Blind Fall (17 page)

After he finished reading the note, John rose from the bed and left it lying on the comforter next to the spot where he had been sitting. He got a beer from the fridge, his first in days now that his job as drill instructor had come to an end, and spent a few minutes trying to use the bottle opener with his left hand. When his sister knocked on the front door, he opened it for her and brushed past her without meeting her expectant gaze. She moved past him into the house, probably toward the note, and he walked through the darkness toward the creek, waiting for the predictable emotions to come.

Instead he felt anger, pure and simple, and he realized that for so long he had nursed his rage toward Danny Oster, and next to that whirlwind, his brother had been nothing more than a birdhouse rocking in the winds of other men’s perversions. The idea that an anger that had driven him so completely had been based on a lie—that was just too overwhelming to swallow all at once, like staring down at a corpse and demanding that you immediately accept the fact that you yourself will become one someday. He started for the meditation garden and realized from the numbness in his legs that he was in a kind of shock. He sat down in front of a Buddha statue and tried to lose track of time until he heard twigs crunching underfoot.

Patsy stood next to the bench off to his side, probably so he wouldn’t have to look at her if he didn’t want to. “Are you sorry for the way you treated him?” she asked, a tremor of anger in her voice.

“Should I be?”

“You never lifted a hand to him in his life. He wasn’t afraid you’d kill him. He was afraid you’d reject him. That’s a different goddamn ball game, and he knew it.” He realized her anger was on his behalf, or at least she believed it was, and this silenced him even further. “What he left out of that little note is that he had been dealing heroin for three years. He also left out that he and that buddy of his owed his supplier almost fifteen grand and that his buddy had skipped the country rather than pay his portion of the debt. So rather than face up to anything he had done, he decided to get good and numb and check out. But not before blaming
you
first.”

“He came to see you,” John whispered.

“Yes. He did. And he had track marks up and down his arms and he didn’t say a damn thing about owing anyone any money. He wanted three thousand dollars, and I told him the only way he was going to get it was if he let me check him into rehab and if he started trying to put his life back together. And he could start by telling
you
that he had lied about Danny Oster.”

“He admitted it to you? That he had lied?”

“Yes. He told me you would have killed him if he hadn’t. The same…
crap
he wrote in that letter. And when he saw I wasn’t going to budge, he called me a stupid cunt and left.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this the other night in the car?”

“Why, John? So I could be
right
? I don’t want to be right anymore. I want to be able to sit down and have a meal with my brother and talk about what’s going on
today
.”

He wasn’t ready to accept her belief that he hadn’t played a hand in Dean’s suicide. For the first time in his life, he felt diseased, as if a sickness of his had caused his brother to lie to him, and that same sickness had caused Mike Bowers to lie to him about who he was.

“You wouldn’t have killed him, John. He knew that.”

“Death isn’t always the worst thing that can happen, Patsy.”

“No. You’re right. It isn’t. For the one who gets to die, it’s pretty easy.”

He knew exactly what she had meant, had groped from the same logic himself in his long nights of mourning a brother who was still sixteen in his mind, but it always seemed to wiggle out of his hands like a wet fish. He got to his feet suddenly, which startled her, and that’s when he realized that she had slowly been trying to close the distance between them.

In the darkness, it was impossible to see her face, but he looked right at its shape as he said, “A fate worse than death is life in prison, and that’s what Alex is going to get if he kills Duncan, or tries and fails. Mike wouldn’t have wanted that. It’s the only thing I can be sure of. So I have to stop him.”

“How the hell are you going to do that?”

“I need to get to his friend Philip in San Diego. If he didn’t go there, Philip might know where he’s gone. I need wheels, Patsy.”

A long silence settled between them. Then Patsy said, “I’ll drive.”

She told him to wait for her while she talked to Eddie, collected some things, and got ready. Then she was gone before either of them could say another word about Dean’s suicide note or the names he had called her from the grave. He was walking back toward the cabin when something glinted at him from the darkness to his left. He went to the spot, at the edge of the dirt road they had driven in on, and found the shattered casing of a cell phone. Alex’s cell phone. He recognized the Samsung logo above the cracked plastic display.

Alex had gone to the effort to back over it more than once.

After thirty minutes Patsy called the phone in the outer house and told John to meet her next to the garage. When he got there, he saw that the door was already up, the overhead light was on, and his sister was stepping inside the driver-side door of a battered Toyota Tacoma pickup with a dented camper shell on the back. It sat parked next to a dusty green Ford Explorer that Eddie probably took on more respectable trips than a hunt for a would-be killer.

When he got in the Tacoma’s passenger seat, he saw that Patsy had shoved her hair up under a Phoenix Suns cap. But when she turned to pull her seat belt over her, he saw that the back of her neck was covered in brown bristle, and without asking her permission, he reached up and pulled the cap from her head. Startled, she turned and stared at him wide-eyed as he took in the fact that she had chopped off her lustrous brown mane. She looked like a punk rocker, or a woman who needed to disguise herself.

And for what felt like too long, too long considering Alex was probably burning rubber toward his date with death, John fingered the chopped ends of her hair. “They’re going to figure out I skipped town,” she finally said. “They’ll see I made an ATM withdrawal before we left. Pretty soon my face will be all over the news, too.”

“He shouldn’t have called you all those names,” John said.

She shook her head and looked down at the steering wheel as if he had paid her a petty compliment she didn’t feel she deserved. Gently, she pulled his hand from her new do and set the hand on his knee, but she didn’t let go out of it. “Just tell me I wasn’t dead to you and everything should be all right,” she said, trying to sound flip and almost pulling it off.

“You weren’t.”

He knew full well that the things his brother had said about him were far worse than the names he had called their sister. Names were one thing, blame was another, and he had laid that one right at John’s feet. Maybe John needed his sister to cry over it for him, or maybe he needed the anger between them to dissipate and there was no other way to do it.

People talked about therapy and change and the power of Christ, but maybe you just had to wake up one day and say you weren’t going to do it anymore, you just weren’t going to act like someone who felt that way, and you had to begin by saying words that felt strange on your tongue, even if they resonated inside your heart.

“Maybe when this is done, you and I can have a meal.” After a few seconds of trying to control her breathing and failing, she closed her fingers around his and nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks, jaw quivering.

She let go of his hand after a while, wiped tears away with the back of one hand. “Sounds good to me,” she said, and then she started the engine as if they were on their way to a Sunday BBQ.

But when her eyes passed over his, he saw the fear in them and was reminded that he was not the only one risking everything.

Loop 303 took them around the western edge of Phoenix. After just three days in woodsy isolation, the city’s massive, twinkling expanse seemed like an alien landscape, one he was unfit to inhabit. He barely knew the city, but Mike’s ghost loomed so large in his life now that the entire expanse of it seemed like a graveyard dedicated to him. Somewhere out there were streets Mike had played on as a kid, the university classroom where he had first learned of the Spartans’ brave stand at Thermopylae, the alley where he had been beaten and left for dead. Look at any city through the right memories and it could become a graveyard as haunted as a former battlefield.

They had given up listening to the radio because one of them would keep switching to the nearest available news station, which usually led with a report on the two fugitives connected to the gruesome murder of a gay Marine.

They were about an hour from Yuma and two hours from dawn when Patsy pulled off onto a side road that seemed to go nowhere. Inside the camper shell, Patsy made a makeshift cot of grease-stained blankets and whatever else she could find, and John eased himself inside. He watched dawn rise over the Anza Borrego desert through the camper shell’s grease-stained windows, knew they were two hours from San Diego and their only possible lead on Alex’s whereabouts. Before they had left the house, Patsy had used whitepages.com to find a single listing for a Philip Bloch in San Diego. She had MapQuested the address, which was in University Heights, the same neighborhood where The Catch Trap was, where John had almost abandoned Alex when he had insisted on getting that box of Mike’s belongings out of his car.

At a gas station, Patsy bought him a prepaid cell phone—practically untraceable unless law enforcement already knew of the purchase and you were stupid enough to use it for criminal activities for more than forty-eight hours after purchasing it. Considering Patsy had made it out of the gas station shop unscathed, John felt safe dialing Philip’s number on it as they pulled out of the gas station’s parking lot.

Philip answered after one ring, sounding groggy from sleep. It was nine-thirty. John prayed he had simply worked late or had been up all night worrying about Alex. “Are you being watched?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Check outside right now. Any Crown Vics or other vehicles hanging around that you don’t recognize?”

“No. I checked already. This morning, when they let me go.”

“When who let you go?”

“San Diego PD. Hanrock County Sheriff’s. It was like a big party downtown. They had me in an interrogation room all night. I think I made them happy, but they told me not to leave town.”

The bottom of John’s stomach dropped out, but he knew he couldn’t get into it on the phone. “Can you meet me somewhere?”

Silence. Hesitation.

“Is he with you?” Philip asked.

“No. He isn’t.”

“Tell me what that means.”

“I will. If you meet with me.”

“Should I bring a gun?”

“I’m not. I lost mine. Someone took it.” He prayed this was enough to convey his meaning because he had no interest in getting more specific over the phone. He told Philip he would call him back with a place; then he hung up on him before Philip could come up with a response.

A few minutes later, they were driving past the address for Philip Bloch that Patsy had found online. Philip lived in the second-floor unit of a stucco duplex with mud-colored walls and ornate iron bars over all the windows. A long driveway led to the garage in back, but after a brief scan of the street John was able to confirm Philip’s statement that there was nothing that looked like an unmarked car waiting for them outside.

Next John instructed Patsy to head over to Pacific Beach, to a run-down motel where he and some old buddies once rented a room for a weekend when they were fresh out of boot camp. They had spent the weekend chugging Coors while they discussed the prospect of going surfing, which none of them actually knew how to do. Patsy didn’t protest when he asked her to go inside and use cash to get a room. She came back with the room number, and John handed her a sheet of paper and told her to take dictation.

Ten minutes later, when Patsy returned from the room she had paid for, John called Philip back. He answered after the first ring, and John gave him the name and address of the hotel and the room number. He hung up just as Philip went to ask another question. Once this series of steps was completed, he started to breathe easier.

At exactly the moment he said he would, thirty minutes from their last phone call, Philip pulled into the motel’s parking lot. He was driving a white Ford Escape with all sorts of gay bumper stickers on the rear bumper. Patsy watched him as he went for the room, and John watched out the back of the camper shell to see if Philip had been followed. Traffic on the avenue continued to flow, nothing slowing or stopping or turning to follow Philip into the motel parking lot. A minivan with kids in the backseat turned into the Carl’s Jr. across the street, but that was it.

“He just went in,” Patsy said as John continued his survey.

Now that he was inside the room, hopefully Philip had picked up the note that Patsy had left for him on one of the bed pillows. Hopefully he was reading John’s instructions to get on the 5 and head south for Border Field State Beach, a relatively desolate expanse of coastal chaparral and angry coastline right next to the Mexican border. He was to look for any car that might be tailing him by switching lanes every so often. A following car that was willing to switch to the right lane with him but not back to the left was probably a tail; tails instinctively hated changing lanes into their blind spot and would fall back before doing so. If he saw a tail, he was to call the number for the cell phone John had given him. If not, he was to call when he reached the entrance to the park. And last, he was to wad up the note in one hand and carry it with him to his car to indicate compliance.

Fifteen minutes after he entered the motel room, that’s exactly what Philip did. He even raised the wadded-up note in one hand, as if he were waving good-bye to someone he didn’t care to look at. Then he got behind the wheel of his car and headed for the 5. They followed.

“Tell me we’re not trying to win the sympathy of the border patrol here,” Patsy finally said.

“If we stay far enough north of the border, we should be good,” John said. And the truth was he needed open space to make sure Philip wasn’t being tailed, and he couldn’t think of another beach nearby that wouldn’t be crawling with surfers on this bright, sunny day. Only the bravest dared enter the treacherous waters off Border Field, a watery graveyard to hundred of immigrants foolish enough to try that doomed crossing. But maybe the choice had been prophetic, because if he failed in what he wanted to do, he might have to cross that border to avoid the consequences.

Philip called when he reached the entrance to the park, then made a disgusted sound in his throat when he saw the Tacoma pull up right behind him and realized he had been followed the entire time. John leaped out of the back of the camper shell, phone pressed to his ear, and ordered Philip to unlock his passenger-side door. As soon as he shut the passenger-side door of the Escape, Patsy backed up enough so she could pull a U-turn, then headed out of the park, past the chaparral expanses on either side of Dairy Mart Road, and in the direction of the waiting spot they had picked out in the run-down residential blocks just south of the 5.

Without being distracted by the sight of his new chauffeur, John ordered Philip to drive deeper into the park. Philip kept his mouth shut and followed orders, and soon the whitecap-strewn deep blue of the Pacific appeared ahead. John had been right; all that awaited them was an empty expanse of windblown sand and angry whitecaps. They were a good distance from the border fence that jutted into the ocean, looking pathetically frail given its auspicious purpose.

He told Philip to stop. The guy’s eyes were bloodshot, and he looked like he had shed a few pounds since John had last seen him. But he was freshly showered, his hair a wet pile on his head, and was giving off the scent of lotion that smelled like the stench someone might get from dousing roses in pineapple juice.

“What happened to your arm?” Philip asked.

“Let’s get out. I’ve got a better view that way.”

“Don’t you want to stay hidden?” Philip said.

“I do, but I need to see if anyone’s coming.”

“And if someone is?”

“Then you’re going to drive this thing straight for the border fence while I head in the other direction.”

Philip glared at him. “And why would I do that?”

“Because the alternative is Alex spends the rest of his life in jail for murder.”

Philip stepped out of the car. John followed suit, walking slowly around the nose of the SUV until his back was to the roaring ocean, and Philip was backed up against the grille, arms folded over his chest, refusing to look in John’s eyes, like a defiant child.

“Where is he?” Philip finally asked.

“I was hoping you could help me with that. I need to know if he has any other friends he would run to—”

“Why did he
run
?” Philip snapped. “If you were protecting him, why did he run from you?”

“Because I think somebody called him and told him what had been done to Mike’s body and it sent him into a state of rage. And now he’s out there with my gun, which apparently he already knows how to fire. Do you know who taught him to fire a gun, Philip?”

“Well, I sure as hell didn’t call him. As for teaching him to shoot, my guess would be the other Marine in his life. They were two fag boys living in the middle of Hicksville. I imagine it was a skill he needed.”

“You use that word a lot more often than I do,” John said.

“Which one?
Fag
? You barely know me, so it’s not like you’ve had time to count.” They were circling the source of anger between them and getting nowhere fast, so John decided to plow right in.

“The police kept you all night? You must have given them quite a story.”

“I didn’t tell them a damn thing you told me. I just told them that you came to the club looking for Alex. I told them that you and Alex had had some sort of fight and you didn’t make it clear what it was about. I told them that you two left together. I was just confirming what they already knew. They questioned everyone at the club.”

“How did they get to the club in the first place?”

“The same way you did. They knew Alex used to work there.”

“Is that all you told them?”

Philip exhaled loudly, tongued his upper lip briefly, and crossed his arms more tightly against his chest. “I told them Alex always had a thing for Marines—butch, straight-acting Marines like yourself. I thought it was better to let them believe you guys were fucking than to tell them what you told me. Then they started asking me questions about Alex’s history. Other men he had dated. Where he might be. The same questions you’re about to ask me, it sounds like.”

John couldn’t avoid the contempt Philip had for him; it was as naked as Alex’s anger toward him during that first phone call, before Alex had believed Mike to be dead. True, he had never made much of an effort to prove himself to Philip, and that would probably be impossible now, given that Alex had fled his protection and given that the resentment radiating off Philip’s very being seemed ingrained. But it struck John as pathetic, full of defeat, or, at least, the perception of it, as if Philip believed John had already beaten him to a pulp and the only recourse he had was to pop off some nasty remarks about it. Could Philip not see that John was the one with the broken arm, the one who stank of auto grease?

“They asked you about other people in Alex’s life?” John asked.

“Yes. I told them there hadn’t been any other men in Alex’s life for the past three years because he gave his entire life to Mike. Even when Mike was in Iraq, there was no one else. No one. And I told them that Alex was not capable of murder. On any level!”

“And me? Did they ask about me?”

“Of course they did, and I said I didn’t know you at all.” It sounded like an insult. John turned away, scanned the beach and the distant fence, the expanse of wind-whipped chaparral leading off in the direction from which they had come.

“Alex isn’t capable of killing anyone,” Philip said, as if John’s silence had begged the question. John stayed silent, didn’t mention the reenactment the day before, replete with smashed beer bottles and a lead pipe. “The only reason he went with you was to prove his manhood. That’s all. Shit, after all the time they spent together, Alex got as caught up in that macho Marine Corps bullshit as Mike was.”

“How did I get such a big role in his life?”

“For Christ’s sake, you were practically the other man. He lost his shit when Mike asked if he could invite you up to the house.”

“What? He thought Mike and I would run off together?”

“No. He thought you had power. The power to make Mike pretend he was straight again, even if it meant kicking Alex to the curb. It’s not like it would have been the first time he’d been thrown out. His parents did the same thing when they found out he was a fag. They stopped paying his tuition, cut him out of their life insurance policy.” They had also left him a luxurious cabin in the mountains for him and his boyfriend to play around in, but mentioning this wasn’t about to get Philip on his side. “So, in walks this big, hot Marine, and Alex just gives him his entire life. He gave up on everything else.”

“He said he made a decision,” John said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Most people call it a
commitment,
” John fired back. “Now, I’m sorry he didn’t make it to you, but maybe if you care about him enough to get over it, you’ll start telling me where the fuck he could have gone!”

This outburst stilled Philip. At first John thought the guy had been mortified by his anger. Then in a gentle voice Philip said, “A commitment, huh? Pretty soon you’ll be calling it a marriage. You’ve come a long way in a short time, John Houck.”

“Maybe not such a long way. You saw what they’re saying about me on the news.”