T. Boyle - When the Killing's Done

Barefoot, in a pair of shorts and a flannel shirt, he goes to the door to let the dogs out and continues on down the drive, walking gingerly, to retrieve the morning paper (which will have nothing in it yet, he knows that, Toni Walsh stuck out there on the island till it was too late to do anything about it, but he can’t help scanning the thing nonetheless). No, no mention. But tomorrow will be a different story. Tomorrow the shitstorm starts in all over again, a hurricane of it, Force 10 winds, and he’s wondering vaguely if he should write up his own version of events and post it on the FPA website as a counterweight to whatever Toni Walsh is going to lay on him, when he hears the phone ringing in the depths of the house.

He’s up the front steps and back inside, snatching up the phone in the living room on the fourth ring — and wincing, wincing too, because he must have pulled every muscle in his body out there yesterday, a pure searing jolt of pain rocketing from his left knee to his groin so that he has to fling himself down in the nearest chair and grab hold of the inside of his thigh and squeeze till it passes. “Hello?” he snaps, expecting Anise.

“Is this Dave I’m talking to?”

He doesn’t recognize the voice, a man’s voice, low and whispery, jangling with some sort of unreconstructed redneck accent. “That’s right,” he says. “Who’s this?”

The name means nothing to him. It flies right out of his head. He needs coffee, eggs, toast, something substantial on his stomach. It takes him a moment to register what the man on the phone, a friend of an associate of a friend of Wilson’s, is trying to communicate. “I can git you what you want,” the man says. “As many as you want. Only question is price. Thirty apiece? That sound okay to you?”

What he’s talking about, and it comes to Dave in a flash, is rattlesnakes — the western rattlesnake, Crotalus viridis , to be exact. He’s too surprised — or no, overwhelmed by the timing — to respond.

“You there? Can you hear me? I say this is Everson Stiles, from Wellspring? In Texas?”

“Yeah,” he says, recovering himself. “Yeah, okay. Yeah, I hear you. I’m interested. Very interested.”

It was months ago, around the time he’d gone out to the island with the raccoons, that he’d asked Wilson to put out some feelers for him, and this was the contact he’d come up with. Everson Stiles, formerly pastor of an evangelical Christian church that believed in bringing the serpent right into the house of worship. Every year there would be a rattlesnake roundup and the parishioners would show up with burlap sacks of them and roll around on the floor in their midst, speaking in tongues and prevailing upon the Lord to keep them from harm. But the Lord, apparently, let them down, and people were bitten — one, a ten-year-old girl, fatally. There was a lawsuit and it went against the church and that was the end of the practice and the church too.

“Plus expenses. Travel, I mean. Gas money.”

“What, all the way from Texas?”

There’s a brief snort of laughter on the other end of the line. “No, all that’s done with. Now I’m in Ojai. Right up the street from you. And I tell you, this is the time to get ’em, when they’re denned up for the winter? Big balls of ’em, all wound up together. You wait till they emerge in spring and it’s basically one snake at a time, and then the price’s going to go up.”

He’s trying to envision it, snakes in a bag, flexing and roiling, three bags, four, laid out on the concrete floor in the garage, and he’s going to want other things too — more raccoons, rabbits maybe, gophers, what about gophers? “Sounds fine,” he says, feeling himself expand with the exactitude of that vision, rabbits in cages twitching their noses, thumping their feet, giving him a wide anxious walleyed look. And not the white ones you get as a kid at Easter, but jackrabbits, big rangy wild-hearted things honed for survival. “No, the price is fine, and I want them, I do. Definitely. But listen, this isn’t a good time — can I get back to you?”

The instant he hangs up the phone rings, startling him out of his reverie. It’s Anise, asking if he slept well, and his mood comes crashing down all over again.

“You know I didn’t. And no thanks to you.”

“Look, why don’t you pick me up for lunch and fill me in on the details, then we can go up to the gig together, all right?”

He says nothing, hating her.

“I can make an announcement,” she offers, and he can picture her in her kitchen, chewing on the end of a pencil or a breadstick, everything in its place, gleaming and safe. “About the girl and what happened, what we’re up against. Or flyers, we can do flyers, if you want.”

“You don’t know what I’ve been through,” he says finally, sounding soft and self-pitying in his own ears, giving in. “You can’t begin to imagine.”

W hen she gets off the phone with Maria Campos, the lawyer Freeman Lorber recommended, she’s so wrought up she has to go directly into the kitchen and pour herself a glass of sake just to keep from collapsing like a vacant suit of clothes. She takes a long steady drink, staring out into the sodden pit of the yard, the ferns bowed by the recent storm, the lawn a swamp, the eucalyptus shedding bark in long tattered strips. The sun is shining, at least there’s that, but the condo feels alien and sterile and everything in it, from the woodblock prints her grandmother Takesue left her to the forest-green leather couch with the cherry frame that cost her a month and a half’s salary to the stereo and the potted Dracena and even the Micah Stroud CDs stacked on the bookshelf, seems as if it belongs to someone else. Tim is gone. And without Tim, the place is empty, abandoned, useless. For a moment she feels as if she’s going to cry, and she doesn’t want to cry, not over Tim or Dave LaJoy or anybody else, and she has to press the cold glass to her forehead, hold it there right between her eyebrows like a compress, till the moment passes.

What Maria Campos has just told her is so outrageous she can’t process it — a joke, a crazy sick perverted joke made all the worse because it’s no joke at all but the hard truth of what the world is and what she’s facing. Personally. Not as Projects Coordinator and Director of Information Services of the Channel Islands National Park who’s only doing her job and fighting day and night to improve things and give the ecosystem a chance to recover, flourish, bloom, but as an individual before the law. In the morning — tomorrow, Monday morning, her trip to the island cut short because of the incident at Willows so that she got only the single day in the field, as if that isn’t punishment enough — she has to report to the Santa Barbara County courthouse on a warrant stemming from what happened out on the island or have the police come get her. Incredibly. As if she were the criminal and the true criminals the law-abiding citizens. Even worse, arrest warrants have been issued for Frazier, Clive and A.P., meaning that they’ll have to be pulled off the hunt for a day at least, maybe more — and just at the most crucial time.

“You can’t be serious,” she’d said, the phone like a grenade about to explode in her hand.

“I know it’s upsetting,” Maria returned, her voice firm, business-like, as if all this were nothing, the commonest thing in the world, “but you have to appear on this warrant whether the charges are legitimate or not. But believe me”—and her tone hardened—“we’ll get these charges dismissed and see that the bad guys get what’s coming to them. All right? Don’t you even think about it. Just put it out of your head.”