Stephen Gallagher - Valley of lights

'Please,' she said in a pained voice. 'I'm a professional.'

This time, she didn't even take the keys. I think she was beginning to trust me. I waited as she walked across the plaza to one of the newer county buildings which looked like a big glass-and-sandstone harmonica on its side, and as soon as she'd gone through the main doors I was in the glove compartment and checking through the tape boxes. As soon as I'd found the one with my 'actuality' interview on it, I turned the car radio on loud and held the box up close to the speaker for a couple of minutes so that the working magnets could do their stuff.

When Angela returned, I had everything stowed again.

'I think we're on a winning streak,' she said as she climbed into the car, and I could see that she was flushed and eager.

'You found something?'

'An old place out on Highway 89, recently re-registered for development as a turkey farm. They ran me off a copy of the map and everything.'

'That's where green eyes get you,' I said.

'Don't I know it. They're worth every penny.'

'What do you mean?'

'My eyes are brown. These are contact lenses. Listen, Alex, don't you think it's time we went to the authorities?'

I took the xeroxed map that she was offering to me, and said, 'Don't take offence at this, Angela, but keep your nose out, okay?'

We were up and running. It could still turn into nothing, but somehow I didn't think that it would.

Highway 89 was a two-lane road running south-east out of Florence, running parallel but some miles east of the main interstate towards Tucson. It didn't take more than two minutes to reach the outskirts of town through the rundown suburbs that spread in all directions from the main street, new or restored buildings standing out here and there like the odd capped tooth. Angela took me at my word, and said nothing for a while.

Out on the highway, I said, 'I think I recognise this. We're on the same road where Tom Mix was killed.'

'Tom Mix?' she said. 'Was he somebody famous?' But she was only doing this to get revenge.

I think she was, anyway.

I slowed down when I thought we were getting close to the place that had been marked on the map, and there it was; an ungated dirt drive with a battered-looking mailbox on a post at its end, the name Arballo stencilled on it in faded black letters. A couple of deeper dents in the side suggested that somebody had been using the box for casual target practice. I didn't stop. There wasn't enough cover between the road and the house, a two-story clapboard building which stood about a quarter of a mile back with a new-looking hurricane fence all around it. When I finally did pull in, it was onto a roadside picnic area.

I didn't even have the slightest doubt any more. There had been a red pickup outside the house, within the chain-link compound. I know that red pickups in Arizona are about as rare as flies around a dead horse, but the accumulated evidence was too persuasive.

I said to Angela, 'We have to get him out of the house and away from the child. That's where you come in.' And she looked at me with wary suspicion.

'Oh, yeah?' she said.

'All you have to do is go back into town and make a phone call. Make out that you're calling from the post office and that there's some cash for the farm that's to be collected in person. He'll swallow it, because he needs the money.'

'For more baby food?'

'Whatever. As soon as he's hung up, drive back out here with your eyes open for a red truck going in the opposite direction. When you've passed him, put your foot down and get to the farm as fast as you can. I plan to be waiting there with the child.'

'Then do we go to the authorities?'

'One step at a time, all right?'

She wasn't happy, but the story came first; I was the participant and she was the observer, and all of the moral weight was firmly on my shoulders. I got out of the car so that she could slide over. She could see that I knew more than I was telling, especially about the little details like the baby food, but I could always invent something later if she didn't come up with her own explanation first. That's the thing with a psycho killer, anything goes. It's only the psychiatrists who bust a gut trying to make it all fit together, and they always come along after the event.

I walked back to the driveway's end along the opposite side of the road, off the shoulder so that I wouldn't easily be seen from the house. Angela was long gone by the time that I got there, and I crouched down in the scrub to wait. I was sweating already, but I couldn't take off my jacket because then my holster and its hardware would be on show. I didn't know how long this was going to take.

Hunkered down in the dust, I found myself thinking about a frogs' wedding.

It wasn't quite as unlikely as it sounds. The Frogs' Wedding was the first display that Loretta had worked on, and I'd gone along to the mall to look at it one day without telling her. I suppose it was pretty good of its kind. There was this big fifteen hundred-dollar wedding dress as the centrepiece, and peeping out from under the veil was this frog's face. The groom was a frog, too, in a gray morning-suit and spats. They were surrounded by a half-circle of little frogs, probably because it was too difficult to get a bridesmaid's dress to look convincing on a tadpole. All the frogs were facing outward, champagne glasses raised. To this day I have absolutely no idea what they were supposed to be selling, but I'll bet that they sure as hell didn't move many of the dresses. How many girls dream of looking like Kermit in silk on their wedding day?

But the most important thing had been Loretta's obvious pride in her first piece of work, and that was the reason for it coming back to me now. It hurt like a knife going in. I'd even managed to lose her the display job, along with all of the other chaos that I'd brought into her life. I didn't dare mess up again.

The red truck came out after about ten minutes, and I flinched down as it turned within a dozen yards of me, I glimpsed a hard, weatherbeaten face behind the wheel, and felt my first serious twinge of doubt. But it didn't mean anything.

The dust from the truck was still in the air as I put all other thoughts out of my mind and started the quarter-mile run to the house.

I kicked in the door and a moment later the smell hit me, and I knew that I hadn't been wrong. It was just like the room in the Paradise Motel, only worse. I stepped in off the front porch, the Special ready in my hand, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the shuttered gloom.

Jesus, he'd been busy.

Four bodies lay in the hallway between me and the stairs, their heads tilted forward and their faces in anonymous shadow, one of them a middle-aged woman with her skirt rucked up around her knees. The man at the end was snoring, gently. And that was only the beginning – when I stepped over them carefully, not wanting to touch anybody, and went through into the sitting room, I came into something that looked like one of those enormous family parties where all the scattered generations come together and then nobody has anything to say to each other. They sat in the chairs and all along the walls, their half-concealed faces grave as if in judgement, their eyes deep and expressionless pits of shadow. I felt as if I'd been left in the wax museum at night, and the doors had been locked, and now the statues had started to breathe. There was Winter, the college kid, sitting with his hand on the phone as if he'd only just put it down. After taking the call, the ghoul had obviously stepped out of him and into the body of the weatherbeaten man. Perhaps he was someone who belonged here, a caretaker maybe, someone who could move around the town without being seen as a stranger. A body too valuable to risk with a bizarre and memorable request like the store's entire stock of baby food.