The Color of Night (16 page)

I found a strange car on my street when I cruised into the trailer park. Ford Taurus, looked brand-spanking-new. Perhaps a rental. It was parked in my usual spot, and it looked empty when I passed it and drove on.

Lights were on in the trailer too. In a different configuration, I thought, than I had left them. But I use timers, and sometimes I change the pattern of the timers. A good deterrent, the local police tell us, next best thing to a dog.

A quarter mile outside the trailer park gate I aimed my car across the shoulder and cut the engine as it bumped over the low berm. I let it roll to a stop among the snarls of mesquite and creosote. A car passed by one way, then the other. Neither vehicle reached mine with its headlights.

They must already have my car, I thought. Make and model, tag number, distinctive dents and everything.

Trying my very best to be quiet, I didn’t get the trunk quite shut. Didn’t want to slam it. I’d have to take care of that, if ever I did get back to this car.

Then I moved back around the perimeter, keeping about twenty yards out from the wire. The steel diamonds gleamed erratically, catching stray shards of light from trailer windows or from vehicles traveling inside the park.

I moved in slow fits and starts, like an animal foraging, or that’s what I hoped. Or nothing, I hoped to appear as nothing, black smoke dissipating over the plain. I wore black jacket, trousers, white shirt, and a string tie. Faux formal wear for the casino. The black must leap out from the pale floor of the desert, but that’s if anyone were looking for something, and if they were they’d be looking out of a well-lit area into a dark one.

Presently I had come to the rear of my own trailer, and I could see the agent moving about inside. Yes, he’d turned on more lights than I had on timers. All of them, actually. Stumping around like he owned the place. I seemed to be able to hear his footfalls ringing the flimsy metal bell of the trailer.

Often as not they hunted in pairs. Were there two this time? I saw only one. Searching, thoroughly but discreetly. If I returned after he had left I wouldn’t find my stuff dumped all over the floor or the cushions and mattresses slashed open. No. He was leafing through every book before replacing it where it had been. By the time he was done he would have fingered all the containers in my refrigerator, fondled every item in my clothes drawers. Would he look into those albums of O——? No reason he should find them particularly of interest. That had never been reported as a crime. And yet—
reach out and touch someone—
there was a chance that he might know about it now.

And now he pushed open the glass sliding door and stepped out on the deck. He raised his head to sniff the air, considering. Square jaw lifting, pushing forward. He was tall, blocky, a faintly military profile. Light poplin jacket and his collar and tie undone. I was too far out and the light too dim to evaluate his shoes.

I saw his gaze begin to scan the desert. Eyes centered, he swept his whole head slowly, right to left. Then back again at the same slow rate. I was kneeling in the shadow of a stringy juniper, but he would certainly see me if I moved a hair. A flicker in his peripheral vision, to which he would return. He knew what he was doing, and so did I.

There was a fluttering in my throat. Could he see that?—no, of course not. Without moving my head I dropped my eye to the Starlite scope. It calmed me to see his image floating in that aqueous green circle, made him seem safely farther away.

Just one microscopic adjustment. Had he seen that?—or no, he was only lighting a cigarette. I think—

Pphhhhttt,
said the silenced rifle. I probably shouldn’t have done that, I thought. He’d gone down all at once without a whisper, like a marionette when you release the strings. When no one came to his assistance, I knew he must have been alone.

The slow molasses murmur of D——’s voice. Too low for Crunchy and Creamy to hear, where they sat on the pebbled concrete steps to the lodge, and yet they didn’t need to hear it. Their heads came around in unison, and so did Stitch’s head. Tuned, like roach antennae, to a single thought.

D—— then laid his cobalt eyes on me. The blue electricity flickering there. His hair looked soft. Womanly. Someone must have washed it recently. He was wearing his buckskins, I think, but not the moccasin boots.

“Find Laurel.” D—— smiled, stroking his eyes across my body. I felt little hairs all over me unwillingly standing up.

“Take Laurel,” D—— said. “Laurel should go too. It’ll help get her, you know—”

Over it.

I lowered my head. Not in obeisance, but to keep our secret—mine and Laurel’s. D—— was barefoot. Pale grimy toes spreading into the dirt.

I went to Laurel’s room to get the Buck knife I’d been given, because I already seemed to know we would need throw-down knives for this excursion. It would be more than an ordinary slither. Laurel sat up from the tousled covers, raking the mess of her wild hair back, watching me heft the folded knife in my hand. Her green eyes coming alert as she woke.

“We’re going out,” I said, and slipped the knife in my ass pocket.

“D—— wants us both to go,” I said.

Next we were all piled into the Fairlane. Creamy and Crunchy in front next to Ned, me and Laurel in the back. By the open back door, Stitch seemed to hesitate. Her back was to me, but I felt her give D—— an inquiring look. It was dusk, or past it, stars beginning to come out in the indigo sky, beyond the dry teeth of the mountains.

D—— shook his head and came to Stitch in a friendly manner. He curled a fingertip under the waistband of her pants.

“Write something when you’re done,” he said. “Stitch-Witch. You’ll know what to say.”

With the rifle case in the trunk of my car I had my handy set of bolt cutters, and in my purse I had a box cutter, which I’d carried there, for sentimental reasons, since the day the planes flew into the towers. I could cut myself a little with it sometimes, in dull moments and discreetly, inside my upper arm or the concavity under my hip bone.

Except for that I hadn’t packed. I had cards in my purse and a little cash. It hadn’t seemed wise to go into the trailer.

What would Pauley do?
I thought confusedly, driving south on 93. Back in the day I knew how to steal cars, but twenty-first-century cars were too complicated. Computer chips, alarms, all that.

I stopped at a roadhouse near I-40, pulling deep into a big parking lot. Bass sounds throbbed from the windowless pillbox. Even money no one would come back soon. I broke the tip of the box cutter twice, changing plates with the car next to mine, but it didn’t matter much since I had plenty of spare blades.

It was just a day later when Pauley called. A night later, would be better to say. I’d thought it best to lay up during the daylight hours, tucking my car on the back side of a motel, where it couldn’t be seen from the highway. At dusk I started out again. I was in Oklahoma or Kansas when the phone rang; it doesn’t matter which. The same sleek black ribbon of asphalt unrolling endlessly before me in the dark.

“Mae …” Pauley’s voice prickled in my ear. I felt a hint of pleasure, like being tickled by a kitten’s whisker.

I made some sort of pleasant sound, and his voice hardened.

“What did you do?”

I didn’t answer, but wheels were starting to turn in my head. What did he know? It had hardly been twenty-four hours. Well, a dead man would have been found outside my trailer. Almost certainly an officer of the law. And I, the
I
that worked at the casino and lived invisibly in the trailer park, had gone missing. And what did that add up to? And how did Pauley find out so fast? Of course, he was in the business of knowing things like that.

“Mae—” A tightness in his voice, getting tighter. “I thought you were just going to shoot snakes with that thing.”

“He was a prowler.” I probably shouldn’t have said that. Pauley would know that I knew better. “You know, a peeping Tom.”

“He was
fucking FBI.
” The voice whined in my ear like a bee. I leaned on the gas and the car leaped forward. I was alone on the road out here and could see nothing but the two lines that defined my lane, rushing up in the cone of my headlights. So what? Was it all on the news already or did Pauley know through his special channels?

He was still there at the edge of my ear, but for a moment silent. I recalled how if I didn’t hear from Pauley in a while I tended to assume he was dead. That could easily happen in his line of work. So when I did hear from him it was like—my mind started skating. Highway hypnosis, maybe. What if all the dead mortals started coming back to life? What kind of end would there be to it?

“You know that gun was hot already,” Pauley said.

Well, yes. I did know that. Not that we’d ever discussed it.

“Where is that gun, Mae?” Pauley’s voice had got quiet, almost seductive. “Have you got it with you now?”

I plucked the phone away from my head and looked at the little glowing screen. I thought of throwing it out the window, but that was unnecessary—the phone wouldn’t tell him where I was or where I was going.

I thought of the smell of death on his hands. Imperceptible to others, to anyone but me. A little secret we had between us. That perception made me go with him, the first time.

“Don’t worry about the gun, Pauley,” I said. “I’m taking very good care of your gun.”

For a minute I heard only the rush of my tires and the pull of night air against a weak gasket on the driver-side window.

“I don’t know you,” Pauley said, and then his voice was gone.

When it was finished and we left the house we stopped somewhere, nowhere nearby, because we saw a hosepipe in a yard. Ned held it high above us like a shower, then he turned it on himself, and next he started washing the bloody handprints off the white panels of the car, but that was when some guy came out of the house next door and scared us off.

So then we were back in the car, Ned driving. I don’t know where we were—a neighborhood with streetlights. I thought probably he hadn’t had time to get the car completely clean, and then there were other things that had to be done, I thought in a dazed, exhausted way—get rid of the bloody clothes and the knives.

Laurel slumped against me, her breath coming in gasping pants, like running or sex, some strenuous effort. I wished the sound of it would stop, and I wished Creamy would stop whining about how she’d bruised her hand. I’d bruised mine too. I think we all had. The stupid Buck knives had no hilt so when you stabbed and stabbed and stabbed in frenzy, the edge of your palm kept bashing against bone.

Streetlights strobed over the inside of the car, a pulsing brightness. In the regular flashes of light I saw my hurt hand lying on my knee like a dead bird. I wasn’t sorry for anything but I remember feeling sorry for the hand, as if it were no longer a part of me. As if it hadn’t done anything, but something had happened to it.