Carcass Trade (21 page)

I was relieved to reach the end, and when I stepped out, into the fresher air, the sun burst through a cloud, increasing the brightness of the storage shed directly ahead of me. At the left quadrant of the shed there was a small window, a mere cutout of board. A gray lizard clung to the edge. I was going to pass right by and go back to the rally, but there was a movement in the dark recess of the window, and I paused, pulled back, and peeked in, not knowing what I was seeing.

Switchie's light hair is what I recognized first in the shadows. Maybe he and Jolene were in there having a good time. I started to back away, and then I saw more movement by the door I'd seen open when I was looking down from the absent Porta Potti. Something like a long prod hung from Switchie's hand. Then a big man's back mid-distant in the shed blocked my view, and I realized Jolene was probably not there at all.

When the form turned, I saw the belly. And in the space between Paulie's quarter profile and Switchie standing a few feet away, I saw Quillard, his ankles together, his arms behind his back, and in the hole of his mouth a dark plug. He was twisting slowly from the waist first one way and then the other, eyes wide and the whites shining like moons scraped out of raw ice; and sheets of blood pouring from under his silver beard like a vibrant fringed and tasseled prayer shawl.

I dropped down, chest on my knees, and looked wildly for a way of escape.

To my right was a three-strand wire fence with a tall row of wild artichoke thistle behind it. Should I dive for it, or make for the corridor where the pigs were still dancing on their toes? My whole body shook. I was afraid I couldn't rise.

“He's spillin' all over the place. God
damn
it!”

“What do you want me to do about it? Next time we off a guy,
you
do it, you think you can do it better.”

Paulie again: “Over there. The feed bags. Get 'em. Jesus, I don't want to clean this up.”

“Oh, you fat fart, nothin' but whinin'.”

I heard a dull thud, maybe not even that—more like a soft
whump
—and I knew the body had fallen.

Darting toward the fence, I saw more room between it and the sties than I thought. About a third of the way down were three rusty fifty-five-gallon drums with blue plastic buckets nested on top of a short stack of deflated feed bags. I made for this small shelter, slipping in a muddy spot as I curled in, and landing hard on my hip.

My breath coming hard, I forced myself to quiet. Forced myself. Think, Smokey, think. You can do anything. You can take anything. Think it through. Off in the distance, on the playing ground for Monty's fellow riders, motorcycles buzzed. I could continue running down the length of stable, but fear once again had me locked. I concentrated. My breathing slowed and the shaking began to still.

Once my mother had taken two wire coat hangers to the backs of my legs. Only seven, I hadn't learned control: I wet the carpet where I stood; the tiny wool loops darkened, and my face burned with shame. Always I hated, when the memory would return, my lack of control, not the beating itself. Terror lasts until the day you simply run out of it, or it runs over you.
They can kill me, but they cannot hurt me
. That's what I learned when a teacher read
Uncle Tom's Cabin
to my class a few years later, some slave or other hopping over the ice floes with dogs at her heels, or someone else having the flesh flayed off his back.

You can do this, I told myself. You can ride over this fear.

Everything came into tight focus: the ribs on the rusty steel drums next to me; the Q-tip—sized knot of spider house attached under the barrel's lip; the crevices of damp earth bearing my boot skid marks; the gray, splintered boards at my shoulder; and my own buffed nails as I touched the steel barrels with the hands Joe called beautiful.

Through the cracks of the stable boards I felt the heat and prickly bristle of a sow as she leaned in near me as if against a common foe.
Huh
, she said,
huh.

Old girl, I whispered.

I tried to picture the geography of the farm. Was the road Monty and I had taken on the other side of the artichoke embankment? And if so, were there trees, any size, I could run between? When I heard a heavy noise in the shed where the killers were, I thought no more and just jumped for the clearest separation between the thorny plants. A low strand of wire tore into my ankle as I flew through, and I ripped my palm on a barb I hadn't seen. I was afraid I'd made the wires move. I flattened myself and listened for any sound of pursuit, breathing dust and the scent of pale weed pressed beneath my cheek. Above my eye level, a strand of wire neatly bisected the purest of white cloud, and impaled on a barb about a yard down was the desiccated body of a lizard. On another barb bracketed by two purple thistles was a speared grasshopper, the ghoulish testimonial of the loggerhead strike, a predatory songbird called a murdering bird in England and a butcher-bird here.

Carefully, I crouched through the thistle. When the plants thinned out, I was relieved to see stands of pampas grass high as houses, and I knew that in this country that meant a wash, and on the other side, probably a road. Maybe I'd make it after all.

Breaking through the pampas stands, I thought for a moment I should simply hide among them until dusk. But one thing I learned on patrol in Oakland is that it
works
to run, the sheer determined brazenness of flight successful too often for the crims
not
to try it. As I pushed through, the thin, microscopically serrated leaves rustled like secrets and grabbed at my clothes like members of a hazing gauntlet.

I raced up an embankment to the road, flagged down a car driven by a geek wearing a white shirt and brush cut, and thanked his engineering soul very much.

Joe picked me up at a hamburger place in Anaheim Hills an hour later. It was almost six o'clock, and I was doing fine except for being cold even under the denim jacket. I'd been able to order and drink coffee. My hands hardly shook. Doing just fine, yes. Until I saw Joe's solid form coming toward me, the silvery halo of hair, the caring eyes.

“Oh, baby,” he said. We leaned against a yellow pipe barrier outside. “I didn't mean for you to get into anything like this. This shouldn't have happened. Not at all, not at all.”

“It's okay. I'm okay. You were right, Joe. What did I think I was doing?” My throat seemed to cramp and to burn from the cramping. When Joe pulled me to him and his hand cupped my head, it was as though he pressed a button there: I moaned.

“I should have stopped you from going,” he said. “We get comfortable, complacent. I should—”

I looked at him, saw there was water in his eyes. “How many units are out?”

“I want to talk to you about that.” He said it like a doctor preparing bad news.

“A man just had his throat cut. I
saw
it. What do you mean?”

“There's something else going on. I'll tell you as much as I know, in the car. First we get you out of here. Get you cleaned up, get some disinfectant on this.” He turned my hand palm-up.

“Lockjaw might be fun for a while. I haven't done that yet,” I said, as I started walking to his car.

“Are we feeling sorry for ourselves?”

“Of course we're feeling sorry for ourselves. What do you think?”

Opening the door, he said, “The captain's waiting for us at the training center. It's on his way home.”

“The
captain
's waiting for me? Plunkett?”

“Hal Exner. Haven't you seen an organization chart lately?”

“I don't pay attention to those things.”

“He's the new one in from Missouri.”

“What happened to Plunkett?”

“He got promoted, I guess.”

“Probably kicked upstairs for feeling up some new patrol,” I said.

Before Joe backed the car out, I gave a great shiver. He looked at me with a worried expression and turned up the heater.

“Let's go over everything,” he said. “Sharpen everything in your mind before you get there. I won't ask questions, you just talk.”

“Give me a moment,” I said.

As we ran the freeway, I watched strip malls drift by like boat lamps in a lake of darkness. Joe, his face awash in red from dozens of brake lights, reached over to hold my uninjured hand. When he did, hot tears fled down my cheeks. I didn't even wipe them away.

Finally, I said, “The victim was maybe your age. White hair, white beard, kind of handsome.”

“Like me,” Joe said.

“Yeah, like you,” I said softly. “Only short. Think about that for a minute. Who'd we see lately who had white hair, was short, had dirt bikes in the bed of his truck?”

Joe flicked a glance at me, said nothing.

I went on: “The café, after the campground scene. The little guy with the holster. The killdeer. It was him, Joe. I looked over one time, I was standing with Monty, and the guy was looking back. It was him, I know it was. I think he recognized me. I thought, well, it's a free country, the man can be anywhere he pleases. But it was weird, seeing him twice in a week. I should have trusted that.”

Joe said, “What would you have done? Go up to him and say what the hell are you doing here?”

“I don't know. If I had, who knows what?” Anger rising, I said, “He almost had me fooled, that Monty. Talking about his dreams. Talking about his farm, about shooting stars at night.”

“Farm?” Joe asked.

And I kept on: “Shooting stars. Some dream girl with jewels in her belly. The creep.” I turned and looked at Joe, this man so good, so honest. “Joe, the old man out at the farm—Mr. Avalos—I figured he was a nice old man who'd probably had to put up with stupid, lazy children all his life. His wife is dying of cancer, and I liked him because he wouldn't shake Jolene's hand. But he's got to be a bag of shit too. Or else how could all this go on on his farm, right under his nose? Creep. All creeps.”

“Are you worried about Jolene?”

“I'd worry for anyone hanging around a man who can murder as easy as making a sandwich. She's a pisser, but that doesn't mean she deserves someone like Switchie.”

“Earlier, were there any other acts of violence? Any fights . . . ?”

“Just a bunch of rubbie drunks with twenty-thousand-dollar bikes they spit on and shine with their shirtsleeves. A few were rowdy. You know—‘Show me your tits,' like that.”

“Hm,” Joe said. “I should have been there. What kind of drunks you say?”

“Rubbies. Rich urban bikers. Weekend wheelers. Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs. So says Monty. But a lot of them looked like beer-bellied, tar-paper shack creeps to me.”

“Hey,” Joe protested, glancing down, sucking in his belly.

I rubbed it. “There were drugs. Some guy—”

“Tell me where there ain't.”

“Monty says he's not a doper. Who cares? He's a piece of shit any way you cut it. Joe?”

“Yeah, babe?”

“The man?” I turned down the noisy heater, then sat back and looked out the side window, got my breath. “He, he, like just kept turning. They sliced him,” I said, making a motion at my neck, “and he just kept turning, this way and that, like for an audience to see. I wanted to run up and push it back in. I . . .”

When we reached the training center, Joe patched my palm out of a first aid kit from one of the training classrooms. I was sufficiently recovered to recite the details.

The captain was in a different classroom nearest the outdoor firing range. A two-pane window was open six inches top and bottom through which we could observe moths whipping through the bright funnels formed by the range lights; moths, not butterflies. Captain Exner sat at the desk, Joe and I side by side in folding chairs at its corner.

I told the captain how I saw Quillard Satterlee die, his hands and feet bound and something dark stuffed in his mouth, and as I told it, saw again a splash of scarlet hit his slackening knees, saw again the eyes, the eyes.

I told the captain how we'd seen this man in a café after coming from a scene investigation off Ortega Highway. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, I told him, “There's a weird wire at the Avalos ranch.” I could feel Joe looking at me, and when I didn't get a response from the captain, I described the wire: barbs a couple inches apart, then up- and down-turned like a thin snake trying to find direction. “Not your regular barbed wire,” I said, “different. Joe and I, we found some strange wire, too. It was ten miles from the campground, but I don't know, it caught my attention, and there was duct tape in the trash too, like on the victim, his hands and feet, and the victim had wire embedded in his neck, broken off. Dr. Schaffer-White said. I mean, this wire—”

Joe interrupted, gave a recounting; same facts, calmer tone.

“The same wire as on the victim?”

“Not the same exactly,” I said.

“Then why are we talking about this?”

“I guess I don't know now myself, sir.”

He looked at me blankly.

Joe said, “She's been through a lot.”

Then the captain hit me with the questions I wasn't quite prepared for. “Why is it you were with this crowd to begin with, Smokey?” No one had clued him in.

He was a man in his mid-forties, brown over hazel, a packed one-eighty pounds on a six-foot frame, with a lean and canny hardness in his face that looked like he should be arguing cases before a court. I'd seen him around before but never wanted to get to know him. He was too physically perfect for my taste, too sure of himself, bound to have too many ambitions for my comfort. In other words, out of my league but without my regrets.

Cautiously, I began to tell him about the Carbon Canyon case, the charred car there and the remnant of human being within who might be my brother's ex-wife.

At some merciful point, he stopped me and said, “I'm aware of some of this case, Smokey. And I'm aware that you're working as a model at a lingerie bar in Garden Grove.”