Hot Sur (69 page)

Once Rose was able to accept that, he was there of his own will and with a definite purpose. He opened his backpack and pulled out the Glock. Not before that, only then. “Sacrifice is sacrifice,” he said half aloud. “If the thing is killing you, then you have to kill it.” The gun was loaded and the target a gift, yes, there was his Gift from God, distracted, his back to him, practically naked, as if begging for a clean shot in the back of the head. But Rose’s hand began to tremble, and his conviction faltered. Not because he feared the consequences of such an act in the sense of electric chair or such.

“There are things that a man should not live through,” he tells me. “The death of a child is one of them. You might survive, but you’re no longer alive. So that day on the mountain, I couldn’t have cared less about what would happen to me. This was about something else.”

If Rose’s hand trembled, it was because it was one thing to make the decision to kill another human being and another to do it. That was the complicated thing. This wasn’t the first time that Rose’s inability to execute had prevented him from doing away with Sleepy Joe. He just could not pull the trigger. It was beyond his strength; his finger did not obey the order sent from his head. Should he just turn around, go back to where he came from? Have forgiveness? Or pretend none of this had happened and try to forget? Maybe that’s how things would have turned out, given human limitations. But dogs are different kinds of creatures. Rose was seriously considering backing out just at the moment his dogs made a completely different decision, and raced down the hillside as a pack, encircling the kneeling man. Rose, who saw what was happening from above, referred to it as “a vicious hunting scene.” His exact words.

The three beasts fell on the unsuspecting prey and corralled him, cold and contained, in the splendor of their rage. Their teeth were peeled back to the base of their gums, their eyes fixed on the victim, as if reading his thoughts, their ears pricked, registering even the slightest gesture; more wolves than dogs, more wolves than gods, not one false move, no fussing, no barking: the single lethal threat a low growl, sustained, coming from deep inside.

“What I’m about to tell you may sound weird,” Rose warns me. “But the dogs may have saved Sleepy Joe for the moment, definitely forcing me to lower my weapon. With my shitty aim, if I had happened to shoot, I could have missed him and hit one of the dogs instead.”

Sleepy Joe’s next move was a mistake, a dreadful mistake. He tried to run. He had been terrified of animals since he was a child and, faced with this pack ready to maul him, Sleepy Joe thought it best to run. And the dogs, which until that moment simply surrounded him without touching him, fully set on him with the worst intentions. Bare as he was, the man offered all that white meat on a platter. It very soon became a massacre, especially because of Dix, the bitch. While Otto pinned him to the ground and Skunko locked his jaw on Sleepy Joe’s neck, Dix clamped on a calf and twisted his leg this way and that as if trying to yank it off. There are dog bites and then there are dog bites. Some dogs are just biters; other are butchers, merciless, and they don’t stop until the victim is carved up. Dix belonged to this second category, and within minutes the leg was reduced to shreds. Rose believed he heard crunching of bones and cartilage, and could swear he could even smell the fear that paralyzed Sleepy Joe, making him pee on himself.
So this is what it comes to,
Rose thought. If they could see you now, Sleepy Joe, fucked by the rules of your own game, the same mindfuck you played with your victims, making the pain of body, torn flesh, gore, nothing compared with that inward cry of utter panic.

It was an almost mythical scene of superhuman violence and infernal beauty, as memorable as Actaeon devoured by his raging hounds, the heads of Cerberus spewing fire, or the saga of Nastagio degli Onesti as interpreted by Botticelli.

From his box of honor, like Caesar at the circus, Rose noted some revelations from human sacrifice, the clairvoyant terror emanating from the truth that is hidden in death, or something similar, the monstrous lucidity brought about by pain. He understood what Sleepy Joe had been looking for by opening such disgusting doors into the sacred, or the other way around, opening doors to the profane through the sacred. And what had been incomprehensible for Rose took on another color, as if suddenly and for a moment he looked at the situation from within, or crossed a threshold to be able to perceive certain things.

“Don’t ask me what things, because they have no names,” he says. “Things that passed though me like an electric shock and then dissolved, like the images of a dream.”

I ask Rose if he ordered his dogs to stop, for the release of the man he was about to kill. He is evasive in his response. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I doubt that after a certain time they would have obeyed.” I repeat the question, and then he admits that no, he never tried to stop them. They stopped themselves when the man gave up the struggle and froze. Then Rose, who had been standing at some distance, approached, the gun aimed at Sleepy Joe’s head.

“You may say I’m a coward,” he tells me, “and I won’t argue with that. But still, wounded and torn apart as he was, the guy was still a threat. He still inspired fear, perhaps even more than before, bloody as he was, with that bone hanging out of his leg.”

The dogs were done with their prey and took a few steps back, not breaking the circle or hiding their fangs, and something like a gurgle came out of Sleepy Joe’s throat. Was he asking for something? Mercy, or perhaps water? Rose thought it over. Give water to this vermin? He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Wasn’t vinegar customary in such cases?

“I have coffee,” he said, and threw him the thermos.

Sleepy Joe took a couple of sips and turned to look at Rose, his eyes staring as he tried to say something, but at that point the dogs’ growling drowned his words. Rose did not know how long this exchange was supposed to be, what, if any, things were supposed to be said. Drivel, really, while the blood ran out of Sleepy Joe’s leg and the dogs surrounded him and he stared up into the barrel of the gun. But Rose couldn’t quite finish it: he dared not kill the enemy, and that was extending this situation longer than necessary. Sleepy Joe there, wounded but alive, and the minutes passing, and Rose killing time because he did not dare kill Sleepy Joe. At one point, he was about to tell him that he was Cleve’s father, had the words on the tip of his tongue, but ultimately he didn’t. It disgusted him. Why stoop low with such a claim; the name of his son was untouchable, and to say it in front of his murderer would be to soil it. Best just to give this piece of garbage the coup de grâce and put an end to it. But Rose couldn’t do it.

The silence of the mountain, until then absolute, was suddenly shattered by the blare of sirens. They were far away but they made Rose shudder, because he was forced to face the reality of the situation. A shot would be heard clearly down below, drawing the attention of the police.

“As if my natural cowardice were not reason enough,” he tells me, “I had a new reason not to shoot: I did not want to attract the police. But then I realized that this factor was both against me and in my favor. And I made a decision, to set things up so others could finish off Sleepy Joe.”

Rose would take a few shots in the air, and from there, the key would be in the timing: with the Glock and the help of the dogs, he would keep Sleepy Joe immobilized until the police were almost there, and then step aside to let things proceed. Not too far-fetched a plan, so he shot once, twice, three times in the air.

And from that point began the surprises and necessary improvisations. First off, with the gunshots, the dogs scattered. Otto, Dix, and Skunko were good fighters, but unlike María Paz’s crippled doggie, these three would not qualify as war heroes. Secondly, Rose forgot a very important detail. Something he had neglected to do before the dogs fled.

Rose forced himself to get closer to Sleepy Joe, the Glock held tightly in his right hand and pointed at the forehead. He felt horribly insecure without the support of his dogs, but at least he had the Glock. One step closer, another, jumping back every time the fallen man as much as stirred, and then forward again. The sirens were getting closer, and Rose hesitated, but then he made the risky move anyway, stretching his left hand out, with the finesse with which he would use chopsticks. A little closer and he could almost touch the guy, and then he rushed through the hardest part of the maneuver, which was bending over without giving Sleepy Joe an opening to strike him. A couple of inches more, and Rose’s hand dug into the clothes Sleepy Joe had left on the floor. The winter coat was pinned under the man’s weight. “Turn over, you fuck,” he yelled, feinting to shoot, and as Sleepy Joe stirred, Rose managed to kick the coat out of the way. And then he glimpsed a piece of what he was looking for: red canvas. He grabbed it and pulled it toward him in one swift move.

It was the red backpack María Paz had bought at the last minute in Colorado.

“And you remembered such a thing, just at that moment?” I ask.

“Well, it was not like Sleepy Joe was in any position to have invested in stocks,” he tells me, “or to deposit it in the bank. So he had to have the money on him . . . And there it was, or the red backpack was there anyway. And judging by the weight, he had not spent much.”

And then it was time to retreat without turning his back on the man even for a moment, undeterred by the sirens closing in. Alright. So far so good, as well as could be expected from someone who has leaped out of the seventeenth floor and was passing by the fifth floor or so. One step, pat pat, another little step, pat pat, back and away. Already at a safe distance, Rose started wiping the Glock with his shirt hem, a tricky maneuver, because at the same time he had to continue pointing it. And then, a moment later, at a safer distance, he threw the Glock as far as possible into the thicket so the cops wouldn’t find him armed and think he was the bad guy.

Again the sirens, this time more than one, right on them almost: the cars must have come upon the Gift from God. Rose knew that in a few minutes he was going to have to take off and run. That was the trick; he would count to a hundred, then run for his life.

But he did not count on the third and most grievously unexpected matter: a serious error in characterization. Rose had not counted on Sleepy Joe retaliating, given the sorry state he was in. But he did. He got up and started moving toward him, as if possessed, like the Incredible Hulk: a giant tortoise in his underwear, upright and wounded, his massive arms floating up as if separate from the body, the rather elfish head rising from his thick neck and coming out of the shell, meaning the shell of his torso bulging at the muscles on his chest and shoulders. It wasn’t hyperbole; this beast did indeed look like the Hulk, only not green but blue. Torturously dragging his shattered leg, but despite this handicap and the fact that he was unarmed, the age difference, the size, the weight training, and his newly invigorated state all played in his favor. And Rose, who was no longer twenty, and no longer had his dogs or the gun, began to fear the worst.

“Jaromil!” he yelled as a desperate last resort.

Hearing his real name, Sleepy Joe shrunk and squirmed like a slug sprinkled with salt. Who knows how many years it had been since someone had called him that?

“Where is Danika Draha, Jaromil? You dried her up, Jaromil, you, such a big little baby sucking on your mommy’s tit.”

An uppercut by Rose, not terminal but lethal, like David’s stone hitting Goliath. He won several seconds with the stupefaction that overcame Sleepy Joe, who until that moment must have wondered who this insignificant homunculus that set his dogs on him was, and couldn’t have cared less whether he was a gnome or a park ranger. But now he was suddenly stunned by this mysterious being who knew the name of his sainted mother.

“He must have thought that he was dead and that I was God,” Rose tells me.

But then Rose realized that his relative advantage was only momentary, because Sleepy Joe put two and two together and recognized him.

“I know who you are,” he wailed. “You are the old asshole from the Catskills with the dogs.”

A posteriori, Rose had made sense of things. He thought that ultimately it was not him who Sleepy Joe recognized, but the dogs, just as his dogs must have recognized Sleepy Joe, who during the days before killing Cleve must have prowled around the house in the Catskills, maybe unable to make it inside precisely because of the dogs, and hence nabbed John Eagles, who happened to be nearby, and ripped off his face. Then he waited for Cleve to go far from the house on his motorcycle to kill him.

“It makes sense,” he tells me. “But back to the Hulk. I heard male voices getting closer and closer. Sleepy Joe advanced, staggering, arms akimbo, blinded by the blood that dripped from his forehead, but advancing, advancing toward me. The cops were coming down, I could see them, and I ran toward them, shouting, ‘He’s armed! He’s armed!’ And the cops signaled for me to get out of the way and safe from the crossfire. And they moved in, shooting from all different directions. Sleepy Joe continued to advance, but surprise, surprise, not toward me; apparently I was not his goal because he passed right by me, stumbling, blinded and lame, as if drunk, suicidal, arms open and chest exposed, right into the endless volley of gunfire.”

And that’s it. Sleepy Joe fell, and nothing happened. The sky did not darken, torrential rain did not suddenly fall, the earth did not flinch nor stars cry. Nothing.

The police noted the white cross, of course, impossible to miss, and they realized they had come upon the fugitive they had been after for days, the celebrated Passion Killer, the biggest catch in all the US of A.

Ten or twenty minutes later, Rose, again surrounded by his dogs, played the part of the innocent neighbor who had gone for a walk on the mountain and been shot at by this man, and his dogs had jumped to the defense of their master. He answered a few routine questions from the lieutenant, who was friendly, euphoric even. There were several inconsistencies in Rose’s version of events that would have become known through a more thorough investigation, but the police were too excited about their own role in the case to worry about such things. “Thank you, lieutenant,” Rose said, squeezing his hand, “you saved me, thanks.”