Valley of Lights

NINETEEN

It was strange to put on the uniform again and go out to work; it felt like an unreal existence, a masquerade. Most people on the station seemed pleased to see me back, and the union representative took me aside and tried to sell me on the idea of making a claim for wrongful suspension, which I said I'd think about just so that I could get rid of him. I sat well to the back of the room at the start-of-shift meeting, where I learned that I was to lose four men from my squad to assist the murder team while the rest of us would have to spread a little more thinly to cover the normal patrols. Michaels was also being attached to the murder investigation, as a kind of go-between to carry out essential liaison between the two areas' forces. Because he's been fucking useless for anything else ever since, I heard someone close by me mutter, and I looked across at Michaels. His uniform looked as if it had been slept in, although from his eyes it didn't look as if he'd slept at all. He also seemed oblivious to the unease that he was creating around himself.

For a moment I began to wonder whether… but no, it was too much to hope. He'd seen a bad sight to end all bad sights, but I was the only one who'd nosed out the truth about Woods/Winter. As we all rolled out, the KOOL-TV copter passed low overhead to pick up some footage of the patrol cars rolling out in force, regardless of the fact that most of us were going to be out covering ordinary duties. The press had been given a detailed release on the second murder in time for the late news the previous evening, and now they were all preparing their specials. They love anything like this, it's only natural. I sometimes wonder if they don't sit at home and pray for disasters when things get quiet.

I was hoping that I'd be able to get through it all somehow on a mechanical level, but it was the frustrating little things that got to me in the end. About two hours in, I was taking details of some minor traffic collision and I looked into one driver's car and I saw this cesspit, dirty ripped seats and a floor full of junk, the only clean thing in there a brand-new Mr Submarine sandwich box that he'd emptied and tossed into the back, and then the next thing I knew I was chasing this little fat guy down the road and he was running so hard that he obviously thought he was going to die if he stopped. That's exactly what he did, though, when a patrol car suddenly erupted out of a side-street before him and slammed to a halt blocking the way, and Travis and Leonard were out of the car and holding him by the arms before I got there.

And then, when I got my breath back, I had to say, 'It's okay, let him go.'

'What did he do?' Travis said; and the answer was that he hadn't actually done anything. He wasn't even the culpable driver in the collision. Travis took him back to wait by his car, talking to him in a low voice, and Leonard said, 'Everything all right, Alex?'

'As good as it's going to get,' I said, and left them to take over.

Three blocks away I unhooked the portable radio from my dash so that I could keep in touch and went for my usual donut break, alone. This wasn't working out; Winter, and what he might have done to Georgie, were preying on my mind, but I still didn't see any way that I could act on what I'd learned. The waitress in the place knew my name, but I didn't know hers and we'd become familiar beyond the point at which I could admit it and ask; and as I was sitting by the window, she said, 'Alex, can you get me some more of those Operation Identification stickers?'

These were little yellow stickers which announced that anything of value on the premises had been marked and would be traceable. I said, 'What happened to the others?'

'Somebody stole them before I could put them up.'

'I'll bring some more next time.'

The shop was almost empty, so she came over. She said, 'You're looking tired. Did you get a vacation this year?'

'I took a trip upstate,' I said. 'It didn't work out.'

Five minutes later, I was back in my car and heading back to base. I'd had a radio call to say that someone was waiting to see me in the station yard. Considering the goings-on of the last couple of weeks, it could have been anything; I wouldn't have been surprised to find Doctor Elaine Mulholland, demanding to know why I wouldn't even phone her to explain the appointments that I kept missing. But what I found instead was an ordinary patrolman in an ordinary patrol car from the north-eastern district, sent to collect me and take me out into the desert to the marked spot found that morning by one of our helicopters.

It was the grave. It had to be. Not enough time had passed for the traces to be covered over completely, and the disturbance of the ground would be even more apparent from the air. I now had the length of one car ride to come up with the explanation that I'd so far avoided even considering.

Nothing promising seemed to be offering itself.

But as we came out of the yard and along by the airport, the patrolman was saying, 'It looked like a grave, but the lab people spent the last three hours taking the dirt out with little spoons and they didn't find a thing.'

'It was empty?' I said.

'It had been dug over, but nothing was there. The reason you haven't heard is that they've been keeping it off the radio so that the press people won't get to hear about it and come trampling around. Listen, can you read the map for me when we get closer? I'm not a hundred per cent sure of the turnoff.'

'Of course,' I said, and found the folded city map in the door pocket beside me. I left it open on my knees, even though I wouldn't need it when we got there. I knew the turnoff only too well.

So the grave was empty. Only Winter could have done it, because only Winter and I had known where it was; and of the two of us, probably only Winter had the long-time familiarity with the desert to be able to find the exact spot again. What was the point? I wondered. There had to be one, and I somehow didn't think that it would turn out to be anything that I'd like.

We headed out into the desert by the old broken stake. The dirt road didn't look any more heavily-used than it had last time, but then the earth was probably baked as hard as concrete. The patrolman said, 'Your liaison guy, Michaels. Is he all right?'

'Most of the time,' I said, thinking that most of the time didn't include the hours since he'd walked out of the so-called 'massacre house'. The patrolman nervously changed his grip on the wheel, and I could see that he had a delicate point to make.

He said, 'Well, maybe you could have a word with him. He's wandering around like he hardly knows what he's doing. He walked off into the desert this morning and didn't reappear for almost an hour.' And then he glanced over at me with a brief, apologetic smile, and I realised then that this was the real, if unofficial, reason for me being summoned along, not because there was some new dimension to the Paradise connection but because Michaels was on the slide and needed someone to quietly take him home. Business had to continue, and the massacre house hero was becoming an embarrassment.

There were only a couple of cars and a van remaining when we got there, first glimpsed through the heat haze but firming-up as we got closer. The lab people had taken their samples and covered the grave site with polythene sheet, staking it down against the possibility of wind and adding stones for extra certainty. Now they were stowing their gear away, their hair in sweat-spikes and their shirts patched dark.

Twenty minutes later, they and the patrolman had gone. They left me, and Michaels, and Michaels' car.

He hadn't said more than two words to me in all of that time, one of which had been Hi and the other of which had been Alex. He'd spent most of it carefully treading the dust around the edge of the site, arms folded and his eyes on the ground in front of him as if looking for lost money. I'd seen the lab people exchanging glances about him as if having him around made them uncomfortable – which is pretty rich, if you know lab people at all. But in this case, I couldn't blame them.

Watching as the dirt-clouds raised by the departing vehicles slowly dispersed towards the horizon, I wondered how I was going to open this conversation. Time seemed to take a beat.

But then, Michaels was the one who spoke first.

He said, 'Let's not kid each other, Alex, okay?'

I turned to him. The peak of his uniform cap shaded his eyes, somehow making his gaze seem all the more intense. It was like talking to somebody wearing mirror sunglasses, which I've never liked to do.

I said, 'Kid each other about what?'

'I was at the Paradise when it started. I've seen the sequence, too.'

I said warily, 'What sequence is this?'

'Don't make me put it into words, Alex. I don't want to hear myself saying those things. I've been walking around these last two days and it's like I've been able to feel my mind slipping away, one piece at a time. But then I put you and that business with Woods into the picture, and it all came together again.'

'I mistook the guy, that's all,' I persisted, and he stared at me for a few moments longer. I couldn't even guess what he might be thinking.

Then he said, 'Come with me.'

He turned, and set off into the desert without looking back. I hesitated a moment, then started to follow. I didn't know if he'd fastened on the truth, or what. He might even have reached something like the right conclusion, but for all the wrong reasons; the only safe course was to watch, and let him speak, and give away as little as possible.

But life had turned pretty interesting again in the last couple of minutes.

I glanced back at the car several times, uneasy at the chance of losing sight of it. We seemed to be covering quite a distance, and a light breeze would have been enough to wipe away our tracks in the dust and leave us stranded; but the air was still and hot, and furthermore Michaels seemed to have a definite sense of where he was going.

'I saw birds overhead,' he said at last. 'That's what led me here.'

We'd reached the side of a shallow canyon, a straight-sided cleft that had been cut by some long-vanished river. It went down about fifteen feet, no more, and the scrubby growth of the desert had intensified and become almost lush in its shelter. Michaels scrambled down the side, and began to make his way along the canyon floor; I followed in his wake, feeling absurdly like a kid on a dare.

Where the canyon turned about fifty yards further on, one of the sides formed a shady overhang and it was here that I got my first glimpse of our destination. A bleached adobe wall showed through the prickly bushes, its edges crumbling away, and I could see other shapes and structures in the unmistakable pattern of a ruined pueblo built into the canyon side. How long it had stood there, I couldn't have said; some of these things go back a thousand years or more.

This one hadn't been so big, only about seven or eight windowless rooms, and most of these were now open to the sky. We went in through what had once been a doorway, and climbed a step into the next chamber. This was the biggest of the complex, and. looked, to be the most complete. Michaels stepped aside to let me pass.

Before me, on an earthen dais that had once served some other purpose but which now had the look of nothing less than a primitive throne, sat the body of Woods. Someone had taken a lot of trouble with it. He was crusted with desert dirt and his time in the dry ground had sucked all of the moisture from his flesh, stretching his skin tight and drawing his lips back in a tight oval. It gave him the look of those Vietcong dead in the newsreels. His arms were spread wide and had been converted to form crude wings by the addition of twigs, brush, feathers, and scraps of cloth; and in the hollow that had been his skull, a rounded boulder sat neatly like an egg in a cup. However he'd come to be here, it was pretty certain that he hadn't walked.

It was another joke, of course. I didn't have to see a caption to know that it would read something like Phoenix in Flight. I could see that his eyes were gone, probably pecked out like a lamb's.

Michaels said, ' Now have you got anything to tell me?'

Woods may not have had many friends in life, but in death he'd found plenty of admirers, all of them flies. I turned away. I said, 'How come you kept this to yourself?'

'Because I wanted you to see it,' Michaels said, and there was desperation in his voice. 'Because if you don't open up to me, Alex, we get nowhere. My guess is that you killed him and he came back, am I right? So now I've got your problem because I can't tell that to the investigators. But you know better, don't you, Alex? Because you killed him, and he came back, and now all of this is just to show you that he's too powerful to be stopped.'

Time to take a gamble. What did I have to lose, after all?

'He can be stopped,' I said.

I saw the relief in Michaels' eyes. 'So what went wrong?'

'He was lucky.'

We moved through into the next chamber, away from all the insect life, leaving Woods to hold court in an empty room. I sat on the rubble of an inside wall and Michaels stayed on his feet, as if he was too hungry to rest. He already knew most of the story from being involved in it, but I filled him in on some of the scenes where he hadn't been present. Then, after the details, came the speculation.

'This is amazing,' he kept saying. 'This is incredible.'

'Number one,' I said, 'he's old. That's the key to everything he thinks and does. You've got to think of what the worst old people can be like, and then multiply it a hundred times over. He's set in his ways, not flexible like a creature like him really needs to be. He kept going back to the same motels over and over out of habit, and that's why he was so easy to find again. He knows how to drive, but he doesn't seem to like to. And he's crabby, he hates young people… and to him, everybody's young. I don't think he only hates youth, I think he hates life itself – he's been around too long and it's gone sour in him. But his nature won't allow him even to consider the idea of giving it up, so he takes it out on the rest of us. He knows to keep his head down for most of the time, but every now and again it comes bursting out and we get the killings and the mutilations. Right now more than ever, because I found a weakness in him and his pride's been dented.'

I picked up one of the flat stones that had once been a part of the wall, and hefted it from hand to hand. Michaels shifted his weight from one foot to the other, still listening, still unable to relax.

I said, 'Point number two, he's not very bright. What he can do makes him look awesome, but stop for a minute and look how he uses it. He says he's been around for ever, and where does it lead him? To the Paradise Motel in the Deuce, low-life all the way. He ought to be living like a king, but he can't handle or hang onto money. Even when I thought I'd found his weakness and wiped him out he could have slipped away and broken the trail for good, but instead he comes back screaming and pointing the finger at me like some outraged old prima donna. It occurred to me that he probably isn't the only one of his kind, but the rest of them are smart enough never to be seen. They don't rip up children and they don't make waves – they just keep on surviving and probably do pretty well. So perhaps this one's just the visible rogue of an invisible species, I don't know. What I do know is that essentially he's a loser, and he can be stopped.'

'So,' Michaels said, 'what's our lever?'

'I've been thinking about the way he works. I mean, the way he's put together. The quickest way to release him is just to kill the body that he's in. I've seen him do it without, but it takes concentration. Give him a bang on the bead or knock him unconscious, and it messes him up enough to keep him in one place for a while; that's how come he couldn't escape a beating when he was Mercado, and how I was able to hold onto him when he was Woods. The point is that he has to have another body to go to, and fast. Without that he'll just piss away into nothing.'

'You sure?'

'I saw the look on his face when he thought it was coming. I'm sure of it, all right. It would have worked, too, if he hadn't got lucky in a hospital Emergency Room just a couple of blocks away. But I'll tell you something else. I don't think he realises it, but deep-down it's what he wants.'

'How do you figure that?'

I turned the stone over in my hand. No Indian writing on it. 'He's old, but he's not wise. He's constantly on the run. He's so jaded that he uses child-murder like other people use hard drugs. And all that he has to look forward to is a life everlasting in the Paradise Motel.'

'You're saying that be actually wants to die?'

'I'm saying that he can't handle the idea, because dying's something that only happens to other people. But he waited for me on the morning after I'd made him, and he opened up when he could have walked away. He says he doesn't know why he let me get so near, but I do. I think he's chosen me. And one way or another, I intend to track him down and deliver.'

'Just about what I was afraid of,' Michaels said. 'Sorry, Alex. You got closer than anybody.' And be drew his revolver and fired at me with a sudden blast that shook the canyon.

He was faster than I'd been expecting, but he obviously wasn't used to the weight of the gun and the shot went wide by a couple of feet. I threw the rock as hard as I could, slamming in just under the breastbone. His reaction was way out of proportion to the severity of the blow, and I knew then that I'd made a right guess; I didn't wait around to watch the after-effects, but rolled back over and into the shelter of the low wall as he folded. I didn't want to stay around and give him a second try at me.

I scrambled, along in the shelter of the wall, getting right out of the pueblo and into the canyon before he could recover. He came out shooting, but I could tell from the sound that he didn't know which way I'd gone. By then I was safely into a crack in the canyon wall, and could even risk a look out through the bushes without being seen; he'd wasted three shots, and was standing by the ruined doorway with his free hand clutching at his stomach as if he was afraid that it might split and let everything come spilling out.

Obviously, his belly was still bruised and sore from the killer-blow that had stopped Michaels' heart; I didn't see how else the body of a child could have accomplished it. He must have been waiting inside the massacre house for the first policeman to come along, ready to cry out and draw him in alone; and then, what better guise than that of total innocence to get close enough to deliver the death-stroke? Michaels hadn't had a chance, he'd walked straight into it. His lack of concentration, his inattention to the job over the last couple of days – they weren't symptoms of an emotional reaction, they were his cover for the fact that he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing for most of the time. And all to one purpose – to find out how vulnerable he really was, to find out how much I knew.

And I'd told him now, hadn't I?

As long as he was in Michaels' body, he should have given himself some practice with Michaels' gun; if he'd been a little more expert, then I'd have been dessert for the pueblo flies. But like I'd said to him, in some ways he obviously wasn't too bright.

Now he was walking away from me, scanning the canyon floor for signs of where I might have gone. He wasn't bothering to keep to cover. I was a better shot than him, and could have put four into his back before he hit the ground… but where would it have got me, in the long run?

And there were some things I wanted to know.

Almost at the turn of the canyon, he seemed to give up and look all around him.

'Alex,' he called out, 'this is stupid. Can't we talk?'

His voice, raised as it was, echoed from the canyon sides and came back at me from three different directions at once. Would the trick work both ways? I decided to give it a try. I could always drop him, if he zeroed in on me. After coming so far, there was no point in worrying about adding to his annoyance. I'd simply increase my own personal body count and the chances of a final reckoning, that was all.

So I called back, 'I thought that was what we were doing.'

It seemed to work. His head swung around, but he hadn't placed me. It was strange to watch. This was the first time I'd seen him as someone that I already knew. It wasn't as if Michaels had died; but it certainly wasn't as if he lived, either.

He said, 'So I flew off the handle. Is that so surprising, after some of the things you said? Come on out.'

'I'm fine here.'

'It's your chance to ask me about your friend's child.'

Ah.

There was his hold over me, and he knew it. I said, 'What about her?'

'She's safe. I haven't done a thing to her. Can you believe that?'

'I can believe anything.' I didn't believe him. 'But what's the catch?'

I saw him grin. He was talking to the wall; I don't know if he was aiming toward some point where he imagined me to be, or what. He said, 'No catch, just a deal. You leave me alone, I'll leave her alone. How does that sound?'

'Sounds as if…' I began, and was immediately drowned out as he brought up the gun and fired three rocketingly loud shots into a bush that was a good fifty feet away from me.

I paused for the echoes to die down, and then went on, 'Sounds as if you don't plan to let her go.'

He was unfazed by his failure. 'Come on,' he said. 'Put yourself in my position. Would you?'

I thought it over. Georgie alive and unhurt was about the only thing in the world that could be guaranteed to keep me at bay. Could I credit him with enough intelligence to have realised the fact all by himself? I supposed that I'd have to. After all, overplaying his lack of mental agility could be even more dangerous than failing to perceive it in the first place.

I said, 'So, where are my guarantees?'

'Oh,' he said, 'don't worry, I don't expect you to trust me. I'll call you at your house tomorrow, before your shift. I'll let you talk to her. You can ask her one question, something that I couldn't know, and that's all you ask her because I'll be listening. No traps or traces, Alex, or she'll suffer. Can we agree on that?'

I took a deep breath before replying. 'Yes,' I said.

'Good.' He sounded as if he was pleased with the conclusion of a neat piece of business. He returned the gun to its holster, dusted off his hands, and straightened his shirt. Then, passing close by my hiding place – I didn't breathe or move – he walked back to the rough scramble-slope by which we'd first entered the canyon.

At the top, he paused and looked back; the sky behind him was almost too bright to look at. A few loose stones were still sliding down as he said, 'By the way. The child stays safe, but the show goes on. Enjoy it, Alex. It's your benefit performance.'

When I got to the canyon rim and cautiously put my head up, I was half-expecting to find him waiting; but he was already most of the way back to his car, a tiny figure on that vast plain. There was something in the way that he was walking that I now recognised, as if he was no longer bothering to disguise it. What I saw was Woods's walk, cocky and self-assured and probably pre-dating Woods by some considerable time.

In his place, I'd have stayed around a while longer and made the most of my advantage. But it occurred to me then, thinking over that parting shot about a 'benefit performance', that I was really the only audience that he had. As long as Georgie lived, my hands would be tied… and I'd be able to do nothing other than watch his parade of terror as he made the most of the spotlight after living in darkness.

And I still knew enough to be a threat to him, in the end. So in his eyes, the show could only have one logical final act. We'd bargained and he'd deferred it for a while, that was all.

It was only when I saw the plume of dust that marked his car's exit from the desert that I emerged all the way out of the canyon.

I had some walking to do.