Authors: Martha Conway
“We should probably go back,” Scooter said, pulling on his straw.
“Now I don’t know what I’ll have,” said Dave.
Neither one of them moved. Dave felt in his pocket for his mini-tool, then remembered that Davette still had her tool, too. He took it out and looked at it, then put it back in his front pocket. Scooter took another sip of the smoothie he did not want. After a few moments the buffalo stopped walking, but although Scooter and Dave waited and watched, the animals did nothing else—didn’t eat, didn’t move, didn’t yawn; they just stared straight ahead at nothing.
“I don’t know what I’ll have now that Dave has defected,” Dave said again after a minute. “And you know who I blame?”
“Hunh.”
“Your wife.”
“Ex-wife,” Scooter corrected. He was still watching the animals. “It’s weird,” he said, “I remember that they were more interesting than this.”
They walked back to the car past a group of Korean men wearing thick nylon jogging suits. The ground was sandy and peppered with mole holes, and on the road a few cars slowed as they drove past the buffalo. Scooter unlocked the car door, then sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel, drumming his thumbs.
“Back to the dog races, eh?” Dave asked.
Scooter stopped drumming and stared straight ahead. “God,” he said.
Dave pulled his minitool out of his pocket again and looked at it. Wasn’t there a little toothpick on it somewhere? “I can’t believe we lost the four grand,” he said.
“We’ll make it back,” Scooter said automatically. “We just need to plug up some holes.”
“Well, anyway, the database is almost done. Or, like, halfway.”
But Scooter didn’t answer. The trees seemed heavy and full of some dense toxic gas and Scooter looked over at the two buffalo staring out into the middle of the field doing absolutely nothing. What were they doing? They both looked bored out of their minds.
Scooter sighed. “I had plans for a great shining life,” he said.
Dave glanced over at him. He noticed Scooter’s hands and feet were unusually still.
“Can I have a sip of your smoothie? If you’re finished?”
Without turning his head Scooter handed him the oversized Styrofoam cup. Dave took a sip. “Your wife really fucked you over, didn’t she,” he said.
“Ex-wife.”
“She always been like that?”
“I don’t know what ‘like that’ means.”
“You know, it occurs to me,” Dave told him, “that we should be the ones in charge, not her. I mean we already did a crime, didn’t we? You and me? We did a crime already.”
“Yeah, but she foiled it.”
“So what she foiled it, like so what. We did the hard part—we organized it, planned it, got it going, got it rolling. She messed it up, that’s all. It’s easy to mess things up; believe me, I should know.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t inspire much confidence,” Scooter said.
“You still in love with her?”
Scooter started the motor. “For me love has always been a story of humiliation and despair,” he said mildly. He put the car in gear and looked back into the rearview mirror.
“Listen,” Dave said. He took a long suck at the smoothie, then began pulling the straw up and down in its lid, making plastic music. “I have an idea,” he said.
Nineteen
Chorizo was looking
for Nicola. He couldn’t leave it any longer. Nicola had seen him at his motel, she had recognized him, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed to do something about that. Probably it meant nothing. Still, she was a link between the last girl—he hated the word victim—and his motel. He’d picked up the girl at the same café, the same day, after Nicola had turned him down. Melissa, her name was.
He decided at this point the direct approach was best, but although he sat in the West Portal Café for almost three hours drinking their overroasted coffee she never showed up. It was a risk, sitting there. As he got up to pay he saw the missing-girl poster Scotch-taped to the counter. He put on his sunglasses, but no one looked at him twice.
On the sidewalk he checked his watch. Just past three-thirty. The wind blew in sharp, sideways gusts and the waves were breaking at five stories high. Only that morning a young boy had been swept out to sea then saved by the Coast Guard. Chorizo thought of the ocean as an animal, something caged and fierce which occasionally escaped from its chains. Take that energy and use it, he thought, zippering his leather jacket. He knew that a warrior could advance in strength, or retreat with honor. Now was the time of strength.
But it was too early to go to her office. He wanted to wait until she was nearly through for the day and he could woo her away. When, with any luck, she might be alone. A pity she didn’t come with him the last time. Or was it a pity? Chorizo crossed the street to look at the West Portal theater marquee. No, it was better this way.
“Film’s been rolling for an hour,” the clerk at the theater said. He had purple hair and trendy eyeglasses and was reading a magazine put out by the American Motion Picture Association.
“That’s all right,” Chorizo said.
“You missed the best dialogue already.”
“I thought this was an action movie?”
“Exactly,” said the clerk.
Chorizo took his time. He wasn’t hungry but he bought popcorn and a fourteen-ounce bottle of water and a hot dog without meat. He should be careful about what he put into his body but at the same time he needed to load up on carbs. Tonight he would need all his energy.
But as he turned away from concessions he thought for a moment he could still hear the wind. Like a woman’s cry. Ghostly. It wasn’t often Chorizo thought of the ones he had killed, but that wind—there was something about it. He put the boxed popcorn on a counter and checked his front pocket for his passport. It would all be fine, he told himself. He was in the wings now, before the show. A little tense but okay.
Gathering strength.
* * *
Nicola’s cell phone
began to ring just as she was unlocking her car. She opened the door and set her bag of self-defense items down on the passenger’s seat. Inside, the air was hot and stuffy.
“It’s me,” Davette said. Her voice sounded high and young with the vacuous tone of a teenager, and she told Nicola that Carmen and Lou were back; everything was okay. And Carmen had in fact found a few disks at the office.
“I’m looking at one now. There are a couple of new files. One of them is a sliced image, an image of a hand.”
“Whose hand?”
“A man’s hand. There are a few other files here but they’re compressed and I don’t have the right decompression program.” Davette named a couple of applications that might work.
“I have both of those in my office,” Nicola said. She shifted the phone to her other ear and began backing out of the parking space. “I’ll stop by and get them.”
“If you tell me your e-mail address I’ll send you the hand image now,” Davette said.
Nicola gave it to her, then turned out of the parking lot and followed the road alongside the highway, looking for the entrance ramp.
“Okay, done. But listen,” Davette went on, “I wanted to say something else, too. It’s just—well, I feel a little bad about Dave.”
“About Dave?”
“I feel like I kind of just abandoned him.”
Nicola passed another strip mall entrance, a Quickie Lube, and a motel with a marquee which read,
WELCOME BACK MABEL MCKEYS
.
“Listen to me. Is Dave on the boat?” she asked.
“What?” Davette asked.
“Is Dave on the boat or is he off the boat?”
“What boat?”
“It’s a figure of speech, you know what that is?”
“Oh, a figure of speech, okay. Okay, well yeah, he’s off the boat.”
“It was his decision to get off.”
“Yeah, I know, it was his decision.”
“Then go on; let him be. Let him do what he wants.”
“Okay.”
“And you can do what you want.”
“You’re right.”
“Because you know what? You’re a strong woman. You make good decisions. You’re intelligent. You pay attention. And anyone, any guy, can be with you or not. They can come along or not. Because you’re the boat, Davette. Did you know that? You are the boat.”
“Okay. Um, I don’t really get that,” Davette said.
Nicola smiled to herself. “I’m really glad you’re doing this with me, Davette. You’re really good at all this.”
“Really?” Davette asked. She sounded pleased.
“So I’ll stop by my office for those programs and then call you from there.”
* * *
Nicola found the
entrance ramp and as she merged with the oncoming traffic she began to accelerate but not too much because it was really windy now and she could feel it beneath her car moving the frame slightly back and forth. A power line was down next to the BART tracks and a couple of cars were stopped on the meridian, though maybe for reasons unrelated to the weather. Still, it must be really bad on the bridges, she was thinking. Once when she was going over the Golden Gate Bridge in a windstorm she had the brief sensation that she was floating on the pavement with no steering and no power—it was as if the car had been lifted slightly and taken from her control. Of course, the wheels were still touching the ground and she must have been in control no matter what it felt like. Or was she?
She glanced at the bag of goodies from the gun shop. What would her mother think if she saw them? Her mother, who often told Nicola to stick up for her principles. Nicola was fairly sure this wasn’t what she meant.
The problem was she didn’t know where the nearest police station was—or any police station, come to think of it. Did she have time to stop for a latte or something beforehand? She was nervous and it seemed fairly certain to her that her story would sound foolish.
There’s a man who tried to pick me up … I saw this missing-girl poster and the same night she vanished a man tried to pick me up.… My landlord took an overdose of methadone and I believe this is connected to.… My landlord took an overdose of methadone yesterday. Although seemingly unrelated, a man tried to pick me up and I think he picked up this other girl who then vanished …
Nicola frowned. It sounded ridiculous—ridiculous, all of it. But what could she say? What would they pay attention to?
“A crime has been committed,” she said aloud.
The car swayed in the wind then steadied itself. Nicola slowed down. It was becoming clear to her that in order to go to the police one has to agree to appear stupid. Could she agree to appear stupid?
Christ, Nicola thought—she hated this indecision. A gray hill rose up in front of her and the highway turned itself into a narrow, busy, city street. A flock of pigeons flew up from the roof of a Presbyterian church that doubled as a day care, and as Nicola watched one of the birds detached itself from the group and fell behind the building. A sick bird? A dead bird?
Oh my God. Nicola suddenly pulled over and stopped in a bus zone. She dialed Lou’s cell phone number. Oh my God, I get it, she thought.
“Hello?”
“Lou, thank God you’re there,” Nicola said. “Listen, I just figured something out. Can you get to the library? There was this article in the
Chron
last Friday; Chorizo was reading it. It was about a rash of pigeon deaths near Civic Center. It’s been going on for a few weeks now.”
“Pigeons?” Lou asked.
“Chorizo was reading it at the café that day. They were all poisoned, and I bet you anything it was methadone.”
“The same thing that killed Robert,” Lou said.
“Exactly,” Nicola said.
“Chorizo,” Lou said.
“Right. A practice run.”
They agreed they would meet at her office, or she would call him if she finished up early and went home. Her heart was pounding hard. How would she find the nearest station? On the other hand, going there was going to take a lot of time and she wanted to get the program disks to Davette as soon as possible so they could show the police something useful. Or did she mean believable? Her office was actually really close to where she was now. She sat with her hands on her lap, still parked at the bus stop, and a Volvo veered by erratically as if the driver was constructing a bomb from a kit while he drove.
Why was she thinking about bombs? She looked down and noticed her hands were shaking. Outside the moon was rising early like a lopsided grin and Nicola watched a row of palm trees pull back like slingshots in the wind. She compromised: she would go to her office and look up the nearest police station address, and just grab the disks quickly. Maybe she could give them to Audrey.
That’s a good idea, Nicola thought. Maybe Audrey could drop them off at her house while she sat and said—what?—to the police.
There’s this guy, he’s running this Web site, it’s hard to tell but I’m pretty sure the girls are dead. He runs it from a server from Finland …
Christ, Nicola thought again. Through the rearview mirror she could see a bus coming; its blinker was on, it was going to pull into the stop. Nicola turned the key, looked back at the lane of cars, and headed out toward her office.
* * *
Chorizo stepped out
of the movie theater and began walking down the street to Nicola’s office building. In the theater bathroom, just for fun, he had thrown a rune to see what he would get. It was Hagalaz: the rune of disruptive natural forces. Chorizo smiled to himself. Change, freedom, liberation—this is what Hagalaz represents. Expect a great disruption, says the rune. Expect something strong. Here comes change, here comes power, here comes the big boss and it is you.
Well, that was fine. That was good. Chorizo crossed over the muni tracks and the wind blew sideways at him with that sound, that sudden wail. Chorizo tried to close his mind to it. He knew that his own nature was creating what was happening. Sometimes he thought about karma, but more often he did not. Would his karma be favorable at this point, or not so much so? Two women carrying copies of
The Watchtower
stood on the street corner and as he walked by one of them noticed him looking.
“Like to take home a copy?” she asked.
Chorizo shook his head. “I’m not from around here.”