Bill Pronzini - A Wasteland of Strangers

But even as other kids began to drift in for my next class, my mind shifted back to Dick’s absence last night. I wanted to believe he wouldn’t be foolish enough to take up with Storm Carey again, but I knew men well enough to understand that once bitten, twice shy was an axiom that didn’t always apply. If she crooked her finger in the right way, waggled her tail on a night when he was feeling lonesome... yes, it was very possible he’d go running to her. If he was seeing her again, how could I hope to compete? I could be just as good in bed, but a man couldn’t tell it by looking at me. One sideways glance at Storm Carey and he’d know it instantly.

I thought wryly of the old Pomo stories about the bear people, men and women who had the power to transform themselves and to go prowling at night in their hides and cloaks of feathers. They were fierce defenders of their territory; when they encountered interlopers, others like them or spooks such as the walépu, tremendous battles were fought using magic powers, great leaps into the air, bellows so loud they caused landslides, eardrum-shattering shrieks and whistles — whatever it took to intimidate and then to vanquish or destroy their rivals.

Too bad I couldn’t be one of the bear people and have their powers for just one night...

No more than a minute after Stephanie and Kitty Waylon left for school I happened to walk out onto the front porch, to trim the hanging fern as I’d been meaning to do for days. If I hadn’t gone out there... well, I don’t dare let myself think about that. Thank the Lord I did go out.

He was there on the street, the bogey who’d scared me half to death in Treynor’s Hardware. Driving by our house in a disreputable old sports car, the window rolled down, inching along with his ugly face turned my way, staring first at the house, and then, as he passed it, staring at the girls skipping along the sidewalk, Steffie bundled in her cute fur-trimmed parka and Kitty wearing that tattered old brown thing her mother lets her out in public in. And the smile on his dirty mouth was nothing short of lewd.

I nearly had a seizure. By the time I raced down the steps and across the lawn I was gasping for breath and all I could manage was a weak shout that not even the girls heard. I don’t know if he saw me or not. He probably did, because he kept on going into the next block, though he didn’t bother to speed up so much as a hair. And he was still watching Stephanie and Kitty in his mirror — I swear I could see the tilt of his head through the back window.

The girls didn’t know what was going on, poor things, when I ran up all excited and out of breath and hugged them both. I didn’t want to scare them, so I made myself calm down before I asked, “Did that man say anything to you? Anything at all?”

They both said, “ What man?” They hadn’t even noticed him!

I made them come back to the house with me and get in the car, and I drove them to school. It would’ve been sheer madness to let them walk with that intruder still around somewhere. He may not have said anything, but the way he’d been looking, and that lewd smile on his wicked face... well. I warned Stephanie again to beware of strangers, to never, ever, under any circumstances, let any strange man come near her and especially not a big ugly one driving an old red sports car. I warned Kitty, too, no doubt the first time the child had ever had such good sense put into her head, Linda Waylon being the kind of woman she is, off in a fog half the time and forever chattering nonsense the whole time she does my hair.

Well, I was still in a state when I got back from the school. There was no sign of him, but I didn’t let that stop me, not after what I’d seen, what might’ve happened if I hadn’t gone out on the porch when I did. I called the police right away. Chief Novak wasn’t in, so I had to talk to a female officer, Della Feldman, and I didn’t mince words with her. The police weren’t the only ones I called, either. People have a right to know when there’s a threat in their midst. I’d be a sorry soldier in God’s Christian army if I kept silent, wouldn’t I?

I finally tracked down John Faith a little after ten o’clock. At the one place in Pomo I least expected to find him — Cypress Hill Cemetery.

I’d been all through town, half around the lake, and just missed him twice — once at the Northlake Cafe, where he’d had a late breakfast while I was out talking to Harry Richmond, and once on Redbud Street. Della Feldman, the day sergeant in charge, had had a frantic call from Zenna Wilson, who claimed Faith had been stalking her daughter and a playmate on their way to school. The Wilson woman was a nuisance and a wolf-crier, and the claim was likely another of her hysterical fantasies; still, after the prowler at Audrey’s home last night, I wasn’t about to treat any report of suspicious activity lightly.

But there was no sign of Faith or his Porsche in the Redbud neighborhood, and that frustrated me even more. I had no real reason to suspect the man of any wrongdoing, just the vague uneasiness he’d stirred in me yesterday, but there was a slippery, secretive quality to the way he kept moving around town, one place to another with no apparent motive. I should’ve gone out to Lakeside Resort as soon as I left Audrey’s the first time, rousted him out of bed, and to hell with protocol and a natural reluctance to hassle a man without provocation. But instead I’d gone to the station, given Verne Erickson the Porsche’s license number, and had him start a computer background check on Faith — find out if he was wanted for anything, if he had a criminal record of any kind.

I’d told Verne about the attempted break-in at Audrey’s and asked him to keep quiet about it for the time being. There was no sense in inciting fear of night prowlers and masked rapists. Zenna Wilson was a perfect example of why things like this needed to be kept under wraps until, if, and when it presented a public threat. Then, as tired as I was, I’d managed a couple of hours’ sleep on my office couch. Long, bad night. Half a pot of coffee and some breakfast at Nelson’s Diner, after which I wasted another half hour looking around Audrey’s yard and the cottage next door. And after that, Faith kept eluding me — until, as I was passing by on my way back from Redbud, I spotted his Porsche in the parking area just inside the cemetery gates.

I turned around and drove in and parked next to the Porsche. Faith wasn’t inside, or anywhere in the vicinity, and I didn’t see him on the narrow roads that led up into the older sections of Cypress Hill. But with all the trees and hillside hollows you can’t see much more than half the grounds from below.

The Porsche wasn’t locked. I opened the door, bent for a look inside. An old army blanket on the backseat, a plastic bag full of trash on the floor in front of the passenger bucket — that was all. I leaned across to depress the button on the glove compartment. Owner’s manual, a packet of maps bound with a rubber band, two unopened packages of licorice drops. And under the maps, the car’s registration slip. John Faith, street address in L.A. proper; the registration was current and had been issued eighteen months ago. I made a mental note of the street address, put the slip back where I’d found it, closed the box, and leaned back out.

“Finding everything all right, Officer?”

He was propped against one of the cypress trees about thirty feet away, in a patch of the pale sunlight that had come out a while ago. One corner of his mouth was curved upward — a smile that wasn’t a smile, just a sardonic twisting of the lips.