Valley of Lights

TWENTY

I suppose that I ought to have waited at least until the sun had dropped behind the mountains, but I didn't. I was remembering the way that Woods had struck out from the dirt road on foot with such confidence, his long experience obviously telling him the shortest way back, and I was planning to take the same line. Then, if darkness should fall, I'd at least have the sky-glow of the city to follow. I've never been able to get the hang of this business of navigating by the stars. Every direction always looks the same to me.

I'd done worse. I'd done this kind of thing at double-time and with a full pack; the trick was in taking it steady and staying cool on the inside. Within ten minutes I was back at the grave site, picturing what I'd seen through the scope lens and looking for a piece of horizon that matched the background. At a guess, Woods had been striking out towards the Beeline Highway when my rifle bullet had rearranged his hairstyle.

In less than an hour I came to a small road that saw more regular use, a fact betrayed by the bundles of tumbled rags and mincemeat that were the leftovers of last night's roadrunners. I was doing fine, but dehydration was starting to make me feel light-headed. I followed the road south, and another half-hour brought me the sounds of the distant highway; but before that, only a quarter of a mile ahead, I could see a half-finished white adobe structure with a couple of trucks outside it. A big sign on the front said that the building was going to be an Indian craft center when it opened sometime next year, but I didn't plan to wait. I walked in and said hi, and nearly frightened the crap out of a big long-haired guy up a ladder.

It was unbelievably cool and dark inside those three-foot walls, or at least it seemed that way to me. There were five of them working, all Indians and all curious to know how a scruffy and sweat-stained cop came to be strolling in out of the desert haze. I told them some story about how the electrics on my patrol car had died and taken the radio out, so it had been walk or else just sit around hoping that someone might miss me. They had a standpipe for water but it wasn't fit for drinking, so they gave me some sweet juice from their coolbox and then one of them drove me back to Sky Harbor in the smaller of the two trucks. He dropped me in the yard, and I went into the locker room through the side-door so nobody would see the state I was in; once inside I stripped off and got straight into the shower. About half of it got onto me, the rest I think I drank.

These immediate problems had been keeping my mind off my longer-term troubles, but now these were starting to reassert themselves. It all came down to one simple fact; that if he truly had Georgie and she was still alive, not just another of his inert puppets, then my hands were tied. He had absolute leverage, and I had nothing.

The shift wasn't over, but I knew that my duties had been covered and I didn't feel in much of a fit state to go out again; the same was doubly true of my uniform, and my spare wasn't at the station. Everything considered, I was persuaded that I ought to keep my head down and go home. The skin on my forearms and in the V just under my collarbone was starting to itch and burn, and I wanted to get some Solarcaine onto it.

Having sneaked out of the station, I was then faced with the prospect of sneaking back into my own house because one or both of Loretta's in-laws were moving around in the kitchen of the house next door. I sat out in the car for a while. I handled awkward situations every day in my job, so why was I so reluctant to face up to this one? Because it was so close to home, I supposed.

I got out of the car and climbed the wooden steps to Loretta's door.

It was the man, Heilbron, who answered. 'Yes?' he said, and he somehow seemed eager and distracted at the same time. He was probably somewhere in his sixties, well-worn and friendly-looking and not made for misery. He also looked as if he'd lost weight some time over the last couple of years, and he hadn't yet grown used to it.

I said, 'I'm sorry if I'm disturbing you. I live next door. I was wondering how Loretta was coming along.'

'Would you be Alex?'

'That's me. Is she talking again, now?'

'On and off. Can I ask you to come in for a minute, Alex? There's so much we don't understand, here.'

He stepped aside to allow me in, and I knew that I couldn't refuse. 'I don't know that I can throw much light,' I said, but he gestured towards the inside. It was an invitation, not a demand.

'Please,' he said, so I went on through.

They'd got the place a lot neater than Loretta had ever been able to manage, but it was a dead and unlived-in kind of neatness that wasn't exactly pleasing to see. The only mess was over on the table, where a heap of Georgie's schoolbooks and drawing-pads had been stacked up for careful examination as if by a valuer. Their son's photograph, I noticed, had been brought out of the bedroom and put in a more prominent place over by the stereo.

Heilbron waved me towards a chair, and started opening cupboard doors. I was remembering the lies that I'd told to Loretta in the hospital – white lies, I'd considered them then – and was wondering if they were going to return to accuse me now.

'They say you were actually with her,' he said, rummaging and not finding what he was looking for. I stood by the chair, unable to bring myself to sit. He seemed to be alone in the house.

'Not when it happened,' I said, 'but up to a couple of hours before.'

'So you're as much in the dark as the rest of us?'

'I don't know where Georgie is,' I said. 'If I did, I wouldn't be wasting time around here.'

He muttered something, moved on to the next cupboard. 'I've been waiting here in case the phone should ring,' he said. 'If there's any kind of news, I don't want to miss it. Clara's staying at the hospital for most of the time.'

'What are the doctors saying now?'

'Her neck was broken, but the spinal cord's still in one piece so they don't think she's going to be paralysed. I can't believe how lucky she's been. They say that if somebody untrained had tried to pull her out of the wreck, that would have been the end of it. The main danger now is this haemorrhage business.'

I said, fishing cautiously, 'Have they got any ideas at all about Georgie?'

He gave up on the cupboards, and started on the drawers. 'Not a one,' he said. 'As many theories as you like, but nothing solid. I mean, if somebody's kidnapped her for ransom or something like that, I don't know what I'm going to do… I'm retired, I'm not worth much.' With a sudden, impatient gesture, he slammed shut the drawer that he'd been looking through. 'Damn it, Alex,' he said.

'What's wrong?'

He turned to me, obviously out at the end of his line.

He said, 'Have you any idea where Loretta keeps her booze?'

I took him through into the kitchen, and showed him the cardboard box with the bottles in it that she kept behind the spin-dryer. I could see that he desperately wanted to talk to somebody, and I felt guilty because I knew that I couldn't give him the information that would reassure him. He'd want to take it to the police, the police would treat it as a normal kidnap, and Woods, Winter, or whatever he was calling himself now, would simply kill Georgie and change his face and move on.

He rinsed, out a couple of glasses at the sink, and we took a half-full bottle of scotch over to the table where the schoolbooks were. We sat, he poured.

He said, 'I gather the two of you are fairly close.'

'It was moving that way,' I said cautiously, uncomfortably aware of the framed picture behind me.

Heilbron said, 'You're not going to hurt my feelings if you say yes. We're all grown-ups here.'

'I know,' I said.

'We think of her like our own daughter. I only wish we could see her more, but… you can't stifle kids. You can't live on top of them, looking over their shoulder all the time. You understand me?'

'I certainly do.'

'But then, of course, it means we don't see Georgie so often… and kids of that age, you blink and they've got bigger… where is she, Alex? Who took her?'

I picked up one of the schoolbooks and turned it over in my hands. 'Hard to say,' I said.

'I drove out to where it happened. Went over every inch and looked in every culvert, just in case she might have been thrown out and could still be lying there. I don't understand it. I don't understand a single thing about it.'

He topped-up our glasses, and I explained the department's missing-persons procedure and the extra measures that we took whenever a child was involved. I was only half-listening to myself, knowing that I was covering up, but Heilbron was taking it all in like a starving dog with its eyes on a handful of biscuits. I could feel the truth like a bubble inside me, trembling and threatening to burst, and I had to leave my glass untouched because already I could feel the booze etching away at the edges of my will. It would be so easy to let go and tell. But they say that it's the same kind of thing with drowning.

Loretta, I learned, now remembered nothing of the accident or of our conversation in the hospital recovery room, probably as a result of the post-operative trauma involved in her second bout of emergency treatment. I also learned a lot about the insurance business, which was the field that Heilbron had worked in before he'd retired.

Finally I said, 'I have to go.'

'I know,' Heilbron said, 'I'm sorry. I've been talking too much.'

'No, it isn't that.'

'I've appreciated you being here. I want you to know something, Alex.'

I pushed away the drawing book that I'd been leafing through, filled with colored-in pictures of animals and birds, and said, 'What?'

'You're not the dull person you seem to think you are. You're reliable, but that's something completely different. I want you to think about that.'

'I will,' I promised.

'You sure you won't have one more drink with me?'

'I'd really like to,' I said, standing and pushing the chair back. 'But I have to take an important call in the morning.'

If only you knew, I thought as I crossed the narrow patch of ground to my own place.