God Is a Bullet (13 page)

“Nothing. Just that she was alive when they’d been there.”

“That’s all?”

Case’s eyes remain fixed to the road. “That’s all.”

He suspects she’s lying. Maybe he’s even thankful for it. Maybe.

It takes another two hours between stops for gas and coffee to breach San Diego County. The steady drone of the road behind the Dakota’s stereo lulls them, but all that changes when a road sign squares up for the Escondido exit.

Case turns off the radio. “Just a couple of miles now,” she warns.

Bob slips the Ruger out of his belt and checks the wheel-gun’s ammo. It’s almost eleven. They cruise past weedy vacant lots and tracts of flat-faced homes. At the far end of El Norte Parkway is a trailer park sitting up in brush country. It’s surrounded by a scratchy palisade of cypress and blue oak.

They park the truck in a field about a quarter mile away. They steal through the waist-high grass like tribesmen on a
hunt. The moon runs silvery behind the clouds. The night is cool, but both are sweating as they make for the line of trees. Case is starting to feel her stomach seize up on her. She could vomit. She is afraid. It ain’t up to wizards now, or shamans, or even therapists. No one to whisper, Here’s how it goes down, bitch, if you want to do it right …

They wolf in low behind a knot of trunks. Thirty yards ahead there are a few streets’ worth of trailers. They pick up the sound of a television going through a series of station changes and the smell of food being fried. Spots of light from the windows fall in patches on the gravel road and against cars parked in tight alongside the double-wides.

Case points. “Over there. That green double-wide with the porch up on cinder blocks. That’s one of Cyrus’s places.”

Bob looks over to where she points. One light glows behind a brown curtain.

“You think the whole pack of them would bring her here?”

“Maybe,” she says.

“He’d take that kind of chance?”

“There is no such thing as chance to him. You can only take a chance if you’re afraid. If you’re not, chance ain’t nothing. He’d do it for that reason alone.”

Bob wipes the sweat off his neck. “It’s been a long time, right, since you were there.”

“Yeah.”

“The place could be someone else’s by now.”

“We’ll find out pretty soon.”

The rear door of the closest trailer opens. A ransacked-looking excuse of a housewife in a funky pink robe steps out into the dark carrying her garbage. Her German shepherd jumps into the light and scoots around her, his nose working the ground for a spot to piss.

Case and Bob slide down into the cask of the roots so as not to be seen. The dog seems to pick up their smell. He starts barking. His head turns in hard snaps. The woman
calls him but he doesn’t move, doesn’t stop. The woman hangs there with a cigarette on the edge of her lips.

Bob can see she’s got the kind of face that’s been wrecked by decades of cocktails and bad attitude, and not one to go along gently. She keeps watching.

Case and Bob huddle there, hardly breathing now. Finally she calls the dog in, and her door closes and the yellow light of the room is swallowed up.

Case goes to sit up, but Bob stops her.

“Hold back a bit,” he says. “She may be watching. She’s the type. Believe me, I’ve been called in by enough like her to know.”

Case nods and sits there.

They huddle up for maybe an hour, giving the old lady’s eyes a chance to get bored. They talk and lay out the moves ahead. Case will play the Little Red Riding Hood part. Knock on the door and see if the Big Bad Wolf is there filing his teeth. If Cyrus is, and if she can clear the door by putting on a good junkie grovel, and if the girl is there or at least if she gets a sense the girl is there, she’ll give Bob one sign. If not, she’ll give him another. Bob will then move accordingly. But each move comes with the promise of blood.

If none of them are there, if there’s just some coolie they got holding down the fort for room and board and a few toots, well, that’s something else altogether. And Bob’ll be given the sign to lay back.

Case is barely an imprint against the green cinder-block walls as she makes her way along the sundeck of the double-wide. She passes the window. A sliver of light seeps from the edges of the drawn curtain, whose ratty corners leave a thin, useless glimpse of the room beyond. There are no voices. Just music. Heavy-edged stuff on the slow side, thrumming from somewhere down a hallway. Case takes a breath, knocks on the door.

Bob watches from a twisted grotto of branches. No one
answers. Case looks back in his direction. There is a muscle-tightening pause as she knocks again.

Bob can feel the tension climbing up his neck. Jesus Christ, he’s been here before. Back on Via Princessa. Waiting for an answer to a knock that didn’t come.

He notices the old lady had made a return appearance and is now working the trailer windows. A church-owl of a face aiming right at the front door of the double-wide.

“Get your fuckin’ face back inside, you …”

Case is still eyeing the dead silent fake-wood door. Enough with bullshit civility. She reaches for the doorknob. Everything from her stomach down through her ass turns to jelly.

Screw this up, girl, she thinks, and you’ll end up some sewer cocktail making your way through the city’s drainpipes out to the sea. Just something some innocuous swimmer off the coast of Encinitas will get a face full of, in the quiet Sunday morning surf.

Bob sees the door open, and his eyes go back to that nervous speckled face inside her kitchen.

“Don’t do it, Case,” he whispers. He tries to wave to her. “Not with the bitch eyeballing you like that.”

He stands and tries to get Case’s attention. But in one cursed breath, she’s in. In, and the old lady’s heart-shaped face is staring at the green double-wide. She turns and glances at the telephone.

Bob feels the air whistle out of him. No, not this time. He does not need some “concerned citizen.” Not this time.

He sees her take those first steps to the phone.

He curses silently. Don’t touch that fuckin’ phone … Don’t …

She lifts the receiver.

He is shocked at the moment inside him. You can’t have it both ways.

She begins to dial.

Maybe she’ll have a heart attack right now. Nothing serious, just a little slammer to slow her down.

No such luck.

The living room is a vacant stand of furniture. Case did a couple of tours of duty in this place, and a few rancid memories come back. She leans against the dark where the wall is and listens. There is not a sound except that music coming from a back room.

She starts a slow course in that direction. Her hand down on the pistol hidden under her shirt in her jeans, following the lamplight, following the shadowy breakers beyond that.

She comes toward the music, toward a maze of short halls. She can feel the bass line from the speakers pound up through the floorboards. She’s getting ready to put on her best shuck and jive for whoever might be home. Then, coming around a corner and into a bedroom that once was hers, she spots a naked piece of manhood lying on a red corduroy couch.

He’s twenty, maybe twenty-five. Over six-foot-three. His body is covered with the hand art of some skin wizard. He’s got coarse red hair and nipple rings, and the tip of his penis has been pierced. A diamond stud sparkles against pink skin. His eyes are closed.

No Cyrus, though. No Lena. None of the old rat pack. Just some new boy on the block. She notices a hash pipe and a needle on the carpet beside the couch, with all the necessary jewels around it for a good high.

She can’t help but check the boy out. He’s the type she used to do a lot of fifteen minutes with.

She looks around the room for some sign of the girl, though she’s not quite sure what exactly that might be.

“Am I dead?”

She turns and looks at the boy, who is now lying there
with his eyelids half open. “I don’t know,” says Case. “Can you have a hard-on when you’re dead?”

He moves a little. “If I was dead, you might be an angel. I would like to fuck an angel. But if I’m not dead …”

Case eyes him slyly, putting together the pieces of a play. “You’d fuck whatever’s left, right? Let me give you a hint, alright? Leave the talking up to that cock of yours.”

Bob is counting the clock. Five minutes went by twenty minutes ago. And what he gets for his worry is the slow crawl of a police cruiser turtling up the dirt access road toward the old bitch’s trailer. He’s got to start working on his options now. Got to either try getting Case out of there or let her go down and deal with it later.

The old lady isn’t out the front door a heartbeat before she’s harping away. She’s got that nosy paranoid sense of dire urgency, something every cop fears but knows he better deal with if he doesn’t want to face some charge of dereliction of duty.

By the time the cops start for the green double-wide, Bob is running back to the pickup, his arms caning at the high grass. He takes off his money belt and slips it under the front seat. He grabs a shotgun and shells and heads back toward the trailer park, toward that runny well of light.

He makes his way past the garbage cans behind the old lady’s trailer, looking for a soft spot in the dark he can curl into. He gets a back-row seat nested behind some wild brush for the cops’ slow approach on the green double-wide.

The loud knock cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is, and there has to be a voice coming back from inside because one of the policemen answers. Then everything is a collision of cross-purposes and bad timing.

Bob sees some jerk-off kid, a tall buck with red hair, come crashing out the back window with nothing on but black leathers, leaving a comet trail of broken glass behind him.
The old lady goes psycho right there in the middle of the street. This bony thing with a boom box for a mouth starts running as one of the cops rams the front door. His partner leaps the sundeck railing and kangaroos down the slippery side of a dirt garden. In the section of bedroom framed by the broken window, Bob sees Case scrambling to get her clothes on, scrambling to get her pistol. What the hell is she doing jackass naked?

It’s all fugitive madness. He hears a cop yell “Halt!” and fire a warning shot into the air. The old lady goes down into the gravel like some pissant sinner at a tent meeting. The front door is hammered in by a blue shoulder. Every one of Bob’s plans to get Gabi back is heading for the scrap heap.

It’s dig-down time.

Bob gets ready to rewrite the party book. Give the boys in blue a little vamp on procedure. He’ll show them a routine they ain’t practiced. That much he knows for sure.

He brings the shotgun up and puts a fast shell burst into the front of the police cruiser. The radiator punctures like a main artery and a line of blue Freon sprays out twenty feet. Both cops come to a dead stop, trying to get a handle on what is going down. Thinking time is lost time, boys. There’s another scream, and a dog starts howling. A baby begins to cry. Bob puts a second shot into the cruiser and the hood of the sedan is sent straight up, straight up like a blown jack-in-the-box lid spinning end over end.

For a moment Bob thinks he spots Case making a bust-out through a back door and rushing up into the darkness at the far end of the trailer park. He slips into the dark, back beyond the panic, out of view of the cops converging on the spot where the shiny black hood has slammed into the ground like the blade of an executioner’s ax.

Bob is running now, full-tilt boogie for the pickup, knowing full well that if he’s caught it’s just a matter of where they send the remains.

He’s behind the wheel now and spinning out through the
brush with his headlights off when he sees someone shape up over a pile of fallen cypress limbs and stumble into the darkness. He comes to a ground-grinding stop. The shotgun door swings open. It’s Case. She’s got blood coming down her cheek from a wound over one eye. She isn’t even in when she yells, “Fuckin’ go!”

Gabi lies naked in the night sand, curled up and shining like a lucent egg. The sand against her back comes howling up the crooked wash eroded out of the hillside. The sand burns her flesh in waves and slowly brings her to.

Helpless and mute, staring at the grim remainder of the night sky, she tries to sit. The world around her is a bare ten feet of wind-whipped yellow sand. Her aching left breast is purple and swollen with nubbed red marks like sutures from endless teeth bites. Her left arm aches where the needle was shoved up into her veins. She is lazy and disoriented from the heroin. She is exhausted from the nightmares. She is unsure what she dreamt and what she lived. She is alone in the middle of some uncertain wilderness. Too confused to understand the fear that is coming up within her.

She remembers vague sentences, ellipsing feeble thoughts like ether … Words in Spanish … Crossing into Mexico … The one they call Cyrus endlessly talking … Crying … Breaking glass … There were gunshots, weren’t there?

Finally, like some newborn beast realizing it is alone and without, she struggles to her feet. Wary and wobbling, she cups her hands around her eyes against the wind. She cries out to her father. Panicked and swaying, she moves, lost, but some force leads her along. She follows the wind up through the charred yellow rock.

Her eyes sting from the wind, but she fights to keep them open. She trips, slides down a stretch of stone. Rolls over, weeping. It’s then she sees him. She struggles up on game-less legs. Looks for the will to lead her feet.

He is just an outline, really, a scarecrow figure above the rocks where the wind has thinned out. Beside some dark Jeep-like vehicle. It isn’t Cyrus. It’s not one of the others. It’s not the van she was raped in.

She calls to him. He doesn’t answer. She grabs at the rock with a child’s fingers. Squeezing them like cleats against the stone, pulling herself up and shouting.

He seems to turn.

She blubbers out a few more cries, trying to get his attention, but the wind overwhelms her words. She sees him move, move just slightly. There is something like a nod. Something that tells her he has seen her.