Текст книги "Howlers"

Six a.m. Willis Good, on the cusp of madness and still wearing the bloodstained clothes he’d been arrested in, picked up a pencil stub he’d found on the floor. On suicide watch, the jail cell’s dim light had been kept on throughout the night; he’d not slept or even tried to. The pencil’s blunt tip made a scratching music as he wrote on the wall, just under a small window with a second-story view of Timberline’s Main Street.

Willis—slight, sandy-haired, father, lawyer, son of the town drunk, Cambridge scholar, and the boy that no one thought would make good—wrote deliberately, something he remembered from his Latin classes at Cambridge:

In hac lacrimarum valle.

In this valley of tears. Under it, he wrote his name: Willis Good, Year of Our Lord, 2014, in a firm hand. Then he threw the pencil violently across the cell, afraid that if he started to write down what had happened to him he might not be able to stop—that he would tell his terrifying story to the cell wall.

And if he did that, it would surely mean he was mad.

Willis stepped back to the window and stared out at the multi-colored Christmas lights strung across Main Street, kept up by the “city fathers” until the end of February. He’d done the same as a child when his mother’s alcoholism had proven too much to bear. He would escape their poverty-and-alcohol-wrecked life and walk the streets of the mountain town at midnight in winter, wearing only a thin secondhand jacket. On those spectacularly beautiful nights, the town seemed like a great empty cathedral, with lamp-stars hung above it, perhaps hung by some benevolent god of the Sierra Madre. He’d felt then, as a small boy, completely protected. He’d grown to love Timberline and the Sierra Madre. No matter where he’d traveled in the world, this town was his home. Of course he’d come back.

He watched dawn break over the snow-bound high Sierra town. A sad platinum light reached into the granite-block jail, which dated back to the Gold Rush. His second day in hell would start with this weak and struggling-against-the-snow dawn. It made him feel sick.

Despite himself, he once again prayed that this was all just a terrible nightmare. He put both palms on the cell’s cold wall and tried to will himself awake. If only I could just wake up! He lowered his forehead onto the wall and closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye, he saw his young wife lying asleep in their bed and very much alive.

If only I could wake up.

Without realizing it, he yelled his wife’s name. The two deputies downstairs heard him yelling, but ignored it.

Willis had been arrested the day before for murdering his wife and their two little boys in cold blood. The irony was that he had stood in this very jail cell many times with clients, advising them in his capacity as their defense lawyer.

“Tell the truth. Be honest. Lying will only hurt your chances of a successful conclusion,” he’d warn them in his distant but earnest manner, pulling off his gold wire-rim glasses to look at them, searching their faces for the truth. At 32, Good was remarkably youthful looking, which put some clients off. Usually the client—a miner, or truck driver, or waitress—would lie to him anyway, incapable of anything but the most childish and pathetic defense for their crimes, which were serious if they were seeing him and not the county’s public defender. He was the only good—and perhaps more importantly, the only sober—lawyer within fifty miles of Reno.

Willis would polish his glasses in the same studied way each time and begin the process of categorizing the client to himself: honest victim of passion, career criminal, charming sociopath, or dim-witted fool? He’d learned over time that the list of types was depressingly short. Because he came from their world, was born to lies and small-town poverty, it was almost impossible to fool him, or elicit the easy sympathy city people dole out for almost any hard-luck story if it’s told out on a country road. By the time Willis Good put his glasses back on, more likely than not, he understood you better than your mother did.

Willis spotted Dr. Poole outside on Main Street, the doctor’s black face shrouded by a heavy winter coat, edged in white sheep’s wool. Poole came out of Gloria’s Organic Cafe and walked toward his office. He’d always liked the doctor; always saw him as some great Moorish caliph. It had been Doctor Poole, when Willis was a teenager, who had come to his house and given his mother—a notorious town drunk—the B12 shots that helped her beat the disease at last. And he’d done it for free. More importantly, the doctor was someone Willis could look up to after seeing so many failures troop through his mother’s bedroom. As a young man, he’d wanted to be like Poole: cool, intelligent, kind, and emotionally steady.

Willis put his hand on the thick Plexiglas window of his cell, which had been scribbled on by a thousand drunks. Perhaps, he thought, the doctor would believe him. How could he warn people of the danger if he was locked up in here? Willis watched Dr. Poole make his way along the snow-plowed street. A long way from Granada, Willis said to himself. The doctor’s blackness stood out against the snow that caked the tops and hoods of cars. With a finality that Willis couldn’t postpone, Poole disappeared into his office.

The Christmas lights strung over the street below, swaying slightly in the wind, brought back his lonely nights of wandering. He could picture himself as a child, seeing the lights twinkling joyous and hopeful at Christmas time, reminders that families, and Christmas, and normalcy, were out there and that he would have his own family someday. His future family would be like those he saw on TV: perfect.

The town’s Christmas lights had reassured him that he only had to wait for that day to come. He would go to Timberline’s Catholic church and sit in the empty pew, in the early morning, after his peregrinations. And later, during the nine-o’clock mass, Willis, along with old ladies bundled against the cold, would kneel for the beginning of the service.

“This is the body and blood of Christ,” the old red-faced priest would say, holding up the chalice at the center of the little mountain church, built small and low to withstand all that God could throw at them in winter.

Willis would walk back afterward through the snowy streets to his mother, who would meet him in the hallways of her alcoholism, her face soft and pale from crying in fear that he had frozen to death. They would not speak more than necessary, neither wanting to hurt the other on Christmas day. There would be no presents. The house was violated by vodka bottles. His mother tossed those miscreant things out into the snow, somewhere. Their labels were garish, red and silver, and sad like his fatherless life. His mother thought that the snow would, and could, hide them forever. But by spring, the bottles surfaced in the backyard like bad memories, necks exposed by Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday was his favorite holiday; it was when Willis, proud to be a Catholic, would go and get the black cross painted on his forehead so the townspeople could see that he was pious, and not at all like his damaged mother.

       Willis heard loud coughing and spitting sounds from the next cell. He wished to God that someone would wake him from his nightmare. This is, after all, the year of our Lord 2014. How could it happen? Because of his success, he’d thought he had beaten the odds poor people face.

I almost escaped, he thought, staring down onto Main Street that was coming alive now. But in the end, Fate had won. Where was his childhood God when Willis had needed him yesterday? No. God didn’t exist. There was no God. What Supreme Being would allow what had befallen him and his family?

There is no God.

Willis was alone and knew it. He heard the next prisoner over shout for the jailer, still drunk and confused as to where he was. He too was lost.

        *   *   *

The falling snow was tinted blue by headlights as the sheriff deputy’s patrol car drove down the pre-dawn mountain road. The asphalt looked black and new, the falling snow mysterious as it blew onto the road. It seemed to Sheriff’s Deputy T.C. McCauley as if the two materials, asphalt and snow, were somehow meant to be together; to embrace, to resolve some riddle of nature and meet at last, snow rushing through space.

Out of nothingness, to nothingness, he thought.

Man’s fate was decided in winter, Deputy McCauley guessed, driving alone. He took a sip of 7-Eleven coffee he’d bought fifteen minutes before on highway 50, hot and tasteless. He was taking a Philosophy class at the junior college in Nevada City. The class had freed his imagination, giving him the confidence to plot an idea, for no other reason than because it came to him. The teacher had told the class of housewives, policeman, and shoe salesmen—all trying to better themselves—that every man was a philosopher.

It was winter that must have brought man to the high places, the deputy thought. It must have been a winter day when he ripped the skin from that first animal and wrapped its bloody, warm fur around his naked shoulders in the falling snow in some godforsaken forest. That day was our bright beginning, the first technology. Blood, fur, and guts would lead to all the rest of it—to this smartphone-wielding place. We, all of us, carry that day with us, stamped in the darkest part of our cerebellum—our wet computer chip. The dark code is written there, whether we like it or not. It is a very simple line of code: kill or be killed.

The deputy drove, one hand on the wheel, the radio turned low, its chatter a white noise, not unpleasant. He’d learned that truth long ago in Iraq—kill or be killed. He watched the dawn break with satisfaction, a dawn much different from the 710 dawns he’d seen over there. Those dust-red blood dawns were part of his past now, part of his personal diary, and he cherished them. The idea that he’d lived through all those nights—walks down the middle of hut-clad, IED-hiding, sudden-death roads—cheered him up now as it had every morning since he’d gotten back. Life was good. He had a wife he loved, two daughters and a son, a house he would never finish paying for! You had to be on the cusp of losing your life to remember that simple fact. You had to see the face of the slaughtered to remember it forever: Life, no matter how terrible, was better than death.

“Damn, take one class and you turn into a fucking preacher,” T.C. said out loud.

T.C. saw Sheriff Quentin Collier’s familiar white Jeep Cherokee coming toward him on the otherwise empty road. McCauley slowed his patrol car down and flashed his headlights. The two cars, bristling with antennae, pulled alongside one another. The deputy rolled down his window. Dawn was breaking, changing everything by the second, exposing the snow-bound pine forest around them.

“Quentin,” McCauley said. “You’re out early.” A white breath-vapor shot out of the deputy’s mouth from the cold as if he were some kind of engine. T.C. had a calm but tough countenance, reassuring in a lawman. His war experience showed in his eyes; their hooded quality seemed to reflect the savagery he’d witnessed and been forced to inflict on others. McCauley was only 27, but strangers he encountered on the job thought he was much older.

“Good morning, T.C.” Quentin looked away for a moment. It was the first time they’d seen each other since the horrible murders up at Willis Good’s place.

Quentin was older than McCauley. He had just turned forty, his face still handsome and lean. People in town said he looked like an old-fashioned lawman, right out of a Louis L’Amour novel.

“It’s a damn shame, is what it is,” the sheriff said. “Why did Willis do it? I don’t understand. His wife and the two boys? I don’t understand, T.C. What makes people go off and do things like that? The kid had it all. He’d come so far.” It was as if they were still standing there, looking at Willis’s murdered wife and two small boys.

T.C. had seen a lot of cruelty in Iraq, the worst kind of wanton butchery. What he’d seen up at the Goods’ place was no easier to understand. T.C. looked out the window at his good friend, and beyond the sheriff at the wall of pine trees, their tops caked in snow, the snow painted by the morning’s first moments of light.

T.C. had known Quentin all his life. Quentin had chased him around the county when T.C. and his friends were teenagers. He’d always liked Quentin; seeing him always made him feel a little better about the world.

Quentin, he thought, should run for Congress. We should send him to Washington instead of the jack-holes up there now.

“I don’t know, Quentin,” T.C. said finally. They looked at each other blankly.

“They’re going to blow that snow bench this morning. Out at Emigrant Gap,” Quentin said. “I’m glad it’s you taking Willis to Sacramento—someone who knows him.”

“Yeah,” T.C. said. “I’m on the way to pick him up now. I promised his mother I’d be the one to take him.”

“The judge was right to send him for evaluation before the inquest,” Quentin said. “He’s crazy, if any human being ever was. Seven-Eleven coffee still as bad as ever?”

“I think it’s getting worse,” T.C. said, looking down at his cup. It started to snow harder. The small chink of red in the sky had closed as quickly as it had appeared. The mountains above Timberline had emerged, steel grey and ominous. The dawn had come and gone already.

“I’ll see you back at the office, then,” Quentin said. They couldn’t small-talk the murders away and they both knew it. It was preferable to move on than to think about it anymore.

“Say hi to the girls,” T.C. said, absent-mindedly. He almost mentioned that he’d seen Sharon, Quentin’s youngest daughter, out the night before with a known ex-felon and member of a white street gang who had moved up to town that summer and were suspected of cooking and selling crank. But he decided that it wasn’t the right time. Quentin nodded and said he would.

The men rolled up their windows. They glanced at each other one last time through the falling snow and the glass, as if they were looking at each other in a different light, wearing the expressions of great sadness grown men can wear when they confront the ugliness in life straight on.

Quentin drove off. T.C. sat contemplating the snow and the coldness of the landscape as if nature could deliver an answer to Willis’ crime. He shook his head, punched the gas pedal and drove faster than he should have into a morning that promised more bad weather.

CHAPTER 2

Miles Hunt, tall and thin, was sipping a Starbucks double latte. Standing alone, he looked out from the newspaper’s well-lit third-floor city room. At 6:00 a.m. it was still dark in Nevada City, dawn twenty minutes away. A hulking snowplow passed in front of the Nevada City Herald’s new six-story building. The newspaper served Nevada City and scores of the surrounding small communities across the Northern Sierra. The cub reporter wore a black turtleneck sweater his fiancé had bought him in New York City, in an attempt to dress him à la Esquire magazine. Miles sported shoulder-length blond hair that girls loved, his Nordic good looks a gift from his Swedish mother.

Miles touched his face and then his ears, which were still ice cold. He’d driven into work from his parents’ home in Timberline with his Mustang’s top down because he couldn’t afford to get it repaired.

Why don’t you get a better job? Why? Any job would be better than this. You have to leave town and go to San Francisco. Think up an app! Sell it to Apple for millions. What would it be? An app that eats student loan data! An app that blocks wedding-planners’ irritating emails, like the ones I’ve been getting all week: “Roses or Carnations? Boutonnieres for your guys—of course!

He’d begun forwarding questions relating to his upcoming nuptials to his fiancée, a budding fashion designer who worked for Lululemon. His fiancée was the daughter of a famous Hollywood producer, who was paying a small fortune for their wedding—solely, Miles realized, to impress the man’s horde of Gucci-clad friends, who expected a show. When Miles suggested they not have such an extravagant wedding, and instead donate some of the saved money to charity, the family—including his fiancée—had burst into laughter, thinking he was joking. They were all about the show of power.

Gazing out the window, Miles thought about the murders in Timberline and a chill went down his back. Like Willis Good, he too would soon be a young husband with responsibilities.  He’d come to realize, too, that his fiancée expected to live as if Miles were wealthy. She was already looking at homes they couldn’t possibly afford. This was it, he thought: student loans and a big fat mortgage. Maybe Willis had been under financial stress and snapped? He wondered what had happened to make Willis murder his wife and children. Willis had to be crazy.

He’d covered the story. The accused murderer, Good, had been a close childhood friend, and someone he’d thought he’d known well. If he’d not gone to the house and seen the family’s dead bodies, including the couple’s two little boys, with his own two eyes, he would not have believed it.

“What do we really know about the world?” Howard Price, the Herald’s managing editor asked, walking up behind him.

Miles stepped away from the window, gladly putting the murders in Timberline and his fully-mortgaged future aside.

“Really, what do we know, young man? How do you know that CNN isn’t all fiction, the whole thing?” Price said. He looked at Miles self-satisfied, his fifty-something face fleshy, robbing it of authority. Price was on his favorite tangent: the remarkable and ever present conspiracy of: fill-in-the-blank.

“And don’t forget Building Seven,” Miles said, “whatever you do.”

“Exactly,” Price said, turning serious. “Building Seven wasn’t hit by anything but debris and it collapsed like a house of cards! I watched it myself that morning. Concrete and steel don’t just collapse, son. There was a small fire in the building. Hundreds of engineers are saying the official government explanations are scientifically impossible.” Price walked away, checking his Facebook page on his new iPhone.

Miles had heard it all before. His editor had been fired from his six-figure salary at the LA Times because Price had refused to put down the 9-11 story long after everyone else in the country had moved on. Even in kooky, hippie-dippy Nevada City, most of Price’s colleagues considered him a tin-foil-hat-wearing wing nut. When Price tried to get his reporters to read the reports issued by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, no one bothered. The fact was, no one—even professional journalists—cared about the story. Mainstream journalists who still cared, like Price, found themselves without employment, lucky if they could find jobs on small-town papers.

“I don’t know,” Miles said, walking to his messy-with-stuff metal desk. “But if it’s true about Dancing With The Stars being rigged, then I don’t want to go on living.” He enjoyed pulling Price’s chain.

“Don’t believe seventy-five percent of what you read, or what you hear on the Tell-U-Vision. You want to know my formula? I take everything and I divide it by the BS Factor,” Price said, taking off his glasses. His voice trailed off, lost in the clatter coming from one of the paper’s antiquated fax machines. Price opened a window on his computer and beckoned Miles over.

“Look at this,” Price said.

United Press International

Big Bear, California

Mass hysteria has hit Big Bear, California and several small towns in Southern California.

People in the town of Big Bear have gone missing, say their loved ones. They’re missing in Bakersfield, Needles, Los Angeles, and hundreds of other small towns in Southern California. Not just one or two people, reports say, but tens of thousands in the last 48 hours, according to police sources. Relatives of the missing have jammed the police station in Big Bear looking for their loved ones who, they say, have literally disappeared off the streets and homes of this high-desert community, 70 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Authorities have no explanation for the disappearances.

“Now, even I don’t believe that,” Price said. “I’ll call my friends at the Times and they’ll get a big kick out of this. You’ll see.” Price looked at the copy and shook his head. “I think it’s some kind of New Year’s joke.”

“It’s the first of February,” Miles said. He lifted the lid on his cup of coffee and peeked at it.

“We’ll run it on page two. Follow up. It’s a good story, win or lose,” Price said.

“You’re kidding,” Miles said.

“Miles, will you please stop questioning authority. We are a small country newspaper. You are a small-town reporter; we are losing readers every day to Oprah Winfrey and unwashed, hare-brained bloggers, not to mention Twitter. Now get on the damn phone and get the story from—where is it?”

“Big Bear,” Miles said. “I thought you were just telling me how I’m supposed to question authority.”

“Don’t argue. And don’t forget you have to be at the Genesoft news conference at eleven sharp this morning. They have several new food products to announce. We’re going to give them a full page this Sunday,” Price said. “I promised the CEO, yesterday at lunch.”

“That’s not news, that’s public relations,” Miles said.

“Welcome to the news business,” Price said. “They scratch our backs—”

“We scratch theirs,” Miles repeated Price’s favorite saw. When he was first hired, fresh out of journalism school, the young reporter had been shocked to learn how much PR copy the Herald used. The paper often published whole stories that had originated in some big New York City PR firm, and were part of an expensive US-wide PR campaign.

Price turned around and left for his corner office. Miles printed up the UPI copy and went to his desk. He underlined the first four towns mentioned, then went to his computer and Googled Big Bear’s municipal listings for the police department’s non-emergency number. He dialed it. No one answered.

Well, so far, it’s no lie, Miles thought and hung up.

        *   *   *

From his office window, Dr. Marvin Poole watched the string of colored Christmas lights twinkle out on Main Street. The doctor could see his new Volvo station wagon where he’d parked it earlier that morning, with several inches of new snow on the hood and roof. A sheriff’s car drove by in the misty grey penumbra. Poole saw T.C. McCauley, one of his patients, at the wheel. He caught a glimpse of Willis Good in the back of the patrol car and he shook his head. He’d treated the Good children only a few days before. He couldn’t believe what he’d read in the paper: that Willis had murdered his family in cold blood—all of them.

He made a note to call Willis’s mother and see if he could do anything for her. He’d always had a weak spot for the poor woman and her son.

“I have CDC on line three, doctor.” Marvin Poole heard his receptionist on the intercom and he reached for his desk phone, chagrined. It was hard to call a place where he’d once worked. He missed his former life; he missed walking into the middle of an epidemic in the backside of nowhere. But he was younger then, he reminded himself, and picked up the phone. Working at CDC was a job for young doctors.

“Doctor Poole, good morning, this is Dr. Franzblau. I got your message. I was intrigued. We haven’t had any cases of spinal meningitis west of the Rockies this year.”

“I’m not sure that’s it,” Poole said. “I spoke to the Virology department at UC Davis and we were discussing it. There was some disagreement. I’m a virologist, but right now I run a family practice. I used to work in Atlanta for you guys, though.” Dr. Poole slipped that in.

“Really,” Franzblau said. Marvin could tell that Franzblau could care less. “What division?”

“Childhood diseases. I was just out of medical school.”

“Yes,” Franzblau said. “Mosley is the head man now.”

“I’m sure you’re busy, so I’ll try and make this quick,” Marvin said. He watched his secretary push open his office door and put down a note by the phone.

The waiting room is bursting.

The word “bursting” was underlined twice in red.

“Well, as a matter of fact I am,” Franzblau said. “What do you have, doctor?”

“Sixteen cases that look like bacterial-related spinal meningitis. All acute. Just developed symptoms overnight. Ages range from ten up to fifty-five. So it’s all over the map, age-wise. There is lower-tract discomfort, vomiting, confusion, seizures. But here is the odd, but signature symptom: numbness in the extremities. All the patients complain of numbness. And copious amounts of phlegm. Something I’ve never seen before.”

“You’re in Northern California?”

“Yes, a small town in the Sierra Nevada—Timberline,” Poole said. “Backend of nowhere.”

Marvin could tell the voice on the other line didn’t agree with his call of meningitis. He’d been around doctors long enough to tell when interest turned to skepticism. They usually just shut up then.

“You say in your email there have been no deaths. My guess is that we have a flu strain that is off our radar—hence the phlegm. But we’ll check the blood work. Send it in,” Franzblau said in a slightly patronizing tone.

“I’ve got several samples here on my desk, ready to send,” Poole said.

“We have a lab in . . .  let me see. Bakersfield.” Franzblau gave him the address.

“One other thing, doctor,” Poole said. “All the patients are suffering from neology, young and old. They are acting, quite suddenly, like schizoids.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Poole said. “They all start speaking gibberish. Patients who were perfectly sane. A lot of them talk about hearing God, or the Devil, speaking directly to them. The excessive phlegm seems to come on at the same time as the neology.”

“All right, let’s do the blood work-up. We’ll go from there. I’ll have someone here contact you as soon as we have something. You were right to call, doctor,” Franzblau said, his tone reversing to one of real concern.

Poole hung up the phone. His gut told him he’d missed something. He looked at the snack he’d bought from the new vegan restaurant in town: a bran muffin and a cup of coffee that he hadn’t had time to touch. He opened the white bag and took out his coffee.

He’d ruled out E. coli days before. Several of the patients had switched to pasteurized drinks since the last E. coli scare had hit the Whole Foods Market in Nevada City. Several patients had been in San Francisco and had just arrived in town, with no strong connection to anything in Timberline itself. He’d carefully queried them all about what they’d eaten, and whether they had traveled recently.

He opened the bag again, looked inside, and stood up. Could be some kind of reaction to the meth lab that had blown up east of town. He went back to his desk and picked up the phone and dialed the sheriff’s office. I was so stupid. I should have checked before. Of course, the meth lab. That was a huge explosion . . . toxic smoke and gases drifted right over town?