Valley of Lights

THIRTEEN

We were coming up to a simple turnoff, marked by nothing more elaborate than a broken stake with an old car wheel as its base; the sign that it had carried had long gone, and as we turned onto the nameless track I glanced at Woods. He was blinking, and literally didn't know what had hit him. This was as I'd hoped.

I said, helpfully, 'It's called a headache.'

He turned to look at me, his head moving like something on a stiff bearing. I could almost see the intelligence reassembling itself there, the scattered pieces rapidly coming together in a seamless fit.

'Clever, Alex,' he said, and his voice was dry and scratchy. 'Very clever. But as a technique, it's annoyance-value only,'

'Better than nothing at all,' I said.

The road went on into the roughest, poorest country. It was an unmade track, a bare strip of the wide desert plain running all the way out to where the mountains were like heaped stones on the horizon. To either side were cacti, prickly pear, salt bushes; we passed a desert fox which lay bundled at the roadside like an old shirt, days dead.

It wasn't a road that got heavy use, because it led almost nowhere. This was what made it ideal.

Woods said, 'Whatever you've got in mind, you're wasting your time.'

I glanced at him again. He was looking straight ahead, but that confident and irritatingly superior smile was back. He'd settled into the seat as far as the cuffs would allow, and in spite of his dusty clothes and his bruises and his messed-up hair he had the look of someone who was waiting to be entertained.

I said, 'You think so?'

And he said, 'Yeah, but don't stop. I can always use a good joke.'

'I bet you don't get many, in a life like yours.'

I seemed to have hit a nerve with that one, because he didn't reply. He made as if something had caught his interest over to the side, and turned away; I got a brief flash of the dropping of the mask, but I didn't see what was revealed underneath.

'Exactly what are you?' I said. 'Really?'

'I'm older than the desert,' be said tonelessly. 'I don't have a name.' When he turned to face front again the facade was back up, but now he was looking more serious. He said, 'Don't hate me for what I have to do, Alex.'

'What do you expect me to do? Like you for it?'

He shook his head slowly, looking out through the windshield but not focussing on the road ahead. 'I don't know why I let you get so close,' he said. 'No-one else ever has.'

Hearing him use my name like he had, it was like having somebody stroke my back with a dead snake; but I wanted to keep him talking and so I said to him, 'Answer me one thing. Tell me why you killed the child, And then tell me how many others you've done.'

'That's two things.'

'Come on, just between us. I know it isn't for food, because you threw up what you ate. Do you get something else out of it? Or is it just some kink?'

He turned to look at me then. He wasn't smiling, his eyes were dead; for one brief moment I was afraid that he'd pulled out and left me with a lifeless shell as a hostage, but then he spoke.

'He was young life,' he said.

His voice was remote, like something echoing up from a crack in the earth. Even in the desert heat, I felt the chill wind of the dead blow through me.

'So it's a kink,' I said.

His dead eyes seemed infinitely weary. 'What do you know about anything?' he said.

'I'm learning all the time.'

'Better start counting the time you have left. Because I've got to tell you, Alex, when your little game's finished then so are you. Nothing personal, it's just the cycle. The cycle's all that matters. Predator and prey. It's like a heartbeat, only your kind never hear it. That's the difference between us. That's why I'll always win, and you'll always lose.'

'But you can die,' I persisted.

'Anything can die. But I never will.'

There was silence for a while. Our dust trail now went back five miles or more, but the mountains still seemed an infinite distance ahead. We'd seen no life at all, apart from a couple of roadrunners that had dashed across the track in front of the jeep towards the beginning. The sky overhead was the deep, pitiless blue of noon.

Young life. Jesus. Ancient and sour as he was, he must have despised it. He'd worked his way through every pleasure on offer through the ages, and now the only one left to him was to see young life suffer. Revenge on those who had something he'd lost and could never have again.

I slowed the jeep to a halt, but kept the engine running. It was the only sound, out there in the vast bowl of the desert.

'Okay,' I said, and I reached up to the roll bar and unlocked the handcuffs. I was wary of him grabbing for me, but he didn't try. He sat rubbing some life back into his wrists, and flexing his fingers.

He said. 'What now?'

'You've convinced me. Get out of the car.'

'What?'

'Get out of the car. I'm damned if I'm going to drive you back into town.'

He was suspicious. Nothing too great, just a tiny grain of disquiet, but I could see that it was nibbling away at the edge of his confidence.

'What are you planning?' he said.

'What does it matter? You're supposed to be untouchable. Now move away from the car.'

He got out, stiffly. He stood by the jeep and put his hands into the small of his back and stretched until I could almost hear his joints pop.

I reached over into the back, and came up with the hunting rifle.

'Move,' I said, and he started to walk. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back; I could see that he still wasn't entirely certain about this. It wasn't because of the rifle, because that didn't seem to be bothering him at all.

I said, 'Something else?'

'The woman and child,' he said. 'I'll remember them.'

But not for long, I thought, and without taking any particular aim I raised the rifle one-handed and fired into the scrub just a yard or so to the side of him. The sound was instantly lost out here in the open, but the rock-dust flew and spattered his legs.

I said, 'Keep walking.' He was still too close. I didn't want to risk getting anything of him on me, or on the jeep.

He was shaking his head. 'Oh, Alex,' he said, and I recognised the tone of it; I heard actual affection there, the condescension of a higher species for a lower, an immune observer touched by the frantic but futile efforts of some small beast to do him harm. With a sorrowful smile, he turned and started to walk. He didn't follow the road, but struck out at an angle; as if he'd been here before, and knew where he was, and knew exactly which direction would be the shortest way back.

Perhaps he had. The Salt River Valley had at least a two thousand year history of settlement, but it was a history without details; the Hohokam Indians had faded out and left no writings and very little for the mound-diggers to argue over. They also used to cremate their dead; and I wondered now if I was looking at the reason why.

'Okay,' I said, 'That's about far enough,' and he stopped and turned to face me again.

'You're disappointing me, Alex,' he said.

'Answer me one more thing,' I said. 'Say somebody made it so that you had no more bodies to jump to, and then something happened to you. Say I'd found your boy in the Tropicana and switched off his lights for good. What then?'

He didn't have to reply.

His face had already told me everything that I needed to know.

He turned and he started to run, and I hoisted the rifle up and put my eye to the scope sight. I was standing in the jeep and resting the gun on the roll bar, so my aim was steady. That awful flowered shirt was already beginning to lose its colors with the distance; beyond him, the rising haze from the desert shimmered like meltwater. The crosshairs were almost squarely on the back of his head. He had a balding spot, and I was targeting just below it.

Now look at me, I thought.

It might have been coincidence or it might have been something else, but at exactly that moment I saw him turn to look back over his shoulder and I corrected slightly to re-site the crosshairs. I had the feeling that be was looking straight into my eyes as I squeezed the trigger. I lost the image of him for a moment with the bucking recoil of the gun, but then I found him again and he was still looking back as be ran, only now his head from the eyebrows up was empty space. He took three more staggering steps, like a drunk. Then he folded for good.

I waited, wondering if I was going to hear or feel anything as the bird made one last flight to find its refuge gone. I was tensed-up, but I heard nothing. A faint echo of my shot came back from the mountains, but that was all.

I wondered if he'd seen it coming.

I hoped that he had.