Light Before Day (8 page)

"You need to leave, Scott."

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. "I thought you were a southern gentleman.

You're not even going to offer me anything to drink?"

"There's a sink right behind you."

His silent laugh shook his shoulders. "Does the name Dale Dupre ring a bell?" he asked.

It didn't, but I had a feeling Koffler was going to ring it for me.

"Dale's from your hometown. I knew him when he lived out here. He wanted to be an actor, did some porn, ran back home—same old story. Anyway, he's a bartender at this club down in the French Quarter now. I understand it's one of your old haunts. Dale says you visited his bar after your mother's funeral. You remember?"

I didn't. I couldn't remember anything about the night of my mother's funeral except calling my sister from a French Quarter pay phone because I couldn't find my rental car.

"Dale says you told him that there were witnesses to the accident that killed your mother, and they claim that your mother was fighting with her boyfriend just before it happened. Apparently the boyfriend came to the funeral and sobbed to everyone about how he hadn't pushed her."

My pulse sounded like a tribal drumbeat in my temples.

"But the next thing you told Dale ..." Scott shook his head. "Dale says he'll never forget it.

Do you remember, Adam?"

"Get out, Scott."

"You said if the guy had pushed her, you would understand."

His eyes went wide and then his head snapped sideways on his neck. I felt the impact in my fist as I retracted it.

He hit the floor like a sack of dirt and made a sound like a window unit in August. I grabbed the back of his belt and hoisted him up on all fours.

He hit the door across the hall from mine hard enough to shake the wall. He rolled over onto his back, and I saw that his nostrils were bubbling and his lips were smeared red. His dead eyes met mine. "You're too easy," he breathed.

He sat up, wiped blood from his face, then stared down at his red palm. "You're just too fucking easy," he croaked.

I heard a door down the hall open just as I closed mine. One of my neighbors was calling after Scott as he walked down the hallway. I leaned against my door until the hallway was silent and the only sounds I could hear were Scott's car pulling off down the street and my own breaths whistling through my nostrils.

When I reached the Strip, a sheriff's cruiser was parked in the median across from Keyclub, where a line of Goth kids waited to gain admittance to see some band whose name kept flashing on the Jumbotron above the entrance. I had never heard of them. I heard a squeal of brakes and saw the crime scene photograph that depicted my mother's death pose. Now her outstretched arm was not pointing in the direction of the cab that had run her down at forty miles an hour. She was telling me to walk past her fate. In life, my mother had never been so direct or so caring. In death, she had no choice but to become everything I chose to endow her with.

I felt as if my mind were encased in steel and every thought inside my head had tried to escape a few seconds too late, clanging the walls of their prison until my ears screamed. The next thing I knew, I had turned my back on the Sunset Strip, a river of bass beats and heterosexual aggression, and was walking into the tree-shaded blocks that sloped downhill.

At the door to Nate Bain's building, I studied the call box and determined the apartment number for the sober neighbor who had given me the card I had left for Nate. I don't remember what I said when he answered his buzzer. The neighbor opened his door for me without asking me what I was doing there. I sat at his small dining room table as he fixed a pot of tea.

"There's blood on your shirt," he finally remarked. I didn't respond, which didn't seem to bother him. He handed me a cup of tea and sat down across from me. The overhead light bounced off his glasses, hiding his eyes, and gave a moist sheen to one side of his bald head.

He sipped his tea and allowed a long silence to pass between us. "You're going to stay here until two A.M.," he said gently. "You can watch TV with me. You can sit right there and stare into your own head. You can even go in my bedroom and entertain yourself with the Men of Falcon.

But you don't leave this apartment until two A.M. Deal?"

Two A.M. was when the bars and liquor stores closed. I nodded. "What do you guys talk about at your meetings?" I heard myself ask.

"Everything." He sipped his tea. "There's a midnight meeting I know of over in Hollywood.

You want to go?"

When I didn't respond, he smiled slightly and rose from the table.

"I don't want to die like my mother."

I heard his footsteps stop behind me and realized I had given voice to the thought.

"You won't, honey," he said gently. "You'll die just like you."

A few seconds later, he raised the volume on the television. The apartment filled with the sound of enervated British people discussing petty trifles as if they were of global consequence. The longer I listened, the less petty their trifles seemed. After a while, I joined my strange companion on the sofa. Eventually I nodded off, and when I awoke, my guardian was tugging gently on my shoulder. It was ten after two, and he was telling me that I had made it through another day.

He closed the door behind me before I could thank him or ask him his name. As I walked back to my apartment, I cried for my mother for the first time since she died. My tears didn't last as long as I had feared they would.

Coalinga, California Same Night

In 1891, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company established the small town of Coalinga at the northern end of the narrow valley that lies between the Coast Ranges and the Kettleman Hills. It was named for the coal discovered under its soil, and today it is the only mining boom-town in California
to
have survived into the twenty-first century. Over the years, it had subsisted off what was once the largest oil field in California, the cattle ranches that lie in the hills to the west, and one of the only small-town medical centers to be constructed with a federal grant in recent memory.

At night, the sodium vapor lights of Avenal State Prison throw an orange glow across the tule-blanketed hills to the south. Highway 198 marks the town's southern border before it travels into the rolling landscape of grassy plateaus and rounded hills that make up the Inner Coast Ranges.

Lucy Vernon was the only clerk on duty when a young woman named Caroline Hughes pulled her silver Chevy Tahoe into the service station's parking lot, bypassed the gas pumps, and slid into the parking spot next to Mike Harberson's pickup. For the past hour, Mike and his partner in crime, Joey Murdoch, had been sitting at one of the tables next to the coffee machines, shouting things about how the Ding Dongs didn't look fresh and how it must have been a bad season for Twinkies. Lucy wasn't responding, and they had returned to snickering like
South Park
characters and taking sips from squeeze bottles that smelled like they were full of Drakkar Noir.

When Caroline entered the gas station, Lucy recognized the spray of freckles across the woman's nose and forehead and the pupils that reminded her of frozen amber. There had been a picture of the woman on the front page of the
Coalinga Record
a few weeks earlier, taken just as Caroline Hughes emerged from the Kings County sheriff's station after identifying her mother's burned corpse.

Lucy figured the woman's expression must have been what her grandfather referred to as a thousand-yard stare. Caroline pulled a basket from the stack without acknowledging anyone else inside the service station and disappeared into the racks.

"Whatsa matter, Luce?" Mike Harberson called out. "You see a ghost?"

Lucy returned her attention to the copy of
US Weekly
she had been flipping through and listened to Mike's shuffling footsteps. He leaned on the counter with both elbows. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his latest attempt at a beard looked like a swarm of fleas clinging to his chin.

Mike was a nice enough guy when you got him alone. He had an almost childish affection for the nearby foothills and he liked to share it with women like Lucy, women who saw him for the jackass he was and forgave him for it.

"Or maybe it was your special friend?" Mike whispered.

"Your breath's gonna make me throw up," Lucy said.

Her sharp tone brought a flash of pain to his eyes. "Hey. Look, Luce. I know I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about your—"

He saw her glaring at him and stopped talking. For a second Lucy thought he might not mention the story she had told him a few days earlier, after he had plied her with Strawberry Boone's and lured her into his F-150 for a drive out 198 West. The sex itself had been fine. Lucy wished she had been able to keep her mouth shut once it was over with.

Instead she had told Mike a story she had promised never to tell anyone, a story her father had repeated to her through a haze of morphine years before. It scared Mike so badly he hadn't said much for the rest of the evening. Now he was going to use it to make fun of her in some way, just so he could get it out of his head.

"Hey, Joey!" Mike called over one shoulder. "Remember that story I was telling you about?

Shit! What was his name again, Luce? El Mariachi or something."

"El Maricon," Joey answered. "It's Spanish for fag."

"Right," Mike said. "But this ain't no redecoratin',
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
kinda fag now, is it, Lucy? This guy is badass, right?" He laughed nervously.

Lucy glanced up to see Caroline looking at cleaning products, then tried to focus on an
US

Weekly
photo of an emaciated former child star who had just been carted off to rehab. Mike returned his attention to his buddy. "He rides around the hills on some hog, blowin' up shit right and left. He wears a black motorcycle helmet so no one knows who he is, right? And according to Lucy here, he carries a machete on his back. You know, like, in a holster, so he can just reach up . . ."

Mike reached up into the space behind his back, then whipped his hand forward. ". . . and whack your fucking head off like X-Men or something!" His head twitched.

"I heard of him before, dumbass," Joey said. "The guy's just a fairy tale."

Joey's comment stabbed Lucy in the gut. The story her father had told her had been far too specific and gruesome to be dismissed so easily.

"So what do you think, Luce?" Mike asked. "You think your homo hero had anything to do with what happened down in Avenal?"

"Shut up, Mike," Lucy said.

Mike turned to see Caroline Hughes standing several feet behind him. She had pulled her lustrous red hair back into a ponytail and her white tank top revealed broad shoulders and biceps that were as big as a woman could make them without looking like a freak. A strange light had come into her eyes and the sight of it was enough to silence Mike Harberson where he stood.

"I want to know what you're talking about," Caroline Hughes said. Her voice was low and hoarse. Lucy thought it might be a smoker's voice, but the woman's face was taut and unblemished, save for the gold freckles that gave it an almost muddy sheen.

"I asked you a question," Caroline Hughes said.

"No, you didn't," Mike answered. "You gave me an order. Bull dykes don't give orders around here. This ain't San Francisco."

Caroline closed her eyes briefly, gave Mike a brief nod, and turned on one heel. Lucy was about to take a breath when the woman spun and landed Mike with a sucker punch that sent him stumbling backward into a rack of sunglasses.

Before Lucy or Joey could make a sound, Caroline was on her knees, holding the back of Mike's head against her breasts with a grip so tight it looked like she would pull his stringy hair out by the roots. The knife she held to his throat had a six-inch blade and a five-fingered rubber grip on the handle.

Tears spit from Mike's slitted eyes. Lucy almost felt sorry for him until she remembered what Caroline Hughes had been through—her mother burned to death just because she had gone to visit one of her students in trouble. Maybe Mike Harberson was finally getting the ass-kicking he deserved.

"You've got a story to tell me," Caroline Hughes said. "Tell it."

"You heard it," Mike groaned.

"I want to hear all of it," she said.

"Fuck you," he spat.

"You're an asshole, Mike. Not a dangerous asshole. Just a third-rate white-trash small-town asshole who hangs around gas stations threatening every sixteen-year-old who crosses your path.

You want to know something, Mike? Not even sixteen-year-olds are afraid of guys who hang out at gas stations."

"I told him the story!" Lucy snapped. "He was just repeating stuff I told him." Caroline didn't lift her gaze from the top of Mike's head. "You're right. He's an asshole. But that's all he is. Let him go and we can talk."

"Tell me now," Caroline said without looking at Lucy.

"Maybe you need to know," Lucy answered. "But they don't."

"They already do," Caroline answered.

"Not all of it!" Lucy shouted, panic flaring in her voice.

Caroline met Lucy's eyes, and the intensity of her stare lit up hairs on the back of Lucy's neck. "Joey can go first," Lucy said. "Then you let Mike go and I lock the doors."

"And what if I call the cops?" Joey Murdoch shouted.

"Then I tell them you've been hitting the glass pipe just like your brother!" Lucy told him.

Joey paled and sank back down into his chair.

Caroline gave Lucy a slight nod. Lucy jerked one thumb at the front doors and Joey bolted.

Caroline lifted Mike to his feet, walked him to the door, then kicked him square in the ass. The two men scrambled into their pickup and peeled off into the night.

Lucy locked the doors. Then she went behind the counter to turn off the sign outside. When she turned, Caroline Hughes was standing right behind her, watching her every move. She still held the long-bladed knife in one fist. Several locks of hair draped her face and her eyes were red-rimmed, her breaths rapid and shallow.