The Haunting of James Hastings (23 page)
Read The Haunting of James Hastings Online
Authors: Christopher Ransom
Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Suspense
‘James? Look at me, son.’
I did.
‘There’s no such thing as ghosts. Your house is not haunted. Lucy Arnold was on four kinds of prescription medications. She had a history of anxiety and depression, possibly some form of mild schizophrenia. She told her therapist she sometimes heard voices, all right? I personally spoke to three of her former lovers and they all left her because she would not stop harassing them. One of them had a restraining order on her last year. Add to which, I lifted her prints from the storage unit rented in your name on La Brea. We took seven positives from the door and two from the lock. We found more of her prints in your kitchen, your living room, the bathroom and your ballroom doors.’
I had stopped crying.
‘I know when someone’s lying to me. This all fits, and I never saw you as the kind of guy who’d lose his temper and chase a woman down the street. So. I’m going to leave you alone now, on one condition.’
‘What?’
‘Promise me you’ll get some counseling. Annette has the names of three good doctors. Don’t drag this out. Be a man and get on with your life. You need to talk to someone about your wife. Will you do that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m fuckin’ serious this time.’
‘Okay, yes, I promise.’
Bergen smiled. ‘And go slow with your girlfriend, there. She might be a keeper, but you two . . .’ he trailed off, shaking his head.
‘What?’
‘The hair, James. Jesus. Okay? That’s why you need therapy, man. She’s a sweet gal. She was very cooperative on all this, and you should be thanking your lucky fucking charms she answered all my questions. But just because she’s willing to indulge your, what? Fantasies? That doesn’t make it right. I get it, she gets it, okay? But stop being so fucking morbid, for Chrissake. Take it easy, son. Didn’t I tell you this was going to be a headache? She’s a looker, I’ll give you that. But there are limits, right? Got to be limits.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Okay. I’ll check on you next week. Get your ass to the shrinker.’
He shook my hand and left.
After Bergen’s interrogation, my session with the hospital’s on-call psychiatrist was a cool breeze. I told him what he wanted to hear. He told me he was a big Ghost fan and doubled my valium prescription with a wink.
Annette came back with my Fatburger, two bags of onions rings and two vanilla shakes. I ate it all in her car on the ride home. When she pulled up in front of my house I stared at it for a minute without opening the door.
‘You ready?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think I want to stay here any more,’ I said.
Annette looked through the windshield. ‘Where should we go?’
‘Away,’ I said. ‘Just . . . away.’
‘We can stay at my place,’ she said. I looked at Mr Ennis’s house. ‘No, in Sheltering Palms.’
‘I thought you were in foreclosure.’
‘I will be soon. But we can probably crash the gates one more time. For a week or so anyway.’
‘And then?’
‘We’ll figure something out,’ she said.
I looked at her. Her eyes were hidden behind her sunglasses. Did I want to figure something out? I guess I did.
Inside I packed a week’s worth of clothes, flip-flops, my toothbrush. Back in the car I found a pair of old school Ray-Bans in her glove compartment and crawled in back, put my heels up on the rear panel and rolled a sweatshirt under my head for a pillow. Annette drove and I fell asleep enveloped in a warm cocoon of sun, wind and tire hum.
disc 2
the wife
The Millennium Falcon, my rhymes jump to light speed
Han Solo smokin’ bowl-o’s in the land of legalized
weed
With a wookie who taps every last Holly and never Go
lightly
I poke a hole in the condom, skip the K-Y and flow
tightly
Mow the lawn with Lady Gaga’s Schick
and break one off in Keira’s ass Knightly
Go ahead and try, shy boy, take off this mask you most
likely
find yourself wishin’ you brought a bigger knife to the
fight, see
When I finish openin’ arteries your blood jump-starts
my battery
And guess who’s next while you text 9-1-1 and scream
help, please
I grab the scalpel and stain the sheets like Jeezy Wayne
Gacy
Pin your eyelids back and grab a snack so you can
watch me
Creep down the hall, grow ten feet tall and have a ball
dibbidy-dibbidy-dee-the-that’s all, folks
It’s time for Ghost to wake up wifey
The Habitual Offender
LP
courtesy of Serial Nubile Records © 2008
21
I drifted in and out until her cursing at intermittent traffic woke me a few hours later. The car slowed, then surged up to highway speed again, and the sun beat into me and I gave up on sleep. I climbed into the front and buckled my lap belt and fished around on the floor until I found a bottle of water. I guzzled and cupped a handful onto the back of my neck. Annette kept rubbing her temples between angry glances at me.
‘Do you want me to drive?’
‘You don’t know where we’re going,’ she snapped.
I stayed quiet for another half-hour. We were well past the Inland Empire, I realized. There were a lot of golf courses and resorts to the south and a lot more of nothing to the north. ‘Where are we? Arizona?’
‘A little ways past Banning. Not quite to Palm Springs.’
‘We could go camping at Joshua Tree,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that out here?’
‘Just a little ways north.’
‘Are we close?’ I said. ‘To your place?’
‘Another hour or so.’
‘It’s pretty,’ I said.
‘It’s obscene. This was all just ranch country in the twenties. Now it’s spas, clubs, shopping malls, golf courses, sushi restaurants. Everything you could want and don’t need. But we don’t live in Palm Springs or Palm Desert.’
I decided to keep quiet and let her narrate when the mood struck her. We exited south, moving into the desert for another twenty-five minutes, doubling back until things turned somewhat green again, then hooked up with a road that disappeared into the low hills, winding and climbing for another ten miles through a shallow canyon (okay, it was a suggestion of a valley) before the signs for Sheltering Palms appeared, warning us to reduce our speed, Residential Area Ahead.
‘Now I’m really lost,’ I said.
‘If there was a highway that went straight through this godforsaken land for another two hours, we’d wind up back in San Diego.’
‘Really?’ That didn’t make sense to me.
‘Actually, I don’t know. Hemet is pretty close, but there aren’t any roads in this direction that go there, not after the SP.’
‘The SP?’
‘Sheltering Palms,’ she said. ‘You know, like the OC.’
‘Right.’
Traffic had ceased to exist. We were the traffic. This was the kind of place people mean when they say, ‘way out there’. Peace. Quiet. Sand. Rocks. No sign of the humies. Hastings’s idea of Heaven.
We approached two chintzy white gates leaking rust and a white-walled security booth with no one on duty. Annette removed a plastic card from her purse and waved it in front of the magnetic box. Nothing happened. She waved the card again, spastically, and said, ‘Open up, you piece of shit.’ After a disconcerting period of waiting, the gates began to hum, sliding on casters into pockets within the brick walls. The walls seemed excessively tall and formidable until you looked in either direction and realized they terminated after about fifty feet. At the ends were pallets of bricks waiting to be added, but no workmen. I glanced at my cellphone. It was 3.25 in the afternoon and I had NO SERVICE. As we entered, I noticed that the security booth windows were just air, every inch of glass broken out or waiting to be installed.
The roads were clean, composed of new asphalt and shallow concrete gutters so unblemished they might have been made of snow. Mature palm trees (what else?) and grass lined the medians, but the grass was crabby and browning by the minute. It must have been a hundred and five degrees, with no wind.
But it’s a dry heat
, I consoled myself. The houses were big and no two looked exactly alike, but they were clearly all of one builder. Lots of white and pink stucco, some with white stone façades framed in heavy wood beams. Black tile roofs sucking solar into the grid to counter some of the AC expense, which out here would be exorbitant.
But it’s a dry heat
, I consoled myself. The houses were big and no two looked exactly alike, but they were clearly all of one builder. Lots of white and pink stucco, some with white stone façades framed in heavy wood beams. Black tile roofs sucking solar into the grid to counter some of the AC expense, which out here would be exorbitant.
About a hundred feet in we entered a roundabout with a marble fountain at its center, which itself kept a large swan made of greening copper and whose feathers were marred by hard-water stains. The head of this atrocious sculpture stood at least twelve feet above the fat body, a grotesque miscalculation of neck and beak that undoubtedly figured in the nightmares of children who lived here. No spumes glittered in the sun, but a trickle burbled out of the swan’s daffy beak, encouraging a beard of moss that hung in greasy strands. As Annette leaned the Mustang through the curve we were blanketed by a miasma of equal parts bog mud, charred metal and rotting salmon.
‘I think the motor needs to be replaced,’ I said.
‘Is that what that is?’ Annette scrunched up her nose. ‘I always wondered.’
‘And there’s a dead horse floating in the basin.’
‘Don’t be a poopy-pants. I told you there’d be some rough spots, but this is a nice place. There’s tons of stuff to do here. Wait till you see the bocce court.’
I appreciated her optimism.
The speed limit was posted as twenty-five, but Annette left her pony in second gear and we moved deeper into the development at what felt like a walking pace. There weren’t any kids at play; she was giving me a chance to take it all in. The lawns were hardpans of baked dirt. Next to the fire hydrant was a plastic big wheel that had once been red but was now sun-bleached the color of a seashell. I counted fifteen vacant driveways before I spotted another car. It was a blue Grand Cherokee and looked to be in more or less mint condition except for the tires. All four had gone flat. Not slashed, just heat-fucked.
Annette had not been exaggerating. This was not a partially sold out community or a struggling development. It was an abandoned suburb, paradise fled, a ghost division.
The lots ranged from a tenth to half an acre, but the houses were too close together, with less than ten feet of white gravel or dead sod between them. Most were four-, five-, seven-thousand-square-foot jobs. Two-story Mediterranean and Spanish villas. Lots of terraces and archways and balconies for tanning, hosting martini parties or busting out the good old telescope. Some of the balconies were missing chunks of plaster or stucco, the fallen debris littering the driveways below, the metal caging and rebar inside exposed like snapped tendons.
‘Oh, hey,’ I said, pointing. ‘We got a Benz at two o’clock. Someone’s home.’ The black E-Class was parked in front of a rather striking sherbet-pink domicile whose lawn was still green but also twenty inches high and wilting.
‘That’s Dr Sewell’s place,’ Annette said. ‘The car belongs to his ex. I think he spends most of the year in Vail now. His sons go to Arizona State.’
The basketball backboard mounted above the middle door of Dr Sewell’s three-car garage was missing its hoop. Where the orange plating had been bolted in, there was now only a fiberglass maw. On the backboard itself, in black spray paint, was a fairly accurate rendering of the male genitalia. Above the man junk, in contrasting hot pink, the graffitist had written DR COCKFAG SUKS BOY JOOSE and added a smiley face.
I sipped at my water bottle. ‘It would seem Dr Sewell is not on ideal terms with Sheltering Palms’ more artistically inclined ruffians.’
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