The Blue Hour

Twenty-Four

Merci studied the two missing persons files that Casik had bird-dogged for her, then hovered around the unbelievably slow clerk who processed the purses into evidence. She estimated the guy had an IQ of about 50.

Six, she thought. Six. The idea made her furious.

By the time she got to the gym she was even more furious. And livid at Kamala for drinking on the night in question — then not admitting it until later.

But Merci knew she was primarily angry at herself for not hurrying up the hypnosis and the release of the sketch. If it had been all over the newspapers and TV two days ago, like it should have been, Ronnie Stevens might be working at Goldsmith’s today. It was a grinding guilt she felt, tangible, right there in her throat. And now, by the looks of it, three more women had been taken by the Purse Snatcher. Six. Time to work off the rage.

The weight room was empty on Sunday. She looked at herself in the mirror when she walked in — face in a scowl, sweats disheveled, arms up, big hands twisting her hair into a wad and applying an elastic band and thought: Loser. You are a large dark-haired loser who belongs in Traffic.

She humped the stationary cycle for thirty minutes with the resistance up almost all the way. She was dripping sweat and standing on the pedals to make them move after eight minutes and the final twenty-two were actual torture. Blister time. Good, she thought. Let the pain bring the gain. She got off the bike and wobbled to the ab cruncher on legs that felt like petrified wood. Good again: hurt to learn, learn to hurt.

She ran the Nautilus circuit once light and once heavy, resting five seconds between each of the three sets and thirty seconds between each station. Her heart was beating fast and light as a bird’s, fast as that wren’s that was blown from its nest in a Santa Ana wind one year. She’d found it in the grass and cradled it home in her hands while its heart beat like some overcharged machine against the inside of her middle finger. The bird had died overnight and Merci prepared a tissue box to bury it, but her mother flushed it down the toilet. She’d never had luck with animals: her dog chewed the hair off its own body; her cats ran away; her parakeets died quick; her hamster bit her. Merci catalogued these failures as she struggled on the chin-up bar — twelve was more than she could do so she set her sights on fourteen and slid to a gasping heap on the ground after thirteen.

Up, loser. You have work to do.

Time for the free weights. She had just settled under the bench press bar when she heard some commotion near the door. She turned her head to the mirrored wall and watched in the distorting glass as Mike McNally and three of his deputy friends swaggered in, all muscles and mustaches and towels over their necks, smiles merry to the point of insanity. The atmosphere of the room changed instantly. Suddenly she was aware of herself, her body, her clothes, her sweat, what she might look like, what they might do. It was like having 30 percent of your energy sucked down some useless hole. Fucking great.

She did her best to will them out of her universe, turning to look up at the rusted bar above her nose, spreading her hands wide for a pec burn on her beginning weight of eighty pounds, digging the leather palms of her gloves against the worn checkering of the grip.

“Hi, Merci!”

“Hi, guys!”

“Need a spot?”

“Sure don’t!”

Then up with it. Ignore them. She liked the feel of the weights balancing above her. She moved her left hand over just a hair to get it right. Then the slow, deliberate motion — all the way down to her chest, then all the way back up again — ten times in all, not super heavy, really, but you could feel eighty pounds when your body weight was one forty. Three sets. Every rep was hotter and slower. Grow to burn, burn to grow.

At one hundred pounds she had to go a lot slower, but she got the ten. She heard the sweat tap-tapping to the plastic bench as she sat there breathing hard and deciding whether to max at one thirty-five or one forty.

She picked the lighter weight to look stronger in front of the men, a decision that angered her. She was ignoring them but aware of them in the mirrors, where she saw they were ignoring her but aware of her, too. They laughed suddenly then and two of them glanced over at her. Mike was looking down as if regretting something he’d just said. Merci wished she lived on a different planet. She thought again of Phil Kemp’s ugly words and his touches and felt like all her strength was about to rush away.

Stay focused. Will away these things.

She heaved up on the bar and ground out five reps before she realized she wouldn’t make ten. Six was a labor. Seven wasn’t even up yet when she knew she’d had enough. The sweat popped off her lips as she exhaled. Kind of stuck, actually, not enough gumption to get it back up to safety on the stand, too much pride to set it down on her heaving chest and rest. Mike McNally now appeared in the north quadrant of her defocusing vision, looking down at her, a blond-haired Vikingesque once-upon-a-time boyfriend gritting “One more... one more... one more, Merci” at her until she felt the bar rise magically with his help. Her breathing was fast and short. She felt lungshot. Then she felt McNally ceding the weight back to her and down she let it come, all the way to her sternum, pause, then halfway up, then a little more than halfway, arms and bar wobbling like crazy now and Mike’s lift helping her get it up then suddenly one side shot down and the other shot up and iron crashed with a clang and the bar smacked into her rib cage as the weights slid off and chimed to the floor beneath her head.

She was aware of three more bodies around her, aware of Mike’s cursing them away, telling them she was fine, aware of gripping his hand with hers and rising to a sitting position on the bench. Little lights circled her vision like the stars around a cartoon character hit with a hammer.

“You know the circuit court’s going to hear the scent-box case,” he was saying.

“That’s great, Mike.” Merci wasn’t positive what century she was in.

“I know it’s going to be accepted. I know that a hundred years from now they’ll be using those boxes in court all the time. A good scent box and a good dog. That’s my answer to high-tech crime solving. Plus we’re going to patent the thing and make a million. I don’t know what I’ll name it. Mike’s Truth Box or something.”

“Hope you’re right. Wow.”

“Light in the head?”

“Um-hm.”

“Lay back.”

“No way.”

“Well, pass out then.”

“I’ll lay back.”

“Better?”

“Um.”

She lay back down on the bench and felt her chest rising fast, her back pressing into the pads, the air rushing in and out. Mike was gone. Just her and the white ceiling and the mirrors in the periphery of her vision and the ringing in her ears. Lots of red.

When her heart rate settled Merci dozed a few minutes. She awoke to the sounds of weights, male voices, the harsh light of the gym in her eyes. She sat up, looked around and yawned. Her muscles felt enlarged and stupid. The pile of spilled weights was still next to her bench.

She worked herself up and collected the weights, walking them one at a time back to the rack and sliding them onto the pegs. Then she lumbered on heavy legs over to the stationary bike and climbed on, setting the resistance lower than the first time, but still pretty darned high.

For just a moment she thought about who she was, and about how strong she was. She remembered the most important thing she had learned in her life thus fan you are powerful and you can make things bend to your will as long as you try hard enough.

Your will is the power to move the world.

So she set the resistance even higher than the first time. Effort was how things got moved. Effort was pain. Pain was strength.

She looked at herself in the mirror as she stood on the pedals to get them going. Pale as a sidewalk, she thought, and about as good looking.

Merci thought of Hess to steady herself — how he might do this, his economy and focus. She liked the way he didn’t waste anything. She couldn’t forget the look on his face that morning when he’d seen the hood of Ronnie Stevens’s car. It was the saddest, wisest face she’d ever seen. He looked like Lincoln. But he had been diminished by what he had seen. The Purse Snatcher had taken something from him, she thought, and that made her feel angry on Hess’s behalf. For him. For someone not herself. It was nice to admire someone you didn’t want to be.

Thirty minutes on this bike should do it, she thought: burn the foolishness out of my brain and burn the strength into my muscles.

She picked up an ankle holster for her .40 cal derringer, got some takeout food and brought it home. Home was a rambling house that used to belong to the owner of the large orange grove that surrounded it. But most of the grove was dozed years ago for housing tracts, all but a couple of acres, around the house, which was now owned by a friend of her father and rented cheap. It was old and the faucets groaned and the fuses blew in heat waves and the garage was full of black widows. It sat back at the end of a long dirt drive that filled with potholes in winter and bred dust in summer.

The land was flat and you wouldn’t even know the housing tracts surrounded the grove because the trees were healthy and high. It was like living inside a wall of green. Merci liked the cheap rent and the smell of the orange trees and blossoms and the fact that she had no neighbors to consider. She thought little of strolling around in nothing but her underwear, behind open windows and screen doors, stereo and Sheriff’s band short wave turned up loud while the orange grove cats lounged in the sunshine on her porch, licking themselves incessantly, alert to the sound of the food bag. Once in a while she’d walk out through the rows and look at things. Not much to see, really, because the big citrus company that worked these acres did a meticulous job. The workers were quiet Mexicans who hid their cheerfulness when she was around.

She stared back at one of the cats as she unlocked the door, then picked up the fast food and holster and went inside. She loved many things about cats without loving any one cat in the least. The place got hot during the day so she opened all the windows and doors, then went to her bedroom and stripped down to undies and her sport shirt with the sleeves rolled up, working off her bra and tossing it on the floor. She set her holster and automatic beside the bed, which is where it stayed when it wasn’t on her. She strapped on the new ankle rig and slid in the derringer — lots of play, but the strap was good and taut. Skivvies or not, it was good to have a gun on, or at least one in each room, positioned where she could get it quick if she needed to. One of her father’s habits. She had no fear at home. This was more or less a game she played to keep her life interesting.

Again she pictured her partner’s face that morning. In the same way that something was taken out of Hess, something was taken out of her, too, and this reminded her that nothing they did would make a difference in the long run. The short run was their stage, collar the creeps and maybe save a life or even two.

But a purse full of human guts sitting on a Chevy Malibu in the pretty Southern California sunshine put you in your place. It said: you might find the perpetrator of this, but there will be other perpetrators of even worse things to follow. More and more of them, following your own children down the years if you ever have any. Job security, she thought. It really was a shame. It wasn’t a surprise, though. Her father had taught her early on that being a cop was just plugging the dike for a while. It didn’t make the calling any less genuine, but it suggested something about what you should risk your life for and what you shouldn’t.

Of course, her father was an ineffectual man who never risked one whisker for anything. A man who couldn’t stand up to a crazy wife was doomed.

She listened to her messages. One from Joan Cash, just a hi, how are you. One from bumbling, lovable old Dad — Merci’s mother wasn’t feeling well and it made her father frantic with worry. And one from Mike, saying he hoped she was okay, quite a workout she had in the gym today, coffee sometime? He must have called right after she left the weight room. That was all. They all seemed to imply so much obligation and worry. Sometimes Merci really didn’t want to know how other people were feeling. Not that she didn’t understand or respect those feelings. It was just that she didn’t give a shit about them right that minute.

She called Hess.

No answer, so she left a message — nothing urgent, just wanted to talk, call if you want. She wondered if he was out getting pounded at the Wedge or maybe having another treatment. What a strange feeling to be him, she thought, to have almost seven decades of your life gone and maybe one left if you were completely lucky, but to be unsure if you’d see another year.

She wondered how come he had gotten married and divorced so many times. Why he never had children. Why he came back to work on something like the Purse Snatcher. Hess was interesting to think about because he was so different from herself. It was funny that he’d told her she’d have to feel what others felt and think what others thought in order to get ahead in the department, in life itself. Maybe she could try to feel like him.

It probably wouldn’t be that hard because Hess was so large and simple. Of course, Mike McNally was large and simple too, until you got to know him. Then he seemed to grow small and hectic as a five-year-old at his own birthday party: me, me, me. She actually missed Mike right now, missed some of the casual hours. A guy who talked all the time made the hours seem longer. That was good. She missed his profile and the blue light on his cheeks when he was watching TV. And all the sweaty athletics in bed, well, she missed them too, although they made her feel things she wasn’t in favor of feeling.

But she wasn’t about to talk to him every single night, be his current steady woman, baby-sit his resentful kid, get engaged or even talk about marriage. So, she broke it all off rather than just part of it — which part? — and that was enough to loose the dogs of hell on her. Mike’s dogs. Mike’s Truth Box. The hardest part of the whole miserable thing was the way Mike attacked her for being closed and cold and controlling, and apparently blabbing such things to everyone else, thus the remark in the cafeteria regarding her sexual preference. Just thinking about it made her face flush with anger.

The phone rang and it was Hess.

“I was thinking about you earlier,” she said. “And I wanted to know if... well, I wanted to know... how you’re doing with this morning.”

“I’m hoping for prints off the interior.”

“Well, I am too. What I meant, though, was if you were doing okay now, after seeing that.”

“It got me. I remembered cleaning deer up in Idaho. The way the guts kind of stick together and fall out in one big mass. Hardly any blood. And I thought that was one awful thing to do to that girl.”

“Six, Hess. We’re looking at six now.”

“I know. I just... it really makes you wonder where these guys come from. It’s just pure meanness.”

“Where do they come from, Hess?”

“I think they’re born evil. That’s not a popular notion these days but I believe it.”

“They say these monsters are created, not born.”

“I’m just disagreeing is all. I don’t understand a guy who kidnaps and kills a woman, keeps her carcass but takes the time to do what he did with that purse. Again and again. What do you call that, besides just plain evil?”

She thought. “It doesn’t matter, really. For us.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“It’s interesting to think about, though.”

“Yeah. It raises some interesting questions for Corrections and Sacramento and police science classes.”

“And for politicians,” she added.

“Writers.”

“Priests and evangelists.”

“I’ll say, Merci.”

“I’ve always known that. Some guys are just born bad.”

“Well. I usually don’t trust things that seem simple, but in this case I just can’t help seeing it that way. It’s what I’ve gathered over the years, is all. You see what you see.”

“Hey, Hess, what if I came over?”

There was just enough of a silence to make Merci wonder if she’d done something wrong.

“That would be great,” he said. “Not much in the cupboards, though.”

“I’ll bring something to eat.”

“There’s a parking space behind the garage.”