Blind Fall (16 page)

“I saw it. With my own two eyes. I walked into the bedroom, and he had Dean flat on his back and he was ramming himself into him and Dean was making sounds like he had been speared in the gut!”

Alex averted his eyes from John’s, as if these details were too much for him to absorb. “On his back,” Alex finally whispered, and then John realized Alex was asking for clarification on this detail, so he nodded.

“I had a choice,” John said. “The day I decided to track you guys down I had all the information I needed to do some real harm to that man. But that morning I got a phone call from this guy—a few months before I had gone to him to get a present for Mike, a Spartan sword, just like out of
Gates of Fire
. When he called to tell me it had arrived, I knew, deep in my gut, that I could get that sword and do whatever it took to find out where Mike was. Or I could sit in my trailer all day, staring at Danny Oster’s new address and wondering what I could do that would hurt him the most until I got sick of wondering and decided to take some action.

“The reason it wasn’t an easy choice is because if I sat down with Mike, I knew I would have to tell him the truth about what happened that day in Ramadi. I would have to tell him that the reason he had to save my life is because I had just gotten an e-mail from Patsy telling me that Dean had killed himself, and I didn’t tell Mike about it. I didn’t come clean about my mental state when we’re going into a hostile area and Mike lost an eye because of it. He needed to hear that. I owed him that. The sword was nothing. What I wanted to give him was the truth.”

“Instead you got me,” Alex said.

“Yes. And I haven’t turned my back on you for one moment.”

At first John didn’t know how to read the wide-eyed expression on Alex’s face, because it seemed like the first time Alex had looked at him in such a manner. He looked concerned and afraid at the same time, and even though John was staring him right in the eye, Alex’s expression didn’t change.

When he crossed the cave again, John felt a surge of triumph, but he tried to keep it hidden as Alex untied the ropes that bound John to the chair. Even when he was free, John didn’t get to his feet.

Before he stepped out of the entrance to the cave, Alex looked back at him over one shoulder and said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

This simple statement, delivered without any of the anger or sarcasm John was used to hearing out of Alex, kept John glued to the chair. The tension in his chest threatened to give rise to a small seizure, and when he started to blink back tears, he told himself they were just a result of having beer poured in his face.

When he was within sight of the main house, Patsy shot up out of the chair on the back porch where she had clearly been waiting for him. Behind her, the house was lit up like a fishbowl, and he could see the men inside crowding the kitchen, where one of them had just finished cooking something and was passing out servings to his excited patrons. It was too dark for Patsy to see the condition he was in, but when she smelled the beer on him, she cursed under her breath. “Shouldn’t be drinking on the stuff I gave you last night,” she muttered. Then she curved an arm around him, felt his soaked shirt against her skin, and fell silent.

She steered him through the back door of the house, then through another door and into what was clearly the master bedroom, where her suitcase sat at the foot of the bed and there was real furniture and something besides prayers hanging on the walls. She sat him on top of the toilet, took time pulling his shirt off him and around his cast. She dabbed at the cast with her fingers to make sure it wasn’t beer-soaked.

“Y’all fought?” she asked softly.

She saw a response in his eyes, and it seemed to take the wind out of her. She pursed her lips, indicating that she was biting her tongue, hard. Then she turned her back to him and turned on the bath and for a while they sat there in silence, she watching the water fill up and he hearing the sound of the lead pipe striking the wall of the cave over and over again.

She turned off the faucet. Then she set a short stack of bath towels between the toilet and the tub, told him he could use them to rest his cast on, and left him alone with his next mission: a hot bath.

He was halfway between nightmares and being awake when Patsy shouted his name a while later. When he didn’t respond right away, she threw open the bathroom door, without regard for his nudity or the fact that she had roused him from a doze. His cast had been sliding off the stack of towels, was about to go under when he sat up as straight as he could. He asked her what was wrong, and she opened a towel for him to step into. “Is it Alex?”

Without answering, she wrapped the towel around him, kept her eyes on the floor as she steered him into the bedroom. Mike’s face filled the television screen above a banner that read
GAY MARINE SLAYING.
In voice-over, the Headline News anchor was detailing the stellar service record of former Marine Corps captain Mike Bowers. Then John found himself staring at Ray Duncan, in full uniform, including a wide-brimmed khaki hat, standing before a phalanx of microphones. His backdrop was the brown brick sheriff’s station and the rolling hills that cradled his town.

Eyes locked on the sheet of paper he held in one hand, Duncan said, “This Sunday, the body of Michael Bowers, twenty-nine, was discovered in a wooded area ten miles east of the Owensville town line. The body was badly mutilated. Exact time of death has not been established.”
Badly mutilated.
John dreaded the thought of what other injuries Duncan had added to the body to cover up the fact that he had buried one of Mike’s hands in the desert.

The reporter took over for Duncan, and suddenly John was staring at himself. His last official Marine Corps photograph swelled to fill the screen. He wore his dress blues and cover, and the flash had flattened out his face. Then, right after him came Alex, a candid party shot. His cheeks had the blush of a few drinks, and he had a Glo-stick around his neck. The reporter spelled out that both men were believed to be on the run. Both men were wanted for questioning.

“They’re not saying you’re on the run together,” Patsy said quietly.

“They don’t need to. Duncan’s saying exactly what he wants to.”

“Which is?’

“Both men are wanted for questioning. That means they think we’re both alive and well—and together. In each other’s arms.” He turned to see if she was getting his meaning. “Duncan’s trying to make this thing out like it’s some big gay love triangle.”

“You tried to
report
this murder,” Patsy said. “He accused you of having PTSD. He showed you the door.”

“Exactly. It’s not me he’s trying to frame. He’s just trying to get me out of the picture. Then he can claim Alex had an accomplice who moved the body while I was chasing him into the woods. In the meantime, he thinks I’ll cut the guy loose if the entire country starts to think we’re slipping it to each other.”

On television, news crews pursued an impeccably dressed woman up the front walk of a sprawling pink mansion surrounded by a high stone wall. Her platinum blond bob looked like it would hold its form in a monsoon, and her cream-colored pantsuit had a flared collar. Her enormous sunglasses made it impossible to tell whether she was ignoring the reporters with stone-faced dignity or outright contempt. Charlotte Martin, Alex’s mother, had her son’s long, full-lipped mouth and delicate chin. She had only one statement for the media, and apparently she had released it in writing earlier that day: “I am saddened by the circumstances in which my only son has found himself. But given that he left my life several years ago, I cannot be held responsible for what he has invited into it since.”

“Jesus,” Patsy whispered as the words hovered on the screen for a few seconds. “Woman can’t even say Alex’s name.”

But John was too taken by the phrases
left my life
and
my only son.
Odd choices for a woman looking to distance herself from the situation, and further proof that Alex hadn’t told John the entire story of his departure from Cathedral Beach.

The report ended, and Patsy used the remote to kill the volume. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. “The cash I gave Eddie for this place,” she finally said. “It was under the table. I’m just saying—this place can’t be traced to me. If you need to stay here, we probably can.”

She had taken a seat at the foot of the bed. When she lifted her eyes to his, he thought she was going to defend herself. Instead she said, “Should we tell Alex?”

Dressed in a pair of Eddie’s too-short blue jeans and a T-shirt for something called an AA roundup, John led Patsy down the creek toward the outer house, where the clerestory windows revealed a glow coming from several bedside lamps inside. When he saw that the front door was shut, he expected it to be locked, but it wasn’t, and when he swung it open, he saw that Alex’s bag was missing, and the bed he had been sleeping in was perfectly made, as if he had never been there at all.

Patsy brushed past him through the front door, gave the entire house a once-over, and seemed to come to the same conclusion as John. “Shit,” she whispered, and then she seemed struck by a thought and ran past him. He turned and watched her jog in the direction of where she had parked her SUV when they had first arrived.

He felt blindsided and shamed by the panic that filled him. Given the events of the evening and the day prior, he didn’t think there was room for another emotion inside him, but this was pure panic, plain and simple. Being branded a fugitive was something he had anticipated days earlier, and it had come as almost no shock to him, but this empty room—there was terror in it, the terror that he had failed utterly and allowed Alex to slip through his fingers and into a blind fall.

Patsy burst through the front door a few seconds after John found the note lying on the kitchen counter. “He took the Jeep,” she said through gasping breaths. John showed her the note, which said,
I hope you will hear from me soon, Alex.
Patsy backed away from the note as if she thought it were about to self-destruct, and her hands went to her mouth. “Oh, no, John. He had a cell phone. What if someone called and told him—”

“I had the ammunition clips you bought me out in the tent earlier, but he took them when he started shooting. Check the cabinets for them.”

“Where are you going?”

Instead of answering, he stopped in the doorway and said,

“And there’s something else. It’s a diagram. Got a man’s torso and head and shoulders on it. See if it’s in any of the drawers or if he took it with him.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a diagram on how to kill a man, that’s why.”

In almost no time at all John covered the distance between the house and the cave where Alex had held him captive. The electric lantern was still there, and when he turned it on he saw the empty chair, missing its seat, and the coil of rope that had been used to tie him to it. No Ka-bar knife. No Sig. Not even the lead pipe had been left behind.

Cursing under his breath, he ran back to the house, found Patsy waiting for him out front, her arms crossed over her chest as if there were a chill in the air only she could feel. “I didn’t find it,” she said. “Where did you go?”

He threw open the front door as if he were about to confront a band of insurgents, as if something about the room might have shifted and given up some evidence of Alex’s intention in the few minutes he had been gone. His sister had to say his name several times in a row before he could feel his feet again.

“‘
I hope
you will hear from me soon,’” John said. “Like there’s a chance that’s not going to happen.”

“What does that mean, John?”

“I think you’re right. Somebody called his cell and told him about the story, and now he knows where Mike’s body is and he’s planning on doing something about it. And he needs Mike’s knife and my gun to do it. I think he’s going to try to kill Ray Duncan.”

Patsy sank to a seated position on the foot of the bed; then a thought struck her. “How the hell did he get the keys?”

“Where were they?”

“In my purse,” she said. Then her face seemed to cloud over, and suddenly she was running out the front door and toward the house. John followed her, calling out to her, and she called back that everything was fine in an absurd attempt at placating him, even though she was running so fast John could barely keep up with her. She bypassed the back porch. Some of the men were watching television in the living room. John followed her around to the front entrance of the house, stopped calling out to her because he didn’t want to draw the attention of any of the men. Was she afraid that Alex had stolen her entire purse?

To his shock, she tried to close the front door behind her in John’s face, but then she was drawn to the sight of her purse turned on its side on a table inside the white-walled foyer. The sight of it lying there didn’t seem to give her any relief. Breathless, her brow furrowed, she hurriedly went about stuffing the contents of her purse back inside it. That’s when John saw the envelope, the same envelope she had been turning over in her hands early that morning as he drifted in and out of a drugged haze, the same one he had assumed was a good-bye note.

He tried getting her attention by saying her name. When she ignored him yet again, he snapped, dug into her purse with his left hand, pulled the envelope free, and was shocked to see her holding on to it, panic in her eyes. Then she released it, brought her hand to her mouth as if she expected John to sock her in the jaw. He turned the envelope over and saw his first name written on it in blocky handwriting that at first seemed only vaguely familiar. Then he recognized it, and the breath went out of him. It was his brother’s handwriting.

For a while they just stood there, Patsy breathing into her hands, the sounds of some cop show thudding against the walls. At one point John looked up to see Eddie standing in the doorway, but when he saw their postures and the look on John’s face he retreated without comment. When John turned for the door, Patsy said his name in a trembling whisper that had the threat of tears in it. He stepped outside anyway, walked a few paces away from the house, waited until he heard the sound of Patsy’s footsteps crunching the gravel behind him.

“How long have you had this?” he finally asked.

“Since he died. I found your trailer, tried leaving it, but the damn envelope was too big to fit under the front door, and I figured—” Her voice caught, and John remembered that Mandy had told him that Patsy had tried to leave a note for him. “I figured it wasn’t the kind of thing you left under somebody’s door. It was with him, John. It was with him when he died.”

A suicide note,
he thought.

“You should have given this to me, Patsy.”

“You were distracted. You had other things on your—”

“You should have given this to me, Patsy.”

When she didn’t respond, he turned, saw her bowed head and heaving chest as signs of surrender. “I know, John,” she whispered. “But I wanted a shot at you first. I wanted to see if I could get you back.”

He had no answer for this, and when he started walking away from her, she didn’t follow. He walked all the way back to the outer house, where the front door was still open and the bedside lamps inside gave off a deceptively welcoming glow.

John pulled the door shut behind him and locked it, sat down on the foot of the bed Alex had used, and opened the envelope.

The envelope was large because it contained an entire sheet of watercolor paper that had been folded in half. At first John thought it might be a store-bought, oversized greeting card. Then he saw that Dean had glued an old tattered photograph of John and Dean to the front flap, taken a few days after they had moved to the desert. They stood in front of a one-story tract home with salmon-colored stucco walls just south of Highway 62 in Yucca Valley. The two young men posed on the dried patch of dirt that passed for a front lawn were doing their best to look happy to be in each other’s presence, if not the high desert. The bill of John’s baseball cap with the New Orleans Saints logo on it shadowed his glower, but Dean’s red curls were exposed and his smile was a metal-studded rictus thanks to braces, which flashed against the deep red of his first California sunburn.

John could remember the picture being taken, could remember how Patsy had tried to force them into this tiny moment of celebration. With trembling fingers he opened the card and took a few seconds to squint at the tiny block letters that passed for handwriting, too tiny and too controlled, and he wondered if his brother had spent his last days under the influence of something speedier than heroin. He began to read.