Red Light (25 page)

"It
settles the stomach."

"Just
some water."

Mike
hopped to, brought her a glass with ice and a lemon slice on top.

"There's
a bug going around the department," he said.

"Maybe that's what
I've got."

• • •

Dinner lasted for several
thousand years. Merci guided the talk toward Tim, Jr., and Danny. Mike almost
always followed her conversational lead and rarely took it himself. He listened
to her with an intensity that she originally had thought was a tool for getting
her into bed. He could chatter like a jaybird about sports or hunting with his
friends but Merci cared about neither. Tonight he was quiet, attentive, aglow
in the candlelight. He looked good in the black sweater. She pictured him
pushing his silenced Colt into Aubrey Whittaker's chest and pulling the
trigger. She could picture his body okay, but his face was just fog.

She
believed, but she did not believe.

She helped him clear
and rinse the dishes. Mike slid the dish towel over the oven handle.

"Please
come to bed with me now," he said.

"Okay."

It was over fast so they
started in again. Merci surrendered to the wrongness of it all, she clutched it
like a boozer his bottle, a suicide his gun. Beyond the wrongness she found
something that had to be love because nothing else could possibly exist there.
Love of what they once had. Love of Mike, the boy and the man. Love of love.
Her climaxes were powerful implosions that seemed less of muscle and nerve than
of bone. During them she was vertiginous and free and she wished they could on
for hours, leaving her exhausted and purged and molecularly rearranged into a
completely different person—a good-natured blonde; perhaps, or a fundamentalist,
a savant, a pilot. Her jugular throbbed and her ears roared.

When it was over they
lay in the darkness breathing hard. She had done what she wanted to do. For
just a few minutes she had loved and believed in him. She had given him
everything she had, even the benefit of her doubt. She had testified to the
innocence she had helped him lose. Offered proof of a trust she wanted so badly
to feel.

And now, while Mike
dozed beside her, she came back to herself with an awesome regret.

She looked up at the
ceiling, knowing that whatever had been between them was over now. She would
never look at him the same way, for better or for worse. There was betrayal and
maybe murder. There was before Aubrey, and after. One thing had just ended;
another was just beginning; and there was a fat black line dividing the two.

She got up, collected
the condoms she had brought, went to the bathroom and dosed herself with the
aerosol spermicide from her purse. Then she showered and dressed.

"Stay
tonight," he whispered in the dark.

"No."

"I
love you, Merci Rayborn."

She brushed away his
hair and kissed his forehead. "I'll see tomorrow."

Five miles down
Modjeska Canyon Merci pulled onto a wide shoulder and parked the Impala. The
moon was high and cast a silver light on the hillsides.

She took the .45 from
her purse and aimed at the man in that moon, trying to keep him atop the
sights. She couldn't hold it still.

Then it jumped in her
hands and the noise hit her ears with a sharp crack. She collected the brass
with a flashlight and a tissue. Then she emptied the clip and reloaded it.
First she put in three shells from the new box she'd bought at the range. The
top four cartridges were Mike's. She wiped down the gun with a rag from the
trunk.

Five minutes later
she let herself back into Mike's house. Nothing looked different. Even with the
bloodhounds howling, Mike was a world-class sleeper once he was down.

She walked down the
hallway to the bedroom and peeked in. He was over on his side now, facing the
wall, curled up like a child, which was how he liked to do those deep first
hours. She stepped in and closed the door half way. The room went deeper into
shadow. No movement from Mike.

"Back
forever?" he whispered, words slurring.

"You warmed me
up so much I forgot my coat," she said. She went to the bathroom, left the
lights off. She got the coat off the robe hook and put it on. Then she eased
the range gun from the holster and slid it into her pocket.

"That
was really nice, Merci."

"It
was."

She
replaced Mike's Colt. No snap.

She went over and
touched Mike's cheek. Her hands were shaking again and she wanted to ask him to
forgive her but she would not have forgiven him for this, and she knew it.

He was breathing heavy and
deep, his hands balled into fists up near his chin. It reminded her of Tim. The
sleep of a child, the sleep of the innocent.

• • •

She woke Gilliam up at home, 12:27
a.m
., and told him what she needed.

"No
case number, no NIBIN, no DrugFire, no IBIS, no Brasscatcher. Nobody sees it,
nobody touches it, nobody knows about it but you. Not Coiner, not O'Brien,
nobody.
You and you only."

He understood
completely. He asked no questions. He'd have what she needed by the start of
the workday.

He gave her
directions to his house and Merci wrote them down in her blue notebook, using
the swing-out lamp above the radio for light, guiding the big car down Modjeska
Canyon with her left hand at two o'clock, just like her father used to do.

She tried to
concentrate on the road, but she had trouble thinking. Trouble knowing what to
feel. Trouble believing that today was Tuesday, barely a week since she'd seen
Aubrey Whittaker for the first time. Last Wednesday morning she'd argued with
Mike about a movie date she wanted break. And now, a few short days later, she
was gathering evidence to determine whether or not Mike McNally was a killer.
Her hand was locked on the wheel and her jaw clamped tight and her eyes weren't
seeing well.

Too much, she thought. Too
fast, too strange, too bad.

• •

At home she checked on
Tim, tucked the blankets up a little tighter, made sure his mittens were still
on. He didn't budge. She turned up the heater. Clark's door was closed.
Dreaming of Marcella, thought Merci, of all they'd had and all they'd said
good-bye to. Sometimes it crushed her to think that she, Merci, was the best of
what her father had left. Or maybe Tim was. She wished he'd find someone new to
love again, but he didn't socialize much except for the poker games on
Wednesdays. She wondered if he considered himself alone.

She poured a huge
Scotch, thought of Hess as she always did when she poured a huge Scotch, and
took another shower. She lathered and rinsed her hair, then did it again. She
scrubbed once with shower gel, once with soap. She stood under the hot powerful
water and wished everything that felt unclean inside her could just run off and
go down the drain like all the unclean things outside her. When she got out her
eyes were red and she looked like hell.

She put her little
.32 in her robe pocket and went back out to the living room. For a while she
sat in her father's recliner, a butt-sprung chair that was comfortable and
worn. The old house creaked and her heart jumped. She hated her fear. She
wondered if a modern, creak-less home would be better for her, but that meant
neighbors you'd have see, no orange groves for protection, nothing between them
and us

I'll sell the
ring, if it's too much pressure.

She sipped down some
Scotch and wondered if life was sad like this for everybody. She hated her
sadness like she hated her fear but she couldn't figure a way around it. The
trouble was, everywhere she aimed an optimistic thought it ricocheted and came
back at her head: She thought of a man she had loved and he was gone; she thought
of her own mother and she was gone; she thought of Clark and he was alone; she
thought of Mike and he was hiding silencers in his barn and good Jesus in
heaven, even if he
hadn't
shot Aubrey Whittaker, what in hell was going
on in that brain of his? Paul. Janine. It seemed like the only point of light
in the whole miserable universe was Tim, Jr., so radiantly and perfectly happy.
But what about five years from now? she thought. What's he going to be then,
one of those kids who brings a gun to school and shoots everybody? How much
time does he have before life wrecks him? What an awful thing to think. She
hated herself for thinking it, for poisoning even her son's unlived future with
her own fear and sadness. She wished she could crawl out of her skin. Become
new. Become improved. Trade all the fear and sadness and become quiet, content,
efficient and occasionally chipper. How long since she'd actually smiled
without irony? How long since she'd laughed without bitterness? It felt like a
million years. Was this too much to ask? And yet, if she had a choice she
wouldn't choose this. It wasn't her nature to feel this way. She hadn't had a
single miserable day in her whole life until what happened to Hess. Since
then, that's all she'd had. Like something in the air, like something you
couldn't get off you.

She considered Joan
Cash's Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing procedure, much promoted
by the FBI in its Critical Incident Stress Management Program. But all she
could think of with regard to EMDR was the opening scene of that horrible
college movie where the razor slices the eyeball. It made her queasy.

So she told herself
she was just feeling sorry for herself, that she only felt this way because she
chose
to feel this way. She reminded herself that she was captain of her
own ship. That she was responsible for her own feelings. That the world you saw
was the world you wanted to see. And all that other
crap
everyone was
always trying to tell you. She wondered if she should give herself over to
Jesus, but she couldn't respect a God that loved her unconditionally. It made
her suspicious of Him. Those were some of the same reasons she couldn't marry
Mike was she equating God with Mike now? What did
that
say about her.
Fuck, it was just a damned mess.

She drank down most
of the Scotch, hoping it would dull her sadness. Thirty seconds later, it did.
Made her dizzy, too, in a good way. She could see why people lived on the
stuff.

She dumped the rest
down the drain and went in to check Tim again. There he was, perfection in a
crib, the whole potential of the race contained in one individual thirty pound
unit.

All she could do was shake
her head and smile.

• • •

Later that morning—Merci
had no idea what time—she dreamed she was asleep in her bed, dreaming.

She heard something
beside the bed. She woke and reached under the bed frame for her H&K. When
her hand found the butt of the gun, it froze. Hess stood across the room
looking at her, his hands folded before him like he was standing in a reception
line.

It's okay,
he said, then he
turned his back to her and vanished.

She jumped out of the
bed before she even knew she was jumping. She landed hard on the floor. She
looked at the wall through which Hess had traveled but it was simply the wall.
Sweat ran down into her eyes and she could feel that she was soaked in it, her
gown damp, palms slick, her hairline cooling.

She heard her
father's footsteps on the hardwood hall, felt the air the room change when the
door flew open, and the next thing she knew she was stunned by light and he was
lifting her off the floor and back into the bed.

"Bad
dream," he said. His voice was soft, like he'd been dreaming too, like he
was talking down a five-year-old. "Just a bad dream, honey.”

"Yeah.
Hess."

"Hess. That's
okay. He's fine, you know. Now you settle in. Settle in, girl. Just a bad
dream."

"Good
dream."

"That's right.
That's it. There you are. A good dream. Let me get you a washcloth,
honey."

T
he
address in the "For P. B." letter turned out to be Inland Storage in
Riverside. Merci stopped at the gate and punched in the entry code. The old guy
in the office gave her a long hard stare so she gave him one back. She drove
around, following the numbers to 355. It was a maze. The doors were faded
orange, some of the padlocks brown with rust. The early morning sun hung over
the roofline, shot into her face like a spotlight.

She parked across
from the unit, looked at the letter again.
For P. B.
It surprised her to
think she was not the only person who gave a damn about Patti Bailey. She took
her kit from the trunk and got back behind the wheel. She worked on a pair of
fresh latex gloves, then brushed the key with black fingerprint dust. She found
exactly what she expected to find, nothing.

She pulled the key
off the letter, examined the dopple of glue and the little platform of paper
stuck to it. Back in the crime lab she could fume the letter, envelope and
stamp with cyanoacrylate, but something told her she'd be wasting her time. It
was a newly cut key, a generic blank, no ID from a cutter or shop.