Fear itself: a novel (33 page)

“You know where Concord is?”

“Massachusetts.”

“Concord, California. North of San Francisco—Contra Costa County, I think. The subdivision’s named Rancho del Vista.”

“Just give me the street address; I’ll find it.”

Here we go again, thought Linda. “Ed, sooner or later, McDougal is gonna—”

“—be very, very proud of his little Liaison Support Unit. But I give you my word of honor, if Nervous Nellie has anything at all to tell us about Childs’s whereabouts, I will pass the information along to the appropriate authorities.”

Linda gave him the address, reminded him of his promise, and wished him luck; it wasn’t until another hour had passed that she realized their agreement could have been more precisely worded. She called him back and got his message box.

“Ed, this is Linda. Just to clarify: the term ‘appropriate authorities’ does
not,
repeat
not,
include yourself. Talk to you soon.”

“How far is Concord?” Pender called through the bathroom door, when Dorie had finished her shower.

“Two, three hours. Depends on the traffic and the time of day. You can pretty much bypass San Fran and Oakland entirely, if you swing around on six-eighty. Why?”

“That’s where Nervous Nellie lives.”

“All right! We should probably leave now, avoid both commutes.”

“Whoa. To paraphrase Tonto, what you mean ‘we,’ white woman?”

“What
you
mean, what I mean?” Dorie came out wrapped in a bath towel, winding a second towel around her wet hair. “You’re not leaving me alone here, buster.”

“Luka practically tore me a new one for bringing you along yesterday. Said I could be doing you untold psychological damage.”

“In the
first
place: you didn’t bring me, I brought you. In the
second
place: Luka is at least ninety, and rumor has it he takes LSD once a month. In the
third
place: the psychological damage has already been done—by Simon. I dream about him, I imagine him popping up every time I turn a corner, and if you’re not in the room with me, I can’t even bring myself to look at the window, in case his face pops up there. In the
fourth
place:
you’re
the one who keeps saying he’s probably within driving distance of Berkeley, and in case you’ve forgotten, this house, my home, which he’s already invaded once, is very much within driving distance. Is that enough places for you yet? ’Cause if it’s not, I can come up with a whole lot more.”

He raised both hands, palms out. “Okay, okay, I surrender.” But half an hour later he sneaked out of the house via the studio door while Dorie was on the phone with one of her girlfriends—better to ask forgiveness than permission was as effective a strategy with women as it was with the Bureau.

Some women, anyway: when Pender reached the driveway, he stuck his hand into his pants pocket for his keys and came up empty. He told himself they must have fallen out of his pocket when he took his pants off last night. As he tiptoed into the house and past the kitchen on his way up to the bedroom, though, Pender heard a familiar jingling sound and backed up to see Dorie seated at the kitchen table, telephone in one hand, his key ring dangling from the thumb and forefinger of the other.

“Be with you in a minute there, Lone Ranger,” she said, and jingled the keys merrily again.

Just as well, thought Pender—he’d forgotten that he couldn’t work the damn shift anyway.

Conventional wisdom would argue that Simon Childs’s use of powerful pharmaceuticals, on top of all the other stress he was under, could only have served to accelerate the inevitable deterioration of an already unstable personality.

Simon would have disagreed—and a case could well be made that the serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting effects of 3,4-methylene-dioxy-N-methylamphetamine, also known as MDMA, Adam, or Ecstasy, in addition to the weed and the Percodan, were indeed having a pacifying effect on him.

But Simon was no pharmacologist. All he knew was that he’d stepped into the little stall shower in the guest bathroom half a jump ahead of the blind rat, and emerged feeling as giddy as a schoolboy and so full of fellow-feeling that on his way upstairs, he took the time to rearrange the body on the chrome and leather couch into as comfortable a position as rigor mortis would allow and cover it with a striped Hudson’s Bay blanket from the spare bedroom.

Simon was feeling so mellow, in fact, that upon his return to the bedroom, before sitting down at the vanity to roll another doob, he removed the sheet he’d draped over the mirror earlier, and played a quick round of Senor Wences—”S’awright? S’awright! S’okay? S’okay!”—with Grandfather Childs.

That was pushing it, though: once the joint—a better effort than the last one—was rolled, tempting as it would have been to watch his grandfather toke up, Simon turned his back on the old man. He took a deep drag—his glance fell upon the canvas travel bag on the floor next to him. He unzipped it a few inches to peek in on the king and the coral, sleeping peacefully in the bottom, entwined in each other’s arms like an old married couple.

“Except you don’t
have
any arms, do you?” giggled Simon, zipping the bag, then unzipping it again. “S’awright…?” “S’awright!” he called in two different voices.

But why this sudden obsession with Senor Wences? he asked himself. Hadn’t thought of the old ventriloquist from the
Ed Sullivan Show
in years, and now he was practically channeling him. Eventually it came to him: he missed his sister. Missy had been so taken with Senor Wences that she’d spent most of 1959 with a little face painted on the thumb side of her fist.
“Eassy for you, deefeecul’ for meee,”
she used to croon to her hand. Not that anybody but me ever understood her, Simon thought sadly.

But it was a good sadness, a sweet, loving sadness welling up inside him, filling the emptiness like a big warm golden marshmallow. Then he caught a blur of movement in his lower peripheral vision and looked down in time to see a banded snake slithering out of the canvas bag—God
bless
it, he’d left it slightly open. A second serpentine head emerged from the bag, testing the air with its tongue. This second snout was black, thank goodness—Simon snatched up a hairbrush and forced the coral back into the bag.

“No big deal,” he muttered to himself, zipping up the bag again—the scarlet king snake was only an enhancement. He’d planned to use it to deliver a few practice bites first—something that was not, of course, feasible with the coral—so he could watch Skairdykat’s panic slowly build as she waited for the venom to take effect. And as soon as it began to dawn on her that the king snake was harmless, it would be time to bring out the real deal.

That had been the plan, anyway. But as long as he still had the coral, he reminded himself, Skairdykat’s game would not be seriously compromised. And after Skairdykat, Pender: the plans for
that
game had been hatching ever since La Farge, as the eyeless corpse on the living room couch mutely attested.

And yet, under the enforced calm of the Ecstasy, Simon was vaguely aware of a budding anxiety. Somehow it seemed that the closer he got to Pender’s game, the less anxious he was to have it over with. That was probably why he’d driven east after La Farge, instead of south to Maryland, he was beginning to understand, why he’d detoured through Allenwood and Georgetown, risking life and liberty for a game with Skairdykat. It had been Pender’s game that had been driving him ever since Missy died, but thinking about what came after Pender was like speculating on what came after infinity, what lay beyond the borders of the universe.

A fellow could hurt himself, trying to wrap his mind around a paradox like that—especially a fellow as stoned and as constitutionally unable to contemplate the possibility of his impending nonexistence as Simon Childs. So what Simon asked himself instead was whether he had any unfinished business here in the east. And when the answer came up yes, he knew what his next move had to be.

Dorie steered the Toyota through the wide, empty suburban streets of Rancho del Vista, past cookie-cutter colonials with wide, empty suburban lawns.

“Speaking as a plein air painter, if I lived around here, I’d starve,” she said. “No damn ranchos, no damn vistas.”

“Yeah, but at least there’s plenty of parking.” Pender was navigating with the aid of a point-to-point map Dorie had printed out from MapQuest.com, which had recently been voted one of the top ten “Sites That Don’t Suck” on the Internet. “Okay, left on Guerrero…right on Oaxaca…” The streets were all named for Mexican states—so the gardeners would feel at home, according to the local wits. “And…here we go, twelve-eleven Baja Way.”

The driveway was empty, but Pender had Dorie drive past and park on the street, two houses down. She started to scoff. “C’mon, Pen. What are the chances he was even here in the first place, much less—?”

He cut her off long before she got to the second place. “You painter, me FBI,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and donning his new Panama, which he had to take off in the car—insufficient headroom. “Until I’ve established with one hundred percent confidence that he’s
not
in there, I’ll run the show. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Good. Wait here.”

“Yes, sir!” replied Dorie, who was not entirely unfamiliar with the
better-to-ask-forgiveness-than-permission
theory herself.

Mailbox stuffed. Driveway empty. Blinds drawn, upstairs and down. Front door locked; garage door locked. Pender walked around back. The landscaping was minimal, the fences low—not much privacy here at Rancho del Vista, despite the spacious lots. There was a patio, backed by a floor-to-ceiling picture window, but the curtains were drawn. He put his ear to the glass: not a sound inside the house.

Nobody home, thought Pender, trying the patio door, which was also locked. It happens—that’s the drawback of dropping by unannounced. But he continued his circumambulation, and when he came around the front of the house again, he saw Dorie at the end of the driveway, chatting with the mailman. She waved him over.

“Ted, tell Special Agent Pender what you just told me.”

“FBI, hunh? What I told your partner, I was off Monday, but I come back yesterday, Saturday is still in the box, along with Monday. Now, this guy Carpenter, he’s kinda weird, doesn’t like to answer the door, keeps it on the chain if I need a signature or something, but I’ve been on this route five years now, and in all that time he has never
not
emptied his mailbox. I was gonna give it one more day, then report it in. We’re supposed to report stuff like that—you’d be surprised how many dead people get found that way.”

“A sad comment on our times,” said Pender. “Thanks for keeping your eyes open.”

“I don’t need to report it, then?” asked the letter carrier.

“Not necessary,” Pender replied. “My
partner
and I can take it from here.”

Pender jimmied the patio door with the lockpick he’d been carrying in his wallet since his days as a Cortland County sheriff’s deputy. In another five days, after his retirement had officially taken effect, carrying it would be at least a misdemeanor bust in most states. Not that entering the house on Baja Way without a warrant wasn’t, he thought, sliding the door open.

But in a quarter century with the FBI, Pender had never willingly turned his back on a virgin crime scene—if this even
was
a crime scene. If it wasn’t, he could be in and out in five minutes, no harm done and nobody the wiser. As for Dorie, if she wasn’t going to follow instructions, it would obviously be better to have her where he could keep an eye on her. “Stick close, walk in my footsteps, and don’t touch anything.”

“Can do.” Without being consciously aware of it, until a week ago Dorie had had her life arranged so that she’d rarely had to walk into a strange house or an unfamiliar room until someone had vetted it first (you never know, could be a mask on the wall: booga booga!). Now she was starting to regret her newfound boldness. It wasn’t just the musty smell of the soaked carpet that had her spooked, it was Pender’s manner, the hushed but commanding tone of his voice, the grim set to his jaw, the wary tilt of his head as he started up the carpeted stairs, which were also squishing underfoot—somehow Dorie’s affable, comfortable, slow-moving Pen had turned into an FBI agent before her very eyes.

“Wait here,” he told her when he reached the top of the stairs.

“Pen, what’s that smell?” Stuffy, as if the rooms hadn’t been aired out in months. Or, no, not stuffy, more like sickly sweet, like old melon rinds in the garbage.

But he’d already disappeared into one of the bedrooms. Wait here? thought Dorie. Alone? You’d have to handcuff me to the banister. She followed him through the door, saw him standing in an open doorway on the far side of a bedroom. When he turned around, Dorie could tell from the look on his face that for a moment there, he’d forgotten she was even in the house. She started toward him—he met her in the middle of the room and put his arms around her to stop her from going any farther.

“You don’t need to see what’s in there,” he said softly.

“Is it Nelson?”

“It was.”

The seventy-six-year-old woman watching her soaps in a studio apartment in a deteriorating, if not blighted, neighborhood on the outskirts of Atlantic City had been born Rose Ella Moore and passed her happiest years as Rosella Childs, so it sometimes seemed strange to her to look back and realize that she’d spent a larger portion of her life as Rosie Delamour, a name she’d adopted half in jest and three-quarters stoned, than she had as Rose Moore and Rosella Childs combined.