The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (25 page)

“Why do I get the feeling McKinney didn’t get the paperwork done on it?” 

“Because he didn’t,” the sergeant said, but the confiding tone was there:
We both know what McKinney is like, don’t we.
 

“Shit.” Klinger sighed again.  

The sergeant looked at him for a moment and finally sighed, too. 

“All right . . . I’ll consign you a belt, but make sure he fills out the A-202 sheet when he gets in.” 

“Thanks, sir.” 

“Have a good run,” the man said, and then added: “Just don’t shoot anyone.” 

It was the best joke the man could think of that early in the morning. Klinger laughed at it. 

As he left, he knew she had been there with him again. Even this—the belt—had gone too easily. 

As he neared the Witness, backpack and pillowslip beside him, the sun blinded him for a moment to the east and he banked, pulling over the access road that drove for ten straight kilometers across the Mojave floor. It was 9:45. Two minutes later he spotted the car below him—the gray-blue paint job and black tire walls of a Justice car. He pulled ahead, squinting toward the Witness, and when he was almost on top of it saw the second car—a big white Seville parked behind the shack, front and rear license plates missing. 

Two figures were visible, standing beside it. 

Banking south, he watched the two closely, and when he was sure they had seen the Huey, he nosed toward them just as McKinney had shown him to, firing. 

The sound of the gigantic zipper filled the air. 

He let it chew the sand and gravel ten meters from the car for three full seconds while the two men dove, scrambled, looking like roadrunners with absolutely no place to go. 

When he zeroed in on the car at last, it took only a second. The car collapsed, the doors blowing sideways, the roof disappearing, fragments of metal flying after the men wherever they tried to run. 

He banked, circling them, and knew at last why McKinney liked those jackrabbits on the desert floor. 

He chased them. He sent short bursts every couple of seconds right behind them and the faster they ran, the slower they seemed to go, tiring, circling back toward the shack because there was really no other place to go. One of them fell as he fired. The figure jerked. Little plumes rose around it. The figure began to crawl on its hands and knees, stopped, fell over, jerked some more, and finally lay still. 

Klinger wondered what the man would transmit over the next few days, weeks and months, what word or phrase a Witness somewhere would pick up in the neutrinos and transcribe. 

And then the bullets hit me? 

I tried to crawl, but couldn’t, and then I died. 

Just like her:
And then I died.
 

Klinger thought of the message he had composed—the one for her, the big-boned girl he could only meet in dreams, because that was what life—and death—had dealt them. He repeated it to himself for the thousandth time as he tracked the other running figure, firing until it, too, was down, and, without looking at the body, flying on, putting the Huey down at last not far from the shack. 

When the rotor wash had died away and he could see again, he watched the cloud of dust from the company car getting larger on the access road. 

The car stopped. None of the doors opened. With the backpack and pillowslip under his bad arm and the Colt Phantom in his good hand, he got out of the Huey, stood for a moment, and took aim. Gravel flew a few meters in front of the blue-gray car and the car shot into reverse, fishtailing wildly until it had turned and was speeding back down the access road. Stopping about a kilometer away, it turned back around to face him like a bull. They were probably radioing for backup. 

He went inside. 

With the PC reconnected and the handwritten pages and the Xeroxes—all he had of her—laid out on the floor, he propped open the door, sat down at the card table, and waited. 

There was one transmission—only one: 

. . . but when I waked I saw that I saw not cold in the earth and the deep snow piled above thee come live with me and be my love John who knows me so well. . . . 

He did not understand. How could she be answering him? He had never sent the message. And now he never would. 

He wanted to cry, but found he could not. 

He heard the bullhorn before he heard the choppers. And then the choppers drowned the bullhorn out and he got up to go to the door. 

A black-and-white sat a few hundred yards down the access road, doors open, a bullhorn—what he assumed was a high-powered bullhorn—peeking around one of them. 

For some reason they imagined he could hear the thing over the noise of the choppers and he had to point at his ear again and again—standing in plain sight in the doorway—before they got the idea and radioed for the choppers to stand back. 

“Klinger!”
the bullhorn said. It wasn’t Davis.
“We know what you’ve got and we know what you can do. This is as far as it needs to go. If we can reach some agreement before the SWAT boys get here, things will go a lot easier. Signal if you understand.”
 

Klinger waved the Phantom. 

“We see the weapon, Klinger. We’ve received your signal. We want to know what you want—we want to hear what’s on your mind.” 

He wondered if it was too soon for the marksmen to be there. He didn’t have hostages. He wasn’t even in the Huey with the Vulcan. They actually had, he realized, no idea what he really “had” or what he wanted. They really didn’t. 

“I want to talk to Davis,”
he shouted. 

The words were lost in the wind. 

Someone had binoculars. He could see them. He could see something shaped like a dish, too. 

“We can’t hear you, Klinger,”
the bullhorn said. 

“Davis!”
he shouted.
“I want to talk to Davis.”
 

“You want to talk to Mack Davis?” 

The dish was a directional mike. 

“Yes!”
he shouted. 

They were talking to each other now. One of them had to be a negotiator. 

“Davis is a good man, Klinger,”
the bullhorn said at last.
“He’s treated you well—just like a father. He’s a true friend.”
 

Davis was with them. That was obvious. The negotiator knew what he was doing. 

“Yes. He’s the one I want to talk to.” 

“What?” 

“Davis is the one I want to talk to.” 

There was more talking behind the open car doors, figures scurrying. He could see Davis stand up, two uniforms shielding him. 

“Davis is your one true friend, Klinger. Remember that.” 

“Yes, he’s treated me well!”
Klinger had, he discovered, started to cry at last. 

Everything fell silent at that moment. The wind was gone. 

“Davis is the only one I’ll talk to,”
Klinger said again, sure that they could read his lips—even if the mike couldn’t pick him up. They had a lip-reader. With binoculars. They had to. 

Then, because he thought he heard the ID alarm go off on the printer, he went inside again. 

He’d been staring at the printer for what seemed like forever—it hadn’t been the alarm at all, but something else, a sound from somewhere in the desert—when he heard Davis’s voice on the bullhorn. 

Stepping outside, wondering if a rifle round would hit him in the forehead before he could say a word and he would join her where words didn’t matter—he shouted:
“I can’t talk like this, Davis. You gotta be in the shack. I’m not going to hurt you, but you’ve got to be in the shack with me.”
 

More discussion behind car doors and then, through the bullhorn, Davis answered:
“I’m coming in, Klinger. I am
not
armed and I
really
don’t think you want to hurt me. I think you care about me as much as I care about you.”
More negotiator words.
“I think this is something that’s simply gotten out of hand. We’re
good friends
and I’m coming in because I think you want and need a
friend
right now.”
 

“I won’t hurt you,” Klinger found himself saying. He said it quietly. His eyes were blurred. He didn’t want them to be. 

When the big man, sweating in the heat and his own nervousness, was inside, Klinger couldn’t look at him, couldn’t keep the Phantom aimed at him. He was looking at the printer instead, while the big man—he could hear him doing it—sat down slowly and carefully on the old cot. He was, Klinger was sure, looking at the hand-copied pages and the dark Xeroxes laid out so neatly on the floor. 

“Klinger?” 

“Yes.” 

“What do you want? People have gotten hurt, but I think I know who they are, and the people out there in the cars and choppers are willing to agree. They just need to
understand
. If they aren’t able to understand, Klinger, and understand
soon,
they’re going to have to come in. If they have to come in, they’re going to have to view this as a hostage situation.” 

“I want to stay here,” Klinger said, his back still turned. It wasn’t what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t think. 

“That’s what you want to tell me?” 

“No . . .” 

“Did you make those dupes, Klinger?” 

“Yes.” 

“Is that why you wanted me here—to tell me
why?”
 

“Yes . . .” 

“I’d like to listen—” 

“I didn’t want to lose her, sir,” Klinger heard himself saying. “You don’t know what she is like.” 

He could hear the big man shift his weight on the cot, searching for the right words—his own, or someone else’s. 

“She’s
dead,
Klinger,” Davis said at last. 

Klinger looked at him. “No, she’s not, sir. She’s been answering me.” 

The big man was shaking his head, blinking. Klinger could see it. 

“She’s dead and she’s
sending,
Klinger. That’s all. That’s what we do, Klinger: We listen to what the dead send us.” 

“Could you tell me her name?” 

Davis closed his eyes. Klinger looked away. 

“Please,”
Klinger said. 

“I don’t think so, John. I don’t think that would help . . .” 

Klinger took a deep breath. “Please tell them that’s what I want. I want to know her whole name and I want the right equipment to transmit a message to her. Tell them that.” 

The big man didn’t seem to be breathing. He was shaking his head. “Klinger . . . Klinger . . .” The big man took a breath at last. “Her name was Semples . . . Linda Semples. She was a
black prostitute,
Klinger. A
smash
junkie. Her pimp killed her. He killed her because she was threatening to tell the police about his lab, his friends, the distribution from Victorville to Vegas. She
fucked for money,
Klinger. Or she did once. She was getting old. She was forty years old and the only thing that kept her in business, Klinger—I’m sorry to have to say this, but you’ve got to understand and accept it or this isn’t going to end—was the kinds of things she’d do in bed with a man—” 

Davis was looking at his hands, which were clenched white. He would not look up. Klinger knew it must have felt cruel for him to say these things, and he was not a cruel man. Klinger realized then how much he loved the man. 

“You’re doing this over a dead hooker, Klinger—a dead hooker with a mean pimp. You’re doing this over a forty-year-old whore who liked honkies like you about as far as she could piss. I think you can be helped, Klinger, but it’s got to stop
here
. She’s dead, Klinger. You didn’t really understand this—you didn’t know a thing about her—otherwise, you wouldn’t have done all of this, am I right?” 

Klinger was looking at him. He was holding the Phantom, not aiming it, just holding it. 

“I’d like you to leave now, sir,” Klinger said. “I’ll be staying here waiting for her next transmission. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but I’ll signal when I’m ready to leave. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell them.” 

Davis got up slowly, as if reluctant to leave. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. He wasn’t blinking now. Neither of them was. 

When the big man was gone, Klinger sat down at the card table, closed his eyes, and recited to himself once again the message, letting the fingers on his good hand move as if he were typing on a keyboard somewhere: 

. . . to the woman who slept under a bridge who loves poetry who dreams I know you better than you were ever known in life I love you please answer me John K. . . .