Night Relics (23 page)

It was dark night. The moon and stars shone in the sky overhead. Peter felt the wind sweep through him, hastening him along
as if suddenly it would lift him above the rocky landscape like a clutch of dried leaves.

He shouted with a wild desperation, but his voice was hoarse, again as in a nightmare, and the wind swept him across the darkened
landscape. He saw them ahead of him, knew that they were running from him, the two of them possessed with a desperate terror.
The moon shone on her black dress and pale skin, and illuminated the white of the boy’s shirt. The distance between them shortened,
and for a brief moment he thought he might overtake them. He shouted again, reached toward him, the dark shadows of his arms
and hands stretching away like the shadows of ragged tree limbs across the gray sagebrush.

The thicket of alders stood like a dark wall along the rocky streambed. There was a moonlit hole between the wind-lashed trees
that led like an open door into the moving shadows. He could hear the rush of water that plunged in a torrent over the clifftop.
His breath came in ragged gasps. His hands in the silver moonlight were streaked black with dried blood and dirt, and at the
sight of them he was gripped with revulsion.

The rage that had driven him through the last hour, the jealousy and the loathing, turned to raw fear. In his mind he saw
two dark shapes lying dead at the base of a cliff, and he knew absolutely what she meant to do. He had driven her to it, just
as surely as if he had led her by the hand to the edge of the precipice.

He saw the inside of the bunkhouse then—the candles burning, the moving shadows, the flesh of her uncovered flank along the
edge of the quilt, the man’s face turning in sudden horror toward the swept-open door, the rush of wind and leaves swirling
into the still air of the room, the feel of the weather-roughened handle of the spade in his own upraised hands, the shock
of the shovel blade scraping across flesh and bone….

The dark arch in the trees opened before him, still impossibly distant but seeming at the same time to rush forward as if
he were falling into a yawning black pit. Moonlight shone on the hem of her black dress as she slipped into the darkness ahead,
pulling the boy through with her, glancing back at him with eyes filled with such fear and terror that he groaned and looked
away, stumbling and falling to his knees on the rocky path. Over the sound of the wind and water he heard her scream, and
then, in the abrupt silence, the moon and the stars were swept as if by a hurricane into the deep void of the night sky.

Peter stared at the dirt of the path. His hand was pressed into a sharp pebble, and he lifted it to brush the pebble away
before looking around him, vaguely surprised at the daylight. Somehow it ought to have been dark. Or maybe not. He remembered
her scream, and he had a perfect memory of Amanda’s face, looking back at him out of the darkness of a cave mouth.

He stood up shakily, his head pounding. It was the first time in his life that he’d fainted—if that’s what had happened. The
line of alders stood out against the sky some thirty feet ahead of him, leading back up the ridge along
the streambed above Falls Canyon. Somehow he had walked, or run, the last quarter mile along the ridge, but he could barely
remember any of it, just ragged images of the moon in the sky confused with a man’s bloodied face against a dark wall, and
the dim memory of Amanda running away from him into the darkness.

He lurched forward, nearly sick, and sat down on the trail again, fighting just to breathe evenly. There in front of him lay
the shadowy hollow like an arched door in the thicket of alders. Gray limbs bowed and danced across it as if beckoning him
to step through into the shadows. He stood up and walked slowly toward it. The certainty that he had seen Amanda’s face in
the darkness there was too crazy to believe. The morning sun shone through the trees, illuminating the stream with glinting
diamonds of light. There was nobody among the shadows.

The miner’s lettuce and nettles and grasses that lined the creek had been smashed down, and there were depressions in the
soft dirt on the opposite side of the creek that looked like boot-heel prints—his own, from last night. The creek gurgled
along, a clear brown like tea because of the dead leaves on the stream bottom. He stepped carefully out onto the rocks and
looked over the edge of the falls, but there was nothing now, no bodies lying broken in the shallow pool. The narrow gorge
fell away steeply, choked with dead limbs and leaves that were barely disturbed by the wind, and he could hear the sound of
car engines down on the road.

Suddenly in his mind he saw once again the moonlit image of his own bloody hands. The picture flitted away, replaced by the
dead man’s eyes, open in horror where he lay entangled in the bedclothes, and he was flooded with a jealousy and horror so
loathsome that it was nearly inhuman. He pushed himself away from the precipice and lurched back out into the sunlight. Staggering
forward, nearly falling again, he caught the limb of an alder and held on to it, forcing his mind clear, tasting the residue
of the
bitter emotions as if he’d eaten burned food.

He realized that his shoes were soaked, and the knees of his jeans were scuffed and dirty from where he’d fallen forward onto
the trail. He looked at his shaking hands, then abruptly turned around and started back down the trail. The wind blew fitfully
now, innocently, and the morning was spent. Bobby and Beth would probably be at the house already, and suddenly what he wanted
more than anything else in the world was to be there with them.

P
ARTWAY UP THE RIDGE TRAIL BEHIND HIS HOUSE
, K
LEIN
stopped to pull foxtails out of his socks. The Colt pistol was heavy in his pocket, as if it were going to tear right through
the thin fabric and fall onto the dirt. He half wanted to pull it out and fire all six bullets into a tree, or whatever the
hell else presented itself. But that was crazy. He was going to be in deep
kim chee
if he didn’t get a grip.

He had screwed up badly again with Pomeroy. Larry Collier wasn’t worth more than about a nickel’s worth of anger, but somehow
Pomeroy, with his Smart-ass tone and his pervert mouth, had managed to turn Collier into some kind of issue. Klein shouldn’t
have hit him, no matter what, but the
real
mistake had been the gun talk, especially in front of Lorna. Lorna would know he wasn’t kidding. He had told Pomeroy to leave
Lorna out of it, and then he had involved her in it himself by losing control. And here he was now, loafing around out in
the hills, carrying the loaded .38 that he’d promised to use to blow a man’s head off.

And even if it came to that, even if that was the
only
way, finally, to deal with Pomeroy, it was the stupidest thing in the world to talk about it, especially when it might be
a real option. As far as Klein knew, Pomeroy didn’t have any family. Nobody would miss him aside from the shysters down at
the car lot where he worked, and they wouldn’t miss him much. Probably they’d have a celebration and burn the contents of
his desk in the middle of the showroom floor.

But he wasn’t serious about killing anyone. Not yet, not as long as Pomeroy was all talk. When he produced something real,
then Klein could get serious. Part of Pomeroy had to be a little bit worried. There was sure as hell fear in his eyes when
his lip was bleeding and he was crawling across the pool deck like a crab. But the thing about psychopaths like Pomeroy was
that time and experience didn’t change them. They were locked too deeply into their own twisted point of view, and they thought
the same thing was true about everyone else. In that way they were nearly blind.

That was what would screw him up. When push came to shove, Klein would hand him his head on a plate. That’s what Bobby next
door had said once. Klein brightened up, thinking about it: “Cut off his head and make him eat it.” That was it. Christ, that
was funny—something like that coming out of the mouth of a six-year-old. Kids were so full of beans these days that he couldn’t
get over it. Times had changed.

He thought suddenly about Lorna. He had laid into her pretty good back at the house. It was true that when he was in trouble
she’d stood there blinking like a blinded rabbit, but then what the hell did he expect, that she’d chase Pomeroy down and
kick his teeth in? “Here’s your gun, dear, I’ve loaded it myself….”

Right now she was probably drinking a Bloody Mary for breakfast, putting down a little hair of the dog. Well, he couldn’t
really blame her. Not this morning. If he hung
around Pomeroy much longer he’d become a damn sight bigger drunk than she was. He had always figured live and let live, as
the saying went, and he had applied that to Lorna, too. She was free to have her own opinions, which she could keep to herself.
The thing about wives was that they wanted to control you, and that was something he’d never been able to stand. He didn’t
want a nanny, thank you very much.

And for that reason he had always given her the same break: if she wanted to sleep till noon, so what? If she took a dip in
the vodka bottle at breakfast, fine. She was a big girl. He wasn’t going to tell her how to spend her time.

It occurred to him now, for the first time since they were married, that there was another way of looking at it—as some kind
of
failure
on his part. He tried to wave the thought away. It suggested too much. It was so big that it threatened to knock him over.
He had always believed that running a marriage was like putting together a plan for a home: you drew things out the way you
wanted them, adding in enough doors and windows, moving the pencil and straightedge yourself, so you didn’t turn out with
some kind of mess.

He couldn’t stand uncertainty, which was why he attended to his own business and let Lorna attend to hers. The way she talked
sometimes it seemed like she wanted him to
submit
to the marriage, or something, and that sounded to him like drowning. Maybe he just didn’t have the faith—in her, in marriage
itself. Faith had always seemed like a sucker bet.

He looked around him, feeling a gust of wind on the back of his neck. The grass on the hillside billowed as if a wave had
run through it, and he thought suddenly of the woman in the black dress. Was that why he was out there? Waiting for her? Christ,
he was one doomed son of a bitch, crazy and criminal both. He started toward home, looking one last time at the nearby oaks
and sycamores. The shadows
were merely shadows. He couldn’t wait all day for something that wasn’t going to happen anyway.

Lorna wasn’t in the kitchen. He opened the cupboard under the sink and checked the trash. There was an empty V8 can that he
was pretty certain hadn’t been there earlier. For a moment he half thought he’d fix himself one—a shot of Tabasco, stick of
celery. It might make Lorna feel better about things if he had a little belt, too. She wouldn’t be drinking alone.

He let it slide. Drinking during the day cut into production. He’d promised Beth that he’d install the dead bolts, and he
still had to run down into El Toro to buy the damned things. There was no use muddying the water with alcohol, so to speak.
That was almost funny, except that he had the feeling that somehow he’d slipped around the issue again. And he was already
sick of feeling that way. Why couldn’t Lorna just put a
lid
on it?

Shutting the study door behind him, he sat down at his desk, opening the top drawer and sliding the pistol into it. Later,
when Lorna was awake and out of the bedroom, he would return it to the nightstand. There was no use letting her see him with
it. Tilting the chair back, he pushed up the lid of the Rolodex, then flipped through the cards until he found Dale Winters’s
telephone number. Winters was his contact, call it his go-between, with Sloane Investment Services. Sloane was an investment
“consortium” that seemed to finance a number of cash-only restaurants and import-export businesses that shipped merchandise
to South America. That’s all Klein knew about it, the only thing he
wanted
to know. Winters had arranged the loan in return for a percentage, and Sloane’s money spent as well as anyone else’s, although
they expected a good return—a damned good return when you added Winters’s to it. That’s something Pomeroy couldn’t get into
his head: that if he took Klein down, and the deal collapsed, Sloane would be the unhappy loser, not to mention Winters. It
was high time
that Pomeroy was “leaned on” himself, by someone heavy enough to make it count.

Winters had an office in Irvine, and sometimes he worked on Sundays. It was a good day to call, because there weren’t any
secretaries there, and if Winters was working, then Klein could get straight through without being put off, which wasn’t always
easy. He remembered Winters laughing at the Begin joke at Spangler’s party. He was one of those oversized people who hugged
everyone. He got awards for giving truckloads of toys to kids down in Mexicali or somewhere. He didn’t owe Klein any favors,
but there was a good chance, if Klein pitched it right, that he’d have something valuable to say about Pomeroy.

He punched in the numbers and the phone rang three times before it was picked up and a voice said, “Yeah.”

“Dale!” Klein said. “This is Lance Klein.”

There was a moment of silence and then Winters said, “What’s the difference between a man and a bottle of wine?”

Klein thought about it, but nothing came to him. After a moment Winters said, “Wine matures,” and Klein laughed out loud,
even though it took him a moment to get it. He forced another laugh, wondering vaguely if the joke was meant to apply to him.

“You know who told me that?” Winters asked.

“I give,” Klein said.

“A waitress in a restaurant in Laguna Beach. Can you beat that?”

“I could think of a dozen to hit her back with,” Klein said, “especially if she was a blonde.”

“Well,” Winters said, “my wife was there, and she’s a blonde. I’m not big on blonde jokes, I guess.”