Last Light

16 Round Three

Two hours before sunset.

Having returned to Makani’s bungalow to sleep in her bed with the scent of her, eat her food, shower with her soap and her loofah sponge, and again use her toothbrush, Rainer was rested and primed for the encounter ahead.

When he checked the GPS for the location of her ’54 Chevy, he found that it remained at the house of Oliver Watkins.

He was not surprised.

There were people who ran like the frightened mice they were. He destroyed them.

Then there were people who would not run and who thought they were clever enough to outwit him. In the end, they died, too.

Makani most likely believed that her power made her a harder target than ordinary people. But her power was ordinary when compared to Rainer’s.

Anyway, Rainer had analyzed the situation from every angle. He was confident that she had no advantage that would save her or the pretty-boy feeb who imagined he was her guardian.

One of the many things at which Rainer excelled was analysis. Of data. Of situations. Of people.

He would have become the winningest chess player in history if he had been interested enough to learn the rules of the game. Chess looked boring. Too slow, no sex, no killing.

Pogo and Makani sat at the table in the gazebo to enjoy the sunset. The rope lighting under the encircling handrail and around the perimeter of the ceiling was hardly noticeable at the moment, but with nightfall, it would cast a warm glow over them, so that their location would be obvious.

On the table stood two bottles of Corona. They had not drunk any beer, and they would not until this was over. The gazebo was a stage. The bottles were props. They intended that Rainer Sparks should interpret their demeanor as either reckless confidence or fatalistic indifference, though it was neither.

Bob paced around the gazebo, pausing now and then to stick his snout between balusters and sample the thousands of scents that the sea and the city offered him. He was not a prop.

Part of the day had been spent encouraging the Labrador to smell the threshold at the side door to the garage, by which Sparks had evidently gained entry, the alarm keypad outside the laundry room, which he had somehow overridden, the carpet of the guest bedroom, the blanket and sheets, and the clothes that Makani had been wearing when he had forced her facedown onto the bed and had lain atop her, pressing her into the smothering pillow. Initially, Bob wagged and capered and grinned, seeming to think that they were teaching him a new game, but soon he began to take the instruction seriously. He apparently found Sparks’s scent complex, disturbing, and endlessly fascinating.

A spectacular sunset required scattered clouds to provide reflection, and the day’s end was furnished with a perfect mix.

Feathery cirrus at the highest altitude. Cirrostratus farther down. And nearest the sea, a procession of puffy stratocumulus clouds, like unsheared sheep, wandered slowly northward.

Not sure if they were yet under observation by the murderer, Makani pretended to take a sip of her beer and then said, “When this is over, we need to do something special for Bob.”

“We’ll give him a special day,” Pogo said. “Start out cutting up a couple frankfurters in his morning kibble.”

“A long walk in Corona del Mar, the Village. He loves all the smells there, the other dogs out walking.”

“Some Frisbee at the dog park.”

“Lunch at a restaurant that takes dogs on the patio.”

“Go over to Muttropolis, buy some cool new toys.”

“The dog beach. A long nap on a blanket, in the sun.”

“Get him on the board. He’s more an inlander than a surf mongrel, but he’s game.”

“Shut your face,” Makani said. “He’s no inlander. He’s born to thrash the waves.”

“If you say so. I haven’t seen him channeling Kahuna yet.”

The sinking sun phased from lemon-yellow to orange, and the lower clouds caught fire first, though soon the blaze laddered up to higher elevations.

Makani said, “I’m afraid.”

“Who wouldn’t be?”

“You seem way cool.”

Pogo said, “I’ve been thinking I might need an adult diaper.”

The heavens were as full of fire as Hell when Rainer parked three blocks from the Watkins house.

He waited in the GL550, listening to music, as night crept in from the east and the sun went to its daily death and the bloody light drained down the sky to the horizon.

Currently, he was sampling symphonic music. Wagner.

His life was so eventful, so epic, that he felt it needed theme music. He was a demigod, and demigods didn’t stride through their days without a soundtrack.

He had tried gangsta rap, but it didn’t seem important enough.

Beethoven was too spiritual. Glenn Miller too ebullient.

The movie soundtrack for The Terminator had possibilities, as did certain tunes from that old TV show Twin Peaks.

Wagner was the closest to being right, but it wasn’t ideal.

Rainer had begun to think he would have to write his own music. He had never written music before, but he was sure he could do it.

When the sunset had diminished to a thin red wound along the horizon, he got out of the Mercedes.

He walked without haste to the Watkins house and the pleasures that the night held for him.

As before, he wore his stylish and practical khaki coat with cargo pockets.

Makani and her guy had probably figured out by what route he had previously entered the house. It didn’t matter if they were waiting for him.

He was unstoppable.

Nevertheless, this time he went directly to the front door.

It would have been amusing to ring the bell, but he did not.

A deadbolt. The LockAid released the pin tumblers in less than half a minute.

With a pistol in hand, he entered the foyer fast, in a half crouch, but no one waited to greet him.

Since he was invisible to them, he didn’t expect to be fired upon. Just in case, he was wearing a bulletproof Kevlar vest under his coat, a custom model to which had been added short sleeves.

The house was quiet.

A few lamps were lit, dialed low.

In the family room, through the French doors, he saw the dark patio, the dark yard, and the lighted gazebo toward the end of the property.

Makani and her guy were sitting in the gazebo. Downlighted.

“What game is this?” he wondered aloud.

Makani lifted a bottle to her mouth. Maybe a beer bottle.

Not-Ollie lifted a bottle to his mouth, too.

Who were they trying to kid? After he had kicked their ass in Round Two, less than twenty-four hours earlier, they weren’t lying back, relaxed, and getting juiced.

It looked like a trap of some kind.

Now and then, other people had tried to set a trap for him. Idiots, all of them.

If he opened a patio door and stepped outside, they wouldn’t see him, but they might see the door open.

So he’d go out by way of the side garage door.

He hesitated, watching them.

The gazebo was near the gate in the glass-panel fence. A gate on a bluff meant there must be stairs leading down to the shore.

Maybe they expected him to come at them from the beach.

Maybe they figured that at the first sound of him on those stairs, they’d step through the gate and shoot down on him.

Did they think he was a loser?

Rainer wasn’t a loser.

They were the losers.

Maybe they thought he wouldn’t attack them if they were in the open, under the gazebo lights, visible to neighbors if anyone in a second-floor room or sitting on an upper deck of the flanking houses happened to look this way.

Stupid.

He could simply push out his mojo to affect the neighbors as well. They’d never see him or hear the targets’ screams any more than the other diners in Sharkin’, the previous day, had seen him throw beer in Makani’s face or heard him curse her out.

And his pistol was fitted with a silencer. It would make only a soft, sensuous sucking sound when he shot not-Ollie in the head.

Rainer was ready to be done with that guy. Eager to get started with Makani.

He left the family room, followed the main hall to the laundry room, crossed the garage, and opened the side door.

The moon hung too low to brighten the narrow walkway between the residence and the property wall.

Rainer moved toward the back of the property.

Snout between two balusters, facing the house, Bob became agitated. He growled low in his throat, whimpered, growled again, and turned to look at Makani and Pogo.

“Our guest has arrived,” Pogo said.

Makani said, “I’m going to be sick.”

“You’re not going to be sick. You might wind up dead, but you won’t embarrass yourself.”

“I think maybe you’re right. Which amazes me.”

When the last light had faded from the sky, they had turned their chairs away from the view, angled them more toward the house.

Earlier, they had turned off the landscape-lighting timer. The yard lay in deep darkness. They could not see Rainer coming. Or hear him. But he could not see much, either, except the glowing gazebo and Makani radiant within it.

The previous night, in the guest room, when Bob couldn’t see or hear Rainer, but only smell him, he had become confused. Now, in the night, the dog could not expect to see him, and therefore should not as easily become disarmed by puzzlement. Besides, that afternoon they had spent two hours sensitizing the Labrador to the murderer’s scent.

Bob became increasingly agitated, which suggested that Rainer was crossing the yard, approaching the gazebo. Pogo held in his hand a switch he’d bought that afternoon. A black extension cord ran from the switch, around the yard, to the control box for the lawn sprinklers. The trick was not to activate them too soon, out of fear. He had to wait for the cowbell.

As Rainer approached the gazebo, he heard in his mind’s ear a stirring passage from Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung.

It was Hitler’s favorite music.

Now that Rainer was in action, Wagner’s composition proved to be the perfect accompaniment for the violence to come. It made him feel ten feet tall. It almost brought him to tears.

Shoot the idiot pretty-boy in the face.

Shoot the dog.

Drag the bitch into the house and teach her the beauty of pain as she had never known it.

In his nearly blind rush, he came to a wire, maybe five or six inches off the ground, stretched taut across the width of the yard.

As he tripped and fell, a cowbell rang.

Still in the thrall of the killer’s power, Pogo didn’t hear him fall, but the cowbell was a thing apart from Sparks, and it clanged when the wire was violated.

The scent of the murderer excited Bob beyond his ability to control himself. He would have sprung out of the gazebo and dashed into the yard if Makani hadn’t been holding his leash with both hands.

Pogo flicked the switch. After a hesitation while relays worked and valves opened, the lawn sprinklers showered the grass with an abundance of water, thanks to the higher-flow heads that he and Makani had installed earlier.

Furious that he had fallen, that he had been embarrassed by the likes of those two losers in the gazebo, Rainer gasped when a veritable storm erupted from the pop-up lawn sprinklers.

What did these morons think they were doing?

Did they imagine they could humiliate him to death?

He struggled to kick loose of the wire.

His efforts made the cowbell clang louder.

He would feed the pretty-boy his severed manhood before he fed the bitch her face.

Wagner was booming in his mind’s ear.

The length of half-inch insulated cable lying on the floor by Pogo’s chair was wired at one end into the junction box that served the gazebo. When he picked it up after activating the lawn sprinklers, he was careful to keep his hand well back from the bare copper wires at the end from which he had stripped the insulation.

As Bob strained at his leash and Makani held him safe, Pogo stood up and threw the cable between two of the balusters, onto the sodden grass.

He expected Sparks to scream. The murderer wouldn’t be able to maintain the spell that he cast over them, surely not in his death throes. According to Makani, when she had thrown beer in his face, in the restaurant, he had for a moment lost control, and others had suddenly become aware of him in his embarrassment.

The scream didn’t come. Still didn’t come.

Pogo told himself to stay cool, stay cool, but a fine sweat broke out on his brow.

Rainer thought he was free of the wire, but when he clambered halfway to his feet, he discovered that he was still entangled, and he fell again, face-first, into something disgusting, of which he got a choking mouthful. He didn’t have to wonder what it was, he knew instantly what it was, and he was furious—outraged—that they had been so busy setting their trap, they hadn’t remembered to pick up after the dog.

Had he been standing, the rubber soles of his shoes would have insulated him and, in spite of the electricity arcing through the heavy spray, might have saved him.

Prostrate on the lawn, he never heard the end of the heroic passage from Wagner that boomed through his mind, though an instant before eternal darkness blacked out the last light in his brain, he realized that he was listening to the fourth of the composer’s famous tetralogy, which was Götterdämmerung, otherwise known as The Twilight of the Gods.

After counting to twenty, when he still hadn’t heard a scream, Pogo counted to twenty again before he reached to the junction box and threw the little breaker in it. He detached the cable from the box, reeled it in from the yard, and coiled it on the floor of the gazebo.

During Pogo’s recovery of the cable, Makani let go of Bob’s leash and used the jerry-rigged switch to turn off the Niagara hissing from the lawn sprinklers.

The grass squished under their shoes and water splashed their ankles as they went in search of the murderer. With the moon still low in the east, they could not see Rainer Sparks until they were almost on top of him.

He was visible in death.

“That was radical,” Makani said.

Pogo agreed. “Totally live.”

“Should we check for a pulse?”

“This isn’t a movie.”

“So the monster doesn’t keep coming back.”

“Exactly.”

As far as Pogo could tell, no neighbors were at second-floor windows or lounging on upper decks. The privacy walls prevented anyone on the ground floors of the flanking houses from having a view of recent events. The darkness would shroud what needed to be done next, and there had been no gunshots to draw attention, only a cowbell, which was one of the decorative objects that Ollie Watkins had distributed through his “cottage” to make it feel authentic.

Bob rolled around in the puddled grass, kicking his feet in the air, as if celebrating Rainer’s end, although of course he was just being a dog.

They dragged the corpse across the backyard, alongside the house, through the side door that Rainer had left open, and into the garage, where they saw why the murderer hadn’t screamed.

“Cosmic justice,” Pogo said, and Bob looked on with pride.

While Pogo moved his primer-gray thirty-year-old Honda from the garage and parked it in the street, Makani searched the many pockets in the khaki coat until she found the keys to the Mercedes GL550. Because he had parked it three blocks away, she needed ten minutes to find it and pull it into the garage stall that Pogo had vacated.

Getting more than two hundred pounds of dead weight off the garage floor and through the tailgate of the Mercedes was a challenge.

“That was gnarly,” Makani said.

“It gnarled,” Pogo agreed.

Bob didn’t like being left behind in the laundry room.

“You’re wet, Bobby,” Makani explained, “and you’ve done your part already. You’ve been a good, good, good boy, Mommy’s best boy ever, little Bobby baby.”

As the Labrador wiggled his butt, delighting in the praise, Pogo assured him that they would be back soon.

“You drive, O’Brien,” Pogo said. “You look more reputable. No cop would ever pull you over — except to ask for a date.”

As they drove away from the house, he entered Rainer Sparks’s street address into the vehicle’s navigator. Earlier in the day, they had gone online and, in public records, discovered that he was a property owner.

Killing for money, Sparks had done well for himself. The house was large, in a good neighborhood.

They assumed that he lived alone, that he didn’t have a wife and kids, especially since the bride of Frankenstein had been dead for many years. Their assumption proved true.

In Sparks’s garage, they had to do the gnarly thing again, get him out of the SUV without dropping him and leaving the corpse with an inexplicable injury. He was still a big dude, but he didn’t look so formidable anymore.

Pogo said, “It’s almost as if he’s…fourteen again.”

Getting Sparks upstairs, stripping him naked, drawing a hot bath for him, and sliding him into the bathtub would be something they would remember for the rest of their lives.

“It was a bonding experience,” Makani said.

“Something to tell our grandkids.”

“If we ever get married.”

“If we ever do.”

“If we ever even go to bed together.”

“If we ever do.”

She said, “Don’t you come on to me until I’m ready.”

“I was just sayin’.”

From Oliver Watkins’s cottage, they’d brought a Bakelite radio, a yellow-and-red Fada, from the Art Deco period, which Ollie had restored as a conversation piece. After wiping his prints off the Fada with a towel, Pogo plugged it in, switched it on, set it on the edge of the tub, and pushed it into the water.

They placed the contents of Sparks’s many coat pockets on the dresser in his bedroom, but left all his clothes in his laundry room, where the garments would probably dry out before anyone found his corpse.

On the way out of the house, they wiped down everything they could remember touching.

“This worries me,” Makani said.

“What — you think we missed something?”

“No. What worries me is we’re so good at this.”

“It was self-defense. That’s no crime.”

“It feels like a crime.”

“Nah. It’s more like a Batman thing.”

They walked seven blocks to a tavern, where they drank one beer each. Then Pogo called Uber, and they were driven to Laguna by Pedro Alvarez, a most pleasant young man who might have been a tad naïve, as he seemed to believe their pretend inebriation was real.

Bob the Labrador was ecstatic to see them.

“I’m quashed,” Makani said.

“I’m totally thrashed,” Pogo agreed.

They slept in separate guest rooms. He dreamed of her. The next morning, he wanted to ask if she had dreamed of him, but he held his tongue.

He cut up two frankfurters and added them to Bob’s morning kibble. They dressed for a walk in the Village, and they took the Frisbee for the dog park.

Sparks’s body wasn’t found for three days.

On his computer, police discovered a large collection of photos of murdered men, women, and children, with Sparks’s detailed account of how he had felt as he’d taken the life from each of them.

The authorities weren’t disposed to spend public funds to investigate whether the accident with the antique radio was in fact an accident. The coroner allowed the possibility of suicide.

For Makani and Pogo and Bob, order returned to their world, at least for a while. As bizarre and frightening as it had been, the affair seemed to be the start of a beautiful friendship, if not something even better.