No Man's Land (5 page)

The Coast Guard boat was no more that
ten yards astern as Corso climbed on board, secured the crabs and the
dinghy and pulled off his black neoprene gloves.

“You Frank Corso?” somebody
yelled.

Corso ignored the query. Instead, he
knelt on deck and transferred the crabs from the bucket into an old
topless cooler full of fresh salt water. He watched the two new crabs
settle in. Watched how they fought for territory even within the
featureless plastic domain of a cooler, thinking maybe there was some
deeper truth to be found in the mindless battle for space, but not
being quite able to put his finger on it. He didn’t straighten up
until he felt
Saltheart
twitch as somebody put his weight on
the swim step. He got to his feet and looked down.

Wasn’t the kid with the bullhorn;
this one had himself a little gold braid on his cap and shoulders. He
was about forty. Thick black eyebrows accented an angular face that
looked like it had been assembled out of spare parts. The sight of
Corso sent the eyebrows scurrying toward the center of his brow.

“You deaf or something?” the guy
demanded.

“I don’t remember inviting you on
board,” Corso said. The guy laughed in his face. “We’re the
Coast Guard, man. We tell you to pull alongside, you pull alongside.”

“I had crabs needed to be put
away.”

The guy sneered. “Under the
provisions of the Patriot Act I could—”

Corso interrupted. “Don’t even
start with that shit. You want to check my paperwork or my gear, then
go ahead. That’s your legal right. Otherwise, I’ll be up top
cleaning crab.”

The guy was nimble. He slipped a foot
into one of the arched holes in the transom and hoisted himself on
board in a single smooth motion.

Corso’s first instinct was to grab
him by the arms and pitch him overboard. He took a deep breath and
restrained himself.

“Okay, so I’m Frank Corso.”

“You don’t know what’s going
on, do you?”

Something in his tone brought Corso
up short. “What’s that?”

“In Arizona.”

“What the hell are you talking
about?”

The guy told him the
Reader’s
Digest
condensed version. “He shot the third one a couple of
hours ago.”

“Jesus,” Corso muttered.

“I know it’s a hell of a thing to
ask of a man, put himself in jeopardy for the sake of people he
doesn’t even know.” He raised his hands in frustration and let
them fall to his sides with a slap.

“People down there are hoping maybe
if he sees you’ve showed up, maybe he’ll stop. I’m supposed to
tell you they don’t expect you to go inside or anything, They just
want you to show up and maybe talk to him. Something like that.”

“And if I don’t see this as my
problem?”

The guy thought it over. “I guess
that’s between you and your conscience.”

“I gave up guilt for Lent.”

“My orders say it’s up to you.”

Corso ran a hand through his thick
black hair. “My boat . . . ,”

he started.

“I’ll personally take her back to
your slip.”

Corso nodded his thanks. “How am I
supposed to—”

A sound in the distance stopped his
thoughts. The noise was rhythmic and growing closer. More of a pop
than a roar. Familiar. And then it was on them like a giant
grasshopper, the helicopter pushing its way through the ceiling and
settling down on the old British parade ground, scattering the ground
fog like frightened children.

“The governor of Arizona’s jet is
waiting at Boeing Field,” the guy said.

Corso checked his watch. “What
time’s he supposed to kill another one?”

“O-six-hundred.”

“I need to change clothes. Come on
inside.”

The guy followed Corso into the
salon. Stood there looking around while Corso navigated the three
steps down to the storage lockers and the forward berths.

“Beautiful rig,” the guy said.

“Thanks,” Corso said from below.

“You live aboard full-time?”

“Yep.”

“I always wanted to . . . you know,
something like this . . . but you know, kids and such . . . and my
old lady . . . I mean, there’s no way in hell . . .”

“People do it with families.”

The guy turned his back and changed
the subject.

“What’d you do to this Driver guy
where he wants you so bad?”

“I wrote a book about him.”

The guy watched as Corso traded
coveralls and long underwear for jeans and a black silk shirt. “Book
must have really pissed him off.”

Corso came back up the stairs into
the galley. He pulled a black leather jacket from the nearest hook
and put it on. “Actually, he was quite fond of the book.”

“Then how come he wants to kill
you?”

Corso barked out a sinister laugh.
“Driver doesn’t want to kill me. He wants to make sure his story
gets told. That’s my end of it.”

“You’re kiddin’ me.”

Corso signaled “Boy Scout’s
honor” with his fingers. “Honest.” He pulled open the top
drawer and grabbed his wallet, stuffed it deep into his hip pocket.
“Listen, man . . . I don’t want to rain on your Western hero
motif or anything, but if I thought for one minute Driver was
planning to off my ass, I wouldn’t be going anywhere near that
place.”

The guy checked Corso for traces of
irony and came up empty.

“When you get her back home, leave
the lines loose,” Corso said. “We’ve got some big tide shifts
coming up here pretty soon.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Corso looked around, then drew a deep
breath. “Let’s go,” he said.

“I thought Arizona was supposed to
be hot,” Melanie groused as she walked in a circle, hugging herself
and stamping her feet to keep warm. The wind was everywhere. Seemed
like whichever way you turned it was in your face. Melanie raised the
collar of her coat and pulled her head in like a turtle. On the roof
of the satellite truck a pair of technicians engaged in the
never-ending task of tuning and fine-tuning the dishes.

“Not this high and not this time of
year. Minute the sun goes down so does the temperature,” one of
them said. “Around here’s got some of the biggest daytime to
nightime temperature differences in the country.”

“What’re you, the weatherman?”
his partner wanted to know. Melanie gazed out over the barren
landscape. Banks of portable lights had been brought in to light the
perimeter, but the prison itself lay dark and silent. In the
distance, the San Cristobel Mountains stood sentinel against the
night sky, their jagged peaks offering the proceedings little more
than a crooked grin. Another gust of wind swirled the desert dust,
making Melanie’s lips feel chapped and eyes feel heavy and full of
grit.

“I’ll be in my trailer,”
Melanie announced to the deepening No Man’s Land night. Her
trailer
was actually a forty-seven-foot mobile satellite unit designed to
Melanie’s specifications. Her agent had made it part of the last
contract negotiation. As Melanie left the comfort of the studio less
and less these days, they’d included the motor home merely so as to
have something to jettison when negotiations got serious. Turned out,
the network had given them everything they’d asked for . . .
including the motor home. In the past five years, she’d used it
less than a dozen times. Tonight, however, she was glad to feel the
warm glow of heat on her cheeks as she climbed inside and closed the
door. She rubbed her hands together as she made her way to the
refrigerator and opened the door. The usual. A fresh carton of
half-andhalf for her coffee, lots of bottled water and not much else.
She grabbed a bottle of water and walked over to the dinette, where
she sat down in one of the deep, upholstered chairs flanking the
table. She blew on her hands before lifting the phone from the
cradle. Memory Dial 1. Home. She listened through several clicks,
then through half a dozen rings before her own voice instructed her
how to leave a message. She followed the recorded instructions.
Wasn’t until the beep sounded that she realized she had no idea
what she was going to say. “Brian . . . er . . . it’s me . . . I
just wanted to . . . Anyway I’m here. Hope you had a good day. You
can get me on my cell. Okay . . . see ya.”

She sat back in the chair and took a
deep breath. She couldn’t remember anytime in the past thirteen
years when she and Brian had left so much unsaid. When so many words
had hung in the air at one time, so many confessions, admissions and
epithets left to fester on the vine like overripe fruit. Her stomach
felt like it had a hole in it. Her breath tasted of metal.

Brian had been gone by the time she
set her bag by the door and returned to the back of the house to tell
him she was leaving. She’d just begun to ponder the significance of
his absence when the cab blew its horn from out front. She’d
snapped off the TV on her way out. On the way to LAX she’d tried
Brian’s cell, but got nothing but voice mail.

She was halfway through the bottle of
water when a knock sounded on the door.

“Come in,” Melanie said.

Martin Wells poked his head in the
door, then mounted the steps and came inside. “Fifteen minutes,”
he said.

“What’s in fifteen minutes?”

“They shoot another hostage in
fifteen minutes.”

“I thought we were meeting with the
prison people.”

“They’ve got problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“National Guard problems.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact that very nearly
every combat-trained member of their National Guard is somewhere in
the Middle East. They’ve still got a bunch of cooks and drivers and
clerks here stateside, but that’s about it.”

“What are they going to do?”

“They’ve been trying to borrow
soldiers from Nevada, but the governor of Nevada doesn’t seem to be
in a hurry to send his soldiers into anything where the opposition is
as armed to the teeth as this.”

“Are we set up and ready?”

Martin shook his head. “We’re all
sharing a CNN feed. Right now that’s as close as we can get.”

Melanie swallowed a mouthful of
water. “Nobody’s gonna tune in to see what they already saw on
the news, Marty. We need something of our own.”

“I got my people working on the
Driver angle. He’s the one shooting the hostages. Seems to be the
leader of this thing. We’re working on a full profile.”

“So is everybody else. What else?”

“Rumor has it they’ve got tape of the moment when this Timothy
Driver guy took over the prison’s control module, which is like the
macher
of this whole prison. We’re working on maybe getting
a copy.”

Martin liked to throw in occasional Yiddish words. Melanie figured
it made him somehow feel more ethnic. Whatever.

“Working?”

“We’re pushing on both ends. Freedom of Information Act on the
front and we’ve got somebody who might be willing to cooperate on
the back side.”

“This somebody gonna come through?”

“Too early to tell.” He made a conspiratorial face. “Source’s
got big-time money problems. We could be manna.”

“Any idea what this Driver guy wanted with Frank Corso?”

“Nothing other than the obvious fact that Corso wrote a book
about him.”

Martin ran a hand through his thick salt-and-pepper hair.

“You remember when we had him on the show . . . what was that .
. . five, six years ago?”

“Women don’t forget men who look like Frank Corso.”

Something in her tone caught his attention.

“Everything okay?” he inquired.

“I’m fine,” Melanie replied. “Only thing could be better
was if we had something the networks didn’t . . . some angle of our
own.”

“At home?” Martin pressed. “Everything okay with you and
Brian?”

Melanie rose to her feet. “You spend as much time finding us an
angle as you seem to want to spend inquiring about my private life
and we’ll be back on top of the ratings in a heartbeat.”

Martin held up a hand of surrender, then brought it down and
checked his watch. “ ’Bout eight minutes,” he said. “State
cop said Corso is on the way. Didn’t think he’d make it in time
to save this one though.”

“It’s like the Roman circus,” Melanie said. “Kind of makes
you wonder if we’re as civilized as we like to think we are.”

“Civilized my ass,” Martin said. “We’re not civilized. We
just created this little Disneyland of a world where we’re on top
of the food chain. We’ve taken the law of fang and claw and
arranged it so the killing takes place offstage. All nice and neat
so’s we don’t have to look at it. Dead cows come shrink-wrapped.
Headless chickens were happy free-range fowl. Salmon are caught with
hooks instead of being scooped up in nasty old nets. It’s all a
bunch of bullshit designed to make us feel better about ourselves.”

Melanie walked forward, opened the cabinet beneath the built-in TV
and pulled out a bottle of Dalwhinnie scotch. She read Martin’s
expression. “I’m just a little chilled,” she said, pouring
herself three fingers. “Trying to get a little blood flowing.”

Martin Wells kept his face as blank as blank and as open as
concrete. He pushed open the door and stepped out onto the first
riser. “Come on. Bring it with you,” he said.

“You’ll excuse me if I skip the Christians and the lions
today.”

“Come on,” Martin coaxed.

Melanie crossed to the refrigerator, found a handful of ice cubes
and dropped them into her drink. “Close the door,” she said.
“You’re letting all the heat out.”

Martin gave a look and a shrug and disappeared into the night. She
waited a long moment, making sure he was gone, then brought the glass
to her lips and took a substantial pull of the scotch, shuddering
slightly as the liquor wound its way down her throat and came to rest
as a warm puddle in her innards. The effect was sufficiently pleasant
to encourage her to repeat the process.