Orange County Noir (Akashic Noir) Read online

"But we got other descriptions too."

  I knew it was him. And I'd seen the reports over the last year-six-two, five-nine, white, Chicano, long-haired, shorthaired, huge, thin.

  I shrugged again. "A guy with a rock." I bent over and got it out of the passenger seat. The windshield glass was piled up like some broken mirror in a fairy tale. "A rock the size of an orange."

  Then their radio crackled, and Anderson leaned in to take it. "He just got somebody else. A lady."

  When I got to work in Santa Ana, someone had already told Chuck George about it. He'd been special assigned to the phantom for months.

  In the locker room, I felt the bandages over my neck and temple. I had a cut on my right hand that I hadn't noticed until the tow truck came for my Nova.

  Somebody in the locker room said, "Who the hell runs through traffic on the Riverside Freeway?"

  "How does he do it over and over and not get plastered, man?"

  "Hey, he hit somebody else after he got Frias. Broke five bones in her face and she's got deep cuts. He's gonna kill somebody tomorrow."

  "George has the tracker," I said, over the lockers. "The one from Oklahoma. He wants to talk to me. He says they're going out Thursday night."

  But all night, driving my route, winding along the 91 and the 55 and the 22 and the 57, back up the 91, the way the engine chugged under me when I went after an idiot speeding near Imperial Highway, the way the exhaust smelled when I was writing the ticket-the tumbleweeds were green and big by November, like explosions all along the frontage road right there, and the guy's arm dangling in his white cuffed shirt, the burgundy Buick Regal and how he was so pissed-I thought about how long the phantom had already been living in the Santa Ana Canyon, how smart he was, how he slid down the pick he had to have made himself.

  "Hijo, what happened to your face?"

  I went to see my father almost every day before work. I got my own apartment a year ago, but all I had in there was a TV, a couch, two chairs, and one of those coffee tables made from a burl of wood. The apartment was in Corona, because it was cheap, so I would leave a couple hours early and stop at the ranch to see if he needed me to carry anything for him. He was only fifty-seven, but his shoulders were wrecked, full of loose cartilage. One day he said, "Stand here," and he moved his shoulders, and the popping was loud. "Sounds like that cereal you always wanted."

  Rice Krispies. We'd had tortillas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Same as my mother and father had grown up eating.

  My cuts were scabbing over, two days later, and they itched like hell.

  "The phantom," I said. "He busted my windshield."

  "Yours?"

  "He doesn't know who's driving." I leaned against the tractor. He had it set up to disc weeds. "The tracker's going out tomorrow with a search party. Tell everybody we'll be up in Brush Canyon. He thinks the guy is holed up there."

  "We?"

  "He told me to come along because I know the area. He and George have been talking to people in the canyon."

  People who lived on the ranches had caught glimpses for more than a year. He'd thrown a rock at one of the workers driving a tractor one day, and my father had called me. Someone had seen the phantom bathing in a stock tank up where the cattle ran. Someone else had been out riding a horse and saw him butchering a goat, but that was last year. "He's been here a long time now," my father said, easing himself off the fender. "He's living on food from the golf course."

  The Green River Golf Club was just to the east. "How do you know?" I asked. We started walking to the shed where he kept the smudge pots.

  "I met one of the cooks. He's seen the guy taking bags out of the dumpster in the back."

  "Oh yeah?" I said. My father stopped and sat on the wooden bench near the picnic table where he repaired tractor parts and pruning shears and whatever else needed fixing. In the open door of the shed I saw the smudge pots lined up like one-armed soldiers.

  "Remember when he knocked over every single one a those?" my father said, rubbing his shoulder. "Took its all night to fill 'em back up with fuel and he did it again. I wanted to kill him."

  "Kill him?" I looked at my father's hand, the wrinkles filled with black rime from the citrus rinds, the dark lines never erased since I'd been a child no matter how hard he scrubbed with cleanser.

  "Not kill him," my father said wearily, glancing up at me. I was a cop now. "I was just so damn tired. And the kerosene was running down the irrigation lines. El fantom-like a mo- coso, but they say he's a grown man."

  Mocoso. A bad little kid. Why would he throw rocks all the time? I said, "Maybe we'll find him tomorrow."

  I took all the bagged fertilizer off the truck and into the barn. When I walked back to my car, with the new windshield thick and green in the afternoon light, I stopped at the house, like I did every time. Three rooms. I looked inside the front window at the altar for my mother.

  I only remembered the cough. I was about five. She coughed all winter. You could hear it in the front room, where I slept, and from inside the trees when we picked the valencias in January. The crows used to wake its up with those raspy caws, and I thought it was them, but it was my mother. Pneumonia.

  The altar had not changed since she died that year. Plastic wisteria blossoms arranged all around her picture, and new roses every day in a vase on the little table underneath, with the veladora glowing faint. He left it lit all day, no matter how many times I told him not to. The flame was little, though, inside the glass. Maybe as big as a grain of rice.

  He thought I didn't know about the two babies, but I did.

  The long drive into the ranch was lined with pomegranate trees. In spring the flowers were like pink umbrellas hanging everywhere. But now, in November, the old pomegranates were hanging on the branches like dead Christmas ornaments.

  There were only about fourteen families left on the ranch. People kept telling my father the owner was going to sell it next year, and someone would build housing tracts all the way up to the hills. "Yorba Linda will be a big city," they said. "The canyon will be full of people instead of cows."

  I got on the freeway and the center divider was full of trash and bottles.

  "Keep on truckin, baby," the radio said. "You got to keep on truckin. "

  By the time I pulled into the station, it was "One toke over the line, sweet Jesus, one toke over the line."

  The words were still in my head when I got dressed. The tracker was from Oklahoma, and his voice was country. They'd hired him from El Cajon Border Patrol and he'd been here off and on since May, when the deputy got stabbed. George and some deputies had been out on a bunch of occasions, sometimes on motorcycles and horseback, and they hadn't seen anything. So they got Kearney.

  He didn't say much, but I heard him tell someone, "I plain love putting together a puzzle like that." They'd been looking at maps for weeks. I couldn't tell what he thought when he glanced at me, so I hadn't said anything except that I used to hunt with my father in the canyons.

  "What you hunt?"

  "Rabbits."

  He had a mustache like a black staple turned upside down. A brimmed hat. They called him a sign-cutter and a man-tracker. Some of the other guys in the locker room joked that he was like Disneyland-Daniel Boone or some shit. He'd been working Border Patrol for seventeen years, tracking Mexicans trying to cross.

  He looked at me. "Rabbits. Why?"

  I looked back. "Dinner."

  Then he nodded. "We ate a lot of rabbits in Oklahoma," he said. "Let's go."

  We got there when the sun was in the eucalyptus windbreak, not twilight yet, and hiked toward Brush Canyon. It was Kearney and four other Border Patrol sign-trackers, three deputies, George, and me. La Palma Road went along the canyon, with the river and freeway west, and the train tracks and hills east.

  "He crosses the damn river every time he hits the freeway," someone said. "How the hell does he do it? He fords the river, fords the traffic, all to throw a rock?"

  The tracker had seen whe
re he entered the river, and where he left, and he thought the guy was living in Brush Canyon.

  We moved up toward the foothills. We were going to stake out the mouth of the canyon and the trail he used lately to get to the freeway or the golf course.

  I scratched the cut on my neck, under the bandage. I could smell the cooking fires from the ranch. How many times had the phantom watched my father, or me?

  Did he remember my face from when I dug the hole, when I pushed the body into it after I checked for the bullet?

  My service revolver was on my hip. I was fifth in line and the foothills loomed up like they had all my life, in fall, the rocks smelling cool, not like summer. The brittlebush and creosote giving off their scent. The animals stirring in late afternoon.

  "First camp was Bee Canyon, right?" someone said. "That's where he lit the fire last year."

  "What was he doing?"

  "Cooking. In a coffee can. Musta got out of control."

  "He was camped in Coal Canyon after that. But that one's been empty a long time."

  Kearney frowned. No one talked after that.

  Kearney was sure it was Brush Canyon. He said the tracks kept leading us away from there-that's what any animal does when it wants the hunter to stay away from the nest or den.

  We're just animals, my father said. Except our souls, the priest said. The phantom was a man, but he'd been living like an animal for years. We moved up past the railroad tracks and the rocks smelled of sulfur along the embankment.

  He had a knife.

  If he saw my face, if he moved toward me, if he started shouting, I would shoot him. He had a knife. He was armed. Justifiable.

  I knew the rules. I'd known them last year when the guy kept walking toward me.

  Kearney studied the ground every step of the way. He figured the phantom had to leave Brush Canyon on the trail he'd been using for days, and we each had a place to hide. I kept looking up, since Kearney was looking down. Brush Canyon was a jagged arroyo, steep sides and then slopes studded with granite boulders that turned pink now with the sun fading. A few rogue pepper trees, like in every canyon, and no other green because winter rain hadn't started yet.

  Was he watching us, all this time? He was a crazy little kid, my father said. Was he laughing? He wouldn't throw a rock down here, because we'd find him then, but he'd stand in the center divider of the 91 where hundreds of people could see him for a few minutes, until he launched it like a Little League pitcher.

  The air was purple now, the railroad tracks ran red and shiny as Kool-Aid. This was the time my father used to say I had to head home. "When the silver tracks turn red, or the rocks turn pink, or the river turns black, you better be close to here. Or La Llorona will get you."

  We were fanned out on the possible trails, about a hundred yards from the canyon. I lay behind the boulder Kearney had pointed to. The others kept going.

  I listened to their footsteps move away.

  They knew nothing about La Llorona. She was a beautiful woman who had killed her children over a man, and now she roamed the riverbank searching for them, or for some other kids to replace them. That's what my mother had told me, before she died. She was lying in her bed, and I was six, and she didn't want me wandering.

  She didn't know I'd watched in the night after the two babies came out of her, with the old woman from up the ranch to help. My mother was very sick. The babies were born too small, the size of small puppies. They were wrapped together in a white cloth and then my father took the bundle outside to the rose garden and pomegranate tree my mother loved.

  They couldn't have been babies yet, with skeletons and hearts, or they would have gone to the priest. But my mother was crying and coughing, and the old woman said in Spanish to my father, "No mas."

  And my father said to her, "Don't tell anyone. No one. Those Hernandez women keep saying she's got the evil eye."

  By the time I was eight, my father didn't care if I wandered off, as long as I did my work. We'd go up to Brush Canyon, the ranch kids. We dug a deep mine, with hammers and picks and shovels, looking for gold. We found piles of mica-fool's gold we thought we could sell.

  The darkness fell completely, and I waited for my eyes to adjust. I heard nothing.

  In Bee Canyon, I'd had nothing to dig with, to bury the guy.

  I hadn't gone up there to shoot rabbits. I'd been CHP for about a year then, and I'd come to my father's house on my day off to help him take out two dead lemon trees. Gophers were bad that year.

  I was covered with sweat and dirt and crumbled roots that flew up when we finally pulled out the stumps. We chainsawed the branches and trunk for firewood, and then I piled the green wood on the south side of the house so it could dry out for my father to burn in winter.

  I told him I had trouble with the service revolver. It wasn't like the rifle I'd been shooting since I was a kid. "The kick is weird," I said. "And the way you have to look at the target. They keep messing with me at the range. Their favorite word is wetback. Go back to a hoe if you can't handle a gun." I felt the rage rise up in my chest like hot coffee swallowed the wrong way. "I want to tell them I'm not used to shooting something that ain't alive. But I can't say shit. Hueros."

  "You been shooting all your life," he said. "A gun's a gun. Go up there in the hills and find something to aim at."

  I put my T-shirt back on, even though my skin was sticky, and then my shoulder holster. I grabbed a flannel shirt to cover the holster. I was still sweating when I left the grove.

  I walked a couple miles that day, along the river where the wet sand smelled like aspirin from the willows, and then I turned toward the hills. The cattle grazed up there, three thousand acres or so. We had three hundred acres of citrus.

  I remember I was already thinking about the phantom when I crossed the tracks, because he'd thrown rocks a couple of times by then and downed the smudge pots. I'd seen a bridge made out of vines and cable over the arroyo under the train tracks, but everyone said that was old, from a Vietnam vet.

  I figured I'd get far enough into Bee Canyon so no one would hear me shoot at beer cans set up on a rock.

  I found tall Coors cans in the shade under a little pepper tree, like I knew I would. In high school, lots of people came up here to drink beer. Always Coors and Marlboros and weed. The cans were old and faded. Perfect to shoot.

  I stuck four fingers into the four sharp tab holes and kept walking. A car was parked in the dirt at the mouth of the canyon. But maybe the people had gone back toward the river. I listened. No laughter from the canyon. It was dim up there now.

  I kept going, and then I heard a huffing-huh, huh, huh. Breath like a hammer. Huh, huh, huh.

  Then I heard, "What the fuck! What the fuck you lookin at? What's a nigger doin up here in Orange County!"

  I dropped the cans in the sand. I was off-duty. I didn't go on for two hours.

  I kept walking, up past a flat section of sand near the deep scour where the rainwater poured down, and then around another boulder.

  A white guy with long brown hair hanging down his bare back was straddling a girl. He looked up the canyon. He hadn't seen me. But he stood up.

  She looked dead. Dried blood dark under her nose. Denim skirt hiked up around her waist, her legs open, black hair there, her feet black on the bottom. He hunched over and zipped up, the muscles in his back jerking like snakes, and then turned and saw me.

  "What the hell?"

  My CHP voice came out before I could think. "Sir, I need you to tell me what's going on here."

  "You speak English?"

  My face burned. "Sir, is this-"

  "You're not dark enough to be that nigger's brother. He was right up there. Watching. Freak."

  "What's wrong with the young lady?" I hadn't moved. Felt like my feet were sinking into the dirt.

  "Young lady? Why you talkin like you're on TV?"

  "I'm law enforcement, sir."

  "No you're not. You're just nosy."

  "Is she okay?"<
br />
  He laughed. "She was supposed to do a slow ride. Take it easy. But the stupid chick OD'd. Couldn't handle the trip. Couldn't handle the ride, man. Like it's your fuckin business. Wetback." He pushed his hair behind his ears and started walking toward me. He must have been about thirty-five, forty. His skin was lined around his eyes like birds had clawed him deep.

  Was he another phantom? Shit. Was he the vet who'd built the bridge?

  The girl hadn't moved. What if she was dead? I made my voice louder. "I need you to turn around and walk over to that rock and put your hands on the rock." I didn't have handcuffs. I might have baling wire in my pocket.

  "You need to go back to Mexico."

  "Sir."

  I didn't move. There was no sound except his feet on the sand. Soft like ground corn.

  "Sir." He was close enough that I could see his eyes were green.

  People said the real phantom was a guy who still wanted to live in the jungle. Maybe if I brought up the war he'd know I respected him.

  "Are you a veteran, sir?"

  "Fuck Nam. I don't need to be a Vietnam vet to kill somebody."

  He was about ten feet from me now. Kill her? Kill me?

  Then the girl made a noise. She coughed. Her throat rasped like it was full of sand. He grinned at me and said, "Hey, kid, you just get here from Tijuana? You swum all the way up that river and this is where you made it?"

  I looked past him. The girl raised up on one elbow and tried to stand. She scrabbled against the boulder and he turned back fast and covered the ground. He said, "I'm not done with you."

  He drew back his arm and punched her in the face. Like she was a man. The sound of her nose breaking. A popping. Then an animal moan-like a coyote, full in the throat-but not her. From above its. The phantom. He moaned again, like he couldn't stand it when the girl fell.

  I pulled my service revolver from the shoulder holster under my vest. It was silent now above its. The girl lay still, but her breath was in her throat like a saw blade in wood.

  He wouldn't shut up. He just kept talking when he came back toward me. "What the fuck are you gonna do with that? You steal that from a cowboy, Frito? From an American? Ay yi yi yi-you think you're the Frito Bandito?" He was three feet away and reached out his hand. A turquoise ring on his finger. "You better give that to somebody who knows how to use it, chico."