When the Killing's Done (42 page)

They’re at the car now, the faint lines where Ed had bent over the hood to erase the graffiti with rubbing compound and a whole lot of elbow grease still showing in evidence of what she’s up against, and she feels so sad suddenly, so overwhelmed, that she just drops her arms to her side and stands there in confusion while cars back out around her and her mother catches herself in the middle of a reminiscence about a concert she once attended at the Hollywood Bowl with Alma’s father, with Greg, to ask her what’s the matter.

But the thing is, she can’t answer because she doesn’t know.

“Alma?” Her mother’s voice is like the soft beating of a wing in the dark. “Are you all right?”

And there it is again, the weakness, the feeling of helplessness and exhaustion, the nausea rising in her as if something’s come unstoppered, and she’s barely aware of opening her arms to her mother’s embrace and of holding her there in the rain and the flaring red flicker of the brake lights of a hundred cars while the night passes overhead and Micah Stroud sits alone in his dressing room, bathed in sweat.

In the morning, she feels nauseous all over again, nauseous for no reason, leaning over the toilet till whatever it was—whatever it is—comes up in a quick liquid burn to float there briefly before vanishing in a descending coil of water.

Willows Canyon

H
e pays cash for the wire cutters, five pairs, standing in line with an assortment of off-duty housewives, daytime drunks and chipper retirees at Home Depot, the most anonymous place in the world, and nobody looks at him twice. Or maybe they do, because of the dreads, but so what? He’s a citizen just like them, a man with ready cash and a need for a particular tool for a particular job and he’s waiting his turn without complaint, though all the customers in front of him—seven, to be exact—are leaning into carts piled up like houses on wheels with every sort of crap imaginable, stainless-steel toilet paper dispensers, closet organizers, bug zappers, ceramic garden trolls. The indolent fat woman at the checkout counter lifts the scanner as if it’s a set of barbells. The intercom rattles on mercilessly. Jets—the airport is right around the corner—blast overhead at ever-shorter intervals. Everybody wants to stop and chat.

Eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes to make a simple purchase because customer service is a notion as foreign to these people as paying an honest price for an honest product. He loathes places like this—as a small-business owner, he ought to, what with Costco and Best Buy and all the rest undercutting him twenty-four/seven—and he would have gone to the locally owned hardware store in the upper village instead of driving all the way out here to park in the middle of this paved wasteland except for the fact that they know him there, know him well, and for this purchase what he wants above all else is anonymity. Yes, and
Welcome to Home Depot, shoppers
.

In the car, on the way back to the marina, he’s making mental lists, running through the details to be sure he hasn’t forgotten anything. The black cap is on the seat beside him, the shades clamped over his eyes, the sunblock in his daypack—along with a sweatshirt in the event it turns cold and a plastic poncho to keep the rain off him because rain is in the forecast, always in the forecast for February, the one month out of the year you can count on it. For food, he’s made up three sandwiches, two peanut butter, one Swiss and tomato, and he’s got a baggie of trail mix and two PowerBars for energy, plus a liter bottle of water—you can’t trust what’s out there on the island, especially when you’ve got pig carcasses rotting all over the place. A compass, though he isn’t exactly sure how to use it and won’t need it in any case—stick to the canyon and the fence line, that’s his plan, and that’s what he’s going to tell everybody else too. Because whatever you do, don’t get lost. You get lost and you’ll be swimming home.

He parks in his usual place, across the lot from the close-in spots where people ding your doors and fenders without thinking twice about it and well away from the eucalyptus trees along the fringes, which tend to lose their branches this time of year (that’s all he needs, a smashed windshield waiting for him when he comes dragging in off the boat). Wilson has his card key—he didn’t want people attracting notice waiting for him outside the gate, so Wilson has already ushered them in—and he flips open his cell to call him as he digs out the daypack and pulls the cap down over his eyes. It’s just past ten, the weather holding steady. There’s a breeze off the ocean, clouds riding past to eradicate the sun and bring it back again like a bad connection, and he’s hitting Wilson’s number and thinking rain can only benefit them because it’ll keep the pig killers under wraps and mask any boat making its way out to the island, so yes, let it rain. Let it rain like holy hell.

Wilson answers on the first ring: “Yeah?”

“I’ll be at the gate in two minutes. Everybody there?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“
Pretty
much? What the fuck you mean, pretty much? Are they there or not?” He’s chopping along, in a hurry now, the sea black and oily-looking, running up the boat ramp at the edge of the lot in a pissing yellow foam, which means it’s going to be rough beyond the breakwater. “The reporter, right? Don’t tell me—”

“She called. Says she’s running late.”

“Shit. I told her. I warned her—” And he’s just working himself up when he turns the corner by the restrooms and there she is—Toni Walsh, in an Easter-egg-pink slicker and matching sandals, her flayed quasi-red hair beating at her face like sea drift, standing there at the locked gate, looking puzzled. “Hey,” he calls out, snatching a quick look round him to make sure no one’s watching (nobody is: the place is all but deserted because there’s weather coming down and everybody knows it). “Toni, hi.” And then, working up a smile as he closes the distance between them, he finds a harmless enough phrase to toss at her: “All set?”

The look she gives him, as if she’s never laid eyes on him before, as if they haven’t planned all this out on the phone and met twice on the back deck at Longboards to trade information about the progress of the killing and the temporary restraining order Phil Schwartz filed for him (which apparently did nothing more than raise the judge’s eyebrows), makes him wonder. The wind whips her hair and he sees she’s attached a seasickness patch to the side of her neck, just under her earlobe, as if it’s a piece of flesh-colored jewelry. Is she going to be all right with this? Her irises are the color of silt, the sclera cracked and veined, last night’s mascara clumped in her lashes. She’s clutching her cell phone in one hand, a pink designer bag the size of a suitcase in the other.

For a long moment, she just stares at him, a strand of salmon-colored hair caught in the corner of her mouth.

“You brought your camera, right?” he says, skipping the formalities. “Because you’re going to want to take pictures, to document some of this . . .”

“You said we’d be back by seven, isn’t that what you said?”

“Yeah, thereabouts. Seven, seven-thirty. I figure we get there by maybe twelve-thirty or so, you come up the canyon with us and see what’s what, snap a few photos—and then we do what we have to do and we’re back on board by dark. Then it’s two and a half hours across. Give or take.”

“Good,” she says, “good.” No smile, no hello, no thanks for the hot tip,
no hiking boots for Christ’s sake
. “Because I have a date”—and here’s the smile, finally, a compression of the lips and an erratic flicker of the eyes to suggest there’s a brain working in there after all—“like at eight? And I’m going to need to get home and clean up, you know?”

He’s wondering what to say to this, coaxing and cajoling not really his strong suits, or being pleasant and making small talk when he’s under the gun, but here’s Wilson loping up the ramp on the other side of the gate, and in the next moment the gate’s pushing open to receive them and they’re inside, click,
Boat Owners Only Beyond This Point
. Wilson gives him a thumbs-up, as if pink-slickered reporters with nicotine-stained fingers and open-toed sandals are the usual comrades in arms, and then they’re working their way down the ramp to the boat, where the rest of the crew’s already hunkered down in the cabin, sipping coffee, lying low. Waiting.

“You know Wilson,” he says, making the introductions in the cramped cabin while the boat bobs and weaves underfoot, “and this is Josh, Kelly, Cameron—Cammy, I mean—and Suzanne.”

Toni Walsh stands there awkwardly, her shoulders slumped, nodding in turn at each of the crew—the volunteers, as he likes to call them, all of them in their late teens or early twenties, Josh an apprentice tattoo artist and whole-foods advocate, the girls members of the same environmental studies class at City College—before she unbuttons the slicker to reveal a black cashmere sweater, low-cut, with a black bra underneath. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I won’t use any real names.”

Josh—he’s wearing a wife beater to show off his sleeves, some sort of dragon motif that looks like intertwined earthworms running up both arms—scoots up to the table on the overturned bucket he’s been perched on and gives her a long annihilating look. He can’t be more than five-six or -seven, pumped but in the stringy way of the body type that’s too lean to put on real muscle, and you can see at a glance he thinks of himself as a hard case—which just makes him all the easier to manipulate. “Shit,” he says, “I don’t care if you blow my name up right across the headline of the paper, biggest blackest type you got—it’s Joshua Holyrood Miller, with two o’s—because I’m ready to lay it all on the line to stop the slaughter. We all are. Right, Cammy?”

None of the girls is much to look at, not that he’s interested—they’re kids, basically, and he’s got Anise and Anise is more than enough for him, too much really—but Cameron, Cammy, an emaciated brown-eyed blonde with her hair kinked out to her shoulders and the look of somebody who knows a whole lot more than she’s revealing, has her moments. “Right,” she says, darting a glance round the cabin, “right. But don’t use my name.”

And that’s it: the cabin falls silent. When they were coming down the ramp, he could hear voices raised in animation, laughter, the giddiness of those about to go into battle, but Toni Walsh has managed to kill it. No matter. They can make their peace on the run out and whether or not they wind up finding common ground is nothing to him—he’s no social director and this is no cruise ship. He watches dispassionately as Toni Walsh sets her bag on the table and warily eases herself down on the bench beside Cammy.

“So,” he says, “all good, right? Everybody good to go?” And he’s on his way up the steps to the cockpit when he catches himself. “Oh, yeah, before I forget”—and here he extracts the wire cutters from the plastic Home Depot bag and fans them out on the table, one to a person, except for Toni Walsh, that is, who’s along as an observer only—“put these where you can get at them. And, what? Just kick back—it’ll be a two-and-a-half-hour run out there. And if it’s rough, you puke outside, right, and not in the cabin . . .”

Of course, given the look of the sky and the way the boats are shifting in their berths, chances are about a hundred percent it will be rough—just how rough becomes apparent as soon as they leave the shelter of the breakwater. The wind’s coming down-channel from the west and it’s kicking up whitecaps out there as far as he can see, the boat rocking pretty aggressively through the full range of its motion, left to right and back again, and then slapping through the creases with a weightless rise and a hard drop down. For Wilson, it’s nothing, because he’s off in dreamland before they’re even out of the harbor, but the others are looking pretty green around the gills (and where did that expression come from, he’s wondering, because people aren’t fish and if they were they wouldn’t be seasick but wriggling and flapping and happy as clams, and really, how happy can clams be when they just lie there in the mud all day waiting for something to come along and pry them open to get at what they are, which is basically just animated slime?). Anyway, he’s got to fight it down himself, the feeling of something alien creeping up his throat while his stomach sinks and sinks lower still, but the good news is that by the time the island heaves into sight the rain has started in, and this is no drizzle but a good gray pelting rain sweeping across the water in rippling sheets that rise up like mythical beings, like gods and angels and devils, to erase everything. Sure. Fine. Anybody want to go pig-hunting today? I don’t think so.

The cabin stirs to life when he cuts the engine and drops anchor. They’ve put in at Willows, on the far side of the island, a place he’s picked because it’s out of the way and because he knows it as well as any other. It was here that he liberated the raccoons in broad daylight three months back, anchoring the
Paladin
at just this spot and ferrying them across in the inflatable. They’d come to life when he lifted the cage down, thrashing from side to side under the tarp, and thank God it was calm that day or he might have had two drowned raccoons on his hands. They couldn’t know what was happening to them, couldn’t imagine being at sea or even what the sea was, couldn’t know that he meant them no harm and that they were going to virgin territory, mother and son, and maybe they’d breed and start a new genetic line, inbred or not, or maybe, and he had this thought once he’d got the cage ashore and hidden in the willows that lent the canyon its name, maybe he’d trap more. A big male, another female, who knew? That would confound Dr. Alma, wouldn’t it? A whole new race of animals out here on the island, and why not? Her precious foxes and skunks and lizards and the three types of snake had got here at random, washed down out of the canyons on the mainland in a storm like this and riding debris out to sea, and it was nothing more than an accident of fate that raccoons hadn’t been part of the mix.

He’d pulled back the tarp to see them huddled there, their eyes fastened on him, expecting the worst, and then he flipped open the door of the cage and backed off—actually got behind a bush so as to hide himself—and watched as they put their noses to the air, stiffened, and made a break for it. Two patches of fur, gone so fast and so completely it was as if they’d never been there at all. That was random too. But he—Dave LaJoy, citizen, homeowner, activist, defeated in court and ignored on the picket line—was the deliberate agent of release, nothing random about it. He was a life-giver, that was what he was, the rescuer of these creatures Animal Control had all but told him to eliminate while they looked the other way.