had the energy to fight, or even dread. Then Alex spoke, which surprised John because nothing about the guy’s body had indicated he was preparing to say a word. “Stupid faggot? Is that what you called me? You were chasing me out of my own house while that son of a bitch was getting away with Mike’s body. I may be the faggot, but you’ve got
stupid
covered all on your own,
Sergeant
.”

The words slugged John in the chest. Now he could see clearly how he had managed to avoid saying them to himself over the past day: some part of him had known how much they were going to hurt. Calmly, as if they had just concluded a discussion about which route to take to Grandma’s house, Alex turned and started toward a yellow Nissan Pathfinder parked next to the trailer-park manager’s 4Runner.

John turned on his heel and started walking back to his trailer. He heard a voice call out, but he didn’t recognize it and assumed it belonged to the neighbors who had spotted Alex. A car engine answered them by starting up. John turned, glimpsed the yellow Pathfinder as it sped out of the gate. John waited, watching to see if Alex headed in the same direction as Duncan. He didn’t. Alex took the service road in the opposite direction, toward the interstate on-ramp that would put him in the southbound lanes. He didn’t have the courage to follow Duncan. Not without a gun. Not without John.

If any neighbors had come to investigate the shouting in John’s trailer, they were gone by the time he got back. Inside, John went to return the Sig to its holster behind the headboard, but as soon as he did, he envisioned Alex’s headlights cutting lone swaths through the night. It felt like a valve had opened in his chest, emptying something cold and thick down into his stomach.

John imagined helicopters circling high over the trailer park, saw their searchlights probing the nest of trailers below, looking for Alex. Looking for John.

John was behind the wheel of his Tacoma and bouncing down the rutted mud road that led out of the trailer park before it occurred to him that he might be away from home long enough to merit bringing a few changes of clothes along. By then he was idling just outside the gates of the park, trying to decide which route to take: the one Duncan had used, or the one Alex had used. He was sweating and having trouble breathing because he knew full well that Alex’s parting words had been God’s truth.

John had made another seriously bad mistake. He had pursued the wrong man and allowed the real killer to escape with all the evidence of his crime. Then, he sent the man who paid most dearly for his mistake out into the night alone.

Thoughts of GHB and crimes against nature and sexualities kept secret all seemed to recede from view, like the black space around an aperture, and he saw clearly the one thing the Marine Corps had taught him: wherever he had made wrong, he had to make right.

So John headed south, the same direction Alex Martin had taken on the 15, with the same clarity of purpose that had driven him to Owensville the night before. As he drove, he kept seeing the expression on Alex’s face before he had left, the defeated look that told John he was just another son of a bitch in a long line of fag haters.

By the time John reached Temecula, a spread of lights covering the hilly inland of Riverside County, he could see Captain Mike Bowers giving him the same expression with his one good eye.

John doubted he would find Alex in any of the parts of San Diego he was familiar with. That meant he had one real lead, and he didn’t like it.

In Poway, he pulled off the interstate and found a pay phone. Because it was a business, the information operator was happy to give him the street address for The Catch Trap, the notorious gay bar featured in one of the photos hanging on the wall of Mike and Alex’s cabin. Next, he purchased a
Thomas Guide
from the nearest gas station and used the index to look up the address and plot a good course there from the 15. The neighborhood was called University Heights, and it was almost midnight by the time John was cruising its streets in his truck.

The Catch Trap was designed to look like a French Quarter brothel, with green shutters framing its blacked-out windows. A short line of pale-skinned boys with gelled hair and high-pitched laughs filled the entrance. John ignored the looks they gave him. Instead he studied the chunky guy with spiky blond hair at the head of the line checking IDs and slapping wristbands on legal drinkers, the same guy who had been standing behind Mike and Alex in the photograph on the wall outside their bedroom. John considered charging the line, but he figured that would draw more attention to him than hovering in the back, his hands shoved in his jeans pockets, the bill of his baseball cap shoved down over his forehead.

On the wall next to John was a poster advertising some special event that happened at the bar every Thursday night called Booted! The poster featured a muscle-bound model wearing cammie pants and a cover and glistening dog tags that hung between his blown-up pecs. For a full minute, John just stared at it. Maybe he was just fighting fatigue, but it was almost as if the man on the wall was a truer version of Lightning Mike Bowers than John had ever been allowed to know.

When John reached the head of the line, Spiky said, “May I help you, sir?” The stiffness and defensiveness of this greeting startled John, made him feel as if he had been pegged as an outsider.

“I’m looking for Alex Martin.”

“Let me guess. You heard he gives the best head north of the border?”

Anger surged inside him, and the kid rocked back on his heels at the sight of his expression. “You don’t need to be an asshole,” John said.

“I give a lot of head a lot of the time. If you want my help, stop acting like I called your mother a whore,
girlfriend.
”

“Where is he?” John asked quietly.

“Why do you want to know?” the guy repeated, slowly, drawing out each word as if John were a badly behaved eight-year-old.

“I said some things to him earlier tonight that I’m not proud of. I’m here to apologize.” Spiky squinted at him; John figured Alex hadn’t confided that much in the little shit-ass, so he decided to keep the details to himself.

“Philip Bloch,” the guy said, as if just giving John his full name was some kind of defeat. Then, he summoned a co-worker to take his place, and John followed him into a crowded wood-paneled room that led out onto an equally crowded patio, where two muscular men in thong underwear gyrated on boxes above a largely oblivious crowd. John was busy trying to avert his eyes from the sexualized display of male flesh when he knocked into a drag queen done up like a 1940s cigarette girl, only in a nod to the current age, her cigarette box was filled with candy and breath mints. John smiled against his will and the girl said, “If you ever feel like doing porn, call me.”

Philip jerked him forward by one shoulder and pulled him deeper into the crowd. John said, “Alex actually came
here
?”

“He used to work here. Is that a problem for you?” Philip stopped suddenly and turned to face him. Their noses almost touched, and John realized that Philip had deliberately brought them to a halt in the middle of a veritable sea of homosexuals.

“This is about Mike, isn’t it?” Against his will, John found himself scanning the crowd around him.

The men all around him were more clean-cut and attractive than he would have liked them to be, and the long looks they were giving him were cold, intent, focused—they made him feel as if he had farted in church. This was the cycle he went through with Alex, and now with these men. First came the belief that they weren’t truly homosexual because they didn’t look like those leather-clad slow dancers at The Blue Oyster Bar in the
Police Academy
movies he’d loved as a kid. Then came the paralyzing embarrassment, as if their looks meant he had something hanging from his nose. Then, like a lightning bolt, the anger struck—anger that other men he could take in a fight, hands down, could make his cheeks get hot.

“Hiding in plain sight,” Philip shouted over the music. “That’s all he told me. You want to tell me why he needs to hide
anywhere
?”

“There’s been some trouble,” John said. Back in his real hometown, Baton Rouge, “trouble” was a polite term used to describe everything from flat tires to wife-beatings, and John couldn’t manage a more suitably general term for the gay stranger standing nose-to-nose with him.

Philip sneered and started to lead him through the crowd again. John had barely made it another few steps when a hand sunk into his ass. He seized the guy’s wrist and used it to bend his entire arm back over his right shoulder. The perv was about half John’s height and twice his weight, but John kept pushing back on the guy’s awkwardly bent arm until the man bent at the knees and his mouth became a silent O. He shoved the guy backward and when he saw how much trouble he had regaining his footing, John realized how drunk the stupid son of a bitch was.

John turned around, preparing himself for Philip’s anger. But his new guide was standing with his hands on his hips, having watched their brief tussle with what appeared to be boredom.

“Sorry,” John said. “Was that a
hate
crime?”

“Not in my book,” Philip said. “Nobody has the right to grab my ass unless I invite them to, and I didn’t hear you invite him, so you get a pass on that one.” They started through the crowd again, toward a door in a small outbuilding that sat at the back of the courtyard. Once they were inside a cramped and darkened hallway, Philip said, “He wanted to stay here until my shift ended and then I was supposed to take him home with me.”

They passed a cramped employee lounge, then a messy office where a heavyset woman in a white T-shirt that bore the bar’s logo sat behind a desk talking quietly into a phone. She looked like she could hammer the shit out of them both. “And after you took him home? Then what?”

“Then we were going to make sweet, sweet love in the morning light. I don’t know what. All I know is that he showed up here a couple hours ago looking like he had run all the way from that hick mountain town he’s been living in. He won’t tell me what the hell’s going on but I have a pretty good guess it’s got—”

John cut him off with, “What about his parents?”

“His mother’s a fucking bitch. She pretty much cut him off when she found out he was a fag. Hasn’t said a word to him since.”

“His father? He gave him the house they were living in, right?”

“I’m sorry. Are you actually friends with Alex? His father’s been dead for three years. Wait! They
were
living in it? Did they move?” When John didn’t answer, Philip went pale and cursed under his breath as he stared at the floor between them. A transformation seemed to take place inside him as he realized that by harboring Alex he had taken part in something more far-reaching than he had previously assumed. He averted his eyes from John, led him to a closed door, opened it, and ushered him inside quickly, which fooled John into thinking they were walking into a real room. Then he knocked into a rolling mop bucket and saw Alex sitting on a bar stool right next to it, looking ghostly under the single hanging bulb. The three of them were wedged inside a crowded janitor’s closet.

Philip stood just inside the door. John noticed he was holding the knob with one hand wedged between the door and the small of his back, as if he were trying to keep them both prisoners now that all of three of them were together. Alex studied John with a furrowed brow and a pained look that exhibited his deep fatigue.

Philip broke the silence. “Your new friend here started using the past tense when we were talking about your house. So I guess that means that either your house burned down or—”

John cut him off. “You really thought this was a good place to come?”

“I didn’t plan on staying here for very long,” Alex said.

“Right. Philip was supposed to take you home. Which puts him in danger.”

“You’re real helpful all of a sudden.”

Philip stepped forward. “I need one of you to tell me what’s going on.” Neither man answered. “Fine. Then I need one of you to tell me what the fuck happened to Mike.”

The mere mention of Mike’s name sent a shudder through Alex. Philip noticed this, and as Alex screwed his eyes shut and tried to suck in a breath through his nose, Philip closed the distance between them, tenderly cupped Alex’s chin in one hand. “Babe,” he whispered gently. John couldn’t take his eyes off this display, couldn’t decide whether it was their motions that seemed unreal to him or the ease with which they executed them.
They’ve got to be kidding me with this,
John thought.
They’re homos. Not women.

Alex blinked back tears and tried to meet Philip’s gaze, but then he seemed to remember John’s presence. He reached up and took Philip’s hand away from his chin, shook his head brusquely. It had been a small moment, but it told John that Alex was filtering himself—not lying to him, but showing him a different face than the one he almost displayed to his close friend, a furious and angry one, meant to imply that the guy who wore it was tougher than he actually was. “Can you give us a minute?” John asked Philip.

“I’ll start counting right now,” Philip said.

He left them alone with bass beats knocking at the walls all around them and rattling the mops in their buckets. Finally John said, “You pull another move like you did in my trailer and you’re going to get yourself killed.”

“What are you doing here, John?” Alex asked, his voice breathy and distant, his eyes glazed with exhaustion and the kind of numbness that moves in to turn fear into something bearable.

“We’re going to go to the authorities. The right authorities.”

“Who would that be?”

“The sheriff of Hanrock County.”

Alex’s silent laughter shook his shoulders, twisted his mouth into a joker’s grimace. “Are you shitting me? Hanrock County is one of the most right-wing places in the country. If I’m going to accuse one of their own of murder without a shred of physical evidence, I’ll need the entire Marine Corps backing me up. Can you arrange that? Besides, what are we going to accuse him of? Having a weird fucking handprint?”

“Trying to frame you for murder.”

“Bullshit. He wanted to kill me.”

“Then why did he spend so much time on Mike while you were drugged downstairs?”

“Maybe you stopped him. Maybe I was next.”

“So he ties Mike to the bed and leaves you there, passed out, without any restraints?” Alex took a moment to consider this. John checked the door behind them to make sure Philip wasn’t eavesdropping. “He wasn’t interested in killing you. He wanted you to take the fall for it. If I hadn’t shown up, it might have worked. I didn’t believe your story about Mike spiking your drink when you first told me. If I hadn’t seen Duncan’s handprint on the doorknob, I still wouldn’t believe it.”

Alex took this in, closed his eyes briefly as he seemed to accept it.

“We need to get out of here,” John said.

“Where are we going?”

“Someplace where you can think this through. Look at what your options really are.”

“You’re going to help me? That’s one of my options?” John nodded because it was easier than giving voice to his agreement. When Alex stared into his eyes intently, it looked as if he were about to reject an offer John hadn’t brought himself to make explicitly. “Because Mike saved your life. Semper Fi and all that?”

There was nothing John hated more than when civilians used Marine Corps expressions with false bravado. But Alex was a few steps closer than your average civilian to knowing the true meaning of expressions like the one he had just used. John just had trouble with what had put Alex in such a place.

“Fine,” Alex said, as if the offer on the table were nothing more than a lunch date. “Start by handling Philip.”

In the hallway outside the broom closet, Philip leaned against the wall, arms folded over his chest, lips puckered in anger. He stood up straight when he saw the door open. “Did anyone see him come in?” John asked.

“No,” Philip said. “He called my cell and asked me to meet him in back.”

“Good.”

“It is?”

John stared at the guy, hoping to unnerve him. He didn’t see any evidence of this taking place so he said, “It’s called plausible deniability, my friend.”

“Is Mike dead?”

“Yes.”

“Murdered?”

“You got any vacation days coming to you, Philip? Because if you keep asking me questions like this, you better take them all, starting tomorrow, so that when the people who are looking for us come here asking questions—”

A door opened behind them, and John turned to see the heavyset lesbian he had spotted earlier emerging from the office down the hallway. Philip gave her a terse nod and a smile, and the woman pointed a finger at them in warning before she shuffled off. Maybe she thought they were trying to sneak a romantic moment together. Once the woman was gone, Philip said, “I’ve got two weeks of vacation and some sick days. From
both
my jobs.”

The color left Philip’s face as John told him the entire story. Then, in the silence that followed, it returned until the guy’s cheeks were flame red with an outrage John had yet to marshal.

“You’re here to help him?” Philip asked.

John had barely addressed the question himself, so he just nodded, hoping Philip would move on.

“How?” Philip asked.

“I don’t know.”

Philip seemed genuinely affected by this display of vulnerability on John’s part, if only because he waited a considerable amount of time before asking his next question.