“No. There’s no time.” She lowers her voice. “I’ll take you to the body. You’ll know what to do. I’m in over my head. I trust you.”
He stammers out the beginning of an argument. She is already up, heading toward the door.
Trust. If he thinks about it too much, his muscles tense.
He offers to drive, insists upon it, concerned about her staying alert enough with the substance in her system. She won’t have it. They argue. Unable to reveal why he opposes her getting behind the wheel, he concedes.
She drives east out of Chinatown. They cross the river. A dark left takes them down an industrial service road until they hit Riverside Drive. They exchange no words. She speeds and swerves. He clutches the handle above the window.
Elysian Valley. She gets out of the car, locks the door, and heads toward the entrance of a bike path that runs along the crest of cement lining the deep, empty river basin.
“Hey!” he calls after her. “I think we need a plan. You haven’t told me anything. I want to help you, but I need a little more.”
“It was an accident.” Her words slur.
“Accidents happen.”
“We should walk and talk.” She takes his hand. “He knew so much about the river, more than most Angelenos.”
“So do you.”
“Yeah, well, that’s it. I think he was stalking me. I think… I was next.”
“An old flame?” He looks over the edge of the bike path. A knee-high barrier of loose chain-link tops an almost perpendicular sheer.
“No, I didn’t know him. I mean, I hadn’t ever met him. He started posting anonymous comments on my blog. Every time I wrote an article on the river, he would add his two cents. Sometimes he’d make corrections, sometimes he’d start an argument by taking a contrary point of view. At first I assumed he was with FoLAR-”
“Friends of the L.A. River?” He remembers this detail from her site.
“Yeah. But it didn’t fit. I know most of the gang over there, and he wasn’t anyone I recognized.” Her breathing has become labored. “Later, we e-mailed back and forth. His username was Pavlov.”
“A strange handle.” His eyes adjust, searching for the body. The only light comes from across the river. She tells him the MTA uses this defunct Southern Pacific structure as a place to store their spare light rail train cars. To him it looks like an abandoned factory.
“Wait, wait a second, please. I gotta stop.” She rubs her eyes. “I didn’t realize I was so out of shape.”
He touches her between her shoulder blades. “He wanted to meet you alone at night in the river? How did it get to that point?”
She walks away from his fingers. “Didn’t you ever want something so bad that, well, it’s not that you’d be willing to do anything, it’s that each step adds up and soon you find that you’re over the line, somewhere you shouldn’t be? You’ve got to help me, Jim.”
He does not say anything. His mind is already made up.
She points to where the body is, although he has a hard time seeing it at first. He must walk several yards farther north to where the embankment is gentle enough to descend. He makes his way down, his feet sideways so he doesn’t slip.
The body lies crumpled on the bone-dry, flat edge of the riverbed, several feet away from the small swash of water tracing the center of the channel. The man is dressed in a gray sports coat and jeans. His neck is twisted. His face is down.
“Hey,” he whispers, nudging the guy in the rump with his shoe. “Hey.” He leans down to find a pulse. The guy’s neck is cold.
She whispers down the embankment. “Is he definitely dead?”
“I wouldn’t think a fall down here would kill a guy.”
“He must have snapped his neck. It was a bad fall. From here it’s almost a straight drop.”
He looks up at her.
She says, “What? What are you thinking?”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He hears her breathing heavily through the sobbing. “He… he took her.”
“Who?”
“Before I pushed him, he, he said I could find her… through… through the six cats. Should’ve went right away, but… got scared. Thought you could help.”
“You’re crazy-you’re not making any fucking sense.” He continues to examine the body, looks in the guy’s pockets. No wallet, no ID, a few dollars in cash. “I’ll help, but you need to start filling me in.”
“What… what are you doing?” Her voice rises like helium.
He pulls something from the body’s right suit pocket. A small metal object. A bell. Caked in dried mud.
He walks to the center of the river, to the water.
“Where are you going? What are you doing?” she asks.
He tries to wash the bell. He shakes it under the water, as if ringing it. No sound comes up past the surface. The cold water is surprisingly swift, like a full-force faucet running over his hand.
“I know you want me, Jim. And I know why you think you can’t have me. Doesn’t matter to me anymore. Find her and… I’ll do anything… I’ll let you do anything.”
Something in the water touches him, something that floats around his hand, something that feels like fingers. He flinches. The bell slips from his grasp.
“Shit,” he says.
“What! What’s going on down there?”
He splashes his hand in and out of the shallow water, but he can’t locate the bell.
“Shit. That guy had something in his pocket and when I tried to clean it off in the river, I dropped it. Now I can’t find it.”
“Was it the bell? Was it?”
He turns around to look up at her. She screams, using all her energy. The effort actually deflates her. Her body withers, goes limp. Her knees strain against the short chain-link fence. It buckles. She topples.
The drug. His drug. Now is its time. Its damage, far from expected, doesn’t seem real. Had she stayed a couple feet back, he would be crawling out of the river, gathering her unconscious body, and returning her home.
But she is too close to the edge. The fence cannot hold her body when she loses consciousness. Her upper body folds over the edge, the momentum carrying her head down fast in a dive. Her feet flip over the fence, and she’s falling. He watches her as she goes down with impressive velocity. Her limp condition might have saved a more substantial body, but her delicate frame snaps when her curved neck crashes into the dry gravel at the bottom. He runs to her, stops in front of her twisted, broken form.
He can hear the river churning, flowing fast behind him; its thimble-full of water, a flood.
He hyperventilates, looks for something to hold, to steady himself. His tongue pumps piston-like into the back of his throat.
What is happening?
He doesn’t bother with a pulse this time. He is afraid to know; although he knows he knows.
He speaks out loud, hoping his voice will give truth to the lies: “This is not my fault. This is not my fault. This is not my fault.”
This is a trap, he thinks, his heart still racing. I see it clearly, this quicksand of culpability. If I do nothing, I sink. If I struggle, I go down faster. I must remain calm, go backward up along the path that brought me here, until another path presents itself. A tiny pocket. A window. An escape. If not from responsibility, from guilt.
Her dress has come up above her knees. He glances over to the man’s body. The head is cocked on its broken axis. Jim imagines the body looking back at him, even though only one eye is open. The man would say, You can look. Take a peek. It’s okay. You haven’t gone any farther than the rest of us. Don’t worry about crossing the line. I am the eraser. The line is gone.
He walks away from the bodies, climbs out of the river. He takes her purse, checking for her keys and wallet. He leaves.