Jon Evans - Dark Places

The phone rang. I picked it up.

"I called my friend in Cape Town," she said. "The South Africans were the same as the others. Swiss Army knives in their eyes. He's reopening the case and he's going to talk to your friend Gavin and call Interpol."

"Great," I said. "I'm going to Indonesia."

"You're what?"

"I'm going to Indonesia."

"When?"

"Tonight," I said.

"Tonight? Are you crazy?"

"Maybe."

"What the fuck do you think you're playing at, you idiot?"

"Hey," I said, more than a little hurt. I was doing this, I suddenly realized, in part to impress Talena. "I got laid off today, I got nothing better to do, I'm going to go down there."

"And do what?"

"Find him," I said shortly.

"Yeah? Suppose you do. And then what?"

"And then I'll know who he is."

"No, you dumb shit, and then you'll be dead, because in case you've forgotten, you're a computer programmer, and you're chasing a fucking serial killer, and he already knows who you are, and he's going to fucking murder you if you find him. You're being the worst kind of macho moron. Cancel the tickets and stay here."

I chose to ignore her advice. "Listen," I said, "he sent another message today."

"I know. I saw."

"Could you try to check to see if it came from the same place? If you remember anything about what I did?"

"I remember fine, I already checked, it came from the same place," she said. "Now tell me you're going to cancel the tickets."

"I'm just going to go there and see what I can find out," I said.

"Balthazar," she said quietly. "You stupid shit. You think I want to find you with knives in your eyes?"

"Call me Paul."

"All right, Paul. Tell me this. Suppose you do find him. Then what exactly are you going to do?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You think you're going to kill him because he killed your friend?"

"I don't know," I repeated.

"Because I'm telling you now, you're not the type."

"How do you know what the type is?"

"I've seen a lot more murder victims than you ever have, you… Look." She abruptly switched from angry hectoring to pleading. "I grew up in Bosnia. I was there for the war. I've met enough nice guys who wound up dead for one lifetime. Take it from me, you're no killer. And I know you're a guy and that sounds like an insult, but it's not, I like you for it. And believe me, please believe me, chasing him down to Indonesia is the worst and stupidest thing you can do right now."

"I gotta go," I said. "SuperShuttle is here."

"No, Paul, don't be a total fucking — "

"Wish me luck," I said. "I'll be in touch."

The flight passed in a haze of bad food and bad movies and bad company. I didn't really mind. Sometimes I felt that as I had gotten older the only thing I had really gotten better at was waiting. Twelve hours on an airplane? No problem. I dozed, watched movies, read the Lonely Planet guide I'd bought at the airport, stared out from my window seat at the endless metallic sheen of the ocean. I had an emergency-exit row and the extra space to go with it, for which I was very grateful, as they don't make economy-class seats for men six feet tall. I didn't really think. There didn't seem to be any need for it.

The twelve hours passed in a flash, and then I was outside in Indonesia's sweltering heat, walking down steep stairs from the airplane to the tarmac. I passed a McDonald's and a Hard Rock Cafe on the taxi ride from the airport to the beach, and found a comfortable bungalow room for two dollars a night.

Kuta Beach was awful. Green, and pretty, and it boasted a terrific beach, but awful all the same. It reminded me of Fort Lauderdale. The population consisted largely of noisy, obnoxious, drunken college-age Australians. Generally I like Aussies, but not this batch. Indonesian men wandered around with hateful eyes and briefcases full of cheap knockoffs for sale, watches and perfume and rings and Zippo lighters. Indonesian women walked around, barely clad, offering five-dollar "massages" to the Australians. And watching the Aussies I could see how the idea that all white men look alike and all white women are easy gets around the Third World.

I sat on the beach and watched the sunset. It was spectacular. But it was half-ruined by the company. One drunken batch of Aussies played rugby on the beach, shoving the Indonesian hawkers out of their way, knocking one woman and her cargo of bright sarongs sprawling onto the wet sand. Another group passed a huge hash pipe around. At the beachfront cafe where I sat there were two men sitting at tables with prostitutes. One was a fat bearded man in his twenties, strutting and beaming as if the presence of two twenty-dollar-a-day whores showed that he was the most desirable man on the planet. The other was a wrinkled, white-haired man with two girls who looked about thirteen.

It occurred to me that The Bull was not so different from a lot of other travelers. Some people go traveling to explore, or to experience; but a hell of a lot go to exploit. Many Third World travelers are there at least in part because poor countries offer cheap drugs, cheap sex, complete anonymity, and police who happily turn a blind eye in exchange for a small contribution. The Bull took it a little further than the drug tourists or the sex tourists, he got his kicks from murder, but the general idea was the same.

I was no angel myself. I had lost track of how many countries I had gotten high in. Sure, soft drugs should be decriminalized, but in the meantime it was hard to argue that I was somehow helping a country by contributing to the violent gangs that invariably control the drug trade. I'd never slept with a local girl, the idea made me morally queasy, but I'd met and traveled with lots of people who had. It wasn't exactly prostitution, the way it was usually done, just an accepted tradeoff; the local girl sleeps with you for a week or two, and you buy her a lot of gifts. It wasn't just men, either, I'd met musclebound Africans with temporary European girlfriends who were, shall we say, not conventionally attractive. Sometimes it was genuine romance. Sometimes it was a harmless fling. Sometimes it was exploitation. The line was much too fine, and rationalization much too easy, for my liking. I was sure the fat bearded man was already telling himself that the two beautiful women at his side were there mostly because of his powerful physical magnetism.

I finished my beer, watched the sunset, listened to the ocean. I was exhausted, drained by a day's travel and by jet lag. I wanted to sleep, but instead I went out and found the Internet World cafe. It was fair-sized, about twenty machines. There was nobody there that I recognized. I'd spent the flight alternating between fear that I wouldn't be able to find the killer and fear that I would. Now that I was here it was the first fear that dominated. There were literally thousands of tourists in Kuta Beach; even if my theory was correct and I would recognize the killer, what were the odds that I would just happen to bump into him?

I logged in and checked the Thorn Tree, but no response from our boy yet. Talena had sent me an email telling me I was a complete idiot and she'd be damned if she'd help me and I better send daily updates. I sent one back telling her I'd gotten in and everything was fine, went back to my bungalow, and got a much-deserved night's sleep.

I had come to Indonesia because I had resurrected the theory that Laura's murderer was somebody on the truck. Originally I had written that off because the dates didn't fit, there was no way a trucker could have been involved in the Southern Africa killings. But now I wondered: what if Laura had been a copycat killing? What if somebody on the truck had heard out about the Southern Africa killings, from a phone call or an e-mail, and decided to respond in kind? What if Laura's murder hadn't been random at all? What if she was killed somebody she knew, who dressed it up to look like the work of the serial killer allegedly in Africa?