The Bad Place

Page 6

After a while, even the memory of those preternatural events wasn’t enough to keep him awake. The last thing that crossed his waking mind, as he slipped off on a tide of sleep, was that four-word phrase that had come to him when he had first awakened in the deserted alleyway: Fireflies in a windstorm. . . .
12
BY THE time they had cooperated with the police at the scene, made arrangements for their disabled vehicles, and talked with the three corporate officers who showed up at Decodyne, Bobby and Julie did not get home until shortly before dawn. They were dropped at their door by a police cruiser, and Bobby was glad to see the place.
They lived on the east side of Orange, in a three-bedroom, sort-of-ersatz-Spanish tract house, which they had bought new two years ago, largely for its investment potential. Even at night the relative youth of the neighborhood was apparent in the landscaping: None of the shrubbery had reached full size; the trees were still too immature to loom higher than the rain gutters on the houses.
Bobby unlocked the door. Julie went in, and he followed. The sound of their footsteps on the parquet floor of the foyer, echoing hollowly off the bare walls of the adjacent and utterly empty living room, was proof that they were not committed to the house for the long term. To save money toward the fulfillment of The Dream, they had left the living room, dining room, and two bedrooms unfurnished. They installed cheap carpet and cheaper draperies. Not a penny had been spent on other improvements. This was merely a way station en route to The Dream, so they saw no point in lavishing funds on the decor.
The Dream. That was how they thought of it—with a capital t and a capital d They kept their expenses as low as possible, in order to fund The Dream. They didn’t spend much on clothes or vacations, and they didn’t buy fancy cars. With hard work and iron determination, they were building Dakota & Dakota Investigations into a major firm that could be sold for a large capital gain, so they plowed a lot of earnings back into the business to make it grow. For The Dream.
At the back of the house, the kitchen and family room—and the small breakfast area that separated them—were furnished. This—and the master bedroom upstairs—was where they lived when at home.
The kitchen had a Spanish-tile floor, beige counters, and dark oak cabinets. No money had been spent on decorative accessories, but the room had a cozy feeling because some necessities of a functioning kitchen were on display: a net bag filled with half a dozen onions, copper pots dangling from a ceiling rack, cooking utensils, bottles of spices. Three green tomatoes were ripening on the windowsill.
Julie leaned against the counter, as if she could not stand another moment without support, and Bobby said, “You want a drink?”
“Booze at dawn?”
“I was thinking more of milk or juice.”
“No, thanks.”
“Hungry?”
She shook her head. “I just want to fall into bed. I’m beat.” He took her in his arms, held her close, cheek to cheek, with his face buried in her hair. Her arms tightened around him.
They stood that way for a while, saying nothing, letting the residual fear evaporate in the gentle heat they generated between them. Fear and love were indivisible. If you allowed yourself to care, to love, you made yourself vulnerable, and vulnerability led to fear. He found meaning in life through his relationship with her, and if she died, meaning and purpose would die too.
With Julie still in his arms, Bobby leaned back and studied her face. The smudges of dried blood had been wiped away. The skinned spot on her forehead was beginning to scab over with a thin yellow membrane. However, the imprint of their recent ordeal consisted of more than the abrasion on her forehead. With her tan complexion, she could never be said to look pale, even in moments of the most profound anxiety; a detectable grayness seeped into her face, however, at times like this, and at the moment her cinnamon-and-cream skin was underlaid with a shade of gray that made him think of headstone marble.
“It’s over,” he assured her, “and we’re okay.”
“It’s not over in my dreams. Won’t be for weeks.”
“A thing like tonight adds to the legend of Dakota and Dakota.”
“I don’t want to be a legend. Legends are all dead.”
“We’ll be living legends, and that’ll bring in business. The more business we build, the sooner we can sell out, grab The Dream.” He kissed her gently on each comer of her mouth. “I have to call in, leave a long message on the agency machine, so Clint will know how to handle everything when he goes to work.”
“Yeah. I don’t want the phone to start ringing only a couple of hours after I hit the sheets.”
He kissed her again and went to the wall phone beside the refrigerator. As he was dialing the office number, he heard Julie walk to the bathroom off the short hall that connected the kitchen to the laundryroom. She closed the bathroom door just as the answering machine picked up: “Thank you for calling Dakota and Dakota. No one—”
Clint Karaghiosis—whose Greek-American family had been fans of Clint Eastwood from the earliest days of his first television show, “Rawhide”—was Bobby and Julie’s right-hand man at the office. He could be trusted to handle any problem. Bobby left a long message for him, summarizing the events at Decodyne and noting specific tasks that had to be done to wrap up the case.
When he hung up, he stepped down into the adjoining family room, switched on the CD player, and put on a Benny Goodman disc. The first notes of “King Porter Stomp” brought the dead room to life.
In the kitchen again, he got a quart can of eggnog from the refrigerator. They had bought it two weeks ago for their quiet, at-home, New Year’s Eve celebration, but had not opened it, after all, on the holiday. He opened it now and half-filled two waterglasses.
From the bathroom he heard Julie make a tortured sound; she was finally throwing up. It was mostly just dry heaves because they had not eaten in eight or ten hours, but the spasms sounded violent. Throughout the night, Bobby had expected her to succumb to nausea, and he was surprised that she had retained control of herself this long.
He retrieved a bottle of white rum from the bar cabinet in the family room and spiked each serving of eggnog with a double shot. He was gently stirring the drinks with a spoon to blend in the rum, when Julie returned, looking even grayer than before.
When she saw what he was doing, she said, “I don’t need that.”
“I know what you need. I’m psychic. I knew you’d toss your cookies after what happened tonight. Now I know you need this. ” He stepped to the sink and rinsed off the spoon.
“No, Bobby, really, I can’t drink that.” The Goodman music didn’t seem to be energizing her.
“It’ll settle your stomach. And if you don’t drink it, you’re not going to sleep.” Taking her by the arm, crossing the breakfast area, and stepping down into the family room, he said, “You’ll lie awake worrying about me, about Thomas”—Thomas was her brother—“about the world and everyone in it.”
They sat on the sofa, and he did not turn on any lamps. The only light was what reached them from the kitchen.
She drew her legs under her and turned slightly to face him. Her eyes shone with a soft, reflected light. She sipped the eggnog.
The room was now filled with the strains of “One Sweet Letter From You,” one of Goodman’s most beautiful thematic statements, with a vocal by Louise Tobin.
They sat and listened for a while.
Then Julie said, “I’m tough, Bobby, I really am.”
“I know you are.”
“I don’t want you thinking I’m lame.”
“Never.”
“It wasn’t the shooting that made me sick, or using the Toyota to run that guy down, or even the thought of almost losing you—”
“I know. It was what you had to do to Rasmussen.”
“He’s a slimy little weasel-faced bastard, but even he doesn’t deserve to be broken like that. What I did to him stank.”
“It was the only way to crack the case, because it wasn’t near cracked till we’d found out who hired him.”
She drank more eggnog. She frowned down at the milky contents of her glass, as if the answer to some mystery could be found there.
Following Tobin’s vocal, Ziggy Elman came in with a lusty trumpet solo, followed by Goodman’s clarinet. The sweet sounds made that boxy, tract-house room seem like the most romantic place in the world.
“What I did... I did for The Dream. Giving Decodyne Rasmussen’s employer will please them. But breaking him was somehow . . . worse than wasting a man in a fair gunfight.”
Bobby put one hand on her knee. It was a nice knee. After all these years, he was still sometimes surprised by her slenderness and the delicacy of her bone structure, for he always thought of her as being strong for her size, solid, indomitable. “If you hadn’t put Rasmussen in that vise and squeezed him, I would’ve done it.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. You’re scrappy, Bobby, and you’re smart and you’re tough, but there’re certain things you can never do. This was one of them. Don’t jive me just to make me feel good.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it. But I’m glad you did. Decodyne’s very big time, and this could’ve set us back years if we’d flubbed it.”
“Is there anything we won’t do for The Dream?”
Bobby said, “Sure. We wouldn’t torture small children with red-hot knives, and we wouldn’t shove innocent old ladies down long flights of stairs, and we wouldn’t club a basketful of newborn puppies to death with an iron bar—at least not without good reason.”
Her laughter lacked a full measure of humor.
“Listen,” he said, “you’re a good person. You’ve got a good heart, and nothing you did to Rasmussen blackens it at all.”
“I hope you’re right. It’s a hard world sometimes.”
“Another drink will soften it a little.”
“You know the calories in these? I’ll be fat as a hippo.”
“Hippos are cute,” he said, taking her glass and heading back toward the kitchen to pour another drink. “I love hippos.”
“You won’t want to make love to one.”
“Sure. More to hold, more to love.”
“You’ll be crushed.”
“Well, of course, I’ll always insist on taking the top.”
13
CANDY WAS going to kill. He stood in the dark living room of a stranger’s house, shaking with need. Blood. He needed blood.
Candy was going to kill, and there was nothing he could do to stop himself. Not even thinking of his mother could shame him into controlling his hunger.
His given name was James, but his mother—an unselfish soul, exceedingly kind, brimming with love, a saint—always said he was her little candy boy. Never James. Never Jim or Jimmy. She’d said he was sweeter than anything on earth, and “little candy boy” eventually had become “candy boy,” and by the time he was six the sobriquet had been shortened and capitalized, and he had become Candy for good. Now, at twenty-nine, that was the only name to which he would answer.
Many people thought murder was a sin. He knew otherwise. Some were born with a taste for blood. God had made them what they were and expected them to kill chosen victims. It was all part of His mysterious plan.
The only sin was to kill when God and your mother did not approve of the victim, which was exactly what he was about to do. He was ashamed. But he was also in need.
He listened to the house. Silence.
Like unearthly and dusky beasts, the shadowy forms of the living-room furniture huddled around him.
Breathing hard, trembling, Candy moved into the dining room, kitchen, family room, then slowly along the hallway that led to the front of the house. He made no sound that would have alerted anyone asleep upstairs. He seemed to glide rather than walk, as if he were a specter instead of a real man.
He paused at the foot of the stairs and made one last feeble attempt to overcome his murderous compulsion. Failing, he shuddered and let out his pent-up breath. He began to climb toward the second floor, where the family was probably sleeping.
His mother would understand and forgive him.
She had taught him that killing was good and moral—but only when necessary, only when it benefited the family. She had been terribly angry with him on those occasions when he had killed out of sheer compulsion, with no good reason. She’d had no need to punish him physically for his errant ways, because her displeasure gave him more agony than any punishment she could have devised. For days at a time she refused to speak to him, and that silent treatment caused his chest to swell with pain, so it seemed as if his heart would spasm and cease to beat. She looked straight through him, too, as if he no longer existed. When the other children spoke of him, she said, “Oh, you mean your late brother, Candy, your poor dead brother. Well, remember him if you want, but only among yourselves, not to me, never to me, because I don’t want to remember him, not that bad seed. He was no good, that one, no good at all, wouldn’t listen to his mother, not him, always thought he knew better. Just the sound of his name makes me sick, revolts me, so don’t mention him in my hearing.” Each time that Candy had been temporarily banished to the land of the dead for having misbehaved, no place was set for him at the table, and he had to stand in a corner, watching the others eat, as if he was a visiting spirit. She would not favor him with either a frown or a smile, and she would not stroke his hair or touch his face with her warm soft hands, and she would not let him cuddle against her or put his weary head upon her breast, and at night he had to find his way into a troubled sleep without being guided there by either her bedtime stories or sweet lullabies. In that total banishment he learned more of Hell than he ever hoped to know.
But she would understand why Candy could not control himself tonight, and she’d forgive him. Sooner or later she always forgave him because her love for him was like the love of God for all His children: perfect, rich with forbearance and mercy. When she deemed that Candy had suffered enough, she always had looked at him again, smiled for him, opened her arms wide. In her new acceptance of him, he had experienced as much of Heaven as he needed to know.
She was in Heaven now, herself. Seven long years! God, how he missed her. But she was watching him even now. She would know he had lost control tonight, and she would be disappointed in him.
He climbed the stairs, rushing up two risers at a time, staying close to the wall, where the steps were less likely to squeak. He was a big man but graceful and light on his feet, and if some of the stair treads were loose or tired with age, they did not creak under him.