The cop studied his license, then the registration. “Mr. Hollis. Jackson Hollis.”
“Yes.” His voice shook, but the cop didn’t seem to notice. “Yes, that’s correct.”
“Keokuk Street address current?”
“Yes.”
“West side. Not on your way home, then?”
“Out for a drive. Truth is, Officer, I had a fight with my wife. A real screamer. If you’re married, you know how it can be sometimes.”
“I’m married.” Empathy in his tone? Maybe a little. “Alcohol involved? Before, during, or since?”
“No. Nothing all day.”
“Mind stepping out of your car?”
“Not at all. If you’d like me to take a Breathalyzer test...”
“Just step out, sir.”
He obeyed, unbending in slow segments, standing ruler-backed with his arms at his sides. The cop held the light on him for a few seconds, then told him to wait there and returned to his cruiser. Hollis squinted against the glare of the headlights. He couldn’t see what the cop was doing inside, but he thought he knew: checking to see if there were any outstanding warrants against him.
Another car crept by, the driver’s face framed briefly in the side window, gawking. Felon by the roadside, caught. He shook the thought away, tried to will himself into a kind of sleep mode the way a computer is programmed to do. No good; his mind kept churning. Was there anything to make the cop suspicious? No, not even an unpaid parking ticket on his driving record. He had nothing to worry about if he just cooperated, kept his head, masked his emotions.
It seemed a long time before the cop emerged again. He didn’t approach Hollis; instead he stood just off the Lexus’s rear bumper, in the headlight wash, and began writing in a slender book. Ticket... writing out a ticket. He took his time doing it, glancing up a couple of times. One of the glances seemed to hold on the trunk. No, not the trunk, the license plate. Hollis could feel sweat trickling on him, in spite of the cold night air. Less than five feet between the cop and what lay inside the trunk... what if a sixth sense told him something was wrong? What if he came up and said, “Mind opening your trunk, Mr. Hollis?” All over then. Nowhere to run, nothing more to cover up except Eric’s involvement. He’d say that he killed Rakubian, he’d say he went to the city to talk to him and they argued and Rakubian attacked him and he’d acted in self-defense...
The cop finished writing and moved toward him. Hollis stood rigid.
And the cop said, “Okay,” and extended the ticket. He took it automatically; a little gust of wind tried to tear it from his fingers and he tightened his grip. “Sorry to have to write you up, but running a stop sign the way you did can cause a serious accident.”
“Yes.
“Better be more careful from now on.”
“Yes.”
“Might want to go on home instead of doing any more driving around. Patch things up with your wife.”
“Yes.” As if his brain had slipped into a one-word loop.
“Good luck,” the cop said, and made a little gesture with his forefinger that was half warning and half salute, and turned away.
Hollis shut himself inside the Lexus. Good luck. Jesus, good luck! It took him two tries to turn the ignition, a few seconds more to steady himself before he eased out onto the road.
The cop followed him. He’d expected that; he drove well within the legal limit, straight down Crater Road to the intersection with East Valley Road. Full stop at the sign there, flick the turn signal for a left onto East Valley. He made the turn, and again the cop followed, hanging back by a hundred yards or so and matching his speed as he accelerated.
Hollis’s eyes kept skipping between the road and the rearview mirror. What if he follows me all the way home? I can’t go home with Rakubian in the car, I can’t do that. Have to stop somewhere, 7-Eleven, service station... shake him somehow and pray I don’t run into him again. If he spots me driving back this way he’ll wonder what I’m up to, maybe pull me over again, demand to look inside the trunk...
The trailing lights abruptly cut away: the cop had turned off onto the road paralleling Crater, heading back toward town.
He was alone again, safe again, with Rakubian’s corpse.
The corkscrew climb into the hills seemed to go on and on endlessly. He felt exposed up here, too, like a bug crawling across a piece of glass; headlights on these mountain roads could be seen for miles, all across the valley and the town. But not tonight — he kept reminding himself of that, for all the good it did. Tonight there was haze in the valley and along the spine of the hills, a thin river of fog flowing down from the north that blurred the distant lights. Another thing in his favor, another reminder: nobody paid any attention to headlights in the Paloma Mountains, took them for granted. If he came upon another car, even a county sheriff’s patrol, the occupants would assume he lived here or was visiting someone who did. The only thing he had to worry about now was driving slow and careful on the sharper turns.
He was still afraid.
The encounter with the cop had solidified his fear, jammed it down tight inside him. It would not break loose until he was finished with Rakubian, maybe not even then. He wondered if it would stay with him long after tonight, for as long as he lived, a different kind of cancer inexorably eating away at him.
He needed to pee again. His bladder felt huge, an overinflated sac with needles attached to the outside... bloated and stabbing pains both. Partway up the winding road, in a little copse of trees, he stopped the car and got out and unzipped. The burning, this time, was acute enough to make him grit his teeth. But he was done quickly for a change, and the pains were gone by the time he started driving again.
He reached the gate to the Chesterton property without seeing another set of headlights. Unlock the gate, drive through, relock it behind him. Tires crunching gravel as he crawled along the newly built road. The construction site loomed ahead, dead-still and full of broken shadow shapes. Thin curls of mist drifting through the headlamp beams made it seem an even eerier place — like a cemetery in the dead of night. Some of the shapes appeared and disappeared as he swung in among them, and his mind turned them into graveyard images: foundation slabs and staked sections became burial plots, portable toilets became headstones, Dulac’s trailer and the heavy equipment became chimerical crypts.
His mouth was dry, his face hot, as if he might be running a fever. His consciousness began to shrivel again. Defense mechanism, and he didn’t fight it this time. The only way he would be able to get through what lay ahead was to do it mechanically — an android drone functioning on programmed circuitry.
He braked long enough to orient himself, crawled ahead at an angle toward the wine cellar excavation. The beams picked it out; it might have been a mine shaft cut into the hillside, or an unfinished mausoleum. Tiered rock and dirt gleamed a short distance to the right. He drove as close as he could to the hillside, turning the wheel to bring the rear end around and his lights full on the earth dump. When he shut them off, the darkness pressed down so thickly it was as though he’d gone blind. The illusion brought a brief twist of panic; he opened the door to put the dome light on, kept it open for several seconds after he swung out. Then he stood blinking, scanning left and right, until his eyes adjusted.
Cold up here, but not as cold as it had been in San Francisco. Not as much wind, either, the fog moving in slow, sinuous patterns. Cricket sound rose and fell; the wind carried the faint rattle of disturbed branches, the odors of pine, madrone, damp earth. The lights of Los Alegres were smeary pinpricks in the ragged veil of fog.