Gravedigger (19 page)

Thelma Gaillard watched him hang the receiver in its fork, her face creased with worry. She wrung her hands. “You’ll find him now, won’t you? You’ll find Don?”

“I’ll find him.” Dave gave her a quick smile and hurried out the door and down the stairs in the solemn rain. He didn’t feel solemn. He felt elated.

T
HE CANYON WAS HUNG
with rags of sooty cloud this afternoon. The rain fell steady and cold. Anything able to turn green had turned green—oaks, pines, chaparral. The grass among the rocks was thick and high. The potholes in the twisting roads were wider today, deeper, but the Jaguar didn’t let him feel them. It took the bends, elbows, the steep lifts and falls of the roads without effort. Even so, his good arm grew tired, his hand on the wheel ached.

He stopped on a plank bridge above the tumbling muddy stream and studied again the map he’d picked up at a shiny bookstore in Santa Monica. He had to squint to make out the map. Burro Trail was no more than a thin scribble maybe a quarter-inch long. It was far back in from the roads he’d prowled along the other morning. He hadn’t come within miles of it. There’d been no chance that he’d sight the Rolls, the panel truck, the old Impala.

He laid the map on the empty seat beside him and sat flexing his stiff fingers and frowning to himself. He had passed and left far behind the crossroads with the filling station, general store, building yard. Should he drive back there and ring Salazar? Being alone when he found Westover didn’t worry him. Gaillard didn’t worry him. But what about the girl? If she was Serenity, how sane was she, how stable? Maybe, after all, she had been the one who tried to kill him.

He gave his head a shake. This wasn’t like him. This case was humdrum—attempted fraud on an insurance company. He’d handled a hundred of those in his time, more than a hundred. The car smash and his aches and pains were getting to him. And his goddamn age. And the gruesome background of this one. He saw those shacky blue buildings again out there in the desert, the sandy holes where the girls had been buried. He shivered, though the heating system of the car worked well. He wasn’t even wearing his jacket. He wished he knew what Cecil had learned at Perez. Had the Impala come from Jay’s dusty lot of high-gloss jalopies? Ah, the hell with it. He was acting like an old woman. He started the car and rumbled it off the loose planks of the bridge and went to find Burro Trail.

It climbed a box canyon as Anna Westover said, two ruts that the new spring grass was doing its best to make invisible. The rainy daylight was dying fast, helped by tall trees, pines and pin oaks. He peered past the batting of the windshield wipers, hoping Westover had switched a light on that would lead him to the cabin. But there was only gloom. He didn’t want to show headlamps. He wanted to arrive with as little warning as possible. In the TR this would have been unthinkable. It was noisy. The Jaguar’s engine purred like the big cat it was named for, powerful, no need for bluster.

Was what he saw now, back among the trees, the straight line of a roof? He slowed the car, inching it along the bumpy ruts, keeping in his sights that horizontal line until he was sure. He stopped the car, switched off the ignition, set the gears. He stretched awkwardly to paw his jacket off the rear seat, and got out of the car. Under the chill sifting of the rain, he worked his good arm into the jacket sleeve and hiked the left side of the jacket up over his shoulder, over the arm in the sling. He crouched to set the handbrake, straightened up, and quietly closed the door. He stood for half a minute, gazing up the trail. Had Lovejoy sent that letter? Had Westover picked it up? He sure as hell hoped so. He drew a long breath, expelled the breath, and began to climb the trail.

Even in the growing dark, it wasn’t hard to see the marks cars had made coming down out of the woods and going back up into the woods. He followed the marks, slipping sometimes in the mud. The house was farther than he had judged. He encountered the Impala first, facing him, front fender crumpled, dripping rust in the rain, the headlamp smashed. Beyond the Impala stood the rain-glossed Rolls. And beyond that, half in some kind of ditch, tilted, Gaillard’s panel truck. The light was bad, the paint faded, as Thelma Gaillard had said, but he could make out the yellow lettering, as much of it as showed above the dripping brush: “llard” and, below that “fted furniture.” He didn’t know why it put him in mind of an abandoned hearse.

The cabin looked deserted. It wasn’t. Sounds told him that—the slap of a screen door, the drum of heels on a porch. A rifle went off. The slamming noise it made echoed in the rainy hills. A bullet whined past his ear. Someone shouted, “Hold it right there, mister.” Dave stepped behind a tree trunk. The voice called, “You’re on private property. You’re trespassing. Get off.”

“Charles Westover?” Dave called. Could it be Westover? It sounded like a boy’s voice. The rifle slammed again, the bullet hit the tree trunk, and knocked loose bark that fell on Dave. He brushed it out of his hair. He shouted, “I’m from Banner Insurance.” The rifle went off again. But the bullet didn’t sing, and it didn’t strike anything. He thought it had been fired into the air, and he couldn’t make sense of that. He shouted, “We wrote you a letter. About your claim. Did you get the letter?” The gun went off again. The bullet hit the tree high up. A pinecone rattled down through wet branches and hit the ground with a splash. Dave shouted, “I need your signature on some forms. So we can pay you.” Why was he saying these things? Why didn’t he just turn around and leave? He turned around to leave, but someone was in his way, someone scrawny. The blond girl, in her raveled sweater, dirty jeans, and dark glasses. The rifle fire had been only cover to let her reach him. A big black machine pistol was in her little hand, and she pushed it into his sore ribs and said, “Not this way, that way. We’re going in the house.”

“What is Westover so afraid of?” Dave said.

“You think about being afraid,” she said. “Don’t worry about him. Move. Move.” She jabbed him with the gun barrel and pushed him. He wished she sounded nervous. She sounded confident, even bored. He walked ahead of her, watching his step on the rough and muddy ground in the dying light. As if his falling or not falling were a matter of importance. He grinned sourly to himself.

“You’re Serenity,” he said, “aren’t you?”

“That doesn’t mean it’s over,” she said. “It’s only just beginning. Climb the steps.”

“Why aren’t you with Azrael?” he said.

She laughed and poked the gun hard into his lower back, right against the spine. “Climb,” she said.

He climbed. The stairs were well made. Paint had worn off them but the planks were thick and sturdy, meant to last. He thought about Gaillard, hanging onto this place in the frail hope of getting Westover back here some sweet impossible day. Only it hadn’t been impossible, had it? It had just been all wrong. At the top of the stairs, Dave lifted his eyes. The rifleman was scrawny too. He held the rifle under his arm, pointed at Dave. The roof overhang made the porch dark, so there was no way to see his features. He looked as blond-haired as Serenity. And his eyes were so pale they seemed to glow.

He backed through the cabin door, keeping the rifle barrel leveled at Dave. The girl pushed Dave ahead of her across the porch and through the door into a room that was pitch-dark. The door closed. A match was struck, and the flame showed Dave a second man, slight, gray-haired, bending above a kerosene lamp on a table of thick, polished planks. The man touched the flame of the match to the wick of the lamp and the wick took fire softly. The man blew out the match and set a slim, smoky glass chimney over the flame. The top part of the man’s right ear was missing. He looked at Dave sadly and slumped down on a spooled maple sofa with faded chintz cushions. He looked thoroughly beaten.

“Are you Lovejoy?” he said.

“I work for him,” Dave said. “I’m Brandstetter.”

“That’s good,” the rifleman said. “That means we’ve got a name to contact at the insurance company. That’s very good. Where did you leave your car? Is there anyone in it? You came alone?” His pale eyes were crazy and he smiled. It was a wide smile meaning nothing. He had cut off his holy-man hair and beard. But there was no mistaking him.

“You’re Azrael,” Dave said.

“Azrael died in the desert on the way to Las Vegas,” Azrael said. He sat down at the other end of the sofa, the rifle laid carelessly across his knees. But Dave wasn’t going to escape. He could feel the girl’s breath on the back of his neck. “His soul is in limbo, waiting to be reborn in a far country, to begin a new life.”

“You had Serenity follow you to Nevada,” Dave said. “You dumped the van out there in that barranca and doubled back here.” He looked at Westover. “It wasn’t your idea to apply for her insurance. It was theirs. They wanted the money to escape on.”

Westover sighed and nodded glumly.

“You didn’t leave your house to avoid creditors,” Dave said. “These two brought you here.” He glanced over his shoulder at Serenity. “You remembered this place. Uncle Don’s cabin in the woods. A good place to hide until the insurance company paid up.”

“Too many neighbors down there,” she said.

“Where is Gaillard?” Dave said.

Westover made a sound and put his hands over his face.

“You want to see Gaillard?” Dave had thought Azrael’s smile was wide before. It stretched wider now. He looked straight into Dave’s eyes. The effect was like an electric shock, but less pleasant. Dave tensed to keep from shivering. Azrael jumped up off the couch, laid the rifle on the table, scratched a match on its blue cardboard box, and tilted the chimney of a lantern to set its wick afire. He picked up the lantern by its wire-loop handle. “Come with me.” He went down the room, making a sound that might have been a chuckle. It resembled the noise hyenas make around a kill. Serenity’s gun nudged Dave and he moved after Azrael.

Dave asked Westover, “Why don’t you run away?”

Westover’s mouth twisted. “Because if I try, he’ll kill Serenity. Oh, he will. Oh, yes. And you, too.”

“Move,” Serenity said. And Dave moved, through a door Azrael had opened and down a short hallway, half-open doors on either hand, and through a kitchen strewn with empty cans and wrappers and stinking of garbage. The lantern swung in Azrael’s hand. At a door that led outside, he turned back to give Dave another look from those insane pale eyes and to make the hyena noise again. He was amused. He pushed out a screen door and the lantern stairstepped downward. Here were more of Gaillard’s sturdy steps. They ended in a puddle. The rain fell through the swinging nimbus of the lantern up ahead, sparkling. Dave stumbled on clods and rocks. Brush lashed his trousers, soaking them, chilling his legs. Branches slapped his face. He wiped the wet off his face with his hand. The land sloped off. Azrael had moved faster than they. The lantern stood on the ground and Azrael moved in its glow. For a second, Dave couldn’t figure out what he was doing. Then he knew. He had a spade, and he was digging. Dave stopped.

“I don’t want to see this,” he said.

“You said you wanted to,” Serenity said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what you want. All that matters is what he wants. That’s all that matters in this world. You’ll learn that. You’ll be happy when you learn that.” She jabbed him with the gun. “Go on. Go on down there.”

Dave shut his eyes. Thelma Gaillard was looking up at him, pleading, wringing her hands.
You’ll find him now, won’t you? You’ll find Don?
He opened his eyes and went on down to where Azrael was throwing heavy clods of mud to one side and making the hyena sound. He grinned at Dave.

“You wanted to see Gaillard?”

He threw the spade aside and dropped to his knees and dug with his hands, scrabbled with his hands like some animal after some other animal in a burrow. The glow of the lantern in the falling rain made it stranger even than it was. In Dave’s mind, Cecil said, This is weird. Azrael made a new sound. A long-drawn growl of satisfaction. He turned his sharp small-boy face up to Dave, his mad eyes. With animal quickness his hand caught Dave’s and yanked Dave to his knees in the mud. Azrael grabbed the lantern and held it low over the hole he had dug. A face looked up at Dave, a face already eaten at by the things that live in the ground, waiting for such faces, but a face Dave knew, the face of Don Gaillard. A terrible smell rose out of the hole. Dave turned away and vomited.

“You wanted to see him,” Azrael said. There was no expression in his voice. He got to his feet, set the lantern down, picked up the spade, and began filling up the hole again. “I wanted you to see him. I want you to believe in me.” The wet earth slopped into the hole. “I want you to remember my deeds. By their fruits shall ye know them, all right? I always mean what I say. Mortals say”—he was panting a little with the effort it took to move the sodden earth—“I’ll kill you. But they don’t mean it. When the angel Azrael says I’ll kill you he means it.”

Behind and above where Dave hung on hands and knees, trying to make his stomach stop convulsing, Serenity laughed. The spade slapped the wet earth. Dave felt splashes of mud from the grave. The spade rattled when Azrael tossed it aside again. Dave felt arms under his arms. He was lifted to his feet. He couldn’t look at them in the lantern light. He kept his face averted as they climbed back to the cabin. In the main room, Charles Westover sat slumped on the couch just as they’d left him. He lifted his beaten eyes to Dave.

“They made me eat his heart,” he said.

“He wanted to help you,” Dave said. “He loved you.”

Westover nodded. “I know.” But it didn’t appear to matter to him anymore. “He drove into the yard. I saw him from that window. Smiling. He looked so happy.” Tears were supposed to break in here. Westover waited for them, or seemed to, but they didn’t come. He looked bitterly at Azrael. “He shot him. Over and over again. He didn’t even have time to get out of his truck.” He looked at Dave again. “You were lucky.”

“Is that what you call it?” Dave said.

“Perverts,” Azrael said. “Perverts.”

“I was glad my son was gone,” Westover said. “When they came, I felt like thanking God that Lyle was gone. Is he all right? He didn’t kill himself, did he? He said he was going to kill himself. It wasn’t true, was it?”