Valley of Lights

SIX

Later on, after the wine and some Mexican food out of Loretta's freezer, Loretta went to pick up her daughter and I walked the half-dozen yards back to my own home. There you go, Georgie, I was thinking; it all worked out the way you wanted, and you weren't even around to know it. I messed around, straightening a few things and moving some unpaid bills from one drawer to another, until I heard them get back.

Even then, I couldn't relax. One of those lights out in the valley stood for a child-killer, a torturer, and I still couldn't shake the feeling that I was almost within reach of some kind of understanding. A light had gone out when Mercado had died but then another, just as surely, had blinked on somewhere else. It was the pattern, the damned pattern, so persuasive that it hardly seemed to matter that it wasn't actually possible.

I pulled my canvas gun roll out from under the bed, and started on the cleaning-and-oiling routine. Hardly realised what I was doing, until I looked down and saw that I was holding the hunting rifle almost as if I was expecting Mercado to appear outside and say, Hi, Alex, I've come for the kid.

Was that it? Was I getting all raw and protective because, for the first time in years, it was starting to look as if I had something to protect? Not that my eyes weren't wide-open; I'd noticed without commenting on the picture in Loretta's bedroom that was supposed to be hidden behind a stack of her Romance paperbacks, and I'd said nothing to break the long silence afterwards. We'd both been around, we weren't children; but I wanted to think that there was still some of that special innocence in us both, the kind that Georgie showed when she looked at a tray of day-old chicks destined only to survive long enough to be live food for the reptiles and hawks. The kind that can be lost so easily, like when somebody says the obvious out loud.

Mercado could still come, I was thinking. His body may be in the morgue, but he's still out there.

But I couldn't say it.

Not to anybody else.