God Is a Bullet (39 page)

For a moment Bob’s head rests against the barrel of his shotgun picketed up in the sand. He closes his eyes. He finds himself searching for his god, desperate for him, praying to that crucified Christ to see them through. He opens his eyes, and Case is staring at him hard, as if she’s climbed into his head and plucked out that very thought. Her only possible
response to such a useless idea is to slam home a shell in the shotgun’s chamber.

As they face each other, that legion of horribles screams out the promise of a blooding. Insane frenzied pledges. Then, as the flames hurl themselves onto the sky, the world around them goes silent. In that lapse of seconds there is now only the night wind and the flames, the ash and the smoke-colored ground combed through with the coming cold.

Bob can feel the chill of the assault just waiting. The slow breathing of those fuckin’ aggro vultures somewhere beyond the ring of light, ready to blind out their lives.

“It’s just a kiss away, Coyote,” Case murmurs. “Just a fuckin’ kiss away.”

The back of Bob’s hand wipes the sweat away from his eyes.

A shot cuts up the night. And then another. And a next, in rapid succession. Far off at first. But closing in. They’re out there in the dark and coming on fast. They’re a dead run across the sand from a half dozen different angles.

Bob and Case spread out to defend both sides of the ravine, and in one chilling landslide of fear the fight begins. A streaking sprite leaps over the rim of the burning wreck, legs pulled high. A screaming blot that one blast from Bob’s shotgun takes out in a sunburst.

The punk tumbles down the incline, and Case is on him fast, boots kicking sand a half beat behind the hitching leathered carcass. As he slams to a stop against a piece of piping, Case puts a shot into the head, nuking the flesh away from the eye sockets and nose to make sure that even if he’s dead—he’s dead.

In a circling warp of night outlines, Bob turns to meet head-on a screeching bull-stud. Black and young and ripped from steroids. Bob fires through the blinding smoke at the twisting image but misses, and the figure is gone behind a wall of turned ash.

Case ducks down low, the flames of the bridge clinging to
the bottom of her boots. She spots a shape of motley colors sweeping that pit of salt, and she fires and fires and fires again and a leg is blown apart.

A form hurtles past. A human shell fragment that disappears over the bridge, leaping into the ravine.

Bob spots something streak by. He moves quick to finish it. There is a savage desperation closing in. He leaps over a pipe casing toward the frail figure of a boy gathering himself up. He’s not more than fourteen, and on any street corner he’d be a nothing you’d walk past, but put an oversized bullet slammer into his hand and scar his face with fiendish tributes to the Left-Handed Path, and you’ve got a satanic Capone hunting for his first coup.

The boy’s god grants him his wish in the shape of Bob Whatever. But it’s bad news. Bob fires first. The boy’s ribs are blown into a blood lattice of crate shreds. He lands on his back. As Bob comes on, the black bull-stud races along the length of the ravine ledge, then sweeps past his field of vision. One kill at a time, Coyote. The boy gasps as the wind escapes from the sacs of a ruptured lung, and while blood fills his mouth, Bob comes in for the life close.

The ground around Case is spattered with gunfire. Tracers of white sand. She tries to get away by making for the smoke from the burning bridge struts. She fires at a girl sweeping the far upper end of the ravine, but misses. She fires again as the girl cuts across a breath of moonlight, but misses again.

The ash smoke burns her eyes. She keeps retreating. The sound of a shotgun streaks past her back. She comes around to see the half-decapitated form of the boy Bob has just sent into oblivion.

Case is gasping. Bob’s shirt is drenched and stuck to his chest. It’s covered with the boy’s blood, as is his face. The adrenaline has them wired from hell to the far side of the universe.

“You alive?” she screams.

“I’m alive,” Bob screams back.

The pack is closing in. Case and Bob know they’ll never get to the top of the ravine now. Not until it’s finished one way or the other. Each takes up a piece of ground at opposite ends of the bridge. Then it starts. Numberless shadows come through the flames like lighted spears. Split images. Howling. Broaching the Stygian darkness.

Case and Bob are among them now, in the gasping smoke and flame. They fire point-blank at one and all.

A high female cry. A shoulder blade wracked in a fall. Case with the taste of raw iron in her mouth. Skin covered in hemorrhage. Bob bleeding down his back. Ink outlines tottering across the flame-swept sand.

A huge trestle tie on the bridge yaws violently, its charred midsection snapping into gray ash, a downward-crashing nightmare spray of cobalt hot sparks.

It is madness now. The first fights are for blood and land, the final fights for myth.

Cyrus’s head moves slow as a monk’s at vespers behind his camouflaged infrared goggles. He watches the heat waves of human life, locked in a brutal hecatomb against that fiery wreckage of truck and bridge. Then beyond, in the far distance, he picks out of the pitch-black murk of the Panamints a hunter’s moon racing a hundred feet above the desert floor, coming on fast, in a hard mean straightaway.

Along that grim perimeter Bob sees Gutter snake-crawl down the ravine floor toward the drainage pipe. Bob is a vision of gaudy desperate motions. His face just a mouth-hole shouting his daughter’s name.

In the tunnel womb, choking from the smoke-foul air, Gabi waits for death. She begins to hear her father’s scrambling voice when the carnal smoke around her parts to reveal a face just as shocked to see her as she is to be seen.

• • •

A great white halogen-eye wind rides above the desert floor. It scoops out blocks of sand from the darkness. Clearing the banks of the ravine, the chopper blows a firestorm of cinders up that grouted trench and along the salt flats under its whirling blades of salvation. And before Bob can wade through the detritus of charred and burning collapsed timbers and reach that larvae of pipe pieces, he hears a shot and a scream married in a scarce moment.

On the far side of the bridge, the sheet metal of the Dakota begins to warp and melt, and the stench of plastic poison swirls in the air. Case searches through that congress of wasted life-forms like a vampire on yellows and crack to find Cyrus. With knife and gun at the ready, bent, she scours each corpse and shadow.

She hears the ratty echo of a voice on a loudspeaker trying to get through the tearing hum of the chopper blades and she hears Bob yelling for Gabi, but she keeps to the ground like a white huntress wolf, wounded and ready for blood.

By morning, a huge area around the bridge has been cordoned off. The cops are keeping the news rats on the ground well beyond the scope of their zooms, so it’s up to the local station choppers to try and scoop each other for the most salacious close-up.

Arthur’s house has also been cordoned off. The streets leading up to his place through the Paradise Hills tract are a maze of news trucks and lookie-loos who finagled their way
past the gateman and neighbors hosting neighbors in shocked front-yard coffee klatches. Newscasters get their hair coiffed or finesse their makeup so they can look their spiffiest for the lurid gloss they deliver through toilet-bowl-white teeth.

They are a barrage of one-liners highlighting what little they know of Gabi’s rescue and Bob’s story with Case. They offer a general description of Cyrus and provocative attempts to explain his seamless escape. Also, the first reports of John Lee’s disappearance in the last two days have begun to surface.

Inside the house a mob of police officers from John Lee’s department, along with tech experts and FBI agents and sketch artists, all try to profile the facts, tracing events from that night on Via Princessa to the fight in the desert months later.

Gabi is off in a back bedroom, sedated and under a doctor’s care for malnutrition. After a cursory exam at the hospital she was released. It was decided her privacy could be better safeguarded at the house. Also, word of her forced addiction is being concealed from reporters as best it can.

Bob wanders out from his child’s room and back to the dining area, where Case is going through a long interview. As he passes through the cluttered groups of personnel, he notices officers and agents alike staring at him with a kind of dark fascination. There is also something sober and brooding behind their looks.

In a side bedroom of pale orange and gray, Arthur and Maureen talk with two supervisors from the Sheriff’s Department and a homicide detective for the Valley district. Maureen is going over how John Lee got a call the night before last. How it was “allegedly” a lead on Gabi’s whereabouts. He’d left the house well past midnight. He had told Maureen only that it was a long drive into the desert and he wouldn’t be back till late the next day. Arthur then takes over, as the troubled and bereaved friend, explaining that
Maureen called him. She was worried and so he came over. They made calls to everyone they knew to try to find him. They tried the hospitals. Then they called the authorities.

Bob listens and watches from the doorway. He interrupts the conversation, asking the officers if he can steal Maureen and Arthur for a few minutes. The officers give way politely, and the two follow Bob through the living room and down into the basement. At first it seems like nothing, but when Bob latches the door Maureen and Arthur share a moment of quiet hesitation.

Bob leads them through a playroom and around an ornate relic of a pool table stacked with boxes of family mementos from the Via Princessa house. He recognizes a handful of pewter-framed pictures of Gabi in an open box. He stops and spends some time quietly looking them over.

“Bob,” says Arthur. “What is going on?”

Bob picks through the box, finds a sweater of Sarah’s he’d bought her long before the divorce. A pair of her blue cowboy boots. Combs she wore in her hair. He hovers over these. His chin clefts. “They’ve already accumulated the mummy smell of dust and mold,” he says. Then, looking up: “Haven’t they?”

“Bob,” says Maureen.

Bob says nothing more. He leads them farther on back through the house to a small television room that is used now for storage. It has a single standing lamp for light, which Bob turns on. The air-conditioning has been off so long the room is thick with leftover air.

When they are in that small room, Bob closes the door behind them. He leans against it.

“I’ll have the truth now, Arthur.”

Arthur gives him an I-don’t-understand shoulder hitch. Maureen sits on the arm of a deep-cushioned easy chair.

“What did you do to John Lee, Arthur?”

Maureen folds her hands. “Bob. What kind of thing is that to …”

Bob stares her down. Cold-checks her in mid-sentence. Gives her body language a hard read. She’s an illusion of controlled decorum shrink-wrapped around a frightened stiffness. “And you too, huh?” says Bob.

It’s a small room, and in two steps Bob is standing over Maureen. She is eye to eye with his belt buckle. “I suppose you know it all, don’t you?”

Maureen does not look up.

“Did Arthur tell you he and John Lee were there when the old lady got murdered? Did he tell you Cyrus was there? Did he?”

He turns to Arthur. “Did you tell her?” He turns back to Maureen. His voice rises. “How come you’re not asking me what old lady, Maureen? How come?”

Arthur nervously tells him to shush.

“I know about the old woman,” says Maureen.

Arthur’s chest heaves. “Maureen.”

“Ah, shit,” she curses. “The whole world is led by a handful of empty hats.”

Bob turns to Arthur. “She knows you were there, but does she know you and John Lee may have helped kill the old lady?”

Both Arthur and Maureen’s heads come about.

“I was part of no such thing.”

“That’s not what Cyrus said.”

“We believe him, now, is that it?”

“He hasn’t lied as much as some.”

“Be careful where you’re going with this,” Arthur warns.

Bob turns on him, presses into that bulky frame. “Because of you, we have a little girl upstairs who has been …”

Maureen can see Bob is about ready to torch the old man down. She is up quick, squeezing between them. “Stop. Please, Bobby. They’ll hear you upstairs. Please.”

“We wouldn’t want that, would we?” says Bob, then, to Arthur again, “She’s paying for your ‘being careful.’
Our
Gabi. You watch yourself with me, Arthur, I mean it. I’ve tasted a lot of blood lately and I’m not sure I got a full stomach yet.”

“Okay,” says Arthur.

“Maureen, what happened to John Lee?”

“I think we should just go back upstairs and …”

Bob flips off the light. They are in the dark now. He grabs Maureen. Her face is a robber’s mask with a scent of bath oil.

“Maybe it’s easier in the dark.”

“Please, Bobby. Let me go. Turn on the light and let me go.”

“Come on. As long as we can’t see faces.”

“You’re hurting me.”

Arthur flips on the light. Maureen is trembling.

“Look at your arms, Maureen. Look at them shaking. You’ve already halfway told me. Come on. You’re big on going ‘all the way.’ ”

“Let her go, Bob.”

“Fuck you,” he says.

Maureen starts to turn ice-rock against the architecture of his anger. “He paid to have Sam killed,” she says. “John Lee.
Did you know that?
He paid to have him killed, and it ended up getting Sarah killed and Gabi taken. That is where the fault lies as far as I’m concerned. And I’ll tell you this, too. I only wish that whatever happened to John Lee had happened to him sooner. Like last November. How’s that for an answer?”

“You’re the art of the half-truth.”

“Most of life is not the art of truth at all, Bobby,” she says. “It’s the trading of trivialities.”

“Is it?”

“Sure,” says Arthur, with a coy ugliness. “Sure. Just ask Errol Grey.”

Bob comes about. His face is ashen, except for the rage on each cheek.