The Girls He Adored

39

Flashing lights in the passenger-side mirror.

Please, I want to live, thought Irene. Maxwell pulled the van over to the side of the highway, steering with his right hand while reaching across his body to draw Terry Jervis's snub-nosed offduty. 38 from the waistband of Bill's jeans with his left.

“What's going to happen?” Irene asked him.

His eyes were fixed on the rearview mirror as he lowered the revolver out of sight between the edge of the seat and the door. He knew what he had to do-he also knew it would be better for his relationship with Irene if he pretended that one of the other alters had done it. Luckily, he could imitate them all.

First, though, he had to feign a switch. “I don't… I don't know,” he stammered, as if he were in the process of stressing out, then closed his eyes and blinked them violently several times before continuing in Kinch's rough, reluctant voice. “The fuck do I know? He probably calls in the plates first. They're looking for this van, he stays in his unit, calls over the loudspeaker for us to put our hands up, keep them in view.

“That happens, I either hold the gun to your head, see how much leverage you buy me as a hostage, or I put a few rounds through his windshield and run for it.”

“And if he only wants to give you a ticket or something?”

“He asks me for my license, I have to kill him. Don't make me have to kill you, too-I don't want Max to have to start all over with another therapist.”

For the next few seconds the wheels of Irene's mind spun ineffectually. If the highway patrolman got out of his car, this new alter would kill him. If the cop didn't get out of his car, the alter would kill her. She couldn't pray for the latter and wouldn't pray for the former. But when she heard the door of the cruiser opening, her first reaction was pure relief, followed quickly by shame and a sense of impending horror. She closed her eyes.

Footsteps on gravel, then Maxwell's voice-his new voice: “What's the problem, officer?”

“Did you know you have a taillight out?”

He sounded like a young one. Irene kept her eyes shut tight- she didn't want to see his face.

“No, I didn't. I'll get it fixed at the next town, I-”

“Can I see your license and registration, please?”

“Got 'em right here.”

The pistol cracked three times. The noise was unbearable in the confines of the van. Irene covered her ears. Maxwell opened his door, stepped out. Another shot. Irene buried her face in her hands and began sobbing.

“Oh, knock it the fuck off.” Maxwell slammed the door and peeled out. He steered the van across the grassy, depressed median strip, executing a wide U-turn; they roared south on 101, past the orphaned highway patrol car with its lightbar flashing and its radio squawking. The left sleeve of Max's blue flannel shirt was splattered by blowback-blood and soggy, spongy beige brain tissue from the point-blank coup de grace.

He switched the pistol to his right hand, leaned toward her, and shoved the end of the short barrel against her neck; the steel was still hot. “Calm down or I'll blow your head off, right here, right now.”

“Okay,” she managed. “Okay, okay…”

Okay okay okay… Pounding the side of her fists against her thigh to the rhythm. Okay okay okay…

By the time she stopped, her thighs were sore, but the panic attack was over, replaced by an exquisite spiritual and emotional numbness. Irene sat up, looked around-they were off the highway, driving east up a steep mountain road. “I'm okay,” she told him.

“So I heard.” He was hunched forward, concentrating on the road.

“Do you know where you're going?”

“I think so. If not, I'll find somebody who does.”

“And kill them?”

“When I no longer need them.”

“Are you going to kill me when you no longer need me?”

Max gave her his best Kinch glare-ordinarily, when a woman saw it, it was her last sight on earth.

“Frankly, lady, I don't need you now.”

Max had bigger problems to attend to than a hysterical womanthough he had expected better from a psychiatrist. He knew it wouldn't take long for the CHP to realize they'd lost one of their officers. He needed another vehicle, quickly-he figured he had no more than fifteen minutes to get off the highway, then find a way north without running into any of the roadblocks the CHP would be throwing up on 101.

In fact, it took less than ten minutes for a motorist who'd apparently seen his share of cop shows on TV to spot Officer Trudell's body in front of the orphaned patrol car, pull over, and use Trudell's own radio to call in the emergency.

“Officer down,” he'd shouted self-importantly into the dashboard mike. “Officer down!”

Since Trudell had followed standard procedure, calling in the description and license plate of the vehicle he was stopping, within minutes of the discovery of his body the CHP dispatcher called in a 10-28-a request for vehicle registration information from the California DMV-and was able to ascertain that the suspect vehicle was a white '72 Dodge van owned by a William Stieglitz, of Big Sur. By then, roadblocks had already been thrown up on 101 in both directions, and the CHP had a plane in the air, while a few hundred miles to the south, the Monterey County Sheriff's Department dispatched a deputy to the Stieglitz residence in Big Sur.

Deputy Gerald Burrell was perhaps not the sharpest blade in Aurelio Bustamante's department. He located the driveway eventually and raced his cruiser up the steep hill, fishtailing and kicking up dust behind.

“No van up here,” he called into the dispatcher. “Just a green Volvo station wagon.”

“Of course there's no van there,” replied the dispatcher, who was familiar with Burrell's shortcomings. “It was north of Ukiah two hours ag-Whoa, whoa, say again the vehicle on premises?”

“Volvo station wagon, green, license three niner niner-”

The dispatcher didn't even wait for Burrell to finish. “That's the guy who broke out of County-Jesus Christ, Gerry, don't you read the BOLOs?”

Burrell found Bill Stieglitz lying on the floor of the trailer a few minutes later, his head nearly severed by the kitchen cleaver embedded in his throat and his body, in full rigor mortis, straining against the ropes that had bound it in life.

Within minutes of Deputy Burrell's discovery, the BOLO was updated to include the van, and the search for Officer Trudell's killer was folded into the Casey manhunt, which was moved north to Mendocino County.

By then Max had turned off 101 and was heading east, toward Covelo. When he heard the planes buzzing and the helicopters whop-whop-whopping to the west, he turned off the main Covelo road, followed a mountainous two-lane county road for a twisting half mile or so, then pulled the Dodge off to the side of the road into a copse of trees, where with any luck it wouldn't be seen at least until daybreak.

Irene was still numb in the aftermath of the cop's murder and her subsequent panic attack. She allowed Max-it seemed to be Max again-to drag her from the van and march her back up the hillside, then lay docilely in the heavy brush by the side of the road for what seemed like an eternity while he waited for a suitable vehicle to come along. It was nearly dawn when he finally scooped her up in his arms and stepped out into the road to flag down a blue Cadillac.

As the driver ran toward them, Irene saw that she was only a girl, a beautiful young Native American girl. Enough is enough, she thought-not the most elegant thought anyone ever decided to die for.

And as Irene began to struggle and shout, trying to warn the girl away, knowing that it would probably cost her her own life in return, her biggest regret was not having to die, it was that she hadn't found the courage to begin fighting earlier, in time to warn the highway patrolman. At least then her death would have put an end to the killing.

Bernadette Sandoval, a twenty-three-year-old Pomo Indian, drove a powder-blue '78 Coupe de Ville her mother had named Maybelline, after some old fifties rock-and-roll song. Eight cylinders, eighteen feet long, and bench seats front and back, wide enough to screw in comfortably. This last was important, as Bernadette lived with her mother and grandmother in Willits, while her fiance Ernie was currently living with his father in the hills east of Covelo.

Since attaining her majority, Bernadette had been working as a night-shift cocktail waitress at the Pomo casino on the Round Valley Reservation north of Covelo. After her shift ended on the morning of Saturday, July 10, she detoured by Ernie's father's place, turned into the driveway, shut off her engine and turned off her headlights, then coasted down to the house in the dark. Ernie was waiting for her on the front step. They enjoyed a quick one, then a slow one, in Maybelline's spacious backseat.

Bernadette tore herself away from her lover just before dawn, and was not far from the Covelo Road when she spotted a man staggering out of the brush, carrying a woman in his arms. She jammed on the brakes and pulled as far over onto the side of the narrow road as she could, set her flashers, grabbed her car phone, and hurried back down the hill to help.

Her first thought was that the couple had gone off the road nearby-it could be treacherous if you weren't familiar with it-but as she approached them she saw that the situation was more complicated than she had assumed. The woman was struggling; her red wig was askew, and the man had his hand over her mouth.

Before Bernadette could decide what to do, the man dropped the woman in the dirt by the side of the road and drew a snubnosed revolver from the waistband of his jeans.

“Thanks for stopping,” he said conversationally, as if he weren't pointing a pistol directly at Bernadette's chest. “Lots of people wouldn't have, nowadays.”