The scanner was quiet, the static hum of the early-morning calm. Even killers sleep. He switched it off, clicked a cassette tape of Marvin Gaye, and stared at the map.
“Ah, things ain’t what they used to be, no no…”
He pictured the woman on the floor of her kitchen tonight, contorted with stiffened muscles, and that memory collided with the memory of Emma falling off Gus. The way she went down—backward, headfirst—was just the way it had happened to his father. Sitting there on Tin Man, he was terrified Emma was going to break her neck. He was sure of it, and he couldn’t shake the feeling of that knowledge; for a moment, in his heart, she had died. Talk about an atmospheric disruption.
“Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east…” Marvin crooned.
The afternoon of the day his father was killed, they had been pushing the cattle into Bommer Canyon, where the grass was still knee-high. His father, up on the ridge, herded the cows toward Ben, down in the flats. A heifer was bawling at a clump of manzanita, her cries echoing off the limestone wall of the hillside. It was early summer, just a few months after birthing season, and when Ben came up along the side of the cow he saw her calf in the bushes, its head flopping up and down. Camouflaged in the brush, a mountain lion had its nose buried in the calf’s stomach, devouring the still-living animal’s intestines. The lion was ten feet away, just ten feet. Ben could have taken a shot, could have blasted open the lion’s skull, but his stomach upended and he dry-heaved into the bushes. By the time Ben got his stomach back, his father was racing down the hill, popping off shots at the lion. All three shots missed, and the lion bolted up the rocks, all claws and sinew, into the deep brush beyond.
“Put that animal out of his misery,” Ben’s father said to him, before he heeled his horse into pursuit down the finger canyon.
Ben stood there, his .22 in hand, watching the dying calf. Behind him, the heifer bawled, a sound he never imagined an animal could make—something almost human about it. Ben heard the clap of his father’s rifle echo down the canyon, and he cocked his own rifle. But Ben couldn’t make his finger work; he was eleven and his mind wouldn’t send the necessary impulse to his finger. He watched the calf’s head go rigid in the underbrush before he sighted the space between its eyes and pulled the trigger. A useless cover for his cowardice.
“Wipe those tears,” his father had said when he got back. Two important lessons: Kill when necessary, and don’t cry about it. You’re almost twelve, for Christ’s sake, not a little kid anymore.
They hunted the lion up Moro Ridge, rode a deer trail along the cleft of the hill, the evening sun cutting geometry out of the ridges, the grass in the valley below bruising purple in the approaching fog. They rode for three hours, down into splinter canyons, both their rifles cocked, picking along the edge of limestone outcroppings as the fog blanketed the sage and manzanita, the gray sky swallowing the gray hillsides, the clouds erasing the landscape.
It was nearly dark when they left, fogged in and sunless, and the paved road was so new on the landscape that Ben forgot it was there until he heard the clip-clop of his father’s horse’s hooves. Ben’s horse, Comet, balked at the cement, and Ben steadied him just in time to see a streak of green metal flash in front of the horse’s nose. A Chevelle, a ’66, he was sure of it. It never stopped, just appeared out of the darkness and clipped the hindquarters of his father’s horse. In the headlights, the horse spun, and in the taillights, Ben watched his father and the horse flop into the ditch.
His father’s neck was snapped against an aluminum irrigation pipe, his body horribly still. His father’s horse stood, miraculously, at the bottom of the ditch, a two-inch gash bleeding on his hindquarter. Ben stumbled into the ditch, tried his father’s pulse, held his hand to his father’s open mouth, hoping for a breath, but necks weren’t meant to turn that way. Crying, Ben tried three times to run the horse out of the irrigation ditch, the dry ground giving beneath their weight, until he found a purchase on the cement and led the horse out. He walked both horses home to the barn, cleaned the cuts with Betadine, combed the sweat out of each, and put them in their stables for the night. He must have been out there for forty-five minutes, the wires gone crazy in his head.
And three hours later, after Ben had told his mother, after the sheriff had pulled his father’s body out of the ditch and inspected the horse’s wound, after he’d taken a statement and declared to Ben and his mother that the police would find the car, Ben’s mother eyed him across the kitchen table.
“You put the horses away,” she said, swollen pillows of skin beneath her eyes. “Why didn’t you come get me immediately?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Shock, Ben knew now, but then he didn’t know why, had no way to explain it.
“You left him there and cleaned the horses?” She narrowed her eyes as if she identified something new in him that she didn’t like, and she looked at it hard. “Maybe he could have been—”
He burst out sobbing. His mother’s eyes softened then and she held out her arms and he tried to curl his eleven-year-old body, all lanky legs and knobby joints, into her lap.
Now he sat on the metal folding chair and listened to the freeway rush, the white noise of millions of cars speeding on pavement, Marvin singing, the boards and slats moaning in the wind. One shot, and none of it would have happened. If he’d made that one shot and killed the mountain lion, his father might still be alive. He thought about that a lot—when he was a kid, after his mother remarried, when he went off to the police academy, even now: the necessary things left undone.
The wind was picking up again, and through the open barn door he watched the trees bend, their thin bodies outlined by the orange glow of the distant city. There was a killer out there somewhere, a woman’s body growing cold on a stainless-steel table at the county medical examiner’s office. A gust scuttled sand across the floor of the barn. Ben pulled a red pin from a bowl and stabbed it into the map at the Mission Viejo address. He shut off the lights and sat in the dark, the trees arcing and swaying, arcing and swaying.
3
AT 6:07 THE NEXT MORNING, he got the call. He stumbled, half asleep still, from the couch to the kitchen to grab the phone off the hook.
“Sleeping in today, huh, Ben?” It was Ken Brady, the overnight desk sergeant.
“Yeah, Ken,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Beauty sleep.”
He had finally crawled into bed at 4:12 and tossed until 4:53 before retiring to the couch, listening to the house beams buckle and moan in the wind, before nodding off into a half sleep.