Stephen Gallagher - Valley of lights

'Maybe someday,' Loretta said in that parental tone that really means maybe never. 'Are you all done over there? Alex says he's got some other places for us to see.'

'I'll go say goodbye,' Georgie said, and ran off down the unmade path. She was in jeans and sneakers and a cowgirl shirt, and she raised more dust than a dirt bike.

Loretta was shaking her head. 'Would you believe it?' she said. 'A million dollars' worth of imported wildlife, and the kid goes crazy over a box of ten-cent chicks.'

'You going to tell her what they're being bred for?'

'I think she probably knows.' Georgie was back at the broader shed window now, on her toes and looking inside again. 'But some things are best if you don't say them out loud.'

Amen to that, I thought.

For the picnic and for the afternoon, we went out to the Pioneer open-air museum and wandered around the old and reconstructed buildings. We spread the checkered cloth in some shade by the pond overlooked by John Marion Sears' Victorian mansion, broke out the food, and waited for the ants. Watching Georgie, I couldn't help wondering if she was lonely and if, in some ways, she wasn't having to grow up too fast. I suppose it was the cage bird business that had set me thinking. By the time that I was her age I'd been through just about every kind of animal that walked, crawled or flew, including a big yellow dog that had died of a tumor at five years old. I grew up believing that kids ought to have pets, but Georgie didn't have any. She lived in a place where the nearest person to her in age was her own mother. She had her own house key, kept her own hours, and had more freedom and responsibility now than I'd had when I was fifteen.

But at least if she was unhappy, none of it showed.

When the day had begun to fade, we headed for home over the mountain road. We came over the crest and there it was, a whole valley of lights against the black velvet of a desert evening, a low-rise city tricked into beauty by a fierce sunset and an unexpected approach. We pulled off for a while and watched as the sky flared through from blood-red to black and the city pulsed with evening traffic. It hadn't been a bad day, if you considered my lack of experience as an entertainments manager.

And it wasn't to end there, because even before we were out of the car Loretta was announcing dinner and I was being pushed back behind the wheel so that I could go and find somewhere to sell me some wine. It was almost five miles down the road to the nearest liquor store – the only one that I could be certain of, anyway – and it took me more than half an hour to complete the round trip, returning with something French that I'd never tried, but which looked awfully classy.

I didn't make it entirely unscathed. When I was back at the site and getting out of my car, I heard a voice call, 'Sergeant Volchak?' It was a voice that I recognised with a sinking heart.

'Yes, Mrs Moynahan?' I said.

'He was here again.' Mrs Moynahan was short and stocky, and always looked as if she was ready to leap to the attack. She lived in the most old-fashioned looking unit on the site, a silver Jetstream like an aluminium bullet. She was coming across the road to me now, mostly a silhouette just slightly warmed by the reflected glow of Loretta's curtains.

I said, 'And who was this?'

'The man from the ClA. Snooping around, knocking on everybody's door.' She thrust a piece of paper towards me. 'I made a list of all the places that he went. This is a copy, you can keep it.'

I hesitated, and then took the paper. Where was the harm? I said, 'Did you speak to him?'

'No. I pretended I wasn't in. Are you going to..?'

'Yeah,' I said, 'we'll put it all into the police computer. Then when he makes a wrong move, we can grab him.'

It was my standard answer, but it was the only thing that ever seemed to satisfy her. Poor old stick. I pushed her piece of paper into my pocket as I went up the wooden steps and into Loretta's house, reflecting that I'd at least escaped without having to listen to the usual half-hour of theories and observations. I can handle these things on the street, but with neighbors you have to approach it differently.

There was no sign of anybody when I got inside. The table wasn't set, apart from two glasses, and there wasn't even a light in the kitchen; but then I heard Loretta, calling to me from somewhere in the back.

'Who were you talking to?' she said.

'Mrs Moynahan, from across the way.' I set the bottle down alongside the glasses. 'She gives me reports on everybody who goes by. There's a salesman been calling around for the last week trying to get the whole site to bulk-order its toilet paper, she's got him marked down as a government agent. Where's Georgie?'

'With her friends.'

'Running loose? Loretta, I don't think…'

'She's not running loose, she's with the Hendersons. The Hendersons have a pool and an Old English Sheepdog and they're having a poolside barbecue for Jilly Henderson's birthday. I drove her there while you were out.'

What was this, a conspiracy? Georgie hadn't said anything about it. 'Loretta…' I began.

'Yes, Alex?' Loretta said patiently.

'Why are we shouting from opposite ends of the house?'

I heard movement, and then a moment later she appeared in the doorway. She was mostly backlit from the bedroom, and she was wrapped in a towel.

As far as I could see – which was quite a lot – she wasn't wearing anything else.

'Damn it, Alex,' she said, 'is it too much trouble just to come through and get a surprise?'

'Try it without the towel,' I suggested, 'and I'll tell you if it's worth the walk.'

One stunned second later, I was walking.

Later on, after the wine and some Mexican food out of Loretta's freezer, Loretta went to pick up her daughter and I walked the half-dozen yards back to my own home. There you go, Georgie, I was thinking; it all worked out the way you wanted, and you weren't even around to know it. I messed around, straightening a few things and moving some unpaid bills from one drawer to another, until I heard them get back.

Even then, I couldn't relax. One of those lights out in the valley stood for a child-killer, a torturer, and I still couldn't shake the feeling that I was almost within reach of some kind of understanding. A light had gone out when Mercado had died but then another, just as surely, had blinked on somewhere else. It was the pattern, the damned pattern, so persuasive that it hardly seemed to matter that it wasn't actually possible.

I pulled my canvas gun roll out from under the bed, and started on the cleaning-and-oiling routine. Hardly realised what I was doing, until I looked down and saw that I was holding the hunting rifle almost as if I was expecting Mercado to appear outside and say, Hi, Alex, I've come for the kid.

Was that it? Was I getting all raw and protective because, for the first time in years, it was starting to look as if I had something to protect? Not that my eyes weren't wide-open; I'd noticed without commenting on the picture in Loretta's bedroom that was supposed to be hidden behind a stack of her Romance paperbacks, and I'd said nothing to break the long silence afterwards. We'd both been around, we weren't children; but I wanted to think that there was still some of that special innocence in us both, the kind that Georgie showed when she looked at a tray of day-old chicks destined only to survive long enough to be live food for the reptiles and hawks. The kind that can be lost so easily, like when somebody says the obvious out loud.

Mercado could still come, I was thinking. His body may be in the morgue, but he's still out there.

But I couldn't say it.

Not to anybody else.

I hit paydirt with my twelfth residential motel, just as I was starting to get weary and to believe that I was taking a long shot that would get me nowhere. Most of the desk monkeys so far had known me already, which meant that I didn't have to show my badge and make it official, thereby risking the trouble that this might cause if word ever got back; but the young man behind the counter at the Sunset Beach Motor Court didn't know me, and I didn't know him. He was tall and skinny and wore glasses and had the air of somebody with an education who hadn't been able to make any good use of it. He was two or three years too old for this job to be any kind of a stop-gap.