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The tracker shortened its beeping intervals, suggesting that if I looked around, I would spot the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird. I parked in the first available gap by the curb and switched off the beeps.

A swarm of police officers clustered at the entrance to an alley, going in and out. One officer was struggling to unroll a coil of police tape. Between the uniforms, I spotted the ruby-red car and its open trunk. Two men in jackets and jeans were examining the corpses.

I closed my eyes. I folded my arms over the steering wheel, pressed my forehead against them, and let out a growl for about three seconds, muting the Graham Nash song on the radio. Then I lifted my forehead from my forearms and leaned back in the seat.

Two officers standing guard at the alley mouth were chatting with a reporter who thrust out a microphone connected by a cable to a briefcase slung over his shoulder.

If they had arrested Richard Alcala, the news would be all over it. He’d escaped on foot—who knew where. The throng of officers prevented me from getting close to the Ford Thunderbird to search for a clue or to rescue my transponder from under its chassis.

* * *

The cook—a black man with a shaved head and a wiry beard—arrived with my pineapple chicken dish, humming along to the chorus of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” on the radio. But the station cut the song short to talk about the Prowler, causing the cook to swear. When he set the plate in front of me, greasy sauce splattered onto the table, sending a piece of marinated chicken skidding. I pinched it up and ate it. He’d gone overboard with the pepper.

“Sorry,” said the cook. “It makes me sick.”

“No problem.”

“Another boogeyman.”

“They’re everywhere.”

“Every time they need to distract us from prices, from rising rents, from their corruption. They force us to look the other way, to distrust our neighbors.”

He walked off muttering and came back with a crumpled sheet of paper. He held it up: a wanted poster. Two pictures of Richard Alcala, facing front and in profile against a height chart. He was smiling like a Greek statue even though one side of his lips was split, a bump bulged under his right brow, and that eye was barely open.

“Does that look like the face of a man who could do the atrocities they’re accusing him of?” the cook asked.

“What does a killer of two dozen women and girls even look like?”

His features twisted in disgust.

“You’d see it right away in his photo, believe me. His eyes would scare you, his teeth would be rotted. They need a boogeyman. Out of the hundreds of women who vanish, plenty ran away from home or from a marriage and now live hundreds of miles away. Some took a ride with the wrong driver, sure. Others got killed in robberies, random assaults. But a single man skulking through Southern California murdering dozens, like Death incarnate? What a lie. In a week, the news will drop the story. They’ll say the police nabbed somebody, and they’ll stop talking about the Prowler like he never made headlines. And they won’t dig up the corruption they were covering before this so-called Prowler crawled out of the sewers.”

“I hope it ends in under a week, because I wish I’d never heard about any of it. That I’d slept through it for seven days.”

The cook snorted and smiled from a corner of his mouth.

“I could use a rest like that.”

“Are you going to hang up the poster?”

He bristled as if I’d demanded it.

“You heard what I said, didn’t you?”

“Mind if I keep it?”

He shrugged, folded the poster, and slipped it under my plate.

“Guess it’ll make a keepsake.”

“Maybe if I say his name three times in front of a mirror, the Prowler will appear.”

The cook laughed and shook his head as he moved on to another customer.

When I finished eating and stepped into the scorching two o’clock sun, a little boy darted across without looking, and I reached out to keep him from crashing into me. But a woman rushed up to grab the boy’s hand. They headed down the street as she glanced over her shoulder to see if I was following them.

I leaned on the roof of my car, which burned against my forearm. I rubbed my eyelids. The asphalt felt like a current, dragging at my legs. This Los Angeles, baked by heat in the mid-thirties, was losing color, sliding into black and white.

Back in my car, I drove to the end of the street and turned wherever my subconscious guided me. Sometimes I forgot the car was even carrying me. My arms felt weighed down by lead, and I wanted to hide between four walls in the dark.

I understood why I’d left Richard Alcala’s arrest up to the police, but I should have foreseen that even though I told them I was guiding them to the Prowler, they’d doubt me, just like the rest of the world that turns its eyes from the evil roaming around. If I’d shot Alcala in the face and left someone else to discover the corpse, I’d be wandering Los Angeles by now, looking for a movie theater. With the trunk stuffed with first-edition vinyl, I’d be planning which storage unit to rent so that years later I could retrieve all the records I’d stashed. But Alcala got away. I had rescued Cassie June, who now hated me, and drove Alcala straight to his next victim.

On the sidewalk, a few people had dragged out a radio and were seated around, listening to the latest on the fugitive. As I passed by, the volume rose and fell with the Doppler effect. Young skaters were everywhere—long hair, big smiles. Couples walked by hand-in-hand, wearing tight clothes that showed off their tanned skin. On one corner, a man narrowed his eyes and scanned the horizon, his gaze jumping from one passerby to another. A cop stapled a wanted poster to a telephone pole while a middle-aged couple with two teenagers came up, looking worried.

Was Richard Alcala in hiding? He had been killing every couple of weeks. Could someone like that hold back? When the police closed in on him, Alcala had kept himself busy with rape and murder, like an office worker putting in extra hours. On a map of Southern California, the spots where the Prowler had attacked women were scattered like shrapnel after an explosion, with Los Angeles at the epicenter. I doubted he’d gotten on a boat and set sail across the Pacific, but he could have stolen a car and driven off to Long Beach, Anaheim, Riverside, or San Bernardino, or west to Oxnard or Ventura. Nothing indicated he’d revisit the same hunting ground.

A patrol car went by in the opposite lane. The cop at the wheel had his tan arm sticking out the window, tapping the door panel right over the LAPD badge. My reflection flashed in the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.

Would Alcala revisit the places where he’d left the bodies? Why would he? Sure, I’d made it clear I knew where three of his corpses were. But once he switched cars, he basically handed those bodies over to the police. That alone was enough to lock him up for life.

Sometimes I glanced at the wanted poster spread out on the passenger seat, then swept my eyes over the sidewalks in case the killer was blending in with the pedestrians. Playing the lottery.

My forearms itched every few minutes, and my sweaty palms made the steering wheel slick. I felt like I was digesting a concrete ball. Alcala remained at large because of me. Cassie’s mother’s face floated into my head, her scornful glare. If I were a serial killer who raped and murdered women and girls day in and day out, what would I do?

Yesterday, I’d caught him in the act of sweet-talking that woman. If I hadn’t visited his apartment, he would have met her at five o’clock at the address he gave her. She’d think this smiling photographer was going to jumpstart her modeling career, but maybe she’d have heard on the news that the police were after the Prowler in the area. She might have canceled the appointment. Really? With no way of contacting the photographer? I’d be following the news, but maybe she wouldn’t. Even if she heard about it, would she grasp the danger? Maybe she was dolling herself up right now to head off to a photo shoot.

---

Author’s note: this is a translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago, that is contained in my collection Los reinos de brea. Regarding that tracker thing, I’m quite sure I lifted it straight from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. No shame in stealing from the best.