Valley of Lights (9 page)

FIFTEEN

Loretta had gone inside, and I could hear that she was putting Georgie to bed. I tapped lightly on her door and waited out on the boardwalk.

When she came out, I managed to smile and said, 'Wrong number.'

'It happens,' she said.

'Yeah, I know. Now, listen...'

'Please, Alex,' she said. 'My head's spinning so much, I can hardly stand it. I don't know what to say.'

I wanted to tell her that this was one of those things that's better not said out loud. But I could only shrug.

She said, 'Let's talk in the morning, okay?'

'Sure,' I said, and. she went back inside. She hadn't given me a straight look in all the time she'd been out.

Back in my own room, I turned out my bag and took my service gun from under the spare shirts where I'd packed it. State law only allows for the carrying of unconcealed weapons, but over the years I'd developed a blind spot towards it and now I was glad that I had. I don't mind admitting it, I was deeply scared. I didn't know who he was now, or how he'd found me, or from how far away he'd called. He might be down in Phoenix still, or he might have been at a roadside pay phone only a couple of miles away. Whatever the case, I didn't know whether to run or to stay put or what.

I hefted the revolver, checked the load. I knew that the safety that it could buy me was strictly temporary, that I could kill him over and over and he could come back in new shapes and with new faces, but it was the only reassurance that I had to hold onto. Jesus, I felt small; there I'd been, thinking that I'd wiped him out, when all that I'd done had been to pull on the lion's tail. Now I could feel his dead breath as he turned on me, and I didn't know what I was going to do or how I could possibly handle this. I suppose I felt guilty about the people on the TV, but perhaps not as guilty as I should; I had my own to look after, and Loretta wasn't even with me in appreciating the scale of the problem yet.

Running in the dark didn't seem like a good idea. There was only the one narrow valley road, and he knew the jeep; we'd be like rats in a drainpipe even in daylight. Besides, I wasn't even sure that I could get her to haul Georgie out of bed and come along. She had to be sitting there and questioning my sanity right at this moment — after what I'd been telling her, I'd have been surprised if she hadn't. But I'd broken the story on the assumption that I'd have time to follow it up, and that time had now been wiped away.

A problem.

I spent the next ten minutes or so outside, checking all around the motel, and had to come to the conclusion that it was pretty well undefendable. There was forest on three sides and the valley road on the fourth, and Woods — or rather, whoever he was now — could easily walk in from any of them. First thing in the morning I'd have to come up with some bright idea about moving on to somewhere else, and I'd have to sound casual about it in case Loretta should pick up the signals; and in the meantime, I'd simply have to sit awake with my door slightly open and my revolver on my knees, ready for action at the first sign of a prowler.

He'd turned the tables on me. I couldn't say that I liked it.

I set the room up with my chair by the window. If anybody came by, I'd hear his tread on the boardwalk and I'd be able to look out without hardly moving. I could see myself in the glass; the reflected spill of the reading lamp was green, and it didn't flatter me. I looked like somebody who'd been pulled out of the sea after a couple of days. I got a cup of lousy coffee from the two-cup courtesy maker in the bathroom, and paused to switch off the lamp as I carried it over to the chair.

Loretta's light went off after an hour, and just past midnight the outside lights went off as well. In that time I'd been in a more or less constant state of tension, screwed up a little tighter every time a car or a pickup turned in onto the forecourt and new people checked in for the night. But couples and families were okay, it was loners who interested me. I went out a couple of times in response to sounds that I couldn't identify, and on one of them saw a cat with half a tail scoot across and down into the juniper trees.

I didn't think that I'd ever sleep on such a night. But it turned out that I was wrong.

I knew it the moment that I opened my eyes and saw daylight, and felt the aching stiffness in my neck and my back from sitting too long without shifting. My gun hand in my lap felt as if the wrist had been broken. What woke me was the sound of the early starters revving their engines outside, a sound enough to shake the thin walls as they warmed up and turned around on the forecourt. I squinted out of the window and saw the side of a red pickup going past, and then as the tail of the pickup cleared the way I could see that the slot where the jeep had been the night before was now empty.

My door, which I'd left open about six inches, was now closed. It must have been done gently, in order not to disturb me. I threw it open and rushed out, feeling as if all of my joints had been packed with gravel, my gun still in my hand and me not caring who saw it. Loretta and Georgie's room was empty, the linen stripped from the beds and folded neatly for collection. On the bedside table were a folded note with my name on it, and some change.

The note was an apology. The change, a contribution to my bus fare.

I got a ride into town with a couple who were in the area looking for a retirement home. I had to share the back seat with their dog, a little beachball of an animal which made a sound like farting when it breathed and which farted every now and again just to show that it knew the difference. They dropped me in the uptown area before they turned off towards the newer developments to the west, and I walked down to where I could pick up the Greyhound service on its way down from Flagstaff. I had my bag in my hand and the gun stuck into my windcheater where I could get at it in a hurry if I needed to. I was lucky, I didn't have much more than half an hour to wait before the bus came through.

I picked up a copy of the
Republic
from a stand outside, and spent the time reading what it had to say about the slayings. The picture of the window-writing was reproduced and the comparisons with the Manson family were repeated, but other than the names of the victims I didn't learn anything new save that Lieutenant Michaels had responded to a neighbour's call and had been the first one into the house. The actual details of what had gone on inside were, apparently, being withheld. This was standard, not least as a means of screening out the crank calls and confessions that would inevitably follow.

The bus was half-empty, and pulled out on time. I sat in a window seat and watched the road behind us, but nobody seemed to be following. I was the only passenger sitting alone. I liked being a passenger of any kind about as much as I liked being in a crowd.

Loretta must have been awfully stealthy in making her getaway like that. The idea hurt a little, even though I could understand why she'd done it; I suppose that her leaving the bus fare was the part that had really got under my skin. The note itself had said a lot less. I think more than anything, I must have scared her; I'd been one of the few people in a strange town that she'd come to like and trust, and then suddenly I'd whipped off the rubber mask to reveal Mad Alex, the paranoid cop with the wacky delusions. But perhaps a little time away from me would change that, when she thought it over and realised that I hadn't told her anything that couldn't be checked for accuracy, with the exception of that one incident in the alley behind the gay bar which, as far as I knew, still hadn't been uncovered. She might think that the sequence led into madness, but it was a destination she'd sighted without any help from me.

If she thought about it at all. I also had to face the possibility that the shutters might slam down and stay down; although that wouldn't make the two of them any less of a target.

We were about midway between Cordes Junction and Black Canyon City, both of them big names attached to little places that appeared to be out in the middle of nowhere, when I heard one of the people further down the bus saying something about 'a jeep turned over'. I stood up quickly and looked out, but I couldn't see anything; but then, everybody else was looking out of the other side, and when I slid over into a spare seat opposite what I saw in the receding distance was enough to send me forward to the driver.

'Stop the bus,' I said.

He glanced at me once, briefly, a quick flash of my own image in his aviator sunglasses. He was about fifty, in his shirtsleeves, and looked as if he'd been put together out of rock and sandpaper and wire. He said, 'What?'

'Something's happening back there, you have to let me off.'

He didn't look at me again. 'Regulations won't allow it. Will you go back to your seat, please?'

'Screw the regulations, this is police business.'

'So, where's your ID? Back to your seat.' And then, almost an afterthought: 'Please.'

I reached into my windcheater and pulled out the gun and held it up in front of him where he couldn't help but see it. I didn't point it at him or anything, just showed him the side view and said, 'Is this ID enough for you?'

It got the fast result that I wanted; somebody further back in the bus shrieked, and immediately he hit the brakes and I had to grab at one of the chrome bars to stay on my feet. The doors were open before we'd even come to a stop, and as I jumped out they closed again so fast that they almost bit me. The bus kept on rolling, not waiting around in case I should change my mind, and seconds later I was standing in its dust. My last view was of three open-mouthed black faces in the rear window.

I was now about a mile further on from where I wanted to be, so I started to walk along the shoulder of the road where it was beginning to crumble into the soft stuff. Within the first hundred yards I passed a dented silver mailbox at the end of a dirt road, and that was the only sign of habitation that I saw which didn't have four wheels and go zipping by well in excess of the legal limit. Not, that is, until I looked up into the sky and saw a helicopter in the livery of the Arizona Department of Public Safety passing low overhead and dropping to set down close to the spot lay the road where a Renegade jeep lay belly-up with a County vehicle and a DPS cruiser alongside it. I started to run, but I was still some distance away. I saw people in white hopping out, bending low as the blades still turned, and I was only just leaving the road and starting out across the scrub as the copter took aboard its load and revved up to lift again. The patrolmen on the ground held onto their hats as the machine climbed into the air, turned around its own centre, and dipped its nose for extra lift and speed as it began the valley run down into Phoenix.

There were two of them waiting for me, a patrolman of the DPS and a man from the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office. They were admirably laid-back about my approach, both of them smiling lazily and letting me see the pump-action shotguns before they levelled them to cover me.

'You want to stop and raise your hands?' the DPS man said, and the Deputy said, 'I'd advise it.'

Obviously the Greyhound driver had radioed in a report on my unorthodox exit from his bus, and word had travelled fast. I stood with my hands in the air as the DPS man came around to frisk me from behind as the Deputy kept me covered. I felt the weight of the revolver go first, and then my wallet from my back pocket.

I said, 'I'm Sergeant Alex Volchak, Phoenix PD.'

'He is, too,' the DPS man said with some surprise as he came around the front again, my wallet open in his hand. It didn't seem to change anything, just an Interesting Fact to spice up the encounter.

The Deputy said, 'You gave some people quite a scare back there. Radio's been buzzing ever since.'

'I was in a hurry,' I said. 'What happened here?'

He glanced back at the overturned jeep, which didn't seem to be too much damaged. There was a dirt side road with a built-up banking a few yards further on, where fresh tyre scars indicated the start of the roll. I didn't have to look twice to know that it was Loretta's. I'd been hoping that the color might be a coincidence, but I'd been wrong.

He said, 'Tell you what. You talk, and
we'll
listen.'

I let my hands fall, and nobody complained. I said, 'Her name's Loretta Heilbron and her daughter's name is Georgina. She's a widow. We came up for a couple of days in the canyon, the Red Ridge Motel. Last night we had a disagreement, this morning she set off without me. That's why I had to get the bus.'

The Deputy looked at the DPS man. They were both about twenty-four, twenty-five, and still looked pretty fresh. He said, 'What do you think?'

'Sounds solid enough to me,' the patrolman said. 'But I'm inclined to hang onto the hardware for a while. At least, as long as the Sergeant's so jumpy.'

'Keep it,' I said, 'I've got others. Just tell me what I missed.'

The Deputy returned his shotgun to his car. 'We've got a witness says the car was forced off the road by another vehicle,' he said. 'Something beat-up, blue, and foreign is the best description we can get. It cut across in front of the jeep and forced it onto the dirt road, then got in behind and pushed. Driver couldn't hold it straight, so the jeep rolled off the rise. No safety belt.'

'How bad is it?'

'Bad. A lot of things broken.'

'She was still conscious when I got here,' the DPS man added, 'but she wasn't making a lot of sense.'

I could see what must have happened. He'd have seen the jeep and assumed that we'd all be together. He might have been waiting down the road from the motel. Loretta wouldn't have suspected a damn thing if she hadn't believed me anyway.

I said, 'What about the little girl?'

The two men exchanged a glance.

'There was no little girl,' the patrolman said. 'The woman was alone.'

SIXTEEN

They made a radio check and told me that the helicopter had taken Loretta to the Lincoln Samaritan hospital in the north-west of the city. The patrolman had to wait around for his incident team to arrive and start taking photographs and measurements, but the Deputy gave me a ride down to the nearest truck stop so that I could ask around for someone to take me the rest of the way. They let me have my gun back, as well. Technically it was now up to the bus company if they wanted to pursue the matter — I had, after all, identified myself as a police officer before showing the revolver, and showing it was all that I'd done... no pointing, no threatening, just a hurried attempt to establish my identity at a time of emergency.

It was bullshit and we all knew it, but it would probably get me by.

He took me as far as Rock Springs, just short of the county line, where he flagged down a silver-blue Fury that had a loosely bouncing trunk lid. The driver was in stained kitchen whites, and before he got out I saw him slip on a little paper hat as if to say Hey, I'm a working guy too. The result of the negotiation was that the driver got a warning but no coupon in return for taking me on to the hospital. He drove all the way from there at a steady fifty, and I don't think that we exchanged more than four words in all of that time.

The Lincoln Samaritan was a new hospital, built right out on the northern edge of town to serve the expanding fringe of the city. I walked in the wrong door and couldn't find my way, but was eventually directed towards the surgical facility. Loretta was still in the operating room, I was told by the nurse on desk duty, but I was welcome to wait around. I didn't know whether to take this as good news or bad. Now that I knew she'd come through the helicopter lift, I had to wonder what kind of mess she was in. A part of me didn't even want to be told.

There was a little waiting area with low chairs and unread magazines. I got a coffee from the machine, set it down, and forgot all about it.

I had to face the possibility that he'd taken Georgie. I only hoped that he was bright enough to see that she' d be of more use to him safe and in one piece; maimed and dead, she'd be useless as bait or leverage. If he'd taken her. There could be some other explanation, but I sat there and I tried and I couldn't come up with one.

Where had I gone wrong?

After a while, I wandered back over to the desk. The nurse on station, a trim-looking middle-aged woman, gave me a smile. Things seemed quiet, so it seemed like a good time to get her to talk. I'd already let her know that I was with the police. When it's likely to help, I try to work it into the conversation early.

I said, 'I've got a weird question for you.'

'We get 'em all the time,' she said.

'Say you get somebody brought in dead, and suddenly his eyes open and he's okay. Maybe a guy who'd had an accident, something like a shock that stopped his heart but didn't damage him much. Would that be unusual enough to be news?'

'No,' she said.

'It wouldn't?'

'Nobody here's dead until they get a certificate. Nobody gets a certificate until the medical staff have used up every trick they know. We get people right on the brink, practically shaking hands with the angels, and still we pull them back. Not every day, but it happens.'

I decided to go for broke. 'How about three days ago, early in the afternoon?'

She didn't have to think for more than a moment. 'No,' she said. 'I was here, it was a quiet shift. What's your interest?'

'Just academic. Say somebody down in the morgue climbed out of his drawer and disappeared. Wouldn't that be news?'

'That would be a George Romero movie, and I'd be on the first plane out of here.'

But it was something worth pursuing. After being told that it would be another hour or more before they'd be able to tell me anything about Loretta's condition, I spent the next thirty minutes trying to get the loan of a pool car for the afternoon out of one of the hospital's administrative officers. It was like trying to dig a pebble out of a lump of set concrete, but in the end I managed it. I drove into nearby Peoria and picked up one of those giveaway magazines that are actually thinly-veiled ads for new housing developments; what I really wanted was the list of all the valley's hospitals and their services that I found under the heading of 'Caring for our Lives'. I could have found the basics in the phone book, but this way I got all the background and a map as well.

I was away from the Lincoln Samaritan for more than the hour. When I got back, Loretta was out.

I had to wait around a while longer for the doctor to come out and talk to me; in the absence of any immediate kin, I'd have to suffice. This high-school kid in glasses had taken my arm and was hustling me down the Surgical corridor before I belatedly realised that this was the doctor.

'Okay,' he said. 'She's conscious, but she's well-doped. Tell her she's doing fine, tell her she's still got her looks, and then get yourself out of there.'

They'd wheeled her out into a low-lit recovery room prior to transfer to the intensive care unit. I saw sheets and IVs and machines and, almost as an incidental in the middle of it all, one fragile but recognisable form. They'd fixed her in some kind of body brace that immobilised her head.

I crouched down alongside her. 'Loretta?' I said softly. 'You hear me?'

She took a moment to respond, like somebody swimming up from the depths.

'Nick?' she said.

'It's Alex, Loretta. Don't try to turn your head.' Now that I was closer, I could see the silver screws that were holding the arrangement in place like a crown. I moved around a little so that she'd be able to see me.

'Alex?' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

'That's okay.'

'He found us. I think he'd been waiting. He followed us all the way down.'

I said, 'Did you get a look at him?'

For a moment I thought she hadn't heard, but then she said, 'You were right. I couldn't believe it, but you were. He had a different face, but it was him. He'd thought you were in the jeep, and then he thought you were trying to make a fool of him because you weren't. You've scared him, Alex.'

'Scared him how?'

'He stood over me and he kept asking, how much does he know?' And then she frowned, as her doped memory dredged up something new. 'Then he said he was going to take Georgie... did he, Alex? Did he take her?'

'No,' I said, feeling ashamed of myself. 'No, he didn't.'

'Thank God,' she said, closing her eyes. She was as pale as the sheet beneath her, and I could see a blue pulse of life beating at her temple. 'Is she hurt?'

'She's fine,' I said.

Loretta opened her eyes and looked at me again, and I was afraid that she'd be able to see right through my lie; but the pain and the drugs had clouded what was normally so sharp, and she only said, 'Don't bring her here. I don't want her to see me like this. Tell her... think of something to tell her, Alex.'

'I will,' I said.

God Almighty, I was thinking as I walked away.

Imagine the
bill
.