ANTELOPE VALLEY
Park knew why wolves howled when they hunted. He’d learned it his first night as a cop over in San Bernardino. He and Stutz, his training officer, had come across a street race in the warehouse district. Lines of cars on either side of the road, dozens of faces mouthing oh shit the cops. Stutz pulled a hard U and came back around. The racers gunned off the line, away from them. The spectators jumped in their own cars and sped off into the night.
“Code three,” Stutz told Park. Park flipped the switch. The night turned blue and red. Stutz mashed the gas. Park felt acceleration press him like sideways gravity. The siren howled out into the night and something else was howling too and it took a second for Park to realize it was him.
“Goddamn,” he said, and Stutz had laughed and said, “You’re goddamn right,” and pretty soon they were laughing together, laughing at how crazy good it all was. They drove fast as falling. They ran their quarry to the ground. On a skidding turn when the tire squeals joined the choir, Park’s skin went gooseflesh—hell, his soul went gooseflesh. The car they chased hit a bad turn, rolled and wrapped itself roof-first around the pole of a fast food sign. It made a sound like God clearing his throat, and Park felt something crest and break inside himself, something so strong he quick-checked the front of his trousers to make sure he hadn’t shot in his pants.
The way he saw it, these were junkie times he was living in. Everybody hooked on something. Maybe dope or booze. Maybe pizza or half-gallon cups of soda or foods made up by guys in white coats. Maybe picking fights on the Internet or some game with electric jewels falling from the top of their phones. But everybody was a rat in a lab, everybody had something stuck in their skulls and a pedal to push that gave them a jolt. The best thing you could do in this world was find the thing that jolted you the most and killed you the least, and go after it hard. For him it was the chase. So he’d given himself up to it.
He’d learned to use the thrill as a divining rod. He went where it told him to go. He pressed where the thrill told him to press.
When the captain told him about the double murder, the buzz kicked in. When he learned the ex-husband was a fresh-sprung ex-con, the hairs on his arms stood at attention. And when the cop showed him the photo of the missing girl with the sad blue eyes, he knew he was hooked.
And right now, in this gas station out in Antelope Valley, the buzz was telling him this woman behind the counter with the horseshit eyes knew something.
Park had spent days since the captain threw the murder of Tom and Avis Huff to Major Crimes learning the ins and outs of Nate McClusky. He spent zero time on non-Nate avenues. A con walks out of jail, and twelve hours later his ex-wife is dead and his daughter is missing? One plus one equaled two last time Park checked.
Tom had a pretty nice gun collection. Park got a list of the guns Tom had registered, compared it to the guns they found, and did a little more simple math. Whoever killed them—read Nate McClusky—had helped him or herself—read him—to a couple of pistols and a nice Ithaca pump shotgun.
Park read up on Nate. He didn’t see anything that didn’t tag Nate as a pure knucklehead. Two armed-robbery convictions, small-time gas station shit. He got lucky with the first one by being white and nineteen. The judge gave him a break. The second one was pretty heavy time. He had served five years and should have been locked up for another five at least, but there was some sort of fuckup. Park scanned the appeal that had let Nate walk. It was pure legalese horseshit.
Nate’s mother and father were dead. One sibling, a brother named Nick, also dead. Nick McClusky. The name poked out at Park. He ran the brother. He got back a heavy file. Nick had a few pro MMA fights. Then he beat a man to death in a bar fight when he was twenty-three. It got pled as manslaughter. Nick did a bit in Victorville. Came out scarier. He did muscle work for Aryan Steel. He’d died a few years back, crashed a stolen bike on the freeway during a high-speed chase. The guy had died live on the evening news.
Park knew the odds were on Nate getting picked up on a traffic stop or doing another robbery. Odds were he’d get himself caught before Park would find him. Park chased the buzz and kept busy anyway.
Park did the news circuit. He caught postnews phone tips. A Tacoma psychic said Polly’s body would be found near water. It was classic phony-psychic horseshit. Everyplace was near water one way or another. If they found her in a house in the high desert the psychic would take credit for guessing the faucet leaked.
Park pulled police reports. He looked for white men with children. He checked 911 calls. He found something that felt like something. A man who had been buying lottery tickets at some Sun Valley gas station reporting a standoff, knife versus gun. A man with a gun, a girl about Polly’s age with him. Another man with a knife, shaved head, tattoos.
A blue thunderbolt tattoo, in fact. Prison ink. Aryan Steel used blue thunderbolts to mark their members. One for each kill they committed for the club. The buzz upped itself. The buzz pointed Park this way. Nate was Aryan Steel connected through his brother. Maybe he was trying to get out of state on the whiteboy underground railroad. Maybe he just wanted a favor.
It wasn’t a full-on buzz. But it was something. So he’d gone out to Antelope Valley. The woman behind the counter was the one who’d been working that day. Carla Knox, the sort of big hard woman that gets called a battle-ax by men who are scared of her. She’d clocked him as a cop the moment he walked through the door of the store. Park didn’t try to look like a cop, but he knew the world you live in every day stains you whether you like it or not.
He badged her anyway. Her eyes went wider. The buzz kicked up in Park. He told it to settle down. Folk had all sorts of reasons for the cops to worry them. Maybe she had a baggie of something worth jail time in her pocket. Maybe she’d had a bad experience way back. Maybe she was just one of those people so soaked in guilt they see a cop and assume they’re going to jail, that they’re guilty of something, of everything.
Or maybe she knew something.
“Detective John Park,” he said, and watched her throat go spastic.
Maybe she knew something.
He talked to her, barely listening to her answers, watching her body, the way her breath went in and out. He didn’t need to listen to her, because he knew from the moment she opened her mouth it was horseshit. She was lying, that much was clear. The question was why?
His phone vibrated against his leg. He ignored it. He circled around for the kill. He leaned forward. He gave her the you’re-fucked smile.
The phone started twitching again. He pulled out the phone. Saw it was from the precinct. He stepped away from Carla. He let the moment with Carla die.
“This better be good.”
“It’s Miller.” The Major Crimes officer he shared a desk with. “I got a call for you. Want me to patch it through?”
“Take a fucking message.”
“It’s a little girl. Says her name is Polly McClusky. Says she wants to talk to you.”
Chest pains told Park he’d stopped breathing. He felt skin tingles. He wondered if this was what junkies felt like just before the OD sucked them under. He walked out of the store without even a look back to see Carla’s face.