Well, I slept, dear Di. Not that it did me any good. When I woke up this morning I was so weak I could hardly get up on my crutches, and had to piss into an empty plastic water jug. My leg isn’t hurting quite as much as yesterday, but my left ankle is still swollen double its size, plus my left foot is now the color of a plum, and the toenails are blueish purple, which I’m pretty sure is not a good sign.
My mind is as sharp as ever, though, and focused in like a laser on the problem at hand, which is that while I’m lying in a crumbling barn in Marshall County, rotting from the bottom up, my grandparents are living happily ever after down in Santa Cruz.
THIS CANNOT STAND.
But neither can I.
April 21
At least I think it’s the 21st. It’s easy to lose track when you’re spending most of your time stoned or sleeping.
Whatever day it is, dire deary, my condition continues to deteriorate. The whole foot is now blueish purple, while the toenails are almost black. Chuckles, however, is doing much, much better. The drugs they gave him in the hospital seem to be wearing off. No more drooling, hardly any jerky movements, and as for his mental functioning, when I woke up this morning (I’m pretty sure it was this morning) he was sitting up cross- legged with his nose buried in the BMW owner’s manual, turning the pages rapidly and apparently reading with intense concentration.
“So how’d it come out?” I quipped, when he finally closed the booklet.
To my surprise, he shut his eyes for a few seconds. I saw his eyeballs tracking left to right behind the flickering eyelids, then he opened them again. “Windshield Wipers, 71, 159,” he said, clearly and intelligibly. “Wiper Blade Replacement, 159. Wipers, intermittent, 72.”
Which proved to be the last three entries on the last page of the booklet, word for word. Far fucking out, as Big Luke used to say. A few days ago the guy’s a babbling idiot, now he can recite a 200-page car manual by heart. That’s got to be a jump of at least a hundred IQ points, which means he must have been some kind of major genius before they started drugging him. Either that, or he’s one of those, what do they call them, idiot savants.
Still April 21?
It’s dark out, dear Di, so unless I just slept something like 36 hours, I’m assuming it’s still the same day. And since I can’t seem to get back to sleep, I might as well get you caught up on recent events.
To begin with, Chuckles, or rather Asmador, as he now prefers to be called, woke me up a little while ago, dragging his Wal-Mart sleeping bag over next to mine and asking me, with a haunted look in his deep- shadowed eyes, to roll him a doobie. By the hissing light of the Coleman I twisted up a bomber, and after we’d each had a couple tokes, I asked him what was bothering him.
I was lying on my side and he was sitting up in his sleeping bag. With the lantern throwing our flickering shadows across the sloping mountain of dirt that formed the back wall of the barn, it felt like we were a couple of old-time western outlaws holed up in a cave. “It’s the Council,” he said cautiously. “The Infernal Council.”
I gave him a knowing nod. “Oh, them.”
“Yes! Them!” He leaned forward earnestly, so relieved and grateful to be taken seriously that I almost felt guilty for putting him on like that.
“What about them?”
With his mind moving faster than his tongue, it took him a few tries to explain it. The gist, I gathered, was that something called the Concilium Infernalis, or Infernal Council, which was basically hell’s board of directors, had some kind of task or mission he was supposed to complete in order to become a Council member, as opposed to (and here he’d shuddered so hard he shook the ash right off the joint), being consigned for all eternity to the ranks of the damned souls in hell. “I know I have to prove myself to them,” he repeated firmly. “But the thing is, they won’t tell me what they want me to do.” He toked up, passed the joint back to me. “They won’t even… (cough, choke)…give me a…(cough, choke)…hint.”
I took a prodigious toke, and suddenly it was like one of those astronomy or astrology deals where all the planets line up in a row. I saw clearly how our lives intersected, how our strengths and weaknesses, our needs and our abilities, meshed, and all at once I understood why fate had brought us together and led us out of Meadows Road, Asmador with his need for a mission, me with my need to have one carried out.
“Oh, but they will, my friend,” I assured him, the words streaming out of my mouth in a cloud of milky white smoke that curled upward through the stark light of the lantern like Aladdin’s genie trying to take shape. “I guarantee you, they will.”
Murphy’s farm was crawling with crime scene techs dusting for fingerprints, taking plaster tire impressions, probing the shallow grave from which they’d exhumed two decaying heads, and searching the grass at the bottom of the hill for ejected cartridges left by the warning shots Pender had fired to scare away the vultures yesterday.
Skip and Pender followed Laurel Baldinger, the sheriff’s crime scene analyst, out of the glaring daylight into the barn, where the dim light was pierced by glowing shafts of morning sunlight angling in through pinholes in the roof. Having been blindfolded during his entire stay, Skip had never actually seen the inside of the barn, but it felt eerily familiar to him all the same, as if he’d seen it in a dream.
“Do you have any idea how long Sweet might have been holed up in here?” Pender asked the CSA.
“We found a receipt from a Seven-Eleven near Marshall City dated April seventeenth.”
“That was the day the hospital blew up. He must have come directly here.”
“You mean they, plural,” she corrected him. “Almost everywhere we’re dusting, we’re finding two distinct sets of latents.”
“Couldn’t the second set have been the other victim’s, the one Skip here was tied to?”
Baldinger shook her head. “Both sets of prints are all over the barn and the van, inside and out. So whoever it was obviously had free run of the entire place. To me, that says accomplice, not victim.”
Pender turned to Skip. “Looks like we need to have another chat with Dr. Gallagher,” he said, then turned back to the analyst. “I was told you’d found something you wanted me to take a look at.”
“Yes, sir.” She handed Pender a small black pocket diary. “The reason I called you is, we found your name in it.”
Pender read the cover aloud. “1995 Pocket Pal, courtesy of your Pfizer Sales Representative, Robert F. Peterson, 2500 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, California.” He opened the book, squinted exaggeratedly, brought it up to within an inch of his nose, then held it out at arm’s length before giving up. “If you can read this, your eyes are better than mine.”
“Oh, sorry. Here.” Baldinger handed him her own round, thick-lensed magnifying glass, which had a raised rectangular inset of even higher magnifying power. It took a little experimenting, but after a few tries, he was able to make out the first sentence. “On the morning my father telephoned from Marshall City to announce that the FBI was closing in, I was in the trailer watching Teddy, my stepmother, getting dressed. …”
