Free A Stranger Lies There by Stephen Santogrossi Page A

it, I wanted to be more careful than I’d been with the matchbook. In the living room, I set the burglar alarm to allow movement inside for Deirdre but no outside entry, then double locked the front door behind me.
    Outside in the car, I clicked on the dome light and found a map in the glove compartment. I checked the address I’d written down on a scrap of paper. The Blue Bird was on Highway 86 in Indio, just off the Dillon Road exit from the interstate. I started the car, telling myself I was doing the right thing. The engine came to life immediately. I felt bad about not talking it over with Deirdre, but I knew that one word from her would keep me home tonight.
    Rolling silently over the empty streets, the nighttime breeze whispered through the open windows and dried the sweat on my skin. For all my attempts to avoid thinking about it, I was still apprehensive about what to do once I got to the motel. Check things out first, try to determine if Turret was staying there. I resigned myself to telling the cops what I’d found no matter what happened, despite my earlier inclination to avoid that if I could. I’d just have to deal with Branson and his attitude. So that was settled.
    I turned on the radio, finding KCLB again. The overnight guy, known as the “Night Manager,” introduced a band called Mazzy Star. He described them as a cross between the Velvet Underground and the Doors. Their chiming guitars and echoing voices blended together into a woozy, hypnotic sound that soothed my jangling nerves as the freeway on-ramp came up. The traveler’s stop was still open, but only a few gas station and restaurant customers were visible, wraithlike figures in the sodium glow shuffling to and from their vehicles.
    I got on the freeway going east. The engine heaved briskly up to speed as the wind and the music on the radio filled the car. Mazzy Star was still on, and the song featured a spooky organ sound that was like the Doors at their most psychedelic. It brought back a smoky, hallucinatory night I’d experienced some thirty years ago, a party where the drugs and alcohol were freely offered and nonstop. Loud music had pounded my eardrums all evening, until a bizarre conversation with Glenn Turret later on in a quiet corner of the house.
    On a fishing trip with his parents, he’d watched the lifeguards administer CPR to someone who’d almost drowned. The victim survived, and Turret remembered wondering what it felt like to have that much power in a life or death situation. He went on and on about the godlike qualities of those lifeguards. If I hadn’t been so stoned at the time, maybe the story would have scared me.
    Twenty minutes later, I was at the Highway 111 turnoff. The bright lights of the Indian casinos glared in my windshield as I made a right off the highway and entered the city of Indio.
    Indio is a dusty old place with a grungy southwestern flavor that I normally found appealing. On more carefree evenings, Deirdre and I would drive past the quaint old buildings here, through relaxed, siesta-like streets, catching the aromas of Mexican cooking on the musty, crop-scented air. Sometimes we’d hear ranchera music drifting in the wind, and watch the falling sunlight burnish the town a twilight gold.
    Now the area was enshrouded in darkness that felt stifling in my unease, and I had to force myself to go on. I turned off the radio and slid through the dim city light toward the motel. The Union Pacific tracks at Indio Boulevard jarred me to attention; I made a right just after them, following the boulevard as it turned into Highway 86. The Blue Bird would be just a few blocks down, I remembered from the map. I slowed down a bit, squinted at the address numbers on my left. To the right, the railroad tracks paralleled the road. The silent hulks of two boxcars, massive and dark, sat on some siding next to the tracks, sentries standing guard.
    In the light from a streetlamp, I