God Is a Bullet (42 page)

He walks alone with these thoughts on the night of the last lunar eclipse of the millennium. Walks the same field where he and Case talked, swigging from a pint bottle of tequila.

It has become a second home to him, this patch of scrub. He drinks and paces. Blame will not devour him. The truth will not devour him. The insane mechanics of the world will not devour him.

There are now bitter ironies everywhere. Arthur is rebaptized in the stone font of the church he has helped build, soon after its first Sunday mass. When John Lee’s car is discovered in a wash up Dove Springs Canyon Road, the police find it yields no clues to his death or whereabouts. Maureen establishes an organization for the victimized children of crime. As the months pass, Arthur and Maureen’s attitude toward Gabi becomes nervous and robotic, as if the sight of her brings home the sickening reality of who they are. Their visits soon become short and perfunctory.

The dark star attached to Bob may never go away, but he won’t kick it off, either. Not after what he’s paid for it. He wanders back and up the scrabbled hillside, looking into the black-green earth. The same faith that carried him out of that fuckin’ tract with an ex-junkie to find his stolen daughter is the same faith that carried him back home and carries him now. It is just colored differently. He squats and holds a clump of damp earth in his hands.

One night, Bob’s eyes open into darkness. There is knocking at the front door and he sees a Sheriff’s Department car in the driveway. At first he is afraid to answer, afraid that it will be bad news about Case.

• • •

By dawn he is pulling through a police barricade at the near end of Encantada Cuesta. He drives down that road strangled with apprehensions. He pulls into the yard. The forensic boys are there, Homicide, too. No coroner’s van, not yet.

He takes out his dated Sheriff’s Department ID tag and shows it to the sergeant in charge. “I’m looking for Lieutenant Anderson,” says Bob. “He called me last night about a murder and …”

Bob notices something register in the sergeant’s eyes as he scans the ID. An intrigued reshaping of the eyebrows is followed by “You the guy from Antelope Valley, right? The guy who went after his daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Shit … Good fuckin’ shootin’, man.”

Lieutenant Anderson is tall, gaunt. He wears a brown suit. It’s as plain as his plain pale face. He’s not yet thirty, but he walks stoop-shouldered beside Bob as he leads him up the porch and into the house.

“It’s a shame,” says Lieutenant Anderson, “what happened to that captain in your department. Disappearing like that.”

“Yes, it’s a shame,” says Bob.

“I’ll bet it was the son of a bitch in here that got him.”

“Yes,” says Bob, as if a curse were falling about him. “You’re probably right.”

“The woman who owned this place was also killed. Knife across the throat. From the way she was lying in there, I doubt she ever knew what got her. Her brother is an INS agent. He was working last night, but he seems to have disappeared since we notified him of the murder.”

The entrance to the house from the porch takes them through the kitchen. It’s a run-down affair. Cracked blue tiles and patchy white wood.

“Well, anyway, we got this weird call,” says the lieutenant, “from a woman who said to come on out to this address.
That there’d been a murder. Then she gave us your name and said you could identify the man as the one who kidnapped your daughter.”

From the kitchen, through the dining room, Bob follows the lieutenant. There are double rows of potted plants along the walls and vines that grow up around the window frames. The place reeks of tobacco and incense, and in each corner stands a huge floor urn bizarrely designed and painted.

“The woman actually called from here. Can you believe it?”

Bob feels a prefiguration of knots inside his stomach as they pass along the edge of the dining-room wall to where the living room starts to open out and he can see a crew dusting for prints and doing up their photos.

He clears into the open room, lit by a triptych of window squares, and stops dead in his tracks.

The hunt is over.

Cyrus sits in the battered chair where Case shot him. Pinned to his chest is a card: the final enigma of the Tarot. The Fool. Cyrus’s head is tilted to one side as if some invisible friend were leaning down and whispering to him a secret. His eyes, what is left of them, are open. The right side of his head is a blown-out street lamp. A mass of mucousy brain matter dries sickly gray, the blood a simple brown.

The stark reality is nothing Bob would expect of stark reality. It is quiet and simple. He steps closer. A box fan windmills somewhere behind him. He looks over what was once the man. There is nothing expressed in the eyes or the face. There is not that one moment of implied disintegration he wanted to see in the drama of his enemy.

“Is that the man?” asks Lieutenant Anderson.

Bob does not answer. He is living out a horrific pleasure in seeing the bastard cut down and grouted. A sheer merciless adrenaline rush of black, righteous poison at this fierce bloodletting. Yet Bob’s face is as calm as the lieutenant’s.

“Yes,” says Bob. “This was the man.”

“The woman. The one who called. Do you have any idea who she was?”

She’d done it, Bob thinks to himself. She committed the ultimate sacrifice. Offered herself up as murderess.

“Mr. Hightower. Do you know who the lady was?”

He still does not answer. He looks at the card pinned to Cyrus’s chest. Remembers that night in Case’s apartment when they first talked of the murder on Via Princessa. He tries to imagine how it all went down in this room. Those last moments.

“Mr. Hightower. The woman gave us your name and number. Do you have any idea why?”

“I don’t know what’s in people’s minds,” he says, without looking at the lieutenant. “Not after what I’ve seen.”

“And you have no idea who the woman is?”

“An idea? No.”

“The woman who helped you find your daughter …”

“Yes, what about her?”

“Do you think she could have been involved with this in any way?”

Bob takes a long moment. “She is long since gone, I’m afraid.”

Lieutenant Anderson eyes him skeptically.

“And you have no idea who might have killed him?”

“Yes,” says Bob. “I do. The woman even told
you.”

The lieutenant’s long angular face pouches up. “I don’t understand.”

Bob sticks his jaw out toward the wall beyond the chair. “You’ve seen for yourself.”

The lieutenant glances at the wall where the light from the windows reaches up in three perfectly formed blocks of empty space. Written there in Cyrus’s blood, across the flaking white, the words
GOD IS A BULLET
.

“Are you screwing with me, Hightower?” asks the lieutenant.

Bob stares at the bloody aphorism on the wall. He thinks
back to the night in Hinkley when he and Case sat talking in that seedy, dark barbecue hole while in her hand she held a Hornaday bullet and gave him two minutes of hard philosophy on what held ultimate power in this, our heartfelt world.

The lieutenant asks again, “Are you screwing with me?”

Maybe she was right, Bob thinks. Maybe the world does work cleaner her way. Better. Maybe the world works her way period. Maybe God is only a bullet. Maybe the ultimate parable is carried inside a cartridge with a gliding metal jacket and grooved points.

Of course, she could be playing a bit of coyote herself. Making the murder look like a cult killing, so the keepers will hunt through that wretched wasteland of crude desert for some aberration, for some Cyrus in the making. Maybe she is clever enough to be covering her trail. Or maybe she’s just leaving it all open to speculation. Maybe …

Bob turns and passes the lieutenant on his way out.

The lieutenant stops him. “Hightower … You gonna answer me?”

Bob has no answer for the lieutenant, and walks away.

In central Arizona, along the Mogollon Rim, at a truck stop packed with the dinner crowd, Case sits alone having coffee. She stares out the window, past a great line of rigs and into a country of deep eskers raked by a burning sunset. Gorges chiseled by the primitive artifacts of time are now cast so red it seems the ground itself is bleeding. This is the country once called by Coronado
el despoblado
, “the howling wilderness.”

Behind the milk of her headlights, pounding through the dark swerves of midnight, in the clutches of that massive silent heath, windows open to crank in the air, waiting for the perfect turn that never comes, she can hear Cyrus in the radio’s voice: “He blew his mind out in a car …”

Nothing abides alone. Not evil, not good. Yet she can’t seem to rise past her privations. Every phone tempts her, but she is afraid to make the call. So she tries to drive her need into the ground. The thorn short a lily, the lily short a thorn.

In October, there are fires from Malibu to the Ventura Hills. The ground burns again in an act of creation and change. Bob sits on his kitchen steps, the last Saturday of the month. He looks up into a full moon that drips white blood across the channel of the sky to its partnered earth.

He drinks tequila and smokes. The phone rings but he doesn’t bother with it. He sets his teeth against the dark inside him. But the ringing doesn’t stop.

Don’t make it be like all the other times, he thinks. Some reporter who wants a little quick one-liner. Or the crawling night-freaks who want to talk murder or guns or Christianity or the Left-Handed Path or …

He would have changed the phone number, but he is still stumbling through the heart of tonight’s and tomorrow’s and next week’s and next year’s wishes.

He moves with the cautious motion of a spider across the kitchen toward the phone. There is a second of silence after he answers, and he would swear he can hear the drone of the highway in the emptiness of that moment.

The dry California winds that bred the fires burn up through his nose as he takes a long deep breath. “Case?”

Seconds waste by.

“Hello, Coyote,” she says.

In the winter Sam’s and Sarah’s graves are desecrated. The headstone is spray-painted with the letter
C
pierced by a lightning bolt. The same sign appears on the doors and walls of the Via Princessa house, which still sits empty on the bluff above the Antelope Freeway.

Some say it’s the work of punk vandals. Others say it is a cult warning.

A reporter calls Bob’s house to snag a comment, but she finds the number has been changed. She takes a quick drive out to the place only to discover from the family now living there that Bob and Gabi have moved and left no forwarding address. She then contacts Arthur and Maureen, but neither knows where Bob and Gabi have gone.

This book is the sum total of many lives. With that in mind and heart, I would like to walk through a short list of thank yous for those who helped nurture, shape, and polish this manuscript, and also my being.

First, to Sonny Mehta, who stands firmly at the center of this experience. It was he who set this book on its course, and who gave freely of his experience, talent, and commitment. To Sarah McGrath, who worked more than her fair share of judicious editorial hours carrying this manuscript to completion. To the Knopf executives Patricia Johnson, Paul Bogaards, Paul Kozlowski, and Bill Loverd, for their sincere and dedicated stewardship. To Jenny Minton, for a helpful push in the right direction.

On a personal note: To Deirdre Stefanie and the late, great Brutarian … to Deaf Eddie … to G.G. and L.S.… to my friends who are still in hiding … to Felis Andrews-Pope … to the Ferryman, who guided me through many, many miles of uncharted American life, from those shape-shifting corners of the California desert to the forgotten camposantos of Mexico … and finally, to my friend and agent, David Hale Smith, who always does more than he says he will and does it with the utmost care for my work. An ethical workhorse and dedicated family man, he has my deepest respect and admiration. A special thanks goes to him and to Shelly Lewis and Seth Robertson, his associates at DHS Literary, Inc. I will always define my good fortune in meeting David as kismet times seven.

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