Find a Victim

Chapter 26

The sky turned lime-white all along its edges, then flared in jukebox colors. The sun appeared in my rear-view mirror like a sudden bright coin ejected from a machine. The chameleon desert mocked the sky, and the joshua trees leaned crazily into the rushing dawn.

I thought if this place had a god he was lonely and barbaric, tormented by colored memories, bored by the giant inhuman drama of starset and sunrise and sunset. I glanced at Bozey’s sleeping face, swollen and discolored now like the face of a drowning victim hauled up out of black depths after many weeks. His head was on Jo’s shoulder. She was awake and looking down at him.

I shoved the car’s long shadow due west across the flatland, so tired that I had to exert a steady pressure of will to hold the gas pedal down. In sight of Tehachapi Pass, I shook Bozey awake and listened to his mumbled directions. The side road turned off to the left a few miles farther on. It led down into a hidden canyon, dwindling to a cattle-track.

The floor of the canyon was still in shadow. Four ragged buzzards wheeled above it. They soared away from the sound of my engine into the blue upper brilliance. Where the bed of a dry stream wound among the scrub oaks at the foot of the slope, a black convertible stood.

“There she is,” Bozey said.

I left him under MacGowan’s gun and crossed the gravel to the abandoned car. The front of it was empty, the rear trunk locked. A bobcat had left the marks of his pads on the dusty turtleback.

I went back to my car for a pinchbar. From deep in the grotesque mask of his face, Bozey’s eyes followed me questioning.

MacGowan put the question into words: “Isn’t she in there?”

“I’m going to break open the trunk.”

I broke it open, and she was in there, lying with her knees pulled up like a child in an iron womb. There was a badge of blood on the front of her sun-dress. The heel of one of her sensible brown shoes was missing.

I leaned over to look at her face. Tears gathered behind my eyes and almost blinded me. Not that she mattered to me. I’d never seen Anne Meyer except in a snapshot, laughing into the sun.

It was anger I felt, against the helplessness of the dead and my own helplessness. Overhead, the buzzards turned in wobbly circles like tipsy undertakers. The sun’s insane red eye looked over the canyon’s edge.