The Darkest Evening of the Year Read online

  “Minimum basic ordnance, Vern. Never know when you’ll need it.”

  “Where is your rifle right now, Bobby?”

  “Relax. It’s wrapped in a blanket in the back of the Rover.”

  “We’re not hit men, Bobby.”

  “I know we’re not. I know, Vern. I know better than you what we are. Relax.”

  “Anyway, nobody wants her dead.”

  “There isn’t nobody that somebody doesn’t want dead, Vern. Bet a hundred people wouldn’t mind you dead.”

  “How many you think wouldn’t mind you dead, Bobby?”

  “Probably a thousand,” Bobby Onions said with what sounded like a note of pride.

  “All you were supposed to do was watch her while I searched her house, and warn me if she started to come home.”

  “That’s all I’ve done, Vern. She’s up there on the hill with her dogs, silhouetted against the sky.”

  Vern said, “I’m done here. I’m leaving as soon as I hang up. So you don’t need to watch her anymore.”

  “I don’t mind watching her. I’m on the clock for you anyway until after the meeting with the wallet.”

  “Wallet? What wallet?”

  “That’s what I call the client. I call a client the wallet.”

  “I call him the client.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me, Vern. What do you call the subject of a surveillance, like this woman?”

  “I call her the subject,” said Vern, “the mark, the bird.”

  “That’s all so old,” Bobby said disdainfully. “These days, the mark is called the monkey.”

  “Why?” Vern wondered.

  “Because it’s not the Jurassic Period anymore, Vern.”

  “You’re twenty-four. I’m only thirty-nine.”

  “Fifteen years, Vern. These days, that’s an Ice Age. Times change fast. You still want to meet at two-thirty before we go see the wallet?”

  “Yeah. Two-thirty.”

  “Same rally you said before?”

  “Rally?”

  “Rallying point, Vern, meeting place. Get it?”

  “Yeah. Same rally as before. Two-thirty. Hey, Bobby.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If some guy’s an asshole, what do people call him these days?”

  “Far as I know, that’s what they call him.”

  “I guess asshole is a kind of timeless word. See you at two-thirty.”

  Vern terminated the call and looked around the cheerful yellow-and-white kitchen. He wished he didn’t have to leave. Amy Cogland, alias Amy Redwing, had a sweet life here.

  After locking the bungalow behind him, Vern walked back to his rustbucket Chevy, carrying the white trash bag of items that he had confiscated during the search. He felt old and dumpy, and melancholy.

  As he drove away from Redwing’s neighborhood, he thought about Von Longwood and the flying sports car in Second Life, and his mood began to improve.

  Chapter

  25

  A half dozen sea gulls drop out of the sky, shriek to perches on the higher branches of the Montezuma pine, fall silent in the same instant, seem simultaneously to detect a danger, and as one burst into flight, with a violent drumming of wings.

  Either disturbed by the gulls or coming loose by coincidence, a ten-inch pine cone rattles down through the branches and lands on the blanket beside Moongirl.

  She does not react to the sudden shrill cries of the gulls or to the thunder of their wings, or to the fall of the heavy cone. With the manicurist’s brush, she smoothly spreads purple polish across a toenail.

  After a while, she says, “I hate the gulls.”

  “We’ll go to the desert soon,” Harrow promises.

  “Someplace very hot.”

  “Palm Desert or Rancho Mirage.”

  “No waves breaking.”

  “No gulls,” he says.

  “Just hot silent sun.”

  “And moonlit sand at night,” he says.

  “I hope the sky is white.”

  “You mean the desert sky.”

  “Sometimes it’s almost white.”

  “That’s more like August,” he says.

  “Bone-white around the sun. I’ve seen it.”

  “At high altitudes like Santa Fe.”

  “Bone-white.”

  “If you want it, then it will be.”

  “We’ll go from fire to fire.”

  He doesn’t understand, so he waits.

  She finishes painting the last toenail. She returns the brush to the bottle of purple polish.

  She tosses her head to cast her long hair behind her shoulders, and her bare breasts sway.

  Far out on the scaly sea, a ship is northbound. Another sails south.

  When one profile passes behind the other, perhaps the ships will cancel each other, and cease to exist.

  This is not a thought he would have had before hooking up with Moongirl.

  Eventually all ships sink or they are disassembled for scrap. In time, anything that was something becomes nothing. Existence has no ultimate purpose except cessation.

  So why shouldn’t the existence of any one thing—ship or person—terminate at any moment, without cause or reason?

  “We’ll burn them all,” she says.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “If they get here by then.”

  “They will. Burn them down to bones.”

  “All right.”

  “Burn them, then to the desert. From fire to fire.”

  Harrow says, “When you say burn them all…”

  “Yeah. Her, too.”

  “I thought it might be time.”

  “It’s ten years overdue.”

  He says, “When the burning’s done…”

  Moongirl meets his eyes.

  “…who leaves here and how?” he finishes.

  “Me,” she says. “And you. Together.”

  He thinks she means it. He will be wary nonetheless.

  “White sky pressing down on flat white sand,” she says. “All that heat.”

  He watches her for a while as she blows on her wet nails. Then he asks, “Have you fed her?”

  “It’s a waste of food now.”

  “We may need her in good shape.”

  “Why?”

  “Show and tell. He’ll want to see her.”

  “To lure him in.”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’ll feed her.”

  He starts to get up.

  She says, “When my nails are dry.”

  Harrow settles to the grass once more, to watch her blow.

  After a while, he gazes at the sea, which is now so sun-silvered that it appears to be almost white.

  He can’t locate either the northbound or the southbound ship. Perhaps they are hidden in the solar glare.

  Chapter

  26

  The Land Rover left while Amy and the kids were enjoying the meadow. Later, when she drove to the south-county animal shelter to keep an appointment, no one followed her.

  “What was that about?” she asked the dogs, but they had no idea.

  At the shelter, she locked her kids in the Expedition, leaving four windows down a couple of inches for air circulation.

  Neither Fred nor Ethel, nor Nickie, expressed any desire to accompany her. They knew what kind of place this was. All three were subdued.

  Her accountant, Danielle Chiboku, also a Golden Heart volunteer, waited for her in the dreary reception area.

  “You bought that rescue last night for two thousand bucks?” Dani asked first thing.

  “Kind of, sort of, if you want to see it that way, I guess you could say maybe I did, in a manner of speaking.”

  “What am I going to do with you?” Dani asked.

  “Gee, Mom, I guess you’ll have to send me to a military school to straighten me out.”

  “If I were your mother, you’d know the value of a dollar.”

  “You’re only
five years older than I am. You couldn’t be my mom. You could be my stepmother if you married my father.”

  “Amy—”

  “But since I’ve never known who my father was, I’m not able to introduce you. Anyway, the two thousand bucks wasn’t Golden Heart’s money. It was mine.”

  “Yes, and every year when the organization doesn’t quite raise enough donations to cover its work, you make up the difference.”

  “I always expect Batman, in his Bruce Wayne identity, to write me a check, but he never comes through.”

  “If you keep this up, you’ll be broke in five years.”

  “You’re my accountant. You can’t let that happen. Put me in some investment with a two-hundred-percent return.”

  “I’m dead serious, Amy. Five years.”

  “Five years is an eternity. Anything could happen in five years. The dogs need me now. Did I ever tell you how much you look like Audrey Hepburn?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject. Audrey Hepburn wasn’t half Japanese and half Norwegian.”

  “How did your parents meet, anyway? Working on a whaling ship? Blubber and ambergris and love at first sight? Hey, did Mookie meet with Janet Brockman yet?”

  Mukai Chiboku—Mookie to his friends—was Dani’s husband and Golden Heart’s attorney.

  “He’s going to handle her divorce pro bono,” Dani said. “The little boy and girl half broke his heart.”

  Mookie, specializing in real-estate law, had offices in a plain two-story building in Corona del Mar. Few passersby would imagine he had six clients whose combined holdings exceeded a billion dollars.

  Dogs were welcome in his office. He went to work every day with his golden, Baiko, who had been named after a master of haiku, and he always greeted Fred and Ethel by exclaiming “Sweet babies!”

  “You ready for this?” Amy asked.

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  The shelter workers knew them well. She and Dani walked this facility at least once a week.

  An animal-control officer named Luther Osteen led them out of reception, past the shelter offices, into the kennels at the back of the building.

  Small but clean cages flanked a concrete run, and all of them contained dogs. Larger animals were housed one to a space. Sometimes the smaller individuals shared a cage.

  A few were so depressed, they lay staring at nothing, and did not raise their heads.

  Most came to the doors of their cages. Some appeared forlorn, but others wagged their tails and seemed tentatively hopeful.

  Occasionally one of the smaller dogs barked, but most of the inmates were quiet, as if aware that their fate—adoption or death—depended in part on their demeanor.

  The majority were mutts. About a quarter looked like purebreds. Every dog here was beautiful, each in its own way, and the clock was running out for all of them.

  Because the volume of abandoned and abused dogs far exceeded the resources of all the rescue groups combined, each organization had to limit itself to a single breed.

  The shelter worked hard to place the mixed breeds, the mutts. Yet thousands every year would have to be euthanized.

  Amy wanted to stop at every cage, scratch and cuddle each dog, but raising their hopes would have been cruel, and leaving them behind after making their acquaintance would have devastated her.

  Luther Osteen had two dogs for their consideration, the first a pure golden named Mandy. She was a sweet girl, nine years old, her face mostly white with age.

  Mandy’s owners had retired. They wanted to spend a few years traveling through Europe. Mandy no longer fit their lifestyle.

  “She’s got some arthritis,” Luther said, “and her teeth haven’t been so well cared for, but she has a few good years in her yet. Hard for us to place an older dog like her. She’s probably given back ten times the love she’s gotten over the years, so it’d be right if she had a chance to be with someone who’d give her a better deal.”

  “We’ll take her,” Dani said.

  The second orphan was a male, part golden, part something else not easily identified, perhaps Australian shepherd. He’d been running loose in an industrial park, wearing a collar with no license.

  “Looks like he was abandoned there,” Luther said, “must’ve been fending for himself a couple weeks, he’s so thin.”

  The nameless dog stood at the cage door, pressing its black nose through a gap in the wire grid.

  “How old, you think?” Dani asked.

  “Figure he’s maybe three or four years. No obvious disease.”

  “Fixed?” Amy asked.

  “No. But you take him, we’ll pay for that. He’s got some ticks, but not a lot.”

  Finding forever homes for hundreds of purebreds a year was hard enough. The mixed breeds were more difficult to place.

  The tail moved continuously. The ears were raised. The brown eyes pleaded.

  “The boy’s housebroken,” Luther said, “and he knows some basic commands like sit and down.”

  That the dog had some training made him easier to place, so with relief, Amy said, “We’ll take him.”

  “You go deal with the paperwork,” Luther said. “I’ll bring them both out to you.”

  Returning along the kennel run, between the rows of cages, Dani took Amy’s hand. She always did. Her eyes were full of unshed tears, which Amy saw before her own vision blurred.

  Coming in past all these dogs, most of whom would be euthanized, always proved to be a tough walk, but the return trip, leaving them to their fate, was brutal.

  Sometimes, Amy despaired for the human race, and never more so than on those days when she visited the county shelter.

  Some repay loyalty with faithlessness and give no thought to their own final hours, when they might have to ask another to grant them the mercy that they withheld from those who trusted them.

  Chapter

  27

  Harrow makes a ham-and-cheese sandwich, adds two sweet pickles to the plate, and puts the plate on a tray with a container of deli potato salad. He adds two lunchbox bags of potato chips and a small bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies. She likes root beer, so he puts two cold cans on the tray.

  Just as he finishes, Moongirl enters the kitchen. She has dressed in black slacks and a black sweater. She still wears the diamond necklace that he gave her, but the diamond bracelet is a gift from some man before him.

  Regarding the laden tray, she says, “I would’ve done this.”

  “Saved you the trouble.”

  Her green gaze is as sharp as a broken bottle. “Always doing things for me.”

  He knows this wire well. He has walked it with her many times before.

  “I enjoy it,” he says.

  “Doing things for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about her?”

  “What about her?” he asks.

  “You give her what she likes.”

  He shrugged. “It’s what we have.”

  “Which you bought.”

  “Next time give me a list.”

  “Then you’ll buy what I want her to have.”