Sinister Shorts Read online

  “I'm going-back down the trail.”

  “No,” Fleck said. “It's dangerous.” He grabbed her arm, as much to support himself as to restrain her. They stood there on the dusty path in the hard sun. “C'mon. We'll get some water, then we'll go straight down.”

  She tried to shake him off. He held on.

  “Let go of me, John.”

  She started back down the trail. He took her arm again and turned her around. “No, I'm not letting you go,” he said. “We're going to get some water, then we can go back. I'm sorry if I scared you,” he was saying to her as he half-pushed her ahead of him up the trail. Silent, tearful, and exhausted, Charisse went along, which was fortunate since the immense pain that had lodged in his gut had fragmented and he could barely control his legs. Into a buzzing black shade they climbed, unable to see ahead through the psychedelic play of light and shadows beneath the canopy of leaves.

  One more steep incline. The hillside turned rocky. Off to the right, beyond the scarred hillsides, he could now see the whole bay, a vast glittering silver lagoon dotted with boats, ringed by sunlit cities, the four great bridges connecting the peninsula and the headlands of Marin and the East Bay, San Francisco on the horizon partially veiled in its mountain range of white fog, the city of Oakland spread along the water, just below their feet. It all looked so pretty from far away.

  One more thick stand of eucalyptus, and the trail abruptly delivered them out onto a flat sweep of granite. On the other side, about a hundred yards ahead, Fleck made out a rock wall, what looked like a depression. The Cave. Where the spring would be, inside and out of sight. On the right, another cliff fell away into miles of air.

  “That's it,” he said, pointing. “Water.” Just saying the word made him feel better. He must have heatstroke, plus whatever else was gnawing away inside him.

  Ducking down to enter, he nudged Charisse ahead. The dark blinded him; the coolness immediately started him shaking.

  The Cave was a small rock room, lit only by the blazing open arch where they had entered. As his eyes adjusted, he saw Charisse in the corner, her whole head under the spring, her hands splashing up clear water, drinking greedily while it flowed over her head and neck.

  Another shadow in the dark, an older man, drank water out of a tin cup, watching Charisse. Fleck put his hand against the wall and blinked several times. Some of the faintness went away. The man was a white biker type, tall and brawny, with a heavy gnarled walking stick. He stepped aside into indistinct shadows when he saw Fleck. Charisse came up for air, saw Fleck, and moved back.

  Heedless, Fleck dove for the spring.

  Freezing! It hurt, burning his head. His neck muscles spasmed. Red waves crashed inside his eyelids-

  He slid down on the hard cold floor, his back propped against the wall, choking and sputtering. “Charisse,” he gasped as soon as he could speak. “Wait a minute. I'm sick.”

  Charisse didn't answer. With a sound like a sob she turned and, lowering her head at the arch, ran outside. Fleck was gripped by sick dread. He scrabbled to get up, but he fell into a cramp.

  He had to be with her. He got to his knees, shaking his head like a bull, droplets flying off his hair. Suddenly he felt the man behind him, wrapping long arms around his chest, pinning his arms.

  His dread degenerated into physical panic and he struggled. So it was this stranger, the one he had forgotten to watch. A snap of the fingers-

  Fleck was hauled to his feet. The man stepped back, saying, “You okay, buddy?” Fleck pushed him off, walking unsteadily to the mouth of The Cave.

  His hand shading his forehead, he saw Charisse out in the glare, crossing the flat, looking so small. The sight of him made her rush off the main path, off to a narrow shaded walkway fringed by exotic red plumes of bottlebrush…

  She ran up the path where Julie died.

  Blind again, each breath a scorching effort, Fleck loped out of The Cave after her, hunched over, but she ran hard until she disappeared. It wasn't until he reached the far end of the flat and made his way to the brush that he saw the sister, the black girl who had waved at them earlier, way up the path beyond him, rising out of the eucalyptus forest behind Charisse. She had to be almost six feet tall, her hair in a natural like pictures he'd seen of Angela Davis in the sixties.

  Stepping behind Charisse, the girl wrapped her arms around her neck in a choke hold. They struggled and Charisse fell. The girl went down with her and began methodically beating Charisse's head against the rock-

  He tore up the path, his pain forgotten, the biker hollering and waving his stick, following, both trying to scare her off. The girl jumped up alertly. Charisse wasn't moving at all. Then the girl lifted a heavy stone, grunting a little, and raised it above her head, the muscles on her arms as strong and defined as the forelegs of a tiger above its kill-

  They heard her say, angrily, almost petulantly, “Renee, you stay dead this time-”

  – and Fleck shot her, from fifteen yards away. She fell slowly, as if she had all the time in the world, still holding the stone, eyes wide and startled. Her big handsome body twitched, would never move again-

  – and he was holding Charisse, crying out her name. Her eyes were closed and her hair in back was matted with blood.

  “Can you make it, pal?” the old biker said. He scooped Charisse up, and they ran down the trail, taking turns with her. Halfway down she roused and said she wanted to walk, so they supported her the rest of the way.

  ER at Alta Bates Hospital admitted her. When Fleck passed out in the waiting room, they admitted him, too, and pumped the rotten food from his stomach. “Health department closed that place down where you ate today. You're our fourth customer,” the nurse told him.

  He slept then, and a few hours later two officers he knew came to talk to him.

  Through the window in her door, on the outside looking in, he could see only the bottom part of her body on the bed, the sheets lifting and falling with her breath, one elegant hand at rest.

  She sat up, saw his face in the window, and wiggled a finger at him. “Aren't we a fine pair?” she asked when he came in, adjusting the white gauze bandages in back where hair used to be.

  He gathered her up. Neither of them talked for a long time, until she said, “You were right to bring the gun. In the camera case, wasn't it?”

  “Ex-cop, ever vigilant. I was afraid-”

  “Of me. You think everyone around you dies-”

  “You almost did. You walked into her zone.”

  “You didn't let her take me. You saved me, John.”

  Snatched her off the dangerous street, and loved her.

  “It wasn't random,” Charisse said. “She had her reasons.” She held him even tighter.

  Charisse and her big thoughts-

  Fleck wondered where she was-Renee, the woman who looked like Julie, who looked like Charisse. Out there, everywhere, women who wouldn't stay dead.

  Success Without College

  Paul van Wagoner swiveled in his desk chair, observing the bustle at the Hog's Breath Inn below, indulging himself in a pat on the back. You couldn't pick a more beautiful place on earth than Carmel, California. He'd seen the world, and remained unimpressed. What did Italy have that California didn't have? Ruins? California had missions. London? San Francisco had sexier water. Well, okay, there was no Himalaya to climb. But from his front door, it was five hours to the Sierras, max. Here he could enjoy a sea as blue as the Mediterranean and beaches lounged upon by people as cosmopolitan as any in Nice.

  He had started his morning with a steaming espresso at a sunlit café for breakfast, and finished it up with a few phone calls to organize his subcontractors for the next day. He would leave about four, he decided, and take a long fast walk up the beach, get his feet wet, let the waves bury his feet and the sandcrabs tickle his toes. In the late afternoon on a glorious blue-on-blue day like today, all the pretty women would still be out baring their midriffs to the air and his gaze. He didn't want to miss that
. And now that he had his own business, he could do as he pleased on any fine afternoon.

  After spending years getting educated on the East Coast, he loved everything about California. Even crime paid here, for him as it did in Hollywood. California could transform the most venal crime into a song and dance and success for somebody.

  He liked his work. He dealt in issues of life and death. What could be more important? And if lately the rest of his life seemed less vital than usual, well, that was subject to change. That could be remedied instantly, with a certain sway of the right someone's hip.

  Today, he had new clients coming in at two o'clock, the Maldonados, Victor and Delilah. They were parents whose son had been shot four times, allegedly by a drive-by shooter. In the hospital now, in intensive care, the teenager was just barely alive. When Paul spoke on the phone to the parents right after the incident, their son had not been expected to live.

  Matter-of-fact people who never expected a tragedy to blow their simple dreams for their son and themselves sky-high, he could tell the Maldonados had gone through several phases by the time they called him, using voices calm and hopeful. They had entered the denial phase, one that Paul recognized all too well. Years ago in Nepal, Paul had seen a woman hang a strip of cotton with inked messages on it onto a line, next to a dozen others, multicolored, at various stages of fading. She hung it there as a message to a presumably benevolent god. As the flag faded, her god absorbed the message. The Maldonados had been hanging out their prayer flag, not giving up. He didn't know what to expect from them.

  He poured himself another jolt of coffee for fortification. This part of his job could get him down.

  Victor Maldonado entered the room first. His wife trailed in behind. They sat side by side in his client chairs, not touching, but bouncing thoughts off each other the way married people did, flinging questions and arguments his way. He imagined they'd been married for a very long time. The wife's whole milk-colored face seemed to be a frame for a generous mouth with perfectly straight white teeth. Her skin had lost its youthful flush, and lines ran along the edges of her lips, but the lines told Paul about a life full of laughter and smiles.

  She didn't smile now; the face that was made to smile looked painfully tense. Her husband sat close by, tall and dark and round around the middle, his voice booming, and his body movements closely aligned to hers, responsive to her nuances, physical and verbal. They were close; Paul could see that. Good. They needed each other now. Roman, the shooting victim, nineteen years old, was their only son.

  “How's Roman?” Paul asked.

  “We called this morning,” said Victor. “They took him out of intensive care. The doctor said he was ‘cautiously optimistic.'”

  “Great,” Paul said, surprised. He had steeled himself for bad news, he realized now, as the tension in his neck relaxed, and he felt the ache of holding it stiff for the past few minutes. How amazing to be shot four times and hang in there anyway. Good for Roman. He asked them to fill him in on the events surrounding Roman's shooting.

  They explained that he had been working for two months at Taylor 's Corner Store, north, up near Gilroy, being paid under the table, in cash.

  “We can't afford college, even though he really wants to go.” Roman's mother spoke in a voice loaded with regret and guilt. “We have just enough on paper so nobody would give him the financial aid he needed, and his test scores were okay but not great. He was sick the day of the test, and too demoralized to try again. He's actually a smart kid. Always got real good grades. I worry about what's going to happen to him. You can't get anywhere today without a college education.”

  “Don't beat yourself up about that anymore, Delly. He'll get there. Have a little faith.”

  Delilah adjusted her purse on her knees. “Victor buys twenty bucks' worth of faith every week. Thanks to the lottery, he dreams away our bills, our bad health…”

  “Our mortgage,” teased her husband, shrugging, looking okay with the characterization.

  “Lord,” she said to Paul, “if dreams were real.”

  “So your son went to work to save money for college?” Paul prompted.

  “So he got this dumb job that hardly kept him in black T-shirts. He never meant to stay long, just until he could get something that paid better and had some benefits,” said Victor.

  “He should've been looking for a better job then, shouldn't he have?” his wife said. “None of this would have happened if he had a decent job. Roman's so young. He thinks he can play around, and everything will turn out right anyway.”

  “Nothing wrong with being young and expecting a lot of the world, Delly,” her husband said. “Keeps the spirit happy and engaged.”

  “His boss, Bert Taylor, has owned that store for twenty years. Now he claims Roman never worked there, that he's always run the place on his own,” Delilah went on. “But why in the world would Roman make up a job?”

  Paul could think of a few reasons. Maybe Roman had another way of making money that he felt shy talking about, or maybe he just wanted out from under his mother's eagle eye for a few minutes every day.

  “I can't see why it makes a difference,” Victor said with exasperation. “They found Roman lying out front, didn't they? It's nothing to do with his job.”

  “He's not out of the woods yet, the doctors say,” said Delilah, reality breaking through as her flag faded but her wishes remained undone. “He could still take a turn… I can't stand to think…”

  “Did you talk with Roman's boss, with Taylor, after the accident?” Paul asked.

  “Went over to the store when Roman got shot, on Sunday,” Delilah said. “The ambulance had just gone. We were going to hustle over to the hospital. But they said he wasn't expected to make it. We needed a minute… our son's blood was on the sidewalk and Taylor was inside, doing all the normal end-of-the-day stuff. Wiping counters, tidying. You know. It seemed so strange to me.”

  “You shouldn't have yelled at him, Delly,” her husband said, looking softly at his wife.

  “No, I guess not. But my son nearly died in front of his store and he's so concerned about all that blood on his precious sidewalk.”

  “People don't know what to say,” said Victor. “Keeping busy helps. You know that.”

  “But Roman wouldn't lie to me,” Mrs. Maldonado said, getting a little weepy.

  Putting an arm around his wife, Victor gave Paul a look. The brown depths of his eyes told Paul he knew their son better than his wife did. All sons lied to their mothers.

  “Have you talked to Roman since he was shot? Is he conscious?”

  Victor Maldonado picked up the thread while his wife sniffed into a tissue. “He is. He's foggy about what happened. They say it's a miracle he's survived. Nobody expected it. The police said they'd send someone over to see him today, see if he remembered anything helpful about the car.”

  “We're going over there to see our boy right now,” piped Delilah, obviously relieved by her tears, more relaxed, ready to reenter the fray.

  Paul decided to tag along. He could walk down to the water tomorrow.

  He followed the Maldonados in his car to the hospital in Monterey, met them in front, and walked with them up slippery floors to Roman Maldonado's room. The boy's parents kissed him gently. His mother smoothed the hair off his broad, wet forehead. A mouth as wide as his mother's, but wrecked and torn, was patched together with neat black rows of stitches ending in small knots. The couple introduced Paul, and left their son with promises to return shortly. Until Paul knew if the kid was lying, the parents were better occupied elsewhere.

  Roman lay on the bed, his muscular body so long his feet hung off the end. Thick white bandages broke the dark expansive skin of his chest, a sheet furled down around his waist, and his eyes remained closed.

  “Roman, I just want to ask you a couple of questions about what happened, okay?”

  Roman nodded slightly, opening his eyes.

  “You know you've been shot?”


  He nodded.

  “Were you clerking at Taylor 's store yesterday?”

  He nodded again.

  “He paid you in cash?”

  “Yes.” He groaned. The puffy red lips strained against their stitches.

  “We'd like to find out if you saw the person in the car. Do you remember anything about that person? Or the car? What color was it?”

  The boy's face, splotched white and red, screwed up. “What car?” he asked.

  “You remember going outside right before you got shot?”

  He shook his head, eyes wide-open now, looking perplexed.

  “You don't remember going outside?”

  “No.”

  The word came out simple and clear. Dang, no memory of the incident. Well, these things sometimes came back with time.

  “I never went outside. There was no car.”

  Paul looked at him for a moment, hands in his pockets, pondering the many lies he had told his mother and other inquisitive adults while he was growing up. Then he said, “You know you're in the hospital, Roman? You know how badly hurt you are?” He didn't add, They took four bullets out of you yesterday and you could die any minute.

  From Roman's face, his father's clear brown eyes told Paul Roman knew he could die.

  “Who shot you?”

  “I never saw him before.”

  “Okay. Then what happened in the store that day?”

  But Roman had closed his eyes again and sunk back into his pain. He stiffened his body in the bed as if preparing for some private ordeal.

  Paul pushed a button to call the nurse, who took the time to frown at him on the way to her patient.

  Well, thought Paul, a mystery. He trotted off to bribe a talkative cop.

  He invited Armano Hernandez out for a beer after his shift.

  They met at five that evening at the Pine Inn, a few blocks from Paul's office. A decade younger than Paul, around thirty, Hernandez had worked under Paul when he had managed a special homicide task force a few years before. Small and agile, with fine features, he was a handsome and funny guy who loved being a cop; when Paul left his job in minor disgrace, Hernandez took his place. Hernandez seemed to feel he owed Paul something, and although Paul couldn't agree, he found Armano's loyalty both touching and useful.