He looked down at his now-empty bottle for nearly a full minute before he continued. “So he just quit. His job. His life. Everything. One day, it was all over. I could see the change in him, but it was a long time before I started to understand what had happened, why he had changed so suddenly. He had always been like his mother. He had that hole inside of him, too. I think he thought he could fill it with all of his accomplishments, with the way he thought people in the community would look at him. I guess he ended up filling it with anger. Hatred. And you personified everything that was wrong with his life and his world. His biological father was dead by then. We all knew that. He couldn’t even track him down and try to get the answers he needed. And that left only you. Despite everything I had done for him. Despite the fact that I had assumed the role of father when no one else wanted to job. I chose him. But it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. Not for his mother. And not for him.”
His cheeks glistened with tears when he looked up at me. The expression on his face was one of unadulterated anger, though. I was in no mood to allow him his indulgences. I wasn’t about to let him brush the responsibility off on me. I refused. He was Ban’s father. By birth or by choice. It made no difference. He needed to accept that whether intentionally or not, he had helped create a monster.
“At what point did you learn he was killing people?”
“All you had to do was look us up. Come down here and show him that he wasn’t alone, that you didn’t think you were better than him, that you were—”
“Don’t try to pin this on me.”
“—brothers.”
“You knew he was killing people and did nothing to stop it. That makes you every bit as guilty in my eyes.”
“Your eyes…”
“This has to end, Roman. You have to—”
“I know,” he whispered.
“Tell me where he is.”
“I don’t know where he is.” He blinked away whatever thoughts had been distracting him, then looked up me with an expression that I easily interpreted as sincerity. “I don’t know where he is.”
“But you know where he’d go if he was out of options, don’t you? Not that old abandoned trailer. Someplace where nobody would think to look for him. Someplace no one else knows about.”
He nodded, closed his eyes, then hurled his bottle against the wall. Shards of brown glass shot in every direction. A gob of foam rolled down the wall.
“Where can I find him, Roman.”
“There’s another trailer.” His voice became progressively softer as he spoke. “At the back of the property. By the wash. Used to belong to my mother’s brother before he passed. Long time ago now. Long time ago…”
“The trailer, Roman. Where exactly…?”
But he was already gone, vanished inside of himself, or perhaps into another place and time altogether as I had seen him do before. A part of me wanted to hurt him even more, to vent my frustrations on him, but I realized that there was nothing I could do to hurt him more than I was already going to.
I was going to kill his son.
There was no other way I could see this playing out.
I was going to kill the Coyote.
I was going to kill my brother.
THIRTY-FOUR
My patience was spent. I was pissed off and frustrated and tired of being manipulated. I didn’t care about the desert and I most certainly didn’t care about the pool car as I drove away from the house across the open gravel and sand. If there was a road, I didn’t see it. Then again, I didn’t look too hard either. All of the deaths wore heavily on me. They always did. I think that was what allowed me to do what I did. Without that personal impetus, I can’t imagine what wells of motivation an investigator draws from in order to follow the trails of blood and suffering so many sociopaths leave in their wake. This one drove me harder than I’d ever been driven before, though. Antone’s death was weighing on my conscience. I don’t believe it was merely the fact that I had known and liked him that caused his death to trouble me so much. Maybe it was because after enduring so much loss and heartache, he’d been trying to combat the bad guys within the constraints of the system, by the rules, only to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. A freak stroke of bad luck. My old nemesis coincidence. Whatever the case, something was nagging at me like the sound of footsteps behind me, but every time I turned around, there was no one there.
I found the trailer pretty much right where Roman said it would be. It made the previous one look positively futuristic by comparison. Like he said, this one had been set up right beside the wash. So close, in fact, that the bank had eroded out from beneath it. Either that or someone had dug such a large hole beneath it they had nearly toppled the trailer, which was a line of thought I had no intention of pursuing at the moment. Even from a distance, I could tell the trailer was leaning away from me.
I parked in front of it and climbed out of the car. I left the headlights on and directed at the dilapidated single-wide. I added my Maglite to the cause and drew my Beretta.
A coyote yipped and howled in the distance. Maybe just over the rise on the other side of the mesquite-lined gully. The wind rose with a scream, pelting the back side of the trailer with grains of sand that sounded like buckshot. I figured that was probably the reason for the lack of paint on the mobile home. It was just plain gray wood and cracked windows patched with duct tape and sealed behind a layer of dust and grime.
Red flagstones had been stacked in front of the door to form uneven stairs. Tumbleweeds clogged the skirt, a crosshatched pattern of thin wooden slats that had proved no match for whatever animals had tunneled under it and, in spots, straight through it. The way the trailer canted toward the dry streambed made it impossible for the front door to close in its frame. Which also meant there was no way to lock it. I’d caught so few breaks up to this point that I was almost surprised at my good fortune. Of course, all it saved me was a little wear and tear on my leg from kicking in a door a good solid knock would probably topple. It was held closed by a bungee cord stretched between the door knob and what looked like the handle from a kitchen cabinet that had been screwed onto the exterior.
I undid the cord and drew the door open. The smell that greeted me was one of tobacco smoke, sour sweat, dust, and rotting wood. The shadows fled from the flashlight as I ascended the uneven rocks and entered. Even my softest tread made it sound like I was stomping on the hollow floor. The carpet was so old that there was nothing left of the actual knap, only the crunchy matrix through which it had been sewn. It had pulled away from the far wall, due in large measure to the transverse ridge that bisected the main room where the settling of the trailer caused it to break its own back. The lone item of furniture was a threadbare couch that looked like it had spent more time outside than in. It had slid down the slope to rest against the far wall.
The wind roared and again assailed the wall opposite me with sand. The entire trailer shuddered with the gust. Dust shivered loose from the ill-fitting, yellowed acoustic ceiling tiles and sparkled in my light, lending an element of unreality to my already surreal surroundings. It was almost as though I had stepped across some magical threshold from the rational world I knew and loved into another reality entirely. There was something about this place that made me uncomfortable on a primal level.
The windows had been boarded over from the inside and painted bone-white to match the walls. Nothing hung from them. There were no pictures or speakers or bookshelves or plants or knickknacks. Only the flat white walls that served as a canvas for a tableau of an entirely different sort than the one in the cave, but somehow nearly as unsettling. There were stylized smiley faces painted on the walls. Every square inch, covered with variations of smiley faces. Some were red. Others were black or gold or brown. All of them had similar slanted eyes and that broad arched grin. Some had eyebrows, others nearly full circles for the heads. Some had what I took to be upward-curving mustaches, others various markings that seemed at odds with the overall motif. There were literally thousands of them, painted on every available surface, one on top of the other. All of them nearly the full height of the walls. There were some sections where it looked like he had simply practiced painting circles, over and over and over again until they were just right.