The Narrows

left. I saw it the same way the bureau did. Backus, having adopted the name Tom Walling, was living in Clear and preying on the customers he drove from the brothels. He operated with impunity for years because he chose the perfect victims. That is until the numbers went against him and investigators from Vegas started to see a pattern and put together their list of six missing men. Backus probably knew that it was only a matter of time before the connection might be made to Clear. He probably knew that that time would be even shorter once he saw Terry McCaleb's name in the newspaper. Maybe he even got wind that McCaleb had gone to Vegas. Maybe McCaleb had even gone up to Clear. Who knows? Most of the answers died with McCaleb and then in that trailer in the desert.
    There were so many unknowns in this story. But what did seem obvious from this point was that Backus had closed up shop. He made plans to end his desert run in a blaze of glory-to take out his two proteges, McCaleb and Rachel, in a pathological display of mastery, and to leave behind in his trailer a burned and destroyed body that would beg the question of whether he was alive or dead. In recent years Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had gotten good mileage by leaving behind the same question. Maybe Backus saw himself on the same stage.
    The books in the fire barrel bothered me the most. Despite Rachel's dismissing them because the circumstances of their burning were unknown, it still seemed like an important piece of the investigation to me. I wished I had spent more time studying the book I had pulled out, maybe even identifying it. The burned book gave an indication of a part of the Poet's plan nobody knew about yet.
    Remembering the partial receipt I had seen in the book, I opened my cell phone, checked to make sure I had service and called information for Las Vegas. I asked if there was a listing for a business called Book Car and the operator told me there was not. I was about to hang up when she told me there was, however, a listing for a store called Book Caravan on Industry Road. I told her I would try it and she connected me.
    I guessed that the store would be closed because it was late. I was hoping for a message machine on which I could ask the owner to call me in the morning. But the call was answered after two rings by a gruff voice.
    "You're open?"
    "Twenty-four hours. How can I help you?"
    I got an idea what kind of store it was by the hours. I took a shot anyway.
    "You don't sell any books of poetry there, do you?"
    The gruff man laughed.
    "Very funny," he said. "There once was a man from Timbuktu. As far as poetry goes, fuck you."
    He laughed again and hung up on me. I closed the phone and had to smile at his on-the-spot rhyming skill.
    Book Caravan seemed like a dead end but I would call Rachel in the morning and tell her it might be worth checking for connections to Backus.
    A green highway sign came out of the darkness and into the spray of my headlights. ZZYZX ROAD
    I MILE
    I thought about pulling off and driving down the bouncing desert road into the darkness. I wondered if there was still a forensic crew on duty at the burial site. But what would the point of going down that road be other than to engage with the ghosts of the dead? The mile came and went and I drove on by the exit, leaving the ghosts alone.
    The beer and a half I'd had with Rachel proved to be a mistake. By Victorville I was growing fatigued. Too much thinking with the added mix of alcohol. I pulled off for coffee in a McDonald's that was open late and designed to look like a train depot. I bought two coffees and two sugar cookies and sat in a booth in an old train car reading through Terry McCaleb's file on the Poet investigation. I was getting to know the order of reports and their summaries just about by heart.
    After one cup of coffee I had nothing going and closed the file. I needed something new. I needed to either let it go and hope and believe the bureau would get the job done or find a new angle to pursue.
    I'm not against the bureau. My take is that it's the most thorough, well-equipped and relentless law enforcement agency in the world. Its problems lie in its size and the many cracks in communication between offices, squads and so on down the line to the agents themselves. It only takes a debacle like 9/11 to make clear to the world what most people in the law enforcement world, including the FBI agents, already know. As an institution it cares too