No Man's Land (26 page)

Corso hopped down onto the ground and loped around to where Doris
Green lay stretched out on her back among the leaves and bracken. Her
limbs were stiff; her face was ashen. By that time Marty had left the
camera whirling away on the tripod and was beginning the initial
sixteen compressions of CPR. He looked up at Corso, without losing
his compression rhythm.

“There’s a satellite phone in one of the camera cases. Call
911.”

Corso turned and sprinted for the phone.

Driver sat on the edge of the bed watching TV with the sound off.
He was getting ready to leave. She could tell by the way he was
breaking down those precious guns of his and wrapping the pieces in
towels from the bathroom.

“Pleeeease,” she whined. “Don’t leave me here all alone.”

He looked up at her with those hooded black eyes.

“Come here,” he said.

She crossed the room and knelt at his feet like an apostle. She
leaned hard against his leg, hoping the feel of her breast would
kindle a flame in his loins. No such luck.

He looked down at her. “Anybody see you kill anybody?”

“What?”

“In your travels with Harry . . . did anybody see you kill
anybody.” He zipped the bag on his left.

“I never . . . ,” she stammered.

He cut her off. “I don’t give a damn whether you did or you
didn’t kill anybody, girl. I just want to know if anybody still
alive saw you grease anybody, or even point a gun at anybody,
anything could make you look like you were going along with the
program of your own free will.”

She thought it over, trying to decide whether he would prefer
she’d killed somebody or not. “Only person I killed was that old
woman in the drugstore. Only person there was her old man and Harry
shot him a bunch of times.”

“Well then,” he said. “Here’s what you do . . .” When he
looked down, she was lost in her own thoughts. “You listening to
me?” he asked.

“I’m listening,” she said.

“Room’s paid up through noon tomorrow,” he said. “You get
yourself a good night’s sleep. In the morning you call up the desk
and tell the lady there you need to see the cops. You tell her you’ve
been kidnapped. Tell ’em I left sometime during the night. Soon as
you saw I was gone you called the desk. Right?”

She batted her blue eyes and nodded.

“It’s important that you make the call. You don’t want to
get caught by the cops. You gotta turn yourself in. You understand
what I’m telling you here?”

She said she did and began to rub his leg with the flat of her
hand.

“You tell that story and you stick to it. No matter what anybody
says or what any lawyer says to you, you tell the same damn story.
You were kidnapped from the beginning. Harry murdered your father and
dragged you off kicking and screaming. He did all the killing. You
were there against your will. After Harry was dead, it was Kehoe and
me. We kept you captive after that. Tell ’em where to find Kehoe.
Show ’em where Harry lies. Anything you can do like that will work
to your advantage.”

She stopped toying with his zipper for long enough to ask, “You
think they’re gonna believe that?” she asked.

“They’re gonna hate the idea,” he said. “There’s a bunch
of cops dead, so they’re gonna want a fish to fry for sure.” He
held up a finger. “But . . . you tell that story long enough and
loud enough and you’re going to attract the attention of women’s
groups, of victims’ rights groups, of groups neither you nor me
ever heard of. Big-time attorneys are going to come out of the
woodwork, fighting each other for the right to take your case. All
you got to do is help the cops and stick to your story and you’ll
make it hard for Texas or anyplace else to convict you of anything.”

By the time he’d finished talking, she’d eased his fly all the
way down and had begun the somewhat contorted process of extricating
his manhood from the confines of his briefs. Just as it seemed she
might actually pull it off, his hand reached over and grabbed her
wrist. He began to remove her hand from his crotch, when, all of a
sudden, he seemed to lose interest, dropping her arm and grabbing the
remote control from the bed. Sensing an opening, she used both hands
to free her quarry. As the TV volume began to rise . . . “
We’ve
been following your
son’s story. We were hoping . . .”
she
slipped him into her mouth. The TV got louder. “
I’ve seen you.
I’ve seen you on the television,”
screamed the first voice.
“
Yes ma’am,”
bellowed the second. Within seconds, her
efforts began to achieve the desired results. Even with his attention
diverted by the television, the natural laws of anatomy and physics
began to take over. Thus emboldened, she fell into a regular rhythm.
“
You get out of here,”
the first voice cried. “
You
take that filthy camera and that trailer
of yours and you go
right back the way you came. There’s nothing
here for you.
You get out of here now.”
And then, a moment later, she sensed
something had gone terribly wrong. The voice coming from the TV
screamed of terror.

“
Oh God,”
the second voice wailed. “
I think she’s
dead. Oh God.
What do I do? What do I do?”
Despite her
best efforts to maintain control, he shifted his hips and extricated
himself from her mouth with a wet pop. Before she could regroup, she
felt a cold oval of steel press against her lips, felt the front
sight bang against her teeth as the barrel slid into her mouth. She
looked up. Men liked it when you looked up. The expression on his
face sent a wave of fear through her body. He was crying as he used
his thumb to release the safety. She closed her eyes. It took Melanie
Harris three tries to dial the number. She brought the receiver to
her ear with both hands. Brian answered on the third ring. His voice
was husky with sleep. “ ’Lo,” he said. She flicked her eyes at
the bedside table. The digital alarm clock read three fifteen.
Five-fifteen in Michigan.

“Brian,” she said. “It’s me.”

“Hello,” he said again.

“It’s me.”

The bumping and groaning at the other end told her he’d dropped
the phone on the floor. She was waiting for him to get everything
organized when she heard the woman’s voice in the background . . .
plain as day. Except it wasn’t daytime.

“Who is it, Bri?” the sleepy voice asked.

She heard his breathing again as he righted the phone.

“Hello,” he said.

Melanie used her thumb to break the connection and replaced the
receiver. She drew several ragged breaths . . . rubbed her nose with
her arm . . . thought she was going to cry . . . but the tears never
came. Instead, she lay back on the bed and stared at the cheap light
fixture on the motel ceiling. She brought her legs up onto the
bedspread, closed her eyes and the events of the past eight or nine
hours flashed across her mind’s eye like a bad movie in fast
forward.

It had taken an aid car just under an hour to reach Doris Green.
The county police arrived five minutes later. Marty and Corso had
traded off CPR for the whole time before being forced to give up the
ghost. Even after her lips had become blue and cool to the touch,
they’d maintained their faith they could breathe life back into
her. It took the arriving EMTs to convince them there was nothing
more to be done. By that time, Marty was so exhausted, he could
barely raise his arms from his sides. When the time came to leave,
Corso had to help him back to the RV. Once the excitement was over
and Doris Green had been carried down from her mountain, they’d
backtracked seventy miles to a town called Jenner Peak, an alpine
hamlet close enough to the Mountain West ski area to support half a
dozen cheap motels, a pair of which stayed open year-round. Since
ten-thirty, they’d been holed up in rooms three, four and seven of
the Ski Chalet Motor Inn.

She’d been too cold and hollow to sleep. Spent the night pacing
to the bathroom and back. Now . . . now she was something else.
Something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Not since Samantha’s
death. That feeling of disconnectedness, of being alone on the planet
in the midst of all the hustle and bustle of people and things
equally singular. She wondered how she’d come so far toward
cynicism as to make her call to Brian insufficient cause for tears;
and then, in the same instant, she knew the answer. It was because
whatever it was they had to lose had been lost a long time ago, flung
facedown in that frozen ditch in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the
rest of her hopes and dreams. It was as if her life, from that moment
on, had become little more than a holding action. Nothing more than a
leaking boat and a mindless need to stay afloat.

Again she tried to cry and again she was unable.

Corso was wide-awake when the knock came. He’d nodded off a
couple of times but had not been visited by anything resembling
restfulness. Funny too, because the vagaries of life and death
generally rolled off him rather easily. Too easily, he often thought
in his more reflective moments, when he wondered if his capacity to
move forward in the face of tragedy was not somehow an indictment of
his inability to feel. When others found themselves numbed by the
moment, and unable to do anything more than question the universe,
Corso had always been able to take a deep breath and move on. In his
more self-indulgent moments, he attributed his resilience to the
horrors he’d witnessed as a reporter, but in his heart he knew
better, knew that he’d been that way for as long as he could
remember. Remembered way back when he was nine and watched his
grandmother’s funeral, standing amidst the wailing and the
handwringing, clear-eyed and detached, wondering if he should join
the chorus of sorrow and knowing, with certainty, that something in
his makeup made such expressions impossible.

He levered himself from the bed and padded to the door in his bare
feet.

“Yeah,” he said through the door.

“It’s Melanie,” the voice said.

“Melanie who?”

“Stop it.”

“Just a sec,” he said.

Corso pulled his jeans from the back of the chair and slipped them
on. His shirt was hanging in the closet at the far side of the room.
Too far for four in the morning. He was still bare-chested when he
walked back to the door and opened it. Melanie Harris. Black cashmere
overcoat, no shoes. She stood, holding her coat closed at the throat,
shivering in the wind. Corso stepped aside and motioned her into the
room.

“I saw your light,” she said as they passed in the doorway.

“I haven’t had much luck getting to sleep,” he admitted. She
sat on the edge of the bed and looked around. “Looks familiar,”
she said. Corso laughed. “Yeah . . . I’m thinking of booking this
one for my next winter vacation.” He lifted the plastic armchair
from its nook beside the nightstand and set in on the floor next to
the bed. Before sitting down, he crossed the room and slipped his
shirt over his shoulders, without bothering with the buttons. By the
time he worked his way back around the foot of the bed, Melanie had
stretched out a bit, putting her hands on the bed and leaning back on
her arms.

“So . . . ,” he said tentatively, “what can I do for you at
this ungodly hour of the night.”

“Actually, I think it’s morning.”

“At this hour of the morning,” he amended with a smile. She
looked away, embarrassed. A silent moment passed before she said, “I
didn’t want to be alone. I kept seeing that old woman’s face.”

Corso nodded his understanding. He sat in the chair and ran his
hands over his face. “She’s going to be with me for a while too,”
he admitted.

“I can’t help thinking we were responsible for her death.”

Corso was shaking his head. “You give us too much credit,” he
said. “We may have had a part in it, but there’s no way we were
what I’d call responsible. The way I see things, each of us is
responsible for himself. We each forge our own relationship with the
universe and take our chances from there.” He put his feet up on
the bed. “There’s a lot of luck involved. It’s like something I
heard Driver say while he was babbling about fish. Some are destined
to make it all the way back to the spawning grounds, some are
destined to fall victim to bears, some to eagles and others just
don’t have the juice to complete the journey. They just melt back
into the water and feed the algae.”

“I don’t want to feed the algae,” she said.

“Nobody does.”

They were silent for a while. It was comfortable.

“You check out the tube?” Corso asked finally. She shook her
head. “I haven’t had the stomach for it.”

“We’re everywhere,” he said. “Live at six o’clock.”

“Somehow it doesn’t seem important right now.”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“And?”

“Might be one of those times we weren’t careful enough about
what we wished for.”

She let herself slip down onto her back. “We weren’t careful
at all,” she said. “We . . .” She waved the thought away, then
used the hand to cover her eyes.

He heard a quick intake of breath and, before he could be certain,
the noise of an eighteen-wheeler, low in its gears, laboring over the
summit, overtook the sound in the room. When the roar had faded and
nothing could be heard above the wind, the sounds of her crying
became audible. Corso sat quietly, staring down at the cigarette
burns on the wooden arms of the chair. Her measured tears came in
fits and starts; angry and aggrieved, they escaped from her eyes like
reluctant refugees.

Corso waited for a lull. “Anything I can do?” he asked. At
first she shook her head. And then, in a voice he’d never heard
before, she said, “I think maybe I need a hug.”

“Come here,” he said.

A moment later they stood by the side of the bed wrapped in each
other’s arms. The solace gave Melanie Harris the strength to let it
out. Her body shook with sobs; the tracks of her tears coursed down
Corso’s bare chest. Corso hung on and waited for the storm to
subside. Seemed like she had a lot of tears stored somewhere inside
her, so it took a while. More like she ran out of energy before she
ran out of tears. By the time she stopped shaking, Corso reckoned
he’d been hugging her for longer than he’d ever hugged anyone
before. He whispered in her ear. “You know . . .”