Night Relics Page 8

  To Peter she looked a little like a character out of a book, lying there in sunshine—maybe a princess who as a baby had been switched with a woodsman’s daughter. She was five ten or so, and had a model’s slender build. Her shirt, unflattering as it was, couldn’t hide her figure, and when she rolled onto her side as if to say something to him, the top three buttons of the shirt were loosened, although they hadn’t been only a short time ago.

  He lay still, waiting, almost afraid to touch her. When he felt the pressure of her hand on his thigh, suddenly it was unavoidable. Unhurriedly he traced the curve of her breasts above the lacy fabric of her lingerie. He unbuttoned the fourth button of her shirt, and then the fifth, and she sat up, shrugging out of it entirely, and then tugged his shirt out of his jeans as he knelt beside her. She pushed him away and untied her hiking boots herself, pulling them off and pitching them ten feet down the hill. He threw his after them, and both of them stood up, scattering their clothes around the meadow. He pressed against her, lost utterly in the warmth of her body, in the feel of her flesh against his, warming him while the breeze blew down off the wild hillsides at his back.

  Leaves drifted down onto the meadow from the solitary trees, the ferns and high grass waved in the wind, the afternoon wore on slowly. Once a red-tailed hawk swooped down over the spring and snatched something up from the edge of the water, and for a moment the air was full of the sound of beating wings. …

  Hearing her voice, he looked up now. She was saying something to him, looking at him a little oddly from the kitchen doorway, wearing the same shirt that he had helped unbutton that day on the meadow. Recollecting it had dragged him partway up out of the depressing rut his mind had been in all afternoon. At the same time it complicated things utterly, and he understood that despite his resolutions, there were some things he didn’t want to lose. On that afternoon in Bell Canyon everything had been easy, but he knew that nothing that good ever stayed easy.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Sure.” He managed a smile.

  She walked out into the room. “Julie’s been telling me that they’ve had some trouble here today.”

  “What sort of trouble?” Peter asked, forcing a look of interest onto his face.

  “A strange boy hanging around,” Julie said to him, following Beth out of the kitchen. She gestured toward the window. “Out there in the brush.”

  Through the glass Peter could see the trail that led up the hill and onto the ridge. It ran for nearly four miles before meeting up with the Holy Jim Trail. A couple of miles up the ridge, it skirted a hillside right above Peter’s house. He and Bobby had hiked home that way from he day-care center once, racing with Beth, who drove down the canyon along the dirt road. Beth had beat them home, but not by much.

  “He threw part of the carcass of a fawn over the fence,” Julie said. “Hit Betty Tilton with it. She wasn’t hurt, but it was pretty traumatic for her. We had to call her mother to come pick her up. He’d been hanging around this morning, I guess, making noises, mostly. Throwing rocks at the kids. One of the kids lost a glider over the fence, and the boy apparently picked it up and ran off with it. Then about an hour later he just rushed at the fence and pitcher this dead fawn over.”

  “Do you think he killed it?” Peter asked. “What do you mean, part of it?”

  “Doesn’t look like he killed it,” Beth said. “It’s in the trash can out there. I’d guess a cougar killed it. Left the head and shoulders. Bones all splintered up. It’s been dead for days, dried out from the wind. The boy probably found it up on the ridge and hauled it down.”

  “I tried to talk to him,” Julie said, “but he just ran off. Later on I heard him crying off in the brush.”

  The term “crying off in the brush” was startling. For a moment Peter could almost hear the crying, and he thought briefly about Falls Canyon, picturing the face of the boy now, lying beside his mother.…

  He clipped the thought short. Probably there was nothing in this. Just a kid messing around.

  “Couldn’t have been foxes?” Peter asked, looking at Beth. She rolled her eyes at him.

  “I guess it was him crying,” Julie said. “Why he was out there on a day like this I don’t know. The wind must have been blowing fifty miles an hour.”

  “What can you do about it?” Peter asked. The story had made him uneasy. There was something strange about it, something dark and suggestive. More coincidence.

  “Nothing,” Julie said. “It’s just a prank. Still, it was such a nasty one that it wrecked the whole day. Kids couldn’t even play outside most of the morning.”

  “Well,” Peter said. “Probably it’s nothing. I remember we used to throw earthworms at girls when I was that age.”

  “The world’s changed,” Beth said. “Now it’s dried-out deer carcasses.”

  Julie walked to the door and shouted for Bobby. In a couple of moments he appeared, out of breath and smiling.

  “What’s up?” Peter asked him.

  “The moon,” Bobby said. “Did Julie tell you about the dead deer head?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “She told us.”

  “It’s really gross. Can we keep it, Mom?”

  “I don’t think so,” Beth said.

  ‘I wasn’t here,” Bobby told Peter. “I would have kicked his butt if I was.”

  “He’s lucky you didn’t get at him,” Peter said, “but you shouldn’t be talking about kicking people’s butts anyway. The world’s already too full of butt kicking. Probably he just wants a friend.”

  “A friend?” Bobby said, clearly unconvinced.

  Nodding good-bye to Julie, Beth held the front door open, and the three of them went out.

  “So what are you doing tonight?” Peter asked Beth as they walked to the cars. He winked at Bobby, who pretended to cut up food on a plate.

  Before she could answer, Bobby said, “Want to eat at the steak house?”

  “Sure,” Peter said, answering for them both.

  “I’ve got a load of stuff to do,” Beth said doubtfully. “I should have gotten more done today, but nothing went right.

  Peter shrugged. “You’ve got to eat.”

  “That’s right,” Bobby said. “We’ve got to eat. I’ m as hungry as two dogs.”

  Beth looked hard at Peter. “You look beat,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Same thing,” Peter said. “Nothing went right today.” His throat constricted, and he suddenly found himself on the edge of tears.

  “Then let’s eat at the steak house,” Beth said. “I’ve got nothing in the house anyway but frozen macaroni and cheese. And it’s Saturday, we better get over there now, before the rush.”

  “Hey,” Peter said, forcing himself to be cheerful, “I bought something in town today.”

  “For me?” Bobby asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Uh-uh,” Peter said. “It’s for your mother. A cooking tool.” He pulled open the door of the Suburban and picked up the spud gun, showing it to Bobby and Beth.

  “What is it?” Bobby asked.

  “Potato laser,” Peter said. “It’s from a planet in Milky Way called Idaho. They shoot potatoes there instead of bullets.”

  “Idaho’s not a planet,” Bobby said. “It’s a state.” He took the gun from Peter and pulled the plastic away from the cardboard, waving the gun around like a gangster and pretending to shoot his mother’s car. “What does this shoot?”

  “Potatoes,” Peter said.

  “You’re kidding, of course.” Beth took the cardbord backing from Bobby. She turned it over and scanned the instructions, then fixed Peter with a withering look. “It does shoot potatoes,” she said flatly. “Pieces of them.”

  “Zucchini, too,” Peter said.

  “I think we can buy a potato at Emory’s,” Bobby said, opening up the passenger-side door of the Suburban and climbing in. “I’ll drive down there with Peter, Mom. We’ll meet you.” He pulled the heavy door shut, and Peter shrugged helplessly at Beth,
as if the world and its crazy affairs were beyond his control.

  On the way down to the steak house Bobby talked rapid-fire about the deer head in the trash can and about holy he wanted to take it and hang it on the wall like hunters did. But he said nothing about his flight back home from visiting his father or about the week he had spent then about having to come back early because his father was a busy man.

  Perhaps he had already bottled it up and put it away in the cardboard carton that people used to store that kind of thing, shoving it out of sight on some back shelf of their minds. Peter had been dumping stuff into his own carton for too damned long, closing the lid over it, carrying it around until the bottom had fallen out. If he could help it, he wasn’t going to let Bobby do the same thing.

  17

  THE CLATTER OF PLATES AND BOTTLES WAS GIVING KLEIN a headache. If he had been in any other company there wouldn’t have been a problem, but he was eating at the steak house with Pomeroy, who had been explaining things in detail—gesturing, offering Klein unnecessary and unwanted advice.

  There were ten good reasons not to be there listening to Pomeroy, and only one good reason to be there. Pomeroy was becoming a liability. It was necessary right now to humor him, and then to damned well think of some way to get him out of the picture entirely. Short of murder, Klein didn’t have any ideas.

  Pomeroy had even come up to the house today. Thank God Lorna hadn’t been home. Pomeroy couldn’t be persuaded that he and Klein shouldn’t seem to be closely associated with each other, and he dropped by like an old friend, full of howdies, smirking around as if he had a secret that he couldn’t share. Either he was the most happily self-deluded man Klein had ever met, or else he had a bigger agenda, and was running some kind of lowball bluff. He yammered on now, looking grave, talking about the world of car sales.

  Klein had lost track of what the point was. He realized he hadn’t eaten half of his steak, which was the size of a packing crate. Normally he could put away the sixteen-ounce sirloin without any problem, but Pomeroy had killed his appetite. He was nervous about simply being seen in the company of the man. The words fraud and collusion kept popping up in his mind like idiot cards.

  The waitress appeared right then and Pomeroy couldn’t keep his eyes off her tight jeans. Klein almost told him to quit being such a damned hormone case, but talking sense to him was like shooting peas into a can.

  “Another beer?” the waitress asked Klein. She picked up his empty bottle.

  “I’m fine, Peg, thanks.”

  “I’ll have another glass of milk. A refill,” Pomeroy said to her. “And cold this time, if you please. That last one was tepid. Check the date stamp on the dispenser. I think it’s about to turn. If you start giving your customers bad milk, you won’t have any customers left. That’s a tip.”

  The waitress nodded at him. “Sure,” she said, taking away his half-empty glass.

  When she was gone, Klein said, “I used to work in a restaurant, back before I got into construction. There was a guy I worked with, a waiter, who used to hate that kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing was that?”

  “Advice from a customer. Complaints.”

  “Hey,” Pomeroy said, holding his hands out. “The milk wasn’t cold, period. It’s another case of the customer being right.”

  “This guy I worked with, you know what he’d do to your milk?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Pomeroy said, “whatever it was. Typical of small minds, I suppose.”

  Klein shrugged.

  The waitress returned with the fresh milk along with a small stainless steel mixing bowl half full of ice. She sank the milk into the ice, winked at Klein, and left.

  “What you have to realize,” Pomeroy said, nodding at the milk, “is that if you can judge a person’s character, eventually you can get what you want from them. ‘ He stared at Klein for a moment, as if he had said something significant and was letting it sink in. Then he turned away and watched the waitress work the tables along the far wall. Smiling faintly, Pomeroy spun the milk glass in the bowl of ice, cooling it off. Klein wanted to dump it over his head.

  “This pal of yours …” Pomeroy started to say.

  “What pal?”

  “Your friend who … what? Spit in people’s milk?”

  “That was a guy I worked with. He was an asshole He wasn’t my pal.”

  “Well, he’d love this.…”

  Klein listened with growing attention to the story of the rats in the water tank. Pomeroy seemed to have worked it all out very carefully. He knew just how sick you’d get from drinking contaminated water. No real damage if you got to the antibiotics in time. Little bit of a bug. Some gastrointestinal distress, that’s all. Over in a day or two. Of course you’d have to drain the tank and disinfect it and fill it again. And you’d go crazy wondering how the hell rats had got in there in the first place. But really what it was was a minor sort of irritation, something to make an old man fed up with living out in the sticks, where you were at the mercy of every damned rat in creation.

  Klein nodded, following the story uneasily. Peg walked past and he signaled her. “I think I need another beer after all,” he said. He fought to maintain some self-control, but he was losing badly. Pomeroy was walking all over him. Why? That’s what Klein wondered. Pomeroy was going to lengths here. Clearly he thought he had some kind of upper hand, but in regard to what? And what really frosted Klein was that he had seen it coming. He had known what Pomeroy was, that he was capable of this kind of vicious trick. This was his own damned fault.

  Ten years ago he and Pomeroy had some dealings together, back when Pomeroy had been working for Delta Core Sampling, a Newport Beach firm that had finally been litigated to death. The building that housed the company had burned under mysterious circumstances, eradicating incriminating records.

  Providing false core samples had been the issue in the litigation. A couple of houses out in Oceanview Heights had slid down a hillside that had turned out to be clay instead of bedrock. The core samples provided by Delta had been fakes, allegedly drilled out of an adjacent hill. Klein had built the houses. That was a few years before married Lorna—part of a past that was better left in shadow. The owner of the drilling company, Pomeroy’s boss, had died of a heart attack. Pomeroy had walked away and become a car salesman, apparently very successful, though there was no explaining the success.

  So there were reasons that Pomeroy could sit here telling Klein about poisoning a man’s water tank with dead rats, and Klein couldn’t just hit him over the head with a beer bottle and do the world a hell of a favor. The second most regrettable thing in Klein’s life was getting involved with Pomeroy again. The truth was, Klein had set the man loose on the canyon, bankrolled him, pep-talked him. Monsters by Dr. Kleinstein.

  And that’s where the trouble would come from. It wouldn’t be fraud that would take them all down, it would be Pomeroy and his bag full of rats.

  “So when I tried to pet the creature,” Pomeroy skid showing Klein his bandaged hand, “it took a bite out of me.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Klein said.

  Pomeroy shook his head, as if he couldn’t imagine why either. “I’ve got a couple of other nice plans, too. Even better. We’ll wedge the old man out of there yet. That’s the nicest place in the canyon. I’m thinking of keeping it for myself. A little investment.”

  “Why don’t you lay off the nice plans,” Klein said, working to keep from shouting. “A checkbook ought to do the trick. We’ve had this conversation more than once. We’ve picked up a few places, we’ve got a lot of maybes, we’ve got twenty people to talk to still. All signs point to success. Leave the goddamned rats at home from now on. And as far as personal investments go, keep the bigger picture in mind.”

  “Relax,” Pomeroy said, lowering his voice. “The beauty of this is that it’s rats. They’re a naturally occurring pest out there
. Put arsenic in the tank, and they’ll come looking for you. Put a rat in the tank and they put out a warrant on Mother Nature. It’s foolproof. It’s biodegradable.”

  “Clear it with me next time.”

  Pomeroy shrugged.

  “Mr. Ackroyd happens to be a friend of my wife’s,” Klein said. “They used to work together. He’s a nice old guy. Now what the hell am I going to do, just let him get sick? Shit.” He looked around tiredly. With Pomeroy, if it wasn’t one thing, it was another. The man was a grab bag of bad surprises.

  “It’s nothing personal,” Pomeroy said. “It’s business.”

  “It’s bad business,” Klein said. “You’ve got to remember that we’ve got a fairly heavy backer here. Sloane Investments, I mean. They prefer a soft touch. You don’t have one. Take my advice and work one up before you wake them up, will you? This whole thing could dissolve in about a dozen phone calls.”

  “Sometimes a soft touch doesn’t work. Sometimes you’ve got to push someone.”

  “Don’t try to push me.”

  Pomeroy sat back in his chair. “There’s pushing and there’s pushing,” he said. Then, widening his eyes, he rolled up a paper napkin, shoved an end into the candle vase, and let the paper catch fire. He dropped the burning napkin into the bowl full of ice and water alongside his milk glass, pushing it under the ice with his finger.

  “Hey,” he said, standing up. “There’s someone I know. Small damned world, isn’t it?”

  Klein didn’t look up. Any friend of Pomeroy’s was sure to be worth avoiding.

  “Thanks for dinner,” Pomeroy said. “I’ll cover the tip. Next time let’s try a restaurant that’s a little more upscale, though. All these chopped-up neckties hanging from the ceiling give me the creeps. That can’t be sanitary.” He threw two singles on the table and walked away.

  “Anything more?” Peggy asked Klein a few moments later.

  “What? No. I guess not,” Klein said. “Look, I’m sorry about that guy. He’s the king of the jerks.”

  “I guess I’ve seen worse.”