Valley of Lights

TWENTY-ONE

I was up at dawn the next morning. I didn't dare dress, or go in the shower, or do anything that would prevent me from getting to the phone within the first couple of rings. I walked around in a bathrobe and couldn't even sit for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Today I was on Second Watch, which meant a mid-afternoon start, so I could stick around for as long as I needed to. Somehow it never occurred to me that he wouldn't call.

He did, on the dot of eleven.

All that tension, and now I hesitated before I picked it up. But then I snatched the receiver from the cradle and said, 'Yes?'

'Hello, Alex.'

It was a voice that I'd heard once before, on the line at the motel up in red rock country when I'd been told that I wasn't so hard to find. I said, 'Is that you, Winter?'

'Damned if I can remember,' the voice said pleasantly. 'Is Winter the college kid?'

'Yes.'

'Then that's who I am today. His eyes aren't so good, but he's fitter than most. I've used some real wrecks to get by, in my time.'

'You said I could speak to Georgie.'

He made a sound of disappointment, of disapproval, but I could tell that he was playing with me. 'Little hasty today, aren't we, Alex?' he said.

'Are you going to put her on, or not?'

'She's right here. Remember, Alex, one question and nothing more.'

I could hear fumbling around at the other end of the line, and some whispering. I couldn't make out what was being said, but I thought that I heard my own name in there somewhere. After what seemed like forever, I heard her voice.

'Hello?' she said.

I wasn't going to allow myself to get carried away. Not yet. I said, 'It's me, Georgie. I can't talk for long, but I'm going to ask you something and it's important. It may not seem so but believe me, it is.'

'Okay.'

'You remember your history book from school? No, don't answer that, just think about it. Somebody wrote his name on your history book and you tried to rub it off, but it wouldn't come. If you turn it to the light, you can still read it. Whose name is that, Georgie?'

'On my history book?' She was taking the question seriously, at least, and not messing around and making perplexed noises like an adult might.

'On the back,' I said.

'That was David Haber. He's awful, and he won't leave me alone.'

I sat down heavily, because relief had made my legs go shaky. She was safe, she was whole. There was no way that Winter could have known the answer – I hadn't even known about the book myself, until I'd seen it last night – and so I knew now that he wasn't speaking through her to fool me.

I said, 'That's fine. I can't talk any more right now, Georgie. Put your friend back on, will you?'

'Okay,' she said, and then there was more fumbling around. She'd sounded fine; a little on-guard and apprehensive, perhaps, but not as if she was being kept in fear. I wished that I could see what was happening there at the other end of the line, get some idea of exactly how and where she was being held.

When Winter came hack on, he said in a voice of exasperation, 'Jesus, Alex!'

I said, 'What's the matter?'

'I give you one simple question to ask and you have to make a whole production out of it. Are you satisfied now?'

'Depends what you call satisfied.'

'Oh, don't play games. Do you believe she was speaking for herself?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Good. Now leave me alone, and that's how she stays. She's safe, she's being looked after, she's got everything she needs.'

'And how long are we supposed to he able to go on like this?'

'For however long I say we do,' he shot back, and I could hear the iron of arrogance lying just underneath his words. 'You're not in control here, Alex, I am. Be by that phone every day at this time. I may call, I may not, but when I do, you'd better be there. Anytime you're not, that finishes it.'

'What if there's trouble with the phone?'

'Then it's bad luck for both of you. The child's here with me, so I don't think you'll want me to say what happens then. But you get the picture, don't you, Alex?'

'I get the picture,' I said, and he hung up on me.

I'd dented his good mood, and I wished I hadn't. I didn't want to score points off him, because he could too easily take it out on Georgie. But at least I now knew that she was all right, and I'd spoken to her; she'd sounded calm, too calm if anything. If I'd worried before about her being thrust too fast into a premature kind of adulthood, I had more to be troubled about now. I didn't know what she'd been seeing or what she may have learned, but I knew that it wouldn't be the kind of knowledge that you'd get from Sesame Street.

I sat there by the phone a while longer, looking at my empty hands. What was I going to do?

I was going to do exactly what I'd been told.

When I went out a couple of hours later, I had my spare uniform on a hanger for wearing and the other one in a plastic sack for the laundry. As I was putting them both into the back of my car, Heilbron was getting something out of his. He squinted at me, a non desert-dweller unused to the sunlight, and said, 'Hello again, Alex. The phone didn't ring while I was out, did it?'

'I don't believe so.'

'Only, I had a brainwave. Picked up this.' He brought it over to show me; it turned out to be a telephone answering machine in a box. 'Eighty-five dollars but the man said it works like new. Now if somebody calls and I have to be out, I won't have to worry about whether I missed it.'

'Good idea,' I said.

'I don't suppose you know anything about fixing them up?'

'Not a thing.'

'Well,' he said, turning the box over and looking all around it as if for clues, 'I ought to be able to manage. There's supposed to be a booklet somewhere in here.' And then he turned kind of sheepish and serious. 'Listen, Alex…'

'What?'

'I'm sorry if I rambled last night. I'll bet you thought I was never going to shut up.'

'Didn't even cross my mind,' I said.

'Well… thanks for coming around, anyway. It did me good.'

And me as well, I supposed. I said, 'Any time. Except now. Now I have to work.'

He didn't take offence, as I'd known that he wouldn't. He said, 'Listen, if you should hear anything at all…'

'I'll find you,' I promised.

He walked to the park's entranceway and waved me off down the road. It was years since anybody had done anything remotely like that for me. But then I suppose that I'd lost a father, and he'd lost a son… we were like pieces from two different puzzles, we may not have matched but we more or less fit. I liked him, he was all right.

But now it was hack to business.

Michaels, I learned at the station, had called in sick. This was to everybody's relief and to nobody's surprise except mine; I couldn't understand why he'd bothered to keep up the deception. Within ten minutes of being on the road almost the entire Watch was involved in a major scramble when we had a call from somewhere on North 40th Street for a domestic quarrel with shots heard; the address turned out to be somewhere in a labyrinthine estate whose roads followed no comprehensible system and which had no less than ten units screeching around and almost shunting one another as they crossed at the intersections. The cause of the panic proved in the end to be an over-loud TV set. After that there was a kind of lull in the action, and I took advantage of the quiet period to slip out of the area and drive out toward the quiet street where Michaels had lived.

I'd been there once before, but that had been before his wife had taken a college place somewhere back east to begin belated work on her Master's degree. I didn't know what kind of arrangement they had now. The place seemed dead and silent as I walked up the short path to the door, anyway; I rang the bell, but nobody came.

It was a one-story house, no more than three or four years old, with close neighbors but a well-screened boundary of masonry walls and bushes between each property. It wasn't bad, not bad at all. I knew that Michaels topped up his salary with all kinds of business interests; in fact he'd once told me that he looked upon policework more as a recreation and a labor of love than as a career, to the extent that he'd declined to take the captains' exam because he didn't want to be taken off the streets.

Well, he was off them now.

I went around to the back, through a gate which should have been bolted, but which wasn't, into a yard where a stepped redwood deck overlooked a small swimming pool. There were leaves on the surface of the pool, and the patio door beyond stood open a couple of feet.

I unclipped my holster. Just in case.

The whole house had been pretty thoroughly turned-over. Drawers had been turned out and dumped, clothes pulled out of the closets and strewn, pictures clawed down from the walls in the search for a concealed safe. He'd uncovered one in the study, an iron safe with a combination lock, and although it was scratched and chipped he hadn't been able to get it open. Michaels' certificates of business practice still hung on the wall to either side. The desk beneath had been plundered and things like files and deeds and ranch prospectuses had been thrown around in the hunt for cash and petty valuables to pawn. It was low, it was petty, it made me sick. To be able to live forever, and to choose to live like this.

I noticed one other thing before I left, and that was a letter lying on the mat behind the door. It had yesterday's postmark, and must have been delivered this morning. I didn't have to open it to know what was inside, because I recognised the stationery of Doctor Elaine Mulholland. Poor old Doc, sitting there in an empty office and none of her patients putting in an appearance. I hoped it wouldn't give her a complex, or anything.

Five minutes later I was back in my own area and responding to a call. No-one had even noticed that I'd been gone.