The Famous and the Dead

52



Hood watched Mike through the one of the grates. The grates were made of welded wrought iron, with heavy lids that slid open and locked shut with a penitential clang. There was one in a spare bedroom and one in the living room under an end table and one outside, flush with the concrete slab of the carport. The Mexican ironmonger who built the grates had the blood of Spanish and Moorish craftsmen in him, so his work was not only profoundly strong, but had an exotic Arabesque flourish. The grates were roughly the size and shape of the large, old-fashioned heater vents and because of this—and the vault soundproofing that Hood had installed months ago—he hoped they would not draw undue attention.

They had carried the still-unmoving Mike Finnegan down the stairs and placed him on the floor faceup in the largest room of the wine cellar, alongside the coffee table that sat in front of the sofa. Not willing to chance a surprise escape, they had left him bound in the angel hair, weed cloth, duct tape, and chain link, with the heavy-duty fasteners still in place. Mike did not appear to be breathing, and Hood detected no warmth at all when he placed the palm of his hand over Mike’s forehead. Beatrice assured everyone that Mike was in the pink. Forty-eight hours later he had still not moved and Hood had no visual proof that he was breathing or even alive.

Hood looked down into the vault: one secondhand floral-print sofa, two mismatched upholstered thrift-store chairs, a colonial-looking coffee table. There were shelves with a TV and DVD player that would play music CDs as well. No computer, of course. A few books and movies, some music. A wine rack with several bottles. There was a kitchen off to one side but no oven or stove, though it was plumbed for hot and cold water. Just a microwave and a small refrigerator, a set of plastic plates, bowls, flatware, and cups, one roll of paper towels. He could not see them from here but there was a good-size bedroom and a bathroom adjacent to the living area below, both visible from inside his house. There was central heat and AC.

By the middle of the third day nothing had visibly changed with Mike. He had not moved. Hood’s dreams since Mike’s arrival were vividly terrifying. He’d wake up throwing punches, shouting, sweating. Skinned knuckles, a broken bed-stand lamp, a shattered picture.

Now Hood dozed on a patio chair in the shade of the carport. The day was warm. Daisy napped fitfully beside him. She had been subdued and pining for Minnie, which reminded Hood of Beth, with whom he talked daily. Erin spent most of her hours with Thomas and her guitar and a portable keyboard, locked away in her bedroom writing. Hood could hear her from almost anywhere in the house, faint snippets of melody and lyrics. She came out with Thomas and sat with Hood a few times each day, then headed back for naps. Reyes, less needed now that Hood was here full-time, dropped by and spent most of his time talking with Beatrice. Beatrice cooked and ate and watched TV and borrowed Erin’s car for increasingly long trips to unspecified places. She had gained nineteen pounds in less than a week and her skin was no longer alabaster white but a subtle rosy color. She bought larger clothes, and personal items and cheap jewelry. On the third day of Mike’s incarceration she was picked up by a woman she introduced only as “Joan,” and they set out for El Centro. She returned alone around two o’clock in a white Cube with Castro Ford plate holders and the pink slip that went with it. The large back cargo area was stuffed floor-to-ceiling with groceries.

Late on the third day, just before sunset, Hood was still sitting under the carport when he saw Mike’s chest rising and falling. Hood heard a faint wheezing and noted that Mike’s mouth hung slightly open now. An hour later Mike’s head lolled to one side.

After dark, Hood put on a knit watch cap and a down jacket and got his one-million-candlepower floodlight and an extension cord. He aimed the ferocious beam through the grate at Mike’s face. His head had lolled the other way. By midnight his eyes were cracked open. Soon his shoulders began to roll in a strange and rhythmic way and this went on for almost two hours. It looked to Hood like Mike was trying to scratch and itch or get his circulation going.

Around two o’clock Hood heard two startling wet cracks and Mike stopped moving. Then Mike craned his head hard to the right and over the next twenty minutes his left shoulder rotated one direction, then the other, rolling and rolling in ever larger circles. Finally it rose out of the encasement to rest flush against his cheek. Then the elbow popped out from the mesh, and the rest of his left arm flopped free. Mike was breathing hard. He craned his neck to the left and brought up his disjointed right shoulder and labored to free it, too. He wriggled and grunted and yelped. The shoulder and arm finally escaped. He wriggled more. When his body was free to the waist, Mike lay still and within a minute or two his breathing slowed to almost normal.

Then, one at a time, he shrugged the balls of his shoulders back into their sockets, drew the reconstituted joints up against his scapulars, and jackknifed himself into a sitting position. He was panting again by then but he unfastened the straps around his waist and legs and struggled out of the fencing material. He stripped off the duct tape and weed guard. By then he seemed weakened and Hood wondered if it was because of the newly exposed ropes of Beatrice’s hair. Mike untied the ropes one at a time, deliberately, fumbling like a drunk to complete the simple task. But he stuck with it and had the strength left to coil and throw the hairy bonds to the other side of the room. Just after four o’clock he lay back in his red swim trunks and turned his face into the beam of Hood’s light. He opened his eyes. “Owens,” he whispered.

“Yes,” said Hood.

“I was a fool. Our greatest weakness. Becoming sentimentally attached.” Mike wiped his eyes with both hands, then let them drop back to the concrete floor. He sighed deeply and lay still for a long while. “Can you take the light off my eyes, please?”

Hood turned away the spotlight.

“First, Charlie, I’ll need newspapers and periodicals and plenty of books. History, science, philosophy, social commentary, biography, poetry, and top-flight fiction.”

“Nothing until you stop the dreams.”

“Grim, aren’t they? Agreed for now. Actually, an electronic reader would be cost-effective.”

“No. You’d find a way to exploit it.”

“I trust there are lights down here.”

“Everything you need is down there.”

When the cellar lights came on, Mike was standing by the wall with his hand still on the switch. “How long are you planning to keep up this nonsense?”

“Forever. I’ll have a younger replacement lined up before I die. And so on.”

“This won’t look good on your résumé.”

“Nothing much does.”

“But you rounded up that simpleton with the missiles, now, didn’t you?”

“He pretty much captured himself.”

“I’m open to negotiation, Charlie.”

“I’m not.”

“Just you and me?”

“Looks that way.”

“Beth?”

“Back home.”

“Bradley?”

“In the wind. Warrants issued, posse formed.”

“Erin and my beloved Thomas?”

“Temporarily here. He’s not yours, Mike. And he never will be.”

“Going to move in on Erin while she’s vulnerable?”

“She’s tied to Bradley whether she wants to be or not.”

“Charlie. Charlie. You are a good and honest and staggeringly disappointing man. I know full well what you feel for her. Whatever happened to the take, take, take that marks your human race? What happened to you, Charlie Hood?”

“I’ll get what I want, Mike.”

“But the odds are good that our beautiful Dr. Petty has already broken it off with you. Correct? She can’t sit back and allow a fellow human being to be kept in a dungeon by her boyfriend. A violation of her Hippocratic Oath, just for starters. No. That won’t play in her hot little movie house.”

“I’ve got you, Mike. Right now, you’re what I want.”

“We’ll see how long that lasts! Is that Beatrice’s hair you bound me with? It certainly has her stunning aroma.”

“Yes.”

“She’s long gone by now, knowing her.”

“I think she’s about to be.”

Mike took a deep breath and dragged the ropes of hair over to the media hutch. He held his breath as he stuffed them into the bottom and slammed it shut. “You know we had a quake storm here just last month. Have you given any thought to seismic activity?”

“Some.”

“Then you know the Yuma/Alvarado Fault runs right through here, between us and Buenavista. It’s larger than they think, and very, very overdue.”

“In geologic time. It could hold for hundreds of years. Thousands. And when it goes, it might free you and it might not.”

“I guarantee you that Imperial County building codes are no match for the Yuma/Alvarado.”

“Then we’re both taking our chances.”

Mike walked over and stood directly below the grate. With his foot he pushed away the roll of chain link, then looked up at Hood. He looked tiny and far away in his red swim trunks, a man easily contained by the walls around him and by the world beyond the walls and by the night beyond the world.

Then he squatted and sprang straight up and latched himself upside down and flylike to the grate. His white hands clenched the filigree and his feet clung to the ceiling, and he pressed his face hard against the iron. Hood hopped back a step. Mike’s blue eyes peered at him from behind the thick iron. Hood saw the red stubble on his cheek. Mike was smiling rigidly and his breath was short and sharp. “Your walls cannot contain me, Charlie! And neither can the world or the night beyond the world. I will haunt your life and the life of your children and their children, and so on and so forth, forever and always, to the close of the age.”

Mike hissed something in a language Hood didn’t recognize, then let go. Hood stepped forward and watched him fall with his arms out and his knees flexed—ending the fifteen-foot fall lightly as a gymnast. Mike glanced up with pride, then brushed his hands together and went to the media center where he patiently studied the selections before putting a DVD into the player. Then he got the remote off the coffee table and lowered himself onto the couch. “Manhunter,” he said. “I love this movie. That scene in the grocery store. The pictures in Will’s head are much like your dreams, Charlie.”