DOWN INTO THE Sinks, like a hole in the earth swallowing the land. The horse was skittish on the way down, balking at Ben’s tugs on the bit, dancing around snakes sunning themselves in the sun-bleached dirt. Five minutes earlier, Ben had grabbed his service revolver, handcuffs, and his Viper fins cap out of the truck. He snagged a walkie-talkie from the command post while Barrow’s men set him up with one of the sheriff department’s horses. Hernandez railed about insubordination, threatened him with a desk job. The lieutenant could be a tough bastard, but he was smart, too. Arrest your own officer, the hero, and lose the serial? No.
Ben was supposed to meet up with the MEU riders at the bottom of the canyon, some two hundred feet down a switchback cattle trail that cut through manzanita groves and ears of prickly pear cactus. High above him, a sheriff’s Bell and an Anaheim Police Defender floated circles around each other. It was hot now, the midmorning sun radiating off the exposed earth. The air stank of coyote mint and sagebrush, and even with the hat he had to squint through the brightness, watching the shadows beneath the trees, scanning the needle grass for any movement.
Nothing.
He found the Ventura guys clustered together in the shade of an oak grove, a couple of them smoking cigarettes, all of them looking strung out for lack of sleep. The horses were tied to tree trunks, their heads hung low with exhaustion. The sergeant in charge, Powell, and another MEU were consulting a map spread out across a boulder. When Ben trotted into the grove, Powell turned to watch him come, looking like a man who has just been told he’s doing a shitty job.
“Barrow says you got some theory,” he said.
SOMEONE IS COMING FOR YOU
By the time the sun was up he was high above the policemen, crawling among truck-sized boulders, his left hand smudging rust red prints on the rocks as he climbed. The sun was a hole cut out of the sky, sucking him into its white heat. The land tilted off-balance and was teetering in the sky. The canyon spread below him, the earth’s guts exposed in limestone breaks as though the land were sinking into the ground. The men on the horses with the rifles were getting closer to the steep trail that took him up to the cliffs. He could hear them now, down in the valley, the snorting horses, the electric radio voices echoing off the canyon walls.
The boulders were like things dropped from the sky, shaken loose from the stars—bulbous and sharp, specks in the rock sparkling in the sun. The string holding his head above his shoulders had spun out into the white air, and he could see a cave above him, a dark mouth between rocks. He wedged his toes into the canyon wall, pulled himself up by the fingertips of his good arm, and crawled inside the mouth of the cave, dust on his tongue, an animal piss sour that tasted yellow in his mind. He curled into the corner of the cave where it was cold and lay in the dust and breathed the earth inside of himself, and for some reason he remembered the boy.
He had been hidden in the camp late at night, half asleep on the old mattress, when the boy came through the door. It was one of the boys from the pickers’ camp, Mexican or Honduran, his dark skin and brown eyes. He’d watched this boy with another one in the orange groves. He’d been sleeping there once, hidden behind a picker’s cart when he heard them, and he watched them kiss in the circle of shade beneath a tree. He liked to watch them, liked the way they touched each other. It reminded him of someone, the person who had said she was his mother; the one with the little holes in her arm who sometimes came into the basement and stroked the back of his head; the one who pressed her lips to his forehead; the one who stopped coming.
When the boy saw him in the camp the other night, he’d stumbled back toward the door.
“I thought you were someone else,” the boy said.
“I know,” he said. No one ever expected him.
The boy stared at him, trying to piece his face together. He knew he was strange-looking to them, knew his face was something that frightened people.
“Did someone else come here,” the boy said, “looking for me?”
He noticed the gun then, hanging from the boy’s right hand.
“No.”
“No one?” the boy said, starting to shake. He was tall, his shoulders broad and straining his shirt with muscle. If he’d wanted to choke the boy, he wouldn’t have been strong enough. “He said he’d be here.”
“No,” he said. “No one came. No one comes when you need them.”
The wind shook the cabin, dust skittering across the floor.
“I need to talk to him,” the boy said. He was crying now, running his fingers through his hair.
He had stood up and stepped toward the boy, felt something strange for him, something soft. He wanted to touch the boy, to feel the heat of his skin. He knew what it was to be left alone. Then the boy pointed the gun at him. The gun was shaking in the boy’s hand, but the boy wasn’t going to shoot him. The muzzle jumped around in the air and the boy was crying. When he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder the boy shoved him against the wall. Then the boy stumbled out the door of the cabin into the roaring wind. He followed the boy through the orange grove shadows and down the moonlit white path, angry now that he’d been shoved, wanting to choke him.
He tracked the boy to the edge of the strawberry field and then crouched down in the needle grass near the irrigation ditch. The boy stumbled into the field, a tall shadow cut against the electric light of the city. In the middle of the field, among the dead strawberries, he sat down. He could see the boy, a blotch of black upsetting the rows of fruit, rocking back and forth, hugging his knees. Then the boy stood suddenly and paced up and down the row, the gun swinging from his hand. Twice he raised the gun to his head, before dropping it to his side. He paced in the row like an animal stuck in a cage, shifting the gun to his left hand, back into his right, and then into his left, and then suddenly, mid-step, he jerked the gun to his head and a pop of spark exploded, the sound carried away on the wind.
He sat there on the edge of the field, the wind blowing the needle grass against his arms, the city lights shimmering in the hot night, the clump of dark where the boy had fallen between the strawberry rows. Most people wanted to live; they fought him, dug their nails into his arms, kicked at his back, their whole body writhing to take another breath. He didn’t know how to think about this boy, didn’t know what it meant that he’d killed himself, and he sat there until morning thinking—the boy alone in the field for hours, the yellow light bleeding into the sky, the silent pickers going down the rows until one of them screamed.
Now they were coming for him, the men with their guns. They hadn’t come for his eleven-year-old self, but now he’d done things that made him worthy of being found. They had sounded closer, but now, from inside the cave, their voices began to grow faint. He smiled to himself; they hadn’t found him. But his head hurt and his vision was tunneled and he was in a hole in the ground again, deep in the cold mouth of the earth, and he could still just barely hear them—their radios, the horse snorts, a chain rattling from a saddle, all of it going the other way, fading down the length of the canyon floor. They were coming for him finally, but he crouched in the dark, sure they would not know where to look.
19