Frisbee to Arlo. Katie, laughing, throwing barbecue sauce at him after he'd squirted her with a water gun. He looked down at the body and for a moment was paralyzed by the colliding past and present.
Come on, he thought. Focus. Three shots fired. Pretty damn loud. The lots were big in Ladera, though, typically separated by fences and trees that would suppress some of the sound. Could be people slept through it all, or convinced themselves it was something other than gunshots, or thought it might be gunshots but figured someone else would do something about it. Could be someone picked up the phone and called the police. He couldn't afford to wait around to find out.
He went through the guy's pockets quickly, not expecting anything. This one was better than the Russians. He was a pro. It wasn't like he was going to be carrying a business card.
A bunch of spare Taurus rounds. Useless. A SureFire E1E mini light. Same. And…
A car key. No rental agency fob or other identifying characteristics, but it belonged to a Volvo. He'd seen a few Volvos parked on the streets on his way in. A good bet one of them belonged to his new dead friend here. Or if not, then another one, somewhere within, say, a one-mile radius from the house. After all, the guy didn't parachute in here.
He dragged the body back behind the hot tub. He took the guy's goggles and the Taurus-the less physical evidence left at the scene, the better-and headed back over the fence and to his car. He drove away with the headlights off, switching them on again only when he was back on Erica. He parked far back in the Ladera Center parking lot. There were only two streets in and out of Ladera, and from here Ben could see both. If the police came, he would quietly drive away.
He waited, watching and thinking. Leave the guy, or move him? There were risks either way. If he left him, it wouldn't be long before someone saw the body. And a body in his brother's backyard was too close a connection to himself. Okay. This guy had to go for one last ride and be found somewhere else, if he was ever found at all.
After a half hour with no sign of police, he drove back to Escanyo and parked as he had before. He crossed the yard, hopped the fence, and walked over to the woodpile. He grabbed the tarp that had been covering it, got the guy onto it, and dragged him back to the fence. The tarp was plastic and sledded easily across the wet grass. At the base of the fence he rolled the guy into the tarp, managed to scoop the package up onto his shoulder, and then, using both hands and his head, shoved it over the side. From there it was an easy drag to the car.
He passed two Volvos parked in the street on the way out. Both times he hit the remote unlock button on the key he had taken from the dead guy, hoping for a bit of luck. No good either time. Okay, take care of business and come back later. Too risky to drive around looking for the guy's car with his body cooling in the trunk.
Two minutes later he was back on 280, heading north. He made two stops: first, San Andreas Lake, where he punched the necessary holes in the body to prevent it from floating and then dumped it, along with the guy's pistol and goggles and the knife he used for the aeration; second, a Dumpster in the Mission, where he unloaded the bloody tarp. Then he drove back to the hotel, smiling grimly at the prospect of the girl. Wasn't she going to be surprised to see him now.
24
VIRUS
After Ben had left, Alex opened his laptop again and continued to work with Obsidian and Hilzoy's notes. But his focus was shot.
Maybe he shouldn't have said anything about the cemetery. But it wasn't his fault that Ben couldn't handle it. A simple suggestion, a request, that his brother pay his respects, and Mr. Tough Guy has a purple fit. What was Alex supposed to do, walk on eggshells out of fear that Ben might blow up at the slightest provocation? It was ridiculous.
He felt sick and exhilarated at the same time. Sick because he'd said some harsh things, things he hadn't thought of in a long time and had never dared articulate before. Exhilarated because it was high time Ben heard them. Most of all he was angry-furious, in fact-that Ben, who'd pulled the world's greatest disappearing act while their mother was sick and dying, would now accuse Alex of taking care of her only because it had been convenient for him, because it was some kind of excuse not to go anywhere or do anything else.
Convenient? I wish you could have been there to hold her head while she puked her guts from the chemotherapy. To watch her waste away until she looked like a prisoner of war. Trying every stratagem to get her to take just one more bite. Come on, Mom, it's good, just one more, can't you? No? You want something else? I'll make you something, it's not a problem. Or I could run down to the deli at the shopping center. Just tell me, Mom. Just eat something. Just a bite. Please. Please, Mom.
They'd hired a nurse, but she hadn't been there all the time, and Alex had cleaned up more than one mess when his mother had lost control of her bowels, and then had to try to comfort her afterward, had to try to find ways to ease her shame and shore up her collapsing dignity.
He remembered her feeble laughter at his feeble jokes. Come on, Mom, what are you talking about? You used to do the same for me, remember? Remembered his despair when he realized she was only pretending he had made her feel better to make him feel better, remembered this as one of the black instants when he understood, really understood, she was going to die.
Mostly she'd been tough, but still, sometimes the facade would suddenly crack and out of nowhere she'd be crying. I'm scared, honey. I'm scared. Look at me, big brave Mommy.
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. It was amazing, the clarity of the moments, of the images, that lived in his mind. Months would go by, years, without anything from that horrible time surfacing, and then here it was, in total-recall high definition, all at the flick of a switch.
Yeah, you could have tried looking into her eyes when she cried, while you lied to her about how it was going to be all right. And you could have cried yourself to sleep afterward, because everyone you loved was dying and you couldn't handle this again. Except you had to. You had to. Because no one else was there. That was convenient, too, asshole.
His screen saver kicked in, an image of a galaxy or something, infinite black studded with distant stars and swirling violet nebulas.
The hell with it. He wasn't getting anything done on Obsidian. He got up and started pacing.
It wasn't just that Ben, underneath all his war medals, was a chicken-shit that bothered Alex. It wasn't even his hypocrisy in suggesting that Alex had cared for their mother just because he could, while he himself had done nothing. It was his refusal to acknowledge, in his acts if not in one repentant word, that he was the cause of so much of what had happened. If Ben could just admit that, maybe Alex could let it go. But the way Ben acted as if he hadn't done anything wrong… that made it even more wrong.
Their parents had been wrecked by Katie's death. It was as though her presence, her life, had been keeping them both intact, while without her, fault lines in their personalities had started to widen, hairline fractures, previously invisible and irrelevant, now developing into deepening cracks and fissures until the whole structure had become unsound.
Initially, the change had been more obvious in his mother. She had thrown herself into community work: school fund-raisers, get-out-the-vote projects, church activities even though until that point she'd barely attended a Sunday service. She'd started talking a lot, too, and always needed a television or radio playing on top of it. She seemed always to be in motion. It was as though she couldn't stand stillness anymore, couldn't stand what might well up without a cacophany of manufactured distractions to obscure it and beat it down.
His father had the opposite reaction: never a talkative man to begin with, he'd grown increasingly taciturn. Bags had grown under his eyes, and he seemed to be physically shrinking, too, his shoulders slumping, his posture sagging, his gait tired and shuffling where before it had always been confident and brisk. He spent a lot of time at the office, and when he was home he was always working on some solitary project: waxing the car; repairing something in the garage; a ham radio hobby, conducted from his office behind a closed door. He communicated mostly in yesses and noes, in “sure”s and “okay”s. Ben was home a lot those days, and the only thing that really animated their father was arguing with Ben about staying at Stanford, waiting to graduate before joining the army.
