Breathing hard when I was done. Yeah, and ready for another shot. Went out front again and picked up the bottle and knocked back a double. I was wiping my mouth when I heard the Jap car come whining into the driveway.
Well, well. Well, well.
Walk right in, baby, see what Earle’s got for you.
And she walked in and there I was, waiting. She took one look at me and her face turned white as paper and she tried to go back out again. I cut her off. Didn’t touch her, not yet, just cut her off and then grinned at her real big, like a junkyard dog grins at a piece of raw meat.
“Nucooee Point Lodge,” I said.
She sucked in her breath. Look on her face made me happier and crazier than I’d been all afternoon.
Richard Novak
By four o’clock I was dead on my ass, the pain in my broken nose so bad I couldn’t see straight. And that made driving around the way I’d been — Storm’s house, slough roads, possible hiding places along the shoreline that might’ve been overlooked, back and forth aimlessly and unproductively — made me a safety hazard to pedestrians and other drivers. I needed food, sleep. And I couldn’t rest at the station; too much activity, too much noise. Like it or not, I’d have to take myself out of action for a while.
I radioed Della Feldman and told her I was going home. She made approving noises. “Best thing for you, Chief,” she said. Wrong. The best thing for me was finding Faith, dead or alive. It was the only way to close the books, all the books, on Storm’s death, the only way for me to start putting my life back together again.
Mack was all over me when I let myself in the house. Jumping and wagging and nuzzling, as if I’d been away a week instead of twenty-four hours. “Hey, boy. Good old Mack.” He needed to go out, but the shape I was in, I couldn’t walk him half a block. I let him into the backyard instead.
In the kitchen I swallowed a couple of the codeine capsules they’d given me at the hospital. My stomach had been burning off and on all day: bile and emptiness. The burning started in again now. The thought of food was nauseating, but if I didn’t eat something pretty quick I knew I’d puke up the painkillers. I made a sandwich, poured half a glass of milk. Let Mack back in and took the food into the living room and flopped on the couch.
It took ten minutes of little bites and sips to get the sandwich and milk down. It was like eating paste, but once it was into me it stayed there. I thought I ought to go in and lie on the bed, but I couldn’t seem to move; my whole body felt heavy, as if all the bones and muscles and sinews were petrifying, turning me to stone. I couldn’t even make myself lean over and untie my shoes. But that was all right. Better to keep all my clothes on, so I could respond immediately if any word came through on Faith.
I lay sprawled in the cold room, watching night close down outside the windows. The codeine started to work, easing some of the throbbing in my face. But whenever I closed my eyes, they wouldn’t stay shut; I couldn’t sleep yet. For a while my head was a vacuum, no thoughts of any kind, but then Storm was there again and pretty soon my skull seemed to swell with memories and images of her alive and dead. I must’ve made a sound, because Mack stirred at my feet, then jumped up beside me. I reached out to him, pulled him close, buried my face in the soft fur of his neck.
“Oh God, Mack. Oh God, Mack.”
He whined and licked my hand, as if somehow he understood.
Audrey Sixkiller
I probably should have told Dick about my suspicions right away, but I didn’t because suspicions is all they were. I had no proof John Faith was alive or that Trisha Marx had used my boat to help him get away. No proof, even, that either of them had been anywhere near my property this morning. Plus, there was the question of why. Why would she give aid and comfort to an accused murderer? Some sort of quixotic teenage impulse, perhaps; girls could be highly romantic and foolish at that age, as I had reason to remember. But even so, there must be something more to it than that and I had no idea what it might be. Rumors fly wildly in a small town; once a person comes under a cloud of suspicion, people are quick to convict and shun without benefit of evidence or trial. I didn’t care to be responsible for branding anyone.
The thing to do before anything else, I decided, was to have a private talk with Trisha. I drove to her house on Redbud Street, and her father was home but she wasn’t. He was angry because she was supposed to have been there when he returned from work at one o’clock. I asked him to let me know as soon as she came home. A school matter, I said, not serious but still rather important. Mr. Marx looked skeptical; I think he was afraid she might be in some kind of trouble. But he didn’t question me further and he said he’d call when she showed up.
Back at my house, I taped a piece of cardboard across the broken bathroom window and cleaned up the glass shards. Then I microwaved a Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. Brian Marx hadn’t called by the time I finished my belated lunch. I put the answering machine on and walked out to the dock for another look at the Chris-Craft.
Clouds, thick and dark-veined, had begun to gather to the north. There was the faint smell of ozone in the air. Rain sometime tonight, I thought. Gulls wheeled over the lake, more than a few of them — another sign of coming weather. Watching the gulls, I found myself thinking of the legend of the Huk, the mythical bird old-time Pomos believed had evil supernatural powers.
The Huk was said to be the size of a turkey buzzard, dark red in color, with long, fine feathers. A reddish liquid, like blood, filled the gills and would flow from end to end if the feathers were turned up and back down. The creature had hairy legs, an enormous head, a bill curved like that of a parrot. Its power lay in the fact that it brought death wherever it went. If it appeared and you heard its cry of “huk, huk,” you or someone close to you was sure to die, immediately or within a few days.
I’m not superstitious; I believe in the old legends only as legends, campfire stories for adults and children. But I shivered just the same as I watched the gulls wheeling against the clouds, their wind-carried cries sounding more than a little like “huk, huk” in the quiet afternoon.
George Petrie
I sat in the car, staring out over the desert. I’d been there a long time now, on the side of Highway 50 a couple of miles east of the 361 junction. It was as far as I’d gotten after leaving the crossroads rest area. It was as far as I was going.
Over. Finished.
Beaten.
The dark-green van with the tinted windshield was long gone, miles and miles down 361 by now — the van that hadn’t been driven by the gray-haired man from the Truckee motel, or by anybody else bent on stealing my stolen money, but by a fat young fellow traveling with his equally puddinglike wife and their two chubby daughters. Tourists who hadn’t even glanced at me when they drove into the rest area, who didn’t know or care that I existed, whose only interest was in food and toilet facilities. Long gone, but the fear hadn’t gone with them. Nor had the core of paranoia. With sudden, sickening clarity I’d seen both for exactly what they were and would be if I continued on the course I’d set for myself — constant companions no matter where I went or what I did, partners in crime that would destroy me as surely as a fast-growing cancer.
It was stifling in the car. Almost December and the Nevada desert was still a furnace; I felt as though I were melting inside my clothes. Pretty soon I would have to start the engine, put on the air conditioner. But when I did that I’d have to start driving again, too, and I wasn’t ready to drive yet. I sat and smoked another cigarette without inhaling and squinted out over the sun-blasted flats, the low, barren hills hazy and shimmering in the distance. Broken earth, clumps of sage and greasewood. Dry salt sink to the north, its floor as seamed and cracked as an old man’s skin. Jagged splinters of rock along the bank of an empty wash, bleached white by the sun, like crushed and discarded bones. A wasteland.