Off the Edge (The Associates) (32 page)

She pulled the crate aside. “Scoot down, Devilwell.”

“Get out of here!”

“Scoot down unless you want me to stand here like a fool.”

He dragged himself deeper into the crevasse. She scooted in with her bag and pulled the crate back in front of them.

“Bunk designed to hornswoggle folks.” She knelt, pressed a cool hand to his forehead.

“What are you doing?”

“I got supplies. Gauze and tape and some coagulant gel hoo-hah the fellow at the
rankaya
swears by.”

“You have to go,” he said.

“Yeah, well that’s
way
off the table. Tell me what to do with this stuff.”

“Laney—”

“I know. Save myself. Leave you to die. Nothing good in you anymore. You and your stupid severed hand.”

“
Excuse
me?”

“We have to stop the bleeding, right?” she asked. “Did it go all the way through?”

Stupid severed hand?

“The bullet, Peter, the bullet. Lie back. What do you want me to do? Concentrate.” She pushed him gently.

He gave in and lay back, elevating the leg. “Roll that gauze into a pad as wide as your hand.” He had a good idea what the coagulant was—it was a good choice, and he gave her specific instructions about slathering it onto the silk and fixing the gauze over that. He’d seen a lot of blood in his day, but he didn’t think she had. Still, she was amazing. Like an angel. No, a warrior.

When she finished with his leg, she arranged the crates to look more natural. It was better, but they were still too vulnerable, dammit. He had one bullet left in the piece Rio had left him with. Maybe two.

A rhythmic noise sounded nearby. A bouncing ball and shouts. The boys were back.

Thwack.

The ball hit the wall right near their hiding place. A few feet over and it would take down the crates.

Thwack.

“I’ll ask ‘em to—”

“Shhh,” he whispered as the sound of new footsteps grew louder. Large footsteps, followed by a deep voice asking the boys if they’d seen Laney. The man spoke a few words of Thai— “
Phu ying
American,” he said. American girl.
“Pom see nam-dtaan,”
he added. Brown hair. Another voice repeated the phrases. American hunters, maybe Canadian.

He picked up his gun. “I tried to borrow a phone from those boys before,” he said. “When I was under the stairs. There could be a slight blood trail from there to here. Not much, but…”

Laney nodded. If the boys thought to mention what they saw, the hunters would take a look and see the trail. But the hunters weren’t very polite.

Thwack.
That one hit too close.

The hunters kept pressing. “
Phu ying
American? You sure?”

Macmillan held his breath. Some six feet above them, a spider had spun a web between buildings. It was a beautiful web that caught the haze of light just so.

“That ball’ll take down these crates,” she whispered.

He nodded.

More voices.

Thwack.

“Hell,” she whispered, eyes shut.

Thwack.

He squeezed her hand.

Thwack.

Finally the footsteps started up again. The hunters moving on.

“I’m going to talk to those boys,” she said.

“Laney, no.”

“Sorry, Devilwell.” She pulled out the wad of cash and poked her head up over the crates and then she was gone. He heard her conspire with the boys, speaking softly and sweetly in Thai, wrapping them into the fun and excitement of helping her stay hidden from the bad guys. She had money for each of them. And if they did the job well, they’d each get more.

She was back, arranging the crates. The bouncing had started up again, but they were bouncing the ball on the ground now, counting. “They’re to count bounces. And if anybody comes, I ran to the road long ago.” She checked his wound. “It’s not soaking through,” she whispered. “So far so good.”

Just when she’d settled in, the bouncing stopped. Uneven footsteps approached, like somebody limping. Macmillan recognized Thorne’s voice, questioning the boys.

The boys directed Thorne to the road.

Thorne wasn’t easy to fool; he needed to be ready.

Macmillan sat up, cradling the gun, fire tearing through his thigh. Laney shook her head, meaning
no, lie back down.
Macmillan ignored her.

After an excruciatingly long exchange he only caught parts of, the uneven footsteps headed off. Thorne actually believed them? A minor miracle. Unless it was a trick.

And the limping. Had Thorne been injured?

The bouncing and counting started back up.

“We have to get out of here,” she said.

“Too dangerous to stay and too dangerous to go, dammit.” Even she had to see that. Hunters swarming. The TZ on the loose. Everything gone to hell. He’d failed the whole damn world and worst of all, he’d failed Laney. He wouldn’t be able to protect her if they were discovered. She deserved so much better.

His heart beat fiercely, as though his chest was nothing but the thinnest membrane separating him from the world.

Strength drain. Bad sign.

And then he laughed. “
Stupid severed hand?”

“That’s right, your stupid severed hand,” she whispered back, making herself small with him in the shadows. “I think you got hornswoggled by your own metaphor there.”

“You don’t know—”

“Oh, I know well enough,” she interrupted. “Hands are part of what makes us human and all of that. You standing there holding one disconnected from a body, I see why you took it where you did. All the world fallen away,” she whispered. “Doomed to be disconnected. It’s bull is all.”

“Only shows you don’t get it.”

“I get it. I think you had to be disconnected to survive—hard and jokey and cut off as that hand. Chopping apart language like you do. I think disconnection is what saved you, but it’s not your destiny.”

He grunted in dissent.

“I’m telling you,” she said, “nothing goddamn fell away. That’s not how it works. You lost your people in that attack, yeah, but you didn’t lose any parts yourself. I say you gained something.”

“Laney—”

“Shut up.” She squeezed his hand. “You tell me, what is this?” She squeezed again.

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“I’ll tell you what it is—it’s a hand that’s connected to a heart so big I can’t believe it sometimes. This is a hand that helped save my hide several times over.”

He felt breathless. And not from blood loss.

“And what else?” She squeezed. “What else is this hand connected to? Right now? Who are you connected to right now?”

He looked into her eyes. “You,” he whispered.

“Yeah, you got that right,” she whispered.

He wanted to laugh and cry both at the same time. He had the impulse to make a joke, just to control the situation. Because he was spinning out of control. Because he was falling off the edge.

“What is it?” she asked. “You can tell me.”

He pushed through the impulse to squash the moment with understatement. It’s just that the feeling was too sharp, too intense. He swallowed. “It hurts,” he grated out.

She sucked in a breath, staring at him like he’d uttered something amazing. “Where does it hurt?”

He looked at her, thinking about the question. “My thigh.” But that was a half-truth. “Everything hurts,” he said. “Everything,” he whispered. “Beauty hurts. Darkness hurts. Love. Death—”

“Like hell you’re dying.”

It felt good to tell her. Like something essential, chunking into place. “Laney—”

“What, Peter?”

He was silent for a bit, absorbing the soft ring of his name. “It all hurts.” The boys outside kept bouncing their ball.
Bounce. Bounce
.

“I know.”

“Sing to me,” he said.

She went still. “You want me to sing a song?”

“Yes,” he whispered. Maybe he wasn’t thinking straight, but it’s what he wanted.

Her eyes filled with tears. She started to sing
You Are My Sunshine
as she had before.

“No,” he said. “Sing one of yours.” He wouldn’t blame her if she refused. He’d ridiculed her songs right to her face. But now he wanted to live inside one of them.

He nestled his head into her lap.

“Which one?”

“The kitchen,” he whispered. “With the cookbook.”

She started to sing, soft and whispery and melodic. The cookbook full of wishes. The stupid kitchen hangings.

The emotions flowing through him were too sharp, too clean, like they might rip him up inside, like they might rip up the world, but he let it happen.

He was going off the edge and he no longer fought it.

He closed his eyes as she sang on, letting the lost things inside the song echo with all the beauty and ruthlessness in the world.

And the strangest thing: it was all okay.

She was on the part about her mama now,
catches
tokens of life like fireflies, to enjoy when she was right as rain, but that day never came.
That was one of the lines that had suggested to him that her mother was an alcoholic hoarder. He’d used that knowledge to manipulate Laney before, but now he felt into it, and into what it would’ve been like for Laney, the abandonment with a mother like that, and no father. He’d had so much, really, with his own family. Gwen. He missed them, but they’d given him such gifts. Gratitude washed over him. He’d never gone near that feeling—the loss was too much for him to bear, but they were still with him.

The beats of the bouncing ball sounded far away as he abandoned himself to her song.

It was then that the answer came to him, in the form of a line from her mother song:
Greedy with memories.

“Laney.”

She paused in her singing. “Yeah?”

“She kept things,” he said. “Your mother.”

“Our place was piles of things.”

“Memories.” He turned his gaze up to her. “How did she keep memories? Was it photos, or did she do video?”

“Some video, but not of Rolly.”

“What about your wedding? Did she video tape your wedding?”

She furrowed her pretty dark brows. “Mama was drunk off her ass—she couldn’t have worked a doorknob, let alone a camera. I’m sorry.”

He sat up, ignoring the blaze in his thigh. “The mother who keeps every last magazine and broken TV doesn’t miss her girl’s wedding, dammit. Somebody taped that wedding, and she got a copy.
Especially
if she was drunk. Especially then.”

“It would be something ancient. Like VCR,” she said.

“And who would have a VCR player? I bet your mother does.”

“But we can’t get it over the computer. It wouldn’t be digital.”

“Tell me you have one of the burners Rio grabbed.”

She pulled a phone from her pack.

“Call.”

She scowled at the phone, as though unsure what to do with it. “It’s been so long. I don’t know what I’ll say.” She looked up at him. “I never told her where I was. I couldn’t trust her.”

“You’ll make it right.”

“Maybe she knows what happened to Charlie.”

“Call her. Make this happen. We need more of his voice.” He fished the list from his pocket and put it on the ground. “We need these sounds.”

She dialed while he fired up the laptop. It would be a bitch to clean samples recorded off a VCR played over a phone, but if he could record Rolly forming just a few more sounds, his library would be complete, and he could beat the challenge words.

Outside the bouncing ceased. Voices. He darkened the screen. More hunters.

“Eight in the morning there. Mama won’t like that,” she whispered.

“Put it on speaker when I say the word,” he whispered, listening to the voices. He would pull the recording right into the spectrogram software. The bouncing started up again—the hunters had moved on. He nodded at Laney.

The phone rang. A soft, woozy voice answered. “Whadya want?”

“It’s Emmaline, mama,” she said, tears in her eyes.

“Baby doll? You okay? Where are you?”

“I’m fine, mama. I’ve been running from Rolly. I couldn’t call—”

Her mother began to ramble angrily about Rolly. Smooth as a pea chicken, she called him. She seemed drunk.

“You hear from Charlie?” Laney asked.

“Yeah, your brother’s in the looney bin, did you know that?”

“A psych ward?”

Macmillan’s heart nearly flew out of his chest as she caught his eye. The brother was alive. “He signed himself in last month,” her mother said. “Nobody can get at him. If that boy’s crazy I’m a monkey’s uncle, I’ll tell you—”

He saw when Laney got it—Charlie had gone in to get away from Rolly. “Mama, I need you to do something really important.”

“You’re not going to ask how I am?”

“Look, I’ve got a heap of trouble, and I need a recording of Rolly’s voice. I’m thinking you can put your hands on one. I’m thinking you might have a recording of the wedding—is that possible?”

“That man’s got nothin’ to say I want to hear.”

Eventually Laney got her mother motivated. “Now you’re glad for your old decrepit mama saving mementos,” her mother mumbled, rustling in the background.

“I’m glad for you to save mementos,” she whispered. “And you’re not old and decrepit, and I miss you, but I need this bad. The wedding dinner,” Laney said. “You got a tape?”

“Well, that cousin of Gordy’s filmed the ceremony and the toasts. Don’t know why I’d keep anything that scumsucker Rolly ever said.”

“And I bet you got a VCR player in there somewhere. Bet you can get at it fast.” Laney walked an expert line, applying just a bit of urgency, but taking care not to upset the woman. Over the next ten minutes, Laney’s mother hooked up two VCR players, both of which turned out to be broken. Finally she found one that worked.

He whispered to her, “If I circle my finger, have your mother rewind a bit and replay.” He showed her how he wanted her to hold the phone.

They waited as her mother fast-forwarded through a tape. They got to the wedding vows, but the sound was terrible. He shook his head.
No good.

But then they got to the reception tape. The holder of the video camera was closer to Rolly. He was asking Rolly what he most loved about Emmaline.

“I look at her and I think she’s the most beautiful thing alive,” Rolly said.