Light Before Day (30 page)

Off Highway 178

Outside Bakersfield

Same Night

Eddie Cairns had made a lot of discoveries about himself in the week he had been a dishwasher at Atwell's Bar and Grill, a small hangout for roughnecks and truck drivers on the outskirts of Bakersfield. If Eddie ran his hands under scalding hot water for several minutes, the heat tightened the skin around his fingers and made it easier for him to work faster. And if he kept his hands in constant motion, the small crawling things that lived under his skin stopped fucking with him.

He suspected they looked like potato bugs, and the next time one of the fuckers tried to make an appearance, he planned on opening up his skin so he could find out.

Earlier that evening, Eddie had made another discovery. If he jabbed the tip of his tongue up against the canker sore inside his right cheek, he could make a spiderweb of white flame shoot up the side of his face. He decided to keep this trick a secret from Jose, the short-order cook he shared the kitchen with.

The day before, Eddie had made the mistake of telling Jose his theories about the highways and how the federal government had moved all of the telephone lines under them without telling anyone. That way the telephone lines above ground could be used for secret transmissions, such as discussions between high-level defense officials about how Eddie chose to wear certain colors that keep microscopic insects at bay.

Eddie hadn't meant to include the detail about the microscopic insects, but like most thoughts that entered his head, it had just slipped out. Jose had just stared at Eddie for a while. Then he said, "You fucked, Eddie. You fucked in the head and everywhere else too, prolly."

Maybe Jose was the reason Suzanne had been checking on him for most of the evening. She was a nice enough woman, but Eddie was fairly sure she had no idea that the immense folds of fat around her waist were a perfect breeding ground for unidentified organisms that were the true causes of most of the fatal diseases in the world, diseases the government could easily find a cure for if they wanted to. Eddie had yet to write his paper on the origins of cancer and how it was the result of too much of what he had dubbed skin-to-ground contact. He made a mental note to start work on it later that night, after he wrapped the satellite dish in tinfoil.

Suzanne. Now that the woman had entered his head, he couldn't get her out. She'd been in the kitchen four times already, made various wisecracks about how he must have washed each dish ten times in a row. (He did. It was the only way to get them clean. Wasn't that why the bitch had hired him?)

Eddie felt prickles on the back of his neck, and when he looked up he saw Suzanne standing several feet away. Her silver hair was pinned back with a barrette, and her huge glasses made her blue eyes look like marbles she could take out and polish with a dishrag. When she didn't smile at him, Eddie jabbed several times at the canker sore in his right cheek to see if he could scare her. The trick didn't work.

"Take a break, Jose," Suzanne said.

When the Mexican cook complied, Eddie felt one of the crawly things punch at the skin around his right elbow, and before he knew it, he was holding his right arm to his chest, rubbing the thing into submission with his fingers. Suzanne gave him a long once-over.

Everything was too real all of a sudden. Eddie could hear Faith Hill's voice coming from the jukebox out in the restaurant and the harsh laughter of drunken truck drivers, could smell Suzanne's sickly sweet perfume. For Eddie Cairns, clarity was a beautiful woman that broke your nose the minute you offered to buy her a beer.

Suzanne said, "I went to school with your sister, Eddie. Did you know that?"

Eddie shook his head.

"You should," she said. "I told you the day I hired you."

"Ma'am—"

"How long you been awake, Eddie?"

"Ma'am, I see things that others do not see. It's just that simple." When Suzanne frowned, Eddie realized he had said the last sentence four times in a row.

"Shit, Eddie," Suzanne whispered. "If jail's not going to do it, what will?"

Eddie thought he could make out a small radio transistor in her gold barrette. This entire conversation was being monitored, and it was obviously a test. How stupid of him to have trusted Suzanne, to have assumed the Highway People had not gotten to her as well.

Suzanne said, "My guys can do whatever the hell they want at home. But I know you've been doin' it at work, Eddie. That just won't do. I'm sorry."

"Could you please take off that barrette?"

"Excuse me?"

"Ma'am, you have underestimated me."

"You need to go, Eddie. I'll pay you for this week—"

When Suzanne's eyes widened, Eddie realized he was closing the distance between them. He saw his hand reach for her barrette, and then she grabbed his wrist and started screaming for Jose. Eddie was frustrated that there were only a few inches between his fingers and the recording device in Suzanne's silver hair, so he threw his body against hers, driving her against the wall as he bucked his wrist in her grip.

The next thing he knew, Jose had pulled him off the woman and was dragging him through the kitchen. Eddie hit the gravel parking lot on all fours and heard something break. Betty. His precious Betty. The glass pipe had been with him since he had taken his first toke of meth at sixteen, and now she was shattered. But not beyond repair.

Behind him, Jose was shouting something, something about how meth came from the devil and turned guys like Eddie into the devil, but Eddie was too distracted to pay attention, too busy trying to collect the tiny pieces of glass from the gravel. He needed something better than his fingers to do it.

"Looks like you need some tweezers, Eddie."

When Eddie looked up, he beheld the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The security light above the restaurant's back door turned her hair the color of sand in the Sahara Desert, a place where the crawly things under your skin curled up and died, a place where the Highway People had not yet managed to extend their evil empire. This woman was going to take him there. He was sure of it. Her golden freckles seemed to dance and shimmer like those plastic fish scales you sometimes saw on signs and billboards, and her full lips were probably the same rosy color you would see if you pulled her thighs apart.

She said something to Jose that made him go back inside. Then she lifted Eddie to his feet with one arm. "You just got fired, didn't you, Eddie?"

He croaked something. She laughed and said, "Well, whenever I'm having a fucked-up day, I like to cap it off by fucking it up the way I want it fucked up. You get the picture, Eddie?"

"I should warn you about the Highway People," he said.

"Uh-huh. Tell you what, Eddie. Why don't you just come with me so I can slide that big hard cock of yours in my mouth. But first I'll shoot a nice white present up your leg."

"Are you an angel?" Eddie asked her.

"Your angel."

As Eddie tasted his own delighted laughter, the woman pushed him into the backseat of her silver Chevy Tahoe and crawled in on top of him, then pulled the door shut behind her. The tinted window blocked out the security light over the restaurant's back door, but the woman's face continued to shimmer above his.

She smiled at him as she pushed one of his pant legs up past his ankle. Then he felt a sharp stab of pain and prepared himself for the brilliant flow that filled his veins in an instant. It didn't come, and the woman's smile had vanished.

"I changed my mind about the blow job, Eddie."

He felt thorny vines wrapping their way around his leg, tickling his ribs, then wrapping around them as well. Suddenly the woman's arm was against his throat and with a crushing sense of defeat, Eddie Cairns realized that the Highway People had won and that his only option—if he was going to survive—would be to surrender to their evil schemes.

"Sleep well, Eddie. You and I are going to have a long conversation when you wake up."

He grunted something that must have sounded like a question, because the woman brought her mouth to his ear and whispered, "You're going to tell me about the man who killed my mother. You're going to tell me everything, Eddie."

Whatever she had injected him with was dulling the meth he had smoked three hours earlier, and Eddie could hear the dark voices of that great engine of hatred and evil that drove the Highway People and all their emissaries of darkness in the world. Memory.

"No one's ever believed you before now," the woman murmured, "but I do. Maybe I'm not an angel, Eddie. But I'm the best fucking friend you'll ever have."

Before he blacked out, Eddie Cairns was sixteen again and down on all fours, wishing the cattle stall where he cowered would form four prison walls around him. Only that would have protected him from the horror that rained down on him that night. That night's sounds were the worst part, and nothing could have protected him from those. After the crack of the first explosion, the other men hitting the floor like sacks of sod, their furious growls turning to agonized squeals as they were butchered.

C H A P T E R 14

At ten minutes to eight o'clock, I was in my apartment standing next to my phone. I was wearing black jeans, a black V-neck T-shirt, and black Doc Martens. The leather motocross jacket Billy had asked me to wear was draped over the back of my desk chair. I was confident that Billy had asked me to wear the jacket for a specific reason. I figured I would find out soon enough.

After one look at the bruise on my face, Rod had driven me back to my apartment without asking me a single question. I was sure he had assumed that I had relapsed and some self-help book had told him it was better not to ask me about it. After Rod dropped me off, I had walked to a hardware store and bought a box cutter with a three-inch blade; then I hit a drugstore, where I bought some base to conceal my bruises from a clerk whose tense smile told me he thought I was in an abusive relationship. Now my bruises were concealed and the box cutter was tucked inside my right sock. The pressure it exerted against my bare ankle made me feel absurd.

At exactly eight o'clock, a pair of viciously bright headlights shaped like a serpent's eyes swung onto my street. Billy's ice-blue Lexus SC430 pulled to the curb outside. Everett was behind the wheel. The kid was wearing a white ribbed tank top, black leather pants, and his chunky silver bicycle chain. Neither of us said a word as I got in. I pondered asking him what it had felt like to wrap the bicycle chain around Scott Koffler's neck, and then I remembered that my sister's e-mail address was viewable to anyone with Internet access. We got stuck in the clot of traffic that always develops around the Beverly Center.

"Where are you from, Everett?" I asked him.

"You're weren't very nice to me last time," he said. "Why should I answer your questions?"

"You were a little forward," I said carefully.

We rode in silence until he merged onto the 10 Freeway, heading west. The West Side

became a blur of palm trees and low clouds reflecting the lights of Century City and Westwood.

"You've been to see Martin Cale before?" I asked.

"Many times," he answered, his voice cold.

"You like him?"

He didn't answer. He took the 90 Freeway toward Marina del Rey. Massive beachfront condo complexes rose on the western horizon.

"Any idea what Cale's expecting to happen tonight?" I asked.

"Billy said you asked for this meeting."

"And now I'm asking you a question."

When he glanced at me, it looked as if my anger had sparked something in him that was almost sexual. "Some men like to watch. Some men can't do anything else."

"Which kind is he?"

"The second kind."

He turned into the marinas parking lot. In the harsh floodlights that lined the docks, the masts of over a hundred sailboats looked like trees after a nuclear winter. Everett had a key for the gate in the chain-link fence. He opened it and gestured for me to step through.

He led me down a dock, past the point where the slips ended. The water made a thick and repetitive sound against the dock piles, a sound persuading me the ocean was a hungry thing, impatient to strike beyond its borders. The floodlights turned the rippling water a milky green. I was convinced the ripples were being made by something large and dark waiting for me below the surface.

"Where is he?" I asked.

"Martin Cale lives on his boat."

"I'm aware of that. Where's his boat?"

Everett was standing with his back toward the end of the dock. I counted the number of feet between us. His outfit didn't allow for a concealed weapon. His black leather pants were so tight they left little to the imagination, and his tank top was almost translucent.

"His boat's at sea," Everett said.

"Billy said he was coming to shore," I said.

"He only comes to shore for supplies," Everett said flatly.

Everett pointed down at the water. A metal ladder went down to something that someone somewhere might refer to as a boat. It was a black inflatable dinghy with a small outboard motor and the words
lost at sea
written all over it in invisible ink.

"This is bullshit," I whispered.

Everett heard the tremor in my voice and smiled. "You want me to call Billy? Tell him tonight's off?" He closed the distance between us, his eyes wide and glazed, his lips parted and moist. "Maybe you and I can get a room together."

I gestured to the dinghy floating below. It swung back and forth in the water like a metronome moving through molasses. "You first," I told him.

I sat with my back to the open ocean. The wind in my ears must have sounded similar to what passengers on a jetliner hear after the fuselage comes apart. Everett sat on a bench in front of the outboard motor, his eyes narrowed against the wind but his expression serene.

The temperature dropped by about ten degrees. I pulled up the zipper on my leather jacket.

After what felt like an eternity on the water, I glanced over my shoulder and saw Martin Cale's yacht cruising through flat seas. The twinkling strands of light on the southwestern horizon belonged to Catalina Island.