T. Parker: Black Water

"I love you," he said.

She couldn't speak.

Late that night she poured another scotch, got a flashlight and went out to see Frank.

She walked across the back patio, then the lawn, then through the gate to the far side of the garage. The orange trees made shadows in the moonlight. She stood before the pile of cinder blocks and tumbleweeds then set the light and her tumbler on the ground. Squatting, she pulled away the cinder blocks. She tilted up the plywood planks one at a time, dragged them over to the garage wall and propped them against the stucco. The tumbleweeds, tethered to the plywood with dental floss, remained fixed to the wood. She brushed off her hands and went back to the trench. She pulled away the bubble wrap then sat down cross-legged on the ground and shined the light in.

There was Francisco. Ancient and still, a startlingly small human skeleton with a conquistador's helmet over the skull. The front of the helmet swept up like the prow of a tiny ship. From deep within its recess Francisco's bottomless eye sockets looked back at her. His teeth were enormous. His hands were monkeylike but his sword was huge. Beneath the chest plate and the Spanish armor his bones were brown and helpless.

"Hello, Frank," she said. She'd named him Francisco out of general probability. She'd discovered him here one day while trying to locate a leach line, and had no idea what to do with him. She felt possessive and protective. She'd fashioned the cinder-block-plywood-tumbleweed-bubble-wrap security system to protect him from dogs, kids, coyotes. She had only shown him to one other person-Hess, of course-who had pronounced him "alone."

She sipped her drink, then ran the flashlight beam over Frank's skeleton. It bothered her that she couldn't determine his eye or hair color, what kind of mustache he might have worn, the shade of his living skin. She harbored a baseless hope that Frank had been in law enforcement of some kind. The badge would have rusted away by now, right? Even the big sword was half eaten by decay.

Every time she decided to call the university and rat him out, she'd think of them dismantling and cataloguing him, taking their instruments to him, touching him.

So he remained here, where he had been buried some five centuries ago.

She never actually said much to him. What could you? But she found something inspiring in him, in his literal embodiment of the idea, of a life, of action. She loved it that even after death, Francisco remained suited up, armed and ready. Talk about eternal vigilance. She had read about the ferocity of the Spanish conquerors and admired him for it. And she understood something of what Francisco's sword had cost his soul.

She thought about Mike and Hess and Evan O'Brien, but mostly about Hess.

She sipped, checked the moon, turned to see the dark treeline against the sky and the orange fruit surprisingly clear in the darkness Then back to Frank. She wondered if, after Francisco's death, someone had willed him back to life the way Archie had willed Gwen. The way she tried to imagine Hess back but never could, except that one time in the dream when he came into her bedroom while she was sleeping to tell her everything was okay.

She looked down again at the conqueror and felt comforted by his patience.

"You know Archie didn't do it. Don't you?"

Just before midnight Merci dumped the contents of the La Quinta Inn trash bag onto the floor of her garage and rummaged through it in the bright fluorescent light: wadded tissue, some of it stained with bloody discharge; used bandages, folded into quarters; two days' worth of newspapers; fast-food bags and cups; a plastic bag from a pharmacy and one from a market; balls of lined yellow paper three of the little waxy sacks used to cover hotel water glasses.

In addition to the long, sword-shaped swatch of blue tarp that she had noted earlier she found several smaller scraps of the same material. There were also six short lengths of one-inch PVC pipe-four of them jointed together with dark blue pipe cement-and dozens of wilted blossoms and flower petals.

She separated the pipe and the tarp fragments and considered them. Something to do with the flower drop? Maybe. But what? Archie hadn't used anything but what had looked like a bedsheet. It certainly wasn't a blue plastic tarp. Something to do with transporting the flowers? Something to do with Gwen? With his wound? With snaring Vorapin and Cherbrenko? With… what?

It was the same material used to hold down the earth from Gwen's grave, she thought. She pictured the burial scene, the orange dirt and the unnaturally blue tarp covering it, and the black mourners against the green grass.

She picked up one of the tarp scraps and saw the darker blue of PVC cement stuck to one of the straight sides. One of the pipe pieces had glue along its length also, and the telltale blue plastic debris where the tarp had been affixed, then torn off.

She tried to arrange the PVC into a meaningful shape but could not. Ditto the scraps of material. She thought they looked like the remnants of some sixth-grader's science project, but what was he trying to make? Had he completed or abandoned it?

The balled-up legal sheets were all pencil drawings, apparently made by Archie. Most were childishly inept renderings of Gwen. One sketch showed a latticework of some kind-a long rectangle cross-hatched with short support beams. For all Merci could tell it might have been anything from a retaining wall to a new board game.

She spiked the sketches to a nail in the drywall and turned her attention to the largest piece of tarp. Shaped roughly like a sword. Or a wing. Or a surfboard skeg. Or a jib. The long rectangle again, but with one end sharpened.

She pulled out a dusty old folding chair, whacked it open and sat. She stared at the potential evidence. A few minutes later she moved the chair, and a few minutes after that she moved it again.

But it didn't work. No matter what angle she looked from, nothing about the pipe and the glue and the tarp suggested anything she could use to figure what Archie Wildcraft was up to.

Half an hour later she put everything back in the bag, tied it shut and leaned it in the corner before turning off the lights.

She called Brice on his cell phone and he answered, slurry with drink.

"Where was Wildcraft when you saw him?" she demanded.

"Up against the wall, Sergeant."

"What wall and where, Gary? I can't believe you wouldn't tel! where he was."

"I called you four times, Merci. I tried to tell you where he was.

"You could have tried Zamorra. Or the watch captain. You could have called Vince, for that matter."

"I wanted you to get the exclusive."

Merci heard a female voice in the background, teasing and chipper.

"Where was he?"

"He sent me to a pay phone in Santa Ana, then to another Then to a closed-up body shop down on First Street. When he saw I hadn't brought along any company-such as you,

Sergeant-he led me around to the back and let me shoot him. He said if I told anybody where he'd been, he'd never call me again with an interview. He took off real fast when it was over."

Giggling in the background, the sound of a slap.

Rayborn felt her anger abating, replaced by curiosity over the condition of Archie Wildcraft.

"He looked a little… unbalanced on the TV," she said.

"Unbalanced?

Merci, that guy's crazier than a shithouse rat. Tell me about the Russians."

"What did he say?"

"Said he'd be taking care of them real soon. What gives? Do you have some suspects I should know about?"

"Abelera's on at noon. Pictures, everything."

"Shit, no kidding? Fucking ROC in OC? That's a story I'd like to run with."

"Too late for the morning final," she said. "You'll have to break along with everybody else."