‘Ian?’
Silence.
He walks down the bookshelf-lined hallway to the bedroom. The bed is made but looks as though it has been lain upon. The blankets are wrinkled and there is a dent in its middle. Within the dent is more blood. And on the floor between the bed and Diego a hospital gown in a pile.
A dresser drawer has been left open. A shirt hangs from it.
Blood. Signs that Ian was here but left in a hurry, and no sign of Ian himself.
And Donald is missing.
He has to go to the Dean place.
On his way he tries to call Ian’s cell phone for the third or fourth time this morning and, as happened before, the call goes to voicemail after five rings. He thumbs the button to end the call without bothering to leave a message, and then pockets his phone.
Rolling down the driveway is a surreal experience. All around are traces of what happened yesterday. Gravel stained red. Yellow tape cordoning off the house. A.22 casing missed by the county boys at the foot of the stairs, catching a glint of sunlight.
Diego drives past this to the single-wide mobile home behind the main house. It’s sitting on blocks, the axles and wheels long ago rusted, the tires rotted away and lying on the dead grass beneath like prehistoric serpents. Steps made of plywood and two-by-fours weathered to a pale gray, the dull copper of rusted nail heads dotting them.
The mobile home itself is a powder green, the metal siding dented in several places, tattered and torn window screens hanging from their frames like the flags of those who lost the war. An antenna juts above the asphalt shingles that line the roof.
He parks next to Donald’s El Camino and steps from his car.
‘All right, Diego,’ he says to himself, and unsnaps his holster with the twitch of a thumb. He walks up the steps-heel-toe, clunk-clunk-stopping at the narrow metal front door. He looks down. He is standing upon a welcome mat with Yosemite Sam on it, aiming a gun up at him from the ground. Hasn’t even announced himself yet and already there’s a gun pointed at his face.
‘Pow,’ he says, then presses the doorbell to the left of the door.
It ding-dongs inside. He waits. When, after several beats, he does not get an answer, he bangs on the hollow metal door. It rattles in its frame.
‘Donald, it’s Diego. Officer Peña. Open up.’
Donald does not open up.
Diego draws his SIG with his right hand and with his left grabs the doorknob. He turns it gently to see if it will give and it does. He pushes a bit. Waits, exhales, and shoves the door open with his back to the wall just left of it.
He looks in quickly, not long enough for someone to take aim, and pulls out again. The place is dark and hot. The curtains are drawn. Only one light is on, a dim lamp in the lazily spinning fan in the ceiling. The wood-paneled room feels sick and claustrophobic. Flies dot the ceiling.
‘Donald, it’s the police.’
No response.
After another breath he steps into the living room. At first he sees nothing out of the ordinary, but this is only because he does not see what’s on the other side of the open door. All he can see is what’s to the left of him and what’s to the left of him is a single man’s living quarters. A sagging chair, a sagging couch, a dinner tray, empty beer cans littering the floor, a nudie-magazine centerfold thumb-tacked to the wall.
But then he takes another step into the place, clearing the front door, and can see into the dining room. The first thing he sees is a dining table stacked with papers, a few loose socks, pens and pencils, a set of keys, a yellow legal pad smeared with bloody fingerprints. A single white candle made flaccid in the summer heat sits upon it, and a glass bowl filled with a soup of brown water and clumps of something wrapped in pieces of paper towel. Then he sees what is between him and the table, a wooden chair tipped on its side and a man within it. The man is Donald. He has no fingers or toes. It is strange how inhuman a hand looks with no fingers, just red stumps with bone-white cores. Flies crawl on his face. They crawl on his blank staring eyes. They crawl on the stumps where his digits once were, laying their eggs.
Diego swallows back sick. His friend did this. A man who has eaten dinner with him and his family. A man who has slept on his couch. A man who has played video games with Elias. It seems somehow unbelievable.
He walks to the glass bowl on the table and looks down into it. He swallows. After a brief hesitation he reaches into the brown soup and pulls out a wad of paper towel. It is heavier than he expected. He unwraps it and is soon looking at a grown man’s pinky finger. A white core surrounded by red meat and cased in wrinkled skin that reminds Diego of pickled pigs’ feet.
He drops the finger back into the brown soup.
His friend did this. Ian did this.
Ian came to get information that neither Diego nor the sheriff could manage to pry from Donald, and he worked hard for that information. He killed for it. What Diego can’t tell, what the room will not reveal to him, is whether Ian managed to get it. He worked for it, but that doesn’t prove anything. People work for things they don’t attain every day, and attain things they didn’t work for with equal frequency.
Diego arms sweat from his forehead.
He looks at the legal pad on the table smeared with bloody finger prints. Shouldn’t the bloody prints mean it was used during or after what happened here last night? He picks up a pencil and holds it sideways and brushes it gently across the page. As he does this he finds an address revealed in relief.
372 Conway StKaiser, CA 92241
He tears the top sheet from the legal pad, folds it into quarters, and pockets it. Then he glances at the glass bowl of brown soup just to his right, and then the body on the floor. He can’t help but feel this is partly his fault. If he had held on to Donald the man would be safe in a cell right now. Diego might even have managed to get the information out of him himself without resorting to. . what happened here. What happened here.
Diego is a fairly intelligent man, graduated high school with a good GPA and got his AA from the community college in Mencken without any trouble at all, spending most of his time falling madly into and out of love with various coeds, and what happened here would be obvious even to a very dumb man. What happened here was murder, plain and simple.
And after he was done killing Donald, Ian went home for a while, changed clothes, grabbed a gun maybe, and got into his car and headed west. Headed toward Kaiser, California, with a catheter threaded into his lung meat and a bullet hole punched clean through him. Headed toward, based on Henry’s shooting, what will almost certainly be his own death.
If Diego had just managed to get that information out of the son of a bitch Ian wouldn’t-
If Sheriff Sizemore hadn’t let him-
He needs to think this thing through. He’s got an address now. He knows where both Henry and Ian are headed. He could get the federal law involved. They’re almost certainly involved as it is. A kidnapped girl in the possession of a murderer on the run. Feds are probably at the Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Office in Mencken right now, getting whatever information Sizemore has and collecting his files to take back to the Houston field office. He could simply call them. That might be the smart thing to do. Except that Ian killed a man. Ian tortured a man for information and killed him, and though this is something that Diego could never have done himself, he knows that Ian did it out of desperation, and out of love, and he understands these things. The horror before him reveals just how ugly even the purest of emotions can be-but he understands them. Besides which, Ian is his friend. The man has slept on his couch, shared his meals, played videogames with Elias. He let Diego see him cry when Debbie kicked him out. He was drunk and probably doesn’t even remember it, and Diego would never mention it to him, never embarrass him with it, but it happened all the same. If he gets the FBI involved they’ll come poking around, and they will uncover what happened here last night.