Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

“You a family man, Terry?”

“Divorced. Had a son but he died when he was five.”

Sam turned and looked at me with his wide, quizzical face. “I’m awful sorry to hear that. Don’t mean to be pryin’.”

“It’s all right.”

The stock cars roared under the lights. I liked the reverberations in my chest and the whining of rpms in my ears. Three cars almost piled up on turn three but they veered out of it in a chaos of white smoke. The Copenhagen Smokeless Tobacco car — irony noted — came out ahead of the Budweiser and Marlboro cars and banked low and fast into the straight to build a two-length lead.

“That’s one of the reasons I started up the Crimes Against Youth unit,” I said. “For my son. Kind of like a tribute to him, or a memorial.”

Sam nodded.

I don’t know why I say things like that sometimes, usually to friendly strangers, bartenders, people I might like a little but don’t really know. It just comes out. Sometimes I say things just to see if I believe them or not.

“Was he a victim, your boy?”

“An embolism while he was swimming,” I lied. “It was an accident.”

“Shame, Terry.”

“You keep them alive inside, somehow.”

“I got three girls, and they’re the best things in my life. Them and their mother. Don’t know what I’d do if something happened to one of them.”

“I know exactly how you feel.”

“You see that Ford out there, the blue one? The guy that built those engines is a buddy of mine. Buck. He’s been workin’ on cars since he was about four. Think he could rebuild a Ford motor blindfolded if he had to.”

The blue Mustang was running fourth now, right up behind the Marlboro Camaro.

I offered Sam the tequila but he shook his head. “Don’t like the hard stuff anymore.”

I nipped and tucked.

“You mind telling me how a guy could feed a six-year-old girl to a snake? I just don’t get it, Terry.”

“I don’t either. Criminal scientists would say that he’s living out his fantasies.”

“Who’s got a fantasy like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s that really mean, though? Living out a fantasy?”

“In basic terms — it means getting off.”

He turned and looked at me again, then shook his head. “Sex?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah, man. Does he have sex with them first?”

“We’ll probably never know on Mary Lou, but I’d guess he did. In Orange County, he isn’t. He isn’t killing them, either. He takes them for a few hours, then lets them go out where there’s no people. He dresses them in old clothes, girls’ clothes — that’s what led us to Wichita Falls in the first place. And he puts these... well, these lacy kind of... robes on them. And he puts hoods on them. I suspect he photographs or tape-records them. Then he lets them go. And they wander around until someone finds them.”

He looked at me again. It isn’t often you see a look of such affronted disgust on a peace officer. “Doesn’t rape them?”

“Not yet. I think he has before. I think he’ll start again.”

“Now why do you think that, Terry?”

“It’s about sex. Sex in his head. Sex in his memory, in bis past. You know how strong it can be. We think about it. Talk about it. Dream about it. Sooner or later, we try our damnedest to make it real. That’s what he’s doing — making it real. And once you start, well, you can call yourself off if you’ve got enough willpower, maybe. But not forever. Not once you know you can get what you need. He’s working himself up to the act again. That’s my take on it.”

“Little lacy robes, like they were angels?”

I thought about that. I hadn’t really figured out the robes — if they even were figurable. I had assumed they were some kind of symbolic skin. Something akin to the shed he’d left in Brittany Elder’s bed. A way of saying that he was about to... change the girls, hatch them into something else. But Sam’s word connected to something I’d thought before, namely, that The Horridus wasn’t — in his mind — taking the girls as captives, he was freeing them. So, maybe they were angels’ robes, or angels’ wings. He was taking them as mortals and releasing them as angels. After what I’d seen today in Wanda Grantley’s backyard, I would have believed almost anything about him.

“Angels, hatchlings — I don’t know.”

“ Hatchlings? ”

“It’s just a... notion, Sam. Tied in with his snake totem and his fantasy. He calls himself The Horridus. Horridus is Latin for a kind of rattlesnake.”

“If I saw him, I’d shoot him like a rattlesnake. And that’s about how bad I’d feel after. I got no tolerance for people like that. None a’ tall.”

“Get me all of Wanda Grantley’s married names, if you can.”

He looked at me but said nothing.

After the second race we went down to the pits and found his friend, Buck. He was a wiry little guy with a red jumpsuit on and an STP cap tilted way up on his head. Big smile, a drawl. The hood of his Ford was up and Sam leaned in with him for a look at the works. They talked for a minute about the supercharger and how to cool it. I stood back and looked at them, wishing I knew something about cars, wishing I had a friend I’d known for thirty years who I could just be with. Like Sam was just being with Buck — casually interested in the same things, tacitly pulling for each other, relaxed, undefended, whole. The big dark Texas sky seemed to make everybody look smaller to me, to reduce them to a heavenly perspective. It made me feel real small, like I was just one guy out of many millions, walking on feet, breathing through lungs, seeing through eyes and doing the best he can with his seventy years, or whatever I’d get And that’s a good thing, I think: people behave better when they know they’re not the center of the universe. Where I’m from, in California, a lot of them never realize that.

We walked through the pits, Sam spitting into his cup, his free hand jammed into his windbreaker.

“Be a good thing for you to leave in the morning,” he said. He didn’t look at me, but I noted the hard-pressed expression of his face as he looked over the lip of the cup. It was the face of the Sam Welborn you wouldn’t want to mess with.

“You met my team,” I noted quietly.

“I don’t know what you’re into back there, Terry. Don’t want to know. But I’m not supposed to discuss this case with you anymore. I told them you’d be back on that plane first thing tomorrow, and I don’t want you makin’ a liar outta me.”

“Who called you?”

“Don’t ask.”

“I was planning to go, anyway.”

“Puts me in a tough position, you know, because I got nothin’ against you. Fact, I like ya. You helped me out with Mary Lou. You solved a crime I’d been working on for two years and getting nowhere.”

“There’s some politics going on back home. That’s all it is.”

We rounded the pits and stood up by the entryway fence to watch Buck’s Ford rumble past. On the ground like this, the cars were even more impressive — you could feel their power rattling your guts and bones when they were just idling. Buck, lost in a red helmet, waved at us from behind his meshed side window.

There wasn’t much more Sam and I could say to each other. His suspicion, and my implied guilt, hung over us like a black, oppressive sky. I was furious, but had no target for my anger, no vent for my bile.

Buck won and we clapped. After that Sam gave me a ride back to the Holiday Inn.

Twelve hours later I got off the plane at John Wayne Airport, greeted by Jordan Ishmael and two deputies I barely knew.

“Guys,” I said.

“Terry.”