He saw the woman in her open garage, unloading groceries from the trunk of her sedan. He was parked across the street, two houses down, sitting low in the leather seat, sweating in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. He could smell himself, blood and sweat—his insides had leaked down his forearms and dried sticky-wet in the webs of his fingers, his shirt so soaked it felt like molted skin. She hoisted a paper bag to her hip and carried it through the little door at the back of the garage that led to the inside of the house. The door was propped open as though she were asking him inside.
It was late afternoon, the white light beyond the shade of the car setting off starbursts in his eyes. He thought it was the third day since the policeman shot him, but he wasn’t sure. Day and night…night and day were blurred in his head. He remembered the bright lights of the highway patrol cruisers spread across the freeway, the traffic rolling to a stop in front of him. He remembered the way he slipped the car into the stream of other cars riding the emergency lane to the roundabout exit off the freeway to this new town. He remembered finding the raincoat in the trunk of the car, slipping into it to hide the bleeding hole in his arm, buttoning up its skin to become another person, and walking into the drugstore to buy medical gauze and tape. He had smiled at the teenage boy behind the counter, thanked him for the coupon he had slipped into his bag. Back at the car, he’d wrapped the shoulder with the gauze, the blood blooming on the fabric, and taped the edges so tight his arm went numb. He had to keep himself inside himself.
That night, the first one, he’d slept curled up in the driver’s seat of the car, parked in the lot of a twenty-four-hour grocery, people coming and going, buying their milk and eggs, their carts rattling across the cement. Not one person peered inside his window, not one policeman shone his flashlight across the license plate. The second night, he’d parked in a used-car lot, exchanged license plates with one of the cars with a FOR SALE sign in the window, and listened to the sirens of the police cars in other parts of the city. That’s what he’d learned about these people in these safe places: They believed that what was dangerous hid in darkness, lurked down at the railroad tracks, stalked the alleyways between buildings. If he stayed in the open, in the light, where everything was neat and organized, he became invisible to them. He was a shadow man who made his own darkness and hid in it.
She was back now, coming through the door toward the car. She was draped in a sundress, as though she’d just come from the beach. She was younger than he liked, but this town, this new town, was becoming like a room with a lock on it. He had to get out.
Last night when he slept in the used-car lot, he dreamed his father was digging his fingers inside his wound, pushing the bullet deeper into the muscle, shoving it beneath his shoulder bone and between the cage of his ribs and into the pumping muscle of his heart. He had startled awake when a police helicopter burst over the tops of the trees, slashing its light across the cement drainage of the dried-up riverbed below. This morning, he’d tried to get back to the freeway, but a patrol car sat in the grassy circle of the on-ramp. A second patrol car lurked in the circle of the opposite ramp, so he drove the other way, up into the hills, up into the curving roads of the residential streets. That’s how he found her, the woman carrying in her groceries.
He’d used up all the medical gauze, and the bandage was soaked through and he could feel his inside-self emptying into the air. He also needed another car, one that looked nothing like the car he’d stolen. He’d watched her hang the car keys on the hook next to the open garage door.
When she hoisted another grocery bag to her hip, he eased open the driver’s side door, his head spinning a little when he stood. She stopped, the heel of her left foot lifted in mid-step, and turned to glance over her shoulder. He knelt and froze—he was good at being still, good at becoming invisible—and let her feel him. This is what he truly loved, he knew that now—that moment he charged their little world with fear. If he could freeze time, he’d freeze it here and forever feel that charge of fear pass between them. But it didn’t work without becoming death, too. Death the creator and the destroyer of fear.
She turned and started across the garage, toward the open door and the steps into the house. He slipped across the street, silently coming up the driveway as she stepped inside. When he reached the very same steps, he pressed the button to put the garage door down, and the mechanical wheels and chains came to life, rattling the wooden door down the guide rails until it snapped closed.
16
ALL SUNDAY EVENING THE HOUSE phone rang off the hook. He answered none of the calls, just let it go to the answering machine. The Orange County Register wanted an interview. A representative for the Today show was trying to fly him out to New York.
The fog was rolling in tonight, wisps of it coming off the ocean and tendriling down the ridges of the hills. He sat and watched it come in, drowning the land, and listened to the scanner. 904-G: Brush fire in Eagle Rock. 390-F: Under the influence of narcotics. 10-59: Funeral detail.
At 8:33 P.M., a truck came up the road. A Ford Bronco, Lieutenant Hernandez’s truck.
“Thought I’d check in on the hero,” he said, standing in the doorway of the barn. He had a six-pack of Coors dangling from his left hand.
Hernandez had visited the hospital two days before along with Marco and Carolina. They’d dropped off a vase of flowers and a Playboy magazine, ironically wrapped in a bow. “Since you’ll have time on your hands,” Carolina had said, and they all laughed about that, and then they left him alone to rest and read the articles. Hernandez had been up to Ben’s place three times before, all invited.
“I’m on medical leave,” Ben said.
“Yeah, I signed the paperwork.”
Hernandez tossed him a can and took a seat on a metal chair across from Ben’s desk.
“Mayor’s talking about giving you keys to the city,” Hernandez said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Means you’re the story he wants to tell,” Hernandez said. “It’s good marketing.”
Ben nodded and took a sip of the beer.
“Looking a little heavyweight, but not too bad,” Hernandez said, raising the beer at Ben’s eye. “You seeing straight yet?”
“It’s all holy-light shit right now.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You look like a stoner.”
The scanner squawked. 901: Accident—unknown injuries.
“Jonesing, huh?” Hernandez said, nodding toward the scanner.
“Thinking maybe tonight will be the night we catch him.”
“The whole goddamned world’s looking for him.”
“I went up to the house,” Ben said. “You know, the one in Norwalk where he was locked up as a kid?”
Hernandez nodded once.
“There was this woman there, a neighbor,” Ben said. “I’m pretty sure she knew about the kid. People knew what was happening to that boy.”
“It’s a hard thing to believe,” Hernandez said, hearing the question in Ben’s voice, “that a man would do that to a boy. That’s the kind of thing, I guess, that most people don’t want to believe happens. You believe that, you have to believe a whole lot of other things about people.”
415-F: Civil disturbance.