Now he set the box on his desk. He knew what he would find inside, so why did he still doubt himself? As a cop, his doubt made him look professional, conservative, always dotting every i and crossing every t. But in civilian life, it was like constantly forgetting, a sort of denial of himself, of the simple facts of his life. He didn’t know when that doubt crept in, but he knew there was an archaeology of that change in this box.
He cut open the tape with an X-Acto knife—releasing the smell of mold and yellowing paper—and pulled an envelope from the stack inside. The letter had been opened years ago but had resealed itself with the hardening of glue and saliva. He set the envelope on the desk, his name written on the front in neat script: the same neat cursive as on the slip of paper Ben had found on Lucero’s body, the same writing—the elegant loops of the B, the aggressive sweep of the j—as on the papers Ben had found this afternoon at Esperanza’s. Black marks against paper as identifiable as fingerprints, the geometric intersections of letters as damning as ballistics on a bullet.
A scream punctured the roar of the wind. Ben, startled, dropped the envelope back into the box and stepped out into the spark-dry air, the song still playing in his head. The eucalyptus were bent to the wind like penitents. Dust deviled across the gravel driveway, lifting clouds over the drainage and into the grass of Quail Hill. Say gotta give me danger, wild little stranger. The scream cut the air again. It sounded like a woman out there in the hills, crying in terror. There it was again—a fox. Something had it spooked—a coyote, a mountain lion. It was farther away now, and when he caught it a fourth time it was deeper into the canyons, where soon only the darkness would hear it.
Then Ben remembered something Neil said the other day: Someone had been at the camp that night, when Neil was waiting to see Lucero. Back in the barn, Ben locked up the box, found his service revolver. Five minutes later he was driving down Junipero, heading east.
—
BEN CLIMBED THE aluminum fence with the NO TRESPASSING sign and passed through two rows of orange grove before the canyon opened up, cliff-lined and shadowed where the hills blocked the moonlight. He found the deer trail and followed it through the thigh-high brush to the Loma Canyon cabin.
Inside, the cabin stank of piss and spilled beer, of animal hide and dried blood. His flashlight scanned a snout moth caught in a web, one wing shuddering loose of the threads. In the corner next to him, six 40-ouncers were stacked in an unstable pyramid. Pushed up against the west wall was an old mattress, one corner gnawed open to the stuffing. He scanned the plaster walls—wood-rat holes tunneled to the grass outside. Names were scratched into the walls, too—Alejandra + Emilio; Dead Kennedys; an anarchy sign, crude drawings of penises and mouths. On the east wall, the high school’s mascot, the Vaquero, was spray-painted into the plaster. Then, near the broken window frame, to the left of the torn-up mattress, he found it: find a little strangr. He didn’t know if it had been here the other day. It was small, scratched faintly along the joist of a broken windowsill like a whisper, surrounded by other indecipherable scratches and symbols, but it was there.
Beneath the spot were twists of opened paper clips, a half dozen of them. He was about to head out to the cruiser for an evidence bag when he heard something crashing through the brush outside. He flipped off the flashlight, drew his revolver, and slid alongside the broken window frame. The moon, above the cliff ridge now, lit the canyon white, bowling it out of the hillsides like a pelvic bone. A trio of deer threw shadows across the ground as they leapt toward the underbrush on the other side of the canyon.
Ben holstered the revolver, but new footsteps crunched the pebbled dirt. He stepped back from the window, reaching for the gun again before he saw the shadow of the man through the open doorway. The shadow stood there for a moment, cast spindly and elongated in the moonlight. Then it stepped forward, one skeletal foot easing its toes to the dirt. Ben took another step back, pressing himself against the wall to get a shot if he needed to, and then something crashed behind him: the pyramid of beer bottles.
The shadow bolted. Through the broken window Ben glimpsed the figure—small, like a kid—running along the deer path. Ben stumbled through the door and down the white line of the deer path, the man ahead kicking up clouds of dust. Then the man cut left, through the underbrush and into the orange grove, the fog of his escape floating out across the canyon.
Shit. Ben ducked into the grove three rows down and pushed through the hanging fruit.
“Santa Elena Police,” Ben hollered. “You run, I shoot.”
Ben heard a shuffling up ahead, and he dropped to his haunches to peer beneath the limbs.
“Turn yourself in and we can talk,” he said. Mottled moonlight and darkness. He couldn’t see a damn thing. “So far you’re only trespassing.”
Then he saw him—legs opening and closing like scissors as he snuck through the grove. Ben dove through the trees, the branches scratching at him, fruit falling at his feet. When he hit the row, the moonlight illuminated the man sprinting ahead of him, his hands stretched out, knocking branches out of the way. Ben was closing the gap, the man raking his hands across the trees as he ran. The fruit rolled and popped beneath Ben’s feet, the tangy citrus flesh cracking open. He could hear the man’s breath now, wheezing with fear. Ben could take a shot, but what if it was a panicked teenager? What if it was one of the pickers looking for a place to throw back a 40 in private?
Ben was about to dive for an ankle when his foot twisted on the fallen fruit and he face-planted. He pushed himself up, stumbled back into a sprint, and tore into the open on the other side of the grove. A black car peeled out, fanning gravel across the road. Ben ran into the road, trying to see the license plate: 6MV2— The car swerved around a corner before he could read the last numbers, and he was left alone, catching his breath, listening to the rev of the engine as it descended into the grid of the city.
12
NATASHA SPENT EARLY TUESDAY MORNING with Lucero, sliding him out of the cooler and examining his body again, wondering if she’d missed anything. Adductor, pectineus, rectus femoris, the scrotum, the corona, the glans penis—so exposed, in some ways more vulnerable than a woman’s body. There were no bruises, no lacerations, nothing to indicate anything other than a bullet to the brain.