Light Before Day Page 6

  I suppressed my gag reflex and put an arm around his back. I led him inside the building and through a maze of brightly lit stale-smelling hallways. When I asked him where his apartment was, he pointed toward a door that was pounding with bass beats.

  I asked him who was inside and he put his forehead against his closed fists. I wondered if the pose was a method for keeping the drugs in his brain.

  When I opened the unlocked door, I was hit by a stronger version of the stench that came from Nate. Towels and blankets had been nailed over the apartment's windows. The only light in the room came from a porn film playing on a tiny television set in the corner. The sole piece of furniture was an overstuffed sofa, and there were four naked guys on it. Two older men with stripes of bristle down their lean torsos lowered a rail-thin blond kid onto the condomless erection of the man who sat below him. The kid's flaccid penis spilled from his cock ring like an elephant's tail. It took me a second to realize that the red spots on it were the result of extreme chafing.

  "Party's over, guys!" I announced. "I hate to tell you guys this, but I've been watching everything on the camera inside that smoke detector, and I had to call the FBI. They'll be here in five minutes."

  The men scrambled to get out. Three of them made for the front door. "Get dressed first!" I barked. Each one of them had shed his clothes in a different part of the apartment, but they were dressed and out the front door in the blink of an eye, which shouldn't have surprised me considering they were speed freaks. Once they were gone, I looked up and saw that Nate was one step ahead of me: the smoke detector had been covered with newspaper.

  I walked Nate into the bedroom and dropped him onto the mattress on the floor. The sheet was so badly stained it looked like it had been lifted from an auto body shop, and the piles of dirty laundry gave off a smell like rank water poured over cut grass. It took me a second to realize that the piles were sorted by color. In the tiny bathroom, I found three bottles of Viagra in the medicine cabinet. Crystal meth lights a fire under some men's sex drives, but it also turns their equipment to mush. But there was also a bottle of Xanax, just as I had expected there would be. Two-milligram pills. The good stuff.

  I dumped several into my palm and asked Nate if he could swallow without water. He just stared at his laundry. In the kitchen I opened the cabinets and discovered that Nate had smashed through the back of them with a hammer, pulled coils of wiring through, and taped the individual strands to the shelves in a pattern that made sense only to him. I found a dirty glass and scrubbed it as if I'd retrieved it from a sewer pipe.

  Once the pills were in him, Nate rolled onto his back, his eyes wide and his chest red and heaving, and started picking at the skin on his left arm. I asked him to stop and he told me he would as soon as he could feel his arm again.

  For a while, I just stared down at him. My Daniel Brady story was dying on the vine. I had just been fired from the only media outlet I had access to, and my only source was a speed freak who believed that an organism had taken up residence behind his eye and that the Department of Homeland Security was having him tailed. I did believe that Nate had seen Daniel Brady in West Hollywood, but I didn't think there was a chance in hell I could make anyone else believe it too.

  I wanted to hurt him as much as he was hurting himself. That's when I realized that pursuing Daniel Brady and Scott Koffler had been nothing more than an attempt to escape from myself, and I felt a sudden surge of guilt that kept me from shaking the gasping deranged wreck of a young man before me.

  The look in Nate's eyes told me that he was seeing eight of me or none at all. I leaned against the wall until his eyes started to drift shut; then I went into the living room where I pulled the blankets and towels from the windows and stacked them next to the sofa. Screw Nate's privacy. If he got any more privacy, it would probably kill him.

  I checked on him again and saw that he lay limp and twisted on the mattress, as if he had been dropped from the Emser Tile building. I put one hand to his bare chest to make sure he was still breathing.

  Out in the hallway, Nate's neighbor was standing in the open door to his apartment. He was tall and lean, with a shiny bald dome and sympathetic eyes behind invisible-framed glasses.

  "You guys finished yet?" he asked in a soft, high-pitched voice.

  "I wasn't with that crew," I said.

  "I've talked to that kid," he whispered. "Back in my day, the drugs were about the search for the soul. That drug is about getting rid of it."

  "Are you sober?" I asked.

  "Twenty years," he said. "You?"

  "Forty-eight hours."

  He disappeared inside his apartment. When he returned, he handed me a business card printed with his first name and last initial, along with his home and mobile numbers. The guy was obviously a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. "Your generation," he said quietly. "You die too quickly to get anyone's attention."

  After he went back inside his apartment, I turned and slid the card under Nate's door, even though I knew that I was the one the man had tried to reach out to.

  Rod Peters had left three messages for me expressing his condolences and asking me to meet him for dinner. He made no mention of Jim, the former Scott's kid he had been trying to locate. I figured he had assumed I had dropped the story.

  The six o'clock news had just started when I heard a harsh knock on my door. I thought it might be one of my neighbors, but when I opened the door, Scott Koffler brushed past me before I had time to collect myself.

  "How'd you get in?" I asked him.

  "Your neighbor's nice," he said.

  I leaned against the edge of the open door as he studied the Krewe of Dionysus poster above my love seat. He was wearing a backward baseball cap and a USC Trojans football jersey. I still couldn't tell if his costume was a device for earning the trust of his young charges or if the guy genuinely lived in a state of perpetual adolescence.

  "How's not drinking going?" he asked, giving me his full attention. "I hear you had a rough day."

  "You need to leave, Scott."

  He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. "I thought you were a southern gentleman.

  You're not even going to offer me anything to drink?"

  "There's a sink right behind you."

  His silent laugh shook his shoulders. "Does the name Dale Dupre ring a bell?" he asked.

  It didn't, but I had a feeling Koffler was going to ring it for me.

  "Dale's from your hometown. I knew him when he lived out here. He wanted to be an actor, did some porn, ran back home—same old story. Anyway, he's a bartender at this club down in the French Quarter now. I understand it's one of your old haunts. Dale says you visited his bar after your mother's funeral. You remember?"

  I didn't. I couldn't remember anything about the night of my mother's funeral except calling my sister from a French Quarter pay phone because I couldn't find my rental car.

  "Dale says you told him that there were witnesses to the accident that killed your mother, and they claim that your mother was fighting with her boyfriend just before it happened. Apparently the boyfriend came to the funeral and sobbed to everyone about how he hadn't pushed her."

  My pulse sounded like a tribal drumbeat in my temples.

  "But the next thing you told Dale ..." Scott shook his head. "Dale says he'll never forget it.

  Do you remember, Adam?"

  "Get out, Scott."

  "You said if the guy had pushed her, you would understand."

  His eyes went wide and then his head snapped sideways on his neck. I felt the impact in my fist as I retracted it.

  He hit the floor like a sack of dirt and made a sound like a window unit in August. I grabbed the back of his belt and hoisted him up on all fours.

  He hit the door across the hall from mine hard enough to shake the wall. He rolled over onto his back, and I saw that his nostrils were bubbling and his lips were smeared red. His dead eyes met mine. "You're too easy," he breathed.

  He sat up, w
iped blood from his face, then stared down at his red palm. "You're just too fucking easy," he croaked.

  I heard a door down the hall open just as I closed mine. One of my neighbors was calling after Scott as he walked down the hallway. I leaned against my door until the hallway was silent and the only sounds I could hear were Scott's car pulling off down the street and my own breaths whistling through my nostrils.

  When I reached the Strip, a sheriff's cruiser was parked in the median across from Keyclub, where a line of Goth kids waited to gain admittance to see some band whose name kept flashing on the Jumbotron above the entrance. I had never heard of them. I heard a squeal of brakes and saw the crime scene photograph that depicted my mother's death pose. Now her outstretched arm was not pointing in the direction of the cab that had run her down at forty miles an hour. She was telling me to walk past her fate. In life, my mother had never been so direct or so caring. In death, she had no choice but to become everything I chose to endow her with.

  I felt as if my mind were encased in steel and every thought inside my head had tried to escape a few seconds too late, clanging the walls of their prison until my ears screamed. The next thing I knew, I had turned my back on the Sunset Strip, a river of bass beats and heterosexual aggression, and was walking into the tree-shaded blocks that sloped downhill.

  At the door to Nate Bain's building, I studied the call box and determined the apartment number for the sober neighbor who had given me the card I had left for Nate. I don't remember what I said when he answered his buzzer. The neighbor opened his door for me without asking me what I was doing there. I sat at his small dining room table as he fixed a pot of tea.

  "There's blood on your shirt," he finally remarked. I didn't respond, which didn't seem to bother him. He handed me a cup of tea and sat down across from me. The overhead light bounced off his glasses, hiding his eyes, and gave a moist sheen to one side of his bald head.

  He sipped his tea and allowed a long silence to pass between us. "You're going to stay here until two A.M.," he said gently. "You can watch TV with me. You can sit right there and stare into your own head. You can even go in my bedroom and entertain yourself with the Men of Falcon.

  But you don't leave this apartment until two A.M. Deal?"

  Two A.M. was when the bars and liquor stores closed. I nodded. "What do you guys talk about at your meetings?" I heard myself ask.

  "Everything." He sipped his tea. "There's a midnight meeting I know of over in Hollywood.

  You want to go?"

  When I didn't respond, he smiled slightly and rose from the table.

  "I don't want to die like my mother."

  I heard his footsteps stop behind me and realized I had given voice to the thought.

  "You won't, honey," he said gently. "You'll die just like you."

  A few seconds later, he raised the volume on the television. The apartment filled with the sound of enervated British people discussing petty trifles as if they were of global consequence. The longer I listened, the less petty their trifles seemed. After a while, I joined my strange companion on the sofa. Eventually I nodded off, and when I awoke, my guardian was tugging gently on my shoulder. It was ten after two, and he was telling me that I had made it through another day.

  He closed the door behind me before I could thank him or ask him his name. As I walked back to my apartment, I cried for my mother for the first time since she died. My tears didn't last as long as I had feared they would.

  Coalinga, California Same Night

  In 1891, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company established the small town of Coalinga at the northern end of the narrow valley that lies between the Coast Ranges and the Kettleman Hills. It was named for the coal discovered under its soil, and today it is the only mining boom-town in California to have survived into the twenty-first century. Over the years, it had subsisted off what was once the largest oil field in California, the cattle ranches that lie in the hills to the west, and one of the only small-town medical centers to be constructed with a federal grant in recent memory.

  At night, the sodium vapor lights of Avenal State Prison throw an orange glow across the tule-blanketed hills to the south. Highway 198 marks the town's southern border before it travels into the rolling landscape of grassy plateaus and rounded hills that make up the Inner Coast Ranges.

  Lucy Vernon was the only clerk on duty when a young woman named Caroline Hughes pulled her silver Chevy Tahoe into the service station's parking lot, bypassed the gas pumps, and slid into the parking spot next to Mike Harberson's pickup. For the past hour, Mike and his partner in crime, Joey Murdoch, had been sitting at one of the tables next to the coffee machines, shouting things about how the Ding Dongs didn't look fresh and how it must have been a bad season for Twinkies. Lucy wasn't responding, and they had returned to snickering like South Park characters and taking sips from squeeze bottles that smelled like they were full of Drakkar Noir.

  When Caroline entered the gas station, Lucy recognized the spray of freckles across the woman's nose and forehead and the pupils that reminded her of frozen amber. There had been a picture of the woman on the front page of the Coalinga Record a few weeks earlier, taken just as Caroline Hughes emerged from the Kings County sheriff's station after identifying her mother's burned corpse.

  Lucy figured the woman's expression must have been what her grandfather referred to as a thousand-yard stare. Caroline pulled a basket from the stack without acknowledging anyone else inside the service station and disappeared into the racks.

  "Whatsa matter, Luce?" Mike Harberson called out. "You see a ghost?"

  Lucy returned her attention to the copy of US Weekly she had been flipping through and listened to Mike's shuffling footsteps. He leaned on the counter with both elbows. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his latest attempt at a beard looked like a swarm of fleas clinging to his chin.

  Mike was a nice enough guy when you got him alone. He had an almost childish affection for the nearby foothills and he liked to share it with women like Lucy, women who saw him for the jackass he was and forgave him for it.

  "Or maybe it was your special friend?" Mike whispered.

  "Your breath's gonna make me throw up," Lucy said.

  Her sharp tone brought a flash of pain to his eyes. "Hey. Look, Luce. I know I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about your—"

  He saw her glaring at him and stopped talking. For a second Lucy thought he might not mention the story she had told him a few days earlier, after he had plied her with Strawberry Boone's and lured her into his F-150 for a drive out 198 West. The sex itself had been fine. Lucy wished she had been able to keep her mouth shut once it was over with.

  Instead she had told Mike a story she had promised never to tell anyone, a story her father had repeated to her through a haze of morphine years before. It scared Mike so badly he hadn't said much for the rest of the evening. Now he was going to use it to make fun of her in some way, just so he could get it out of his head.

  "Hey, Joey!" Mike called over one shoulder. "Remember that story I was telling you about?

  Shit! What was his name again, Luce? El Mariachi or something."

  "El Maricon," Joey answered. "It's Spanish for fag."

  "Right," Mike said. "But this ain't no redecoratin', Queer Eye for the Straight Guy kinda fag now, is it, Lucy? This guy is badass, right?" He laughed nervously.

  Lucy glanced up to see Caroline looking at cleaning products, then tried to focus on an US

  Weekly photo of an emaciated former child star who had just been carted off to rehab. Mike returned his attention to his buddy. "He rides around the hills on some hog, blowin' up shit right and left. He wears a black motorcycle helmet so no one knows who he is, right? And according to Lucy here, he carries a machete on his back. You know, like, in a holster, so he can just reach up . . ."

  Mike reached up into the space behind his back, then whipped his hand forward. ". . . and whack your fucking head off like X-Men or something!" His head twitched.

/>   "I heard of him before, dumbass," Joey said. "The guy's just a fairy tale."

  Joey's comment stabbed Lucy in the gut. The story her father had told her had been far too specific and gruesome to be dismissed so easily.

  "So what do you think, Luce?" Mike asked. "You think your homo hero had anything to do with what happened down in Avenal?"

  "Shut up, Mike," Lucy said.

  Mike turned to see Caroline Hughes standing several feet behind him. She had pulled her lustrous red hair back into a ponytail and her white tank top revealed broad shoulders and biceps that were as big as a woman could make them without looking like a freak. A strange light had come into her eyes and the sight of it was enough to silence Mike Harberson where he stood.

  "I want to know what you're talking about," Caroline Hughes said. Her voice was low and hoarse. Lucy thought it might be a smoker's voice, but the woman's face was taut and unblemished, save for the gold freckles that gave it an almost muddy sheen.

  "I asked you a question," Caroline Hughes said.

  "No, you didn't," Mike answered. "You gave me an order. Bull dykes don't give orders around here. This ain't San Francisco."

  Caroline closed her eyes briefly, gave Mike a brief nod, and turned on one heel. Lucy was about to take a breath when the woman spun and landed Mike with a sucker punch that sent him stumbling backward into a rack of sunglasses.

  Before Lucy or Joey could make a sound, Caroline was on her knees, holding the back of Mike's head against her breasts with a grip so tight it looked like she would pull his stringy hair out by the roots. The knife she held to his throat had a six-inch blade and a five-fingered rubber grip on the handle.

  Tears spit from Mike's slitted eyes. Lucy almost felt sorry for him until she remembered what Caroline Hughes had been through—her mother burned to death just because she had gone to visit one of her students in trouble. Maybe Mike Harberson was finally getting the ass-kicking he deserved.

  "You've got a story to tell me," Caroline Hughes said. "Tell it."