Valley of Lights

TWENTY-EIGHT

When Angela Price came out a few minutes later, the farm caretaker lay dead with my untraceable Colt Special in his hand. For anybody who wanted to work it out, it would look as if he'd committed mass slaughter in the house and then crawled over here with the notion of escaping in one of the cars. That didn't leave me exactly free and clear, but it took me a lot of the way.

I looked up from beside him and said to Angela, 'Did you call the sheriff?'

She looked once at the body beside me, and then looked away again. None of the dead inside the house had been quite as messy as this, and what had been the ghoul was also lying out in full daylight. She said, 'Right after I called the network. There's a news crew on its way down here in a helicopter.'

Yeah, I could bet on it. I could also bet that she'd spent at least half of the time negotiating a television contract for herself before she'd disclosed the location of the story. Straightening up and dusting myself off, I said, 'Well, I'm going to disappear.'

Her eyes widened. 'What?' she said. 'You can't!'

'Only for as long as it takes to get Georgie to her mother. Tell the sheriff I'll be turning around and coming straight back, and then I'll tell him anything he wants to know.'

'He won't like it.'

'You're right, he won't.'

And I probably didn't have much time before he'd get here. I picked up the bird box from the hood of the St Regis and took it around to the Toyota, which was the only other car that could be rolled out of the barn without a lot of manoeuvring. The engine turned over easily and started on the third try. Angela followed me out around the side of the house, and in the rearview mirror I could see her standing at the top of the drive as she watched me go. She probably didn't want to go back into the house alone, and I couldn't blame her. Before I turned out onto the main road I checked in my mirror again, only now she was shading her eyes and watching the sky.

The bird in its pet store box was on the passenger seat now. I'd held it in place with the seat belt, otherwise it would have slid around every time I hit the brakes. As the outskirts of the town approached, I could hear it tearing at the cardboard from the inside.

'Either you stop that,' I said, 'or I tape over the airholes.'

That quietened him for a while.

Georgie was asleep on the back seat of Angela's car when I got there, but she woke up as I was carrying her over. I'd decided to stick with the Toyota, which seemed to be fine apart from a tendency to jump out of gear on a stop. Georgie sat in the back, yawning and blinking as I drove another two blocks in search of a pay phone; I saw a lot of activity around the county sheriff's compound, in addition to the three cars that had passed me at speed on their way out to the farm. From the phone I called Loretta's number, and left a message on Heilbron's answering machine. His taped message said that he was at the hospital, so that would be where I'd go. When I got back to the car Georgie was leaning forward on the back of the passenger seat so that she could look over at the bird box, and she was frowning. But she didn't say anything, and dropped back as we moved out.

I took no chances on the way back, no speeding or anything, and just before we reached the city outskirts I turned off down a side road. Once we were out of sight of the rest of the traffic, I stopped. I walked off the track for about two hundred yards, and there after wiping my leather holster I scraped a hole in the dust and buried it. Looking back as I returned to the car, I found that it was already impossible to say where the hole might be.

Georgie seemed to be holding up pretty well. She certainly wasn't the distressed wreck that I might have expected her to be after a week as a captive and in strange company. When we were moving again, I said, 'How did he treat you?'

'He was okay,' she said, coming forward to lean on the back of the passenger seat again. She could barely reach to see over. 'He was explaining stuff all the time. Like he'd never had anyone to talk to before.'

'What kind of things did he say?'

'Weird stuff,' she said, and when I glanced at her I don't think I'd ever seen a kid looking so thoughtful, and so troubled, I asked her to tell me what kind of weird stuff.

So she told me about how he never slept if he could help it; how when a body grew tired he'd move to another, even if it was only for a few hours. She'd asked him why and it had emerged that he was terrified by his own dreams. He'd told her about another time when he'd been forced to take refuge in a bedridden soldier who'd been so sick and so feverish that he'd been unable to get out again until almost a year later, when a nurse had come along at four o'clock on a Christmas morning and injected him with a massive dose of morphine, silent tears silvering her face in the moonlight. He'd said that food had no taste for him, but that every life tasted different. He'd said that young life gave him a hit like cocaine. Georgie thought that he'd meant like Space Dust, only stronger, and I didn't try to explain it to her. Apparently she'd quickly begun to recognise him through whatever mask he was wearing when he came up to her loft with some new comic books or a TV Guide or some piece of loot that he'd thought she might like; she'd told him that she always knew him because of his eyes. Whoever he was in, she'd said, his eyes were always sad.

Then he'd said that he could try to teach her the trick of it, if she wanted; that maybe she could do it if he came along with her and prepared the way, and maybe then they could get around and have some real fun and never have to worry about being caught.

I looked sideways at her, quickly, she was still leaning forward, staring down at the bird box over the back of the passenger seat. 'What did you say to that?' I asked her.

'I told him no thanks,' she said, and she stretched over as far as she could and reached down to put her finger to one of the slots in the box. The reaction was instantaneous, a squawking and a fluttering which caused her to pull away so fast that she teetered for a moment before dropping back onto her seat. I glanced in the mirror at her as she added, 'I mean, who'd want to be like him?'

It was almost five in the afternoon when I pulled onto the parking lot outside the Phoenix Zoo. I told Georgie that I had a quick visit to make and that I wouldn't be more than a few minutes, and then I unbelted the bird box.

As I was lifting it out, Georgie said, 'You trapped him in Hector, didn't you?'

I stopped, half-in and half-out of the car. I could see from her face that there was no point in me trying to make up some lie, so I said, 'I'm afraid I did. I made it so he had nowhere else he could go.' I didn't want to tell her about how I'd carefully squeezed the life out of the bird to bring it right up to the point of death and no further, or about what I'd had to do to the body of the farm caretaker to drive the ghoul across.

'Is he going to die?' she said. 'I mean, for real, this time?'

'Yes,' I said. 'He is.'

She thought about it for a few moments. Then she nodded.

'I think it's best,' she said. 'That's what he wants, really.'

The zoo was about to close and the girl at the turnstile wasn't going to let me in, but I said that I was here to see one of the assistant managers and mentioned Frank's name. She must have phoned ahead, because as I walked towards the Administration block over by Macaw Island I saw him coming out to meet me. He gave me a friendly enough hello, but I could see that he was puzzled at my appearance so late in the day and I also saw his eyes stray to the box under my arm.

I explained what I wanted, making it sound casual and nothing special. He shrugged, and went over to call something into one of the offices, and then together we walked down the path that would take us out to the eastern spur of the grassland habitat area. Where two paths crossed, we stopped to let the last Safari Train of the day go by.

I hadn't been consciously trying to think of the last time that I'd been here but the memory was with me all the same, trotting along at my side like some faithful old dog. Frank, who knew nothing of what I'd been through in the past few weeks, was saying, 'You should hear some of the things we get asked. Weird? We had a woman six months ago, wanted to buy some gorilla semen. I don't even like to think about why.'

'Did she get it?'

'We told her that she could have as much as she wanted, but she'd have to do her own collecting. What the hell, you've seen our gorilla, he needs all the fun that comes his way. She didn't call back. What did she think, that we kept it around in bottles?'

Here on our left was the drinking fountain where we'd stopped before leaving. Georgie hadn't been able to reach, or so she'd said. So I'd lifted her to it, and she'd managed to spray both Loretta and me.

Frank said, 'All I'm wondering is, what did the bird do to offend you so much?'

'Not me,' I said. 'It's my nephew's. It got a taste for blood.'

'A canary?'

'It must have seen too many Sylvester cartoons. Now there's no stopping it. This is the best way.'

The final bell was ringing as we reached the line of pens which held the birds of prey.

Frank called a keeper out from around the back, and he produced the keys to open up the walk-through feeding alley by the side of the hawks. There were three of them, sleek, well-oiled machines with dark little hearts, and at the noise we made they turned and stared at us from their perches with eyes that were like small, beady lasers. They kept on staring as I put my box through the hatch and opened up the lid.

Within an instant there was a sharp pain in my hand as the canary came out in a flurry of yellow feathers, and it struggled and fluttered as I tried to shake it off. Frank and the keeper were both staring in surprise at the quarter-inch gash that its beak left in my hand, so deep that the blood simply ran, but I only had eyes for the birds.

The canary was zigzagging around, completely disoriented after its time in the box. Two of the hawks had already started to move, Indian sun-gods with their cloaks spread wide, and I drew my bleeding hand back and let the wire hatch fall shut.

'You could have released it,' Frank said. 'Cage birds hardly ever make it in the wild anyway.'

'I want to be sure of this one,' I said. 'And I want him to know what it felt like for the rest of us.'

It lasted no longer than a single wing-beat, of which I could feel the backdraft like the passage of a dark angel. The yellow bird was picked from the air with a squawk and returned to the perch, where the biggest of the hawks held it and decapitated it. After that, there was no sound other than that of tearing and feeding.

I told Frank that I owed him one.

And then I headed back toward the car, where Georgina would be waiting.