bone until the hand came away. He struggled to his feet, spat at the body, and tramped back to the car.
He was drenched when he collapsed again behind the wheel, his wet hair dripping in his eyes. He wiped his face and placed the severed hand on the dash above the steering wheel. It was flecked with mud. The skin was a yellowish-gray color, with a knot of bloody bone and tendon congealed with nerve endings coiled in the gore. It lay there on the dash like a freshly butchered oxtail, except with fingers.
“I know a back way out of here,” Cesar said, putting the car in gear again.
A half mile on he turned into a private road. It was slick with mud and grass. Twice the car’s rear end slid sideways, edging toward the culvert running parallel to the road. Cesar slowed down then, more so than he wanted, and Shel watched as he checked the rearview mirror every few seconds, whispering to himself in Spanish.
“Where are we going?” she ventured as they rounded a stand of pear trees.
Abatangelo drove Waxman to the Vallejo waterfront. As they waited for the San Francisco-bound ferry’s final call for boarding, Abatangelo asked for pen and paper, then began to print out instructions to the coroner’s people or whoever else might find his body that night. When he noticed Waxman staring in puzzlement, he explained, “I don’t want anything I shoot disappearing if it all goes wrong.” He handed the note to Waxman. “Read it.”
The note instructed anyone who discovered Abatangelo’s remains to hand over the cameras, the film, anything found on or near him, to Bert Waxman, care of the newspaper. Waxman nodded, handed the note back and said, “Thank you.”
Abatangelo put the note inside an envelope which he marked, IMPORTANT, then sealed it shut. He then perforated one end of the envelope with his pen tip, unlaced his scapular, threaded the lace through the hole in the envelope, knotted the lace back together again and hung the envelope around his neck. It lay flat against his chest beside the image of the dying St. Dismas.
“What I said back at the hotel,” Abatangelo said, “about Shel, if she isn’t dead already, you killed her? That was unfair.”
Waxman shrugged. “I suppose,” he replied, “when all is said and done, there will be blame enough to go around for everybody.” He chafed his hands between his knees, trying to warm them. “I still maintain it would be best if the authorities were notified.”
“No, Wax, no authorities. I lack your confidence there.”
“Confidence has nothing to do with it. People like Moreira and Facio wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the authorities.”
“Nicely put.”
“But we’re talking about a crime.”
“I don’t know about it,” Abatangelo said. “I heard some garbled trash from a suicidal tweak. You don’t know anything, either, Wax. Everything Frank spewed out is just stuff. Until I come back with the goods, you’d be a fool to believe him. Besides which, if the boys in Homicide didn’t believe you when you told them what I said, I hardly think your credibility will get better when the source is Frank.”
Waxman made a helpless gesture of acceptance. With difficulty, he confessed, “I’m afraid for you.”
Abatangelo smiled at the thoughtfulness. He’d put Waxman through a lot these past two days, manipulating him, cajoling him, accusing him of falsity and begging off when it came time to need him all over again. And in the face of all that, Waxman, for all his faults, had demonstrated a mindful persistence that, in light of his obvious fear, spoke of real courage. Now, Abatangelo thought, he’s saying he fears for me.
“I won’t be any safer if you call the law, Wax,” he said. “I’d probably end up getting tagged with everybody else, and in jail I’m obscenely easy to kill. Besides which, if this trade really is going down, and the cops walk into the middle of it, things’ll go crazy. And in that kind of chaos, with people like this and the heat I’m sure they’re going to bring, Shel’s life won’t be worth the breath it takes to talk about it.”
The ferry for San Francisco began boarding. Waxman glanced at it, then asked, sensing time was short, “Do you honestly think she’ll be there?”
Abatangelo smiled despondently and looked away. “Yes. I honestly do.”
“Alive?”
He remembered the article Waxman had recited to Facio, about the woman left bleeding in the jungle for the insects, the women hung from trees with their dead babies tied to their backs. “No,” he confessed. “But if her body’s there, I want to be the one to claim it.” The ferry sounded three short blasts from its whistle. “Thanks for all you’ve done, Wax. I mean that. Do the story proud, you tweedy motherfucker. No matter what I bring back. Or don’t bring back.”
Waxman blushed and adjusted his glasses. “Yes, sir. Good luck.” He exited the car and waved like a man trying to convince himself the farewell was not final. Then he turned away and hurried through drizzle up the slick gangplank and onto the ferry.
As Abatangelo drove back to the marina, the mist created a slick, oily veneer across the asphalt. It sent a chill through the air, too, and he warded off intimations of death as he peered past the wipers and the rain-streaked windshield at the road. He considered stopping at a liquor store, a pint for warmth, but decided drink would only make him moodier. Get any more depressed, he thought, and you’ll start singing.
When he got to the marina he drove through slowly. The boats sat high and dark in the rising tide, hulls bumping faintly against the sagging pier. No dogs barked as the car drifted past, nor was anyone about to scowl at his presence. It made him wonder if a little forewarning had gone around. He came abreast of the sawhorses he’d seen that afternoon and spotted what he wanted among the debris.
Turning off the ignition he sat awhile, listening. Steam purled off the hood. A wind chime made of sawed-off bottles rattled dully in the rain. He opened the door, navigated the mud troughs in the road, and gathered up a paint-spattered tarpaulin. Scudding back to the car he folded it into his trunk.
Wiping his hands on the upholstery, he drove on to the wall and looked out across the funnels of tall damp grass caught in his headlights. With the rain he’d leave a visible trail, so he’d have to go in from the back.
He drove down to where the access road turned back toward the highway and parked deep in a tree-high thicket of oleander. Opening the trunk he moved the tarp aside and opened his canvas camera bag. He wished he had a clearer idea of what might actually happen. As it was, he’d just drag everything out to the incinerator and improvise. Anything was possible, a shoot-out, a wank fest, a lot of rough talk followed by business as usual. His hands shook. He put the car jack in the camera bag then zipped it closed, hefted it from the trunk and started back, the tarp folded beneath his arm.
His shoes skated along the grass and mud, and by the time he made it to the lone oak tree looming above the grass, he was soaked to the skin. He took a moment in the shelter of the tree to get his bearings, then headed in across the field, keeping to the fence line until he was right behind the incinerator, then made straight for it from the rear, taking long strides to leave as few marks as possible in the sodden grass.
Once inside the incinerator shelter he knelt down, threw the tarp over the top and took out the jack. Assembled and at full height it pushed the tarp up just slightly, enough for a window. He loaded each of the cameras with 3200 black-and-white, feeling the leader onto the sprockets in the darkness. Removing the lens from one camera, he screwed the Passive Light Intensifier onto the camera body, then fit the lens onto the end of the PLI. He set up the tripod and adjusted its height, securing the camera onto it, then looking out through the viewer at the shimmering green phantoms, the grainy, vaguely 3-D effect. He could make out individual bricks in the windbreak. Beyond it the water resembled a stretch of whitish, undulating sand. The vertical and horizontal hatch marks of the sight met in a central circle which he focused straight ahead at a point ten yards beyond the nearest stretch of wall.
The second camera he fitted with a flash and a 35-105 zoom, setting it for autofocus and hanging it from his neck. If he ended up close to anybody he’d let go with that, using a fill flash to make sure he got a decent exposure. The third camera, fitted with a standard 55 and a second flash, he left in the bag in case one of the other two jammed.
He settled back to wait. Over time the rain stiffened, the wind picked up. His legs cramped from the cold and he chafed his wet clothing for warmth. The wound at his temple inflicted by Frank started throbbing again. Eventually he withdrew Shel’s letter from inside his coat pocket and fingered it. He reached inside the envelope, felt the hand-worn paper, recalled the spidery handwriting, not needing light to see it. He pictured her not as he’d seen her last, brutalized by Frank, but as he’d known her long ago, when life still seemed tinged with luck- saw her in a denim shirt and painter pants, sitting barefoot on the porch of a rented beach house near Santa Barbara, wind in her hair, staring out across the ocean with a beer bottle lodged between her legs. The West Texas drawl. The tomboy wisecracks.
