Sinister Heights (16 page)

“Don't see. Do.”

“I'll call you back.”

“You're goddamn right.” I was talking to a dial tone.

I'd been off the ankle too long. My foot had gone to sleep. Before it could wake up I limped into the kitchen and cranked down the bottle from the cupboard above the sink and filled the water glass I'd used earlier. I leaned back against the sink with my ankles crossed and drank it down the same way I'd drunk down the water.

It was cheap Scotch, the kind that kills the nerves in the tongue on contact, like licking a twelve-volt battery. If you drank enough it did the same thing to your brain. I wanted to drink enough; wanted it the way I wanted an easy retirement and a cabin on the lake and all my dead friends to be alive. Instead I put the cap back on the bottle and pushed it to the back of the drainboard. I had a long way to go and a short time to get there. Jerry Reid. Carl Sandburg in boots and a cowboy hat.

I caught the telephone on the third ring, even though I had to hobble in from the kitchen and my foot was wide awake and letting me know how it felt about it. “Thorpe?”

“Yeah. I called in a favor. It isn't a Cadillac. It isn't even a Yugo, but it'll be at your place in twenty minutes. How's your midlife crisis?”

“I don't even remember midlife.”

“Too bad, it'd help.”

At the end of eighteen minutes something rumbled into my driveway. I went to the front door, snapped on the light over the garage, and looked out.

“Holy Christ,” I said.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

The young man aboard the motorcycle hadn't been born the last time that model thundered off the line. He was in his tender twenties, slender and tattooed, in factory-faded jeans and a black T-shirt with a white legend reading
RUNS WITH SCISSORS
. He had a Kerouac goatee and when he swung down the kickstand and climbed off the machine and removed his helmet, his hair lay flat and sleek to his skull like a beaver's. He looked up at me on the front step, shielding his eyes against the bright bulb above the garage.

“You're Walker? Thorpe called me.”

I said I was Walker. “Where's Peter Fonda?”

“Don't know him. The name's Dollier. I work security at the GM Tech Center in Warren. Thorpe said you need to borrow my bike. You ride?”

“It doesn't look that much more complicated than my old Schwinn.” I stepped down and walked around it. It was a hike. It was a chopper on a six-foot wheelbase with red-and-black fenders and full chrome on the engine and pipes, a mirror finish, and
Indian
written in silver script on both sides of the fuel tank. The black leather banana seat had fringe hanging off it, a nice frontier touch. I'd heard about the 2000 Chief, the first reissue in almost fifty years of the legendary V twin, but I'd also heard of Sasquatch and the alien autopsy and I hadn't gotten any closer to them than the tabloid rack at Wal-Mart. It smelled of rubber and leather and hot shiny metal, a new-toy smell.

“C'mon, mister. Thorpe's Thorpe and I owe him my job, but I was only six months looking for this one. I was on a waiting list for the Chief four years.”

“Mind if I try it out?”

He frowned at a scuff mark on the white helmet. “Sure. Why not? Hell, I mean I got out of bed.”

I swung a slippered foot over the seat, felt a stab of pain when I rocked the weight onto my bad ankle to release the stand, and turned the key. I was grateful for the electric ignition. The motor started with a pleasant virile bubbling bass like hailstones on a kettle drum and I felt the vibration in my crotch. I twisted the throttle a couple of times, clearing its throat, then found the foot shift and took off. I wobbled a little at first, found my balance by the end of the driveway, and swung into the street.

I had the pavement all to myself at that hour, and I opened up around the corner, lighting up windows in my wake; the neighborhood was mostly retirees who called to complain whenever someone played Jerry Vale too loud on the stereo. The damp night air misted my face, gnats and tiny moths patted my cheeks and forehead and staggered away to sleep it off on a nice quiet burdock leaf. The rippling beat of the big 1442 between my knees blatted back at me from the brick and clapboard facings on both sides of the street. In my wild young days before the service, I'd torn about the countryside aboard a 350 Suzuki, blowing raspberries at God and man from a pipe I'd reamed out with a broomstick to eliminate the baffles; the two machines had as much in common as Hot Wheels and a Bentley. The Indian weighed better than six hundred pounds and hugged the turns like a tank.

I circled the block, then as I approached my house I hunkered over the handlebars and twisted the throttle all the way forward. The curb slanted at a thirty-degree angle where it was cut down for my driveway. I hit it, went airborne for a giddy half-second, and turned the wheel as I landed on the grass, braking and pegging down my good foot as a pivot. I skidded in a circle and cut the motor. There was a little lagoon of silence, then the first brave cricket scratched its legs, followed by an ovation.

Dollier came sprinting across the lawn. “It's not a mountain bike. You want to lay it down?”

“Just shaking out the ticks. I'll stand you to a cab home. When do you need it back?”

“I need not to let it out of my sight. Tell me where you're going. I'll ride you over.”

“No good. I'm moving fast.” And dodging pickups; but I didn't say that. “You talked to Thorpe.”

“You don't talk to Thorpe. He talks to you, and he doesn't say anything you can use. But it looks like you can handle it okay. Don't get cute and park it between two cars. It needs its own spot.” He caressed the fuel tank. “I'll still be making payments when the Democrats get back in.”

“What's it burn, regular or premium?”

That brightened him a little. “Regular's fine. Don't let it spill over. It's hell on the paint. You'll need this.” He held out the helmet.

“Looks small. What's your hat size?”

“Six and three quarters.”

“I'm seven and a half.” I took out my wallet and stuck out two fifties. “Get it decaled.”

He took them, nodding. They didn't make a dent in what he owed on the bike. They were just a symbol, like the feathered chief on the fender.

Dollier was still there, using a handkerchief on a smudge on the chrome, when I came out of the house in my Windbreaker and a pair of elastic-sided boots I'd dug out of the closet, supporting the ankle without pinching it. The Windbreaker was leather, with a flannel lining. I felt like Brando; the ex-Wild One who had lost a daughter to suicide and a son to prison.

“You want to look out for the law,” Dollier said, straightening. “They'll bust you without a helmet.”

“They'll have to catch me first.” I swung a leg over the seat.

“Where you headed?”

“Toledo.” Fear flew up in his eyes like a spark. I smiled. “Don't worry, they only shoot during football season.”

I started the motor. He shouted that he had to be at work at eight. I said I'd try to be back at the house by seven. I didn't say that if I didn't make it, it meant I was in jail or clogging up the treads in David Glendowning's oversize tires. My last glimpse of Dollier, standing in my driveway with his helmet dangling by its strap from one hand, belonged to an astronaut left behind on the pad.

The remains of red flares guttered near the Trenton exit over on the northbound side. They'd hauled away the Cutlass and a couple of troopers with flashlights were measuring the skid marks with a wheel the size of a barrel hoop. One of them was the big good-looking cop who had heard Martin Luther King speak at Cobo Hall. I wondered where he went when his second shift ended.

South of Woodhaven I buzzed past another trooper parked in a crossover, right under a stadium lamp. His lights flared in one corner of my left-hand mirror, then died. Reflex action. He'd decided saving one more idiot from splashing his brains on the asphalt wasn't worth the trouble of a possible cross-country chase. The best time to commit a misdemeanor is near the end of a tour.

I had a couple of close calls. The driver of a minivan nearly batted me off the interstate when he changed lanes without checking his blind spot, and a Lexus with a Mudhens pennant flapping from its radio antenna made a right turn directly in front of me as I swung off the exit ramp in Toledo, forcing me to gun it and heel around him. I nearly laid it down, and again on the other side when I overcompensated. A motorcycle is a good idea on paper, but it only works in a vacuum.

I was angry, and grateful. I'd begun to enjoy the ride and forget what I was there for.

Dawn, the first one without Iris, was bleeding in when I entered Glendowning's block. There were lights on in a couple of houses; coffee was percolating, someone was waking up under a hot spray, getting ready to fling himself against the same hard vertical surface all over again. Not Glendowning, though. The brick split-level was quiet, as dark and peaceful-looking as a dam at dead low tide. There were no police cruisers in sight, keeping the peace in their noisy obnoxious way with loud radios and stuttering strobes. The only thing moving in the immediate vicinity was the little painted wooden man sawing a log in the front yard.

I killed the motor, coasting to a stop in front, and toed down the stand carefully, being quiet about it. I was either early or way too late. I listened for the sounds of a neighborhood trying to come back down after a sudden violation of the night: dogs barking, babies yowling, Randolph Scott potting at black hats on the insomniac channel. Nothing. That was one race I'd won. I patted the Indian.

I leaned back against the sissy rail, propped up my injured foot on the handlebars, lit a cigarette, and smoked, waiting for the glowing tip to lose its hard ruby edge. I needed light for what I had in mind and I didn't want to slow down for wall switches.

Dawn spread with a glacier's eternal creep. Shadows slithered, seemed to pause, then slid away. I reached back to make sure the .38 hadn't slipped out of its holster during the ride; reached back a second time just for luck. I smoked and watched the light spread, and when I couldn't see the glow of the tobacco without turning the cigarette around to look, I snapped it toward the gutter and put my foot down and got off the bike.

I was still being quiet. If I thought my ankle would take the strain I might have slipped off my boots and crept across the grass on the balls of my feet. A mourning dove hooted, like wind in a bottle. I wanted to shush it.

The lawn ornament was anchored to the earth by a wooden stake opposite the paddles that activated the sawing man when the wind blew. I worked it loose, lifted with both hands, twisted my trunk, and hurled the ornament through the picture window in the redwood wall next to the front door.

The safety glass exploded inward in kernels the size of molars. Down the street a dog started yapping frantically, without warmup. I swept the barrel of the revolver around the molding, clearing away the jagged edges, and stepped over the low sash, pivoting when my feet crunched down, with the gun in a two-handed grip. There was nothing to shoot at but bottles. I was alone on the riser looking into the sunken living room with the same newspapers on the sofa, the same butts in the ashtray with a new colony well along on the table next to it, and fresh empties on the furniture and floor. The place had begun to smell like the inside of a keg.

I checked all the rooms on the ground floor, moving faster than I had the first time, but not so fast I entered any ahead of my weapon. Another squalid stratum was settling atop the previous layers. Whatever had turned black and bubbling in the refrigerator had made its presence known throughout the kitchen. Ants spilled out of pasteboard containers and pizza boxes on the table and stove and joined a forced march past the pantry and under the door leading to the garage. Nothing had entered the den except a greater accumulation of dust. No one and nothing new in the bathrooms either, on both levels. At a glance, little Matthews room had not been used. The bed was still made. The grownups' bedroom looked the same as well, even down to the pattern of the tangled sheets. I'd wondered how long it would be before Glendowning gave up going to bed and started sleeping in his clothes in the recliner downstairs.

On a hunch I tugged open the drawer in the nightstand that had contained the nine-millimeter Beretta tricked up on a .45 frame. No gun. There was a light oil stain on the paper lining where it had lain. I checked the other nightstand, but it hadn't migrated there; just a litter of bottles of nail polish and an old copy of
Woman's Day
.

Back in the living room I scratched my temple with the muzzle of the .38. My ankle was throbbing from all the walking and climbing and my neck hurt. With those things on my mind it was a couple of seconds before I realized there was a part of the house I hadn't searched.

On my way through the kitchen I used the gun to root among the teeming food boxes, not expecting to find anything except more ants. I was getting too cynical. The black plastic oblong of a key tag lay on the table with a key attached to the ring, its tab insulated in more black plastic. It was right where it would have skidded to a halt when whoever had used it last had tossed it. I scooped it up and opened the door that led down to the garage.

Something crunched when I put my foot down on the first gridded step. It might have been stale breadcrumbs. I switched on the light in the stairwell. The trail of ants that had started in the kitchen continued across the step, down the side onto the next step, and on from there. One, daunted at first by the obstacle of my foot, pulled itself up over the lip of the sole and trekked across my toe. Others followed in a straight line, as determined as private detectives to move on to the next step. I wondered what the attraction was. I shook them loose and went on down.

Glendowning's white Dodge Ram pickup stood a couple of feet over from where I'd first made its acquaintance, encroaching on the half of the garage where his wife had parked when she was living there. I heard a metallic tick and then a few seconds later a little hissing sigh, as of an engine cooling slowly. I grasped the handle on the passenger's door, tightened my grip on the Smith & Wesson, and swung the door open. Both seats were vacant.