This was not quite Poe’s purloined-letter trick, but something similar. Our pursuers would expect us to flee, and the open south-side door would suggest that we had done just that.
In the heat of the moment, believing they were close on our heels, they were not likely to suspect that we would risk hiding in what was virtually plain sight.
Of course, they might find the open door and the in-creeping fog to be a tad too obvious. They might decide to search the garage, and if they did, we were doomed.
They were not fools, after all. They were serious men. I had it on good authority that they were planning many deaths and much destruction; and men don’t get much more serious than that.
SIXTEEN
HUDDLING IN THE BACK OF THE MERCEDES, WE had arrived at one of those moments of extreme stress that I mentioned earlier, one of those awkward situations in which my imagination can be as ornate as a carousel of grotesque beasts, standing on end like a Ferris wheel, vigorously spinning off visions of ludicrous fates and droll deaths.
If we were found, these men could shoot us through the windows. They could open the doors and shoot us point-blank. They could bar the doors, set the car on fire, and roast us alive.
Whatever they chose to do to us, we would not die as easily as any of those scenarios allowed. They would first need to find out who we were and what we knew about their plans.
Torture. They would torture us. Pliers, sharp blades, needles, red-hot pokers, nail guns, garlic presses applied to the tongue. Blinding bleach, caustic acids, unpleasant-tasting elixirs, secondhand smoke. They would be enthusiastic torturers. They would be relentless. They would enjoy it so much that they would take videos of our suffering to play later for their adoring mothers.
I had told Annamaria that I was prepared to die for her, and I had told the truth, but my vow had come with the implicit promise that I would also not lead her to her death before I died for her. At least not in the same hour that I had solemnly sworn to be her protector.
Someone switched on the single bare bulb in the garage ceiling. The car was parked nose-in, which meant we were at the front of the garage, farther from the stairs than anywhere else we could have hidden. The light proved too weak to penetrate to our dark little haven.
Mercedes’ engineers could be proud of their skill at providing sound attenuation. If someone was poking around the garage, opening the door to the water-heater closet or peering behind the furnace, I could not hear him.
Silently I counted sixty seconds, then another sixty, and then a third set.
Timing our confinement proved to whittle my nerves, so I stopped counting minutes and waited, trying not to think about torture.
The interior of the old Mercedes smelled of well-worn leather, mentholated liniment, gardenia-based perfume, cat dander, and dust.
An urge to sneeze overcame me. In a spirit of Zen stoicism, I meditated on transforming the urge to sneeze into an itch between my shoulder blades, which I would have been more able to endure. When that did not work, I meditated on transforming the urge to sneeze into a benign colon polyp.
After tightly pinching my nose and breathing through my mouth for a while, I began to believe that the agents of the nefarious harbor department would have by now concluded that Annamaria and I had escaped. They must have gone away.
As I cautiously raised my head, intending to scope the garage, two male voices rose nearby, one deep-toned and the other full of wheedle. I dropped back into my hole as though I were a jack-in-the-box.
Annamaria reached out of the shadows and found my hand. Or maybe I reached out and found hers.
I could not discern what the men were saying. Clearly, however, one of them was angry, and the other was making excuses.
A loud crash followed by a diminishing clatter suggested that the deep-voiced one had knocked over something or had thrown a heavy object at the excuse-maker.
As the argument continued, I realized that Annamaria’s hand in mine seemed to give me courage. My racing heart began to slow and my teeth unclenched.
The two men proved to be closer than I had first realized. To make a point, the angrier one pounded a hand three times on the hood or on a front fender of the sedan in which we had taken refuge.
SEVENTEEN
THE DEEP-VOICED THUG, WHO MOST LIKELY HAD yellow eyes and a chin beard and a reservation for a bed of nails in Hell, pounded on the Mercedes again.
In our inadequate hidey-hole in the backseat of that very sedan, Annamaria squeezed my hand gently, reassuringly.
My eyes had adapted to the gloom. I could see her face just well enough to know that she was smiling as though to say that this would prove to be a temporary setback in our escape, that soon we would be skipping through meadows full of flowers, where iridescent butterflies would dance through the air to the sweet songs of larks and robins and bright yellow warblers.
I knew that she was not stupid, and I doubted that she would prove to be foolish. Consequently, I assumed that either she knew something that I did not or that she had more faith in me than my survival skills justified.
As the argument subsided, the voices grew quieter. Then they moved away from the Mercedes.
The garage light went off.
A door closed.
I could no longer see Annamaria’s face. I hoped that she was not smiling at me in the dark.
Although it is not a full-blown phobia, I am made uncomfortable by the thought of people smiling at me in the dark, even people as benign—and even as good-hearted—as this woman seemed to be.
In the movies, when a character in a pitch-black place strikes a match and finds himself face to face with someone or something that is grinning at him, the someone or something is going to tear off his head.
Of course, movies bear virtually no resemblance to real life, not even the kind that pile up awards. In movies, the world is either full of fantastic adventure and exhilarating heroism—or it’s a place so bleak, so cruel, so full of treachery and vicious competition and hopelessness that you want to kill yourself halfway through a box of Reese’s miniature peanut-butter cups. There’s no middle ground in modern movies; you either save a kingdom and marry a princess or you are shot to death by assassins hired by the evil corporation that you are trying to bring to justice in the courtroom of a corrupt judge.
Outside, a truck engine started. The noise ebbed, and silence flowed back into the night.
I remained slouched in the dark car for a minute, perhaps being smiled at, perhaps not, and then said, “Do you think they’re gone?”
She said, “Do you think they’re gone?”
Over dinner, I had agreed to be her paladin, and no self-respecting paladin would decide on a course of action based on a majority vote of a committee of two.
“All right,” I said, “let’s go.”
We climbed out of the sedan, and I used the flashlight to find our way to the man-size door in the south wall. The hinges creaked when it swung open, which I had not noticed previously.
In the narrow passage between the garage and the tall hedge, no one waited to tear off our heads. So far so good. But they would be waiting elsewhere.
After dousing the flashlight, I hesitated to lead her out to the driveway and the street, for fear that a sentinel had been stationed there.
Intuiting my concern, Annamaria whispered, “At the back, there’s a gate to a public greenbelt.”
We went to the rear of the building. Passing the steps that led to her apartment, I glanced up, but no one was looking down at us.
We crossed the foggy yard. Slick yellow leaves littered the wet grass: fall-off from sycamore trees that held their foliage longer on this str
etch of the central coast than elsewhere.
In a white fence with scalloped pickets stood a gate with carved torsades. Beyond lay the greenbelt. A sward of turf vanished into the mist to the south, west, and north.
Taking Annamaria’s arm, I said, “We want to go south, I think.”
“Stay near the property fences here along the east side,” she advised. “The greenbelt borders Hecate’s Canyon to the west. It’s narrow in some places, and the drop-off can be sudden.”
In Magic Beach, Hecate’s Canyon was legendary.
Along the California coast, many ancient canyons, like arthritic fingers, reach crookedly toward the sea, and any town built around one of them must unite its neighborhoods with bridges. Some are wide, but more of them are narrow enough to be called defiles.
Hecate’s Canyon was a defile, but wider than some, and deep, with a stream at the bottom. Flanking the stream—which would become a wilder torrent in the rainy season—grew mixed-species junk groves of umbrella pine, date palm, Agathis, and common cypress, gnarled and twisted by the extreme growing conditions and by the toxic substances that had been illegally dumped into the canyon over the years.
The walls of the defile were navigable but steep. Wild vines and thorny brush slowed both erosion and hikers.
In the 1950s, a rapist-murderer had preyed on the young women of Magic Beach. He had dragged them into Hecate’s Canyon and forced them to dig their own graves.
The police had caught him—Arliss Clerebold, the high-school art teacher—disposing of his eighth victim. His wispy blond hair had twisted naturally into Cupid curls. His face was sweet, his mouth was made for a smile, his arms were strong, and his long-fingered hands had the gripping strength of a practiced climber.
Of the previous seven victims, two were never found. Clerebold refused to cooperate, and cadaver dogs could not locate the graves.
As Annamaria and I walked south along the greenbelt, I dreaded encountering the spirits of Clerebold’s victims. They had received justice when he had been executed in San Quentin; therefore, they had mostly likely moved on from this world. But the two whose bodies had never been found might have lingered, yearning for their poor bones to be reinterred in the cemeteries where their families were at rest.