It was another picture, as they all seemed to be, of the same angle facing Debbie’s apartment building, taken at night. Except now there were wisps of fog across the pavement, and most of the lights had gone out in the windows.
“No, I don’t see anything.”
“Well, neither did I, at first. Look here.” He pointed to the extreme right edge of the photograph. “See him?”
And then John did: a figure, standing in the misty fog near the building’s front steps. He couldn’t tell anything about the figure at all, just that there was a shape mostly consumed by darkness.
“That was Saturday morning, about one-thirty. This was Sunday morning, around one.” Teegarten slid the next photograph over.
In it, the figure had almost emerged from the fog. It was still a dark, hazy shape, but now it was definitely a human being. A man, tall and slim. At least, John thought it was a man; the hair was very short. Then again, that didn’t really say much.
“It’s a man, all right,” Teegarten said, as if reading his thoughts. He offered the next photograph, and in it the man—wearing a long, loose coat of some kind—had stridden out of the fog. He was standing in front of the building, arms hanging at his sides. His face—a gray blur—was tilted upward.
John felt his breath catch, as if his lungs had iced up. He knew.
“Yeah,” Teegarten said. “I think he’s looking up at the window of number six.” He pushed several more pictures over for John’s inspection. In them, John could see the tall blond man edging closer toward the apartment steps. Then the man actually started up them, and was about to enter the building.
And then the last photograph: the man was standing almost at the entrance, and his face—still a cloudy blur, the features indistinct—was turned, directly it seemed, toward the lens of Teegarten’s camera.
“I stopped shooting to put on a zoom lens,” Teegarten explained. “I wanted to get his face good and clear. But right after that shot, he turned and walked away. He went around the corner, too fast for a fat gut like me to catch up with.”
“So you think he saw you?”
“Saw me? Naw! I was hunkered down in my car with what looked like a basket of dirty laundry over my head. A car was coming. It must’ve spooked him, and he took off. Listen, when the Hoss wants to pull a camouflage job, he does it up right!”
“How long was this man standing there?” John asked, staring at the final photo. There was something oddly familiar about the figure—the stance, the coat…something—but he couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Wasn’t more than three minutes. But three minutes is a long time. You either go where you’re going or you don’t in three minutes. That dude didn’t want to be seen. A quiet creeper.”
“You mean…he wasn’t looking for an address? Or just walking around late at night?”
“Nope,” Teegarten said. He took the pictures back and returned them to the folder. “I think he knew the address already. And I think he knew who he was looking for.”
“Debbie,” John said, an ashy taste in his mouth.
“You win the seegar.” He sealed up the folder. “Father Lancaster, it seems you’re not the only one keeping tabs on…” What had he called her? “…this erotic actress.”
John sat back and stared up at Christ awrithe on the Cross.
“I’ll be back in the trenches tonight.” Teegarten stood up. “With my trusty Nikon. We’ll see if our friend comes calling again.”
“And if he does?”
“If he does, I think we ought to get the cops in on it. Three nights in a row and you don’t call it creeping anymore.” He paused.
“What…do you call it?” John asked.
“Stalking,” Teegarten told him. He clapped John hard on the shoulder. “Leave it to the Hoss, Father! That guy goes into the building, I’ll get on his ass real quick. Fat gut and all.” He walked away a few paces up the aisle, then remembered something and halted. “Hey, Father! Where’d you get that ten-speed?”
“Bay Cycle, over on Pacific Avenue.” He was still stunned. Stalking, he thought.
“I watched you pedal off after you left my office. That’s real good exercise, huh? I was thinking about maybe getting me a ten-speed. You can change the gears so the hills won’t break your ass?”
“Yes,” John said hollowly.
“That’s good. I’ve got a lot of ass to be broken. Well, maybe I’ll get me a bike and some of those tight black pants that look like sprayed-on rubber. That’d be a whopping sight, wouldn’t it?” This time the priest didn’t answer, and Teegarten knew the information had burrowed down to a deep place. “Don’t worry,” Teegarten said firmly; then he walked on along the aisle, pushed through the heavy oak doors and out into the misting rain of a gray Sunday.
John leaned forward and put his hands to his face. Don’t worry. Stalking. Don’t worry. Easy to say, but it was an impossibility. Oh, my God…oh, Holy Lord…if someone was stalking Debbie…
No, not Debbie, he realized. Someone was stalking Debra Rocks.
He remembered what she’d said at Forest Lawn, about the death of her friend in Los Angeles: The cops never found out who it was. I don’t think they looked too hard; You know what they call us? Freak fodder.
And it seemed now that yet another freak had just crawled out of the woodwork.
“Father?”
John quickly looked up.
Garcia stood there. “I don’t mean to bother you during your prayer, Father, but do you want me to lock the doors?”
John hesitated. It was customary to lock the doors on Sunday afternoon, because of the gilded icons, the candleholders, and other expensive fixtures. Garcia waited for him to speak.
“No,” John said finally. “No, leave the doors unlocked.” If someone came in and made off with a heavy candleholder or two, they surely were in more dire need of money than the Catholic Church. John stood up, leaving Garcia blinking in puzzlement over the failure to turn a key that had been turned every Sunday for at least the nine years of his employment as a maintenance man. John went directly to his apartment, where he sat down in a chair, attacked a volume on the nature of evil, and tried desperately not to consider picking up the phone and calling Debbie.
Stalking, he thought. That word rattled in his brain like a cold stone, or a bullet.
Rain ticked on the window’s glass, and beyond it the red X was a savage smear. The afternoon passed on.
22
BY TWELVE-THIRTY ON MONDAY morning Hoss Teegarten had been sitting in his Chevy, watching Debbie Stoner’s apartment building, for over four hours. Her green Fiat was at the curb, and the lights of number six were on. He could look up, from under his camouflage cover of what appeared to be old newspapers, and see the shapes of cacti in her window. His butt had gone to sleep, but he was born to be a couch potato anyway. Or a car eggplant, at least.
Rain speckled the windshield. He had the driver’s window rolled down, and his hand ready with the Nikon. But so far there was no sign of Blondie. A few cars had passed by, but they were on their way somewhere else. Now the street was deserted of movement, just the low tendrils of fog beginning to roll up from the bay at about knee-height over the pavement.
He yawned. Stifle it! he thought. Got a long time to sit here. At times like these he wished he could afford to hire an assistant. Tonight had been another slow one; at around six-thirty, Debbie Stoner had walked down the hill to a Chinese restaurant. She’d taken her time, sitting in the window and watching the rain as she ate. He had some nice pictures of her face. What was a beautiful girl like that doing in porno? His not to question why. He himself used to ride with the Hell’s Angels, when he was twenty-one and seventy pounds lighter. Oh, those were the days! he mused. Now he’d bend a hog’s frame into a chrome street-scraper. Got to cut out the spaghetti and meatballs, he vowed for the fourth or fifth time that day. Get hooked on sushi, maybe.
He eased up a little bit, put his elbow on the doorframe, and squeezed off a couple of
shots just to get the camera warmed up.
There was a metallic click.
And it did not come from the Nikon.
A gun barrel slid up into the window, right into Teegarten’s face.
“No sounds,” the man who’d crawled up beside the Chevy whispered.
“Is that real? That’s not real, is it?” Teegarten babbled.
“Shut.” The man’s blond-crew-cut head rose into view. “Up.”
“I’ve just got a camera, see? Just a camera. I’m just sitting here—”
“In deep shit,” the cowboy told him, and Teegarten saw the red teardrops tattooed at the outer corners of his eyes. “You took my picture, didn’t you?”
“Me? No. I never saw you before!” His voice shook, along with his chins, and he knew that the cowboy knew.
“Hands on the wheel. Do it. Grip tight.” The cowboy walked around the car, the Colt’s barrel still aimed through the glass at Hoss Teegarten, and then he slid smoothly into the passenger side and closed the door. The barrel pushed into the fat man’s blubbery side. “Drive,” Travis said.
“Oh…come on.” Jesus! Teegarten thought. Oh, Jesus…this guy’s not kidding! “Listen… I’m nobody. I’m just a private dick, right? Come on, give me a break.”
“I’ll break you, all right. Drive.”
By the time he scrambled out of the car, Teegarten realized, he’d be a fat Swiss cheese. He swallowed, cold sweat on his face and sparkling on his scalp. He started the engine and guided the Chevy away from the curb. “Where…do you want me to drive to? Around the block?”
“I’ll show you. Turn right at the next corner.”
Teegarten did. He could crash into another car, he thought. He could run up on the curb, or go right into a store’s window. He could yell like bloody hell at a stoplight. But he did none of those things, because he wanted to live. “I’m Hoss Teegarten,” he said, his voice shaking. “Like Hoss in ‘Bonanza.’ Right? What’s your name?”
“Death,” Travis said, and the car drove on.
They crossed Market Street and headed along Fourth Street toward the warehouses and wharfs of China Basin. “Give me a break,” Teegarten kept saying, his palms slick on the wheel. “Okay? I’d give you one. I used to be a Hell’s Angel. Can you dig it?”
“You’re not one anymore, though, are you?” Travis asked. “Turn left here. Now straight and another right at the light.”
Warehouses brooded on either side. The streets were empty, as if the city had turned her face away. They went on three more blocks, near the basin now, and Travis said, “In this alley and stop.”
Teegarten did. A bead of sweat ran from his forehead and dangled on the end of his nose. “Cut the lights,” Travis told him, and Teegarten obeyed with a soft, terrified moan. Then Travis got out and came around to the driver’s side. He opened Teegarten’s door for him. “Walk.” He motioned—not with his gun hand—toward a doorway in the alley’s ugly wall. “Hold it.” Teegarten froze on the edge of getting out, his breath rasping. “Give me the keys.”
And the way the cowboy said that told Teegarten he would have no further use for them.
Travis put the keys in his jeans pocket. “Now, walk, Moby Dick.”
Teegarten entered the doorway. He smelled damp concrete and the tang of salt rust on metal. There was no light, not even a hint of it, and four paces behind him Travis ordered, “Stop.” The cowboy bent down and found the flashlight that he knew was hidden beneath an old orange crate three paces right of the door. The light came on, spearing into Teegarten’s back. “Keep walking.”
“I can’t… I can’t see where I’m going.” But he had no choice. He walked, his legs loggy, and his heart hammered behind his breastbone and his eyes bulged with terror. The warehouse—deserted, it appeared, for some time—was full of cavernlike rooms and corridors. “Turn left,” Travis said. They came in another moment to a staircase, going down.
“Oh, no. Please…listen…”
A hand shoved him forward, and Teegarten grasped at the iron railing before he tumbled like Humpty Dumpty. He went down into darkness. “I’ve got money,” he said. “Got a bank account. Crocker Bank. I swear to God, I’ll get you all the money I’ve got!”
“I think,” Travis said softly, “I hear a ghost talkin’.”
The lower floor was puddled, and water dripped from corroded pipes overhead. Teegarten kept going, shoved along at the point of the flashlight. He splashed through a puddle and stepped on something that squished under his left sneaker.
“Right. Into there.” Travis motioned with the light; it swept across the concrete and toward an archway about ten feet ahead.
Teegarten caught his breath. He had seen something on the floor, in the sweep of that light. It had looked like a mangy dog, its head shot away, and beside the carcass a little mound of gray hamburger. He heard the hungry buzz of flies, and now he could smell rot. He hesitated, trembling—and then the Colt’s barrel pressed into his spine. Its chill eagerness forced him through the archway and into a realm of the damned.
Dead rats, each dispatched with a single shot that had blasted their carcasses to pieces, lay around Teegarten’s feet. He walked on, stepping on mangle, and then abruptly stopped again as the light glanced past his shoulder and fell on something else that lay ahead.
It was a dead man, old and skinny. Wearing gray trousers and a tattered purple sweater with brown blotches. No, no, Teegarten realized. The brown blotches were not part of the sweater’s natural color. Flies clung to the bullet holes in the corpse’s chest, and spun like a dark blizzard over the gaping face.
“Walk to the wall,” Travis commanded. “Go on, Moby Dick.” He chuckled. “Moby Dick. Get it?”
Teegarten trudged forward in a zombie daze. The wall was of dark, wet bricks, and there was a chair. Around the chair were more brown blotches.
“Sit,” Travis said.
Teegarten did. The chair creaked. He was sitting not facing the cowboy but with the wall on his right. He stared into darkness, and every time he trembled, the chair groaned again.
A match flared. The cowboy was lighting candles set around the room, stuck with wax to paper plates. The match went out, and Travis struck another one and kept lighting candles until all fifteen of them were burning.
“Please don’t kill me,” Teegarten whispered, and a tear crawled from his right eye.
“My name is Travis,” the cowboy began, and Teegarten winced because he didn’t want to hear a name, he didn’t want to know anything, all he wanted to do was go home and pull the covers over his skull. “I’m from Oklahoma. Ever been there?”
“No. Please…”
“Hush. I’m talkin’. Oklahoma’s the big country. Everythin’s wide open. I used to be in the rodeo. You want a cigarette, Moby?”
“I…want to…go home.”
An unlit cigarette was pushed into Teegarten’s mouth. Then there was the clocking noise of the cowboy’s boots as he walked back toward the archway. He stopped, and when he spoke again his voice echoed: “Don’t move, now. This is my best trick.” He holstered his Colt and took a gunfighter’s stance. “Keep your chin up!” Travis said.
A drop of sweat rolled into Teegarten’s eye. He shivered, and started to scream.
The Colt came out of the cowboy’s holster in a blur, and its barrel spat fire.
The bullet ricocheted off the bricks beside Teegarten’s head and blasted the side of his face with clay splinters. The tip of the cigarette burst into flame, and an instant later the flame went out.
Smoke trickled between Teegarten’s clenched teeth.
Travis spun the Colt around his finger and lodged it home again. “There you go. Pull on that coffin nail. Don’t spit it out now, I don’t wanna have to light you another one.”
Teegarten’s teeth met through the filter.
“I used to be with the rodeo,” Travis went on. “Did I say that? I was a trick shot. You gimme anything, I can hit it. Don’t matter. I kinda like the movin??
? targets best.” The toe of his cowboy boot prodded a dead rat. “Sit up straight, Moby! We got some jawin’ to do.”
The fat man trembled, swallowed, bellowed smoke through his nostrils.
“So why were you sittin’ there takin’ pictures in front of my girlfriend’s apartment?” Travis asked, kneeling down between two candles. “You can take the cigarette out for a second.”
Teegarten removed it. but his lips remained in a tight O. “I don’t know…anything about your girlfriend, man. I was there to watch somebody for a client. A priest. Yeah, this eccentric priest, rides around on a ten-speed. He wanted me to watch—”
“Whoa,” Travis said quietly. “A ten-speed. Bicycle?”
“Yeah. Yeah. A bicycle. He wanted me to…like…keep tabs on this girl who lives in apartment number six. Her name is—”
“Debra Rocks,” Travis interrupted coldly. “She’s my girlfriend.”
Oh…shit, Teegarten thought. His mind skipped and lurched.
“I believe I’ve met a bike rider before. He ran me a little race. A priest?” He paused. “Oh, that’s wicked.” He held his gun hand palm-down over the candle’s flame on his right, and slowly worked the fingers. “What’s his name, and what church is he at?”
“His name is…is…” The detective’s heart pumped. “His name is Father Murphy, at the Church of St. Nicholas.”
Travis kept clenching and unclenching the long pale fingers. “What street?”
“Valle… Jones Street,” he corrected. “Jones and Jackson. It’s a big white place.”
“Ain’t they all?” Travis asked as the flame began to scorch his palm. His face was devoid of expression. He looked up from the candle. “Saint Nicholas. Ain’t he Santa Claus?”
“I swear to God,” Teegarten gasped, “if you let me go… I won’t say a thing. Nobody’ll ever know. I swear it. Okay?”
“You’ll know,” Travis answered. He removed his hand from the fire. “Put the cigarette back in your mouth, Moby.” He stood up.