Black Water

CHAPTER THIRTY

Tim had dressed himself for his mother's return home: plaid shorts, rubber rain boots, a suede cowboy vest with fringe and a red cowboy hat with his name embroidered on the crown. Stringless bow in one hand, rubber-tipped arrow in the other.

He met her at the screen door as she came across the porch in the lingering heat.

"Awchie threw flowers from the heckilopter."

"Yes, he sure did."

Good to know that her father and son had been monitoring the Wildcraft case. She could see Clark in the depths of the kitchen, looking out at her, keeping an eye on his grandson, too.

Tim banged the door open and clomped across the porch. She swept him up-it took real leg strength to lift him now-and he hugged her as much as the bow and arrow would allow. She tilted back the cowboy hat to reveal a face stained by something orange.

"Awchie is gone in the heckilopter?"

"Gone for now."

"Can you find him?"

"I hope so, Tim. He needs a doctor."

Merci elbowed her way past the screen door, reached up and locked the little deadbolt when they got inside. She set him down and he dropped his bow.

"Can I have your gun?"

"No. Never touch the gun. You know the rule."

"I never touch the gun?"

"Never touch the gun. "

"I can touch the gun?"

"What do you guys do all day, Dad," she said over Tim. "Just stay home and figure out ways to defy me?"

"Pretty much," he said. "They've been showing Archie and the helicopter over and over on CNB."

"Slow news day."

"You ought to see it. You can't tell at first what's coming out the chopper, then they zoom in and you see it's flowers. Then they show petals on the coffin. It really gets you. After that they intervewed the families."

In his rubber boots Tim waded to the TV and turned it on, but it was a commercial for a local car dealership.

"New car?" he asked.

"No, thanks, Tim. The Impala's running fine."

It was too hot and humid to be inside, so they sat on the backyard patio. Merci shooed one of the cats off an Adirondack chair and huffed down into it, wondering why an allegedly classic design was so uncomfortable. Clark had made lemonade but Merci asked for a "hearty scotch and water over ice. In the near dark, Tim played with a hose on the grass, watering down his hat, vest, shorts, everything. He chased one of the cats but it outran him and his spray. He found a gopher hole, put the hose down it and squatted down to watch the bubbles and mud froth out. She loved the way he squatted.

Merci looked out at Tim and the deep green Valencia orange trees beyond. She wasn't much of an orange eater, but she loved the smell of the trees, and not just the orange blossoms that narcotized you late winter and early spring, but the astringent summertime smell leaves and fruit. She was content for a moment, then the feeling was gone.

"Gary Brice left two messages. And Mike called a few minute ago."

"Mike? What about?"

"Well, not to talk to me."

"Pretty obvious, Dad."

"I really don't know. I'm just telling you he called."

Merci heard a vehicle out on the dirt road that led to their driveway. Probably the grove manager, she thought. Odd that Mike would call, but one of them was bound to break the silence. You don't love someone then arrest that person for a murder he didn't commit, then just ignore each other for the next fifty years.

Clark checked his watch, popped up and headed back toward the house. "I'm going to go get the evening paper," he said. "See if they got pictures of Wildcraft in the chopper."

The screen slider slapped shut and Merci saw Mike McNally's pickup truck bump onto the driveway concrete. She quickly connected the phone call, the watch check, the need for a newspaper and Mike's arrival into a loose conspiracy theory.

She watched the truck come up the drive and park under the floodlights she'd had installed. Mike got out and waved at her, same as he used to. His blond hair was shiny in the light. She saw from the way his hands went suddenly to his hips and the chesty posture that he was nervous.

Danny came around from the passenger's side carrying a small clear box by a handle. Danny was eight now, an intense and humorless boy who had gone far out of his way to ignore Merci when she and his father were together. She'd admired Danny's loyalty to his mother, a woman who treated Mike pretty much like shit so far as Merci saw. Tim spoke often of Mike and Danny, having easily attached himself to a friendly man and a big brother. Merci had explained their departure in vague terms that had never satisfied him. Tim was precise, forgot little, and it angered him to get soft answers to hard questions. She despised herself for taking them out of his life and told herself that someday he would understand. Mike had taken up with CSI Lynda Coiner after the arrest and she'd wondered what Mike told Danny.

Tim bolted for the backyard gate.

Here goes, she thought, taking a large gulp of her drink and pouring the rest into a potted rose tree, leaving the glass upended against the trunk and the ice cubes in the soil. Merci slid the bolt and Tim pushed open the gate. Danny gave Tim the clear box: a small terrarium containing an alligator lizard he caught. Danny didn't look at Merci. Mike extended his hand like salesman and she shook it, increasingly flummoxed and wishing she had some warning on this, then feeling her anger brew because Mike and good old Dad had not extended that common courtesy.

"Thanks for the warning," she said.

"We can't stay, Merci. I told Clark we were just going to drop lizard off for Tim."

"Well, okay, there's no harm done, Mike. It's great to see you. You too, Danny."

He glanced at her.

"Play with the hose?" Tim asked, pulling Danny by the shirtsleeve. The boy looked to his father for an answer, and Mike looked at Merci.

"Okay," she said. Tim pretty much threw the lizard box at her and the boys bolted.

"We can't stay," Mike said again. "We were just, look, Merci know I should have said something to you before we bombed in. I didn't. But I need to talk to you and I thought… I figured you'd say no and I didn't want to hear that."

"Okay, okay. Come on in. Let's sit."

Mike lowered himself into one of the torturous Adirondack chairs and Merci offered lemonade.

"No, thanks, really," he said. "I won't be here long."

She sat in the chair next to his and for just a flash felt like a real couple, watching their children play in the yard. Tim had turned the hose on Danny, who dodged in and out of range. She could smell the dogs on Mike because Mike was the department bloodhound hand and three of the hulking monsters-Dolly, Molly and Polly-lived with him.

"It seems like a thousand years since I sat here," he said.

"It does. How are you, Mike?"

"Just fine, really. I'm glad to be out of Vice. Burg-Theft is hopping.

"You?"

"Hands full with Wildcraft." She had the lizard box on her lap and she saw the creature peeking out at her from under a piece of bark.

"The press conference was bad. Sorry."

"Yup."

"But that's one of the reasons I'm here. I mean, not directly, but related."

"What's up?"

"It's time for the Deputy Association to elect its reps for next year. Pretty much whoever gets nominated gets elected. I'm on the nominating committee and I want to nominate you."

A wrinkle of joy wobbled through her, followed by a hot flatiron of suspicion. She set the terrarium beside her chair.

"Why me, Mike? Half the department hates me."

"It's kind of hard to explain. I'll try, though."

She watched Mike's forehead knit, saw in his clear blue eyes his enduring struggle with words. He'd told her once that he liked being around dogs more than people and meant it.

"Merci, some of it's about you and me. See, what happened wasn't all your fault. And not all Evan O'Brien's fault, either. Some of it was mine. So, skip forward until now, and a lot of the deputies, they blame you. And a lot of them took my side, like you just said. But not many of them knew that I fell in love with that girl, and that I deserved to get my ass kicked for it. Not that I deserved exactly how it went down, but… well, they just don't know. Am I making sense?"

"Some."

"So I hate it like this, half the guys pulling for me when they don't know what happened, and half of them hating you for no good reason. It's all… simplified and stupidified. Like a bunch of children. It's like we're symbols for something. But what you did with Brighton and my dad and yours, God, it must have been hard for you. And it had to be done, Merci. I know it did. I'm glad you did it, even though my dad suffered. He deserved to suffer. Clark deserved to. Brighton deserved to. So what I'm saying is, I was behind you then, even though everybody pulled us apart. And I was too wrapped up in you and the girl and getting arrested to see clear, you know? I just let the crowd carry me along like some kind of wounded hero. It was easy. But I'm sick of it now. It's degrading. I don't want the department torn like this. I want us all at least halfway together. What you did, it cleaned us out, but now nobody gets along. I can't write a memo about all this because it's hard plain all the emotions I was going through back then. Too personnal. I'm sick of my emotions, I really am. But I want you on the of deputy reps. And if I'm the one to make the nomination, then that just sets all this stuff straight. It says two people who disagree agree. I don't mean to sound like I'm important or anything, but it sends a message. I can send a message to this department-forget. forgive, move on. Actually, I can send half that message to the department. And you can send the other half by accepting the nomination and letting it go to a vote. I'll be explaining to the other deputies what happened, as much as I can. I'll be pulling for you. For us. You know, I mean, for the whole department."

He was a little breathless by then, blinking fast like he did when his mind was working hard.

"I haven't said that much at one time in my whole life," he said, smiling. His forehead was relaxed now, but covered in a shine of sweat. "Except maybe to one of my dogs."

A large and basic movement took place inside Rayborn then, and she could feel it, plates of hope and history in realignment. It was like breathing a new way, or having your nerves cleaned and straighten and freshly laid into place.

"I accept."

"You've got a couple of weeks to think about it."

"I accept."

Mike stood but said nothing.

She opened her mouth to say she was sorry, that she was so sorry for everything that had happened, but this was not quite true and she knew it; and she was also about to say she thought he was a man, really a very good man, but there were a million wrong ways to take that; and she wanted to hold him like you'd hold a brother or old dear friend or an aging mother or father, but again there was so much that could go wrong. She wiped away a small tear and called upon all her will to keep more from coming.

"Damned hot today, wasn't it?"

He turned and looked at her. "Ninety-two at Civic Center, about average for this time of year. Good seeing you, Merci. You look terrific."

"Thanks. How's Lynda?"

"She said she'd break it off if I came over here and asked you to run. I told her it was off already, then. It shouldn't have gotten to that point. Even I'm smart enough to know that."

She let Tim stay up an extra hour to watch the late CNB report. Clark settled in early for it, like it was a playoff game. Merci sat on the couch beside Tim and stroked his soft hair while Michelle Howland blabbed her intro over a montage of the annual portraits that the Wildcrafts commissioned of themselves:

"Was it love or hate? Did the deputy kill his wife? Or did he try to save her-and get the bullet that is still lodged in his brain? This is Michelle Howland and tonight we'll have a special look inside the life of county Sheriff Deputy Archibald Wildcraft-a man many believe was responsible for shooting to death his beautiful young wife, Gwen. But whom many others believe is a man misunderstood, a man too deeply in love with his wife to ever do her harm. In the next hour we'll talk to Archie's and Gwen's parents and friends, to the people they worked with. You'll hear from doctors and lawyers. We'll show you how Deputy Wildcraft attended Gwen's funeral today without touching the ground, and we'll show you exclusive CNB footage of Wildcraft himself taken just hours after his dramatic funeral appearance. Stay tuned for 'Hero or Killer-the Mystery of Archie Wildcraft.' "

That shithead

Brice, Merci thought, even as she was dialing the reporter's home number. Brice had located Wildcraft but not bothered to call her, not even after he'd gotten his interview. She got the machine and tried his

Journal, cell and CNB numbers but got machines for those also.

"Maybe he was calling here to tell you," said Clark.

"Unbelievable."

Tim looked at her hopefully. "Awchie throws the flowers?"

"Yeah. Right."

She stood abruptly and walked into the kitchen, her bare heels heavy on the hardwood floor. Tim thumped in behind her, still in his rubber mud boots. His brow was furrowed, his eyes wide with alarm.

"You are mad?"

"I'm not mad at you."

He looked away from her and his bottom lip swelled, then trembled. She picked him up but it was too late. The tears jumped from his eyes like living diamonds. Plenty of volume to his wail. She hugged him and told him over and over that she was mad at

Gary not at

Timmy and after a while this worked. She silently cursed her temper and her selfishness. She felt her heart beating against his little pot belly. He stopped crying as quickly as he'd begun, pushed away and looked her very seriously.

"Why did Awchie throw flowers?"

"Because he loved Gwen."

"Loved Gwen?"

"Yes."

"I down, please."

She set him on the floor and watched him pad purposefully along the hallway toward his room. Another mission. When she got back the sofa Michelle was interviewing the Kuerners and the Wildcraft;

"Tell me how Archie and Gwen first met. Mrs. Kuerner, was it love at first sight? "

Why, thought Merci. She tried the CNB after-hours number but the receptionist wouldn't say whether Brice was in the studio or not. She tried his cell and

Journal numbers again but there was still no answser. Zamorra answered and she gave the news to him.

She tossed the phone into the sofa cushion and paced while she watched, too rattled to sit. Earla Kuerner had tears in her eyes. Natalie sat still and sharp-eyed as a kestrel. Lee talked about his daughter falling in love with a college ballplayer, smiling at the memory while his hands wrung themselves in a dissenting agony. George Wildcraft; stared at the floor.

"Watch," said Clark. "Here comes the grave.

"Merci saw the cars filing into the memorial park, then longshots of the mourners disembarking for the chapel. She had not been aware of the CNB van coming up behind them and it angered her now that she hadn't thought to look for them. But what would she have done? It wasn't Michelle Howland's or Gary Brice's fault that Wildcraft had put on a show. Maybe Archie enjoyed the attention, she thought, maybe he was courting public opinion like everyone else on Earth.

Take a deep breath, she told herself. She took two. Didn't help, never did.

She heard Tim pulling his wheeled suitcase down the hallway. It was one of his favorite things, easily transporting small toys, snails, fallen oranges. Or the heavy newspaper, which he would roll right up to the kitchen table and deliver to Merci on Sunday mornings. Then the kitchen slider rasped open and slammed shut. Merci saw that the patio lights were on, noting that she'd need to look out on Tim in a minute, two at the outside.

On-screen the helicopter lowered and sent some of the mourners running. The deputies drew down and hats flew and the orange dirt dusted up around the blue tarp. Then the first faint bomb of color burst in the air and Archie Wildcraft waved down at the crowd. Merci hadn't seen him do that. Gwen's music kicked in and the flowers fell and Archie was back at the open cargo door of the chopper disgorging an entire bedsheet full of blossoms.

"Incredible," said Clark. "Look at that."

Thanks to the beauties of zoom and stop-action the incident was more detailed on video than it had been live.

"Natalie Wildcraft, what did you think when you saw that? "

"1 thought, get 'em, Arch. Show 'em what you 're made of. "

"What is he made of, Mrs. Wildcraft? "

"Guts and flowers, lady. "

Clark turned and smiled back at her. Merci caught the pride of fandom in it and she realized that Clark was pulling for Archie the way he'd pull for the Angels or the Dodgers or the Lakers.

The TV picture changed to the back view of the Wildcraft property.

Merci went to the window and saw Tim out on the edge of the patio, trying to catch the moths that rose up from the margarita daisies whenever the back lights were on. The suitcase lay behind him, zippered open and waiting for the treasures he might find.

"But is Archie Wildcraft truly the wounded hero he appears be?"

Then came the video footage of Archie and his twelve-gauge a Gary Brice. Merci watched again as Wildcraft, unshaven and bandaged, the head wrap dirty and bleeding, his clothes wrinkled and his eyes furious, leveled the big barrel at the reporter's chest and hiss out something about killing himself or killing them himself or whatever it was. Try as she could, Merci couldn't make out his words because of Brice's near fall and the air crackling around the mike. Then the press conference in which Michelle Howland tried to pin Merci on the specifics of the physical evidence:

"Can you tell us why Deputy Wildcraft is not a suspect in the death of his wife if his gun was used to kill her, and his fingerprints were on that weapon, and a test for gunshot residue came up positive?"

Merci listened to her reasoned, slightly condescending answer:

"Because there's more to a homicide case than fingerprints and gunshot residue."

A shot then of a dapper, gray-haired man sitting in a law library, with Michelle Howland's voice-over.

"But is there? Attorney Giles Newman has prosecuted scores murder cases, and defended hundreds more. As a private attorney now working in Denver, Colorado, Newman is immersed in the details homicide virtually every working day of his life. "

Dapper gray:

"Fingerprints and residue tests positive? Suspect apprehended at the scene with the weapon in his hand? That's powerful evidence in a courtroom. I'm not going to comment on this case any other, but generally, when a prosecutor gets his hands on that kind of evidence, you 're looking at a conviction. "

Merci shook her head and looked back through the window. Tim was over by the roses now, suitcase still open. It looked like he was brushing ladybugs off into his luggage.

Then a forensic expert from Washington, D.C.; a psychiatrist from Los Angeles; a neurosurgeon from Baltimore. Michelle explained that neither Assistant DA Ryan Dawes, Sheriff Vince Abelera nor Dr. John Stebbins were able to go on record for this CNB report.

"And what does Archie Wildcraft have to say? He requested an interview with CNB just a few hours after showering his wife's grave with flowers…"

Merci took a deep breath as Archie appeared on the screen. Free of the gauze turban, his head was close-shaven and somehow vulnerable rather than menacing. His eyes were pale and he looked exhausted. He wore a shortsleeved white shirt buttoned all the way up, like a youngster. There was a big beige bandage over his wound, the kind you can get at a drug store. Merci tried to make out the background but all she could identify with certainty was a brick wall. They were outside.

"1 want to tell Mom and Dad and Lee and Earla that I'm fine. I'll have this case wrapped up pretty quick now. Just don't worry, guys. "

He smiled a smile such as Merci had never seen: innocence, cunning, danger and serenity all in one brief flash.

"And everybody? Gwen says hello. She's just fine. I promise you that."

"Deputy Wildcraft, did you murder your wife? "

The same perfectly contradictory smile.

"After reviewing all the evidence, I'm now certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I did not. Turn off the camera now. That was the agreement. Now."

"Oh wow," said Clark.

Back to Michelle in the studio, sitting with, of course, Gary Brice.

"Gary, what do you make of Deputy Wildcraft's strangely unemotional and less-than-positive defense? "

Merci shook her head and looked back outside. Tim had zipped up the little suitcase and extended the handle, which he now used to pull it across the patio toward the slider.

"I think he's delusional. And he's probably an extremely unreliable witness to the events of that night. I don't mean to condemn him, but the man has a bullet lodged in his brain. "

"Why isn't he in custody?"

"I think what's really interesting here is the way the Sheriff's Department moved so slowly to question and arrest him. Now he's out there, maybe a danger to others, certainly a danger to himself.

"It's a heartbreaking story. "

"Yes, it is, Michelle. And it's far from over. "

"What were you thinking when he had that shotgun aimed at you?

"To be honest? I thought I'd be meeting my maker in about two seconds."

"We're glad you're still with us, Gary. "

"I am, too."

"I'm not," said Merci.

She called Zamorra.

She read Tim

Cars and Trucks and Things that Go and let him find the Goldbug character hidden in the vehicles. He knew exactly where Goldbug was on every page, but pretended to be uncertain. She put him in bed. He was quiet, perhaps still mistaking her anger at Brice for anger at him. She sat down in the darkened room and watched the light from the hallway softly illuminate her son's face.

"Lay down here," he said.

Sometimes she lay beside his little bed and talked to him through the mesh of the safety rail. She understood that he wanted her to be closer tonight, so she lay down on her back and looked up at him.

"Stay," he said.

He climbed out of bed. She heard him extend the handle of his suitcase and roll it over beside her. She heard him zip it open. By the time she'd turned her head to see what he was plotting he was standing beside her, dropping little handfuls of damp cool flowers onto her body. She caught a few in her hand and tilted them toward the hall light: rose petals, margarita daisies, dandelions from the lawn, geranium.

"I love you," he said.

She couldn't speak.

Late that night she poured another scotch, got a flashlight and went out to see Frank.

She walked across the back patio, then the lawn, then through the gate to the far side of the garage. The orange trees made shadows in the moonlight. She stood before the pile of cinder blocks and tumbleweeds then set the light and her tumbler on the ground. Squatting, she pulled away the cinder blocks. She tilted up the plywood planks one at a time, dragged them over to the garage wall and propped them against the stucco. The tumbleweeds, tethered to the plywood with dental floss, remained fixed to the wood. She brushed off her hands and went back to the trench. She pulled away the bubble wrap then sat down cross-legged on the ground and shined the light in.

There was Francisco. Ancient and still, a startlingly small human skeleton with a conquistador's helmet over the skull. The front of the helmet swept up like the prow of a tiny ship. From deep within its recess Francisco's bottomless eye sockets looked back at her. His teeth were enormous. His hands were monkeylike but his sword was huge. Beneath the chest plate and the Spanish armor his bones were brown and helpless.

"Hello, Frank," she said. She'd named him Francisco out of general probability. She'd discovered him here one day while trying to locate a leach line, and had no idea what to do with him. She felt possessive and protective. She'd fashioned the cinder-block-plywood-tumbleweed-bubble-wrap security system to protect him from dogs, kids, coyotes. She had only shown him to one other person-Hess, of course-who had pronounced him "alone."

She sipped her drink, then ran the flashlight beam over Frank's skeleton. It bothered her that she couldn't determine his eye or hair color, what kind of mustache he might have worn, the shade of his living skin. She harbored a baseless hope that Frank had been in law enforcement of some kind. The badge would have rusted away by now, right? Even the big sword was half eaten by decay.

Every time she decided to call the university and rat him out, she'd think of them dismantling and cataloguing him, taking their instruments to him, touching him.

So he remained here, where he had been buried some five centuries ago.

She never actually said much to him. What could you? But she found something inspiring in him, in his literal embodiment of the idea, of a life, of action. She loved it that even after death, Francisco remained suited up, armed and ready. Talk about eternal vigilance. She had read about the ferocity of the Spanish conquerors and admired him for it. And she understood something of what Francisco's sword had cost his soul.

She thought about Mike and Hess and Evan O'Brien, but mostly about Hess.

She sipped, checked the moon, turned to see the dark treeline against the sky and the orange fruit surprisingly clear in the darkness Then back to Frank. She wondered if, after Francisco's death, someone had willed him back to life the way Archie had willed Gwen. The way she tried to imagine Hess back but never could, except that one time in the dream when he came into her bedroom while she was sleeping to tell her everything was okay.

She looked down again at the conqueror and felt comforted by his patience.

"You know Archie didn't do it. Don't you?"

Just before midnight Merci dumped the contents of the La Quinta Inn trash bag onto the floor of her garage and rummaged through it in the bright fluorescent light: wadded tissue, some of it stained with bloody discharge; used bandages, folded into quarters; two days' worth of newspapers; fast-food bags and cups; a plastic bag from a pharmacy and one from a market; balls of lined yellow paper three of the little waxy sacks used to cover hotel water glasses.

In addition to the long, sword-shaped swatch of blue tarp that she had noted earlier she found several smaller scraps of the same material. There were also six short lengths of one-inch PVC pipe-four of them jointed together with dark blue pipe cement-and dozens of wilted blossoms and flower petals.

She separated the pipe and the tarp fragments and considered them. Something to do with the flower drop? Maybe. But what? Archie hadn't used anything but what had looked like a bedsheet. It certainly wasn't a blue plastic tarp. Something to do with transporting the flowers? Something to do with Gwen? With his wound? With snaring Vorapin and Cherbrenko? With… what?

It was the same material used to hold down the earth from Gwen's grave, she thought. She pictured the burial scene, the orange dirt and the unnaturally blue tarp covering it, and the black mourners against the green grass.

She picked up one of the tarp scraps and saw the darker blue of PVC cement stuck to one of the straight sides. One of the pipe pieces had glue along its length also, and the telltale blue plastic debris where the tarp had been affixed, then torn off.

She tried to arrange the PVC into a meaningful shape but could not. Ditto the scraps of material. She thought they looked like the remnants of some sixth-grader's science project, but what was he trying to make? Had he completed or abandoned it?

The balled-up legal sheets were all pencil drawings, apparently made by Archie. Most were childishly inept renderings of Gwen. One sketch showed a latticework of some kind-a long rectangle cross-hatched with short support beams. For all Merci could tell it might have been anything from a retaining wall to a new board game.

She spiked the sketches to a nail in the drywall and turned her attention to the largest piece of tarp. Shaped roughly like a sword. Or a wing. Or a surfboard skeg. Or a jib. The long rectangle again, but with one end sharpened.

She pulled out a dusty old folding chair, whacked it open and sat. She stared at the potential evidence. A few minutes later she moved the chair, and a few minutes after that she moved it again.

But it didn't work. No matter what angle she looked from, nothing about the pipe and the glue and the tarp suggested anything she could use to figure what Archie Wildcraft was up to.

Half an hour later she put everything back in the bag, tied it shut and leaned it in the corner before turning off the lights.

She called Brice on his cell phone and he answered, slurry with drink.

"Where was Wildcraft when you saw him?" she demanded.

"Up against the wall, Sergeant."

"What wall and where, Gary? I can't believe you wouldn't tel! where he was."

"I called you four times, Merci. I tried to tell you where he was.

"You could have tried Zamorra. Or the watch captain. You could have called Vince, for that matter."

"I wanted you to get the exclusive."

Merci heard a female voice in the background, teasing and chipper.

"Where was he?"

"He sent me to a pay phone in Santa Ana, then to another Then to a closed-up body shop down on First Street. When he saw I hadn't brought along any company-such as you,

Sergeant-he led me around to the back and let me shoot him. He said if I told anybody where he'd been, he'd never call me again with an interview. He took off real fast when it was over."

Giggling in the background, the sound of a slap.

Rayborn felt her anger abating, replaced by curiosity over the condition of Archie Wildcraft.

"He looked a little… unbalanced on the TV," she said.

"Unbalanced?

Merci, that guy's crazier than a shithouse rat. Tell me about the Russians."

"What did he say?"

"Said he'd be taking care of them real soon. What gives? Do you have some suspects I should know about?"

"Abelera's on at noon. Pictures, everything."

"Shit, no kidding? Fucking ROC in OC? That's a story I'd like to run with."

"Too late for the morning final," she said. "You'll have to break along with everybody else."

"You could really help me out here."

"I was saying that to you two minutes ago."

"Forgive me. Forgive me, and when we meet again, punish me severely. In any way you want.

Whip me. Beat me.

But until then give me the names of the suspects and some of the evidence you've got against them. E-mail me the pictures and I'll get them into the Art Department ASAP. Give me just a two-line statement I can use. Please, please, please help me get this story out before the Times and Register do."

She hung up on him and didn't answer when he called back