Rube sat up in a sweat and tried to shake off the mix of images. Two dreams in one, both horrible memories, both repressed; but that’s what was bothering him. He’d seen a wound like that before, and it was definitely made by a harpoon.
Outside the late afternoon sun filtered weakly through the leaves of the big tree above his tiny deck. Someone had harpooned that girl, Rube was certain of it now.
He put his shoes and socks back on and plucked a lightweight nylon jacket from the back of the chair and shut the house door behind him. Rube had never said a word to his boss about the slaying of the dolphin, had just stood open-mouthed and dumbfounded and shocked. He was afraid to spill out his anger, was afraid of losing his precious job and his new promotion. In some small way he’d hated his lack of courage for years now. But he’d have to talk to Sheriff Boggert again. He had to tell the man what he knew.
The tourists had thinned out, and the going was clear. To the west, over the Pacific, the sky was turning pink from the refraction of dust in the clouds. Rube cursed his scientist’s mind as he thought it. Why ruin a pretty image like that, with the petty small knowledge of why it happened? But it was part and parcel of the animal he was, the mind he lived in, and he’d grown more accepting with age.
The pink in the clouds was quickly turning red, and Rube kept seeing the rent in the girl’s chest. She’d probably been pretty, and she was obviously young. And now she’s dead, a part of his mind screamed. Or was it some horrible accident? Was it some terrible mishap that no one wanted to report? Maybe by now someone had reported it.
Sheriff Boggert would know.
Much as Rube hated seeing the man again.
He almost missed the tiny office as he walked by with his head down, but the caustic smell of new paint made him follow his nose back.
No light inside.
Door shut and locked; he jiggled it to make sure. Hours listed said ten A M. to five P.M. It was only a few minutes past five. Rube started to walk off, then thought better of it. He stepped back to the door and took out his notepad and pen, scribbled on it, and slipped the note beneath the door. No sense irritating the authorities any more than he had to. Sheriff Boggert looked like a man who was anxious to jail someone — like a man hard put by the demands of a one-man job. Rube didn’t want to be his victim. Being new to a small town was a lot like a kid’s first day at school. The bullies and the big guys had a tendency to pick on you.
Go home, he told himself. Go back to your little place and turn on the TV and shut the front door and let it all pass.
And he started to, had turned on the sidewalk and was heading back for the east side of town, when the horn beeped and made him turn his head. Boggert’s big dog face stared at him from his big black and blue sheriff’s Jeep.
“You’re blocking traffic like that,” Rube said, still walking as the Jeep followed him down Main Street.
“Don’t matter,” Boggert called through the window. “They can go around.”
They moved on like that, a pair of old dogs sizing each other up. And in the city where Rube grew up, the people would have gone around. Here, though, in this tiny beach town, people just stayed behind the sheriff’s Jeep, forming a line of cars back to the last street.
“I left you a note,” Rube called, still walking.
“I ain’t got time to go get it.” The Jeep lurched ahead and pulled over, half blocking the sidewalk. The door popped open. “Get in, Rubekowski.”
Rube stared at the open door as though it were the open mouth of a shark.
But Rube got in. He pulled the big door shut after him, but he left his seatbelt undone in protest.
The sheriff turned a corner, still cruising, his eyes moving left and right over the shops and people. “What the note say?”
“I know how she died,” Rube said.
Boggert leaned his head back and chuckled, the sound as deep and vibrant as breakers against the sand.
“Something put a big damned hole in her, Rubekowski. That’s how she died.”
Rube shook his head in irritation. “Somebody harpooned her.”
Boggert looked angry. He glared at Rube like he might at a precocious child. “The hell you say.”
Rube stayed with the big sheriff’s eyes: they locked like lovers in an ugly embrace.
“It’s not a wound I’d forget,” Rube said. “I saw it once before.”
“You saw someone harpooned before?”
Rube hesitated. “Not exactly a person, no, but—”
“Yeah, sure,” Boggert said. He shook his big dog head. “You know, Rubekowski, we got coroner’s reports for this, and that’s what we’re waiting for.”
Rube looked away, through the big windshield. The sun was lower now, dark plucking at the buildings, and the wind had picked up. A Dixie cup splattered against the glass and Rube twitched an inch in his seat.
“Won’t the trail get cold, sheriff?”
Boggert’s eyes stabbed at Rube from across the seat. “We don’t even know, to begin with, how long she was in the water. Coulda been a couple of days. The trail is already cold.” The sheriff let it go with a tiny shake of his head, as though castigating himself for talking to this man at all.
“Besides, what do you care, Rubekowski? What’s your interest in all this?”
Rube continued to stare through the windshield. It was a Friday evening, and the tourists were starting to pack the sidewalks again. As though L.A. and San Francisco had emptied their streets, had set the wanderers loose to rape and pillage... the way Rube felt Mercer Chemical had raped and pillaged, with methods too insidious to bring to trial. Subtle hurts upon the public. Subtle acts against nature. And what was his interest in the case? What answer could he give this bulldog of a man who worked for the public good?
“It’s the indecency of it.” Rube moved his hands in the air as though he could draw a picture the sheriff could understand. “The way someone just punctured her body with a harpoon, as if she were a fish — something less than human.”
For the first time, Boggert smiled. It wasn’t a smile that Rube would have liked over a friendly lunch, was more of a contemptuous sneer. “You think death is pretty, all wrapped in neat motives and easy death? Some sigh where the actress turns her head left and quietly passes away?” The big man snorted and burst into a quick but nasty laugh of derision.
Maybe Rube did. Maybe that’s what he expected. Something from a TV tube or big screen where the blood was makeup and the actress opened her eyes and walked away. But this lady wasn’t walking, had lain bloated and violated, and no one even knew her name. Rube remembered her tattered green dress, a sheath that was torn too badly even to serve as a shroud.
“Do you know yet... who she is?”
Boggert snapped his gaze back to Rube’s. “Was, you mean?”
Rube met his eyes with shock that quickly wore to a sad kind of moisture, as though he’d picked up a small piece of dirt in the corner of his eye. At least he explained it to his inner self that way.
“Yeah, was,” Rube said. “Who was she?”
The sheriff’s face went stone hard and cold. “Somebody’s little girl. Somebody’s loved one.” His voice, gruff now and husky, skipped a beat. “Somebody’s... hate. I’m not gonna to tell you who she was; there’s no reason for you to know.”
The sheriff coughed to cover his emotion, as if feeling were a mistake he wouldn’t make again. Not soon.
Rube could only nod and blink his wet eyes as the twilight sun closed in on the tiny tourist town and its evening shoppers.