The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SIX

The ride north from San Francisco was long and troubling. Not because he’d blacked out sometime the night before and awoken many hours later covered in blood, but because he hadn’t.

Well, he had blacked out; he’d felt that coming on in his tiny living room and sank onto the old couch begging for it to pass. The next thing he knew, the sun was in his eyes, waking him from where he lay sprawled across the bucket seats of his Honda, parked behind a rusted, beaten-up blue VW on a quiet street lined with other parked cars. He had looked around at the low-hanging tree branches and the pastel mélange of tall and narrow houses along the sidewalk and then immediately at his hands. They were clean. No blood specks on his knuckles. No crimson rust beneath his fingernails. No used rubber gloves lying on the car floor.

He’d looked on the passenger seat, expecting to see the leather pouch he’d woken up with so many times after a blackout. But it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the backseat either, or on the floor or stuck between the door and the seat. He was sure. He’d gotten out of the car, down on his knees along the curb and looked. Three times.

He hadn’t felt comfortable staying where he was. He’d reached into his jacket pocket and found his car keys right where he always kept them, started up the Honda and pulled out onto the road, not having any idea which direction he was facing, let alone where he was, but he’d thought he could figure those things out once he got a little farther down the road. A little ways away from the scene of the . . . nap? He couldn’t be sure there’d been a crime.

He didn’t see any weapon. Which was a large part of what worried him. He had never felt the blackout come on and then not awoken without the blood of some poor soul drenching him. And he’d never awoken from a blackout without those knives. Had he cleaned himself up for some reason at the scene of the murder but forgotten the blades? Would the police be able to trace any fingerprints on the knives to him? What exactly had he done? He’d never been sloppy before, not while under the control of the force that he now thought of simply as the Other, and this new wrinkle worried the hell out of him.

It hadn’t taken long before he realized he was somewhere in San Francisco not Santa Rosa. He’d stopped at a burrito joint, gotten some huevos rancheros to go and directions back to the 101. Now, an hour and a half later, he pulled into River’s End and the driveway of his apartment.

The first stop inside wasn’t the toilet but rather the shelf where he normally kept the knives after cleaning them. They always disappeared a day or two later, never stayed in his apartment long, but they were always there for a day or two after an incident. That was why he’d clean them.

They weren’t there. They weren’t in the utility space near the washer and dryer either, and they weren’t anywhere in his bedroom. He stood on a chair and looked on the top closet shelves and then got on his knees and peered under the bed. He turned the entire place upside down, but the knives did not come to light. He thought he knew why: he’d taken them somewhere on behalf of the Pumpkin Man.

But, something different had happened this time. Maybe he’d used them, and maybe he hadn’t. He had no way of knowing.

It was an indisputable fact that the knives, the trademark of the Pumpkin Man, had not returned to River’s End with him. Months ago, he had flown all the way to Chicago to bring them home—not that he remembered much of the trip. But he felt responsible for them now.

In a sense he was glad they were gone. At the same time, he was scared to death. What had he done with them? Worse, what story would they tell when they were found?