I didn’t want to leave the corpse in a space to which coyotes could easily gain access. Robertson had been a monster; I remained convinced of that; however, regardless of what he might have done or might have been capable of doing, I couldn’t consign his remains to the indignity that Granny Sugars had feared might befall her if she dropped dead in a poker game with hardhearted players.
Maybe coyotes weren’t carrion eaters. Maybe they would eat only meat they killed.
The desert, however, teemed with more life than could be seen at casual inspection. Much of it would be pleased to dine on a carcass as fleshy as Robertson’s.
After pulling the Chevy as close to the chosen building as possible—about ten feet from the door—I required a minute to summon the nerve to deal with the corpse. I chewed two antacid tablets.
During the drive from town, Bob Robertson had not once asked, Are we there yet? Nevertheless, and against all reason, I didn’t trust him to stay dead.
Hauling him out of the car proved easier than getting him into it, except that at one point, when his big gelatinous body quivered inside the bedsheet shroud, I felt as if I were handling a bag full of live snakes.
After I dragged him to the door of the Quonset hut, which I had wedged open with the flashlight, I paused to wipe the sweat from my dripping brow—and saw the yellow eyes. Low to the ground, twenty or thirty feet away, they watched me with unmistakable hunger.
I snatched up the flashlight and focused the beam on the very thing I had feared: a coyote that had come in from the open range, exploring among the abandoned buildings. Big, sinewy, rough-hewn, sharp of brow and jaw, it was less wicked by nature than are many human beings, but at that moment it looked like a demon that had slipped through the gates of Hell.
The flashlight didn’t frighten it off, which suggested that it had become dangerously certain of itself in the presence of people—and that it might not be alone. I swept the immediate night with the flashlight and discovered another slouching beast to the right of and behind the first.
Until recent years, coyotes rarely savaged children and never adults. As human settlements encroached on their hunting grounds, they had become bolder, more aggressive. Within the past five years, several adults in California had been stalked and even attacked.
These two didn’t appear to find me in the least intimidating, only savory.
I searched the ground near my feet, seeking a stone, and settled for a chunk of concrete that had broken off the edge of the walkway. I hurled it at the nearest predator. The missile struck the blacktop six inches wide of the target and bounced away into the darkness.
The coyote shied from the point of impact but did not run. The second stalker took its cue from the first and stood its ground.
The wheeze and clatter of the idling car, which didn’t faze the coyotes, worried me. Whispering Burger was an isolated property; no one should have been near enough to have his curiosity pricked by the grumbling engine. If other intruders were already on the grounds, however, the noise would mask the sound of their movements.
I couldn’t deal with two things at once. Getting the corpse out of sight took precedence over dealing with the coyotes.
By the time I returned, maybe the predators would have gone, led away by the scent of rabbits or other easy game.
I dragged the wrapped cadaver across the threshold, into the Quonset hut, and then closed the door securely behind me.
A hallway along one side of the building served a bath and four rooms. Each room had been the workplace of a prostitute.
My flashlight revealed dust, spider webs, two empty beer bottles, a litter of dead bees….
After all these years, the air was still thinly laced with the faded bouquet of scented candles, incense, perfume, fragrant oils. Underlying this faint but sweet melange was a fainter, acrid smell that might have been the stale urine of animals that had come and gone.
The furniture had been trucked away long ago. In two rooms, mirrors on the ceiling suggested where the beds had been positioned. The walls were painted hot-pink.
Each room featured two portholes. Most of the glass had been shot out by kids with air guns.
In the fourth room, both small windows were intact. Here, none of the larger carrion eaters could get at the corpse.
One of the securing shoelaces had snapped. An end of the shroud sagged loose, and Robertson’s left foot became exposed.
I considered taking both laces and the sheet. They were possible connections to me, though they were such common brands, sold in so many stores, that they alone would not convict me.
As I bent to the task, into my mind came an image of the wound in Robertson’s chest. And in memory I heard my mother’s voice: You want to pull the trigger for me? You want to pull the trigger?
I’d had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.
Casting from my mind the image of Robertson’s wound was not as easy. That wet hole pulsed in memory as though his dead heart were beating under it.
In my bathroom, when I’d opened his shirt to check for lividity and had seen the entrance wound in his empurpled flesh, something had compelled me to look more closely. Disgusted by my own morbid impulse and, indeed, frightened by it, afraid that my fascination proved I’d been twisted by my mother in ways I hadn’t realized, I had resisted looking closer and had at once turned away, rebuttoned his shirt.
Now, on one knee beside Robertson, fumbling with the knots in the remaining shoelace that secured the shroud, I tried to close the memory of that shirt over the memory of the oozing wound, but still it throbbed in my mind’s eye.
In the bloating cadaver, gas swizzled up a series of chuckles culminating in what sounded like a sigh from the lips of the dead man, there behind his cotton veil.
Unable to spend another second with the corpse, I shot to my feet, fled the hot-pink room with my flashlight, and was halfway along the hall before I realized that I had left the door open. I went back and closed it, further protecting the body from the desert’s larger scavengers.
I used the tail of my T-shirt to wipe the door handles to all the rooms that I had investigated. Then, scuffing my feet through the prints I’d left earlier, I smeared the thick dust on the floor with the hope that I could avoid leaving clear shoe-tread impressions.
When I opened the outer door, my flashlight beam struck flares of eyeshine from t
hree coyotes that waited between me and the idling Chevy.
THIRTY-SEVEN
WITH THEIR SINEWY LEGS, LEAN FLANKS, AND narrow muzzles, coyotes appear to be designed for speed and savage assault, and yet even as they face you down with a predatory gleam in their eyes, they have some of the appeal of dogs. Prairie wolves, some people call them, and although they lack most of the charm of wolves, they do have a puppylike quality because their feet are too big for their bodies and their ears are too big for their heads.
These three beasts appeared more quizzical than threatening—if you failed to read the right message in their tense posture and in the flare of their nostrils. Their large ears were pricked, and one of them cocked its head as if it found me to be deeply puzzling, an opinion of me that is not limited to coyotes.
Two stood in front of the Chevy, perhaps fourteen feet away. The third waited between me and the passenger’s side of the car, where I had left the rear door open.
I let out a shout at the greatest volume I could muster, for common wisdom holds that sudden loud noises will frighten coyotes into flight. Two twitched, but none of them retreated so much as an inch.
Stewed in my own sweat, I must have smelled like a salty but delicious dinner.
When I stepped back from the threshold, they didn’t spring at me, which meant their boldness had not yet matured into the absolute conviction that they could take me down. I let the door fall shut between us.
Another door at the farther end of the hall also opened to the outside, but if I slipped out by that exit, I would be at too great a distance from the Chevy. I couldn’t hope to circle around behind the car and get in through the door that I’d left open. Long before I got there, the three brethren of Wile E. would have caught my scent and would be waiting, and none would need to rely on a Byzantine killing machine purchased by mail from Acme, Inc.
If I waited inside until dawn, I might escape them, for these were night hunters, and possibly too hungry to outwait me. The fuel gauge in Rosalia’s car had shown a half-full tank, which might last long enough, but the engine would almost surely overheat before the fuel gave out, leaving the car unusable.