Rough Draft (29 page)

“It's almost over,” he said. “Just a little more.”

“You sure of that, are you?”

“You saw him. The old guy's about to die. Tomorrow night this time, he'll be gone.”

She studied his profile for several moments.

“How do you know that, Frank? Tomorrow night this time?”

“Trust me,” he said. “Twenty-four hours, it'll be all over.”

“It's over for me right now. This is it, Frank. I've had it.”

“You can't quit. You're so close.”

“I'm giving up,” she said. “The old guy can die and rot in hell for all I care. This is too hard on Randall. It's too hard on me. I'm quitting, Frank. As of this moment, I'm finished with this bullshit.”

Hal was sitting in the front compartment of the kayak. He was floating directly below the stilt house listening to them talk. Listening to Hannah Keller resign. But she couldn't resign. Hal had been chasing J. J. Fielding for five years and this was the closest he'd come. His employers were unhappy with him. And when those people grew unhappy, they sent others to replace the ones they were unhappy with. Men who disappointed them were not fired, they were executed. Hannah Keller couldn't quit. Hal Bonner wouldn't let her.

Frank saw it first, a dull gleam about twenty yards out in the dark.

“Jesus Christ!”

Hannah followed his gaze and saw a shimmer of moonlight on the narrow hull of the kayak, a wide-shouldered man paddling off into the dark.

Frank was at the top of the ladder, staring down.

“Somebody's stealing our goddamn boat?”

Frank said yes, and in the next instant he was climbing over the rail.

“What the hell're you doing?”

“I'm going to get it back.”

He pitched forward into the dark and she heard the splash, then a few seconds later heard him rise to the surface.

“You okay, Frank?”

“Fine,” he shouted. “Just fine.”

And she could hear his fleet flutter-kicking and saw him in a stray glimmer of moonlight taking long powerful strokes toward the kayak. In the next moment she was over the rail and perched on the edge of the deck. As a ragged flash of lightning tore through the western sky, Hannah picked a spot on the shimmering surface and dove.

Resurfacing quickly, she swam, keeping her head above water, following the sound of Frank's thrashing kick. It was thirty yards or so through the rising chop before she caught up with him.

Treading water, she struggled for breath. Behind her a strobe of lightning pulsed through the sky and in that instant she saw Frank struggling with the wide-shouldered man who was hunched low in the kayak.

Frank and the man were grappling for the paddle. Another flare of lightning lit the sky, followed instantly by a blast of thunder. The sky rumbled for half a minute while Hannah circled the kayak, looking for an opening, a chance to seize the attacker. But the two of them were whirling unpredictably. Frank snorted and heaved for breath as he ducked the savage swings of the paddle. The other man worked grimly in silence.

Then it was over. A blow she didn't see, some lung-emptying whack. Frank was suddenly floating facedown in the water. The man made a threatening wave of the paddle in Hannah's direction, then plowed away into the dark.

She stroked to Sheffield's side, pulled his head up, turned him onto his back, and got her right arm around his chest and side-stroked a few feet to the bottom of the stilt house.
Behind her the man in the T-shirt paddled steadily into the darkness. A double slash of lightning framed him for a halfsecond and she saw his broad back, narrow waist, the blunt shape of his head.

Hannah could haul Sheffield back to the ladder, but she knew that was no good. The bottom rung was within reach, but there was no way she could haul the two of them up. Even if the rotten wood could hold their weight, she simply didn't have the strength to muscle him all the way to the deck.

Frank coughed. He puked up a half-cup of seawater, then went slack again in her arm. He was breathing, but he was clearly far too weak to make it to shore on his own.

“Frank?'

He mumbled something, eyes shut. He made a strangled, whistling sound as he drew breath.

She looked back at shore, the dim twinkle of lights.

Pushing off from the nearest piling, she tightened her right arm across his wide chest, took a grip on the slab of pectoral muscles near his armpit. His butt jounced lightly against her right hip, his legs trailing. She scissor-kicked and made a short stroke with her left hand. High school Red Cross water-safety training. They moved through the water, two feet for every stroke. Two feet and two more.

Frank coughed and hacked up more watery phlegm.

She spoke his name again but he remained limp in her arms. The air temperature dropped a sudden five degrees and as the storm swept in off the sea, the water was churned to froth around them. She kept her head above the chop and stroked another two feet, then another.

Misty was packing her green Samsonite. She was trying to hurry, but trying to do a thorough job too. Leaving this place where she'd lived for five years, she didn't want to forget anything she'd be sorry about later.

She had all eight derringers and her extra ammunition tucked in among the blouses and jeans and T-shirts and panties. She'd taken down all the Barbies, laid them out on the bed side by side, but then decided no, she didn't want them anymore. They belonged to some other girl. Some sappy young thing who'd thought that expressing herself artistically was a way to be admired and respected, maybe even loved. But it hadn't worked that way. People just looked at the Barbies and shook their heads.

Misty took down all her cosmetics and put them in a Ziploc bag. She chose a handful of cassette tapes, Hole, Kurt Cobain, a couple of Megadeth. She was moving quickly but not in a frenzy. A cold, shivery speed to her actions. She didn't know how long she had before Hal came back again.

The icy shudder in her belly was spreading through her limbs. There was a clammy smell of blood tainting the air and the tackiness on her fingertips wouldn't wash off. But it wasn't the blood that worried her. It wasn't the fact that this man was a killer. What frightened her was that she kept hearing his strange, awkward voice, seeing his intense eyes, his full lips. What frightened her was that she wanted to stay and wait for him to arrive, see what was below his surface, what the two of them would be like together. She knew it
was crazy. Knew it was death. She had to run. She had to get away.

She made another pass through her closet, found an old Dolphins sweatshirt she'd always liked, and laid that on top of all her blouses and jeans. She snapped the case shut and carried it to the door. She should probably take apart her computer and put it in the trunk of her car. But when Misty tried to picture her future somewhere out in America, she didn't see a computer anywhere. What she saw was a cheap motel room and a diner where she fried hamburgers and popped the caps off Budweisers. What she saw was the desert of west Texas, tumbleweeds rolling down the streets and lanky cowboys wandering in to buy a Bud and stare at her tits. What she saw was doom.

She stood at the door and took a last look at her apartment. On her computer monitor, her father had awakened and a nurse was taking his blood pressure. She watched the screen and felt the prickle of cold radiating through her arms and legs. He was saying something. Her father was speaking.

Misty set her suitcase down beside the door and walked over to the computer and turned up the volume. Her father was moving his lips but the words coming from him were inaudible. She had to roll the volume knob all the way up. His eyes were half-open. He seemed dazed. Not the cocky man he'd been only yesterday.

With the volume all the way up, his words were filled with static from her cheesy speakers, but she could hear him now.

“Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…”

Then he halted. He took a long raspy breath and began again, slower this time.

“Our Father who art in Heaven …”

Misty had never heard him pray. The Fieldings hadn't attended church. Sundays they used to sleep in, get out of bed in the afternoon, toast bagels, and read the
New York Times.
Misty was surprised the old man even knew the words to the
prayer. But there he was, getting a little of it right, then losing his way, starting over again.

“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done …”

Misty said, “On earth as it is in Heaven.”

Her father lay there squinting into the camera trying to talk to God. Death was shriveling his body. Death was eating his organs, swallowing his tongue, sucking the juicy marrow from his bones. His skull beginning to show through, the shape of it so much like her own. Her father, J. J. Fielding, was peering head-on into the eye of the camera. Saying the words over and over, what he knew of the prayer, what he could remember.

The poor fucker. Dying alone like that, nobody to talk to but a camera. Driven into exile by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ed Keller, sent running from the two people on earth who cared about his ass. And now look at him. Lost, lonesome, and hopeless, calling out to a God he'd never believed in before. That poor old man who'd thought that four hundred million dollars would substitute for what he had, the love of his wife and child. A man who thought he could do the impossible, escape his own destiny. As if anybody could. As if running from it ever worked.

Misty stood there for a long while watching him fumble around with the Lord's Prayer. Then she went back to the doorway and picked up the suitcase and turned around and carried it to the bed. She opened it and began unpacking it, piece by piece, putting everything back where it belonged.

 

Hal made it to shore by eleven-thirty. He climbed out of the kayak, left it bobbing in the surf. He tramped down the beach and found his clothes beneath the curved palm tree where he'd left them. In the shadows he peeled off his sopping underwear and buried them in the sand. He slipped on his jeans and the dark T-shirt and his white Nike running shoes, then he cut through a patch of scrubby grass and headed to the parking lot.

The thunderstorm he'd paddled through had blown away and now the asphalt lot was glistening and full of puddles.
There was steam in the air. Raindrops trickled off the tips of the palm fronds.

Back inside his rental car, Hal sat watching the big parking lot. There were people arriving and leaving, walking to the thatch-roofed tiki bar, stumbling back to their cars after too many drinks; some were leaving the little glassed-in restaurant down by the beach.

Hal watched a white car over near the motel. Two men sitting in the front seat. The men wore dark shirts and sat without moving. In the next row over, there was a woman standing behind a brown panel van. She was talking on a cell phone. He saw two men in tie-dyed shirts go into the motel unit above the FBI agent's, then a little later a mother and father and their little girl arrived in a car and walked down to the beach. He saw two slender men with short hair holding hands near the tiki bar.

When the woman on the cell phone was finished with her conversation, she tapped on the back door of the brown van and it opened. She climbed inside.

That was all Hal needed to see. The needle in his chest had been quivering. Now he had seen a woman climb into a van and two men sitting in a parked white car. He had all the information he needed. It wasn't conclusive, but it was enough for Hal. Someone was shadowing Hannah Keller. They were waiting in the parking lot for her to return. They were either hoping she would lead them to J. J. Fielding so they could recover the stolen money, or they were hoping Hal would appear and they could catch him. Or maybe they wanted to do both things at once.

He sat there a while longer, slumped down in his car behind the steering wheel. He would stay there all night if he needed to. He wanted to watch, wanted to see what was going to happen when Hannah and the FBI agent finally made it back.

The motel tiki bar was busy. There were people dancing in the glow of the Christmas tree lights. It was more than two months until Christmas but they'd hung strings of colored holiday lights already. Just like the last foster home Hal
lived in. He was fifteen. In that foster home outside of Evansville, Indiana, his mother left her Christmas decorations up all year long. A plastic Santa Claus sat on top of their yellow trailer, blinking through the summer nights. The trailer was planted on a small lot beside the main highway and Hal's foster mother decorated the yard for every holiday. She said it cheered up the travelers, particularly the longdistance truckers. His foster mother loved long-distance truckers. She'd married one of them and she slept with others when her husband was away from home. A lot of truckers honked as they passed by on the highway. At Easter his foster mother filled their yard with plastic bunnies and poked cutouts from Styrofoam egg cartons onto the tips of their tree limbs. At Thanksgiving there were cardboard replicas of pilgrims and lots of plastic turkeys spread around the yard.

When Hal's foster father was off on the road in his own eighteen-wheeler, Hal never knew who was going to come walking out of his mother's bedroom in the morning. Sometimes it was a trucker in his underwear. Sometimes it was a trucker with another woman. Sometimes it was two truckers. Once or twice one of the truckers tried to get Hal to join them.

When Hal came back to the trailer in Evansville to kill his foster mother there was a trucker sleeping late in her bedroom. She was frying eggs and bacon. In the year he'd been away she'd gotten old, Hal had already killed Harry Bonner and his wife, Eloise. He'd killed Sarah and Johnny Mitchell and Trudy and Simon Shallows. Now there was only his last foster mother left. Her husband had died in a highway accident, so Hal didn't have to kill him. When this last foster mother was dead, no one would know Hal had ever existed. He would be free to come and go as he pleased. He would be completely unrooted, no longer existing in anyone's mind.