Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (13 page)

The key to the back door, one of several Christy said Max had stowed around the property, was where he’d told me it would be, under the center cushion of a small vinyl-upholstered couch shoved up against the side of the sagging wooden garage. It faced a dry birdbath that contained a pyramid of spherical Christmas ornaments, a decorative touch that seemed uncharacteristically tacky for Max. Maybe it was meant to be funny.

Out of curiosity I first tried the keys I’d gotten from Max’s dry cleaner, but none of them could be fitted into the lock. The one from the couch slipped in easily. I gave it a full turn and pushed against the door, but it didn’t budge.

It took me longer to figure it out than it should have. I turned the key farther and pushed against the door again, and then I backed away from it as though it were red-hot.

I hadn’t unlocked the door. I’d locked it.

My shirt was suddenly wet beneath the arms. Leaving the key in the lock, I stepped away from the house, still walking backwards, until a rosebush poked its thorns into my back. I sidestepped and kept going backward, my eyes on the house, until I was pressed up against the rough trunk of the pepper tree.

No lights showed in the house, no signs of movement. The pepper tree sighed and whispered, bumping against my back in time with the pounding in my chest.

To the right, the fence joined the corner of the house. To the left, the driveway stretched on its way to the street, past more windows than I liked to think about. Behind me, on the other side of the pepper tree, loomed the blank wall of an apartment building, at least three stories high. My rosy bower was a cul-de-sac, as they like to call dead ends these days.

The darkest part of the shade was just next to the pepper tree. I sat there in the warm dirt, my back against the apartment building, and waited.

When the moonlight began to spill over me, maybe two hours later, I shifted to the other side of the tree. Nothing had stirred in the house, and although the breeze kept making a racket in the tree above me, I hadn’t heard anything else. When the light reached me a second time, the moon far to the west now, I got up and shook the kinks from my legs, my back creaking petulantly, turned away from the house, and shone the little penlight at my watch. I’d been there for more than four hours.

The key was right where I’d left it. I turned it, to the left this time, listening to the tumblers’ reluctant click and fall, and slowly pushed the door open. Max’s kitchen lay in front of me, illuminated by a milky patch of moonlight on the littered linoleum floor. It wasn’t much light, but it was enough to show me the place had been ransacked. Drawers had been ripped from their housings, cupboards emptied. Silverware skittered away from my feet as I moved forward toward the pile of food in front of the refrigerator. I smelled sour milk and onions.

The idea of leaving presented itself with some force. I was not looking at the aftermath of a police search.

The kitchen opened into a small breakfast area, rounded and windowed to my left, and I remembered I’d passed a bay window in the driveway. This was a part of the house I hadn’t seen, so I paused a moment to get my bearings, trying to reconcile the rooms through which Max had led me and the side of the house as I’d seen it from outside. More data: Christy had said Max sometimes slept in his room and sometimes in his own, so there were at least two bedrooms. After a few minutes of silent visualization, I had a hypothetical floor plan: Behind me, the kitchen; the small dining room would be in front of me, opening into the living room, and beyond that, the front door. To the right would be the library where I’d talked to Max, a hallway, and the bedrooms.

The moonlight through the bay windows showed me a wilderness of broken dishes and torn cookbooks, ripped open and flung to the floor. The cookbooks I could understand—lots of things can be hidden in books—but the dishes were frightening. They bespoke rage, pure and simple, rage so powerful that its owner hadn’t been able to contain it even though the sound of the shattering dishes must have been deafening in the small room. He would have known the neighbors might have heard them, but he had thrown and trampled them anyway.

A more reassuring idea: He’d obviously come in through the back door and probably left the same way. I didn’t think he’d have risked going out through the front. Maybe he’d started his search at the far end of the house and worked his way backward, his fury mounting with every fruitless room until, with only the kitchen and the breakfast room left, he’d felt secure that he would be out of the house and blocks away before the sheriffs responded to a neighbor’s call. He’d been gone before I arrived.

Maybe.

Whatever he’d wanted had been small enough to hide in a book. What I wanted was Max’s computer, so I could move fast. It was a great relief to move fast.

I barely glanced into the living room and the library. I’d seen them the day before—it seemed like a week ago—and I couldn’t have missed a computer. Both rooms had been tossed violently. Max’s books had been torn from their shelves, flung into piles that spilled into the hallway. Paintings had been slashed, their frames snapped. Stuffing bled out of the incisions in the deep chair.

The hallway was completely interior, so no moonlight reached it. My penlight picked out details of destruction: a rug sliced into parallel strips three inches wide, the bright shards of a broken mirror scattering light on the walls as I passed.

A small bedroom that opened to the left, toward the front of the house, was in total confusion, the mattress standing against the wall, the frame upended, and the box spring slit open from head to foot. The glass shower door in the adjoining bathroom had been shattered. It was not so much a search as an evisceration.

The door at the far end of the bathroom was ajar, and I pushed it open with an extended hand, harder than I’d intended, and waited as it banged against the wall of a larger bedroom, Max’s bedroom, I guessed. The human bomb had gone off in here, too, but on a small desk across the room I saw a compact computer, intact.

I’m not familiar with Macintoshes, but I expected at least to be able to turn one on. I found a switch that seemed to be in the right place and flipped it up. Nothing. Running my hands around the frame, I located no other switches, and I got down on my hands and knees, feeling the room yawning wide behind my unprotected back, and pointed my penlight along the power cord until I came to the socket into which it was plugged. Scratch the first hypothesis, always presented so helpfully in the manuals as a panacea when trouble is encountered: Make sure the system is plugged in.

That left the unwelcome possibility that the outlet was controlled by a switch, probably just inside the door. Craftsmen’s bungalows, for all their strong points, are generally underwired, with few outlets. I guess people in the twenties just didn’t have so much stuff to plug in.

There were only two lights in the room, one a lamp next to the bed and the other a ceiling fixture in the center of the room. I hauled the chair on which I’d been sitting across the floor until it was beneath the fixture and climbed up. The milk-glass covering pulled away with a shower of dust and a couple of dead moths, revealing a small bulb, touchingly pink. It unscrewed easily, and I tossed it into the center of the bed. Then I clambered down, yanked the plug on the bedside lamp, crossed to the door, and threw the switch.

The Macintosh came to life with a startlingly loud whir. The screen glowed and then snapped alight to reveal the fabled user-friendly interface, full of little bugs, pictures that presumably launched programs. There we were: a tiny telephone icon and the legend
modem
. I highlighted it with the mouse and pushed the
enter
key, and the screen flickered again and came up with a dialogue box, full of buttons. One of them said
Timed Send
. It sounded right, so I pushed down on the mouse and the button on-screen turned into a box containing the words
Timed Send: 10/26 14:00
.

At two o’clock I’d been sitting in Jack’s computer room, watching the text fly by: Max’s ghost message, dispatched by the clock in a machine.

As long as I had the computer on, I figured, I might as well search Max’s hard drive. I kicked out of the communications program, located Mac Word, and booted it. It only took a few seconds to figure out how to access the list of document directories, and when I did I found that Max had obligingly named one of them
Correspondence
.

There was quite a lot of correspondence, and absolutely none of it was personal. I found dozens of drafts of his “Therapist” replies and some stuff to his lawyers in Boulder, as well as a few hopeful notes to a publisher to whom Max had apparently submitted a book called
The Map Within
. Nothing else.

“Damn,” I said aloud. Max was being secretive.

I was trying another directory when someone said behind me, in a pleasant voice, “I couldn’t find anything, either,” and then the computer went dark and took the room with it.

The chair I’d thrown clattered harmlessly against the opposite wall, and the noise reverberated in the room as I stood stock-still and waited, willing my breath to slow. The moon was on the far side of the house now, leaving the bedroom harmfully dark. A small part of my mind, the only part not clinging to the immediate issue of survival, asked a question: How long had he been standing there?

A quick scuffling sound, and the chair struck me in the chest and knocked me back against the desk. The keyboard of the computer pitched forward, striking the back of my legs, and I jumped forward and picked up the chair, holding it with the legs pointed away from me, lion-tamer style. “Gotcha,” the voice said, and chuckled.

“You made quite a mess,” I said, willing him to reply.

I heard the door to the hall close, heard the lock snap shut.

“I got a little irritated,” he said, and I held the chair at arm’s length and launched myself toward the voice, hearing him bump up against the wall as he shifted left, and I compensated and felt the chair strike something yielding, flesh, and he grunted, and something either very cold or very hot punched against the bare skin of my left forearm, backing me away. My hand was immediately wet and warm.

“Carpet cutter,” he said. “Very sharp.” He wasn’t even winded.

I hoisted the chair and advanced, swinging it down hard in front of me, and one leg caught him, on the shoulder, maybe, and I heard him go down. A vision of the carpet cutter slicing from below, its hook pointed up to tear, pushed me away like a cold current, and I backed up again, lowering the chair as I went so its legs pointed at where I thought he might be.

I still couldn’t see much of anything; the afterimage of the computer screen floated in front of my eyes, pale and blue and opaque. I took another step away from him, rifling my memory of the room for something that might serve as a weapon, and the chair came to life in my hands, bucking once, and he pulled it free by the legs, bringing its back up under my chin.

The phantom computer screen shivered into a million tiny lights: an exploding Christmas tree. I felt myself fall backward, onto something soft, and let myself go the rest of the way down, twisting and rolling away, toward the far side of the bed. The mattress heaved and jumped, and something tore through layers of cloth in a long, rending arc. I went for the arm above the carpet cutter with both hands, missed, and landed on my stomach on the bed again with a hard lump beneath me.

The tearing sound had traveled toward the foot of the bed. I scrambled toward its head, grabbing at the lump as I went, and came up on my knees, holding the light bulb I’d taken from the ceiling fixture. It was slippery in my gloved hand, and I realized the front of my shirt was soaked. I’d been bleeding the whole while.

“Come to Papa,” he said from the foot of the bed.

I went to Papa, grabbing at the blankets with my free hand and throwing them in front of me like a gladiator’s net. He made a surprised sound as they swept over him, and I tightened my hand on the base of the light bulb and brought it around, side-arm, with all the strength I had. It exploded in my hand as it struck him, and I dragged the ragged edges down along his arm until they snagged on cloth and the bulb pulled free from my grasp, and now he was the one backing away.

“You cut me,” he said, sounding amazed.

With the bedroom door locked, there was only the one leading to the bathroom, and he was between me and it. I sidestepped around the bed, feeling light-headed and almost exhilarated. He couldn’t have been more than eight feet from me; I could cover it in a leap, get the hand with the carpet cutter in it, and…

Get killed. I was losing blood more quickly than I’d thought, getting giddy. I reached behind me, felt the computer desk, and knocked over a can of pencils.

He was on me faster than I would have believed, the full weight of him, all hard surfaces: chin and shoulders and elbows and knees, and the edge of the cutter against my shoulder as his arm came up, trying to pull the point across my throat. I twisted right, away from the blade, a sharp, hot sting at the top of my arm, and I dropped to my knees and brought both fists up, together, between his legs. He jumped back with a strangled sound, far enough to allow me to stand, and I picked up the computer display, yanked it free of the system unit, and threw it through the window. Glass splintered into the front yard, and he positively screamed in rage, the scream following me as I hurled myself after the computer display, feeling the broken edges of the windowpanes rake my legs, brush tearing at my face and hands. The ground came up under me hard and fast, and I was lying on my stomach in Max’s front yard, gasping for breath and looking at Flores Street.

I covered the distance to the sidewalk on hands and knees and sat on the pavement, looking at the broken window. White curtains stirred peacefully in the breeze.

Some soprano was singing in my ears, thin and high as a far-off violin. The porch light came on in front of the house to the left of Max’s, and at the sight a wave of delayed panic rose in me, a swarm of gnats in the muscles and veins, and I got up and ran, bleeding back and front, toward the lights of Santa Monica Boulevard. I was on the Pacific Coast Highway before the fear subsided. I pulled the car over to the dirt shoulder and rested my forehead against the steering wheel. My shirt was stiff and scratchy with dried blood, and my shoulder and forearm burned as though coals had been slipped beneath the skin. The air seemed almost solid. I drew it in and let it go in great shuddering gulps until one caught in my throat and I opened the door and leaned out and vomited coffee and hot bile onto the road. My stomach kept heaving long after the coffee was gone.