Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (23 page)

“I had a guy with a gun open the door the other night,” I say.

“No?” she says, appalled.

“Yes,” I insist.

“What did you do?”

“I played it cool, he thought he was James Bond. Bit bloody frightening.”

“My God, did you tell Charles?”

“No, it was my very first night, I didn’t want to sound highly strung, you know?”

“If it had happened to me, I think I would have resigned on the spot,” she says, laughing. I sit in my chair and she plays with the cheese, stringing it from the plate to her mouth, completely unself-consciously.

“Ten o’clock, we better get back to the others and their tales of woe,” Amber says.

I go outside as she dashes to the bathroom. I watch her through the window. On the way out, she flashes her smile at the pizza man and he grins at her and comes around the counter to open the door. In the moment when he’s obscured by a pillar she deftly puts her hand in the tip jar, takes out half the notes, and puts them in her pocket.

“Thank you,” she says breezily, as she leaves.

* * *

We had walked nearly the whole way back to the rendezvous point when Amber noticed black spirals of smoke coming from the stoner kids’ house.

“That’s not pot, is it?” Amber asked.

“No, it’s not, their fucking house is on fire,” I said, and began to run.

We got to the house in seconds, but now the fire had taken hold. Sheets of flame coming from underneath the front door, a side window buckling from the heat—all the neighbors bloody oblivious.

“Amber, go to the closest house, call nine-nine-nine,” I said.

“What’s nine-nine-nine?” Amber asked.

“Jesus, whatever it is in this country, the fire brigade, call the bloody fire brigade.”

“Nine-one-one,” Amber said in a daze.

“Yes, just fucking go.”

I had to physically shove her in the direction of the house next door.

It looked bad. The wind and the open windows had really stoked the fire and as I got to the front step I was hit by a wall of heat. I staggered back, put my jacket over my arm and head. I pulled my shirtsleeve down over my fingers and pulled the screen door. The front door was unlocked, the handle searingly hot. I pushed it open.

A horrible sight.

The kitchen was on fire at the back of the house and the walls and carpet were burning. Jets of orange flame shooting up the stairs.

The living room was in to the right. Stairs to the left. Impossible to breathe. I ran down the hall, got about two feet, dropped to a crawl, fumbled for the handle, and shoved my way into the living room. My lungs aching, sparks falling on my back and hair.

Both kids lying on the living room floor, unconscious. The room wasn’t on fire yet, but thick black smoke poured in from a door to the kitchen. I stayed down on my knees, breathing. Behind me a huge tube of fire came hurtling down the hall, and I slammed the door. Something crashed down in the back room.

A couple of breaths of that smoke could knock me for six. But I had no choice. I got to my feet, picked up the TV set from off an upturned wooden crate, threw it through the front window. I kicked away the rest of the glass, got to the floor again, breathed. Stood. I picked up the first kid in a fireman’s lift, hoisted him on my shoulder, ran with him to the broken window, tossed him out.

The second kid groaned.

“It’s going to be ok, you little shit,” I said, and picked him up too.

My legs buckled, but I managed to get him across the room. I tossed him out and leaped after him into the garden. The street full of neighbors now. They dragged the boys out of the garden, helped me to my feet and down the path. A couple of them clapped and patted me on the back.

I dry-heaved and spat, someone gave me a water bottle.

I saw Amber. She ran over and threw her arms around me.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” she kept saying, over and over.

Two fire tenders arrived and in a couple of minutes they had the blaze under control and out. An easy one for the fire department, considering the number of wildfires they were increasingly having to deal with in this second summer of drought.

A cop showed up and paramedics took the kids to the hospital. They both had suffered smoke inhalation but would be fine. A paramedic asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital but I said no. He gave me a hit of O
₂
. I coughed and heaved and he gave me Gatorade instead. Amber helped me up.

“How did you do that, how did you know how to do that?” Amber asked, incredulous.

I knew, but I didn’t tell her. My cop training had taken over. I’d been a cop for six years, not six months. It wasn’t me, it was automatic pilot.

“I don’t know,” I said, “it just seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Are you ok? Are you hurt? Maybe you should go to the hospital? What do you think?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

While I recovered, we sat there on the curb with all the other onlookers. Amber held my hand and give me sips from a water bottle. A couple of minutes later a police officer came over to interview me. Tall, skinny, alert, he looked a little like trouble. I got to my feet. He asked me if I was ok. I said I was. He asked what exactly had happened. I began to tell him as simply as possible. He wrote everything down and in the middle of a sentence he suddenly stopped me.

“I know you,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yeah, I know you from somewhere, I can’t quite place it.”

“Well, I don’t think I know you,” I said, guessing that the cop recognized me from the bloody artist’s-impression wanted posters down at his station house.

“Yeah, it’ll come to me in a minute. What’s your name?”

“Um, it’s Seamus Holmes,” I said.

Amber looked at me, startled, but said nothing.

“Where do you live?”

“Uh, two-oh-eight Broadway, apartment twenty-six,” I said.

“Ok, Seamus, what kind of accent is that?”

“Irish.”

“Irish, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Not Australian, right?”

“No.”

“Hold on a minute,” he said, and walked off.

He went to his car and said something into his police radio. I was getting quite scared now. He walked back slowly. His face expressionless, giving nothing away.

“Just something I had to take care of there,” he said.

“Ok,” I said.

“And what do you do for a living?” the cop asked.

“Uh, I’m a schoolteacher, I coach, uh, soccer,” I said, the first thing that came into my head. Also a stupid thing. If he asked what school I was at, I was sure to blunder.

“What school you at?” he asked.

“Kennedy,” I said.

“Is that near Washington High?” he asked.

“Reasonably near,” I said.

“Yeah, I know it, ok, and you just saw the fire and went barging in?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded, was about to ask something else, and then his face lit up.

“Sheeat, I remember now, you play in the Cherry Creek Soccer League, right? I knew I recognized your face from something.”

“I play soccer,” I agreed.

The cop grinned. “I knew I knew you from somewhere.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I better cancel that radio call,” he said to himself.

“What?”

He looked at me. His face much more relaxed.

“Oh, nothing, it was to do with something else. I knew I knew you. Shit. And, hey, man, before the fire department gives you a lecture, which they will, I just want to say you did good getting those kids out of there.”

“Thanks.”

A TV crew from Channel 7 showed up searching for people to interview. They were getting in the way of the fire crew, and the cop looked distracted.

“Officer, is it ok if we leave, it’s getting late?” I asked.

“Hold on,” he said, not looking at me, “I gotta just take care of this and then I can let you go.”

The Channel 7 crew marched right onto the lawn, started to do a live feed. The cop straightened his tie. This was his chance to get on TV. He marched over and chatted to them for a couple of minutes.

And then, to my absolute amazement, who should get out of a red Toyota Camry on the other side of the street but Detective David Redhorse. All five feet of him. Jesus Christ. Now I understood. Redhorse
was
looking for us. He had stuck up a wanted poster at the cop shop or put the word out asking the police to hold for questioning any young men with Australian-sounding accents. So after Klimmer’s murder, Redhorse had gone to the train station to stake it out. He had seen the pair of us run onto the train and decided to follow. We seemed a little suspicious. But then we’d talked to him and his suspicions had been allayed a little. He thought we were ok. I was even injured, but it wasn’t a gunshot wound and the facts they knew at that stage were that the suspects were Hispanic and (because the cop had fired and seen me fall) that one of them had been hit by a bullet.

Still, something had been nagging at Redhorse, he’d checked out our story and hadn’t liked it and then come looking for us at the Holburn Hotel. Of course we weren’t there. It had clearly worried him. Two Australian boys who perhaps looked a little like the two Spanish boys that had killed Klimmer. John had cut his hair, but there was nothing he could do about his height. Maybe it didn’t mean anything, but it was something that he wanted to follow up.

And Redhorse himself scared me. A digger. A good peeler. His Denver Nuggets cap was on slantwise, his jeans and T-shirt were dirty, like he’d come from dinner or yard work, but appearances were deceiving, I could see that.

Redhorse lit himself a cigarette, took in the scene, and started making his way across to the cop.

“Let’s go,” I said to Amber.

I walked her fast along the street. We hurried down a long alley.

When we turned the street corner, Amber grabbed me. She led me under a big overhang at the entrance to an elementary school. She threw me up against the wall.

“You lied to him,” she said.

“I did.”

“You’re an illegal immigrant. All that stuff on your résumé is fake, isn’t it? Everything except for the address on your paycheck.”

“Not everything was a—”

She kissed me. She thrust her body against me and kissed me hard. Leaning up on her tiptoes, biting my lips. She took my hands and placed them on her breasts and we moved together backward into the shadow of the overhang. Her hands searched under my shirt and she touched my back and chest with her fingernails. She grabbed my ass with her right hand and pulled me closer. With her left she began unbuttoning my jeans.

“Right here,” she said. “Right now.”

“Madness,” I said as I grabbed for the zipper on her black jeans. She stopped me and pulled down her jeans and then her panties. She held me and shoved me inside her. She was dripping wet. I leaned back against the wall and she leaned on me and climbed on me and I fucked her the way only a junkie can. Need and desire and displacement and hunger and concentration and pain.

“You’re killing me,” she said.

“I—”

“Don’t stop,” she said.

And when I came, she came, and I groaned and she yelled and bit her finger and laughed.

“I’m breathless,” she said.

The whole thing couldn’t have taken five minutes. She kissed me and zipped herself up. I buttoned my jeans and looked at her and caught my breath. Amber had a little crazy in her: this, the stolen money in the pizzeria. A Venus in a sweatshirt. Everything you could ever think and more. And yet a sadness about her too, a sense of loss, a hunger that needed filled.

“We better get back,” she said.

She took my hand and we walked in silence along the streets, past the bungalows and mock Tudors and ranch-style houses, past mailboxes and strip malls and dog walkers and lovers and illicit men watering their lawn under cover of night.

She let go of my hand when we made it to the van. All the others inside, waiting impatiently. Robert wound down his window.

“Come on, you two, it’s been a trying evening for everyone, l-let’s get home,” he yelled.

I sat near the window. I stank of smoke. Everyone was polite, ignored it, didn’t mention it. Amber said nothing.

They dropped me on Colfax.

I watched them turn the van.

Amber in the front passenger seat.

You should run, Alex, I told myself. Run, now. Now that you’ve seen Redhorse. You should go.

Time had passed since Klimmer’s death and the cop resources were stretched thin. We could have gotten out of town easily. A million different ways. And yet I knew it was too late. The hooks were in.

Amber.

Stupid to remain.

I knew I wouldn’t tell John about Redhorse and I wouldn’t tell him about her.

The van drove off. Through the window I could see her brushing that golden hair.

I stood there. Coughed.

The whores. The homeless. The wide street. The black sky. The tail-lights diminishing. Standing there staring after the van, even when it had long since gone.

9: THE SUTRA OF DESIRE

H
aze covers Lookout Mountain. A calm sky. Aegean blue. Jets bending diagonals. The stillness becoming deeper and more taut. A silent vacancy. An absence from airport to aqueduct. It’s early yet. A stray dog. A tailless cat. A girl in a black stole.

The foothills close as a spider on the ceiling.

Hawk’s-eye view.

A street made more straight by the perfect right angles formed at intersections. Light sucked sideways from the vast eastern sun.

Worry has you by the hair.

Enemies from compass point to azimuth.

But not on this morning of ivory cloud, azure heaven, and the friendly boiling local star.

And only a moment ago this was the mythic plain, a migration path for bison and the Comanche nation.

Imagine an archer the instant before release. Before the Spanish, before the horses. Poised and under discipline of sudden death. That same feeling. The template for success or disaster. Blood, either way.

Mosquitoes above the windowsill.

The dead sunflowers.

The
thock
of arrows in the stampeding herd.

The braves running on to catch more game. The butchers remaining with their long knives of antler and bone.

“Noo nu puetsuku u punine,”
they call to one another before they part.

That was then. The city’s pulse a drumbeat of cars and feet. A million people breathing in unison as the alarm sounds seven.

It’s not worse, merely different.

The right angles, symmetry. The smell of cannabis, garbage, eucalyptus. Urine.

My father would say that the Comanche missed out on the great secret of the universe. The linking of the five most important numbers in mathematics by the formula e
^iπ
+ 1 = 0.

My father.

What does he know?

Nothing.

Voices in the living room.

The pair of them.

Laughing, talking.

And then the silence betrays a more intimate encounter still.

A knock. A third voice.

Two men and a girl.

Happy.

She’s cooking.

They want me to come out but they think I’m sleeping. They’re letting me lie in. Still, the smell of food is bringing me back to life.

Even a junkie has to eat sometimes.

But if I don’t go out, the world out there can’t hurt me.

If I don’t go out.

I go out….

I don’t know what Ethiopians eat for breakfast, but it seemed unlikely that it was this. Areea had made us French toast with fried eggs, links sausages, and bacon. Faux maple syrup and coffee, too. Pat and I didn’t have the greatest appetites at the best of times, but John wolfed his portion and there was no denying that everything had a delicious flavor.

All very amiable. Areea in the middle of a story about her life in Ethiopia and why, of all places, they’d come to Denver. Apparently, it had the second-biggest Ethiopian community in America, though it was hard to concentrate since she was wearing a miniskirt that showed off her long, dark, beautiful legs, which complemented her flashing eyes and beautiful smile.

Still, everything clicked along until she and John started kissing again.

“Not at the breakfast table,” I protested.

“Alexander is right,” Areea said, removing John’s big hands from her bum.

John gave her a kiss on the cheek, and turned around to look at us.

“Well, boys, are ye not eating, how’s the grub?” he asked, smacking his lips.

“Everything is just wonderful,” Pat said.

“It is,” I agreed. “You’re a great cook, Areea.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Areea said, “American food is easy to make.”

She went to the kitchen to get more coffee.

“Isn’t she great?” John moaned happily with a goofy expression on his face.

“Jesus, you’re not in love with her, are you?” I whispered under my breath.

“I might be,” John said with a grin.

“You bloody eejit. You realize, of course, the relationship has no future,” I said.

“What is it with you, Alex? You’re such a grumpy boots every morning,” John replied.

Pat lit himself a cigarette and stared up at the ceiling. I clenched my fist under the table. I felt I had been very patient with John. Not one time had I brought up the fact that he had pushed a man over a balcony and bloody topped him.

“I’ll support her, I’ll look after her, I’ll get a job,” John said thoughtfully.

“Yeah, you’re doing a fine job now,” I muttered. “Me working my ass off all day long and you smoking pot and making love, living the life of bloody Reilly.”

“Why is someone else’s happiness such a burden to you? It’s the fucking ketch, robs you of feeling for your fellow man, don’t you think, Pat?”

“I’m keeping out of this, boys,” Pat said, and continued staring at a point above his head.

I took a sip of the coffee. John was a wanker, but maybe he was on to something there. I shrugged. I didn’t want this to develop into an argument. The situation was as much my fault as his.

“Sorry, John. Look, my head hurts, my sinuses are aching, my feet are killing me from all the walking. Problems, you know?”

“The sinus problem is from the pollution,” Pat said. “They should be dealing with that and the fucking drought, not going after minorities in this state.”

Areea came over with another pot of coffee.

“Wonderful,” Pat said, and gave her a grin.

“You have sore feet?” Areea asked me, and we all reddened with embarrassment, hoping that she hadn’t heard the rest of the conversation.

“Yeah, I do, I never walk this much normally.”

Areea took a long look at my feet and offered to give me a foot massage. I looked at John, I didn’t want to get into macho head games with him, but John nodded to show he didn’t care. I retired to the couch and Areea proceeded to torture the soles of my feet with her incredibly strong fingers. Ten minutes later she was done and my feet felt much better.

“Wow, that’s really amazing, you’re totally multitalented,” I said.

“That’s not all she’s good at,” John said. He and Areea dissolved into giggles.

“Honestly don’t know what she sees in you, she can’t even get a green card off you,” I said to him.

Areea asked Pat if he wanted a massage too. Pat refused out of politeness because his feet were in a bad way, but Saint Areea insisted, ignored his calluses and an open sore and gave him a gentler massage than me, but still effective nonetheless.

My watch said twelve and, sadly, it was time to leave this scene of domestic tranquillity. Pat begged me to have at least one martini before I went, but I couldn’t. I’d had a weird high this morning, inverted and almost a bad trip, and I wanted to stay off the booze. It turned out that the heroin supply in this town was very patchy and you never really knew what you were getting. Manuelito, my dealer, always complained about it. Around here the crack cocaine was of the finest quality but the smack could be dodgy. Smackheads were all in New York: singers, starving artists, Goth girls, anorexic fashion models.

I was reluctant to go, though. I was tired and this was the best part of the day, hanging out in the morning with John, Pat, and Areea, chatting, messing about, sharing the fire escape with Pat, looking down on the world.

Of course, last night I hadn’t been able to sleep. Two nights of that now. Ever since Amber.

Amber. Hypocritical me telling John off.

For it was all about her.

It’s an old trope, the peeler who falls for one of his suspects or a witness or a victim. It’s a cliché. They even tell you about it in the police academy, apparently it’s very common in domestic abuse cases.

I should have had more sense, anyway. After seeing Redhorse, I should have scarpered. Smart thing to do. But Amber was the magnet. She had caught me. Something about her that could not be denied. Smart, beautiful, sexy. Maybe if I’d been older I would have been immune. I should have run. But I didn’t want to. And there was that feeling I’d had that she was somehow Victoria Patawasti’s polar opposite. A looking-glass version of her, a Victoria in the parallel world. WASP, blonde, prim as a counterpoint to Victoria. Both incredibly clever, but Amber lacked Victoria’s wit and Amber did not have Victoria’s sense of humor, how could she? Victoria, who had been the only Paki in the whole school, darker even than her brothers, she needed a defense mechanism right from the start. She’d verbally taken apart anyone who’d screwed with her. Sarcastic, ironic, cool, in fact. I shouldn’t have let her go. And this was before ketch and Mum’s illness—no excuses. I suppose I was too immature, too caught up in my own universe.

Too clever by half, the teachers used to say about me, and they said the same about her. But she went on to be head girl. I wasn’t subtle, that was my trouble, how could I be, growing up in that crazy house with those pseudo-hippie parents and aloof siblings—subtle would have gone unnoticed. And also, she was out of my league, destined to go to Oxford University, graduate with a first, and eventually be head-hunted by a nonprofit who would offer her a green card, free rent, a good salary, responsibilities, rapid advancement, and a chance to live in the USA. Aye. Fucked up then, fucking up now.

I sighed, went out.

Colfax Avenue. Heat, light, pollution, three Mexican guys being questioned by a motorcycle cop. A protester outside Planned Parenthood wearing a fetus billboard. Bikers in the park dealing pot.

The CAW building.

The Haitian concierge sitting at his desk and reading a green pamphlet, which was the latest security briefing from the Denver Police Department. He looked at me, smiled.

“Ça va?”
he asked.

“Ok,” I said, hoping there wasn’t a description of me in there.

I pushed the button for the fifth floor. The elevator dinged. I got on. The day began.

* * *

That night, for the second time that week, I was paired with Amber Mulholland. We were soliciting in a town called Evergreen right up in the foothills. Big houses, lawns, American flags, kids on bicycles. It was odd that Amber and I would be together, for a couple of reasons. First, I had been working at CAW sufficiently long now that I didn’t need training or a partner anymore. Second, Amber told me when she did go out she did it only to keep Charles company. And yet here we were again. I wasn’t complaining. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days, not since the night she’d caught me in a lie and I’d seen her steal and we’d rescued the kids and had hard, crazy sex up against a wall. I wanted to see her, I needed to see her.

She was wearing a white crew neck over khaki slacks. A little cooler here in the foothills. Needless to say, she looked stunning. We walked away from the van, and when the others were behind us, she turned to me. Her face flushed, rosy, biting her lip.

“Alex, listen to me, I lost my head the other night. I love Charles, I don’t know what happened, but it can’t ever happen again. I blame myself, the fire, the excitement, I don’t know, I was overcome, if you value my friendship you won’t mention it, please.”

I didn’t know what I was expecting her to say. But not this. Not the brush-off.

“Ok,” I said.

“Friends?” she asked, and offered me her hand.

“Friends,” I said, concealing my amazement at her behavior. It seemed so wrong, so immature, so silly. And yet maybe that’s what adults did. We walked in silence for a half minute and took out our maps.

“I think we’ll do better tonight. Tonight we have the Glengarry leads,” Amber said with a little smile….

She proved correct. A short night, but good work. Two hours, ten members each. A hundred and fifty bucks for me.

It was only on the way back to the van that we managed a real conversation. I tried to be lighthearted.

“You know what this neighborhood reminds me of?” I asked her.

“What?”

“It’s the sort of place a lot of Spielberg movies begin in, you know, picket fences and kids playing and stuff and then something ominous happens, aliens come, or a poltergeist, or government agents, something like that.”

“I don’t really go to the movies,” she said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Oh, that’s right. You said you like the theater,” I said.

She nodded and the conversation died. With annoyance, she brushed the hair away from her face. How dare one strand of hair be out of place again. She knocked her hair clip to the ground. I picked it up, gave it to her. Our fingers touched. She smiled at me. I swallowed.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Look, about the other night, I’m glad you didn’t say anything to the police,” I said.

“It’s ok, I understand. You’re from Ireland, you want to work, and you don’t have all the papers, nothing to be ashamed of,” she said, sympathetically.

“Not every American takes that attitude,” I said.

“Well, I do, I come from pretty straitened circumstances myself,” she said.

“Your parents weren’t well off? Thought you went to Harvard?”

“I worked hard,” she said firmly.

“Tell me about your background, if you don’t mind,” I said, and again she returned my smile.

“It’s very complicated,” she said carefully. She blinked a couple of times, angled her head away from me.

“I’d like to know,” I said.

“Well, my parents were divorced, you know,” she said.

“That can be very hard on a kid, did you have brothers or sisters?”

“No.”

“What did your parents do for a living?” I asked.

“Dad was a mechanic, he went to college part-time, and he became a union rep and did well. Mom worked in a place called Dairy Queen, which you probably haven’t heard of, I haven’t seen any in Denver.”

“So you were solid working class?” I asked with a smile, since some people can take offense at that kind of question.

“I suppose so, I don’t have a, uh…”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?” I insisted.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I don’t have a relationship with my dad, we haven’t spoken in years.”

“How did that happen?”

“Well, he divorced my mom and he’s a real operator, he had good lawyers and she got screwed over and got nothing. That’s the first thing. And then when I was going to college, he’d promised he would pay but he stopped paying. He wouldn’t give me anything until I went to see him, to beg in person, but I didn’t want to do that because of what he did to Mom.”