They Thirst (11 page)

"We may never find him."

"Can I quote you on that?"

His eyes widened slightly; he couldn't tell if she was kidding or not because her expression was serious, her gaze sharp and piercing. "I don't think so," he said and opened the door for her. "I'm sure we'll be talking again. By the way, what knocked Roach off the front page? Something about a little old lady who found Howard Hughes's will in her attic?"

"No." A chill passed through her; she could still smell the rot of those corpses in the cemetery as if her clothes were full of it. "Grave robbers over at Hollywood Memorial. That's why I was late; I had to call the story in and talk to the Hollywood cops."

"Grave robbers?" Palatazin said softly.

"Yeah. Or rather
coffin
robbers. Whoever it was ripped about twenty caskets out of the ground and left . . . everything else lying around."

Palatazin took the pipe out of his mouth and stood staring at her, a dull pulse beating at the base of his neck. "What?" he said in a strange, hoarse voice that sounded more like the croak of a frog.

"Yeah. It's weird." She started out the door, but suddenly Palatazin's hand was gripping her arm just short of painfully. She looked at him and blinked. His face had gone waxen, his lips moving but making no sound.

"What do you mean?" he said with an effort. "What are you talking about? When did this happen?"

"Sometime during the night, I guess. Hey, listen . . . you're . . . you're hurting."

He looked down at his hand and instantly released her. "I'm sorry. Hollywood Memorial? Who was first on the scene?"

"I was. And a photographer from the
Tattler
—
Jack Kidd. Why are you so interested? Vandalism isn't your detail, is it?"

"No, but . . ." He looked wan and confused, as if he might suddenly collapse on the floor in a limp heap. The set of his eyes with their glazed intensity frightened Gayle so much she felt a quick shiver ripple up her spine. "Are you all right?" she asked him tentatively, and for a moment he didn't reply.

"Yes," he said finally, nodding. "Yes, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'd like for you to go now, Miss Clarke, I have work to do." He held the door open, and she stepped out into the squad room. She turned toward him, intending to ask him to keep her in mind if and when they did get a solid lead on Roach. The door closed in her face. She thought,
Shit! What's his problem? Maybe what I've been hearing is true. Maybe the pressure is starting to crack him wide open.
If so, that would make for a juicy human interest story. She turned away and left the squad room.

And behind that closed door, Palatazin was gripping his telephone with a white-knuckled hand. The police operator answered. "This is Palatazin," he said. "Get me Lieutenant Kirkland, Hollywood Division." His voice was urgent and full of terror.

The sun reached its zenith and instantly began to fall, deepening the shadows that clung like a precious autumn chill to the eastern facades of the massive stone and glass buildings at the center of Los Angeles. In the slow decay of hours and light, the sun shone red on the smooth lakes of MacArthur Park; clear, golden beams wafted through the windows of shops and boutiques on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills; dust stirred lazily in the air among the cramped, boxy tenement buildings of East L.A., and clothes strung on lines from window to window caught bits of flying grit; the Pacific surf that rolled up to the edge of the Venice Beach boardwalk, where the kids darted and spun on roller skates like human tops, slowly turned orange, then red deepening toward purple; lights began to glimmer like hot jewels along Sunset and Hollywood boulevards; the San Gabriel Mountains were jumbled piles of light and darkness, the western face of stone glowing red, the eastern exposures almost black.

And above the whole metropolis with its eight million separate lives and destinies sat the Kronsteen Cattle on a throne of rock. It was a huge, sprawling edifice of black weather-beaten stone with high turrets, arched Gothic roofs, broken gargoyles leering from towers or contemplating the patchwork of humanity in the valley below. Many of the windows had been shattered and replaced with boards, but some of the windows at the higher elevations had survived vandalism, and those that were of stained glass glowed red and blue and purple in the strong, hard light of the setting sun. A chill gathered in the darkening air and began to grow vicious. The wind hissed and whispered around stone battlements like a human voice through broken teeth.

And many in the city below thought for just a cold, eerie instant that they heard their names called from behind the falling curtain of night.

Rico Esteban's brain was scorched with hot neon. Around him there was the thunder of engines, the crisp notes of electric music rippling through the air. He thought he should say something to the dark-haired girl who sat pressed against the other side of the car, but he could think of only one thing and saying it wouldn't be right—
Holy Shit.
Beyond that crude summation of his feelings, his brain buzzed with overloaded circuits.

He thought,
Prenado? Did she say she was pregnant?
Only a few minutes before, he'd pulled his fire-engine-red Chevy lowrider in front of Merida Santos's apartment building on Dos Terros Street in the dark, tenement barrio of East Los Angeles. Almost immediately she'd come running out of the hallway, where a single, dim light bulb exposed a shaky set of stairs and walls layered with spray-painted graffiti, and slid into his car. As he kissed her, he'd thought that something was wrong; her eyes looked funny, they were a little sad, and there were the beginnings of dark circles underneath them. He'd started the Chevy, filling Dos Terros Street with a rumble that shook window panes and brought a couple of shouted complaints from the old folks, and then had screeched off toward Whittier Boulevard. Merida, her long black hair cascading in waves around her shoulders, sat away from him and stared at her hands. She was wearing a blue dress and the silver crucifix on a chain that Rico had bought for her birthday the week before.

"Hey," he'd said and leaned over to tilt her face up with a forefinger beneath her chin. "What's wrong? You been crying? That crazy
perra
been beating on you?"

"No," she'd replied, her soft voice trembling slightly. She was still more a little girl than woman. At sixteen her flesh was smooth and tawny, her body as tight and lean as a colt's. Usually her eyes sparkled with shy, laughing innocence, but tonight something was different, and Rico couldn't figure it out. If her crazy old mother hadn't been beating on her again, then what was wrong? "Did Luis run away from home again?" he asked her. She shook her head. He leaned back, cushioned in the cup of his red bucket seat, and brushed a lock of thick black hair off his forehead. "That Luis better watch out," he said quietly, swerving around a couple of drunks who were dancing together in the middle of the street. He hit the horn, and one of them shot him the finger. "The kid's too young to be running with the Homicides. I told him once, I told him a hundred times not to get mixed up with those
ladrones.
They're going to get him in trouble. Where you want to eat tonight?"

"It don' matter," Merida said. Rico shrugged and turned onto the boulevard, where a gaudy carnival of neon pulsated over porno movie houses, bars, discos, and liquor stores. Though it was just past six-thirty, the lowriders were already jostling for position, chugging like streamlined locomotives. They were painted every color of the rainbow from electric blue to Day-Glo orange and outfitted with zebra-striped tops or leopard-skin upholstery or radio antennae that seemed as tall as towers. The mass of cars moved at a crawl, bouncing and swaying like wild bucking horses along the boulevard, which was lined with hordes of Chicano teenagers looking for fun on a Saturday night. Music from transistor and car radios blared at each other, the tumultuous frenzy of rock and disco overpowered only by the thundering bass lines that prowled out through the open doors of the bars. The air, sweet and hot with exhaust, cheap perfume, and marijuana, crackled with tinny voices. Rico reached over and turned his own radio up loud, his brown face split by a grin. The growl of KALA's Tiger Eddie became a hypnotic chant—". . . gonna TEAR this town down tonight, gonna lay it to WASTE, 'cause we're the BEST, beatin' all the REST on a SAT-UR-DAY night! Mighty KALA, comin' at you with The Wolves annnnddddd 'Born To Be Bad'!"

Merida had turned the radio off. The Wolves wailed on anyway from a dozen other sets of speakers. "Rico," she'd said, and now she was looking him straight in the eyes, and her lower lip trembled. "I found out I'm pregnant."

He thought,
Holy Shit! Pregnant? Did she say pregnant?
He'd almost said, "Who did it?" but stopped himself cold. He knew she'd been sleeping only with him for the past three months, even after he'd gotten his apartment down on the low, poor end of Sunset Boulevard. She was a decent, good, loyal woman.
Woman?
he thought.
Barely sixteen. A girl, yes, but a woman in many ways, too.
Rico was too stunned to speak. The waves of lowriders before him seemed to undulate, an ocean of metal. He'd used rubbers most every time and thought he'd been careful, but now . . .
What am I going to do?
he asked himself.
Your big macho prick has gotten this woman in trouble, and now what do you do?

"You sure?" he said finally. "I mean . . . how do you know?"

"I . . . didn't have my time. I, went to the clinic, and the doctor told me:"

"Couldn't he be wrong?" He was trying to think—
When did I not use protection? When we were drinking wine that night, or when we were in a hurry . . . ?

"No," she said, the finality in her voice started a dull throbbing in the pit of his stomach.

"Does your mama know? She'll kill me. She hates my guts anyway. She said if I saw you again she was going to shoot me or call the cops___"

"She don' know," Merida said softly. "Nobody else knows." She made a little choking sound like a rabbit being strangled.

"Don't cry!" he said too loudly and too sharply, and then realized that she was already crying, her head bent and the tears rolling down her cheeks in large drops. He felt protective of her, more like a big brother than a lover.
Do I love Merida?
he asked himself; the question, so simply stated, baffled him. He wasn't sure he knew what love would feel like. Did it feel like good sex? Or was it like knowing somebody was there to talk easy to you? Or did it feel awesome and silent, like sitting in church?

"Please," Rico said as he stopped at a traffic light with a row of other lowriders. Feet punched accelerators, challenging him, but he paid no attention. "Don't cry, okay?" She stopped after another moment but didn't look at him, then fumbled in her purse for a tissue to blow her nose.
Sixteen!
Rico thought.
She's just turned sixteen!
And here he was like all the rest of the strutting, Saturday night boulevard crowd, dressed in his tight chinos and pale blue shirt, gold chains and a tiny coke spoon dangling from his neck like a macho stud, going to take his woman to get something to eat, hit a disco or two, and then return her to his bed for a quick sex session. Only now there was a very big difference—he had gotten Merida pregnant, filled up a child with a child, and now he felt weighed down with age and the serious concerns he'd never dreamed about even in his worst nightmares. He imagined that if he could see his face—lean and high-cheekboned and handsome in a dark, dangerous way because of a nose that had been broken twice and set badly both times—he would be able to see faint lines around his eyes and crinkling in his forehead. In that instant he wanted to be a little boy again, playing with red plastic cars on a cold wooden floor while his mother and father talked about Mr. Cabrillo running off with Mr. Hernandez's wife as his big sister sat spinning the dial of her new transistor radio back and forth. He wanted to be a child forever, without worries or weights around his neck. But his mother and father had been dead for almost six years now, killed in a fire that had started from a spark from bad electrical wiring; the fire had roared through the tenement building like a volcanic whirlwind, and three floors had collapsed before the first of the fire engines arrived. Rico had been running with a street gang called the Cripplers then, and was huddled under a stairway, drinking red wine with three buddies, when he'd heard the fire engines screaming; it was a noise that even now sometimes awakened him and made him break out in a cold sweat. His sister Deanne was a model up in San Francisco now, or so she said in her infrequent letters. She always wrote that she was about to do a shooting for some magazine or other, or that she'd met a man who was going to get her into commercials. Once she'd written that she was going to be the June Playmate, but of course the girl in that month's Playboy was blond and blue-eyed and worlds away from the barrio. He hadn't seen his sister in two years, and the last letter had been over six months before.

The traffic light flickered to green. Around him the lowriders screeched off, leaving thick trails of rubber. He realized he was gripping Merida's hand very tightly.

"Everything's going to be okay," he told her. "You'll see." And then she quickly slid across the seat to him, as close as a second skin, and if love felt anything like pity, then yes, Rico loved her. "Listen, you want a hamburger or something? I can stop there." He motioned toward a Fat Jim's burger stand, a huge, livid, neon hamburger floating in the sky. She shook her head. "Okay. We'll eat later." He took his pack of Winstons off the dashboard and lit a cigarette. A black and white prowl car went gliding by in the opposite direction, the eyes of the cop at the wheel meeting Rico's for one glacial, heart-stopping instant. Rico was carrying a few grams of coke and some nickel bags of fine Colombian Red in a box that rested in a cavity cut beneath the rubber padding of the trunk. That was his business now, supplying coke to the kids who hung around the rock clubs on Sunset Strip. Though he was just a nickel-and-dimer, he was making enough money to keep himself in good threads. And his supplier, a bald guy who wore Pierre Cardin business suits and called himself Gypsy John, said he had the nerve and ambition to be big in the trade someday. Not as big as Gypsy John, of course, but big enough. Rico let his gaze coolly slither away from the cop's and jockeyed into position behind a Thunderbird painted in tiger 
stripes. Someone called him from the curb, and he glanced over to see Felix Ortega and Benny Gracion standing with two fine-looking foxes in front of the Go-Go Disco. Rico raised his hand and shouted, "How's it goin',
amigos?"
but did not stop because they were walking reminders of his time with the Cripplers.