High Life Read Free

I’d seen since I arrived in the city, but after it gained a quarter mile and I saw where it was headed, I had a bad feeling I wasn’t going to be able to dismiss it as part of someone else’s horror.
    Activity on the edge of the park, about opposite where San Vicente cuts off inland. A couple of police cars were already there, turning the street into a movie set with their roof lights. Dark shapes of people moved around, silhouetted against the blue-and-red glare. The foliage back from the street rippled under the sweeping colors like there was a high wind blowing through it.
    The paramedics slowed, curved across the oncoming lanes, parked next to the cops, and added their lights to the rest.
    I had an urge to turn around, to head home and escape knowing what it was that had brought this group of emergency vehicles together on a parkland bluff at the western edge of a country of 350 million people. But I didn’t. I had to know if they’d found what I’d been looking for all night.
    I left the Prelude a little way north of the commotion and walked back.
    This was the shitty end of the park where the tramps came to dump and screw—a ravined and collapsing patch of dirt without sidewalk that sloped toward the cliffs in a shallow network of gullies and depressions. There weren’t many trees, but low bushes grew densely over much of the area, nourished by scraps of junk food and the droppings of withered bowels.
    A small crowd of rejects from the park and early-morning joggers had gathered along the roadside and were craning their necks, trying to see into a gully that ran from the edge of the road, back into the park about five feet below ground level. They weren’t having much luck. The police had the scene locked down. They’d run a horseshoe of yellow tape around the gully and strung sheets of blue plastic between a couple of bushes to block the view from the street. Going for a side angle farther up or down Ocean Avenue wasn’t much use either. The depth of the gully and the bushes that grew along both sides of it made viewing pleasure an impossibility.
    Flashlight beams flitted about behind the plastic sheeting, throwing the shadows of cops against it—hunched shoulders, hands rising and falling with cigarettes. Whatever had dragged them here at this hour was probably lying at their feet, and, as the paramedics were sitting on the step at the back of their van drinking coffee from a thermos flask, it was also probably dead.
    I stood for a little bit with the other people, listening to conversations, hoping for information. Nobody knew what had happened, but they all knew what that yellow tape meant. And they knew if they waited long enough something would come out in a bag. But that was no good to me. I wouldn’t be able to see the face.
    The alternative was simple enough. The cops had a couple of men making sure no one got too inquisitive, but they were only guarding the street edge of the scene. So … a quick walk twenty yards south, cut into the brush, and circle back deep enough into the park to hit the gully somewhere on the other side of the plastic sheeting. It took a while because I had to crawl in a lot of places to keep my head below shrub level and because I had to concentrate on avoiding turds. But I made it eventually, right up to the tape, the last ten yards on my belly. I got a good view through a gap between two bushes.
    The gully had been reinforced with concrete to make a trough for a storm drain outlet. A shallow stream of water spilled from the mouth of a large pipe and made rills around the shoes of four cops who were standing in a group telling jokes. All of them were in uniform and didn’t seem too bothered about the thing on the ground. I figured they were killing time until the detectives showed.
    The thing on the ground …
    It was much worse than I’d expected.
    I lay there and watched the water wash against it for a while, then I inched back the way I’d come.
    Away from where my