The Orchid Eater (27 page)

“Fucking
vandals!” Hawk jumped out of the seat and danced around the front, pounding on
the hood. He bent to look under the car, but the asphalt was bare.

“Jesus
fucking Christ! This is sacrilege!”

“Well,
whoever took that mother better not go wearing it around his neck,” Dusty said.
“Every cop in Bohemia knows that chrome cross on sight.”

***

It was late
when Hawk returned to the trailer. He had covered Bohemia Bay from one end to
the other, grabbing his boys when he saw them, visiting their hangouts, working
up a plan with Dusty. After arranging for a meeting in the morning, he had
dropped Dusty at a bar and headed home. He needed time to heal and ready
himself for the days ahead. He was feeling worn thin, all his mental padding
rubbed away. He looked forward to seeing Maggie. Sometimes a few words with her
was all it took to get his head on straight. Her kisses had restorative powers.

Jesus, he
thought, I can’t even tell her about Stoner yet. And I know she loved him in a
way . . .

He tried to fight
the growing feeling of isolation.

He was
amazed to see Mike waiting for him as he pulled into the lot. He had figured
the boy would’ve gone home long ago, but there he was, silhouetted in the open
door of the trailer where Hawk had left him half a day earlier.

Jesus, the
kid looked pathetic. He hoped Maggie had given him something to eat.

He got out
of the jeep and trudged toward the trailer, wondering about how much of the
plan he should reveal. He could share his methods, but not his motives. He was
proud of the scheme he’d worked out with Dusty: a net of watchers waiting to
catch the killer. It should make Mike feel secure. He had spent most of the day
working for this kid’s benefit. In an altruistic mood now, he didn’t expect
anything for his labors but the satisfaction of a job well done. The real
payoff would be getting his hands on Lupe Diaz. He doubted the boy could
appreciate everything Hawk was about to do for him, but what the hell. Kids.

The
twitching shadows of giant crosses swept the sides of the trailer, moved by the
headlights of passing traffic. Mike wavered in and out of view.

“Hey,” Hawk
said. “Thought you’d be gone by now.”

“You said to
wait.”

“Oh, well.”
Hawk chuckled. “I didn’t mean forever. Maggie take care of you?”

“Uh,” the
kid said, blocking the doorway. “Maggie . . .”

“What?”

Mike handed
him a piece of paper, folded so many times that it looked like a piece of
crumpled Kleenex.

“What’s
this?”

“I’m sorry,”
said the boy. “She made me write it.”

22

Sal’s front
door flapped like a jabbering mouth. Visitors went in and out, in and out, all
day and all night. Neighbors in any other suburban neighborhood would have
suspected what was going on, but it hadn’t escaped Lupe’s notice—little
did—that when cars parked in neighboring driveways, they belonged to realtors
showing houses. Sal didn’t have many neighbors to bother.

Some of the
customers swaggered up to the door and knocked loudly, not caring what sort of
attention they drew. Others stood there twitching and sneaking nervous glances
from side to side, jumping at every car that passed. Barefoot hippies in
tie-dye bell bottoms and floppy knit caps; suntanned skateboarders in bathing
suits and dark glasses; older men, neatly groomed, professional. Very few women
came around; those who did were mostly hippies in sandals, long skirts, no bra.
Lupe sank back deeper in his blind when they appeared, fearing they might feel
his eyes from across the street. Women had intuition.

Twice a day,
the cops cruised past. The prowl car never slowed, and the men inside hardly
glanced sideways at the house, even though the curb was often crammed with
everything from beat-up VW buses to shiny sports cars.

Sal had them
fooled, he supposed. He put on a convincing front as an art studio. Every
afternoon, the garage door opened and a handful of Sal’s boys went to work,
laying sixteen or twenty canvases in rows on the concrete floor. They went down
the lines, working them in sequence, like assembly-line artists. They sprayed
the canvases with black paint, then globbed on thick ropes and blobs of color
which they swirled and spread with spatulas. These hideous works left the house
as soon as they were dry, tucked under the arms of Sal’s customers.

At other
times of day, Sal gathered his boys in the back yard, leading them slowly, in
unison, through the poses of tai chi. At first Lupe shifted his vantage to
watch the exercises, but they were always the same and he soon stopped
bothering. He was more concerned about the few—very few—intervals when the flow
of customer traffic let up, the boys cleared out, and Sal was left alone in the
house.

Lupe kept
laborious track of comings and goings, tallying a guest list and a schedule in
his head. Eventually, he verified the fact that there was one time each morning
when Sal was guaranteed to be alone.

Precisely at
ten o’clock, the front door opened. Whoever had spent the night would spill out
of the house and climb into the van, leaving Sal alone. For one hour, from ten
to eleven, no customer ever dropped by. Sal must have warned them not to
disturb him, because they wandered in at every other hour. Not long after
eleven, the van returned with groceries and art supplies. The boys were like
house slaves, out on errands while the master attended to his private rituals.

It was now
five minutes to ten.

The morning
was hotter than he liked. It exaggerated his sense that everything could see
him. He dreaded leaving the shade of his shelter. He could already feel the sun
burning his back and shoulders, even through the branches. He kept checking
the breeze for the faint whiff of charring. When it didn’t come, he relaxed a
bit. Then he heard voices.

Two boys
came out of Sal’s house. Lupe had met them on the afternoon when he confronted
Sal. Randy and Marilyn, that was them. They got into the van and drove away.
There was no one in sight, no one watching. Lupe made his way to the barbed-wire
fence.

Halfway
across the street, he paused, thinking he smelled burning. He looked back but
saw only clear sky above the brown grass, nothing else, no smoke from a brush
fire, no reason for the smell.

Unless it
was coming from him.

He hurried
across the street and hammered on Sal’s door. He could feel his skin beginning
to smoulder.

It took Sal
forever to answer the door. When he did, his pupils were huge. Sal had closed
all the shades and turned off the lights. A candle flickered in the shadows.
The sight made Lupe’s spirits rise. Lupe had done a lot by candlelight.

“Guadalupe,”
Sal said. It sounded like a formal greeting.

Lupe pushed
past his brother, trying not to show his relief at entering the dark house.

“What are
you doing here?”

“You don’t
look very glad to see me. Is this a bad time?”

In the
living room, a cushion rested in the center of the floor. A votive candle
burned on a low table before it.

Sal said,
“This is when I meditate.”

He closed
the door soundlessly. Lupe relaxed as it grew nice and dark again. Cavey. Sal
followed him into the living room, looking remarkably at ease. Lupe had
expected some surprise or tension.

“You have
nerve coming around here, Lupe,” Sal said.

“Why’s
that?”

Sal picked
up a lit stick of incense that sat on the table, fuming. He waved it in the air
between them as if dispelling a bad odor.

“I think you
know.”

“I came to
say good-bye, that’s all.”

“I thought
you were long gone. I mean, you show up, you disappear, you seem to show up
again, but nobody’s sure it’s you. Now you’re here to say good-bye? Why bother?
I guess I’m not part of your life, Lupe. Okay. I offered my love when you first
arrived—and what did you do? I don’t know what you did. I don’t
want
to know. You’re trouble,
that’s all. You could have gone off without bothering me again.”

“That’d make
you happy, wouldn’t it?”

“I’d be
happiest if you weren’t the kind who needed to run. But since you are, I admit
that I’ll be happier knowing you’re gone. I don’t like knowing you’re around my
boys. Not after . . . not after that kid at the beach. If it’s true, what I
think.”

“You always
were trying to get rid of me,” Lupe said. “Ditching me.”

“Is that
what you think?”

“I was
looking for you when it happened, Sal. I was scared and I went out looking. You
stirred everything up and left me in it.”

“When
it
happened,” Sal repeated softly.
“You hold that against me? You think I—”

“I went
looking for you, man. I looked everywhere, without the faintest idea how big
everything was. You never told me how lost I could get.”

“You think I
don’t wish I could have helped you—healed you somehow?”

“Don’t you
worry about that. I did my own healing.”

Sal looked
doubtful. “Yeah? I thought maybe you had, when I saw you at the Rock Lobster
with our friend Raymond. I thought at first maybe you were like me, and had
come to peace with yourself. But I don’t think so anymore. You were only using
him, weren’t you? In a fucked-up, cynical way.”

“Don’t you
dare judge me, not when it was your responsibility . . .”

“I’m sorry,
Lupe, but you have to get past that. You’re not a kid anymore.”

“No?” Lupe
said. “Then what am I?”

Sal shut his
eyes in exasperation. He might be strong from his tai chi, but the muscles of
his belly were soft where the knife went up inside him.

Lupe turned
the blade as if twisting a key in a lock, and Sal’s life rushed out and down
his arm. His brother fell over gasping, clutching his navel. The cupped hands
filled with blood but it kept coming, overflowing.

“Good-bye,”
Lupe said, alone now in the room.

How many
times had he dreamed he was the last man on Earth? At odd moments, people would
shift and turn to smoke around him; only he was real. All the things that hurt
him seemed phony now. They were like devils that came from the back of his
head, a game he played with himself, as if his mind were a magnifying glass
held up to the sun, which made little things big and brought the hot smell of
smoke out of his flesh to prove to him that he was alive.

Sal’s blood
drew Lupe’s boys instantly. They didn’t mind candlelight either. The nine of
them gathered in the dark, hovering over Sal, looking to Lupe for guidance.

“Do what you
want with him,” he told them. “No initiation today. Take him far from here. I
want him to hurt. Forever. Like I hurt. He doesn’t deserve to be with us.”

Sal still
moved feebly, stubborn. Lupe crouched in front of him.

“Come on,”
he said, looking straight into Sal’s face. “Get out of there.”

Sal’s eyes
congealed.

A tenth
shadow entered the room.

Lupe moved
back from the body, giving Sal’s ghost a place to stand. The faces of corpse
and ghost looked equally confused.

Sal didn’t
speak. The dead can’t talk. But he took one step toward Lupe and the gang
closed in, blocking his path, forming a circle around him.

The Cherokee
shoved Sal’s ghost soundlessly into the arms of the Musician, who caught and
thrust him away again, toward the Pump Jockey, who grinned spitefully and
shoved him at the Marine, who whirled him around toward the gray-toothed
Junkie. Sal went from one to the other, shoved with increasing violence. He
soon stopped casting dizzy, pleading looks at Lupe. It took all his ebbing
strength to hold himself together.

“Get rid of
him,” Lupe whispered.

The nine
became a blurred cage of teeth and eyes and moving hands, with something like a
frightened animal trapped inside. Sal didn’t much resemble his brother anymore.
He was hardly even a man: more like a fly buzzing between screen and windowpane.

They glided
through the living room. Miguel leaped ahead to beckon and urge them on.
Perspectives changed, the world warping around them. Blood spattered the
Marine’s fists and teeth; the Hopi threw back his head and howled silently.
They kept on toward the walls, as if they might pass through them. Only then
did Lupe see the window there, opening into a night city of ragged jet-black
towers, a blue-black sky of weird blotches. Streaks and dabs of white on the
buildings suggested broken windows; they cast a meager light on canyon streets
between cliff-tall spires. It looked like a nightmare, the last place on earth
anyone would voluntarily go, but the last bit of Sal dodged toward it, leaping
up and away from Lupe’s boys. A gust blew out of the painting, fanning the
dying spark of Sal’s ghost-light. Lupe smelled oil and asphalt, borne on the
wind from the dark streets. A door opened in one of the buildings, framed by
flickering light from a dim fluorescent bulb. Sal darted for it and slipped
inside, slightly ahead of the boys. Then the door slammed shut, leaving them
thrashing and snarling.

Abruptly the
scene was only a painting again, a crude and lurid cityscape hanging flat on
the wall of the drab room where Lupe stood alone with Sal’s equally mundane
husk.

He cursed at
the canvas. After all this time, all his planning, Sal had gotten away.

His boys
spun idly around him, waiting for further instructions. In frustration, Lupe
pulled the knife out of Sal and slashed the painting till it hung in tatters
from the frame. He hoped that Sal was still in it somewhere, cut to ribbons.

After that,
he felt a little better. He had to be realistic and content himself with
practical things. He had learned a hard lesson. He would be more careful next
time; he would cut off all possible escape routes.

By the clock
on the wall, it was not even ten-fifteen. He had plenty of time before the van
returned. But there wasn’t much left to do.

He grabbed
the body by the hair and threw it facedown in the hallway, half on matted shag
carpet, half on blood-slippery linoleum. He folded up his knife, stowed it in
his pocket, and took out the other thing he’d brought along.

“Get his
pants,” said a distant voice, somewhere deep inside him.