An innocent man would have been baffled by my statement. Harlo stared at me, his eyes suddenly owlish not with wisdom but with fear.
'On that night,' I said, 'you took with you three small squares of white felt.'
One hand still on the wheel, Harlo looked away from me, through the windshield, as if willing the Pontiac to move.
'After using the girl, you collected some of her virgin blood with the squares of felt.'
Harlo shivered. His face flushed red, perhaps with shame.
Anguish thickened my voice. 'They dried stiff and dark, brittle like crackers.'
His shivers swelled into violent tremors.
'You carry one of them with you at all times.' My voice shook with emotion. 'You like to smell it. Oh, God, Harlo. Sometimes you put it between your teeth. And bite on it.'
He threw open the driver's door and fled.
I'm not the law. I'm not vigilante justice. I'm not vengeance personified. I don't really know what I am, or why.
In moments like these, however, I can't restrain myself from action. A kind of madness comes over me, and I can no more turn away from what must be done than I can wish this fallen world back into a state of grace.
As Harlo burst from the Pontiac, I looked down at Penny Kallisto and saw the ligature marks on her throat, which had not been visible when she had first appeared to me. The depth to which the garroting cloth had scored her flesh revealed the singular fury with which he had strangled her to death.
Pity tore at me, and I went after Harlo Landerson, for whom I had no pity whatsoever.
TWO
BLACKTOP TO CONCRETE, CONCRETE TO GRASS, ALONG-side the house that lay across the street from Mrs. Sanchez's place, through the rear yard, to a wrought-iron fence and over, then across a narrow alleyway, up a slumpstone wall, Harlo Landerson ran and clambered and flung himself.
I wondered where he might be going. He couldn't outrun either me or justice, and he certainly couldn't outrun who he was.
Beyond the slumpstone wall lay a backyard, a swimming pool. Dappled with morning light and tree shadows, the water glimmered in shades of blue from sapphire to turquoise, as might a trove of jewels left by long-dead pirates who had sailed a sea since vanished.
On the farther side of the pool, behind a sliding glass door, a young woman stood in pajamas, holding a mug of whatever brew gave her the courage to face the day
When he spotted this startled observer, Harlo changed directions toward her. Maybe he thought he needed a shield, a hostage. Whatever, he wasn't looking for coffee.
I closed on him, snared his shirt, hooked him off his feet. The two of us plunged into the deep end of the pool.
Having banked a summer's worth of desert heat, the water wasn't cold. Thousands of bubbles like shimmering showers of silver coins flipped across my eyes, rang against my ears.
Thrashing, we touched bottom, and on the way up, he kicked, he flailed. With elbow or knee, or foot, he struck my throat.
Although the impeding water robbed the blow of most of its force, I gasped, swallowed, choked on the taste of chlorine flavored with tanning oil. Losing my grip on Harlo, I tumbled in slow-mo through undulant curtains of green light, blue shadow, and broke the surface into spangles of sunshine.
I was in the middle of the pool, and Harlo was at the edge. He grabbed the coping and jacked himself onto the concrete deck.
Coughing, venting atomized water from both nostrils, I splashed noisily after him. As a swimmer, I have less potential for Olympic competition than for drowning.
On a particularly dispiriting night when I was sixteen, I found myself chained to a pair of dead men and dumped off a boat in Malo Suerte Lake. Ever since then, I've had an aversion to aquatic sports.
That man-made lake lies beyond the city limits of Pico Mundo. Malo Suerte means 'bad luck.'
Constructed during the Great Depression as a project of the Works Progress Administration, the lake originally had been named after an obscure politician. Although they have a thousand stories about its treacherous waters, nobody around these parts can quite pin down when or why the place was officially renamed Malo Suerte.
All records relating to the lake burned in the courthouse fire of 1954, when a man named Mel Gibson protested the seizure of his property for nonpayment of taxes. Mr. Gibson's protest took the form of self-immolation.
He wasn't related to the Australian actor with the same name who would decades later become a movie star. Indeed, by all reports, he was neither talented nor physically attractive.
Now, because I hadn't been burdened on this occasion by a pair of men too dead to swim for themselves, I reached the edge of the pool in a few swift strokes. I levered myself out of the water.
Having arrived at the sliding door, Harlo Landerson found it locked.
The pajamaed woman had disappeared.
As I scrambled to my feet and started to move, Harlo backed away from the door far enough to get momentum. Then he ran at it, leading with his left shoulder, his head tucked down.
I winced in expectation of gouting blood, severed limbs, a head guillotined by a blade of glass.
Of course the safety pane shattered into cascades of tiny, gummy pieces. Harlo crashed into the house with all his limbs intact and his head still attached to his neck.
Glass crunched and clinked under my shoes when I entered in his wake. I smelled something burning.
We were in a family room. All the furniture was oriented toward a big-screen TV as large as a pair of refrigerators.
The gigantic head of the female host of the
In this open floor plan, the family room flowed into the kitchen with only a breakfast bar intervening.
The woman had chosen to make a stand in the kitchen. She gripped a telephone in one hand and a butcher knife in the other.
Harlo stood at the threshold between rooms, trying to decide if a twentysomething housewife in too-cute, sailor-suit pajamas would really have the nerve to gut him alive.
She brandished the knife as she shouted into the phone. 'He's inside, he's right
Past her, on a far counter, smoke poured from a toaster. Some kind of pop-up pastry had failed to pop. It smelled like strawberries and smoldering rubber. The lady was having a bad morning.
Harlo threw a bar stool at me and ran out of the family room, toward the front of the house.
Ducking the stool, I said, 'Ma'am, I'm sorry about the mess,' and I went looking
