The Big Boom (22 page)

So they’d lingered in the city, and then there were complications. Because Arturo had gotten another call.

The dead girl’s father had a hired a detective, it seemed, and the client needed a last favor. Shake the father up a little. Don’t hurt him, not yet, just scare him. Be creative. Then follow the detectives for a few days. Make sure they are off the case.

She hadn’t wanted to take it on.

But it had been fun, she had to admit, chasing the cat off the diving board. Watching the fool thing leap. Laughing while it thrashed through the blue water, tried to find its way out of the pool. Clawing at the concrete lip.

And they were almost finished.

Sylvia reached over now and touched Dante’s nose. How close he’d been to figuring them out, she didn’t know.
Naughty detective.
Either way, she imagined herself with him in that hotel room. She imagined blowing into his ear, sweet nothings, whispering, and him all the while with that look in his eyes like she was the one who could unlock the secret. Who knew the story behind the story. She put one hand on his pants, the other on his nose. She caught a glimmer of steel in the rearview, moving through the trees.
It’s too late now.
Then the blue van appeared, pushing a swirl of dust.
You’re never going to know.

Max was driving. This concerned her. It was Arturo’s van, his pride and joy, and he never let anyone else drive.

“Where’s Arturo?”

“In the back,” he said. “Taking a nap.”

Sylvia knew what that meant. She looked in Max’s eyes and saw the light had gone dim. It had not vanished, of course; it never vanished, but the glint was dull. This maybe was more dangerous, because Max was in some ways even more impulsive when he was high, when all the guardians were asleep and it was just the restless animal inside.

“Is there any dope for me?”

“The man overdid it again,” said Max. “The man with the plan. He’s useless.”

She slid open the van door. It was true: Arturo lay in the bunk and did not look well. Sylvia touched his arm. His skin was not as warm as it should be, and his color was too blue. Meanwhile, Max had gone over to the Polaris and opened the passenger door. He stood there looking down at the detective.

“This guy, I don’t see how a woman can stand looking at a face like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“A face like that. With that thing in the middle of his face. That’s a crime against nature.”

“His nose?”

“Nose? That’s not a nose. That’s a dick. That’s a goddamn dick in the middle of his face.”

“I think he’s kind of cute.”

“You would.”

Max stomped off, following the path to the cliff edge. She knew how he could be. The thing with Rose, it had not been supposed to go that way. They’d had a plan, a way to take care of him, but Max had gotten edgy and pulled the trigger. She did not want that to happen again.

She reached inside the car and touched the detective. He did not stir, and she told herself this was a good thing. He was out.

Max came back shaking his head. “That’s a long way down there. I say we get this done quick,” said Max.

“What are you saying?”

“I can’t do this alone. He’s dead weight.”

Sylvia realized what he was implying, and she did not like it. The plan had been simple. She would get Mancuso out here. Then Arturo and Max would lift the man out of the car and throw him over the cliff. Not the most elegant of plans, but it got rid of the body, and did so according to Arturo’s rules. No gunplay. Nothing to trace. And it looked like an accident. Guy went hiking, fell off the cliff.

“We don’t want to get reckless,” she said.

Max smiled then. “How about I do it the simple way. Shoot him where he sits,” he said. “Right there in the Polaris.” Max put on the London accent, doing the James Bond bit. Suave, tongue in cheek. Only Max was no James Bond. “They’ll trace the registration,” she said.

“Don’t tell me you got it under your real name.”

She shook her head. “There’s no sense in taking any chances,” she told him. “Come on. Let’s get loose. You leave the gun up at the van. Then we can do this, just like we planned.”

“I don’t need any,” he said. “I’m perfect.”

“Good for you.”

They went back to the van and unfurled the foil, and in the end Max couldn’t resist. She saw his dullness grow a little duller, and then he started to paw her like he had the night at Angie’s apartment. Sylvia stopped his hand. “Get rid of the gun,” she said. Truth was, she didn’t mind it, the gun there in his pocket; she didn’t mind touching the gun while Max touched her, but if she had any say with him, she had it now. Meanwhile Arturo still lay in the bunk,
and she could see his foot hanging over. The way it hung there, it was not a normal-looking foot. Poor Arturo, she thought. Poor Arturo, who had been like a father to her. Poor Arturo, who had grieved over the beloved wife who used to measure out his dope in careful spoonfuls. Poor Arturo, who had dreamed just this morning of a little dog, chasing him down his boyhood streets, but whose foot at the moment hung over the edge of the bunk, a sad foot, a stiff foot, that didn’t have anything left to say.

Meanwhile, Max had her skirt up, the same as the nightgown that night at Angie’s apartment. Max could not get hard enough to penetrate her and so he was rubbing himself against her leg. He had put aside the gun, like she asked, and it lay on the floor of the van. While he struggled, she reached out and touched the barrel. It was beautiful, Sylvia thought, and for an instant she imagined there might be a whole new way. It was her and Max now. Her and Max and the gun. But she did not trust Max and they would do it Arturo’s way tonight. For old time’s sake. Then Max came all over her black skirt. The light in his eyes was gone. Arturo’s dead foot dangled overhead.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s finish our work.”

They went over to the Polaris and she saw a vague flicker cross the detective’s face, the eyes fluttering.

“Grab his feet,” said Max. “I’ll take the head.”

“I don’t think he’s all the way under. I think he’s coming to.”

“How can that be?”

Max grabbed the man by the nose. The detective opened his eyes, but it was just reflex. His head lolled and his eyes crossed. Max turned the nose again a little harder, just to watch the eyes cross again—as if the man were a tweak doll on a kid’s bookshelf.

“What are you doing that for?” Sylvia demanded.

“What do you propose I do?”

She crouched on her knees and looked up into Dante’s face. “He’s in a transitional state.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we do with him how we did with the girl on the boardwalk. Coax him out, tell him we’re going for a little walk.”

Max stood straight up. He glanced back at the van, then at the ocean. He was dubious, she could tell, and Sylvia herself had a moment of doubt. Maybe Max had the right idea: Just shoot the guy and throw him in the ocean. But then Max shrugged and leaned into the car.

“Come on, dickface,” he said. “We’re going for a little stroll.”

D
ante had never gone fully under, but was in and out of consciousness. Partly, it was how the drug worked. It took away short-term memory. Dante did not remember the drive over, even though he had been conscious at times, eyes open. The images simply disappeared from memory as soon as they were registered. But when he saw the girl now, in front of him, he remembered the parking lot. He remembered kissing her. He remembered her lips. Now she helped him out of the car, entreating him to put his arm over her shoulders. There was someone on the other side of him as well. A man, he realized, but he did not remember the man. Then his brain went empty, and Dante experienced the immediate moment again, isolated from the moment before, with no memory of it. He saw the girl’s face again, and felt the man’s fetid breath, and was aware of his own weight sagging between them as his feet searched for the ground. But the moment was isolated from the moment before, and isolated from the moment after, each an impression in its own right but without connection one to the other.

Dante would have stayed in this state longer, perhaps, except that physical motion tended to wake the brain, and with each step forward the moments connected a little more.

“Thattaboy, prick nose,” the man said. “Now you’re getting the idea.”

“Where we going?” Dante asked.

Or tried to ask. His tongue was thick in his mouth and the words were not decipherable—and anyway he forgot the question as soon as it was spoken.

“Come on, Loverboy. Just around the bend here, you can take it easy.”

“That’s right,” said the girl. “Just a little ways.”

Dante watched his feet. He tried to move them more deliberately, and soon he and the girl and the man moved more efficiently, less like a clumsy entry in a three-legged race. “Good, honey,” the young woman said. “Very good.” They were on a path, and it was narrowing, and then Dante heard a sound that had been in the background all along, though he only now recognized it. The ocean, he thought, and in that instant he remembered Tosca’s. The girl in the bar. The drink.

He let his feet go slack. His body sagged, and the trio pitched around violently for a moment, almost tumbling, and in that moment he must have gone black once more. Then the girl stood in front of him, holding his hand, peering into his face. She reached out and touched his cheek.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We just have a little farther to go.”

“Stop that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Get your hands off his goddamn nose.”

“You jealous?”

“Why don’t you jack him off while you’re at it.”

Dante’s clarity was back. Or he thought it was. He could see the ocean now. The man was somewhere behind him, not far, and the girl was just ahead, leading him by the hand. She turned every once in a while to look him in the eyes, to keep him on track. She smiled with that smile of hers that twisted up at the corners, a girl’s smile, and he saw again the odd beauty in her crooked eyes, and behind her the ocean, and all that infinite space.

“Here,” she said.

He heard the man behind him, and at the same time heard an inner wheel turning, the secret part of the brain that calculated when you did not know it was calculating, that grasped what was happening at the edge of your senses. They were positioning him. The edge of the cliff was just ahead, and soon the girl would step away, and the man would push him from behind. The drug had taken away the part of the brain that felt fear—it had stripped away all the outer edges, and all of a sudden he had a moment of clarity of the type you can have only when there is no present, and no past, and you are standing on the edge of the cliff with nothing but sky in front of you.

The girl’s eyes coaxed him. She pulled him by the fingers, lightly, her body cantilevered toward the sea. She was going to step away now, this moment, now, leaving him on the cliff edge, tottering, on the verge. And in that instant he did a simple thing. He took ahold of her wrist. She pulled in the opposite direction, an instinctive reaction, trying to break his grip. The man grabbed Dante by the shoulders, trying to yank him away. Dante let go. The girl hovered for a moment, one foot in the air, mouth open.

“Oh,” she said.

Then she was gone, over the edge. Clawing at the air.

The two men, carried by momentum, tumbled backward. Dante
had had training. The dark calm that had settled in his brain was gone, shattered by adrenaline, and his movements were automatic, brutal. He drove his elbow into the man’s temple, then a knife hand into his throat. He picked up a rock and smashed it into his face. He smashed the rock into the man’s mouth and then lifted it again, and smashed into his eyes, into his nose, and then smashed him again. He could not stop himself. He smashed the man’s face until it was a pulp. Until the skull cracked and the face was raw with blood. Then he stood up and looked down into the cove.

Sylvia lay some hundred feet below. She lay there in her white blouse and her pencil skirt and her black boots, her body sprawled and broken. She lay on a rock shelf with the line of the surf maybe ten feet away and the tide rushing in.

Dante backed away. He meant to find the path but instead tripped over the Englishman’s corpse and stumbled along the clifftop A few steps more and he collapsed into the weeds and the succulents growing helter-skelter along the rim.

This time Dante didn’t get up. He put his face into the sand and let the darkness come.

W
hen he woke, it was night. There was an offshore breeze and the sky was clear and there was a moon overhead.

He walked to the edge. The tide had come in, and the waves were up against the cliff. It was a small cove, with a rock reef at the mouth, and the water churned violently. Just because the tide had come in, though, didn’t mean the girl’s body had been taken out to sea. Dante knew this from experience, from seeing bodies of people who had drowned in coves like this. There were eddies and crosscurrents, whirlpools within whirlpools, and it was not unusual for a
corpse to be buffeted back and forth, smashed over and over against the rocks.

Dante went back to the Englishman. He was tempted to leave the son of a bitch where he lay, but there would be forensic evidence, he knew, small details connecting him to the death, and he might as well put those to a minimum. Dante rifled the man’s wallet first, pulling the identification. Then he grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. The next part was not easy. He propped the man on the edge, into the sitting position. Then pushed him over. The cliff was sheer, jutting over the inlet, and the man hit the water more or less in the same spot where the girl had landed hours ago, before the tide came in.

Then Dante walked over to the van.

Inside he found the corpse of Arturo Lind. He searched the man’s wallet, and found the gun, too, lying on the floor. Then he returned to the corpse and unbuttoned the shirt. It was not easy to get it off, and the shirt stank of death, but he had no choice: His own shirt was covered with blood and he could not be wearing it in public. Then he drove the van toward the edge of the cliff, creeping along the path, until he was in the spot where the Englishman had gone over. He released the emergency brake and got behind the van and pushed. There wasn’t much of a slope but there was enough. The van went over the cliff and into the ocean.