Blue World (51 page)

“Right. Into there.” Travis motioned with the light; it swept across the concrete and toward an archway about ten feet ahead.

Teegarten caught his breath. He had seen something on the floor, in the sweep of that light. It had looked like a mangy dog, its head shot away, and beside the carcass a little mound of gray hamburger. He heard the hungry buzz of flies, and now he could smell rot. He hesitated, trembling-- and then the Colt’s barrel pressed into his spine. Its chill eagerness forced him through the archway and into a realm of the damned.

Dead rats, each dispatched with a single shot that had blasted their carcasses to pieces, lay around Teegarten’s feet. He walked on, stepping on mangle, and then abruptly stopped again as the light glanced past his shoulder and fell on something else that lay ahead.

It was a dead man, old and skinny. Wearing gray trousers and a tattered purple sweater with brown blotches. No, no, Teegarten realized. The brown blotches were not part of the sweater’s natural color. Flies clung to the bullet holes in the corpse’s chest, and spun like a dark blizzard over the gaping face.

“Walk to the wall,” Travis commanded. “Go on, Moby Dick.” He chuckled. “Moby Dick. Get it?”

Teegarten trudged forward in a zombie daze. The wall was of dark, wet bricks, and there was a chair. Around the chair were more brown blotches.

“Sit,” Travis said.

Teegarten did. The chair creaked. He was sitting not facing the cowboy but with the wall on his right. He stared into darkness, and every time he trembled, the chair groaned again.

A match flared. The cowboy was lighting candles set around the room, stuck with wax to paper plates. The match went out, and Travis struck another one and kept lighting candles until all fifteen of them were burning.

“Please don’t kill me,” Teegarten whispered, and a tear crawled from his right eye.

“My name is Travis,” the cowboy began, and Teegarten winced because he didn’t want to hear a name, he didn’t want to know anything, all he wanted to do was go home and pull the covers over his skull. “I’m from Oklahoma. Ever been there?”

“No. Please…”

“Hush. I’m talkin‘. Oklahoma’s the big country. Everything wide open. I used to be in the rodeo. You want a cigarette, Moby?”

“I… want to… go home.”

An unlit cigarette was pushed into Teegarten’s mouth. Then there was the clocking noise of the cowboy’s boots as he walked back toward the archway. He stopped, and when he spoke again his voice echoed: “Don’t move, now. This is my best trick.” He holstered his Colt and took a gunfighter’s stance. “Keep your chin up!” Travis said.

A drop of sweat rolled into Teegarten’s eye. He shivered, and started to scream.

The Colt came out of the cowboy’s holster in a blur, and its barrel spat fire.

The bullet ricocheted off the bricks beside Teegarten’s head and blasted the side of his face with clay splinters. The tip of the cigarette burst into flame, and an instant later the flame went out.

Smoke trickled between Teegarten’s clenched teeth.

Travis spun the Colt around his finger and lodged it home again. “There you go. Pull on that coffin nail. Don’t spit it out now, I don’t wanna have to light you another one.”

Teegarten’s teeth met through the filter.

“I used to be with the rodeo,” Travis went on. “Did I say that? I was a trick shot. You gimme anything, I can hit it. Don’t matter. I kinda like the movin‘ targets best.” The toe of his cowboy boot prodded a dead rat. “Sit up straight, Moby! We got some jawin’ to do.”

The fat man trembled, swallowed, bellowed smoke through his nostrils.

“So why were you sittin‘ there takin’ pictures in front of my girlfriend’s apartment?” Travis asked, kneeling down between two candles. “You can take the cigarette out for a second.”

Teegarten removed it, but his lips remained in a tight O.

“I don’t know… anything about your girlfriend, man. I was there to watch somebody for a client. A priest. Yeah, this eccentric priest, rides around on a ten-speed. He wanted me to watch--”

“Whoa,” Travis said quietly. “A ten-speed. Bicycle?”

“Yeah. Yeah. A bicycle. He wanted me to… like… keep tabs on this girl who lives in apartment number six. Her name is--”

“Debra Rocks,” Travis interrupted coldly. “She’s my girlfriend.”

Oh…

shit,

Teegarten thought. His mind skipped and lurched.

“I believe I’ve met a bike rider before. He ran me a little race. A priest?” He paused. “Oh, that’s wicked.” He held his gun hand palm-down over the candle’s flame on his right, and slowly worked the fingers. “What’s his name, and what church is he at?”

“His name is… is…” The detective’s heart pumped. “His name is Father Murphy, at the Church of St. Nicholas.”

Travis kept clenching and unclenching the long pale fingers. “What street?”

“Valle… Jones Street,” he corrected. “Jones and Jackson. It’s a big white place.”

“Ain’t they all?” Travis asked as the flame began to scorch his palm. His face was devoid of expression. He looked up from the candle. “Saint Nicholas. Ain’t he Santa Claus?”

“I swear to God,” Teegarten gasped, “if you let me go… I won’t say a thing. Nobody’ll ever know. I swear it. Okay?”

“You’ll know,” Travis answered. He removed his hand from the fire. “Put the cigarette back in your mouth, Moby.” He stood up.

“No… please…” He caught back a sob, and pushed the scorched cigarette into his mouth when he felt the awful force of the cowboy’s silence.

“Hold still, now. Real still. I don’t think I believe there’s a Santa Claus church.” His hand flashed to the Colt and wrenched it smoothly from the holster in an eye blink. The gun boomed, more brick splinters hit Teegarten’s face, and the cigarette was clipped in half. Teegarten wet his pants, his mouth clamped on the smoking butt.

“It’s the Cathedral of St. Francis!” he shouted. “I swear it! The Cathedral of St. Francis, on Vallejo Street!”

“Okie-dokie. Is that the priest’s real name, or is he made up too?”

Teegarten choked on smoke, and tasted hellfire.

He heard the Colt’s hammer click back.

“Lancaster,” Teegarten moaned, tears trickling down his face. “Father… John Lancaster. That’s his name.”

“Good,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet smashed into the fleshy bulb of Teegarten’s nose and took it away in a splatter of blood and flesh fragments. The shock threw him off the chair and against the bullet-pocked bricks; he cried out in agony and grasped his bleeding face.

“Shucks.” Travis blew smoke from the barrel’s tip. “I missed.” The Colt spun around his finger, was returned to the well-used leather. “Stop cryin‘. I hate that sound. I’m gonna tell you a story now,” he decided. “Once upon a time there was a cowboy who had so much love in him it busted his heart. Just--boom--blew it all to pieces. So Dr. Fields --oh, yeah, him, the bastard--said shut him away so he can’t never love nobody again. And I was doin’ so damned good before I heard that music. On a radio at night. Out there in that big country, where all the music floats in and tangles up in the air. Now, I told Bethy to behave. I swear I did. Oh, she was a willful thing!” He rubbed his hands together, trying to dry the palms. “Willful. I said you want me to cry blood, I’ll show you I can, by God, and then I went and had him do it. You know. The guy on Tenth Street out by the fairgrounds.”

Hoss Teegarten held his face as if trying to keep the rest of his dangling nose from falling off. His eyes were bright and staring with pain, and he began crawling away from the blotches of his own blood.

“I think he had a needle that made me sick,” Travis wandered on, through the haunted land. “Bethy and those red shoes, I swear!” He blinked, watching the fat man crawl. “No,” he said, and he pulled his gun out and shot the detective through the left knee. Then, as Teegarten sobbed and howled and sobbed some more, Travis opened the Colt’s cylinder and began to reload with bullets from his holster. “I always had a thing for blonds, but I like me brunettes too. Hell, redheads I won’t kick out of bed for eatin‘ crackers. Cheri Dane and Easee Breeze were blonds. Debra Rocks is a brunette. You see

Super Slick?“

Teegarten kept crawling, desperate and insane now, dragging his ruined leg across the wet concrete.

“There’s a scene where they all looked at me. Right at me. The three of them, together. And when they opened their mouths I heard that music, and I knew right then that California wasn’t such a long way from Oklahoma. See, the movie was made in California. So I came here. I mean, to Los Angeles first. Cheri Dane went to the openin‘ of her new movie.

Girl Trouble.

But that’s not near as good as

Super Slick.

So I followed her to her place, just like I followed Debra Rocks when she was at that bookstore. Oh, they try to change cars and all to shake you, but once ol‘ Travis gets his heart set…“ He watched the wounded man crawling, and then he lifted his reloaded gun and put a bullet squarely through the right elbow.

“I found out from this guy in a theater that he saw Easee Breeze in person at a place right here in San Francisco. So I came on to find her. I loved her, see. Like I loved Cheri Dane. And like I love Debra Rocks. I mean… they love me too, ‘cause I figured out the music.” He clicked the hammer back. “I knew what they were really sayin’, all the time.” He took aim. “They were sayin‘, ’Travis, come make us cry blood.‘”

The gun went off.

Hoss Teegarten lurched and fell on his face, his skull pierced at the right temple.

“And that’s the end of that story,” Travis said. He spun the Colt gracefully and sank it away. The barrel’s warmth bled through his jeans. “That wicked, wicked priest. We’re gonna have to do somethin‘ about him, ain’t we? She’s my date.” He went around blowing out the candles, but before he extinguished the last one he walked to his sleeping bag, surrounded by hamburger wrappers, and picked up a coil of rope. Then the final candle went dark, and he followed the flashlight’s beam out.

The telephone rang.

John almost fell out of bed in his haste to get to it. He grasped the receiver. “Hello?”

“Howdy.”

Whose voice was that? John had been expecting to hear from Hoss Teegarten…

“This Lancaster? Father John Lancaster?”

“Yes. Who is this?” Rain was still tapping at the window.

“Somebody who wants to see you.”

John glanced at his wristwatch on the small bedside table; he couldn’t make it out, so he switched on the lamp. Three minutes before two. “It’s a little early for games, isn’t it?”

“Not this game. The time’s just right. I’ve got a message for you from your girlfriend.”

“My…” His heart seized up. “Who is this?”

“I can bring the message to you, if that’s what you want.”

“Just tell me now.”

“Oh, I can’t do that.” The voice sounded as if the man might be smiling. “No, sir. You got a place we can meet… say, in about ten minutes?”

“The sanctuary,” John said. “What’s this about?”

“The sanctuary,” the man repeated. “I like the way that sounds. Safe. Listen, you a Catholic?”

“Of course I am.”

“You Catholics… like… have a little box you go into, don’t you? Thing about the size of a closet? You go in there and listen to people tellin‘ you what all they’ve done wrong?”

“A confessional, yes.”

“And you don’t see each other’s faces, do you?

It’s like one box talkin‘ to another box.“

“Roughly speaking.”

“That’s where I want you to be.”

John frowned.

“What?”

“In your box. In ten minutes. That’ll be… two-oh-seven. Whoops. Two-oh-eight. Then you leave the front door open, and I’ll come and get in my box. They’re right out where you can see them, ain’t they?”

“Yes,” John said cautiously. His skin was beginning to crawl.

“Well, that works out pretty as pink. You be there, and I will too. Oh. Hold on, now. Let’s get this straight up front: what I’ve got to say to you is between you and me. There ain’t gonna be nobody else there, right?”

“If there’s anybody else there, I won’t come in. I won’t tell you what your girlfriend in apartment number six with that pretty long black hair wants you to know. You be there alone, now.” The man hung up.

John’s first impulse was to call the police. But for what? Someone was coming to confessional; maybe the time was strange, but… And anyway, John wanted to hear what the man had to say. He was shaking like a wild leaf; if this really was a message from Debbie, had she found out about him? Oh, my God… had Teegarten told her?

Mysteries, mysteries.

John hurriedly put on his jeans. His black shirt with its stiff white collar was lying nearest to hand, so he put that on and buttoned it up. Then a thick beige cardigan pulled out of the closet. He slipped on his sneakers, without socks, and ran from his apartment to the sanctuary.

He checked the doors; they were still unlocked. The lights were low in the sanctuary, saving electricity, and he decided to leave them that way. He checked his watch. Almost time. This was ridiculous, but he had to find out what was going on. He walked to the confessional booth, entered it, and sat down on the velvet cushion to wait.

Two-oh-eight.

Two-oh-nine.

Two-ten.

And John sat alone, feeling like more of a fool every passing second.

Two-eleven.

Two-twelve.

He heard the hinge creak quietly as the front doors were pushed open. He sat up straight, his heart pounding, and put his hand on the latch.

“Which one you in, Father?” the man’s voice called.

“This one. Here, on your left.” He started to open the latch and peer out, but the man said, “You stay in there, now. Got somethin‘ real important to tell you.”

John’s fingers burned to open the door, but he sat listening to the sound of boots coming across the marble. Had he heard that sound somewhere before?

The footsteps halted. “You nice and snug in there, Father?”

“Come on and let’s get this over with!” John said, his nerves about to snap. “What do you want to tell me?”

“I want to confess,” the man said, and John heard him enter the confessor’s booth.