stealing this stupid netsuke and inro that John and Yoko had given her when we were in New York one year. She loved the ugly little thing because they'd given it to her, right? I didn't take it, but she's been obsessing over it for five years now, demanding I give it back, claiming I stole it just to hurt her. I never even wanted the goddamned trinket, though it's worth about twenty grand. But she's convinced I've got it stashed in a safe-deposit box somewhere. For that, she's threatened to write me completely out of her will.'
'And your response?'
'I told her to fuck herself, keep her money, and leave me alone. I can work. I've got a job. Or at least I had one until those creeps Amber sent started hanging around the store. They truly scared me. They really scared me.'
'Amber sent the men?'
'Of course she did. It's all a way to get me frightened back into her fold. She doesn't want to write me out of her will. She just wants me to lick her boots.'
Grace jacked a right turn onto Cliff and headed down toward the Canyon Road. 'Look, Russell. I've got my problems, but they're not your problems. I appreciate you putting me up for a few days. Take care of Isabella-she needs you. And quit thinking about Mom. She's a waste of time. Believe me.'
I thought about these words, and they seemed to be full of great wisdom. From the mouths of babes. 'Drive faster,' I said.
My head snapped back against the rest and the engine howled from behind us. 'I want to see Izzy. I want to love my wife.'
'Good thinking, Russell.'
Before lying down with Isabella, I had the presence mind to retrieve the unpaid bills from the wastebasket in my study and replace them in the drawer. The act felt like a step in the right direction. It was something positive, actual, redolent of hope.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Grace had just taken Isabella her breakfast and I had just taken my second handful of aspirin in six hours when the telephone rang. It was seven in the morning, eighty degrees already, and too early for business as usual. I half-expected to hear Amber's voice on the phone. I'd replayed the vision of her in my mind a thousand times that night, even in my dreams, so many times that, by an inexplicable trick of memory, it began to seem unreal. Had I or hadn't I? It was impossible. It was true. I was outraged. I was mystified.
I had read and reread my Journal article on the Midnight Eye-front page, above the fold-and it was good. The courthouse and crime-beat reporters would be gnashing their teeth and screaming at Karen Schultz by now. The general public would be buying even more handguns.
I made it to the phone and said hello, my head thundering.
There was a long silence, but I could hear breathing. 'Speak up,' I said. 'Life is short.'
'It certainly is. Russell?'
'Yep.'
'I am the Midnight Eye.'
I entertained the notion, very briefly, that this was a joke. I would not have put it past Martin Parish or Erik Wald or even Art Crump to call so early and with so idiotic a sense of humor. But something in the pause that followed, something the firm timbre of the voice, something I remembered from the tape left in the stereo at the site of the Wynn slaughter, something in the center of my soul suggested that I was talking to the real thing.
'Fuck you, Jack,' I said, and hung up.
He called back immediately. The voice was even, unhurried, perhaps just slightly lower than average. To my ear, he had no accent, which means a California accent.
'The Wynn wife was still alive when I tied her to the shower nozzle. I wouldn't have tried it with anyone who weighed over a hundred pounds. Blood drains clockwise above the equator, just like water, unless you reverse the flow. I did not. It clogged early, anyway. Cedrick Ellison had a dangling left testicle and a much smaller penis than legend gives the Negro. The picture of Jesus over Sid and Teresa's bed actually brought tears of laughter to my eyes, which, incidentally, a blue. There, Russell, a clue-even though you were rude enough to hang up on me. Convinced?'
It was my turn to breathe wordlessly. No one on earth but a good person of the Sheriff's/Coroner's office could have know what the voice had just told me, except for the man who'd committed the acts. There is no way he could have extrapolated that information from my article that morning, even with the strongest and most intuitive of imaginations.
'No,' I said.
'What is your IQ?'
'Higher than yours.'
'Mine is one thirty-six, according to the Stanford-Binet they gave us in high school. Junior year. I think I'd have done better, but I was preoccupied that day with a fantasy about the neighbor's cat. I was d-d-distracted. Are you really not convinced?'
'No, I am not.'
The line was quiet for a moment. His stuttering d reminded me of the garbled, cryptic tape left behind. But this voice, live on the phone, had none of the rambling, slurring delivery that handicapped the maker of that tape.
'Then ask me.'
'What do you have on your back?'
'A green devil.'
'What does the Midnight Eye see?'
'Hypocrites.'
'Spell it.'
'You know, this may be the last time we'll get to have a long conversation, Russell, because I know you'll report this call to the Sheriff's, Winters will install an electronic call tracer I will allegedly not be able to hear, and you and I will have to have short talks. Right now, this feels like a luxury. Let's not turn it into a spelling bee.'
The line on which we talked was dead quiet in the background, not so much as a hum, no static, clear. He could have been calling from the depths of a tomb.
'What do you want?'
'I liked the article. Thank you for using my name.'
'What is your real name?'
He laughed for the first time then, a strange, muted sh-sh-sh that sounded wet, compressed between teeth or lips to draw force from both the inhale and the exhale. It sounded like something with scales escaping from a cage.
'How is Isabella?'
Again, it was my turn for silence. I could find no words for the protective fury inside me.
'What do you want?' I finally said again.
'The county should understand my quest.'
'Which is what?'
'Cleansing.'
'The races?'
'Absolutely. I can remember when the orange grove spread for miles and every face was a white, healthy, brave face.'
'So what?' I said. 'Places change.'
'And change again, Russell. I am doing my part, signaling the change. Tell me, what has Erik Wald given you in terms profile?'
'Nothing, yet.'
'The usual bludgeon stuff, beards and size and neo-Nazi survivalist nonsense?'
