Stagger Bay (22 page)

I nodded. “You know, I understand outside money coming in here – it’s a nice, scenic, isolated place. But what about the pulp mill? I can’t see rich folks moving to Stagger Bay if their view’s going to be blocked by those two huge smoke stacks, even if they’re not spewing toxic waste anymore.”

“Oh, they’re going to dynamite the stacks next week. You can watch it live on TV or in person if you like. Some cruise ship line bought the property; they’re going to put in a big dock and a resort there after the rubble’s cleared away.”

Given Stagger Bay’s current startling cash influx, it was worth the risk to Elaine if she was gaming. She was being a smart girl; there were so many angles here to generate a nice payday for Ms. Hubbard. Then what? An account in the Caymans, a villa in Sao Paolo? And when she got her passport, would Sam be getting one too?

“We don’t know how far this goes,” I said, continuing the pretense we were all putting our cards on the table. “We should step carefully. But I don’t think we’re going to be able to – our only chance is to make things loud and messy, hope they make more mistakes than us.”

Chapter 48

When we got to Natalie’s, something was burning in the trash can where the Crips usually stowed their empty 40-ouncers. Smoke and flames came from the top of the can; I stepped in closer and saw it was a man’s clothes on fire in there.

“I'll never regret Wayne,” Natalie said as I joined her on the porch to watch the pyre. “He gave me Randy after all. But you can’t sleep with the dead and it’s time to put Wayne to rest all the way. I have to clean house and move on.”

“I’m tired of being in love with pain,” she said, harsh and anxious. “Hate won’t warm my bed. It just takes. And takes.”

“You’re right about that,” I said.

Natalie started to say something else but I’d already commenced walking to the Garden’s entrance. Once there, I studied the stillborn development across the way.

Even before it had seemed like those empty lots were besieging the Gardens. Now they had all the charm of a malignant tumor about to metastasize and engulf the people who lived here.

I surveyed my intended battle ground. One wide avenue ran directly across my front, with the Gardens’ entrance teeing into it midway. A hundred yards to the right and to the left, the avenue turned 90 degrees away at the corner, extending a hundred yards from me before joining the far fourth side of the huge blank rectangle that was the series of ghost lots, all surveyed and ready for the retirement community to be built.

I crossed the avenue and hopped the curbs, dodging surveyor stakes as I trotted across the graded earth, finally reaching the far side of the development. I was next to a big Caterpillar grader parked by the lead contractor’s hut.

The avenue in front of me was twin to the one fronting the Gardens a football field length behind me – an easy scrambling lope. I was midway between both corners, which were again a hundred yards to my right and left.

Directly in front of me the access road led up that steep, short slope and teed into the highway running along the crest of the ridge. To my right, the ridge highway curved around the hospital and past the swamp to Stagger Bay proper. To the left it curved out of sight up Moose Creek Road through the tall pines, into the lair of the Driver.

I turned and looked back at the Gardens. Even from this distance I could identify Big Moe and the other 18th Street Crips watching me. Several of the Hmong men were with them; but I saw no women except Natalie, standing by herself to the side, staring in my direction with her arms folded under her breasts.

There was no traffic in or out today. The Crips weren’t serving any customers, and no kids were playing outside. The Gardens were Alamo-ed up.

That was only fair, of course. Even if I was doing this alone, the Gardens folk had to know they were my lure.

Gauging the distance from the Gardens, studying the ground and the rectangle of road surrounding the construction zone, I figured it should just be possible for a man running full tilt to get to this access road before a fleeing car, even a big beast like the Cougar. He’d be driving balls out and slaloming around the corners, but the Driver would have to slow at each turn – and slow even further before sledding up that last steep stretch of access road.

A street racer like the Cougar? No way would he take it off-roading, or try to cut across the construction site – he’d stay on the asphalt.

There was no guarantee he’d come in his ride of course – hell, there was no guarantee he’d come at all. He might come, but just drive by the Gardens and heckle us. Or he might come all sneaky to do a recon, and leave without us ever knowing he’d been there.

But he was an excitable boy. He’d come to the Gardens (I hoped, I prayed, I yearned) and try to do the dirty deed he loved so much.

If I could take him down before he struck, I’d do so. If not he’d make his getaway, with a victim as passenger or not.

And when he made the final turn out of here, when he thought he was home free? I’d be waiting for him with a bullet or ten to blast him straight to hell. If there was a God, the Driver would know it was me killing him when he died.

Chapter 49

I was sitting in the easy chair in Natalie’s living room, Montaigne’s Essays unopened in my hand.

“Read to me,” Randy said, and flew through the air to land in my out-of-practice lap.

I was startled more by his request than by the impact. But I went ahead and opened to the part I loved the best, the passage where I always knew my communication with Monsieur Montaigne was still open whenever I read it.

“He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave,” I said, reading from the page.

But – just as had happened every time I’d tried to read it since checking it out from the library – my head immediately hurt from trying to read with one eye.

I closed the book and quoted from memory: “Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint. There is nothing evil in life for the man who has thoroughly grasped the fact that to be deprived of life is not an evil.”

“What does that mean?” Randy asked.

“It means that this world will crush us like bugs in the end,” I said. “But that is no tragedy.”

Randy lost interest at that, and climbed off my lap to wander outside.

Natalie entered the room, picked up the Essays and riffled its pages. “You actually enjoy reading these old books?”

“I do,” I said, a little irritably from the pain. I closed my eye and rubbed my temples against the growing headache. “I owe everything to them, they’re my fuel.”

But how was I to read anymore? Had that day at the school cost me the Canon?

“Would you like me to rub your head?” she asked, finally seeming to notice my sourness.

I nodded without looking at her, not wanting to impose with any kind of request. She stood behind me, her cool strong fingers stroking my temples in a circular motion.

The headache immediately faded. My pain in my missing left eye even turned down a hefty notch for the first time since I left the hospital.

“I still miss Wayne,” Natalie said. “I miss him in the morning, and in the evenings too. All I had to do was touch his cheek, you know?” she said, brushing the side of my face with the back of her fingers.

“I think my headache is gone now,” I managed to choke out, hoping I wouldn’t have to stand up any time soon.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her chin raised slightly as she leaned around to look me in the face sideways. Her breasts rested easy on my shoulder. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

The living room felt several dozen degrees warmer, probably from the incandescent lamp my face felt to be. And then Natalie said the words that made me smile as she breathed them in my ear; the sweetest words I’d heard coming from a woman’s mouth in a long time:

“You know you can get all those books on tape, right?”

Chapter 50

A nap of exhaustion and I wake from a dream, get up to go to the bathroom. The dream had been an unrealistic one, wherein she welcomes all my attentions and desires.

But now, awake, I hear her sobbing on the other side of her closed bathroom door. I stand there unconscionably rapt at her almost erotic cries, as if they’re the distant call of a siren or undine luring some poor pitiful sailor to his doom.

The door opens and there she stands weeping – strange that her tears lend her a carnal seductiveness her quiet demeanor has never fully expressed to me yet. She’s angry to see me there.

“You . . .” she says in an accusing tone, before closing her mouth tight and biting her lower lip. I back off and step out on the porch; after a few minutes she joins me and apologizes, but for what I don’t know.

I am awed by her tears. Who are they for, exactly? I am still aroused but now is not the time.

Chapter 51

Later that night, I prowled Natalie’s darkened front room. She’d offered to stay up with me, make coffee and keep me company – but I was pretty gruff and she finally took the hint.

This was the place I was never good at: the waiting. I grew more and more restless, like an over-wound top waiting to whirl into action Tasmanian-Devil-style. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling; as usual it was like a bellyful of bad drugs spinning away in my gut. I kept yawning from tension too, and my jaw was sore from nervously gulping air so often.

I’d had Natalie and Randy lay their bedding on the bedroom floor in case of gunplay. I checked on them from time to time through the open door as I paced the front room: two blanket covered oblong hummocks, one large, one small, looking like graves in the dimness. I couldn’t tell if they were asleep or just pretending to be, but their figures were motionless beneath their bedding and I did my best not to disturb them.

There was a quiet knock on the door and I almost jumped before I got a grip. When I peeked out the spy hole, a tall wide silhouette stood blocking the street light’s glare.

“Everyone in the Gardens is in place,” Big Moe said through the hole. “We’re all up for it, and if he comes we’re ready for him. We got cars if he gets away from us.”

I opened the door and shook my head. “He’ll see a car easy, and he can outrun anything you’ve got if he knows you’re behind him. Minivans and that cute little Taurus of yours got no replacement for his displacement. And if you lynch-mob after him up Moose Creek Road, you know the cops will be waiting. That’ll be suicide for you all.”

I shook my head again. “No, son. I have my plan – sometimes one guy on foot can do things a group could never get away with.”

Big Moe left and stood for a moment at the corner of Natalie’s stoop, clearly visible in the light of the full moon before wandering off on his rounds, the war chief checking his troops. Down the block I saw a cigarette coal flare, illuminating the face of a male Hmong who stood in darkness next to a bungalow. Around the area, several other still figures stood guard in whatever pools of shadow could conceal them from the streaming moonlight.

How had Sam and Elaine made out? Were they still alive, or had the Driver come calling and caught Sam napping? I restrained the impulse to call – I would have wound up wearing out the phone like any worried parent.

Sam could handle his end. And if he couldn’t, if the bastards took out my son, the only family I had left in the world? Then God help Stagger Bay, because I wouldn’t have any pity or self-preservation left in me.

Chapter 52

Time passed and I spun myself up more and more. I couldn't stop myself from shuffling and reshuffling the cards in my head, dealing hand after mental hand of solitaire in my mind’s eye.

The Driver was the only thing I needed to pay attention to right now. Ding an Sich, baby: What was that thing in itself?

How did the he think? What drove his twisted plans? I kept trying to put myself in his shoes but they sure weren’t a comfortable fit. He was arrogant and impulsive, utterly dangerous and seemingly close to some kind of final frenzy – but he could be manipulated and somewhat predicted.

Out of the people I knew, which one was he? Hell, did I even know him? Changing his voice might’ve just been him having fun, deliberately feeding me a red herring.

No, that was bullshit. Ockham’s Razor had to be kept in play. Keep it simple, Markus – you knew the Driver, all right.

What was Rick Hoffman’s place in all this? Was he the Driver? What was going on behind that blank Noh-mask face of his right now?

Or was it Killer Reese? And just how did that rogue cop’s actions fit into the larger campaign? Kendra had loved him, but so what? Either she’d understand what I was doing or forget her.

Someone with influence was protecting the Driver, that was for sure. What would make law enforcement shield a serial killer, make them willing to frame me and let him keep on doing his thing? Was the whole department in on it, or just enough to muster a hillbilly death squad with the other Stagger Bay police unable to break the rogue cops open? They had that 911 dispatcher at least.

And how did Stagger Bay herself feel about so many law-abiding white citizens disappearing? Exactly how many were part of it? Was it pretty much the whole town – or just enough to make it fly, with all the rest too scared to do anything about it, or paying with their lives if they were reckless enough to stand up? A lot of these good people here were making healthy construction-job wages off all the new development coming in. They had enough at stake it’d be easy for them to put the blinders on and live tunnel-vision lives.

This was when it really came home that my big brother was gone forever. Karl would be calming me right now, watching my back while I prepped my head for the upcoming fracas, maybe cracking one of his many dorky jokes to break the tension.

Despite his twitchiness and his many flaws, he’d always tried to be the careful one; the complement to my wrecking-ball nature. Me, I’d always been more hey-diddle diddle, right up the middle, come right at you and say hi as it were.