Valley of Lights

FOURTEEN

Two days later, we loaded up the Renegade and drove north. In three hours we climbed from the desert plain through the hills and into red rock country, burning in the rays of the mid-morning sun. Georgie was still out of school, Loretta was out of a job, and I still didn't know what was to happen to me as a result of the Woods business; but I'd set up this trip and talked Loretta into it because I needed some time to work on her. I could see what was going through her mind as clearly as if she'd been made of fine glass; she was scared to ask me about what had taken place after I'd driven away and left her by the canal, but she was also troubled by not knowing. It was tearing her up, and she was saying nothing. We must have made a strange pair – Loretta being down and trying not to show it, whilst I was bursting like a jumping bean with a story that I couldn't tell. What Georgie must have made of us both, I don't know.

The gas jockey at the Mobil station told us that we were lucky, because it was warm for October; Oak Ridge had usually had its first snows by now. I turned to Georgie in the back and said that she'd probably make it to Slide Rock, a kind of natural Wet'n'Wild ride along a smoothed-out streambed, after all if the weather held. Georgie looked thunderstruck and said that she hadn't packed any swimming stuff, and I said that was okay, in that case she'd have to go all the way along Slide Rock naked. And then Georgie fumbled around in the back, and came up with the paper bag that had contained most of our breakfast, and promptly put it over her head.

Loretta smiled a tight little smile, and then told her to take it off.

We drove into Sedona and parked on the wide main street, just across from where the pink-painted tour jeeps were lining up ready for the first excursion of the afternoon. Sedona was still a small resort town, spoiled only by the hustling of the realtors to turn it into a big and sprawling one; on my last visit, I'd overheard a waitress saying that the area was expected to become like another Palm Springs. I'd been split between mourning the passing of an old friend, and wondering if I'd be able to get the stake together to pick up a piece of land somewhere on the outskirts so that I could then sit back and watch its value climb. I counted up, and between my salary and my savings and my monthly outgoings the most that I could have afforded would have been a box number in the local Post Office.

We went for lunch in a place that I knew where we could sit out the back on a board terrace. Beyond the rail we could look out across Oak Creek, its valley sides lined with cypress and pine and rising to the rust-colored mesas that gave the area its name. Loretta didn't order much and said that she wasn't too hungry, but I could see that she was making an effort. Afterwards the two of them went out to see if they could pick up some swimwear in one of the main street shops, and I stayed behind at the table for a while.

Not for the first time, I wondered exactly what I was going to say to her.

I knew what I wanted to tell her, and that was the whole truth, from start to finish; but I was too aware of how it would sound, of how it was an open invitation to disbelief. I'd been out there and I'd looked Woods in the eyes and we'd known each other as enemies, but this wasn't the kind of knowledge that I could pass on in words; the only way that I can describe it is to say that it was more part of the fabric, like when my old man died and changed my understanding of death from something that existed in the same layer of reality as taxes and airline schedules to something deeper and more permanent. Perhaps I could make up something that had a part of the truth in it but which sounded more plausible, but I wasn't sure that I could do the job. I'm not exactly what you'd call imaginative.

I was confident that this thing was going to work itself out, and that this was the best way to go about it; staying at home would probably have meant a slide into a fearful silence that would eventually become impossible to break. And the one big bonus for me, the knowledge that made every other problem seem small and manageable, was that I'd found a cancer in the city and I'd cut it out. Maybe I'd always have to stay an unsung hero, but at least I knew what I'd done.

Or rather, I thought I knew.

I was soon to find out that I'd been wrong.

The place where I'd reserved our rooms was about six miles further on out of the town, and we headed there after lunch to drop off our luggage. It was a small and inexpensive motel called the Red Ridge Terrace, and there didn't seem to be anybody around as we parked the jeep on its stonechip forecourt and rang the bell outside the office for attention. A friendly guy in his sixties appeared, apparently from raking leaves around the back, and called for Jolene; and moments later Jolene appeared from one of the units, walking down towards us and shaking the office key out of a bunch that hung beside her apron. Georgie went exploring as we signed for our two adjacent rooms, and then Loretta had to go and find her when we'd moved the bags out of the jeep. Georgie came trailing back behind her, insisting that she could hardly believe it but she'd seen a squirrel go by not six feet away. I told her that in Central Park, the squirrels formed gangs and mugged the kids for money to buy peanuts.

After that we got back onto the road and went even further into the valley, climbing and winding steeply through the forest with little room for passing. The roadside fruit stalls were all shuttered, and we passed a number of campground access roads with barriers across them stencilled Closed until April. It suited me fine, I hate crowds. I hate being one of them.

We left the car on a red-dirt strip by the road and spent a couple of hours at Slide Rock, after which the three of us went for a walk up the bed of a dry gully. There had been a lot of older kids splashing around at the Rock, but here we saw nobody. The gully had been sculpted and smoothed into all kinds of weird shapes and steps, and we went as high as we could until a fallen tree blocked our way. Then it was everybody race back to the jeep, and back into town in search of the perfect deep-pan pizza.

Loretta was unwinding, one notch at a time; I could almost hear the clicks. Perhaps tonight, when Georgie was asleep, she'd be able to let her worries out for some exercise.

There was a message waiting for me at the Red Ridge; someone had been phoning during the afternoon, asking for me but leaving no name.

Loretta said, 'Who knows we're here, Alex?'

'I left a number at the station desk in case they wanted to reach me,' I explained. 'I'm still on suspension, remember.'

'Could it be trouble?'

'There's only one way to find out.'

The pay phone was outside, under a shingled awning that ran the length of the units and provided a covered walkway down to a roofed lean-to area at the end of the building. It was now the last quarter of the sunset hour, where the greens go to black and the blues and reds turn vivid and metallic before dying away altogether. I shivered a little in the evening chill, wishing that I'd picked up a sweatshirt before I'd come out.

'This is Sergeant Volchak, District Five,' I said when I finally got through on the office extension. 'Has somebody been trying to get hold of me today?'

'Alex?' a voice said, and I recognised Blowjob Horowitz. 'That you?'

'Yeah,' I said, relaxing a little. 'Who's been calling?'

'I don't know anything about that, but they sent somebody around to your house this afternoon with a letter. Woods has dropped out of sight and there's no complaint against you. Your suspension ends Monday.'

'That's good news. Thanks.'

'Wait until you see what you'll be walking into. It's been chaos here, all day.'

'Why, what's happened?'

'You haven't heard? Go turn on the TV, it'll tell you more than I can. All I know is, this new boy makes the Encanto Park killer look like Mister Rogers.'

When I got back to the rooms, Loretta was inside with Georgie and presumably helping her to get into her night things. She put her head out of the door as I went by, and said, 'They tell you anything good?'

'I don't think so,' I said, and went into the next unit.

There was a large black and white TV in the corner of my room, its aerial lead trailing up to a hole in the ceiling; I plugged it in and switched it on, and as it slowly warmed into life I found that the sound wasn't working. The volume switch turned too easily, not meeting the resistance that it should. The TV next door was working fine, because I could hear it through the wall, but I didn't want to walk in and explain to Georgie why I wanted her to change channels from The 'A' Team or whatever it was that she was being allowed to watch in the last half-hour or so before she'd be packed off to sleep. With a certain and formless apprehension, I watched as the monochrome image resolved itself into the main news story of the evening.

A plain house, with stuccoed walls painted in some medium tone – probably the dusty kind of blue that looked good on many of the houses on the south side of the city. There were portable barriers in the near foreground which I knew would have Police Barrier – Do Not Cross stencilled on them in much the same style as the campground, notices that we'd passed earlier in the day, and beyond the barriers were enough official vehicles to spell major disaster clearly in my mind, sound or no sound. The coverage then cut to an unsteady hand-held shot on a long lens. It showed stretchers with blankets draped full-length over the bodies that they carried, five of them emerging from the house in a sombre procession as the news people fought and jostled all around the camera to peek through the cars at the one narrow angle that would show them anything. Then, as there was a jump cut to a lot of our people getting into vehicles, I heard the door to the next unit open and close and then Loretta slipped in to join me. She was about to speak, but didn't; there's something in the coverage of a tragic aftermath that makes it instantly identifiable, so instead she came over and sat on the bed. I'd been sitting in near-darkness, and when she reached over to switch on the reading lamp the TV picture jumped and threatened to get smaller.

I could hear another station's commercials running on the set next door, and they made a weird counterpoint to the sight of Lieutenant Michaels walking by and shaking his head as a sudden forest of microphones and mini-recorders were thrust in from every side of the frame towards him. They supered his name at the bottom of the screen, and I wondered what they were saying about him. Then, another unsteady image, this time a sneak-shot around the back of the house; keeping newspeople back at a scene like this is always like trying to dam up a creek with sawdust, you stop them in one place and they just come through at another. The camera zoomed in on a ground-floor window, and then immediately they froze the frame to show that there was writing of some kind on the glass, and then they did some kind of electronic trick and flipped it around so that it read the way that it would when seen from inside the room.

It read

YOUNG LIFE

OLD SCORES

and whatever it had been written in, it had run.

After a few moments on the anchorman, they went into some archive footage. Loretta frowned at the old film and said, 'Isn't that Manson?' and I made a noise of agreement as I stood up. Suddenly I had to go outside for a while.

The roofed lean-to at the back of the motel overlooked a terrace with two blackened barbecues and a couple of tables. It was now lit from above by a single naked bulb, around which moths were circling. I sat on one of the benches with my own weak shadow falling across the table in front of me. Somewhere in the RV park in the valley down below the terrace, a door slammed. After a couple of minutes, another shadow joined mine.

Loretta said, 'You didn't kill him after all, did you?'

She sounded relieved. I said, 'I took him out into the desert and shot him, but I didn't stop him. We just saw him make another entry in his resume.'

'You can't be sure of that.'

'Yes, I can. He's showing off, now. He's wiped out an entire family just to prove that he's still in business. Those words on the glass, they were a message to me. He's dancing out of reach.'

'So, how come no-one else is in on this? Why should you carry it alone?'

I looked at her now. The pale light showed up her lines, but it also stripped away the years. I said, 'Do you like horror stories, Loretta?'

She became a little suspicious, reluctant. 'Depends how close to home they are,' she said.

'Well,' I said, 'then you're not going to like this one.'

What I did then was to tell her the whole story from day one, step by step but with no conclusions or commentary; the idea was that I'd let her supply the connections for herself, go through it and see light in the same places that I'd seen it. Once you accepted the basic truth of the sequence, everything else had to fall into place.

Or so I hoped.

I didn't get to finish, because when I reached the part where I arrived home and found Georgie gone, the phone under the overhang started to ring. I tried to ignore it, thinking that someone else might come out and pick it up, but it carried on and I began to lose the competition with the distraction. I had to break off and go around the corner to answer it.

'This is the Red Ridge Motel's phone,' I said. 'Who's that?'

'Alex Volchak?' said a voice that I didn't know.

'Yes?'

' Sergeant Alex Volchak?' Whoever he was, he sounded young.

'Who is this?' I said.

'You weren't so hard to find,' he said, and rang off.