“Nothing like this happens here,” she said.
These people were new to fear. There was a virgin sweetness to the smell of it here. As though they weren’t sure what to do with it yet, like the rabbit in shock, paralyzed by the new feeling. He had discovered that he loved being what they feared. As long as he was Fear, he wasn’t afraid. Fear had form, Fear had substance, it took up space; it had possessed him for so long in the basement—its weight pressing him, crushing his lungs, and stealing his voice. He had tricked Fear, though, slipped his body into Fear’s and learned to occupy it as though it was another skin, until he was the limbs and muscles of it.
In the parking lot, he crouched between cars and unscrewed the license plate from a nearby Firebird. Then he unscrewed the license plate from his black car and swapped them. He unspooled the red cellophane and stretched it across the broken light and taped it in place. Then he drove the speed limit down the wide, clean streets. The midday heat made everything stink—the char of the Carl’s Jr. burgers, the rank of industrial trash bins, the rot of the tomatoes turning black in the fields. He pushed play on the cassette and listened to the song—the ripping guitars, the singer’s growl. He made a right into a housing complex, the new stucco homes with their red-tile roofs, the palm trees bent in the wind, the blinds swiveled shut on the closed windows, as though if they didn’t see him he couldn’t get them. He loved that, their belief that if they didn’t look at what frightened them it would go away. He knew he should leave. The policemen would have identified him by now, they would know who he was. Or they would know what he looked like and where he came from but not who he was; they couldn’t understand what he was. But he wasn’t scared, and how could he leave now? He’d just gotten here. No, he couldn’t leave this place now.
13
BY DUSK BEN WAS UP in the wilderness, he and Tin Man picking their way through the greasewood and coyote brush. The shadows fell in long angles across Loma Canyon, slicing to the edge of the city, which glowed orange in the last of the sunlight. But up into the finger canyon, where the limestone fell away in collapsed breaks, the land cut open to its guts, it was already dark.
Two hours before, he’d met with the MEU guys at a turnout at the end of Junipero Road. There they parked their vehicles and the horse trailers, and Ben talked them through the topo maps. Ten guys total, two teams of five—a day shift and a night. Five men and their horses for seventy-two square miles of land horseshoed from the coastal hills of Laguna all the way up into the Cleveland National Forest. The Ventura guys had Remington 788s with Leupold scopes. Ben had his father’s old Browning bolt-action with a scratched-up Weaver K-4. The Remingtons, according to a cop named Keating, could pop the back off a skull at four hundred yards. It would have been nice, Ben said, if they’d brought him one of those Remingtons. And they all had a good laugh over that.
Hernandez had called for extra patrols that night; everyone from meter maid to sergeant detective was on coffee patrol, cruising town, looking for black Tercels and a crazy man climbing through windows. Ben and the MEU guys were supposed to ride horseback into the hills to flush out the killer—check abandoned cowboy camps, shine lights in caves—and run the perimeter of the city, where the wilderness met civilization. They split the land into sections, each tracking close to the edge of town. Ben got the east end, from Loma Canyon to the Santa Elena reservoir, from Whiting Ranch to the Sinks. The Ventura guys had brand-new Bearcat handheld radios that they clipped to their belts. They hooked Ben up with one, too, and for the first ten minutes the radio squawked with chatter. But now it was silent, just the sound of the wind in the coyote brush and Tin Man’s hooves cutting semicircles in the sand.
He first checked the cowboy camp where he’d almost caught the killer last night and then picked his way along Trabuco Ridge, the city spread electric orange in the valley, the reflected light casting a rusted hue against the hillsides. In the distance, across town in the coastal hills near his place, an Orange County Sheriff Department’s copter spotted swaths of light across the ridges.
A week after his father’s death, Ben’s mother had called the sheriff’s office to see if they had any leads on the driver of the Chevelle. The sheriff had to look up the incident in the report files to remind himself of the case. He had murders to contend with, rapes, grand thefts; an accident that left a cowboy dead was far down the list of concerns. Ben’s anger erupted after that. Someone out there had killed his father and was going to get away with it. Ben saddled up Comet and rode through the brand-new housing tracts, looking for the Chevelle. He would recognize that car in a second, but there were a hundred garages with a hundred closed doors and not one green Chevelle parked in a driveway or on the street. Soon he was walking the horse through the old town, scoping the gravel parking lots, inspecting the Esso gas station. Nothing. For three days he rode circles in town. The driver might live a half mile away in one of the new homes or he might be a soldier on the Marine base or he might live in Los Angeles; there was no way to know. Ben was an eleven-year-old child and he had no resources, no knowledge of how to hunt down such a person. The car was a ghost, something shot out of another world to forever change his. And he realized then that he was going to have to accept it, that he was going to have to live with the killers that go free. But Ben never really could accept it; for him, there was always a ghost out there, always a man racing down a dark road in a Chevelle that Ben would never catch.